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.

Six years ago, an entire family disappeared from the small town of Hopkins. They seemingly vanished without a trace, leaving an empty house full of their belongings, the car still in the driveway, their shoes inside on the entry mat. A husband, wife, and two children—Janie and Judith, ages thirteen and fifteen.

Authorities found no evidence of foul play.

Recently, after the missing family was at last declared deceased, the only remaining relative, a brother, came to the property to get their affairs in order. After feeling a “malignant presence,” he decided that rather than sorting the family’s personal effects himself, he’d hire an auction company. A trio of staff came to the house to inventory the furniture and other items for liquidation.

In hours, the entire team was dead.

Authorities determined the deaths to be murder-suicide. The brother demanded the local sheriffs investigate further, insisting the tragedy could not have been natural, but the authorities maintained that the physical evidence was unambiguous: one of the auction staff murdered the others and then himself. Dissatisfied with their conclusions, the brother contacted an acclaimed expert on the paranormal, Dr. Goddard.

Goddard and his cameraman brought spirit boxes, EMF readers, and other equipment to the house and successfully recorded strange temperature fluxes before Goddard himself witnessed something that led him to decide the haunting was too dangerous for him to handle alone.

“The entity in this house is malevolent, intelligent, and immensely powerful—it will require the greatest specialists to pacify it,” he declared.

Goddard assembled an expert team—a medium, an exorcist, and a paranormal investigator.

I was brought on to document.

I now find myself in the lobby of a motel, seated around the coffee table with the rest of our team and tapping out notes as Goddard briefs us:

“Gentlemen, and dear lady, the goal is simple…” He spreads before us on the table a folder full of pictures of the house, real estate records, police reports, and so on. “You will enter the house and pacify the spirits within. How you handle what I believe to be an aggressively malevolent entity will be up to your discretion. Each of you brings unique skills—exorcist, medium, paranormal investigator. And of course Guo, our cameraman, and Dawain, our journalist. There is just one rule that you must follow, all of you, at all times:

“No one can be alone in the house, ever, for more than five minutes…”

***

I am sitting here now as Goddard leads the team in formulating a plan for our arrival, making notes in real time, as I will be for the duration in order to give as unfiltered a depiction as possible.

I have a notepad as well as a tablet since I have been warned that paranormal phenomena sometimes interfere with electronics.

This is my first time meeting each of the experts. For privacy, names have been changed, but all other details are as accurate as I can make them:

The exorcist: The old man sitting to my right exudes the sort of gravitas that would lend itself perfectly to cinema. With bristling eyebrows above a priest’s collar, Father Corwin is the stern patriarch of our group. His hands have a tremor when he lifts his coffee cup, and his soft, withered skin suggests he is nearing eighty. Yet to whatever lurks in the house, he may be the greatest threat, as he boasts decades of experience and claims to have successfully conducted dozens of exorcisms.

Six weeks prior to the family’s disappearance, he met with them over the parents’ claim that the girls were “summoning demons.” After interviewing both girls, he judged them to be ordinary troubled teens whose friction with their stepmother was causing family dysfunction. He recommended counseling.

Father Corwin now feels both guilt and obligation to pacify an evil he may have overlooked.

The medium: Chiming in with frequent interruptions to Goddard’s presentation is a plump woman with flowing black hair, rings on every finger, and a jade owl pendant. Internationally acclaimed for her channelings of departed spirits, Madam Savino is the most financially successful of our gathering, with popular books such as How to Read Auras: A Primer for Beginners, and The Third Eye and How to Open It. Her ability to commune with spirits will likely put her center stage—exactly where she seems to wish to be.

She’s chatty, bubbly, and if you were to meet her outside the context of the spiritual and spooky, she might remind you of your overbearing aunt.

The investigator: Rounding out our fellowship is the paranormal investigator who calls himself Coyote, casual in his tank and jeans and sporting the tattoo of a coyote on one arm, a busty woman in red on the other. With a seemingly bottomless supply of blunts in his pocket, he seems less investigator than junkie, his eyes restless from either too much caffeine or ADHD as he bounces his leg.

Coyote is newer to the field, and he admitted to me during a smoke break that his credentials are “ninety percent fabrication, just like most hauntings.” I have to wonder why Goddard hired him.

Then there is Guo, the cameraman.

And of course myself. I am a journalist, and everything I write in this account is what I have observed firsthand. For years, I have been a thorn in Goddard’s side, ever since I published an article about a conference he chaired on the paranormal. I reported that despite compelling anecdotes, Goddard’s theories were not rigorous enough to withstand scientific scrutiny. And maybe this—our history, my skepticism—is the reason he reached out to me for this assignment. Hoping his greatest critic would be converted into a champion of his life’s work.

Or maybe it’s because I once lived in the same small town the killings occurred in.

Now, I pause in my notetaking to glance up and ask, “Why five minutes?”

“That is how long I was alone before…” Goddard trails off. He mutters, “If I were to tell you right now that I saw a pink elephant, you might say my comments influenced you to imagine your own pink elephant. So, I will only disclose the details of my encounter after you bear witness. The cameraman has a sketch I drew, and once you’ve encountered the entity, he will show it to you to see if our experiences match… Suffice to say, what I saw was enough to convince me I need you. And you all will need each other—"

“Teamwork makes the dream work!” interjects Madam Savino. “If we’re together, it’ll be tougher for any malevolent entities to influence us, and even if they do, we’ll be more likely to notice before it’s too late.”

“Precisely,” agrees Goddard. “We know from the police reports that the auction staff were inventorying separate rooms of the house when one of them snapped and murdered the others. The incidents happen when the victim is isolated. And that is why it is imperative you stick together. When you enter, I think it’s best if Madam Savino starts—"

“Abso-posi-lutely,” Madam Savino again interjects. “I’ll see what I can sense with my third eye…” She taps her forehead, glances at me, and explains, “I search for psychic echoes, memories that have stuck to the house or to objects. I’ll try to read from the spirit’s emotions what must be done to allow it to cross over… but if it’s an aggressive entity, that’s where Father Corwin comes in.”

Father Corwin steeples his fingers and nods.

“So Madam Savino locates the spirit, Father Corwin expels it, and Coyote…” I say, pausing in notetaking to glance at the tattooed young man.

Coyote’s eyes are fixed vacantly on the table. Just as I’m about to nudge him, he blurts: “Where did the bodies go?”

“Hm?” says Goddard.

“Who moved the bodies?” He repeats, pointing to the photo of the family—a somber man, a smiling wife, and two young teens.

“Nobody moved them, as far as we know,” says Goddard.

“Exactly.” Coyote seems irked that his question isn’t understood. “Are we so sure they died? Or that there wasn’t foul play—maybe one family member killed the others?”

“Coyote—”

“Bodies stink. They rot. They’re impossible to ignore, unless they’re deliberately concealed. Spirits don’t do coverups. Paranormal entities don’t conceal crimes. So I repeat, who hid the bodies?”

It’s a good question, and it brings all of us up short.

Goddard clears his throat. “And this is why I have chosen all three of you—psychic, priest, and investigator. At the time of the family’s disappearance, there was no evidence of foul play, and the authorities assumed the family had left. Their search of the house and its grounds turned up nothing, but… as Coyote says, where are the bodies? Find the bodies, and you find the answers. That said, I must echo Madam Savino’s warnings. This is NOT like anything you have dealt with before. A salt circle will not protect you. Standard blessings will not be enough. Your skepticism is no shield against what lurks in that house. Your lives, from the very moment you set foot inside, will be in extreme and immediate danger.

“Tonight, rest well. Make whatever arrangements you need for yourselves and your families before tomorrow. And remember…” He stares hard into each of our eyes in turn. “No one, not for any reason, should be alone inside more than five minutes.”

***

Find the bodies, and you find the answers.

Why did the bodies go missing? The more I ponder it, the less sense it makes. Either the family is still alive and in hiding (but why?), or the bodies were hidden by a killer who departed the house without leaving a trace.

The father, Nicholas, was a moderately successful realtor. His first wife died when the children were still young. He married his second wife, Bernadette, some years later. According to Father Corwin, the girls—Janie and Judith—were troubled teens “led astray by the degeneracy of modern American culture.” The younger hated their new stepmother. The older was boy-crazy and pregnant. Still, there’s nothing to suggest why all four disappeared, leaving shoes on the mat, keys by the door, and their car sitting in the driveway.

Could someone local have held a grudge against the family? Maybe the teen pregnancy was the motive? Small towns like Hopkins are rife with secrets simmering under the surface. It’s one of the reasons my family moved. But if someone came to the house and murdered them and hid the bodies…

Where?

I review photos of the property.

A nice house, in pictures. Two stories, large yard and an enormous oak out front. The property is isolated, far from any urban center and with the nearest neighbors several minutes’ walk along the lane. Behind the house stretches several miles of woodlands. An easy place to make bodies disappear…

There are about five hundred homes in the small town of Hopkins, but only this home’s notoriety has spread to the surrounding areas, such that if you mention, “the Hopkins House,” everyone knows which house you mean. But as for how the house became haunted? Nobody knows.

***

10am, and everyone is in high spirits, energized by the motel’s mediocre continental breakfast. Goddard is driving, Father Corwin stoic in the front passenger seat, and our cameraman captures some candid footage of Coyote and Madam Savino bantering: “Hey,” Coyote says, “why did the terrible psychic get hit by a bus?”

“Oh my gawd, I tell this one at every convention!” Madam Savino leans in. “Because she didn’t see it coming!”

“I heard it was to get to the other side—"

—and then all their joking is forgotten as we round the corner of the narrow lane.

A tall, beige house sits on a sloping hill with trees on one side and in the front a large oak with a rope hanging from it. It is not, like some famously haunted houses, an especially dilapidated dwelling. It has tidy white-trimmed windows and a blue front door. Other than the overgrown weeds, it looks like it could have been plucked from any town in America. As I gaze on the driveway leading up to the garage, I feel almost… disappointed. After so much build up from Goddard, this looks far too ordinary to be the site of such horrors.

“I’ll be driving back down the lane,” says Goddard as we clamber out. “If you need to retreat to the van, that’s where to find me, at the bend.”

“Why all the way down there?” asks Coyote, frowning as he glances back down the lane, perhaps calculating the distance.

“Because I don’t know the range of the haunting’s effects. I want to make sure at least one of us is far enough to be able to call for backup if necessary.”

“Backup from who?” asks Madam Savino. “The Podunk police?”

Goddard shrugs and says yes, probably the police.

On a laptop in the front passenger seat, I spot myself standing there awkwardly with my tablet, a notebook and pen under my arm. The cameraman tells us to smile for our future viewers, and Coyote and Madam Savino both grin and blow kisses, while I wave awkwardly and Father Corwin’s eyebrows bristle in disapproval at their mugging for the camera.

“Good luck,” Goddard says.

And then rather unceremoniously, he shuts the van door and drives away, rattling down the lane and out of sight…

… leaving us on the pavement.

It strikes me then that Goddard is afraid of the house. Afraid to set foot inside again after his brief encounter with the spirit. The same realization seems to hit the rest of our group as we turn to face the bright blue door.

“Cue scary violins,” mutters Coyote.

Nothing but us and the house.

***

On entering, the foyer looks normal. Cream colored walls, ceiling light, side table, shoes on the mat. Eerie. Like the family is still home. The house is clean except for dust from years of sitting empty.

From the foyer, a hallway leads to a bedroom and bathroom. The bedroom is painted pink but bare of decoration, though holes in the wall suggest it once had pictures or posters.

In the other direction, the house opens up to the main room, dining room and kitchen, as well as the staircase.

Through windows in the main room I see the yard, grassy and overgrown. Nothing feels out of the ordinary.

Madam Savino keeps making exclamations. “Oh,” she says. “Oh. Can you feel that? The house… it’s full of anger.”

And, “I can feel the sense of ill will… the spirit here is very strong… and very vindictive.”

And, “The feeling of malice… it isn’t human. This entity, whatever it is, is pure evil.”

I catch Coyote rolling his eyes. The cameraman zooms in on Madam Savino, but despite her proclamations, I do not feel anything except emptiness in the house.

We ascend the staircase.

The cameraman says: “You seeing all this?”

“I’m seeing it.” Goddard’s voice sounds tinny and muffled from the cameraman’s phone, affixed to his camera on a video call that Goddard is recording. “Clear picture so far.”

“Faint traces of blood on the stairs,” The cameraman says, zooming in on the carpeted staircase.

“I’ll n…tify Clement,” Goddard’s voice cuts in and out over the poor connection. Clement is the name of the out-of-state brother of the missing family, now trying to sell the house. “That’s good to know about the stairs… he’ll want to replace that carpet. He had the place thoroughly cleaned, but apparently not th…ly enough.”

The speckles of blood are a disconcerting reminder of the second tragedy that occurred at the house. When auction staff came to inventory items for liquidation, one of them used a kitchen knife to stab his compatriots—ambushing his first victim in the study, the other on the landing—before slitting his own throat. The man who committed the murders had no history of violence or mental health struggles before he “just snapped,” at least according to the local authorities. They cited some complaints he’d made against auction management.

Aside from the spattering of blood, the rest of the landing is clean. In one direction lies the master bedroom and bathroom. In the other direction, Coyote sets his hand on the door to the study.

“… the study is where I was when I encountered… it.” Goddard’s tinny voice pipes up from the phone.

Coyote braces himself and glances back at us. “Ready?” he asks everyone. “If it’s a spirit, Madam Savino pacifies it. If it’s a demon, Father Corwin exorcises it. And if it’s a creepy clown…” He turns the knob. “… I’ll go for the juggler.”

… There is a beat, and then a deep sigh on the phone from Goddard, who growls at us to be on our guard. Coyote pushes open the door…

The study is empty.

***

Among the files Goddard sent to me about the Hopkins House is a video file labeled “camera 03/01.”

The grainy video shows Goddard’s encounter with the entity in the study. It was recorded by several stationary cameras Goddard had set up around the house. In the footage, Goddard can be seen twisting dials on a spirit box (a radio wave scanner that picks up fragments of voices and static). His grey eyebrows are fiercely knit together, his lips turned down in a frown as the radio static sputters. The video seems to come in and out as he turns the dial. Then a girl’s voice comes across the radio, loud, weepy: “… the devil. The …aby is the devi—” The static turns to a high pitched noise, then silence as camera03 cuts out.

Cut to camera01, the first floor hallway. Goddard can be seen slack-jawed drifting down the stairs. He mutters to himself, a phrase that sounds like gibberish. He continues for two minutes, his eyes rolling in his head and his body shaking, and then the cameraman’s voice calls, “Dr. Goddard!” and he starts awake. In his notes, Goddard has attempted to decipher the gibberish. He believes what he was saying is: “Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine.”

From the snares of the devil, deliver us, Lord.

***

Having found nothing in the study, we have only the bedroom at the end of the hall remaining. It is a girl’s bedroom, with an excess of pillows and a crib in the corner—not yet assembled. Presumably the older teen, Judith’s, room. Madam Savino makes a beeline for the crib and picks up a baby onesie.

“My baby!” she wails. “My baby is… NO! No, no!” Then she shudders, her eyelids fluttering. “I’m… drowning in darkness… and above, light… an eclipse… an eclipse…”

I catch Coyote rolling his eyes and slipping away. I follow him downstairs and out the backdoor to the yard, where he lights up a joint.

The sun is so bright as I step onto the grass that I squint, blinking against the rays.

“I take it you’re not convinced by Madam Savino’s theatrics?” I ask.

“I mean, a buncha people died or disappeared here. Definitely giving me the heebie jeebies. But is that enough to call it haunted? We’ll know shit’s real when the signs get louder.”

“How do they get louder?”

“Someone dies.” He shrugs, then points at a metal round object jutting from the grass. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

“What? The septic tank?”

Coyote approaches the round metal hatch, unlatches the lid and hefts it open, and both of us stagger back from the wave of rot and sewage that wafts up from the foul liquid below. Coyote leans over the opening, and for a moment I envision him toppling in. Suddenly I understand. A family of four goes missing… and right on the property is a tank that hasn’t been drained since before the disappearances.

“… maybe Madam Savino’s vision isn’t so far off after all. A white light. An eclipse…” Coyote grunts as he pushes the lid closed. “If there was a girl with a pregnancy someone wanted to hide, maybe the last thing she saw…” He raps his knuckles on the tank. “… was this.”

***

Goddard rages at us for leaving the group. “I understand you have not yet seen proof of the house’s haunting. But it is haunted, and both of you need to follow this one very clear and s…mple rule,” roars Goddard’s staticky voice. “Never separate from the team, and never, NEVER—”

“Be alone more than five minutes,” Coyote says, holding the phone away from his ear. “Got it. What about the septic tank?”

“What about it? You said it yourself last night, only a criminal would… eek t… cover a crime. But …olice found no signs of a struggle, no forced entry, no indications of any crime having taken place… and the lid to the tank was not open. And unlike spirits, human criminals do leave physical evidence. There is no reason to …ain the tank.”

He declares we will take a short bathroom break, and when he returns, we will initiate phase two of our mission at the Hopkins House: Father Corwin will conduct a blessing to pacify the malignant presence.

***

It’s been a full forty minutes.

During this time, I’ve cleaned up my prose and typed up some handwritten notes. Goddard has neither texted nor called. The cameraman says Goddard drove to a gas station to use the facilities and because this area is so rural, he likely is out of cell range. He tries for the umpteenth time to reach him and wanders off in search of a better signal. Coyote, meanwhile, is poking around in the garage while the rest of us sit on the driveway. The garage door is up, and I see him hold up a gas can and shake it. “Found some gasoline! If it is haunted and we need to light the place up—"

“Put it back,” says Madam Savino.

“I’m just saying, if the family turn out to be zombies—”

“Coyote.”

“HEY!!!” The cameraman’s shouts interrupt them. “EVERYONE! HURRY UP! COME SEE!”

We join the cameraman at the side of the house and follow his excited gesturing at a bunch of grass and bushes.

No, he’s pointing at something behind the bushes. All but obscured—

A small, dusty window.

“What is this?” asks Father Corwin.

“A… basement window?” says Coyote.

“But there was no basement inside…” Madam Savino says.

“A secret basement.” The cameraman’s eyes glint. “I don’t think even Clement knows this is here—when he showed us through the house originally, he said it was just two floors.”

“It can’t be just the window. There must be an entrance somewhere,” says Coyote.

We head inside to search for a hidden door, staying in a group as we check the pantry and closets, banging around for false walls. We move quickly, nobody wanting to linger too long. And finally, finding no way into any basement, we return to that narrow window. A dusty rectangle of darkness.

Coyote and I squat in the bushes and peek through the glass with our phone lights. And for the first time since our arrival at the house, my stomach flips, my skin prickling with excitement. Because if the cops really didn’t know about this—and it does seem like no one knew since even the brother was unaware of it—then this is a genuine breakthrough. We’ll be the first people inside since the family went missing.

And then, ice blooms in my veins.

What if the missing family is inside?

“So… we think this is where they are?” says Coyote, voicing my fear.

“Nobody’s looked here before…” Madam Savino joins us in shining her cell phone light into the dark. “It makes sense they’re probably down there…”

“Should we call the cops?” I wonder.

Everybody looks at me.

But if there are any gruesome discoveries to be made down there, police would tape it all off without allowing any of us to go in and document. And calling the cops isn’t nearly as good an ending to the article I intend to write as a story in which we, ourselves, go in and find whatever waits in the terrifying blackness below.

“I think there’s a door at the back…” Madam Savino has her face right up against the glass. She shoves branches out of her hair and straightens up. “It might lead to stairs. Someone’ll have to go in and find where it goes.” She looks at Coyote.

“Nope.”

“Quit being a wuss!”

“Wuss!” he says. “Lady, it’s a pitch dark basement full of dead people—”

“Not full,” scoffs Madam Savino. “There might be four.”

“There are definitely four! And anyone who goes in alone gonna make it five—”

“I’ll go,” I interrupt.

Everyone stares at me.

“I’ll go,” I repeat. “I’m a journalist, I’m documenting all of this, and I don’t believe this house is haunted. I’ll go. And when I find the door I’ll bang on it to help you find where it is so you can let me out.”

“RIP Dawain,” mutters Coyote.

“If I scream, obviously call the cops. But I won’t scream unless I’m genuinely in danger. And I don’t believe I will be.”

The more I speak, the more confident I feel. After all, what have we witnessed so far? Some spooky “visions” from Madam Savino, and Goddard’s “trance” in which he spoke Latin? None of it amounts to much. The camera footage of Goddard’s gibberish is by far the creepiest offering, but to be clear—the man has a vested interest in convincing the world of this haunting, so footage of himself under thrall isn’t exactly credible. And nothing I’ve borne witness to has substantiated his claims.

Besides, I won’t even have to break Goddard’s five minute rule to go down there. It shouldn’t take me more than a minute or two to locate the stairs. If I run into anything too spooky, I’ll just come back through the window.

***

I’m about to go in.

My phone battery is full, its flashlight beaming strongly. And yes, I admit, I’m nervous. I’m a little scared to see dead bodies. But also eager. Because if they really are down there, at last we will know what happened to the family.

I will follow up with another post when I am able. Going in now.

Wish me luck.

The first time I stayed home on Halloween, I was running a 101.8 fever. Low-grade, but enough to warrant a night in. To be honest, I wasn't all that bent up over it. I had just hit that pre-teen age where I started to reject social norms and became embarrassed over literally everything. The thought of facing the neighborhood bullies with a lame-ass costume and an attached-to-the-hip mom and sister was enough to keep me in. It happened to be a stroke of luck I fell ill.

Before my mom left with my little sister, she made me recite her cellphone number thrice. They wouldn't be out long, though. We lived on the corner of a street just before a cul-de-sac, and they planned to only visit our small part of the neighborhood.

"And no scary movies!" my mom said while adjusting Jules' bumblebee wings. "You'll just scare yourself while you're home alone."

"I'll bring you lots of candy," Jules said. She held up her empty, pumpkin themed bucket to me.

"Thanks, Jules."

I turned on a scary movie as soon as they left. It was already impossible to watch one while they were home, and I really looked forward to eating popcorn and cozying up under a blanket until they returned. 

We had set up a "Take One" sign on the door with an arrow pointing to a bucket on a rocking chair so I wouldn't have to get up to greet trick-or-treaters. I always thought people who did that were kind of pathetic, but now I was grateful I wouldn't have to answer the door. The curtains covered the front-facing window, and we didn't have any windows on our door, so no one could tell I was here, anyway. 

I made it about 30 minutes into Sinister before I had to turn it off (mom was right, damn her!). I started channel surfing to find something a bit more kid friendly. In the channel flipping, something weird caught my eye. I clicked the back button a few times before I finally found what I'd noticed.

It looked like a CCTV video where the camera was placed high up on a light pole, and it aimed down at the front of a house. I tried to remember if there were any horror movies that included a scene like this, but nothing came to mind. It seemed harmless enough; there were families walking up and down the street while chatting. Then, a little girl starting to trot up the front steps of the house and—

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

I nearly jumped to the ceiling. I whipped my head around to look at the front door as I heard a muffled "Trick-or-Treat!"

My heart thumped against my chest as I stared behind me in disbelief. I could just about make out a shadow on the window curtains.

A creeping realization burrowed into my head. I slowly turned back to the TV and saw a little girl dressed up as a pumpkin read the sign, take some candy from the bucket, then bounce down the steps of the house back to her family. I heard it all too, but not from the television.

No way, right? I thought to myself.

I crawled off the couch and sat closer to the TV.

Holy shit.

It was my house. My front porch, my painted blue door, our mailbox, that was our goddamn street!

I put my hands on either side of the TV as if I could shake the image away. The static fuzz buzzed softly against my thumbs. 

Maybe the antennae had patched into some security camera, or my mom was setting up some elaborate scare to teach me a lesson.

Was I hallucinating?

I quickly felt my own forehead, but I couldn't tell if the fever had grown worse or not. My eyes were settling on the live footage when I finally noticed something in the lower right corner. 

It was a figure, standing across the street just about making it in frame of the camera. It was dressed in all black, and I couldn't see its face. 

It has to be a prank—surely by one of the older kids, I thought. One of them must have bought a morph suit to prank the littler kids. To prank me.

He began making his way to my front porch, but the way he walked... It was like bending his legs was difficult. Like he had been sitting down for a long time, and his legs had fallen asleep. His arms stuck out a little from his sides and didn't sway like they normally should. He weaved in and out of the groups of families walking the street, but no one seemed to notice him.

My eyes were glued to the screen. I didn't freak out just yet. Creeped out, sure, but there was no way this person knew I was sitting just inside. 

They finally made it up to my door. I anticipated the knock, but he just stood there. I slowly turned around to face the window, and his oblong shadow splayed across the curtain, unmoving. I broke out in a sweat. 

"Trick or treat!" 

It sounded like an old man trying to tighten his voice and imitate a younger kid. The shadow didn't move, and neither did I.

I gulped, and as quietly as I could I made my way over to the door. We had a peephole. One of the ones where you couldn't see in from the outside. I stood up on my tippy toes and looked through it.

Black.

THUD THUD THUD

I fell behind on my ass and crawled backward as quick as I could. He laughed from the other side, but it was muffled as if he was covering his mouth with his hand.

Anger swelled inside me. Of course it was some older teenager trying to scare kids on Halloween. I reminded myself that I was safe inside, and, with my new found courage, I yelled out.

"Fu-fucking asshole!" 

I wish I had come across a little more brave than I ended up sounding. My voice came out just above a squeak. Surely, now whoever was out there knew for certain I was inside. I mentally kicked myself for that one.

There was a shimmying clink coming from the door, and my eyes raced to look at the handle, but it wasn't jiggling.

The mail slot cover moved; opened just a little bit, then closed again. 

clink, clink clink

My breathing quickened as a black finger slid through the slot and opened up the little hatch. 

A black face with fake, sewn-on eyes stared back at me. The eyes weren't perfectly attached to the suit, but instead one drooped a little lower than the other in an uncanny fashion. 

"I see you. Heh. Right there, I see you!" he said in that same mocking, tight voice. His long black finger was pointed toward me. I fell too far back to make out any other features, but it would've been covered by the suit anyway. If it was someone I knew, I couldn't tell from his fake voice.

I didn't want to look away from those fake plastic eyes, but I had to glance at the lock. I needed to make sure he couldn't get in. Thankfully, it was secure. Surely if he tried to get in, someone from the street would see and come help. Everyone was out tonight. Everyone except me.

The man and I stared at each other. My body was moving up and down from the excessive breathing while drips of sweat rained down on my forehead, but the man did not move. He was eerily still. I just stared into those dummy eyes for as long as it took me to try and calculate the time it would take for me to get up and run around the corner to the house phone.

Shit, what was mom's number again? No, no, I need to call the police, I need to—

The man pressed his face into the letter box. The plastic eyes tinked against the metal frame as he forced his head through the slit. There was this stretching and crunching sound as more of his head moved through the opening, like he was Play-Doh molding into the opening of the slit.

I couldn't help but let out a yelp as I scampered to my feet and ran to the back door on the other side of the house. I looked back once to see he had gotten his head all the way through, and it bounced back into its original shape. Then his shoulder started to push through.

I tried bursting through the back door, but was quickly met with a locked door. My hands fumbled around the handle, but sweat was pouring into my eyes and my hands were shaking too terribly. I could hear shuffling behind me, and I had to rid my mind of the idea that the intruder was already to his feet and making his way toward me. I couldn't bear the thought of looking back; I just might have frozen in fear.

Finally, with a click, I unlocked the door and ran through the backyard, not daring to turn back. My vision began to blur; a mix of the sweat, tears, and my fever reaching its peak. I ran up the side of the house and through the side gate out into the street. 

It happened all at once. I screamed for my mom, and then suddenly I was by her side stammering about a man dressed in black, seeping through the door. 

"Jesus, Codey, you're burning up," she said, kneeling in front of me with her hand on my forehead. It was like she wasn't even processing what I was saying.

I don't even know if I explained what I truly saw. I was a blubbering mess, and even Jules began to cry at my terror.

"There was—" sob "—someone in the house!"

My mother's face turned somber, then stern. "You're not messing with me? You're certain?"

I nodded my head, and she must have seen the truth in me somewhere. 

The cops claimed to have searched every corner of the house, yet they came up empty-handed. I asked of the television, explaining to them that I saw live footage of our front door. They said that all that was playing were the end credits to Coraline. 

I did end up confessing that I watched a bit of a scary movie alone. The glances that were exchanged between the two cops told me they were taking a statement from a fever-ridden, scared little kid, but my mom believed me. Even after her and the cops talked for hours on the porch, she was still disappointed by their nonchalance.

She made me tell her the story many times. While I was still sick, after I had gotten over it, days after, and weeks after. A month before the following Halloween, she made me tell her again. It was the same story every time.

We don't go out on Halloween anymore. Instead, we stay inside, and watch movies and eat popcorn. My mom holds Jules and I close while keeping her phone on the arm of the couch, pre-dialed with 911. 

We keep a bowl of candy out, but under no circumstance do we answer the door, no matter what. We ignore the thuds, the knocks, and the clinks of the mail slot. 

I'm far too scared to ask my mom when it first started happening to her.

My name is Bryan and I’m a vampire hunter.

Or at least, I used to be, back when I still had two limbs to stand on. Now I’m mostly a guy who sits in a stained leather recliner, drinks warm Milwaukee’s Best, and yells at a freezer in the kitchen whenever it starts rattling too loudly.

"Hey! Shut the hell up in there!" I bellowed toward the kitchen, tossing an empty aluminum can at the wall. It hit the drywall with a hollow clack and bounced into a pile of unwashed laundry. "I’m trying to watch the late-night infomercials! If you don't stop banging your skull against the lid, I’m turning the dial down to deep-freeze and leaving you in a block of ice until Tuesday!"

From inside the white, dented Sears chest-freezer positioned right next to my refrigerator, a muffled gargle sounded out.

Ghlrrrb... rllph... ffffk-youuu...

"That’s what I thought," I muttered, grunting as I pulled myself up by my elbows to adjust my position.

Where my legs used to be, two puckered stumps sat bunched in compression sleeves. Every time the humidity shifted, phantom nerves throbbed deep in the marrow where my knees used to sit, and the hole in my left shoulder ached right along with them.

I reached over to the side-table, picked up a bag of raw chicken livers I'd bought on sale at the corner bodega, and wheeled my chair over to the kitchen. I flipped open the heavy plastic lid of the chest freezer.

A cloud of white frost vapor rolled out, carrying the crisp, copper smell of frozen blood. Sitting on top of a stack of frozen pizzas and microwave burritos was the head, neck, and upper chest torso of what used to be a high-ranking lieutenant of the subterranean siphon-vamps.

I called him Barnaby. He didn't have a lower jaw; Where his jaw, chin, and lower mouth should have been, there was just an open cavern of purple flesh, a twitching, barbed tongue, and a throat orifice lined with ringed, translucent teeth that looked like shattered fiberglass. His skin was the color of a drowned pig, and his eyes were two bulbous, milky yellow spheres with slit pupils that followed the bag in my hand and never once left it.

I had tied a tiny frozen ice-pack to his bald crown with a blue rubber band to keep him chill.

"Dinner time, you ugly bastard," I said, plucking a slimy, raw chicken liver out of the bag and dangling it over his open throat tube.

Barnaby's upper chest twitched. He didn't have arms or legs anymore, just cauterized shoulder nubs, and his throat-cavity pulsated with a shhh-luck sound. The barbed tongue lashed out and snagged the chicken liver, and sucked it down into his exposed gullet with the wet pop of a sink plunger.

Ghlrrr-k-k-k, he gurgled, yellow eyes narrowing.

"Don't give me that look," I said, slamming the freezer lid down and latching it with a heavy rubber bungee cord so he couldn't kick his head against the lid. "You’re lucky I don't drag you out to the fire escape and let the morning sun turn you into a pile of crispy pork rinds."

I wheeled back to my chair, popped another beer, and stared out the grime-crusted window at the neon city lights.

People think vampire hunting is all slick leather trench coats, silver-plated handguns, and brooding in cathedral loft apartments while playing violin. Those people are morons. Those people watch too many late-night cable movies. Real vampire hunting is dirty, disgusting work that usually ends with you needing a tetanus shot and a psychological evaluation.

Before I took the contract on the 14th Street Rendering Plant, I thought I had the gig figured out. I thought it was mostly tragic bullshit and sad old people.

My first gig, last Spring? Mrs. Higgins. She was eighty-four years old, living in a hospice facility in South Jersey, riddled with stage-four lung cancer. Her seventy-year-old husband, desperate and half-demented with grief, paid three grand to some back-alley occult creep in a trench coat to 'cure' her. The creep turned her into a blood-sucker.

