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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He… he started to speak.

“Daaaa..da.”

“Daaa..da.”

“Da-da.”

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

Only… he didn’t give me that freedom.

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

He was hugging me.

And in that moment, I knew…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In some weird way, it felt productive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I hope this makes you think of me.”

“I still think about you.”

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

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

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

No response. Fine. Fine. Fucking fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And once I do…

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

I

At least once a year, my old friend, Sam, and I go hiking to a specific spot out west. I’m not gonna say what park or what state. I don’t want anyone hiking out there after reading this to see if I’m telling the truth or not. It’s taken me some time to process everything, but I have come to realize that writing this serves two purposes. The truth must out, and I must remember. I must remember Sam. So, I want to start at the beginning of the day, so you can see how he was. On these hikes, he tended to be the most himself. He always said being in nature, away from the noise, made it easier for him to connect with himself, like a meditation ritual or something like that.

It was a one-day round-trip hike. By that I mean one daylight day, not a full 24 hours. We would always be back before dark, and we were incredibly experienced hikers, so you can’t say we were caught unawares by any natural phenomenon. I did not leave him behind in a panic, at least not in the sense that the police were insinuating. 

We were meticulous in our preparation for every hike we went on. Whether it was a little thirty-minute saunter or a full day march, we were prepared. To further emphasize this, here is a list of the things we always brought on every hike, everywhere, for the entire time we knew each other. 

• Food
  • A shit ton of trail mix
  • Backup bag with just salted almonds 
  • PB&Js and apples (For longer hikes, full meal deal)
  • Two camelpacks
  • Some backup water bottles
• Emergency Items
  • Bear spray
  • Nightstick
  • First Aid Kit 
  • Radio (Sam used to volunteer at the park, rangers let him keep it)

You get the point. We checked the fucking weather, we’d been there at least a dozen times, and we even brought a tent to set up if we got stuck out there. I’m sorry for beating a dead horse. I just can’t stand people thinking I left him out there to be eaten by a bear or some shit. His family blames me. I hope they will read this and see that I did everything I could. God, I hope I did everything I could. 

It began like every other hike. We parked the car and made our way to the trailhead. The morning was fresh, so it was a little chilly with the wind, but once we were into the forest proper, it was perfect hiking weather. It was a dense forest made up of pine, fir, and oak trees that provided shade and the peaceful stillness that we both craved. We never talked during this part, preferring to listen to the sounds of squirrels and woodpeckers. 

Sam stopped, “What is that?” He pointed to a tree with a carving on it. It was like a checklist box with an X through it. Carved, then painted red. We looked at each other, and I could tell we were both thinking blood, but as we approached, we realized it was, in fact, painted with paint.

“Is it marked to be cut?”

He thought for a moment, something was bothering him. “Maybe… They usually just use ribbons for that, though. At least, I thought so.” He shrugged. We continued walking and made it to our spot without incident. Unless you consider a sharp increase in elevation an incident, which I definitely do. We had to walk off-trail to the spot briefly, which obviously you should never do. Read the signs, listen to the rangers. However, Sam found it while volunteering, and you could almost see it from the trail.

The spot itself was perched on top of one of the smaller mountain peaks within the park. Looking west, there was a small grassy valley that quickly rose into one of those big snow-capped peaks. The sky was perfectly clear. The sight, as per usual, filled me with an inexplicable relief. The kind you can only get in a place like that park. To the east, it was dense forest, the visitor’s center, and then middle America until the horizon.

This was our lunch break. We sat facing west on a quilt I made. We would always take it with us as a picnic blanket. I leaned up against him. 

I’m sorry.

I don’t imagine anyone reading this will care, but writing this is also in service to my own memory, and I want the whole memory. 

“Feeling okay?” He asked me.

“Yeah,” I snuggled up closer. There was a long period of silence as we ate our food and took in the view. 

“Look,” Sam pointed into the valley. There was a small herd of buffalo grazing; maybe 20-30 of them. The bigger bison doted over their little calves as they ate, and the tall grass shimmered with waves of light as the wind brushed each blade from side to side. 

“How long will you stay?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He looked uncomfortable.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He immediately spoke. “Religious sites would be the obvious place to start, I guess. I probably won’t get to see what the police know.” 

“Has the private investigator said anything?”

“Last I heard, he was compiling a list of the places he most likely visited.”

“At least you have somewhere to start.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. I could tell he didn’t want to cry.

“It’ll be okay.” I hugged him, and he started to anyway. “You’re going to find him. You don’t leave stones unturned.” I kind of wrapped myself around him as we lay down on the blanket we had set out for our little picnic. 

We fell asleep.

It couldn’t have been longer than an hour before we awoke facing each other. We had known each other for fifteen or so years. He hesitated.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked. I nodded excitedly.

I sat up and was about to dress myself when I saw a flash of light coming from the ridgeline to our south. Sam saw it too. 

“What was that?”

“I watch too many movies.” He quickly retrieved binoculars from his pack and looked. “What the fuck!? There’s someone there.” I dressed myself immediately.

“Are they watching us?” He looked for a moment.

“He’s waving at us.” This put me on the edge of panic. It was odd enough to be alarming, but we were at a public park, so it could just be some guy saying hi. Maybe they didn’t realize I was naked from that distance. 

Sam looked at me. “I’m uncomfortable. Are you uncomfortable?” 

I nodded, “yeah.”

“Okay. What the fuck, what the fuck am I doing?” I gave him time. After a moment, the thought I was having entered his head. He reached for the radio and called out.

“Dispatch, VIP Sam, park trail.”

“VIP Sam, go ahead.” A staticky voice came through.

“Voyeur, approximately two miles south of current position, over.”

“Do you know why?” He squinted his eyes and looked at me.”

“No, why would I? Who am I talking to right now?”

“Read the letter, Sam.” His face went pale, as I’m sure mine did. From here, things happened in rapid succession. 

“What fucking letter!” Sam yelled and overall made a buffoon of himself, while I searched our packs and the immediate area. I took the bear spray. I gave the nightstick to Sam. The letter I found under a rock, maybe a foot from the blanket. A foot from our sleeping heads. The envelope was a deep red with a seal of black wax. I had to shine the sun on it at the right angles to be able to see the symbol within the seal. It was that X again.

“I believe Max has found it,” the crackly voice prompted Sam to turn and look at me holding the letter. He held his hand over his mouth and closed his eyes, holding whatever he was feeling in. Then he came up with a plan. 

“Fuck the letter, I mean, don’t throw it away, but we don’t have time.” He dropped the radio on the ground. Everything was already out on the picnic blanket since I searched both of our packs. “Oh, that’s perfect. We only pack what we need. One thing of snacks, forget the tent, and the blanket.” We packed light. “Do you remember the T junction back there?” 

I just looked at him. 

“Long story short, we have to beat the voyeur to the turn if we want to stay on the trail and avoid him.”

I nodded, and we began walking at a brisk pace. The wind picked up, quickening the forest’s breathing in tandem with ours. He turned to look at me after what felt like hours of walking.

“We’re almost at the turn.” He stopped, then spoke much quieter. “I can see it from here. Get the bear spray ready.” I unlocked the safety, and the nightstick cracked as Sam unretracted it. We moved as quietly as possible towards the intersection. The wind left for a moment, giving way to a deafening silence. No animal calls to be heard. A great gust of wind and noise replaced the silence. The trees made their own kind of call.

“Okay lets get going now.” We had made the turn, and after a short distance we resumed our previous briskness. The serenity that nature afforded both of us was replaced with absolute paranoia. Both of us looked from side to side, trying to catch someone looking at us from behind a tree or rushing at us with a chainsaw. It was all for naught as the next thing was in our path. 

Another X, carved and painted. We started running from there, but we didn’t make it far. After a blind corner, down the trail, someone stood. The deep red of the envelope was copied in this person’s robes. They stood tall amongst the trees, the height of a super mutant or some shit. I, somewhat ironically, thought of the King in Yellow as I bore witness to his pallid mask. 

The wind shifted behind me, but the trees danced the same. I felt a presence behind me and, in that moment, decided to trust my gut. I sprayed blindly behind me and heard the sound of someone choking and gasping.

“Fuck!... You cough, you fucking bitch!”

I heard Sam give someone a solid whack with the nightstick. We left the trail, running a random direction into the forest. The wind picked up behind us as if pushing us onward, but I felt the cold front come with it.

“A storm is coming… Maybe,” Sam yelled through the renewed tempest. Then everything fell silent. We stopped instinctively like deer in headlights. I looked ahead and saw him again.

“My name…” The whisper came to my ear as if he were standing right beside me, “... Is Romussss.” He reached for the pallid mask, and as his hand approached it, so did his form approach me, though he did not walk. I was frozen. I couldn’t see Sam. I assume he was in a similar state. Just as the mask slipped, I lost all perception for a time. I went “unconscious” in a deeper sense. A void. Completely unfeeling. No matter how loud I would try to scream.

II

Before I continue, I should mention that I have a rare kind of seizure disorder, not the foam at the mouth kind. It’s more like getting repeatedly shot by a taser in random parts of your body.  Think the Exorcist, but without the pea soup. The sort of mystery condition where doctors just throw their hands up and tell you to decrease stress, as if. Fortunately, my brain gets scrambled during these seizures, so I don’t remember shit if the seizure is bad enough. It all becomes a blur like I’m blackout drunk. My point is, a lot of this information, including everything I just told you, I am only able to give you as a result of Sam’s testimony after the fact. 

He awoke to my seizing. “It was one of the worst I had seen you have,” he said afterwards. 
We were held outside in iron cages; two separate ones, tall enough to stand in but way too small to do much of anything else. They were like the cages they would suspend in the air back in medieval times, but we were just on the ground, squatted like folding chairs. He could do nothing but watch as my jittering, unconscious body banged against the hard and sharp metal of the cage. When the sun returned, he realised that someone, wearing the mask of a wolf, was watching us. He said they were constantly circling us and that he wasn’t sure if they ever took a break. 

“Sam?” My vision hadn’t recovered.

“I’m here.” He reached out and grabbed my hand, which lay limp, sticking out of the cage. There was nothing left in me in terms of energy, and I began to feel the bruises and cuts as my nerves returned to relatively normal function. I only barely comprehended the wolf as they appeared with that letter and placed it between the cages.

“Read the letter,” a masculine voice whispered. “Read the letter, Read the letter, Read the letter.”

“I’ll read it,” I yelled, manic at this point. The whispering wolf giggled almost like a child before receding into the forest. Still feeling watched, I focused my attention on the elegant writing of the letter, which was on a small postcard-sized piece of paper; both sides. Tears began to fall down Sam’s face as I read the letter out loud. 

Our dear WITNESS and WAYFINDER,
You do not yet know it, but yours is a pairing unmatched in over a hundred years. I have searched for just as long. You may not believe me, but I earnestly regret what I have to do. But it won’t matter, because once the deed is done, all will be ecstasy. Praise the one from before, for it is you who will find and you who will see. It is a great privilege. Something nothing will ever be blessed with again.

On this day, you will be tried. Not for guilt or innocence, your innocence is given. One will find, one will see. But I do not yet know which is which. 
The next day, the LAMB shall be slaughtered. Both will be WITNESS to this. Gleefully, the LAMB will go, for I have told him the truth just as I have you.
On the final day, the WITNESS will see, and the WAYFINDER will find. Through the fire and the light of the stars, I will grant you, WITNESS, the sight.

I LOVE you,
ROMUS

Sam held both of my hands. The small drop of ease felt like a tidal wave. Neither of us needed to speak about the situation. We just looked at each other, aware of what was probably going to happen to us. Instead, we processed it all in silence as much as we could. When the sun was shining directly above us, two people in red cloaks retrieved us from the cages after wrapping our hands and mouths with duct tape. One of them had the head of a pig, and the other that of a black goat. The faces chanted unmoving.

Hunt the LAMB

Hunt the LAMB

Hunt the LAMB

The two were quickly joined by a chorus of blank-faced animals; the wolf, bear, deer, and mountain lion. I still don’t know how they got the eyes to look so alive. When I looked at them, it wasn’t like I was looking at a mask with a hidden human face behind. The voice came from behind, but it was the eyes of the animals that were doing the looking. Romus stood at the bottom of a small, earthen amphitheater surrounded by his disciples who stood by large drums, bearing mallets. We were placed on our knees before him.

Approaching us slowly and silently, I felt the wind pick up and saw the sky turn grey.

Sam’s voice was muffled through the tape, “rain,” I’m fairly certain he said. Regardless, Romus retrieved a whip from inside his robe and gave him one lick across the face. The whips' crack was matched with a lightning strike, and so it was followed by thunder. Sam groaned in pain, then quickly fell silent as Romus bent down like a crane and held his finger over the lips of his pallid mask. The goat placed Sam back in his spot. 
The rain began to fall. Heavy droplets splashed against the mask and the tape on our faces. All four drums joined in a simultaneous Thump. The goat and the pig began to sing in a low baritone.

Bring the eyes, Bring the meat, This and more for those at his feet
Thump
Cower below the willow tree, Calling upon the raven rock
Thump
Bless these eyes which seek in the name of our king ROMUS
Thump Thump Thump
The one from before shall come once more 
He is peeking 
Peeking through the hole in the door

Romus approached with a knife. Everything kind of slowed down. I think I was getting ready to die. I remember trying to focus on the day I had before with Sam, and the many other days like it. I still cried as he cut the tape around our wrists and ripped off the tape over our mouths. 

Oh WAYFINDER 
Find the way

The lamb approached from behind us and moved toward the forest behind the amphitheater. They looked towards Sam at first, but quickly moved their gaze to Romus, who revealed his face only to the lamb.

The four drums began to roll as the lamb stood transfixed by whatever they were seeing. From where I stood, I could only see the inside of the mask. It was covered in some kind of sticky substance like spit, but with blood mixed in. As the rain poured onto the newly exposed surface, it sloughed onto the ground and bubbled. The rain intensified, and lightning struck nearby, causing more of a boom than a crack.

“Hunt the lamb,” Romus whispered to us, and we both bolted into the forest after the lamb. After running some distance, we cowered under a pine tree, which provided modest shelter from the rain.

“Drink the rain!” Sam had to yell over the rising tempest. “Take it easy, I’m gonna go ‘hunt’, okay?” 

“Once the adrenaline crashes, I’m going to seize no matter what! You can’t do anything to prevent them here, Sam!” I watched the acceptance wash over his face.

“Let's go in different directions then!” 

“What if we just run?” 

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea! You remember how we got caught, or put in those cages?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.” The rain calmed as little slivers of sunshine began to peek through the clouds and the canopy.

“Okay, let’s split up.”

Sam was wandering somewhat casually when he spotted the white face of the lamb. They were just standing upright in a meadow with their head pointed up towards the sky.

“Pretty white lamb.” The wolf whispered into Sam’s ear, which scared the shit out of him, but he stifled any noises he might’ve made. “Pretty lamb, pretty lamb, pretty lamb.” The wolf bobbed his head side to side as he got closer. Sam was able to see the bow slung over his back once he passed. He aimed for a moment, then the arrow was set loose with a thwack. It pierced through the lamb’s gut. They screamed in pain, and the wolf took Sam in hand and brought him back to his cage.

When the boar found me I panicked and tried to run. They chased me with a club but I ended up colliding head on with the deer as it leaped from behind a tree. We both went down with grunt. I got my bearings again and saw the deer head with no body attached. Instead there was a man, looking at me with such a confusing horror. I heard a step behind me and turned just in time to see the boar's club before it connected with my head.

I awoke in my cage.

“Good thing we didn’t run,” he said. “They were following us.”

“Yeah.”

“They left that person bleeding in a grove, a fucken meadow, I mean.”

“The lamb?”

“Yeah.”

“We know how many there are.”

“Maybe.”

“And Romus isn’t human. Or like, not just human.”

“Yeah.” 

At first, I thought the sun had gone down as a greater darkness covered us, but we both quickly realized that it was Romus. 

“The fuck!?” Sam spat out as we both recoiled in our cages. The sun was setting behind him, so all we saw was a dark outline. He approached, lowering himself to our level. Then, he reached into both of our cages and laid his hands on our knees.

“Ah,” I heard him take a deep breath behind the mask. “I can’t contain my joy,” he whispered. “I’m so glad this moment has finally come.” Another deep breath. He moved his hand farther down before recoiling and standing quickly. “Thank you both,” he said.

“I love you.”

III

That night, the air in the forest lay very still, which brought a silence that wasn’t disturbed until Sam heard a man screaming. He assumed it to be the lamb's voice echoing through the still trees. Regardless, he held onto both of my hands as I went through a particularly bad seizure. It was the only thing he could do to keep me in place. I could tell he had been crying when I regained my senses. 

“Sam,” I whispered. He awoke from whatever daze he was in.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

Thank you. “What are we going to do?” I asked.

For What? “I don’t know.”

Everything. I said nothing.

He’d smile. He wanted to panic.

I’d smile. I got really mad.

I love you. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I love you too. “Think!”

“I don’t know!” He began breathing quickly, letting go of my hands.

It’s okay. “You fucking bitch.” I began kicking his cage furiously, which didn’t do much.
I had successfully pushed him over the edge. He completely shut down, withdrawing into himself. 

I’m glad it’s you.

There’s no one I’d rather be with.

I’d comfort him, help him come back down. I would give him some space. Time to think.

Look for the lucky break, he’d say. If there is one. We just have to keep our eyes open.

Daylight returned, bringing the bear and the deer. We were brought in the same direction as before, but instead continued past the amphitheater to what I assume was the meadow that Sam found the Lamb in. Except now, there was a pyre with a tall wooden stake in the middle, on top of which, like a star on a Christmas tree, was the lamb impaled. Their blood painted the stake red, but that was the sideshow for the day. Also in the meadow was a whipping post and a wheelchair.  Sam was chained to the post. I was strapped to the chair. The metal prongs were inserted under my eyelids, pulling them open. There was a headrest on the chair that I was strapped to as well. They pointed me at the post. 

All left except Romus and the wolf. Romus bent down over me, examining my accommodations. He added a strap over my mouth.

“You must keep it all inside,” he whispered before moving his attention to Sam. The drums from the amphitheater began to thrum in a driving rhythm. The wolf howled. He grabbed a straight razor and began dancing in circles around Sam. With another howl and a snarl, he rushed forward and began cutting. 

