u/unloufoque

The astronomers missed it. Someone should have seen it coming. The world should have been warned. Every news program should have left off with whatever else they were covering. Wars should have stopped. There should have been podcasts.

Instead, on an otherwise unremarkable day in early June, half of the world was surprised when the Sun simply disappeared from the sky. (The other half of the world was already in darkness and would not find out about their antipodal neighbors’ situations for some hours, or until they checked the Internet.) Time will tell whether this was an apocalypse, but it certainly did not begin like one.

Planes did not fall out of the sky. There were car crashes, but not many. Hospitals did not fail; nuclear power plants did not melt down; office workers did not jump out of their tenth-story windows en masse. The most cinematic thing to happen was that a significant number of people looked up at the now-starry sky, all at the same time, like sheep looking up at a rainstorm.

There was a great coming-together in those first few hours. People helped their neighbors. Everyone waited, hardly breathing, for the Sun to come back. It didn’t.

It took a few days, but life went more or less back to normal. Well, mostly. The disappearance of the Sun created a great deal of despair. Suicides spiked after the third day, went way down, then slowly trended up. Church attendance rose, though not in the Abrahamic faiths.

A movement popped up from seemingly everywhere simultaneously, that the Sun had left, not because of some sin humanity had committed or cosmic accident, but because people had left the old ways behind. It was a revival of the old pagan belief that the order of the universe ran on human sacrifices of all kinds. Centuries without sacrifice led inexorably to disorder in the universe.

And so, as seems inevitable in retrospect, bands of new believers began crossing populated areas, performing acts that would make Charles Manson and his family blush with envy.

The true effectiveness of these groups was that their goal was simply death. It did not matter to them who died, except insofar as they preferred people willing to kill to be alive.

Jordan was late in getting home. Without the diurnal cycle, it was sometimes hard for him to tell what time it was. It wasn’t the first time his teenage daughter, Jemma, would have to cook dinner. He came home to a wide-open front door. He called Jemma’s name. There was no spoken reply, but there were various noises like movement and working coming from the house. He went in.

In the living room, he saw Jemma. Most of her body was tied to a chair in front of the fireplace. She had been split vertically from the base of her neck down through her crotch, and there was a fire in the fireplace upon which Jordan saw his daughter’s innards burning. His first thought, before the tragedy of his loss hit him, was that it must have been hard to get the wet organs to catch fire.

His second reaction was more primal than thought. He threw up and cried.

The noise from elsewhere in the house stopped. He heard scurrying, as though a thousand rats were running towards him from the rest of the home. It was not rats but sacrificers, though in that moment Jordan felt the rats had a greater moral value.

They had knives; he was unarmed. They were many; he was one. They were focused, honed by religious ecstasy and bloodlust; he was lost in a sea of grief.

The first stranger came at Jordan alone. Without thinking, he caught the man’s wrist and squeezed, causing him to drop the knife. Jordan caught it by the blade, slicing open his left hand. He switched hands with the knife and slit the man’s throat with one motion. Arterial spray blinded Jordan. Another charged from behind Jordan. He stabbed without looking and gutted this challenger. He withdrew his hand, still holding the knife, slick with gore. Jordan screamed, emptying himself entirely.

Despite two of their number falling, the remaining sacrificers lost no zeal. The five of them attacked as one unit, though they were hardly synchronized. Jordan ducked a blow from one, who overbalanced and tripped over him, landing on the poignard of another who had been trying to thrust it into Jordan’s back. She died with a smile on her face, but her killer was pinned under her.

Jordan took out another with a wild punch from his bloodied left hand. He felt something shift beneath his skin as one of his fingers - and his assailant’s nose - shattered under the blow. The two left standing looked at each other and seemed to communicate something without speaking or hardly moving. At the same time, they turned around and sprinted out of the house.

Jordan strode to the pinned sacrificer, who was struggling with her burden. He looked her in the eyes and said nothing as he stomped on her face until it was not recognizable as anything that had even once been human.

With the immediate crisis passed, Jordan’s adrenal glands went back into normal production. He threw up again, though it was just bile that mixed in with the pulverized remains of his assailant’s head. He looked around the room and his eyes once again alighted on Jemma, the light of his life, the only thing he hadn’t lost. But now he had.

He looked past the remains of his daughter, to where part of her was slowly cremating. It would be a squeeze, he knew, but he was pretty sure he could fit both of them in there. He turned up the gas, picked up his girl, crouched down, and crawled into the flames.

Winter was nearing, and the summer and fall had not had as good hunting as they ought to have. No one, not even the village elders, could remember so big a hunting party leaving so late in the season, but there was great fear that they would not last the winter on their current stores. And so most of the men of the village left one grey, drizzly morning, to bring death to others and life to theirs.

Winona watched them leave. She looked particularly for her new husband, Nagamo. They had been married for only a few weeks, and their wedding feast had been nominal, not like she had dreamed when she was a child. These days nothing was like what she had dreamed. She waved. He did not look her way.

For a few nights after the hunting party left the village, they sent up smoke signals. On the fourth night, it rained and there was no signal. While some, among them Winona, were concerned, the acting chief declared that there was no need for concern. It was just the rain and nothing else.

The next night, a clear one, there was no signal. At daybreak scouting parties set out in the direction of the last signal. It would be days before they would be heard from again. The air was filled with anxiety and grief.

That day an old man wandered out of the woods. Winona happened to be harvesting some dried beans in the area and saw him. She kept about her work.

“What is this?” the man yelled. “You don’t lift your head for the return of your husband?”

Winona looked up again. Nagamo was a young man, though this oldster did bear a certain resemblance to him, somewhere between the nose and the ears. “You are not my husband. Nagamo is out with the hunters.”

