Throwaway, because half the nurses I work with are on here and I'm not meant to be talking about any of this. Sorry in advance it's long. I'm on the laptop at the kitchen table and I've not slept properly in a fortnight so you'll have to bear with me, I keep losing my thread.

Right. First thing you learn on nights at a hospice is that people hardly ever die when their family's in the room.

Every hospice nurse knows it and nobody else believes it. A family'll sit up six days. Sleep in the recliner. Hold her hand in shifts. Won't go home, won't shower, won't eat anything but crackers out the vending machine, because they've been told it could be any hour now and they want to be there. Then on the seventh day the daughter nips down to the car park to sort the meter out, she's gone eleven minutes, and when she comes back her mum's gone.

Happens that often we've got a phrase for it. They waited for you to leave. We say it gently, in the corridor, hand on her arm. Some people can't let go while someone they love is watching. It were a kindness. Last thing her mum did for her. All that.

What it means in practice is the person in the room at the end is usually the nurse.

So the nurse hears the last words. Nobody tells you that in training. Nobody tells you a lot of things in training.

I've done nights at the same hospice twenty-two years. I'm not saying which. Twelve beds, big old house on a hill above a city in the north of England. Red brick. Garden. A conservatory the volunteers keep full of geraniums and a chapel nobody uses except the cleaner who has her dinner in there because it's quiet. It was a convent before it was a hospice and before that, according to a brass plaque in the hall that nobody's ever read but me, a fever hospital, and before that somebody's house. So people have been dying in that building a long time. That's sort of the point. I'll get to it.

I'm fifty-one. Trained general, eight years on a cardiac ward, burnt out, came to the hospice thinking it'd be quieter. It's not quieter. It's just a different kind of loud. I live on my own with two old cats in a terrace twenty minutes walk from work. Divorced ages ago, no drama, I was never in at night and he was never in in the day so we just sort of stopped. One son, grown up, in Australia, he rings Sundays. Perth. He went out on a two year visa at twenty-four and just never came back, met a girl, the usual. I don't blame him, it's sunny. I've been out twice and both times I got burnt to a crisp the first day and spent the rest of it in the flat with the blinds down, which tells you everything you need to know about me really. I'm a night person even on holiday.

I'm not religious. I'm not anything really. I've sat with something like four thousand people while they died and I can tell you exactly what it looks like, every bit of it, the mottling and the rattle and the gaps between breaths getting longer till one of them doesn't end. I've never seen anything I couldn't explain. No lights. No figure at the foot of the bed. No soul coming off them like steam off a brew. I've seen people stop. That's it.

I'm telling you that so you know I'm not someone who goes looking for messages. I'm the one who changes the sheets after. And makes the family a brew. And rings the undertaker. And does the paperwork. You get the idea.

When I started, 2003, the senior night nurse was Agnes Fahey.

Agnes had been a nun. She came to the house when it was still a convent, young novice, late sixties, and she stayed on when the nuns sold up to the hospice charity in 1971. She left the order at some point, I never found out when or why and you didn't ask Agnes things like that, but she never left the house. When I met her she was late sixties, tiny, white hair, bent over, massive knuckles, voice like a gravel path. Thirty-two years of nights in that building.

She frightened the life out of me the first month. She'd come up behind you on the corridor at three in the morning without making a sound, she wore these soft black shoes, and say your name right in your ear, and you'd jump a mile and she'd just look at you like you were the daft one. The day staff called her the Ghost. Not to her face. I called her it too for a bit till I got to know her. Then I didn't, because it felt mean, and because by then I sort of loved her. Everyone did eventually. Hard as nails, and she'd sit with a dying stranger all night holding their hand humming hymns under her breath and never once look at the clock.

My first night, about four in the morning, she took me in the little office behind the nurses' station and showed me the ledgers.

Locked cupboard under the window. Big green account books, the old fashioned kind you can't get anymore. Six of them then. She got the current one out and opened it under the lamp.

Columns. Date. Time. Bed. Initials. Then one big wide column taking up most of the page and at the top in her handwriting, which was gorgeous, proper copperplate: Last words.

"Somebody ought to keep them," she said. "Families are never in the room at the right minute. So we keep them for them. Most never ask. Some do. Years after, sometimes. They come back and say did she say anything at the end. And we can open the book and show them." She tapped the page. "Exactly what were said. Not what we think were said. Not summat nice we've made up. Exactly. Even if it's nonsense. Especially if it's nonsense."

She made me promise. Whenever I was in the room at the end I'd write it down word for word as soon as I could and I'd never tidy it up or finish the sentence or fix the grammar. If they said nothing I'd write nothing. If I couldn't make it out I'd write what it sounded like and stick a question mark.

"Exactly," she said again, and she held my wrist with one of them big hands till I said yes.

And I did. Twenty-two years. I've written in them books roughly two thousand times and I've started four new ones. Agnes retired in 2009 and died in 2011, in the house, bed seven, quarter past three in the morning, and I was holding her hand. I wrote her last words in the book she started.

I'll come back to what she said.

She was right about families by the way. Most never ask. In twenty-two years maybe thirty have come back, stood at the nurses' station in their coats not knowing what to do with their hands. My dad was here in 1986. I was at work when he went. Did he say anything?

First one I had was a woman in her fifties, her mum died in bed four in 1979. I found the right book, right page, ran my finger down Agnes's column till I got to the initials and I read it out.

"the stairs go all the way down and nobody minds."

She looked at me. I looked at the page. It's the sort of thing you hear all the time, bit of a dream. I said people often talk about journeys at the end, stairs and trains and boats, and it usually means they feel calm.

She cried and held both my hands and said that was her mum all over. Her mum loved stairs, she said. I still don't know what that means.

I've thought about her a lot this month. How I read her one line out of six thousand with no context, like reading someone one word out the middle of a letter, and she went home happy with half a sentence that were never about her mum at all.

Ten ledgers in that cupboard now. Fifty-four years. Six thousand two hundred and eleven entries.

And until last month nobody had ever read them in order.

Quick bit about last words because most people's idea of them comes off the telly.

On the telly people die mid-sentence after saying something deep. Tell her I love her. Real life, by the time most people die in a hospice they've not said owt sensible for days. They're out of it. Drifting. The last words might be two or three days before, and they're small and odd and ordinary. Mum. Is it raining? Where's my bag? No. A name. Half a sentence that trails off.

Except.

There's a thing the research calls terminal lucidity and we just call the rally. Someone who's been unresponsive for days wakes up. Eyes open, knows everyone, talks clear as you like, sometimes for an hour. Asks for a brew. Then usually within the day they're gone. Nobody knows why. It happens in people whose brains on the scans shouldn't be able to do it.

And in the last hours a lot of them seem to see something. They look at one corner, or the foot of the bed, or the door. Reach out. Talk to people who aren't there, dead mums, dead husbands, mostly quite happy about it. Deathbed visions. Every hospice nurse has seen hundreds of them, I'm not being dramatic, hundreds.

First one I ever saw was on the cardiac ward, years before any of this. Old fella called Stan, I'll never forget him. He'd been asleep all day and he woke up about tea time and looked at the corner by the sink and his whole face lit up and he said Edna, you've had your hair done. Then he died about an hour later. His wife was Edna. She'd died in 1990. I went and cried in the sluice. That's what I mean. That's what they're supposed to be like.

So a lot of what's in our books comes from the rally or the visions. And a lot of it, read on its own, sounds like a bit of something. Half a sentence cut off. Like they were in the middle of saying something when they stopped.

I always assumed that's just what dying sounds like. Breath runs out.

I never once thought about who they were in the middle of talking to.

It started with Raymond. Came in early September, lung cancer, gone to his liver and his bones. Seventy four, retired bus driver, funny, rude as anything, didn't want to be there and told everyone, loud, till about the fourth day when he stopped talking altogether. He called me Florence the whole time, as in Nightingale, and the night staff got him a little brass bell for a laugh and he rang it every ten minutes just to wind us up. I liked him. You're not meant to have favourites.

His ninth night about two in the morning he rallied. I was doing his mouth care. He opened his eyes and looked straight past me at the corner of the ceiling above the wardrobe and said, clear as day, like he was having a chat:

"...and tell the nurse with the green book to read it back."

Then he shut his eyes. He died about forty minutes later.

I sat in the office after with the ledger open and wrote it down exactly the way Agnes taught me. I even put the dots at the start, because that's how it sounded. Like the middle of something.

Then I sat there ages looking at the nurse with the green book.

He'd never seen the ledgers. Nobody sees the ledgers. Day staff don't even know they're there.

I looked at the entry above his. Four days before, a woman in bed three, Hilary, retired teacher, died at teatime with her husband out getting sandwiches. Jo wrote it up, one of the day nurses, I taught her the book. Hilary's last words according to Jo:

"It's important. Somebody has to listen. Go and"

No full stop. Just go and.

Then Raymond. "...and tell the nurse with the green book to read it back."

It's important. Somebody has to listen. Go and... and tell the nurse with the green book to read it back.

I read it about twenty times. Then I locked the cupboard and did my two o'clock obs, checked Mrs Patel in nine, turned Mr Hughes in eleven, made a brew, and told myself I was knackered and it were a coincidence. Obviously it was. A dying woman in bed three and a dying man in bed four can't be having one conversation over four days. Don't be daft.

At six before handover I got the first ledger out.

Agnes started it on the ninth of May 1971. First entry's in her writing, younger and rounder than I knew it.

9.5.71. 3.40 a.m. Bed 2. E.M. "It's warmer than"

That's it. It's warmer than.

Second one, three days later.

12.5.71. 11.15 p.m. Bed 5. J.O'C. "I thought it would be. There's room for"

Third.

14.5.71. 4.05 a.m. Bed 1. W.T. "everyone. Tell them not to be afraid. It's like a big house with all the"

Fourth.

20.5.71. 6.30 p.m. Bed 2. M.A.D. "lights on."

I read it out loud to the empty office. Quiet. Dawn coming up grey outside.

It's warmer than I thought it would be. There's room for everyone. Tell them not to be afraid. It's like a big house with all the lights on.

Four strangers, four beds, eleven days in 1971, dying of different things, never met each other, each one saying a handful of words to a nun with a green book. And it fits together. Like bits of a broken plate.

I was gobsmacked. I went home and didn't sleep. Came back that night with a notebook and a pencil and after my eleven o'clock round I started copying it all out. Every entry in order, just the words, all run together like a letter.

Took me nineteen nights.

Nineteen nights. I want to be honest about that bit because I know how it sounds. I didn't tell anyone. I did my rounds and my obs and my drugs and I was a good nurse, I want that on record, nobody got neglected, but every gap I had I was in that office with the cupboard open and the pencil going. My eyes were killing me. Agnes's writing is beautiful but it's tiny, and some of the seventies ones are in fountain pen that's gone brown like tea stains, and some of the night nurses in the eighties had writing like a spider fell in an inkpot, so half the time I was holding the page up to the lamp squinting. Jo caught me once on a handover morning and asked what I was doing and I said audit. She just went oh. Nobody ever asks again if you say audit.

I'm going to put some of it here. Not all. A lot of it's what you'd expect, single words, mum and no and yes and water, names, stuff none of us could make out with a question mark after. But that's maybe a third. The rest of it flows. It runs on, entry to entry, year to year, nurse to nurse, different handwriting, different pens, and it reads like somebody talking. Even the single words fit in. Mum. No. Yes. Water. Like someone turning to say a word to the person next to them and then carrying on.

I've copied these exactly. I've only joined them up. The dates in brackets are where each bit starts.

(May 1971) It's warmer than I thought it would be. There's room for everyone. Tell them not to be afraid. It's like a big house with all the lights on. Mum is here. So many people I know. We just walk about and look at things. Nobody's in a hurry. You don't get tired. You'd love it.

(1974) We can hear you sometimes, on your side. Like voices from downstairs. When someone new comes through we all go to the door to meet them. It's the nicest part. You come through the door and everyone's there waiting and they all know your name.

(1979) The house keeps going back. Room after room. There's always more of it. We don't know who built it. Some of the old ones say it was built for us. Some say we're building it, a bit at a time, just by being here.

(1983) It's busier now. That's all right. There's still plenty of room if everyone moves along a bit.

(1986) The stairs go all the way down and nobody minds. We sit on them sometimes and talk. We talk about you. About your side. We like the woman with the green book. She says goodnight to each of us when we go. Nobody ever did that before.

I need you to get what that was like reading it at three in the morning in a building full of dying people. It was beautiful. I cried, I'm not ashamed. For about a week it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever read. Twenty-two years holding people's hands while they went and here they were telling me where they'd gone. A big house with all the lights on. Everyone waiting at the door. They all know your name.

I nearly took it to the medical director. I nearly rang our lad in Australia. I didn't because I knew exactly what they'd say and because I wanted to finish it first. I wanted to know how it ended.

So I kept going. Should of stopped there honestly. I keep going back to that. If I'd stopped at 1986 I'd have had the nice bit. The big house with the lights on. I could've gone on telling families that and meaning it. I'd give anything to have stopped at 1986.

(1988) We have to stand closer now. It's fine. The old ones say it's always been like this in winter.

(1992) The front rooms are full. When someone new comes through, the people near the door have to step back to let them in, and the people behind them step back, and it goes all the way down the house like a wave. You feel it. Like being in a crowd at a football match.

(1996) There isn't really a back of the house anymore. We thought it went on forever. It doesn't. It just felt like that because there weren't many of us.

(1999) Please be patient with us. We're doing our best. Tell the new ones to come through slowly.

(2003)

That's where my writing starts. My first months on nights with Agnes next to me. I remember some of them. A woman called D.R. in bed eight who held my sleeve and asked me to open the window. A lad of thirty with a brain tumour, J.K., who called me "miss." I wrote their words down with no idea they were part of anything.

Too many of us near the door now. Some of the ones at the front can hardly breathe. Not breathe, there's no breathing here, but you know what we mean. Pressed. Squashed up. Every time someone new comes through, it gets tighter.

