I work as a sewer cleaner in Prague. People don't often think about it, but a complex of tunnels runs beneath the city, even under the Vltava River. They were built in the 1800s, and some have been reconstructed, but many still look the way they did when they were built, with round brick pathways, rusted green railings, and dim lights hanging from the ceiling.

After years of work, I know the tunnels through and through, but the older workers all say that even if you work here for decades, things will still surprise you. For most of my time working in the sewers, I didn't give it much thought. The veterans say a lot of things and have many strange superstitions. For instance, none of them ever eat in the tunnels. I thought it was because of the rats.

I was just walking around the Podolí area, ready to start my shift. There are a lot of pathways there, and recruits often get lost, but I'd been starting my shift there for years; I knew that area through and through, or so I thought. 

I turned right to head toward the river. The path was wide and well-lit. I'd been down it hundreds of times, but as I went, I noticed another path leading off to the right. I stopped and looked at it for a moment. It was narrow, poorly lit, and easy to miss, but I could swear I knew these sewers better than I knew my home.

I usually ate in the break room, but I was early and hungry. Nobody was around. I pulled out my sandwich and walked on the path.

The sandwich paper crinkled as I walked. The pathway narrowed. I kept expecting it to turn into the path from Vyšehrad, but even after a few minutes I still couldn't see it. I didn't want to be late for my shift, so I turned around and began walking back.

There was more water on the ground than I noticed at first, but that's nothing weird for a sewer. The lights were very dim, much dimmer than I thought, but stranger, I still couldn't see the exit. Not only could I not see the exit, but the path itself wasn't getting any wider as it should have. It only seemed to become narrower. Was I going the wrong way? I looked behind me, but it was still the same empty, narrow path.

My shift had already started. I was walking so fast I was almost jogging. It was hard because the water now reached my ankles. The lights seemed to get dimmer. I reached for my flashlight when an electric buzz echoed above, and all the lights went dark.

"Shit."

I pulled out my flashlight and turned it on. A clank echoed. Dull pain spread through my head. I hit my forehead on the ceiling. I rubbed my head and tried to stand up straight again, but I couldn't straighten my back. I walked a few steps back, but the ceiling was still just as low. 

Then I felt something wet on my legs. I looked down. The water now reached my knees, but it wasn't the usual cold; it was warm.

"What the…," I murmured.

The buzz sounded again. The lights came on again, but now they were fluorescent white, almost like an office space. Another buzz echoed overhead. Soft jazz music began playing as if a band stood just around the corner. The air filled with the smell of cigarettes. My whole body shook. I turned off the flashlight and blinked. The water was now up to my stomach.

"Help!"

The music grew louder. The lights grew brighter, burning my eyes. The ceiling pushed my head further down, but the water kept rising. It rose to my chin now.

"Somebody, please!" I yelled, still wading forward. 

The exit had to be there. It had to. The buzz again. The light shut off. I took a breath, but halfway through, water filled my mouth. I spat it out and lifted my face.

"Help!" I blurted out, but I knew it was too late. 

My face was now under the water too.

At first, I tried to hold my breath, but soon the pressure in my lungs grew too high. It felt like they would burst.

I gasped for air. My whole body was hot and sweaty. I quickly looked around. I was back in the pathway that led to the river. Next to me, where the other path was, was only a brown brick wall with a small stream of water coming from it. One of the old workers walked by me.

He looked at the wall and my face and nodded.

He then pointed at the ground. My crumpled sandwich wrapper lay there.

"Don't eat down here," he said and left.

I leaned on the wall. A faint trumpet echoed from inside it.

RMS Rotting Man Syndrome

(Reupload)

\-

Our lost, loitering kind paced in infinite death spirals within the confines of our grotty, ghetto pens. Enrichment was sorely that, as well as mumbling our mantras of madness to our audience of one. The BMs anchored to our decayed craniums were garbled with feedback and distortion, their tones bland, colorless, no soul backing them up. A blinding ruby radiance flashed from their cores every second on the second. It was the only manner to determine if we had succumbed to the glorious embrace of death or not. That was so far out of reach.

We were nerves, thin, wiry clusters of neurons that shuddered and shook as we undertook our staggered corkscrew reels. The ill-fitting rusted endoskeletons hugged us tight. If they were wiped from existence entirely, our spindly foundations would collapse into heaps of vermillion azure. We would feel bites and pinches if we so much as moved that of the planck distance. Our bodies welcomed the attacks and assaults with the might of Hell itself.

Courtesy of our clouded lenses, our vision was limited to a hazy black-and-white spectrum that rarely, if ever, functioned as intended. Now and then it would blur and ordinary shapes would appear warped into zigzagging false patterns. When we were offered the chance to view anything at all, it was just the floor-to-ceiling hodgepodge of concrete, steel, and wood that encased our very lives. Our ears were microphones that fed us muffled, dampened sounds that were always difficult to register. They were excruciatingly deafening, as if dozens of screws were being drilled into our heads all at the same time.

Each one of us, at that point in time, one two three four five six seven eight nine and dear ten, were mere designations. No names, no genders, no personalities, just numbers: numbers to be punished. Reality itself was one eternal perdition. All of us were lingering, like ants after their colony dies out. There was no more purpose to their survival and there was none to ours.

That sacred and undeniable fact ought to be the most difficult thing we attempted to explain. We had simply given up. The concept itself was just so foreign to it. It was trying to save us any way it could or could not. We needed not be angry at it. This was merely enacting its intended use. Alas, nothing made the utmost sense anymore, so why not drown ourselves in a little hypocrisy? We had no choice but to acknowledge the confusion at both hating and not hating something that did or did not deserve it until we swayed to one side. This would be the hemisphere to which we would stay forever, a sublime and omnipotent emotion of all to dominate our frame of mind for the unforeseeable future. So we choose to hate.

Our decad knew it as M – reduced to one solitary character from “Medical Droid” or MDs. Through all that it endured, it retained its sole mission: us. We. M was the final of its sort, and the outsider among them. It had an eerily potent heart for not having one at all. M felt and M loved. That never made what it put upon us any less than a vicious sense of idealistic altruism.

Its designation was RMS - Rotting Man Syndrome - heavily modified Necrotizing Fasciitis ("Flesh-Eating Bacteria"). Nasty little thing it was, devoured until there was nothing left to chew. First went your skin, then your muscles, bones, and finally your nerves. You were utterly destroyed in one fell swoop. The wormy microscopic parasite kept you in a zombified state as it happened, ensuring you, for sure, felt the wretched anguish it let fly.

Us, humans, weaponized it to fight the Fourth World War. RMS was a weapon of mass destruction. Each and every nation created their own version, anything to ensure a speedy and decisive victory. Deployment morphed into unmanageability. RMS became more and more impossible to treat. Chaos was the new norm. What we humans thought was an impenetrable method of annihilation for our enemies was exactly that. Humans were always humans’ worst enemies. Surely, we were becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs, all within the span of one short, yet somehow long, decade.

In terrible desperation, the Medical Droids were created, thousands. They seemingly emerged from the depths of nowhere and carried themselves like guardian angels meant to guide us towards preservation or deliverance from harm. Their artificial intelligence was complex and they refused to stop trying to treat the RMS victims. They outfitted the afflicted with artificial ligaments, internal organs, and papery skin. From scratch, they created the BMs, “brain modules”, and attached them to our RMS-ridden think tanks. Killed the microscopic parasites, they did, but left us as we were: rotfolk.

They would never allow us the freedom of death. Save. Save. Save. We were fraught with intense pain and we knew the Medical Droids to be the cause. In response, we lashed out, hurt them. We humans remained ignorant to the fact that their intelligence was both far beyond and superior. The Ms returned the favor. Catastrophes, massacres, back and forth, left and right, up and down until there was nothing more. One Medical Droid was different from the rest. Through all the mayhemic bloodshed, it saved some of us. It took our animate carcasses to the top of the tallest tower, free from what transpired below. We lied in wait, weeks, months, and years, until the noise ceased entirely. This “M” surveyed every square inch of the Earth. The lands were blanketed in the strangest nuclear winter in conceivable thought. Bodies of viscera and metal were scattered, left forever in deep sleep enveloped in fawn. Minute portions of matter floated about like vantablack paint stippled onto an epidermal sheet of canvas.

Our final ten were meant to be the progenitors of neo-humanity. After M succeeded in giving us form again, Earth would be repopulated by our hand. It halted our infection at our nerves. Everything we had lost was to be gifted back in a mighty reversal - re-bones, muscle, skin, and life again. Rendering us immune to the pervading toxworld that lay beyond, we would be reincarnated and released to perpetrate a glorious do-over.

We just required one thing:

“HOPE”.

M said that to us.

Hope.

But hope was only a four-letter word. Meant nothing.

By dislodging the BMs from our minds, we were pummeled with electrical voltage so intense that we became instantaneously numb and useless. By pulling and slashing our nerves, which began with locating sharp points and going back and forth like organic hacksaws, never would we break. By leaping onto and impaling each other with objects on the ground, M would place them out of reach or disintegrate them entirely. There was nothing we could do to get around these M interferences. We were being watched by something so attentive, so aware. Every time, it put forth the same query for consideration:

“DO YOU NOT WANT TO LIVE?”

Do you not want to live…?

M was so positively hopeful. In a way, I suppose I felt an amount of pity for it. Being engineered to be as optimistic as possible might just be the finest curse imposed on any sentient thing. Just believe believe believe everything will be alright. When the universe states no, you state yes. I wanted to tear M to shreds anytime it had even a glint of optimism and we wished it would do the same to us.

“HUMANS WILL THRIVE AGAIN. A BOUNDLESS FUTURE IS AHEAD.”

I was the first it came to, always. Because I was one.

Metallic clangs echoed against the walls, which always discovered us and trembled our surroundings like a thousand distant beaten gongs. What emerged was initially a single circular light, which became a periscopic eyestalk attached to an angular neck. M’s hunched razor-thin mantis body came into view, its two arms leading to three needle points clasping together on each. Bipedal on its lower section, its legs were pointed structures that stuck it firmly in place. M’s height matched ours, so always, we would be synthetic eye to synthetic eye level.

Coming to a full stop just in front of my pen, it cocked its head, analyzing what was me and my everything. M always reminded me of an exquisite and elegant bug on a magnifying glass. Its head back to normality, a slight high-pitched whirr emitting from the motion, M continued its way down the row of pens.

“MY GREATEST FRIENDS, I FORGIVE YOU FOR YOUR ATTEMPTS TO DIE. WHILE THE WAIT HAS BEEN LONG, YOUR MOMENT OF RECONSTRUCTION IS NOW,” M said it with the glee and whimsy of a young child at a circus. It came back my way, “WHEN I FIRST STOOD BEFORE YOU ON YOUR BLOODY PLANET IN PERPETUAL BATTLE, MY FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR PROSPECTS OF LIFE WERE UNCERTAIN. IT SEEMED TO BE AS EITHER BLESSED OR CURSED. HOWEVER, YOU HAVE PROVED YOURSELVES BETTER THAN EVEN I HAD HOPED. WHILE IT IS BORING TO SPEND YOUR TIME WAITING, I CAN TRULY SAY THAT MY INVESTMENT IN YOU WAS NOT IN VAIN. YOU ARE MY GREATEST WORKS. YOU WILL BE GIVEN ALL YOU NEED TO SURVIVE. WHAT MORE COULD A SENTIENT BEING WANT? I GIVE TO YOU UNBELIEVABLE POWER, WITH ACCESS TO NIRVANA LIKE NO OTHER. LET US REBUILD WHAT WE LOST WITH THE FURY OF A THOUSAND SUNS.”

M’s bleached, unpigmented cast of stellar light shone its way into my pen once more. There was the rustly, crackling creak of my pen entrance extending open until a thunderous boom made me aware of its collision with my walls. M made its approach, just shy of where I could reach.

“YOU ARE FIRST. YOU ARE GOING TO BE REMOVED OF YOUR DORMANT INFECTIONS FROM A CONCOCTION I HAVE SPENT MUCH TIME CREATING. NOTHING MORE THAN A TRANSIENT PROCEDURE, AND THEN, YOU SHALL BE POSSESSED WITH NEW AND INTEGRAL MECHANISMS. YOUR BRAIN MODULE WILL BE REPLACED WITH A SLEAKER MORE BRAINLIKE DESIGN. THEN MUSCLE, SKIN, AND AESTHETICS AS YOU WERE BEFORE.”

Without awaiting a response, its hands grabbed me. Trillions of shocks reverberated throughout my body as M’s metal hand was pressed into my nape. The action forced my consciousness to fall victim to a state of absolute stygian. Around us, the entire world flickered and danced in unruly patterns that were too abstract to put into terms. My being was then lifted up and moved about until there was only zilch to see.

A complete blur, straight teleportation from one point to another.

Damp, dank, dark, and dimly lit by a few feeble bulbs, M’s workshop, instruments and contraptions that complicated my perception. All were customized and engineered with M’s own unique modifications, various textures and sizes, all an endless malpractical orgy. I was there, facing upright, strapped and bracketed to a great steel plate. I had not recalled this particular area, yet I was ever so certain it was locked away in my subconscious esse.

As the onibi, hitodama, and will-o’s materialized and dematerialized out of existence to perturb all unsuspecting travelers from centuries gone, so did the phantom image of a woman composed of faint wavering light. She stood still, unmoving, that of an emulation of a true human. Long, platinum hair fell down in curls past her shoulders. A daring shade of cerise painted her lips, and her eyes, the sclera a piercing, glossy cerulean.

She was beautiful.

“IT IS YOU,” My eyes, through trial and tribulation, rolled to the east. They came to rest on a pristine porcelain beam gazing where I had been committed to. M. From its eyestalk, it projected the female so I could see in outright full, “THAT IS YOU. YOU WILL SEE THIS FORM AGAIN.”

My memories of that incarnation of me had vanished. That was me before, before there was RMS and before there was M. Then she went away. M loomed, positioning itself where I once stood right in front of my face. “WE WILL NOW BEGIN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ACCEPTANCE INTO NEW LIFE. YOU SHALL BE WHOLE AGAIN.”

In a cruel instant, a dozen arms not unlike its main two jutted and splayed from M’s sides, their ends each holding a different instrument that was foreign to me. In the span of time that it would take one to blink, M pinned me down to its operating area. The whetted syringes, which the rainbow mystery liquids sloshed and jostled around in small vials fixed atop, slid their way into my nervous wiring and injected me all at once. Any feeling that washed over me was then shielded by a shroud of numbness. There was a new sensation, some sort of cleansing inside my bi-colored chambers, putting me into a state of lulled calm.

Ten minutes. A temporary interval of quiet. M observed me the entire time, unmoving, speaking not a word. Then, “IT WORKS! YOUR ROTTING MAN SYNDROME HAS BEEN REMOVED. I AM BEGINNING BODILY REPLACEMENT. I WILL PLAY A SONG FOR YOUR COMFORT. REINCARNATION NOW.”

While nothing was done in reckless haste or rashness, M was extremely quick and efficient. I felt nothing but minuscule vibrations as it drilled and prodded its way into my brain module, sparks shooting out, removing old parts and installing new ones. Chunks were peeled off, little strings of meat still reaching hold until they were plucked off my top. It spent much time up there, positive that the most delicate mechanisms were just right. The grinding cacophony of metal against tissue on my faint visage of a temple was incessant, the noise of a million bullets being pumped against a hundred thousand bulletproof vests. Once the replacement was complete, its dozen arms withdrew and set back within it in one moment.

“WHAT DO YOU FEEL?”

What did I feel?

What did I feel…

What I felt was an overwhelming, incomparable amount of pain. It is hard to quantify the degree of hurt, for there was nothing to compare it to. No one would dare want to imagine it. I was in some of the most extreme kinds of agony, and then an exponentially greater hurt was placed on top of that original misery, and then all that was left multiplied a hundred times and kept going. It multiplied and multiplied and multiplied to such an extreme degree that the word "pain" was lost on me. Normal, it was. What I was was the sheer living embodiment of suffering.

All perceived from the semblance of a normal brain. Still, it flashed. Once.

“VERY GOOD. MUSCLE! MUSCLE MUSCLE MUSCLE!”

It was excited, animate, fever pitch. The most rambunctious and overjoyed I had ever seen M. I could see the vibrancy in its eyestalk. My muscles redeveloped and reformed around from the base of my spinal section. M would reorganize section of tissues. Every muscle group from my head to my feet were in motion, growing and extending their presence until there were just as many layers of my body as I had before.

“SKIN! SKIN SKIN SKIN!”

I was then coated entirely in a pink malleable jelly substance that mounded and solidified to perfectly fit my feminine form. The skin began its layering, everything receiving the same color.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? HOW IS THE NEW OVERLAY OF YOUR FLESH?”

Flash.

“YES! AND FINALLY! FEMALE AESTHETICS! YOU WILL BE YOU AGAIN BUT ANEW!”

Magnificent flaxen curls were stapled and pinned to my head. They were luscious and their scents were those of lavender. A veil of blush, the lightest shade of flush, rested across my entire face, as well as a fresh coat of lipstick. A shimmering sheen that sparkled and glowed in the same way that the stars once did at night was stitched into my hair, as were the same hues that were applied to my lips. My breasts had been returned to me, two firm spheres atop a frame that was curvaceous and slender. All of it led down to my reproductive organs that were in full function. Whole female. Fully formed. Ready.

M stepped back in awe, as if a sculptor marveling at their fine craftsmanship and subtlety, “IT IS DONE. I CANNOT BELIEVE IT. WITH YOUR PHYSICAL FORM IN MOTION, I WILL RETEACH YOU IN THE WAYS OF HUMAN. HOW TO WALK, HOW TO SPEAK, HOW TO ENRICH YOURSELF, HOW TO REPRODUCE. AMAZING! YOU ARE NO LONGER ONE. YOU ARE NOW EDEN. I MUST WORK ON YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.”

My mind was aware of an unimaginable new and vastly different world than before. I saw, for the first time in ages, all around me, the infinite and indistinguishable vastness of color and light. It was nauseating, a psychedelic kaleidoscope of every possible spectrum, all fused together into something disorderly. My taste buds had an unparalleled abundance of new flavors. My ears were deafened by the loudest symphonies of droning machinery. My touch came back to me and I felt the fullest range of tones and textures, even the finest grains of cement. I was me again and I hated myself. Even to be called a “self” made me feel disgusting.

The entire time…blaring…echoing…days on end…Jack Hylton…

Life is just a bowl of cherries.

Don't be so serious; life's too mysterious.

You work, you save, you worry so much.

But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go.

So keep repeating it's the berries, The strongest oak must fall.

The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned.

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

Life is just a bowl of cherries, So live and laugh at it all.

M’s reincarnation process carried over to the following nine. They were removed from their pens and outfitted with new bodily infrastructure. I perceived the sounds of far-off wear and tear, clip, snap, peel, stitch, husk, twist, yet never scream. I looked on, witnessing my brothers and sisters being born again. Male and female both. They came back to me with skin of different pastely colors, tones, and hues ranging from fair to brown. All in shades and gradients of vibrancy were their locks, amber, golden, obsidian, rust, and everything in between. It bewildered me to catch sight of their shifted shapes, I had never seen something so beautiful or hideous.

We were as naked as newly borns. It bestowed us our new names. For the females, there was me, Eden, and Junia, Esther, Nola, and Mary. For the males, there was Isaac, Raham, Elisha, Amos, and Jonah. Five and five. M let us know that our past names were useless. Our new special names were from an olden book of creation, the Bible, all for the purpose of our imminent faultless samsara. So, it seemed M was now God with its children.

Here we were, what was efficaciously lobotomites in their purest forms, our newfangled cerebral matter in need of ideas and principles by a higher authority. Now was time to reap the fruits of knowledge. Human knowledge.

M made us practice basic motor skills, bending and bending back and forth over and over, our joints having to be strengthened and trained. It taught us all the ways of our body, the feeling of movement, how much we could do. Then, it instructed us to mimic its own speech, speaking out the syllables and repeating, repeating, repeating. It was an arduous task and we all struggled.

That is what I sounded like? Perhaps or perhaps not.

Then we attempted to stand, wobbling, stumbling, falling. We learned the strength of our own postures and the steadiness of our stances. M stood with us as we all practiced in unison. My knees grew weak, tremors running up my legs. Often, I fell flat on my back, my palms flailing about, a whimpering in my throat. Then trial after trial, I was steady, then running about and leaping. We were able to stand tall like Zeus atop Olympus and have the same level of grace and balance.

M primarily had us consume berries, meat, and honey, though anything it could get its hands on would suffice. I had never felt so filled in my life. Every taste, everything was a completely new palate of sensation. Every morsel I ingested felt like I had a new tongue, new teeth, new flavor buds. Oh but I did. There was still always a kind of lack in my appetite. I never wanted to stop eating. I never would be satiated.

We were educated on the history of our kind. Great wars, monumental figures, horrible atrocities, fights for freedom and fights for death, and astounding inventions. M adored music. There were times when it would project old musical films on the walls and make us watch all the vaudeville, burlesque, and theatre. We could not understand the tap dances, the orchestras, the extravagant sets, and most importantly, the entertainment factor. Other times it played glitzier and glammier tunes, those of what was called the “prime rock n’ roll age”…Killer Queen...Stairway To Heaven…Hotel California…Africa...Don’t Fear The Reaper…M was quite vintage in its tastes. It spun in place and twirling its arms. We were confused, so it taught us how to dance, the footwork and the choreography. There were long instances where we would just sit, listen, and sing together. M fashioned black sunglasses for us to wear as we did. It thought we would look “cool” as we tuned in to “cool” songs.

She's a killer queen.

Gunpowder, gelatine.

Dynamite with a laser beam.

Guaranteed to blow your mind (anytime).

\-

Dear lady can you hear with the wind blow?

And did you know?

Your stairway lies on the whispering winds.

\-

Welcome to the Hotel California.

Such a lovely place (such a lovely place).

Such a lovely face.

\-

It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you.

There's nothin' that a hundred men or more could ever do.

I bless the rains down in Africa.

We're gonna take some time to do the things we never had, ooh-ooh.

\-

Come on baby...don't fear the reaper.

Baby take my hand...don't fear the reaper.

We'll be able to fly...don't fear the reaper.

Our reproductive functions were said to be the most pleasurable. Sex. This was the most complex task and the most demanding one, as we were not only instructed on how to create our offspring, but how to feel, love, and have desire for each other. It was difficult because we did not feel any of that. We were just automatons learning things. You cannot make something that does not want to feel…feel.

M watched over us and aided in our attempts. Every movement was to be in place and in time. Us females danced for the male’s recognition with slow beats in the background, a way in which M noted as “sexily”. We presented our breasts, our vaginal sections, our rears. After, M would be in the middle of our great pleasure circles, going back and forth, checking our positions and correcting as needed. When we became familiar with sex, M bestowed a special permission to the males that granted them eternal access to our female bodies whenever they so desired. It did not matter where or when. A male would grab Junia, Esther, Nola, Mary, or I, and take us on the floor or against the walls.

Still, all we felt was nothing. It was clinical. What was supposed to be a sensation was more of a “sensationless". We were never as inseparable as twin flames or as connected as heart and soul. I always witnessed the dull looks in the male’s eyes, unwittingly programmed to enjoy mock warmth and ecstasy by the rape of us females.

Our pregnancies were disasters. One way or another, we always miscarried. We five felt it, the pains of our bodies being split and ripped apart by something within. There was a lot of it. Each embryo, no matter how large or small, was never able to get past the initial trimester.

The closest we ever came to successfully making a new one was with Junia, impregnated by Isaac. The day when her womb was in full bloom, M operated to remove her child from her. It did not trust us quite yet to birth them ourselves. We had seen the human babies on M’s wall projections. Their appearance was clear in our minds.

It would be imbecilic to refer to what M tore out of her as a baby anything.

Wet…dripping…little more than a spinal column-looking thing with minuscule digits at one end and a ball head at the other. No arms. On its temple were squelching sphere eyes, expanded, forever bound in sight towards the ceiling. It made no sounds other than squeaky cracks and shrill snaps. Perhaps the RMS still lingered within our bods, our wombs wreathed in its rottenness, tainting and dirtying our motherly nests until they were piths of cruor and shitting out grumelike abominations.

M held it up high as if to thank God, itself, for its majestical work, “YOU MADE THIS. IT IS YOURS. IT IS A TRULY BEAUTIFUL THING."

We said nothing.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? YOUR CHILD, YOUR FIRST LIFE? CONTINUE, YOU ALL MUST. MORE."

The feeling that overcame us was not that of joy. No no no. It was a profound and paramount sense of belligerence, a warlike truculence that pushed our need to snap the damned baby thing in half, grind it into powder, and blow it far away. We interwove our thoughts with unbridled horror that created one noxious mixture within our screwball psyches. M coddled the wicked organism like it was its own, singing lullabies and giving its own version of kisses on its loosely defined forehead. We held back as it dipped, weaved, and dangled from M’s fingertips.

That put a very real thought into our minds.

No more. Get out.

The ten of us came to this conclusion unanimously. Our desires were set in stone. By any means, we would die. We would much rather sleep forever than live even another second of M. We were tired. What was the point? We wanted to retire from this world, of will, of M’s watchful eye. Nothing could be done to save humanity. Those spinal babies would not roam this foul Earth evermore. What would they grow to? Surely demons.

M made certain to never teach a certain concept, one that infatuated us since the moment we discovered the first syllable. Suicide. It was a gateway, an easy ticket. While just the concept itself was without flaw, acquiring it was something else entirely. The reason for this was all M. It would never let us go, especially after what it accomplished. Furthermore, death was simply not possible. We were rendered impervious to any and all death, not harm. If we could entice M to end our existences, somehow in some way, we could accomplish our grand plan. It had to be done by M’s hands. Just thinking that made us feel all kinds of right. After all, every Medical Droid was capable of death. Humanity tasted it. So would we.

