u/lets-split-up

(CW: child abuse)

Previously, I was given a single rule about entering the house:

Five minutes.

That’s how long I can stay before I am officially dead.

Never be alone more than five minutes in the house, our team’s leader, the paranormal researcher Dr. Goddard, warned us. Always stick together as a group, and watch one another for signs of paranormal influence.

I am Dawain, a journalist, and it is my duty to report the truth objectively, without the taint of superstition or mystical or magical beliefs. The truth is that a family in the town of Hopkins went missing, and the authorities found no trace of them, despite the car still in the driveway and the shoes still on the mat and the keys inside. The house, now called the “Hopkins House,” has sat empty for years…

No one has been able to explain their disappearance…

… until now.

Our cameraman, while trying to get signal on his phone, wandered around to the side of the house and noticed a glint in the bushes, low to the ground. A basement window.

A hidden basement.

Six years ago authorities assumed, because of the lack of forced entry or signs of disturbance, that the family left on their own—and after a cursory search, the local sheriffs left the house. They never found the basement. Meaning if our suspicions are correct, we may soon solve the mystery of the Hopkins House and find the bodies—father, stepmother, and two young teens—who have been missing all this time. But with no entrance, the only option is for someone to climb through the window…

… into the house alone.

Our specialized team has deferred this task to me. The exorcist, Father Corwin, is nearly eighty and frail. The acclaimed medium, Madam Savino, is too plump for the narrow opening. And as for the paranormal investigator, Coyote—he’s as wiry, wily, and cowardly as his namesake.

Now, the three of them stand watching—the spiritual “experts” who are supposedly here to pacify the evil in this house, plus the frightened cameraman.

“Wish me luck,” I say.

“Remember, five minutes,” warns Father Corwin.

“You got this,” says Madam Savino.

“Don’t die,” growls Coyote.

I drop down into the darkness below.

***

The first thing I notice is the smell: the air tastes dank. Stale. Is it my imagination, or do I catch a whiff of rot?

Above me, anxious faces huddle at the window. I turn on my phone light, illuminating cupboards and shelves, a toolbox, shovels, crowbar, cardboard boxes, and a door in the corner, ajar. “It’s a storeroom,” I say, “looks pretty ordinary. Gonna go further in…”

I open the door to the next room.

It’s one thing to be standing in the bright sunshine, looking in through that square of basement window and telling myself, It’s only a basement.

… Another thing entirely to stand in the maw of yawning darkness. And while I know, rationally, that there is nothing in this long-abandoned basement that can harm me… I am suddenly keenly aware of how long it would take me to climb back up through the window if I were trying to run—

Stop it, I tell my childish imagination. There’s nothing to run from.

My fingers grope along the wall and find a switch, flip it.

An overhead bulb bathes me in a warm glow—and I’m nauseated by the momentary dread that I’ll see four bodies deep into decomposition, but to my relief the basement appears normal. Wooden stairs in the corner of the now well-lit basement travel up to a hatch door—probably under the main room or hallway. Along the opposite wall lies a small cot and a nightstand, a mosaic lamp, a dresser and a heavy bookcase.

My nose wrinkles at a musty odor as I approach the cot. Tucked under the pillow is a diary. PROPERTY OF JUDY, it says on the inside cover, and in smaller scribble: if you read this without permission you will be hexed!!! Flipping the pages reveals scrawls of DIE, BITCH!!! in jagged lettering. On another page, a polaroid taped to the paper shows a middle-aged woman, her eyes scratched out and arcane symbols sketched around her.

I’m guessing this is the “troubling behavior” Father Corwin mentioned. The teens’ stepmother, Bernadette, came to him with complaints that they were trying to summon demons against her. He was not especially concerned at the time—after all, what teen girl hasn’t tried to hex her stepmother or chemistry teacher or classmate dating the boy she likes?

But while I don’t believe any of the “spells” in this diary actually worked, its contents might contain clues to whatever actually happened on the fateful day the family went missing.

I tuck the diary under my arm and start for the stairs, but my steps slow at the sudden and overwhelming sensation of being watched. All the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“H-hello?” I whisper.

BBBBZzt—

—the overhead bulb flickers.

In the failing light, I see something impossible. Impossible because it has been six years since the family disappeared, and there’s no way a human being could survive down here all that time. But scurrying out from under the cot is a girl—filthy, mouth open in a silent scream, her disheveled wet hair hanging around her shoulders and a tattered dress dripping around her bare legs—

Darkness falls like a curtain.

I fumble my phone’s flashlight to try and catch her in its beam and—she’s there—there on the far wall! Crawling like an insect behind the bookcase as a hand grabs my shoulder—

Yelping, I whirl.

“Hey, hey!” barks Coyote, phone blinding me in one hand—and a crowbar clenched in the other. “You OK?”

“I—I saw someone!”

“It’s been five minutes and you weren’t answering my calls. Now let’s get the fuck out.” He grabs my arm and spins me toward the stairs, and we both make a mad dash. He bangs the crowbar against the ceiling. “HEY!!” he hollers.

“HEY! HEY!!” I bang my palms on the hatch door.

“Here!” Madam Savino’s muffled holler rings down. “They’re here!”

Footsteps clomp over our heads. A moment later the door lifts upward, and Coyote and I tumble out into the light.

***

We stand clustered around the hatch door. Father Corwin, Madam Savino, Coyote, the cameraman and I. It was hidden underneath the shag rug in the main room. Easily discoverable if one were to lift up the rug. But nobody had been searching because, other than the missing family, nobody knew about the basement.

Now that I’m up in the house proper, I catch my breath. Everyone is barking at me, demanding to know why I wasn’t answering their shouts. I show them the diary and babble, “I-I think Judy might be alive—” Then I catch myself. Remind myself that my role in documenting is to record only objective truth. And my brief sighting in the dark could easily have been the combination of adrenaline and imagination. Nevertheless, I relate what I saw. Madam Savino and Father Corwin suggest that I may have glimpsed Judy’s ghost.

I shake my head. “She looked solid. Real.”

“You were in a trance.” Coyote’s dark eyes study me. “You also said she was dripping wet… so if she was real, she’d’ve left footprints…” He casts a reluctant glance back toward the darkness. “Should we wait for Goddard, or…?”

“He’s still out of range…” The cameraman shows us his calls going straight to voicemail.

“Then it’s up to us to find this girl—and her family,” declares Madam Savino, clapping her hands.

Back into the basement we go.

***

This time the overhead bulb remains bright when I flick the basement light on, its harsh glow sharpening the shadows. The atmosphere should be lighter now that I have company, but the low ceiling is so claustrophobic, the darkness so closely encroaching it’s like we’re being entombed.

“… no wet footprints, just lots of dust.” The cameraman pans to collect footage.

“Let’s see what we can find,” says Madam Savino as we fan out.

A large Persian rug covers the cement floor, with the area near the stairs used for storage—a tricycle, old children’s toys, bags and boxes, cobwebbed appliances. Across the room is the sleeping area with the cot, nightstand, dresser, and bookcase. On the far wall is the open door to the storeroom. There’s not much more here than family junk. Coyote rummages through one of the cardboard boxes, pulling out action figures, faded blue jeans, Air Jordans, a Barbie with scissors stabbed into it. “Kid stuff…” he grunts, pushing the box away and then opening another, finding a cracked frame with a photo of a teen boy. “Hey…” He hones in on the photo. “Did the family have a secret son?”

“The family had no sons,” Father Corwin says.

“You sure? I mean, you didn’t exactly know about this secret basement. Maybe they had a secret son too—"

“That’s not their son. It’s Janie.” The priest picks up the Barbie doll from the box. “The teens were rebellious. The younger, Janie, was a tomboy. The older, Judith, was boy crazy and wouldn’t disclose the name of the boy she was seeing when she became… with child. There was a lot of friction between the girls and their stepmother. But…” He twists the Barbie so we can all see the lock of human hair taped to its head, and BERNADETTE scrawled on its plastic torso like a kind of voodoo Barbie. The priest plucks the scissors from its chest. “… This is why she came to me for help.”

The cameraman zooms in on the Barbie. “So this is what caused the family’s disappearance?”

“You’re kidding, right?” scoffs Madam Savino.

“This is just teen girls being silly,” Father Corwin agrees. “This childish voodoo…” He tosses the Barbie back into the box. “… would not suffice to beckon such a terrible evil as haunts this house.”

Madam Savino inhales, spreading her arms out as if feeling for currents in the air. She closes her eyes and suddenly crosses the room, stopping at the edge of the Persian rug. Motions the cameraman and me to move, and then grabs the edge. Yanks it.

On the cement beneath, a large circle scrawled in sharpie and marked with a pentagram and eye covers nearly all of the floor.

Father Corwin hisses a sharp intake of breath. Madam Savino shrieks at the cameraman, “DON’T TOUCH IT!” as he rushes closer to get footage. Coyote toes the outer edge of the circle.

In the center is a wide crimson stain.

***

While Father Corwin utters blessings and prayers, Madam Savino kneels with her palm to the floor to read the psychic echoes left by whatever ceremony was conducted here.

The bloody circle is clearly connected to the catastrophe that befell the missing family, at least according to our expert team. But even if they’re correct (and I’m not yet wholly convinced), so many questions remain—who conducted the bloody ceremony? Whose blood stains the floor? And where is the family?

“Oh… OOOOH... OohhooOOhhh.” Madam Savino snatches her hand back from the sharpie markings. “… it’s like touching an open flame!” The curious cameraman touches a finger to the circle and nothing happens to him, and he casts an inquisitive look at Madam Savino, who ignores him and goes on: “Whatever occurred here was unimaginably evil…” She looks my way. “You find any clues?”

I am skimming Judy’s diary. Unfortunately, there isn’t much here connecting to the family’s disappearance. Her bubbly scrawl tells the story of a girl who hated her rural, small town life and wished to run away from Hopkins. But she felt she could not leave, writing: If I go, Dad and Burn-a-bitch will make Jakey’s life a living hell even more than it already is. Her handwriting gets progressively more raw, the pages filled with apparent attempts to hex both her parents, until a line that reads, I will NEVER forgive her for—

The pages after that are torn out.

“This house has too many secrets…” Coyote growls after I share the contents of the diary. “And…” He glowers at Father Corwin. “You aren’t spilling them.”

“The family’s disappearance is as much a mystery to me as to you,” Father Corwin says.

“But you know their drama.”

“Their drama isn’t relevant.”

“Someone tore out these pages to keep whatever’s in them secret. Secret pages, secret basement, secret son.” He snatches up the photo of the boyish teen who Father Corwin calls Janie, but who Judy refers to in her diary as Jakey. Coyote connects the dots for us as he says: “Maybe it’s just ‘drama’ that Bernadette couldn’t stomach the thought of a trans kid, and that’s why there’s all this boy stuff boxed up down here—which you obviously knew about since you recognized the photo. But THAT—” He points at the bloody stain in the circle. “—isn’t drama. An entire missing family isn’t drama. And there’s one very important secret you haven’t spilled…”

“And that is?” Father Corwin asks stiffly.

Coyote points to the cot in the corner. He reaches below the mattress and tugs out something I missed when I first found the diary. Something that glints in the wan illumination of the overhead bulb—a chain. He asks: “Tell me why the parents restrained their pregnant teen daughter down here.”

***

Coyote and Madam Savino are both shouting at Father Corwin. He raises his hands as if to bat away their fury, insisting they’re jumping to conclusions—

“You’re lying!” Madam Savino shrills. “I can see the chain right there, and her diary was under the pillow, so who else would they have kept down here? And if it was anyone else, that would STILL be a crime!”

“If you’ll just let me explain—” The cameraman zooms in on the chain, and Father Corwin bursts: “They did NOT imprison her down here! I already told you, when Bernadette came to see me, I referred the children to counseling—"

“It was the psycho mom who needed counseling—” interjects Madam Savino, while Coyote snarls, ”You sent the kids back to their abusers—"

He speaks over them:

“The family called me the night of their disappearance.”

Both fall silent.

“… they told me Judith was possessed. That she had… attacked… everyone. That she was feral. Rabid. They wanted me to come immediately but I could not. I was out of the country, on another assignment. They did not want to call police. They knew the police could not pacify what afflicted her. They told me they would restrain her until I was able to come. That chain was not for Judith but for the… thing… that possessed her. I came the very next day, but there was no one home. Just the gardener, who’d come by to mow and told me the backdoor was usually unlocked, and it was, so I let myself in. I called and called. I walked through the entire house. It looked much as we have seen it today. There was no answer. I thought they had left.”

***

The cameraman zooms in on Father Corwin’s sagging countenance. Under the harsh glare of the overhead bulb, the crags of his withered face have deepened, his eyes almost entirely shrouded in blackness. My fingers have been flying across my tablet while the priest spoke, and now, I ask him: “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“The family shared their troubles with me in confidence. It was not mine to tell…”

“Does Goddard know?” asks Madam Savino.

“Oh yes. I disclosed everything to him.”

“That asshole,” mutters Coyote.

I have to agree. It seems Goddard withheld all sorts of information from us.

“I had hoped that by joining this expedition… I might at least know the fate of the family, even if I couldn’t save them. I might…” Father Corwin sighs, shakes his head, reaches into his pocket and pulls out an envelope. “This is the letter their stepmother, Bernadette, wrote to me a week before her phone call…”

Dear Father, I humbly request once again that you help me with the children. Only yesterday, I was in the kitchen and heard a chorus of voices speaking in tongues. When I turned around, they ran away giggling, and I saw they had drawn a pentagram behind me on the floor. I had to scrub it out of the linoleum…

… Janie posted to social media that, ‘if being my true self means being a devil, maybe that’s what I am.’ I have confiscated her phone, which of course has led to more meltdowns…

… Judith says that she is carrying the devil’s child. She is always pushing my buttons. She has told me repeatedly that she hopes I die. That she prays for it everyday…

… the letter is long and meandering, and ends by begging Father Corwin’s help with her “wild children.”

As he folds the letter up and puts it away, he tells us, “I thought their pranks were harmless, and that family counseling might soften Bernadette. But clearly I have failed them. And even now, I still don’t know where the family has gone. Or how. How did they disappear so completely?”

And suddenly my blood runs cold. Because I know. Maybe because I was the one who saw the girl, in those moments after the lights flickered out. Saw her crawling along the wall behind the bookcase…

I’ve been catching a whiff of it on and off, I realize. A bad, old, rotten smell. And I venture to the bookcase and… it’s leaning forward a little, almost like it might topple were it not for the anchor screwed into the wall. And in the gap behind it is a darkness wide enough, almost…

“Dawain?” says Madam Savino as I lean over the bookshelf, peering into the darkness behind it—

And I step back quickly. Take my phone out and turn on the flashlight and look again.

