Hello again,

 

Okay, so where to begin. After I found that article at the library, I spent all night researching the Calder family. Luckily, I was able to go through some records and finally found the connection. T Calder (the missing person) is the grandson of the Calder in the picture. I had no idea if he was taken against his will or if he decided to go away but I figured, if there were answers to be found, they’d be at Gold Hill. So I went.

After picking up my car from the service station, I asked Jim how to get out there. Reluctantly, he gave me directions but also informed me that my car wasn’t exactly the best option for the trip. He explained the roads are rough and that my best bet was a truck. I don’t have that as an option, so I took my car anyways. I stopped by the gas station to fill up and get some snacks before I left and started heading out around noon.

For a place only 50 miles away, it took much longer than I thought it would to get there and the roads were worse than Jim described. They were a mix of concrete and gravel, with occasional washouts that claimed parts of the road. It felt like no one had been out there for decades. I started to see what used to be houses that were now no more than ruins of what used to be. Houses burned to nothing more than rocks and ash, foundations with rotten and collapsed walls jutting out in the air like a skeleton's rib cage. The sun shone down into the valley casting strange shadows through the hollow bones of houses that now stand completely empty.

The road continued to get worse, and I knew there wasn’t much of a point in trying to take it any further. Rather than turn around, I parked the car on what was left of the road, grabbed my bag and started on foot. I figured it was better to have to walk than risk getting stuck and hearing Jim’s inevitable “I told you so” when he had to pull me out. The town snaked and twisted back and forth between the low points of the mountains and hills that dotted this area. The further I made it into town, the stranger it felt. There is something incredibly eerie about walking through a place that hasn’t been populated in almost 80 years. I found what looked like an old general store that was partially reclaimed by juniper trees and bushes. Next to the store was a house still standing with a porch. The windows were all broken and the porch had smashed rocking chairs still sitting on it. At one point I found a child’s shoe half buried in the dirt. As I continued down the road, I found tire tracks on a dirt road that split off and went further back into the valley.

I tried to think back to my conversation with Jim to remember when he said it had last stormed out here. I thought surely, those tracks couldn’t have lasted through that right? I decided to follow the tracks down the path. Walking down the road I couldn’t help but feel watched. I knew it was just my mind playing with me but something about the angle of the sun and trees just makes it feel strange. The shadows danced and more than once made me think I had seen something moving on one side or the other, but every time I looked, I saw nothing. After about 15 minutes of walking, I started to smell smoke. Smoke? Was something burning out here? Then a few minutes later, to my right I heard a low, mechanical humming coming from just over the hill side. I started up the hill towards the top, pushing my way through trees and bushes so thick, you can hardly see in front of you. When I finally made it to the top I stopped.

Wedged in the valley, right there in the middle of nowhere Gold Hill, was a small camp.

Several small structures arranged in semicircles on the sides of the makeshift road. I could hear a generator running.  Several trucks parked nearby, none of them looked like they were particularly old. One of them even looked like the one that Mr. Johnson had described seeing leaving town with supplies. I just stood there trying to process what I was seeing.

Someone was living here…more than just one person, multiple people were living here.

“Hello?” I called out.

No one answered.

“Is anyone here?”

Still nothing.

I stood there in disbelief, staring at this camp. Tables sat in the middle of the structures, with what looked like boxes and canned food sitting on one. Propane tanks lined one side of a structure, children’s toys in front of another. A small fire burned with folding chairs arranged around it. At one point I could have sworn I heard music playing quietly.

I wanted to keep looking around but I knew that I didn’t have long before it would start to get dark and I didn’t want to be out here at night.  With that in mind, getting back to my car became priority number one and my curiosity would just have to wait. I got back to the dirt road and started walking back the way I came. After a few feet I noticed something on the road. Footprints….walking just off to the side of mine as if they were following me.

Our town was hit by a big storm last night. It seemed to come out of nowhere and was either mainline winds or a tornado. I work in a call center so our phones were down for a bit. Just static on the other end when the line went dead. Service is hard to get in this building on a typical basis. Usually at work, there’s always one radio station we can count on that will pick up through our tiny, 2010 dinky radio with a broken antenna. It sits with aluminum foil covering it and I always try to pick something else up but it’s to no avail. The station that never fails, however, is River Country 102.4. It’s the only thing that ever plays on that godforsaken radio and I hate it. It’s like someone is in that radio station playing songs on a loop that knows it drives me insane. Regardless, it got kind of weird when I realized that after the storm, it doesn’t play anymore. I can’t pick up the radio station; the only radio station that ever comes through. The only radio station that plays now is a gospel station. It’s a station I’ve never heard of before so it’s weird that it’s the only one coming through. River country is just…gone. I turn the radio dial and it’s static to the left, static to the right and gospel in the middle. If anyone hears from them or knows anything, please let me know. I’m at work so it may take a bit for me to respond.

I figured I would post this as a running log, like a journal to arrange my thoughts as I work through this. I work as an investigative journalist for a paper in Utah and have recently been given the assignment of investigating a rash of disappearances along the I-80 corridor.

A little bit about me, my name is Sam. I grew up in a small town in Texas. When people who aren’t from there hear that, more times than not, they think of your stereotypical version you’d see in media. Everyone knows everyone, people to church on Sundays, high school sports are the most entertaining thing you can find to do and no one typically leaves, and in my case you would be right. I had no interest in working blue collar jobs and living my whole life 15 minutes from my childhood home. In high school I enjoyed writing and did good enough to get accepted to college, and focused on a degree in investigative journalism. I figured since everyone in a small town grew up knowing everyone else’s business anyways, might as well turn that into a job.

After graduation I got an offer to write for a small local paper near Salt Lake City, Utah and I took it. As the newest one there, I spent a few years with nothing too spectacular to write. There was the occasional accident to cover, changes to local municipal staff, and other boring things like that but nothing ground breaking or exciting. That is until a couple of days ago when my boss, Mr. Gregory, came to my desk and gave me this assignment and it may just be my first chance at something important.

My first stop was yesterday in Tooele. I arrived at the Tooele County Sheriff’s Department, where I met with Sheriff Deacon. Four missing people had been reported from the outskirts of the county and he was happy to answer any questions I had. After the normal pleasantries and generic questions, I asked if he had any leads about what was happening and he said:

“Unfortunately no and to be honest we don’t have a ton to go on. None of the four individuals had any family in the area and none of their cars have been located. All but one of them were only reported missing when they stopped showing up for work. We still aren’t 100% sure what happened. They could have just decided to leave and start over somewhere else. It’s a beautiful town but there isn’t always a ton of growth around here for restless people.”

I told him it didn’t make much sense. When I asked why they wouldn’t have told someone they wouldn’t be coming back at least, he just replied:

“I don’t know Sam. We’re still treating these as missing persons cases but, so far we have come up with anything. Everyone we have talked to never offered much to go on.”

He was able to give me the place of employment for each person thankfully and I spent the rest of the day going from one place to the next. Unfortunately, each stop was the same as the previous, fruitless.

This morning I woke up and started back on the road. The I-80 corridor from Tooele to Elko is a 215 mile stretch between west Utah and eastern Nevada with mostly nothing but desert beside the interstate with mountains off in the distance. As miles rolled by, I couldn’t help think about what the sheriff said. They didn’t find any of the cars? No sign of them at all? I mean it’s flat desert for miles in all directions. You would be able to see if they had pulled off or got stuck somewhere. Where could they have gone?

As I arrived on the outskirts of Wendover, my cars radiator decided it had had enough and my engine started to overheat. Luckily, I was able to limp my car into the first service station I saw. A tall portly man with a balding head and a beard that would make members of ZZ Top jealous named Jim, came walking out as I pulled in with a cloud of smoke pouring out from under my hood. As I parked he said:

“Lord have mercy son, how longs it been doing that?”

I explained to him I had only limped it along for maybe 10 minutes and popped the hood for him to check it out.
He took a few minutes to check out the engine compartment, muttering and humming as he looked and then said:

“Son, you’re lucky you pulled in when you did. Judging by the look of it you’d have done a lot hell of a lot more damage had you gone much further. I ain’t got this specific radiator in the back but should be able to get one in tomorrow morning, shouldn’t take more than four or five hours to get it swapped out. I’d say safe bet you’re back on the road the day after tomorrow.”

I told him that definitely beats having it towed all the way back home and having to start this process all over. He offered to take me to a hotel that was maybe 10 minutes down the road. I told him thank you and grabbed my bag out of the back of my car. I climbed into the passenger seat of Jim’s truck as we started down the road.

He asked what brought me out and I explained what I was working on. Being my first time out this way, I asked him if he had seen or heard anything about it. He said:

“Well hell, it’s a big desert out here. Many a people come out here and drop life savings into a casino then crawl in a bottle a drink away what little they have left. Plus, there’s plenty of places to go if a person don’t want to be found.”

I asked him if he had seen anything suspicious lately.

“Suspicious? No. I did have to tow a fella who broke down maybe 25 miles north of Gold Hill. That’s honestly about it.”

When I asked him about Gold Hill he explained that it was an old ghost town out between Wendover and the Goshute Reservation. He said the town had gone away and popped back up on and off since the 1850s. The gold rush, the arsenic boom, tungsten mining, reason after reason of the town to open and close. He also said that since the mining in the 1940s ended, there hasn’t been a reason for anyone to go back out there and in his own words:

“and I never had any reason to go check it out.”

When I asked him if the guy had said why he was out there, Jim just replied:

“No. I figured he got lost and turned around. Cell signal isn’t exactly a guarantee out there. It’s out tucked in the mountains and to call the paths out there roads is generous. I doubt much maintenance is done out there and there’s been some real rough storms in that area the past few months. Luckily the storms don’t ever make it up this far.”

It was about that time that we made it to the hotel and I was dropped off. Since I’ve got a couple of days until my car is back up and running, I might as well ask around here and see what I can find out. I haven’t ever heard of, much less been to Gold Hill. Maybe someone around here can give me some more information and I can check things out.

Well, now I’m going to go take a shower and get into bed.
I’ll write more soon.

Hello everyone,

Since my car isn’t supposed to be fixed until tomorrow, today was filled with walking around town and talking to some of the locals. I started with Bonnie, the front desk clerk.

She’s a nice enough woman, older maybe mid sixties? She’s petite with thick glasses and a warm presence almost like a grandmother. When asked about the missing people she didn’t have much to add, just the same things we’ve all heard. When I asked about Gold Hill though, it was a different story.

Bonnie mentioned an older man named Mr. Johnson who claimed he’d seen people hauling large amounts of supplies into the mountains in that direction. Immediately, my interest was piqued and I asked where I could find him. Bonnie told me that Mr. Johnson is always sitting in the diner down the street, so I headed that way. The diner was a textbook version out of a lifetime movie. Red cushioned stools along a counter, booths lining the walls on both sides with the smell of breakfast and fresh coffee filling the air. Mr. Johnson was right where Bonnie said he would be. He sat in a booth in the corner, large plate of eggs and a coffee in front of him. I walked over and asked if I could sit down.

I introduced myself and explained what I was doing here. I asked him to tell me about himself. He explained that after serving in Vietnam, he got a job as a truck driver and settled out here because he liked how far away it was from big cities. After warming up to each other a bit, I started asking him about Gold Hill and what he saw.

He said about 2 months back, two men loaded a truck up at the hardware store with as much as it could hold. Tools, a couple generators, some building materials and other basic supplies. When he tried talking to them about it, they were polite but vague. Then they took off towards the mountains and that was that. He said:

*“I’d seen them a couple times after that. It’s always the same thing, load up supplies and head off. I can’t figure anywhere else they’d be going heading in that direction.”*

It was about this time that a friend of his, Mr. Randall, sat down next to him. According to him, the two men had been friends for years. Mr. Johnson continued:

*“Place ain’t been used in over 70 years. Don’t know what those fellas are looking for but I doubt they’ll have any luck.”*

*“Why do you say that?”* I responded.

Mr. Randall spoke up:

*“Supposedly there was a lower shaft somewhere in the mine that got sealed up long ago. Every couple of years somebody gets a wild hair and claim they’re going to go find it. No one ever finds anything though.”*

I asked if the mine was dangerous to which Mr. Johnson just replied:

*“Hell son, everything in a mine is dangerous. You’re in a tunnel hundreds of feet below the rock. Ain’t enough money in the world to convince me to do that.”*

I continued to sit and talk with the two men for about an hour or so more. Everything just seemed so bizarre. Why would anyone care about an old mine? But they were adamant that every few years, someone gets almost obsessed about it and then that’s it, nothing ever comes of it. Still, if people are going back out there now, I’m definitely interested in why they’re doing it.

