u/Oblivious_Gentleman

The peace I felt in life was taken away after my husband disappeared a month ago. Since that day, I feel as if all my vitality has been taken away from me, and I am living in an automatic loop, more out of obligation than desire. 

We have a daughter together, Stella, and I have been trying my best to take her attention from the whole ordeal, but all my efforts to help her heal were proven to be vanity since last night, when the unexplainable raised its terrific claw from the depths of disclosed wealds, and mocked the fragile security that I tried to pathetically maintain in this half empty house.

It all started some days before Stella’s birthday: my husband came home sooner than usual, put his jacket over the chair instead of the coat rack, and entered home without taking the shoes, as he often did due to lack of attention. I warned him, and with a “sorry, darling” from behind his embarrassed smile, he left his shoes outside, and put the jacket in the coat rack. We started talking about Stella’s birthday, and we together decided to use the celebration as an opportunity to reconnect with friends we had not seen since we got married, under the pretense of inviting their kids for the party. My husband wished to invite a particular friend who was very close to him in the past, but due to problems he had with addiction, distanced himself, and my husband had not seen him for years. My husband had recently discovered through some other acquaintances that his friend had started a family of his own, and this was his best opportunity to rekindle that friendship.

The day of Stella’s birthday came, and it was a pretty happy day: we ordered pizza from Stella’s favorite place, she got her birthday cake with seven candles attached, and we got time with our past friends as our kids played on the trampoline. Unfortunately, my husband’s old friend could not come to the party, and even though he tried his best to seem fine for Stella’s sake, I could see that he was saddened by that.

The day after Stella’s birthday, my husband woke me up for breakfast, and I saw in his eyes that he was excited for something. At the table, he said that he talked with his old friend on the phone. The friend apologized for not being able to go to Stella's birthday, and to make up for it, he invited my husband to go hiking in the nearby woods with some other acquaintances. 

I knew that my husband and his friend used to hike together when they were younger, so I should not be worried, but in spite of that, I could not shake a sense of unease towards the trip.

In spite of my best efforts, my husband noticed it, and tried reassuring me with hugs and kisses. He called me “darling” as he pleaded, like he always used to do, and behind its stupid puppy eyes, he said everything was going to be alright.

I simply could not say no to him. I wish I had…

 The day of the trip came, and my husband’s friend came to pick him up. Alongside him, there were two other men which were, according to my husband, colleagues that his old friend made when he was at Alcoholics Anonymous. My husband was hungry, and I invited them to come for dinner, but my husband’s friend insisted that they would eat something on the way, and promised my husband that it would be a surprise. And just like that, they were gone.

An entire day passed, and I became worried. I called the people responsible for the national park, and they confirmed that my husband and his colleagues had entered the trail, but had not returned yet. I called the police, and once it became clear he was taking too long to return from the trail along with his friends, a rescue mission started.

Fourteen days of searching were granted, but no one found my husband. The search was cancelled, and nobody was retrieved. I knew, deep down, that my husband must have died there, otherwise he would be home already, and I grieved alone, with no corpse to bury, and no funeral.

During all this process, Stella had plenty of questions about her father, and I never told her what I really thought, I could never… I tried my best to invent something, saying that “father was working overtime”, that “he was sick”, and we “could not see him”. Anything that could prevent her from feeling desperation.

Throughout this process, I felt terrible… I felt like a monster as I lied to my child, but I figured I would tell her what happened when the time came. I knew I was lying to myself as well, as there was no appropriate time to disclose the truth, but the lie kept me going.

One day, in an attempt to make Stella feel better, I took her to a pizzeria that she really liked to go to, which ended up being a mistake, as it was the same place from where we always ordered pizza for her birthdays.

After she ate and played the games in the fliperama, I was certain that she had forgotten about her dad’s disappearance, and in a depraved way, I was happy with it: I preferred that she would forget about my husband, rather than me having to tell her anything. I was a coward all the way.

Once we got to the car, I saw a failing star coming from the sky. I pointed the star to Stella, and she was thrilled, as she could now make a wish of hers come true. She closed her eyes, and asked the star that her father would come home.

I froze, and I felt tears starting forming in my eyes, and falling into my face. I tried my best to maintain composure, but once I got home, I cried alone in the shower, thinking about the fuller disappointment and heartbreak this was causing my daughter.

That last night, as I was sleeping with my daughter in her bedroom (she could not sleep alone anymore due to nightmares), I was woken up by the sound of something stepping onto the bedroom.

I froze, thinking that someone had broken into our home. Then, I felt a foul smell as the thing entered the room, and the sound of mushing dirt as he walked to our bed.

The thing stood closer to the bed, staring at us.

As my eyes were adjusting to the lack of light, I recognized the clothes that the figure was using, they were my husband’s clothes…

My daughter woke up screaming, and the creature ran from the bedroom at the speed of the wind, leaving its putrid smell behind as a witness.

My daughter’s scream suddenly took me out of my paralysis, and I ran into the living room, following the thing as its boots left marks of dirt on the floor. 

The front door was wide open when the creature reached it, and once it got there, it turned back, looking at me with its pair of milky-white eyes, half dead and half asleep. 

I stood in the middle of the living room, heart racing. I started moving slowly, reaching towards the lightswitch, unsure if I really wanted to see what was standing at the door.

As I move, I see my husband’s jacket laying over the chair, and the empty coat rack turned over the floor.

Before I could turn on the lights, though, the thing spoke to me… “darling, I am so hungry. The hunger never stops”. I put my hands over my mouth, trying to suffocate a scream, as I did not want to scare Stella.

My husband moved towards me, blood and dirt mixing together with the carpet’s fabric as he dragged his feet towards me. “Please, wish me gone”, what was left of him said, behind the dead and rotting vocal chords.

As it came closer, I could see small maggots twitching over what was left of his skin, and I saw the torn apart fabric of his clothes glued to his body by the decomposition of his body fat fused to the now dried blood. His aspect was that of a human sized, half burned candle.

Suddenly, he looks behind me, and leaves the house in a frenzy. I look to whatever scared him, and I see Stella, eyes wide open, shivering as she looked at the door. I followed the creature outside, but it had disappeared.

I hugged Stella, and tried my best to comfort her, but I know that, even if she does not understand all the details, part of her still developing mind realized what just happened, maybe even better than I did. It almost feels as if our positions have reversed, and she is the one keeping secrets now, not me.

We called the police again, but the culprit could not be found. The police believe that the stranger must have robbed my husband, which explains his possessions in the room. I do not believe that.

Since that incident, I have looked at the sky every night for hours, searching for a falling star so that I can wish my husband the rest he deserves.

This story happened when I was a young adult, barely wiser than a hatchling.

My country was hit by a terrible recession, which caused many to go homeless, migrating in the thousands to the nearest homeless shelter. I was one of those unfortunate people.

I moved into a shelter on the outskirts of my state’s biggest city, and for some time, I had plenty of space for myself, but it did not take long before new people started flocking to it, until the accommodations were flooded. I started to feel afraid for my things, paranoid with the idea that someone could steal my belongings, and I started looking for a place to hide them. I end up finding a loose tile on the floor close to the kitchen, and after bickering with the barely cemented sides, I found an empty 1X1 space below it, perfect as a hiding spot for my possessions.