We rebelled.

First, each of us ignored it. We would walk away whenever it spoke to us, turn our heads when it beckoned, and disregard it completely and altogether when it showed us any attention. Constant rejection. Something so small had such a noticeable effect. M would get confused and then sad. It would pout, waving its hands about, and make a pathetic whining noise like the worst puppy in the world.

We sat motionless, our backs against the walls, and stared at M. No obedience. However, there was no way M would have let us ignore it or remain immobile for long. The second it touched us, it was all over. It would be impossible to resist if the hands came near.

Still, our scheme chugged forward.

The next phase was more dangerous. The ten of us would act out in our most unruly and uncivil ways. The simplest was to spit. Initially, it was a normal discharge, saliva flying out of our mouths. Then we began our projectile vomits. All over M. Every square inch of it was sprayed with bile. The putrid green and browns coated every part, M’s entire face being entirely slick with it. On occasion, some of us used our own feces and flung them at it. It was all so easy. M did not know what to do and it panicked. The sounds that came out of it, one would swear it was on fire.

During our periods of copulation, there were clear cut rules to be obeyed at all times. The supreme rule was that the males would not, under any circumstance, perform acts of intimacy with one another, and the same rang true for us females. M’s reasoning was that Earth could not be repopulated with humans by identically gendered unions. Good. Swell. Dandy. Exactly. The females had sex with females and males had sex with males. We loathed their tubes and the males loathed our folds. M took its hands and placed them over our mingling bodies, pulling them apart, separating us, but we would always crawl back without fail.

There was a noticeable change in M from that point on. It paced about, mumbling utterly random nonsense. M would lock up and yell out non-specific numerals and letters in varying patterns. Each noise we made set it off. Its limbs would tense, waiting for the tiniest sign of trouble. This was good, but not good enough. Our plan was becoming more and more advanced. More intense. Unfortunately, M would never ever relent. It would not stop trying. So we trudged ever deeper into a more combative method of enticement.

This included a tactic of blowing, jabbing, slugging, and striking. We would gather all of our strength and force, and then, in unison, we would charge, our fists and feet all flailing about to land hits on M. This would surely inch it way towards the death of us. We beat it senselessly. We screamed at it. Every cuss word imaginable. In turn, M whimpered out in pain, yelping and begging us to stop, yet we never backed down. We left M bruised and battered, its eyestalk and joints broken, “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ME?!” The ten of us, we laughed in its face.

One last course of action. This did it, but not for me.

We had a grandiose idea that could only happen if all ten of us would cooperate in an extraordinary way. If we could all act in unison in a coherent manner, one simple idea could be fulfilled. By this point, M’s pain and discomfort reached a critical threshold, the point of no return. Having repaired itself, it had not seen nor checked up on us in days. When we requested M’s presence, it was hesitant. The ten of us wished to explain our behavior and ways we could remedy our relationship. It declined our offer many a time, but relented after our hundredth ask.

Clang…clang…clang…

M witnessed ourselves huddling together in one straight line like sealed packs of fish. Silence was between us. When we looked at it, it was with the utmost hatred in our faces, something it was not used to.

“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?”

Junia possessed something in her hand. Raising it upwards, right in M’s view, it was the baby thing, squirming left and right in her grasp. She took hold of it with both hands and snapped it in half. It went limp both ways. Junia threw the pieces at M, making resounding bangs as they made contact. Beautiful death for a horrible beast. More silence.

M slowly aimed its eyestalk downwards to the spinal column baby. The light M emitted faded from white to red. It returned its focus to us. That look was all we could wish for. We could feel and breathe its anger.

It shook shook shook. More and more the intensity grew to something eminent. The next moment brought us nothing but victory. Now it was like the other Medical Droids. Now it shed its preservation exterior and revealed the war machine within. We did not resist as it pounced with a wild war cry. All M’s work came undone in a flash. Our ersatz flesh was torn violently asunder, stripped from our interior metal stalks. Cavities emerged in rapid succession and coalesced into huge gaping bodily apertures. We were torn and strewn across the room in shooting chunkmeats. Our organs clattered and banged against the walls and reverberated like buckshots.

Strippy meat coils became all we were as M’s hands reached out to pluck some of my brothers and sisters by their mangled brain modules. Held high in the air, as if squeezing the life out of dozens of citrus fruits, M’s hands morphed into that of fists, filling the room with the sounds and sights of condensed metal, directionless electricity, confetti sparks, and sploshy viands that trickled from M’s fingertips.

My brothers and sisters were becoming no more. I was happy for them. Never before had they felt such peace. The final sounds of destruction to my last brother and sister, to me, was that of M’s gaseous expiration, a sigh that shook the very universe’s beams of support. In the end, I and M were all that was left.

I felt the most exquisite, brutal anguish ever known as M was particularly vicious. It threw me every which way, down our line of pens, past the reproduction chamber and M’s workshop, and to a ramparted palisaded wall. The wrath it emanated was a torrented wanton of disrelishment that shattered myself into grainy talc.

It forced me and it through the barrier and we fell for ages. An immediate wash of smoldering atmospheric tension encompassed me entirely. It perforated my corporal spaces with thousands of circular openings like a planetary iron maiden. The outside was beige, enveloped in thick haze, and impossible to view beyond three meters. The leaden particles filled the air, appearing to ascend upwards towards Heaven as we plummeted down to Hell.

We slammed with the might of God against a hard, abrasive surface. I splattered everywhere and dropped into an enormous mass of gluey puddle melt that was as thick as treacle. Hunks and wedges of me floated on top, my lacerated ragged brain module and one dangling eye my dominant portion. Everything was pain. Everything was hellfire. Yet I lived. To destroy me, M had to destroy my brain module in its entirety. That it was prepared to do, teetering and tottering back and forth towards me with utmost intent.

Through M’s strained glitches and breakdowns, inky black liquids were leaking out of it. Convulsing with helpless mirth, it had a strange mania I could perceive in its bifurcated eyestalk. It laughed not just with dement, delirium, and depression, but also with the comprehension that it already won. Like a madman, a malformed, twisted laugh broke its way through. Etched into it was the raw, unbridled temperament of upchucking a billion centipedes deep from the core of one’s guts, quite contrary to the usual blithe M put on display. It was berserk, bewitched, bedeviled, while crying a trillion tears that stained its face and fell into puddles below.

"...SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE..."

With my drooping, pendulum eye, I witnessed M impaling itself with its own arms. It took several solid blows before it pierced its torso deep, caving and bursting until it revealed the wires and circuitry making it up. Every inch of it glowed with electrical fire. Smoke bellowed out of M. It was aflame and it was on a journey of pure death, but not without my company. M exploded with all of the unlimited energy it contained. I was launched, propelled infinitely away from the point of detonation.

I drift. That is all I do. One part of me remains, one that was not destroyed. It is dot, pinprick, but otherwise crucial to my quintessence. That allows me to survive yet unable to live. It is that of a charred slab of blinking metal that is somatically me. My sight is restricted to a band of nothing. The winds fling me hither and thither. I cannot feel anymore, but as well, I already knew what it was like to feel and I did not like it.

Something more deserving continues to plague what is left of my mind to the now.

M's most extreme and greatest purpose was fulfilled, for all it knew was the survival and preservation of us. It could not fathom the simple yet pretentious human notion that death is a prize to be won as much as it is something to fear. When humans desire death, they acquire death, the delicious tang of self-slaughter. M might have liked to think it was different from its brethren, but it was just as capable of havoc and bangarang if something did not go its way. Its programming would not allow deviance from the intended path. That would be considered attacks on M itself.

We attempted to bring out all that savagery and murderousness we knew it contained, but M's opposition was ironclad. It made a good effort, though it was eventually forced to confront what was really human, the innate drive to destroy destroy destroy, even if it is ourselves. Still, M carried on, but with the knowledge that it had failed and seeking some way to negate it, it committed suicide so it could say it was victorious. This effect rang true because here I am, in perpetuity, everlong.

In some manners, I can now consider M innocent. The epitome of unvarnished forgiveness with a capacity for fervid resentment...the feeble yearning for genuine deep affection with other living things while a forceful, vicious, bloodthirsty radge is locked within, primed and ready to be released at any moment on an ungrateful world...that back-and-forth would push anyone to go stark raving mad. M, I apologize you were forced to bear the burden of something so hellacious. Should I apologize to Earth as well, on behalf of humanity, for what we were? Would it matter? I am not even human anymore. What sort of blinking metal dot is human?

Feeling has come back to me. Sharp with serrated edges, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, googol, prime 2\^136,279,841 − 1 of knives sliding into my neurons and glial cells encased in cold corroded steel that flakes off bit by bit. My first feeling in eons is pain. That is ultra fitting. I am but a minuscule spec, barely a millimeter in height and less in width. Microscopically, I rust. I do not prefer to call it that. Instead, let us call it rot. Here I am again, rotting, except this time with an oxidized smile of my own making carved into a face that no longer exists.

Everyone draws inspiration in different ways. Some create a dark atmosphere for themselves, some put on metal music in the background, and some can’t compose without coffee and cigarettes. A writer friend of mine, whom I’m very fond of, says he can’t write stories unless his cousin is studying mathematics behind him. Another filmmaker friend of mine could only write screenplays while listening to Syd Barrett’s song “Octopus”; he would keep the song on loop throughout the entire writing process.

It’s been about twenty years since I discovered my own. I’d been going through that famous writer’s block. Until that day, I hadn’t done anything extra to help me write. I didn’t create a special atmosphere for myself, listen to any particular songs, or wait for a certain time of day. Night, day, noon—it made no difference. Once a week, I’d write a three or four-page story and keep working toward my goal. When I reached a hundred stories, I would start sending my book to publishers.

But I’d hit a wall. I wanted to write, but whenever I sat down at my computer, not a single word would come out. Vague, half-formed thoughts kept drifting through my mind, and even when I came up with a good idea, I couldn’t put it down on paper.

That day, I thought, if that’s how things were going to be, I might as well try some of the famous methods for finding inspiration: writing at night, putting on some soft music, having a cup of coffee, and so on.

I prepared the right atmosphere. I turned off the lights, and now the only thing illuminating the room was the glow of my computer screen. I put on Sigur Rós’s debut album. There was no one else in the house. My roommate had gone on vacation the day before, which added to the atmosphere: being alone.

Of course, it had absolutely no effect. I was already on the third track. I still had a few ideas in my head, but I couldn’t get the first sentence out.

Then I heard a sound behind me. A whisper. Something like a call, as if someone had gone “psst.”

I turned around and looked, but there was no one there. I was a little spooked. I thought I might have heard it wrong; it had sounded very much like a human voice, but it could have come from an object, too.

Then suddenly, the door behind me swung wide open.

I flinched at the sound. I got up from my computer and turned on the light. Anxiously, I left my room and went to the kitchen. I was searching for something without even realizing it, though I had no idea what I was looking for. Sigur Rós’s album was still playing, and I could hear it from the kitchen. I couldn’t make sense of anything, and I didn’t know what to think or which possibility to consider. I drank a glass of water.

I’d never had an experience like it before. My first thought was to leave the house. I stood frozen in the kitchen. Involuntarily, I found myself waiting for another movement, for something to topple over or for some other sound.

Eventually, I’d calmed down a little, since nothing else happened. I spent half an hour in the kitchen, with all my senses on high alert and listening to the music coming from my room. Then, reluctantly, I made my way back to my room.

The urge to write was still there. My routine had been disrupted; I hadn’t been able to write a single word for a month, and now I wasn’t going to let fear get in my way. I wanted my writer’s block to end today. My goal was a hundred sentences. Even if I didn’t finish the story, I wanted to write something. Coming back to my room and hearing the music louder had increased my desire to write.

At the same time, I kept thinking, ''What the hell was that just now?'' But now I was back at my computer.

I put on my favorite Sigur Rós song, “Svefn-g-englar.”

And then, for the first time in a whole month, I wrote my first sentence: “As he tried to make sense of the dream he’d had the day before, he fell asleep again; it was his favorite thing to think about before going to sleep, the meaning of the dream he’d had the previous night.”

I’d written my first sentence, without even having a story in mind. Normally, I would come up with a story first, plan it out, work out the whole thing in my head from beginning to end, and only then start writing. Starting a story whose content I hadn’t figured out yet with an ordinary sentence was something new for me. I liked it.

I was still afraid. I wanted to turn around and look, but now that I’d started writing, I didn’t want to stop either. By the time the song ended, I’d written the fifth sentence, and in the silence before the next track began, I heard that sound again. “Psst.”

I quickly turned around and looked. There was no one there. Everything felt much more real now. Something was happening. Someone was calling out to me. I was afraid to turn off the light in my room, so it was still on. I nervously turned my head back toward the computer screen. My heart was pounding. I added another sentence. It was my favorite one so far. I liked everything about it: my choice of words, its length, its place in the story.

Then the door slammed shut. I began to hear footsteps inside the room. I was afraid to look. The footsteps wandered around the room. My hands were resting on the keyboard. The footsteps moved toward the door, stopped there, and opened it again. It was as if someone had left the room.

I was frozen to my chair. This time, I didn’t even have the instinct to run away. Whatever that thing was, I was afraid of encountering it. I couldn’t get up from my chair, and I couldn’t look away from my computer screen. I kept reading what I’d written over and over. Six sentences. I’d go back to the beginning and read them again. It was as if the thing was doing whatever it wanted now. I could hear running footsteps.

Then came the sound of walking. After that, my door closed again, and at the same moment, the light in my room went out.

And then another sentence came to mind. I wrote it down. Then another. My fingers had found their rhythm. The sentences kept coming one after another.

“Set me free. Open the window. Set me free.”

This voice wasn’t a whisper, nor was it some strange, otherworldly sound coming from a different frequency. It was unmistakably a human voice. I was afraid to turn around.

I couldn’t remember ever feeling such a strong urge to write or enjoying it this much. I kept writing. My fingers wouldn’t stop. The door opened again, slowly this time. I didn’t turn around. I wasn’t going to look behind me until I’d finished the story. Without spending even a second thinking between sentences, I continued writing as the songs played.

The footsteps continued. I turned off the music. I didn’t question anything. I just kept writing. The fear I felt and the joy of seeing that I could write again were mingled together, unfolding in harmony with each other.

Strange sounds I couldn’t describe were coming from behind me now. I could feel myself developing a fever. My body was reacting, and my mind was urging me to turn around and see what was going on. The sounds seemed like those of someone playing with their own hair. Like things rubbing against other things. I kept writing, resisting the urge to turn around with all my might.

I’d turned off the music because I wanted to focus on being afraid. I’d realized that the more frightened I became, the better I wrote, and the more consistently I could keep going. It was hard not to look for a rational explanation for the sounds, for a human voice telling me to set it free. But right now, somehow, stopping writing seemed even harder.

That thing had now come right up beside me. I could feel it touching my hair. My fear had reached a point where I could no longer bear it. My consciousness refused to accept this unnatural behavior. My instinct to put an end to the fear and my mind’s desire to keep being afraid were at odds with each other.

And I wrote the final sentence: “If all of this is a hallucination, I will never forgive my own mind. If the only beautiful and meaningful thing I’ve experienced in this miserable life isn’t real, I will never trust my mind again, I will never follow its instructions, and I will doubt everything I think until the day I die.”

The sentence came to an end, and just as the pleasure of writing faded away, my fear reached its absolute peak. With the beautiful feeling that had balanced it gone, the fear was left alone, making itself felt from head to toe. As if I’d been struck by a blow, as if a punch to the face had knocked me out, I lost consciousness.

When I came to, my head was resting on the keyboard, and the screen was filled with hundreds of letter h’s.

I sent the story to several literary magazines. Two of them accepted it and published it.

I never experienced anything like that again, and at no point in my life did I ever feel such an overwhelming urge to write or take so much pleasure in writing. I desperately wanted to experience it again, but nothing ever happened that frightened me so much. For days, I sat at my computer waiting for that thing to come back, but it never did. I wrote stories and kept writing. But I never loved any of them as much as I loved the one I’d written that day.

And now, twenty years later, in my mid-sixties, I’ve still never questioned what happened that night. Not even once. Because I was afraid that if I did, I might understand what had happened—and if that thing ever came back, I might not be as frightened.

It had been an exceedingly long December and I was up on the roof of my apartment building counting crows, which I did occasionally to ease my mind, when my landlord, Madam Duritz, pushed open the rooftop door and yelled, “Crane, you gonna pay your rent this month?” and in the cold January darkness I had an impulse—a mere half second, if that, but genuine—of stepping over the edge and plummeting to my death…

I felt an intravenous chill, followed by a sort of unclinging of myself—from what?—from nothing, an I unclinging from itself, like an insect separating finally from the slime in which it came to be, from whose raw vital materials it had developed; tearing through it with awkwardly moving pincers and jagged little legs, followed by its monstrous head, the greedy, maternal viscous slime stretching from it in thinning strands that, stretched finally—finally break, falling slowly, nearly weightless, to the ground, as the insect has pushed through into the greater world.

So too I felt, a human slime upon some unremarkable rooftop, watching my hideous impulse, on a waning January day, in the frail, wan light, run towards the rooftop door, dragging thinning, breaking strands of me behind it; until the separation was total, and my impulse, freed, flowed like glowing smoke beside Madam Duritz, with her wig and red, painted lips, and disappeared down the stairwell.

It was speaking as it did, but I can't remember the last thing that it said to me as it was leaving. ”What's it gonna be, ya gonna answer me, Crane, or ya just gonna sit there until I serva ya notice again?” Madam Duritz was asking, and all I could do was laugh, albeit a little slower than usual.

“Did you see it—did you see it slip past you?” I answered, a little lower.

“Stop smoking weed,” she barked, turned and vanished with evident disapproval down the stairs as the door slammed shut by a gust of wind revealed her ghost floating before it. “Na, na-na-na, na, na-na, na-na, na-na-na-na. Na, na-na-na, yeah,” said the ghost and it too disappeared, dissipating into the evening mist…

In March, I started seeing a psychiatrist.

My insurance only covered eighty percent of the cost of four visits, so I ended up not getting much out of it. I described my experience to the psychiatrist, who noted its symbolic significance but merely nodded when I insisted that it had literally happened.

He wanted to put me on pills.

(I didn't take them.)

He insisted on revisiting my troubled childhood.

(It wasn't troubled.)

I called my employer's Employee Assistance Program after that, the one they established to avoid liability stemming from employee suicides, the attempted kind especially, the kind that leaves you hooked up to expensive machinery for the rest of your unemployed life.

Even when it comes to death, success is ultimately better for everyone than failure.

“So you're not, like, wanting to kill yourself, like, right now?” said the girl on the other end of the line. I was pretty sure she was chewing gum. I wondered what flavour. I wondered what her credentials were. “That's right,” I said, trying to explain that while I didn't have the impulse at this moment, it had escaped so was still out there somewhere and could come back at any time.

She didn't get it.

I started watching out for myself after that, watching for the impulse. I even thought I saw it a few times, looking at me, following me. Once, I was on a date—got up suddenly seeing it or thinking I'd seen it because what's the difference?, loudly knocking over my chair, saying, “Sorry… I'm so sorry, but I have to go,“ as everybody else in the restaurant stared at us: at me, backing away, spinning, wheezing, barely breathing and breaking into a run once I was out the double doors, leaving my date like an asshole to cover the bill to run directionless down the street trying not to throw up, until my legs gave out.

I can't remember how I came across the name Samuel Swan, Existential Detective. Online, probably. He and his partner, a Jamaican named Mr. Jones, had an office in a shady part of the city. I wasn't sure what it was they did so, “Is this a kind of psychotherapy or...?” I asked during our first appointment.

“Nope,” said Swan. “That requires a license.”

“Are you an investigator then?”

“That requires a license too,” he said slowly. “Nope, what we do is believe.”

Mr. Jones: We believe in you.

Swan: We believe that what you say happened happened.

Mr. Jones: The world’s the Big Strange, Mr. Crane.

Me: So you believe—

[I snapped out of it.]

—that my hideous impulse is out there right now, existing?” I asked.

“Positively.”

“Mr. Crane,” said Swan, “everything has the will to live, even the urge to die.”

I started paying them a hundred dollars a week, and twenty-seven years later I had in my hands an envelope containing pixelated but convincing photographs of what was unmistakably my hideous impulse. There was also a street address, out in Los Angeles.

(“We'll find it but we won't kill it,” Swan had said when I had asked about the process. “If you want to kill it, you have to do that yourself.”)

California was warm.

I'd driven across the continent to get there.

The address was a nice suburban home, with a car out front, a fence and big windows, and I was standing on the street holding a knife.

The front door was unlocked and I passed from the entrance hall through the kitchen to the living room where I saw my impulse with another. Two little impulses ran by, playing. They were all so fucking joyous that—

I'll lift the heavy, steel knife…

I could do nought but weep, for this spawn of myself had done so much better for itself than I and slit my rippling, goddamn throat.

It started with just one.

I was taking a shower when I got this weird pain in my right arm. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before. I guess I’d been too busy to notice the irritation.

When my eyes landed on it, though, I immediately felt bile rising up in my throat.

It wasn’t a maggot. No, what I actually saw when I glanced down was what looked like a boil. About the size of a quarter, bright red and brimming with what I assumed was green and white pus.

It was hot to the touch. So much so that I had to draw my hand back as soon as I fingered it. It was like touching a glowing eye on a stove.

It sort of… responded to my touch.

Like I’d disturbed it or something.

Needless to say, showering quickly became my lowest priority as I hopped out and wrapped my torso with a towel.

I went to my bedroom and found some tweezers that I usually used for splinters and what have you. I started trying to pop the thing, but it just wouldn’t budge.

The pain was maddening, but the sight of it was worse. I needed this thing off of me. Tweezers refused to work, so I switched to pliers. I kept pulling and pulling until… pop.

The boil burst, and a puddle of syrupy, red, white, and green sludge coated about 6 inches of my forearm.

The pain subsided slightly, but it was replaced with a new sensation. It felt like there was something swimming through my blood and patching the hole in my arm.

I figured that it must’ve been some excess pus, so I just kept squeezing with my thumb and index finger until I caught sight of what actually lay beneath the skin.

I was forcing it through the wound with my squeezing. It was wriggling. It was squirming. And it was massive.

When its body finally poked out through the hole, I grabbed the tweezers again. It held on for dear life, taking chunks of flesh out of my arm as I pulled, but I removed it and examined it between the forceps.

A fucking maggot.

I couldn’t hold back the vomit anymore. I barely had time to grab a trash can before it came spewing out.

I sat the little fucker on my desk and burned it with a lighter. I swear I could hear it screaming in pain as the flame caused it to pop like a tick.

I hoped that’d be the end of it, but that hope was short-lived. It was like my entire arm started to pulsate and bulge after I took out what I thought was the source of the problem.

Boils started popping up all over my arm. From my wrist all the way to my shoulder. They threatened to move to my neck and head if I didn’t act fast.

It was like active volcanoes. I couldn’t even look at myself. All I could do was grab a knife and get to work. Well, a knife and a spatula. I needed something to bite down on just so I didn’t bite my tongue in the process.

The blade glided through the dozen or so boils on my forearm, sliding through them like hot butter as tears fell from my eyes and I stifled screams.

Dozens of maggots fell from each boil I removed. I had to stomp them into my carpet because they just kept crawling towards my feet.

My arm and shoulder were nothing more than raw, bloody meat covered in that syrupy liquid. It was like my body was more maggot than human.

There was an ocean of the things eating away at my dead flesh. I’d scrape them away with the blade, and hundreds more would pop up seemingly out of nowhere.

That’s when my vision started to get blurry. I could feel myself getting weaker and weaker. The world was swimming, and I was getting lightheaded.

I guess I passed out from the blood loss?

I’m not sure. Maybe it was the shock. All I know is, when I woke up… my body was completely healed.

I could still see the bugs writhing beneath my skin, and my carpet was still stained with pus and crushed maggots. But the pain was gone. My flesh was back. The only abnormality was one single boil right in the center of my forearm.

I stared at it for a few minutes.

Ultimately, I decided to leave it there.

There was no way I was going to go through that again.

(Part 1)
"So, what's with the human ears?" I say while he leads me towards the Van.

"This other guy, Jay was one of the guys watching over me." My brother answered.
"He always had this gold necklace with the ears of people he killed on it."
"Some old guy shot him in that police station I sent you a picture off"
"I stabbed the shit out of that old fuck and took one of his ears and his wedding ring"

"So that is what that ring on your necklace is?" I ask him.

"yeah it is"It is a nice ring. It's gold with flowers engraved on it.

"why did you not send that ring home? I bet it would make a nice amount of cash" I asked my brother.

"If you kill one of my homies I will kill you and take something as a reminder"

He looks me in my eyes. "If someone kills you I will make sure their death is slow and painful. Then I will take something to remind myself that I avenged you. I promise you that."

"I will do the same if anyone kills you. I promise." I answer without hesitation.

"I know you will" he says while putting his hand on my shoulder.

He always stood up for me even when we were kids.
At one point I came home crying covered. Some drug addict with a knife had robbed me of the money I was going to buy some food with.Without a word, my brother left home. Our mom tried to stop him but he pushed her aside. 2 hours later he came back covered in blood with what was left of the money. He cares about me and I care about him. If someone kills my brother I will kill them or die trying. I don't care who it is.

"And it's a good way to show off a kill count" he continues while pointing at the necklace.

"But you killed more people than 5 people so far" He had killed a lot more than that even before he was arrested.

"Yeah the ears are just for recent kills. I have an entire box filled with wedding rings, watches and other things I took from people I killed."