They said if I had any more questions about Gold Hill, I should swing by the library. So that was my next stop. I figured why not, I’m stuck here until the morning anyways, worst case I find something to read in the meantime.

When I arrived at the library I was greeted (and I use that term incredibly loosely) by an intimidatingly quiet librarian. Likely in her mid 50s, the woman sat maybe five foot tall, had straight, gray hair pulled into a tight bun. I couldn’t tell if she was annoyed or what. She wasn’t exactly unfriendly but seemed like any conversation was an unnecessary interruption of whatever she was doing before I arrived.

When asked where I might find information about the mines she didn’t say a word, she just pointed to a back corner of the library where the archive terminals were located. I thanked her and went to the back.

For the most part, it was just more of the same. I went through document after document. Following articles talking about the operations picking back up in 1892 when the first mills started seeing productive gold and copper extraction, just to close in 1895. There was a “Major Boom” with the arrival of the Deep Creek Railroad in 1917 followed by closure in 1925. A “Resurgence” in 1943 to supply the war department during World War 2, just to come to a halt shortly after.

I found one article with the headline:

*“MINERS STRIKE NEW VEIN IN GOLD HILL”*
Dated: May 2nd, 1942.

Beneath the headline was a picture of six men standing in front of the newly opened mine. Below the picture were the names of the six men from left to right:

*M. Voss*
*T. Williams*
*J. Calder*
*W. Holiday*
*H. Elliot*
*L. Kessler*

After reading that I paused. Calder? Why did that name sound familiar? I pulled out my notes and looked through the names that Sheriff Deacon gave me.

There it was…

T. Calder.

Chapter 1:
 
I have lost count of how many months I have been awake for. Or has it been years? Our ship, The Nessie 14, was stocked up with at least five years worth of food, that was how I kept track of the passing time. This proved useful until we hit an asteroid field, its disembodied, rocky finger tips unintentionally unlatching two of the four food silos, and one of the three escape pods in the process. The Nessie still bears the accident's cracks and scars, like a wounded soldier.
 
My stretcher is stained a mustard yellow. My body's sweat and oil has seeped into the sheets. Cleaning it is no use, and it is too sticky to sleep on now, causing my back to break out into eczema and rashes. I have resorted to moving one of the medically designated metal tables and turning it into a makeshift bunk. Underneath is a thinner tray where Marcus would be able to sleep, but I haven't seen him get any rest for weeks.
 
When I first met Marcus, he was a cocky, fit party boy. He is somewhere in his forties, but with grey hair peppered in more than the usual man his age. He seemed like an unstoppable force of socialization with anybody he came in contact with, especially the number of men in the office who he had small, mutual, and charming infatuations with. I was plentiful shyer than Marcus, but I really did look up to him. I never told him. When we were back on Earth, I could never really get a word in edgewise anyway.
 
Nadia is our other crewmate. She's in her early 30's, somewhat young for this kind of mission, but makes up for it with how brilliantly smart she is. A little too smart if you ask me. I can't say much though, I am as thick as pig shit.
 
Once we made it into space, we went into what the movies call Cryosleep. Professionally the scientists at the office called it a Medically-Induced Hypo-Thermatic Coma. Before we left, the procedure was altered, improved. This allowed the coma, our "Cryosleep" to be elongated, far beyond the previous crews before us. There are rumors Walt Disney is hidden somewhere, sleeping through the same procedure. I call bull shit. If he felt anything like how I felt, especially in such an early attempt, he must have the mind and body of a puss ridden blob fish by now.
 
Our ship was called the Nessie 14 because, well, this is the 14th attempt. Twice the ships exploded before reaching orbit. Eight other times, we never heard from or saw the ships and crews again. And three times, the crews turned around, returning to Earth. That didn't matter though, they were ridiculed for abandoning the mission, an expensive mission at that. It had cost the companies hundreds of billions accumulated over decades of past attempts. The astronauts didn't care though. They had been in space for long enough that they now only ramble nonsense, forever changed from how the confinement of time twisted and hollowed their brains.
 
Our mission isn't one of necessity, but to everybody, especially at the companies, it is a need. The Gilling Telescope, the most advanced of its kind, picked up something from the farthest reaches we have ever found. It didn't just pick up something, it picked up nothing. No stars, no moons, no planets. Nothing. Human kind, after millions of years, has found what we believe to be the edge of space.
 
Chapter 2:
 
I woke up from my coma the first out of the crew. There were clocks on the ship, but no form of calendar. Command didn't want us to know how many years we had truly been asleep for. Even though they kept this from us, I knew, everyone I cared for or loved had most likely been dead for generations.
 
We were instructed not to wake our other crewmates up, as it would interrupt the rhythm of the procedure and could cause harm to the individual. I was isolated for a period that was unknown to me, my only company being the ship's terminal, which spurted out random notifications and warnings, as well as the amalgamation of strange galaxy clusters in view from the multilayered, thick windows. As I watched the clusters, they had the sway and movement akin to fish and whales, as if they were living beings.
That time isolated on my own were the loneliest 105 days of my life.
 
Marcus woke up to the overwhelming smell of body odour and old crushed food packs. His eyes, blurred with a clay thick glaze from the coma, scanned the room. As his eyes wet and adjusted to the light, I could be seen, curled in the dark corner. The vague hum and buzz of my discman could be heard through my cheap plastic headphones. A TOOL CD whirred around inside the small machine. I was ritualistically picking at the barcode sticker still adhered to the back of it. I didn't notice Marcus sleepily approach me. He dropped to a squat, laid an ice cold hand on my shoulder and cockily sputtered "You look a little worse for wear, bud". A relieved and friendly smile pushed up my cheeks. I slowly breathed out. "What took you so long".
 
It took another two weeks for Nadia to wake up. In those weeks, Marcus and I got to know each other better. We had an unmarked console onboard we could read, and write our personal logs on, though we mostly just used it for video games and karaoke. Due to the failure of previous missions, many brands no longer wanted to be seen in conjunction with the mission, so many of the useful items around the ship came in pastel and white unmarked casings. We had unbranded beers aboard, which originally seemed like a waste of space, something that could have been replaced with more useful cargo. We were exceptionally grateful for it in the end. They were all empty vessels of glass by the time Nadia came to.
 
I learnt multitudes about Marcus' life back on Earth. His personal life seems pretty much what it looked like from an outside perspective. Parties every weekend. Flatmates by choice so there were always others around to socialize with. The closer I looked at him, the more I noticed the scarred holes in his earlobes, and the flimsy and eroded septum from what looks like years of cocaine use.
 
We were alerted to Nadia's waking by hearing a guttural groan, and a thick, soupy liquid splatting against the floor. It was like the elevator scene from The Shining, but with much cloudier and beiger vomit instead. We spent most of that day cleaning sick from out of the needle thin panels in the floor, and adjusting Nadia to her surroundings. Seemed like her lengthier sleep as well as her smaller frame caused more side effects post coma.
 
Chapter 3:
 
The next three months were what we expected. Wake up. Eat breakfast. Check the scanners. Wait. Eat Lunch. Check the scanners. Do repairs. Eat Dinner. Check the scanners. Sleep. Repeat. It took Nadia longer to warm up to us. She was very dedicated to the job. Trying to prove her work ethic, only maintaining recreational small talk with us when either Marcus or I tried to include her in our bored antics. Eventually she started allowing breathing room in her busy brain to conjure up jokes. "What issue did the asteroid have with its bum... a hemorrh-oid". It was unexpected from her but extremely welcome. I don't know how the others feel, but I think we became pretty good friends.
 
One night we sat around having dinner together, and Nadia breached the topic of loved ones.
"Do you guys miss your family, I mean sorry for the sudden deep conversation, but I mean... I do". She twirled a curl into her wiry, dark hair. Marcus was the first to respond.
"I was on my own, so not really, didn't have friends and family, I'm a bit old for all that". I noticed a solemn glint in Marcus' eye. It was a noticeable juxtaposition to his strong willed demeanor. I always saw Marcus converse and playfully interact with people all the time back in the office. To think he never considered himself close to them tugged at me.
"Hey you aren't too old for that, you have me- you have us". I responded, my mouth talking faster than my thoughts. His expression shifted to smug and he chuckled.
"Haha ok big man, what about you, miss your family?". The sudden return to the question sunk me into deep consideration.
"I used to look after my father, he lived with me. He used to be quite demanding, even when he couldn't properly speak". I had a certain harsh tone on the word 'demanding'. Marcus' face indicated he picked up that I hid more in that word than what it seemed.
"Then he passed away and I lost my way a little, didn't really do or have anything else. So with what training I had before looking after Dad, it got me into this mission... and that's that". My voice trailed off and we all paused and breathed for a beat.
"Well thanks Nadia for that chipper topic!" Marcus' chuckle being so contagious the saddening tension all diffused and we continued onto lighter conversations. Those nights, with Marcus chuckling and Nadia's deep thoughts, were really special to me.
 
 
After three months, the accident happened. It was 11:45 pm. Nadia was asleep. Marcus was in the storage room, to which he sometimes disables the anti-gravity measures and floats around listening to music. I was reading a book called The Holy Innocents. It made me a little sick, but I had already read the majority of the books in the console over the previous months so I endured. The starboard side solar panels had been down for a week. Nadia and Marcus had been spending 12 hours a day, taking turns going for space walks with repair tools, attempting to fix the issue. I would keep myself occupied by the systems, communicating with them, and endlessly testing whether their endless attempts at patching finally succeeded. I heard the anti-gravity measures reactivate and Marcus, already cloaked in one of the three thick, bulky space suits, tiredly walked up to me.
"Ready to try this again?".
I sighed.
"Yessir".
 
I waved Marcus out through the abnormally thick glass pane in the airlock door. I watched as the pressure of space caused the interior panels to cling to the walls of the ship for their lives. Marcus, steadily hooked to the Nessie by a dense cable, routinely shimmied himself around the corner, out of my view.
I began walking to the heavy set, surgically designed terminal chair. I didn't make it though.
The entire ship jolted, rotating with great pace on a north-west axis. My body was launched, like a baby bird's premature first flight, directly into a hardened corner of the terminal chair. My head collided first. What I heard before going unconscious was a bone crushing crack.
 
Chapter 4:
 
I woke up. The pain, I wanted to scream. Scream so loud my stomach would slither up my throat, metallic blood fill my mouth, until it dribbled off my flaky lips. As much as I tried, all that came out was the muffled sounds of a dying mammal. My jaw was shattered, sharp shards of bone poked through my face muscles like gravel or stones in a bloody wound. It was locked shut, and started dripping dark, red fluid. I held it with my right palm, and helped myself onto both legs with the left. The ship had stopped rotating. Loose objects and panels were scattered across the floor. Few sparks fountained from worn cables.
 
I heard a groan. Nadia. Her silent, wet huffs crept from the bed bays. I hobbled towards her noises, the sounds of skin and nails clipping against the metal floors slowly coming into earshot.
 
Nadia laid in a pool of blood, thickening around the perimeter of her body. Her skin was pale, and eyes unfocused, the figure of a dying snow angel. A long handle had been snapped off during the accident, and as Nadia fell from her bed, the handle pierced the side of her waist, smoothly crawling through the meat of her body until it spurted out the other side. I slumped down to my knees, my lack of balance making it feel more like a fall. I sloppily trace my hands around her wound, trying to find the correct spot to apply pressure. I kept one hand held on her, and the other hand reaching for her bed shirt's sleeve. It was an old stained Freddy Krueger shirt, the soaking, red blood stains unintentionally fitting the faded design. I pulled hard with the one hand, slowly ripping off her sleeve. With each rip and tug, her torso would jolt, compressing her raw wound into the edges of the handle. She would gasp a hideous, wispy gurgle each time, guilt striking my heart like a crowbar.
 
Her harsh, pained exhales reminded me of the deer my father used to hunt. When I was in my early teens he would take me to a small island, about an hour boat ride from the beach near our house. I hated it, but for my father, it was a necessity. He was raised in a cabin in the forest with his father.
I never met my grandfather, he passed away in prison when I was a child a few months before he was to be released. I had only heard the few stories my father would grunt, with malice on his tongue. The way my father hunted was inhumane. He would find a deer, a large one, and lock his brain onto it, the rest of the world, a smoky fog. He would spend hours ritualistically sneaking through the trees, rifle in hand, a predator in a wooden city. I was just there to watch, a dedicated spectator for his sport. Once he had enough of his unnoticed taunting. He would fire the rifle. Hit somewhere that wouldn't kill the animal, just hurt it enough it would squirm and writhe on the ground. He would drop on one knee, always the right one, and stab from the belly to the neck, slowly, the deer vomiting its last breathes in perpetual terror. Nadia's eyes, her sputtering heartbeat, her slowing, sickening gasps... I couldn't let it happen again.
 