Behind the bookcase, wedged in face-down, is 13-year-old Jakey.

***

A bare foot, shrunken and mummified, is the only part of the teenager illuminated by the beams of our flashlights. The rest of Jakey is lost in the blackness between the bookcase and the wall. I can perceive blue jeans, remnants of a t-shirt clinging to skin that has shriveled after six years crammed in the gap.

“Jesus!” cries the cameraman, zooming in with the camera and then stumbling back. “Fuck. Shit. We have to call this in.”

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Madam Savino screeches.

“Looks like the kid was trying to hide...” Coyote leans over the bookcase so far he’s at risk of falling in next to the corpse—apparently he’s less craven when his parental instincts kick in. His muffled voice calls: “… it’s hard to see from this angle, but I don’t see any marks. My guess is Jakey got spooked by whatever went down in that bloody circle, only to get stuck…” He pulls himself up from peering behind the bookcase. “Poor kid probably suffocated.”

“Oh God… how horrible!” Madam Savino’s hand is at her mouth. “But where are the rest of the family? Are they all down here somewhere?”

“Forget all that!” bursts the cameraman. “A dead body means we call the cops! This is a criminal matter now.” He turns to me, “You know the drill, you’re a journalist, right? At this point anything we touch is evidence tampering. We don’t know the kid died by accident. That’s for the cops to decide. I’m calling it in!” He hurries upstairs, shouting back, “I’m going down the lane to wait for Goddard! I suggest you all do the same and LEAVE. Don’t contaminate any evidence!”

“But we haven’t pacified the spirit!” objects Madam Savino.

Nobody responds as distantly, the front door slams. Coyote looks glum. Father Corwin stares mournfully at the bloody circle, the chain, the bookcase. He sighs, crosses himself, and declares, “I must pray for them…”

***

The cops have not yet arrived.

Father Corwin is still praying, and Coyote has scoured every inch of the basement. Madam Savino makes no more pretenses about searching for psychic echoes and instead is flipping through the diary.

“Seems the kids were very attached,” she tells me quietly. “Judy and Jakey have all these messages of support for each other. They were each other’s rocks. At least until…” She sighs and puts it down.

Father Corwin pauses in his prayers. “I am still not sure where the rest of the family was laid to rest…”

“We know where Judy is. I dunno about resting,” growls Coyote.

“Where?”

“In the septic tank! Didn’t you hear Dawain’s description of her? He saw her dripping wet. There’s no rivers near here, nothing else to explain the water. Her parents called you saying she was possessed, she attacked them. Their bodies are the only ones not in this house. They probably killed her over whatever secret was torn outta those pages, and dumped her in the septic tank, and then left town.”

“You do not know that.”

“No, but I can pretty damned well infer it.” Coyote’s tone is conversational, chill as usual. He isn’t an angry guy by nature. But now, I can see his knuckles popping from his grip on the edge of the bookcase. “We know the parents abused them. Jakey’s—” he emphasizes the name. “—bedroom was bare. All the personality stripped from it, all the kid’s action figures and clothes bagged up downstairs after the stepmom came into their lives. That cot, that little nightstand, that wasn’t something they set up in one day because their pregnant daughter was possessed. It’s been down here awhile—you can see from the clothes in the dresser that it was being used. Not a jump to infer the stepmom made one or both kids sleep down here. She was psychologically abusing them—”

“You don’t know that,” says Father Corwin.

“But you do. Did either or both kids tell you their parents made them sleep in the basement?”

Father Corwin does not answer.

“Bet you didn’t tell Goddard that part, did you? And you know what? I’m not even convinced that girl really summoned a demon. That presence you call malevolent, that you say is so angry, that is rageful and spiteful and furious? The evil spirit you’re so keen to pacify? Could just be the lonely, shattered ghost of the pregnant daughter they murdered and dumped in the septic tank before they fled, having gotten away with it—”

THUD.

The sound comes from upstairs.

Our heads snap up.

“Uh…” Coyote’s eyes flash wide.

“What was that?” squeals Madam Savino.

Coyote grips the crowbar. “OK,” he says, “let’s keep our eyes peeled and be ready in case—Dawain!” he hisses.

I am already heading upstairs and calling out, “Hello?”

“Dawain! Dammit… why does nobody here have a sense of self-preservation? Can’t you stop him?” Coyote pleads with Father Corwin and Madam Savino.

“Hello? Guo, is that you?” I call our cameraman’s name as I hurry through the hall and upstairs and stop, because ahead—something moves. A dark, dripping figure. The girl in the wet dress—she darts into the upstairs study.

I follow her in.

My pulse skyrockets as something skitters behind one of the wardrobe and shelving units. Coyote catches up to me, swearing “Gonna chain you to the cot downstairs,” then he stops and asks what I’m staring at. “You didn’t see?” I say, surprised. “The drowned girl, she just went behind the wardrobe there.”

“Uh, no. I did not see.” He’s looking alarmed.

So only I can see her. For the sake of journalistic objectivity, I will not definitively label my sighting as that of a “ghost.” But in full disclosure, this second glimpse of the drowned girl is the moment that, somewhere deep inside, I realize that I am no longer questioning whether the house is haunted… instead, I am wondering what it wishes to show me. I reach for one of the doors to yank it open and see what’s inside—only for it to not open. The handle is decorative. Coyote is remarking on how it smells musty in here, kinda like in the basement. He sees me tug the decorative handle and says, “Hold up, what’s behind that thing?”

Then he comes over and reaches further up, for another handle, and pulls.

It’s a murphy bed.

The study has a hidden murphy bed, which can be pulled down for guests but otherwise blends into the surrounding drawers and cabinetry. It even has shelving with items on it that fold down to the ground. You’d never know it was a bed.

As we tug it down, Coyote jumps back with a yell, and I hold my breath, both of us staring. “Put it back, put it back!” barks Coyote, and we push it back up. I almost giggle. It seems such a ridiculous response. As if putting it back so we didn’t see it, restoring the wall of cabinetry, would somehow undo what we’ve found. Both of us giggle hysterically. Ok. We’re losing it.

Mummified in the murphy bed is the body of the stepmother, Bernadette.

***

So much for Coyote’s theory that the parents made it out of the house alive. Back in the basement, Madam Savino declares that we need to make like the cameraman and exit, isn’t fifty percent enough of the mystery solved now that we’ve unearthed two of the four bodies? Father Corwin, however, lingers at the edge of the bloody circle.

“Do you know, Dawain…” His voice falters, and I have to lean in as he rasps, “I really didn’t know about the abuse. Janie said they were sometimes made to sleep in the basement as punishment—” (“Jakey,” corrects Coyote.) “—But I… I’d been to the house, and I’d seen no basement. I assumed the children were making it up. And because they’d made that up, I assumed so much else they said was also…” He shakes his head.

Is he looking to me for forgiveness? Grace? But I am not the one who can give that. I tell him all I can do is witness.

“Yes… such is your role.” Father Corwin’s jaw sets, and his watery eyes glint with resolve as he adds, “Just as mine has been set to me by my Lord. And if this tragedy is indeed in part due to… to my own failures, it is my duty as His instrument to correct that failing. The house must be purified, and these souls saved.”

“Your prayers ain’t gonna purify shit!” Coyote snaps. “We need to figure out what this spirit wants in order to put it to rest. The kids got their wish—the stepmother is dead—so why is Judy still haunting the house?”

Madam Savino spreads her hands. “Girl’s not talking to me. But I can feel her rage from the foundation to the roof...”

“Yeah, so she’s still mad ‘bout somethin’. Probably whatever’s in those missing pages. And if she won’t talk to you…” Coyote rakes his fingers through his hair. “I can’t believe I’m saying this instead of ‘let’s get the fuck out of this house,’ but… this angry ghost showed Dawain here where to find the bodies of her brother and stepmother. She clearly wants to communicate. So if we are going to try to do what we originally came here to do, and not just tuck our tails and run… there’s really only one person who can find out the reason for this haunting….”

Coyote looks at me, and so does everyone else… and I’m almost certain I feel another pair of eyes watching me. The same ones I felt when I was alone down here.

Coyote says, “We need to give Judy a chance to speak with Dawain. We need to give him the spirit box and leave him alone for five minutes.”

***

I am alone in the study. I try not to look at the wardrobe. Try not to think about Bernadette’s body lying encrusted in the murphy bed just a few steps away from me.

Coyote hollers up from below: “I’m here if you need! And hey, if you die up there, at least you’ll be really famous when your article comes out!”

“How’s it gonna come out if I’m not alive to finish it?” I call.

“Ever hear of ghostwriting?”

I think I hear Madam Savino warn him: “I will fucking throw you down those stairs…”

The fact I can hear their bickering is a reassurance. Their plan is to leave me up here alone in the study for six minutes—just past the five minute mark. That gives Judy sixty seconds to communicate with me, hopefully without killing me. Am I scared? Absolutely. But I’m also curious. This article, this story, is already shaping up to be the most extraordinary I’ll ever write. But to write it properly, I must understand everything. And that means hearing from Judy herself.

A small part of me suspects my role as a journalist is why Judy chose me. Because she knows that I am the one who will share the true story of the Hopkins House.

“I’m ready to listen,” I say aloud to the room. And then I flick on the spirit box.

It begins scanning radio frequencies, catching mostly static, lots of bits of nothing. My cell phone shows a timer counting down from five minutes. So far it’s only at two minutes… three minutes… four…

At five minutes, there’s a clink—the sound of metal straining—and my heart slams my ribcage as the murphy bed falls open with a deafening CRASH, the mummified body staring at me, sockets gaping and teeth exposed by shrunken lips. My pulse shoots to the stratosphere as the spirit box loudly crackles, and a girl’s voice says: “My baby, my baby is the devi—”

And then my eyes roll up in my head as the world goes blank...

(Note: Apologies, my account is too long for a single post, so I will share the horrifying conclusion of the events at the Hopkins House in a followup. It is... hard to write. I keep wondering if I could have done something differently... forgive me. I will update soon)…

| Part 1 |

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

Authorities found no evidence of foul play.

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

In hours, the entire team was dead.

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

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

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

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

I was brought on to document.

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there is Guo, the cameraman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father Corwin steeples his fingers and nods.

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

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

“Hm?” says Goddard.

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

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

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

“Coyote—”

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

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

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

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

***

Find the bodies, and you find the answers.

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

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

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

Where?

I review photos of the property.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goddard shrugs and says yes, probably the police.

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

“Good luck,” Goddard says.

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

… leaving us on the pavement.

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

“Cue scary violins,” mutters Coyote.

Nothing but us and the house.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We ascend the staircase.

The cameraman says: “You seeing all this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The study is empty.

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do they get louder?”

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

“What? The septic tank?”

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

It’s been a full forty minutes.

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

“Put it back,” says Madam Savino.

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

“Coyote.”

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

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

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

A small, dusty window.

“What is this?” asks Father Corwin.

“A… basement window?” says Coyote.

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

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

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

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

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

And then, ice blooms in my veins.

What if the missing family is inside?

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

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

“Should we call the cops?” I wonder.

Everybody looks at me.

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

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

“Nope.”

“Quit being a wuss!”

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

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

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

“I’ll go,” I interrupt.

Everyone stares at me.

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

“RIP Dawain,” mutters Coyote.

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

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

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

***

I’m about to go in.

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

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

Wish me luck.

| Part 2 |

I know it seems unhinged, to make claims about my dreams telling me a boy needs help. But I genuinely believe that what I’m seeing is real.

Let me start with some background: when I was six years old, I dreamed of a kitten shivering and wet in a box by the road. A week later, my father was driving us home from school and we saw that exact box, and we found the kitten. We rescued her and named her “Misty.”

In high school I dreamed of my older sister standing at the altar beside a red-headed woman in a wedding dress. A few days later, my sister and I were at a café and spotted a pretty red-headed girl sitting with a young man. I urged my sister to say hello, but she told me my vision had to be wrong since the girl was obviously dating the young man.

So I marched over and spoke to them. The young man, it turns out, was the girl’s brother. And I told the redhead, “My sister thinks you’re cute.” My mortified sister gave me I will kill you eyes, but the red-headed girl giggled and waved my sister over. And with cheeks flaming nearly as red as the girl’s hair, my sister joined her at the table. The rest is history.

But the dream I’ve had this past week is not only more vivid than those others—but more persistent. I see it every night.

A boy with a broken leg locked in a kennel.

It’s horrible. I mean, yes, I know that there are people in the world who commit the most heinous abuses, I see stories on the news every day, see these real-world cases that defy even my worst expectations of humanity. But it’s one thing to read about a faceless victim, their life ended by human cruelty.

It’s entirely something else to smell the stink of the boy, to hear his hitching sobs and whimpers of fear. The scuff of his bare feet on the plastic flooring. He’s all alone, the only sound his breathing and somewhere, distantly, the barking of a dog. The room is pitch dark, so I can’t see. It’s almost as if, in the dream, I’m feeling what the boy feels—

THUD—THUD—creak—THUD—THUD—

It begins with a heavy tread descending stairs, and then a door opens and a man stands silhouetted. The boy whimpers about his leg and begs the man to let him come upstairs. From the looming silhouette comes a sneering voice: “You’re never getting out.”

The rage I felt the first time I heard that voice! Gruff, slurred with alcohol. Not a familiar voice, though clearly familiar to the boy, who always shrinks further into his kennel, sobbing. Then the sudden snap of a belt in the man’s hand. And the boy’s screaming as he huddles toward the back, the jangling of a lock on the kennel door, and the boy saying, “No, no, I’ll be good! I’llbegood—”

That’s when I wake up.

The first time it happened I burst into sobs. The boy’s terror lingered like secondhand smoke—I couldn’t stop shaking and crying. When I finally came back to myself, I flung the covers off and scribbled everything I could remember from the dream—which wasn’t much. WHERE?? I wrote in all caps on my notes.

Where is this boy being held prisoner?

I moved to this sleepy town to escape the near-daily carjackings and shootings and sirens in the busy metro where I spent the past two decades. But at least there, we had neighbors, resources, witnesses. Out here, I have neighbors near enough that I can hear when they’re watching a loud movie, but go a little further and the houses are spread so far apart, sometimes by miles… the sort of isolation that means this boy I’m dreaming of is unlikely to be discovered…

… unless I can find him.