After some weeks had passed since the first shock, the government stopped providing sufficient meals for the homeless shelters around the city, and people started panicking, screeching for help and sustenance like one single abandoned brood. 

As eating from the shelter ceased to be an option, I started looking for alternatives in order to survive the shortage. As the recession killed the job market and left it to rot like a carcass in the sun, I was forced to scavenge for food. Searching for nourishment in the trash like a detritivore was humbling to me, but I can at least say I never lowered myself into stealing from others… At least never from another human being.

My strategy worked for a while, before the other homeless also started foraging their own food, and soon the streets were clean of leftovers like a bone who had its meat picked by too many birds. 

I finally realized how bad my hunger was when I noticed I was salivating over a dead raccoon's corpse, and decided something had to be done about it before I became more desperate.

As I struggled to find food in the city center, I soared to the suburbs, and looked for something to eat amidst the neighborhood’s outskirts, amidst the trees and bushes that surrounded them. It was a breath of fresh air to leave the urban area’s nauseating grey, and in the middle of my foraging in the forest, I found a bird’s nest with five eggs inside it.

I smiled with glee, happy that I was able to find something worthwhile in my journey. With the benefit of retrospect, I wish I had left that nest alone.

Right after I finished climbing up the tree to reach the eggs, I pondered how many of them to take, as I did not want to delay the bird’s population growth. I decided to take only two.

With my eggs in hand, I glided back to the city center, whistling a song that was putting the birds around me to shame.

I had a friend in the shelter who knew how to make a campfire, and I could use their help to fry the eggs. Of course, I would have to share my food with them, but I preferred to pay half a meal than to try my luck lighting fire with zero experience. I still wonder sometimes what would have happened if I decided to do it myself, how many lives would have been spared if I was a little bit more selfish, or too hungry to share.

I arrived at the shelter, looking for my friend everywhere. After asking around, people said my friend would not return to the shelter until the afternoon, and my stomach crawled in protest.  Realizing there was nothing I could do to make them come to the shelter faster, I decided to apply the stoic doctrine, and let this problem be, as it would inevitably fix itself. 

Walking around the shelter, I noticed that the number of people living there increased exponentially in the last few weeks, even though the shelter was not providing the resources that one would expect. I thought that it might be related to the sudden increase in violence in the streets, and that people could be moving more to the shelter in order to be safer. I did not realize at the moment that this could make the shelter more dangerous as well.

I got to my hiding spot, and put the eggs there, expecting no one to take it. I then moved to my bed in the shelter, even more tired than before, and decided to simply lay down and sleep. I was sick of everything and everyone, and expected that my dreams could at least drown the feeling of hunger away.

Before I had barely closed my eyes, I heard a scream outside, a crow’s scream. The crowing was then followed by the calling of multiple other crows, sounding like an entire murder around the shelter. Then the nightmare started.

A body was launched into the shelter from the entrance door, hitting the wall on the other side with full force. The corpse was my friend, with its arms and legs mangled and both eyes missing. 

People screamed in horror as their mind started following the situation around them. They tried to flee from the emergency doors, windows and other entrances, but as they made their way towards those doorways, a giant murder of crows started entering the shelter from them. They were engulfed, and it was as if the shelter was being drowned in an all black flood.

I looked around me in shock, as I saw the crows cut through human flesh with supernatural ease, as if we were nothing but clay. I could only scream and run, barely processing what was happening.

I heard a loud noise of all the entrance’s doors slamming shut, as the bird’s crowing drowned the people’s cry for help. I realized that I was running towards my hiding spot with only half a plan in my mind.

Two crows jumped into me as I was running, aiming at my face. As I put my hand in front of their attack to protect myself , they closed their claws in my right forearm and hand, slashing my skiing and muscles with no problem. To this day, I still wonder if I did not simply imagine the destructive capacity of that murder of crows, but I still have the marks in my arm to prove the contrary.

I roared in pain, and started punching the birds with my left hand, trying to make them let go of my arm, but it felt like punching a rock, and I harmed myself more than I harmed the crows.

Before I could do anything else, they pushed me into the floor as I started clawing for anything around me, anything that could save me, or make the pain go away. My pleadings were answered with dismissal, as other crows closed in on me. I felt claws closing in my face, thighs, arms, back, torso, and was positive they would feast upon me whilst I was still alive, even though barely so.

Before more harm could be done to my body, a group of homeless people attempting to flee the crows ended up stumbling upon me and my captors in the ground, shaking the situation enough so I could free me from their claws and keep running.

I ran into the kitchen, opened the tile floor, and jumped onto it without hesitation. I still remember hearing the hellish cacophony above me as the people’s cawing was suffocated by the cruel murder. My mind started working, and before I could even think straight, I already knew I was the one to blame for it. 

I do not know for how long I stayed there, and I do not remember when I passed out from my injuries, but I cannot ever forget the aftermath of the crow’s attack once I left my hiding spot. The rescue team was still picking up bodies when I emerged from below the floor tile, and even with their rescuing efforts, there were still too many bodies around, all mangled and eyeless, with expressions frozen in terror and wide open mouths, like unanimated ventriloquist dolls.

I was the only survivor, and I still wonder if I deserved to live knowing what I caused upon others.

On the positive side, that answer does not concern itself with my own notions of right and wrong: since a couple of weeks ago, I see crows everywhere, following me from a distance, but getting closer and bigger in numbers as days go by. 

They already know the answer, I am just waiting for their decision.

I only met my extended family once I left my parents. 

My parents were isolated from the rest of my family due to their religious differences: my mother converted to christianity once she met my father, whilst the rest of her side of the family follow an idiosyncratic mix of beliefs belonging to distinct ancient pagan religions. This meant my parents were never interested in presenting me to my grandparents.

I can remember the first time I heard news of my grandparents as if it was yesterday: someone was calling our home, and since my parents were going out, I was the only one who could pick it up.

On the other side of the line, I heard the voice of an old woman asking to speak with my mother, and once I said I was her child, she started sobbing, and whatever she was there to talk about was forgotten, as she presented herself as my grandmother. She said her and my grandfather were having problems with the retirement home my parents sent them to, and asked when they could pick up the phone in order to talk with them.

Before I could say anything else, my parents came back home, and once they discovered I was talking to my grandparents, my mother took the phone out of my hands, and started screaming to my grandmother, saying she did not want her in her life again.

I was surprised with my parents' reaction, but even more surprised knowing they were in contact with my maternal grandparents: they never talked about them, to the point I stopped questioning who they were, but that day brought those questions back. I asked for more information, and since they refused to tell me anything, we had a huge discussion that day, in which I exposed to them how I resented them for isolating me from my family. This fight was the last straw for us, and my parents even threatened to throw me away from home.

I decided that day that I did not want to live with my over controlling parents anymore, and since I was a legal adult, I decided to leave home and visit my grandparents at their retirement home, and maybe learn something new about myself, or at least learn what made my parents resent them so much.

I searched for more information on my grandparents around the house, and discovered the address of their nursing home: it was in a big city in the neighboring state, pretty different from the town I lived in for my entire life. I did not thought this was a bad change of scenario, thought, and I did not plan to live in my town anyway: my hometown was a particularly dead and unattractive place, with an old population serving to decorate a scenario full of decrepit building and an unusual amount of abandoned factories that once made the place a thriving, yet ugly, industrial center.