I wrapped the sleeve where I could around the wound, the jutting handle an obstacle for this act. She needed better medical attention. The only way this could happen is if I could get her to the medical bay. I looked down, guilt building even more.
"I'm sorry" I muttered to her, but the inability for any jaw motion caused it to be a wet, incomprehensible mess. As I did this flecks of my still dripping blood decorated her face.
I guided my hands under her back and under her knees, I then pulled up. I used all the strength I was able to muster in my state to pick Nadia up off of the ground. She screamed, no longer a raspy groan, but a needly, sharp scream of pure agony. The sound had no other emotion, her body, her mind, was only pain.
 
I am not exceptionally fit, but I had enough strength, especially in that situation, even in that state, to trip and stumble myself into the medical bay and drop Nadia's progressively more limp body onto the long metal table. A fountain of darker blood crawled out of her mouth as her body heaved onto the surface.
This is when her glassy eyed gaze started to come into focus. I was relieved, thinking she was at least cognoscente enough to leave her paralyzed state. Her eyes weren't focused on me though, they were focused on the other side of the room. I traced her gaze with my own, and realized I should have never felt any relief, I should have just felt pure fear.
 
Marcus' motionless body lay pressed against the large window that adorns the wall of the medical bay. Heavy debris from the loose food silos, which had now been fully torn from the ship, covered him, forcing his body to be compressed into the glass. I could not see his face. His helmet was just a doorway into a confined space of only blood. A tear rolled down my cheek.
"Get... him..."
I looked down at Nadia. Her face was determined, but weak. She slinked her hands to her waist, putting pressure on her wound. I grumbled a saddened noise, and slowly traced backwards, keeping my eyes on Nadia until I turned the corner. Her determined look fading as I left.
 
I had never been in space. I was trained for it, but I was on the mission to monitor the scanners, sort out the technology and analyse from the inside. I was in my suit, head peaking out from the thick valve that I twisted my helmet into. I couldn't focus, the scraping of the helmet mechanically screwing into its latches picked its soundwaves at parts of my brain. I was stood in the airlock. I had to lock myself in there, and then venture out of the room all by myself. This was a procedure that needed two people, but there was only me. I flinched every time I felt the cold, damp fabric lining of my helmet, soaking in the blood from my jaw. I took a step. I had to do it. I had to save Marcus. I took another step. The entire ship shifted and I fell to the floor.
A smaller asteroid had collided with the ship. I thought it was over. Why couldn't it have been over. I couldn't do it. I couldn't go out there.
 
Chapter 5:
 
My bare toes felt the chill of the metal floors. My heel tapping repeatedly, at a continuous rate, like a machine in an oil rig. I sat back against the medical bay doors. A small red light spread its glare onto the top of my head, curling into oblivion off the split ends and the tip of my hairs. The medical bay doors were locked. I couldn't face what was in there. My brain was filing thoughts through a fog, an endless fractal that was sporadically being combed through. I sat there for an hour. Paralyzed albeit for my heel. Another hour passed. A tiny metal clang from behind the doors pulled me back to reality.
 
With swiftness I slam my fist against the door, spidering my fingers with haste until I found the lock, and disengaged it. The doors slid open, and an uncomfortable darkness thickened the air. My pupils darted in threes, until they could finally focus on Nadia's stationary body lying on the table. Arm strung off one side, caressed by a thin line and a needle which laid coldly on the floor. The line connected to her wound. She had stitched herself up.
At that time I hadn't even processed that the only sign Marcus had been crushed against the window, were the deep scratches of metal against glass looking out to empty space.
 
I rushed over to Nadia's side. I held my hand near her chapped lips. There was barely any breath pushing against my palm. I shuffled as fast as I could possibly go over to a nearby counter. I stumbled and crushed my organs against the hard edge, silently pleading for air as I winded myself. I spiraled my arms out like an octopus, pulling cabinets open, throwing piles over, trying to find an oxygen mask. My stress unfolded at such a rate I did not notice the slow, heavy footsteps behind me. I returned back to reality again at the sounds of metal squeaking against metal, and a pressurized puff of air. I turned around.
 
Marcus stood, still in his suit, hand clasped against an oxygen mask pressed onto Nadia's face. His helmet was missing, exposing his completely blood soaked face, a thick, deep, red wound across his temple. Chunks of blood coagulated inside his nostrils.
"What were you doing?" He tiredly demanded.
"I was trying... to help her" I unintelligibly spat out.
"I don't even know what you're saying, you know where this mask is kept! We all do!"
"I'm sorry" I said so quiet and full of guilt it was almost a hum.
Marcus, displaying a cowl of anger limped out of the room, pieces of fabric from the bulky suit fluttering to the floor.
 
Chapter 6:
 
The next three weeks rivaled the loneliness of my first 105 days awake on the Nessie. Although we have built back our comradery now, there was an undeniable and dark tension swimming through the air between us after the accident. Marcus wouldn't talk to me, unless it had to do with our mission, or making small repairs to the wounded ship. I sat in the corner again, listened to my discman, as Marcus tended to Nadia. It took her five days to wake up. Five days of silence again, not that I could talk anyway with my jaw.
 
One night, two weeks after the accident, Marcus left the med bay and made his way to the dust glazed corner I resided in.
"Can you talk now?"
I crack open my jaw, the bone hinge popping and cracking in place.
"Yes" I sounded different now, a sultry mix between a new accent and a speech impediment. The way my jaw was healing, I'd never talk the same.
He stood, looming over me. We no longer seemed like equals, people that were friends days ago. Now we were just a strong man, and the broken jawed monster in the dark. If Marcus heard me say this now, he would scoff. Nowadays it seems like he always knows what is going on in my pale head, and says just the right thing I want to hear to make me feel like I'm not a failure.
 
"You did nothing, you left her. Why?" He asked, his anger not quite masking his genuine questioning.
"To save you" I croaked.
"You didn't save me" His tone became demanding.
"I went to save you! I did".
"I could see very little through that window, but I could see you leave, leave Nadia, and then nothing. For the two hours I was stuck at that window, trying to pull myself in, watching her die".
My breath picked up in a defensive panic.
"She told me to leave, she told me to".
 
A voice shot through the room. A bullet of words pierced my heart. Nadia paced out of the medical bay.
"Take some god damn accountability you little... you little rat!" Her breath was heavy, this was the first time she had stood since the accident. She was in a fresh shirt now, allowing a new stain of blood to take another victim.
Marcus twisted around, worriedly shifting his feet in concern.
"No Nadia, you need to rest".
"I can't just let him shout excuses and excuses and EXCUSES!" She dropped to the floor, blood sneaking through her gritted teeth. She gasped. The same guttural gasp she made when I held her bloodied wound. Meat machinery clicked in my head. My eyes lost focus and I stared into the room as if it were space itself.
"He made me cut the deer..."
"What?" Marcus mutters in utter confusion.
"He made me...". I wasn't a spectator. Another excuse.
"I wish your jaw was still broken you horrible fucking man" Nadia continued. She mustered enough strength to determinedly guide her arm towards a nearby table. Her hand lied upon a metal cup, and without a beat, lunged it towards me. It hit my jaw. I cried out the loudest my throat could expel, like a wounded animal. I am not a wounded animal. My eyebrows furled and the oily skin on my forehead tightened.
 
Chapter 7:
 
Those three weeks of turbulence are finally over. The yelling, the arguments, the disappointments we were able to put them behind us. They were a temporary asteroid field that we repaired together and now have moved on. I slip off of the table and the soles of my feet spread across the metal floor. A hard dried substance clinging to the floor panels dig into my skin, but I pay no mind. I cheerfully careen my way through the ship. I need to shower, but it is not an urgent necessity as my body odour isn't a dominant smell these days anyway.
"Marcus I'm up!" My voice bounces and twirls through the empty hallways, which are thick with static and silence. In return I hear him talking from near the main terminal.
 
I make my way up to the terminal. The hallways seeming more mazelike, and even natural. That was possibly just the mold and stains which relocated itself to bare surfaces, growing everyday like an infinite puzzle. I glide past the medical bay, the red locked light flickering in glitched, pulsating bursts. Without decelerating I glide my hand across the face of the doors. I can feel multiple dents from smaller fists that were punched through from the opposite side. I pressed in slightly, the doors staying idle as the lock refrains them from jostling in their place.
"You eaten yet Marcus?"
His monotone voice responds, as I can hear it passing through the hallway much easier as I draw nearer. I step into the doorway, facing the terminal, and see Marcus in his usual spot upon the terminal chair.
"Already at work I see" I chuckle to us both.
"Scanning... Scanning" Marcus responds, his robotic voice wheezing through the speakers. I pull up a chair, shrieking metal noise spouting out, as I scrape it in front of Marcus.
 
Marcus' corpse lay upright, strung up a distance from the terminal chair with cables and strings.
"How's the work going?" I ask, making tired morning small talk.
"Scanning... Scanning" Marcus responds again.
"Haha yeah I get you, work's work". I go to affirmatively pat him on the shoulder in jest. My mind contorts and clocks what I am doing. Do not touch him. Do not feel him. Keep the immersion.
 
Marcus' body is skinny and brittle. His stiff, sloppily positioned posture, strung about like clothes on a washing line, resembled that of a sapling, thin roots with even thinner branches. His eyes were a dark grey, both looking like they had receded into his skull, and like they were on the verge of toppling onto the floor. His handsome, grey, peppered hair was stringy and loose, no longer giving the aesthetic of a young spirited, charming man.
After a fluttering beat, my thoughts travel back to normalcy.
"I am going to go have a little break before I get into working ok"
"Scanning... Scanning"
"Ok yeah see you soon" I make my way to another room, and deactivate the antigravity measures.
 
"Scanning... Scanning... Warning"
 
Chapter 8
 
I let my limbs go limp, gracefully contorting in antigravity. I'm listening to my discman, floating in complete silence, letting all thoughts pour out of my skull, emptying my mind. I see out the window something unusual, well, it's what I don't see. I don't see anything. I see nothing. My eyes widen in complete satisfaction and amazement. Then, my skin tightens.
 
A sequence of crumbling and metal shrieks start echoing through the ship. A layer of the thick glass windows that line the ship start snaking thin almost unnoticeable cracks through their exterior. The ship starts vibrating at only the consistency of a small bumblebee, but noticeably increases within seconds. Pressure within my joints start popping like internal bubble wrap.
 
I grasp onto the wall and propel myself towards the exit. The red light disengages as my fingers, pivoting with an uncomfortable tightness, unlocks the door. I re-enter gravity as my body slinks heavily to the floor. I wind myself as my ribs collide with the stained panels. In a tornado of limbs I clumsily push myself forwards towards the terminal
"Warning... Warning".
"Marcus what is going on?" I shout towards his corpse.
"Warning... Warning"
"Piece of shit" I mumble under my breath, entertaining the idea that he could even hear me. I brush the cables that prop him upright aside, and type into the terminal. His face, frozen in shriveled, moldy, infinite sleep, watches over a short distance from my head. I type a string of messages, simplified to the question "What is happening". As the ship's metal groans the terminal spells out shrill audio from its speakers.
"Limited distance remaining, undocumented pressure damaging hull, repair or 98% human fatality hypothesised".
 
Sweat spirals off of my forehead as I fling my view back towards the window. The void of space started to gradient to a different colour, as we get closer a wall of murky light absorbs what was once darkness. Slowly, from a short distance, a lone piece of debris drifts from beyond the glass. I try focusing my eyes. There are thick letters dashed across the debris, almost unintelligible with how creased and compact it had become. My eyes expand with fear and awe as my brain pieces the words together.
"Nessie 7"
A sharp, unsatisfying crack pounds into my head as I watch an intricate web of thick white lines develop across the window in the storage room. Muffled whistles start pushing into the glass and I have only seconds to act. My toes press with force against the panels and I launch myself towards the lock. Shrieking sounds of glass and air becoming more overwhelming. Another push, propelling myself again. the web of glass expanding to the full size of the large window. My skin keeps getting tighter, shrink wrapping my bones and muscles in a fleshy package. With all my strained strength I launch myself one last time, a finger length away from the lock. Then with the cry of one thousand tiny glass shards, and the wind of a planet wide blizzard the window breaks. My hand reaches the lock as my legs and hips are sucked towards the murky abyss. Tears are vacuumed from my eyes as, with all the hope I have left, I activate the lock. The doors barrel towards each other and shut with a large crack and thud in the centre. I release a heart stopping scream and pull away.
 
