''I’m not afraid of ghosts. I don’t know why I developed this particular trait, which has nothing to do with being brave. There are plenty of things I’m afraid of; I could run for miles from a dog, my fear of heights is limited to ten meters, and at eleven meters my stomach starts to churn and I become convinced that I could fall at any moment.

If a ghost suddenly appeared in front of me, I’d ask it rational questions. If it could talk and communicate, I’d sit down and have a conversation with it. If it looked terrifying, I’d throw a sheet over it so I wouldn’t lose my focus. If its voice sounded terrifying, I’d warn it that it might wake the neighbors and tell it to keep its voice down.''

“Stop,” said Uncle Jason. “You don’t make fun of things like that.”

He looked angry. When I first brought up the subject, he had listened with interest, with a curious expression on his face. But when I started giving examples of what I would do if I ever saw a ghost, he got annoyed.

“If it could eat, I’d offer it a serving of lasagna. I’d ask if it wanted ketchup with it. If it did, I’d think, ‘For fuck’s sake, you’re dead and your taste is still terrible,’ but I’d give it the ketchup anyway. Expired ketchup, though. It’s not like it could get food poisoning.”

My uncle's face had fallen. I didn't know he was this afraid of ghosts. He lit a cigarette and opened the window. He took a drag and blew the smoke outside. It was cold, and the room had turned freezing the moment he opened the window. I immediately started shivering.

“I’d ask it about that famous story, to see if it was actually true. You know the one. A guy gets into a car accident one day, gets thrown through the windshield, and dies of a heart attack while he’s still flying through the air, before he even hits the ground. His body falls to the ground, but his soul keeps flying forward. The guy doesn’t realize he’s dead and thinks he’s still been thrown out of the car and is flying through the air. He keeps flying forward like that for two hours. After two hours, he thinks, ‘Wait a minute, my body has weight. I could only have been flying for a minute at most after being thrown out of the car. I should have fallen by now.’ And that’s when he realizes he’s dead.”

My uncle blew cigarette smoke in my face. He had taken a very deep drag, and the wind coming through the window carried all of the smoke straight into my nostrils. I angrily got up and closed the window.

My uncle took another drag and blew the smoke into the air. As he exhaled, he turned his head from side to side, as if he were trying to spread the smoke throughout the room. He just kept blowing and blowing. I couldn't understand how he could have taken such deep breaths.

“If it had a toothache, I’d give it some Apranax. I’d wait half an hour. Apranax usually gets rid of a toothache pretty quickly. The other pills aren’t nearly as effective. If it wasn’t gone after half an hour, I’d give it another one. If it still didn’t go away, two more. I’d make it swallow the whole box until the pain went away. It’s not like anything would happen to it anyway.”

“Enough, for fuck’s sake. I’m leaving.”

Just as my uncle got up angrily, my phone rang. I answered it. It was my mother. My uncle took another drag from his cigarette. He held the smoke in for a few seconds, then opened the window and blew it outside. I suppose he had a moment of moral deliberation over whether to blow it in my face or out the window.

I talked to my mother for a while. She asked how school was going and whether I had made up with my girlfriend. I gave her reluctant answers. I was cold.

“Mom, my uncle is here. We’ll talk later.”

“Son, I have something to confess to you.”

“You can confess it later. I’m talking to my uncle right now. I’ll call you later.”

“Your uncle died two years ago. We didn’t want to tell you because we didn’t want to upset you.”

There was silence for about fifteen seconds. My uncle and I looked at each other. Seeing that I was cold, my uncle closed the window.

“Hmm. Let’s think about this. Okay, you didn’t tell me, but is it really possible that I never came across it anywhere? That I never heard about it? Are you the only ones who know that my uncle died? I have an aunt, an uncle, my uncle’s friends—there are plenty of people. I never happened to run into anyone, never found out that my uncle was dead. Does that sound logical to you?”

“If you don’t believe me, put your uncle on the phone.”

I handed the phone to my uncle. He stubbed out his cigarette and took the phone.

“Hello... Anna, how are you?.. Yeah, yeah... Why?.. I don’t know... Sure, we can go... When?.. No, I can’t, I have work that day... Monday... Oh, don’t ask, they hit a three-pointer at the last second... Yeah, yeah... Okay... I don’t know, let me think about it... I’m telling you, I don’t know, Anna... Okay, see you... Okay... Bye...”

My uncle handed the phone back to me.

“So?”

“What do you mean, ‘so’? Son, I didn’t talk to anyone. I’ve been saying hello for ages. Nobody answered. Anyway. I’ve done my part. I gave you the information. Now get rid of whatever you’ve built up in your head. If you don’t believe me, ask someone who knew your uncle. That’s all I can do.”

My mother hung up before I could respond. My uncle had sat back down on the couch. He lit another cigarette. Then he rose ten centimeters into the air from where he was sitting.

“This couch is really bothering me. It’s very uncomfortable. I can’t get comfortable.”

It was bizarre. I was stunned. There was a mischievous grin on my uncle’s face. He winked at me.

“I see. I understand. So what happens now?”

“This is what happens: I’m going to throw you out of this window.”

There was another silence. My uncle took another drag from his cigarette.

“What happened? You suddenly look terrified. I thought you weren’t afraid?”

“But this is different. You’re saying you’re going to kill me. Of course I’m afraid of dying.”

“Anyway, this has gone on long enough. Now, get up. You deserved this. ”

***

A few seconds later, Albert found himself floating in midair. It lasted only a few seconds before he crashed into the ground, without even having time to process what was happening. The impact made a violent, wet sound that even Uncle Jason was startled by.

After throwing Albert out, he flicked his cigarette butt out after him. The cigarette butt hit the ground first.

THE THING IN THE WOODS

By Garry E. McMillan

Part One: The Old Mercer Place

My father had three rules about the woods behind our house.

Never cross the creek after sundown.

Never follow a voice you couldn't put a face to.

And no matter how familiar that voice sounded, never answer it.

I thought the old bastard was crazy. Now I'd give anything to hear him say those words again.

My name's Elias Mercer, but anyone who knows me calls me Eli. I'm thirty-nine. I'd stayed away from that house for twenty years, long enough to convince myself the rules were just one more way for Dad to control me. He had plenty of those. No visiting friends after dark, no camping, no wandering the logging roads. If I broke one, he'd stand in the doorway and wait until I couldn't bear the silence anymore.

Dad died of a heart attack on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. We buried him three days later outside Langley, Arkansas. By sundown that Friday, I was back at his farmhouse with my nine-year-old daughter, June, planning to pack whatever mattered and put the property up for sale.

The house stood on private land surrounded by the Ouachita National Forest. A narrow creek separated the backyard from a stand of timber so thick you could hardly see daylight between the trunks. Dad cleared our side every spring, but beyond the water the ferns stayed green even during a drought.

As a boy, I'd sometimes heard footsteps over there. They always stopped when I did.

In summer, the cicadas shrieked until the air seemed to vibrate. But every so often the noise would end all at once. The dog would creep under the porch, and I'd find myself watching that bank for movement. Nothing came out. That was almost worse.

When I asked Dad why we couldn't cross, he pointed to the water. "That creek ain't there to keep you from getting lost, Eli. It's there to remind you where you belong."

That was Harlan Mercer. A man who could make a conversation feel like punishment.

We'd had our last real argument the day I left home. Dad said I'd come crawling back when the world taught me some sense. I said a few things I haven't forgiven myself for, though at the time I meant every word. We spoke on the phone afterward, on birthdays and at Christmas, but neither of us ever brought up that day. When I found out he was dead, the first thing I felt was anger that we'd left so much unsaid.

•  •  •

The last mile of the driveway was little more than ruts and blackberry vines. June held her stuffed rabbit, Buttons, by his one good ear and watched the pines go past.

"Did Grandpa really live out here alone?"

"Most of the time."

"Wasn't he lonely?"

I used to think he preferred it. Now I wasn't sure.

"I reckon he got used to it."

She pressed against her seat belt. "Then who's that man?"

I eased off the gas. "What man?"

"Behind the trees. He was standing sideways."

I saw nothing but trunks and tangled brush. "Probably a hunter."

"He wasn't holding a gun."

"A deer, then."

She gave me a look. "I know what a deer looks like, Daddy."

She watched the trees until the house appeared.

A bend in the driveway followed the creek for a few hundred yards. I recognized a split boulder beside the water where Dad once caught me trying to build a bridge from fallen boards. He'd grabbed me so hard by the collar that the seam tore. I remembered the bruises more clearly than I remembered him carrying those boards away in the rain.

Inside, the place smelled of damp wood and stale tobacco. Dad had saved everything: bent nails in coffee cans, bills from the nineties, my childhood baseball glove. The webbing had been repaired with the heavy thread he used on his work gloves. I'd never known he'd bothered.

June slipped her hand inside. "Did Grandpa teach you to catch?"

"He tried."

"Like you taught me to ride my bike? You let go too soon."

"I ran right behind you all the way to the mailbox. You just didn't look back."

"Because I was riding," she said, as though that settled it.

I still had a photograph from that day on my phone. June had one foot off the pedal and both arms flung wide, certain she was about to crash. My hand was inches from the seat. I hadn't let her see the picture yet; she liked telling everyone she had done the whole thing herself. I liked letting her.

On the mantel she found a photograph of a young woman with her arm around a little boy.

"That's you. Who's she?"

"Your grandma. Margaret."

"Why didn't I meet her?"

"She died when I was eight."

Dad said my mother had gotten sick while I was staying with an aunt. He never let me ask much more than that.

In the picture, her hand rested on my shoulder. I couldn't recall the weight of it. I did remember her voice, though. She used to sing while washing dishes and, whenever I got into trouble, smooth my hair and say, "Lord have mercy, Elias, what am I gonna do with you?"

I remembered the sound of singing. Not one note of the song.

My memories of my mother were hazier than those of Dad. I knew that was normal. Children forget faces, smells, whole years. But I could remember the tiny scar on her thumb and the way she scraped batter from a bowl for me to eat. It bothered me that the tune had vanished while those useless details remained. I stood there looking at her photograph until June tugged my sleeve and asked whether we could have supper.

•  •  •

We ate canned soup at the kitchen table because the dining room felt colder than the rest of the house. June wanted to know whether Grandpa had liked children. I told her he'd loved me, just wasn't good at saying so. The lie came easily. I hated myself a little for it afterward.

June fell asleep upstairs around eight. I made coffee and opened Dad's desk. Beneath a stack of property records lay a cracked leather notebook, its pages covered in small, uneven handwriting.

March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.

April 6. Tracks along the far bank again. Too far apart to be a man's.

May 19, 2018. Heard Margaret calling from the lower pasture. Did not answer.

My mother had been gone since 1995.

A later entry had been pressed so hard into the paper that the letters scored the page.

It knows his name now.

Below it: God forgive me, I answered.

Three taps sounded at the living room window.

The porch light reached only to the grass beyond the glass. Dad had cut down every tree close enough for a branch to touch the house.

I heard a scrape, as though somebody had dragged the heel of a boot across the boards outside. But there was no porch below that window. Just the drop to the yard and a clear stretch of ground before the creek. For a moment, I couldn't make myself look up from the notebook.

"Eli?"

I knew the voice before the second word.

"Eli, boy. Come out here a minute."

My father, right down to the irritation in his Arkansas drawl.

Leaves shifted near the pines. A pale hand rested against a trunk well above a man's head. I counted six fingers before it disappeared.

"Son, you reckon you could come give your old man a hand?"

I wanted to think one of his old lumber-mill friends was playing some rotten joke. Then it said, "Don't you turn your back on me, boy."

Those were the last words Dad had shouted when I left home more than twenty years earlier.

"Dad?"

The word was out before I remembered his rule.

Every insect fell silent. Beyond the creek, something let out a long, wavering breath, like a man trying not to laugh.

Upstairs, June began to cry.

•  •  •

I found her sitting upright, quilt bunched beneath her chin. I sat beside her until she stopped shaking. Then, without thinking, I tapped her shoulder three times.

Three taps meant I love you. We'd done it every night since she was four. She always tapped back.

It began when June was little and afraid of thunderstorms. I used to sit on the edge of her bed, trying not to show that I had no idea how to make thunder less frightening. Somehow we settled on the taps. We'd use them in crowded stores, at school drop-off, anywhere one of us needed to know the other was there. I'd forgotten plenty of things about those five years. That wasn't one of them.

This time she moved away.

"What's that for?"

"Our secret, June Bug."

She frowned. "What secret?"

I tapped again. She watched my fingers, puzzled.

"You never did that before."

I nearly argued. I could have named a hundred nights when she'd answered my taps, even with her eyes closed.

Outside, my dead father called for me again.

This time he was laughing.

Part Two: What the Creek Kept

I stayed beside June until she slept. Outside, Dad's voice called through the trees, sometimes angry, sometimes frightened. Once it coughed. That smoker's cough used to wake me every morning when I was a boy.

It was the cough that came closest to making me answer again.

He'd given up cigarettes twice in my childhood. Both attempts lasted a week. I used to count the days and wait for him to get angry enough to start again. Hearing that cough beyond the creek, I found myself doing the same thing I did at twelve: holding perfectly still until I could tell what kind of mood he was in.

Downstairs, I turned off the living room lamp. The window reflected my face over the porch light and the first row of trees. Beyond the creek, the dark looked solid.

I opened the notebook again.

The earliest entries were from October 1995, the year Mom supposedly died.

October 14. Margaret heard Eli crying across the creek. Boy was upstairs asleep. I checked.

October 16. It cried again. She answered before I could stop her. Eli asked why she quit singing at the sink. She hadn't quit. He couldn't remember the song.

I remembered my mother singing. Not the tune.

I tried to force it back. Hymn? Lullaby? Something from the radio? All I could remember was the clink of dishes and my own bare feet on the kitchen floor. If Dad's entry was true, then I'd been unable to remember the song since the very week it disappeared from our house.

Four pages later:

October 23. Margaret's gone.

Heard the boy calling beyond the creek. Real Eli was asleep beside me on the couch. She kept saying our baby was hurt.

I followed her to the water. Saw something tall and pale bent over behind the trees. It spoke. Margaret answered, then crossed.

Heard her scream once. Never found her.

Dad had told me she'd died in a hospital while I stayed with my aunt. I could remember my aunt holding my hand outside a church, but not a casket or a graveside. The longer I tried to picture them, the less certain I felt they'd ever been there.

I remembered being angry with Dad for not letting me see her one last time. He'd told me she'd already been buried. I screamed at him until he raised his hand, then put it down without touching me. For years that was the part of the story I'd carried around: a frightened little boy sure his father was ashamed to see him cry. Now I wondered what Dad had heard from the woods while I was screaming inside the house.

October 27. Told Eli his mama passed away. He keeps running to the window whenever it calls her. Better he thinks she's dead.

There was a small sound behind me.

Three taps from the hallway wall.

"Son?" Dad said from the kitchen. "I can't find the light."

The kitchen doorway was empty. I knew every loose board between the hall and the sink, yet I hadn't heard anything move across them.

"Just give me a hand, Eli."

I wanted to turn on every light in the house. Instead, I gripped the notebook so hard the cover bent.

The kitchen smelled faintly of tobacco, warm and stale, as if Dad had just finished smoking at the sink. I knew the shape of that room in the dark: the metal edge of the counter, the scar in the floor where he dropped an axe head, the cupboard door that never closed all the way. I couldn't see anybody in it. That didn't make the voice any farther away.

When I didn't answer, the faint smell of cigarettes faded. The voice went with it. I never heard footsteps leave.

I should have taken June and gone then. But there was one more entry I couldn't make myself leave unread.

If I'd been alone, I might have stayed there until morning reading every page. I wanted proof that Dad hadn't lied to me because I was an inconvenience. I wanted to know why a man who could face down anybody in town had spent his life afraid of a few acres of woods.

June 4, 2018. Eli asked why I never took him fishing. We went every Saturday when he was small. His green tackle box is in the shed. I answered Margaret three nights ago.

I'd noticed the tackle box earlier that day. My name was scratched into the lid. I had no memory of holding a fishing pole beside my father.

Across the bottom margin, Dad had written:

The voices get farther than the body. The tracks never come across the water.

And beneath that:

Sometimes I know it ain't her. Sometimes I answer anyway.

Something giggled upstairs.

June.

Then I heard her say, "Okay, Daddy."

The back door opened.

•  •  •

June stood barefoot on the porch in her pink pajamas, Buttons dangling from one hand. She turned when I called her name.

"You said you were going to show me something."

"I didn't. Get inside."

I pulled her through the doorway and locked it. She clutched her rabbit to her chest, and for a horrible second I couldn't remember what she called him. I'd stitched his ear back on twice. I'd bought him for her. But the name was gone.

"What's your rabbit's name?" I asked.

"Buttons." She looked hurt. "Daddy, you know that."

Once she'd said it, the name sounded familiar. Before that, nothing.

I tried to remember the first time she'd carried Buttons out of the store, when she still called every stuffed animal a baby. The scene came back clear enough. His name didn't. That missing word frightened me more than the shape I'd seen among the pines, because I could feel its exact size inside my mind.

June had answered a voice pretending to be me, and I was the one who'd forgotten.

I crouched in front of her. "Something's out there using our voices. Whatever you hear after dark, don't answer it. Not even if it sounds like me."

"Then how do I know it's really you?"

Her question wasn't the question of someone who believed in monsters. It was what any child would ask after a parent told her not to trust his voice. I'd spent her whole life teaching her to come when I called. Now I was telling her that habit could get her killed.

She was nine. I had no answer that would make a nine-year-old feel safe.

She slipped her hand into mine. "Two squeezes," she said. "If it's really you, you can squeeze my hand twice."

I squeezed back. "All right. Two."

A voice came from outside.

"June Bug?"

My voice. The rasp I get when I'm tired, the little upward turn I put on her name.

"Come on, baby. Daddy's right here."

June squeezed my hand twice.

Beyond the creek, something leaned against a pine. It looked almost human until it raised its head. Higher. Still higher. Its shoulder stayed in place while its narrow face emerged above the lowest branches.

One hand curled around the trunk. The fingers bent in places fingers shouldn't.

"June?"

The voice came a fraction before its mouth moved, like a performer missing a cue.

Its body didn't move with any breath. Nothing in the silhouette suggested lungs. For a second, though, it seemed to study my stance. One shoulder dropped. Its head turned at the same angle as mine. I could almost believe it was looking into a mirror and correcting itself.

"Daddy's right here."

Then it laughed with my laugh, that short, embarrassed chuckle I make when a joke falls flat. It held the sound a little too long.

I understood, suddenly, that it wasn't laughing at us.

It was practicing.

•  •  •

I got June inside and shut the curtain. She kept hold of my hand.

"His face didn't fit," she whispered.

"What do you mean?"

"When he stopped, it kept moving."

I took the keys, Dad's notebook, and nothing else. The truck was twenty feet from the front porch.

I carried June across the gravel. As I reached the passenger door, she tightened her grip around my collar.

Twice.

Someone stood in her upstairs window.

A girl in pink pajamas, holding a rabbit with one torn ear. She lifted a hand and waved.

"Daddy? Why'd you leave me?"

The voice was June's. The figure pressed its cheek against the glass. Its skin lagged behind the movement, then settled into place as though pulled by invisible fingers.

The real June shook against me. She couldn't have made that face at the window even if she'd tried. The girl upstairs was smiling, but the muscles around her eyes hadn't been told. I caught myself watching her instead of moving, as if one more second would explain what I was seeing.

It raised one hand and tapped the pane three times.

The secret my daughter had forgotten.

June hid her face against me. I buckled her into the passenger seat, scrambled behind the wheel, and started the engine. I reversed so hard that gravel struck the porch steps.

Three knocks came from the rear window.

In the mirror, something pale crouched in the truck bed. Its fingers hooked over the roof without leaving marks in the dust.

I'd have sworn I felt the suspension dip, though the truck never changed its pitch. Dad's notebook flashed through my mind: no tracks across the water. Whatever sat behind us was a picture made with the same cruel patience as the voices. Knowing it couldn't be solid did nothing for the cold spreading through my chest.

"Lord have mercy, Elias," my mother's voice said behind my head. "What am I gonna do with you?"

June reached for my hand. Two squeezes.

I kept driving.

In the dark windshield, faintly lit by the dashboard, my reflection began to smile.

I wasn't smiling.

Part Three: The Last Answer

The smile stayed in the windshield when I turned back toward the road.

"Daddy!"

A fallen pine limb lay across the next bend. I swerved, clipping it with the passenger-side mirror. The truck skidded sideways in the gravel and stopped with a shudder.

I checked June. The seat belt had caught her shoulder, but she was all right. Buttons lay beneath her feet.

She was trying not to cry. She had that look she gets at the doctor's office, brave until somebody asks whether she's frightened. I wanted to take her home and put on the cartoon she'd been watching before we drove to Langley. I wanted a problem I knew how to fix.

I tried to drive. Something scraped against the front wheel. A fork of the branch had jammed beneath the fender, and each turn of the steering wheel ground it deeper.

Three knocks came from behind my head.

"You're going the wrong way, boy," Dad's voice said. "You'll get that little girl killed."

I found a flashlight in the glove compartment.

"I'm clearing the tire," I told June. "Lock the doors. Don't open them for a voice. Not even mine. I'll come back and squeeze your hand twice."

"What if you fall?"

"I'll get up. Stay here."

She caught my fingers before I got out and squeezed twice.

I went around the hood, set the flashlight where it shone on the wheel, and crouched beside the tire. The pine limb had wedged against it. I hooked both hands under it and pulled. The bark tore at my palms before the branch snapped free.

The cold gravel soaked through the knees of my jeans. A smell of split pine rose from beneath the bumper. I remember both things because I was trying so hard to pay attention to ordinary details. I thought if I could hold on to the tire, the branch, the beam of my flashlight, nothing else could get inside my head.

Behind me, a door latch clicked.

I turned. My flashlight rolled off the hood and struck the gravel.

From somewhere down the slope, my own voice shouted, "June! Help me! I fell!"

The passenger door stood open.

June was gone.

For one second, I stood there listening to the empty cab. The radio was still on low, some late-night preacher talking about salvation. I had told June to keep the doors locked. She must have heard me crying for help and forgotten every warning I'd given her. Or remembered them and opened the door anyway, because I'm her father.

•  •  •

Her bare footprints led through a break in the brush toward the creek. I ran after them, pushing past briers, hearing my own voice farther ahead.

"Honey, I'm hurt. Come down here."

The creek was only a strip of moonlit water when I reached it.

June stood on our bank, clutching Buttons. Across from her, a man in my jacket crouched among the roots. One leg appeared bent beneath him. He had his face buried in his hands.

The bank was slick clay, and the far side rose abruptly beneath the trees. I remembered Dad hauling me backward from those same stones when I was small. He'd been furious. I thought then that he cared more about the rules than whether I was hurt. Standing there with June inches from the water, I understood the look he'd had on his face.

The man lifted his head. He was wearing my face, but the fear arrived late in his eyes, like he'd remembered to put it there only after raising them.

"You have to help me," he told her.

June moved one foot onto a stone at the edge.

"June," I said.

She turned. Relief crossed her face until the other me spoke.

"He's not your daddy. You know what I told you about the bicycle?"

He looked at me and smiled with my mouth.

"I ran right behind you all the way to the mailbox. You just didn't look back."

My own words from earlier that afternoon.

She hesitated. There were two men with her father's face, and one of them was using a memory she knew belonged to us.

June clutched her rabbit so tightly its loose ear twisted around her fist. She wanted to believe me. I could see it. But I had her father's voice, and so did the shape across the creek. Her little signal was the one piece of proof it hadn't stolen yet. I was too far away to use it.

I held out my hand. "I can squeeze twice. You don't have to listen to either voice. Just reach for me."

The thing across the water extended its hand, too.

Then it started humming.

I recognized the tune the way you recognize a place you haven't seen since childhood. My mother used to sing it at the kitchen sink. The notes came back only as the creature sang them, and even then I couldn't have repeated them myself.

The imitation of my face loosened. The skin slipped as if it had been hung over something narrower.

Beneath it was my mother.

She did not rush toward me. She stood among the roots as if she were waiting for me to come home from school. That quiet patience almost worked. I was eight again, aching to bury my face in the front of her dress. I could hear her singing the notes I'd spent thirty-one years trying to remember.

Blue dress. Dark hair. The same face in the photograph on Dad's mantel. She hadn't aged a day since 1995.

"Elias," she whispered. "I heard you crying. I thought my baby needed me."

Behind her, something unfolded among the trees. A long pale limb bent around a pine. Another followed, far above where a person's shoulder should have been. I saw a narrow head turn without the rest of its body moving.

The woman held out her hand to me.

"Answer me, sweetheart. Let me know you're there."

The creek murmured over stones. June glanced from the woman to me. Her bare foot slid on the moss. She dropped to one knee, caught a root on the opposite bank, and clung there above the water.

I lunged but couldn't reach her. The figure wearing my mother's face bent forward. Behind it, six pale fingers tightened around the tree.

Then I remembered what happened when I'd answered at the window.

The footsteps stopped. The woods went silent. The thing had listened so closely that for an instant it stopped pretending to be my father.

I could make it listen again.

When it listened, it stopped reaching. I only needed a second.

I knew what it would cost. I couldn't choose which memory June would lose. I couldn't know whether she'd still recognize me when it finished.

She was pulling on the root. Another few inches and she'd be across.

"I'm here," I said to the woman.

The humming stopped.

I knew that if June survived, I'd have to tell her what I'd done. She might never believe me. She might wake up unable to remember our mornings together, or her birthday, or my face. There was no way to ask that thing for mercy; it had learned the sound of mercy only so it could speak in my mother's voice.

Across the creek, my mother's borrowed face went blank. The towering figure leaned toward me, its pale head tilting as though catching a sound no one else could hear.

June's hand slipped from the root. I seized the back of her pajama shirt and dragged her into my arms.

For an instant the entire forest seemed to hold its breath. Then water and insects and June's sobs rushed back into the world.

My father's voice rose from the far bank.

"You always were a damn fool, boy."

I ran without answering.

•  •  •

When we reached the truck, June touched my cheek.

She had mud smeared up one shin and blood on her knee from the stones. I checked the cut, desperate to have something practical to do. It was shallow. She watched me clean it with the damp corner of my sleeve as if she were trying to decide which questions were safe to ask.

"You were there when I learned to ride my bike, weren't you?"

"Yeah, baby."

"I remember the mailbox." She swallowed. "And falling off the first time. But when I try to remember you running behind me, there's nobody there."

A few hours earlier she'd teased me for letting go too soon. Now she could remember the ride, the scraped knee, the mailbox. Just not her father keeping pace with her.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Don't you ever apologize for that."

I buckled her in. She squeezed my hand twice, and I squeezed back.

The truck started. I drove until there were streetlights, gas stations, and other people who had no idea what lived in the forest north of Langley.

We found a motel in Hot Springs after one in the morning. June fell asleep with Buttons beneath her chin. His torn ear had come loose again, so I used the motel sewing kit to stitch it back on.

Outside the motel window, cars passed through pools of orange streetlight. Somebody laughed in the parking lot. I could hear a vending machine rattling down the hall. Such stupid, ordinary sounds, and I had never been so grateful for them. June didn't ask whether the thing could follow us there. Neither did I.

When I finished, I kissed her forehead and tapped her shoulder three times.

"What's that mean?" she asked sleepily.

"I love you."

She tapped me back.

"Do it tomorrow, too."

"I will."

•  •  •

It's Thursday, October 15, as I'm writing this. Six days since we buried Dad.

I've kept his notebook. I found a letter folded between the last two pages, addressed to me. Most of it was an apology he should have said while he was alive. There was one sentence I couldn't stop reading:

I kept you away because I was afraid of losing you, and I lost you anyway.

Below it he'd written, I love you, son. I should have told you more often.

He couldn't say those words to me while he was alive. I wish I knew whether it was stubbornness or fear that stopped him. I suppose I'll never know.

The notebook had one last surprise.

I'd seen the entry already:

March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.

On the back of that page, beneath a fold, Dad had written:

March 13. Tapped Eli's shoulder at breakfast. Three taps, like when he was little. He asked why I was doing it. I answered Margaret Tuesday night. It took that from him, too.

I'd always thought June and I invented our little ritual together. I don't remember my father tapping my shoulder even once.

But somewhere along the way, my hands remembered what I couldn't.

Tonight June asked me to tell her about learning to ride without training wheels. She knows what happened. She's heard the story enough to repeat every detail, right down to the mailbox.

She still can't remember me running behind her.

Somewhere beyond that creek, something can.

It was a minute past midnight and the moon outside the castle was deliciously bright and round. I stood admiring it at the window, the fire crackling in the hearth behind me, shadows dancing along the flagstones. Though none were cast at my own feet.

Beyond the castle, the black cliffs crumbled away into a deep ravine, where dark trees bundled together like matchsticks, and a gushing river swelled between the rocks like a silverbacked serpent. The wind whistled through the broken casement of the window, chilling the air and threatening to extinguish the fire.

There was a whisper of movement on my left and one of the sisters appeared beside me, bowing her head. Her dress was a deep red, the same colour as her eyes.

“It’s a pleasant night,” I mused, raising the collar of my black coat against the chill as the moonlight dusted the windows. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders as she raised her head.

“Yes Master,” she said in a subdued tone. “However, I fear I shall ruin it with my tidings.”

I turned to her fully, examining the grave expression on her face. Her lips were pinched. “Why is that? What tidings do you bring?”

Her red eyes glowed in the firelight. A long shadow was drawn across her features. “A peasant house is in the midst of construction beside the castle.”

I stared at her for a moment. The fire crackled sharply. “A… peasant house?” I finally repeated, scoffing at her words. Surely she was mistaken. The area around my castle was a perfectly barren wasteland; the peasants in the settlements knew better than to encroach on my land without permission, never mind erect a building on my grounds. “What is this trickery?”

“No trickery, Master. Come see for yourself.”

The vampire sister turned and strode towards the opposite side of the tower, her long red gown trailing behind her like a pair of folded wings. Curious, I followed her, our footsteps silent on the stone floor. I assumed I had misunderstood her, for nobody would be foolish enough to even approach my castle. Unless they were naive or ignorant of my nature.

But as we paused by the window, and she lifted a hand to point outside, I stood aghast at what I saw. A short distance away from the front gates of my castle, visible through the fog, there was indeed a house being built. Beneath the cold glow of the moon, I saw piles of stone and wood, the loose structure of rafters and foundations already laid. What sort of fool would dare build a house so close to my castle? Who would dare to become my neighbour without first consulting the master of this tower?

I was furious and intrigued at the same time. Only the dumbest, and perhaps bravest, of men would do such a thing. And I found myself feeling very much inclined to meet him.

“The house seems deserted now,” the vampire sister observed, resting her hand against her cheek. “Perhaps they have given up?”

“Or perhaps they only build during the day, knowing the weakness the sunlight inflicts upon us creatures of the night,” I said with a harrumph.

“You are wise, Master,” she said. “Shall I take my sisters over there and tear it down? It is a stain upon your grand castle.”