I took my things, and left home when my parents were out for work. I left a note explaining my reasoning, but I did not say I was going to visit my grandparents, as they could use it to find me.

After some days of travel, I finally reached the big city in the neighboring state, and started making my way to the retirement home. This city was a true breath of fresh air: the architecture was old without being dilapidated, with plenty of buildings with a sophisticated Victorian aesthetic, mixed with new and gigantic skyscrapers serving as testament for that city’s importance as an international metropolis. A very different world from my isolated and conservative hometown.

Once I got to the retirement home, I presented myself to the workers, and one clerk guided me towards my grandparents.

The clerk was a pretty friendly woman, and we engaged in a short conversation as we moved towards my grandparents. Unfortunately, I could not get immersed into our dialogue fully, as I realized how terribly managed that nursing home was: I noticed how the other clerks were screaming at the elders they were supposed to take care of, how dirty everything was, and how plenty of the elders there had marks in their body alluding to beating and other types of aggression. The clerk noticed my discomfort, and clearly embarrassed on the behalf of her coworkers, said she was sorry.

We finally got to my grandparents room, a bedroom with strange egyptian idols in the shelfs, and became surprised with how receptive they were: I always imagined them to be difficult people to deal with, since that would explain why my mother left them, but they were actually pretty heartwarming in person.

My grandfather was a skinny, but tall man with a missing right arm and in a wheelchair. He was silent, and often communicating using groans rather than words, but he had a shy smile that showed a far more inviting inner life. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a pretty talkative old lady, often stumbling upon her words as if the topics in her head were fighting for attention, but she was as welcoming as my grandfather.

We started talking, and it was as if they knew me for my entire life, and this was only one more visit after years of not seeing each other. I sincerely never felt as seen by anyone like I felt that day. The clerk excused herself, but my grandfather called her to the side, and whispered something to her ear that made her pale. She looked at my grandparents, and they both said she should take a day off from work, as she seemed tired.

The clerk seemed nervous, and after murmuring something to my parents and saying goodbye to me, she left the building.

I was intrigued by that, but I did not want to embarrass my grandparents with questions during our first day together, so I decided to ignore it for now.

 

As the hours went by and the evening started its slow journey towards the dark night, I started talking with my grandparents about my work, saying that I was glad to have left my job at my hometown, as my boss was a terribly abusive man. My grandmother scoffed at me playfully, and mocked my complaint against my boss. After that, she started telling a story about her and my grandfather when they were younger, a story that still lingers in my mind to this day.

I got interested in what she was about to say, so I left her to ramble the story for how long she wanted.

In the story, my grandmother revealed to me that she was born and raised in the same hometown as I was, and lived there when it stopped being a rural area and became an industrial powerhouse, way before the industry left the settlement as jobs were shipped overseas.

She told me that  my grandfather was one of the workers that maintained it going, one of the thousands of young men that were expected to work for 16 hours a day, 6 days a week.

My grandparents were recently married, and they expected that the factories would increase their economic gains, but they were mistaken: not only my grandfather was receiving little for his cooperation, the factories killed the soil quality, preventing the villagers from engaging with the agriculture that sustained them before industry took over.

The factory owners would pay little for the work, and after they bought most of the town’s services, even the worker’s salary was going back to them. 

My grandfather was working overtime when a terrible accident came upon him: his right arm was crushed by rotating gears, mutilating the limb. He was taken to a healer, and they decided to amputate the arm. Being now disabled, my grandfather was unable to work in the factory again, and the factory owner, fearing the repercussions of his factory being closed for work violations, decided to use his resources in order to create a smear campaign against my grandfather, using my grandparents religious beliefs to put the other workers against them, accusing my grandmother of being the cause as to why so many accidents were happening with other workers as well.

My grandmother took care of my grandfather by using her newfound fame as a witch to open her own fortune telling cabinet. Still, she said people were not as open to mysticism as they are today, and the same clients who would visit her at night would join the angry mobs that would protest outside her house for the deaths and accidents of her loved ones at the factory. 

One day, as the deaths and accidents in the factories became too much to handle for the villagers, they joined themselves into a mob, and attacked my grandparent’s house with fire. My grandmother showed to me the scars left by this incident, saying that she tried her best to defend my grandfather with her own body since he still was debilitated due to a fever that he acquired after the accident in the factory, but said it was ultimately useless, as my grandfather inhaled too much smoke, and his heart stopped beating.

She ran away with him to the forest, praying to many gods that the villagers would not follow them, and when she was certain no one else was around, she started doing everything she could in order to resuscitate my grandfather.

She said he was dead for hours before she could bring him back, and this made my skeptical side doubt the narrative she was telling me. I asked what she did to resuscitate him, and she blushed, getting angry and secretive in a way she never was during our other conversations. When I pressed her more for answers, she limited herself to saying “She applied the wisdom of Isis”. She refused to elaborate further, and stopped telling the story, as if she suddenly realized I was not supposed to know what happened.

My grandmother started pondering alone, and stopped talking about her experiences. I did not press her further, afraid to distance her from me, and we started talking about different things entirely. My grandfather remained silent, and strangely gloomy, as if my grandmother’s tale about their early years and bac experiences in my hometown had affected him deeply.

As the day was coming to an end, my grandfather asked me to take him outside for a while: he was in a wheelchair, and wanted to see the sun set that day. My grandmother, on the other hand, wanted to stay in the bedroom, so it was only him and I.

As we left the room and I could see my grandfather with stronger lights, I noticed his body was full of marks similar to the other elders.

Once we were alone on a balcony, he started talking with me, explaining the rest of the story my grandmother did not tell me.

My grandfather confirmed that he was brought back, but he also refused to tell me the details of the method my grandmother used to resurrect him.

Police were called due to the house fire, and my grandparents were found in the woods. My grandmother knew she had nowhere to go except the village, and due to that fact, she swallowed her pride and publicly converted to catholicism, which seems to have eased the hostility the villagers had towards them. The church helped her rebuild her house, and plenty of villagers would go on to ask for forgiveness for taking part in the fire. She pretended to forgive them, but in secret, she maintained their names and faces so she could, when the opportunity came, get revenge against them.

One day, people around the town got the news that my grandfather’s former boss, the factory owner who ruined their name, was found dead in his home. His body was found contorted, denoting a violent death. His eyes were wide open, and the mark of someone’s hand could be found around his neck, supposedly the hand that suffocated him to death.

His death was only the first of thousands of other similar cases that took the village by surprise: the mysterious strangler claimed thousands of victims, including the lives of my grandmother’s old church congregation.

Once he stopped his story, he looked at me, more serious than ever, and asked me if I understood what was happening in that retirement home. I nodded, realizing the abuse that was taking place.

My grandfather then said that, if I can understand what is going to happen, that I should not be here when the sun finally sets down, and should back away to never come back. 

His commentary sent shivers down my spine, but he quickly turned back to his original calm tone of voice, and we chatted for a little bit before I took him back to his room.

After all that was said and done, I left the retirement home, as my grandfather’s commentary still lingered in my mind. I promised I would do my best to take them out of that place, and maybe contact some relatives in order to get a better place to live.

We gave our goodbyes, and I left my grandparents.

