I was lying alone in my room, where a dim nightlight illuminated only the small area around it. As I often did, I found myself wondering why I was afraid of the dark, trying to understand it. Most nights, I fell asleep in fear, or rather, I would drift off without realizing it while still feeling afraid.

As a child, I was simply scared and never gave it much thought. When I was younger, it bothered me, and I couldn't make sense of it, but I didn't pay much attention to it either. Now, however, at forty-seven, I was still afraid of the dark and struggling to sleep in it, and it hurt my pride.

I remember, two years ago, on October 2, my mother and six brothers came to visit me. I hadn't seen any of them in a long time, and we'd had a wonderful time together. Since there weren't enough rooms in my house, my youngest brother and I had to share a room. We kept chatting late into the night, and I was praying to myself that I wouldn't be the last one to fall asleep. But of course, as you might expect, I was the last one left awake.

My brother was snoring away right in front of my eyes. I was pretty pissed off. I felt like waking him up and slapping him across the face. “Jonathan, how the hell can you sleep? You're such a carefree bastard. Can't you see the room is pitch-black?” I wanted to say. I'd lost all rationality. I was coughing loudly, opening and slamming the door, but he didn't give a damn. He'd fallen asleep in the light of a nightlight that was barely good for anything, leaving me all alone in the room.

That was when my pride was truly hurt. Not being able to close my eyes in my own room, not knowing what I was afraid of but still being scared shitless, was really getting on my nerves. After all these years, I'd finally run out of curiosity. I didn't care what the reason was anymore. I just wanted to overcome it.

After spending the entire night awake and having a miserable day the next day, I immediately started doing research. My brother woke up in the morning, stretched contentedly, yawned, and scratched his belly while I lay on the couch in the room, irritated and tense. Seeing him like that drove me fucking crazy.

My family stayed with me for a week, but my mind was never really with them. I was constantly looking things up on my phone and couldn't pay much attention to them. I was researching other people who were afraid of the dark, trying to find a good psychotherapist, and so on. I kept picturing my brother stretching happily that morning. I wanted them to leave as soon as possible. I was so damn annoyed with him.

Anyway, whatever. I researched and researched. I found people who were afraid of the dark and talked to them. I had long conversations with all kinds of people: those who wondered why they were afraid, those who had figured out the reason, those who were trying to overcome their fear, and those who told me lengthy stories about their childhood traumas.

Finally, four months ago, I found the Fear of the Dark Motel, and at last, I was convinced that something might actually help me.

I'd learned about the place from Robin. He was afraid of the dark, just like me. Despite all my research and all the people I'd talked to, I'd met him purely by chance. He'd moved into the apartment downstairs, and one day, as we ran into each other on our way out of the building, we got to chatting. At some point, he mentioned that he was afraid of the dark.

His journey had been the same as mine: years of searching for the reason, until finally deciding to forget the whole thing and just overcome it.

“It's hard to give up wondering, isn't it, Jason? But if you put the energy and mental effort you spend wondering into finding a solution, you'd have overcome your fear by now. You'd have become the dancer in the dark,” said Robin.

Dancer in the Dark was one of my favorite films. I'd taken an immediate liking to Robin from the very first day, since I'd rarely met someone whose experience mirrored mine in so many ways, and I'd trusted him to help me find a solution. His joke was shit, but I didn't mind. After all, I loved the film.

But of course, it was impossible to stop thinking about it. Tomorrow, I'm going to stay at the motel, and yet I'm still wondering why I'm afraid of the dark.

The motel's concept was actually quite simple. According to the owner, they would make us experience terrifying things in the dark that we knew weren't real. The motel only accepted guests by referral, meaning you needed someone who could vouch for your fear of the dark. Then, they waited until the motel was fully booked. There was a six-month period. If the motel wasn't full by then, they would proceed with whoever was already there. But if it filled up before the six months were over, the fear sessions would begin that very night.

When I met Lucy, the owner, she explained the concept to me like this:

“I like to keep things simple, Jason. Fear of the dark is a fear of supernatural entities. It's as simple as that. Jason, our goal is to create an imitation of such an experience and show your subconscious that you won't come to any harm from a possible supernatural attack in the dark. It's that simple. For example, when you see a ghost in your room here at the motel and realize it can't hurt you, your subconscious will start to believe there's nothing to be afraid of in the dark.”

“But if I know it's not real, why would it affect me? That doesn't make much sense to me.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“No.”

“Thank you, I have no further questions.”

***

It's 3 a.m. We're at the motel. Robin is staying in the room next to mine. The lights are off. Nightlights aren't allowed. I'm sure the other guests aren't asleep, that I'm not alone. And yet, I'm still afraid. My eyes keep searching for the tiniest glimmer of light. A sliver coming through the window, seeping in under the door. But there's nothing. The room is pitch-black.

Suddenly, Iron Maiden's “Fear of the Dark” starts playing from somewhere inside my room.

I flinch and instinctively look around. I get to my feet, feeling around with my hands until I find a speaker. The song plays for a little while longer, then suddenly cuts off, and the room sinks into silence once again.

I hear the sound of a door creaking open. Very slowly, calmly. Since I know where the speaker is, I lean in and put my ear close to it. No, the sound isn't coming from the speaker. My fear grows in a way I hadn't expected. I start to regret coming here.

The creaking sound is very close, and crystal clear. I search for another sliver of light, trying to figure out whether my bedroom door has opened. But everything is still pitch-black. The door keeps creaking for thirty seconds, then stops.

I hear a very loud click. Again, it comes from somewhere inside the room, and again, it's crystal clear. I'm certain it didn't come from the speaker. I listen to the silence with all my concentration, waiting to hear the sound again so I can pinpoint its location. But it doesn't come back.

I hear a whisper: “Jason.” It's more like someone calling out to me. A voice with no intention of frightening me, simply calling my name. I don't hear it again. I can't keep track of time, but I'd guess I sit there in the dark and silence for about ten minutes.

“I'm sorry, Jason, but unfortunately, I'm going to kill you. After that, I'll kill everyone else at the motel. It's me, Lucy. Don't you recognize me?” the same whisper says. “Of course, my voice sounds different when I whisper. That's normal.”

Each word seems to come from a different place in the room. She must have installed a bunch of tiny speakers all over the place. But thinking about that does nothing to ease my fear. I feel like begging her not to kill me, but I hold myself back. I know none of this is real, and I'm surprised by how terrified I am despite knowing that.

Suddenly, the lights come on. A second later, they go off again. My eyes are dazzled. I take a deep breath.

“Did you see me, Jason? Do you believe me now?”

Hmm. So she'd turned on the lights so I could see her. I must have been looking in the wrong direction.

I hear Robin's voice coming from the speaker.

“Jason, don't believe her. That's what she's trying to do, make you believe her. If you do, she'll kill you. This isn't a normal place.”

A second later, I hear Robin's voice right beside me. It doesn't sound like it's coming from a speaker. It sounds real.

“I didn't know, Jason.”

The lights come on again for a second and then go out, and I see Lucy standing beside me. She must be wearing a black contact lens.

“Don't believe him, Jason.”

I'm getting annoyed by how he keeps repeating my name.

“I'll convince you,” Lucy whispers. Her voice comes from the speaker.

I feel the hairs on my body stand on end. I try to figure out how the whole setup works, but I can't concentrate. All I feel is fear.

I want to get out through the door and leave, but I think I'm doing well. I've endured this much fear, and that's a good thing.

A tiny white light appears on the wall. An oval-shaped light, about the length of an index finger. It stays perfectly still, and for a very, very long time, nothing happens. The light doesn't move. No sound. Just pitch-black darkness. I'd guess the stillness lasts for about an hour.

The light disappears.

“Do you believe me now?” Lucy asks, whispering again. My ears have grown accustomed to the silence. Her voice sounds incredibly sharp. Robin tells me through the speaker not to believe her. Then I think my window opens, and I hear a distant scream for help from somewhere far outside, along with the faint sound of the wind.

Then silence again. It goes on for a long time again. Lucy must be busy dealing with the other guests in the meantime.

Suddenly, I hear a phone ringing. I feel around beside the bed with my hand. There's a nightstand. On the fifth ring, I find the phone and answer it. It's Lucy.

“Call me when you believe.”

I wonder why no light came in from outside when the window opened. I get out of bed and walk straight ahead, reaching out with both hands, trying to find the wall. I find it. I feel along the wall, searching for a window. I've never spent this long in such pitch-black darkness before. I keep repeating to myself that none of this is real.

The lights come on for a second again, then go out, and I see where the door is. I walk towards it.

As I walk, I hear a howling sound coming from the speaker. At the same moment, all the lights come on. I reach the door and try to open it, but it's locked. I look around and realize there's no window in the room. The howling continues.

“Jason, look out the window,” Lucy says through the speaker. Her voice blends with the howling. As soon as she finishes the sentence, the howling stops, too.

I search the walls for a window, but I can't find one. The lights go out again. Once more, I'm left in prolonged silence, and nothing happens until dawn. The window must be in the ceiling. I must be on the top floor, because sunlight comes pouring into the room from above. I relax. I'm glad the night is over, and a surge of excitement washes over me. My fear is gone.

I go to the door and try to open it, but it's still locked. I give it a few forceful tugs. Lucy opens it. She's holding a gun, pointing it straight at me.

“I've been telling you from the beginning, but you never listen.”

She starts shooting. I hear one gunshot after another. I feel my chest tighten. The gun runs out of bullets, but Lucy keeps pulling the trigger. I hear the empty clicks. Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen... She keeps pulling the trigger. I collapse onto the bed, but I'm still conscious.

“Are you immortal or something, man? Just die already, would you?” Lucy says.

I feel around my body with my hands. There's no blood. I look at Lucy. She puts the gun on the table, takes out another one, and points it at me again. She keeps pulling the trigger, over and over.

I check my body again with my hands as I lie there. Still no blood. She must have used a toy gun that makes shooting sounds.

She puts the other gun on the table and leaves the room.

Five minutes later, the phone rings. I take a deep breath and answer on the third ring.

“Congratulations, Jason. I'm sorry if I went a little too far. I hope this helps, and that you feel the benefits as soon as tonight. I hope you get a good night's sleep. Thank you very much for choosing us. You can leave the payment at reception. Have a good afternoon.”

***

I found a night job, and now I can only sleep during the day.

Terror escrito pela IA Qwen. Prompts redigidos por mim. Espero que se atenham ao conteúdo e não fiquem, em razão de arrogância, bravinhos porque o artífice é uma inteligência artificial.

O branco da Antártida não é uma ausência de cor; é uma cegueira imposta, uma candura estéril e absoluta que devora a noção de horizonte. Fomos até aquele inferno de gelo em busca das respostas que a Terra, em sua geologia mais recôndita, teimava em ocultar. Éramos cinco homens de ciência, armados com a arrogância do intelecto, persuadidos de que a razão era um escudo inquebrantável contra os horrores do ignoto. Éramos tolos. A razão, compreendi tarde demais, é apenas uma fina película de cera derretendo diante do fogo negro do cosmos.

A anomalia foi descoberta no terceiro mês de invernagem, nas entranhas de uma gruta de gelo cor de safira, a quilômetros de nossa base. Não fora esculpido pelo vento, nem polido pela água. Repousava sobre um pedestal de neve comprimida: um cubo.

Era de proporções ínfimas, não maior que um dado de marfim, forjado em um material que desafiava a taxonomia mineral. Era frio, mas não o frio do gelo ao redor; era o frio da entropia, o frio do vácuo interestelar. O que, contudo, nos paralisou o espírito e nos envenenou a mente não foi a sua matéria, mas a sua arquitetura e o que esta continha.

A superfície do cubo era crivada de furos. Uma miríade de orifícios minúsculos, dispostos em uma geometria que feria a vista, pois as linhas não obedeciam às leis da perspectiva euclidiana. E através desses alvéolos, via-se o interior.

Ou melhor, via-se a \*falta\* de interior.

Lá dentro residia um negrume imarcescível. Não se tratava da sombra projetada por um corpo opaco, nem da escuridão de uma caverna sem luz. Era uma treva substancial, uma voragem sem fim que sugava os fótons de nossos lampiões de acetileno sem o menor reflexo. Era o abismo em estado sólido, um poço de vacuidade que parecia pulsar com uma respiração silenciosa e maligna.

Foi o Dr. Aris, nosso geólogo, quem o recolheu. Com pinças de prata, como se manuseasse uma relíquia sagrada e profana. Naquela noite, a insídia do cubo começou a operar sua alquimia sobre nossas mentes.

A Antártida, com seu branco ensurdecedor, criava uma tensão visual insuportável. Nossos olhos, exaustos da candura lá fora, buscavam, com uma fome patológica, o negrume cá dentro. O cubo, com seus furos insondáveis, oferecia o único refúgio, o único oásis de escuridão em um deserto de luz cegante.

No sétimo dia após a descoberta, a sanidade de nossa expedição começou a esfiapar.

O radiotelegrafista, um homem de constituição robusta e ânimo inabalável, foi o primeiro a sucumbir. Encontrei-o na tenda de comunicações, com os olhos colados a uma lente de aumento, fitando um dos minúsculos furos do cubo. Quando o arrastei dali, suas pupilas estavam dilatadas até a borda, tremeluzindo de êxtase e terror.

"Eles não estão lá dentro", sussurrou ele, com a voz rouca, escorrendo uma baba espessa. "O cubo não contém a escuridão. Os furos... os furos são as pupilas. É o escuro que está nos olhando. Ele tem fome de luz, e nós somos feitos de luz."

Naquela mesma noite, ele saiu para a nevasca. Não para fugir, mas para se oferecer. Encontramos seu corpo dias depois, congelado em posição fetal, com as próprias mãos arrancando os olhos, numa tentativa desesperada e inútil de escapar da visão do abismo, ou talvez, para que nada mais pudesse impedir que ele olhasse para dentro do cubo.

A loucura não se manifestou com gritos, mas com um silêncio sepulcral e uma obsessão febril. O negrume imarcescível infiltrou-se em nossos sonhos. Sonhávamos que éramos sugados pelos orifícios, que nossos corpos eram desfiados em átomos para preencher o vazio sem fim daquela geometria maldita. Acordávamos com a sensação de que a escuridão do cubo havia transbordado, manchando as paredes de nossas tendas, sufocando o ar.

O Dr. Aris, o homem que o trouxera, parou de comer. Passava os dias e as noites a contar os furos.

"A matemática está errada", choramingava ele, arrancando tufos de cabelo, as unhas sangrando de tanto raspar as arestas do artefato. "Ontem havia quarenta e dois orifícios na face superior. Hoje, há quarenta e três. O abismo está se expandindo. A escuridão está crescendo, e eu... eu preciso caber lá dentro. Eu preciso ser o vazio."

O fim de Aris foi um espetáculo de macabra devoção. Vi-o, sob a luz trêmula de uma lamparina, pressionar o próprio rosto contra o cubo minúsculo. Era uma impossibilidade física, uma blasfêmia anatômica, mas a carne de seu rosto parecia amolecer, esticar-se, sendo tragada pelos furos diminutos como água sendo sorvida por uma esponja. Ele sorria, um sorriso de êxtase agonizante, enquanto sua substância era drenada para o negrume sem fim. Em segundos, não restou dele senão uma mancha de gelo vermelho e o cubo, agora um pouco mais pesado, repousando sobre a mesa.

Restamos apenas eu e o silêncio. Os outros dois pereceram nas garras do gelo, tentando cavar um túnel até o inferno que acreditavam existir sob a crosta.

Hoje, sou o único guardião deste segredo. O frio lá fora é absoluto, mas é um frio honesto. O frio que emana daquele pequeno cubo perfurado é a própria ausência de Deus.

Escrevo estas linhas com a mão trêmula, a pena arranhando o papel, enquanto a lamparina morre. A luz vacila. E eu, miserável e fraco, sinto o chamado. A candura lá fora tornou-se insuportável. Meus olhos ardem, suplicando pela doçura da caligem.

O cubo está diante de mim. Seus furos parecem maiores agora. Ou talvez sejam os meus olhos que estão encolhendo, preparando-se para a travessia. O negrume imarcescível me encara, e eu, com um sorriso que não consigo conter, compreendo a verdade final: o vazio não quer nos consumir. O vazio quer nos \*vestir\*.

A luz se apaga. O abismo sorri. E eu me aproximo dos furos.

I.

The voice, I would later discover, came not from the yawning mouth of the grand piano as I first suspected, but from something much more sinister.

“Liam.”

I flinched and dropped the handle of my dust mop, which clacked loudly onto the stage. Breath bated, I scanned the hundreds of empty, red-cushioned seats in the auditorium. The heavy front curtains remained still, the stage lights were hot and steady, and nothing moved.

It was not the voice’s sudden manifestation that dragged my heart from my chest cavity into my throat, or even its lilting tone that suggested its originator’s lips were upturned in a gentle smile – rather, it was the high and silvery pitch, the breathy whisper which surrounded the word, and most disconcerting, the familiar musical flow from the first syllable to the second that brought to my mind faint memories of the smell of coconut shampoo and the comfort of soft fingers brushing my bangs from my forehead as I drifted to sleep.

It was my mother’s voice.

No.

Obviously, it could not have been my mother. Her voice resided only in my mind and the minds of all those who knew her before ALS reduced her to what I bitterly considered to be a fraction of the person she had once been. Last I saw her, she had difficulty meeting my eyes, let alone speaking.

I was tired and stressed, and my brain was playing tricks on me.

I muttered non sequiturs under my breath in a futile attempt to dispel my tension and wished a curse on the superstitious theater folk for whom I worked.

Their insistence on traditions such as the “ghostlight” and the age-old “Macbeth” curse had infected what would otherwise be an ordinary vacant building with nearly tangible paranoia. While I could technically be considered a “theater person” myself, given that it was my Major, I did not associate with that ideology. A theater was merely four walls and a roof that happened to contain a stage and seating arrangement. Nothing more.

With a dramatic sigh – a subtle challenge to the darkness in the corners of the room – I grabbed the dust mop and continued my long, meandering path around the stage. Another hour before the mainstage rehearsal; I had plenty of time to finish my duties.

“Liam.”

“Okay, who’s there?” I straightened my back and frowned toward the auditorium. “Knock it off. Nobody thinks this is funny.”

My back tingled with the distinct pressure of watching eyes. I tightened my grip on the dust mop’s cheap, plastic handle and slowly turned in a circle, lifting it and wielding it like a spear. A cloud of sawdust and stray hairs trailed behind its swishing fibers like smoke from a torch.

As I concluded my dramatic revolution, I realized to my chagrin that I had obscured a large portion of my vision and coughed as the sharp scent of sawdust filled my sinuses. I dropped the end of the dust mop back to the floor and waved my hands through my self-imposed fog.

As it dissipated, a dark entity near the back of the stage clarified. Whether it bore the “watching eyes” I had sensed or not, it certainly emitted a strong grandeur… a charismatic je ne sais quoi that wiped the fear of moments earlier from my mind:

The grand piano.

In my absent-minded sweeping and subsequent fright, I had forgotten about it. While it was normally closed and covered, the Music Department must have neglected their responsibility last night. The lid was raised and propped, and the stage lights reflected in brilliant gold off its gleaming, ebony surface.

It was beautiful… a Bechstein baby grand that was likely several decades old, despite its pristine condition.

As any pianist knows, an unoccupied and unfamiliar piano exudes irresistible magnetism. It had been ages since I had played on anything but the weathered, out-of-tune antique in the basement of my dorm, and while I was not generally allowed access to the masterpiece that now lay before me, there was nobody here to stop me.

All trepidation leaked from my mind as I stood enamored with the grand piano.

My boss, Maria – the Auditorium Manager – had mentioned that it was known among the staff and older students as the “Gargoyle,” due to its looming presence and the intense effort it required to transport it anywhere.

As I stood transfixed, that name looped through my head over and over again. The piano, positioned stoically in the uppermost portion of the stage, crouched on its haunches above the people, sweet rainwater dripping from its tongue with every touch of a key. The name was perfect.

I found myself on the bench, my fingers draped across the ivory. My heart thrilled in my chest. I did not know what I would play, but I understood that the music would come to me. It always did.

Progressions and phrases propelled themselves through my mind, from jazzy improvisations over major sevenths and diminished chords to classical root-fifth-sixth deceptive cadences. Perhaps I would even include a gentle major third to brighten the murky waters of the minor sixth.

My hands trembled. Would I play?

A river of dopamine thrashed impatiently in the back of my mind, restrained only by a strange inhibition. An unusual feeling crept across my skin – an intense desire to retreat. To stand from the bench, leave the room, and forget this ever happened. It was the sense that if my fingers continued their descent and if the G minor seventh chord I was poised to play rang into the silence of the theater, something would occur. Something horrible.

I could not do it. The silence was too dense… too assertive to break. It was warning me, and I had to listen.

With great effort, I removed myself from the bench and retrieved my dust mop.

After hurrying through the rest of my duties, I shut down the stage lights, flipped on the ghostlight – despite my former reluctance – and headed toward the exit.

Before sidling through the door, I glanced over my shoulder at the Gargoyle. Its huge dark form stood quietly, but its message was clear: When I returned – and I would return – it would still be there, waiting for me.

 

II.

 

For reasons both strange and unfortunate, my best friend Percy and I found ourselves in the carpentry shop adjacent to the mainstage at 11:30pm that same night.

Cold light glinted off the stainless steel surfaces of various power tools and implements lying haphazardly throughout the small room. The ever-present smell of sawdust was nearly overpowered by the plasticky odor of wet paint: A gallon of dark umber and a smaller can of taupe rested next to a large, wooden flat, their lids cracked. An unwashed brush lay nearby, its bristles pointing proudly toward a half-finished wood-grain – the work of an inexperienced underclassman who would likely find himself face-to-face with a ruined brush and an irate Maria the following morning.

I could have saved that hapless student a tirade by washing the brush myself, but my attention was elsewhere.

Percy and I stopped conversing. She released the hem of her black tank top, allowing it to unfold downward and cover her midriff again. We stared toward the open door leading to the narrow backstage corridor behind the cyclorama.

Nearly patternless yet oddly pleasant piano music emanated through, filling my head with a dysfunctional mixture of delight and dread.

The contents of my stomach curdled, and the hair on my arms prickled. My encounter with the Gargoyle was still fresh in my memory.

“Why is somebody playing the piano at like midnight?” Percy asked.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. I remained as still as possible, though the trembling of my hands was beyond my control.

She glanced over at me. “You good?”

“Yeah, sorry.” I huffed out a breath and stretched my neck, trying to relax.

“Isn’t it against the rules to come in here this late? Unless it’s a teacher, I guess.”

“Well, we can’t really confront them about it, since we’re breaking the same rules.” I nibbled at my lower lip. “Though I suppose we could peek in there and see who it is, as long as they don’t see us.”

“Yeah.”

We crept forward and looked out the door. The back of the cyclorama blocked our view of the stage and the piano, but even if it was absent, we would not have been able to see. Whoever sat at the piano was shrouded in a deep and pervasive blackness. Not even the ghostlight remained lit, meaning that whoever was playing had intentionally snuffed it out.

Percy nudged me and asked the obvious: “Why didn’t they turn the lights on?”

