All-you-can-eat buffets, a lot of people love them, a lot of people see them as the ultimate sign of greed and gluttony, and some people are just confused by the whole thing.

I want to take a moment to help that last group. Some people are worried that you have to sit there all day and stuff your gullet in order to make it worth the money. Others just aren’t sure what the etiquette is in one.

Well, I am an experienced buffet-goer, and I recently went with two friends, one of whom was a complete stranger to the concept himself. So, I’ll use that trip as a guide to maximizing your All-you-can-eat experience, and not just how much you eat.

“So, this place is something pretty special?”

“It’s a local landmark for sure.”

My friends and I, we’ll just keep the names simple and call them Dave and Joe, arrived at around 6 PM. Dave being the buffet virgin, was cautiously curious about what was to come.

Tip 1: You pay at the door. Unless you absolutely need an ice-cold soda to enjoy your dinner, do not order a drink! They cost extra and you WILL be bugged for (typically not free) refills throughout your meal. The water is also ice cold, and free.

We handed over our entry fees and the three of us went straight to the plates.

“Holy shit, this place is… I don’t know. What the hell?” Dave was looking around in wonder and confusion.

“It can be pretty overwhelming bro. Just keep your eyes on the prize.”

That right there is Tip 2: Know what you want!

Buffets are designed such that you are overwhelmed by the options and grab one of these, one of those, Ooh! Definitely one of that. As you wander down the lanes, you find a full plate faster than you expected.

That’s all the cheap stuff. Your plate is full of canned beans and bread. The expensive foods are carefully at the end of the natural walking routes. Don’t just freewheel it. Plan what you want to eat, and grab it.

“It’s all labeled,” Joe added. “See those signs over each aisle? Just go get what you want.”

I took one of the mini-bowls and went straight to the soup warmers. Odd choice, I know, but I was really in the mood for some hearty beef stew. I glanced over as I went to make sure Joe was sticking by Dave. These buffets are pretty huge sometimes; can’t have him getting lost. Joe was loading up on curry at the Indian foods; he’s a real spice freak, thankfully right next to Dave grabbing some potstickers just on the opposite warmer.

My next target was the fried foods. I wanted a drumstick and maybe a country-fried steak. I capped it off with a warm roll, some collard greens, and, of course, I took my time putting gravy and sauce on everything.

Hey, so I wanted some comfort food. I have to be more than responsible enough during the sixty-plus hours a week I’m working these days.

I went to meet back up with the boys. Joe was staring at two different spicy noodle dishes like deciding between them would answer all of the questions in the universe. He’s like that, never just splits the difference even though that’s what the buffet is all about.

“Just grab a pile of both, dude.”

“I’m trying to decide if I want both.” He insisted, like always.

“If you just try a little of both, then you’ll know.” I was mostly just making the same argument as always for the fun of it now.

“Szechuan, I know it’s gonna be good.” He decided.

“Alright. Dave, you g-“ Dave wasn’t at the opposite warmer anymore.

“Where’s Dave?” My mood turned instantly.

“He’s been picking at the Chinese stuff the whole- Shit.” Joe went from sure of himself to panic even quicker than I had.

We instantly leapt to action and started looking around. We heard him before we saw him.

“…the hell?!” Dave’s shocked and horrified voice echoed down the rows.

That was enough to pick his direction. We ran. It didn’t take too long to spot him, frantically walking the rows. We pushed our hardest to reach him before he did something stupid.

“Hey there Dave!” I called out to him once we were close. “We told you man, we’ll show you the ropes; this place can be overwhelming.”

“Overwhelming? What the fuck is this place?!” He was heading into a full-blown meltdown.

“A buffet, dude.” Joe managed to say it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“A b-? This is not a buffet!” He was just short of screaming. “I must have passed forty rows! And none of this is food!”

“Yeah, it’s big. The whole place is set up to feel bigger; the aisles start to loop. The Chinese you were just at is only, like, five rows back.” I pointed up at the signs, and sure enough, it was there, with me and Dave’s plates left behind easily visible. “We told you to stick with us and know what you want. So what do you want Dave?”

He looked at the sign and the familiar sections we had just been at right behind us, as if we had barely run at all. His face twisted between half a dozen expressions as his mind tried to make sense of it.

“This is ridiculous, what the hell did you bring me into?! That was not there! None of this-!” He started to rant again.

“Dave!” I snapped and cut him off. “Do not make them call the manager. We are not getting kicked out of here. What do you want to eat?”

Dave’s face hovered between confusion and anger. Only when he noticed that lights had started to shut off around us and we all heard a door slam did he stumble backwards and nervously listened to me.

“Pie! Okay, pie.”

“Pie’s right there.” I pointed two rows ahead. “Grab him a slice of apple, Joe. And this?”

I gestured at the things he had been walking through.

“You wandered into the Scandinavian stuff. It just looked weird ‘cause it’s piles of leek goop and preserved fish ‘n crap. That’s it. It’s just a buffet, dude.”

Dave didn’t look convinced, but did look frightened enough to be mollified.

Joe came back, handed Dave his plate, and we all went to our table. Three glasses of water were waiting.

“This fried chicken is heaven on a plate.” I managed to speak between bites.

“Yep, Szechuan was definitely the right choice.” Joe was happily inhaling his noodles.

Dave just glared.

“Okay, cut the crap guys.” He spoke more quietly than before. “What the hell is this. And if you say ‘a buffet’, I swear to god I will freak out. Look around,” he gestured around with his arms to demonstrate “there are no employees, not one. Who the hell is refilling those warmers? And why are we the only people in a buffet, at dinner time, on a Friday? Are you guys with one of those prank shows?”

“Dude, just finish your food. We can talk about this more later.” Joe tried to placate him.

“I’m not playing along with this anymore. Just tell me what the hell this is!” He started to shout again.

Okay, rule number 3 time: The buffet is just like any other restaurant. It doesn’t matter that you serve yourself; it is a public place, behave with decorum! Who cares if the staff isn’t bringing you your food, try being a decent human being anyway. The same etiquette you would apply to any other sit-down restaurant applies to the buffet.

In short? Don’t make a scene.

“Just calm down, you have good food, it’s quiet, safe, don’t stress about it.” I tried to keep him calm.

“Calm down? You’ve been gaslighting me this whole evening. It loops? The warmers are all in a straight line dumbass. Look over there, where is the goddamn back wall? How can I not see the back of the restaurant even! It just, keeps going. That’s insane. And those… things on the warmers weren’t ‘Scandinavian food’ until you said it. I don’t know what this is, or how you’re doing it, but it’s either a messed-up prank or you’re insane.”

“Dave, the manager-“ He cut me off.

“I don’t care about a freaking manager! I’m leaving!” He stood up.

“Maybe that’s best.” I agreed. It was risky leaving with our plates full, but riskier staying at that point with how he was acting.

“You had better explain this stunt.” He seethed. “And trying to have me do that ‘payment’.” He drew the word out with disgust. “I’m not paying a buffet with my dead dog’s old collar.”

I froze cold in my tracks. Joe did exactly the same. We shared a look of horror.

“You paid, right?” My voice was tremulous with fear. “We helped you pick. You had forgotten that old thing was down there even; it’s not really a keepsake.”

“It’s not about the collar! It’s that buffets don’t take payment in ‘things you remember’.” He spoke with a mocking lilt, like talking about magical mumbo-jumbo. “This is seriously messed up and weird, guys. I just want to go home.”

He had almost reached the door by the end of his rant. Me and Joe saw it; no streetlights or shadows from the parking lot. The glass on the doors was pitch black. Dave clearly didn’t, or he didn’t care anymore.

Last rule: Do not EVER cheat the buffet. You pay your fee, you eat your food. Do not take food out. Do not leave a full plate. Most all buffets charge a waste fee for leaving plates of uneaten food. Ours lets us have a takeout carton for leftovers only as long as we reasonably ate from the plate; that’s more a generous exception than the norm though. Dining and dashing will get you banned.

Never get banned from the buffet.

We tried to pull Dave back from the door, we really did. But, he was already reaching for it before we screamed. I caught the briefest glimpse of something like teeth swimming in oil, black and deep and horrifying in a way I will never be able to properly describe, before I snapped to attention and turned around. I pulled Joe’s arm to spin him back too.

“Crap, we didn’t stack our plates, bro.” I forced it through my teeth as casually as I could.

“Oh man! You’re right!” Joe tried his best to match my tone, but it came out more like a choked sob. “Don’t want to be rude.”

“Guys! What the f-!” I tried to ignore the sounds of Dave scrambling backwards and screaming. “Oh god no! Please! No!”

We ravenously ate the remains on our plates. There was no point risking the food waste fee anymore. We were willing to for Dave, but we were forced to hear Dave screaming like a child while some wet thing macerated his flesh less than twenty feet away from us. So, that was a lost cause.

I hid my face in my food to hide the tears.

“We shouldn’t have brought him here.” Joe risked a whisper.

“And risk him coming alone? He never would have made it.”

We both knew why we took the risk, but neither of us felt right either.

We still don’t.

We dumped the scraps on one plate and stacked it on the other two. We placed our silverware on top and drink glasses beside, and we gave the table one quick sweep with a napkin to be kind.

When we turned around, it was over. The entrance was illuminated by the dull orange-yellow of the old streetlights in the parking lot. We took that to mean our performance was accepted. We would be allowed to leave.

We didn’t run. We walked out to my car with a calm decorum, and then we cried.

My God, did we cry.

If we ever have to take another newcomer, we will try a different approach.

But me? I will be back next week.

Because, for the price of a knock-off Oswald the rabbit figurine I managed to pull up one not very good memory of staring at while I had a fever when young, I can eat anything I want for two days, once at the buffet and the next from leftovers. If I want to feel like a king I can eat croquembouche and beluga caviar. Mostly, I just eat well though, and two days a week for free.

In this economy, that matters.

So, I will pull out another not-quite-forgotten relic from my past, I will pay a fee I cannot understand, and I will sit down in an empty building whose walls I cannot see, and I will eat food that cannot exist.

And when I need to, I will help others do the same. I hope I helped you.

Enjoy your meal.

[Part 1] (https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/s/DGu7ldMEaK)

Thank you all for reading my story. Thank you all for believing me. I want to add a little clarification to my last post.

1. My name is Andrew.

2. The events I described in my last post were from many years ago. I was 12 at the time of the events and am now 28.

3. Despite having told my story many times to many authorities and people I thought were my friends, no one believed me. I didn’t think it was worth sharing my story anymore, but I felt the need to write out in detail what, looking back, was the worst day of my life. I want my family to be remembered. I want my town to be remembered. Because according to the State of Minnesota, the town of Goldfield never existed, and neither did my mom Maggie, my dad Chuck, my sister Carmen, or anyone else who called it home.

4. I’m not originally from Goldfield. My parents moved us there from South Carolina because it was known for its colder weather, cloudy skies, and early sundowns, the perfect combination for a kid with my condition to live comfortably. Everyone I knew from Goldfield grew up there, so I haven’t been able to make contact with anyone who lost family there. I don’t want to give up hope of proving their existence. I can’t give up. Maybe one of you knows something about this and can help me. Maybe I am truly alone.

We will continue the story from exactly where I last left off. The moment I saw my family sitting in the backyard, facing the bright sun, unmoved from when they sat down nearly 20 hours before.

——————————————————————————————

I slid the sliding glass door to my backyard open. I wanted to call out to them, but the fear of what I believed to be the reality of the situation made me choke up. Against my best judgment, I stepped towards my family, the same looping fear and the need to validate it pushing me forward.

They never came back inside, the sun never went away. They never came back inside, the sun never went away. They never came back inside, the sun never went away.

I stepped into the light and felt the sun’s warm rays kiss my skin.

That feels nice. The thought formed in my subconscious before I could even process it.

I took a second step, and then another, and another, and then I stopped. My focus wavered, and my fear began to dissolve, being replaced with something else. I couldn’t help it. I slowly spread my arms out and turned to look up at the sun. My skin soaked up the warmth of its glow like a sponge. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

Looking back, I can best describe the feeling of sunbathing as if an angel came down and hugged me, covering every square inch of my exposed skin. Until that moment, I may as well have always been cold. For all I knew, I had never felt true warmth or happiness or love. Everything else before that moment was subpar living, but in that moment, I was in heaven.

After a few moments of basking in the sun for the first time in my life, I walked over, grabbed an extra lawn chair, and dragged it next to my sister’s before plopping down into it. I looked over at my happy family. My mom was sitting in the middle, holding both my dad’s and sister’s hands. They were all silently admiring the indescribably beautiful sun, watching its glittery, dancing rays with smiles transfixed on their faces. They didn’t seem to notice me joining them, but it didn’t matter.

I turned to watch the spectacle with them, grabbing my sister’s hand and breathing in deeply.

“The sun really does feel amazing,” I said.

I had completely forgotten what I was so worked up about moments ago. Who could possibly be upset on such a beautiful day like this? I am here with my family. I am warm and happy. If we all just sat here together forever, taking it all in, I don’t think I would mind it one bit.

I felt my heart still pounding in my chest from whatever it was that had spooked me. I racked my brain trying to remember what it was that caused me to get so worked up.

I probably just got overly dramatic again, just like I did last night, I told myself.

I turned, smiling, to Carmen and said, “Man, I really need to get out in the sun more,” before letting out an involuntary giggle.

She turned her head slightly to look at me, her dry-lipped smile not moving an inch. She looked funny. Her face was puffy and a deep crimson, her forehead was shiny, and her nose was starting to blister. This made me break into a more intense fit of giggles.

“Bowser didn’t do too good of a job reapplying sunscreen, did he?”

She didn’t respond. She just smiled blankly at me, then went right back to staring at the sun, not daring to blink out of fear she would miss even a second of its shimmering dance.

I looked over at Mom and Dad. They were so happy, and that made me happy.

They are the perfect parents, I thought to myself.

They always took care of me and loved me, even though they uprooted their whole life in South Carolina and moved us out here because of my condition.

Carmen was a trooper too. She had friends out there that she lost so I could have a childhood where I could experience the outdoors. Sure, she threw the occasional tantrum growing up, but what teenage girl wouldn’t? She also wasn’t the nicest to me, but I didn’t blame her for that either. It was all in the past. She was my big sister, and I loved her. I gave her hand a little squeeze.

Oh, Bowser! I thought to myself. Almost forgot about my best bud.

I leaned forward and looked past my dad. All I could see of my dog was his legs and tail sticking out from behind the chair.

“Who’s a good boy?” I called out to him.

He didn’t move. Not even a tail wag.

I giggled some more.

“Must be sleeping,” I said, leaning back into my chair to focus on the sun once more.

Our little family sat together like this for a while in pure bliss.

I often think back on this moment we had together. Although I can now fully comprehend the horror that surrounds it, which to this day haunts me, I can’t help but remember how great it felt sunbathing hand in hand with them. It was the last happy moment we ever had together. It was the last time we were all together as a family.

You are probably wondering how I escaped the sun’s grasp when my family didn’t even try. Well, despite the waves of euphoric pleasure I got from soaking in the dancing beams of light, I also felt a creeping fear in the back of my mind after about 15 minutes of exposure. The fear urged me to check my skin and make sure I wasn’t burning. It urged me to cover up and retreat back inside where the UV rays couldn’t harm me. This was a fear that my parents (especially my mother) had instilled in me growing up in an effort to ensure I didn’t get badly burned when playing outside. On that day, the fear not only prevented me from being badly sunburned, it saved my life.

The skin on my arms was already turning red, and I could feel the phantom pain of the sunburns to come tingling on my skin. I was extremely pale, so any signs of color change on my skin were immediate cause for alarm. I saw this, and despite my sun-drunk state, I began panicking.
The previously silent fear now took over the forefront of my mind. I stood up, wide-eyed, staring at my red forearm. I let go of my sister’s hand as my heart started thumping even harder than it already was. I felt the rush of adrenaline kick in. I suddenly became much more clear-headed as the pleasure of the sun gave way to the wave of fears that rushed into my mind like a tidal wave. I began hyperventilating as I remembered all my worries from the past day.

My family all turned their heads to look at me, their crusty smiles unmoved, their skin stretched taut and red across their faces. That terrified me further. I fell backwards and pushed myself away from them until my back was against the fence. My instincts screamed at me to retreat into the house, so I scrambled to my feet and ran past them through the open glass door.

I slid into the house as if the sun itself was chasing me into it. The first thing I did was run to the phone in the kitchen and call 911. My family needed help, and I couldn’t do it. I went out there to help them and ended up sitting down with them. What was I thinking? What the hell was wrong with me? I was laughing in my sister’s face as she was slowly dying. I was content to stay out there, unprotected from the sun for hours, and inevitably succumb to the same fate as they were.

The phone rang and rang and rang before the automated voice message clicked on. No one had picked up.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, COME ON!”

I dialed again. It’s 911. Someone always picks up when you call 911.

…

…

…

…

No one picked up.

In desperation, I called the only other number I knew off the top of my head, Hudson’s. It rang and rang and rang, and then, thank God, he picked up.

“Hudson?! Hudson, it’s me! Something is wrong with my family! I need help. I can’t call 911. Where are your parents? I need them to help me!”

“Did you go outside yet?” he asked in a dry, raspy voice.

“Wha—what? Yes, I did! I need help! Where are your parents???”

“They’re here… with me… at the park… Come to the park and lay in the sun with us… It feels…” He breathed deeply. “Amazing.”

“Hudson, PLEASE, PLEASE snap out of it. I need help. My family needs help,” I begged, tears streaming down my face. I was openly sobbing at this point, my last hope fading away before me.

“Please go inside. It’s not safe. You are going to die. The sun isn’t safe, Hudson. Please.”

No matter how hard I pleaded, he didn’t respond. He didn’t hang up either. I heard a soft thud of him dropping the flip phone in the grass. I yelled through the phone for him to get out of the sun, but all I could hear were symphonies of weak laughter in the background and the occasional chuckle of my dying friend among them.

I left the phone dangling from the cord and curled up in a ball on the cold kitchen floor. I was trapped in my home, my family slowly roasting in the backyard, my best friend a 15-minute walk away suffering the same fate in Pineridge Park. 911 was unresponsive, and there wasn’t an adult I could reach out to for help.

In a last desperate attempt to understand what was happening, I got up and grabbed the remote and clicked on the TV, switching to the local news channel.

The screen switched from live shot to live shot of different parts of our small town, with a rotating news banner fixed on the bottom of the screen that read:

“It’s a beautiful day in Goldfield.” — “Come outside and join us.” — “The sun feels amazing!”

First, it showed a live shot of the farmers market. Vendors and customers alike were strewn about the sunny sidewalks and grassy patches. Some were standing with arms outstretched, some were splayed out on the ground like starfish, and some were sitting back in chairs just like my family was. The shady stands of the market vendor tents were abandoned, and their stock was left forgotten. Everyone was looking at the sun.

Next, it showed the center square in downtown. Hundreds had come out of the surrounding buildings to flood the city center, weakly pushing and shoving one another when they got in the way of the sun. A few people had removed articles of clothing, evidently to expose more skin to its rays. One man was completely nude, arms outstretched and laughing and moaning in pleasure as the sun hit him full force.

A few people were laid out on the dirty street. Some were laughing, some were silently smiling at the sun with the same dry-lipped smile as my family. One elderly lady was clearly already dead, her skin crimson red and lifeless from what I imagined was heatstroke. I knew she was dead because she was no longer looking at the sun. Instead, her head was turned to the side, eyes staring blankly past the news camera. She was smiling.

Finally, the screen flicked to Pineridge Park. At first, I didn’t see anything unusual. The park looked more or less abandoned. The shady park was covered with huge Eastern white pine trees that offered ample shade. However, there was one unshaded field in the center that was a popular picnic spot amongst the locals.

My stomach dropped.

In that sunny field were hundreds of people packed in like sardines, fighting for their place in the sun. They crawled over one another like maggots on a dead thing. The field looked like a writhing hill of flesh. Looking at it made me feel sick.

Hudson is in there, I thought, horrorstruck.

My best and only friend was somewhere in that pile. He had been able to answer my call, so I assumed and hoped he was somewhere on the top. But he was a kid like me, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before a much stronger adult forced him down out of the sun, crushing him underneath the mound of humans.

I turned the TV off.

Part of me wanted to just give up, to just go out into the sun and let the unnatural happiness take over once more. We would all die, yes, but at least we would die together. At least we would die happy.

Another part of me, the part that won, wanted to go outside, grab my family one by one, and drag them into the house before they suffered the same fate as that poor old lady.

I made up my mind. I would go out again. This time, however, I would leave with complete protection from the sun.

If my theory was correct, I would only fall victim to the sun if I felt it on my skin. Praying to God that my theory was correct, I ran up to my room, went into my closet, and began pulling out all my winter clothes. I put on my heavy black snow pants, my thick black winter boots, a pair of black winter gloves, a UV-protection long-sleeved shirt, and a ski balaclava.

I was about to grab my sunglasses when I saw my Master Chief helmet from Halloween sitting on my dresser.

“Fuck it.”

I grabbed that instead, put it on, and headed downstairs.
On the coat hanger next to the sliding glass door was my dad’s favorite winter coat. It was many sizes too big for me, but that was the exact kind of extra protection I wanted right then. I put it on, the sleeves going down way past my hands, and I stepped up to the open sliding glass door.

I took a few moments, mentally bracing myself.

“I will save my family, then I will save Hudson… I have no other choice.”

I stepped into the sunlight once more.

I always knew my grandmother’s jewelry box was wrong. When she passed away last month, the rest of the family refused to touch it. They claimed it gave them headaches, that the faint smell of copper and formaldehyde clinging to the wood was too offensive. But as her only grandchild, the burden of her estate fell to me, and I brought the heavy mahogany box into my apartment. That was the worst mistake of my life.

The box is an ornate, oppressive piece of Victorian craftsmanship. The wood is stained so dark it looks like coagulated blood, edged with tarnished silver filigree that resembles intertwined thorns. But it’s the ballerina inside that makes your stomach drop.

She isn’t made of plastic or cheap porcelain. Her skin has the yellowish, matte texture of polished, aged bone. When you look closely through a magnifying glass, you can see tiny, microscopic pores—like human skeletal remains. Her eyes are two hollowed-out sockets set with jagged chips of black obsidian that seem to track you across the room. Her tutu isn't silk; it's a stiff, brittle mesh woven from coarse, greying human hair.

When you wind the silver key in the back, the mechanism doesn't just chime. It groans. The internal gears sound like teeth grinding together, forcing the bone figurine to move. Her joints don't spin smoothly; they snap and pop, mimicking a grotesque, agonizingly disjointed arabesque to a warped, agonizingly slow rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

I placed it on my nightstand. The first night, the nightmare began.

I woke up at 3:14 AM to a wet, rhythmic clicking sound right next to my ear.

Click. Snap. Click.

The room was freezing. I could see my breath pluming in the pale moonlight. I turned my head slowly. The lid of the jewelry box was propped wide open, yawning like a mouth. Inside, the bone ballerina was spinning so violently that her hair-tutu was whistling through the air. But she wasn't on her metal peg anymore. The silver rod was bare. She had grown.

She was now six inches tall, her elongated, skeletal legs stretching out of the box, stepping onto my nightstand.

I tried to scream, but the air caught in my throat. I was entirely paralyzed by a suffocating wave of sleep paralysis. I could only watch in absolute horror as the entity crawled out of the box. Her bone joints popped with the sickening sound of a compound fracture. Crack.

She didn't just dance; she mutated as she moved. With every agonizing spin, her limbs stretched longer, the bone splintering and reforming, growing larger. The music wasn't coming from the box anymore. The distorted Swan Lake melody was chiming directly from inside her ribcage, vibrating out of her hollow chest like a dying music box trapped in a wet throat.

Crack. Snap. Tap.

She hopped off the nightstand and landed on my chest.

The weight was immense—she felt like she weighed fifty pounds, pressing the breath out of my lungs. Up close, I could smell her. She smelled of a freshly opened grave and rancid machine oil. Those jagged obsidian eyes stared directly into mine. Then, her jaw—a tiny, hinged piece of human jawbone—dropped open far wider than anatomically possible.

A thick, black, viscous fluid began to drip from her mouth, splashing onto my face. It was ice cold and tasted like rust.

"The audience must not leave," a voice scraped out of her open throat. It sounded like two rusted iron plates grinding together, layered beneath the frantic, hyper-speed chiming of a broken spring.

With a sudden, violent jerk, she began to pirouette directly on my sternum. The razor-sharp points of her bone toes sliced right through my t-shirt, tearing into my flesh. The pain shattered my paralysis. I let out a blood-curdling shriek, threw my arms up, and violently shoved the growing monstrosity off me.

She hit the hardwood floor with a heavy, wet thud and immediately scrambled backward on all fours like a massive, skeletal spider. Her limbs were now the size of a human infant's, snapping and bending backward as she retreated into the pitch-black shadows beneath my bed.

I bolted. I didn't grab my shoes. I didn't grab my wallet. I tore open my bedroom door, sprinted down the hallway, and locked myself in the bathroom at the end of the hall.

That was two hours ago. The sun still hasn't risen.

The apartment is dead silent, except for the floorboards right outside the bathroom door. They are creaking under immense weight. Whatever is out there isn't six inches tall anymore. It's heavy. It's massive.

And just a second ago, the silver key on the jewelry box back in my bedroom began to wind itself up again, the loud, metallic crank, crank, crank echoing down the hall.

It started about a year ago. One day, a day that nobody could recall, a day that no one was able to really remember, we all forgot the name of our city.

The street signs, the landmarks, even our IDs still bore the name of our city, but no one could read the name, nor could they remember it. It was as if the information was actively being purged from our minds.

Then came the disappearances. At first only a few dozen people went missing. The city wasn’t exactly a stranger to missing person’s cases, but the consistency with which people were starting to just upright vanish became alarming.

But no one ever looked for them.

Streets became littered with missing person’s flyers. Grandparents, friends, children, none were immune. Eventually even the mayor just outright vanished. The city council held an emergency election and just continued on with business as usual.

For all my concern and apparent awareness of these strange events, never once did I bother to look. Never once did I dare to pick my head up and peak at the ever darkening sky. Never once did I question the ever encroaching fog.

Soon, the sun itself vanished. It still hung in the sky, but it had changed. It hid behind the strange fog that had slowly grown over the past few months. Eventually so too did the cycle of day and night.

As of today, I believe I am all that remains in this place. This city I call home. This city none can remember. The air is filled with the smell of fire and frost, both burning my nose indistinguishable from one another. The sky too rained ash and snow, mixing together into a soft gray powder that piled up around the city. Part of me felt uneasy to see this, I wonder why.

I do not remember much about my life before the fog. I believe I lived in this city, likely was born here, maybe had friends, hopefully had a job. I know I need to eat, I know that the food never expires, I know that I have to keep warm, and I know that I cannot sleep.

The city is cold these days, if not apparent by the snow. Often times I am forced to take shelter in a decaying sky scraper, building a fire to keep warm out of the fancy lobby chairs of what once was a downtown bank.

Every day the city grows colder.

Time blends together. I cannot separate the days that I spend scavenging from the days I spend resting. My eyes grow heavy but my mind will not relent, it must not relent. If I should sleep for but a moment I fear I might too disappear.

I have to keep moving, I can never stay in one spot too long. I find tracks and marks in places I revisit, tracks that do not belong to me, tracks that could not have been made by any human. In the false night I hear screams, I hear howling, or perhaps that is merely the sound of the frozen winds slipping between the dilapidated megastructures. Perhaps the crunching of bone and gnawing of flesh I hear is the impacts from icicles that fall from the buildings above the heavens.

I am searching for something, for someone.

I scuttle about this frozen hellscape, nothing more than a rat in a godless maze, hooked on a scent I cannot identify. I run headstrong into the unknown and familiar streets I used to know so very well.

The winds come and go, a predictable tide of breeze, imperfect in its cycle. Like staggered breaths. The city is safest when the winds are still, no risk of ice crashing down from above nor does the ash get picked up as easily. It is also at its quietest.

When the winds are gusting however, that is when the tracks appear. Long, jagged, impossibly angular streaks are raked into the snow and ash. Distant windows shatter and crash. Then comes the howling, the screaming, the deafening cacophony that feels like a knife being driven into my ears. It had grown quieter as time passed, but it still remains impossibly loud. I’ve learnt that it’s best to not join their chorus, no matter how much it hurts to resist.

I am struggling to remain alert and aware of myself and my surroundings. I fear whatever plague or curse or god-knows-what is still eating away at my mind. Cause and effect are becoming more fluid concepts. Events that I swore had happened long ago now repeat before my eyes, albeit with abstract stone constructs replacing that which had long since decayed. Statues would move and recreate an idea of what the busy streets once looked like. Sculptures would drag across the roadways in line with the echoes of traffic. Sometimes I swear I see myself walking somewhere, but every time I try to follow it I lose track of it. Whether it be in a crowd, or just around a corner. Perhaps this world is playing tricks on me, toying with me, mocking me.

Or was that really me?

There was nothing beyond the fog, beyond the limits of the city, but a massive frozen ocean, icy peaks evoked imagery of the once lively shoreline. The roads that once led elsewhere now led into the frozen sea. At one point I believe I had wanted to escape, to return to the life I once knew, but that dream is dead.

If I ever had that dream at all, for this is a dreamless realm.

The frigid and rigid frosted bars of my mental prison continue to squeeze my mind in ways I find difficult to understand. Reality and, else-wise, blend into unrecognizable shapes and malformed ideas of what they might have been. Another source of light has joined what used to be the sun in the sky, their twin radiance muffled behind the suffocating curtain of fog that has all but snuffed out the flame of life in this place.

I see a body before me.

A massive corpse had fallen from above, strewn about the half-destroyed and decaying buildings of the city. The city now smelt of ozone and fire. The corpse was draped in a beautifully radiant robe of the finest gold to have ever graced the eyes of mortals. Its face was obscured by a platinum mane so magnificent that even in death it billowed in the wind with a life of its own. Its skin was dark, charred, hollow.

I knew not how, only that this must be what I was searching for, waiting for, praying for.

I could not meaningfully measure the time it took to scale the wreckage. I could no longer recall how many times I fell to my death, only to be rejected by its embrace. My limbs had long since turned black from frostbite, but still they obeyed me. The sound of crumbling rocks now accompanied me wherever I went as I continued to scale the summit of the fallen corpse.

Only when I was face to face with the corpse did I realize what it was. From up here, it looked almost as if the body sat restfully upon a throne of ruins. How long had it been here? How long had I been here?

It didn’t matter. I was here now. Nothing can change that, nothing can undo that.

For I am but a corpse of identity, forgetting that it had already died so long ago. For The Cataclysm had destroyed Truth. For I am but a fragment of Truth, scattered across the infinite. For I am dreamless amongst the dreams of man. For I am the ruined throne and the corpse upon which it sat.

For I was once another, and am no longer.

I found the dog because he was scratching at the side door.

The storm had been building since late afternoon. By 8:00, the back steps had disappeared beneath the snow, and the wind was pushing enough of it against the windows that I kept hearing little dry taps from the living room. The scratching was different: three quick drags across the door, a pause, then another.

I turned on the outside light. A dog stood on the landing with his nose close to the glass. He was some kind of shepherd mix, maybe 60 pounds, dark across the back with tan legs and a white patch under his chin. Snow had collected along his spine and packed itself between his toes. He squinted when the light came on and lifted one paw.

There was no collar.

"Come on."

He didn't need to be asked twice. As soon as I opened the door, he squeezed past my legs and shook himself hard enough to spray the cabinets. I locked the door again and got an old towel from the laundry room.

He stood on the kitchen mat while I dried him. I expected to find blood somewhere under the snow or at least a paw rubbed raw, but he looked healthy. His ribs weren't showing. His coat was clean beneath the wet outer layer, and he let me handle his legs and check between his toes without pulling away.

"Somebody's looking for you."

His tail knocked once against a cabinet.

My house is about fifteen minutes outside town, on a road with more trees than houses. There are a few places scattered along the first couple of miles, but only one close enough that I can usually see a porch light through the woods. That night the snow had swallowed it.

There wasn't much I could do with the dog until morning. The roads had been getting bad when I'd come home and were buried now. If the plows got through overnight, I'd take him into town and have the vet check for a chip.

I gave him water and half a bowl of the dry food I keep for my sister's dog. He ate, drank, and spent a while sniffing around the kitchen before moving into the living room. He inspected the couch, the coffee table and the stack of firewood beside the stove, then curled up on the rug.

The wind weakened as the evening went on. Snow kept falling, but the house became quiet enough that I could hear it brushing against the windows. I got up to close the curtains and saw someone standing beyond the driveway.

The porch light covered part of the yard. Beyond it, the ground faded into gray and the trees were little more than vertical streaks through the snow. The figure stood where the open part of the property narrowed between them.

I switched off the lamp beside me. Without my reflection in the glass, I could see it better.

It was tall enough that I initially put it farther away than it was. Its arms hung straight down, and its shoulders were narrow. Snow passed in front of it in sheets, hiding its lower body and exposing it again.

I looked back at the dog. "Looks like somebody came looking for you."

His nails clicked across the floor as he came to the window beside me. He stared outside with his ears forward.

I turned on the porch light. The brighter light didn't reach the figure, but it gave me a better sense of the ground between us. The yard was almost flat there. I knew that because I'd mowed it for six years.

The figure's knees were almost level with the ends of its hands.

Everything above the hips was proportioned close enough to a person. Narrow chest. Long arms, but not unusually so. A head that seemed a little small from where I stood. Most of its height was in the legs.

I took out my phone and tried the camera. Zooming only broke the image apart. Snow streaked across the screen, and the figure became a collection of gray blocks surrounding the pale blur of a face.

The dog began to growl.

The figure's legs started running.

Its arms stayed down. Its shoulders remained level while the legs drove through the snow beneath them, each stride throwing white behind its feet. The torso hardly moved. Its head didn't dip with the impacts. It came across the field with its face held toward the house.

I stumbled backward into the coffee table. The dog barked and scrambled away from the window with me. When I looked outside again, the figure had stopped perhaps 120 feet from the house.

Snow drifted through the gouged path behind it. Its arms hung at its sides again, its shoulders level, its head facing the living-room window.

I called 911.

The dispatcher got my address and asked what was happening.

"There's somebody in my yard."

"Do you know who it is?"

"No."

"Can you describe him?"

I looked through the curtain again. "I don't think it's a man."

She asked what I meant, and I gave her what I could: one person, no visible weapon, about 120 feet from the house, not attempting to enter.

She told me a deputy had been dispatched, but crashes and road conditions were delaying responses. I was to lock the doors, stay inside and not approach whoever was in the yard.

"That's not going to be a problem."

I asked how long the delay might be. Her answer broke apart halfway through, followed by two clipped pieces of her voice before the call dropped. The next attempt didn't connect.

I checked the doors and windows, closed the blinds facing the road and pulled the dining-room curtains. The shotgun I kept upstairs hadn't been fired in more than a year, but I loaded it and brought it down with the remaining shells in my pocket.

The dog had returned to the living-room window. The figure hadn't moved.

Snow had begun collecting on its shoulders and along one side of its head. I watched for the rise of its chest and couldn't see one. After a while the dog lost interest in growling. He drank from his bowl, nosed the empty food dish and settled near the couch while I moved between windows trying to keep track of what was outside.

The figure stayed where it was.

I left the phone on the table and went to the kitchen for water.

When I came back, the yard was empty. The tracks still ended where the figure had been standing.

I checked the front porch and driveway from the windows. The dog had stayed in the kitchen, but while I was looking toward the road his head turned toward the side of the house.

