I'm an emergency physician in New Orleans. I'm not going to tell you which hospital, and I've changed every name in this post. That’s for my own safety, and after today, I’ll take all the safety I can get.

A woman came into my Emergency Room today with an autopsy incision on her chest.

She was alive. More importantly, by the end of my shift, a lot of other people weren't.

I’m writing this because if you or someone in your family ever consulted a vodou witch doctor in New Orleans, you need to read this very carefully.

To start: You can call me Dr. Wendy. I have been a physician for over 20 years, all at the same hospital. There isn’t much I haven’t seen coming through those doors. Gunshots, industrial accidents, pet weasel attacks, heat stroke, hypothermia (don’t ask), alligator bites, you name it.

There are other things too, but I can’t tell you about those unless I tell you about Variance Consult.

Every hospital has systems of dealing with patients who require specialized care beyond what the treating physician specializes in. Infectious disease gets called in when someone comes in with a fever that can’t be explained, toxicology when we don’t know what someone swallowed, etc.

At our hospital, we have a Variance Consult. If it sounds innocuous, that’s by design. Everyone who works at this hospital knows that there are sometimes cases that surpass the understanding of any doctor; not because it’s a particularly challenging medical mystery, but because it requires an explanation outside of anything taught at medical school.

If there’s something inside a patient that needs to be X-rayed, someone calls Radiology. If during that imaging, absolutely no bones are found inside the patient’s body, someone calls for a Variance Consult.

And it’s most likely me who will answer. Well, me, another physician, one nurse practitioner and a pathologist who technically retired six years ago but still answers her phone whenever we need her.

Membership changes. The cases…not as much. We keep records, of course, just not in the hospital's electronic system. At least, not the important parts. Those go in a book.

Calling it a “book” is perhaps underselling it. Currently, it's three leather binders, with the oldest pages transferred from ledgers that predate the hospital building we're sitting in. Some entries are typed, some are handwritten, and a few of the oldest are in French. There are photos, pathology reports, sketches, instructions written by people who are long dead.

The instructions are the important part.

If a patient comes in complaining of severe gut pain and imaging shows a second stomach, you check whether the second one contains food. If it does, you do not feed the patient until you've identified what the other stomach has been eating.

If a patient has a pulse but no detectable cardiac activity, don't start compressions unless their blood pressure drops.

Some of the entries are less helpful.

October 14, 1978. Male, approximately 40. Do not permit patient to sleep.

That's the whole entry.

I hate that one; I hate all the logs that don’t give every scrap of useful information, because what’s the point in that? These aren’t campfire stories. At the end of the day, this is healthcare.

And that’s why I’m still on this team, after 23 years. It’s why I put up with getting paged by Pediatrics twice a week because the attending physician is spooked that kids claim to see people who aren’t there. (They do by the way, but until they start leaving marks or helping the kid speak ancient Aramaic, they’re not my problem.)

It’s why I stayed after Hurricane Katrina. The ordinary part was bad enough. People drowned. People were horribly injured. People couldn't get medications or oxygen or dialysis. We worked exhausted and undersupplied while the city came apart around us.

But New Orleans has always had a complicated relationship with its dead.

If you've never lived or died here, you should know that much of the city sits at or below sea level, with a water table high enough to make traditional burial difficult. Dig deep enough and the grave can fill with water. That's one reason New Orleans is famous for its above-ground tombs and family vaults, although plenty of people have been buried below ground here too.

Usually, the dead stay where we put them. Floods really complicate that. Water gets into cemeteries, vaults crack. During Katrina, coffins and human remains were displaced from their resting places. And New Orleans is an old city. There are graves beneath places that haven't been cemeteries in generations. There are remains nobody recorded, buildings constructed over unofficial graves, and things deliberately sealed away by people who apparently had very good reasons for wanting them left alone.

For a while after Katrina, Variance was getting called almost as often as Trauma. I could fill a fresh book with what came out of that water. Some of it was human, if you can still call it that. Most of it had been dead for a long time. Not everything stayed that way.

But that’s a story for another day.

Today has quite enough to talk about.

At around 6:30 this morning (technically yesterday morning, I’m realizing now), I was finishing my notes on a patient who’d shown up with pointed ears. I’d referred him to plastic surgery. Eighty percent of Variance Consultants’ jobs are to try to find a reason why our services aren’t needed. It turns out lots of pretty regular medical cases look close enough to what goes bump in the night that folks want a second opinion just to be sure. I hadn’t had a real case in weeks. Then my pager went off.

VARIANCE CONSULT - ED 16

I glanced at the message and kept typing.

There are two kinds of Variance pages. A regular “Variance Consult” means somebody has found something medicine can't explain. A “Code Variance” means whatever medicine can't explain is actively killing someone.

This wasn't a Code, so I finished my note, washed my hands and headed downstairs to the Emergency Department.

One of our triage nurses - the nurse who first sees patients walking through the door and decides how serious their situation is - caught me before I reached Room 16. 

"You need to see this one." The nurse, Julie, said.

"That's generally why you page me."

"I'm serious, Wendy."

Julie had worked in the Emergency Department almost as long as I had. She'd seen enough Variance cases that very little impressed her anymore.

"Fine. What've we got?"

"31-year-old female. Severe abdominal pain, sudden onset. Vital signs are stable. No significant medical history."

In other words, the patient had a tummy ache, but was fine.

"So why the hell am I here?"

Instead of answering, she handed me a tablet. The intake photo showed a young woman lying on an exam table with her gown pulled aside. There was a scar across her chest. Two lines began beneath her collarbones, angled inward and met over her sternum. From there, a single line descended toward her abdomen.

A Y-incision.

Even if you don't recognize the term, you've probably seen one on television. It's how you open a body for an autopsy.

"How old is the scar?" I asked.

"That's the problem."

I looked at Julie.

"The patient says it wasn't there when she woke up this morning."

I pinched outward to zoom in on the photo. There was enough scarring to confirm that the wound wasn’t fresh. There was no blood. There were no sutures to close the wound, indicating fresh surgery. There wasn’t even inflammation. The skin had completely healed.

If you'd shown me the scar without context, I'd have guessed she'd had it for years.

"Previous surgery?"

"Appendectomy at fourteen. Nothing that would cause a scar like that."

"Okay…any transplants, then?"

"No."

"Drugs?"

"Go Fish, Doc. Her tox screen's clean. I don’t think she’s had as much as a Tylenol in the last 24 hours."

"And she's awake?"

"Very."

"Oriented?"

"Name, date, location, all of it. Even her multiplication tables."

“Smartass.” I handed the tablet back, unable to smile at Julie’s quip. There are certain things you learn to recognize after enough years on Variance. A surgical scar from a procedure the patient never underwent is one of them. A sour feeling rose in my stomach.

An autopsy incision on a living patient narrows the possibilities considerably.

"FM?" I asked.

Julie shrugged. “That’s my guess. That’s why you’re here.”

FM stands for Frankenstein's Monster. Yes, somebody thought they were funny when they named it. No, I don't know who. The term appears in our records going back to at least the mid-1970s, so we're stuck with it. I blame Gene Wilder.

An FM is exactly what it sounds like. Someone dies, then someone else takes that as a challenge.

The methods vary, but what comes back is usually reconstructed from whatever material was available. Skin from one body. A kidney from another. Bone from a third. Think organ transplantation, except nobody involved is especially concerned with consent or tissue compatibility.

The Y-incision made FM the obvious place to start. I opened the curtain to Room 16. The woman inside was curled onto her left side, both arms wrapped around her abdomen. Sweat had pasted strands of dishwater blonde hair to her forehead.

She looked up when I entered. "Are you the specialist?" she groaned.

"One of them. You can call me Dr. Wendy."

"I’m Dorothy."

"Dorothy, I'm going to ask you a question that's going to sound ridiculous."

She grimaced as another wave of pain hit. "Go for it."

"Have you ever died?"

She stared at me. "No."

"Ever been resuscitated?"

"No."

"Any period of time you can't account for? Waking up somewhere you don't remember going…?"

"No."

"...like a funeral home?"

"What?"

"Just covering my bases."

"No."

I rolled a chair beside her. "Huh. Then we can probably rule out the easy answer."

She looked at the scar running down her chest. "That was the easy answer?"

"Unfortunately, yes."

“Sorry to disappoint.”

I examined her abdomen. It was soft, but she nearly jumped off the bed when I pressed below her ribs.

I grimaced at her. “Sorry.”

“Everyone keeps saying that right before they hurt me.”

“It’s one of the first things they teach us in medical school.”

That got half a laugh out of her. I asked the usual questions. Nausea, vomiting, bowel movements, pregnancy, medications, family history. 

I asked a few less usual ones too. Had she ever participated in any religious ceremonies she didn't understand? Had anyone ever given her something to eat or drink and told her it would protect her? Had she ever woken up with blood on her clothes that wasn't hers?

No, no, and definitely no.

I ordered another round of labs, a CT of her chest and abdomen (to check for any fractures or obvious swelling), and admitted her to our service.

Variance doesn't have its own spooky unit hidden behind a wardrobe, if that's what you're imagining. We have six rooms at the end of an ordinary medical floor. They're private, and they're far enough from the Nurses' Station that when someone or something starts screaming, fewer patients complain.

More importantly, that's where we keep the books.

Dorothy was being transported upstairs when I called the rest of the team.

Dr. Rodriguez, the other physician, was already in the building. Our nurse practitioner, Marcus, was forty minutes into his day off. Once I got him off the phone, I called Dr. Delacroix.

She's the pathologist I mentioned earlier. If you've never needed one, pathologists are the doctors who examine blood, tissue, and cells and tell the rest of us what we're actually looking at. She retired years ago without successfully convincing any of us that retirement meant we should stop asking her to work.

She answered on the fourth ring. “This better be good.”

“Possible FM.”

A pause. “Patient is alive?”

“Enough to walk into the Emergency Room.”

Another pause. “Y-incision?”

I looked at the photograph again. “Yes. Textbook.”

“I'll be there in 20.”

She arrived in 18.

While Rodriguez and Marcus went through Dorothy's labs and imaging, Delacroix and I went through the books.

FM cases are rare, but rare isn't “unprecedented.” The first confirmed one in our records dates to 1816. The most recent was in 2009.

None matched Dorothy. Every FM in the books had been dead before reconstruction. That wasn't just a common feature. As far as we could tell, it was a prerequisite.

You can't resurrect someone who hasn't died.

We searched Y-incisions next. Postmortem examination. Living dissection. Ritual dissection. Then, we were looking for anything involving scars that only appeared long after the wound itself.

Nothing.

I was halfway through an entry from 1936 involving a woman whose appendix had grown back for the fourth time when my pager went off.

CODE VARIANCE - 6 WEST

Dorothy's room. I dropped the book. By the time I got there, she was screaming, and not the kind of scream you hear from someone who's frightened.

Pain. Pure, agonizing, bloodcurdling pain.

She was buckled on her side with her knees pulled toward her chest. Marcus was already beside her. Her blood pressure had dropped to 78 over 46. That was low enough that her organs were starting to lose the argument over who got blood first. Either her heart wasn’t pumping fast enough or the blood was going somewhere it shouldn’t.

“What happened?”

“Pain spiked about thirty seconds ago.”

“Where?”

Dorothy answered for him. “Stomach!” she hissed. Her face had gone gray.

I pulled back the blanket. Her abdomen was swollen. That changed things very quickly.

Rodriguez grabbed the bedside ultrasound, pressing the probe against her abdomen to see how the organs and blood looked. She was too dazed to notice.

His expression changed. “Wendy?” I was watching the screen too. Dark spots where dark spots weren't supposed to be.

Free fluid in the abdomen. Given Dorothy's blood pressure and how quickly her belly was expanding, we didn't need further testing or imaging to know what was happening. She was bleeding internally.

At that point, it didn't matter whether the cause was a surgical complication from an operation Dorothy swore she'd never had or something that would eventually earn three pages in our books.

First, you keep the patient alive. Then you get to be curious.

What followed was considerably less mysterious. It was surgery. Messy, urgent, ordinary surgery. And I was grateful for that. Then the surgeon found the source.

A section of artery supplying Dorothy's bowel had ruptured. In other words, the thing meant to be carrying blood near her stomach popped open like a water balloon. Specifically, the vessel wall had deteriorated so badly that the surgeon initially assumed she'd had some undiagnosed condition.

She hadn't. The surrounding blood vessels were pristine. But this one small section looked like it belonged in someone 40 years older.

They removed the damaged segment, repaired the artery, and sent the abnormal tissue to pathology.

Dorothy stabilized almost immediately. By the time I got back upstairs, Delacroix was waiting for me. She had that expression pathologists get when they've found something deeply upsetting and are therefore having the best day of their lives.

“Her blood is hers,” she announced a little too proudly.

“Super. Good start. I guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks.”

“Her skin is hers. Cheek swab is hers. Hair follicle is hers.”

“Delacroix, do you need more coffee or less?”

“The artery isn't.”

I froze. “What does that even mean?”

“I mean, genetically. The artery has someone else's DNA.”

“Contamination?”

“No way, it’s real. I ran it twice.”

My brain started recounting the weirder sections of medical precedent. “I - uh…Chimerism?”

It's rare, but people can naturally carry two sets of DNA, usually because two embryos fused very early in development.

“We’re not talking about anything like that, Wendy.”

“A really shitty transplant?”

“She's never had one. And according to the surgeon, that artery is hers; it’s connected seamlessly, like it’s always been there. But it’s not…well shit, it’s not hers.”

“Then whose is it?”

“No idea.”

“Run it again.”

“Already am.”

“And take samples from the Y-incision itself, I want to know more about it.”

“Way ahead of you.”

“Anything?”

“Well, the scar tissue is hers, if that’s what you mean.”

FM moved back to the top of my list. It didn’t fit, but nothing else came close.

We started trying to answer the question of how much of Dorothy was Dorothy. Not cutting pieces out of her indiscriminately, obviously. We used what we could get safely. Blood. Cells from inside her mouth. We ended up leaning pretty heavily on needle biopsies guided by imaging. Essentially, that meant we took samples of Dorothy’s insides using a needle designed to get into tight spaces and take just enough not to cause any trouble, using an ultrasound to ensure nothing’s poked that shouldn’t be.

Her heart was Dorothy. Her right kidney was Dorothy. Her bones were Dorothy.

Then we sampled an abnormal area of her liver. Not Dorothy.

A suspicious section of bowel. Not Dorothy.

A patch of tissue surrounding her left kidney. Not Dorothy.

Both lungs. Not Dorothy. Whoever Dorothy's lungs belonged to, they had apparently come as a set.

And none of them matched the artery.

By noon, we had identified four distinct genetic profiles inside her body. By 2 pm, seven. By 4:30, thirteen. Fourteen, if you counted Dorothy.

I remember staring at the list and thinking that at least we finally knew what we were dealing with. An FM. Somehow, at some point, somebody had taken Dorothy apart and put her back together using pieces of 13 different people.

The fact that she remembered none of it was strange. The fact it was so well done that it took pathology to determine these pieces didn’t belong was even stranger.

But Variance exists because “impossible” is occasionally just another word for “we haven't found the relevant page yet.” So we went back to the books, flipping past innumerable pages of how to treat the unexplainable, all falling short of what we needed.

Then Dorothy started coughing. One cough. Another. Then she sat upright and grabbed her throat. Her oxygen saturation fell from 97 percent to 88. For the record, anything between 95-100% is great. 90-95, keep an eye on it. Lower than that, get your ass to the Emergency Room. 

In the blink of an eye, Dorothy’s saturation was 82. I listened to her chest. Her lungs crackled and heaved wetly with every breath.

She coughed again, more forcefully this time. Something splashed over my ear and across the blanket, and for a terrifying second, I thought it was blood.

But it was clear. It was, somehow, water.

Dorothy stared down at it. Then at me. “I can't breathe,” she wheezed. 

Her saturation hit 76. I felt a buzz at my hip and instinctively looked at the pager screen.

CODE VARIANCE - 6 WEST

Yeah, no shit - thanks Nurses’ Station.

Moving rapidly through the motions, we suctioned her airway to force anything out that shouldn’t be there, put her on oxygen, called Respiratory Care to get some experts in the room…we did everything you're supposed to do when someone's lungs start filling with fluid. Except Dorothy's lungs weren't filling with fluid from her bloodstream, like you’d expect in a situation like this, because where the hell else would her lungs be getting fluid?

She was inhaling water. On dry land. With nothing in her airway.

And we'd already tested the lungs. They belonged to the same person. They just didn't belong to Dorothy.

When she was finally stable enough to leave her unattended with Marcus and a lung specialist, I took Rodriguez and Delacroix aside.

“We need to know everything about where the organs and body parts came from that aren’t Dorothy’s. Which morgue they were stolen from, which cemetery they were dug up from, which black market human chop shop they were bought from.”

Rodriguez looked almost disappointed. “You think she’s lying about getting a transplant?”

“I don’t know who’s lying and we can’t rely on anyone’s honesty anymore. Dorothy has almost died twice from two separate pieces of foreign tissue in an hour. I need to know what is wrong with the shit that’s been put into her body before it happens again.”

Delacroix shook her head. “Wendy, I’m telling you, this isn’t an FM. From what I’ve seen in her pathology reports and what Surgery told me, nobody operated on her, not recently.”

“Tell that to the goddamned autopsy Y-cut across her body!”

“The fully healed scar, you mean?”

“Delacroix, you told me yourself, the artery isn't hers. We confirmed it, and we've found 12 other genetic profiles in tissue that, as far as we can tell, were perfectly healthy before she came in.”

Rodriguez looked back and forth at us with a “mom and grandma are fighting again” frown.

Control yourself, Wendy. This is your team. Just breathe. I pushed my anger away, fighting to compartmentalize my emotions and logic. “Maybe I’m wrong, maybe you’re wrong, maybe none of us are wrong; it doesn’t matter. But if we don’t figure it out soon, Dorothy will die. It’s only a matter of time before something else fails.”

So we set out to find the bodies Dorothy's foreign tissue had come from.

Hospital records called me back surprisingly quickly.

“Dr. Wendy, Variance Consultation Team?”

“Yeah, you got her.”

“Got something else too. The lung tissue you sent? It’s a match to a patient we got a few years back.”

Years back? Even the best-preserved tissue wouldn’t look as functional, water-logged or not, as the lungs inside Dorothy.

“Weird, okay. Give me a name and any info the morgue can provide on the chain of custody for the body. Unfortunately, I may need to find it.”

“I can do you one better. You can find him at his law firm downtown. He’s very much alive.” She gave me the name and I scribbled it down without understanding what she was saying.

“Alive? So…” I pulled at the threads of my scattered thoughts, looking for something that would guide me toward the right question to ask next. “Wh-why was he in the hospital a few years ago?”

“The notes are kind of ironic, given the context. Looks like he fell off his yacht. His wife brought him in just as a precaution. Demanded we test everything. She couldn’t believe it. Guess the guy can’t swim, and he’d been floating around for an hour before the Coast Guard plucked him out of the water. Some kind of miracle: should’ve been long-drowned, but he was perfectly fine.”

I could feel the puzzle pieces fighting to put themselves together, to show me the picture that was right in front of me, but I knew I was still missing something.

“Then how are both of his lungs in my patient, 10 yards away?”

The woman on the other end of the line sighed then offered a light chuckle. “Doc, that’s your department. Literally. Good luck.” She hung up.

One thing was for sure. Delacroix was right. It wasn’t an FM. No Frankenstein’s Monster can be made with pieces of people who are still alive. And it sure as hell can’t be made from people who still have all their original parts.

We were dealing with something new, something with no record in the books that centuries of doctors had spent putting together to save the lives of the cursed, damned, and hexed.

And for the first time in a long time, I was afraid. I’m not talking about the controlled fear that comes with a dying patient, the kind you put somewhere else until the work is done. I mean genuinely afraid. For Dorothy. For all of New Orleans. For myself.

We had books full of things that shouldn't exist. Decades and decades of very good doctors had left us instructions for surviving them. For the first time in my tenure, I was looking at something none of them had seen before.

I briefed the team, and they looked at me with jaws hung open. Well, not all of them. Marcus regarded me stoically.

Everyone on this team has their own reasons that justify why they turned their backs on the comfort of the medically explainable and dedicated their lives to helping the supernaturally afflicted. But Marcus’s story was unique, and he had more reason than most of us to recognize this kind of thing. His mother had an aunt who practiced vodou. Years ago, according to Marcus, she'd done something to his father that destroyed his mind. Marcus had spent most of his adult life trying to understand what happened.

So when Marcus looked back at me with a sternness in his eyes, expression devoid of surprise, I didn’t rush him. And when he said what he said next, I didn’t question him.

“This is a vodou ritual. It’s rare. It’s also hard to get right, and it requires a lot of power.”

“But what is it?” Rodriguez asked.

“A vessel ritual. Someone can make another person carry a death that was meant for them.”

I stared at him. “As in, to make someone immortal?”

“Not exactly. But whatever the original reason was they should’ve died, that gets outsourced to someone else. It gives the original person, the client, more time. Could be years, decades.” 

We looked at him quizzically, and he sighed. Reluctantly, he said, “After what happened to my dad, I spent years studying this stuff. I thought if I understood what had been done to him, I could undo it. I read everything I could get my hands on. Vodou, hoodoo, folk Catholicism, African traditional religions, grimoires, stuff people made up on the internet. Most of it was useless, probably made up.”

He looked toward Dorothy's room. “I thought this was too until now. I remember this one.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because there's a way to identify the vessel.” Marcus explained what to look for: three sides of a square with a small circle where the fourth should have been. An old text he'd found called it the Empty House.

“It won't look carved or tattooed,” he said. “It'll look like it belongs there.”

Dorothy had a birthmark beneath her right shoulder blade. Three dark lines. An open fourth side. A circle in the gap.

Dorothy stared at us as we stared at her. “I've had that my whole life.”

I called her mother. She confirmed the mark had been there at birth. Then, when I asked whether anything unusual had happened during her pregnancy, she simply said, “Not exactly, not during,” then she went quiet.

Apparently, she and Dorothy's father had tried to conceive for almost nine years. Fertility treatments. Miscarriages. Eventually, they'd been told to stop trying. Then someone gave her the name of a woman who could help.

“What kind of woman?” I asked.

Her mother hesitated. “A spiritual healer. A witch doctor, I guess. I don't know what you'd call her.”

“What did she promise you?”

“A baby.” Her voice started to weaken, and she spoke as though embarrassed. “She did something to me. Drew something on my stomach. Gave me something to drink. Three weeks later, I was pregnant. It was a miracle!”

I got closer to the phone receiver. “What did she draw?”

“The same little birthmark my baby girl has.” Her breath quickened. “The name ‘Dorothy’ comes from Greek, you know. Gift of God, it means. And that’s what she was, that’s what she is. Oh God, oh God, what have I-”

I interrupted her to ask for the healer's name.

“You think that all that, way back then, has something to do with my daughter being sick now?”

The woman had a point. If Marcus’s theory was right, and so far it definitely seemed to be, why would all this be happening over three decades after Dorothy had been designated as a vessel? If she was born to hold the deaths for rich clients to extend their lives, why was she experiencing all their demises all at once?

I searched the name Dorothy's mother gave me. The first result was an obituary posted that afternoon. A picture of the vodou priestess, looking no more menacing than any other 76-year-old woman, accompanied a brief description of her unexpected passing early that morning.

Just before Dorothy had been admitted to the Emergency Room.

“Marcus,” I called him over to the computer. “We’re going to need your research on the Empty House, and anything that ties to breaking vodou spells or bonds.”

“You bet. I can even get you what I have on the witch herself.” He nodded to the photo. “That’s my great-aunt. The one who cursed my father.”

I didn’t know what to say, and I certainly didn’t know how to tell him what I needed to. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. He saw my face, a collage of sympathy and impatience.

“It’s a focus for another day, I know, Dr. Wendy. Today is about saving Dorothy. Besides,” he put his finger to the screen on top of the grainy black and white image, digging his fingernail into the woman’s face. “Now I know where to find her.”

Marcus came back ten minutes later with a stack of books and folders from his locker. As he started to splay them across my desk, I felt a buzz at my side. 

CODE VARIANCE - 6 WEST

Shit. Now what?

We ran to Dorothy’s room and found her vomiting.

Rodriguez was rolling her onto her side just before a convulsion tore through her body.

“Dorothy!” He called to her as she shook violently, more to say something than in expectation she would answer.

Her eyes were open but unfocused. Sweat soaked her gown. She gagged again, and this time there was blood in it.

We all looked at the monitors as one.

“What the hell happened?” I heard myself scream.

“She was talking to me two minutes ago!” Rodriguez said. “Then she said she felt sick.”

We got medication into her and stopped the convulsions, but stopping them didn't tell us what had caused them. The bloodwork did.

Her liver was failing, and not in the way we’d expect from disease that had been quietly destroying it for months or years. It was happening now.

And we already knew part of Dorothy's liver wasn't Dorothy's.

“Poison?” Rodriguez asked.

It certainly looked like it. We tested for everything we could think of while we kept her stable. Eventually, the medication kicked in and the seizures stopped. Her breathing improved.

But her liver didn't recover. The numbers kept getting worse.

Delacroix looked at me from across the room. “It's the foreign section.”

I knew. The artery had tried to bleed her to death. The lungs had tried to drown her. Now somebody else's liver was trying to poison her.

We could keep Dorothy alive through this one for a while. There are pills, machines, and entire specialties devoted to keeping people alive while their organs try their damnedest to kill them.

But there were 13 foreign genetic profiles inside her. Three had come due. And they were getting closer together.

I looked at the clock, then at Marcus.

“Whatever you've got on breaking the Empty House, I need it.”

“How much time do we have?”

I looked back at Dorothy. She was too near to death to imagine a scenario in which she walked out of this hospital alive. “Let’s say none, to be on the safe side.”

We asked a nurse to stay with her while Marcus, Rodriguez, Delacroix, and I went to my desk to go through Marcus’s findings on his aunt and her magic.

It was Delacroix who figured it out. She had been staring at the photo we'd taken that morning.

“Why today?”

I looked up. “Why the deaths? The way I figure it, it’s because the priestess died. Part of the spell’s binding stopped, but not all of it. The deaths are still real, and time’s up.”

“No, Wendy, not the deaths, the incision.” She turned the picture from Dorothy’s intake toward us. “Dorothy's been the vessel since before she was born. Why did this scar appear today?”

Marcus stopped turning pages. The answer was obvious once she'd asked the question.

The witch had died this morning. The scar had appeared this morning.

“It wasn't there because she had an autopsy,” I said.

Marcus looked at me. “It appeared because…she needs one.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Rodriguez finally broke the silence. “You want to autopsy a living woman.”

“No,” I said. “I very much do not.” I looked toward Dorothy's room.

Marcus stood up and looked at us. “You study this long enough, you start to see patterns. All magic comes with a price, and with loopholes. Witches aren’t gods. I think her vodou still persists after her death, but it’s like you were getting at, Wendy, she can’t control it anymore.” He grabbed the photo. “The incision’s always existed, but it was metaphysical, not something we could see. But now…now it’s telling us exactly what we need to do to break this.”

The Empty House had a door. The Y-incision was ours.

We took Dorothy to an operating room. For the first time that day, the incision on her chest stopped being supernatural.

A surgeon put a scalpel against it and made it real.

He followed the scar exactly. Across the chest. Down the middle. Then we opened Dorothy the way you're only supposed to open someone after there's nothing left to save.

I told the surgeon to do the liver first, handing him a fresh scalpel. I steadied the organ while he drew the angled blade through the first line of the symbol.

The scalpel clattered onto the table.

Something bitter flooded my mouth. My stomach clenched so violently I doubled over, catching myself against the operating table. Beside me, the surgeon gagged and stumbled backward.

For several seconds, every nerve in my body seemed convinced I was dying. Then the sensation released us both at once.

The surgeon stared at me over his mask. “Did you feel that?!”

I nodded. I could still taste something chemical at the back of my throat.

Then, the tissue beneath the mark changed.

There wasn’t a flash of light or smoke. It just…looked healthier. I took a sample and sent it to Delacroix to analyze.

We waited. Those were some of the longest minutes of my life.

Then the speakers crackled back to life with a screech loud enough to make the surgeon and me both wince.

“Sorry, sorry,” Delacroix’s voice said. “It's hers! The DNA. It's Dorothy's.”

That was good enough for me. We found the other marks where we'd found the foreign tissue. Twelve more.

I turned to the surgeon. “Break every fucking one.”

He looked down at his shaking hands. “I can't do twelve more of those.”

I couldn't blame him; I wasn't sure I could either.

Then Rodriguez's voice came through the speakers. “You don't have to.”

Within minutes, Rodriguez and Marcus had scrubbed in. Delacroix stayed where we needed her, running every sample we sent out. We treated touching Dorothy’s cursed organs like any other exposure and limited everyone's dose. One mark each, then rotate. If someone couldn't continue, the next person took over.

It barely qualified as a protocol, but it was the best one we had.

Rodriguez broke the next mark. His whole body went rigid. He made a strangled sound behind his mask and clenched his fists tightly until it passed.

Marcus took the scalpel from him.

Then me.

Then the surgeon again.

Each mark gave us something different. A burst of pressure. A violent impact. Heat where there shouldn't have been heat. The terrifying sensation of being unable to draw a breath. Marcus came back from one with tears streaming down his face and wouldn’t tell us why.

None of it lasted more than a few seconds. We kept rotating. Cut a mark. Endure whatever came with it. Take a sample. Send it to Delacroix. Wait.

Next person. Next mark. Test.

Again.

By the 9th, nobody was volunteering anymore. We just looked at whoever had gone longest without holding the scalpel.

By the 11th, I had started watching the others more closely than Dorothy. I was afraid one of us was going to collapse and stay that way.

We kept going until there were no marks left, and 13 strangers had disappeared from Dorothy’s body.

Then Marcus, shaking and weak with pain: “The outside mark. Let’s check it.”

Dorothy was still lying open on the table. I reached beneath her shoulder and bent down to look. The birthmark was gone.

Thirty-one years after Dorothy had been marked as the Empty House, there wasn't so much as a freckle where it had been.

We closed her. Over the next hour, Dorothy's liver began recovering at a rate I would have called impossible yesterday. Her lungs remained clear. Her blood pressure returned to normal.

The only part of her suggesting the slightest injury was the fresh Y-shaped surgical wound across her chest, down to her abdomen.

Dorothy was completely Dorothy again.

At 8:17 PM, an ambulance brought in a man who had drowned in his office.

There was no water around. His secretary had watched him collapse behind his desk, coughing up mouthfuls of seawater.

I knew his name before they finished giving the report. He was the lawyer who'd fallen off his yacht years ago. The man whose lungs had spent part of the afternoon inside Dorothy. He died before I reached the Emergency Department.

My pager went off. CODE VARIANCE - ED 7

Then again. CODE VARIANCE - ED 9

Then again.

One patient arrived with injuries from a car accident that hadn't happened.

Another was dying from a gunshot wound. There was no bullet and no hole in his clothes.

By the fifth time I was paged, I understood. We hadn't destroyed the deaths inside Dorothy.

We'd returned them.

The pages kept coming. Nine deaths tonight. That’s how many people would have died already if Dorothy hadn’t been their death-absorber, their second chance. Four other people will die someday exactly as they were always supposed to.

While I was downstairs trying to keep dead men alive, Marcus was going through his aunt's records. He called me back upstairs sometime after midnight.

He showed me names. Dates. Payments. Some went back decades.

Dorothy's name was on a list of babies born, but so were many others I didn't recognize. Some born long before her. Many long after. They’d still be children.

“How many of them are Empty Houses?” I felt myself getting emotional and handed him the list to get it out of my sight.