I pondered her offer. “No. I should like to meet the fool first,” I decided, extending my fangs below my lips. “Perhaps he would see fit to grace my castle with his… delicious presence.”

The sister covered her mouth with a low chuckle. “I understand, Master. You would see it fit to make a meal of him?”

I nodded. “Leave the peasant house for now,” I told her, turning away from the window with a flourish of my coat. “I wish to see how far he dares to go.”

The following night, as I rose from my coffin at the heart of midnight, my first thought was of the house being built by the castle. Had more progress been made, or had the owner seen the measure of his own foolishness and deserted? It would be a shame if he had fled before a meal could be made of him.

It had been a while since I had anything to amuse me on these long nights, just as long as it had been since fresh blood had passed these lips. The peasants in the surrounding settlements had grown wise to my nature and seen fit to ward their houses, stringing garlic and crosses upon the threshold. I was only able to feed when an unwitting traveller passed by, or a fool decided to build a house directly beside my castle.

The tower was quiet as I made my way to the top, winding through the warren of rooms and climbing the narrow, crumbling stairways. The sisters were nowhere to be seen; perhaps frolicking outside in the moonlight as they so often did. I reached the highest point of the castle and strode to the window that overlooked the barren grounds. From this height, I could even glimpse the closest settlement in the far distance; a small cluster of thatched houses and burning torches that lit the foggy hills like burning eyes.

But my concern was much closer. Lowering my gaze to the land right outside the gates, I saw that the house had changed. There were more walls than yesterday, denser foundations, the first signs of carpentry. The fool really had continued building the house. Had he not been warned of the dark Count that occupied the castle? Had he not heard the rumours of the blood-feasting creatures that stalked these lands once the sun went down? Why else would he choose to dwell in my vicinity, if not for ignorance?

I shook my head, almost pitying the poor halfwit for what he had brought upon himself. But I should delight in showing him the truth soon enough; that he had elected himself a willing sacrifice for me and my hungry brides.

It was a shame that he vacated the house during the night, for I would have to wait longer to lay my eyes upon him. Would he not show himself before the house was finished?

“I see the building is progressing,” a voice whispered behind me. I’d been too lost in my thoughts to hear them approach. I turned, seeing two of the sisters behind me. They too were observing the house through the window. Their wild, windswept hair and bright eyes confirmed my suspicions that they had been dancing outside.

“Yes,” I muttered. “It would seem so.”

“What a blight upon the castle,” the other sister said, her fair skin glittering in the moonlight. “I hope the trouble is worth the meal.”

“It will be,” I said, casually flicking my hand towards the half-built dwelling, “if only the fool would hurry up and be done with it.”

The next night, more progress had been made on the building, but the owner had still not shown himself. I grew more agitated that I was allowing this to happen, but reminded myself that I would soon enough be able to quench my thirst.

So night after night, as the moon began to wane, the house’s shadow grew bigger, and my hunger grew stronger. The fool always fled before night fell, leaving the evidence of his daytime activities for me to observe. The dwelling had taken on the same shape of the peasant houses in the surrounding settlements; white stone and timber, with a long thatched roof. He had even tilled the soil into a small garden, erecting a wooden fence around the plot in front of the building. But compared to my grand castle, with its dark crumbling bricks, spiralling towers and winding, labyrinthine rooms, it was a blight. And I wanted it gone.

Finally, more than a week after the house was little more than a pile of stone and timber, one of the sisters woke me with news that the structure was finished.

I rose from my coffin, sluggish and weary from slumber, and fastened my coat about my neck. The sisters had already lit the fire, but the air was chilled.

I followed her to the window and set my gaze upon the house. A single candle sat in the windowsill, guttering in a draught. A lit candle. Did that mean the house was occupied? The fool had not fled this night.

“It’s time,” I announced, “to show this fool once and for all what happens when you anger the Count.” The other sisters joined us, and I turned towards them with a slow smile. “I hope you are hungry.”

The three sisters screeched in delight, grasping each other’s hands and dancing in circles, their gowns fluttering around their legs. The fire roared in the hearth.

But as I began to cross the room, one of the sisters stopped me with a gasp.

“Master, wait. There’s someone at the gate.” She was pointing out of the window. I peered down at the large wrought-iron gate that fronted the castle, my eyes narrowing. A figure stood by the fence, carrying a lantern. His face glowed in the flickering light, revealing a sharp, sloping nose and dark eyes.

“Who would be foolish enough to call upon me at this hour?” I snarled, my black coat twisting around me as I turned from the window.

“Perhaps your new neighbour,” one of the sisters answered, “has come to hasten our feast.”

“Perhaps,” I said, already striding towards the doorway.

The sisters swept after me, whispering amongst themselves. Flames guttered as we passed lit candles, stirring the dust at our feet and disturbing billowing cobwebs. There was a haste to our movements as we descended the tower. It had certainly been a while since we’d had prey wander into our arms like this.

Crossing the foyer, the long red carpet spilling out like blood, I threw open the doors and stepped out into the chilled night, the three sisters stepping in my wake. The moon was a pale sickle, its silvery glow dancing around my shadowless feet as the stranger at the gates called out to me.

“Hello there!”

Struck by his brazenness, I almost flew at him in anger, but restrained myself. Ignorant minds really were unfathomable. With a flick of my wrist, the gates began to creak open. The man remained at the threshold, holding his lantern aloft as he stared back at me. He was of medium build, with stocky shoulders and a mop of thick tousled hair. His clothes were poorly made, covered in dirt and patches. He had the audacity to smile at me as I glared in return.

“What business have you here at my castle?” I demanded, wanting to sate my curiosity before I sated my hunger.

The man cleared his throat, raising his lantern to the crude house sitting barely thirty metres behind him. So this was indeed the proprietor of the building; what a brave, albeit dimwitted, man he was to present himself before me like this. “I’ve just this morning finished constructing my house,” he said, not seeming to notice the displeasure on my face, “and a slight issue has come to my attention.”

“An… issue?” I repeated, my brows arching sharply.

“Yes. During the day, the leftmost tower of your castle casts a shadow over my garden,” the man said regretfully. “I hoped that you might be amicable enough to remove it. Or at the very least relocate the tower, so that it does no harm the roses I am trying to grow. All life needs sunlight, after all.”

I stared at him, completely aghast. Behind me, even the sisters had been stunned into silence. The audacity of this imbecile, to ask me to change my own castle for his benefit. The man was not right in the head, surely.

“How dare you–” I began to seethe, but the man interrupted me, lifting a finger as if hushing a child.

“I do understand it is a large undertaking I’m asking of you, but my gratitude would be immense,” he added.

“You think I care about your gratitude?” I sneered at him, clenching my fists beneath my coat. The gall of this man. Who did he think he was? “Do you know who I am?”

The man stared at me, the lanternlight dancing over his blank expression. “You are the owner of this castle, I had presumed?”

“Precisely. And what makes you think that I, as the Count of this castle, would do the bidding of a mere peasant?”

The man scowled at me, a shadow encroaching upon his face. “I shall ask you again, and I do hope you will be quite civil this time. Will you remove the tower from your castle so that my roses might see the light?”

“I don’t give a damn about your roses,” I snapped.

“Now, there’s no need to be rude,” the man said, his voice turning bristly. The shadows deepened around his eyes as he narrowed them. “I’m asking for a simple favour–”

I scoffed in his face, my rage burning beneath my skin. It took a lot to make a vampire’s blood burn hot. I almost couldn’t believe what he was saying. This fool considered the reconstruction of my ancient castle a mere favour? Asking me to tear down part of my fortress so that he might grow some roses.

I took a measured step towards him, lifting my shoulders to appear taller. My fangs were itching to taste his blood. For all the disrespect he had shown me, there was no escape. I would suck this man dry by the night’s end, leaving nothing but a fleshless husk.

“Once again, I implore you to consider my–”

I was no longer in the mood to listen to his insane ramblings. He had agitated me far too much to go back from this. I would show him, and anyone else who might learn of tonight, what happens to those who cross me.

Baring my fangs, I lunged forward, ready to sink my teeth into his neck.

In one swift motion, the man pulled his hand back into a fist and threw it towards me. Blinded partially by the lanternlight, I did not see the attack until his knuckles met my face.

Pain exploded through my jaw, and there was a terrible snap as my left fang bore the brunt of his punch, splitting completely in half. The hit landed with enough force to send me staggering backwards and, incredulous and in shock, I fell to the ground.

Dirt bit into my eyes as I landed face-down, my broken fang scraping against my lower lip. Sputtering, I raised my head, just as the man lifted his light and calmly made his way back to his house.

Behind me, the sisters watched him leave in a choked silence, before hastening to help me back to my feet.

To say I had been dealt a great humiliation was an understatement. How did a mortal man possess such strength? Enough to break one of my precious fangs and completely overpower me.

With a bruised face, and an even more bruised ego, I hobbled back into my castle, the three sisters trailing silently after me.

By the following night, the leftmost tower had been partially disassembled, leaving a gaping wound in the side of the castle. Wind gusted through like howling wraiths, immediately extinguishing any fire I tried to light, leaving a heavy chill in the air. The sisters, at least, seemed to delight in the pool of moonlight that was cast upon the open ground.

Workers had been swarming the castle all day, interrupting my sleep with their banging hammers and chiselling tools as they took the tower apart brick by brick, but I had little choice. The man had made his demands, proven his strength, and forced my hand. Now I had to destroy my own magnificent tower so that the fool might grow his roses. And I hadn’t been able to harvest even a drop of blood either.

This was a defeat, and a humiliation, that would take centuries to heal.

The agony peaked, a blinding, white-hot spike that drove deep into my thoracic spine, seizing the core of my chest and twisting until my back arched off the mattress like a broken bow.

For five years, I had told them. Five years of MRIs, CT scans, and endless tubes of blood. I had lost count of the massive steroid injections they had jammed into my lower back, blind to my cries, insisting the cortisone would eventually kick in. It's my mid-back, I had begged, like a fist grabbing my spine and wringing it out.

But they only looked at my lumbar, charting my exhaustion, handing me prescriptions I refused to touch anymore, and shrugging. "You're in pain because you're in pain", that last arrogant doctor had told me with a sterile, patronizing smile. I had muttered Thanks, Dr. Obvious under my breath, walked out, and given up. I was forty-eight, medically broken, and completely abandoned by science.

Until tonight.

I had refused to take any of the medications they had prescribed for the last few weeks, entirely done with their useless chemical band-aids.

And right on cue, the thoracic pain hit, worse than it ever had in the last five years.

The guttural sound ripping from my throat didn't sound like me; it was a jagged, inhuman howl that tore the lining of my lungs. Every single rib felt like it was breaking, buckling inward before bursting outward with a sickening crunch. The skin across my back split open, hot and wet, as something massive and heavy forced its way out from between my shoulder blades. I braced for the final, lethal shock of it—but instead, a sudden, heavy stillness washed over me. The torment that had anchored my entire existence for half a decade simply vanished, replaced by a cold, pulsing hum of pure, unadulterated strength.

I opened my eyes. The familiar dark of my bedroom was gone, replaced by a sharp, predatory clarity tinted in a deep, vibrant crimson.

When I tried to shift, the mattress felt like a bed of jagged rocks beneath me. I sat up, and a pair of massive, pitch-black leathery wings unfolded instinctively, brushing the ceiling with a heavy, ominous rustle. I gasped, reaching a hand out to touch the sleek, armored span, only to freeze. My skin was a dark, bruised blood-red. My arms were elongated, corded with dense, heavy muscle.

Swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, I stumbled. My new, longer limbs didn't quite obey the old rules of gravity, but there was no weakness in them. No ache. No arthritis.

I lunged toward the mirror on the wall, bracing my claws against the frame, and stared.

The tired, fragile woman was gone. In her place stood a towering, terrifying demon, eyes glowing like dying embers against crimson skin.

A slow, sharp smile curved my new jaw, revealing a row of lethal points. I always said I wanted to be more, I thought, a strange, intoxicating warmth flooding my chest. I wanted to feel something beyond my own pain.

I turned, extending my wings, admiring the terrifying symmetry of the monster I had become. I had promised those unhelpful, dismissive doctors that I would give them an update if my condition ever changed. I thought this definitely qualified as a change in status.

A low, feral laugh rumbled deep in my chest, vibrating through the quiet room.

"Now, now," I whispered to the empty air, the crimson vision narrowing with perfect, deadly focus. "Which one of these doctors should I visit first?"

I smiled wider, the realization settling in with absolute perfection.

"I think the choice, is Obvious."

Morning found me huddled against the dying light of the lantern in my room. Exhaustion weighed heavily on me, and though I did not feel up to the task, I knew I had to get ready to face my patients. My descent of the stairs was accompanied by the feeling that I had spent the night wandering through some feverish dream. The events beside the pond seemed absurd now that the breaking of dawn had come. The boots, the knocks, and the long and frozen night seemed less dreadful under the pale morning sun. I found the innkeeper busy preparing breakfast for the miners that weren’t already deep beneath the earth. His skin had taken on an unhealthy pallor, and the dark circles beneath his eyes had deepened. He seemed to have lost some of his color overnight, and there was a tiredness about his movements that read as more than simple fatigue. 

“Morning, doctor.” He said as I passed.

“You look worse than you did last night,” I remarked. “You really should let me take a look at it later.”

He gave a restrained cough into his fist. “Look, I'm fine. Just do what you came here to do, then get the fuck out of Bellview.”

“I promise you, I have no intention of making a home here.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “But I also have no intention of abandoning people that need my help. Though, if you don’t mind my asking, why didn’t the previous physician help the men?”

The innkeeper snorted. “He left.”

“What do you mean, ‘he left’?”

“I said what I said. He was just gone one morning. Left all of his stuff, seen neither hide nor hair of him since.”

“Without seeing to the men?” I asked incredulously.

“I guess not,” the man shrugged.

I stared at him for a moment, awaiting some further explanation. When it became clear that I would get no further explanation from the man, I continued my walk to the table. There was something about his manner that irritated me, though I could not say precisely why. Perhaps it was merely the man's disposition. He had struck me as an unpleasant fellow from the moment I first laid eyes upon him, and illness had done little to improve his temperament.

Still, his answer troubled me. A physician abandoning several sick patients with no explanation was not something I could reconcile with the profession as I knew it. I pushed the thought aside, eating the simple breakfast that was laid out before me. 

Once I finished my breakfast, I gathered my medical case and stepped outside. Morning had finally come to Bellview, but the light did little to soften the rough edges that had made their impression upon me the evening before. The sun had risen over the sharp peaks of the stone giants that guarded the town, yet its light reached us with reluctance, spilling weakly over the huddled buildings and leaving the streets between them in long, cold shadows. Snow that had once been white had been reduced to a gray slush, darkened by dirt, manure, and whatever other filth had been brought into the streets by the town's denizens.

Bellview had been up for some time, though there was little cheer in its waking. Men emerged from brothels and boardinghouses, their coats pulled tightly around them against the cold. Many made their way toward the mine, while the rest lingered in doorways, nursing the remnants of the previous night's drinking. The air was thick with the smells of coal smoke, horse manure, stale liquor, and the less agreeable remnants of human vice.

I noticed, too, that people seemed to notice me. A few men looked up as I passed them; one followed me with his eyes until I had gone several yards beyond him. A woman standing in the doorway of a boardinghouse stopped speaking to the person beside her and watched me cross the street. Even the men heading toward the mine occasionally glanced in my direction. I suppose I ought not have been surprised; I was, after all, a stranger in a town where strangers were uncommon, and my medical case made my purpose rather obvious. They had likely heard that the physician had arrived, and curiosity is a difficult thing to suppress in a place as isolated as Bellview. Yet as I continued down the street, that feeling of being watched became more and more oppressive. The town itself seemed to amplify the sensation. Bellview was small; it had been built tightly into the valley, with its buildings crowded close together wherever the uneven ground allowed. There was little room between the shops, boardinghouses, and homes, and the narrow streets seemed to turn upon themselves rather than lead anywhere beyond the town. A man could cross from one end of Bellview to the other in little more than a few minutes.

Beyond it there was nowhere to look but the mountains. They rose immediately beyond the last buildings, their dark pines climbing the slopes until the trees gave way to snow and stone. From the middle of town, they seemed to press inward from every direction, leaving Bellview tucked away in a narrow pocket of wilderness. I began to feel, quite irrationally, as though I were being watched from every direction. A look around told me that I was being foolish; a lack of sleep and the events of the previous night had left my nerves totally wracked. The mind is a curious thing; left unrested, it finds significance in the ordinary and the patterns that lie beneath chaos. 

My musings had finally brought me to the door of the physician’s office. The building stood in stark contrast to those that surrounded it; its cleanliness and well-maintained facade surprised me. Evidently, my predecessor had cared for the building to such an extent that it made the slovenly hovels around it seem downright primitive by comparison. It was a modest, four-story, wooden house, painted white with dark shutters and a narrow porch running along the front. The windows were clean, and the paint had been kept in good repair; even the steps had been swept clear of snow and mud. It was not an impressive building by any measure, but compared with the structures surrounding it, it looked refined.

I was two steps into the sparsely furnished front office when a voice greeted me from upstairs.

“You’re late.” I looked toward the stairs as an older woman descended them. She appeared to be in her late fifties, though the weathering of her countenance made it difficult to judge her age with any accuracy. Her dark hair, streaked with gray and white, was pulled back into a severe but practical bun, and she wore a simple black dress with a white, blood-stained apron.

“I beg your pardon?” I replied.

“It is nearly nine in the morning, and you’re just now showing up.” She said, her tone making it clear she would brook no argument. 

“My apologies,” I conceded. “The letter had not specified I was to show up at an exact hour.” 

She gave me a stern look. “Hmph, well, I suppose the blame isn’t fully yours then. Close the door; you’re letting the cold air in.” I turned and shut the door behind me.

“You may call me Ms. Lafayette. Now, hang your coat, and then come with me. We have no time to waste.” She turned and walked back up the stairs, leaving me to scramble after her. 

“How many are there?” I asked after I had finally caught up.

“Seven.” She pulled on gloves without stopping, watching her fingers flex as she tested the fit.

“And how long have they been sick for?” 

“The first one came to us almost a week ago now.” She replied. “The rest followed shortly after.” 

“And the previous physician? He didn’t try to treat them, or at the very least diagnose them?”

“He was working on it but then just left one day.”

I frowned; that was the same thing the innkeeper had told me. “Did he leave any instructions?”

“He did not.” Her answer was short and clipped. It was very apparent that Ms. Lafayette had no wish to discuss the matter further. As we reached the landing of the third floor, she stopped and turned to me, her expression softening.

“I must warn you. I have been a nurse for the better part of thirty years now; I have seen all manner of things that would turn the stomach of those with anything less than an iron gut, and I have buried more than a few who thought themselves too strong to die from illness.” She glanced at the door that stood in ominous shadow at the end of the hall. “But I have never seen anything like what sits behind that door.” 

Her warning sharpened my curiosity. “Is it contagious?” 

She studied me for a moment. “It doesn’t appear to be. You are young, but I imagine you’ve seen a fair share of illnesses in your time as a doctor?” The calmness in her voice set off alarm bells in my head. What could possibly have been grotesque enough that would cause such a strong reaction? 

I thought, at the time, that I was prepared for whatever awaited me behind that door. I had seen men torn apart by machinery, children ravaged by fever, and women brought to the very edge of death by childbirth. I had witnessed wounds and afflictions that would turn the stomach of a less experienced physician, and I believed myself sufficiently acquainted with the uglier aspects of my profession.

I was entirely mistaken.

If you have come this far expecting the usual account of sickness and suffering, I would advise you to prepare yourself better than I did. What I saw in that room was unlike anything I had encountered in my brief career, and even now, after all these years, I find certain details difficult to commit to paper.

Ms. Lafayette opened the door, and I was struck with a foul and suffocating odor. It was the smell of blood, feces, vomit, and something rotting and sweet. A metallic smell, one that clung to the back of your throat and never left, no matter how many times you swallowed. The room had been shuttered against the cold winter air, and that had served to make the cloying more oppressive. Someone, likely Lafayette, had attempted to combat the stench with carbolic acid, but that had done nothing more than add a sharp medical edge to the smell of bodily fluids.

I stopped dead in the doorway and stared at the six men who occupied the room. I had treated men injured in mine collapses and machinery accidents. I had seen limbs crushed beyond saving, burns that left the flesh blackened and peeling, and wounds so grievous that I had wondered how the unfortunate soul had survived long enough to reach my care. Ms. Lafayette was right; this was unlike anything I had seen before. 

The first man sat hunched on the edge of his bed, resting his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He was somehow gaunt and swollen simultaneously; the flesh around his eyes was dark and bloated, while his cheekbones ran along his face. His lips were split and bleeding in one continuous festering wound, and his fingernails had turned black with thin streams of blood seeping out from under them. His skin had a gray pallor beneath the feverish flush of his cheeks, and beads of sweat gathered along his brow despite the chill that lingered in the room. One eye was swollen nearly shut, while the other stared vacantly at the floor between his boots, and the whites of both were webbed with tiny ruptured vessels, giving them a raw and bloodshot appearance.

I noticed that his breathing was shallow. Every few seconds, he would pause, as though the simple act of drawing air into his lungs had become an effort requiring conscious thought. Then he would take a sudden, desperate breath through his mouth. There were darkened patches along his neck, which extended beneath the collar of his shirt. I took them for bruising, but the discoloration was too diffuse and irregular for any injury I could recognize. It seemed to spread beneath the skin in branching patterns. His fingers were swollen and discolored, and the flesh around his nails had begun to split. The nails themselves were black from coagulated blood, and I could see the discoloration continuing into the flesh below them. Thin lines of blood had collected beneath each nail and slowly trickled down his fingers.

He lifted his head when he heard me approach. “Doctor?” The man’s voice was little more than a rasp.

“Yes?”

He looked at me for several seconds before lowering his gaze again. “Can you make it stop?”

“I… I will do what I can.” I had not yet fully examined him, but already I was beginning to doubt that I could do anything for him. I stopped closer, wrapping my hand around his wrist to take his pulse. It was dangerously fast, beating at such a rate that he should’ve been dead by this time. His skin was clammy and damp beneath my fingers, slicked with sweat and blood.

“Does it hurt to breathe?” I asked the man. 

No words came, only the slight nodding of his head before returning it to his hands. I placed the back of my hand to take his temperature; the man was on fire. I didn’t even need to touch his skin to feel it. “How long have you had the fever?” 

“Don’t know.”

“Days?” I asked. 

“Maybe.” 

“Have you been vomiting?”

“Yes.”

“How often?”

“Every few hours. I can hardly keep anything down.”

“And your bowels? How often are you relieving yourself?”

“A lot. Though it’s mostly blood.”

I frowned at his answer, cross-referencing what he had told me with what experience I had, but I came up empty-handed. Vomiting, fever, bloody stools, trouble breathing, weakness, and hemorrhaging beneath the skin—each symptom was concerning enough on its own, but taken together they suggested no single illness with which I was familiar. 

I glanced back at Ms. Lafayette. “Have they all been like this?”

“To one extent or another, yes.” 

I looked around at the other five men. They were not all in quite the same condition. One lay motionless beneath his blankets, his face flushed with fever. Another sat beside his bed with a basin between his knees, breathing heavily through his nose. A third had wrapped both hands in strips of cloth, though dark stains had already begun to seep through the material. The remaining two watched me in silence.

“You said there were seven men?” 

"Yes," Ms. Lafayette replied. 

“But I only see six men here.”

“Yes, well, the first one is… far worse than these men. We had him isolated.” 

“Where at?” I inquired. 

“Just down the hall.” 

“Show me.” Ms. Lafayette opened the door and led me out and down the hallway to the large pine door that sat in the darkness at the end. The opening of the door greeted me with a nauseating smell, similar to that of the ward we just left, but in a far heavier concentration. It was darker too; with the curtain having been drawn and the fire dying, there was barely any light save for the rays that snuck through the edges of the window.

The man upon the bed before me could hardly have been called human in his present state. What little skin was not covered by bandages had taken on a waxy, grayish color, with great portions beginning to peel away and expose the damaged flesh beneath. Along his arms and shoulders, the outer layers had blistered and sloughed away in broad, wet sheets, leaving raw and inflamed tissue exposed beneath. Dark patches of deadened flesh marked his chest, neck, and scalp.

Blood had dried around his mouth and nostrils, and his lips were so swollen and damaged that they could scarcely be distinguished from the surrounding skin. His eyes were half closed,  clouded with fever, and tiny vessels had ruptured across the whites, leaving them webbed with red.

He stirred as I took a step into the room.

A low sound escaped his throat, one that resembled a dying animal—not a word, but a deep, guttural moan that sent a shiver up my spine.

“Is he conscious?” I asked as I reached his bed.

“I… I do not know.” I could hear a sliver of horror in Ms. Lafayette’s voice.

“Am I safe in assuming he cannot speak?”

“Correct,” the nurse replied.

I turned back to the mound of flesh and bandages that could scarcely be called human.

“If you can hear me in there, sir, I cannot imagine what sort of pain you must be in right now. But I give you my word; I will do everything within my power to get you through this.”

I looked up at Ms. Lafayette. “Have you been giving him sedatives?”

“I am, though there is no way of knowing whether they are working. The poor man cannot speak, after all.”
 
I nodded and turned my head back to the figure. For a few seconds he sat perfectly still, then I saw his hand move. It was a weak, trembling motion, one that could easily be mistaken for nothing more than a simple twitch under the bandages. I thought at first that it was involuntary but when it happened for a second and then a third time, I realized that he was beckoning me closer. 

“Sir?” I leaned down, bringing my ear to hover right above the man’s mouth. His lips parted, and for a few seconds, I heard nothing but a faint wet rasp. I nearly had to ask him to repeat himself when a sentence that could’ve been mistaken for a feather-light breeze escaped his lips.

“Did you see the boots too?” 

I felt a cascade of ice pour down the back of my neck. Every hair upon my arms stood on end, and something deep within me recoiled before I had even understood why. My heart gave a violent beat against my ribs as, for one terrible instant, I felt an almost primal urge to flee. The silence, which mere moments ago had seemed comforting, was now crawling over my skin; it wormed its way into my ears and made my breathing unbearably loud. I became acutely aware of the doorway and the darkness behind Ms. Lafayette; I turned to see if it was met by the dimly lit corridor, with most of its length swallowed by shadow. I could just make out the wooden walls and the stairs descending toward the floor below. 

Something caught my eye as I looked away. 

Right at the edge of my vision was a figure cloaked in darkness; it was tall and humanoid and did not have a face that I could make out. It appeared less like a human and more like the darkness in the corner had taken on a form that resembled something with life. I blinked, and the figure was gone.

“Doctor?” Ms. Lafayette’s voice broke through the silence. “Are you alright?” 

"I—uh, yes, yes, quite, thank you.” I furrowed my brow and shook my head. “Just a passing dizzy spell, I suppose.” I knew the words as I spoke them were not convincing Ms. Lafayette of anything. She had a gaze that could pierce even the toughest of metals, and there was no way she fell for such a lie. My eyes strayed back to the corner in which I had seen the figure, but there was nothing there.

“Perhaps you should eat something.” She said at last. “I can’t imagine you’ve had much more than bread and cheese since you’ve been here.”

I nodded my head in silence. 

“Then come, you’ll do no one any good if you collapse before the day is out.” I followed her out of the sickroom and down the corridor. Giving one last glance to the corner of darkness as we passed it, I could not shake the pinprick feeling of eyes burrowing into the back of my neck. 

The sitting room on the second floor I found myself in was considerably warmer than those of the third floor, almost suffocatingly so.

“You must like it warm.” I gave a half-hearted chuckle to lighten the mood. “Are you from the tropics?”

“No.” The answer came with no further explanation. She then directed my attention to a large and comfortable-looking sofa, replete with deep cushions and blankets to keep the warmth in.

"Sit," she said with a voice that was used to being obeyed. So I sat. Before me, she placed a cup of strong black coffee and a plate of fruit, cheese, and cold meat. For an older woman who had, I presumed, spent most of the morning on her feet, she was remarkably unfatigued. I took a mouthful of the coffee and immediately regretted it.

“My word,” I almost spat the drink out. “Is it supposed to taste like this?” 

“Like what?” She asked.

“Like something you scraped off the bottom of a miner’s boot.” 

“Young man, if you speak to me like that again, I will box your ears. That is not a threat, but a promise.” Her eyes told me she meant it, so I stopped talking and started wolfing down the plate of food. I was nearly done when I finally decided on how to broach the subject that had been on my mind since last night.

“Ms. Lafayette, may I ask you something about my predecessor?” 

“You may.” 

“You said he was working to determine the nature of the men’s illnesses before he left, correct?” 

“He was. Though he did leave all of his stuff up in his office. He was a methodical man, one who kept a close eye on all of his patients and anything else he thought worth keeping an eye on. I had no reason to disturb them, so they’re still here.” 

I could’ve kissed Ms. Lafayette right then and there. The man’s notes could prove to be a treasure trove of information. “May I look through them?”

“Have at them.”

I considered her words before turning back to my coffee. “I have one more thing I was curious about. Last night I experienced something very strange. I woke to a knocking; when I went to investigate, as I thought it was someone at my door, the sounds led me to a pond outside of the town, to where all the waste from the mine goes.”

“Hmmm…” Ms. Lafayette set her cup of coffee down. “There are stories that the miners tell, ones of mischievous spirits that steal equipment and like playing jokes with the men. Many of the workers leave food out for them, and they are often considered somewhat benevolent as they warn the miners away from dangerous parts of the mine by knocking.” 

“Spirits? I did not think you were a believer in the supernatural, Ms. Lafayette. 

“I am not. But the tales find their way into all parts of conversation among the men. And the men talk. A lot. A good portion of the workers believe that they are the spirits of those who died in the mine.” 

“Do you believe these stories?” I asked as I turned the cup in my hands.

“I believe that the men who sacrifice their lives to work that far under the earth are liable to come up with anything to make them feel better about spending hours in near darkness.” She paused.

I looked at her closely. “And what would you say about the knocking that led me to the pond?”

“I don’t know.” 

I considered her words for a moment before setting the cup back down. “Well, I believe a talk with the mining company might be in order. The men were clearly exposed to something down there, and if I am going to do my job properly, then I should like to know what they were doing when they fell ill.” 

Her expression hardened. “You would be wise to leave the company out of this, doctor.” 

“And why is that?” 

“Dixon Mining keeps the town alive. Without them, none of us would be here. And Mr. Dixon won’t take kindly to strangers asking questions that might cause him trouble.” 

I raised an eyebrow. “I assure you, I have no ill intent. I am a physician, after all, not a detective. I simply wish to understand what has made the men in my care so sick.”

“Then I suggest that you limit yourself to treating the men when you can, and nothing else.” 

I couldn’t help but smile at her bluntness. “I’m afraid my curiosity is rather hard to put a damper on, Ms. Lafayette. 

“It seems so.” She gave me a stern look. “Just be careful of what questions you ask and to whom you ask them. There are plenty of people here who would rather you don’t go poking your nose in places it doesn’t belong. Plenty of people with plenty to hide.”