A dark shape passed the dining-room window.

I raised the shotgun and waited against the wall. There was no knock, no sound against the siding. When I looked through the edge of the blind, the figure was standing beside the shed.

From there I could finally see the legs without the snowfall hiding them. They had the structure of human legs stretched far beyond human proportions. Bare feet disappeared into the snow. The thighs were long and narrow, with more muscle on them than the rest of the body seemed capable of carrying. Above the hips, the thing looked almost starved. Its arms hung beside a narrow rib cage, the skin gray beneath the outside light.

The dog barked at the window. I caught him by the scruff and pulled him back until he stopped fighting me, then shut the curtain.

There were paw prints in the snow near the figure's feet.

Most had softened around the edges, but I could still follow them from behind the shed toward the house. I looked at the dog standing in the kitchen doorway, then back outside.

The figure ran.

I saw the first stride clearly this time. One bare foot came out of the snow and the knee rose almost to its waist. The other leg drove down, launching the entire body forward without moving the arms at all. It passed the dining-room window, and a pale shape flashed through the narrow pane in the side door.

I brought the shotgun up and stopped several feet away. The dog stood beside me growling at the glass.

One of the figure's shoulders was visible outside, along with the side of its head and an arm hanging straight down. It had reached the landing.

I waited for it to touch the door, but it didn't.

Snow melted against the glass and ran down in thin lines. Minutes passed without a hand reaching for the knob or a shoulder leaning against the door. Eventually the weight of the shotgun began to ache through my arms and I lowered it.

The clock on the stove read 9:17.

The figure had crossed most of my property in three bursts.

By 9:30, it still hadn't touched the door. The dog paced between the kitchen and living room, occasionally coming back to sniff along the bottom of it. When he started nosing the corner of the mat, I pulled him away.

"Get back."

He waited until I released him, then tried to return.

The mat was marked with the mud he'd tracked inside earlier. Outside, the landing had almost disappeared beneath fresh snow, but several shallow depressions remained where he'd stood scratching at the door. Beyond them, his paw prints continued across the open ground beside the house toward the shed.

From the dining-room window, I could pick them out in pieces. The dog's tracks passed the shed and continued toward the back of the property. The creature's deeper prints came from the same direction. Its stride was too long to land precisely over the dog's, but the two trails crossed and separated and crossed again.

I went upstairs for a better view. From the dark bedroom, the dog's route was easier to follow. His tracks wandered in from the trees, changed direction near the shed and continued toward the house. The other trail was made of deep holes separated by long stretches of untouched snow.

It wasn't straight either. Where the dog's path bent, so did the creature's. Both ended at my side door.

The dog barked downstairs.

By the time I returned, the creature was walking away.

It crossed toward the shed with the same rigid upper body it had when standing still. At that speed, its proportions looked no more natural. Each step carried it several feet, but the arms didn't swing and its shoulders barely moved.

It passed the shed and continued toward the back of the property until the snowfall swallowed it. The dog came to stand beside me at the dining-room window.

At 10:05, he started pacing. He went from the living room to the kitchen, stopped at the side door, then came back. A few minutes later he did it again. The third time, he put his nose against the bottom of the door and whined.

"No."

He circled the kitchen table and returned. I wasn't opening the door while I had no idea where the creature had gone.

At 10:16, he squatted beside the cabinets and pissed on the floor.

"Ah, come on."

He moved away with his ears back while urine spread across the tile. I put the shotgun on the counter and cleaned it up. The dog watched from the doorway while I went through half a roll of paper towels and sprayed the floor twice.

"That's my fault."

His tail moved once.

As the next hour passed, the storm began to weaken. I checked the property often enough that I stopped looking at the clock each time. The shed remained empty. So did the tree line.

The dog fell asleep beside the couch. The shotgun stayed within reach while I watched the windows and listened to the house settle around me.

By 11:00, the creature had been gone for more than an hour.

The dog woke and returned to the kitchen.

"No."

He whined.

"You already went."

He stared at me.

"Technically."

He pawed the door.

Another layer of snow had softened the creature's footprints until some were little more than shadows. I checked the yard from downstairs, then from the bedroom window. Nothing stood between the house and the trees.

The dog was still waiting when I came back down. I lasted another ten minutes.

"Right outside."

The moment I cracked the side door, cold air pushed into the kitchen and the dog shoved his nose toward the opening. I held him back long enough to scan the yard before letting him squeeze past.

He stopped on the landing to sniff the snow.

"Go."

I stayed in the doorway with the shotgun while he wandered about ten feet into the yard. He sniffed one patch, moved to another and drifted toward the corner of the house.

"Stay where I can see you."

He ignored me.

A clump of dead grass poked through the snow nearby. He investigated it, moved on, and started toward the shed.

"Hey. No. Come back."

He looked at me and took a few steps in my direction before finding something else worth smelling.

"Seriously?"

A small pine stood near the edge of the yard. He circled it once, went halfway around again, doubled back over his own tracks and buried his nose in the snow.

The tree line remained empty.

When he finally lifted his leg against the pine, I called him back. He started toward me, veered toward the shed one more time, then responded to a sharper "Inside" and trotted up the steps.

I shut and locked the door behind him. The entire trip had taken less than two minutes.

His new tracks were a mess compared with the trail that had brought him to my house. They wandered toward the corner, cut back across the yard, approached the shed, circled the pine and doubled over themselves before returning to the side door.

By 11:18, the dog was back on the rug licking snow from between his toes.

A low growl brought his head up. His ears pointed toward the window.

Something moved between the trees.

The figure stepped into the open farther back than where I'd first seen it, almost beyond the reach of the outside lights. Snow covered its shoulders. It stood facing the house while the dog moved closer to my leg.

One of the figure's feet lifted.

Its legs tore forward.

The first burst carried it across the open ground, but instead of coming toward the house, it cut sideways and stopped where the dog had first lowered his nose after leaving the steps. The next burst took it toward the corner of the house.

It stopped, changed direction and crossed back toward the center of the yard. The dog pressed against my leg.

The figure sprinted toward the shed. It made the same useless turn the dog had made and crossed the same few feet twice. When it reached the small pine, it went around so quickly that one foot slipped sideways and carved a trench through the snow while the torso above it remained upright.

It came around the other side, halfway around again, then back across its own tracks.

I had watched the dog do all of it.

The figure stopped over the patch where the dog had buried his nose. From there it ran to the pine and stood beside the trunk where he'd lifted his leg.

Only one part of the route remained. The tracks between the pine and the side door were almost straight.

The figure turned its face toward the house.

Its legs began to run.

By the time I reached the kitchen, it was standing on the landing again. The dog barked behind me. I kept him back while the pale face settled into the narrow pane of glass.

This time I could see it clearly enough to know there was nothing obviously missing. It had two eyes, a nose and a mouth. The features were narrow and colorless, but arranged the way they should have been.

Its eyes pointed into the kitchen.

I moved to one side. They stayed where they were.

The creature wasn't watching me.

The dog's tracks ended on the other side of the door. He had been inside the entire time the thing ran around the yard. It hadn't cut across the route to reach him.

I thought about the first trail coming out of the woods. The dog had been asleep beside my couch when the creature followed that one to the same door.

I didn't know how it could find the tracks beneath falling snow or why it sometimes stood still for minutes before running again. But it wasn't following the dog.

It was following where the dog had been.

The creature stayed at the door until sometime after midnight. When it left, it walked. It passed the pine without stopping, continued beyond the shed and disappeared into the trees.

For nearly an hour nothing moved outside. The snow dwindled to a few scattered flakes, leaving the trails in the yard exposed instead of slowly burying them. Two routes now ended at the house. One shallow and wandering. The other deep and widely spaced.

The dog eventually came over and pushed his head beneath my hand. I rubbed the fur behind his ears.

"You picked a hell of a house."

He leaned against my leg.

I could wait until morning. That was what I intended to do. The deputy already had my address, the plows would eventually reach my road, and the dog could piss wherever he wanted until then. I moved his water bowl into the living room and sat with him.

Nearly an hour passed before I found myself studying the tracks again.

The newest trail left the side door, wandered around the yard and returned to the same place. The creature had followed it from beginning to end.

If the dog hadn't come back, the trail wouldn't have come back either.

I kept my hand on his neck.

There was another way to make a trail leave the property.

Mine.

My boots were beside the kitchen mat and my coat hung behind the door. I could cross the yard, reach the road and head toward the nearest house. If the creature found my path the way it found the dog's, there would be nothing leading it back here.

I put on my boots. The dog watched from the kitchen doorway while I pulled on my coat. He wagged his tail when I picked up the shotgun.

At the front window, I looked across the yard to the road. The creature had crossed the distance from the trees to the driveway before I'd managed to get away from the living-room window. I pictured that open stretch with no glass between us, then the road beyond it and the woods on the other side.

I didn't know whether it could follow me at all. Every trail I'd seen it follow belonged to the dog.

I stood there until I started getting hot inside the coat, then took it off.

The dog followed me back into the kitchen.

"Don't."

He sat down.

I wasn't sure whether I was talking to him.

I left the coat on the table instead of hanging it back up. The dog had made it through the woods once already. He'd crossed several miles in a snowstorm without an injury I could find. Whatever the creature was doing, it wasn't very good at it. It moved faster than anything I'd ever seen, but it kept stopping. It lost the trail for long stretches. The dog had been in my house for hours before it arrived.

If I sent him out and he kept moving, he could stay ahead of it.

That was what I told myself.

The dog came close enough to rest his chin on my knee.

"You're somebody's dog."

His tail brushed the floor.

There had to be a house on the other side of those woods. Maybe more than one. He hadn't appeared starving or half frozen. He knew people. He knew what a kitchen was and what a food bowl meant. There was a decent chance that if I let him go, he'd do exactly what he'd done before.

He'd find a door.

An old blue nylon collar was buried in the junk drawer beneath batteries, dead pens and takeout menus. It had belonged to my sister's dog before she replaced it. I tightened it several notches and slipped it around the shepherd's neck to check the fit.

He stood patiently between my knees while I wrote my phone number on a strip of white tape and wrapped it around the collar.

When I clipped it around his neck, he leaned forward and licked the side of my hand.

My fingers stayed on the buckle.

"Shit."

He licked me again.

I unclipped it.

The collar sat on the kitchen table while the dog wandered back to the living room and lay down. I stood at the side door looking at the tracks. Nothing appeared in the yard.

I went back to the couch and sat beside him. He rolled partly onto his side when I scratched his chest, one back foot kicking once against the rug.

The house was warm. The doors were locked. The creature had never tried to break a window or turn a handle. Maybe we could sit there until daylight and nothing else would happen.

Maybe I had already seen everything it could do.

Every trail ended at my house.

The dog fell asleep with his head against my foot. I stayed there until the clock passed 1:00.

When he woke, I put the collar back on him.

I chose the front door because none of his earlier tracks began there. The road was visible beyond the yard, a white strip between two darker lines of trees.

The dog stood beside me while I checked outside. I opened the door, and he stepped onto the porch before looking back.

"Go on."

He went down one step and stopped.

"Go."

At the bottom, he turned and looked at me. For a second I reached toward the handle, but the dog turned away before I touched it.

He crossed the yard slowly, stopping once to smell the snow near the driveway. I stayed behind the glass and watched him reach the road.

He looked back at the house.

I didn't open the door.

The snow on the far bank came almost to his belly. He pushed through it, climbed onto higher ground and shook himself. Then he went into the trees.

I watched until the dark between the trunks swallowed him.

The collar had my number on it. If he found a house, somebody would call. If he found his own house, even better. He'd already crossed those woods once and survived.

The kitchen still had his water bowl on the floor.

I left it there.

Sometime before 2:00, the creature returned.

From the upstairs window, I watched it emerge from the trees behind the house. Instead of running, it walked slowly across the back of the yard, stopped, changed direction and walked again.

It reached the side of the house and disappeared from view.

I went downstairs.

The creature came around the corner at a walk and stopped near the front steps. The dog's newest tracks began a few feet away.

For several minutes, it stood between the porch and the driveway.

Then one leg moved.

The creature crossed the yard in a burst and stopped near the driveway, exactly where the dog had paused to smell the snow. The next sprint carried it across the road to the far bank.

Beyond it, the dog's tracks continued between the trees.

The creature ran into the woods.

It didn't come back.

The deputy reached my house sometime after 3:00. By then there was nothing to show him except the tracks. He walked partway into the yard, shined his flashlight over the deeper impressions and took my statement from the porch. Whatever he thought of it, he kept to himself.

I didn't sleep after he left.

Daylight turned the woods gray. A plow came through shortly after 7:00, throwing dirty snow across the end of my driveway. My phone had three bars again.

There was no dog in the yard.

By 9:00, I had started thinking he wasn't coming back.

My phone rang.

I didn't recognize the number.

"Hello?"

"Hi. This is going to sound weird, but did you have my dog last night?"

"Shepherd mix?"

"Yeah. Black and tan."

"Blue collar?"

"That's him. Your number's taped to it."

The man laughed, the exhausted kind that comes after you've spent hours expecting something bad.

"He's been gone since yesterday afternoon. We thought he was dead out there. I don't know how the hell he got that far."

"Where are you?"

He named a road several miles away, on the other side of the woods behind my property.

"Did he come back on his own?"

"About ten minutes ago. Scared the hell out of my wife. Something started scratching at the back door and there he was."

I went to the window.

"He's inside?"

"Yeah."

"Lock the door."

The man went quiet.

"What?"

"Lock your door."

"Why?"

Beyond the shed, the woods were still.

"Don't let him back out."

"He's standing right here."

"Good."

I hung up.

1.      Feed the dog

2.      Water the plants

3.      Take in the mail

4.      Sing to the crib

The list of chores was written on a sticky note on the fridge, stainless steel with a digital display, thing probably cost more than my car. I read the last chore over again. Sing to the crib, they had explained it to me when I arrived but still it gave me the creeps.

 

 

Pulling into the driveway that morning, I had to almost scrape my jaw off the floor. Such affluence I had never seen in all my life. Rounding the fountain in the front courtyard, the manor came into view, its enormous Victorian architecture blocking the rising sun behind it, creating an almost holy glow around its silhouette. The family were out the front when I arrived, loading their Luis Vuitton suitcases into their Range Rover. Standing on the steps leading into the house was Mrs Coldwell, a woman of fifty, though I would never have believed it if she hadn’t told me herself. She was the image of elegance and class, wrapped up in her fur coat and hat, her long thin legs adorned in black tights guiding the eye down to her black 5-inch heels. Noticing my arrival, she waved me over, a warm smile over her face. Mr Coldwell was standing by as his driver loaded the luggage into the car, he turned to face me, offering his hand for me to shake.

“Thank God, you’re here” I tried my best to not wilt before him as I clasped his hand. The mans booming voice and razor-sharp jaw made me feel small in his presence, which I suppose is exactly how he had managed to rise to CEO of Noxar Industries. The man was ten years older than his wife but still he also seemed cut from marble.

 

 

“In sake of full transparency, you really saved our arses when you replied to our ad. Usually of course, we would have had our butler take care of the house while we were away but just yesterday, he has seemingly taken ill.” He gave me a reassuring smile which told me his praise was genuine. The real truth of it was, they had saved my ass. I had been down to my last £50 when I had seen their ad for a week of housesitting paying £2000. I had initially assumed it was a scam but with so little to lose I had applied anyway. I suppose many others had thought the same as somehow; I got the job. I watched as his wife descended the steps to greet me, with each bounce her coat would rise slightly revealing a slither more of her upper thigh.

“This is my wife Margaret” Mr Coldwell announced proudly, gesturing to her now outplaced hand for me to also shake, I would’ve preferred to kiss her cheek.

“And this is my son Adam” he murmured gesturing more solemnly to the boy stood out to his side, a late teen on his phone. He didn’t raise his head to face me, his foppish black hair obscuring his eyes. In disapproval, Mr Coldwell theatrically cleared his throat, and the boy finally rose his gaze, shooting me a quick nod which seemed to double as “You alright?” and “Fuck off”.

 

 

Mr Coldwell led me into the house, the thick oak door giving way to the vast foyer. The space was so large and extravagant it bordered on parody; it reminded me more of a museum than anyone’s home. Mr Coldwell pompously guided me through the manor, stopping at every painting and ornament to explain its gilded history. In the living room, he introduced me to the dog, Harry, a sweet golden retriever which seemed to warm quickly to me, licking at my hands when I went to pet him.

“You can keep him outside if you like” Mr Coldwell seemed taken aback and somewhat offended at how Harry reacted. I suppose it’s no surprise for wealthy men to get possessive, even over their dogs.

Moving back into the foyer and up the stairs, we passed the enormous portrait of Laurence Coldwell, the man who built this place. Dressed in a suitably flashy outfit for the era and holding himself up by his cane, his stern stare surveyed the foyer below with contempt. The upstairs split into two hallways each leading down their respective ends of the house. Mr Coldwell explained that to the left were the family rooms and his study and to the right was the guest rooms and the nursery, which is where I would be staying.

“Nursery?” I hadn’t seen a young child outside. He begun to explain.

“Yes, well… it was for our youngest, Harry... until we… lost him” His earlier layer of pride had shed like snakeskin. What was left was an old man, falling adrift into the worst parts of his mind.

“I was meaning to ask you… for a favour. After the death, Margaret… struggled to cope. In fact, this the first time we’ve taken a trip away from home since it happened, and well… She’s developed this habit… a coping mechanism of sorts. Where she… sings… sings to the crib, like she used to sing to Jacob” He turned to me with pleading eyes. Surely, he couldn’t expect-

“Well, I sort of told her, in order to get her out of the house, that I would have someone do it in her absence…” He couldn’t even ask outright, instead leading me to the question with this weird dance. It was because he knew it was lunacy, but he also knew I wasn’t in a position to refuse.

“Sure, of course. Anything you need” It was pathetic.

 

The house is empty now. It looks a lot different in the dark, something about the vast space makes me feel uneasy. More hiding spots, I suppose. I tried my best to shake off these morbid thoughts as I moved back into the foyer. Henry brushed up against my leg which embarrassingly made me jump, the dog has barely left my side since I got here. I decided to have an early night, I’ll feel a lot better in the daytime. Moving up the stairs, the floorboards creaked with every slight shift of weight, everything seems too loud in this broad silence. Henry skipped up the steps ahead of me, I imagine I’d feel a lot worse about this place if he wasn’t here. I took the right down the hallway to the guest rooms, before he left Mr Coldwell had not so subtly mentioned that all the family rooms on the left were locked.

The guest room is a pretty simple affair for such a lavish place, I opened my bedside drawer and got out my clothes for the night. I had just begun to change when from the walls came this long winding groan, a stark reminder at the age of this place, probably the pipes. Despite this rationalisation, the sound had greatly unnerved me and I suddenly became aware the dog was no longer with me. It didn’t take me long to find him; he was stood just outside my door facing the room opposite mine – the nursery. Sing to the crib, I had no intention of doing it. After all, I don’t even think Mr Coldwell expected me to, he just needed something to tell his wife. But what if they found out I hadn’t done it, for a family of their station it wasn’t unlikely that this place was covered in secret cameras. This was a dream gig, a life raft in the sea of debt I had recently found myself in. Was I really going to risk screwing that up because of some crib?

I shuffled around Henry and tentatively tried the door…

But it didn’t budge, I even forced my shoulder against it, but still it remained sealed. I said a silent prayer of thanks and turned back to my room. Now at least if they were watching, I would have an excuse for why I didn’t do it. I tried to call Henry over from the door, but he remained still, staring straight ahead. I tried again, patting my knees but still he didn’t waver. All of a sudden, he leant back onto his hind legs and reached out with his front paws, placing his weight on the door and with a subtle click, the door came ajar. That wasn’t possible, I had almost ripped the handle off forcing my way in there just a second before. I took a moment to consider; in truth I had been looking for a way to get out of it before I had even tried to open the door. Perhaps, I had imagined I had tried a lot harder than I really had, merely loosening it slightly, but there was no getting out of it now. Henry pushed his way into the room, leaving me alone with the cavernous black of the doorway.

 

 

I sat before the threshold giving my eyes a moment to adjust. The room was barren and could hardly be described any longer as a nursery. There were no toys of any kind, the wallpaper had been stripped away, and all furniture had been removed. The only remnant of what this space use to be was the crib in the centre, empty. I reached in for the light switch on the wall to my right. Lighting the place did little to bring it any comfort, the bulb was starting to go, much dimmer than the lights in the rest of the house, leaving shadows in the corners of the room. Laid next to the crib was Henry, a tragic scene to behold, I wondered what he understood of what had happened. I hurried to get it over with, I didn’t wish to be in this room any longer than I had to. I pulled the lyrics of the song up on my phone and began.

 

“Rock a bye baby, on the tree top,

When the wind blows the cradle will rock.

When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,

And down will come baby, cradle and-“

 

Suddenly, Henry rose and skittered from the room so fast he hit into to door on the way out, closing it behind him. I continued.

 

“Rock a bye baby, gently you swing,

Over the cradle, Mother will sing,

Sweet is the lullaby over your nest

That tenderly sings my baby to rest.”

 

A long winding groan rose from the pipes again shaking the room. Hesitantly, I continued.

 

“From the high rooftops, down to the sea

No one's as dear as baby to me

Wee little hands, eyes shiny and bright

Now sound asleep until morning light”

 

The light above began to flicker, about to die. Time to finish this up.

“Rock a bye baby, on the tree top,

When the wind blows the cradle will rock.

When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,

And down will come baby, cradle and all”

 

With a pop the light goes out casting the room in black. I fumble behind me for the door and grasping the handle I pull…

It doesn’t budge; I pull harder now. Nothing. With both hands, I clasp down the handle and yank my whole body back. Finally, the door flys open but sends me tumbling back towards the crib. I rise to my feet and scramble out of the room slamming the door behind. I don’t care anymore; I’m never doing that again. I step into my room and take a moment to compose myself.

 

 

After that scare, I had trouble getting to sleep that night. Just when I would be about to drift off, I’d hear some creak or groan from the house and shoot up. Looking at the door expectantly waiting for something to burst in. Eventually though my exhaustion took me.

 

 

When I awoke this morning, the terror of the night before was gone, seemingly washed away by the morning sun. I could now look back at the night objectively and conclude everything that had happened could be explained as symptoms of an old house. Moaning pipes, faulty lighting and a fidgety door were hardly out of the norm and were certainly not cause for alarm. I was in fact beginning to feel rather embarrassed by how I had reacted when I came down to the kitchen this morning. I had just made a bowl for Henry, when I decided to reconsult the chore list they had left me on the fridge to ensure I hadn’t missed anything.

 

1.      Feed the dog

Check.

2.      Water the plants

Check.

3.      Take in the mail

Check.

4.      Sing to the crib

Unfortunately, Check.

5.      Lock the nursery door

All at once, the terror of last night was fresh and sharp. Had it really said that? Surely not, after all I didn’t even have a key for the room. Cautiously, I crept up the stairs. This time Henry didn’t follow, electing instead to remain at the bottom of the steps, watching me ascend. With every step, the stairs would let out a monstrous creak, the rhythm did nothing but increase my anticipation. But when I finally came to the upstairs landing, breath trapped in my lungs, I found nothing. Staring down the right hallway I found that the nursery door was in fact still closed. Again, my fear gave way to embarrassment, this house was too big, an unruly beast playing tricks on my mind. I went to my room to get my phone, maybe hearing a familiar voice would help put me at ease. I took it from the bedside table and had begun to dial my mother when-

Sitting on the bedside table, next to where my phone had been, was a key. Attached to it a label said “NURSERY”. With it was another sticky note like the one on the fridge.

Thank you for singing to me!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s election season in the United States, so if you’re here you’re probably getting a lot of these texts:

“CANDIDATE A is looking for your vote on November 3…”

“CANDIDATE B came up short this week on their fundraising goal…”

“We’re conducting a poll and we want to know: Do you support CANDIDATE C in the upcoming election?”

Some might be from politicians you love, others will be from candidates you hate, or you could be one of those apolitical people who thinks both sides are the same and casting a ballot is a waste. (I disagree, but this is not the forum for arguing about that.)

Most messages, though, are usually just annoying. I’ve been getting dozens and dozens, and to be honest, I thought they were innocuous too.

I was wrong. 

I opted out of one of these messages. Now someone is dead. 

It took barely 24 hours.

And I think I’m next.

Look, I know you think I’m joking. Or you saw the title of this post and started coming up with snarky things to say in the comments, like “oh no, did you accidentally donate $5???” or “lowkey this is probably a psyop from a campaign manager.”

But I am completely, 100 percent, swear-to-every-god-in-existence serious about this. 

It started early yesterday evening, when I got the message below. (The candidate name is partially redacted, but trust me — this is not a famous person. Unless you’ve had this experience, it’s not a name you’ve ever heard before.)

Rick (not my real name), I’m Conor with the Nathan [REDACTED] campaign. Did you know that Nathan [REDACTED] is the only candidate who truly cares about your safety?

I got the message while sitting on my couch, scrolling through a steady rotation of Reddit threads (what else?), and munching on some brand of tortilla chips I can’t recall, all to numb the ennui of life in 2026. Normally, I would have just kept scrolling — I had seen this name show up before and ignored it — but this text came at the end of a particularly frustrating day at work (I won’t go into it). So I wanted the satisfaction of rage-quitting at least one of these text chains instead of ignoring or deleting and “reporting junk,” again (which I’m pretty sure does nothing).

I opened it up and, without reading further, I typed:

STOP

—then sent and closed my messaging app, thinking that was that.

Seconds later, I got a reply:

Reply X O 9 6 ♋︎ ♏︎ ♒︎ ♏︎ ♋︎ 6 9 O X to unsubscribe.

Confused, I scrolled up and, sure enough, after the paragraph about Nathan [REDACTED] and safety, the instructions to unsubscribe were exactly that:

Reply X O 9 6 ♋︎ ♏︎ ♒︎ ♏︎ ♋︎ 6 9 O X to unsubscribe.

Feeling a little spicy, and admittedly thinking this might be a candidate who I wouldn’t have any interest in anyway, I shot back: 

“Why?”

Immediately, they replied:

Or else I’ll keep texting. ;-)

That annoyed me to no end. I’ve done text-banking before (yeah, ironic), so I know how it works. Volunteers aren’t supposed to antagonize potential voters. You’re supposed to answer questions honestly, if at all, and most importantly move on to the next text. It’s a volume game.

So I’m not proud of myself for what came next. I wrote some colorful language before copy-pasting the strange lettering and firing it back, then adding, “There, are you happy?”

I expected an immediate reply, some snarky 19-year-old giving me a cry face emoji before letting me be. Instead, the text bubble popped up and disappeared a few times, before finally something came back: 

Thank you :-D

That was it.

Or so I thought.

Last night was normal, so were this morning and today. My job had a Zoom staff meeting, and our cameras had to be on, so I sat there and tried to look interested for an hour and 13 minutes. I ate microwave kimbap for a very late lunch. A volunteer for a politician I actually do support dropped off a lawn sign, one with a single wooden stake in the back, even though I don’t have a yard. I got four more election texts, including a desperate missive from a Senate candidate from another state saying their race could be won or lost at that very moment (despite it still being October).

When my roommate, Jeff, left for a party, I was thrilled. OK, I was a little stung he didn’t invite me, but that’s just how it goes with Jeff — a big, jolly guy with a clean-cut beard, long hair and not a lot of money but a whole lot of personality. Meanwhile, I'm the sort who enjoys clicking “random article” on Wikipedia all night and getting in fights with political volunteers via text message. I understand why I wasn’t first on his Partiful list.

Anyway, after Jeff left, I set the lawn sign on the coffee table, plopped down on our hand-me-down couch, and fired up Netflix to watch Mindhunter for probably the fifth time. Except this weird feeling suddenly came over me. It felt like a deep, immense fear I couldn’t place. And it wasn’t because a fictionalized version of the BTK Killer showed up on my screen. Something seemed really, undeniably wrong.

Then I heard it:

Drip… Drip… Drip…

It got louder in my head each time. I shot off the couch and rushed to the kitchen.

It was just the faucet. Jeff hadn’t turned it off all the way before leaving. "He’s so popular that he’s always in a rush," I grumbled to myself, surely projecting. Whatever. I slammed down the handle, then reversed course, grabbed a glass and filled it with water, thinking maybe dehydration was causing all this. I chugged the whole thing and considered getting more— 

—but when I finished it, that’s when I saw the first anomaly. 

Off in the distance, but just barely in my peripheral vision, a human figure stood in the doorway to our apartment’s hallway. I swiveled my head to look at it, but it was gone.

“Jeff?”

No answer. I stood there, dribble on my chin, half expecting my roommate/frenemy to jump out and burst into a good-natured laugh, as if being afraid in that situation was a sign of me being uptight. It never happened.

More angry at that made-up scenario than frightened at the prospect of a strange person being in my apartment, I returned to the couch and pressed play again. The opening credits began to roll. I really settled in.

Ding!

A text message.

It was from Nathan [REDACTED's] campaign:

Hi :0

I stared at it, confused and scared at first but quickly moving into anger at the idea that some random volunteer thought it was OK to mess with me. Instead of engaging, I swiped to delete the thread. But before I could press the trash can button, another text arrived:

I can see you O_O

Worry coursed through my veins.

Another message. Not words. An image.

It was my face, my actual face, from the POV of my phone’s front-facing camera.

Like I’d been hacked.

I threw down my phone, stood up and said a few expletives, before tearing through my apartment looking in every nook and cranny. Then I realized that was stupid; if they’d truly gotten control of my phone, they could be on Mars and my privacy would still be violated.

I put a strip of masking tape over each lens, rushed out the door and guided my Nissan to the closest Apple store, arriving with 13 minutes left until it closed.

“Yeah, there’s no evidence you’ve been hacked,” the Genius told me after spending 12 minutes inspecting my phone.

“Someone literally took a photo of me with my own camera.”

“Sure it wasn’t you?”

I didn’t even have a verbal response to that.

“I could get you a new phone and we can boot everyone else off your AppleID?”

I scowled; this was not the answer I was looking for. But I’d been doing pretty well at work, having a roommate was saving me money, and I just really, really didn’t like the idea of leaving without addressing this somehow. So I said yes and the Genius, to his credit, stayed 20 minutes after closing to get me set with my new device.

Back at home, Jeff was still out. He’s always the life of the party, after all. I was actually a little disappointed about his absence for once; I really wanted to tell someone what happened. And, I’ll admit, I wanted to feel safe. But I figured Jeff would be home soon. Even he needed to sleep sometimes. 

I dropped my wallet, phone and keys on the table by the door, told myself everything would be fine, and moseyed over to the kitchen for a snack from the fridge. 

THUD — a sound came from the living room. I spun my head around but saw nothing. I stood there, motionless, until the cold air of the fridge started stinging my face. I shook it off, closed the door, and slowly walked toward whatever I’d heard. 

It was my phone, on the hardwood floor.

I picked it up. The screen was cracked. 

And it had a new message.

Proposition [REDACTED] will cost taxpayers billions—

I exhaled deeply, for once relieved to see a spam message like this.

My comfort only lasted a few seconds.

Ding!

Nathan [REDACTED] knows you value your safety. So what are you gonna do about it, Rick?

Fear and panic took over. I frenetically typed “I fckign unsubs ribed. No wI’m going to report you” and sent it without fixing any of the typos. I didn’t care. I had to take this person down. 

I searched Nathan [REDCACTED] and my city and state to see who this horrible human was and how I could get to him.

I found nothing. Not even one lowly WordPress site. 

I typed in so many different phrases — “nathan [redacted] election,” “nathan [redacted] candidate” “nathan [redacted] ballot” — but he was a ghost. Even the AI description said something like “We couldn’t find any connection between Nathan [REDACTED] and elections…” before I closed it.

Then another message came. A photo again.

Of me, from the side, standing in my living room, wearing my typical brandless black hoodie and second-hand jeans, holding my phone, right at that very moment. 

I heard whispers. Heavy breathing. 

And I got one more message:

U thought I hacked ur phone ijbol 

I ran out of my apartment — I have no idea if I locked the door or not— and called 911. All I got were three loud beeps and “we’re sorry, the number you have dialed has been disconnected.” 

I hustled to my car, which was parked by the curb about a block away. Footsteps fell behind me. I glanced back and saw in the orange street lamps the outline not of one person, but a dozen.

My speedwalk became a run. Then a sprint.

When I arrived at my car, like a fool I fumbled my keys and dropped them to the ground. My shaking hands finally grabbed them and beeped it open. I threw myself inside, locked the doors, and turned around to check out the people following me—

—but there was nothing. Just an empty residential road after nightfall.

I stared. Squinted. Looked everywhere, maybe they were hiding in shadows or behind the bushes. But I couldn’t make out a thing. 

I banged my fists into the steering wheel and screamed, partly in fear, partly out of frustration. I smashed the engine button and sped out of there, blasting a random radio station as loud as I could just in case. Maybe if I couldn’t hear any weird noises, I wouldn’t see anything weird either. 

I drove to the closest police precinct. The cop at the front desk looked at me like I was claiming aliens brought back Elvis.

I whipped out my phone so fast he flinched for a second as if it might be a gun, but soon I was scrolling through texts to show him all that had happened.

“All this looks like is you fighting with some volunteer,” he said.

I tried to stay calm. I just needed to explain more. “No, he hacked my phone, then broke into my—”

But when I went to show them, the photos were gone. 

“Well— OK—” I stammered. “He’s not a real politician though!” I continued on, explaining that whoever was doing this was surely using a fake name to avoid drawing attention. After a long, possibly incoherent ramble, I finally finished with: “This is wire fraud! Don’t you investigate that??”

“Honestly, I wish he was a real politician. Safety's a big deal.”

I’m not sure what I said next but it made the cop have some sympathy for me. Maybe it was my stammering. Or maybe it was because I refused to leave. The cop said I should call the FBI, because that’s who investigates wire fraud. I asked if I could use the station’s phone since I didn’t trust mine. 

He picked up his desk phone, found the number, and dialed it himself. After a brief, pleasant exchange with someone on the other end, he handed the receiver to me.

“Can I get your name and number, sir?” I gave them both. “We’ll have someone call you in the morning.”

Unsatisfied, but knowing that was all I would get out of this, I said “thanks” and left. 

I drove away from the station but where was I gonna go? I didn’t want to return to my apartment. But what if this was something bigger, something supernatural, that could follow me anywhere? How else could you explain the disappearing photos, or the people who were there one second and gone the next? Or was it just hallucinations, something induced by my very real tendency to catastrophize when things got negative? You know, one of the many reasons I’m a real bummer at parties?

I decided to go someplace public — these visitors, whoever they were, hadn’t followed me anywhere that had a lot of people. So I chose a bustling hotel with a late-night lobby bar and punched directions into my app. I reached for my wallet to double check for my cards and ... realized they weren’t there. 

I replayed everything back in my mind. The wallet was still on the table by the door. Without that, I couldn’t buy anything, let alone reserve a room. I hadn’t set up Apple Pay on my new phone, so yeah, I was screwed. Unless I went back.

On the street where I parked my car, there was no sign of any intruder. I walked briskly anyway, spinning my head at the building’s front door to make sure I was alone. It seemed so.

Inside, I climbed the stairs to my floor, stood in front of my apartment’s door, and took one big breath. I practically screamed when another human figure jumped into my periphery. But this time it was an actual person, my workout-obsessed neighbor whose name I always forget (I think it’s Kyler?). He picked up his Amazon box of probably creatine and went inside his place. I put the key in the lock to mine.

I turned it. Shook my head as I opened. Reached in without looking and…

…my wallet was not on the table. 