But how? That first night all I saw is that he’s being held in a dog kennel, and it’s either night or he’s being kept in a windowless room. A basement? The man’s footsteps sounded like they were descending creaky stairs.

So a basement.

But where?

My only other clue was the loud, consistent barking of a dog. I suppose I could have driven around the town searching for an isolated house with a barking dog, but it was just too little to go on. The town’s population is almost 5000 people—far too many houses to scout out hoping I can find this child.

But then the next night, I dreamed of him again.

This time, I strained for details.

THUD—THUD—creak—THUD—THUD—

—The man’s footsteps were my first clue. I didn’t hear the crush of carpet or the ring of metal. No, the stairs were wooden, and the third step creaked. After the door opened, the man’s shoes sounded like they were scuffing on concrete. In the wash of light around his silhouette, I couldn’t make out any useful details of the man, but the room appeared cramped. A closet or storeroom. I tried to get a view of the man’s face when he approached the kennel, but it was too dark to see clearly.

The third night I had the dream, which was yesterday, I caught a few more crucial details.

In addition to the barking dog, there was a rumble of thunder. And a distant hoot… a… train? There was a train horn!

Then the sound of the train horn merged into the boy’s frantic wails as the man approached—

I woke up with a gasp.

After making notes, I opened Google maps and searched for train tracks. There are some nearby, running through town. I switched to the weather app.

Sunny. And tomorrow, sunny. Mostly cloudy or sunny all week, until Saturday, when there will be thunderstorms.

I have five days.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to find him??

***

It’s been a week. I realized that I didn’t think strangers would be likely to believe me about the dream, so I wound up not sharing what I wrote above. Instead, I considered asking my neighbors their advice since I don’t know the town very well, and they’ve lived here for years. But the middle-aged couple next door mostly keep to themselves. So, in the end I called up my sister and asked if she could drive up to help me.

My sister agreed we had to find the boy, and she took time off work to come and help me. But as we searched for houses near the railroad tracks, she said: “You always eventually see, with your own eyes, the same vision from your dream, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“So you’re gonna see the boy screaming. You’ll get there right as the man comes down the stairs.”

I frowned.

“You’re going to be in danger,” she pointed out.

“The man never sees me in my dream,” I argued, though dread churned in my belly.

“You wake up when he drags the boy out. What if it’s because that’s when he sees you?” she said. “I’m just saying, Celeste—this is really fucking dangerous. Do you have a gun? Pepper spray? Anything?”

“I have you.”

“Yeah, well I’m not in your vision, am I?”

She made a good point. Which led me to wonder—should I even have her with me, knowing she wouldn’t be there when I finally found him? Every house we staked out together was a dead end. Either there were no dogs nearby, or no train tracks. And then my sister dug deeper into the train schedule and informed me the tracks near my home had stopped being used a couple years ago. The nearest trains still running were freight trains in another town twenty minutes northeast. So we drove out there. And we listened for dogs. But after several days, we didn’t find any houses that fit my dream.

I knew the steps were creaky and made of wood and led into a basement. I knew the basement was unfinished and the floor was concrete. We only found three houses on the train tracks that also had dogs living nearby, and I asked the owners if I could see their basements.

Two of the basements were finished, and the wooden stairs did not creak. One was unfinished but the steps going down were concrete, not wood. No creaky third step. And the basement was clean and empty.

No stink. No filth. No dog kennel.

By Sunday I was in despair. It was thundering, pouring, and there was nothing else we could do. Nowhere to search. I couldn’t sleep. What was going to happen to the boy? Once my vision came true—what next? I feared the worst. I was glued to the news, waiting for reports about a dead child. I kept searching the headlines.

Nothing. At least not about a boy in my town.

But when I ran a search about children locked in dog kennels… God, I’ve lost any faith I had left in humanity.

Do you have any idea how many news stories there are? It hurts my soul. All that rain and thunder felt like God flooding the world—and with everything I’d learned it felt like we deserved it.

By Monday, my sister couldn’t stay any longer. I promised her I’d call her if I did find the house, and I hugged her goodbye. She squeezed me tight and made me promise that I wouldn’t go down those stairs if I found the house alone. That I wouldn’t face the man with no one to help me. That I’d call her.

I promised her, though since she left I’ve been thinking to myself how I would give anything—even my own life—to save this boy.

I honestly don’t care if I die to do it.

I just have to free him from that man.

That monster.

Tomorrow, I will begin again. I’ll keep driving around. My visions always come true eventually. Always. I will find the boy, and I will face the man keeping him captive.

Maybe I should share this post first, in case something happens to me.

***

It’s been a month.

It’s taken me a long time to be able to sit down to finally type out the events of that fateful evening when I found the boy. Each time I tried to write this, my hands were frozen, my heart just empty. But… I think it is important that I finish. And that I share this story. So… here we go.

After my sister returned home, I was determined to find the boy. I mapped out the train tracks and the weather, searching for any houses I may have missed. I hadn’t done laundry in about a week, so I washed all my clothes, and was mentally making a list of groceries to buy to keep me going through all the driving and scouting around.

I was carrying the basket down to the basement laundry when the stairs creaked.

Specifically, the third step on my way down creaked.

And I froze.

My staircase is carpeted. The house was flipped before I bought it, though the bones are very old. And somewhere beneath the carpeting is the original wooden staircase leading down… down to my finished basement, to the linoleum-covered laundry room and the cheaply-carpeted storage area. It usually doesn’t creak when I walk up and down, but with all the extra weight from the laundry basket, my tread was heavier. I put my weight on that third step again, felt that creeeak.

Cold all over, I went downstairs.

I looked around the brightly lit laundry room.

There was nothing unusual, so I moved into the larger storage area. It struck me as I gazed around metal racks of shelving that… this basement was a lot smaller than the square footage of the rooms above.

I closed my eyes, imagined being in the dark, listening for the creak of the stairs, the footsteps, and I slowly turned, orienting myself…

… the footsteps would’ve gone through the wall behind one of the racks.

Heart slamming my ribs, I grabbed the rack and moved it aside. Felt along the wall. It appeared seamless, but I snatched up a hammer from the toolkit on one of the racks and struck it into the sheetrock. Again. And again, until I made a hole, and then used the back end of the hammer to tear it away.

Behind the hole in the sheetrock was solid blackness. An opening to a hidden—and very musty—room.

Once I had torn a hole large enough, I turned on a flashlight and stepped through. The dank smell filled my nostrils, and my shoes scuffed on concrete. The cramped room was filthy, littered with trash and old clothes tossed haphazardly here and there. In one corner was a kennel, and inside it a bin taped closed with duct tape wound round and around it.

***

I called my sister. Called her crying, and told her I was wrong. The dream hadn’t been a premonition.

Several years ago, the man who used to own this house had a wife and three children, one of whom had been reported missing to the authorities. He lost the house to foreclosure after being unable to pay his mortgage. His wife divorced him and left him with the two children, and he remained on the property, squatting for months until he was removed. After that he and his children went missing. When a warrant went out for his arrest, he was finally found in Idaho, shacked up with a new girlfriend and the children, once again living in squalid conditions.

The man is now under arrest for his suspected involvement in the death of his son Jay—the boy in the bin. I realized as soon as I cut through the duct tape and tore the lid off that bin: my dreams were not of the future. Instead, I was drawn into a ghost’s traumatic memories of the past.

I’m heartbroken that I couldn’t save Jay… but at least his bones are no longer trapped in the kennel—he’s free.

And his father will be locked up for a very, very long time.

His mother—the man’s ex-wife—is still being sought. The two other children have been removed from the new girlfriend’s custody and placed into protective care.

But perhaps the greatest horror of all this, for me… is a conversation I had shortly after my gruesome discovery.

The morning after I’d turned over everything to police, I heard the neighbors’ lawnmower, and since they were outside doing yardwork I went over and asked them if they’d overheard anything when Jay and his family were here several years ago. Had they suspected abuse?

They sometimes heard the boy crying and knew the family was rotten, they said.

“Did you ever report them?” I asked.

They shrugged and said that after Jay disappeared, his father told them he’d run away.

“And you believed him?” I asked.

My neighbors didn’t have an answer. These ordinary folks who lived within earshot never once called anyone. Never reported anything.

Legally, of course, they had no obligation to do so, anymore than I have a legal obligation to throw a life preserver if I see someone drowning. There’s no charge for standing by and letting bad things happen.

But I don’t think I will ever look at my neighbors without remembering those bones, curled up in that bin…

… knowing that they heard his screams, and that with a phone call, they might have saved him.

I know it seems unhinged, to make claims about my dreams telling me a boy needs help. But I genuinely believe that what I’m seeing is real.

Let me start with some background: when I was six years old, I dreamed of a kitten shivering and wet in a box by the road. A week later, my father was driving us home from school and we saw that exact box, and we found the kitten. We rescued her and named her “Misty.”

In high school I dreamed of my older sister standing at the altar beside a red-headed woman in a wedding dress. A few days later, my sister and I were at a café and spotted a pretty red-headed girl sitting with a young man. I urged my sister to say hello, but she told me my vision had to be wrong since the girl was obviously dating the young man.

So I marched over and spoke to them. The young man, it turns out, was the girl’s brother. And I told the redhead, “My sister thinks you’re cute.” My mortified sister gave me I will kill you eyes, but the red-headed girl giggled and waved my sister over. And with cheeks flaming nearly as red as the girl’s hair, my sister joined her at the table. The rest is history.

But the dream I’ve had this past week is not only more vivid than those others—but more persistent. I see it every night.

A boy with a broken leg locked in a kennel.

It’s horrible. I mean, yes, I know that there are people in the world who commit the most heinous abuses, I see stories on the news every day, see these real-world cases that defy even my worst expectations of humanity. But it’s one thing to read about a faceless victim, their life ended by human cruelty.

It’s entirely something else to smell the stink of the boy, to hear his hitching sobs and whimpers of fear. The scuff of his bare feet on the plastic flooring. He’s all alone, the only sound his breathing and somewhere, distantly, the barking of a dog. The room is pitch dark, so I can’t see. It’s almost as if, in the dream, I’m feeling what the boy feels—

THUD—THUD—creak—THUD—THUD—

It begins with a heavy tread descending stairs, and then a door opens and a man stands silhouetted. The boy whimpers about his leg and begs the man to let him come upstairs. From the looming silhouette comes a sneering voice: “You’re never getting out.”

The rage I felt the first time I heard that voice! Gruff, slurred with alcohol. Not a familiar voice, though clearly familiar to the boy, who always shrinks further into his kennel, sobbing. Then the sudden snap of a belt in the man’s hand. And the boy’s screaming as he huddles toward the back, the jangling of a lock on the kennel door, and the boy saying, “No, no, I’ll be good! I’llbegood—”

That’s when I wake up.

The first time it happened I burst into sobs. The boy’s terror lingered like secondhand smoke—I couldn’t stop shaking and crying. When I finally came back to myself, I flung the covers off and scribbled everything I could remember from the dream—which wasn’t much. WHERE?? I wrote in all caps on my notes.

Where is this boy being held prisoner?

I moved to this sleepy town to escape the near-daily carjackings and shootings and sirens in the busy metro where I spent the past two decades. But at least there, we had neighbors, resources, witnesses. Out here, I have neighbors near enough that I can hear when they’re watching a loud movie, but go a little further and the houses are spread so far apart, sometimes by miles… the sort of isolation that means this boy I’m dreaming of is unlikely to be discovered…

… unless I can find him.

But how? That first night all I saw is that he’s being held in a dog kennel, and it’s either night or he’s being kept in a windowless room. A basement? The man’s footsteps sounded like they were descending creaky stairs.

So a basement.

But where?

My only other clue was the loud, consistent barking of a dog. I suppose I could have driven around the town searching for an isolated house with a barking dog, but it was just too little to go on. The town’s population is almost 5000 people—far too many houses to scout out hoping I can find this child.

But then the next night, I dreamed of him again.

This time, I strained for details.

THUD—THUD—creak—THUD—THUD—

—The man’s footsteps were my first clue. I didn’t hear the crush of carpet or the ring of metal. No, the stairs were wooden, and the third step creaked. After the door opened, the man’s shoes sounded like they were scuffing on concrete. In the wash of light around his silhouette, I couldn’t make out any useful details of the man, but the room appeared cramped. A closet or storeroom. I tried to get a view of the man’s face when he approached the kennel, but it was too dark to see clearly.

The third night I had the dream, which was yesterday, I caught a few more crucial details.

In addition to the barking dog, there was a rumble of thunder. And a distant hoot… a… train? There was a train horn!

Then the sound of the train horn merged into the boy’s frantic wails as the man approached—

I woke up with a gasp.

After making notes, I opened Google maps and searched for train tracks. There are some nearby, running through town. I switched to the weather app.

Sunny. And tomorrow, sunny. Mostly cloudy or sunny all week, until Saturday, when there will be thunderstorms.

I have five days.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to find him??

***

It’s been a week. I realized that I didn’t think strangers would be likely to believe me about the dream, so I wound up not sharing what I wrote above. Instead, I considered asking my neighbors their advice since I don’t know the town very well, and they’ve lived here for years. But the middle-aged couple next door mostly keep to themselves. So, in the end I called up my sister and asked if she could drive up to help me.

My sister agreed we had to find the boy, and she took time off work to come and help me. But as we searched for houses near the railroad tracks, she said: “You always eventually see, with your own eyes, the same vision from your dream, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“So you’re gonna see the boy screaming. You’ll get there right as the man comes down the stairs.”

I frowned.

“You’re going to be in danger,” she pointed out.

“The man never sees me in my dream,” I argued, though dread churned in my belly.

“You wake up when he drags the boy out. What if it’s because that’s when he sees you?” she said. “I’m just saying, Celeste—this is really fucking dangerous. Do you have a gun? Pepper spray? Anything?”

“I have you.”

“Yeah, well I’m not in your vision, am I?”

She made a good point. Which led me to wonder—should I even have her with me, knowing she wouldn’t be there when I finally found him? Every house we staked out together was a dead end. Either there were no dogs nearby, or no train tracks. And then my sister dug deeper into the train schedule and informed me the tracks near my home had stopped being used a couple years ago. The nearest trains still running were freight trains in another town twenty minutes northeast. So we drove out there. And we listened for dogs. But after several days, we didn’t find any houses that fit my dream.

I knew the steps were creaky and made of wood and led into a basement. I knew the basement was unfinished and the floor was concrete. We only found three houses on the train tracks that also had dogs living nearby, and I asked the owners if I could see their basements.