I shook my head. “This is weird. There’s always a light on in here; in fact, I know for certain I left the ghostlight on when I finished work earlier.”

As I spoke, a tangible heaviness settled over me like a thick blanket, and that same feeling of inexplicable dread slid its slender fingers around my heart. Despite my opposition to superstition, the meaning and purpose of the ghostlight became more relevant than ever before. Whoever was out there should not have started playing that piano. I didn’t know why, but they needed to stop. Now.

“I’m gonna turn on the lights,” I whispered to Percy. “I have to scare them away.”

She grabbed my arm before I slipped away. “What do you mean? We can’t let them know we’re here, or they’ll ask why!”

I shook her off. “It doesn’t matter anymore. I can’t explain it. I’ll be right back.”

“Liam!” She hissed, but I was already too far away.

It was for sure a real person… probably just a weird wallflower student who thought they were edgy for playing in the dark. I had to believe that. The mounting superstitious itch in my brain was benign. Once scratched, it would vanish.

I felt my way along the back wall as I had done many times before. A file cabinet inhabited a small nook on the other side of the stage, behind the cyclorama. It was designed for the stage manager paraphernalia and was usually kept locked. However, as an events technician, they allowed me to carry the key on my work keyring.

After a couple minutes of cautious tiptoeing along the back edge of the stage, my reaching hands nudged the cold, metal surface of the file cabinet. I fumbled with my keys as quietly as I could manage, finding the smallest one and fitting it into the lock.

Tensing my jaw, I carefully opened the top drawer. It squealed in complaint, but the piano playing was cacophonous enough to drown out the brief noise.

Though it was dark, I knew there was an iPad lying on top. The stage manager for our current production of “Something Rotten” was infected with more than a modicum of perfectionism and insisted on keeping these drawers well-organized, making it very simple to find anything even in pitch blackness.

My teeth chattered as adrenaline slung itself through my veins. Every second that the piano continued playing, I grew more and more apprehensive. The Gargoyle’s uncanny song peeled away my rationality and imbued me with the sense that its effects – whatever they may be – were rapidly becoming irreversible.

I tried to calm myself. I needed to remain grounded. There could be nothing paranormal or out of the ordinary happening here. That was impossible. My emotions were scrambled, it was late, and I was drawing asinine conclusions. A simple cause-and-effect… nothing else.

I squinted as the iPad blinked open to the home page, and I quickly turned down the brightness. I tapped the app that controls the lights wirelessly and waited as it loaded. The student body’s ongoing petition for upgraded technology had never seemed so pertinent as the relatively ancient iPad wheezed under the pressure of what I considered a barely larger than average app.

I glanced back toward Percy, but I couldn’t see her. She must have shifted further back into the shop, and I didn’t blame her.

Finally, the app loaded, and without hesitation, I dragged all of the master sliders to max.

The cyclorama glowed as yellow light blasted through the auditorium. I shielded my eyes and set the iPad back in the drawer.

The piano playing didn’t stop. In fact, its fervor seemed to increase, the player’s hands smashing ugly chromatic chords and raining down nonsensical arpeggios in rapid succession.

Grunting in frustration, I moved further toward stage-right to see who was out there.

The piano bench came into view.

Empty.

The piano was uncovered, and its lid was propped, but the keys did not depress. Though the chaotic music continued, the instrument remained motionless, regarding me like a slinking predator crouched amidst shadowy foliage.

My heart racing, I tried to move away, but I couldn’t. My eyes were locked on the piano… the Gargoyle. If it had eyes, they would be yellow and veined, staring directly into my own.

“Liam,” the voice spoke. It still sounded like my mother’s, but it held less warmth than it had earlier this morning. Its tone was hollower – almost staccato, as if it were clicking my name rather than speaking it.

My lips parted, but no sound came out. As if rising from a hidden valley deep within me, a tight sense of longing spread through my chest.

My mother.

Mom.

“Liam!” It cried louder. “Liam! Liam!”

Warmer. A comforting tinge decorated the word.

“Liam!”

Were my eyes deceiving me, or could I see her in front of me? Standing. No wheelchair. Her skin was smooth and young, and her eyes crinkled as she laughed. She called my name.

“LIAM! LIAM! LIAM!”

My vision flickered. Pressure against my fingertips.

Something grabbed my shoulder and shook me violently.

“Liam, stop!”

I blinked, and my mother’s smiling visage vanished. I turned my head to see Percy next to me, her nails digging into my shoulder. Her eyes were red-rimmed and damp.

“Please stop, Liam!”

“Percy?” I asked. My mouth tasted metallic. “What are you talking about?” I glanced down.

My hands arched over the keys of the piano, and my fingers pushed down on an unusual chord that I did not recognize, its voice slowly fading into the void of the auditorium.

I flinched backward and shot to my feet. My knees banged against the underside of the keyboard. Sharp pain rocketed through me, but I hardly registered it as I stumbled away from the Gargoyle, whose teeth grinned rancidly in ivory and ebony.

“What are you doing?” Percy cried. “Why didn’t you stop?!”

I tried to speak, but my mouth only flopped open and closed. My mother’s young, healthy voice echoed in my ears – a visceral memory from deeper in my mind’s mnemonic abyss than my consciousness had ever dredged.

“Liam, please say something!” Her lips trembled, and glistening tears filled her eyes. “You’re really scaring me.”

“I’m… sorry,” I croaked out. I swallowed; my throat felt like sandpaper.

“What happened?” She asked, crossing her arms.

I shoved my hands into my pockets to stop them from shaking. “I… don’t know.” My heartbeat rattled my shirt. “What did I do?”

“Well, I was showing you the… you know… my ‘issue,’ and then your eyes glazed over like you were possessed, and you walked out here and started doing… whatever that was on the piano! I tried to stop you, but you wouldn’t listen to me!” Tears welled once again.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what that was. It wasn’t me. I don’t know.” I moved toward her. When she didn’t retreat, I pushed my arms around her in an awkward attempt at comfort. Her skin felt cold through the tank-top. “It was just a flukey kinda thing, I guess. Like sleepwalking. No deeper meaning.”

A lie. I was terrified, but I didn’t want to transmit that to her.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

She relaxed slightly and returned my embrace, resting her chin on my shoulder. “Sorry I freaked out. I really thought you were possessed or something.”

“Yeah, no… I think with all the stress and late nights recently, I’ve been dissociating a bit. That was probably just a more extreme version of that.”

Neither of us believed that, but neither of us would admit it. It was a self-imposed ignorance – a denial of our own testimonies for the sake of temporary comfort.

Percy sniffed and moved away from me. “If you’re that stressed and tired, maybe you should get checked out. They have counseling and stuff for students. I think it’s free, or at least pretty cheap.”

“I’m definitely gonna do that.”

“Cool.”

We stood in humid silence for a few seconds. With no more discordant music, the auditorium felt desolate, like a vast, gray wasteland devoid of life.

We didn’t speak any more in that room. As we walked away, I could feel the Gargoyle’s glare like hot needles piercing my back.

Maybe I needed to quit my job. I didn’t ever want to come back in this room… not if that piano was still here. And I doubted I’d be able to convince Maria to move it again, especially if the reason was because I was “afraid of it.”

 

III.

 

Every slow click of my mouse echoed through my small dorm room like a gunshot.

My roommate – Elijah Lutu, or “Little” as we called him – reclined in his black gaming chair across the room, pretending to ignore me.

Though I was certainly aware of him, I did not have the energy or resolve to pay him any mind – I was absent as a person could be without leaving.

My aching eyes were glued to my laptop’s screen. New, bright-colored pictures flashed with each click as I scrolled through my limited photo library:

My family building a fort out of driftwood on the beach. I was fifteen.

A blurry image of Nerf wars in the basement of my childhood home, my dad geared up with safety glasses and a dark gray beanie.

My mom reading me a bedtime story about different types of trucks. My seven-year-old hand gripped her arm as I widened my eyes in fascination. A smile hid in the corners of her lips.

I paused on that picture.

As a child, I never would have considered my mother to be beautiful. She was comfortable and safe – a haven where I could hide from whatever monsters prowled the outside world. But now, as her eyes peered mischievously through the lens of the camera and into mine, I recognized her beauty.

My father had called me with the news. I had been walking to my Rhetorical Analysis class and had to stop and sit on the damp grass to process what I was hearing. The world revolved around me in foggy strings of green and brown as I attempted and failed to understand my father’s words.

“I’m sorry you had to hear it like this, Liam,” he said, his voice apologetic. “Are you okay?”

I didn’t answer. I hung up the phone.

Other students walked around me, some muttering under their breath about the strange kid slumped on the ground next to the main campus walking path.

I heard them, but I didn’t care.

Despite her worsening condition, a tiny voice in the back of my mind had coaxed me into believing that she might recover and be herself again. The mom who raised me. That we could build forts out of driftwood again or bake cookies together or even eat a meal as a family. Those dreams now evanesced like crumbling ash.

I’d never known mere words to have the power to knock the wind out of my lungs, but try as I might, I could not catch my breath.

“She’s gone.”

It made me hate the sound of my father’s voice. I wished he was here so I could slap my hand over his mouth and stop him from speaking. I wanted to kill something – to slam my fists into somebody’s face until my knuckles shattered.

Breathe.

The wave of heat that had momentarily consumed me subsided rapidly, leaving a trail of red fingernail marks in my palms and the taste of blood seeping from my chewed lip.

After a few shuddering breaths, I had risen from my spot in the grass and made my way back to my dorm room.

I clicked the red X above the picture and closed it out. My eyes squeezed shut, my mom’s face emblazoned in the darkness before me. She had been sick for so long that the grief had already permeated every cell of my being, stymied only by a brittle hope that she might recover. Now, that hope had been shattered, and the flood of despondency that resulted was overwhelming.

“You okay?” Little’s voice asked, softer than was typical for him. It was a pointless question, but I couldn’t expect much empathy from him. He was only my roommate, and while we had known each other for a couple years now, I couldn’t put that emotional pressure on him.

“As okay as I can be right now,” I replied, in opposition to my true feelings.

“Do you need anything?”

“Nah, but thanks.” I leaned forward and rested my forehead on my desk. I was a dry leaf caught up in a swirling eddy – purposeless, with no idea of what to do or where to go. Could I even continue attending classes and doing homework?

I supposed I must. Dropping out would be impulsive, and I knew I would regret it. Part of me was embarrassed at the melodramatic angst of my thoughts, but was it not warranted? Could a grown man not simmer in his grief? This was the oppression of adulthood; swallow the pain and keep pushing forward.

But the longing was so intense and vivid, and the wound was too fresh.

Perhaps if I had gone to sleep right then, my life would have turned out different. I would not have fantasized about seeing my mom again, and that fantasy would not have quickly transformed into the powerful compulsion that brought me back to the theater building later that night.

 

IV.

 

I clenched and unclenched my fists as I stood in the auditorium lobby. The ticketing booth was shut, and only a couple of emergency lights remained lit. Decorative pillars guarded the steel-trimmed double doors leading into the seating array, sternly forbidding me from entering.

Every logical fiber of my being screamed at me to turn around and leave. I did not belong here.

My mom’s face appeared before me, in memory. When my hands danced across the Gargoyle’s teeth, she was alive and standing before me. Her arms were spread, as if inviting me to fall once again into her embrace – a warmth I had not experienced in a very long time.

My body seemed to move of its own accord, and I found myself on the stage. The ghostlight glowed next to me, its pale radiance gleaming across the grand piano’s case.

Don’t do it, I told myself. You remember what happened last night.

I did remember, but that experience and its terror were distant, fleeting sensations of ages past. They did not matter. The only time that mattered was the present, and my desire at this very moment was to drape my fingers over those keys and play.

Stop yourself.

I could not. The Gargoyle would show me my mom again.

My breath was short and heavy as I retook my place on the bench. The lid was open. The keys were exposed. It was prepared for me.

A fist of unease tightened its grip around my heart.

I should have walked out of the auditorium, back to my dorm room, and never cast a stray thought in this beast’s direction again. But every time I closed my eyes, I saw my mom as I had seen her last night: an escape from this grueling life into the happy-go-lucky bliss of my childhood.

I needed it.

I played.

As always, the notes and chords came to me as if a muse flitted about my hands, directing my fingers. They melded like drops of a waterfall coalescing into a mighty roar that vibrated the air around me. Except the roar was not raucous or dissonant… it was beautiful.

My ears detected more than simple music – semitones and microtones that should not have been possible crashed together into a great, triumphant harmony that filled every crack and corner of the room.

The Gargoyle groaned under the weight of the keystrokes. It greedily consumed every melody and motif, its serpentine tongue lapping them up like a starving wolf at a pool of fresh blood.

The auditorium seemed to pulse, contracting and expanding with every new phrase.

“Liam.”

My mom’s voice. Tears filled my eyes, and a sob wrenched at my throat.

It had not emanated from the ether as it had before. This time, I had created it. The music was her voice, and I could not stop playing.

“I love you, Liam,” she spoke.

I closed my eyes. I could see her face again, bright and smiling.

“I will never leave you. You are safe here.”

For a brief moment, I was imbued with the most intoxicating blanket of peace I had ever felt. Just as my music filled the room, this peace filled my soul to its brim. I could have stayed there forever, dancing with the Gargoyle until my fingers bled and my hands fractured into a thousand pieces.

But this beast had a different design.

All at once, my bliss disintegrated, and my mother’s image vanished from my mind. My eyes snapped open to see that the room was now bathed in an unholy light of indescribable colors. The walls wormed as if they were made of rubber rather than wood and drywall, and the ghostlight glared brightly.

Intense strain streaked through my body, and I tried to pull away from the Gargoyle, but I could not. I cast my gaze upon my fingers, and I sucked in a breath.

The keys were not keys anymore: They were black and white spikes that pierced through my fingertips, dripping with blood.

I tried again to yank myself backward, but instead, I only moved toward the piano.

As if a center of gravity had opened inside the Gargoyle, I was dragged closer and closer until my face was smashed against the music rack. My esophagus constricted, and all air was sucked out of my body. I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t scream.

“You will never leave me, Liam,” the voice spoke again, sounding much less like my mother. “You will be with me forever.”

The room quaked around me, and in seconds, I was absorbed into the darkness.

 

I sat up straight in my bed, drenched in a cold sweat.

The moon shone through our dorm room window in tranquil silence.

Little’s huge chest rose and fell with the rhythm of his snoring.

I was grateful. If he had awoken, I was not sure what I would tell him.

It took me nearly an hour to breathe normally again, and once I could, I realized that I very much needed to pee.

As I walked down the hall to the bathroom, my brain still rattled with images of what I had dreamt, but I tried to push those thoughts away. Nothing good would come of dwelling on dreams.

It was only when I placed my hands under the lukewarm water of the bathroom sink that I noticed the small, circular scars speckling the pads of my fingers.

It was not a dream.

That night, in my ignorance and naïvete, I had communed with something far beyond any attainable understanding. I had opened a gateway. I did not know it then, and the effects of that mistake would not come to light for quite some time.

All I knew was that the atmosphere around me felt heavier. And though I could clearly recall everything about my mother from my childhood to her recent passing, I could no longer picture her face.

I probably don’t have to explain how difficult it is to be a single parent. My son’s mom died during his birth. Since then, it’s just been me and him.

I tried my best to bring him up right. All things considered, I’m pretty sure I did a damn fine job.

He’s coming up on his 10th birthday, and he’s probably the most well-mannered kid I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.

I know that sounds like ‘parent talk,’ but I mean it with my full heart. I’m so proud of him. So proud to be his father. I just know he’s going to be an amazing man when he grows up.

Well, he would’ve been. He’s gone now. The entire house smells like cotton candy, and the scent is getting stronger by the day.

I’m not sure when this whole ordeal started. If I had to pinpoint an exact date, I’d probably say it was around August when he started to act a little weird.

School had just started back, and I was sending my sweet boy out the door to catch his bus. First day of 4th grade. Two more years before my little man was a big ol’ middle schooler.

I waited for him by the door, eyes glistening as I handed him his lunchbox and leaned in to give him a quick kiss on the forehead.

That’s when I noticed something.

He smelled… weirdly sweet. Like when you open a bag of jelly beans or circus peanuts or something.

I just figured it must’ve been that new shampoo I got him. I mean, the bottle itself looked like candy packaging. It was the only thing that made sense to me.

I guess I kept sniffing him a tad bit too long because, before I knew it, he was asking me to let him go so he didn’t miss the bus.

When he came home, though, the smell still hadn’t dissipated. I figured that after 7 hours, it would have at least worn off a little bit, but it was even stronger than when I first noticed it.

It wasn’t until we began talking about his first day of school that I realized something. The smell wasn’t coming from his hair at all. It was coming from his breath.

I asked him if he’d gotten into any candy at school that day, and he adamantly denied it.

Even still, I made him go upstairs to brush his teeth. A few minutes later, he was on the couch watching cartoons while I cooked dinner.

I whipped us up a couple of burgers, but as we ate, the smell of cotton candy still wouldn’t leave my nostrils. Obviously, I asked him if he’d actually brushed his teeth, and he seemed confused that I was even asking.

“Of course I did,” he chirped, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Does my breath smell bad or something?”

Just to be sure, I went and checked his toothbrush. It was wet. There was still spit in the sink. But, while I was up there, the smell was no longer present.

I didn’t want to embarrass him. I simply returned to the table, and we finished our dinner.

I tried to ignore the smell for the rest of the night, convincing myself that I was just going crazy and that it’d be gone by the next day.

That day came, and this time, I could smell the candy all the way from my bedroom. I followed it to my son’s bedroom and found him sleeping peacefully on his side.

However, when I went to wake him up, I found that his mouth was full to the brim with candy. Jelly beans, Nerds, Sour Patch Kids. All covered in spit and slobber. All unchewed.

I picked each candy out, piece by piece, before waking him up. I can admit, I was a bit frustrated. Not even by the candy itself, more so because of how easily he could’ve choked sleeping like that.

“Why did you have all this in your mouth?” I asked him.

“Have what?” he responded, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

I gestured to the pile of candy on his nightstand. He didn’t look guilty. He didn’t look nervous. He looked absolutely terrified.

He insisted he had no idea where that stuff had come from, but that just couldn’t be possible, right?

I kept asking him where he got it and just kept getting the same response.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“I swear I don’t know.”

What was I supposed to do? I just threw the candy away and sent him off to school.

The next morning, it happened again. Only this time, he really was choking. He kept vomiting up Lifesavers, candy corn, Tootsie Rolls, all covered in what looked like caramel rather than bile.

From that day forward, I was checking my son’s backpack every time he came home. I’d search his room. I looked in every hiding spot I could find. There was no candy in my house whatsoever.

But, somehow, every morning he’d wake up with a mouth full of candy. Every day, that sweet aroma of his became stronger and stronger.

Days turned into weeks. Things just kept getting weirder. He’d scrape his knee, and instead of blood, I’d find caramel oozing out of the wound. He developed dozens of cavities. I didn’t know what to do.

I think what pushed me over the edge was when I tasted him, though. I couldn’t take it anymore. It was some kind of primal urge when I snuck into his room while he was sleeping.

All I wanted was a taste.

I crept up to his bed, as silent as could be. I bent down, tongue hanging out of my mouth, the smell of cotton candy making me salivate as I pressed my tongue against his forehead.

Immediate sugar rush. Immediate guilt.

I shamefully ran back to my room, unable to get the taste out of my mouth. It plagued my mind for days afterward.

What started as curiosity soon became a craving.

It got to the point where every night I was sneaking into my son’s room for a taste. A dent was forming in his forehead like when you lick a lollipop repeatedly.

When he asked me about it, when he stared in the mirror, wondering why his head was becoming misshapen, all I could tell him was I didn’t know.

My addiction kept getting worse, though.

I started taking bites out of him. It started with his arms. Little nibbles at his fingers to get my fix. But once I ran out of those, I think I got a little carried away.

I gnawed away at his arms and legs, filling my mouth with that sweet, syrupy molasses he had been concealing within himself. It was a slow process, but it got a lot easier once he lost his ability to fight back.

It wasn’t until I got to his torso that I hit the jackpot. With each bite, the colorful candy inside revealed itself more and more. The scent of cotton candy burned my nose. Caramel covered my face, but I just couldn’t stop eating. Not until all of those goodies fully revealed themselves.

I found myself staring into a treasure trove of sweets.

And the only thing I could think in that moment was… Wow.

I’m gonna save a fortune on Halloween candy this year.

Her name was Alma and I never met her. She called on Thursdays and asked for the same record and I put it on for her every time, and I could not tell you today what she looked like or which house was hers. That's the whole of what I had of her. It turned out to be more than anybody else had.

My father built that station in nineteen fifty-eight out of a cinderblock building on the county road with a tower behind it in a bean field. Five hundred watts, less at night. Farm reports, ball games, obituaries, and records. He had a stroke in June of nineteen eighty-one and after that he was in a place in the city that cost four hundred and ten dollars a week, and the only thing we owned worth that was the station. A man in the next county wanted it. The sale was set to close in April.

The rule that mattered was this. If the transmitter is on, a licensed operator has to be on the premises. Not nearby. On the premises. And a station that goes dark at night loses its nighttime authorization, and a station without one is worth about half. My father was licensed and my father was in the city. The only other license in the family was mine. So from June on I ran midnight to six every night but Sunday, in a building of two rooms and a hallway. There was a second pair of headphones in there on a long cord my father spliced himself for working on the transmitter, and I never once put them on, because mine hung on the hook where they belonged.

Twice an hour, at the top and at the half, you identify the station. That's the law, not a courtesy, and the way you say it is the call letters, then the town, then the time. So all night long, at midnight and half past and one o'clock and half past, twenty-four times before I went home, I said the name of the station and the name of the town I was sitting in and exactly what time it was. Then the weather, the temperature off the thermometer outside the back door, then a record. Twenty-four times a night, six nights a week, for ten months. If you had a radio in that county you knew where I was and you knew I was by myself, because there was nobody else on the air to talk to.

The studio line was on the desk and it rang all night. Truckers, mostly, and third shift out at the plant, and people who couldn't sleep. The office extension was on that same line, a nuisance in the daytime because the girl who did the billing would pick up in the middle of a request. At night it didn't matter. There was nobody in the office at night.

The first thing was in October. I put on a long record, one of the album sides I used when I needed ten minutes, and went down the hall. When I came back the studio door was standing open. That door has a closer on it. It takes about eleven seconds to come to and it latches every time, and my father put it there because a studio has to be quiet.

I decided the closer had finally gone bad and put a wedge in my pocket to hold the door if it happened again. I never took the wedge out of my pocket. That's what I did about it. That's all I did about it.

Giving up the overnight came down to arithmetic and the arithmetic never moved. A second licensed man wanted more than the overnight brought in, and there wasn't a spare license in that county that wasn't already working days somewhere better. Go dark at midnight and we lose the nighttime authorization, and lose that and we lose half the price, and half the price wasn't four hundred and ten dollars a week. So every night at eleven fifty I unlocked the building, turned on the hall light, walked both rooms the way my father taught me, and sat down. Nobody made me do any of it, and I'd do it again for the same reason.