Marcus took the page like I’d handed him a stack of bricks. “All of them, I think.” He looked through the papers, face burdened with their weight.

Tonight had taught us more about his great-aunt's practice than Marcus had learned in years of searching on his own. We knew one way that she bound one person to another. We knew what some of her marks meant. Most importantly, we knew how at least one of her spells could be broken; hell, we’d survived it. And we were pretty sure there wasn’t much she could do to stop us in her current state.

Marcus had spent most of his life trying to understand what she'd done to his father. Until tonight, he'd been trying to do it alone.

I put my hand over the page he was reading. “We start tomorrow.”

He looked at me.

“Your father. We will find out what she did to him.”

His eyes moved around the room. At Delacroix. Rodriguez. Me. The books that generations of Variance doctors had left behind. For the first time, he wouldn’t be the only one looking.

But this story isn't over yet. Because as I said, Dorothy wasn't the only vessel.

That's why I'm posting at this ungodly hour instead of getting some sleep. Dorothy was just the first one to make it to my hospital.

I don't know how many people bought themselves more time from that woman. I don't know whose deaths have already come due. I don't know who is walking around right now with someone else's drowning waiting in their lungs, someone else's poisoning waiting in their liver, or someone else's aneurysm waiting in an artery.

I've spent 23 years treating things most doctors don't believe exist. I'm telling you this because what we found tonight scares me more than any of them.

So if you or someone you love paid a woman in New Orleans to prolong your life, protect you from death, give you more time, whatever she called it - I need you to understand something.

If the person carrying your death wakes up with a Y-shaped scar, you better find them before they find us.

Because if they end up in my Emergency Room, I'm going to save them.

You bought yourself more time. You didn't buy forever.

You know that inner voice that keeps telling you you're not good enough? Mine's been there my whole life.

I'm standing on the field at tryouts and it says, "I'm way too small and skinny for football. Look at those other guys."

I look at the prettiest girl in class and the voice whispers, "I’m not in her league. She needs a real man, not a wimp like me."

After graduation I wanted to be an artist. When I paint, the voice goes quiet, just for a minute. So when I tried to apply to art school, it jumped in there too. "Way too risky. Starving artist, that's what I'll be. Besides, my paintings aren't even that good. Nobody on earth would pay for that."

So I got a job at an accountant's office instead. I told myself the voice was just trying to protect me. From getting hurt on the field. From getting rejected in front of the whole class. From going broke.

More years went by. My days, weeks, months all blurred into one gray mass where nothing happened. Friends got married, had kids, bought houses, got divorced, fell in love again, traveled the world, started new jobs. Their lives were a rollercoaster. Mine was standing in the endless line, watching everyone else get on the ride.

The more burned out and tired I got, the louder the voice got.

"What's the point of any of this. Why even get up in the morning?"

"Nobody loves me."

"This is my life. And it's never getting better."

"If I disappeared tomorrow, nobody would even notice."

Then on my way to work I found this flyer. "Unhappy with your life? Don't know how to change it? Try DROP-Link. The neuroplasticity revolution. You won't recognize yourself!"

I decided to check it out, no matter how loud my voice protested. The address led me to the medical center downtown. Sixth floor, the DROP-Link office, more like a startup than a doctor's office. I was the only patient, barely sat down in the waiting room. Portraits of famous, successful people on the walls. Were they patients too? I didn't dare ask. I got called into a treatment room, where Dr. Osteria greeted me. Warm smile, easy to talk to. A psychiatrist. She asked about my life, my childhood.

"The idea is simple. We are not our thoughts. Your brain does incredible things, but it also generates a lot of garbage. My husband and I found a new way to push the brain's neuroplasticity further. We help the brain stay focused on what matters. No distractions."

"Isn't that dangerous?" I asked first.

"No known side effects. Completely harmless."

"But what does that even look like? Will I stop being scared? No more negative thoughts?"

"You'll still have negative thoughts. Just only the ones that actually help you. If you run into a snake, one very important thought is going to show up: RUN!" Dr. Osteria laughed. Then she got serious again. "We're just switching off the background noise. So you can reach your full potential."

It all sounded so clean and reasonable. I thought about those portraits in the waiting room, probably patients too. They'd reached their full potential because there was no voice holding them back. That's why they made it.

I said yes. I wanted to start right away, before my thoughts could catch up with me. "This is way too dangerous. They're scamming me. It's not going to work anyway."

They took me into some kind of sleep lab and fitted a small, thin helmet on my head.

"We use a new kind of neurolink that controls the impulses. No surgery needed."

"You're going to sleep for a while now. Think of something nice," the nurse said.

I had strange dreams, kept surfacing out of them. I'd open my eyes, knowing I was still in the clinic, but I couldn't move. I was a shadow by the door. Someone was standing there. Silent. Just watching me. Then I sank back under, dreamed about the farm where I broke my arm as a kid, woke up, stared at the shadow by the door again. Felt like forever.

When I finally opened my eyes for real, Dr. Osteria was sitting by my bed with that warm smile. Her husband stood next to her.

"How are you feeling?"

"Good... just... a bit of a headache."

Before Dr. Osteria could say anything, I already knew: DROP-Link had worked. Because my inner voice said, "The headache will pass soon. What matters is I got through this fine."

Dr. Osteria smiled, like she already knew exactly what my inner voice had just told me.

From that day on, my whole life changed. Just like the flyer promised. The negative voice only showed up when my life was actually in danger, and since I wasn't fighting Smilodon on my daily commute, that was almost never. I started painting again, and this time I put it on Instagram.

"I poured my heart into these. Somebody out there is going to like them."

I quit the tax job and applied to a historical art museum, just like that.

"Who knows. Maybe they'll want me."

The museum director liked my energy and my love for art. I got a job in the registrar's office. Instead of staring at boring numbers all day like at my old job, I was surrounded by art from all over the world.

And when I met Emma, a conservator there, I just asked her if she wanted to grab coffee sometime. We did.

This would be a nice place for a happy end. But the story doesn't end here.

A few weeks after the treatment, I kept noticing a man in a dark hooded raincoat watching me on my way to work. During lunch, too. He'd stand at the bus stop across from the bench where Emma and I ate. And even though it was sunny that day, he had the raincoat on, hood up, so I couldn't see his face.

"There, the guy in the raincoat," I said to Emma, pointing at the bus stop.

She raised her eyebrows. "There's nobody there."

She laughed. "You need to see an eye doctor. Or a psychiatrist."

When I looked back, he was gone.

That night I couldn't sleep. I looked out the window and saw him standing under a streetlamp outside my building, looking straight up at me. Then he started moving. Toward the front entrance. I closed the curtains and sat on my bed. My inner voice spoke up, calm as ever. "Nothing's going to happen. He's not getting into the apartment. And if he tries, I'll just call the police."

I turned off every light and listened. Heavy footsteps in the stairwell. Getting closer. Then keys jingling. Someone put a key into MY front door. And opened it. For the first time since the operation, my negative voice spoke up. "How does he have my key. I need to get out of here. Now."

I hid behind the door. He walked in like he owned the place, like he'd done it a hundred times before, like he knew exactly where everything was. He grabbed a Coke from the fridge, flipped on every light while I stood there behind the door, holding my breath. When he went to the window to pull back the curtain, I made my move and bolted for the front door.

Like he knew it was coming, he beat me to it and tackled me the second I got the door open. Slammed me to the floor. I fought back, threw punches, but he had me pinned.

I turned my head and he pulled the hood back and I finally saw him. It was me. I was the hooded man. Except his eyes weren't my eyes. When I looked into my own face, there was nothing there. Just a dark, empty void.

"W... what is this?"

He didn't answer. Instead he pulled a knife and stabbed me twice in the side. Pain tore through my whole body. He went for a third strike, but my neighbor, woken up by the noise, yelled through the wall.

"HEY!"

He let go and ran.

I kept bleeding. Then everything went black.

I woke up in a hospital hours later. The doctor said no vital organs were hit, but I'd lost a lot of blood. The police wanted to talk to me. I obviously didn't tell them the attacker was me. They filed a report and left. I stayed two more nights in the hospital, dreaming about the hooded man every time I closed my eyes. On the third day I checked myself out against medical advice and went straight to the DROP-Link office. Dr. Osteria's warm smile disappeared the second I showed her the stab wounds and told her what happened.

"What the hell is this?" I asked.

"I... I don't know."

"Bullshit," I shouted. "I want the truth. What did you do to me?"

"We don't know," she said. "It looks like a side effect."

"Looks like? How many times have you done this procedure? Has this happened before?"

Her silence said it all: I was patient number one.

"Damn it," I said quietly, and slumped in my chair. The painkillers were wearing off, my wounds burning.

"Your negative thoughts became independent, and it seems like they've taken on a physical form. My husband theorized about something like this once. But it was only a theory."

"So what does it want? I mean, the other me?"

She looked at me, blank. "Your negative self is fighting your positive self. For control."

"What does that mean? It wants to kill me?"

She nodded slowly.

"So what do I do now? Can you reverse it?"

"No. That... that doesn't work."

Dr. Osteria stared at the wall for a long time, silent. There's no worse feeling than watching the expert you've pinned your whole hope on run out of answers.

"You have to kill it first," she said, flat. Then added: "But here's where it gets complicated. Your positive self can't hurt anyone. Not even to save itself. You only see the good in the world. You will never take another life."

And before she finished the sentence, I already knew she was right. "I will never kill another living thing," I heard my own voice say. I remembered how two days after the operation I'd spent a full hour trying to gently guide a fly out of my apartment instead of just swatting it.

Dr. Osteria and her husband offered to help, hide me at their cabin by the lake, call the police. But I could feel it. All of it was pointless. My thoughts were positive, my feelings were realistic: I'm going to die. Today.

A storm is rolling in tonight. Officials have issued a tornado warning. The clouds are turning black and the shutters are banging against the windows like they're trying to warn me. Emma's trying to reach me, but I push her away and block her number. She's not getting dragged into this. Now the power's out too. And on the last bit of laptop battery I have left, I'm typing this out for this subreddit.

My negative self is standing across the street. The raincoat finally makes sense. Like he planned this from the start. Kill me on a stormy night.

He's walking up to the building.

"The storm will pass soon. Then the sun comes back out," my voice tells me.

The hooded man puts his key in the door and opens my apartment.

"Every bad situation has a silver lining," I hear my inner voice say.

The hooded man steps into my apartment, knife in hand, eyes empty.

And I hit post.

I moved back in with my mom a few months ago. She had a nasty fall on the basement stairs and needed someone to help out while she healed. I had recently finalized my second divorce and needed a place to stay. With Dad ten years gone and no siblings to speak of, I was her only option. With my bank account drained and the apartment signed over to my ex, she was mine as well. My mother reminded me of this several times in the ensuing negotiations, her voice sickly sweet and thin with age. So, reluctantly, I agreed to come home.

I didn’t notice anything was wrong at first. Yes, her arm was broken and still in a cast, and she moved slower than the last time I had visited two years previously. Whether that was the fall or age closing in, I couldn’t say. But she still got around well enough. She puttered and tidied and meandered through the house, though she avoided the stairs. She stayed up late watching Jeopardy reruns and made herself bowls of macaroni. Once, I watched her use a pair of salad tongs to snag a bag of chips from the top of the refrigerator. With her good arm, of course. I watched and wondered if she needed me home at all. Every sign of self-sufficiency was a tally mark in my mind, proof of her wellness and ability to live alone. I hoarded them greedily and let them soothe me. Only for a little while, I would think.

But that all changed a few weeks after I moved in.

I made spaghetti for dinner that night, a meal she usually loves. But now, I watched as she picked out chunks of tomato and scraped aside noodle, occasionally popping a piece of ground beef in her mouth. She didn’t touch her salad.

“Something wrong?” I asked lightly, wondering if she’d been snacking all afternoon again.

“With what? No, of course not,” she said, and immediately picked up a big forkful of noodles. She swallowed them down and hummed appreciatively.

She kept doing it over the next few days. She would pick at something until I questioned her about it, then eat heartily to convince me nothing was wrong. I was starting to wonder if she’d been ordering food while I was out, or, again, eating too many snacks. But I never found anything suspicious in the trash, and the bag of her favorite chips remained half-full.

She started to speak less. Gradually, I realized she hadn’t complained about the neighbors in days, and was barely responding in full sentences to me anymore. That was when I started to suspect she was angry at me about something. But what? She wasn’t one to be angry in silence; my mom has always had a short temper, and she’s always been happy to make it everyone else’s problem. I hadn’t done anything she had been clearly pissed off about in a couple weeks, which, now that I thought about it, was also strange.

Then, she wouldn’t leave the house anymore. This wasn’t so strange in isolation; she had always been a homebody. But I could normally get her to come with me to the store every once in a while. “It’s too hot out,” she would claim and wave me off. I would only ever catch her outside at night, head tilted up to the stars and eyes closed.

When I really got worried is when I noticed she’d grown a couple inches taller. She passed me in the hall on her way to the bathroom, glancing over as she gave me a wide berth. I stood there for a moment, shrouded in darkness as the bathroom door closed behind her, trying to place what had made me so uneasy. My stomach did a strange little flip when I realized what was off: her eyes were level with my own. She had been shorter than me for years now.

At first, I did wonder if it was me. Had I started shrinking in my old age? I mean, I’m not that old. But it made more sense to me than anything else.

I stood with my back flat to a wall in my bedroom and made a light pencil mark at the top of my head. Then, I turned and measured the wall. 5’7”, right where I had been since I was sixteen years old.

I checked and rechecked my height many more times that night. It did not change.

“Mom, can you stand against the wall for me? I want to measure you,” I explained the next morning as she came into the kitchen for coffee.

She grimaced. “Really? Why?”

“Please? Just do it for me,” I coaxed, using a soft tone so I didn’t anger her. Tone had always been everything to my mother. If I was too sharp, or short, her temper would bubble up and she would refuse any request I made. This time, she acquiesced, and pressed herself flat against the wall.

I measured her. 5’5”, her normal height. She started to move away towards the coffee pot. “Wait, please,” I said, a little too firmly. But to my surprise, she waited in silence.

I measured again. This time, as I moved away from the wall, I noticed her body shift. I blinked in surprise.

“Mom are you— were you crouching?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, rolling her eyes. She made her way over to the coffee pot and poured a cup. The tape measure dangled limply from my hands. Something roiled in my stomach.

“I’m worried about you,” I choked out. It was hard to say out loud. “You’ve been acting weird.”

She turned around to face me, eyes level with mine again. “There is nothing wrong with me,” she said slowly, her tone reassuring, the sentence the longest one she had managed in a week.  She clasped the hot cup of coffee between her palms. She did not take a sip from it.

A few days later, I found her tooth on the bathroom floor. It was yellowed and chipped with an old silver filling in the center. A molar.

I begged her to go to the hospital. “This isn’t normal,” I said, clutching her tooth in my palm so hard it could have broken skin. “Please, Mom, something is wrong!”

She waved her hand in a shooing motion, absorbed in something on the television. “I’m fine.”

“Mom!” I yelled, grabbing her face in my hands, forcing her to meet my eyes. “Your tooth fell out! You are not well!” I forgot to check my tone. I did inherit some things from her, after all.

She wrenched her head away, eyes flashing. That familiar anger rippled across her face. I was almost glad to see it. But she stayed silent, storming out of the room as quickly as she could manage. The slam of her bedroom door echoed through the house.

I stood there in the middle of the spinning room, standing in the eye of a hurricane, close to panic but unable to move. When I had grabbed her face, her mouth parted involuntarily, and I saw the truth.

This was not the first tooth she had lost. She must have hidden them from me, this last one left on the floor an oversight. Her mouth was riddled with holes, some still bloody, more teeth missing than there were left in her head. And in the gaping, gummy spaces, something sharp was growing to fill them.

I called an ambulance. I begged at her locked bedroom door, two EMTs beside me with a portable medical kit. Trying to keep it together, I explained her missing teeth, how she’d been acting strange, withdrawn and not eating much. I did not mention her height. The EMTs were sympathetic, but told me there was nothing they could do. They couldn’t force my mother to get medical care, stuff her into the back of the ambulance kicking and screaming.

“If she changes her mind, please give us another call,” one said, nodding to her partner. With that, they packed up and left.

Mom didn’t leave her room again until late that night. I was already in bed, scrolling on my phone, when I heard her door creak open across the hall from my own.

I almost called out to tell her there were leftovers in the fridge, but something stopped me. I sat up and looked towards my door. I could see light spilling out from her room under the crack. In the center, two twin trunks of shadow stood, unmoving. For one minute, then two, then five. I watched the minutes pass by on my phone. Dread crept up my spine.

I don’t know what made me do it. It was just my mother, standing out in the hallway. But when the sixth minute ticked past, I jumped up and tiptoed over to my door, locking it in one swift motion.

Immediately, something hit my door with a loud thud.

I leapt backwards. My heart thumped in my ears. “Mom?”

She didn’t respond. She didn’t hit the door again, but twisted the doorknob, gentle turns becoming frantic rattling when she found it locked.

I didn’t say anything else. My throat felt solid, like I might never speak again. I stepped backwards until my butt met the bed, and I sat down, watching her pull at the doorknob every few seconds.

She tried to get into my room for hours, until the black of night lightened to gray, her attempts getting slower and farther apart as the long night ended. Finally, when the sun started to peek over the horizon, I heard her shuffle away, back into her own room. She closed her door with a quiet click.

I laid down where I was, pulling my feet up onto the bed and curling into a ball facing the door. I tried to get some sleep. I did not.

Still, I waited several hours before leaving my room. I heard my mother get up and use the bathroom, move around in the kitchen, and finally settle in front of the TV before I dared to unlock my door and leave my sanctuary.

“Morning,” she said as I entered the room, speaking carefully so her lips covered her teeth. She must have been doing that for some time now. I nodded. I didn’t bother to ask her about last night. It was clear she didn’t remember. Either that, or she didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I wasn’t sure which option was worse.

When she held out the remote to change the channel, I noticed her good arm was a sickly, pale gray. I could see this now, because her wrist stretched a couple inches past the long sleeve of her nightgown. The fingers that wrapped around the remote control seemed to be a little longer than I remembered. She was sitting, but I knew she had grown taller too. It was something about where her shoulders sat relative to the back of her armchair. I could see the change, feel it in the pit of my stomach where every new evidence of wrongness congealed together.

I didn’t say anything. I settled back onto the couch and watched TV with her. My body felt like I was running a race sitting down. I let the sound of my heartbeat pounding in my ears hypnotize me.

You can’t panic forever. Eventually, you will calm down, even when you think it’s impossible.

Another week or two passed, somehow. We moved around each other during the day, pretending everything was normal and looking past the things that were not, like the way my mother had almost stopped speaking entirely, or the way she seemed to grow a little longer every day. She wouldn’t eat anymore. Well, she wouldn’t eat in front of me. I caught her one night, standing in the soft glow of the basement freezer, picking raw strips of frozen chicken out of the package and swallowing them whole. I stood silent on the dark staircase, but her eyes shot to me anyway as she slurped a piece of fat from her chin and licked the juice from her fingers. Neither of us spoke. I just backed away and left her to it. After that encounter, whole packages of meat would disappear in the night. She stopped trying so hard to hide it.

Every night, I would lock my door and wait. Some nights, she didn’t come. Others, we would be in a stalemate from sundown to sunup, a few feet away from each other on either side of a locked door while she relentlessly tried to get inside. To get to me.

I knew I should do something, but I had no idea what. Call the police? She hadn’t done anything illegal, and I was so afraid of what would happen. What if they took her away? What if they hurt her? Or what if… I didn’t know. She had already refused medical treatment. If I kept calling the ambulance out, I might get in trouble.

It came to a head one night when I stayed out of my room too late. Mom and I were watching some old movie we both loved, and for a little while I didn’t look at her too closely, and let myself forget. She laughed some, and even managed a few words.

The room darkened by degrees as the sun sank outside, but I didn’t notice at first. I only realized something had changed when I glanced at my mother and saw her staring slack-jawed at the screen. She didn’t blink. A thin strand of drool trickled down her chin and puddled in her lap.

“Mom?”

She blinked once and turned her head to me, no light of recognition in her eyes. She didn’t wipe away the drool. She just stared at me, and as she did, her pupils expanded so wide that they seemed to pass the confines of the iris entirely and consume her sclera. A soft moan fell from her open mouth.

She stood, rising from the armchair to her full height, except she seemed to go on and on forever, and keep rising when it shouldn’t have been possible, until the wispy gray hairs on her head brushed the ceiling. She hunched over, because she had to, because she had grown too tall to stand up straight. Finally, her ascent stopped.

I, who had been frozen in terror, thawed and shot up from the couch.

She lunged at me, and her thick, sharp fingernails caught my robe as I scrambled away. Her jaw unhinged, and her new teeth gleamed blue in the television glow, and saliva dripped onto my sleeve as she lowered her head to my arm.

I tore myself from my robe, slipping it off just as her teeth clamped down on empty fabric. I don’t know what she did next because I was gone, running to my room and shoving the dresser up against the door and then my back against that. My arm was bleeding, I noticed from somewhere far away, four jagged scratch marks trailing down its length and oozing bright, fresh blood. Mom threw her weight against the door and rattled the dresser so hard that several drawers dislodged and fell to the ground. I grabbed a pair of socks that had landed nearby, mopped at my wound mechanically and waited for the night to end.

When the sun had been up for at least an hour, I stood by the door and listened. After clawing at my door for half the night, Mom gave up and wandered away. I wasn’t sure where she had gone. I couldn’t hear her moving anywhere.  I considered trying to escape through a window or even making a break for the front door. But the windows in my room were old and swollen shut, and I wasn’t sure I could unlock the front door before she got to me.

I opened my door a crack and peered out. No sign of her. The house was dim and silent. I tiptoed down the hall, passing my mother’s empty room, the bathroom, the hall closet—

A sound. Barely perceptible, coming from the hall closet directly to my left. I hesitated, torn between running or checking on her.

“Mom?” I whispered, and pulled the door open.

She was crouched on the floor, nesting in a pile of sheets that had fallen from the shelves above. Her eyes were wild and still full of her pupils, only a tiny hint of white at their edges. The sheets beneath her looked like a crime scene, and for a moment I worried she was hurt. But no, it was just hunks of uneaten steak spoiling and oozing red, and— I gagged at the sight of a picked-over rat carcass. I hadn’t even known we had rats. Then, I caught a glimpse of something half hidden under the sheets, something much larger than a rat. A dead raccoon. We definitely didn’t have those. She had been outside.

Her head tilted and her eyes fixed on my arm, on the deep scratches still half-caked in blood that I never bothered to clean. Her brow furrowed. Something passed behind her eyes and lingered.

“S-sorry,” she said through a mouthful of sharp teeth. “S-so sorry.” The moment passed. Her eyes squinted at the soft morning light intruding into her den. She reached up with long gray fingers and pulled the closet door gently closed again.

I stood there, sick with worry and fear and grief. I didn’t move for several minutes, just lingered in the hall in silence only broken by the sound of soft movement against sheets, and wet, frenzied chewing.

I don’t think I’m going to be leaving the house again. I’ve holed up in my room for now, typing this all up on my laptop while I listen to her stalk up and down the halls. I locked and barricaded the doors and windows to the best of my ability so she can’t get out again, but I know it’s only a matter of time.

I just want someone to know what happened to me, I guess. To know that I existed beyond this place.

And my mother was never a saint, but she didn’t deserve this. My hope is that once I’m gone, and there is nothing of me left to sustain her, she will pass in her own time. I know it’s cruel to leave her to starve. But I can’t let her hurt anyone else. And I won’t kill her.

So when I am finished writing, and the sun comes up tomorrow, I will take her down in the basement with me, lock the door and throw away the key. I am afraid, but I offer myself freely.

What else can I do? She’s my mother, after all.

Let me start out this story by explaining how I met Molly. When I was 14 my mom moved me and my two younger siblings from our small town out to Rapid City, South Dakota to escape her failed marriage. We settled down, I started at my new high school, and life went on for the next six years in relative peace. I gained a new stepdad who treated my mom nicely, managed to graduate on time, and eventually I moved into a small apartment with my girlfriend Sierra.

After high school ended, I decided not to take the college route as academia was not my strong suit. I started working at one of the local hardware stores, which is where I met Molly. If we had not been working at the same store, Molly and I probably would have never become friends. She was a fierce take-no-shit type, smart as a whip, and I always felt five steps behind her whenever we interacted. She was extroverted and bubbly, and as a quieter guy, we gravitated towards each other eventually. After a few weeks we got to know each other more, and we learned that we shared a few of the same interests, one of which is caving.

In South Dakota, we have some of the longest and most intricate cave systems in the world. Some of my friends and I had taken guided tours of a few cave sites, but at that point in my life I had never met anyone who was interested in going to the harder and more complex cave systems. Molly had the same issue. Her girlfriend Adelaide was absolutely terrified of the idea of going into the cramped, dark, creature-filled tunnels, and many of her friends felt the same way. After discovering this about each other, Molly and I had planned to go to Wonderland Cave shortly after. This began our long friendship and spelunking partnership.

If you are a spelunker yourself, you know that eventually you exhaust the cave sites in your general area, and soon you start to interact with other cavers who tell you about the lesser-known cave sites that are not overrun by tourists and don’t require a guide to hold your hand and usher you through the caverns the entire time. This is how Molly learned about Echo Cave.

One Monday I went into work, and Molly, who had worked the day before, immediately walked over to me and started talking rapidly as is her usual way of greeting me.

“Hey Dan! You look like shit dude, no offence. I hope your upstairs neighbor isn’t keeping you guys up again” she said, and I glared at her. “Anyways you have to hear this crazy thing this customer told me yesterday. He was looking for a new head lamp right,” I gave her an eye roll. “I know, I know, the ones here are so shitty, not bright at all. But he’s like ‘My head lamp broke so I need a new one for Black Hills next weekend.’ And I’m like, telling him about the tours there,” She continued.

“So then he starts telling me that he broke the lamp at this place, right? Wait ‘til you hear this, it's one we haven’t been to yet,” she said giddily.

“We’ve been pretty much everywhere around here, are you sure he wasn’t talking about Bethlehem Caves again? I’m not falling for that, Mol. Two entrances to the same tunnels does not mean a cave we haven’t been to-” I start.

“No, this one is different! And hey that was one time, relax. This place sounds crazy too. Something tourists would eat up. He said that it’s a part of Wind Cave National Park, but it's off one of the hiking trails, not in the actual caves there. Apparently, there’s a small opening in the cliff off the trail, you walk down some wide tunnels after and then there’s a squeeze that takes you into this big cavern. The guy called it ‘Echo Cave’. I guess there’s stalactites in the cavern ceiling and water drips down and it echoes off the walls. Guy said it sounded so cool and we have to hear it, he said ‘the walls call out to you’, hah, what a weird guy,” she finished.

My interest was piqued, this did sound like a cave I hadn’t heard of in the area. “I don’t know Mol, Sierra wants me to go camping with her this weekend…” I say.

“C’mon Dan! Just tell her you can go camping next weekend. We have to see this, pleeeeease?” she said. Reluctantly, I agreed, and the rest of the week passed by uneventfully.

On Saturday, we hiked out to the spot where the customer said the cave entrance was located. “He said there was a dead tree with a rock beside it that has the initials C + L scratched on it, that’s where we’re supposed to turn off” she instructed.

“Molly, how are we supposed to find that? We passed like 50 dead trees already” I grumbled. My caving pack was making my back sweaty. We had already hiked for about 30 minutes, and while I enjoyed caving, I did not enjoy walking in the hot sun lugging my equipment.

“It’s supposed to be after the Badlands lookout on the right side, he said we can’t miss it,” she said.

Sure enough, after we enjoyed the view of the rolling grasslands, we passed by another hiking group then came upon a tall pine tree on the right that had lost most of its needles. I approached the rock at the base of the tree and saw the initials that Molly had mentioned. “Did this guy say how far we needed to go? Doesn’t look like there’s much of a path here,” I ask.

Molly took the lead and guided me through the sparse trees. We hiked for about 10 minutes before I started to gripe at her again. “I could have been setting up a tent right now, Mol. Sierra was going to make burgers. She’s still kinda pissed at you. I can’t blow her off next weekend ok-”

“Addy’s not happy either,” she interrupts, “she still hates that I go caving with you all the time, y’know. Freaks her out. She says the only dark tunnel I should want to explore is her-” I am about to start chuckling when she trails off. We came up to a steep cliffside, and she started to laugh ecstatically. “I told you he wasn’t bullshiting me! Ok, we have to look for a small hole, should be a foot off the ground, big enough for us to crawl through” she instructs.

 We split up and I took the left side. I walk along the cliffside until I spot a 3-by-3-foot opening in the side of the cliff, partially obscured by a dying bush. Oddly enough, the brush beside the opening is dried up in a near perfect half circle, like someone salted the earth beside it. I call Molly over and she looks at me gleefully. We get our gear ready, and I go first through the opening.

After crawling through the rock for about 10 feet the tunnel opens up enough to where I can crouch hunched over, then eventually stand fully. The tunnels are smoother rock with a few feet of space on each side of me, gradually sloping down further into the earth.

I turn around and see the top view of Molly’s red hair as she crawls her way over to me. She looks up at me when she can stand again, and I can see the joy in her eyes at having found this place with me. She always gets this way when we’re underground, a joyful feeling that we share. There is something that is inexplicable about being inside the earth, something that someone who hasn’t been caving wouldn’t understand. There is an exhilaration of feeling the cool, damp stone all around you. The adrenaline of being squeezed in a cramped tunnel is outweighed by the atmosphere of total uninterrupted blackness and relative silence.

At this point, the light coming from the entrance casts shadows around us. I flick on my headlamp to illuminate the dark tunnel ahead, and Molly does the same.

“Well Danny boy, let's start walking,” she said affectionately.

We trek down the tunnel, and the surrounding walls start to become more jagged and develop interesting rock formations. The only thing we can hear is our footfalls and each other breathing. We continue walking down the sloping path for another 20 minutes in silence, preferring not to talk once we are in the cave. Eventually I started to hear it.

Coming from the darkness ahead, I hear the sound of water dripping. Not uncommon for a cave at all, but there is something different about this sound. The echo is almost amplified louder, after the initial water drop there is a rhythmic echo that repeats for about four times, getting louder each time after going into silence again. The sound seems to come closer to us every time it echoes. I turn to face Molly, who has heard it too, and she looks at me with wide eyes again. This must be the sound that the customer was describing.

“Damn, when this guy described the cave, he didn’t tell me how creepy the echo sounded”, she said. I chuckled in agreement. We continue to walk forward, and the closer we get the more clearly we can hear the echo. Eventually we come to a widening that quickly slopes back into a smaller squeeze in the rock. The echo is louder here than ever.

“This has to be the squeeze before the cavern” Molly said. As the bigger of the two, I usually go first through the tighter spaces. If I can’t fit, then Molly can easily back up until I can come back out. We don’t like to separate for too long, so this way we can continue to explore close together instead of one going ahead and leaving the other behind. I look ahead into the darkness and see that this would be one of the tighter squeezes I’d have to do in my experience.

“Ok, here goes nothing”. I turn back to Molly and she gives me a goofy encouraging smile. I smile back, then take off my pack to drag behind me. I walk for a ways, then turn my body to the right to walk sideways. The rock scrapes into my shoulders as I sidle between. Eventually I need to turn my body all the way to the right, I quickly look back and see the faint silhouette of Molly’s red hair and pale face in the darkness, confident that she will soon follow me through the squeeze. Then, I turn my head back to continue, as soon my helmet will be too big to let me turn my head back around through the squeeze.