I threw the door open, rushed in, and started turning over everything, desperately searching for the only item I needed to be truly safe that night.

I. Could. Not. Find. It. Couch cushions were on the floor, mail was strewn about, the bookshelves were emptied. But no phone. 

Slowly, in my hysteria, I began to notice a sound. It was familiar. 

DRIP… DRIP… DRIP…

The faucet again.

“Jeff?” He really just could not be bothered to turn off the water faucet all the way, could he? 

My call went unanswered. He probably had his new headphones on. 

“Jeff??”

The sound was getting louder.

DRIP... DRIP... DRIP...

Now I was starting to get angry. I was in a life-or-death situation and he was just callously wasting water as if it wasn’t a rapidly diminishing resource. Unbelievable.

I forgot about the wallet and went into the kitchen, so I could slam the faucet off again and then probably unload on Jeff.

I rounded the counter and reached the kitchen, imagining all the colorful words I’d throw his way…

But the faucet was bone dry.

Yet the dripping sound persisted. And it was coming from the sink. No doubt about it.

Confused, I stepped toward it and looked. 

I have no idea what sound came out of my mouth next.

Because I saw it:

Jeff’s head. 

Inside the sink. Stuck on that wooden lawn sign peg, like Jeff was his own lawn sign, the blood drip-drip-dripping from his severed neck and onto the scuffed stainless steel below.

My blood ran cold. My muscles and joints froze. But that only lasted a second because, from behind me, with the power of an emergency alarm, in a voice that sounded like a thousand humans speaking all at once, I heard:

“Rrrriiiiiiiiiiicccccck!”

And I ran.

Down the stairs, through the lobby, into the night. I didn’t even bother getting to my car. I couldn’t slow down for one single second until I saw a place filled with people.

I’m writing this now from a booth inside a fast food joint, I don’t want to say which because I didn’t run that far and someone might be able to figure out where I live. 

Then again, who cares? Jeff is dead. I know I’m next. The late-night munchies crowd is dying down, and I’m afraid what will happen when this place gets empty.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’ll make it to the morning to talk to the FBI agent. And even if they do call, will they really be able to help? What do I tell them? That I typed in a cursed string of letters and symbols in an election-season text message and now some sort of demon killed my roommate and is tormenting me? I suppose I could try the cops again, but they’re just as likely to arrest me or get murdered as to help.

Really, I’m writing this for two purposes. One: If you’ve been through this and you know how to reverse the curse, please reach out, and don’t make jokes. I’m desperate.

And two: This election season, if you get a message from a candidate whose name does not show up on any sort of search, just ignore it. DO NOT OPT OUT. 

Your life could depend on it.

Draft saved: 03:42 AM — Low Battery Warning (1%)

The air in the district always tasted like torrid copper and wet asphalt, especially around 3:00 AM when the neon sign for Lester’s Transmission flickered its dying magenta guts against the peeling brickwork.

I thought the heavy thudding against the side door was just a stray dog or a junkie looking for scrap—or a quick fix.

My hands were still shaking from the three cups of black coffee I’d pounded to fight off the graveyard-shift drag. My nervous system was already a live wire. Being four months clean means every shadow in your peripheral vision looks like a ghost, and every sudden noise sounds like the floor dropping out from under you.

I was elbow-deep in a blown-out transmission pan, grease stinging my forearms. A muffled synth track pulsed off an old cassette deck on the workbench—warped analog tape-hiss looping over a steady mechanical bassline.

When I stood up and clicked the shop flashlight toward the chain-link partition, the light didn’t bounce off anything.

It just… died.

The thing standing on the other side of the wire mesh wasn’t a man—not really, though it wore the soaked canvas jacket of a shift worker. It was carved out of absolute, light-swallowing darkness. A matte-black silhouette that seemed to pull the neon glow right out of the air around it.

I didn’t hear it breathe. That was the first clear sign something was wrong.

A normal man running in the freezing rain sounds like a freight train—gasping, wheezing, heart hammering. There was only the wet, rhythmic crunch of gravel settling under an impossible weight.

And then, deep in the center of the shadow where a face should have been, a single point of solid, needle-sharp crimson flared open. Like a dying tube television turning on in an empty room. One that only I could see.

I didn’t call the cops. I dropped the wrench, hit the back deadbolt with all of my weight, and bolted straight out into the industrial park.

That was two nights ago. Or maybe three. Time stops working right when your blood is mostly caffeine and cortisol.

I’ve stolen three different cars, hot-wired a delivery van, and run until my lungs felt like broken glass. Somewhere in the middle of it I almost called my sister. Almost. The thought of her voice on the other end was the only thing that felt more terrifying than what was behind me.

In the back of my mind that gnawing old voice—the cynical, defensive part of my brain I fought so hard to silence—started whispering: You’re hallucinating. The relapse is just catching up. The withdrawal is finally painting walls for you.

Every time I kill the engine, crawl into a dark corner, and look back through the rain-streaked rear window—past the neon blur of the all-night diners and the skeletal frames of the shipping docks—there it is.

Walking.

Never running. Never resting. Its heavy boots hitting the pavement with a metronomic inevitability. And through the black pitch of its coat, that single red eye stays fixed on the back of my skull.

I tried desperately to prove to myself it wasn’t real.

Yesterday afternoon I ditched the van on a dead-end logging road behind the old abandoned slaughterhouse. Climbed fifty feet up an ancient white pine. Sat in the rotting canopy for six hours without moving an inch. My muscles cramped. My vision blurred with static.

I told myself: When the psychosis passes, the clearing will be empty.

At 4:15 PM the distinct clack-crunch started up the incline.

It didn’t look up at the tree. It didn’t scan the branches. It walked straight to the base of the pine, stopped, and the red iris burned upward through the gray needles, perfectly centered on my chest.

I didn’t wait to see if it could climb. I dropped out of the tree, tore my shoulder open on a jagged branch, and ran until my boots filled with blood.

Since then the hours have dissolved into a brutal, continuous blur of motion. Stumbling across forgotten service roads. Ducking behind rotting hay bales. Keeping just one step ahead of that steady, relentless rhythm in the dark.

Now my phone battery is at two percent.

The screen flickers with green horizontal scanlines, just like an old VHS tape at the end of its ribbon. The highway ahead of me is blocked by construction barricades. My legs are completely giving out, heavy as lead pipes.

I can hear the measured, rhythmic crunch of gravel coming up the shoulder now.

Close. Too close.

I ducked into an abandoned loading bay behind the old steel mill, wedging myself between a stack of rusted oil drums and a rotting pallet. My chest heaves.

I press the heels of my hands hard into my eyes, squeezing them shut, trying to force the static away.

It’s just my brain, I tell myself, pressing my nails into my palms until the pain is sharp and real. It’s just the lack of sleep catching up. It’s not out there.

Slowly, I open my eyes.

The loading bay is pitch black, illuminated only by the faint, dying pulse of my phone screen on the concrete floor.

And standing right in the center of the doorway, blotting out the gray drizzle and the distant neon hum, is the silhouette.

It doesn’t move. It doesn’t rush me.

But as I sit paralyzed against the oil drums, a strange, sickening clarity washes over me—not a hallucination, but a physical weight pressing directly into my cerebral cortex. A frequency. A low, sub-audible hum vibrating through my teeth, translating itself into something that isn’t quite language:

…found… residual damage… still usable…

My heart stutters in my chest. My breath catches.

If it’s a hallucination, why is the air around it dropping below freezing? Why is my breath frosting in the dark? Why are the rusted edges of the oil drums nearest to it melting away into fine-grained ash, as if exposed to absolute zero?

It takes a single, heavy step forward.

My phone screen flickers—1%—and the battery warning pops up.

I don’t have much time to type this into the notes app. If anyone finds this phone in the mud near Route 9… tell my sister I’m sor—

The screen cuts to black. Plunging the bay into absolute, velvet inky blackness.

The red eye doesn’t need light to see me. It burns brighter in the dark, cutting straight through my retinas, straight through the paranoia, straight to the truth.

Footsteps. Heavy.

One step.

Then another.

It’s right here. It’s—

I took the job because it came with a room.

That was the main thing. I didn't care about the hours or the pay. I just needed somewhere to stay, and the owner didn't ask many questions. He showed me the desk, the security monitors, and a narrow room behind the laundry where I could sleep during the day.

Then he explained the rules.

Lock the front door at two in the morning. Unlock it at six. Never leave the desk unattended. If a guest complained, write it down. If someone asked for a room that wasn't available, tell them we were full.

"Anything else?" I asked.

He thought about it.

"If a guest asks whether someone has checked out, tell them you don't know."

I assumed he meant not to discuss other guests with them.

The hotel was old. It had once been grand, judging by the faded photographs in the lobby, but now it smelled of damp carpet and lemon polish. There were twelve rooms, most of them empty. The occupied ones belonged to people who paid weekly and kept to themselves.

My first few weeks were uneventful. I read books behind the desk, watched the security monitors, and made coffee at six. I learned which floorboards creaked and which lights needed replacing.

Then I noticed the man in room seven.

He'd been there for three weeks, according to my memory. Middle-aged, neatly dressed, with a narrow face and thinning hair. He never complained, never asked for anything, and always nodded when he passed the desk.

I couldn't remember his name.

That wasn't unusual. I wasn't particularly good with names. But whenever I tried to recall his face, I found myself thinking about something else instead. A bill I needed to pay. A book I'd been reading. The coffee machine.

Anything except him.

I started noticing his routine.

Every night at eleven, he left the hotel. He walked down the front steps, turned left, and disappeared around the corner. At one, he returned, nodded at me, and went upstairs.

Every night.

I watched him on the security monitors. The picture was grainy, and the cameras were old, but I could see him clearly enough.

One night, I noticed something strange.

The hallway camera showed him passing room seven at eleven. I looked up from the monitor and saw him standing at the desk, waiting for me to finish my coffee.

I looked back at the screen.

The hallway was empty.

When I looked up again, he was still there.

"Everything all right?" he asked.

I nearly dropped my cup.

"Fine. Sorry. Didn't hear you come down."

He nodded, as if I'd said something perfectly reasonable, and walked out.

The following morning, I asked the owner about him.

"Room seven. Who's staying there?"

The owner checked the register.

"No one."

I laughed because I thought he was joking.

"He pays weekly. He's been here for three weeks."

The owner turned the register towards me.

Room seven was blank.

I checked the other pages. There were names, dates, payments, signatures. Room seven had nothing.

"Perhaps you've mixed up the room number," the owner said.

I hadn't.

I knew I hadn't.

I went upstairs and knocked on room seven. Nobody answered. When I opened the door, the room was empty. No bed, no furniture, not even curtains. Just bare floorboards and a window overlooking the street.

I stood there for a while, trying to understand why I remembered making his bed.

Then I went back downstairs.

That night, the man returned at one, nodded at me, and climbed the stairs.

I didn't ask where he'd been.

A few days later, I followed him.

I waited until eleven and watched him leave. Then I grabbed my coat and went after him, keeping far enough behind that he wouldn't notice.

He walked three blocks, turned left, then crossed the road without looking. Eventually, he stopped outside a narrow brick building with boarded-up windows.

He stood facing the entrance.

Not looking around. Not checking his watch.

Just standing there.

I waited for him to knock, or try the door, or do something that would explain why he'd come all this way.

He did nothing.

At one, he turned around and walked back to the hotel.

I followed him inside.

He nodded at me as he passed the desk.

I nodded back.

Neither of us said a word.

The next morning, I searched the building's address online. There was nothing useful, just an old street listing and a photograph of the same brick facade. The building had been empty for years.

I didn't tell the owner what I'd found.

I began watching the other guests more carefully.

There was a woman in room three who wore a grey coat and carried a handbag with a broken clasp. A man in room nine who always had wet shoes, even when it hadn't rained. Someone in room eleven who never appeared on the lobby camera but whose footsteps I could hear on the stairs.

They all left at eleven.

They all returned at one.

And none of them existed in the register.

When I asked the owner about it, he didn't even bother checking the book.

"You're new here," he said.

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Nothing. You'll get used to it."

"Get used to what?"

He picked up his keys and left.

I started keeping a log.

Room number. Time of departure. Description. Time of return.

I wrote everything down because I was afraid that if I didn't, I'd forget. And I was beginning to forget things.

Small things at first.

Whether I'd eaten that day. Whether I'd spoken to the owner. Whether I'd locked the front door before going upstairs.

Once, I found a cup of coffee on the desk, still warm, with my name written on it in black marker.

I didn't remember making it.

Another time, I found a sentence in my notebook that I didn't remember writing.

Don't follow them inside.

I crossed it out.

The handwriting looked like mine.

After two weeks, the log was full. I compared it with the register, checking every name, every room, every date.

Nothing matched.

Not one guest.

I took the notebook to the owner.

"Who are these people?"

He looked at the pages.

For a moment, something changed in his expression. Not surprise. Not confusion.

Recognition.

Then it was gone.

"What people?"

"The guests. The ones leaving every night. The ones in rooms three, seven, nine, and eleven."

He closed the notebook.

"There are no guests in those rooms."

"I've seen them."

"I know."

The words came out so quietly that I almost missed them.

I stared at him.

"What do you mean, you know?"

He pushed the notebook back across the desk.

"You're tired. Get some sleep."

I grabbed his wrist before he could walk away.

"Tell me what's happening."

He looked down at my hand until I let go.

Then he straightened his sleeve.

"You're the night porter," he said. "Your job is to keep the hotel running."

He left me alone at the desk.

That night, I didn't watch the monitors.

I went upstairs instead.

Room three was empty. Room seven was empty. Room nine was empty. Room eleven was empty.

I checked every room in the hotel.

All twelve.

Some had beds and furniture. Others were bare, as if they had never been used. But there was no luggage, no clothing, no personal belongings. Nothing that suggested anyone had stayed there.

I went back downstairs and sat in front of the monitors.

The lobby was empty.

The stairs were empty.

The hallways were empty.

I rewound the footage from the previous night.

At eleven, the woman in the grey coat walked out through the front door. At one, she returned.

I watched it again.

At eleven, she walked out.

At one, she returned.

I slowed the footage down.

She entered the lobby, stopped in front of the desk, and looked directly at the camera.

Then she smiled.

I had never seen her smile before.

I leaned closer to the screen.

She raised one hand and pointed towards the desk.

Towards me.

I turned around so quickly that my chair struck the wall.

Nobody was there.

When I looked back at the monitor, the footage had moved on. The lobby was empty again.

I checked the register.

Room three was blank. Room seven was blank. Room nine was blank. Room eleven was blank.

But room one had an entry.

My name.

The date beside it was three weeks earlier.

I stared at the page, trying to remember the first night I'd arrived at the hotel. The owner showing me the desk. The narrow room behind the laundry. The keys.

I could remember all of it.

Except the journey there.

I couldn't remember where I'd come from.

I couldn't remember the last place I'd slept before the hotel.

I couldn't remember the name of the person I'd called when I got the job.

I searched my pockets for my phone.

There were no contacts saved in it.

The following morning, I asked the owner when I'd checked in.

He didn't answer immediately.

"Room one," I said. "The register says I've been here for three weeks."

He looked at the page.

"Does it?"

"You hired me three weeks ago."

"Did I?"

For the first time since I'd met him, I couldn't tell whether he was joking.

I went into the little room behind the laundry and locked the door.

There was a narrow bed, a sink, and a wardrobe. I'd been sleeping there every day.

I knew that.

I also knew I'd never seen the room in daylight.

I opened the wardrobe.

Inside hung a grey coat.

I recognised it immediately, though I couldn't remember where I'd seen it before.

There was something in the pocket. A folded slip of paper, soft at the edges, as if it had been handled many times.

On it, in my handwriting, were six words.

When they return, don't let them in.

I sat on the bed until it was time to go downstairs.

At eleven, the front door opened.

The man from room seven stood in the lobby.

He looked exactly as he always had. Neatly dressed. Hands in his pockets. Patient.

He glanced at the desk.

I kept my eyes on the register.

"Evening," he said.

I didn't answer.

He waited a moment, then walked out.

At one, I heard footsteps on the stairs.

I looked up.

The man stood at the foot of the stairs, looking at me.

Behind him, the woman in the grey coat came down from the second floor. Then the man with the wet shoes. Then someone I didn't recognise.

They gathered in the lobby, facing the desk.

Nobody spoke.

I reached for the phone to call the owner.

The line was dead.

When I looked up again, the lobby was empty.

The front door was open.

I got up to close it, but stopped when I saw the security monitor.

The camera showed me standing at the desk.

Behind me, the guests were gathering in the lobby.

One by one, they walked past me and went out through the open door.

I watched until the last one disappeared.

Then I looked at the desk.

There was a new page in the logbook.

The entries were written in my handwriting.

Room seven. Eleven PM. Departed.

Room seven. One AM. Returned.

Room three. Eleven PM. Departed.

Room three. One AM. Returned.

At the bottom of the page, beneath the last entry, was a sentence.

Room one is still occupied.

I turned towards the stairs.

Someone was standing at the top.

I couldn't see their face, but I could see the grey coat. The same coat hanging in my wardrobe.

They began to descend.

I backed away from the desk.

The figure stopped halfway down and looked towards the front door.

Then, slowly, it turned its head towards me.

I knew that face.

I knew it so well that, for a moment, I forgot to be afraid.

It was mine.

The figure smiled.

I looked down at the logbook.

A final line had appeared beneath the others.

Room one. Eleven PM. Departed.

I checked the clock.

It was eleven.

Behind me, the front door opened.

And from somewhere outside, I heard my own voice ask:

"Is anyone staying in room one?"

I have been working late a lot more recently. Eating less, feeling less, caring less. As a teacher, the world kind of begins to blend together until everything turns into nothing.

Monday is Wednesday if you squint, and Friday is Saturday. Each day begins to feel like a symbol, something we use to organize our lives with little regard for the people constantly adjusting their patterns around it.

What are days, really, but a man-made construct? Something humans decided we needed to keep track of our age, our schedules, and the inevitable march toward death.

Time isn't linear. It's fake and round.

Time runs in circles, lapping at the edges of our realities every second, making us believe, if only for that split second, that we exist in this moment. But what if we already existed in the past and were somehow already in the future before we even had the chance to think about the moment we were so desperately focused on?

I say all of this to say that maybe this makes sense.

Maybe he makes sense.

And no. No, no, no.

I'm not crazy.

My marbles are all securely tucked away in my brain cells. Sometimes they're empty, sure, but they're still connecting dots.

I just hope the dots I'm connecting are wrong.

"What?" I questioned aloud into my phone as I heard the voice on the other end erupt into a confusingly loud uproar.

"AHHHHH!"

The scream was so sudden that I nearly dropped my phone.

It wasn't the kind of scream you'd hear from someone who had been startled by a spider or had accidentally kicked the side of a table. No, this was something else entirely. It was the kind of scream that sounded like a person had just witnessed the end of everything they had ever known.

And the worst part?

I recognized the voice.

The man on the other end of the phone was an older gentleman. I was a newbie teacher who had just started working at a new school about six months earlier.

He was a colleague of mine whom I'd met on my very first day. He had taken me under his wing as a "newborn teacher," as he liked to call it.

I remember hating the term.

I still do.

"How are you talking to me?" I whispered into the phone.

I was freaking out internally. My palms were sweating, and my perception of reality was beginning to crack apart, revealing something underneath that I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to see.

Maybe my reality was breaking down into something worse.

Or maybe something better.

I had no idea what to think just yet.

On the other end, I could hear water dripping. The sound echoed through what seemed like an enclosed passageway, accompanied by distant shouts and the occasional scraping noise.

It sounded like he was standing beneath a tunnel.

"Hello?" I tried again. "Frank? Is that you?"

Another scream.

Then silence.

Let me set the scene for you.

Frank was an older man with strands of gray seasoning his hair. It was long in a way that suggested his lineage had been blessed with the rare ability to keep every inch of it past thirty. His eyes were kind and deep green, and he wore older suits tailored to look stylish, always with a touch of business casual.

He always carried a black briefcase. Sometimes, he would write little notes on the side of it for the holidays. He'd even shown me pictures.

His name was Frank, and he had the gait of a young man with the height of a basketball player, standing just under six feet three inches.

He towered over me in a way I absolutely hated.

Tall people always freaked me out.

How's the air up there, buddy?

That was my catchphrase whenever I greeted the man.

He'd usually respond with something ridiculous, like, "Hot and steamy," or, "Airy and cold."

He was a friend, more than just a colleague, even if we didn't know much about each other outside of work. We'd occasionally talk about dating, puppies, houses, and whatever else happened to come up during our conversations, but most of the time, we kept things professional.

I remember the day they called me.

It had been a week ago.

They told me Frank wouldn't be coming back to work.

"Oh," I remember saying after they explained why.

A rush of sadness traveled through me.

The poor soul had been out on a nighttime stroll with his puppy when tragedy struck. He'd been mugged, and things hadn't ended well. The men had stabbed him because his puppy had acted aggressively toward them.

If I were that puppy, I would've acted aggressively, too.

How dare they?

People are the worst monsters.

A neighbor had found Frank lying on the ground while the puppy ran around barking frantically. According to the report, the dog had been there for forty-seven minutes before anyone found him.

By then, it was too late.

He had bled out.

I mourned his passing, even though I hadn't known him all that well. I'd say I knew him enough to miss him, enough to feel that little ache when someone familiar disappears from your daily routine.

Now, a week later, that same warm-toned voice was speaking to me again.

Only this time, he sounded terrified.

I had been using my preparation period to plan for my next class when my phone began to ring. I remember glancing at the screen, expecting another spam call or perhaps a parent returning my message.

Instead, I saw Frank's name.

I stared at it for a good five seconds.

Then I answered.

And now here I was, listening to my dead colleague scream into my ear.

"Frank," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "I need you to tell me what's going on."

"Oh, thank God."

His voice broke on the last word.

"Frank, you're dead."

Silence.

I immediately regretted saying it like that.

Not because it was insensitive, but because the moment the words left my mouth, I realized how absolutely insane I must have sounded.

"You're dead," I repeated, quieter this time. "You died last week. I went to the memorial."

"No."

"Frank."

"No, no, no. Listen to me. You need to listen to me."

I sat down.

"Okay. I'm listening."

"I don't know where I am."

I glanced at the clock on my computer. I had about fifty minutes before my next class.

"Okay. Where are you?"

"I don't know!"

His voice cracked so violently that I pulled the phone away from my ear.

"Frank, I need you to calm down."

"Don't tell me to calm down!"

The words came out so sharply that I froze.

Then he began to cry.

I had never heard Frank cry before.

Not when his dog had gotten sick. Not when he told me about his divorce. Not even when he mentioned his mother passing away several years ago.

This was different.

He was crying like a child who had woken up in a strange house and couldn't find his parents.

"There's a door," he whispered.

"Okay. What kind of door?"

"A door."

"Can you describe it to me?"

"It's black."

"Is it locked?"

"I don't know. I'm not going near it."

"Why not?"

He inhaled shakily.

"Because something keeps knocking from the other side."

I stopped breathing for a second.

"Frank, where are you calling me from?"

"I don't know."

"What's the last thing you remember?"

There was a long pause.

Then he said, "My dog."

I waited.

"I remember my dog barking. I remember being on the ground. I remember the pain. I remember thinking I was going to die."

His breathing grew uneven.

"Then I remember something else."

"What?"

"Someone asking me if I was ready."

I felt the hairs on my arms rise.

"Ready for what?"

"I don't know. I thought it was a paramedic. I thought somebody had found me. But when I opened my eyes, I wasn't on the street anymore."

He began to speak faster.

"I was standing in a room. There was a table. Two chairs. A clock on the wall, but the hands weren't moving. And there was this man sitting across from me. He looked just like me."

I swallowed.

"What did he say?"

Frank's voice dropped to a whisper.

"He asked me how many times I'd done this before."

I didn't answer.

"I told him I didn't know what he was talking about. Then he smiled at me, and he said, 'You'll remember soon enough.'"

The water began dripping again.

Except this time, it sounded closer.

"Frank, I need you to look around. What do you see right now?"

"Concrete walls. Water. A hallway. There's a light at the end, but I can't reach it."

"Why can't you reach it?"

"Because every time I walk toward it, it gets farther away."

I rubbed my forehead.

This couldn't be happening.

It couldn't.

Maybe someone had stolen Frank's phone. Maybe this was some elaborate prank. Maybe I was suffering from a stress-induced hallucination, which would honestly be a pretty reasonable explanation considering my current sleeping habits.

But the voice?

That voice was Frank.

And I knew him well enough to recognize when he was scared.

"Frank, why did you call me?"

"I didn't."

I went still.

"What do you mean you didn't?"

"I didn't dial your number. I was sitting on the floor, trying to figure out where I was, and then I heard your voice."

"My voice?"

"Through the walls."

He started breathing heavily again.

"I heard you talking about time. You were saying something about circles. About how we aren't really here."

My stomach dropped.

I'd been talking to myself before answering the phone.

Or had I?

"I heard you," he continued. "And then I saw your name appear on a screen."

"What screen?"

"The wall."

I looked around my classroom.

The overhead lights hummed softly. My computer screen glowed in front of me. Outside my door, students were laughing as they walked toward their next class.

Everything was normal.

Everything was fine.

"Frank, I need you to answer a few questions for me, okay? I'm going to write everything down."

"Why?"

"Because I need to understand what's happening."

"No."

"Frank."

"No, you need to document this."

His voice suddenly became clearer, almost eerily calm.

"Write down everything I say. Every word. Don't summarize it. Don't change anything. Don't leave anything out."

I stared at the blank document on my computer.

"Okay."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

I opened a new document and typed the date, the time, and Frank's name.

Then I began transcribing the call word for word.

CALL TRANSCRIPT: Frank

Time: 10:43 a.m.

Location: Unknown

Recording initiated by: [REDACTED]

"Frank, can you tell me where you are?"

"I am in a hallway."

"What do you see?"

"Concrete walls. Black water on the floor. There are lights overhead, but they're flickering. I can see doors on both sides of the hallway. Some of them have numbers. Some of them have names."

"What names?"

"Mine."

"Your name is on the doors?"

"Yes."

"How many doors have your name on them?"

He began counting.

I could hear his footsteps as he moved.

"One. Two. Three. Four. Five."

A pause.

"Six."

Another pause.

"Seven."

His voice became quieter.

"Eight."

"Frank?"

"There are more."

"How many?"

"Too many."

I typed it all.

"How long have you been there?"

"I don't know."

"Can you estimate?"

"I've been here for three days."

"Three days?"

"Maybe four."

"Frank, you died a week ago."

"I know."

"How can you know that?"

"Because I remember the funeral."

My fingers stopped moving.

"What?"

"I remember standing outside the church. I remember seeing people come in. I remember you wearing that blue shirt."

I looked down at myself.

I was wearing a blue shirt.

"I remember you crying," he continued.

"I didn't cry at your funeral."

"Not at the funeral."

He sounded confused.

"Before. You were sitting in your car. You were crying because you thought about how quickly people disappear."

I felt something cold move through my chest.

I had done that.

Alone in my car, after work, when I thought about how strange it was that someone could be here one day and then become a collection of photographs and sympathetic conversations the next.

I hadn't told anyone.

"Frank, how do you know that?"

"I don't know."

He began to cry again.

"That's the problem. I don't know anything, but I remember everything."

I typed those words exactly.

Then I asked the question that had been sitting at the back of my mind since the moment I'd answered the phone.

"Frank, is … is Heaven and Hell real?"

The silence that followed was so long that I checked to make sure the call hadn't disconnected.

Finally, he answered.

"I don't think they're places."

"What do you mean?"

"I think they're conditions. States of being. I think they're things you carry with you."

"Frank, that doesn't answer my question."

"I know."

His voice trembled.

"I saw Heaven."

I leaned closer to the screen.

"What did it look like?"

"Home."

He said it so simply that I almost missed it.

"It looked like home. My mother was there. My father was there. My dog was there. Everyone I'd ever loved was there. They were all young. They were all healthy. Nobody was sick. Nobody was angry. Nobody was dying." he said it with a tight sadness in his voice.

He took a shaky breath.

"I could smell my mother's cooking. I could hear my father laughing. I could feel the sun on my face."

"Then what happened?"

"Someone told me I couldn't stay."

"Who?"

"The man from the room."

"The man who looked like you?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

Frank's voice became very small.

"He said I hadn't finished."

"Finished what?"

"My lives."

I stopped typing.

"My what?"

"My lives."

He began speaking rapidly, as though he were afraid the words would disappear if he didn't say them quickly enough.

"I remember things now. Things I shouldn't remember. I remember being a little boy in a place I've never visited. I remember dying in a house that burned down. I remember a woman who wasn't my wife holding my hand while I died in a hospital. I remember being old. I remember being young. I remember being someone else."

He sucked in a breath.

"I remember dying in a field. I remember the smell of blood and wet grass. I remember being buried alive. I remember drowning."

He began to sob.

"I remember being a little girl."

I stared at the screen.

"I remember being a little girl, Lyla. I remember my mother brushing my hair. I remember the ribbons. Being afraid of the dark. A man coming into my bedroom, and hiding under my bed."

His voice broke.

"I remember things that happened hundreds of years ago. Things that happened before my grandparents were even born."

I felt sick.

"Frank, maybe you're having some kind of episode. Maybe you're confused."

"Don't."

"Frank, listen to me."

"Don't you dare tell me I'm confused."

The anger in his voice startled me.

"I know what I remember. I remember being a man who lived in a place where the streets were made of stone. I remember a war. I remember a woman with a scar on her cheek who told me she would find me in every lifetime."

He stopped.

Then he whispered, "And I remember finding her."

I didn't know what to say.

"I found her again and again. Different faces. Different names. Different lives. And every time, I lost her."

He began to breathe harder.

"And then I remembered the hallway."

"What about it?"

"The doors."

His voice shook.

"Every door is a life I've lived. Every single one. And some of them aren't mine."

"What do you mean they aren't yours?"

"I can hear people behind them."

A loud bang echoed through the phone.

Frank screamed. “AHHH!”

"WHAT WAS THAT?"

"Something hit the door!"

"Which door?"

"The one at the end of the hallway!"

"Frank, move away from it!"

"I AM AWAY FROM IT!"

Another bang.

Then another.

The sound was so loud it distorted his voice.

Something began scratching at the other side.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

Like fingernails dragging down wood.

"Frank, find somewhere to hide."

"I CAN'T!"

"Look around! There has to be somewhere you can go!"

"There isn't!"

"Frank!"

"THERE ISN'T ANYWHERE!"

I stood so abruptly that my chair rolled backward and hit the wall.

Outside, a student knocked on my classroom door.

"Ms. Lee? You ok?"

I couldn't even turn to look.

"YES I’M FINE," I called back reassuringly.

Then I returned to the phone.

"Frank, listen to me. I need you to keep talking. Tell me what you see."

He was breathing so hard I could barely understand him.

"The lights are going out."

"Okay."

"One at a time."

"Keep moving."

"The doors are opening."

My heart nearly stopped.

"What?"

"The doors. They're opening."

I heard what sounded like dozens of hinges creaking simultaneously.

Then came the voices.

Hundreds of them.

Whispering.

Laughing.

Crying.

Calling out names I didn't recognize.

Then, beneath all of it, one voice spoke clearly enough for me to understand.

It was Frank's voice.

But not the Frank I knew.

This voice was deeper. Older. Angrier.

“You always come back.” It whispered.

"Frank," I whispered. "Who said that?"

He was silent.

"Frank?"

Then he said something that made my blood run cold.

"I did."

I stared at my computer screen.

"What do you mean?"

"I said it."

"Frank, you didn't say anything."

"I did. I said it before. A long time ago."

He began to cry again.

"Oh, God. Oh, God. I remember now."

"What do you remember?"

"I was here before."

"Where?"

"Here."

His voice was so quiet I almost couldn't hear it.

"I've been here before, Lyla. I've been here so many times."

"How many?"

"I don't know. A thousand. Ten thousand. More."

He inhaled sharply.

"I think I've always been here."

The scratching stopped.

Every sound disappeared.

The silence was so complete that I could hear my own heartbeat.

Then Frank whispered, "It's standing in front of me."

"What is?"

"The thing that looks like me."

My fingers hovered over the keyboard.

"Frank, I need you to get away from it."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"Because it's me."

I felt the room tilt.

"Frank, please."

"It has my face. My clothes. My expressions. Everything."

His voice trembled, he sounded terrified.

"But its eyes are black."

I couldn't speak.

"It keeps telling me I can go home if I open the door."

"What door?"

"The black one."

"Don't open it."

"I know."

"Frank, do not open that door."

"I KNOW!"

He shouted so loudly that I flinched.

Then he began whispering.

"It says I don't have to keep doing this. It says I can stop remembering… I can rest."

He took a breath.

"It says I can finally be nothing."

I thought about what I'd said earlier.

Time was fake and round.

We existed in the past and the future before we could ever understand the present.

What if that wasn't a metaphor?

What if time wasn't a line or a circle, but a room with too many doors?

What if every life we'd ever lived was waiting behind one of them?

And what if death was simply the moment we were forced to remember?

"Frank, look at me."

He gave a weak laugh.

"I can't see you."

"Then listen to me. You're going to keep talking. You're going to tell me exactly what happens next. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Good. Now tell me what you see."

"I see a door."

"Which one?"

"The black one."

"What's happening to it?"

"The handle is turning."

"Move away from it."

"I can't."

"Why can't you?"

"Because there's a little girl standing behind me."

I went cold.

"What little girl?"

"The one I told you about. The little girl I used to be."

My expression twisted.

"Frank, there is no little girl. You're alone."

"No."

His voice cracked.

"She's holding my hand."

I could hear him crying.

"She's telling me she's scared."

I closed my eyes.

"Frank, tell her it's going to be okay."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"Because she says she's been here before, too."

The handle stopped turning.

Then the little girl spoke.

Not through Frank.

Through my phone.

"Are you going to leave us here again?" Her voice was soft and delicate.

I dropped the phone.

It hit the desk, bounced, and landed on the floor.

For several seconds, I couldn't move.

The voice had been so clear.

So close.

I picked up the phone up with shaking hands.

"Frank?"

Nothing.

"Frank, can you hear me?"

A long, ragged breath.

Then he whispered, "I'm sorry."

"Frank, what happened?"

"I opened it."

My heart dropped into my stomach.

"Why?"

"Because she was crying."

He began to sob.

"I opened the door because she was crying, and I couldn't leave her there."

I pressed my hand against my mouth.

"What was behind it?"

He didn't answer.

"Frank?"

"The ocean."

I blinked.

"What?"

"The ocean. An ocean of black water. It stretched farther than I could see. There were people standing in it, up to their necks. Some were screaming. Some were laughing. Some were just staring at me."

He choked on his words.

"They all had my face."

I couldn't breathe.

"Frank, close the door."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"Because they're coming out."

I heard splashing.

Then footsteps.

Dozens of them.

Hundreds.

Running through the water.

"Frank, RUN!"

He screamed, and the phone filled with the sound of frantic footsteps and splashing water.

I heard him fall, it sounded erratic on his end. Water splashing and slurring sounds carried to my end of the call.

He cried out again, seeming shaken. “NOOOOO!”

Then came a voice I will never forget.

My own.

"Hello, Frank." 

I stopped breathing.

The voice on the phone was mine. Except it sounded wrong.

Too calm.

Too pleased.

"You're late," my voice said.

Frank screamed.

"Lyla!"

The call was cut off.

I sat there staring at my phone, my fingers numb, my entire body shaking.

For a moment, I couldn't process anything.

Then my computer chimed.

A new document had appeared on my desktop.

I hadn't created it.