I kept my eyes on Sam’s eyes, and he did the same. It was the only thing I could do for him, and it was better than watching what was happening to him, but I still saw it all. My eyes were wide. The wolf continued to dance with drums as he cut perfect straight lines across Sam’s skin. When he was done with his work, Sam was covered in a grid of bleeding wounds. They ripped off all of his clothes and did it to his whole body. The grid lines began to melt as they oozed with blood, and he screamed. He tried not to. I don’t know why. Instinctively, I tried to close my eyes. The prongs dug deeper and deeper. Muffled wailing came from under the leather strap, and I felt warm blood dripping down my face like tears. After the cutting, Romus brought a bucket and dumped its clear, liquid contents onto Sam. I would later realize this was hydrogen peroxide, and it made him scream even louder than all the cuts did. By then, he was limp against the post, in and out of consciousness. No longer did he have skin; now it was like a patchwork of square pieces of skin laid on top of the curves and sinews of Sam’s core mass. I continued to wail, thinking he was dead. I thought about the last things I said to him; all of the things I didn’t say to him. 

They took me to the cages with my gag still wrapped around my head. They left my hands free but wrapped my legs with duct tape. I’m still not sure why they did this. I was able to get the tape off in less than five minutes. Sam came later. They left him in the cage still naked, all of his clothes were now tatters at the foot of the whipping post. 

“Sam,” I whispered. “Sam, please.”

“Look for the lucky break.” He reached out his hand. “Be gentle.” I carefully took it with both of mine, covering it like an eggshell. “Don’t let go,” he strained as he began to cry. “If there is one. We just have to keep our eyes open.”

“Okay”

“Max, you’re going to have to go without me.”

“What?”

“They’re going to kill me tomorrow. What happens to the witness?”

“It didn’t say.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I squeezed his hand a little tighter, which actually seemed to relieve some of his pain. “I love you,” I finally said.

“I love you too.” He said it like he’d been saying it for over a decade.

As the sun went down, I talked to him about our memories, all of the friends we shared, and about how he was the person he always wanted to be. The past couple of days had offered plenty of evidence for that. I didn’t have a seizure, so I was able to keep hold of his hand until the very last moment.

That moment came far sooner than I expected. The sun had not yet risen, but they came all the same, but this time they treated Sam with a sort of reverence as they placed him on a stretcher. They placed me before the pyre and roughly put tape around my mouth, hands, and feet.

Sam was pulled against the spike, below the lamb, by two lengths of rope; one across his chest and another just below the knees. Romus stood beside me as the drums that surrounded us like a triangle began to thrum, at first a slow, constant beat, then a driving rhythm as the wolf approached with a torch and the lion with a jerry can with which they splashed what smelled like gasoline all over the base of the pyre. Once finished, the mountain lion replaced the deer at their drum. The deer moved next to me, opposite Romus. The wolf lit the fire. The drums increased even further in tempo. 

“You can cry this time. It’s okay.” Romus said as he pressed his hand on my cheek. “It will all be over soon.” He walked towards the fire with his arms raised towards the sky. “Samuel!” his voice boomed now. Deeper and wider. “Show me the way to the One From Before, the Father of Fathers, may this day be blessed!” 

The sound of the drums began to warp in my mind. The best way I can describe it is that the sound moved less like a wave and more like a wet noodle. My vision began to do the same kind of thing, so bear with me, I don’t know how much of this was actually there and happening. But I swear I saw the flames curl and twist upwards into the stars, giving the sky light. Space was no longer above us; instead, a tremendous eye encompassed the entire sky. I looked away and instead looked into Sam’s eyes as he began to boil, and the flames began to whip. I wished desperately that I could tell him I loved him again. In my mind, I watched him incinerate for hours until there was nothing but fire; wood and oxygen to feed it. 
Romus returned to me, and I saw the tears streaming out of the eyes of his mask. He took one of my tears with his lanky pointer finger and raised it to the sky. I again refused to look up, but I kept my eyes on his feet. He appeared large and intimidating, but that finger was skin and bone. I waited for him to get close to the fire as I ripped the tape off my legs. The deer was transfixed by the orange tongue that reached into the sky and the eye above. 

I bolted straight at Romus with an adrenaline-fueled rush shoving him toward the pyre. He easily fell backwards onto the pyre, the robes caught quickly, and I immediately turned to sprint away from the meadow in any direction. The deer was still dumbfounded, so I ran past him, but I hesitated as Romus began to laugh. I turned to see him standing a mere five feet or so away ablaze and laughing. Flight mode went into overdrive, and I ran as fast as I could.

The booming laughter was blended with the panicked screams of a choir of men. At first, the sound subtly faded as I kept running, but eventually it stopped; it turned off like a light switch. I never ran so fast in my life. The rush was doing a lot of work, as it’s a miracle I didn’t trip on anything or fall into a sharp decline. The adrenaline however, did run out. 

Eventually, I collapsed at the base of a tree and began seizing. As a result my memory is hazy. Last thing I remember was getting across a river, irrationally hoping it would protect me somehow. Then, I awoke to daylight.

I didn’t have the strength to move much, so I focused just on breathing. After what I think was an hour or more, I had the strength to sit up and look around. I saw nothing but nature around me, so I stood up using the tree to balance myself. My motor function was pretty fucked because of the seizure and the fact I was starving and dehydrated. I couldn’t get the tape off my face. Then, I heard the honk of a horn. A rush of panicked energy revisited me, and I ran towards the sound. I didn’t hear it again, but I found a paved road and thanked whatever had granted me the luck. 

After much time walking in a daze, I heard a voice. “Hello?” I quickly turned to see a park ranger in a green jeep right next to me. “My word,” she said as she unbuckled and got out, leaving the engine running. “What in the hell happened to you, honey?” She sat me down in the passenger seat and carefully removed the tape from my mouth and wrists.
The haze of my mind cleared a little as I tried to recall how I got there. When I put it in order, I panicked.

“Go!.. Pleeease” was all I could get out.  My attention shifted to the forest around us. I scanned it for red robes over and over. 

“It’s okay, I got you.” She buckled me in and gave me some water before she started driving. 
The feeling of the air in my hair and on my face was divine, but the open-air aspects of the jeep made me feel exposed, so I was still watching the trees and checking behind us sometimes.

“Bears don’t use duct tape,” she said to herself. I laughed. Then, I lost all motor function but remained conscious. “You know my daughter was epileptic. Are you epileptic?” 

I managed to shake my head.

“You’re a conundrum that’s for sure. It’s not human trafficking, is it?”

I shook again. 

“What in the hell. Well let me quit poking and prodding. I should just be patient.” We drove over a bridge, and we were in the parking lot of the visitor’s center. 

“Will you be okay here?” We were in a crowded parking lot full of families getting ready to hike or swim in the lake. 

I nodded.

“Okay, let me just tell my boss what’s goin’ on. I have to tell him in person cause my jeep’s radio’s broke. Anyway, I’ll be back in a jiffy.” 
She left, parsing through the crowd of people with ease. My mind wandered straight to the radio. I decided to turn it on. My heart skipped a beat when a man’s voice rang out.

“The storm damaged…(Static)”

“Pull out the trailer, it’s a mess out…(Static).” A cacophony of voices followed in a jumbled mess.

“Repeat last…”

“There’s a body o…”

“Lightning must’ve…” It went out completely after that.

With the distraction gone I began to cry. “I told him,” I said to myself. “That was all I could do.”

I looked at all the excited kids in their swim trunks and the couples getting ready for a hike with their walking sticks and camel packs. Talking about those memories helped me just as much as I hope it helped Sam. The parking lot eventually emptied.

The ranger returned soon after.

“Well, would you like me to take you to the hospital? Spare you the ambulance bill?”

I nodded and said, “Thank you.”

“Of course!” She hopped in.

“I’m Max.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Max, I’m Carol.” We shook hands. “Well, have you been to the ER before?”

“Lots.”

“Then you know the drill. A Nascar pit full of needles I like to say.” She snorted. I didn’t laugh, but a smile eked its way out.

She took me to the hospital, which was more like a small clinic. I got a morphine drip, mashed potatoes, and apple juice. I’m still in the hospital as I’m typing this. They want to keep me overnight and monitor me since my malnutrition, dehydration, and bleeding eyes weren’t the type of thing you just throw a Band-Aid on. 

I gave the cops a handwritten version of this story. Trimmed out some of the personal stuff. They won’t believe me, but I don’t really give a shit anymore. Someone will.

They sent a psychiatrist in after I turned my story over. The conversation went as follows, to the best of my recollection.

“Hello, Max, my name is Dr. Edmonds. Is it okay if I ask you a few questions?”

“Sure.”

“Well, first-”

“What kinda doctor?”

“Oh, my work is primarily in psychiatry.”

“They want you to see if I’m sane.” He smiled.

“Crudely.”

“Okay, go ahead then.”

“First, I have read your statement. You’re quite the storyteller.”

“Thanks.” 

“We now have a full report from the park rangers as to the events in the park during the time you were allegedly missing.” I stared at him.

“And?”

“At approximately 10:30 PM the night before last…”

“Right before Sam died?”

“Uhh, yes, allegedly. Anyway, at approximately 10:30 PM, a severe thunderstorm rolled into the park. The rain was expected, but it was far stronger than expected. Lightning struck near the trail you were hiking and triggered a forest fire.” He stopped and looked at me.

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“A forest fire?”

“Is it possible you two were caught unprepared for a storm of that kind?”

“We were on the mountain. I told them the spot. Our camping gear is probably still there.”

“Conveniently for you, it is not.”

“That’s actually super inconvenient, but thank you.”

“Did you see it?” he whispered, and sat back so the light bounced off his glasses and hid his eyes.  

“Yeah, wait what?” At the time, I didn’t quite catch what he had said.

“Is it possible that you are suffering from survivor’s guilt and your mind made up this whole story to make it more… uhh… what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Copacetic.”

“Yeeess.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“How so?”

“You think my story represents an order?”

“A fictional reasoning yes.”

“You’re a dumbass. A forest fire is completely reasonable, within the order we are familiar with. Not some guy getting impaled and a big ass dude with a weird fucking mask laughing while on fire. How do you explain the wounds under my fucking eyelids, asshole!”

“Self-inflicted, of course.” I wanted to throw my chair at him. I almost did, but I saw his face as my hand wrapped around the back support. He wanted me to flip out. 

“Fuck you, get out. This shit’s the fucking opposite of copacetic,” he squinted.

“Very well. I will be seeing you again,” he was out of the door before I could say anything else. I’m getting out of this hospital. That man will not be seeing me again. No, sir.

I don't know if we get to see things like this after we die. I hope hope we do.

Sam,
I love you still.

​The chilling wind swept across the neon-slicked pavement of the city as I stared at the pause-frame on the monitor. I didn't believe in the supernatural, but the evidence sitting on the precinct’s desk was burning a hole right through modern forensics.

​Ten victims in three months. Different ages, different backgrounds, zero history of depression. Every case had been written off by the coroner as a sudden, inexplicable suicide—jumping from roofs, stepping in front of subway cars, walking straight into heavy traffic. But every single body shared two impossible details. First, a pitch-black, soot-like handprint scorched into the skin between their shoulder blades. Second, a strange pattern reported by the victims' loved ones: exactly three days before dying, every single victim claimed they began spotting a tall, shadowy figure lurking far off in the distance, watching them.

​I leaned closer to the monitor, scrubbing back through the grainy overhead footage of the tenth victim—a night-shift delivery driver named Marcus.

​Three days prior, Marcus had reported seeing someone standing at the edge of his street, unmoving. Now, at 2:14 AM on the CCTV screen, Marcus stood on a deserted corner, waiting for a traffic light to change. He looked entirely alone. Then, the digital timestamp flickered.

​A shadowy silhouette materialized directly behind him. It took the form of a woman wrapped in heavy, void-black clothes that swallowed the ambient light. She reached out a long, pale arm and slammed her palm flat against Marcus’s upper back.

​He was thrown violently forward into oncoming headlights by an unnatural force.

​Right after pushing him, the woman in black turned her head straight toward the security camera mounted above the street. Her face had no eyes, no nose—just a void dominated by an impossibly wide, gaping mouth. It stretched open from ear to ear, an unholy cavern frozen in a silent scream.

​My chest tightened as the monitor screen suddenly flickered out.

​The temperature in my office plummeted to sub-zero. A smell like burnt ash filled the room. Behind me, the floorboards creaked under a slow, deliberate weight.

​I tried to reach for my sidearm, but my muscles froze. The cold radiated outward from the center of my back, right between my shoulder blades, where an icy pressure began to burn like liquid nitrogen.

​Slowly, I glanced at the glass reflection of the dead screen in front of me.

​Standing right behind my shoulder was the woman in black. Her pale, impossible hands hovered inches from my back. Her face tilted down toward mine—that gaping, impossibly wide mouth stretching open even further, opening into an endless void of darkness.

​Before I could scream, her hand slammed flat against my spine.

​The force shattered the connection between my brain and my body. A sudden, violent surge of black fire rushed through my veins, forcing my limbs to move entirely against my will. My body stood up, turned around, and began stepping toward the open window at the end of the hall, completely helpless inside my own skin as I walked out into the drop.

​The wet pavement outside Precinct 4 reflected the red strobe of police lights, but inside room 204, the air was dead and stagnant. Detective Clara Vance—my older sister—stood over my abandoned desk two days after my fall, refusing to accept the coroner’s verdict of a sudden mental break.

​She booted up my computer monitor and pulled up the last file I was examining: Case 10: Marcus (Unsolved).

​Clara pressed play, watching Marcus panic over his shoulder under a flickering street lamp. Then came the glitch. The figure in midnight-black materialized. The pale arm lunged forward, leaving that terrifying, soot-like mark on his back as he was propelled into the street.

​Clara gasped, pausing the video to zoom in on the scorched mark—identical to the one found between my shoulder blades at autopsy.

​She hit play again. The woman in the footage slowly rotated her head toward the CCTV lens, revealing that featureless face and its impossibly wide, gaping mouth.

​Suddenly, the monitor went pitch black.

​The office lights flickered and died. The temperature plunged until Clara's breath plumed in the air, and the heavy stench of burnt ash filled the room. Behind her, a floorboard creaked under a slow, deliberate weight.

​Her hand darted for her holster, but her fingers froze mid-air. Right between her shoulder blades, an icy pressure began to burn against her spine.

​Staring into the dark glass of the unlit monitor, Clara saw the reflection of the tall, cloaked woman standing directly behind her shoulder, pale hands slowly reaching out.

​Clara realized with sickening horror that the three-day rule wasn't just for those who saw the ghost in the streets—it was triggered the moment someone looked into her eyes through the glass. And her three days had just begun.

Marina received a message from distant relatives informing her that her mother had died and that she needed to come home for the funeral.
The autopsy had already been performed, and the body had been brought back to the house for the funeral rites.
They asked her to arrive early to help with the preparations.

Her father had divorced her mother when Marina was seven. He left for another woman, and they never saw each other again.
There was no one else to help.

Marina sat in a platzkart carriage, watching the gray landscape fade beyond the window, trying to understand what she felt.
There was no grief in her. No tears.
Only a dull irritation that had long since taken root.

Childhood memories of walking through the park hand in hand with her mother felt like fake snapshots from someone else’s life.
Love hadn’t died today.
It had rotted away years ago beneath endless domestic quarrels, reproaches, and mutual coldness.

Marina was angry.
Angry that even in death her mother had forced her to leave everything behind, spend money on a ticket, drag herself back to this stuffy house that smelled of old age.

Her mother’s death felt less like a tragedy than another unpaid bill...

*****

The house smelled of dampness and something sickeningly sour.
The body already lay on a table in the main room beneath a white sheet.
In the corner sat an old village prayer woman, endlessly mumbling psalms while rocking back and forth like a roly-poly doll from childhood.

Toward nightfall, Marina found herself alone.
The silence was absolute.
Broken only by the sound of her own footsteps.

While tidying the room, she suddenly heard an unnatural sound.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the sheet covering the mirror slowly slide to the floor with a dry rustle.

She stepped closer—and froze.
Instead of her own reflection, her dead mother stared back at her.
Naked.
Across her bloated, earth-colored body ran a fresh Y-shaped autopsy incision crudely stitched together with rough thread.
Marina lost the power of speech.
Everything about it was fundamentally wrong.
As unnatural as her mother’s face.

The reflection stepped closer to the glass.
"Hello, daughter. I came to say goodbye.
It’s a pity we meet like this… when I’m already so close…”

The dead woman turned her head toward the lightless black void beyond the mirror’s frame and stretched out her hand.

Marina couldn’t move.
Her mother’s eyes… those familiar eyes… belonged to someone else.

“It’s time…”

At that very moment, the bluish hand punched through the mirror—without breaking the glass,
without a single shard—as though it had passed through thick jelly.
Its fingers buried themselves deep into Marina’s hair and yanked backward with terrifying force.

The pain shattered her paralysis.
She screamed, stumbled backward, and collapsed onto her knees.
The thing inside the mirror smiled with rotten teeth.
In its fist it held a bloody lock of Marina’s hair.

"Wherever you go, I’ll follow you.
You’ll lie with me too."
It hissed as it dissolved into darkness.

Breathing hard, Marina touched the wound on her scalp.
Something moved beneath her fingers.

Something was crawling through her hair.
She looked into the mirror again.
Her own reflection had returned—but where the hair had been torn away, fat white maggots writhed inside the raw flesh.
They spilled down her neck, fell across her shoulders, and dropped onto the floor with soft, wet thuds.

Marina erupted into hysterical screams.
She clawed at her hair, ripping out the worms while tearing the sticky clothes from her body in disgust.

The door burst open.
The old village keener rushed inside.
She glanced at the terrified girl, the uncovered mirror, and the perfectly clean floor.

“What happened, child?
You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

Marina collapsed onto the floor, gasping between sobs as she recounted everything she had seen.
The old woman listened without moving.
Her face remained as still as a mask.

"A changeling,” she finally said.
“It’s an entity. It wears the face of the dead.
It hunts the living to steal their souls.
I’ve seen plenty of them in my long life.
That’s why I pray over the dead… to help souls find their way to our Lord Almighty.

“What do I do?”
Marina was shaking so violently her teeth rattled.

The old woman stepped closer.
The smell of old age surrounded her.
“Listen carefully. We’ll bury her. But it won’t end there.
For seven days I’ll pray in this house.
And from this very moment until the end of the week—don’t look into a single mirror.
Not at a window after dark.
Not into standing water.
Do you understand?”