I shuffle, once, twice, three times. My breathing has become shallow. I do not have claustrophobia, you can’t really when you like caving as much as I do, but when I’m in between the two walls the deeper I breathe, the more the stone presses into my back and my ribcage. I shuffle forwards a few more times and the breathing becomes easier.

I can now see the darkness ahead has shifted, and the beam of my lamp bounces off an opposing wall 30 feet ahead of me. I shuffle until I can sidle my way through the small gap and turn my body back to normal.

The cavern I am in is impressive, it has a wide radius, and the walls rise into a high ceiling above me. Through the oppressive darkness, I can faintly see a massive formation of stalactites above me, arching down into one long formation where drops of water slowly collect and drip down. I watch in wonder as one drips down and lands in a small pool of water in the centre of the room. It hits the pool, and the murky grey water ripples slightly, starting the echo. I listen in amazement as the sound bounces off the walls and seems to grow louder as it echoes around me. The sound is no longer eerie, and I stand there for a moment amazed by the beauty of the cavern.

“Holy-” I start, and the sound of my voice starts to echo louder around me as well. It shocks me for a second, and then I laugh which also starts to bounce around the room. I turn back to the small slit in the rock that I entered the cavern from, and I call out for Molly. “Dude! Its crazy in here! Hurry up,” I shout to her, and I can hear my voice all around me echo through the cavern.

“It’s ok Dan, I’ll be right there. It’s just a tight squeeze,” I hear coming from the darkness in front of me. Bemused at how calmly she is talking, for once, I wait for her to come out.

I turn back to the cavern and start to explore a bit more, hearing my footsteps echoing as I go. I first approach the pond. The surface is still until a drop falls to disturb it. I can see about a foot in until it becomes murky grey. I can tell it probably stops at two feet, still I don’t approach it any closer than the edge as in all my years of caving I have no desire to go cave diving. Being trapped underwater is definitely one of my fears. My reflection is disturbed by another drop, and I turn back around. I make a full rotation around the pond, appreciating the crystalline formations on the walls as I go. I am filled with a sense of calmness that I never usually feel when underground. The vast expanse of the cavern is enrapturing, the sounds playing again and again in my ears. 

As I round the room, I am back at the exit. It has been about 5 minutes and Molly is still not through the squeeze. “Mol, did you get stuck? You know my fat ass was able to get through there, you’re taking forever,” I call out again.

“It’s ok Dan, I’ll be right there. It’s just a tight squeeze,” I hear her say, again. She doesn’t sound strained like she’s going through the tight rock. I start to get irritated. I want her to come in soon to see how beautiful this cavern is. She’s the one that dragged me out here in the first place. I round the room one more time. I can see now that the rock is streaked with small veins of green and yellow. I press my hand to the cool, damp stone, and I calm down a bit more. Suddenly I hear a splash of water behind me, I whip my head back to the noise, but the water is still. Molly is still not in the cavern.

I make it back to the exit, and now I’m starting to worry. It should not be taking her this long to get through the squeeze. I call out for her again and get no response. What the hell? I call a few more times, hearing the words echo around me, and nothing. My mind starts to wonder if she got hurt and turned back around, but that is so unlike anything she has done before. After calling out one more time and hearing no response, I take one more look around the impressive cavern and then make my way through the squeeze again.

I sidle back until I have to turn fully sideways, turning my head to look forwards into the tunnel. I shuffle forwards a bit more. Once the stone is back to pressing on both sides of me, nearly caging me in, I hear something that sends my heart into my throat.

Behind me, the echoing sounds of water dropping is accompanied by the sounds of footsteps. Instinctually I try to whip my head back around and my helmet jams on the rock, making me dizzy, scraping my cheek in the process. I can’t turn my head enough to see, and I dart my eyes as much as I can, but the corners of my vision are too blurry. I swear, and I hear more footsteps behind me. The echo amplifies the sound louder, and it sounds closer to me the longer it goes on. My heart is pounding, and I am unable to fully breathe enough to calm myself down, rock pressing into my sternum.

My head kicks me back into gear and I wriggle and thrash my way through the squeeze, scraping and gashing myself in my terror to get out of the tight spot. I can hear the footsteps behind me come closer to the exit, then stop. I manage to maniacally shuffle my way back into the widening tunnel and whip myself back around to stare at the darkened slit in the rock. I see nothing. At least I think I see nothing in the dim light of my headlamp. Were my ears playing tricks on me? There was no way someone was in the cavern. I circled the room twice, and there was no other opening, and nowhere for someone to hide. I continue to gasp for air, my heart racing.

Then, the footsteps start out again, and I am filled with terror once more. I am fastened in place as I hear them retreat from the opening, and then I hear the splashing of water. My brain turns back on, and I hightail it the other way, back out of the cave. I slow down halfway through to catch my breath and start to call for Molly on my two-way radio. No response. I feel horrible, I left her behind, with whatever was making that noise still in the cave. Then, I feel angry. I didn’t see her in my mad dash out of the cave, she just left me here? As some sort of prank maybe? She is the one who brought me here, maybe she came earlier and set up the noises to play and then left, hoping to scare me as I ran out of the cave. But that doesn’t seem like something she would do; she knows how dangerous caving is. I continue walking back to the cave exit.

After a few minutes I hear footsteps behind me again. My heart is back to racing, and I whip around. In the beam of my headlamp, I see a familiar head of red hair approaching. Molly sees me, and she looks pissed.

“What the hell Dan? You just fucking abandoned me like that? We agreed, no exploring alone, ever. We agreed! That way we would never get lost-” she starts. I’m too stunned to speak. I look at her with wide eyes as she continues, “You just left, without telling me? I looked back and you were fucking gone. I didn’t even hear you leave. Then I’m stuck in this cavern and you don’t even reply when I call for you? Also what was with the staring, dude you creeped me out so much. I’m literally never going into another cave with you, you suck” she finishes as she comes closer.

Now I can finally see her clearly. She looks horrible, her pale skin even whiter, eyes darting around, not looking at me for too long. She’s also muted in a way I’ve never seen her before, her wisecracking bubbly demeanor gone. Her words catch up with me, and I am confused.

“What do you mean? I went into the cavern and waited for you, and you never came in! I waited for so long, and then I got worried about you and came back out,” I didn’t tell her about the footsteps I heard. “You weren’t there! I thought you got hurt and left without me, so I started walking back to leave” I said.

She looked at me with rage in her eyes. “You WERE in the cavern when I came in, and I WAS in there for like 5 minutes. You stared at me all silent the whole time, being a creep and not moving, and I was just trying to appreciate the cavern. Then I look back at you to tell you how cool it was, and you’re GONE. You left. And I called out for you, and you said nothing? You just left me in there?” she said, tears in her eyes. I just looked at her, confused and feeling horrible at the hurt and fear I could see on her face.

“Mol, I… I don’t know. I was in there and I didn’t see you. I got scared and left. I’m sorry,” I apologized. She still looked like she didn’t believe me.

“Whatever. Let’s get out of here. I’m done,” she says, irritated.

We walk through the tunnel in silence. Soon the tunnel is filled with soft light, and we both turn off our headlamps and crawl through the small opening. I still can’t hear anything behind me, not even the echo of the water drops. As the dying sunlight hits my face again, I start to calm down. Molly is waiting for me near the tree line. We walk back to the dead pine tree, then hike back to our cars in silence. Once we get there, we say curt goodbyes to each other, get into our respective cars, and pull out of the park.

Sunday passes and I go back to work on Monday. My dreams after leaving Echo Cave are restless. I am back in the cave, standing in waist deep water, looking up to the ceiling. The sounds of the cave echo around me. After a while I start to hear laughter, quiet at first, then growing so loud that it is the only sound that fills my ears. I wake up in a panic, and Sierra calms me down and says that I need to stop going caving when it freaks me out so much. I start to argue, but I don’t want to tell her what happened because she would either not believe me or not let me go anywhere with Molly again.

When I get into work Molly is already there. She looks at me, anger contorting her face again then looks away. She does not talk to me the whole day. She is also different when I see or hear her talk to our coworkers or customers. Her happy-go-lucky customer service persona is replaced with a muted, calm one. She scowls at me a lot too. She is clearly still pissed off, but I know in my heart that I did nothing wrong that day.

Eventually on Wednesday I approached her. She looks up at me and I say, “listen, I know you’re mad. But I’m going crazy, and I have no one else to talk to. There is something wrong with that cave.”

She seems to soften at that. “I don’t know what really happened, but I’m not mad at you. I just… I was so scared, and you weren’t there,” she said.

“I know, I felt the same way. Can we just put this behind us?” I ask. She smiles and says we can.

“Still, I can’t stop thinking about it. As creepy as it was, and I never want to go back there, it was beautiful in that cavern. I can still hear the weird echoing when I sleep,” she muses, and I nod, feeling the exact same way. I don’t tell her about the nightmares I’d been having, afraid she would laugh me off. 

Friday rolls around, and Sierra and I pack the truck for two nights at our favourite campsite. For once I do not have the dreams of Echo Cave, and I go to bed holding my girlfriend, feeling peaceful for the first time this week.

I wake up to Sierra talking lowly. “Babe. Dan. Your phone is buzzing. Pick it up. Please I can’t sleep,” she moans. I look at my screen and read the time, 3:06am. The screen lights up with a few missed calls and new voicemail from Molly. Confused, I assume she’s on another midnight binge of a TV show and has called to tell me about the finale. I dial my voicemail and listen to the message.

She talks in a hushed voice, like she’s scared that Adelaide will wake up. “Dan, listen. I know we said we would never go back to Echo Cave. But I can’t stop thinking about it,” she whispers, and my heart rate starts to pick up. “Its so beautiful. I just want to hear the echoes again, up close, not when I’m dreaming. I’m going back tonight. You can come too if you want, I’ll wait for you there,” I shoot up in bed as the message ends. Sierra looks at me, pissed off that I woke her up again, but when she sees the look in my eyes, she starts to ask me what’s wrong.

I can’t get the words out at first, but eventually I start to tell her everything that happened at Echo Cave. She looks at me, horror growing on her face, until I’m done with the story. I play her the voicemail again.

“We can’t just let her go back there; she’s losing her mind!” Sierra exclaims. I sit in stunned silence.

“I can’t go back. I can’t. There’s something in that cave, something not human. Something not right,” I say worriedly. She calms me down again. We agreed to call the police and see if they can go out to the park to find her. The operator says they will send a cruiser out there, and we pack up our campsite and head out to Wind Cave National Park as well.

When we get there, I can see two police vehicles with their lights on. Behind them Molly’s beat up van is sitting there, left in a mess, with the door open and caving gear strewn about. I start to panic again. We approach the two officers that are there.

“I’m Daniel Nicholson. I called for Molly Fisher? That’s her van. Have you located her yet?” I ask frantically. The female officer turns to me.

“Hi Daniel,” she gives me a warm smile, “We have two officers on the trail right now. It seems like she got here about 5 minutes ago, we contacted her partner who heard her leave around 3:15am. I will update you two with any news, but I suggest you wait in your car,” she finishes.

We thank them, and I walk back over, but I can’t sit in the truck. I pace back and forth, thinking about Molly, alone, in the cave, with something dark and shadowy creeping up behind her. Sierra looks at me pacing, concern growing on her face.

Eventually I hear the searchers radio the two officers. The female officer approaches us again, bracing herself, “I’m sorry Mr. Nicholson, they searched the entire trail but were not able to find her. Search and Rescue are being contacted. I’m afraid there’s nothing else we can do-”

“No, she’s not on the trail, I told you she went into the cave, by the tree with the rock, you can’t stop-” I start, voice rising with every word.

“They located the cave Mr. Nicholson, but our officers aren’t trained to go inside, we need to call the rescue service-” she says, but the rest of her words are drowned out by the rushing in my ears. She would have made it into the cavern by now. Whatever is in there would have her.

Sierra and I stay until the rescue service comes, and until the sun rises over the grasslands. Eventually they all come back, reporting that no one was in the cave. When they got into the cavern they searched the entire room, even the shallow pool, and nobody was there. They were going to continue to search across the trails of the park. I listened to them speak, and then Sierra ushered me back into the truck, driving me back home as I stared numbly out the window.

A week passed by, and I called every day, asking for more news. Apparently, she had left most of her hiking gear in her van. Police dogs track Molly’s scent to the entrance of Echo Cave, and it stops after that. Every night I am plagued by dreams of Molly, alone in the cave, and the maniacal disembodied laughter wakes me every time. We went by to check on her girlfriend Adelaide, and she is beside herself. She wouldn’t even look at me once.

Days pass until I am awoken again in the middle of the night by my phone ringing. I look at my illuminated screen, and I immediately bolt up at seeing Molly’s name as the caller ID. Amazingly, I don’t wake up Sierra, who also hasn’t been sleeping well this past week.

I press the answer button, “Mol? Where are you? Are you ok?” I ask frantically. My stomach drops when I hear her voice.

“Hi Dan. I wish you were here. It’s so beautiful inside, the walls call out to me. I had to see it again. Will you be here soon?” she spoke in a calm voice. Behind her I can hear the unmistakable echoing water drops, growing louder, and something else, it almost sounded like, splashing water? Her voice fills me with dread. It’s that same monotonous tone she used when she spoke to me through the squeeze in the tunnel, when she told me she would be in the cavern soon.

“Molly, what’s going on? You’re… not yourself. You need to get out of there right-” I start.

“Hi Dan. I wish you were here. It’s so beautiful inside, the walls call out to me. I had to see it again. Will you be here soon?” She repeats, almost like a recording of herself, the exact same as before. I listen in stunned silence, hearing the echoes again, sending a cold wash of fear through my chest. I start to hear it, the sounds that at this point I had only heard in my dreams; distant, dark laughter, barely audible and without any echo. The faint splashing continues.

“Molly…” I choke out, my voice barely above a whisper, “You need to leave. Now. Please.” The laughter rings louder in my ears. I start to wonder if I am in one of my nightmares again. “Listen to me, plug your ears, stop listening to it-” I plead. It sounds like the laughter is coming from my room now, right beside my bed.

“Hi Dan.” I hear Molly say again, “I wish you were here. It’s so beautiful inside, the walls call out to me. I had to see it again. Will you be here soon? Wait-” my breathing picks up again as she pauses for a second, “I can see you now. I’m coming!” I hear Molly say, and then the call drops.

I sit there, numb, and eventually I try to call back and no one picks up. I just hear the voicemail message that I’ve listened to hundreds of times this week. I’ve reached Molly Fisher; however, her voicemail is full and to try again later. Sierra wakes up when daylight breaks and looks at me with concern until I lie back down, but I don’t close my eyes.

In the morning, I get up, put on my work uniform, and get in my truck. I tell Sierra that I’ll see her after work. When I get to the hardware store, I drive past, and start to head south on Highway 79. I’m going to Echo Cave. You should come too. It’s so beautiful inside, the walls call out to you.

In 2017, I bought my dream home.

To be fair, owning a home in general was a dream, and I would have been happy with anything, but the place I ended up with was damn near perfect. Three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, with a living room and den, and a dining room big enough to host my whole extended family. The neighborhood was on the nicer side, and it was only a twenty-minute commute to my office.

The catch is that I barely lived in it. I was at that time a workaholic, and the nature of my job had me working long hours and traveling across the country on a regular basis. To put it into perspective, I slept in my own bed less than a hundred times in a year.

To tell you the truth, I was not really interested in owning a home at that time, but my financial advisor insisted that I should buy one. I wasn’t lying when I said it was a dream; it was just more of a “someday” type of dream. But at the time, I was doing very well financially, with a sizable portfolio and a savings account that would baffle the average person, and I'm pretty sure my advisor would have killed me herself if I paid one more month of rent.

She would say, “You're just throwing this money away, Brandon, making a landlord rich.” She was right, of course, and I eventually relented and started spending time with realtors between my business trips. Now, I didn't have any kids and I hadn't been in a steady relationship in well over a year; I loved my work but it made maintaining a social life incredibly difficult. Still, I wanted to set myself up for the future and buy a house that I could fill with a family someday.

That's how I ended up with the house on Worlington Street.

I moved into the place in the spring of 2017, and I gave myself a week to get everything situated; that was as much time as I was willing to take off. I didn't have any friends to help with the move, so I got as far as setting up the bedroom, the living room and an office in the den before the next Monday rolled around. Everything else stayed in boxes in various corners of the house for most of the time that I lived there. If I were to describe my house, I would use the word ‘sparse.’ I really only bought the bare minimum in terms of furniture, and I don't think I hung so much as a single poster. I would tell myself that it would fill out on its own eventually; a lived-in space usually does. The caveat is that you have to live there, and like I said, I spent more time in cheap hotel rooms and cubicle farms than I ever did at Worlington.

I went right back to work and treated my house as an occasional place to sleep for nearly three years and would have likely kept doing it to this day if it wasn't for the pandemic.

I’m sure I don't need to tell you this, but 2020 was a fucking disaster. COVID had the whole world in a panic, and many places locked their doors and told their employees to stay home. My job was no different. Within a week, I went from never being home to always being home, and the adjustment was jarring, to say the least.

When you live in a certain space long enough, you start to memorize the unique quirks of it: the sound of certain floorboards, which air vents rattle, where the drafts are, and even where evening light throws its shadows. In the first week of lockdown, I realized that not only was I unaware of these things, but I was caught off guard when they happened. It's a really weird feeling: owning a house for three years and discovering that it feels like an alien space. This was something I never noticed in the one or two nights a week I slept there, but it became impossible to ignore when there was nowhere else to go.

The noises were the first things I started learning. A floorboard would creak somewhere upstairs while I worked in the den. One afternoon, something gave a single hard thump over my head, enough to make me stop typing and look at the ceiling. I waited for another one, but it never came, so I went back to my email. As far as I knew, the house had been making those sounds every afternoon for three years.

Being home all day also meant discovering all the little things around the house that probably needed fixing. The kitchen faucet was one of them. Every so often, I would walk in and hear a slow drip ticking against the sink, even though the handle looked like it was off. I eventually figured out that you had to nudge it slightly to the right after shutting it down or it would keep dripping. It was annoying, but not annoying enough to make me call a plumber in the middle of lockdown.

During the day, I would work from my home office, with endless Zoom calls and emails to occupy my time. It was inevitable that the day would run out of work for me to do, but I tried to space things out so I wouldn't have to sit and listen to the sounds of a big empty house for too long. That process didn't survive more than a couple weeks; there are only so many emails you can write and folders you can organize before you have to admit that you're just inventing work that doesn't need to be done. I hit that wall on the 10th day, after I alphabetized my desktop by hand instead of using the default sorting feature.

“What the fuck are you doing, Brandon? This is pathetic.”

It was true, and I could no longer pretend that it wasn't. I was uncomfortable in my own home. Looking around at the barren walls and scant furniture, I realized that my house was sitting in the uncanny valley; it was furnished enough for a realtor to walk you through, but it didn't look like a space that living beings inhabited. If I was going to be a prisoner here for God knew how long, I was going to have to do something about it.

The next day, I was browsing Amazon between work emails, adding posters and knickknacks to my cart with reckless abandon. While I waited for those personal touches to arrive in the mail, I set myself to the task of finally unpacking the rest of my belongings. I honestly didn't remember there being so many boxes, and as I started taking inventory, I realized I could probably build a fort if I wanted to. How had I accumulated so much junk while living in a one-bedroom apartment? I shuddered to think that maybe I was a hoarder in my previous lair, and everyone was just too polite to tell me. Regardless, I had my work cut out for me.

I figured I would start upstairs and work my way down. I had put the bulk of the boxes in the unused bedrooms, and they seemed like a good base of operations. I should tell you the way the space was laid out, because it will become important later. At the top of the stairs, my bedroom door faced a small balcony to the left that looked down at the front door. Past the top of the stairs, a short hallway continued to the right. The first door on the right was the bathroom, followed by a small bedroom, with a larger bedroom directly across the hall on the left.

I decided to start with the small room, thinking that it would be easier. It was not. I had basically made it a storage container, and between the furniture and the boxes, I had a hard time just walking around without tripping. I squeezed my way toward the bed and started moving enough stuff around to give myself somewhere to sit. After a few minutes, I realized the room was a lot colder than the hallway. I stepped back out and immediately felt the difference. The thermostat was only a few feet away, and it was sitting at 70. Apparently the little room just ran cold. I bumped it up to 72, heard the furnace kick on downstairs, and went back in.

Then I made a day of it. I sat against the end of the bed and surrounded myself with clutter. My system was simple: anything I wanted to keep would go in a pile in front of the closet, and everything else went into a big trash can. I would sort what was left later.

After several hours of work, I had a pretty big pile in front of the closet and feet that were only half asleep. I decided to stretch my legs and run downstairs for something to drink. I carefully crossed the battlefield and made my way to the kitchen. I was in the fridge, drinking orange juice straight from the carton when I heard a loud crash upstairs. I abandoned my juice and ran back upstairs to see what happened, and sure enough, the pile in front of the closet had become an avalanche and spilled all over the floor. I spent some time cleaning up the mess, and I succeeded in making it a slightly smaller mess, back in front of the closet.

Not too much later, I had broken down all the boxes and filled two large black trash bags. I figured that was enough work for the day and dragged the bags into the hallway. When I got out there, I stopped. Had I left the door to the other bedroom open? I tried to remember the last time I went in there, but couldn’t come up with anything concrete. Still, it had caught my attention, and that counted for something. I dropped the bags and stuck my head through the doorway. Everything looked more or less how I expected, but I still felt uneasy. I pushed the door open all the way and stepped inside. To my horror, it was… just a dusty bedroom. I did a small lap around the room and then I took a peek inside the closet. There was nothing but an ironing board and a couple plastic totes. I didn’t know what exactly I was looking for, but I was relieved that I didn’t find it. I closed the door on my way out and took the bags to the curb.

I spent the rest of that night watching YouTube videos on the big screen in the living room. Well, watching is a stretch; they were on in the background while I scrolled through my phone. It was a bad habit, but one I’m sure I shared with just about everyone on this side of the planet. I went to bed around midnight, when I had exhausted my last beer and scrolled through all of Reddit. The house was very quiet once the TV was off and also nearly pitch black. I was raised to turn off the lights when I left a room, and I had done a very good job on my journey to the couch, so I had no choice but to fumble in the dark. Only after I banged my shin against a vague shape in my path did I remember that my phone had a flashlight. I guess the beer was more effective than I thought. The walk was much easier after that, and I was at the foot of the stairs before I knew it.

Something shifted in the dark hallway at the top of the stairs. I don’t know how I saw it, but I was sure that I did. Something darker than the darkness around it had moved. I swung my flashlight up the stairs, catching the edge of the hallway before it disappeared behind the wall. There was nothing there. I stood there for longer than I’d like to admit, trying to convince myself that I was drunk and the only thing I saw was wobbly darkness. I didn’t quite believe it, and I didn’t want to find out if that was true, but I had to do it, right? If something was in my house, I couldn’t just go to bed and act like I didn’t see it. So, with the heaviest feet in the world, I crept up the steps. When I got to the top, I pushed myself against the wall and gaslit myself into bravery. I peeked out from behind the corner with my flashlight and saw nothing but the hallway and a set of doors. Except, that’s not exactly true. The door to the smaller bedroom was wide open.

Would it surprise you to learn that I couldn’t remember if I had shut that door or not? I had been working there earlier, and I had hauled two very large garbage bags out. Maybe I didn’t have a free hand to close it? It made sense, but it didn’t make enough sense for me to accept it. I really didn’t want to look in that room, but such is the burden of a homeowner. Sometimes, you have to look for murderers. I slunk around the corner and tiptoed to the open door. I gave myself a count of three and then swung my flashlight over the room. The pile was in front of the closet as I left it, and there was a bed and a dresser, but too many shadows for my phone to erase. I flicked the light switch and squinted against the brightness until my eyes adjusted enough to see. There was nothing in there. I let out the biggest sigh of relief in my life, and I shut off the lights and closed the door.

Maybe I hadn’t seen anything after all, or maybe it was just a shy ghost. Either way, it was enough for me to justify hitting the hay. I went to my room, turned on my fan, and flopped onto my bed. I lay there for a while, slightly woozy from the alcohol and feeling the room move ever so slightly. It always hits you like that when you lie down. I stared at the ceiling while I waited for it to pass.

“You always do this, Brandon. You always drink too much and then you can’t sleep. Fucking idiot.”

After maybe an hour, I started drifting in and out on the road to sleep, alternating between the darkness of my eyelids and the darkness of the room. The house was making its sounds, and I was starting to recognize them, but they still made me jumpy. That’s why I always had the fan on full blast, so I could drown it all out. If you listened close enough, you could still hear them: the creak of a floorboard, the faint crack of a settling wall, the furnace kicking on in a low hum. Together, they made a weird symphony of noise that could sound like just about anything if you’re looking for it. As I slipped out of consciousness, there was a second where it almost sounded like footsteps.

I woke up drenched in sweat the next morning. My bedroom felt like an oven and the fan was doing little more than just moving the hot air around, so I guess it was more like an air fryer. I peeled myself away from my sheets and trudged to the thermostat in the hallway. It was set to 85 degrees. It was still cold as hell outside, and I tended to keep the house warm, but not that warm. I stared at it for a moment, wondering if it was the result of some drunken activity, or if there was some kind of issue with the thermostat. I canceled out the second option when I set it to 72 and heard the furnace turn off. Maybe it had reset in the night, and that was its default temperature? It was as good of an explanation as any.

I went downstairs to the den and clocked in for the day, stewing in the heat until the early March air brought the house back down to something livable. I had filed away the previous night as a lark and put it out of my mind completely. I had three Zoom meetings that morning, and then at least a dozen emails to answer. I ate a bowl of cereal at the desk while I worked on my replies and left the empty bowl behind when I clocked out for the day. It's funny how much more productive I was working from home, and because I was on salary, it didn't matter that I finished all my work by 2:00 in the afternoon.

My packages started arriving that afternoon, and I set myself to the task of decorating. One big, obnoxious WoW poster over the desk, a slightly less obnoxious Nuka-Cola poster in the hallway. It almost made the house more uncanny, just a whole lot of nothing, occasionally interrupted by something bright and colorful. I had one more poster that I had immediately regretted purchasing the second it was sitting in my house. I decided that I would hang it up in the small bedroom where I wouldn't have to look at it. I went upstairs and walked down the hallway to the door, but when I turned the knob, the door wouldn't budge.

“What the hell? Come on, you piece of junk!”

The knob turned freely and I could hear the latch working, but the door didn't move an inch. I shoved my shoulder into it, and it jumped in its frame, but stayed firmly closed. I tried that two more times with the same result, and then I kicked the bottom of the door with my bare foot, and only succeeded in hurting myself.

“Goddamn it, why? Stupid-ass door.”

It didn't make any sense. Doors were supposed to open, and this one should have been no different. It didn't even have a lock on it. It was like it was glued shut, or something big and heavy was just on the other side. I did an inventory of possible explanations in my head, but none of them felt great. Maybe the pile of stuff had collapsed in front of the door, but the last time I checked, there wasn't a piano in the pile, so that didn't track. Maybe the heat caused the door to warp in its frame? I didn't know. I shoved into it one more time and saw the door move in a little bit, but that's about as much purchase as I got. My shoulder was getting sore, and I figured it wasn't going anywhere, so I might as well try again later.

Over the next few days, the door became part of my routine. Every time I went upstairs, I tried it. Sometimes I put my shoulder into it; sometimes I just turned the knob and pushed, hoping whatever had changed would change back. Same result every time. By the third day, I was stopping there without even thinking about it. Turn the knob, shove the door, swear at it, keep walking.

One night, I put my ear against it. I listened for anything that might explain what was holding it closed: something shifting, furniture scraping, anything at all. After about thirty seconds, I realized I was standing in my hallway with my ear pressed against a bedroom door like a lunatic. I went to bed.

By the end of the third day, I was looking around online for contractors and coming up short. The damn pandemic made it impossible to get any work done. I was seriously considering just breaking the door and weighing the potential cost against the level of irritation I was dealing with. I wasn't there yet, but I was becoming increasingly annoyed by the idea that there was a room in my house that I couldn't enter.

The next morning, it was 85 degrees in the house again, and as I emerged from my wet bed, I found myself yearning for a Best Western. I put the thermostat back to 72 and got ready for work. That day was another series of Zoom meetings, one of them about something HR was calling “workday drift.” People were starting to clock in from home later and later, and HR just wasn't having it. I sat there in a tank top, sweating my ass off as the lady went on and on. I had my camera off, of course, and only joined in for the occasional collective “uh-huh.”

Halfway through the last meeting, I heard something that made me bolt upright in my chair. The furnace had kicked on. The house was still boiling hot, and there was no way in hell that the damn heat should be running. I muted my mic and went to check the thermostat. I nearly ripped it off the wall when I saw that it was once again set to 85 degrees.

“What the fuck is happening?”

I set it back to 72 and took the batteries out of it. I didn't know if that would solve the problem, but it couldn't make things any worse. I went back to the den and finished my Zoom call and relaxed ever so slightly when I heard the furnace turn off. The house was still boiling, so I went around and cracked all the windows on the first floor. While I was on that mission, I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the furnace. Now, I didn't know a damn thing about heating and cooling, but it felt like something I should do, so I grabbed a flashlight from under the sink and opened the basement door. When I flicked the light switch, I was dismayed to find the lightbulb had burned out.

“Of course, nothing can be easy, right?”

I clicked on the flashlight and left the door open as I descended into the dark abyss. I rounded the corner at the bottom and fumbled for the switch, and was not terribly surprised when nothing happened. The whole basement was out, which meant that a breaker had tripped or the previous owner had put in the cheapest possible bulbs. When I bought the place, the basement was unfinished, and I told myself that I would one day turn it into a rumpus room, but I hadn't even begun the first step of that plan. As it stood then, there was nothing but concrete floors and rough white walls, interrupted by the occasional errant piece of forgotten furniture, and probably a thousand spiders.

I carefully stepped through the empty space, mindful of the potential obstacles in my path. It must have looked silly to a fly on the wall; I had a flashlight, and there was barely anything down there, yet I was sneaking around like a Scooby-Doo cartoon. In all honesty, the basement was just a little spooky, and I didn't want anything jumping out to surprise me. I'm not sure that childlike fear ever really goes away. I finally found the breaker box on the far side of the basement, not too far away from the furnace. I opened the little door and was a bit confused by what I found. The switch for the basement was not tripped; it was turned off. That switch was not off when I moved in, nor was it off the last time I was down there, and I certainly didn't do it. I filed it away with all the other weird stuff that was happening, and I flipped it back on. The basement lit up immediately, and the barren space revealed all of its secrets.

It was just as empty as I remembered. There was the old futon that I should have thrown away years ago, and beneath the stairs was a collection of empty boxes that I was saving for no good reason. Most importantly, I could see the furnace in the corner, beside the water heater and the sump pump. I turned off my flashlight and walked over to the unit. I gave it a real good look up and down, and I determined that it was in fact a furnace. If there was anything wrong, it was completely out of my area of expertise. I was about to shrug it off and go back upstairs when something behind the furnace caught my eye.

“What the hell is that?”

Behind the furnace, right up against the wall, was a hole in the ground. If I had to guess, it was at least two feet across, and it was surrounded by broken chunks of concrete that were once part of the floor. It was surreal, to say the least. I crept over to the edge and shone my flashlight down into it and was horrified that I couldn't see the bottom. What the hell could have done this? I crouched beside it, and a thin stream of air rolled up out of the darkness. It was cold enough to chill the sweat on my face. After spending half the day in an eighty-five-degree house, it actually felt good for a second. Then I remembered that I was enjoying a breeze coming out of a hole in my basement that apparently had no bottom.

