u/Formal_Ability6839

It's around 10:02 PM. I'm about twenty minutes from the Pennsylvania border and twice that from the nearest state police station.

I think something is following me.

Or maybe I'm getting closer to it. I'm not sure which possibility is worse.

I work as a field technician for a geological and environmental consulting company. Most days, I'm driving between remote sites, inspecting drainage systems, monitoring unstable slopes, things like that. I've spent enough time around old mines and failing hillsides to know what the ground looks like when something is wrong.

Every night when I come home from work, the mountains seem a little closer.

At first, I thought I'd just been lucky with traffic. My commute was supposed to take an hour, and suddenly it was closer to fifty minutes. Then forty. Then thirty. I should've been happy. That's an extra half hour of my life I'd been getting back for free.

But the drive wasn't getting faster. The road was getting shorter.

The first thing that disappeared was a bend along the river. The road just carried on where it should have curved, and the street that used to branch off to the right was gone. I remember the houses along it and the little birdhouse mailbox at the corner that always leaned toward the road. I'd passed it over a thousand times.

There was no closure sign, no construction equipment, no Department of Highway, no rubble. The road just continued straight through the place where the bend and the side street should have been.

I told myself I was tired. A few days later, my truck overheated on the way home, so I pulled over near the northern water tank our county had installed. While I waited for the engine to cool, I looked toward the mountain behind it.

A pale strip cut across the forest.

It looked like a mudslide. We have had a "destructive" summer in terms of rain, so it wasn't an unfair assumption. The problem was that there were no exposed roots or broken trees. The edges were clean. It was a long, smooth scar curving across the mountainside, with both ends disappearing behind the trees.

I took a picture, mostly because I wanted to see if it looked as strange on my phone as it did in person.

The next morning, I had a job near an old mine site a few miles north of town. A contractor had reported a change in drainage, and I was there to check the monitoring points.

The creek was running in the wrong place.

Its old channel was nearly dry, with a few shallow pools left between the rocks. A new one cut across the floodplain forty yards away. The bank was steep and clean, with no debris to suggest a flood. Trees stood along its edge, all leaning at the same angle, their roots exposed on one side.

I checked the GPS coordinates of the monitoring point. The point was where it was supposed to be. The creek wasn't.

The upstream gauge showed no unusual flow, and there hadn't been enough rain to move that much earth. I photographed the new channel and sent my supervisor a report describing unexplained channel migration and possible ground displacement.

I did, however, leave out the mountain.

Over the next week, I found more changes. A culvert sat crooked in undisturbed soil. A fence line that had once run straight now bent in an arc. At another site, the steel rods we used to monitor slope movement all leaned toward the valley. Their angles increased the farther I walked along the ridge, as if the ground were tipping away from something.

From there, I could see the pale scar clearly behind the water tower. It had widened. Farther along the mountain, two more pale strips crossed the trees.

They curved through the forest at odd angles, disappearing beneath the canopy and reappearing farther along the slope. I couldn't find any obvious pattern to them.

So I took another photograph.

This is Appalachia. Old mines collapse. Water finds new spots. Hillsides settle. The ground has been dug into and blasted apart for generations. Each change had a reasonable explanation on its own. Together, they didn't.

That evening, I compared the picture I'd taken at the water tower with a new one. The scar hadn't just widened. Its center had shifted, and the ridge above it sat lower than before. I checked the county's elevation maps against the water tower and a nearby transmission line. I couldn't make the shapes match.

The headaches started around then: pressure behind my eyes, worse when I looked toward the mountains. I blamed the heat and lack of sleep. I took painkillers and drank more water. Nothing helped.

A few days later, I stopped at a gas station on my way to work. I bought a bottle of water, paid, and left. I still had the receipt in my cup holder when I drove home that evening.

The station was gone.

Not closed. Gone.

There wasn't even a foundation left. Just grass beside the road. Even the utility pole at the entrance had disappeared.

I pulled over and scrambled to pull the receipt out of the cup holder. The name of the station was printed at the top, along with the time and date. I looked across the empty patch of land, then back at the paper.

The next morning, I went back. My phone's map still showed the station, but there was nothing there to photograph except the empty patch of land.

When I looked up, the mountains seemed close enough to touch. The pale scars ran down toward the river, their exposed surfaces smooth and faintly lined. For a moment, I had the horrifying impression that I was looking at skin.

I drove away.

That afternoon, the county sent me to inspect a crack in the pavement near a small bridge. It ran from one shoulder to the other, almost perfectly straight. The ground on either side sat at different elevations.

I crouched beside it. Under the road was a pale, dense material threaded with dark lines. I thought it might be a mineral vein until I noticed the lines weren't branching off. They curved around one another, disappearing beneath the edges of the pavement.

I touched the edge with my measuring rod.

A vibration traveled up the shaft and into my palm.

I pulled the rod away. The vibration stopped.

For a moment, I stayed crouched there, listening. Then it came again, low enough that I felt it in my teeth. The dark lines beneath the road shifted against one another.

The far side of the crack rose. Maybe half an inch. The pavement lifted with it, and a stone rolled into the grass.

I stumbled backward and nearly fell. I waited for the rest of the hillside to collapse.

Nothing else happened.

I photographed the crack and left.

On my way home, I crossed the same bridge. The crack was gone. The pavement was smooth, the grass undisturbed. I stopped on the shoulder and checked my pictures. They showed what I'd seen, but in the last one the ground had risen slightly on one side. Behind it, the mountain was crossed by pale lines that joined into a single, broad curve.