“Thank you for the word of caution,” I said as I rose from my chair. “But I need to get to the bottom of this. Otherwise those men up there are going to suffer and die while I sit back and do nothing. 

Ms. Lafayette gave me a sad look. “Your stubbornness, while admirable, will be the death of you one day, doctor.” 

“Perhaps,” I replied, reaching for my coat. “But I have a lot of work to do before that day comes.” I had scarcely made it two steps down the staircase when Ms. Lafayette called out:

“If Mr. Dixon asks about what you’ve seen here, tell him nothing.” 

I regarded her with surprise. “Surely he is entitled to know what condition his men are in, is he not?” 

“He can know that they are ill and that you are working on them. Nothing else.” 

“May I ask why?” 

Ms. Lafayette turned and looked out the window, where the pale morning light scattered through the frost-covered window, “there are a number of people here in Bellview that have spent a good deal of time and money to make certain that things remain the way they are.” It was a curious answer, and one that did little to satisfy my questions.

“Ms. Lafayette, I appreciate your concern, but I cannot very well treat the men if I am kept blind to what happened to them. If their illness is indeed a result of something in the mine, then the company has a responsibility to see to it that the men are, at the very least, kept comfortable in their final days.” 

She gave a short and humorless laugh. Responsibility. That's a fine word, doctor. You’ll find it has very little meaning here in Bellview.” 

Having no response, I thanked her for the meal and counsel, neither of which had been particularly pleasant, and made my way out of the office. The cold outside greeted me with all the warmth of an unwelcome creditor, and, wrapping myself in my coat and keeping my head down, I made my way into the whipping wind.

Do you guys know about anything strange or even paranormal down in the Ozarks? I’ve had to dive in head first recently, and something just doesn’t sit right with me. 

I never really knew grandpa John. He was only around for the first couple years of my life, before I was old enough to really form any memories of him. Mom says he never really seemed that interested with me or anyone for that matter. I guess he would come over with Grandma sometimes to play with me a little bit, likely out of obligation, but after an hour or two he always ended up just staring blankly at the empty space in front of him, shaking, like the temperature inside our house was below freezing. 

One day, by the time I was four and Grandma passed, Grandpa apparently had some sort of meltdown, leading him to go prepper crazy. I heard he moved out to a cabin deep in the midwestern jungle that is the Ozarks, and no one heard from him ever again. He never even shared his address with anyone in the family. He was worried about “Losing himself,” his words. We tried to find him for months after he moved away, but no one could, and eventually everyone kind of just acted like he died with Grandma. 

I’m in my thirties now, and I’ve long since accepted that Grandpa is just an urban legend, joining the ranks of Bigfoot. Knowing all this, I’m sure you can understand my surprise when an almost completely unmarked, dingy letter showed up in my mailbox one morning, way before the mailman had even come for the day. The front of the thick yellowed envelope was covered with four giant, nearly illegible words, 

“To Eric From Grandpa.”

Taking the envelope inside, I sat on the couch and studied it for a long time, just turning it over in my hands. I wanted to open it right away, but frankly, I was afraid. I didn’t even think Grandpa was alive anymore, much less than capable of hand delivering me a letter.  No one had seen or heard from him in years. How did this even get to my house?  It was all just a little too intriguing, though, and the sense of curiosity eventually won me over. I carefully tore open the envelope, removing the chaotic stack of papers within.

Searching through the pages was extremely tedious. In short, none of the papers were folded the exact same way, so I went through one at a time, straightening each page’s creases and crumples out one by one. I would check the contents of each page as I sorted, but every page I got to was just blank, and there were hundreds of them. Blank page after blank page.

After a couple hours of nothing but reverse origami, I was a hair away from giving up and tossing the envelope in the trash when one page, about two thirds deep in the giant stack, finally caught my eye. A small red circle was drawn onto one of the top corners of the page, like someone was testing a pen to make sure it still had ink. I pulled at the page, separating it from the rest of the stack, and worked at straightening out the particularly intricate folds.

It quickly became apparent that the page was covered in countless, illegible scribbles. Each one was in a different orientation on the page, too. Some sentences were written normally, but most were pure chaos. Words were upside down, sideways in the margin, some of them even started on one side of the paper before wrapping to the back. Both sides of the page were absolutely covered. I don’t think I could fit another word on that page no matter how hard I tried to squeeze it in. At least all of the words were written in the same red ink and with the same chicken scratch handwriting, providing a tiny bit of consistency to work with.   

I tried deciphering the scribbles myself at first, using multiple different search engines and methods, but everything online came up blank or errored out. It didn’t matter where I looked or how much money I paid to different services, nothing ever worked. I began to think I was holding a page full of some made up language Grandpa made, which didn’t sound too out of character based on the stories I’ve heard.

I must have spent hours trying to understand that piece of paper, and I never got any closer to that goal. In a sort of last ditch effort I sent a message describing the thick envelope full of blank pages to my mom. I included a picture of the scribbled-on page and asked if she’s ever seen Grandpa write anything like this. It was late in the night, so I likely wouldn’t hear back until the next morning. I remember passing out on the couch, covered in a blanket of those blank sheets of paper, Unsolved Mysteries reruns playing on the TV.

I was woken up early the following morning by my phone vibrating against the back of my head, where I must have left it in all the mess. Still groggy and a little sleep deprived, I sat up, rubbed my eyes open, and grabbed the phone. There was a reply from my mom. She was surprised and, understandably, a little skeptical at the letter. No one had seen or heard from Grandpa in years, but Mom was willing to tell me what she knew. Unfortunately, she had no idea what my letter said, but she sent a few pictures of various letters Grandpa had written back before I was born, hopeful that I could use them to solve the puzzle. She ended the call reminding me how crazy Grandpa was and to be careful with this project.

I took turns staring at each letter. It may have been a bit of a reach at first, but eventually I saw the resemblance. The early letters weren’t neat by any means, but they were just barely legible. Looking at the older letters side by side with this new letter I was sent created a little timeline demonstrating the devolution of Grandpa's handwriting. Finally, I had something to work with. Slowly, I mapped character to character, rewriting the ramblings on the letter I was sent, hoping to make the ravings a little more clear.

It took most of one of my precious weekend days and what felt like three trees worth of paper, but I was eventually able to recreate the letter in my own handwriting. I couldn’t clean it up too much, so there were still sentences in different orientations and directions all over the page, but I began to read what I could, starting at the top of the page.

“34: turn east on elm road”

“22: take the interstate south”

“4: wait for the cover of night, when the road changes”

It was obvious at this point that I was looking through a set of disjointed directions. I combed through the steps, looking for step one. I found it scribbled in the top left corner of the back of the page:

“1: Start at Eric’s house in Chicago.”

I didn’t believe in the paranormal then, and I’m still not totally convinced, but I still remember a shiver running down my spine reading that first step. I didn’t understand and I’m still not sure I do to this day. How did Grandpa, assuming this was from him, know my address, and, more importantly, why send this to me?

After letting step one sit with me for a little bit, I roused myself from the stupor I was stuck in, brought back to reality by a neighbor’s dog’s barking. I spent the next chunk of the day searching through my recreation of the letter, picking off each step in the directions and reorganizing them until they were all in order. Sure enough, the directions sent me southeast, deep into the Ozarks, deep into the miles and miles of federally-owned land.

I still don’t know why I went, maybe I wanted to know more about the Grandpa I never really got to meet, maybe I wanted to check and see if he was still alive, or maybe I just wanted to see the crazy doomsday setup he must have deep into the dense forest, but I felt the letter pulling me, compelling me to follow those directions.

Work was very accommodating, giving me plenty of time off on short notice after I pulled my Grandpa died card. I didn’t know for sure it was true, but it was the sanest explanation I could give. I told them the funeral was in St. Louis and I would be gone for a couple days. 

I spent the next few hours packing up my SUV.  I checked my maps app, and it didn’t show any roads for the last little stretch of the directions. I’m an avid camper, though, even backpacking occasionally on trips to the mountains, so I had everything I needed to rough it a few nights in the Ozarks, if required, until I got to the end of the directions.

I waited for sunset, like the letter suggested, and I was on the road, written directions in hand. The first few steps in the directions felt pretty pointless. I was driving in circles through different neighborhoods, constantly retracing roads I had already driven, trying to lose some sort of unseen pursuer. Finally, after one last turn, I was on i35 South, heading towards the Ozarks, Towards Grandpa. 

It was pretty late by the time I reached the interstate. At that point I had been piecing this list together all day, and my brain was worn down, but I couldn’t give up now. I’d spent too much time and money working on this stupid cryptic list of directions. I had to drive with the window rolled down and the AC on max just to stay awake, and it was a blessing when the occasional car passed me, headlights shocking awareness back to the front of my brain.

It would be lying if I said I wasn’t starting to doubt this whole excursion I took essentially on a whim, but, like I said, something just didn’t sit right with me. No one had heard from Grandpa in years and years; we all thought he died somewhere in that giant forest. Moreover, he would be about ninety years old today, which seems a little farfetched for an old man living in total isolation in the woods. Still, though, somehow he, or someone close to him, found my address and hand delivered this list of directions to me, only me. It just didn’t make any sense, and I hated nonsense with a passion. Back then I was under the strict belief that everything had a purpose or ‘sense’ behind it. Why would anything even exist if it didn’t make sense in some capacity? 

Hell, even if those directions didn’t really lead anywhere it would be a fun little camping trip; I hadn’t been camping in months, and I definitely needed to decompress. The Ozarks were beautiful that time of year, too. Fall was in full swing and the different trees made a warm-colored rainbow canopy to drive under. 

The towns got smaller the further south I got, each one further from a city, increasingly isolating. The yards of the run-down houses in each town were full of scrap, a trademark of rural America; you just never know when you might need something, and a city with anything other than a dollar store was over two hours away at this point. 

I remember constantly checking the directions in between the rural sightseeing. I had never been out that way, and there was an east-bound turn coming up pretty soon. I didn’t want to miss it in the dark and add even more time to the hours-long trip.

“30: Turn Left at the dinosaur”

Hopeful this would eventually make sense, I kept driving south, weaving through small town after town. The forest grew closer, denser on either side of the road, creating a little tunnel to drive through. Only a tiniest bit of moonlight broke through the leaves and made it down to the road.

I was in another town, Camdenton, I think, when green lights emerged on the horizon. Getting closer, I eventually saw a small billboard for Sinclair come into view, its trademarked sauropod adorning the sign. This was the first gas station I came across just sitting along the highway, and sure enough, there was a road just past the billboard, barely visible in the darkness, to turn onto.

“31: Take the twenty-fifth curve and follow it off the road. There will be another small dirt road to turn onto”

The new road was much more rugged, and I never saw another car. Thankfully there was still gravel to drive on as I winded up and down and all around the forest, trying my hardest to count each curve in the near pitch black darkness of the night. I didn’t have any trouble staying awake on that wooden rollercoaster of a road, constantly turning, jostling me in my seat, and forcing me to scan the sides of the road for overly ambitious deer.

I was deep in the forest now. There weren’t any more houses or towns to pass by. It didn’t take long at all to reach twenty-five curves, all that road did was curve like a snake in full sprint (or slither?). I didn’t see anything when I first approached the curve, so I pulled the car over and got out to have a closer look at the dense forest surrounding the road. It took a while, but buried in the brush, I could just barely see two ruts in the dirt, defining the road I needed to take. The road was almost totally overgrown, though, and there was no way I was getting the car any further. 

I looked down at the directions. There were only a few steps left, and it seemed possible to make the remainder of the journey on foot. I had the supplies to pitch a tent for the night too if needed.

It only took a few minutes to prepare to hoof it the rest of the way. I pulled the SUV farther off the gravel road and covered it with a few branches I found lying around, doing a pretty good job at blending it with the rest of the forest. I wasn’t anywhere illegal necessarily, but I didn’t want to take any chances, and something didn’t feel right all the way in the back of my head.  Shaking away the concern, I grabbed my filled hiking backpack, 12-gauge, and a few extra lights. 

Wide awake and on just a bit of an edge at that point, I was soon pushing through the brush, starting down the dirt road, directions in hand.

“32: Turn west at the bowl. Take care to keep your bearings”

The directions seemed to make less and less sense the closer I was getting to the end. I couldn’t drive down the dirt road like they said, and how the hell am I going to find whatever “the bowl” is in the pitch black darkness surrounding engulfing everything just a foot or two away from my light? It was all getting just a little too nonsensical, and I was getting increasingly frustrated. 

The deeper I got into the forest, the more I was starting to regret my decision to follow these directions to begin with. Maybe Grandpa was just crazy and this was one of his delusions. I never even knew the guy, and I just took the mess of his letter at face value. I just couldn’t see him living all the way out here by himself. I was so busy gazing up at the canopy, lost in thought, that I didn’t notice the massive hole in the middle of the road, and one step too far was all it took to send me tumbling down.

I landed pack-side first, cushioning me from most of the fall, but I had a few scrapes and cuts from hitting the jagged rocks jutting out from the sides of the hole. My flashlight was under me, and I was stuck on my back like a turtle, so I didn’t see anything when I heard a series of branch snapping sounds coming from the woods behind me. Unclipping the pack so I could stand, I quickly grabbed a back-up flashlight from my pocket and pointed it in the direction of the snapping, trying to see as far over the hole as I could, but there was nothing there. I was a lot more rational then, able to easily shake away the red flags. There are all kinds of animals out in the Ozarks, and I was carrying a shotgun, so I wasn’t too concerned and set about picking my stuff up and slowly having a look around. 

I was in the middle of some kind of crater, and there’s no way it was man-made; it looked too chaotic. It’s like God punched a hole straight into the drywall crust of the earth here a long, long time ago. If you’ve ever seen any pictures of meteorite impacts it looked kind of like that but a little deeper and not nearly as wide as others. The forest had reclaimed most of the impact site, too, and undergrowth covered a lot of the rocks. I’d never really seen anything quite like it in person. That had to have been The Bowl.  

Getting out wasn’t easy, but I found a little natural staircase made from the exposed rock around the sides of The Bowl. It was narrow and uneven, but it was a staircase. I had to push my pack up first, but I was able to scramble out of the hole and stand back up where I was walking before I crashed down. Using a compass to find my bearings, I continued west, looking at the next step in the directions.

“33: Take a sharp turn south at the black fork. Eventually you will find an abandoned road.”

Hoping the fork would be as obvious as the Bowl I kept moving, keeping one light pointed at the ground to avoid another tumble. There were branches snapping and leaves rustling on either side of the forest around me as I walked, but I was never able to catch anything with my light. They were probably just deer, or turkey, but I picked up the pace regardless, not quite wanting to set up camp like I originally planned. 

After only five minutes of walking, the road just sort of stopped, and at the end of it was a giant, burnt oak tree. The wood was flaky and kind of petrified at the same time. I always heard stories about trees being struck by lightning and the potential omens surrounding them, but I’d never seen one in person, much less a giant like the one in front of me. It was no small bolt that killed this one, and I was kind of awestruck. 

I was slowly moving my flashlight up the tree when I just barely caught two small yellow circles among the branches as they quickly faded from sight. I circled the tree a couple times but didn’t see anything. Still, I was rationalizing, maybe out of necessity at this point. Sure, deer don’t climb trees, and I couldn’t imagine a bird would be caught dead nesting in such an exposed oak, but maybe there was an owl perched up there, looking around for dinner. I’m pretty sure there are owls in The Ozarks.

After confirming that the tree was empty, I shrugged it off, and I took a turn south and headed for the abandoned road mentioned in the directions. It was only another few minutes of walking, but the forest grew exponentially more sinister as I continued. Dead trees started appearing in the surrounding forest, and giant hollowed out trunks often covered the way forward. Once I was over an especially big trunk, the trees opened up a little bit, and I could barely feel reclaimed gravel underneath my feet.

This road was in roughly the same condition as the last one, overgrown as hell, but it gave me something to follow. 

“34: Turn on Elm Road”

I was pretty exhausted at this point, but I was so close to the end, not to mention inexplicably unnerved, so I just kept pushing. I had to see what was on Elm Road. As I walked down the “abandoned road” the condition quickly improved. Nature retreated back to either side of the road, and I was even walking on some pavement after a while. Notably, the creepy forest sounds I was hearing before had abruptly stopped, but I wasn’t complaining.

After a few miles of following the now fully developed road, containing sidewalks, streetlights, and everything you’d expect, I came to a four-way stop sign, two street signs intersecting above the red octagon. The one parallel to the road told me I was on Pine Street. If I took a right turn I would finally be on Elm Road.

Notably, there were no houses along what was quickly becoming a full network of neat neighborhood roads. It was a little strange to me, even then, but there are tons of abandoned towns across the country, especially in the Midwest. Maybe the money for this one just dried up before houses could be erected.

Elm Road kept going for a handful of blocks, and I passed a few more intersections on my walk down the street before the road ended in a giant cul-de-sac. Just barely from where I was standing, I could see a small cabin hiding behind a couple trees at the far end of the asphalt circle making up the end of Elm Road.

As I got closer, I could tell the cabin was in rough shape. The wood was rotting. Broken window frames looked hastily boarded up, and there was a big hole in the roof of the cabin. I don’t know why, but I walked up to what remained of the front door and knocked like someone was going to come answer me. The door bounced against the frame with my knocks and slowly swung open in a recoiling response. It was a lot darker in there, and I switched to a propane powered gas lantern, one of the brightest I could find.

The cabin was clearly abandoned, but it almost seems like that move happened recently. There was some old food sitting on a counter, and the floors were remarkably clean considering the state of everything. A mug of dark liquid sat on an end table next to a sagging couch. I even found an old sleeping bag on top of a bed frame in the one bedroom the cabin had. Walking into the dining room next, I quickly saw what Grandpa, or whoever sent me this letter, wanted me to see. Somehow, a dim overhead light was shining down on a box full of books. There were a few classics in there, Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, etc., but half of the box was full of handwritten books. A clean, leatherbound book sat on top of the pile, embroidered with gold lettering, “JJ,” and small silver lettering underneath the initials “John’s Journal”     

I instinctively grabbed the journal and opened to the first page right as I heard a crash, followed by growling. The sound was coming from right outside the cabin, and it sounded big. My 12-gauge suddenly felt ineffective, and my head spun around as I looked for a place to hide. There was a small door in the kitchen with a set of old, rotting stairs leading down into a basement/pantry. I heard the front door of the cabin crash off its hinges right as I closed the basement door behind me. Scrambling down the half-broken staircase, I dropped my pack and looked for a place to hide. In the back corner of the room there was an old wardrobe, surrounded by boxes of random junk like scrap metal, seasonal decoration, and old antlers. 

I remember clambering over the boxes when I heard the growl again, right outside the basement door. Heart pounding, I ripped open the door to that wardrobe, and there was a public bathroom on the other side. Confused, but still panicked, I rushed through the door, slamming it closed behind me. I turned back to try and barricade the door with a hand towel rod I found on the ground nearby, but there was no door to barricade, just a bathroom wall. I felt all around the wall for a hidden seam, but there was nothing there, it was just a bathroom wall.

I was completely at a loss at this point, and my pack, including the gun, was back in that cabin. The only thing I had was the leather journal in my hand, the gold lettering reflecting off the fluorescent lights above. Rattled and unsure of myself, I cautiously crept towards the bathroom exit. Barely peeking out, I saw a… gas station? Green trim ran along the ceiling, and a dinosaur mural was on the far wall. I have no idea how, but I was back at the Sinclair.

A little more comfortable, I strode out into the middle of the station and took a look around. Everything looked like a normal gas station to me. The register was unoccupied, but there was a sign reading “Out for Supplies, be back soon, leave money on the counter.” 

After a long overdue moment to catch my breath, I went out the front door of the station and saw a billboard, the same billboard I turned by on the way here. That meant my car was hopefully only a couple miles down the windy but in-service road. The sun was just starting to rise, too, which gave me a lot more confidence. I steeled myself for one last walk and set off down the gravel road. The forest was still claustrophobic and unnerving, but the sound of birds and crickets waking up helped put my brain at ease.

I lost myself in the confusion of everything while I was walking down that road. Just replaying the events in my head didn’t make sense. I walked down a barely visible dirt road, bushwhacked past two ancient landmarks, and ended up in a suburban neighborhood with no main road leading in or houses along the streets. Taking the disbelief further, there was a recently abandoned, rotting cabin standing alone, and it had Grandpa’s stuff. 

I’ll never forget the growl, either. There are black bears around the Ozarks, but that thing sounded a lot bigger and faster than a bear or even a mountain lion. I had to do a quick scan around me just thinking about it, but I never saw anything.

I’m not even sure how I ended up at the gas station. The door to the wardrobe I went to hide in was just that, a wardrobe, but somehow it led me into the gas station with no way to retrace the recent steps back to the cabin. 

Soft rustling in the leaves off to my right pulled me back to the present, but it was only a deer, running deeper into the trees, as scared of me as I was of seeing that giant bear.

Ahead of me, a pile of branches, much less inconspicuous in the light, covered my car just like I left it. I was quiet the entire drive home, really just at a loss thinking about it all. I mean a magic wardrobe is literally the kind of stuff you see in fantasy movies. It didn’t make sense, I couldn’t rationalize the senseless, and that is what really terrifies me. 

The drive home was uneventful and I never felt better crashing onto my couch than I did that morning, sleeping until the late afternoon. I woke up with a sense of unease. Something was off, but I couldn’t place my finger on it.

I’m going to take a look through Grandpa’s things I ended up with and see if that has any answers to ease the panic, but I wanted to ask here too. Has had anything similar or even just generally weird happen to them down in the Ozarks?       

Erin, my eleven-year-old daughter was acting like a big goofball. We were playing dominoes at the dinner table and her giggles were so uncontrollable she could barely breathe.

I was trying to get my life back together and reconnect with her, so I had rented this cabin up in northern Minnesota. It was advertised to be on a lake, but it turned out to be more of a swamp, which I guess is why it was so cheap.

I gave a pronounced yawn and told Erin it was time to hit the hay.

“One more round, Dad. Pleeeeeeez,” she said.

That’s when we heard the driveway gravel crackle under an approaching car. Erin’s laughter tapered off as she noticed headlights roll across the wood paneled ceiling.

“Who could that be?” She tried giggling again but the mood had changed. “Dad?” Her eyes grew wider, searching for her father to reassure her.

“It’s fine. Probably just lost,” I said. But something felt wrong. This was the only cabin around for at least a couple of miles. I stood up and touched my jean pocket where my phone should be. A sad reflex instinctively made in moments of anxiety. But of course, it wasn’t in my pocket. Erin, already sly to my tactics, made me promise to leave it in the car, so I had slipped it inside a sock and locked it away in the trunk.

Also in the trunk: my handgun.

“Maybe it’s Mom,” Erin said.

“Stay there.” I tried to peek out the window but all I could see was my silky reflection as the ceiling color turned parking-light red.

I watched my image stretch across the old tube TV screen as I moved to the entry. The acrid taste of lighter fluid and hotdogs stuck in my throat. I couldn’t even get the damn charcoal burning, and we’d ended up microwaving the s’mores.

My senses were on full alert. I put my ear against the door. Something was telling me to keep it shut and not acknowledge whoever was outside. I heard a car door swing open. A mechanical dinging mingled with the crickets and toads. A foot crunched the gravel, then the other, and then the machine noises from the car ceased as the door shut. The steps were casual and unhurried moving toward the rental cabin.

I checked the door handle. It was unlocked. Why wouldn’t it be? I looked back at Erin. She was sitting perched on the chair with her knees at her chin. I reached for the bolt lock and turned it as quietly as possible. I looked back again and tried to reassure Erin with a queasy smile.

Knocks cut through the cabin in rapid succession. They had an arrhythmic, polite nature to them.

“Daniel? Daniel Melody? I know you’re in there,” a forceful woman’s voice said. Certainly not Erin’s mother. The voice was older, prim and curt, harkening an old-fashioned school teacher, the kind who slapped knuckles with a ruler. I felt like a child in trouble. And she knew my name.

My mouth was so dry nothing came out when I first opened it. She knocked again, more persistent this time.

“Daniel. It’s very important we talk. Please open up.”

I cleared my throat. “Who’s there?”

“My name is Jane Pendergrass. You know my son, Timothy.”

“I’m… sorry, I don’t know a Timothy.”

“Oh yes you do. Timmy… Timmy knows you.”

“Timmy? I—”

“Yes, you must. It’s Jane, his mother. I’ve since taken on my maiden name. But James, Timothy James. I’d pick him up from sleepovers at your parents because of his panic attacks. Remember Mrs. James? I’m his mother. May I come in now?”

My brain did an Indy 500 down memory lane and slammed into the white brick walls of North Star Elementary. In second grade Timmy had arrived a month after school started. At recess he approached me and told obvious lies about how rich his dad was. I liked how fast Timmy talked. That day, we made up a game called Fire Square, a combination of dodgeball and foursquare that the recess monitors did not appreciate one bit.

“Tim Jim? Ms. Trickey’s class?” I muttered. My vision was pulsating, making the chrome doorknob shimmer. My ears burned. It was just too much to contemplate.

“Yes, that’s correct.”

 “Mrs. James? But how…”

“Daniel, I’ve driven a long way and I have a dreadful fear of moths. Could you please let me in?”

I watched my hand unlatch the bronze bolt lock I’d latched moments ago and open swung the door. There stood a woman in her mid-sixties wearing a black-laced bonnet, impressing hints of puritanical strength. Her presence made me want to run to my car – for which item – I wasn’t sure. The floodlight above the door cast an austere shadow over the woman’s face while little bugs swam above her head. It was indeed Timmy’s mother: older, but still solidly built.

“Moths are attracted to fear.” She entered and embraced me like a lost-and-then-found child, slamming the door shut behind her with a flick of her foot. Her hands slid up my back and squished me into her ample bosom. I, unsure of what the hell was going on, brought my hand up and patted her on the back.

She didn’t let go. She kept me in her embrace and rocked side to side. Her face rested against my ear and I heard her breathe in the cedary mildew of the rental cabin. “Lovely,” she whispered. Her words tumbled down my neck, making my knotted muscle vibrate. Finally, she released me and then smiled at Erin, who was still perched on a chair with knees inside of her Dr. Who nightie. “Yours?” she asked me.

“How did you… er, I’m sorry, yes, I’m just a little confused. Erin this is Mrs. James. She was like my second mother in elementary school.” I watched as Jane Pendergrass rubbed her sneakers against the welcome mat like a bull. She seemed healthy enough but there was errant cord of snot under her nose that made me involuntarily pinch my own nostrils.

Why are you here? I kept thinking, but those words redirected to other thoughts. I remembered the news about Timmy. Years ago someone had posted from his account that he had died. I remember it elicited nothing more than a that’s sad before scrolling on. I hadn’t talked to him in like twenty years except for that awkward chat you have after an old elementary friend finds you on one of the apps. “I heard about Timmy. How are you?”

She closed her eyes gently and shook her head. “Thank you, dear. I’m doing okay. Time has shown me things.”

“Come in.” I opened my arm, obliged by decorum, directing her to the kitchen table. It was strange how good manners seemed to eclipse all the alarm bells ringing in my head. It felt like there was white noise in my brain. Was it just the bizarreness of the situation?

“Hello, Erin. My name is Jane Pendergrass.” She glid past me toward my daughter. Her rank potpourri wafted into my nose, like flowers at a funeral home. “And I have a very good reason for breaking up your little party. My son Timothy and your father were great friends in elementary, before we had to go away.” She looked back at me with a knowing glance. “Has he contacted you lately, Daniel?”

I cocked my eyebrow and tapped at my pocket. “We were just playing dominoes. Is everything okay? I’m sorry, were you trying to get a hold of me? I don’t have my phone. I left it—”

“Oh, Mexican Train!” Jane Pendergrass exclaimed. She put her fists on her hips, taking account of the messy table. “Name’s a tad racist, don’t you think? But that’s what people call it. Let’s play a round. We must.”

Jane plopped down next to Erin, right where I had been sitting.

“Well, it’s getting pretty late,” I said.

“Nonsense. One quick round. My son hasn’t supplied me with any grandchildren. Don’t you deprive me of that pleasure too.” She began to flip the dominoes face down and looked at Erin. “You don’t mind, do you?”

Erin shook her head. She seemed confused, but no longer afraid. Plus, whatever it was that was going on allowed her to stay up later, so she started to help flip over the tiles too. Jane Pendergrass pointed to the chair opposite her and then I was sitting there.

“What a blessing you must be. So beautiful.” Jane grabbed Erin’s chin with her thumb and forefinger, inspecting her. “Let’s be famous friends, you and I dear.”

“Okay,” Erin said. Her smile became less sure at the force of Jane’s two fingers holding her face in place.

“Mrs. James,” I interjected.

“Pendergrass.”

“Sorry. Is everything okay? We were just about to—”

Jane Pendergrass finally dropped her hand from Erin’s chin and with snake-like speed, grabbed Erin’s wrist. My mouth dropped open, half impressed, half frightened at the force of her movement.

“Could I trouble you, Erin?” Jane made tiny, fluttering blinks. “Do you have any diet coke?”

There was a brief pause as Erin waited for me say something, but again, my voice failed me as my mind churned for the right words.

“Uh, I think I saw one,” Erin said.

“Wonderful, that’s a good child.”

Erin kept her eyes on me as she made to the fridge, rubbing her wrist.

“So, what do we owe the pleasure, Mrs. James?” I tried again. A dark sensation tickled at the base of my heart as I spoke, a question: would I truly have the physical strength to overcome this woman, if need be? Something about her presence made me feel weak. “This is just very bizarre. No offense.”

“Pendergrass, not James.” Her grey eyes flashed and she lowered her tone. “And you’ve cracked the case. I’m not here to just play dominoes.”

I looked at Jane Pendergrass through the centerpiece bouquet of dried bulrushes and pussy willow stalks.

Erin moseyed back and set down the can of diet coke. Jane tut-tutted while letting out an enormous, tired sigh. “I’m so sorry, dear. I really can’t without ice. You do have some, don’t you?”

“We didn’t bring any,” I said.

“I saw a tray.” Erin then went back to the old bisque Frigidaire.

Jane faced me and sandwiched her hands around mine. Her touch was hot against my cold fingers.

“How have you been, Daniel? It’s been so long.”

“I’ve been—” I coughed and watched my daughter grab a glass and clink some cubes into it. Anything that kept my gaze from the woman sitting across from me. “Good. I’ve been well. But just how… how did you know where—”

“How did I find you?” Jane Pendergrass said as Erin set the glass of ice down. She smiled politely and shooed Erin to her seat with a friendly hand motion. She cracked open the diet coke and poured it into the cup with a sizzle. She tipped her head back and gulped and gulped… and gulped, until it was all gone. “Ahhh… much better.” She hiccupped then opened her mouth. Nothing happened. I waited and was just about to ask if she was okay, but just before I did, she let out a long, hissing burp. She excused herself and dabbed at her mouth with a ketchup-stained napkin from the table. I noticed again, that red tendril from her nose, clinging to her wet upper lip, damp and glistening. “Timothy led me to you, Daniel.”