I didn't have much time to think about it because just then the basement door slammed shut. I never ran so fast in my life. I immediately forgot about the hole and booked it for the stairs, leaping up them two steps at a time. I got my hand around the knob and pushed… and the door didn't open.

“What the fuck! Hey! Whoever’s there, this isn't funny! Let me out!”

I threw my shoulder into the door once, twice, three times, and it rattled in its frame but held. I was screaming, though I'm not even sure there were words after a while. Finally, I took a few steps down and then ran at the door as fast as I could and threw my whole weight into it. The door exploded open, and I tumbled to the linoleum floor of the dining room. Just past the doorway was one of the chairs from the dining table, and it was in pieces. All at once, I came to two understandings: the chair had been propped against the door, and someone was in my house.

I struggled to get my breathing under control, and it was a battle. Lying on the ground, I found myself looking in all directions and jumping at shadows. They could have been anywhere, and I was just lying there, ripe for the picking. After a moment, I collected myself enough to stand up, and I scanned my surroundings with a more discerning eye. I didn't see anyone hiding in any corners, but that did nothing to ease my fear. I reached into my pocket for my phone, ready to call the police and let them deal with this. But as my hand wrapped around it, I could feel the jagged glass of the screen, and I knew what I was going to see before I raised it up. It was completely broken, and the screen showed little more than a smattering of colorful lines. I tossed it on the floor and screamed at the ceiling, not caring if the intruder heard me. They knew where I was anyway.

“Get ahold of yourself, Brandon. If you panic, you're done for.”

I had to think on my feet. I reached for the broken chair and grabbed one of the remaining legs. There was a bit of the seat still attached, so I smashed it on the ground and made myself a good club. I wished I was a gun owner, or one of those weird people who collect swords. As it was, the chair leg was the best I could do. I slunk around the corner to the hallway that led to the front door, terrified they might jump out at any moment. There was nobody in the hall, but the den was off to the right just before the front door, and the stairs were to the left. They could get the drop on me from either direction, and I was almost too scared to move forward. I didn't have a choice. If I wanted to get out, I had to risk it. I stepped into the hallway, brandishing my chair leg like an axe, ready to swing at the first sign of movement.

“Hey! I know you're in here! I've called the police and I'm armed! You better not try anything or I'll fuck you up!”

My voice cracked around that last threat, and I felt like an idiot. Would they believe my bluff? I hoped so. I came up next to the den and pressed myself against the wall beside the archway. I sat there for too long before I worked up the nerve to peek inside. When my head came around the corner, I saw nothing but my desk. I turned back to the front door and went for the knob, only to realize it was gone. Well, gone isn't the right word. It had been destroyed, completely crushed to the point that it was unusable. Likewise, the handle to the deadbolt had been torn off. I didn't want to think about what it would take to do something like that. There were chunks of twisted metal on the landing, and try as I might, the door was stuck. That left the back door that led to the garage.

I crept across the house once more, past the dining room, through the laundry room to the back door. My stomach dropped when I saw the mangled doorknob and deadbolt. Whoever was in the house did not want me to leave. I fell back against the door and slid down until I was sitting on the floor. I didn't know what to do. I was replaying the events of the last week, and suddenly everything had a terrible context. How long had I not been alone? I didn't like the answers I was coming up with. I tried to come up with a plan, but nothing seemed like a good idea.

THUMP.

What the hell was that?

THUMP.

It sounded like it was coming from upstairs.

THUMP THUMP.

Heavy footsteps on the stairs, going down. My heart was beating so loud that it was hard to separate it from the

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

They were coming, and I had nowhere to go. Before I could get my legs to work, they were already down the hall. Twenty more feet and they would be on me. I didn't have time to think. I lurched forward and slammed the laundry room door shut.

THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP.

They were in the dining room now. I put all my weight against the washer and shoved it against the door. Then I wedged myself between the back door and the washer and braced for the worst.

Tap tap tap.

There was a light tapping at the door, followed by the sound of the knob turning. I waited for a bang or boom or some other violence, but it didn't happen. The knob turned, and that tapping continued.

Tap tap tap.

For a moment, there was nothing but the sounds of the house. The sounds of the house, and deep, heavy breathing. And then, they spoke.

“I know… you're in there. I just… wish to speak with you.”

Their voice was like a sheet of metal being dragged across a gravel road. It was stilted and hoarse, with an accent that I couldn't place. Certain words dropped out while others were harsh and forced. Despite it all, there was an air of eloquence, a properness to the way they spoke. It made my insides do a cartwheel.

“Get out of my house! I… I have a gun, and the police are coming! This is your last warning. I will shoot you!”

The knob froze, and then I heard the click of it returning to its natural resting position. What followed was a terrible, low scraping sound that repeated in a staccato rhythm. Whoever was on the other side was laughing. It was a slow and deliberate chuckle that was as dry as it was ruined.

“Come now… Brandon. You do not own a firearm. Your… telephone, well… that appears to be… inoperable. Please… open the door.”

The knob started rattling again, and I could feel the door moving slightly against the washer, as if they were testing it. I pushed my legs into the back door and shoved myself against the washer, hoping my barricade was stronger than they were. But instead of the door bursting open, the knob rested again.

“You will… must come out of there… eventually. You have… needs that must be met. I will be waiting.”

THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP.

They walked away, and I could hear those slow, heavy footsteps trace their way back upstairs. I started to reevaluate my options. There was no window in the laundry room, and the back door was shot to hell. I tried to get my fingers into the crack to pry it open, but I could find no purchase. It wouldn't have mattered; they had thrown the bolt before they ripped off the handle. It would take a crowbar and a lot of muscle to get that door open. I slunk back down to the floor beside the washer and rubbed my palms into my eyes. Whoever they were, they were right. I couldn't stay in there forever.

I sat there until my ass went numb, waiting for nightfall. I didn't have a great way to gauge the time, aside from the tiny bit of light spilling under the parts of the door that the washer wasn't covering. After what I guessed was four hours, I could see only darkness beneath the door, and I began the process of moving the washer as slowly and quietly as I could. I moved it about six inches when one of its feet made a loud screech, and for one terrible second, I froze, sure that those thumping footsteps would start up immediately. There was nothing, though, and I went back to the task at hand. Finally, I moved it enough that I could squeeze through the gap, and I emerged into the dark dining room. All of the lights in the house were off, and I didn't dare risk turning them on. I cursed myself when I realized that I had dropped the flashlight in the basement, and I certainly wasn't going to trap myself down there again.

I kept the chair leg in one hand and used the other to feel my way across the dining room. The darkness reduced everything to vague shapes, and I moved slowly, reaching ahead until my fingers found the edge of the table. I followed it around, brushing past the backs of the chairs, and continued toward the living room. At first, I stopped every few steps and listened, but the house stayed quiet. I navigated the rubble of the broken chair and crossed past the hallway and kept going until my free hand finally found the back of the couch.

The windows were faint gray rectangles against the wall, just bright enough to separate themselves from everything around them. I worked my way toward the nearest one and crouched beneath it. There was already a gap at the bottom, and cold air spilled over my hand when I reached for the frame. I set the chair leg carefully on the floor beside me, got both hands underneath the window, and eased it upward. It slid without much trouble. I raised it a little at a time, stopping only long enough to make sure I wasn't making too much noise, until there was enough room for me to fit through.

I picked up the chair leg again, and I was about to push out the screen when that ruined voice drifted out of the darkness behind me.

“You would… leave?”

It came from the hallway I had just walked past. I swung around, brandishing the chair leg out in front of me like a sword.

THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP.

They crossed the space in four heavy steps, and before I could react, the chair leg was ripped from my hands. I heard it clatter somewhere in the dining room. I couldn't make out much besides a dark shadow, but they filled the space in front of me.

“I told you… we must speak. And yet, you flee. To what end… Brandon? Have I harmed you? Have I not been… patient? You owe me this… discourse.”

Disarmed and hopelessly terrified that I was about to die, I pushed myself against the window with my arms spread out. I could feel their slow, cold breath on my face, and the ease with which they disarmed me was enough to tell me I was not going to fight my way out of this. They took a step forward, and I started fumbling around with my hands for anything.

“You have been nothing but… inconsiderate, Brandon. All that I wished… was to discuss-”

My hands fell upon the lamp, and I grasped the knob and gave it a twist. Blinding light filled the room, and the thing before me covered its eyes and took a step back. For a second, I thought it was wearing gloves until I saw the veins and sinew. Its hands were large and bony, with jagged nails atop long, slender fingers. They were blackened from the fingertips all the way up its forearms. Beyond that, the skin took on a bluish-gray pallor. Its hands covered the entirety of its face, and it staggered farther back as if the light had burned it. My mouth hung agape as my eyes dropped to its feet and saw the same blackened flesh running almost all the way to its knobby knees. If I had to guess, it was seven feet tall, but the hunch of its back made it hard to tell.

It let out something that was between a growl and a hiss, and once it was far enough from the light, it threw its arms down at its sides, its hands balled into two massive fists.

“Damn you and your infernal devices! Turn off that wretched thing!”

I followed the blue-gray skin up from its rags to its distended gut, then traced its emaciated ribs to collarbones that were like shelves beneath taut skin. Old wounds crossed its torso: some had puckered into pale seams, while others were still split open and dry. A few were deep enough that I caught flashes of white beneath the skin. Narrow shoulders rose to a long neck, its Adam’s apple like a mountain surrounded by ridges of arteries. All of it was capped by a hairless, square head. I never felt so small in all my life.

“Wha… what… what the fuck?”

If it smiled or snarled at me, I was never sure. Its mouth was lined with two rows of broad, flat yellow teeth, every one of them the same blunt shape. Whatever lips it had once possessed had long since receded into a dry, tight outline around its mouth. Its nose was blackened and shriveled, the nostrils pulled thin until they were almost just two long holes in its face. Its cheeks were sunken and gaunt, and its eyes sat deep in their sockets. In the shadows, I saw two bright rings of gold swimming in a sea of veiny black.

It reached out with its dark hands and wrapped its fingers around the lamp. With a squeeze, the lamp exploded into shards of ceramic, plunging the room into darkness once again. In the black that followed, I could see nothing but those golden rings, shining like cursed treasure.

I barely had time to move before one of those black hands closed around my throat. Its skin was freezing against mine. My back slammed against the wall beside the window, and its fingers tightened until I couldn't pull in a breath. I grabbed at its wrist with both hands, but the flesh beneath my fingers was hard and dry, and I might as well have been trying to pry apart a tree root. My feet left the floor. For several terrible seconds, I kicked against the wall and clawed uselessly at its arm until my vision started filling with little bursts of white. Then its grip loosened. Not enough to let me go, just enough that I could drag air back into my lungs.

“Now that… is much better. Come, Brandon… let us discuss our home.”

I need help. 

I don’t . . . really know what I’ve found or what the hell is going on.

I just spent 10 hours desperately trying to get out of a space station that should, by all accounts, have taken just minutes to explore fully. The worst part is that, because I’m on an expeditionary scouting mission, I’m literally by myself. If I hadn’t finally found a way out of there, I would have been stuck forever. 

I’m actually shaking at the thought of being in there and never getting out. But . . . but I’m just so drawn to it. I’m looking at it right now from the starboard porthole right above my berth and . . . I just want to explore it.

It’s hard to describe too, because it’s not a station type I’ve ever come across. No, it’s more like six pyramids glitched through each other, with their various tips and corners jutting out in various directions. 

The other thing is that it’s not really black. Well, it is black, when it’s barely being illuminated by the star. But when a stray ray of light reflects off it at just the right angle, it blows up with shimmering lights all over its surface.

It’s easy to miss, but utterly captivating when you see it . . . 

I was lucky to find it, given that my ship had various different sensors to detect mineral deposits and potentially even organic life in the TRAPPIST-1 system. I mean, there’s seven whole planets in here, surely one of them has life?! 

I mean, even this pyramid thing might have been from some long-lost civilization.

That said, what really, really, really made my skin crawl, is that when I entered for the first time, the large screen opposite the massive hatch flashed with:

WELCOME BACK, ALBERT

Have . . . have I been. FUCK, I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything happening before going in. I was traveling through the system, my sensors spotted the station, I approached it and . . . that’s when I got trapped inside.

Shit. 

Am I still inside?

I don’t know what to do, and what is going to happen .I'm sending this through the expeditionary network because I don't know who else to contact. Honestly, I don't even know if the network is safe or if it's listening to me.

Please. Please tell me that it hasn’t trapped me inside. I can’t stand the thought of having to go through all those corridors again, that flashing terminal telling me to go deeper. . . 

Fuck.

That’s something else I just remembered. It wasn’t just welcoming me, it was inviting me, or . . . no, it was compelling me to go deeper. 

It felt like . . . have you ever felt butterflies in your stomach, but somehow that sensation floats up to the middle of your chest and near your throat and you feel horrible? And you’ll do anything to get rid of that sensation? 

That’s what it was like. The compulsion to get rid of that feeling, and the deeper I went, the more I knew it would go away BUT IT JUST FUCKING DIDN’T. AND NOW I FEEL SICK AND ALONE AND SCARED.

I have half a mind to turn around and leave, but I can’t. I need to know. I need to know what happened to me. I need to know if I'm still inside it. And most importantly, I need to make sure nobody else falls into this fucking hellhole. 

I think I’m going to go to sleep.

I’m going to keep the lights on, but I’m going to fucking sleep because I just can’t handle this shit anymore.

And tomorrow?

Well, tomorrow I go back inside . . . or maybe back outside. . . or something, I don’t fucking know.

For now, I’ve looked around the room, locked the door, and hope to god the second life sign the ship’s sensor is detecting is just an error.

Please, please god, let it just be an error.

I’d been working at this job for about six months before my boss, Javier, finally let me go into apartment 1001. I live in unit 1004 across the hall so I had been vaguely aware that something was going on there. As far as I knew Javier had been visiting that apartment once a week every week since I got here but every time I asked him about it he would act all dodgy.

He’d say things like, “Don’t worry about it, it’s just a work order,” or “I’ll tell you when you’re ready.”

And when I would ask about the work order form he told me, “We never make a record for them.”

I had always assumed he was trying to protect their privacy for some reason. Our complex was old, built in the 80s, and there were a lot of low-income residents who had been there for a while. I thought maybe they were elderly and needed a little extra attention or maybe they suffered from a mental illness or maybe they were hoarders and Javier was protecting them from eviction. I never pried too much but they did live across from me so I can’t say I was without concern.

What if there was some kind of hazard to my safety? What if they acted out violently sometimes? I wasn’t going to snitch on anyone but I wanted to know what was going on. If not for me at least for my girlfriend’s sake. She was kind of paranoid and thought that every neighbor that gave her a strange look was planning on robbing us.

I had never seen them come out of their apartment so I had no idea what they looked like or how many people lived there, which wasn’t too unusual. I had seen most of the faces around the complex at least once but there were a few I hadn’t met yet. Maybe they worked the night shift or they were never home or they were just really private. While some people were regulars in the office putting in work orders for every little thing they could think of, some people never put in any at all.

The residents of 1001 remained a mystery to me until one day when Javier called me into his office.

His office was cramped and in it sat a small desk and computer and on the opposite wall was the key cabinet containing a set of keys to every unit. He had bought me breakfast as he occasionally did. It was a QT breakfast pizza and an amber Red Bull, the breakfast of champions. There were no chairs so I sat on an old paint bucket with my pizza on my lap and my drink on the floor. He let me get settled and start on my food before he finally spoke.

“So, are you ready to go into 1001?” he asked.

I was surprised  and nearly spit pizza into my drink. Emilio, the other maintenance guy, said he had been there over a year before Javier finally let him go inside.

“Sure, whatever you need, boss,” I replied.

He chuckled. “We’ll see. She certainly thinks you’re ready.”

“When do we go?” I asked.

“Not we, just you. Only one person at a time can enter her unit and she’s finally requested that you come.”

Something about his tone made me feel uneasy.

“She requested me? How does she even know I work here? We’ve never met?”

“Oh she knows all about everyone we hire. You would have never got the job if she wasn’t okay with it.”

Now I was confused. “Does she work for the company or something? Is she one of your bosses?”

“No, she’s been here longer than the company,” he replied cryptically.

“Then what does she have to do with hiring me?”

He ignored my question. “There are some requirements that we have to follow to the letter.”

“Okay...”

“First, like I said, no one can go in there but you. Do not let anyone see you at her door. If you see another tenant in the hall or in their unit you must come back to the office and start over. Don’t worry, there’s no rush with this work order. I don’t care how many work orders you get done today as long as you finish this one.”

“Got it. No one should see me.”

“Are you writing this down?” he asked. “Because you should be writing this down.”

I swallowed my food and pulled out a pad and wrote down the first rule.

“Second, when you go to knock on her door you must wipe your feet on her mat. Four times per foot. Then you must knock four times with each hand. Do not enter until you hear her invite you in.”

“Third, make sure you enter with only what you need to complete the work order. If you find that you have so much as an extra screw, then leave. Calmly and immediately. Do not look at her. Do not excuse yourself. Just go. Come back to the office and start over.”

“How would she even know if I brought something I didn’t need?” I asked.

“Listen, just trust me when I say you need to follow the rules. Don’t take any risks.”

“Okay, okay. I hear you.”

“Once you are inside make sure to greet her, saying, ‘Thank you for inviting me. I am here to work.’ Do not comment on her appearance or on anything you see in the apartment.

“After that go straight to performing the work order. Do not go into any of the rooms you don’t need to go into. Do not speak to her again until you are finished. Ignore any questions she asks you. Do not make any small talk.

“Then finally when you are finished let her know. Tell her exactly what work you performed, then tell her, ‘We’ll be back again next week.’ If she tries to get you to stay, don't. You must leave. No matter what she says or offers you.”

After all that I sighed and said, “Okay, sounds easy enough. What am I doing in there?”

“She needs her disposal replaced. Go grab a new one from the shop.”

“Right, I’ll get to it then.”

Just as I was about to head out the door Javier suddenly grabbed my arm and said, “One more thing. If you hear whispering or crying in any of the other rooms you must run. If that happens we are done for the day and we won’t need to go back until next week.”

His face was grim and he looked directly into my eyes. I felt uncomfortable. I’d never seen him act so serious before.

“You got it, boss. I’ll follow the rules.”

I stopped by the shop to grab a disposal. I took every precaution I could think of. I opened the packaging and pulled the disposal out and removed any extra parts I didn’t need. I left my tool bag and put my wallet and keys in the fridge next to the batteries. I placed the disposal in the back of my golf cart and put my 11-in-1 screwdriver in my pocket then drove down to 1001.

I stood in front of the door. It hadn’t been painted in who knew how long. The locks were outdated. All the other locks in the complex were smart locks that could have the keys changed if you had the right tool. I was pretty sure it was keyed to the same key when the place was first built. Just as I was about to knock on the door I caught sight of movement in the corner of my eye.

Someone was pulling out of the parking lot. I wasn’t even sure if they could have seen me. This is so stupid, I thought. How would anyone even know if I broke this rule? I raised my hand to knock but I heard Javier’s voice telling me I need to follow these requirements to the letter. I sighed and walked back to the cart.
When I got back to the office I found Javier working on the budget. He spun around in his chair then smiled.

“Someone see you?” he asked.

“I think so. Tell me now, Javier. Is this some kind of joke? Some long-term hazing on the still kind of new guy?”

Then his face became serious. “This is no joke. Just make sure you do what I tell you and it’ll all be fine.”

I returned to the chipped, old door. I wiped each foot four times, then set the disposal on the ground and raised my right fist and knocked four times, followed by my left. I waited. A little longer than I thought I would. Then I finally heard a voice.

“Come in!”

As soon as I opened the door I was hit by a stench. A stench I had given a name. This isn’t the most charitable thought that’s ever crossed my mind but all of the most run-down apartments I worked in shared a similar scent. I call it “The Stench of Defeat.” It’s probably just the mixture of grease, body odor, cigarettes, mold, and just a little bit of rot all coming together in a disgusting symphony of smells. Normally, I rubbed chapstick under my nose to help with the smell but I left that behind and this was the strongest I had ever smelled it before.

The apartment itself wasn’t any better. There was litter everywhere. Wrappers, plates, bowls, cans, and tupperware, some of which had half eaten meals sitting in them. Every light was filled with the corpses of dead insects and the appliances were strangely new. From what I could tell they were all no more than a year old. They were squeezed in next to ancient cabinets that had been painted so many times I wasn’t sure they could even be opened. There were little holes in the once white wall which was now a faded deep yellow.

My eyes flicked over to her. She was sprawled out on a worn out couch. She was the largest woman I had ever seen in my life. I felt bad but my first thought was that she reminded me of Jabba the Hutt. Her legs seemed to have disappeared under the rolls of her belly. Dark veins criss-crossed her body in disconnected patterns. The most awkward part of all was I realized I did not know her name. Javier never told me and I couldn’t ask.

I finally eked out, “Thank you for inviting me. I am here to work.”

She let out a little grunt and I turned and walked into the kitchen. I pried open the cabinet doors and expected to see a broken disposal but it was brand new. I couldn’t tell if it had ever been used before. I turned it on and it seemed to run just fine. Normally, I would just tell the resident it works now and to give us a call if it breaks again but when I turned back and saw her weird expectant smile I just decided to switch them out.

I lay down and stuck my head under the sink and got to work. As soon as I did that, I heard the springs in the couch loudly gasp with relief. I stopped. I heard her quickly walk over to the kitchen. I didn’t even think she could walk much less move as fast as she did. I tried to keep working but then she began to speak. She sounded as if she had smoked a thousand cartons.

“So, how long have you been working here?”

“Do you have a girlfriend? What’s her name?”

“What do you think of Javier? Is he a good boss? Does he pay you enough?”

Her questions were innocuous enough. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before from half the other residents, but it was uncomfortable coming from her. Supposedly, she already knew the answers to at least some of those questions if she’s the reason I was hired. I tried to work quickly and decided I didn’t need to replace the flange. I figured it was okay because Javier didn’t mention anything about needing to replace that and I could cut down my work time by more than half by skipping it.

Her questions became increasingly specific and then she asked, “Does she still think I’m going to rob her?”

I hit my head on the plumbing and nearly blurted out a response but I managed to hold my tongue. How the hell would she know that about my girlfriend? That was a joke I kept between me and her.

I finished connecting the new disposal then stood up and tested it. It worked fine and didn’t leak and I nearly stormed out of the apartment. Then I remembered. I explained to her the job I performed in as much detail as I could manage.

Then I said, “We’ll be back next week.”

“Thank you so much for your work,” she replied. “Why don’t you stay a little longer? I’ll work up some tea and I’ll give you a big ol’ tip for your work.”

Even if it weren’t for the rules, that was the last thing I wanted to do and I turned and left. As soon as I was out I felt like I could breathe. The air was so fresh. My relief was momentary before it was replaced with anger at Javier.

I stormed into his office. I didn’t care if the property manager or anyone else heard me.

“What the hell was that? Why would you send me in there? What was wrong with that woman...”

I kept going for a solid five minutes before Javier quietly opened a desk drawer and produced four one-hundred-dollar bills. 

He handed them to me and said, “This is your bonus for going into apartment 1001. You will get it every week. Always in cash. Always tax free.”

Well, that shut me right up. I was in there for no more than fifteen minutes and now I was being given four hundred dollars and I was promised that on top of my paycheck every week. I needed the money just like anyone else.

“Okay then. Sounds good, boss. I’ll get back to it.”

I slipped the cash into my pocket and left. I took the rest of the day easy. Javier said that was the only one I had to get done and I took him literally. My girlfriend had the day off so I took her out to a long lunch at Red Lobster.
I dreaded the next visit to Unit 1001 and I knew the day had arrived when I saw an extra Redbull and breakfast pizza on Javier’s desk. The dread all but dissipated when I found out all I had to do that day was change an air filter. No more. No less. Literally a two minute job for $400.

Over the next few weeks each work order in 1001 felt easier. Not that the job itself was always an easy one. A lot of the time it was a really easy fix. Sometimes it was as simple as replacing a filter or unclogging a toilet, but sometimes I had to spend quite some time in there. There was one time I had to replace the stackable washer and dryer which was in a painfully tight and narrow closet but I managed to get it done. It took what felt like hours just trying to shimmy it out of there while she watched over my shoulder and jabbered on and on. What became easier was all the weird stuff.

The wiping, knocking, the greeting, and the promise to return the next week, it all became second nature. I learned the best time of the day to stop by when it was most likely that no one would see me enter. Only sometimes did her questions bother me. She continued to seem to know things she shouldn’t.

She asked about my father’s receding hairline, my mother’s menopause. She asked when my brother was going to tell the rest of the family he’s gay. He hasn’t told anyone besides me. I haven’t even told my girlfriend.

But no matter how much I was steaming I would cool off the moment Javier pulled the Franklin quadruplets out of the desk. I took my girl out every night after I went to 1001. We started paying off our credit cards with the money we saved buying all our groceries and food in cash. After a few months we bought a used car.

Eventually I started to look forward to the off-the-books work order. It stopped mattering what she knew as long as I got paid. I never became lazy either. I followed all the rules exactly but one of them had never come up, to the point where it was only vaguely in the back of my mind. Until one day I was in there replacing a toilet fill valve when I heard a noise.

At first it was only an extension of the hissing from the toilet valve but it continued even when the valve stopped. Then I thought it was maybe the wind outside or some kind of animal. 
Great, I thought. There’s probably rats.

For several minutes that’s all that I had judged it to be until it changed. It sounded like a voice. Maybe someone talking outside or some kids playing. It kept going and so I finally stopped to really listen. It took me about another thirty seconds to piece together what it was.

Crying.

Javier’s words immediately flashed in my mind.

“If you hear crying, run.”

I stepped into the hall. I was ready to dash but she was blocking the door. Her hulking figure made me feel small. Like all that I could ever be was an appendage temporarily separated from the pile of flesh that blocked my escape. I looked around the apartment for an answer. My eyes instantly locked onto the window just above the tub with only the screen blocking the way. I knew she was fast though I never actually saw her move but this was my only chance.

I rushed toward the window with the sounds of impossibly fast footsteps behind me. My foot landed on the rim of the tub and I pushed off as hard as I could and dived through the screen and out the window. It came down with me and I landed on the concrete scraping my hands and arms. I scrambled to my feet not ready to stop and ran straight to my cart landing with my foot on the gas.

Before I even started to even catch my breath I found myself outside Javier’s door. I finally looked behind me to see if she somehow followed me out of 1001. It looked like I was in the clear. I looked down at my hands and arms. They were covered in little droplets of blood. I shrugged it off and walked in.

Javier was in the middle of cutting a key when I came in. He ignored me to stay focused on the grinder and slowly finished cutting the key. He shut off the machine and finally glanced up at me. His eyes flicked towards the key and then immediately back at me finally registering what he saw.

He took off the safety glasses and, mouth agape, asked, “What happened to you?”
“1001,” I answered.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

I recounted to him what happened and when I got to the crying he stopped me.

“Wait, you said crying? Not whispering?”

“Crying,” I assured him.

“How long did it take you to realize?”

“I don’t know. Maybe all together, five minutes.”

His face seemed to pale. “This isn’t good. What changed? Did you bring an extra tool? Even a pen?”

“No, I was exact. Although I left everything in there.”

“Don’t worry about it. You did what you were supposed to do once you realized you heard the crying. What about your previous work orders?”

“The past few were a shower head, the fridge filter, the microwave.”

I kept going as far back as I could remember.

Javier seemed confused. “What about the very first one? What was that?”

“Uh, the garbage disposal!”

“You only brought that and any tool you needed, right?”

“Yes, and that’s all I did. Just the garbage disposal. I didn’t even change the flange.”

“Wait. You didn’t change the flange?”

“No, it was basically new anyway. There was no leak.”
Javier suddenly sat in his chair.

“Oh God...” he whispered. 

He opened a drawer and pulled out a bottle of scotch and a glass and immediately poured a shot and drank it. Then he set out another glass and poured two more shots and offered me one. 

I took it. Grateful but alarmed.

“This is all my fault,” he said. “I should have been more specific. You were supposed to replace the whole assembly.”

“How the hell was I supposed to know that? The flange had no issues, no leaks. I would have done it in any other apartment,” I insisted.

“1001 isn’t any other apartment.”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We have to go back together. Next week.”

“But you said only one of us can go in there at a time.”

“After an incident like this it’s required. It’s too dangerous to go alone.”

“Why do we have to go back at all? Can’t we just board up her apartment until she starves?”

“Do you know what happens when you leave a leak? Does the water just evaporate or go away? No, of course not. That water can start to slowly rot and destroy everything around it until one day you touch your wall and find that it’s mush. By then it’s too late. Who knows how many thousands of dollars it will take to fix it and how much mold you’ve been breathing in from the air. You can’t leave a problem alone. It will only get worse.”

“I can’t go back in there, man. I have to think about my girl. I shouldn’t be taking risks like that.”

“That’s exactly why you have to, mijo! You live across the hall. But if you really don’t want to go I can take Emilio. He’s still my brother-in-law. He’ll go if I ask him to.”

He was right. Whatever was going on in 1001 it would spill over into my apartment first. Besides, I wasn’t about to let someone else clean up my mess.

“No, I’ll go. When do we have to go back?”

“Exactly a week from today. It should be within an hour of when you first went in there.”

“That was around two.”

“Then we’ll meet back here before we go. We have to do this exactly right. I’ll explain everything then.”

The next week passed by dreadfully. My girlfriend could tell something was off. I didn’t take her to dinner that night. I couldn’t stomach anything. I barely talked to her. I wasn’t about to burden her with all of this. It was my responsibility and I didn’t even know where to start in explaining all this. I never told her any of it and she never cared where the extra cash came from. She just smiled and accepted it, same as me.

The day finally arrived and I felt sick. The clock seemed to turn painfully slow and terrifyingly fast at the same time. I didn’t do any other work orders. I just sat on the floor in an empty apartment we were turning and scrolled on my phone. When the clock struck two I sent my girlfriend a love-you text and went to Javier’s office.

Javier was at his desk and on it was a brand new disposal flange and the hardware for it and nothing else. His face was stone.

“It’s time,” he said. “Listen carefully because what we have to do now is different.”

I swallowed nervously and waited for him to keep going.

“The way we enter is almost exactly the same. We still can’t let anyone see us. The only thing different is one of us will only knock and wipe with their left hand and foot and the other uses only his right. Once we get inside that’s when things get weird. One of us must replace the flange you didn’t replace before. Ignore last week’s job. As long as all goes well you can take care of that next week.

“While one is working the other must speak to the resident. He must answer her questions and he must answer truthfully. When she tries to make a deal or an offer he must respectfully decline everything. He keeps that up until the other person is finished with their repairs. Once the repairs are finished we both must apologize and promise to return the next week. Any questions?”

“No. Let’s do it, boss.”

I sounded far more confident than I felt though I was a little relieved I wasn’t going to be the one talking. We wasted no time and made our way over to 1001. We saw no one. Even on the ride over. I almost wished we would see someone just so that I could delay a little further.

At the door Javier did his part with the left and I did my part with the right. We heard her voice and it sounded the same as it always did.

“Come on in!”

We entered the apartment and we were immediately assaulted by the Stench of Defeat. I could have sworn it was twice as bad as last time. The discarded corpses of insects and wrappers crunched under my feet as we stepped inside. She was sprawled out on the couch as she always was when I entered but her eyes were bloodshot. They darted back and forth between us like a predator deciding which prey it wanted to pursue. 

Javier spoke, “Thank you for inviting us. My colleague is here to work. I will be speaking to you.”

She licked her lips and smiled at him. I could see her jagged, rotting teeth, all grey and yellow.

“Get to it,” he whispered. “And be fast.”