I went home and stayed up comparing the photographs. The changes didn't radiate from one point, as they might after an earthquake or a mine collapse. The curves converged beneath the highest ridge north of town.

I enlarged the map until the details blurred. Whatever I was looking at, it wasn't a pattern I'd seen in any survey. I shut the laptop. I'd been awake too long. That was the only explanation I could live with.

The next evening, my truck overheated again near the water tower. I opened the hood and waited for the engine to cool. Across the river, the forest began to rise.

At first, I thought the trees were bending in the wind. But there was no wind, and they weren't bending. The ground beneath them was lifting.

A ridge pushed up from the valley floor, carrying trees, boulders, and a section of fence. The fence posts stayed upright as the earth rose. The river struck the new slope and split around it, spilling into the low ground on either side.

Then the forest opened.

Beneath the soil was a broad, rounded surface, gray and faintly lined, stretching farther than I could see. It emerged from under the mountain like the back of something buried too close to the surface.

I could make out a wrist.

Beyond it, five enormous fingers shifted under the earth. The ridges of the mountains followed the shapes of the joints. Pale scars ran along the exposed surface and disappeared beneath miles of forest. I couldn't see where the hand ended. I couldn't see what it was attached to.

One finger flexed.

The whole valley moved with it.

The road across the river split into sections. Trees slid sideways with the ground beneath them. A utility pole leaned and vanished behind a fold of rising earth. The sound reached me a moment later, a deep pressure that rattled the truck and came up through the soles of my boots.

Then the movement stopped.

The river kept flowing through its new channel. Dust drifted above the exposed slope. The trees settled, still standing on a hillside that hadn't existed ten minutes earlier.

I got in the truck and drove home.

My commute took eight minutes.

The ridge behind my house was different. A pale curve ran down its face, visible above the rooftops across the valley. I locked the doors and called my supervisor to say I was sick. He told me to take the next day off.

I didn't sleep.

At 10:02 PM, I started writing this.

A few minutes ago, the floor shifted beneath my feet. I went to the kitchen window. The ridge behind my house had risen again, lifting the trees with it. A pale line was opening in the grass outside, running toward the foundation.

I can hear the roots tearing.

The road to town is shorter than it was an hour ago. I can see the water tower from my window, though it should be hidden behind the ridge. I don't think whatever is beneath these mountains knows we're here. I think it's only moving in its sleep.

The pale line has reached the house.

The floor is rising.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

The next afternoon I drove back to the house alone beneath a ceiling of low gray clouds. The trees along the property line bent slightly in the wind, and the gravel under my tires sounded unnaturally loud as I pulled up beside the hedges. In daylight the house looked less uncanny than it had the night before. Less like a trap. Still, something about it felt abandoned in the wrong way, like a building that had been left behind while pretending nothing had changed.

Peter hadn't answered my calls or messages. Around noon he finally sent a single text.

Running late. Check overnight logs if you want. Don't start any environments without me.

The last sentence stayed with me the entire drive there.

The front door was unlocked again. Inside, the air smelled faintly metallic, mixed with the cold sterile scent of electronics running too long in a closed space. The house was quiet except for the low electrical hum hidden somewhere behind the walls. I passed through the sitting room and into the hallway, my footsteps muffled by the deep green carpet.

Halfway to the kitchen I stopped.

One of the hallway lights was on.

That shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did, but Peter kept most of the house dark during the day unless an environment was active. Usually the second floor sat in complete shadow to keep it cooler. Now a warm yellow glow spilled faintly across the landing at the top of the stairs, illuminating part of the hallway ceiling.

I stood there listening for movement. Nothing.

Eventually I continued into the control room.

The monitors were already awake. Camera feeds cycled silently across the walls: empty rooms, hallways, the staircase, the study near the front entrance. Everything looked normal, but after yesterday I no longer trusted what "normal" looked like inside that house.

I sat at the console and pulled up the overnight diagnostics. The logs were still open from where Peter had left them.

03:17 - Bedroom 2 Active
03:17 - Projection Grid Online
03:18 - Environment Loaded
03:18 - User Count: 0

I frowned and scrolled further.

03:19 - Hallway Projection Active
03:19 - Environment Sync Initialized
03:20 - Boundary Warning

Boundary warning.

I clicked the entry. A rough floor map of the house appeared on-screen. Most of the rooms were highlighted blue, indicating inactive grids. Three sections glowed red.

Bedroom 2.

The upstairs hallway.

And another room I didn't recognize.

At first I assumed I was reading the map incorrectly. Then I leaned closer and realized the highlighted room extended beyond the edge of the house itself. According to the floor plan, it occupied space that physically shouldn't have existed.

I stared at it for several seconds, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

Then one of the camera feeds changed.

The upstairs hallway camera appeared on the center monitor. The image was live. Empty corridor. Yellow light glowing faintly from somewhere near the end of the hall.

My stomach tightened.

One of the upstairs doors stood open.

Not the field room.

The last door at the far end of the corridor.

I kept staring at it, trying to remember whether that room had been there yesterday. The more I thought about it, the less certain I became. I knew the second floor only had three bedrooms. I had walked the hallway multiple times.

Now there were four doors.

The monitor flickered suddenly. A figure crossed the hallway camera so quickly I barely registered it before the image distorted into static. The interference lasted less than a second. When the feed stabilized again, the hallway was empty.

