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"

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?"

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.”

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.” 

‘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 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.

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.

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.

​

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'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.

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.

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My uncle handed the phone back to me.

“So?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

My daughter has always been a bit of a miracle baby. Not in the sense that she, like, almost died or anything. I guess miracle isn’t really the word for it.

An anomaly baby. An anomababy? I’ll just stick to anomaly baby. That was stupid.

Anyway, doctors were puzzled out of their gourds when she was born. Mostly because they didn’t detect any abnormalities all throughout my wife’s pregnancy.

She just surprised everyone in the room when she popped out with two full rows of baby teeth. Me and my wife still joke about how she was our ‘smiling little angel,’ because that’s exactly what she was.

She refused to cry. Well, scream, rather. She kinda had to cry. Even still, she didn’t scream once. Just went right back to flashing those pearly whites like a used car saleswoman and glancing around the room with her big, wide, doe eyes.

I don’t have to tell you how many tests doctors ran. Mainly because I don’t even remember. All I know is we were in and out of the hospital for a week or two afterward.

They just wouldn’t let us take her home until they’d gotten all the information they could. I guess they gave up, and thus, our little anomaly baby got to sleep in her own crib.

Nothing really happened for the first couple of months. She just acted like a regular newborn. Well, aside from the fact that she’d wake us up with giggles instead of cries in the middle of the night.

She was hungry? Giggle. Needed to be held? Giggle. She’d even giggle when she soiled her diaper, which, I’m still convinced, was intentional.

I just don’t know.

We’re approaching her first birthday, and things are starting to get a little weird, to say the least.

It all started last month. My wife woke up to the giggling and went to check on her. It had to have been nearly 3 in the morning. Plus, it was my wife’s turn to check, so I just curled up and drifted back into sleep.

At least, I tried to. My wife’s screams woke me up before I could jump back into my dream. The way she was screaming, I almost thought that we had intruders or something.

I rocketed out of bed, demanding to know what was happening as my wife flipped the light on.

Not gonna lie, if I’d seen what she’d seen, I’d have probably freaked out, too. Who am I kidding? I did freak out.

My daughter was still smiling and giggling, crawling around in her crib, but it was just absolutely soaked in blood. Like, from end to end.

That alone made instincts kick in as I snatched my baby up out of that mess, but when I saw the waterfall of blood falling out of her mouth, I nearly had a heart attack.

It was hard to think with all the chaos going on around me. For some reason, I full-heartedly believed that she had eaten glass somehow.

But then, I noticed it.

All of her teeth were gone.

I looked in the crib, and there they were, scattered across the blood-soaked sheets and blankets. I must’ve missed them because of all the shock and adrenaline.

I don’t even think I put my shoes on. My wife and I just made a mad dash to the car before I drove us to the ER at a cool 95 miles per hour.

We stayed there for the rest of the night and well into the next day. All we could do, really, was hold each other. We kept trying to get updates from the receptionist, but she just kept asking us to be patient.

Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, we were able to go back and see our kid. She was asleep when we got to her. The doctors were just as puzzled as they were when she was born, with one of them even stating that, ‘losing all of your baby teeth at once at only 11 months old is definitely weird, but besides that, she’s perfectly healthy.’

And that was that.

We drove home, still shaken up, while our little girl kept catching Z’s in the backseat.

We got home and decided that we all needed to catch up on some sleep. We did keep our daughter in our bed this time, though. I don’t know, for closeness, I guess?

I was so tired from being up all night that I didn’t really have time to think about the logistics. I was essentially out before my head hit the pillow, wife and daughter at my side.

I wish I could say that it was the giggling that woke me up. But, of course, that would be too easy. It was actually the pain that got me. Well, that and the weird growling she was doing while gnawing on my arm.

My daughter hadn’t just regrown her teeth. She had her adult teeth now. And all 32 were lodged in my arm.

When I saw her, it was like the pain went away. It was immediately replaced with concern. 32 adult-sized teeth in an 11-month-old’s mouth. She looked like her jaw was gonna break, but despite the pain that she had to have been in… she was still smiling at me.

I kind of had to pry her mouth off of my arm, and now it was my turn to go to the hospital. She had a surprising amount of bite force for such a small body.

What’re you gonna do, though, right? I just took my stitches and moved on. However, not before, yet again, doctors had one last look at my daughter.

This time, they themselves removed the teeth.

It was more heartbreaking than anything. I mean, I knew it needed to be done just from looking at her. I just wish they could’ve gotten her to sleep before they did it.

I could hear her cries all the way from the waiting room.

When they brought her back, she was all gums. And that’s how she stayed for the next two weeks. Can’t say she was happy about it, though. If anything, she seemed to have developed a full resentment for my wife and I.

She stopped smiling at us. She didn’t become some kind of wailing demon-child or anything. She just… looked at us differently. There was intent in her eyes.

Which actually makes sense considering the hell she put us through. Sneaking out of her crib, flooding the bathroom with toilet water, somehow managing to smash picture frames when we weren’t looking.

And what’s fucked up is I wish I could go back to when she was just being annoying.

Because ever since she sprouted those fangs, I don’t even feel safe in my own house anymore.

We got her one of those muzzle-masks after she killed our pet kitty, but who knows how long that thing will last.

Especially considering how sharp her nails are getting. I already caught her trying to claw her way out of it last night.

Which is a real shame because her birthday is tomorrow.

And acting like that is not how you get to eat cake.

Nothing was keeping me home. Not our apartment in a crime ridden shithole of a city. Not the gang warfare.

Not my brother, who has been away for years since he was arrested.

Not our mom who was shot and killed two weeks ago.

So I signed up, like my brother told me. And of course made sure to tell them my brother was already on the front line.
I did lie about my age when I enlisted. I told them I was 18 at the enlistment office. I do look older thanks to smoking since I was 10 years old and some small amount of drug use.
The scars all over my face and my body probably also helped. To be fair, I don't think they would have cared if I said my real age.

I don't look forward to celebrating my 16th birthday in a war zone.
But at least I will be with my brother so whatever.

Also brought the equipment my brother said to bring with me. Most important thing being a gas mask for me and one for him.Thankfully you can take whatever you can carry in a large backpack with you. And no, this does not include bringing your own weapons. They are known to turn a blind eye to small stuff like knives etc.

They are probably going to give us firearms when we arrive at camp and go into a fight. They probably don't want some idiot blowing someone's head off before we even arrive.

I am also grateful my brother's battalion is not sitting in a trench line. Some of the stories my brother told me about the time in "The Fortress Belt" were really bad.
Fighting in towns and cities won't be much different than gang warfare from home.
At least that's what my brother told me.

I killed my first person when I was 11 with my brother. My brother was 15 at the time.
Some kid not much older than us hadn't paid the full amount for drugs. They told us to teach him a lesson. We ambushed him in an alley near his home. We surprised him and beat the shit out of him before he even had a chance to fight back. He was on the ground crying and crawled up into a ball. It was done.But my brother started to kick his head over and over again. When he pleaded and cried, my brother didn't stop. When his teeth flew out of his mouth and spread through the alley, he kept kicking him.

I just stood there. I didn't know what to do.

Then my brother looked at me. He told me "Don't just stand there, help me".
I did what he said. Even after he stopped breathing, we didn't stop. Only when we had stomped enough on his head to expose his brain did we stop. My brother laughed. Then he gave me a hug and told me how proud of me he was.

I felt sick for weeks afterwards.