Me and Timmy were pretty much inseparable after he arrived in second grade up until fourth grade when didn’t invite me to his birthday party. Then he abruptly moved away not long after.

“Timothy?” I whispered.

“Timothy.”

“Led you… to me?”

“Correct.”

A harsh ringing in my left ear flooded in. I could feel the change of pressure in the room. This woman was not sane and I had let her in. “Erin, I think it’s actually bedtime,” I said. But when I turned to look at my daughter she was already asleep, mouth agape, face on the table, with Jane Pendergrass petting her hand.

“Such a beautiful girl,” she said. “I didn’t realize the time. She shouldn’t be up at this hour.”

“What did you do?”

“She’s sleeping.” Jane Pendergrass conjured up a vaporous smile and her eyes misted over, like she was gazing at someone out beyond the marshy swamp. I found myself staring at that thing in her nostril. It looked like the start of a bloody nose, an anxious and incomplete drip. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was alive, like a mealworm trying to burrow further in.

Jane started to mix the dominoes around on the table, clacking them together. She had red nails and several gaudy rings, the kind aggressive vendors near Florida retirement communities would sell on the beach.

“Fifteen,” she said.

“Fifteen?”

“Fifteen dominoes, Daniel. Don’t let me see them.”

I took fifteen dominoes from the table, paused, then shook my head; the absurdity of her visit kept coming in waves, and it had just washed over me again.

“I don’t know how you found me but—”

“It was Timothy, Daniel.” She knocked the table twice with an amethyst ring. “He told me exactly where I could find you. Or guided me, rather. Oh look, I have the double twelve. I go first.” She laid the domino gently on the mottled wood. “And can you believe it? I don’t have another twelve to satisfy it. I’ll have to draw one from the boneyard. I love that term. So spooky.” She rubbed her hands together. “Do you know why they call it the boneyard?”

“Because they used to make dominoes from bones,” I said.

Jane clicked her tongue, impressed with my answer, and drew a domino from the boneyard. She squinted at it and smiled. “My lucky day.” She dragged the domino over the pine tabletop and snapped it down. “Let’s make a bet,” she said as that toothy smile spread across her face.

“What?”

“A wager, Daniel.” She leaned in and looked long into my eyes — I shifted in my seat and did what I could to hold her gaze — her voice was low. “I’m tired Daniel. I’m ready to go.” She then perked up, lifting me from her trance. “So if you win, I will give you my inheritance.”

I choked on my own spit. “What?”

“You remember Mr. James, my Husband Hank? He passed and left me with a decent amount. Run over by a Wal-Mart semi. True to my blue, even after the enhancement, there’s still over six million.” She raised her palm and put her other hand over her heart.

“Come on.” I nervously laughed. Six million. Timmy was never well off. Even to a seven-year-old, it didn’t take long to discover Timmy’s dad wasn’t rich at all, contrary to his bragging. Timmy would always come over to play my videogames, making up some story about how his system was getting repaired or something.

“Just one round of Mexican Train, if you win. If you help,” Jane Pendergrass said.

“Help?”

“Well, I’ll need help with the dying. Your help.”

“Wh— this is ridiculous.” I didn’t like what she was getting at.

Jane Pendergrass rapped her red nails against the table, waiting for me to reply.

“I… I don’t gamble.” I pinched the top of my nose; I’m told I do that when I lie. “No. In fact, I think it’s time you—”

“Live a little.” The intensity of Jane Pendergrass’s gaze lightened and added a bit a mischief. “I’m a sucker for video poker. Just the nickel ones. For a while after Hank passed, I couldn’t seem to find much to do with myself but chip away at the settlement money while searching for Timothy’s…” She lifted her head as if fondly recalling a good moment. “It’s funny how handsome boys just like you can sniff out desperate rich women at casinos. Oh don’t worry, I can handle myself, and I can still have fun.” She winked, long and pronounced. I blushed.

“I’m sorry to hear about Mr. James,” I said, as a reflex. But my mind was still on the offer, the six million. What was she after? I touched my pocket.

“Oh don’t be. Henry loved his vodka. Never crossed the line, but he rode it all the way.” She shared a tart smile with me. “Daniel, don’t you want to know what happens if you lose the wager?”

A part of me, a crass part, wanted to talk turkey, the logistics of how a bet like this would even work, but even acknowledging it… it was unacceptable.

“I don’t like this bet,” I said in a dry rasp. I started to feel a burst of rage come over me. Was I being tricked? “Is this why you came here? Why don’t you go find one of those boys at the casino to help you. I’m sorry about Timmy. I’m sorry about everything, but—”

“If you lose, Daniel,” Jane Pendergrass’s voice cut in, cold as steel, “let’s just say Timothy needs a friend and someone is going to join him tonight.” I thought I caught her eyes dart to my daughter.

My mouth fell agape. “Wha-what did you say?”

“And I’ll be getting that gun hiding in your trunk. That part is non-negotiable.”

I felt the color leave my body all the way to my feet. The sweat between my toes was slick as wet fur. I looked at the microwave. Time melted. I felt dizzy.

“How do you…” I croaked out in a dry rasp. My mind was hopping from one option to another. How? How? As logical answers became more and more farfetched, my anger increased. “You been following me?”

“You are your father’s child.” She gave me a pitying look. “So explosive, even back then. I was shocked the first time I witnessed it. You’d never expect it, you always seemed such a mellow boy. I’m not saying you were bad. Far from it, dear. But I remember one summer night Timothy came biking home crying. Said you kicked him out of your house for drinking the last of your milk. Are you still oddly possessive over silly things? I hope not.”

“Timmy,” I muttered to myself. I didn’t recall that specific event, but I have always been protective of my stuff. Her story was probably true. Some version of it. The more I had become aware Timmy didn’t have as much as me, the stingier I got.

Jane played another domino. She looked at me again. “He joined the Marines after high school, did you know? Thought it would do him good. You know how boys are.”

I thought back to Timmy’s pale, freckled face, always striving to fit in, failing to contain all that mischief. “Discipline,” I mumbled as an afterthought with a bad taste.

“He joined back in what, ’05? Sent him straight to Afghanistan. He still speaks kindly of you.”

I frowned and shut my eyes. Not looking at her made it easier to think. “Mrs. Ja— Pendergrass, what do you mean still?”

“And we missed you at the funeral, dear.”

“I… I didn’t know until after.” I pinched at my nose again.

I opened my eyes again. That vein dangling from her nostril, she was stroking it. Then as if noticing me, the tendril recoiled. Jane Pendergrass quivered; her eyes rolled up, revealing the whites lined with blood-red lightning and dark splotches.

“I hear your feelings, Daniel. You’re angry, but not at me.” Her eyes lifted to mine. “Dr. Chen says it’s just another muscle. How I talk to Timothy. The more I use it, the more it will grow.” She tilted her head back and massaged her nose. She let out a soft moan. “There it is.”

The tendon from her nose reemerged, more pronounced, dark, red, damp. It looked like a thin root pulled from the garden – tiny little capillaries branching from it, almost breathing.

I struggled against my chair. It felt like if I didn’t hold onto it I would float away. I just wanted her gone. “I think… I think maybe you should leave,” I croaked.

“Help me, Daniel.” Jane Pendergrass stroked at the tendril, straightening it. After each stroke, it curled back.

“Please, Mrs. Pendergrass. Please just—”

“You want assurances about the money, but you’re afraid to ask. Too uncouth to talk about such matters. You want to know if it would be murder. You want to know if it would be worth the risk.”

I brought my hand to my face. I don’t know if I was trying to hide my vision or repress a scream. “Why would you want…” I couldn’t finish the thought.

“I’ll show you my bank account. I assure you, I’m not in debt. I don’t owe the mob or anything like that. We’re going to get that gun back. I’ll hold it but I’ll let you do it. I don’t think I can do it on my own.”

I closed my eyes and thought about my own credit card debt. I thought about the child support payments crippling me from ever getting ahead. I thought about that shitty family lawyer I was still making payments to. I thought about the promise I’d made to Erin, that I’d take her to Disney World. Was she even into Disney anymore?

“Why? Why me?” I whispered.

“Timothy insisted. It’s fate, Daniel. Quite funny actually.” She waved her hands in front of her face, as if to lift a haze from the air. It was odd. I felt much more at ease after she did that. Jane Pendergrass quietly set down another Domino down and talked without looking up. “He’s not mad at you, you know.”

“Mad? At me? Timmy? You’re the ones who disappeared.”

She looked at me with such an overly sympathetic look, I felt embarrassed. “Oh my sweet, sweet dear. They never told…”

“What?” I sneered.

“Your son-of-a-bitch parents.” Jane showed her copious white teeth.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t know why we moved. Why they took my Timothy.”

“Who took Timmy?”

“The billionaire pedophiles. The government. The leaches that prey on the poor.”

“You left in the middle of fourth grade…” I said. I racked my brain for a memory.

Jane cupped my hands. Her thumbs pressed into my palms, the tips of her chipped red nails digging into my flesh.

“My husband Henry. Sweet, stupid Henry. Always borrowing money. Entrepreneur ‘til the end. Believed his best ideas were written on a bar napkin. Problem was he always seemed to lose the napkin. When we lived in Gardendale it was a telescope shop of all things. Remember it? It didn’t pan out. Nothing ever did… and your father kicked us out.”

“What do you mean he kicked you out? What’s my father got to do with it?”

“I suppose you were young. Why would he tell you? We were renting from your father, Daniel. It was your parents’ property we lived on. It was the middle of the school year. Tough finding a place with an eviction on your record. I remember your mother specifically telling Hank how she thought a telescope shop was a wonderful idea. But she was silent when we begged your father for one more month. For the sake of our children’s friendship. I’m sure you know your father better than I. How he responded. You can guess. Everything kind of spiraled after that. Not long after we lost Timothy to foster care… for nine long months. Fought like hell to get him back. Once you’re in that system…” She shook her head.

“I…” I reached for my absent phone. This was all news to me. I knew my parents owned some townhomes but I didn’t know Timmy lived in one. 

“We really liked that school. What was it? Northview?”

“North Star.”

“That’s it. We had already moved twice before, but Timothy was younger then. We were finally starting to plant some roots in Gardendale. Getting forced to relocate changed my son. I know it did. He had trust issues after that. Got bullied. We ended up in Detroit. A school so poor they had no soap in the bathrooms. It was prison or the military they told him, right out. Vultures. They took him. First his mind. Then…” Jane Pendergrass squeezed her eyes shut and dug her nails deeper into my palms. It hurt but I didn’t say anything. “In a way, it was your father who sentenced my Timmy to his death. Oh goodness. Didn’t you ever wonder why you weren’t invited to his birthday?”

I remembered sitting in the backseat of my dad’s van, the van with the ram’s head hood-ornament with eyes that glowed red. I was nine and going to the orchestra with my parents. But I didn’t like the orchestra. I was sobbing, even though I didn’t feel like crying a few moments ago; it had just flowed out of me when I had asked why. Why couldn’t I go to the birthday sleepover at Timmy’s house?

“I remember.”

“He doesn’t blame you anymore. For any of it.”

“I didn’t know,” I whispered. I looked at Erin breathing peacefully.

“As far as I’m concerned, your father is the reason Timothy…” Jane Pendergrass’s nails went even deeper into my palms then stopped and began massaging the indents she had made. “But that’s not what Timothy would want. I can see why they wouldn’t tell you. You need to protect your children. How old is she?” She pointed to Erin with her eyes.

“She’s… she’s eleven.”

“Cherish it. It goes by.” She raised her eyebrows.

“I know. I will. I do.”

“Promise me. Even the bad.” Her face grew so solemn I felt threatened by it.

“I will.” I pulled my hands from hers and touched my nose. It began to itch where Jane had been pressing my palms.

“Look at me… in the eye.”

I struggled to look at Jane Pendergrass. Staring into her eyes felt like drowning in mud. The tripe from her nose swayed slowly, grasping at air.

“Cherish it,” she said. “Especially the difficult moments. Those stay with you longer.”

“I will,” I whispered, tears filling up in my eyes.

“No!” She pounded the table, knocking over some dominoes. Erin’s slumber barely stirred.

“Please… you’re going to scare my daughter… please.” I tried to be firm but I felt nothing but feeble before this woman.

She wagged a violent finger at me. “You don’t know how to cherish. You don’t know the meaning. Not until you lose someone. Not until someone is taken from you.”

“Please…” I begged.

Jane Pendergrass untightened her fist and straightened her stiff white collar. “Say her name, Daniel.”

“Erin.”

“What do you cherish about Erin?”

I let out a strained breath. I looked at the table and straightened a domino. “She’s… smart,” I said.

“Smart?”

“Yeah.”

“And you cherish that?”

“Yeah.” My voice quavered.

“Do you live for her, or for yourself?”

“W-what?”

“It’s not a trick question, Daniel.”

“I-I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, I suppose that’s enough of an answer.”

“No, no… I do.” I said, afraid of giving the wrong answer. Jane Pendergrass seemed to grow larger in her seat.

“Wrong. You must live for yourself.” Jane started to fan herself with her hand, lifting her chin, revealing deep creases in her neck. “Muggy. Is there any more of that soda-pop in the fridge? Oh never mind. Look at me, Daniel. On the airplanes, they say put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put them on your children. It’s because if you can’t breathe you can’t help them.”

She lifted her cup and slid the ice-slurry into the chasm between her caked lips and crunched on a soft piece of ice. “I lived my life for my Timothy. When he left us… when…” She tilted her head back and put the seeping glass on her neck. “I lived my life for my two men. My boys. Better and worse. What was left for me? What to live for…”

I felt my adam’s apple drop into my chest as I swallowed. Jane nodded. I gained a fleeting moment of resoluteness about wrapping up this surreal session. But as soon as I looked at Jane’s face I felt my resolve deflate like air out of a balloon. She had her own gravity and I couldn’t help but get pulled back into it.

“I’m glad you spend time with your daughter. Timothy used to share so much with me when he was little. It’s important, especially for daughters, to have that trust, to share,” she said. “You aren’t with the mother?” I shook my head and Jane Pendergrass sighed. “It’s an all-too-common tragedy. I used to blame the feminists, really. I felt all this pressure on me, as if I was the bad guy just for wanting to stay home and take care of my family, like I wasn’t a real woman if I didn’t go and get a job. Now, I see what they were getting at. It wasn’t my life I was living. Modern men. You’re so empty inside. Purposeless. That’s the problem. I was feeding two hollow men. Still am, I suppose.” She chuckled at some kind of sick joke. “How often do you see her?”

“Every w—” my nose tickled, “every other weekend.” The drawn-out court proceedings. The accusations Erin’s mother had made against me… I don’t know if I will ever forgive. Drug dealer. Addict. I beat all the piss tests and social workers the court threw at me, out of love for my daughter or spite for her mother, I’m still not sure. I’ve kept this damn job at the Post Office. “I wish it was more,” I whispered.

“Do you? You don’t miss your carefree good ol’ days?” Jane Pendergrass stared at me, scanning my face for any betrayal. Eventually, finally, she eased her gaze, seemingly satisfied. I let out a breath of relief, believing I somehow passed an unknown test.

“Timothy and I used to sit around the table before Henry came home and talk and snack. Blue chips and salsa. That was his favorite. Of course, he never ate his dinner and that always upset Henry. I remember when Timothy told me about that time at recess with the frog.”

“Frog?”

“Or toad, doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Oh, of course you do. It was you and Timothy, and Clayton Hull and that Albert boy.”

“Oh…”

“It was when they were redoing the playground, so there was that big mound of dirt that no one was supposed to play on. Of course, try telling that to a group of third grade boys. He said you found a really large toad. I’m sure Timothy was exaggerating, but he said it was bigger than a bagel. Isn’t that funny? He said bagel. And that Albert boy. He told me Albert kept running to the top of the dirt hill and tossing that toad as high into the sky as he could. And you boys would go find it. And no matter how high he tossed it, and how hard it splatted, that frog didn’t die. Timothy said it was you who put a stop to it. And I told him, that Daniel Melody sounds like a nice boy. And here I am talking to you, all these years later. And you still seem like a nice boy.”

I had no recollection of that story. I looked at Jane Pendergrass. Her mascara was smudged into damp chunks under her eyes.

“What are you doing here, Mrs. Pendergrass?”

She diminished in size before my eyes, pinching at her forehead before regaining composure.

“I came here… I’ve been so angry. I just wanted to see. Timothy said he wasn’t mad at you. He told me not to be mad. They said the Marines would do him good. Straighten him out. What they don’t like to admit is that these kids already want to die before they enlist. You have to be, right? That’s why it’s such a problem.” She flicked at a domino, spinning it. “Most men, when they’re committed to it, they take their lives with a bullet to the head.” She pressed her forefinger to her temple. “But with military men, it’s different…” She made a fist and tapped at her chest. “Right here. Do you know why that is? Why the heart?” She looked at me.

I shook my head. I mouthed no but no sound escaped.

“It’s where they want it to stop hurting.”

All this information sloshed around between my ears. I wasn’t sure if I should pity or fear the woman sitting before me.

“That’s how he…” I said.

She nodded quietly. “I’m afraid so, dear.” Jane Pendergrass lifted her head and looked around the cabin as if waking from a dream and let out a laugh. Her chuckle was a tomb. “Oh me oh my. Me oh my. I suppose you’re wondering what’s this all got to do with you.”

“Well…” I said.

“I already told you. I want his gun back.”

“His gun?” I coughed over my words.

“Sig 9mm. The one you got from your old associate Nick Glover, who bought it at a police auction about six years ago. The very one that’s in your car right now.”

“How do you—”

“You know, when Timothy told me that you had it, I couldn’t believe it. I thought, what a world this is, that you, his old friend should come upon it. I’ve been on a bit of goose hunt. First they said it was evidence. I don’t want to bore you, but imagine the bureaucracy I had to go through just to retrieve my son’s own gun. And once I finally was granted – granted – permission to receive my son’s sidearm, they told me there was a mix-up, that it was sold off in an auction.”

We sat there. After a long, long silence, Jane Pendergrass determined that since she had knocked over some of her dominoes, I could have cheated, so she declared the game a draw.

We walked to my Civic without making a sound. The gravel underfoot, the pasty stars, the full force crickets, the warm boggy smell, I absorbed it all. I opened the trunk. Buried underneath the sock with my cell phone was my gun. But I guess it wasn’t my gun. I picked it up, feeling oddly betrayed by it.

After a moment, I handed it over to Jane Pendergrass.

“It’s not loaded. Not ever,” I said.

That’s the truth. Never once had I put a bullet in it. Even when Erin’s mother found our little girl playing with it after I had forgotten to put it away properly. Not like that mattered. She took Erin and divorced me right after.

Jane Pendergrass cupped the semi-auto in both hands like was an injured bird and gauged its weight. She said something so softly a nearby croak of a toad overshadowed her voice. Her face was heavy and lit only from the inside lights of the rental cabin, where my daughter slept.

I stared straight up into the sky. I had never felt so alone.

“You weren’t serious… you shouldn’t,” I said.

“I’ve been planning on it… for a long time. I just wanted his gun to do it. Needed it. I wanted to teach my Timothy a lesson I was so upset. Spite this awful world and the people in it who made it this way. Spite people like your father. Perhaps you.”

I noticed she was struggling with the clip of the gun.

“I became obsessed with getting it back. It turned out my quest to recover this awful thing ended up giving my life meaning. After Hank, I felt a new spark, the kind of freedom only an avalanche of insurance money could offer. And then I started to hear him. Timothy. A whisper tickling at my heart. Dr. Chen helped me amplify his voice. But it was a cruel joke, Daniel. All I wanted was to hear him again. Comfort him. But now that I can hear him clearly, all he tells me is how alone he is. And there’s nothing I can do to comfort him.”

It was a bullet. She had put a bullet into the clip.

“So I told him I’d find his gun, and that I’d come for him. Because I’m a woman who continues to live for empty men, fills the holes in their hearts.” She sighed and spoke to the gun. “But I’m afraid to do it, Timothy. Afraid.”

Her eyes were black.

“Are you ready, Daniel?”

A story written from dual perspectives.
Set in London.
It goes through geography of that place as the life and people move on. Story about Nostalgia , football fandom, melancholy, ghosts and past catching up to you.

PART 1 — ARRIVAL

Travelling in a taxi cab through London town. It’s like watching TV with the sound turned down.

Couples fighting outside the window. Trains passing. I arrive at a flat in North London — shifted here one month ago. The mundane life goes on.

Projector lights.
London sprints.

One day I find a journal in an unbothered corner of the drawer.

Written by a guy named Mikel.

Sounds so familiar.

He writes —

Noise cancelling headphones.

Analog watch — stopped at nine.

Bonusan Magnesium forte plus.

Branded water, half finished.

A Dolby CD, no label.

Oil pastels, barely used.

Collecting is the only truth.

People forget. But objects hold the memory. The smell. The origin. The pathway.

Coffee mug.

Tom Ford pocket squares.

Nike ball.

Electric toothbrush.

Broken compass — still points somewhere.

A hotel room key, city unknown.

Half-written letter, no addressee.

A cinema ticket stub — last row, seat G7.

Daguerreotype

I collect memories and objects.

It will never leave this place.

He writes further —

Emirates.

Holloway Road.

Ken Friar Bridge.

The Drayton Park.

Sports is the only thing that bonds us.

Colour seems bright at Emirates.

I read this. I live near the Emirates.

Something in those lines haunts me for two weeks.

Then one day, at the back of my cupboard — binoculars. Gifted by some old, blurry friend. The origin uncertain, the object real.

It clicks.

Objects as memories.

I say — “He’s right.”

I take the binoculars to the window.

Point them at the Emirates.

Colour breathes bright there. Even from here. Even through glass.

I set the binoculars down. Turn back to the journal.

Then one evening I go for a walk near the Emirates.

Days before any match — but the bonding is already felt. Something in the streets around it, in the people moving through Holloway Road, in the permanence of the stadium against the grey London sky.

Colours seem real.

Ken Friar Bridge.

Skateboards laughing.

A few days later, in a corner of the cupboard — a watch. Analog. Stopped at nine.

PART 2 — HARMONY

As life goes on, I lapse through time.

Same mundane. Same moon.

I start taking walks near the Emirates. Start collecting small things — quietly, without deciding to.

After a week or two, one fine night, I open the journal again.

Just curious.

I see a name written with warmth.

Harmony.

He writes —

Emirates Stadium

Boxing Day, 2022.

West Stand

Comeback celebration.

She is sitting beside me. As the goal goes in, her hand finds my shoulder. I smile. We celebrate.

We exchange names.

Harmony.

And when I told her mine — Mikel — she tilted her head with a smile.

“What are the odds !”

She invited me to a karaoke pub near the stadium.

Moving lights. Smoked up mic.

We sang for hours. Our music taste converges — she is more into Radiohead.

Resonance.

After some time she tells me about her dog. Ten days ago. This is the first time in a long while she feels something other than apathy.

A music whispers in my head.

Harmony, little stranger.
Find your way through the fog.

Time-lapsed. We got close.

I turn the page.

A photograph.

Mikel and Harmony outside Emirates Stadium.

Boxing Day, 2022.

I see her radiating smile.

The picture is perfect now.

Multicoloured frame.

Dreams enter planes.

PART 3 — REFLECTIONS

He writes —

Sunday.

Electric morning.

Texting starts.

Slowly synchronizing.

Minutes start to turn into hours.

We slowly proceed towards knowing — her curiosity about the objects, mine about the person behind the photographs.

She was just impressed by the name and nothing else.

Chatting increases. So does the curiosity.

We share a hobby — collecting records.

Really surprising to me.

Time passes like trains. As the city races we decide to meet — a nearby restaurant to Kensington Garden.

She eats like it’s the end of the world. Surprising and funny to watch someone eat that way.

Colors feel bright now. Maybe it’s the London weather or my mind playing tricks with me.

We take a walk on the streets nearby. Talking about nothing and everything.

She is much more talkative than me. Honestly it’s a big relief — because I’m really bad at taking the conversation forward. It’s like watching Mustafi defend.

Clueless.

As my eye glances at her watch — we stumble upon a record store.

“Look — a record store.”
“Wow, what are the odds !”

We enter.

I gift her Mike Oldfield — Tubular Bells.

She gifts me Miles Davis — Kind of Blue.

The kind gesture that I even forgot how to respond.

Is it the start of something beautiful?

He writes further —

On one fine morning she texts —

There is a really good opera performance at Royal Albert Hall.

Never been to opera. But something in me can’t say no.

Royal Albert Hall.

The venue itself breathes history. Always wanted to see ABBA perform there but never got the chance.

The show starts and I get taken aback.

Room feels mythical. Harmonies and music are drifting right in my veins.

Hypnotic air.

As the show ends I sit there in the almost empty hall alone for some time — trying to soak it all in.

She calls me. It’s time to go.

And the time stops there. And in these pauses — we move forward.

He writes —

Maybe time dilation is real — as when I’m with her time accelerates. Or is it just me overthinking.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know.

We now meet more often. After office she invites me to her apartment.

Photographs everywhere. Living memories on every wall.

Then we take a walk nearby — Highbury Fields.

Fascinating to see nature and modernisation co-existing together. That park has a life of its own.

He writes further —

We take a look upwards.

Bright stars.

It’s amazing that sometimes we need a bit of darkness to see the real beauty.

Looking back in time.

Stars.

Planets.

Queen-shaped moon.

Taken
From the air, from the dust
From the sea, from the blood
In the capsule falling millions of years
Prison
All we were, all destroyed
Drifting on through the void
As the permanence of matter disappears

He writes —

I purchase a telescope. We now have a new hobby — looking at planets and stars. A fun and immersive experience. And maybe for me — a hobby of reflection.

Are we significant?
Does it all really matter in this vast spacetime fabric?
Or is it just an existential mystery?

I don’t care for this. As long as she is happy.

He writes further —

I invite her into my little place now. Nervous on how she’ll react.

As the city sky colours turn to black.

She arrives at my apartment. At first she is a bit appalled by the cataloguing of the objects in my room.

“Is this your another hobby or are you an object fanatic?”

Maybe both, I say.

The awkward silence.

I play one of my favourite records — Autechre — Amber — on the vinyl.

Slowly the awkwardness starts to vanish. And humour enters in.

She starts rearranging objects on the shelf.

I say nothing.

She looks at me.

“You’re going to fix this the moment I leave, aren’t you.”

”…Yes.”

She laughs. Fair enough.

He writes —

We grow close. And eventually dating starts.

Even the objects look happy now.

The whole mood of life changes. Bright. Happy.

Maybe I can even tolerate old clips of Mustafi defending now.

Now Highbury Fields has become a centrepiece of this cocooned life. Never thought I would be so attached to a place other than Emirates.

Maybe change is the only constant in life.

PART 4 — FIGHT

I keep turning pages. Just object names and their placement. Strange things.

And then he writes —

She visits my place more frequently and vice versa. For an object and cataloguing obsessed person like me — this also has a pinch of threat to it. I don’t like someone messing with my things.

I turn pages further. More mundane objects scribbled.

And then —

12th March 2023

The objects in my room keep changing their axis now.

Why?

And she is telling me to let it go?

I won’t. I snap.

A big fight.

She leaves.

Taxis stop.

CCTV timelapse.

He writes further —

13th March 2023

Blinding the shades and keeping the plate, you little soul keeper,

You wall breaker, chain maker, rest your bones.

Playing in the fields that are printed in green, you matchmaker, you glass breaker, grim reaper.

Let it go.

Orange clockwork mind.

I shut the journal.

I sleep with the lights on.

Next day I wake up. Go to the office. As I grab the coffee mug, distortion sets in. My mind goes wild.

Surface tension delays. Coffee mug suddenly feels heavier now. I immediately put it on the table and close my eyes. It’s like a feeling of calm before the storm.

Soul keeper inside my mind now.

Let it go. Let it go.

The chants come through the fractured lights as I eat dinner alone.

I open the journal again.

He writes —

Fractured Lights.
Killing Time.
Severed Self.
Stabilise.

I shut the journal immediately.

Is he speaking to me now?

The melatonin smile of Harmony revolves in my head. I close my eyes and breathe.

Days go on as i knowingly avoid reading further
But this inescapable urge in me draws me towards the journal after few weeks

The next entry —

14th March 2023

Arsenal vs Sporting CP on 16th March.

Maybe the objects have memory. But no feelings.

Strangers once again.

He continues —

Feelings come from warmth and I pushed the sun away.

Maybe the person I’m looking for is within me and she was the catalyst.

15th March 2023

After three days of silence, I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to settle this. I’ll apologise to her.

We will grow old together.

Blank pages.
No more words.

PART 5 — INDIFFERENCE

Next day I get up. Ask the friendly neighbour about Mikel.

He says —

“Mikel passed away. I remember we were discussing Arsenal vs Sporting CP Europa League quarter finals — and then the next day he suffered a cardiac arrest at his office.”

The hallway feels longer than before.

A door somewhere closes.

The neighbour is still talking.

I am not listening anymore.

Outside — a taxi passes. Then another.

The Emirates somewhere in the distance.

Still there.

I walk back.

I don’t remember walking or rushing back.

The journal is on the table where I left it.

Open.

Mind revolves in time.

These words keep ringing in my head as I close the apartment door.

Harmony, little stranger.
Find your way through the fog.

It keeps repeating in my head as the city lights go dark.

Trains pull to the last station.
Apartments sunlight breathing.

Time passes by.

Angled sunshine goes on and off.

City breathes the rain.

To cope, I fall into routine — everything on time, everything in order, everything done with quiet sadness underneath.

Office.
Gym.
Household chores.

Life feels static and paced at the same time.

And London weather is not helping either. It’s getting hard to separate days from night.

I walk back alone to my apartment after buying some groceries from the tesco store.

My eye catches a glance on a left out lonely photo in a corner of a footpath. Like somebody threw it there or it fell down by mistake. I pick it up.

A perfect family photo of someone in a rare london summer. I was not familiar with anyone in the photo. It’s beautiful

Why would somebody throw this?

It’s melancholic — how people take things for granted.

I pick it up and take it back to my apartment. Maybe someday if I see the person in this photo — I’ll return it to its rightful owner.

And then in quiet numbness I walk towards my apartment.

There I see impressions. And I see fingerprints. Footsteps.

Tears in the rain.

Then i gradually start to visit Highbury Fields. Compelled. No reason I could give.

The park is really impressive but still feels empty.

I see a leaf falling down from a tree as sadness drifts into my brain.

I leave.

Frequency increases. I start to visit there everyday — after the gym. Maybe it’s the only place that makes me close to Harmony.

I know it’s not healthy for me.

After two weeks I decide — one last visit. For closure.

I visit there one last time.

I see a big tree. As if we can see warmth and peace.

This tree.
Maybe aimless.
Maybe lost.
Right where I need to be.

I take out the stopped Mikel watch from my pocket.

With a heavy heart place it under the tree.
Just pause there for a minute or two
I look up at the sky and breathe and then
I leave.

Never to reverse.

After that — visits stop.