I sat very still.

Then I heard footsteps overhead.

Not through the speakers.

Above me.

A slow creak crossed the second floor ceiling, followed by another. Someone, or something, was walking across the upstairs hallway. I looked immediately back to the monitor.

The corridor remained empty.

Another step sounded above me. Closer this time.

A cold pressure tightened slowly in my chest. I switched audio channels on the console until one of the hallway microphones came alive with a layer of soft static. For a few seconds I heard nothing except electrical hiss.

Then a door opened upstairs.

Slowly.

The sound came clearly through the speakers.

On the monitor, the new door at the end of the hallway stood wider open now. The room beyond it was dark at first, but as the camera exposure adjusted, details slowly emerged from the shadows.

Wallpaper.

Yellowed ceiling paint.

A hanging light fixture swaying slightly.

Furniture.

Old furniture. Worn furniture.

Not staged like the rest of the house. Lived in.

I felt myself leaning unconsciously toward the screen.

The room on the monitor didn't belong inside that house.

A shape moved somewhere in the darkness beyond the doorway.

Human.

The figure crossed partially into view for only a moment before disappearing deeper into the room again. It wasn't running or hiding. If anything, it moved casually, the way someone moves through a familiar home late at night.

I grabbed the radio Peter kept beside the console.

"Peter?"

Only static answered.

Upstairs, another floorboard creaked.

Then another.

I looked back at the hallway feed. The camera flickered once. For a single distorted frame, someone was standing directly in front of the lens.

Tall.

Featureless.

Then the image snapped back to normal.

Empty hallway.

My phone buzzed violently in my pocket, making me jump hard enough that I nearly dropped the radio. A text from Peter filled the screen.

DO NOT GO UPSTAIRS

Another message appeared almost immediately.

If you hear movement, stay in the control room.

Then a third message arrived.

This one wasn't from Peter.

In fact, there was no sender listed at all.

The message contained only four words.

HE IS INSIDE NOW.

The storm started just after sunset the following day. 

I remember the exact time because the emergency weather sirens went off across town around 6:14, long before the first thunderheads rolled over the mountains. That alone should’ve unsettled me more than it did. Sirens in our county were only supposed to activate for tornadoes or flooding, but after the Revelation, people started hearing them before storms no radar could properly track.

My father used to call them listening storms, storms where something listened back. 

By seven the entire sky had turned the color of bruised flesh. Thick green-gray clouds churned low enough over the fields that it felt like the town itself had been sealed beneath them. The air smelled metallic again. Not rain exactly. 

Blood. 

I tried distracting myself by cleaning out my father’s room. 

Party because I needed something to do. 

Partly because I was trying very hard not to look out the windows. 

My father’s bedroom still smelled faintly like candle wax and old books. The curtains were open like always. He’d stopped closing them near the end of his life. Said the room “felt crowded” when he couldn’t see outside. 

Most of his belongings were exactly where he’d left them. Reading glasses on the nightstand. Half-finished devotionals stacked beside the bed. Old sermon notes covered in cramped handwriting that became progressively harder to read the closer they got to the end of his life. 

Over and over again, he’d written the same phrase in the margins:

THEY ARRIVE DURING WORSHIP

Sometimes all caps. 

Sometimes scratched so hard into the paper the pen tore through completely. 

Another line appeared several times too:

NOT ALL ANGELS WERE CAST DOWN 

Around 8:30 the power flickered. 

Outside, thunder rolled low across the valley. 

Then came the knocking. 

Not at the front door. 

Beneath the floorboards. 

Three slow knocks somewhere deep underneath the house. 

I froze. 

For a second I genuinely thought it had come from inside my head. 

Then it happened again.

Knock. 

Knock.

Knock.

Directly beneath my father’s bedroom.

The sound was wrong. Muffled. Heavy. Like something enormous striking wood from very far underground. 

The storm outside intensified suddenly, rain hammering against the roof hard enough to shake the windows. 

And somewhere beyond the fields, through the thunder, I heard singing. 

Not humming this time. 

Voices. 

Hundreds of them. 

Low and distant beneath the storm like a congregation reciting something in perfect unison.

I backed slowly away from the bedroom doorway without realizing I was moving. 

Then lightning illuminated the backyard. 

And for half a second, something stood at the tree line. 

Not kneeling anymore. 

Watching the house. 

Part 1

I didn’t go into the woods.

Not after hearing the hymn.

I know that probably sounds cowardly after everything I’ve already told you, but standing out there in the fog listening to something beyond the tree line hum the same melody they’d played over my father’s coffin finally triggered the part of my brain that still understood fear.

I backed away from the kneeling impression without taking my eyes off the woods once.

The humming stopped the moment I reached the porch.

Not faded.

Stopped. 

Like whatever had been making the sound knew exactly where the property line ended. 

The back door was open again when I stepped inside. I remember freezing in the kitchen staring at it while cold morning air drifted softly through the screen door. I knew I’d locked it before going outside. That probably sounds insignificant compared to everything else, but you have to understand something about my father near the end of his life: 

He became obsessed with keeping doors open. Windows too. Especially during storms. 

Most people outside the Revelation Zones probably didn’t understand why older churches stopped ringing bells during thunderstorms. Officially, the government blamed panic. Mass hysteria. Religious fixation.

That wasn’t the real reason.