Once I was away from the retirement home, I heard news of what happened: I saw news about a mysterious attack that claimed the lives of all the clerks. They were all found deceased with signs of being strangled to death. The elders , on the other hand, were left alone.

Some of the elders reported seeing the killers: a spectral arm who strangled the clerks to death. Unfortunately for them, the police did not take those reports seriously, and the “strangler ghost” became a short lived urban legend that quickly died out in the city once public interest in the case mellowed.

I am still not certain what happened that night, but I know it was not an ordinary event in any way, and I take the accounts of the elders more seriously than the police did.

I still visit my grandparents often, as they have changed to a better nursing home after the events that took place in their old one. Something inside me knows they were involved in what happened in that retirement home, but not only I have no desire to harm my relationship with my grandparents due to my suppositions, I could not even prove they were responsible in any way, so why bother? 

I have seen how the clerks were treating the elders, and even though I do not approve of killing in any capacity, I will not shed tears for elder beaters and condemn whoever decided to do justice with their own hands.

Due to special circumstances related to this case, I cannot give locations or real names, as that could serve as a clue for my whereabouts, and they could use it to find me.

I am still not sure what caused the events that lead to the disappearance of my friend, as I have no idea if I can even call myself a reliable witness, given the nature of my memories regarding his disappearance. Even with the risk of being called a liar or lunatic, though, I feel like the best I can do for him is to tell what I remember, and maybe you can help me understand why it took him, but decided to leave me alone.

Jake and I have been friends since we were little children. Maybe it was due to the fact that we did not have brothers growing up, but we became inseparable from the moment he and his family moved to our neighborhood. I still remember how much I loved to go into their parents house, as they had a somehow better economical condition than most people in the street, and Jake would invite me to play the latest videogames, or to birthday, where he would sometimes give away old toys that were replaced by his latest gifts, and as his best friend, I usually got the best ones. His family were not snobbish in any capacity, but I would be lying if they did not trigger feelings of envy on the people living around us.

Jake’s grandmother was a very superstitious woman, and in one of those birthdays, she gave him a pendant with a matiasma as an ornament. Jake’s grandmother was Greek, and would walk around with plenty of lucky charms with the matiasma symbol carved into it in order to repel curses. He thanked his grandmother for the gift, and after a while, he became inseparable from that pendant, using it everywhere.

Jake’s life was not perfect, but I could bet it was the happiest time of his life. That time came to an end once we became teenagers: Jake’s parents had to take him outside of town for medical evaluation in the big city, as he was having terrible episodes of headaches, nausea and weakness. He got to the doctors, but they could not figure out what was causing those symptoms.

They came back to town frustrated, but due to heavy traffic, Jake’s father was forced to take an alternative path: he drove towards the Boulevard. 

Our city boulevard is an abandoned road on the settlement’s outskirts: it has been abandoned since the Civil War, and almost nobody likes to travel through it, as the only things giving the lonely driver some company on the Boulevard are the Bare Trees that almost bend over the road, and the 19th century mansions left behind by old landowners who never came back.

Jake’s father, different from his grandmother, was not superstitious at all, and did not believe the ghost stories told about the Boulevard. If he was a little bit more hesitant whilst dealing with things that he does not understand, maybe he would still be around us today.

Jake’s family suffered an accident on the Boulevard that day: the cops suggested that the dark of the night made Jake’s father lose sight of the road, but I doubt that, as Jake’s father was a very good driver, and never involved himself in any accidents. His parents were thrown out of the car, and their bodies ended up impaled on the tree’s upper-branches. Jake was found walking for hours on the road, unharmed. He was crying, and holding his pendant between the fingers of his right hand. 

After the town united in a heartbreaking funeral for Jake’s parents, we left town together, as I wanted to study abroad, and Jake wanted to leave behind any memory of what happened that night. He said goodbye to his grandmother, and we planned to not come back for a long time.

Years passed, and Jake never told me the details of what happened on that day, but I decided to not ask, as I could bet it was traumatic, and did not want to reopen the wounds. He was given no choice, though, as he received a phone call from our town, it was his aunt saying that his grandmother was found deceased that day. Jake was left speechless, but given how close he was with his grandmother as a child, he held himself better than I would expect.

After he recomposed himself, we decided to pay a visit, as his grandmother’s funeral would probably take place soon, and we could not miss it after everything that she did for us.

Before we started preparing for the trip, Jake started looking for his matiasma pendant everywhere, but could not find it. He became agitated, thinking that someone might have stolen it (I had no idea what made him believe that, as we had never had problems with theft in our city), but after it became clear the pendant would not be found, he decided to give up his search.

Once we got back to the town, we stayed in Jake’s aunt's house before the funeral could start. It was clear she was affected by her mother’s passing, but Jake and I realized that no one in town would disclose the cause of death to us, which made us feel uneasy. Jake’s aunt decided to only share it with me, and once she told the details, I realized why.

Jake’s grandmother did not die of natural causes: she was found just like Jake’s parents, impaled by the bare trees in the abandoned Boulevard. I felt sick to my stomach hearing it, and I felt like I had to leave that place with Jake as soon as possible. I wish I had done it, but I decided to keep appearances so Jake could have some closure, even if I had to lie about what happened to his grandmother.

The funeral was less crowded than Jake’s parents' funeral was. Plenty of people had left town since we decided to move away, and it was becoming more ghost-like everyday. Part of me imagined the trees in the Boulevard slowly taking away the city as the people moved, growing the cursed street into a full haunted ghost town. I shivered, but then brushed my own thoughts away, embarrassed for letting old superstition and urban legend get in my head.

We left the cemetery, and decided to stay in Jake’s Aunt for the night. Jake was having trouble sleeping, as he was being affected by a strange illness, similar to the one he had many years ago, right before the accident. I asked what I could do in order to help him, but Jake looked at me as if he was dead already, and said nothing could help him now that he stepped on the hunter’s trap for a second time. Jake’s seriousness took me out of guard, but I decided his gloomy behaviour was a product of grief, even if it manifested in such an eerie way.

It was before dawn when I heard the first sounds coming from outside. Jake was awake, looking at something through the living room’s window where we were sleeping. Jake looked at me with an almost contorted expression of horror. He let out a desperate screech, begging me to find a matiasma anywhere, as the evil eye had got to him.

I was confused with his behaviour, thinking that he might be sleepwalking or losing his mind, but then the window was shattered by the branches of a leafless tree, spreading glass throughout the living room. The branches surrounded Jake, and snatched him out of the living room through the window. I could only hear his screams of desperation getting further and further, and I immediately ran to the door.

Looking outside, I could see the entire neighborhood outside, looking at our broken window. I asked for help at first, but the neighbors simply looked at me with gleaning eyes, women, men, children… All looking at me as if I was simply an actor in a comedic stageplay, smiling as my friend was taken away from me.

right in front of me, I could see a bare tree identical to the ones found in the Boulevard. The people clapped and cheered as the tree held Jake, half impaled by the branches, and crushed as if he was smashed by metal. I tried to scream, but my voice failed, and I could only fall to the ground as despair took me whole.

Jake tried to reach in my direction, but he could barely move his mangled arm towards me. With no ceremony, the tree retrieved underground, whilst Jake’s body left out a sickening squish sound as the branches hugged him tighter, smashing him.