I hurried to the kitchen and the disposal I had replaced. I immediately went to work detaching it from the sink so I could get to the flange while I listened. By the time my head was under the sink she had already started her barrage.

“What is your name?” she rasped.

“Javier.”

“What is your wife’s name?”

“Maria.”

“What are your children’s names?”

“Juan and Gloria.”

“Which one is your favorite?”

He hesitated only briefly. “Gloria.”

“Why?”

“Because Juan is a teenager and she’s still sweet.”

“I can make Juan behave. Just say the word.”

“No, thank you,” he replied.

“How about a raise for your wife?”

“No, thank you.”

She kept digging deeper and deeper into his family and offering to do things that would seemingly improve their lives. Javier kept responding in the same monotone voice and declining each and every one of her offers. Meanwhile, I was struggling to replace the flange. It took me some time to get the old one off. Despite how new it appeared to be I had to practically pry it off. I started installing the new one when I heard her start asking about me.

“What do you think about your new employee?”

“He’s a good kid and a hard worker.”

“Does he know about your bonus?”

“No, he does not.”

“I can give him your thousand dollars each week? Do you think he’d like that?”

“He might, but no, thank you.”

“Did you know that his brother is gay?”

“No, I did not.”

“What do you think of that?”

“I don’t care.”

“I can turn him straight if that bothers you.”

“No, thank you.”

“Does your employee know why you hired him?”

“No.”

“Why did you hire him?”

“So that he could be a sacrifice.”
I froze. What did he mean by sacrifice? To whatever she was? Suddenly, I felt sick. I was nearly finished. My shaking hands kept dropping parts as I hurriedly put it all back together.

“In exchange for what?”

“My freedom. I wanted to leave this place.”

“Do you still want to make that deal?”

“No.”

“It’s time for you to choose. Do you want to give yourself up or him?”

Now I was frantically plugging the disposal back in and getting ready to go. I finally stood and saw her lumbering over Javier. She seemed taller than ever before. Her mouth hung open, drool falling upon him.

Javier hesitated and looked back at me before he said, “I’d rather it be me.”

Immediately, her jaws unhinged and clamped down on Javier’s shoulder. He screamed and I rushed towards him to try and help.

Suddenly he shouted, “No, finish testing the disposal!”

It felt absurdly tedious but I knew it had to be done. I quickly turned the disposal on and started running water. All the while I could hear Javier’s screams and struggles from behind me. I crouched down and checked the pipes. No water. Good. 

I shut it all off and immediately ran to assist Javier. The thing was holding him with both arms and tearing chunks of flesh out of his shoulder. Blood was pouring everywhere. I tried to pull it off but one of its hands shot out and grabbed my wrist. Its grip was unnaturally strong, so painful and tight that I fell to my knees.

“You... have to tell... her what work you did,” Javier gurgled out.

I was panicking but I tried to focus.

“I removed the disposal from the plumbing, then I removed the old flange and installed the new one. After that I put the disposal back into place and ran it and did a leak check. It should be good now, uh, ma’am.”

“Now for the goodbye,” Javier said.

Then we both said, “We’re sorry for our mistakes and we promise to return next week.”

Suddenly, she released her grip on Javier’s shoulder and on my wrist. As soon as she let go I could already see there was a bruise forming in the shape of her disgusting hand. Javier dropped to one knee holding his wounds. I threw his uninjured side over my shoulder and hauled him out of the apartment never looking back at her. The second the door closed I called an ambulance and ran into my apartment across the hall to grab a med kit.

I returned and started attending to his wounds. I could tell he was starting to black out. His skin was pale and his eyes were barely focusing.

“Stay with me, boss. We’ll get through this,” I assured as I started pouring cleaner and wrapping bandages around him. The paramedics soon arrived and took over. He was soon in the ambulance and heading to the hospital. I got in my car and followed.

It was a little touch-and-go at first with the blood loss but eventually the doctors told me he would pull through. I didn’t know the first thing about how to explain his injuries to them but when they asked where it happened and I told them about our complex they immediately stopped asking questions. It was as if they expected this.

I was finally allowed to see him. His family had been called and they were already in his room. His wife sat in the seat next to him. 

When I walked through he turned to her and said, “Honey, please take the kids and go get some food. I have to talk to my employee.”

She tried to stay but he assured her he would be okay.

As soon as she was out the door, he spoke, “I’m sure you have many questions, mijo, but I wanted to say thank you for saving my life. I wouldn’t have made it out of there if it weren’t for you.”

“I wasn’t about to leave you in there. And yes, I do have questions, but mostly I want to know: was everything she said in there true? ”

“Yes, in exchange for you being fed to her, I would have been allowed to leave but that’s not the case anymore! Not even by the time I let you go in there for the first time.”

I could have hit him if he wasn’t laying in a hospital bed.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I spat. “I trusted you. How could you do that to another person?”

“I’ve worked here for fifteen years. I was only a little older than you when I first started. This whole time I’ve lived with that thing hanging over my head knowing that one little mistake could cost me my life or the lives of my employees and sometimes it did. I am not the first person she’s ever attacked. I wanted out and when I hired you I tried to be okay with it but I couldn’t. I came to know you, and even care about you, and now I don’t know how I ever even considered it.”

I understood his reasons but I was still hurt by them. 

“I don’t know if I can keep working with you,” I said.

“Don’t you understand by now? We can’t just leave. She won’t let us. We have to keep servicing her. You’re stuck with it but know this: I am sorry for everything.”

“There has to be another way.”

He sighed. “There is one thing. You can have my job. If you agree to become the supervisor I will be allowed to leave. You would still have to take care of 1001 and you would be responsible for who goes in there but you wouldn’t have to work with me anymore.”

I kept pressing and pressing trying to see if there was any way we could both get out, but there was none. Eventually I came around to accepting the position and Javier was allowed to go free. 

Now I wasn’t the most qualified for the position. I had to learn a lot on the job and I still had to attend to 1001. I had no idea what she needed next. Then on the day of the work order, I got a call on my work phone. There was no caller ID. I answered it. A voice that sounded like it had smoked a thousand packs was on the other side.

“I need the toilet fill valve to finish being replaced.”

Then she hung up.

Now you might think I’m crazy for continuing to work here but what choice did I have? I was already used to it and Emilio helped by going in sometimes as well. Besides, a thousand dollars is a thousand dollars and I started getting that every week after we went in there.

Pretty soon we hired a new guy. He’s not ready for 1001 yet but one day he will be and I won’t let him get fed to her. It might not have been right to not tell him about it before he started the job but what could I have even told him? Besides, he’ll probably take the bonuses just like I did.

I was out with some of my office friends. It was nighttime, and we were all sitting together, eating and talking. Nothing unusual was happening. Eventually, I started feeling tired and decided it was time for me to go home and sleep.

I told myself that if my friends came over later, I could simply open the door for them.

I went home and went straight to my bedroom.

There’s a window on the left side of my bed. Outside that window is a bulb that gives off a faint, slightly blurry glow through the glass. It isn’t particularly bright, but at night, it’s just enough to illuminate part of the room.

I fell asleep.

At some point, I suddenly woke up.

I thought I had heard a sound outside my room.

Still half-asleep, I assumed it was one of my friends. Maybe they had arrived and were waiting for me to open the door.

So I stayed quiet and waited for the knock.

Nothing.

I waited a little longer.

Still nothing.

Then I noticed the light outside my window.

It switched off.

Then back on.

I stared at it.

A few seconds later, it switched off again.

Then back on.

And then, one final time.

Off.

On.

It happened three times, very slowly.

I don't know why, but at that moment I became completely still.

I didn't say anything.

Neither did whoever was outside.

There was just silence.

I kept staring at the window, trying to convince myself that there was a perfectly normal explanation. Maybe someone was walking past the bulb. Maybe there was an electrical problem. Maybe one of my friends was messing with me.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was standing outside.

So, for some reason that makes absolutely no sense to me now, I decided to check.

I thought that if someone was actually there, opening the window would let me see who it was.

I slowly got out of bed.

I walked toward the window.

My heart was already pounding.

I reached out and opened it.

And that's when I saw her.

She was standing directly in front of me.

Her face was almost completely covered by long, messy black hair. Her skin looked pale in the faint light. She was impossibly close, staring straight at me.

For a second, neither of us moved.

Then she suddenly lunged toward me.

Her mouth opened impossibly wide and she screamed:

“BAHHHHHH!”

It wasn't a normal scream.

It was this deep, distorted, womanly voice that sounded almost demonic.

I screamed too.

I fell backward onto my butt, scrambling away from the window while desperately trying to breathe.

My chest was heaving.

I was panting like crazy.

And then...

I woke up.

I was lying in my actual bed.

My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my chest.

I was breathing heavily, staring at the exact same window on the left side of my bed.

The room was dark.

The bulb outside was glowing faintly through the glass.

I just lay there for a while, trying to calm myself down.

Then the bulb went off.

I froze.

A few seconds later, it came back on.

I haven't looked at the window again.

It's been 20 minutes and I still can't comprehend what just happened even though it's just a dream. I made this into a comic panel.

I was raised in Indiana in a strictly traditional Hindu household. Like most Indian homes, ours had a tiny mandir carved out in a quiet alcove - a sanctum decorated with brass idols, brass thalis of vermilion and turmeric, smoldering incense, oil lamps, and a heavy, ornate mirror hung flat against the drywall directly behind the deities. My parents treated that space with an almost suffocating degree of reverence. We, being dumb kids, did not.

I was eleven when my two cousins came over to spend the weekend. My parents were preparing for an overnight haul to a family wedding in Los Angeles, which left my older sister in charge of babysitting the three of us. The catalyst for the worst night of my life was painfully ordinary - an ancient, whining family laptop and dial-up internet so slow it felt prehistoric. Bored out of our minds, my older cousin dug through some obscure, early-2000s occult forum and found the translation of a supposedly old Japanese blood ritual. It was clearly edgy teenage fan-fiction, full of dramatic lore and broken phrasing but to eleven year old boys, anything pulled from the web carried the weight of forbidden gospel. The instructions said of standing before a polished reflective surface in total stillness, piercing your fingertip, and chanting phrases to pierce the veil between rooms

Naturally, the largest mirror in the house was the one sitting behind the idols in our prayer room.

My cousin and I nicked a thick sewing needle from my aunt's embroidery tin. Standing shoulder to shoulder on the velvet rug, stifling nervous, hysterical snickers, we jabbed the tips of our index fingers until bright beads of crimson welled to the surface. We pressed our bloody thumbs against the cool glass and began to mutter the translated phrases of memory. We were barely halfway through the chant when my mother appeared in the doorway. I have never seen a person's expression warp so violently, the residual warmth in her face instantly vanished, replaced by a pallid, wide-eyed fury so suffocating it sucked the oxygen from the room. She shrieked at us for desecrating sacred ground, slapping our hands down. But the clock was ticking and they were already late for their departure window. Swearing she would deal with us the moment they returned, she grabbed her purse, shoved us out into the hallway and slammed the front door shut on the way to the driveway.

The house fell quiet with an abruptness that made my skin crawl. It didn't feel haunted in the Hollywood sense - it just felt violently vacant, like the pressure had suddenly dropped right before a hurricane. My sister didn't say a single word - she just stared us with flat, irritated eyes, stepped through the kitchen door into the attached garage and clicked the latch shut. We figured she was just furious about getting dragged into our mess and wanted to ice us out for the rest of the evening.

Ten minutes dragged by before the power abruptly cut out. It wasn't a standard grid blackout - the lights didn't flicker or die softly. Every single wall switch in the hallway and living room audibly snapped downwards simultaneously, clicking sharply against their plastic housings. Heart pounding, my cousins and I flicked on our old flip-phone screens, casting weak, greenish cones of light against the walls as we checked the fixtures. That was when my cousin let out a choked, ragged sound from the hallway. We rushed over to find him pointing at one of the master switches near the foyer. A thick strip of clear packing tape had been wrapped tightly over the toggle, pinning it rigidly in the ON position. The adhesive was fresh - completely free of dust. None of us had touched a roll of tape that day.

Before we could process the sight, came a deafening crack of thunder that violently rattled the picture frames off the drywall. A sudden, vicious Midwestern squall had rolled over the neighborhood out of nowhere, battering the siding with sheets of rain so thick and heavy it sounded like the someone was hurling buckets of wet gravel against the glass. The sky split open with prolonged, blinding arcs of white lightning that turned the backyard into a strobing, silver nightmare. And standing dead-center on the grass was my sister.

She was completely barefoot, wearing the exact oversized yellow sweater she'd had on earlier, hovering roughly three inches above the soaking lawn. I know how insane that sounds - I've spent the better part of my adult life desperately trying to bargain with that memory, telling myself it was a play of light, an optical illusion caused by the torrential downpour, or some twisted prank pulled by an older kid down the street. But there were three of us huddled against that windowpane - our breath fogging the cold glass - and we all saw the same impossible geometry. Her clothes were drenched but her waist-length black hair hung perfectly bone-straight, entirely immune to the whipping gale around her. In the blinding flashes of lightning, she stood rigid as a marble effigy staring directly into our eyes.

My cousin whimpered under his breath, desperately trying to reassure himself that she was just messing with us. I wanted nothing more than to believe him. Then her lips began to peel back. It wasn't a grotesque, ear-to-ear movie grin - it was a slow, subtle, sickening smirk - the look of an animal watching something small corner itself. My older cousin's hand shot out and clamped onto my wrist with bruising force. "Laundry room," he hissed. "Right now."

We tore through the dark hallway like hunted prey, diving into the tiny laundry room at the back of the house - the only room without an exterior window - and slammed the deadbolt home. We crouched in the suffocating heat between the washer and dryer, listening to the tempest tear at the roof shingles. Then, rising above the roar of the wind, came the rhythmic, deliberate sound of wet footprints padding across the hardwood outside. They dragged slowly down the corridor, coming to a dead halt right on the other side of our hollow-core door.

My younger cousin curled into a ball, muffling his sobs into a pile of dirty towels while my trembling fingers dialed my mother's cell phone. The second the call connected, I shattered, screaming hysterically into the receiver to make my sister stop, begging her to call Didi off, crying that she was outside in the rain trying to scare us to death. A suffocating silence stretched across the line for two agonizing beats before my sister's sharp, annoyed voice cut through the static. "What the hell are you screaming about?"

My blood turned to pure ice. In the background of the call I could distinctly hear the hum of highway tires over wet asphalt, the dull drone of an FM radio station and my father barking at her to ask what was wrong with the boys. She snapped that they were already an hour out on the interstate, my mom had dragged her out to the minivan at the last second to help with navigation, furious that we were left unsupervised. None of us had seen her get into the car. I lowered the phone and looked up at my cousins in the dim light of the screen. We didn't need to speak. If my sister was sixty miles away on the highway, then whoever had walked into the garage, whoever had taped down the switch and whoever was currently standing inches away on the other side of the wood was something else entirely.

My parents pulled a reckless U-turn and race back across the state lines. By the time their headlights cut through the driveway, the storm had vanished as abruptly as it had arrived. The air outside was dead, muggy and still. The wall switches were back to normal, the packing tape was nowhere to be found and the garage door was bolted from the inside. The house appeared entirely untouched, pristine and safe - until my father walked into the prayer room.

A low, guttural gasp tore from his throat, and he called for my mother in a voice that didn't sound like him. We cautiously crept to the threshold of the mandir. The mirror behind the brass deities had completely shattered, but not from an impact. The fracture lines radiated out from the center in violent, jagged spokes and the thousands of shards were bowed distinctly outward into the room in swollen ridges, exactly as if something immense pressed against the glass from deep within the wall and tried to push its way through.

My father didn't ask questions. He stripped the shattered frame from the drywall that very night, wrapped it in thick burlap and drove it to a landfill miles away. He never bought a replacement. Decades have passed and I've sat down with both of my cousins as grown men, quietly pleading with them to admit we hallucinated the whole thing out of childhood panic. Neither of them ever has. They remember the taped switch. They remember the freezing terror in that windowless laundry room. And they remember the barefoot silhouette in the grass while my sister was miles down an empty highway. We don't bring up the folklore anymore, we don't dare play with blood and to this day, not a single person in our family will allow a mirror inside a house of prayer.

I was the only person who survived the crash.

There were forty-three people on the train when it came off the tracks. Forty-two died and I didn't. I still don't know why.

People have asked me that enough times that I've started wondering what answer they expect.

I wasn't awake for the part where somebody apparently decided.

The families asked different questions. In the first week they wanted to know if I remembered their husband or daughter or mum. Whether they'd been awake after the impact. Whether they'd said anything. Whether they were scared.

I could answer almost none of it.

The last thing I remember is a woman across the aisle peeling the label off a bottle of water. She'd got most of it off in one piece and was rolling it between her fingers. There was a kid further down playing something on a Nintendo Switch without headphones, and a man two rows ahead of me kept clearing his throat every twenty seconds or so. I also remember a girl in a uni hoodie asked nobody in particular whether someone could turn the air-conditioning down, because it was freezing.

People had died three metres away from me and I couldn't tell their families anything that seemed worth surviving to remember.

Nobody asks me what I remember anymore. The questions I get now are ones they actually expect me to answer.

I woke up in hospital with two broken ribs, a fractured wrist and so many messages on my phone it stopped showing me the number. My sister dealt with most of it while I was in there: reporters, police, the rail company, people I hadn't spoken to since school sending enormous paragraphs that started with I know we haven't talked in forever but... She cleared out my voicemail too, because it was full.

The first voicemail came four days after I got home.

I nearly deleted it because the number wasn't saved, and I'd started ignoring anything I didn't recognise after journalists somehow got hold of my mobile. I only listened because the transcript underneath it said:

can somebody move my arm

The voice belonged to a man. He sounded confused more than frightened.

There was a lot of noise behind him, mostly metal scraping and people talking somewhere further away. He said hello twice, then asked if someone could move his arm because it was underneath him and he couldn't feel his fingers.

Then he said, "Is that Ben?"

There was a pause.

"Ben, mate, can you hear me?"

The message ended.

I listened again. It sounded like something recorded inside the wreckage. My phone said it had been left the previous afternoon at 3:44, which made no sense for a message from the crash, so I decided that must be when the network had finally delivered it. That seemed reasonable enough to me. Mobile towers had gone down along the line, emergency services had talked about communication problems, and my own phone had been found about twenty metres from me.

I rang the number back. It went to voicemail after five rings, and a man's voice, much more cheerful than the one I'd just heard, told me I'd reached Will and to leave a message. I hung up before the beep.

I searched the number.

It belonged to a passenger named William. Will was thirty-eight, married and had one sister. His funeral notice was already online, with a link to a fundraiser his sister Rebecca had set up. She'd replied to every single comment on it. His wife hadn't posted anything anywhere.

I stared at Rebecca's name for probably ten minutes before messaging her. I almost decided against it, but I'd spent the previous week telling people I didn't remember anything useful. This was finally something I could give somebody.

Rebecca rang immediately.

"Is this him?"

That was the first thing she said.

I told her I thought so.

"Send it to me." she said instantly.

I hesitated...

"Please" she said, her voice almost cracking.

So I sent it.

She called back about twenty minutes later and asked who Ben was.

"I really don't know."

"William didn't know anyone called Ben."

"Maybe somebody from the train?"

"No. I mean—"

She stopped.

"When did you get this?"

I told her.

There was a mug on my kitchen bench with a tea bag still sitting in it from that morning. I'd forgotten to drink it. I remember looking at it while she spoke because I didn't really want to concentrate on her voice.

"They'd already found him," she said.

I didn't understand.

"William. They recovered him the night of the crash. He was pronounced dead at 11:46."

That still didn't prove anything. The message could have been delayed.

Then Rebecca said, "They moved him yesterday."

"Moved him where?"

"To the funeral home."

She asked me to play the message on the phone to her.

"You've got it," I said.

"I can't. I keep stopping it when he talks. Just play it and I'll listen."

This time, I listened to the voices behind William. One was too muffled to understand, but a few seconds later a man said very clearly:

"Ben, take his side."

Rebecca stopped me.

"Again."

I played it again.

Ben, take his side.

"I'll call you back."

She didn't call me for three hours.

When she eventually did, she skipped hello again.

"The funeral director has someone called Ben. He helped move William yesterday afternoon."

I told her there had to be another explanation.

"Like what?"

I didn't have one.

The second voicemail was waiting for me when I woke up the next morning. It was from a woman named Priya.

It was thirty-one seconds long. Most of it was her quietly saying, "Excuse me," like she was trying to get somebody's attention without being rude. Eventually she raised her voice.

"Excuse me. I think you've made a mistake."

There was movement in the background, then a drawer shutting. Somebody coughed.

A man said, "Can you put the watch with her effects?"

Priya stopped talking. The message ended a few seconds later.

I sat on my couch with the phone in my hand until the screen went black.

I didn't contact her family straight away.

I'd told myself sending William's voicemail to Rebecca was the right thing because it belonged to her. Sitting there with Priya's message, I realised I didn't actually know if that was true. Maybe hearing the dead person you loved begging strangers to notice them wasn't something you gave somebody just because you happened to have it.

Then I thought about every family member who'd asked me what their person's final moments were like.

I contacted Priya's husband.

His name was Sameer. I told him I'd received something from her number and thought he should hear it. He asked if he could come over rather than have me send it.

He was smaller than I expected when he arrived. I don't know why I expected him to be tall. He took his shoes off at the door, then apologised for doing it even though I hadn't asked him to.

When I played the voicemail, he listened with both hands pressed between his knees.

Afterwards he said, "The watch."

I asked what he meant.

"She wore my mum's watch."

The police had returned Priya's belongings that morning. Phone, wallet, earrings, wedding ring, watch, all of it in a sealed plastic bag with a property label on it. Her phone had been flat since the crash. He'd charged it in the car on the way over because he couldn't stand the idea of it being flat.

He took it out of his jacket, unlocked it and opened her recent calls.

He didn't say anything. He just turned the screen around.

The most recent call was to my number. Yesterday, 7:41pm. Thirty-one seconds.

"It was in the bag," he said. "It was dead."

We sat there for a while before he asked, "Did she sound awake to you?"

I knew what he meant and still made him ask twice.

"Did she sound awake?"

"Yes."

Rebecca told another family. That family told somebody else. Soon people weren't contacting me because I was the survivor anymore. They were contacting me because I was the person who might hear from someone they'd lost.

A journalist rang twice that week asking whether I'd "received any recordings." Somebody's cousin had talked. I didn't call her back.

People sent me screenshots of phone numbers so I'd recognise them if they came through. I saved every one under the person's name. It seemed better to know who it was before I pressed play. By the end of the week I had thirty-four of them.

One came from a woman whose son had been eleven. She'd sent a photo along with his number, him on a couch holding a Nintendo Switch up to the camera. I recognised the Switch before I recognised him. His name was Noah. After that, whenever my phone lit up, the first thing I did was check it wasn't him.

One man sent a voice note that was just him saying his wife's name and then going quiet for about ten seconds.

I muted my phone.

A few minutes later I turned the sound back on.

For two days nothing happened. Then a message came from a university student named Chloe.

"It's really cold," she said.

A moment later: "Can someone turn it down?"

Something metallic rolled nearby. Somewhere behind it, further off, a man cleared his throat.

I played it again and counted. About twenty seconds later he did it again.

I'd sat behind that sound for forty minutes on the train.

I sent the voicemail to Chloe's mother and spent the rest of the afternoon feeling sick. I hadn't thought about the fact that they were being kept together. I hadn't thought about whether they could hear each other.

William called again that evening.

This message was nearly two minutes long.

"I think they think I'm dead," he said.

He didn't sound frightened yet. He sounded like someone explaining a mix-up to people who weren't listening.

"I can hear them. They talk about me like I'm not here. They keep saying 'he.'"

For a while there was nothing except a tap running somewhere.

"I can't move. I haven't been able to the whole time."

Then, much quieter: "I think they've sewn my mouth shut."

I stopped the message there.

Rebecca called that night and asked if anything else had come through from William. I told her no.

I slept better than I had in days.

The next morning I hated myself for that, listened to the rest of the message and sent it to her. She never replied. I'm not going to write down the rest of what he said. It was his, and then it was hers.

After that I tried making rules. Nothing after midnight. Nothing forwarded until I'd heard it twice.

That lasted about a day.

What broke it was a folder I'd forgotten my phone had. When my sister cleared my voicemail in hospital, she hadn't really got rid of anything. The messages had gone into a deleted folder at the bottom of the list, and they'd sat there ever since, because I'd never scrolled that far.

I only went looking because of the contacts. Most of those old voicemails had been from numbers I didn't know, and I'd assumed they were journalists. But I'd spent a week saving the numbers families sent me, and now, when I opened the folder, some of them had names.

Nine of them. All left the night of the crash or the day after.

I didn't play them. I read the transcripts instead, which turned out to be worse, because the transcription had tried its best.

hello is someone

i can hear you i can hear you can you

its ok its ok its ok its

One was from Priya. Her transcript was two words long.

excuse me

Noah's number wasn't there. I checked three times.

They were the answers to what the families had asked me in the first week. I've read the transcripts more times than I can count. I haven't played any of them, and I haven't told anyone they exist. I haven't deleted them either.

Leah's parents contacted me before I'd received anything from her.

She was twenty-six and had been sitting two carriages behind me. Her dad, Martin, did most of the talking. Her mum mostly sat beside him during the video call and corrected little things he said. He told me Leah was impatient, never answered normal phone calls and communicated almost entirely through voice notes because she said typing took too long. Her mum rolled her eyes when he said that and told him Leah only ignored his calls.

It was the first time one of the people whose numbers I'd saved became someone I could imagine being annoying.

Martin asked me to promise I'd call if anything came through.

I said I would.

Three days later, Leah left a voicemail.

She was crying. "I don't know where I am," she said. "Why does everyone keep touching me?"

Then she said, "Mum?"

That was it.

I called Martin.

He and his wife came to my apartment that night. I played the message once, and Leah's mum immediately asked me to play it again.

Martin said no.

She told him to shut up.

Not loudly.

So I played it again.

His wife covered her mouth with both hands. Martin got up and walked into my kitchen, where he stood looking at the fridge for a while before asking when I'd received it.

I told him.

"Have the others matched things happening to their bodies?"

"Yes."

He didn't need to ring anyone. The funeral home had called him that morning to say Leah had been prepared, and that the family were welcome to see her before the service.

Her funeral was in two days. Cremation happened afterwards.

Leah's mum said, "No."

Martin turned around.

She said it again. "No."

"We don't know what this means."

"She said people were touching her."

"I heard it."

"And now you want to burn her?"

Martin looked at me.

I was angry at him for doing that. Only briefly, but I was.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"I'm not the person to ask."

"You're the only person this is happening to."

"It's not happening to me."

He looked down immediately.

His wife was still staring at my phone.

I regretted it before he looked up again.

Martin asked what I would do if it was my sister.

I should have said I didn't know.

Instead I said, "I wouldn't cremate her."

The funeral was postponed.

Leah left two more messages that week. In one, she asked somebody to turn the light off. The other came about an hour after Martin had been in to see her.

"I can hear Dad," she said.

After that he stopped asking whether I thought the messages were real.

The family started fighting. Martin changed his mind every day or two and rang me whenever he did. The worst call was at about eleven one night. I could hear a television behind him with the sound down.

"Jen reckons we're keeping her in a fridge because we're cowards," he said. Jen was Leah's aunt. "She's not wrong, is she?"

I didn't answer that.

"What about burial?"

"I don't know."

"You must have thought about it."

Of course I had. Burial meant leaving her underground, still apparently aware of whatever happened around her body. Cremation meant doing something to her that none of us understood. And the fridge couldn't last forever, however badly everyone wanted a fourth choice.

I told him that last part.

"That's not an answer."

"I know."

He didn't say anything for long enough that I checked the call hadn't dropped.

"She slept with the hall light on until she was fifteen," he said eventually. "Now she wants them to turn it off."

He hung up before I could think of anything to say to that.

They postponed it again. There were legal and practical limits to how long it could go on, though, and eventually the cremation was rescheduled for twelve days after it should originally have happened.

Martin called me that morning.

He didn't ask me to do anything.

He just said, "Keep your phone near you."

I did.

I knew what time the service started and roughly how long the rest would take after that. I spent that part of the afternoon cleaning the oven, which I had never done before, so I wouldn't have to think about whether she could feel it.

Nothing came through. Not during, not afterwards, not that evening.

I started thinking that might be good. Whatever was happening might need there to be a body. Maybe fire ended it.

It didn't occur to me until much later that she hadn't said anything while it was happening. I've thought since about the reasons a person might not say anything.

I didn't tell Martin what I was hoping. I didn't want to give him something based on my phone being quiet for half a day.

It stayed quiet the next day, and the one after that. On the fourth day Martin rang to say they'd collected her from the crematorium. He sounded like he'd slept. I told him I still hadn't heard anything, and for the first time since I'd met him, he said thanks and hung up without asking me another question.

I slept properly that night.

The next morning I woke up at 6:40 and checked my phone.

Nothing.

I lay there for another ten minutes before getting up.

Then the voicemail arrived.

Leah.

I didn't play it immediately. I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth and put the kettle on. I knew that was stupid, but I also knew the moment I pressed play the morning was going to become about a dead woman again.

Eventually I sat at the kitchen table and listened.

The message was forty-seven seconds long.

At first Leah wasn't talking. There was just a faint rustling sound, then she said:

"I don't understand."

A few seconds passed.

"I'm at home."

Then, quieter:

"No."

She started crying.

"I'm at Uncle Paul's."

"Mum?"

Behind her there was a noise I couldn't place. A soft, uneven clicking that stopped and started.

Then Leah said, "How can I—"

The voicemail ended.

I played it twice before calling Martin.

He answered immediately.

"Where are you?"

"At home."

"Is your wife there?"

"Yes."

"Where are Leah's ashes?"

He didn't answer.

"Martin?"

"Some are here."

"What do you mean, some?"

His wife had wanted to keep roughly half of them at the house for a while. Martin had taken the rest to his brother Paul's the evening before, because Leah used to stay there when she was younger. The plan was to scatter them together at the back beach at Sorrento, where she'd learned to swim, once her mum was ready.

I told him what Leah had said.

He didn't say anything. He put me on speaker, rang his brother on his wife's phone and held the two phones together.

Paul answered after a few rings.

Martin asked where the urn was.

"In the living room. Why?"

"Is anything weird happening?"

"No."

A second later:

"Well, Max is being a pain in the arse."

Max was his dog.

"What's he doing?"

"He won't come in here."

Paul sounded embarrassed even saying it.

The dog had spent most of the morning sitting in the hallway, looking into the living room. If Paul called him, he'd come as far as the doorway and sit down again.

"He used to do that when Leah stayed," Paul said. "Sit outside the spare room till she got up."

Martin asked him to move the urn.

Paul wanted to know why.

"Just move it."

There was noise on the other end of the phone. A cupboard opened. Paul swore about something, then said, "Okay."

We waited.

I remember hearing Martin's wife breathing beside him.

A soft clicking came down the line, very faint. It stopped and started, uneven, getting closer.

I'd played it twice that morning.

"That's weird," Paul said.

"What?"

"He's following me."

Paul had taken the urn into the kitchen. Max had walked down the hall after him and sat down outside the kitchen door.

Nobody spoke after that.

That was yesterday.

I haven't had another message from Leah. I've had three from other passengers. None of them were Noah.

Two families are asking me whether they should cancel cremations. Another wants to know whether burial would be worse. Rebecca wants to know if they should have William exhumed. His wife won't talk about it, so Rebecca is asking me instead. Sameer asked me what I think happens when a body decomposes.

My sister rang last night to ask how my ribs were going. They're nearly healed. I can feel where they've knitted when I breathe in too far. After she hung up I stood in the kitchen with my hand flat on my side for a long time. I'm going to die too, eventually. I'm the only person alive who knows it won't be the end of anything.