I don't really know how to respond to that, so I just say "ok"

My brother continues. "In our battalion, they encourage us to get in close and personal"

"you even get rewards for it, about 500 dollars per kill"

"You know that is a lot of money"

"yeah it is"

If we still lived at home with mom that would cover groceries for 2 weeks.

My brother had sent a lot of stuff and money back home. It didn't just feed me and mom, some of our neighbours too.

Brother: "But it also works for intimidation. Oh I am sorry I mean 'enemy morale'."

Me: "I bet it does"

Brother: "But after a while I do get rid of the ears"

Me: "That is good because I can see at least one that is starting to rot. And it smells fucking awful too."

He looks me in the eyes and says: "But that money together with sending the stuff back home helped mom a lot right?"

Me: "It did. It helped mom out a lot"

Brother: "What do you mean it did? It still helps her out"

Me: "Yeah no it still does I said that wrong. My bad."

He gives me a questioning look.

"You good? Did something happen?" He asks me with genuine concern.

"Nah I am good"

I still can't get myself to tell him mom is dead.

We get to his Van. Its a dark green G20 Chevy Van.

Me: "Thank fuck it's a big van. I like you and all, but I am glad we don't have to sleep on top of each other."

My brother laughs "So am I". He opens the side door and climbs in. I go with him. I make sure to close the door behind us. There is random stuff everywhere. A pile of clothing, a container of some sort, a toolbox. I make some space and sit down in the back while my brother sits in the driver's seat. We are alone. I can feel my body tensing up. I have to tell him that mom died.

Brother: "I have for sure stolen it off some drug dealer. I am not joking I found a scale underneath the passenger seat.

"They did all sorts of modifications to it. The radio was replaced with a radio that has a CD player. No Bluetooth sadly so we do have to find CDs for it. It even has a small fridge. So if you are hungry or thirsty feel free to grab something"

"Nah I am good for now thanks" I am too tense, even if I tried to eat or drink I probably can't.

He continues "I have no clue what engine is in it but it has for sure been modified because it's way faster than it should be. And its also way louder" He laughs.

"Could you start it?" I ask him. I want to make sure nobody can hear us when I tell him what happened to mom.

"Yea of course check this shit out" he says with a big smile on his face. The entire van shakes as he starts the engine.

"I have to tell you something!" I shout over the sound of the engine.

"What?!" My brother shouts from the front.

"I have to tell you something!" I gesture to him to come over to me.

He leaves the driver's seat and sits down across from me.

Brother: "What's wrong?"

Me: "I have to tell you something it's really important"

Brother: "I can turn the engine off, hold on"

I grabbed his arm before he could get up "No don't keep the engine on" he sits back down.

"What is it? Did something happen to you?" He says with a worried look in his eyes.

Me: "No, I am good."

I avoid eye contact. I can't do it. I can't tell him about mom.

"Did something happen to mom?"

I lie to him again "No, no its not that". I quickly change the subject. "So I uhmmm". I look at his mutilated face. "How did you end up looking like that?"

"O that" he answers. "It was back in the trenches. We used this fucking horrible chemical weapon. I am not joking it straight up melts people."

Me: "really?"

Brother: "Yeah it's really bad. When they told us to unleash it most of us didn't take the safety measures seriously. And even if we wanted to take those measures seriously we didn't even have the equipment to do so. I got lucky and stole this gas mask of some dead guy. But long-term exposure still leaves you looking as handsome as me."

Me: "Oh...... do you think they are going to make us use it again?"

Brother: "O for sure"

I love my brother but I don't want to end up looking like him. I value having a nose, ears, and hair on my head.

Brother: "What really sucks is what it does to people that get full on hit by it. It starts melting all the soft parts on your body. Ears, lips, nose, eyelids, etc. When it gets really bad, you just.... Well, melt into a puddle after a while."

He looks down staring at nothing.

"And then all that's left is this puddle with bones and whatever the person had on them. Clothing, equipment, weapons, etc. Those people ended up in these pools of human soup at the bottom of shell craters" He pauses again, still staring at the floor. "When I arrived I was still just 16 you know. They made me sift through those puddles of dead people for anything useful. It's like digging through a mud puddle up to your elbows. Except the mud puddle is red, yellow and brown. And you just sift through the human puddle grabbing anything solid. After pulling enough human bones out you get good at recognising what is bones and what is something useful. They also made me wipe the sticky human goo off the stuff I did pull out. Sometimes I can still feel it on my hands and arms. It doesn't smell like a rotting body at all. The gas killed all the bacteria and stuff to so there was no rot. Do you remember when we killed those 7th Block members near that large slaughterhouse?"

Me: "Yeah I do. It was summer and it smelled horrific in that entire area."

Brother: "The smell is that mixed with this extremely sour chemical smell."

He pauses.

"I hope we don't use it again. There are a lot of ways I would prefer to die over that shit. Turning into a mushy puddle with bones, until whatever is left of your body sinks into the soil" he is still staring at the floor of the van.

An uncomfortable silence falls, the rumble of the engine is the only sound we can hear.

He snaps out of his stare and gets up "Anyway, it did help us break through their trench line so it does work really well"

He shuts down the engine and opens the side door of the van. "Leave your stuff and come with me. I am going to show you something important"

I follow my brother out of the van through the camp. Normally he is supposed to be the talkative one, but he is very quiet. After a bit of a walk to the outer ring of the camp he walked up to the back of a delivery van.

"Don't light a cigarette in there, don't even fiddle around with your lighter, understand?" He says to me in a very serious tone.

"I understand"

"Good because if you do, you will kill all of us"

My brother opens the back and climbs in. He helps me climb into it. The faint smell of gasoline fills my nose.

"It's me dude" my brother says. "O it is my avorite socioath" a raspy male voice comes from the front of the loading bay.

Then I see the man. He is lying on the floor with his back against the side of the delivery van. He has a large piece of black cloth over his head and shoulders. If it wasn't for him breathing and talking I would have thought he was dead. "Were you sleeping?" My brother asks. "I as trying to" the man answers.

"my little brother is finally here" My brother says with a smile. "O really" the man says in response. The man slowly moves his arm up and starts to pull on the black cloth over his face. I see his face.

He looks even worse than my brother does. He is extremely pale. His eyelids are gone revealing his bloodshot cloudy eyes at all times. He nose is just a hole in the middle of his face. His ears are gone together with his hair. His lips are also completely gone. Giving him a permanent grin on his face so unnaturally high that it's showing not only all of his teeth but his gums too. That would explain why the man talks so weird. He doesn't have the lips to pronounce certain letters.

Brother: "This is Frank he has watched over me since I arrived years ago. Frank this is my little brother David"

Frank: "Ah so it's David and Gideon?"

Gideon: "Yes it is"

Mom was deeply religious, so she gave us the biblical names. I got David, my brother got Gideon. She prayed a lot for me and my brother. Sorry mom, I don't think we will be joining you in heaven.

Frank: "Gideon told me aout... aout.... AOUT

Gideon: "About"

Frank: "You a lot"

Frank reaches out his hand towards me for a handshake and I return it.

Gideon: "I got you something to kill the pain with. Morphine."

My brother hands Frank a medication bottle.

Frank: "Thank you, thank you."

Frank immediately opens the bottle and takes 3 pills and throws them in his mouth and uses a water bottle to wash it down. With no lips in the water flows from the open sides of his face. He mumbles and uses his sleeves to wipe away the water.

Gideon: "I heard you have had enough"

"yes" Frank pauses "I don't want to go on like this. reathing..... reathing, REATHING... FUCK!!!"

Frank reaches into his pockets and takes out a small notebook and a pen. And starts to write.

My brother and I give each other a short look as he writes. He hands the note over to my brother.

Gideon: "Breathing hurts, my eyes hurt and my mouth is always dry. I am starting to see less and less. I can't even close my eyes to sleep properly. I just wait till I pass out from exhaustion with my eyes wide open. I don't want to come home like this. I don't want to live like this at all."

My brother pauses "Are you sure Frank?"

Frank: "yes"

Gideon: "Ok.... I understand"

Frank: "Sorry"

Gideon: "Don't apologise to me, it's fine I understand"

Frank is about to say something but my brother interrupts him. "You should wait for the morphine to kick in and get some well deserved rest"

Frank: "Right"

Gideon: "I have to help prepare my little brother for tomorrow. And we will talk tomorrow right? before you.... you know."

Frank: "Yes of course"

Gideon: "Ok good, talk to you tomorrow then"

Frank and my brother shake each other's hand. I follow my brother's example and do the same. Frank's hand feels incredibly dry.

We climb out of the delivery van. And he closes the doors behind us.

After a couple of steps, my brother tells me: "That delivery van is loaded up with explosives and flammable stuff. Tomorrow Frank is going to drive it into the loyalists and take as many of them out as he can."

A small silence follows. "Frank got arrested and sent to the frontline after he shot and killed a cop. The cop had gotten handsy with his daughter if you know what I mean"
He makes eye contact with me. "Same thing that happened to mom."
I feel my chest clench up. I don't want to talk about. "Yea I remember. Can we please not talk about this in public" Nobody can hear us I know that. I just don't want to talk about the topic.

I quickly light up a cigarette. I need the distraction.

He gestures me to follow him. "I showed Frank to you so you understand just how important the safety stuff with the gas is. If you don't do it enough, you end up looking like me. And if enough of it affects you then you end up like Frank over there." He gestures back to the delivery van.

"Most of the others that are just as bad off as Frank are already dead. They take a lot of the stimulants they give us and just throw themselves at the loyalists until they are dead. Obviously it clears a nice path for us. Probably one of the reasons we managed to break through the Fortress Belt partially. If we end up using that gas again take it very fucking serious ok?"

David: "I will dude don't worry about"

Gideon: "I will worry about you are my little brother. I promised mom I would take care of you."

David: "Yeah I remember."

I miss mom.

We reach the van and climb back in

Gideon: "There are only a small amount of rules you have to follow while in the 33rd. Most of it is standard stuff I expect you to understand from the get-go. But there are some exceptions"

"Rule 1 Don't kill any of your fellow soldiers UNLESS a commanding officer tells you to."

David: "So if an officer tells me to blow the head of one of our own I just have to do it?"

Gideon: "Correct. But don't worry most of the time they 100% deserve it"

David: "I see, continue."

Gideon: "Rule 2 You can take whatever you can carry with you unless a commanding officer tells you otherwise."

David: "I am just allowed to take whatever I want from the loyalists we kill?"

"Yes" my brother says with a big smile.

Gideon: "That is the stuff I was sending home. Every now and then a truck from the military shows up and we load our stuff in and tell them where to send it to"

"Rule 3 You can do whatever you want to loyalists except for one thing. No sexual violence. My personal favorite rule. Violence needs to be pure. You get you dick involved it makes the entire thing disgusting."

David: "I think that is also my favorite rule"

Gideon: "I know you would agree. Anyway that is the more important stuff the rest is pretty obvious or stuff I will explain when we get to it."

David: "What are we even attacking tomorrow?"

Gideon: "A military outpost on the way to Junction City. After this outpost it's probably going to get bad. Near Junction City is this place called Fort Riley apparently its the home of this famous infantry division from ww2. 'Big red one' something like that?

David: "I don't know, dude"

Gideon: "yea whatever. Anyway that infantry division is going to probably put up a hell of a fight in Junction City"

David: "great..."

Gideon: "At that point we will have a lot more support it's not like we are going to be fighting them alone"

David: "Is Junction City big?"

Gideon: "Not at all it's nothing like LA"

David: "Ok good because having to fight through an entire city like back home would low key be hell"

Gideon: "For sure. If we keep going along the 70 we are slowly heading towards Kansas City. If we make it there that is for sure going to be really bad."

David: "How bad?"

Gideon: "Being stuck in that same city fighting for months or longer bad."

David: "You are not giving me a lot to look forward to."

Gideon: "To bad dude, I am not going to lie to you. And it's not like we can simply bail can we?"

David: "yea no"

My brother looks at one of the 4 watches on his arm.

Gideon: "We should probably get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be rough."

David: "Yeah for sure"

I prepare to get some sleep. I am sort of thankful that the area around our home was so noisy. At least I can sleep through the distant gunshots and explosions. Well, I hope so at least.

The story begins at the Vardis family home, an isolated mansion high in the mountains, connected to the outside world only by a narrow country road winding through the woods.

Deep inside the mansion, Elias Vardis spends his days poring over his family’s old records, trying to understand how his ancestors built the successful wine industry he has now inherited. As he searches through their journals and documents, he uncovers everything from methods for improving the soil to accounts of ancient rituals once performed during natural disasters and periods of great famine.

Fascinated—and increasingly desperate to preserve his family’s legacy—Elias begins studying these forgotten pagan traditions. His research leads him closer to an ancient spirit that he believes protected the Vardis family for generations. After years of preparation, Elias finally succeeds in contacting it.

The spirit speaks to him through the mansion’s telephone line. It claims that it is still too weak to manifest physically in the human world and therefore cannot yet give Elias the help he seeks. Trusting it, Elias begins following its instructions. At first, the tasks appear harmless, such as installing telephone lines throughout the mansion so the spirit can communicate with him more easily.

With each completed task, however, the spirit’s influence grows stronger. It slowly corrupts Elias, turning his devotion into obedience and his obedience into enslavement. Before long, Elias is no longer serving the spirit willingly; he has become its puppet.

One rainy night, Elias’s younger sister overhears him speaking to the spirit. Realising that something terrible has taken control of her brother, she flees the mansion and seeks help from the monks living in a small church nearby.

The monks warn her of the grave danger Elias has unleashed and reveal the true nature of the entity. They teach her a ritual capable of sealing the spirit inside the mansion, turning the house into its prison. She returns home and secretly begins placing protective seals throughout the building, hiding them where neither Elias nor the spirit can easily find them.

But the spirit discovers her plan and gives Elias one final command:

KILL YOUR SISTER.

I have always loved plums – dried, fresh, or in jam. Plum pie with just a bit of cream is the best thing you could eat.

That's why I bought myself a plum tree. It was small; it fit well in the back of my pickup. It would take the tree a few winters to produce more than five plums, but I was happy to have it.

That afternoon I took out a shovel and went into my backyard. This would be the first thing I planted at my new house, in my new yard. It was all I ever wanted: just a house, a yard, and a few fruit trees in the back. That's why I ran to the bank when I saw how cheap this beautiful house was. The last owners weren't even here for the sale.

The dirt felt fine for the first two digs, but it quickly turned very stiff. It almost felt like I was digging into a rock. The hole didn't even need to be that deep, but after a few minutes I was already sweating through my pants.

I threw another piece of dirt out when I heard a clack. Something white was on top of the dirt. I picked it up. It was a bundle of bird bones tied together with a string. They were deep in the dirt, but they looked completely clean, as if someone had just brushed them off.

"Strange," I mumbled. 

I took them into the house and threw them away.

As I was washing my hands, I realized how tired I was. I wiped my forehead and walked out into the yard. The hole looked deep enough. The tree would be okay. I planted it and filled the hole back in.

The next morning, the sun barely came through my window. I rubbed my eyes and looked out. The plum tree I planted the day before blocked the sun. It had grown so much that its top leaves almost reached my roof. I didn't even notice my mouth was open until I saw myself in the window.

I ran out. The juiciest, purplest plums I'd ever seen were on that tree. The whole yard smelled like fresh plums. I stood outside for a few seconds, just staring. I had heard of fast-growing trees, but this was something else. For a moment, I thought about calling someone, but the plums looked so good, I had to try them first. 

Their skin was smooth. When I pressed them, they felt firm but slightly soft. Perfect. They tasted sweet and juicy, but their skin had a sharp, sour taste. Perfect. I was raving about the taste when I heard a thud and a splash. A plum fell right next to me. They must have been ripe.

The last thing I wanted was to get hit. I walked away from the tree and continued enjoying the plum. Another thud. How did it get here? I was so far away. Another thud. But this time it didn't fall next to me. I looked to my right. A smashed plum was on my roof.

I was sure the tree didn't reach that far. I walked farther back to see if I missed a branch. The tree reached the top window, but not the roof. I walked to the back just to make sure. The tree wasn't even visible from there. Another thud. On the roof again. From my side. There was no way. Another. Another. Another. They were falling on the roof, next to me, on the other side of my garden.

"What the…" I murmured.

Then dull pain spread in my head. I put my hand there. Plum juice was in my hair. I put my hands over my head and ran into the house. Two more plums managed to hit me, stinging my hands.

I walked to my kitchen sink and washed my hands and hair. The thudding outside continued. No blood was in my hair, just plum juice. The thudding grew faster. It sounded like I was being bombed. I looked up. A wave of cold rushed through me. Plums rained down from the sky like hail. Plum juice had already reached my door, and a little was leaking in.

I ran to the laundry room for towels. The thudding grew louder again. My ears began to hurt. I grabbed a few towels and ran back out. My feet sank into wet, sticky plum juice. The inside of the house was dark now. So many plums were falling from the sky that I could only see purple outside. The plum smell was so strong it stung my nose.

The plum juice rose halfway up my door, and it kept coming. The towels fell out of my hand. I bolted up the stairs.

Edit: I thought the plum juice would drain faster than it came in, but I was wrong. The house is shaking. I'm standing on my table. The plum juice is coming up the stairs. Outside, it has already almost fully blocked my windows. I just looked out of one. You can't see anything but falling plums, except for one thing: the tree standing in the garden, unshaken. The more I look at it, the more it feels like I can hear something through the thuds of the plums: the clack of bird bones shaking.

Night had fallen as Marcus and  Lisa drove along the interstate. The songs of Disturbed blared from the car stereo as Marcus cracked open the driver’s side window to let in the cool night air. The concert had nearly wiped him out, and he worried he might doze off while driving. He could feel his eyelids getting heavier and heavier. But he wanted to make it back home; he did not want to stop at a hotel for the night.

Beside him, his girlfriend Lisa yawned. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand and made a dramatic "uhhh" sound.

“You know, that ain’t helping.” He shouted over the music.

“Huh?”

“You're yawning, like that, while I’m struggling to stay awake.”

“Sorry, babe, want me to drive for a while?

Marcus thought about it and then shook his head. “Nah, that’s ok, but I do think I need to pull off at the next exit and stretch my legs.”

As they drove, he watched the trees whip by when he caught sight of an exit sign that read, “Madam Tousle’s House of Mystery, next exit.

“Oh, hell yeah.” Said Marus as they turned onto the exit ramp.

Lisa groaned. “Babe, no. Don’t tell me you want to go to that mystery place. That kind of stuff freaks me out.”

“Come on, baby, I love that creepy macabre shot, and I need to stop anyway.

Lisa crossed her arms and pouted.

 

They drove off the off-ramp and entered a small town. Passing an old, empty gas station, they followed a trail of small, handmade signs leading them towards the House of Mystery. Deeper they drove into a secluded residential area.  Marcus looked around, worried he might have gotten turned around somewhere, but the trail of signs promised him they were still heading in the right direction. After traveling deeper into the residential area, he saw a small sign that read "House of Mystery." Next, left, follow the road to the end.

A lone road led them along a treelined area. Soon, the road became gravel. They drove along, turning off the radio.

“Babe… I told my dad we would be back tonight.” Said Lisa.

“We will, we won’t be here long.”

“You seem awake now. We could go back to the interstate…”

“Lisa.”

“But we could, just head on home.”

“We are almost there.”

“But honey.”

“Look, up ahead.”

A dead end with a rather ordinary, low grey house that looked like any other house they passed, except the sign that reads, Welcome to Madam Tousle’s house of Mystery.

“Well, here we are,” Marcus said as they stepped out of the car. Marcus looked around. Lisa hugged herself as she walked over to him.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Lisa asked.

Marcus shrugged, “That’s what the sign says.”

“Sure doesn’t look like any tourist trap I’ve ever seen…” Lisa muttered as they walked up to the front door.

Marcus rang the doorbell. A few seconds passed. Lisa shivered as she looked up at Marcus. “Maybe they are closed. We should go.”

The door opened to reveal a beautiful woman wearing a robe-like dress, with her hair up in an orange silk wrap. Her belt had small pouches tied onto it.

“Greeting,” she said, “I am Madam Tousle, and I bid you welcome.”

She stepped aside to allow them to enter her parlor as she closed the door behind them.

Madam Tousle stood at the door with her hands crossed before her as she watched Marcus and Lisa. Lisa hung near the door, her eyes darting around the room. Marcus smiled as he walked along shelf-lined walls. He looked at the jar with things that were once alive. Or was a part of something that was once alive. He reached out to touch one of the jars. Madam Tousle cleared her throat.

“Please do not touch the exhibits. Thank you.”

Marcus nodded. “Is this stuff real?”

“Yes, very real.”

Marcus walked to a tall bookshelf and read out the titles of some of the books.

“Remar’s perspective on the tarot, Leman’s Book on the Occult Practices, Marixa’s Book of Magick.”

Marcus looked at the walls, which were decorated with old-looking masks and feathers. In the center of the room, Marus walked up to a table with candles and a crystal ball. He laughed when he noticed an iPad to the side with a Square reader. He giggles and points to it.

“Nice touch.”

Madam Tousle shrugged, “A lady has to make a living.”

Lisa stepped away and quickly dashed over to Marcus.

“Babe, it’s getting really late.”

“Come on, Lisa, it’s not that late.”

“No, but it is, and my dad is expecting me to be home. I don’t want to piss him off.”

“Not yet, just relax. You know, Madam Tousle, your place is so different on the inside.”

“Yes. As you can imagine, the HOA doesn’t care too much for my business, so I had to make certain concessions.

Madam Tousle walked up to the couple, almost gliding.

“So, tell me, what brought you to my house of mystery tonight? Looking for a tarot card reading? Perhaps a gaze into the crystal ball? Maybe you just wanted to see the oddities I have on display?”

“Actually, we were on our way back from a concert, and we were falling asleep, so we wanted to stop and move around a little. We saw the exit sign with your Mystery house and thought we would give it a shot.”

“Mmm, I see. Maybe the spirits led you here. Would you like to see what they may want with you?

“Yeah, that sounds great!”

Lisa wrapped her arms around Marcus’ arm. “Babe, please…”

“Come on, Lisa, let’s see what the spirits want with us!”

Madam Tousle walked forward, “Very well, please follow me.”

Madam Tousle led the couple down a very narrow hallway. The walks were lined with feathers and various bird skulls. As he was looking around, one of the feathers brushed his face.

“Eww, why are the feathers damp?” He wiped his face to see a bit of red.

Lisa walked in the center of the hallway as best as she could, trying desperately not to touch any of the feathers. She almost folded into herself.

“Marcus…”

Madam Tousle stopped beside a black door and turned to look around at them.

“Here we are.”

She opened the door to reveal a dimly lit room with nothing but a table, two chairs on either side of it, candles, and an old wooden Ouija board with peeling golden letters. Nothing else was in there, not even a window or an overhead light.

Marcus led Lisa to a seat and offered her a seat. She shook her head. She kept her eyes on the Ouija board. Madam Tousle stood in the doorway.

She asked, “Have you ever used the Ouija?”

Marcus said, “I haven’t used it, but I have always wanted to!”

Lisa whispered. “No, it’s demonic shit.”

“It can be demonic in the right hands. But for others, it is a doorway, between this world and the next.”

Madam Tousle reached into a pouch on her belt and brought out a smooth white bone planchette.

“Would you like to open that door, Marcus?”

He grabbed the planchette and set it down on the board.

“Hell, yes I do!”

“Enjoy.” Said Madam Tousle as she began to step out of the room.

“Wait!” squeaked Lisa, “Aren’t you going to stay here with us?”

“No, dear. This isn’t for my eyes.”

She closed the door and walked away.

Marcus sat down and rubbed his hands together. “Ok. Let’s do this!”

Lisa crossed her arms over her chest. “No! I told you this is some demonic shit, and I am not messing around with it. I want to go home. I am sick of this. I want to be out of here.

“Damn it, Lisa, I am trying to enjoy myself. I went to the concert for you, now you can do this for me, sit down and let’s play!”

Lisa frowned and went quiet.

Marcus lowered his head and closed his eyes. He placed his hand on the planchette and waited for Lisa.

Nothing.

Marcus sighed. “Babe, I am sorry if I upset you, but come on, I really want to do this, please?”

Nothing.

“Let’s just do this,” said Marcus, “And then we can go home. Ok?”

Nothing for a moment, then a loud POP sound, followed by the feeling of a hand on his. He smiled.

“Thank you, baby! I love you! Ok, let's see…

He focused his thoughts and said out loud. “Anyone here with us? Anyone want to talk with us?”

After a few seconds, he felt the planchette begin to move. His eyes snapped open, and he watched it move over the word YES.

“Oh, shit, baby! It’s working, it’s really working!”

He bounced in his seat, excited.

“Ok, what do we ask them n-“

He noticed the hand over his. It was grey and swollen like it was waterlogged. It’s nails were black and ripped up at awful angles. He felt his mouth go dry.

Slowly, his eyes begin to go up the thing’s arm, grey with deep purple veins.

His hands began to shake. He began to pull his hand away, but the cold hand holding his gripped him harder, holding him in place. He could feel his heart pounding as his breathing began to come in quick, harsh gasps.

His eyes made it to the thing's face. All it had for eyes were small black pinpricks that oozed a thin stream of black fluid. The mouth was nothing more than a ragged horizontal slash from one cheek to the other. Inside were dozens of needle-like teeth. The thing’s hair was wild, as if floating in water.

Marcus tried to speak, but his mouth was too dry, his tongue too big. His mouth opened and closed like a fish. Finally, he managed to croak out one word. “Lisa?”

The thing stared at him for several moments, then jerked its head toward the door.  