The grass in the front porch grew in an instant, and the earth returned to the hole as if nothing had come from the ground in the first place. I passed away, only to be woken up by one of the neighbors when morning came.

The neighbor tried to be friendly, asking me why I was sleeping on the front porch, but I ran away from him like an animal, and drove my car out of town without a second thought.

I have heard news on Jake’s disappearance, and I know people will suspect me, since I left the settlement right after it, but I do not fear persecution: I know it is only a question of time before they find Jake in the Boulevard, killed by the tree that took his parents so many years ago, and them I will be found innocent of this terrible crime.

For most of my life, I have had a good opinion about my moral character: I decided to be a psychologist because I saw the world getting sicker and sicker, and felt like I should dedicate my life in order to cure those sicknesses that live and contaminate the human soul. The last few years have made me realize, though, how deeply selfish of a creature I actually am, and if Hell exists, I am certain there is a special place reserved for me there.

Before I start my story, I have a few disclaimers to make: this confession is not a plea of atonement, I recognize that what I did (and still do) is wrong, I have just decided that my guilt over my actions is far superseded by the love I feel towards the only person who can actually make this life look meaningful to me.

When I was really young, I met my first wife when her family moved away to the city where I lived with my parents. We studied in the same school, and for most of our lives, we were nothing more than friends, though I have always felt something for her. Those feelings of mine were only reciprocated when we got to college together, and we both decided to study psychology.

Something happened in those moments where she would ask me for help studying for the exams, and like a moonflower, her love for me bloomed in the sleepless nights we shared at my dorm. 

By the end of college, we decided to get married, and I was the happiest man alive, feeling like no one else could ever be as lucky as I was for holding her hand and opening the door to share my entire life with her. This was taken from me without ceremony, and without a chance to say goodbye.

After two years of living together, we both had stable jobs working in the field, but whilst I worked as a family therapist, she worked in rehabilitation of criminals. I never liked how dangerous her job was, but she was a brave (although stubborn) woman, and I would not have married her if she was any other way. 

It was a Tuesday, and we ate breakfast together, as usual. I usually would go to work hours before the sessions started so I could get my office in order, but my wife asked me to stay for a little bit. I said I had to go, and I wish to this day that I had made an exception for her, just once.

She never came back home. One of the officers committed mistakes whilst retaining a violent prisoner, and she attacked my wife for something that was said during the session. They tried to help my wife, but nothing could be done: she was stabbed with a sharpened toothbrush in the stomach multiple times. I hated the prisoner like I have never hated someone in my life, thinking of her as the scourge of Earth for killing someone who was only trying to help her. In retrospect, it would be hypocritical of me to still consider her that.

After my wife's death, I spent years living in what felt like a mental purgatory, as if the world lost its colours. My interest for anything other than my grief completely vanished from my inner life, and bitter nostalgia became the only thing that would make me leave the bedroom in the morning, in a strange way, I became addicted to the pain, as if I recognize that it was the only feeling my wife left me when she parted this world, and I had to cherish it, otherwise I would forget her, and this was worse than death.

The pain never left, but after some time, I learned to still function, and from the outside, people would think I had gotten over her loss. Truth is, I was living like an automaton, letting the people around me guide the difficult decisions, whilst I simply survived by engaging in the habits that did not take me much though. 

Due to my friend’s insistence, I even started dating, but never once I found a woman that could substitute her, I found something else, though, I found my second wife.

She was also married in the past, but she divorced her ex-husband after he cheated on her with one of his students. She was a teacher, and had a young son from her previous relationship. She was very different from my first wife, but maybe that was what made me like her: my mind could open a new space for a new person, instead of comparing her to a person she did not even resemble personality wise.

We got married after seven years of dating, and I took her son and raised him as if he was mine. The grief for my first wife stayed there, but my second wife showed me happiness I forgot whilst in my state of depression years before. I did not love her as much as I loved my first wife, but I still felt very strongly for her, and I was (still am) thankful for the times she gave me. Which is why the decision I took was not an easy one.

One day, my stepson had a sleepover party with his friends at our house, the house where I once lived with my first wife. He and his friends did a lot of the stupid challenges that teenagers like him usually do, and one of those challenges was using an Ouija board in order to communicate with a spirit. They did, and when the spirit talking through the board presented themselves by my first wife's name. My stepson asked some questions to the spirit, but after a while, he felt sick, like one of his friends was controlling the board and making fun of my first wife’s death, and he decided to cut contact with them.

He told what happened, and me and my wife supported his decision, but part of me, the childlike part that is devoid of logic and lives of pure emotion, thought: what if? What if they actually talked to my dead wife? 

I tried to dismiss this notion, but once an idea is planted, it is not easy to take it back, and after some days of being slowly possessed by that idea, I surrendered, and decided to run the experiment.

I waited until I was alone at home, and I attempted to contact my wife with the Ouija board. She answered, and I felt as if I was the same young boy meeting her for the first time at class. We shared the entire night together, and it was in that moment that I realized that I had forgotten what true joy felt.

Still, there was the barrier of two worlds separating us, and this made the conversation bittersweet for both of us. I could not feel her touch, and she could not hear my heart beating faster whilst her head was pressed against my chest.

Still, we continued talking for months, and I will admit, even though I did not do anything physical, I was cheating on my second wife, emotionally speaking. I became cold towards her and my stepson as the ghost of my late wife took their place, or in better terms, regained the place that was once hers anyway.

The separation became unbearable for the both of us, and as I grew distant emotionally towards my wife and stepson, fighting became commonplace in our household, and they wept for the loss of the stepfather and husband that I once was. I did not care, all that I could think of was her, I had part of her back, but the separation still hurted us both.

This would come to an end when, on a starry night just like the ones where we used to study together at college, we devised a plan to eliminate that separation.

As a psychologist specialized in hypnotherapy, I have learned the same lesson over and over again: the human mind is extremely suggestible. Most people pretend to actually understand what that understanding actually reveals about us, but the truth is that just a few actually comprehend and deal with the fact that what constitutes a person is something very fragile, and a feel stimuli placed on strategic points is enough to make someone break, so you can rebuild however you want.

Spirits can possess living things, but only when the thing in question has a weaker will, or is currently in a state where her will is temporarily dormant (like deep sleep). I inverted every single teaching my psychology teacher gave me, and descended from surgeon into butcher.

It started with small commentaries: I started comparing my second wife to her friends, making her feel insecure about our relationship, but never stating anything out loud. Then, I started randomly deciding to be cold or warmer towards her, feeding the insecurity that I made take root. I started lying about things that happened in the past, and made her doubt her own mind. I started doing hypnotic sessions on her whilst she sleeps, making her more and more susceptible to control as time went by, and after a couple of months, I succeeded: my second wife was constantly afraid of going against my will, and she slowly became a shell of the person she was, a shell in which a new spirit could fit.

One night, after we both felt like it was time, my late wife took the body of my second wife. It fitted her like a glove. Sometimes my second wife still manifests in short periods during the day, but the night is always the moment in which she is the weakest, and when I can share the stars with her without fearing interference. 

My stepson left our house when he saw the way I was treating his mother, and I do feel bad for the boy: I was, at the end of the day, his father figure, and to see someone you trusted slowly becoming a monster… That does things to you, and if I could get what I wanted without harming others, I swear I would, but we do not live in a perfect world after all.