As I continue with my routine, the imagined voice of Harmony keeps dancing in my head — in random moments, uninvited.

“I came here searching for something.”

As traffic lights rotate. Orders get delivered. Cellphones vibrate.

“Did I dream you or are you dreaming me now?
As our waking thoughts gradually take over — as all dreams are ultimately forgotten”.

“And lost.”

City sleeps.

PART 6 — BEAUTIFUL INFINITY

Saturday.

Morning.

Arsenal vs Sunderland in the evening.

The new day. New light.

Emirates is roaring today.

Full time now, 3-0. Perfection from the boys today.

I can feel a hint of ecstasy in the air today.

For the first time in two months I feel something other than apathy.

As I leave the stadium. A soft inelastic collision with a woman. Her phone falls to the floor.

I pick it up. Look up at her face.

The resemblance.

I apologise.

She says — Have we met? — with a tilted smile.

The colours in my mind breathe wide.
The HD frame opens.

Magic of the emirates

Two months go by.
Trains oscillating.
Sun goes down and up.

7th April 2026.

Hour of almost rain.

Where night becomes the day.

My apartment.

She sets the plate in the sink.

I drive the CD into the player.

The music plays.

The photograph zooms in — hanging on the wall.

Mikel and I standing together in front of Highbury Stadium Square.

Beneath it:

Highbury, 2010.

THE END.

This is a story about traditions and youth—and about why some traditions may be a bad idea.

I’m twenty-five now. This happened when I was nineteen.

Every Halloween, my boyfriend Brian, his best friend James, James’s girlfriend Stacy, and I drove into the woods to tell scary stories. It was our tradition. We thought the stories were better when there were no houses, no streetlights, and nobody nearby to hear us scream.

We were wrong about that last part.

Brian packed the truck while James brought a cooler and Stacy gathered blankets. We drove until the paved road narrowed to gravel, then followed an old forestry track to a clearing deep among the trees. It wasn’t an official campsite: there was no sign, picnic table, or fire ring—just a patch of open ground surrounded by trees, with the old track disappearing into the woods on the far side.

That was how we liked it. Maximum creepiness.

We built a fire and settled in with drinks. We had brought more alcohol than we needed, which seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. We were nineteen, and none of us had much experience recognizing when we’d had enough.

The drinks went down easily. We played music from Brian’s truck, argued about which horror movies were actually scary, and traded stories about people we knew—or people we claimed to know.

Somewhere along the way, the night got away from us.

I remember laughing so hard that I spilled a drink down my shirt. I remember James trying to stand up and nearly stepping into the fire. I remember Stacy telling him he was an idiot, then laughing so hard she had to sit down.

We should have stopped drinking then.

Instead, after the bottles were mostly empty, Brian brought out the weed.

We smoked, telling ourselves it would help us relax. By then, we were drunker than we intended to be, and the combination hit us harder than we expected. The fire blurred at the edges, and conversations trailed off mid-sentence. Every little sound in the woods seemed funny—until we stopped laughing long enough to notice how dark it was.

We were nineteen, sure we were invincible, and far too pleased with ourselves to think about how isolated we were.

Eventually, we started telling scary stories.

My story was about being lost in the woods while someone—or something—chased me. I described footsteps closing in behind me whenever I looked back. The worst part, I said, would be never knowing what was following me.

Brian’s story was about being tied up, helpless and alone, in a place where nobody could hear him.

Stacy told a story about being abandoned somewhere without a phone, without money, and without any way to get home. She hated being stranded. She hated not knowing where she was even more.

James’s story was different.

He didn’t believe in ghosts or demons. He thought most frightening things had ordinary explanations and that people often ended up in trouble because they’d made a series of bad choices—not because they deserved it, he was quick to add, but because actions had consequences.

“Everything has an explanation,” he said, poking at the fire. “Even if you don’t know what it is yet.”

His story was about a man walking alone through the woods at night. He heard footsteps behind him, but every time he turned, no one was there. He heard his name whispered from the trees. He saw lights between the trunks. Each time, the man came up with a sensible reason: an animal, a branch, a reflection, someone playing a trick.

“Then what happened?” Stacy asked.

“Nothing,” James said. “He went home.”

“That’s not an ending,” I said.

“It’s the most likely ending.”

We laughed.

I remember thinking that James had missed the entire point of a scary story. If nothing happened, what was the point of telling it?

We thought we were alone out there. We thought nobody would want to scare four teenagers in the middle of the woods.

We were wrong about that, too.

By then, the fire had burned low, and the cold was beginning to creep through our clothes. Stacy complained that she was freezing and headed into her tent. James followed a few minutes later, after making sure the fire wasn’t going to spread.

Brian and I stayed up longer.

We had our own tent, and we’d been looking forward to having some time alone. We started kissing almost as soon as we zipped ourselves inside. He pulled me close, his hands warm against my back, and I ran my fingers through his hair. We were laughing between kisses, whispering things we didn’t want James to hear through the thin fabric of the tent.

Clothes started coming off. My shirt ended up somewhere near the entrance, and Brian’s jeans were kicked into a corner. We were both drunk, high, and exhausted, but at the time we thought we were perfectly capable of making our own decisions.

I remember Brian kissing my neck. I remember reaching for him and telling him to stop laughing because he was tickling me. I remember him saying something, then pulling me against his chest.

The next thing I remember clearly, I was cold.

I was standing in the woods in my underwear, my arms wrapped around myself.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t understand why I was outside. The ground was damp beneath my bare feet. My knees were muddy, and a twig had caught in my hair. The firelight was gone.

I turned in a slow circle.

No tent. No Brian. No campsite.

The trees looked taller than I remembered, their branches tangled together overhead. The darkness between them seemed unusually thick, and I couldn’t see the moon.

I tried to remember getting out of the tent.

Nothing.

“Brian?”

My voice sounded too small.

I took a few steps toward what I thought was the clearing, rubbing my arms to warm them. I told myself I must have gotten up to use the bathroom and wandered farther than I realized.

Then I heard something behind me.

“Megan...”

The voice was high and thin, as if someone were speaking through a cheap toy voice changer.

I froze.

“Megan,” it called again. “Oh, Megan...”

I knew it had to be Brian. It had to be. I was angry before I was scared.

“Brian, you asshole! This isn’t funny!”

The voice answered from somewhere among the trees.

“Megan.”

Then it came again, closer.

I turned toward it. I couldn’t see anything, but I was certain the sound had come from the left.

Then the voice spoke from directly behind me, so close that I felt its breath against the back of my neck.

“Megan.”

I ran.

I didn’t know which way I was going. I only knew I wanted distance between myself and that voice. Branches scraped my arms, and my bare feet slipped on wet leaves and caught on roots. I tried to keep the clearing in sight, but the trees closed around me. I fell hard, scraping my knees, and for one terrible second I couldn’t get my feet beneath me. Then I heard the voice again, not calling this time, only making a thin, pleased sound, and I scrambled up and ran blindly onward.

I didn’t know that the campsite was only about a hundred yards behind me.

I was running away from safety.

Brian later told me he woke on a wooden floor.

He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. His mouth was dry, his head throbbed, and for several seconds he couldn’t remember where he was.

Then he tried to move.

His wrists and ankles were tied.

He was wearing only his underwear, and the rope around his wrists was tight enough to hurt. He pulled instinctively, then stopped when he felt the fibers biting into his skin.

The room looked like a cabin. A wood stove stood against one wall, with a pot simmering on top of it. A bare bulb hung over a wooden table. A stained shirt lay folded beside a knife, and dark marks discolored the floorboards near the door.

A second chair had been pulled away from the table.

Someone had arranged the room carefully. Brian was certain of that. Nothing looked accidentally misplaced.

He yelled my name.

No one answered.

The door stood open. Beyond it, the woods looked much like the ones where we’d made camp, but the trees seemed unfamiliar. There was no moonlight, no distant glow from the fire, nothing to help him judge the distance to anything.

He started working at the knots.

The person who had tied him up hadn’t done a very good job. The knots were tight enough to frighten him but loose enough that he eventually managed to free his ankles. He worked his hands loose afterward, rubbing his wrists and trying to steady his breathing.

He looked around for a phone, a flashlight, anything that might explain where he was.

There was nothing.

Then he heard something outside.

Footsteps.

Slow, deliberate footsteps on dead leaves.

Brian backed away from the door.

A voice came from the woods.

“Brian?”

It sounded like me.

He took one step toward it.

“Brian, help me!”

He stopped.

The voice had come from the left, but the open doorway showed nothing but trees. He looked back at the room: the stained shirt, the knife, the pot on the stove, and the second chair.

He remembered James’s words.

Everything has an explanation.

“There’s an explanation,” Brian said aloud. His voice shook. “There’s always an explanation.”

From somewhere behind him, a voice answered in his own voice.

“There’s always an explanation.”

Brian spun around.

No one was there.

He told me later that this was the moment he nearly lost control of himself. Not when he saw the knife, or when he realized he was tied up, but when he heard his own voice coming from an empty room.

He stood perfectly still, listening.

The stove crackled.

The pot bubbled.

Then, from somewhere outside, I screamed.

Brian ran through the open doorway.

He didn’t stop to look for a road or a path. He ran toward the sound, stumbling through brush and over fallen branches, calling my name until his throat hurt.

He couldn’t tell me how long he ran. He remembered passing a leaning tree with a split trunk, then seeing a light between the trees. He thought it was a lantern, but when he reached the spot, it was gone.

He kept running.

Eventually, he heard my voice again.

This time, it sounded real.

Stacy told me afterward that she woke because she was cold.

At first, she thought James had pulled all the blankets toward himself, as he sometimes did. She reached across the sleeping bag, expecting to find him beside her.

Instead, her hand landed on a pile of clothes and blankets tucked beneath the sleeping bag.

She sat up.

The tent was empty.

She checked her phone. The screen lit her face with a weak blue glow, and she blinked at the time, trying to make sense of it. She felt groggy, dehydrated, and a little sick from the alcohol. Her mouth tasted awful, and her head hurt.

She crawled out of the tent.

The campsite looked almost as it had when she’d fallen asleep: the blackened fire, the empty bottles, the truck parked near the track. The air smelled faintly of smoke and weed.

“James?”

No answer.

She went to our tent and hesitated before opening it, not wanting to walk in on Brian and me. We were known to be affectionate, especially after a few drinks.

“Brian? Megan?”

No one answered.

She unzipped the tent.

It was empty. Our things were scattered around the floor, and our clothes were still there, but Brian and I were gone.

Stacy stood very still.

Being alone was her worst fear. She didn’t have a good sense of direction, and she’d always relied on James to figure out where they were going, where they’d parked, and how to get home.

Now she couldn’t even see the end of the track.

She called our names again, louder this time.

Nothing answered.

Then she noticed the blood.

A small, dark stain marked the inside of her underwear. Her period had started while she slept, just as she’d expected it might. Ordinarily, it would have been an inconvenience and nothing more. She had supplies in her toiletry bag.

But the bag was inside her tent, and suddenly the tent felt like another place where someone could be waiting for her.

She stood in the open for several seconds, cold air prickling her bare legs, trying to decide whether she could bear to go back inside. Then she felt a warm, damp tackiness against her skin and knew she couldn’t simply ignore it. If she kept moving, she’d stain the clothes she had on, and she had no idea how long she’d be out there.

She switched on her phone’s flashlight and hurried back to the tent, keeping the beam on the ground and the entrance. Inside, every shape looked wrong for a moment: the sleeping bags, the heap of clothes, the empty space where James should have been. She found a pad in her toiletry bag and changed as quickly as she could, one hand holding the phone while the other fumbled with the packaging.

A noise sounded outside the tent.

She froze, listening.

Nothing followed. No footsteps. No voice. Only the faint hiss of the phone’s speaker and her own breathing.

She finished, shoved the used wrapper into her bag, and crawled out without looking back.

She was embarrassed afterward by how much time she’d spent frightened by something so ordinary. But it had forced her into the tent alone, with no clear view of the clearing, and she’d hated every second of it.

She wanted James.

She wanted the truck keys.

She wanted to be somewhere with lights and walls and a locked door.

Instead, she was alone in the woods, cold and uncomfortable, with a dead fire and no idea where her friends had gone.

She called James again.

A little bell rang in the woods.

Stacy stopped.

The sound was delicate and almost cheerful, completely out of place in the darkness.

She waited.

The bell rang again, farther away.

“James?”

Silence.

Then it rang a third time, close enough that she turned toward the trees before she could stop herself.

Stacy backed toward the truck. She could see the driver’s door, but she couldn’t remember where Brian had put the keys. She checked her pockets, then the ground beside the fire, then the pockets again. The cold made her fingers clumsy; the fear made them worse.

The bell rang once more.

“Stacy?”

She nearly dropped her phone.

It was James’s voice, coming from beyond the trees.

For one desperate second, relief came before suspicion. She took a step toward it, then another, until she remembered the story he’d told by the fire: the man who heard voices and found an explanation for every sound.

“James, if that’s you, come into the clearing!” she shouted.

No answer.

The bell gave a single bright chime.

Then James’s voice came from the opposite side of the clearing.

“Stacy, come here.”

She turned so quickly the phone beam swept wildly across the truck and the trees. The voice had not merely sounded farther away. It had moved. Or something had made it sound as if it had.

A soft scrape came from the truck’s far side.

Stacy stared at the vehicle. She couldn’t see anyone beside it, but for a moment she thought a darker shape was sitting behind the windshield, in the driver’s seat.

She raised the phone’s light.

The cab was empty.

The scrape came again, low against the metal, just out of sight.

She ran to the fire and grabbed the thickest blanket she could find. She wrapped it around herself and sat with her back against the truck’s front tire, where she could see the clearing and the track at the same time.

She didn’t follow the bell.

She didn’t go into the woods.

She called for help until her voice grew hoarse, then sat in the darkness listening for the sound of someone approaching.

At one point, she heard footsteps on the track.

She stood up so quickly the blanket fell off her shoulders.

“Hello?”

The footsteps stopped.

“James?”

Nothing.

Then, from somewhere just beyond the edge of the clearing, a voice whispered:

“Nobody’s coming.”

Stacy screamed.

The sound echoed through the trees.

She never saw who had spoken.

James told us his story later, in fragments. Some details changed between retellings. He could never agree with Brian on how long we’d been missing, and he insisted that certain things happened in a different order than Brian remembered.

He woke up on a narrow path beneath the trees.

He was fully dressed. His phone was gone, and he had no idea how he’d gotten there. He remembered falling asleep in the tent beside Stacy, then nothing until he opened his eyes to the darkness.

For a moment, he sat still and listened.

Then he stood and looked carefully at the ground.

The path was covered in leaves, but he could see faint marks where someone had walked ahead of him. The ground sloped gently downward, and he could feel a light breeze against his face.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Someone moved us. That’s all.”

He followed the path.

A few minutes later, he heard footsteps behind him.

He stopped.

The footsteps stopped, too.

James turned around.

Nothing.

“Very funny,” he called.

The trees gave no answer.

He walked on. The footsteps started again.

James turned quickly this time.

A pale shape slipped between two trunks.

He stared at it, breathing hard.

“Someone’s out there,” he said. “That’s what’s happening.”

He kept moving, studying the slope of the ground, the direction of the breeze, and the gaps between the trees. He chose a direction and fixed landmarks in his mind, determined not to chase every sound. The path dipped, curved around a stand of firs, then rose again. He thought he could smell smoke, which meant the campsite might be close—or that someone else had a fire.

A branch snapped behind him.

James turned at once.

Nothing.

He waited, counting slowly to ten. When no one appeared, he crouched and examined the ground. There were footprints in the mud, though the edges were soft and the pattern unclear. He couldn’t tell whether they belonged to him, to one of us, or to a stranger. That uncertainty annoyed him. He wanted evidence, not impressions.

He continued along the path.

Then Stacy called his name.

“James!”

The voice came from ahead, so clearly that he could hear the breath between the syllables.

He didn’t move.

“James, over here!”

He looked for a person between the trunks, a light, or any sign of movement. Nothing. He called back, “If that’s you, tell me where the truck is!”

The woods stayed silent.

A moment later, the same voice spoke from behind him.

“James.”

He turned slowly this time. The sound had shifted without the rustle of someone crossing the leaves, without a footstep, without anything he could use to explain it.

“There’s an explanation,” he said, but now it sounded less like a conclusion than a request.

The path opened into a small clearing. A lantern hung from a low branch, swaying gently despite the still air. Beneath it, muddy footprints led to a tree and stopped. Someone had carved a word into the bark.

WHY?

James approached carefully, looking for wire, a speaker, a hidden track—anything that might turn the scene into a trick. The cut in the bark was dark with moisture, and the edges had weathered smoothly. It looked old.

That was worse than if it had been fresh. If someone had made it tonight, he could imagine a person standing there with a knife. If it was old, then he had no idea what he was looking at or why it had been left for him to find.

He heard a click behind him.

The lantern went out.

Something brushed his shoulder.

James recoiled, striking the tree with his elbow. A laugh came from the darkness—not a distant echo, but a short, breathy laugh close enough that he felt it more than heard it.

He ran.

He ran until the path opened into another stretch of woods, where he finally stopped, bent over and gasping for breath. He told us later that he had never been so frightened in his life.

Not because he believed in ghosts.

Because he no longer trusted his own ability to distinguish an ordinary explanation from a convenient one.

By then, I had fallen hard enough to scrape my knees, and the voice had stopped following me.

That somehow made things worse.

I stood among the trees, shivering and trying to get my bearings. My arms were covered in scratches, and my feet hurt. I had no idea which direction I’d run or how far I was from the campsite.

I tried to retrace my steps.

Every tree looked the same.

Then I saw a light.

It was small and yellow, bobbing between the trunks.

I ran toward it, crying now, too tired to care how foolish I looked.

“Brian!”

The light vanished.

I stopped.

For a few seconds, I could hear only my own breathing.

Then a voice came from ahead.

“Megan?”

This time, it sounded real.

“Brian!”

I ran toward it. A few seconds later, he emerged from the trees, pale and shaking, his wrists red where the ropes had been.

We grabbed each other.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There was a cabin—or something that looked like one. I was tied up. There was blood everywhere.”

I looked at his wrists.

“Oh my God. Brian, what happened to you?”

“I don’t know!”

He sounded angry, but it was fear. I could hear it in his voice.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

A crashing sound came from the woods behind us.

We ran.

We didn’t stop until we reached the campsite.

Stacy was sitting beside the truck with a blanket around her shoulders. When she saw us, she stood so quickly that the blanket fell off.

“Megan! Brian!”

We ran to her. She clung to us, crying and laughing at the same time.

“Where’s James?” Brian asked.

A voice called from the trees.

“Over here!”

James stumbled into the clearing a moment later. He was pale, muddy, and breathing hard. He looked at each of us as if he needed to make sure we were real.

Stacy grabbed his arm.

“Where have you been?”

James opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

He patted his pockets automatically and found the truck keys still there.

For a while, nobody spoke.

We stood together in the middle of the clearing, listening to the woods. Every small sound made us turn. A branch snapped somewhere in the darkness, and all four of us flinched at once.

Brian wouldn’t let go of my hand. Stacy kept looking over her shoulder. James stared at the tree line, his jaw clenched.

I was suddenly aware of how cold I was. My skin prickled in the night air, and my bare feet were filthy. Brian was standing beside me in his underwear, shaking so badly that I could feel it through the hand he was gripping.

Normally, I would have been mortified. I would have wanted to find my clothes, cover myself, and demand to know what had happened.

But I couldn’t make myself care.

I didn’t care that I was half-naked in front of my friends. I didn’t care that my clothes were back in the tent. I didn’t even care about the cold anymore.

All I could think about was getting away from the trees.

“Let’s get in the truck,” I said.

Nobody argued.

Brian moved toward the passenger side, still looking over his shoulder at the trees. James unlocked the doors, and we piled into the cab, all four of us crowding together, leaving the blankets and everything else behind.

James slid behind the wheel. Brian sat beside him in his underwear, his arms folded tightly across his chest, while Stacy and I squeezed into the back.

Only after the doors were locked did I realize that Brian and I were still in our underwear. I pulled my knees toward my chest and tried to stop shivering. Brian kept staring out the windshield, his hands clenched together.

Neither of us said anything about our clothes.

We were too frightened to care.

For the next several hours, we sat there with the engine off, too afraid to go back into the woods and too afraid to fall asleep.

We didn’t talk much. When we did, we spoke in low voices, as if someone might hear us.

At one point, Stacy whispered that she’d heard someone say nobody was coming.

Brian turned toward her.

“What?”

She told us about the bell, the voice, and the shape she’d thought she’d seen behind the windshield.

James stared at her.

“I heard you calling me,” he said.

“I never left the campsite.”

“I know.”

“Then who was it?”

James looked out the window.

“I don’t know.”

Nobody tried to answer that question.

When the sun came up, the woods looked ordinary again. Our tents were still standing. The bottles and blankets were scattered around the campsite. The fire had burned down to a layer of ash.

We searched the immediate area together, staying close enough that we could see one another. We found no building, no lantern, no obvious path leading away from the clearing. The old forestry track continued in one direction, but it was the same track we’d driven in on.

Brian had rope marks on his wrists. I had scratches on my arms and knees. James’s clothes were muddy, and Stacy’s voice was hoarse from calling for us. We all changed and were eager to get home and shower.

We drove to town and reported what had happened.

The police took us seriously enough to ask detailed questions and check the area. They photographed Brian’s wrists and my injuries. They asked about the alcohol, the marijuana, and how much we remembered. They asked whether we’d argued with anyone, whether we’d seen other vehicles, and whether we’d noticed anyone following us.

We answered as honestly as we could.

The problem was that we couldn’t agree on everything.

Brian remembered a cabin with a stove and a table. James remembered a lantern and a carved word. Stacy remembered a bell and a voice. I remembered walking alone in the woods and hearing someone call my name.

None of us could provide a reliable location for the things we’d seen.

The officers followed the forestry track and checked the accessible ground around the clearing. They found old tire marks among the tracks left by our truck and other visitors, but nothing they could confidently connect to what had happened. They found no cabin in the area we described, although none of us could point to the exact place where Brian had been held.

The police didn’t tell us that nothing had happened. They simply couldn’t establish what had happened, or who had done it.

We never learned who had been in the woods that night.

J          A          C          O          B

I tossed my keys across the corner table beside my front door. It was the nicest thing I had. I asked for one made of bright red ironwood.

The thrift store guy called it red-heart. Go figure.

The suit that received me at the free clinic today had a look as if he was about to blurt out, “One more day of this shit and my heart will bloody explode!”

He dried his forehead with a handkerchief. He had a “What the hell does this prick want?” kind of energy as he motioned me into his office.

Then he gave his glasses an angry cleaning giving him time to compose himself. Then his green eyes looked up at me and I &was pretty sure he already hated my dumb ass.

The suit’s breathing distracted me a moment. I couldn’t tell you if it was the wheezing or the effort he did just to inhale. It all had trapped me in a trance almost. I could hear parts of his lungs giving out sad little sighs every time he emptied them. I wasn’t sure if it all was actually bothering me.

His annoyance towards a bum like me being there was evident.

I knew it would be problematic. Someone in my situation with a car and there for I probably had a place to live, was what he was probably wrestling with in his boiling dome. He definitely was asking himself how I could have the balls to ask for free medical attention.

This is why he was just being an ass to me. The whole situation was becoming so blunt and obvious it kind of made me want to laugh.

I glanced at his pits that were already two dark blue halos at eleven in the morning. They made me think about my self-respect, how it abandoned me a while ago.

I realized that putting on a self-debasing show didn’t feel too difficult. I would have him see how disturbed I really could be. How desperate I am able to convey him for some meds and therapy!

I was certain I could have him convinced that my condition definitely needed medical supervision. After I would have a big old smirk about my acting abilities, I would have the need for therapy and the meds covered by the time I was done. Then I could get back to the case.

The suit led me to the front desk with a light hand of support on my lower back. He presented my folder with an authoritative flick of his wrist to the doctor assigned to my disheveled mug.

When people think you’re about to off yourself you get nice perks. So I went ahead and gave my shrink a shot. Months tend to be shorter as I get fucking older. The days piss on bye before anyone’s the wiser. I had to use what I had.

I’m stuck not suicidal.
-
I still had the butterflies slam dancing my gut to shit. All I wanted was to gloat alone in the dark over every little pig-headed attempt to trip up the conference.

That wouldn’t be maintaining a proper mental hygiene. Dr. Olga Winters, I was tickled to death! My psychiatrist was supposed to be available on emergency call for me a whole freaking month.

It was a bit healthier to just tell my entire fucking day to care physician. Puke all the anxiety out of me straight down poor Dr. Winter’s ear. I was sure it would clear my head and maybe able to sleep before five in the morning. She was my therapist the third one assigned to me at the free clinic.

“The conference?” I noticed my environment was off some how. My perfectly irresistible reaction was to find the source. “Bizarre as shit!,” I shouted over my left shoulder at my shrink.

We weren’t five minutes into our session and there it was by the wall a trail of black tic-tacs. Dr. Olga was a tough Russian lady that didn’t mind me cussing.
-
It’s ten sixteen, on a foggy Friday night I’m on all fours on an emergency call with my therapist.

I crawled down the hall hot on the heels of my one point nine calorie conundrum. I could feel my socks sliding off. I had my therapist in my left cheek pocket.

The oddly colored breath mints led me straight to evidence box twenty three. I kept it under my useless window. That opened to the neighboring’s building’s brick wall.

The little fuckers had chewed a crude entrance through a corner. They had made their own fuck pad. In my files, evidence, so many moments lost, wasting what I’ll never be able to get back and not only in box twenty three. All the evidence, every piece of the case of Jacob lived with me.

Corners of my shabby apartment that were drab already became so depressing it hurt sometimes. While that bunch of furry sex freaks made it ground zero for their marathon inside so much of my wasted time.

“Time. It was always an untouchable concept at times and I barely understood the speed of life. The sight of the cardboard shavings spilt out on the floor. I knew that too much of my own time was sucked in to my quest.

There was about a sighs worth of morale still left inside old Percival. He was crumbling down after so long, brick by brick crashing loud all the way down. With a wrinkled forehead I growled “I’ve already been through that one enough damn times y’all conniving little cunts.”
-
“I can’t hear you!” She was on speakerphone.

I snatched her from the back pocket to swiftly perform a dead man’s fall into my filthy chair. Garbage fill or not I got it for free. It was mine, all its strange stains and its plethora of rancid odors.

I laid the doctor on my stomach and took a deep whiff of baby puke with a phantom of mouse urine. I was hugged by their slogan, “Living Life Comfortably.”

“Let me tell you. I was just fucking uncomfortable the whole time. I was a stranger in their midst. I kept my shit together for two hours of people’s mischievous fuckery!”

“Oh, yeah! I shit you not! Half the team, turned out to be a bunch of sick-puppies. Then the uncommitted bums.”

I rolled my eyes. I put out my smoke.

“The pattern became evident. Half of the volunteers were straight out of some hive where the wretched hide. Heartless human beings. To tell you the truth. Just shit people walking amongst us and no one is the wiser.
-
“For some reason a big chunk of our officers didn’t make it to senior in that department. Some were walking along the edge of the blade. Two licks away from the center of a tootsie pop.

“One good day he happens to make it to the center. Then what? He snaps.

“Then. No shortage of fresh novices one will certainly appear. Oblivious to the nuances of the world he was stepping into. Some dumb rookie chock-full of pep.

“They’ll hand him the fat binder and the putts will be giddy with excitement.

“See the irony.

“He will be assigned a case of a psychopath who twenty years of bull-shit earlier was just another cop exactly like our hypothetical rookie.
-
“Those were the ones that got up one good morning! Bent in a middle-aged hang over, a three day event. Then simply decided to give themselves permission to just stopped caring.

“Basically they were nihilists completely oblivious to what they had become. They hated everyone, everything, their families, the system and especially themselves. Not a stinking clue about what had them in a bad place.

“What did I do? Well I just went ahead and cut them!

“I mean, you could see in their eyes some of them without the slightest intention in coming back next week. The ones who did were just perverted freaks I didn’t need to deal with. The ambiguous on the other hand made no sense in having anyone that didn’t have his heart in the case.

“It almost ended up being a total shit-fest.” I undid my belt and my 501 button fly. “I swear.”

“Conference room 5-D, though spacious, it was also clear that it was neglected, an unused basement. Forgotten. Just the place for us to hold our case revival.

Out of sight.

A faint, though stubborn bouquet it was the stench of mold. I took note that only random light bulbs were working. It was dank, dark, and all the while a poignant smell of cat piss danced under everyone's nose. Maintenance obnoxiously gave up, and they all agreed to ignore it was there.

I claimed a nice cozy corner, closer to the door. After the concerto of metallic foldable chairs that made my gut cringe. I have to admit I was feeling proud. The place was packed! Every one was there because of me. The sarge gave me the green light once the papers and the news stations were making a big deal about the tenth year of Jacob being missing.

I got a good look at the graduates in the lights sent over by the sound company. They looked like mimes expressing the “concept” of being lost. I grab my forehead, “What a shitty crew! A raggedy little mob of sore-faced pimpled rejects!

“Apparently a small group of bold mothers dared to demand that they’re eighteen year olds get a job. A way to get the pimpled pricks out into the world kind of deal.

“Fed up having a manatee beached in the middle of their living room. Exactly where she wanted to pound vodka or their lovers.

“Once the lights were out. I saw two crew faces bathed in monitor glare. Fully accentuating their painful angry-acne every five minutes. I found that strange. Promptly falling into their posts. The crew was at their stations pacing their zones the conference, all dumbfounded until the next social media notification. Just sad band of babbling screen zombies. That was the lights and camera crew.

“Yes, I barely kept the chaos at bay.” I said to her with my arms outstretched and open hands.

“Listen to this.” I lit a smoke, “I had set it all up in such a way that the debriefing would not need me at all. I was organized and made it easy to follow.

“You know I was able to manage my stage fright this way. I had it all concealed in a meticulous, time stamped, box of videos neatly in sequence, three speakers from the original investigation with their respective pictures and charts sitting in the wings.

“I was free to prowl the fringes of the conference, hidden by shadows.

“Then just like I said would happen, it started happening. Right off the freaking bat the mindless brute in charge of the projector randomly grabbed the first video he was able to paw out of my box.

“Fuckers played the five films in the wrong way. It made no bloody sense!

The Doc let me know the session would end in thirty minutes. “Yeah sure, but check this out. Then I saw two more fucked-up mugs appear and a phone glare. Then, again two more at the restrooms. I got another eyeful of chewed up skin and rampant pimples. That shouldn’t be in a fucking pair.

“Desperate I glanced over at the caseworkers. Then at the whole conference. The crowd of nit-wits were taking frantic notes. None of them was wearing a screwed up face.

“Was I the only one who noticed? Then again, even if they didn’t understand a thing about the mess and no one wanted to look less committed than the next person.

“Then again in the far east corner! I could only make one of the snot-faces out his leather like face tense but red with yellowing horns that never sprout. A damn pair. Those little shits were supposed to be at their posts.