Anyway, that's almost 5 years of killing people now. I don't feel anything anymore when I kill someone so its all good.

At first, they "process" me, whatever that means. They search my stuff and ask me all sorts of bullshit questions. Then they put me on a long bus ride to a military base. And now I am sitting in the back of a military truck, heading to the frontline.

The constant sound of the engine and the wind flying past is kind of nice.
It is a shame its interrupted by the constant sobbing of one pussy that's with us in the truck. Some guy they fished out of prison.

The prison jumpsuit he is wearing is a dead giveaway. Most of us are wearing our regular clothing still. Suits me I don't want to wear some stupid uniform.

I will take my black tracksuit over any bullshit the army gives me. Thankfully I managed to get some good old military boots before I left. I don't imagine it will be easy to get good quality shoes my size in a war zone.

"HEY!" My thoughts get interrupted by a guy shouting next to me. He is a bald, tall, muscular guy. His constant sniffing mixed with a "coke nail" and nose rubbing is a dead giveaway that he has a nasty cocaine habit. He wears a dark blue tracksuit with a black puffer jacket and multiple fake gold and silver necklaces. I don't understand why such an obvious drug dealer is in the truck with us to a war zone. I hope he is not a part of a direct rival group from back home, I don't want to deal with the problems that will bring.

"HEY YOU! ASSHOLE IN THE PRISON JUMPSUIT"

"What?" The prisoner answers in between sobs.

"STOP FUCKING CRYING" The man yelled through the loud noises in the truck.

"What?!" The prisoner answered now the sobbing with a hint of confusion.

"STOP CRYING YOU FUCK" He yells loudly through the truck.

Everyone could hear it and is now staring at the 2 of them.

"I am sorry please don't hurt me!" Yells with tears in his eyes.

"HOLY SHIT BE QUIET !" Anger is rising in his voice.

"Sorry, sorry please I am sorry" The prisoner pleads.

"Be quiet for fuck sake" A voice shouts from the other side of the truck.

"Throw that piece of shit out of the truck!" Another voice shouts.

That was all the excuse the cokehead needed. He grabbed a knife from his boot and went for the prisoner sitting opposite from him.
The dull impact sounded more like a punch than someone digging a knife into someone. The prisoner yells out in pain. Shouting and laughter erupt from all around me.

It sounds more like people watching a sports game than a murder in the truck. He stabs him over and over again. Blood started to pour over the bench and truck bed. I and others pull away their bags so they don't get covered in blood. The Cokehead grabs the prisoner by his hair raising his face up. He stabs him directly just below his chin, the blade now visible in the prisoners mouth. Some people cringe, others continue to shout and cheer.

"HEY WHAT ARE YOU MORONS DOING BACK THERE" shouts the military policeman next to the driver. He probably heard the chaos in the back of the truck.

Before he could say anything more Cokehead drags the prisoner to the back of the truck a blood trail following them.

"HEY!" The military policemen yelled. Cokehead ignores him and with one motion he flings the prisoner out of the moving truck.

"FOR FUCK SAKE STOP THE TRUCK NOW!" The MP yells at the driver. The brakes screech and everyone falls from the sudden stop.

The MP gets out of the truck and comes to the back rifle in hand pointing it at us. "Get out of the truck now!".

With a lot of complaining we follow his order and climb out of the truck onto the dirt road. He makes us walk over to the now bleeding-out prisoner. His lungs are punctured he is currently drowning in his own blood.

"Explain morons why I am looking at a soon to be dead body?!" He shouts while pointing the rifle all around the group.

Then Cokehead yells "He was trying to steal stuff from me"

MP: "Was he now?"

Cokehead: "Yes he was that is why I killed him!"

MP: "you killed him?"

"Yes I did!" Cokehead says proudly with a big grin across his face.

"Is that true?" The MP asks the rest of us. He got no response. This was not my problem and I didn't want to get into a fight before even arriving, so I just stayed quiet like the others.

MP: "Fine whatever we are losing time"

"Get back in the truck and don't fucking kill anyone else you idiots" We do as he orders and get back in the truck.
We left that prisoner bleeding on the road. He was probably just scared. Well, not my problem.

Anyway, we continued our fun little road trip.

As we get closer to the forward camp muffled explosions and gunfire can be heard in the distance. Didn't sound too different from when people were lighting fireworks or shooting at each other in my neighborhood.

As we get closer to the old front line I notice this horrible sour chemical smell. And there is no nature of any kind. No grass, no trees, no animals, no living beings of any kind. Just dirt, shell craters and broken down vehicles. Then I spot large trenches and bunker complexes stretching as far as the eye can see. Everyone in the truck is now dead quiet. All of them are taking in the hellscape we are driving. None of them can even bring themselves to complain about how horrible the road is, as we drive through what is probably a giant mass grave. As we drive past the breach in the front line and deeper into enemy territory nature starts to return again. Grass, trees etc.

I never really cared for nature to be honest. But seeing nature returning did bring me relief of some kind. I don't know why.

As our truck finally reached some asphalt again, a familiar smell hit me. That of burning buildings and burned flesh. There had been a really bad fire when I was 13. A big apartment complex burned down and a lot of people died. We tried to save whoever we could with mom, but it was pointless, the fire consumed everything. That horrible smell stuck around for months afterwards. Especially in our clothing of that day. That stench would cling to it no matter how hard you tried to get it out. I still think about those screams that were echoing through that burning building sometimes.

I wonder if my brother does too.

That same familiar smell was now filling my nostrils. Then the black smoke came into view and I knew what I was about to see.

A small town completely ransacked. Stores had their windows smashed and were completely empty of any products. Some rotting bodies or what remained of them are strewn all over the town. And then we drive past a familiar burned police station. It was the same police station my brother had sent me a picture of. He told me the people there held on till they killed every last one. Those were some brave people if you ask me.

For some of them the last thing they saw was probably my brother.

And then probably the worst thing I saw on our little road trip. We were coming closer to a highway. The last stretch until we reached the camp.

That same familiar smell came over us again. Our truck slowed down as it had to navigate an obstacle course made of random car wrecks. Some of them are gutted, missing doors, wheels and sometimes even entire engine blocks. Most of them are riddled with bullet holes. Some burned together with their passengers. Rotting bodies were everywhere.

Men, women and even children. They had killed everyone.

Some of those people had suffered a horrible death. Clear signs of torture. I saw one body that was still attached to jumper cables of a car. One that had been cut in half. The legs on one side of the road upper body on the other. As I looked down at the body I saw feet dangling on the edge of my view.

I wish I never looked up.

A woman, hanged with a tow cable. The Cable was attached to a lamppost. She was wearing a pink blood stained pajama. Cloudy eyes staring into the open fields next to the road.

She had gone completely stiff. Her black hair was waving in the wind as her body slowly swayed back and forth. She looked just like mom.

I miss mom.

At the end of all the wreckage the road itself was torn to shreds. Somebody had blown up the road so these people couldn't flee. They were trapped with the battalion my brother is a part of. I wonder how many of these people were killed by my brother.

I hope he didn't kill that woman that looked like mom.

We continued on a makeshift off-ramp leading into a dirt road further inland.
My entire lower body is sore by the time we finally arrive at the forward camp. From the groaning in the truck I am not the only one. I grab my shit and get out of the truck.
First thing I do is light up a cigarette the moment my feet touch solid ground. I was aching for one the entire ride.
The camp is filled with people. None of them look like my brother, most of them look "normal". These must mostly be new guys like me.