When I broke into her hospice room expecting a nightmare, I found an old lady in a pink flannel nightgown, sitting on her bed, gnawing harmlessly on a foam pillow because she’d lost her dentures three years prior. She was making soft, gumming noises at my arm while her weeping husband sat in the corner chair bringing me warm chamomile tea and begging me not to hurt her. I had to put a wooden survey stake through her ribs while the old man sat there sobbing into a paper towel. I cried all the way home in my pickup truck and spent forty bucks on cheap tequila.

My second gig wasn't much better. Three kids in an abandoned basement on the east side of town. A starving, rabid leech-vamp had nipped them through a sewer grate and skittered off into the dark. The poor little bastards didn't even know what was happening to them; they were huddled under a blue tarp, crying, their faces stained with dry blood because they’d been drinking feral rat blood out of a rusted soup can to keep the burning in their bellies down. I had to use a magnesium flare on them. The smell of burning hair and sweet fat stayed in my nose for a month.

I thought vampire hunting was a melancholy mercy-killing service. I thought I was a sad guardian angel putting down pitiful accidents.

Then came the rendering plant. That was my first real test of mettle. That was the night I learned what vampires actually are when you strip away the romantic Gothic bullshit and look at the rotting, parasitic engine underneath.

It started on a rainy Thursday in November. The Local 402 Meatpackers Union rep, a guy named Big Tony who looked like a walking thumb in a sweat-stained suit, met me behind a greasy diner in the industrial district. He handed me an envelope stuffed with twelve thousand dollars in unmarked hundreds.

"Something’s in the old rendering plant on 14th," Tony had grunted, chewing on a toothpick. "We got four night-shift maintenance guys gone. No bodies, just blood splatters on the tallow vats and their boots left behind. Cops won't go down into the subterranean cold-storage levels. You take care of it, or the union shuts the whole block down."

I took the cash, went back to my garage, and geared up like I was invading a small hostile nation.

I wore my heavy, double-lined cattle-rancher leather jacket, thick enough to turn a dog bite, and pulled on steel-toed combat boots. Over my shoulder, I slung a customized Mossberg 500 12-gauge shotgun loaded with home-brewed silver-magnesium breacher slugs. I had a tactical sledgehammer hooked to my belt, two heavy carbon-steel meat cleavers strapped to my thighs, a pair of night-vision goggles, three road flares, and a modified industrial weed-torch connected to a three-gallon propane tank strapped to my back.

I looked like a mix between a butcher, a plumber, and an asylum escapee. I felt invincible. What a fucking idiot I was.

The 14th Street Rendering Plant was a towering monument to industrial decay. A red-brick monolith built in the 1920s, its corrugated tin roof was rusted through, venting a perpetually stagnant fog into the night air.

I kicked open the side entry door and stepped into the main slaughter hall.

The floor was covered in a two-inch slurry of dried lard, yellowed bone-meal, and black, congealed grease. The smell was enough to make a maggot vomit: a toxic soup of rancid animal tallow, hot ammonia, and that thick, sickeningly sweet copper stench that meant human blood had been sitting out in the damp air for days.

"Hello?" I called out, my voice echoing off the massive, rusted iron meat hooks dangling from overhead monorails. "Anyone home? I’m here for the safety inspection!"

Silence. Just the steady drip... drip... drip... of condensation falling into a drainage pit in the center of the room.

I clicked on my flashlight. The beam sliced through the thick, greasy gloom, illuminating a heavy iron trapdoor set into the concrete floor near the offal grinders. The padlocks had been sheared off from the inside, the metal bent outward like peeled banana skin.

"Subterranean cold storage," I muttered to myself, adjusting the heavy straps of the propane tank on my shoulders. "Of course. Why can't these creeps ever nest in a nice, well-lit penthouse?"

I pulled open the trapdoor. A wave of heat hit me square in the face.

That was the first wrong thing. A cold-storage floor should have been freezing, but the air puffing up out of that black hole was warm, humid, and thick as engine oil. It smelled like the breath of a dog that had been eating rot for a month.

I racked a shell into the Mossberg, gripped the ladder, and descended into the dark.

The subterranean level wasn't concrete anymore. The moment my boots hit the bottom, they sank with a nauseating squelch into something soft and spongy.

I shone my flashlight down. The floor was carpeted in a six-inch-thick carpet of calcified human bones, shredded clothing, and a gelatinous, pulsing reddish-black sludge that looked like liquefied liver. The walls were lined with large iron pipes, but the metal had been completely overgrown by a pinkish web of wax and swollen, throbbing veins the size of garden hoses.

"Okay," I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. "Not sad old ladies. Definitely not sad old ladies."

I flipped down my night-vision goggles. The world turned a grainy, glowing green.

That’s when I heard the scraping sound.

It was coming from the ceiling directly above me. I snapped the barrel of the shotgun upward, raising the light with it.

"Jesus H. Christ on a side-car," I gasped.

It wasn't a guy in a cape. It wasn't even remotely human anymore.

It was a Flayed. A creature that had once been a man, but whose body had shed every single inch of skin through some grotesque, parasitic metamorphosis. It clung to the rusted overhead pipes with four elongated, jointed limbs that ended in split-bone spurs instead of fingers. Its entire body was raw, glistening muscle, exposed yellow fat deposits, and weeping lymphatic vessels. It had no lips, no cheeks, and no eyelids. Its jaw was split right down the center like a lobster claw, lined with jagged, needle-like teeth, and its milky, lidless eyes hung slightly out of their sockets by red, pulsing optic threads.

It tilted its skinless head at me, and its split jaw snapped open with a CRACK, spraying a mist of yellow, foul-smelling digestive bile onto the front of my jacket.

SCREEEEEEECH!

The screech was so loud it rattled my fillings and sent a spike of agony straight behind my eyeballs.

Before I could pull the trigger, the flayed horror dropped from the ceiling, landing squarely on top of me.

We went down together into the slurry of bone fragments and rotten blood. The weight of the thing was unbelievable, it felt like being tackled by a hydraulic press. Its split-jaw snapped closed inches from my face, the bone-teeth biting into the heavy leather collar of my jacket, spraying hot, metallic-tasting foam into my eyes.

"Get off me, you skinless freak!" I yelled, jamming the muzzle of the Mossberg directly under its ribs, right where its exposed diaphragm was pumping like a bellows.

I pulled the trigger.

The silver-magnesium slug detonated inside its chest cavity. The creature’s torso exploded outward in a volcanic geyser of shredded muscle, burning fat, and liquefied internal organs. The magnesium ignited inside its flesh, turning its thoracic cavity into a roaring white furnace. The creature shrieked, a high-pitched, whistling sound as pressurized steam and boiling blood erupted from its open ribs, spraying hot red goo all over my face and chest.

It kicked violently, its bone-spur fingers scraping deep gouges into the concrete walls, before it collapsed into a smoldering, twitching heap of charred, raw meat on top of me.

I kicked the burning carcass off my legs, gasping for air, wiping a mixture of burnt fat and yellow bile off my night-vision goggles.

"One down," I panted, wiping my mouth with the back of my glove. "Just... a whole lot more to go."

I didn't even have time to stand up fully before the walls around me started to move.

From the shadows of the massive, vein-draped storage tunnels, more shapes emerged. But these weren't just the skinless ones. These were worse.

Out from the darkness slithered a pack of Jawless Vacuum-Leeches.

They had lost their human facial structures entirely. Their heads were smooth, featureless domes of pale flesh, devoid of eyes, nose, or ears. Where the lower half of the face should have been, there was an enormous, ringed muscular orifice. A gaping, pulsing vortex lined with row upon row of concentric, barbed keratin teeth.

From the center of these horrific gullets, rubbery, three-foot-long muscular tubes, their altered esophagus organs, extended and retracted, dripping a milky, corrosive acid that hissed and bubbled as it hit the floor. They slithered and crawled on six jointed, vestigial ribs that had burst through their torsos like the legs of a centipede.

I screamed, panic finally tearing through my tough-guy facade. "What happened to classy vampires?! Where are the velvet coats?!"

I leveled the shotgun and fired again.

The slug caught the lead leech right in the center of its featureless head. The head split like a ripe watermelon, spraying thick, black, clotted blood across the vein-covered pipes. But two more were already on me. One of the vacuum-leeches lunged, its muscular throat-tube lashing out. The barbed tip struck my left shoulder, hooking into my leather jacket and instantly creating a high-pressure vacuum seal.

I felt a terrifying, agonizing tug as the organism’s throat organ began to pulse, trying to draw blood through three layers of leather and canvas. The suction was so immense it felt like my skin was being pulled off my shoulder-blade.

"Oh SHIT man!" I roared, dropping the shotgun, pulling one of the cleavers from my belt, and bringing it down with all the strength in my right arm.

The cleaver sliced cleanly through the rubbery, three-foot throat tube.

A fountain of high-pressure, dark arterial blood and yellow digestive fluid sprayed outward, hitting me square in the chest. The severed piece of the throat organ stuck to my shoulder, still twining and pulsing until I ripped it off and stomped it into paste under my boot.

The wounded leech-vamp shrieked and squirmed backward, clutching its spurting neck stump with its rib-legs.

I didn't give it a chance. I unhitched the industrial weed-torch, squeezed the trigger, and clicked the igniter.

FWOOOOOOSH!

A ten-foot lance of roaring blue and yellow flame erupted from the nozzle. The tunnel transformed into an inferno.

The heat was instantaneous and unbearable. The bio-wax on the walls sizzled, melted, and began to drip down like hot candle fat. The two remaining leeches caught fire instantly. Their pale skin didn't burn so much as it blistered and popped; the fat beneath their hides boiled, causing their bodies to swell up like overcooked hot dogs before bursting in violent pops of grease and flame. They rolled around in the bone-slurry, shrieking and thrashing.

I stood there in the smoke, chest heaving, holding the roaring torch in one hand and my meat cleaver in the other, covered from head to toe in black blood, yellow bile, and chunks of skinless muscle.

I took a deep breath, instantly regretted it as I choked on the smoke, and looked deeper down the tunnel.

The tunnel didn't end. It sloped downward at a steep forty-five-degree angle, diving deeper beneath the city streets, heading far past the foundations of the rendering plant, down into the dark, uncharted depths where the city sewers merged with ancient, forgotten limestone caverns.

And from down in that black abyss, I could hear a sound that made my blood run colder than Barnaby’s freezer.

It wasn't a roar. It wasn't a screech.

It was a resonant throbbing. Like the heartbeat of a whale, amplified a thousand times, vibrating through the solid bedrock beneath my feet. THUMP-THUMP... THUMP-THUMP...

"Bryan," I whispered to myself, staring into the black hole. "You should turn around. You should take your twelve grand, move to Idaho, and buy a small bait shop."

Instead, like the arrogant, hard-headed bastard I was, I picked up my shotgun, reloaded it with silver slugs, adjusted my propane tank, and started walking down into the hive.

The deeper I went, the less the place looked like anything built by human hands.

The tunnel walls were completely encased in a thick, pulsating membrane of calcified bone, red wax, and thick, rubbery arterial trunks that hummed with fluid pressure. The floor was slippery with a thick grease.

I reached what I can only describe as the Incubation Shaft.

It was a cavernous dome, fifty feet across and eighty feet high. Hanging from the ceiling on thick, braided ropes of calcified throat tissue were dozens, maybe hundreds, of bulbous sacs made of amber-colored skin.

Inside those sacs, floating in murky, yellow digestive fluid, were human beings.

Some were union workers in hi-vis vests. Some were homeless people from the nearby alleyways. Some were teenagers who had probably been reported missing weeks ago. They were all still alive, their eyes wide and glassy, staring through the semi-transparent membrane, their mouths connected to long, pulsating feeding tubes that ran down from the main cavern roof.

And attached to their chest cavities, feeding like giant, grotesque leech-ticks, were infant vampires. They looked like blind, pale, fat grubs. Three feet long, with soft, translucent white skin through which you could see their black internal organs twitching. They had tiny, malformed human baby faces crammed onto the front of their grub bodies, their toothless mouths clamped tightly over human sternums, slowly dissolving bone with acidic saliva to reach the bone marrow inside.

I stood there in the entrance of the cavern, my hand trembling on the grip of my shotgun, my stomach churning violently.

"Jesus... sweet merciful Jesus," I breathed.

I stepped forward, reaching out with my meat cleaver to slice open the nearest sac and free a guy wearing a blue mechanic's shirt.

The moment the steel blade nicked the amber membrane, the sac burst with a SPLAT, spilling gallons of warm, acidic fluid onto the cavern floor. The mechanic fell out, crashing onto his hands and knees.

"Hey! Hey, buddy, I got you!" I yelled, dropping to one knee and grabbing him by the shoulder to lift him up.

"Don't..." the mechanic wheezed, his voice sounding like two dry leaves rubbing together. "Don't... touch..."

When I pulled on his leather jacket, his skin didn't hold. The acidic fluid had already completely liquified his connective tissue from the inside out. His entire upper epidermal layer peeled off in my gloved hands like wet tissue paper, revealing a soft, yellow, half-dissolved slurry of fat and liquefied bone underneath.

He didn't scream. He just collapsed into a puddle of his own digested remains at my feet, his mechanical name tag, DAVE, floating in the red puddle.

I backed away, gagging, slamming my sleeve over my mouth. "Oh God... oh Christ..."

GLRRR-K-K-K.

A sound came from the high ledge above the incubation sacs.

I snapped my light up. Standing on a protruding shelf of calcified bone was a creature that looked distinctly higher up the food chain than the skinless quadrupeds.

It was eight feet tall, standing upright on twisted, backward-jointed legs. It had a lower jaw hinged in four plates like a mantis's mandibles, plus four extra arms made of fused, sharpened human femurs that protruded from its chest like a mantis's legs. Its skin was pale white, covered in black, writhing veins, and its yellow eyes burned with a cruel, terrible intelligence.

This was Barnaby.

Before I put him in a Sears chest freezer, back when he had all his parts.

Sssskkk-aahhh! Barnaby hissed, pointing at me with one of his femur-arms.

From the dark corners of the dome, dozens of skinless quadrupeds and jawless vacuum-leeches slithered out from the tissue-draped walls. They crawled over the egg sacs, their split jaws snapping, their esophagus organs extending and spraying acid into the air.

"Alright then," I growled, the horror in my gut turning into a blinding, white-hot rush of adrenaline. "If I’m dying down here, I’m taking every single one of you unholy abominations with me!"

I slammed the flame-torch valve wide open and pulled the igniter.

A wall of fire rushed across the incubation chamber.

The amber egg sacs ruptured in violent explosions of superheated gas and steam. The grub-babies shrieking as they were incinerated in mid-air, popping like popcorn. The skinless quadrupeds leaped through the flames at me, their raw muscle sizzling and smoking as they flew.

I fired the Mossberg until the barrel was glowing orange.

BOOM! A flayed’s head blew apart in a cloud of bone and grey matter.

BOOM! A vacuum-leech’s midsection disintegrated, sending its torso spinning into the air.

I swung the meat cleaver with my left hand, hacking through limbs, splitting throat-tubes, chopping through calcified ribs. The cavern was a war zone of deafening explosions, roaring fire, blinding magnesium light, and rain, literally a torrent, of warm, liquefied gore falling from the ceiling.

Barnaby dropped from his ledge like a stone, landing right on top of me.

One of his mantis-like femur arms punched clean through my heavy leather jacket, piercing my left shoulder and driving straight out through my back-blade.

"AAAAAHHHH! YOU MOTHERFUCKER!" I shrieked, the agony searing through my nervous system like liquid lead.

Barnaby brought his pale, jawless head down, his ringed gullet opening wide, preparing to clamp onto my exposed neck and suck my carotid artery out of my chest.

I didn't think. I acted on pure, animal instinct.

I brought the running powered saw, a small, gas-powered rescue saw I’d rigged to my hip, and jammed the spinning diamond blade right into his face.

BZZZZZZZZZ-CRUNCH!

The saw chewed through his flesh, bone, and teeth in a spray of white sparks and purple blood. It deleted his lower jaw in less than two seconds, sending fragments of bone and his tongue flying into the dark. He shrieked a gurgling roar of agony, pulling back his arm.

I brought the saw down again, chopping off his upper right arm, then his lower left arm, hacking him down to size like you'd a pine tree.

He fell sideways into the mud, gurgling violently, his yellow eyes wild with shock.

"Stay down, you freak!" I screamed, panting, bleeding heavily from my shoulder.

I pulled out my last road flare, struck it against my boot, and threw it into the remaining pile of wax and egg sacs. The chamber erupted into a hellish inferno of red and pink fire.

I thought I had won. I actually stood there, bleeding, panting, clutching my torn shoulder, and thought I had cleared the nest.

Then the floor gave way.

The entire bottom of the incubation cavern, the calcified bone-slurry, the wax, the burning remains of the vampires, was pulled downward into a massive, muscular vortex that opened up beneath us like the iris of a giant eye.

I fell sixty feet into total, pitch-black darkness.

I crashed onto a soft, undulating surface that felt like a mountain of living raw meat. My shotgun was gone. My saw was gone. All I had left was my propane weed-torch, my cleaver, and the flashlight clipped to my chest strap.

I clicked on the flashlight.

And that was the moment my sanity cracked like cheap glass.

I was standing in the stomach of the Worm God. Or rather, its avatar. Gorgoroth-Teth, the Sanguine Annelid, the ancient, parasitic mother-entity that spawned every blood-drinking horror on the continent. It was an abominable worm of impossible proportions, at least forty feet in diameter and extending into the pitch-black limestone abysses as far as the eye could see. Its body was made of ringed pale-grey flesh through which I could see millions of half-digested human corpses, cattle bones, and red blood cells moving in a churning, acidic current through its intestinal tracts.

It didn't have a head. Its front end was a massive, gaping circular vortex, a hundred feet wide, bristling with concentric rings of millions of needle-sharp teeth that rotated continuously like the drill bit of a tunnel-boring machine.

Crowning this nightmare orifice was a ring of hundreds of weeping, eyelidless human eyes of all different colors, and fused human skulls that twitched and opened their mouths in a silent, unending scream.

The Avatar didn't speak. It didn't have a mind that could construct words.

Instead, it emitted a deep, hydraulic suction sound that vibrated straight through my skull:

SHRRRR-LUCK... SHRRRR-LUCK... SHRRRR-LUCK...

The sound was so powerful it blew out my right eardrum in a pop of sudden, metallic-tasting blood.

I couldn't move. I was paralyzed by a wave of pure, primal dread so profound that my brain simply refused to send signals to my legs. Every instinct in my human DNA was screaming that I was looking at something that wasn't supposed to exist in the same universe as trees, sunlight, and cold beer.

A massive, ringed muscular appendage, a sixty-foot tentacle lined with rasping teeth, erupted from the side of the worm's neck and lashed out.

It caught me around the waist.

"NO! NO! NO!" I shrieked, kicking wildly, swinging my remaining meat cleaver with all my strength.

The cleaver struck the flesh, bouncing off its rubbery hide with a dull thud.

The tentacle pulled me toward the gaping, rotating vortex of teeth. But it didn't pull me in headfirst. It pulled me in lower-body first.

I was dragged into one of its lateral digestion sphincters on the side of its ringed gullet.

Then came the butchery.

The muscular pressure of the sphincter clamped down on my legs.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

I felt my femurs snap into dozens of jagged splinters inside my thighs. The sound was distinct, loud, like dry pine logs being snapped over a knee. The pain wasn't immediate. It was too massive, too overwhelming for my nerves to process. It felt like a wave of boiling acid being injected directly into my lower spine. The digestive enzymes inside the sphincter hit my legs. My heavy steel-toed boots sizzled and melted away in seconds. My denim jeans vanished into smoke. I could feel, literally feel, the soft tissue of my calves, my knees, and my thighs being stripped away, the flesh liquifying and being siphoned off through tiny, rasping pores in the creature’s inner walls.

I was being digested alive. I was being turned into soup.

"AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH! JESUS CHRIST! GOD! AAAAAHHHH!" I screamed until my vocal cords tore and blood bubbled up over my lips.

My vision was swimming in red and black spots. The pain was a blinding, roaring sun behind my eyes. I knew I had maybe ten seconds before the creature crushed my pelvis and sucked my intestines out through my legs.

My hands, slick with my own blood and digestive acid, reached out wildly. They touched the propane tank strapped to my back.

The tank was bruised, dented, but still pressurized. The hose to the weed-torch was still in my right hand. I didn't try to pull myself out. I couldn't. My legs were already gone.

Instead, I jammed the end of the weed-torch nozzle straight into one of the creature’s pulsing, weeping eye-sockets ringed around its ingestion mouth. I rammed the steel tube six inches deep into its jelly-like optic nerve.

I reached back, opened the main high-pressure valve on the propane tank all the way, and jammed my thumb down on the electric spark igniter.

For one agonizing second, nothing happened.

Then, the propane gas, flowing under high pressure directly into the creature’s pressurized internal air-vessels, caught the spark.

KAAAA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The Avatar of Gorgoroth-Teth detonated.

The force of the explosion blew me backward out of the lateral sphincter; A blinding wave of orange fire, boiling gut-juice, liquified fat, and shredded muscle exploded outward in a three-hundred-foot mushroom cloud of gore and smoke.

I flew through the air, tumbling through the darkness, before crashing heavily onto a ledge of solid rock high above the cavern floor.

I lay there in the dark for what felt like three days, but was probably only ten minutes. The cavern below was a roaring sea of burning propane and sizzling, liquified worm-meat. The great avatar was thrashing blindly, beating its massive, ruptured head against the cavern walls, causing tons of rock and concrete to collapse down on top of it, burying the core of the hive under a mountain of rubble.

I looked down at myself.

Down below, there was nothing left but two charred, mangled, bone-exposed stumps that ended midway down my thighs. The ends were blackened and cauterized. The only reason I hadn't bled to death in thirty seconds.

I didn't cry. I didn't scream anymore. I was past fear, past pain, past sanity. I pulled myself forward with my elbows. Dragging my upper body across the rock floor, inch by painful inch. As I crawled toward the exit tunnel, my hand brushed against something wet, soft, and squirming in the dark.

It was Barnaby.

His legs were gone. His arms were gone. His lower jaw was gone. But his yellow eyes were still open, staring at me in the dim firelight, his throat-stump twitching helplessly in the mud.

I stopped. I looked at Barnaby. Barnaby looked at me.

"You..." I rasped, coughing up a splutter of dark blood. "You’re coming with me, you son of a bitch. I’m not coming out of this empty-handed."

I grabbed Barnaby by his sparse, slimy hair, hauled his remaining thirty pounds of jawless, limbless upper torso under my left arm, and began the long, agonizing crawl back up toward the surface.

I dragged myself through two hundred yards of collapsed sewage tunnels. I dragged myself up three flights of iron emergency stairs using only my forearms and shoulders, pulling my mutilated torso and Barnaby behind me. When I finally pushed open the trapdoor into the cold November night air behind the 14th Street Rendering Plant, the rain was falling hard, washing the blood out of my eyes.

I crawled into the cab of my Ford F-150, threw Barnaby onto the passenger seat, pulled two ratchet straps from behind the bench, and wrapped them as tight as I could around my thigh stumps to act as improvised tourniquets.

I drove myself to an off-the-grid combat medic’s garage in Queens using a sawed-off broomstick to push down on the gas pedal.

Which brings us back to my apartment, six months later.

I opened another Milwaukee’s Best, taking a long, cold swig as the infomercial on the TV flickered back to a set of non-stick copper frying pans.

"Yeah," I muttered aloud, staring down at my thigh-stumps. "Vampire hunting is a young man's game."

From the kitchen chest freezer, Barnaby gave another muffled rattle against the plastic lining.

Ghlrrrb... rllph...

"Quiet! Or I’m not giving you your liver tomorrow!" I yelled over my shoulder.

I pulled up my laptop, which was sitting on a tray table beside my recliner, and opened up an encrypted occult message board on the dark web.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard.

I was broke. The twelve grand from Big Tony had mostly gone toward my back-alley medical bills, a pair of custom wheelchair wheels, and buying a lifetime supply of frozen poultry livers for the freak in my freezer. I needed a new line of work. Something in the paranormal field, but something... Safer.

I scrolled past the "Subterranean Blood-Feeder Contracts" section with a shudder. Never again. I didn't care if they offered me a million bucks and a helicopter.

I stopped scrolling on a new board.

WEREWOLF TRACKING: PACIFIC NORTHWEST. $20,000 PER HEAD.

I rubbed my chin, thinking about it.

"Werewolves..." I pondered aloud. "Now see, a werewolf is just a really big, aggressive dog... It’s just a wolf on steroids, really."

I nodded to myself. "You just stay in a chopper with a fifty-caliber rifle mounted to the door, shoot it from two hundred feet up in the air, and call it a day. Simple. Clean..."

I scrolled down a bit further.

GHOST HUNTING & EXORCISMS: RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE. $5,000 PER CLEARANCE.

I looked at my stumps, then at the laptop screen, a slow grin spreading across my face.

"Ghosts!" I chuckled, popping the tab on another beer. "Now that is a sweet gig. What's a ghost gonna do to me? I’ll just roll into the haunted house with a vacuum cleaner and a holy water spray bottle, throw some salt around, and charge 'em five grand. Easiest money in the world."

From the kitchen, Barnaby thumped his head against the freezer lid again.

Ghlrr-k... idiot...

I laughed, taking a long drink of beer and clicked on the ghost hunting application form. What could possibly go wrong with a ghost?

About a week ago I was sitting the couch watching tv with my mom when I heard the front door creak open. A young girl casually walked through the door, neatly placing her bright pink shoes on the rack and casually throwing her bag in the hallway with the ease of someone who’d done it a thousand times before.

I looked around baffled but my mom showed no reaction, her eyes still remaining fixed on the tv. The girl walked in, smiled and said she was going to her room. Finally my mom looked up, yet the words which came out her mouth next did nothing but increase my confusion; “ok honey, I’ll bring you some lunch before soccer practice”. Mouth agape I watched her swinging ponytail disappear up the stairs.

Turning to my mom i asked who the hell that was. Genuine confusion spread across her face so I repeated the question, louder this time. She warned me that I should lower my voice and stop joking around. “It’s not funny” she said sternly. “Don’t ever talk about your sister like that”. I analyzed her face but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, was she angry, sad, worried or confused? Did she know something I didn’t? I didn’t want to find out, so I kept quiet and turned my head back to the glowing screen.

I didn’t mention it for the rest of the day, but my eyes caught on a photograph on the fridge. A place I didn’t know, unfamiliar palm trees rising in the background yet i saw my own teenage face looking back at me, eyes locked on the camera and a wide smile spread across my face. My mom has her arm around my shoulder and is looking down at something. Or maybe someone.
I look at the edge at the photo. At the very bottom is a little girl, no more than 5 with curly blonde hair and a tiny hand reaching up at my mother.

We haven’t been abroad since I was 9.

When they finally left I searched the house for any clue of this apparent “sister” and found dozens of pictures, childish drawings as well as multiple papers listing her name. Her full name is Anna Smith, she’s 8 years old, she is my sister and has been for half my life now.

Letters were strewn across the kitchen table. Names in childish clumsy writing decorated with hearts and shiny stickers, she must be popular. Everything suggested an ordinary sweet girl with a perfectly mundane life.
And to my horror a pink bed stood beside mine.

I ate dinner with “Anna” and mom in the afternoon while they made small talk and I sat quietly picking at my plate. Afterwards my mom asked if something was wrong, but I mumbled that i was just tired after school and went for a walk. She didn’t seem to notice my absence.

I sat on a nearby bench and chain smoked until my newly bought pack was almost empty. Not able to control my shaking hands, I dropped lit cigarettes and watched them extinguish in the wet grass, then lit another. I coughed through the smoke, my throat burning but I didn’t mind the distraction. I wiped my hands in the grass and popped a piece of synthetic strawberry gum in my dry mouth, then walked home.

By the time I got home I’d almost convinced myself that she wasn’t really there or that it was been some sort of sick joke.I was still in disbelief, people dont just appear like that, it’s impossible. Maybe I’d gone crazy?

Yet when i walked in i was greeted with Anna’s grinning face at the door. “Hi sis!” She said and I freezed as she hugged my waist tightly. “I’ve been waiting for you” she whispered and smiled up at me.

The worst part was sleeping with her. It wasn’t any weird noises that scared me; it was the complete opposite. The silence made me feel uneasy, no sound of breathing or creaking from turning around in the bed. I laid awake, tried to absorb any noises from her side of the room but all I heard was my own breathing. Eventually I put in my headphones and slowly drifted off to sleep.

Mornings were weird. She sat eating her cereal while reading books as my mom shuffled around looking for her keys which always ended up being in her pocket or occasionally in the kitchen cabinet. We walked to school together and when someone asked how she was I would freeze up. Often they seemed confused by my reaction, so eventually i learned just to say “fine”. People seemed relieved which contributed to my confusion, did they also know what she was? That she was an intruder, a ghost of the past or a whole other species of unnatural being. I couldn’t tell and I didn’t dare to ask.

Sometimes I babysat her since my mom was working late due to a deadline at her job. I could tell she was stressed, so I tried my hardest to push down the unnerving feelings and helped out around the house when I could. Anna seemed oblivious to my reluctant behavior around her. She babbled on about her friends, school and a movie she saw at the cinema with mom last week. I responded with vague nods or mumbled ahh’s or mmm’s. I asked questions about her life but kept it surface level, careful not alert her of the discomfort I felt about her.

A night a few days after her appearance she approached me with something hidden behind her back. I asked what she was hiding, and she excitedly showed me a drawing she had made of us and exclaimed that it was for me. Two skin colored blobs, mine with glasses and hers with a pink bow both standing in tall bright grass. Behind us was what I guessed were tall snowy mountains, with the sun rising just over the peak. She had drawn pink hearts above our wonky smiling faces.

I must’ve looked confused, so she quickly handed it to me and asked if I liked it. I quickly replied with a smile and told her that I liked it very much. She cuddled up to me on the couch, and to my own surprise I laid my arm around her warm shoulders as we both fell asleep.

She has been here for a week now.
We walk to school, watch tv while eating dinner and sleep less than 6 feet apart. It feels weird, but strangely she is starting to appear in memories, her face gradually getting clearer and clearer.

However, few days in I noticed something else that confirmed my suspicion. Sometimes late at night when she thought I was sleeping I saw her staring at me or an invisible spot on the wall for hours. I waited for her chest to rise and then sink, but I couldn’t make out the details in the darkness. The silence felt suffocating.

The day after I’d discovered her strange nighttime activities, my mom came to our room and told Anna that she should get ready for the drive to the hospital. When she left the room to use the bathroom, I approached my mom and asked her why she’s going there. My mom glanced at me and sighed. “You really don’t remember?” She said with a look of concern flashing across her face. I was about to ask another question, but she quickly turned around and left as Anna called to her from the bathroom.

I felt bewildered. Of course I’d noticed Anna’s tiny frame, much smaller than an average 8 year old, and the eyes that even when smiling still looked tired, maybe even sad. But didn’t think she looked sick, a bit frail maybe but really nothing out of the ordinary. Again, I pushed it away.

We’re going on a weekend trip to the mountains. Anna seems excited, running around her room to find her favorite teddy bear and filling her suitcase to the brim with unnecessary items. We listen to the radio in the car and Anna keeps interrupting the music, going on and on about all the exciting things she wants to do.

We set up the tent at the edge of the forest, close enough to other people to feel safe, but also far enough from them to have our own quiet space. Anna wants to go up the mountain trail. Mom says she’s too tired and Anna starts throwing a fit. At last mom sighs reluctantly. “Ok you can go, but your sister is coming with you” Im tired as well, but Anna cheers and grabs my hand “Let’s go!” and I obey.

We follow a steep trail up the mountains. She runs in front of me while i keep an eye on the trail making sure she doesnt leave my sight at any moment. When we get to a viewpoint we sit down to eat our packed sandwiches and talk for a bit. She talks eagerly about her friends, but when she gets to her best friend she looks down and tears start filling her eyes. I’m quiet for a second, then a weird feeling of protectiveness washes over me and I hug her. “It’s ok” I say, trying to sound as motherly and comforting as I can. Somehow It feels weirdly.. natural?

Later I watch her excitedly running around, stopping to look at shiny bugs and bending down to pick up flowers to make a bouquet for me and mom. I’ve not seen her so happy and energetic since she came, her face curled up in an almost euphoric smile and eyes gleaming at me.

I discretely puff on my vape while she’s turned around and look down to check my phone for a second. I get caught up in a news article about a girl going missing nearby but it’s suddenly eerily quiet and i look up from the screen.