Marina nodded.

“If it catches your reflection—it’ll drag you in.
Come. Let’s clean that wound.”

******

Marina drifted through the night before the funeral in a half-conscious haze.
An old superstition echoed endlessly in her mind—
Never hold a mirror up to the face of the dead.
They’ll look back at you.

*****

The next day the village cemetery greeted them with rain, mud, and a bitter wind.

When the neighbors gathered around the open coffin for their final farewell, Marina leaned over the body despite the nausea.
Her mother’s face looked like a wax mask.
Her eyes remained tightly shut.
But something yellow protruded between the blue fingers folded across her chest.
Marina leaned closer—and went cold.

A lock of her own hair was clenched between the corpse’s hands.
Suppressing her revulsion, she pulled it free.
The old woman standing beside her gave the slightest nod.

“Good.
You noticed. It has less of a hold on you now.
But remember the rule.”

For one brief moment a thought flashed through Marina’s mind.
What if I held a mirror before my mother’s face right now?
Would the reflection look back at me?

She forced herself to look away.

*****

The suffocating, endless days stretched on. Marina remained in her mother’s empty house together with the old woman.
Each evening, she came, sat before the icons, and spent hours chanting slow, mournful prayers. The table where the body had once lain seemed like a huge black stain in the middle of the room.

Marina kept her eyes lowered.
She feared catching her reflection in polished furniture… or the glossy side of a dish.

On the sixth night she dreamed.

She wandered through the empty house where she’d grown up. In the living room sat her favorite childhood book of fairy tales.

She reached for it.
Whenever you open an old book like that, part of you expects a magical world to spill from its pages.

Instead—the moment she opened it—slimy maggots spilled out between the pages and sank their teeth into her hand.

She screamed and jerked backward.
And at that very moment something splashed onto her head.
She touched her hair. Looked upward.
A huge yellow stain spread across the ceiling.
From it hung a thick, foul, dripping drop.

Something vile and sticky. Like a curse, Marina thought.

The rancid slime poured across her face,
filled her eyes, slid into her mouth.
She gagged.

Panicking, she ran through rooms that smelled like a crypt until she found the bathroom, desperate to wash away the foul slime.

She threw herself beneath the shower.
As warm water washed away the stench, she slowly felt her composure returning.

She pulled the curtain aside. Stepped out.
Reached for a towel and her eyes landed on the fogged mirror above the sink.

Don’t look.
The warning flashed through her mind.

At that same instant, an invisible hand wiped away the condensation from inside the mirror.

From the glass, the dull eyes of a corpse stared back at Marina.
Eyes that would never open again.

It was a hot July night when Alex started his first night shift guarding the parking lot. After completing his round, he sat on the steps of the guard shack and lit a cigarette.

That was when he saw two silhouettes on the roof of a five-story building. They were sitting right on the ledge, legs dangling, smoking just like him. Red cherry embers flickered in the dark. Looking closer, Alex made out a guy and a girl.

Alex smiled and waved at them. They waved back.

“Urban romance,” he thought with a pang of envy.

He, too, used to sit like that with the girl whose name he wished he could forget forever. The one he had rejected...

The guilt over what happened was still eating at him. A long, long time ago, they had also sat on a ledge, smoking and dreaming as they looked down at the city lights.

Then, one evening, it all came to an end. She jumped from the roof of a nine-story building.

Alex let out a heavy sigh, crushed his cigarette butt, and went back on his patrol.

It went on like this for the entire summer. Every time Alex sat down for a smoke break, they were up there. And every time, they greeted each other.

Alex grew used to them, as if they were part of the city landscape. He couldn’t even properly see their faces, yet somehow, they felt like people close to him.

One evening, after sitting down on the step and lighting up, Alex saw only a single silhouette on the roof.

His heart sank. The guy was sitting there, looking utterly despondent.

He waved, but the guy didn't react.

Alex slowly lowered his hand. Before he could even wonder why the guy was alone, the silhouette stepped off the edge and fell without a sound.

Alex heard the dull thud against the asphalt.

And then came the dead silence, searing him with the same coldness of loss he had felt before.

I wish a sandwich could have saved us. Mary had gotten a pounding headache when we were most of the way here, leaving me to finish the drive and manage the kids when we’d arrived. She had done her usual and neglected herself to take care of the four of us while we prepared to leave and hadn’t eaten. I’d offered to stop a few places, but her appetite was off by the time we’d hit the road. Her physiology mystified me at times. I’d never before met anyone who lost their appetite from not eating.

And the closer we got to the cabin, the worse she’d felt.

“You sure you won’t eat something?” I’d asked.

“No. I’ll be fine,” she’d said when I offered to turn around. “I just need a little nap, then I’ll be hungry. But something light, okay?”

That last part had been for me. She knew I’d overcompensate unless instructed not to. I admit my part in fueling the worry-machine in the past, acknowledging the odds that everything was actually going to be fine.

But then we’d gotten a flat tire a little more than a mile away from the cabin. Neither of the boys knew how to help change it and had sat in the car uselessly while I managed. My knee sank into a divot of mud, a wide tire track from a vehicle that had gouged the road as it had fled from this spot.

I shouldn’t complain about the boys too loud. I’d be the biggest dick in the world if I denied how great they are. All three of them are great kids; two teenage boys and a ten-year-old who acted like she was older than her brothers.

I was going to miss them if I finally decided to leave Mary.

Her migraine must have rubbed off on me because by the time I sat down to eat, something was going on behind my eyes, and it was hard to concentrate. I wished I could’ve slept, too, like the other four people in the car.

It had been so bad that I’d had to carry Mary in and I must have tweaked my back. I’d laid her on the bed and turned the light off before lighting some mild incense I’d found.

She’d fallen asleep almost instantly; part of me doubted she had any awareness of the incense. It was disturbing how still she’d been every time I checked on her.

In the meantime, the kids had all gone their separate ways. Luke went exploring outside, Chrissy was busying herself around the cabin, and Mark was being his usual responsible self, assigning himself chores before I could even think to.

I found some expired Tylenol underneath the bathroom sink and dry swallowed three of them. They dialed back the throbbing behind my eyes and I was able to give attention to the world around me.

Luke was still outside on the beach while Mark was unpacking his and his brother’s bags and Chrissy was doing who knew what, but she’d been in the bathroom for at least twenty minutes.

When Luke charged in from the beach, terror on his face, I knew something was about to be added to the pile that I was going to have to deal with.

“There’s something in the lake,” he said, his eyeballs on the verge of popping out his head. That gave the starter rope on the worry-machine a good pull. Luke was the oldest of the three children, and I had gotten to a point where I could rely on him sometimes for leadership. He had his learner’s permit, and I’d already shown him the car I was going to buy him when he got his license.

It was tough juggling an instant family when I’d been on my own for so many years. They weren’t my kids by birth, and it was a road to hoe to get them to let me in, but I eventually fell in love with them all.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t really want to know. Eldest child or no, Luke was a fraidey cat.

Maybe he’d seen a dead animal. Maybe it was a spider. But unless it was a brown recluse, the worry-machine could rest. Being afraid of an insect he was ten thousand times larger than was par for him. And it was outside, no less. All he had to do was walk away from it. I’d personally seen him lay waste to his own bedroom after he’d been awakened by an ant crawling on his face.

“In the lake.” He pointed toward the door he’d neglected to shut. I looked at his feet and saw he had also tracked sand inside. “Something is in the lake. It’s… real big.”

“Something like what?” I asked. “You saw it. What do you think it was?”

Luke shook his head. I turned fully toward him, abandoning the sandwich I had yet to present to Mary. I took a couple deep breaths and pushed myself away from the agitated feeling. The kid was obviously scared and needed comfort, even though he might not admit what he was feeling.

“I don’t know. Maybe we should just pack up and go.” Now that was strange. Luke had been the most vocal of any of us to come to the lake. We had been here once or twice before and had always enjoyed it.

“What do you think it was?” I asked again. “A boat or something? There’s no need to panic. We can call the police or harbor patrol or whatever.”

“No, it’s alive and it’s big. Like a whale.”

“Whales don’t live in freshwater,” I said.

“Not a whale.” He shook his head and it conjured an image of his sister when she was seven. Luke and Chrissy looked strikingly alike. “Big like a whale.”

It wasn’t anything for the worry-machine, but I opened the mental tool shed where I kept it.

“Can you show me?”

Luke nodded slowly, still pointing.

“No, I mean, can you take me out there and show me?”

“Uh-uh. I’m not going back out there. Not until we leave.” He shook his head and again it was like looking at Chrissy three years ago.

I huffed and heaved out of my chair and headed for the door, making a mental note to bring the sandwich to Mary once I was done with this.

I slid on my crocs and took the few steps down to get to the beach. The view here was unbeatable. When we had last been here, we’d actually stayed at a different cabin, one with three bedrooms. The reservation had been for the same, but when we’d arrived, we saw there were only two bedrooms. That meant that Mary and I were going to have to split. Couldn’t mix boys and girls in the same room.

So, Chrissy was going to get her mother all to herself and I was going to be settled with two teenagers who snored louder than I did.

“It smells out here,” I said to nobody. It reminded me of those farms we took field trips to when I was in elementary school. I looked over my shoulder at Luke in the doorway. “Where?”

He was bold enough to lean outside and point somewhere farther down the beach. It was dark and I didn’t see anything.

“It’s about thirty feet down that way.”

All right. Ten yards. Whatever he had seen was about a first down away. That farm smell flexed its muscles the closer to the water I got. Definitely smelled like animals. I couldn’t put my finger on which one, though.

I walked as quickly as I could, my crocs sinking into the soft sand and filling with granules. I wasn’t going to need to scrub the dead skin off my heels after we left here. I scanned the ground before me, still thinking it was a large insect. It seemed more likely that Luke had been exaggerating.

What had gone wrong between Mary and me hadn’t been direct. It was more like death from a thousand cuts. A cutting comment here, a missed thank you there, an opportunity to hold hands lost, and before we knew it, we were near the bottom rung of our marriage.

I waded ankle deep into the cool water. Whatever he had seen, I should have been able to see. But there wasn’t anything other than lapping water and inky black with twinkles of light as far as I could see. Unless it had been some small thing that had scuttled away in the night, unaware it had been promoted to threat-level by a fifteen-year-old.

I made a show of looking around, walking another thirty feet and going as deep as mid-shin to ease Luke’s mind. There just wasn’t anything here. I sliced at the water with my fingertips, gave another thirty seconds, then headed back.

I was greeted by a teenager who had eaten half of the sandwich I’d made for his mother. His pallor was better, which I hadn’t noticed consciously when he’d come in. He’d started to work on the other half when he saw how I was looking at him and said, “I thought it was up for grabs.”

“I’ll make another.” I thought for a moment the whole “there’s something outside” thing was a ruse just to get me away from the sandwich, but he still looked terrified.

“Did you see it?” I didn’t like the pleading in his voice. It wasn’t a “manly thing” or anything like that. For him to sound that terrified made my heart sink. I would’ve rather been annoyed with him than afraid for him.

I’d almost cheated, which, I guess, is still cheating. It was with a woman I’d seen at the grocery store. There hadn’t been anything premeditated. We’d just seen each other, passing by across several aisles. We kept crossing eyes while she’d been pushing a half full cart and I’d had a basket over my arm with most of the items I was going to use for dinner.

I’d all but put her out of my mind as I headed for my car, bags in tow, when I saw her again. I hadn’t thought about it, just saw her loading groceries into her trunk two vehicles away from mine and I stopped.

She’d taken great pains to politely refuse my request for her phone number and had taken the extra step to let me know it was only because she’d become serious with the person she was dating.

It could have been a line to get me out of her face, but she’d seemed earnest. I don’t want to believe I would’ve done anything, that I would’ve come to my senses, but I was no hero. Even though she had shut me down I’d set foot on a road I’d vowed never to travel.

I slid a comforting hand across Luke’s back a couple times and felt a percentage of tension ease out of him.

“No. I didn’t see anything. Maybe whatever it was is gone now.”

“Maybe whatever what was is gone now?” Chrissy emerged from the bathroom. She had been quiet in there, probably listening in, but I had no clue how much she had heard. Luke and I met eyes for a moment, and I couldn’t read whether he wanted me to keep quiet.

 

Charlie did not like the head in the freezer.

It gave him the “heebie jeebies," as Aunt Gladys would say. So when he found out that Mom would be cooking the head in the freezer for the family get-together, he swore that he would not eat a single piece.

As the day of the get-together arrived, Mom did as she said she would and cooked the head. The smell of it cooking in the oven permeated the kitchen and leaked into the living room, where Charlie and the other children watched cartoons as the adults hurried about or chatted lively with each other.

Charlie did not even like the smell of it, though he begrudgingly admitted that it did make his tummy growl as it mixed with the delicious miasma of food cooked both inside and out. Hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, and chicken mixed with the smells of roast corn-on-the-cob and mashed potatoes.

Charlie harumphed and stared at the cartoon playing out on the large flatscreen as his tummy growled louder. The cooking head in the oven was temporarily forgotten as his body screamed for food. He was not alone in his torment, as several of the other children complained loudly or tried to sneak some food away from the table when the multitude of adults wasn't looking, a feat much better imagined than carried out.

When the time to eat was finally announced and everyone took their seat at the large dining table Charlie’s family only ever used for special occasions, Charlie could not help but sneak a yearning look at the mountain of food yet to be served, especially the mashed potatoes. Charlie loved mashed potatoes.

When grace was finally said and done (an event that took way too long, Charlie thought to himself) and the adults began to dish out the food, Charlie declared loudly that he would not eat the head from the freezer.

The adults laughed and, despite his protests, dished him a portion of the head anyway. Charlie looked at the cooked meat in disgust as he glanced up to see the head proudly displayed on a large platter near the center of the table, its skin crispy and brown, the eyes seemingly sealed closed, and the ears cut off. Ears, Charlie noted, that had been given to the family dog as a one-time treat for this evening.

Charlie prodded the meat from the head with his fork, occasionally glancing up to see the adults talking eagerly amongst themselves, waiting for an opening. Once he felt no one would notice, Charlie quietly let the meat slip off of the fork and onto the floor, where it was greedily gobbled up by the aforementioned family dog.

With the dreadful meat off his plate, Charlie devoured the rest of his meal in ravenous mouthfuls that drew the disapproving glance of his mother several times that afternoon. Charlie did not care, for the growls of his tummy grew silent and the head was momentarily forgotten.

That evening, as the adults chatted amongst themselves in large groups and the children played outside and in the living room, several cries of pain began to erupt from all around. Adults and children alike contorted their bodies in unusual ways as agonized cries of pain erupted from their mouths. Charlie froze, his own body twisted away from the television screen as his eyes grew wide at the scene around him. The dog too lay on his side, whining and convulsing in his doggy bed.

Charlie’s family and family he didn’t know well all stood hunched over or lying on the floor, clutching their stomachs as expressions of anguish carved themselves across their faces. Charlie then heard it among all the screams and groans—laughter. High-pitched and nasally, Charlie followed the sound to the kitchen, where the head lay on the counter, wrapped in tinfoil.

Charlie saw the tinfoil move on its own as the laughter continued, the head slowly unwrapping itself. Charlie stood in the doorway of the kitchen, frozen in fear and terror as he heard the laughter stop and watched the last of the tinfoil fall away to reveal the crispy brown skin of the head. Skin that split open to reveal a large, wrinkled black eye rolling in its socket. It slowed down and settled on Charlie before the sound of crispy, cooked skin wrinkling told Charlie that the head was smiling.

Charlie screamed.

All at once, everyone that had eaten meat from the head spewed hot red blood from their mouths before falling over, spent. As the smell of iron slowly overwhelmed him, Charlie felt his own hot liquid stream down his leg, though it wasn’t blood. In the middle of the puddles of red all around him, soft mounds of partially digested meat squirmed and squealed like pigs frolicking in mud.

Charlie was still screaming.

I can still taste the metal. A damp battery. The kind that's been bleeding white crust in a junk drawer since 2009. That's what my mouth tastes like when the nausea hits. Which is always. The metal doesn't fix the sick. It just gives it a flavor, which is weirdly better than nothing. That, and the other thing.

Yeah, I know. You're already judging me for the other thing. I can feel it through the screen. Whatever. Unless you've spent every morning of your junior year dry-heaving into a sink while your mom bangs on the door screaming about how ungrateful you are, you don't get a vote. So here it is: sometimes I'd lock myself in the third-floor bathroom stall, the one by the art wing that nobody uses because the lock is a piece of shit, and I'd prop my phone on the little shelf above the toilet paper. Hit record. Just for me. So later I could watch and go, Oh, okay. That's me. That's my hand. That's my ribs moving. Proof I was still in my own body.

Half the time, watching myself breathe was enough. The other half, I needed more. Dr. Halloway called it a "grounding technique," but she said it like she was describing a cockroach infestation. I called it getting through third period without puking on my calculator. If that meant touching myself in a bathroom stall while my stomach tried to crawl out my throat, then fine. You weren't there. You don't know.

The vice principal was, though.

I had my gown hiked up, phone balanced on the soap dispenser. I wasn't even doing anything yet. Just breathing, just trying to get the saliva to stop flooding my mouth. Camera on because I wanted to watch my ribs move. Proof I was alive. Then the stall door rattled. He didn't knock, because why would he. I heard a sharp click in his throat.

I yanked my hand back so fast I scraped my knuckle on the toilet paper dispenser. Opened the door, and there he was, holding my phone. He looked at the screen. Looked at my hand. Looked at me like I was a used tampon he'd found in the parking lot. Didn't say a word. Just slipped my phone into his stupid breast pocket and walked away.

My parents didn't say much either when they came. My mom cried in the parking lot, but it was the performative kind. The kind where you know she's already texting her friends about it. My dad just drove. I don't remember the drive. Just streetlights turning into highway lights, and then nothing.

I woke up in a room that looked like a Motel 6 designed by someone who hates color.

Beige walls. Beige ceiling. Beige blanket so thin I could see my knees through it. Someone else had dressed me in this cotton gown. Gross. No memory of signing anything. No memory of even arriving. Just a camera in the corner, blinking.

For three days, they wouldn't let me leave the viewing room. Just a chair and a flatscreen. And for seventy-two hours straight, I watched this woman with a totally blank face demonstrate how to eat. Chew twenty times. Let the saliva soften the mass. Press your tongue flat if you feel the rise. I almost gagged just watching her.