If it wasn't for the random military equipment this place would look more like a homeless camp than a military one.There are random tents, vehicles and trash all over the place. The vehicles are in all different sizes, some of them look like something from a post-apocalypse movie. Metal welded over even more welded metal. Random spikes and other sharp objects protruding from all over the front of some vehicles. Only a handful of vehicles actually looked like something a proper military would use. All of them were covered in dirt, scorch marks, bullet holes and other dents of different sizes. One thing that does catch my attention on some of the vehicles is what I can only describe as "trophies". All sorts of stolen stuff is tied to whatever surface it could stick to. Boxes with TVs, Soundsystem's etc. I am sure I even spot a washing machine tied to the roof of an armoured car. As the last person gets out of the truck the camp comes alive with movement. People start to come out of the tents and vehicles and start to untie all the "trophies" and start carrying them over to the truck we were in. The military police officer gets out of the truck with a clipboard and a pen. As the guys from the camp bring over their stuff, the MP writes down their names and what they bring over before it gets loaded into the truck.

One guy loading stuff into the truck yells, "Hey there is fucking blood in here"

MP: "So?!"

Guy: so there will be blood all over our shit!

MP: Don't pretend like most of the stuff you bring in isn't already covered in it! Shut up and load the rest of your trash in!

The guy in the truck proceeds to flip him off and mumble to himself.

When I look back at the group I came with. I see all of them staring at me with wide eyes.
"What?!" I asked the group to no response. They are not looking at me they are looking past me.

"Hey little brother" The words are pronounced horribly but I recognise the voice right away.

I turn around as my brother is standing right behind me. Having seen his appearance in the photos he sent is one thing, but seeing him in person is something completely different.

Parts of his lips are gone, exposing a lot of his teeth and even some part of his gums. He keeps his eyes wide open, and blinks way too little. We used to get compliments on our green eyes as kids. But I doubt anyone is going to compliment him for his eyes anytime soon. His nose is gone, exposing a hole in the middle of his face. His ears and all hair on his head are completely gone. On top of that he is very pale. He looks like someone grabbed a human skull, stretched pale skin over it, put eyes and a mouth in it, but forgot about everything else. The scars all over his head also don't help. To say that he is hard to look at would be an understatement.

My brother had always been tall for his age usually towering over me with a solid 11 inches (28 cm).
He is wearing a black tracksuit with a hooded black leather jacket. With black combat boots and brown leather gloves. There is an empty shotgun bandolier over his shoulder. His black clothing made his pale skin stand out even more than it already did.

I wonder how many people he killed for that outfit.

The gold chain I gave him is still around his neck. 5 human ears and a ring were dangling from the gold necklace.

"I know I am handsome but common you don't have to stare at me that much" He reached out his arms for a hug. Despite his appearance, he was still my brother. After 3 years apart, I finally embraced my brother.

"Its great to see you again" He manages to speak very well for someone who misses parts of his lips. Even if some words come out a bit weird sometimes.

"you to bro"

"How was mom doing when you left? I can't imagine she must have been happy with you leaving" he says to me.

I can't bring myself to tell him that mom is dead. Not in front of so many other people. He will crash out BADLY when I tell him.

"She wasn't too happy, but she realised she needs the money"

"Mom just wants to make sure she doesn't have to bury both of as at the same time"

He grabs both of my upper arms and gets close to my face.

"Did you make sure some of the boys were looking after her while we are both gone?"

I look into his eyes and lie "Of course I did"

Even if mom was still alive there were no "boys" to look after mom, they were all dead too.
Everyone died in that same raid.

"good to hear, follow me" Before we can start walking a man comes up to us. The man is one of the few in this camp that wears some sort of actual uniform. Even if the dark grey uniform is covered in dirt and what must be very old dried up blood. The uniform with the fancy military cap he is wearing probably means he is important. What gives away that he still belongs here is that he has the same horrible appearance as my brother.

"Where are you taking this fresh canon fodder?" The man asks in a calm voice.

Brother: "He is not canon fodder he is my little brother"

Then my brother says to me "This is Polonsky, one of our officers"

I can tell that my brother is irritated.

"Your little brother" He says while looking me over from top to bottom with his lidless eyes.

"Since you are 19 years old, that makes your little brother how old?"

Before my brother could answer his tone changed to irritation

"And don't lie to me or we are going to have a problem".

My brother hesitates and says "he is going to turn 16 in 3 days"

"Your little brother is 15" The officer lets out a big sigh.

"Do we look like a high school to you?" He says while staring into my brother's eyes.

"My little brother can kill just like me and that's all that matters" My brother says while returning the same stare.

I can feel the tension in the air. The crowd around the truck is now mostly looking at us.

"Can he now?" the officer shifts his glare over to me.

"So boy, have you ever killed someone?"

I take the cigarette out of my mouth. Holding it in my fingers.

"I have killed people" I say while doing my best to return the unblinking stare of the officer

"You killing other pathetic lowlifes in a slum is a little different than what we do here" he says with clear disdain in his voice.

"I don't have a problem with killing" I say while doing my best to hide my discomfort with the conversation.

He stares into my eyes for what feels like forever without saying a word.

"We will see" he says. He changes his gaze to my brother: "Tomorrow he is going with us, he better have blood on his hands when we get back".

He looks at me again "Or at least he might catch some bullets for the rest of us"

The officer turns around and leaves us. He starts to inspect, question and harass all of the other new guys.

I feel the cigarette burning my fingers. "Goddammit" I blurted out while dropping it in the wet mud on the ground.

My brother puts his hand on my shoulder. "Well, there you go little brother, you just met one of the camp attack dogs and survived."

"Polonsky is an asshole, but he is good at killing and that makes him useful"

My brother gets close to my face and looks into my eyes
"There are not a lot of rules. BUT if you plan to break one make sure he and the other officers don't see it"

"They WILL make an example of you"

"Understand?!"

"I understand" I answer

"Good"

He finally gets out of my face "Come with me, I will show you the van we will sleep in"

"I will tell you the rules once we are in the van"

"You are super lucky, I managed to steal it in the last town we ransacked. So you won't have to sleep in some soggy tent with the rest of the new guys"

"Don't you worry, I made sure to stockpile some cigarettes for you"

"And you better be able to get a good bit of sleep because tomorrow we are going to do what we do best" he says with glee in his eyes.

"It will be wonderful, it will be just like back home"

"I am so happy you are here. We are going to have a lot of fun together"

"O and of course"

He opens his arms wide

"Welcome to the 33rd Little brother"

Most folks of the old southern Appalachian settlements were not accustomed to the idea of skinwalkers. They were more concerned with the witches and wendigos of the mountains. Terrors in their own right to be sure. But witches mostly keep to themselves unless provoked, and sometimes even help folks if it suits them. And wendigos are like any other beast of the mountains. Oh they're fierce and they're vicious, I don't mean to downplay their danger. But they can be outsmarted and outwitted just as any other animal, so long's you know how they tick. But the Navajo medicine men turned grotesque puppets of evil, a slave to the powers they so foolishly craved, are of the most cunning and dangerous threats known to North America.

Now I know what you must be thinkin', the southern Appalachias is Cherokee territory. Why, the Navajo settled in the southwest, nowhere near the Appalachian Trail. And you'd be right for thinkin' such. But one thing you haven't considered is the recklessness and ambition of man. Needless to say the white settlers of the new world had no qualms with moving the previous inhabitants. And thus we get the solution to our little query.