The man beat his chest in woe. “How is it that you don’t recognize me? I know we were not married long before I left, but I will remember your face even until the end of my days.”

“My husband is young. You, elder, are old. How can you be the same man?”

The stranger calling himself Nagamo bade Winona sit down for her answer. She did. “We had split up into smaller groups. I and two others were trailing a deer, when I heard a rustle in the bushes behind us. I turned; the others did not. I walked towards the bushes; the others did not. I know not what happened to them.

“I pushed aside the bushes and found nothing there. I thought it had just been the wind that moved them and turned to rejoin my fellows. But as I turned, I saw out of the corner of my eyes an indescribable beast. I had never seen its like before. It ran on all fours like a wolf, but was as large as a bear. Its fur was all white, with no blemish or stain of any other color, save that its mouth was red as blood and its eyes were a sparkling yellow.

“The beast jumped upon me, teeth gnashing at my neck. It tackled me to the ground, but I held it off. It was then that I noticed that it did not have paws like an animal but rather hands like a man. It grabbed me around the neck with one hand and the face with the other. I fought and squirmed but its body was heavy on top of me and I couldn’t move.

“It forced my mouth open and opened its own, exposing its necrotic tongue. The tongue was the color of rot and was moving around as though searching for something. It found my open mouth and dove in until I gagged. I could feel it draining something from me, though at the time I knew not what.

“After a short time of this, I fell into a deep unconsciousness. When I awoke it was dark, and I was not where I had been. I called out for my fellow men but heard nothing in response, not even the noises of the owls and other nighttime animals. When the beast attacked me, I was not afraid. I did not have time. Now, though, alone at night in the woods, not knowing where I was or what had happened, fear took me.

“It was almost peaceful. I was so sure that I would die that night that all my other troubles and worries seemed to melt away. But morning came and I was still alive. I found the trail the beast had dragged me down and followed it back to familiar territory and from there came here.”

“But how are you so old now?” asked Winona.

“The beast took my youth. That is why it attacked me and why it didn’t kill me.”

Winona had heard of such things. She took the man to her home and acted as wife to him until her womb was quickened. They lived like that for many days, and soon the whole village knew Nagamo’s story.

A week later, the scouts returned. They had found the hunting party. Many had gotten lost in the storm and wandered into another village’s territory. They did not want to light signal fires for fear of confrontation. The hunting there was good and they were bringing back enough food to last through winter.

The next day all the village ran to the edge of the forest to see the hunters return. Nagamo complained of rheum and stayed in the wigwam, but Winona would not miss the homecoming. The hunters swarmed the village, each carrying some bit of game to their loved ones. Winona’s heart clenched, icy and painful. There was her Nagamo, the very picture of youth, trailing a clutch of rabbits for her stewpot. She clutched her stomach and screamed.

“Motion at front door.” It was the middle of the night and my Ring app wouldn’t shut up. I rolled over and checked my phone. There was nothing at the front door. But I could see movement in the background. I zoomed in as much as I could. It was my new neighbor, and she was having sex.

She moved in a day or two before. The old neighbors had curtains, so I didn’t even realize my camera was aimed right at their living room window. I hadn’t even met her, and here I was, watching her getting it on with her husband. It looked like they were having fun. I started feeling like they weren’t the only ones who should have some fun, so I did a little bit of self-care too. I finished right around when they did, closed the app, cleaned up, and went back to sleep.

The next evening, we both happened to take out our garbage bins at the same time. I thought this was a good time to introduce myself. I waved and jogged across the street. “Howdy, neighbor. Welcome to the neighborhood. I’m Bill.”

She flashed me a smile that would’ve made my knees weak even if I didn’t know what she looked like under her chic blouse and tight black jeans. Her teeth were almost shining. “I’m Tiff.”

“Husband makes you take out the bins? I guess he’s not worried about bears, huh?”

“Husband? I’m not married.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’m no prude, obviously, but the intimacy I saw last night really felt like two people who had been together forever. I just smiled. “My bad. Sorry.”

“Oh, it’s no problem. Anyway, nice to meet you.” She turned around and walked back to her house. Either I’m seeing things, or she put a little bit of English on her ass just for me.

“Good night, Tiff,” I called lamely to her round, retreating form.

That night my Ring app woke me up again, as I kind hoped it would. There she was again, but with a different guy this time. It was even better this time.

After it was done, I thought about what I was doing. It felt wrong, but that kind of made it feel better, like I was getting away with something. And she was having sex right in front of a window with no curtains. Anybody driving down the street could just see her. Tiff basically wanted people to watch her.

The next day my Ring app rang right in the middle of the day. I was working from home but wasn’t in a meeting or anything, so I could afford to get excited. But not for long. I opened the app and saw a police officer standing at my front door. I answered it.

The cop asked me if I’d seen a few guys who he said had gone missing from the area recently. I told him I worked from home and didn’t get out much, but he showed me pictures anyway. There were some I didn’t recognize, but two of them were the guys Tiff was with. I was pretty sure of it. I mean, the footage was somewhat grainy, but their faces were unmistakable, and the descriptions roughly matched. I don’t think my surprise showed, and I quickly told him I hadn’t seen them. He thanked me for my time and left. I opened up my Ring app and saw him cross the street and knock on Tiff’s door. I never saw him leave the house.

I couldn’t sleep that night, just lay in bed thinking. Was Tiff doing something to these guys? Besides the obvious, I mean. Or was it just a coincidence? And if she was doing something, was it worth it? It looked worth it.

Soon enough my phone made its familiar alert. I wondered who it would be this time. When I saw that same cop, there wasn’t an ounce of me that felt surprised, like I had known all along it would be him.