For the first few years after the Revelation, churches across the country overflowed with people desperate to witness something divine for themselves. Prayer circles formed in public parks. Entire congregations gathered outside during storms hoping to hear what the survivors of Jerusalem claimed they’d heard. 

Then the disappearances started. 

Not during services.

After them.

People walking home alone after evening prayer and never making it back. Families waking up to find their front doors standing open after storms with wet footprints leading through the house. Entire congregations claiming they could hear singing outside their windows at night. 

That’s when churches stopped ringing bells during thunderstorms. 

Too many things started arriving before the congregation did. 

Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night to thunder shaking the house only to find every curtain pulled back and every window unlatched while my father sat at the kitchen table, listening to the rain with this distant expression on his face. 

Like he was listening for something beneath the thunder.

The last real conversation I had with him happened about two weeks before he died. 

There’d been a storm rolling across town all evening. Not normal summer thunder either. The kind where the clouds turn a sickly shade of green and the whole world starts smelling metallic before the first drop of rain falls. 

I found him standing barefoot in the backyard around midnight. 

Just standing there in the field. 

Lightning kept illuminating the tree line in violent, white flashes while rain hammered the grass around him hard enough to bend it sideways. 

I remember screaming at him to come back inside before he got struck. He wouldn’t turn around. He would just say, “They sing loudest during storms.”

Then another flash of lightning lit up the field.

And for half a second…I saw something kneeling out there beside him. 

It was enormous. 

That’s the first thing I remember clearly now.

Even kneeling in the grass beside my father, its shoulders still rose higher than his head. I couldn’t make out details through the rain. Just the outline of long arms folded against the earth in something that almost looked like prayer. 

Then the lightning faded. 

And the field was empty again. 

My father still hadn’t moved.

But for the first time in my life, I realized he wasn’t standing out there alone.

Part 1

I didn’t go into the woods.

Not after hearing the hymn.

I know that probably sounds cowardly after everything I’ve already told you, but standing out there in the fog listening to something beyond the tree line hum the same melody they’d played over my father’s coffin finally triggered the part of my brain that still understood fear.

I backed away from the kneeling impression without taking my eyes off the woods once.

The humming stopped the moment I reached the porch.

Not faded.

Stopped. 

Like whatever had been making the sound knew exactly where the property line ended. 

The back door was open again when I stepped inside. I remember freezing in the kitchen staring at it while cold morning air drifted softly through the screen door. I knew I’d locked it before going outside. That probably sounds insignificant compared to everything else, but you have to understand something about my father near the end of his life: 

He became obsessed with keeping doors open. Windows too. Especially during storms. 

Most people outside the Revelation Zones probably didn’t understand why older churches stopped ringing bells during thunderstorms. Officially, the government blamed panic. Mass hysteria. Religious fixation.

That wasn’t the real reason.

For the first few years after the Revelation, churches across the country overflowed with people desperate to witness something divine for themselves. Prayer circles formed in public parks. Entire congregations gathered outside during storms hoping to hear what the survivors of Jerusalem claimed they’d heard. 

Then the disappearances started. 

Not during services.

After them.

People walking home alone after evening prayer and never making it back. Families waking up to find their front doors standing open after storms with wet footprints leading through the house. Entire congregations claiming they could hear singing outside their windows at night. 

That’s when churches stopped ringing bells during thunderstorms. 

Too many things started arriving before the congregation did. 

Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night to thunder shaking the house only to find every curtain pulled back and every window unlatched while my father sat at the kitchen table, listening to the rain with this distant expression on his face. 

Like he was listening for something beneath the thunder.

The last real conversation I had with him happened about two weeks before he died. 

There’d been a storm rolling across town all evening. Not normal summer thunder either. The kind where the clouds turn a sickly shade of green and the whole world starts smelling metallic before the first drop of rain falls. 

I found him standing barefoot in the backyard around midnight. 

Just standing there in the field. 

Lightning kept illuminating the tree line in violent, white flashes while rain hammered the grass around him hard enough to bend it sideways. 

I remember screaming at him to come back inside before he got struck. He wouldn’t turn around. He would just say, “They sing loudest during storms.”

Then another flash of lightning lit up the field.

And for half a second…I saw something kneeling out there beside him. 

It was enormous. 

That’s the first thing I remember clearly now.

Even kneeling in the grass beside my father, its shoulders still rose higher than his head. I couldn’t make out details through the rain. Just the outline of long arms folded against the earth in something that almost looked like prayer. 

Then the lightning faded. 

And the field was empty again. 

My father still hadn’t moved.

But for the first time in my life, I realized he wasn’t standing out there alone.

The hoofprints began at the tree line and ended directly beneath my bedroom window. 

I noticed them after sunrise yesterday morning, standing on the back porch with a cup of coffee trying not to think about my father’s funeral. 

At first I thought they were deer tracks. We get them all the time out behind the house, especially near the woods after heavy rain. But these were wrong. Too large. Each print was split clean down the middle like a hoofmark, except nearly the size of a dinner plate and pressed so deep into the mud it looked like whatever made them weighed as much as a truck. 

The ground shouldn’t have held tracks that deep. 

It hadn’t rained in almost a week. 

I remember standing there staring at them while the fog rolled low across the field behind the house. Something about the spacing bothered me too. The stride looked uneven, almost human in places, like whatever made the tracks had changed the way it walked halfway across the field. 

They started near the tree line.

And ended directly beneath my window. 

I wish I could say that was the moment I finally started taking my father seriously. 