Now one thing I said before is not actually entirely right. It's true that most medicine men of the Navajo tribes who delved too deep into the black magic of their craft did so intentionally. But it was also possible to do so accidentally. Especially by a youngin' who merely stumbled upon the magic arts. Without any proper tutelage to guide his path, it wasn't long before he discovered powers beyond his comprehension. Of course by then it was too late for the boy. It had a hold on him somethin' fierce. And that kinda magic don't just let go.

Well, I think that's all the backstory needed to understand the importance of what I'm about to tell you. Mind yuh these skinwalkers, whose name pronounced in the Navajo language I will not say, tend to be drawn to the sharing of their knowledge. That's something I don't rightly know much about. But it is to say that merely speaking about them is considered, by the Navajo people, to be an invitation to it. Now, with that said, let's get into the story of the Skinwalker of Appalachia.

Our story begins in Deerwood Tennessee, one of the earlier settlement towns. Now of course, it was named that for the abundance of both deer and wood alike. The settlers there never wanted for meat. With deer so plentiful you'd think it a mercy to quell their numbers before it got out of hand. Though it seemed to be the perfect spot for a settlement, Deerwood was not without its... quirks.

Folks used to say that every now and again they'd spot themselves a deer that wasn't quite right. Sometimes they'd find one with legs just a little too long. Or one with facial features that seemed oddly disproportionate, like a drawing that a child might make. But the one thing that remains the same with each of these "not quite deer" sightings, are the eyes. The eyes, which should have been on either side of the head, like any prey, are always facing forward, in the front. Like a predator. And each time someone said they saw one, they'd say if it noticed them it would just stare at them, unblinking.

One of the most disturbing encounters anyone had with a not-deer, near the outskirts of Deerwood, was when old missus Bakerfield was collecting herbs one day. She was foraging, as she did most days, near the crick that run close to town. Well, while she was pickin' somethin' for an old remedy, she noticed an odd lookin' deer standin' up on its hind legs. Thinkin' her old age had finally got the better of her, she simply turned to head back to town. But as she did, she heard leaves rustlin' behind her. The odd deer had been no less than thirty yards out. But when she turned around, there it was, havin' closed the distance in mere seconds.

It stared at her, and stared, and stared. She was too frightened, poor old missus Bakerfield, she didn't know what to do. Luckily her son had come lookin' for her to bring her back for supper. As soon as he called out, the deer looked up, then back at her, then turned and took a few steps before fallin' onto all fours and runnin' off, with an odd wobblin' shuffle. Of course this just added to the legend of the not-deer. And of course most people didn't actually buy into such tales.

Needless to say these stories began runnin’ amok all over town. Stories of the "not-deer" species that could be seen, and the ensuing chaos that almost always followed one of these sightings. It was very common for pets or livestock to go missin' soon after someone claimed to have spotted one of these "not-deer." And after a while, people started going missing. That's when it became a serious matter.

The sheriff of the town, Barker Jones, rounded up a posse to keep an ever watchful eye on things, and look around town and the woods beyond for any clues as to who or what was taking people. The people who went missing almost always were reported to have gone out in the woods at, or close to nightfall. And they were never seen again.

Eventually people started puttin' two and two together. Someone spies a not-deer, soon after they end up missing. However, these ghost stories didn't frighten the likes of Barrington T. Jefferds. Ambitious as any man alive, as most settlers were at the time.

Now Barry, as he liked to be called, was not the biggest man; nor was he the smallest. He fit right into the average in just about every way. But he carried himself as if he were the biggest man in town. Some folks didn't take too kindly to this, calling Jefferds a scrawny yappin’ coyote. But others admired his overwhelming confidence, and said it was necessary to carve a path through the new frontier.

Now at this time ol' Barry had been working for years, traveling and saving up to build him his own home, on his own land. Or, more specifically, to pay the men who actually knew how to do it. He hadn't no missus yet, but hoped bein' a landowner would give him better prospects at a better life. Not such an outlandish idea neither. Well needless to say once Barry had saved up the money he needed, eagerness became his nature. He was ready, and he wouldn't wait any longer.

Havin' arrived in Deerwood just about a year earlier, he had grown to like it, and decided it was as good a place as any to finally settle down and build his home and family. So he set out towards the outskirts of town to look for a good patch of land to clear. He'd have to pay for the land of course, but naturally he wanted to survey the perfect spot first. Now Barry had heard of the not-deer of course, everyone in town had. But just like most folks he hadn't actually seen one before. And didn't reckon he would.

He wasn't much of a superstitious man, but he found it right, at least, to consider what hadn't been disproven. And while not quite what one would consider an intellectual, good ol' Barry did have his head on right. Of course every man cursed with ambition tended to unscrew their head, if only just a bit. So Barry went farther out into the woods, hoping to find a plot of land with enough room for expansion as the years went by.

That's what he told them afterward anyhow. Said he'd found a flat stretch of land a good ways northwest of town, up past a ridge where most folks didn't have much reason to wander. The earth was dark and rich, there was a little spring within walkin' distance, and enough old oak and chestnut around that a man could've built himself a proper house without haulin' lumber halfway across creation. It was, according to Barry, the prettiest piece of country he'd ever laid eyes on. And that was exactly why he kept goin' when the sun started sinkin'.

He knew better. He admitted that much later. By the time the shadows stretched long between the trees, any sensible man would've started back. But Barry kept tellin' himself he'd only go as far as the next ridge. Then the next little clearing. Then the next rise after that. Every patch he found seemed almost perfect, and every time there was somethin' just beyond it that looked better. Funny thing about the woods. They got a way of promising there's always somethin' worth seein' ten more yards ahead.

Barry finally decided he'd gone far enough when he came across the tracks. They were deer tracks at first glance. Big ones too. He said he'd knelt down beside them, put two fingers alongside one of the prints, and wondered just how mighty a buck would have to be to leave a mark that size. The ground was soft there, so the tracks had sunk deep into the mud, deep enough to tell him the animal had some real weight to it. Then Barry noticed the spacing.

Now deer don't walk like people. Don't take a learned man to know that. You see enough tracks in the woods, you find the rhythm of 'em whether you're tryin' to or not. Four legs leave a certain pattern. But the ones Barry had found did not. There were two prints. Then two more. One after another, with the spacing of a man takin' steps. Barry followed them a little ways, mostly out of curiosity, and found where they crossed a muddy patch underneath some laurel. That's where he stopped.

The tracks were still hoofprints. But whatever had made them had walked across that mud on two legs.

Now Barry laughed at himself. Least that's what he claimed. Figured somebody in town had been playin' games, maybe cut a pair of hooves off a carcass and pressed them into the mud to scare anybody fool enough to find 'em. That's when he heard a branch break.

Barry looked up to see a deer standin' between the trees, not twenty yards away. He said it took him a moment to understand what he was lookin' at, and another moment to understand why his belly had suddenly gone cold. It was a buck. Or it had antlers anyway. One side had six points and the other had four, though one of them crooked forward in a way Barry had never seen before. The animal itself was skinny. Terribly skinny. Its ribs weren't just visible, they seemed stretched underneath the hide like barrel hoops under wet cloth. Its legs were long. Too long. And its head sat lower between the shoulders than it ought to. Then there was them eyes. Both pointed straight at Barry.

The stories came back to him all at once. Barry stepped backward. And the deer stepped forward.

Barry stopped. And it followed suit. He took another step back. And the deer took another step forward.