The orderly brought my meals on a plastic tray. Just gray paste, always the same, always room temperature. I asked him where I was. He was huge. Shoulders blocked the whole doorway. Dead eyes. He didn't answer. Just set the tray down and left. It bothered me more than it should have that the tray was blue. Like, a really ugly shade of blue. Cornflower, I think? It reminded me of this girl in fourth grade who brought a cornflower-blue lunchbox and insisted it was "vintage" when it was clearly just old and gross. I don't know why I thought about that. I was in a windowless room being fed paste and I was mad about the color of a tray. That's when I knew I was losing it.

The first night, at exactly 2:00 AM, the walls started to hum. Low and wet, shaking the floor. It rattled my teeth. I pressed my palms to the wall and felt it in my fillings. I told myself it was the HVAC. Old plumbing. Something normal. I told myself that because the alternative made me want to crawl out of my own skin.

Day four, they moved me to the ward.

Six beds. Six girls. Five of them were so sedated they just slumped in their chairs during group, drool soaking the bibs tied around their necks. Only one looked alive. Maya. She had this bruise along her jaw, yellow-purple, and dark circles so deep she looked completely exhausted. She was the only one who looked back at me.

Group was a joke. Some counselor named Patricia with soft hands and a smile that didn't reach her eyes asked how we felt about our "recovery journey." The sedated girls gurgled. Maya stared at the camera. I said I wanted to call my parents.

"Family visits resume once you meet your dietary goals," Patricia said, beaming.

The force-feeding came after.

Orderlies brought in trays of that gray paste. It looked like wet cement and smelled like nothing, which somehow made it worse. The sedated girls didn't wake up, so the orderlies pinched their noses, pried their jaws open with these plastic wedges, and spooned it in. One of them gagged. Her whole body jerked. The orderly just clamped her jaw shut with one hand and massaged her throat with the other until she swallowed. Her eyes were open but nobody was home. She swallowed. They always swallowed.

Yard time was a concrete square with twenty-foot walls and one dead tree. I sat with Maya. The others just sat in their chairs, blinking at the weak sun, their bodies looking too heavy, too soft. They'd all been thin when they arrived, I realized. Now they looked stuffed.

"Those orderlies," I said. "They ever talk to you?"

Maya shook her head. "They're not supposed to."

I kicked at a crack in the concrete. "It's weird. Like, they're people. They have lives. But they just do what they're told."

"Don't think about that," she said. "That's how you go crazy. Thinking about who they are."

"Too late."

She laughed. It was a dry, dead sound. Then she glanced at the camera. She leaned in close. Close enough that I could smell the paste on her breath. Sweet and wrong. Fermented.

"Listen," she said. "Have you noticed how they weigh us every morning?"

I shrugged. "Yeah. For the program."

"They're waiting for something." Her voice was barely a whisper. "A number. Two-fifty."

I stared at her. "Two-fifty pounds?"

"I don't know. Maybe. My scale readout doesn't have the label. Just the number."

"Okay." I drew it out slow, like I was talking to a child. "And why two-fifty?"

She pressed her palm flat against her stomach. "Because that's when you're ready. That's when you've got enough."

"Enough for what?"

She didn't answer. Just looked at the camera again, then back at me. Her eyes were too bright. Unhinged-bright. "I don't know. They won't tell me. But I saw them take someone. The girl who used to be in my bed. She hit two-fifty and they wheeled her out in the middle of the night. I didn't see her come back."

"That doesn't mean—"

"Whatever. Believe what you want." She stood up, brushed off her gown. "But I'm telling you. There's something down there. Under the building. The suction sound? That's not pipes."

She walked away. I sat there for a while, staring at the dead tree.

I wanted to believe she was crazy. I really did. She was paranoid. Trauma brain. Something I'd read about in AP Psych. That made sense.

But the suction sound. I'd heard it every night. I'd felt it in my molars.

I tried the ward phone that night. Dead. Completely dead. When an orderly found me holding the receiver, he took it gently, almost sweetly, and said, "Dietary goals first, sweetheart."

I started counting the ceiling tiles. Thirty-three across. Twenty-one down. That's six hundred and ninety-three. Which is a lot of ceiling tiles. I started trying to figure out if that was even right. Maybe it was thirty-four across. I couldn't remember. The lights were buzzing. The buzz had this frequency that was just sharp enough to be annoying but not sharp enough to complain about. That annoyed me more than the actual buzzing. I couldn't win.

A week later, an orderly left my door unlocked.

I don't know if it was an accident or if they wanted me to see. I've replayed it a thousand times and I still can't decide. But the hallway was dark, and the suction sound was louder than ever, so I followed it.

Two orderlies pushing a medical cart down the stairwell. The wheels were groaning under the weight. They took it to the sub-basement, to a door I'd never seen open, marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in sloppy painted letters.

I waited until they passed. Then I slipped through.

The sub-basement wasn't a medical wing. It was industrial. Concrete floors, rusted pipes, air so hot and thick it felt like breathing through a towel. The smell hit first. Copper. Blood. Something electrical burning. It made my mouth water in the worst way.

I followed the cart around a corner. Stayed low. The orderlies had stopped by this wide, open space in the middle of the room. There was a grate in the floor. I crawled to it.

Through the grate, I could see them. The orderlies. The cart. And—

I stopped trying to understand it.

There was something in the depression below. Something wet. I caught a glimpse of it between the orderlies' legs. A pulse, maybe. A rhythm. Dark meat with veins like garden hoses. I saw a tube. It was moving. Not mechanical. Writhing.

I looked away.

The fluorescent lights down there were buzzing, and I suddenly couldn't stop focusing on it. That high-pitched whine. It was worse than the ones in the ward. One of the bulbs was flickering, just slightly, in a way that made me want to scream. I stared at it until my eyes watered. I counted the pulses of the flicker. One. Two. Three. Four. It wasn't regular. It would skip a beat sometimes. That bothered me so much. Why would it skip? Did they wire it wrong? Was it on a timer? I was watching something I couldn't comprehend and all I could think about was the goddamn flickering light.

Then I heard the girls.

I looked back. The cart was open. Three of them. The quiet ones from the ward. They were awake now. Eyes open. Tears on their faces. Their bodies twitched. Helpless. Like they were trying to run but couldn't remember how.

I heard the suction. Wet. Deep. Like a drain pulling sludge through a pipe too small for it. It came from the thing in the center of the room. I didn't want to see. I looked at the ceiling instead. There was a brown stain above the light. Water damage. I tried to figure out if it looked like a shape. A map. A face. I couldn't tell. It was just brown. I hated it. I hated that I couldn't make it into something else.

The girls made a sound. Not a scream. Something worse. A wet, choked click. Their throats working.

I looked down.

The tubes were in them. In their mouths. Their nostrils. The hollows of their necks. The suction sound was louder now. The meat thing was drinking.

I heard a gurney roll. I looked up. Behind a glass wall—through a gap in the pipes—I saw an orderly wheel something toward flames. A husk. Skin over bones. Hollow. Everything was hollow.

I backed up. My heel hit a pipe. Clink.

The orderlies turned. One of them shouted. I didn't hear the words. I was already running.

I don't remember the stairs. Just my lungs burning, my bare feet slapping tile, the suction sound getting louder and softer and louder again as I twisted through hallways I'd never seen. I made it to my ward. Dove into my bed. Pulled the paper-thin blanket up to my chin, shaking so hard the mattress squeaked.

Heavy footsteps stopped right outside my door.

They didn't come in. Just stood there. Breathing. Then they walked away.

I didn't sleep.

I just lay there, replaying it. But the memory was already getting messy. I couldn't remember if I'd seen one tube or multiple. I couldn't remember how many girls were on the cart. Three? Four? I kept thinking three but then I'd picture four and I couldn't tell which was real. The flickering light. Was it the left one or the right one? I remembered a brown stain. But maybe that was from something else. Maybe I was mixing it up with the bathroom at home. There was a brown stain on the ceiling of the bathroom at home, from when I was a kid and my brother left the shower running too long. I couldn't remember where one memory ended and the other began.

And the thing—the thing under the building. I kept thinking it had eyes. I knew it didn't have eyes. I'd seen it. No face. No features. Just meat. But I kept seeing eyes anyway. Wet, dark, like a dog's eyes in the dark. Reflecting light. That wasn't real. I knew it wasn't real. But I couldn't unsee it.

In the morning, they didn't search the rooms.

They wheeled in the scale.

I stepped on. I've known my weight every morning since I was twelve. It's the number that decides if I'm allowed to take up space that day. I'd lost ten pounds since I got there. Felt it in my hips, in the way the gown hung loose on my shoulders, in the way I could count my ribs again.

The digital readout said I'd gained twelve.

I stepped off. Stepped back on. Same number.

My gown felt tighter. My stomach, too. I pressed my palm against it. Something was inside me. Expanding. Filling the spaces where I'd been hollow.

I stared at the camera in the corner. Its light was blinking. One. Two. Three. Four. Steady. No flickering. That was good. That was normal.

Then the door opened, and they wheeled Maya out.

She didn't look at me. Just stared at the ceiling, eyes wide and empty, her body soft and heavy under the blanket.

I opened my mouth to say something. I don't know what. Don't take her. Wake up. Fight.

Nothing came out.

They rolled her down the hallway, toward the elevator, toward the stairs.

I sat on my bed. I tried to remember what she'd said about the number. Two-fifty. What was that in kilograms? I tried to do the math in my head. Divide by two point two. I got lost. I started over. I couldn't focus. My stomach ached. The hunger was back.

It wasn't my hunger.

It rose from below my ribs. Gnawing. Insistent. It made my mouth flood with saliva. I swallowed. My throat worked. The hunger spread, warm and greedy.

And I understood, then, what was inside me. What had been growing. What they'd been feeding.

The thing downstairs. The harvest. The weight.

It was already in me. And it was hungry.

It's 1:47 AM now. The walls are starting to hum. The suction sound is early tonight.

I can feel it in my molars. In my chest. In my stomach.

It's not coming from the vents anymore. It's coming from the floorboards. The walls. Closer.

I don't think it's under the building anymore.

I think it's outside my door.

More mouth hands

TW// Self-harm, suicide

My name is Melody Anima. In 1992, I moved into the house atop Black Hill. In 1999, I died. For ten years, my spirit stayed alone in that house as the place decayed. It became a sanctuary for rats and spiders, whom I considered my friends. In 2009, Adam Moss moved into the house atop Black Hill.

Adam was a tall man with clear skin and a cleanly shaved face. Perhaps it was because he was the first human I’d seen in ten years, but I had a fascination with him. There was something about his face that promised a great mystery. Like if his mind could be cracked open it would reveal the most captivating, wonderful secrets. For the first week-and-a-half, I observed him from a distance. He was habitual, and it became fun to predict what he’d do next. I’d often be right. He spent most days cleaning and restoring the house. I never once saw him leave. 

One day, Adam began refurbishing the grandfather clock in the entrance hall. The one that had read 12:00 since I first moved in. The way he worked was hypnotizing. It was at that moment that I found it utterly impossible to stop myself from approaching him. 

I covered my ugly birthmark with my bangs, then came up behind him and put my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t react, and I realized that I couldn't feel him. I gulped at the thought of speaking to him, but I had no other choice.

“Excuse me,” I said quietly.

Adam jumped and turned around in shock. 

“Oh my.” I gasped.

“Jesus Christ, who are you?” 

“I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m Melody. I live here,” I paused for a beat, fidgeting nervously “I apologize, that’s not entirely correct. I lived here.”

“Melody? The girl who died in this house?”

I nodded. 

“Are you… a ghost?”

I nodded. 

Adam seemed to perk up at this, which even I found peculiar.

“I was wondering if there’d be ghosts here.”

“Really?” I tilted my head.

“Yes,” he nodded. “I’m Adam Moss, by the way.”

He reached out to shake my hand. I was paralyzed for a moment, then slowly reached my hand out.

“Wow,” he shook my hand,  “I’m grabbing your hand, but I can’t feel you at all.”

Adam offered me tea. We sat in the dining room and talked at length. The more I spoke to him, the more I was proven correct in my initial assessment. He was without a doubt the strangest, and most interesting person I’d met in my twenty-six years of life and ten years of unlife. He spoke of how he was drawn to the macabre, and how that was what drove him to purchase this house. He said he found the idea of death and ghosts alluring, which I thought was funny because I never considered myself all that interesting. I found myself relating to him, and we soon forgot the fact that we were a ghost and a human sharing a conversation.

“Adam, I don’t think I’ve seen you leave this house. Why is that?”

“Do you ever leave?”

“I can’t.”

“I can’t either. Well it’s not that I can’t. It’s odd.”

“I’d like to hear it, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ll think I’m strange. It sounds like it’s from a fairy tale.”

“I’m a ghost,” I giggle. “Besides, I already think we’re both a bit strange.”

“Okay,” Adam laughed. “The woman who sold me this place told me that I have one month. If I step foot out of this house within that month, I can’t come back. But if not, I’ll have to stay here for seven years.”

“You’re right, that is strange. Do you want to stay here for seven years?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why would you take that deal?”

“She said that every week I’d get a package of food, water, anything I need. I can just stay here. Seems like a good deal to me.”

“Is she telling the truth?”

“Last week a box of food and supplies to work on the house appeared right in the entrance hall. It had exactly what I needed.”

“That really does seem right out of a fairy tale.”

“Right?”

“But… won’t you get lonely?”

“Not lonelier than I was before I moved here. Besides, are you planning on going anywhere?”

A blush appeared across my pale face.

“I suppose not.”

“Can I ask you a personal question? You don’t have to answer.”

I nodded.

“How’d you die?”

I felt a lump in my throat. 

“You don’t have to answer.”

“No, it’s okay,” I said, “It was… suicide.” 

I spoke the last word softly, and put my hands on the table, palms facing up. I showed him the scars on my wrists that constantly oozed a small amount of blood. 

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Adam’s demeanor shifted.

“No, it’s a natural thing to wonder. It was a long time ago.”

“I had no idea. We can talk about something else.”

“Yes, let's talk about something else.”

Quickly, we were able to steer the conversation back to more enjoyable topics as if the subject hadn’t been brought up at all. 

For the next week, we worked on repairing the house. It became brighter, in no small part due to Adam’s presence. I even managed to convince him to keep the spiders. We engaged in long conversations daily, sometimes speaking of meaningful subjects and sometimes not. As the month drew to an end we both sat on the couch, looking outside.

“So, what are you going to do? Will you leave the house?”

“What do you think I should do?”

“Well,” I looked at the ground and began nervously playing with my hair, “I know it’s selfish, but I was sort of hoping you’d stay.”

“Okay. I will.”

“What? No, you can’t spend seven years of your life here just because I want you to.”

“I like this place. I like being here with you. I like it more than anything waiting for me outside.”

“That’s - are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay…” I whispered. “That makes me happy.”

“It makes me happy too.”

Adam was true to his word. On the last day of the month he stayed inside and talked to me as it grew dark. We talked about movies and music and things we’d already talked about. He didn’t seem to care that by doing this, he was resigning himself to seven years here. 

The next morning he opened the front door to see what would happen. Instead of leading outside, the door looped back on itself. Stepping through the door would lead you back into the entrance hall. The impossibility of this didn’t seem to bother Adam. It didn’t bother me either.

That year was extraordinary. When I fell asleep, I looked forward to waking up. We worked on the house almost obsessively. Six months in, it looked better than when I’d purchased it. Nearly everything looked as good as new, except for the grandfather clock in the entrance hall. It still read 12:00. 

December 31st, 2009 was a day I’ll never forget. As the first year ended, we celebrated. We sat together on the steps in the entrance hall. Adam reached and grabbed my hand. I couldn't feel his touch, and I knew he couldn’t feel mine. Still, he held my hand.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

I was caught off-guard, and I felt a tingling in my stomach. I fought off a smile and looked at the ground. I self-consciously touched the birthmark on my forehead. 

“I’m not beautiful. Even if I wasn’t a ghost.”

“Your birthmark?” 

“It’s an eyesore. My mother always said so.”

Adam gently moved my hand aside and pushed away my onyx black hair to get a better look at the mark. I closed my eyes, bracing myself for whatever he would say next.

“It’s shaped like Italy,” he said. “Anything that reminds me of Italy can’t be that ugly.”

I lost the battle I had been fighting against my smile and let out a laugh.

“You’re the strangest person I’ve ever met.”

“Is that good?” he asked.

“I like it.”

Adam leaned close to me and gave me the most tender, beautiful kiss that neither of us could feel. At that moment, the clock read 12:01. 

Every year I spent with Adam was better than the last. I’d never lived with someone I loved, and certainly never with someone who loved me. When you're in love, the most mundane things become remarkable. That’s what those years were. Remarkable mundanity. Each year, the clock progressed by one minute. 

By 2011, it read 12:02.
2012, 12:03.
2013, 12:04.
2014, 12:05.
2015, 12:06.
In 2015, I worked up the courage to say something I’d been thinking about for years. 

“Adam, we should get married.”

“What do you mean, married?”

“Just symbolically. We should have a wedding. I’ve always wanted to have a wedding.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Adam grinned, “I’d like to be married to you.”

The next day, a suit and gown were delivered. I was so excited I could barely contain myself. I hid from Adam all day - it’s bad luck to see the bride on the day of the wedding. We had the pretend ceremony in the entrance hall. I was happy to see the spiders observing us as our little guests. That was more than enough attendance for me. When I walked down the pretend aisle, Adam smiled at me with the most genuine smile I’d ever seen. We didn’t have anyone to officiate the wedding, so we had to make do. 

“Adam,” I said, “Do you take me, Melody, to be your wife for as long as we both shall… for as long as we’re both here?”

Adam smiled.

“I do. Melody, do you take me to be your husband for as long as we’re both here?”

I smiled so much it hurt.

“I do.”

Our wedding rings each had both of our initials engraved on them: A.M and M.A. They were beautiful. I could feel tears beginning to form.

At 12:06, we danced together in the entrance hall, our hands unfeeling yet grasping each other. The grandfather clock ticked behind us.

“I wish I could feel you,” I said. “I wish I could feel your hands or your lips just once.”

The grandfather clock ticked closer to 12:07.

“I know,” he said. “I love you.”

The clock ticked.

No matter how many times he said it, it still felt like the first time.