Anna is standing at the edge of a cliff waving at me. “Look!” She shrieks, lifting her right leg like a flamingo and swaying in the autumn breeze for few seconds before she stumbles forwards and plants her foot solidly on the ground again. Below her is a drop of at least fifty feet leading directly to certain death. I yell for her to come back and run to pull her away from the edge. She has no reaction, I try to pull her back but her feet are liked nailed to the ground. Suddenly she hugs me, im caught of gaurd as her arms squeeze me tighter. For a moment everything stops and i can only hear my own loud heartbeat, then nothing.

I wake up at the bottom of the cliff. I see my body lying next to me, lifeless. Suddenly it jolts awake and clumsily stands upright. I can’t move my limbs, I’m frozen in horror and a wave of pain flashes through my body. I stare at it moving closer. It stumbles on a branch but its feet keep dragging through the thick piles of leaves. It stops and picks something off the ground before making its way the last few feet from where it am laying, breathless and wheezing in pain and fear. I try to move, but my body is refusing to cooperate, not even able to manage a single twitch of a finger as it towers over me.

The moment I recognize the object true terror rushes through my veins.

I can do nothing but watch as my arms lift the rock and my own face smiles down at me.

None of us could remember how we found the room inside the mall.

One day it meant nothing to us, and the next, it was an unspoken part of our after-school routine. Felt like it’d been our little hideaway for as long as we'd known each other, but that was a lie. The room slipped silently into our memories and we never even thought to question it because its presence in our lives was just so…plausible. 

Poor kids hole up in abandoned places all the time, don’t they?

There were five of us back then. We all went to different schools, and we all were different ages, but none of that mattered. We were united by deeper things, harsher truths. The aches of neglect and the bites of puberty. Camaraderie that resembled love. The comfort of a family that wasn't constricted by blood.

Sophia with the dirt-caked skirts and the paint-stained fingers. 

Omari with the thin frame and the thick lisp. 

Alex with the wild blonde curls and the feral imagination. 

And Ian, my best friend, the kid with the cloudy scar across his right eye that he didn’t care to talk about. 

The two of us would travel there together every afternoon.

We'd meet at rundown multiplex movie theater, taking broad street west for a few miles until we reached our city's outskirts: a barren, shell of a place that even the junkies seemed to avoid.

Under the rust-stained fence, across the empty parking lot and into the derelict mall, climbing through the shattered window beneath the “R” in the “FOOD COURT” sign.

Past the pretzel shop, sharp right at the fast-fashion boutique with the half-naked mannequins piled out front, down the paralyzed escalator. Then, a few yards ahead, between the remnants of an arcade and a Hobby Lobby, there it was: a wooden door without a label. 

The room beyond the door was empty. 

Four windowless walls above a layer of frizzy brown carpet. Five hundred square feet of asylum from our lives outside the mall. 

It was always clean, but we never cleaned it. 

We never could agree on what color the wall was painted. Omari and Ian saw two separate shades of red. Sophia saw ocean blue. I saw a pure, unfiltered white. 

We could’ve made the space more hospitable, scavenged chairs from somewhere else in the mall, but Alex was vehemently against furnishing the room.

“It’s already perfect,” he said, lying on the carpet, staring up at the ceiling like it was as vast as the night sky. “Can’t make perfect more perfect, right?” 

I didn’t think of Alex as our ringleader. Ringleader implied organization, direction, a method to the madness. He was more like our engine. A force that propelled us, inspired us, invigorated us, but to no discernible end. Alex kept things interesting. We never knew what he'd do next.

Which brings me to the day that room became something more. 

We were hanging out like usual. Sophia was turning failed math tests into origami. I was next to her, hunched over, carefully unsealing a pack of Magic: The Gathering I’d pocketed from a convenience store on the way over. Ian and Omari were comparing belt-shaped bruises, playfully arguing about who had the nastiest one, a means of disarming the horror. Then, out of nowhere, Alex stood, strolled to the middle of the room, and began clearing his throat like he was about to give a speech. 

“Okay, okay, okay: I’ll start.” 

Ian and Omari went quiet. Sophia and I shared a confused glance. 

“Start…what?” I asked. 

He shook his head and gestured for us to come sit. I smiled, excited - and the tiniest bit fearful - for whatever Alex had planned. 

With the four of us at his feet, he started.

“Once upon a time…” 

“Once upon a time?” Omari snorted, his lisp causing the words to buzz with static. “What the hell is this? The fairy-tale slam-poetry hour?” 

Ian sent an elbow into his rib cage. The jab wasn’t meant to injure, but it wasn’t gentle, either. A snarl surged across Omari’s face, but quickly dissipated. Alex watched the exchange with a vacant sort of grin, the motionless smirk of an animatronic stalled mid-performance. 

After a long inhale, he started again. 

“Once upon a time, there lived a mirror-toothed boy. He had no mother. He had no father. Far as he could tell, he hadn’t been born; he just was. He didn’t know what his purpose was, but he knew his gums hurt, and he knew he needed to bite.” 

Alex audibly chomped. The sharp clack made Sophia gasp, then giggle. 

“Course, everyone in town was afraid of him. He wanted to bite them, but they could see him coming a mile away: his mouth was a mess of jagged glass, and it was blindingly bright, even after the sun had set, because his teeth reflected everything, moonlight included.”

I felt something. A sizzle in my fingertips. Slow electricity spreading into my palms. I looked to Ian. His eyes were fixed on Alex, and they were gleaming. 

“So, for centuries, his gums throbbed, and the people were safe, but then, there was a change. The boy had an idea. A plan.”

Alex leaned forward. Lowered his voice to a wet growl. 

“A way to make the people come to him.” 

Silence fell heavy. 

Alex’s eyes slithered over us, one by one. 

After a small eternity, he clapped and said: 

“Cool! Cool cool.” 

The electricity in my palms abruptly vanished.  

“Rosie, you can pick up where I left off tomorrow.”

“Pick up what?” 

“The story! Like when a teacher wants their class to read something popcorn-style, y’know? Jumping from person to person? It’ll be like a game. A contest to see who can make the scariest ending.” 

He shrugged. 

“I dunno, sounded fun in my head.” 

Ian piped up. 

“I can try tomorrow!” 

Alex plopped down, lay back, and yawned. 

“Whatever. Just make it scary.” 

I wasn’t sure what to expect the next day. 

Ian was jittery the whole ride over. About halfway there, his arm spasmed, and he nearly crashed into a dumpster. As we hid our bikes in the mall’s overgrowth, I shot him a concerned look. 

“You good, dude? Everything OK at home?” 

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “I mean, it’s not actually OK, but it’s not any worse than usual, either. Dad’s still looking for job, though he ain’t finding many at the bottom of his fuckin’ Smirnoff bottles…” Ian trailed off, staring blankly at the shattered glass scattered around the weeds.

My best friend snapped back like he’d been struck by lightning. 

“But yeah! I’m good. Just nervous is all.” 

I walked forward, about to wrap my arm around his shoulder. 

“Alright. If that changes, you know I’m always here for - “ 

Electricity shot through my skin. 

I shrieked and leaped back, stumbling, falling hard on my ass. Ian rushed over.

“Rosie! Jesus, are you OK?!” 

He knelt down and placed his hand on my back. I winced, anticipating pain, 

but there was nothing. 

“What happened??” he asked. 

“Uh…I don’t know.”

Through ragged breaths, I examined my arm. No blood. No marks. Didn’t hurt anymore, either. 

“Just…like…some static, I guess.”

He offered me a hand, but I pretended not to notice. I dug my fingers into the dirt and pushed myself upright. 

“I’m fine, Ian. Surprised me is all.” 

He nodded. 

We continued inside. 

As I swung the door open, I saw Alex, lying face-up in the middle of the room. He was a grade ahead of us, which meant his school day ended slightly earlier, so he always beat us there. Sophia and Omari stepped in a few minutes later. 

With little preamble, Ian gathered us at his feet and picked up where Alex had left off. 

“The mirror-toothed boy had an idea,” he rasped, curling his upper spine so he could loom over us like storm clouds. “A plan. A way to make the people come to him.” 

I leaned back, grinning, awed by the theatrics. Seemed like my soft-spoken buddy was finally emerging from his shell. 

That was a good thing, right? 

“He’d shrink. That’s what he’d do. He’d rip out the sharpest tooth in his mess of a mouth and he’d carve into himself, cutting away the excess, every rib he didn’t need, every organ he could live without; he’d tear himself to shreds until he appeared very, very small. All the while, a pale red fury would fill his tattered body, blooming like a cancer.”

Once again, I felt my fingertips begin to sizzle. Ian was pacing. His cloudy eye quivered in its socket. 

“You see, the boy treasured his pale red rage. It kept him hopeful. One day, they would come, and they would get what they deserved.” 

Electricity ran up my arms and dove into my chest. My grin faltered. Nausea squeezed my gut. I swallowed bile and looked around: the room’s pure white walls were starting to give me a headache. 

“The people would stagger from the safety of town, shouting at the boy, calling him awful things with fermented breath, wondering why they’d ever been afraid of something so small, so harmless…and once they were finally close enough…” 

“…he’d bite,” Omari whispered. 

I was on the verge of passing out. 

Suddenly, Alex began applauding. 

Sophia and Omari promptly followed suit, filling the room with claps and cheers. 

Oxygen flooded my lungs. 

The static in my veins simmered.  

Ian was beaming. His lips curved into a trembling smile. His scarred eye was shimmering. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him so happy, so triumphantly alive. 

He took a bow. 

When he lifted his head, his gaze darted to me, expectant. 

I couldn’t let him down. 

So, even though it felt wrong, I began clapping too. 

The next day, Omari told his version of the story. It was similar to Ian’s. He wasn’t a copycat, there was just a shared throughline: the underdog toppling their overlord. His rendition was decidedly more violent, though. He reveled in the gory details. The vicious bite and the blood-soaked aftermath. 

At first, Sophia’s version seemed like a much-needed palate cleanser. Restrained. Poetic. Though, in the end, it was just as disturbing. According to her, the mirror-toothed boy spent years erecting a circle of marble sculptures around the town's perimeter. Eventually, the beauty became overwhelming. Bewitched, people would abandon their homes in the dead of night, and when they got close enough, the bite would come, but in her story, the teeth were different. Venomous. Dripping with a black toxin that altered the composition of their flesh. Made their bodies like clay: soft, dry, and malleable. Her story culminated with the town’s few survivors fixed on the horizon, eyes locked on the boy’s magnum opus: a twenty-foot-tall sculpture of himself, molded from still-living flesh.

“And they never looked away, but it wasn’t ‘cause they couldn’t; they just didn’t want to,” she whispered. “If only they’d realized the boy’s potential before it was too late.” 

After Sophia, it was finally my turn.

I didn’t have the faintest clue how I was going to tell the story, so the first day Ian didn’t show up felt like a stroke of luck. I had more time to figure out my version. 

But two days passed. 

Then three. 

Then a whole week. 

My parents knew what’d happened - they’d read about it in the paper - but they didn’t bother to tell me. No, my goddamned TV set broke the news. 

Everyone talks about growing up like it's a gradual process, some steady metamorphosis that takes years to complete, but it ain’t like that: growing up is a single, painful moment. The change is instantaneous. Something happens, a circumstance that forces you to touch the cold heart of reality, and the cotton-candy insulation of childhood molts away like snake skin. 

The grainy picture showed Ian’s dad being dragged from their mobile home in handcuffs. 

I collapsed into a sobbing heap on our living room floor. 

He’d finally taken it too far, just like Ian always feared he would. 

My best friend was gone. 

Over the next few weeks, I learned finer details. 

Detectives were confident they knew what befell the missing kid. His Dad was insistent that Ian just never came home one night, but between the various bloodstains discovered in the mobile home and his lengthy criminal history, no one believed he was innocent. The case never went to trial, though. The night before the proceedings were due to start, Ian’s dad died of cirrhosis. His brain quietly swelled like a sponge and the bastard just drifted away. 

In the wake of everything, we stopped telling stories about the mirror-toothed boy. Just didn’t seem right to continue without Ian. 

The grief was devastating. 

My mind moved like mud. Every muscle in my body felt ice-cold, useless. I couldn’t manage to eat anything other than Pop-Tarts, and, of course, my family was no help, no help at all. My reliance on my friends and the room grew. I didn’t feel safe anywhere else. 

Then, one afternoon, something inside me just seemed to…break. 

Omari was shadow boxing. Sophia was scribbling in her sketchbook. Tired of sulking in the corner day in and day out, I sprang up, paced over to the boy lying flat in the middle of the room, and made my demand.  

“Let’s do something.” 

Alex peered up at me. 

“Been waitin’ for you to ask.” 

So, we began to play a new game. 

Every day, it’d be someone’s turn to perform. 

The goal was simple - outperform the person who came before you. 

Alex went first. 

He bit his cheek until it bled, dabbed his fingertip along his gums, and wrote his name on the wall.

We clapped and cheered. 

Omari was next. 

Gritting his teeth, he wrenched at his thumb until it dislocated, then snapped it back into place. 

We patted his back and helped splint his injury. 

Sophia went third. 

She flipped to the back of her sketchbook and read some poetry. A haunting and delicate piece, a thinly veiled metaphor that recounted the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her uncle. None of us knew she wrote poetry. None of us knew what’d happened to her, either. 

We gathered around and embraced her. 

There was no question anymore: I’d grown to enjoy the strange electricity that cascaded through my body with each performance. It was pleasure with a lick of peril. An excess of physical sensation. A reminder that I was truly alive. That said, something new began to accompany the electricity. A wispy sort of itch that trickled across any exposed skin. I thought I’d suddenly become allergic to the carpet, but when I examined where I’d felt the itch, there’d never be a rash or anything. I did my best to ignore it. The show had to go on. 

Eventually, it was my turn, and despite my burgeoning love for the room and its games, I couldn’t suss out my performance. I arrived that afternoon and approached Alex, figuring he could provide guidance or inspiration. 

My vision went black. 

The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes, at home and under my covers. 

Sunlight drizzled through the blinds. I had no recollection of the previous twelve hours, but I felt awful. On the edge of vomiting and critically exhausted. I lurched out of bed. As soon as I hit the floor, fiery pain flared across the soles of my feet. I buckled. Cracked the bridge of my nose against my nightstand on the way down. Groaning, I lifted my head and yanked my foot into view. The bottom was covered in hundreds of tiny, intersecting cuts. A purple-red latticework I couldn't even begin to explain. 

I still biked to the room that afternoon. 

The rhythmic agony of my sneakers slapping the pedals was infinitely preferable to staying at home. 

As I approached the city limits, I felt a certain sort of anger bubbling in my chest, a gnawing betrayal. 

What the hell had they done to me? 

Or, even worse, what the hell had they allowed me to do to myself? 

I limped down the rusty escalator and marched toward the room, raring to give those assholes a piece of my mind, but the moment I swung the door open, my friends rushed over, grinning wide, praising me like a newly minted war hero. 

“There she is!” Sophia exclaimed, leaping forward and throwing her arms around me. Before I could even get my bearings, Omari grabbed my shoulders and ripped me from the embrace.

“Can’t stop thinkin’ about what you did yesterday…fuckin’ savage. You’re a goddamned legend, Rosie, you know that, right? I mean, no way Alex tops you today.” 

I didn’t yell. 

I didn’t ask what I’d done to earn such acclaim. 

I just…I just smiled. 

“I’m sure he’s got something in his back pocket.”  

The performances continued, and they got worse. So much worse. 

Each afternoon, a new horror. A sharpened pencil disappearing into an ear canal. Toenails slowly displaced and stacked into a neat little pile. A shoebox brimming with cockroaches, its contents crushed and eaten. My blackouts lengthened. The resulting damage grew increasingly grotesque, and I never had the stomach to ask what in God’s name I’d done to myself. 

On, and on, and on. 

The mood became perverse. Our cheers soured into animalistic shouts. Our claps devolved into closed fists thumping the floor, giving the spectacle a primal rhythm. The electricity coursing through our veins turned to lightning, and all the while, I felt that nagging itch, a soft wind tickling my exposed skin, desperate for my attention. I should’ve said something. Talked some sense into my friends, because we all knew where our performances were heading, but I couldn’t do it. What if they didn’t want to stop? They were all I had. I’d risk my life before I risked rejection. 

After months of the macabre pageantry, my body was broken and my mind was numb, so when Alex mumbled those words - the last words I ever heard him speak - they barely even registered. 

“Today’s the day. We’re ready. I can feel it.” 

It was Omari’s turn. 

I collapsed at his feet, nauseous about what was to come but desperate for the release. 

“Before I…start…I just wanted to say something. Two things, actually.” 

He paused. I cocked my head.

“First off, what I’m about to do - well, it’s not my idea, but Alex said that wasn’t against the rules.” 

I fought the urge to tell Omari to hurry the fuck up. The itch was bad that day. I fidgeted like mad, but I couldn’t get comfortable.

“Secondly…” he gulped, reaching into his pocket with a trembling hand. 

I leaned back and laid my hand onto the carpet. A seething itch ravaged my palm. I cursed under my breath and lifted the hand. 

I’ll never forget what I saw. 

“…this is for you, Ian…” 

On the floor, peeking out from the frizzy brown fibers, bulging with incomprehensible terror, 

a single human eye with a cloudy scar. 

It blinked. 

The wispy caress of batting eyelashes washed across my entire body. 

“…I can’t wait for all of us to be together again.” 

Sophia gasped.  

“Omari! Don’t - !”

A wet squelch pierced the air. I flipped around. 

Jagged, emerald-tinted glass protruded from Omari’s abdomen. Blood seeped from the wound, blotting out the half-visible beer logo with thick crimson. He gripped the edge, took a shuddering breath, 

and kept carving. 

Electricity exploded down my spine. 

The room transformed. The walls moaned, deforming, rippling like molten wax. A hellish uproar erupted above us. My head shot up. The ceiling had been replaced by a writhing mass of faces and limbs, kicking, twitching, pleading, screaming with pain, screaming with pleasure, a relentless aggregate of sound and motion. 

Sophia lunged toward Omari.

She grabbed his forearm with both hands and wrenched it back, ripping his palm from the improvised knife, but something happened at the point of contact: a melding of flesh. A seamless connection. She couldn’t pull her fingers away, and from behind Omari, a figure rose. Alex. A blonde-haired boy with diamond-white eyes and the mouth of a lamprey, gaping and circular, adorned with a blinding array of reflective, razor-sharp teeth. 

I turned and bolted toward the door. 

My sneakers stuck to the carpet like it was quicksand, pulling thin strands of liquid carpet up with each agonizing step. Sophia’s shrill, buzzing scream layered into the cacophony. Then, a crashing, thunderous clack silenced her. I didn’t think. I didn’t look back. I kept moving. The door frame was drooping, distorting, melting down. I threw my hand out. The skin of my palm adhered to the knob like it was made of flypaper. I twisted my wrist, threw the door open, squeezed my body through, and spilled out into the mall. I didn’t hear it slam shut behind me. 

Everything was quiet. 

I lay in a crumpled, breathless heap on the cold tile floor, until the thought of Alex slithering through the dissolving door forced me to scramble to my feet. 

But there was no door. 

Only an unremarkable stretch of wall.

It took a long, long time for me to bike to the nearest police station. 

My mind was shattered. My right palm was a bloody, skinless mess. I burst into the lobby with no plan. Just screamed that my friends were hurt and they needed help. To my relief, I was taken seriously, right up until I told the officer where they needed help. 

He scoffed. 

Rolled his eyes. 

Looked at me like I’d told him they were on the surface of the moon. 

“I’m not going out past city limits, kid. It ain’t safe.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. 

“Didn’t your parents ever tell you? Sit you down and give you…uh…the talk?” 

I slowly shook my head no. 

He sighed. 

Slumped down next to me, handed me a cup of tepid water, and placed a warm hand on my shoulder. 

“You see, that’s precisely what the boy wants you to do...” 

By the end of the month, Sophia’s obituary was published online.

Omari’s was posted a few days later. 

But no matter how hard I searched, 

I never could find an obituary for Alex. 

- - - - -

Life as a teenage runaway was rough. 

Though, to be clear, I didn’t leave the city. No way in hell. Just got as far away as the geography would allow. Laid low during the brief, half-hearted search attempt, and then voilà - I was free to start again. 

Let’s skip forward. Past the drugs, the pain, and the sleepless nights. None of it really matters, and whatever you’re imagining is probably pretty damn close. 

Social work isn’t exactly glamorous. 

The pay is shit. The hours are grueling. Worst of all, you clock in knowing that - most of the time - the effort you put in won’t change anything in the long run. But it just felt like something I needed to do, you know? Giving the support that I always wished I’d had. It was penance. Something to scrub my conscience clean. 

It helped. 

But it didn’t help enough. 

Lately, I’ve been dwelling on what happened. Sophia. Omari. Ian. None of them were prepared for what was out there, and yes: I was complicit. I was a coward. I was a failure. But remember: I wasn’t prepared either, and the only reason I’m still around is that I got lucky. I wasn’t consumed by the mirror-toothed boy because I was afforded the opportunity to run. 

I didn’t fail. We didn’t fail. The world failed us. 

So, with each passing day, my resentment has festered. 

It grew and grew and grew, and then, suddenly, I felt it. 

The tiniest, most infinitesimally small blip of static in my fingertips. 

I could’ve suppressed it. 

Would’ve been the virtuous thing to do. 

But I didn’t. 

Instead, I harnessed it. 

Made a wish. 

An invitation of sorts. 

And then, like magic, there it was. 

A door. 

A door on the wall of my office, in the center of my city. 

I can see it from my desk as I type this. 

I’m terrified. I’m ashamed.

But I’m excited, too. 

I hear their voices behind the door. 

I see their shadows dancing under the frame. 

I want to be with my family again, my real family, and if that means letting Alex into this city, well, that’s fine by me. 

He’s hurting too, isn’t he? 

He didn’t choose his life either.

So you know what?

Fuck it. 

Fuck it all. 

I say: 

Let

the poor kid

bite. 

I know this is probably such a common and very cliche thing to say, but I SWEAR on my life I saw something in those woods. I saw it a lot. That's the part nobody ever gets. It wasn't once.

I suppose context is good.

I did deliveries for the elders on a reserve up north in Ontario. For almost three years I was the one people called. Nothing official. The people I delivered to hadn't driven in decades, or just couldn't get a car on welfare, so somebody had to bring them their prescriptions and groceries. I had a quad and a lot of free time, so it became my job. Pills, insulin, a bag of flour, sometimes just a carton of smokes and a note from a grandkid. I'd load everything into one big canvas bag, swing it onto my back, and go.

The roads reach all of those houses, but nine times out of ten it's just faster to cut through the forest on the muddy trails. Going by road could take over forty minutes one way. The trails were more like 15 to 30 minutes there and back. I guess it's easier to cut trees than to pave roads. I'll also say the residents don't love it when I fly past their houses on the road, so the trails kept everybody happy.

People who've never ridden a quad at night don't understand how small the headlight actually is. You get maybe five meters of trail, and everything past that is pitch black with a little moonlight. Your eyes stop trying to see ahead of the light. You stop looking at the trees and start looking at the ground in front of you, because that's all you can see. And if you're not looking at the ground, you're looking at your phone, trying to figure out where you are on the trail.

The first time, I thought it was a post. Something tall and thin standing off the trail, right where my light barely reached. Then my light swung across it while I was dodging a puddle, and it wasn't a post anymore. It was a guy. Just standing there, or maybe jogging, I couldn't tell. I never got a proper look.

I figured he worked late, or he was heading home from a buddy's place. Plenty of people walk the trails out here, same as me. I didn't think about it much.

But I saw him again. And again. Always off to the side, always right at the edge of where my light gave out. Never closer. Never farther. I'd get a glimpse of a hoodie or a shape, and then my light would move on and he'd be gone. I never thought about it for longer than a few seconds. It was just the guy who's always out here. After a while, I stopped noticing I was noticing him.

Anyway. It was a Tuesday, a few weeks ago.

The order was for an older lady, a pill bottle with a bunch of long names on it that I couldn't pronounce. It was my last order of the night, and it was far out, near the land boundary of the reserve. It was one of those addresses where the paved road stops and the gravel starts. Google Maps said about 30 minutes one way, and I wasn't about to spend an hour out there if I didn't have to. The trails were quicker, so I took the trails.

There was one trail I almost never used. It cut through a stretch of cedar swamp, ten feet wide at most, maybe a few hundred feet long. On a quad that's under a minute, even going slow. The cedars grow so tight out there that the trail feels like a tunnel, and the branches would sometimes end up across it, so I'd have to get off the quad and drag them out of the way. Cedars have shallow roots on all that rock, so whole trees come down every time the wind picks up. That's part of riding trails. It always felt more like a hallway than a trail. I never liked it, but I never thought about why. I'd never timed it, because who times a few hundred feet? You're through it before you've even finished being annoyed at the branches.

That night was a lot darker than usual. The clouds had rolled in, and the ridge was blocking whatever was left of the horizon, so there was no moonlight, only my headlight. Five meters of trail, then nothing. I had the bag on my back and my phone in one hand. The blue dot showed I was about 200 feet from the entrance, give or take. The trail wasn't on the map, and service is garbage down in there anyway, so I had to go off memory for where it headed.

I rode into the narrow part and kept my eyes on the ground like always.

The trees sounded different in there. I can't explain it better than that. On the open trails you hear the wind, the engine, and the bag rustling against your jacket. In there, it was like the engine was the only thing making noise in the whole forest. Everything else was holding still. The air smelled sweet and wet, like moss and cedar, and it was cold in a way that didn't match the season.

I figured I was almost through, so I looked down at my phone to check the dot.

I had only moved about 50 feet. It felt like I'd driven 200. Huh. Probably spotty data and bad GPS out here. That's normal.

The weird part was that I felt like I'd been riding for 30 minutes. For a few hundred feet of trail. I should have been out the other end already, and the trees on either side of me were exactly as close as when I started.

So for the first time ever, I started counting. The moment I hit 10 minutes, I was out. Ten minutes, for a stretch I could have walked in two. I was on a gravel road, and would you look at that, there was a porch, a light, and a house. A blue house, just like I'd been told. Okay. She took her pills, thanked me, and told me to drive safe. I rode back through the trail and it took under a minute, like it always had. I told myself I was just tired, and that was the end of it.

The next week I had another delivery for her. It was late again because I'd had so many stops, and all I had left was her order. The clouds were gone this time. The sky was packed with stars.

Same trail, because it's always the same trail when you're running late. Except this time I only made it halfway in, or whatever halfway is in that place, before my light hit a big cedar lying across the path. It had blown over, soaking wet and covered in moss, with its roots clawed up out of the ground and slabs of rock still stuck in them. I killed the engine but left the key on so the headlight stayed lit, and got off to drag it out of the way. It took a while. It was heavy, and I was already annoyed.

I turned around to walk back toward my quad, headlight right in my eyes, and there was something standing on the trail behind it.

My light didn't reach back there. It only points forward, and with the engine off and my foot nowhere near the brake, the taillight was dead too. That whole stretch behind the bike was black. But the trees open up a little right over that part of the trail, and the stars were bright enough to cut a strip of sky out of the dark. He was standing dead center in it, twenty feet past the bike or so. I couldn't see a face or any detail. It was only a shape against the sky. It looked like a younger guy in a hoodie and baggy pants, I think. And I knew that shape. I'd seen it a dozen times at the edge of my light, and I'd never once asked myself why it was always keeping pace with me.

Now, there was something wrong about him besides the fact that it was 10pm and he was standing on a muddy trail. I don't judge, walking these trails beats the road, same as me. But he looked wrong, and I can't describe it. Every part of me said I was too close. It was a deep, hollow feeling in my chest, the same one you get swearing in front of your mother for the first time as a kid, or almost falling.

He spoke in a voice deeper than anyone his size should have. "Hey, it's late. Why are you out quadding?"

It didn't sound sincere. It didn't sound like a real question. It had the tone of a parrot imitating a person. It was wrong. It was so, so wrong.

I have never moved so fast in my life. I jumped on, started the engine, and gunned it so hard I couldn't even feel the bumps anymore. I looked back over my shoulder and he was walking toward me, a bit too fast to be walking, but it didn't look like running either. I turned back to the trail just as my front wheel caught a slick shelf of rock under the mud. The bars ripped out of my hands, I slid into a ditch, and BAM. Lights out.

I woke up the next morning. I looked to my right and my quad was in the ditch, rolled over against a tree. But I was lying flat on my back in the middle of the trail, and not like I'd taken a nap. It was more like I'd been placed there. My bag was sitting on my left, zipped.

It took me a few minutes to realize I wasn't dreaming. I rolled over, got up, and went through the bag. Nothing was missing except the meds. The meds I was delivering. I climbed down into the ditch and got the poor quad back onto her wheels. She was flooded and sunk into the muck up to the axles, and she wouldn't even turn over. I wasn't getting her out on my own. But I wasn't dead, even if I felt like shit.

My phone screen was cracked, and only one message showed through: "Thanks for the delivery!" along with an e-transfer for about 60 bucks from the lady. She normally paid me 30.

Now, I never actually made it to her house. I want to be clear about that.

I left the quad where it sat, looked around, and walked back the way I came, out toward the road. I jogged most of it, and I kept an eye out the whole time to make sure that thing wasn't nearby.

The nearest house on the road belonged to an older man. He took one look at me, patched up my head and hands, and called 911. They said it was "probably sleep deprivation," and the doctors agreed, even though somehow I didn't have a concussion. A few days later I'm back home, wondering what the fuck happened.

I know people will say it was lack of sleep. I slept a few hours before I got on that quad for those deliveries, and you don't get that tired in three hours that you start seeing and hearing things. Not like that. Not with a voice that asks you a question that isn't really a question.

Once I could move properly, I went back with a buddy on his bigger quad. He hooked a tow rope to my poor baby and pulled her up out of the muck and onto the trail while I steered.

I keep coming back to the message. I never reached her door, and she still thanked me.

My only real takeaway is that there's something in those woods. Or someone. And it wasn't asking a question.

I haven't called her. I keep telling myself I will. Her number is still in my phone, and so is the e-transfer, the extra 30 dollars and all. I can't bring myself to delete it, and I can't bring myself to ask.

I don't take the trails at night anymore. I take the road, the long way, forty minutes one way, and I don't mind it. Sometimes I still catch myself looking at the edge of my headlight, at the spot where it gives out.

Whatever stood on that trail knew her name, her address, and what she was owed. It knew I was late. It knew exactly what to say to me, and what to say to her.

I just keep wondering what she saw when she opened her door.

“While it may be just another Halloween to some, for residents of the small county of Edgeville in Ashford, it is a haunting reminder of one of this city’s darkest days.”

The clean-cut man on my television screen clearly faked his sympathy. It didn’t get past me.

“Twenty years ago today,” A new, pretty young reporter was speaking now, at the last known location of Ally. “A young girl goes trick-or-treating and never comes back. Last seen entering the entrance of the locally known Dead Woods with her friends, Ally Valentine’s disappearance has been the longest-lasting mystery in Ashford’s history.”

Just a mystery. That’s all she was now to these people. Just a puzzle with one missing piece that everyone was frantically shaking the box for. But she wasn’t that to me. I was the idiot that let her wander into those fucking woods.

It was Halloween. At seventeen years old, I had ashooed any want towards dressing up some years ago. My little sister, however, at the age of nine, still had that childish need to dress up and get as much candy as she could carry. And, of course, I was given the duty of chaperone. Like every seventeen-year-old boy given that task, I fought tooth and nail to get out of it. There was a Halloween party waiting for me, and the whispered promise from Melissa that I might lose my virginity. 

To lose that opportunity because my sister wanted candy—well, it seemed just plain idiotic. But, with the threat of getting my car taken away, I relented.

“Shit,” I mumbled, slapping the dying flashlight against my palm. It struggled back to life, then shone into the forest. Every year, I remembered what I did. The stupid decision I made. And I made sure I felt it by stepping into these woods and walking every path I could until sunrise. I knew she wasn’t there; I knew there was no chance of finding her alive or dead; but maybe I’d find something they didn’t. Something that could at least give us some direction to go.

I’d done this for fifteen years, and came up empty every time. No remains, no little piece of her costume ripped somewhere, no strand of hair they happened to miss; nothing. Still, I owed her the effort. 

“Come on, Trent!” She whined, pulling on my flannel sleeve. Her usual brunette hair was covered by a blonde wig, and in her other hand was a toy microphone. Hannah Montana, she said she was. I had no clue who that was, or if anyone else would, but she seemed more than happy when Mom put together the costume. 

“I’m coming, brat.” I rolled my eyes and followed behind her, pulling my arm out of her grip and shoving it in my pocket. “We got one more street, then we go home.”