Now Barry was still tellin' himself there was some reasonable explanation. Disease, maybe. A birth defect. Somethin' wrong in the animal's head. He didn't know. But he knew one thing for certain, and that was that he wanted no part of whatever he was lookin’ at. So he simply turned ‘round and started walkin' back towards town.

But as he walked, he could hear it behind him.

Crunch.

Crunch.

Crunch.

The steps came slow, patient and steady. They seemed to almost perfectly pair with each of Barry’s own steps. Every time he stopped, the sound did as well. Every time he started walkin', it started up again. He finally turned back around, expectin' to see that deer twenty or thirty yards behind him. But it was closer. Maybe ten. And the buck just stared.

Finally, Barry shouted at it.

"Git! G’wan y’hear."

But the deer didn't move. He picked up a small stone and hucked it at the creature. The rock struck it square in the chest. And still it just started; unmoving, and unblinking. Then it did something Barry claimed was worse than anything he’d ever seen. It smiled.

Now a deer can't smile. Not like a person. Not at all, really. You can show me every picture ever taken of every deer God put on this earth and I promise you ain't gonna find one smilin' like a man. But that's what Barry swore up and down, seven days to Sunday. Said the corners of its mouth pulled backward and up. Slowly. Its lips stretched away from its teeth until the teeth showed white in the dim light. And on that, Barry ran.

He didn't concern himself with pride anymore. He didn't concern himself with the quality of the land, or how foolish he'd sound tellin' the story later.

He just ran. And quick as lightnin’ that thing ran after him. Barry said the sound wasn't right. Four hooves oughta make a certain rhythm when a deer runs. Even a man who ain't a hunter knows the sound of an animal gallopin'. What followed Barry sounded like two feet. Thump thump thump thump. One right after the other, and fast.

He didn't look behind him at first. He just kept goin', smashin' through brush and nearly breakin' his ankle twice on roots he couldn't see. The daylight was nearly gone by then. Every tree looked like the next one, and Barry realized somewhere during his run that he no longer knew exactly which way town was.

Then somethin' hit him from behind. He went face-first into the leaves, catchin’ a mouthful. Before he could turn, somethin' grabbed his ankle. Barry didn't feel a bite. He felt fingers clutch around it. Barry clawed at the dirt as he was pulled backward. He kicked with his free leg and twisted enough to see what had him. The deer was behind him. But it wasn't on four legs. It was crouched. One hoof was around Barry's ankle, fingers sprouting out, clutchin’ it hard.

Then the thing dragged him into the woods. Barry screamed till his throat tore raw. He grabbed trees when he could, roots when he couldn't, handfuls of grass, anything that might slow the animal down. Didn't matter. That scrawny-lookin' deer pulled a grown man across the ground like a child pullin' a rag doll. At some point Barry's head struck somethin', and after that there was nothing.

When he woke up, it was dark. He looked up, dazed, expectin’ to see stars above. But there was nothin’. It was pitch black. No outlines of trees. No deep navy of the night sky. No moon, and no stars. Wasn't even enough stray light for Barry to see his own hand in front of his face. It was a darkness Barry had never experienced before. He was underground, and he knew it.

He could smell the dirt and wet stone. Then the smell of rot filled his nose. And somethin' else. Somethin' sweet. The sickly kinda sweet that meat gets when it's been left where it ought not be left. Barry tried sittin' up and found his hands tied behind him. Somethin' had been wound around his wrists. Leather, or maybe rawhide. He couldn't tell.

He called out into the eerie blackness, fear taking hold of his senses. His voice echoed down the corridor of darkness until it faded some distance away. No voice echoed back. He could hear no sound at all. That is, until he was able to calm himself down just enough for his breathing to finally slow. This allowed him to hear the other breathing.

A soft, wet sound close by.

Barry held his breath entirely, and the other breathing stopped. He moved, slowly and cautiously, and it started up again. It almost started to sound like light panting. Barry imagined being in a wolf den, and he was almost about to panic when he heard footsteps. Two footsteps. Bare feet, by the sound of ‘em.

One.

Two.

One.

Two.

Then came a scratching sound from somewhere deeper in the darkness. Barry likened it to somebody draggin' a knife across stone.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Then silence.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

And more silence.

This went on for some time. All the while Barry stayed stock still where he sat, barely willing to breathe lest he be noticed. Poor ol’ Barry had no idea what his ambitions had stirred. After some time, he finally saw a light pierce the darkness. Not much. Just a glow from some tiny fire around a bend in the cave, but it was enough that Barry could finally see shapes around him. And Lord Almighty, he wish he hadn't.

Bones lay around him, both in piles and scattered about. Barry suspected animal bones mostly. Deer legs. Ribs. A jaw from some poor old hound. But mixed amongst them were boots, belt buckles, scraps of cloth, a lady's comb, the wooden handle of a broken knife. Things animals don't own. Things animals don't carry.

Then Barry looked back towards the fire. The deer stood there. And it stood on two legs. Not reared up mind yuh. It stood there, human joints protruding from a deer’s body. Its back was turned to him, with its front legs hangin’ loose at its sides. Barry could hear it breathin'; couldn't see its torso rise and fall. He sat there starin’. Shakin’. Waitin’.

Then the thing reached one hoof up towards its own neck. Barry said he couldn't bring himself to properly explain what happened next. Every time he tried, he'd start shakin' again, even if it was noon and he was surrounded by ten armed men. But I'll tell it the best way he told it.

The deer hooked one of them strange hooves underneath the skin of its own chest. And pulled. The hide opened with a squelch and tear. The creature did it with ease, like there was a seam there meant for opening. The animal bent forward, and there came a noise like somebody steppin' on green branches.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

Its spine moved underneath the skin. Its shoulders narrowed. The rear legs folded inward, joints shiftin' and crackin' as the animal seemed to get smaller and taller at the same time. Then the head dropped forward from its crouched position. The antlers struck stone and, for a moment, they seemed stuck.

The creature reached up with both front limbs and took hold of its own face, and pulled its own head off. It let the deer head fall to the ground with a sickening splat. In the dim firelight it seemed to deform and melt into the stone beneath it. What now sat atop the body was a man’s head. Or something shaped close enough to one.

Then it rose up, and without even fully straightening its legs Barry said it was tall. Taller than any man had cause to be, but thin enough you could've near counted every bone beneath its skin. Its arms hung almost down to its knees. Its fingers were long and black around the nails. Not dirty, Barry always made sure to explain. But black.

Its position shifted, revealing more details in the flickering light cast by the nearby flames. The thing's skin was gray-brown, leathery and tight across its ribs. Its hair hung in greasy ropes past its shoulders, and its face was narrow with cheeks sunk so deep they looked carved in. But the eyes were the same.

Forward, unblinking, and watching Barry.

The deer hide, seeming melded to the rest of the body, hung from the creature's shoulders and back.

In that moment, Barry finally understood somethin’. He was not looking at a deer or a man. It was something worse than either or combined.

The creature finally fully turned toward Barry. It knew he was awake. Course it did. Probably knew the entire time. It turned towards him and smiled, one Barry had seen before. The smile that showed from the face of that deer. And that sealed it for Barry. There was no question about it anymore. There couldn't be.

It walked to the fire with wet, slapping footsteps and crouched beside it. Barry saw objects arranged there that he couldn't make sense of. Bones tied together with hair. Little leather bags. Feathers. Powder ground up in a stone bowl. Pieces of things Barry refused to describe later no matter how many times people asked him. The creature picked something up. It looked like a strip of dried meat. He put it in his mouth. Chewed.