I should get going, my wife is calling my name, she wants to see the star with me, like we did when we procrastinated in my college dorm.

I was not a particularly retentive child as I grew up, and this has left plenty of gaps in my long term memory. I have forgotten entire events that were supposed to be milestones: birthdays, the names of school friends, crushes, holidays… I suppose there is no one to blame for it other than me.

I was never the most sociable kid, and this has made my childhood a very uneventful time of my life. I like to think it was due to my at the time undiagnosed social anxiety, but I know, deep down, that it also stems from an all encompassing sense of quiet narcissism and sense of superiority that I cultivated towards the people around me. I felt like I was special, like an ancient Aztec emperor that would not touch the ground in order to avoid its spiritual contamination. I feel quite ashamed of confessing that, but it is true, I felt too unique to mix with other people.

I eventually outgrew that feeling, and also the social anxiety that it produced, but this is not the story I came here to speak about. I came here to speak about one of the only experiences I had in my childhood that lingers in my mind as if it happened to me yesterday.

I was twelfth years old, and my father had just accepted a new position that forced us to move to an entirely new city. The city was located in a different state, far distant from where we originally came from. 

The culture of said state was very different from our hometown, and it did not took longer before I became a target of bullying due to my accent and lack of physical ability. I absolutely hated that place: I was lonely before, but never in my life I suffered what could be called bullying. The other students would steal my things, spread rumors about me, step on my shoes, and sometimes just beat me when they got the chance. Abuse against me spread like wildfire, and when i realized, bullying me became a sort of common habit amongst many different students, so many that i know fail to remember most of their names and faces.

In order to escape it, I learned to hide, and discovered that one of the most comfortable places to hide away in my school was its library, where I first discovered my love for fiction and literature as I flipped through the pages looking for a way to kill time before class would start again. The books became my main source of human connection, and when i realized, I was better connected with fictional people than the real ones.

That came to an end when a group of the kids that used to bother me discovered that i used the library as my favorite hide out, and started to purposefully pass the entire lunch break close to the library's entrance, in order to take away the only thing that would give me a little bit of solace in that entire hell of a school. They got me the first time, and I received the worst beating ever. It was so bad, one of the boys that beat me asked me if I was okay, as to guarantee that they would not go to detention if they found the kid from the west coast unconscious on the ground.

 They took me by the arms towards the bathroom, tossed water in my face, and once they realized I had fainted, dropped me onto the ground and left me there with no ceremony. It took a while before my senses came back to normal, but I could, out of the buzzing sound that permeated my eardrums, distinguish the sound of myself crying for the first time since we had moved out. I felt as if I could not hold it anymore, and it all came crashing down. I was interrupted, though, by a sound that seemed to come from inside my own mind, a weak and trembling voice saying:

“Hello, anyone here?”

I froze, thinking that it could be a side effect of the beating.

“Please, if you can hear me, say something!”

I was unsure how to respond, so I tried to do what the voice asked me to.

“Hello?!” I said, embarrassed of talking alone in the school’s bathroom.

“I cannot believe it… You can actually hear me!”

“Who are you?”

“Me… My name is… Is Henry. Sorry, it has been a long time since I last talked with someone, so I almost forgot my own name” The thing inside my head started laughing, and I could guess from its voice pitch that the voice seemed to belong to a young boy. Something about Henry’s accent also seemed to sound old, like a dead and long forgotten dialect.

“My name is Nicholas… What are you doing inside my head?”

Henry said he had no idea how he came to be there, but it seemed like now I was forced to share my mind with this unexpected guest. At first, Henry’s mannerism and the fact that he was sharing my senses made me uneasy, but with time, I not only got used to it, I started appreciating Henry’s company.

Even though Henry sounded like someone around my age, he confided in me that he never learned how to read, as the place where he came from was one in which said ability was not expected of most people. I decided, with the little bit of cash that my parents would sometimes give me, that I would buy a book and teach Henry to read alongside me.

I bought a copy of “The Three Musketeers”, by Alexandre Dumas (Henry liked the cover). It took some time, but in a couple of months, not only we finished the book together, Henry was finally able to read by himself. We cherished that milestone together, and in that moment I realized that I had made a friend, even if it was a very unusual one.

This was not the end of my experiences with Henry, and the negative aspects of having another “person” inside my head would show themselves not so long after.

I used to be a promising kid academically before I had moved to this town, but something had changed, and my grades declined significantly, to the point that I could very well fail this semester. My parents, strict as they were, were quick to show their disapproval, and they made my homelife as much of a hell as my school was to me: they took away my books, my drawing boards, and applied several different physical punishments in order to motivate me. They failed to do so, and my grades only plummeted as they became more severe.

At the end of the semester, I was one of the worst students, and my parents made everything possible to stretch out the idea that my life was over, because anyone that would hire me in the future would know I failed to pass seventh grade. I took their words very seriously, and cried myself to sleep, thinking about how much I had disappointed them, and cursing the night we decided to leave our home state for this place.

Henry could hear me, and through this all, he did his best to comfort me, or so I thought.

“Nicholas?” Henry asked me as I left a new river of tears flowing.

“Yes, Henry?”

“Have I ever told you how much I actually appreciate you?”

“...Why are you telling me that now, Henry?”

“I am grateful for everything that you ever gave me, and if I could help you in any way, I would do my best to satisfy your need.”

“I understand, Henry. Thank you for being here with me.”

“... I feel like I can help you with your problem.”

I stopped crying, curious about what Henry meant.

“How?”

“You do not like the place you currently live in, correct?”

“... I suppose.”

“I know a place where we can live together, you and I, and you can get away from your school, and your parents, and this town that you do not enjoy.”

“Where?”

“... So, Nicholas. Before I became a voice in your head, I was a boy, just like you. I lost my body and started living in this place once… Well, first I need to know if you could promise to trust me.

Henry was scaring me. Never before I had seen him speak in such a scheming tone. Out of the blue, I felt as if he was not going to tell me the whole truth. Nevertheless, my curiosity got the best of me.

“Sure, I trust you.”

Henry took some time before speaking, them he said:
“Nicholas… I live in a place that… It is similar to where fictional characters exist, you know? It is a different, and non-material place. A place that exists for eternity, and different from your world, things never age, or come to an end. You can always turn the page back, and start the book once more.”

“How… How did you get in there?”

“... Listen, Nicholas. What I am going to say may sound frightening, but I swear I am saying it all as a friend” Henry sighs, “I… I was about your age when I suffered an accident, and after it, I found myself here.”

“... Are you dead?”

Henry laughs, but it does not sound natural as it once did.

“You can say that, you may not be wrong.”

“So… How would I be able to… You know, live alongside you?”

“... How tall is the apartment where you and your parents live?”

I felt shivers down my spine as I guessed what my friend was suggesting.

“Henry, I… I cannot do that.”

“... Why, you do not even like your life that much.”

“I… I do not want to die, Henry.”

“... It is not even going to hurt, Nicholas. It will be just a second and then it is gone, and we can be together.”

I fell silent. Henry’s behaviour was nothing like he used to be before.

“Do you even like me?” Henry says after a moment of intense silence, “I thought we were friends, and now it seems like you want your shit life more than you actually want to come meet me.”