This time Tiff was really putting on a show, though for whose benefit I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem like it was for him, because his face was otherwise engaged the entire time, as far as I could tell, and he couldn’t see anything at all. Maybe it was noisy. I couldn’t look away.

At first I didn’t want to pleasure myself. It was just too weird. But I couldn’t look away. As I watched, it got more and more intense. I just couldn’t resist. I pulled my pants down and went at it. That time, I finished long before she was done with him. I watched on, entranced, until I fell asleep.

The next morning, I checked all the footage from the previous night. The cop never left Tiff’s house. I turned my phone volume up all the way so I wouldn’t miss it.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when my phone told me there was someone at my door. It was Tiff. I hurried to answer it.

“I’ve been thinking about the other day, when we met,” she said, stretching out in my doorway, putting her whole clothed body on display. “Were you checking to see if I was single?”

I gulped.

“Well, I am, if you’re interested.” She was looking at my eyes but talking to my crotch, and we both knew it. “Why don’t you come on over tonight?” She leaned in and kissed me, just a heavy peck on my lips that left me needing more. “See you later,” she winked. Then she turned and walked away, swaying like she was caught in the sexiest breeze.

I’m gonna do it. I don’t know what’ll happen or if I’ll make it out, but I can’t not go. So I’ve been writing this all day, just so that if I don’t make it, someone will know what happened to me. Wish me luck.

Later, Peter Martelli would say that he was suspicious of the old man from the moment he entered the train. His shuffling hunch looked artificial, or somehow put upon, like he was exaggerating his frailty for some reason. Peter would say that to anyone who asked - and people did ask, many of them - but he was never really sure that it was true.

Either way, the man got on the express train at the tail end of a group of three or four strangers. He shambled his way to a seat nearish the door and sat down as the speakers announced that it would be about twenty minutes to the next stop. The doors closed soon after.

The man stood up about a minute later. He clutched at the left side of his chest and yelled, a guttural wordless emission of agony and terror. He bent over double.

Peter had never seen a train car full of people react so quickly. Many people took out their phones. Most put them away when they saw we had no signal because of the tunnel. Some started filming. A few people ran towards the conductor intercom button at the other end of the train. One, sitting about halfway down the train, ran towards the man. She said she was a nurse. Peter simply watched.

When the nurse reached the man, a lot happened quickly. He unbent himself quickly, whanging her in the chin with his head and stunning her. With his left hand he grabbed her shoulder and pulled her in tight to him. With his right hand he pulled a pistol out of his breast pocket and held it at the nurse’s temple.

Unbent, the man no longer seemed so old or infirm. He had a commanding presence, projecting that he was used to being obeyed quickly.

A ripple went through the other passengers. There had been no one who was not paying attention, but Peter could almost see the quality of that attention change as the wave of realization of the gun passed down the train. Everyone slouched a little bit, subconsciously moving away. And then, when their brains processed what they were seeing, they consciously moved away.

In a flash it was only Peter on the same side of the train as the man and the nurse.

“All right everyone,” the man bellowed. “Nobody has to get hurt. I only want two things. One, back away from the intercom, and two, hand over phones, wallets, jewelry, and anything else you’ve got that’s valuable.” He let go of the nurse for a moment and gave her a sack, never removing the gun from her head. “What’s your name, honey?”

“Please don’t kill me! I have a family!” the nurse begged. The man poked her with the barrel of the gun. “Allison! My name is Allison!”

“Thank you, Allison. All right, everyone. My good friend Allie the nurse is going to hold this bag for me. You’re going to come up one by one and put everything in the sack, then go over to that side of the train. I’m going to be looking at all of you and especially at the intercom. If anyone does anything I don’t like, we all get to see what Allison’s brain looks like.”

Careful not to show any expression on his face, Peter smirked inwardly. A few people rushed over to the man, seeming to hope that quick compliance would keep them safe. To a one, they kept their heads down, not looking the man in the eyes. At arms’ length away, with shaking hands, they forked over their valuables, then scurried as far away from the gun as they could.

Once that trickle dried up, the man shook the gun at the crowd. “Who’s next?” he shouted, his voice hoarsening. Peter almost smiled. The man seemed to be under some sort of strain. And he had the easy job. It was just too much.

Seeing no one else moving, Peter got up. He walked slowly towards the man, staring him in the eyes the whole time as though memorizing his face. His gaze was so intense the man broke eye contact first. Peter got close, closer than anyone else had. He could feel the man’s warm quick breath on his face. Peter raised his left arm and shook it, the sleeve falling down a bit to reveal his watch. He raised his right hand to unclasp it.

But his right arm never made it to the watch. Instead, as he brushed close to the gun, he struck. With his right arm, he grabbed the gun and jerked it into the man’s face. He brought his left down in a chop on the man’s deltoid, right at the juncture of shoulder and neck. The man stumbled backwards, bleeding from his nose. He let out some sort of half roar of surprise before all noise dropped out of the world.

The crack of the gun in such close quarters was deafening. Allie’s hearing never recovered; she wasn’t fully deaf, but she needed hearing aids in both ears for the rest of her life. Peter was unfazed, as though this wasn’t the first time he’d been so close to a gunshot. Everyone else in the small train car was stunned and heard ringing for weeks.

The man, of course, never heard anything again, though not because of damage to his ear drums. Rather, his body slumped backwards in a slow fall, missing about half of his forehead. “So that’s what his brains look like,” Peter quipped, but no one heard him due to a combination of the hearing damage and screaming. Peter ejected the bullets from the gun, pocketed them, sat down, and placed the gun on the seat next to him.

Police were waiting at the next stop. Peter tried to slink away, but there was no escape. Not for the hero of the day.