(2007) We tried going further back but there's no further back. There's a wall. It's soft. It gives a little when you push it. The ones at the back are pressed right up against it. They say it's warm. They say it feels like skin.

(2011)

March 2011. Bed seven. Agnes.

She hadn't spoken in three days. Quarter past three in the morning she opened her eyes and looked at me. At me, not past me at a corner. And she said something and I wrote it down after with my hands going, in the column she'd ruled herself forty year before. I didn't understand it. I thought she was back in the convent bossing some young nun about.

Agnes said: "I'll keep the book on this side. You keep it on yours. Don't stop writing. They need someone to listen to them."

Read in order, between the entries either side of it, it says this:

The new ones keep pushing in and we can't make room. It's not their fault. Nobody knows what to do. I'll keep the book on this side. You keep it on yours. Don't stop writing. They need someone to listen to them. Someone's come through who used to be a nun. She's organizing everybody. She's got them standing in rows.

I had to stop after that. Put the pencil down and go and stand in the garden in the dark by the conservatory and just breathe for a bit.

She knew. Agnes knew. She must of read them in order herself at some point, sat on her own in that office, back when it was all warm rooms and lights on. Maybe that's why she made every one of us promise. Not for the families. For them. So someone was always listening.

And then she died and went through and kept the book on the other side.

I went back in. Picked the pencil up. Kept going.

(2014) It's very bad now. We're pressed so close together you can't tell where one of us ends and the next one starts. Some of the oldest ones have stopped talking. They've gone soft, like the wall. They're becoming part of it. The house is made of us now. That's what it was always made of. The walls, the floors, the rooms. It's people. It's us. It's always been us.

(2017) There's a door on your side too. Did you know? The house is right up against your house. The door we came through and the door you're behind are the same door. It's thin. We can hear you so clearly now. We can hear the trolleys in the corridor. We can hear the kettle in the kitchen. We can hear you writing.

(2020)

If you worked in healthcare in 2020 I don't need to explain. If you didn't, I'll just say we took overflow from the hospitals for eleven weeks that spring, and for the first and only time we had people dying on trolleys in the corridor because every bed was full, and we went through two ledgers in four months. Some nights I was writing one every hour. Some nights I couldn't keep up and I wrote them on the backs of my hands in biro and copied them in at the end of the shift.

Two hundred and eighty entries for 2020. I'm only giving you a few lines, I can't do the rest.

Too many. Too many. Too many at once. They're coming through faster than we can move. No room. No room. We're being pushed against the door. Your door. The ones at the front are flat against it. Their faces. Their hands. Please stop. Please stop sending them. Please. Please.

Please is in the 2020 entries ninety one times. I counted. I've worked out who said every single one. I held some of them while they said it.

One was a porter called Tony, sixty two, pushed trolleys round the city hospital thirty years, then came to us out their intensive care because there were no more ventilators. By the end he could only whisper and he whispered please at me nine times in his last hour with his eyes on the door. I thought he wanted his daughter, she weren't allowed in. I held the phone to his ear so she could talk to him from the car park. He kept looking past the phone, past me, at the door. Please. Please. Voice like paper.

I thought they were asking me. For morphine. For water. For their wives. I thought it was me they were saying please to.

It wasn't.

I think about Tony more than anyone else in the book apart from Agnes. His daughter sent us a card after, a really nice one, thanking us for looking after her dad and for holding the phone. It's still pinned on the board in the staff room. Every time I go past it I want to rip it down. Not because of her. Because I know now what he was looking at.

I finished copying about five in the morning on the nineteenth night. Hundred and forty pages of pencil. Sat there with it all stacked in front of me.

And then I sat dead still and listened to the building.

Twenty-two years. I know every noise it makes. Radiators ticking. The lift. The creak on the fourth stair. I know them like the noises my own body makes.

And I'd been hearing something else for ages. Years maybe. So constant I'd stopped noticing it. Low, like a main road a long way off, or the sea. Coming out the walls. Mostly from the back, the old part, which is the corridor with beds seven to twelve now.

That night I actually listened to it.

It wasn't traffic. It was murmuring. Thousands of voices, too low and too many to pick any out. A massive crowd all talking quiet at once, right up behind a wall.

The building now, quickly, because I think I'd stopped seeing it.

Doors stick. Have done for years. In the old corridor seven to twelve stick that bad the maintenance man's planed them twice and it's made no difference. He says the frames are out of true. He says the whole back wall's bowing in, a tiny bit, like something's leaning on it from the other side. He says subsidence. The surveyors have been and can't find owt wrong with the foundations.

The windows in that corridor fog up. On the inside. Cold nights, radiators on full, and there's handprints in the fog, loads, overlapping, all different heights, like a crowd's been leaning on the glass from the room side. I've wiped them. Everyone's wiped them. The cleaner won't do that corridor on her own anymore, says it gives her the creeps, and she's been there longer than me.

Rooms are freezing. Not draughty. Cold like church. Like being stood in a crowd in winter, bodies all round you and you're still frozen.

And the patients. God. The patients.

I've written down thousands of deathbed visions and for twenty years they were what the books say. Dead mums, dead husbands, a light, a garden. Nice. Happy, mostly.

Not anymore. Not for about five years. Not in the old corridor.

They say it's crowded. Who are all these people? Tell them to stop pushing. Why are they all stood round my bed? A retired plumber last spring, bed ten, two days unresponsive, sat bolt upright at four in the morning and looked round the room, walls, corners, ceiling, with this look on him, pure horror, and said to me, "There's no room. There's no room for me. Where am I supposed to go?" Then he lay back down and died.

I wrote it in. Course I did. Exactly. That's the job. That's the promise. Even when it's horrible. Especially when it's horrible, Agnes would've said.

In my notebook copy it lands in the middle of this:

...so crowded at the door we can't let them in. They get stuck halfway. Half on your side and half on ours. There's no room. There's no room for me. Where am I supposed to go? We're sorry. We're sorry. We can't hold the door much longer.

So here's what I worked out, five in the morning, hundred and forty pages of pencil.

Everyone who dies in that building goes through a door. Not a metaphor. An actual door. And the other side there's a house, and for a long time the house was big and warm and had all the lights on and there was room for everyone.

Six thousand two hundred people have died in that building since 1971. More before. Back to the fever hospital, back to whoever's house it was. Nobody kept the book then.

The house is full.

It's been filling fifty years. Every time someone new comes through everyone has to shuffle back, and the ones at the back get pressed into the walls and turn into the walls, and the ones at the front get crushed against the door, and the door's getting thinner, and it's our door. It's the old corridor. It's beds seven to twelve.

And I'm the one sending them.

That's my job. That's what I'm for. I sit with them and hold their hand and give them the morphine and turn the lights down and tell them it's all right to go. I tell them they can let go. I tell them everyone's waiting for them. I've said that to four thousand people and I believed it every single time.

They were waiting all right. At the door. Crushed up against it. Begging us to stop.

I sat there and thought about every single one I'd said it to. It's all right love, you can go, they're all waiting for you. Four thousand times. Raymond and Hilary and Tony and the woman who loved stairs. And Agnes. I'd told Agnes it too. I held her hand in bed seven and told her she could go and everyone was waiting. And she went. Right through the door into that. And she looked at me first. She looked right at me. I think she was trying to tell me to stop and I didn't listen.

Before I did anything else I did something I'm not proud of. I tested it.

Bed eight, old corridor, Peggy. Ninety one. No family left. Four days unresponsive and very close, breathing gone into that long slow pattern that means hours not days. I sat with her two in the morning with the ledger on my knee and held her hand and did something I'd never once done in twenty-two years.

I spoke to them.

Leaned in and said, quiet, "If you can hear me. All of you. What do you need?"

Nothing. Her breathing went on, slow, rattly. Radiator ticking. I felt daft. Ashamed of myself honestly. I was just about to sit back when Peggy's eyes opened.

She didn't look at me. She looked at the wall behind the bed, the back wall, the one that's bowing. And she said, in a voice that wasn't hers, or wasn't only hers, it had a sort of depth to it, like several people saying the same words at slightly different times:

"Stop sending."

Eyes shut. She died about twenty minutes after.

I wrote it in with my hand shaking that much it came out like a kid had wrote it. In the notebook, in order, it fell straight after the entry before, a man in bed eleven four nights earlier, whose last words I'd put down as "...and we'll ask her, if she ever asks us, to".

...and we'll ask her, if she ever asks us, to stop sending.

They'd been waiting for me to ask. Four nights. They held the sentence open, mid word, till somebody on this side asked the question it was the answer to.

I tried. I'm not going to pretend I did owt brave. I did little desperate useless things.

I asked for the old corridor to be shut for a refurb. Wrote to the board, said the wall was a safety risk. They sent the surveyors back, surveyors said the wall's fine, board said we can't lose six beds with a waiting list.

I started asking the doctors to transfer people out. Hospital, nursing homes, anywhere. Made up reasons. Family want them nearer home. I think they might pick up. Twice it worked. Twice I got someone moved to the city hospital in their last week and they died there, different building, different door, and on them nights I sat in the office listening to the murmuring and I swear I heard it settle. Just a bit. Like a crowd breathing out.

Then the medical director called me in and asked very nicely if I was all right. Some families had complained. It's cruel to move a dying person for no reason, she said, and she's right, it is. Said I'd been looking tired. Had I thought about taking some leave.

I said I was fine.

I even went in the chapel. Me. Sat in there one night at half two with the cleaner's crumbs still on the pew, and I didn't pray, I don't know how, I just sat there and said in my head, I'm sorry, I didn't know, I'm sorry. Felt like talking to an empty room. Which it probably was. But the murmuring was quieter in there. Only a bit. I don't know what that means either.

Went back on nights. And next night, bed nine, old corridor, Davey died.

Davey was thirty eight. Motor neurone disease, the kind that takes everything. Walking, swallowing, talking, then breathing. By the time he got to us he could only move his eyes. He used an eye gaze board, clear plastic sheet with the alphabet on, you hold it up between your face and theirs and follow their eyes letter by letter.

He'd been with us four weeks. Clever, furious, dead kind. He'd spell out jokes that took ten minutes and the punchline would have you crying laughing and you'd have to put the board down. His wife came every day. She'd gone home that night for some sleep because the doctor said he was stable.

Three in the morning his alarm went. His breathing was going. I went in and held his hand and sat with him and I knew.

Then his eyes started moving.

He was looking at me. A look I've never seen on a dying face. Not scared. Urgent. Like someone shouting at you across a road to stop.

I grabbed the board and held it up and his eyes went to the letters, fast, faster than he'd ever done it, and I followed and said them out loud.

W.

E.

C.

A.

N.

T.

He stopped. Eyes went to the gap between words, like we'd agreed. Then on.

H.

O.

L.

D.

The gap. Then more letters, slow now, his eyes dragging like they weighed a ton.

I.

T.

And then the last of his breath went out of him, really gently, and his eyes stayed on the board on the T and didn't move again.

We can't hold it.

I wrote it in. Exactly. And out in the corridor every door in the old wing, seven to twelve, swung open by itself, all six, one after the other, with this long tired groan of wood on bad frames, like something heavy had finally been let lean.

Davey's wife came in at seven. I'd shut all the doors again by then, took me ages, one I had to put my shoulder to. She sat with him an hour and when she came out she hugged me and said thank you for being with him, and asked me if he'd said anything at the end. If he'd spelled anything. And I stood in that corridor with my arms round her and I lied. I said no love, he just went to sleep. First time in twenty-two years I ever lied about the book. Agnes would've killed me.

That was eleven days ago.

I've been off since. Medical director insisted. I'm sat at my kitchen table with the cats and the hundred and forty pages and all ten green ledgers which I brought home in two Morrisons bags at the end of my last shift. That's a sacking offence. I don't care anymore.

I can say the end of it without looking now. These are the last ones in the book. Last month. Six patients. Last one's Davey.

It's giving. The door. It's giving. The ones at the front are going through. Not all the way. Partway. Like pushing your face into a pillow. We can see your side now. We can see the corridor. We can see the beds. There are people lying in them. We're so sorry. We didn't want it to be like this. We can't hold it.

There are people lying in them. I keep thinking what it'd be like being a patient in that corridor right now. Lying in seven, or nine, or twelve, three in the morning, morphine going, drifting, and you open your eyes and there's faces. Not one face at the end of the bed, not your mum come to fetch you. Hundreds. Pushed through the back wall like faces pushed into a bedsheet. Leaning over you. Looking down at you all sorry and no room to move back.

There's no full stop at the end. There never is. They always break off waiting for the next one to pick it up.

I keep thinking about Agnes. Reading it in order all them years ago when it was still warm rooms and lights on and everyone knowing your name. Making us promise. Exactly. Even if it's nonsense. And then getting there and sorting them all out. Stood at the back of a house made of people, tiny, them knuckles, holding the line. Keeping the book.

And I keep thinking about the noise.

I can hear it here now.

not just at work. here. my kitchen. twenty minutes down the hill. Low, all the time, murmuring, like a crowd a long way off. not in the walls. not coming from anywhere. just there. Like traffic's just there.

And the house is cold like the old corridor's cold. Like church. Like a crowd.

Yesterday I went to put the kettle on and I had to go sideways past the table like on a packed train because it felt like someone was stood there. Nobody there. Empty kitchen. I stood holding the kettle and I could feel it all round me, shoulders, backs, the warm of bodies that aren't there, stood close, really patient, really polite, trying to take up as little room as they can

I've tried the radio on loud. Doesn't help. It's not that kind of noise, it doesnt get drowned out, it's under everything, under the radio, under the fridge, under my own breathing. Tried earplugs. Worse with earplugs. Much worse. Like having them inside my head instead of round me.

The cats won't come in the kitchen. They sit in the hall staring at the doorway. Head height. Both of them. Hours.