Two of the basements were finished, and the wooden stairs did not creak. One was unfinished but the steps going down were concrete, not wood. No creaky third step. And the basement was clean and empty.

No stink. No filth. No dog kennel.

By Sunday I was in despair. It was thundering, pouring, and there was nothing else we could do. Nowhere to search. I couldn’t sleep. What was going to happen to the boy? Once my vision came true—what next? I feared the worst. I was glued to the news, waiting for reports about a dead child. I kept searching the headlines.

Nothing. At least not about a boy in my town.

But when I ran a search about children locked in dog kennels… God, I’ve lost any faith I had left in humanity.

Do you have any idea how many news stories there are? It hurts my soul. All that rain and thunder felt like God flooding the world—and with everything I’d learned it felt like we deserved it.

By Monday, my sister couldn’t stay any longer. I promised her I’d call her if I did find the house, and I hugged her goodbye. She squeezed me tight and made me promise that I wouldn’t go down those stairs if I found the house alone. That I wouldn’t face the man with no one to help me. That I’d call her.

I promised her, though since she left I’ve been thinking to myself how I would give anything—even my own life—to save this boy.

I honestly don’t care if I die to do it.

I just have to free him from that man.

That monster.

Tomorrow, I will begin again. I’ll keep driving around. My visions always come true eventually. Always. I will find the boy, and I will face the man keeping him captive.

Maybe I should share this post first, in case something happens to me.

***

It’s been a month.

It’s taken me a long time to be able to sit down to finally type out the events of that fateful evening when I found the boy. Each time I tried to write this, my hands were frozen, my heart just empty. But… I think it is important that I finish. And that I share this story. So… here we go.

After my sister returned home, I was determined to find the boy. I mapped out the train tracks and the weather, searching for any houses I may have missed. I hadn’t done laundry in about a week, so I washed all my clothes, and was mentally making a list of groceries to buy to keep me going through all the driving and scouting around.

I was carrying the basket down to the basement laundry when the stairs creaked.

Specifically, the third step on my way down creaked.

And I froze.

My staircase is carpeted. The house was flipped before I bought it, though the bones are very old. And somewhere beneath the carpeting is the original wooden staircase leading down… down to my finished basement, to the linoleum-covered laundry room and the cheaply-carpeted storage area. It usually doesn’t creak when I walk up and down, but with all the extra weight from the laundry basket, my tread was heavier. I put my weight on that third step again, felt that creeeak.

Cold all over, I went downstairs.

I looked around the brightly lit laundry room.

There was nothing unusual, so I moved into the larger storage area. It struck me as I gazed around metal racks of shelving that… this basement was a lot smaller than the square footage of the rooms above.

I closed my eyes, imagined being in the dark, listening for the creak of the stairs, the footsteps, and I slowly turned, orienting myself…

… the footsteps would’ve gone through the wall behind one of the racks.

Heart slamming my ribs, I grabbed the rack and moved it aside. Felt along the wall. It appeared seamless, but I snatched up a hammer from the toolkit on one of the racks and struck it into the sheetrock. Again. And again, until I made a hole, and then used the back end of the hammer to tear it away.

Behind the hole in the sheetrock was solid blackness. An opening to a hidden—and very musty—room.

Once I had torn a hole large enough, I turned on a flashlight and stepped through. The dank smell filled my nostrils, and my shoes scuffed on concrete. The cramped room was filthy, littered with trash and old clothes tossed haphazardly here and there. In one corner was a kennel, and inside it a bin taped closed with duct tape wound round and around it.

***

I called my sister. Called her crying, and told her I was wrong. The dream hadn’t been a premonition.

Several years ago, the man who used to own this house had a wife and three children, one of whom had been reported missing to the authorities. He lost the house to foreclosure after being unable to pay his mortgage. His wife divorced him and left him with the two children, and he remained on the property, squatting for months until he was removed. After that he and his children went missing. When a warrant went out for his arrest, he was finally found in Idaho, shacked up with a new girlfriend and the children, once again living in squalid conditions.

The man is now under arrest for his suspected involvement in the death of his son Jay—the boy in the bin. I realized as soon as I cut through the duct tape and tore the lid off that bin: my dreams were not of the future. Instead, I was drawn into a ghost’s traumatic memories of the past.

I’m heartbroken that I couldn’t save Jay… but at least his bones are no longer trapped in the kennel—he’s free.

And his father will be locked up for a very, very long time.

His mother—the man’s ex-wife—is still being sought. The two other children have been removed from the new girlfriend’s custody and placed into protective care.

But perhaps the greatest horror of all this, for me… is a conversation I had shortly after my gruesome discovery.

The morning after I’d turned over everything to police, I heard the neighbors’ lawnmower, and since they were outside doing yardwork I went over and asked them if they’d overheard anything when Jay and his family were here several years ago. Had they suspected abuse?

They sometimes heard the boy crying and knew the family was rotten, they said.

“Did you ever report them?” I asked.

They shrugged and said that after Jay disappeared, his father told them he’d run away.

“And you believed him?” I asked.

My neighbors didn’t have an answer. These ordinary folks who lived within earshot never once called anyone. Never reported anything.

Legally, of course, they had no obligation to do so, anymore than I have a legal obligation to throw a life preserver if I see someone drowning. There’s no charge for standing by and letting bad things happen.

But I don’t think I will ever look at my neighbors without remembering those bones, curled up in that bin…

… knowing that they heard his screams, and that with a phone call, they might have saved him.

Pretty much what the title says.

Any picture I take. Any video I record. Always, every time, the body of a dead influencer shows up in the background.

If you’re wondering—do you know this influencer? No. Maybe? Depends on how into fitness stuff you are. His channel was doing fine I guess but he never got truly viral.

Well, not until he died, that is.

He was caught in bed with a woman whose husband came home to find her undressed and stammering excuses. The fitness influencer tried to hide from discovery by sneaking out onto the balcony and climbing over the railing and clinging so he was out of sight. And he clung for a few minutes—he was a fitness guy, after all. In pretty good shape. Meanwhile a crowd gathered below and some asshole filmed the whole thing.

But then the woman’s husband stepped out onto the balcony and the fitness influencer—he musta freaked out, because he lost his grip.

And he fell.

To his death.

The footage of his death immediately went viral. Of course it was taken down after. But not before everyone on the internet had taken clips and screenshots of him plunging, and then of his broken-doll body slamming into the pavement five stories below.

And that’s the image of him that shows up in the background of all my videos and pictures. The dead influencer, lying just as he was when I filmed him.

Oh, right.

Yep, I’m the asshole who filmed his death.

Well, not just me. I filmed it with a friend. A dude named Kenzo. I was behind the camera, holding it, and Kenzo was in front of it. Kenzo is always the one in front of the camera because while some people are incredibly photogenic, I am… whatever the opposite of that is. I blink in every picture. My hair is always blowing the wrong way. Even my boobs look two different sizes, one perking like a teen’s and the other sagging like it’s whispering secrets to my belly button.

But forget about my boobs. We’re talking about the body.

We came across the scene by chance while driving around, and Kenzo leapt out of the car. See, Kenzo and I are also wannabe-influencers. In high school we started our first Youtube channel. And since Kenzo is the Ken to my asymmetrical-boob-Barbie (i.e. he’s got rizz while I’ve got nerdy editing skills), he’s the one who always appears onscreen.

Our footage of fitness bro’s fatal plunge went immediately viral.

Even after the video got taken down (prompting me to re-post clips of Kenzo’s commentary-on-the-scene minus the footage showing the man’s body), the story kept climbing, as did our subscriber count. And if you’re wondering, did my conscience ever whisper that maybe, just maybe, using a man’s tragic and scandalous death was a little… morally bankrupt?

Nope. I couldn’t hear such pangs of conscience over the euphoric rush of all those new subscribers!

And I mean, we were trending for days.

It was only later, when I was editing our latest video, that I spotted the, er… glitch, let’s call it.

The glitch of a dead body in the frame.

“The fuck…?” I whispered.

It was in a video we’d shot by the poolside of Kenzo reacting to different super-duper hot sauces (yep, our content is super original). On the concrete beside the pool in the corner of the screen lay the fitness influencer. Looking like he’d been cut and pasted from our viral footage.

I sent the clip to Kenzo.

“Oh my God, you evil diabolical genius,” he exclaimed. “People will go fuckin’ crazy!”

Apparently, he assumed I’d put the body there, maybe as rage-bait to troll the people who’d clutched their pearls over our initial footage of the man’s death.

And yeah, that would’ve been a brilliant marketing strategy.

But I said, “I didn’t put it there.”

It was far enough to the side in the frame, right at the corner, that I was able to cut it out and post the video without it. Even if it would generate clicks, I was beginning to feel the tiniest churnings of queasiness that I’d eventually realize was my conscience.

But after it went up, the comments exploded anyway. The body was back in the frame. I quickly removed the video from our feed, only to see that notifications were blowing up on Instagram, too. Kenzo had posted a selfie on the beach with the waves in the background, and the dead body was there—lying on the wet sand.

Like he’d cut and pasted it from our footage.

No… not just cut and pasted. It looked a little more gross, like it was in the early stages of decomposition.

That settled it—it had to be a filter he’d installed, and I called him up to hash it out with him and found that he was about to call me to demand if I’d hacked his phone or something.

So we met up.

And we tested it.

And in every pic we took of Kenzo, there in the background was the dead body.

“So,” he said after our tests, “I guess I’m haunted?”

“… yeah.” I tried out other cameras, even a polaroid. The dead influencer was even on the polaroid.

So. After we got high, and drunk, and spent a good twenty-four hours in complete freakout mode, we finally sat down to brainstorm solutions to this decomposing influencer problem. Like, what exactly should we do about this? And how were we gonna continue our channel if he kept appearing in all our videos?

We did the only thing that made sense for us.

“The Decomposing Influencer” series was our biggest ever.

… what?

It got us clicks.

And YES, every alarm bell in my brain clanged with the warning that we were fucking with something that definitely shouldn’t be fucked with…

… but I mean, do I even need to tell you how insane our metrics were?

We couldn’t have asked for better content. Kenzo promised a thousand dollars to anyone who could debunk him, and challenged anyone who believed the haunting to be a hoax to show up with a camera and a livestream. Everywhere and anywhere we went, he urged people to snap pictures of him with the hashtag #hauntedkenzo.

“It’s not a prank. It’s not staged. It’s all real,” he claimed.

We were so high on our skyrocketing subscriber base that we barely noticed the spookiness. The body was decomposing by the day—but so what? All the better to farm engagement.

… it wasn’t until later we realized that, in addition to rotting onscreen, it was actually moving closer.

One of our followers put together a timelapse.

In it, the body could be seen vividly rotting, turning discolored and bloating—and all the while moving closer to the camera.

And not just that.

It happened so slowly we didn’t notice at first. But in the original video, the dead guy was lying on the pavement facing away from the camera.

In all our recent videos, he was turned toward the lens. His sightless eyes fixed on us.

“What happens when he gets right up next to you?” I asked Kenzo.

“Dunno,” Kenzo said, obviously chilled. We both sat there in deeply contemplative silence for a moment before he added, “We gotta get it on film.”

You know that scene in Austin Powers where there’s a dude standing with his hand out, screaming and screaming, while Austin Powers drives a steamroller and motions him to get out of the way, and he just doesn’t? He just stands there until it flattens him?

With my camera I’m like Powers driving the steamroller, with Kenzo in my sights facing down his inevitable doom.

In the last selfie he ever took, Kenzo was lying on his sofa, and the dead man was right on the floor beside the couch, lips pulled back in a rictus grin and eyes leaking from his head.

The next day, Kenzo disappeared.

The popular rumor is that Kenzo faked his own disappearance as a publicity stunt.

Some people are now claiming the whole thing was always a hoax.

But…

What most people don’t realize is that there is an unreleased video of him in his final moments. See, we were scheduled to do a shoot of his final confrontation with the decomposing influencer over by the condo where the guy had died (it seemed thematically appropriate and we figured it would boost our views). Once we were on location, I framed him in the camera view and asked him, “How are you feeling about today’s planned confrontation with the decomposing influencer?” He laughed and said, “Well I can’t see him, so… it’s really hard to know what to expect when we meet.” “Oh that’s right,” I said, “to you it’s just an empty sidewalk. You won’t see him until editing. What if he—HOLY SHIT!!!”

What I remember is how Kenzo cocked his head, while on my camera screen, a bloated body was rising up and reaching for him. And even though he couldn’t see the body, he must’ve felt when the hand gripped him, because his eyes flashed impossibly wide, his mouth gaping in a shriek of absolute terror—

—and then he was gone.

Just… gone.

I’ve rewatched the video over and over.

It doesn’t change. I haven’t posted it.

As popular as I know it would be, I haven’t posted it.

Because I finally realized something. Like I mentioned I’m not photogenic, right? Maybe that’s why it’s taken me so long to notice. I assumed the dead influencer was going for Kenzo. And yeah, he definitely did grab Kenzo and even appeared in selfies Kenzo took without me. But in the videos that I took of Kenzo, the body wasn’t actually getting closer to him—it was getting closer to the camera lens. To me.

And when it finally grabbed Kenzo, in the moments after he disappeared, it was still onscreen and turned its head to glare at me—

I stopped filming.

I haven’t taken any photos or videos since then. I’ve taken down our channel and deleted all our content, hoping that’ll appease the dead dude. But… I got caught in the background of someone else’s selfie recently, and he was there. He was right there, more decomposed than ever, and reaching for me. He hasn’t gotten close enough to grab me yet. But given how hard it is to avoid smartphones these days…

… I can’t help but wonder how long until I, too, feel rotting hands dragging me down to whatever special place in hell is waiting for those who sold their souls for clicks.

First I have to tell you about the trunk.

It belonged to a middle-aged nobody—let’s call them Liu—who had an enormous lake house in the woods. It was Brayden who told us about the house. Said it was full of antique Chinese porcelain and vases and jade and all sorts of valuables. Said that the owner was a recluse who didn’t do anything but collect precious objects and hoard them, that the house was practically a museum.

But the heist was all Jess’s idea. Not mine.

None of it was mine.

Not that it’s an excuse for what happened. I’m just saying, I didn’t intend for any of this. Nobody did.

It’s just that the opportunity was there. Because all those old antique vases—that shit was valuable. Brayden ran an auction biz, that’s how he met Liu, and how he knew that Liu was harmless. A bald-headed hermit of indeterminate gender, Liu was shy and short and nearsighted, and Brayden said, “They’re like if Piglet from Winnie the Pooh was human and hoarded antiques.”