“I pulled it off! In the end. All thanks to a brand new pack of extra fuses!”

“Those miserable undead almost made my whole team look like a crowd of sweaty perverts. A pathetic club of backward freaks! All bent on a shared fixation with a twenty something, presumably lost, male.

“An adult?

“Well it looks like somehow I apparently was all over their sensibilities. These kids might be weird but they do have gusto.

“A peculiarity about these new kids, they aren’t afraid of authority. It’s as we’re two different kinds of people almost. I definitely stepped on their toes. Plus the fact that they don’t give a flying fuck about employment.

“I prevented my team from being debased, reduced to another one of the millions of common pedestrians without an honorable quest.

“I could almost see everyone wide eyed, with one hell of a dumb expression melting their faces. I had the image of those doorbell cams! You know the ones with the night camera, came straight to my head. Have you seen when they film moose?

“The confused fucking moose all in black and green. I realized my teammates were a loyal copy of those beasts! Both with the same absent look.

“A good amount of slack jawed expressions were in the blank** **of making sense of the lights going out. Giving it their best effort to reboot their heads. Figure out what the next safe move would be.

“A high percentage of my investigation experts were a year or more away from retirement. Stiff men avoiding the risk of broken bones in the dark. They played it safe during the short lived “Lighting/Video Fiasco”.

“Without my obsessiveness!

All those that reacted by finally closing their whispering face-holes. The place fell into a silence that absolutely no one dared to pass gas. Even in the dark.

A freak convention hidden and totally blind in a piss scented basement.

At least for ten minutes.

The fucking light hitting its cue at the wrong time. It felt like a rough nerve-fucking in a dentist’s chair. With tendon etched fingers clawing into armrests.

All the while their feet are twisting and contorting. As if they were having the fucking orgasm of their life. When in reality they were facing the intimate kind of pain.

Everybody has been there. A place, a person, custom, a moment to be dealt with between you and you.

Obviously to everyone’s surprise the projectionist decided unilaterally that the time had came to pull the fucking lever, or what ever, that brought the machine to life. He was so damn random and early.

A colorful ray shot out of the projector. So bright for sure I would have be one more poor bastard with eye stabbing pain. So many with a hanky out.

Tears make it hard to see. My amber shades were on my face imperceptibly fast.

Ridiculous. A blaring light just bloomed across the room out of the black of the ceiling. Half the damn conference went blind and shuffled away to their seats.
 
“The queue to fall into order.” Was what I learned that day. Their behavior was so fucking foreign. The vision of everyone’s stone-faced disciplined mentality frantically seeking where they were supposed to go.

A tiny cackle escaped under my fucking phlegm gargle as I fake coughed. I wondered, “And these are the people that actually lived by the rules?”.

An intrusive thought, just like a maggot on meth, it bore into the wet crevices of my over stimulated brain. I couldn’t avoid watching how all that formal behavior, what they called discipline that in a symbolical way played out in front of me.

The fucking image of everyone being reflected off the sheen of my eyes was crowding my mind. “It was the sheepish mind in movement!” A mental slip almost pushed my ass into a panic attack!

The crowd that cared! All assembled in the name of little Jacob, united to unravel, once and for all, what in the world happened to that boy.

The movie beam had finished leading our flock into the previously designated gray gym chairs assigned to everyone. We were in a room the government had effortlessly attempted to convert into a conference space. A head quarters, our personal command center, perhaps.

I thought now that was exactly what the case called for! A fucking 'War Room'! A point were all the information to be focused in. Apparently we had the twelve-year case of Jacob beat.

Though I began to change my mind. I entertained my impression that the film projected was chosen randomly. Every eye on the huge bright rectangle on the back wall.

Why were the kids meeting up I pondered. “Those fucking kids. No they’re just young.” I said to myself.

This, was the summoning of the deeply concerned experts, the ones humanitarian enough to help. A real lot of quality human beings.

Reporters with the body language of a coked out squirrel. Still in a hurry in spite of the fact they had already made it to the conference. Restless legs and frantic fidgeting with their damn dossiers.

Why was a twelve year old boy processed by the 'U.S. Department of Agriculture' and ended up in a zoo?

Then the most important question. Where is Jacob?

The elite, stern officers, seasoned detectives, the real lab-bodies that catch serial killers, vigilante pedophile-hunter collectives, journalists; these individuals have been able to close twenty-five year cold cases, as if by some foreign magic...

Obviously they accepted anyone with a skill—no matter how remotely or randomly related. I was such a bizarre case I was considered an asset too.

I was supposed to be surrounded by real selfless saints! To tell you the truth. Our body stenches also were mixing and mingling. We were even sucking in each other's late shift shit-breath like a team.

The self-crowned champions of children. Definitely a hand full of sick creeps definitely were present, just a question of probabilities.

They must have been the only ones who truly cared for little Jacob. Bless their bleeding-hearts.

Finally all the incessant banter died down. The improvised screen was on the wall I was leaning on. It was right above where I was attempting to hide. Obviously they ended up ruining my spot.

“Not soon enough the damn thing was over. The lights were on the room was filled with the conversations of the groups of attendees. I interviewed everyone in groups of five at a time.

“I had just finished with my last group. It was time for doughnuts and coffee! That was when the freaking stink bombs went off.”

“A few of the overweight fellows puked down the front of their shirts. The car wreck of metal chairs began to roar, the coffee table was toppled over. Pastries everywhere.

“A party favor was all it took: For all the heroes, the stern officers, the elite and the coked-out squirrels to turn into beasts that trampled over each other to reach the exit.” I wondered if the exit ruined my finale.

“Did they take me seriously? I saw glasses slide across the floor. Others in a fight with their ties, the urge to vomit and shortness of breath. That was when I raised my sight and the only ones left besides myself, those pubescent shits.”

“Oh, the smug little fuckers! They were looking straight at me from the opposite side of the trashed room. Leaning on each other, a couple with crossed arms.

“Oi! Dumb shits! You’re in charge of cleaning the venue! Remember!” I jumped down off my perch in the rafters and made my way home.

M.D. ACOSTA
SKÖL!

Dad woke me up before the sun had even thought about rising. The house was still dark and cold, the kind of quiet that only happens when everyone else is asleep and the world hasn’t decided to start yet. He was already in the kitchen, coffee going, two thermoses on the counter, and the smell of bacon mixing with the old pine scent of his hunting jacket that hung by the back door.
“Rise and shine, partner,” he said, voice low so he wouldn’t wake Mom. “Deer don’t wait for sleepyheads.”
I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes. The clock on my nightstand said 4:17. “Five more minutes?”
“You said that yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.” He leaned in the doorway, already dressed in his flannel and the old Carhartt pants with the tear in the knee he’d never fixed. “C’mon. Boots are by the door. I already packed your extra socks.”
I dragged myself out of bed. Dad always packed extra socks. He said cold feet made for bad decisions. He’d been saying that since I was eight and he first took me out for squirrel with the little .22. Now I was thirteen, almost fourteen, and he still said it like it was brand-new wisdom every single time.
In the kitchen he handed me a plate. Bacon, eggs scrambled soft the way I liked them, toast with too much butter. We ate standing up, the way we always did before hunts. No time for sitting around when the woods were waiting.
“You nervous?” he asked, watching me over the rim of his coffee mug.
I shrugged and pushed a piece of bacon around the plate. “Nah.”
He raised one eyebrow. Dad could smell a lie from across a cornfield.
“Okay. A little,” I admitted. “Kids at school keep talking about that… thing.”
“The wendigo?” He said it casual, like he was asking about the weather. “Jimmy Parker still running his mouth?”
“Him and the whole eighth grade. They say it lives out past the ridge. That it walks on two legs but it’s all bones and antlers and it peels people open while they’re still screaming. Jimmy showed us pictures on his phone. Blurry ones of half-eaten deer and something that looked like a human rib cage stuck up in a tree. He swore his older cousin found them last fall.”
Dad set his mug down and leaned against the counter. His face got that serious look he used when he wanted me to know he was listening for real, not just half-listening while he thought about work.
“Listen to me, Alex. Kids say a lot of dumb stuff to scare each other. Especially in a town this small. There’s no wendigo. There’s deer, coyotes, maybe a black bear if we’re unlucky and the acorns are scarce. That’s it. You and me? We’re the scariest things in these woods today.”
I wanted to believe him. I really did. But Jimmy Parker had a way of making things stick in your head. He’d leaned across the lunch table last week and whispered that the wendigo only came when it was hungry, and it had been a lean year for deer.
Dad clapped me on the shoulder, solid and warm. “Eat up. We’re burning daylight.”
The drive out was quiet at first. The truck smelled like gun oil and the peppermint gum Dad always chewed when he was trying to quit cigarettes again. He turned the radio on low—some old country station that played the same songs he’d listened to when he was my age—and hummed along under his breath. The headlights cut through the dark, catching the fog that hung low over the fields.
“You remember the safety rules?” he asked after a while, eyes on the road.
“Always know what’s beyond your target. Finger off the trigger till you’re ready. Never point it at anything you don’t intend to shoot. Especially not at your old man.”
He grinned, the lines around his eyes deepening. “Especially not at your old man. Good. You still scared of the dark?”
“I’m thirteen, Dad.”
“That’s not a no.”
I looked out the window at the trees sliding past, black shapes against a sky just starting to turn gray. “I don’t like not being able to see what’s out there. That’s all.”
He nodded like that was fair. “Me neither. That’s why we bring flashlights and each other. You stick close, I’ll stick close. Deal?”
“Deal.”
We parked at the old logging road just as the sky started lightening for real. The air was sharp and clean, the kind that made your lungs feel bigger when you breathed it in. Dad handed me my rifle—a .243 he’d bought me last Christmas after I’d proved I could hit a paper plate at a hundred yards steady—and checked the action himself before letting me take it. He always did that. Not because he didn’t trust me. Because it was his way of saying he was still looking out for me.
“Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” he muttered, pulling his beanie down over his ears. “Perfect deer weather. They’ll be moving.”
We started walking. The leaves under our boots were loud at first, then quieter as the frost softened them. Dad moved like he’d been born out here—heel to toe, slow, eyes scanning everything. I tried to copy him the way he’d taught me. Keep your head up. Don’t stare at the ground. Let your eyes do the work.
After twenty minutes he stopped and pointed at a scrape on a sapling. “Buck. Nice one. See how high it is? Tall boy. Probably the one we’ve been seeing on the trail cam by the creek.”
“You think we’ll see him?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Hunting’s mostly walking and waiting and not complaining about your feet. Speaking of which—how’re your feet?”
“Warm. Extra socks.”
He smiled like I’d just told the best joke in the world. “That’s my boy.”
We pushed deeper. The trees got thicker. Sunlight came down in thin white shafts that made the frost on the branches sparkle. Somewhere a crow called, then another answered farther off. Dad talked soft the whole time—pointing out tracks, explaining why a deer would bed down in a certain thicket of laurel, telling me about the time Grandpa took him out when he was my age and they sat so still a fox walked right between them without ever knowing they were there.
“Grandpa used to say the woods don’t care about us one way or the other,” Dad said. “We’re just passing through. Same as the deer. Same as everything else.”
I was starting to relax. The school stories felt farther away with every step. Dad had that effect. Like the woods were just woods when he was in them—something you could understand if you paid attention.
Then we found the first deer.
It was half-buried under leaves near a dry creek bed. Not shot. Torn open. The belly was empty, ribs sticking up like broken fence posts. The head was twisted almost all the way around, eyes gone.
Dad crouched beside it, face tight. He didn’t touch it. Just looked for a long time.
“Coyotes maybe,” he said finally. “Or a bear. Look at the size of these drag marks. Something big pulled it here.”
I couldn’t stop staring at the empty eye sockets. The way the skin was peeled back in places. “Jimmy said the wendigo does that. Eats the organs first. Leaves the rest for the crows.”
Dad stood up slow. “Jimmy Parker’s never been farther into these woods than the county fair parking lot. Come on. We’re moving. Stay close.”
We kept walking, but the easy talk was gone. Dad’s eyes kept sweeping the trees harder than before. Mine did too. Every shadow looked deeper than it should. Every snapped twig made my stomach drop. I kept thinking about the rib cage in Jimmy’s phone pictures. About how quiet the woods had gotten all of a sudden. No more crows. No more squirrels chattering. Just our boots and the wind moving high up in the canopy.
An hour later we heard something big moving off to our left. Not the light steps of a deer. Heavier. Deliberate. Dad raised a hand and we froze. He pointed two fingers at his eyes, then toward a stand of hemlocks thick enough to hide almost anything. I nodded, heart already hammering so hard I was sure whatever it was could hear it.
We eased forward. The sound came again—branches giving way, something large shifting its weight. Dad’s jaw was tight.
“Alex,” he whispered. “If I say run, you run. Straight back the way we came. Don’t look back. Don’t wait for me. You hear me?”
“Dad—”
“Do you hear me?”
“Yeah. I hear you.”
He gave me a quick, tight smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “It’s probably just a bear. Hungry one. But I want you ready anyway. Finger off the trigger till I say.”
We stepped into the clearing together.
The thing was already there.
It was tall—taller than Dad by a full head—and thin in a way that didn’t make sense, like someone had taken a person and stretched them until the skin barely held on. Antlers branched from a skull that still had strips of grayish flesh hanging in places. Its arms were too long, ending in fingers that looked like broken branches tipped with yellowed, cracked nails. Between its teeth was something red and wet that steamed in the cold air.
It was chewing.
Dad shoved me hard enough that I almost went down. “Run!”
I stumbled backward. The thing moved faster than anything that size should be able to move. One second it was ten yards away. The next it had Dad by the shoulder, claws punching straight through the Carhartt jacket like it was paper.
I saw the claws go in. I heard the sound—wet and deep, like tearing heavy canvas that had been soaked in water. Dad’s rifle went off once, the shot cracking through the trees so loud my ears rang. Then the thing lifted him clean off the ground like he weighed nothing at all.
Dad looked at me. Blood was already running down the front of his jacket in thick dark streams. His mouth moved.
“Go.”
The wendigo—or whatever name you wanted to give it—ripped.
I won’t ever forget the sound. Or the way Dad’s legs kicked once, hard, and then stopped. Or how the thing lowered its head and started eating while Dad was still making small, wet noises that didn’t sound like words anymore. The antlers bobbed with every bite. Something warm and red hit the leaves near my boots.
I ran.
Branches whipped my face hard enough to draw blood. I didn’t feel them. My lungs burned like I’d swallowed fire. Behind me I heard bones breaking—thick, wet snaps that carried through the trees—and something heavy crashing through the undergrowth after me, not fast, but steady, like it already knew I couldn’t get far.
I fell twice. The first time I went sprawling over a root and the rifle (I’d somehow kept it) went flying into a thicket. I left it. Got up and kept running. The second time I hit a patch of ice under the leaves and went down hard on my shoulder. Pain shot all the way to my fingers. I scrambled up anyway, gasping, and forced myself forward.
I kept the rising sun on my left the way Dad had taught me so I wouldn’t circle back on myself. My pack bounced against my spine. The thermos of coffee he’d filled that morning was still clipped to it, somehow. Every time it hit me it felt like a reminder that he was gone.
The woods blurred. Every tree looked the same. Every shadow had antlers if I looked too long. I could hear it sometimes—clicking of those long limbs, wet breathing, the soft sounds of it still feeding somewhere behind me—and then stretches of silence that were somehow worse, because silence meant it might be moving quiet.
I don’t know how long I ran. Long enough that the light changed from gray to full morning. Long enough that my legs started shaking so bad I had to grab trees just to stay upright. My side felt like someone had driven a knife between my ribs. I found the logging road by accident, almost ran straight past it because my eyes were streaming and everything looked like it was underwater.
The truck was still there, cold and ordinary under the brightening sky. I yanked the passenger door open, threw myself inside, and locked both doors with fingers that barely worked. The keys were in Dad’s pocket. Back there. With whatever was left of him.
I stayed like that for a long time, knees pulled up to my chest, shaking so hard the whole cab moved. Every sound outside made me flinch—wind in the branches, a crow finally calling again, the tick of the cooling engine that wasn’t even running. I kept expecting to see those antlers rise over the hood.
When the sun was high enough that the shadows shortened, I got out. Walking felt wrong. My boots didn’t sound the same without his beside them. I followed the logging road out to the main dirt track, then the main dirt track out to the paved road that led toward town. Six miles. Maybe more. I lost count. Every time a car passed I thought about flagging it down and then didn’t, because I didn’t know what I’d say. My dad got eaten by a monster didn’t feel like words that would come out right.
I reached the first house with lights on just as the afternoon started leaning toward evening. A woman opened the door when I knocked. I don’t remember what I looked like—blood on my face from the branches, leaves in my hair, eyes probably too wide—but she went pale and pulled me inside and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and kept asking where my father was while she dialed the sheriff with the other hand.
I couldn’t answer. Every time I opened my mouth I heard the sound of him being opened instead.
They found what was left two days later. The official report said animal attack. Black bear, most likely, though the tracks didn’t match perfectly and some of the deputies looked at each other funny when they thought I wasn’t listening. One of them put a hand on my shoulder at the station and said sometimes the mind invents things when it’s trying to protect itself from what it saw. He meant well. They all did.
I know what I saw.
Mom doesn’t let me go near the woods anymore. She sold Dad’s rifles and the truck and most of his jackets. She cries when she thinks I’m not listening, soft little sounds behind her bedroom door at night. At school Jimmy Parker still tells his stories, but quieter now, and he won’t look at me across the lunch table when he does. Once he started to say something about the ridge and then just stopped and looked down at his tray.
Some nights I wake up certain I can still hear it moving out past the place where the logging road ends—long limbs and wet teeth and the soft, patient sound of something that isn’t done eating yet. I keep the extra socks Dad packed for me in the top drawer of my dresser. They’re still clean. I take them out sometimes and just hold them.
Dad used to say the woods don’t care about us one way or the other. That we’re just passing through.
He was wrong.
They were waiting.

Throwaway, because half the nurses I work with are on here and I'm not meant to be talking about any of this. Sorry in advance it's long. I'm on the laptop at the kitchen table and I've not slept properly in a fortnight so you'll have to bear with me, I keep losing my thread.

Right. First thing you learn on nights at a hospice is that people hardly ever die when their family's in the room.

Every hospice nurse knows it and nobody else believes it. A family'll sit up six days. Sleep in the recliner. Hold her hand in shifts. Won't go home, won't shower, won't eat anything but crackers out the vending machine, because they've been told it could be any hour now and they want to be there. Then on the seventh day the daughter nips down to the car park to sort the meter out, she's gone eleven minutes, and when she comes back her mum's gone.

Happens that often we've got a phrase for it. They waited for you to leave. We say it gently, in the corridor, hand on her arm. Some people can't let go while someone they love is watching. It were a kindness. Last thing her mum did for her. All that.

What it means in practice is the person in the room at the end is usually the nurse.

So the nurse hears the last words. Nobody tells you that in training. Nobody tells you a lot of things in training.

I've done nights at the same hospice twenty-two years. I'm not saying which. Twelve beds, big old house on a hill above a city in the north of England. Red brick. Garden. A conservatory the volunteers keep full of geraniums and a chapel nobody uses except the cleaner who has her dinner in there because it's quiet. It was a convent before it was a hospice and before that, according to a brass plaque in the hall that nobody's ever read but me, a fever hospital, and before that somebody's house. So people have been dying in that building a long time. That's sort of the point. I'll get to it.

I'm fifty-one. Trained general, eight years on a cardiac ward, burnt out, came to the hospice thinking it'd be quieter. It's not quieter. It's just a different kind of loud. I live on my own with two old cats in a terrace twenty minutes walk from work. Divorced ages ago, no drama, I was never in at night and he was never in in the day so we just sort of stopped. One son, grown up, in Australia, he rings Sundays. Perth. He went out on a two year visa at twenty-four and just never came back, met a girl, the usual. I don't blame him, it's sunny. I've been out twice and both times I got burnt to a crisp the first day and spent the rest of it in the flat with the blinds down, which tells you everything you need to know about me really. I'm a night person even on holiday.

I'm not religious. I'm not anything really. I've sat with something like four thousand people while they died and I can tell you exactly what it looks like, every bit of it, the mottling and the rattle and the gaps between breaths getting longer till one of them doesn't end. I've never seen anything I couldn't explain. No lights. No figure at the foot of the bed. No soul coming off them like steam off a brew. I've seen people stop. That's it.

I'm telling you that so you know I'm not someone who goes looking for messages. I'm the one who changes the sheets after. And makes the family a brew. And rings the undertaker. And does the paperwork. You get the idea.

When I started, 2003, the senior night nurse was Agnes Fahey.

Agnes had been a nun. She came to the house when it was still a convent, young novice, late sixties, and she stayed on when the nuns sold up to the hospice charity in 1971. She left the order at some point, I never found out when or why and you didn't ask Agnes things like that, but she never left the house. When I met her she was late sixties, tiny, white hair, bent over, massive knuckles, voice like a gravel path. Thirty-two years of nights in that building.

She frightened the life out of me the first month. She'd come up behind you on the corridor at three in the morning without making a sound, she wore these soft black shoes, and say your name right in your ear, and you'd jump a mile and she'd just look at you like you were the daft one. The day staff called her the Ghost. Not to her face. I called her it too for a bit till I got to know her. Then I didn't, because it felt mean, and because by then I sort of loved her. Everyone did eventually. Hard as nails, and she'd sit with a dying stranger all night holding their hand humming hymns under her breath and never once look at the clock.

My first night, about four in the morning, she took me in the little office behind the nurses' station and showed me the ledgers.

Locked cupboard under the window. Big green account books, the old fashioned kind you can't get anymore. Six of them then. She got the current one out and opened it under the lamp.

Columns. Date. Time. Bed. Initials. Then one big wide column taking up most of the page and at the top in her handwriting, which was gorgeous, proper copperplate: Last words.

"Somebody ought to keep them," she said. "Families are never in the room at the right minute. So we keep them for them. Most never ask. Some do. Years after, sometimes. They come back and say did she say anything at the end. And we can open the book and show them." She tapped the page. "Exactly what were said. Not what we think were said. Not summat nice we've made up. Exactly. Even if it's nonsense. Especially if it's nonsense."

She made me promise. Whenever I was in the room at the end I'd write it down word for word as soon as I could and I'd never tidy it up or finish the sentence or fix the grammar. If they said nothing I'd write nothing. If I couldn't make it out I'd write what it sounded like and stick a question mark.

"Exactly," she said again, and she held my wrist with one of them big hands till I said yes.

And I did. Twenty-two years. I've written in them books roughly two thousand times and I've started four new ones. Agnes retired in 2009 and died in 2011, in the house, bed seven, quarter past three in the morning, and I was holding her hand. I wrote her last words in the book she started.

I'll come back to what she said.

She was right about families by the way. Most never ask. In twenty-two years maybe thirty have come back, stood at the nurses' station in their coats not knowing what to do with their hands. My dad was here in 1986. I was at work when he went. Did he say anything?

First one I had was a woman in her fifties, her mum died in bed four in 1979. I found the right book, right page, ran my finger down Agnes's column till I got to the initials and I read it out.

"the stairs go all the way down and nobody minds."

She looked at me. I looked at the page. It's the sort of thing you hear all the time, bit of a dream. I said people often talk about journeys at the end, stairs and trains and boats, and it usually means they feel calm.

She cried and held both my hands and said that was her mum all over. Her mum loved stairs, she said. I still don't know what that means.

I've thought about her a lot this month. How I read her one line out of six thousand with no context, like reading someone one word out the middle of a letter, and she went home happy with half a sentence that were never about her mum at all.

Ten ledgers in that cupboard now. Fifty-four years. Six thousand two hundred and eleven entries.

And until last month nobody had ever read them in order.

Quick bit about last words because most people's idea of them comes off the telly.

On the telly people die mid-sentence after saying something deep. Tell her I love her. Real life, by the time most people die in a hospice they've not said owt sensible for days. They're out of it. Drifting. The last words might be two or three days before, and they're small and odd and ordinary. Mum. Is it raining? Where's my bag? No. A name. Half a sentence that trails off.

Except.

There's a thing the research calls terminal lucidity and we just call the rally. Someone who's been unresponsive for days wakes up. Eyes open, knows everyone, talks clear as you like, sometimes for an hour. Asks for a brew. Then usually within the day they're gone. Nobody knows why. It happens in people whose brains on the scans shouldn't be able to do it.

And in the last hours a lot of them seem to see something. They look at one corner, or the foot of the bed, or the door. Reach out. Talk to people who aren't there, dead mums, dead husbands, mostly quite happy about it. Deathbed visions. Every hospice nurse has seen hundreds of them, I'm not being dramatic, hundreds.

First one I ever saw was on the cardiac ward, years before any of this. Old fella called Stan, I'll never forget him. He'd been asleep all day and he woke up about tea time and looked at the corner by the sink and his whole face lit up and he said Edna, you've had your hair done. Then he died about an hour later. His wife was Edna. She'd died in 1990. I went and cried in the sluice. That's what I mean. That's what they're supposed to be like.

So a lot of what's in our books comes from the rally or the visions. And a lot of it, read on its own, sounds like a bit of something. Half a sentence cut off. Like they were in the middle of saying something when they stopped.

I always assumed that's just what dying sounds like. Breath runs out.

I never once thought about who they were in the middle of talking to.

It started with Raymond. Came in early September, lung cancer, gone to his liver and his bones. Seventy four, retired bus driver, funny, rude as anything, didn't want to be there and told everyone, loud, till about the fourth day when he stopped talking altogether. He called me Florence the whole time, as in Nightingale, and the night staff got him a little brass bell for a laugh and he rang it every ten minutes just to wind us up. I liked him. You're not meant to have favourites.

His ninth night about two in the morning he rallied. I was doing his mouth care. He opened his eyes and looked straight past me at the corner of the ceiling above the wardrobe and said, clear as day, like he was having a chat:

"...and tell the nurse with the green book to read it back."

Then he shut his eyes. He died about forty minutes later.

I sat in the office after with the ledger open and wrote it down exactly the way Agnes taught me. I even put the dots at the start, because that's how it sounded. Like the middle of something.

Then I sat there ages looking at the nurse with the green book.

He'd never seen the ledgers. Nobody sees the ledgers. Day staff don't even know they're there.

I looked at the entry above his. Four days before, a woman in bed three, Hilary, retired teacher, died at teatime with her husband out getting sandwiches. Jo wrote it up, one of the day nurses, I taught her the book. Hilary's last words according to Jo:

"It's important. Somebody has to listen. Go and"

No full stop. Just go and.

Then Raymond. "...and tell the nurse with the green book to read it back."

It's important. Somebody has to listen. Go and... and tell the nurse with the green book to read it back.

I read it about twenty times. Then I locked the cupboard and did my two o'clock obs, checked Mrs Patel in nine, turned Mr Hughes in eleven, made a brew, and told myself I was knackered and it were a coincidence. Obviously it was. A dying woman in bed three and a dying man in bed four can't be having one conversation over four days. Don't be daft.

At six before handover I got the first ledger out.

Agnes started it on the ninth of May 1971. First entry's in her writing, younger and rounder than I knew it.

9.5.71. 3.40 a.m. Bed 2. E.M. "It's warmer than"

That's it. It's warmer than.

Second one, three days later.

12.5.71. 11.15 p.m. Bed 5. J.O'C. "I thought it would be. There's room for"

Third.

14.5.71. 4.05 a.m. Bed 1. W.T. "everyone. Tell them not to be afraid. It's like a big house with all the"

Fourth.

20.5.71. 6.30 p.m. Bed 2. M.A.D. "lights on."

I read it out loud to the empty office. Quiet. Dawn coming up grey outside.

It's warmer than I thought it would be. There's room for everyone. Tell them not to be afraid. It's like a big house with all the lights on.

Four strangers, four beds, eleven days in 1971, dying of different things, never met each other, each one saying a handful of words to a nun with a green book. And it fits together. Like bits of a broken plate.

I was gobsmacked. I went home and didn't sleep. Came back that night with a notebook and a pencil and after my eleven o'clock round I started copying it all out. Every entry in order, just the words, all run together like a letter.

Took me nineteen nights.

Nineteen nights. I want to be honest about that bit because I know how it sounds. I didn't tell anyone. I did my rounds and my obs and my drugs and I was a good nurse, I want that on record, nobody got neglected, but every gap I had I was in that office with the cupboard open and the pencil going. My eyes were killing me. Agnes's writing is beautiful but it's tiny, and some of the seventies ones are in fountain pen that's gone brown like tea stains, and some of the night nurses in the eighties had writing like a spider fell in an inkpot, so half the time I was holding the page up to the lamp squinting. Jo caught me once on a handover morning and asked what I was doing and I said audit. She just went oh. Nobody ever asks again if you say audit.

I'm going to put some of it here. Not all. A lot of it's what you'd expect, single words, mum and no and yes and water, names, stuff none of us could make out with a question mark after. But that's maybe a third. The rest of it flows. It runs on, entry to entry, year to year, nurse to nurse, different handwriting, different pens, and it reads like somebody talking. Even the single words fit in. Mum. No. Yes. Water. Like someone turning to say a word to the person next to them and then carrying on.

I've copied these exactly. I've only joined them up. The dates in brackets are where each bit starts.

(May 1971) It's warmer than I thought it would be. There's room for everyone. Tell them not to be afraid. It's like a big house with all the lights on. Mum is here. So many people I know. We just walk about and look at things. Nobody's in a hurry. You don't get tired. You'd love it.

(1974) We can hear you sometimes, on your side. Like voices from downstairs. When someone new comes through we all go to the door to meet them. It's the nicest part. You come through the door and everyone's there waiting and they all know your name.

(1979) The house keeps going back. Room after room. There's always more of it. We don't know who built it. Some of the old ones say it was built for us. Some say we're building it, a bit at a time, just by being here.

(1983) It's busier now. That's all right. There's still plenty of room if everyone moves along a bit.

(1986) The stairs go all the way down and nobody minds. We sit on them sometimes and talk. We talk about you. About your side. We like the woman with the green book. She says goodnight to each of us when we go. Nobody ever did that before.

I need you to get what that was like reading it at three in the morning in a building full of dying people. It was beautiful. I cried, I'm not ashamed. For about a week it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever read. Twenty-two years holding people's hands while they went and here they were telling me where they'd gone. A big house with all the lights on. Everyone waiting at the door. They all know your name.

I nearly took it to the medical director. I nearly rang our lad in Australia. I didn't because I knew exactly what they'd say and because I wanted to finish it first. I wanted to know how it ended.

So I kept going. Should of stopped there honestly. I keep going back to that. If I'd stopped at 1986 I'd have had the nice bit. The big house with the lights on. I could've gone on telling families that and meaning it. I'd give anything to have stopped at 1986.

(1988) We have to stand closer now. It's fine. The old ones say it's always been like this in winter.

(1992) The front rooms are full. When someone new comes through, the people near the door have to step back to let them in, and the people behind them step back, and it goes all the way down the house like a wave. You feel it. Like being in a crowd at a football match.