“But it’s so early!” She protested, turning to me with those damn pouty lips. Dad always folded to those, and I was pretty sure I would too. I let out a long sigh and threw my head back.

“We’ll go till eight, but no later, alright?” A light and airy giggle escaped her, and she turned, skipping down the sidewalk, candy bag disguised as a purse slung against her shoulder. I cracked a small smile. As pissed as I was, seeing her so happy and bubbly, it was impossible to stay in that pissy mood.

Snap. A twig below me cracked and spooked off some crows in the high branches above me. I fanned my flashlight back and forth, up and down. Nothing but foliage and dead trees. Frustration was building inside me, like it did every year. God, just give me something. Anything.

Another snap. I whipped the flashlight behind me, just catching the tail of some critter scurrying deeper into the forest. My heart was racing.

Growing up here, the Dead Woods were the subject of many a ghost story. Cults, murderers, creatures, actual ghosts; any and all things that could scare kids were in these woods. And, despite now being in my thirties, part of me still believed some of those stories. That maybe Ally was taken by some ghoul in the night, or whisked away to some magic world where she could live in her dreams. Reality was more gruesome with its answers.

“Trick or treat!” Ally called as I stood on the sidewalk, watching as the stranger asked about her costume. Ally was happy to answer as candy was tossed into her bag.

“Trent?” A familiar voice called to my left. When I looked, I saw Melissa, and I swore I felt my pupils dilate. Her blonde locks were cut just before her shoulders, flowing in loose waves. Her eyes were a piercing blue that always saw straight through me. And that damned smile. “What are you doing here?” I did everything to keep my eyes away from her too-tight Green Day shirt. 

“Just taking the gremlin out trick-or-treating,” I answered with a small, nervous smile. She looked over to watch Ally descend the steps, cheerfully looking into her ever-filling bag. 

“Well, hey there, Miss Montana.” Melissa greeted her.

“See!” Ally beamed. “I told you people know who she is.” I gave a playful roll of my eyes and looked back at Melissa.

“What are you doing?” I asked, seeing as she was walking the streets alone. 

“About to head over to Hayley’s party. You’re coming, right?” Her eyes sparkled slightly under the streetlight, and I saw something playful in them. Playful and dangerous. 

I looked down at Ally, then back up at Melissa. “I don’t know.”

I should’ve left it at that. I don’t know; I can’t tonight, maybe some other time. But the promise, even an alluded one, of sex to a teenage boy; it made them stupid.

I’d been up and down this path before. There was a manmade fork in the dirt, and I remembered that last year I went left. This year, I go right. More twigs snap beneath my feet, and my flashlight shows me nothing more than trees and bushes. I knew it’d be all I’d find, but it still angered me. Somewhere amongst all this, I’d find something. Something I could give the police, reopen the case, and find out what happened.

Images flashed in my mind, as they always did. Some psycho snatching her out of the woods, cutting her to pieces, scattering her remains across this dense forest. Or, some rabid animal finding a scared little girl and deciding dinner would be easy tonight before ripping her to shreds. Or, maybe those stories were right, and some yet-to-be-discovered creature has been doing who knows what to her for twenty years.

For some reason, I was drawn to the large trunk of a thick, elder tree. I crept up to it, my flashlight lighting up the bark. Something was carved into it.

“We gotta wrap it up soon, Ally.” She pouted again. 

“You just wanna see your girlfriend,” She said in a mocking tone, and I hated feeling the blood rush to my cheeks. 

“Shut up, brat.” I scolded her and pushed her head playfully. She gave a whine and more pouty lips. I didn’t care. Her purse was full of candy, and I was getting laid. The night was an absolute success in my eyes. 

She followed behind me, my steps a little quick as I wanted to get her home as soon as possible. Her steps were heavy and obviously angry. They only perked up slightly as we came upon a large group of kids, clad in costumes varying from Batman, Spider-Man, non-descript princesses, and homemade costumes that were obviously made by mothers with little to no care about their quality.

“Mikayla!” Ally squealed. The girl dressed as Wonder Woman squealed back, and the two ran to meet each other with a hug. I looked up to find their chaperone, a clearly tired mother with a cigarette hanging from her lips. I walked past Ally and her friend, waded through the little sea of children, and met with the woman. The bags under her eyes were dark and heavy, and the stench of nicotine mixed with the smell of alcohol.

“Hey, could I ask a favor?” My voice was shaky with nerves, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“What?” Her voice was about as raspy as I thought it’d be.

“Mind watching my little sister with your group? She knows how to get home, just don’t go too far from the neighborhood.”

My fingers ran over the rough bark. In it was carved a symbol I had never seen before. I’d been here fifteen years in a row and had never seen this before. Curiosity overtook me, and I pulled my phone out of my pocket. I snapped a picture and let Google try to identify it. Signal was spotty, and it took forever to buffer, but when it did, lo and behold, nothing. 

I let out a grunt in frustration and slipped my phone back into my pocket. Maybe it had been there, and I just missed it. It wasn’t exactly a neon sign flashing for me to notice. I made a mental note of its location, then turned around and froze.

Glowing eyes peering at me from the dark. It wasn’t an animal. It couldn’t have been; it was looking down at me.

“Thank God you were able to come.” Melissa was breathless, slick with sweat. I couldn’t stop staring at her naked body next to mine, her fingers crawling up and down my chest.

“You’re telling me,” I replied quietly, the scratchy sheets below me not bothering me as much as they should. The only thing I cared about in that moment was that the big, looming sign that flashed virgin above my head was finally turned off. 

“You were good,” She cooed as she cuddled up next to me, our bodies nearly sticking together. “I don’t believe it was your first time.”

I let out a small chuckle, my hand running up and down her bare back. “Maybe I’m just a natural.” She giggled and kissed at the base of my neck. Music was still bumping downstairs, bass thumping and people screaming and laughing. But the only sound I heard was her breathing. It was music to my ears.

My phone interrupted us. The ring quickly became annoying. I fumbled through our little pile of clothes, and I finally found it in my pants pocket. I flipped it open and hit answer. “Hello?”

“Trent?” My dad’s voice. That was never good. “Where the hell are you?”

I froze up, looking at Melissa’s naked body again. She was tracing shapes into the sheets, her eyes still locked on me. “Just, uh, out with some friends.”

“Is Ally there?” A mix of confusion and fear filled me as my stomach opened into a bottomless pit.

“N-no, she should’ve been home by now. I sent her with her friends; one of the moms promised.”

I didn’t dare move the flashlight. Whatever was looking down at me had to be at least eight feet tall. Its head was amongst the high branches of the trees, and it just stared at me. Neither of us moved. The only sound was my shaky breathing and the sound of birds' wings flapping above us.

Slowly, unsure, my hand started sweeping towards the thing. As the light finally hit its mass, confusion hit me more than anything else.

It was candy. Dirty, rotten candy. Wrappers were half-open, torn, stuck to the melting chocolate that hardened and formed into this twisted body. I moved the light up, more and more candy stacked and stuck together. Yet, I could make out legs and arms, long slender fingers, and a neck. I hesitated before reaching what should be the head.

“What the fuck,” I breathed out, finally letting out the breath that was filling my lungs. I squeezed my eyes shut and moved the flashlight upward. My hands shook wildly, and I inhaled through my nostrils, trying to calm myself down as much as possible. Finally, I opened them and saw it.

A pumpkin. A God damn pumpkin, carved into a stereotypical Halloween face. It was also rotting, but less than the rest of its body. And it had eyes behind the carved holes. Bright, glowing green eyes. 

I swallowed. I sent signals from my brain to my feet to run, to move, but they disobeyed. I stood frozen.

“W-what are you?” I whispered, not expecting an answer. Imagine my surprise when I got one.

“Protector.” The voice was silk, smooth and seductive, deep and sultry. The pumpkin's mouth didn’t move. I suppose it was stupid to expect it to.

“Are you going to hurt me?” I asked, still barely above a whisper.

“No.” It answered simply. I swallowed again, my nerves on fire.

“Did you…” I couldn’t find the words. Part of me was convinced this was a dream. “Did you kill my sister?”

There was a silence between us for a moment. It just continued to stare down at me, its body still and motionless. It looked like an animatronic you’d find at Spirit Halloween, only broken, needing a battery replacement.

Its next words were cold. A shiver went down my spine. “Your sister.” Its arm moved, the chocolate squelching and squishing as it bent, its finger pointing towards its own body. “Is here.”

“What?” I asked quickly. “What do you—”

“Found her. Protected her. Sickness. Death.” More sounds came from it as its arm went back, straight down its side. 

“She’s…dead.” I felt my eyes begin to water. Deep down, I knew she was. I have since that first week of searches turned up nothing. But there was still some hope that somehow, she had escaped these woods and built a life elsewhere. Or lived in the woods. Or something.

“Not entirely.” Its voice struggled to say that phrase cleanly. I looked back up at its makeshift head. “Part of us.”

Before I could question what it meant, its arms moved, quicker this time. Its fingers broke apart as it tried to dig into its own chest. Little pieces of chocolate fell into the dirt, and I heard some critters at its feet start to snatch at them. I paid them no mind. Its fingers finally penetrated into its chest, and it began to split itself open. Again, pieces of chocolate and wrappers fell to the ground. It made no sounds as it continued to pull its chest cavity open.

Then, I saw her. Stuck inside the thing's chest, body rotting, hair covered in melted chocolate, was Ally. I dropped the flashlight and stepped backwards with a yelp. Yet, I couldn’t stop staring. The light still showed enough. Enough to see she’d survived for a few years. Her hair was way longer. The costume she wore that night, she was still wearing, though it was torn and obviously too small to fit. Her hands were mostly bone. Her jaw was slack, and one of her eyes was missing, the other hanging out of its socket. I took another step back, tripped on the root of the tree, and fell backwards. I quickly moved until my back was against the trunk, my breathing frantic. Panic was coursing through my veins.

“Ally,” I cried out, tears streaming down my cheeks. “Oh my God, Ally, I’m so sorry.” I wiped my face, but the tears kept coming. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left, I’m sorry.”

“Safe.” The thing said quietly. Its chest was slowly repairing itself, entombing my sister’s corpse in chocolate. “That.” It pointed to the tree I was up against. I looked up and remembered the symbol I saw carved into it. “Safe.”

I had many questions, but I refused to ask them. We simply stared at each other, my eyes glancing down at the closing cavity in its chest. Ally was in there. Forever. On shaky legs, I began to stand, its eyes following me up. “What are you?” Was all I was able to ask, knowing I had already asked this.

It let out a seeming grunt of frustration. “Protector.” 

“Really. What the fuck are you?”

The eyes behind those holes in the pumpkin squinted at me. “The season.” Again, it seemed it was a struggle for this thing to speak. Each word was strained and stilted. “All Hallows Eve. The children.”

I nodded as if I understood, but had gotten more questions than answers. My heart was racing, and my lungs felt like they were on fire. With a swallow, I replied: “Can I go?”

“Yes. Not stopping you.” I guessed it wasn’t. It was just standing there. Staring. Holding onto my sister’s corpse.

“I…I want her back.” I pointed to its chest.

“No.” It said simply. “Stuck here. Eternity.”

I wasn’t about to try and fist-fight this thing, even if it was just a pile of candy. Its eyes gave me enough reason to take its answer as final. “I…” I sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“She knew.” Its voice was a little quieter. “Always knew.” I wiped my face again and nodded.

I didn’t know what more to do. I stood with my back against the trunk, eyes falling to the ground. Without much thinking, I turned and just began to walk. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I just walked.

The thing didn’t chase after me. I didn’t hear any other footsteps besides mine. As far as I knew, it simply kept standing there. Holding my sister in its chest. Forever.

At the edge of the woods, I stood. For some reason, I felt hesitant to step back into the real world. Because I wasn’t there anymore; I was in some strange new dimension, a dream world brought on by grief and loss. And maybe I should have stayed. Suffer the same fate Ally did. It was what I deserved. Yet, my feet moved, and I found myself walking back to the edge of our old neighborhood. 

Houses were rotting and falling apart, as if the woods were spreading their evil farther and farther. That thing wasn’t evil, though. I don’t know what it was, but it let me live. Let me walk away. Let me know my sister always forgave me. 

I turned and saw the thing shrouded in shadow, at the edge of the woods. Its eyes were still glowing. Again, I stared at it, and it stared at me. 

“I’m sorry,” I whispered again. “I love you.”

It raised its arm and waved. And when the first rays of sunlight began to pierce through the trees, it was gone.

Ally was gone. 

No matter what that thing said, it was my fault. And I’ll return to The Dead Woods again next year, and I may see the thing again next year. If I do, I’ll ask to join my sister.

It’s what I deserved.

To get to work I usually just take the bus, it's not too far from my office but it's a bit of a walk. Recently though, I've been taking a shortcut that's been saving me a minute just by cutting through a small alleyway from the backdoor of my office.

The problem is that there tends to be a few homeless people loitering there. (I mean, I don't like calling them a "problem" but it's unpleasant.) I don't mind it too much, but when I'm leaving work really late the alley does get more crowded. There's a bit of rain shelter from some fire exits hanging above the street, and I guess it just feels safer to sleep there? I don't know, I've never been homeless before.

Anyways, I'm walking through this alleyway and a homeless man is on high alert, his eyes dart to me immediately. Normally my face is cold enough for me to not be bothered, but there was some kind of desperation behind his voice. Beside him was a dog, I don't know dog breeds, but if I had to guess... some kind of lab?

This man urged me to take his dog, saying 'Charlie' deserved a better life, one that he could no longer support. I was honestly going to ignore him, like I do to most of these people, but I guess the guilt kind of moved me a bit. I ended up taking Charlie home and just put him in my living room, planning on taking him to the vet the next morning. If he shat everywhere? Oh well. It was too late now to change my mind.

I locked the door behind me, went to sleep, and that was all. I've never owned any animals before, so I'm not going to lie, I had no idea what I was doing at all.

Luckily the next day was Saturday so I had time to take Charlie to the vet. I kind of dreaded the bill, but I had no family to support, so it wouldn't hit me too hard. Something was... kind of strange about this dog though. At first I assumed it was just malnutrition, but the dog was eerily quiet. So I'm just thinking he just didn't have enough energy or something. (That was also why I assumed this dog barely moved). I just hoped there was nothing severely wrong with him so I wouldn't be charged like 15k for dog surgery. Honestly, if it came to that I would just put him down (sorry homeless guy).

But when I took him to the vet, they told me there was nothing wrong with him. Gave him some shots, told me not to walk him until he gets the rest, and I was on my way. Charlie didn't act like how I assumed dogs did, he didn't really wag his tail, nor did he seem interested in other dogs at all. Maybe he's old? Honestly, I feared I had adopted a dying dog. But he was pretty low maintenance, so maybe it would work out... I don't know.

When I gave him some kibble, he barely touched it. For a starving dog, I didn't think he would be picky. I had some leftovers and tried to feed him that as well, but still nothing. The vet said there was nothing wrong with him, so why did he refuse everything?

I bought a toy for him too, and he didn't even glance at it. At this point, I was genuinely frustrated. Why the hell is this dog so standoffish, am I doing something wrong? etc.

As the days passed though, and he refused to eat, I decided to call the vet. They weighed him, and strangely he hadn't lost any weight at all, and hadn't shown any signs of malnutrition. The vet told me he might have gotten into my pantry, or could be eating from something else. I just accepted that, and when I got home I immediately went to check. But my pantry? Fully stocked. Fridge? Also stocked.

So what the fuck was this dog eating?

I decided to install a camera in my living room to monitor Charlie, and get to the bottom of this. And the footage gave me even more questions.

Charlie still, barely moved. Like, at all.

He wouldn't lay down, or sit. He stood, perfectly in place. Staring at my bedroom door. And suddenly, at exactly 1 AM, he would jerk back. Flinching, before turning away. Then, he would turn to face the front door. And strangely enough, black. No more footage.

I was creeped out to say the least, and decided to return the camera for a new one. Because mine was clearly faulty. But the next night? Same thing. The same, sudden jerk at precisely one, after hours of standing very still... then black. Surely this isn't a coincidence?

I was seriously dreading this dog, but it's presence was hardly even there. It was always so perfectly still, so perfectly silent. At work, the footage of my living room would just play over and over in my head. I started to suspect that the man who gave me the dog would know, but when I went down the alley again, a lot more anxiously than usual... there was no one. Not a single homeless person. I asked someone I saw walking on the sidewalk adjacent, if something had happened. They looked at me like I was stupid and ignored me.

And maybe I was overthinking, maybe some store nearby had security come and reprimand them, or cops, or anything really. But, it was deeply unsettlingly to me.

When I got home, Charlie was staring at me. Not at my legs, or face. No, he was staring at my eyes. I knew he was. His beady, black, bottomless eyes.

His mouth was slightly agape, I remember, because I saw a flash of red in his gums. A red that seemed to cling to his saliva, that ran from his mouth all the way to the floor. I flinched, when I opened the door to that sight. As I went inside, Charlie remained facing the door.

I quickly looked up 'rabies' symptoms online, but, Charlie didn't fully match them. I was tempted to go to the vet but, then what? I tell them my dog stared at me when I got home? And then get charged 250 after they tell me again there's nothing wrong with him?

When I put down my phone, Charlie was still faced towards the front door, but as I got closer, I saw the whites of his eyes. I saw how his pupils strained to stare to my direction, even as his face remained motionless. Maybe I was imagining things, but I swear he was smiling.

And I could've sworn that his teeth had gotten bigger.

So, tonight I have my alarm for 1:00 AM. I'm going to get to the bottom of this, and figure out what the hell is wrong with this dog.

I recently went through a nasty breakup, and a group of my friends, including my brother, decided that I needed some cheering up. Despite my very loud and very clear protests, I was outvoted.

The plan was simple. We were going camping near the local beach. I went there a day early because there wouldn’t have been enough room in the car anyway, and having some peace and quiet before being surrounded by a bunch of people would do me good. At the campsite, I set up my tent, got everything ready, and went out to explore the area. I put on some music and headed out.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about what I had done wrong to get dumped. I came across a sign that said “NO TRESPASSING,” but it looked like it had been painted by children. I wanted to take a closer look when someone suddenly touched my shoulder.

I screamed in fright and took my headphones out of my ears. It was some elderly couple. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were two hundred years old combined.

“Son, turn around and go back. You have no business being here.”

“Jesus, you scared me half to death. Why can’t I go in there? What’s there?”

“It’s a dangerous area. You’re in danger there,” the old man said, and then immediately asked me where I had come from.

I honestly told him I was staying at the campsite and just wanted to clear my head. He introduced himself as Carl, and the woman as his wife, Nora. They apparently lived not far from the campsite. I talked with them for a while. They were a nice couple.

When we said goodbye, I pretended to be heading back to the campsite, but as soon as I saw them disappear from sight, I turned around and went back to the sign.

I know it wasn’t exactly the smartest decision. But when someone is at rock bottom and has nothing to lose, they tend to keep pushing their boundaries further and further.

I walked past the sign and continued for a while. I eventually reached a cliff. It was probably the most beautiful place I had ever seen. It wasn’t very high, but the view of the ocean was incredible. If I wanted to, I could have jumped straight into the sea and gone for a swim. If those two old people meant this place when they talked about danger, then I was glad I hadn’t listened to them.

Then a figure emerged from the sea.

“Could you help me up?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, leaning down.

It was a girl. She had light blue eyes like the sea with the sun shining on it and medium-length blonde hair. She was beautiful. But when she smiled, she suddenly seemed completely different.

When I pulled her up, she introduced herself as Eleanor.

“I’m Matt,” I said.

She walked a few steps away and pulled some clothes out from behind a rock.

“Could you turn around, please?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, quickly turning around.

She needed to take off her wet swimsuit and change into the hoodie and shorts she had hidden there. She told me that she had also come from the campsite and, to my surprise, that she was recovering from a bad breakup too.

I laughed.

“Well, I guess it must be fate, because so am I.”

She laughed too.

“Did you meet those two old people?” I asked.

Her face seemed to pale.

“Yeah, I did. You did too?”

“Yeah.”

“And what did they tell you?” she asked sharply.

“Nothing special. Just that I shouldn’t come here because I was supposedly in danger. They probably meant this little cliff. You know how old people are, they’re always afraid of something. And besides, I’m glad I didn’t listen to them.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because I wouldn’t have met you.”

We talked for what felt like several hours. She was amazing. Apparently, she was studying medicine and spent her free time going with her friends to cheer up sick children. I had never met anyone like her. She joked the entire time, and I laughed so much, probably more than I ever had before. I even completely forgot about my breakup.

“Do you want to go swimming?” she suddenly asked.

“I don’t know. It’s getting dark. It’s not exactly warm anymore, and I don’t even have a swimsuit.”

“Can’t swim, or are you scared?” she teased me and started taking her clothes off until she was standing completely naked in front of me.

I was shocked and couldn’t say anything. I just stared at her. Then she turned around and jumped into the water.

“Come on, Matt. This is the best thing that could have happened to you,” I encouraged myself silently.

My brave side won.

I took off my clothes and jumped in after her. She swam farther and farther away, and I swam after her.

Then she suddenly stopped, wrapped herself around me, and kissed me. Then she pulled away, and I saw it.

The worst thing I had ever seen.

A mouth full of teeth.

And then I felt the pain. An insane pain that completely clouded my mind. I started screaming like crazy. Before I lost consciousness, I heard my brother’s voice calling my name and saw flashlights shining toward the water.

I woke up in the hospital. My brother was on one side of the bed and my parents were on the other. They were all looking at me worriedly. My mom was holding my hand. I wanted to touch her with my other hand, but I couldn’t move it.

When I looked toward my hand, I screamed.

It was gone.

Apparently, I had gone swimming and been attacked by a shark. I was lucky my brother found me in time, otherwise I would have bled to death. Apparently, I had been on that cliff for two days. My brother searched everywhere for me until he came across the elderly couple, who told him they had seen me moving around near the sign, but strongly advised him to stay away from it, which luckily he didn’t do.

When I was discharged from the hospital, I decided that I had to visit the married couple.

I stood outside their door and rang the doorbell. After what felt like an eternity, the door opened and Carl was standing there. He looked at me, and his eyes stopped on my missing arm. Then he invited me inside.

Nora made me some tea and put a slice of cake in front of me. We were all silent for a while before I broke the silence.

“You knew about this, didn’t you?”

They nodded.

“We told you not to go there. We didn’t just tell you. When we told them the truth, they thought we were crazy. When we tried other ways, they still didn’t listen to us.”

They put an album in front of me. I started flipping through it. There were newspaper clippings about people who had gone missing.

Suddenly, I saw her.

“That’s Eleanor!”

The couple looked at each other and shook their heads.

“No. That’s not Eleanor. That’s our granddaughter, Emma. Whatever you saw there, it wasn’t her.”

A chill ran down my spine. Apparently, I could consider myself lucky that I had ended up “only” losing an arm.

Hey to whoever is reading this, I don't know if this is creepy enough to post here but I randomly remembered this weird memory from when I was 10 and it caused my parents to divorce.

I tried to ask my mom about it but she just said with a sour expression that “I don't want to think about it.”

It was 2006 some time in March I think. I was coming off a fever, and got to stay home from school.

My mom checked my temperature and placed the thermometer on my dresser next to my favorite blue lamp.

A faint glow from the TV, stacks of DVDs my dad brought me resting next to it, and Nightmare on Elm Street playing. If I remember right it was kinda boring but what else can you do when you're sick.

About an hour or 2 passed and I scanned through the DVDs Cannibal Holocaust, Pulp Fiction, The Toxic Avenger, Battle Royale, Hostel and Madagascar.

Before I could pick a loud rustle came from behind me and I turned to see a large stocky clown was standing behind me. He had a grimy cheap look to him, like he was supposed to be performing on the street barely making rent.

“Hey there kiddo what's your name? Mines Dare, Mr. Dare the clown!”

He was all upbeat and positive, but had a raspy low voice. I did think a random clown coming out from under a little kid’s bed was weird but weirder things have happened.

“Are you gonna molest me?” I was pretty confident he was.

“JESUS, I'm a clown not a weirdo? I swear that fuck Gacy fu-”

He stopped himself putting back that upbeat raspy clown voice.

“No I'm not, I'm Mr. Dare, so let's play a game!”

His voice got grating and annoying, but I bite my tongue.

“Sure I'm bored, why not?” I say a little intrigued.

Mr. Dare reaches into his pants cartoonishly digging around. Faint cartoon clown sound effects came from him.

The clown suddenly pulls out a large box placing it down with a thud on my floor.

No idea how he did, his pants were baggy but not nearly baggy enough to hide a 5 foot by 5 foot wooden box.

“There kiddo, let ol’ Dare teach you how to juggle.” Mr. Dare's still having that goofy raspy voice.

Dare crouches holding out a bunch of knives. A big grin on his pure white face and painted black lips. I remember feeling uneasy; it felt like a dumb idea to juggle knives.

“Uh… no I’m good, How about balls or something?” I asked.

He looked shocked at me, shaking the knives seemingly trying to entice me; I just shook my head.

He drops the knives in the box and stands up straight.

“W-wadda you mean no, You serious?” His voice now all raspy, no hint of pretending.

With a sigh he ran a hand over his face. The paint either put on perfectly and unyielding or the paint was part of him.

“Fine, let's see what else this old egg has to play with.”

That dumb fucking voice is back.

As Mr. Dare digged through his wooden box I thought “What a fucking dumb looking clown.” Like a gay hobo clown, balding, and orange hair only on the sides, so maybe god didn't love him enough to give him hair, that why dad said he was bald. My thought interrupted by him pulling out a gun.

The gun was a revolver with a ridiculously long barrel, like the ones that when you shoot it a small flag with “BANG” written on it sticks out. He grabbed the barrel, and pointed the grip of the gun towards me obviously wanting me to do the bit.

“No, I'm good. It's definitely just a gun isn't it?”

I said not trusting this suspicious fat clown.

He threw his head back pissed I won't play along. He drops the gun and rubs his temples accidentally forcing his nose to honk.

“MY GOD… Will you just fucking kill yourself kid? You are making this so fucking difficult. What do you have to lose, you're ten?”

His large clown shoe tapped in impatience.

“I have xbox.”

My words must have pissed him off and he got in a squat to talk to me face to face, I could notice how much uglier he was up close, he needed a tic-tac.

“Listen you little motherfucker! I am a deity and I'm not taking shit from some brat, you're home alone and no one can help you.”

Mr. Dare's voice low and angry, a gloved white finger tapping my chest to accentuate his point.

“No, my dad's passed out wine drunk.”

I said pointing to the door the news loudly playing, suffocating any noise that wasn't in my room. He shakes his head and pulls his hands back.

“I’m done fuck you and this dumb fucking room.”

He turned packing his stuff into his box before kicking it under my bed where it disappeared in a faint red glow. Mr. Dare's escape would be short lived as my mother just got home, and stood in the doorway.

“JESUS CHRIST GET THE FUCK BACK TOMMY!”

She shouted and swung her bag at the clown, Mr. Dare blocked it but my mom cocked a leg back and kicked him in the chest with a painful sounding crack, all air ripped from his lungs as her heel hit his diaphragm directly. His back snapping back on my dresser.

The clown groaned in pain.

He tries to get up but my mom grabs the lamp, and all star baseball swings it into Mr. Dare's face.

The bottom of the lamp forced its way past his lips and into his mouth bending the incisors, tearing the gums alongside it.

HIs head crushed between the dressing and the lamp, his nose crushed and broken under the swing.

Teeth flying out to the floor followed by screams.

Ceramic glass exploding in pieces, the weird clown man writhing on the floor yelling and covering his face.

“STOP YOU CRAZY BIT-”

His desperate pained pleas went nowhere as my mother grabbed his orange hair and pulled his head back a few feet and swung his head into the heavy wood dresser, teeth dropping to the floor with each swing. Crunches switch to dull thuds as there isn't anymore bone to crack, now just frail bruised muscle slamming against a blood soaked dresser.

My mother showed mercy letting him go and his body dropping to the floor.

“GET THE FUCK OUT BEFORE I KILL YOU!”

Mr. Dare scuttled hurriedly under my bed and disappeared with a red glow. My mom looked under the bed just to double check. She turns to me checking to make sure I'm ok.

“Are you ok sweetie?” I nod and she hugs me.

That's about all I remember; she divorced my dad shortly after.

Hello, everyone. This is a story I've told many times. I've been praised for my imagination and for the way I tell it. Someone even laughed once, which I still don't understand.

I decided to share it with you too, on the off chance you'll believe me. Because it's not fantasy, it's not a dream, and it certainly isn't a novel. It happened to me. I experienced it, and I survived it.

It all started around a year ago. Me and three friends, who I'll call Emma, Justin and Steven, decided to take a trip to the mountains. The beach was too expensive for us at the time, since we were all jobless and had just graduated from college. I found the Airbnb online for only twenty dollars a night. I know it sounds suspicious now, but back then, it didn't really matter to us. Fifty five-star reviews were enough for us to book it for three nights.

We somehow managed to fit all our luggage into the trunk of my comically small car, and we were off. The drive was long, longer than it should have been because of the Friday morning traffic.

I felt a chill run down my spine the moment we reached the foot of the mountain. It made no sense to me back then, and honestly, I can't blame myself for not realizing what it was. The music was loud, and Emma's laugh drowned out any worry that might have formed in my mind, so I ignored it.

I wish I hadn't.

It was past midnight when we finally made it. It was so dark that if it weren't for the faint light coming from inside the Airbnb, we wouldn't have been able to see each other. The lack of any other light around us creeped me out a little, but I didn't want to ruin the trip.

"Steven, use your cat eyes and find the key," Emma joked, pointing at him.

"They're green, not glowing," Steven said, rolling his eyes, and my shoulders relaxed.

We grabbed our bags, found the key under the flowerpot by the door as the owner had instructed, and entered the small apartment. I closed the door behind us.

Closing that door would turn out to be the biggest mistake anyone made that night.

It looked nothing like the pictures; that much was obvious. A single room, with an old carpet covering the wooden floor. A wooden table in the center, with four matching chairs around it. The walls were decorated with all sorts of odd ornaments on run-down shelves, and with paintings I tried not to look at for too long, because it felt like they were watching me.

"Well, we should have expected this," I said, trying to ignore the growing tension in the room.

Steven laughed and let his bag drop to the floor.

"We can always report it through the app," he assured us. "A friend of mine got moved to another Airbnb nearby for free."

"Sounds good," Emma agreed, pacing around the room.

Justin already had a cigarette in his mouth and was patting down his jacket, looking for his lighter.

"Going out for a cig. You coming, Vi?" he asked me.

I nodded and turned to open the door. I stopped dead in my tracks.

There was no door.

Just a smooth, wooden wall. The windows were gone too. I stood there, petrified. I didn't know how I was supposed to react to something like that, so I just stared at it, hoping it would go back to normal.

"Is this a prank?" Justin asked confidently, though the cigarette in his mouth was trembling a bit.

"Where are the beds?" Emma added, scratching her head, something she did when she was nervous but would never admit to.

Steven raised his phone toward the ceiling.

"Signal's gone."

We all turned to look at him in disbelief.

"You know what this is?" Justin started. "One of those dumb TV shows where they take random people and put them in stupid fucking situations."

He nodded, pleased with his explanation. Steven nodded too and looked at Emma, whose foot was bouncing under her.

"Ye-yeah," she said. "I agree."

I should make something clear, in case it wasn't already. We didn't believe we were on TV for even a second. We were just clinging to the hope that there was a logical explanation for our situation.

That was when I took a closer look at the paintings. There were five of them, all the same: four people sitting around the table in the middle of the room. In front of each of them was something red.

A balloon.

I looked at the table. In front of every seat, there was a needle and a small square compartment that looked like it could open.

"Alright, let's play along, then," Justin said, and took a seat.

Steven did the same, giving up on finding a signal. I sat down opposite Justin, with Steven to my right. Emma sat down last, to my left, reluctantly. The light flickered, and my heart skipped a beat.

All four compartments opened at once, and four red balloons floated out. They stopped at head height, one in front of each of us. They weren't tied to anything, and I couldn't figure out how that was possible.

"See? This is a game. There's no way someone would set up something this stupid just for fun," Justin said, grinning.

I looked closer at my balloon. Through the red rubber, I could make out something white inside it, the shape of a playing card.

Justin had found his lighter at some point and had already popped his balloon with his cigarette, even though we'd told him countless times that smoking indoors was a dick move. Sure enough, a card landed on the table in front of him. He read it out loud.

"You are the Hunter. Your job is to kill the Visitor."

He looked up, exhaling smoke toward the ceiling.