Droplets dance along the floor beside me and I pull my gaze down. The bottom of the door's crease is painted red, and my left foot is missing three and a half toes. Red pulp and toothy bone protrude where the toes used to be attached. The Nessie moans and roars, twisting inwards on itself. The pressure, the pulling, the compressing, its overbearing. At the speed we are travelling towards the cloudy edge of space, we won't make it before we collapse inwards and transform into a crumpled piece of paper. I need more speed. I need to finish the mission.
 
There are two remaining escape pods that sit within a well at the bottom of the Nessie. Developed to protect us during an emergency, they launch outwards at a speed exceptionally faster than that which we are travelling now. That is my only way out. I hobble through the corridors, one wrong movement away from slipping on my own slinking trail of blood. One fall, one stop in momentum, and I could miss my window to escape, and become stuck, melded and bursting inside an imploded metal prison. I press on, past the red light of the medical bay doors, past our dingy, damp sleeping quarters, and to the few steps that remain to make my leave. With each hobble down these steps, I writhe in pain, gaining my breath before each drop as even the smallest bump shoots agony through my foot.
 
I now stand at the escape pods. Two undamaged circular orifices with a view to a compact metal char and a baron console. This is it, this will bring me past the edge of space. The ship roars and sparks, glass shattering and panels crumpling. I have no time to breathe and with my one healthy foot I push myself into the pod. The door speeds to a robotic close and decompresses with an industrial exhale. I don't even think about sitting in the chair, I set the velocity to max, ignoring the warning. Disengage the launch countdown and... The roar of the engine pulsates as I shoot out into space. I don't look out the front window. I look back. The walls of the ship are an obstacle to my view, but I know I'm in the eyeline of Marcus. Guilt wells up as tears thicken against my tight eyelids. My crew once trusted me. Considered me their friend, and what did I do to them. String Marcus' corpse up. Lock Nadia in a room to starve. I made that choice for them. I am the one leaving their bodies behind as I get to run away and see the outcome of our shared work.
The Nessie crumbles inwards slowly as I look away, my brain slowly focusing on the quick collapse of the escape pod. Alarms whirr and bounce their sounds through the deteriorating structure. I just need more time. One of my lungs tighten as the other one expands full of liquid. My face tightens on one side and sags on the other. The pressure is too much for my body. My ears trickle blood profusely, until it slips across my lips and into my mouth. The alarms are almost silent as my ears are blocked and muffled. The murky wall becomes brighter as I propel closer. I am almost there. The mystery uncovered and the mission almost complete. What is beyond the edge of space? Galaxy clusters shoot past and swirl around me, becoming strands and trails of light at the speed I am travelling. My knees swell, filled with fluid and my eyelids puff up until my vision is as though I am looking through two straws. I shut what remains of my vision, my body contorting and the escape pod ripping into strings of material and metal as I break through the barrier.
 
Space breaks into an exploding splash. Voids of stars and darkness spray and clump like a blast of water from a whales blowhole. I open my eyes, glazed over with blood and crust. I see a bright void, a sky above the space below. Static clusters of galaxies and stars resemble vast islands, and the dark pit that we know as space, just an ocean. I am but the size of an ant, in whatever this world is. It's beautiful, it's horrifying, it can't truly exist, can it? A large collection of space and galaxy reaches out with an elongated form, a limb, and swats me and the debris downwards. My head crumbles from the impact, my body just a collection of mush and bones gracefully twisting through a plateau of inconceivable life. My vision goes dark.
 
I lay on humongous interstellar grains. A beach of stars. What resembles the remains of my body decays purple, and frost claws and grasps at the edges of my skin. I do not remain anymore, just the mind and body of a puss ridden blob fish. The black, bleeding orbs that contain the last resemblance of my eyes drift upwards, and everything fades to black.

11 AM:

I’m writing this blog because I realize that something is happening to me. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve forgotten things I don’t want to. I don’t know where else to turn to.

My name’s John. I’m 25, I’ve had lower body paralysis since I was 12.

I have a steady job, it's okay. I’ve been single for a few months even if my ex’s toothbrush says otherwise. It’s stupid, I know, but it’s one of those electric brushes that costs a lot, so I don’t want to throw it away, just in case.

I have brown hair, light hazel eyes, light brown complexion, and I’m a bit overweight (the  motorized wheelchair doesn’t help).

I have a French Bulldog named Cece. She has a black-round spot in her brow, I call it her third eye.

We live with my childhood best friend, Jack. I’d say he was the perfect roommate if he didn’t insist on playing his drums in the middle of the day. He just left town for the week so I’ll finally be able to take midday naps without rough awakenings.

This thing, I think it started yesterday. I was talking to a woman on Instagram, Monica. I liked something about her. Her profile was mostly pictures of her pet birds, but a few posts showed her beautiful pale skin and gorgeous blue eyes.

We were just talking, and then she sent me these messages:

>United, we'll be happy.
Tomorrow we'll be happy.

And yes, it was weird, but I’ve been with worse crazy like with this one girl, or  was it a guy that… crap.
Doesn’t matter.

So for a while, we kept talking, about my personal life, about how her parrot Steve would shit all over the house if he was unattended, how her canary Grace took the term “bird brain to a whole other level”, and some things about my friends that I can’t recall talking about.

I’m going to eat lunch, and take Cece out to walk, I’ll keep writing after.

1 PM

It was mostly uneventful.

When we got out, my elderly, indian neighbour Rashid greeted us with a “John, Cece”  like he  always does. I swear to God he’s been painting his house’s facade and spilling paint all over the sidewalk for the last six months. I would complain but he reminds me of my dad too much for me to care.

We had to change our usual route because a large fallen branch blocked the wheelchair from the sidewalk. Cece didn’t mind.

After we reached the park, and the queen decided to poop in the most annoying place for a disabled person to pick up, we headed back home.

On our return a man painting the neighboring house asked me about Jack’s return. I’ve no clue what he was talking about. Poor guy, dementia must’ve made him confuse me with someone else.

3 PM

I had some obligatory work meetings I couldn’t miss. 

The first meeting was the long and boring kind for the most part. At some point, while I was admiring how sun deprived everyone in my team is, a teammate asked me something about last week’s report… I had no idea what she was talking about. Some teammate saved me after an uncomfortably long silence. I wish I could remember who it was to thank them, but they all looked the same.

The second meeting started badly. My microphone died on me so I had to rush to the garage to get another one. This side quest was complicated by the drum set right in the middle of the room that blocks the wheelchair. I don’t remember buying them.

Now, I’m going to for an earned nap hoping, it’ll help with my head. Wish me luck.

6 PM

FUCK!

I woke up sweating, having this awful feeling in my chest. My heart pounded so loudly, yet my head didn’t understand what was wrong.

By the time I managed to get up, the pounding stopped, and my head was hurting instead. Cece looked as confused as I, even when I offered her a walk. She didn’t want it, but I needed it, so I went out alone.

I put my walking shoes on, and took off. For some reason, they had that new shoe feel, as if the soles had never hit the ground.

I mindlessly went forward, hoping it would clear my head, but it only seemed to make it worse. I started running out of frustration, and I only halted after realising I didn’t know where I was or where I started.

The white picket fences, and cookie-cutter facades didn’t help it. I wanted to call someone for help, but I can’t recall anyone who gives a fuck about me. So, I did a 180 turn, and started running the other way, hoping I would know when to stop.

After what felt like hours, and dozens of pale runners(side note: why is every runner in this town so fucking pale? They spend hours in the sun FFS), I heard Cece’s bark. I knew it was hers because someone always said she sounded like a screaming child.

She was in the window as the one thing that distinguished the house from all the mass produced clones, barking, as if she knew I needed it. I went to the door, and sure enough, the key fit. 

I walked in, expecting stubby tail wags, but was instead welcomed with more barking. It didn’t feel like the barking of a dog happy to see its owner, rather the one of a creature afraid for its life. I neared my hand to see if she’d calm down by scent, but she backed away.

I tried again… and she bit me, hard. I instinctively pushed her, and ran to the master bedroom, slamming the door before she could get near.

She’s never been like this, not to me. 

The actual fuck is happening.

8 PM

I still can hear her snoring outside the door. She barks anytime I make a noise, it’s driving me even more mad. I’m a whole human being, stuck in his room afraid of a 20 pound dog, whose most deadly characteristic are her farts.

I tried talking to the person who started this, whatever the fuck their name is. It wasn’t easy, everyone on my laptop looked exactly the same. If it wasn’t for her pictures of Steve and Grace I would be able to find them. I tried to write, to recall what was wrong. All I could manage was to resend what I’ve written here up until now.

They responded:

>Tonight we'll be happy.

And no, I have no clue what the hell they mean. Further messages got no response. It’s making me feel stupid for ever liking those dark eyes of theirs.

9 PM

I attempted to call someone on my phone, but I forgot the password. All I had to do to unlock it then was answer the security question about my mom’s name… I have no fucking clue. Why don’t I remember that while I can perfectly recall that 20 years ago she adopted a calico cat named Bizcuit Jones?

God, the heart pounding came back, with an accompanying throbbing headache. 

I went to the bathroom to take a shower, I found two toothbrushes. What the hell? Why is there another toothbrush in my personal bathroom?

This is my house, this is my room, why does it feel like it’s not made for me?

I'm sorry for the messy writing, as you can probably tell, I’m having a hard time gathering my thoughts. I’ll keep writing whenever I manage to gather my thoughts.

11 PM

Something feels wrong. 

I look at my pale white skin in the mirror, it looks normal, but it feels off.

I don't remember if I've always looked like this.

We don’t remember anything else.

12 AM

Thank you for worrying.

We're okay now.

United, we'll be happy.
Tomorrow we'll be happy.

My tendency to isolate and my curiosity led me to my field of expertise: literary conservation. I loved old books. The forbidden histories, the untold stories, the glimpses into that deep truth. It also made relationships very difficult so I didn't have many friends still, and I'd only had a hand full of romantic partners despite being in my early 30s. Being alone was ok with me, I liked the quiet.

I started my career at the New Orleans Public Library. I'm originally from east Texas, so it wasn't too far from home, but far enough away that I wouldn't run into anyone I had grown up with or gone to college with. Something to note about New Orleans, it's an old city, and so there are a lot of folk tales and mysticism sewn into the tapestry of its history. Even though I didn't believe in any of it, really, I always found it fascinating. Vampires, voodoo, the occult. There's also a very prominent presence of the Catholic Church. A strange mix in my opinion.

A few months into my time at the NOLA library, we had a middle aged man come in, clad in black with a white collar. He was apparently looking for a book about the early gnostic teachings. These were pre-catholic, primordial Christian philosophies and stories, something I always found interesting because of their stark contrast to the publicly accepted version we have had since the middle ages. The librarian directed him to the area of the library where he could find such a book and he left, polite and thankful but reserved.

A few months go by, nothing out of the ordinary really happened. Occasionally we would get older books that needed to have their degradation halted, and that was my forte. It was Monday. A stormy humid Monday I will never forget.

The priest comes back and asks if there is anyone who can direct him to someone who can repair antique tomes. Obviously, I was summoned to meet him. The church needed help with some very very old versions of the Bible they had come to acquire from some old man who lived out in the swamps a few miles outside of town. All the rain had caused some flooding that had unearthed some of a very old forgotten graveyard, probably populated mostly by only a few families over the centuries. There were coffins, of course, but there was also a wooden box, sealed in leather that had been buried with one of the coffins.

I was excited, more than happy to help. This was an opportunity to preserve a very rare piece of human history and culture.

Pleased with my work, the priest said in a gentle but raspy voice, "I'm in charge of the rare antiquities acquisition for the Vatican. I was sent to New Orleans because there are records of a family who had been brought over during the slave trade who had a family heirloom. A Bible, handwritten, with all the original gospels. Judas, thomas, so on and so forth. Untouched by the dishonesty and political aspects of the church during the middle ages." I was surprised by the admission of such a forgery.

"I assume that's what's in this box?" I said.

"Yes sir. And there are some other books, many many other books owned by the church that are in need of someone to look after them. The person who was in charge of that recently disappeared. Would you be open to an opportunity?"

"What kind of opportunity are we talking about exactly? I don't know if I'm the right person. I don't really believe in God." I said.

"That actually isn't important. We just need someone with your particular skills." He let out a sigh and smiled faintly, "Are you open to relocation?"

"Relocation to where?" I asked dryly.

"Italy. The Vatican."

My eyes widened and I took a large breath and exhaled deeply, "I've got nothing tying me here. This could be really interesting, I've never been out of the country before. Shit, I've never even left the South. Oh, sorry for the language!"

He chuckled and accepted my apology. He urged me to tie up any loose ends and if I had any family, to let them know I may not be back for a long while. I had a week before we would fly to Rome.

I called home that night and let my parents know. My mom was excited for me and my dad was less so. He wondered when they'd see me again, of course. I reassured him id have time to visit home.