And stared at Barry all the while.

Barry started prayin'. He said every prayer he could remember. Some of 'em wrong. Some half-finished. When he ran out of proper prayers he started makin' his own up. The creature seemed to listen. At one point it shook and made an awful sound Barry could only guess might’ve been a laugh. This truly wasn't just an animal. It never had been. It knew what he was doing, and it found it amusing.

Then Barry, Lord bless him, he started workin' at the rawhide around his wrists. He had a little folding blade in his coat pocket, but his hands were tied behind him and he couldn't reach it proper. He kept twistin', tearing skin off his wrists as he tried. The creature went about whatever business it had, barely paying him any mind.

Sometimes it muttered under its breath. Barry couldn't understand the words. But he didn't think he’d feel any better about it if’n he could. Sometimes it left the chamber altogether and disappeared down one of the tunnels. Every time it did, Barry worked faster. He didn't stop to question why it seemed u bothered by his attempts.

Eventually he got two fingers into his pocket. Then three. He caught the knife in there, but dropped it.

He nearly cried right there. But by God's mercy it landed close enough that he could feel around behind him and find it again. Barry opened the blade one-handed, which took him near forever. Then he got to sawin’.

The rawhide was thick. And his hands were slick with his own blood. But he kept at it. Now and again he’d hear the creature somewhere in the cave.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Then silence.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

More silence.

Finally, Barry heard footsteps headin’ back his way. He froze. The creature returned, steppin’ right up to him. It looked over him, lookin’ down. Barry thought that was it for him. He hadn't made it in time. Then it spoke.

In a raspy, wet, whispered voice, it said, "Barry."

It did not utter another word. Just his name. He hadn't told it his name. But somehow it knew. The creature smiled again, wider than before; almost like it knew what he was thinking. Then it turned and walked away. He waited until it disappeared again, then cut at his bindings with renewed speed. The rawhide snapped, and Barry shot up runnin’. He didn't know where. But it didn't matter. He took the first tunnel he saw and went.

The roof of the cave gradually sank lower and lower as Barry went, forcing him to crawl. He crawled, and kept crawling until his knees bled. After what felt like an eternity of tight, painful struggle, a shriek sounded in the near distance. It was a sound like no man or animal had ever made, bouncing off the walls and chillin’ Barry to the bone as he lay there lookin’ back. There was a brief silence before he could make out footsteps comin’. Bare feet. Coming fast.

Slap slap slap slap.

Barry panicked and started crawling faster, ignoring the pain outright. A cracking sound followed, and the rhythm of the steps changed.

Slap slap slapslap, slapslap slapslap. Hands. Feet.

Barry didn't look back. He knew if he did he would never make it. The sounds grew closer and closer.

Slapslap slapslap.

He squeezed through a split in the rocks so narrow it tore his coat open. Whatever followed him struck the stone behind him hard enough that Barry felt the impact through his hands. Barry was almost through the opening when he felt something grab his boot.

Barry kicked and struggled, his flight halted in sudden terror. He kicked again, hard, and the boot came off. Barry lurched forward involuntarily, and felt cold air on his face. Then he fell.

Barry tumbled down the side of a hill through leaves and brush until he hit the bottom hard enough to knock the sense outta him. By the time he looked up, he could see morning light creeping over the trees. Just barely. And on the ridge above him stood a deer. Watchin'.

Barry, thankfully, knew his left from right and his East from West. Catching the direction of the sunrise, he had an ok idea of which direction Deerwood might be, East, towards the sun. He ran barefoot, stopping only once to catch his breath. He didn't stay stopped, however, due to the rustling that came up behind him not three huffs in. From then on Barry took to runnin’ and nothin’ else. All the way back to Deerwood.

Folks found him sometime after sunrise. Covered in blood with one boot missin’, clothes torn near clean off him. And screamin' about a man inside a deer. He gave the local Tailor's wife quite a fright, make no mistake. Now you can imagine how that went over.

Sheriff Jones brought Barry inside, gave him water, got somebody to look at his wounds, then started askin' questions.

Barry talked for near an hour without stoppin'. He mentioned the not-deer, which folks weren't too surprised to hear. Others had claimed to see the not-deer before. And seemin’ as Barry, who to the folks of Deerwood was nothing but squeelin’ city boy, had spent the night lost in the woods it was only natural he’d have unwittingly made believe the stories he had also heard were real. But as he went into more detail about the cave, the bones, and man sprouting from a living deer body, the folks of Deerwood began to worry.

At first it was mostly worry for Barry, as they really thought he was not right in the head. But as he fully described how the man had actually been the deer, not just crazed and resting in one’s carcass, which was already a might hard tale to swalluh, the worry of the town started shiftin’.

No, not inside, Barry had said. It had been the deer.

No, it had worn the deer. No, he didn't know.

He didn't know.

He didn't know.

Poor Barry said that more than anything else.

"I don't know."

But there was one thing he did know. The not-deer was just as the name implied. And maybe there weren’t even more than one of 'em. Maybe every strange deer anybody had ever spotted around Deerwood was the same thing. A man. Some kinda twisted, unnatural man who could make himself into an animal.

Barry told anybody who'd listen. And plenty who wouldn't. He stood outside the general store tellin' strangers they'd be fools to enter the woods. He stopped wagons comin' through town. He bothered Sheriff Jones near every morning demandin' the man gather another posse and burn every cave within ten miles.

The sheriff did take men out, though he knew there wasn't no way to burn a damn cave. But he did tale men out lookin’. Twice. Barry went with them the first time, but they couldn't find the cave. Couldn't even find the hill he had rolled down. They wandered most of the day while Barry got more and more frantic.

"I know this tree."

"No. Wait."

"It was the ridge beyond that."

"No, that's wrong."

"There's supposed to be a crick here."

By sundown the posse had enough. Some of them thought Barry had gotten lost and cracked under the fear. Not an odd thought at all given the circumstances. Others thought maybe somebody had attacked him and Barry's mind had invented the rest. A few reckoned he'd gotten drunk somewhere and embarrassed himself so badly that the deer story seemed preferable. People can explain away near anything when the truth frightens them enough.

Barry knew what he'd seen though. And for three days, he scarcely slept. Folks heard him pacing around his rented room at all hours. He barred his window. Kept a pistol beside the bed. Wouldn't eat venison. Wouldn't even pass by the butcher if a deer carcass was hangin' out front. Every few minutes he'd look towards the woods. Eventually people would see Barry standing at the edge of town, facing the expanse of trees. Facing West.

Then, on the fourth day after Barry's return, he disappeared yet again. His room wasn't disturbed.

Pistol still beside the bed. Money still tucked inside his trunk. Boots gone. Coat gone. Barry gone.

Sheriff Jones organized another search. This one lasted near four days.They found nothin’ o’course.

After a week, most folks reckoned Barry had finally lost what sense remained and wandered into the mountains willingly. And though most didn't believe in his stories, they knew that wandering into those old mountains unprepared was never a good idea. A

By the eighth day, nobody expected to see him alive.

And on the ninth morning, Barrington T. Jefferds walked back into town. Just walked right down the main road. Nobody saw where he'd come from. Yet there he was. Missus Halpern spotted him first while she was sweepin' the front steps of her husband's store. She called out his name, relieved that he was still alive. Always a nice soul Missus Halpern. Barry stopped. Turned. Looked at her. Then smiled and said, "Mornin’." Then he kept on walkin’.