More importantly, Liu distrusted technology and feared government surveillance, and had no cameras. Only a simple alarm system.

“Here’s what we do. We just knock on the door, acting friendly, until the antiques collector disarms the alarm to open it up for us. Easy,” claimed Jess. She was the brassy one, and since Liu might recognize Brayden, she agreed to be the knocker. Not only was our victim near-sighted, but Jess planned to disguise her appearance with makeup and a wig. After the door was open, I’d lunge and tackle Liu. Then we’d bind Liu’s hands with zipties and lock them in a closet while we looted the house.

And at first, everything went off without a hitch.

It was all too easy. Just like Brayden said, Liu answered the door, and surrendered to us like a petrified hare, not even objecting, just shivering until we put the bag over their bald head. The only problem was the closet. The closets were all full—of winter supplies, or cleaning items, or pantry stocks.

Then I spotted the trunk.

A big, lacquered antique trunk with designs all across the top and sides.

I pointed it out to Jess and she got a big grin and we pushed Liu into the trunk and closed and locked it.

Then Brayden came in and silently pointed us to the most valuable items and we packed them all up.

There was a Qing dynasty vase worth $5000. Ming dynasty jades worth tens of thousands. And so much more.

After we left, Brayden mentioned one of us should call the cops and tip them off so that Liu wouldn’t be left in the trunk. Jess said it shouldn’t be one of us. If it got traced back to us, we’d be fucked. And eventually Jess convinced me to talk to my girlfriend-at-the-time, Monique. I told her I’d witnessed a possible break-in and that I didn’t want to call it in myself because I already looked shady, peeking in through the windows. Monique probably suspected something was up—she was reluctant to make the call, but after my wheedling and promising to buy her something nice if she did, she finally agreed. Then we all went out for drinks and celebrated our haul. And since Brayden was the one who was gonna sell the stuff and get our share to us, he gave me and Jess an advance.

It all went off without a hitch.

Until a little over a week later, when Brayden called.

His voice was strained on the phone. “Yo,” he said, “you called in that tip, right?”

“What? Yeah.”

A long pause. And then, “I sent my delivery guy to the house. He said no one was home. Liu’s not answering the phone, either.”

“Delivery?” I echoed, confused.

“Yo I told you about this last week! I know Liu from auction. They bought an item, and I told them I’d make a delivery. I sent my guy to do it. I was also gonna try and get a feel for… for Liu’s reaction to everything, you know? See if they have any suspicions.”

“OK.”

“You sure you called in that tip?”

“Yes! I—I mean, Monique, she said she—”

“Get here NOW.”

Fuck.

On my way to Brayden’s office, I spoke to Monique. She was at work, and I asked if she’d called in that tip last week like she promised and she said, “Oh, shoot, babe.”

My stomach dropped. “What do you mean, ‘shoot’?”

“I didn’t even want to make the call, OK? You pressured me into it! I didn’t want to do it, and I was getting worked up about it because it felt weird, and then… I forgot. All right? What’s the big deal?”

“WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL? THE BIG DEAL IS—” I bit off my words, ‘cause anything else I said could incriminate me. Monique didn’t know any details, just my story about seeing something shady. Yeah it was weak, but she’d seemed to buy it at the time.

All she had to do was call the fuckin’ cops, you know?

None of this would’ve happened if she’d just called the cops like she was fucking supposed to.

So there we were, the three of us, Jess and Brayden and I, standing in Brayden’s office screaming accusations at each other. Then Brayden said we had to go back to the house and check on everything. Jess was firmly against the idea. Brayden said fine he and I would go since he had a delivery to make anyway. I tried to object but he told me, “No, you fucked this up, you’re coming with me.”

So we made the drive up to the lake house. And on our way there, winding through the trees, it struck me how isolated the place was. How deep into the woods and nature and all that crap. And how if you were stuck in a closet or inside a trunk surrounded by jade and porcelain, there would be no neighbors to hear you scream.

Still, somehow the reality hadn’t settled in yet. I clung to the vague notion everything would turn out all right. That we’d break in and open the trunk and that little bald collector would be petrified and traumatized but wouldn’t recognize me. That somehow, they wouldn’t know the hands of the person who pushed them into the trunk.

What kind of idiot am I, that I was worried about being recognized?

Then we were at the house.

That big, beautiful house with the deck overlooking the lake and the tall glass windows. And everything seemed calm. But the front entrance in the shade of the trees was ominous, somehow. And the silence hung too heavy. And Brayden and I got out and approached the door, and both of us just stood there for a moment. When we tried the knob, it was locked. We’d closed it behind us when we left a week ago. No, more than that. It’d been nine days.

Brayden told me to look for another way in.

I didn’t like being bossed around, but apparently that’s how it was since he and Jess both blamed me. So I went around the side of the big house, trying the windows, and to my surprise the window to the living room slid easily upwards. I froze as I peered through the open window into the dim interior, which looked exactly as we’d left it.

And there, still in its place in the corner sandwiched between the sofa and an ornate hutch, was the trunk. Only it appeared to have shifted slightly. It was ever so slightly askew compared to the other items in the room. Compared to the furniture that was almost obsessively positioned, every item in perfect place. The trunk was like a cock-eyed picture frame. Like something inside had been banging around, knocking it out of position.

It was still locked shut.

I pulled my head out of the window and looked back at Brayden. His face looked exactly how mine felt—tight, heavy with dread.

We’d both noticed the smell.

A godawful stink emanating from inside.

***

What’s important is that you understand—it wasn’t supposed to go that way. Nothing went like how it was supposed to. It was all just a mistake. A stupid fucking mistake. But the real problem—the reason I’m writing this post now—is because of what came next. I don’t know what the fuck to do. I can’t ask anyone for help. Can’t go to the police. And here’s the real fucking problem:

The trunk is in my home.

I don’t know how it got here.

All I know is I woke up one morning and it was in my living room.

Wait. Let me back up.

Before that, we had all these antiques, right? We never saw a dime from them. After Brayden and I left the lake house, we didn’t speak to a soul. We didn’t even talk to each other. It was like we just wanted to forget. To act like none of this had happened and like none of us knew each other. We stopped calling each other or hanging around. All of us felt guilty, I guess, and the antiques are still just sitting in one of Brayden’s auction storage facilities somewhere.

Then one evening Jess rang. Said the trunk was in her living room.

I honestly thought she was fucking with me, and I wanted to forget all this trunk bullshit, and I hung up on her.

When I got the news she OD’d, it was a shock, but honestly she’d always been wild. Her death was really fuckin’ sad but not totally surprising when I thought about it.

Then Brayden called me. On the phone, he was freaking out. Asked if I knew how she died. Yeah, I said, I saw on her socials friends posting about how she’d OD’d. He said not just that, her body had been found inside a trunk. That she’d apparently tucked herself inside before overdosing. I asked if he was fucking with me—

“It’s in my living room,” he burst, sounding breathless on the phone. “The trunk.”

I said, “That’s not fucking funny.”

“I’m not fucking joking. It’s here. I’m looking right at it right now, it’s here.”

I told him to quit making shit up, but when he asked me to come over, I did. And we just stood there and looked at it.

It was the exact same fucking trunk. Same ornate designs. Same scuff marks along the surface and the corners. Same crack in one of the mother-of-pearl flowers on the lacquered surface. It was the trunk. I asked him how it got there, and he told me there was nothing on the ring cam. But when he woke up and came into his room this morning it was here. I asked if he’d opened it and he gave me a long look.

Dread settled deep in my gut.

Then, “Fuck it,” I said, and opened the lid.

The groan of the hinges, the whoosh of air as it creaked open—it was like a last gasp of someone or something suffocating. As if the damned thing took a breath. But when I looked into the yawning interior—there was nothing. Nobody. And no body either.

Just a faint stain and a musty, unpleasant odor.

We both stood over it for a long time before Brayden’s nostrils flared and he asked me, “Did you do this?”

I told him no way.

We argued. He said if he went down I was going down too. I told him it wasn’t me. He asked who else knew? Who else coulda done it? Did I think a fuckin’ ghost did it?

I told him maybe Jess set this whole thing up before she died. If she really had crawled into the trunk before OD’ing, maybe she did it as a statement, I said, out of guilt. And maybe arranged to have the trunk brought here after her death to punish us. I’m not sure if he believed me, but I’m telling you, like I told him, it was not me. He told me he was gonna send the trunk to my house and I said he’d better fucking not and that if he did, I’d burn it, and he said “That’s actually a good idea. Help me.”

I didn’t like how he was acting the boss of me but I didn’t like that trunk either, so I helped him. We carved it up with an axe, smashed it all apart and burned it in the firepit out back. It smelled like roasting flesh. It was absolutely foul, lemme tell you. The way the lacquer sizzled and oozed as it shriveled. It looked like we were burning a corpse, and it smelled like it, too.

When it was done, I went home.

But a few days later, I got a call from one of Brayden’s coworkers asking if I’d seen him. He hadn’t been in to work. I panicked and called the cops for a wellness check. I babbled a little on the phone to them, I think. I was just freaked out. Anyway, the cops did a check on him and found him.

In the trunk.

He was burned to a crisp.

But there were no burn marks on the trunk at all.

***

So you see my dilemma?

The trunk. The fucking trunk showed up in my apartment.

First thing I did was lock it in my basement storage. But then I thought, What if I get stuck inside it? Who’ll hear me scream? So then I put it back in the middle of the living room and I set cameras on it, watching it. And I put a magnetized alarm on the lid that triggers when it opens.

The first night I woke up around 1am to the sound of the alarm. I was standing over the trunk, which I had just opened, and it was yawning as if ready to swallow me. I backed up, heart galloping, and my phone rang and I had to tell the alarm company that everything was fine, it was me, I’d tripped it by accident.

Except it wasn’t by accident. Apparently I’d sleepwalked my way over to the trunk and tried to climb in.

I didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night.

Since then I’ve put a padlock on my bedroom door with a numbered combination. I’ve handcuffed myself to the bed and put the key in a bucket of ice. I’ve set an alarm on my bedroom door to wake me if I leave.

This has worked pretty well so far. Usually, I wake up the moment my arm does the polar plunge for the key. A few times I’ve woken fumbling at the padlock. And once, when I fell into a really deep sleep after an exhausting day, I woke up only after the sirens exploded in my ears from my opening the door.

But then yesterday, it almost caught me. I woke up with the yawning ornamental trunk about to swallow me. It was only the pounding on the door that woke me. A neighbor was banging and screaming. I’d sleep-walked right through the alarm, and to be honest didn’t even hear the sirens at first until the neighbor asked me if I was fucking deaf, and I realized he was shouting at me and the reason was so I could hear him over the shrill wail. I turned the sirens off, answered the call from the security company, and then I went to the hardware store.

I bought steel bars and welded them around the trunk in a cage so that the lid can’t be opened more than a couple inches.

But I’m worried it won’t be enough.

The trunk has started to smell. I mean really, really smell. And sometimes it moves. It jerks and thumps inside its steel cage, like there’s something inside it. Or someone. Someone trapped.

I’m afraid to get rid of it. I’m certain if I dump it, it’ll just return. I already know what happens if I burn it. Sometimes I have dreams in which I’m the one inside it, thumping, screaming, begging to be let out, but nobody is around to hear me. And one of these days, I’m afraid I won’t wake up from that dream.

Please, tell me—what the fuck do I do?

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn.

The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn.

Where is the boy who is dressed all in blue?

He’s counting the days, he’s hiding from you!

Is he in the meadow? Or under the bed?

Ten days he’s gone missing—oh whence has he fled?

They’ll find him beside you—stone, cold, dead.

*         *         *

So, there’s this doll. Little Boy Blue.

It was found with an old nursery rhyme scrawled on yellowed paper tucked into its checked blue gown. And ever since the doll was sold at an auction in 2002, fatal misfortune has struck each of its owners. A woman named Frances died by a fall. A collector named Santiago by a car crash. And most tragic of all—a four-year-old died by drowning in the family pool. In each case, the doll went missing for ten days before the fatal accident occurred... and was found beside the corpse.

But were these deaths the result of a curse—or coincidence?

The doll’s newest owner, Theo, bought it online under the assumption that it was just a hokey bit of paranormal paraphernalia to share at a party. Even when the doll disappeared from its locked case, he assumed one of his fellow partygoers had pranked him. But as the days ticked by, his dismissal turned to concern. He realized from cameras that no intruders entered or left his home during the hours of the doll’s disappearance. Furthermore, the only key to the glass case remained in his pocket at all times. And finally he called me, Jack, a paranormal investigator, to help find the doll.

Return it to its case.

But time is running out—he hired me on day nine.

Tomorrow, he dies on day ten.

*         *         *

The first thing I examine is the glass case.

I trace my hands along the exterior, and the laminated warning taped to the front crinkles under my fingers:

DO NOT OPEN THE CASE.

DO NOT TOUCH THE DOLL.

ALWAYS KEEP THE DOLL ON CAMERA.

Theo, hovering over my shoulder, looks exactly like the sort of dude who dies first in a horror movie. Which sounds harsh until you hear him boast. Stuff like, “Bring it Lil’ BB,” and “Let’s see how you like a taste of this genuine samurai sword.” For context, he’s a white guy, gripping the two-handed sword in one hand like an anime character, and with every torturously mispronounced word (“I’m trained in the way of buh-SHE-do”), I find myself rooting harder for the doll.

I should probably stop judging… though his pronunciation is bull-shit-do and what he’s actually saying translates to “I’m trained in the way of the way of the warrior.” I grew up speaking Japanese. Badly, as the son of an immigrant. But not as badly as Theo.

The kid’s only 23 though. And it’s not as if my 20’s weren’t cringe. Pretty sure I even posted a samurai pic on my old Insta, under the classy handle Jack_Kingofforever.

In any case, the lock hasn’t been picked. The door can’t be jangled loose. I trace my fingers along the frame and say, “Either it magically popped open, or…”

“Or someone unlocked it, like I said?” Theo finishes.

I nod.

“I knew it! That chucklefuck Steve and his pranks!”

“It’s not Steve.”

“Then who, bro?”

Theo blinks wide green eyes at me, and he looks like one of those photos you’d see on a milk carton way back when, or a webpage that at second glance you realize is an obituary. There’s just an aura of tragedy. And while the glass case is devoid of any supernatural energies…

Theo here practically radiates bad mojo. He’s swimming before my eyes, hard to see through the vertigo.

“Who?” he repeats. “Who took Lil’ BB? You got any ideas?”