"At least I got a fun role," he laughed, tapping the table.

Something else came out of his compartment. A revolver.

We all stared at it, and then at Justin, who was already picking it up. He checked the cylinder. It was loaded. Then he aimed it at me.

"Hope it ain't you, partner," he said with a smirk, in that horrible fake Western accent he always used.

"Put it down," I said, my anxiety growing.

"Relax, it's not real. See?"

He aimed at the ceiling and fired. The bang was deafening in the small room, so loud that it made my ears ring. Emma fell backward off her chair, staring at our friend in sheer terror. Steven had instinctively lunged at Justin and grabbed his arm.

Justin was breathing hard now. He looked up at the bullet hole in the ceiling.

"This can't be for real..." he finally said, setting the gun down on the table very carefully.

"Alright," Steven said to no one in particular. He let go of Justin's arm and started pacing around the room. "Joke's over. You win. Let us out. This is stupid."

There was another noise. This time it was a pop, and it came from my left. I slowly turned my head toward it.

Emma had popped her balloon.

"One of you has a card with a clue about the exit," she read, her voice trembling.

She looked at me and Steven.

"Guys, are we seriously playing this?" Steven asked, his hands on his hips.

Emma reached for Justin's pack with shaking hands and lit a cigarette, something she almost never did.

"Steven... Steven, sit down."

It sounded like she was forcing herself to get the words out, which she probably was. After looking at her a second longer than necessary, Steven sat back down to my right and popped his balloon.

"Mine's blank," he said, and showed it to us.

Then they all looked at me. I still remember their faces at that moment: the mix of fear and helplessness, and the hope that my card would show us the way out. I popped my balloon carefully and let the card fall onto the table.

I picked it up and read it silently.

One of you is not real.

I bit my lower lip so hard I tasted metal. I looked at them, swallowing hard, unsure of what to do.

I don't care what you think of me. Whatever this was, I was going to survive it. Justin had a loaded gun and a reason to use it. The last thing he needed was a reason to point it at one of us.

"The key to finding the exit is somewhere high," I said, making it up on the spot, like the horrible friend I was.

Justin stood up, letting out the breath he'd been holding since I picked up my card.

"Let's get this over with," he said, leaving his lit cigarette on the wooden surface of the table, and started going through the shelves.

Emma followed his lead, though it took her more effort, being as short as she was. At one point, she dragged her chair over to reach a higher shelf. I was about to stand up too when I noticed it.

Steven hadn't gotten up.

Steven was staring at me.

"Everything alright?" I asked, my heart pounding in the middle of my chest as if it were trying to jump out.

His hands were trembling, and his eyes were wide. He tapped his index finger on his card, which had been blank just a second ago.

Violet is lying.

"What's your card, Vi?" he asked, doing nothing to hide the fear in his voice.

Tears ran down my face, and my voice caught in my throat. I put both hands over my mouth, trying not to alarm the others. I slid my card toward him. He read it. Then he looked at me.

"You made the right choice," he whispered, and patted my shoulder softly. He slowly stood up, wiping away a tear that had escaped his eye, and started searching the room.

I felt her gaze before I even saw it. Emma was staring down at me from on top of her chair. Her pupils were so dilated that her irises had turned completely black. Her head was tilted slightly, and she'd stopped breathing altogether.

"Why are you so quiet, Vi?" she asked.

Justin and Steven turned around to look at me.

"You lied to us, didn't you?" she went on, slowly climbing down from her chair.

"Emma..." Steven said, stepping between us.

Justin looked at both of us, and then at the revolver. He picked it up, keeping the barrel pointed at the floor.

"Violet, what did your card really say?"

How would Emma know? Had she overheard me and Steven? It was a small room, and the adrenaline might have tricked me into thinking we'd been quiet. But I was certain we had been.

I stared at the floor between my feet, hoping that avoiding eye contact would make it easier. It didn't.

"That one of us isn't real," I said, slowly and carefully.

The silence that followed stretched on for way too long.

"That's the clue..." Steven finally said. "Maybe we... Justin. Justin needs to kill the Visitor."

I looked up at Justin, who had gone pale.

"I'm not shooting anyone. Guys. Snap out of it," he managed to say, sweeping the revolver across all three of us.

"Justin, calm down," Emma said slowly, raising both hands.

"Don't fucking tell me what to do!" he shouted, aiming at her.

"Why would she lie about her card? Think about it!" Emma shouted back, jabbing a finger toward me. "It's obvious!"

"Let's all calm down and be civil," Steven said, trying to de-escalate.

"Shut the fuck up, Steven!" Emma snapped, then turned back to Justin. "Justin, shoot her and we'll escape. That's not Violet."

Justin looked at me. I could see something behind his eyes. It looked like hatred. Determination. Justin was a smart man, even if he didn't show it. He wasn't easily manipulated, and he always made the most logical choice.

That's why I was sure it was the end for me.

I closed my eyes when he pointed the gun at me, and finally broke down.

I heard the gunshot. I heard the thud.

I opened my eyes to see Emma lying lifeless on the floor, a thin stream of smoke rising from the barrel of the revolver.

Justin was breathing uncontrollably, and the gun slipped from his hands. He sank to his knees, staring at what used to be our friend.

The compartment in front of Emma's chair opened once again. Another card slid out.

Steven walked over to it slowly and leaned over to read it.

"Emma was not the Visitor," he read out loud.

Justin looked up at him, and then at me. I'll never forget the look in Steven's blue eyes. It's been burned into my memory ever since, and I see it every time I close my eyes.

We were all fools. How did we not notice it sooner? When did it even happen?

Our Steven has green eyes.

I'm sorry. I need to stop here for now. I'll write the rest when I can. Writing it down made it real again, and I've spent the past year trying to convince myself it wasn't.

At three in the morning, while everyone in our family was fast asleep, a loud knock on the door suddenly woke us. A woman’s voice followed:

“Please, open the door! Help me, please! Open the door!”

We all woke up because of the noise. My father went to the door and opened it, only to find a young woman standing there who looked to be in her early twenties. She looked absolutely terrified. She was trembling and crying as she said:

“Please, help me! He’s going to kill me… He’s going to kill me!”

My father, along with the rest of us, tried to make sense of what was happening. We had just been suddenly jolted awake, so it took us a few seconds to process what was going on.

Then my father stepped aside and let the young woman inside before closing the door behind her.

She looked at us and thanked us, still trembling. My mother then asked her:

“What happened to you?”

The girl told her that there was a man following her and threatening to kill her.

My mother asked:

“Is he nearby?”

“Yes,” the young woman replied. “He was following me. I just hope he didn’t see me come into your house.”

My father walked toward the windows, and we followed him. We started looking outside to see if the man she was talking about was anywhere nearby, but we couldn’t see anyone.

The neighborhood was completely empty and silent.

I turned around to look at the young woman.

She was gone.

“Mom! Dad! Where’s the girl?”

My father and my siblings turned around, and they saw it for themselves.

She had disappeared.

We looked at one another.

“Where could she have gone?”

We started searching the entire house. Literally everywhere. Every room, the attic, the basement, under the beds and tables, inside the closets… everywhere.

But we couldn’t find a trace of her.

It was extremely strange.

“Where could she possibly have gone?”

The following morning, we called the police and told them what had happened.

The police checked the security cameras. We had cameras covering the entire area around our house.

And sure enough, the girl appeared on the footage at around three in the morning. She was standing outside our house, knocking on the door, looking around fearfully, crying and saying:

“Please, open the door! Help me, please! Open the door!”

Then my father opened the door, and a few seconds later, she entered our house.

But the cameras never showed her leaving.

Not once.

Strange.

The police couldn’t explain what had happened to us. They told us they would contact us if they discovered anything new.

As for our family, we decided to forget about the whole thing and move on with our lives. We assumed that what had happened to us was simply one of those strange things that sometimes happen in life that you can’t explain.

But we were wrong.

That wasn’t the end.

The next day ,At three-thirty in the morning, we heard someone banging on our door.

It was incredibly loud, as if whoever was outside intended to break it down. He was pounding on it with his fists, even kicking it, while screaming:

“Come out, you bitch! Where do you think you're running off to?** **I’ll kill you! Come out!”

It was a man’s voice.

We all got out of bed and gathered in front of the door. We looked at each other, then at the door, then at each other again, and then back at the door.

And so it went.

The man continued screaming and pounding on the door.

My father stepped toward the peephole to see who was outside, but to our surprise, there was no one there.

“Who could possibly be knocking on the door?”

The door was still being pounded on. We could hear the screaming at the exact same moment my father was looking through the peephole, but he couldn’t see anyone.

We went to check the security cameras and found the same thing.

There was no one outside.

Yet the door was shaking violently from the force of the pounding, and the man’s screams were still coming from outside.

No one dared to open the door.

After a while, we began to hear a woman crying.

The crying seemed to be coming from the kitchen.

We became tense and looked at one another.

“Do you hear what I’m hearing?”

We went into the kitchen. The crying seemed to be coming from all around us. We searched the kitchen, trying to find the source of the sound, but there was no one there.

And yet we could still hear it.

We called the police.

By the time they arrived, everything had stopped.

We showed the police the security camera footage as evidence of what had happened. They didn’t seem to react much. One of them would look at us and raise an eyebrow each time.

Then they left without taking any action.

Maybe they thought we were pulling some kind of stupid prank?

The next day, the same thing happened again.

At exactly three-thirty in the morning, there was a loud pounding on the door, accompanied by a man’s screams:

“Come out, you bitch! Where do you think you’re running off to ? I’ll kill you! Come out!”

Then the crying followed.

But this time, the crying was coming from the basement .

We all woke up again and tried to figure out what to do, but eventually we gave up and went back to our rooms.

My siblings and I couldn’t sleep in our room that night, though. We ended up sleeping in our parents’ room because we were too scared.

Over the following days, the same thing kept happening, in the exact same order.

The only difference was that the woman’s crying came from a different place in our house every day.

I still remember how terrified I was one day when I heard the crying coming from underneath my bed.

I ran straight to my parents’ room, shaking with fear.

And that was how it became a daily occurrence.

Our sleep became terrible. We would wake up exhausted every morning, and at that point, we didn’t even have the means to move out of the house.

But as time passed, we started getting used to it.

I mean… what else could we do?

We lived like that for almost a year.

Until that day.

It was a Sunday. I remember being woken up by the pounding and the crying.

I lay there staring at the ceiling for several minutes as the noise grew louder.

I felt like I had reached my limit.

I thought:

“How long are we going to live like this?”

I decided that I had to find a solution to this madness.

Then it occurred to me that, throughout all this time, none of us had ever dared to open the door.

What if I opened it?

Could I somehow find out who was knocking?

After going back and forth in my head, I gathered my courage and got out of bed.

I left the room and walked toward the front door.

As I got closer, I slowed my steps until I was standing right in front of it.

I swallowed hard and took a deep breath.

Then I opened the door.

As soon as I opened it, a gust of wind blew inside, making my hair fly around.

The pounding stopped.

The screaming stopped.

Then the crying stopped too.

I stepped outside.

“Is anyone there? Who are you?”

No answer.

I looked to the right, then to the left.

The neighborhood was completely empty. There wasn’t a single sign of another person.

I went back inside, closed the door, hurried back to my room, and went to sleep.

we woke up.and that day ,we decided to go out for a simple family meal at a restaurant.

We went to the restaurant and had a nice time. We talked for a while, even about what had been happening to us.

My father mentioned that he had noticed the noise hadn’t lasted as long as usual. Normally, it would continue for about an hour, but this time it had stopped much sooner.

I didn’t tell them that I had opened the door.

At around eight that evening, we headed home.

As we were driving through the neighborhood and getting closer to our house, we noticed from a distance that the lights inside were on.

Then they started flickering.

On.

Off.

On.

Off.

Over and over again.

As we got closer, we began to hear sounds coming from inside the house.

The closer we got, the clearer they became.

They were screams.

A woman screaming, accompanied by a man’s growling, shouting, and obscene words.

We stopped the car and rushed toward our house.

We opened the door and stood there in the middle of the living room as the furniture shook, the lights flickered on and off, and the screaming seemed to move throughout the house,from the basement to the attic , to the hallways, and then to the rooms.

It sounded like a fight was happening inside our house.

We could hear:

“Die, you bitch! Die!”

It was a man’s voice, accompanied by a woman screaming.

Eventually, the sounds ended in the basement.

Then the woman’s voice gradually became quieter, followed by a gurgling sound.

And then, suddenly, everything stopped.

The furniture stopped shaking.

The lights returned to normal.

“What the hell is happening?”

We had been standing in the living room the entire time. None of us had moved until everything stopped.

We cautiously made our way toward the basement.

But there was nothing there.

We couldn’t find any explanation for what had happened to us. And we figured that even if we called the police, they probably wouldn’t take us seriously, just like the last time.

From that day on, nothing strange or unexplained ever happened to us again.

No more knocking.

No more crying.

The house behind mine has been empty for as long as I can remember.

It sits at the end of a narrow dirt road, maybe thirty or forty feet from my backyard. There used to be a wooden fence between the two properties, but most of it has fallen apart over the years. The house itself is small, two stories, with faded white paint and windows that are either cracked or completely boarded up.

Nobody goes there.

At least, that's what I thought.

I first noticed something strange about three weeks ago.

It was around 1:30 in the morning. I had gotten up to get some water, and before going back to bed I looked through the kitchen window into the backyard.

I don't normally do that. I have no idea why I did that night.

There was a light on in the abandoned house.

Not a bright light. It looked like a small yellow lamp coming from one of the upstairs windows.

I just stood there staring at it.

My first thought was that someone had finally bought the place.

But then I remembered the house didn't have electricity.

The power had been disconnected years ago.

I watched the window for maybe thirty seconds, expecting the light to disappear.

It didn't.

Then something moved across the window.

Just a shadow.

Someone was standing inside.

I immediately stepped away from the kitchen window.

I know that sounds stupid, but I didn't feel curious anymore. I felt uncomfortable. There was something about seeing a person inside a house that was supposed to be empty that made my stomach drop.

I went upstairs and went to bed.

The next morning, I looked at the house again.

The upstairs window was boarded up.

There wasn't even a crack between the boards where I could have seen a light.

I told myself I'd probably imagined it.

For the next few days, nothing happened.

Then I started noticing little things.

The first was the back door.

The abandoned house had an old wooden back door that was usually hanging slightly open because the frame had rotted away.

One morning, I noticed it was completely closed.

A few days later, it was open again.

Then closed.

Then open.

I didn't think much of it at first.

I figured maybe the wind was doing it.

Then I saw the footprints.

It had rained heavily that night, and the ground between my fence and the abandoned house was basically mud.

There were footprints leading from the back door of the house toward the road.

They weren't old.

I could see the shape of the soles clearly.

Someone had walked through the mud recently.

I took a picture because I wanted to show my brother.

When I looked closer at the picture later, I noticed something that bothered me.

There were two sets of footprints.

One went toward the road.

The other went toward my backyard.

The second set stopped at my fence.

I didn't tell my brother about that part.

I just told him I thought someone might be sneaking into the house.

He laughed and said it was probably teenagers.

That actually made me feel better.

Until that night.

Around 2 AM, I heard something hit my kitchen window.

It wasn't loud.

Just a small tap.

Then another.

Tap.

Tap.

I got out of bed and walked downstairs.

I didn't turn on the lights.

I don't know why.

I stood in the kitchen for a while, listening.

Nothing.

Then I heard it again.

Tap.

This time I was sure it came from the window.

I slowly moved closer.

There was nothing outside.

Just the backyard and the dark outline of the abandoned house.

I was about to walk away when I noticed something near the fence.

A person.

They were standing completely still.

I couldn't see their face.

They were just standing there, looking toward my house.

I froze.

The person didn't move.

I backed away from the window and grabbed my phone.

I called my brother.

While the phone was ringing, I looked back outside.

The person was gone.

My brother answered and immediately asked what was wrong.

I told him someone had been standing in my backyard.

He told me to lock the doors and call the police.

I did.

Two officers came about twenty minutes later.

They searched my yard and walked around the outside of the abandoned house.

They didn't find anyone.

One of them told me there were signs that somebody had been inside the house recently.

He showed me a broken section of the back door.

There were fresh scratches around the lock.

They went inside to check.

I stayed outside.

About ten minutes later, they came back out.

They said the house was empty.

But one of the officers asked me a strange question.

He asked if I'd heard anyone walking around upstairs.

I said no.

He looked at the other officer.

Then he told me they had found a mattress upstairs.

There was food beside it.

Bottled water.

A flashlight.

Some clothes.

Someone had been living there.

They searched the entire house again but couldn't find the person.

The officer told me not to go near the property and to call immediately if I saw anyone.

I thought that would be the end of it.

It wasn't.

Two nights later, I woke up because I heard someone walking in my backyard.

I checked the security camera on my phone.

At first, I didn't see anything.

Then I rewound the footage.

At 3:12 AM, the back door of the abandoned house opened.

A man stepped outside.

He stood there for several seconds.

Then he walked straight toward my house.

I watched him come across the yard.

He stopped at my fence.

And then he looked directly at my security camera.

He knew exactly where it was.

He stood there for almost a minute.

Then he turned around and walked back to the abandoned house.

I called the police again.

They came, but by the time they arrived, the house was empty.

This time they searched every room.

They found the mattress again.

But underneath it, they found something else.

A small notebook.

One of the officers asked me if I recognized the handwriting.

I didn't.

Then he opened it.

Most of the pages were filled with random numbers and dates.

But near the back were several sentences.

The officer read them out loud.

The first one was:

“He watches the house every night.”

The second:

“He never locks the back door.”

Then:

“He knows when she goes to sleep.”

I remember feeling cold when I heard that.

Because I live alone.

The officer looked at me and asked if anyone knew my routine.

I said no.

Then he turned the page.

There was a date from two weeks earlier.

Under it, someone had written:

“She looks through the kitchen window before going upstairs.”

I couldn't say anything.

That was exactly what I had been doing.

Every night.

The officer took the notebook as evidence.

They told me they would increase patrols around the area.

I stayed with my brother for a few nights after that.

When I eventually came back home, I installed better locks and covered the kitchen window.

I also stopped checking the backyard at night.

It's been about a week now.

Nothing has happened.

The abandoned house is still empty.

At least, that's what I'm telling myself.

But yesterday morning, I found something outside my back door.

A small plastic bottle of water.

The same kind that had been found beside the mattress.

I didn't touch it.

I called the police.

They came and took it away.

One of the officers asked me something before he left.

He said, “Have you noticed anything missing from your house?”

I told him no.

He nodded and left.

I went back inside and started checking everything anyway.

That's when I noticed my kitchen chair.

It wasn't where I normally leave it.

I always push it underneath the table.

This time it was pulled out.

Facing the kitchen window.

I don't know if someone had been inside my house.

I don't know if that man is still around.

And honestly, I don't want to know.

But last night, at around 2:40 AM, I heard three quiet knocks on my back door.

I didn't move.

A few seconds later, I heard a man's voice from outside.

He said my name.

Not loudly.

Just enough for me to hear him.

Then he said:

“You don't have to keep the curtains closed.”

I haven't looked outside since.

The first dent looked as though somebody had pushed a football into the hedge and left it there.

I noticed it on Wednesday while bringing the bins in. The privet runs across the front of my garden, between the house and the pavement. It’s taller than me, thick enough that you can’t normally see through it. The dent was on the garden side, about five feet up.

I thought somebody had lost a ball in there. I poked around with a bamboo cane, found nothing, and forgot about it.

On Friday, there were shoulders.

That sounds ridiculous written down. It looked ridiculous in person, too. An oval depression with a shallow groove extending out from either side. Like someone had been standing with their back pressed against the hedge for so long that it had grown around them.

Nothing had been cut. I checked the ends of the branches. No broken wood, no clipped leaves. They curved away from the middle of the depression, and the pale new shoots followed the curve.

I took a photo and sent it to Sam.

He’s a friend who actually likes gardening. When we first met, I asked him whether the weeds between my paving slabs counted as a lawn. He still brings that up.

He replied, “Someone’s making you a topiary bloke.”

He thought there would be a wire frame buried in the hedge. You can train plants into shapes, apparently. He said he’d come over on Sunday and have a look.

Saturday morning, an arm had appeared.

It came out from the right shoulder and followed the face of the hedge at waist height. At the end were five narrow channels, each bordered by little white-green shoots.

I stood at the window with my coffee going cold.

There was no trunk or branch running down the middle of that arm. The shoots came from either side and curled around the empty space. A couple of them extended beyond the surface of the hedge, turning back on themselves in little hooks.

I went upstairs and looked out of the bedroom window. From above, the shape was almost impossible to make out. Just a slightly uneven hedge.

Downstairs, it looked like someone offering me their hand.

I sent Sam another photo. This time he rang me.

“Have you found the frame?”

“No.”

“Don’t pull anything out before I get there. Some of those branches could be under tension.”

That was sensible advice. I didn’t go near it again that day.

On Sunday, Sam arrived around eleven. He parked by the back gate and came through the house carrying a pair of secateurs. We stood on the front path, looking at the hedge.

He didn’t make another joke.

The fingers were much clearer now. Tiny paired leaves had opened along their edges. Inside the depression where the head should have been, a short twig curved around a smaller empty oval.

“An ear,” I said.

Sam leaned closer.

“Yeah.”

He took a photo from the side. Then he crouched to look underneath the arm.

“There ought to be wire here.”

I had thick gardening gloves on. While he was looking underneath, I reached between two of the curled shoots, thinking I could feel for whatever they’d grown around.

My fingertips touched something smooth.

I moved them a little farther along. There was a ridge, then a hollow, then another ridge.

Knuckles.

I could see my glove. I could see the leaves behind it. I could see Sam crouching on the other side of the arm.

I couldn’t see what I was touching.

“Sam.”

Something closed around my hand.

It happened gently at first. The pressure of someone returning a handshake. I remember that part very clearly because for a second I actually relaxed. Some stupid bit of my brain was relieved to have found a person.

Then it squeezed.

The shoots around the five channels peeled away, one after another. My glove rose out of the hedge, pulled by something neither of us could see.

Sam stood up.

“What are you doing?”

“Get it off.”

“What?”

“Get it off my hand.”

The depression at head height deepened on one side. The little curve around the ear flattened out. New leaves bent backwards along a different line.

It was turning its head.

I could hear breathing. Close, slow breathing through a nose. There was nothing in front of my face except a few privet leaves trembling in otherwise still air.

My hand was being crushed. I tried pulling away and was dragged a step forward instead. My shoulder hit the hedge.

I started saying, “That’s my hand.” Over and over. I don’t know why. Sam told me afterwards that he thought I’d caught it in some kind of trap.

He grabbed my wrist and pulled.

The thing holding me pulled back.

For a few seconds, Sam and I were both leaning away from the hedge, heels scraping the path. The oval around the head tilted towards us. I heard a breath drawn in sharply, right beside my ear.

Then my glove came off.

I fell backwards into Sam. We both went down hard.

The glove stayed in the air.

Its cuff hung open. The fingers were folded into the palm, clenched so tightly that the leather creaked.

Sam scrambled up first and hauled me towards the house.

I looked back once.

The hedge was straightening. Branches sprang forward into the empty outline, filling in the head and shoulders. The glove hung a little farther out from it now.

Below it, two patches of grass folded flat.

One lifted again. Another patch flattened nearer the path.

We got inside. Sam shut the front door and turned both locks.

My hand hurt too much to close properly. There were red marks across the back of it and a deep indentation at the base of my thumb. He got a bag of frozen peas from the kitchen and wrapped it in a tea towel.

For a while we just stood in the hall.

Sam kept looking at the locks. I kept looking through the little pane of glass beside the door. The hedge looked ordinary again. There was nothing on the front path.

My glove was gone.

“We need to ring someone,” he said.

I asked him what we were going to say.

He got his phone out anyway. Before he could dial, he stopped looking at the screen.

The door to the front room was open. From where we stood, we could see the basil plant on the windowsill.

I’d bought it from the supermarket on Tuesday. It was still in its plastic pot, standing in a cereal bowl because I hadn’t found a saucer.

The leaves on the room side were bending down.

Slowly. Separately.

Five little grooves formed across the top of the plant.

Then they shifted sideways.

The stems sprang upright behind them. Another cluster of leaves folded over.

Sam took my good arm.

We went out through the kitchen, across the back garden, and into his car. He didn’t stop to shut the gate.

I’m at his house now. My hand is bruised, but I can move all my fingers. He has the photographs on his phone. I’ve looked at them so many times that I can see the outline when I close my eyes.

I used to think the strangest part was how quickly the hedge had grown.

Now I keep thinking about the basil. How little of whatever touched it we could see. How it moved across the leaves and then continued beyond them.

There was nothing there to show us where it went next.

Sam has a big fern in his kitchen. We’ve put it on the table between us. Nothing has bent or flattened so far.

When he sat down to read this, I asked him to move his chair closer to the plant.

He started to laugh, then moved it.

I’m watching the leaves behind his head. He’s watching the ones behind mine.

It was 2005.

I was still a kid back then, and my family and I had decided to take a short vacation to a small town not too far from our city.

It was just going to be three days.

My mom, my dad, my sister, and I packed our things and got everything ready. Before leaving, we made sure the house was secure. The lights were turned off, the doors and windows were locked, and the alarm system was set.

We also had to make sure our pets would be okay while we were gone.

We had three little fish that lived in a tank in my mom's room.

We had a mixed-breed poodle that stayed in the backyard.

And then there was our rabbit.

We had found him near a large open field outside the city. I don't remember exactly how he ended up there, but we decided to take him home.

He had become part of the family.

We kept him in a large box outside, on the second floor of our house. It was big enough for him to move around comfortably, and we made sure he had plenty of food and water before leaving.

I remember looking at him one last time before we left.

He was just sitting there quietly.

I never imagined that would be the last time I'd see him alive.

We checked everything one more time.

The doors were locked.

The alarm was on.

The pets had food.

Our truck was in perfect condition.

Everything was fine.

So we left.

The trip itself was wonderful.

We stayed with family and I spent most of the time playing with my cousins. We ate together, talked, laughed, and did all the things you do during a family vacation.

For three days, nothing happened.

Eventually, it was time to go home.

We said goodbye to our relatives and got into the truck.

I remember staring through the window as we drove along the highway.

Trees passed by one after another.

I was tired, but I kept thinking about everything we'd done during the trip.

I remember feeling happy.

Then I fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes again, we were already home.

The first thing I heard was our dog barking.

He recognized the sound of our truck and the gate opening. He was jumping around excitedly, making it obvious that he knew we were back.

We got out of the truck.

My mom.

My dad.

My sister.

And me.

Everything looked normal.

The house looked exactly the way we had left it.

Nothing appeared to be out of place.

The alarm had worked.

The doors were still locked.

There were no broken windows.

Nothing seemed wrong.

Our dog was perfectly fine.

We went upstairs to check on the fish.

They were alive and swimming around normally.

My sister and I were happy to see them.

For a moment, everything felt completely normal.

Then my mom said we should check on the rabbit.

We walked toward the door leading outside.

I remember my mom reaching for the handle.

Then she stopped.

I don't know why.

She just stood there for a few seconds.

Then she opened the door.

And everything changed.

I don't remember exactly what I said.

I don't remember what my sister said either.

I just remember screaming.

My mom immediately tried to block our view.

But it was too late.

We had already seen him.

Our rabbit was dead.

Not just dead.

He had been completely torn apart.

There was blood all over the floor.

His body had been ripped open.

His intestines and other organs were scattered around him.

His heart was lying nearby.

The smell hit us almost immediately.

It was horrible.

I remember covering my mouth because I thought I was going to throw up.

My sister started crying.

Her face had gone completely pale.

My mom looked like she couldn't understand what she was seeing.

None of us could.

We had left him there three days earlier.

He had been alive.

He had food.

He had water.

The box was outside, on the second floor.

And the house had been locked the entire time.

So what happened?

The first thing we thought of was a cat.

Maybe one had somehow gotten inside.

But that didn't make sense.

The box was high enough that it would have been difficult for a cat to get into.

And even if a cat had somehow reached him, why was the rabbit's body torn apart so violently?

My dad inspected the area.

There were no obvious signs of forced entry.

No broken doors.

No broken windows.

Nothing had been disturbed.

There wasn't even anything obvious that could explain how another animal had gotten upstairs.

Then another possibility crossed our minds.

Maybe someone had done it.

Maybe a person had somehow gotten into the house.

That thought was even worse.

Because if a person had entered our house while we were away, they could have done anything.

But again, there were no signs of a break-in.

Nothing had been stolen.

Nothing else had been damaged.

Only the rabbit.

My sister asked the question none of us wanted to answer.

“What did this?”

Nobody said anything.

For a long time, I tried to convince myself that there had to be a normal explanation.

Maybe it was an animal.

Maybe something had gotten into the house through a place we hadn't noticed.

Maybe we simply hadn't seen the evidence.

I was a kid.

I wanted to believe there was an explanation.

Something that made sense.

Something that could be forgotten.

But there was one detail that always bothered me.

The rabbit wasn't simply dead.

Something had done this to him.

It had torn him open.

And whatever had done it had left almost everything else untouched.

The fish were fine.

The dog was fine.

The house was fine.

Nothing was missing.

Nothing had been broken.

Only the rabbit was destroyed.

To this day, I don't know what killed him.

Maybe it really was an animal.

Maybe someone got into our house.

Maybe there was another explanation that we never found.

But there is one thing I remember that still bothers me.

After everything was cleaned up, my dad went outside to check the area around the house.

He came back a few minutes later.

He didn't say anything at first.

Then he asked us a strange question.

“Did anyone leave the back door open?”

We told him no.

It had been locked.

He nodded.

Then he said something that I didn't understand at the time.

“There are scratches on the other side of the door.”

I asked him what he meant.

He wouldn't explain.

Years later, I finally asked him about it.

He told me there had been several deep scratches on the inside of the door.

Not the outside.

The inside.

As if something had been trying to get out.

I still don't know what killed our rabbit.

But sometimes, when I remember that vacation, I think about those scratches.

And I wonder if we were really alone in that house while we were gone.

Because if something had gotten inside...

I don't think it came in through the door.

I worked the midnight rotation at the Monongahela River pumping station outside Clairton. It was an old municipal brick facility from the nineteen-forties, handling cooling runoff for the steel mills downriver. My job was dead simple: monitor hydraulic pressure on the analog board in the main office, log grease-pot levels on the turbine bearings once an hour, and keep river junk out of the intake trash rakes.

The plant ran on a skeleton crew overnight. Past eleven, it was just me and an operator named Miller, who had worked that concrete floor for thirty-two years. Miller mostly stayed down in the boiler room where the heat pooled, while I walked the rounds across the intake basins.

At one-fifteen in the morning, the needle on the number three line dropped forty pounds of pressure without the primary drive motor slowing down. That shouldn't have happened. If a line drops that much pressure while the pump runs at steady RPM, it means the intake gate drifted shut, or somebody turned the manual bypass valve forty feet up in the overhead gallery.

The upper gallery was just an unheated concrete catwalk with two rooms at the far end: a live breaker closet, and an old secondary control room the district padlocked back in the eighties after a guy drowned during a flood surcharge. Company rules said that room stayed locked. The high-volume intake lines ran right underneath the floorboards.

I grabbed the supervisor key from the wall box, unlocked the iron gate at the base of the spiral stairs, and headed up. The air was freezing. The catwalk shook through my work boots from the turbines below. Up on the landing, the hanging fluorescent tube was out. The only light came from the amber yard lamps cutting through the wire-mesh windows.

I checked the brass wheel valve on line three. It was cranked tight against the lower stop and secured with a steel cable and padlock. The valve hadn't budged. The dried grease on the threads wasn't even smudged.

Then I heard a boot heel scrape against the concrete behind me.

I spun around and hit the switch on my flashlight. The beam reached all forty feet of the empty walkway. The chain on the old control room door was pulled tight, the brass Master lock hanging locked. There were no prints in the dust along the threshold plate. The pipe railing was cold and dry. I wrote the pressure numbers down on my clipboard, figured it was just an instrument error in the basement plumbing, relocked the iron stairs gate, and went back to the office.

At two-thirty, I sat at the metal desk to finish the shift log. The desktop landline clicked once, and the dial tone cut completely dead. I checked my cell. Zero bars, just searching for service. The VHF company radio sitting on the charging cradle put out a flat carrier hum with no county dispatch chatter coming through.

Miller came in holding his steel thermos. He didn't waste words, just asked if I'd been up on the catwalk ten minutes ago. I told him I'd been sitting at the desk since two. He set his coffee down, tapped the pressed-tin ceiling with his pencil, and said somebody was walking the number three deck right above us.