We all know that one morning, after dreaming restlessly, Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself turned into some sort of giant insect, an ungeheures Ungeziefer. Of course he did. But did he, really?

You may think, ‘Of course not. Gregor Samsa is a fictional character.’ In one sense, you would be right. Samsa, as presented in Die Verwandlung, is a creation of Franz Kafka’s intellect. But he is based on a real person who lived in Kafka’s neighborhood while he was growing up in Prague. Stories abounded in the late nineteenth century about Adolf Sedlak, and a young Kafka heard - and was enchanted by - these stories.

Let me set the scene for you. Beginning in roughly the 1870’s, the city of Prague was expanding rapidly. New buildings, both public and private, were erupting seemingly out of the ground. The coming decades brought electrification, modern sewage treatment, nationalism, and a groundswell of Czech identity coming to displace the previous German sentiments. This shifting identification even groped its way into the Jewish quarter, which was also experiencing its own growth and in which Kafka grew up.

Traditional patterns were upended in what felt like a flash. People stopped drinking so much beer and started drinking more coffee, which caused taverns and bars to shutter and take their culture with them, which caused more coffee uptake. While many people embraced this change, a sizable minority felt left behind. Many of these just so happened to be neighbors of Sedlak’s.

Adolf Sedlak was born in the early 1860’s. No record survives of exactly when. He spent his entire human life living in the same three block radius, located approximately a quarter of a kilometer away from where Kafka spent his childhood. We know very little else about Sedlak for certain.

Uncertainly, we know a great deal more. Rumors circulated about him as rumors circulate about all colorful characters in growing cities. While no individual rumor can be trusted, especially now, so long after the fact, the general gist and tide of the rumors are likely to be more or less true. From that we conclude that Sedlak likely had what we now would call an intellectual, learning, or learning disability. Physically he was a giant, the size of a full-grown man before he turned thirteen, and, as an adult, a full head taller than anyone else. Mentally, he seems to never have progressed past late childhood.

Sedlak loved nothing more than entertaining children. He was surprisingly agile for a man his size, and delighted in running, jumping, tumbling, and performing other feats of athleticism for applauding youngsters. While he was never a favorite of the neighborhood’s parents’, he was generally well tolerated for providing entertainment for the kids while their parents inculcated themselves into the rapidly-changing culture of their city.

Children began disappearing. In total, in a thirteen-month period, six children disappeared. In each case, they were seen by many reliable witnesses with Sedlak in the days or even hours leading to their disappearances. None were ever found again. There were no leads.

Two weeks after the final child was last seen, in the middle of the night, a strange howl was heard coming from the building in which Sedlak lived. At the time, there was some suspicion that he had had something to do with the disappearances, but that was far from the majority view. Nevertheless, one of the disappeared children’s fathers (given name: Jan, surname: lost to history) happened to be passing by Sedlak’s building on his walk home from the last remaining tavern in a quarter-kilometer radius. He heard the scream and rushed into the building. He recognized it as Sedlak’s and ran straight for the young man’s door. The door was unlocked.

Jan threw open the door. Inside the flat, he found crawling around hundreds or even thousands of unidentifiable insects. Every surface seemed to be covered with them. Many had the form of beetles or roaches, but with oddly-shaped torsos, and limbs hanging off their bodies at uncanny angles. Jan first thought to stomp some, but as the nearer ones started heading towards the hall, he quickly shut the door and ran. Police were summoned but found the flat mostly empty, except for a handful of corpses of strange insects no one had ever seen before, except presumably Jan.

Rumors quickly swirled that Sedlak had kidnapped the children and used them in some sort of black magic ritual that had gone wrong and turned him and the children into the mysterious insects. More rational minds prevailed, and after a perfunctory investigation turned up nothing, the matter was officially let drop.

The truth was never uncovered. I was kidnapping the children for a magic ritual. It was no black magic, though, but white. The children were suffering, a malaise of the soul. No one seemed able to sense it but me. They needed someone to set them free.

You see, I’m not as idiotic as everyone thought I was. I just noticed from a young age that appearing to be so made my life easier. People let me be. But I watched and I listened and I saw their pain. I wanted to heal them.

Prague was advancing, but there were still people who knew the old ways, the old rituals, and I learned them.

I’m not as stupid as everyone thinks, but it’s not that far off. The ritual went wrong. The children were unwilling to be healed. That made all the difference. Old magic is not like the new technology; it is much less predictable. Their collective wills were stronger than mine and that made all the difference. Rather than heal, the ritual combined and broke down. We now are one and we are many. We are swarm.

The sound was unmistakable. A few melodic bings coming from my laptop. My body responded before my mind, trained from an entire pandemic’s worth of meetings. While I was still rubbing crusties from my eyes, before I realized that it was the middle of the night, I was on my feet, headed towards my desk.

It was only a few steps, but something clicked in my brain before I opened up my laptop. It was dark, and not just because of my blackout curtains. Like, it was dark dark. Middle of the night dark. Nobody would be calling me right now, and I was definitely not in a state to be on camera.

I turned around and went right back to bed. Falling back asleep took longer than I wanted it to, but I did it anyway. Right before I lost consciousness, I had a thought. It was important, I knew that, but it was lost in the haze of sleep and I didn’t remember it when I woke up.

In the morning, the whole thing kind of felt like a dream. I was a little bit more tired than usual, but it wasn’t like I hadn’t slept at all or anything. I did all my morning stuff, and, as I was putting on my mascara, I remembered the thought I had in the middle of the night.

My computer wasn’t supposed to make noise when it was shut.

I finished getting ready, grabbed a bagel, and went to my desk to check out the laptop. I opened it up. Put in my password. Everything seemed normal. I logged on to zoom and didn’t have any missed calls. I just kind of assumed it was a dream, I guess, and moved on.