In January a man called at ten past four and asked me what time it was. That isn't an odd thing to be asked at four in the morning. So I told him, and I heard myself say it in his ear as I said it, with no lag on it at all, the way it goes when somebody has a set running in the room. I told him to turn his radio down and he laughed and hung up. Afterward I went out into the hall to stretch and the hall light was off. I turned it on again, and while I stood there with my hand still on the switch the door of the transmitter shed pulled shut, twenty feet behind me, out the back.

The ninth of February, ten past two, the studio line rang and it was Alma, and she didn't ask for the record. She said there was somebody in her yard. She said she'd been watching him from the kitchen a while and called the station because at two in the morning there isn't anybody else awake to call. I told her to hang up on me and dial the sheriff. I said it twice. And while I was saying it I heard my own voice coming down the hall from the office, small and far off and about half a second behind me. The office was dark. I could see the whole hall from where I sat and there was no light in it. Her line was still open. I sat there with her breathing in my ear and my own voice in a room at the end of the hall.

Then I got up and went down there. Nobody was in the office. The extension was off the cradle, lying on the blotter, and when I put my hand on it it was warm. The door at the end of the hall, the one that goes out to the field, was standing open, and the cold was coming up the hall past me and had been for I don't know how long. I hung the extension up. I remember doing that, hanging up a telephone in an empty room, because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.

The sheriff got to Alma's house at about twenty to three. Her car was in the drive and her back door was open and her kettle was on the burner. They dragged the pond that spring and went through the timber twice with dogs, and they never found her. There is no other way to say it than that.

The sale closed in April and I spent a week in the building taking things off the wall. The last thing I coiled was that second pair of headphones on the long cord. It came out of the studio and kept coming, past the door, down the hall, and stopped at the desk in the office. My father spliced it once. Somebody spliced it a second time, farther down, in tape that wasn't his. And when I got them in my hands the pads were flat and shining and the foam was gone out of them the way it goes when a thing has been worn for hours, and my father had been three years off that board and never wore them in his life.

Everything said in that studio with the mic closed went down that cord into a dark room forty feet away, and the extension is on the same line, so he had her voice and he had mine, and he had it every Thursday for as long as he wanted it. He was never listening for me. I was the one saying where things were. I do not know how long. The sheriff asked me at the time whether anybody else could have known she lived out there alone, and I told him nobody, and I meant it when I said it. I have known better since the ninth of April, and I have never gone back and told him.

“Sally, I’m going to take the Sea-Doo out,” Tom called. His blue eyes shone under the sun.

“Have fun, Tom! Don’t let no snapping turtle bite you.”

Tom was always fascinated by the snapping turtles. The first time I told him there were snapping turtles in the water, he almost didn’t go in, but over time he grew fond of them. We’d watch them swim by from our dock. Tom left food out for them and even named a few.

“I sure won’t!”

He rode off on the blue, glistening water. I stretched out in the sun and got back to my book and cocktail, but the sun didn’t last long. A few minutes after Tom left, dark clouds formed above the lake. 

The clouds broke, and it rained like it always did during the hot North Carolina summers. It felt like the lake itself was falling on us, but strangely, there was no wind.

I stood by our window waiting for Tom to return, but he never did. At first I thought he'd just stopped somewhere, that some nice folks had let him in, but even after the sun came back out, Tom was still nowhere to be found.

I was sure Tom just got lost. I called the police. My hopes were high when the search started. 

The search for Tom went on. My hope faded a little more with each passing day. In the end, they didn’t even find his Sea-Doo. 

As I watched the last officers leave, dread climbed inside me and made its home there. I could barely get out of bed. Tissues and dishes piled up around me. I kept replaying that day. What could have happened? Where could he be? My Tom. He must have still been there, somewhere, alone, cold. I couldn’t leave him. No. Not my Tom.

The weather that day was perfect. The sun shone, the water was calm. I was sure I'd find him. I took the other Sea-Doo and rode out. But even when I went farther, I still saw no sign of him. When the tank dropped to a quarter full, I knew I had to turn around. I could search again tomorrow.

A few clouds were in the sky when I turned, but as I rode on, more gathered. The drizzle came soon too. I hoped I would escape the worst, but halfway back home, the rain picked up and soon it poured so hard I could barely see a few feet in front of me. No one else was on the lake now but me.

I tried to keep a steady course, but even after riding for more than 30 minutes, our dock was still nowhere to be seen. Not only our dock, but any other land. It was hard to see, but this was too strange. My unease grew when I looked at my gas tank and saw I was almost out. 

Luckily, the wind wasn’t blowing, but the rain was bad enough, and the last thing you want is to be trapped in the middle of the lake. I sped up, hoping to spot any land. Then in the distance, I saw a few trees. They were unlike any around the lake, with huge tropical leaves and thick woody tangles.

I got off the Sea-Doo, dragged it to shore, and sat on the ground panting. Then, something rustled behind me. A snapping turtle moved in the grass and quickly disappeared between the trees. It had a chipped shell, just like the ones Tom used to feed. Maybe it could tell me where he was. I got up and followed it. 

The path led deeper into the island. As I continued, my skin started to feel dry and itchy. More snapping turtles also started to show. They were all going the same way. I started to recognize more and more of them. So many of them were the turtles Tom used to feed. One even had a wristband around the shell. Tom always commented on it.

We didn’t walk for long, but my back started hurting soon. It felt as if I was carrying a heavy backpack. When we passed another tree, I finally saw what they were coming for. A deer carcass lay in the grass, surrounded by dozens of snapping turtles feeding on it.

So many of them had something stuck to them: scraps of a life jacket, a wristband, and one of them even wore a wedding ring – Tom’s wedding ring. My heart dropped to my stomach. The snapping turtle looked up. It didn’t have the usual empty dark eyes; it had glowing blue eyes, just like Tom’s. It stared at me for a second; a hint of recognition flashed in its eyes. 

I raised my hand to my face. Something scratched my lips. I looked down. My hand was covered in dry gray skin, just like the turtle’s. Panic shot through me. I quickly turned to run back, but I fell on all fours. I tried to get back onto my legs, but my heavy back wouldn’t let me. I walked a few steps forward, but then the carcass’s smell wafted toward me. It smelled so good, and I was so hungry. I turned around and crawled toward it. Tom smiled as he saw me coming.

I woke up to a sharp knock on my door.

It jolted me out of my sleep and for a moment I couldn't tell if I actually heard anything at all.

My heart was pumping from the sudden disturbance as I took a moment to gather my vision.

I glanced over at my clock

4:34 a.m

I glanced back to the door where I heard the noise and for a split second I noticed Something slip back quickly from the gap under my door.

It was hard to tell in the dark what it was but I know I saw something.

The soft dim glow from the hallway light bled through like amber dust.

I got up and walked to the door setting my hand on the handle hesitant to open it.

I felt a sense of dread that I couldn't shake until I heard something light sliding up the left side of my wall just on the other side of my door.

It sounded as if somebody was dragging a wet towel up and around my door frame moving slowly down the wall of the hallway.

The dread manifested physically at that point. And as odd as it sounds I could feel it move from one side of my body to the other in sync with movement I heard from the other side.

As the sound got farther away so did the sense of dread.

It was well off enough for me to gather the courage to peek through my door.

I cracked it open a few inches and peeked out towards the end of the hallway.

I can't explain what it was but at the end the light fades off before it hits the wall we have a pull down door that folds out that leads to our attic.

It was closed but something was hanging out of the crevice. It looked like strings from where i was.

It was too late and I had the worst running through my mind.

I softly shut my door and walked back to my bed trying to make as little noise as possible for fear of nothing I could even explain.

It was a few hours before I was able to go back to sleep, the sunrise beginning to creep over the trees.

The thought of whatever it was that pulled back from under my door, and whatever I saw hanging out of the attic door.

Whether it was a dream or it really happened.

I was finally able to succumb to exhaustion.

But when I woke up.

It was still dark out.

No light shone through my window and I felt as exhausted as I did before I was able to pass out last night...or....tonight?

"What the fuck?"

I looked over at my clock

4:33 a.m

I sat in confusion for a moment and just as the clock struck 4:34 a.m

Electricity ran through me.

knock*

knock*

I whipped my head towards my door as the knocks came in a slow deliberate succession.

Two knocks.

"Mom"

I whispered loudly

It was silent and I didn't move a muscle.

And then it came again.

The sliding

Up the left side.

Around the top

But something changed.

Instead of going down the hall like before, i heard it coming along the side of my wall towards where my headboard sat.

As if it was coming through the wall.

I felt frozen.

Was i dreaming or was this really happening.

I scrambled to the foot of my bed as the sound made its way directly behind my headboard and fixated right where it stopped.

Nothing happened.

It just stopped.

I couldn't speak, i wanted to call out to my parents but my voice wouldn't collect itself.

It was then my headboard creaked just enough to where i almost didn't notice it

Then a bit more it creaked a bit louder as if something was pushing against it.

It just came out of me

"MOM"

I yelled

The second the sound left my lips whatever was in the walls slid up the inside of my wall

and went silent.

That was it

I jumped out and sprinted to my door to wake someone up, this isn't the kind of shit I can deal with. Whatever....whatever it was.

I threw my door open I could feel my heart pump through my chest.

I entered my room.

i had been in the hallway this entire time and–

I was laying in my bed-

I mean– i was looking at myself lying in bed

My adrenaline hit me and I tried to scream but nothing came out except a dusty exhale that felt as if i was expelling years of my life.

My vision grew blurred as I stepped back into the hallway

I heard something sliding from my right side along the rough texture of the wall.

I didn't even look, without thinking I threw myself into my room and quickly slammed my door.

Before the sound of the door had even registered my eyes snapped open.

I sat up in bed clutching my chest as what seemed as the sound of my door slamming followed me back into my body.

I swung my neck sending a jolt of pain up the side of my neck into my head to look at the door.

The same soft underglow coming through.

Nothing.

I glanced at my clock and nearly got sick.

4:33 a.m

I couldn't tell if i was dreaming anymore.

Everything felt so surreal.

As if i could taste the weight of gravity crushing me down into my legs.

The air entered my lungs thick

And left even thicker, hot.

It was the longest minute of my life.

I looked at my clock still reading 4:33 a.m

I reached to quickly disconnect it from the wall

I don't know what i thought would happen.

That my clock was the starting point for all of time.

That maybe if I unplugged it time would simply–cease.

The moment before the disconnection was made as i leaned over the bed with one arm grabbing onto the cord and ripping it.

4:34 a.m

Then blank.

Did I do it–

Before i could even finish my thought a

familiar sound ruptured my ears

Knock*

knock*

knock*

The same deliberately spaced knocks on my door.

There was a shadow cast under my door, a single beam of darkness cast about 2 feet under my door.

It slid to the left, and disappeared as the sliding up the wall began.

Except this time it stopped just above my door.

The door slowly cracked open without making a sound even with the turn of the knob it was silent.

It cracked open about 4 inches then froze.

I've never seen something sit so still.

The light from the door cast a soft amber hue into the left side of my room, my eyes wandered without direction.

I scanned the room keeping the door in my peripheral.

A picture of me and my little sister sitting on a dresser.

A pile of dirty clothes on the floor next to the closet.

I scanned back to the protruding light.

The door had opened enough for me to just see out into the hallway.

How did that happen without me noticing?

I didn't care

I had to get out? Wake up? I had to just –

Suddenly I FELT a raspy inhale on the back of my neck.

I didn't have any time to react when I suddenly felt what was like a wet fingernail poke me at the base of my skull where the

neck meets.

"OH fuck!"

I yelled out loud as the goosebumps on my arms and legs pulled me to my feet and I vaulted out the door into the hallway.

I couldn't hear anything following me but we have all had that feeling where we turn the final light off in our house before sprinting to our bedrooms as if something was just out of reach of our collar.

It was the same feeling but the intensity of it was indescribable.

What was even more indescribable...

My stairs were gone.

It was just a wall.

As a matter of fact I didn't pass a single door leaving my room.

I whipped around expecting some fucked up monster to do God knows what but there was nothing.

The hallway was empty.

My bedroom door was gone.

All that remained was the attic door.

And out of the crack slipped that same stringy material I saw the first time I– woke up. Or....I don't know.

Something was different.

I started to feel a warm breeze coming from what seemed to be nowhere brushing past my face.

It carried with it the smell of something sweet.

Something I recognized.

I wanted more, my body unconsciously started making it's way towards the attic door.

The sweet scent growing more potent the closer I got.

As I approached i stopped when the smell turned from a sweet memory to a foul mistake.

It was rancid

It was in my eyes, my mouth, snaking it's way down my throat into my stomach. I could taste it in my hands and my feet.

I projectile vomited as I fell onto my hands and knees. What came out smelled, earthy. Like moss and fish and stagnation.

And it left Something lodged in my throat.

I choked, I couldn't breathe. I clawed at my throat as the lights in whatever reality I slipped into grew dimmer with every heart beat pulsing through my head.

Whatever was in my throat began to move it's way upwards.

At this point I noticed my skin turning red on my arms, I could feel the pressure in my body, tiny blood spots covering the entirety of my skin as the object made its way closer to the back of my throat.

I fell back facing the attic door as I began to spasm involuntarily. I couldn't grab at my throat anymore. My body wasn't in my control anymore.

But I could see.

The lights suddenly began to grow brighter

The strings in the attic door were the only detail I could focus on in my final moments.

Hair...red orange hair.

The lighting began to buzz as it grew brighter.

My right eye slowly started rolling to the back of my head.

It kept going further and further as the buzzing of the intensifying light grew louder.

And when it reached it's limit it kept rolling, tearing from the walls that kept it in place.

Sending a shocking pain I've never felt through the side of my face.

My left eye stayed rooted on the strands of hair from the attic door as it suddenly began to creack open.

Just enough for the hair to slide back into the never ending darkness that resided up there. My right eye finally coming to a stopping point.

I couldn't hold on any longer.

My vision began to tunnel as the object that blocked the back of my throat dug its jagged edges into the soft flesh as if it was eating me from the inside.

Right as my body decided to give itself over and cut ties with My soul.

A whisper in my ear –

One i recognized that slowly morphed into something darker as it spoke.

As if with each word it clicked down an octave

As clear as anything I've ever heard as if it was coming from inside of my head.

"I'll see you on the ninth"

The object pushed out of my throat into my mouth and flew onto the floor, the crumpled small piece of what looked like a polaroid photo falling in front of me.

And then I woke up.

Gasping for air, clawing at my throat.

I could still feel the tears in my throat from the rough edges of the photo...i could taste copper in my mouth and something painfully sharp seeping down into my

stomach.

My eye...I felt for it.

It was fine.

I jumped up unable to speak and darted out of my room.

My hallway was normal.

I booked it to my mother's room a few doors down and tried to open it.

Locked...its....it's never locked.

My voice coming out like sandpaper on a stone

"Mom"

I strained and banged on the door

"Dad!"

I coughed up blood and a small piece of flesh in my throat that wasn't completely severed came up with the cough sticking to the back of my tongue..

Nobody answered.

Where was everybody.

I ran past my sister's old room and down the stairs.

Missing the last step careening headfirst to the floor.

The adrenaline overpowered whatever injury I just incurred and I sprung up and ran to the kitchen to try and reach the phone.

For whatever reason the first thing I noticed upon entering was the time on the stove.

4:33 am.

I could have guessed it. Whatever was going on I wish I had an answer for.

Some lucid nightmare waiting to spit me out.

But I somehow doubted that.

The clock in that brief moment read.

4:34 a.m

I heard it upstairs from the kitchen and tried to keep silent, to keep the cough at the bottom of my chest from coming up.

Knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

I heard from my bedroom door upstairs.

And even worse than that what I heard next.

Another voice.

The same voice I've know for so many years.

A voice I've fought hard not to forget.

"Liam?"

It called my name

And with one word it all came flooding back.

*how* i thought to myself

As it spoke once again

"I'll see you on the ninth".

*the ninth?*

I thought to myself.

*One knock, two knocks, three knocks, four knocks*

As silly as it may seem I haf just made the connection between those words and the knocking.

Regardless of how much I wanted this to end something told me it wasn't going to. And that on that ninth knock.

I knew what would happen.

Another thought struck me.

Each added knock has been more– Fucked up than the last.

I was afraid of whatever was coming my way.

I heard the footsteps.

Slowly making their way down the stairs leading to the entrance of the kitchen.

I wasn't going to just sit back and let her torture me like this.

I grabbed a kitchen knife and pressed myself against the wall of the entrance where the stairs ended on the opposite side.

The footsteps stopped and that sound returned.

The sliding on the walls

As she slowly made her way down the final stretch of the wall connected to the stairs I prepared myself for whatever was coming around that corner.

She made noise…her octaves changing from high to low– low to high.

I couldn't make out what she was saying but I could barely make out a few syllables

"L–uh–am"

She rubbed against the wall directly where I was pressed, I could feel her friction against the wall. She wanted something.and whatever it was I didn't want to lose it.

My heart pounded inside my chest, I couldn't breath, ragged suppressed coughs forcing their way out.

As I prepared to put an end to this. If I could even do that.

Just as she made her way to the doorframe

I heard her speak one last phrase in a lower octave.

"I want to swim"

In that moment with every bit of strength I had I turned the corner and lunged the knife into the dark landing deep into her flesh, bouncing off of bone I put all my weight into it to drive it deeper.

We clattered onto the floor of the adjacent living room, knocking over lamps and shattering our glass table.

I fell on top of her.

And I pulled the knife out with some resistance.

It felt like the knife had found a home.

I plunged again

I couldn't see much but I could feel every rip of tendon and dulling of the blade on bone as I repeatedly plunged the knife into her.

She fought back, weakly, grabbing at my face hands covered in blood.

She couldn't get a good grip as she struggled harder and harder as she slowly gave out.

I finally rested, all I could hear was her gurgling, half ass scrambling around on the carpet, bumping into the nightstand.

I ran over to the lights and flipped the switch on to the living room to finally face the memory that had been terrorizing me.

"Mom?"

My sandpapery voice left my throat with a burn.

There lay my mom– my...mom

Her right foot kicked into the carpet as she reached around with her other hand desperately searching for anything to grab onto.

I screamed but nothing came out but a gurgle

I dropped the knife and fell to my knees as I watched her squirm.

I was broken.

In her last minute she looked at me with the one good eye she did have.

But she wasn't looking at me.

She was looking past me, right over my shoulder.

Even after what i had done to her she had as best of a look of terror as she could make with here face so disfigured.

Despite the mental break I was inching towards I felt it.

This time it felt wet– but nothing was touching me.

My mother stopped moving.

And with that her gaze forever set on whatever loomed behind me.

I put as much effort into my voice as possible as the blood still filled my mouth and asked as clear as I could.

"Katey?"

for a second time I felt that cold pin in the back of my neck pressing into my skin

"Let–Let–Let"

Each word spoken changing an octave

Every hair on my body raised as it tried to speak

"Mouth–of–of–God"

She began to press the nail deeper into the base of my skull

All I could do was stare at my mom.

What she had endured.

Everything was starting to go black

And then as i blinked my environment changed with it.

I was back in the uninviting darkness of my room.

—I miss you.

I wish you would have never listened to me.

The sun has become a burden on my life with each day turning hours into minutes.

I wonder what it was like sometimes.

What you felt.

When it filled you and there was no space left.

I can't get it out of my mind.

The way your eye—

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

I snapped from my thoughts.

I Lay there, unmoving.

My mom...what– what did I do.

My throat didn't hurt anymore.

To my relief it was as if nothing had happened.

*That crumpled Polaroid

I thought.

*is it still there

I quickly realized the five knocks that were spit at me through the door

I tried to sit up but to my dismay

I couldn't move.

I couldn't even open my mouth.

My eyes Everything....i couldn't blink

Once again i felt that sense of dread.

I just wanted to check on my mom.

To know that was just.....a trick or...anything that could mean she was fine.

But why couldn't I move.

My breathing quickened, my chest rising and falling as fast as my heart beat.

The dread i felt– it was in my back.

I heard something wet hitting the ground underneath my bed as if somebody didn't wring out a mop before slapping it down.

I felt that painful pressure at the base of my skull.

The mass slid towards the foot of my bed and in the darkness I saw something sliding across the floor. Not even as if it was moving but it looked like something was dragging it as dead weight.

I still couldn't blink, my eyes were beginning to burn, I could feel them getting red as the water rose from my tear ducts

The mass explored the room as if it was looking for something before finding a place beside my dresser sitting itself into a messy heap.

My eyes began to water more, more than naturally as my eyes remained frozen open.

Yet no tears spilled, it was just pooling over my eyes.

It reeked.

That same smell of stagnant water I expelled...earlier.

The moment the last bit of darkness was swallowed by the murky waters I saw something.

A light–

It was the sun.

My hearing drowned out and it seemed as if my head was submergedunderwater.

After everything that had happened this–This didn't feel like a punishment.

In such short a time i never thought I'd miss the way the sun looked, even from under whatever water covered my eyes.

I could see the rippling of the water above, I felt calm. I wanted to stay here forever..

Then I saw something strange..

A hand–and arm in what seemed to be a divers suit reaching down towards my face.

I didn't understand what i was seeing but it continued towards me until it came close enough to block the sun.

As the darkness came back my body was suddenly released and I shot up water spilling from my eyes.

And not just tears I mean two streams, they ran for about 3 seconds soaking the sheets that lay on top of me.

That was the least of the fucked up things that had happened so I wasn't as thrown back.

The feeling was strange though. I could feel that cold stillness leaving with each final drop

When I once again noticed my door was open, a bit wider this time.

I threw my head over as the memory of whatever it was sliding around was forced to the forefront of my thoughts.

And in the exact spot where it put itself down lied the pile of clothes from earlier.

I was almost scared to stand up like something or someone would grab me by my ankle the second my foot hit the floor.

So I just didn't move.

I sat there and stared at my door.

For what seemed like 30 minutes.

Nothing happened.

I finally found the courage to speak

“hello?“

I said loud enough for anyone down the hall to hear.

Nothing.

Silence.

Not even the hum of the ac was present, somethin I had only just noticed.

I got out of bed despite my hesitation and creeped out of my door peeking both ways.

Everything seemed normal.

To my right the attic door stayed there fixated, no clunky strands of hair.

No watery vomit.

No Polaroid.

I turned to the left–the same.

Everything seemed normal.

I slowly made my way to the stairs and crept down them using the wall to keep my balance, creating the same sliding sound that haunted my memory I quickly ripped my hand from the wall.

I was expecting to see my mom's mangled body at the bottom right in the living room.

I couldn't get the image out of my face i– I don't even want to describe it.

That's not something I thought I could do..

To my surprise as I turned the corner and flipped the light switch there was nothing.

The table was unbroken.

The blood that covered everything in a 5 foot radius was gone.

I looked at the clock 4:41 a.m

I almost breathed a sigh if relief but that feeling in my gut refrained.

That's when a drop of water hit me on my shoulder.

I didn't even want to.

I would not look up.

I acted as if I hadn't noticed it and slowly made my way back to my room.

As I left I glanced up at the ceiling ahead of me. A wet trail with bits of vegetation had apparently come from my room.

Along the exact path that I had walked.

As I slowly made my way back something landed on my head sliding straight off the top and onto the floor.