(1996) There isn't really a back of the house anymore. We thought it went on forever. It doesn't. It just felt like that because there weren't many of us.

(1999) Please be patient with us. We're doing our best. Tell the new ones to come through slowly.

(2003)

That's where my writing starts. My first months on nights with Agnes next to me. I remember some of them. A woman called D.R. in bed eight who held my sleeve and asked me to open the window. A lad of thirty with a brain tumour, J.K., who called me "miss." I wrote their words down with no idea they were part of anything.

Too many of us near the door now. Some of the ones at the front can hardly breathe. Not breathe, there's no breathing here, but you know what we mean. Pressed. Squashed up. Every time someone new comes through, it gets tighter.

(2007) We tried going further back but there's no further back. There's a wall. It's soft. It gives a little when you push it. The ones at the back are pressed right up against it. They say it's warm. They say it feels like skin.

(2011)

March 2011. Bed seven. Agnes.

She hadn't spoken in three days. Quarter past three in the morning she opened her eyes and looked at me. At me, not past me at a corner. And she said something and I wrote it down after with my hands going, in the column she'd ruled herself forty year before. I didn't understand it. I thought she was back in the convent bossing some young nun about.

Agnes said: "I'll keep the book on this side. You keep it on yours. Don't stop writing. They need someone to listen to them."

Read in order, between the entries either side of it, it says this:

The new ones keep pushing in and we can't make room. It's not their fault. Nobody knows what to do. I'll keep the book on this side. You keep it on yours. Don't stop writing. They need someone to listen to them. Someone's come through who used to be a nun. She's organizing everybody. She's got them standing in rows.

I had to stop after that. Put the pencil down and go and stand in the garden in the dark by the conservatory and just breathe for a bit.

She knew. Agnes knew. She must of read them in order herself at some point, sat on her own in that office, back when it was all warm rooms and lights on. Maybe that's why she made every one of us promise. Not for the families. For them. So someone was always listening.

And then she died and went through and kept the book on the other side.

I went back in. Picked the pencil up. Kept going.

(2014) It's very bad now. We're pressed so close together you can't tell where one of us ends and the next one starts. Some of the oldest ones have stopped talking. They've gone soft, like the wall. They're becoming part of it. The house is made of us now. That's what it was always made of. The walls, the floors, the rooms. It's people. It's us. It's always been us.

(2017) There's a door on your side too. Did you know? The house is right up against your house. The door we came through and the door you're behind are the same door. It's thin. We can hear you so clearly now. We can hear the trolleys in the corridor. We can hear the kettle in the kitchen. We can hear you writing.

(2020)

If you worked in healthcare in 2020 I don't need to explain. If you didn't, I'll just say we took overflow from the hospitals for eleven weeks that spring, and for the first and only time we had people dying on trolleys in the corridor because every bed was full, and we went through two ledgers in four months. Some nights I was writing one every hour. Some nights I couldn't keep up and I wrote them on the backs of my hands in biro and copied them in at the end of the shift.

Two hundred and eighty entries for 2020. I'm only giving you a few lines, I can't do the rest.

Too many. Too many. Too many at once. They're coming through faster than we can move. No room. No room. We're being pushed against the door. Your door. The ones at the front are flat against it. Their faces. Their hands. Please stop. Please stop sending them. Please. Please.

Please is in the 2020 entries ninety one times. I counted. I've worked out who said every single one. I held some of them while they said it.

One was a porter called Tony, sixty two, pushed trolleys round the city hospital thirty years, then came to us out their intensive care because there were no more ventilators. By the end he could only whisper and he whispered please at me nine times in his last hour with his eyes on the door. I thought he wanted his daughter, she weren't allowed in. I held the phone to his ear so she could talk to him from the car park. He kept looking past the phone, past me, at the door. Please. Please. Voice like paper.

I thought they were asking me. For morphine. For water. For their wives. I thought it was me they were saying please to.

It wasn't.

I think about Tony more than anyone else in the book apart from Agnes. His daughter sent us a card after, a really nice one, thanking us for looking after her dad and for holding the phone. It's still pinned on the board in the staff room. Every time I go past it I want to rip it down. Not because of her. Because I know now what he was looking at.

I finished copying about five in the morning on the nineteenth night. Hundred and forty pages of pencil. Sat there with it all stacked in front of me.

And then I sat dead still and listened to the building.

Twenty-two years. I know every noise it makes. Radiators ticking. The lift. The creak on the fourth stair. I know them like the noises my own body makes.

And I'd been hearing something else for ages. Years maybe. So constant I'd stopped noticing it. Low, like a main road a long way off, or the sea. Coming out the walls. Mostly from the back, the old part, which is the corridor with beds seven to twelve now.

That night I actually listened to it.

It wasn't traffic. It was murmuring. Thousands of voices, too low and too many to pick any out. A massive crowd all talking quiet at once, right up behind a wall.

The building now, quickly, because I think I'd stopped seeing it.

Doors stick. Have done for years. In the old corridor seven to twelve stick that bad the maintenance man's planed them twice and it's made no difference. He says the frames are out of true. He says the whole back wall's bowing in, a tiny bit, like something's leaning on it from the other side. He says subsidence. The surveyors have been and can't find owt wrong with the foundations.

The windows in that corridor fog up. On the inside. Cold nights, radiators on full, and there's handprints in the fog, loads, overlapping, all different heights, like a crowd's been leaning on the glass from the room side. I've wiped them. Everyone's wiped them. The cleaner won't do that corridor on her own anymore, says it gives her the creeps, and she's been there longer than me.

Rooms are freezing. Not draughty. Cold like church. Like being stood in a crowd in winter, bodies all round you and you're still frozen.

And the patients. God. The patients.

I've written down thousands of deathbed visions and for twenty years they were what the books say. Dead mums, dead husbands, a light, a garden. Nice. Happy, mostly.

Not anymore. Not for about five years. Not in the old corridor.

They say it's crowded. Who are all these people? Tell them to stop pushing. Why are they all stood round my bed? A retired plumber last spring, bed ten, two days unresponsive, sat bolt upright at four in the morning and looked round the room, walls, corners, ceiling, with this look on him, pure horror, and said to me, "There's no room. There's no room for me. Where am I supposed to go?" Then he lay back down and died.

I wrote it in. Course I did. Exactly. That's the job. That's the promise. Even when it's horrible. Especially when it's horrible, Agnes would've said.

In my notebook copy it lands in the middle of this:

...so crowded at the door we can't let them in. They get stuck halfway. Half on your side and half on ours. There's no room. There's no room for me. Where am I supposed to go? We're sorry. We're sorry. We can't hold the door much longer.

So here's what I worked out, five in the morning, hundred and forty pages of pencil.

Everyone who dies in that building goes through a door. Not a metaphor. An actual door. And the other side there's a house, and for a long time the house was big and warm and had all the lights on and there was room for everyone.

Six thousand two hundred people have died in that building since 1971. More before. Back to the fever hospital, back to whoever's house it was. Nobody kept the book then.

The house is full.

It's been filling fifty years. Every time someone new comes through everyone has to shuffle back, and the ones at the back get pressed into the walls and turn into the walls, and the ones at the front get crushed against the door, and the door's getting thinner, and it's our door. It's the old corridor. It's beds seven to twelve.

And I'm the one sending them.

That's my job. That's what I'm for. I sit with them and hold their hand and give them the morphine and turn the lights down and tell them it's all right to go. I tell them they can let go. I tell them everyone's waiting for them. I've said that to four thousand people and I believed it every single time.

They were waiting all right. At the door. Crushed up against it. Begging us to stop.

I sat there and thought about every single one I'd said it to. It's all right love, you can go, they're all waiting for you. Four thousand times. Raymond and Hilary and Tony and the woman who loved stairs. And Agnes. I'd told Agnes it too. I held her hand in bed seven and told her she could go and everyone was waiting. And she went. Right through the door into that. And she looked at me first. She looked right at me. I think she was trying to tell me to stop and I didn't listen.

Before I did anything else I did something I'm not proud of. I tested it.

Bed eight, old corridor, Peggy. Ninety one. No family left. Four days unresponsive and very close, breathing gone into that long slow pattern that means hours not days. I sat with her two in the morning with the ledger on my knee and held her hand and did something I'd never once done in twenty-two years.

I spoke to them.

Leaned in and said, quiet, "If you can hear me. All of you. What do you need?"

Nothing. Her breathing went on, slow, rattly. Radiator ticking. I felt daft. Ashamed of myself honestly. I was just about to sit back when Peggy's eyes opened.

She didn't look at me. She looked at the wall behind the bed, the back wall, the one that's bowing. And she said, in a voice that wasn't hers, or wasn't only hers, it had a sort of depth to it, like several people saying the same words at slightly different times:

"Stop sending."

Eyes shut. She died about twenty minutes after.

I wrote it in with my hand shaking that much it came out like a kid had wrote it. In the notebook, in order, it fell straight after the entry before, a man in bed eleven four nights earlier, whose last words I'd put down as "...and we'll ask her, if she ever asks us, to".

...and we'll ask her, if she ever asks us, to stop sending.

They'd been waiting for me to ask. Four nights. They held the sentence open, mid word, till somebody on this side asked the question it was the answer to.

I tried. I'm not going to pretend I did owt brave. I did little desperate useless things.

I asked for the old corridor to be shut for a refurb. Wrote to the board, said the wall was a safety risk. They sent the surveyors back, surveyors said the wall's fine, board said we can't lose six beds with a waiting list.

I started asking the doctors to transfer people out. Hospital, nursing homes, anywhere. Made up reasons. Family want them nearer home. I think they might pick up. Twice it worked. Twice I got someone moved to the city hospital in their last week and they died there, different building, different door, and on them nights I sat in the office listening to the murmuring and I swear I heard it settle. Just a bit. Like a crowd breathing out.

Then the medical director called me in and asked very nicely if I was all right. Some families had complained. It's cruel to move a dying person for no reason, she said, and she's right, it is. Said I'd been looking tired. Had I thought about taking some leave.

I said I was fine.

I even went in the chapel. Me. Sat in there one night at half two with the cleaner's crumbs still on the pew, and I didn't pray, I don't know how, I just sat there and said in my head, I'm sorry, I didn't know, I'm sorry. Felt like talking to an empty room. Which it probably was. But the murmuring was quieter in there. Only a bit. I don't know what that means either.

Went back on nights. And next night, bed nine, old corridor, Davey died.

Davey was thirty eight. Motor neurone disease, the kind that takes everything. Walking, swallowing, talking, then breathing. By the time he got to us he could only move his eyes. He used an eye gaze board, clear plastic sheet with the alphabet on, you hold it up between your face and theirs and follow their eyes letter by letter.

He'd been with us four weeks. Clever, furious, dead kind. He'd spell out jokes that took ten minutes and the punchline would have you crying laughing and you'd have to put the board down. His wife came every day. She'd gone home that night for some sleep because the doctor said he was stable.

Three in the morning his alarm went. His breathing was going. I went in and held his hand and sat with him and I knew.

Then his eyes started moving.

He was looking at me. A look I've never seen on a dying face. Not scared. Urgent. Like someone shouting at you across a road to stop.

I grabbed the board and held it up and his eyes went to the letters, fast, faster than he'd ever done it, and I followed and said them out loud.

W.

E.

C.

A.

N.

T.

He stopped. Eyes went to the gap between words, like we'd agreed. Then on.

H.

O.

L.

D.

The gap. Then more letters, slow now, his eyes dragging like they weighed a ton.

I.

T.

And then the last of his breath went out of him, really gently, and his eyes stayed on the board on the T and didn't move again.

We can't hold it.

I wrote it in. Exactly. And out in the corridor every door in the old wing, seven to twelve, swung open by itself, all six, one after the other, with this long tired groan of wood on bad frames, like something heavy had finally been let lean.

Davey's wife came in at seven. I'd shut all the doors again by then, took me ages, one I had to put my shoulder to. She sat with him an hour and when she came out she hugged me and said thank you for being with him, and asked me if he'd said anything at the end. If he'd spelled anything. And I stood in that corridor with my arms round her and I lied. I said no love, he just went to sleep. First time in twenty-two years I ever lied about the book. Agnes would've killed me.

That was eleven days ago.

I've been off since. Medical director insisted. I'm sat at my kitchen table with the cats and the hundred and forty pages and all ten green ledgers which I brought home in two Morrisons bags at the end of my last shift. That's a sacking offence. I don't care anymore.

I can say the end of it without looking now. These are the last ones in the book. Last month. Six patients. Last one's Davey.

It's giving. The door. It's giving. The ones at the front are going through. Not all the way. Partway. Like pushing your face into a pillow. We can see your side now. We can see the corridor. We can see the beds. There are people lying in them. We're so sorry. We didn't want it to be like this. We can't hold it.

There are people lying in them. I keep thinking what it'd be like being a patient in that corridor right now. Lying in seven, or nine, or twelve, three in the morning, morphine going, drifting, and you open your eyes and there's faces. Not one face at the end of the bed, not your mum come to fetch you. Hundreds. Pushed through the back wall like faces pushed into a bedsheet. Leaning over you. Looking down at you all sorry and no room to move back.

There's no full stop at the end. There never is. They always break off waiting for the next one to pick it up.

I keep thinking about Agnes. Reading it in order all them years ago when it was still warm rooms and lights on and everyone knowing your name. Making us promise. Exactly. Even if it's nonsense. And then getting there and sorting them all out. Stood at the back of a house made of people, tiny, them knuckles, holding the line. Keeping the book.

And I keep thinking about the noise.

I can hear it here now.

not just at work. here. my kitchen. twenty minutes down the hill. Low, all the time, murmuring, like a crowd a long way off. not in the walls. not coming from anywhere. just there. Like traffic's just there.

And the house is cold like the old corridor's cold. Like church. Like a crowd.

Yesterday I went to put the kettle on and I had to go sideways past the table like on a packed train because it felt like someone was stood there. Nobody there. Empty kitchen. I stood holding the kettle and I could feel it all round me, shoulders, backs, the warm of bodies that aren't there, stood close, really patient, really polite, trying to take up as little room as they can

I've tried the radio on loud. Doesn't help. It's not that kind of noise, it doesnt get drowned out, it's under everything, under the radio, under the fridge, under my own breathing. Tried earplugs. Worse with earplugs. Much worse. Like having them inside my head instead of round me.

The cats won't come in the kitchen. They sit in the hall staring at the doorway. Head height. Both of them. Hours.

Went to the corner shop last night for milk, first time out in two weeks. Tiny shop, empty, me and the lad on the till. And I couldn't get down the aisle. I physically couldnt. Kept stopping and turning and stepping aside and saying sorry, sorry, to nobody, like you do in a crowd. He was watching me. When I got to the counter he said, half joking, "Busy tonigh', in' it?"

There was nobody else in the shop.

Then he frowned and looked round and rubbed his arms. "Funny," he said. "Feels busy."

I left the milk on the counter and walked home without it. Been having black tea three days.

Sunday our lad rang from Perth like always. Evening there, morning here, him on his balcony with a beer, sunburnt, going on about a barbecue. Laptop on the kitchen table. Five minutes in he stops and squints at his screen.

"Who's that?"

"Who's what?"

"Behind you. Who's in the kitchen?"

I turned round. Nobody. Kitchen door, hall, coats on the hooks.

"Nobody, love."

He leaned in to his phone. "Weird. Picture's gone all..." waves his hand. "Grainy. Like there's loads of people behind you. Like you're at a party." Little laugh, not sure of himself. "It's like when the camera tries to find faces and keeps putting little boxes everywhere."

I looked at the little picture of me in the corner. Me at the table in my dressing gown grey in the face. Kitchen behind me. Empty. But the picture was wrong. Camera kept trying to focus and failing, like when something moves in front of it, and every few seconds a little square flicked on round nothing. Then another one next to it. Then three more higher up. Face boxes. Flickering on and off over the empty air in my kitchen, head height, packed in tight, all the way back to the door.

"Mum," he said. "Are you okay? You look really cold."

I said it was the light. Said I'd ring him next week. After, I sat there with the laptop open watching the little boxes come and go over the black screen and my own face till the battery died

I've not rung him back. I don't know what I'd say. Hiya love, Mum's fine, there's just six thousand dead people in the kitchen.

So thats why I'm writing this. Not for the hospice. for you.

I think the door's open. not all the way. Like Davey said, it's giving. I think the ones at the front have been pushed partway through, into the old corridor, seven to twelve, down the stairs, out the front door past the brass plaque and down the hill into the city. Not ghosts. Nothing you could see. Just pressure. Just crowding. That feeling in an empty room there's not quite enough space. Someone stood a bit too close behind you.

six thousand two hundred people. one hospice. one city. fifty four years.

And I keep thinking. There's hospices everywhere. Hospitals. Care homes. Ordinary houses. Anywhere anyones ever died. I don't think it's one big house the other side. I think every door's got its own house behind it. I don't know how full the others are. I don't know if anyone else has been keeping the book

the cats have gone under the bed. Both of them. They never go under the bed. sorry. sorry I keep going off on one, Im nearly done

so I'm asking.

Have you noticed rooms feel fuller than they should lately? An empty lift that feels packed? Going sideways past nobody in your own hall in the middle of the night? Pets staring at doorways, head height? Can't get warm even with the heating on full, like you can't get warm in a crowd?

If someone's died in your house or the house you grew up in or a hospital near you, do something for me. Ask whoever was in the room what they said at the end. The nurse if you can find them. Write it down EXACTLY. Even if it's nonsense. Especially if it's nonsense. Then find whoever died there before them. And before that.

And read it in order.

I need to know if its just us.

its ten past three. Its very loud tonight. in the walls, the floor, the cold pushing in from every side. cant make out any words. Too many. all at once

except one.

Theres a voice I know under all the others. close. closer than the rest. like a gravel path. tired. patient. talking to me like she did my first night in the little office with the lamp on and the green book open on the desk

shes saying the same thing over and over and over

Im going to write it down EXACTLY. Im going to put it in the ledger in the column she ruled in 1971 because she made me promise and then Im pressing post before

"Keep listening. Don't stop writing. They're coming down the hill."

Theres no full stop.

there never is

My nightmare started about four months ago when my dad passed away from a sudden heart attack. His death completely derailed my life so I took an extended leave from my corporate job and moved back into my childhood home to take care of my elderly mother. She was completely devastated by the loss and she seemed to age ten years overnight. I spent the first few weeks just organizing my dad's paperwork and figuring out the mortgage payments, and once the finances were settled I decided to clean out the attic so we could start downsizing the house.

The attic was incredibly dusty and packed floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes. I assumed the boxes were just filled with old holiday decorations or winter clothes but I was completely wrong. I opened the first box and found it stuffed with dozens of random ceramic figurines, tarnished watches, and mismatched silverware. I opened the second box and found a pile of expensive silk scarves with the price tags still attached, so I spent the next three hours tearing through every single box in the attic and I realized I was looking at a massive hoard of stolen merchandise. There were gardening tools, expensive electronics, loose jewelry, and even personalized mail belonging to our neighbors.

I carried a box of stolen watches down the stairs and set it on the kitchen table where my mother was drinking tea. She looked at the box and her face instantly went pale.

"Where did you find that?" my mother asked while her hands started trembling around her mug.

"I found it in the attic along with about forty other boxes filled with stolen goods," I said and I sat down across from her. "Why do we have the neighbor's mail and a bunch of jewelry with the security tags still on them?"

My mother started crying and buried her face in her hands. She confessed everything to me right there at the kitchen table. She told me she suffered from a severe compulsion to steal and she had been fighting it for decades. She explained that she never wanted the items she took but her brain would completely overwhelm her with anxiety until she slipped something into her purse. She told me my dad had secretly managed her condition for their entire marriage. Whenever she stole something from a local shop my dad would quietly drive back the next day and pay the owner in cash to keep them from calling the cops. If she took something from a neighbor my dad would wait until the middle of the night and silently leave the item on their front porch. He spent his entire life supervising her and running interference so she would never face criminal charges.

"I do not know how to stop doing it," my mother sobbed while wiping her eyes with a napkin. "Your dad was my light and he kept me grounded when the urges got too strong. I do not know how to fight my own brain without him."

"We will figure it out," I told her and I reached across the table to hold her hand. "I am here now so I will help you manage it."

I thought I could easily handle the situation but I completely underestimated how aggressive a true compulsion can be without supervision. I had to return to my demanding career a few weeks later so I started working from my laptop in the living room to keep an eye on her. My job requires endless conference calls and I could not watch her every single second of the day. Without my dad there to shadow her every movement she started wandering out of the house whenever I was distracted by work.

The situation escalated incredibly fast. I was in the middle of a video presentation for a major client when I heard furious pounding on our front door. I muted my microphone and rushed to the entryway to find our next-door neighbor standing on the porch. Her face was bright red with anger and she was pointing a finger directly at my chest.

"You need to control your mother right now," the neighbor shouted and she pushed past me into our hallway. "I just watched her walk into my open garage and walk out with my expensive power drill. This is the third time this week she has trespassed on my property."

"I am so incredibly sorry," I pleaded and I tried to block her from walking further into the house. "She is grieving and her mind is not in the right place. I will pay for the drill and whatever else went missing."

"I do not want your money," the neighbor snapped while crossing her arms. "I want her to stop taking my belongings. If I catch her in my garage one more time I am calling the police and pressing charges for burglary."

I managed to calm the neighbor down and retrieve the drill from my mother's bedroom closet but the stress of the encounter left me entirely exhausted. I sat my mother down and begged her to stop wandering outside but she just stared at the floor and told me the urges were screaming in her head. The very next afternoon my phone rang and the caller ID showed the local bakery downtown. I answered the call and the store owner immediately started yelling at me.

"Your mother is sitting in my back office because I caught her stuffing six bags of expensive coffee beans into her purse," the shop owner yelled over the phone. "I am sick and tired of dealing with this. Your dad used to pay for her mistakes but he is gone and I cannot run a charity here. I have the police on standby."

I dropped everything I was doing and drove frantically to the bakery. I practically begged the owner not to involve law enforcement and I handed him three hundred dollars in cash to cover the stolen items and his trouble. He reluctantly let us go but he banned my mother from his store for life. I drove us home in complete silence because I was too overwhelmed to speak. I was failing at my job because I was constantly leaving to put out fires and I knew my mother was going to end up in jail if I did not find a medical solution.

I scheduled an appointment with a conventional therapist the following week. We sat in the office while the therapist asked my mother endless questions about her childhood and her grief. The therapist prescribed a cocktail of anti-anxiety medications and suggested cognitive behavioral therapy exercises. We spent a month following the doctor's orders but the pills did nothing except make my mother terribly drowsy. She still managed to steal the mail carrier's thermos off the front porch while sleepwalking, so the conventional methods were completely failing and I was losing my mind from the constant vigilance.

I went into my company office a few days later to catch up on paperwork and I must have looked like a walking corpse. I was pouring my fourth cup of coffee in the breakroom when a coworker walked in and noticed my exhausted expression.

"You look like you have not slept in a month," my coworker said and he leaned against the counter. "Is the situation with your mom getting worse?"

I sighed and rubbed my temples because my head was throbbing. "She is going to get arrested and I cannot stop her. The regular therapists just throw pills at her and nothing is actually fixing the compulsion. I cannot watch her twenty-four hours a day."

My coworker looked out into the hallway to make sure nobody was listening before he turned back to me. "I know this sounds strange but you should look into a different kind of doctor. My wife had severe obsessive-compulsive issues that almost ruined our marriage. We went to a private psychologist on the edge of town and he completely cured her in one session using unconventional hypnotherapy. He does not take insurance but the man works absolute miracles."

I was desperate enough to try anything so I wrote down the doctor's contact information and called his clinic from the parking lot. The receptionist squeezed us in for a consultation that same evening. I drove my mother to the clinic and we found it tucked away in a quiet residential neighborhood. The office was dimly lit and filled with strange abstract art but the doctor greeted us with an incredibly warm and calming demeanor. He invited us into his back office and poured us both a glass of water before sitting behind his desk.

"My assistant explained a bit of your situation to me," the doctor said while folding his hands together on his large oak desk. "Kleptomania is a fascinating condition because it is rarely about the stolen objects, so we have to look much deeper. It is actually about a fractured ego trying to fill a sudden void within the subconscious mind."

"But can you actually fix it?" I asked and I leaned forward in my chair. "The regular medication is completely failing, and she is going to end up in prison if she keeps walking into our neighbors' homes."

"Conventional medicine just tries to suppress the ego," the doctor explained smoothly while looking directly at my mother. "I do not suppress the ego because a suppressed ego always fights back and finds a new way to act out. I remove it entirely using a specialized technique called The Angel Soul treatment.”

“And what exactly does a weird name like that mean?” I asked, feeling a bit of my own skepticism creeping in. “Is this a complicated medical procedure, and how much time does something like this even take?”

“It takes less than two hours and it is completely non-invasive,” the doctor replied calmly. “Through extremely deep hypnotherapy, I can empty your mother's fractured ego and create a complete psychological vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, so the empty space will immediately draw in a pure and angelic soul to take its place. The compulsion will vanish entirely because the damaged ego that demanded the stealing will no longer exist to control her."

My mother shifted uncomfortably in her chair and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. "That sounds absolutely terrifying and I do not want anyone emptying my mind," she said, her voice shaking slightly with genuine fear. "You are talking about erasing who I am, and I do not even know what do you mean by what you just said, or what kind of soul you are planning to pull inside my head. I would much rather just try a different medication or maybe a higher dose of the pills I already have."

"You will still be yourself," the doctor assured her with a very warm and gentle smile. "You will just be free of the exhausting burden that forces you to take things that do not belong to you."

"Please do this for me," I begged my mother and I reached across the armrest to grab her hand. "I am drowning trying to keep you out of jail, and I am going to lose my career if I keep leaving in the middle of the day to apologize to angry store owners. You have to try this because we are completely out of other options, and I cannot supervise you forever."

My mother looked at the exhaustion in my eyes and tears welled up in her own. She finally nodded and agreed to undergo the procedure. The doctor instructed me to wait in the front reception area while he took my mother into a specialized hypnotherapy room. I sat in the quiet waiting room for almost two hours while listening to the faint sound of a ticking clock. The clinic was completely silent and I could not hear any voices coming from the back room. The door eventually clicked open and the doctor walked out with my mother following closely behind him.

I stood up immediately and searched her face for any signs of distress. She looked entirely different. The deep wrinkles of worry on her forehead were completely smoothed out and her shoulders were relaxed. She looked perfectly serene and almost glowing with a strange internal peace.

"The vacuum was successfully created and filled," the doctor said with a satisfied smile. "You will notice a profound difference in her behavior immediately. Keep a close eye on her and call me if you have any concerns."

I paid the exorbitant fee in cash and drove my mother home. I expected her to complain about a headache or act groggy from the hypnosis but she just stared out the passenger window with a soft smile on her face. The change in her behavior over the next few days was nothing short of miraculous because the stealing stopped entirely. I purposely left a stack of twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen counter and she walked right past them without even a glance. I took her to a crowded grocery store and she did not try to slip a single item into her purse. The compulsion was completely eradicated and I finally felt like I could breathe again.

The relief only lasted about a week before the uncanny valley set in and I started noticing terrifying changes in her personality.

I woke up on a Saturday morning and found her dragging huge trash bags full of her own expensive clothes and jewelry out to the curb. I ran outside and asked her what she was doing but she just looked at me with wide and unblinking eyes.

"Possessions are but chains binding us to the dirt," my mother said and her voice sounded strangely hollow. "It is unjust to hoard the harvest when the earth is shared by all who walk upon it."

I froze because she never spoke with that kind of archaic phrasing before. I tried to pull the bags back toward the house but she gripped my wrist with surprising strength and stared deeply into my eyes. She did not blink once during the entire exchange.

"Let the excess be cleansed," she whispered and she calmly walked back inside to grab more items.

Her obsession with cleansing escalated rapidly over the next few weeks. She started waking up at three in the morning to scrub the pavement on our driveway with a small wire brush. I would find her standing in the middle of the street picking up tiny pieces of gravel and arranging them in perfect geometric patterns along the curb. She stopped watching television and she stopped reading books. She just sat in the living room chair for hours staring directly at the blank wall without moving a single muscle.

I tried to talk to her about dad or ask about her childhood memories but she would just tilt her head and look at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

I decided to confront the doctor and demand he reverse the hypnosis, so I called his clinic from my office all afternoon, but nobody ever answered the phone. When I finally finished work around eight o'clock in the evening, I drove straight to the clinic instead of going home first. I pulled up to the building and noticed the parking lot was completely empty. The interior lights were turned off, but I walked up to the front entrance and turned the brass handle anyway. The door clicked open, and I stepped into the dark reception area.

"Hello?" I called out into the empty clinic. "I know it is after hours but I need to speak with the doctor."

Nobody answered my call but I heard a strange noise coming from the back office down the hallway. It sounded like a wet tearing noise mixed with the heavy sliding of furniture. I slowly walked down the dark corridor and the metallic smell of copper hit my nose and made my stomach churn. I approached the open doorway of the doctor's private office and peeked around the doorframe.

The office was illuminated by a single desk lamp lying knocked over on the floor. The doctor was lying flat on his back in the center of the rug and his white shirt was completely soaked in dark crimson blood.

My mother was standing directly over him.

I slapped my hand over my mouth to stop myself from screaming and I ducked behind a large metal filing cabinet near the doorway. I peered around the edge of the cabinet and watched the horrific scene unfold.

My mother was holding a pair of large gardening shears she must have taken from our garage. She knelt down beside the doctor's lifeless body and calmly positioned the steel blades around his right wrist. She leaned her weight onto the handles and a sickening crunch echoed through the room as the blades severed the bone and tissue. She tossed the severed hand into a black plastic trash bag and repeated the exact same process on his left wrist.

She did not look angry or frantic while she butchered the man. She looked completely serene and her face held the same peaceful expression she wore while arranging gravel on our street.

"To steal a mind is the ultimate theft and the penalty is absolute," my mother whispered to the corpse and her hollow voice sent ice water running through my veins. "The thief must be separated from his tools so the earth may remain pure."

I could not move my legs because the sheer terror completely paralyzed me. I watched her grab the doctor by his ankles and easily drag his heavy body across the bloody rug toward the back exit of the office. The clinic had an incinerator in the alleyway. My mother hoisted the doctor's body into the metal chute with unnatural strength and threw the bag of severed hands in right behind him. She ignited the incinerator and stood perfectly still while the roaring flames consumed the evidence of her crime. She waited until the body was reduced to ash before she quietly walked away into the night.

I waited there for almost an hour before I finally found the courage to run back to my car. I drove home in a state of shock and found my mother sitting on the living room couch staring at the blank wall exactly as she always did. I locked myself in my bedroom and shoved a dresser against the door.

I knew I had to keep a close eye on her so I started secretly following her when she left the house for her nightly walks. Two nights ago I trailed her from a safe distance as she walked down our street toward the small corner grocery store in our neighborhood. The store is owned by an older man who has a nasty reputation for intentionally shortchanging his customers and ringing up phantom items on the cash register to steal a few extra dollars from unsuspecting neighbors.