I spent the week, packing and getting things I thought I'd need for the flight, and for my new home. The priest had told me they would take care of shipping my things and that was a huge relief. They were going to put me up in a small apartment a few miles outside the Vatican. I was never a material person so the move was going to be relatively painless.

After a gruellingly long chain of flights with a few layovers, I finally arrived in Rome. I was greeted by a new priest, who was holding a sign that read, "Jarred Thompson" so I walked over and let him know that was me.

"Hello, Jarred. I'm Father Gastani. I'll be escorting you to your living arrangement." He said cheerfully, with a surprisingly mild accent.

"Nice to meet you, Father. Thank you."

I followed him to a taxi and we rode down the cobbled road for a few minutes while he explained the locations of and pointed to multiple shops as we passed them, places to get essentials and various things I could do in spare time. Upon arrival I thanked him again and he urged that I be on time for the taxi he would send in the morning to transport me into the Vatican for my first day on the job. The following days would be the most significant, glorious and terrifying days of my life.

Past the absolutely insane security, checkpoints, x-rays, swiss guard, etc, I finally was lead to the entrance to the fabled library of the Vatican. It was gorgeous. Vibrant colors dancing on the ancient stone as the sun reached through the titanic ornate windows to caress the walls and floors of the massive archive. Father Gastani lead me through the towering rows of books and scrolls to the farthest reaches of the gallery.

"How are you settling in, Jarred?" He said, in his typical warm demeanor.

"Couldn't really sleep from the excitement and anticipation so I was able to put away almost all my things. Figured it best to be productive on some level."

"Glad to hear it! We're almost to the room with the books we need your help with."

This room was clearly rarely used. Dust covering most of the shelves and surfaces other than one section of the room. He walked over to a large glass wall full of transparent temperature and humidity controlled drawers, put on some gloves, and removed an old book. He set it down, pointed me to my equipment, and wished me good luck on his way out.

I decided to take a look around, as my curiosity about the various antiquities and potentially forgotten knowledge populating this room had my full attention. Ancient texts and tomes littered the place, and I browsed like a music lover in an old record store. Towards the back of the room there was a large door made of extremely smooth, moderately reflective black stone. Or at least I guessed it's stone. It had no handle or window but there was a faint light creeping from beneath it. There was also a sound coming from the other side. A sound that's hard to explain. It was like a mixture of the hum of machinery and chorus of deep vocals but not close enough to either to be identified as such. A loud creak startled me as Father Gastani re-entered the room.

"Oh shit, Father, you scared me!" I chuckled nervously, fearing my curiosity had violated trust. "No one has been in that room for centuries, as far as I know. The door just doesn't seem to open. We've tried hydraulics and every other machine we could think of and, nothing. It won't budge. We even had a team of geologists come and use a device to see if we could map out what's behind it using waves but the results came back as if there was nothing on the other side of it." He smirked, "Let me know if you figure it out."

My heart beat steadied as I realized I had caused no offense. I decided to get to work on my assignment, restoring the ancient Bible. I spent the rest of the day meticulously repairing pages and bindings before I found myself exhausted and ready to call it a night. As I moved all my equipment back to their places, I got an eerie feeling that sent chills crawling across my back like a thousand micro needles. Something was watching me but upon scanning the room, I was very much alone. I shuddered and told myself I was being ridiculous.

The next day, around noon, I'd decided to take a break, eat the lunch I had packed and then inspect the strange door again. The archway around the obsidian mirror door was about 20 feet tall and 6 feet wide. It was covered in black twisting, intertwining ridges and valleys, what looked like a cross between mycelium and a vascular system. I ran my fingers over it and it seemed to vibrate. It was also cold to the touch, covered in a layer of perspiration from the juxtaposition of temperature of the room. I wiped my fingers on my shirt, realizing the liquid was black as well. The water was ashen and gritty, leaving a streak of grey on my shirt. Stepping back, I admired the possibility of what stories might be behind the door. Ancient, forlorn thoughts and ideas, lost histories, so intriguing.

I could hear the hum from inside return, pressing my ear to the monolithic door, all my senses vanished and my consciousness was left floating, silence so thick I could hear the blood moving in my veins, smothered by limitless darkness. Darkness isn't the right word. It was Nothing. It seemed like I had been suspended for days. There was nothing at all.

Gasping for air, I crashed back to reality to find Father Gastani peering down at me shouting in Italian to other priests as I tried to sit up from the cold, dusty granite floor.

"Lay still, son. I think you may have hit your head."

I could still feel the weight of the void on my mind the way you feel the static numb of physical weight on a constricted body part.

Weeks went by, and I had finally finished restoring the old Bible. There were literal tons of other books they needed my help to restore, so I had my work cut out for me. All I could think about was the door.

Though what I had experienced frightened me at the time, I could not shake the feeling that it was beckoning me back. There was a peace to the Nothing. This had to be some kind of technology. But it's too old. Maybe there is something to the ancient aliens theory? I've always kind believed it to some extent, though I'm embarrassed to admit. I certainly could not accept that this was spiritual or supernatural in nature. The curiosity was unbearable. I had to investigate further.

I gazed up at the enormous door. My pulse quickening as I moved closer. Not paying attention, my eyes fixed on the door, stumbled over a loose stone in the floor and caught myself on the sharp edge on the underside of one of the tables, preventing my fall, but slicing into my thumb. It wouldn't require stitches but it was deep enough to cause quite a pain response. I squeezed my finger with my shirt, trying to apply pressure and pretend it wasn't that bad.

I looked at the archway holding the door with great intent, searching for any semblance of a mechanism to interact with. There's no way I'd find something they haven't already searched for after all these years, I told myself. I ran my hand across the strange, cold archway again. The varicose textures began to pulse and writhe, coming to life and moving towards where my blood had rubbed off on it. It absorbed it, giving off a brief faint glow as it did. A deep, loud thunk reverberated off the decorative angular ceiling adornments and I jumped back, startled. The door was no longer reflective. It was completely matte now and I reached out to touch it's once mirror-polished surface to find a thick viscous onyx substance, somewhere between a solid and a liquid, similar to the texture of crude oil, but the surface pulled against me as I yanked my hand away, stretching like goo before breaking and leaving small spheres of the stuff floating still in the air. Imagine spilling a liquid on the ISS in zero gravity. It slipped off my hand, laying motionless in the air before me. In a fraction of a moment, the door pulled the floating particles back into itself immediately appearing as still and solid as it did before I had disturbed it's bizarre surface. I knew I had to go get Father Gastani. Of course they had never considered blood, these were priests. Whatever was behind this door, or fucking gateway, or whatever it is, I didn't want to be alone. The door out to the main hall of the library was gone. Like it never existed. I sat down, crossed my legs and stared at the blank space in the wall, trying to figure out if the door was made of some poisonous material, causing me to hallucinate. That had to be it. I'd just close my eyes, and wait for this to pass. It couldn't be real, it's impossible. My anxiety was too high to sleep, and I had to relieve it by moving around, doing something. Anything. Occupy my mind. "Let's get some work done, Jarred." I thought. But I couldn't focus. Irritated, I pushed myself to face the door again. This was the only way out.

I reached forward slowly, shakily, moving my fingertips ever closer to the door. I made contact with the liquid surface and pushed my arm in up to my elbow. My arm was still there. I pushed further, up to my shoulder. I felt my hand break through the other side. There was something there! A room on the other side. I decided to leap through to the other side, as the texture of the door gave resistance. I would need some momentum. I pulled my arm out, flinging dark pools of the substance floating out into the room, before they were pulled back into the door like before. I got about a 20 yard running start from where the exit door to the library once was and sprinted towards the black door. I hurdled through it, bursting through the other side and finding myself falling from the ceiling towards a large pool of liquid below.

I landed in the pool of black liquid, only about 3 feet deep, and looked up to find the door pulling all the displaced liquid back into itself, realizing the ceiling was actually the floor as the door was upside down on this side. I made my way towards the edge of the pool, taking in my surroundings. The room was a massive cathedral. An upside down cathedral. Marble columns lined the sides, connecting from floor to ceiling, this side of the room appearing more like a cave, with sharp rock formations like clusters of earthen teeth jutting sporadically from the ground. Further in, the cavernous space faded seemlessly like paint on a canvas into a cathedral's vaulted ceiling with beams and rafters intermingling and posing as subtle obstacles for my traversal.

Off in the distance at the back wall, I could see a man, suspended by a perverse biomechanical crucifixion. Wires and tubes weaved in and out of his flesh, his head looking up towards the floor of the grand basilica. The haunted chorus and mechanical hum emanating from within him and a beam of bright white light shot out of his mouth straight up towards the pulpit. I followed the beam to see the stone and brass structure of the pulpit. As I got closer to the crucifix, I noticed the man wearing black with a white collar. Could this be my predecessor?

Does Father Gastani know about this? He couldn't. He said nobody had been through this door in centuries. But that alluded he knew when the last time someone had come through was. There must have been some record of what this was!

How the fuck was I going to get out of here? The wall where the black door was, was far too high for me to reach. I looked around and realized the wall behind the pulpit was riddled with elaborate and decorative architecture. Most of it protruding far enough out of the wall to seemingly give me the space to grip and plant my feet to climb. There were two gold and stone doors on either side of the pulpit. The tubes and wires crawled up the wall in spidery limbs towards the thresholds of those doors and through to the other side. I just had to climb up the hellish crucifix to reach the architecture.

I began my ascent of the crucifix, the sound of the wicked circuitry making my skull rattle as I got closer to the priests head. The light was hot, I could feel the heat growing stronger as well. When I reached his shoulders, I planted my feet on one side of the cross, the searing white light felt like it was giving me a sunburn on the back of my neck. I reached up and grabbed onto the decorative wall structures and pulled myself higher and higher. As I reached the midway point, gravity seemed to reverse, or rather, correct itself to what you would assume would be it's normal orientation. I went falling to the floor, landing on my back with a loud thud. I had to have fallen 20 feet, yet I was completely unscathed. I stood up, and turned to face the black door.

I rushed towards it. I just wanted to be back. This place was surreal, horrific, and undoing everything I believed possible. I was wrong. I was so fucking wrong. There's something else happening beyond what we can perceive in our day to day mundane lives. The fact that this place exists within the holiest place on earth, brings so many questions to the front of my mind.

It was reflective and solid again. I had to give it blood to activate the portal. My cut finger had healed completely. I'm not sure when that happened. Not even a scar. I tried to cut myself again and it didn't work. How could I get back now? The only way was forward. To enter the doors pincering the pulpit.

Approaching the pulpit, there was a scroll lying on the surface. It was full of unrecognizable patterns and shapes. They changed and faded in and out of existence. Looking at the page made me dizzy. I felt drunk and waves of joy and fear washed over me as I gazed at it. As soon as I broke eye contact with it, I snapped back. Focus. I moved towards the door to the left of the pulpit.

The door was heavy. I pushed through and this room made the last seem normal in comparison. It looked like the main hall of the Vatican library, except the bookshelves extended upward into an infinite void. There was no percievable ceiling. And the rows of shelves extended into the horizon, disappearing into the curvature of whatever world this was. Miles and Miles and miles. The haunting machine chorus was here as well, and much louder. I walked for what felt like weeks. For whatever reason, my mortal requirements to eat and drink were non-existent and I was impervious to any physical damage.

I finally reached the end of the library. It was an enormous structure, living and mechanical. It stretched in every direction as far as I could see. Machines made of flesh and bone intertwined with gears and wires and contraptions I can't even describe. Yawning, pulsing, howling, infernal machinations performing unholy forsaken functions. Millions of bloodshot eyes across its surface, all locked on me. I approached it, the sound of the machine bringing back that static feeling in my mind. It felt like a hive, or a cocoon. I could sense something old and hungry inside the Mountain. Before it, a pedestal. There was a book.

It was black. An imperceivable black. Like the space it occupied had just been deleted from reality. So dark it was beyond the void of sleep or death. It was Nothing. I opened the book. There were no pages. A sound erupted, a thousand trumpets accompanied by screams and laughter and countless voices clamoring all at once. I could see a trillion trillion stars, I felt every emotion, every pain, every triumph, I was everywhere and nowhere all at once. Time was looping in on itself like an ourobouros. I could see for the first time. It had to be fed. It was the only way to keep It dormant. I could feel my mind slipping back into the absolute Nothing. My senses retreating like the tide in a tsunami. Consciousness slipped away slowly, my mind overwhelmed completely by knowledge not meant to be known.