Truth was, I think part of me subconsciously already had. 

I was raised Methodist in a town where people still locked their doors during thunderstorms because older folks believed lightning was how angels searched for things. Most of us stopped taking that kind of stuff seriously after the Third Revelation.

If you’re too young to remember, or if you live outside the States, that probably sounds insane. But there was a point where people still debated whether what appeared above Jerusalem was actually divine. Before the broadcasts. Before the bleeding statues. Before the Vatican went dark for three months and the broadcasts finally resumed with half the cardinals having gouged out their own eyes. Before entire congregations started speaking in languages nobody on earth could translate. 

That was thirty years ago. 

People don’t argue anymore. 

Now churches have government occupancy limits and most larger congregations require federal observation during Easter services. Pilgrimage routes get monitored by the National Guard. Entire counties in the Midwest are still considered uninhabitable after the Kansas Ascensions. There are towns in Louisiana where they ring iron bells at dusk because whatever moves through the swamps after dark is drawn to prayer. 

Faith became measurable after the Revelation. 

That was humanity’s first mistake. 

The second was believing we understood what answered us. 

I stopped believing any of it mattered after my father died. 

He spent twenty-three years as a deacon before the Choir took his hearing. That’s what people call it when someone hears one of Them directly and survives. Sometimes it blinds you. Sometimes it liquefies your nervous system. Most of the time it just leaves you…different. 

Quieter. 

Near the end of his life, my father stopped speaking in complete sentences. He’d sit awake at the kitchen table after midnight with all the lights off mumbling things under his breath while staring toward the fields behind our house. 

Sometimes I’d wake up around two or three in the morning and find the back door standing open.

Just open. 

Cold air moving through the kitchen while my father sat perfectly still in the dark listening to something outside. 

Three days before he died, he grabbed my wrist hard enough to bruise it and whispered:

“They’re underneath.”

I remember asking him who was underneath. 

He started crying before he could answer. 

Yesterday afternoon, after finding the tracks, I followed them back toward the woods. 

About halfway across the field, I found where something had been kneeling in the grass.

Something had crushed the grass flat in a wide circular depression roughly ten feet across. Mud and dead weeds pressed deep into the earth like something impossibly heavy had rested there for hours. 

At first I thought it might’ve been a sinkhole. 

Then I saw the marks in the dirt. 

Handprints.

At least I think they were handprints. 

The fingers were too long. Too many joints pressed into the mud at strange angles, narrow enough in places that they looked more like roots than bones.

All of them pointed toward the house. 

Toward my father’s bedroom window. 

Something about that disturbed me more than the tracks themselves.

Not because it looked violent.

Because it looked reverent. 

Like whatever had stood out there in the field hadn’t been trying to get inside. 

It had been waiting. 

The grass around the depression smelled faintly metallic, like air before a thunderstorm.

The wind moved softly through the grass behind me. 

And for a second, I could’ve sworn I heard humming coming from somewhere out near the tree line. 

Low. 

Almost melodic. 

Like the tail end of a church hymn carried through fog. 

I stood there listening for almost a full minute before I realized I recognized the melody.

It was the hymn they played at my father’s funeral. 

—-----

The hoofprints began at the tree line and ended directly beneath my bedroom window. 

I noticed them after sunrise yesterday morning, standing on the back porch with a cup of coffee trying not to think about my father’s funeral. 

At first I thought they were deer tracks. We get them all the time out behind the house, especially near the woods after heavy rain. But these were wrong. Too large. Each print was split clean down the middle like a hoofmark, except nearly the size of a dinner plate and pressed so deep into the mud it looked like whatever made them weighed as much as a truck. 

The ground shouldn’t have held tracks that deep. 

It hadn’t rained in almost a week. 

I remember standing there staring at them while the fog rolled low across the field behind the house. Something about the spacing bothered me too. The stride looked uneven, almost human in places, like whatever made the tracks had changed the way it walked halfway across the field. 

They started near the tree line.

And ended directly beneath my window. 

I wish I could say that was the moment I finally started taking my father seriously. 

Truth was, I think part of me subconsciously already had. 

I was raised Methodist in a town where people still locked their doors during thunderstorms because older folks believed lightning was how angels searched for things. Most of us stopped taking that kind of stuff seriously after the Third Revelation.

If you’re too young to remember, or if you live outside the States, that probably sounds insane. But there was a point where people still debated whether what appeared above Jerusalem was actually divine. Before the broadcasts. Before the bleeding statues. Before the Vatican went dark for three months and the broadcasts finally resumed with half the cardinals having gouged out their own eyes. Before entire congregations started speaking in languages nobody on earth could translate. 

That was thirty years ago. 

People don’t argue anymore. 

Now churches have government occupancy limits and most larger congregations require federal observation during Easter services. Pilgrimage routes get monitored by the National Guard. Entire counties in the Midwest are still considered uninhabitable after the Kansas Ascensions. There are towns in Louisiana where they ring iron bells at dusk because whatever moves through the swamps after dark is drawn to prayer. 

Faith became measurable after the Revelation. 

That was humanity’s first mistake. 

The second was believing we understood what answered us. 

I stopped believing any of it mattered after my father died. 

He spent twenty-three years as a deacon before the Choir took his hearing. That’s what people call it when someone hears one of Them directly and survives. Sometimes it blinds you. Sometimes it liquefies your nervous system. Most of the time it just leaves you…different. 