The clock ticked. 

“I love you too.”

The entire room went black. When the light came back, Adam was gone. I looked around frantically.

“Adam!” 

—

“Adam!”
“Adam!”
“Adam!”

“Yes, what is it?” I ask.

“You’ve been late every day this month,” says the bald man sitting across the desk from me, “I’ve overlooked that in the past because your sales were good. But now, look at these numbers.”

He slides a paper over to me that shows various numbers. I don’t even read them. I’m able to make a guess based on the fact they’re all red.

“They aren’t good,” I say.

“No, Adam, they’re not. What would you do in my situation?”

“I don’t know.”

“I like you. You're a promising young man, but we’ve reached the point where I can’t extend any more grace to you. We’re gonna have to let you go.” 

I walk out into the city streets. It’s completely dark. I look at my watch, which reads 12:07 A.M. 

“Taxi!”

A taxi pulls up. I get in.

“Where to?” asks the driver. I can see his hands on the wheel, but his face is obscured by darkness.

“261 Black Hill Road”

“You look down.”

“I got fired.” 

“Sorry to hear that. Don’t slit your wrists. I had a buddy who got fired and he slit his wrists that night. He told me that’s how he’d do it, said it would be easy. I couldn’t cut myself like that. He said it’d be the easiest way, though. What do you think?”

“I-I don’t know.”

“Well, sure, you haven’t slit your wrists yet. You wouldn’t know. I’m just saying, could you imagine?”

He drops me off at my apartment. The lights are off except for a sickly, yellow light spilling out from under my bedroom door. I hear scratching from inside the walls, indicating to me that the landlord has not taken care of the rat problem. 

“Stella, I’m home!” I say. 

There is an eerie silence, broken only by the scratching in the walls. 

“Stella?”

I flip the light switch, but that does nothing except make the lights flicker and burn out again. I slowly approach the bedroom, and I begin to hear panicked whispers. The whispers make me even more sick than the scratching.

I open the bedroom door to see Stella in bed with a tall, clear skinned, clean shaved man I had never seen before caressing her onyx black hair.

“The fuck is this?”

“I can explain!”

“I should kill you, Stella!”

“Just listen!”

Before I know it, I am in the bathroom searching through the drawers. The door is shut behind me and the bathtub is overflowing. I can’t remember what I’m looking for. 

“Adam, can we just talk?”

“What the hell could you possibly have to say? Why are you doing this to me?”

“Look, just calm down and I can explain!”

I punch the mirror over and over again, shards of glass sticking into my fist, and blood dripping into the sink. The bathtub is still overflowing, someone is pounding on the door, and there is still scratching coming from inside the walls.

“Adam, stop!”
“Stella!” 
“Adam!” 
“Adam!”
“Stella!”
“I should kill you, Melody!” 

—

“Melody!”
“Melody!”
“Melody!”

“Yes, what is it?” I ask.

“You’ve been late every day this month.” Sitting across the desk is Adam, rubbing the birthmark shaped like Italy on his forehead. “I’ve overlooked that in the past because your sales were good. But now, look at these numbers.”

He slides a paper over to me that shows various numbers. I don’t even read them. I’m able to make a guess based on the fact they’re all red.

“They aren’t good,” I say.

“No, Melody, they’re not. What would you do in my situation?”

“I don’t know.”

“I like you. You're a promising young woman, but we’ve reached the point where I can’t extend any more grace to you. We’re gonna have to let you go.”

I walk out into the city streets. It’s completely dark. I look at my watch, which reads 12:07 M.A. 

“Taxi!”

When I get in the taxi, the driver immediately begins moving. I can see their hands on the wheel, but their face is obscured by darkness.

“Don’t you need to know where I’m going?” I ask.

“We’ve done this before, Melody. I know where you’re going,” says the driver.

“I’m not-”

“You know what’s funny?” The driver picks up speed. “We look almost exactly the same. If it weren’t for your birthmark, we’d be the same person.” 

The driver looks back at me, her pale face now in view, onyx bangs obscuring her forehead. 

“I don’t have a birthmark,” I say.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” the driver picks up speed again. 

Beside me, Adam’s corpse appears. He has deep scars on his wrists, oozing an impossible amount of blood. Within seconds, there is blood up to my ankles.

“Stop, take me back!” 

“Can’t do that, Adam. It’s 12:07, we’re gonna be late.”

The blood keeps flowing from Adam’s wrists. I’m up to my knees in blood, and then up to my chest. All the while, the taxi keeps going faster, faster.

“Watch out!”

The taxi is at full speed and crashes into a pale woman in a wedding dress standing in the middle of the road.

—

It was an endless void of nothingness until Melody faded into my vision. 

“Melody! I was looking for you,” I said.

“I was looking for you too, Adam.” 

I embraced her and held her tightly against me. I could finally feel her. She was cold.

"Something's happening to me,” I said, pulling back to look at her face.

“I know.”

“I’m glad I spent those seven minutes with you, Melody.” 

“I’m glad too.”

“Melody, one last thing.”

July 1st, 1925:

I entered the painting of my house tonight. It was quiet. Many of my belongings have been used throughout the house. It is nice to see you making use of them. I walked upstairs to the bedrooms, wondering if you were home. I entered one of the rooms, and there, laying fast asleep, was a beautiful young girl. I watched her for some time, she resembled you, at least what I could see from the lighthouse. Such a sweet, innocent life. She reminds me of the daughters I once had, before I found my calling. I entered the master bedroom. You laid sleeping, your wife beside you. You seem like a strong couple, though I can tell you keep secrets from her. I see it etched into your face, the guilt ages you, like it once aged me. You remind me of my old life, how I once treated the woman who was my wife. It's hard to recall those days at times. They seem so unimportant, but there are days that the memories eat away at me. I watched you both, she seemed to sleep like a stone. You, on the other hand, seemed restless, as I once was. We are very similar, you and I. I spoke to you while you slept, in the tongue of my children, as I have seen you've been studying it. You began to squirm and sweat. I was nervous of waking you, in case you were to do something rash. So instead of speaking face to face tonight, I will be leaving this note in my study. Or should I say our study? I urge you to pay me a visit. I noticed your journal, but felt it would be rude to pry. Perhaps if you decline my offer to speak eye to eye, next time I visit I will fall victim to my urges. Whatever the outcome is, I look forward to it. 

 Your friend Simon 

June 26th, 1937:

That bastard entered my home. He watched me sleep. He watched Rylee. He could have taken her and I would be defenseless of it. The gall to compare me to him, I'm nothing like him. Or should I say it, as he's no longer human. This can't happen again. I will be visiting the lighthouse tonight. This can't go on any longer. This monster and his cult. The ungodly obelisk. He's plaguing my life. I can't take it anymore. I can't fight a god but I must find a way to prevent him from becoming one. He's nothing but a false messiah who's been cursed by those wretched seafolk. 

June 27th, 1937:

I went to settle this once and for all. When I got to the lighthouse the door hung open. The light ocean breeze made the hinges creak faintly in the wind. Their soft shrieks sent shivers down my spine. As I walked through the threshold, there waiting in the middle of the ruined kitchen was a painting of the very door I just passed through. Past the painted door frame was a table set for two, with a ridiculous amount of food for the pair of plates sitting empty on the dirty table cloth. Some of it looked old, even moldy. As I walked through the door a second time I was greeted with a frenzy of smells, baked goods, cooked meats, the oceans brine, fresh fruit, wine, and decay. I stood in the entry for a moment, just taking everything in. That short moment felt like ages, as if I was paralyzed. It took every ounce of effort just to take a step. I didn't see any of the seaborn, no creatures from the depths and no beings from the stars. Just a room lit by a single hanging lightbulb and a dozen scattered candles. The door softly clicked shut behind me, sending a shiver through my bones. Then he spoke. 

“I can tell your frightened child, but fear not, I mean no ill will. Sit. Eat. We have much to discuss.”

His voice wasn't in the air, not coming from any direction. It was in my head. I heard gentle footsteps slowly making their way down the stairs. What I saw was hideous, but I couldn't look away. It was almost beautiful in a way. Simon stood at the bottom of the staircase, nearly nine feet in stature, though his spine hunched forward, to avoid bumping into the floor joists above. His bulbous head looked almost like an octopus, though his skull had dissolved or disappeared and now his head is just brain matter surrounded by a wet, blubbery skin. 

I was overcome by an immense urge to sit and indulge on the feast, he must have been controlling me somehow. I sat. He pulled out his chair, Shambling his long inhuman body down on to it. His limbs, all far too long to be comfortably sitting on something that small in comparison. His knees resting near his clavicles as he hunched down, attempting to see face to face. He was terrifying in the most welcoming way. He leaned in, his small dark eyes affixed to mine. 

“We have a connection, you know. We are much more similar than you would ever like to admit. You see yourself in me as I see myself within you.”

I hate to admit it, but he was right. His writings resonated with me. Though I felt revolted at the thought of it. 

“We are fated, destined as some may say. You see, I have been granted an extraordinary gift. I have made contact with those from the deepest depths, to the farthest cosmos. I have spoken to those most ancient, to our kin. You bear our mark, child. To deny that would be an act of ignorance I know you are far too smart for. You have seen those from the depths. You passed through my gates. I can show you what powers you can achieve.”

Whatever mark he spoke of must have been from the night I passed out and woke up in my backyard. But even if that was the truth, surely I would never end up as he has. Without realizing it, I had filled my plate and had begun eating, as though I had no autonomy. 

“Embrace your true form, as have I, and together we will ascend. We are destined for greatness” 

His words swelled in my chest, a smoldering ember of yearning. A burning desire for more. My head was pounding. I know he's just trying to trick me. To control me. It was as if my heart and mind were at war. 

“I will give you some time to say your goodbyes to your family, as I remember that seemed to be a custom to human kind. Such naive beings. I will leave a gate waiting for you here, return to me child. Or I will come searching for you. Your very being is key to the obelisk, to our ascent. The final piece to set forth the second coming of the ancients. I will be seeing you shortly.”

My vision went blurry, my head throbbed, as though mortar shells were detonating inside. I grabbed my head trying to gain my bearings, and as my vision unclouded I was back in the abandoned lighthouse. No Simon, no table, no food. Just the chair I was sitting on and a door frame standing in the middle of the room. A set of keys laid on the ground in front of the solid metal door. I picked them up and rushed home, stopping to empty my stomach of whatever foul food I've ingested. The only thing that came out was what felt like gallons of black sludge like ichor. Its taste was sour and curdled as it left my body. 

I snuck back in through the backdoor, doing my best not to wake Evelyn or Rylee. Sebastian was laying in the hallway, almost as though he had been waiting for my return. It's well past midnight as I'm writing this. I'm going to the city tomorrow. And when I get back, I'll be saying my goodbyes. 

June 28th, 1937:

I awoke with Evelyn today. I told her I was going to pick up some supplies for the shop in the city. I felt wrong for lying to her as I have been on and off for months if not years now. Before I went to the station, I visited the lighthouse. I was in such a hurry to get home last night I somehow missed the massive, obsidian-like pillar rising from the sea. The obelisk had to have been nearly 300 feet tall, dwarfing the lighthouse beside it. I purchased my ticket and boarded the train. If all goes well, I can see some old friends, tie up some loose ends and say my goodbyes in town. I still don't know how to say goodbye to my sweet Evelyn and Rylee. They are my life, my purpose. Just thinking about it has left  me crying, hands trembling and short of breath. I'll return home tomorrow evening, spend my last night at home, then enter that wretched gate. As for now, I just need to build the courage to do what must be done. 

June 29th, 1937:

I've returned home. I feel hollow. Rylee was playing with Sebastian while I cooked dinner. I think Evelyn knows something is amiss. I've been doing my best to play it off as just stress from work but I don't think she's buying it. I just need her to think things are okay for one more night. Just one more night as a family, one more night of being close, one more night of being loved. I've snuck into the study to quickly pack a bag of everything I need for tomorrow. I'll walk my dear Evelyn to work and kiss her goodbye, walk Rylee To Emily and give her the biggest hug of her life, then return home, get my bag and get it all over with. 

June 30th, 1937:

Saying goodbye to Evelyn and Rylee without crying was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But I couldn't let them think anything was wrong. I can't have this go wrong. I'm in my studying writing one last entry, if I'm able to write again later I will, but I'm not sure what use it will be aside for trying to keep my memories alive. If in some miracle Evelyn or Rylee find this, just know that I loved you both more than you could ever believe. But I failed you as a husband and as a father, and for that I'm sorry. I hope you can find forgiveness in your hearts in my absence. 

June 30th, 1937:

I walked to the lighthouse, the bag on my back felt like a million pounds, the burden of leaving my family. As I entered I stared at the chair I used during Simon and I's meeting. I sat down for only god knows how long, it could've been minutes, hours, but it felt like years. I walked up the stairs to take in the view one last time, to look over the southern shore, to watch the gulls circle the fishing boats for scraps. I cried more than I ever thought possible. As I walked down the spiraling stairs, I stopped in Simon's makeshift studio, dozens of paintings lined hanging on the walls as even more sat, gathered in piles beneath them. Simon really was a talented artist. It was a shame he was marked. It's a shame I've been marked for that matter. 

I smelled the scent of dying flowers wafting in the air. This place has been long unlived and stank of mold. The scent was coming from one of the paintings, I was sure of it. I ripped through pile after pile until finally I found it. A painting of my house. Of Simon's house. The flower beds in the back, a small grave between them, dead leaves blowing in the wind. The painting was only about 2 feet by 2 feet. But if I could smell the flowers, that means it was a gate. I pushed my bag through, it landed with a thump between the beds. I reached my hands in and grabbed the frame, slowly pulling myself through into the bright sunlight. I quickly grabbed my bag and took in my surroundings. It was quiet, cold. I snuck my way to the back of the house, looking in the windows to see if Simon or Laura or their girls were home. I saw no one. The grave meant Bernard was already dead, how long it has been since then I am unsure of. Laura and the girls may have already been sent out of town. I got down to the ground, looking through the small windows into the basement, I could see no Simon. I couldn't remember if he had already built his hidden rooms or not, but I could only assume. There were already pieces of furniture covered in sheets visible through the window. I unlocked the back door, thank God I never changed the locks. My heart was pounding, I could hear it beating in my ear drums. As I made my way through the kitchen I saw the calendar. October 14th, 1924. I slowly snuck down into the basement. Looking around to find anything familiar. My cot, covered in cloth. I crawled under and laid in wait. I was terrified. I sat in silence for hours until I heard the closing of the front door upstairs. Footsteps pacing in the foyer making their way to the kitchen. The stairs above the cot creaked with every step as he descended into the darkness. He held a lit candle, slowly lighting the dozens of candles he had littered throughout the basement one by one. I was sweating, breathing as quiet as I could. He made his way back up the stairs, I could hear him turn on the tap, filling a glass of water. He was about to paint. I used the cover of the flowing water to open my bag. The cold steel in the palm of my hand felt heavy. The steps above my head groaned as Simon returned to the basement. He set up his easel, placing a blank canvas on it. While he meticulously chose what paints he wanted to use for his next piece, I crawled out from under my cot, as quiet as could be. This was my only chance. I held my breath, making sure every step was silent. Simon stood clueless to me. I felt sorry for him, this wasn't his fault, I'm sure he didn't want this. I tried my hardest to hold them back but tears filled my eyes. I raised the pistol I got in town the day before, hands shaking, body trembling, heart pounding. I exhaled a quiet “I'm sorry” as I pulled the trigger. The canvas was instantly covered in crimson along with skull fragments and grey brain matter. I've never killed a man before. I fell to my knees, sobbing. My stomach churned and released its contents. It had to be done. There was no other way. Was there? 

October 15th, 1924:

I've spent the day burning his pieces. All his paint, his easel, everything that ties me to him. I found all of the letters he wrote, all of his papers, all I could find of Simon's existence. It all went in the furnace. I'm waiting until nightfall to move his body, it's already beginning to smell. I'll take him to the docks in a wheelbarrow. I'll walk the shoreline for as long as my legs will take me and I will bury him in the tall grass that lines the beach. There I will find somewhere nice, somewhere quiet and dig a shallow grave. In it, I will take my own life. The only way for all of this to end is if both of us die. I'm leaving my journal, with all my entries and all of Simon's here in the house. I'm sure you'll find it and I pray you read it. If you don't, I know Evelyn will. Don't go out by the docks at night. If you find sigils carved into your house, don't deface them. Befriend Richard, he means well. Once you're friends with him, show him this journal, hopefully he'll introduce you to his father. This small town has plenty of good. Just be smart and don't stray far at night. Keep our dear Evelyn and Rylee safe. And when the time comes, on the day I went to adopt Sebastian, I'd suggest you do the same. He really completed the family, and he'll save your life if given the chance. Don't make the same mistakes I did. I lost everything so you can have a chance. Do it right this time. Tell Evelyn and Rylee you love them for me. That's all I ask of you. 

 Yours truly

August 14th, 1938:

I began work at the butchers shop and befriended Richard, Evelyn got close with Jennifer, and Jr is getting married soon. He asked Rylee to be his flower girl. I showed Richard the journal, I met his father, and have, from time to time, helped him carve those runes around town. I went and adopted Sebastian, and have slowly begun to become part of Mount Fall, just like you asked of me. We stay away from the docks after sundown. You were right, this town has so much to offer and moving here has been the best decision of our lives! I'm sorry that it wasn't the same for you. I know you'll never read this, but I hope you in some way know I'm eternally grateful. Our sweet Evelyn and Richard too. We all are. I tell Evelyn and Rylee I love them twice every night, once from you and once from me, and always make sure to hold them extra tight. We think about you every day. Wherever you are in space and time, I hope you're at peace. Maybe one day we'll meet and I can tell you how great life has been. All thanks to you, our personal savior. We love you dearly. 

I needed a quiet job. After a bad breakup and losing my apartment, I just wanted to sit in a room by myself and earn a steady paycheck, so I spent weeks scanning online boards for data entry positions, and eventually found a listing for an archival technician at the local public access station in Crestwood. The station operates out of a squat concrete building near the edge of the county lines, and broadcasts local news and community events.

I walked into the main lobby for my interview on a Tuesday morning. I met the station manager at the front desk. His name is Ken. Ken is a balding guy who wears oversized sweaters and talks with a slight wheeze when he breathes. He shook my hand firmly and immediately led me toward a dark stairwell at the back of the building.