The file was titled:

Frank_FINAL_INTERVIEW.docx

I opened it.

Every word I'd typed during the call was there, transcribed exactly as I'd written it.

Except the document continued beyond the point where the call had ended.

The cursor blinked at the bottom of the page.

I scrolled.

The last section was labeled:

FINAL STATEMENT

Subject: Frank [REDACTED]

Location: Unknown.

Condition: Unknown.

Statement:

I can see the light now.

I can hear the birds.

I can smell the grass.

I think I'm home.

Wait.

No.

No, no, no.

The birds are screaming.

The grass is moving.

Something is breathing underneath the ground.

I remember this place.

I remember dying here.

I remember dying here before.

I remember all of it.

Oh, God.

It's the best part.

It's the best part of Hell.

Why is it the best part?

Why does it look like Heaven?

Why does it smell like home?

Why can I hear my mother calling me?

Why is she telling me to come inside?

Why is she standing at the window with black eyes?

I don't want to go back.

I don't want to remember.

Please.

Please.

Please.

Then, beneath that, another statement appeared.

One sentence.

If you're reading this, don't answer when I call again.

I slammed my laptop shut.

For the rest of the day, I barely spoke to anyone.

I called my administrator and told her I was sick. I went home, locked every door, closed every curtain, and sat on my bed with the lights on.

I didn't sleep that night.

Or the next.

For three days, I kept my phone turned off.

I didn't want to hear Frank's voice again.

I didn't want to know what had happened to him.

I didn't want to know what the best part of Hell was.

But on the fourth night, my laptop turned on by itself.

I watched from the doorway as the screen illuminated my bedroom.

A new document opened.

Frank_FINAL_INTERVIEW_2.docx

I should have left the room.

I should have unplugged the laptop, thrown it out the window, and moved to another state.

Instead, I walked toward it.

Because curiosity is a terrible thing. Cats have it and it often leads to their downfall or so I've heard.

And because some small, horrible part of me needed to know whether Frank was still alive. Which clearly he wasn’t, but did his soul survive whatever was happening.

The document contained a single line.

I'm somewhere safe now.

Then another.

I found a place to hide.

Another.

I think it can't see me here.

I sat down.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard.

Then the document began filling itself with words.

There's a little house at the edge of a field. It has white walls and a blue door. The windows are warm with light. There are flowers growing along the walkway.

I can hear people inside.

They're laughing.

They're eating dinner.

There's a dog sleeping by the fireplace.

I think it's my dog.

I think this is where I'm supposed to be.

I swallowed.

Then the next line appeared.

But I can see the hallway through the kitchen window.

My skin prickled.

It's standing at the end of the field.

It has my face.

It's waving at me.

I backed away from the laptop.

Another line appeared.

It says I can stay here as long as I want.

Another.

It says this is the best part.

Then, after several seconds:

It says the worst part is remembering.

I stood up so quickly that my chair fell backward.

The laptop screen flickered.

A final line appeared.

Lyla, I remember you now.

I couldn't move.

You were here with me before.

The cursor blinked.

You were the little girl.

My mouth went dry.

You were the woman with the scar.

You were the man in the field.

You were the person who told me I would find you in every lifetime.

I felt something inside me give way.

Not a crack.

Not a snap.

Something deeper.

Something that had been holding together the thin, fragile understanding I had of my own existence.

I thought about all the strange dreams I'd had as a child. The places I'd never visited but somehow recognized. The faces that made me feel homesick for people I'd never met.

I thought about the way time sometimes seemed to fold in on itself, how certain moments felt less like new experiences and more like memories I'd forgotten to remember.

I had always blamed my imagination.

My creativity.

My tendency to think too much.

But what if those weren't explanations?

What if they were symptoms?

The laptop chimed.

One final message appeared.

Don't worry.

You'll remember soon enough.

Then the screen went black.

I didn't touch the laptop again.

I moved it into the closet and shut the door.

I slept with the lights on.

For a while, things returned to normal.

I went back to work. I taught my classes. I graded assignments. I answered emails from parents and reminded students to put their phones away.

I laughed when people made jokes.

I ate when I remembered to.

I tried to convince myself that stress had finally caught up with me, that I'd experienced some kind of breakdown, that there was a reasonable explanation for everything that had happened.

I needed that explanation.

Because without it, I had to consider the possibility that Frank had been telling the truth.

And if Frank had been telling the truth, then death wasn't an ending.

It was a reminder.

A reminder of every life we'd ever lived.

Every person we'd ever been.

Every terrible thing we'd ever done.

Every terrible thing that had ever been done to us.

Perhaps Heaven and Hell weren't places we went after we died.

Perhaps they were places we'd already been.

Places we'd return to.

Places we'd been returning to for longer than we could comprehend.

And perhaps the best part of Hell wasn't a place at all.

Perhaps it was the part where you could finally stop screaming.

Where the grass was green, the birds sang, and the people you loved waited for you behind warm, familiar windows.

Where you could pretend that everything was okay.

Where you could forget.

And maybe that was the cruelest thing of all.

Because if you could forget, you could be happy.

But if you remembered, you'd know.

You'd know that the person standing beside you had been someone else in another life.

You'd know that the person you loved might have killed you before.

You'd know that the child laughing in the yard had once been your mother.

You'd know that the man smiling at you from across the street had watched you die a thousand times.

And you'd know that none of it mattered.

Because eventually, you'd die again.

And you'd come back.

And you'd remember.

And you'd forget.

And you'd come back.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I think about Frank sometimes.

I think about that little house at the edge of the field.

I think about the blue door, the warm windows, and the dog sleeping by the fireplace.

I wonder if he's still there.

I wonder if he's finally at peace.

I wonder if he knows he's dead. If he succumbed to being nothing.

And sometimes, when I'm working late and the school is quiet, I think I hear his voice in the hallway.

Not screaming.

Not crying.

Just laughing.

The same warm, familiar laugh I remember from the first day we met.

Sometimes I almost answer and call his name.

But I don't.

Because I remember what the document said.

Don't answer when I call again.

And I don't.

I never do.

Until last night. Yes, I’m a walking contradiction, a hypocrite, but I feel plagued. What does it all really mean? I had to know, I needed to rest better at night.

Last night, my phone rang at 3:17 a.m.

Frank's name appeared on the screen.

I stared at it for a long time.

I told myself I wouldn't answer.

I told myself it was a glitch. The world let the matrix glitch accidentally showing its under belly of the spirits and the dead souls who walked beyond us.

A prank, it had to be.

A mistake, because I’m not crazy.

Anything besides what I knew it to be.

Then the phone stopped ringing.

A message appeared.

1 NEW VOICEMAIL.

I don't know why I listened to it.

I wish I hadn't.

At first, there was only static.

Then the sound of water dripping.

Then footsteps.

Then Frank's voice.

"Hey, Lyla."

He sounded perfectly normal.

Warm.

Friendly.

Almost amused.

"I found something out."

A pause.

"I know where I am now."

I held my breath.

"I know what the best part of Hell is."

Another pause.

Then he laughed.

"You."

The voicemail ended.

I haven't listened to it again.

I haven't told anyone.

And I haven't slept.

Because I know what I heard.

I know what he said.

And I know that if Frank is telling the truth, then I have a problem.

A very big problem.

Because I remember the little girl.

I remember the woman with the scar.

I remember the man in the field.

And I remember the house, the blue door, the dog sleeping by the fireplace.

I remember standing at the window and watching someone walk toward the house.

I remembered smiling, opening the door, telling them they could stay as long as they wanted.

Because this was the best part.

This was the part where nobody hurt you.

The part where nobody left you.

The part where you could finally rest and be whole.

The part where you could forget.

I remember all of it.

I just don't remember when I started to.

And that is what terrifies me most.

Not that Frank is dead.

Not that he might be trapped in Hell.

Not even that Hell might be real.

It's the possibility that I've been there before.

That I've been there so many times that I've forgotten the difference between a memory and a dream.

That every life I've lived has been leading me back to the same place.

That somewhere, in some other version of myself, I'm standing in a hallway beneath a flickering light, listening to water drip onto the concrete.

That somewhere, a little girl is holding my hand.

That somewhere, a man with my face is standing at the end of a field, waving me home.

And that somewhere, behind a blue door, a voice is waiting to tell me that everything is going to be okay.

I don't know if Heaven and Hell are real.

I don't know if we live once or a thousand times.

I don't know if time is a line, a circle, or a hallway full of doors.

Are we all really connected as one? All of the people in the world are each other. There is no separation between one another, because consciousness is smaller portions of our soul split into smaller bits to experience every ounce of life that is possible.

But I know this.

If you ever find yourself somewhere familiar after you die, somewhere warm and beautiful, somewhere that feels like home, don't trust it.

If you see someone you love standing in a window, don't wave back.

If you hear a voice calling your name, don't answer. Especially if their eyes are black.

And if you find a blue door at the edge of a field, no matter how tired you are, no matter how badly you want to rest, no matter how much you miss the people waiting on the other side...

Don't open it.

Because the best part of Hell is the part that makes you forget you're there.

And the worst part?

The worst part is when you remember.

When I was eighteen, I had this wonderful friend, Sveta. She was gorgeous and a little fucking nuts. Actually, more than a little. The kind of girl you could never get bored with—the kind who regularly left you thinking, “Well, thank God we got out of that one without getting into trouble!”
She was amazing. I say “was” because we lost touch a long time ago, and I haven’t been able to find her. I think I had a bit of a crush on her, too :)
We balanced each other out. She was always coming up with wild ideas, and we’d carry them out together. But if I thought something was dangerous, or just had a feeling something wasn’t right, I’d say I wasn’t doing it. Usually, Sveta would drop whatever questionable plan she’d come up with and stay with me.
She called me her “voice of reason.” Later, she started calling me her guardian angel.
And this is why.
One summer, we were staying at her family’s summer house in a tiny village. There were three of us: Sveta, me, and her little brother, Kolya. He was four.
We all slept in the same room. Sveta and I shared a big bed, and Kolya slept in a little child’s bed. He always slept with a small teddy bear, and that night was no different. He fell asleep with his arms around it.
Sveta and I stayed up chatting and laughing our asses off until about two in the morning, then went to sleep.
A little later, I woke up to the sound of her laughing.
She was laughing in her sleep. Her blanket had almost slipped onto the floor. Nothing particularly strange about that. It happens. I picked up the blanket, tucked it around her, and went back to sleep.
At eight the next morning, Sveta woke me up. Normally, we’d sleep until ten or eleven, whenever Kolya woke up. But that morning, she woke me early and immediately started telling me about a dream she’d had.
In her dream, she’d gone out into the yard during the night. There was a group of young women out there—beautiful, wearing short, sparkly dresses and bright makeup, their long hair loose around their shoulders. They were laughing and inviting her to come out with them.
They seemed so cool and fun that she decided to go.
Then she saw me standing in the doorway. She ran over and tried to talk me into coming along.
I told her I wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t know these girls, this could end badly, and anyway, let’s just go back to bed.
The girls were waiting for her.
Sveta stood there for a moment, torn. Then she said, “Fine, stay here. I’m going to have some fun.”
“Fine. Off you go, then,” I said, and sat down on the bench beside the house, pointedly turning my back on her.
Sveta ran over to the girls. They hugged her and whispered things to her.
Then she turned around and ran into the house.
When she came back out, she was carrying Kolya.
He was asleep with his head on her shoulder, still clutching his teddy bear.
The girls had opened the garden gate and were filing out, one by one. Sveta was the last in line.
Just as she stepped through the gate, I jumped up and ran after her. I caught her by the arm as she was about to close it, pulled her back into the yard, and shut the gate myself.
I started begging her not to leave.
“What do you need those girls for? You don’t even know them. We can have fun ourselves.”
I kept talking her into staying as I led her back into the house.
We put the sleeping Kolya back in his bed and lay down in ours.
Sveta said she was cold.
I saw that her blanket was on the floor, picked it up, and covered her with it.
Then I went back to sleep, too.
That was her dream.
She told it so vividly, with so much emotion, that I felt as though I’d seen the whole thing myself. Then she hugged me and said she was glad she had me.
And then she asked, “Where’s my cross?”
She wore a little silver cross on a chain. She always had it on. Never took it off.
But now it wasn’t around her neck.
We searched the bed and found it under her pillow.
We were surprised, of course, but we came up with a perfectly reasonable explanation: she’d been tossing and turning in her sleep, and the clasp must have come undone.
And now for the end of the story.
A little later, Kolya woke up. We had breakfast and decided to go swimming in the river.
We opened the gate and stepped outside.
About five paces beyond it, lying in the grass, was Kolya’s teddy bear.

“You still read those dumbass things?”

I jumped a bit when I heard the sudden voice. I turned to see my older brother peeking into my room with a sneer. I didn’t hear him coming.

“It’s not reading,” I said, “there are no words.” I looked back down at the page. 

“Those are for kids.”

“Screw you. They’re fun.” I had already made it through 5 Waldo books, so I figured I could do all the rest. Something about the colors and details of the setting were so interesting to me. I would judge the outfits of the random pedestrians and imagine what their lives were like. Sometimes I even forgot to look for Waldo. “You know, my friend Thomas from England told me it’s called Where’s Wally over there.”

My brother frowned. “What did I tell you about talking to British people?”

“I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

My brother walked over and looked down at the page. “You know, I saw a weird one of those in the library once.” He sounded serious all of a sudden. I looked up to see his expression had hardened.

“What was weird about it?”

“Well, it was like a year ago, so I don’t remember that well. But I think it had no title, and there was a creepy looking guy. Mr. Carpenter saw me with it and got really mad. He took it away from me. I couldn’t find it in the library after that.”

“You’re lying,” I said. My brother was always pulling pranks on me and trying to mess with my head. Although the image of Mr. Carpenter in my mind did make me feel some doubt. Everyone at school knew to avoid him and his library. There was something off about that man.

“Whatever, loser. I’m gonna go play Xbox.”

For the next couple weeks, I forgot all about that conversation and continued to find and complete every Waldo book I could. When I finished the final one, I felt an unexpected loss. It was like I was saying goodbye to an old friend. As stupid as it sounds, I almost teared up.

I was walking down the school hallway the next day when I came across the library. I suddenly remembered the conversation with my brother. I looked around to check if anyone was nearby, but the hall was empty. It was early in the day, and the only other students were in the cafeteria for breakfast.

I peeked my head into the library and immediately heard a soft rumbling sound. I jerked my neck to the sound and saw Mr. Carpenter asleep at the front desk. He was snoring.

My heart started racing as I entered the room slowly. I had to know if my brother was telling the truth. Pretty quickly, I found the section where the Waldo books were kept. I only found ones that I had already finished. Then I looked back over to Mr. Carpenter and the open door behind him. His office.

I slowly crept behind his desk and into his office, keeping an eye on him as I went. Inside, I turned to see stacks of loose papers and books. I studied the spines of the books, but they were all normal kid’s books. 

Then I noticed one of his drawers was slightly open. I pulled it out. Inside was a book with a blank, black cover. I picked it up. It was chilling to the touch.

Mr. Carpenter stopped snoring. 

I jerked my head to the side to see him shifting. I froze.

After a moment, he started snoring again. I breathed in relief.

I kept the book at my side and slowly made my way back to the door. When I was halfway out the door, I heard Mr. Carpenter’s chair creak.

“Hey you! Stop!” he screeched.

I ran down the hallway at full speed and didn’t look back. I prayed that he didn’t recognize me. 

I was tense for the rest of the day. I couldn’t focus on any of my classes. I just kept imagining Mr. Carpenter charging into the classroom and coming straight for my throat or being called to the principal’s office. But it never happened. Eventually, I was back home in my room. 

I pulled the black book out of my backpack. I opened it up to the first page to see in large red letters, “FIND ME.”

The next page was normal looking. A colorful town square with hundreds of people marching in a parade. It looked exactly like our Christmas parade. I laughed to myself. There was nothing creepy about this.

Then I started to notice. It was little things. Some of the people had unusual proportions. They were too wide, or too tall and skinny. 

The strangest thing was that I couldn’t find the main character at all. I went over the page a hundred times but never saw anyone that obviously stood out. All I did find was a wanted poster on one of the brick walls. An image of a man wearing a prison jumpsuit with black and white stripes. But the poster was folding over at the top and covering the man’s face. Beside the poster was a dark hand reaching around the corner of a shady alleyway.

Still, I could only laugh. This was my brother’s idea of scary? And he always made fun of me for being a wuss. I turned the page.

This time, it was a concert with a massive stage and crowd. My eyes immediately fell on the man in the prison jumpsuit at the center of the page. His black and white outfit stood out among the otherwise colorful concertgoers. The other people near him were looking at him with odd expressions and keeping a bit of distance despite the little room there was. Weirdest of all was that he was facing the opposite direction, so I could only see the back of his head.

The next page was a crowded mall, but there were less people than before. I very quickly found the man because there was another large gap around him and the others on the page. The ones near him had fearful expressions and seemed to be hurrying away from him. He was still facing the other way, but his head was turned ever so slightly toward the page, showing an inch of his pale face.

Now I was starting to feel uneasy.

The next page almost made me drop the book. I immediately spotted the man at the center of a beach. He was turned perfectly sideways, revealing a half of a twisted smile. But what really horrified me was his surroundings. 

They were wounded and bloody bodies all around him. Some seemed to be clinging to life and crawling away. At the edges of the pages, I could see police charging in.

“What the hell?” I said out loud. I had never seen anything this graphic. The hairs on my arms stood on end, and my hand trembled as I turned to the next page. This time, I did drop the book in shock.

The man was all alone in a purely white background, standing far too close to the page. His eyes were wide with glee. I yelped as the book slipped out of my hands.

After a minute of deep breaths, I found myself picking the book back up. I turned to the next page to find it completely blank. The rest of the pages were like that.

I rushed to the game room to find my brother.

“Fucking campers!” he yelled into his headset.

“Nathan! I need your help!” 

“What do you want?” he asked without looking at me.

“Can you come with me to the library tomorrow? I really need to return a book.”

“Do it yourself, dipshit.”

“Please!” I begged. He finally turned to meet my eyes.

“We can’t anyway. Didn’t you hear? Mr. Carpenter has gone missing. He wasn’t at school today.”

“What?!” I asked. But I saw him this morning. “Maybe he’s just sick or something?”

“No, I heard some teachers talking about it. Apparently, his wife called the police. She’s really worried about him.”

I wordlessly turned back and ran into my room where the book laid on the floor. I decided to look back through it one more time. Maybe I was just imagining things.

What I saw this time left me even more confused. The pages looked similar to how they did the first time, but with one crucial difference. The man was nowhere to be found.

I looked in the spots where I saw him before, and at every inch of the page to see if he somehow moved but couldn’t find him anywhere. 

He was just gone, like he was never there.

I turned back to the very first page to find one last horrifying surprise. The title had a little bit extra added to it:

FIND ME

BEFORE I FIND YOU

What makes for a good voodoo doll? Simple, blood and hate, the one not so easy to obtain, the other readily available in abundance. The price of hate is cheap, but blood is costly. Not physical blood, but spiritual blood- the blood of an enemy, the blood of an oppressor, or most often sought, the blood of a lover.

There are novelty dolls which I sell regularly, which have no power, but allows the purchaser a means of venting, a way to stab out their frustrations without hurting anyone, including themselves. Then there are the real dolls, the dolls that do cause harm. The dolls that are connected with real victims. It is a craft said to be fabricated by the Serpent himself, brought out of the Garden and steeped in a tradition of absurdity. Dancing in circles, building bonfires in groves, singing to goats, smoking, eating and drinking horrendous concoctions, and many more rituals men dream of when trying to empower themselves against another human being, but behind it all is one simple ingredient: hate. Hatred of another person, sometimes a hate so deep it manifests as a living entity, a killer, a torturer, a sadistic madman born not of flesh, but of a darkened, unredeemable soul.

I was taught how to make both dolls, the novelty to help put bread on my table, and the authentic harbinger of sorcery to weed out the worst of humanity. Yes, we are the good guys. The truth of the matter is the doll is to punish the buyer, the one seeking to do harm. The more they punish the doll, the quicker they kill themselves. Hate blinds them to their own demise. The victim does indeed suffer but after a time the effects subside, the curse bounces and resides with the perpetrator. There is always a choice. The perpetrator can choose to stop, but rarely does.

Blood is difficult to come by because the perpetrator has to obtain the blood of his victim himself. The blood is mingled with the perpetrator’s blood. It matters not how they get it or how much. It is a test of their resolve and a measure of their depravity. A dab will do from the victim, but the villain must bleed out enough to fill a ceremonial bowl. The things I’ve mixed in that bowl related to the victim are both evil and comical, from tampons to patches of skin. It is here where the decision is made, the decision of whether to make the doll or not.

It is a decision of high consequence for the perpetrator will become the victim and they will most certainly die. Is it murder? My mentor Doctor Evelyn preferred to call it a cleansing, a voluntary removal from existence. They kill themselves. She was adamant that this stage was crucial, that the decision was only reserved for the worst, for those that the clairvoyants would recognize as enemies of humanity. Killing them truly meant saving lives. Killing them made people’s lives exponentially better. There are ten questions we are to ask, devised by the clairvoyants, and if the answer is yes to all of them, then we are to proceed. Those questions I am not at liberty to reveal, as they were taught to me orally, never written down, and with a promised curse upon my existence if I were ever to reveal them. My mentor taught me, her mentor taught her, and his mentor taught him through a long line of well-trained practitioners of the magical arts, a tradition clouded in mystery, taught as secret knowledge taken from the Garden, hidden in the Apple. A dubious claim of course. I highly doubt the genesis of this tradition is enveloped in such a mythological environment, gifted from Lucifer. No, it didn’t take a Devil to teach us hate. As soon as we forged languages and became self-aware, we realized that we loathed certain other apes of our own species.

There was a curious case that made me almost quit the whole endeavor. One snowy evening, a lanky cadaver of a man dressed in a grey trench coat walked through the empty store and carefully placed a mason jar of blood on the counter. It wasn’t a small mason jar and the inside was opaque from bottom to brim, filled with the dark marron elixir of life.

“Can we adjourn to your workshop downstairs?”

My workshop downstairs was reserved for making the authentic dolls.

“What do you need sir?”

“I need a doll,” he replied.

Something felt wrong; something was askew.

“I have my blood. I am ready and willing to pay whatever you ask?”

“Fifty-thousand dollars,” I said in jest.

“So be it. I have a hundred thousand in the trunk of my car.”

“You’re going to pay me a hundred thousand?”

“I thought we settled on fifty thousand,” he said with a smirk.

At that point, I wasn’t willing to risk losing fifty thousand. “Follow me.”

We carefully stumbled down the stairs to the only working light before the doorway of my workshop. I flicked the switch. I had several racks of dyed camel hair fabric in the far corner, a worktable in the middle of the room, and shelves filled with cotton fiberfill. Everything organic, nothing synthetic. Directly across from the doorway near the opposite wall stood a glass case and inside was a green onyx bowl.

I worked for the next hour and a half constructing the doll, always careful to make everything perfect and paying attention to details. I wasn’t a half-ass doll maker. I took pride in my art. I knew the victim was a young woman with blond hair. I fashioned a dress and black shoes. I put a pearl necklace around her neck. I did more than necessary because I enjoyed it. I was allowed to do as much as I wanted or as little as I wanted but never permitted to make a face. The face was always left blank, the idea being that the entire person could never be fully represented. It was considered an affront to the majesty of the temple of the human body, whatever that meant. I guess to be sure, it does seem a waste of time for me to go through all that trouble only to chuck the doll into a bowl of blood and then allow it to be obliterated by a villainous, hateful shit-bag. But these are the trappings of a voodoo priest.

After I had finished making the doll, I opened the case and brought the ceremonial bowl to the worktable. As soon as I had placed the bowl on the table, the man began pouring the blood from his mason jar into the bowl.

“What are you doing?” I roared.

“Sorry. Just excited!”

“You seem to know more than you should.”

“I know someone who has already done it.”

I knew that had to be a lie or something had gone wrong. If that person hadn’t died, then there was a mistake, a failure of some sort. Hesitantly, I proceeded with the ritual.

“Do you have blood from your enemy?”

“Yes, I do. I most certainly do.” He pulled out a white handkerchief speckled with dried pink blood. He tossed it in the bowl.

‘Sir… dammit.”

“What?”

“You should’ve handed it to me.”

“What does it matter?’ It didn’t matter, but it pissed me off that he had the gall to take control of the ritual.

I put the doll in the bowl. It floated and spun in circles. I opened a drawer, grabbed a lead weight and placed it on top of the doll, submerging it to the bottom of the bowl. I brought two black candles and placed them on either side of the bowl and lit them.

“Ok, that’s it. Now we have to wait seven days,” I explained.

“That’s it? No Latin? No chanting?”

“Well, I do have some questions to ask.”

“Shoot.”

I proceeded to ask him the obligatory ten questions plus one of my own. He answered yes to all of them except for the last one pertaining to the promised fifty thousand dollars.

“So, fifty-thousand for the doll, correct?”

“If it works.”

After seven days the man returned holding a briefcase. I took the blood-drenched doll, wrapped it in tissue paper and put it in a cardboard box. As I slid the box over to him, he opened the briefcase. It was more money than I had ever seen in my life.

He picked up a hundred-dollar bill and placed it on the counter.

“What about the other forty-nine thousand and nine hundred dollars?”

“You’ll get the rest when I know it works.”

Months passed without a single trace of the man. I figured he had destroyed the doll and himself by then. One hundred dollars wasn’t a bad pull for a doll but the lure of fifty-thousand had already whetted my appetite. Yet, if the son of a bitch was dead, then that was payback enough. Did I really expect I would get that money? People searching for violent voodoo solutions aren’t normally very trustworthy.

And then one day there he was waiting in his car parked in front of the store. He jumped out of the car and lunged at me as I was trying to get my keys out of my pocket.

“You’re coming with me.” He pulled a pistol from his pocket and pointed it towards me. “Get in the car.”

We drove to the edge of town to an abandoned warehouse. He forced me through a side entrance way and down a long flight of stairs. There in a large, liminal space sat a lonely blonde headed woman on a mattress. Both her wrists were in shackles and chained to the floor. Behind her sigils of various kinds were spraypainted on the cinder block wall, sigils which I knew to represent demons and evil entities with varying levels of power. A circle of candles surrounded an altar nearby with a thick tattered book opened placed on top.

“The Grand Grimoire, with a ritual for becoming a powerful, unstoppable beast. A possession of sorts, but not so much so that you lose your own identity. The deal is you’ve got to eat people but you have eternal life. I guess a vampire without the charm. Not a wimpy blood sipping aristocrat, but a brutish animal purposed to devour the entire person. Only problem, you need a willing sacrifice. Your damn doll isn’t working.”

It was then that I noticed that the doll was lying on the mattress next to the young woman. A large pin was stuck in its chest. The man ripped off his coat and threw it to the ground. He looked emaciated and weak.

“Why isn’t the curse bouncing back to her?”

I was shocked and dumbfounded.

“Yeah, I know what’s supposed to happen but it ain’t happening. I’m getting the worst of it. You did something wrong and now I need you to fix it,” he yelled as he pointed at me.

Just then the woman took the pin out and started stabbing the doll. The man fell to the floor writhing in pain. She cackled and rocked back and forth.

“I feel it. I feel it,” she said. Her voice sounded like several people talking at once, some more sinister than others.

“It’s done.” She lifted both her arms and broke the chains from the floor. A light wind blew through the area extinguishing most of the candles. Her dark figure walked over to the man, lifted him up by his shoulders and sunk her teeth into his neck. She tore away a chunk of flesh or at least I imagined so. It was too dark to see but my mind had filled in the gruesome details based on her sinister movements, motions not indicative of a loving embrace. I couldn’t see the blood but I could hear fluid falling to the floor. She then placed him on the floor and began to do something with his head. I heard the cracking of bones and the snapping of muscles. I realized as she raised it high in the air and a smattering of light hit it just right, that she had just ripped his head off.

She then turned and glided toward me, moving as if without taking steps. Her freakish face was illuminated as she got near. Her brow was protruded and she had hideous yellow eyes. She smiled and laughed. Her teeth were jagged and pointed, caked with flesh and blood.

“He abducted me, but I knew his plan from the start. He talks to himself. He thinks out loud. He was going to use your ritual to help with his ritual, but I switched it up. Hell, if I was going to die anyway, why not sacrifice my soul for revenge. Fear rules the day, but after a while fear is subsumed by hate. I feared him at first but then I started to hate him.”

She paused and stared at me for more than a minute.

“I’m so hungry.”

I started to back away, hoping to make a run for it.

“Don’t even think about it. You don’t have a chance. I’m not going to eat you. I owe you. In a way, you saved my life.”

I still didn’t understand. She must have noticed my puzzled expression because she then elaborated on her whole scheme.

“Silly, the blood in the mason jar was mine. The blood on the handkerchief was his. It doesn’t matter who abuses the doll. It only matters who has the most blood in the bowl. I was the victim in every sense of the word, but he unwillingly became the willing sacrifice. I guess he didn’t need to die, but just suffer enough to please the masters, or maybe they left him alive for me to finish him off.”

 He demonic face had a sudden look of dismay.

“Pity, I really hated destroying that doll. You did a good job. You’re very talented. You best go while you can. I’m not so sure one is going to fill my belly and I’m not feeling so benevolent at the moment.”

I turned and ran up the stairs, out the door, and past the car. Were the keys in it? I don’t know. I wasn’t taking a chance. I think I ran for at least an hour as fast as I could. I ran until I felt a piercing pain in my side and chest. I heaved for air and vomited all over myself. When I got home, I found a crucifix and put around my neck, wondering if that worked, wondering if it was blessed, wondering if being blessed even worked. I hid in the closet and prayed for morning.

I stayed inside for a few weeks, too scared to leave the apartment. Eventually I would have to leave and at least buy some groceries. I was down to the bare essentials, a half a roll of toilet paper and two packs of instant noodles. The news reported on a missing man and woman. The man I knew they would never find; the woman I knew the officials would be better off not finding.

A couple people from home know my main account and I don't want them finding this. This is long, sorry. I'm not a writer, I'm a dispatcher, and I'm typing this on a motel laptop... well, my laptop, motel wifi, which keeps dropping, so if it posts twice that's why. And if I jump around, I'm sorry. I haven't slept right in about two months and I've been up since yesterday morning.

I've been lurking here for years, mostly on my breaks at work. Never thought I'd post. But I need people who aren't from my town to read this, and this is the only place I could think of where people might actually listen instead of just telling me to get some rest.

I need to start with what my dog does, or none of the rest of it is going to make sense.

If you've never seen a cadaver dog work you probably picture a bloodhound in a cartoon, baying and dragging some guy through the woods. It's not like that. A good HRD dog (human remains detection) is quiet. She works a grid with her nose low, back and forth, tail up, and you can actually see her thinking, like a kid doing long division in their head. And when she finds what she's trained to find she doesn't bark and she doesn't dig. She sits.

That's a passive alert. She sits as close to the source as she can get, points her nose at it, and stares. She won't look at you. She won't look at anything else. Rain, snow, swamp up to her chest, she'll stare at a patch of ground or a car trunk or the bottom of a lake until you give the release word and hand over the toy. Some dogs hold an alert twenty minutes. Mine holds it as long as it takes.

Her name's Juno. Belgian Malinois, nine years old, sixty-one pounds, tan with the black mask, and honestly the best thing I've ever done with my life except my son. I've had her since eight weeks. She's certified every year by two separate national organizations, which means every year she gets tested blind: somebody hides real human remains in one of several spots and decoys in the others, and neither me nor the evaluator knows which is which, and she has to find the right one. She's never failed. 226 deployments, for PDs and sheriff's offices and families, four states. She found a drowned boy at the bottom of a reservoir by leaning out over the side of a johnboat and staring at the water. She found a woman in a septic tank. She found ninety-year-old bone fragments in a farmer's field under two feet of plowed dirt.

She has never made a false alert. Not once. Not in training, not in certs, not on a search.

I need yinz to get that before I tell you what she's been doing. Like actually get it.

The one I think about most was four years ago at a reservoir down in West Virginia. Nine-year-old boy went off a dock at a family reunion and didn't come up. Divers had been on it three days in water so silted they couldn't see their own hands. And the family was standing on the bank in a line. Mom, dad, two grandmas, an uncle holding a toddler. Three days they'd been standing there.

We went out in a johnboat, Juno in her orange harness up in the bow, me on the tiller, a deputy with a GPS. Ran slow lines across the cove. She leaned out over the side with her nose maybe an inch off the surface, working the scent that comes up off the water in a column from whatever's below, drifting, breaking up, coming up again. Bottom of that boat was slippy as anything and she never once lost her footing.

About forty minutes in she sat down in the bow.

Boat's still moving, and she sits, and turns her head to keep her nose on one patch of water as we slide past, swiveling around until she's facing straight back over the stern, staring at a spot of brown water that looked exactly like every other spot of brown water in that reservoir. I cut the motor. Deputy dropped a marker buoy. She stared at it for twenty-five minutes while the dive team came out, didn't blink, didn't move, and the second diver went down the buoy line and came back up after four minutes and pulled his mask off and just nodded.

On the bank the mother sat down in the mud.

That's what Juno does. She doesn't guess. She doesn't get excited. She tells you with her whole body, here, and she keeps telling you until somebody listens.

OK. Me. I'm Delia, 46. I live with my son Caleb, he's 16, in a little town in the hills of western PA that I'm not naming, because anybody from there would know it in two seconds. Coal town, or it was. About four thousand people. Main street with a hardware store, two churches, a diner, and a lot of empty storefronts. Closest real grocery store is the Giant Eagle twenty minutes out by the highway, so most people just make do with the IGA. High school whose football team is the only thing anybody talks about August to November. And under all of it, the streets and the houses and the football field, there's mines.

All closed now. Last one shut in 1994. But they're still down there, miles of tunnels, rooms cut out of the seam and propped up with timber and left to fall in in the dark. Every so often somebody's backyard drops a foot overnight. Every so often a basement fills up with water that smells like rotten eggs. The old-timers call it the town under the town.

I'm a dispatcher at the county 911 center. Nights, three on three off. The dog stuff is volunteer, most HRD handlers are. You do it because once you've watched a family get somebody back to bury you can't really not do it. People think it must be depressing. It's the opposite, mostly. It's the one part of my life where I actually get to finish something.

Caleb's dad left when he was four. It's been the two of us and a dog ever since. Before Juno there was Rudy, black Lab, could find a single tooth in a ten-acre field, died at fourteen with his head in my lap. (Still can't talk about Rudy much.) Caleb grew up with cadaver dogs. He's been helping me train since he was eight, hiding sources, laying out grids. He thinks it's totally normal that we've got a locked freezer in the garage with human teeth and placenta and body farm soil in it, all labeled, for training. His buddies think it's the coolest thing about him.

He's a good kid. Funny, kind, terrible at math, plays left tackle. I'm telling you about him now because I need you to know him a little before I get to the end. Sorry. Getting ahead of myself.

Church picnic is the second Sunday in September. Lawn behind First Methodist, under the oaks, folding tables, everybody's casserole dishes lined up, a cooler of lemonade the size of a bathtub, and somebody always brings like nine two-liters of pop that nobody drinks. I bring Juno every year. Kids love her. She's real gentle with kids and she likes a crowd scratching her ears. She's off duty, on leash, blue collar not the orange harness. That matters. A working dog knows the difference.

About one o'clock I'm in line for the potato salad, Juno sitting by my leg, and Pastor Gene comes over to say hi.