Quieter. 

Near the end of his life, my father stopped speaking in complete sentences. He’d sit awake at the kitchen table after midnight with all the lights off mumbling things under his breath while staring toward the fields behind our house. 

Sometimes I’d wake up around two or three in the morning and find the back door standing open.

Just open. 

Cold air moving through the kitchen while my father sat perfectly still in the dark listening to something outside. 

Three days before he died, he grabbed my wrist hard enough to bruise it and whispered:

“They’re underneath.”

I remember asking him who was underneath. 

He started crying before he could answer. 

Yesterday afternoon, after finding the tracks, I followed them back toward the woods. 

About halfway across the field, I found where something had been kneeling in the grass.

Something had crushed the grass flat in a wide circular depression roughly ten feet across. Mud and dead weeds pressed deep into the earth like something impossibly heavy had rested there for hours. 

At first I thought it might’ve been a sinkhole. 

Then I saw the marks in the dirt. 

Handprints.

At least I think they were handprints. 

The fingers were too long. Too many joints pressed into the mud at strange angles, narrow enough in places that they looked more like roots than bones.

All of them pointed toward the house. 

Toward my father’s bedroom window. 

Something about that disturbed me more than the tracks themselves.

Not because it looked violent.

Because it looked reverent. 

Like whatever had stood out there in the field hadn’t been trying to get inside. 

It had been waiting. 

The grass around the depression smelled faintly metallic, like air before a thunderstorm.

The wind moved softly through the grass behind me. 

And for a second, I could’ve sworn I heard humming coming from somewhere out near the tree line. 

Low. 

Almost melodic. 

Like the tail end of a church hymn carried through fog. 

I stood there listening for almost a full minute before I realized I recognized the melody.

It was the hymn they played at my father’s funeral. 

—-----

I’ve removed some names. I don’t know who might still be looking.

I sat in front of a lattice of photos and case logs spread across my apartment floor. They overlapped, pinned together with string, corners curling from being handled too many times.

Some of them I don’t even remember printing. 

I set my mug down carefully, like it might tip something over that couldn’t be put back, and pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose. 

I had burned through thousands of dollars in Department resources on this. 

No sleep. No real leads. Just patterns that almost made sense. 

I told myself I wasn’t losing it. 

I stopped saying that out loud a few days ago. 

Suspects: Barry, Ginny, and Alexandra. Last name redacted. 

Three siblings. Two sisters, one brother. No school records. No hospital records. No neighbors who could say more than “they kept to themselves.” They’d grown up in a rotting trailer with parents no one seemed particularly surprised were gone. 

The trailer park burned down during a thunderstorm two months ago. 

Electrical fire, they said. Lightning strike.

Bad luck.

But no one could tell me why the fire moved the way it did, why it seemed to skip structures and then double back. 

Why it burned hot enough to warp metal in some places and barely singe woods in others. 

We picked the three of them up in an abandoned greenhouse the next county over. 

I can still smell it. 

Wet soil. Rot. Iron. 

They hadn’t run. 

Barry was the one who saw us first. He just…looked up. Calm. Like he’d been expecting it. 

Ginny didn’t react at all.

Alexandra was asleep in the corner. 

The bodies were behind them. 

Not hidden. Not buried.

Arranged.

At first, I thought it was a pile (God knows I’ve seen enough of those), but then one of the techs swore and told me to get up on the walkway. 

Forensics brought in a drone because the greenhouse was too large to see it all at once. 

From above, it made sense. 

It wasn’t a pile. It was a shape. A curve of bodies. A second arc. Negative space carved out with almost surgical precision.

An eye. 

They’d been feeding the remains to pigs kept outside the greenhouse.

That part was efficient. Clean. And in a way, that made it worse. 

Barry and Ginny had been dissecting animals since they were kids, neighbors told me that much. Stray dogs. Raccoons. Anything they could catch.

Practice, I was guessing. 

Alexandra…she was different. 

Every time I spoke to her, she looked at Barry before answering. Not for permission…more like she was waiting to be told what reality was. 

In less than two months, they’d killed almost a hundred people. 

No clear victim profile. No consistent location. No financial motive. No ideology I could pin down. 

Just…accumulation.

One of the bodies in the greenhouse still had dirt packed under its fingernails.

Like they’d tried to climb out. 

When I asked Barry why, he smiled like I’d finally caught up to him.

“For something bigger,” he said. He didn’t blink when he said it. Just smiled. Like he was waiting for me to understand.

The rain started sometime after midnight. 

I didn’t notice at first. My apartment always had some kind of noise. Pipes, neighbors, the hum of the city bleeding through the walls.

But eventually it settled into something steady.

Pat…pat…pat…

I got up and went to the bookshelf.

Last summer, the Bureau had a course on occult symbolism. Ninety percent of it was nonsense. The other ten percent was worse, because it wasn’t. 

I’d bought a mythology reference after. Never thought I’d actually use it. 

I flipped through the glossary, fingers catching on thin pages. 

Eye.

Too broad.

Protection. Surveillance. Divinity.

Nothing useful.

I kept going.

Mesopotamia.

My fingers paused. I don’t know why. Then -

Dagon. 

I stared at the page longer than I meant to. Agriculture. Fertility. Sea. Offerings. 

None of it fit. 

I almost closed the book.

But the illustrations -

Not an exact match. Not even close. 

Wrong proportions. Wrong shape.

And still…my stomach turned.