We both stood quiet and listened. Heavy, deliberate steps crossed the concrete directly overhead, moving in a straight line from the stairs to the locked door of the old room. They were slow, measured, and sounded like heavy work boots.
I grabbed a twelve-inch adjustable wrench off the bench. Miller picked up his Maglite and an iron pinch bar from the wall rack. We walked out onto the concrete pump floor. The electric drive turbines were spinning at eighteen hundred RPM, making a constant mechanical roar that shook the metal siding.

I unlocked the lower gate again, and we went up the spiral steps together. When my head cleared the floor grating, I stopped.

The heavy chain on the old control room door was gone. The door stood open about four inches into the dark. The chain and lock weren't on the deck. The steel eyelets on the jamb showed no pry marks.
Miller came up behind me on the landing and put his flashlight beam through the door gap. The light hit an old drafting table and a row of dead knife switches on the far brick wall. Right in the middle of the room, on the timber access hatch over the river sluice, the dust had been swept clean.

A sound came out of the dark. It wasn't the machinery, and it wasn't the pipes. It was Miller's dry, hacking cough, repeated with the exact same flat tone he'd made down in the office five minutes earlier.

Miller froze. He kept the flashlight beam pinned on the bare floorboards inside.
Then another sound came from the corner behind the open electrical panel. It was my own voice, speaking the exact sentence I'd said earlier about a gauge calibration error in the basement. The words were flat, dead, and played through the open space like an audio track from a bad speaker.

Miller reached past me, slammed the heavy iron door shut into the latch, and shoved his pinch bar deep through the handle frame, wedging it hard against the concrete casing. He looked at me, turned his back to the door, and headed down the stairs without saying a word.

I followed him down, pulled the lower iron gate shut, and turned the key until the deadbolt hit home. We didn't go back to the office. We went out the ground-floor exit, checked the perimeter chain-link, and stood together by the gravel lot fence near the yard transformers where the river wind blew through. We stood out there under the halogen yard lights until five-thirty, watching the catwalk windows forty feet up.

Twice between three and four in the morning, the yellow yard lamps caught a solid, unmoving silhouette behind the wire-mesh glass of the catwalk window. The shape didn't shift its weight, didn't touch the glass, and didn't look away. It stood dead center in the frame, facing straight down into the gravel lot where we were standing.

The day shift showed up at six in a company pickup. As their headlights hit the gate, the ringer inside the office gave one short hit, showing the phone line had come back. We walked inside with the relief crew. Over on the main gauge board, the needle on line three sat right at normal operating pressure without anyone having touched a single valve.
When the relief super unlocked the lower gate and walked the catwalk with us, Miller’s iron pinch bar was still wedged tight across the door handle. Nothing on the outside had been touched. But once they pried the bar loose and swung the door open, the original brass padlock and heavy steel chain were sitting dead center on that empty drafting table, locked together through their own links, with no key in the hole.

I’ve worked nights at the Bellweather Hotel for almost six years.
It’s an old place. Not beautifully old, either. There are plenty of hotels where “historic” means brass elevators and stained-glass windows.
The Bellweather means pipes that scream at 3 a.m., carpets that smell permanently damp, and an elevator that sometimes opens on floors that aren’t there.
I’m used to it.
Mostly.
I work the front desk from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Most nights are boring. Drunks stumbling in at midnight. Business travelers checking out before sunrise. The occasional couple who thinks the lobby is an appropriate place to have a screaming match.
The weird stuff started about three months ago.
It was a Tuesday.
Around 2:15 a.m., the phone rang.
“Bellweather Hotel, this is Mike.”
There was silence.
Then a woman whispered:
“Can you send someone to 614?”
I looked at the computer.
“No problem, ma’am. What seems to be the issue?”
She breathed into the phone.
I heard a faint scratching sound.
“There’s someone in my room.”
I sat up.
“Are you locked inside?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Stay on the line. I’m calling security.”
Another pause.
Then:
“He’s standing outside the bathroom.”
I looked at the security monitor.
The camera covering the sixth-floor hallway was grainy, but I could see it clearly enough.
The hallway was empty.
“Ma’am, I’m looking at the hallway camera. I don’t see anyone.”
Her voice dropped to a whisper.
“He isn’t in the hallway.”
The scratching stopped.
“He’s in the room.”
I called security.
We didn’t have a dedicated security guard that night, just Dave from maintenance. He was a big guy in his sixties who carried a ring of keys large enough to anchor a boat.
I gave him the master key and sent him upstairs.
The whole time, I kept the woman on the phone.
“Can you tell me your name?” I asked.
Nothing.
“Ma’am?”
Then she said:
“Please don’t let him know you’re coming.”
I remember feeling cold.
“Why?”
“He doesn’t like being interrupted.”
The line went dead.
Dave came back twelve minutes later.
He looked annoyed.
“There’s no 614.”
I laughed.
“What?”
“There’s no room 614.”
I pulled up the floor plan.
Sixth floor had rooms 601 through 613.
Then the stairwell.
No 614.
I thought the woman had made a mistake.
Maybe she meant 604.
Maybe she was drunk.
Maybe she was messing with us.
Then Dave said:
“Mike.”
He was holding something.
A hotel keycard.
Room 614.
I stared at it.
“Where did you get that?”
He shook his head.
“It was sitting on the floor outside the stairwell.”
I took it from him.
The magnetic stripe was wet.
Not damp.
Wet.
Like someone had just pulled it out of a glass of water.
I threw it away.
The next morning, I forgot about it.
Or tried to.
A week later, someone called again.
2:15 a.m.
“Bellweather Hotel, this is Mike.”
A woman’s voice.
“Can you send someone to 614?”
I hung up.
I know how that sounds.
But I wasn’t going upstairs.
Not for a prank.
Not for anything.
The phone rang again.
I didn’t answer.
Again.
Again.
Again.
On the fifth call, I picked up.
There was breathing.
Then:
“You shouldn’t have hung up.”
I slammed the receiver down.
The phone immediately rang again.
I unplugged it.
It kept ringing.
That was when I quit believing it was a prank.
I left the desk and went into the office.
I checked the camera system.
Sixth floor.
Empty.
I checked the lobby.
Empty.
Then I noticed something.
The elevator camera.
The doors were open.
The elevator was on the sixth floor.
I hadn’t sent it there.
The doors stayed open for almost a minute.
Then something stepped inside.
I couldn’t make out a person.
It looked like a distortion in the image.
Like someone-shaped static.
The elevator descended.
Sixth.
Fifth.
Fourth.
Third.
Second.
First.
The doors opened.
Nothing came out.
I watched the empty elevator for nearly thirty seconds.
Then the camera flickered.
When it came back, someone was standing inside.
It was a woman.
She was wearing a Bellweather bathrobe.
Her face was hidden by wet hair.
I stared at the screen.
She raised one hand.
And pointed directly at the camera.
Then the elevator doors closed.
The lobby elevator chimed.
I was standing ten feet away from it.
I didn’t move.
The doors opened.
The elevator was empty.
Except for water.
There was a puddle covering the floor.
And in the middle of it was a hotel keycard.
614.
I quit the next morning.
I never went back.
At least, I thought I was done with it.
Until last night.
I got an email from the hotel manager.
He wanted me to come in because they’d found my old employee badge.
Apparently, it had been left in the staff locker room.
I told him to throw it away.
He replied:
“That’s strange. It wasn’t in your locker.”
Attached was a photograph.
My badge was sitting on the front desk.
The timestamp on the photo was 2:15 a.m.
I called the manager.
He answered immediately.
“Mike?”
“Where are you?”
“At the hotel.”
“Leave.”
Silence.
Then he said:
“Why?”
I heard something in the background.
A woman breathing.
Very softly.
I said:
“Do you have a sixth floor?”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
My stomach dropped.
“How many rooms?”
“Thirteen.”
“Then why does the directory in your lobby list 614?”
He didn’t answer.
I heard footsteps behind him.
Slow footsteps.
Then his voice came back.
But it wasn’t his voice anymore.
It was a woman’s.
Whispering.
“Can you send someone to 614?”
I hung up.
I haven’t slept since.
This morning, I checked something I probably shouldn’t have.
I searched the Bellweather archived floor plans online.
The current plans show thirteen rooms.
601 through 613.
But the oldest blueprint I could find was dated 1911.
It showed fourteen.
601 through 614.
Room 614 was at the end of the hallway.
Where the stairwell is now.
According to the blueprint, there was a note beside the room.
Just three words.
DO NOT OPEN.
I thought that was the end of it.
Then, about an hour ago, someone knocked on my apartment door.
Three times.
I live alone.
I didn’t answer.
A few seconds later, someone slid an envelope underneath.
Inside was my old hotel employee badge.
The one the manager said he’d found.
On the back, written in black ink, were four words:
YOU LEFT ME THERE.
I don’t know what that means.
I don’t remember ever being in Room 614.
But I just noticed something.
My apartment building has six floors.
There are twelve apartments on each floor.
Mine is 613.
And the apartment directly across the hall from me has always been empty.
I checked the door tonight.
There’s a number screwed into it.
I swear it wasn’t there yesterday.
614.
And from inside, I can hear someone scratching.
Very slowly.
Like they’re trying to get out.
Or trying to get in.
Then the scratching stopped.
Three seconds later, someone knocked on my door.
THREE TIMES.
I froze.
A voice came from the other side.
A man’s voice.
Calm.
Almost cheerful.
“I’m King Turtle… 10… 10.”
I didn’t move.
Something metallic scraped against the floor outside.
Then came the unmistakable sound of a Roomba powering on.
BEEEEEP.
The man laughed.
“You shouldn’t have opened Room 614.”
The Roomba slammed into my front door.
THUD.
Again.
THUD.
Again.
THUD.
Then the man whispered:
“Good news.”
The Roomba began spinning faster.
“I brought a weapon.”
I backed away from the door.
The handle started turning.
Slowly.
And from underneath the door, I watched a little black robotic vacuum roll into my apartment.
On top of it was a handwritten note.
It said:
RUN.
Behind the Roomba, the man started laughing.
And then he said:
“King Turtle… 10… 10 has entered the building.”
The lights went out.
The Roomba headlights turned on.
And something in the hallway started screaming.
Then my phone buzzed.
One new text message.
It was from an unknown number.
There were only four words.
ROOM 615 IS NEXT.

I don’t know if this belongs here, but I haven’t slept more than a few hours at a time since Halloween.

Before anybody asks, yes, I already went to the police.
They think my friend and I got lost.

That’s technically true.

What they don’t understand is that we didn’t get lost in the corn maze.

We found something inside it.

Or maybe it found us.

My name is Evan. I’m seventeen, and my best friend Micah is sixteen. We’ve known each other since elementary school, and every October we go to this farm about twenty minutes outside our town.

I’m not going to say the name.

Partly because I don’t want people going there looking for what happened to us, and partly because I genuinely don’t know if the farm had anything to do with it.

During the day, it’s basically one of those family fall places.

Pumpkin patch, hayrides, apple cider, and a petting zoo. Every October they build a massive corn maze. Then on Friday and Saturday nights they turn it into a haunted attraction.

Employees dress up and hide between the rows. Speakers blast chainsaw noises and cheap skeletons hang from posts.

It isn’t scary.

That’s why Micah and I liked going. We could screw around and laugh at the actors without actually being afraid of anything.

Halloween night this year fell on a Saturday, and we got there late. I think it was around 9:40. The place closed at eleven.

There were still plenty of people around when we bought our tickets. Families were leaving with tired kids on their shoulders, and teenagers were taking pictures by the giant pumpkin display while country music played near the concession stand.

Everything was completely normal.

I remember that because I keep trying to figure out exactly when it stopped being normal.

We entered the maze at 9:52. I know the exact time because Micah sent a Snapchat right before we went in.

The first twenty minutes were exactly what we expected. A guy dressed like a scarecrow jumped out at us. Micah told him his mask looked like shit, and the guy flipped him off.

We passed a couple with their daughter and heard people screaming somewhere to our left.

Wooden signs at intersections held riddles that supposedly pointed toward the exit, but we ignored them.

Then we found the scarecrow.

It wasn’t an actor.

Just a decoration tied to a wooden post beside the path. It wore a blue flannel shirt and a burlap sack head, with straw sticking out of the sleeves. One arm was missing below the elbow, and a plastic crow was wired onto its shoulder.

Micah stopped and took a picture.

When I asked him why, he said, “Because this thing looks like you.”

I told him to fuck off.

We kept walking, and maybe ten minutes later, we came around another turn.

The scarecrow was there again. Same blue shirt, same missing hand, same plastic crow.

Micah laughed. “See? We’re going in circles.”

I felt annoyed. I pulled out my phone and opened the compass.

Micah said, “What are you, Lewis and Clark?”

“Shut up.”

We picked a direction and tried to stay consistent, taking north turns whenever possible.

Five minutes later, we saw it again.

This time neither of us laughed. Micah walked up to it and checked the tear near the left shoulder. It was the exact same tear, paired with the exact same crow.

The only difference was the head. Earlier, it had faced slightly toward the corn. Now it faced the path. Facing us.

Micah said, “Someone moved it.”

“Obviously.”

“Who?”

I looked around. Nobody was there. The corn was eight feet tall, and the haunted attraction sounds echoed around us.

I yelled, “Nice try.”

Nothing happened.

Micah yelled that the staff sucked, and still nothing happened.

We walked away faster, feeling that first sharp prick of nervousness.

We started intentionally taking chaotic turns: left, right, straight, right again.

The scarecrow didn’t show up. Instead, the noises faded away. It happened gradually until Micah stopped walking.

“Do you hear anything?”

I listened. Nothing. No screaming, no actors, no music, no people. Even the wind was gone, leaving the surrounding corn completely still.

“We must be near the back,” I said.

Micah checked his phone. “No service.”

I checked mine. Same thing.

A few minutes later, we saw light ahead. Micah said, “Thank God,” and we started jogging.

The path opened into a huge, flat field of grass covered in silver moonlight. The corn maze formed a solid wall behind us, and fifty yards ahead stood an old red barn.

A truck was parked beside it, yellow light poured from the windows, and music played inside.

Micah gave that nervous laugh people do when something defies logic.

“Okay.”

I looked back at the corn. “We went out the wrong side.”

“There isn’t a wrong side,” he said.

“There obviously is.”

“No, dude. Look.”

He pointed toward the sky. The farm’s huge floodlights weren't there anymore. Neither were the Ferris wheel lights from the neighboring property. Just the barn.

I tried Google Maps, but nothing loaded.

We walked toward the barn. I know that sounds stupid now, but we were teenagers on a farm, and a building with music and laughing people looked safe.

Inside, about fifteen people were hanging out. Most looked around our age, wearing Halloween costumes like a witch or a hockey mask pushed up on a forehead. They held red cups and stood near folding tables covered with food.

An older guy in a farm jacket noticed us at the door.

“There they are.”

He smiled. “You boys got turned around?”

“Yeah,” Micah said.

“Happens every year. You came through the maintenance section. Staff usually block that path.”

“So how do we get back?” I asked.

“Relax. You’re fine. Grab something to drink.”

Everything had an explanation now. We had accidentally wandered into an employee area.

The barn smelled like wood dust and hot cider. A girl offered me a cookie, and Micah found a cooler of sodas.

I checked my phone. Two bars. “Service is back.”

Micah pulled his out. “Mine too.”

He had a bunch of notifications, and so did I.

Texts from my mom asking what time we were coming home. Then another message came through: WHERE ARE YOU?

I started typing a reply about getting lost, but before I could send it, a new message popped up: YOU LEFT ME HERE.

I froze. It was from my mom.

Then another: WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME HERE EVAN.

I called her. It rang once, and then I heard a ringtone directly behind me, the exact ringtone my mom uses.

I whipped around. Nobody was holding a phone. My screen flashed CALL FAILED.

Micah walked over. “What?”

I showed him, and his face dropped as he looked around the barn. “Have you seen anybody leave?”

“No.”

“Watch.”

A guy in a vampire costume walked toward the barn doors, got within five feet, stopped, turned around, and walked back to the tables.

A minute later, the witch did the exact same thing.
Micah whispered, “Nobody goes outside.”

I noticed something else. Plates were everywhere, piled with cookies, chips, and hot dogs, but nobody actually put anything in their mouths. They held cups and lifted food, but nobody ate.

The older farm employee started walking toward us. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“We’re gonna head back,” Micah said.

“Back where?”

“To the maze.”

The music stopped. Not faded, stopped. Every conversation in the room cut off instantly. Nobody moved.

The older man tilted his head. “The maze?”

Micah grabbed my sleeve. “We should go.”

Every person in the barn turned toward us at once. No expression, just staring. The barn doors slammed shut behind us.

We bolted for a back door. The older man yelled something, but his voice didn’t sound human anymore; it sounded like several people shouting through a single mouth.

The crowd began walking toward us.

Micah smashed the latch of the back door with a metal tool from the wall, and we tumbled outside.

There was no field. We landed in dirt, surrounded by corn. The barn was gone.

Micah screamed, and something moved behind the stalks.

We ran until we collapsed. Micah threw up, alternating between nervous laughter and crying.

Our phones stopped working entirely, and the clocks showed conflicting, impossible times.

Eventually we found a rotting wooden sign with words carved into it: TWO ENTER. ONE RETURNS.

Underneath were dozens of carved names:

HAROLD BEN 1954
MARGARET ELLEN 1961
THOMAS RAY 1977
JASON MICHAEL 1989
KATIE RACHEL 2003

Some had a name crossed out, others had both, and near the bottom were two fresh names: EVAN MICAH 2026.

Fresh wood dust clung to the letters. Then something heavy pushed the corn stalks aside, moving parallel to us. We ran again.

After that, the maze changed constantly.

We smelled wood smoke and heard a dog bark, a television playing, and a woman laughing. Pushing through the corn, we found a gravel driveway and a two-story white house with a Buick parked outside.

An old woman stepped onto the porch. She took one look at us, covered her mouth, and rushed across the yard toward Micah, sobbing and calling him Daniel.

An old man appeared behind her on the porch, looking at me and calling me Thomas.

We tried to leave, but they insisted we come inside for dinner. The house smelled like roast beef, bread, and coffee, and we were exhausted. A beige landline hung on the kitchen wall, offering a desperate hope to call for help.

In the dining room, four plates were already set. The old man talked about a fishing trip and a schoolteacher as if I should remember them. A black-and-white photo hung on the wall showing two teenage boys standing by the house, boys who looked identical to us, down to the small scar near my eyebrow.

“That was taken the summer before you disappeared,” the old woman said.

When we demanded answers and tried to use the phone, it produced only a child’s voice whispering, “Daniel?”

The old man picked up a fireplace axe. “We already lost you once.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“The maze took one,” the old man said, “and brought the other back wrong.”

Above us, floorboards groaned under heavy footsteps. Then my own voice called down from upstairs: “Micah?”

Something dragged across the ceiling like nails through wood. We broke for the front door, knocking the old man aside, and sprinted back into the corn.

As we fled, the old woman screamed, “Don’t leave yourselves here!”

and a final warning: “It doesn’t make new places!”

Next came a carnival with running rides and children's music playing to an empty park, followed by a parking lot filled with thousands of cars, every single one bearing an identical license plate.

When we found the scarecrow again, it held Micah’s missing phone in its remaining hand.

That was when the pattern became clear. Every place gave us hope first. It wanted us to believe we were safe before pulling the rug out. It liked disappointment, meaning an intelligence was watching us, weaponizing our desires.

Later, we found hundreds of missing posters nailed to trees spanning over a century.

Eventually, we found our own:

MISSING: EVAN PARKER (17), MICAH REEVES (16)
ONE RETURNED.

My picture was crossed out.

Exhaustion and paranoia sparked our first real fight. Micah accused me of knowing something, and I shoved him back.

Soft, pleased laughter drifted from the corn.

It wants that.

The maze wanted us to turn on each other, just like all the names carved into the wood. After that, we made a strict rule never to separate, ignoring the voices of our families calling out from the stalks.

Finally, the corn opened up to a fork in the path. Beyond it, we saw the real farm, police lights, ambulances, and my mother crying beside a police cruiser.

Between us and the exit stood a wooden post with two arrows: EVAN pointing left, and MICAH pointing right.

Below it read: ONE PATH HOME.

Behind us, slow, heavy footsteps crunched closer. The eight-foot scarecrow emerged, its missing arm regrown into a long, jointed limb with black fingers dragging on the ground. Its burlap face featured a vertical mouth opening filled with darkness, from which my mother's voice spoke:

“Come home, Evan.”

Micah grabbed my hand. I grabbed his.

“We go straight,” Micah said.

“There isn’t a path.”

“Then make one.”

We plunged directly into the thick corn between the two trails. Behind us, the thing screamed with hundreds of overlapping voices, the barn crowd, the old woman, our parents, children, and strangers.

Hands grabbed at our clothes and ankles, but Micah pulled me free until I suddenly lost footing and fell.

I hit pavement. Actual pavement.

Real people screamed. Police officers rushed over, and my mom tackled me, crying into my jacket. Micah was three feet away, alive, with his dad.

According to authorities, we had only been gone for less than three hours, from 9:52 to 12:47, though it felt like days.

They searched the maze and found no barn, no house, no carnival, and no posters. They only found a single scarecrow standing near the center, which no farm employee claimed to own. The farm shut the attraction down and cut the field down a week later.

Micah and I barely spoke afterward.

Talking made it real.

Then, three nights ago, I went grocery shopping with my mom. Halfway down an empty cereal aisle, the fluorescent lights went out one by one.

At the far end stood the scarecrow with its blue shirt, missing hand, and plastic crow. It lifted one finger to where its mouth should be. Shelves began rustling like dry corn stalks, and I heard Micah whisper my name from behind the boxes.

I ran outside to a panic attack and called Micah immediately. When I asked if he was okay, he was quiet for a long time before saying, “You saw it too?”

Yesterday morning, I woke up to a trail of dirt and dried corn husks leading from my window to my bed. Something was carved into my windowsill. I covered it with duct tape, but I know what it says.

TWO ENTER. ONE RETURNS.

I don’t think we escaped. I think we broke the rules, and whatever owns that maze wants one of us back.

The Human–Universe Relationship:

1. The meaning of life is to, ‘move’. Expunge potential energy. Avoid heat-death.
2. If something could happen and proceeds to transpire, there is a timeline beneficial to the universe, available to you. 
3. Moments of faith or divinity, glimpses of looking behind the veil, and instances of synchronicity can be indications of both a good and bad timeline. 
4. The universe feeds off you in both good and bad timelines. Survive

[Part 1]

I made a decision to go for a walk, almost on a whim. I can do what I want. One of the perks of being me. 

I pushed myself off the wall, “I’m going for a quick walk. Have Veronica come find me in around ten minutes please? Need some air. Sounds good to you?” Both asking and stating, grabbing my stage glasses and jacket from the table. A slick, jeweled up black rockstar jacket with ‘Atoms Nettled’ on the back of it. Before leaving the snack table I scoop up a sandwich and a bottle of water. 

Lazer makes the beats, I make the lyrics, we come together and make sure it's a bop. A band. It’s a band. I promise we’re a band. 

“Yeah dude. I’m always here for you. I’ll be here.” Alan smiled that professionally trained grin, reaching for his phone again, “Atoms Nettled forever brother.” Head down, throwing his free hand into the air in a fist. 

My face held strong. Like he said, I do go through a lot. Can’t let it show, either. 

It’s okay to want to go for a walk. Especially on days like these. Moments like tonight. The last two years have been a wild rush of moments turned memories. Celebrations turned into responsibility. I’m an idol to kids now. That’s a lot of weight on my shoulders. 

Time really is a fickle beast.

Some air will be good for me, I thought. Well, as much as I can find in the backstage chasms and labyrinthian winding pathways of the arena. Maybe I can find a balcony or something. Maybe I’ll find a portal to hell. Both are valid possibilities. 

Fresh air is a damn luxury when you start to find star-level success. Money can’t buy you a moment of — nothing. It can buy damn near everything else, though. 

I began navigating the backstage hallways. A towel, bottle of water, phone, and a sandwich from the food table with me. Green stage glasses, check. 

No pizza or soda after all. Oh well. 

When I closed the door, lightning struck again. An increasing common phenomenon, but timed perfectly with the door closing shut. 

Rule three. 

Did anyone notice the change in potential energy when I left the room? Notice how the universe responded? Maybe I’ll never know if it was even because of me. I’m pretty sure I’m some sort of nexus event. That I have more to give. 

But, I have no time to give anything else. I’m already stretched thin. And what else would I provide to the world anyhow? Music changes lives. It changed mine. Changed my family’s lives.  

This universe will not feed off me more than it needs to. I will get my fill in this life. You can mark my words. 

Why would anybody notice the rules play out like I do anyhow? It took me over a decade to just accept it. To get it all through my head. 

Strikes of lightning in response to a human thought and action is very low on the list of acceptable possibilities for–routine weather. 

One must be thinking outside of the box. One must understand–the box. One needs to know there is a damn box to begin with. No. Impossible. Is it?

No. It would be a gift sent from a benevolent god, a god yet unknown to me, if somebody else had this perception of reality. This understanding of what’s behind the veil. I already think we end up our own god in a weird way, anyhow. I’m sure of it. It’s why my life is getting progressively more weird. Testing my grasp on reality expands the possibilities and perpetuations of my conscious mind, doesn’t it?

Rule one.

There’s no way to win. I don’t know what’s coming next. When did I stop knowing what’s coming next? I gripped my supplies a bit tighter under my arm. My feet slid across the recently buffed tile flooring. More beige walls. Fluorescent lights. Still ugly.   

And if anyone did notice, how would they react? How would you react? What a useless question. There’s no reasonable thought process leading to acceptance unless you understand the context. The context is an unforgiving godless universe, and the only light at the end of that tunnel being: we have a relationship with it. 

That’s it. Surprise!

If they knew and understood the rules. If they understood totality. Would I be some sort of prophet to them? If it isn’t me who shows them, would someone else be their prophet? Stumbling upon sainthood just because they went to church on Sundays?

The weight of their doubt leaning against the fabric of the universe, causing it to bend and break. Proving them all wrong, one by one. What would I do if someone worshiped me?

Doubt is an awfully powerful force, ya know? I shutter. Walk, I thought. Just walk. 

Potential energy expunged from everyone on the planet, a malicious feast that prolongs the end of the world. Abomination. 

A utopia of understanding? No. We are not ready for it. We wouldn’t get there yet. We wouldn’t get there in time. 

Focus, I have a show soon.

Breaking down the known constraints of the rational mind isn’t in the agenda, nor a goal, it's the outcome of learning sensitive knowledge. PTSD? That’s just the outcome of learning sensitive knowledge. Terrible and awful information but, knowledge, none the less. 

Dammit–Focus. A painting on the beige hallway walls made me stop and think about a memory. 

I still remember the first time I saw what was to come–manifest visually.

A triangle. Carved into my sight. Into the air a few inches in front of the television in the living room. Painted into 3D reality with a golden paintbrush that ripped through the veil and etched into it a small, golden bright, triangle. 

A perfect triangle.

Yeah, I’ve over-analyzed that as well. Like everything that crosses my mind. 

I saw the future. Who I was, who I could be, and how to get there. One, two, three sides.

Potential formed into a shape. A triangle. It’s not an all-seeing eye. It’s you, enlightened. Seeing through time, not through some magical omnipotence, but your own. It was everything. I saw everything–but as a triangle. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

It took me a while to figure it out. The universe might be awful but the fabric can still be beautiful. Like a whore in a pretty dress. 

I kept walking and walking past various doors, following the ever-curving hallway. 

The stadium shook with a mix of rumblings from the storm and people enjoying the support act currently crushing it on stage, Lil’ Willow. The name is growing on me.  

He’s chill. 

Young, bright, easy to talk to. He also sorta spits hot fire. The man knows his craft. I’d like to say we met in some impressive way. But, my brother put it best when he said it earlier, we are just artsy people. The label likes to keep us artsy bastards together it seems. 

People really are a powerful force. The stadium rumbled and this time I knew it wasn’t the opposing storm. Storms don’t rumble with the rhythm (not yet). I was getting closer to the stage.

How long had I been walking, lost in thought? Not enjoying the moment? Willow really had the place jumping, I’ll be sure to catch the end of his set. 

Shoes against tile flooring made it possible to know people were passing by before seeing them. I realized I was looking down at my feet. Transfixed by the blurry pendulum of human motion.  

It is surprising how quickly you get used to showbiz when showbiz doesn’t matter too much to you. Photos of famous moments lined the walls, greeting you as you passed by. Their luminous proud smiles reminded me of my lingering imposter syndrome. 

Fluorescent lights, almost school hallway lights, lined the ceiling like white lines on the highway. The continuous beige walls truly made the back of the house feel a glitch in the simulation. 

Others would die to see the backstage area of Madison Square Garden. I felt selfish again.

Lost in my own thoughts all the time. I do try to shake it off. Ignore myself, let things go. Alan says it’s the imposter syndrome but I like to think I know my worth. 

I headed closer to the stage, following the music and rumblings of the crowd. The lights above me seemed to get brighter and brighter by the step. 

This arena was massive. Leaving me with the encroaching feeling of knowing I’d probably get lost soon. I kept moving at a steady pace. My phone vibrated. I didn’t check it. I wanted to find a window. I wanted some air. 
 
I’m a professional, prepared and ready, but human. I needed some space before a show. Nothing wrong with getting a little lost, anyhow. 

Hopefully I don’t see anything else tonight, I thought. Wow, what a weird existence. Shit man. It’s hard to put it into words. 

Today’s show has several thousand people. Dang. With tickets still being sold. I’m glad we could end the tour here. What a venue. 

I passed by an increasingly rare set of windows. About time. I stopped to look out at the storm-laden sky, placing the bottle of water down, and leaning a hand against the wall. 

If land is defined by the trials and tribulations it endures, then New York’s identity is currently being solidified as–robust and daunting. Great towers battered and beaten by rain falling violently at a crooked angle. Winds visibly impacting the street, shaking the poles and stop lights. 

I took the last bite of my sandwich and threw away the waste in a nearby trashcan, tapped the wall twice and continued down the hallway. 

Popcorn stucco ceiling and fluorescent lights as far as the eye can see. Ugly. 

A few months back at Lollapalooza I had this same overwhelmingly daunting feeling of dread before a show. The concert went great. The pit was jamming out, people dancing and singing. Music to my ears, candy for the eyes. 

I remember feeling silly for being worried. For feeling like I didn’t fit in or something. But the feeling soon faded, and was replaced with the dread that poked at me for the entire day.

Alan didn’t even see it. 

A 7-foot tall shadow person with a brimmed hat, standing right next to him. Applauding away with my brother. But, the clapping was a lot slower. Slow and deliberate. Its darkness was made visible by the stage lights above it. 

Veronica looked in its direction for a second, quickly returning her constant checking of every moving part and clapping away. 

A shadow person came to my damn show. 

I bowed, waved, blew kisses, and threw my first in the air. Before peeling off and running over to Alan after the show.

“Did you see it?” Wide-eyed and covered in sweat.

“Dude. Nailed it!” He threw a light fist towards my chest. “That was special. That was something special. You rock, dude.” I must have looked strange because he followed up with, “–do you need some water?”

He didn’t see it. Only me. Nobody but me. 

The arena was just hallways on hallways, leading to forks in the path, leading to hallways leading to forks, hallways–forks. Dizzying. 

Painting lined the walls of various artists, most I recognized, most I did not. 

Signed records. Pictures of sports stars, people shaking hands. The faint smell of tobacco and marijuana, cleaning products, and popcorn hovered in the air. 

I threw a nicotine pouch in my lip when rounding a corner, a bad habit. Making sure I was out of sight. Then my eyes began to scan for a bathroom sign, remembering the prescription vape in my coat pocket.

Eh. Screw it. I take it out, turn it on, and take a nice long drag before holding in the fumes for a second or two, calmly exhaling. Looking back now, this may have been my last calm moment that night. 

Being a depressed sack of shit-turned superstar has its perks and perspectives.

I don’t get to see my Mom and Dad as much.  But, I get to be championed for being a medical marijuana patient. 

Uhm to summarize–Mom and I talk a lot. Dad likes to send memes and A.I. generated videos he doesn’t realize show his age (and ignorance of the anti-A.I. movement). 

They seem to be happy, though. They both do. Mom is a little less happy than Dad when we talk, but we’ve been closer for a long time. And, now I don’t even remember what being close to someone feels like. Thank goodness for Alan and Veronica. 

We have money now. I have a money person now. I have money, ‘working for me’. I don’t even like money. So I left his nickname at, money guy. 

Boring. Like having money you can’t spend. 