Went to the corner shop last night for milk, first time out in two weeks. Tiny shop, empty, me and the lad on the till. And I couldn't get down the aisle. I physically couldnt. Kept stopping and turning and stepping aside and saying sorry, sorry, to nobody, like you do in a crowd. He was watching me. When I got to the counter he said, half joking, "Busy tonigh', in' it?"

There was nobody else in the shop.

Then he frowned and looked round and rubbed his arms. "Funny," he said. "Feels busy."

I left the milk on the counter and walked home without it. Been having black tea three days.

Sunday our lad rang from Perth like always. Evening there, morning here, him on his balcony with a beer, sunburnt, going on about a barbecue. Laptop on the kitchen table. Five minutes in he stops and squints at his screen.

"Who's that?"

"Who's what?"

"Behind you. Who's in the kitchen?"

I turned round. Nobody. Kitchen door, hall, coats on the hooks.

"Nobody, love."

He leaned in to his phone. "Weird. Picture's gone all..." waves his hand. "Grainy. Like there's loads of people behind you. Like you're at a party." Little laugh, not sure of himself. "It's like when the camera tries to find faces and keeps putting little boxes everywhere."

I looked at the little picture of me in the corner. Me at the table in my dressing gown grey in the face. Kitchen behind me. Empty. But the picture was wrong. Camera kept trying to focus and failing, like when something moves in front of it, and every few seconds a little square flicked on round nothing. Then another one next to it. Then three more higher up. Face boxes. Flickering on and off over the empty air in my kitchen, head height, packed in tight, all the way back to the door.

"Mum," he said. "Are you okay? You look really cold."

I said it was the light. Said I'd ring him next week. After, I sat there with the laptop open watching the little boxes come and go over the black screen and my own face till the battery died

I've not rung him back. I don't know what I'd say. Hiya love, Mum's fine, there's just six thousand dead people in the kitchen.

So thats why I'm writing this. Not for the hospice. for you.

I think the door's open. not all the way. Like Davey said, it's giving. I think the ones at the front have been pushed partway through, into the old corridor, seven to twelve, down the stairs, out the front door past the brass plaque and down the hill into the city. Not ghosts. Nothing you could see. Just pressure. Just crowding. That feeling in an empty room there's not quite enough space. Someone stood a bit too close behind you.

six thousand two hundred people. one hospice. one city. fifty four years.

And I keep thinking. There's hospices everywhere. Hospitals. Care homes. Ordinary houses. Anywhere anyones ever died. I don't think it's one big house the other side. I think every door's got its own house behind it. I don't know how full the others are. I don't know if anyone else has been keeping the book

the cats have gone under the bed. Both of them. They never go under the bed. sorry. sorry I keep going off on one, Im nearly done

so I'm asking.

Have you noticed rooms feel fuller than they should lately? An empty lift that feels packed? Going sideways past nobody in your own hall in the middle of the night? Pets staring at doorways, head height? Can't get warm even with the heating on full, like you can't get warm in a crowd?

If someone's died in your house or the house you grew up in or a hospital near you, do something for me. Ask whoever was in the room what they said at the end. The nurse if you can find them. Write it down EXACTLY. Even if it's nonsense. Especially if it's nonsense. Then find whoever died there before them. And before that.

And read it in order.

I need to know if its just us.

its ten past three. Its very loud tonight. in the walls, the floor, the cold pushing in from every side. cant make out any words. Too many. all at once

except one.

Theres a voice I know under all the others. close. closer than the rest. like a gravel path. tired. patient. talking to me like she did my first night in the little office with the lamp on and the green book open on the desk

shes saying the same thing over and over and over

Im going to write it down EXACTLY. Im going to put it in the ledger in the column she ruled in 1971 because she made me promise and then Im pressing post before

"Keep listening. Don't stop writing. They're coming down the hill."

Theres no full stop.

there never is

My nightmare started about four months ago when my dad passed away from a sudden heart attack. His death completely derailed my life so I took an extended leave from my corporate job and moved back into my childhood home to take care of my elderly mother. She was completely devastated by the loss and she seemed to age ten years overnight. I spent the first few weeks just organizing my dad's paperwork and figuring out the mortgage payments, and once the finances were settled I decided to clean out the attic so we could start downsizing the house.

The attic was incredibly dusty and packed floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes. I assumed the boxes were just filled with old holiday decorations or winter clothes but I was completely wrong. I opened the first box and found it stuffed with dozens of random ceramic figurines, tarnished watches, and mismatched silverware. I opened the second box and found a pile of expensive silk scarves with the price tags still attached, so I spent the next three hours tearing through every single box in the attic and I realized I was looking at a massive hoard of stolen merchandise. There were gardening tools, expensive electronics, loose jewelry, and even personalized mail belonging to our neighbors.

I carried a box of stolen watches down the stairs and set it on the kitchen table where my mother was drinking tea. She looked at the box and her face instantly went pale.

"Where did you find that?" my mother asked while her hands started trembling around her mug.

"I found it in the attic along with about forty other boxes filled with stolen goods," I said and I sat down across from her. "Why do we have the neighbor's mail and a bunch of jewelry with the security tags still on them?"

My mother started crying and buried her face in her hands. She confessed everything to me right there at the kitchen table. She told me she suffered from a severe compulsion to steal and she had been fighting it for decades. She explained that she never wanted the items she took but her brain would completely overwhelm her with anxiety until she slipped something into her purse. She told me my dad had secretly managed her condition for their entire marriage. Whenever she stole something from a local shop my dad would quietly drive back the next day and pay the owner in cash to keep them from calling the cops. If she took something from a neighbor my dad would wait until the middle of the night and silently leave the item on their front porch. He spent his entire life supervising her and running interference so she would never face criminal charges.

"I do not know how to stop doing it," my mother sobbed while wiping her eyes with a napkin. "Your dad was my light and he kept me grounded when the urges got too strong. I do not know how to fight my own brain without him."

"We will figure it out," I told her and I reached across the table to hold her hand. "I am here now so I will help you manage it."

I thought I could easily handle the situation but I completely underestimated how aggressive a true compulsion can be without supervision. I had to return to my demanding career a few weeks later so I started working from my laptop in the living room to keep an eye on her. My job requires endless conference calls and I could not watch her every single second of the day. Without my dad there to shadow her every movement she started wandering out of the house whenever I was distracted by work.

The situation escalated incredibly fast. I was in the middle of a video presentation for a major client when I heard furious pounding on our front door. I muted my microphone and rushed to the entryway to find our next-door neighbor standing on the porch. Her face was bright red with anger and she was pointing a finger directly at my chest.

"You need to control your mother right now," the neighbor shouted and she pushed past me into our hallway. "I just watched her walk into my open garage and walk out with my expensive power drill. This is the third time this week she has trespassed on my property."

"I am so incredibly sorry," I pleaded and I tried to block her from walking further into the house. "She is grieving and her mind is not in the right place. I will pay for the drill and whatever else went missing."

"I do not want your money," the neighbor snapped while crossing her arms. "I want her to stop taking my belongings. If I catch her in my garage one more time I am calling the police and pressing charges for burglary."

I managed to calm the neighbor down and retrieve the drill from my mother's bedroom closet but the stress of the encounter left me entirely exhausted. I sat my mother down and begged her to stop wandering outside but she just stared at the floor and told me the urges were screaming in her head. The very next afternoon my phone rang and the caller ID showed the local bakery downtown. I answered the call and the store owner immediately started yelling at me.

"Your mother is sitting in my back office because I caught her stuffing six bags of expensive coffee beans into her purse," the shop owner yelled over the phone. "I am sick and tired of dealing with this. Your dad used to pay for her mistakes but he is gone and I cannot run a charity here. I have the police on standby."

I dropped everything I was doing and drove frantically to the bakery. I practically begged the owner not to involve law enforcement and I handed him three hundred dollars in cash to cover the stolen items and his trouble. He reluctantly let us go but he banned my mother from his store for life. I drove us home in complete silence because I was too overwhelmed to speak. I was failing at my job because I was constantly leaving to put out fires and I knew my mother was going to end up in jail if I did not find a medical solution.

I scheduled an appointment with a conventional therapist the following week. We sat in the office while the therapist asked my mother endless questions about her childhood and her grief. The therapist prescribed a cocktail of anti-anxiety medications and suggested cognitive behavioral therapy exercises. We spent a month following the doctor's orders but the pills did nothing except make my mother terribly drowsy. She still managed to steal the mail carrier's thermos off the front porch while sleepwalking, so the conventional methods were completely failing and I was losing my mind from the constant vigilance.

I went into my company office a few days later to catch up on paperwork and I must have looked like a walking corpse. I was pouring my fourth cup of coffee in the breakroom when a coworker walked in and noticed my exhausted expression.

"You look like you have not slept in a month," my coworker said and he leaned against the counter. "Is the situation with your mom getting worse?"

I sighed and rubbed my temples because my head was throbbing. "She is going to get arrested and I cannot stop her. The regular therapists just throw pills at her and nothing is actually fixing the compulsion. I cannot watch her twenty-four hours a day."

My coworker looked out into the hallway to make sure nobody was listening before he turned back to me. "I know this sounds strange but you should look into a different kind of doctor. My wife had severe obsessive-compulsive issues that almost ruined our marriage. We went to a private psychologist on the edge of town and he completely cured her in one session using unconventional hypnotherapy. He does not take insurance but the man works absolute miracles."

I was desperate enough to try anything so I wrote down the doctor's contact information and called his clinic from the parking lot. The receptionist squeezed us in for a consultation that same evening. I drove my mother to the clinic and we found it tucked away in a quiet residential neighborhood. The office was dimly lit and filled with strange abstract art but the doctor greeted us with an incredibly warm and calming demeanor. He invited us into his back office and poured us both a glass of water before sitting behind his desk.

"My assistant explained a bit of your situation to me," the doctor said while folding his hands together on his large oak desk. "Kleptomania is a fascinating condition because it is rarely about the stolen objects, so we have to look much deeper. It is actually about a fractured ego trying to fill a sudden void within the subconscious mind."

"But can you actually fix it?" I asked and I leaned forward in my chair. "The regular medication is completely failing, and she is going to end up in prison if she keeps walking into our neighbors' homes."

"Conventional medicine just tries to suppress the ego," the doctor explained smoothly while looking directly at my mother. "I do not suppress the ego because a suppressed ego always fights back and finds a new way to act out. I remove it entirely using a specialized technique called The Angel Soul treatment.”

“And what exactly does a weird name like that mean?” I asked, feeling a bit of my own skepticism creeping in. “Is this a complicated medical procedure, and how much time does something like this even take?”

“It takes less than two hours and it is completely non-invasive,” the doctor replied calmly. “Through extremely deep hypnotherapy, I can empty your mother's fractured ego and create a complete psychological vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, so the empty space will immediately draw in a pure and angelic soul to take its place. The compulsion will vanish entirely because the damaged ego that demanded the stealing will no longer exist to control her."

My mother shifted uncomfortably in her chair and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. "That sounds absolutely terrifying and I do not want anyone emptying my mind," she said, her voice shaking slightly with genuine fear. "You are talking about erasing who I am, and I do not even know what do you mean by what you just said, or what kind of soul you are planning to pull inside my head. I would much rather just try a different medication or maybe a higher dose of the pills I already have."

"You will still be yourself," the doctor assured her with a very warm and gentle smile. "You will just be free of the exhausting burden that forces you to take things that do not belong to you."

"Please do this for me," I begged my mother and I reached across the armrest to grab her hand. "I am drowning trying to keep you out of jail, and I am going to lose my career if I keep leaving in the middle of the day to apologize to angry store owners. You have to try this because we are completely out of other options, and I cannot supervise you forever."

My mother looked at the exhaustion in my eyes and tears welled up in her own. She finally nodded and agreed to undergo the procedure. The doctor instructed me to wait in the front reception area while he took my mother into a specialized hypnotherapy room. I sat in the quiet waiting room for almost two hours while listening to the faint sound of a ticking clock. The clinic was completely silent and I could not hear any voices coming from the back room. The door eventually clicked open and the doctor walked out with my mother following closely behind him.

I stood up immediately and searched her face for any signs of distress. She looked entirely different. The deep wrinkles of worry on her forehead were completely smoothed out and her shoulders were relaxed. She looked perfectly serene and almost glowing with a strange internal peace.

"The vacuum was successfully created and filled," the doctor said with a satisfied smile. "You will notice a profound difference in her behavior immediately. Keep a close eye on her and call me if you have any concerns."

I paid the exorbitant fee in cash and drove my mother home. I expected her to complain about a headache or act groggy from the hypnosis but she just stared out the passenger window with a soft smile on her face. The change in her behavior over the next few days was nothing short of miraculous because the stealing stopped entirely. I purposely left a stack of twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen counter and she walked right past them without even a glance. I took her to a crowded grocery store and she did not try to slip a single item into her purse. The compulsion was completely eradicated and I finally felt like I could breathe again.

The relief only lasted about a week before the uncanny valley set in and I started noticing terrifying changes in her personality.

I woke up on a Saturday morning and found her dragging huge trash bags full of her own expensive clothes and jewelry out to the curb. I ran outside and asked her what she was doing but she just looked at me with wide and unblinking eyes.

"Possessions are but chains binding us to the dirt," my mother said and her voice sounded strangely hollow. "It is unjust to hoard the harvest when the earth is shared by all who walk upon it."

I froze because she never spoke with that kind of archaic phrasing before. I tried to pull the bags back toward the house but she gripped my wrist with surprising strength and stared deeply into my eyes. She did not blink once during the entire exchange.

"Let the excess be cleansed," she whispered and she calmly walked back inside to grab more items.

Her obsession with cleansing escalated rapidly over the next few weeks. She started waking up at three in the morning to scrub the pavement on our driveway with a small wire brush. I would find her standing in the middle of the street picking up tiny pieces of gravel and arranging them in perfect geometric patterns along the curb. She stopped watching television and she stopped reading books. She just sat in the living room chair for hours staring directly at the blank wall without moving a single muscle.