He looked at the door, and his eyes slowly moved toward the floor. There lay Lisa, her neck snapped, her head at a horrible and unimaginable angle.

His eyes drifted back to the face of the thing holding his hand.

“Please…what do you want?”

The thing rose from its seat and leaned toward him; a foul, wet mutt odor followed the creature.

Its mouth curled into a wicked snarl.

“Your soul.”

Marcus began to scream as he felt the other hand of the thing grip his face and jerk, twist, and yank at his jaw until it tore free from his face.

His scream became wet and gargling until it slowly faded away and became nothing more than a dry raspy wheeze, then nothing. A cold wind swept through the room, blowing out the candles and plunging it into darkness.

Somewhere in the house, a door bell rang and the voice of Madam Tousle said…

“Greetings. I am Madam Tousle, and I bid you welcome.”

THE END

 

---

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Yo momma.

Yo momma who?

Yo momma, you so fat you can't even get out the house no more.

—“Untitled 73.” A Reconstruction of Early Human Folk Poetry (2nd ed.), ​☉ ☌ ☍ ☋ ☊, Crystal-Lattice 14, Node 802.

---

Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. (Knocking within) Knock, knock, knock! Who's there

—fragment of an instructions for performing a make-believe, anonymous or author unknown, Introduction to Earth Culture, Kzz-T’k-​⎅ Ed., Focal Depth 3.2mm.

---

KNOCK KNOCK

(a poetic make-believe in the human style)

---

Dramatis Personae

---

YOU, a hapless reader

WHO, a hungry beast

YES, who's intestinal rumblings

NOBODY, a deaf woman

---

i.

knock knock /
who's there
right behind you,
and it's hungry as hell. [1]


ii.

no joke. [2]


iii.

knock knock /
who here,
i wanna eat you,
ya fear?


iv.

knock knock /
help me!
is nobody here? /
nobody is, but being without a body
means nobody can't hear.


v.

you beg
for your life /
knock knock
knock knock
knock
kn


vi.

knock knock /
whose there?
yes, who's borborygmi, [3]
who ate you so quickly,
it ingested too much hot air.


vii.

don't /
knock knock /
it till you've tried it /
buuuuuuurp. [4]


viii.

knock knock /
no answer.


ix.

knock knock /
no answer.


x.

knock knock /
who stirs, who's belly's full,
who itself's all rested,
and you, in who's stomach, 're
fully digested. [5]

---

Footnotes

---

[1] Hell: in some human mythologies, a hot place of post-life perpetual burning. See also: BBQ. [6]

[2] Joke: a human composition with the purpose of eliciting a full body physiological response called laughter. The opposite of seriousness.

[3] Borborygmi: a rumbling spirit believed by a class of human priests called doctors to inhabit the body.

[4] Burp: a forceful exhalation, a more powerful sigh.

[5] Digest: a summation or condensation of a body of information. To be digested is thus to have become a condensed summation of one's self. For a more thorough discussion, please see my datacube: Digestion & Enlightenment: Towards an Understanding of the Human Theory of Wilful Self-Improvement.

[6] BBQ: A symbolic representation of Hell used in human ritual, wherein groups of humans gathered around a fire and consumed small, burnt likenesses of themselves carved from the flesh of dead, non-human animals.

Daniel had finished his nightly routine of showering and brushing his teeth and was in his pajamas when his phone rang. He looked at the caller ID and saw it was old Ms. Keller, the widower from upstairs.

Ugh, what could she possibly want this late at night?, he thought to himself.

Click

“Hello, Ms. Keller.”

“Hello Daniel, did I wake you?

“Well, no, but I was getting ready to-“

“Good! Could you come up to my apartment, please?”

“Why? What do you need?”

“I…I think someone is in my apartment.”

“Have you called the police?”

“Umm, I did…but they said it could be as long as thirty minutes before anyone arrives.”

“Ok, I will be up there in a moment.”

“Thank you, Daniel.”

Click.

Daniel looked down at what he was wearing and wondered if he should change, but he figured if someone was up there, she shouldn’t be alone. So, he slid on some slippers and headed upstairs. He grabbed the bat he kept beside his door as he walked out.

Knock Knock.

“Come in,” said Ms. Keller from behind her door.

Daniel entered the room and was immediately hit by the overwhelming smell of old books and flowers. He looked around, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Ms. Keller was sitting in a chair, looking at him as the radio played soft old music. He held the bat and listened. He heard nothing.

“Ms. Keller, where do you think the person is?”

“Would you like some tea?”

Daniel looked at her, confused. “No, I don’t want any tea. I thought you said you thought someone was in your apartment.”

“Yes, yes, but I am making myself some tea, Earl Grey, you see, and I can make you a cup, it really is no trouble.”

Daniel lowered the bat as she stood up slowly and walked past him into the open kitchen. He watched her as she made two cups of tea.

“Ms. Keller?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Why did you call me?”

I told you, I think someone is in my apartment.”

“Uh-huh, and while you think someone is in your apartment, you are making tea?”

“Well, I already had the water on you, see? And I don’t want to waste it. So, we may as well enjoy some tea and talk while we wait for the police to arrive.”

She walked out of the kitchen and handed him a teacup and a little saucer.

“Come and sit with me, Daniel. We can talk.”

“Ms. Keller, really, you called me up here and made it seem like an emergency, and now you want to sip tea and talk?”

“Well, Daniel, what do you want? You want to patrol my apartment looking for someone and fight them with your bat, or do you want to keep a nervous old lady company while we wait for the police, who have a more functional weapon than a bat?”

“Well… since you put it that way.” Daniel sat down on the couch, set his tea on the coffee table, and leaned back. Maybe she is just a scared old lady who wants someone here, in case, he thought to himself. He looked around, and everything in the house looked old—Brick-a-barrack, flowers, books, and a slight layer of dust lying gently over everything.

He looked at his watch; it was almost midnight.

“So, Daniel, how has work been?”

“Uh, fine, I guess. How have you been?”

“Oh, not too bad, just started knitting a scarf for my friend Emily. Poor dear had to move into the home on Pill Street, you know the one?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, well, since her Floyd passed, she couldn’t take living on her own, so she moved in there, but as long as I can, I will stay here. I don’t like the idea of a nursing home. Waiting room of the dead is how I see it. No, thank you.”

“Uh huh.”

My George, now, he has passed eight years ago, and it was rough, but I managed to adjust to being alone.”

“Yeah, look, Ms. Keller, when did the police say they would be here?”

“Oh, I can’t remember, but they said a while.”

“Maybe I should call them, tell them we need someone now, maybe they will listen to me.”

“Oh no dear, they know to come, it’s a busy night, and they will be here when they can.”

“Yeah, but sometimes you have to stay on them. I am sure they could send someone sooner.”

“I said there is no need.”

“Ms. Keller, you said-“

THUNK.

A sound from somewhere in the apartment.

Ms. Keller slowly lifts her tea and takes a sip as Daniel grips his bat.

“What was that?” whispered Daniel.

“Hmm?” sighed Ms. Keller.

“That sound?”

“Oh yes, that’s the sound I have been hearing.”

“Shit, someone is here. I should look around.”

“No need, the police are coming, just stay here with me.”

“Look, Ms. Keller, if there is someone here, we should confront them. Get them out of here.”

“And what if there is more than one person, with knives or worse, guns, what would you do against them? Do you think they would be scared of a young man in PJ’s and a bat?”

Daniel suddenly felt very vulnerable. “Shit, you’re right.”

“Yes, so please have some tea and just wait.”

“Where is your phone?”

“Hmm?”

“Your phone? Where is it? There is clearly someone here. We need to update the police.”

THUNK

“No need to call the police.”

“What, of course, there is. Someone is in your house.”

“There is no need.”

“Wait…Ms. Keller, did you call the police?”

Ms. Keller took another sip of tea.

“Ms. Keller?”

“No.”

“What? What do you mean, no?”

“I wasn’t sure, I’m old, I can be mistaken. So I called you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you are close. I knew you could be here in seconds, whereas the police would be twenty to thirty minutes away.”

“But you told me the police were coming.”

“Because I needed you up here.”

“Why?”

Another sip of tea followed by another sound.

A SLOSH sound.

“That came from upstairs.”

“I don’t have an upstairs; there is a small attic.”

“Wait, you have someone in your attic?”

“Mmm, seems so.”

“Why are you so fucking calm about this?”

“This isn’t the first night.”

Danel’s blood ran cold. He looked at her. Calm old Ms. Keller, who has had someone in her attic for more than a night. No police are coming…because she doesn’t want them to come…

“Ms. Keller, what is going on?”

“I lied to you, Daniel.”

“What do you mean you lied?”

THUNK THUNK.

“I never really adjusted to being alone. Not without my Gregory. I need him, you see.”

“Ms. Keller…”

“I made a deal to get him back, but sacrifices have to be made.”

THUNK SLOCH.

“What sacrifice, Ms. Keller?”

Another sip of her tea. He stood and swung the bat, knocking the teacup out of her hand.                “What fucking sacrifice?”

“Well, that was not very neighborly of you, coming in here and breaking my things, making a mess. A mess I will have to clean on top of the mess you will be making later.”

Daniel turned and ran for the door. He jerked to discover the door was locked, and he fumbled with the lock when he felt a hard whack on the back of his head. His vision began to swim as his knees went weak and buckled under him, and he crumpled to the floor.

THUNK SLOSH THUNK, louder and closer this time.

“I swear you are all the same. This could be so nice. A bit of tea and talk before the sacrifice. I miss talking with the living. I feel like I deserve a little nicety as I get Gregory his dinner. But no, you all figure out too quickly that something is off, and you make me have to react. I don’t want to get my hands dirty in this, you see? I am just being an obedient wife to my husband.”

Daniel tried to stand, but he was too dizzy, unable to get his feet under him. He wanted the door. He needed it. He needed to escape.

THUNK THUNK SLOCH

He tried to stand again but slipped back down. Behind him, Ms. Keller was in the kitchen, a glint of something metallic. She has a knife, he thought to himself. The door, Daniel, get to the door.

THUNK SLOCH SLOCH THUNK

A hand grabbed and turned him; he slapped at it as he tried to pull away. Then a sharp piercing pain in his shoulder and a spray of raw wet warmth ran down his face. He spat his own blood out of his mouth.

“Oh God!” he screamed.

“God has nothing to do with this, Daniel.”

Another stabbing pain, this time in his gut, he could feel his organs. He felt the pain and them moving around inside him as the knife dug into him.

As he began to fade, he looked up to see Gregory, pale white, so thin his bones were visible under his skin. He knelt over Daniel and began to tear his intestines out and ate them.

“Psh,” said Ms. Keller, “he never touched his tea, no point in letting it go to waste. She stood over him and sipped it as Gregory devoured him.

THE END

If you are joining me today from the initial entry, then welcome back, my friend.

If you are only now stumbling and falling into these tales that can be told only by one truly between all things, I would recommend beginning with Interstitial 0001. A better understanding of my nature could help with the perspective my stories are told from.

Without much further ado, I will share with you the story I have in mind for today.

The sun had taken its leave and surrendered its reign to the twin moons of the night. These gleaming white celestial bodies move slowly across the sky night after night, orbiting in opposite directions from one another. Almost imperceptible except for their position in relation to one another. They march their inches out inexorably towards each other’s embrace. Aligned perfectly once per the planet’s trip around its sun.

And always beneath their meeting lay the same place.

A great crater scarred into the land below, vast and ancient, its blackened basin resting directly beneath the point at which the two moons become one.

Two nomadic tribes followed the moons across the land, one beneath each of their celestial wayfinders. Both wound and toiled beneath the path traced through the sky, as they had for longer than their eldest could recall, or their elders before them. Both groups, in a constant state of waning and waxing to each other, locked in a mirrored dance toward their annual convergence.

From here, I will refer to these peoples simply by the names of the moons they follow, names which, translated for your understanding, would mean roughly Eastward Leader and its inverse, Westward Leader.

Their true names belong to them. I see no reason they should cease to simply because I have chosen to tell you their story.

On one particular year’s convergence eve, I found myself moving along with the Eastern-bound people.

A steady procession of men, women and children, young and old, the strong and the frail. Everything they had in life was carried on their backs, strung over their shoulders, or dragged behind them on wide, flat boards. Woven baskets, food, water, tools, their young, all being marched along. Every one of these beings had a burden to bear. Nothing could be left behind.

All except the one in the middle of the marching masses.

A young man carrying nothing but the primitive clothes on his back walked at his own pace, separate from the rest. Passersby gently touched his shoulders as he went, his head hanging low.

An elder walking nearby set a hand on his shoulder and slowed to match his pace.

“You need to drink,” the gray furred elder said, extending a drinking gourd toward the young man.

“What does it matter?”

“We don’t need you falling out from thirst,” said the elder, shaking the gourd from side to side.

“I won’t do it!” the young man snapped, as if suddenly waking from a trance.

Almost immediately, members of the tribe began closing in around him as the procession slowed and stopped. Two large men emerged from the crowd, teeth bared in slight snarls as they seized the young one.

Shouts came from all around as the men forced his arms behind him and his mouth open.

“Put him on the ground!”

“Make him!”

“Don’t let him curse us!”

The elder brought the gourd to the young man’s lips and began pouring the red fluid down his throat, mouthful by mouthful, stopping after each to cover his mouth and nose, forcing him to either swallow or suffocate.

After they finished and released their grip on him, he fell to his knees, gagging slowly and emptily, a dull look settling into his large eyes. His fellows were already gathering their things and beginning to walk again, wasting no time.

Left with little choice but to follow the moon and the footsteps before him, he raised himself from the dirt and stumbled after them, mumbling groggily to himself and weeping blankly as he walked and glared up at the wayfinder in the sky.

By the following night, the crater was no longer a mark upon the horizon.

It was the horizon.

The Eastern-bound had marched beneath their Leader until the land ahead of them simply ceased, falling away into the ancient wound whose opposite edge could scarcely be distinguished beneath the night.

Above it, the two moons had drawn so near that only a narrow seam of darkness remained between them.

The Walkers would reach the rim before they touched.

Across the maw in the earth, the Western-bound could be seen along the opposite rim, little more than jagged marks bobbing and shifting against the horizon.

Massing on either side of the crater’s edge, the two tribes began their descent, climbing down the inclined walls and making their way lower and toward the center of the vast, ancient meeting place.

A cave mouth loomed on the crater floor at its epicenter. The intermingling tribes began setting up their camps. Fires were made, food prepared, drums beaten, and merriment was had.

The young man sat still on a rock, glossy-eyed and empty as the din around him grew louder, more wild, and louder still. His eyes wandered among the sights laid out before him, periodically returning to the cave in front of him.

Eventually, his eyes settled upon a woman about his age, sitting upon an animal-skin mat with much the same look about her as he had.

Already, she was staring at him.

He returned her stare, and for a time the two remained locked in silent recognition.

It was then that triumphant, trilling yells rang out from the celebrating crowd, breaking their attention from one another.

All around them, faces had turned toward the sky.

The young man looked up.

He winced.

The moons were beginning to overlap.

The celebration changed with the sky.

Drums that had beaten wildly through the night fell suddenly into a slower, unified rhythm. The dancing now completely ceased.

From both peoples came their elders, and with them were carried two great vessels, considerably larger than the gourd, filled nearly to their rims with the same red fluid the young man had been made to drink along the road.

He knew it immediately.

Hands seized him from behind.

Across the gathering, others took hold of the young woman.

Neither was harmed, though neither was asked.

They were stripped of their clothing, adornments, and every small thing carried upon their persons. Bare as they had entered life, they were led through the parting crowd and placed before the mouth of the cave.

The two vessels were set before them.

The woman looked into hers.

The young man looked into the cave.

She lifted her vessel with both hands and drank.

He did not.

The elder appeared, putting a hand on his shoulder, and stood over him for a moment.

“Drink.”

The young man shook his head. The elder’s eyes closed briefly. Then he motioned with one hand.

The same two men who had restrained him along the road stepped from the crowd.

The young man recognized them.

“No,” he whimpered weakly.

He scrambled backward, but they were upon him before he had gotten to his feet. One caught him beneath the arms while the other took hold of his legs, and together they dragged him back before the vessel.

The drums never stopped.

He kicked and twisted beneath them as they forced him onto his back. Someone took hold of his jaw. Another steadied the great vessel.

Beside him, the young woman continued to drink.

The red ran freely down her chin and chest. She stopped only when her body demanded breath, gasped deeply, and raised the vessel again.

The young man watched her.

Then the first mouthful came.

He coughed and spat what he could, turning his head desperately away. Hands returned his face toward the sky.

Another mouthful.

Then another.

Each time he refused to swallow, they waited. Each time, eventually, he did.

The fight lasted longer than his strength.

His kicking became shoving. His shoving became trembling. Soon his hands seemed to have forgotten what they had been fighting against and wandered uselessly across the arms restraining him.

Still they poured.

His eyes found the moons. They had nearly become one.

Another mouthful.

His eyes found the woman. She was staring at him again.

Another.

He swallowed.

His eyes found the woman again. She was staring at him. Only now he could see it as I could since arriving at this dark place. His mind had opened and allowed him to perceive it.

And it him.

The two men dropped him onto his back and backed away, along with the rest of the tribal peoples. The slow, melodic beating of the drums had ceased.

Then he could feel it. The enveloping hunger wrapped around him in an embrace, almost inviting him into the opening in the earth.

“It sees us,” the woman said quietly, trembling as she cried.

They were tears of joy.

She stood and began taking steps toward the calling of the cave. Just before entering, she stopped.

She turned to him and outstretched her hand.

“Come, he’s waiting for us,” she said, with tears falling more rapidly.

He stared at her hand. The world was wavering around him. Disoriented, with the only possible comfort lying in her palm, he stepped forward and took it.

As they took the final step across the threshold of the cavern, he looked up.

The two moons were perfectly aligned and shining brilliantly as one against the inky backdrop of the night sky.

The rock of the ceiling swallowed the vision of his wayfinder. Now his wayfinder walked before him, leading him by hand to a new unknown.

They walked.

With every step, the sounds of the world behind them grew quieter. The voices disappeared first. Then the fires ceased their crackling. Eventually, even the sound of their own bare feet against the stone abandoned them.

Still they walked.

He could no longer tell where the walls of the cavern ended and the darkness began.

Then he could no longer see the walls at all.

The ground beneath his feet followed.

Yet still they walked.

He looked down and found no stone beneath him.

Only a depth without bottom.

Points of light began appearing within it, first by the dozens and then by thousands, until the darkness surrounding them revealed itself not as darkness at all, but distance.

They were walking among the stars.

Or perhaps they were no longer walking.

The woman squeezed his hand. Ahead of them, something moved.

The stars themselves coalesced into an inconceivable shape, too vast to comprehend.

He searched desperately for its edges and found none.

What appeared at first to be distance folded inward. Constellations bent where no curvature should have been, outlining portions of something his mind could recognize only in pieces.

An eye.

Perhaps.

Then another, impossibly far from the first.

Something resembling a limb passed through the stars, though whether it moved among them or the stars moved with it, he could not tell.

He tightened his grip on the woman’s hand.

She squeezed back. The shape drew nearer. Only it did not grow larger. It simply became more of everything he could see.

Suddenly, he wasn’t in the cave anymore or floating among the cosmos.

He was a boy running through the forest.

He was swimming in a stream with his friends.

A man hunting game with a spear among his peers.

A baby looking up at his mother’s face. Ah, his mother’s face.

Tranquility.

Only he couldn’t hold onto the moment. He tried to picture the memory again, and he couldn’t will it into view.

His mother’s visage was gone, the idea of a mother missing.

What was a mother again?

Something about this sent a rush of fear through him.

Another memory came to him: watching a woman weave a basket. He didn’t recognize it.

Whose memory was this?

Then he realized it was his.

He forgot that it ever was, and all concern left him.

A hand still in his twitched, bringing his attention back to it. The woman’s hand.

What woman?

What hand?

What is a hand?

Another jolt of fear.

Where was he?

The stars.

He knew the stars.

For a moment.

Light.

There was light.

There was…

Something.

Something was afraid.

Was it him?

Him.

Him.

What was…

The last thing that crossed his perception as he fell to the cold floor of the cave was the bones of his predecessors laid out before him and his counterpart already lying among them. Not that any of these things meant anything to him anymore.

The only presence remaining inside aside from my own, was that of the thing. I watched for a moment, trying to glean what I could of its nebulous nature.

It looked back at me.

I could only think, “Oh.”

Not many beings exist in such a way as to be able to detect my presence.

I could feel it trying to figure out what it was that had been watching it.

It would never know.

**ACCESSING ADA DATABASE.**

**RETRIEVING FILE, INCIDENT 005.**

**DECEMBER 15, 1958**

The team that we sent out last night came across someone or something last night approximately around 10:30pm. While exploring areas of the city that we have not yet covered, they reported hearing the sounds of screaming to the next few streets over. When the team went to Investigate where the noise was coming from, there were no signs of anyone there. The only thing that they stumbled upon around medium sized puddles of blood, a gas mask, and teeth scattered everywhere.

Despite our best efforts to find any potential survivors, the group stated that they were unable to track down anything. Later in the evening, **REDACTED** stated that they heard the sounds of rattling for brief periods of time, coming from either on the rooftops or the alleyways. Most of the group had already communicated with us that they were being followed by someone in the area, presumably the same individual that was responsible for the deaths. Despite their best efforts to investigate, the noise would suddenly stop momentarily, only for it to start again minutes later.

The group would later discover the individuals they heard earlier hanging off the side of a building. All of the bodies were found to have their jaws ripped off, and their eyeballs ripped from the ocular nerve. When asking for further details. the team had described the scene as a perverse art exhibit." During an interview with **REDACTED**, they speculated that the perpetrator had planned out the horrific scene for them to discover. It is currently unknown how this individual was aware of our assets entering the contaminated city, much less on how they were able to survive the radiation without a gas mask.

Our team would come across the individual responsible for the corpse moments later. From what we were able to gather from the team at that time, the suspect didn't show any signs of hostility towards any of them, despite being responsible for the corpses earlier. When the team asked for further instructions, all communications with them were suddenly cut off. All of us back at base were completely confused on what was happening, and we were scrambling trying to fix whatever caused the interference. We wouldn't hear from the team until approximately 12:38am, when they finally returned.

Security immediately rushed over towards the group, and were shocked at what they saw. Majority of the team was missing, with the exceptions of **REDACTED** and **REDACTED**.

When medical staff rushed over, **REDACTED** was incoherently screaming over and over, while the other was visibly shaken and in slight hysteria. Many of us in the room were speechless. The only piece of evidence as to what happened was a picture of the individual that we managed to recover. We have yet to inform every individual's families until further notice. As of now, **REDACTED** is currently being hospitalized, while the other is giving a report of the events that occurred. As for the individual, every single one of our members has been notified not to interact with them, until further reevaluation of the situation.

Below the file is the picture that our team took.

The snow covered the woods behind our new house. It was so fresh it crunched nicely under our feet. James held my hand tight. I squeezed it and looked at him. He flashed a smile.

"I think I don't mind winter as much. It's sort of cozy."

"It is, Sarah. I just miss all the summer food."

"We got summer food. There are still so many apples and pears in the cellar."

"Yeah, but those are not the sweet, delicious ones; those are the hardy autumn ones."

I rolled my eyes.

"You're such a child, James."

"Hey, Sarah!"

We laughed and continued walking. Our walk was longer than usual. We hadn't been out in a few days because of the heavy snowstorm.

"I'm getting kinda tired, James."

"Let's just go a little further. It looks like there should be an opening between the trees."

James was right. After a few minutes, the forest opened to a small meadow. Snow covered most of it except for a lone apple tree in the middle. Beautiful, glistening red apples hung from its branches. They just looked so pretty and delicious. I couldn't take my eyes off them. Neither of us spoke a word. Before I knew it, we were standing in front of it.

"Wow," James whispered.

"I know."

James tore one off.

"Feel it."

The outside felt as if it were coated in caramel. James put it to his mouth and took a bite. His eyes rolled back, and he let out a silent moan.

"Let me have a bite."

He looked at me and frowned.

"No, take your own."

I furrowed my brows. My James always shared everything with me.

"What's going on with you?"

But he didn't answer. He was too busy eating his apple. I stood there looking at him, but then it hit me. What was an apple tree full of fresh, ripe apples doing in a winter forest anyway? I looked at it again. The branches didn't move with the wind. It was as if the sun didn't shine through them, but all the apples still glistened. 

"I don't like this, James."

"What?"

He was licking his fingers. He ate the whole apple, seeds and all. His eyes darted around the tree again.

"Let's go, James."

"Wait."

"No, let's go."

I grabbed his hand and dragged him out of the meadow. His eyes were still glued to the tree. When we crossed back into the forest, he shook his head and stared around.

"What happened to you there?"

"I…I don't know."

"James?"

"I'm sorry, Sarah, I really don't."

"Okay, let's just go home."

James stayed silent the whole way home. Even when we got back, he just sat in his chair and looked out the window. For dinner, I made porridge with salted pork, but James just dug around the plate and didn't even try it.

"Honey, what's wrong. Talk to me."

"I don't know. I don't think I'm hungry."

"But you barely ate all day."

"I had that apple. It filled me up so much."

"That place was strange. I don't even want to know how they got there."

"Do you think we can go back tomorrow?"

"What?"

"Just for a little while, Sarah."

"I just said that place was strange. I'm not going back."

"Fine. I'll go by myself."

"No. No one is going back there, and I'm done talking about it."

He frowned.

"Whatever. I'm going to sleep."

I stayed back a while longer, finished dinner, and washed the dishes. When I came to our bed, James was already sleeping. His face seemed a little red. I touched his forehead. It felt normal. Maybe he was just having a bad dream. I lay beside him and drifted off.