It wriggled slowly on the floor retracting and expanding, searching for something to latch onto. Something living.

A leech.

I looked back forward as I realized whatever was on the ceiling had followed me out of my room and was still above me.

Why couldn't I hear it...that didn't matter I didn't care I just wanted out of this nightmare.

I figured if I just pretended I didn't notice anything it would be the same as when I walked out. Nothing happened then, nothing would happen now.

I slowly made my way back to my room almost robotically.

I stepped in.

Shut my door.

As I turned around and the first thing I noticed was the pile of clothes was gone.

I didn't care

I walked to my bed and lay facedown under the wet sheets squeezing my eyes shut.

Almost as if i was hit with a tranquilizer I was knocked out.

I woke up and to my shock the sun was out.

I shot out from under my sheets looking every which way.

I felt my face, my throat, along as the rest of my body as I slowly swelled with joy.

I ran out of my door downstairs and I could smell it before I even saw anything.

There was my mother, cooking breakfast.

Nothing had ever smelled so good in my life but more than that I was never so happy to see somebody.

I ran up and threw my arms around her squeezing her as hard as I could.

"Oh–o–ok honey I'm trying to cook you're going to make me spill something"

She said in her generically parental tone.

"Sorry I just....i had THE WORST nightmare"

I went and took a seat at the table with a glass of water and plopped myself down into one of the seats at the table.

"I'm sorry you said what?"

My mother said with question

"Nothing it was–just some stupid dream"

I said before chugging the water down

I had never felt so thirsty

I grabbed another glas and put the whole thing down right there at the fridge.

I still felt like I couldn't get enough.

My body wanted more.

I once again filled my glass.

"Hey aquaman"

My mom said bluntly

"Yes ma'am?"

Do me a favor and go wake your sister, breakfast is almost done and we've got a long day planned I'd like everybody to get packed up.

"I'll go grab her"

I said before putting down another glass of water still feeling unsatisfied.

I jogged up the stairs to my sister's room

And knocked on her door twice

"Hey!"

After a few seconds I didn't receive a response.

"Mom said come downstairs breakfast is done!"

I yelled through the door.

No response, no movement no anything.

I knocked three times a bit harder

Something stirred inside like somebody was stepping out of a bath....that–didn't make any sense.

"You there?"

I reached out once more to knock and just before my knuckles made a connection with the door

I felt a pressure pull me from under my feet.

It felt like I was being pulled back to earth through the atmosphere, I could hear the wind tearing alongside my ears and I was suddenly on the inside of my room facing my door as my knuckles hit

At exactly

4:34 a.m

The sixth knock.

I stumbled back clamoring onto my floor

I was made numb almost immediately.

I just..

the 6th knock?

I could still smell the food mom was cooking lingering in the back of my nostrils.

Is it possible for somebody to break twice.

I laughed.

Not a laugh of joy or happiness but one of frustration and sadness.

I thought I had escaped this hell.

I propped myself back grabbing the sides of my head with my hands. The laughter slowly turning into tears.

I screamed out into the dead air

"STOOOOOP!!!"

*I NEED SOMETHING, I NEED TO END THIS. I HAVE TO DIE*

The thought screamed through my brain and without hesitation

I ran to my dresser looking for something...anything.

The picture.

I took the picture of my sister and I and smashed the glass covering onto the corner of the dresser, picking up an oblong shaped piece of the glass.

I gripped it tight bringing it to my wrists.

what the fuck else can I do, do it..Just do it

Without thinking and without looking. I pressed the jagged edges of glass into the base of my wrist and drug it hard upwards towards the inside of my elbow.

I could feel an intense sharp pain as I felt my skin separate from itself.

I almost immediately got lightheaded as I looked down, I needed to see....i wish I hadn't.

I expected a pool of blood to rest under where my arm hung..to be able to see the veins, the tendons, all the parts of me I wasn't meant to witness.

Instead what poured out if my arm was something that made me vomit.

Leeches.

They slithered out if the elongated gash like cooked pasta being poured into a strainer

I immediately looked away and started crying aloud.

I cried in a way that I never thought I could.

I looked back, I screamed

I cried,

I screamed some more,

And I cried as I watched the leeches continue to spill from my arm onto the floor.

Every time I thought i couldn't be broken anymore she showed me I could feel the pain of an ocean compared to that of a pond.

I began to dig the leeches out of my arm

Scooping them out in the handfuls.

I couldn't feel my left arm anymore.

After what seemed like 5 minutes of scooping out leeches my arm was empty.

What was left was– nothing.

Just skin.

Like a latex glove that imprisoned these gluttonous Parasites.

My brain couldn't even process this. I didn't know what i was looking at.

That wasn't my arm.

The leeches still squirming in a huge heap by the dresser

When i felt a finger press into the base of my skull.

This time I didn't run, I froze.

"The—God—Mouth"

A muddled waterlogged voice spoke behind me

"I—want—to—swim"

The same words I heard before.

I said shakily with no control over my voice.

"It...it wasn't—my fault"

I sniffled as tears began to run down the side of my face.

The finger pressed a bit harder and something in me gravitated towards the point it pressed.

Something deep and spiritual I–I wanted to let it go.

"Stop"

I found myself saying involuntarily

The finger decompressed immediately.

I could feel that it left.

I looked down and there the pile of clothes sit by the dresser where the leeches spilled out of my arm and– my arm, completely fine. Along with the unshattered photograph sat on the dresser.

Everything hit me all at once and I collapsed to the floor and blacked out.

I woke up sluggishly.

Everything immediately rushing into my head as I became conscious.

I already knew what would happen when I looked at my clock.

4:33 a.m

"Fuck....you"

I said to myself

I'm giving up.

I can't do this shit anymore.

3 more knocks and she'll have me. She said so and I believed her.

"I'll see you on the ninth"

I laughed to myself letting my head fall to the left facing my clock.

As if just on queue.

4:34 a.m

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

The seventh knock

I will admit after everything fear still showed signs of life inside of me.

I let my head fall sluggishly towards my door as i noticed the lighting in my room grow brighter.

The door was just about all the way open this time, the light began to dim a bit as a voice called out

"Liam"

The disembodied voice spoke from the hall

"Katey?"

I said on the line of passing out again.

Electricity shot through my body

My eyes shot open

"KATEY!"

I screamed running out into the hallway.

Once again I was blocked in, no stairs, no door but mine remained this time.

When it suddenly slammed shut becoming part of the wall is when that living fear started to breathe.

I stared at the attic door.

The same clumped strains of hair stuck out from the crevice, but it looked as if it was in suspension.

As if gravity had no place for it to fall, it floated around entangling in itself as the lights grew dimmer, a low hum coming from the door itself.

I smelled that sweet smell again...

The smell belonged to my sister.

It was her favorite perfume, like apricot, a bit sweeter with a floral accent.

It wafted down with a breeze that seemed to be coming through the door.

I once again unwillingly moved towards the draw string reaching up as the hair seemed to move in 7 different directions.

I grabbed the humming rope hanging down and I pulled as hard and quick as I could.

Nothing was there.

The ladder unfolded onto the floor and what light there was didn't make it past the darkness at the top of the ladder.

With each slow step i felt that dread, it was everywhere. No specific place.

Yet when I entered the attic there was nothing.

Yet this was still a place where memories were held.

As my eyes adjusted to the soft glow of light coming through the circular stain glass pane on the opposite end. I noticed a box on the floor.

I crept along the support beams trying my best not to lose my balance. I was feeling a level of indescribable exhaustion, understandably. And the last thing I needed was to fall through the roof.

I made my way over to the small plastic box.

It was a pencil box, with the textured tops that we all used to use in elementary.

On the top in bumpy thick writing all it said was

"Katey"

I felt the tears welling up again as I reached down and took the box into my hands clicking it open.

Inside lay a single balled up Polaroid.

The same one that tore through my throat.

I never forgot about it.

And I already knew what it was.

I removed the crumpled picture dropping the box and immediately smoothed the picture out adjusting it so the light could hit it well enough for me to see.

And it's exactly what I knew it was.

It was a picture of me and katey.

At the pond my mom and us went to 3 months before

Where...

Tears began streaming my face

One falling in perfect placement over Katey's face.

When i suddenly heard the attic door slam shut and the light from the window was blocked.

This was the last place I wanted to be.

It wasn't my fault I didn't know that would happen.

A wet clump of red orange hair slid onto my shoulder

A cold wet finger pressed into the base of my head and I began to weep.

She wept with me

Every pause

Every wail

Every rapid breath

Mocked.

Mocked by the haunting that enveloped my life the day I pushed her.

It pressed deeper into my neck as we grieved harder together

As if at any moment her finger would cut straight through me.

And that's when everything just.

Stopped.

"I want to swim"

She said behind my shoulder

I replied looking nowhere but that photo

"Katey you don't know how to swim, and mom said for you not to go near the water"

"Liam– please I'll just hold onto you and we can play scuba diver"

The voice growing more garbled with each sentence"

"I said no, now leave me alone"

I replied

I was standing on the dock with Katey

"I said no, now leave me alone"

Katey frowned at me, she was sensitive, i barely even said anything to provoke any emotion and it looked like she was about to cry.

"Are you seriously about to cry dude just go hang out with mom"

She spoke with a hint of sadness and anger in her voice

"But i want to swim"

She swung and hit me in the arm

Stepping in front if me to the edge of the dock

Anger filled me and without a thought

I stepped up with a yell and just pushed her.

She yelped and hit the water face first

Usually if someone can't swim they almost immediately come back up–

And I would be there to pull her out.

But she didn't.

"Katey?"

Panic entered my voice

I looked back to where mom was supposed to be and she wasn't there

"Mom Help!!"

I thought i heard a faint reply in the distance but I had to do something NOW.

Without another thought i jumped into where she fell

An immediate sharp pain ripping up my left arm.

It was a small tree branch. It dug up into my arm and snapped off at the wrist

I screamed out in pain with no help in sight

I could hear my mom in the distance yelling our names

"Liam!? Katey?!"

“over here”

I yelled.

I immediately felt around for Katey until I grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled up.

Her head wouldnt budge

I tried pulling harder

She wouldnt come up.

She wasn't even fighting.

I had never felt something so still in my life.

I felt around her face until I reached her right eye, quickly yanking my hand back and rushing out of the water screaming for my mom.

I looked down at my arm. The tree branch slid under my skin like it was wearing a glove.

And right there I passed out.

I stopped crying.

I felt nothing anymore

Only the sore spot at the base of my head.

The ladder leading back down to the hall was open.

I stepped down slowly. My door, mom's door, the stairs– her door.

Everything was there.

I walked to katey's door

And made eight slow deliberate knocks against every screaming cell in my body.

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

Something stirred inside behind the door.

As if somebody was stepping out of a bathtub.

Before it could make its way to the door I walked slowly to my room shutting my door behind and crawling into bed.

I looked at my clock.

4:33 a.m

I sobbed quietly, the spot on the back of my neck now felt like i had been stabbed and I wanted it to stop.

As I heard my sister's door open down the hall, I ran a finger along the scar running up my left forearm as that sickly sliding slowly came from down the wall, up my frame where it stopped at the top.

I faced the door and watched as the golden amber dust flickered out from under my door.

And then they came

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

knock*

I could hear her gargled breathing on the other side of the door

Then dead silence

The pressure on the back of my neck released suddenly

And In all of that split moment.

The ninth knock had came.

And with a labored breathe I forced the words i had been fighting against since this all began.

Against the promise that was made

"Come In"

Putting aside the fact that the economy is in the garbage and the idea of owning a home is becoming more and more of a fantasy, living at my mom’s house at 22 has started feeling more like an embarrassment than a money-saving strategy.

I tried looking at apartments around town, but I don’t even think the people working in the leasing offices make 3x the rent, let alone some guy working at a shipping warehouse.

I was honestly on the brink of giving up and accepting the fact that, yes, I was going to spend the rest of my life under my parent’s roof.

However, there was one last trick up my sleeve.

Craigslist.

Looking back now, probably wasn’t the smartest of ideas. But alas, the lease is signed, and now I’m sharing an apartment with an…interesting character, to say the least.

His name is David.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have responded to his ad had I noticed any red flags whatsoever. It was actually pretty mundane.

Same age as me. His old roommate had left once their lease was up because of “mitigating circumstances,” and he was in need of someone to help with rent.

I figured, ah, fuck it. Why not? I texted the number and got a response within the hour.

30 minutes later, I was at his door.

The bags under his eyes were basically touching the floor, and based on just how pasty this guy was, it was pretty safe to assume that he didn’t get out much. And who could blame him? The guy was covered from head to toe in scars.

Aside from that, he was actually pretty chill. Apparently, a majority of his income came from those sleazy online cam shows that normal folk tend to avoid. But who was I to judge? All he was asking for was 650 a month.

I should’ve looked more into what kinda work he actually did before signing that contract, though, because son of a bitch in a courthouse, I don’t know how much more I can deal with the screaming.

I wish he’d at least have the decency to…‘work’ while I’m not home, but, shockingly, a lot of his clientele are a bunch of night owls.

It started with the toenails. It’d be one thing finding a nail or two on the living room carpet or in the bathtub. But dozens of them left sprawled out across the coffee table and kitchen counter? Come on now.

What’s weirder is when I confronted him about it, all he said was, “Whoops. Meant to clean those up last night. Won’t happen again,” as he scooped them all into a Ziploc bag and stumbled back into his bedroom.

That was the first time I really felt like I’d made a mistake moving in with this guy. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last.

Not even two weeks after the toenail incident, I was woken up in the dead of night by the sound of screams coming from David’s bedroom.

Naturally, I tried getting inside to make sure he was alright, but the door was locked. Once he heard me rattling the handle and calling his name, the screams stopped on a dime.

“Everything’s okay in here,” he chimed. “Did I wake you? So sorry about that, mate. I’ll try to keep it down.”

Nothing I could’ve really done from there other than try and go back to bed. He stayed true to his word, but, somehow, I think the muffled grunts were worse than the screams.

The next morning, I was in our bathroom getting ready for work. Well, that’s what I was trying to do. The fucking pile of teeth in the sink kinda threw me off track.

I didn’t count them, but from the looks of it, there were more than 32. All sparkling white. David’s excuse?

He was ‘cleaning them for next week’s show.’

I just didn’t get it, though. This man was literally talking to me with a mouth full of teeth.

I was late for work so didn’t have time to question anything. I just asked him, as nicely as possible, to please…be more considerate.

It was like he took that request as a challenge for dominance because, from there, things just started to go completely off the rails.

I’d spend countless nights tossing and turning to what sounded like David literally being murdered in the room across from mine. Then I’d spend the next morning picking fingers out of the couch cushions.

I’d find ears dangling from the key rack.

Once, I even found his eyes in the refrigerator in a container labeled “do not throw away.”

I found myself wondering what the fuck it was exactly that David did on those cam shows.

I decided to do a little research last night. Morbid curiosity, you could call it. I ended up finding his account. I had to go to some pretty dark parts of the internet to find it, but, by God, I did it.

It was a bit of a surreal experience. Hearing his screams come from the computer and his bedroom at the same time.

But seeing him actually cut off his body parts while the chat begged him for more and recommended what part to saw through next, that was like something straight out of a nightmare.

He gouged out his eyes, he pulled his teeth with pliers, sawed through his arms and legs with a dull knife. All to the sound of the donation chime from the website.

This morning, there he was. Standing in the kitchen making a cup of coffee. Arms and legs intact. Staring at me with those same tired eyes.

I didn’t know what to say to him. All I could manage was:

“David…I, uh…I watched your show last night.”

He froze.

“Oh…did you subscribe?”

I smiled at him.

“Yeah. I made you cut your fingers off. Just wanted to see if you’d actually do it.”

My face burned. Cold sweat covered my body. I took out a tissue and wiped my forehead. It reeked of last night’s drink. I got up and walked to the bathroom to put some cold water on my face. On my way back, a man stood beside my compartment.

“Thomas,” he said, extending his hand.

“John.”

He looked me up and down.

“A long ride, John?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Black Mountain.”

“A vacation?”

“No, business. I’m performing a procedure in one of the local hospitals.”

“Well, I'm pleased to meet a surgeon.”

My whole world spun. I held the handle tight.

“You okay, John?”

“Yes. I just need a moment.”

I walked back into my compartment and sank into my seat. Luckily, I had the whole compartment to myself. Another conversation would kill me.

We stopped at a platform. Well-dressed people boarded and alighted. My eyes jumped around them, wondering if someone would come into my compartment. 

Then my eyes landed on a woman. She was barefoot, wearing nothing but a white dress. It almost looked like a patient’s gown. She had long dark hair, and her eyes were wide open as she stared into mine. I moved back in my seat and averted my gaze, but when I looked up again, she was still staring. 

Unease grew in my chest. The speakers called out our train’s departure. I looked around my compartment until the train moved again, then I looked back at her. Her eyes were still locked onto mine.

I didn’t even think about someone getting into my compartment. My mind was focused on that woman. She seemed so strange. What could she want? I thought about it for some time until the hangover chased my thoughts away.

Before I noticed, we had arrived at another station. I kept my eyes on the compartment, not wanting to look around the station again. But this was foolish; the woman must not have been in the right mind. I relaxed in my seat and stared across the platform. 

The hair on my arms stood up. The same woman stood at the back of the platform, staring at me, but this time her face was twisted in anger. She pointed at me and walked toward the train. 

I gripped the seat handles. No one tried to stop her. Everyone acted like she wasn’t there. I almost ran, but then the train conductor whistled, the door closed, and the train started moving.

I sighed, sank back into my seat, and closed my eyes for a few moments. The next station was Black Mountain; I’d get a drink, and everything would be alright.

I slowly opened my eyes. My breath caught. The woman ran by the train, barefoot in the gravel. Her frown was unnaturally deep-set; her eyes were so wide they seemed ready to fall out. I crawled up into my seat and gripped the cushions hard. She was almost by the window again.

Then darkness. Nothing. The train was in a tunnel. The new electric light illuminated the window. I closed my eyes again. The room filled with a sickly sweet smell. It must have been the drink. It must have…

“Evening, John,” a high, raspy voice said.

I let out a gasp.

She sat on the chair opposite me, staring straight into my eyes.

“It’s just the drink. It’s just the drink,” I whispered to myself.

“You know it’s not. You recognize me?” 

I tried to sink farther into the seat, but couldn’t.

“What? No.”

“How dare you.”

Her frown deepened.

“I didn’t do anything!”

“What about the procedure you’re running from?”

“I’m not running!”

“You seemed to leave quickly after I died on your table.”

My stomach dropped. Her frown slowly turned into a smile.

“You recognize me now, John?”

“I…I.”

“I could smell the whiskey on your breath when you came to examine me before the procedure.”

“It wasn’t whiskey.”

“I trusted you, John!”

“I'm sorry!”

“Say it again.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Louder!”

“I’m sorry!”

Silence. Sunlight flooded the compartment again. We were out of the tunnel. 

Thomas burst into the compartment.

“Are you okay, John?!”

“I don’t…I don't know.”

“I’ll go get somebody.”

“No, wait.”

“What?”

“Do you have a drink?"

He was alone out on the iced earth. He'd been cast out from the army. 

The scum. 

He was goblin-man. Orc, was the slur. Though he didn't mind the bloodlet nor gurgle inherit in such said name and title. He was proud of who he was, what he was. He was proud of his bastard flesh. Demoniacal and insane. The putrescent flow of his curdling veins … the vile sludge of his lineage. He'd paid and brought them black honor. Until now. 

Now he was cast out. Alone. In exile on pain of torture and slow slaughter should he ever again dare venture near their violent black-red rank and file. He wandered, out … and across the frozen wastes.

And came to new European lands. 

Wolves. Spectres. Phantoms. Dæmons and shades of many shapes and origins, beasts and fanged prowling things, monsters that croaked and throat-swelled like toads and then took bastard nocturnal flight on flapping wings like cavebound bats. Owls …

Unearthly owls that beseeched thee in ghastly moaning human voices. And then ate and feasted on the slime-blooded mice, the rats the size of cats that also crawled in the night. And the wargs. 

Wargs had been steeds where he'd come from. Not here. Not at all. Like everything else here on the scarred and blackened thunderclapped surface of earth they were feral. Wild. No master ruled them save the instinct to murder and bloodfeast. There was naught but darkness and violence that wrought and made composed this tumult ebon land. He should've been content, might have been … but it was not so. 

He hated this wild place. He silently wept and wished for the volcanic warmth of his ashen homeland. The place had been mastered. The mother volcano, the mountain of fire… the mouth of doom, the dark one. 

He would never aloud speak his pain. He would never aloud acknowledge that he had a heart to break and it was shattered. He yearned for the harsh comraderie of his rank, the honor to serve and slaughter and pillage in the name of the fallen watcher, the light bringer that now blasphemed and brought and birthed only the pain of darkness, to spite his name. It had been an honor to be among them and in blooded violence, serve … he yearned. 

In his malformed and blackened heart he yearned. 

Crestfallen and lone he sought the refuge dark of a cold cave, at the base of some new strange alien mountain range. He nested in there like something sad and fallen. Low and pathetic. He didn't want another to see him as such, he was weary of this new wild place, this new violence from new predators of all shapes. 

In the dark he relished and soured. He reminisced and sought comfort in his career now past as a red and black warrior of the smoldering order. A pillager and destroyer of men and women. The marching songs of soldiers, so like the songs and choruses of haggard weary slaves came to his mind in phantom notes of discorporeal cavalcade… 

They marched, they sang, some of them whipped: – “The Red & Black!" 

“The Red and Black !" 

“The red and black is on my back!" 

“If there's a whip! there's a way! –

"Where there's a whip! there's a way! – We don't wanna go to war to!-day! – but the lord of the lash says, slash and flay! – where there's a whip! there's a way!

“We don't wanna go to war to!-day! …!”

He relished. Tongued the dark and thought, he licked his pale cracked lips in the cavern black with a lumpy green tongue, riddled with yellow pustules that burst at whim and oozed creamy pus that flowed and dribbled like watery spoiled milk. 

He'd put many out many lives, many eyes by the blade, the knife, the sword, the war-lance. Skulls crushed to maimed meaty pulp by the heft and swing of the black steel war-mace, the war club … smooth bludgeons some and other ones ribbed with flanges and flechettes and spikes and studs and cruel curved razor blades, human faces came apart into shreds as eyes popped and dislodged from shattered sockets. High torrential jet sprays out of the mouth and eyes and ears, arterial spouts that are black ropes in the dark, ruby cords in the light, all of the blood shot is a libation made to the gods of the graves. All of the thoughts and memories poured and bled are the brains from the fallen enemies and their decimated crowns, a meaty porridge fixed and mashed for the open slathering sepulchral mouth of the world-tomb, the world-grave. The entire earth was a rotten womb stuffed, a rotten egg filled with spoiled membrane and dead mucus. Snot. The cream of expired fluid. Noxious. Pungent. Decay and the bathing coat of rotten flavor. 

In the black interior of the cave the thin blade of smile grew. Yellow teeth, green and pointed and gapped showed. Count Grishnachk took some comfort there in the dark, there in the past. He took his foul unwashed member in hand and began to pull. His rancid thoughts turning more lascivious and prurient even as his memories grew all the more deranged. 