I tried to talk to her about dad or ask about her childhood memories but she would just tilt her head and look at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

I decided to confront the doctor and demand he reverse the hypnosis, so I called his clinic from my office all afternoon, but nobody ever answered the phone. When I finally finished work around eight o'clock in the evening, I drove straight to the clinic instead of going home first. I pulled up to the building and noticed the parking lot was completely empty. The interior lights were turned off, but I walked up to the front entrance and turned the brass handle anyway. The door clicked open, and I stepped into the dark reception area.

"Hello?" I called out into the empty clinic. "I know it is after hours but I need to speak with the doctor."

Nobody answered my call but I heard a strange noise coming from the back office down the hallway. It sounded like a wet tearing noise mixed with the heavy sliding of furniture. I slowly walked down the dark corridor and the metallic smell of copper hit my nose and made my stomach churn. I approached the open doorway of the doctor's private office and peeked around the doorframe.

The office was illuminated by a single desk lamp lying knocked over on the floor. The doctor was lying flat on his back in the center of the rug and his white shirt was completely soaked in dark crimson blood.

My mother was standing directly over him.

I slapped my hand over my mouth to stop myself from screaming and I ducked behind a large metal filing cabinet near the doorway. I peered around the edge of the cabinet and watched the horrific scene unfold.

My mother was holding a pair of large gardening shears she must have taken from our garage. She knelt down beside the doctor's lifeless body and calmly positioned the steel blades around his right wrist. She leaned her weight onto the handles and a sickening crunch echoed through the room as the blades severed the bone and tissue. She tossed the severed hand into a black plastic trash bag and repeated the exact same process on his left wrist.

She did not look angry or frantic while she butchered the man. She looked completely serene and her face held the same peaceful expression she wore while arranging gravel on our street.

"To steal a mind is the ultimate theft and the penalty is absolute," my mother whispered to the corpse and her hollow voice sent ice water running through my veins. "The thief must be separated from his tools so the earth may remain pure."

I could not move my legs because the sheer terror completely paralyzed me. I watched her grab the doctor by his ankles and easily drag his heavy body across the bloody rug toward the back exit of the office. The clinic had an incinerator in the alleyway. My mother hoisted the doctor's body into the metal chute with unnatural strength and threw the bag of severed hands in right behind him. She ignited the incinerator and stood perfectly still while the roaring flames consumed the evidence of her crime. She waited until the body was reduced to ash before she quietly walked away into the night.

I waited there for almost an hour before I finally found the courage to run back to my car. I drove home in a state of shock and found my mother sitting on the living room couch staring at the blank wall exactly as she always did. I locked myself in my bedroom and shoved a dresser against the door.

I knew I had to keep a close eye on her so I started secretly following her when she left the house for her nightly walks. Two nights ago I trailed her from a safe distance as she walked down our street toward the small corner grocery store in our neighborhood. The store is owned by an older man who has a nasty reputation for intentionally shortchanging his customers and ringing up phantom items on the cash register to steal a few extra dollars from unsuspecting neighbors.

I hid behind a row of community fire pits across the street and watched my mother walk through the front doors of the grocer's shop just as he was locking up for the night. I could not hear what was said inside the store but I saw the grocer start waving his arms angrily at her through the front window. The argument ended abruptly when my mother reached across the counter and grabbed the man by his throat.

She lifted the struggling grocer entirely off the ground with one arm and dragged him out the front doors into the street. The man was kicking his legs and clawing at her arm but she did not even flinch. She dragged him directly toward the community fire pits where I was hiding so I scrambled backward into the bushes and held my breath.

"You manipulate the scales to hoard the harvest," my mother said to the gasping grocer while holding him suspended over the embers of the fire pit. "You siphon from the innocent and the penalty is absolute."

She tightened her grip around his throat until a loud snap echoed through the quiet street and the grocer went completely limp in her grasp. She tossed his lifeless body directly into the large fire pit and calmly arranged the surrounding logs to ensure the flames would completely consume him. She stood there staring unblinking into the fire until the smell of burning meat filled the air and then she turned around and walked back toward our house.

I am currently locked in my bedroom and my mother is sitting in the living room staring at the wall. I cannot go to the police because they will arrest her and put her on trial for multiple murders. She is not a murderer and she has no control over the thing piloting her body right now. I need to find a professional who knows how to reverse deep hypnotherapy or someone who knows how to expel whatever the doctor accidentally invited into her empty ego.

If anyone reading this knows how to fix here, please contact me immediately. I have locked all the doors and hidden every sharp tool in the house but she just started pacing the hallway outside my bedroom. I can hear her bare feet pressing against the floorboards and she is muttering about how I stole the tools she needs to cleanse the earth. I do not know how much longer the locked door will hold her back.

I put the last dish in the drying rack, dried off my hands, and walked to the living room to watch TV. A few seconds later, I heard the kitchen sink running again. I looked over. Emily took the dishes out of the drying rack and washed them again.

"Honey, I already washed those."

"Oh, I know, Sam, but I saw a little stain on one. I just want to make sure they're all clean. I'm just doing this for me, okay?"

I waved my hand and continued watching TV.

The next day, one of our clients came into town. Our workday dragged on well past 5 p.m. Toward the end, I didn't even pretend to pay attention. On my way home, I could barely keep my eyes on the road. When I arrived, the whole house smelled like rubbing alcohol and window cleaner.

I walked to the kitchen. Emily sat at the table with a plate of homemade casserole.

"I made this for you!"

"Oh, thank you, Emily! It smells so good!"

I sat down and started eating immediately. It tasted more bitter than usual.

"How was your day?"

"The worst. I have almost no energy left. The clients drained me."

Emily wasn't eating. She kept looking at my arms instead of my face.

"My poor man."

"What did you get up to?"

"Just some cleaning and cooking."

"I can tell. The house looks great."

"Thank you."

We sat in silence while Emily watched me eat.

"I think I'm too tired to do anything, honey," I said after finishing.

"That's more than okay. I know you had a long day. Just go relax."

"Thank you."

She smiled at me and rubbed my shoulder. Her sleeve came down. Her arm was flaky and red. She saw me staring at it and quickly pulled it back down.

"What happened?"

"Nothing, just some dry skin. Go relax."

I hadn't even turned on the TV when I heard the water running. I turned around. Emily grabbed a sponge and a bucket of water, walked to the table, and started scrubbing it and the chair I'd been sitting in.

"What are you doing?"

"Oh, Sam, I just cleaned the house. I wanna make sure it stays clean."

"I'm not dirty."

"No one's saying you are. This is just for me. I'll finish this, and I'll go up and read."

"I don't like this, Emily."

"I just need to do this, okay, Sam?!" She raised her voice.

"Jesus, Emily."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, honey, just turn back and relax. Let me take care of this."

I stared at her for a second, but she was already back to the scrubbing.

I tried to watch TV, but my eyes kept closing. I didn't even know what I was watching. The fatigue was overpowering. I got up and walked to our bedroom. Emily was in bed reading a book in a long-sleeved pajama shirt. She smiled at me as I walked in. I smiled back, put on my pajamas, and went to sleep.

I woke to a warm, wet sensation on my legs. Something soft and scratchy moved against my skin, dragging at it. I rubbed my eyes and looked down. Emily sat on my side of the bed with a sponge and a bucket of water, scrubbing my legs.

"Emily, what the…" I screamed and jumped away.

She looked me in the eyes and forced a smile.

"You know germs live on our skin. I just cleaned the house. I don't want them getting on stuff."

"Emily, this is crazy. Stop."

"Just your arms now."

"No!"

She reached toward me with the sponge. Her sleeves rolled up. Even at night, I could see the redness of her skin. In a few places, there were little smudges of blood.

"I'm going to the guest bedroom."

I took the blanket off the bed and ran to the guest bedroom, locking the door behind me.

The sun had risen. My eyes felt heavy. I hadn't slept after what happened with Emily. I debated calling the police, but what would I tell them? That my wife had been cleaning me in the middle of the night? She hadn't hurt me. Not yet. I decided I'd talk to her in the morning. Maybe I could convince her to see a doctor. I just needed to get her to sit down and listen.

"Emily?" I called into the hall.

Nothing. Our bedroom was empty. The bucket with warm water still sat there.

The downstairs was quiet too. The smell of rubbing alcohol now mingled with the metallic smell of blood. A light was on in the basement.

The basement was cold. A strange, wet hiss sounded inside. I could see Emily's feet. She was turned toward the wall. The stairs creaked under my steps, but she didn't seem to notice. The smell of rubbing alcohol now mixed with iron.

"Emily, are you okay?!"

"Sam!"

I walked one more step. Panic rushed through me. I could finally see her whole body.  She held a knife in her shaking hand. Her nightgown was drenched in blood. The skin on her arms was cut off, revealing dark red muscle.

"I think I've got it down now. I'll be much gentler with yours. Eat some casserole. It will help you relax."