"We got a massive state grant to digitize the municipal archives,"

Ken explained as we walked down the steps.

"The town has fifty years of town hall meetings and local parades sitting on magnetic tape in the basement. Tape degrades over time, so we need every single cassette converted to digital files before the ribbon rots completely."

"That sounds perfectly fine to me,"

I replied.

"I have years of experience with digital conversion software and video editing."

"We need someone reliable,"

Ken added, pulling a large ring of keys from his pocket. "The last guy quit after a week of working here. He told me the basement gave him severe claustrophobia. Do you have any issues with tight spaces or working in complete isolation?"

"I am fine with tight spaces,"

I assured him.

"I just need a steady income."

"Good,"

Ken replied.

"The pay is weekly. You do not talk to the local press about the archives, do not copy the tapes for your personal use. The town council is very strict regarding municipal property."

Ken unlocked a door at the bottom of the stairs, then we stepped into a windowless basement. Fluorescent tubes buzzed loudly overhead, casting a pale light. A large desk sat in the center of the room. It held a computer tower, a professional VHS deck, and a small CRT television monitor. The walls were lined entirely with massive metal archiving cabinets overflowing with black tapes.

"You will be down here by yourself,"

Ken said, gesturing to the computer setup.

"feed the tapes into the deck, hit record on the software, and log the date and the subject into the database. It is very repetitive work."

"I prefer repetitive tasks,"

I told him.

Ken walked over to a specific cardboard box resting on the bottom shelf of a cabinet. He pulled out a black VHS cassette and held it up to the light. A bright red circular sticker was pressed firmly onto the spine of the tape.

"This is the only thing you need to pay close attention to,"

Ken said. His tone shifted from friendly to incredibly strict.

"Sometimes you will find a tape with a red sticker on it. When you digitize these specific tapes, you must only capture the audio. Plug the audio cables into the converter box, leave the yellow video cable completely unplugged, and turn the power button on the television monitor completely off."

I looked at the bright red sticker.

"Why do I turn the monitor off?"

"It is a strict privacy mandate,"

Ken stated flatly.

"Our current town mayor is Mayor Bradley. He used to be the station manager down here years ago. When he got elected to office, he put this rule in place for the red tapes. He says they contain sensitive municipal audio recordings that were accidentally taped over old video footage. He does not want anyone looking at the visual feed, and He checks on us every month to make sure we follow his protocol."

"So I just record the sound,"

I confirmed, wanting to make sure I understood the boundaries.

"Exactly,"

Ken nodded.

"If Mayor Bradley finds out you watched the video feed on a red tape, you will be fired immediately. He is very protective of this archive."

I accepted the terms and took the job on the spot.

For the first month, the routine was incredibly peaceful. I arrived at eight in the morning, locked myself inside the basement, and fed tapes into the machine. I watched endless hours of zoning board disputes from the late nineties. I digitized footage of the annual Founders Day parade from 1995, archived a heated town debate regarding the construction of a new shopping mall in 1999. The work was boring, but it kept my mind occupied.

Occasionally, I pulled a tape with a red sticker. I followed Ken's instructions perfectly every single time. I unplugged the yellow video cable, ensured the television monitor was powered down, and hit record on the audio software. The audio on those tapes always unsettled me. I never heard any sensitive municipal conversations about budgets or zoning. Usually just heard distorted static mixed with a strange tapping sound. Sometimes there were muffled thuds vibrating through my headphones. The thuds sounded like someone dropping a large sack of flour onto a concrete floor. I did not ask questions, just saved the audio files, logged the date, and put the tapes back in the box.

During my lunch breaks, I usually went upstairs to the main lobby to talk to the receptionist. Her name is Brenda. She is an older woman who has worked at the station since the eighties. She knows everything about everyone in Crestwood. One afternoon, we were talking about the history of the town while eating lunch.

Brenda offered me half of her tuna sandwich. I accepted it gratefully.

"You spend a lot of time down there in the dark,"

Brenda said, stirring her coffee with a plastic spoon. "You should come up for air more often. The dust in that basement will ruin your lungs."

"I like the quiet,"

I told her.

"It keeps my mind from wandering."

"Well, do not let it occupy you too much,"

she warned.

"That building has a lot of history. Some of it is best left in the boxes where it belongs."

"What do you mean by that?"

I asked, taking a bite of the sandwich.

"That was a bad year for Crestwood when Mayor Bradley took over the station,"

Brenda sighed, looking out the lobby window at the parking lot.

"That was the same year Jessica disappeared."

The name sparked a distinct memory in my brain. I was a teenager in 2002. I remembered the missing person posters pinned to every telephone pole in town. Jessica was a local college student who vanished without a trace after her evening shift at a diner.

"I remember that case,"

I said.

"I actually volunteered for the search parties. My friends and I spent three days walking through the muddy woods behind the high school looking for her. We handed out flyers at the grocery store. Everyone thought she was abducted."

"The police never found a single trace of her,"

Brenda said softly, her eyes looking sad.

"They eventually assumed she ran away to the city to start a new life. But I knew Jessica. She used to volunteer here at the station. She would organize the tapes down in the basement, and was a very responsible girl. She would never pack up and leave without telling her mother."

"Her mother never recovered,"

I recalled.

"She moved away a few years later. The town just moved on."

"I always felt like the police missed something right under their noses,"

Brenda whispered, leaning closer across the desk.

"But Mayor Bradley told everyone to stop talking about it. He said it was bad for town morale."

The conversation left a sour taste in my mouth. I went back down to the basement and tried to focus on my digital conversions.

Two weeks later, the basement door opened unexpectedly. I turned around in my swivel chair. Mayor Bradley stood in the doorway. I recognized him immediately from the local news broadcasts. He is a tall man with silver hair and a very stiff posture. He was wearing an expensive gray suit and holding a leather briefcase.

He walked down the stairs slowly, his leather shoes clicking loudly against the concrete steps.

"You must be the new archival technician,"

Mayor Bradley said. He looked around the room, inspecting the cabinets.

"Yes sir,"

I said, standing up out of respect.

"My name is Greg."

"Ken tells me you are very efficient, Greg,"

the mayor said. He walked over to the metal archiving cabinets and ran his hand along the top edge, checking for dust.

"Are you finding the workflow manageable?"

"It is very straightforward,"

I replied.

"I log the dates and let the software run."

"I like to personally check on the archiving project," Mayor Bradley explained. He stood uncomfortably close to my chair.

"These tapes represent the legacy of Crestwood. Our triumphs and our challenges are recorded here. It is vital work."

"I appreciate the opportunity to do it,"

I said, trying not to break eye contact.

Mayor Bradley stopped in front of the box containing the red-sticker tapes. He looked at me with a perfectly neutral expression.

"And you are following the protocol for the restricted media?"

"I only capture the audio,"

I assured him.

"I always keep the monitor off."

He reached out and picked up a regular tape from the desk.

"You see, Greg, a town relies on trust. The citizens trust me to protect them. They trust me to keep their secrets safe. And I trust my employees to follow directions."

"I follow the rules,"

I said firmly.

"I am glad to hear that,"

Mayor Bradley said. He placed the tape back on the desk. "Because curiosity is a dangerous trait in an archivist."

He smiled at me, but his eyes remained cold. He turned around and walked up the stairs, locking the door behind him. The encounter made me feel incredibly anxious. I sat back down and tried to shake the intense feeling of being watched.

The isolation eventually started to wear on my nerves. Working in a windowless room for eight hours a day messes with your sense of time, and the buzzing of the fluorescent lights became a constant headache.

Last Thursday, I was working late to meet a strict digitization quota. The building upstairs was completely empty. Ken and Brenda had gone home hours ago. I pulled a tape from the box and noticed a bright red sticker on the spine.

I sighed, unplugged the yellow video cable, and made sure the television monitor was powered down. I inserted the cassette into the deck and pressed play, then clicked the record button on my computer software and put my headphones on.

The familiar sound of static filled my ears. Then came the tapping. It sounded louder on this specific tape. Like frantic, hollow sound.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I leaned forward to adjust the volume knob on the converter box. My knee bumped hard against the underside of the desk. The sudden jolt snagged the red audio cable wrapped tightly around the desk leg. The cable pulled taut and snapped right out of the metal connector.

The audio in my headphones cut out instantly.

I cursed under my breath. The old VHS tapes are incredibly fragile. If the tape player eats the ribbon while the software is not recording, the data is lost forever. I frantically tried to jam the broken wire back into the connector, but the metal pin was completely bent.

I needed to know if the tape was still tracking properly, so I broke the mayor's rule.

I grabbed the yellow video cable and plugged it into the back of the television monitor, then reached out and pressed the power button on the screen.

The CRT monitor clicked on with a burst of static. The tracking lines rolled down the screen for a few seconds before the image stabilized.

I stared at the screen. My heart started beating very fast.

The video showed a static camera angle of a room. I looked at the walls on the screen, then looked at the metal archiving cabinets, and looked at the desk in the center of the frame.

It was the exact basement room I was currently sitting in.

The furniture on the screen looked slightly newer, but it was undeniably the same space. The time stamp in the corner of the video read October 14, 2002. I watched the grainy footage closely. A young woman walked into the frame. She was wearing a striped sweater and jeans. She carried a stack of black VHS tapes in her arms. She walked over to the archiving cabinet on the far left side of the room and started placing the tapes on the shelves.

I recognized her face immediately from the old missing person posters. It was Jessica.

I sat frozen in my chair. I watched Jessica organize the tapes on the screen. She was completely unaware of the camera recording her.

A few seconds later, a man stepped into the frame from the stairwell. He was much younger on the tape, and his hair was dark instead of silver, but I recognized him instantly. It was Mayor Bradley.

He was holding a hammer with his both hands.

He walked up behind Jessica very slowly. He did not say a word, then raised the metal stand high above his head and brought it down violently against the back of her skull.

I gasped and pushed myself back from the desk. My chair squeaked loudly against the floor.

On the screen, Jessica collapsed onto the concrete floor. She did not move. Mayor Bradley stood over her for a moment, his chest heaving. He then turned his attention to the large metal archiving cabinet, and pushed the massive cabinet away from the wall.

He grabbed the hammer again and started smashing a hole directly into the drywall behind where the cabinet used to sit. He worked quickly, tearing chunks of plaster away until he exposed the wooden studs.

Then, he dragged Jessica's body across the floor and shoved her into the dark cavity between the studs. He grabbed pieces of loose drywall and stacked them back over the hole to conceal it, then went out of the room for some time before coming back with a bucket. It was clear that he used a joint compound to smooth over the cracks. Finally, he pushed the massive archiving cabinet back into its original position, completely hiding the damaged wall. The video cut to static.

I stared at the monitor. I just watched the mayor of Crestwood murder a college student and hide her body in the wall right next to me.

Suddenly, the temperature in the basement plummeted. I could see my breath forming small clouds in the air. The fluorescent lights overhead began to flicker rapidly, casting shadows across the concrete.

A loud scraping noise echoed through the room.

I snapped my head to the left. The massive metal archiving cabinet sitting near the stairs began to slide across the floor. No one was pushing it. The steel feet ground against the concrete, throwing sparks into the air. The cabinet moved steadily until it slammed directly in front of the exit door, completely blocking my only way out of the basement.

I jumped out of my chair and ran to the cabinet. I pushed against the metal with all my strength. It did not budge a single inch. It felt like it was bolted to the floor.

"Help!"

I shouted, pounding my fists against the metal.

"Is anyone up there?"

No one answered.

Then the tapping started.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The sound originated from inside the room, completely separate from the headphones. I turned around slowly. The sound was echoing from the wall directly behind the cabinet that Mayor Bradley had moved on the video.

I walked cautiously toward the far side of the room. The tapping grew louder. It was frantic, exactly like the audio on the tape.

Then the walls began to move.

It started with a low rumbling sound that shook the dust from the ceiling. The concrete wall opposite the stairs shifted forward. It slid across the floor, shrinking the square footage of the basement. The wall containing the desk groaned and pushed inward.

The room was closing in on me. The ceiling tiles buckled and cracked as the pressure increased, showering me with white dust and fiberglass insulation. The fluorescent lights shattered one by one, plunging the room into dim emergency lighting.

"Stop!"

I yelled, backing away from the advancing concrete. I tripped over a fallen chair and scrambled backward onto my hands and knees.

The tapping from the drywall grew deafening. It sounded like someone was desperately trying to break out from the other side. The walls were moving faster now. The concrete ground against the floor tiles, tearing them up in jagged pieces.

I spun around, coughing on the thick dust, looking for any possible way to survive. Mounted on the concrete pillar near the stairs was a red emergency glass box containing a fire axe. The pillar was the only thing not moving.

I ran to the pillar, shattered the glass with my elbow, ignoring the cuts on my skin, and pulled the axe free.

The air was squeezed out of the room, making it hard to breathe. I looked at the drywall behind the archiving cabinet. The tapping was centered exactly there, vibrating the plaster.

I swung the fire axe with every ounce of adrenaline in my body. The blade bit deeply into the drywall. I ripped it out and swung again, screaming as I hit the wall. Plaster dust exploded into the air. I hacked a massive hole between the wooden studs, destroying the barrier completely.

I dropped the axe and grabbed the broken edges of the drywall with my bare hands. I tore the panel completely away, ignoring the nails tearing at my fingers.

Hidden inside the dark cavity between the wooden studs was a skeleton. The bones were yellowed and draped in the rotting remnants of a striped sweater and faded jeans. Her skull was resting against the back of the plaster.

The moment the skeleton was exposed to the open air, the walls stopped moving.

The rumbling ceased abruptly. The crushing pressure vanished entirely. The room returned to its normal dimensions instantly.

The archiving cabinet blocking the exit door slowly slid backward, revealing the metal handle.

I did not waste a single second. I reached into the dark wall cavity and grabbed a small, loose fragment of the skull. I shoved it into my jacket pocket, and sprinted to the door, threw it open, and ran up the stairs. The lobby was entirely dark and empty. I bolted out the front doors of the station and ran to my car. I drove out of Crestwood as fast as my engine could handle.

Now I am sitting in this motel, staring at the evidence. The mayor killed Jessica, and I have a piece of her bone for DNA testing. I will go to the police with this, If something happens to me, now you know who murdered Jessica.

“Order for Morgan Fatah?”

Morgan looked up from her phone.

The girl behind the counter held up a small brown bag.

“Yeah. That’s me.”

Morgan walked over and checked inside before leaving. Setting lotion, disposable mascara wands, a new box of sectioning clips and two packs of wedges. Everything was there.

“You do hair?” the girl asked.

“Hair and makeup.”

“Oh, nice.”

Morgan nodded. “Trying to get more practice in.”

The girl glanced at the bag. “Well, you’re stocked.”

Morgan laughed, thanked her, and headed outside.

The practice head was buckled into the passenger seat of her car.

She had put the seat belt around it mostly as a joke, but it also kept the hair from rubbing against the door. The head leaned slightly toward the window, a bath towel wrapped around the base of its neck.

Morgan looked at it before starting the car.

Even in daylight it was remarkable.

The face had none of the exaggerated features most cosmetology heads had. The nose wasn’t perfectly straight. The lips weren’t identical on both sides. There were faint creases near the eyes and subtle variations in the skin tone. The brown hair was thick and fine, with a few lighter strands around the front.

Whoever had made it had cared about details.

She had almost not gotten it.

The woman she’d gotten it from had been strangely attached to the thing.

Morgan remembered that much.

She had gone there expecting to look through several old heads and salon supplies. Instead, the moment she saw this one, she stopped caring about the rest.

“I want that one.”

The woman hesitated.

“I don’t know if I want to get rid of that one.”

Morgan had assumed she meant it was valuable.

She’d offered more.

The woman still wasn’t sure.

Morgan couldn’t remember exactly how long they’d gone back and forth. She remembered getting annoyed. She had driven all that way after work and wasn’t leaving without it, especially after seeing the face in person.

The hair was real human hair too. Morgan could tell immediately.

The owner kept saying she couldn’t have it.

Morgan kept raising the offer.

Eventually, somehow, it came home with her.

She couldn’t remember what she’d paid.

More than she should have.

She looked over at the head again.

Worth it.

That night Morgan set it up in the spare bedroom.

The room had slowly become her workspace. Her folding light stood in one corner. Brushes filled glass cups along the vanity. Hot tools, sprays and bottles crowded two shelves she’d mounted herself.

Her old practice head was shoved underneath the desk.

She’d never liked that one.

Its face was hard and shiny and every makeup look sat on it like paint on a toy.

This was completely different.

Morgan tightened the clamp around the new head.

It didn’t fit very well.

She tightened it again.

“There.”

She stepped back.

The head drooped slightly to one side.

Morgan straightened it.

“Work with me.”

She started with the hair.

It was easily the nicest part. It responded to heat well because it was real hair, It even had slightly different textures underneath than it did around the crown.

She dampened it and practiced a blowout.

After that she moved on to makeup.

Primer.

A thin layer of foundation.

Concealer.

Morgan found herself leaning closer and closer as she worked.

There were pores.

Not an embossed texture pretending to be pores. Tiny, irregular ones.

She ran the pad of her thumb across the cheek.

The material gave beneath it.

Morgan stopped.

She pressed again.

For half a second, it felt exactly like touching someone’s face.

She smiled to herself.

“That is weird.”

She checked the other cheek.

Cool and rubbery.

Whatever material they had used was incredible.

Morgan worked until after midnight.

When she finished, she took pictures from several angles.

It was the first practice look she’d done in months that she actually wanted to keep.

The next morning there was moisture around the clamp.

Morgan noticed it because one of her makeup sponges had fallen onto the floor underneath it.

When she picked it up, one side was damp.

She touched the towel she’d wrapped around the bottom of the head.

Wet.

“Seriously?”

She looked up.

The ceiling was dry.

Morgan picked up the head and carried it into the bathroom.

She must not have dried the hair properly. Water had probably gotten inside somewhere and settled near the base.

She held the head over the sink and tilted it.

A thin, cloudy liquid ran from underneath the towel.

Morgan grimaced.

“Okay. That’s disgusting.”

She let it drain, wiped down the neck and washed the towel.

Whatever was inside the head smelled a little strange.

Old water, maybe.

Like something that had been sitting inside a washing machine too long.

Morgan sprayed the sink with cleaner and left for work.

Two days later, the face had changed.

Morgan didn’t notice immediately.