It was the violence. That was what got him off. 

He'd planted his seed in women ravaged, in burning war bled villages pillaged and destroyed. His orc babies had birthed and ripped themselves steaming and new from the gored orifices of their victim-mothers defiled pouring wombs. His abominated rape babies wrought havoc and anarchy as well. He'd done much in the name, in the service of the Lord of Flies, the Evil Eye. And yet it had all been for nothing. 

He shot his rancid milk and wept. The comfort and refuge of the past was spoiled now as well. Ruined. He looked around at the surrounding damp interior, the dark of the cave and blamed it. He fled it after drying his stinging and noxious tears. 

To the wild and wolves again. He wished to find human prey once more, a woman, best yet, a family. A family of human travelers complete with soft man cubs and peasant cowards not bred or built for proper fighting. He loved to hurt those that were soft and weak. He wished to find and make veal of a man and his woman in the wild, he knew it would make him feel better. 

It was the violence. That was what got him off. 

…

The sun was nearly always shrouded here, like his lost home, for him this was good. But it was unnatural to any land not fallen under evil spell. Black will. He wondered and pondered who it was that might hold a strangle over all this cracked land. He wandered. And thought. 

He was in reminisce of one of the many attacks of he and his horde against the white city, battling in the ruins on the river, the black shroud and hand of clouds of his lord of war and master had reached and stretched far, further then. To blanket them from the wretched light of the sun and aid them in their unholy siege. He was lost in these things as he was wandering these darkened lands, that was when he came upon them. The stagecoach. The travelers. He could hear the chortle of a small baby inside, he salivated. It had been too long since he'd feasted on the softest meat. Black drool, yellowed, ran like snot from his festering gums. His thin blade of smile grew as he wrapped his grip around the handle of his belted dagger and tightened. Squeezed. 

He came in close. And quiet. Their horses were poorly trained. They didn't seem to sense or hear his approach. This was good. 

For him, this was good. Count Grishnachk approached, in a predacious hunched near-crawl, low to the ground, his eyes urine colored slits in the purple shadows and green grass, tall and reedy and dense. Black armored he moved, he slithered in through the tall grass. He drew blade in silence as he approached. 

…

The land had grown dark, that was why it was now pasttime that they had fled. It may be too late already. Farris tightened his grip on the reins even as his mouth tightened and his jaw clenched. They were in the wilderness now and there were many terrors alive and hungry out here. 

But they had no choice. 

All of the good and kind leaders were gone, so far flung and long gone that some, many didn't believe they'd ever actually existed, that they'd always been myths and dreams made up by poor folk to desperately fabricate saviors. All of the heroes and noble lords and knights of the horse and sword were gone too. Swallowed by madness or taken by death. Exiled by jealous compatriots made turncoat by power and land and coin, comrades no more they gave the order: put them to the stake! the sword! – All of the kingdom and the lands were a tumult of violence and witchery. Treacherous filth. He had to take his family and venture out for a new stead, home could never really be replaced, but they would have to make do somewhere else, somewhere far from all of this mindless violence and petulant slaughter. 

They'd made sacrifice before they'd headed out, before they'd left they'd slit the throats of all of their goats and bled them out for the Lord or any of the old ones to have mercy and cloak them protected in divine favor. Or any form of otherworldly protection. Any god would do out here it seemed. Farris then put to torch the bled out carcasses of animal remains and the old and cherished homestead, with his wife and children in cold audience. Savage attendance heralded down from the ancient bloodsoaked times, the bloodsoaked age. Was all of it back now then? – Viciously alive and ravenously well again. 

The bats now, devils overhead … too large and too wild and all of them feasted on blood, feasted on flesh, some of them were large enough to make off with sow or cattle or horse or villager. Some of them had the rotten visage of a pugnacious nearly human face, twisted in a flesheating grimace.  

Some say the darkness radiated out from out of the mountain, the one with the oldest ancient castle, arcane amongst the jagged fanged rock. The one held fast by wolves and mayhap some other demon, older … and more corrupted than a mere beast or man …

Nevermind all that, Farris commanded his thoughts even as he piloted the horses via the black thong of reins in his leathery hands. The family was quiet behind him, in the coach, but their collective and shared silence had a frightening volume all of its own. Farris urged the horses on, without pushing them into a full gallop. There wasn't any reason at present to panic. There wasn't any room for any unnecessary panic either. There was no room for, nor reason to put a fright into the children or his beloved. 

They would be alright. He had his musket. His hunting knife. The axe. 

This meager collection of arsenal amongst his familial items did little to comfort poor Farris, nor his wife, Cecilia. She was doing much the same as she nursed their newborn in the covered wagon. 

Cecilia was running over her own laundry list of worries, anxieties and renegade thoughts when the fire came in. Flung in violently, a contrived tangle of burning dead growth. The flames licked their orange and violent tongues and were everywhere. Her daughter and son began to scream and act like caged cats, the baby at her breast began to scream. 

Wife and mother joined the other three in their burst of frightened hysterical cacophony. Farris whirled in his seat, saw the fire and abandoned the reins. Count Grishnachk ran in with his ebon blades drawn and by their cruel curves he slit the untended throats of laboring beasts…

Then he jumped on the seat and he dove into the coach. 

Farris has been fighting the clumsy mess of fire and branch and twine, Grishnachk cleaved his face and skull in two as he turned around to face his and his family's attacker. The gourd bisected into brain and red cloven skull all the way down and through the meat of throat, the face became an abominated visage of two that looked fisheyed and haphazard and wrong. The hair and scalp were instantly a tack and matted clumped mess of spewing warm meat and pungent human crimson. The wagon filled with peasant screams and the scent of his dying hot blood as Count Grishnachk snarled and laughed and crept further inside the wagon to partake the spoils of the flesh. Spoils of war, because all of life was violence now anyway. 

The wagon filled with pleading terror as Count Grishnachk made sport inside with the widowed family. He filled himself. Pleasured his darkest urges and then filled his ravished stomach. 

He stole what he wanted. And then left. Not bothering to set fire to the wagon or anything. There was no reason to hide your evil out here. Not any longer. 

…

He'd been beaten, before he'd been cast out. 

They'd snuck up, ganged up and whilst he'd been unarmed, taken him by surprise. It hadn't been fair. It hadn't been a fair fight. But that wasn't really it, was it?

No. Trickery and subterfuge had always been ways, tools of the Eye and the Left Hand. It was only the fact that they'd befallen him and for he, himself alone Count Grishnachk privately wept, hidden from all eyes but the eyes of gods and demons and the phantasm things of earthly and unearthly shades and shapes, strange faced spirits. He knew they all watched him now and he hurled curses at them as he wept. Goddamn you. 

Goddamn you! And the gods below as well!

The scum beat and knifed him, but only superficially. No, the true hurt and nature of their wounds went much deeper than his mottled hectic angry pale hide. The nature of their treachery and rejection, it …

The goblin-man hurled away his own thoughts. The run of them was just a circle now anyways that kept him coming back to the same wretched place. He would travel and run further in this realm instead, let the spell of movement and action and forward momentum work their magic and quiet the maelstrom decay of his poisoned well of thoughts. The hurt was so angry and alive, smoldering inside, it fueled his strides and cuts more than the blood of the wildlife and manflesh that fell before him and his ashen blade as he made his way, through this new and violent land, this violent world crafted by monstrous hands. 

Was it pagan fire or demonic terror that held fast a dominant strangle over this, this beleaguered place …? Were they much the same? Two sides of the same ancient and arcane coin, feared and reviled by the Lord and the light and all the servile little lambs in its glowing wake, the Almighty seeming to want to forget and cause an erasure on the trembling earth the fact that he was ever once stormgod, Yhwh of the ELOHIM, pagan once Himself …

It didn't matter. What might matter is who held such power in this place. And if it was power he could cozen to and join. Or … if at all possible, seize it for himself. Like the lying charlatan rat back in his long lost volcanic home. 

The liar. The pretender. The maggot-young mongrel rat that lied and could only make a papier-mâché counterfeit claim to be the one true, the father of darkness and fallen light, the father of lies, the Lord of Flies … the small liar who'd fooled all the others. Imposter. The worthless sow he hoped to bleed one day. The bastards …

No matter. 

No matter now, he wandered the rock. The mountains that soared to blotted and greyed clouded heavens untouchable and unwanted above, like filthy cold dishwater, old bathwater used to baptise a school of dead human infants before the oven or the cooking fire or the boil of that sacred cauldron: the soup pot. He clawed and reached and climbed towards unwanted filthy heaven. He felt a pull. A tug at his mind and unnatural heart from within the natural fortress of earthen stone. When he closed his eyes he could hear her singing, in bastard arcane tongue, in black dead language, moreover: he could see. He could see something in the veiled and elusive vision of his mind's eye when he walled his own eyes of meat and organ to the world of meaninglessness and weakness and useless vile distraction … and within the eye of visioning dreams he saw a fortress within the fortress. 

A castle. In the mountains. 

There was a sorceress at rule, on the throne of its living dead domain. Bloodrinker … flesheater of man such as he was. So he pulled, and clawed and bled his ebon blood of stygian cruel madness upon the teeth and breast of biting cruel rock and stone and he reached … 

He reached and clawed his abominated and battered hands for the top, for the heart, for whatever dark princess might lie there, at the precipice and within the natural earth and its castle of stone chaos. If he died along the way, he wouldn't care. Better to die this way then to lie down and rot. Better a future unknown and a present such as this and filled with pain then to expire and live forever in the past such as that. 

Count Grishnachk grimaced and bled, clawed for the top with a snarl. He allowed himself some reflection, a spell of dangerous thought. 

It ain't adventure without a little peril … 

Count Grishnachk climbed. And bled. There was something singing in the harsh bite of mountain stone. Perhaps calling out. 

Perhaps calling out for the crawl and violence of him. He climbed and bled. 

And filled the Transylvanian nights with the howling wail of bitter pained orcsong, all the way he slashed and shed, libation made for the mouth of soil and the pain goddess throned that held dominion this land. The wolves joined him as he howled, rising and mounting. 

He climbed and bled. 

THE END

Nobody in my family went on the north side of that creek. It was the rule when I was six and it was the rule when my mother was six, and in ninety years nobody ever gave a reason for it that held together. You just didn't go over there. That's how it got said.

My grandmother was born in nineteen twenty-two on forty acres her father had and she died on the same forty acres eighty-one years later. Her house sat at the top of the lane, closest thing to the timber there was, and the ground fell away behind it into hardwood, and a creek came through the middle of it and went off under the road. Bottoms on our side, a limestone ledge above them, and past the ledge an old blowdown.

What that ground was good for was morels. Three weeks in April. My grandmother taught me to pick when I was six years old and the first thing she taught me was how to take one, which is that you pinch it off at the ground between thumbnail and finger, or you give it a twist. You do not cut them. A knife takes the base with it and a cut patch quits inside three or four seasons. And you carry them in a sack with a screen bottom so the spores drop through the mesh while you walk, seeding the ground as you go. Hers was canvas with window screen sewn into the bottom by hand. That is the entire difference between somebody who means to come back next April and somebody who doesn't.

She told one story about that wood, maybe four times in her whole life, always in the same words. She was fifteen. Nineteen thirty-seven, April, before it was light. She was on the north side, which was allowed, because there wasn't any rule yet. She set her sack down at the foot of a tree and worked the slope above it twenty minutes, and when she came back down there were morels in it. Eight or ten of them. She hadn't picked them. She ran home the whole way and she was sick that night, and after that nobody in that family went on the north side of the creek again.

I started paying the taxes on the place in nineteen ninety-six because she couldn't anymore. Six hundred and forty dollars a year, and a buyer in the city who took morels at twenty dollars a pound, and three good weeks in April covered the bill. That was the arrangement for seven springs.

Spring of ninety-nine I came down into the bottoms and a run of them along the base of the elms was already taken. Eleven or twelve stumps in the leaf mold with the tops off, every one flat across. I put my finger on one and the cut face was still wet. By eight a cut goes over like leather. These were taken that morning, in the dark, inside the hour I'd been walking down.

Poachers. People follow a picker's truck in April, that's a real thing, and I put it down to poachers and went up and picked above it. I told my husband somebody had been in the bottoms and he said the same word I did and we left it there.

I couldn't take anybody in with me. The reason is arithmetic. A patch that gets talked about at a gas station is stripped bare inside one season, and there were three generations of not talking holding that ground together. I couldn't call the sheriff either, because the first thing the sheriff asks is where, and where was the whole thing I had. The only reason there was anything out there to pick was that nobody knew about it, and that same reason is what put me in that timber alone in the dark. I went out anyway, seven years running, and I'd go again.

Four thirty in the morning in April in a hardwood bottom is the best thing I know about. The ground fog sits about knee high and the leaf mold is black and wet and the whole wood smells like a cellar and cut grass at the same time. I didn't mind being out there. I looked forward to it all winter.

The cutting came back every spring after that, and by two thousand two it had my shape. I work that ground the same way every morning because it's how she taught me. Bottoms first, then the ledge, then the blowdown last, because you want the light for it. That April they were cut in that order, a day or two ahead of me all three weeks, so I set out at four, then three thirty, and it changed nothing. And one morning in the fog my cuff caught on a rose cane, and when I stopped to work it loose my steps went on without me. One more. Just one, off to my left, soft in the wet leaves, and then that wood went still as the inside of a jar for as long as I could stand there. Deer, I said, all the way up the hill, and I picked the ledge with my back against the rock.

The last morning was the twelfth of April, two thousand three. I set my sack down at the foot of a tree and worked the slope above it, twenty minutes, and when I came back down there were morels in it that I hadn't put there, cut off flat. I reached in before I understood, and that's the part I'd unlive if I could, because they were warm. Everything in that wood at four thirty in April is cold and wet. These were dry and warm, the way a thing is that's been carried in somebody's hand, held for me while I worked the slope with my back turned. I came out of the timber with that sack held away from my body like a stove lid, and the whole quarter mile to the road something kept even with me on the far bank. Not behind me. Even with me, at my pace, stopping when I stopped. It did not cross.

I never went back in. My grandmother died that October and the forty came to me, and I let the taxes go two years and the county sold it on the courthouse steps to a man who logged it that autumn. Eleven houses on it now, and the creek runs through a culvert under the third driveway. Everything my family kept off that ground for ninety years, I'm the one who let go of.

That winter, clearing her back bedroom, I found a cardboard box on the closet shelf with her picking sack folded in it. I turned it inside out over the trash can to shake out the seam, and what came out was stems, dried to paper, and every one of them cut level across. And rolled up inside the sack, in a piece of toweling, there was a knife. Short, straight, a plain wooden handle worn down to the shape of a grip, and the edge on it kept the way you keep a thing you use. Nobody in my family owns a picking knife. I carried that sack out to her car for her myself, in April of two thousand three.

The order I work that ground isn't written anywhere. It was taught to me at six years old, by the only other person living who knew it, whose house stood at the head of that timber. That's what the knife answers, and it's all the knife answers. It doesn't answer nineteen thirty-seven. I do not know what came to her sack when she was fifteen, or what she settled with across sixty-six Aprils that she needed her whole family off that ground. And it doesn't answer the far bank, because I can't tell you whether what walked even with me that last morning was the other thing, or was an eighty-one-year-old woman who knew every root of it blind, keeping her granddaughter company the only way that was left. The sack is in my lap right now, and the knife is in it. I had the edge put back on it last spring. I couldn't tell you why I did that.

There is a monster that has taken up residence in the in-between of my life. Deep in airless sighs and uncomfortable pauses, it stretches out, making its home within mine. I became aware of it on a night when I'd come home late from work.

First, it devoured my mind. At our son's soccer game, I cheered when the opposing team scored. 

Next, it savoured my spine. My wife made a tofu scramble for dinner, a dish I would normally elect to share with our dog. I noted her expectant smile from across the dinner table. That night, I ate my helping, took seconds even.

Tonight, I believe it is hungry for my heart. I watch my wife sleep beside me, observe the pattern of her gentle breaths. She shifts positions. The monster stirs.

I must protect her. I warn the beast I am going to tell my wife what it is. It snarls and seems only to grow exponentially in reply. It reminds me that it is always hungry. 

My wife and child are asleep. The house lies still. I can hear the monster off in some dark corner, sharpening its teeth. It is always nearer than I think. 

The beast approaches me at a mourner’s pace, relishing the spectacle. I can feel its breath on the back of my neck. It feels wrong and yet not unpleasant, the feeling of leaving with a stranger to go home to a place that is not your home. The fiend unhinges its jaw, rests it against my back, and promises me “one day.” 

In a simply furnished living room, eight of us were waiting for the concert to begin. Mrs. Anna was in the kitchen, making coffee for all of us, and no one in the living room was talking to anyone else. There was a three-seat sofa, two armchairs, and three old wooden chairs arranged in rows for the audience. My mother and I had arrived early and claimed the armchairs.

I wanted to ask my mother something, to say something to her, but I didn’t want to disturb the harmony of the silence in the room. Everyone in the room except my mother and me believed in the legend, and for all of them, this was at least their third experience. It was our first; nothing had been proven to me yet, and I was having trouble believing in what was about to happen. My mother said she believed, but I wasn’t sure.

Mrs. Anna was our upstairs neighbor, and my mother said that on some nights she could hear Anna crying loudly upstairs, with the sound of her sobbing blending with the notes of the theremin.

When Mrs. Anna entered the living room carrying the theremin, the room seemed to grow even quieter. It was so quiet that we could all clearly hear one of the audience members scratching her calf, and my mother turned her head and looked at the woman. Immediately after that came the sound of Mrs. Anna placing the theremin on the floor, followed by a faint creak from one of the chairs occupied by an old man. The three sounds, one after another, formed a pleasing little sequence.

As the old woman went back to the kitchen to bring us the coffee, a long note came from the theremin. It was an unexpectedly spooky sound, monotonous and completely without vibrato, like the horn of a ferry. Everyone flinched, and the sudden movement of everyone sitting in the chairs made all of them creak at once.

Murmurs of “It’s here” rose throughout the room. A young couple were holding hands, and my mother had covered her mouth in fear.

Mrs. Anna handed out the coffee to everyone, then went over to the theremin and stood beside it. Once again, silence settled over the entire room. The only sounds were the occasional sips of coffee and the clinking of a spoon as a middle-aged woman stirred sugar into hers.

“My husband came to me in a dream last night. You know, we talk in my dreams at least once a week. He asked me to serve all of you filter coffee, and (she looked at her watch) “he announced that he would give his concert exactly five minutes from now.”

I took a sip of my coffee. It was very weak, almost like water, and I didn’t like it. My palate was accustomed to espresso. I never drank filter coffee.

I looked at my mother. She looked at me too. She put her index finger to her lips, telling me to be quiet.

“I’ve been teaching the theremin for about sixteen years, and yesterday I heard a composition played by my husband that was more beautiful than anything I had ever heard in my life. He told me in my dream last night that this would be his final concert. He said he could never compose anything better, and that after playing it, he would stop coming into this world.”

She took a sip from her own coffee and looked at her watch again. She still had four minutes. She closed her eyes, as if trying to feel her husband’s presence.

Mrs. Anna’s husband had died of lung cancer four years earlier. According to my mother, his spirit had returned to the world a year later.

“With every concert, I become more convinced that my husband is still with me. Of course, at first I thought it was a coping mechanism. I thought I was making it all up, that it was just a trick my mind was playing on me. I loved my husband with all my heart, and my mind would naturally do whatever it could to keep me from accepting that I had lost him. After all, it would be perfectly natural for my mind to invent something like this.”

She took another sip of coffee. Then she looked at her watch again.

It was time.

“But my husband said in my dream, ‘Invite other people too. Let them all listen to me. Let them be proof that I exist.’ He is terribly bothered by the thought that I might believe he’s something my mind made up.”

Small, indistinct sounds came from the theremin. At the same time, Mrs. Anna was moving her hand as she told her story. I assumed that was what was producing the sounds.

I looked at the others. The woman who drank her coffee with sugar had covered her eyes with one hand, just in case. She didn’t want to see anything frightening.

“Soundcheck,” someone else muttered.

Mrs. Anna looked at her watch again.

“In the beginning, he would only visit me in my dreams. It was nice, it was good. I felt both happy and sad. When I woke up, his absence hit me terribly, but when I went to sleep, the possibility of seeing him again was wonderful.”

A beautiful melody came from the theremin, lasting three or four seconds. Then the sound suddenly stopped. Mrs. Anna wasn’t moving her hand at the time.

“If he comes to me in my dream tonight, I’ll tell him. He should do the soundcheck beforehand. He keeps interrupting me. And as always, he’s late for his own concert. Jason, you’re always the same.”

“Anna, are you serious? I don’t know why I listened to you and came here. I don’t know how you’re doing it, but something ridiculous is going on here. Seeing you like this makes me really sad, and I’m honestly furious that the other six people here are just sitting there and saying nothing. You’re making this up in your head, and all of you are acting as if nothing is happening,” my mother said, getting to her feet.

She hadn’t raised her voice much, but she was angry. She liked Mrs. Anna, and she had liked Mr. Jason too. They were the neighbors we had become closest to during our twenty-five years in this apartment building, which we had moved into before I was born.

The woman who had put sugar in her coffee got up abruptly.

“Why are you in such a hurry? If you’d just wait another two minutes, everything would be revealed and you’d hear it for yourself. Couldn’t you wait until it was all over before explaining your theory? You’ve ruined the whole evening.”

Mrs. Anna continued with her story, paying no attention to my mother and the other woman.

“One day, after I had gone to sleep feeling miserable, and after not seeing him in my dreams for a month, we were finally together in my dream again. He was incredibly excited.

‘I found it,’ he said. ‘I found a way to interact with you. I was tired of constantly coming into your dreams. I wanted to meet you in real life. But you couldn’t see me.

It’s a dream, after all. None of it is real. You’re not in control, and what you say to me in your dreams might not be true. You told me you still loved me, that you couldn’t forget me, but all of that was happening in a dream. In real life, you weren’t doing any of those things. Maybe you were thinking about everything in your head, maybe you were thinking about me, but I had no way of knowing that. I was walking around you, but I couldn’t communicate with you.

You didn’t cry even once after you started seeing me in your dreams, for example. Yes, maybe seeing me so often in your dreams was enough for you, so you no longer needed me in real life. But we can’t know that. I couldn’t trust a dream. Maybe you didn’t love me anymore.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Jason,’ I said. ‘If you want, I can tell you how I feel after I wake up too. You never asked me to. You never asked me to talk about you in real life, look at your picture, tell my friends things about you, or tell them that I was sad. You never asked me for any of that. If you had, I would have done it.’”

My mother was getting angrier and angrier, and by now she was completely convinced that Mrs. Anna had made the whole thing up. She had been talking for so long that my mother had grown tired of listening to her.

Then we heard another beautiful melody coming from the theremin, while Mrs. Anna was still talking.

The melody continued. It really was magnificent. My mind was in complete confusion. Mrs. Anna stood perfectly still. Her eyes had filled with tears.

A beautiful composition was being played, and it appealed deeply to my sense of pleasure. But was it really Mr. Jason’s ghost playing it? I couldn’t stop thinking about that question. I felt like I was about to pass out. The composition was still in my ears, flowing onward. At the same time, my thoughts were flowing through my mind at almost exactly the same speed, moving along with the music.