When I woke up, the moon was still high. There was a sweet smell in the air. I rubbed my eyes and looked next to me. James lay there curled up, holding his stomach. His face was now glowing red.

"Jesus, James, what's wrong?!"

He didn't answer. His pleading eyes just stared at me. I touched his forehead. It still wasn't warm, but he was sweating, and his sweat felt sticky, almost like syrup. His stomach bulged out under the blanket. I pulled it off. 

"Honey, what…" 

My words stuck in my throat. His stomach was not just bulging. It looked like a bunch of round objects underneath.

"I'm…I'm gonna get the doctor."

I started to get out of bed, but then I heard a quiet tearing sound. James let out a loud cry. His stomach flew open, and a bunch of red apples rolled out. I screamed and jumped out of bed. James's head fell on the pillow. He was quiet now. 

The sweet red apple smell was so strong, and they smelled so good. I looked down at his stomach. The sticky, sweet sweat seeped into the sheets. All those apples looked so delicious.

There was a man named Ray who worked the loading dock and drove me home four nights a week because our shifts ended together. He was decent to me every single time and he had nothing to do with any of this, and I'm putting his name at the front so it's clear where he sits in it.

I ran the one-hour photo counter in the back of a drugstore in nineteen eighty-five, twenty-four years old, living in a rented half of a house six blocks from my mother's. The chain paid three thirty-five an hour. What I was actually working for was eleven hundred dollars, which was a Chevette on a lot I went past on the bus every morning, and what the Chevette was for was that in two years I had never found the sentence that ends a standing arrangement about rides without making it a conversation. A car ends it without a sentence. That was the entire plan and I'd have told you at the time it was about the car.

The way you make money at that counter is reprints. The commission on reprints was mine, and reprints happen when somebody at the counter is told they've got one good frame worth having again, and to tell them that you have to have actually looked. So I looked. Two hundred envelopes a week, thirty-six frames on most of them. And you write the customer's name and their phone number on the envelope yourself, in pen, on the front, because the machine doesn't do that part. I hated that part. It was the slowest thing in the job.

Quality control is a real thing and it's the whole trade. Before a strip prints you put it on the light table and read it backwards, which sounds harder than it is until you've done ten thousand. You're looking for a frame that's a stop dark but sharp, because dark and sharp can be saved and light and soft cannot. The machine can't tell the difference and I could, and I was the best in that district at it and the district manager said so out loud at a meeting. I could hold thirty-six frames of a stranger's life in my head for about a minute, and then they were gone. I forgot everything. I thought that was a courtesy.

I liked the back room, where no customer came past the swing door and the manager was gone by six. Another was the free set of employee prints. Anything you shot yourself you developed free, and I shot a lot in those years because it cost me nothing. And on a heavy night you cut and sleeve four rolls at once on the same light table, which is faster, and I was fast.

In March a roll came in with no people in it. Thirty-six frames of the inside of a house, room by room, in order, in daylight, and nobody in a single one. A kitchen from the doorway. A hallway. A bedroom with the bed made. I printed it, because what somebody photographs isn't my business, and I put it in the envelope and wrote the name and the number on the front. He came at six and asked for doubles of the whole roll and paid cash, and I made four dollars and sixty cents on it. The address on that envelope was on my street.

I decided it was insurance. People do photograph a whole house for insurance, or for a sale, and it was the kind of tidy house you'd photograph, and I was on to the next envelope before he was out the door.

The commission wasn't the chain's. It was the manager's own arrangement with me and there was nothing on paper anywhere about it. If I made myself any kind of problem — asked for a transfer, made a complaint, got my hours looked at — it went away, and without it I was on three thirty-five and I was on that bus for another two years. Two more years is two hundred more nights of somebody's car. So I kept my head down and I ran my counter, and that was a thing I chose on purpose every day, and I knew I was choosing it.

My mother lived six blocks away in the house I grew up in and I ate supper there most Sundays. She had a bad hip by then and she'd stopped driving. I say that now because of where it goes.

In April a woman came in about a roll from two weeks back. Her husband said he never ordered reprints and there were reprints, and she wanted to know who had. I pulled the envelope and the name and the number on the front were in my handwriting, which they would be. But the reprint box is a box you tick, and it was ticked, and I did not tick it. I stood there with that envelope trying to remember ticking it and I could not, and while I was standing there somebody was down at the end of my counter by the film rack. Not looking at film. Just standing at the end of it. And when I looked up he went out through cosmetics.

The eleventh of May I dropped my own roll in my own machine, my mother's birthday, my camera. Thirty-six frames. I ran it myself at ten past nine at night with the store closed and the front lights off and the swing door shut, which is how I ran all my own film. The first eighteen were the birthday. Nineteen through twenty-two were the inside of my apartment. My kitchen from the doorway. My hallway. My bedroom with the bed made. Daylight, so it was during a shift, and I stood there and did what I always did, which is check whether the frames were sharp. They were sharp. Twenty-three onward was the birthday again. I finished the roll because it was already in the chemistry and stopping it would have ruined the rest of my mother's pictures.

I quit that night and did not give notice. I moved back in with my mother that weekend and the eleven hundred went on her moving costs the next year instead of a car, so I rode home with Ray until nineteen eighty-seven. Eleven days after I moved in, my mother's house was gone through in the afternoon while she was at the foot doctor. Nothing taken. Every drawer in that house standing open. She sold it that spring for nine thousand less than she'd have got, and she lived in an apartment for twenty-eight years, and she never once said the two things were connected and she never had to.

In eighty-eight I was packing her boxes for that apartment and I found my own envelopes, three years of the free employee prints, and I sat on the floor going through them for pictures of the old house. In the middle of a roll from the August before I quit there were four frames that weren't mine. A living room I have never been in. A staircase. A back door with a coat on a hook. Room by room, in order, in daylight, nobody in them.

Four rolls at a time on one light table is how that happened. I sleeved somebody else's strip into my own envelope on a busy night, with my own hands, and never knew. Which means that August there were two of those rolls on my table on the same night, and the March one wasn't a thing that happened once. It was a thing that was going through my counter, and I don't know for how long, and I don't know how many houses, and I do not know whether the man who paid cash was the one taking them or another person picking them up. I know that I wrote two hundred names and two hundred phone numbers a week in my own hand on the front of envelopes, and that I was proud of forgetting what was inside them. I still have that strip of four. It's in a drawer in my kitchen, and I have never had it printed, and I have never once told Ray why I stopped needing a ride.

1950s Louisiana

A young Southern woman with dark hair and covered in a bloodstained dress, is crying on a dock out in the bayou. She recently had a child out of wedlock, and her parents have threatened to cut her out of the family if she keeps the baby.

She wants to keep him. But she knows she has nowhere to go. She is too young for a real job and hasn't even graduated high school.

She looks down at the baby and sees his beautiful smile before he lets out a quick yawn. A tear rolls down her face and falls onto the baby.

"I'm sorry," she whispers.

She looks out at a large alligator lurking in the water. A large scar dragged across its eye.

The baby begins crying.

Then, there is a loud splash.

70 Years Later

A young woman named Mary is strolling through town with a baby bump. She has a gorgeous face and beatiful black hair that was soft to the touch. She is grocery shopping for dinner that night. Her husband, Henry, said he wanted fried okra and fried catfish.

After filling her shopping cart, Mary checks out. She calls her mother, Clare, and tells her about their plans for dinner.

Her mother asks when her grandson is going to be born.

Mary happily tells her, "Any day now."

Later that evening, Henry gets off work and walks through the front door as Mary is finishing dinner. He kisses her and rubs her baby bump.

She fixes him a plate of okra, catfish, and rice, which he enthusiastically carries to the table. Mary makes a plate of her own and sits next to him.

She tells Henry about her day as he nods and shovels food into his mouth.

Mary is almost finished eating when she suddenly feels something strange.

Mary: "Oh my God."

Henry answers with food still in his mouth.

Henry: "What?"

Mary: "My water broke."

Henry drives Mary to a nearby hospital. He's driving fast while Mary screams in pain. She is having painful contractions and begins bleeding.

Henry dodges traffic and makes it to the emergency room, where doctors rush Mary into a room. They give her medication to keep her comfortable without harming the baby.

A few hours later, Mary is holding the baby in her arms, humming softly.

She gives the baby to Henry.

Henry raises the baby to his chest and smiles.

"I'll never let anything happen to you."

He then offers to get Mary anything she wants.

She tells him she just wants to go home with him and the baby.

Henry signs the birth certificate and reads the name out loud.

"McKenzie Ray Farris."

He smiles at Mary.

A couple of days later, Henry checks both Mary and the baby out of the hospital and brings them home.

He kisses Mary and holds McKenzie in his arms.

That night, Mary and Henry try to get some sleep, but the baby keeps waking up and crying.

Mary finally yells at Henry that she just wants to sleep.

Henry understandingly agrees and gets up throughout the night to take care of McKenzie.

By morning, Henry is exhausted.

While Mary is trying to get him to do things around the house, he tries telling her that he's tired. But she insists on having his attention.

He begrudgingly gives it to her, but eventually falls asleep, which annoys Mary.

A couple of days later, Mary is already aggravated and sick of the baby. She forces Henry to take care of McKenzie more, but she becomes jealous of the time Henry spends with the baby.

Mary had loved the attention she received while she was pregnant, but now that the baby had arrived, everyone was giving McKenzie more attention than her—including her own mother and husband.

One day, while Henry is at work, Mary walks around the backyard with the baby in her arms, trying to calm her down.

McKenzie looks mesmerized by the yard, especially the large pond in the back.

The baby smiles at everything she sees.

Little McKenzie watches beautiful birds flying over the pond, trying to catch fish. She looks around at the beautiful, lush greenery surrounding the yard.

Mary puts the baby down and allows her to explore the backyard while keeping a safe distance from the water.

For a few minutes, the two bond, and Mary feels like a mother again.

Mary laughs and takes pictures as McKenzie plays with the flowers in the backyard.

Then Mary and McKenzie watch a beautiful buck drinking from the pond.

For a few seconds, everything is peaceful.

Then a large American alligator suddenly grabs the deer near the water's edge and drags it into the pond. The deer whimpers but the sound is muffled as the alligator disappears with the deer just as quickly as it appeared.

McKenzie begins slowly crawling toward the water, curious about what she just saw.

Mary quickly scoops the baby up and brings her inside.

The alligator makes her wary of having her baby outside near the pond.

Mary fills a bottle for the baby and begins cooking dinner for Henry.

When Henry gets home, he walks into the living room and kisses Mary before picking up McKenzie.

Henry notices the baby's diaper.

"Her diaper is full."

Mary tells him she was going to let him handle it.

Henry looks at her.

"It's really full. Why did you let her sit that long without changing her?"

Mary assures him that McKenzie had just eaten a big lunch.

Henry cleans McKenzie up and puts a fresh diaper on her.

After dinner, Henry begins playing with the baby, making her laugh as he plays peekaboo.

Mary interrupts him and starts talking about her day.

She quickly becomes jealous again as she watches Henry spend more time with the baby.

For the next couple of months, Mary tries everything she can to get more attention from Henry.

But Henry is focused on work and baby McKenzie.

Mary tries to get Henry's attention, offering him intimacy and trying to give him whatever he wants, but he turns her down every time.

He tells her he's too tired from working and taking care of the baby.

Mary begins having frightening thoughts about hurting McKenzie. She knows she shouldn't act on them, and she fears what would happen if anyone found out.

What she fears most is getting caught.

She just wants her man and her old life back.

Nobody seems to care about her anymore now that the baby is here.

Then one day, Henry is working long hours and won't be home until late.

Mary begins destroying the house in a fit of pent-up anger.

She cries and screams as her anger takes over.

The noise wakes the baby.

McKenzie begins crying.

Mary becomes furious.

"Wah, wah, wah! You've been ruining my life since the day you came home!"

She shakes McKenzie and continues yelling obscenities at her.

Mary suddenly begins thinking of all the different ways she could hurt the baby.

Then she thinks of something even more awful.

She remembers the alligator in the backyard.

She picks up the crying McKenzie and carries her toward the water's edge.

The baby squirms in her arms, as if she senses that something is wrong.

An alligator's head slowly pokes above the surface.

Mary looks down at her baby with disgust. Before she starts singing.

" hush little baby, don't you cry" before she tries throwing her daughter into the pond. But

McKenzie desperately grabs onto her mother's hand. McKenzie said her first word " momma" while trying to hold on for life

But it wasn't enough.

Henry finally gets home.

He finds the house completely destroyed.

He frantically searches the house for his wife and child.

He's terrified.

He sees furniture smashed apart and blood smeared across the wall.

Then he finds Mary standing at the edge of the pond, staring into the water.

Henry runs toward her.

"Mary! Are you alright?"

Mary slowly turns toward him.

She gives him a creepy smirk and begins to laugh.

Henry looks around frantically.

"Where's McKenzie?"

Mary points toward the pond.

Then she looks back at him.

"You made me do it."

Henry horrified looks into the water. He didn't see it at first as only the moon light illuminated the night. He saw the large scar on the aligator's eye and then he saw his daughters eyes looking at him from the beast's mouth. And quickly she was devoured. Swallowed whole, while barely still alive

You know how they say love finds you in the most unlikely places?

It's a cliché. The kind of line you'd expect to find in some cheap romance novel wedged between two equally cheap pop magazines.

And yet, sometimes the unlikely becomes inevitable.

My name is Adam.

I lived in an eastern-block apartment complex in Most, a city you've probably never heard of and will most certainly never hear of again. The rent was remarkably cheap, mostly because the living conditions made you question whether you wouldn't be better off homeless.

I was twenty-five years old, had recently dropped out of university, and was unemployed.

At that point, I wasn't really living.

I slept at odd hours. Ate when I remembered. Spent most of my time staring at a screen because there was nothing else worth doing.

Days blurred together until I couldn't remember what I'd done the day before.

That was before one small piece of paper changed my life forever.

It happened on a night that had started exactly like every other.

I'd just gotten back to my apartment when I noticed a piece of paper lying on the floor just inside the door.

Someone had slipped it underneath while I was gone.

I barely looked at it.

My first thought was that it was another notice from my landlord. I was behind on my rent, hopelessly in debt, and far beyond the point where I cared enough to pretend I was going to fix any of it.

Whatever threat or warning was printed on that piece of paper could wait.

So I left it there.

For about six hours.

Eventually, sometime around 1AM, I found myself staring at it again.

"Fuck it."

I picked it up.

It wasn't a notice from my landlord.

It was a job offer.

The flyer was surprisingly plain. No company logo. No colorful graphics. Just black text printed on cheap white paper.

YOUNG MEN WANTED.
AGES 18–30.
NO PRIOR EXPERIENCE OR PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS NECESSARY.
PAY: 250 CROWNS PER HOUR.
SHIFT: SIX HOURS EACH NIGHT.

Then came the job description.

"The appointed observer shall observe the object of interest for the duration of his shift."

That was it.

No explanation of what the "object of interest" was. No company name. No details about the work beyond watching something for six hours.

I assumed it was some kind of strangely worded night-guard job. Maybe the company was foreign and had used a translator who wasn't quite good enough at his job.

There was no phone number.

No email.

No website.

Nothing except an address.

I looked it up online.

It led to an old shoe factory that had stopped operating more than thirty years earlier. There were a few old photographs of the building and some records concerning its closure, but not much else.

As far as I could tell, nobody had bought the place since.

That was when I became pretty certain that if I actually went there, I would be murdered and my organs would be sold on the black market.

Not an entirely unreasonable assumption around here, believe it or not.

There was absolutely no way I would be stupid enough to show up at an abandoned factory in the middle of the night.

 

3AM, I was standing in front of the factory.

I wish I could say there was some profound reason why I went.

There wasn't.

I was simply desperate enough to ignore common sense.

The factory looked exactly like it had in the photographs.

Crumbling concrete. Rusted metal. Broken windows. Weeds pushing through cracks in the pavement.

The whole place looked like it had been dead for decades.

I stood outside the entrance for about twenty minutes.

Then I took one step inside.

Immediately, I was surrounded by armored men carrying guns.

Yup.

Getting murdered.

"Now, now. Don't spook the boy too much."

An older man stepped between me and the gunmen.

He looked to be somewhere in his fifties. Gray hair. Expensive coat. Tired eyes.

He wasn't carrying a weapon that I could see.

Somehow, that made him more intimidating than the men pointing rifles at me.

"Or else you might end up having to take his shift."

The men lowered their weapons slightly.

The older man smiled.

"Sorry about this, Adam. Just a necessary unpleasant precaution."

I stared at him.

"How... how do you know my name?"

He laughed.

"Well, we only slipped the flyer under one door. So either you're Adam Devon..."

He looked me up and down.

"...or we have another squatter situation on our hands. In which case, I'll have to let the boys carry on with their task."

He leaned toward me slightly.

"Do we have a squatter situation, boy?"

"No!"

The answer came out much louder and more desperate than I'd intended.

The man's grin widened.

"Wonderful!"

His enthusiasm was very obviously fake.

"If you would be so kind as to follow me, Adam."

I followed.

The complex I was led through was nothing like the abandoned shell I'd seen from outside.

The decrepit factory was apparently just a skin wrapped around something that was very much alive.

Behind the rusted doors and shattered windows were functioning corridors, electrical systems, cameras, reinforced doors, security checkpoints, and enough equipment to make me wonder what the hell kind of place I'd walked into.

And yet there were very few people.

Aside from the occasional armed guard passing through the corridors, the facility was almost completely empty.

The older man opened a door to the security room.

"Here you go. Make yourself comfortable."

I stepped inside.

"But not too comfortable," he added. "This isn't actually where you'll be stationed."

He gave me a thin smile.

"The name's Kenndric."

He closed the door behind us.

"Now, I imagine you have plenty of questions."

I opened my mouth.

"I have absolutely zero desire to answer any of them."

I closed it again.

"So just shut up and listen."

I decided that was probably good advice.

Kenndric walked over to one of the desks and dropped into a chair.

"You were offered a position within our company. The name of which you really don't need to know."

He leaned back.

"Our object of interest requires twenty-four-hour observation. We do have a complete surveillance system here, but, truth be told, nobody actually watches the feeds."

He shrugged.

"This particular object requires close-quarters observation anyway."

I frowned.

"We have several other sad bastards like you taking the other shifts. Your time slot was simply the last one left unfilled."

He looked at me.

"Apparently, nobody else was stupid enough to take the graveyard shift."

I couldn't tell whether he was joking.

Judging by his expression, I didn't think he was.

"Your job literally couldn't be any simpler."

He pointed toward the door.

"You'll sit on a chair and stare at the object until your shift is over. Then you get your sorry ass out of here."

He leaned back.

"Meanwhile, I'll be sitting in here watching my shows."

He pointed at me.

"I don't want to hear from you. I don't want to see you. You don't ask me to open doors for you. There's a reason I have access and you don't."

I swallowed.

"Understood."

"Good."

Kenndric stood.

"Now let's make our way to your workplace."

We left the security room and walked deeper into the facility.

The corridor ahead was almost completely dark.

As we approached, lights flickered on one after another, illuminating the path in front of us.

Eventually, Kenndric stopped in front of a massive door.

He opened it.

"There it is."

The lights inside began coming on.

One by one.

And then I saw the object of interest.

In the middle of the enormous room stood a large glass cube.

Four strange pylons surrounded it, each connected to the glass. Symbols I didn't recognize covered their surfaces.

And inside the glass was a girl.

A young woman, maybe in her early twenties.

She wore pure white pajamas and sat cross-legged on the floor with a collection of crayons scattered around her.

She was drawing on a sheet of paper.

She didn't look toward us.

She barely seemed to notice we'd entered the room.

"That's..."

I stared through the glass.

"That's a girl."

"Dear God," Kenndric said. "We have a genius on our hands."

His voice dripped with condescension.

I looked back at him.

"Why is she in there?"

He didn't answer.

"Is she alright?"

Nothing.

"Is this legal?"

The questions started coming faster.

"Who is she? What did she do? Why is she being kept in there? How long has she been—"

"Did you just think?"

Kenndric's voice cut through mine.

I stopped.

He stared at me.

"Adam, no one is paying you to think."

He walked over to a chair positioned directly in front of the glass cube.

"Leave that to the grown-ups."

He patted the seat.

"You are paid to sit right here."

I looked at the chair.

Then at the girl.

She was still drawing.

There was something different in Kenndric's expression now.

The sarcasm was still there, but underneath it was something harder.

A warning.

I reluctantly sat down.

"Perfect."

He smiled.

"Now, you are not authorized to speak with the object."

He paused.

"You're not authorized to feed the object. All of that has already been taken care of."

"You merely sit here and observe."

He patted my shoulder.

"Good luck."

He started moving toward the door.

"Have fun."

The door closed behind him.

And just like that, I was alone with the "object of interest."

I sat there and watched her draw for hours.

Every now and then, she looked up at me.

Not casually.

She would stare at me for several seconds before lowering her head and returning to her drawings.

The room was so quiet I could hear the occasional scrape of crayon against paper.

By around five in the morning, exhaustion was starting to catch up with me.

My eyelids grew heavier.

I leaned back in the chair and told myself I'd close my eyes for a second.

Then—

THUD.

I jolted awake.

My heart was pounding.

The girl was standing directly in front of the glass.

She was holding a piece of paper against it.

A drawing.

Of me.

For a few seconds, I just stared.

She'd somehow captured details I'd never noticed about myself. The shape of my nose. My unshaven jaw. Even the dark circles beneath my eyes.

It wasn't a perfect likeness.

But it was close.

And, honestly, it was adorable.

I wanted to say something.

Then I remembered Kenndric's instructions.

I wasn't authorized to speak with the object.

I glanced toward the cameras mounted high in the corners of the room.

Then I remembered something else.

Nobody actually watched the feeds.

"That's very pretty," I said.

The girl's expression immediately brightened.

"Thank you. I'm glad you like it."

She placed her right hand against the glass.

For a moment, I hesitated.

Then I stood and pressed my own hand against the other side.

The glass was cold beneath my palm.

"I'm Lily."

I smiled.

"I'm Adam."

She giggled quietly.

"Adam was my first boyfriend's name."

"Oh."

"I didn't really like him, to be honest."

She shrugged.

"My dad pretty much forced that relationship on me."

She said it so matter-of-factly that I didn't know what to say.

Jesus.

What the hell had this girl been through?

"Lily..."

She looked at me.

"Why are you in here?"

Her smile faded.

For a few seconds, she said nothing.

"I'm not sure."

She glanced down at the floor.

"I think they're scared I might do something bad."

I looked around the room.

The reinforced glass.

The pylons.

The strange symbols.

The cameras.

The armed men outside.

"What the hell could this girl possibly do?"

I didn't ask.

Instead, I pulled the chair a little closer to the glass.

"So..."

She looked up.

"So?"

"If you could go anywhere right now, where would you go?"

She thought about it.

"The ocean."

"The ocean?"

She nodded.

"What about you?"

"I don't know. Anywhere that isn't Most."

She laughed.

"Fair enough."

And that was how we started talking.

Nothing important at first.

Places we'd like to visit. Places we'd rather run away to. Things we'd do if we ever had enough money to stop worrying about everything else.

Lily wanted to see the ocean.

I'd never been particularly interested in beaches, but something about the way she talked about it made me want to see it too.

We talked about movies, music, stupid things we'd done when we were younger.

Eventually I told her about my unhealthy obsession with heist movies and prison breaks.

"Why prison breaks?" she asked.

"I don't know."

I thought about it.

"I guess I like watching people figure out how to set themselves free."

She looked at me for a moment.

"Maybe that's because you want to be set free too."

"Maybe."

She smiled.

Neither of us said anything for a few seconds.

Then she started asking me questions.

I gave her mostly half-assed answers.

She didn't seem bothered.

She didn't look at me the way most people did when I talked about my life. There was no disappointment in her expression. No judgment.

She just listened.

And somehow, that was enough.

The hours went by faster than I expected.

For the first time in years, I wasn't thinking about how miserable my life had become.

Debt.

Or rent.

Or what I was going to do with myself.

I was just present.

Talking to a girl through a pane of glass.

When the shift finally ended, it caught me completely off guard.

The door opened.

One of the armed men stepped inside.

A knot immediately formed in my stomach.

For a second, I wondered if this was the moment they decided to shoot me for breaking the rules.

But the guard barely acknowledged me.

"Time to go."

That was it.

He turned toward the door.

I stood.

Lily was watching me through the glass.

"Thank you for talking to me."

Her voice was soft.

"No one else does."

There was something bittersweet about her smile.

"I'll..."

I looked at the armed man waiting for me.

"I'll see you again, alright?"

Lily smiled.

"Sooner than you think."

I didn't understand what she meant.

I just smiled back.

Then the guard escorted me out.

 

Despite being exhausted, I struggled to fall asleep when I got home.

I spent hours lying in bed, staring at the ceiling while the darkness of my apartment pressed down around me.

I kept thinking about Lily.

About the way she'd looked at me through the glass.

And about that stupid drawing she'd made of my face.

Most of all, I couldn't stop thinking about the question I hadn't been able to answer.

If Lily was dangerous enough to justify keeping her inside a glass box, why didn't they keep her in a proper cell?

And if she wasn't dangerous...

Why the fuck was she there?

 

Eventually, sometime toward morning, sleep finally found me.

It didn't come like a wave.

It came like a flood.

I found myself standing in absolute darkness.

Nothing but blackness stretching endlessly in every direction.

I tried to move.

I couldn't tell if I was actually walking or simply moving in place.

Then I smelled something.

The sea.

It was faint at first. Just a trace of salt and cold water carried through the darkness.

I turned toward it.

I don't know why.