It happened again that night. Middle of the night, zoom call on my closed laptop. The next morning there were slight bags under my eyes. You’d have to look very close to notice, but I knew they were there. I swabbed at them with foundation and blended it away until even I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

I couldn’t focus hardly at all that day. I was constantly in meetings, often on zoom, and every time I stared at those little boxes, my mind kept drifting to the middle of the night. It was so bad that my boss called me out in one of the meetings, right before lunch. He suggested I take an early break and come back with my head in the game. Whatever.

That night, I muted my laptop before closing it and going to bed. After tossing and turning for a few minutes, I thought better of things, got up, and just turned it off. Hah. Let’s see it wake me up now.

It did.

My eyes shot open when I heard the familiar ringtone. My body jerked to life before my caught up and my hand was on the edge of my laptop, ready to open it, before I remembered that it wasn’t on and there was no way it could possibly be making the noise that it was very clearly making. I stopped myself, put my computer in another room, and got right back in bed. I didn’t sleep that night, though, just lay there tossing and turning, my body shaking from adrenaline.

I called in sick the next day. Felt it, too. I had barely slept at all the previous night. The skin underneath my eyes was a subtle purple that did not go with my overall tone in the slightest. I was not so secretly glad that I was not going to see anyone at all so I didn’t have to go through my whole makeup routine. I looked like a ghoul. That was okay, because I felt like a ghoul too.

Again, no missed calls on zoom. I emailed customer support and bit my nails waiting for a response. My leg shook until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I paced around my apartment. After some time that was either half an hour or half a lifetime, I just called them. I was bounced around from hold to robot and back again, but I had nothing else to do that day. Finally I connected with an actual living human being. He told me that it wasn’t possible that zoom would receive a call when my computer was off and there not be a record of it. I told him that that was exactly what happened and he said that I must be confused and I could hear his smug, condescending smile even after I hung up the phone.

There was only one thing left to do. I couldn’t uninstall zoom, and even if I could, I didn’t think that would solve it. I obviously couldn’t get rid of my computer altogether. So I had to answer next time. Once I’d made my decision, my whole body relaxed, as though an electrical current had been running through me but no longer was. My shoulders fell what felt like an entire inch. I had no idea if I was actually making the right decision, but I sure felt like it.

Who knew what would happen that night? Not me, certainly, so I lived it up that whole day. I went out for lunch - I never go out for lunch - and I even got ice cream for dessert. Texted all my friends to ask about their pets or kids. I got my nails and hair done and tried a new facewrap I’d heard about on instagram.

After dinner, I poured a bottle of wine into three of my biggest wine glasses and drank it while watching mysteries on Netflix. I did my makeup, making sure every speck of my face was perfect. Then I sat on my bed, computer open, and waited.

My computer had long since gone to sleep, but I hadn’t. I heard those short bings and walked over, ready to meet my ghost.

I knew getting a smart home was a mistake. I knew it even when we were at Best Buy and Ronald the salesman was talking my stupid husband into it. He was all “And this dishwasher has an app so you can run it from your phone whenever you want” and “Imagine preheating the oven on your way home from work” as though Cal ever did anything in the kitchen. I said that none of that made any sense because you still had to physically load the dishes or food in so who cared that you could turn the machines on remotely, but Ronald only stared at me blankly and Cal just patted my arm like I was some kind of imbecilic cat he wanted to comfort.

So that’s how we ended up downgrading (my word, not fucking Ronald’s) every single appliance we owned, from our dishwasher straight through to our thermostat. Every lightbulb was to have its own motion sensor to turn on whenever anyone walked into a room, and a dimmer hooked up to a clock to provide gentler light in the evening, like we’re all just big babies who can’t make any decisions for ourselves or even want something that a goddamn clock doesn’t tell us to want.

And our locks wouldn’t have keys anymore, just an app we can use to remotely lock and unlock them. And another app to control this, and a third to control that. I wouldn’t even be able to interact with my own home anymore without my cell phone being glued to my hands. I never had the courage to ask what happened if my battery died, or I dropped my phone in the toilet (things that have never happened to me but seem to happen to Cal alarmingly frequently).

But the real coup de grace was Ronald selling Cal on the most idiotic thing I could even imagine: signing us up for an AI that linked everything together (even across all three apps!) and learned our habits to better control our lives. I mean, to better suit our purposes. I guess. I don’t even know. When Ronald made the pitch, it was so obviously a bad idea that I was stunned speechless when Cal didn’t dismiss it out of hand, let alone when he agreed!

I had one last hope, that Cal wouldn’t ever get around to installing or setting up any of this pointless domestic garbage. I loved the man, but he could never finish a project for the life of him.

Of course, he was so excited by the idea of turning our entire house into one big toy that he put everything in right away.

At first it was, well, terrible. But, looking back, past Cal’s mangled corpse, less terrible than it is now. The lights turned themselves on and off, somewhat intrusively, but I could get used to it. The oven started picking up on when I usually cooked dinner and turned itself on, even - it felt like especially - when I didn’t want it to. The washing machine and dryer sent me what felt like endless notifications. It seemed like my clothes couldn’t take a tumble without my knowing about it.

Over time, as the AI took more control, it just got worse. Lights would turn on randomly throughout the house because it thought we were going to go into a room, even if we weren’t anywhere nearby. Toilets flushed just because. One night the fridge and freezer opened themselves up and stayed open all night for some reason. We had to throw away every single bit of food. I don’t even know what happened when Daylight Savings Time rolled around, but every single thing in our house turned off at once, like we had a short. There went another fridgeful of food.