“One,” I say.

“And that is?”

“You opened the locked case.”

*         *         *

Theo both opened the case with his own key and is destined to die by his own hand (and perhaps by his own samurai sword). His haunting has all the hallmarks of possession. The doll likely puts its victims into a trance, during which they hide Little Boy Blue. From there, everything unfolds as in the rhyme: ten days pass. Little Boy Blue cannot be found. On the tenth day, the victim (again in a trance) retrieves it from the place they’ve hidden it, and under its influence… an old woman falls from a ladder, a collector crashes his car, a little girl jumps into a pool. And Little Boy Blue is found beside them—their bodies stone, cold, dead.

Just as Theo will be… unless I can come up with a brilliant plan to save him.

*         *         *

Unfortunately, I have only a mediocre plan.

My plan is get Theo as far as possible from wherever he’s hidden the doll and hold him hostage while waiting out his tenth day. Meanwhile my smarter and better half, Emma, will take the lead in finding the killer doll.

In the pre-dawn grey of morning, Theo and I cruise for miles and miles, pausing only to grab supplies at a Walmart before continuing to a secluded Airbnb cabin perched in the desert amid scrub and endless pale blue sky. While the cabin itself is rather industrial looking, with a steel roof and cinderblock walls, the interior is cleanly furnished with a futon, a small table set, a kitchenette—and crucially, some pretty solid chairs.

“Bed or chair?” I ask him.

“Chair.”

“You sure?”

He plops himself down in one of the hard-backed table chairs, and I hold out a package of Depends. When he glowers, I remind him that he will be my hostage for twenty-four hours, and the bathroom is statistically the second most dangerous room in the house, with one American dying in there on average every day. “If I untie you to take a piss, you could wash your hands, water splashes on the floor—oops. Slip. Fall. Dead.”

“Jokes on you, my guy. I never wash my hands.”

“Ok, buddy.” I say “buddy” like a bouncer as I give him some relevant context: “You are going to die. Not maybe. Not probably. You are going to die the way a man who has jumped out of a plane without a parachute is going to die. My plan? The plan to save your life? That’s your parachute. And every deviation from that plan is you cutting the fucking strings. So you’re gonna put on that diaper, sit in that chair, and quit givin’ me crap—unless it’s in the diaper ‘cause that’s what it’s there for.”

“Fuckin’ unreal,” he mutters.

But he takes the Depends, and after a few minutes emerges from the bathroom with the diaper crinkling under his sweatpants, and for all his bluster it’s the moment I realize how scared he truly is.

*         *         *

“Bad news, Jack,” Emma says over the phone.

She finally received a call back from the Archive of Arcane Artifacts—the occult museum that originally owned Little Boy Blue. The museum’s director admitted that the doll was advertised online to garner attention, but that other vintage dolls from the museum’s collection were to be sent to buyers. An uninformed staff member shipped Little Boy Blue to Theo by mistake. Unfortunately, the museum’s director could offer no solutions or new information beyond what we already know. Everything they have on the doll is from the notes of the collector Santiago N., who passed away in a car crash caused by Little Boy Blue twenty years ago.

With the Archive unable to assist, Emma’s been looking into famous dolls like Annabelle and lesser-known ones like Okiku (said to be possessed by the ghost of a teen girl and have continuously growing hair), as well as esoteric rituals and practices centering dolls. The problem, she tells me, is that we don’t know whether Little Boy Blue is haunted, like Annabelle and Okiku, or cursed, as with witchcraft or voodoo.

“What does it matter?” I ask. “Haunted or hexed, isn’t it all just flavor text?”

“NO. No, you’re not listening. My fear is the doll is less like Chucky, more like a monkey’s paw. Like maybe it attracts misfortune. Which might mean everything you’re doing, all these measures to prevent Theo’s death, might actually wind up causing him to die.”

Shit.

I think about what I told Theo about the parachute. Think about how if he’s incredibly unlucky the metaphorical lines might entangle and choke him, and he could die wrapped in the very strings I told him not to cut. Because one thing you can’t fight is fate…

“Try not to kill Theo,” Emma suggests helpfully. “I’m going to keep searching and hope we can find the doll before it finds him.”

*         *         *

Theo sits zip-tied to the chair while I’m stationed at the desk, keeping watch on my laptop. The screen displays four camera views: bright red door, dusty sun-bathed road, patio with grill and firepit, tin-roofed cabin perched in the desert. I’ve set up surveillance in case Lil’ BB defies expectations and comes skulking through the desert to sneak up on us, though I consider this the least likely scenario for our face-off with the killer doll. Theo’s last sighting of it was at 9am nine days ago. Both of us stare at the clock on the wall in the final few seconds as the hands tick forward to 9am—beginning his tenth day. I hit a countdown timer on Theo’s tablet: 24:00:00, 23:59:59, 23:59:58, etc.

And we’re off.

*         *         *

Incidentally, by now, I absolutely should know where the doll is. I have all the information I need to figure out where it is hiding.

I could blame a lot of things: sleep deprivation, the weird rockiness between me and Emma lately, fears for my future marriage, the fact Theo is unequivocally my most annoying client—which sounds harsh unless you’ve spent the past three hours listening to his terrible startup ideas (“Humans look for love on apps, so like, why not doggos? ‘Puppy Love’ was conceived to fill the dog dating-app void…”).

But the truth is, the person I am most annoyed with is myself. I’m missing something, something that I know in hindsight will be the kind of obvious like when you wonder where your sunglasses are and they’re already on your face, throwing shade…

I don’t want Theo to die.

But I especially don’t want him to die because I’m an idiot.

*         *         *

Two hours into Theo’s final day, and I really wish I’d swapped jobs with Emma. She’s much better at research than me, but she also has a higher tolerance for idiocy (I give her a ton of practice)—whereas I, hypocritically, can’t stand other people’s dumbassery.

Bro keeps inundating me with YouTube videos. He’s got his phone in one hand, his wrists zip-tied to the arms of the chair, and he’s casting to the TV. The latest vids are from a channel called “Jon drinks water” that somehow has more than 70,000 subscribers, and all I can do is marvel at how much money and resources and time have gone into micro processing and near-instantaneous satellite communications all so we can watch an average-joe take gulps from water bottles. It’s the most low-effort channel in existence. I am both gobsmacked at the insane popularity of Jon drinks water and deeply offended at the longevity of a series that spans over a decade from #1 to #10029.

Just when I think we’ve reached the limit of human stupidity, Theo asks, “Wanna see what’s even dumber?” and before I can refuse, he opens up reaction videos to Jon drinking water.

We are now watching YouTubers watch Jon drink water.

If I were God and I had made this world this is the point at which I would flood it. Except then Jon would probably just make more videos, a lot of them, of him drinking all that water.

*         *         *

“Dude I am so stiff can’t you just like uncuff me for a second? Just let me walk around?”

“Bro I will give you fifty bucks to uncuff me for five minutes.”

“Bro… bro, can you scratch my nose? It really fuckin’ itches!”

“How much time left?”

“Dude, are those doritos? Gimme… what of course I’m not gonna choke! Let me have one!”

“I need my nose scratched again.”

“If I can’t eat, you can’t eat. It’s only fair if you’re gonna make me suffer here. I won’t pay a fuckin’ cent if I gotta watch you eat… Put that shit away.”

Four hours in, and where the fuck is Little Boy Blue?

I need it to come and kill Theo for me.

*         *         *

Six hours in, and Theo is now accusing me of “torturing” him.

He is threatening to withhold payment unless I untie him so he can stretch. His life is (maybe?) more important than my payment, so despite his threats, I continue to hold him against his will. Though with every passing moment, I am more ready to unlock the door, swing it wide open, and escort Lil’ BB in myself.

In retaliation, Theo introduces me to “Jon drinks water popping 500 balloons.”

*         *         *

Theo is now actively attempting to free himself while watching YouTube videos about how to escape a kidnapping situation.

“Just wait,” he growls. “As soon as I get out, I’m gonna take a piss, then I’m gonna punch your fuckin’ face in.”

His need to use the toilet and the stiffness of his ass from sitting in the chair have made him really ornery. He bends his head down to gnaw at the zip-ties.

Since he’s already declared I’m going unpaid, I grab a bag of chips and toss ‘em into my mouth like popcorn.

*         *         *

Seven hours in and Theo has finally given up the struggle, his head lolling against the pillows I’ve propped around him. It’s mid-afternoon, and I assume he’s napping… until I hear soft sniffling and realize, with some surprise, that he’s probably crying. And suddenly he pipes up: “Hey, have you ever talked to ghosts?”

My glazed eyes are staring at the outdoor surveillance cams. Nothing has moved except the sun and shadows. “Once. It’s pretty rare for them to talk.”

“’Cause like, I was thinking…” Sniffle. “… like if hauntings are real, and if like, spirits are real, then that means we must have souls, right? So like when I die, I’ll see my dog?”

And suddenly I’m struck by what an asshole I am. Here I am, bemoaning this kid’s Youtube tastes and his threats and his tantrums when it’s all because he’s scared as shit—scared he’s going to die, scared that I’m not taking this seriously. I’ve been so exasperated, treating him like a pain in my ass, but all his babbling about his startups isn’t because he assumes his ideas are good—what he’s really wondering is whether he’ll live long enough to attempt to make them. And as stressful as his confinement is, not only is it a million times worse for him than for me, but he’s in so many ways still just a kid. A scared kid who just wants his dog, the dog that probably inspired his stupid app and fuck me. “Look, Theo,” I tell him, “I’m sorry, but your dog’s gonna hafta wait a little longer to see you. ‘Cause you hired me so Lil’ BB’s not getting to you, OK? I promise.”

“Yeah? You’re that good, huh?” The ghost of a smile.

“Yeah.” I can’t look him in the eye. Looking at him—it makes my heart race and my eyes burn. Makes the nausea clench my belly. I think it’s the fear I might be lying about being able to save him.

“… but you said you dunno what makes it work.”

“Nope.”

“So what you’re doing, all this torturing me, basically, might cause me to die.”

I hate the chill that slinks up my spine when he says that. “Maybe,” I reluctantly admit.

“So you should let me have a chip.”

Dumbass kid. “Nope.”

*         *         *

Eight hours in, and I’m about to be #teamLilBB

I made the mistake of letting Theo use his phone, and now he’s threatening to call 911 if I don’t untie him.

“This is fucking KIDNAPPING, man, it’s a CRIME you’re holding me hostage against my will FUCK YOU if you don’t untie me I’ll call the cops and have you arrested AND I won’t pay you they’ll throw you in fuckin’ prison for this—”

Fuck this kid and his dead dog, too. I untie him.

*         *         *

“You did WHAT??” Emma is livid on our video call.

“It’th not hith fault, I made him!” Theo announces from where he lounges on the bed, munching on chips and getting crumbs everywhere. He swallows and adds, “I threatened to call the cops. Look, it’s fine. I’m fine. It’s probably all Steve’s prank! We’ll just chill here for sixteen more hours—”

“It is not fine. Jack, you need to tie him up right now! Christ, I’m heading there.”

“Hey can you pick up a pizza on your way?” I ask.

“I’ll take a supreme and a cheese,” pipes up Theo.

Emma mouths at me to call her back privately. Now. She hangs up. I tell Theo I gotta use the toilet and he has to be zip-tied while I’m in there, and he makes a face and mutters, “Dude, how much coffee did you drink? Maybe you should wear the diaper.”

Emma is gonna have a lot of questions when she arrives to find this kid already dead.

Anyway I manage to get him back in the chair, Theo tolerating the zip-ties so long as I agree to unbind him after, and I call Emma back.

Her nose wrinkles. “Ew, are you on the toilet?”

“Yes. Babe, just tell me what—”

“OK, listen. You have to keep Theo tied up. I talked to Santiago’s widow—his death wasn’t an accident.” Santiago N. was the collector who procured Little Boy Blue and displayed it in his shop for years until he died in 2006 in a car wreck. Emma continues urgently: “He intentionally veered into oncoming traffic.”

I take a breath as I consider this. So Santiago got behind the wheel, presumably while carrying the doll, and caused his own crash? That fits my hypothesis of how Theo removed Lil’ BB from its case under the haunting’s influence. And looking back at the previous incidents—the fall from the ladder, the drowning from the pool—those deaths also fit the pattern of victims causing their own “accidents.” So as long as we don’t allow Theo to retrieve the doll and initiate his own death, he’ll be safe.

“So we just keep him restrained until—”

“Until when? Jack, how do we know when it’ll stop?” I can feel the migraine creeping behind my eyes as she leans in and says, “There’s only one way to guarantee he’ll live. We need to find the doll.”

*         *         *

Emma will monitor Theo while I go search his house. Or at least that’s the plan—until she arrives wreathed in the aroma of Italian herbs and greasy mozz, and Theo absolutely loses his shit. He demands to be released because he will “literally die” if he can’t eat that pizza, so I snip the zip tie on one of his hands and tell Emma I’ll stay until he’s done eating. Midway into his second slice, Theo demands to use the bathroom and claims refusing him violates the Geneva Convention and I think, Not this shit again. I’m getting a real sense of déjà poo.

Surprisingly, Emma agrees to let him use the facilities unsupervised.

From inside, Theo loudly complains (through the door kept ajar at my insistence) about how Emma is so much nicer than I am.

“Good luck with this,” I warn Emma.

When he emerges, he grabs a pizza box and plops onto the bed.

“You’re going to have to get back in the chair—” begins Emma

“Just lemme eat! It’s like torture, for real. My body needs a break.”

He glares as he bites into his pizza, and Emma sighs and looks at me. And because I’m a genuinely bad person, I tell Theo that Emma’s never seen Jon drink water.

Emma’s all business, though, cutting through the kid’s YouTube bullshit and explaining that she’s already searched the house, but wants me to go over each floor and the grounds again focusing on my attunement to the paranormal…

… only I’m not really listening, I’m watching Theo gobble the pizza, grease dribbling from his lips. His fingers stuff the crust into his mouth and then he grabs his soda, guzzles, sets it down and wipes his hand on his shirt and grabs his phone and leaves oily prints. I feel nauseous, bad vibes oozing from the kid as he swims in my vision, and that same hand reaches for another slice.

And suddenly I realize what I’m seeing. And I am such an idiot. Oh my God, such an idiot.

I know how Little Boy Blue killed them.

When Theo closes the lid and sets the box aside, I tell him to sit in the chair.

He frowns. “What’s the rush, bro? Just let me relax a little.”

“Now.”

“Why?” he snaps.