Gene Hollis has been pastor at First Methodist twenty-six years. Married half the town and buried the other half. He's 64, big and pink and bald, laugh you can hear across a parking lot. He crouched down to scratch her like he always does and said something like "There's my girl."

And Juno went rigid.

I felt it through the leash before I saw it. Every muscle locked. She got up off my leg, took two steps toward Gene, and sat down right in front of him, maybe eighteen inches from his chest. Nose pointed at the middle of his body. And she stared.

Not at his face. At his sternum. At the space under his shirt between the buttons. That glassy, total, locked-on look I've seen 226 times over lake water and car trunks and plowed dirt.

Gene laughed. "Well hey, somebody likes me."

I said "Juno, leave it." Nothing. That had NEVER happened. She's off duty, blue collar, leave it means leave it. I said it again sharper. She didn't even flick an ear.

I said her release word (it's a goofy made-up word so nobody says it by accident, I'm not putting it here). Nothing. I pulled her tug out of my back pocket and waved it right next to her head. She didn't look at it.

People were noticing now. Couple of the kids giggling. Gene still crouched there smiling, a little unsure. "She okay?"

I had to pick her up. All sixty-one pounds. Arms around her chest, lifted her off the ground, turned her around, and the whole time her head kept swiveling back over my shoulder toward him like a compass needle. Carried her to the truck, put her in the crate, and she lay down with her nose jammed against the wire pointed back at the lawn, at Gene, and stayed like that the whole way home.

So I told myself there was an explanation. There's always an explanation. Cadaver dogs alert on decomp odor, which is a cocktail of chemicals with ugly names, cadaverine, putrescine, a few hundred others, that a body starts putting out within hours of death. It's stubborn stuff. Gets into soil, fabric, wood, carpet, car seats, n'at. A dog can pick it up off a rug where a body lay twenty minutes, years later.

And Gene's a pastor. Pastors are around the dead all the time. They sit with dying people, they put hands on bodies in hospital beds and at the funeral home. So I'm thinking OK, he did a viewing this morning. Or last night. Whatever, he touched somebody, it's on his hands, on his shirt, and Juno's a pro and she's trained to report that smell wherever she finds it, and she reported it, and I'm the one who embarrassed us both.

Monday I called the funeral home, casual, asking about something else. I know the girl who does their books, so it wasn't even weird. Or I told myself it wasn't. Small town, everybody's nebby, nobody thinks twice. No viewing that weekend. Gene hadn't been in.

I ran into Helen Ostrowski at the post office that week. Before she was on the list. Or after? Honestly I don't trust my own dates anymore. She was behind the counter weighing a package and she looked at me over her readers and said something I've thought about every single day since.

"Delia," she said, "do you ever get the feeling you forgot to do something?"

I said sometimes.

"I keep getting it." She put the package on the scale and looked at the number and didn't write it down. "All day. Like I left the stove on. Like there's something I was supposed to do and I just can't think what." She smiled. "I keep wanting to sit down. Isn't that silly? Just sit down someplace quiet and rest. Like I've been on my feet a hundred years."

Then she shook her head and laughed and wrote down the weight and sold me my stamps.

Anyway. I figured it was something with Juno. A bad day, getting older, maybe something off with her nose. I booked her a vet check and a blind proficiency test with a handler buddy two counties over.

She passed both. Perfect on the blind. Found the source in under two minutes, blew right past three decoys.

The next Sunday I took her to church with me on purpose. Sat in the back pew. When it let out and everybody filed past Gene at the door shaking his hand, I walked her past him on a short leash.

She sat down in front of him and stared at his chest.

I need to tell you about Gene. What he was like those weeks.

He was fine. That's the thing. He was totally fine. Cheerful. Preached. Visited the sick. Big laugh across the parking lot. But there were little things, the kind you only catch if you're watching, and by then I was watching.

He'd stopped sweating. It was a hot September, ninety most afternoons, every other man in town had pit stains, and Gene, who has always been a sweater, big pink guy with a hankie permanently in his fist, stood out in the sun after service in a black shirt and his face was dry and pale as paper.

He'd stopped eating. Not obviously. He'd take a plate at the picnic and carry it around and talk, and at the end of the afternoon the plate went in the trash still full.

And the flies. This is the part I keep coming back to. At the picnic, at church, once outside the hardware store, there were flies around him. Not a swarm. Two or three. Big slow metallic-green ones, the kind that find a deer on the side of the road inside an hour. They'd land on his collar, his ear, the back of his hand, and walk around, and he never brushed them off. Didn't seem to know they were there.

I know those flies. Every handler knows those flies. They get to a body before anything else does. Sometimes on a search you look for them before you even cut the dog loose.

Fourth Sunday, Juno alerted on Helen Ostrowski.

Helen runs the post office. She's 71, tiny, sharp as a tack, known me since I was a little girl. Juno sat down in front of her in the church lot and stared at her chest, and Helen laughed and said "Is she doing her job on me, Delia?" and I said something about Juno being a goofball and dragged her off and sat in my truck with my hands shaking.

Next day she alerted on Dale Sorensen, who coaches the football team, outside the diner.

Two days after that, a teller at the bank. Then the Petrakis kid who bags groceries at the IGA, nineteen years old. Then a woman I didn't know walking her own dog down Second Street, a chocolate Lab that was trotting along at the very end of its leash, as far away from her as it could get, head turned away, tail clamped between its legs. I noticed that. You notice that kind of thing when you do what I do.

I quit taking Juno into town. Started walking her at night on the old rail trail away from people. But I live in town, everybody lives in town. She alerted on the guy who reads the gas meters, through my backyard fence. She alerted on two of Caleb's buddies who came by to get him for practice, sat down on the porch boards and stared at the passenger door of their car.

(I'm going to stop listing them all, it doesn't matter, you get it.)

I kept a list. I'm a dispatcher, I keep logs, it's literally what I do. Name, date, time, location. By the middle of October I had twenty-nine names.

By the end of October I had forty-four.

I talked to Bonnie. Bonnie Kreider, she's a nurse practitioner at the clinic on Main and one of maybe three people in town I'd call an actual friend. We went to high school together. I met her at the diner on a Tuesday, back booth, and told her everything, and she didn't laugh. Which honestly scared me more than if she had.

She stirred her coffee a long time.

Then she said, "Gene came in for his annual physical. Three weeks ago."

I waited.

"His temp was ninety-four point one," she said. "I did it three times with two different thermometers. BP was seventy over forty. Resting heart rate thirty-one." She put the spoon down. "Thirty-one, Dee. That's a marathon runner asleep. He's sixty-four and he weighs two-sixty. I told him he had to go to the hospital in the city right now, I was calling an ambulance, and he laughed and said he never felt better in his life. He said he felt peaceful. That was the word." She looked up at me. "He was so calm. He said, 'Bonnie, I'm fine. Really. I'm just tired, I think. I've been tired a long time.'"

"Did he go?"

"No." She turned her cup around and around on the saucer. "I've had six more since. Same thing. Low temp, low pressure, pulse in the thirties. They come in for a cough or some routine thing and I take vitals and nearly fall over. And they're all so calm. Not one of them will go to the hospital." She dropped her voice. "Helen Ostrowski. Last week. I couldn't find a pulse at all. Fingers on her wrist, on her neck, nothing. And she's sitting on the exam table telling me about her grandson's wedding."

We sat there a while.

"Is she on your list?" Bonnie said. "Helen?"

I said yeah. Second name.

Bonnie nodded real slow. She looked out the window at Main Street, people walking by in the October sun, going in the hardware store, coming out of the bank.

"How many on your list?"

"Forty-four."

She closed her eyes.

So then I went to see Walt Bevan.

Walt's 93. Little house at the bottom of Furnace Street, porch leans like a drunk, yard full of rusted mine equipment he won't let anybody haul off. He went down the Number 4 at fourteen and came up for the last time at sixty-one, and he knows more about the town under the town than anybody alive. I brought him a pie, because you don't visit Walt without a pie, and sat on the porch with him and told him about Juno.

He listened with his eyes shut, rocking. When I was done he didn't say anything for a long time.

Then he said, "You know about 'twenty-seven?"

Everybody in town knows about 1927. There's a plaque outside the town hall. November 8, 1927, an explosion in the Number 4, about two miles in and half a mile down. Seventy-one men died. Thirty-eight of them were never recovered, because the fire burned for weeks and the company sealed that section with them still inside.

"Most of the boys that died," Walt said, "didn't die in the blast. They died of the afterdamp."

I didn't know the word. I'm putting it here exactly how he said it.

"After an explosion," Walt said, "the air goes bad. Blast eats up all the good air and leaves the bad behind. Carbon monoxide, mostly. Miners called it afterdamp. Whitedamp. You can't smell it, can't see it. It don't hurt. It just takes you, nice and quiet. You get tired. You get calm. You sit down for a rest and you don't get up."

He rocked a while.

"My grandad was in that mine in 'twenty-seven. One of the ones that walked out. And he told me something I never told nobody, because they'd have thought he was cracked." Walt opened his eyes. Milky blue, real steady. "He said a lot of the boys walked out with him. Come up the slope after the blast, coughing, black all over. Walked home. Sat down to supper with their families. Kissed their kids. Went to work next day, some of 'em. Went to church Sunday."

"And they was dead," Walt said. "Been dead since the afterdamp hit 'em, down there in the dark. They just hadn't noticed yet. Some of 'em kept going a week. Some longer. Walking around. Real calm. Real polite. Didn't eat. Didn't sweat. Then one morning they'd just be sitting in their chair, and they'd stay there."

He looked at me.

"My grandad said you could always tell which ones," he said. "By the dogs."

I know how that sounds. Believe me, I know. I sat in my truck in front of his house for twenty minutes after and didn't start it.

Three nights later I'm at the console at 3:12 a.m. and a call comes in from an address on Sycamore.

Linda Sorensen. Dale's wife. The coach. Juno had alerted on Dale outside the diner six weeks before. He was name number three.

She wasn't screaming. That's what I remember. Twelve years of dispatch, I've taken hundreds of calls where somebody's found a husband or a wife or a parent not breathing, and they scream, or sob, or they're so scared their voice goes up into a squeak. Linda was calm. Kind of puzzled. Like she was calling about a weird noise in the furnace.

"It's my husband," she said. "He's in his chair. He won't wake up. He's been sitting there since dinner, I thought he dozed off watching the game, and I went up to bed. And I came down just now for a glass of water and he's still there, and he's..." Pause. "He's cold. He's real cold. And he's smiling."

I ran the protocol. Asked her to check breathing. Asked her to get him on the floor and start compressions, and I counted them out loud for her, one and two and three and four, like I've done a thousand times. Sent the ambulance. Stayed on till the medics walked in.

I knew it was pointless. I knew before she finished the first sentence.

End of my shift one of the medics, Troy, I've known him forever, came and found me in the break room and sat down across from me and said "Dee, that was weird."

I asked him what was weird.

"Wife says he was talking to her at dinner," Troy said. "Like, normal. Talked about the Blackwood game, asked for the salt. Then sat down in his chair to watch TV." He rubbed his face. "But Dee, the lividity. The blood pooling. That takes a while to set like that. Rigor had already come and gone. That man was dead for days. Maybe a week. Maybe more." He looked at me. "So how'd he ask for the salt?"

Death certificate said cardiac arrest. Dale was sixty. Everybody said what a shame, big healthy guy like that, and the funeral was Saturday and the whole team came in their jerseys and stood in the back of the church, and Gene did the eulogy with his face dry and pale as paper, and there were flies around the casket, and nobody brushed them away.

I watched Gene from the back pew. He said Dale went peacefully, in his own chair, in his own home. Said it was the way we'd all want to go. Said Dale wasn't afraid. He said, "I don't think he even noticed."

And the whole church nodded. Calm and polite.

I didn't sleep after the funeral. I went home and redd up the kitchen table, which I never do, just shoved everything onto the counter, mail and dog stuff and Caleb's practice gear n'at, and got out the county survey maps. We have a set at the 911 center, old ones, from back when they plotted mine subsidence. They show the Number 4 tunnels laid out under town in faded blue ink, like the veins on the back of an old lady's hand.

I put a red pin on every address on my list. Home, work, and wherever Juno alerted on them.

Took about an hour. Then I stood back and looked at it.

They weren't scattered. They made a circle. Rough and ragged, about half a mile across, centered on the east end of Main, on the high school, on the football field. I laid the old mine map over top and the center of the circle was right over the sealed section of the Number 4. Where the explosion was in 1927. Where the thirty-eight men are.

And the first pins, the September ones, Gene and Helen and Dale, were all near the middle. Late October ones were further out. Last week's were right on the edge.

It was spreading. Like a ring from a rock you drop in a pond. Like gas coming up through the ground.

There's been stuff over the years about the mine, for the record. CO in basements. A family got evacuated in 2009 when their alarm went off in the middle of the night. The fire in the Number 4 was supposed to be out by 1928. But there's mine fires in Pennsylvania that have been burning sixty years, look it up. And the company that sealed it went bankrupt in 1952 and nobody's checked that seal since.

So maybe that's all it is. Maybe the old fire never went out and the afterdamp is leaking up through the cracks in the town under the town, into basements and classrooms and the church. Can't see it, can't smell it, quiet. Making people tired. Making people calm.

Or maybe it doesn't matter what it is.

Because Walt's grandad was right. They don't notice.

That night after Caleb was asleep I did something I'd been putting off. I put Juno's orange harness on in the kitchen and told her to search.

I stood still in the middle of the floor. She worked around me in a slow circle, nose at knee height, then waist, then up on her hind legs with her front paws on my hip, sniffing my chest, my collar, my hands. Professional. Thorough. Then she dropped down and looked up at me, tail going, waiting for the next command. No alert.

I took her upstairs and cracked Caleb's door and sent her in. She worked the room in the dark, around the bed, nose to the blanket, up by the pillow where he was breathing slow and deep with his mouth open. Then she came back out and sat in the hall looking at me, wagging.

No alert. Not on either of us.

I sat on the top step with my arms around her neck for a long time. I remember thinking, We're outside the circle. We're six blocks from the edge. We have time. I remember planning to move us to my sister's in Ohio before Christmas. I remember feeling, first time in weeks, something like relief.

That was October 24th. I've checked. It's in my log.

Friday I went to the football game.

I wanted to see. I left Juno in the truck way at the far end of the lot, windows cracked, and walked up to the bleachers by myself with my collar up. Homecoming. Half the town there. Lights on, those huge white stadium lights you can see from three miles off on a fall Friday, band playing, air smelling like popcorn and cut grass and bus diesel. If you grew up around here you know exactly what I mean.

I sat at the top of the home stands and watched the crowd.

Most of them were just a crowd. On their feet, yelling, stomping the aluminum so the whole thing rang like a drum. Kids running up and down the steps. Old guys with blankets on their knees screaming at the ref.

And scattered in with them, like rocks in a creek, the others.

They sat very still. Didn't stand when everybody stood. Didn't yell. Watched the game with calm, interested faces, like watching fish in a tank, and when there was a touchdown and everybody around them jumped up screaming they turned their heads real slow and smiled at the people screaming. Kindly. Like you'd smile at little kids. I counted thirty-one of them in the home stands. Thirty-one little islands of quiet in all that noise. I knew most of their names. Most of them were on my list.

Over each one, up in the white glare, a few flies turned slow circles.

When I got back to the truck Juno was sitting up in the back with her nose pressed to the gap at the top of the window, pointed at the stands. Not at one person. At all of it. Her head going in little quick jerks, left, right, up, down, like she was trying to alert on everything at once and couldn't pick. She was trembling. Nine years. I'd never once seen her tremble on a scent.

I sat in the cab with my hands on the wheel and listened to the band doing the fight song across the dark lot, and the crowd roaring, and I thought about how many of them were roaring and how many were just sitting there smiling, being polite, waiting for it to be over so they could go home and sit in their chairs.

I went to the county. I called state DEP, the mine safety office, the health department. Told them I'm a 911 dispatcher, which is true, and that we'd had multiple CO alarm calls in the east end, which is not. They sent a guy out with a meter. He walked around the high school and the church and down Main and got nothing. Zero ppm. Said the air was cleaner than in the city.

I called the state police and asked to talk to somebody about a possible public health emergency. I got as far as the word "dog" before the trooper started using the voice. You know the voice. We use it at the center for people who call about the government putting chips in their teeth.

I thought about the paper. I thought about telling Gene. I thought about walking up to Helen at the post office counter and saying, Helen, I think you might be dead.

And then what? What do you even say after that?

November 1st, Juno alerted on Caleb.

I've written and deleted this part like six times. Just going to say it.

He was eating breakfast. Cereal at the counter, standing up like always, practice shorts, hair sticking up. Juno was under the table. I was at the stove.

I heard her get up. Nails on the linoleum, click, click, click. I turned around.

She was sitting at my son's feet staring at his chest.

He laughed. "Hey, Junebug." Scratched her head. "What, you want my Cheerios?"

She didn't move. Didn't look at the Cheerios. She stared at the place under his T-shirt where his heart is, with that total, terrible, locked-on look of a dog who found what she was looking for.

I don't remember the next couple minutes great. I remember dropping the spatula. I remember grabbing his wrist and digging my fingers in, hard, harder, while he laughed and said "Mom what the hell" and tried to pull away. I remember I couldn't find a pulse, and then I thought I could, real faint, real slow, and then I wasn't sure. I remember putting my hand flat on his chest and holding it there and him going still, looking at me, his face changing, the laugh going out of it.

His skin was cool. Not cold. Cool, like somebody who's been sitting in AC all day. And I couldn't feel his heart. I held my hand there a long time and I couldn't feel anything.

"Mom," he said, real quiet. "Mom. You're freaking me out."

He was so calm.

I drove him to the hospital in the city. Fifty-three miles. He griped the whole way, he'd miss practice, he felt fine, I was being crazy. I told him I'd seen some symptoms. Told him there might be a gas leak at the house. Juno rode in her crate in the back.

Around the thirty-mile mark I saw her in the rearview. She'd been sitting up since we left, nose on the wire, staring through the back seat at Caleb. And at thirty miles she just. Stopped. Lay down, head on her paws, went to sleep.

In the ER they took his vitals. 98.4. BP 120 over 76. Heart rate 62, which the triage nurse said was great for an athlete. They checked his blood for CO because I made them. Normal. The doctor was very nice and very tired and asked me, gently, if I was under a lot of stress at work.

I almost laughed in his face. Almost. Then I wanted to cry, because the thing is, part of me wanted him to be right. I wanted so bad for it to be me. Stressed out dispatcher mom loses it, takes a leave, gets on some pills. I would've signed up for that in a heartbeat.

On the way home, about thirty miles out from town, Juno woke up. Sat up in her crate, pressed her nose to the wire, and stared at the back of Caleb's head.

That was a week ago.

I kept him home. Told the school he has mono. He's furious with me. He's in his room all day on his phone texting his friends, and they keep texting back, dude come to practice, coach says you're fine, everyone's asking about you. He says he feels great. Says he's never felt better. Says he feels peaceful, with this little smile, and he has no idea he's using Gene's word.

He quit eating. Takes a plate up to his room and I find it on the landing in the morning, not touched. Hasn't sweated in a week. He sleeps, or looks like he sleeps, with his eyes a little bit open.

Yesterday morning there was a fly on his pillow. Big, slow, green. Walked across the pillowcase onto his cheek and up toward the corner of his eye, and he just lay there smiling a little in his sleep and didn't move.

I killed it with my hand. I smacked my own kid in the face to kill a fly. And he woke up and looked at me and said "Mom?" so gently. Like he was worried about ME.

Juno won't leave him. Sits outside his door all night staring at it. When he comes down she follows him room to room, and every time he stops she sits at his feet and points her nose at his heart. He thinks it's funny. Calls her his bodyguard.

I haven't slept more than an hour at a time since. I sit on the landing. I listen.

And then last night they came to the house.

Not a mob. Nothing like that. Nothing in this town has ever been like that. I heard a car pull up around nine, then another, and when I looked out the front window there were maybe a dozen people standing on my lawn in the dark.

Gene up front. Helen next to him in her good coat. Linda Sorensen in Dale's old letterman jacket. The teller from the bank. The Petrakis kid. Caleb's two buddies. Just standing there on the grass in the porch light, hands in their pockets or folded in front of them. Calm. Polite.

Nobody's breath was fogging. I noticed that. It was thirty-four degrees, I could see my own breath on the inside of the glass, and theirs didn't fog. At all.

Gene came up on the porch and knocked. Real gentle.

I didn't open it. I talked to him through the door.

"Delia, honey, we're just worried about you." Warm. The big pink voice I've known my whole life. "Folks are saying the dog's been upsetting people. Sitting down in front of 'em. Scaring the kids. Helen says she can't hardly go to work without wondering if Juno's going to come at her."

"She doesn't come at anybody," I said. "She sits."

"I know, honey." Pause. "But it upsets folks. Makes 'em feel funny. Like she knows something about 'em they don't." Longer pause. "And Caleb ought to be at practice. He's missing the Blackwood game Friday. The boys say he's never been in better shape."

Juno was in the hall behind me. Not staring at the door. Turning in a slow circle in the middle of the hallway, nose up, sweeping, the way she does at the start of a search when there's so much scent in the air she can't decide where to start.

"Some of the folks think," Gene said, "maybe it's time she retired. She's nine. That's old for a working dog. Maybe let her rest." Quiet a second. "We'd all feel a lot more peaceful, Delia. You would too. I promise. It doesn't hurt. You just get tired. You've been tired a long time, haven't you, honey? We all have."

Upstairs I heard Caleb's door. Feet on the landing. He came halfway down the stairs and stopped.

"Mom?" he said. "Is that Pastor Gene? Can I go out and say hi?"

Juno ran up the steps past me and sat on the step below him, between him and the front door, and stared at his heart.

Anyway. I'm writing this from a motel off the interstate. Not saying which one. A hundred and ninety miles from home. It's four in the morning.

I put Caleb in the truck around midnight after they'd all gone. Told him we were going to his aunt's in Ohio. He didn't argue, which isn't him. Got in the passenger seat, buckled up, looked out the window at town going by, the church, the post office, the high school, and said real quiet, "I like it here, Mom. Everyone's so nice."

Then nothing. Not a word the rest of the drive.

Juno rode in the back seat behind him, not in the crate. Sat up the whole way with her nose a few inches off his headrest. Staring through it at my son.

At thirty miles I was watching her in the mirror. Praying. I'm not religious and I was praying out loud in the truck at quarter after one in the morning, please lie down, please lie down, please.

She didn't lie down.

Not at thirty. Not at fifty-three where the hospital is. Not at a hundred. A hundred and ninety miles she sat behind him and stared. And she's at the end of the motel bed now, in the dark, staring at him. He's on his back on top of the covers. Eyes a little open. Hands folded on his chest.

The way they fold them at the funeral home.

His phone's been buzzing on the nightstand all night. I picked it up an hour ago and read the screen. His friends, the team, numbers I didn't know. Dozens. All the same kind of thing, same gentle, no-hurry way. come home man. everyone misses you. coach says no rush. its so quiet here now its nice. your mom can come too. tell her we're not mad about the dog.

Last one came at 3:51. 3:51 in the morning. From Gene. I didn't know Gene had my son's number.

Whenever you're both ready. We'll leave the porch light on.

I turned the phone off. Caleb didn't stir.

It's not wearing off this time. The city was a reprieve. Whatever came up out of that ground is in him now. All the way in.

OK. Here's the actual reason I'm typing this at four in the morning instead of sitting with my kid.

We stopped for gas around two, truck stop off the interstate, different county, different state, a hundred and sixty miles from home. I let Juno out to pee on the strip of grass by the air pump. Guy filling up a pickup at the next pump. Fifties, hunting jacket. Nobody.

Juno walked over and sat at his feet and stared at his chest.

He laughed and said "Well hey there" and scratched her ears.

I got her back in the truck. And pulling out I saw a woman come out of the store with a coffee, and Juno in the back seat turned her head and tracked her across the lot with her nose. The way she does when she's on a scent she's trained to report. Then the cashier, through the window. Young kid, couldn't have been twenty. Then a guy asleep in the cab of a semi.

All the way down the interstate. Every car that got close. Every light in every little town. Her head kept turning. A man walking a dog. A woman at a bus stop. A family in the next lane at a red light, kids in the back waving at her through the glass.

It's not our town.

It was never just our town. We were just the town with a dog that can't be wrong.

I don't know how far it goes. I don't know if our old fire is the only one or if there's seams burning under every town, every city, the whole country, leaking afterdamp up through the cracks for years, decades, making everybody a little more tired. A little more calm. A little more peaceful. Till they don't notice the moment they stop. I don't know if this is new. Maybe it's always been like this and the dogs always knew and nobody listened.

But I'm asking yinz something. Seriously.

If you've got a dog, and your dog has started sitting down next to somebody and staring, not at their face, at their chest, and won't quit, won't take a treat, won't come when you call: don't laugh it off. Don't drag her away. Don't tell your buddy she's just being a goofball.

Look at the person. Look for the sweat that isn't there. Look at their plate. Look for the flies.

And then ask yourself how long it's been since you felt anything but tired.

It's five now. Caleb hasn't moved. Eyes still a little open. Little smile. Room's cold and getting colder.

Juno's been restless since three.

I heard her nails on the carpet. Heard her walk away from Caleb, along the side of the bed, slow, nose down, sweeping. Like a grid. Heard her stop.

She's standing next to my chair.

Not sitting. Standing. Nose pressed into my side, right under my ribs, breathing in, long and slow. She does that on a search when the source is deep. When the scent's only just starting to come up through the ground and she isn't sure yet. She checks, moves off, comes back, checks again.

This is the fourth time tonight she's come back to me.

She hasn't sat. Not yet.

I'm so tired. I've been tired so long. Since September. Before September. I don't know since when.

I'm going to post this now. Then I'm going to sit here with my hand on her back and watch her, all night if I have to, and see what she does.

She's never been wrong.

Content warning: abduction, violence, and self-inflicted injury.

The man who tied me to a chair is still out there, and we don't know if he'll come to our house. My wife and our boys are staying at her sister's.

The chair was in a barn, next to a stone trough. The door was on the other side of the room. I knew I couldn't reach it.

I wasn't trying to reach the door.

There's a mark on my chest where a tube went in. It started with a patient named Gabriele.

I've changed the names. The investigation is still open.

I'm a nurse on a locked psychiatric ward in southern Italy. Gabriele was twenty-six and had advanced cystic fibrosis. Steroids for an allergic reaction in his lungs had left him unable to sleep and convinced people were poisoning him. Our doctors and his lung team agreed on a short admission in a private room. Once the steroid dose came down, the delusions passed. He stayed longer than he needed to. Pulmonology had no isolation room free, and a patient with lungs like his couldn't be put in a shared one.

Every morning he spent about forty minutes inhaling medication and clearing mucus from his lungs. At first I stayed because he needed someone nearby. Later I stayed when I could, even after he was done. Some mornings we talked. On others he was too tired, and I sat there doing paperwork.

He was a fan of a soccer team I couldn't stand. He also noticed that I'd make coffee, leave it on the counter and remember it an hour later.

"You could skip a step," he said once. "Make it cold to begin with."

One morning my wife sent me a video of our younger boy learning to ride a bike. He got going, looked back to see if she was watching and rode straight into the grass. He stood up laughing, with dirt on both knees.

Gabriele asked me to play it again. The next morning he wanted to know if my son had learned to brake.

"No. He's learned to blame the grass."

I'd mentioned that I used to play soccer. Gabriele decided I must have been a goalkeeper and asked how tall I was. I told him. He said his team would have put me in goal anyway, which started another argument about his team.

His father came by after his shifts in intensive care. No one else came. I mostly saw them together when Demetrio stopped me at the door to ask whether Gabriele had eaten or finished his treatments. Sometimes he'd ask while the empty meal tray was still beside the bed.

A few days later Ferruccio came back from his break smelling of cigarettes. I told him I could smell him from Gabriele's doorway. He asked if I'd finally decided to try one. I said I'd never smoked. Gabriele was in his room, turning a paper cup in his hands. I didn't think he was listening.

Another day I complained about the photo on my new ID card. Gabriele asked if I'd registered as an organ donor when I renewed it. I said yes. After a pause, he made a joke about the camera trying to improve my face.

Around then, he began going quiet when his father came in. I thought he didn't want Demetrio to see how much time I spent in his room.

Gabriele was already waiting for two new lungs. When his breathing worsened the following week, his lung team arranged a transfer to the transplant center. By the time I reached his room, he couldn't finish a sentence. He kept pulling at his oxygen mask. When I got him to look at me, he left it alone long enough for it to help.

"Just look at me," I said. "You don't have to talk."

I stepped away to speak to the transport team. He caught my wrist.

Nunzia, our head nurse, was beside us.

"He only wants Matteo," she said.

I finished the transfer notes, and Nunzia sent me with him. The doctor assigned to the transfer had been pulled into another emergency, and no one else was immediately available. Demetrio was an intensive care anesthesiologist and had done critical-care transfers before. The transport coordinator wasn't happy about sending Gabriele's father, but after a call between the two hospitals, they cleared him to go with us as the physician.

Before we left, Demetrio held the metal end of his stethoscope in his palm to warm it. Gabriele's eyes were shut. His father warmed it anyway.

On the road Gabriele pressed a hand against one side of his chest. His oxygen saturation dropped. He tried to tell us something and couldn't get enough air to say it. The driver pulled over. Demetrio listened to his chest and said he could barely hear air moving on one side. Gabriele's blood pressure was falling too.

Demetrio stopped with the stethoscope in his hand.

"Demetrio."

He didn't answer. His hands were shaking.

"Help him."

He opened the emergency kit and relieved the pressure building around Gabriele's lung. I held the mask in place. We went to the nearest emergency department, where they put in a chest tube. Once he was stable enough to travel, we continued to the transplant center.

Demetrio hardly spoke for the rest of the trip.

At the center, other doctors took over. I bought a coffee from a machine in the hall and left half of it on a ledge when someone called me back. Gabriele's breathing had worsened again. They were about to sedate him and put a breathing tube in his throat.

He caught my sleeve.

"I'm sorry."

I thought he meant the mask, or the trouble he'd given us in the ambulance. I told him there was nothing to apologize for.

He watched me until the medication took effect.

Later a transplant doctor told us the center was requesting emergency priority for him on the national transplant list. The request still had to be reviewed. Even if it was approved, she couldn't tell Demetrio whether suitable lungs would become available in time.

Demetrio thanked me for staying with his son. A little later I saw him on the phone at the far end of the hall.

I expected him to stay there. He said he needed to collect Gabriele's things from our hospital, where he'd left his car, and rode back with us in the ambulance.

I sat beside the empty stretcher. Demetrio pointed at my seat belt.

"Put that on."

I did.

"You have children?"

"Two."

"Then you understand."

I thought he meant leaving Gabriele at the center.

The road home was nearly empty. A van passed us, slowed down and stopped across our lane. Our driver braked hard. While he radioed that the road was blocked, a man got out of the van and came toward us, waving for help.

The driver stepped down. I saw him fall, but I didn't see what hit him.

Demetrio got out on the other side and went down beside him. By the time I reached them, the driver was breathing but wouldn't answer me. Demetrio lay with his eyes shut and blood at his temple. His eyelid tightened when I tried to lift it. I thought he was coming around.

There was no sign of the man from the van. The van sat across the lane with its doors open. I climbed into the cab to use the radio and found the handset ripped from its cord. I looked up and down the road. Nothing moved.

Dispatch had our location from the driver's call, but they didn't know he was hurt. My phone had no signal. I didn't want to leave the two men on the road, so I only went a little way uphill, looking back at them every few steps. I checked the phone again. Still nothing.

A hand landed on my shoulder.

I started to turn. Something hit the back of my head.

When I woke, my wrists and ankles were tied to a chair in an old farm building. A strap crossed my chest. I could hear an engine idling outside. I pulled at one of the ties until I tore the skin underneath it.

There was a stone trough close to the chair. The door was farther off.

A man outside was arguing with someone. I couldn't make out everything he said, but he'd heard that the ambulance had been found and wanted to leave.

The door opened.

A man came in with his face covered and a medical bag in his hand. There was dried blood at his temple. He took out a stethoscope and held its metal end in his palm.

"Demetrio?"

He took the covering off. Then he listened to my chest. I held my breath. He waited until I couldn't hold it anymore and listened again.

"Is the driver alive?"

He raised one finger to silence me and kept listening. Then he took the stethoscope out of his ears.

"That's why I told you to put the belt on."

I thought about Gabriele asking my height. About Ferruccio's cigarettes. About my ID card.

"You looked up my blood type."

"Yes."

"That's all you know? You don't know if my lungs would be right for him."

"No."

He clipped an oxygen monitor to my finger. Red light showed through my nail. He watched the reading for a few seconds.

"You want me to get to a hospital with a brain injury," I said. "While my lungs still work."

He didn't answer.

We'd been on our way home. Whoever found me would take me to our hospital, and an injury like that would go straight to his unit. His colleagues would keep my heart going for the transplant team. He'd trained some of them himself.

That was why he'd let me see his face.

"You can't make the transplant team give them to Gabriele."

"I know."

"They might give them to someone else."

He gathered the monitor's cord into his hand.

"Then I'll have killed you for nothing."

The man outside called for him. Demetrio told him to wait.

I said Gabriele's name. Demetrio kept looking at the monitor.

I tried my wrists again. The ties held.

Gabriele needed both lungs. If I damaged one of mine badly enough, Demetrio might have no reason to go on with his plan. I might also die before anyone found me.

My son still hadn't learned to brake.

I looked at the trough.

I threw my weight sideways. The chair went over with me, and my ribs struck the stone edge.

At first I couldn't tell how badly I'd hurt myself. Then I tried to breathe and couldn't get a full breath in.

Demetrio was on the floor beside me. He cut the strap across my chest and listened with his stethoscope. He hadn't warmed it this time.

"Call them," I said.

He checked the monitor again.

"Call them."

I was afraid he'd leave me there now that my lungs were damaged. He stayed where he was, listening to my chest while I struggled to breathe. I couldn't tell whether he was trying to help me or assess what was left.

The man outside shouted, "I'm leaving."

Demetrio went to the doorway and held up his phone until he got a signal. He put the call on speaker and told emergency services where to find me.

"Is he conscious?" the dispatcher asked.

"Yes."

He cut the ties around my wrists and put the phone beside my hand, the call still open. Outside, the van's engine revved.

"Why me?" I asked.

Demetrio stopped at the door.

"I didn't choose you."

He looked back at me.

"He only ever wanted you."

The van pulled away. I stayed on the line and asked about the ambulance driver.

The driver survived.

I remember the noise of the rotor and someone counting my breaths. The helicopter took me to our hospital, and I ended up in Demetrio's unit after all. One of the doctors who looked after me had trained under him. She couldn't meet my eyes.

Three of my ribs were broken, two of them against the trough. I also had a collapsed lung, a concussion and a drain in my chest for several days.

Each morning a physiotherapist had me cough into a pillow pressed against my ribs. The first time, it took me forty minutes. Gabriele had spent forty minutes like that every morning since he was a child. Ferruccio came on his day off and stayed until I was done, and a while after that.

Demetrio and the man with the van are still missing.

An employee at our hospital later admitted he'd let Demetrio see a blood bank record from a surgery I'd had years earlier. It showed my blood type and nothing more. Demetrio had looked at it before Gabriele's breathing got worse, while Gabriele and I were still talking about my son's bicycle.

Gabriele was alive. The emergency request had been approved, but there were still no lungs for him. Once he was awake enough to write, he asked for me. Ferruccio drove me to the transplant center after my chest tube was removed.