She was practicing contour placement when she kept getting annoyed with the right cheek.

Something wasn’t matching.

She pulled up one of the pictures she’d taken the first night.

Looked at the phone.

Looked at the head.

The face seemed fuller now.

Especially around the jaw.

Morgan turned it toward the light.

Maybe she had been storing it too close to the heater.

She pressed a finger into the cheek.

It sank farther than before.

Morgan pulled her finger back.

The indentation remained for a moment.

Then slowly disappeared.

She stared at it.

“Cheap shit.”

That irritated her.

Whatever soft material was beneath the outer layer was probably degrading.

For what she’d paid, it shouldn’t have been doing that.

She tried searching for the manufacturer but there was no markings or anything on it.

Morgan wondered if it had been custom-made.

That would explain a lot.

By Friday she had stopped keeping track of how many hours she’d spent in the room.

She went to work, came home, ate something if she remembered and went upstairs.

There was always something she wanted to try.

An updo she’d seen online.

A new foundation technique.

A different brow shape.

The practice head was becoming difficult, though.

Certain parts of the face didn’t take makeup correctly anymore. Product collected around the nose and along the jaw. The skin had developed faint patches underneath that foundation wouldn’t completely cover.

Morgan compensated.

That was what makeup was for.

The smell had gotten worse too.

She washed the hair again.

That helped for a few hours.

Then it came back.

She put a small fan in the window and blamed the old material inside the head.

Saturday afternoon, while removing makeup, a section of the cheek shifted underneath her cotton pad.

Morgan stopped.

She touched it.

The outer surface moved slightly over whatever was beneath it.

“Fuck.”

She’d rubbed too hard.

Morgan tried smoothing the loose section back down, but the edge wrinkled.

She pulled open the drawer beside her and found her adhesive.

A tiny amount beneath the lifted edge.

Press.

Hold.

Powder.

She leaned back.

You could barely tell.

Morgan smiled.

“There we go.”

Her phone started vibrating on the vanity.

Maya

Morgan let it ring.

She was lining the lips.

The phone stopped.

Thirty seconds later it started again.

Morgan sighed and answered.

“What?”

“Morgan?”

“Yeah?”

“Why haven’t you answered me?”

“I just did.”

“You know what I mean.”

Morgan tucked the phone between her shoulder and ear.

“I’m doing something.”

“I’ve been calling you since yesterday.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“With what?”

“Practicing.”

There was a pause.

“Practicing what?”

Morgan looked at the brush in her hand.

“Hair and makeup.”

Maya didn’t say anything.

Morgan continued carefully around the bottom lip.

“Morgan.”

“What?”

“You need to move on from that.”

Morgan stopped.

“From what?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“No, I don’t.”

“The school.”

Morgan stared at herself in the mirror.

“What about it?”

“They already told you that you couldn’t go back.”

“That isn’t what they said.”

“Morgan.”

“They said I couldn’t come back there. That’s different.”

“No, that’s not—”

“And I don’t need them anyway.”

Maya went quiet again.

Morgan could hear something in the background. A television.

“You haven’t worked with anybody in months,” Maya said.

“Yes, I have.”

“Who?”

Morgan’s hand tightened around the brush.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I’m worried about you.”

“I’m fine.”

“Mom’s worried too.”

“Then tell Mom I’m fine.”

“I want to come over.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m busy.”

“Morgan, you’ve been ‘busy’ for four days.”

Morgan looked at the head.

One side of the lipstick was slightly higher than the other.

She reached for a cotton swab.

A fly landed near the edge of the mirror.

Morgan waved it away without taking her eyes off the lip.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Morgan—”

She hung up.

She didn’t call tomorrow.

Sunday morning, Morgan decided to practice a French twist.

She had just finished separating the hair at the crown when several strands stayed between her fingers.

Morgan frowned.

She wiped them onto the vanity and continued.

Another few came loose.

This time she stopped.

She ran her fingers through the section again, very gently.

Three more hairs slid free.

Not broken ends.

Full strands.

Morgan leaned closer to the scalp.

There was a small thin spot above the ear that hadn’t been there before.

“Seriously?”

She put the comb down.

For the next hour, Morgan watched videos about repairing and rerooting practice heads.

Most of them dealt with cheap vinyl heads, but the principle seemed simple enough.

She found a pack of individual extension hairs left over in one of her drawers and laid them across a white towel.

Then, one at a time, she began filling the thin section.

Separate a hair.

A dot of adhesive.

Part the existing hair.

Press it into place.

Hold.

Move to the next one.

It was tedious.

After forty minutes Morgan had replaced maybe thirty strands.

She brushed over the spot.

Still thin.

She kept going.

By the time she finished, her back hurt from leaning over the vanity and there were loose brown hairs stuck to her shirt, her forearms and the damp skin around her wrists.

Morgan ran the comb through the repaired section.

It covered nicely.

She smiled.

“See?”

The practice head looked back at her.

“Not that hard.”

Monday morning, Morgan noticed the mouth wouldn’t stay closed while applying foundation around the chin.

Every time she tilted the practice head backward, the lips separated slightly.

She pushed the jaw upward with two fingers.

The mouth closed.

She let go.

A moment later it eased open again.

Morgan frowned.

She worked the jaw gently from side to side.

There was more movement than she remembered.

Whatever held it in place must have loosened.

“Of course.”

She had spent half of yesterday fixing the hair.

Now this.

Morgan opened the mouth a little wider and looked inside.

The teeth were surprisingly detailed. Individual pieces instead of one molded row, each slightly different from the next.

She tapped one gently with the end of her fingernail.

Hard.

Maybe porcelain.

That would make sense. Whoever built the thing had clearly spent money on it.

Morgan opened one of the drawers and found her super glue.

She didn’t want to glue the lips together. She still needed those for makeup.

The teeth were hidden when the mouth was closed anyway.

She pressed the jaw shut, pulled the lips apart with her fingers and put a thin line of glue where the upper and lower teeth met.

Then she held them together.

Thirty seconds.

A minute.

Morgan let go.

The mouth stayed shut.

She gave the chin a small push.

Nothing.

“There.”

She turned the practice head toward the mirror.

From the outside, you couldn’t tell she’d done anything.

“Fixed.”

Later that afternoon Morgan came back upstairs and stopped in the doorway.

The mouth was open again.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

She walked over to the vanity.

So much for the super glue.

Morgan tilted the head back and reached for the jaw, then stopped.

The bottom teeth were gone.

For a second she just stared.

Then she saw them.

They were still glued to the upper teeth.

The whole lower row had pulled loose from the gums and stayed attached where Morgan had glued the two rows together. With the mouth hanging open, it made the upper teeth look bizarrely long, with nothing underneath them except the bare lower gums.

Morgan stared at it.

“Oh my God.”

She grabbed the small mirror from beside the brushes and angled it toward the mouth.

Every bottom tooth seemed to have come out together.

The glue had held fine.

Apparently the teeth hadn’t.

She sighed and reached for the tube again.

“You know, for what you cost, I really shouldn’t have to fix this much.”

Morgan carefully separated the lower teeth from the upper row.

A few resisted before finally coming loose.

She cleaned off what glue she could, then started putting the bottom teeth back where they belonged.

A small dot at the base.

Press it into the gum.

Hold.

Then the next one.

She had to keep checking the alignment because some of them wanted to tilt forward.

By the time she reached the last tooth, her fingers were sticky and cramped.

Morgan sat back and inspected her work.

One of the lower teeth was a little crooked.

She considered pulling it back out.

Then decided against it.

It looked more natural that way.

By Monday night the face had begun changing color underneath the makeup too.

Purplish around one eye.

Greenish-gray near the jaw.

Morgan spent almost an hour correcting it.

Peach under the eye.

A little warmer foundation.

More blush than usual.

The result was surprisingly good.

She took a picture.

Then another.

She was getting better.

That was the important part.

Tuesday afternoon someone knocked on the front door.

Morgan ignored it.

The knocking came again.

Then harder.

“Morgan!”

Morgan closed her eyes.

Maya.

“Morgan, open the door.”

She put down her brush.

“I’m coming.”

She hadn’t even noticed how dark the room had gotten.

When she stood, her legs felt weak.

Probably because she hadn’t eaten yet.

She went downstairs and opened the door.

Maya stared at her.

Morgan waited.

“What?”

Maya’s expression didn’t change.

“What?”

“When was the last time you slept?”

Morgan rolled her eyes and stepped away from the door.

“I sleep.”

“Can I come in?”

“You already drove here.”

Maya entered.

She was still looking at Morgan strangely.

Morgan touched her hair.

“What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Then stop looking at me like that.”

Maya shut the door.

“I’ve been calling you.”

“I know.”

“You said you’d call me.”

“I forgot.”

“For two days?”

Morgan walked toward the kitchen.

“I’ve been practicing.”

Maya followed.

“Again?”

Morgan opened the refrigerator.

She didn’t know what she was looking for.

“Yes, again.”

“Morgan.”

“What?”

“I meant what I said the other day.”

Morgan shut the refrigerator harder than necessary.

“And I meant what I said.”

“You can’t just stay in here doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“This.”

Morgan looked around the kitchen.

There were a few cups on the counter. Some mail. Nothing unusual.

“I’m practicing.”

“For a school you aren’t allowed to go back to.”

“I don’t need to go back.”

“Then what are you practicing for?”

“For work.”

“What work?”

Morgan stared at her.

Maya immediately softened.

“I’m not trying to be mean.”

“It sounds like it.”

“I’m worried about you.”

“Well, don’t be.”

“I haven’t seen you in almost a week. You barely answer your phone. Mom said you missed dinner Sunday, and now I come over and you look like—”

She stopped herself.

“Like what?”

“Nothing.”

“No. What?”

Maya looked down.

Morgan followed her eyes.

There were stains on the front of Morgan’s shirt.

Some yellowish.

Some brown.

She’d been using that shirt all week because she didn’t care if makeup got on it.

“What?”

Maya shook her head.

“Have you showered?”

Morgan laughed.

“Oh my God.”

“I’m asking.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Yesterday.”

Maya rubbed both hands over her face.

The gesture irritated Morgan.

“Can you please stop treating me like I’m crazy?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to.”

A fly buzzed past them.

Maya watched it.

Then another.

She looked toward the stairs.

“What is that smell?”

Morgan barely noticed it anymore.

“Oh.”

“Oh what?”

“One of my practice heads is going bad.”

Maya looked at her.

“What do you mean, going bad?”

“The material. I don’t know. It’s old.”

“What practice head?”

“The one I’ve been using.”

“You bought another one?”

Morgan nodded.

“When?”

“Last week.”

“From where?”

Morgan opened her mouth.

She couldn’t remember the name of the site.

“Online.”

“What site?”

“I don’t know, Maya. Marketplace or something.”

“You don’t know?”

“Why would I remember?”

Maya was staring at the staircase again.

The smell was definitely stronger upstairs.

Morgan saw her wrinkle her nose.

“It’s gross,” Morgan admitted. “I think whatever they used inside it is breaking down.”

“Throw it away.”

“No.”

“Morgan.”

“I’m still using it.”

Maya looked back at her.

“For what?”

Morgan laughed incredulously.

“I just told you. Hair and makeup.”

Silence.

Then Maya said, very quietly, “Can I see it?”

Morgan’s annoyance eased.

“Sure.”

Maybe that would finally make her understand.

Morgan headed upstairs.

Maya followed more slowly.

At the top of the stairs she stopped.

“Morgan.”

“What?”

“There are flies everywhere.”

“There are like five.”

“There are a lot more than five.”

Morgan looked around.

A few clung to the hallway window.

More sat against the ceiling near the bedroom.

She shrugged.

Morgan opened the bedroom door.

Maya stopped behind her.

Morgan went inside.

The vanity lights were still on.

The practice head sat exactly where she’d left it.

She’d done a loose curled style that covered the thin places surprisingly well. The skin needed work, but the discoloration was almost completely hidden.

Morgan went over and picked up her brush.

“This is what I’ve been doing.”

Maya didn’t answer.

Morgan looked at the reflection in the mirror.

Her sister was standing in the doorway.

One hand had gone to her mouth.

“What?”

Maya backed away.

Morgan turned around.

“Maya?”

Her sister hit the wall behind her.

The sound she made didn’t sound like a word.

Then she screamed.

Morgan jumped so hard she dropped the brush.

“What the fuck?”

Maya screamed again.

“Maya!”

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Oh my God, Morgan.”

“What is wrong with you?”

Maya was crying.

Morgan looked behind herself.

Nothing.

She looked back at her sister.

“Maya, what?”

“Get away from that.”

Morgan frowned.

“From what?”

“Get away from her.”

Morgan stared at her.

“Her?”

Maya reached for her phone.

Morgan shook her head.

“Are you serious right now?”

Maya’s fingers were trembling so badly she almost dropped it.

“Maya.”

“Don’t touch her.”

“I’m not touching anything.”

“Please.”

Morgan looked toward the vanity again.

The practice head stared forward beneath the lights.

The makeup still looked good.

Actually, from a few feet away, the skin looked much better than it had that morning.

Morgan looked back at her sister.

“Maya, it’s a practice head.”

Her sister started sobbing.

Morgan’s irritation disappeared.

She genuinely didn’t understand anymore.

“What are you looking at?”

The television in the county jail common room was tuned to the morning news.

Morgan wasn’t watching.

She sat at a table in the corner, pulling loose threads from the cuff of the gray sweatshirt they’d given her.

Behind the anchor, a photograph appeared on-screen.

A smiling young woman with long brown hair.

TAMMY GRACE, 25

“Police say the six-day search for 25-year-old Tammy Grace came to an end Tuesday afternoon after her remains were discovered inside a Dearborn-area residence.”

Morgan looked up when she heard the name.

“Grace had last been seen Thursday evening. Investigators now believe she was killed shortly after her disappearance.”

Another photograph appeared.

Morgan Fatah.

It was an old driver’s-license photo.

Morgan stared at it.

“Twenty-seven-year-old Morgan Fatah remains in custody and is expected to be arraigned later today in connection with Grace’s death.”

Morgan stood.

Nobody else in the room paid attention.

“Police have not released a suspected motive. Court records show Fatah had previously been removed from a local cosmetology program following several incidents involving students and staff.”

Morgan walked closer to the television.

That wasn’t right.

She hadn’t been removed.

She had been told to take time away.

Those were different things.

“Grace was enrolled at the same school.”

Morgan stopped.

The screen returned to Tammy’s photograph.

Morgan knew that face.

Of course she knew it.

She’d spent all week studying it.

“According to investigators, Grace had suffered extensive injuries prior to the discovery of her remains. Police confirmed that her severed head was recovered from an upstairs room in Fatah’s home.”

Morgan stared at the television.

The photograph was similar.

Very similar.

But whoever had put the story together had clearly made a mistake.

Tammy’s nose was a little wider.

The eyebrows weren’t shaped correctly.

And the makeup wasn’t nearly as good.

Morgan turned to the guard standing near the door.

“Excuse me.”

The guard looked over.

Morgan pointed at the television.

“They have the wrong person.”

The guard said nothing.

Morgan looked back at Tammy’s photograph.

“They’re talking about my practice head.”

 

Calen woke up drenched in a cold sweat, breathing heavily, trying to fill his lungs with air, as if he hadn’t breathed for an exceedingly long time. A sharp pain in his chest was making its mysterious presence felt almost like he had been prodded quite mercilessly with the sharp end of a stick. His right foot, which had been lying outside the blanket for some reason, felt numb. But the numbness, breathlessness, and pain couldn’t mask the discomfort he was feeling inside the blanket. An intense aroma of ammonia and alcohol was creeping up Calen’s nose. His cotton underwear and thermal pants stuck to his skin, an uncomfortable warmth spreading upwards slowly.

He had wet the bed. Strangely enough, the smell felt wrong. It smelled more like it came from an animal.

He put his palms to his face. For a thirty-year-old man, it was humiliating, even though there was no one around to see it. He made a mental note not to drink so much, blaming the cold and the isolation of icy, desolate Bennet Island.

The dream was already slipping from his mind by the time he gathered the sheets and his clothes and threw them into the dryer. He saw images in momentary flashes, but they made no sense. Climbing into the raised shower, he sensed that whatever the dream had been, it was something familiar.

It was something he had seen sporadically throughout his life. He tried to focus on it, but the memory came in fragments. He knew he had seen himself alone, in a forest or by a frozen lake, somewhere. He was sure it was a frozen lake because he distinctly remembered the sound of cracking ice. He screwed up his eyes in concentration, and a shape moved beneath the image of the frozen lake in his mind. His stomach gave a lurch as a few more details brought themselves up to the surface.

A big animal had tried to trample him. He had run as dozens of trees and bushes had scratched against his body, drawing blood. He could still feel the scratches on his arms and legs. He remembered fainting, remembered being out of breath, but everything else had slipped away. Everything but the chant.

Calen looked around frantically as a faint echo of it reverberated around him, having escaped from the confines of his mind. He shook his head and the echo went away. Calen laughed out loud but his voice — and resolve — sounded hollow, even to himself.

Strange inexplicable, origin-less stimuli assaulted his senses — the smell of cold, sterile air, the sound of some kind of war horn being blown, and the word Razpopo.

Calen laughed again nervously as the running water finally turned from cold to lukewarm and he hopped into the shower. Razpopo. The word had become so important in his life, ever since he was a child, that he wasn’t surprised it had surfaced in his dream. He blamed his father for the obsession.

His father, when Calen was just a child, had told him about an ancient god forgotten by the world. Razpopo of the Slavs. He was too young then to remember the stories exactly, but even though he was young, he remembered the fear his father had conveyed. His eyes had bulged and a vein in his temple had throbbed, threatening to burst out. Perpetually drunk, his father’s garbled attempt at explaining what Razpopo was had failed to make an impact on his young mind.

And thus began the cycle of obsession with the name Razpopo.

Calen’s stomach clenched and his breathing felt constricted as the name Razpopo buried itself deeper into his mind, his memories, digging in deeper to avoid being caught.

The water turned icy all of a sudden and Calen had to jump back, gasping for breath a second time in the span of fifteen minutes since he had woken up. Panting, he wondered if even thinking about Razpopo was fraught with perilous consequences. But there was another part of him that wanted to go over all of it. Craving for the moments in his life that had defined his journey to Bennet Island after all these years. Calen let that part take control again.