Emma intervenes, cajoling, like a teacher at an elementary school to a kid on the brink of a tantrum. But it’s too late—Theo’s agitated, regardless of whether it’s her or me telling him what to do.

“Why? Why is it SO IMPORTANT I be tied up?” he snaps, and I squint as the vertigo worsens, knowing it’s already too late so I just tell him what I should have figured out yesterday when we met for the first time.

“Theo, what’s in your hand?” I say.

“Huh?” He looks at his phone.

“This whole time, you’ve been eating with one hand, setting down the pizza and picking up your drink, setting down your drink and picking up your phone. In fact you were doing that yesterday, too, when you were swinging around the katana, a two-handed sword, but using only one hand. Why? What’s in your other hand?”

His head cocks like a spaniel’s, and he slowly turns from the greasy phone in his fingers to his other hand, held in a loose fist resting on his chest.

Here’s the thing about the paranormal: by definition it doesn’t belong in our world, so to influence material objects takes a lot of energy. To make the doll get up and run around—that would be an impossible feat for most ghosts. That’s why it’s so difficult to find physical proof, because the paranormal rarely impacts the physical world beyond flickering lights or the occasional temperature drop. In fact, the most common kind of paranormal influence is psychological. Effects on perception, judgment, decisions. Like veering into traffic because you see yourself in the wrong lane. Like losing your balance on a ladder because you’re suddenly struck by vertigo. Like stumbling into the pool because you think the surface is concrete. It can make you see something that’s not there…

… Or not see something that is there.

That miasma of bad mojo around Theo—I assumed what I was sensing was his impending doom. But Little Boy Blue’s influence, though strongest on its victim, also influences everyone else in proximity. And so all of us—me, Emma, Theo—are not seeing the same thing. That’s why my skin’s been crawling so much, my eyes watering. Especially when I look at Theo. Especially when I look at his closed hand. It’s what the last lines of the rhyme have been telling us all along—whence has he fled?

They’ll find him beside you.

“The reason everyone dies with the doll beside them is because they’re carrying it,” I say.

They carry the doll for ten days. Nobody sees. (A camera would, and I’m kicking myself for aiming my surveillance cams outside instead of in here.) On the tenth day, the doll’s delusions kick into high gear and drive its owner to their death.

I hold out a hand and step closer and say, “Give me the doll.”

Theo just stares at me, green eyes going almost impossibly wide.

And then he screams and, still holding his closed fist to his chest, he flings the pizza box at me.

*         *         *

It’s impossible to know what Theo sees as he springs from the bed, glancing frantically between the door and window, looking like nothing so much as a panicking dog scrabbling for an exit.

“Theo STOP! Stop moving!” Emma shouts.

But he doesn’t hear her and we have no choice. We have to take him down.

This, THIS is why I didn’t want to untie him, not even for a moment, not even to use the bathroom. Because now we have a 6’2” hallucinating maniac who might bolt for the door, might bolt for the window, might even bolt straight for the wall and bash his brains out against the cinderblock. Unless we stop him right here his delusions will drive him to run off into the desert, or leap in front of a car or swan dive off a cliff. Emma and I cannot let him leave.

While Emma keeps trying to talk him down, I raise my fists.

I’m a natural-born coward, not made for fighting. But when I was around Theo’s age and still early in my transition, I didn’t yet have the beard or the muscles or the chiseled abs (Yep, definitely have those now, would I lie to you?). What I did have was a mouth that made very bad choices for my face. There was this one time in particular I had the shit kicked outta me, so afterward I found my way to this MMA gym. It was all dudes who’d been doing taekwondo since they were toddlers. They told me they required some background in BJJ, kung fu, etc., so I explained my situation—that my parents never allowed me in martial arts because it wasn’t appropriate for a “girl.” So I’d never been taught to throw a punch but was now getting quite the education in receiving them. Could they teach my fists to back up my mouth?

The instructor sympathized. He was a gay marine, and understood what it meant to be targeted. He also warned me later, “Bruce Lee couldn’t back up your mouth. Maybe wise up and be less of a wiseass, huh?”

Long story short I trained long enough to learn what I needed. So now, when a panicked Theo takes a swing, I duck. He telegraphs his motion so clumsily it feels almost too easy to catch his arm on the next punch, twisting my back to him and dropping to throw him over my shoulder. Slamming on the floor knocks the wind from him. I bark at Emma but she’s already here, jerking and tugging at something in his fist, and Theo writhes while I pin him. There’s the rrrrrriiiiiiip of fabric and suddenly Theo goes limp. Emma tumbles backwards. She scrabbles into the wall and I swear I hear her skull ring as she hits it.

Cursing, I yank a ziptie from my back pocket and bind Theo’s wrists together while Emma curls in a fetal position.

“Did I hurt her?” he keeps asking. “Did I hurt her?”

I scurry to Emma who whimpers like a whipped dog with her arms pinned against her chest. But Emma—brave, brilliant Emma—she twitches, shrieks, and hyperventilates, but she does not let the doll trick her into running.

I retrieve a jackknife from my bag, then move behind her and wrap my arms around her almost as if in an embrace. I grab her forearms, gently but firmly, and tug.

Emma resists.

I have to grip her extremely hard to force her arms away from her body, and she cries out as I pin her beneath me, arms splayed out in front of her. I grab the jackknife and stab it into the spot where my vision wavers the most, right by her clenched fists. Emma (or the doll?) screams, and something squirms under the blade. It feels like I’ve impaled an animal, like something alive, flailing on the end of that knife, even though I know the sensation can’t be real. And I lift the blade and it bucks and jerks in my grip. In my vision the tip of the knife is swimming and I glimpse flashes of a child writhing as I rush to the firepit outside to throw the whole squiggling and squirming mess in. I grab lighter fluid from beside the grill and pour it around the knife and then I light it up.

As the flames rise, I record the scene on my phone.

Later Emma and Theo will both tell me the doll showed them the same thing: me attacking them. Likely because it wanted to neutralize me as a threat. Now, the sense of nausea churning in my belly gradually settles. The chill that was prickling my skin burns off in the desert heat. My vision clears, and I see the flames devouring the doll, scraps of blue cloth turning to black, its tiny inked mouth widening and curling as the fire consumes the cloth and stuffing until there is nothing but ash.

*         *         *

Through the haze of cheap beer and tequila, Theo and I wear headbands and pose with katanas and take selfies in front of the laughing, babbling crowd. We’re celebrating, Theo recounting the Lil’ BB story to his friends, showing off the glass case, the website and doll photos, even the Depends. And after hours of accolades and cheers and slaps on the back—man, it feels good!—afterwards, I go outside and light up a joint under the stars in the desert air, breathing the buzz into my lungs.

I sit there awhile and watch the scintillating sky and try to grasp at that elusive sensation, happiness. We’ve just ended a terrifying hundred-year-old haunting. So why do I feel like a sour note?

(Probably because it would’ve been a lot less hassle if I’d just aimed a camera at the kid from the get-go. Frigging amateur hour…)

The door slides open behind me, and Emma sidles next to me.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” I say, and offer her the joint but she declines. And we just lean together in silence for awhile, and eventually I ask her, “Hey… we good?”

“Of course! Why do you ask?”

“I dunno. You seemed pretty annoyed at me during most of this trip.”

“That’s because you were being annoying.”

“Okay. Well… before today, too.” I don’t know how to say what I’m trying to say. She pulls away from me so she can study my face, and I tell her, “It used to be easy to make you laugh.”

“Babe! You still make me laugh. But… you know.” And then she catches me off-guard, in that blunt way this girl sometimes has that feels like a sucker punch when she says, “The honeymoon phase doesn’t last forever.”

And all I’m thinking is, She’s past the honeymoon phase?

We haven’t even had our actual honeymoon. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised—she’s been keeping count of how many days I leave my socks on the floor (old bachelor habits die hard). Still, to hear her say it out loud pulls me up short, and Emma must see that in my face because she launches into a lecture about love, about togetherness, about “stable romance”—whatever the fuck that means.

“… Instead of infatuation and butterflies like on your first date,” she says like I’m the slowest student in her Intimacy 101 seminar, “it’s like… like dressing in pajamas instead of dressing up. Being comfortable, because you’re with the person you ask every night, what do you want to do for dinner, for the rest of your lives.”

“I pretty much always let you pick,” I say, partly because I’m still processing, but also Emma’s the one with dietary restrictions. I add, “Usually after you present me with choices. But they’re false choices because you secretly know which restaurant you want, and I have to guess and if I guess wrong then you suggest the other one so we go to that one and then I think… why not just tell me the one you want in the first place?”

Emma is glaring. “Ok, fine, I do do that,” she admits. “But you always say you don’t care, but you secretly have preferences!”

“Of course I have preferences! It’s just… my biggest preference is that I get to eat with you, so.” I shrug, and pull her closer and add: “That’s what I want. You ask me what we do for dinner. You give me false choices. I tell you what I want, you choose anyway, and we go together. For the rest of our lives.”

Emma smacks my arm, but her eyes are shining, and she leans up and kisses me.

Maybe I’m just not done chasing highs yet, but to me there’s no star brighter than this girl in my arms.

But for tonight, we’ve defeated a hundred-year-old doll, everyone is alive, and we’re riding high in victory. So at least for now, I guess, we can worry about forever another day. It ain’t going nowhere.

Here’s the deal: there’s this cloth doll. Vintage. It’s called “Little Boy Blue.” Goes up for sale online, with a warning: Anyone who holds this doll dies. Not right away, no. But according to the seller, the doll has a history. It always disappears ten days before a horrific accident befalls its owner… and then reappears beside the owner’s corpse.

Which sounds staged.

Or bogus.

So who came up with this bullshit story?

Turns out the doll is being sold by The Archive of Arcane Artifacts, an independent “museum” which is really more of a modest building filled with supposedly haunted paraphernalia. But we’re deep in an economic crash and they’re deep in the red, so selling some of their stock is their only hope of staying afloat. They’ve got a listing for a haunted recorder (“It plays itself!”), a creepy painting of a smiling girl (“Her expressions change, and so does your luck!”), an old telephone (“The line is dead… just like the callers you’ll hear!”), etc. Every haunted item comes with a disclaimer about how the museum is not liable for any misfortune incurred by the purchase of said item.

Little Boy Blue, in particular, comes with extra warnings in bold lettering on the glass case housing the doll:

DO NOT OPEN THE CASE.

DO NOT TOUCH THE DOLL.

ALWAYS KEEP THE DOLL ON CAMERA.

The doll sits with other items under a surveillance camera in its locked case until a man named Theo spots it in a hokey online advert and decides it will make a great conversation piece and that his buddies will get a kick out of it. Little Boy Blue arrives packed in a crate, still locked in its glass display case. Later that week at a party at his cushy California home, Theo puts Little Boy Blue on display and promptly breaks every warning.

He opens the case.

He picks up the doll.

Fast-forward to today—the doll has disappeared.

I, con-artist turned paranormal investigator Jack, am currently on video call with Theo. I have a reputation for cracking the most cryptic cases. Theo’s ask for me is simple:

Find the doll.

Return it to its case.

*         *         *

“… I’m like ninety percent sure one of my buddies has it. It vanished, like, three days after the party. I mean, fuckin’ dumb.” He laughs, the camera wobbling as he walks. “Like bro, such an obvious prank!”

Behind his tanned, 20-something face are palm trees, traffic, blue sky. The sun winks off his shades as he repeats in a too-chipper tone about how he’s certain it’s a prank, haha. He talked to Steve. Steve is a douche and had that shitty grin that means he’s up to something. It’s gotta be Steve. His mouth is motoring a mile a minute, his eyes too wide, his laugh too loud, and he adds, “But just in case. How much for your services?”

My services. LOL. Makes it sound like he’s paying me for a blowjob in the park. I don’t list fees for my “services” because I operate on a sliding scale—as in, when I see you’re a trust fund kid livin’ it up in on the West Coast with selfies shot in Sao Paulo and the Galapagos, I slide up my scale. I tick off on my fingers the expenses I’d incur traveling to California—airfare, hotel—

“I’ll cover all that,” he says. “But I need you today.”

“Today?”

“Yeah, you know this thing is on, like, a timer—”

“I have other bookings.”

I don’t have other bookings. But I’ve got Theo here by the balls, and pretty soon I’ve negotiated an all-expenses paid gig to sunny SoCal for myself and my “assistant” Emma (actually my fiancée and the two of us have been hitting some discordant notes lately so we could use the vacay). Theo lays out the details of the doll’s disappearance:

“I have the only key.” The camera shakes wildly and then goes black as he tucks his phone into his pocket, and there’s rustling and a metallic tinkle and the phone comes out and focuses on a small silver key he’s dropped on the sidewalk. “See? I keep it with me. So…” More shuffling around until he gets the key back in his pocket and resumes his walk. “Like, someone had to have pickpocketed it and put it back, somehow without my noticing. Or made a copy. Or the doll magically unlocked itself from inside.”

“You got any cameras in the house?” I ask.

“Yeah, hang on, I’m sending you a pic…” He taps on his phone. “I took this at 9am on the morning it disappeared. When I got home around 1pm it was gone. Cameras are only on the entrances and didn’t catch any vehicles in the driveway or anybody approaching or leaving, just me pulling into the garage. But somehow, poof! It’s gone. So like, any ideas, investigator-man?”

“How many days since it disappeared?”

He pauses. Puffs out a breath and then looks up at the blue sky. “Uh…. Since, um… last Saturday.”

I glance at my calendar. Then I look again and frown.

“Last Saturday?”

“Yeah.”

“Nine days?”

He laughs nervously and bites his lip. “Yeah…” He adds, “I mean, that’s why I’m willing to pay so much for you to find it, ya know? Just… get here today.”

Nine days.

On the tenth day, the doll reappears… on the corpse of the victim at the scene of a horrible accident.

Tomorrow is his final day.

*         *         *

Little Boy Blue looks exactly like you’d expect a cursed doll to look.

In the photo Theo sent, it sits inside its glass case partially obscured by the laminated rules pasted onto the door. Sewn of a peach-colored fabric, with stubby arms and legs like a sock doll, it has no buttons for eyes or yarn for hair. Instead, its face has been painted in ink. But the ink has faded, so that its nose and mouth have blurred together in a reddish smear. Its eyes are ovals with two pinprick black dots in the center, as if someone colored them with a magic marker. Its hair is a dark brown stain on the back of its cloth head. At a squint, it almost looks like it is smiling—a pink smile drooling down its chin. It wears a checked blue gown, the old-fashioned sort children wore back in whatever early American period this was made.