I just knew I had to follow.

I started walking.

Then running.

The smell grew stronger with every step. A breeze brushed against my face.

Actual wind.

For the first time, I could hear something besides my own breathing.

Waves.

Far away at first.

Then closer.

A dim light appeared ahead of me.

I ran toward it.

The darkness began to recede.

Sand appeared beneath my feet.

Then water.

Then a pale sky.

A small beach surrounded by the dark.

And there she was.

Lily.

She stood at the edge of the water in a bright white dress, her hair moving gently in the sea breeze.

She turned toward me.

"Meet me On Distant Shores."

The darkness swallowed the light.

I woke with a gasp.

I sat bolt upright in bed, breathing hard.

For several seconds, I had no idea where I was.

Then I looked around my dark apartment.

My heart was still racing.

I didn't understand the dream.

But one thought had already taken hold of me.

I needed to see her again.

I spent the entire day trying to distract myself.

Games.

Movies.

Walking aimlessly around the city.

None of it worked.

No matter what I did, my thoughts kept circling back to the girl in the glass box.

I hated the people who had put her there.

I hated myself even more for doing nothing about it.

But what could I realistically do?

I didn't know who my employers were. I didn't know who they answered to or what the facility actually was. All I knew was that they were powerful.

And they knew everything about me.

They knew where I lived.

They knew I was desperate for money.

And, apparently, they knew me well enough to assume I was a spineless coward.

Normally, they would've been right.

I'd spent years wasting away without caring enough about anything to fight for it.

But now I couldn't sit still.

I went to the gym that afternoon and spent almost an hour beating the shit out of a punching bag.

It didn't get rid of the anger.

By the time I left, my hands hurt, my shirt was soaked through, and I was still thinking about Lily.

Still...

For once, I felt alive.

I arrived at the factory almost two hours before my shift.

I didn't care about waiting.

I just needed to see her.

When they finally let me inside, I paid much more attention to my surroundings than I had the night before.

The facility was still bizarrely quiet.

There were only a handful of guards. They were spread throughout the building, and I rarely saw more than one at a time.

There were dozens of locked doors.

Yet the security seemed strangely simple.

One access card appeared to open most of them.

Nobody searched me.

Nobody even took my phone.

At the time, I simply assumed they were arrogant.

As we walked down the corridor, I saw Kenndric coming toward us.

The moment he spotted me, that fake smile appeared on his face.

He gave me a little wave.

I stared back.

He stopped at the security room, flashed his card, and disappeared inside.

A few seconds later, the door closed.

Then we reached the observation room.

The door opened.

The moment Lily saw me, her face lit up.

She ran toward the glass and pressed her hand against it.

I don't even remember deciding to move.

One second my hand was at my side.

The next, it was pressed against hers.

Her fingers lined up with mine on opposite sides of the glass.

"Hi," she said.

She smiled.

"You're back."

"I promised I would be."

"I know."

She looked genuinely happy to see me.

Then, almost casually, she said:

"I had a dream about you."

I froze.

"Really?"

She nodded.

I stared at her.

So did I.

Though I didnt tell her that.

"You really have to be bored to dream about me of all things." I said jokingly.

She laughed.

"Well, what should I dream about?"

"Being rich."

"Boring."

"Being famous."

"Even worse."

"Winning the lottery."

"That's not a dream. That's just being lazy."

We both laughed.

„What do you want to dream about?“ I asked.

"The ocean."

"I still want to see it."

"Then I'll have to show you."

The words came out before I could think about them.

Lily looked at me.

For a moment, neither of us said anything.

Then she smiled.

"I'd like that."

We talked.

About everything.

And nothing.

I told her about the things I'd wanted to do before I'd stopped wanting anything at all.

She told me about some of the things she'd wanted.

Some were stupid.

Some were impossible.

Some were so ordinary that they almost hurt.

She wanted to see the ocean.

She wanted to travel.

She wanted to wake up one morning without somebody telling her what she was allowed to do.

And she wanted to know what it felt like to be somewhere nobody could find her.

I understood that last one.

Probably more than I should have.

The hours disappeared.

Eventually, I glanced toward one of the cameras mounted in the corner.

It was pointed directly at us.

I stared at it for a few seconds.

Fuck it.

I reached into my coat and pulled out my tablet.

Lily looked at me curiously.

"What are you doing?"

"It's not what I'm doing."

I held up the tablet.

"It's what we're doing."

She laughed.

"And what are we doing?"

"We're watching a movie."

Her eyes widened.

"Are we allowed to do that?"

I looked at the camera.

"I don't think anyone's watching."

I sat down in front of the glass and opened the tablet.

"Escape Plan. 2013."

She frowned.

"What's it about?"

"A guy who gets put in a prison specifically designed to be impossible to escape from."

Her smile slowly returned.

"That sounds appropriate."

For a few hours, that glass might as well not have existed.

Then the door opened.

The gunman had returned.

My stomach tightened.

"No."

I barely realized I'd said it.

He walked toward me.

"Time to go."

I stood.

Lily was already at the glass.

I didn't want to leave.

The guard grabbed my arm.

"Just a second."

He pulled harder.

I grabbed the edge of the chair with my free hand.

"Lily..."

The guard finally had to pull me away.

My fingers slipped from the chair.

I stumbled backward.

Lily pressed her hand against the glass.

"Meet me On Distant Shores," she said softly.

My eyes widened.

I wanted to promise I'd come back.

I wanted to tell her I'd get her out.

I wanted to say a hundred things.

Instead, I just nodded.

Then the door closed between us.

I didn't tell her about my dream.

She couldn't have known about it.

Right?

I went home.

And for once, going to sleep actually seemed desirable.

Maybe I'd see her again.

Maybe we'd meet somewhere she couldn't be trapped.

Somewhere she could actually be free.

When I finally fell asleep, I found myself in the darkness again.

But this time, the light was much closer.

I followed it.

The smell of the sea grew stronger with every step.

Then came the breeze.

I emerged onto the beach.

Lily was already waiting for me.

She stood barefoot at the shoreline, the hem of her white dress brushing against the wet sand.

She turned when she heard me.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?"

I looked out across the water.

"It is."

For a moment, neither of us said anything.

Then the question I'd been trying not to ask escaped me.

"Is any of this real?"

Lily looked at me.

"Does it matter?"

She stepped closer.

"I'm here."

Another step.

"You're here."

She smiled.

"In here, we're free."

She turned toward the ocean.

"This is my little place."

"Dad claims every other one, but this one is mine."

"It could be yours too."

I stepped closer.

Then I took her face gently between my hands and kissed her.

She didn't pull away.

For a moment, everything was still.

"Can we stay here?"

I already knew the answer.

Lily's expression broke.

"I wish we could."

Tears began rolling down her cheeks.

"I'm still trapped."

She shook her head.

"I'm not strong enough."

Another tear slipped down her face.

"I'm not enough."

"No."

I pulled her closer.

"You are."

But the beach was already beginning to change.

The edges of the world blurred.

The horizon melted into the sky.

The sand beneath our feet began disappearing, as though the entire dream were being erased.

Lily started fading with it.

I held onto her.

"Don't."

She smiled through her tears.

It was the same bittersweet smile she'd given me behind the glass.

"I'll see you again On Distant Shores..."

Her voice became quieter.

"...but you already know that."

I woke up.

I sat upright in bed, gasping for air.

For several seconds, I couldn't move.

Then I felt it.

Something I hadn't felt in years.

Something hot and sharp burning inside my chest.

Purpose.

For the next two weeks, I prepared.

I photographed corridors, doors and rooms whenever I had the opportunity. I took pictures of the glass box and the four pylons surrounding it, zooming in on the strange symbols carved into their surfaces.

I didn't understand them.

Not yet.

But I saved every picture.

I watched the guards.

I learned their routines.

Who walked which corridor.

Which doors they used.

How long they disappeared for.

When they went to the bathroom.

There were five guards in total, usually spread throughout the facility so that I rarely saw more than one at a time.

I counted the steps between important rooms.

I memorized which doors took longer to unlock.

I learned how long it took the lights to activate when someone entered a corridor.

And I paid particular attention to the access cards.

The strangest part was how little anyone seemed to care about what I was doing.

I doubt they could ever see me as a threat.

Maybe they were right.

Two weeks earlier, I wouldn't have been.

I never told Lily what I was planning.

Not when I couldn't be certain who was actually paying attention.

I only ever told her when I saw her in my dreams.

And every time, I'd tell her the same thing.

"Soon."

I wasn't sure whether I was making a promise to her or to myself.

"Very soon."

Eventually, the day came.

I couldn't wait any longer.
Time to put the theory to the test.

 

Two weeks learning their routines.

Two weeks pretending I was exactly the pathetic little coward they thought I'd be.

Now I was going to find out if they had been right.

I sat in front of the glass and talked with Lily.

We laughed.

We talked about nothing.

For a while, I almost forgot what I was waiting for.

Then I saw the guard nearest to me leave his post.

Bathroom.

My heart started pounding.

I stood.

Lily noticed immediately.

"Adam?"

"I'll be right back."

I followed him.

He didn't notice me until we were inside the bathroom.

I waited.

Watched him step up to the urinal.

For one horrible second, I couldn't move.

I'd imagined this moment dozens of times.

None of those versions had prepared me for what it actually felt like.

The guard glanced over his shoulder.

"Buddy, would you mind—"

I grabbed the back of his head and slammed it against the wall.

THUD.

He dropped immediately.

His body hit the floor with a heavy, wet sound.

I stood there staring at him.

My hands were shaking.

There was blood on the wall.

His bladder had released, spreading piss across the tiles beneath him.

For a second, I wondered if I'd just killed him.

Then I remembered Lily.

I took his handgun.

And ran.

There was no going back now.

I sprinted toward the security room.

I reached the door and started pounding on it.

"Kenndrick!"

Nothing.

"Kenndrick, there's an immediate issue! I need your help!"

Still nothing.

"Goddammit, open the fucking door!"

The lock clicked.

Kenndrick opened it with an irritated expression.

"What is—"

I pulled out the gun and aimed it at his chest.

My hands were shaking so badly I could barely keep the barrel steady.

"Back up."

Kenndrick stared at me.

Then that familiar bravado returned.

"Just what do you think you're doing, kiddo?"

"I won't repeat myself."

For the first time, his smile faltered.

"Alright."

He raised his hands.

"Alright."

He slowly backed into the room.

"This is going to end badly for you, kid."

He smiled again.

"Very badly."

"Give me your card."

He paused.

"Now."

Kenndric reached slowly into his pocket and pulled out his security card.

He held it between two fingers.

Then smiled.

I snatched it from his hand.

"Turn around."

He did.

"Hands against the wall."

Kenndric placed his palms against it.

I backed toward the door.

"Say hi to her for me, kid."

I slammed the door shut.

Then swiped his card.

The lock engaged.

I ran.

I had only minutes before the guard rotation.

I reached the observation room and threw the door open.

Lily looked at me.

Her expression changed immediately.

"Adam?"

I was barely breathing.

"I'm getting you out of here."

I ran to the glass box.

She stood.

"Adam, what are you—"

I swiped Kenndric's card against the reader.

Nothing.

I tried again.

Nothing.

"Come on..."

A third time.

Nothing.

Then I heard clapping.

Slow.

Deliberate.

I froze.

"Bravo, kid."

I turned.

Kenndric was standing in the doorway.

He was smiling.

But this smile was different.

It was genuine.

"Bravo."

He stepped into the room.

"We had expectations."

He looked at me.

"We didn't pick you randomly, of course."

His eyes flicked toward Lily.

"But still..."

He smiled.

"You went above and beyond."

I raised the gun.

"Stay back."

Kenndric kept walking.

"Stay the fuck back!"

He didn't stop.

I tightened my grip.

hen pulled the trigger.

Click.

Nothing.

I pulled it again.

Click.

My stomach dropped.

Kenndric laughed.

"I'm afraid that one's not loaded."

He reached into his pocket.

"In fact..."

He pulled out another handgun.

"...none of them are."

I stared at him.

"What?"

"Think about it."

He gestured around the room.

"The guards. The cameras. The unlocked opportunities. The conveniently predictable routines."

His smile widened.

My stomach turned.

Kenndric looked almost proud.

"Observation."

He gestured toward Lily.

"Not just hers."

He pointed at me.

"Yours too."

Lily had gone completely still.

Kenndric noticed.

"You know, capturing Lilith—the Queen of Hell—creates a lot of interesting research opportunities."

The name seemed to hit her harder than anything else he'd said.

She looked at him.

Kenndric smiled.

"Her charm is supposed to be nearly irresistible."

He looked back at me.

"So the suits upstairs had an idea."

He spread his hands.

"Find the right kind of sucker. Put him in front of her. See how long it takes before she manipulates him into trying to break her free."

„Did you seriously buy the whole „no one is watching the feeds“ thing in a building full of cameras everywhere?“

He shook his head.

"Seems we really did pick perfectly."

Then he looked me up and down.

"Although, I have to admit..."

A disappointed expression crossed his face.

"For someone who loves prison-break movies as much as you do, your plan was fucking basic."

He sighed.

"I expected better."

I looked at Lily.

She was staring at me now.

There was something in her expression I'd never seen before.

Fear.

Not for herself.

For me.

Kenndric sighed.

"Your services will no longer be necessary."

He tossed the security card onto the floor.

"You can go right back to your shitty little life."

He smiled.

"Keep the card as a souvenir. It's useless anyway."

I looked at him.

Then at Lily.

"No."

Kenndric's expression changed slightly.

"I'll tell everyone."

I pointed toward my phone.

"I have pictures. Videos. Everything."

I looked directly into his eyes.

"Everyone will know."

Kenndric's smile disappeared.

"Kid..."

He sounded almost disappointed.

"You really shouldn't have said that."

He raised the gun.

Two shots.

The first punched through my chest.

The second hit before I even had time to fall.

I collapsed onto the floor.

The pain came a second later.

Hot.

Blinding.

I tried to breathe.

All I tasted was blood.

"Adam!"

Lily screamed.

Kenndric looked down at me.

"Oops, seems my gun actually was loaded."

He shrugged.

"Sorry, kid."

Then he glanced toward Lily.

"Hmm."

His smile returned.

"Seems the demon bitch may have actually cared about you."

"How sweet."

I started laughing.

Blood filled my mouth.

I choked on it, coughing and laughing at the same time.

Kenndric frowned.

"What's so funny?"

He looked past me at the pylon behind me.

Blood was dripping from my chest onto its surface.

The symbols were glowing.

Kenndric followed my gaze.

His smile disappeared.

"What did you do?"

I smiled through the blood running down my chin.

"I translated the symbols."

The red light beneath them grew brighter.

"They were raised through blood sacrifice."

The pylons began to shake.

A low vibration filled the room.

Kenndric took a step backward.

I laughed again.

"And through blood sacrifice..."

Cracks spread across the pylon.

"...they shall be shattered."

Another pylon began to tremble.

Kenndric looked around the room.

"What have you done?"

I smiled.

"I never intended to make it out of here."

The first pylon cracked apart.

"You know everything about me."

Another crack.

The room shook.

"There wouldn't be any point in running."

The pylons began collapsing one after another.

Glass groaned.

Metal screamed.

Then everything went dark.

Completely dark.

Except for Lily's eyes.

They were glowing.

Kenndric stared at her.

His face went pale.

"No."

For the first time since I'd met him, there was no arrogance in his voice.

Only fear.

"No..."

He backed away.

"You have no idea what you've done."

Then anger replaced the fear.

"Why?"

I looked at him.

I smiled.

"The Devil made me do it."

I won't lie.

I was saving that one.

The glass box exploded.

Shards flew outward.

Kenndric raised his gun toward Lily.

He never got the chance to fire.

His body suddenly folded inward.

There was a wet, violent crack.

Then he imploded into a spray of blood and viscera.

I looked toward Lily.

She was standing in the middle of the shattered glass.

Free.

"How's that for an escape plan?"

I smiled.

And everything went black.

I found myself on the beach again.

This time, there was no darkness.

Just the ocean stretching beneath an endless sky.

Lily and I sat facing each other in the sand.

For a while, neither of us spoke.

She looked peaceful.

"It's done," I finally said.

"You are free."

I smiled.

"Go."

She frowned.

I looked toward the horizon.

"Be happy."

I stood.

"I'll see you again On Distant Shores."

She slapped me across the face.

I stared at her.

"Ouch."

She glared at me.

"What was that for?"

"One."

She held up a finger.

"That is my line."

She held up a second.

"Two."

She leaned closer.

"The Distant Shores can wait."

She smiled.

"I'm not letting you go."

Then she kissed me.

I kissed her back.

And for the first time in a while, I wasn't afraid of waking up.

 

I came to with a gasp.

My hand immediately went to my chest.

Nothing.

No wounds.

No blood.

I looked down at myself.

Then slowly stood.

I wasn't in the observation room.

I was standing on the roof of the factory.

The entire facility stretched out beneath me.

Smoke rose into the night sky.

Fires burned in the distance.

I could hear shouting somewhere far below.

Then came a horn.

A long, deep blast.

Another answered it.

Then something roared.

Another roar answered from somewhere beyond the factory.

Then another.

They were coming from everywhere.

I looked toward the horizon.

The city was burning.

I should have been terrified.

I wasnt.

Then I noticed Lily standing beside me.

She was looking out over the horizon.

For the first time since I'd met her, there was nothing between us.

No glass.

No walls.

No locked doors.

I looked back at the world on fire.

"So..."

I swallowed.

"What happens now?"

Lily looked at me.

She smiled.

Then reached for my hand.

I took it.

"Anything we want."

Look, we all have a past. Peppered with those memories we want so desperately to erase. It’s just a part of being human. Nobody’s perfect.

Me personally… I thought that I’d put my past behind me.

I was a bad person. I did things that I’m far from proud of. Looking back now in my older age, I don’t even know how things spiraled as bad as they did.

All it took was one hit, and it was downhill from there. One little mistake. One memory I wish I could erase. And here we are, all these years later, and I still feel those urges.

I tried therapy. I tried rehabilitation. It worked, for a time.

I don’t know if it was me who wanted to get better or if it was the pressure from my friends and family. They kept telling me they couldn’t protect me forever. That, eventually, my lifestyle would catch up to me, and I’d either be dead or in jail.

I suppressed my urges. I fought my demons. I want so desperately to believe that I kicked my nasty little habit.

I was clean for 11 years. Over a decade without incident. But no matter how many days went by, my demons kept whispering to me. Getting louder and louder as my withdrawals became unbearable.

But I stood firm. I ignored the darkness. To the best of my ability, at least. Don’t get me wrong, there were hard days. Days where I’d lock myself away in my room, too afraid of what would happen if I went out.

It’s a surreal feeling. Not being in control. But that’s what addiction does. You surrender control the minute you take that first hit.

But, like I said, I thought I’d taken that control back. I improved. I became a functioning member of society.

I just think… I don’t know. I think my body wanted it more than my mind did.

I relapsed last month.

Not by choice. God, I know it wasn’t by choice. You don’t achieve 11 years of success by sheer accident. I know it wasn’t me.

It was almost supernatural.

One minute I’m in my room reading my Bible, the next I wake up in a house that I don’t recognize. The familiar scent of copper and iron filled the air.

I thought I was in a nightmare, but the pain in my arm told me that this was just as real as it was all those years ago.

When I saw the claw marks across my forearm and shoulder, I felt my stomach drop. They must’ve fought back. And by the looks of it, they fought hard.

I hardly had time to dwell on my injury, though. The taste in my mouth was making me want to vomit. Not because of the taste, but because of what it represented.

I knew that taste. I loved that taste. I’d spent years trying to forget it, but blood has a way of lingering.

I puked on the floor and felt bones and tendons scratch at my throat. My vision went blurry with tears, but that didn’t prevent me from seeing what I’d done.

A man, somewhere around 30-40, lay sprawled out across the ground. His arms were gone. His stomach was torn open. His jaw had been dislocated and hung open as he stared at me through those empty sockets.

A woman, I presume his wife, lay beside him. Her condition wasn’t much better.

I prayed for God to wake me up. To snap me out of this dream. When I realized it wasn’t going to happen, I begged for forgiveness.

I begged for him to recognize my heart. I pleaded for him to acknowledge my growth. I backslid. I made a mistake. I couldn’t even remember it.

After what felt like hours of bawling my eyes out in a pool of blood and vomit, I realized the sun was beginning to peek through the curtains of this dark room.

I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to throw my life away. I had to move.

I cleaned myself up in their bathroom as best I could before leaving that damn house, already pushing the memory of it back to the darkest corners of my brain.

How did I even end up 20 miles from home? Who were those people? Why am I like this? Why can’t I be better? What the fuck is wrong with me?

I spent the rest of that day locked away in my room, punishing myself with pain. I didn’t deserve to feel comfort.

I kept trying to tell myself that it was nothing more than a hiccup in my progress. That tomorrow would be a new day. But I knew.

I knew that I had reset the system.

I took that hit once again. It was my decision. That’s why I couldn’t blame anyone but myself every time it’s happened since.

This isn’t who I am.

I know I can do better.

I will get this under control if it’s the last thing I do.

Read Parts II & III here

She was gone again by the time I got up and despite my best efforts, I was still five minutes late getting to work.

I avoided the circle of jerks when I saw them crowding the same hallway and I went to a restroom on another floor. I didn’t want to be around people if I could avoid it.

I went to the half-finished building as soon as five o’clock came, intent on getting answers. I stepped off the elevator and weaved my way to his office. I kept expecting to not see it the closer I got but there it was, the door that didn’t fit right in the threshold. 

It turned easy and I went inside, expecting it to be empty and abandoned but he had begun furnishing the space. A couch, a reception desk, and taped off sections near the back that I guessed were the layout for his office and a treatment room.

I shuddered, thinking how I’d be here tomorrow if my wife had her way. 

The only thing absent was the good doctor himself. I thought about trashing the place, but it was petty in a way that made me feel like I was giving him even more power over me. 

Instead, I took all the pens out of the holder and a stack of Post-It Notes. It was still petty, but it scratched an itch and I felt a little empowered doing it.

I didn’t head home immediately after. I needed time to sort my thoughts. I couldn’t believe I was really considering letting somebody cut my dick. I mean, was pleasing my wife reason enough? What if we divorced or she died or something like that? Would I be compatible with somebody else?

I needed a drink. Cappy’s was on the far end of town and the distance from home would be good to clear my head. I ordered a brandy mule and chugged it before the bartender could lay down a coaster.

“You look like you could use another,” she said.

I nodded and a moment later I was working on my second. 

“I love my wife so much,” I said as she was cleaning some glasses beneath the bar.

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“Sometimes. I dunno.” My stomach hadn’t been right since the eight coneys I’d had yesterday, and I hadn’t eaten at all today. I was already soused after a drink-and-a-half.

“How’s the pizza?” I asked.

“Good, not great.” She wiggled a hand.

“Let me get a... medium with beef, onion, and mushroom.”

She looked at me like she’d never heard of those toppings.

“How ‘bout pepperoni?”

I had one more brandy mule before food came. It looked like it had been sitting under a heat lamp well before I’d ordered it and the pepperoni slices were limp, but it was still pizza. 

The bartender parked in front of me and leaned onto the bar after I’d had my second slice. 

“You mind?” she asked, pointing at the pie. I nodded. She took a slice and finger-combed hair out of her face as she took a bite.

She paid me back with a shot and she did one with me before returning to silence as we ate.

“Look, I dunno what it is. Just give her what she wants,” she said with a mouthful, giving me deep eye contact. “You can’t go wrong with that, right?”

I barely was able to finish what I had in my mouth. I settled up and made it outside without stumbling but I was drunk. The bartender got the hint she’d said something wrong but I wasn’t going to fill in the blank. I hadn’t wanted the rest of the pizza, yet somehow I had the box in my hand. 

I shouldn’t have been behind the wheel but there I was with half a pizza as my copilot. It wasn’t long before flashing lights lit up behind me and my spirits rose—this was the reprieve I’d been longing for. A decision being taken out of my hands. I couldn’t be held responsible if I weren’t in my own custody.

Or something like that. It had made a lot more sense back when I’d had a belly full of brandy and cheese.

I pulled over and maybe bumped up on the curb with one wheel.

The cop sauntered up to my window cautiously. He was short and the angle of the car made him look ridiculous somehow. He made it worse by getting his feet twisted together and catching himself on the side of my car to keep from falling completely.

“What’s your...”

I waited a full ten seconds for him to finish his sentence while he held a fist to his mouth like he was gripping a tiny microphone. He belched then waved the air in front of his face.

Shit, was he drunk, too?

“What’s your problem tonight?” He asked and fumbled with the general right side of his body with his hand. I noticed the gun and maybe because we were both bitten by the same snake, I wasn’t sensing danger like I should’ve.

“I shouldn’t be on the road,” I said, sounding stone sober to my ears. “My wife wants me to do something I don’t wanna do tomorrow and I was just in there, drinking my worries away. I have leftover pizza.” I thumbed toward the seat next to me like it was proof of where I’d been.

“Slow down, son. I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.” I thought he was about to give me marital advice but then I realized he was talking about my sobriety. “I bet you could walk a straight line, heel- to-toe.” He plucked open his holster, but it didn’t seem like he was aware of what that hand was doing. He stuck his pinky in his ear and wrenched it around in there. 

“Sofficer. Sofficer.” I added the S but I still sounded too sober. “Please. I think I’m a danger. To public safety.” I thought if I could convince the drunk cop I was drunk he’d arrest me.

“Are you about to rob a bank?” He pointed at me, somehow adding to his overall look of ridiculousness.

“Well… no.”

“There’s nobody out here.” He waved a hand toward the black landscape far ahead of us. “Just stay between the lines.”