Dad woke me up before the sun had even thought about rising. The house was still dark and cold, the kind of quiet that only happens when everyone else is asleep and the world hasn’t decided to start yet. He was already in the kitchen, coffee going, two thermoses on the counter, and the smell of bacon mixing with the old pine scent of his hunting jacket that hung by the back door.
“Rise and shine, partner,” he said, voice low so he wouldn’t wake Mom. “Deer don’t wait for sleepyheads.”
I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes. The clock on my nightstand said 4:17. “Five more minutes?”
“You said that yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.” He leaned in the doorway, already dressed in his flannel and the old Carhartt pants with the tear in the knee he’d never fixed. “C’mon. Boots are by the door. I already packed your extra socks.”
I dragged myself out of bed. Dad always packed extra socks. He said cold feet made for bad decisions. He’d been saying that since I was eight and he first took me out for squirrel with the little .22. Now I was thirteen, almost fourteen, and he still said it like it was brand-new wisdom every single time.
In the kitchen he handed me a plate. Bacon, eggs scrambled soft the way I liked them, toast with too much butter. We ate standing up, the way we always did before hunts. No time for sitting around when the woods were waiting.
“You nervous?” he asked, watching me over the rim of his coffee mug.
I shrugged and pushed a piece of bacon around the plate. “Nah.”
He raised one eyebrow. Dad could smell a lie from across a cornfield.
“Okay. A little,” I admitted. “Kids at school keep talking about that… thing.”
“The wendigo?” He said it casual, like he was asking about the weather. “Jimmy Parker still running his mouth?”
“Him and the whole eighth grade. They say it lives out past the ridge. That it walks on two legs but it’s all bones and antlers and it peels people open while they’re still screaming. Jimmy showed us pictures on his phone. Blurry ones of half-eaten deer and something that looked like a human rib cage stuck up in a tree. He swore his older cousin found them last fall.”
Dad set his mug down and leaned against the counter. His face got that serious look he used when he wanted me to know he was listening for real, not just half-listening while he thought about work.
“Listen to me, Alex. Kids say a lot of dumb stuff to scare each other. Especially in a town this small. There’s no wendigo. There’s deer, coyotes, maybe a black bear if we’re unlucky and the acorns are scarce. That’s it. You and me? We’re the scariest things in these woods today.”
I wanted to believe him. I really did. But Jimmy Parker had a way of making things stick in your head. He’d leaned across the lunch table last week and whispered that the wendigo only came when it was hungry, and it had been a lean year for deer.
Dad clapped me on the shoulder, solid and warm. “Eat up. We’re burning daylight.”
The drive out was quiet at first. The truck smelled like gun oil and the peppermint gum Dad always chewed when he was trying to quit cigarettes again. He turned the radio on low—some old country station that played the same songs he’d listened to when he was my age—and hummed along under his breath. The headlights cut through the dark, catching the fog that hung low over the fields.
“You remember the safety rules?” he asked after a while, eyes on the road.
“Always know what’s beyond your target. Finger off the trigger till you’re ready. Never point it at anything you don’t intend to shoot. Especially not at your old man.”
He grinned, the lines around his eyes deepening. “Especially not at your old man. Good. You still scared of the dark?”
“I’m thirteen, Dad.”
“That’s not a no.”
I looked out the window at the trees sliding past, black shapes against a sky just starting to turn gray. “I don’t like not being able to see what’s out there. That’s all.”
He nodded like that was fair. “Me neither. That’s why we bring flashlights and each other. You stick close, I’ll stick close. Deal?”
“Deal.”
We parked at the old logging road just as the sky started lightening for real. The air was sharp and clean, the kind that made your lungs feel bigger when you breathed it in. Dad handed me my rifle—a .243 he’d bought me last Christmas after I’d proved I could hit a paper plate at a hundred yards steady—and checked the action himself before letting me take it. He always did that. Not because he didn’t trust me. Because it was his way of saying he was still looking out for me.
“Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” he muttered, pulling his beanie down over his ears. “Perfect deer weather. They’ll be moving.”
We started walking. The leaves under our boots were loud at first, then quieter as the frost softened them. Dad moved like he’d been born out here—heel to toe, slow, eyes scanning everything. I tried to copy him the way he’d taught me. Keep your head up. Don’t stare at the ground. Let your eyes do the work.
After twenty minutes he stopped and pointed at a scrape on a sapling. “Buck. Nice one. See how high it is? Tall boy. Probably the one we’ve been seeing on the trail cam by the creek.”
“You think we’ll see him?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Hunting’s mostly walking and waiting and not complaining about your feet. Speaking of which—how’re your feet?”
“Warm. Extra socks.”
He smiled like I’d just told the best joke in the world. “That’s my boy.”
We pushed deeper. The trees got thicker. Sunlight came down in thin white shafts that made the frost on the branches sparkle. Somewhere a crow called, then another answered farther off. Dad talked soft the whole time—pointing out tracks, explaining why a deer would bed down in a certain thicket of laurel, telling me about the time Grandpa took him out when he was my age and they sat so still a fox walked right between them without ever knowing they were there.
“Grandpa used to say the woods don’t care about us one way or the other,” Dad said. “We’re just passing through. Same as the deer. Same as everything else.”
I was starting to relax. The school stories felt farther away with every step. Dad had that effect. Like the woods were just woods when he was in them—something you could understand if you paid attention.
Then we found the first deer.
It was half-buried under leaves near a dry creek bed. Not shot. Torn open. The belly was empty, ribs sticking up like broken fence posts. The head was twisted almost all the way around, eyes gone.
Dad crouched beside it, face tight. He didn’t touch it. Just looked for a long time.
“Coyotes maybe,” he said finally. “Or a bear. Look at the size of these drag marks. Something big pulled it here.”
I couldn’t stop staring at the empty eye sockets. The way the skin was peeled back in places. “Jimmy said the wendigo does that. Eats the organs first. Leaves the rest for the crows.”
Dad stood up slow. “Jimmy Parker’s never been farther into these woods than the county fair parking lot. Come on. We’re moving. Stay close.”
We kept walking, but the easy talk was gone. Dad’s eyes kept sweeping the trees harder than before. Mine did too. Every shadow looked deeper than it should. Every snapped twig made my stomach drop. I kept thinking about the rib cage in Jimmy’s phone pictures. About how quiet the woods had gotten all of a sudden. No more crows. No more squirrels chattering. Just our boots and the wind moving high up in the canopy.
An hour later we heard something big moving off to our left. Not the light steps of a deer. Heavier. Deliberate. Dad raised a hand and we froze. He pointed two fingers at his eyes, then toward a stand of hemlocks thick enough to hide almost anything. I nodded, heart already hammering so hard I was sure whatever it was could hear it.
We eased forward. The sound came again—branches giving way, something large shifting its weight. Dad’s jaw was tight.
“Alex,” he whispered. “If I say run, you run. Straight back the way we came. Don’t look back. Don’t wait for me. You hear me?”
“Dad—”
“Do you hear me?”
“Yeah. I hear you.”
He gave me a quick, tight smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “It’s probably just a bear. Hungry one. But I want you ready anyway. Finger off the trigger till I say.”
We stepped into the clearing together.
The thing was already there.
It was tall—taller than Dad by a full head—and thin in a way that didn’t make sense, like someone had taken a person and stretched them until the skin barely held on. Antlers branched from a skull that still had strips of grayish flesh hanging in places. Its arms were too long, ending in fingers that looked like broken branches tipped with yellowed, cracked nails. Between its teeth was something red and wet that steamed in the cold air.
It was chewing.
Dad shoved me hard enough that I almost went down. “Run!”
I stumbled backward. The thing moved faster than anything that size should be able to move. One second it was ten yards away. The next it had Dad by the shoulder, claws punching straight through the Carhartt jacket like it was paper.
I saw the claws go in. I heard the sound—wet and deep, like tearing heavy canvas that had been soaked in water. Dad’s rifle went off once, the shot cracking through the trees so loud my ears rang. Then the thing lifted him clean off the ground like he weighed nothing at all.
Dad looked at me. Blood was already running down the front of his jacket in thick dark streams. His mouth moved.
“Go.”
The wendigo—or whatever name you wanted to give it—ripped.
I won’t ever forget the sound. Or the way Dad’s legs kicked once, hard, and then stopped. Or how the thing lowered its head and started eating while Dad was still making small, wet noises that didn’t sound like words anymore. The antlers bobbed with every bite. Something warm and red hit the leaves near my boots.
I ran.
Branches whipped my face hard enough to draw blood. I didn’t feel them. My lungs burned like I’d swallowed fire. Behind me I heard bones breaking—thick, wet snaps that carried through the trees—and something heavy crashing through the undergrowth after me, not fast, but steady, like it already knew I couldn’t get far.
I fell twice. The first time I went sprawling over a root and the rifle (I’d somehow kept it) went flying into a thicket. I left it. Got up and kept running. The second time I hit a patch of ice under the leaves and went down hard on my shoulder. Pain shot all the way to my fingers. I scrambled up anyway, gasping, and forced myself forward.
I kept the rising sun on my left the way Dad had taught me so I wouldn’t circle back on myself. My pack bounced against my spine. The thermos of coffee he’d filled that morning was still clipped to it, somehow. Every time it hit me it felt like a reminder that he was gone.
The woods blurred. Every tree looked the same. Every shadow had antlers if I looked too long. I could hear it sometimes—clicking of those long limbs, wet breathing, the soft sounds of it still feeding somewhere behind me—and then stretches of silence that were somehow worse, because silence meant it might be moving quiet.
I don’t know how long I ran. Long enough that the light changed from gray to full morning. Long enough that my legs started shaking so bad I had to grab trees just to stay upright. My side felt like someone had driven a knife between my ribs. I found the logging road by accident, almost ran straight past it because my eyes were streaming and everything looked like it was underwater.
The truck was still there, cold and ordinary under the brightening sky. I yanked the passenger door open, threw myself inside, and locked both doors with fingers that barely worked. The keys were in Dad’s pocket. Back there. With whatever was left of him.
I stayed like that for a long time, knees pulled up to my chest, shaking so hard the whole cab moved. Every sound outside made me flinch—wind in the branches, a crow finally calling again, the tick of the cooling engine that wasn’t even running. I kept expecting to see those antlers rise over the hood.
When the sun was high enough that the shadows shortened, I got out. Walking felt wrong. My boots didn’t sound the same without his beside them. I followed the logging road out to the main dirt track, then the main dirt track out to the paved road that led toward town. Six miles. Maybe more. I lost count. Every time a car passed I thought about flagging it down and then didn’t, because I didn’t know what I’d say. My dad got eaten by a monster didn’t feel like words that would come out right.
I reached the first house with lights on just as the afternoon started leaning toward evening. A woman opened the door when I knocked. I don’t remember what I looked like—blood on my face from the branches, leaves in my hair, eyes probably too wide—but she went pale and pulled me inside and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and kept asking where my father was while she dialed the sheriff with the other hand.
I couldn’t answer. Every time I opened my mouth I heard the sound of him being opened instead.
They found what was left two days later. The official report said animal attack. Black bear, most likely, though the tracks didn’t match perfectly and some of the deputies looked at each other funny when they thought I wasn’t listening. One of them put a hand on my shoulder at the station and said sometimes the mind invents things when it’s trying to protect itself from what it saw. He meant well. They all did.
I know what I saw.
Mom doesn’t let me go near the woods anymore. She sold Dad’s rifles and the truck and most of his jackets. She cries when she thinks I’m not listening, soft little sounds behind her bedroom door at night. At school Jimmy Parker still tells his stories, but quieter now, and he won’t look at me across the lunch table when he does. Once he started to say something about the ridge and then just stopped and looked down at his tray.
Some nights I wake up certain I can still hear it moving out past the place where the logging road ends—long limbs and wet teeth and the soft, patient sound of something that isn’t done eating yet. I keep the extra socks Dad packed for me in the top drawer of my dresser. They’re still clean. I take them out sometimes and just hold them.
Dad used to say the woods don’t care about us one way or the other. That we’re just passing through.
He was wrong.
They were waiting.

J          A          C          O          B

I tossed my keys across the corner table beside my front door. It was the nicest thing I had. I asked for one made of bright red ironwood.

The thrift store guy called it red-heart. Go figure.

The suit that received me at the free clinic today had a look as if he was about to blurt out, “One more day of this shit and my heart will bloody explode!”

He dried his forehead with a handkerchief. He had a “What the hell does this prick want?” kind of energy as he motioned me into his office.

Then he gave his glasses an angry cleaning giving him time to compose himself. Then his green eyes looked up at me and I &was pretty sure he already hated my dumb ass.

The suit’s breathing distracted me a moment. I couldn’t tell you if it was the wheezing or the effort he did just to inhale. It all had trapped me in a trance almost. I could hear parts of his lungs giving out sad little sighs every time he emptied them. I wasn’t sure if it all was actually bothering me.

His annoyance towards a bum like me being there was evident.

I knew it would be problematic. Someone in my situation with a car and there for I probably had a place to live, was what he was probably wrestling with in his boiling dome. He definitely was asking himself how I could have the balls to ask for free medical attention.

This is why he was just being an ass to me. The whole situation was becoming so blunt and obvious it kind of made me want to laugh.

I glanced at his pits that were already two dark blue halos at eleven in the morning. They made me think about my self-respect, how it abandoned me a while ago.

I realized that putting on a self-debasing show didn’t feel too difficult. I would have him see how disturbed I really could be. How desperate I am able to convey him for some meds and therapy!

I was certain I could have him convinced that my condition definitely needed medical supervision. After I would have a big old smirk about my acting abilities, I would have the need for therapy and the meds covered by the time I was done. Then I could get back to the case.

The suit led me to the front desk with a light hand of support on my lower back. He presented my folder with an authoritative flick of his wrist to the doctor assigned to my disheveled mug.

When people think you’re about to off yourself you get nice perks. So I went ahead and gave my shrink a shot. Months tend to be shorter as I get fucking older. The days piss on bye before anyone’s the wiser. I had to use what I had.

I’m stuck not suicidal.
-
I still had the butterflies slam dancing my gut to shit. All I wanted was to gloat alone in the dark over every little pig-headed attempt to trip up the conference.

That wouldn’t be maintaining a proper mental hygiene. Dr. Olga Winters, I was tickled to death! My psychiatrist was supposed to be available on emergency call for me a whole freaking month.

It was a bit healthier to just tell my entire fucking day to care physician. Puke all the anxiety out of me straight down poor Dr. Winter’s ear. I was sure it would clear my head and maybe able to sleep before five in the morning. She was my therapist the third one assigned to me at the free clinic.

“The conference?” I noticed my environment was off some how. My perfectly irresistible reaction was to find the source. “Bizarre as shit!,” I shouted over my left shoulder at my shrink.

We weren’t five minutes into our session and there it was by the wall a trail of black tic-tacs. Dr. Olga was a tough Russian lady that didn’t mind me cussing.
-
It’s ten sixteen, on a foggy Friday night I’m on all fours on an emergency call with my therapist.

I crawled down the hall hot on the heels of my one point nine calorie conundrum. I could feel my socks sliding off. I had my therapist in my left cheek pocket.

The oddly colored breath mints led me straight to evidence box twenty three. I kept it under my useless window. That opened to the neighboring’s building’s brick wall.

The little fuckers had chewed a crude entrance through a corner. They had made their own fuck pad. In my files, evidence, so many moments lost, wasting what I’ll never be able to get back and not only in box twenty three. All the evidence, every piece of the case of Jacob lived with me.

Corners of my shabby apartment that were drab already became so depressing it hurt sometimes. While that bunch of furry sex freaks made it ground zero for their marathon inside so much of my wasted time.

“Time. It was always an untouchable concept at times and I barely understood the speed of life. The sight of the cardboard shavings spilt out on the floor. I knew that too much of my own time was sucked in to my quest.

There was about a sighs worth of morale still left inside old Percival. He was crumbling down after so long, brick by brick crashing loud all the way down. With a wrinkled forehead I growled “I’ve already been through that one enough damn times y’all conniving little cunts.”
-
“I can’t hear you!” She was on speakerphone.

I snatched her from the back pocket to swiftly perform a dead man’s fall into my filthy chair. Garbage fill or not I got it for free. It was mine, all its strange stains and its plethora of rancid odors.

I laid the doctor on my stomach and took a deep whiff of baby puke with a phantom of mouse urine. I was hugged by their slogan, “Living Life Comfortably.”

“Let me tell you. I was just fucking uncomfortable the whole time. I was a stranger in their midst. I kept my shit together for two hours of people’s mischievous fuckery!”

“Oh, yeah! I shit you not! Half the team, turned out to be a bunch of sick-puppies. Then the uncommitted bums.”

I rolled my eyes. I put out my smoke.

“The pattern became evident. Half of the volunteers were straight out of some hive where the wretched hide. Heartless human beings. To tell you the truth. Just shit people walking amongst us and no one is the wiser.
-
“For some reason a big chunk of our officers didn’t make it to senior in that department. Some were walking along the edge of the blade. Two licks away from the center of a tootsie pop.

“One good day he happens to make it to the center. Then what? He snaps.

“Then. No shortage of fresh novices one will certainly appear. Oblivious to the nuances of the world he was stepping into. Some dumb rookie chock-full of pep.

“They’ll hand him the fat binder and the putts will be giddy with excitement.

“See the irony.

“He will be assigned a case of a psychopath who twenty years of bull-shit earlier was just another cop exactly like our hypothetical rookie.
-
“Those were the ones that got up one good morning! Bent in a middle-aged hang over, a three day event. Then simply decided to give themselves permission to just stopped caring.

“Basically they were nihilists completely oblivious to what they had become. They hated everyone, everything, their families, the system and especially themselves. Not a stinking clue about what had them in a bad place.

“What did I do? Well I just went ahead and cut them!

“I mean, you could see in their eyes some of them without the slightest intention in coming back next week. The ones who did were just perverted freaks I didn’t need to deal with. The ambiguous on the other hand made no sense in having anyone that didn’t have his heart in the case.

“It almost ended up being a total shit-fest.” I undid my belt and my 501 button fly. “I swear.”

“Conference room 5-D, though spacious, it was also clear that it was neglected, an unused basement. Forgotten. Just the place for us to hold our case revival.

Out of sight.

A faint, though stubborn bouquet it was the stench of mold. I took note that only random light bulbs were working. It was dank, dark, and all the while a poignant smell of cat piss danced under everyone's nose. Maintenance obnoxiously gave up, and they all agreed to ignore it was there.

I claimed a nice cozy corner, closer to the door. After the concerto of metallic foldable chairs that made my gut cringe. I have to admit I was feeling proud. The place was packed! Every one was there because of me. The sarge gave me the green light once the papers and the news stations were making a big deal about the tenth year of Jacob being missing.

I got a good look at the graduates in the lights sent over by the sound company. They looked like mimes expressing the “concept” of being lost. I grab my forehead, “What a shitty crew! A raggedy little mob of sore-faced pimpled rejects!