This morning, the shit really hit the fan. Cal went to make his breakfast smoothie, but the blender got a little overeager. Somehow Cal got caught up in it, and that made it spin faster and faster until it blended him right up. I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t looking right at his body.

I screamed, of course, and tried to call the police or an ambulance or just anyone. One of those stupid apps locked my phone. I couldn’t even make an emergency call. You’re supposed to be able to make those under any circumstances, but no dice. I tried to leave. Every door and every window was locked. They wouldn’t unlock, no matter how many times I slammed on the button on the door app.

So now I’m here, stuck helplessly in my own home with my dead husband just waiting for something to turn on me. “Smart” indeed.

Welcome audiophile! Thank you for picking up this helpful guide to making an audio record using human skin. The benefits of physical media are immense, and the vinyl record industry has never been stronger. However, for the most discerning listeners, there is no material better at highlighting those high highs, low lows, and everything in between, quite like tanned human hide. Unfortunately, the music industry is not as brave as you are, so you are going to have to fend for yourself in this worthy endeavor. But fear not! You have selected the world’s foremost guide on the matter, and you’re in good hands. Just follow these easy steps and you’ll be well on your way to musical nirvana (or Nirvana for you grunge-heads) in no time!

In order to complete this task, you will need to purchase a home vinyl recorder. Many companies make them, and they can easily be found on the Internet. Find whichever one suits your needs best.

Step One: Acquire some human skin. To make a standard-sized LP, you’ll need a twelve-inch diameter circle. For shorter discs, you’ll need less material. Either way, a great deal of shrinkage will occur during the process so it’s best to have a piece no smaller than three feet square. You’ll need one single piece, so no stitching together offcuts! Smooth skin is best, so generally speaking the torso is the place to look. It’ll have to be fresh, so put away your grave-robbing shovel. Instead, book a trip to your local morgue or find a donor yourself. You’ve already shown initiative by reading this guide, so you can do it!

Step Two: Clean the skin. Whether you harvested it from someone currently alive, recently alive, or recently dead, the skin will be absolutely filthy! We’re not just talking about dirt and chemicals, but there will also be hair and blood and other viscera. Scrape down both sides with a clean, sanitized straight razor or fleshing knife. Take long, slow strokes. You don’t have to get everything in one go. How you prepare your fleshcanvas now will determine the maximum quality audio you can achieve later, so do not rush.

Step Three: Now it’s time to begin to preserve your hide. Lay the hide out in your garage. Make sure it’s below the flickering bare lightbulb so you can see well. Generously salt one side to draw out the moisture in the skin. Leave it to dry overnight, then flip it and repeat on the other side.

Step Four: In a large tub in the cobwebby corner of your basement lair, soak the hide to remove the salt. The soakwater should be warm and soapy.

Step Five: Dump the water from the tub and rinse in a mixture of water and calcium hydroxide. Make sure to wear gloves! You don’t want any nasty chemical burns on your precious hands. Much like the guitarist on your record, your hands are your instrument!

Step Six: Drain your bloodstained tub again, and fill it with a slightly acidic solution, with one ounce of sulfuric acid per gallon of water. We’ll leave getting the acid up to you, big guy. Leave your future audio dream in the bath for anywhere from one week to one month, depending on its size.

Step Seven: Let your long pig leather air dry for a day or two. Once it’s fully dry, put it in a two hundred degree preheated oven for about an hour until it’s good and stiff. If you skimp on this step, your record may be wobbly and the final audio quality will suffer.

Step Eight: Cut your record to its final shape and size. This is going to be based on the amount of music you want to put on your record and the machinery you have to do it. Follow the manufacturer’s instructions for the best results.

Step Nine: Enjoy your one-of-a-kind, high quality musical adventure. Every time you listen to your album, you will think about all the steps you went through and the ultimate sacrifice someone else made to bring you this totally unique experience. Like all things, music is better when you have to work for it. Enjoy!

Strange things happened in Jamie’s house. Well, the things themselves were not strange, but rather how frequently they occurred. She often could swear that food disappeared from her pantry or her fridge. Much of the time it was older things, cans of beans or half-wilted salads that she couldn’t be fully certain she had actually bought or hadn’t thrown away.

When she woke up in the morning, sometimes lights would be on that she was pretty sure she had turned off the night before. Sometimes she would turn on the TV and it would be set to a channel she didn’t watch. Chairs moved on their own in the night. Her toilet paper seemed to diminish much faster than she felt she was using it.

One morning she woke up and saw her underwear drawer open. No other drawer was open. Her dresser actually stuck a little bit - old wooden furniture, what are you going to do - so it didn’t open itself. That was the last straw for her. That day she called in sick from work, went to a big box store, and bought some home security cameras. She set them up all around the old house, concentrating in her bedroom and the kitchen.

The next day was Saturday. She had linked the cameras to her phone and all she could manage to do before checking them was to put on her glasses. For most of the night, the cameras showed nothing, their black-and-white visions of her home essentially indistinguishable from still pictures. Then, sometime after 2 a.m., one of the cameras in the hall leading to the bathroom cut out. It didn’t come back on.

Jamie got out of bed and padded down the stairs, her bare feet slapping against the hardwood treads making an echoing hollow sound. When she got to the hallway, she saw the remains of one of the cameras broken up on the floor. She immediately called the police.

In about half an hour, her doorbell rang. The sudden sound made her jump off her couch. She’d been scouring the footage from the night before, looking for anything at all that might point her towards what happened to the camera. Nothing. As far as any other camera showed, nothing at all had happened last night.

She opened the door to a very large man in a striking blue uniform. “Ma’am,” he said. “Can I come in?” He didn’t wait for her to respond, just barreled past her. Jamie dodged out of his way. “So what’s the problem here?”