Pat…pat…pat…

I went back to my interview logs. Dug through transcripts until I found Barry’s last session.

There were things I’d skimmed over before. Words that didn’t mean anything at the time. 

“Watching.”

“Growing.”

“Opening.”

And once…just once…

“Not done.”

The phone had been ringing.

I didn’t remember when it had started. I picked it up. “Detective [redacted],” I croaked. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. 

How long had it been since I’d talked to anyone? 

“Sir,” the officer on the other line was out of breath. “Look, I don’t know how to say this,” he sighed. “Jesus, I’m sorry.”

My chest tightened. “Say what?”

“The youngest girl, Alexandra, she’s gone. Slipped her cuffs during transport. We…we don’t know how. She just—“

I hung up. Grabbed my gun. My badge. The nearest set of keys. 

That’s when I heard it again. 

Pat…pat…pat…

I turned toward the window. The rain had stopped, I was sure of it. 

No streaks on the glass. No shimmer from streetlights. No sound from the gutters outside. 

Just that noise. 

Steady.

Deliberate.

Pat…pat…pat…

It wasn’t random. It was too even. 

Three taps. Pause. Three taps. Pause. 

Then four. 

Then three again.

My throat went dry. I stepped closer. Slow. Careful. Like I was approaching a crime scene. 

Three taps. Pause. Three taps. 

I reached the window and stopped, because I realized something I should have noticed sooner. 

It wasn’t coming from the glass. It was coming from just beyond it. Measured. Placed. Like someone, or something, was tracing a pattern I already knew. 

Three points. A curve. Another curve. 

An eye.

Pat…pat…pat…

I didn’t open the window. I don’t plan to. But it’s still there, still tapping. Still building it, piece by piece. And I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not trying to get in. 

I tried to step back.

I don’t think I did.

It’s waiting for me to understand what it wants me to see. 

The same way Barry did.

Because once I do…I don’t think it’ll need the window anymore. 

April 5

I don’t really know why I’m posting this here.

Maybe because I haven’t slept properly and writing things down still feels more sane than saying them out loud. Maybe because I tried calling my therapist yesterday and spent ten minutes listening to ocean sounds before I realized the line had actually connected. 

I don’t know anymore.

I’ve been driving west since the beginning of April. Originally the plan was Colorado, maybe Oregon after that? Somewhere far enough from Virginia that I could stop thinking about my ex every time I walked into a grocery store or passed our favorite restaurant. 

That was the idea, anyway. 

I still catch myself reaching for my phone before remembering there's nobody left to call.

Now I’m somewhere in Nebraska writing this from a motel that smells vaguely damp even though it hasn’t rained in three days. I should probably explain something first. 

Over the last few days, I’ve started noticing a pattern. And not just with me. With people. Families. Truckers. Older couples towing campers. Guys my age driving alone with half their lives crammed into the backseat. People I meet at gas stations and roadside diners. Everyone heading west has the same look to them. I started noticing it in truck stops first. Then in diner windows. Then in the mirror while I shaved at four in the morning.

You talk to enough people and eventually they all say some version of the same thing: 

“Just felt like it was time to leave.”

Or: 

“Didn’t seem like much keeping me there anymore.”

Or: 

“West sounded better.”

Nobody says exactly where they’re going. And weirdly, nobody seems to care. That’s the part starting to bother me most. 

I met a guy outside a Sunoco off Highway 30 around two in the morning two nights ago. Trucker. Fit for an older man. Large gray beard. Slight beer gut. Looked like he hadn’t slept in days. 

We talked while I filled up my tank. At some point he glanced at my Virginia plates and asked, “First time heading west?” 

I laughed and told him I’d driven cross-country plenty of times before, getting shipped to different duty stations for the past decade. He nodded slowly like I’d misunderstood the question. 

Then he asked, “You been dreaming yet?”

I remember joking back: “What, like about being in my underwear in class?”

He didn’t smile. Just looked past me toward the highway. “You’ll start hearing the water soon,” he said. Then he got back in his truck and left. I stood there for a solid minute before the gas pump clicked, trying to figure out what the hell that meant. 

That same night, I woke up around dawn because my motel room suddenly felt humid. 

Not hot. Wet. Like the air outside the room had somehow thickened while I slept. And for a few seconds, lying there in the dark, I could’ve sworn I heard waves outside. 

Not rain. Not traffic. Waves. In Nebraska. But ever since then, I keep noticing things that shouldn’t be here. Sea birds circling above truck stops. Road signs coated in salt stains.

And the farther west I drive, the more normal it all starts feeling. 

Last night was the first time I had the dream the trucker was talking about. I was standing on a shoreline at night. Black sand. Fog so thick I could barely see more than a few feet in front of me. Somewhere out beyond the water, I could hear something massive moving underneath the surface. 

Not splashing. Shifting. 

The sound reminded me of those old oil tankers groaning against the ocean at port, except deeper. Slower. Like whatever was out there was unbelievably large.

I remember seeing lights through the fog. Hundreds of them stretched along the shoreline.

People. Just standing there in complete silence facing the water. I couldn’t see their faces, but I knew they had all traveled there. That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about. I knew they were just like me. 

Then, somewhere out in the dark beyond the surf, something opened its eyes.

I woke up choking. The motel room smelled like saltwater. 

And my pillow was damp. 

I sat in front of a lattice of photos and case logs spread across my apartment floor. They overlapped, pinned together with string, corners curling from being handled too many times.