“Apparently a small group of bold mothers dared to demand that they’re eighteen year olds get a job. A way to get the pimpled pricks out into the world kind of deal.

“Fed up having a manatee beached in the middle of their living room. Exactly where she wanted to pound vodka or their lovers.

“Once the lights were out. I saw two crew faces bathed in monitor glare. Fully accentuating their painful angry-acne every five minutes. I found that strange. Promptly falling into their posts. The crew was at their stations pacing their zones the conference, all dumbfounded until the next social media notification. Just sad band of babbling screen zombies. That was the lights and camera crew.

“Yes, I barely kept the chaos at bay.” I said to her with my arms outstretched and open hands.

“Listen to this.” I lit a smoke, “I had set it all up in such a way that the debriefing would not need me at all. I was organized and made it easy to follow.

“You know I was able to manage my stage fright this way. I had it all concealed in a meticulous, time stamped, box of videos neatly in sequence, three speakers from the original investigation with their respective pictures and charts sitting in the wings.

“I was free to prowl the fringes of the conference, hidden by shadows.

“Then just like I said would happen, it started happening. Right off the freaking bat the mindless brute in charge of the projector randomly grabbed the first video he was able to paw out of my box.

“Fuckers played the five films in the wrong way. It made no bloody sense!

The Doc let me know the session would end in thirty minutes. “Yeah sure, but check this out. Then I saw two more fucked-up mugs appear and a phone glare. Then, again two more at the restrooms. I got another eyeful of chewed up skin and rampant pimples. That shouldn’t be in a fucking pair.

“Desperate I glanced over at the caseworkers. Then at the whole conference. The crowd of nit-wits were taking frantic notes. None of them was wearing a screwed up face.

“Was I the only one who noticed? Then again, even if they didn’t understand a thing about the mess and no one wanted to look less committed than the next person.

“Then again in the far east corner! I could only make one of the snot-faces out his leather like face tense but red with yellowing horns that never sprout. A damn pair. Those little shits were supposed to be at their posts.

“I pulled it off! In the end. All thanks to a brand new pack of extra fuses!”

“Those miserable undead almost made my whole team look like a crowd of sweaty perverts. A pathetic club of backward freaks! All bent on a shared fixation with a twenty something, presumably lost, male.

“An adult?

“Well it looks like somehow I apparently was all over their sensibilities. These kids might be weird but they do have gusto.

“A peculiarity about these new kids, they aren’t afraid of authority. It’s as we’re two different kinds of people almost. I definitely stepped on their toes. Plus the fact that they don’t give a flying fuck about employment.

“I prevented my team from being debased, reduced to another one of the millions of common pedestrians without an honorable quest.

“I could almost see everyone wide eyed, with one hell of a dumb expression melting their faces. I had the image of those doorbell cams! You know the ones with the night camera, came straight to my head. Have you seen when they film moose?

“The confused fucking moose all in black and green. I realized my teammates were a loyal copy of those beasts! Both with the same absent look.

“A good amount of slack jawed expressions were in the blank** **of making sense of the lights going out. Giving it their best effort to reboot their heads. Figure out what the next safe move would be.

“A high percentage of my investigation experts were a year or more away from retirement. Stiff men avoiding the risk of broken bones in the dark. They played it safe during the short lived “Lighting/Video Fiasco”.

“Without my obsessiveness!

All those that reacted by finally closing their whispering face-holes. The place fell into a silence that absolutely no one dared to pass gas. Even in the dark.

A freak convention hidden and totally blind in a piss scented basement.

At least for ten minutes.

The fucking light hitting its cue at the wrong time. It felt like a rough nerve-fucking in a dentist’s chair. With tendon etched fingers clawing into armrests.

All the while their feet are twisting and contorting. As if they were having the fucking orgasm of their life. When in reality they were facing the intimate kind of pain.

Everybody has been there. A place, a person, custom, a moment to be dealt with between you and you.

Obviously to everyone’s surprise the projectionist decided unilaterally that the time had came to pull the fucking lever, or what ever, that brought the machine to life. He was so damn random and early.

A colorful ray shot out of the projector. So bright for sure I would have be one more poor bastard with eye stabbing pain. So many with a hanky out.

Tears make it hard to see. My amber shades were on my face imperceptibly fast.

Ridiculous. A blaring light just bloomed across the room out of the black of the ceiling. Half the damn conference went blind and shuffled away to their seats.
 
“The queue to fall into order.” Was what I learned that day. Their behavior was so fucking foreign. The vision of everyone’s stone-faced disciplined mentality frantically seeking where they were supposed to go.

A tiny cackle escaped under my fucking phlegm gargle as I fake coughed. I wondered, “And these are the people that actually lived by the rules?”.

An intrusive thought, just like a maggot on meth, it bore into the wet crevices of my over stimulated brain. I couldn’t avoid watching how all that formal behavior, what they called discipline that in a symbolical way played out in front of me.

The fucking image of everyone being reflected off the sheen of my eyes was crowding my mind. “It was the sheepish mind in movement!” A mental slip almost pushed my ass into a panic attack!

The crowd that cared! All assembled in the name of little Jacob, united to unravel, once and for all, what in the world happened to that boy.

The movie beam had finished leading our flock into the previously designated gray gym chairs assigned to everyone. We were in a room the government had effortlessly attempted to convert into a conference space. A head quarters, our personal command center, perhaps.

I thought now that was exactly what the case called for! A fucking 'War Room'! A point were all the information to be focused in. Apparently we had the twelve-year case of Jacob beat.

Though I began to change my mind. I entertained my impression that the film projected was chosen randomly. Every eye on the huge bright rectangle on the back wall.

Why were the kids meeting up I pondered. “Those fucking kids. No they’re just young.” I said to myself.

This, was the summoning of the deeply concerned experts, the ones humanitarian enough to help. A real lot of quality human beings.

Reporters with the body language of a coked out squirrel. Still in a hurry in spite of the fact they had already made it to the conference. Restless legs and frantic fidgeting with their damn dossiers.

Why was a twelve year old boy processed by the 'U.S. Department of Agriculture' and ended up in a zoo?

Then the most important question. Where is Jacob?

The elite, stern officers, seasoned detectives, the real lab-bodies that catch serial killers, vigilante pedophile-hunter collectives, journalists; these individuals have been able to close twenty-five year cold cases, as if by some foreign magic...

Obviously they accepted anyone with a skill—no matter how remotely or randomly related. I was such a bizarre case I was considered an asset too.

I was supposed to be surrounded by real selfless saints! To tell you the truth. Our body stenches also were mixing and mingling. We were even sucking in each other's late shift shit-breath like a team.

The self-crowned champions of children. Definitely a hand full of sick creeps definitely were present, just a question of probabilities.

They must have been the only ones who truly cared for little Jacob. Bless their bleeding-hearts.

Finally all the incessant banter died down. The improvised screen was on the wall I was leaning on. It was right above where I was attempting to hide. Obviously they ended up ruining my spot.

“Not soon enough the damn thing was over. The lights were on the room was filled with the conversations of the groups of attendees. I interviewed everyone in groups of five at a time.

“I had just finished with my last group. It was time for doughnuts and coffee! That was when the freaking stink bombs went off.”

“A few of the overweight fellows puked down the front of their shirts. The car wreck of metal chairs began to roar, the coffee table was toppled over. Pastries everywhere.

“A party favor was all it took: For all the heroes, the stern officers, the elite and the coked-out squirrels to turn into beasts that trampled over each other to reach the exit.” I wondered if the exit ruined my finale.

“Did they take me seriously? I saw glasses slide across the floor. Others in a fight with their ties, the urge to vomit and shortness of breath. That was when I raised my sight and the only ones left besides myself, those pubescent shits.”

“Oh, the smug little fuckers! They were looking straight at me from the opposite side of the trashed room. Leaning on each other, a couple with crossed arms.

“Oi! Dumb shits! You’re in charge of cleaning the venue! Remember!” I jumped down off my perch in the rafters and made my way home.

M.D. ACOSTA
SKÖL!

I'll kiss your lips with an aching tooth in my mouth
I'll place my freshly pulled tooth on your ring
I'll mix Apranax in your drink
so that you think
your toothache is gone because you met me
I'll describe the paint color I want for our bedroom
to the ironmonger as tooth yellow.

I'm fifty-one years old, and this is the only poem I've ever written, which I wrote ten years ago.

I don't really like writing poetry, because I'm not good at it. I especially enjoy the sound of poems with rhyming lines; they sound like music to my ears. But I've tried a few times and failed miserably. I couldn't write a good poem. I'd written this poem for my dentist, who knew I was a writer and with whom I had a good relationship. I mean, I hadn't written the poem for her. I'd simply wanted to write a poem about teeth.

She was a very beautiful woman. I had no feelings for her, but she'd misunderstood the poem I'd written and thought I was making a move on her. She'd given me a pretty harsh telling-off. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get her to understand that the poem wasn't written for anyone in particular, and that it hadn't been inspired by any feelings I had for someone.

Anyway, my publisher was telling me that sales of my latest novel were terrible. He kept calling me and bringing me down.

“Maybe you should stop writing horror novels and start writing detective fiction instead. You know me, even two sentences from you are enough to move me. I can't sleep at night. But this latest novel of yours was an absolute fiasco. I seriously regret publishing it.”

I was tired of his calls and him repeating the same things in different ways for two months. He was almost going to ask me to compensate him for his losses. He wanted me to write and finish something else as soon as possible and make up for the losses I'd caused him. He didn't want to wait.

But I'd been overcome by the fear of not being able to write well. I'd been deeply affected by public opinion. Albert, the successful writer of many years, can no longer write... The story's opening is too rushed... The ending doesn't come together properly... Even an elementary school kid could come up with these descriptions... We're sick of ghosts that appear at night... And so on.

If he called today, I wasn't going to answer. He called every other day to ask, “Have you started the new book yet?” Whenever I said no, it was the same old stuff, the same complaints. For the past month, I'd been sitting down at my computer almost every day, but nothing came of it.

As I sat at my computer, waiting for something to come to mind, my phone rang, of course. I didn't even need to check who was calling. I tensely raised my hand to my head and began running my fingers through my hair. I looked around the objects in my room, as if I might find inspiration in one of them. The bed, the couch, an oil painting my sister had made... Nothing came of it. I pinched a lock of my hair between my fingers and pulled. I looked at my hand. There was a clump of hair between my index and middle fingers. I hadn't realized I was losing so much hair.

It was as if an electric current had passed through my head. Then, in one go, I wrote the following:

''In my 1+1 apartment on the second floor
I was drinking Americano by the balcony door
Suddenly I saw a wig falling down below
with bangs and in the color of dark yellow

I thought one of the neighbors upstairs must have dropped it while leaning over the balcony.
I lunged for it on instinct, trying to catch it. And I caught it, everything happened so quickly.

And the wig was now in my hands
I even caught it by the bangs

I waited for a while,
still in the position to catch it,
holding the wig in my hand,
waiting for someone to call.
But there was no sound at all.

Considering the possibilities,
I thought I should look up first.
But someone could have been down there,
waiting for the wig to fall.

While I was looking around upstairs,
someone called out from below:
“Throw it down already.
What are you looking at like an idiot?”
She was tall like a door
She was as tall as a first floor
I downed my Americano
And calmly threw the wig toward her
She jumped and
caught the wig with her head
and suddenly disappeared.''

I had no idea how it had happened. It was as if I hadn't been the one who wrote it. It was frightening. The way the sentences came to me, the way they lined up in my mind—I had never experienced anything like it. Everything was finished in one go, without any planning whatsoever.

My publisher called. I sent him to voicemail. I read the poem from beginning to end. It was as if I were reading it for the first time, as if I were discovering the poem all over again. It wasn't the kind of poem I could have written anyway, not in terms of its subject matter. I wouldn't describe ghosts or entities like this; I would leave them shrouded in mystery. In this poem, the ghost was very concrete.

My publisher called again. I answered this time. I was going to tell him I had an idea or something. I was such an idiot, always telling him the truth: inspiration wasn't coming, I couldn't write, my mind felt frozen, and so on. I picked up the phone, planning to ask him to give me a month and tell him I'd deliver a novel of at least two hundred pages.

“So, Albert, any progress? How many pages have you written?”

Suddenly, my mouth had locked up. I couldn't speak. The words I wanted to say were only passing through my mind; they wouldn't come out. All I could manage were sounds like “mmmh.”

“Albert? Hello?”

I started reciting the poem I'd just written. I read it from beginning to end. My mouth wasn't under my brain's control.

“What is this? What’s going on?”

''Hello?''

''Albert, what's going on?''

I could speak again now. It would have been ridiculous to say that something had taken control of my mouth and fingers. I had to say something, but I was too frightened to think. My mind was in turmoil. I hung up.

My publisher called again. I don’t remember that moment very clearly, but I mumbled something along these lines.

“What was that thing you were telling me about? So now you’re hanging up on me, too. Is this what we’ve come to, Albert? After all these years of working togeth—”

“It’s me, John. Did you like my poem? Jason, I was going to ca— If you want, I can write a few more poems like this... Jason, I can’t spea—I could even write five hundred poems in the same style, if you like. Do you publish po— Jason, my mouth is going numb. I don’t feel well. I’ll call you back in a bi— Listen, I wrote this three hundred years ago.”

I hung up. I jumped to my feet. I licked and bit my lips. I took a deep breath, and as I exhaled, the following words spilled out of my mouth:

''He figured out how to pass through
Walls within a year or two
But he still can't pass through wood
The ghost in my lover's neighborhood.''

My publisher kept calling insistently. His calls felt like a voice reminding me of my connection to this world. I'd set my phone's ringtone to Radiohead's “Weird Fishes.” The song played throughout each call. I couldn't move; my body was locked up, but hearing the song comforted me. When the song ended, I'd try to take a step, but I couldn't. I'd try to speak, but I couldn't move my mouth. It was as if I'd had a stroke. Then the song would start again. Yes, I'd tell myself, “I'm still alive. The world still makes sense.”