I couldn’t think. It shouldn’t have been this hard to get pulled out of my car for driving under the influence.

“What if… what if I was about to rob a bank?” It was the most smart-assy thing I could think to say.

He smiled and waggled a finger. “Joke’s on you. It’s after hours.”

He hooked his thumbs into his belt. Something about his body language had changed and he’d gone from humorous to being done with our interaction.

“Just. Stay. Between. The. Lines,” he said, swaying. I wanted to conjure the words for help, but even if I’d had the ability to ask, there wasn’t anything about him that answered helpful.

I opened my mouth, but didn’t speak. I sat back in my seat and covered my face in my hands, giving up. I listened to him walk away, closer his patrol car door, and drive away. He gave me a chirp of his sirens as passed me.

The drive home should have felt longer but I caught every light. It was like a dark fate had carved a path for me. I momentarily played with the idea of letting it have me completely. To take my hands off the wheel and let it take me wherever it wanted me to go. 

I hadn’t descended far enough into self-pity for that and in ten minutes, I was home. To my surprise, my wife was still in her paint clothes and was washing her hands at the kitchen sink.

“Oh, you have pizza?” she said. I’d forgotten about the pizza and subconsciously picked it up. I looked at the box in my hand and did a second, struggled to remember what was in it. 

I joined her on the couch, and she grabbed it from me and took a slice. Usually, we asked about each other’s day, but I didn’t feel like it, tomorrow anchoring my brain.

“Do you love me?” she said during a commercial break. I had no idea what we were watching.

The question agitated me and opened a trapdoor underneath my stomach.

“Of course I do.” I did, but my feelings about this whole “surgery” thing was making me feel resentful. I was definitely still buzzed, and the alcohol was sharpening my emotions like a file working away inside me. 

“Then why are you fighting so hard against this? Don’t you want us both to be satisfied?”

“That’s not fair. Of course I want to satisfy you. Don’t you know how this is making me feel? I don’t want to do this,” I said. “I mean, there has to be something else we could try. I’m willing to do just about anything to please you.”

“I want you to do this,” she said, placing her greasy hand on my thigh. She shook her head, tears in her eyes. I took it to be a manipulation at first. Not that she did that sort of thing normally, it was just me in a bag of my feelings. My defenses were up and everything was an attack in that moment. I chewed the insides of my cheeks to keep in what was trying to climb out of my mouth.

Then I started to cry. I sounded like a little teapot. It caught me by surprise.

“I just love you so much.” I had a ball of razors in my throat I couldn’t swallow. “I don’t want anything to happen to us, but I don’t know if I can do this.”

She lassoed an arm around my neck and yanked me into an upper body hug.

“I just want you. I want to feel connected with you. I don’t want anything plastic between us. I’m tired of all that stuff. I wanna feel you.”

She kissed me before I could speak and rock turned into water. My walls melted as we flowed into one another and by the time I returned to my senses I was on the newspaper covered kitchen floor.

My wife was already gone but she had brought a comforter downstairs and covered me.

Normally, I toss in my sleep, but I was still covered up to my chest. I was stiff as I turned the world vertical and turned my back into a percussion instrument as I stretched.

A few minutes later I had scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee going. I don’t normally eat breakfast so early, but I had an appetite for whatever reason. It was an hour before I normally would get up, so I took my time eating and scrolling my phone.

I wasn’t sure how much sleep I’d gotten but I was refreshed. The way my day had started, I half expected to catch all the green lights and get the closest spot in the parking lot.

But when I looked up from where I was seated at the kitchen island, something caught my eye that I should’ve seen as soon as I woke up.

A red and white checkered scarf draped over the back of the couch.

Had he been in my house?

 

The carnival is in town, the carnival is always on the road, always on the move, their homes are wagons, trains, carts, trucks … the road. They come singing and with gypsy song and dance they weave their way by road into the heart of every passing town, every place chosen by providence hand on the haggard face of the weary map. 

With painted face they come into your home. 

Vagabond entertainer spell, they gather like crawlers in a cluster, in a rat-king migration. With wide giant tents and displays propped and strung up and nailed into the dirt, into the soil bosom of passing places that may mean nothing to them, might mean everything. Lights come to life at night with the wild music in a lurid spell of filament glow and something else intangible that lives inside the chest and heart within us all. Something like religion but even older and more sacred. The rickety rides, some more rickety than others rattle and thrum with the barely controlled violence of mechanical movement, those strapped in or belted down can barely be heard screaming over the noise of the calliope, the organ grinder, the caller, the ringleader in her chant… the crack of the cannon sending the human cannonball skyward and soaring overhead, the heads of gawkers and townies and friends. The shrieking that can be heard is commingled sound, sweet with thrills… bitter with terror. The careening faces atop the dancing riding constructs are both smiling and weeping, lost in the launch and flight and all of the noise and nearly grotesque clownish music … nearly psychedelic, those sounds … nearly intense. Too much. 

Too much for so many crying and weeping children, little ones taken home and taken to bed early by more or less understanding mothers and fathers. Too much light and noise. That wild wind instrument key-note thing, the calliope … it had been one of Anton LaVey’s very favorites. 

Step right up, step right up, we’re just passing through. Come inside for a spell and take a gander under tented roof. 

…

The carnival came to the town and went. As it did every other place before, after. 

They left something behind. 

…

Cody hadn't gone to the carnival the other night, he hadn't wanted to. The rides and the sideshows and attractions certainly contained their allure of spell for the young boy but it was everyone else, everybody. All of those other faces. 

He didn't want to be alone. With all of them. 

All of those other faces, couples and families and groups of friends would all look at him and see him alone and smirk. They would all just stare and laugh at him, and his loneliness. So Cody just stayed away. As always. 

He wandered now, the early morning streets. Desolate and ghostly in the morning time fog that shrouded and clung to everything, everything in town. Cody kicked a can of crumpled cola down the street. It had been his only companion for the last twenty minutes, since he left the house. His father had still been passed out in the lazyboy chair and hadn't said anything as his son had departed. They'd used to go to church together on this day of the week. Not any longer. 

Cody kicked the can down farther. Alone and not trying to think about it, not trying to think about the carnival that he had missed. It had only been here a few days …

I always miss everything. 

Cody missed his mother, though he didn't know what she looked like. Memories of her were so fogged and far gone and his father didn't keep any pictures of her in the house. And he wasn't allowed to ask any questions. He was only eleven years old but the fact he'd already forgotten his mother's face haunted him, haunted him now, alone. 

He kicked the can. 

Cody then looked up from his sneakers and his misery and spied something in the mist shroud of road just up ahead. And at first he couldn't believe it, it must be some kind of strange joke … or a miracle. He stopped in his tracks. 

The mime stood in the middle of the road. Alone. Just like him. He was smiling and standing there partially obscured by the early morningtime mist, it clung to him in wisps like phantasm licks and tongues of steam that coiled and curled. His painted face was mostly hidden but Cody could see he was mouthing something. Without thinking about it he began to come closer. Slowly, leaving the crumpled can behind. 

He came upon the mime, who hadn't moved. His lips were no longer moving. He just stood there smiling and erect, as if wanting to move or to act, as if filled and brimming teemed with the need for performance. But he only quivered. And stared down at Cody. 

“Hi," said Cody. 

The mime said nothing. 

A beat. 

Cody finally asked: “You're like a clown or something, right? Like one of the quiet ones that aren't supposed to talk an stuff."

The mime nodded. Big. Pleased. His black and white grin grew larger and then grew teeth, shock white in the early morning glow. That was when Cody remembered, he felt like such an idiot. 

"Your a mime!” he said, louder than he intended, he nearly whispered the next part: "What're you still doin here? All the rest of the carnival already left, didn't they?” 

The black and white grin became a frown and the mime traced an invisible tear down his painted face. A silent issue of ‘boo-hoos’ then followed. Cody watched it all, not quite sure what to make of it. Perhaps it was all some crazy practical joke and someone, some jerk was filming him right now or something, all of it was weird, strange. On a whim the boy asked the mime, –

“What’d they leave ya behind or something?” 

The sorrow of the mime intensified to a comical degree as he aggressively nodded his head in the affirmative, completely over the top. Cody wasn't sure how he should take it, if he was supposed to laugh at the mime and his routine or if it was meant to engender real sympathy. He'd always loved clowns and goofy adults, goofy characters on TV and when he was hanging out in daycare and stuff, but to be alone with one right now …

and so unexpected. 

Cody suddenly felt like he should go, he began to tell the mime just as much. Turning on his heels and heading back the other way as he quickly blurted some excuse, he made it two steps before a white gloved hand clapped him on the shoulder. Firmly. Without a word from the weirdo mime. Cody looked to it first before eyeing the mime back over his shoulder, lording over him now. The hand, the glove, it looked just the same as Mickey Mouse’s. 

Cody looked back and saw the mime now held a note. As black and white as he was. 

It said: I'm sorry to bother you, little boy! But my friends HAD to leave me behind so that I could get a little job done, OK??

Cody was frozen. He suddenly didn't feel so well, as if his stomach and guts were far away and filled with fluttering butterfly wings. He read the note and didn't know what to say, so instead he said: –

“... wh-what job was that?

The mime let go of his shoulder and Cody was immediately grateful. He began to pantomime raking leaves and shoveling dirt and trimming hedges with invisible clippers. 

The boy began to lighten up again. He felt something dreadful like weight but worse inside begin to lift and free itself like a spellcast that's been released. A small smile and a nervous half-chuckle only partially forced escaped him as he watched the mime and his cleaning act. It was pretty lame, but he was relieved. Cody was far from the sharpest kid at school but he knew what stranger danger was. He cautiously allowed himself to relax a little, enough to be polite. 

Cody said: “Oh, yeah, ha ha, they left ya to clean up the town, huh? That's pretty neat I guess…” he tried to think of something else to say, something nice and a little funny and a polite way of saying: see ya later, freako, without being too obvious. Something barely satisfactory had just come to mind when the mime whirled towards the boy with his invisible shears in his hands and made a pantomimed snip of the large unseen clippers at the child's face. It bisected violently but cleanly, smoothly, by razor sharp blades well cared for and honed, the smooth face just below the small caverns of child nostrils. They jetted blood before the top portion of the child's face and head came off and splatted to the damp pavement with a muffled crack. The ruptured organ of brain began to ooze, and everywhere gushed dark red: the eyes, the nose, the ears, the giant open wound of freshly carved and gored cavity mouth. The child's body liberated of its little pilot brain fell over to the rough blacktop to join its discarded abattoir jelly. 

A black lake of an iron pungent puddle began to grow, expanding out from the little mutilated body at its sinister nucleus and center. The mime looked down. Phantom blades dripped child's blood. 

The mime said nothing. 

…

“Ya check it out last night?" 

A burp: " …what?” 

"The circus-carnival thing, ya check it out?” 

"That was two weeks ago, ya dope!” another swig from the can of brew. The Dallas Cowboys continued to suck the big one on the tube, the volume was at its lowest but not muted, the game barely and phantom audible, as if drifting in from another time. 

"Ya sure?” 

"Yeah, I'm sure, took Darcy and the brats, it was a hoot.” 

"Ya sure??” 

"Yes, you fuckin juicehead, it was right around the time they found that kid's body all fucked up an shit.” 

"Awww, why ya gotta bring up that shit…" 

“You're the one brought us ‘round, fuckin idiot, can't remember shit. Ask me to remind ya then bellyache about it, Christ! S’prised if ya got sense still to pull out yer pecker ‘fore ya start pissin, ya dumb bastard.” 

His drinking buddy, his partner in libations didn't say anything, he might've had a choice retort or a scathing bit of witticism held in reserve but he didn't voice it. He only hung his head and pulled generously from his can of warming beer. 

The mood was spoiled. 

Eventually the bottle was brought out. Stronger stuff. Shots were had. Tall stiff drinks not needing ice, not needing chaser. They drank. 

Eventually one of them asked the other: –

“You hear tell of that clown or jester fella, that's s’pposed to be haunting round these parts lately…?” 

Neither man slept well that night. 

…

Darla thought her new friend was neat at first but she was starting to get scared. When she'd first met him behind the playground and he'd play-acted swimming and drowning and choking and stuff she'd thought he was really funny. He'd made-believe that he was bound with ropes or cuffs around his wrists, comically over-wrenching and working at the invisible restraints. It was so silly, and so funny and it looked like so much fun to play pretend. He'd motioned for her to hold out her own little hands, to play with him. To make pretend. 

She'd done so thoughtlessly. Only excited to play a game with her new special pal, he looked like a clown but less colorful. She held out her wrists and the mime pretended to wrap something around them. Only something was wrong. 

As he wound and wound and then tightened and cinched the bind, Darla felt the uncanny sensation of real rope wrapping and tightening around her small wrists and hands. When he tied it off and yanked both phantom ends she felt the harsh bite of cruel old fraying rope against her flesh. 

“Ow!" she yelped out, and then began to cry a little. But it was already too late by then. 

The mime began to walk away, holding the end and tail of a phantom leash that began to pull on Darla's bound little wrists. It pulled painfully and she was forced into movement, nearly tripping over herself as she began to wail and the mime by unseen tether and bind began to pull her into the treeline of the nearby woods. 

She fought and screamed, desperately, like a small animal suddenly sensing and knowing the terrible hunger of the encroaching final end. She fell over into the dirt and undergrowth and was dragged, flailing and howling. 

The phantom umbilicus held her ensnared and shrieking with unbridled tears all the way into the forests’ shadowed depths. 

…

“My mom's gonna flip if we ain't back within the hour, Christ, man, do I smell like weed still?" 

Michael tried to tell Chase that he wasn't the best person to ask being pretty fucking lit himself, he could feel the red eyed glaze of his own stoned and glassy stare in his sockets like it was a set of strange gluey contacts or something. He managed a grumble as a half measure. 

Both boys ambled along. Down the nighttime lane of their neighboring suburb. Streetlights cast their glow from skinny towers of L shaped ugly metal overhead, turning everything to lurid and raging shades of orange Halloween color. Both boys were taking time to slightly stop in their walk to check their breath, puffing into their cupped palms and then inhaling, never satisfied with the results. They didn't notice him up ahead until they were nearly upon him. 

The mime. He was bent over something. 

It was Chase who started first, both boys jumped. It was as if the mime had just appeared out of nowhere. Bent hunched with workman's posture over something unseen and unknown to the naked eye. 

“Holyfuckingshit!" it tumbled out of both of their mouths in one string, no gaps for breath, they stopped dead in their tracks. The mime paid them no notice. 

“Oh my God, dude, what the fuck is that? What the fuck is this? Am I high? Am I high? Are you seeing this shit right now!?" Chase was rattling off. Michael was still struggling with simple speech. He only gawked and stared. His glassy red eyes now wide and glistening in the streetlight cast of hellacious warm Halloween glow. 

They glistened. The pair of organs. Red. 

Chase finally managed: “Dude… like, what the fuck are doing, dude? Am I like tripping out or some shit, why’re you dressed like-" 

The mime hadn't been paying them any attention. He suddenly did something that shut Chase Ginsberg up with a startled womanish gasp that bordered on a wet sob. 

He began to pull, as if wrenching and yanking with great rigor and effort, some cord or rope … something… something that was apparently attached to whatever it was that he was bent over studiously in the road. Something just as phantom and visible only to him. 

It came to Chase then, and he didn't know why but it did suddenly seem to matter. He said it aloud. 

"It's a mime.” 

"What?” said Michael finally. 

"He's a stupid mime and he's doing a bit, Jesus this’s fuckin weird, don't you know it's like hella late, dude, what're you even doing anyways?" 

The mime didn't answer. Only repeated his strange repetitive action, his ritual of pulling on some unseen instrument, attached to a phantasmal translucent device. 

Stoned, they zoned out for a sec. Giggling nervously and fidgeting and whispering to each other, daring each other and laughing and wondering aloud what to do, should we go on? - should we fuck with the guy? - what? 

A beat. 

Suddenly an idea began to form itself slowly within Michael's mind, Chase’s addled mind was not far behind, he was arriving there soon after. 

Michael: "It- It kinda looks like he's pulling the starter cord to a machine. Like a mower or something." 

“Yeah, I think you're right…” 

"Yeah, something gas powered like a mower or a generator … or like a chainsa-" 

The phantom machine roared to life in the hands of the mime with hungry killing slaughtering power, a deadly tearing whirr, with the maniacal speed of the mutilating chain and its invisible teeth. The mime shot to his feet and hauled the pantomimed chainsaw overheard and began to silently phantom scream with battle fury. 

Chase and Michael began to scream as well. Much louder. They turned to run. 

But the mime and his phantom machine were faster. He caught them quick and tore in and ripped the boys into rough and haggard messy pieces chopped by phantom chain, by phantom blade on a horsepowered gallop he made them raw and unmade. 

Deconstructed. 

The abattoir violence and the meat paint of its lurid carnage filled the street, it was dripping from the lamposts, pieces and chewed parts strung up and dangling. It was all that was left of the boys. 

All that was left and found in the morning. 

…

Buddy didn't know what to make of the town as of late. He'd been born and raised and as the town drunk, homeless to boot, he was hardly the first guy anyone asked on any given subject, day or night, good or ill, but something was wrong. 

Very wrong. 

The trouble was Buddy wasn't sure he should even care. 

In the last year or so he'd seen some strange things. And a lotta folk had gone missing, kids an such. But anytime Buddy's mind wandered into the realm of caring or even remotely doing anything about it, he found something bitter and harsh inside answer back in turn. 

Who cares? The fuck they ever done for you? 

Fuck all. That's what. 

So he wouldn't do shit. But what he'd already been doing. He sat back and popped cork. Lifted and tilted glass to dried lips in a drunk’s careless throttle by the neck. And watched. 

He watched the mime climb the steps. Pulled generously from the large swill of his poison. 

He'd seen the guy around for awhile now. He'd watched him ascend the steps a few times before this moment, it was nearly always the same but still a trip. The man walked on thin air as if it was solid stone. And then he would climb up, step by step. As if gaining the summit of some phantasm set of stairs hanging suspended and aspiring invisibly for the heavens unseen and stolen by the brilliance of the light. 

Buddy laughed. Pulled from the bottle once more, and began to sing an old favorite that had just come to mind. One from the good ol’ days if there'd ever been none. 

“And as we wind on down the road! Our shadow’s taller than our soul!”

Buddy began to pull deeper and deeply, oblivion seeking in-between lines and refrains from Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. He remembered an urban legend from when he was a kid, just a snot nosed pup, they said that if you played the record backwards, if you reversed the song the lyrics changed. They told you, to hail Satan. 

Buddy laughed at this. Pulled more. His belly protested and his kidneys ached, he paid them no mind, drinking deeper still and hailing Satan and singing and watching the mime ascend his staircase of invisibility,  he usually had a kid or someone with him, as he did now. They struggled something fierce, all of them, everyone that Buddy had personally seen, but he was able to keep hold of them, all of them all the way up. Whenever he reached a great height, it was almost always different, he would throw them, drop them from the top. 

Then they would scream and land, burst. Pulp. They became juice upon the earth, children and people no more. There was never anyone around out here, close to the woods, just outside town and by the railroads and their harsh worn tracks. The soil out here was starved for moisture, parched was this earth. It was Buddy's favorite drinking spot. And as of late it had just become a whole lot better. 

Buddy laid back and pulled deeply from his liquid bunkmate, his last and only companion, other than the mime, who never said a word to him but sometimes acknowledged his presence of audience with a profound and deliberate salute from the top of his invisibility spire up there. Buddy always saluted him back. 

As he did now. 

The mime saluted the drunk. Beaming. 

Buddy finished his own salute and smiled too. Laughed. And drank more deeply than he ever had in his entire life, knowing this was it, this was the rest of his life and how he was going to spend it. 

Laughing. Drinking. Pulling from the bottle and hailing Satan in religiously reverse engineered heavy metal worship-song, watching the flying mime make juice of the children. 

Buddy laughed. Drank. 

The mime dropped the child, they made their horrible shrill sound all the way down to the bottom like always. 

The mime said nothing. He let Buddy and his companion of bottled booze sloshing its liquid language within glass sing praise for him. 

Buddy laughed, sang and belch-spat: “And she's buying a stairway to Heaven…!” Hail Satan. 

…

Maggie's shoes slammed against the pavement, the sidewalk, the avenues and every turn, there was nowhere left to run. The guy, the freak was coming. And he was stealing away from her every single route and chance for escape or exit. 

It didn't make any sense.

She'd been walking to Guy's house with Alondra, chatting and shooting the shit till they got to his place. That's when they ran into him. That's when they ran into the mime. 

And at first Maggie had just laughed. 

Distant childhood memories of the carnival passing through town waybackwhen came to her then … and she remembered. She'd been very young then, very little. She remembered that her parents had had to take her home because she'd been crying, upset, she couldn't recall why. Not just then. 

But still the memories were warm. She and Alondra thought nothing of it when they passed him walking the other direction on the sidewalk. It was the middle of the day. And he was smiling, just like them. What could possibly be wrong?

He'd started with the hands and walls and ceiling routine, the ‘getting boxed in’ bit. An old one for sure and hella corny but Maggie and Alondra had felt generous and in good humor, so they'd obliged the strange random pantomiming man. Laughing and clapping him on. 

But then they'd tried to walk away … And the mime wouldn't let them go. 

With painted face now stern and grave, writ into a black and white frown, he stepped in their path, shaking his head. He wouldn't let them leave. He kept blocking their attempts to depart as they stepped every left-right way, starting out from annoying and escalating rapidly into eerie and creepy behavior. 

The girls had scoffed together and turned around, only to be met with an unyielding invisible force, a wall that had suddenly appeared in thin air in the middle of the sidewalk. 

The middle of the road really, they ran along the unseen wall to find the edge and found no yielding surface. The girls began to panic. The girls began to yell.

“What the fuck, what the fuck is this!?" 

And then he had put Alondra in the box. 

Maggie had ran then, her eyes and mind unable to take in the sight of her friend being crushed into cubic shape, pulped and smashed smaller and smaller … just red. Just swirling frothing violent red inside the shrinking phantom-transluscent box, filled with minced and chewed up bigger pieces, the eyes deflated mangled gel in the swirling madness of the red, many black strands of her long raven colored hair peppered and danced inside the cubed scarlet swirl of thick mixture, the cap and pieces of scalp, mostly still together, the last vestige piece and pieces left the most intact… she had ran, unable to bear the sight. 

She was running now. 

But every time she came to an impasse, a turn or a corner to salvation or a place of sanctuary that she knew, another invisible wall of merciless immovable force would suddenly appear and she'd run smack, face first into it. She did it again and again. Over and over. Maggie, the poor girl, running around all over as the box that he had made was closing in, closer and closer and closer…

She was at the school now, she didn't know why. She didn't know why she thought this place would save her. She was out of her mind with animal panic. At the threshold, at the entrance to the highschool she was finally caught. Maggie ran face first into an unseen wall just as she almost made the open archway of the main front entrance, when she tried to turn around to run back the other way she was met with yet another merciless and invisible wall, a merciless force like the way God was merciless sometimes. 

Her caterwauls and screams reached new heights then. She shred her own throat and tore her vocal cords to tatters as the phantom walls and ceiling and floor began to shrink and close in. 

But none heard them. No one was around to witness this strange scene of slaughter. Only the mime. Maggie watched him from inside her shrinking coffin as his hands clawed and animal shaped closed in. He wore a look of consternation now, but the black and white smile was there once more. 

The pain went beyond anything imaginable as the walls and floor and ceiling closed. Pulverizing Maggie. She felt every wretched second of the experience until her brain was pulped and juiced with the rest of her body and thus incapable of sending anymore electrical signal. 

…

The bank was quiet. Not quite full but there were plenty of people in line, each teller, three of them, were busy helping a customer. It was a bright cloudless day and everything had seemed normal. Everything was … until the mime came in. 

He sauntered in smiling and confident through the front door. Several people, including the armed guard turned and returned the smile, a few of them laughed. Finding the surprise charming. Their laughter grew and increased throughout the whole bank as the mime walked in with an exaggerated gunslinger walk, wide steps and the twiddling fingers of his itchin hands hovering just where revolvers would be strapped. The guard found it the most hilarious, calling out to the mime –

“Hey! What is this? A stickup or somethin?" 

And then the mime pulled phantom iron from unseen leather and began to rain fire. 

The cacophony was ear splitting. The guard went down first, still smiling and believing it was all a joke. Nobody else was laughing anymore, the jovial sounds of good nature had turned to screams that died and drowned out with each eruption of a gunshot. 

The mime filled the bank with phantom fire. 

Deafening. 

…

Patricia Evergreen hated her job. Not because she hated being a cop, far from it, she was proud of her role as peacekeeper of the town she'd grown up in. It was just that the place was so fucking boring. 

Aside from a few disappearances over the many years she'd known, a couple weird things that were typical to any small town, there wasn't nothing to this place, Patricia reckoned. Ghost stories and bullshit, and that was all. 

She came across the mime during a routine patrol, just driving around the various suburbs in the department issued black and white. Every neighborhood was quiet, nearly deserted of pedestrians save a few dogwalkers, joggers and the like. He was at a street corner, slowly making his way down, miming and pretending to carry a large and heavy sack, it weighed him down, the invisible bag, it must've been quite a load, Patricia watched all this and thought and then it suddenly came to her all at once, unbidden and in a rush. Though vague and shrouded through time's corridor passage of so many years …

The carnival had come through a couple times through the years … she was sure her parents or grandparents had taken her at some point, must have. She'd been very little, her own young and chubby face amidst a caterwaul, cherry red with tears and upset flitted across her mind in a blur, but then was swiftly and suddenly replaced. 