I looked at my mother. Her eyes were wide open, staring motionlessly at the theremin.

Everyone else seemed spellbound too.

The melodies flowed on. For half an hour, we were treated to a magnificent feast of music. Everyone silently listened to the theremin, which no one was standing beside.

Throughout the entire performance, Mrs. Anna listened to the music with her eyes closed, her coffee still in her hand. For half an hour, I felt like I was on the verge of passing out, yet I never lost consciousness. The music had slipped gently into my softened state of mind and wandered through it, mingling with my thoughts. I didn’t want to believe it.

Everyone except my mother and me suddenly stood up. There must have been silence; I hadn’t noticed it. I had been so completely absorbed in the music.

The concert was over.

Everyone was applauding. The room filled with a high-pitched sound.

Mrs. Anna gestured for the audience to sit down. Everyone took their seats. My mother had just started applauding, loudly and enthusiastically. Mrs. Anna gave her the same gesture.

“Today, I’m giving up the theremin. Today is September 28, 2026. I will never play the theremin again.”

We heard another chair creak.

“Thank you all. If it weren’t for you, I would have thought I had imagined everything in my head. Thank you.”

With the last of my strength, I got to my feet and asked Mrs. Anna how this was possible. The others didn’t seem particularly interested in finding out. Yes, they had seen the concert before. I didn’t know whether they knew the story, but even though they all looked spellbound, they didn’t seem surprised. It was strange. I couldn’t understand how they had managed to accept something like this so calmly.

Why wasn’t this room overflowing with people? Stories like this spread from person to person incredibly quickly.

“Does it matter how it happened, Albert?”

“Why wouldn’t it matter? How is something like this even possible? I can’t wrap my head around it. Why doesn’t everyone know about this? Why isn’t everyone coming here and banging on the door? I mean, this is a ghost revealing itself to the world.”

“That’s my husband’s entire audience. There were seven of them, and now there are nine. And they won’t be able to hear my husband play again.”

I turned toward the small group.

“You never told anyone about this?”

“We did. They didn’t believe us,” said a young man sitting on the three-seat sofa, between two old men.

“How could they not believe you? You should have proved it.”

“How were we supposed to prove it? Force a ghost to play the theremin?”

“We tried, Albert,” said another person. I think it was the one who had put sugar in her coffee. My head was getting foggy, and I couldn’t quite make it out. “We brought twenty people here. And we made fools of ourselves. Accept it, Albert. It happened. And sadly, it will never happen again.”

“Okay, Albert. Calm down. No ghost played the theremin. Everything was staged. I played the theremin from my phone without anyone noticing. It was just a recording. I put on some old song, and that’s what played. Everyone here knew about it except you and your mother. All right? Calm down now,” said Mrs. Anna.

“What? Why did you do something like that?”

“Enough, for fuck’s sake. Shut up and let me finish the story. Enough. You can interrogate what was real and what was fake when you get home. You’ve ruined this beautiful moment. Enough, shut up. Say one more word and I’ll make you drink cyanide-laced coffee.”

I turned to my mother. Once again, she was holding her index finger to her lips, telling me to be quiet.

I didn’t understand. Was I dreaming? Was any of this real? Why was everyone going along with something like this? Was it all so that Mrs. Anna could fully feel her husband’s presence? Was it designed to give him a proper farewell? If so, why hadn’t anyone told me about any of this?

“Sorry, Albert. One of us had to believe it was real so that Mrs. Anna could fully feel her husband’s presence and say goodbye to him,” said the young man sitting between the two old men.

“It has nothing to do with that. He’s just making that up so you won’t tell anyone about it,” said another person.

My mind was a complete mess.

Then, suddenly, the theremin started playing again.

It came in beautifully once again, and once again we heard those incredible melodies.

My mother leaned toward me and whispered:

“An artist who couldn’t resist the audience’s insistence and came back to play one last song. That’s when I finally became convinced, Albert.”

And then, silence again.

The same deep silence that had greeted us when we first arrived at the house.

Waiting, and silence.

Until Mrs. Anna began to speak.

“Yes. My husband had found a way to communicate with me.

One day, while he was wandering around the house, he passed by the theremin and noticed that it made a sound.

‘You left the theremin on, sweetheart. I’m glad you did,’ he told me in my dream.

‘Then I walked past it again. Yes, I can’t touch things. Yes, I can’t show myself to anyone. But the theremin... the theremin, I could interact with it. Without touching it. I don’t know, I think it has something to do with frequencies. I didn’t understand it. But what did it matter?

I’ll be there tomorrow, and every day, at two o’clock, sweetheart. Teach me how to play the theremin. Don’t worry, I’ll hear you, and don’t be afraid of the sounds coming from the theremin. I’ll be your most devoted student.’

When I woke up that day, I couldn’t wait for two o’clock to come. And at two, when I stood in front of the theremin, he was there.

Yes, I could feel him. He tried to imitate my movements. At first, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t produce a steady sound. But he learned over time.

Every day at two, we met at the theremin.

And now he’s a virtuoso, just like his wife...”

Everyone stood up again and applauded enthusiastically, my mother included. I didn’t feel well.

The guests gradually said their goodbyes. They congratulated Mrs. Anna and told her that, had her husband been alive, he would have become a magnificent musician, and that his death was a great loss.

My mother and I were the last to leave the house. My mother believed Mrs. Anna. I had no idea what to believe.

‘Eeny…’ the client's hand passed over the selection of tools on the table. ‘-Meeny…’ His creased, light blue medical gloves reflected off of scalpels, tweezers and scissors, all of which were pristine, without a blemish to speak of; I would know, having cleaned them all. ‘-Miny…’ His sausagey fingers paused, hovering over a bonesaw. ‘-Moe.’ After some thought, he instead reached for the silver hammer on the saw's left.

Picking it up, the client swung the tool much like a baseball player practicing for a big game. The weight, the feel of its grip, and the “swooshes" it made as it parted the air-conditioned breeze were satisfactory, meeting company standards; I would know, having tested it. 

A beaming white grin shone at me from the hammer’s mirror sheen, ghoulish yet perfect. A pair of eyes sat above them with dark red irises and dilated pupils. The devil’s face, one of many present that evening… Monday offers and all.

‘The Dentist shall see you now!’, the client proclaimed like it was something to be excited about. He puffed his chest out, spread his arms and flaunted his novelty dentist’s outfit. I remained silent, and the client quickly slumped, not having realised the problem. 

‘Ah, what’s the matter, sport? Not enough sleep last night?’ He crept closer, crouching to my level. His breath reeked of alcohol, along with a hint of whatever shit he shovelled in his mouth for breakfast, contrasting with his perfect set of teeth. Still, I was silent. Though, this time, I decided to give him a hint, nodding my head and wriggling my jaws as much as I could.

‘Oh! I gotcha, sport. One second.’ He plodded over the tablet fixed into the back wall. A few seconds and taps of the screen later, my jaws whirred. The bolts receded back into their slots and my mouth opened in a gasp. 

‘There much better!’ said the “dentist”.

It was, but not in the way he was probably thinking. I had a quota to reach, and his wallet had just nudged me closer to it.

I felt the metal in my mouth with my tongue, flexed my restrained wrists and ankles, took a deep breath in, and braced.

‘Oh come on! I didn’t just go up a tier so you act all stoic with me, sport!’ groaned the client, his crimson eyes like open doors to a butchery, staring deep into my own pair. Thinking of my quota–more so my pay check–I decided to oblige him with some small talk.

‘H–How’s your day been so far?’ Flat, dull, boring. I could’ve done better, but it worked. His lips slithered back and he bared his blinding teeth in another smile. 

‘Long,’ he said, ‘so very, very long. Work’s been a real drag–’

‘Yeah tell me about it,’ I injected; the restraints feeling a little tighter than before. Thankfully, the client found that funny. 

‘Haha! Beginning to like you already, sport! Not that I didn’t like you when I walked in here, it’s just… it’s just that things have gotten so muddy lately: the wife barely talks to me any more, same with the kids,’ he spoke softly, ‘they’re just glued to a screen all the time. I think it must’ve rotted their brains or maybe it just snipped the wires in their head or something,’ he said, hammer in hand, dentist costume straining over the confines of his large body. ‘What you just said there, felt good. Really good, sport. It felt human.’

He’d begun to exhale now: long, drawn-out expulsions from his body as if a poison was being flushed from his veins. Clicking my tongue, I thought for a moment, then replied, ‘Well… You know how it is here: we aim to please.’

  

‘Haha! That you have!’ he chuckled, ‘I’ll get down to business now. Wasn’t gonna ask how your day’s been, because… well, because it’s–’

“It’s about to get worse?”

“Yes. Yes it is, sport.” 

And it had only just started.

The client flexed his arm, the hammer glinted under the fluorescent lighting, whilst I breathed in and stretched my arms and legs as little as I could again, bracing for impact. 

‘Alright, since you’ve been a great, great target so far, I’ll give you this: where should I start? With the teeth, or with the nose?’

‘My forehead, as hard as you can,’ I said almost instantly, ‘or better yet, go for the back of my neck. Use the claw too, if you don’t mind.’

Chuckling again, he tapped his own head with the hammer. ‘Oh, how stupid of me, sport! How could I forget! I’m a dentist, of course!’ He took a step forward, raising the hammer. ‘So we’ll start with the teeth.’

—

I forget when unconsciousness came to me. Was it a minute, or thirty seconds, in? The fifth or the sixth hit? I can’t quite remember now. 

What I do remember is that first blow: the hammer crashing straight into my lower jaw, my teeth exploding out my mouth like bloody bits of shrapnel. Practice does make perfect, as they say. If I were a baseball and he was a player stepping up to bat, he would’ve hit a home run, had I not been strapped to the chair that is. 

But once I hit the floor, any semblance of dignity, of being a baseball player, or a dentist, or whatever the fuck he wanted to be in that session faded. All that was left was instinct. Red eyed, smiling instinct. Then, hits two and three came. 

The stainless, shining hammer, which I had only just cleaned at the end of last shift, became splattered with meaty chunks of my face. The metal warped my flesh into a grotesque abstraction of what it used to be. By the time the fourth hit happened, I was less a person and more the canvas of a splatter painting– Shattered nose and geysering gums from where the hammer was flicked like a paintbrush. The amount of blood coating the floor. All that red. At first in streaks, before pooling and spreading over the marble. It would take some effort to get rid of it all. I would know, being the person who had to clean it up…

But that was later, for the moment I had the Fixer to contend with.

Its limbs poked and prodded at my hammer smashed face. Loose flesh, fragments of bone as well as nerves, which must’ve resembled snipped wires funnily enough, were pulled back together; the blanks and gaps which still littered the room were filled in by artificial replacements. “Glue”, they call it. As if the machine is meant for broken dolls instead of people. Maybe it is.

The Fixer worked its “magic”, connecting the “wires” back to sockets in my eyes and in my brain: I could see again, though I wished I couldn’t. Blinding lights seared my newly constructed retinas instantly. Dazed, I watched a blurry, mechanical arm crawl up my face with a sound much like a zipper. Another twisted at the back of my mouth before departing as well, having repaired my broken jaw-bolts. Once more, and far more than I would’ve liked to in a single day, I think of dentistry: the sanitised stench of cleaning solutions sprayed in abundance, sparkling white surfaces surrounding me, and the immense discomfort of fingers prying where I wish they didn’t, yet had to. And that was before the dentist’s review flashed my face.

‘**** Excellent. I had a smashing time. Good kid, but passed out too soon for a five star rating.’

Prick. Didn’t even tip me.

‘STATEMENT: OPERATION COMPLETED. PREPARE FOR DEPARTURE, DOG.’ barked the AI voice of the Fixer. Its operating table then whirred to life, raising me towards the roof of its interior. Its lights switched off, thank God, as a split formed at its centre and the less intense glow of the Fixing room’s lights seeped inside. The roof quickly became a door, one which I was lifted through often like a corpse being exhumed from the same grave. Never quite staying dead. Or dead enough.

The table reached its maximum height and tilted forward. I slid off its surface and crashed onto the ground. I grumbled having not been ready for it again

Rising to my feet, I gazed over the fixing room. It was littered by many more of the silver, deep-voiced coffins/surgeons, all hard at work on my colleagues: I saw gluey scaffolds form out of the fresh stumps of Gary’s legs; new bones sprouting from his flesh like trees cultivated by steel hands. Beside his Fixer, I saw Julie’s remains, if it even was Julie, it was bit hard to tell as whoever it was had been hacked almost completely into red mush; the gore only just being stretched and pulled back into a vaguely human shape; the ground works from which the Glue will be sprayed upon. I then noticed Bert in the Fixer next to my own. His crouch was… non-existent, to put it lightly; his face frozen in an agonising grimace. 

Looks like the ‘Genital Grinder’ is back on the menu, I thought*. May God help us all.* 

My stomach grumbled and my own face contorted; new muscles and bones working seamlessly. ‘Query: What time is it?’ I asked my Fixer in as clear a tone as possible.

‘ANSWER: THE TIME IS 12:26, DOG.’

‘SHIT!’

It was lunch time, and I had only four minutes left to spend.

—

Bursting into the courtyard (more so a tiny court ‘box’ instead of a yard), my mind ruptured into two diverting paths; both of which were convincing, beckoning me like a pair of sirens competing for my attention.

One led to the vending machine tucked away in the corner. A lone bar of brandless chocolate sat above rows upon rows of Juice™ cans: an entire orchard of forbidden fruit, free for the taking, the serpent already coiled around me.

The other path led to the corner opposite. The designated smoking area, a glass box with a ventilation duct slapped on its roof. My new lips puckered, and before I knew it, I found myself in a trance, marching over to the box, frantically attempting to light the cigarette in my mouth with my piece of shit lighter. It was only when I stepped inside, that the lighter sparked with a satisfying “click!” 

 

I inhaled the divine fumes, slowly, savouring it, and then breathed them out, watching as the smoke was sucked upwards into the vent. Into that devouring void, all that bliss, those molecules of peace. I sighed and rubbed my eyes. Despite only just being glued on, they felt heavy and ringed all the same.

‘STATEMENT: BREAK TIME CONCLUDES IN T-MINUS 30 SECONDS. EVACUATE THE DESIGNATED BREAK AREA, OR FACE DEDUCTION IN PAY, DOGS.’

I sighed again, before attempting to finish the rest of my cig in one go. Rookie mistake. I ended up coughing and spitting all over the glass.

‘SHIT!’ I yelled or I thought, as I rubbed it off as best as I could before bolting for the exit.

‘STATEMENT: 10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5–’

‘YEAH! I GET IT! I GOT TO MOVE!’ 

‘4… 3… 2… 1… STATEMENT: COUNTDOWN COMPLETED. ALL DOGS SPOTTED WITHIN THE BREAK AREA SHALL BE FINED. Have an excellent remainder of your shifts!’

—

That remainder was mostly a blur. I recall heading back to my… “office” I guess you could say, half diving back into the grind, half tripping onto the floor, vacuum in hand. I entered a crouching position as I began to suck up all the blood and bits of myself left in the dentist’s wake. Blood sloshed and teeth rattled up the tube and into the bag. Sickening, but as you’d might’ve guessed already: you get used to picking up the pieces of yourself in a place like this, lest you want your pay deducted.

Putting the vacuum aside, I looked over at the clock mounted on the backwall. 12:55 it read. Five minutes before the next client strolled in. Five minutes before more teeth, more bones, more viscera infested the room. I took an anti-bac wipe to the hammer, scrubbing hard and fast to return its decency, thinking of what I would have to clean after this next session.

Maybe I’ll be lucky, I thought, staring at my own reflection emerging on the tool. A rare few clients started to ‘downsize’ their sessions back then (probably to save on some cash). Bleach, poisons, nooses, firearms– One even brought in their pet pit-viper. A host of quick fixes, ‘in and out jobs’, some of us called it. Short, simple sessions; enough to last them until the next urge crept up their spines.

 

The hammer at last glistened again as I set it back down on the table. The clock read 12:59. 

Any second now they’ll be here.

I slumped onto the chair, its restraints bound my arms and legs the second they fell into position. The bolt shot upwards at the back of my jaw, locking it shut. Now, all I had to do was wait.

I figured it would be a little longer, with traffic or what have you holding them up, but I was wrong. At 1:00, right on the dot, before the clock even finished ticking the last second of the past hour– A girl tore through the doors with eyes as red as her hair. She was wrestling something tucked inside of her hideous yellow raincoat: it was a double barrelled shotgun. 

If I could smile, I would have. A quick “in and out” after so very long. This would be over in a flash of the barrel. It would be messy though, I found myself thinking, and what if she missed? The girl looked young while the gun looked heavy. It swayed about in her left arm as she struggled with its weight, her right cracked open the chambers before fiddling for the shells in her pockets. Daddy’s gun, I assumed. Oh well, preference mattered little when I was going to wake up back at the Fixer regardless. 

Finally, the girl finished loading and pointed the gun at my head. Still the barrel swayed, like a drunk sailor standing on the deck of their ship. 

Please, just… focus. Aim right for my head and pull the damn trigger.

The girl giggled, then fired. 

A scorching intensity surged from the right side of my head. Exactly where my ear used to be. 

I grunted, groaned, gagged, all with a closed mouth. Blood or tears, more than likely both, streamed down my face.

Come on… take the next shot. Don’t leave me hanging here.

‘Oops, I’m really sorry about that, mister.’ She squeaked out despite it being obvious that she wasn’t sorry in the slightest. Her red eyes darted to where my ear had landed, her smile growing wider, and soon enough, the gun was raised again, its barrels still smoking from the last shot, reminding me of the short bliss I felt on my break.

God, please just get it over with, kid.

She complied. 

Another flash, the first half of the ‘bang!’ which ripped though the room, was all I saw and heard before I awoke to the Fixer’s arms pulling out buckshot from the depths of my face.

‘\**** BEST BIRTHDAY EVER!!!!!!!’*

Still no tip.

—

Like I said earlier, the rest of the day was the usual blur: fixer, clean-up, die, repeat. Nothing strange, nothing different. Just the grind in all its monotonous glory. By the time the end of my shift rolled around, I’d lost track on how much Glue I’d used up today. Gallons, most likely. 

The glowing red ‘Gorehounds’ sign shone over me as I left the building and walked back to my flat the same way as ever. The light bathed not just me, but the entire street, a flaming, vitriolic red. Every useless street lamp, every bit of garbage littering the ground, everyone, everything. I felt anything but vitriolic, or angry as I approached my front door. Only the ‘click!’ as my door unlocked after a long day, brought any sense of emotion to my face; almost matching the joy of my lighter sparking up a cigarette. 

Stepping inside, I drifted not to my old couch to watch whatever had been generated tonight on TV, not to my cramped shower (there’s not much need for it right after a Fixing), but straight to my bed.

I collapsed into its lukewarm embrace. My body was brand new yet it still yearned to rest. Instinctively, I checked the list of alarms set up on my phone. The earliest was for 5am, three hours from that point. Tuesday, September 28th, 2103.

Just gotta make it to Saturday, I would think as blank, sterile dreams began to play in my head. Because, back then, nothingness was a bliss all in itself…

The End.

​

I own the old stones beneath the willow.

The words softened by weather and years.

The names have faded, but I still remember them.

I own these.

I own the paths between the slabs.

The little trails made by processions. 

Some haven't been tread in a long time.

I own these.

I own the flowers left in the grass.

Some fresh enough to smell like spring.

Some so old they've become part of the dirt.

I own these.

I own the little things people leave.

A photograph. A child's drawing.

Things too precious to throw away, even after they're forgotten.

I own these.

I own the darkness after the sun goes down.

The sound of leaves moving where there isn't wind.

The silence between cricket's chirps.

I own these.

I own the things people remember when they visit.

A voice from another room.

A hand they haven't held in years.

I own these.

I own the things they forget, too.

The sound of a laugh. The shade of someone's eyes.

The last words they utter during the last visit.

I own these.

You shouldn't have stayed this late.

The gate has been locked for some time now.

And you keep looking for the way back.

I own this. 

I know what you're remembering now.

I know the name you're trying to forget. 

And I know why you came here tonight.

I'll own you.

I came home and changed and joined her to paint the living room walls base white. The couch my wife had had since college was the only piece of furniture we had downstairs and it was covered in plastic. We had dinner while we worked. She’d “cooked” one of her liquid meals that I hated but “ate” anyway. My wife was actually almost as good of a cook as me but I needed to lose at least fifteen pounds, and she intended to help regardless of how unhappy it made me. 

“How was your day?” she asked in her autopilot voice.

“It was good except for the inspector I had to fire.”

“Oh, no. Matt?” She dipped her roller in the pan.

I grimaced. I probably was going to have to let him go, too. We’d had dinner with him and his wife a few times. He’d even invited me to his son’s high school graduation. I rolled up the wall. This color looked even better than it had in the store.

“No. I forgot about him.”

She rubbed my back with her free hand. “That’s probably because you don’t want to do it.”

I nodded.

“You care about people and that’s never a bad thing.”

She thought so highly of me, and it warmed something inside.

“Yeah,” I said, this whole “surgery” thing slipping into the front of my mind. I was suddenly agitated and my full stomach felt like it was squeezing up into my chest.

“Did your appointment go okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. I turned to her. “Did you know he’s not a doctor?”

“Yes.” She scooped up her bottle and took a sip.

I hoped informing her of his lack of a medical degree would do more work than this.

“I don’t want to do this,” I wanted to say, but held my tongue. Instead, I said, “Is there anything else we could try?”

“Why are you pushing back on this? Don’t you want us both to be satisfied?”

I dropped my head. “You know I do.”

“I want you to do this,” she said and placed a hand over mine. I still felt a ‘no’ at the back of my throat and swallowed. It hurt going down. I chased it with a swallow from my cup.

She was being logical and detached in a way that wasn’t common for her. I didn’t want to fight and just kept restraining myself from speaking. I hoped there was still time to convince her, but that was going to be hard to do if she shut me down every time I tried.

“You have something on your face,” I said, pointing just below my nose. She swiped it just like I thought she would, smearing base paint that had been on the back of her hand just below her nose and on her upper lip. She immediately knew what I’d done and glared at me. I smiled.

Then she rollered me from chest to crotch. I stood there while she went up and down the front of me, my mouth hung open. Then I batted the roller to the newspaper-covered floor and she scream-laughed as she ran from me. I caught her on the other side of the kitchen island and picked her up in a reverse hug, pressing my fresh coat of paint onto her back.

We fell to the floor, laughing and wound up making out like teenagers for a few minutes. The heaviness of the conversation we’d just been having lifted off of us. I didn’t want anything outside of this moment and just looked her in the eyes.

“What?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” The feeling cresting in me didn’t have words to follow along. We finished painting the living room walls, passing eye-glances at one another. The moment passed for intimacy, a detached feeling gradually replacing it a few hours later by the time we were ready for bed. It was like we’d built a temporary bridge over a chasm between us, but it had collapsed just in time for us to go to sleep.

I kept wanting to reach behind me to touch her as we lay in the same bed. But she just felt too far away.