“I think there’s somebody in my house,” Jamie said. She told him about the missing food and toilet paper, and her underwear drawer, and all the other strange happenings. She wrapped up with the cameras and ushered him to the back hallway, where the corpse of the camera remained undisturbed.

“Mhm,” the man said noncommittally. “The other cameras didn’t pick anything up?” Jamie nodded. “And you put these cameras up yourself?” She nodded again. The officer took a spiral wired notepad out of his back pocket. It looked almost comically small in his huge, meaty hand. He scribbled something Jamie couldn’t see, then turned around to leave.

“That’s all?” Jamie pleaded with him. That couldn’t be all. The police would have to investigate, help her. The officer grunted and kept walking.

At the door, he turned to her. “Ma’am, thank you for calling. We will investigate this and be in touch with you soon.” He turned again and left before Jamie could say anything. She stood in stunned silence for a few minutes.

Jamie didn’t want to be in the house anymore. She couldn’t. Not alone. She quickly packed a bag with a few outfits and toiletries and texted some friends to see if she had a couch she could crash on for a few nights. Before she got any responses, she was in her car driving aimlessly. Hunger hit; she went to a diner. Still nothing from her friends. She thought about calling the police again, but couldn’t think of what good it would do. She went shopping, just to be surrounded by people.

Night was coming, and she still hadn’t heard back from anyone. Jamie spent the night in a hotel. It was an uneventful night, but not restful. Even outside of her house, Jamie was too paranoid to sleep soundly.

She woke up to a text from a friend, Tina. Tina had kids and a husband and not enough room in her house to begin with, so she was so sorry that Jamie couldn’t stay with them, but she did offer to check out Jamie’s house with her. Jamie texted back and arranged to meet Tina in a few hours.

The hours passed agonizingly slowly. Jamie didn’t want to leave the hotel, so she sat on the bed staring at whatever the TV wanted to play until it was time to check out. She drove home and sat in her driveway until Tina came.

As soon as she saw her friend, everything hit all at once. Jamie felt all the fear and frustration and she couldn’t help but weep. Tina held her up, and they just hugged for a while in the driveway. When Jamie’s feelings began to ebb, the two walked to the front door.

The house seemed exactly as Jamie had left it. The two went upstairs to Jamie’s bedroom first. Everything was as it should be, except that every camera that could be reached without being seen by another camera was lying on the floor, destroyed. Jamie alternated between screaming and sobbing. They went through the rest of the house; it was the same everywhere.

Until they got to the kitchen. There, right on the counter, plain as day, was a note. It was scrawled by hand on Jamie’s personal stationery, the good kind that she kept by her computer. On it were five words that chilled Jamie to her core: “You shouldn’t have done that.”

Jacob stretched his hands over his head, reveling in the sound of his shoulders cracking. He’d slept on his neck funny last night, and it had a crick in it. Gripping hand in hand over his head, he looked first left, then right. Ear to shoulder, ear to shoulder. Neck cracking all the while, he grinned. His simple morning routine seemed today somehow more fulfilling than usual. Probably that crick. It’ll go away any moment now.

‘This feels so good,’ he thought, ‘I’ll just do some more.’ He cleared a space on his shag rug and sat down. He tucked his right leg underneath him as far as he could get it and stuck his left leg straight out. He leaned forward to touch his toes, but something didn’t look quite right. His left foot hung somewhat limply, listing towards the side like a drunken newlywed on a honeymoon cruise. And there was something white sticking out of his heel.

No, not out of his heel. It was his heel. The bone was fully outside of his foot. ‘Huh,’ Jacob thought. ‘That wasn’t like that yesterday.’ There was no pain or blood, just ivory-white bone protruding from the flabby, unsupported skin. Jacob tried to wiggle his toes but could not do it. He switched legs.

Reaching down to his right foot, he expected either to see everything as normal, or his bones sticking out of this foot too. He saw neither. In fact, he saw nothing. When he tried to grab his toes, he couldn’t, because they simply weren’t there. He had no idea where his right foot could have gone. It was there when he woke up, he was pretty sure. Just, not now. The stretch still felt good though.

Jacob tried to stand. He didn’t get very far before he came crashing down to his knees, as his one boneless foot and one absent foot could not support his body. This did hurt, though both knees were present and intact on further examination. Already his left knee had a nasty-looking bruise forming.

Most baffling was the suddenness of Jacob’s affliction. His body began its disintegration with missing frames, as though someone had edited out some portion of the film of his life. The very abruptness of it all convinced him that everything would return to normal if he just went about his normal business. And so he dragged himself across the carpet.

Jacob wanted to get a drink of water. But as he reached the edge of the kitchen, he reached out his right arm and could not find purchase on the floor. He turned his head right and saw a raw pink mass in the shape of his arm. He flexed his fingers and watched the thin strands of tendon tense and relax in the same rhythm. He could not see his skin. He expected there to be pain, or at least blood, but it felt more like his skin had turned invisible than that it was gone. He reached over with his other hand to verify, and found that he could touch all of the inner workings of his right arm. His skin was gone.

His left arm looked strange, too thick. It responded slowly to his brain’s direction, as though his nervous system was moving through molasses. He waved it around and the skin seemed to move just a moment behind when it should, like it was a loose-hanging T-shirt. He pinched the hanging skin with his semi-visible right hand. Just as he suspected: there were two layers there. The skin from his right hand had migrated to his left.

It was almost overwhelming just how little pain Jacob felt. He wasn’t numb; he could feel every normal sensation that he expected to in every part of his body, but there really should have been pain. The complete lack of any abnormal sensation despite the abnormal optical input made him tremble. Jacob crawled on.