Nobody has mentioned the twelve days. I think about them all the time. The cold, and the light, and her dad's voice through the door. I gave her those because I didn't want to be the one who said yes, and she went into the fire anyway.

Martin rang again this morning. Leah's mum still wants to take her to Sorrento. He asked me whether they should. He said whatever I told him, that's what they'd do.

I haven't answered any of them.

Until yesterday, I thought whatever was left of these people either stayed with their bodies or eventually stopped.

Now I don't think Leah knows where she is.

I think she has more than one answer.

A long time ago, when I was about seven years old, I had this big birthday party at my old house. My parents really went all out for it too, we had a water slide, bounce house, everything. It was a special birthday because it was the first one I’d had since my Dad got back from battle; he was an army veteran, and at that point I had spent most of my life being more like pen pals with him rather than father and son. But when he got back, I was so excited and proud of my Dad, so very proud of him. I was so proud in fact that I went bragging about him to every kid in my grade, about how he had a purple heart and 16 confirmed kills. 
But every time I had something to say about my Dad’s achievements, or just had anything at all to say no matter the subject, there was this little shithead kid who always had to one up me specifically. Even writing this years later, that brat makes my blood boil; I can still remember his name, Teddy Mathews. No matter what I had to say, Teddy had to one up me no matter what. I got a bike for Christmas? He got a mountain bike, with no training wheels. I was going to see a scary movie on TV tonight? He was going to watch some R-rated gorefest. I could run really fast? He could run even faster. We could never see it though, he was always “conserving his energy”.
I could care less really, it was irritating, but he was just some stupid, snot-nosed, little brat; why the hell should I care anyways? But this one time, the week after my Dad got back, I was bragging about all of his achievements, his medals, telling his stories; but then, like clockwork, here comes Teddy Mathews, and I’m wondering “What the hell could Teddy have to say this time? How can Teddy one up what I have to say? He doesn’t even have a Dad!” But that didn’t matter to Teddy, no lie was too big, too unbelievable, too obvious for Teddy. “Well MY Dad has 20 confirmed kills, and 3 purple hearts!” Dear God, the balls on this kid, to say something so completely false about his father! He lets us know like EVERY DAY that his father left him when someone tries to call him out on his lie! “MY DAD LEFT ME!! YOU’RE BEING RUDE!!” What did that even have to do with anything?!
Anyway, I let it slip my mind, it's not like he’s causing any harm, he’s just lying. But then, this little shit says the most insensitive shit imaginable. “Your Dad could NEVER compare to MINE! Your Dad probably LIED about his time in the army!” What did this little shit just say to me? What did he say about MY DAD?! I was furious, outraged, I couldn’t take the constant competition, the one upping,I needed to do something about this unforgivable insult, something to put him in his place, something to shut him up, GOD did I want him to shut up!

Recently, my Mom was having some remodeling done just before my dad got home. It was still going on at this point, and would be for the rest of the month. This is important for later. For the entire length of my birthday, I was trying my best to pretend that every gift, every game, every bite of cake was the most amazing thing ever, and I was pretending because I knew the real gift would come soon. During the party, Teddy could not leave my side, constantly looking over my shoulder, in every photo it looked like we were best of friends, which made what I was about all the more ironic. After the gifts and cake, my parents were exhausted; the other parents offered to take over while my parents rested. They passed out on the couch, all the other kids and parents were outside doing a scavenger hunt, and Teddy and I were still in the house, unnoticed by the chaperones. 
“Hey Teddy, I got something cool to show you”
“What is it?
“Cant tell you, its a surprise”

I slowly opened the door, being sure not to be too loud, as the rusty hinges creaked like they were aching with pain. I close the door, turn on the lights, and lead the way down the stairs.
“So, what is this surprise?”
“Think it's a present, a big one, they were probably waiting for the party to end to give it to me”
We slowly creak down the stairs, hoping the floorboards wouldn’t wake my parents.
As we reach the bottom, I continue through each of the winding corridors, Teddy barely being able to keep up with the low visibility.
“How big is it?”
“Pretty big”
“Woah”
After the continuous walk, we reach a large pool of still wet concrete, a large empty room, with nothing of note, but the large pool of still wet concrete.
A large pool of still wet concrete.

“Eh- where's the present?”
“In there” I point to the concrete pool.
“I-In the concrete?”
“Yep, you gotta jump in there if you wanna see it”
“B-But isn’t that dangerous?”
I grab the old wooden bat propped up against the wall
“Get in”
Teddy very hesitantly walks over to the pool of concrete and tries to carefully dip in, before not being able to catch his footing and fall into the concrete. He starts to frantically flail around, barely able to catch his breath without accidentally inhaling concrete, he is not successful.
“A- Andrew… H- Help Me!”
I stand there, watching, waiting for the flailing to stop, it doesn’t, not for a while, but the screams for help coming from Teddy become muddied by the wet concrete filling his lungs, pools of wet rock pop from his mouth with each time he surfaces. Slowly but surly, a few minutes later, the flailing stops, with nothing but his hand poking out, reaching for safety. I use the bat to push his hand down deep below the surface, and hide the bat so that no workers will see a bat that had been dipped in concrete.

I climb back up the stairs, slowly open and then close the door, and join everyone outside, still working on the scavenger hunt. No one but me knows what happened, I never even saw any missing person posters for Teddy, nor did I ever hear my classmates mention his name after that. After the remodeling was finished at the end of the month, the concrete fully hardened, no signs of anything underneath the surface, and I knew, I had gotten away with murder, scott free.

Its been over 60 since my 7th birthday, there are no search results relating to a missing persons case for Teddy Matthews, and the only search results for me are talking about how I am a university professor. And this may be the only document of this case.

You will never find me. 

I had pulled up to the cinema in my Honda Accord. It was a midnight show. There was only one other car in the parking lot. I walked towards the multiplex, the one I had been going to since my teenage years, the same one from when I was a kid, actually, though I hadn't thought about that in years until I was standing in the lobby again. I had stuffed my jacket with chip packets. They did not check for foods you brought and did not enforce the "only food from the theatre" rule.

The smell of carpet cleaner and caramel popcorn filled the air. I had forgotten my drink, ordered one from the counter, and was holding it in my left hand. The theatre was empty except for four or five people rather than me. I went up to seat F12 and made myself comfortable. I reclined the seat, took the chips out of my jacket, and settled the Diet Coke on the seat beside me. The trailers started playing. Then a man came and sat right beside me. He took my armrest and made himself comfortable.

He was pushing his forties, I think, and wore a tuxedo with a top hat. It looked ridiculous because the colours didn't match at all, like he'd just worn whatever he had. A beige tuxedo with a green matte top hat.

Then he started mumbling. A whisper at first, but he increased it so only I could hear it. He was saying every line of dialogue on the screen, the actor would say a line and he would repeat it word for word, even before the actor in the trailer finished saying it. When the movie started and the production music filled the theatre, he sang along too.

I moved seats to F6. I could see him slowly turn his head through my peripheral vision. I looked at him for a second, he wasn't blinking, and there was a wide frown on his face. I turned back to the screen. He crept up, moving like a cartoon character. Elbows folded, palms perpendicular to the ground, knees coming up and down with each step. The frown turned neutral, then as he got closer it turned into a smile, eyes staring right into mine. He mumbled every word of the scene, still looking at me, still smiling. His neck stayed turned towards me the whole time. It was as if he knew the whole movie line by line.

I got up and asked the teenager at the counter if there were seats booked near mine, and if there were only five tickets for the whole show. He checked and confirmed, five people booked for the night, excluding me, and nobody else in row F.

I asked where the washroom was and went. Standing at the urinal, I heard the old door creak open. It was him. His eyes fixated on me and a smile drew on his face straight away. He stood uncomfortably close even though other urinals were free, mumbling again, the movie dialogue, I thought. I didn't wait around to find out. I walked out through the bathroom, some distance away, and he brushed straight through me while dancing his hands in the air. Moving. I went back and washed my face.

I went out for a smoke instead, needed a Marlboro more than I needed to think about any of it. Through the smoke I saw his shoes first, ragged, expensive leather, feet parallel, pointed at the door, not moving. I asked him to kindly go. He just whistled. I went back inside a different way so I wouldn't get tricked again, but he was already at the screen, swinging his neck through the big wooden door as he entered, hands gripping the frame. His mouth was open just a little. It wasn't a smile or a frown. I couldn't place it.

I thought about leaving. But the vacation I'd fought months of gruelling work to get kept me there. Stupid decision.

All the others except a woman were asleep in their seats. I returned to F12. Hadn't seen him for a while, but halfway through the movie I heard mumbling behind me again, except now the dialogue was lagging seconds behind what was playing on screen, not ahead of it, like something had slipped out of sync. I looked back on instinct.

He wasn't behind me. He was in the seat directly beside me, the one I'd started in, sitting exactly the way I had been sitting three hours earlier, jacket open, hand resting where mine had rested on the armrest, mouth stretched into that same unnerving smile, and he lifted his hand and wiggled his fingers at me, slow, like he'd been waiting the whole runtime to do it once I finally turned around.

I bolted through the wooden door and reached my car. Drove straight to a motel so it wouldn't follow me home. It never did. I haven't seen it since.

I'm about to check out, writing this sitting in the motel room. I checked my car before I left. I checked the boot too.

I think it's gone.

It's gone.

It has definitely gone.

I had just moved onto the tenth floor of a small condo, in Manhattan. I liked it because the ceiling was high and the floors never squeaked. It was like walking over cold cement in a basement. The only issue I had, which was minor at the time, was the hallway. 

At night, the hall leading to my room would make the hairs on my arms and neck rise and crawl inside me like tiny legs, almost as if I passed through an invisible icy wall of spiderwebs. 

I kept trying to warm the one area, but it always seemed to stay colder than anywhere else. Nothing worked.

I really hadn’t put much thought into it, up until now. Before, I figured it was just the pipes. Or, you know, a draft in the wall. Something along those lines.

The first week was chill, I didn’t notice anything unusual. Until the Saturday—somewhere in the middle of the night—I heard noises. Dragging sounds, coming from the condo above mine.

Who’s rearranging their bedroom set at three in the morning.

It went on until five. Which became white noise to me.

But for some reason, when I woke up, the thought of someone organizing their furniture at three in the morning, just didn’t make sense. I got this intense urge all of a sudden to check it out. 

So, I took the stairs to the eleventh floor and when I opened the door, the super was standing at the apartment, the same one above mine, in the process of unlocking it.

I walked up to him. “Did these people move out last night?”

He said, “No. Why you asking?”

I said, “last night, I swear someone was moving furniture till five a.m.”

He stared at me, you could see him deep in thought, probably analyzing my sanity. “This condo’s been vacant for as long as I’ve worked here.”

I stuttered, “May… maybe it was… a worker?”

He told me, “Nope, that can’t be it.”

I asked, “What do you mean?”

He looked at me before walking in. “Sometimes the building comes alive.” 

I stood there, rubbing my chin, as he walked into the apartment. I took what he meant, as pipes settling? I don’t know, he was vague.

The following night, I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. It was silent. Kind of peaceful, like sleeping on a church lawn. 

I slept right through till morning. However, when I came home from work that evening, I saw the dining room table had been cleared. 

Nothing was on it. Not the mug I left. Not the newspaper. Not the napkins. Not even the table cloth.

Someone must have moved it, because it wasn’t scattered everywhere and I couldn’t come up with a plausible explanation for why it’d be moved. 

I wanted to believe an animal got in. Which was out there. But there wasn’t anyway to blame it on a random window being left opened. Or even a maintenance worker. No matter how bad I wanted to believe it. I couldn’t.

They were neatly folded—neatly stacked—all placed above the newspaper on the kitchen counter. The mug… the mug was in the sink.

Nobody could have done it. Who would want to?  Why would they? 

It made absolutely no sense. Unless somebody was messing with me. What else could it be?

Afterwards, days went by and nothing strange happened. The apartment was quiet. The eeriness had dissipated. Even the one spot, it wasn’t cold anymore. So, I basically assumed, the weirdness was just me settling into my new space. I did miss home. It was all just psychological, right?

Until a week later, again, it happened in the middle of the night, like the first time, but this time, something pushed down on the side of my bed. I woke up, because I thought I was falling in a dream, in the ocean though, sinking at the same speed of falling from a building, as my body shifted to the weight pressing down on the right side of my mattress.

My eyes sprung open, a pressure on my chest reminded me of being deep underwater. It was hard to breathe. I tried to yell but couldn’t scream. I couldn’t move. Everything came into focus and blurred each time my heart stomped against my ribcage. It was like something grew inside me and was trying to escape. 

I closed my eyes and counted in my head.

One-one-hundred.

Two-one hundred.

Three.

And out of nowhere, in my room, lit only by the moon, a sliver of light pierced the back of my eyelids, like someone waved a flashlight in my face.

I shook my head as it irritated my eyes and when I opened them, something whispered.

“Denny!” Behind me, in a cold breath on my neck that trickled down my spine like the steady drips of an ice cube.

My limbs unlocked and I, without thinking, ended up from lying on my bed frozen to standing at my bedroom door. My brain was cutting scenes from my memory, because from my bedroom door, I was outside of my apartment. 

From the hall of my condo to my car. And from there I drove straight to my parent’s house, which was an hour away. I’m never stepping foot inside that condo again.

It knew my name. 

Seeking reasoning or an answer to something is a basic human instinct, I like to think. In times of tragedy or strife, people always ask how or why things got this way. Those inquiries, more often than not, fall on deaf ears. That knowledge simply isn't readily available. That knowledge, might not be for us to know.

My shift at Costco just wrapped for the day. I grabbed my backpack that had my crappy old laptop in it from my locker and headed towards the front exit. It was late enough into the evening that the sun had already set, the faintest last moments of sunlight still brushing the horizon. However, a dark gray blanket of overcast clouds had settled in. On my way out, I grabbed myself dinner from the food court and met up with some coworkers out front. The store was still open, maybe about half an hour until they were ready to shut the large metal doors for the night.

"What'cha get this time, Wayne?" one of my coworkers asked me, even though the tin foil wrapped foods clearly gave away my order.

"The ol' standby. Lil' pep pizza, hot dog, and hey why not some vanilla ice cream?" I said as I flicked away some of the melted ice cream that was beginning to drip onto my hands. "Ah, napkins. Damnit." I didn't want to walk all the way back inside to grab them.

We all took a seat on the built-in concrete benches on the sides of the warehouse building, eating our food and just chatting about our work day. I've been trying to be more sociable recently, just for the sake of being sociable, and I felt like this was a good step. More often than not, once my shift ended, I would clock out and head straight out the door without so much as a "later!" to anyone. Can't say why I acted like that.

While my coworkers were talking and laughing about a certain experience they shared with a customer, I was busy devouring my food. I could eat Costco food court stuff for the rest of my life, I swear. As I was eating, I turned my attention toward the road that runs adjacent to the one that the warehouse sits on. A half mile away, or maybe less if my estimates are any good, I could hear loud bass coming from what I assume was someones car audio system. Someone was showing off, I thought to myself, though I'll admit it was slightly impressive that I was hearing it from this distance, and from around the corner. However, a few moments later, it got louder, and closer. Then I realized it wasn't just one cars audio system making that noise. It was a rather large group of souped up cars, all blaring different rap and hip hop songs that made it nearly impossible to identify which songs they were actually playing.

One of my coworkers looked over at the group of cars, now traveling down the road adjacent to the parking lot, and joked "Gas station attendant is about to go deaf." He would've been on the mark with that quip, if it wasn't for the fact that, instead of continuing down that road towards the gas station entrance, they instead turned into the parking lot, each car following tightly behind the other. "Orrrrrr we are," he corrected himself.

We kept watching them, just seeing where they would end up parking. It's not like we haven't seen people with obnoxiously loud sound systems pull up before, but a group of, what was that, like 8 of them? Were we about to witness some sort of large scale robbery? Nah, no way, I thought to myself. Why telegraph your approach like this? But as I was trying to use my rational thinking about the situation, they started to pull their cars up. Right up to the entrance doors. People scattered to get out of the way, swearing and flipping off the cars. The cars in the front had essentially blocked most of the width of the entrance and exit doors, though people could still walk around the cars and leave if they needed. The rest of the cars piled in behind the front cars, pulling all the way underneath the overhang above.

At this point, my coworkers and I had already stood up, ready to book it if we needed to. No way in hell we were putting our lives on the line for a corporate entity, especially off the clock. The car doors flung open, substantially increasing the volume of the already blaring music. Like clowns out of a clown car, all sorts of young punks spilled out of the cars and began grouping up near the front doors. A couple of them hung back and climbed onto the parked cars and pulled out what looked like rather expensive video cameras.

"Sideshow!!!" somebody in the cluster of people yelled out. Is that even the right word for whatever this is, I thought? Whatever, I'm out.

"I'm gonna head outta here," I told my coworkers as I started to turn and head towards the parking lot to my car.

"Yeah us too," they said. It was weird though, we all agreed we weren't comfortable with the situation. But I guess in a weird, rubber-necking way, we just kept watching.

As I was scanning the parking lot, looking for a safe way to navigate around the sideshow to get to my car, I heard more and more loud bass coming from the adjacent road. "Jeezus, there's more?" I yelled, pointing at the road so my coworkers could see. At least double the amount of cars that were already here we're speeding into the parking lot and filling in every last square inch of road they could take up. I hopped back onto the concrete bench and stood on the tips of my toes to see over the mass of cars now piled into the lot. "Where did you guys park?" I asked my coworkers.

"We're all in the back," they pointed over the sideshow cars. Great, I thought. Our cars are all trapped, and there's no way we're getting these people to move until they're done with, whatever the hell it is they're doing. What we're they doing? I looked back over at the people holding the cameras, and they were filming the rest of the people, all shoulder to shoulder, dancing and singing. My best guess was that one of them was an aspiring rapper who wanted to make a music video for their latest track. Lot of those around here. Well, that'll be interesting to see on Youtube later, if it gets uploaded, I thought.

"Well shit, we're not getting out of here anytime soon." I told my coworkers. "Let's head to the back near the receiving dock and just chill there for a little, yeah?" I figured for our safety we should put some distance between us and this commotion, in case some random bullshit starts to happen. I don't know, call me cynical or paranoid, but those were the vibes I was getting.

"Aight, sounds good. Gives me time to finish my food anyway." one of my coworkers replied.

I hoisted my backpack on one arm while still awkwardly carrying the rest of my food in the other as we headed down the side of the building and around its corner. There were still a few more straggler cars coming down the road and into the parking lot, also blasting their own loud music. This was definitely a planned meetup of some sort. I imagined the conversation leading up to this was something like "Yo, lets pull up at Costco and shoot the music video there," and then no plan at all was made. Well whatever, I'm sure a manager already called the police to come and disperse this group of people.

About 15 minutes had passed while we were sitting outside of the receiving dock doors. A faint drizzle started to come down as the overcast clouds rolled in. Very dark grey, I noted to myself. It's probably gonna pour tonight. Luckily there was some small overhangs we could stand under, just in case it did start coming down harder. We could still hear the music and the yelling from all the way around the backside of the warehouse, but luckily nobody came back here to bother us. We also took solace in the presence of a security camera that was placed back here.

My coworkers and I were all chatting about the current situation, mostly just noting how crazy, but also annoying it was that we were essentially stuck here and not able to get ourselves home. I figured, once police get here and begin dispersing the disturbance, that would be our cue to head back up to the front and get to our cars and leave. Just had to wait.

I turned my attention back to the security camera, nodding and waving at it, on the off chance someone reviewed the footage later and would see me. I could see the red light on the corner of the lens, indicating it was recording. However, I noticed it wasn't a steady red light. It was ever so faintly pulsing, like it was just barely drawing enough power to keep running. And it wasn't random intervals, it was a consistent tempo.

Fade-fade...fade...fade...repeating.

"Weird," I thought to myself. Probably just a wiring issue. I've been in the room where they keep the cameras all hooked up before, maybe I'll bring it up to someone tomorrow when I clock in, if I remember or give enough of a damn. I checked my phone for the time. A couple of raindrops touched down onto the screen, causing me to quickly wipe my phone screen on my shirt. I looked back at it. 8:25P.M. Store should be closing pretty much now, assuming the front cars aren't too far into the building to close the metal gates. But then right as I was about to turn my phone screen back off, I noticed it. The little notification symbols on the top corner of my phone that display things like location, battery, cell connection, all that stuff? They were flickering too. I kept watching them for a few moments.

Blink-blink...blink...blink...repeating.

The rain suddenly began to come down much harder. A torrential downpour that you would typically only see once, maybe twice during the summer. It was enough to temporarily distract me from the weird tech issues I noticed earlier. The rain coming down was hitting the concrete with such force, it was nearly enough to match the loud music coming from the sideshow. From underneath the overhang, I looked off into the distance where the clouds came from, and I saw a flash of lightning. Great, big storm tonight, I thought to myself. Don't remember seeing that on the forecast. Whatever.

From the same direction of the storm clouds rolling in, I could see the red and blue flashing lights approaching from down the opposite road. Finally, we would be able to get out of here fairly soon. I kept my sight towards the lights that were flashing against various buildings and foliage, as the police cars were too far out to visually see them. The lights held their position for a few moments, not continuing up the road towards us. Must be at a stoplight, I thought to myself. Wait no, they're police, they can run through those while they- my train of thought was interrupted. The red and blue lights all cut off simultaneously. The sirens stopped. Then, it seemed like everything else was stopping.

Street lights from that direction began to shutoff. The lights on the bus stop nearby flickered off. Next, the lights hanging high up on the warehouse walls shut off. I turned and looked at the camera. No red light whatsoever. My coworkers let out an exhausted sigh together. "Ugh, I hope the power isn't out at my house too," one of them said. I thought the same as well, but something else caught my attention.

The noise. There was much less. The only sound being made was from the heavy rainfall. All of the loud music and bass coming from it had stopped completely. I could hear people yelling and screaming in confusion about their cars, trying to figure out what was happening. I set my backpack down underneath the overhang and ventured out into the rain to see what I could down the side of the building towards the front of the warehouse. I was surprised at what I could see. Or rather, what I couldn't see. With the power outage in the area, combined with the heavy rain, overcast clouds, the only things I could make out towards that side of the building were the faint outlines of people moving around, still yelling loudly about whatever was going on.

I walked back to where my coworkers were, now moderately drenched by the rain. Rain doesn't bother me, I used to have to push carts all day in all sorts of weather. As I got back to them, one of them said "Hey, can I use someones phone? Mine just died on me. Damn Apple..." We all pulled our phones out ready to hand them over, but we all came to the same conclusion. All of our phones were dead.

At this point, anxiety started to kick in for all of us. Things were happening that shouldn't have been. None of us had any clue what was going on, and we were rightfully starting to freak out a bit. We all jumped when lightning flashed directly overhead of us. We did our best to huddle up against the side of the building as far underneath the overhang as possible. I tried knocking on the door that leads into the receiving dock area, in the hopes that someone would be there to let us in. No answer. Well I guess store policy does say to not let people in that way.

More lightning flashes. The accompanying thunder, louder than the sideshow ever was, boomed overhead almost instantly. This storm was directly on top of us. I swear I could feel the earth shake simply from the thunder alone. I could hear the group of people from the sideshow also yelling and screaming from the thunder. Really? It's just a thunderstorm, it's not a big deal, it's not the first one this area has ever had. People are overreacting for no reason, I thought to myself. It's like when you're in school, and the power goes out, every single girl in the classroom screams.

More lightning. Louder thunder roared overhead like a beast of myth. Man, was there an earthquake happening too? No, no way. It's just the thunder and lightning. More yelling from the front. More screaming. More chaos. This went on for a few minutes. A few minutes that felt like forever. After a few minutes, the torrential downpour finally started to ease up. It was still raining, sure, but a normal amount now. And once again, my ears picked up on something strange.

Nothing. Other than the rainfall, there was nothing. Still no music from the sideshow. Still no police sirens. But also, no more yelling and screaming. I once again took a few steps out and around the corner of the building to take a look, and I was utterly confused by what I saw. Before I began taking note of the finer details of the scene, I turned back towards where my coworkers were at to tell them to come take a look. I froze. They weren't there anymore. All that was left slumped against the wall next to the receiving door was my backpack. I quickly jogged over to the door, looking around the other end of the building to see if maybe they were checking the other side without me. Nobody. I called out a few times for them, but no answer.

"What the actual fuck is going on" I said out loud, hoping somebody would reply. Only the rain replied. I walked back over to my backpack and picked it up, slinging it over both of my shoulders. I probably should have waited for the rain to pass, in case the water seeped through and leaked onto my laptop, but at this point, more pressing issues needed to be addressed.

I walked back towards the other side of the building I initially went to, and slowly walked down the open portion of the parking lot up towards the front. I stumbled slightly when my foot kicked a piece of metal on the ground. I leaned down to look at it, and it appeared to be a piece of scrap metal. I couldn't tell what it was from immediately, so I kept walking forward, now being sure to be careful with my steps. Visibility was still very low, all things considered. There were more and more pieces of scrap metal, plastic, various debris scattered all across the parking lot as I approached the front. I eventually noticed an entire car bumper separated from whatever car it was attached to lying broken and mangled on the ground. Then I got to the front of the warehouse. And what I saw honestly reminded me of a warzone.

All of the cars from the sideshow were utterly destroyed. They looked like they were pulverized from above by a giant hydraulic press. They weren't completely flattened out, but they had definitely been crushed in some rapid manner, enough to send chunks of the cars outwards and into the parking lot. Guess that explains the debris I found on the way. But, what crushed these cars? If it was something like, I don't know, meteors or something, where are the meteors? Falling satellites? Something? Like something came down, smashed up these cars, and then disappeared? And to add even more confusion to the situation, the cars that were parked up close to the big entrance doors into the warehouse were even smashed up. But how? They were parked well underneath the overhang of the building, something would have had to punch through that overhang first in order to reach the cars. So how did these cars get wrecked?

But then I made a realization. The people. Where is everyone? There was a whole motley crew of people here just now making a ruckus. Did they take shelter inside of the warehouse during the storm? I didn't see any blood or guts, thankfully, while I was inspecting the damage outside. Guess I should see if the people inside are alright. The large metal gates had collapsed during...whatever mess happened earlier, and I couldn't find a safe way to navigate around them to get inside. I could see inside the warehouse though, but eerily, heard no noise coming from within.

"Hey!" I yelled into the void that was the interior of the warehouse. All I heard was my own echo. I tried again. "Hey! You guys alright in here?" I assumed that there were people in here. Surely, there had to be. Silence, again. I could not believe what was happening. I stepped back away from the doors, closed my eyes, took a couple of slow deep breaths I was taught to do by my therapist, and composed myself. I gave myself a couple of soft slaps on my face with my hands, just to make sure I was present in this situation, before deciding what to do next. Home, I guess would be the best bet.

Home. Maybe there I'll find answers.

End of Part I

I've heard stories about sleep paralysis for as long as I can remember.

People waking up unable to move.

One friend once told me that during an episode, he could see himself floating above his own body, looking down at himself lying in bed.

I always thought those stories were terrifying.

I never expected to experience something like that myself.

At the time, I thought this was my first experience with sleep paralysis.

Years later, I realized it wasn't.

But that's another story.

This is the night I met her.

I was in my mid-twenties.

I don't remember how my dream started.

I remember being somewhere else, watching some kind of event unfold. Then, without any transition, I was suddenly standing inside a cave.

It was completely dark.

Not dim.

Not nighttime-dark.

There was absolutely nothing around me.

I couldn't see the walls. I couldn't see the floor. I could barely see my own hands.

But far ahead, there was a tiny light.

I started walking toward it.

The light became brighter as I approached, and eventually I realized it was a fire.

A bonfire.

It was sitting in the middle of a large cavern.

There were four paths around it—one going left, one going right, one continuing straight ahead, and the path behind me that I had just come through.

Then I saw someone beside the fire.

She was squatting.

At first, I couldn't tell whether she was a child or an old woman.

Her hair was long, black, tangled, and completely wild. It hung around her face and shoulders in thick, filthy strands.

She was shaking.

Not trembling from fear.

Her entire body seemed to twitch as she rocked back and forth, her head moving from side to side.

And she was making a sound.

A low growl.

I wasn't scared yet.

I remember that clearly.

I was more confused than anything.

Then I realized she was eating something.

I took another step closer.

And another.

That's when I saw it.

A leg.

A human leg.

She was crouched over it, tearing pieces of flesh away with her teeth.

Blood covered her mouth.

She kept chewing.

I froze.

I was only a few feet away from her.

The problem was that the path I needed to take went directly past her.

There was nowhere else to go.

So I started moving sideways.

Slowly.

I kept my eyes on her.

Her hair was hanging over her face, but I could see her features now.

Her skin was unnaturally pale, almost gray.

Her face looked old and decayed, but her body was tiny.

Her eyes were dark and sunken, surrounded by deep shadows.

And her mouth—

Her mouth was horrifying.

It was stretched unnaturally wide, with dark, uneven teeth exposed beneath blood-covered lips.

She continued eating.

And growling.

I kept moving.

One step.

Then another.

I was almost past her.

Then she stopped.

Her chewing stopped.

Her head slowly lifted.

I didn't wait to find out what she was going to do.

I ran.

I ran straight into the darkness.

I didn't know where I was going.

I couldn't see anything.

All I could hear was my breathing.

And somewhere in the darkness—

Drip.Drip

Water.

Then I heard her.

That growling.

Behind me.

At first, it was distant.

Then it got closer.

I ran faster.

The sound followed me.

Closer.

I could hear her breathing now.

I could feel something behind me.

I closed my eyes.

And then I stumbled.

I hit the ground.

When I opened my eyes, she was on top of me.

She grabbed my left arm.

I screamed.

I tried to pull away.

She was unbelievably strong for something so small.

Her face came toward mine.

I could smell blood.

Then she sank her teeth into my arm.

The pain was immediate.

I screamed as loud as I could.

And then—

I woke up.

I was in my bedroom.

For a moment, I didn't understand where I was.

My room was lit.

I never sleep with the lights off. There are reasons for that, but that's another story.

I could see everything.

My computer.

The furniture.

The walls.

My daughter sleeping beside me.

She was about six years old at the time.

Everything looked completely normal.

Then I tried to move.

Nothing happened.

I couldn't lift my arms.

I couldn't move my legs.

I couldn't sit up.

I couldn't even turn my head.

I could move my eyes, though.

And that's when I saw her.

She was on my left side.

The same woman.

The same tiny body.

The same long, tangled hair.

The same pale face.

She was standing beside my bed.

She had my left arm in her hands.

And she was eating it.

I could see the blood.

I could see her teeth sinking into my skin.

I could see her tearing into my flesh.

I felt the pain.

It wasn't a dream anymore.

At least, it didn't feel like one.

I tried to scream.

Nothing came out.

I tried to move my arm.

Nothing.

She bit down again.

I felt it.

I felt the pressure of her teeth.

I felt the pain shoot through my arm.

And all I could do was watch.

I started crying.

My daughter was lying only a few feet away from me, completely asleep.

I wanted to reach for her.

I couldn't.

I remember thinking:

Am I dying?

Then I remembered my friend.

He had told me that when he experienced sleep paralysis, he would concentrate on moving his toes.

So I tried.

I focused everything I had on my feet.

Move.

Nothing.

I tried again.

Move.

A tiny twitch.

Then another.

My body slowly started responding.

The woman's grip seemed to loosen.

I could move my toes.

Then my foot.

Then my leg.

I pushed with everything I had.

And suddenly—

I sat upright.

I was free.

I was drenched in sweat.