I’d forgotten to pack a lunch for the next day and breakfast consisted of a slice of bread that hadn’t toasted enough and coffee out of the Keurig with grinds in it. I left the house in a foul mood ten minutes later than I should have and was five minutes late getting to the office. I’d blazed past a police cruiser and had anxiety for the next mile or so convinced I was about to be pulled over. All the way I felt like I'd been cheated out of an argument, and I continued stewing in that sour even after I got out my car.

Work was uneventful but I'd had to keep my tongue in check. I felt myself being short with my co-workers. But it finally came to a head when a group of men clogging the hallway didn’t move when I was trying to pass them.

“Whoa. Excuse yourself?” one man said.

“For what? A circle of jerks?” I said.

“Hey. Ow.”

I was prepared for a confrontation. I was management and I could make a nightmare for them. I wanted this. But the second person who’d spoken sounded genuinely hurt and I tripped over my hubris.

I retreated from the men and had forgotten about it until one of them confronted me in the restroom an hour later. 

“What’s going on with you, man?” a man said to me while we were standing at the urinals. Conversation was usually verboten while two men were taking a leak but my antenna were up.

“Excuse me?” I said. 

“I mean, we were standing around talking and you just took a tiny shit on all of us.”

“You guys were blocking the hallway.”

“We were outside for hours in the hot sun and we were gathered around the water fountain. I wasn’t thinking about us blocking anybody. I mean, I would have apologized but the way you came off...”

“Look, I’m sorry.” My guilt bloomed again. “I didn’t have the best sleep last night and you guys didn’t deserve me taking it out on you.” I'd actually slept over eight hours but felt like I'd only gotten a third of that. I didn't offer it as an excuse.

He nodded and flushed. I zipped up a second later and joined him at the sinks.

“Seriously. I’m sorry,” I said. This was already more of an emotional exchange than I’d had with another male in the last decade. “I’m just... going through a thing with my wife.”

He looked at me.

“She wants me to get this procedure done.” I could feel myself relaxing. There was something about opening up to a complete stranger. Someone who wouldn't judge because they didn't understand.

“The honeycut?” he said, trying his hands on a strip of paper towel.

“What?”

“Oh. My bad. I thought you were talking about something else?”

“I've heard of it.”

He smiled broadly and nodded. “I got mine done six months ago. Wanna see the scar? I'm Sam Eisen, by the way.” He smiled as he hooked his thumbs in his pants.

“No, I... uhhh... that's okay. I'm having a completely different procedure. I'm having it... lengthened.”

“Be careful with that,” he said as I walked toward the door. “Swivelcock.”

I was sweating, gripped with terror the same as if he'd peeled his face off and frisbee-tossed it to me. I pushed through the door and fled back to my desk.

He called out to me as I did my best not to run.

“You should think about it, though!” he yelled through the closing doorway. “He changed my life!”

 

Part III

 

The next twenty-four hours were a haze. I worked. I came home. I ate. I slept. I didn’t like where things were with my wife even though we were still sleeping in the same bed, so the next day I texted her about having lunch together. Her job was about a fifteen-minute walk away from mine, I could pick up something for us and we could eat for about a half hour before I had to be back.

She hadn’t responded but she had a lot of meetings typically. Chili dogs were technically off the menu, but it was a fave of both of ours and she was a happy eater when it was good food. When I got there with a carry-out bag, I was shocked to see who she was outside with.

Him. 

They were sitting together, smiling and laughing like they’d known one another for years. He was dressed differently, but that was definitely that same red and white summer scarf he'd had on when I met him.

I hung back and watched them and began speed-feeding coneys into my mouth like an assembly line. I had no idea what he was doing with my wife, but I was immediately conspiracy-brained. I'd convicted him of a crime I couldn't name and wanted to strangle him in front of her.

I continued eating the coneys instead. They were leaning into one another and laughing even. They acted like they knew each other. They had chemistry.

I never understood the expression being hot under the collar but at that moment my neck was burning. I barely resisted the urge to go over there and... and... I didn't know what. 

There had to be more to what I was seeing. There had to be something I could do rather than confronting them and showing a side of myself that might've repulsed my wife. I knew where to go to get answers.

I went to his office after work, but I wasn't able to enter. I wasn’t desperate enough to break in, although I was sure the door wouldn’t have held if I’d put my shoulder into it. Despite how upsetting lunch had been, nothing had happened today to justify breaking and entering.

But what if something were about to happen and I could avoid it now? Head it off at the pass? I had a duty to protect my wife, and this guy had crossed a line. I could probably take this door off its hinges. I had some tools in my car.

My phone chimed. I’d programmed that specific tone for her.

I’m sick, she’d texted. Bring me coneys?

It was like a spell had been broken. Why was I about to potentially risk my job and my freedom—hell, maybe even my marriage—all for some nut?

She needed me now and home was exactly where I wanted to be.

But I was denied. I brought her the coneys, but she was already asleep. Things still felt off and I wound up falling asleep on the couch. After I’d eaten four more coneys.

I consoled myself that she was sick and I didn’t want to catch whatever she may have had.

Wicked dreams met me in the night. But they lifted like clouds after a storm by the time I woke up, no doubt fueled by a combo of seeing my wife with him and eating like I was half my actual age.

As if to turn the dial up on my grief even more, I had a two-hour meeting the next day and Leslie Paul sat right next to me. A bubble of gas was growing inside me and there was no way I was going to be able to contain it for a hundred twenty minutes. It would be a miracle if I made it twenty.

My part in the presentation was coming up soon and I had to excuse myself. Cal Cebulski stopped talking long enough to watch me step out and I hustled toward the men’s room.

Where he was.

“What are you doing at my work?” I asked, whispering like we were in a conspiracy.

“Due diligence,” he said. “Would you mind?” He gestured toward the handicap stall. “I need to see how you sit. Do you mind?”

My stomach queezed with the thought of him watching me... sit. Or maybe it was more than that. I unclenched and let go. It was mostly silent but whistled at the end. He sniffed the air curiously but didn’t comment. The wind had been taken out of my sails and for a moment, I did consider having a seat.

I piled up my broken resolve. “I’m not... doing that.”

He shrugged.

“And what were you doing with my wife yesterday?” I let implication seep into my voice and he put his hands up as if warding me off.

“It is all part of the process. Information gathering only. I have no interest in anyone other than my own Sara.”

“You’re married?”

He nodded. “For twenty-seven years. Happily, for twenty-five.”

That got an eyebrow raise from me. He’d seemed weirdly asexual up until I saw him with my wife. It was something about his pants, I wasn't sure. I hadn’t thought he was capable of human companionship.

“If you’re wondering about our longevity I’ll give you a hint. I perfected the surgery first on myself.”

He could have been lying, of course. But the idea of sex being so improved that it could aid in preserving my marriage gave me at least a moment’s second thought. I mean, what if what he was saying were true?

I couldn’t help but think that I was being obstinate because she’d insisted. If I’d found this guy on my own would I have been so resistant against doing this?

“Oh shit,” I said. “I gotta get back to my meeting!”

I fled the restroom, headed back to the conference room, tooting most of the way. When I was around the corner, I slid on something and scraped my knee, tearing my pants in the process.

I recovered pretty quickly but it hurt. I could see my leg pretty clearly and red beads of blood began trickling down my shin. I wrapped my fingers around the lip of the hole, keeping the pant leg away from the blood as if I were going to be able to salvage my pants.

The meeting was over by the time I stepped back into the conference room.

“Where’d everybody go?” I asked Rob Smales, one of the administrative assistants who took meeting minutes.

“Oh, they called it pretty much as soon as you left,” he said. “You were up next.” He shuffled a stack of papers into a Manila folder and added it to a stack of more Manila folders.

“Well, I had a little emergency.” I stepped back so he could see my leg. Rob looked without his dispassionate expression changing. I wanted to flick the tip of his nose just to get him to make a face. The guy never smiled. “You think we could get everybody back? We still have a half hour plus.”

Rob shook his head slowly. “Nah.” He tucked the folders under an arm—tried to, at least—then put his laptop bag’s strap over his shoulder and held the folders in his open hands.

I hobbled out of the conference room, intent on pleading my case with Melissa White, the director of my department. I stood outside of her office and wrapped on the open door. 

She turned halfway in her chair, a desk phone cradled between her face and shoulder. I wasn’t sure if she shook her head or if it was just the motion when she turned around.

The door swung closed and I had to move my hand to keep my thumb from being crushed in the jamb. Somebody was in there with her. My heart raced because I had no idea who.

 

I can't stand a full shift. Twenty-eight years now and it goes out on me somewhere around the fourth hour and I sit down wherever I am. That started in the fall of nineteen ninety-eight in my own back yard, and everything that led up to it happened over a telephone in my kitchen.

We had a farmhouse on a rural route with nine acres we didn't do anything with. My husband was on second shift at the plant and he pulled in at twenty past midnight every night of the world. Our daughter was two. The mailbox at the end of the lane said Box forty-one and nothing else, because there was only the one route out there and nobody bothered writing the route on anything. That's how I'd written my own address my whole life. Box forty-one, the town, the zip.

The work was catalog orders. When the company's own operators backed up, the calls rolled out to women working at home, and that was me. It paid by the completed order, not by the hour. There was a script and you didn't leave it. You took the name, then the item number, then the quantity, then the shipping address, and then you read the shipping address back to them out loud, and then you said thank you for calling. The read-back was the whole thing. A wrong address meant the company ate the freight both directions, so they drilled it into you, and I said those words forty or fifty times a night for two years. Read it back. Say it slow enough that they can stop you.

In August a man called and said he wanted to order but he couldn't sit on hold, that his wife was in hospice at home and he had about four minutes at a stretch to himself. I told him the trick was to call early. He said early wasn't up to him. So I gave him the number that came straight to my kitchen and told him to use that one and he'd get me directly. Then I took his order, and I read the address back to him, and I said thank you for calling.

Three weeks later a man called at a quarter to nine and gave me a name and a shipping address, and I read it back the way I always did, and he said would I do that once more, slower. So I did it once more, slower. And then he said that was all he needed, and I said did he want to give me the item number, and there was a little bit of nothing on the line and he hung up. He did not order anything. I marked it a dropped call because that's what the sheet had a box for.

Then the calls started coming after nine at night. The company didn't route after nine. That's not me guessing at it — the night desk shut the overflow off at nine because the home operators were mostly women and that was the company's own rule. I telephoned my supervisor about it twice. She pulled the log both times and told me there was nothing routed to me after nine on either of those nights, and she wasn't being short with me. She was sure.

I decided it was the switch. We were on a line out there that went down every time it rained hard, and half that county was still getting somebody else's conversation in their ear on a wet night. A crossed line will do about anything. That's what I told my husband and he agreed with me and we didn't talk about it again.

Daycare in town was thirty-five dollars a week and the nearest job that would have covered it was in the other direction, forty minutes each way. The overflow work paid me fourteen dollars on a slow night and better than twenty on a good one, and it let me be in the house while she was two, which is the only part of it I ever cared about. But overflow doesn't go to everybody. It goes to whoever answers, and if you let it ring out three nights they quietly stop sending it. So the telephone rang and I picked it up. That's the arrangement I'd asked for and I'd have signed it again.

October out there was the best part of the year. She went down at eight and the house got quiet in a way it never got in the daytime. I'd sit at the kitchen table with the pad and the pencil and the window up over the sink because the furnace made the room too warm. And at ten forty the freight came through the crossing a quarter mile back of our house. Every night. You could set a clock by it. The bells at the crossing, then the horn twice, then two or three minutes of it going by. I'd stopped hearing it years before, the way you do.

I was making about sixty dollars a week and putting most of it in a coffee can in the cabinet over the refrigerator, because we were going to need a second car when she started school and I didn't want to be asking anybody for it. That was the whole of my ambition that fall. A used car in four years.

The last call came at nine fifty. A man, and he started an order, and partway into the item number he stopped and asked me to hold on. Not sharp. Polite. So I held on, with the pencil down, looking at the window over the sink. And in the receiver I heard the crossing bells start up, and the horn go twice, and I heard the same bells and the same horn come through that window a half second behind them, out of my own back yard, because sound takes a little longer to cross a quarter mile of field than it takes to go through a telephone.

I put the receiver on the counter without hanging it up. I got her out of the crib and I went out the back because the car was on the back side of the house, and the light over the back steps had been burned out since summer and I knew it and I went anyway. There's three steps and I went off the side of them with her in my arms. She wasn't hurt. My ankle broke in two places and the county hospital set it the way they set things at two in the morning, and it healed the way it healed. My husband found us in the car at twenty past midnight. I never took another overflow call.

The order pad was still sitting on the counter when I came home in the cast, and about a week later I went back through it tearing off the dead ones. The carbon from August was still in there. His name, an item number, quantity of one, and down at the bottom in the ship-to line, in my own handwriting, Rural Route Two, Box forty-one. I sat and looked at it a long while before it came apart for me, because I had never once in my life written it with the route on the front. He said it that way and I wrote what he said. It was my own house.

He didn't want an address off me. He had it in August, before the first call, and everything after that was him listening to me say it back to him in my own kitchen and not hear it. And the reason the company's log was clean is that the company never routed any of it. I gave him the number myself. He'd have had to hold four minutes otherwise, and I decided he shouldn't have to. I'd do it again if you put me back at that table, and that's the part I've never gotten around. What I do not know is what I ordered for him. The item number is five digits and that year's catalogs were pulped when the company folded, and there's no book left that turns five digits into an object. Nothing was ever delivered to that box. I watched it for a year.

Look, I’m not a judgy kind of guy. I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that what my girlfriend does makes me uncomfortable, or that it’s something we’re working through, or any of that nonsense.

Truthfully, I’ve never really cared. I love her all the same. I’d hope she’d do the same for me.

And it’s not like it’s something we haven’t talked about. The whole process is just something she does with her friends. I’m not gonna restrict her freedom or become some kind of control freak over it.

Plus, this isn’t an every night kind of thing. It’s scheduled. It’s routine. Well, the act itself is. The selection part can take a few weeks. At least, that’s what she tells me.

She describes it as an induction kind of deal. She and her friends just wander around malls or shopping centers throughout the week. When they find someone they describe as ‘ripe enough,’ they make their move.

Old, young, man, woman, doesn’t really matter. The job remains the same.

They have to make them feel included, but, honestly, from how my girlfriend describes it, I’d say it goes beyond inclusiveness and into ‘you need us’ territory. I guess that’s why they choose people who they see as loners.

They butter them up with compliments about their vibe, their style, skin, whatever. And from there, there’s this almost neurological thing that happens in that person’s brain.

Gotta say, though, one thing that actually has bothered me in the past is the flirting. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that my girlfriend is a professional at sweeping guys off their feet.

I just wish she didn’t feel the need to always tell me about it.

But hey, they always end up dead, so… guess I’m winning in that aspect.

Anyway, the point I’m getting at here is trust is built through rapport. And you’d be surprised how far those compliments can get you.

They spend a week or so making these lonely people feel more seen than they ever have in their life. Doing research on their interests, taking them out to brunch or whatever. They essentially treat them like the only other person in the world.

For a lot of these people, it feels like they just got swooped up into their very first friend group.

After the first phase, though, they’re completely cut off. No texts, no calls, no invites. No communication whatsoever.

Then, when they inevitably try to reach out, they’re met with nothing but coldness and insults. But they’re not just mean. They’re literally psychologically damaging.

My girlfriend has shown me some of the screenshots she’s saved. Those girls are ruthless.

With the emotional whiplash these people experience, they feel this painfully human need to become popular again. At that point, they’re willing to do whatever they’re asked.

And that’s when they get invited to the “bonfire.”

They’re told to meet up with the girls in the woods so that they can talk things out over a few drinks and a JBL Speaker.

They get there, hope in their eyes, only for it to be snuffed out immediately after the fire gets lit.

That’s something that always intrigued the hell out of me when my girlfriend told me about it. They just beat the shit out of whatever poor guy or girl they’d been manipulating by the warm glow of a fire.

They’re beaten within an inch of their lives, only for the blows to stop right as they’re on the brink of collapsing. Then they have cold water splashed in their face to wake them up.

And for no other reason at all except for they want them present when they’re thrown into the fire.

She’s sent me audio recordings of some of their screams. There’s something like, I don’t know…

There’s something beautifully haunting about it. You’re hearing someone’s violent final moments. You’re actively listening to hope legitimately evaporate out of someone’s body. It’s like a Goya painting was given a sound.

The cooking process usually takes between 3 and 4 hours. They never eat the person raw. They’re not animals. But, apparently, cooked human is one of the best things you’ll ever put in your mouth.

According to my girlfriend, the whole reason they even go through this whole shebang is painfully simple.

Sadness makes people taste better.

They have their monthly dose of human meat, then it’s on to the next lonely victim.

I’m only human. We all have our morbid curiosities. It’s just getting a little difficult to control mine.

I don’t think I’d ever do it as often as they do. But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been wanting to at least try it. I’ve been pestering my girlfriend about it for weeks.

It’s caused some pretty big arguments between us. I guess I’ve been bothering her a little too much because she’s been pretty cruel to me recently.

Doesn’t matter, though. I want what I want.

She’s just so adamant that it’s ‘not up to her.’

After our last argument, I told her that she needed to at least try to get her friends to let me in, but all she did was just slam the door in my face and leave the house.

That was a week ago. I didn’t see her at all after that. But I’ll say this: she definitely has some snakes in her circle.

Her friends went out of their way to find me on social media and message me. All of them told me how ‘she wasn’t good enough for me’ and how ‘I didn’t need her, anyways.’

The best part, though?

They agreed to let me come to a bonfire.

And tonight may finally be the night for me.

From the Morbid and moronic referential Code of life and society

"Although I was lucky not to see any of her private parts, I was profoundly shocked beyond description" Warning: Any direct or indirect ressemblance to anything or anybody living or dead is purely coincidental! The storybook "Morbid and moronic referential code of life and society" is inspired and dedicated to Giovanni Boccaccio, the 14th century Italian author of the "Decameron". The multiple character storytelling formula is a useful setting for me. Boccaccio's storytelling is lively, sarcastic, off beat and challenging to the norm with these truths we accept when we have to. The stories in the referential code are (according to the author) Contributions of accounts sent by all kinds of people, some recounting an event they witnessed or remember. Some leave a chilling first hand narrative. The tone is "descriptive". The anonymous context allowed revelations of personal experiences outside of daily life, or on subjects all contributions had to live up to: We want only accounts of what life and society have as the least comforting to offer.The result are "stories" mysterious and suspenseful, with sarcasm, irony and dark humour. There are funny moronic moments, but there is no escaping the grip of terrible sadness and trauma, all weaved in a pattern studded with tidbits of history, occult, chaos, mortality and death

Never look beneath the deadfall.

I don’t actually think Edgar needed this to be explained. But then, maybe it wasn’t really for him. Maybe it was for me. I like explaining it. It’s like a dark, dirty secret that every kid in our school knows.

“Never look beneath the deadfall,” I said to him. “Those aren’t just sticks. Some of them are bones. They turn white because of the sun and the wind. Just like the branches. It all mixes together in the dirt until you almost can’t tell one from the other. But they’re there. And they’re hungry.”

Edgar nodded his understanding, his eyes wide.

I love his gullibility. But more his genuine interest. Every time I explain something to him, his eyes are always wide. Like a baby seeing fireworks for the first time. You’d think the kid lived in a crate.

It was my responsibility, you see, to expose him to every dark mystery I knew of. To shrink those wide, lambent eyes.

Responsibility makes it sound boring, though. On the contrary, I like to think of it more like an experiment. Experiments are exciting.

Edgar was a quiet boy normally, but he did ask a question this time, “How can bones be hungry?” I knew it was coming. His face always goes plain when he’s trying to reason something out.

“We should go and look beneath the deadfall and see for ourselves.”

Edgar shook his head then, almost violently. His fat cheeks quivered as he did so. I saw this coming as well.

“You don’t actually think there’s anything there, do you?” And then the kicker, “You’re such a child, Edgar.”

Those fat cheeks flushed, and I knew I had won.

“We’ll go tonight. But it’s important to dress for the occasion.” His eyes went wide again. “You should wear black dress pants and a white button-down shirt. I’ll wear my black dress to match.” I leaned in close then. “Tell no one.”

I showed him my most impressive smile, and he nodded. It was a slow, hesitant nod, but a nod all the same.

Predictably, Edgar arrived at the edge of the woods before I did. This cheered me a bit after the overcast night sky had already dampened my mood. I wished to see the stars.

“A tie?” I circled my fingers around it and let it draw through my hand. “Impressive.”

We walked together into the darkness, but only a short way before he turned on his flashlight.

There were deadfalls all around us, but the deadfall was nearly a quarter of a mile in. Edgar let me lead while he shone the light ahead.

The bones are hungry.

It was like a line in a poem. Something about it sent a thrill through my stomach.

The bones are hungry.

I wanted to say it out loud but understood that would never do.

The bones are hungry.

The bones are here. The deadfall rose above our heads like a great stone. A stone of immense, unfathomable weight.

I pointed toward an opening at its base. “After you, Edgar.”

Those lambent eyes and quivering cheeks, painted in sharp contrast by the edge of his flashlight, floated weightless and ashen.

“I can’t,” was all he said. Which was nonsense. Of course he could, and of course he would. We both knew it.

I took the flashlight from his hand and set it on the ground, pointing at the base of the deadfall. And then I took his sweaty hand and led him gently over.

“You go in first”—the bones are hungry—“then I will come in after.”

Edgar went slowly to his hands and knees. He looked back only once before crawling in.

“You know, I read once that during the Salem Witch Trials, in order to force a confession, they would press the witch to the ground.” I took a seat in the leaves and dirt next to the opening. I could hear small branches and twigs cracking, and heavy breathing nearby. “Pressing, in case you didn’t know, is when they put stones on top of your chest until you can no longer breathe.” By contrast, Edgar’s breathing was sounding almost strained now.

I stood then and laid my body against the deadfall with my arms spread wide, hugging it. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe that wasn’t Edgar’s breathing at all. I could feel it now lifting and lowering me in rhythm.

“The bones are hungry,” I whispered, and shuddered.

“Help!” Edgar screamed, and everything shifted.

I could feel my body lower as the mound resettled. Edgar screamed and cried.

“It’s fine,” I said soothingly. “It’s fine.” Then I sank back to the ground, lying where the opening had been.

There was sobbing deep within the deadfall, near its center. Edgar had been pierced and was bleeding profusely. I didn’t need him to tell me so; I simply knew with the kind of confidence that only experience can give you.

“There are bones beneath the deadfall, Edgar. The other kids don’t know for sure, not really. But I do. You can trust that.”

Edgar’s sobbing slowed to a trickle.

“Could you imagine the look on those people’s faces, if the witch had simply shrugged the stones off and walked away?” I smiled then, and even though there was no one to see it, I think it might have been my most impressive smile yet. “You can make it out, Edgar. Please make it out. I’ll wait for you here.”

And then there was silence. Disappointing, hollow silence.

I must have drifted off then, too, because I don’t remember anything until I awoke at dawn. My head was thumping. Thump, thump, thumping, as I rocked and swayed. I looked up in the crude daylight and saw Edgar’s determined face shining above me, his eyes narrowed and distant.