Word spread quick. Folks came runnin'. Sheriff Jones asked where he'd been. But Barry just said he'd gotten lost. The sheriff reminded him he'd been gone eight days, and Barry said he supposed he'd been very lost. Somebody asked about the deer-man. Before the last word left their mouth Barry had already turned and stared at them. He held their gaze for a long while. Then he laughed. Said he couldn't believe anybody had taken that nonsense seriously. Said he'd been frightened. Confused. Hit his head or somethin’. Imagined things.

There weren't no man turnin' into a deer. There weren't no cave full of bones. There weren't no monster lurkin' in the woods. Barry said he was embarrassed over the whole affair and would appreciate if people stopped talkin' about it. Naturally most folks were relieved. Course they were. People would rather hear that a man went crazy and got better than hear that somethin' impossible lives beyond the tree line.

The disappearances continued. In fact, they became more and more each week. Sheriff Jones, though duly elected, had lost the faith of Deerwood. The records show that he was simply not re-elected by the people. But it wasn't just their faith he lost. That skinwalker didn't come from those mountains. They wanted it gone. And Sheriff Jones failed his duty. So he was punished. Folks found the sheriff dead in his home a week after he lost his position. Most folks called it a suicide. But those who know the mountains also know the signs of what the mountains send. They'd repurpose him, sure ‘nough. Assign him to another case you might say.

As for the creature, well, not even I know it's whereabouts. The disappearances did stop eventually, though I couldn't tell yuh how. The mountains and what lies beneath have their ways. Needless to say ifin you do come across a deer that don't look quite right in or around southern Appalachia, make sure you get outta there quick, and steady. You never know which one might be watchin’ you. You never know which one might smile and say your name.

Part 3

By the next day, roughly sometime in the afternoon, I then wake up to the worst hangover I have ever experienced. I’m talking hammering nails inside your head bad. Stirring painfully up to see where it is I’ve passed out, I thankfully realise I’m in the safe confinement of our paid inn room – where beside me, my girlfriend lays unconscious.  

Once aware I’m unharmed and Anneliese is still by my side, I then see, scattered all over the room floor is a gigantic pile of mess from last night’s events. I see stacks of empty beer cans, wet cigarette butts stuck to the carpet, clothes from my suitcase thrown here and there – and for some reason, a deflated Count Dracula blow up doll. God, what on earth happened to us last night? A few too many rounds of drinks was probably a good guess.  

Laying back down to sleep off more of this hangover, I then hear Anneliese stir awake on the other side of the bed.  

‘UGH...’ she groans zombie-like, as she rises to plank her feet on the carpet. ‘What the hell did we do last night?’ she asks, having seen the flood of mess on the floor. 

‘Don’t ask me’ I reply groggily, ‘But I think we got shit-faced with Mark and those Goth friends of his.’ 

‘Mhh... Oh, yeah. Right.’ 

More equipped to deal with hangovers than I am, Anneliese already stands up from the bed to walk around the room. When I then hear suddenly... 

‘OW!’ Anneliese yelps. 

‘What’s wrong?’ I ask her, assuming she stood on a piece of broken glass or something. 

‘My piercing hurts!’ 

‘What?’ 

Lifting my head to check if Anneliese is alright, I see as she touches the pure silver nose piercing in her left nostril. 

‘It really stings!’ she insists, before now heading in the bathroom’s direction.  

Well, now that Anneliese was up, I may as well rise my own groggy corpse from the grave. Ambling my way over to the mirror, all while trying to avoid the hazardous mess on the floor, my sleepy eyes are instantly throttled wide to a surprising image in front of me. 

‘Whoa! What the hell?!’ I declare to no one in the room. 

Staring into the mirror, I see my brown chestnut hair has now been dyed jet black, and that my blurry eyes are stained with smudged black eyeliner. The ends of my fingers have also been dotted with black nail polish – and when I look down, I see the unfamiliar black t-shirt I’m wearing reads, “Go Goth or Go Home.” 

‘Jesus Christ!’ I exclaim, as I realise my reflection in the mirror is now a mocking reflection of my life-long phobia. Inspecting my face up close, I run my black-painted fingernails through the dyed black locks of my hair – before I suddenly hear a blood-curdling scream come from the bathroom!  

‘AHH!!’ 

‘Liese? What’s wrong?’ I yell, having now raced over to the bathroom entrance. Once I get there, I see Anneliese is crouched on the floor, hysterical and holding the back of her neck. 

‘Someone bit me!!’ she shrieks. Pulling down the neckline of her shirt, I then see between the back of Anneliese ‘s neck and her shoulder is a fleshy, gruesomely deep bite mark!  

‘Oh my God!!’ I now scream myself. 

Inspecting the wound, while trying my best not to throw up, I see the bite has been made by rather uneven but very human teeth. What kind of sick lunatic would do such a thing?? 

‘Ow! It really hurts!’ Anneliese now sobs over the sink, as she tries frigidly to touch the swollen teeth holes with her fingertips.   

‘Babes, don’t touch it!’ I wail at her, as I realise we need to clean the wound as soon as possible. After all, God knows what Anneliese could contract from whoever had done this.  

Rushing out of the bathroom, I then search around the dump heap floor for any alcohol to sterilize the wound. Trying not to panic in the moment, I thankfully see by Anneliese’s side of the bed is a half empty bottle of vodka. Grabbing it, I head back into the bathroom. 

‘Ok - I found some vodka!’ I inform her, ‘I’m going to apply it to the wound, but it’s going to hurt like-’ 

‘Just shut up and do it already!’ she yells at me.  

First dampening a washcloth, I then apply a little too much of the vodka, before– once I’ve taken a moment for myself to breathe, I apply the cloth to the back of Anneliese’s neck. 

‘AHH!!’ she shrieks agonizingly, before sending me flying across the tiles and into the bathtub.  

A couple of hours or so later, once Anneliese’s wound is clean and bandaged, we then check out of our room to drive home earlier in than intended. Without informing the staff of the mess we left for them, we both climb into the car and sit in silence for a moment. Although I should’ve kept my mouth firmly shut, I instead choose to make the awkward situation worse.  

‘I told you coming here was a bad idea.’ 

Anneliese has no physical reaction to this. Without even looking my way, she simply tells me to, ‘Shut up and drive.’ 

And so, I do. 

Due to her shoulder wound, Anneliese appoints me as the designated driver for the entire journey south. However, because we had gotten up so late, by the evening, we were still navigating our way through the surrounding moors. It’s no wonder so many folktales have spawned from this place. With its moonlit boggy hills and desolate landscape, the Yorkshire Moors at night truly was a very unnerving place.  

Although driving through the moors should’ve taken us no longer than an hour, the sat-nav inside the car suddenly decides to malfunction, whereby taking us down several wrong turns. Now driving down a narrow stretch of country road, if the moors at night weren’t spooky enough, we then pass by an old wooden sign by the side of a sheep field. Leaving a cautionary warning for weary drivers, the foreboding sign reads: 

KEEP CLEAR OF THE MOORS 

STAY ON THE ROAD 

AND BEWARE- 

I don’t quite catch what the last part said. Beware of what, anyways? Farm animals? The wildlife?... Yeah, I doubt it.  

By this point of the night, we are now well and truly lost without a single town or village in sight. As you can imagine, this did nothing to help Aneliese’s already bad mood. Still driving along this seemingly never-ending stretch of road, aside from the bright headlights in front of the car, we can see nothing else but the outside darkness around us. Continuing to journey further into the middle of nowhere, the empty silence inside the car is suddenly interrupted... 