Some of them I don’t even remember printing. 

I set my mug down carefully, like it might tip something over that couldn’t be put back, and pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose. 

I had burned through thousands of dollars in Department resources on this. 

No sleep. No real leads. Just patterns that almost made sense. 

I told myself I wasn’t losing it. 

I stopped saying that out loud a few days ago. 

Suspects: Barry, Ginny, and Alexandra Stewart. 

Three siblings. Two sisters, one brother. No school records. No hospital records. No neighbors who could say more than “they kept to themselves.” They’d grown up in a rotting trailer with parents no one seemed particularly surprised were gone. 

The trailer park burned down during a thunderstorm two months ago. 

Electrical fire, they said. Lightning strike.

Bad luck.

But no one could tell me why the fire moved the way it did, why it seemed to skip structures and then double back. 

Why it burned hot enough to warp metal in some places and barely singe woods in others. 

We picked the three of them up in an abandoned greenhouse the next county over. 

I can still smell it. 

Wet soil. Rot. Iron. 

They hadn’t run. 

Barry was the one who saw us first. He just…looked up. Calm. Like he’d been expecting it. 

Ginny didn’t react at all.

Alexandra was asleep in the corner. 

The bodies were behind them. 

Not hidden. Not buried.

Arranged.

At first, I thought it was a pile (God knows I’ve seen enough of those), but then one of the techs swore and told me to get up on the walkway. 

Forensics brought in a drone because the greenhouse was too large to see it all at once. 

From above, it made sense. 

It wasn’t a pile. It was a shape. A curve of bodies. A second arc. Negative space carved out with almost surgical precision.

An eye. 

They’d been feeding the remains to pigs kept outside the greenhouse.

That part was efficient. Clean. And in a way, that made it worse. 

Barry and Ginny had been dissecting animals since they were kids, neighbors told me that much. Stray dogs. Raccoons. Anything they could catch.

Practice, I was guessing. 

Alexandra…she was different. 

Every time I spoke to her, she looked at Barry before answering. Not for permission…more like she was waiting to be told what reality was. 

In less than two months, they’d killed almost a hundred people. 

No clear victim profile. No consistent location. No financial motive. No ideology I could pin down. 

Just…accumulation.

One of the bodies in the greenhouse still had dirt packed under its fingernails.

Like they’d tried to climb out. 

When I asked Barry why, he smiled like I’d finally caught up to him.

“For something bigger,” he said. He didn’t blink when he said it. Just smiled. Like he was waiting for me to understand.

The rain started sometime after midnight. 

I didn’t notice at first. My apartment always had some kind of noise. Pipes, neighbors, the hum of the city bleeding through the walls.

But eventually it settled into something steady.

Pat…pat…pat…

I got up and went to the bookshelf.

Last summer, the Bureau had a course on occult symbolism. Ninety percent of it was nonsense. The other ten percent was worse, because it wasn’t. 

I’d bought a mythology reference after. Never thought I’d actually use it. 

I flipped through the glossary, fingers catching on thin pages. 

Eye.

Too broad.

Protection. Surveillance. Divinity.

Nothing useful.

I kept going.

Mesopotamia.

My fingers paused. I don’t know why. Then —

Dagon. 

I stared at the page longer than I meant to. Agriculture. Fertility. Sea. Offerings. 

None of it fit. 

I almost closed the book.

But the illustrations — 

Not an exact match. Not even close. 

Wrong proportions. Wrong shape.

And still…my stomach turned.

Pat…pat…pat…

I went back to my interview logs. Dug through transcripts until I found Barry’s last session.

There were things I’d skimmed over before. Words that didn’t mean anything at the time. 

“Watching.”

“Growing.”

“Opening.”

And once…just once…

“Not done.”

The phone had been ringing.

I didn’t remember when it had started. I picked it up. “Detective Jameson,” I croaked. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. 

How long had it been since I’d talked to anyone? 

“Sir, it’s Martinez.” He was breathing too fast. “Look, I don’t know how to say this,” he sighed. “Jesus, I’m sorry.”

My chest tightened. “Say what?”

“The youngest Stewart girl, Alexandra, she’s gone. Slipped her cuffs during transport. We…we don’t know how. She just—“

I hung up. Grabbed my gun. My badge. The nearest set of keys. 

That’s when I heard it again. 

Pat…pat…pat…

I turned toward the window. The rain had stopped, I was sure of it. 

No streaks on the glass. No shimmer from streetlights. No sound from the gutters outside. 

Just that noise. 

Steady.

Deliberate.

Pat…pat…pat…

It wasn’t random. It was too even. 

Three taps. Pause. Three taps. Pause. 

Then four. 

Then three again.

My throat went dry. I stepped closer. Slow. Careful. Like I was approaching a crime scene. 

Three taps. Pause. Three taps. 

I reached the window and stopped, because I realized something I should have noticed sooner. 

It wasn’t coming from the glass. It was coming from just beyond it. Measured. Placed. Like someone, or something, was tracing a pattern I already knew. 

Three points. A curve. Another curve. 

An eye.

Pat…pat…pat…

I didn’t open the window. I don’t plan to. But it’s still there, still tapping. Still building it, piece by piece. And I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not trying to get in. 

I tried to step back.

I don’t think I did.

It’s waiting for me to understand what it wants me to see. 

The same way Barry did.

Because once I do…I don’t think it’ll need the window anymore.