Gabriele still had a breathing tube in his mouth and a drain at his side. There was a small whiteboard beside his hand. The only chair was against the wall. No one had pulled it up to the bed. I tried, but it hurt too much. Ferruccio moved it for me.

I'd had questions ready on the drive. Before I could get the first one out, Gabriele wrote on the board and turned it toward me.

Does it hurt?

I didn't answer.

"Did your father tell you to ask how tall I was?"

Gabriele nodded.

"Did he tell you why?"

He wiped the board and wrote:

I didn't ask him.

"What about the cigarettes?"

The marker squeaked on the board.

I told him what you said.

"And the donor question?"

He told me to ask.

I looked at him. He held the marker but didn't write anything else.

"When did you realize something was wrong?"

He waited a long time before putting the marker to the board.

Before the ambulance.

He wiped it clean, then wrote again.

I told him you had children. I thought he would stop.

Demetrio had known the answer when he asked me on the way back.

I thought of Gabriele catching my sleeve before they sedated him. I'd told him he had nothing to apologize for.

"You could have warned me."

Gabriele nodded.

"Why didn't you?"

He looked down at the board. Ferruccio was standing near the window. I could hear someone moving equipment in the hall while Gabriele wrote.

I didn't want you to stop coming.

He set the marker down.

I looked at my wrists. I thought about the driver on the road, and my wife taking our boys out of the house because we didn't know who Demetrio might come after next.

"You should have told me," I said.

Gabriele nodded again. He didn't try to pick up the marker.

"I could have died."

He shut his eyes. A tear ran down toward his ear.

I put my hand over his. My sleeve slipped back, and he saw the marks from the ties. He tried to pull away. I held on.

"Look at me."

He did. I was still angry with him. I couldn't say anything for a few seconds.

"I forgive you."

He tried to say something around the tube, but no sound came out.

"You don't have to talk," I said.

I kept holding Gabriele's hand until his fingers warmed against mine. By the window, Ferruccio wiped his cheek with his thumb.

After a while Gabriele pointed at my phone. I knew which video he wanted.

My son started pedaling. Halfway across the frame, he looked back to see if someone was watching and rode into the grass. Gabriele watched him get up laughing.

He reached for the marker.

Did he learn to brake?

"Not yet. He still blames the grass."

His shoulders shook, and the ventilator beeped at him. I laughed too, and I had to press my free hand to my ribs.

Then he looked at me. He was still holding my hand, and his eyes dropped to my chest as I breathed.

"A little," I said.

I waited for the machine to lift his chest.

"For all of your trusted funeral needs. Adams Funeral Home." That was the slogan my grandfather came up with when he started this business almost 100 years ago. He passed it on to my father, and when my father passed away, it was given to me. It was a business that I never wanted. Hell, I didn't even want a job ever in my life, just so I could avoid red tape and bullshit. I pretty much run the funeral home all by myself. Occasionally, a part-time employee named Tiffany helps answer the phones and assists me in the occasional funeral. Other than that, she's practically useless.

Useless is good because let's just say my business practices aren't orthodox. I am the only funeral home for 50 miles. People from neighboring towns come to me for all of their funeral needs. I have a specific policy that I like to call the "closed casket clause." No matter the funeral, that lid cannot be opened. This is a cover that I use to dispose of unwanted body parts or at times unwanted corpses. People think I'm burying Grandma, but sometimes it could be a homeless man that was dumped at my doorstep.

If I run out of space and you want your great uncle buried, I'll cremate him and put rocks in the casket. I get paid handsomely for the work I do and I couldn't care less about what happens to the dead because as far as I'm concerned, they can't pay me. Call me a monster, call me anything you want, but you could never call me broke.

One afternoon, Tiffany strolled in only two and a half hours late this time. She really dresses to impress for this job. She usually wears these Goth platform black leather boots, a pleated black skirt, and a band T-shirt — today it's My Chemical Romance — and always the same black choker. She could easily be mistaken as Wednesday Addams's body double, with long black braided hair and black lipstick. She attends the community college the next town over and this apparently was the only job that would give her a chance. She usually answers the phones for a couple of hours and then comes up with an excuse like she has to do homework, get an oil change, or drive her father to work because he doesn't have a car. However, I know the main reason she leaves early is so that she can go see her boyfriend. I was born on a Wednesday, just not this Wednesday.

I usually don't mind her lying to me because it gives me more time to do what I need to do alone. I've become very well versed with a chainsaw. I cut up bodies like logs from a tree. If I'm able to use the crematory, I get rid of them quickly. However, sometimes it's on the fritz and I have to throw them in the woods behind the funeral home. Past the woods is the cemetery. I own the entire land and I know exactly how to utilize every inch of it.

A couple of days later is where this story truly begins. I had a man come in by the name of Jonathan Watts. He was a business owner — something about concrete, I think, though I wasn't really paying attention because I didn't care. He came by because his mother had passed away and he needed to work out her funeral arrangements. Even though he was a middle-aged man, he looked like a lost puppy dog to me. Whatever business he was in, I didn't care. All I cared about was the business he was going to give me, and that only produced dollar signs.

He had picked out one of the caskets I had displayed around the parlor. Little did he know I kept the cheap ones in the back and put only the expensive ones out front. They took up an entire room and covered the floor. Above them were shelves stacked with urns, also on the expensive side, with the affordable options hidden away in the back room. He picked the most expensive one — a cherrywood glossy finish. He gave me some sob story about how he was the last member of his family left and that he trusted me with fulfilling his mother's final wishes.

Before he left we set a day for the following week to bury his mother in my cemetery. This gave me a few days to prep the casket and her body before the service. Little did he know I cremated her that evening and poured her ashes down the drain. That's when I began stuffing the casket with some of the body parts that had really begun to smell. I mean, he did agree to the closed casket clause after all.

A couple of nights later during a thunderstorm, I was in the back — let's just discreetly say using a chainsaw — when I heard somebody ring the doorbell. Tiffany, who was supposed to be there, was nowhere to be found. I had to change out of my dirty coveralls that were soaked in blood and what I could only describe as other bodily fluids. I rushed to the door to find Jonathan standing there in the rain.

I groaned under my breath and rolled my eyes as I opened the door. "Jonathan, it's late. Is everything alright?" I said to him, as if I actually cared. I deserved an award for that performance. He took a deep breath and sniffled as he said, "Yes Mr. Adams. I'm alright. However, I just miss her so much and I was wondering if I could see my mother one last time before the funeral in the morning." He said as the rain steadily dripped from his soggy work uniform. "I know you have a closed casket clause, but I just miss her so goddamn much." He concluded by throwing his face into his hands and sobbing uncontrollably.

On the inside, I was boiling with rage, but on the outside I had to have a little bit of courtesy. I put my hand on his shoulder and explained to him, "I'm sorry Mr. Watts, part of my closed casket clause is that I weld the caskets shut. I apologize that you'll never be able to see her again, however, I would feel more comfortable if you would wait inside while the storm passes. I can get you a towel and make you some hot tea." He just hung his head low and agreed to come in after turning around and looking at the pouring rain.

I told him to stay put while I went and fetched him a towel and started a kettle on the stove in the break room. I was already pissed because he was drenching the freshly shampooed carpet, but again I had to have some tact. I hastily grabbed him a towel from a utility closet and popped the kettle on the stove. I had forgotten my phone in the back room so I decided to go grab it while I was waiting for the water to boil. There was my phone next to a mangled corpse and a chainsaw. I grabbed my phone and put it in my pocket.

In the time it took me to do these three tasks, I turned around and there was Mr. Watts. "I don't know what kind of shit you're playing here, but I just went into my mother's room, and the lid was in fact, not welded shut." Mr. Watts stood there, pointing his finger at me, and if it were possible, steam would've come out of his ears. I stood there sweating because I had been caught for the first time. He then continued his rampage. "Why in the fuck are there mangled body parts in my mother's casket?" Before I could even utter a word, his eyes swept over to the workbench. His eyes began to tear up when he saw it. "Mama?" Was all he could say.

I had left out the detail that the body I was chopping up was in fact his mother. I didn't know what else to do so I shoved him to the ground as he stumbled backwards onto his ass and ran out the back door. Trudging through the mud I felt like I was running in quicksand. I headed straight for the woods and decided to hide. When I could hear Jonathan yelling my name in the darkness I decided to hide behind a tree. When I crashed down, that's when I remembered that I had my car keys in my pocket.

My car was about 500 yards away. If I did it quickly, I was sure I could make it there in time before he could catch me. I swiftly waded through mud and trees in the forest before I was in the clearing of the cemetery. After dodging gravestones I could see my car in the distance. Next to it was Mr. Watts's cement truck. I was almost there. That's when I heard a shot ring out like thunder piercing the sky. I all of a sudden felt a sharp pain in the back of my right knee. That son of a bitch had shot me. I fell in agony while clenching my fresh wound. I looked up and there he was standing over me with a six-shooter.

"I got you now, you sorry son of a bitch." He said, looking down at me on the ground. "Mr. Watts, this is a big misunderstanding. That room was inaccurate. Your mother's room was the one next to it. That room I use for body parts that need to be cremated." I was pleading to him with lie after lie dripping from my tongue. However, he wasn't buying it. "Not only are you a sorry son of a bitch, you're a lying one to boot." He said, not wavering the gun pointed directly at my chest. He then looked over to a hole in the ground and began to smirk.

"Is that the hole you were gonna put my mother in?" He asked me bluntly. All I could do was vigorously shake my head that it in fact was. "Great!" He said as he shot my other leg. As I began screaming from the hot lead that had just entered my other leg, he picked me up, put me over his shoulder, and tossed me into the would-be grave of his mother. "Now mister, this here is yours." As I begged for my life he just walked away. For a moment, I thought he was just going to leave me there. That's when I heard an engine kick on. It got louder and louder, indicating that it was close.

That's when it started beeping as it was backing up. As I looked up, all I could see was what looked like a chute at the top of the hole. A car door opened and shut as I could hear footsteps in the mud. He looked down on me once again and began to speak. "You see, running my own concrete business has its perks. Since you took it upon yourself to defile my mother's corpse, yours will never be found again." He then walked over to the truck and I could hear him flip a switch. That's when wet cement started covering my body. After a while, my screams were muffled by the wet mix and I could hear Mr. Watts laughing as the hole began to fill up.

Part 1

Viktoria and I stood on a pier in Cape Cod at the end of a long summer together. Life was perfect in a way it hadn’t been in a long, long time.

Her hair was golden like the sunset. Her grey cotton dress hugged her body from head to toe as though she’d just stepped out of the water. I leaned in, taking her face in my hand as her hands wrapped around my back, fingernails sending shockwaves down my skin.

But as her fingernails grazed my skin, the sound was just…wrong.

Like metal scraping something.

I blinked, and the pale light of dawn streamed in under the blinds as I realized I was hearing metal on concrete. Something was being dragged across the pool deck.

How long had I been out? Shit.

I sprang up and threw open the door to the outside as a thousand nightmarish scenarios ran through my head, mostly involving me being shown the door and told to pack my things.

I blinked again as I realized that “something” was the lifeguard stand, which had somehow been ripped from its foundation and was now teetering on the edge of the deep end. There was a small splash as something - presumably whatever had pulled it, and I was more than happy not knowing whatever that might be - slipped back under the surface. I took in my surroundings.

The pool deck was in complete and total disarray. Several chairs and tables were toppled over. An umbrella stuck up out of the pool like it was doing a handstand. I had my work cut out for me, but if there was any upside to this, it was that the pool wasn’t totally in ruins.

I was nearly done getting everything back in order when I heard a voice behind me, not unlike a parent in a teen movie when they get home and see the house wrecked from a party.

“What on earth has happened here?!”

Vitaly. Shit.

I turned toward him as he strode towards me.

“Uhh…storm last night. Kinda messed stuff up.”

“I was at the Boston Red Sox game. Clear sky all night. Do not bullshit me.”

As shit as the Red Sox were that year, that didn’t really seem like whatever administrative tasks he claimed to have had. Still, I also couldn’t call him out either.

“I’m sorry... it was a long day. Church freaked me out a little bit and so I was emotionally exhausted as well.”

I saw a flicker of sympathy across his face, and I had a feeling church had been on his radar but he had forgotten to mention it yesterday. He took one look at the security camera in the foreground, then started wildly gesturing at me while keeping his voice down, as though he was performing for the camera.

“Alright…I let you off the hook this one time since you did volunteer for this and it does appear that I forgot to inform you of the schedule change for church. So that is on me. But this is your only warning. This cannot happen again. You understand?”

Relief flooded through me. “Yes, absolutely…..thank you so much.”

“Yes. Now…help me finish fixing up the rest of the pool, then go home and get some rest. You will not participate in the straw drawing tonight.” That was more than fine with me.

I went home. Slept for about six hours. When I got up, the other three wanted to know everything about the night shift. I just told them it was easy. Nothing much happened. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell them about the church meeting. I myself still wasn’t sure whether I had been hearing things or not and wanted nothing more than to tell them everything. But something kept me from doing so.

We went back earlier in the afternoon for our shift that day. Got there about 20 minutes early to a very pleased Vitaly. He clapped his hands together in satisfaction as he saw us approaching. “Now THAT is more like it!”

The deck looked…normal. As though nothing had happened to it the following night. I mean, it hadn’t been that hard to put everything back. Vitaly had made me wait before hopping in the deep end to get the few chairs and umbrellas that had wound up in there. Wanted to make sure the “cleaning system was off.”

I couldn’t help but notice, though, that the guard stand was right back in its place. Firmly cemented, as though nothing had ripped it out of its foundation the night before. I wanted to ask how they had managed to get it back in that quickly but decided not to. Figured some things were better left unanswered, and the answer would be much simpler than I expected. Assuming he called some guys in as soon as I left, they could have picked it up with some serious effort, put in some quick drying cement, and no one would be the wiser.

Viktoria had the night shift that night, followed by Ricky, then Cody. I noticed a pattern the mornings after - they would arrive home, and the rest of us would want to know all about it. Anything crazy happen? You would see the forced reluctance in their eyes, but they just cheerfully waved it off. I had to give Ricky and Cody a look that second morning, one that said “don’t press it” without actually saying it, and that seemed to do the trick.

Lord knows what happened on Cody’s overnight. He let out the most forced sigh I had ever heard before he even walked in the door. “WOW. Easiest fuckin shift ever!” We knew he was bullshitting us, because he looked like he’d been through a war. We also knew not to ask.

Vitaly took Friday and Saturday night. Saturday was the regularly scheduled church service, he said, and he needed to have a word with Pastor Patterson beforehand. He gave me a look right before saying this, mostly telling me he didn’t entirely trust me to not fall asleep again on the shift, but that was fine with me.

Sunday night was “scheduled maintenance” before the pool would begin normal operating hours since school was now out. The other five guards had orientation that Monday, and would begin working throughout the week, replacing one of us each shift.

They were all fine. But the four of us had already bonded, and we kept gravitating toward each other.

About a month in, maybe mid-June, Ricky and I had a night shift together. The church was having a baptism that night. Ricky had been voluntold for the shift to get back in Vitaly’s good graces after, hungover one Sunday morning, he had grabbed the wrong shirt for work. Viktoria was pissed about something or other, so I jumped at the opportunity.

By this point, I was no stranger to the services, because my night shifts just so happened to land on them half the time. I figured Vitaly thought I was best accustomed to handling them once I had proven I wouldn't fall asleep, and I felt a weird pride in that.

So, once we got our dinner heated up and were situated in the guard office, I propped the front door open, pulled down the front and back blinds, and shut the door to the guard office. I looked over. Ricky was watching me, a mixture of curiosity and confusion on his face.

“Aren’t we supposed to leave the blinds open for night shift?”

“Oh…yeah, but Pastor Patterson likes them closed. Says his parishioners are shy. Something like that.”

I tried to avoid elaborating as much as possible. I’d learned over time that certain things were left…unsaid.

He nodded, though uncertainly. “Gotcha.”

We settled in. I kept a curious eye on Ricky. I wasn’t sure if he’d worked a church night yet, and it was sort of like watching a horror movie with someone, and you knew a jump scare was coming and they didn’t.

As if on cue, the chanting started a few hours later. Slowly, at first. I could never be sure where exactly it started.

Ricky raised an eyebrow slightly. “…you hear that, dude.?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure how, or if I even should react. Didn’t want to gaslight him but also wasn’t sure how he’d react if I validated him. So I played dumb. Tried to look confused. “Hear what?”

“That weird…moaning noise over there. Like over by the clubhouse. But now it’s getting closer?”

The chanting was louder now. Like they were coming outside. I tried to picture a bunch of guys in hooded robes processing through a men’s locker room and it wasn’t nearly as funny as I thought it would be.

“Dude….it’s like, right outside now… what the fuck is going on?!”

Ricky started to get up, almost certainly to try and raise the blinds and get a look. I grabbed his hand and pulled him back down. He no longer looked confused. He now looked genuinely frightened, and I could tell the chanting was already starting to get to him. I remembered that first night. Lord help me if the keening started.

“Dude. You gotta sit down. Please.”

He ripped his hand out of mine. I could see that he was panicking now and trying and failing to hide it.

“Get your hands off me, man! WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?!” he screamed, and I hoped with everything I had that something outside hadn’t heard us. I could almost hear it in my mind -sudden, unbearable silence. Followed by slow, steadily increasing knocking on the window from the outside. Then the doorknob would shake, as if someone was trying to get in. Slowly, at first. Then the entire door shaking, as if someone was trying to break in.

As if to answer his question, the chanting was replaced by a low hum. Something I hadn’t heard before. It wasn’t from a machine, but nor was it from a human. This was something entirely unnatural. And, while I couldn’t tell specifically, it seemed to be coming straight from the pool.

The baptism.

Ricky began to cry. He looked at me, tears streaming down his face, sobbing.

“Dude…what is going on here… WHY WON'T YOU ANSWER ANY OF MY QUESTIONS?!”

I looked at him, at a loss for what to do.

“I’m sorry man…my guess is as good as yours… I’ve never dealt with this before.”

He grimaced. Scowled at me with puffy, red-rimmed eyes.

“That’s just not fucking good enough.”

With that, he sprang for the blinds.

I’m not sure how close he got to actually pulling them. Or if he ever got a hand on them to begin with. But it seemed to me like he was just about to pull them, exposing us to whatever horrors lay right beyond the glass, when I grabbed him by the waist and pulled him down.

We rolled around on the floor, Ricky trying to get me off him, me trying to hold him down. I think he was ready to fully rip the blinds off the windows at this point, not just pull them up.

I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it until then, but I felt like a total dumbass when I did.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my headphones and phone lying on the office desk. Managed to extract myself, pin Ricky down with my knee and barely, just barely stretch out enough to grab my headphones and shove them onto his head.

The chanting had returned by this point and was nearly overwhelming. It was almost in my head. I grabbed my phone and found the first white noise playlist I could. Some “rain on pavement” thing. Turned my phone to max volume and hit play.

Up until this point, Ricky had been in such a frenzy that I doubt he had been aware of the headphones until now, because a look of confusion filled his face. He put his hands up and touched the headband and earpieces.

The plan had worked. He could no longer hear the chanting. Me, I could still hear it fine. It was awful, don’t get me wrong, but like I said, I had worked a couple services by now and had more or less gotten used to it.

Ricky took a deep breath. Flopped over onto his back. Put his hands on his face and started to silently cry.

I sat down in a chair. Put my feet up on the guard desk. Didn’t close my eyes, but I stared up at the fluorescent ceiling lights until spots appeared in my vision. Tried to mentally drown out the chanting. Did some thinking, about nothing much in particular.

I don’t want to say “when I came to” because I never fell asleep, but you get what I mean. When I popped back to reality, I guess, my phone and headphones were on the desk in front of me. The chanting was gone. I could hear sniffling. Looked behind me to see Ricky sitting in the corner. Knees scrunched in front of him. Eyes red and puffy. Looked like he had been through hell, which he probably had been mentally. Why he wasn’t in the chair was beyond me. Maybe thought I was upset with him.

He looked up at me. Sniffled.

“Man…I’m so sorry… I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s all good buddy. Happens to the best of us.”

He let out a choked laugh. “You tried to tear the windows down because you couldn’t handle a little noise?”

I snorted.

“Well…not quite that.”

“I… thank you for putting the headphones on me. No one’s ever done anything that nice for me before.”

I refrained from telling him that it had felt pretty life or death to me.

“Hey…anytime. Figured you could use a little distraction.”

“Understatement of the fucking century right there.”

We laughed, harder this time.

“I ever tell you about my parents?” he asked, throwing me for a loop.

“I’m sorry?”

“My parents. Why I’m living at the house for the summer when my parents live five minutes away, on the other side of the neighborhood.”

“You’ve mentioned it in passing. Something about how you were held back a year. Parents booted you for the summer.”

“Got it.” He took a deep breath before continuing.

“I never knew my dad. He left when my mom was pregnant with me. Claimed he wasn’t ready to raise a kid. Was just my mom and me for years. She really did try her best, I’ll give her that. But I’ve seen pictures of him. It’s like they took him and hit copy and paste. My mom also didn’t really have a support system. She had moved across the country after a rough childhood herself - she named me after the doctor that delivered me. No, I’m not joking.”

I think he could see I thought he was joking there.

“Anyhow, she tried her best, but there was always some distance between us because my dad had fucked her over so badly. Like, don’t get me wrong. She was a great mom. I had a great childhood. It’s just… sometimes, she would look at me, and I don’t think she realized I was aware, but I think all she could see in those moments were the guy that left her high and dry with a newborn. So it was just us for years. I could tell we were struggling at times, but she did her best to hide it."

"When I was in 8th grade, my football coach had this end of season summer cookout. She came out of her bedroom when it was time to go, and she looked put together in a way I had never seen before. Not that she usually looked frumpy or anything, but she was always tired from working, you know? She had on this long, summery blue dress I had never seen before. Her hair was straightened. She had even thrown some makeup on. The entire cookout I could see his eyes were on her. Thank God he didn’t have a wife or kids, that would have been a scandal.

"But yeah. They both disappeared near the end for like 30 minutes. I was playing kickball with some other kids and at some point, she comes up and is like it’s time to go. Her hair was kinda messy. Makeup is smudged in places. But she was glowing in a way I’d never seen before. He started coming by more and it didn’t take a genius to know what was going on. "

"He proposed at Christmas. No joke. They married 6 months later. He’s been an amazing dad. Don’t get me wrong about that. But they had a baby maybe like a year ago. My mom dotes on that kid in a way she never ever did with me. Bums me out a bit, but again, she was never outright, like, a total bitch growing up, so I can’t complain, you know?”

"Right around the time Benny - that’s my half-brother’s name - turned 1, we moved here because our growing family supposedly needed more space. That was six months ago. Right after that, my dad caught wind that the country club would house lifeguards in the house we’re living in. I guess he coaches Craft’s grandson now."

"Since I was already planning on lifeguarding this summer, and I’ve been pretty independent my whole life on account of having a single mom for 14 years, they asked if I would mind living in the lifeguard house this summer. Give them some more space with the baby, whatever that means. They said they would still come by the pool to see me, check in on me and stuff, and whatnot. They haven’t come by once. Not a peep from them either. Asked my mom if we could call once, just to catch up since, you know, it’s been a fucking month since I last talked to her…said she was tired with the baby, and she’d text when she woke back up. That was a week ago. That… that’s kind of sucked. Not gonna lie.”

He swallowed a lump in his throat. Wiped a hand across his face. I put a hand on his back.

“Jesus, man…. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all good…just life, you know?”

I nodded. Not much else I could do. Then, he looked at me again.

“Do you notice anything?”

“Like…?”

“The blinds are open.”

“Right. They’re supposed to be. The chanting stopped like an hour ago.”

“Right…. but did you open them? Because I didn’t.”

We looked out onto the dark, unlit pool deck. Nothing was out of place. No deck furniture was sticking out of the water. Lifeguard stand was in place. According to my phone it was about 75 degrees outside.

And yet, unbeknownst to us before, a chill suddenly filled the room.

We went about the rest of the early morning as normal. Once it had lightened up a bit outside and we were more at ease, we decided to try and earn some brownie points by getting everything set up for the day ourselves.

Vitaly arrived. Winked at me as he took in the spotless pool deck, and then Ricky’s rather bedraggled appearance.

“Eventful night?”

Ricky couldn’t stop himself.

“Fuck you.”

Where another boss might have been, well, pissed, Vitaly just chuckled.

“I’ll give you that one. I’m sorry. I know from Luke that those... services can be a bit overwhelming the first time. How can I remedy this for you.”

“Never give me a church night again. Please.”

He sighed. “That I cannot promise. But please. Get some rest. Take this and get yourself some breakfast. Get Luke some too. No coffee. You need sleep today.”

He handed Ricky the gold credit card he had handed me the first night.

“Do not tell anyone else about this. I will know if you do.”

He walked off, in the direction of what I assumed was the pump room.

Ricky did not use the card to buy himself breakfast. He left it on the desk, where Vitaly would see it. When we got home, he went into his room and shut the door. He had the day off, which was good, because he did not emerge until dinner almost 12 hours later.

_______________________________________

There was one day in, probably early July, that I remember vividly.

It was just Cody and I that day. Vitaly had planned an outing to that evening’s Red Sox game. Six guards had gone, including Ricky and Viktoria.

I remember it particularly because Viktoria, who I don’t think was familiar with how casual baseball games are, had spent the entire morning and early afternoon shopping for an outfit for the game. She had finally come out in a figure hugging, red and white striped maxi dress. Her hair was down in waves. She looked breathtaking, although I kept this to myself.

Unfortunately for her, what Cody chose not to keep to himself was that she looked more like she was going to a polo match than a baseball game, and that earned him a hearty “fuck you!” and a middle finger that we noticed had a tattoo on it, a swallow, as she flipped her hair and strode out the door.

The day went by uneventfully. Cody had volunteered to cook that night, but then decided he didn’t feel like cooking, so he invited me over for dinner at his parents’ house.

Cody’s house was not what I expected, so let me leave it like this: he had the personality of someone who lived in a picture and signs house, you know? Family pictures everywhere, and “Live, Laugh, Love” signs where there weren’t. Little kids running around. Very relaxed and homely. Cluttered in a way that everything made sense.

What I did not expect was a house that looked like it had been plucked from Architectural Digest. His parents looked like they had strolled out of the L.L. Bean summer catalog. And, not that there’s anything wrong with that whatsoever. I just didn’t expect it.

“Hey there, bud.” His dad.

“Dinner in 30, Code.” His mom.

I nodded at both as we passed - neither really seemed inclined to shake hands.

Instead of heading to his room, we went straight through the back of the house, and out into an enormous, very well-manicured backyard that looked out onto the forests bordering the edge of the neighborhood. Headed to a treehouse in the back.

We climbed up the ladder, and, as we entered, he made for a toy box in the back, pulled out a small package taped under the lid.

Took out a small cigarette, lit it, took a hit.

“Fuck, man. Been waiting all day for one of these. You want a hit?”

“Sure. You good?”

He let out a small cough as he absorbed the smoke into his lungs. Waved off a cloud of smoke and sprayed what looked like a bottle of Febreze in the air.

“More or less.”

He handed me the joint. I got a hit.

Instant warmth, followed by an instant coughing fit. I felt a cloud descend over me. It had been a minute since I’d done this.

“So…remember when I told you Craft had paid my tuition?” “Right.”

“Yeah, so I failed out. Couldn’t cut it. And they’re gonna go to pay for the fall - albeit with Craft’s money - and they’re gonna find out, and I’ll be in deep, deep shit.”

“And you haven’t told them, why?” I knew it was a stupid question before I asked. Luckily, Cody was mellowed out now, so he took it in stride.

“Well, for starters - I am - or I was, now - a third-generation student there. Grandfather went there. Then my parents met there. Both of my brothers went there. So, not sure how well it would be taken if I told them I’d failed out.”

“Can’t you, like, just…take a semester off, get your grades back up, and go back?”

He laughed, a hint of bitterness on his tone.

“Yeah… fat fucking chance of that happening. I hated school, man. Hated it. All I did was party. I’ll be honest, I was that kid in high school that didn’t have to try. Then I went to college. Rudest reality check I’ve ever had.”

“And your parents never checked? Asked about anything?”

“Like I said, I had my shit together enough in high school that they didn’t feel the need to. I avoided that dreaded letter home by the skin of my teeth. I don’t even remember most of the spring semester. They did send a letter home then. I just made sure they didn’t see it.”

“Are you gonna tell them?”

The look he gave me told me he was done with the questions. “Fuck if I know, man. I’m just skating by, one day at a time.”

Dinner - lamb chops and some sort of summer salad - was incredible. As were the homemade Long Island Ice Teas they made us. The family dog, Otto, also seemed to very much like the lamb chops, because he kept climbing onto my lap and trying to get at them.

Tension sucked the air out of the room, though, when Cody’s brother, Austin, made the ill-advised decision to bring up the check from Craft.

Austin worked in private equity-something in Boston and had come for dinner, for which I was beginning to think Cody had invited me to for moral support.

“So…” he said. “This check is a…scholarship?”

“Yes, it is.” said Maureen, Cody’s mom.

“And this is for… what? Having the highest grades out of all the lifeguards? Something like that?”

“It’s for service to the community. Your brother has been lifeguarding since he was 14. You know that.”

“Oh, right. Sorry… wish I’d have known, maybe I’d have…tried a little harder. So that’s all he did.”

“I saved a guard last year. Pulled up to open the pool. Craft was there. One of the foreign guards was lying on the edge of the woods. He’d had a seizure and fallen and messed up his face pretty bad. Not sure if he survived. But I got the award for that. Now, please. Shut the fuck up.”

“CODY BROOKS WARREN!!” his mom.

“… Sorry.” he said, still glowering.

“Sorry, brother.” Austin said, smirking. “Didn’t mean to hit a nerve like that.”

Cody didn’t say anything back.

_______________________________________

Viktoria and Ricky got back late that night from the game - a blowout win for the Red Sox with 8 home runs. Both were exceptionally drunk.

Viktoria was plastered with sweat, the curls gone from her hair.

“Guess who got a date with Vitalyyyyyyy!” she announced in a very singsong voice.

_______________________________________

That night, as I laid in bed, I thought about what Cody had said about the scholarship.

Remembered his joke on the first day.

What was real?

And what wasn’t?

_______________________________________

The day of the date arrived – a Saturday - three weeks later because of a road trip for the Red Sox. Vitaly had scored suite tickets for the first game back, and he wanted to treat Viktoria.

It was gorgeous. Not a cloud in the sky. And, since the four of us all had the morning shift together for the first time in seemingly forever, Cody, Ricky, and I decided to grill that night while Viktoria and Vitaly were out doing their thing.

One of the things I remember most that day was that the pool was…empty. The weather was perfect for the pool. Mid 80s. People were absolutely out and about. The playground next door was popping. Kids were out on their bikes. Being near the end of July, it seemed like you’d want every last bit of pool you could get before it closed in a month. And yet I could have sworn I saw multiple people in bathing suits walk by the pool entrance… and then just walk right past.

We were all sitting on the deck in the deep end, legs in the water, just shooting the shit, when Ricky asked the question that I think had been hanging over us since the beginning of summer.

“So… what the fuck’s up with the deep end?”

You could tell Cody had begun to smoke before he came to work. Not a lot. I think the stress of his college situation had gotten to him more, and he was doing it to relax a bit.

“Alright…y’all didn’t hear this from me… I heard there’s some Lovecraft shit in the deep end. It gets so hazy because sometimes there’s no bottom and they let it out at night. That’s why we have the night watch.”

You’d have thought from Viktoria's reaction that that Cody had insulted her to her face. Because she punched his arm. Hard.

“Don’t say shit like that, Cody! Ever again!”

She glared at him. He looked at her, shocked.

“Alright…Jesus. Sorry Vik. Didn’t mean to hit such a nerve there.”

She looked back at him, face hard, before softening again.

“…it’s okay. And I’m sorry too. I don’t know why I reacted like that. I think I’m just nervous about tonight.”

I think she could tell I was about to say something, because she put a finger up.

“And, no, I can’t just call it off. I’ve been throwing myself at him this entire summer. What do I even say? Sorry! Cold feet?”

We heard a knock in the back just then.

“Helloooo! Anyone there?”

Our first patron of the day. An hour before our shift ended. Go figure.

_______________________________________

As it turned out, Viktoria didn’t need to come up with an excuse to cancel the date, because Vitaly gave her one.

We were in the kitchen getting everything we’d need for the night. Cody was grabbing beers from the cooler. I was grabbing the food from the fridge. Ricky was in the family room getting the speaker, so he had a front row seat to it all.

The front door thundered open with a loud bang that sounded like a bomb going off. I doubt a SWAT team could have opened it with more force than it had been.

Viktoria stood there. Soaked from head to toe. Her hair was slicked down her back, soaking wet. Her dress - the same one she’d worn to the Red Sox game - was also soaked.

I might have noticed how she looked had she not looked ready to commit murder. But I kept that to myself.

Ricky was right there to chime in, though. “What happened here? I’ll grab a towel.”

Followed by Cody. “I’ll grab another burger or two!” I saw the barest of grins crack her face.

_______________________________________

After drying off and opening a drink, she gave us the full story of what happened as we ate dinner in the backyard, seated around a small bonfire:

After getting off, she had gone to the women’s room to get ready for the date. “I love you guys, but that shit is like a 5-star resort.”

After getting dressed, she realized she had forgotten her makeup and decided to walk across the street to grab it.

Instead, she was greeted by screams as she exited the locker room.

Vitaly, who was supposed to be watching the pool, had gone to use the bathroom. That was enough time for a kid to - go figure - find himself struggling in the deep end. Viktoria, not even considering for a moment that she was wearing a floor length dress, had sprinted across the deck and dove headfirst into the pool, making it over to the kid in under 5 seconds. After carrying the kid to the ladder and rolling him onto the deck, she’d gotten out and stormed over to the guard office.

Vitaly had left the bathroom and walked right into Viktoria, who had loudly and profanely told him off right then and there. He’d begged her not to tell Craft. She’d said she would think about it. She had no intention of doing so but wanted to let him sweat.

“And now, I’m here.” she said, midbite. “And, quite frankly, I prefer this.”

“You do?” said Cody. As though she hadn’t spent the entire summer up to that point hanging out with us.

“…yes?” She said, with a raised eyebrow. “Have I… told you guys about my family back home?”

Our faces told her she hadn’t, and that she might have phrased the question in a way that painted her family in a…less than favorable light.

“My family back home is…very traditional. I was never really allowed to do…boy-ish things very much. I’m using this job to help pay for law school back home because my family wouldn’t pay for it. You get the idea”

“Getting to let loose and be one of the boys this summer has been the best experience of my life. I know I’m pretty much the same age as you guys and not like an old maid or anything, but it’s been…an amazing time. And I’m truly going to miss you guys when I go back home in a month.”

She wiped her hand across her face. I resisted the urge to put a hand on her back.

None of us were like, blinking away tears or anything, but I could tell Cody and Ricky were as touched as I was.

“And Cody… I’m sorry again for punching you today. That was a very stupid joke, but it still was not okay for me to do that.”

He nodded. “All good…. but who said I was joking?”

Viktoria laughed and punched him again. “Stop!”

_______________________________________

We spent the rest of the evening outside, long after the sun went down. Drinking, playing games, listening to music.

We went to bed. Cody was in no shape to drive, so he took the couch in the living room. I lay in bed that night, trying in vain to fall asleep, but something was nagging me.

Around, I’d say, 1a.m., as I finally drifted off, I realized what it was.

After Cody denied it being a joke, we all laughed.

Except for Cody.