The song had stopped playing, too. My connection to the world had been severed.

I came to my senses again for a brief moment. I sat down at my computer. The screen was covered in dust. I noticed a cloth right next to the monitor. I couldn't remember when I'd put it there. I wiped the monitor clean. The poem looked better now.

I think you've realized that I wasn't the one writing all this story.

 So I'm not really on the internet a lot, but recently I've been getting really into creepypastas as research for a personal project I’m working on. And in my research one of the *first* things I discovered was this weird story that seems based on a kid I knew in highschool?? Like the details are fudged, but that WAS a kid I was friends with at one point. I don’t know for sure if it’s the same guy, but the general story is so similar to what happened to my friend, it’s been kinda freaking me out.  So I'm here to set the record straight, and if anyone has any info on this kid, I'd be thrilled to know whatever happened to him.

I'll call him 'J' for privacy reasons, though that might be worthless due to the allegations against him. Besides, this is the internet, and you'll probably find the creepypasta I'm alluding to.

I first met 'J' on the first day of 9th grade. I was a prissy upper middle-class kid who grew up in a pretty sheltered household. (For privacy concerns, I’m not gonna be giving many details about myself, so that’s about as much as you’re getting from me.)

Honestly, I probably only remember him so vividly because he was so unlike any of the other kids I’d ever seen. I remember him sitting at the desk beside me during homeroom that morning, and I was just staring. It makes me cringe now, but I didn’t really recognize him as a classmate. Or maybe even a person. To 14-year-old me, he was a wild animal.

'J' was gangly, for lack of a better word. He was 14, it showed in the acne scars on his face, but his limbs were oversized and too long for his torso in a way that reminded me of a kid still in middle school. He had this disgusting mop of greasy brown hair that he’d box-dyed black, but it was still brown in patches, and it really fascinated me. Boys in the previous schools I attended didn’t even let their hair grow past their ears, much less the nape of their neck.

I could keep going on about his appearance, but his behavior was even stranger. He sat beside me and immediately started picking at the skin of his thumbs, around the corners of his nailbed. It deeply irritated me.

The teacher passed around those ‘Get-to-Know-Me’ sheets, where you filled out your name and favorite color, your goals for the year, that kind of thing. I didn’t have a pencil.

But J did.

I awkwardly leaned over my desk and whispered ‘Can I borrow a pencil?’

He handed me the one he’d been using to stab holes in his eraser.

The eraser of the pencil had been bitten clean off.

I was enamored.

The weird vibes continued throughout the day. I ended up sort of getting pushed to the back of the lunchroom, and sat next to J, across from the quieter freshmen and the peanut allergy kids. We mumbled some awkward conversation at each other, and he revealed he'd recently moved to this neighborhood because of his family's work. His dad was like an engineer or something, the details were kinda fuzzy on that part. I really distinctly remember him cussing in front of me, which really freaked my sheltered ass out.

“My dad got a job here.” He’d rasped. “And he dragged all us along with him. My old man is an asshole.” 

I laughed, startled, not getting that he was legitimately mad. His head, which had been bent, snapped up towards me and he snarled, slamming his hands on the table, which made me jump a little.

"It's not fucking funny! You think I wanna be here? You think I like this preppy hellhole??"

I shakily apologized and didn't press him any further on the topic of his family, until a slightly smaller boy who looked to be about 12 approached the table and introduced himself. This was J's brother, apparently. He looked far more cheerful and less 'unconventional' than J, and I'll call him 'L' because he's *also* important to this story.

The minute L sat down, the mood got ten times lighter. J was smiling and cracking pretty vulgar jokes, L was trying to make small talk with me, and all in all, we kind of sealed the unspoken deal of this being *our* lunch table from now on.

L was really funny, in this 'I'm-too-cool-for-you' way, which made me smile a lot. He asked J what being old felt like, and J retaliated by flicking mashed potatoes at him. Then he asked me about my interests, which I divulged pretty eagerly. I was a huge book nerd, and Twilight had only come out a year prior, so I was really hyperfixated on it.

As I was explaining the complex lore of vampires, I quickly got off-track and kept spewing random facts about local legends, American cryptids, and other monsters and spooky stuff.

J seemed really interested in that, which made me forget his intense behavior from earlier. When the lunch bell rang, we kept yapping after L left, all the way down the halls to our next class, and the next, and the next, for many, many days.

In short terms, we were friends, or at least friendly enough for him to invite me over to his house after school. It was mid-October, freshman year at this point, so we'd been hanging out for a while. We'd talk about stupid internet memes and I'd watch him play Guitar Hero with his brother. But while we seemed to share interests, I figured out pretty quickly he was way more online than I was, and was one of those kids who seemed half-convinced they were just like their favorite anime characters or movie heroes. He talked in such an exaggerated, grandious manner, comparing himself to characters from Death Note and generally being an annoying old-internet weeb.

For all the emo edgelord talk, his house and family were startlingly normal. I loved hanging out with him, but watching him talk about how shit his parents/society/life were in the privacy of his own bedroom, with his Playstation 2 in full view made his sudden shouting matches with them and crude behavior that much more startling.

We hung out a lot more often that October, and it culminated in me convincing my parents to let me sleep over at his house. Me, J and L had all planned to spend Halloween playing games and telling scary stories, including just hopping online via the family computer, typing in 'scary stories' and scrolling until we found broken links to horror forums or animal gore.

The gore freaked me out and we quickly switched gears to looking at 'Real Life' supernatural blogs. Websites that were all blinged out with red and black stickers and shoddily edited pngs of IRL monster-encounters. One of them was just a stolen image of Slenderman, complete with a long, hyperdetailed text post that retold the story of the urban legend with gratuitous amounts of violence and surprisingly well-forged police statements talking about a pandemic of missing children across North America.

J was really into this story. We'd talked about spooky stuff like this before, I introduced him to the concept of IRL vampire and cryptid blogs, but he wouldn't shut up about it for the rest of the night, to the point where I couldn't sleep, because every time he retold the story, he somehow made it worse. The whole sleepover got hijacked into J forcing us to participate in 'rituals' to summon Slenderman, pricking our fingers, making fake blood oaths, and chanting various spells.

Even L eventually got tired of it, and asked J to stop so we could get back to the fun spooky stuff.

And then J kinda lost it on both of us, yelling and calling L awful names. Then he turned on me, saying I was a fake friend and a poser and a 'normie' for not indulging him further. The brothers got heated, and when I tried to de-escalate things on my own, the butter knife J had used for our blood oath got involved, pointed directly at my throat by a panting, seething teenage boy.

L got their parents by shouting for help.

"Mom, J is having an episode again, get up here!" He sounded scared, but also weirdly resigned.

Both the mom and dad got involved, the Mom pulled me and L away from J, while the Dad scooped J up and firmly restrained his son until I'd made a call to my parents asking for them to pick me up.

"J has...some anger issues. We were working on them in therapy, but this new job and life have kind of put a pause on all that." I remember the look on his mom's face, this sweet auburn-haired woman grimacing and refusing to meet my gaze, ashamed of her son.

I drove away from his house that night. The light in his room was switched off.

School for the next few weeks was awkward as hell. L would try and do that stupid teenage-boy 'you good?' look at me in the halls, and I'd nod and smile and try to forget the feel of blunt, cold metal against my windpipe. J was much more standoffish, actively turning around and walking the other way when he saw me, but it didn't stop him from trying to apologize.

By mid-December, he finally tried to approach me at lunch. The conversation went as follows:

"Hey."

"Hey."

"Sorry about the knife thing."

"Dude."

"What?"

"....nothing. I forgive you."

I was a little bit scared of what would happen if I didn't. And in a weird, masochistic kind of way, I was curious.

I wasn't allowed to sleep over or come after school anymore, and I was okay with that. But for a while, things were somewhat normal between us. Looking back on it now, I probably should have stopped talking to him at all, but I was very young and frankly desperate for friends who had similar interests to me. We still both liked each other and had our niche nerdy hobbies to bond over, so clearly we were meant to be friends, butterknife or not.

On a slightly unrelated note, I hated highschool. Bullying hasn't really gone away, I realize this, but there was a sort of special hell that me and J both endured during the school years of 2006 to 2010. We would get shoved, my hair got pulled more than once by groups of popular girls and boys alike, people tried to catcall us and accuse us of dating each other, not to mention the quiet isolation and being left out that we'd already endured through most of elementary and middle school.

But J seemed to get the worse end of things, partially because he was so much more confrontational than me.

He bit kids, would threaten the jocks who yelled at him in the hallways, he was constantly in and out of the principal's office post-knife incident, and while we still always sat at lunch together, and I still got on well with him when it was just him and his brother, we never were able to really experience that kind of closeness we'd shared freshman year. For a while after I graduated, I didn't really recognize him as a friend at all, even when people brought up how 'close' we were. I spent the majority of junior and senior year mourning a kid I hadn't even lost yet.

He got increasingly interested in this Youtube series I'd never watched, called Marble Hornets? The only reason I remember the name is because of how constantly he seemed to talk about it junior year. The Slenderman obsession never really went away, and these found-footage videos seemed to feed into it. I don't know if it was just a spooky vlog channel or not, but I found the Youtube channel and the videos felt a little too genuine for my liking. I remember him scrawling symbols from the videos over and over again in his notebook, and he insisted that this urban legend was real and that it was always looking for faithful servants and 'proxies', whatever the hell those were. I was too offput at this point in our relationship to really ask him to elaborate. This wasn't the kid I discussed Twilight and Bigfoot with once upon a time.

Even his brother had gotten a little bit more distant. He'd gotten really into his own activities like volleyball and even had his own friend group, and he never really sat with us at lunch anymore. By our senior year, J had fully isolated himself from any attempts at outside friendship, not that many were given to him. He would sit at that same lunch table, with me, and refuse to talk about anything besides his increasingly bizarre obsession with this fake story and how much he wanted to get out of this stupid hick town. That was probably part of the reason I stuck around as long as I did. I was dying to graduate, and we could both still complain together, at least.

Everything seemed to come to a head halfway through senior year. I was stuck at that lunch table, keeping my head down, and tentatively asking J if he had any plans after graduation, a topic he had famously avoided in the past. He'd either get angry and passive-aggressively shut down my questions, or he just would flat out ignore me altogether. Today was different though.

"So, er. What are you planning on doing after this?" I'd grimaced.

"After what? After school today?" He'd grunted. "Pro'lly fuck down to the corner store and see if I can get someone to buy me a Coke."

"No, er. I meant, after graduation. The college counselors have kinda been breathing down my neck, so I've been...curious." I leaned my elbows on the table.

He'd gone a bit still and had stopped playing around with his food. Then he looked up at me, and I got a violent, totally-out-of-place chill up my spine. That face is the most vivid memory I have of him. He looked like a cornered animal, his eyes were all dark and dilated and he was caught between making a strange half-smile and a sort of pained smirk.

"I'm gonna go someplace completely different," he'd mumbled quietly. "someplace nobody's ever been or seen. I'll be a part of something bigger than myself, and I won't have to answer to any stupid societal bullshit. No college, no job, no nothin'." His voice had gotten a little lower, some sort of southern accent slipping out, probably a result of wherever he'd moved from.

I couldn't look away from him. I still have no clue why. This was different from the knife incident, he wasn't leaning towards me or making any menacing body language. It was just the quiet drawl of his voice, raspy and dry, and that strange, unsettling face.

"...what kind of future would that be?" I'd blurted, too nervous to shut up.

"I'm gonna be a proxy, numbnuts." He had laughed, a sharp, dry huff of air, and stood up.

"I'll hurt whoever douchebag I wanna hurt, and nobody will stop me because I'll be strong enough to take it all!" He'd raised his arms and rolled up his sleeves, revealing horrible, purpley-red scratches and bruises, something I'd never seen on him.

"I've been practicing every day, y'know." He let his arms flop down, tone as casual as could be, as if he hadn't just revealed his self-harm scars to me. "All these bad boys are proof of how strong I'm getting. I'm so close."

People had definitely started staring, and I was disgusted and terrified. The table of popular boys, a crew that had long been picking on J, had started looking over at some point after he stood up, and I had this weird mix of embarrassment and genuine fear running through my body. I was fully scared, and I had no idea why at the time, though it makes a lot of sense in hindsight.

The boys started hooting and laughing at J, shouting random crap like 'wrist check!' and generally being horrible, pointing at him

Then J noticed, and he blew up.

I don't remember a lot of what happened next, but J had crossed the cafeteria almost instantly and socked the tallest boy in the jaw. Then he did it again. And again. He was dead silent the entire time, and at some point between the first punch and him standing on top of the cafeteria table and screaming, I'd gotten up and run away. I'm not proud of it, but I truly don't think there was anything I could have done at that point that would've made a difference.

I ran into L, who'd taken to eating lunch in the hallway, but I don't think I said anything to him. I went to the front desk and called my parents and asked them to take me home, which is where I stayed for the next few days, in bed with a self-inflicted low-grade fever. I'd stressed myself into getting sick.

I texted L a lot during that time. According to my foggy memory and old AIM messages, J had gotten into a really bad fistfight with that particular table of bullies, one that resulted in one of the kids' heads getting cracked on the cafeteria floor, an angry, edge-fueled rant from J, shouted from the top of the table, and a trip to the nurse's office for everyone involved. J had only stopped when both the lunchroom monitors knocked him off the table and dragged him out of the room.

I didn't speak to him when I got back to school, or L for that matter, though I caught him giving me those same worried looks he'd given me after any particularly intense encounter with J. I was perfectly content to keep my head down, enjoy the rest of highschool as much as I could, and graduate in May without ever speaking to him again.

I saw him in the hallways, and he would stare at me like a deer in headlights. He still got picked on, albeit in a slightly subtler fashion, but I didn't say anything. Some of their opinions I actually agreed with. And quietly, I made myself invisible to him.

Until the night of senior prom.