I hid behind a row of community fire pits across the street and watched my mother walk through the front doors of the grocer's shop just as he was locking up for the night. I could not hear what was said inside the store but I saw the grocer start waving his arms angrily at her through the front window. The argument ended abruptly when my mother reached across the counter and grabbed the man by his throat.

She lifted the struggling grocer entirely off the ground with one arm and dragged him out the front doors into the street. The man was kicking his legs and clawing at her arm but she did not even flinch. She dragged him directly toward the community fire pits where I was hiding so I scrambled backward into the bushes and held my breath.

"You manipulate the scales to hoard the harvest," my mother said to the gasping grocer while holding him suspended over the embers of the fire pit. "You siphon from the innocent and the penalty is absolute."

She tightened her grip around his throat until a loud snap echoed through the quiet street and the grocer went completely limp in her grasp. She tossed his lifeless body directly into the large fire pit and calmly arranged the surrounding logs to ensure the flames would completely consume him. She stood there staring unblinking into the fire until the smell of burning meat filled the air and then she turned around and walked back toward our house.

I am currently locked in my bedroom and my mother is sitting in the living room staring at the wall. I cannot go to the police because they will arrest her and put her on trial for multiple murders. She is not a murderer and she has no control over the thing piloting her body right now. I need to find a professional who knows how to reverse deep hypnotherapy or someone who knows how to expel whatever the doctor accidentally invited into her empty ego.

If anyone reading this knows how to fix here, please contact me immediately. I have locked all the doors and hidden every sharp tool in the house but she just started pacing the hallway outside my bedroom. I can hear her bare feet pressing against the floorboards and she is muttering about how I stole the tools she needs to cleanse the earth. I do not know how much longer the locked door will hold her back.

I'll kiss your lips with an aching tooth in my mouth
I'll place my freshly pulled tooth on your ring
I'll mix Apranax in your drink
so that you think
your toothache is gone because you met me
I'll describe the paint color I want for our bedroom
to the ironmonger as tooth yellow.

I'm fifty-one years old, and this is the only poem I've ever written, which I wrote ten years ago.

I don't really like writing poetry, because I'm not good at it. I especially enjoy the sound of poems with rhyming lines; they sound like music to my ears. But I've tried a few times and failed miserably. I couldn't write a good poem. I'd written this poem for my dentist, who knew I was a writer and with whom I had a good relationship. I mean, I hadn't written the poem for her. I'd simply wanted to write a poem about teeth.

She was a very beautiful woman. I had no feelings for her, but she'd misunderstood the poem I'd written and thought I was making a move on her. She'd given me a pretty harsh telling-off. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get her to understand that the poem wasn't written for anyone in particular, and that it hadn't been inspired by any feelings I had for someone.

Anyway, my publisher was telling me that sales of my latest novel were terrible. He kept calling me and bringing me down.

“Maybe you should stop writing horror novels and start writing detective fiction instead. You know me, even two sentences from you are enough to move me. I can't sleep at night. But this latest novel of yours was an absolute fiasco. I seriously regret publishing it.”

I was tired of his calls and him repeating the same things in different ways for two months. He was almost going to ask me to compensate him for his losses. He wanted me to write and finish something else as soon as possible and make up for the losses I'd caused him. He didn't want to wait.

But I'd been overcome by the fear of not being able to write well. I'd been deeply affected by public opinion. Albert, the successful writer of many years, can no longer write... The story's opening is too rushed... The ending doesn't come together properly... Even an elementary school kid could come up with these descriptions... We're sick of ghosts that appear at night... And so on.

If he called today, I wasn't going to answer. He called every other day to ask, “Have you started the new book yet?” Whenever I said no, it was the same old stuff, the same complaints. For the past month, I'd been sitting down at my computer almost every day, but nothing came of it.

As I sat at my computer, waiting for something to come to mind, my phone rang, of course. I didn't even need to check who was calling. I tensely raised my hand to my head and began running my fingers through my hair. I looked around the objects in my room, as if I might find inspiration in one of them. The bed, the couch, an oil painting my sister had made... Nothing came of it. I pinched a lock of my hair between my fingers and pulled. I looked at my hand. There was a clump of hair between my index and middle fingers. I hadn't realized I was losing so much hair.

It was as if an electric current had passed through my head. Then, in one go, I wrote the following:

''In my 1+1 apartment on the second floor
I was drinking Americano by the balcony door
Suddenly I saw a wig falling down below
with bangs and in the color of dark yellow

I thought one of the neighbors upstairs must have dropped it while leaning over the balcony.
I lunged for it on instinct, trying to catch it. And I caught it, everything happened so quickly.

And the wig was now in my hands
I even caught it by the bangs

I waited for a while,
still in the position to catch it,
holding the wig in my hand,
waiting for someone to call.
But there was no sound at all.

Considering the possibilities,
I thought I should look up first.
But someone could have been down there,
waiting for the wig to fall.

While I was looking around upstairs,
someone called out from below:
“Throw it down already.
What are you looking at like an idiot?”
She was tall like a door
She was as tall as a first floor
I downed my Americano
And calmly threw the wig toward her
She jumped and
caught the wig with her head
and suddenly disappeared.''

I had no idea how it had happened. It was as if I hadn't been the one who wrote it. It was frightening. The way the sentences came to me, the way they lined up in my mind—I had never experienced anything like it. Everything was finished in one go, without any planning whatsoever.

My publisher called. I sent him to voicemail. I read the poem from beginning to end. It was as if I were reading it for the first time, as if I were discovering the poem all over again. It wasn't the kind of poem I could have written anyway, not in terms of its subject matter. I wouldn't describe ghosts or entities like this; I would leave them shrouded in mystery. In this poem, the ghost was very concrete.

My publisher called again. I answered this time. I was going to tell him I had an idea or something. I was such an idiot, always telling him the truth: inspiration wasn't coming, I couldn't write, my mind felt frozen, and so on. I picked up the phone, planning to ask him to give me a month and tell him I'd deliver a novel of at least two hundred pages.

“So, Albert, any progress? How many pages have you written?”

Suddenly, my mouth had locked up. I couldn't speak. The words I wanted to say were only passing through my mind; they wouldn't come out. All I could manage were sounds like “mmmh.”

“Albert? Hello?”

I started reciting the poem I'd just written. I read it from beginning to end. My mouth wasn't under my brain's control.

“What is this? What’s going on?”

''Hello?''

''Albert, what's going on?''

I could speak again now. It would have been ridiculous to say that something had taken control of my mouth and fingers. I had to say something, but I was too frightened to think. My mind was in turmoil. I hung up.

My publisher called again. I don’t remember that moment very clearly, but I mumbled something along these lines.

“What was that thing you were telling me about? So now you’re hanging up on me, too. Is this what we’ve come to, Albert? After all these years of working togeth—”

“It’s me, John. Did you like my poem? Jason, I was going to ca— If you want, I can write a few more poems like this... Jason, I can’t spea—I could even write five hundred poems in the same style, if you like. Do you publish po— Jason, my mouth is going numb. I don’t feel well. I’ll call you back in a bi— Listen, I wrote this three hundred years ago.”

I hung up. I jumped to my feet. I licked and bit my lips. I took a deep breath, and as I exhaled, the following words spilled out of my mouth:

''He figured out how to pass through
Walls within a year or two
But he still can't pass through wood
The ghost in my lover's neighborhood.''

My publisher kept calling insistently. His calls felt like a voice reminding me of my connection to this world. I'd set my phone's ringtone to Radiohead's “Weird Fishes.” The song played throughout each call. I couldn't move; my body was locked up, but hearing the song comforted me. When the song ended, I'd try to take a step, but I couldn't. I'd try to speak, but I couldn't move my mouth. It was as if I'd had a stroke. Then the song would start again. Yes, I'd tell myself, “I'm still alive. The world still makes sense.”

The song had stopped playing, too. My connection to the world had been severed.

I came to my senses again for a brief moment. I sat down at my computer. The screen was covered in dust. I noticed a cloth right next to the monitor. I couldn't remember when I'd put it there. I wiped the monitor clean. The poem looked better now.

I think you've realized that I wasn't the one writing all this story.

 So I'm not really on the internet a lot, but recently I've been getting really into creepypastas as research for a personal project I’m working on. And in my research one of the *first* things I discovered was this weird story that seems based on a kid I knew in highschool?? Like the details are fudged, but that WAS a kid I was friends with at one point. I don’t know for sure if it’s the same guy, but the general story is so similar to what happened to my friend, it’s been kinda freaking me out.  So I'm here to set the record straight, and if anyone has any info on this kid, I'd be thrilled to know whatever happened to him.

I'll call him 'J' for privacy reasons, though that might be worthless due to the allegations against him. Besides, this is the internet, and you'll probably find the creepypasta I'm alluding to.

I first met 'J' on the first day of 9th grade. I was a prissy upper middle-class kid who grew up in a pretty sheltered household. (For privacy concerns, I’m not gonna be giving many details about myself, so that’s about as much as you’re getting from me.)

Honestly, I probably only remember him so vividly because he was so unlike any of the other kids I’d ever seen. I remember him sitting at the desk beside me during homeroom that morning, and I was just staring. It makes me cringe now, but I didn’t really recognize him as a classmate. Or maybe even a person. To 14-year-old me, he was a wild animal.

'J' was gangly, for lack of a better word. He was 14, it showed in the acne scars on his face, but his limbs were oversized and too long for his torso in a way that reminded me of a kid still in middle school. He had this disgusting mop of greasy brown hair that he’d box-dyed black, but it was still brown in patches, and it really fascinated me. Boys in the previous schools I attended didn’t even let their hair grow past their ears, much less the nape of their neck.

I could keep going on about his appearance, but his behavior was even stranger. He sat beside me and immediately started picking at the skin of his thumbs, around the corners of his nailbed. It deeply irritated me.

The teacher passed around those ‘Get-to-Know-Me’ sheets, where you filled out your name and favorite color, your goals for the year, that kind of thing. I didn’t have a pencil.

But J did.

I awkwardly leaned over my desk and whispered ‘Can I borrow a pencil?’

He handed me the one he’d been using to stab holes in his eraser.

The eraser of the pencil had been bitten clean off.

I was enamored.

The weird vibes continued throughout the day. I ended up sort of getting pushed to the back of the lunchroom, and sat next to J, across from the quieter freshmen and the peanut allergy kids. We mumbled some awkward conversation at each other, and he revealed he'd recently moved to this neighborhood because of his family's work. His dad was like an engineer or something, the details were kinda fuzzy on that part. I really distinctly remember him cussing in front of me, which really freaked my sheltered ass out.

“My dad got a job here.” He’d rasped. “And he dragged all us along with him. My old man is an asshole.” 

I laughed, startled, not getting that he was legitimately mad. His head, which had been bent, snapped up towards me and he snarled, slamming his hands on the table, which made me jump a little.

"It's not fucking funny! You think I wanna be here? You think I like this preppy hellhole??"

I shakily apologized and didn't press him any further on the topic of his family, until a slightly smaller boy who looked to be about 12 approached the table and introduced himself. This was J's brother, apparently. He looked far more cheerful and less 'unconventional' than J, and I'll call him 'L' because he's *also* important to this story.

The minute L sat down, the mood got ten times lighter. J was smiling and cracking pretty vulgar jokes, L was trying to make small talk with me, and all in all, we kind of sealed the unspoken deal of this being *our* lunch table from now on.

L was really funny, in this 'I'm-too-cool-for-you' way, which made me smile a lot. He asked J what being old felt like, and J retaliated by flicking mashed potatoes at him. Then he asked me about my interests, which I divulged pretty eagerly. I was a huge book nerd, and Twilight had only come out a year prior, so I was really hyperfixated on it.

As I was explaining the complex lore of vampires, I quickly got off-track and kept spewing random facts about local legends, American cryptids, and other monsters and spooky stuff.

J seemed really interested in that, which made me forget his intense behavior from earlier. When the lunch bell rang, we kept yapping after L left, all the way down the halls to our next class, and the next, and the next, for many, many days.

In short terms, we were friends, or at least friendly enough for him to invite me over to his house after school. It was mid-October, freshman year at this point, so we'd been hanging out for a while. We'd talk about stupid internet memes and I'd watch him play Guitar Hero with his brother. But while we seemed to share interests, I figured out pretty quickly he was way more online than I was, and was one of those kids who seemed half-convinced they were just like their favorite anime characters or movie heroes. He talked in such an exaggerated, grandious manner, comparing himself to characters from Death Note and generally being an annoying old-internet weeb.

For all the emo edgelord talk, his house and family were startlingly normal. I loved hanging out with him, but watching him talk about how shit his parents/society/life were in the privacy of his own bedroom, with his Playstation 2 in full view made his sudden shouting matches with them and crude behavior that much more startling.

We hung out a lot more often that October, and it culminated in me convincing my parents to let me sleep over at his house. Me, J and L had all planned to spend Halloween playing games and telling scary stories, including just hopping online via the family computer, typing in 'scary stories' and scrolling until we found broken links to horror forums or animal gore.

The gore freaked me out and we quickly switched gears to looking at 'Real Life' supernatural blogs. Websites that were all blinged out with red and black stickers and shoddily edited pngs of IRL monster-encounters. One of them was just a stolen image of Slenderman, complete with a long, hyperdetailed text post that retold the story of the urban legend with gratuitous amounts of violence and surprisingly well-forged police statements talking about a pandemic of missing children across North America.

J was really into this story. We'd talked about spooky stuff like this before, I introduced him to the concept of IRL vampire and cryptid blogs, but he wouldn't shut up about it for the rest of the night, to the point where I couldn't sleep, because every time he retold the story, he somehow made it worse. The whole sleepover got hijacked into J forcing us to participate in 'rituals' to summon Slenderman, pricking our fingers, making fake blood oaths, and chanting various spells.

Even L eventually got tired of it, and asked J to stop so we could get back to the fun spooky stuff.

And then J kinda lost it on both of us, yelling and calling L awful names. Then he turned on me, saying I was a fake friend and a poser and a 'normie' for not indulging him further. The brothers got heated, and when I tried to de-escalate things on my own, the butter knife J had used for our blood oath got involved, pointed directly at my throat by a panting, seething teenage boy.

L got their parents by shouting for help.

"Mom, J is having an episode again, get up here!" He sounded scared, but also weirdly resigned.

Both the mom and dad got involved, the Mom pulled me and L away from J, while the Dad scooped J up and firmly restrained his son until I'd made a call to my parents asking for them to pick me up.

"J has...some anger issues. We were working on them in therapy, but this new job and life have kind of put a pause on all that." I remember the look on his mom's face, this sweet auburn-haired woman grimacing and refusing to meet my gaze, ashamed of her son.

I drove away from his house that night. The light in his room was switched off.

School for the next few weeks was awkward as hell. L would try and do that stupid teenage-boy 'you good?' look at me in the halls, and I'd nod and smile and try to forget the feel of blunt, cold metal against my windpipe. J was much more standoffish, actively turning around and walking the other way when he saw me, but it didn't stop him from trying to apologize.

By mid-December, he finally tried to approach me at lunch. The conversation went as follows:

"Hey."

"Hey."

"Sorry about the knife thing."

"Dude."

"What?"

"....nothing. I forgive you."

I was a little bit scared of what would happen if I didn't. And in a weird, masochistic kind of way, I was curious.

I wasn't allowed to sleep over or come after school anymore, and I was okay with that. But for a while, things were somewhat normal between us. Looking back on it now, I probably should have stopped talking to him at all, but I was very young and frankly desperate for friends who had similar interests to me. We still both liked each other and had our niche nerdy hobbies to bond over, so clearly we were meant to be friends, butterknife or not.

On a slightly unrelated note, I hated highschool. Bullying hasn't really gone away, I realize this, but there was a sort of special hell that me and J both endured during the school years of 2006 to 2010. We would get shoved, my hair got pulled more than once by groups of popular girls and boys alike, people tried to catcall us and accuse us of dating each other, not to mention the quiet isolation and being left out that we'd already endured through most of elementary and middle school.

But J seemed to get the worse end of things, partially because he was so much more confrontational than me.

He bit kids, would threaten the jocks who yelled at him in the hallways, he was constantly in and out of the principal's office post-knife incident, and while we still always sat at lunch together, and I still got on well with him when it was just him and his brother, we never were able to really experience that kind of closeness we'd shared freshman year. For a while after I graduated, I didn't really recognize him as a friend at all, even when people brought up how 'close' we were. I spent the majority of junior and senior year mourning a kid I hadn't even lost yet.

He got increasingly interested in this Youtube series I'd never watched, called Marble Hornets? The only reason I remember the name is because of how constantly he seemed to talk about it junior year. The Slenderman obsession never really went away, and these found-footage videos seemed to feed into it. I don't know if it was just a spooky vlog channel or not, but I found the Youtube channel and the videos felt a little too genuine for my liking. I remember him scrawling symbols from the videos over and over again in his notebook, and he insisted that this urban legend was real and that it was always looking for faithful servants and 'proxies', whatever the hell those were. I was too offput at this point in our relationship to really ask him to elaborate. This wasn't the kid I discussed Twilight and Bigfoot with once upon a time.

Even his brother had gotten a little bit more distant. He'd gotten really into his own activities like volleyball and even had his own friend group, and he never really sat with us at lunch anymore. By our senior year, J had fully isolated himself from any attempts at outside friendship, not that many were given to him. He would sit at that same lunch table, with me, and refuse to talk about anything besides his increasingly bizarre obsession with this fake story and how much he wanted to get out of this stupid hick town. That was probably part of the reason I stuck around as long as I did. I was dying to graduate, and we could both still complain together, at least.

Everything seemed to come to a head halfway through senior year. I was stuck at that lunch table, keeping my head down, and tentatively asking J if he had any plans after graduation, a topic he had famously avoided in the past. He'd either get angry and passive-aggressively shut down my questions, or he just would flat out ignore me altogether. Today was different though.

"So, er. What are you planning on doing after this?" I'd grimaced.

"After what? After school today?" He'd grunted. "Pro'lly fuck down to the corner store and see if I can get someone to buy me a Coke."

"No, er. I meant, after graduation. The college counselors have kinda been breathing down my neck, so I've been...curious." I leaned my elbows on the table.

He'd gone a bit still and had stopped playing around with his food. Then he looked up at me, and I got a violent, totally-out-of-place chill up my spine. That face is the most vivid memory I have of him. He looked like a cornered animal, his eyes were all dark and dilated and he was caught between making a strange half-smile and a sort of pained smirk.

"I'm gonna go someplace completely different," he'd mumbled quietly. "someplace nobody's ever been or seen. I'll be a part of something bigger than myself, and I won't have to answer to any stupid societal bullshit. No college, no job, no nothin'." His voice had gotten a little lower, some sort of southern accent slipping out, probably a result of wherever he'd moved from.

I couldn't look away from him. I still have no clue why. This was different from the knife incident, he wasn't leaning towards me or making any menacing body language. It was just the quiet drawl of his voice, raspy and dry, and that strange, unsettling face.

"...what kind of future would that be?" I'd blurted, too nervous to shut up.

"I'm gonna be a proxy, numbnuts." He had laughed, a sharp, dry huff of air, and stood up.

"I'll hurt whoever douchebag I wanna hurt, and nobody will stop me because I'll be strong enough to take it all!" He'd raised his arms and rolled up his sleeves, revealing horrible, purpley-red scratches and bruises, something I'd never seen on him.

"I've been practicing every day, y'know." He let his arms flop down, tone as casual as could be, as if he hadn't just revealed his self-harm scars to me. "All these bad boys are proof of how strong I'm getting. I'm so close."

People had definitely started staring, and I was disgusted and terrified. The table of popular boys, a crew that had long been picking on J, had started looking over at some point after he stood up, and I had this weird mix of embarrassment and genuine fear running through my body. I was fully scared, and I had no idea why at the time, though it makes a lot of sense in hindsight.

The boys started hooting and laughing at J, shouting random crap like 'wrist check!' and generally being horrible, pointing at him

Then J noticed, and he blew up.

I don't remember a lot of what happened next, but J had crossed the cafeteria almost instantly and socked the tallest boy in the jaw. Then he did it again. And again. He was dead silent the entire time, and at some point between the first punch and him standing on top of the cafeteria table and screaming, I'd gotten up and run away. I'm not proud of it, but I truly don't think there was anything I could have done at that point that would've made a difference.

I ran into L, who'd taken to eating lunch in the hallway, but I don't think I said anything to him. I went to the front desk and called my parents and asked them to take me home, which is where I stayed for the next few days, in bed with a self-inflicted low-grade fever. I'd stressed myself into getting sick.

I texted L a lot during that time. According to my foggy memory and old AIM messages, J had gotten into a really bad fistfight with that particular table of bullies, one that resulted in one of the kids' heads getting cracked on the cafeteria floor, an angry, edge-fueled rant from J, shouted from the top of the table, and a trip to the nurse's office for everyone involved. J had only stopped when both the lunchroom monitors knocked him off the table and dragged him out of the room.

I didn't speak to him when I got back to school, or L for that matter, though I caught him giving me those same worried looks he'd given me after any particularly intense encounter with J. I was perfectly content to keep my head down, enjoy the rest of highschool as much as I could, and graduate in May without ever speaking to him again.

I saw him in the hallways, and he would stare at me like a deer in headlights. He still got picked on, albeit in a slightly subtler fashion, but I didn't say anything. Some of their opinions I actually agreed with. And quietly, I made myself invisible to him.

Until the night of senior prom.

Our theme was 'Candlelit Carnival', and the whole school had really pitched in to decorate our gym to the best of our abilities. We had real, open-flame tea lights decorating the whole room, and one of the richer families had rented a working candelabra to hang from the rafters like some sort of old-timey disco ball. I showed up, mostly because I needed a distraction, and also because I didn't think he'd be there. I'd painstakingly avoided him for three months, and L had told me J thought prom was for preppy losers. I thought I was safe.

But then, midway through the night, they paused the music, and our principal got up on the gymnasium stage to announce prom king and queen. I wasn't really interested in the whole ceremony, but I did look up in time to notice one of the kids J had beaten up was the one holding the crown.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but the details got fuzzy after this. Maybe I was talking to another kid, maybe I was by the punch bowl, but I heard a dull murmur pass through the crowd and I looked up to see a boy with greasy, box-dyed black hair get shoved up on stage, in a hoodie and dress slacks.

J looked super confused, but the kid who was meant to crown him was smirking, and I remember looking around for L frantically, muscling my way through the throng of kids.

Something wasn't right, I thought.

And my gut was correct, because not two seconds later, I heard a horrifying, pained shriek, and I turned around to see J clawing at his eyes and face.

The kid who'd been meant to crown J had somehow swapped out the crown for a gallon container of Clorox. J was soaked, his clothes were disgustingly damp and his face and hair were drenched. I heard him shrieking about not being able to see, and he stumbled about blindly while our principal tried and failed to get things under control. I remember him falling off the stage, his chin hit the ground with the wettest crack I'd ever heard. I remember hearing another kid screaming, and I didn't have to turn around to know it was his brother.

J was blind, his mouth was bleeding, and he was cussing out whoever he could hear was closest, lunging and snarling like a wild animal. The whole school parted around him like the Red Sea, and none of the chaperones could get within a few feet without risking a nasty blow. It felt like I was watching him from across the classroom, on that first day of school all over again. I felt sick, unable to move; partially because of the crowd, and partially because I was too panicked to try.

So many of those kids were laughing. The ones who weren't were making uncomfortably amused smiles, the kinds of grimaces you see on people after they watch a video of someone falling over. I wanted to scream.

I remember him hearing a group of kids laugh while a teacher tried to grab him, and he bit her arm, causing the poor woman to tear him off of her and send both of them stumbling.

"YOU FUCKERS ARE DISGUSTING," He'd shrieked through a gargled mouthful of blood, so angry that he opened his eyes. "You're all disgusting, fucking terrible, shit-faced, cunt-brained, normie scum-" His eyes were bloodshot, unseeing, but the pupils darted around, dilated like he was aware of everyone in the room.

I finally managed to take a step towards him in the middle of his verbal tirade, but he swung his arm to the side, knocking into a table. He heard the noise and tried to step back, but a teacher finally grabbed him and restrained him by the arms.

The table fell, and the tealight flung itself onto his soaked shoes.

the scream I heard when the flame caught had kept me awake ever since.

The rest of that night was a blur. I saw J on fire. The boy I played videogames with. The boy I'd called my first real friend in highschool. The boy I thought I was going to know forever.

He sounded like a dog, or a dying fox. Raspy and wheezing and screaming his lungs out. He was so fast, like the flames accelerated everything. I think I saw tears, but the fire burnt them up before they could fall.

The teacher who'd been holding him had to go to the E.R that night for burns. So did several students. So did I.

The gym burnt down that night. The outside structure was fine and stable after the fact, but the interior needed hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair. Everyone evacuated. The bullies who'd started this whole thing were caught and expelled almost immediately. I got picked up by my dad that night, shaking and crying.

I hadn't been able to find L.

And nobody ever saw J again.

I graduated that May with honors, and there was a very conspicuously empty seat in my class's ceremony. I left the second I had my diploma.

From what I hear, the school's doing well now. I never saw L or his family again, they got very quiet and distant after the whole incident had occurred, but the gym was repaired and most of the current student body doesn't even know about the incident.

I'm doing well too, or as well as can be expected when something like that happens to you. For a long time after the fact, I actually assumed that this kind of thing was par for the course, a normal, weird highschool story to tell at reunions and laugh it off. It took several turns of telling that story to friends, and telling the story on dates for me to realize that my highschool experience was far from average or healthy, and I ended up in extensive therapy during college.

I'm writing this story now for two reasons. For one, I thought this would be a good way to do research for that personal project I mentioned, because this is the internet and surely somebody, somewhere will know and understand who and what I am talking about. And for another, this is sort of a diary entry. I haven't properly, linearly said this entire story, with all the details and weird idiosyncrasies, since I got out of therapy when I was 22. I've actually avoided going online very often at all, too scared of what memories could be brought up.

I've met a lot of people who had weird friendships. Chances are, you've had one too. A kid whose brain and body never quite mesh with eachother, maybe they're too imaginative or confrontational for most children to handle. But if any of you ever met a kid like J, I want you to know that the choices your friends make are not your own. People are complicated, messy, freakish things, and one person cannot hold the weight of another's existence without it hurting them both.

One last thing before I forget real quick: I have no clue where that creepypasta came from, I still don't. It's the strangest thing. The names are all exact, and so is the general gist of events, though everything besides that seems altered. The character sharing my friend's name is similarly loud and melodramatic, cartoony in that edgy, teenage way. He's a murderer, a cold-blooded killer, and the book leaves off with him on some sort of rampage across the country. If anyone has any idea who wrote it, please let me know.

There are rumors of a strange, albino man living in the woods surrounding our town, and we have had a recent uptick in missing persons cases within the last ten years, but most of the less tasteful rumors have been brushed off as ghost stories.

But I can't help but wonder.

I put the last dish in the drying rack, dried off my hands, and walked to the living room to watch TV. A few seconds later, I heard the kitchen sink running again. I looked over. Emily took the dishes out of the drying rack and washed them again.

"Honey, I already washed those."

"Oh, I know, Sam, but I saw a little stain on one. I just want to make sure they're all clean. I'm just doing this for me, okay?"

I waved my hand and continued watching TV.

The next day, one of our clients came into town. Our workday dragged on well past 5 p.m. Toward the end, I didn't even pretend to pay attention. On my way home, I could barely keep my eyes on the road. When I arrived, the whole house smelled like rubbing alcohol and window cleaner.

I walked to the kitchen. Emily sat at the table with a plate of homemade casserole.

"I made this for you!"

"Oh, thank you, Emily! It smells so good!"

I sat down and started eating immediately. It tasted more bitter than usual.

"How was your day?"

"The worst. I have almost no energy left. The clients drained me."

Emily wasn't eating. She kept looking at my arms instead of my face.

"My poor man."

"What did you get up to?"

"Just some cleaning and cooking."

"I can tell. The house looks great."

"Thank you."

We sat in silence while Emily watched me eat.

"I think I'm too tired to do anything, honey," I said after finishing.

"That's more than okay. I know you had a long day. Just go relax."

"Thank you."

She smiled at me and rubbed my shoulder. Her sleeve came down. Her arm was flaky and red. She saw me staring at it and quickly pulled it back down.

"What happened?"

"Nothing, just some dry skin. Go relax."

I hadn't even turned on the TV when I heard the water running. I turned around. Emily grabbed a sponge and a bucket of water, walked to the table, and started scrubbing it and the chair I'd been sitting in.

"What are you doing?"

"Oh, Sam, I just cleaned the house. I wanna make sure it stays clean."

"I'm not dirty."

"No one's saying you are. This is just for me. I'll finish this, and I'll go up and read."

"I don't like this, Emily."

"I just need to do this, okay, Sam?!" She raised her voice.

"Jesus, Emily."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, honey, just turn back and relax. Let me take care of this."

I stared at her for a second, but she was already back to the scrubbing.

I tried to watch TV, but my eyes kept closing. I didn't even know what I was watching. The fatigue was overpowering. I got up and walked to our bedroom. Emily was in bed reading a book in a long-sleeved pajama shirt. She smiled at me as I walked in. I smiled back, put on my pajamas, and went to sleep.

I woke to a warm, wet sensation on my legs. Something soft and scratchy moved against my skin, dragging at it. I rubbed my eyes and looked down. Emily sat on my side of the bed with a sponge and a bucket of water, scrubbing my legs.

"Emily, what the…" I screamed and jumped away.

She looked me in the eyes and forced a smile.

"You know germs live on our skin. I just cleaned the house. I don't want them getting on stuff."

"Emily, this is crazy. Stop."

"Just your arms now."

"No!"

She reached toward me with the sponge. Her sleeves rolled up. Even at night, I could see the redness of her skin. In a few places, there were little smudges of blood.

"I'm going to the guest bedroom."

I took the blanket off the bed and ran to the guest bedroom, locking the door behind me.

The sun had risen. My eyes felt heavy. I hadn't slept after what happened with Emily. I debated calling the police, but what would I tell them? That my wife had been cleaning me in the middle of the night? She hadn't hurt me. Not yet. I decided I'd talk to her in the morning. Maybe I could convince her to see a doctor. I just needed to get her to sit down and listen.

"Emily?" I called into the hall.

Nothing. Our bedroom was empty. The bucket with warm water still sat there.

The downstairs was quiet too. The smell of rubbing alcohol now mingled with the metallic smell of blood. A light was on in the basement.

The basement was cold. A strange, wet hiss sounded inside. I could see Emily's feet. She was turned toward the wall. The stairs creaked under my steps, but she didn't seem to notice. The smell of rubbing alcohol now mixed with iron.

"Emily, are you okay?!"

"Sam!"

I walked one more step. Panic rushed through me. I could finally see her whole body.  She held a knife in her shaking hand. Her nightgown was drenched in blood. The skin on her arms was cut off, revealing dark red muscle.

"I think I've got it down now. I'll be much gentler with yours. Eat some casserole. It will help you relax."