I had never seen Henry act that way before, and it scared me. I decided to go to sleep with phones on, as music seemed to make his voice disappear for a little bit. I could still feel Henry’s presence, even if I could not hear him, though.

That night, my parents woke up with multiple sounds coming from my bedroom, as if something was stumbling as it tried to walk. They left their bedroom, and walked towards my room. They shouted my name, but nobody answered. Finally, they opened the door, only to find me sleepwalking. I was bent over the window, as if I was prepared to jump. My parents stopped me before I could hurt myself, and I woke up from my state crying like a newborn, knowing exactly who was responsible for this.
That incident was only the beginning: through most of my teenage years, I could not sleep without something restraining me, as it was known by my parents and doctors that I would sleepwalk myself into suicide if ever given the chance. What I never told them, though, is that I knew why that was happening, and I could still hear Henry’s voice every time I was not with my headphones on. He stopped attempting to be friendly once that did not work, and would do his best to make my life as miserable as possible so I would make the decision he wanted by myself.

After a while, Henry started disappearing, and by the time I was nineteen, his voice had ceased by the most part. But to this day, when I fall asleep, I can still sometimes hear his mocking laugh reverberate through my half awake mind, and when I am alone in my bedroom, I always make sure to lock the windows and put the key away. I fear he will never truly be gone, only ignored until I cannot do so anymore.

In the United States, approximately 600,000 people disappear every year. About 90% of those cases are solved, and the people are found, either dead or alive, but in the other 10% of those cases, the person is never found. I am here to talk about those cases, and where those victims currently lie.

For a time of my life, I was homeless. I do not wish to enter into details as to how I ended up living in the streets, as it is not important to what I wish to say, but I need to give this context in order to explain why I decided to sleep in an abandoned office building that night. I lived in a very cold city, and I decided that I was at less risk in that building than I was in the open, freezing to death.

I was sleeping with a poorly sewn blanket over my body, when I woke up thinking that someone had whispered my name to me.

I looked around, and there was nothing breathing in that room except for myself, in spite of it, I could not for the life of me get back to sleep, as I felt like something was watching me. I was not in my better state of mind in that period, which made me extremely paranoid, so I decided to look around the building, thinking that someone must be there. I wish I was wrong.

I walked through the building, holding a metal bar in my hands and screaming for nobody to hear. I must have done it for hours, as the city around the building  grew silent as people finished their work and moved to their homes. 

After that useless exercise, I was tired, and ready to go to sleep again. Having the paranoia more or less soothed by my patrol, I moved to the room I left my blanket in, only to find it had disappeared. This left me even more paranoid than before, and I started looking at the entire building again, feeling like I had not been careful enough.

I did not find my blanket anywhere, but right before I was about to give up, I started hearing laughter and slurs being directed at me, coming from places around the building. I imagined they were being done by the people who took my things, maybe a group of teenagers trying to mess around with the homeless man for a change. 

This infuriated me, and I started looking for them. I must have looked for a very long time, as the sun started to rise, breaking away the darkness. 

Finally, I found my blanket in a room at the top of the building, and before looking around for any sort of trap, I reached my hand towards the blanket.

Before I could even reach it, the room was taken up by a cacophony of screaming voices, and I covered my ears in reaction. Around me, I could see multiple humans fused with the walls, as if they were used as material to its firmament. I wished to scream, but the faces and the sounds of those tortured people made me lose my voice.

I tried to run away, but I was too tired after spending the night looking for my blanket. It was at that moment I understood that they purposefully made me do so in order to make my capture easier.
The people fused to the walls separated themselves from the bricks and plaster, sprinting into my direction. I tried to put up a fight, but there were too many… There are too many.

I have never left the building, not truly. I became one of the people in the walls, waiting for the next loner to step up into the building, so that He commands us into life again.

Living inside Him has given us insight into His terrible purpose, as we share His thoughts like one. He is not the only of His kind: they form everywhere, when humanity abandons a place that was created to serve a forgotten purpose. Houses… Churches… Cities… But they never stop craving the company of humans, but descend into more and more depravity in order to acquire their company.

They wait for a solitary human to enter their confinements, and once they feel like the victim has let their guard down, they take them, and never let them go.

I feel for the buildings forced into becoming those monsters, but I cannot stress enough how much more terrible the experience is to the people who were, like me, imprisoned, who disappeared without a trace, forgotten like the places they are now forced to inhabit.

It is for that reason that I warn you: do not visit abandoned places alone. They might want you to stay forever.

When I was my parent’s only child, I really wanted an older sibling. I remember seeing the other kids in school getting to class aboard their older sibling’s cars, and I always felt a bit of envy, wishing that I also had one brother that could do the same. I remember recently seeing a family album with my parents with a letter they helped me write when I was little, asking Santa Claus for an older brother.

Life had other plans, and instead of getting what I asked for, my mother became pregnant with my two sisters when I was about six years old. Even if I was not wishing for sisters in my Christmas letter, I was pretty happy with the possibility of being the older brother who would take them to school, but my parents were uneasy: when my grandma was pregnant with my mother, she was actually supposed to have two daughters, but my aunt died during childbirth. Knowing what had happened, my father prayed day and night that the same would not happen to my sisters.

Months passed, and since my grandmother lost my aunt in a natural birth, my parents opted for a cesarean section in order to deliver my sisters. The day came, and although my parents did not told me about their fear that the delivery could have complications (i was too young, so i do not judge them for that), i remember that i could pick up on signs that something was bothering them, but being the timid child i was, i decided to not ask questions.

I stayed with my grandparents whilst my parents were in the hospital, and I remember how much I hated the old house my grandma used to live in. My mother was always a deeply superstitious person, and said I inherited my grandmother’s talent to detect spirits and evil places. I have been an agnostic since my teens, and do not believe in spirits of any sort, but there was something about that house that could be described as haunting: it was wooden and crocked, and whilst it was located in a suburb near the center of our town, there was a lot of bushes and trees in the back of the house where the bedroom windows faced. I was in the guest’s bedroom watching cartoons on a 2000s CRT TV, when I heard something knocking on the window. 

I thought it was my grandfather tapping on the glass, so I asked him what he wanted. No response, and the knocking started again. I realized it was not my grandfather, got up and started moving towards the curtains in order to see who was making that sound, but something inside me made me stop. I got possessed by a feeling of dread and unease that I never experienced as a child before that day, and I simply could not open the curtains.

The knocking became more incessant, till the thing was slamming the windows so hard, I feared it would break and it would get to me. Then, the thing stopped beating onto the window, and I heard a child’s cry coming from there. For a reason that I still do not understand today, the child’s crying snapped me out of my frozen state, and I ran onto the window and opened its curtains. Nothing was there. I kept this experience a secret, and never told it to anyone to this day.

After a couple of days, my parents finally got out of the hospital, and took me out of my grandparent’s house. I was relieved, until I noticed that my mother was only holding one baby. That made me curious about what happened to my other sister, but what made me really disturbed was the fact that no one, not even my grandparents, seemed to care that only one baby was there.

I was afraid to ask what happened, but once we left my grandparent’s house, i could not hold it anymore, and asked my parents what happened to my sister. They looked at me as if they did not understand what I was talking about, and I became so bothered I started to cry, pleading for an answer. 