I awoke in my apartment. My ears ringing and my vision blurry. I arose slowly, aching and weak. The door leading from my living room to the hallway outside was covered in a sinewy, muscular web, filled with eyes. The eyes are inside me too. Tiny iridescent particles floated on the air, swirling like the embers of a bonfire in slow motion. I cracked the thick curtains to look outside. The world was different. Did I let something out into this world or can I see what had always been here, lurking beneath the thin veil of corporeality our minds have been draped in by the Dream of the Mountain? I had to make sure they continued to quell what slumbered inside the Mountain. I've seen what happens if it stops Dreaming. I had to get back.

I walked down the winding roads towards the Vatican. The stones of the street beneath my feet slithered and oscillated. The buildings tapered off into the horizon, which seemed to move ever further away from me. In the distance, above an immense glowing aura, the sky curved up into a cylindrical hole with no end. The Vatican was the source of the aura.

I approached the first security checkpoint and stopped ahead of it, taking a moment to marvel at the impossible swirling vacuum into Nothing above the grand facility. As I moved through each checkpoint, things continued to get more and more surreal. Walls crawled and breathed, the angles of the rooms unsettling and irregular. People's faces were wrong. They were not unusual in a structural sense, but all features were unrecognizable. I couldn't tell people apart.

Finally settling into my work place, I noticed the books were different too. There was one in particular that was beckoning me, the most beautiful song I had ever heard reverberating in the room. I followed the notes, they floated on the air, almost in a physical form. They decorated time and space around me with melody unlike anything I had ever heard. It felt like a rebirth, like pure love and warmth. I was hearing music for the first time like someone born deaf. I opened the old tome, written in Hebrew. I could not read Hebrew but I knew the meaning of the words anyway. I guess, a gift of the inner eyes. It was the Song of Solomon, but greatly expanded upon. I could sense the intentions of the author. I experienced his consciousness as it was written. It was singing praises of love, of devotion, of obsession. With the forgotten verses, I could hear it was an aria of madness, inspired by something deep below the Earth. Sickly sweet and gorgeous but unnervingly so. Something dead and Dreaming of us. It's reveries a grand illusion, weaving the shapes of our desires, of our hopes, of our fears, and of the very nature of reality. An ethereal puppeteer.

I knew Father Gastani had come to check on me only by his voice.

"Jarred, good to see you've acclimated and are finding your work without need for direction. Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?"

"Father, I want to ask you something that may seem strange. Are there any books about that door? There must be something.'

"You're very fascinated by that door aren't you, my son? I can give you access to your predecessors records. He worked here for almost his entire life. His knowledge of our archives is more extensive than anyone else."

I closed the Song of Songs and replaced it on the shelf it had come from. Father led me to another room, clearly my predecessors records.

"Everything is here. I hope you can find what you're looking for soon, as we have some recently excavated new additions coming tomorrow and they will require much time and your full attention." I looked at the blurred, gossamer imitation of a face that sat on Father Gastani's head, trying not to stare or do something else that alerted him to my current state of perception. I poured hours into digging through his meticulous records. I finally found it. The door was discovered by Emperor Constantines guard after the construction had been completed. It was not part of the design. It was just....there. Centuries gone by, they tried everything, like Father had told me, to open the door. The only papacy to manage it was Pope Urban II in 1094. His closest and most trusted bishops and cardinals were ordered to gather all record or instruction involving the door and destroy it. They say he was forever changed after crossing the black door and seeing what secrets were always meant to be kept hidden. It seems to me the Mountain wants to be found.

I contemplated telling Father that I had gone through the door. I contemplated telling him of the Dreaming Mountain, and of the black book that had given me sight beyond sight, and of the great Nothing. I could not. Not yet. I had to bring back the book. They all needed to know the cosmos, to have sight. They should know the true nature of God.

Over the next few weeks, I spent most of my days squeezing in time to go through my predecessors notes and records between shifts of repairing books. His name was Enzo Ansetti. He knew of the Mountain. He had spent much time with the black book over the years. He hid his greatest discoveries inside the Inverted Chapel, away from the possibility of discovery by the Church. Tomorrow I will enter the Chapel again, to find them.

The chapel was not empty this time. Grey, emaciated human forms lined the room above, weeping quietly, facing the walls in what seemed like penance or shame. I looked upon the mechanical cruciform once again. It really was Enzo, the beam of light stretching from his gaping maw into the space above me. The light was flickering, fading slowly but surely. I could see that Enzo was dying. I climbed the abominable monument, falling up to the floor like last time. This time, I would take the other door beside the grand pulpit. The heavy door resisted as I pushed, finally giving way to an expansive basilica. Strange beings traipsed aimlessly, stitched together wings wrapping them like robes and adorned with a bell over their heads. They did not seem to take notice of me at all. In the center of the room, the ceiling vaulted suddenly upwards into a maelstrom of teeth and eyes. It was like Charybdis swallowing stars from the sky rather than swallowing the sea. The sight of it brought me to my knees. It was horrific and beautiful. I could see something descending from Charybdis, down towards me. I backed away to watch a platform fit neatly into the center of the room. I wondered if I was retracing Enzo's steps, if I would end up just like he did.

I stood on the platform, my knees buckling as it unlocked itself from the ground and raised into the air. I floated up towards the whirlpool of eyes and stars, preparing myself mentally for whatever strange place awaited me, whatever secret fates lied ahead.

I stood alone in the Nothing. Physically actually here now. This is outside the Dream. It is overwhelming, suffocating me. My thoughts danced like a movie before my eyes. They felt as if I had no control over them, as if they were having me rather than I was having thoughts. In the distance I could see something. Something incredibly large and spherical. The platform became active again beneath my feet, moving forward toward the shape on the horizon. As I got closer, I saw what it was. It was a giant orb of blinking lights, metal protrusions of impossible shapes, and an amalgam of naked human bodies stuffed and stitched together like a sleeve around whatever awful machines lay beneath the fleshy surface. They moaned in pain and their arms reached out toward me as I passed them, they were begging for help. Under the middle of the Granfaloon of bodies and hellish engines, above me now, was an opening. The platform stopped moving forward and redirected itself upward. Into the mouth of the structure, an entrance by design.

This room appeared to be a nexus. A connection between an enormous number of other places. Hallways stretched into nothing all around me, unfathomable amounts of doors lining the halls, in every shape size and color imaginable. But there was one that called to me. It looked like the doors near the pulpit. Its weight formidable like the others, I discovered an archive. Enzo's truth lay here. At the back of the room, a man flayed and suspended from the shoulders by vast curtains of flesh and muscles, stretching away from him towards the ceiling like putrid wings. His back to me, he looked to be tending a massive wall of scrolls.

"Approach. I know what you seek." He said, his voice several voices at once, falling over each other at slightly different intervals and volumes.

I obeyed.

He handed me a scroll, like the one I saw on the pulpit, but now I could understand it. These were Enzo's hidden records. Hidden not only physically from the world, but hidden from normal mortal perception by unworldly elder runes.

What slept inside the Mountain always was and always will be. Older than anything imagination allows. We had brushed up against it several times in human history. The veil between the Truth and the Dream overlapping for brief moments in time. Some men were touched by the breach. Shamans, prophets, philosophers. But one man had eyes inside. That man saw the Truth. The Anointed Christ. The first Beacon. The central point of all time and space. The first being to ever fully know the secret fate of the universe. His knowledge showed him that it must always Dream. He spent his life spreading his gospel, garnering followers through ethereal wisdom and great works. The sheep would flock to their shepherd, because they must. Faith, is what fuels the machines built to keep the Mountain Dreaming. Before, all the world's religions were scattered and separate, causing the very fabric of the Dream to weaken. Reality was slowly coming undone and only he knew.

Through Him, their faith would be unified. Men were antennae, you see, whose hopes and fears and belief would be a signal channeled to the Mountain. His sacrifice was not to forgive us our sins, it was to create a bridge. An extra-dimensional intersection, between the unravelling Dream and the Mountain. This is the reason for the cruciform symbol the Church used. His death was not understood fully, they knew not what they witnessed. He would be the catalyst to keep the pillars of the world standing, connecting us permanently to the Mountain. Every prayer, now directed at the source, we were synchronized. When one person prays, it's a drop of water in a lake. When billions pray, the water moves like waves towards the shores of the Mountain.

Urban II saw the Truth as well and thought that the only way to truly unify humanity in the Dream was through conquest. The Crusades were meant to be the final act, ensuring our reality remains intact, through brute force. Belief is immeasurably valuable and the Church would come to learn that it cannot be forced. The Mountain feeds on genuine belief, not fear or obligation. You must trust in It, love It. Worship is synchronization.

The Church must protect the Truth, for knowing dissolves faith. Every major catastrophe weakens the signal through loss of life and therefore loss of faith. The Enlightment weakened the signal. The discovery of heliocentricity weakened the signal. Modern secular thought is the antithesis of the Truth, being the greatest engine of disbelief. How ironic that the search for truth and knowledge would be the very thing to destroy us all. Progress is antonymic.

The Church knew everything. Each Pope is secretly taught the Truth. They were supposed to be guardians and conduits. Most were. Everything made so much more sense. It was a system. The Church itself was a machine. A derrick of faith. Missionaries were meant to increase fuel production. Every conversion strengthens the signal, and therefore reality itself. Even still, there must be a connector. Enzo became that, but the flesh is weak, and eventually his form will be used up, and someone must replace him and become the Beacon, where all prayers converge to be consumed.

I poured over an ancient Bible with my new knowledge. The Revelation had an entirely new meaning. John had written the blueprints of The End. This is what happens when the Mountain stops Dreaming. The beast awakens, the stars fall, indescribable beings pour into our reality. This cannot come to be, as Christ gave us the means to prevent the collapse.

The Mountain does not know of us. It doesnt know it Dreams, but it must.

I will become the Beacon. The transmitter of love and faith. The way, and the light.

There is a fate worse than death. That is how the Priest began the sermon. Despite the unorthodox opening the sermon was infact quite normal. We had all known that the Silent Choir was the enemy. Then he said something we had never expected. Something that made the entire congregation go dead silent. He told us about the Betwixt.

That is the fate worse than death, to become Betwixt. You dont die, you dont even cease to exist. You simply become stuck between reality and the hell of the Choirs realm. It is the punishment for willing service to the Choir. Your soul is eternally damned for turning away from the light and truth of the Savior, the Blessed Anchor of Our Souls against the Darkness. You are left flickering forever between the two realities, barely more than a shadow one moment, the next your normal form, back and forth every moment of every day for the rest of eternity.

I have to admit this sermon was certainly the most thought provoking sermon the old priest had given in many years. A terrifying new prospect to consider. The truth of service to the newest guise of the Father of Lies. All the more reason to ignore its whispers and lies. All the more reason to NEVER cross the threshold beyond all hope. I was still thinking about this when I got home, tomorrow I would join the UHSN the Unified Holy Sanctums Navy. I had nothing left anymore anyways not after little Ellen died, then my wife Juliana only a week later. I had to move on I had no reason to stay here anymore.

The apartment was of course empty save for a lonely air mattress in the corner of the living room. I cant even bring myself to sleep where She used to sleep. It was time to go, I was finally ready to explore the galaxy. I had almost forgotten about the Betwixt by the time I had laid down to sleep. I would never forget them again after that night.

I was in a strange place, one I had never been before. Long hallways painted gunmetal grey, though I had never been on one I couldn't shake the feeling I was seeing the interior of one of the UHSNs great warships. At first the overhead lighting hummed brightly and the hallways were well lit, not a single place to hide save in one of the many rooms I assume the doors lead too. A I began to walk around however I noticed a slow dimming of lights and a noticeable drop in temperature.

I turned a corner after what I estimated to be about 35 minutes of walking to find a hallway with barely functioning lighting, if one wasnt simply off it was flickering. The temperature too suddenly dropped even more, I wasnt just cold I was freezing. Then I heard a sound that could've stopped my heart. "There you are Daddy" little Ellens voice came from the darkness. "Are you here to play with me?" She said sounding closer. "This cant be" I said. "Dont be silly Daddy you can see me again. Just give in." Then she came into the one working light. No, it wasnt her, not really. It was an outline of her form, then it was her exactly as I remembered. Then back to the outline again. "No. No. No" I began to say backing up. I gripped my crucifix and began to pray. She began to laugh. "He has no power here Daddy. He doesnt listen to your Dreams." Then a voice that most definitely wasn't her a voice of ancient Primordial Evil, "ONLY I DO". "JESUS HAVE MERCY ON ME A SINNER" I Began the Jesus prayer aloud and strong.

The temperature rose suddenly, the lights all turned on and Ellen was gone. As soon as I finished the prayer I woke up covered in sweat. I looked over at the closed bedrooms. I could see the lights flickering underneath the door crack.