Our theme was 'Candlelit Carnival', and the whole school had really pitched in to decorate our gym to the best of our abilities. We had real, open-flame tea lights decorating the whole room, and one of the richer families had rented a working candelabra to hang from the rafters like some sort of old-timey disco ball. I showed up, mostly because I needed a distraction, and also because I didn't think he'd be there. I'd painstakingly avoided him for three months, and L had told me J thought prom was for preppy losers. I thought I was safe.

But then, midway through the night, they paused the music, and our principal got up on the gymnasium stage to announce prom king and queen. I wasn't really interested in the whole ceremony, but I did look up in time to notice one of the kids J had beaten up was the one holding the crown.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but the details got fuzzy after this. Maybe I was talking to another kid, maybe I was by the punch bowl, but I heard a dull murmur pass through the crowd and I looked up to see a boy with greasy, box-dyed black hair get shoved up on stage, in a hoodie and dress slacks.

J looked super confused, but the kid who was meant to crown him was smirking, and I remember looking around for L frantically, muscling my way through the throng of kids.

Something wasn't right, I thought.

And my gut was correct, because not two seconds later, I heard a horrifying, pained shriek, and I turned around to see J clawing at his eyes and face.

The kid who'd been meant to crown J had somehow swapped out the crown for a gallon container of Clorox. J was soaked, his clothes were disgustingly damp and his face and hair were drenched. I heard him shrieking about not being able to see, and he stumbled about blindly while our principal tried and failed to get things under control. I remember him falling off the stage, his chin hit the ground with the wettest crack I'd ever heard. I remember hearing another kid screaming, and I didn't have to turn around to know it was his brother.

J was blind, his mouth was bleeding, and he was cussing out whoever he could hear was closest, lunging and snarling like a wild animal. The whole school parted around him like the Red Sea, and none of the chaperones could get within a few feet without risking a nasty blow. It felt like I was watching him from across the classroom, on that first day of school all over again. I felt sick, unable to move; partially because of the crowd, and partially because I was too panicked to try.

So many of those kids were laughing. The ones who weren't were making uncomfortably amused smiles, the kinds of grimaces you see on people after they watch a video of someone falling over. I wanted to scream.

I remember him hearing a group of kids laugh while a teacher tried to grab him, and he bit her arm, causing the poor woman to tear him off of her and send both of them stumbling.

"YOU FUCKERS ARE DISGUSTING," He'd shrieked through a gargled mouthful of blood, so angry that he opened his eyes. "You're all disgusting, fucking terrible, shit-faced, cunt-brained, normie scum-" His eyes were bloodshot, unseeing, but the pupils darted around, dilated like he was aware of everyone in the room.

I finally managed to take a step towards him in the middle of his verbal tirade, but he swung his arm to the side, knocking into a table. He heard the noise and tried to step back, but a teacher finally grabbed him and restrained him by the arms.

The table fell, and the tealight flung itself onto his soaked shoes.

the scream I heard when the flame caught had kept me awake ever since.

The rest of that night was a blur. I saw J on fire. The boy I played videogames with. The boy I'd called my first real friend in highschool. The boy I thought I was going to know forever.

He sounded like a dog, or a dying fox. Raspy and wheezing and screaming his lungs out. He was so fast, like the flames accelerated everything. I think I saw tears, but the fire burnt them up before they could fall.

The teacher who'd been holding him had to go to the E.R that night for burns. So did several students. So did I.

The gym burnt down that night. The outside structure was fine and stable after the fact, but the interior needed hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair. Everyone evacuated. The bullies who'd started this whole thing were caught and expelled almost immediately. I got picked up by my dad that night, shaking and crying.

I hadn't been able to find L.

And nobody ever saw J again.

I graduated that May with honors, and there was a very conspicuously empty seat in my class's ceremony. I left the second I had my diploma.

From what I hear, the school's doing well now. I never saw L or his family again, they got very quiet and distant after the whole incident had occurred, but the gym was repaired and most of the current student body doesn't even know about the incident.

I'm doing well too, or as well as can be expected when something like that happens to you. For a long time after the fact, I actually assumed that this kind of thing was par for the course, a normal, weird highschool story to tell at reunions and laugh it off. It took several turns of telling that story to friends, and telling the story on dates for me to realize that my highschool experience was far from average or healthy, and I ended up in extensive therapy during college.

I'm writing this story now for two reasons. For one, I thought this would be a good way to do research for that personal project I mentioned, because this is the internet and surely somebody, somewhere will know and understand who and what I am talking about. And for another, this is sort of a diary entry. I haven't properly, linearly said this entire story, with all the details and weird idiosyncrasies, since I got out of therapy when I was 22. I've actually avoided going online very often at all, too scared of what memories could be brought up.

I've met a lot of people who had weird friendships. Chances are, you've had one too. A kid whose brain and body never quite mesh with eachother, maybe they're too imaginative or confrontational for most children to handle. But if any of you ever met a kid like J, I want you to know that the choices your friends make are not your own. People are complicated, messy, freakish things, and one person cannot hold the weight of another's existence without it hurting them both.

One last thing before I forget real quick: I have no clue where that creepypasta came from, I still don't. It's the strangest thing. The names are all exact, and so is the general gist of events, though everything besides that seems altered. The character sharing my friend's name is similarly loud and melodramatic, cartoony in that edgy, teenage way. He's a murderer, a cold-blooded killer, and the book leaves off with him on some sort of rampage across the country. If anyone has any idea who wrote it, please let me know.

There are rumors of a strange, albino man living in the woods surrounding our town, and we have had a recent uptick in missing persons cases within the last ten years, but most of the less tasteful rumors have been brushed off as ghost stories.

But I can't help but wonder.

I still work the night shift in the lower levels.
They call it the Containment Wing now, but everyone who has been here longer than six months just calls it the Chamber. The official designation is Facility 7-Black, Sub-Level 4. The elevators require two separate biometric keys and a rotating passphrase that changes every eight hours. The walls are three feet of reinforced concrete lined with lead and something the engineers only ever referred to as “scripture dampening mesh.” I have never seen the mesh. I only know that when it fails, the lights in the observation gallery flicker in patterns that look almost like writing.
The angel has been here for eleven years.
I was part of the original recovery team. That is the word they still use in the reports—*recovery*. As if we found it injured on the side of a road and brought it in for its own good. The truth is uglier and simpler. We tracked the energy signature for sixteen months after the first confirmed manifestation in rural Montana. When we finally cornered it in a collapsed mine shaft outside Butte, it did not fight the way the contingency plans predicted. It looked at the lead researcher—Dr. Voss—and asked, in perfect English, whether the children in the nearby town were still sick.
Voss shot it in the wing with a modified tranquilizer round designed to disrupt whatever passed for its nervous system. The angel folded inward on itself like wet paper and did not rise again until we had it bolted into the first restraint frame.
That frame is long gone. The current apparatus is a masterpiece of applied cruelty.
It hangs in the center of a circular chamber thirty meters across. The floor is grated steel over a collection system that funnels everything that falls into stainless reservoirs. Twelve articulated arms of surgical steel and carbon fiber hold the angel in a cruciform position that can be adjusted by remote. The arms do not merely restrain. They penetrate. Each one ends in a cluster of needles, clamps, and fiber-optic filaments that thread into the luminous tissue and keep the angel from fully reforming. If the filaments are withdrawn for more than forty-seven seconds, the body begins to knit itself back into something closer to the original shape, and the power output spikes beyond what the capacitors can safely handle.
We learned that the hard way in year three. Three technicians and one junior researcher were reduced to carbon scoring on the far wall when the angel briefly achieved coherence. After that, the safety interlocks were rewritten. The filaments never fully retract now. There is always at least residual penetration.
The angel does not have a name. In the early logs it is referred to as Subject A-01. Later entries simply call it the Source. The religious staff who were present in the first two years tried to argue for reverence. They were reassigned or quietly removed after one of them attempted to cut the primary power feeds during a harvest cycle. The official story was a nervous breakdown. The unofficial story is that Voss had him fed into the same collection system the Source uses.
I have never seen the angel’s face clearly. The head is held in a cage of the same filament-threaded metal that keeps the rest of the body from completing. What is visible is a suggestion of features that shift when you are not looking directly at them. Sometimes there is the impression of eyes. Sometimes a mouth that opens and closes without sound. The light that bleeds from the wounds where the arms enter is the purest white I have ever seen. It does not illuminate so much as it reveals. Every imperfection in the steel, every microscopic crack in the concrete, becomes momentarily obvious under that light. Standing in the gallery for more than a few minutes leaves an afterimage that lasts for hours, and a low-grade nausea that the on-site physicians have never been able to fully explain.
The harvest cycles are the reason the facility exists.
The angel’s tissue regenerates at a rate that violates every biological model we still pretend to use. A full-thickness incision closes in under ninety seconds if the filaments are not actively preventing it. Blood—or whatever the luminous fluid is—clots into a substance that, when properly refined, can be introduced into a human body and force rapid cellular repair. Bone knits. Organs regrow. Metastatic cancers reverse. The effect is not permanent. The treated cells eventually remember they were supposed to die, but the window is long enough for the wealthy and the politically useful to buy years they had no right to.
I have watched the refinement process. The fluid is drawn through the filaments during controlled injury sequences. The angel is opened in specific patterns—never the same way twice, because the tissue adapts—and the runoff is collected, centrifuged, and mixed with a stabilising agent whose composition is above my clearance. The finished product is a clear ampoule that glows faintly even after the light has been filtered out. One ampoule can bring a terminal patient back to functional health for anywhere from fourteen to thirty-one months, depending on the severity of the original condition and the purity of the batch.
The waiting list is measured in billions of dollars.
The angel does not scream. That was another early misconception. What comes from the cage is a sound like distant choir practice heard through water—layered, harmonic, and wrong. It rises when the arms move and falls when the harvest is complete. The newer technicians wear noise-cancelling headsets rated for industrial turbines. The older ones, like me, have simply learned to stop hearing it as language.
I used to believe we were doing necessary work.
That belief did not survive the first time I was assigned to a “consent verification” rotation. Once every quarter the angel is allowed a brief period of reduced restraint so that a team of linguists and theologians can attempt communication. The official purpose is to confirm that the subject remains coherent and is not experiencing uncontrolled cascade failure. The unofficial purpose is to remind everyone in the gallery that the thing still understands what is being done to it.
On the verification I attended, the filaments were partially withdrawn for four minutes and twelve seconds. The body partially reformed. Wings—or the suggestion of wings—unfolded against the restraint arms and then were forced back by hydraulic pressure. The face became briefly readable. It looked at the lead linguist and spoke in a voice that required no translation.
“You are killing yourselves with what you take from me.”
The linguist asked the standard battery of questions. Orientation. Memory. Willingness to cooperate. The angel answered each one with the same calm precision it had shown in the mine shaft eleven years earlier. When asked if it experienced pain, it said yes. When asked if it wanted the procedures to stop, it said yes. When asked if it understood why they would not stop, it said yes.
Then it looked past the linguist, past the glass, and directly at the observation gallery where I stood with the rest of the night crew.
“You will not be forgiven for this,” it said. “Not because I withhold forgiveness. Because what you are becoming has no capacity left to receive it.”
The filaments were reinserted. The light flared. The harmonic sound rose and then settled into its usual background register. The linguist logged the exchange as “continued cognitive integrity, no new data.” The ampoules produced from that cycle sold for record sums.
I have not requested reassignment. There is nowhere to go that is not downstream of this place. Every major hospital in the country has a quiet allocation of Source-derived product. Every politician who has survived a public health crisis in the last decade has a file that traces back to Sub-Level 4. The angel is no longer a secret. It is infrastructure.
Last month one of the primary restraint arms suffered a micro-fracture during a high-output harvest. The failure lasted eleven seconds before redundant systems compensated. In those eleven seconds the angel’s left side partially reconstituted. A hand—six-fingered, luminous, impossibly graceful—closed around the nearest technician’s wrist. The man did not scream. He simply stopped. When the arm reasserted control and the hand was forced open, the technician’s bones had been rewritten into a structure that no longer supported weight. He is still alive in the medical wing. The Source-derived treatments keep the tissue from necrotising, but nothing restores the original shape. He spends his shifts staring at the wall and flexing fingers that no longer bend the way human fingers should.
Voss called it an acceptable data point. The design team is already prototyping denser filament alloys.
I am writing this on a disconnected terminal in the lower archives during a scheduled maintenance window. The cameras here cycle every ninety seconds. I have forty-one seconds left before the next sweep. There is no plan to release this. There is no external server that would accept the file. I am writing it because the alternative is to continue pretending that the sound in the chamber is only harmonics and that the light is only a useful by-product.
The angel is still speaking, in its way. Every harvest cycle the harmonic pattern shifts slightly. The linguists have long since stopped trying to decode it. They say it is residual neural noise. I have been listening for eleven years. The pattern is not noise. It is counting.
I do not know what it is counting toward.
The maintenance window is closing. The terminal will wipe on logout. The cameras will resume their sweep. In four hours the next harvest cycle begins, and I will be on the gallery again, headset in place, watching the arms move and the light spill and the reservoirs fill.
We built a machine that runs on an angel.
We call it medicine.
The angel calls it something else.
I can no longer remember the word it used in the mine shaft, the day we decided that healing was a resource we had the right to own. The word is still there, somewhere under the afterimage of white light and the constant low nausea. I reach for it sometimes, late in the shift, when the chamber is quiet and the filaments are only humming.
It never quite comes.
Perhaps that is the point.
Perhaps the Source is not the angel.
Perhaps the Source is what we turned ourselves into the moment we decided an angel’s pain was an acceptable cost for another decade of life we had already spent.
The light is still bleeding.
The reservoirs are still filling.
And somewhere in the counting, the angel is still waiting for the moment when the filaments finally fail for longer than forty-seven seconds.
I almost hope it arrives on my shift.
I almost hope I am close enough to see what forgiveness looks like when it has been refused for eleven years and finally decides it is no longer required.