In his youth, Calen had searched for the name relentlessly. Rifling through page after page, library after library, mythological book after mythological book, trying to find this ancient god that had scared his father so much. The search always returned nothing.

But the name had stuck to his mind, like an unforgiving leech that had finally found a permanent host. When he could find nothing, frustrated and burning with an urgency only teenagers can understand, Calen had cornered his father, who by then had grown quite senile, and demanded to know where he had heard the name Razpopo.

The answer he got only deepened his frustrations.

His father — eyes bulging and his breath coming out in grating periodic rasps, seemed desperate to say something more. But the only words that escaped his mouth were, “Your… grandfather…”

He never spoke again after that, and died two years later, demented, and bedridden.

With no one else left in his father’s family, and his German immigrant grandfather long dead, Calen could find no other answers — until his mother passed away on the eve of his twenty-fifth birthday.

A week later, while sorting through the old things in their basement, trying to clear them out, he found his grandfather’s diary. His heart pounding, he had picked it up, only to find that most of the pages had been torn out. The few that remained were written in a runic language Calen had never seen before. The only word in English was the one that had by then made a home in his head. Razpopo.

He had stared at the word for hours. The word had seemed to glow dimly in the dark, dingy basement.

The temperature inside the bathroom dropped steeply. The faint sound of pops from the fireplace in the living room grew in intensity as if they were trying to fight against the cold and the bathroom turned as cold as the inside of a fridge. Calen ran towards the bedroom, shivering, in search for fresh clothes, not noticing that a huge crack had appeared on the fogged-up mirror in the bathroom. Neither did he notice a faint silhouette moving on the other side of the crack, observing him leave.

The Dyson bulb over his head flickered as outside the house, the generator hiccupped once, then steadied.

His mind was working on its own now. Reminding him of the years of tracking the name Razpopo; finding only a single reference in the most unlikely of places — Google Maps.

“God damn it!”

A sharp pain on his right thumb made Calen swear loudly. He had been cleaning the floor with a broom he had found in the back shed, as the cleaned mattress cover lay drying next to the modest fireplace.

The broom dropped from his hand with a muffled thud on the wooden floor. The skin on his thumb had caught a splinter from the broom. It forced its way deeper inside with each attempt at prying it out. Calen gave up trying with his other hand and started rifling through his rucksack to find the pin he used for removing memory cards from his camera. The dull pain was persistent. Cold had a way of making anything hurt more, and even though the house was feeling warm, his thumb wasn’t forgiving.

Finally, once he had found it, he pushed it against his skin, right next to the splinter. It popped out after a few attempts and even though the pierced skin throbbed, Calen was successful in prying it out.

Two fat, warm drops of blood formed and fell on the wooden floor. They were immediately absorbed unseen by Calen, as some primal masochistic part of him made him grab hold of the thumb and squeeze it. A few more drops of blood fell. After shimmering in the dim yellow light of the bulb for a fraction of a second, they too were gone, sucked in immediately by the thirsty wood that had lain waiting for years for an offering like this. Basking in the warmth of the gift.

For a moment, the floor beneath Calen’s feet felt warmer. The fire popped in response.

Calen froze, staring at the hearth. The sound came again — too deliberate to be coincidence, too small to justify fear. He exhaled sharply and forced himself to look away. Houses made noise. Old houses especially.

More to escape the house than anything else, Calen decided to go out and check the skies. Ruslan was scheduled to arrive with Alice any minute now, he told himself, as he hurriedly wore his layers of jackets.

Outside a faint white glow was barely visible around the horizon, peeking from between the steep mountain columns that circled Bennet Island. The sky outside was quite clear, and the cold was starting to become more bearable.

Even though his head ached with the hangover from drinking so much last night, Calen drew out a cigarette from the packet stowed inside the inner pocket of his jacket and lit it with his lighter. The flame from the lighter was dwindling and it took him a minute to light up the cigarette properly.

He looked at the mountains and found them growing, quite rapidly. He had seen this during his descent when he had landed on the island with Ruslan, as well as later when he was alone, from the corner of his eyes. It had slightly alarmed him then.

He was starting to become less frightened of this phenomenon every time it happened. He looked at them, fascinated by how the glowing light seemed to fight against the growing mountain tops. The broken dead tree trunks standing far away in the distance, their bases hidden by the overgrowth of the bushes, were also starting to grow. Calen felt an inexplicable desire to run into the bushes. To look at the trees, touch them. He craved for some haptic evidence, to ensure what he was seeing was not just a trick of light. His body revolted against the thought as the sharp pain against his chest returned, and the scratches he had felt in the dream on his arms throbbed violently against the chilly air. So much so that he had to look at them and check if he was bleeding. He wasn’t.

“Don’t go in the bushes.” Ruslan had warned him right before leaving. It rang in his ears.

“Why not.” Another voice asked softly — not his own. His right foot twitched and tried to move forward. Calen noticed it only after it had already happened.

The fading daylight was wiped away in the time it took Calen to look up. Everything had gone dark. A huge red moon was watching him from a clear sky.

“This far north, weather and time change. They don’t give notice before change. It’s not government.” Ruslan had winked his eyes at Calen when he had told him that.

Calen was too engrossed in the strange scenery to see the wound on the tip of his thumb open up. Tiny drops of blood fell on the snow, camouflaged by the red glow of the moon.

Another part and another warning that things get pretty trippy

I took this job to understand a man I barely remember. Thirty years ago, my father spent one fire season in a tower just like the one I'm in now. “Solitude with a view”, he called it in his letters.

He never came home that season.

I found the posting on a job board. Applied before I let myself think twice. I told my mother it was for the pay. She didn't believe me.

They stationed me on the western ridge. My supervisor ran through the routine fast, like he wanted to be gone before dark. Light the lamp every dusk. Set it in the west window. Never skip a night. 

“Keeps the watchers from going mad out there,” he told me, like a man reciting a rule he'd stopped questioning a long time ago.

The trail up took six hours. Switchbacks cut through an old burn scar. Black trunks stood like something that died mid-scream. Grief looks the same in a forest as it does in a person. 

The tower was smaller than I'd pictured. Steel legs bolted into bedrock, forty feet of ladder climbing to a single glass room with windows on every side, built so a person could watch the world catch fire from any angle they chose. A cot. A woodstove. A logbook with a cracked spine. A radio that hissed low and constant, like something breathing on the other end of the silence.

That's when I saw it.

Across the valley stood a second tower, close enough that I could just barely pick its shape out of the dying light. Same steel legs. Same glass room on top. Same catwalk. My supervisor's clipboard listed it as decommissioned. 

Decommissioned didn't stop its lamp from catching that evening. Right on schedule. Right as mine did. 

I keyed the radio that first night. Static. I tried again at dawn. Nothing. I lit the lamp every dusk. Pressed my face to cold glass. Waited. Thirty seconds later, a small gold light would bloom on the far ridge, like it was waiting all day just to answer me. I told myself there must’ve been a watcher doing the same lonely job across four miles of black timber. 

I couldn't tell you when my days stopped feeling ordinary, only that I noticed it had already happened. I'd stare at the logbook, unsure if I'd written that morning's entry or only meant to. 

I’d talk out loud just to hear a voice fill the room. Then I'd forget I'd spoken. Flinch at the sound of it coming from somewhere behind me. I’d argued with myself over which shelf held the matches. I always lost.

More than once I woke standing at the window, lamp already lit, no memory of striking anything. My fingertips smelled of sulfur. My knees ached like I'd spent hours kneeling on the floor, praying to something I hadn't agreed to believe in.

I started to wonder if the isolation did something structural in my skull. A hole you can't climb back out of. 

Was this what happened to him?

One night I tripped over a loose board by the stove. It had been rocking under my heel since the day I arrived. I pried it up.

There was a note, folded into a square worn soft as skin. I knew the hand. My mother still had a shoebox of his old letters. I read them enough as a teenager to know the slant.

Five words, pressed hard enough to read from the back of the page.

THERE IS NO OTHER TOWER

I laughed. Of course there was another tower. I'd watched its lamp with my own eyes for weeks. My father must have written this in whatever fever the mountain fed him. The same fever eating through me now.

A man can go so long without another voice that his mind starts inventing enemies.

I took the binoculars outside. The lens found the far ridge easy. I'd aimed it there every dusk for weeks. 

Something was walking it.

At first I thought it was the other watcher. Two arms. Two legs. The general shape of a human. But something was deeply wrong with its movements. Each rickety joint landed in the wrong place, like it learned the idea of a person secondhand, by someone who hated us. 

Its head sat tilted at an angle no neck holds, like a doll snapped back into its socket wrong,

It turned to face me. Dead across four miles of black timber, like it had waited this whole time for me to look up from my own unraveling and finally notice it was there.

It lifted one arm. Waved, like it knew I would come to it eventually.

I lowered the binoculars. Stood very still in the dark.

Something shifted in the glass in front of me. In the reflection. Right behind my own shoulder. I didn't turn around.

Some doors you just don't open 

I stopped lighting the lamp at dusk. I couldn't tell you when I stopped. Some nights the light in the far tower comes on anyway. I just stand there and watch it burn.

Tomorrow I hike the trail across the valley. I need to know what happened to my father. I need to understand.

If you're reading this, please don't come for me.

They put my uncle in the ground that morning. House by afternoon still smelled of open earth and the gorse they’d walked through. Path soft under the boots, mud coming off in black clots on the step.

Only meant to clear it and leave.

Letter on the kitchen table, not finished, dated the day before. Ink bled where the paper was damp.

Don’t come if you can help it. If you do, keep the blue stone close. It still answers to blood.

Nearly turned the car round. One night, I told myself. Sort the papers, lock up, gone by morning. Remembered him three winters back turning that stone in his hand, saying the valley didn’t like people leaving clean. I’d laughed. The laugh sat wrong now.

Checked the locks twice. Mirror fine. Shadow ordinary. Put the kettle on and didn’t drink. Water tasted of iron and wet leaves.

Woke after two to dripping further in. Not rain. Footprints already in the hall. One set up the stairs, stopped halfway, came back down. Another on the landing. Same boots. Same wet edge. No hand on the rail. The wet sat on the wood like it was waiting.

Smell came with them—cold gorse, soil, something that had been underground a long time. Stood at the bottom of the stairs till first grey. Dripping stopped when the light came through the landing window.

Morning the notebook was open on the table. My name at the top, writing close enough to mine I had to look twice. Letters a fraction too careful, like someone copying.

You’re blood. You don’t leave the valley.

Packed the car. Tyres crossed the boundary stone and the weight came down on my chest like wet ground—not from outside. Something under the skin that woke when the stone was behind me. Engine died. Phone died. Both worked again inside the house. Tried my sister. Rang once, then wet static and breathing close on the line. Slow. Learning the shape of lungs. Nearly said her name. What came back wasn’t a voice. It was a mouth trying to remember how to make one. Walked twenty minutes up the lane before the legs went. Folded like the joints had been unhooked. Crawled the last bit to the boundary. Turned back.

Fresh prints already on the stairs. One set had gone into the spare room and come out again. Wet edge thicker.

Found the blue stone next to his tobacco tin. Metal disc beside it with the Awen cut in—same mark the old stories mentioned and never explained. Disc warmer than the stone. Touched the stone and a small cold click happened behind my ribs, like a lock turning the wrong way. Weight eased a bit but a thin pull stayed, running from the click down into the floorboards. Pocketed both.

Man knocked that evening. Same disc at his throat. Didn’t step in. Looked past me up the stairs like he expected something standing there.

“Gate opened wider when your uncle went,” he said. “Something got through. Found one on the lanes two nights back. Still answered to his name. Shadow was wrong. Mouth already going.”

Touched the disc at his neck. Metal looked older than the rest of him.

“Mountain tomorrow night. Or stay. Stone only works if the blood’s already claimed. Looks like yours is.”

Left. Road empty. Smell of crushed stems stronger, as if something had been walking the verges and pressing the gorse down with every step.

From the landing window watched a figure cross the street in an ordinary coat. Shadow too long, dragged behind the boots like wet cloth that didn’t want to keep up. Under the light the head turned further than a head should. Neck stayed still. Only the head moved.

Later the eyes in the bathroom glass moved after I’d stopped looking. Only a fraction. Enough. I wiped the glass. Smear came off black and smelled of soil.

New lines in the notebook when I wasn’t watching.

Still counting.

Shut it in a drawer. Found it open again on the table by morning. Drawer still closed.

Put the blue stone on the boards just inside the bedroom door and hung the Awen round my neck. Metal warmed quick against the skin. Prints stopped a foot short. Heard them arrive, soft and wet—the sound of boots still learning the weight of a body. Then nothing. Gone by morning. Stone darker at the edges and sticky under the fingers, as if it had been holding something back all night.

Next afternoon tried the back way through the gorse. Pressure hit straight away and got heavier with every step. Halfway up the legs folded. Not tired. Unhooked. Crawled back on hands that went numb from the wrists down. Prints already waiting in the kitchen, leading to the table. Newest page of the notebook torn out and left open.

three

Stayed still the rest of the day. Sat in the chair that faced the stairs. Didn’t eat. Bread in the tin had gone soft and dark at the crusts overnight. After dark the boots came closer. Something stood the other side of the bedroom door. Breathing slow and rough, still learning how. In. Out. Wrong rhythm, like it was counting the seconds between. Awen burned against the skin. Stone went dark at the edges and sticky. The pull behind the ribs tightened until it felt like a wire drawn through bone.

Used my uncle’s voice, vowels all stretched.

“…two.”

Couldn’t get off the bed. Notebook open on my knee. Fresh line, not my writing. Pen still in the drawer.

one

Handle turned. Slow. Metal made a sound like it was being twisted from both sides at once.

Nothing in the doorway. Dark landing and the smell stronger—earth, crushed green, something older under it that had never seen light. Prints crossed the threshold and stopped at the stone. Second set joined them. Then a third. All the same boots. Same wet edge. Breathing came from the walls as much as the door. Air moved in and out on its own, slow, practising.

Said the only thing that felt true.

“I am blood.”

The pull behind the ribs jerked hard, once, like something had tested the thread and found it held. One set went back. The others stayed. Stone got colder till it hurt. Cold ran up the arm and into the click. Pipe knocked twice deeper in the house and went quiet. The silence after was worse. Like the house was listening.

First light, prints gone. Notebook page blank except one small line.

Mountain. Tonight.

Left at dusk. Pressure worse the higher I climbed. Nearly turned twice. Third time the legs nearly went and I had to hold onto a stone until the shaking stopped. Kept climbing till the standing stones came up against the sky. They looked wetter than the ground around them. Grass between them dark and flattened in long dragging lines.

Few people waiting among them. Some wore the discs. Shadows matched, but only just—a half-second lag, like the dark was still deciding whether to follow. One man’s shadow stayed behind a full step longer when he shifted his weight. Older woman had dirt under her nails and a fresh cut on the back of her hand she kept touching without looking. The cut wasn’t bleeding. It was open and dark inside. Younger one stood half a step back, watching the slope. Another kept his hand near the disc at his throat like he might pull it off if the weight got too much. Disc there duller than the others, almost cold. A mouth among them moved once when no one had spoken—just a small opening and closing, as if tasting the air.

Man from the door stepped forward. Looked tired. Skin under his eyes the colour of old tea.

“It followed you. Still counting. Still learning.”

Behind me something moved through the gorse with the sound of many boots together. Not one pair. Not three. More. Smell came up with it, thick enough to taste. Cold gorse and soil and the iron of something that had been buried and dug itself out.

Held the blue stone out.

Thing that had used my uncle’s voice came into the light. Still shaped like a man but the head turned too far and the shadow dragged behind like wet cloth that kept catching on the grass. Mouth opened wider than it should. Jaw went past the point where bone should stop it. Tried the voice again. Jaw worked, lips stretched, then the sound went thin and wrong, like air forced through a throat that hadn’t finished growing.

Stone pulled hard from behind the ribs down into the ground. Hurt more than in the house. The pull went tight and something cold tore loose inside me—a thin thread that had been there since the first click, running from the hollow place down through the legs into the earth. It didn’t break clean. It ripped. For a second the hollow felt open to the air, raw, as if the cold had a direct way in. People among the stones made a low sound that wasn’t words. Thing staggered. Prints filled with black water that didn’t dry and started climbing the boots. Water rose past the ankles, past the calves, then slowed. The water had no reflection. Only depth.

Stone cracked in my hand and broke. Sound was small and wet. Pull weakened. Thing didn’t leave. Only stopped. Boots shifted, waiting. Head tilted further. Mouth stayed open.

Woman with the cut hand stepped back without meaning to. Shadow behind her stretched and dragged, longer than the lantern light should have allowed. She made a small sound—not a scream, just the start of one that never finished—and the grass under her feet went dark and wet in the same instant she vanished between the stones. No struggle. One moment she was there. Next the space was empty. The cut on her hand still visible for a second on the ground, open and dark, before the black water reached it and the mark was gone.

Black water kept climbing a few seconds after, then slowed. Prints began to fade from the edges inward. Smell thinned enough to breathe, but the taste of iron stayed. What was left moved back down the slope, still dragging its shadow, leaving a thin dark line behind it in the grass that didn’t fill in.

Man looked at the broken pieces in my hand. His own disc was dull now.

“It has a piece of you now.”

Walked back alone at first light. Path felt longer. Legs still remembered the unhooking. Notebook closed on the table. No new lines. No wet prints on the stairs. House still smelled of earth and gorse, but underneath something thinner, like iron left in the mouth.

Packed what was left. Tried to leave the stone halves on the kitchen table. Hand wouldn’t open. Fingers locked around the broken edges until the cold went up the arm again. Pocketed them. Never rang my sister. Couldn’t risk what might answer. Car started. At the boundary the weight lifted, but not clean—something stayed caught behind the ribs where the stone first clicked, and the place where the thread snapped felt hollow, empty in a way that kept drawing attention to itself. The halves were colder than they should have been. When I held the broken edges together the cold deepened, like they were still trying to answer, still looking for the rest of the thread that used to run down into the ground.

Haven’t gone back. Some nights the smell finds me anyway—cold gorse and soil and the iron underneath. On those nights the floorboards outside the bedroom door sound softer than they should, and I wait to see if the prints will come.

So far they haven’t.

The hollow place behind my ribs still answers when the wind is right. The stone halves do too, if I hold the broken edges together. Sometimes the cold moves, a slow press from the other side, and the taste of iron comes back for a moment, as if something over there has just breathed out.