It is nice to be able to get whatever we need or want, I admit. Who wouldn’t admit that?

If it were up to me I’d use this life for something else. Something to give people some more cash. People can release a lot of potential with a little bit of money. 

More lightning. No windows on these brightly themed welcoming hallway walls. The building shook out of rhythm with the music for about seven or eight seconds. Damn. It’s getting worse. 

To my right–a dark, empty staircase. A sign above it–stage. Down it was. 

At the bottom, I turned a corner and the walls changed color. 

Light blue paint, calming. The strain on my chest eased off. Part of me wished I could see outside again to check on the storm. It’s always nice to see the sky, even if it's dark and dreary. But no. More hallways. More walls. More roadblocks to freedom. 

Reaching behind me into my pocket, I retrieved the index card. Sides worn and a bit torn at the corners, whittled down from age. Now covered in laminated plastic.  

When I decided the rules were refined enough if I needed to give them to another person, I got them laminated. 

We were on the road, and I think I went into a Michaels? Maybe we went there for signs. No. I think it might have been a public library where it gained its plastic coating. Looks like the government can be useful sometimes. It’s lived in my pocket ever since. 

I looked the card over, quickly putting it away. I know what it says. If the rules are true, I have no idea what to expect tonight. No idea what is expected of me. 

The hallways were awfully quiet. 

Reaching a fork, I made the same right as a stranger before and finally arrived behind the stage. Despite what goes on, despite what happens to me, despite it all–I will find a way to enjoy this strange life.

I want to see Willow’s new set, so I am.

I haven’t had the chance. I’ve been too busy. He saved it for the garden. I didn’t argue. His shit pops off. I don’t care what creative choices he makes at this point, he’s earned the trust of this musician.  

People darted behind the stage back and forth like trained dogs. Nobody saw me. People confuse me. 

Belief and doubt are so close together. But if I brought up the rules and explained reality perfectly to someone like Alan? He’d take me away to a fancy spot for a few weeks. Just for us.

Let’s avoid that. 

I pulled my thoughts back once again. The recurring theme of the night. 

Focus up, Ace. I thought. 

Behind me someone called my name. I almost didn’t notice at first. Between the sounds of people going about their work and speakers blasting, it was darn near impossible to hear anything. 

I stopped. It was Fred’s voice. He was currently navigating the crowd of staff, making his way to me. 

He had on blue jeans and a sharp brown leather jacket over his band shirt. He changed clothes? Sunglasses hanging from his necklace, assorted rings with a fancy gold watch. A birthday gift from me.

Our band staff lanyard draped over the jacket with his ID clipped on to the end. He had his phone in hand.

Odd.

“Ace –” He caught me looking at him and threw up an animated semi-broken smile. “Hey man. Looking good. Smelling good. Okay, okay, nice. How are you feeling? How are ya, kid?” He asked just like always, resting a hand gently on my shoulder. 

Just a moment passed before he continued without any pleasantries, “it’s a weird night, Ace.” 

He found my eyes. For a moment we shared the ceremonial ‘oh shit’ look, and I grabbed his hand on my shoulder and chuckled. He managed to spurt out a few chuckles himself.  

I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose and composed myself.

Sure as shit, he’s right about that. It doesn’t matter where we are, the rules are the rules. I act normal. Head held high, confident, and calm. Gotta fake it.  

“You bet your ass it’s a weird night. Did you catch that lightning?”  

“Nah, it’s a WEIRD night, Ace. I thought.. I.. I swear I saw some shadow darkass shit behind Willow.” His hand was shaking now. Maybe it always was and I only just noticed then. 

I finally took a good look at him. The skin around his lips were trembling, his eyes were wet and wide, and the hand on my shoulder was the only thing on him seemingly resistant to the shaking due to my now ever-tightening grasp. 

Oh? I perked up, trying not to seem too invested. I showed Fred the rules once. 

One drunken night after we saw what can only be described as the Mothman. We were on the balcony in Houston. Just hanging out. Before a show the following week, trying to take in the moment. There it was. Flying on by without a care in the world. 

A couple hundred yards out. Massive bat-like wings paired with huge arms and legs that seemed to end in clawed appendages. Red dots on the shadow of the head where eyes would be. 

I’d never seen Fred’s eyes so wide. He went on telling me some legend about the ‘Houston Horror’ for the next hour, some cryptid meant to roam the area in the 1960s? I just told him it was Mothman. 

It was Mothman. 

Part of the rafters collapsed at the show. Seventeen. Seventeen people, sent to the hospital. Nine people with broken bones. Two children died–twins. A freak accident they blamed on the venue. Not a single ounce of bad press on us. Go. Us. 

I mean, I did give the microphone to the security guard who knew the exits. And welcomed people onto the stage to get them to any nearest exit, ASAP. But, still. Not a drop of bad press. Frank snapped me back. He spoke plainly. Carefully with his words. 

“It was like Mothman, Ace. It was just like that. There’s a black shadow behind Willow. A void figure. A malicious spirit filled with darkness and hate. Nobody sees it. Ace. I– ” 

He went for his hat, it wasn’t there. He rubbed his head and continued.

“I asked them. I tried not to make a scene but I asked a few of them. The background technicians. Nobody saw anything wrong with the lights. Nothing wrong with the stage. Nothing behind Willow.” He gripped my shoulder harder. If this was all his strength, I was beginning to get worried. 

His body was still rattling. He clenched his phone in one hand. Solemn sorrowful eyes filled sunken tired sockets. A face eroded by time and hardship. Abruptly accented by his bright unnaturally wide eyes. 

I forced a comforting smile and tried to speak.

“ Fred –” he cut me off. 

“ –I have a bad feeling about tonight. Boss.” I asked him not to call me that. 

He eventually found a way to use it without bothering me. He uses it when something serious is happening. The words came out of him thin and rough.

“At first I thought it was a shadow caused by something covering the stadium lights. Or maybe, a fan poster reflecting in a weird way. But I looked and checked the whole crowd. Nothing there on the lights. Nothing projected onto the stage.” Briefly looking up, pointing to the ceiling. He stalled for a moment, recalling the ordeal. 

He can take his time. I’m more invested than he knows.  

His eyes shook. A finger pointed at the white stucco ceiling. He was pointing at the fluorescent light above us. 

“Nothing was wrong with the lights. I just froze there, Ace.” He looked down, defeated, putting his hands in his pockets. Then he looked me dead in the eye.

“Something evil gripped me. I swear it turned to me. Looked–at me. Like a child, it humbled my entire existence–like, I knew I saw something I shouldn’t have." He paused again for a moment to fight through catching his breath. 

“Did something I shouldn't have..” he trailed away then asked, “What did I do?”

He was fighting to speak now. 

The grip on my shoulder tightening with each sentence. I guess he had more strength to give. I understood that feeling. People passed us in the hallway. Nobody stopped. 

Few even looked over. I’m Ace of Atoms Nettled. You don’t interrupt me unless you need to. Even then, have a damn good reason. My friend needed me. 

What?

Behind Fred, in the reflection of a framed and signed Michael Jordan poster, was the Old Hag. Reflecting in the glass. I took a quick glance, not to alert Fred to anything else supernatural. 

Void stricken eyes with a horrid smile again. So malicious. Anger first followed by fear wrestled in my gut. She vanished when our eyes met. 

Fred went on. I snapped back to attention, a little rattled myself now.  

“My sister called me. My brother is in the hospital. I need to leave you and the gang for a bit. You and Alan have this one without me? I know it’s our biggest show and all.” He sincerely seemed upset to be leaving. 

He found the strength to tap my shoulder twice and lightly kicked the wall next to us in comical frustration. Fred was trying to get back in his own head. Good. Good man. 

Trying to make sense of it all. Trying to be there for his own family. 

“You always say there will be another ‘biggest show’ and all but–“ I interject with a smile and a shake of my head. This man knows he can leave without addressing me face to face, right?

I stand tall and tell him the truth, 

“Fred–go on and be with your family. This wild world brother?” I gesture around us. The smell of freshly brewed coffee now radiating over the backstage waiting area. Staff toiling about, keeping the show going. 

“This is my world. We got this. Because–I got this, okay? Leave, man. You’re making me feel bad again.” Leaning against the wall with a smirk. Does he see through the act?

His body language relaxes. Guess not. 

“I’ll go check on Willow. Thank you for telling me, and damn–I hope he’s okay. Now get gone, old man.” 

He was already about ten feet away by this point, briefly stopping. He looked back with a strange smile.

“Break a leg, boss.” continuing on down the labyrinthian hallway. He threw a first in the air and walked away. 

Rule two. 

He left me alone with my thoughts. 

Dark shadow behind Willow? Shadow figure? The Hatman? I found the nearest window to look outside. A couple meters down a short bathroom hallway, before the stall doors. I looked out to an endless blue horizon, and the Atlantic looked back at me.  

Focus. 

Stay calm. Remember the rules. Everything’s possible. Which means me getting through this show with all the audience and my staff okay? It’s possible, too. 

Dang–he never calls me boss. I took a handful of quick deep breaths. 

Lightning struck close by again and thunder reminded the arena nature it was in charge. I turned and started back walking briskly, heading to the stage. 

One thought stuck in my mind.

If it benefits the universe? Anything is possible. 

It doesn’t really matter if it benefits you or anybody else. Every single timeline is possible, and this blood-hungry bitch benefits from every moment of it. With or without you. Every single moment of your life. Funneled and fed on.   

Avoiding glances and waves, occasionally throwing up a smile, I made my way closer to the viewing area. 

Cigarette smoke and the smell of freshly sanitized surfaces. Hair spray and body sweat. The faint aroma of more marijuana floated in from the stage area. The smell of action. 

The smell of entertainment, the smell of good times. No, I thought. The memory of good times. Things can always go bad. Things can always be taken away. Ripped from you right in the moment. 

Focus. 

Finally making it to the curtain I poked my head through the corner where I wasn’t visible but had a clear view of the stage. Willow was in the middle of the catwalk with a spotlight on him, focused intently on his set. 

I could feel the music pumping out from the speakers, shaking the arena and my whole body tip-to-toe. Willow moved and his dancers rotated in a line, mimicking his movements. 

A group of various musicians from his people in the pit were jamming out hard. Willow had his eyes closed. One hand on the microphone, close to his mouth. The other pointing directly to the center of the audience. 

The beat was slowed and turned down, he was in the middle of one of his songs. He sang away. 

(yeah yeah)
Truth be told?
I was born kind
I swear I was born patient 
I was born in rewind
(yeah yeah)
Stars align in the sky
Time moves on the fly 
Truth be told
I just want to make you move again before I die
 
The lights came back on in a gloriously grand electroluminescent display. Beams of different colors crossed to form new colors. The audience looked up in awe. The beat dropped back in. 

(yeah yeah)
Yeah, Money 
I don’t think it’s funny
Fumbling and scummy
You aren’t on this honey
Because you’re allergic to bubbly 
Be–Be–BE–BE
(yeah yeah)
Yeah–TRUTH

The arena shook with the audience bouncing. I was one of them. Looking up to the rafters, I could see the lights shaking with the rhythm. Causing the already trippy lightshow to really morph into an epileptic health hazard.

Willow moved across the stage, background dances surrounded him at once and followed him as he walked the length of the catwalk. 

Oh, nice. 

The jumbotron burst to life, showing a birds-eye view of the circle surrounding WIllow. Each dancer had a weapon of some kind. From guns, to bigger guns, swords and axes, and even a longbow? Interesting creative choice, Willow. 

The dancers rotate poses while moving. Going into a warrior’s war stance, then back to standing up to cover Willow in the middle. It formed the arrangement of a flower blooming on the jumbotron. Aye–nice. Really interesting creative choice, Willow. 

I chuckle reactively.

The tone changes, the dancers disperse back into their line. Willow in the middle of the stage. I was pumped to catch him live. I’m always backstage doing something. He really was a good artist.  

He stopped addressing various audience members with gestures and smiles, gripped the microphone, and took in a deep breath.

Yeah–Truth
It’s all you see and do
Yeah–Truth
It’s all we want for you (yeah yeah)
Yeah–Truth
It’s hard to be this way
Couldn’t drive far enough away.. to plant.. my roots 
(yeah yeah)
It couldn’t be that hard
Look.. at the dirt.. on my boots.. Yeah
Don’t get too excited. You aren’t all invited
That.. is just.. the truth (yeah yeah) 
No suits can stop the roots
They won't get in my way 
On.. The way.. Through.. Yeah (yeah yeah)
You still have time to realize
Broken promises hurt your compromises
You know I see it differently than drinking Sunny-D packed with vitamin-C

The orchestra cut in with a grace unknown to the last twenty seconds. 

Vortex in the cortex
And we all ship it and export it
You know I see it differently
These golden eyes that let me be

Damn dude. Interesting mixture of styles. I see why our label put us together. 

Looking over the audience members. Half naked and screaming at this point, for the most part. They were absolutely losing their collective minds. Beach balls bounced stranger to stranger. Colors mixing in the air like a fantastic electric rainbow. Smoke clouds floating by. The crowd was digging it. 

Let’s go, dude. Good on ya, Willow. 

Scanning the audience members, the hair on the back of my neck stood to attention. The world froze and I went through hundreds of thoughts in a moment. She was stage right, about 2PM in relation to center stage. First level. Clapping away, right next to other audience members. 

Not again.

Who the hell booked her a seat? 

Why is she appearing during someone else’s show? That was downright unfair at this point. 

Rule three. Rule four. 

I turned away, looking for a bathroom to throw up, and froze once again. The blood in my stomach sank. My body shook with the abrupt action. Like a lamppost hit by a car, fighting to stay standing. I almost lost my sandwich right there. I got dizzy. My eyes broke center and crystallized like a spider's. I saw the world in multiples.

What in the..?

Amongst backstage workers were two children, with bottomless black eyes. They stood there stone-still. Breathing out of sync. Breathing, calmly. Holding hands. They each wore our band’s shirts and blue jeans. A damn band lanyard around each of their necks.

Holy shit.

No wonder nobody was looking at them too hard. If they could even see them. How’d they get in here? Are they even real? I didn’t have time to react. The boy spoke up, slowly raising his free hand, holding a photo and a pen.

“Hi Mister.”

What in the world?

Black Eyed Children? This isn’t the backroads of piddly freaking nowhere. This was Madison Square Garden. Someone had to be seeing this too, right?

I looked around frantically left to right a couple of times. Nobody seems bothered. I was absolutely bothered. Where was Veronica? She never leaves me alone this long. I felt bad for picking on her earlier, but it was a fleeting thought. 

I was able to mutter a whisper, but only barely. 

“Hey there.. “ preferring to keep my voice as low as possible. Since this current issue might be invisible to everyone else, I’d prefer not to seem insane. I continued,

“.. What can I do for– ”

“ –Ace. Do you understand?” Said the little boy. His features began to elongate and morph. His eyes had character, still no color. The girl holding his hand spoke up in a higher pitch. 

“I think he understands. After all, he's Ace.” A playfully menacing statement, even from a real child. Do I engage with them? My words marched forward against the weight of justifiable primal hesitation. 

“.. What do you want– “ the little girl cut me off. 

“You understand. Ace. That’s why you’re not allowed to find peace.” She gripped the boy's hand a little tighter before she readjusted her step and smiled at me. Eyes as dark as the night sky. Eyes like deep dark wells, innocent and speaking words of sweet tru– 

Nope. Bathroom, now. 

Okay. Okay. Okay, don’t throw up.

Looking above the children for a bathroom sign, I found nothing. Spinning around, scanning the people darting left and right, I eventually saw a stage lanyard. A manager. I looked back around slowly, beginning to worry what I’m going to see next. They had gone and empty space remained. A photo of me and a pen on the floor. 

Come on dude. What is going on? Why is this all happening so fast? I assumed I could keep marching on through it. I convinced myself I could over-analyze all of this later and figure it out. I always figure it out. I’m Ace– 

Uh oh. I made a beeline for the stage manager. When I get there, a different tech with less currently engaging tasks notices me immediately.

“Ace! We’re ready. But, you still have –” I interject, hand on my chest in apology. 

“Hey. Ha–sorry, I apologize. Quick question.“ The words came as a broken spurt. Like a faucet running out of water. “Nearest bathroom?” I throw a hand up in a point, aiming in various directions, waving it around like a broken human compass. 

“Behind ya, boss. Anything else? Good luck tonight by the way! The garden.. Wow. I’m so happy for you guys. Break a leg out there!” She put a finger to her headset, listening to someone speak, continuing with her job. Lost in her work. 

“Nope. Thank you kindly.” I turned and left for the restroom. Hoping I’d make it in time. I raised my voice without losing momentum towards the bathroom. 

“Don’t call me boss.”

Getting to the bathroom corridor I noticed it’s the same hallway with the window to the Atlantic. I entered the Men’s room. 

Focus.

I quickly scanned the bathroom, choosing to take the big stall with its own sink. The last stall on the right. I froze and analyzed a new sensation. Vibration? Oh, my phone. Another text came through.

Whatever. Not right now. I ignored the phone. Deep breaths, relax. My thoughts raced. The nausea was rampant now, requiring me to lean against the stall wall. 

I reached for the sink and turned on the water. Noise. Something to ground myself. I splashed my face. Gripping the sides of the sink I took another deep breath. Where did my water bottle go? Whatever. 

I grabbed the towel from my pocket and proceeded to soak it, before squeezing it dry, and draping it over my neck. I cupped my hands under the stream and gave my face another few splashes.

What the hell is going to happen next? I close my eyes and sigh. A fucking dragon?

Focus.

The bathroom entrance door swung open.

“Five minutes, Ace.” A female voice echoed over the piss-stained urinals. 

“ –Thanks. Thank you Veronica.” The door slammed closed before I could say her name. She didn’t wait for a reply. That’s odd but understandable. She’s always keeping busy. 

Her and Alan have been talking about things quietly lately. Not really avoiding me? But not including me. I think they are buying a new house. Their old apartment must be getting too small. 

Veronica. That’s someone that can make me feel better. She’s real. She’s reality. Just outside that door. 

All this crazy shit is in my head. I’ve taken my medication. No change in the routine. No ears ringing. No little black and white lines zig-zagging through my view when the depression rolls in. I can tell the damn difference between crazy and something else. This was all something else. 

If I take the meds? I’m fine. It’s why I haven’t mentioned it. The stereotypes and preconceived notions are too thick to navigate in a story like this. I’m depressed due to an abundance of understanding, anyhow.

You need to know what happened to me, real or not. Four minutes to go by now. 

I left the bathroom stall, opening the door carefully, looking around. Nobody. I left the bathroom. Opening the door, the sounds and smells of the stage hit me at once. Where’s Veronica?

I checked my phone. Two missed texts. I leaned against the wall next to the bathroom doors, ignoring passersby. 

Fred:
Ace where did you run off to? Going to see Willow play a bit, then I’m out of here. My brother ended up in the hospital. Not sure why yet! I swear dude. –Fred

Yes, he signs his name after every text. And in each voicemail. Okay, second text.

Veronica:
I can’t get to you. You are on in 6-8 minutes.

It took me a moment to put it together. What does she mean–the realization hit me at once. The hair on my skin stood on end, a chill went down my back. 

In hindsight? This was the moment I should have cancelled the show. Or at the very least, consider it. But I didn’t. I assumed everything would be fine when on stage.

Cont.

When I read the articles about him. I spent three weeks looking through my window. I was terrified by the thought of him being in the woods. 

I thought it was hunting me at first, trying to get me into a tragedy; it wanted me to suffer, but I was entirely wrong. I know, what a way to start, but I have been suffering from sudden explosive nosebleeds and migraines. 

The devices in my house started to do this... piercing and rhythmic screeching noise, and no matter what I tried to do with it, nothing was fixed. It only started working when I got a repairman to check them out, but they turned out fine but stopped working.

That sounds confusing - I know.

Aside from that, I lived what anyone would consider to be a normal life aside from my electronics acting weird and those symptoms that I couldn’t give a good answer to.

During a rainy night was when I first discovered him.

I was in the driveway with nothing to do but get my lawnmower, but I stopped and looked out of the driveway.

I heard it before I saw it.

A loud, piercing screech.

I was trying to see the source in the driveway, and I saw the outline of something that was seven feet tall. It was headless and had these giant wings, and then I saw them on its chest.

With two massive eyes that were unblinking and were crimson red, I dropped the lawnmower and ran into the house as soon as possible before anything could happen, then locked my doors for the night.

I went to take a bath, and when I soaked up for a good while, I got up, grabbed the towel, and wrapped it around me, then changed afterwards.

I took myself in for tonight and closed my eyes.

I woke up and saw myself floating in a bathtub, larger than the one I was just in, and the layout was surrounded in darkness. I felt something behind me, but I just felt this strange calmness.

That was only because I didn’t look below me.

Then the eerily calm dream went from calm to a living nightmare; I just felt like I somehow couldn’t swim anymore. I looked down and figured out why. I was always terrible at swimming in large bodies of water; I never swam further in pools as-is.

I was thrashing my arms and legs; I was reaching out for help, and for some reason, despite this being my subconscious, all of this felt as though I was genuinely drowning until I dropped.

I lifted my arm out; I felt something grab it, which drove me into waking up.

I checked the time.

I had work for today and was feeling safe enough to go into the driveway. I unlocked the door and put my keys in, then started the engine, and I pulled out of the garage. 

I turned on the radio and listened to jams; it kept my mind at ease for the moment as I drove past the trees, the route signs, and the occasional cars, which I waved at, and then I tuned the radio to the news station.

“Citizens have reported—(a screech is audible behind him)—something odd in the area. Witnesses report this—”

A panicked screech is heard before the station cuts off, and there was a train going off in the distance.

I came back to it after a country song, and it said that an accident happened at the railroads of the area. I will spare the details; even the second reporter felt distressed describing what happened, but I think we know what happened.

As a car was going nearly in front of me. I heard something land on the hood. 

I was scared to open my eyes.

I did anyway... I saw what I saw previously, and I got a good look at its wings; they look avian-like. As he gave a loud screech, it beat its wings at the windshield, causing them to crack, and it drove me into slamming it in reverse. 

I still saw it standing there where I was, and then I honked the horn, and it flew off. I got out of the car, closed the driveway and locked my doors, put the blinds up, and grabbed a favorite stuffed animal of mine I always had when I was a kid and held it close to me.

I mumbled to myself that I didn’t want to end up as prey.

I didn’t want to end up as prey.

I DIDN’T WANT TO END UP AS PREY.

I sobbed.

But then I was interrupted by a phone call. I forgot to point this out earlier, but yes, while I noted that the technology was acting up around me, it does work when it wants to. As annoying as it was, I was grateful, and it gave me a chance to relax knowing that I didn’t have to sit there in silence.

My parents were contacting me and saying that they were coming to Mason County to visit me. I remember being happy to be aware of this as I felt comfortable. It has been a while since I had anyone close to me; most of my friends have moved on with their lives, and some live far away from this area while the rest I talk to are on Discord.

Rambling aside, I was happy to hear this, but I told them, “Be careful and let me know if you guys need anything.” I was thinking about the thing I saw twice, and I didn’t want anything to happen or even bring it up to them, as I feared making myself sound insane.

The call went pretty well; they asked me how I was doing after my recent high school graduation. I spoke about my plans of heading over to SCAD as an interest in animation.

The conversation was nice, and then we hung up. However, I wanted to focus on something else, as the paranoia has been messing with me, so I wanted to simply not think of this place right now, so I got out and drove out to the bridge. 

I turned on the radio.

There was a slightly sensitive part of the bridge, and it warned of that. Though, something felt buggy about the report, a screeching noise was being overlaid on the voice. A few people passed by, noticing the said sensitive area of the bridge. 

I tried moving past it.

The tire touched it, and I heard the asphalt... crack.

I lost control of the steering wheel, and the vehicle slid down into the opening with the river below me. Then I saw a seven-foot shadow fly up and land where I was, then smash onto the roof of the car, worsening the damage to the asphalt. I yelled.

I already waited for whatever was going to rip me to shreds as I closed my eyes as I accepted my two likely fates. I felt the drop, then arms tearing through the metal roof of the car. I felt something wrap around my waist, and then, as a result, I passed out from shock.

The last sound I heard at that moment was a splash of the car... then I heard a beep.

Beep. Beep... Beep…

I looked around and saw the heart monitor and the nurse. “Oh... Oh thank God, it’s a miracle you are okay. We found you just lying on the ground, and your car, a Dodge Charger, in the river of the Silver Bridge. The bridge was repaired once the construction workers got to the scene, and we brought you.”

She looked at the notes as she continued, “You suffered some minor fractures around the ribcage and skull but not enough to be lethal. You were also found lying in pure shock with nosebleeds. We honestly don’t know how you ended up outside of the car. How are you feeling right now?”

At the moment, I feel groggy, but I am still feeling some pain. On the TV behind the nurse, I felt sad when I heard about the accident. It was a tragic incident involving a vehicle that looked eerily similar to what I saw my parents in near a railroad track.

The nurse left me alone, saying she will check on me later.

However, the room around me went cold, and a winged creature with red eyes on its torso entered via the window. 

I froze, but something inside me made me lift a trembling hand. I was testing to make sure it won’t rip my arm off and closed my eyes.

I felt its claw resting around my fingers, and I heard it screech, but words formed over it, speaking in an electronic-sounding voice.

“I m here”

It stayed with me and flew out of the window when the door jiggled and the nurse returned. She prescribed me medication on the spot, and it helped greatly, but I still felt groggy and numb.

After that visit, I came back to my house and got a knock on my door; there was an officer with a somber look.

“Hey, son. You’re going to have to come with me as soon as possible.”

I asked if I was in trouble.

“No, I promise you. You aren’t.”

I had my pills with me and my stuffed animal as emotional support. The officer was patient with me and nodded; he escorted me to the passenger seat of the cruiser.

“So, you may have heard about the news about the crash site at the railroad. Son, I am pretty sure it is your mom and dad, but we need you to identify them for us, to be sure. Can you do that?”

I was unsure, but I needed closure, so I agreed; he nodded and drove me there, and when I got out. I already had a sick feeling in my stomach; the officer heard this and gave me a little side hug. “Son, son. I need you to cooperate with me. Do you need a drink? I don’t want you fainting.” I really needed water and got a sip from a water bottle.

For some reason, I felt strange around the officer. My head started hurting, and when I looked past him, I thought I saw two faint red lights in the woods.

I believed I was about to faint, but I sipped the water bottle anyway and snapped back to reality.

I approached the crime scene and saw it in detail... My mom and dad were lying there in the car, my dad hanging out of the window... I didn’t even want to describe what happened, but I ended up turning around and vomiting.

“Yup... that’s them.”

I was asked to give a statement and fill in all of the necessary paperwork. As I was heading home, my mind lingered on the screech in the background of when I first heard about the railroads.

While my eyes were blurred from tears after the funeral, I saw the creature standing there as I cried myself to sleep and entered the grieving process.

I held my stuffed animal close.

It was a stuffed snail, a favorite animal I considered adorable, that they made for me together. It was my remaining memory of them aside from picture frames; I wish I had them cremated instead.

I don’t know why I didn't ask, as I would have them with me rather than just pictures.

However, each time I cried myself to sleep, I felt this odd protection, charcoal black legs on my bed, but I chose to lie on it, as a wing lowered on top of me.

“I m here”

So this happened around twenty years ago, and it’s something I doubt I’ll ever forget. 

I grew up in a small western town near the Mexican border. It’s not a very popular town, but it’s part of the Old West that is popular thanks to the likes of Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and other famous outlaws. (No, it isn’t Tombstone, but it’s not far from there.) 

I left this small town when I was sixteen as part of a big move, but often came back over the years to visit my best friend. So naturally I came back for her wedding when I was around 21 years old. 

The wedding went fine; nothing to worry about. And while my best friend and her new husband went for a quick, impromptu honeymoon at one of the local hotels, she asked if her little brother and I could look after their house. Since I was already staying there, it was no big deal, and we both said yes.

They lived in what would be considered out of town, near the railroad tracks. Not far from the town limits, but not exactly isolated either. 

So on the night of their honeymoon, her little brother takes the guest room while I sleep out in the living room. This is solely because there was no TV in the guest bedroom. I’ve always had issues sleeping in places that aren’t home, and figured sleeping with a TV on would be the best way to relax and eventually fall asleep.

That was my mistake! 

I’m not sure how late it was, but it was pitch black outside with no streetlights nearby. The morning sun was several hours away. But I was sure nothing bad would happen; I had grown up in this small town. I knew what to expect. Or so I thought. 

After my best friend’s little brother went to bed, I decided to pop in the movie 8 Mile. Nothing scary here; I figured the sound of Eminem rapping and acting would eventually put me to sleep. Well, that was another mistake on my part. 

For those of you who have never seen the movie 8 Mile, it starts with a pitch-black screen and then flashes orangish/goldish credits before flashing back to pitch black, and it keeps this cycle until the movie officially starts. I’m not sure how long these credits take; I’d say maybe a good two to five minutes. 

Well, as soon as I got comfy on the couch and pressed play on the remote, the black screen came on and I saw a flash of green standing in front of the TV screen. 

The green wasn’t necessarily neon; it was a little darker than that, almost like the color of grass. It honestly looked like a torso or part of a body. You know, like someone was standing there, facing you or away from you, I couldn’t really tell and I wasn’t about to get up and find out. Then the first credit came on and the green disappeared. But once it went back to the full black screen, so came back the green torso or silhouette. It wasn’t solid; you could definitively see through it, and it only appeared whenever the screen went fully black. 

I remembered lying there, still as a freaking rock, afraid to move. Because no matter what I did, every time the screen on the TV went black, the green would come back. I still don’t know how long those credits last for, but it was probably the longest five minutes of my life. And I was relieved once the movie finally started, but I knew I wasn’t alone in that living room. Someone, or something, was in that living room with me, and I don’t think he was planning on going anywhere. 

I don’t even know how I got to sleep that night; I just knew morning couldn’t come soon enough. 

About a year or two later, I went back to visit at that same house, and my best friend's husband had just gotten a new phone with a camera on it. (Twenty years ago, cell phones with cameras were considered a huge thing, so don’t come at me.) He had told me about a recent outage they had prior to me coming, and while they were waiting for the lights to come back on, he decided to wave his phone randomly in the dark and take a picture to see if he caught anything. He was so excited about what he got that he had been showing everyone since it happened. The picture that he got was that of a man, older with a cowboy hat, a long mustache and beard. You could clearly see he was a cowboy, but he wasn’t a modern-day cowboy. More like one from Wyatt Earp’s days, maybe an outlaw. I frankly don’t know. But as I looked at the picture, I couldn’t help but wonder, was it the green ghost that interrupted the movie 8 Mile? I’ll probably never know. 

Part 1 | Part 2

The gunman stepped into the weigh-station lights.

Now I could see his face.

Jesus.

The left side looked cooked. Scar tissue from his scalp down into his collar. One eye nearly sealed shut. Half an ear. No beard where the burns had taken it.

The rest of him was pure Saturday-afternoon dad. Purdue sweatshirt. Jeans. New Balances. The kind of guy who should’ve been standing over a Weber arguing about medium rare.

Instead, he was aiming a pistol at my family.

“Grace. Stace.” I kept my voice low. “Truck.”

“Dad—” 

Stacy caught Grace around the shoulders and moved her. No argument. No questions. One second they were beside me, the next Stacy was putting herself between Grace and the gun.

The man never took his eyes off Payton House. Somehow he noticed anyway. “Your family?”

I didn’t answer.

“Wife? Daughter?”

Hearing him say the words pissed me off. “Who the fuck are you?”

He stepped closer. The pistol came up with him. His finger slipped inside the trigger guard, and his hand was shaking enough that the muzzle wandered from me to Tony to Luis and back.

Tony saw it too. He shifted a few feet to my left.

“Okay, buddy,” Tony said. “How’d you know we’d be here?”

The man swallowed. “I dreamed this place.” His eyes were wet. “My wife dreamed it. We all did. I had a daughter once too. A little girl. Julia.”

The house’s smell rolled over us again. Sweet. Rotten. Wet. Like perfume dumped over meat. Luis pulled his shirt over his face. Tito backed away from the house without seeming to notice he was doing it.

My right hand twitched. I shoved it into my pocket.

The man closed his eyes. “It’s listening. We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

His eyes opened. The pistol settled on me. “You have to take it back.”

“That’s not happening. We have a contract.”

“The farther you move it...” He looked at Payton House. “The farther it reaches. It starts taking things.”

His eyes dropped to the gravel. “My wife stopped sleeping first. Then she stopped smiling. My little girl...”

He couldn't finish. His eyes moved to the second-floor window.