_______________________________________

I had a nightmare that night.

A horrible one, in which I had laid in bed, unable to breathe or move, as hooded shadows moved throughout the house.

One came into my room. Stood over my bed. At some point, the moonlight shifted just enough to show part of a face.

The face of Craft Dunn.

I woke up around 5am to a splitting headache and knocking on my door.

It was Ricky.

“Yo…did you see Cody leave last night?”

“No... why?”

“He’s not here… but his stuff still is… and his car is still out front.”

We got a text that morning from Vitaly that Cody had fallen ill and would be out for the week. We didn’t believe him at all, but at this point, not asking was second nature.

A week passed. I texted him that Sunday.

“Hey bro - how’s it goin”

“Hey! Still super sick. Not sure when I’ll be back. Sorry!”

I might have believed it. But Cody texted in all lowercase. I had never seen him use punctuation.

This was not something he would ever write.

_______________________________________

Vitaly came by the house three days after I texted him. Asked us to sit down.

“I’ve been asked to inform you all that Cody will not be returning this summer due to a family emergency. He has requested privacy, so please do not reach out to him.”

He looked around.

“Where are Cody’s things? I’ve been asked to retrieve those as well.”

I pointed to the backpack against the wall. Right where he had left it.

“Right there. But I can take it back. No- “

“I will take it back. You will not. You will not contact Cody again. Is that understood?” he snapped.

What. The. Fuck?

“… yes?”

“Good.”

He walked over, picked it up, and quickly walked out without another word.

Right past Cody’s car, which was still parked outside, without so much as acknowledging it.

_______________________________________

The first Saturday of August, I woke up and decided to start my day off with a run. This wasn’t unusual - I ran almost every morning.

What was unusual was that, after about 10 minutes, I found myself standing across the street from Cody’s house. I don’t know if it was subconscious, or something guided me there, but there I was.

There was a giant truck in the driveway, with a moving company’s logo on the side. His mom stood outside on the front stoop.

I figured this was my last chance to maybe get some closure, so I ran over.

“Hey…Mrs. Warren!”

“Oh! Hello! You are…?”

“Luke - the friend from work that Cody brought over that night? Last month?”

“Oh…yes! Did you need something?”

I could tell she wanted nothing more than for me to leave and never come back.

“Yeah…uh… I just…really enjoyed hanging out with Cody this summer. He left…rather abruptly and I wanted to make sure he was okay? We were never told what happened.”

“Oh! Right…. He…. decided to leave for college a little earlier this year. Found a great place close to campus that opened early. Got a job. With him gone…we…just felt the house was a little quieter and decided it was time to downsize to something smaller.”

She had been avoiding eye contact the entire time, but I noticed something. As she had said he was gone, her eyes had gotten a little…moist…..As though filling with tears.

“Well… let him know I wished him luck this year! And that I hope to see him around at some point again!”

“Yes, absolutely dear! Will do!”

At that moment, just as I was turning around to leave, the dog - Otto - chose that moment to turn around and scamper out through the door.

“Otto!” she cried. “Get back here!”

The dog leaped into my arms. I guess it remembered me from a month ago.

As I sat there holding and petting it, a shadow approached us. I looked up.

Craft Dunn. In the flesh.

He was shorter, stockier than I expected. He wore a golf shirt and slacks. Was tan.

He approached Ms. Warren and handed something to her. A check.

“Hi, Maureen. On behalf of Dunn Dwellings, LLC, I would like to thank you and your family for all the memories over the last 20 years. You will be missed by the community.”

She took the check without looking at him or saying anything in response. Silently walked back inside.

I took the opportunity to silently set the puppy back down and walk down the yard, before setting back off on a brisk jog. If Craft noticed me, he didn’t say anything.

A lot of things went through my mind on that 10-minute jog. Mainly Cody’s joke that first day, about Craft and the shotgun. Then his comment at dinner about the award. And then his comment that night around the fire. Tried not to notice how well the two stories fit together.

I thought of the check Craft had handed to his mom. Of her telling me he was back at school… and then him telling me he had failed out.

The way she had seemed on the brink of tears as she described him being “gone”. The way she refused to look at or speak to Craft.

Then, I realized something that nearly stopped me in my tracks in the middle of the road.

Cody had disappeared on a Saturday night.

I never expected to even have a honeymoon until I met Charlie.

I was never a romantic. Ask my ex girlfriends. They'd all tell you that was a major reason, if not the number one reason, things ended between us. I just wasn't a boyfriend guy - I couldn't understand the desire for flowers, the urge to hear sweet nothings, the necessity of chivalry. I found opening car doors demeaning. Long back massages beneath the glow of candle light felt a little creepy.

Sue me.

She changed all of that.

In the past I'd had long screaming matches on the topic of equality: I would say, don't you feel belittled by all this? Wouldn't you rather just be two people? And my girlfriend would say, my god you are such an asshole, etc.

On our first date, Charlotte brought me a bouquet she'd picked on the way to the restaurant. She pushed it into my hands, a truly jubilant smile making her cheeks scrunched and ruddy in the dim orange lighting.

I snorted instinctively, although I couldn't quite place what was funny about it. Maybe I was just a little misogynistic. Maybe I just thought it was weird to receive a gesture as the man, whatever. She didn't react to my snarky laughter. Didn't give me even an inch.

On our next date, we went to the fair. I won her a stuffed animal.

On our first anniversary, she got me fancy cologne and a box of chocolates. I got her a ring.

It was just easy with her. She made me realize maybe I wasn't anti-romance: maybe I just never felt all that romantic about anyone else. We had fights, and she never pulled her punches with me, but she never said I wasn't enough... because I wasn't not enough. Not making her feel loved became my worst fear. She deserved everything she wanted.

I never thought I'd have a fancy wedding. I pictured myself getting married in the courthouse.

When I said that to her, she laughed and rolled her eyes.

"Your family has so much money, Oli. Not having a wedding is, like, the dumbest idea you've ever had." Then she leaned in, running her fingers through my hair and kissing my cheek. "Just think of it as throwing a huge, expensive party."

And so I did. And we threw a huge party with everyone we knew. And I had a great time. I even cried at the alter, something I'd made fun of countless guys for before.

It just came naturally.

When I told her I also never thought I'd have a honeymoon, she reacted about the same.

"You never wanted one because your whole life is a honeymoon, sweetie."

We compromised.

No Italy. No yachting in Barbados. No bull-running in Spain. Charlie always thought that felt kind of cruel, anyways.

We would go camping.

And after a few hours of research, we found the perfect place.

"Seems a little less private than advertised," I muttered as I pulled my Chevy into our lot, nodding towards a campsite mere feet away from where we had planned to set up.

It was only 1 PM, and they already had a fire going. An older woman sat in front of it in a fold up chair, roasting what looked to be a sausage on a metal poker.

Charlie gave me a light shove, tutting. "Don't be such a grump, boy. It's summer." I saw her grinning from the corner of my eye as I maneuvered the truck, backing in. "Love is in the air..."

Honeymoon Hill was surrounded by trees. We had driven for an hour down winding forest roads to get here, and the meadow was the first expanse of land without thickly packed pines we'd seen since leaving the freeway.

It was beautiful, I had to admit. You could see across the top of some of the woods: the sunset was going to be otherworldly.

There was a loud knocking on the glass next to my face. I jumped, cursing under my breath.

The old woman was standing outside my door, beaming up at me. I fixed my expression quickly, rolling down the window. Charlie snickered at me.

"Hi there!" The woman crooned. Up close I could see she had bright blue eyes, and she had pulled her windbreaker hood down, revealing that her hair was nearly entirely white. She had to at least be in her seventies. "I guess we're your neighbors for the weekend, isn't that nice?"

I nodded, smiling back a little awkwardly. Charlie laughed again, leaning over me to take over.

"We're on our honeymoon!"

"Oh!" The woman's hand flew to her chest, as if clutching at her heart. Her mouth formed a perfect little 'o'. "My goodness! Well, forget me, then, I'd better leave you two alone!"

"No, no, it's okay!" Charlie intercepted, to my mild dismay. She loved people. "What's your name?"

The woman smiled again, pleased. People loved Charlie, too. "Well, it's Beverly, dear."

Charlie placed her hand on my shoulder, which made me feel a little bit like a dog. Like she was settling me down. I couldn't help but pout. I felt plenty settled.

"That's a beautiful name. I'm Charlie, and this is Oli."

Beverly clapped her hands together. "Charlie and Oli! How sweet. Oh, you must meet my husband."

I opened my mouth to protest, to tell her we probably ought to start setting up if we wanted the tent built by dark, but she was already spinning back toward her RV.

It was pretty decked out, I realized. They had a canopy hanging from the side, shading their little outdoor living room area, and when Bev opened the door, I could see that the inside was much larger than it looked. I shifted a little uncomfortably.

"Hey," Charlie purred, finally turning her attention back toward me. "What's wrong?"

I shook my head, unbuckling my seatbelt. "Nothing's wrong."

"Hey," she said again, catching my wrist before I could push open the door and climb out. She smiled at me, her half smile that made her face look rounder, and I felt something inside me soften. "We'll have plenty of alone time. And... I love it here. This is perfect."

She always knew what would make me feel better. Hesitantly, I smiled back. "Really?"

"Yes. Perfect. Thank you for bringing me here."

I leaned over the center console, and I kissed her.

"Well, here are the kids my wife is raving about," came a gruff voice from outside the cabin. He sounded how I might imagine Santa Claus would sound. I pulled away from my wife, resting my forehead against hers and closing my eyes, sighing. She giggled.

John, Beverly's husband, insisted on setting up our tent for us. Charlie and I watched as he grunted over the spokes. I felt a little emasculated, but Charlie wouldn't stop grabbing my arm and chuckling, so that kept me from crossing over the line from mildly annoyed to fully crabby.

By the time everything was all assembled, the light over the trees was beginning to fade, painting the hill in orange light. John and Bev invited us to join them for dinner, but, thank god, Charlie declined politely.

She and I carried a bottle of wine up to the highest point of the hill and sat in the grass. As the sun set, she rested her head on my shoulder. I took her hand, feeling the wedding ring I'd given her between my fingers, imprinting the diamonds into the pad of my thumb.

It was the perfect night.

I woke to the sound of a metallic door banging open.

I blinked, rubbing my eyes and slowly sitting up. It was pitch dark outside, and the crickets were chirping so loudly it felt like they were inside of my head.

I looked down at my wife. She was facing away from me, the blankets wrapped tightly around her like a cocoon, snoring softly. I reached down, pulling a loose sheet up to her neck. She was illuminated slightly by a warm yellow light, I realized, slicing across the back of her head.

I turned toward the other campsite. Where the sound that had woken me must have come from.

Through the thin polyester tent, I could barely make out their camper. Sure enough, the door was hanging open. The glow was coming from within, where the lights had been turned on sometime since I'd fallen asleep.

I frowned, squinting my blurry eyes and leaning closer.

"You aren't happy, are you?"

At the sound of Charlie's voice, I nearly leapt out of my skin. I whipped back around. She was still lying where she had been: she didn't seem to have moved at all, and I could've sworn she'd been snoring half a second before speaking.

Her voice was right there, attached to her body, but it also sounded distant. Like it came from outside.

"What?" I asked, my voice rough with sleep. I shook my head, stretching my arms above my head. "Of course I'm happy, baby. I mean, I guess I wish we weren't sharing our campsite, but-"

"Your whole life's a honeymoon," she said, cutting me off.

I paused. Those were the words she'd said to me before, but this time, they didn't carry the same playfulness. This time they were snide. Cutting. Almost pained.

I lay back down behind her, forgetting about the neighboring campers. I drew my fingers through her long hair, brushing down her back. "What's wrong, Charlie?"

She didn't answer. When I pressed closer to her, burying my face in her neck, I could hear her snoring. Still, or maybe again. Maybe she'd been sleep talking.

When I wrapped my arms around her waist, she pushed back against me, humming happily.

In the morning, when I finally forced myself up and out of the tent to pee, I found Bev sitting in front of their fire pit. I watched as she held a cigarette up to the minuscule flame, lighting it and bringing it up to her mouth.

I hadn't pegged her as a smoker.

"Careful," I called out, trying to make my voice soft and friendly like Charlie would, but it still made her jump in surprise. She clasped her chest. She tended to do that.

"You scared me, my goodness. Forgive me, what's your name again?"

I smiled a little weakly. I was positive she remembered Charlie's name.

"It's Oliver."

"Yes, yes. Oh, that's right." She took a drag of her cigarette, her hand shaking a little, likely from the cold. She was bundled in a puffy jacket, pinning it tightly around herself. "Come sit with me for a moment, Oliver."

I hesitated, looking behind me at the tent where my wife was still sound asleep, then shrugged. I took a seat on the stump beside her camping chair, rubbing my hands together.

She offered me her cigarette. I took it.

"How long have you known Charlie?" She asked me, her eyes trained on the dying fire. I smiled.

"Two years," I said, bringing the cigarette to my mouth. "People say that's not long to know someone-"

"People are silly," she cut in, her voice surprisingly curt. "People don't know."

I nodded, watching her. Something was off about her this morning. "That's what I think, too."

She was quiet for a minute. I handed her back the cigarette. She took it, looking down at it for a while before she spoke again.

"Yesterday was our forty-ninth anniversary." A small, unreadable smile pulled at her wrinkled lips. She finally looked at me. "Isn't that just crazy, Oli? Forty nine years."

"Wow," I offered. "That is crazy. That's a long time."

She nodded at me, her blue eyes searching over my face. "You would think you'd know someone by then." She stubbed out the cigarette on a rock, groaning as she leaned over. I watched the last traces of smoke trickle from the butt before it was extinguished. "But there's always more. There's always more to know. There are all these things that they think about, things they keep up in their head, that they may never tell you. Isn't that just awful? You can never just be one. Isn't that so strange? That you can never be one?"

I didn't know what to say. I tucked my hands into my jacket, nodding slowly.

She waved her hand, dismissing me.

"I'm sorry, listen to me. Babbling on like a fool. Let me not take you from your honeymoon, sweetheart."

She pushed herself to her feet, walking away before I could say anything. She left me there, sitting in front of her fire, my face frozen in surprise.

It took about an hour for Charlie to convince me to go on a hike, but once it was happening, I was glad. The fresh air was amazing compared to our usual city smog, and the sunlight that dodged through the tree branches made our skin warm and illuminated.

The only thing I could do without was how hard it was to keep up with her. She kept disappearing up ahead of me, and with how thin and obstructed by brush the paths were, I found this quickly frustrating.

"Charlie!" I called out after the fifth time, stopping to catch my breath. "Charlie, I'm gonna stop for water, okay?"

I was silent, waiting. No response came: all I heard was the flutter of birds in the trees, and the wind.

I rolled my eyes, a little annoyed. Weren't we supposed to be together on this trip? It felt like things were always pulling her away from me.

I sat down against a tree, reaching for my water bottle. I had just unhooked it from my belt when I heard something.

A rustle, and then a voice.

"Oliver? Oli!"

It was distant, nearly indistinguishable, even though the rustling had felt fairly close. I shot up, peering down the path. It hadn't sounded like it was up in front of me, either.

"Charlie?"

For a moment, nothing. I spun around in a circle, searching the trees, as if that was going to do anything.

"Charlie, are you okay?"

"Help!"

I froze.

Her voice was coming from several angles all at once, like it floated on the wind to reach me. It sounded wrong, I couldn't quite place my finger on why... maybe it was too cheerful, and yet it was too strained at the same time.

"Help! Help!"

Instinct kicked in and I started to run down the path, my water bottle dropping to the ground and rolling into the brush. She couldn't be too far ahead of me, could she? There was no way she was as far as she sounded.

Suddenly, her voice was right in my ear. Right behind me. A whisper. It drowned out the sound of my feet on the path and my heavy breathing.

"It isn't enough."

I slid to a halt, nearly tumbling backwards. I whipped around.

She was there. She was standing at the end of the path behind me, at least the furthest down that I could see... not directly behind me. I could barely make out her face, she was nearly just a sillouette, but I could tell that she was crying now, her body trembling with the sobs wracking through her.

"What are you talking about?" I asked, forgetting to shout it, but she heard it anyways. She shook her head, crying harder.

"You don't love me, Oliver! Why can't you ever show me you love me?"

"I do love you," I breathed, panic pulling sharply at my chest. I began advancing toward her, almost in a daze. "I do love you! How can you say that? I show you I love you all the time!"

"You didn't want to have a wedding. You didn't want to go on a honeymoon." She whimpered, hugging herself like a child as I got closer, turning her face away from me. "And I don't want to be with someone no one likes. You should just go, Oliver. Just leave. I don't want you here. GO!"

I opened my mouth to protest, to tell her I'd never leave her here, to beg her to tell me what was going on, when something sharp hit me on the back. I winced, my strange haze broken, and spun around.

"You asshole!" Charlie shouted at me, crossing her arms and frowning. I looked down. She'd thrown a stick at me. "What the hell are you doing?"

"I..." I trailed off, glancing over my shoulder. 'Charlie' was gone. I blinked, shaking my head. Was I going insane? "I'm sorry..."

"I don't know if you're trying to mess with me or what," Charlie murmured, stepping closer to me. I felt a strange urge to back away. "But it's not funny. You're being so mean."

I frowned, the first real expression I was able to make. "I am?"

"Yes," she hissed. Then her face broke down, her mouth turning in in the corners and her eyes drooping sadly. "Yeah, Oli. You never make fun of me for money stuff. Not even as a joke."

I ground my teeth. I glanced over my shoulder again. Nothing.

I forced myself to snap out of it, stepping toward her and pulling her into my arms. I didn't know what to say. How to explain that I hadn't made fun of her, or at least I didn't remember it. "I'm sorry," I mumbled into her hair, warm from the sunlight.

She sighed, the tension in her body slightly loosening. She hugged me back, hiding her face in my chest. "How did you get back here, anyways?"

"What do you mean?"

She looked up at me, her eyebrows furrowed. "You kept running up ahead of me. I couldn't keep up with you. How did you get back here when you were in front of me that whole time?"

When we got back to the camp, we were both exhausted. So exhausted, in fact, that it took us far too long to notice that our neighbor's camp was entirely packed up.

The RV roared to life, which was what finally what caught my attention. Charlie and I looked at each other, confused.

I followed her as she ran up to the driver's side window, knocking on it like Bev had that first afternoon. Bev rolled it down, her whole body trembling like a leaf.

"You heading out?" Charlie asked, a little sadness tinting her voice. She peered around the cabin. "Where's John?"

Bev started to shake her head. She didn't stop shaking it. She reached out the window, clasping Charlie's hand in her own, squeezing tightly. Her face was alarmingly pale. I took a step forward instinctively.

"Go," she whispered. Her eyes flickered back toward me, locking on mine. I felt a cold chill wash over me. "Go now. It's getting smarter."

She seemed to hear something and her head jolted like a deer, whipping to the rear view mirror. I followed her gaze.

John was sprinting toward us, faster than an old man should be able to, up to the back of the RV from down the hill. Bev let go of Charlie's hand, letting out a little shriek. I grabbed Charlie by her shoulders and pulled her back from the camper before it started moving.

Bev peeled away, kicking up dirt and grass as the tires spun wildly. John kept coming: he didn't call out to her, beg her to stop, nothing. He just ran, chasing until she had picked up too much momentum to catch.

Then he turned back toward us. I held Charlie close to my side, watching in shock as he stumbled toward us.

His face wasn't nearly as kind as it had seemed before. It was too shadowed, too long.

"Are you okay?" I called to him, my voice shaking a little.

He didn't answer me. He just looked for a while, standing in the center of the dirt road, his stance a little crooked.

Then he walked down the hill and disappeared into the woods.

I begged Charlie to leave that night. I need it on record that I truly did. I told her that something was incredibly wrong with that place, that we could have a redo somewhere else, that we should listen to Beverly and go now.

She told me we should stay and leave in the morning. She said this was our chance to have some privacy, we had the hill all to ourselves, and that it would be way too dark to drive even to the closest motel.

I tried to protest. We argued for what had to be at least an hour and a half. But her words from earlier kept flashing into my mind, making me feel desperate to prove her wrong: you didn't want to have a wedding. You didn't want to go on a honeymoon. You should just go, Oliver.

I wasn't leaving without her, and she wasn't leaving.

So we stayed.

We did have a nice evening. I'll give her that. We played cards by the fire, and we listened to music, which helped me forget what had happened a little. It helped me stop glancing toward the trees, wondering when John might emerge again.

But then it was time for bed, and everything came rushing back again.

Charlie fell asleep fairly quickly, but I didn't. I couldn't. I listened to her snore, the sound melding with the hum of the outdoors and the trickle of rain bouncing off the plastic. I stared at the ceiling of the tent, willing my heart to stop racing.

I must have drifted off eventually, though, because I woke up. It was still dark out. I couldn't place what had woken me, but I felt panicked the second I opened my eyes.

I felt around in the dark for my wife, letting out a breath of relief when my fingers landed on her waist. She stirred, rolling toward me.

"Sorry," I breathed. "Sorry, baby. Didn't mean to wake you up."

She hummed in response, pressing close to me. I held her close, reaching for her hand under the covers.

I heard something outside. A voice, from far off. I froze, my fingers half clasped in hers. Charlie froze too.

"What was that?" She hissed, holding onto my arm. "Oli?"

"I don't know," I whispered back. I sat up, slowly rising.

"Wait." Charlie's voice cracked, and she reached for me. "I don't think you should go..."

I chewed on my lip, taking her hand and squeezing it.

"I'm just going to check," I whispered, unzipping the tent.

I fumbled for my phone, turning the flashlight on and shining it toward the sound.

Down the hill, I saw her. I knew what I'd see, but it still came as a shock... it still made my entire body feel like it'd been set ablaze.

My wife stood at the bottom of the hill, facing the thicket of trees. She was talking... shouting, really... to someone in the darkness. Or something.

I looked back into the tent, at my wife, sitting up and hugging the blankets to her chest. I shone my flashlight at her, which made her wince and cover her face with her hands.

I stared at her long, slender fingers, and something cold struck me.

There was no ring.

Charlie never took off her ring unless she was doing the dishes, or cleaning the toilet.

I turned without a word and ran down the hill. I grabbed Charlie from the edge of the trees despite her protests, nearly tossing her over my shoulder in my haste.

We left without the tent. I placed her in the passenger seat and buckled her seatbelt without a word, and we were gone.

I now understand better what we experienced.

I think I understand what those things wanted.

They wanted to trick us. They wanted to drive us apart. They wanted one of us to break, to stray, to leave without the other. They wanted to replace one of us with one of their own, and do whatever they wanted to do to the real one once they were left behind.

Maybe eat them. Maybe worse.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what that something worse might be lately.

Because I think I've made a horrible mistake.

I've noticed lately that Charlie never has her wedding ring on. And now that I think about it, I don't know if I've seen it on her since we left Honeymoon Hill.

Charlie never took off her ring.

I'm writing this not only as a warning. I'm writing this in case you see it, Charlie. If I'm right... god forbid I'm right... if you're still out there somewhere, if you survived, if I truly left you there with those things...

Please, please come home.

I love you.

White kimono ritual

First, I must say that this ritual is not worth it at all, i was an idiot. This lady will stop you from sleeping and being able to concentrate.

Around December 2025 I found this ritual and I became so interested around the origin of the ritual, apparently its from a Japanese black magic called "Akuma no gishiki" which no one here can find bc its super rare. The ritual has something missing from it that only the book contains.

Also Check out @Yetiforestman experience on three kings, I learnt alot from his comments and posts on how to deal with this.

I was very bored and in my bathroom when I found the incantation, In that moment it didn't scare me so I read it out loud 3 times (You dont have to do the entire ritual to summon her) so i thought it probably wont even work. After I did it I felt immediately regretful and confused on why I had just did that. (This was around 6 30 sometime during February)

I went to sleep around 12 and didn't think anything much so I wasn't stressed, I also didn't have the dream I was supposed too.I heard whispering in my ear (idk time) and woke up without even moving my hand like im supposed and she was bending over my bed towards me, I felt like i was choking and after maybe 2 seconds she slipped back to the corner of my room that overlooked the bed and then vanished when I blinked after a minute. I didn't see her again for the rest of the night or during the day.

I went to bed again around 12 again and I had a nightmare about her chasing me while murming words I couldn't make out. She looked around 8-9 feet tall had the long white kimono the was tourn at the bottom and had no feet.

I woke up again and saw green orbs flying around my room briefly, i didn't see her but I definitely felt a presence and after a while I felt a giant hand cover my face and begin to push me down into my bed, it wasn't a super strong force and it was only one hand but I was too scared to move and it eventually stopped, the same night I felt walking behind me and then someone get on my bed and lay next to me, it was weird and uncomfortable but I eventually fell asleep.

Nothing was happening during the day time at this point but nothing happened apart from me seeing her in dark corners for a while.

Monday April 27th i recorded my sleep after things kept moving by themselves around me the recording is 6 hours long and is from 12:30 to 6:27, to this day I haven't listened to the entire thing because that would take very long but here were a couple things that stood out to me

Here is around 3 am exactly and there is a noise that sounds like there is a tornado in my room and some weird murmuring

2 hours 22 minutes 39 seconds

At this point into the video is hear loud breathing from across my room and I say "Shh!" And it goes quiet.

3hours 55 minutes 55 seconds

There is alot of static noises maybe because my phone was placed next to an outlet but it was switched off, there is also alot of the blinds next to my bed moving which is where she stood over me for the first time.

After listening to the footage I hung up Japanese ornaments and Ofuda in my room and around my house, i was thinking of call a priest but idk what they would do for this thing.

It calmed down after that but I started seeing her outside often just staring at me with disgust but no more nightmares. I heard alot of bashing on my window during this time though.

After this I was chilling the bath one night and randomly from no where I felt the word kimono like run though my body, Kimono. I was doing a face wash thing and had my eyes completely shut but when I put my head underwater and came up to get the soapy stuff off my face, a bottle of mouthwash went flying from the sink to the opposite wall. I said wtf before it could even hit the floor but I ran to my room and grabbed this lanturn thing with patterns and went back to the bath, I was scared so I kept the door open for the rest of the bath. When walking from the shower to my room I saw her at the end of the hall smirking for the first time.

I looked back because my instinct made me walk into my room so I couldn't see her and she was no longer there when I checked. Its been almost a month i haven't seen her since but I think I am fine now, my sleep got much better and I don't randomly hear words or phrases whenever im alone in my house.

I reckon my experience was calm compared to others but please take my advice and play another game, this wasn't fun like I'd thought it would be for some reason. Its bad dont do it, btw this was one of my first rituals, ikr crazy probs because it was so accessible but im chilling now. I kinda want to leave this all behind me and do other rituals now but im happy to answer questions.

Audio

https://www.reddit.com/r/gshsnsbhshshsbhshsjsb/s/YJsIV4Un8V

I didnt have anything on my bed because it was very hot and i have no idea of the thumping or why i was hissing in pain

The body of REDACTED Singh was found skeletonized by back country hikers in the northern woods of Wisconsin. The sheriffs had been notified and then requested help from state police. I was a ten-year veteran at the time, and was sent up from Madison with my partner, John REDACTED, to assist with the recovery of the body in the deep woods. We were led by one of the hikers, a gaunt redneck by the name of Hershberger, to what was left of Singh.

The bones lay embedded in the moss of the forest floor, as if they were slowly sinking beneath the rippling green waves. The polyester blue t-shirt had become like a spider’s web of threads just barely holding on to one another, letting you see the gaping cavern of the chest cavity through the holes in the ribcage. The jeans were covered in a jungle of mold and lichen, as if they were the surface of some alien world. The legs were bound together with orange nylon cord at the ankles, and from the way the arms were beneath the body, we could guess the hands were bound in the same fashion. The skull sat, vacant sockets staring to the blue sky and treetops as if looking at something beyond. The belt buckle sat like a lighthouse through the fog, the chrome sparkling as if it was polished that very morning. A solitary star and the words U.S. ARMY emblazoned on the metal disk.

After taking a nauseating number of photos, the remains were carefully transferred to bags and removed from the woods. During the long drive back south past rolling hills of corn and soybean, John and I tossed theories back and forth.

“Seems like an awful long way to go to dispose of a corpse Bruce” John said.

“I think it was a more local killing, some old farmer dispute maybe” I said, eyes fixed on the road.

“Not much in the way of missing people in that area that match the description, I’ve checked, not much in the way of people up there anyway. If that army belt buckle’s anything to go off, we should get a hit on the dental record”

John was right, a thin packet was waiting on my keyboard the next morning. The deceased was one REDACTED Singh of Cresskill, New Jersey, aged 37. Singh was a native of the garden state and had been in the army for a decade as a military policeman. After earning an honorable discharge, he got licensed and became a PI in Jersey, and a respected one at that. His parents were both deceased, he had no siblings, and the only inquiry into his whereabouts was by his secretary, who had reported him missing after a month of absence. That was filed close to a year ago.

I made my way over to the forensics lab; there I found Schwarz hunched over his desk. A spindly, pale man with short, yet unkempt blonde hair. The walls by his desk were decorated haphazardly with family portraits, Christian Iconography, and fast-food coupons. A coffee pot that looked like it hadn’t rested since the great recession hissed away.

“We got a cause of death yet Schwartz?”

“It’s interesting you ask that, the bones and clothing show little sign of gashes or breaks, he might have died of a heart attack for all we know, but considering the rope, I would say something like suffocation. I would give the time of death as 10 months, give or take a month, given the advanced bleaching and seasons. So, Octoberish of last year.

“Interesting, anything else of note?” I replied

“It’s hard to say” Schwartz replied with his flat voice, “I am surprised it is in as good of shape as it is. It is quite common for animals to scatter remains in remote areas like this. I wonder if there was something keeping them away”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Oh, any number of things, the cadaver could have been dumped already in a state of advanced decay, if it was originally stored outside, I might not be able to tell. It could have been contaminated in some way with some chemical or the like.” His good-natured smile clashed with the morbid subject matter, “You know in some cultures they believe the remains of a human sacrifice won’t be touched by even the flies to respect the god it was offered too”

“Maybe leave that last one off the report, thanks for getting it back to me so quickly”

I did not like spending time in the forensic lab. The smells of cleaning chemicals and decay clashing made me nauseous, and being so close to dead bodies made me uneasy. I found John sitting at his desk, tooling on his phone waiting for his computer to turn on, a brightly colored energy drink can close beside him

“Mornin' John, Schwartz got us a type up of the forensic analysis”

“Morning Bruce” John began flipping through the report and sipping his beverage, a puzzled look spread across his wide face, his hand rubbing his bald head, “Schwartz put ‘avoidance of cadaver by wildlife could be result of demonic activity’ in his write up, didn’t we talk to him about putting that kind of stuff in official reports?”

“I don’t know, Webber seems to have stopped caring” I replied as I took a sip of my coffee.

“I have yet to meet a forensics expert who was not at least a bit eccentric” a voice behind me said, startling me ever so slightly.

Chief Webber was a tall, imposing man. While age had certainly taken a toll on him, you could still see the strength of the old man, his bald head glistening under the light, the dark skin of his face wrinkled and his eyes deep set. The beginnings of a beard crossed his chin, flecked with white.

“Not many people want to spend their days poking through dead bodies, all things considered he is a well-adjusted man for that field.” He turned his head to look at me

“Check your email Dieter, someone called in saying they knew this Singh guy”

“Already?” I replied, “We haven’t even had the notice of death out for more than an hour!”

“Someone must have been looking for him” Webber said, walking away.

Later that day John and I were sitting in the late summer sun outside a fast-food restaurant on the Illinois border, waiting for our lead. A well maintained, but aging car pulled into the lot and out stepped a man in a white shirt and orange stripped tie. His hair was a dark blond, well combed but graying, and a thin mustache sat neatly on his upper lip. He saw us and came over, a wide yet polite smile on his face

“You must be officers John and Bruce, I’m Mr. Williams.”

“Pleased to met you” I said, hand outstretched. John tipped his red fry container to the man

“Oh no I’ll get lunch when this is over, thank you for meeting me here, I understand it’s a bit out of your way”

“Where is it you work again?” John asked

“Osbrem and associates, attorney” Williams said as he took a large 3 ring binder out of his briefcase. “Singh and I where old army pals, both MPs at Fort Riley back in the day. I believe I am the only one he kept in contact with after he left the service. We would talk about once, oh, every month or so. I had been concerned after he hadn’t been responding to me since last September.” He gazed away, gathering his thoughts, “I feared the worst, you know with his line of work and all, He wasn’t one of those PIs who just chase after cheating husbands, he did a lot of missing persons and cold case work for families, and that can get dicey. I called his secretary, she filed a report with the police but all she cared about was that her checks stopped coming in. So, I went to his office and collected his files. This was his last case. I got in contact as soon as I heard he’d been found”

He pushed the folder across the stone table to us, rubbing his forehead “God, I still don’t believe it, I was still holding onto delusion that he was OK, that he was under deep cover or something and one evening would still give me a call, just like we always did. You never get to an age where the death of a friend is easy, hell, I think I’m the only family he had” Tears where welling in his eyes while he ran his fingers through his hair. “Fuck he probably listed me as his next of kin, God knows he his blood family didn’t care for him.”

“Thank you for bringing this to us Mr. Williams, we promise you we will hold the proper people accountable.” John stood, putting his hand on the distraught man’s shoulder. “Now let me get you some lunch, lawman to lawman”

As we got back into the car I began flipping through the file, John carefully balanced an ice cream cone in one hand as he drove.

“No Shit John, he was working on the REDACTED Al Awadhi case”

Al Awadhi was a college student who had gone missing two years ago in Madison. She had come from a rich and well-connected family in the Gulf states, and they had pulled out all the stops to try to find her. Rewards were offered, buses had her face on them, even a few TV ads played during football games. Briefly, Madison had become the center of a national crime sensation. Every social media sleuth had an opinion; theories of political intrigue, jealous lovers, and powerful coverups rocked the university.

John briefly glanced down at his shirt, now speckled with vanilla ice cream, “Him and every other PI from here to New York.”

Any progress made by law enforcement had been derailed by the media circus that had ensued. Her boyfriend, who had been cleared of suspicion in hours, was harassed so much by every two-bit PI and amateur internet sleuth he had to go into hiding in everything but name. Rumors had spread like gospel, and the quagmire of fact and fiction had slowed the case to a halt.

Flipping through his notes I found a confusing mess of arrows, sketches, and abbreviations. Most was in English, and some not. Entire news stories were printed out and placed in between pages and then covered in marks. Like gold in quartz, there was something in there, but it was going to take a lot of work to get it out.

After we got back to the station, I made a digital copy of the notes to look over during the weekend. John had to leave early to pick up his kids, and by the time I left the sun was setting in the late summer sky. I lived in a cramped apartment outside of town alone. It was supposed to be temporary lodgings originally, but after my engagement fell apart, it had become very much permanent. It lacked any real furniture and my walls were bare, save a Conan the Barbarian Poster, but I had grown used to it. I sat outside, sipped cheap coffee and chipped away at the notes. A few times I took a break to relax but soon found my thoughts drifting back to the vacant eyes of a man who died violently and alone. I thought of the pain his friends, as few as they might be, were living through. I owed it to him to make things right.

I got to the office early on Monday, made myself a cup of coffee, and sat at my desk. As I waited for my computer to boot, I savored the smell of my coffee, waiting for it to cool. As I was scanning my email John poked his head over the cubicle.

“Morning Bruce, how was your weekend?” he yawned.

“Productive, got a good amount of those notes deciphered, still can’t make much out of them though.” I replied, “Looks like we got something back on his credit card history, last used it at a gas station up in Clarksford.”