[DEAD DOGS CAN’T FETCH]

Prologue:

I want to die. I want them all dead; but why do they get to go first? It feels like torture rehearsed, or a poetry’s hearse when we’re in our dog days. A month turned to a year. The years swallowed up the good months, and “I can’t” turned into “I should have.” 

“Should have what?” you ask. I guess I’d have to say, “Everything I ever wanted.” Even though I never actually found out what that was. The blood rushed out, and I finally felt enough. A vampire, a cryptid, who am I? It’s cryptic, too much. I long to draw my last breath by the screams, or where the rivers and valleys meet the sunrise. I’m tongue tied on what to say, but at least my lungs breathe and my feet move onto the next night. It’s always “next time” and not right now. That’s a cowards mindset. I wish I could burn the towel, but I can’t surrender. Maybe then they will see I’m not clean, or that I never was what they found out.

You couldn’t even spot me in a crowd. I live the most abnormal normalcy. They dress the same as me, and walk with the same gate. I studied for years on the things in my surroundings. Pain, suffering, stories of the astounding; it all ends the same. So I burn my lessons into the grave, and I cover the lesions on my face. If water cuts deep in smooth soil, then why the long face? Wouldn’t it just make sense to harden up, or is it a hard day of work that leaves you drowning in your fate? Is it the same thing that helps you breathe that causes decay? What do you believe in?

“That’s enough.. I’m done for now.” I voiced aloud as I stumbled away from my keyboard to find my keys. Writing is fun, because it gives me a way to personify the fucked up shit in my head. The type of things I wouldn’t even wish on my worst enemy. In a way that’s me, but most people don’t read anymore so I can send any new character off with a different outcome. A new part of me ripped from the page, just to die before the days in. “Waitttt, I know where I put them.” As I fumbled through the rough draft pile until I saw light reflect. “There’s my keys!” I could finally leave and start a new day. Well new is an overstatement, it’s the same one I’ve lived a thousand times over.

Walk through the door, take a right, walk a few steps to the elevator, and wait for it to come up. Here’s the hard part. Once I’m out of that confined death trap, Rob is gonna ask with that fake ass customer service smile of his, “going out for your morning routine?” and I’ll ignore him. Fuck Rob. I hate Rob. Actually you know what, “Fuck you” I mumbled under my breathe as I begrudgingly strolled through the bustling lobby into the even busier streets.

This is my favorite part, not being able to see for ten seconds as the UV rays travel less than a parsec to my current location. Oh to be blinded from the woes of this world. Then everything’s back.

A million Robs.. Or at least what feels like it. The streets contain a multitude of “different” people, living “different” lives, but somehow they all look the same. Everyone in New York thinks they’re a business person. Just how every author stamps “best selling title of the year” on the front cover, whenever their partner also dropped their “best selling title” that same month. We’re all nobody wanting to be somebody, doing the same things to impress gods who couldn’t even give a fuck about us. We all have our own gods whether we realize it or not. We all worship something. Sometimes it’s relationships, money, pleasure; we all have our demons. Mine just so happens to be the bottle, and I’m late for my date.

It’s ten minutes past eleven and I still haven’t stepped foot into the liquor store. I wonder if they miss me yet? “Excuse me, Excuse me” I say as I bump into the mindless bodies interfering in my path to destruction. I’m almost there. The hefty door jingles as I push it open, and Melody’s voice rings out even louder, “The same as usual?” With my most vocal response yet, a quick nod. Melody was nice. I never asked her name, but it said on her nametag. She rang me up, and I got out of there as quickly as possible. Mission complete, now back to my dark, damp, safe apartment. Safe from any outside interference that is. Just me, myself, and this shitty vodka. Whatever gets me through writing this next book. Whatever pays the bills. In that aspect maybe I am more similar to everyone else than I think.

**SHOT #1:**  

** **Maybe this is a good idea.

• *SHOT #2:
  ** **Noooo that's just idiotic, scrap it.

• *SHOT #3:
  ** **This is way better.

• *SHOT #4:
  ** **Okayyyy I might be getting closer.

• *SHOT #5
  ** **No, No, NO. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

• *SHOT #6:

  SHOT #7:

  SHOT #8:

Ring, Ring, Ring, my phone yelled out into the eerie silence, and its name was “EDITOR”

“Come onnn, not yet.” I picked up the call as I struggled to wake up and change my tone, “Hey Bill. How are you doing?” Bill obviously wasn’t too well, “BETTER IF YOU’D FINALLY SEND ME THIS ROUGH DRAFT YOU’VE BEEN PREACHING ABOUT TO THE PUBLISHERS FOR MONTHS NOW. You know the deadline was last week right?” silence. Oh he was waiting for me to explain, “Well you see-”

“ACTUALLY I DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOUR EXCUSES. YOU HAVE UNTIL TOMORROW NIGHT FOR THIS TO BE FAXED OUT AND ON MY DESK. THIS IS BOTH OF OUR ASSES ON THE LINE. FUCK YOU.”

Beeeeep

Yeah, Bill was pretty pissed. I don't know why, because without me and my book he wouldn’t even have a job in the first place. It wasn’t my fault that at the meeting I got anxious and talked up this grand idea of a story I had. Well didn’t have, and still don't have. I just needed a paycheck, and I figured the words would have just come to me by now. It happened the last time, but this time seems different. No matter what angle I try to write from, the story goes nowhere. 

“DEAD DOGS CAN’T FETCH”

Amazing title.
No wonder the publishers ate up the idea, but what’s a title with no story. It’s nothing. What I had was nothing. Just a pile of fragmented ideas hoarded into the corner of my musty room. Cleaning wasn’t a part of my daily schedule.

I picked through them searching for anything, anything at all I could run with. It didn’t matter how good it was at this point I just needed something. That’s when I found it. One of the pages I must’ve done recently. It had SNOOPY written** **in big bold letters, with my shit recreation of a peanuts cartoon drawing right underneath.. I’m a joke. I laughed and maybe cried a little, until I actually got a real idea. It all comes full circle. The first book wouldn’t have ever happened unless I became an alcoholic in the first place. My mom had just passed, and my dad seemed to want to cope by himself. By that I mean in Miami with a new family, away from me. I guess writing and drinking just kinda became my own way of coping. Without either I’d really be nothing, and I can’t get drunk if I’m broke and homeless. That was enough motivation for me. Time to keep writing.

Yeah, so I might have blacked out.

Chapter One:

A great idea. I already had it, I just needed to find the things that made it great. It’s been almost six months since I stopped drinking, and a couple months since my book got published. Since then life has really changed a lot. If you knew the old me you probably wouldn’t even recognize who I am in the present day. My small apartment has become a penthouse suite, and I write all my stories by hand now. That’s because the day I stopped drinking was the day I short circuited my computer; the day of the “royal spill.” That was what really made me stop. The publishers were super impressed by my first draft, and approved the writing process to continue on. I was still a sloppy drunk then, but when my hard drive got fried it gave me a real reality check. I knew if I wanted to ever finish the story something would have to change. It did, and god am I so glad it did.

If I thought my first book was successful, this one blew that out of the water. Stores were wanting me to do book signings, my book was advertised on billboards in Times Square, and even my dad got in touch with me again. It might have been just for money, but still it was a sign I was doing something right. Overall life was good. I was still mostly a hermit though, despite the occasional public appearance. It was for good reason, because I had a newfound fire in writing again. What was originally a coping mechanism, became my main reason to keep going, so I kept my focus in the right place. Onto the next story.  

It was something I was super proud of. I can’t reveal too much just yet, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be the best thing you’ve heard from me to date. The publishers liked the idea too. Maybe even better than the last, and this time I actually planned to follow through without all the extra stress I caused myself last time.

I had just comfortably sat down and opened my notebook to finish writing CHAPTER 3 of my new title. Finally concluding the first major story arc, moving into the real meat and potatoes of everything. That’s when I heard a knock at the door. I decided to ignore it since I was busy, it must be housekeeping. Not even ten seconds later though I heard the knocking again, and it sounded like someone slamming a mangled body over and over again into the door. The sound was heavy. Me being a horror writer I had quite the imagination. Just in case it was a crazed fan or something, I waited another minute until I opened the door. Of course I’m not stupid, so I had my phone on speed dial for 9-1-1. I’ve heard of similar things happening before, but I might just be a little paranoid.

Once waiting I opened the door slowly to find that there was nobody there. Whoever it was though left something. There was no shipping box, so it had to have been hand delivered. It happened to be one of my signed copies of “DEAD DOGS CAN’T FETCH.” I decided to peek my head out into the hallway, but saw no trace that anyone had even been there in the first place; other than the book of course. It looked as if someone had tried to scribe their own signature up underneath mine. It wasn’t in any language I had ever seen before though, weird. I threw it away. I have enough of those lying around here anyways.  

Chapter Two:

Bill called me on the morning of the 27th. Regardless of what your preconceived notions probably were after our first interaction, me and Bill were childhood best friends. I got him a job as an editor, my editor, because I believed in him. Bill had spent his younger days doing nothing but reading and becoming obsessed with the art of writing. Funny enough I used to bully the shit out of him. I didn’t always have the artistic prowess I have now. I was once an ugly, stinky, little kid that loved to get into any trouble I could. It landed me in detention more times than I could count at school, and left me on my parents shitlist more than double the amount of fingers I could count with. More than a few of those times Bill was in my detention class. I didn’t know why he was there at the time. Part of our punishment was the teacher made us stay silent, and write the same statement as many times as we could until our hands gave out. She had the creative duty of coming up with the statements by herself. By now mine had become a run-on sentence. Miss Farley hated my guts.

I found out years later Bill, the nerdy kid, ended up in detention with me multiple times because he was actually quite the smart-ass. It didn’t matter if he was right or wrong, if he felt he was correct about something he would argue till his face turned blue. It didn’t matter if his opponent on the stand was a teacher or student alike. As my mother would’ve said, “Bill is the type of person to argue with Jesus,” and I would say that’s still holds up today. He grew on me after a little while.

“Hey, where are you at with the new book? Just wanted to toss some ideas back and forth,” Bill proclaimed on the other side of the line. Normally I’d love to talk with him, but I haven’t been sleeping too well these past couple weeks. My creative juices are running out. “Hey Bill so it’s crazy that you mention that, I’m actually in the middle of finishing up this chapter. I’ll have to call you back tonight and let you know where I’m at.”

…

I abruptly hung up, and went back to my very important task of rotting away in my bed. That’s all I’ve seemed to be able to do since the last time me and you wrote. I’m still stuck on CHAPTER 3, “the meat and the potatoes,” but how can I keep writing a good story on an empty stomach? Money isn’t the problem anymore. I ordered groceries, and tried to cook a few hearty meals to get me back to one-hundred percent. Everything I’ve eaten I’ve thrown right back up though. With no appetite, a high fever, and the way I’m feeling it’s probably best I go to the doctor to see what’s going on.

It wasn’t anything that took too long. In a way I was still a vampire of sorts. I hated having to go out into the bright ass sunlight. Leaving the house with a mask on and my lazy house garments, so no one would recognize me. The doctor couldn’t find anything wrong. No strep, flu, or covid, and all my vitals were fine. It’s crazy because when they checked my temperature I was a smooth 98 degrees fahrenheit. He looked at me with a smile saying, “You’re as healthy as an ox,” before sending me right back on my merry way home, with a handful of paperwork.
When I got back to my building was when the real problem arose. There were already police and fire services there with all the tenants and workers evacuated outside. Even with my disguise, they stopped me from entering the building, and asked what floor I was staying on. I responded truthfully. To my surprise they had let me know that there was a small fire that had occurred on my floor with a suspected arsonist on the loose. We could all go back inside once fire rescue cleared the place out. It took about an hour in the smoldering heat of the sun, before we finally got to go back indoors. Apparently, the sun is hotter in cloud coverage. It wasn’t the prettiest day New York has seen, that's for sure.

I took the elevator all the way up to the 128th floor, and smelled the char as soon as the coffin’s doors opened. By the time I got to my room the smell permeated stronger and stronger, causing me to realize the fire was a lot closer to home than I thought. Opening the door I could tell it was definitely coming from my place. At first I couldn’t see what had burnt. Maybe I was so out of it earlier while I was cooking that I accidentally left the stove on? Rushing to the other room, Nope. The kitchen was fine. What could it have been? I finally found the culprit. My brand new shiny bookcase, with all of my writings and other books I was a fan of, destroyed. Literally turned to ash, somehow without spreading to any of the other furnishings in the vicinity. It sort of reminded me of the story from the bible where Moses saw a burning bush, but it wasn’t burning up. It spoke to him. My bookcase might have been Victorian style wood, but it definitely wasn’t any burning bush. Mine ended up as dust on the ground, along with almost every book and idea on it. There were only a few left. All of them being copies of “DEAD DOGS CAN’T FETCH.” I guess it’s a lot harder to kill Cujo than most.