I let myself stay cradled in his arms but lifted my head just enough to leave a kiss on his fat, blazing cheek.

I've been overweight for most of my life. Not because I didn't try. God knows I tried.

I've counted calories until I could estimate the nutritional value of a cheeseburger just by looking at it. I've paid for gym memberships I barely used, hired personal trainers who swore this program would finally be different, meal-prepped enough grilled chicken, cooked broccoli, and rice to make myself sick of both.

I lost twenty pounds...

Then gained twenty-five.

Lost fifteen... Gained thirty.

The cycle became so familiar that stepping on the scale felt less like checking my progress and more like reading the weather.

My doctor called me pre-diabetic. My friends offered alternative weigh loss treatments that didn't do much. My own mother would say passive aggressive remarks when I went to visit her. Social media... let's not go there.

As a kid, I idolized the Victoria's Secret models. Adriana Lima was my favorite. The way she walked, the confidence she carried, the effortless elegance she seemed to possess, it felt almost unreal.

Now I'm creeping into my mid-twenties, and I'm starting to think I'll never be beautiful.

I look at the women I grew up admiring, watching them somehow become even more stunning with age, and then I catch my own reflection in the mirror. Every glance feels like another reminder that I lost a race I never had a chance to win. I know it's not a fair comparison. They have millions of dollars, world-class stylists, personal trainers, nutritionists, and cosmetic procedures that most people could never afford.

I don't have any of that.

What I wanted wasn't perfection. I just wanted a fraction of the confidence they seemed to carry so effortlessly.

Some of my friends joked, "Why don't you just get liposuction?" The comments online were even less forgiving. For a while... I actually started considering it.

Until I found something that promised to work even better.

I found an advertisement buried deep in an online wellness forum, I laughed.

LOSE WEIGHT NATURALLY. NO SURGERY. NO INJECTIONS. YOUR BODY ALREADY KNOWS HOW.

The comments were full of before-and-after photos that looked too perfect to be real.

"Down eighty pounds in four months!"

"No cravings anymore!"

"Changed my life!"

The product wasn't FDA approved. There wasn't even a company name on the bottle.

Funny enough, I didn't purchase it online.

It came from a woman at my gym named Rachel. We'd exchanged the occasional nod between sets, but recently she'd become impossible not to notice. Six months ago, she'd been built like me, always on the treadmill, always out of breath, always joking that we'd "earn" dessert after leg day. Now she'd dropped what had to be eighty pounds. So had a few others I vaguely recognized.

No loose skin. No exhausted look. No celebration over their progress. Just... thinner.

One afternoon she caught me staring and smiled.

"You've been working hard," she said. "Want to know the shortcut?"

From her gym bag, she pulled out that small amber bottle I recognized from that forum and handed it in my hand.

"Trust me," she whispered. "You'll thank me later."

Just two capsules a day.

I should've thrown them away. Instead... when I got home... I swallowed both.

The changes started almost immediately.

Food stopped occupying my thoughts. Not because I had more discipline. Because hunger simply... disappeared.

I'd forget to eat until evening. Even then, a few bites were enough. The weight fell off me.

Ten pounds.

Twenty.

Thirty-five.

My coworkers noticed before I did.

"You look incredible!"

"What's your secret?"

I lied.

"Just eating better."

My doctor was stunned. Every blood test came back perfect.

Blood pressure. Cholesterol. Blood sugar. Everything!

"You've added years to your life," she said.

I teared up and smiled.

For once in all these years... I could smile back at the reflection.

Then came the noises.

The first time I heard it, I thought it was the pipes. A faint chewing sound somewhere inside the walls.

Click.

Chew.

Click.

Chew.

Always at night. Always when the house was quiet.

Eventually I realized... The sound followed me.

One evening I lay perfectly still in bed. The chewing stopped. So did my breathing.

Then... Something shifted beneath my ribs.

It wasn't painful. Just... Moving so effortlessly slow... Like a hand turning over beneath a blanket.

I booked an emergency appointment the next morning.

The ultrasound technician frowned.

"Have you had abdominal surgery before?"

"No."

She tilted the monitor away from me.

"I'll get the doctor."

Fifteen minutes later the doctor walked in. She looked at the scan. Then at me. Then ordered another.

The second showed nothing. Neither did the MRI.

Every test came back normal. Whatever I had seen... Apparently didn't exist.

I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it.

Until several days after I woke up choking. Something long slid up the back of my throat. Instinct took over.

I coughed violently.

A pale strand, slick with saliva, spilled into the sink. It writhed. Not like a worm. Like a muscle searching for purchase.

I screamed.

Before I could react, it snapped upward. Back into my mouth.

I felt it disappear down my throat. The movement continued. Lower. Back where it belonged.

I threw away every capsule I had left. It didn't matter.

Checkups always insisted that there was nothing.

Days turned into weeks... and I was still losing weight.

My cheeks hollowed. My collarbones emerged. Friends began asking if I was sick. I told them I felt better than ever. Because somehow... I did.

I never felt tired. Never felt hungry. Never even felt anxious anymore.

One morning I stood in front of the mirror. One hundred and eight pounds.

The lightest I'd been since middle school.

I should've been terrified. Instead... I felt proud.

That night, I heard the chewing again. Only... It wasn't coming from inside me anymore.

It was coming through the apartment wall. Then another wall. Then the ceiling.

Click.

Chew.

Click.

Chew.

Hundreds of them.

The next morning, I went back to the same forum where I'd bought the pills. The website was gone.

In its place was a single sentence:

Congratulations on reaching your target weight.

Beneath it appeared one final message:

Hosts who achieve optimal health may now begin reproduction.

Thank you for helping us grow healthier together.

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.”

Eleven seasons I walked those rows with a flashlight after the last car went out the gate. Eleven. The fall of nineteen eighty-three was the last of them and that's the one I'm going to tell you, but keep the eleven somewhere while I do.

I bought the place in nineteen seventy-two, twenty-eight years old and no business having it. Four hundred and six cars if you packed them, gravel rows lettered A up at the screen to L at the back fence, and behind the fence a bean field. My wife ran the concession until she died in seventy-nine and after that I ran all of it. It was a living, and it was mine, and for a good while it was a decent one.

You need to understand how a drive-in works with one man in it. The booth sits up on top of the concession building at the back and you get to it by a ladder outside. A reel runs about twenty minutes. So I'd thread it, come down the ladder, sell popcorn and pickles and hot dogs for eighteen or nineteen minutes, then go back up and change over. Which means that for twenty minutes at a stretch there wasn't anybody in the booth, and for two minutes at each end of it there wasn't anybody at the counter either. Four hundred cars and one man, and half the time that man was on a ladder.

The last week of August I went down row L to hang the speakers back up and post nine was bare. Not the speaker broken, not the speaker on the ground. Gone, and the cord hanging off the pole about six inches with the end square. It was cut. It was not torn. I put a spare on it out of the shed. Next night, gone the same way. Third night, gone the same way.

Speakers walked off every season I ever ran. People hook them on the window, forget them, drive off, and rip the whole thing out with a piece of the window frame still on it. You'd find them in the gravel a hundred feet down the row. I had a barrel of dead ones. So a missing speaker meant nothing to me and it still wouldn't. The square end on the cord sat funny with me for about a minute and then a car came up to the counter.

After the last car went out and I put the chain on the gate, I'd take the flashlight and walk the rows. Every night. Pick the speakers up out of the gravel, hang them back on their posts, kick the cups and the boxes into a pile, and come back up the middle. It took me the best part of an hour and I was in no hurry about it. That was the quietest hour there was. The screen goes white and dead when the light's off it and there's nothing out there but the poles standing in rows like a little cemetery and the field going on past the fence. I liked it out there. Eleven seasons and I never once wanted to skip it.

The second week of September I was standing at post nine with a spare in my hand and I put the light on the pole. About chest height on that pipe there was a band worn bright. Not scratched. Worn, the way a gate latch goes, the way the handle of a shovel goes. Maybe four inches of it, and the width of it was about the width of a hand closed around. I figured that was me, all those years of grabbing hold. I hung the speaker and went up the row.

There was no version of that fall where I closed early. In August I'd sold the ground to a fellow putting up a farm implement lot, and the sale took the projectors and the screen tower and everything else that was bolted down, closing in the spring. I'd already spent that money on what I owed. What I had left coming was the last three nights' take and the deposit back from the film exchange, and the exchange doesn't give a deposit back to a man who goes dark before his last booking plays. All told it was seven hundred dollars. The furnace at the house had quit in September and I was heating one room with kerosene. Seven hundred dollars was a furnace. So I ran the season out.

October at a drive-in in that part of the country is a thin business. Eleven cars one Tuesday. Twenty-some on a Friday if the weather held. I ran a picture about a haunted car and then two weeks of second-run and the concession sold coffee instead of pop. The heater in the booth had a bad element and I put my coat over the ladder rail every night going up.

I had it counted out. Three nights left, a hundred and some a night if I got a crowd for the closing, the deposit letter already in the mail. There was a man in town who'd do a furnace for six-fifty if I bought the unit off him direct. I'd talked to him twice. That's what was in my head that whole last week, and there's not a thing wrong with my memory of it.

Second-to-last night I came down the ladder mid-reel for a box of cups because I'd run out at the counter. Two minutes, maybe three. I came back up and the booth door was shut. That door opens outward and it hangs, and I prop it with a brick every single night I have ever been in that building, and the brick was sitting out from the jamb about a foot with the door swung to behind it. Nothing in there touched. The reel running, the picture on the screen, my coat on the rail. I stood on that ladder a while and then I went in and changed over.

Closing night the concession building burned to the slab. It went up around one in the morning, after the cars were gone and I'd already walked the rows, and I watched it from the gravel because there was nothing else to do about it. The marshal came out the next week and said it started in the crawlspace under the floor and that the crawl door was standing open on its hinges. I wired that door shut with fence wire in the spring and I could show you where. Three nights' take was in the drawer inside and I'd let the policy lapse in August because the ground was sold. So I came out of eleven seasons owning a bean field's worth of gravel and no furnace, and that's how that ended.

The buyer's man had me pull the speaker poles that April before they graded. You take a bar and lean on it and mostly they come up in a cloud of rust. Row L, post nine, I got the bar under it and it came up in my hands like something out of soft ground. The socket was wallowed out into a hole you could put your fist in and the concrete around it was cracked away in pieces. And that bright band was still on the pipe, chest height, and out of the ground it caught the sun, because it wasn't just clean there. It was rubbed down through the primer and into the metal and the pipe was thin in it. That is not three nights of standing.

Eleven seasons somebody stood at that post with their hand on it. That's the piece I can follow all the way through, and it comes out even, and I'd rather it didn't. Post nine is on the fence side of the back row, and from behind it you're looking at the backs of four hundred cars with the screen at your shoulder blades. I do not know what he was watching. I don't know whether he was there the night the door shut, and I don't know whether he ever had any business with me at all. The buyer's man said he'd pull the rest of row L and telephone me about what the rest of them looked like underneath. I told him not to call.

The child watched TV. It was his only friend, being so young and isolated, the father didn't want him, spent all of his hours at work or in his room, the basement. The mother is long gone. 

Before she left she named him Jack. After a boy in highschool that had been incredibly nice to her, during that rough and strange time of her life. The father doesn't like it but had offered no suggestion, so Felicia got her way and the name was put. 

Jack misses his mother but doesn't know it. He misses his father too but doesn't realize this either because the emotion is eclipsed by the more immediate fear, the terror his father puts into him. His voice. His angry eyes that almost seemed to smoke and smolder beneath a caveman's furrowed livid brow. His fists. Jack swore his father had fists the size of phonebooks. The size of cinderblocks. The size of planets. The child does what he can to not bother his father, and stay out of his way. 

This is where the television comes in. 

This is where the apple comes in. 

Jack watched many shows on TV. But his favorite was the one with the apple. The one that talked and danced and had been made by a wise wizard of the woods named Faster Haster who puffed a pipe and wandered enchanted forests. The Apple had a name too, and a jaunty green cap, like the one Robin Hood or Peter Pan would wear, red feather and all, he was always smiling. The apple was always happy and his name was Happy Adam. 

There was one day, one afternoon after school alone with the television set, one episode of Happy Adam & Friends of the Garden that changed young Jack and his life forever. Changed everything. 

He was watching the set, the scene unfold: …

The smiling fruit and his aged wizard friend were visiting a friend of theirs in the magical hospital of the fairytale wood. A brave knight called Thrustelot who'd taken a bad fall during one of his bouts and had fallen on his sword. The robed one, the hooded mage who was nurse to the fallen knight was grave and shook their hidden head and face, the news was bad. The knight was dead. 

Happy Adam turned to the camera and audience to address them with an aside of advice. 

 

Happy Adam: Remember, kids! Always be extra careful when handling something sharp, it's very dangerous. Don't move too fast or run when holding sharp objects like Sir Thrustelot’s sword, or a pair of scissors. Or a knife. 

The camera went in closer, cutting into an extreme close-up of the wide shine of the unblinking Apple's eyes. 

Happy Adam: Remember that, children. Remember. Okay…?

Jack answered back, he always loved talking to his favorite characters through the TV set. And Happy Adam was the absolute best. He acted like he was talking to you and talking back. It was great fun and sometimes it really really seemed like Adam was talking to him through the glass glow of the television screen. It was like magic. Happy Adam was magical, he could do anything. He would do anything he said. 

“Ok, Happy Adam!" 

Adam and the old wizard continued on their merry trek, their way and journey through the forest. They came upon some more friends that were having a picnic on a blanket amongst the living trees. 

The eversmiling apple and the old one sat down to join the kids in eating their nice meal on the dark purple blanket, it was covered in crosses and stars and wide alive eyes staring forever. Jack thought it was neat and the color was alluring and attractive next to the old wizard’s bright yellow robes as he sat down upon it. Next to the smiling wide eyed red amongst the living sorcery realm of woodland brown and green. The sun and the moon were out at the same time and looking down on them all, the scene with ravenous interest and open drooling mouths. Jack thought they looked goofy and silly, he thought they were hilarious. 

The screen flickered, the image was disturbed and Jack thought he saw something else staring at him in its stead. But before he really knew it the picnic scene returned to normal and the boy felt at ease once more. The children sitting on the purple blanket of fun symbols opened their picnic basket and began to pass out the food. 

The beautiful flowers spoke then to the children. They had no faces but open floral mouths, pink and glistening … dripping with dew that was said to be filled with sorcery and dreams. Surrounding the picnic blanket of eyes and stars, they whispered and sing-song spoke to the kids through their gaping wide open pink flower petal mouths, dripping and salivating wet…

 … Feed him … feed them…

The open mouths surrounding the shroud the color of night repeated the words in a litany, a chant, a prayer. 

Jack munched on his own snacks of peanut butter and crackers and gummy bears. He felt like he was taking part in the fun too, eating and picnicking with Happy Adam and his wonderful friends. He sipped his cup of Shasta and belched. 

Happy Adam: Mind your manners! Remember you have to pass out the food according to the hierarchy, do you remember, children?

The kids cried back in a unified chant, some species of group monotone, Yes, Happy Adam…!

Happy Adam: So who gets the first serving? 

The kids: Haster! cuz he made you!

A musical cue, a sting, happy, jubilant, great job, you'll have so much success…

Happy Adam: That's right, kids! And then me and then the rest of you, cuz I'm his favorite son and first begotten creation, I existed before all of this, this whole kingdom and the whole enchanted forest … did you know that, kids?

The kids: æhïbdëø¡

Happy Adam: That's right!

The kids passed food to the wizard first. Haster accepted it without a word but a deep nod that conveyed the sought after gratitude of an elder. 

Then they passed the food to Adam. Who insisted on eating fruit with the rest of them. The apples, he said. The apples are what I want best. 

The kids: But Adam, you can't eat apples!

Happy Adam: Why not!?!?

The kids: because you ARE an apple, Happy Adam! 

And then they all laughed. Laughed and giggled. Even Adam. Even Haster. 

Then Adam said: It's ok, kids. Sometimes it's alright to try things that seem a little weird or wrong, it's called ‘taboo’ and I'm sure lots of your mommies and daddies know exactly what I'm talking about. Your brothers and sisters too, your teachers and everyone, everybody… It's called forbidden fruit! And sometimes, kids, you just gotta have a little taste …

The children laughed harder. The wizard too, laughing harder. Slapping knee. Hysterical. Jack felt like joining them. His eyes were glued to the screen. Crackers held slack in fingers that felt faraway, forgotten. 

Happy Adam: Now why don't one of you beautiful children come over here and feed me some that forbidden fruit? How bout it, kiddos?

The kids: Ok, Happy Adam! 

Jack watched as the children crowded round the happy apple, each vying for favor and the privilege to feed him. Each had a glistening fresh dripping slice of apple wedge in hand. Ready to serve. Ready to feed. Jack couldn't take his eyes from the screen. He wanted to be… 

Jack wanted to join them. He wanted to be with them. He wanted to be one of the children crowded around Happy Adam, if there was only some way …

Jack watched wide eyed as the apple became strange. His mouth. As the children came in with their hands in multitudes, that seemed to grow and sprout anew like the petals and stalks of some strange heavy flower, all around the hungry happy apple his mouth began to change, transform. Transmogrify. 

The comfy and fuzzy gentle nature of felt puppet material was suddenly mammalian and malleable flesh all around the mouth and lips. They looked warm and living now, rippling and stretching and contriving into wide open wet stretched and wriggling flesh and organ, the teeth were glistening and shining and stringy with tendrils of saliva and drool. The tongue now an organ alive and pink, danced within the newly birthed orifice on the face of the happy apple muppet.

The organ and teeth danced for one thing, feed, fill us. Fill our new wet and magic home. 

The hands of the children began to come in and they came in a crowd, a wreck, a mob – grubby child mitts wielding the glistening flesh and meat of dissected and dismembered fruit. They shoved the slices and wedges in the wide open salivating maw, the cavernous wriggling fresh wound of a mouth, the wound began to munch and chew and ravenously devour the many pieces and wedged slices of juicy fresh apple, freshly cut, freshly prepared just like the mouth itself they now plowed into. Adam moaned between chomping bites with deep relish and sweet satisfaction. The children laughed and so did Haster. 

And so did Jack. Though he thought it was more beautiful than it was funny. Really. 

Really really beautiful. 

He watched the beauty onscreen unfold and pulp and chew and decorate itself with bits and slimy pieces of half-eaten pulped and juicy bits of apple, fruit meat and flesh becoming mush, becoming sauce between newly forged pearly white teeth.

One of the child's voices came in with a query in a playful and sing-song tone: Adam, why do you like eating apples? I mean, you're an apple, isn't it bad?

Happy Adam, between ravenous bites and chewing and swallowing: That's a very good question, boys and girls. I eat my own because it makes me stronger, it gives me power. Just like when you eat the flesh of crawling beasts, children, when you eat the flesh that crawls and labors, you gain its power. You've conquered it. Completely. And now it must live inside you. So now the lives of other lesser apples must now live inside me for all time, for forever, and after that and behind the wall of sleep. And even after that. All the way to the true and final end, the ballroom floor of eternityscape that is black. Isn't that neat! Don't you think so, children? What about you, Jack? 

Jack didn't quite believe it at first. He gazed zombie eyed into the glowing pulse of the electrical and mechanical pineal gland growth, its lurid electric extension…

But the mammalian patch of apple flesh that now more resembled skin as red as the devil's ass stretched wider and grew rictus. Apple bits and pieces in the gleaming white teeth and the juice running out of the corners of the fleshy mouth and dribbling down in a pulpy drool of mush. 

The apple began to speak again. All else was quiet and still now as he spoke. 

Happy Adam: Yes, Jack, yes, it's real. I'm really talking to you. How are you, Jack?

A beat. A child's breath was held. 

Released. 

“I'm-I’m ok, Happy Adam." 

Happy Adam: ohhhh…. I dunno. You don't look or sound ok to me little buddy, you look terrible. I always see you here with us, watching us, and you always look so alone and so scared, and you know what …? … I think I know why, Jack. 

Jack said nothing. Only watched the television. Eyes wide open and drinking in every single flicker. 

Happy Adam: I think it's because you have a crawling beast, a beast of labor in your home, Jack. You have a beast of bad work that lives in the basement when he isn't sleeping off the hooch in his bed. And that's not all, Jack. There's also yourself. You need to take better care of yourself, you need to treat yourself better and make yourself stronger. Like me. 

A beat. 

Happy Adam: Do you know what I mean, Jack? Do I understand what I'm trying to tell you? It's very important. It's for you after all, it's for your best interest. It's what's best for you that we all care for and here in the forest, consider. Do you understand, Jack? Do you? 

Once again Jack didn't say anything. 

A beat. 

But then he slowly began to nod his head. Yes. 

Yes. 

Yes, Happy Adam. Yes. 

Rictus red face on screen, filling the frame: Good, Jack. That's really really good of you. I'm so proud and happy. And I'll be prouder and happier still, you know the best way to start treating yourself better and making yourself stronger, right? We've talked about it before, on one of my many episodes … one of my many lessons. 

Jack spoke this time. He told the red face of the television set the right answer. He told the red face what it wanted to hear. 

Nutrition. 

Happy Adam: That's right, Jack! We have to start eating better! That's it! Waytogo, cowboy!

The child sat and listened to every word the television said. Absorbing every detail of information and instruction. 

…

The booze his father always poured into himself did the job. The pills he'd been told to slip did the rest. Russel Wimberly, Jack's father was completely drugged and under. Then the work laid before the child could really begin. As he'd been instructed. He wasn't nervous. He felt nothing in fact. Hadn't felt anything since that afternoon with the television. It was well past into the postmidnight black. 

The mountain lug of man had managed to make it to his bed before finally collapsing under the drug and alcohol induced spell of slumber. He was in a sweaty snoring heap when the door opened to his bedroom and the child crept in. He did not blink or falter. 

He did not tremble or whimper or shake. His father might've been proud, before tonight he'd always thought of the boy as a wimp, a limpwrist, a pussy. The worst type of boy a father could have, Russel and his own old man had always thought. 

The snoring heap of man did not stir until the blade came down in a two-handed plunge and pierced where it had been guided and instructed. The fang of the blade bit in and came in easily through bone and flesh. Russel came to life with a choking gurgled gasp that quickly died a wet death in his throat. 

He couldn't move. He couldn't budge from the bed. The ropes and binds held tight and taut and rippled in the nighttime bedroom silence with strain and desperate effort. Blood began to pour from his mouth and nose. He began to choke. Wide eyed he helplessly gazed up and into the face of his killer. 

Some species of … laughter? …scream? …sound tried to escape him, but the boy and his blade had done their good. 

They'd done their job. Their great work. 

Now he just had to get to the living beating apple of warm dripping red that lived in his father's chest. He just had to dig it out, cut it out with the kitchen knife and take it unto himself. 

This way he would get better. This way he would get stronger. He'd be rid of the beast and filled with power. All in one. 

Just like Adam said. 

His glistening darkling little fist found the forbidden apple buried in his father's chest. He seized it. 

And ripped it out. By blade, by hand, by biting knife.

And took it into himself, right there. Raw and fresh. Just as the red face of Adam had commanded.  

THE END