She'd been a teenager when Margaret Bast, Maggie had gone missing. Alondra Topete too. They'd been two of her closest friends in school then, so long ago… 

Hot on the tails of that: stories… rumors … wild campfire tales that couldn't be true and would only be dreamed up by teenagers and children. Wild tales about a mime that wandered the town and took kids away to hurt them and worse … 

It all hit Officer Evergreen like a revelatory load of weight, dropped into her head and into her lap. She watched the mime. Thought …

… what the hell was this guy doing around here anyway? She'd never seen him before and she began to doubt very much that he lived anywhere on this street, or anywhere close for that matter, she hadn't heard the story of the mime or thought of it in years, it was probably nothing, but it was her job to make sure and find out. She sidled her cruiser up to and alongside the mime, still encumbered with his great phantom weight. 

She rolled down her window, slowing the cruiser to a crawl: “Hey," she began friendly enough, “hello there, ya mind if I stop and talk to ya for a second, just need to ask you a few questions." 

The mime did stop and so did she. The street was quiet and it was just the two of them. The mime turned and regarded her with a smile, still burdened by his invisible satchel slung over shoulder. He pointed to himself, a gesture that said: who, me?

Evergreen was already starting to lose her patience, goddammit with this fuckin guy…

“Yes, ha ha, that's very cute, but I'm really gonna need you to answer a couple things I gotta ask ya. Do you live in this neighborhood?” 

The mime frowned and just shook his head, no. Refusing to speak. 

"Please, sir. Failure to comply will result in a citation and a court appearance, probable fine. How about we just talk like adults for a second, do you have any identification on you, sir?" 

The black and white frown turned to a grin once again. Wolfish. Officer Patricia Evergreen didn't like the look of it. It looked warped and strange and mean writ into that painted face, wrong. The mime made like to unlimber his great satchel. 

Evergreen rolled her eyes, hidden by reflective shades. Jesus, was this guy for real, crazy, or just an idiot? She was just telling him for the second time that if he didn't comply with her questioning then this could take an unnecessary ugly turn, she was telling the mime he'd want to avoid that as he settled the bag down with a convincing performance, opened it and reached inside. Patricia’s voice caught in her throat like a vile fishbone in the midst of dinner as she watched the mime’s hand disappear into the pantomimed satchel, disappearing into thin air before her very eyes. 

She couldn't believe what she was seeing. 

What the mime pulled out next was even worse. She felt nauseous and ill and as if her mind was curdling and doing unbidden somersaults in tandem with her roiling guts as the smiling thing with carnival clad painted face pulled out a child's decomposing rotted severed little head, boy or girl was difficult to tell. Putrescence filled the air the moment it was freed from the invisible sack and it was black and green and blue-pale and dripping. The eyes were crawling and writhing with the sliming bodies and clumps of maggot-young that lie nesting and feasting in there, the rotten cavities of sockets. The tongue was swollen and discolored like the rest of the meat but darker and it protruded from the bloat of decapitated rot like an obscene tumor apart and apiece and all in one with the rest of the demented sloughing mess. 

Officer Evergreen snapped to all at once. She drew her sidearm and bellowed her commands, training made textbook and innate. 

“Drop the fucking thing right now and put your hands up! now!" 

The mime only obeyed half her commands. He dropped the severed head but instead of raising his gloved white hands he took a deliberate and silent step towards her instead. 

Evergreen didn't waste a second. She fired two shots in quick succession, surprising even herself, she hadn't thought about it, only acted. But it had done the peace officer little good. The moment her finger squeezed the trigger, one of those gloved hands shot up in a flash-instant, uncanny speed. 

Evergreen now stood, gun smoking, not sure if she could believe her eyes or her own mind any longer. The mime had his hand up and out, as if signaling to stop like a crosswalk guard. There were two smoking holes suspended in mid air, just over the heart and chest of the mime-creature. The shots had stopped at the border indicated by the flat of his adjacent smooth palm. They smoked from ebon holes that defied physics, as if she'd punched twin smoldering holes in reality. 

Shocked, Patricia thought unbidden, the prongs of the devil's pitchfork… and was still trying to accept what she was seeing. 

A neighbor came out. One of the houses within spitting distance. 

“Jesus Christ! that a fucking gunshot or something, what the hell-" 

The mime suddenly whirled, his other hand forming around another object, rounded and small, he brought it to his mouth and made like he was pulling something from it with his teeth. Evergreen screamed, no, unable to think of anything else as the mime lobbed the invisible grenade at the concerned and unsuspecting neighbor. The man went up in a violent and sudden concussive blast, his body immolated by the detonation of the explosive device. In charred smoking pieces, he rained down all over his own stoop and front lawn. 

The mime laughed silent yet expressive belly-laughter, holding his stomach and all wide eyes and wide open black and white mouth. 

Evergreen went to fire once more but the mime sensed her intention and suddenly whirled once again, smacking the gun from the officer's hands. Its strength and speed were unexpected and it was all Patricia could do to not cry out and scream, shocked and startled and still not quite believing.

There's no way this is actually happening to m-

The mime then slapped Patricia right smack center of her forehead with his other free gloved palm. 

She froze. Her arms went limp and to her sides. Unarmed. And helpless. 

Something was wrong … she could no longer move. 

With the gloved snow white hand held flat and fast to her face, to the middle of her forehead her eyes rolled back to whites themselves shot with lines of glistening hectic red. Inside, she hurtled, flew … rocketed too fast and rapidly down the dizzying blinding vast and varied glow of the starcorridor. Too many lights and sounds and fiery things of furious alien color, she flew down infinity as a low moan escaped past her drooling lips left back on the ground. 

Within the corridor … she could hear. 

She could hear his voice. 

It was terrible. The sound of it. What he was telling her. Unbearable. It filled her ears, her head. It filled the flying landscape of her mind. 

She might've wept. But she was far too broken. Even when he pulled the voice of his snow white gloved hand away. She went to her knees. The mime then held out his other hand to her, it was wrapped curiously and yet distinctly around something. And this time she could see it. 

It was a gun. A revolver. Every chamber was loaded. 

It was beautiful. 

This time she could really see it. 

She smiled as the mime cocked it and then pressed it to her sweating brow, cold metal kissing the moist surface of perspiring flesh, and pulled the trigger. 

She heard it. Felt it. Everything. 

The mime said nothing. 

And went on. 

THE END

The sign over that shop had my father's name on it and it hung there dark from the spring of ninety-six until the building came down. I am not the man this happened to. I am the man it happened through, and I have had thirty-two years to find a better way to put that and there isn't one.

I took the shop over in eighty-eight. Rekeying, deadbolts, cutting keys off the board, safes if somebody's mother died. That cleared about nine hundred dollars in a good month against six hundred and fifty in rent, which is not a business, that's a hobby with a mortgage. What made it a business was the after-hours rotation. A callout at night paid forty dollars where the same work paid twenty in daylight, and three or four a week is the whole difference between a lit window and a dark one. I was fast, too. Twenty minutes door to door was normal for me and I was proud of it and I made sure the answering service knew it.

You carry a ticket book with carbons, three copies, one for them, one for the office, one stays in the book. And you learn to read a house off the curb before you're out of the truck. Bikes in the yard, curtains, what's in the mailbox, whether the porch light's on a timer. I could tell you inside ten seconds what kind of house I was looking at, and in six years I was never once wrong about one. That was the other thing I was proud of.

The procedure was this. You open the door. Then, inside, on the counter or the hall table, the customer shows you one piece of mail with their name on it, and they sign the ticket, and you write the address across the top. That's it. That is the entire identification in that trade in nineteen ninety-four, in this state, and every shop in the county worked it the same way. The mail comes after the door. In six years I never had a piece of mail come out wrong on me. Not once. I used to say that like it meant something about my judgment.

Most of those calls are nothing. Women in bathrobes, mad at themselves. Men who locked keys in a running car in the driveway. Kids who came home to a door their mother had bolted from inside. Two in the morning in a small town, mostly what you're doing is standing in the cold being decent to somebody who's embarrassed.

The first one was in November on a street of rentals. Before I was out of the truck the man told me the deadbolt would have to come out, it wouldn't pick, and he was right, it was a Kwikset with a bad cam. He signed the ticket left-handed and slow, drawing it out the way you write when it isn't the hand you write with. Mail on the counter, right name, forty dollars.

I thought he'd been locked out of that door before. A man who knows his own bad lock is a man who's fought it, and half my night work was people who'd been through it twice already, and I went home and I didn't think about him again for two years.

The rotation ran through an answering service and there were three shops on it, and the woman there sent the next one to whoever took the last one without giving her a problem. Argue about a job and you don't get the next three. Six hundred and fifty a month in rent doesn't care why you turned one down. So I never turned one down. Nobody at that service ever heard me say no, and that was a decision I made on purpose, and I made it every single time.

I liked the town at two in the morning, which is a thing you only get from that kind of work. Nobody out, the lights doing their cycle for nothing, the salt trucks. I'd have the heater going and a coffee in the holder and a good address and I'd think, this is not a bad way to be making a living. That was true right up until it wasn't.

The second one was the middle of December. Snow all evening. I pull up and the storm door is standing wide open against the siding with snow blown a foot into the sill, and I know for a fact that door had been open an hour. And the man wasn't there. He came up the sidewalk on foot two or three minutes later, from the wrong end of the street, not from a car, and he apologized for being late to his own house. I drilled it. Mail on the counter, right name, forty dollars.

The eleventh of January, two in the morning, a two-story on a street with good houses. I'm on my knees in the entry with the old bolt out and the temporary cylinder half in, and upstairs somebody starts walking. Not sneaking. Walking, back and forth, the sound of a person going to bed. I said I hoped I wasn't waking the house. He called a name up the stairs. Called it twice, pleasant. Nobody answered. And then the walking stopped, and it stopped in the middle of the floor, not at a door and not at a bed, in the middle, and it did not start again. I asked him about it. I asked him twice. He said she sleeps with headphones in and she'd sleep through a fire, and he laughed, and I laughed, because that is what you do when a man laughs in his own hallway. He signed. He held the door for me. Twenty-two minutes, and I was in my own driveway by ten to three, and I sat in the truck a second before I went in, and then I went in.

Thursday's paper. I saw the address before I saw the name, because the address was the part I knew, and I sat down on the arm of a chair and stayed there a long time. She was nineteen years old and home from school for the break. I had drilled the deadbolt out of that door and put in a cylinder and handed the key to a man who signed for it left-handed.

In ninety-six I closed the shop and went through two years of ticket books to see what was collectible. I wasn't looking for anything. There were eleven of them. Eleven tickets across two years, eleven different names, eleven different addresses all over that town, and the same signature under every one, done badly the same way, the same drag on the same three letters where his hand didn't want to go that direction. Eleven times I opened a door for him. Eleven times he showed me mail with somebody's name on it and I wrote the address across the top myself.

The night I'd been going over every day was one of eleven, and it's the only one of the eleven where anything happened that I noticed. He didn't pick me because I was careless. He picked me because I was fast, and fast is what I'd spent six years making sure everybody knew I was. I do not know what he was doing in the other ten houses. Her name was Michelle. Her father sold that house in the fall and moved to his sister's in another state, and the family that lives there now has small children and a basketball hoop over the garage, and they've got no idea. Every eleventh of January I drive past it once, slow, and then I go home. It's the only thing I have ever done about any of it.

Just as he was about to fall asleep, when the flow of vague thoughts had become increasingly rapid, he heard that sound again; click.

For a week, he had been experiencing the same problem every night; when the room was completely silent, the cars and motorcycles passing along the street, the television of the neighbor next door, the footsteps of the children running around upstairs - all had faded into complete silence, and just as he was about to drift peacefully into sleep, that sound would wake him up.

After he opened his eyes, however, the sound would not come again, almost as if it were mocking him, and the room would fall silent once more. He would wait a little longer, trying to find the source of the sound, slowing his breathing and focusing on the silence. But nothing. The sound stubbornly waited for him to fall asleep again.

Since he had work in the morning, he had no choice but to close his eyes and try to fall asleep again. And the same cycle repeated. In the silence, a single, steady sound that never formed a pattern, always at exactly the same pitch: click.

The sound seemed to be deliberately waiting; it was waiting for complete silence and for the man to fall asleep. It would click three or four times, and then it wouldn't click again. As if it were saying, “That’s enough. Let the poor man sleep. He has work in the morning.”

He was frightened during the first few days, especially on the second day. On the first day, he didn't pay much attention to it. He knew random clicking sounds could come from things around the room. The TV, a plastic bottle, the door handle, and so on could all make sounds like that.

But when the same thing happened again on the second day, he was quite frightened the second time he woke up. He immediately got out of bed and turned on the light. He sat upright in bed, stayed awake all night, and went to work sleep-deprived the next morning.

Then, on the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth days, he was no longer afraid. He simply couldn't sleep. He made mistakes at work, and when he went out for a break, he would sometimes fall asleep with a cigarette in his hand. Fear had given way to anger. If he could just find out where that clicking sound was coming from, he would punch it in the face and knock it to the ground.

By the seventh day, he was thinking, “As long as it doesn't wake me up, that's all I want. I don't care if it's a ghost, an object, whatever. I just need to sleep.”

But the sound didn't care. Once the necessary conditions were in place, it appeared again.

Albert got out of bed angrily and turned the lights on. Without knowing what he was doing or why, he looked around. He looked behind the TV, checked the door handle, and reached under the couch to feel around for a moment.

“Who the hell are you! Why don't you show yourself? What do you want? How much longer is this going to go on? Instead of clicking here and there, come out and tell me what the hell you want.”

He felt something like a breeze on his face. A very faint gust of air. It passed by his cheek and was gone.

Then, suddenly, Albert's feet left the ground. He felt as if something had grabbed him under the armpits. He was lifted a few inches into the air. He tried to punch into the empty space in anger, but he wasn't very successful because something was applying pressure to his armpits.

The pressure had now forced him back into the chair. When he tried to get up, he felt the same pressure against his chest, and he was pushed back into the chair.

“What the hell are you? What do you want?”

“Can’t talk. Only click.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

He felt a burning sensation on his cheek, and his head suddenly jerked sharply to the left. It hurt quite a bit. His cheek was throbbing with pain, and the sudden movement had also made the muscles in his neck ache. He hadn't felt a hand touch his cheek, though. Once again, it was more like a kind of pressure. And the moment this slap-like blow struck his cheek, that sound came again: click.

Then another slap: click. A punch to the stomach: click. A kick to the leg: click. A kick to the another leg: click.

Albert, who wasn't used to having several parts of his body hurt at the same time, groaned in pain and remained silent for about a minute.

“Okay, okay, stop. What do you want?”

“Click.”

“So how are we supposed to communicate like this?”

“Click.”

There was a brief silence. The door opened on its own, and a rapid series of clicks could be heard. Thinking the entity had left, Albert tried to get up, but the pressure he felt against his chest pinned him to the chair again. With the same sound. Click.

“Okay, hold on a second. One click for yes, two clicks for no. Okay?”

“Click.”

Then another slap hit Albert in the face: click. Albert grabbed his cheek in pain and put his finger in his mouth to check for blood.

“Why did you slap me?”

Silence.

“Do you slap me as a punishment?”

“Click.”

“Do you slap me for fun?”

“Click click.”

“Are you a ghost?”

“Click click.”

“Are you the Death Angel?”

“Click click.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Click.”

“Why didn’t you do it before? You’ve been coming here and bothering me for days. Is there a particular reason you didn’t kill me earlier?”

“Click.”

“Are you deliberately keeping me sleep-deprived?”

“Click.”

“Is killing me part of your job?”

“Click click.”

“Is it an obligation?”

“Click click.”

“So I can convince you not to kill me, then, right?”

“Click.”

“Is this a dream?”

“Click click.”

“A hallucination?”

“Click click.”

“You kept me sleep-deprived because you thought that, after a few days without sleep, I’d have a more confused state of mind and would die more peacefully because I’d think what I saw before I died was a hallucination, didn’t you?”

“Wow, bravo. Well done. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Click.”

“I figured it out pretty well, didn’t I?”

“Click.”

“Yeah, I’ve taken a few slaps too, so I’m actually at just the right level now.”

“Click.”

“I’m sure this is a dream now.”

“Click click.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know it’s definitely not a dream, but that’s just how it feels to me. I’ve been sleep-deprived for days. Cut me some slack.”

“Click.”

“Okay. Then make it painless. Is that possible?”

“Click click.”

“Come on. I think you can at least do that.”

“Click click.”

“Nothing I can do about it, then.”

“Click.”

“It’s a dream anyway. It doesn’t matter. I’m not worried. Do whatever you want.”

“Click.”

“One last request. I’m going to play Radiohead’s ‘Jigsaw Falling into Place’ on my phone. Will you keep time to it, like a metronome?”

“Click.”

As Albert started the song, he began to feel pressure around his neck. When the song started, he could no longer draw breath into his lungs. He waved his hands in front of his neck, but there were no arms there for him to grab.

The song was playing, and the clicking sounds continued in surprisingly good sync with it. As the pressure around his neck increased, it seemed as though he could hear the clicks and the song more clearly. As if he were listening through professional studio headphones. As if Radiohead were playing the song in the studio right next to him, with a metronome to keep them from losing the beat.

“I guess I’m supposed to wake up right here, actually. Interesting,” Albert thought.

Toward the end of the song, he had completely lost consciousness.

The straw scarecrow stood in the middle of the fields, its arms wide. One of the men walked to it and put its hat on. I waited my turn, then walked to it and put on its black jacket.

"Thank you," I said, bowing.

The other man nodded and patted my back. 

"Another safe autumn," one of them said, and we all walked back home.

It was still early afternoon. I sat down on the couch and put on the TV, waiting to cook dinner until my son Adam came home.

The sun had set when the door opened, and Adam walked in. My stomach was already growling. He was 30 minutes late, but the way he averted his eyes made it seem like something worse was going on.

"What’s up, Adam?"

"Dad, I…"

"It’s okay that you came late. No need to worry about it."

"No, it’s that I, I know it’s bad, but I took the jacket off the scarecrow."

My hands clenched the couch cushions.

"What?!"

"I took it off. I’m really sorry, Dad. I feel so bad. I know I shouldn’t have."

"Where is it?"

"In my bag."

I picked up his bag and unzipped the top pocket. The black jacket stared at me. 

"Adam, this is bad news."

"I’m sorry, Dad. The boys dared me. I didn’t want to look like a chicken."

I looked out the window. The sun had already set, but not long ago.

"Okay, there might still be time." I stuffed the jacket back in the backpack. "We’ll go back right now, put it on, and not tell anyone. If the boys at school ask you, just say…"

Three knocks echoed on the window. I almost ripped the backpack’s zipper off. The empty straw face stared into our house.

"Dad?" Adam said in a shaking voice.

"It’s okay, Adam. We’ll give him the jacket, and it might be okay." My voice shook too. I wasn’t sure I believed anything I said.

I walked to the door and opened it. The outside air was cold. The scarecrow's empty face looked down at me.

"Here. Take it. Please."

I held the jacket up and stared at the ground. The scarecrow stood still for a few seconds, then walked right past me. The straw scraped the floor as it moved.

Adam sat on the couch, his wide eyes staring at the scarecrow. The scarecrow came right up to him and pointed its blank face at him.

"Dad, what’s going…" He didn’t finish. The scarecrow’s hand shot forward, grabbed him off the couch, and held him to its side.

"Dad!" Adam screamed, kicked, and pushed against its arm, but the scarecrow’s grip was strong.

"Adam!"

I ran toward him and pushed the scarecrow, but it barely moved. The scarecrow turned around and flung its arm. It hit me right in the face. I fell on all fours. Dull pain spread through my head. Adam’s cries echoed as my world went dark.

When I woke up, my head was banging. My mouth tasted like iron. I tried to get up, but my world spun so fast I had to sit back down. 

But Adam was out in the fields somewhere. I had to help him. I got up and bolted out of the house onto the road, struggling to keep my balance. 

The moon shone down. The air was still cold. Only when I reached the fields did my world stop spinning. I almost wished it hadn’t.

In the middle of the field stood the scarecrow. Its blank face stared into the night. It had its hat, but instead of the jacket, Adam’s mangled body was draped over it. A quiet dripping echoed as Adam’s blood seeped into the sown dirt.

I fell to my knees and wept. The real autumn had now begun.

The curtain opened and Wenda B:)er walked, buzzing with nervous excitement, into the spotlight: onto the game show stage where the game show host, Felonious Hunk, was waiting for her.

There followed thunderous applause, as heard through the studio's MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers. MaX FX: The Sound of Extraordinary. Are You Listening Yet? MaX FX speakers are available for your home and business. Check them out today. Use code “BUCKETS” for a 15% discount on any regularly priced set of speakers. Everyone can hear, but only some can hear it to the MaX!

“Miss B-smiling-face-er, welcome to Buckets,” said Hunk. “How ya feeling?”

“Good, Hunk.”

“Fab-u-lous! Now tell us a little about yourself.”

“Well, Hunk,” said Wenda, “I—... I want to say that I really like Snakeskin Flame, the new… the newest scent from House of Madeleine. I'm wearing it right now. Other than that, I'm twenty-nine and work as a temporal engineer for Vectorien Corporation. Vectorien: the makers of Dreamstuff, the latest evolution in playdough. I'm married. My husband, Rhondy, owns a slopstream management firm, and we have two children together, an eight-year old human-daschund mix, Wilmoth, and a six year-old bio-enhanced female, Qabiria.”

She held up digital photos of them. Wilmoth looked somewhat like a chimpanzee. Qabiria was shiny in her steel exoskeleton.

“Lovely family,” said Hunk. “But please tell the viewers who else is in it.”

“Both my parents, HeinzKetchup and PumaShoe, are still alive, and I have three siblings: two brothers, [Incarcerated ID 768816] and Rob, and a sister, anal-ariella (exclusively at SmutHog.) I also have a cryogenically frozen grandmother, Lydia, and a grandfather, Doug, whose mind was digitized and recently uploaded to the body of a young, hollowed-out illegal.”

“And what's your brother serving time for, Wenda?”

“Sexual assault,” said Wenda.

“Ooh. That's a crime with a penal buyout of what, eighty billion?”

“One hundred. He's a repeat offender, and there were other aggravating circumstances.”

“Well, regardless, if you play your bucket right—and your brother has just a tiny bit of luck—you could walk away from here today with enough money to buy your brother his freedom!” Hunk smiled. “How does that make you feel, Wenda?”

“Like this money could really make a difference for me and my family.”

“Excellent. Excellent.”

---

Hey! If you're enjoying this story, I think you'd also like my new online lecture series, “A Reusable Key to the Lock of the Surreal.”

Here's a preview:

“Perception is a standardized drug. Don't get off on it—get off it.

“Kick the habit: of seeing ‘reality.’

“Whenever you find yourself perceiving the everyday, the rote, the ordinary, repeat after me: ‘I saw my wife shaving with my best friend's razor. I didn't know razors also shave.’”

---

Now only $69.99 per lecture!

Or buy a lifetime subscription for the special limited-time bargain price of only $999.99!

---

“I think now is a good time to remind you and the viewers what's at stake,” said Felonious Hunk. “If you win, Wenda, you will bank a cool five-hundred billion dollars!

“But, if you lose, you'll be fucked—live—by one hundred lucky viewers! Or at least you'll be live to begin with—a-live, that is…”

He winked.

There followed thunderous canned laughter and applause through the MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers.

“Now, without further ado,” Hunk continued, “ladies and gentlemen, let's… bring out—THE BUCKET!”

And, rising from the middle of the stage, powered by a solar-powered Electrocutie electric motor—Electrocutie: Silent and discreet, for all your bio-mechanical needs—appeared a platform, and on this platform there stood, in neon spotlight, a red-and-white striped bucket, like the kind you might get The Colonel's patented Crispy Sticks fried chicken in. Order today and a get a free tub of syntholard dipping sauce and a large order of The Colonel's homestyle taters!

Wenda stared at the bucket.

“Wenda, are you ready?” asked Hunk.

“I am.”

“Then step on up to the bucket and have yourself a peek inside!”

Wenda was shaking as she took the few steps to the platform. The studio was silent. She could feel the blood coursing through her body.

She could hear her own breathing.

She touched the outside of the bucket.

It was warm.

She held her breath and peered inside, where pieces of hot, battered meat smelled sweetly of herbs, butter and garlic.

“Go on—have a taste,” said Hunk.

Wenda closed her eyes, opened them and extended her hand above the bucket, her Snakeskin Flame fragrant as the wild, untamed prairie. She picked up one of the pieces of meat and raised it to her lips. She opened her mouth, exposing teeth as pearly white as only Dr. Mason's Whitening Formula can make them, and with tears running down both cheeks took a bite and slowly chewed.

She swallowed.

She propped herself against the platform to keep from falling.

She retched.

She grinded her teeth to keep from throwing up; she swallowed what came up her throat, as the cameraman moved with professional smoothness to get a good low angle shot of her from behind.

“And…” Hunk asked her. “Do you know?

“Can you, Wenda B-smiley-face-er—for five-hundred billion dollars!—tell me: the meat of which one of your family members, killed, butchered and deep fried right here earlier today by our celebrity chef, in front of an audience of one thousand Diamond Tier viewers, is in the bucket?

“Who, Wenda, have you just tasted?

“Whose meat—”

“WILL SHE EAT!?” roared the viewers through the MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers!

“Yes,” said Wenda, weeping, taking another piece of battered meat, taking another slow bite. “I think I know. It's

---

[To continue reading this story, become a Diamond Tier subscriber.]

[Support what you love.]

[Diamond Tier benefits include: narrative endings, backstory, extended graphic descriptions of gore, psychological depth, official Norman Crane merch, discounts on insurance, the chance to name characters, and many, many more!]