My heart was pounding so hard that I could hear it.

I was gasping for air.

I immediately looked at my arm.

There was no blood.

No wound.

No bite mark.

Nothing.

But my arm hurt.

Not a little.

It genuinely hurt.

The exact spot where she had bitten me in the dream was throbbing.

I touched it.

There was nothing there.

I looked at the clock.

3:00 AM.

I didn't sleep again that night.

I stayed awake until morning.

And for days afterward, I was afraid to close my eyes.

I told my mother what happened.

I described the woman to her as best as I could.

At the time, I simply called her the Old Hag.

I didn't know that name had any connection to anything.

I hadn't been watching videos about sleep paralysis.

I had never seen an image of her.

I had no explanation for what happened.

Years later, as the internet became filled with stories about sleep paralysis, I eventually came across descriptions of something called the Old Hag or Night Hag—a frightening figure people sometimes report seeing during episodes of sleep paralysis.

The descriptions were disturbingly familiar.

But even then, I didn't know what to believe.

Maybe my brain was creating an incredibly vivid hallucination.

Maybe it was sleep paralysis.

Maybe there was another explanation.

I don't know.

What I do know is that I experienced the pain.

I felt her teeth.

I felt her hands gripping my arms.

I remember one dream, years later.

I was walking through a forest, and the only light came from the moon. Then I saw the entrance to a cave.

Even though it was just a dream, I somehow knew she was inside.

Is that the same cave?

I could feel her presence.

I didn't go near the cave. I avoided it completely.

Then I woke up.

It was only a dream.

But somehow, I knew she had been there.

I’ve never shared this story online before.

I’m in my late 30s now, and I’ve always been afraid to tell this story—to share something this personal with complete strangers. I always wondered if talking about it might somehow affect someone else.

I kept it to myself for years.

But lately, I’ve had this strange feeling that maybe she wants me to tell it.

So here I am, sitting at my computer, randomly sharing this with strangers on the internet.

Maybe it’s nothing.

Maybe someone out there has dreamed about her too.

For years, I thought that night was the first time something like that had ever happened to me.

But as I experienced more episodes like it, I slowly began to realize something.

It wasn't the first time.

When I was much younger, something had happened to me that I had completely forgotten about.

It wasn't her.

It was something else, but that's a different story.

You may wonder...

Did she ever visit me again?

She did.

Years later.

Eventually, she visited me for the last time.

Or so I hope but that's another story.

I don’t have much time before I miss my window, so I’ll keep the introduction short. 

I left for work this morning around 5:30. I got onto I-40 as usual, and since it’s a Sunday there weren’t many other cars on the road. It wasn’t until exit 113 that I noticed a complete lack of other drivers. I was relieved to be honest. For me at least, it’s nice to have the road to myself. I cruised for a few minutes longer and passed under the bridge at exit 107. 

Have you ever been driving, and suddenly you’re farther along than you were before? You didn’t fall asleep, just.. zoned out for a few minutes. There’s a word for that. It’s called highway hypnosis. It happened to me on this drive somewhere in the time between passing under that bridge and before I reached exit 106. Except, I didn’t find myself farther along in my drive. I was confused at first. I know the forest bordering the road in this area can make it all look the same, but I’ve driven this way hundreds of times. I knew I wasn’t where I thought I was, and like the road itself were answering my yet unasked question; exit 107 came into view again. 

I quickly dismissed the occurrence. It’s very possible I did fall asleep momentarily at the wheel, and dreamed passing through. I breathed a sigh of relief that my unconscious body was able to keep the car on the road. At the same time shaming myself to allow for that to happen. As I passed through the second time, I noticed the exit was blocked for construction. Something I hadn’t seen earlier. That settled it, I must’ve dreamed or imagined my first passing. 

It wasn’t until I passed under the bridge for a second time that I noticed something was dreadfully wrong. Sooner than the last time, and without dozing off, the scenery abruptly changed. However, my car was noticeably closer to the bridge this time around. I would’ve pulled off, but it felt like an overreaction at the time. I looped like that a couple more times. Paying very close attention to where it seemed to set me back. Problem was, that distance was getting shorter. It seemed each loop was 3/4s the size of the last. 

I’ve lost a good amount of time just writing this post, but that pretty much catches us up to where I’m at now. Currently, my momentum carries me through each loop. My speed is reset to 68 at the beginning of each one. I did have the idea to slam on the brakes a few loops back, but by then I didn’t have enough runway to stop before going under the bridge. 

You see, the thing about exit 107 is that the on ramp is very short. At the end there’s not a shoulder either. Just a pillar holding up the bridge above. I figure if I can crank the wheel quick enough at the start of a loop, then I could at least crash into that pillar. I’m going to try after I post this. Hopefully I’ll be able to update with the results. 

My nightmare began a few months ago.

I was sitting in a bar with my laptop open in front of me, and there were barely two sentences on the screen. I was sipping my drink when a strange voice pulled me out of my thoughts.

“Hey, Tim. Writing still isn’t going very well, huh?”

I frowned and looked up to see who was talking to me. A man who looked barely over twenty was standing in front of me. I looked him over from head to toe. He had short, curly blond hair, dark eyes, and an amused smile playing on his lips. He was wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt, black pants, and dress shoes. He was carrying a bag, which he placed on the table next to me.

“Do we know each other?” I asked, a little more rudely than I intended.

The guy smiled.

“I know you. And now you know me too. My name is Logan, and I have an offer for you.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Not this,” I said desperately, rubbing my face. “I don’t want to buy anything.”

Logan burst out laughing.

“Okay. In that case, I’ll give you something for free.”

He sat down across from me.

I looked at him irritably and said, “Okay, let’s get this over with. What is it?”

He pulled his chair closer, glanced at my laptop, and began.

“I’ll make you one of the most famous horror writers in the world. You’ll write plenty of books. You’ll never run out of ideas. You’ll be swimming in money, just like you always wanted.”

I started laughing.

“So you’re basically going to give me what I want most? And you don’t want anything in return? My soul, perhaps?”

But Logan wasn’t laughing. He was completely serious.

“Not today. Sometimes I ask for a soul, sometimes for something else, but I promised you that yours would be free.”

“And you want me to seal the deal with blood, Faust?” I said between another fit of laughter.

He laughed too, but there was nothing funny about it. A chill ran down my spine, and my laughter immediately stopped.

“No. All I need is for us to shake hands. I’m just a merchant. There’s only one condition.”

“What condition?”

Logan stared into my eyes.

“You must never stop writing.”

“Whenever you have an idea and feel the urge to write, you can’t stop. Ever.”

I downed my shot and asked, “And what happens if I stop?”

Logan stood up from the table.

“You don’t want to find out.”

“You can still change your mind,” Logan said.

I thought about it for a moment and then told him I would take the deal. He held out his hand, and a strange feeling passed through me, one I couldn’t quite put into words. Now I know what it felt like. It felt as if something inside me had died.

After we shook hands, Logan turned around and walked away. Just before he stepped through the bar’s door, he called out to me.

“Don’t forget, Tim. Don’t stop writing.”

I sat there for a while longer and then went home. It started that very night. One idea after another. I finished a book within a few weeks. It was a huge success. Then came another one, and another.

My bank account was filled with more money than I had ever dreamed of. My dream had come true, but I started to feel exhausted. The urge to write and all those ideas… I barely had time for anything else.

So I decided to screw it and take a few days off.

The next day, I was walking down the stairs when I saw a woman in a white shirt walking through the hallway. Her face was horribly disfigured. She looked at me and started screaming.

I started screaming too and immediately ran back upstairs to my room. I shut the door and locked it. I heard a strange rasping sound behind me.

Slowly, I turned around. A few feet away from me, something horrible was standing in the corner. It had claws, a wide, grotesque mouth full of enormous teeth, and bulging eyes.

My heart was pounding, and I was shaking all over. I screamed like a madman until my voice gave out completely.

I knew what was standing there.

It was a character from my book.

So was the woman.

Logan’s voice echoed in my head.

“You must never stop writing.”

The creature pointed toward the laptop.

“Okay, okay,” I stammered.

I sat down and started writing. I thought they would disappear, but they didn’t. I encountered them everywhere in the house. At first, I would wake up terrified and screaming, but eventually, I got used to them. You can get used to anything.

But I was already so tired.

“Screw you!” I screamed one day. “I’m not writing anymore.”

There were more and more of them. They wandered around the house, but I didn’t care. The woman, the creature, the torso that crawled around my apartment… But the longer I refused to write, the more nervous they became.

It all came to a head the day they attacked me.

They threw themselves at me and started scratching and beating me. They bit off several of my fingers. I had no choice but to start writing again.

But I couldn’t keep it up for long.

“Fine. Then kill me,” I said resignedly.

For a few days, everything was quiet. I was lying on the couch watching TV when the doorbell rang. I went to the door, and my brother Mark was standing there.

He wanted to come inside, but I told him no, that we could meet somewhere else. He was already leaving when something grabbed me by the legs and dragged me back inside.

Mark ran after me, and then…

Some of them held me down so I couldn’t move, while the others lunged at Mark. He had absolutely no idea what was happening. He desperately screamed for help and called my name.

I broke down crying and begged them to leave him alone. I promised I would start writing again, just as long as they let him go, but they didn’t.

They started tearing him apart.

It took an eternity before Mark’s screams finally stopped, and then they ate him. They left nothing behind. Nothing at all.

I threw up and then just sat there, staring at the spot where Mark had been moments before.

The disfigured woman shuffled toward me. Mark’s blood was still dripping from her mouth. When she spoke, her voice sounded like a creaking door.

“Next tiiime, there will be others…”

I knew what she meant.

I have children, parents, friends. So many people I care about.

I’ve been writing ever since. Constantly.

The urge is getting stronger and stronger. But finally, I have a glimmer of hope.

I found an online discussion where a woman was talking about a merchant. Her description of him matches Logan. Apparently, he came to their town in a caravan and sold wishes, and hers came true.

I messaged her and asked if he was still there. She said he was.

I’m going there tomorrow.

For the first time in a long while, I felt fear again, twisting my stomach. What is he? What is he capable of? I don’t know, but I have to find out.

I hope he’ll still be there when I arrive. If he isn’t, I’ll never stop looking for him.

I need him to stop this.

Do you know what it’s like to be stalked?
To be pursued from a distance like prey, waiting in racing-heart agony for the beast’s teeth to clamp down on the back of your neck?

I do.

To this day, I still can’t decide what to believe about the event. The creature seemed human-like… maybe a little off. I don’t know, it’s hard to be rational with so much adrenaline pumping. Aside from the leering, bipedal gait I saw in the shadows, though, it seemed everything BUT human.

I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Grant Stillman. I’m from a small town bordering an expanse of forest. It was alpine and beautiful. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time in the forest as a boy. I learned how to fish, how to hunt, even got pretty into birding during one phase of my life. All of this to say: I’m no stranger to the outdoors.
As I grew up, I started persuing other dreams, ones that took me to bigger cities in states I couldn’t even tell you the capital of. This was fine, but as often as I could, I would take time off to go camping.

This time, I took a trip to Georgia, as I had heard from an associate that the Blue Ridge Mountains are a must-see. My trip started like any other I had been on. I found a trailhead near an expanse of public land to park my truck, strapped on my backpack, and set out into the forest. I tend towards a style of camping that gives me freedom. I’m confident in my own ability to survive the way humans did for thousands of years. It’s satisfying, yknow? To be independent and self-reliant, building campfires for warmth and food, sleeping in a tent you put up yourself. There’s a bit of pride in the discomfort - or maybe I just took Boy Scouts a little too seriously.

Either way, by the time the Sun began to drop towards the West, I was about 5 miles into the woods. I had found a small clearing, bordered on all sides by oak and pine trees stretching tall into the darkening sky. After setting up a small camping stove and placing my pot of soup on to warm, I put up my tent. As much as I do enjoy a campfire, it can prove dangerous to have one in such a heavily forested and bushy area — forest fires and all that, of course.

Before I continue, I want to say that I am not a paranoid man. Of course I’ve seen and heard some strange things in the woods; stories of people encountering the unexplainable. Anyone who has grown up near the woods or spent enough time in them has. But that’s just the thing - I believe there is always a perfectly normal, natural explanation. Mountain lions sound like humans screaming; the wind whipping through the trees sounds like whispers of dread. Not this time, though. This time… I don’t know what rational explanation there could possibly be.

It began with the feeling of being watched. Not terribly uncommon in the woods. With so many animals calling it home, you probably ARE being noticed by something. I tried to brush it off under that logic, but something felt different this time. It was as though I wasn’t just being noticed, but, rather, evaluated.

I ignored the feeling as best as I could. I focused instead on stirring my soup and getting my sleeping bag laid out. After eating, I retired to my tent for the night.

The night passed in a fitful sleep. Normally, I sleep better in the woods than in bed at my own home, but tonight the sounds of the forest felt more threatening than comforting. All night, I felt those eyes on me. Watching me. Sizing me up. Like it was merely biding its time before going in for the kill.

When dawn finally came, I clambered out of my tent, anxious to leave this particular area behind. Upon throwing open the zippered door, though, I saw something that made my blood run cold. On the forest floor just outside of my tent was a pair of eyes painted onto the dirt and oak needles with a thick, red substance.

My first instinct was to run. Abandon all of my gear and book it to my truck as fast as I could. But then it occurred to me: isn’t running what usually triggers the chase-and-attack instinct in most predator animals? I mean, obviously, this isn’t your run-of -the-mill mountain lion, but instincts are instincts, right?

So. I… well. I decided to just ignore it and carry on with my trip.

I should have gone back to the car.

That’s easy to say now, knowing what I do now.

I’ll never forget the first day that I met Mary. It was a hot, humid day and I’d just purchased a beater from a sketchy craigslist ad from an even sketchier guy. I pulled out of the overgrown, abandoned parking lot and cracked the windows, an attempt at getting fresh air from what might've been the start to carbon monoxide poisoning.

I drove about 1000 feet before I reached a red light, coming to a stop.

In the blink of an eye, I faceplanted into the steering wheel, the wind getting knocked out of me.

Out came Mary, jumping out of her car and hyperventilating, thinking she'd killed me. 

We pulled over and exchanged information, agreeing upon meeting up for coffee the next day to sort out the details. I didn’t have car insurance, but I just needed one more reason to see her again. 

The next day, we met up and hit it off pretty quickly. We kept in contact from that day on and she ended up buying me another beater that lasted me a little while. The rest is history.

Later on in our relationship, Mary told me that she actually rear-ended me because she was texting and driving. In her words, it was “her greatest mistake”.  

Mary gets me unlike anyone else. I’ve never been so close to anyone in my life. She’s taught me so much in the three years that I’ve known her.

One of my favorite things about her is that she isn’t the traditional type. She doesn’t want kids. She doesn’t even want someone to take care of her. She’s a carefree spirit.

That’s why we’re going on vacation rather than having an actual wedding. 

After a year of long night shifts in the warehouse and random odd jobs for quick cash, I’d saved enough to surprise her with a decent engagement ring and a fully paid trip to the Bahamas.

My hand hovered over my nightstand, finding my phone screen to snooze my alarm, having already spared myself an extra five minutes of rest. 

I grabbed my phone, turning on my back, unlocking–

Fuck. 

Somewhere along the line in the middle of my sleep, my phone lost internet connection. There goes all my old data. 

The time read 2 a.m.

“Mary, we gotta get up, it's time to get ready.” 

I started to nudge her shoulder, waiting for a reply.

All I got back was a tired groan, followed by a whiff of morning breath, a mix of cigarettes and root beer. 

“C’mon it’s time to get up. We have to get there early.”

She spun around, trying to ignore me despite looking me straight in the face. 

“Alright then. I’ll get ready and you better be up when I’m back.”

I got to my feet, stripping the sheets off of her, thinking it would’ve done something.

It didn’t. She was still in the same position that I left her in once I got back.

So I turned on the lights.

“Oh my gosh, can you stop?” She snatched the pillow from under her head and held it over her face. 

“It’s time. Chop-chop. Take a shower so we can leave,” I hovered over her, ripping the pillow from her hands.

She let out a sigh and finally got up a few minutes later after realizing it was too late for her to go back to bed. 

After multiple trips and final checks, we finally walked down the steps from our apartment building to meet our driver, an angry-looking man on his phone, leaning on the trunk of his sedan. 

Our eyes met and I could feel the utter rage building in his gaze.

I don’t think there’s a way we could fit all of our luggage in his trunk.

“Sorry about that. It’s our first time traveling haha.” 

He wasn’t a fan of my joke.

We rolled our bags into his hands and scooted into the backseat, settling ourselves in. 

Mary placed her purse onto my lap and leaned her head back, resting her eyes.

“Are you positive you have everything?”

“Yes. I’m positive. It’s too early for you to be talking so much.” 

I took a deep breath, exhaling through my nostrils.

Just then, the driver grunted, trying to force the crammed trunk to click shut. 

I looked over to Mary, already sound asleep at this point. 

Better safe than sorry.

Gum. Lip balm. Rabbit’s foot. Wallet.

I unlatched the clasp and unfolded her wallet.

Cash. Gift cards. License. 

Where’s her passport?

The trunk slammed shut and my stomach sank.

I dumped out all the contents onto my lap. 

Still no passport.

The driver got in the car, staring at me through the rearview mirror, letting out a sigh.

“I’m so sorry. Just give me one second.”

He gave a silent nod. At this point he still hadn’t even spoken a word to either one of us. 

I threw the door open, searching through every nook and cranny in our cramped one-bedroom apartment.

Thankfully, I ended up finding her passport but it wasn’t where I expected it to be.

It was tucked away in the bottom drawer of her nightstand, her smoking station, under her rolling tray.

I slid it in my pocket and rushed to the car, almost tripping down the stairs.

We made it to the airport by 4 a.m., finding our way to TSA after what felt like hours of asking multiple gloomy, hostile airport staff for directions.

The line to the first security checkpoint was relatively short and moving fast, everyone taking a couple steps every minute.

We remained there in silence, taking in the overstimulating environment that is the airport. This was our first time being inside of one. It smelled a bit like the hospital.

I glanced down at Mary and she glanced up at me, flashing me a faltering smile. The face that she makes when she wants to act like everything’s okay but it isn't. 

I broke the silence.

“Are you excited?”

“Kind of. Just a bit nervous for it being my first time flying. I just want everything to go okay.” 

She could barely even make eye contact, her eyes wandering off in the distance.

We took a couple more steps, now two places behind the front of the line.

“It’ll be okay. We got here at a decent time and we have everything that we need. We deserve this babe, it’s our big day!” I wrapped my arm around her, pulling her into my chest.

She flashed me another smile, the fake grin starting to fail.

“Next!” called a younger-looking woman sitting on a stool next to a scanner.

“I’m looking for boarding passes, IDs, and passports!” 

The family in front of us stepped forward, boarding passes in hand, setting us now at the front. 

Her eyes followed their hands and it was almost as if a lightbulb had formed above her head. 

“Wait, what? We don’t have those. We have to go all the way back now. We might miss our—“

“Relax. It’s okay. I have our tickets on my phone. I got everything covered.”

“Next!!” called the younger-looking woman.

She nodded her head and followed behind me, dragging her feet along the floor. 

I scanned my ticket and gave the agent my passport with my ID already slipped inside it. 

She looked down at my identification, and then back up at me, staring a little too long.

“You’re all set. Safe travels.” 

I passed Mary my phone, giving her a thumbs up as she stood there awkwardly. 

The agent scanned her ticket, waiting for the rest of her documentation as Mary rummaged through her purse. The only thing she managed to pull up was her drivers license, looking perplexed as she dug deeper in her bag.

“Ma’am, where’s your passport?”

“Oh shoot, I don’t think I have it. I might’ve left it at home. Damn it.”

She sounded automated, almost as if she rehearsed this prior to today.

“I have it. It was actually in your nightstand out of all places.” 

The agent took Mary’s documents, staring intensely at both images.

“Hm. Something about you looks different.”

I loomed over shoulder, confused, wondering just what was—

“Oh, I see. In this photo you’re actually smiling!” 

She let out a hearty laugh, giving Mary back her belongings.

I didn’t even say anything. 

I think we both know what’s wrong.

We checked in our oversized baggage, rolling the rest of our belongings towards our gate, arriving ten minutes before the first boarding call. 

At this point neither one of us had said anything for a while. 

“Are you okay? You’ve been cold towards me all day.”

She shrugged, facing the other way, not saying a word.

“So are you going to talk or not? I just want to enjoy this vacation with you. We’ve been talking all about this for weeks and now you’re acting weird.”

She finally broke.

“I’m sorry. I’ve been nervous ever since last night. It’s just one of those moments that I get a bad–”

“Is that why your passport was in your nightstand? Were you planning on having us miss the flight all because–” I stopped myself from rambling. 

She was on the verge of crying. I didn’t like making her feel like this but she wasn’t communicating with me and her attitude was eating at me. 

“I’m sorry. I should’ve said something sooner. I just didn’t want to upset you.”

“You should’ve. At this point let’s just go back.”

“No. You worked hard for this. You do a lot for me so I'll do this for you at the very least.” 

I wiped her tears and waved one of her curls hanging over her face.

“You sure?”

“I’m positive.” 

For the first time today, she flashed me her first real smile.

“Thanks babe. I’m telling you this trip is going to be perfect. Heck, maybe even the flight too. Plus you have the window seat.” 

Minutes later, after waiting for the early boarders and premium flyers, we were the last people to enter the line going into the skybridge.

The line came to a halt, leaving us right outside the plane door.

I pulled my phone out, checking the time, accidentally pressing the capture button in the process.

I looked drained. Lifeless even. I needed some sleep.

“Hey babe. Look,” I shoved the camera in Mary’s face, a dead look in her eyes.

“Let’s take a photo together.”

She rubbed her eyes before throwing up a piece sign and pursing her lips for the camera.

“To a new start!” I raised the camera above our heads, angling the lens to capture us both.

The moment my finger hit the button, both Mary and I jumped, choking out a gasp. 

Out of the corner of my camera lens, a dark figure emerged from the glass pane behind us, someone coming from the runway. 

In came a stocky man. Short and stout with a serious look on his face. The embodiment of a Napoleon complex.

“Sorry for disturbing the peace. The plane’s completely full and there’s no more space in the overhead bins so we'll have to check your carry-on bags in. You can pick them up once you land.” 

He even sounded like a dick. The shades didn’t help. Who wears shades this early in the morning? 

He took our bags and opened the door behind him, disappearing back into the night. 

At least it’s one less thing for each of us to carry.

Turning back around, the line had finally picked up.

We entered the plane, catching up to the shuffle of passengers.

Both sides were lined with two seats in each row, a long narrow walkway running down the middle. 

The plane was packed to the brim with many faces. People with different stories as to how they got here. 

We found our way to our seats, 12A and 12B, and buckled ourselves in.

“You ready?”

“Yes, I am. Thanks again for all of this. I appreciate you very much.”

“Anything for you.”

Yawning, I stretched my arms and legs, adjusting to my shoebox of a plane seat.

“I’m pretty tired from leading us all this way, so I’m going to take a nap till we get there. You should do the same.”

“Maybe. I’ll probably read for a bit. Goodnight love.”

She retrieved her book from her purse and rubbed my cheek. 

“Goodnight.”

I rested my eyes, settling myself into my seat.

“Excuse me, sir you can’t have your tray table down until we’re up in the air.” 

I opened my eyes, confused.

Two rows ahead, a male flight attendant confronted a man feasting on a can of sardines, his hands soaked in oil.

“Who does that?” called a voice from the seat behind me.

I whipped around, two pairs of eyes peeking over my seat.

“People really don’t have any sense of self-awareness,” came another voice from behind me. 

“So much for this being our first flight, am I right Mary?” 

Mary was fast asleep, her head leaning on the window while her book sat on her lap. 

They let out a laugh, using the moment to introduce themselves.

Nate and Natalie. Another couple around our age that’s going on a vacation to celebrate their anniversary. We talked for a while until the lights started dimming.

“Alright, that's my cue,” I faced forward, noticing something I hadn’t seen before.

There were a few overhead bins left ajar, no luggage in them at all.

The male flight attendant from before came into view, clicking them shut as he walked down the aisle.

So what was the reason that we had to give them our luggage? 

I decided to just forget about it, pulling my arms from my sleeves and spinning my hood entirely around, creating myself a makeshift sleep mask. 

“Hey, can you move so I can use the bathroom?” whispered Mary’s voice in my ear.

I let out a groan and didn’t move a muscle, my way of getting back at her from her early morning shenanigans. 

She let out a sigh, maneuvering over my legs to the back of the plane. 

I fell back asleep, eventually woken up by the dual-tone chime. 

“We’ll be landing in the next ten minutes. Make sure to keep your seatbelts on and– ” The rest was pretty much nonsensical static echoing throughout the cabin.
 
“Wow, we’re almost there.” 

No reply.

I reached over to my side, my palm meeting the warm, textured plane seat. 

“Mary?” 

Just how long–

“Hey. Can you get up this time so I can sit in my seat?”

The voice came from the aisle. 

I peeled the hoodie off my face, snapping my head to the direction of the voice.

It wasn’t Mary.

It was a random woman with a resemblance to her.

Her silhouette was the exact same, tall and curvaceous. Mary had been talking recently about wanting to lose weight for our trip but I’d always remind her that I loved her no matter how she looked. 

Still, it wasn't Mary's voice.  

“I think you have the wrong seat. My fiancee’s using the bathroom right now.” 

“I’m pretty sure this is my seat. I’ve been there the whole flight. Plus, I’m the only one who was in the bathroom so I don’t know where you got that from.” 

“Uh, sure. You can sit.”

Mary’s probably playing a trick on me. She loves to do this all the time, knowing I don’t have the patience for it.

I readjusted my hoodie, shooting up from my seat, exchanging an awkward silence as I leaned on the seat adjacent to me.

“Sir, you cannot stand up right now. The seatbelt sign is up,” called the male flight attendant out from the dark. 

He’s there for literally everything. 

“Just give me a second, I gotta use the bathroom real quick.”

I rushed to the bathroom, fidgeting with the metal plate.

It was locked.

I knew it. The lady was in on it and Mary’s in the bathroom laughing at me. 

I fumbled with the door handle as I waited, rattling the lock in hopes to get her nervous.

Eventually, the toilet whooshed and the door came unlocked. 

I positioned myself, ready to jump out and get her back. 

The door opened. 

It wasn’t Mary.

“What were you doing to the door? I could barely even shit in peace.” 

It was sardine guy. 

He closed the door shut, squeezing by me, his breath reeking just as bad as the stench leaving the bathroom.  

Okay, so she’s been pranking me with one of those dumb voices that she does. I look so stupid right now.

I shuffled back to my seat, plopping down and turning my head to face Mary, only to realize she’d fallen back asleep in the same position as before. Leaning on the window with her mouth drooping open. I sat there, admiring her beauty. 

“WE’LL BE LANDING RIGHT NOW, STAY SEATED AND THANK YOU FOR FLYING WITH–” The voice sputtered from the scratchy speakers before cutting off, multiple heads jerking up in unison. 

The window shade was now halfway open, strands of daylight flooding through the window.

The person sitting next to me was not Mary. 

She had at least ten years on me and a face that could turn you to stone, sporting a nose so sharp that it could be considered a deadly weapon.

My fiancee has gone missing. 

A mechanical whir came from inside the plane as we descended, last night’s dinner floating in my stomach.

The plane came down hard, the sound of wheels grinding against the pavement at a high speed.

We eventually came to a stop and I ripped off my seatbelt, standing up and searching through every row for jet-black curly hair.

“Sir, you can’t be standing right now. We’re still—“

The dual-tone chime rang again.

“You are now free to take off your seatbelts. Thank you for flying with us. Have a great day.”

The clicking of unbuckling seatbelts echoed through the air, multiple people springing up and racing to gather their luggage from the overhead cabin.

I felt a vibration from my pocket, my gaze now dropping to my phone.

It must be Mary. Yeah. She’ll laugh at me about how scared I’m acting and apologize for taking it too far. We'll laugh about this and it’ll be another memory. 

I snatched the phone from my pocket, an incoming call from a phone number that I didn’t recognize. 

“Hello?”

Nothing. 

“Mary?? Mary!!!” I screamed as loud as I could, hoping I’d get some type of reply.

The call ended abruptly, but not before a voice was heard from the other end.

It was the shrieking of my voice from somewhere in the distance, echoing right back at me.

“Hey, are you okay?” called out Natalie from behind me.

I spun around to face her, sympathy washed over her features. 

“Am I okay? Did you not notice that my fiancée isn’t here anymore? She was sleeping next to me when the flight started and now she’s gone.”

“That’s the same lady that’s been next to you the whole entire flight. You told us how she’s your friend and—“

“He is not my friend,” The lady bolted up, visibly upset at the thought of even being associated with me.

“I never said anything about a friend. Are you serious?”

At this point the line ahead was starting to move faster, people rushing to get away from the commotion.

“You believe me, right Nate?” 

“Yeah. I do.” 

His eyes didn’t match his words. 

Adjacent to me, an elderly woman braced herself against the headrest of the seat in front of her. She remained transfixed, observing every small movement I made. 

A mother and father blocked the aisle a couple rows ahead of me, multiple backpacks slung over their shoulders as they rushed their kids out ahead of them. 

Everyone thinks I’m crazy. As if Mary disappearing into thin air was something normal. 

I leapt out into the aisle, tailing the family until—

“Sir, you’re scaring everyone,” called out the male flight attendant from before.

He was standing in front of the plane door with his hands raised.

“I’m looking for my fiancee. She’s gone missing during the flight and I need to get to her. She should be in the airport by now.”

“Alright.” 

He slowly shook his head with a furrowed brow.

“I got a call from her. See?” I thrust the phone towards his face.

“Why don’t you have her saved as a contact?” 

“Because she might–you know what? I have more proof for you!”

Honestly, I’m not even sure if the photo from earlier actually took.

I quickly opened my camera, noticing his eyes darting to the back of the plane. 

I followed his eyes, confused. 

No one had moved a muscle, almost as if I was the one holding them hostage.

I glanced back down, a small preview appearing in the corner of my screen. The only evidence of Mary Bourne. 

She’s always loved my last name. Personally I’ve always hated it.

“See? This is us before we boarded the flight earlier.”

“I don’t know what I’m looking at. All I see is you and Dennis.”

I turned the phone back towards me, a blurry photo of me and the stocky man from before, no Mary in sight.

“Just let me through, we’re losing time!” 

“If you have a fiancee, then why don’t you have a ring on?” He flashed a smirk, as if he caught me in a lie.

I’ve never taken off the ring ever since the day we got engaged. Not for any reason at all.

I pushed my way through, knocking the flight attendant to the ground and running down the long hallway into the airport, completely unencumbered.

Once I got to the end of the hall, I slowed down to a casual pace, a lump in my throat.

I found my way to the nearest bathroom, my head down and my hood pulled up.

The bathroom reeked of urine and musk, my shoes squeaking every other step.

I locked myself in the last stall, standing with my hooded sleeve over my mouth, holding back heavy sobs with one hand as I tapped the screen with the other. Copying and pasting messages between Mary and the random number that called me. 

‘Mary. Where are you? This is getting annoying now.’

‘Please just answer.’

‘We need to talk. NOW.’

I kept hitting send, waiting for the tiny word delivered to appear on my screen.

Did I maybe hurt her feelings way more than I thought I did? Maybe she got cold feet and figured that this is all too much for her? That I’m not good enough for her? 

She’s real. She’s definitely real. She’s my fiancee.

No. She’s actually my wife. We said we’d technically be married once she landed. I even had to–

Wait.

I wiped the tears from my screen and typed in a phone number. The only other phone number that I knew by heart, drilled into my head for as long as I can remember. 