Out of the blue, my father started shouting at me to shut up. I had never seen my father explode like that, and I felt extremely guilty, even if I did not knew what I had done wrong. I looked to my mother for help, but all she did was hold on to my newborn sister and look at the empty night streets as tears ran through her face.

Weeks passed, and my parents continued life as if nothing had happened. I tried to pretend as well as they did, even if they never told me why we were acting, but I could never shake up the feeling that something was wrong. My newborn sister seemed to also recognize it, as she was a very clingy and sensitive baby, never once laughing, but crying and screaming at everything. One night, she was particularly upset, and my parents and I could not sleep due to the noises she was making. I heard my parents fighting with each other, and then my father got out of the house. I also heard my mother crying, and wanted to comfort her with hugs as I once did, but I felt as if she had grown cold towards me, and my younger self did not feel safe with her as I once did.

My father comes back to the house after a couple of hours, holding a baby in his arms. That was my second sister, he said.

My mother was mortified, and they locked me into my room as they started screaming at one another again. After some time, though, the fighting stopped, my parents forgave each other, and now I was supposed to pretend my parents came from the hospital with my two sisters, not only one.

They put the second baby onto my sister’s crib, and her crying ceased, replaced by an expression of silent terror that I had never seen a baby do before. I knew that my little sister was not comfortable with sharing her crib, and so did my parents but, shamefully, I have to admit I preferred to see her quiet and scared rather than screaming and crying as she did before.

Years passed, and my two sisters grew to be exact physical copies of each other, but very different people in any other regard. My first sister, the one my parents first took out of the hospital, grew up to be a very quiet and timid child, to a point that would make me look extroverted when I was young. Even though she was a closed book for most people, she seemed to feel at ease with me, which made me close to her in a way that I never was with anyone else. My second sister, the one my father took in later, was identical to my first one in appearance, but something about her eyes and behaviour deeply disturbed me. She was more mischievous and cruel, killing pets that our parents would sometimes buy for us, such as hamsters and cats. My parents tried her best to discipline her, but nothing would work. 

My second sister had… Difficulty integrating with other kids. In the kindergarten, my parents would be constantly called by the professors, as my sister would attack other kids regularly. Once, she bit off a kid’s ear, and my parents had to pay tons in damages for their parents. Even though my sister gave my parents many problems as she grew, they would grow to love her more than me and my other sister, calling her “miracle child”. I feared my little sister even if she had not done anything against me at that point in time, because I could swear looking at her dead fish eyes that no soul was driving that kid's body.

She quickly learned that her violent behaviour could get her in trouble with others, so as she grew, she started learning new ways to hide her cruelty, and only strike when she knew she could get away with it. Me and my other sister look with envy as she was considered by others to be a prodigy at school, a popular and talented girl, whilst knowing that she would go out with “friends” later in the night to harass and beat homeless people, or would leave scars on the special needs kid she once took care of, and blame it on something else.

During that period of my life, I had a recurrent nightmare in which I would wake up in my bed, and I would hear something knocking at my window, similar to the experience I once had in my grandparents house, but due to the streetlights coming from outside, i could see the silhouette of the thing on the other side: a slim and tall figure, with a disproportionately big head and hands with long and skeletal-like fingers. I would refuse to open the window, and to this day I am still unsure if those were dreams or the figure was really at my window.

Everything came to an end when I was 20 years old. My twin sisters were both 15 at the time when my grandparents died. A terrible fire engulfed their house, and they unfortunately did not survive. My grandparents had cut my parents off from their lives at some point of our childhood for reasons that our parents never spoke to us about, so we did not have much of a relationship with them. My mother was still devastated at her parents death, and she decided to go to their funeral alongside my father, leaving me responsible for my sisters.

They still had classes to attend, and as they studied in different places, I decided to drive them there myself. I left my first sister at her school, she kissed my cheek and hugged me, and just like that, I was alone with my other sister.

At this point in time, we both had reached a secret agreement to not speak to each other: it was obvious to her that me and my sister despised her, and we were aware that she was incapable of loving anyone, so we decided from an early age to not engage with one another, thus preventing fights that would get us punished by our parents. She broke that agreement that day and spoke to me.

She started saying horrible things and taunting me: she said she met a girl at her school who accidentally got pregnant by her boyfriend. She started speaking in a profane tone, using the ugliest of words to reference that girl, and delighting on her suffering as a future teenager single mother. I look at her from the rearview mirror surprised at the tone of her voice, sounding less like the teenage girl she was, and more like a witch, or a demon relishing at the torture inflicted into a poor sinner. It was as if she decided to take the mask off at that moment.

I started to feel the same dread I used to feel in the past at my grandparents house, and I could not do anything but continue driving and listen to what she had to say.

She stared at me from the rearview’s reflection, with a sickening grin that reached both her ears, a similar smile to when I first saw her kill a litter of stray cats when she was little.

I did not know what she planned, but I felt as if I could not let her, in good consciousness, go to school that day, and started to go back to our home. Her demeanor changed, and from snarky, she became desperate, then furious, and started threatening me with a thousand different things. She promised to end me, she promised to get me in jail, she said she would take my nails off if i did not let her go to school that day, but I decided to ignore her and keep going home. I then felt a knife against my throat, and my sister ordered me to go to school, or she would cut me right there.

I froze, and told her to think of what she was doing, but she refused to listen. I started driving, thinking of myself as a complete coward for what I was doing. I opted to follow what she said, and later call the police on her, but as if she was reading my mind, she said that, if anything interrupted her in the school, she would make sure my other sister would not live to turn 16.

That threat was enough to dissuade me: even if I called the police and she was caught with the knife, I knew she would not face prison, as no one knew what type of person she actually was. She could very well retaliate against my sister for that. At least that is the justification I created in my mind for why I was such a coward and gave what she wanted with no serious resistance. 

That was the last time I saw my sister, and that was a day my town would never forget for a long time. At school, she killed six students, and dragged their bodies to an empty classroom. There, she also dragged the pregnant student alive, and left multiple marks on her skin using the knife she threatened me with. The police were called once the teachers noticed the disappearance of said students, and the news reported that they were able to shoot my sister before she could take the pregnant student’s life as well. I doubt that they actually saved her at all, and I feel as if my sister got exactly what she wanted.

My family is very well off, so my sister, different from her victims, got a very expensive and luxurious funeral. I could barely hide my disgust, and my other sister agreed with me in secret that we would not miss our sister at all. 

During the funeral, I could not help myself but to stare at my father. He would pretend to not see me, but in the small glimpses in which our eyes met, I could see that he recognized my anger, and that, even if I did not understood what he did that night when he brought my second sister to our house, i blamed him for everything that trespassed due to this action of his. I could only hope he comprehended.

Some days later, the cemetery in which we buried our sister reported that someone had taken her body from the grave. Investigators were called, and they could not find a culprit. After some months searching, the case went cold, and the police seemed to give up looking at all.
The favorite theory of everyone who has looked up this case is that a group composed of those sick people that venerate school shooters, serial killers and all depraved types took my sister’s body as a tribute, but I digress: I know where my sister actually is.

Every single night, when I go to sleep, I hear her knocking on my window, taunting me. She had my grandmother, then my mother, and now she wants me.