Words really can’t do justice to this cloth doll. Lil’ BB is creepy af.

The description on the Archive of Arcane Artifacts website reads:

Little Boy Blue is a vintage cloth doll estimated to be about a century old. Nothing is known about its early history. It was discovered in an attic in the early 2000’s and sold in a box lot at auction to a woman named Frances S. Frances died several months after purchasing the lot when she fell from a ladder at her home. She was allegedly found with the doll lying beside her.

Little Boy Blue was subsequently sold to a collector named Santiago N., who put the doll on display in his antique shop, where it garnered the admiration of visitors until it disappeared suddenly one afternoon in 2006. Santiago searched everywhere but Little Boy Blue could not be found. Ten days later, he was involved in a fatal car crash. The cloth doll was found beside him in the wreckage.

The most tragic occurrence was in 2016, after Little Boy Blue resurfaced at a flea market, where a tween boy purchased it as a joke to scare his sisters. After he scared the older sister with it, he moved it to their littlest sibling Sarah’s room, from where the doll disappeared. Ten days later, the boy woke up to screams. Little Sarah had drowned in the pool, and was floating there alongside Little Boy Blue. (For privacy reasons, the children’s names have been withheld.)

The bereaved family donated the accursed doll to The Archive of Arcane Artifacts in order that its paranormal effects be documented. Today, it remains an object of fascination for supernatural researchers. It sits inside its locked glass case, monitored 24/7 by security cameras, waiting for its opportunity to escape and be claimed by its next owner…

*         *         *

Color me skeptical, but I am pretty sure the reason the names are withheld is less to do with them being private and more to do with them being fictional—can’t fact check ‘em if they aren’t there! As for Santiago and Frances—sure, there are obituaries matching those names and describing accidents. BUT, no mention of any doll in connection with their deaths.

Now, did Santiago own the doll, and have it on display in his antique shop? Sure. In fact, his obituary shows a picture of him smiling in the store, and on a shelf behind him is Little Boy Blue. I’m guessing the museum acquired the doll because it was vintage and creepy, then strung together details from these obituaries into this totally bogus story. (Totally bogus, that is, unless you’re named Theo. Which reminds me I have a joke for Theo when we meet. If you say “gullible” really slowly it sounds like “oranges.”)

But hey, one man’s prank is another man’s paid vacay! I’m lounging in the airport bar with a pina colada in hand, having refused to do any research until we land in Cali because it’s probably a crock and the easiest way to know if more effort is needed is to meet Theo in person. Instead, I have been looking up restaurants and tourist attractions and (as I admit to Emma when she asks me how it’s going) trying to figure out, “which beach has the hottest bab—sand,” I correct.

Emma doesn’t laugh. “We’re being paid so we should put in the hours.” She sounds exactly like the teacher’s pet who insists “study hall” is for studying. “You said his last sighting of the doll was at 9am that Saturday. By the time we arrive, it’ll be close to 10pm… that only gives us tonight and early morning to prep for his last day. I’ve reached out to the families of Frances and Santiago and to the museum. That’s about as much as I can do for now to verify the history of Little Boy Blue.”

“Why’s it called ‘Little Boy Blue’ anyway? Isn’t that a nursery rhyme or something?” I muse. “‘Little boy blue, come blow my’…” I pause as I sip my drink. “Huh… that can’t be right.”

“It’s not yours, it’s his own he’s blowing,” says Emma. I start to giggle, and she smacks my shoulder. “His own horn. He’s blowing his own horn.”

“Wish I were that flexible.”

“’Little boy blue, come blow your horn, the sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.’ Stop ruining nursery rhymes and just focus for a minute! Jack, what if we walk in, and you get tingles?”

She means the unpleasant skittering sensation along my skin, that chill like spiders in my flesh and frost in my veins. I have what you might call a “sensitivity” to hauntings, ever since my own personal (and nearly fatal) encounter.

“I won’t,” I say.

“But if you do?” she insists.

I shrug. “RIP Theo.”

Emma glares.

I sigh and put down my pina colada. “Ok, if that happens, we tell Theo that tomorrow being his last day really only leaves him with two options.”

“Which are?”

“Cremation or burial.”

“Jack!”

“Emma. If discount-Annabelle really is haunting him, it’s gonna be tough to catch it.” I lean back in my chair and spread my hands. “But I’m telling you, it’s a hoax! You know why? ‘Cause if the doll were able to disappear from its locked case, it woulda done that years ago!”

“Maybe it didn’t because they kept a camera on it.”

“Pffft. This is a vintage doll. Cameras didn’t even exist a hundred years ago, so how would any spirit inhabiting the doll even know to look out for them? Come on. He told an entire party of college-aged buddies about it—obviously one of them’s pranking him! Besides, not like we can prevent an accident if that’s how he goes.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that if it is real…” Emma’s eyes narrow because she can sense what’s coming but I just can’t help myself as I finish, “… It means Theo won’t just be in a jam—he’ll be toast.”

*         *         *

It turns out there actually is a specific nursery rhyme associated with Little Boy Blue. Not the traditional one. No, per the museum’s website: “The doll was discovered with a yellowed paper tucked into its frock, on which was written a rhyme—or curse. This terrifying rhyme is thought to be as old as the doll itself.”

So how did a hundred-year-old scrap of paper manage to remain with the doll through auctions, flea markets, car accidents, and drownings? Just one of those funny things, I guess, like how if you say “coincidence” really slowly it sounds like “oranges.” (Emma maintains that it could’ve been with the doll when it was first found and replaced by a replica later.)

In any case, this is the rhyme:

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn.

The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn.

Where is the boy who is dressed all in blue?

He’s counting the days, he’s hiding from you!

Is he in the meadow? Or under the bed?

Ten days he’s gone missing—oh whence has he fled?

They’ll find him beside you—stone, cold, dead.

*         *         *

Emma has relegated me to the window seat while she takes the aisle, her headphones on while she focuses on “work,” leaving an empty seat between us to give her some space from my jokes.

We’re 30,000 feet up, the sun igniting the sky in passionate colors outside the window. I suspect she’s irritable because she’s hungry, vegan, and has just declined the flight attendant’s offer of a meal due to the lack of options. I tell the flight attendant I’ll have their sandwich plate and tell Emma, “You know the worst part of being vegan? It’s a big missed steak.” She grumbles that I need a permaban from r/ dadjokes and as soon as the flight crew has moved on, gets up to go to the bathroom. Disappointingly, she is going to pee, and not slipping off a few minutes ahead of me so that we can join the mile high club.

The seatbelt sign flashes on, and the captain announces a rough patch. It all feels like an on-the-nose metaphor. Every morning I wake next to this incredible girl, we have stupendous sex in a big gorgeous house and she’s chasing her dreams and I’m living mine and yet… I exasperate her on a daily basis. Anything from forgetting to restock the toilet paper to what she calls my signature sock move (she once asked me to proofread a paper but when I opened the attachment it was titled: “The hamper is right there: the story of a breakup”). Most of my adult life I’ve been living single. Now that I’m cohabiting I’m realizing that 90% of our future marriage is likely to be arguing about when to load the dishwasher or make the bed (the only correct answer is never, because you just unmake it when you go to sleep, but Emma says that is “typical bachelor” behavior and as usually happens when we argue about laundry, I fold).

Strip away the love hormones and I’m not sure we’re domestically compatible. I chalk up our longevity to her fetish for saving lost souls. She has a history of dating self-absorbed assholes. Her exes are like Russian nesting dolls, full of themselves.

And I don’t know whether I fit that mold or break it.

Lately, even my jokes don’t land—Emma looked at me after that “missed steak” pun like I’d just told her I drop-kick puppies for pleasure. So this vacay? Sure, it’s a gig. But I look out the window at the blazing sky and hope we can bring some of that fire back with us.

I resign myself to enduring the rest of the flight in relative solitude. I’m just settling back in my chair and putting my earbuds in when—

Ping!

I glance over at Emma’s phone in her seat.

Ping!

Ping!

Ping!

I peer over my shoulder down the aisle but Emma is still in the bathroom. And while normally I don’t touch her phone without her permission, some hunch leads me to pick it up after the next ping.

THE ARCHIVE OF ARCANE ARTIFACTS: Please read! There was a mixup among our staff. The doll you received, “Little Boy Blue,” was incorrectly listed despite not being for sale. We would be happy to immediately replace it with any of the other dolls in our collection or to refund you the cost. Please contact us immediately at >![redacted]!<.

THE ARCHIVE OF ARCANE ARTIFACTS: Urgent! Mr. Theo W., we are contacting you again about Little Boy Blue. We would be happy to reimburse you for the cost of the doll and shipping for its return, as well as send you a replacement from our vintage collection at no cost to you. This doll was not for sale and we would greatly appreciate its return.

THE ARCHIVE OF ARCANE ARTIFACTS: Urgent! My name is Mai, I am the director for The Archive. Please contact me immediately at >![redacted]!<…

The messages get more and more frantic. They’ve come through so rapidly, it’s obvious they’ve been copied and pasted, presumably from messages sent originally to Theo. The last few are directed to Emma:

THE ARCHIVE OF ARCANE ARTIFACTS: See forwarded msgs above

THE ARCHIVE OF ARCANE ARTIFACTS: My calls to you are going to voicemail. Please reach me at >![redacted]!<

THE ARCHIVE OF ARCANE ARTIFACTS: If you are in contact with Theo W., you MUST convince him to return the doll.

THE ARCHIVE OF ARCANE ARTIFACTS: Little Boy Blue is strongly believed to cause a fatal outcome to its owner. This is not a hoax. I will forward you what I sent to him. My name is Mai, I am the person who procured the doll in the aftermath of the tragic death of Sarah W. (I ask you not share that name out of respect for the family’s privacy)

THE ARCHIVE OF ARCANE ARTIFACTS: See attached. DO NOT SHARE

The link is to a folder on Google drive.

When I open it, inside the folder are a mix of images and videos. They are all from July of 2016, all from the same device according to the metadata. There are a series of photos of a flea market, one of them showing a pudgy, pale hand holding up Little Boy Blue against the backdrop of fold-out tables covered in boxes of antiques and junk.

There’s also a photo of a small child, maybe four years old, sitting on her bed holding Little Boy Blue, her expression comically frightened. It’s the sort of photo that would be funny to share years later, if not for the videos.

There are three videos.

The first shows the sun-drenched grass, the camera wobbling as it approaches a girl of about ten who is plucking weeds from the driveway. A tween boy’s voice speaks (from the volume, it’s clear he’s the person holding the phone) and says, “I got you a present.” The girl squints against the sun, and the boy’s pudgy hand thrusts Little Boy Blue at her. She grabs the doll and turns it around, looks at its face with the smear of a mouth and says, “That’s disgusting!” Then she flings it like a champion quarterback, and the camera pivots to catch its distant shape thudding in the grass. “How ungrateful,” huffs the boy’s voice as he marches across the grass to retrieve the doll.

Cute. Silly. It seems like typical little kid stuff. I cannot decide if it is staged. Vaguely, I am aware of Emma returning from the bathroom. She asks sharply why I am on her phone and I tell her it was pinging like crazy and she reads through the messages and asks, “Do you think it’s legit?”

I don’t know. We each take an earbud as she opens the next video.

This one is only a few seconds, showing Little Boy Blue being carried up the stairs. The boy’s voice says, “Maybe Sarah will like you better.” The doll is set down on a bed, and the boy snickers and the video ends.

The third—and final—video has a timestamp of August 2—more than two weeks after the previous ones. It opens with blurry motion as distantly a girl’s high-pitched scream rings out, and the boy’s voice whispers, “Oh shit.” The camera veers wildly and blurs to a window and then angles down, showing the screened patio and pool. In the grayish dawn light, the image is dim and pixelated, but two figures are floating face down. Vaguely, I am aware of Emma’s gasp. Then the shape of an adult plunges into the water, grabs one of the figures. The camera shakes. The boy draws a ragged breath, and the video stops.

I rewind and freeze the frame on the two figures floating face down. Zoom in. And even through the blurry pixelation, it’s obvious that one of the figures is the four-year-old.

The other is Little Boy Blue, its nubby hand rigidly clutched by the fingers of the drowned child.

*         *         *

Our winding drive up to Theo’s West Coast home takes us along a breathtaking valley ringed by scrubby mountains under the star-studded sky. Technically it’s his parents’ property (his folks are currently in Milan), and Theo has offered to put us up in the guesthouse, which if the scenery en route is any indication, is a picture-perfect vacation spot. Palm trees line the driveway, and the air is cool and fresh—we’re far enough from the city to smell desert more than smog, close enough to see the glow of lights on the horizon.

Emma and I park the rental car and approach the sleek house of wood and stucco, taking in the floor-to-ceiling windows, the deck and wraparound balcony.

There’s a fire going in a perfectly cylindrical stone firepit with cushy chairs around it, and it would be great to sit there and light up a joint, shoot the shit, joke about this doll hoax. About how well-staged those videos are of the family. Emma couldn’t verify the drowning of Sarah W., and though she called Mai when we landed, it’s an East Coast number. Past midnight there. Mai didn’t pick up, so we probably won’t get a reply ‘till morning.

My eyes search the sky full of stars and I wish on all of them for my instincts to be right and for it to be a hoax.

Emma laces her fingers in mine and we knock on the door.

“Be right there!” calls a voice. And then footsteps. “… thanks for coming all this way,” says Theo’s voice as the door unlocks and swings open.

Golden light spills from inside. I catch only a glimpse of his silhouette, wavering in my vision, and then the world tilts—

—and the sandwich comes up. I heave it out on his front doorstep, the vertigo so intense I’m clinging to the pavement for balance, sputtering bits of digested croissant and turkey onto my fingers as Emma gasps, “Babe! Are you OK?”

“—gross man,” comes Theo’s voice. “Is he all right?”

—and fuck me, my stomach bucks again as I think of that boy and his little sister and fuck, I don’t know what’s making me sicker, the sudden certainty that the videos aren’t a hoax, or the fact that the man standing only a foot away is oozing with the effects of the doll’s curse. My flesh is crawling, crawling as if a thousand ants are wriggling their way under my skin. And as his face dances before my swirling vision, I hear it in my mind—the last lines of that fucking rhyme:

Ten days he’s gone missing—oh whence has he fled?

Day nine. Tonight is the end of day nine. And tomorrow, unless we can find the doll before it’s too late, it’ll show up beside this unlucky dude’s body—stone, cold, dead.

UPDATE!