“He was nowhere near Clarksford” John said, brow furrowed.

“A lead’s a lead, you drive and I’ll keep chipping at the notes” I said as I poured the rest of my coffee into my thermos.

The drive was peaceful. I was watched the gentle rolling fields of corn and soybeans as I kept working on the notes. Trees standing like soldiers at attention. As we drove further north the trees became more and more numerous, till the fields faded away entirely and around us was a sea of wood. John pulled us off the main highway and brought us on the winding narrow road to Clarksford.

The town was small and had definitely seen better days. Two streets ran parallel to each other on different sides of the small river that ran through town, with a small bridge in the middle. There were two churches, a warehouse, a gas station, about three dozen houses, and four bars. We pulled into the gas station and stepped out of the car, stretching.

We went inside and began asking questions to the cashier. We didn’t expect too much, and we were not surprised when we found nothing. Security footage was only saved for a few weeks, and no one would remember a seemingly random customer coming in. When we asked about his car, however, a man in a bright Hawaiian shirt browsing the shelves spoke up.

“You’re looking for a red corolla with Jersey plates?” he said.

“Yeah, a red 2011 corolla, bought gas here October of last year, did you see it?” I replied.

“A car just like that has been parked outside Skip’s for months now, maybe that’s your car”

The man led us to an old, closed down restaurant on the edge of town. Sure, enough, the car sitting there matched our description. Checking the plates, it was Singh’s.

“Well shoot, I’ve seen this car every day driving for work” The man, who had introduced himself as Isaac, said “What’s the story, why’d too state police like yourselves be doing all the way up here chasing an abandoned car?”

As he asked that a sheriff’s deputy pulled in alongside us. We had called them on the way up. Out steeped a woman in her 30s, bearing remarkably similar features to Isaac.

“Isaac what are you doing here?” she said.

“They were asking about a car like this, looks like they found it” he replied.

“This is my cousin, sorry” she said to us, introducing herself as Deputy Sarah.

“Your cousin was a great help” John said, “Anyway Isaac, this car is tied to the disappearance of one…”

He clapped his hands together, an idea coming into full swing “The camp Orion people got him ooh I knew it!” he fished into the pocket of his shirt as Sarah rolled her eyes.

“Oh, shut up Isaac” she said, “First you and Hank talk all our ears off at the family reunions now you start wasting the time of these gentlemen”

“I’m sorry, what’s going on?” I asked.

“Isaac and his brother both drive delivery trucks, there are plenty of farms or summer camps, the like, around, and there is an old astronomy camp they are infatuated with” Sarah began “they’ve always been huge conspiracy nuts, talking my ear off at family get together on everything from reptilians to JFK.”

“Oh, come on Sarah, even you gotta admit this one has some merit” Isaac interrupted.

“No Isaac, no more than the governor is from mars” she replied in a harsh tone.

Isaac raised an eyebrow then shrugged at us. “Hank gets lunch in a half hour, meet us at Curly’s and well give you the whole spiel” he said as he began texting on his phone hastily and walking away.

“I’m sorry about him, him and his brother are nice, decent, hardworking people” Helman said, “But when they get on conspiracies, they have a one track mind.”

We began combing through the car, but nothing besides some old coupons and maintenance logs were inside. Feeling like we had no reason not to, we headed over to Curly’s, much to Deputy Sarah's chagrin.

Isaac smiled as we walked into the dim bar and waved us over to his booth. Inside sat his brother, Hank. He had the same black hair as his brother, but unlike his brother’s strait hair his sat in a curly mop on his head. His beard went down to the heavy metal logo on his T shirt, opposed to his brother’s neat mustache and stubble.

“Whatcha got for us boys” I said sitting down in the booth.

“Camp Orion is a former astronomy camp, went under a long time ago” Hank began, wasting no time, “four years ago the place started receiving deliveries again. At first, we thought the place was renovating or something, but the quantities kept increasing and stuff got weird.”

“I deliver food mostly” Isaac said, sliding an open notebook onto the table, “Hank is mostly construction stuff. They make us drop stuff off on the outskirts of the camp.”

“Neither of us have ever seen someone there.” Hank broke in “No contractors have ever been in there either; despite all the construction stuff they keep buying.”

“They buy enough food for a hundred people” Isaac said, “We’ve started keeping tabs on the entrance and only a few times a month does anyone leave.” He flipped to a picture in his notebook “This van is the only thing to go in or out.”

“You have a camera watching the entrance?” I said, concern in my voice.

“Yeah, just a trail cam” Isaac replied, oblivious to our legal concerns “we got some pictures from above to.”

“What?” John said, surprised.

“We got a friend of ours with a pilot’s license to fly us over, you have to see these” Isaac said.

The blurry pictures where hard to make out. From what we could gather there was an old building at the end of the driveway, and then a small trail leading further into the camp. Two long buildings flanked the trail. Further along the trail there were a few dozen square, tan buildings in a grid layout. In the middle stood a large, square structure. It was made of the same tan material as the smaller buildings around it and seemed to tower above them. It was terraced, with three layers and steps running up the middle of each side. The top seemed to have something on it, but the image was too low quality to make out.

“What is that” I said.

“We don’t know, it looks like a pyramid of some kind.” Hank replied, “We can’t figure out what they are doing in there and why it has to be so secret. We would go there ourselves, but I think they’d shoot us or something.”

As I was flipping through the notes John kept asking questions.

“Anyone else in town talking about this.” He said.

“No, no one ever listens to us about stuff, we were actually planning to make a YouTube video and see if anyone would listen to that.”

“Wait John, look at this” I said, “REDACTED McIlroy is listed as a part-owner of the property, she is in Singh’s notes!”

McIlroy was one of the standout features of the PI’s notes. A former professor of ancient history at the University of Vancouver, she had been all over the world giving lectures and going to archaeological digs. Then one day she vanished from the public eye entirely. I had yet to figure out why Singh thought she was connected, but a coincidence like this is usually not a coincidence.

“Well, we should go check out Orion then,” John replied “Maybe Ms. McIlroy is there and can answer us some questions.”

The brothers faces lit up with delight. They handed us copies of all their notes and wished us luck.

“We’ll keep quite now for the time being” Isaac said as we got into our cruiser, “but once the media is up here, we’re gonna get full credit right.”

“Yeah yeah don’t worry” John said as he began backing up the car.

The drive to camp Orion was short, easily within walking or biking distance should Singh have made his way from his car to it. The entrance was an unkempt gravel driveway peaking out between the dense trees. As we went down, we saw a shed with a sign noting it for deliveries, with a barrier in the road not far after. We exited the vehicle and began walking down the driveway.

The welcome center was just like the photos we’d been shown. The squat, long building had seen better days, with an overgrown lawn surrounding it like a house on the Iowa prairie. An old van rusting at the wheel wells sat parked next to the front door. As we approached two figures emerged and walked up to us.

“Wisconsin State police, I am Officer Bruce and this is my partner John” I said, pulling out my badge, “We have some questions for a REDACTED McIlroy who is listed as a part-owner of this property.”

The two women, both in their late 20s early 30s, stopped in their tracks and exchanged concerned glances. They whore identical black cargo pants and dark gray crew necks. I quickly glanced at John and he nodded back to me. If they had any weapons on their belts, we would have no idea. The tense few seconds were agonizingly long. I stood with my hands on my hips, trying to betray my heart beating out of my chest.

“Yes she is here, I can go get her for you, wait here” one said and retreated back into the building. The other women stood just as still as before, looking like she was trying not to scowl at us.

“So what do you guys do here” John said trying to break the silence. No response came.

After a few more tense minutes, the whir of a small engine could be heard. A golf cart with the woman who left and a new figure came around the corner. The new women was average in height, olive in complexion with strait black hair falling to her shoulders. She looked to be in her mid-40s.

“Hello Gentlemen, I understand you are here to see me?”

“A man by the name of REDACTED Singh went missing here about a year ago, would you know anything about that?” I said.

McIlroy was taken aback by the remark, and looked back at us with squinted eyes, “Are you insinuating I had something to do with it?”

“let’s not get ahead of ourselves ma’am” John replied “Singh seemed to have an interest in you and this place, then went missing. This could all be purely coincidental, but even so we would like to poke around.”

McIlroy’s expression softened, slightly. “Well come, I can show you around.”

She brought us inside, the two women still flanking us. The whiplash of the run down exterior to the hospital like, sterile interior was jarring. Glass displays housed pottery, suits of armor, and swords. Dioramas of battles sat on low tables; the small soldiers painted with the care of a surgeon.

“We are a work in progress museum.” She said “These are our artifacts, all pertaining to ancient Mesopotamia. We have a particular focus on the Sumerian period, but there are some displays from subsequent periods. While we do have a few replicas, most of our displays are authentic artifacts. If you would please follow me, I can show you some of our full-sized replicas outside.”

We went out the back door of the building and began walking down the trail through the trees. Two more people, a man and a woman, dressed like the first two, came up to us and began walking silently with us. While McIlroy continued her tour guide speech, John and I exchanged nervous glances. If anything were to happen to us the department would know this was our last known location, and they’d rain hell down on this place. We just had to hope the uniformed people flanking us knew that.

We passed the low, long buildings that flanked the trail that we had seen on Isaac and Hank’s photos. McIlroy told us they were employee housing. We saw a few more uniformed people, and they were ushering women in long, colorful dresses with shawls and men in brown tunics into the buildings.

I made eye contact with one of the women and my blood ran cold. Staring back at me was Al Awadhi. Her eyes went wide when she realized I recognized her, and she quickly began whispering to the nearest uniformed man. I was forced to keep going, but I could hear the noise of their whispering as I went passed.

The woods peeled away on either side of us, and in the middle of the clearing sat a number of low, single room houses made of mud-brick. In the middle of them sat a three-tiered pyramid, like the ziggurats modeled in the welcome center.

“This is the crown jewel of our facility,” McIlroy said, wide grin on her face, “A replica of a Sumerian town during the reign of Sargon the Great, complete with a temple complex.”

I nodded along as she explained the intricacies of the replica houses, my mouth dry. My mind raced with an excuse to get the hell out of here. The eyes of the guards burrowed into the back of my head. My training was the only thing standing in the way of me spiraling into a panic. Like a sailor in a storm, I had to stay calm, my life and John’s depended on it.

We began to climb the steps of the pyramid as McIlroy explained how they built it. “This is a 1:1 recreation of a temple I helped excavate near the Tigris River in Iraq.” We made it to the top, the entire camp, or more accurately compound, stretched out all around us. “The alter and idol here are authentic, I dug them up myself. The Idol is of Hanbi, the Sumerian deity of the north sky.”

The Idol was bronze, with the body of a man and the head of a bull. Its hands where outstretched as if waiting for you to give it something. The alter was smooth and black, made from volcanic glass.

John was on edge too, I could tell from the glances he was shooting at me. He pulled out his phone and pretended to look at a notification “Well, thank you for the tour, ma’am, unfortunately we’re gonna have to cut it short, some other business has come up.”

We were escorted all the way back to our car. The eyes of the guards never left us as we pulled out. A word was not spoken until we were on the highway.

“I thought they where about to hold us down on that alter and cut our throats open!” John gasped “there had to be 30 people in those uniforms, all staring us down with just, hatred!”

“Al Awadhi was there” I said, my breathing still heavy from adrenaline

“WHAT!?” John about veered the car off the road “Fuck they must have hog tied Singh and bleed him like a pig, what are these people even doing?”

That was still up in the air. Antiquity smuggling stuck out first and foremost. There was a lot of money in it, and it was a major source of income for some of the less savory groups in the Middle East. That would not explain why Al Awadhi was there, however.

We got back to headquarters just as dusk began to fall. This quickly became an all hands on deck event, with everyone pouring over the footage from our body-cams. Others in the shots were IDed as other missing persons, not only from the US, but as far away as São Paulo and Tokyo. The office was abuzz with calls and the chatter of plans being made. A raid was coming together.

In the corner of the room, I found Schwartz poring over the footage of the temple.

“Find anything?” I asked

“That is not the Sumerian god of the north sky” he replied flatly “That would be Enlil, and this is clearly not him”

“So, they misnamed the idol? Weird this history expert would do that” I replied

“Maybe not, Hanbi is the king of the demons in the Mesopotamian pantheon. I did a study in collage of the religions in the ancient world, specifically Canaan but we talked a lot about Mesopotamia too. I referenced my old textbook, there was never any endorsed worship of Hanbi, if that Idol is what they say it is, we could have some devil-worshipers on our hands.”

I nodded and looked over at the screen. The bull-headed idol stared back at me, it’s open hands seemed to be beckoning me. Schwartz was one to go on odd tangents, but this one stuck with me.

“You think it’s a cult?” I asked

“Seems like an awful lot of theatrics for a smuggling ring” He replied “I brought it up with Webber, but he said they’ll worry about that after the raid.”

The plan was set; a team would go in under cover of darkness, detain McIlroy and allow for a mass of law enforcement to fall upon the place. John and I were selected to lead this team, as we had seen the facility itself. The eight man team was cloaked in black, the only light in the back of the van was the dim glow of a red bulb. We had gone over the plan a hundred times, so we sat in tense silence as we approached the entry site.

The night was black, moonless. We all climbed out into the inky dark and watched as the van sped away. Scores of law enforcement sat somewhere, tense, ready to crash down, but to us they might as well have been invisible. We moved wordlessly into the tree line, our night vision making the world a ghastly gray. A faint mist hung in the air, like the vapor off of a witch’s cauldron. Even breathing felt like shouting. Scurrying animals would make noise like thunder, staring back at you with glowing, reflective eyes.

As we approached the edge of the wood, the chatter of voices pierced through the silence. As we broke into the clearing, the glow of fires could be seen dancing on the sides of the mud brick homes. The pyramid was bathed red, dancing in the firelight.

We came to the edge of the mock town, hugging the sides of the buildings. Looking at the pyramid, a great mass of robed figures stood on the steps, their voices unified in a chant of some harsh, guttural language, unrecognizable to the modern ear. On the alter lay a woman, crying in pain. A fire was lit under the idol, and the bronze glowed red.

A lead figure stood, arms raised, and the chanting ceased. In the eerie quite only the screaming of the woman on the alter could be heard. A new voice joined in the crying, the shrill voice of a newborn. An attendant handed the babe to the lead figure, who then showed the masses. The chanting started again, this time louder. Mesmerized, we all watched as the shrieking infant was placed in the hands of the idol and burst into flame.

The thunder of gunshots woke us from the trance; the leaders’ head exploded into a red mist.

“POLICE, EVERYONE ON THE GROUND NOW!” John yelled, gun smoking.

Chaos ensued, a number of cultists produced weapons from under their robes and began firing at us. We traded shots from behind cover, except for John. He stood tall and advanced, beating a number of them to the draw before falling to the ground riddled with bullets. The unarmed cultists ran in every which way, many falling in the exchange. Over the gunshots the sound of engines could be heard winning from the perimeter, the cavalry coming to finish the job.

I was trading shots with a cultist behind cover when one jumped on top of me from nowhere, curved knife clutched in his hand, panting like a wild animal. We rolled about on the ground till I was able to wrestle my sidearm from my belt, putting him down with a single shot. As I stood back up another one jumped out from cover, and I found myself on the ground clutching my guts. I had taken a shotgun blast to the lower torso.

The rest of the night was a blur, and the next coherent thought I had was at the hospital, days later being told I would never walk again.

The psychiatrist told me writing this all out would help me come to terms with it. I think I could live a thousand lifetimes and not. I have nothing, No friends, no family, and not even my work anymore. I only ask one thing, that you see the last few days of my life. For while I still breath, I died that cold, black night in the woods of Wisconsin.

I really have no words for what I've seen as of lately, because its something I've been carrying from a long time ago, and its something I never thought I would ever have to talk about again, but, I guess I just need to write this down...

I'm in my mid 20's, and this experience has brought back many emotions, which I thought I already knew how to handle, but, turns out I was wrong all along, and it feels like I really didn't learn anything from it, back to square one.

Last week, I was doing my usual tasks in my workplace.

I work for the local soda company, what I usually do, alongside Satō, a good friend of mine who's some years older than me, is taking our products to the local restaurants, stores, refill vending machines, check and organise inventories and see what's in stock in each of them, as well as replace old products and items.

In short, our company is in charge of distributing soda and cola.

Last month, Satō and I were in the truck heading towards our last stop in the middle of the night, a very warm night to be more precise. An old yet beautiful ramen place owned by a man older than the place itslef, his name is Koichi. He waved at us when he saw the truck, then we went to the backdoor leading to the kitchen, carrying all the merchandise in four heavily loaded dollys. One in each hand for both of us.

Mr. Koichi opened the door to let us in, and I could smell the udon boiling, the fried pork meat and a warm wave of broth coming from the kitchen. Going all around town, all day long with Satō to load and unload afterwards was really exhausting, specially that day. I thought of grabbing some ramen before going back to the plant, however I knew that wouldn't be possible because our boss is pretty strict with punctuality, and I understand, it was a friday night, no one wants to stay there when you could be home early and rest.

Then, Satō unloaded his dollys inside the fridges while I unloaded mine in the kitchen for display.

Afterwards, Mr. Koichi helped us out by putting our dollys back into the trunk. Satō bought some soda from the restaurant. He got in the truck and started the engine.

I looked one last time at the restaurant's kitchen, knowing I wouldn't be able to have some delicious ramen that night, particularly Mr. Koichi's ramen, its so good after a long day of hard work.

Man! Are you coming or not? You know how pissed Mr. Rio is gonna get, come here and get in already!

I knew Satō was right so I got inside the truck.

— I'm sorry Satō-san, I was just thinking about the ramen, you know?

— I don't blame you man, but if Mr. Rio decides to scold us for being late, I won't even have an apetite for the rest of the weekend, you know how his face becomes really weird with all those wrinkles when he gets angry, not to mention the smell of his breath...

We both laughed, knowing Mr. Rio's temper and his bad breath.

I kept seeing many trees and lights along the highway, Satō wanted to listen to some music on the truck's radio, however it was to no avail because it couldn't catch any station or anything like that, so we could only listen to the sound of a few cars passing.

A few minutes passed and I saw some water drops hitting the front window, it was a dew.

Despite the plant not being too close to the city, we still made it just in time.

We parked the car and we got inside the employee's room, and Mr. Rio was already there, he talked to us in a neutral tone.

Hey guys, you made it in time, Satō, gimme your delivery vauchers, I'll sort them out, both of you, go change your clothes, good job.

I was pretty relieved by the fact that Mr. Rio would take care of the paperwork that was left, it didn't take him too long to get it all done anyways.

After we changed back into our casual clothes, Mr. Rio turned off the lights and began to close everything.

I was concerned because I thought the rain had become heavier while we where inside, but once we got out to the parking lot, I saw it had already stopped.

We weren't the only ones leaving already, there were at least another 30 employees getting ready to go. Mr. Rio grabbed his car keys and spoke to us for the final time.

Good job guys, I'll see you on monday, take care and rest, good luck.

After saying those words he drove away.

Satō and I said goodbye, he went with other guys because one of them had a truck and offered them to take them home safely.

I took my bike and rode along the highway, it was pretty quiet, I thought I would head straight home and forget about everything else. On my way home I saw a small shrine, very close to the road.

"It's been a while since the last time I went to one of these..."

I stopped for a bit, just to check out the place. It was all really quiet, and it looked like nobody had been there for quite some time. Before going home I made a short prayer for good luck and left to get my bike.

All I had in my mind was about getting home as soon as I could and have something to eat, but something was going on with my bike.

It started doing some weird noises until it stopped and wouldn't move anymore. It had stopped in a place of the highway where there was almost no artificial light, only moonlight. There were no trees around that part so I could actually watch my step.

I took off my helmet, and took a deep breath, then I pushed my bike to the side of the road, where it wouldn't be an obstacle for anyone driving.

I pulled out my phone to see if I had signal, in case I had to call someone to tow my bike and give me a ride home.

I checked the bike and it seemed alright, there wasn't really anything causing a malfunction, and I just couldn't understand why it even had happened in the first place.

I felt a breeze, gentle and fresh, and I figured out I could stay there for a few minutes to see the place I was standing on, after all, even with all the trips I made with Satō back and forth from the plant to the town, I never payed much attention to the surroundings. I saw some rice fields, a few hills, and some trees. Although it wasn't much or something too impressive, I felt like a tourist in a place I had passed by so many times but never bothered to explore it.

From all the things I saw, there was a small clearing not too far away from a rice field. I decided to see that spot and began walking.

When I got there, I sat down on the grass. It was all really quiet, except for the distant sound of some crickets.

Just for a brief moment I lied down on the grass, and it was pretty comfortable.

I heard a faint noise that resembled a the one of a creek, it wasn't too far away so I followed the sound.

I walked next to some trees and stones, and suddenly the air around me became cooler.

I figured out it would have something to do with the wind, humidity, it was nightime anyways. After a few meters a found the creek, it wasn't too big or deep, but it gave me an eerie feeling.

It was pretty dark by this point, but I steel could make out the edges of the creek.

It was between two pieces of land, there were trees everywhere, rocks, I even saw some fireflies, but then, I saw a kid.

He didn't seem to notice me, standing there, at least 10 meters away from him, and he looked confused

It looked as if he was looking for something in the creek. His feet were in the water but it didn't seem like he was cold at all, just staring at the water.

I wasn't sure about asking or even saying anything at all because I had a strange feeling about the whole thing. Why would a child be here? Is he alone? and overall, What is he even doing here?

I walked around for a bit to see if there was anyone else, anyone that would know anything about the child, but it didn't take me too long to figure out he was totally on his own.

I came back to see the kid, he was still doing his thing and again, he didn't notice me.

I shouted to get his attention.

Oi! Oi!

For a second, the kid stopped doing whatever he was doing, then he turned his head, almost as if he had heard my voice, but didn't know where it came from, he was looking everywhere, until he stopped, I looked away for a moment to check if there really wasn't anyone else around until I suddenly heard his voice.

— Are you perhaps lost, mister? - He inquired

His sudden question spooked me, I really wasn't prepared for it, specially after it seemed like he couldn't figure out where I was.

— Uh, no? I was just wondering, where's your parents at? - I replied.

— Oh, they're at home, but don't worry mister, I'm not alone, I came here with my friend!

— Your friend, you say? Where is he? - I said as I looked around to see if his friend was anywhere to be seen.

— Yes, we're looking for stones for the fish pond at my home!

— You sure are, but I don't see your friend anywhere around...

— I think he wen't back home, I heard him say something about getting help...

— And just how long ago did he leave?

— What? Hmmm, about three minutes ago or so, I think.

— Three minutes, huh?

The whole place became quiet, I had no idea if this kid's friend would return soon. And, what about his parents? They've gotta be worried sick about their child being outside so late in this cold.

— So, how old are you? - I asked.

— Hm? I'm 9 years old, mister.

Suddenly I realized I didn't even tell him who I was, which made me feel a bit ashamed.

— My apologies, I haven't introduced myself. My name is Oda, Takeshi Oda, its a pleasure.

— Oh! My name is Josuiji, Josuiji Hayato, its my pleasure.

Just as he finished introducing himself, he looked at the water as he began searching for more stones.

"That's odd", I thought, he didn't seem distraught by the fact that he's all alone, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, in the middle of the cold stream.

The silence of the whole place was oddly unnerving, I could feel my skin shiver and the cold of my clothes almost made me jump everytime they touched my body because of the wind.

I knew this kid could contract a disease if he didn't get out of the water in time, or worse, he could get a hypothermia and die.

— Hey, Hayato, I know you're busy with your rocks, I get it, but its pretty late already, I bet your parents are worried about you!

— It's not that late, mister! Besides, my friend shouldn't take that long...

I interrupted him mid sentence — Ha- Hayato, you said earlier that your friend went away to get help, right?

He looked a bit mad that I had interrupted him, but nodded in response.

— Alright, what kind of help did you guys need? - I asked

Hayato looked a bit puzzled, then he stared at me for a brief moment.

— He said I was hurt, I think I fell, but I feel okay, I promise! - He replied in a frustrated tone

— I see, so you fell, where did you hit yourself?

— Mister, I promise! I didn't hurt myself! - He sounded angrier than before

I thought of asking more questions until I saw the kid looking at me angrily, he stared at me that way before turning around to search for more stones.

A little ray of moonlight that passed through the trees lit his head, but when I looked at it, I noticed part of his hair was wet, but the liquid on his hair didn't look like water, the moonlight showed it was red.

I panicked for a bit, but I made a decision.

— Oi! Hayato! Can you come here, please? - I said while I moved my hand in signal that I needed him to come close.

— Hm? Yeah? - He said as he walked to where I was standing.

Once he got there, I took out my phone and turned on the flashlight to take a closer look at his head, but even before doing so, I spotted see a bruise on his head.

— Oh boy, Hayato, I think your friend might have been right after all, you might have a little bruise... - I said in a way that he wouldn't get too scared but would understand that he wasn't really okay as he thought he was.

Hayato's hair was in the way, so I decided to move it in case his bruise was worse than I had thought

— Alright, Hayato. — I said — I'm gonna have to move your hair just a bit...

Right when my hand touched his head, Hayato fell to the ground.

I gasped before yelling: — Oi! Hayato! Come on, hang on! What's wrong?

However, Hayato rolled all the way into the stream; I hurried up and ran there to see if he hadn't hit his head again and stop him from potentially drowning.

I yelled again: — Hayato! Hayato! Hang on! - I got there as fast as I could, then, I lifted him above the water, he looked unconcious, his skin was cold and he wasn't breathing.

I took another look at his head, but he didn't have more bruises.

I looked away for a second, but when I looked at him again, his eyes were already open, Hayato was staring at me. I was a bit surprised but figured out he would be alright.

Right as I was about put my hand on the side of his head, his body suddenly felt lighter. When I looked down, I couldn't see Hayato's body anymore, then I looked back up too see I was now holding a small human skull facing me.

I yelled and dropped the skull into the stream, where it just dissapeared as soon as it touched the water.

I yelled again, thinking I was just imagining stuff. — Hayato! Hayato!

I looked around, thinking Hayato would be somewhere. I was breathing heavily, and suddenly I felt as if the force of the stream was about to drag my feet.

My heart was racing and the cold water made it real hard for me to move, I felt as if something was wrapping my chest, and I woke up.

I was laying at the small clearing, not too far away from the rice fields, I couldn't understand it. I stood up and ran back to the stream, hoping I would see Hayato somewhere. I saw the same trees and rocks that I saw the first time I met Hayato.

I yelled: — Hayato! Oi! Hayato! Where are you!? - But there was no response, only the most unnerving kind of silence anyone could imagine.

My heart was still racing, I was very tired from running as fast as I could to see if Hayato was there, and I was just so confused, I thought that maybe something had happened to him, maybe his friend had come back and they went back home?

There were so many questions in my head, but none of them made sense, I felt like I was going crazy, I couldn't breathe properly and I couldn't shake the feeling that something was very wrong.

I walked back to my bike, I tried starting it and it was working again. I put my helmet back on and I took a deep breath before riding off back home.

I suddenly felt very hungry and decided to go for a change of plan, instead of heading straight home I would stop by Mr. Koichi's restaurant.

Soon I had arrived, but by then I was feeling a little bit less spooked or so I thought, I took of my helmet and parked my bike next to the restaurant.

As soon as I stepped into the restaurant, Mr. Koichi saw me from the counter.

— Welcome! Eh? Oi, Mr. Oda, you look really pale, did you see a ghost or something? - He said as he laughed.

I was a bit shook, it took me a second to respond; — Wha- Oh! No, no, ha ha. Nothing like that.

I quickly noticed the place was empty, so I would be eating in silence that night.

I ate some ramen, after all, a large and warm ramen bowl was all I needed to feel better, although I was still wondering what that had been all about, but I figured out it was just a weird nightmare.

After finishing my bowl I walked up to the counter to pay for my meal, but something caught my attention.

On the counter there were some photographs, in one of them there was a kid.

My heart began racing again as I realized that kid looked a lot like Hayato.

Mr. Koichi, noticed me looking at the picture.

His face suddenly changed, he looked nostalgic and a bit melancholic.

He let out a sigh before speaking; — That was my son, Hayato, he was my first son, he died in a stream. We never knew what he was doing out there, he had many bruises on his head and his neck was broken. Sometimes I think about him.

I felt as if a cold wind surrounded my body, I stood in silence before speaking again. — I- I'm sorry to hear that, I had no idea...

— Its alright. — He said with a barely noticeable smile on his face — It was a very long time ago, I've moved on and always try to be a better father to the rest of my children, even if they rarely come by to visit, they've all moved to the big city a while ago...

After that, I walked out of the restaurant, the street was in complete silence and only a few street lights were working then, I couldn't even hear any cars passing by, maybe because it was already pretty late, it all felt very lonely, no different from that place where I had been earlier.

Suddenly a soft, yet, cold and dry breeze made it clear for me.

It was time for me to go home.

"Come in, Dan," Emma said.

"Hi Emma, what can I do for you?"

"As you might know, I recently got promoted to a branch manager, which came with this beautiful office."

"It is really nice."

"Thank you. But it means the basement office is empty. Management would like to move you there. It's not bad. I've actually enjoyed working there."

"But I really like my office, Emma, and the basement…"

"It's non-negotiable."

I rubbed my face.

"Sorry, my hands are tied. Please have it done by the end of the day." She glanced at the clock. "Also, keep the back room closed."

I got up and slowly walked to my office. It wasn't as pretty as Emma's, but it still had windows and sunlight, and it was mine, but what could I do? I packed up my things and headed down.

The basement was cold concrete, with bright fluorescent lights. A long hall led to the office. My steps echoed in the silence. A water cooler stood in the hall, but there was no coffee machine. I sighed and unlocked the door. 

The lights flickered. They seemed even brighter inside. The room was in the back. I put my stuff down and turned on my computer. A loud whoosh sounded from the back room like a bunch of computers turning on at once. We kept old servers in rooms like these, but why would they turn on now? 

I knew Emma had told me not to open it, but who cared? She moved me to this shithole. I walked to it and opened the door. The room was dark, but in the back, blue electric current glowed. I turned on the light. 

On the ground lay a strange gray blob, buzzing with blue electricity. Its whole body seemed to move with each volt, as if it breathed through it. The zaps got louder. They sounded like someone saying my name. I grabbed the door frame tightly. The thing expanded and deflated, and a blue wave of electricity ran along the ground, shocking me.

"Fuck!" I yelled. 

The thing moved around again, ready to fire. I turned and bolted to Emma's office.

She took a deep breath as she saw my frightened face.

"There's a, there's a thing."

"Did you open the door?"

"No. Yes. I…"

Her face went blank. She glanced at the clock.

"Dan, calm down."

"We need to call someone."

"No." She furrowed her brows. "There will be no calling."

"But it zapped me, it…"

"Listen to yourself. You're being ridiculous. Come, I'll go with you and show you it's nothing."

"No, I'm not going back there."

"Do you want to lose your job?"

"What?"

"You're getting fired if you don't listen."

"But I need this job."

"Then just come down, Dan. I'll show you it's okay. If it's not, we'll call someone."

We walked down the stairs. I still couldn't believe we were doing this. Emma seemed worried too. She kept looking over her shoulder and checking her phone. I thought we'd turn around, but she kept walking until we stood before the basement office.

She grabbed the door handle, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

"See? Nothing is going on."

She stopped and looked at the open back room.

"You opened it. It wasn't supposed to be awake yet. Not until..."

A loud electric zap sounded. The whole room turned blue for a second. I put my hand in front of my face. Emma's body lay on the ground, face down. The gray smudge moved across the floor, leaving a slime trail. As it rose and fell, its crackling formed into words, Emma's words. It climbed onto her, and a wet tearing echoed through the room.

I shut the door, ran out of the building, and called the police. They arrived shortly after. I took them to the basement, but I couldn't make myself open the door. One of the police officers had to do it. 

My heart beat against my ribs as he grabbed the handle, but the room inside was spotless. Only a faint smell of burnt meat hung in the air. The back room door was closed, and Emma sat at the table, fiddling with her hair.

"What seems to be the problem, officers?"

My fingers went numb.

"We're sorry, Ma'am. We received a distress call from your employee, but it seems everything's okay."

"We're awfully sorry. Dan has been under a lot of stress. Take the day off, Dan. If there are any costs for your troubles, officers, just invoice the company."

"No problem, Ma'am."

That day I went home feeling like a shell of myself. I couldn't remember driving home, and I didn't even change my clothes before bed. 

The next day I woke up in a haze. I didn't know whether to believe what I'd seen, and I still needed the money. I got back in my car and drove to work.

My heart pounded as I opened the building's door, but everything seemed the same. My breathing eased as I passed the office halls, but then I heard it – Emma.

"Come in, Dan," her voice crackled with static.

My ex and I dated for a little over two years.

The relationship wasn’t horrible, but the breakup definitely was.

She wanted to stay together. I didn’t.

For the first few weeks afterward, she texted me constantly. Sometimes she’d apologize, sometimes she’d get angry, and sometimes she’d act like we hadn’t broken up at all.

Eventually, I blocked her.

A couple weeks later, I got a message from a new number.
It was her.

I blocked that one too.

Then she started emailing me.

That went on for maybe a month before everything suddenly stopped.

I thought she’d finally moved on.

Then one night, I went out with a couple friends to this small bar about twenty minutes from my apartment.

The next morning, I had an email from her.

All it said was, “Hope you had fun last night.”

That bothered me, but we still had mutual friends. I figured somebody had mentioned seeing me.

A few weeks later, I drove out of town to visit my brother.

While I was there, I got another email.

“Tell your brother I said hi.”

That one freaked me out.

My brother lived almost two hours away, and I hadn’t posted anything about visiting him.

I asked everyone I could think of if they’d spoken to her.

Nobody had.

So I started going through everything.

I changed my passwords. I checked Snapchat, Google, Find My, basically anything that could possibly be sharing my location.

Nothing.

I even checked my car because one of my friends convinced me she might have put an AirTag on it.

We didn’t find anything.

Then it stopped again.

For almost two months, I didn’t hear from her.

During that time, I started seeing someone else.

We weren’t officially dating yet. We’d only gone out maybe four or five times.

One Friday night, we went to a restaurant downtown.
We ate, had a couple drinks, and then I drove her home.
The next morning, she called me.

She sounded uncomfortable and asked if I’d given her Instagram to anybody.

I said no.

Then she sent me a screenshot.

Some blank account with no profile picture had messaged her.

There was no text.

Just a picture.

It was us sitting inside the restaurant.

The photo had been taken from outside, across the street.

You could see me through the window, and you could see the girl I was with sitting across from me.

I knew immediately who sent it.

I called my ex.

She denied everything.

She actually got angry at me for accusing her and said I was obsessed with making her look crazy.

So I hung up.

Then I drove back to the restaurant.

Across the street was a small parking lot.

From where the picture had been taken, whoever took it would’ve been sitting almost directly across from our table.

That meant they hadn’t randomly walked by and seen us.
They had parked there.

I filed a police report after that.

There wasn’t enough to prove she’d taken the picture, but at least there was documentation.

I also told basically everyone in my life what was happening.

And strangely enough, once I did that, it stopped.
Completely.

No emails. No messages. Nothing.

It’s been over a year now.

As far as I know, she’s moved on.

I have too.

But there’s one thing I never figured out.

The restaurant wasn’t somewhere I normally went.

The girl I was seeing picked it.

We decided to go there less than an hour before we arrived.

Neither of us posted about it.

So either my ex somehow still had access to my location…
or she had been following me long enough to see where we went.

I honestly don’t know which explanation I prefer…