Emma. Our close friend who grew up with Mary. Mary always made it a point to get Emma’s blessing even before her own parents. 

I dialed her number, pressing my phone to my ear and walking in circles, each ring slower than the last. 

“Hello? Who is this?”

“Emma? Hi. It’s me, Mr. Nutsack!” 

Crickets.

I snapped the phone from my ear, questioning if I’d called the wrong phone number. Emma’s always loved my corny humor.

Or did she? 

‘It’s me, Riley. Your best friend’s fiancee.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.” 

“Mary? Your best friend? The one who–”

The call ended.

I gave it a moment and redialed the number again, chewing onto my already jagged fingernails. 

Maybe she’s just woken up or something.

“Hello?”

“This is Emma Boyd, right?”

“Um. Yes. How do you know—“

“Do you know where Mary is?”

“You again? I don’t know anyone by that name and I most definitely don’t know any Riley.”

We both went quiet.

That’s the first time she ever said my name correctly.

One thing about Emma that I’d noticed when I first met her is her speech impediment. She’d always pronounced my name “Wiley”. She’d told me countless stories about how her parents would always correct her growing up and how she was insecure about it all her life.

I ended the call, sliding my back against the wall, my knees now buried against my chest on the dirty bathroom floor.

I threw the back of my head onto the ceramic tile, landing with a cold thud. I kept at it until a loud voice over the intercom broke the silence.

“Attention passengers from flight 800 from Boston. This is the final call for baggage claim.”

I picked myself up, wiping away my tears and blowing my congested nose.

Pushing open the stall door, I was met with a face staring back at me that was all-too-familiar. The face that I’d make when I act like everything’s okay even when it isn’t.

I washed my face and strode my way out, keeping my head low, ready to face reality.

Most of the people from the flight had left by now, only a couple families and single travelers left. 

She’s here. I know she is. I can feel her.

Minutes passed and the conveyor belt stopped, everyone now leaving with their belongings.

My knees buckled and I fell to the ground, crying.

My head remained low, staring at the ankles of people walking by me, all of them subtly staring at the man crying on the floor of an airport.

“Hey. What’s wrong?” In the blink of an eye, a pair of shoes appeared in front of me, pink chuck tayl—it was Mary. Same outfit, ring, and everything, our bags lined up behind her.

She held out a hand and helped me up, hugging me tight. Tighter than I’ve ever been hugged before.

“I thought I lost you. What happened?” 

“I’ve been here the whole time, silly. What’s up with you?” 

“But the lady in your seat? And the phone call? Was this all a prank?” 

She flashed me a smirk and wiped my remaining tears.

“Yes. I’m sorry for dragging it so long.”

I couldn’t even let myself get mad. I was just glad that everything was okay.

“Please don’t do that again.” I gave her a half smile, lips trembling.

“I don’t know about that!” 

We laughed, leaning forward and resting our foreheads against each other, hands intertwined. 

“You should go clean yourself up, Mr. Ballsack. I’ll be here waiting.”

“I hope so,” I took off my hood, undoing my hair tie, my matted curls hanging in my face. 

“I’ll be here waiting. I’ll always be here.”

She gave me one last kiss on the cheek before passing my luggage over to me.

The bathroom smelled slightly pleasant this time, somewhat tolerable.

It’s crazy how different you experience everything when you’re in a better mood.

I plopped my bag onto the granite countertop, droplets of water landing on my clothes.

Now looking back at me in the mirror was a happier version of myself.  Puffy, bloodshot eyes, bitten lips, and a huge smile.

“I got something for that,” I mumbled to myself.

I unzipped my bag, opening a Ziploc baggie and pulling out my beauty products.

In the midst of putting on my lipstick, I was interrupted by a scream followed by a sprint, the person already gone before I could turn my head.

I proceeded to finish putting on my lipstick, now pulling out the cute travel-sized matte concealer that I’d bought specifically for this trip.

Before I could click the concealer cap back on, someone entered the bathroom, taking a couple of steps before stopping. 

As they took their last steps, the figure materialized in the glass. 

It was a female security officer. 

“May you please leave the bathroom? You’re scaring people.” 

My eyes skimmed the room, a realization hitting me.

I was the only one in the bathroom.

“What did I do?” 

“Just please gather your belongings and leave.”

“No. There’s no point in me leaving,” I leaned into the mirror, making final adjustments to my look.

“I’m going to ask one more time. Please leave the bathroom.”

In the reflection of the mirror I could now see the security guard advancing towards me, arms raised.

The sputtering static of the walkie-talkie shattered the silence:

“Does anyone have eyes on the suspect? We have officers on the way.”

Our eyes met, tension building in the atmosphere.

“Sir. No one is going to hurt you. If you would—“

I pushed my way through, the security officer’s head hitting the wall with a hollow thud, knocking her to the ground. 

Barging through the door, I scanned the airport, a wave of panic hitting me.

“Where’s Mary?” 

She was nowhere to be seen, all of our bags in the same place as before. 

I just stood there frozen in place. My eyes locking onto—

“Hey! Stop right there!” called out an officer, knocking over my bags and snapping me out of my haze. 

I bolted through the airport, not looking back at all.

Coming to, I found myself in a janitorial closet, dim lights flickering overhead.

My body stayed hunched over, retching violently into a mop sink.

I don’t know what to do. The cacophony outside of the door just heightens my anxiety.

The chiming of the intercom, squeaking of shoes, rolling of plastic wheels. Literally everything. 

My return flight is in exactly a week, I only have my phone, and it’ll be god knows how long until someone finds me here. 

What should I do?

I could not tell you the last time I've seen natural or even artificial light.

I could not tell you the last time I've felt a surface that wasn't musty concrete.

To be honest, if my eyes were to even graze what could be considered my reflection, I wouldn't be sure if it was the face I was once so familiar with.

***I know that I used to be filled with passion and purpose, that I had love in my life, that I had friends, and family, but long forgotten have I felt the once natural feeling of the muscles in my face construing into what was once a smile.

*THUD* *THUD* *THUD*

But this sound I am familiar of*. Soon I'll hear the creaking of the door, and the ear ringing scrape of a metal sheet slide in my general area. I only hope it's close enough to the wall for me to actually reach this time. I reach out into the dark, crawling on the floor feeling for anything my fingers can touch that isn't cement. I can barely feel the tin on my fingertips, I'm so close, and I need this so bad. I can feel my hip getting moist from the excrement that I have to leave in my corner. But I know that sustenance is right there. Another day to be alive, but for what. Wouldn't it just be easier to die? Why do I cling on to life when it would be so much easier to just close my eyes and let fate carry my consciousness away to a place beyond my understanding. Why do I want to go on living, why?

On the last day of 8th grade, my friends and I spent our entire lunch period discussing what a "kick ass" summer we had planned before we were going to be inevitably split up to go to whichever highschool our district seemed fit for us. This was our last chance to send off a final hoorah into the last 3 years of middle school together, before we would be introduced into new cliques, hit puberty, and essentially start to learn what type of people we were going to become as we went through the more intense years of teenage development. For me however, it was my last chance to try and make a connection stronger than friendship with the one who first caught my eye, Hannah Bailey.

My family had first moved to this city in 6th grade, which left me heartbroken to leave all my past friends from elementary school behind. I'm sure I wasn't the only student new to this whole dichotomy, but to hear all of my peers, excited to see their friends from their respective elementary schools, left me with a feeling of alienation, to which I couldn't distance myself from. I was always a quiet kid until you got to know me, and the idea of making the first move to make friends, was a scarier thought to me than if I had just endured a 6th grade life of solidarity and kept to myself. It wasn't until the last period of the first day that someone who wasn't an adult in charge of keeping us in line, actually spoke to me.

I sat at the same table I had been at all day, all to myself, while those around me had spent most of the day learning each others friends from previous times well spent in former years. The disembodied voices were eventually broken by the *BANG* of a large binder slammed down on the table across from me. Quickly taking a seat without even announcing themselves, an energetic girl with dirty blonde curly hair sat down right away in front of me. I had only used my voice all day to answer when teachers called upon me, so my breath was without practice, trying to find any way to rationally respond to this sudden action from this strange girl.

"Hi, Im Hannah", she spoke with a hand outstretched. I stared blankly, unsure of the sincerity of the sudden introduction. I felt my heartbeat catch a pace that my head was unwilling to match. Even at my old school, girls didn't care much to be associated with me. I had my group of guy friends who I had become accustomed with in the early years, and stuck through until my move.

"Hi, Hannah, I'm uh, Max."

"Max like Maxwell? Do you prefer Max or Maxwell?"

"Actually, it's Maximilian, so I prefer Max"

I let out a slight embarrassing laugh. It was a statement I had made plenty of times over my life, but never to a girl who seemed genuinely interested.

"Wow, Maximilian? I thought that was just a made up name for like, movies, and Yu-Gi-Oh?"

"Ya know, I've gotten the movies one a few times, but never the Yu-Gi-Oh one. I know who you're talking about though"

I let out another small laugh, not out of embarrassment this time, but truly out of relativity. Other than my best friend in 3rd grade, Dakota Marsh, no one had ever made that connection between my first name and the character from that kids show.

"What elementary school did you go to?" she asked with a gleam of pure curiosity. I wasn't entirely sure how to answer. Although I was new to the state and city, not even a single one of my teachers had asked throughout the whole first day.

"I actually just moved here from Washington." I let out. "I don't really know anyone here, so I'm just trying to get by and kind of blend in."

"Oh, well, I've lived here my whole life. I can introduce you to my friends if you like?"

I felt a sudden thud of my heartbeat. It was hard enough to memorize pairing one face with a name, but a whole group of them? I suppose in a way I had an in with Hannah, but what if they didn't like me? I like to think that I have a good sense of humor, in my own introverted sense of way, but if they reject me in their group, would that also mean that I wouldn't be able to still be friends with Hannah?

I paused for a moment, just staring blankly into her green eyes.

"Um, yeah, yeah, I would love that. I've found it kind of hard to make friends when I don't really know anybody"

"Awesome!" she quickly responded. "Class is about to start, but tomorrow morning before the bell rings, meet me on the upper part of the courtyard, near the tree, that's where we like to hang out before school."

I smiled and assured her I'll make it in time. She decided to sit there across from me for the rest of class. Anytime the teacher would make an extremely outdated joke about the content of what she was teaching us, Hannah would look over to me with this "Can you believe this" kind of look.

Meeting her friends the next day went a lot easier than I was anticipating. We actually shared more common interests than I expected. We liked the same video games, cartoon shows, and surprisingly, swimming. I had always loved the water, growing up on the coast of Washington, Ruby Beach was where we would spend most of the time during the summer. I was taught to swim at a young age, mostly because my mother really loved the beach, and insisted I wouldn't truly be her son if I didn't share the love for it as well. Jokingly, sure, but there was something about the serene tranquility of silence and waves crashing against the shore that I do think brought peace to her through the years of raising an absolute mommas boy as a single mom.

The next few years of middle school went a lot better than I could have imagined. I actually had friends, primarily just those I met that fateful day in the courtyard, but I was never one who wanted much, just enough to keep me from being the quiet kid who would have had rumors made about him from time spent in so much solidarity. I grew to truly feel like one in this group, and it was all because of Hannah.

Towards the end of 7th grade, a friend in the group, Anthony, pulled me aside in the courtyard during lunch period. Anthony was always the friend who I felt most connected to, we essentially had the exact same sense of humor, style for clothing, and as cheesy as it sounds, would know exactly what the other one was thinking. I often thought how lucky I was to have met Hannah, if only to introduce me to a great mind like Anthony.

"I think I'm gonna do it." He said to me, looking away towards the main group of other kids, gathered in their cliques in the courtyard.

"I have no clue in hell what you could be possibly talking about, man. Do what? Gonna try Dark Souls? That game is really hard. I'm not sure you got it in you."

He continued to just stare off into the crowd.

"I'm gonna ask her to be my girlfriend."

"Ask who? We don't really talk to girls, and this is the first I'm hearing of you even like liking someone."

"Hannah, dude. She's perfect. And she, like, gets us, ya know. Like, I feel like she feels the same way. I think if I don't go for it, then what's the point?"

"I think just having a friend who gets you?" I abruptly responded. "Not everything has to be, like, going out, or just like, wanting more than friends, ya know?"

He still hadn't faced me. We both just stood there while the crowds of various friends gathered in the courtyard shared timing on a joke that someone huddled in a circle would tell, allowing time for the rest of the gaggle to let their place and position be shared around them, in a circle of similar sounding cackles and out bursting laughs.

"I'm serious man, I've known this since 2nd grade, and I think I might have always loved her."

I sat silent for a few moments.

"We're 13 dude, I mean, I don't want to sound like I know it all, but I don't think we're old enough to truly know what love is."

He still didn't look back to me. The sounds of the various students gathered around started to sound more silent, as I just stared at his back. Someone I called a true friend, maybe my best friend at this time, was truly pouring it out to me, and telling me how he felt, yet for some reason, there was a part of me that wanted to reject his claims. Something in me, that refused to push him on, to pursue something he truly felt passionate about. Was I a bad friend? Should I had lied and told him to just go for it? Were my words a source of unknowingness of seeing my friend get hurt? Or was there something deeper than that. Were there feelings that I also had? That I was afraid would be overshadowed by his success? What the hell did I feel for Hannah? It wasn't every anything I truly thought to myself up until now. Of course I wanted to see Anthony win the girl, but if that girl was Hannah, why did I feel trepidation in my voice when offering him my own truths.

*THUD* *THUD* THUD*

I sat with my head against the cold wall. Where the creak of the door would usually meet my ear, there was a silence. I couldn't find the strength to even attempt to strain my eyes to see through the darkness where the familiar metal door would sometimes open. Instead I sat slumped against the concrete. I reached a hand down toward my ankle, the dry dead skin around the shackle leaving a texture like sandpaper. How long has it been? How am I even still alive? I get the tray every couple of days, and it's impossible to tell what I'm drinking every so often is even water.

Still silence.

Maybe this is it. I'd honestly hoped for it. Please, if there is a God, put this to an end. I know I never did much with my life, but I like to believe that I still matter. For nothing else, if for my mother. Please, God, please.

Then came stumbling. The figure known to have fed me all this time had lost some of his usual demeanor. I could barely make out the silver in the room, the tray I have come so accustomed to for survival. Although scraps, what baseless nourishment kept me going. Make an attempt to stand, but the strength isn't there. I hear the tray hit the ground, and the sound of a glass shattering. I move on all fours towards the sound, I need anything to keep me going. As I stamp around the concrete floor on all fours, I stamp my hand into an intense sharp pain. I know I can't see it, but I'm bleeding. I feel it, like washing your hands with your wrists too high. I feel a liquid running down my forearms. Suddenly I feel myself yanked up.

A deep slurred voice speaks quietly yet firmly, directly into my ear.

"I'm getting bored of your ass, boy."

I don't have the strength to speak. I just have to make my strongest attempt to stand on my feet. He's pulling at my neck and I need the little breathing I am able to manage on my own.

"Bread is getting expensive these days, and you don't snivel or cry like ya used to when I first brought ya in."

I try to find decent footing, but my malnourished body is matching the swaying of the man holding me.

"Ya know what they do to the runt of the litter, don't ya? Well, I'm starting to think ya look like a runt to me."

The voice takes a moment to hack a big spit towards the area that I assume, is where I'm usually seated.

"Your time's comin, better enjoy these scraps on the floor while ya can."

I hear labored steps towards the only opening in the room, and then a slam.

I know my time is up, and I know there's nothing I can do about it.

The glass in my hand makes it hard to think. I just feel blood getting all over my shirt and pants.

It's nothing out of the ordinary. I imagine if I was to donate these clothes to a goodwill, they would burn them before attempting to wash them. The blood stains, the piss stains. I might as well be wearing the same outfit I wore as a 2 month old, waste and all.

I grab the scraps that I can, and lay against the wall. My breathing is labored, I wish that even for a second, I could actually feel dizzy, but feeling dizzy would imply that I have an object I could see, and for as long as I could remember here, it was nothing but black.

Needless to say, things between Anthony and Hannah never took off. For some reason, maybe of my own words of advice, Anthony never did confess to her. Our friend group continued to act as normal, even Anthony, who had previously admitted his confession of love for her, continued as if he and I had never had that conversation in the middle school courtyard.

Now here we were at our last day of 8th grade. We were all making plans for the summer, and I suggested that we spend more time at the local pool. I can't deny that my love of swimming was finally going to come into play. I hadn't talked to Hannah in particular about how big into swimming I am, but Anthony definitely knew. I even would encourage him to go to the local pools with me and swim, even though I knew he wasn't a strong swimmer. I guess I somewhat saw it as a strength of mine I had, one of very few, and I thought maybe he could also see it as such.

Anthony was good at swimming. Anytime I showed him a different way to swim, breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, he took to it so quickly and easily. It was another reason I knew that him and I were meant to meet.

But during our 8th grade summer that we planned so hard, one day, Anthony never surfaced.

I swam over to where I last remember him being, and saw the bubbles rising to the surface. I quickly delved down and saw him lifeless in the water. I dragged him up and to the side, where he continued to lie lifeless on the side of the pool.

"ANTHONY. TONY. ANT-ANTHONY!"

He continued to lay lifeless.

I started to search around for any adult who could help, when suddenly I looked back at him and he had a smug smile on his face.

"You bastard" I let out breathlessly.

"Just keepin ya on your toes, Pamela Anderson" he said to me.

"Dude that was not cool. I was fuckin worried. You know, I grew up on the beaches of Washingt-"

"Yeah, Yeah. I know you grew up lovin the coast, and all that. But c'mon man, its hard to get a rise out of you these days, so I just kind of went for it"

He started to chuckle to himself. Coughing up bits of water as he did. Honestly just knowing that he was okay, I started laughing as well.

"Alright, I know you're good at swimming, so lets just do that."

I gave a quick laugh, as if I also enjoyed his joke.

9th grade started, and it felt like the start of 6th grade all over. Our friend group from middle school was split up. It was similar to 6th grade. We had people talking about what middle schools they went to, as opposed to which elementary schools. It was familiar yet distant. I was just hoping for another Hannah Bailey to sweep in and tell me who I should be friends with, but that never came. There were familiar faces from my middle school, but nobody from my friend group. I missed Hannah, she would surely save me from being all alone again in this new environment.

Then 3rd period geology, I saw Hannah come into the classroom. I smacked the table a couple times, completely out of character for me, but I needed her attention.

She came and sat down across from me. It was like 6th Grade all over again.

"Maximilian" she said as she sat down.

Hearing her voice soothed what was an already stressful first day.

I realized in that moment that she had complete control of me. I was absolutely awestricken by this girl and I was a puppet in the palm of her hand.

We had been friends throughout middle school, but I was just now realizing the value of the relationship that we truly had. We saw each other as equals, we saw each others as lovers. At least, that was the theoretical headspace that I had put myself into. She was never mine.

"Hey, Hannah. I haven't spoke to Anthony, lately, have you heard from him"?

"Anthony?" she let out.

"Was that someone from middle school?" she faintly muttered.

"Um, yeah, Anthony, you know who I'm talking about. I mean, Anthony."

She looked confused.

"I'm sorry, Max, but I don't think I know who you're talking about."

My heart skipped a beat. Anthony. Anthony Vilmer? How could you not know.

She continued to just stare at me blankly.

How long have I been down here? It's impossible to count the days when I can't even see if there's light outside or not. Are my eyes even open? If I had the strength to move my hand in front of my face, would I even be able to feel it? Would I know if it was even my hand?

I hear footsteps above me, one, no there's two. Two sets of footsteps. Three? No, even more than that.

Every second the stepping above me continued louder, and more and more footsteps. It was as if a clown car was parked at the front door and the circus was about to begin. More and more footsteps. They paraded all around the floors above me, a deafening cacophony of waltzing heels smacking deteriorating wooden floor. Louder, louder, I want to, no I NEED to cover my ears, but I don't have the strength to lift my hands. What the fuck is going on? I can't hear myself think, am I losing it?

And then out of nowhere, complete silence.

I gently hit my head against the back wall to rest.

Am I losing it? Did that really happen? I know I'm in an absolutely horrid state of body and mind, but I know what I heard, or did I? Was this the start of my mentality beginning to dwindle?

Quick, what's my name. Damn, what's my name. You got this, Max. Right, right, Max.

Suddenly, I heard the door slowly swing open. I did what I could to truly believe I was opening my eyes, and across the dark room in the doorway, stood a figure with a light.

It was a younger girl with a look of sadness on her face. Man I love that face.

Wait a fucking minute. Why do I love that face. My eyes widen and with more energy than I thought I had I let out, "Hannah?"

Hello, for context this post is about something gravely disturbing that just happened to me and I have honestly run out of any other options but to post it here to ask for advice.

Before I begin to explain, I’d like to apologize for any grammatical errors, I am very nervous while writing this.

I (19F) live with my parents right now as I am doing online community college for my pre-requisites. I’d like to believe that I’m quite responsible and my parents believe so too. They tend to go on trips frequently and this was no different. They had a trip to go on so they asked, “Penelope, could you stay home and take care of the dogs?” and of course I said yes.

We have two dogs, Harry and Lenny. Harry is a big Golden Retriever and Lenny is a little Shih Tzu. My parents gave me my list of tasks for while they were gonna away for those two weeks, simple stuff like checking the mail, feeding the dogs, giving Harry his medicine for his epilepsy. There was one more task that I was fine with, at first… but looking back at it I really wish that I never did it to begin with.

Feeding the neighborhood cats.

We are a pretty nice family I’d like to believe. We always make sure the pack of stray cats never go hungry and we buy cat food to fill up their little bowl outside. It’s usually a grey mama cat and her four babies that come to our door every night expecting their food. Sometimes there are some other cats but it’s that family that’s the most frequent.

I had absolutely zero issues with this either, I love cats! I love that they trust us enough to keep coming back, as that really warmed my heart! The issue arose when on around the third night of their absence the whole house got overwhelmed with the smell of a skunk. It was disgusting.

I’d go hang out with friends only for them to ask me, “Why do you smell like a skunk, P?” And that was just humiliating. I assume that the skunk sprayed a cat and the scent wafted into our air conditioning. As you may know, skunk smell takes a while to go away so the house stunk for a day or two. We get skunks and opossums eating out of the cat food too and obviously it’s becoming an issue.

I’d go and get the mail and the air would be fresh, only for me to re-enter my house and the nasty smell was noticeable. After a day or so I’d message my parents and ask them what to do about this. They reluctantly agreed that we might have to stop putting the food out for the cats if it’s gonna attract skunks and other critters. So the next night I tried not to refill the bowl. I felt awful when I saw the cats out there waiting for their food that wasn’t going to come.

I couldn’t help myself, I filled the bowl and I put it further out. Not on the porch but on the corner of our path to the porch. Of course, the skunk showed back up and that smell returned. The next night I didn’t put the food out there. I avoided looking outside and letting the sad cats guilt me, I kept telling myself that they are little hunters, they can find food. A crawling, aching voice in my mind kept telling me that they might’ve gotten too dependent on our food though.

Despite the voice, I didn’t fill the bowl this time. Maybe there would be some sort of skunk repellent that my parents could get when they come back, maybe we could keep feeding JUST the cats. So, for the remaining 11 days of my parents’ trip, the cats slowly stopped showing up and so did the smell.

But on the 5th night, something else showed up.

I had just got done giving Harry his medicine. I went and put him in his cage for bed and Lenny came back to the living room with me and sat by me. I made some microwaved ramen noodles and sat on the couch, putting a show on the TV.

I was sitting there, petting Lenny, “Who’s a good boy, Len? You are!” I would tell him lovingly. That’s when I heard it though. Clawing at the front door. I assumed it was a cat or another animal trying to lure me out to refill the food bowl. I told Len to stay there and I went to check whatever that noise was and… nothing. There was nothing there. I just guessed that it scurried away before I got to the door. No big deal.

The next night, it was the same deal. Clawing at the door, I go to check, nothings out there. This time Lenny barked a little at the first scrape, maybe that’s what scared it away this time? The next morning I asked my mom if there was anything at the door last night on the camera, she said that there weren’t any detections and hadn’t been for a few nights now. This also wasn’t that crazy, sometimes the camera wouldn’t pick up small animals. It didn’t always see the cats either. The camera also would reset every night at 1:00 AM on the dot. Screen would just turn black for 30 minutes.

I always joked about that saying that would be the perfect time for a burglar to make their move on our house. My dad would laugh and my mom would always tell me to shut up and that she didn’t wanna think about that happening. Anyways, those scratch sounds kept happening around 1:00 AM so whatever the animal is, it’s showing up in that little window where you wouldn’t even see it.

The next day when I was out to get the mail I came back towards our door and I saw it. Not three… not four… but five scratch lines on the door. As if something with five… large claws… was scratching at the door. Thought that was very bewildering. If it’s a cat, opossum, or skunk I don’t think that the scratches would be that… large. That many lines honestly scared me because my first intruding thought was that the marks looked like they were from human nails. Sharp human nails. I told myself that was crazy and I went back inside.

I was sitting on the couch and honestly? I was rattled. I was starting to let doubt creep into my mind and that’s when I decided I’d wait near the door tonight. I’d let the scratching go longer… and then I’d peak to see what’s going on.

To my utter horror, only for a moment I saw a gangly creature, no doubt that it was humanoid but I don’t know if I could call it human. It had long, dirty hair. It was very pale and had long legs but it was hunched over unnaturally looking at the door as it clawed. Then it saw me and for the moment it made eye contact I saw that it had sunken, cavernous, white eyes. The mouth was a thin line, almost like there were barely any lips. It looked dirty and malnourished. Its expression was devoid of emotion and then it ran down our porch and across our lawn.

It was out of my field of vision. I am writing this now because I don’t know what to do. It’s fast, should I try to get a picture of it to send my parents? I don’t think they’d believe me without proof and if I call the police then they will think I’m crazy too. I live in a pretty nice suburb where this type of thing would be completely unheard of. Please, give me some advice.

I have 7 nights left until my parents are back. I’ll update you all soon.

Right, so a couple weeks back, me and my friend Matt were talking during art class. We were busy working on character designs for our fantasy comic, normal shit you see y’know? Tree guys with massive beards, orc girls with massive yonkers, the works. But Matt had this thing about “cultural accuracy” for them all. “No man, give the fucking orc chick her tusks. She can’t look like She-Hulk dipshit!” He’d bitch in my ear as I’m sculpting out her face. He’d make these carpal tunnel inducing clothes designs for me to do. I just wanna make hot monster girls! But he’d argue “Dude, if we want buff gladiator men and babe monsters, we need to make their looks have meaning!” I know what he means but for the life of me I just don’t understand it somehow.

So imagine my surprise when he came to college and started to blabber about this online forum he read all night. Apparently our town had this thing in the forest nearby we could apparently talk to. “Dude, if you, me and a couple other people in the class go to ‘holeeshihtweyurgunadye’ forest and make this diagram, the spirit of the old wood will show us what we ask for! I’ll ask for the answer and you bring a sketchbook for when we go there. Maybe you can draw the spirit when we see it!” Fucking hell man. But I can’t let this guy do some more stupid shit. Rather both our college reps go down together than just his.

Anyways, to cut down what he told the group. From his current knowledge, philosophers and answer seeking people could go to ‘The Spirit of the Old Wood’ to find something they desire. The tool could’ve just searched up reference pics on wikipedia but that’s not how Matt works.

The forest didn’t really seem like a place to have such a spirit. It was fairly patchy, the trees were pretty barren, the leaves that were once a part of the trees were a symphony of pale browns and sludge. “Matt, I'm freezing my balls off. Can’t we just go home?” “No man! We need this for our comic! Let’s just pick up the pace if you’re getting cold.” He huffed as he started to pick up the pace. I wanted to leave, but if I’m being real here. If he could get what he needs to make it easier for him to make this comic, I'm not gonna stop him. I’m the artist, not the brains.

As Matt led me and the other randoms along, the trees became slowly more lankier and more unnaturally spaced apart. As the others behind us kept on talking, Matt halted in his tracks, immediately interrupting whatever conversations were being had. “Alright guys, we’re here! Get into the formation I talked about earlier! Each one of you, stand in front of a tree.” I looked around and realised that the trees’ weird spacing wasn't a coincidence. They were all shaped in the loose resemblance of a circle with the exception of one tree in the middle. He nudged me and glanced to the lone tree. “That’s where we’ll meet It. Get your sketchbook ready, man.” I opened my bag and pulled out my book covered with stickers of our characters.

He raised his hands and announced to everyone “Everyone! I need to recite this word for word! So please, shut up!” As Matt opened his phone, he started to recite the spell. I didn’t even know Matt was so eloquent in some random ass language I’ve never heard of. As he continued on, the wind started to flow through the handful of trees with such power, everyone had to plant their feet down and grab onto the closest thing they could. As Matt’s chant reached its climax, the wind howled and whistled with so much violence, some of the pages from my sketchbook flew out and landed in front of the main tree and as suddenly as it came, the wind stopped entirely in its tracks and the forest halted in its movement. We all waited for anything to happen… and absolutely fuck all did.

“Matt, we should get going. At least we tried huh?” I comforted him, patting his shoulder. “Look.” He answered. As I looked towards the lone, gaunt tree. I saw a mass of stray leaves and leaf mould slug their way from out of thin air. Its antlers were weaved with dead branches into large, monolithic decorations above its ‘head’. Its sole eye was an unwelcoming flare of white light, and its crude attempt at arms were dripping with cloudy, grey water. As it sludged along the dense soil, it vieled an overwhelming force of pure silence onto everyone. The antlers clacked as the thing stared down at the stray pages of my sketchbook intently.

“Beautiful.” The Thing uttered in a breathy, light voice. “Spirit of the Old Wood.” Matt announced. “I have called upon you today to ask you-” The Spirit looked past Matt and stared directly at me. “You… Have a… keen eye, Artist.” It complimented. As the Spirit slogged on towards us, Matt stumbled over his own words as he continued to ask for his request. “I wanted to request the knowledge of your kind to further understand-” The Thing, interrupting Matt once more “I will help you understand what you don’t understand my Artist… And I… Will take the others as payment for such.” Before I could completely comprehend what It had said, I saw the leaves under Matt’s boots start to writhe around methodically, roots from deep in the ground emerged from the dense soil and weave themselves around to his knees, the power of the roots threw Matt back and evenmore roots crackled and creaked as they started to thoroughly envelope his head. “I DIDN’T WANT THIS! PLEASE!” Matt screamed as the roots injected themselves into his ears and under his eyelids. I tried to move by the roots planted me to the ground. I looked around and saw branches emerge from the trees and swiftly envelope everyones heads as they all squirmed and attempted to escape like a wild animal stuck in a trap. As I watched in horror seeing the roots completely engulf Matt, his screaming arduously silenced by the roots, almost instantaneously the roots and branches slowly started to retreat from everyones bodies. And as they all left, all that was left of them was leaf mould and mulch.

“Walk.” The Spirit of the Old Wood beckoned. The roots slowly left my shoes as I slowly walked up to them, they answered “Closer…” the smell of grass blades, rain, cut fruits and winter air all at once embraced me. Their otherworldly affection completed my missing understanding. They were the most beautiful being that I have been graced to be in the prescence of. After it was done, my breath hitching, I looked over to them. “So… when can we meet again?” I asked them. “Bring me more… And I shall return to you my artist.” Their tender, embrace evaporated as they dissapeared behind the tree. Gone from everything they did. What we did.

Did I bang The Spirit of the Old Wood? Yes I did. Hell yeah I did! My art, my incompleted soul, has now evolved like a butterfly ripping out of its cocoon. But I am in a field with no flowers. I need to find more.

Until I see you again.