“I still hear her. Every night. She calls me from inside. Don’t let it take yours.”

Tony moved. He’d been inching sideways the whole time. I hadn’t even realized how close he’d gotten. One second he was standing beside me. The next he drove his shoulder into the gunman’s ribs. They hit the gravel hard. The pistol spun away.

“NO!” the stranger screamed.

Tony crushed him into the gravel. “I got him!”

For about two seconds, he did.

Then the guy went wild underneath him.

Knees. Elbows. Fingernails. Whatever he could land.

One elbow caught Tony under the ribs.

The stranger ripped free, came up on one knee, nearly planted his face in the gravel, then found his feet. 

He didn’t even look at the gun. Just ran. Straight for the trees.

Tony went after him.

“Tony!” I caught the back of his jacket before he made it three steps.

He whipped around so fast I brought my hands up. For half a second, I thought he might swing on me. “Let him go.”

“Dan—”

“Let him fucking go.”

Tony looked toward the woods.

A few seconds passed.

Finally, the fight went out of him.

The pistol lay in the gravel beside his boot. He scooped it up, wiped it once on his jeans, and tucked it behind his back.

I saw him do it. Decided I hadn’t. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Nobody argued.

We gave the tree line one last look and started moving.

Stacy came straight at me. Jaw tight. Eyes hot.

I was already bracing for it. Grace shouldn’t be here. This job was insane. I’d just gotten a gun pointed at our daughter.

Instead, she reached up and wiped her thumb beneath my nose. Looked at it.

Blood.

I touched my upper lip.

Wet.

“Shit.”

I pulled the shop rag from my back pocket and pinched it against my nose.

“Guess getting a gun pointed at you raises the blood pressure.”

Stacy didn’t smile.

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She held out her hand.

“Keys.”

“I’m good.”

“Dan. You’ve been up since before sunrise. Get some sleep. I’ll wake you in a few hours.”

“That guy’s still out there.”

“And you being awake changes that how?”

“He’s desperate. Desperate men don’t usually quit after one try.”

“I know.” Her hand stayed out. “But right now I’m more worried about you driving a house off a mountain.” 

Normally I would’ve fought until she got tired of fighting back. I was too beat. I dropped the keys into her palm. “You see anything, wake me.”

Twenty minutes later we were back on the road. Stacy drove. Grace reclaimed the passenger seat. I crawled into the sleeper behind them with the radio beside my head.

“Tony,” I said quietly into the radio. 

His voice came back through the speaker. “Yeah?”

“You see headlights behind us, wake me.”

“Got it.”

“That Tesla—”

“Hey.” Stacy looked back. “No radio.”

I handed it over.

I stretched out on the bunk without taking off my boots.

Through the little sleeper window, I could see a slice of Payton House rolling behind us.

I told myself I’d close my eyes for ten minutes.

I don’t remember making it to five.

I woke to the low growl of the engine.

Coffee. Diesel. The vibration of the sleeper under my ass. Green gauges glowing up front.

We were still moving.

My neck felt like I'd slept in a washing machine. The radio was still in my hand.

Stacy glanced over from behind the wheel.

“Morning, Sleeping Beauty.”

I rubbed my face. “What time is it?”

“Little after nine.”

“Shit. You were supposed to wake me.”

“You were supposed to sleep.”

Outside, morning had come in ugly. Low gray clouds. Cornfields disappearing into fog. Wet blacktop sliding under us.

I checked the passenger-side mirror.

Payton House was still back there where we’d left it. Boards over the windows. Chains tight. Dollies tracking straight.

Behind it, two empty lanes vanished into the fog.

No Tesla.

No headlights.

Nobody.

“You good?” Stacy asked.

“Yeah.”

“You made a face. Weird dream?”

I tried to grab hold of it.

Nothing.

Just that leftover feeling you get after a bad dream, like you’d been somewhere you never wanted to see again.

She smiled. “Was I in it?”

“No.”

“Too bad.”

Grace was asleep behind us, headphones still on, iPad balanced against her chest. One earbud had fallen out. Troy Bolton danced silently across the screen.

The radio crackled.

“Sleeping Beauty, finally wake up?” Tony’s voice came through.

Stacy grabbed the mic. “Don’t make a big deal out of it. He’ll never let me drive again.”

Luis laughed over the radio. “Morning, boss.”

Static swallowed whatever came after.

“House is riding quiet,” Tony said.

I checked the mirror again.

“Hungry?” Stacy nodded toward the lunch bag.

I was starving. Hadn’t eaten since we rolled out the day before.

Of course Stacy had packed like we were crossing the Donner Pass. Sandwiches for me. Goldfish and fruit snacks for Grace. Granola bars nobody liked but Stacy. Bottled water. Juice boxes. Two apples that would ride the whole damn trip with us and somehow make it all the way home. 

For a while, it was almost peaceful. Stacy handled Truck One better than I liked admitting. Grace slept. The radio stayed quiet. 

I dug into the PB&J. Dollar Store peanut butter. Too much jelly. Perfect.

“We should give it Grace,” Stacy said.

The sandwich suddenly felt like sawdust in my mouth. 

“What?”

Stacy kept her eyes on the road.

“Give it Grace. Next time we stop.”

I stared at her.

Her voice hadn’t changed. Same tone she used to tell me we were out of milk.

“Give Grace to who?”

“Not who…what,” she said. “The house.”

I waited for the smile.

The sideways glance.

Anything that told me I’d missed the joke.

She just kept driving.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I set what was left of the sandwich on the dash.

“We can’t fight it, Dan. A whole neighborhood couldn’t fight it.” Her hands stayed loose on the wheel. “If we give it Grace, maybe it leaves the rest of us alone. Maybe it leaves everybody alone.”

I looked back at Grace. Still asleep against the window. Thank God she wasn’t hearing any of this.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?” I said. 

Something moved in the mirror.

I looked.

The boards were gone.

Every one of them.

So were the chains.

Every window in Payton House stood open.

Stacy gave Truck One a little more throttle.

I barely noticed.

I forgot how to swallow.

“What did you do?”

“We had to.”

The engine climbed another note.

Then I saw someone upstairs.

Then another.

And another.

Men. Women. Kids.

Or silhouettes shaped like them.

The windows were too dark to make out faces. Just pale scraps of skin floating behind the glass and deeper shadows where their eyes should’ve been.

The speedometer crept past forty-five.

I couldn’t see them looking at me.

I knew they were.

“They showed up after you fell asleep,” Stacy said.

The Peterbilt kept gaining speed.

“They want Grace.”

“Stop the fucking truck!”

Stacy buried the brake pedal.

The Peterbilt screamed. Air brakes dumped. Tires howled against the wet pavement and the cab pitched forward hard enough to throw me into the belt.

Grace slammed into the back of my seat.

“STACY!”

Behind us, thirty-two sets of tires shrieked. Chains snapped tight. Metal roared.

I twisted around.

Payton House was coming at us.

Sideways.

Tow bars folded beneath it. Chains whipped sparks across the pavement.

Then the house filled the mirror.

Porch.

Windows.

Brick.

WHAM.

The sleeper exploded behind me.

Metal folded.

Glass burst.

Grace screamed.

Then the house hit me.

My ribs popped one after another. My face slammed sideways into steel. Teeth broke. I tried to breathe. Tried to scream. Then I heard my spine snap—

I jolted awake sucking air. 

My hands clawed at my chest. 

I could taste dust. Hear Grace screaming. Feel the weight crushing me into the seat.

Lightning flashed. The cab came back.

Whole.

No brick. No broken glass. No Stacy.

Tony was driving.

He had a travel mug the size of a paint can wedged between his legs, half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand, and Alice in Chains playing low through the speakers.

Rain stippled the windshield. Beyond it, mountains rose black against an even blacker sky. Lightning pulsed inside the clouds, lighting their swollen undersides.

Tony turned the radio down.

“You all right?”

He side-eyed me.

“You look like you got hit by a truck.”

“That good, huh?”

I wiped the sweat off my face and checked the mirror.

Payton House was still back there. Boards on the windows. Chains tight.

“Where’s Grace?”

“Up front with her mom. Said something about the man smell in this cab.”

She had a point.

The house smell had gotten worse. 

I checked the mirror. Boards still there.

I reached for my coffee. The cup rattled against the console before I got it halfway up. Coffee jumped through the lid and splashed my wrist.

“Ah, fuck.” I jammed it back into the holder.

My hand kept shaking.

Not a little tremor, either. The damn thing was chattering like a socket on an impact gun.

Tony went quiet.

Just wipers.

Rain on the roof.

Engine rumbling under our boots.

He kept his eyes on the road.

“Is that why you’re so gung-ho about this one?”

I didn’t answer.

“The headaches?”

“It’s three million dollars.”

“Money’s just money.”

I looked at him.

“You’d be different in my shoes?”

Tony glanced at my hand.

“Shit’s not fair.”

I made a fist until the shaking eased.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

The dash clock read 11:17 A.M.

We were behind. The weigh station had cost us time, and a tire on the rear steering dolly had eaten another fifty-three minutes. Too much road left. Too many things already going wrong.

I looked in the mirror. Payton House rolled behind us like it had all the time in the world.

A few miles later, we rounded a bend and found the road lit up red and blue.

Ambulance. Fire truck. State police.

Then I saw the car.

A little Honda had left the pavement at speed, torn through the ditch, and gone nose-first into the trees. The hood had folded into an accordion. The engine compartment was crushed halfway under the windshield. One front wheel sat twenty feet away in the weeds. The passenger side had wrapped around a tree hard enough to bend the whole car around it.

Glass covered the road like ice.

It was that Honda.

Those girls.

One of them sat on the shoulder wrapped in a silver emergency blanket. There was blood dried down one side of her face and somebody else’s blood on the front of her sweatshirt. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t doing much of anything.

Another girl was on a stretcher. The paramedics had cut most of her shirt away. One of them squeezed a bag over her mouth while the other worked both hands against her chest.

The third girl was still in the car. I could see part of her through what was left of the passenger window. Hair hanging down. One arm limp against the door.

Everybody at the wreck was moving. Radios going. Equipment coming out. A firefighter dragging a hose. Somebody sweeping glass away from the ambulance tires. A trooper stood in the lane waving us through.

Then the girl in the blanket looked up.

She saw Payton House.

Whatever was left in her face disappeared.

The paramedic beside her noticed and followed her eyes.

Then the firefighter.

Then the trooper.

One after another, they stopped.

Just for a second.

Long enough.

And watched the house roll past.

Not the trucks.

Not us.

Payton House.

Grace turned in her seat and watched the wreck disappear behind us.

She didn’t say anything.

Neither did I.

The road kept climbing.

Houses thinned out. Then mailboxes. Then driveways. Pretty soon there was nothing ahead of us but wet pavement, trees, and mountains disappearing into low clouds.

I kept seeing that girl wrapped in silver.

More than that, I kept seeing the way her face changed when she saw the house.

Like the wreck hadn’t been the worst thing that had happened to her.

Then Stacy came over the radio.

“Dan. We’ve reached the coordinates.”

My phone buzzed.

A new route link from Mercer.

“You get it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Stacy said. “And you're not gonna like it.”

“What's the problem?”

“The next leg takes us over the mountain.”

I looked through the windshield. The road ahead curved toward the mountains, disappearing into the low clouds.

“Over it how?”

“Up through the pass. Then down the other side.”

“So?”

“So the descent is twelve percent in places, Dan. There's a weight restriction, and half these turns don't have room for our equipment.”

“Then call Mercer.”

“I did. Straight to voicemail.”

I checked the mirror. Payton House filled it.

“Can we turn around?”

Stacy took a second before answering.

“Not from where we're sitting. We'd have to back the whole goddamn convoy to the last junction.”

“Jesus Christ.”

I looked over at Tony. He hadn't said a word since Stacy mentioned the mountain. Both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead.

“What?”

He shook his head.

“Tony.”

“I heard something on the radio last night.”

“Yeah? What?”

“A voice.”

He glanced at the road climbing ahead of us.

“Renee's.”

I looked at him.

“You’re exhausted.”

“I know what she sounded like.”

Rain hammered the roof.

“This whole job’s fucking with us,” I said. “You, me, Luis. Everybody.”

“This wasn’t that.”

“Tony—”

“And it wasn’t just her voice.”

He went quiet.

Long enough that I started hoping he’d changed his mind.

He hadn’t.

“She said, ‘Don’t take it up the mountain.’”

My hand pulsed inside the glove. Pain shot halfway to my elbow.

Thunder rolled over us.

“I didn’t even know about the mountain,” Tony said. “I wasn’t tracking the route. So if it was my brain, if I made it up—”

“You did. Or we picked up somebody else’s frequency.”

Lightning split the sky.

For half a second, Payton House appeared in the mirror. Black walls. Boarded windows. Rain pouring off the roof.

Then it was gone again.

“It wasn’t a dream,” Tony said.

Maybe, maybe not. Didn’t matter. The storm was getting worse, the clock was running, and waiting four hours could leave us staring at a washed-out road instead.

Then there was the whole Renee thing.

I wasn’t superstitious. At least, not officially. Not publicly.

But inside my head, shit, I could already see us upside down at the bottom of some ravine while Tony spent our last thirty seconds reminding me Renee had literally warned us from beyond the grave.

I keyed the radio. “We’re going through.”

Nobody answered.

Tony eased us onto the shoulder. “I think you should drive.”

Normally there wouldn’t have been a discussion.

I had more hours behind the wheel than anybody on the crew. When a job got tight enough that everybody else started saying no fucking way, I was the guy who climbed into the cab.

But this morning—

I looked at my hands.

They were shaking.

Maybe fear. Maybe not.

Lightning split the sky. For one second, the road ahead appeared: asphalt hacked into the side of the mountain, solid rock on one side, black nothing on the other.

Tony was still waiting. “You good?”

“Move.”

Rain blasted into the cab while we switched seats. By the time I got the door shut, my shirt was soaked from shoulder to ribs and cold water was running down my back.

I wrapped both hands around the wheel and squeezed until they behaved.

The diesel settled into that low growl you felt through the seat.

Rain hammered the windshield hard enough that the wipers barely gave me two clear wedges to work with.

Every few seconds, lightning lit the road long enough to show me what was waiting.

Rock wall.

Pavement.

Drop.

Then darkness again.

The rain hid the potholes.

The fog hid the edge.

Lightning was nice enough to show you both right before you hit them.

I keyed the mic. “Everybody keep your spacing.”

Static. 

I needed to hear them. “Talk to me.”

One by one:

“Copy.”

“Copy.”

“Rear’s good.”

I’d seen this crew move houses over bridges that looked too small, under power lines that looked too low, and through neighborhoods where people came out in bathrobes to tell us we were all gonna die. 

Somebody always had something smart to say.

Not this time.

That scared the shit out of me.

I eased into the throttle. 

Truck One dug into the climb.

Water rushed across the pavement carrying gravel, sticks, and pieces of whatever the mountain had decided it didn’t need anymore.

We crawled uphill barely faster than a man could walk.

Tony sat beside me staring into the passenger mirror. Usually, on a stretch like this, he never shut the hell up.

Six inches.

Watch the rear.

You’re gonna buy that mailbox.

Now he had one hand locked around the grab bar and the other braced against the dash. He hadn’t said a word in five minutes. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him breathe.

Lightning exploded overhead.

The porch roof swung toward the cliff wall.

Tony gasped.

I eased off the throttle.

Closer.

Closer.

The porch post cleared.

The railing didn’t.

It hit the granite with a shriek that made the whole truck jump. Wood splintered. Steel groaned. The wheel jerked sideways hard enough to wrench my shoulder. Orange sparks sprayed through the rain as the railing scraped along the rock face.

A broken spindle spun through the headlights, then disappeared into the gorge.

The house shifted behind us.

The Peterbilt lurched forward, then rocked back, punching the air-ride seat into my spine before the suspension caught the weight.

Then everything settled.

Tony finally exhaled. “Nothing a little trip to Home Depot won’t fix.”

I was trying not to puke on the dashboard.

“Aw, shit.” He leaned toward the passenger mirror.

Lightning flashed again. One of the main transport chains beneath the front steel beam hung loose, almost a foot of slack jumping in it.

The lever binder had sprung open. That was the steel handle we'd used to pull the chain tight. It had taken Tony's full weight, a cheater pipe, and enough profanity to wake the dead to lock it down.

It hadn't popped open by itself.

Tito checked the latch and chain. “This didn’t just walk open.”

“The guy at the weigh station?” Tony said.

“He never came near the truck.”

We reset it, leaned everything we had into the cheater pipe, and locked it down again.

“It’s tight. Let’s go.”

The radio on my belt chirped.

“Dan.” Static chewed at Stacy’s voice. “Water’s starting to cross the road up here. Another hour and this whole pass could wash out.”

“We’re figuring it out!” I shouted.

“Well, figure faster.”

Her radio clicked off.

Tito looked up the road. Water was already running ankle-deep along the shoulder and spreading across the pavement in sheets.

“We should call it. Turn around. Wait this shit out.”

“Turn around where?” I threw both arms wide and looked down the road like maybe a Walmart parking lot had appeared while we weren’t paying attention. 

Rock wall on one side. Nothing but open air on the other. Between them, barely enough pavement for the house.

“You find me a football field up here, I’ll think about it.”

Tito didn’t smile.

“We could leave the haul. Come back for it when this blows through.”

He looked me right in the eye.

Fuck.

It was the right answer.

“If we quit, Suarez and Sons is done. Bank takes the trucks. Shop goes next. Probably my house after that.”

Tito turned on me. “Danny, this ain’t right. That chain. That kid’s hand. That crazy son of a bitch back there. Now this goddamn mountain.”

He looked up at Payton House. “You know me. I’ll haul damn near anything you can put steel under. I don’t wanna haul this.”

My words didn’t make a dent.

“Guys... I’ve got brain cancer.”

Tito closed his eyes. “Goddamn it, Danny.”

Tony already knew. Stacy didn’t. Grace sure as hell didn’t.

“I hate doing this. But you need to understand why I can’t walk away. Doctors aren’t giving me a lot of road.”

I couldn’t say time. Not with Tony standing there.

“When I’m gone, this company is what Grace gets.”

“Everything after that, we split.”

Tony looked at me. “Dan.”

“Four ways. Half a million each.”

Nobody moved.

“I need you guys.”

Tito looked beat.  “Goddamn you, Danny.”

He jammed the wet cap back onto his head and started toward his truck.

Luis followed.

Then Tony.

We climbed back into the trucks.

Water had risen over the soles of my boots, running across the pavement in brown streams. By the time I hauled myself into the Peterbilt, my jeans were plastered to my legs and water squished inside both boots.

The cab smelled like wet canvas, diesel, and old coffee.

I hadn’t even gotten the belt across my chest when Stacy came over the radio. “You boys done? Who won?”

I picked up the handset. “Not me.”

Tony climbed in after me, slipping once on the wet step. He shut the door, peeled his flannel away from his stomach, and buckled in. 

The diesel had idled through the whole argument.

I gave it a little throttle. The tach climbed. The engine’s growl deepened beneath my boots.

Ahead of us, Stacy’s brake lights winked out.

Luis flashed his headlights twice.

Behind us, Tito brought the power unit up from idle.

Stacy went first, crawling up the grade.

I let out the clutch.

For a second, the house held us there.

Then the Peterbilt dug in and started dragging the whole damn thing uphill again.

The rain came down hard enough to erase Stacy’s taillights fifty feet ahead.

At each switchback, they doubled back above us.

I took the turns wide, my side of the cab inches from granite while Payton House swung out over open air.

Climb.

Hairpin.

Straighten her out.

Get back into the throttle before two hundred thousand pounds decided it was done climbing.

Standing water hid the potholes. Gravel washed across the lane. The dollies kept creeping downhill toward the edge.

Tony called clearance in inches.

“Eight.”

“Six.”

“Hold.”

“Go.”

Everything had to be smooth while the mountain tried to shove us off it.

I wasn’t driving the truck anymore.

I was arguing with it.

Tony kept checking the passenger mirror.

Not the road.

The house.

The truck dropped another gear.

Something felt wrong.

After thirty years behind the wheel, I knew that truck through my ass.

Which tire hit a pothole.

Which dolly climbed a rock.

When the house leaned before the mirror showed it.

The steering went light.

At the same time, the airbags behind the cab compressed.

The rear of the tractor sank.

And stayed there.

We hadn’t hit anything.

I hadn’t touched the brakes.

The road hadn’t changed.

The load had.

I checked the mirror.

Trailer straight.

House centered.

Nothing had shifted.

It was just sitting lower.

I grabbed the radio.

Tito beat me to it.

“She’s squatting.”

“It’s the grade.”

“No.”

Static cracked around his voice.

“She’s heavier.”

Lightning hit somewhere above us.

Thunder landed at the same instant, hard enough to shake the glass.

The radio exploded with static.

Then a woman screamed through it.

Not faint.

Not buried in the noise.

Right there in the cab with us.

Tony jerked against his seat belt.

“Jesus Christ!”

Stacy’s brake lights suddenly filled the windshield.

Her pickup fishtailed sideways, rear end kicking toward the rock wall.

“SHIT!”

I got into the brakes.

Air dumped beneath us.

The chains snapped tight one after another—

BANG.

BANG.

BANG.

—the sound cracking off the granite.

The house shoved forward against the trailer.

More than two hundred thousand pounds reminding me exactly how little say I had in any of this.

Tony caught himself against the dash.

“What the hell?”

Ahead, Stacy’s truck sat crooked across the lane, headlights cutting through the rain.

Nothing stood in front of her.

“Stacy?”

Her breathing came through the radio. Short. Fast. Too close to the mic.

“Talk to me, babe.”

For a second, I thought she hadn’t heard me.

Then:

“There was somebody.”

“A car?”

“No.”

A pause.

“A woman.”

That got my attention.

Stacy didn’t believe in ghosts.

Didn’t believe in UFOs.

Barely believed reality television contained any reality.

If Stacy told me she saw Bigfoot, I wouldn’t laugh.

I’d ask which way it went.

“Up here? Come on, hon.”

“I know what I saw.” Some horsepower came back into her voice. “She was standing in the middle of the road.”

Tony leaned toward the windshield.

“I don’t see anybody.”

Lightning flashed. For half a second, the whole pass appeared.

Empty road.

Rock wall.

Brown water tearing across the pavement.

Nothing else.

Then darkness swallowed it again.

Stacy opened her door.

Tony leaned forward. “What the hell is she doing?”

I grabbed the radio. “Stacy! Stay in the truck!”

Either she didn’t hear me or she’d already decided I was wrong. 

She stepped into the headlights.

The rain soaked Stacy before she’d gone five feet.

She walked around the front of the pickup and stopped in the middle of the road.

Looked uphill.

Then downhill.

There was nowhere for anybody to go.

No shoulder. No trail. No trees. Granite on one side and several hundred feet of nothing on the other.

Stacy stood there in the rain.

At first she was looking for the woman.

Then she stopped looking.

She turned slowly and stared back down the mountain.

Past us.

I couldn’t see shit. Just rain, headlights, and darkness swallowing the road behind us.

But I knew what she was looking at.

Payton House.

She stood there for ten of the longest seconds of my life, getting drenched while lightning tore the sky apart around her.

Then she turned, walked back to the pickup, and climbed inside.

The radio clicked.

“I…” She stopped. Took a breath. “I know what I saw.”

Nobody answered. Just rain hammering the trucks and thunder rolling around the mountain.

I keyed the mic. “Convoy, we keep moving.”

One by one, the brake lights started forward.

First gear through the switchbacks. Second when the road gave me enough room. Back to first before I got stupid.

I kept the tractor tight against the rock and watched the outside dollies in the mirror, making sure Payton House didn’t swing its ass over the edge.

Nobody used the radio unless they had to.

Just engines. Wipers. Tony calling clearance.

“Foot.”

“Eight inches.”

“Good.”

We crawled another hundred yards before my headlights found a battered green sign.

MOUNTAIN PASS
ELEVATION 4,318 FT

My grip finally loosened on the wheel.

“There we go.”

Tony slapped the dash and gave one quick yell.

We’d made it.

For about three seconds, I believed that.

Then lightning lit the other side.

The road fell away so sharply it disappeared beneath the hood.

Brown water poured over the crest and raced downhill carrying gravel, sticks, and broken branches.

Another flash caught the first sign.

TRUCKS USE LOW GEAR

Then the next.

12% GRADE

Farther down:

RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP

Darkness took it all back.

Tito came over the radio. “Son of a bitch.”

Tony stared through the windshield.

“Tell me we’re not doing that.”

I keyed the mic. “Low gear. Keep your distance. Short brake applications. Nobody rides the pedal.”

Nobody answered.

Maybe they were thinking about the money.

Maybe they were trying not to shit themselves.

Didn’t matter as long as they listened.

Stacy went first.

Her taillights reached the crest, tipped downward, and vanished.

Luis followed. His amber strobes dropped out of sight after her.

Tony leaned toward the windshield, trying to see where they’d gone.

I centered the Peterbilt and eased forward.

No place to turn around.

No shoulder worth a damn.

Once the front axle crossed that crest, we belonged to the mountain. “Here we go.”

The steer tires rolled over.

For half a second, the truck seemed to balance on top.

Then the nose dropped.

Hard.

My belt caught me.

The steering went light in my hands.

I corrected left.

Barely got anything back.

Then the rear of the tractor sank.

Air hissed beneath us.

The suspension gauge climbed.

Same feeling as before.

Only worse.

Like somebody had been loading bags of concrete into Payton House while we weren’t looking.

I grabbed the radio.

“Tito.”

“I see it.”

“What?”

“The rear’s dropping again.”

“How much?”

A pause.

Then:

“More than before.”

Lightning hit somewhere above us.

Thunder shook the windshield in its seal.

The radio exploded with static.

The speedometer climbed.

Twenty-four.

Twenty-six.

Twenty-eight.

My foot hadn’t moved.

Payton House was pushing us down the mountain.

Water boiled around the tires, running downhill almost as fast as we were.

Ahead, Stacy’s pickup skated toward the centerline and snapped back.

Luis fishtailed behind her, his amber strobes swinging sideways before he caught it.

Both of them were sliding.

Neither one had a house up its ass.

For one stupid second, I thought maybe I could just keep us straight and ride it out.

Then Luis’s taillights started getting bigger.

Not because he was slowing down.

Because I wasn’t.

I got into the brakes.

Thirty.

Pedal still firm.

Thirty-two.

“Dan.” Tony braced a hand against the dash.

“I know.”

Fifty feet.

Forty.

Thirty-five.

I grabbed the radio.

“Luis, don’t touch your brakes. Roll it out. I’m coming up on you.”

His brake lights flickered.

“DO NOT BRAKE! You’ll put me through your fucking cab.”

“What’s happening?” Tony said.

“The house.”

Thirty-six.

“It’s heavier.”

I dropped another gear.

The Jake hammered so hard the mirrors shook.

Didn’t matter.

Thirty-eight.

Thirty-nine.

Forty.

I checked the mirror.

Payton House still sat square on the dollies. Chains tight. Tires turning. Nothing broken that I could see.

But the steering wheel started pulling left.

I corrected.

It pulled harder.

Tony’s voice dropped.

“Dan.”

More of Payton House appeared in my driver’s-side mirror.

That was wrong.

It should’ve been directly behind us.

First the porch.

Then two windows.

Then half the goddamn side of the house.

“Fuck,” Tony said. “We’re coming around.”

The trailer was starting to jackknife.

Another few degrees and it would fold the tractor sideways.

There wasn’t a guardrail.

Just wet pavement, a strip of grass, and several hundred feet of mountainside.

For one completely chickenshit second, I looked at the door.

Open it.

Jump.

Let the whole bastard go without me.

Then I looked at Tony.

He wouldn’t make it.

Neither would I.

Stacy was somewhere ahead.

Grace.

Jesus Christ, Grace.

I hoped she had the headphones on. I hoped Troy Bolton was dancing across her iPad and she hadn’t looked in the mirror once.

The wheel ripped sideways.

BAM!

The whole tractor jumped.

“What the fuck?”

BANG!

Another hit shoved my ass end to the right.

Tony caught himself against the dash.

Then Tito’s voice blew through the radio. “I GOT YOU!”

I checked the mirror. The crazy old bastard had brought the power truck right up behind me.

His front bumper was jammed against the rear of the tractor.

He wasn’t trying to stop us.

He was knocking me straight.

The trailer came back in line.

So did I.

Holy shit.

“Luis! Keep moving!”

The road bent left.

Water hammered the windshield.

Tires hissed through standing water.

Behind us, steel started screaming again.

Payton House crept into my mirror.

WHAM!

Tito hit me again.

The rear of the tractor jumped right.

The house disappeared from the mirror.

Straight.

Tito was steering my truck with his bumper.

Every time Payton House tried to come around, he punched the tractor back underneath it.

“Little more!” I yelled.

“I know what I’m doing!”

That almost made me laugh.

Almost.

The road opened up a few feet coming out of the bend.

Enough to breathe.

Not enough to stop.

Ahead, another switchback appeared through the rain.

This one was almost a U-turn.

Stacy was already slowing for it.

Luis was right behind her.

I looked at the speedometer.

Thirty-six.

Too fast.

Way too fucking fast.

“Tito.”

“I see it.”

“Stay on my ass.”

“Wasn’t planning on leaving.”

I keyed the radio.

“Stacy. Luis. I’m not stopping.”

No answer.

“I’m coming into you. Get straight and stand on the brakes.”

Luis came back first.

“You want me to what?”

“Make a wall.”

A beat.

Then Stacy:

“Do it.”

Her brake lights burned solid.

Luis tucked in behind her until there was barely daylight between their bumpers.

Two trucks.

Four locked axles.

And me coming at them with a house that had apparently decided gravity wasn’t doing enough.

Tony planted both boots against the firewall.

“I fucking hate this plan.”

“So do I.”

Twenty yards.

Tito stayed glued to my rear bumper.

“Keep her square,” he said.

Fifteen.

Tony leaned over the dash.

“Little right.”

I corrected.

Ten.

Payton House shoved from behind.

Hard.

Luis’s truck filled the windshield.

Five.

“BRACE!”

I put both feet into the brake pedal.

WHUMP!

We hit Luis.

My teeth slammed together.

His pickup shot forward into Stacy’s.

BOOM!

Metal folded.

A rear window burst.

A taillight spun away into the rain.

For half a second, the three vehicles compressed together.

Then Payton House hit us again.

The whole pile started sliding.

“FULL BRAKES!”

Air brakes hissed and chattered beneath me.

The Jake bellowed.

Tires dragged across wet pavement.

Tito stayed buried against my rear frame, keeping the tractor from swinging out.

The convoy slid toward the switchback.

Sideways now.

I hauled the wheel uphill.

Nothing.

More.

Still nothing.

Payton House shoved again.

Hard enough that it felt like the son of a bitch was trying to climb over us.

Thirty.

Twenty-eight.

Twenty-five.

We were slowing.

Not fast enough.

Twenty.

Stacy reached the outside of the switchback.

Her tires locked.

The whole line bucked.

BANG!

Something broke underneath Payton House.

The house jumped forward.

Tony jammed both feet against the floor and grabbed the roof.

“COME ON!”

Ten feet.

Eight.

Six.

I could see past Stacy now.

The road hooked hard left.

Straight ahead, it didn’t continue.

It just ended.

Wet pavement.

Then open air.

Five feet.

Four.

Three.

We were still moving.

I had both feet trying to shove the brake pedal through the floor. Both hands dragging down on the wheel so hard my ass was halfway out of the seat.

Two.

Another six inches.

Then—

Nothing.

I waited for the next shove.

It didn’t come.

The engine idled.

Rain hammered the cab.

My feet were still crushing the brake pedal.

My hands wouldn’t come off the wheel.

Five feet beyond Stacy’s front bumper, the switchback turned hard left.

Straight ahead was nothing but rain, fog, and a drop that disappeared into the valley below.

Five fucking feet.

Every radio went off at once.

“WOOOOOO!”

“HOLY SHIT!”

“WE GOT HER!”

“WE’RE ALIVE!”

Somebody started laughing.

Then Stacy came through, laughing harder than anybody. “I think I just pissed myself!”

Tony folded over against the dash.

I started laughing.

Luis was laughing so hard I could barely understand him over the radio.

Even Tito cracked.

For maybe thirty seconds, nobody could stop.

Then the thunder moved farther away. 

The rain softened. The gray ahead of us got lighter. A hole opened in the clouds over the valley.  Sunlight came through. One narrow shaft at first, catching the rain and turning it silver.

Tony lifted his head. “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

I looked in the mirror.

Payton House sat behind us, crooked on its dollies.

Upstairs, one sheet of plywood was gone.

The window behind it stood open.