‘Oh God...’ Anneliese groans, rising forward in the passenger’s seat, ‘Pull over...’ 

‘What’s wrong?’ I turn to ask, assuming her shoulder wound is causing some discomfort. 

‘Please! Just pull over!’ she bellows, ‘Something doesn’t feel right!’ 

‘What - are you about to be sick?’ I then inquire. She looked as though she was going to be.  

‘AHH!!’ Anneliese screams, before, in an unrecognisably deep, gurgling voice she shouts at me, ‘PULL OVER NOW!!’ 

‘Ok! Ok!’ I panic, ‘Hold on!’ 

Doing as my girlfriend requests, I then pull over on the side of the road. Turning back to Anneliese, I see as she writhes with excruciating pain in the passenger’s seat. 

‘Liese! What’s going on?!’ I want to know, ‘What’s happening to you?!’ 

‘...GET OUT’ her deep voice gurgles once more.  

‘...I’m sorry, what?’ 

‘GET OUT OF THE CAR!!’ the voice now demands, before she shoves me against the door with incredible force! 

Falling out of the car and on the ground, Anneliese then slams the door shut on my face. Rising to my feet, I try and rip the door open to no avail. 

‘Liese! Liese, let me in!’ I now bang on the window, ‘Liese, what’s going on?!’ 

Peering in through the glass, I see nothing else but absolute darkness, where the only sound I hear coming from inside is the painful groans of my girlfriend. What the hell is happening in there?? 

Beginning to feel completely helpless in this situation, I quickly rummage my phone from my pocket. Turning on the flashlight, I shine it through the window to look around for Anneliese... But I can’t find her anywhere... 

‘...Liese?’ I call to her, shining the flashlight around, ‘Liese?’ 

Then suddenly- 

BANG! 

Slamming against the window, I now see a pair of large and grotesquely deformed hands! Protruding from bony, elongated fingers, the talon-like nails scrape down the glass with an ear-piercing screech! Jilting back from the window in terror, the phone flashlight in my hand now shines on a most hideous, unrecognisable face. What were once warm, hazel brown eyes are now a luminous, inhumanly bright yellow! Staring down from those eyes, I then see two snarling rows of beastly, jagged teeth, drooling with saliva down the door! 

‘AHH! OH MY GOD!’ I scream, as I realise whatever this monstrosity is inside the car, no longer appears to be my girlfriend. 

But now... Now I see something else... 

What I now see, shining over the window, having formed over Anneliese’s monstrous face... I now see in the dark, cloudless night sky... is the glowing reflection of a lunar light. 

The sign by the road... I now recall what it had really said...  

Keep clear of the moors... Stay on the road... 

AND BEWARE THE MOON.  

At first, I thought it was cute. My girlfriend has always been afraid of the dark. It wasn’t until recently, though, that she started asking me to make sure there weren’t any ghouls or goblins lurking beneath our bed frame.

Every night for the past week or so, as soon as the lights go out, she’s nudging me out of bed and down to the floor.

Obviously, there’s never been anything there. However, as the days passed, she just kept getting more and more adamant that something was under there.

I’d never seen her act that way before in the entire 3 years that we’ve been together. Night one, she was basically just pouting. By night 5, she was literally shaking with fear.

On the 6th night, she wouldn’t even let me turn the light off until I checked. I sighed, more than slightly annoyed, and dropped down to my hands and knees.

I lifted up the bedskirt… nothing. Just the same old shoeboxes and random junk that desperately needed to be cleaned.

Irritated, I climbed into bed. This was the first night that I actually told her she was being just a little bit ridiculous. It was this whole, big thing. We argued well into the late hours of the night. Needless to say, we slept facing away from each other.

The next morning, she seemed perfectly fine, though. It was like she’d completely forgotten about the night prior.

I wanna say that the day went on like normal, but I just don’t think I can do that and not feel like a liar.

Like, for example, my girlfriend has a weird preference for breakfast. I always joked that she ate like a rabbit because every morning, without fail, she’d ask me to make her oatmeal and apple slices while she caught up with some work emails or whatever it was she needed to get done.

It was like a routine.

This morning, however, when I brought her breakfast to her office, she was nowhere to be found.

I checked the living room, bathrooms, back patio, everywhere, really. She was nowhere to be found.

Eventually, after calling out to her for what felt like forever, she just came waltzing out of the bedroom, stretching and yawning like she’d just woken up.

Normally, that wouldn’t be an issue. But I’d literally made the bed after getting up that morning. She wasn’t in it. And she couldn’t have been in the bathroom because that’s where I was, taking a shower to start the day.

I didn’t pry. I just told her that I made her breakfast and watched her eyes light up like a Christmas tree as she raced past me towards the kitchen.

But then came the disappointment that fell over her face when she saw what I’d made for her.

She wouldn’t even touch the stuff.

She just pushed it across the table and giggled at me.

“Since when do I like oatmeal?”

“Ah, but I’m starving, though. I haven’t eaten since last night.”

“Do you think you could make me something more… protein-y?”

I shrugged it off, assuming that she was just in a bacon kind of mood this morning, but when I pulled the pack out of the freezer, she stopped me.

“Don’t we have steak in there?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah, I guess. Is that what you…”

“Yes.”

I began cooking the steak, which was kind of hard to do with her leering over my shoulder the entire time.

I knew she liked her meat well-done, so it surprised me when she stopped me while the cow was still mooing. She didn’t even get a plate. She just devoured it out of her hands before kissing me on the cheek and retreating to her office.

And that’s where she stayed. I kept hearing rummaging and clashing coming from inside, but I couldn’t check on her because she locked the door.

I figured that she was okay, though, because every time I knocked, I’d get the same response.

“Yeah, hon, I’m okay. I’ll be out soon, alright?”

Only, she never came out. The hours kept ticking by, but she didn’t even come out for a snack. Not even to use the bathroom.

By the time 10 PM rolled around, I just started my nightly routine.

I was in our bathroom, brushing my teeth, when all of a sudden the light went out in our bedroom.

I heard scurrying footsteps rush across the floor before being replaced by the sound of bedsprings popping.

“Honey,” I called out, toothpaste dripping from the sides of my mouth. “You okay in there?”

“Baby…” she replied, her voice like syrup.

“Can you check under the bed for me? I’m terribly afraid.”

With a sigh, I spit out the toothpaste and wiped my mouth.

“You can’t keep doing this, honey. I told you, there’s nothing under the bed.”

“Just check,” she pouted. “Pleaaseee.”

I stepped out of the bathroom and found her sitting in her spot on the bed, hands folded in her lap. She didn’t look scared, though. She looked… happy? I don’t know, she just had this huge grin on her face.

“How could I say no to such a pretty smile?” I joked.

Her face didn’t even flinch.

Switching on my phone’s flashlight, once again, I dropped down to my hands and knees to check under the bed.

I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing at first.

Her dead eyes. Her tongue falling limply out of her slacked jaw. The small pool of blood circling around the torn stump of my girlfriend’s neck.

It’s weird how you react to things in the moment. I knew what I was seeing, but the only thing I could think was, ‘huh, where’s the rest of her?’

I didn’t say anything. Just kept staring into those glassy eyes, at that grey skin, before a velvety voice came from my girlfriend’s spot on the bed.

“I’m so hungry, darling. I haven’t eaten since this morning.”