The linoleum was cold beneath his hands, both skinless and double-skinned. He dragged himself arm over arm, leaving unnoticed traces of his belly skinned on the floor. It wasn’t until he got to the sink that Jacob thought what he would do next. He had no glass, and no way to reach the cupboard where he kept the glasses given that he could not stand. Even if he had a glass, he couldn’t reach the sink.

Jacob tried to pull himself up on the cabinet. It worked, too, at first. He rose slowly, but rise he did, until his body was bent at almost a right angle with his legs on the floor and his torso sticking up. And then he fell back.

Before Jacob even knew what was happening, he felt the back of his head resting squarely on the backs of his thighs. His waist was bent exactly around. He stared up at the ceiling and tried to lift his chest up, like the world’s worst sit-up, but his abs weren’t strong enough. His arms were facing the wrong way to push himself up. He struggled for a moment, but for naught.

A banshee scream made of rage and frustration exploded from Jacob’s throat. There was no pain in the scream as there was no pain in Jacob’s body. But he knew, in that long moment of release, that there was simply nothing he could do to extricate himself from this situation. The cavalry was not coming. His body would continue its slide into disconnection or it wouldn’t, but either way, he would never move from that spot again, folded like a clean shirt in front of his kitchen sink.

And he was right.

The cart rattled over the parking lot. Jane got to her car and opened the trunk. She began unloading the groceries, saving the berries for last. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. There had been a sale, thank goodness. Some days it felt like her toddler would only eat berries and buttered toast. These six pints should last the week. Hopefully.

Having packed up the car, Jane closed the trunk and returned the cart to its corral. She approached her car from the passenger side and sidled to the front, trying to avoid someone else bent on leaving the lot as quickly as possible. She didn’t notice that there was someone in her car.

Jane opened the driver’s side door and got in the car while she checked her watch. She’d have to leave to pick up Lockley in two hours. Just enough time to get home, put away the laundry, and get dinner prepared so she could actually play with her son tonight before bedtime. As she ticked the last item off her mental checklist, she looked up and, startled, saw her passenger.

The first thing Jane noticed about him was that he was dressed head to toe in a black robe that fit so loosely and draped such that she couldn’t tell anything about his body. The second thing she noticed was that he wore a mask that looked like a goat’s head but was colored blood red. What Jane failed to notice was that he was holding a hypodermic syringe, which he did not hesitate to inject into her upper arm. After that, she didn’t notice anything at all.

Jane slowly regained consciousness. The room she was in was dark. She was too sluggish from whatever drugs she was given to move her limbs. As the drugs wore off, she realized that her arm and legs were tightly bound. She was lying on some hard surface, maybe a table. It felt rough underneath her. She wanted to scream but was too drowsy.

All around her were people in those same black robes and goatshead masks. They were chanting something that Jane couldn’t quite understand. It didn’t sound like English. Given the context, she assumed it was Latin, though if she was honest it was just a guess. The figures were splayed out in a semicircle around her. The one directly in front of her was either taller than the others by a good margin or on some sort of raised platform, Jane couldn’t tell. He definitely seemed to be the leader, though, as his voice was louder and he held a nasty-looking, wavy kris.

The leader approached Jane’s feet. As he did, the chanting faded out slowly, as though they were gradually moving farther away. The low light dimmed even further until Jane could see only the one cultist. Underneath his mask there was a shift and Jane imagined that he was smiling.

A voice emanated from the mask, though it did not seem to come from the goat’s mouth. “Good morning, Sacrifice.” Morning? Jane had left the grocery store in the early afternoon. Where was Lockley? “Thank you for your service.”

Jane tried to scream. She couldn’t tell if the noise she made was in the world or just in her head, but it left her entire body raw. The cultist did not react. He simply said a quick phrase in whatever language he had been speaking, held his hand over Jane’s head, and used the dagger to cut a deep line across his palm. He turned his hand over so that the blood dripped onto Jane’s face. It splattered in her eyes and mouth. It singed when it touched her. She blinked and gagged, desperately struggling against her bonds.

“It begins. The end.”

Jane’s heart raced in her chest. All the moisture left her mouth, save that from the cultist's blood. Behind her eyes was only panic.

And then a strange sensation began to course through her. It started in her feet. They were tingling, as though they had been numb, but Jane didn’t think they had been. The tingle seemed to accelerate. She couldn’t quite believe it, but it felt like it was getting faster and faster. Not spreading, not increasing in intensity, just vibrating more excitedly, like a huge magnet had just come nearby.

The tingling soon turned to a pain more exquisite than any she had ever felt before. It felt as though each individual molecule making up every nerve in her legs was tearing itself apart and reknitting into new, horrible combinations. If she had had any scream left inside of her, it would have leaked out. Instead, just her bladder did.

Out of the most perverse curiosity she had ever felt, Jane tilted her head down to look at her legs. Nothing she had known about them was true any longer. Each leg was a terror of interlocking knees, joints that seemed to lead back in on themselves and to nowhere at all. Instead of terminating in feet, the ends of her new legs split off into even more nightmare cycles, down as far as she could see.

The feeling moved from her legs to her torso. She could barely see her stomach from the angle her neck was at, but she sensed similar changes happening all up and down her body. The bindings tying her to the slab slackened, but her limbs would no longer respond to her brain so she did not rise.

Still the feeling continued upwards. She felt her arms bend and crack, rip apart and fuse together, over and over, endlessly, creating loops and fissures. Her neck snapped this way and that, each vertebrae clicking against its neighbor before it disappeared, subsumed within the whole of this new creation.

Jane expected the feeling to keep going to her head. But it didn’t. Her face remained, locked in a never-ending scream of torment.