Chapter Three:

Webster’s Dictionary says, “Rabies is usually transmitted through the bite of a rabid animal and that is characterized typically by increased salivation, abnormal behavior, and eventual paralysis and death when untreated.”

Diseases always scared the shit out of me, and so did horror movies. Watching all of Stephen King’s movie renditions, and in particular George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead are the reasons why I am the way I am today. CUJO also had a special place in my heart, and that place was extremely low to the floor. Not necessarily because it was the scariest thing ever, but because I had been bitten on the face a year prior to my first time seeing the film. It was the first true horror that I had actually experienced in real life. So it stuck with me, both the film and the dog cause to this day I despise dogs, or at least the way they would make me feel. Looking back at my childhood I wasn’t too much different than a mutt. I would wallow in my own filth forever if there wasn’t anybody there to tell me that it was wrong. “The crazy kids are dirty, and the cool kids are clean,” is something still in my memory that I picked up from my parents. I can’t really remember which one of them said it though. It might have just stuck with me because, as you know, I was quite the rebellious kid. Kind of ironic, the thing that I hated most when I was young turned out to be what I made a career out of. So maybe I was right to not listen to anyone. All they did was dog me anyways.

That last experience at my home intrigued that childlike curiosity inside me that I’ve missed for so long. No matter how much my brain told me, “Run away, you’ll just end up in flames like the pages you put months into.” That wasn’t something I could do, because now I was curious, and cats always were my favorite animal. I hate that our’s had to run away.

Death brings new life, and there’s no darkness without light. My bookshelf died, and he got replaced just as quickly as he faded away. 

“It really lightens up the place doesn’t it?” I attempted to ask Bill, trying to make simple, awkward, conversation. That night I never called him like I said I would, and then I didn't the next, or the next. So validly worried and pissed off per usual, he came by to do a “wellness check” to see what was going on with me. See, I never told him about getting super sick out of nowhere, and very lightly brushed over the burning furniture situation in an attempt at conversation. For someone I’ve known damn near my whole life he’s extremely callous. It took two annoyed sentences from him, before conversation spiraled into work. “Why haven’t you told me anything about this story? Why the hell are you ignoring me? I swear to god if you’re fucking drinking agai-”

“Dude. I’m good. It’s just been a busy couple weeks. I got sick as fuck, and when the fire happened I lost all the manuscripts. You should know by now not to worry about something like that. I fumbled the last book at least two or three times before I got it right, and look at how we recovered. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Bill had a very particular way of seeing through my bullshit, which is what I’m guessing he was doing now. All he said was “okay,” stole my oreos out the pantry, and walked out. 

About five minutes later my phone pinged.

(EDITOR:) you better actually let me know what’s going on this time. Thanks for the food.

Guess I gotta respond..

(ME:) you a bitch

*delivered two minutes ago*

*read five minutes ago*

I’ll call him next week.

Chapter Four:

So I decided to start writing down my dreams lately. For the first time in a while, something actually scared me. It wasn’t the fire, or the deadlines, it was literally my own thoughts. I guess I would be the one to scare myself. I may or may not be tweaking but you let me know, because I haven’t dreamt in years. It might just be my brain finally getting prepared to finish this book. So many ideas. I still had all the old ones in my head after all, even if the originals had turned to dust.  

Enough rambling though, I’ll just copy over what I wrote down.

Day One:
“I had the weirdest dream last night, well I wouldn't really call it a dream. It was more like I went to sleep but didn’t actually ever sleep. At the very least I know I wasn’t awake. The “dream” literally was nothingness. Like pitch black. I didn’t see a thing, not even myself even though I could feel that I was there. I knew for sure when I felt them breathing on my neck. I woke up.”

Day Two:
“I’m gonna keep writing these down, because if I was unsure about last night being a dream or not, I was definitely positive after what this last one was. It was something. As soon as I faded to sleep I saw myself. Not in an astral projection type of way, like of me in my bed, or on the couch, but more so how it would look if I was in the scene of a movie. It started like I said with me seeing myself, and it definitely wasn’t dark this time. It looked like I was standing directly in front of a clone of me. The clone was laughing hysterically, and crying at the same time, like actually bawling, but had no real single expression on their face. It just pointed forward. As soon as I thought about where it was pointing to, that’s when it started to show me. My point of view slowly started to pan behind the clone, revealing what it was pointing at. It was the building I lived in. Well at least it looked like it, so maybe it was a clone too. It had the same framing and dimensions, but all the walls were glass. I heard voices I recognized from inside, but couldn’t see any faces. They didn’t have those. But they still had a way to vocalize. With their hands stretched out, pointing back towards me, I was forced to watch as these faceless figures burnt up. Even though they didn’t move as the flames engulfed their disproportioned bodies, I could hear them scream. Or at least what I think were screams. I would’ve been able to tell better if they actually had mouths. I woke up.”

Day Three:
“This seems to just be something I’m gonna have to deal with more often I guess. I dreamed again. It was pretty much the same as the night before, so I’ll spare you most of the details. Instead of me seeing random figures burning up, this time it was a bunch of me inside the building. The fire burned blue, and there was no laughing this time, just crying. Every single one of me had a different expression on their face, as they silently burned to ash. In a way it was beautiful. Seeing the steel beams melt and the building shatter on top of that horrible sight. Anything is better than seeing that. I woke up, and checked to make sure the fire alarms were working.”

Day Four:
“It’s dark again like the very first night, but this time there’s a horrible stench in the air and a heat that felt like it was burning my skin. I heard that horrible laughter again, but couldn’t see anybody else around me. I knew it wasn’t just me whenever I felt a breath deep inside of my skull. I woke up.”

Day Five:
“I didn’t sleep last night. I drank coffee until my hands grew stiff, and my brain didn’t want its break. There was too much to do. I started to write again, but when I looked down at the page it was just incoherent scribblings.”

Day Six:
“I didn’t sleep again. I can’t let myself. So much to do that I’ve lost track of how much time I’ve actually been awake. I know it’s been two days of course, but it feels like an eternity. I have a feeling soon my body will have to shut down again. Too much to do. I started to write again. I woke up.”

Day Seven:
“I’m kind of unsure if I actually slept or was awake on night six. I don’t remember going to sleep, but I remember waking up. I have to remember that I always wake up. They’re just dreams after all. I’m gonna get some rest tonight.”
“Update: No dreams tonight, or at least not any that I can recall. I woke up to the start of a new week, and I will not be carrying over any of that negativity into the real world. It’s all fake, just like the real emotions I serve up on silver platters by the spine, the words engraved to eat up by all you filthy swine. All dogs are gonna die, it just might not be today.”

Chapter Five:

	Today was a new day. My mind might be a little zombified after not sleeping well for almost a month, but some of the world’s greatest artists have made their best work out of sleep deprivation. I was going to be proactive today, so I called Bill to come over. It seemed like a good idea for him to be here if I wanted to stay on my toes with this story. I wonder if he still had those ideas he wanted to toss back and forth?

Not even ten minutes later he was already knocking on my door. Weird, cause it’s usually a thirty minute drive from Brooklyn to where I stay, but I didn’t think too much of it. I wanted to get some work done anyways, and who better to bitch at me about work than Bill? Letting him in the door, there was obviously something wrong. Instead of him saying a word to me, he beelined straight to the kitchen. I followed and just started spilling what I was thinking about what the plan was going to be for today. He still didn’t say anything to me though. I must have struck a nerve during one of our last interactions, because if he’s REALLY mad he’s not going to speak until he’s ready to strain his vocal chords. Real New-Yorker shit, Bill loved to scream at folks. I wasn’t too far behind when he took a left into the kitchen, but as soon as I turned the corner, there was no Bill.

“Bill? Bill?” I yelled across the spacious apartment expecting some type of response. There was none.

I must have still been tired, seeing things, so I decided it was probably best to grab a glass of water. 

Nerves make me sweat, and all I’ve been this last month is a nervous wreck. My guess is that I had to be super dehydrated by now. Grabbing a glass from the cabinet, I went to the fridge to fill up, and that’s when Bill actually called to let me know he would be here shortly. I guess he wasn’t too mad at me anymore. I told him about what had just happened, he laughed and said, “Go ahead and put some coffee on. We’re both gonna need it.” Me and him said our goodbyes, and I figured I’d go ahead and grind up the beans. That's when I heard another knock. I paused what I was doing, and figured I would check it out. My dumbass had left the door open, but there’s only a few people that lived on my floor. They were much snobbier than I was, so I wasn’t too worried about one of them breaking and entering. 

As soon as I slammed the door shut, I heard another set of knocks. This time right behind me, coming from my window looking out onto the luxurious skyline. It must have been a bird, but that idea got shut down quickly. As soon as I turned back to the kitchen to finish putting on the coffee, I heard it again. Turning around I saw it, Bill’s lifeless body hung up from what must have been the top floor. Being this high the winds were pretty strong. If I was to scream on the rooftop of the building nobody would hear it from here. I didn’t scream though. I tried, but I wasn't able to. I sat there frozen just trying to make sense of the situation, but that’s when the wind slammed his body back into the glass again like a ragdoll on set. He must have been up there for hours. How couldn’t I have been able to tell? 
His eyes were bulging out of his head, about to pop, and his face was like purple Lavender in bloom. The beauty of flowers is that they die quickly, so you have to cherish them while they hold that beauty. If you believe in the afterlife, then you believe there is beauty in death. It doesn’t end, and it never will. Life keeps moving on even after you’re gone. Just like Bill’s mangled corpse knocking against the panes as if to say I’m not done yet.

That’s when I finally heard the scream. His jaw opened wide, as if to reveal a crooked smile before the words that came out proclaimed, “I woke up.”

“WAKE UP, WAKE UP!!” Bill was in my face yelling for me to get the fuck out of the apartment. I must’ve fallen asleep on the couch again. Just another dream. What was very real though was the urgency, because there was another fire, and this time it wasn’t so small. I could see smoke pouring out of the kitchen into the living room where I was at. It was almost like a sentient being itself, infecting the clean air like a parasite. There was no time to grab my things. Bill yanked me off the couch and towards the door as fire rescue burst through to take control of the situation. One of them escorted us down the stairs as quickly as possible, pressing me about how something like this could happen. We had more than enough time to talk, seeing as how we still had a hundred and fifty floors to go down. The perks of being rich am I right? I told him I didn’t want to talk right now, that I was traumatized, and the fireman told me that was fine, “I needed to save my breath for the cops downstairs anyways.”

The long trek down felt shorter than expected. Was I going to be in trouble? Bill didn’t help my concerns at all, because even though he might be similar to a brother to me, right now he looked like a disappointed dad. He definitely thinks I’m drinking again after this.

We arrived at the bottom of the stairs and four cops were already there, waiting, ready like a pack of hungry wolves. They let me know I wasn’t in trouble yet, but they needed to take me in for questioning. I complied, because honestly I would rather be any place than here right now. Why is this happening to me? Me and Bill parted ways, and I hopped in the back of the patrol car. The cops weren’t very talkative guys, and I wasn’t feeling the most outgoing right now anyways. Normally they’d bring me into Lower Manhattan’s 1st Precinct for questioning, but that’s not the way we were going. We were going towards the Lower East Side in Chinatown, not necessarily where I would want to be. So, I decided to ask where they were bringing me. No response, and now to think of it, they have not looked into the backseat once. Maybe they didn’t hear me, I asked again. They took their attention off the road and both simultaneously turned around to face me, foot still on the gas, and hands still on the steering wheel. That’s when I realized they weren’t who I thought they were at all. They had the same dismembered faces as the burning bodies in my nightmares. No mouth, No eyes, No characterizing features at all, but I could feel their stare. Obviously I was freaked the fuck out, so I tried with all my strength to break through those doors, even though I knew I wouldn’t have been the first to try that in the back of a patrol car. I yelled at the top of my lungs for them to, “STOP! STOP THE FUCKING CAR! LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!” Their attention never faltered once they turned towards me, I looked forward and saw the traffic light ahead was red, and there were already cars waiting to be told when to go.

The last thing I saw was the glass shattering, shooting shards into the bodies of the demonic figures sitting in front of me. We all have demons, and mine happen to be very present. I couldn’t feel my legs anymore, and there was a sharp crack through my abdomen. Lying there silent I had lost my ability to scream, but onlookers watching in terror still had that ability. I heard the sirens already approaching quickly from a distance. My sense of smell was interrupted away from the rot of the officer’s bodies, and instead clung to the sweet smell of Lavender. What would a whole field of them smell like when set ablaze I wondered? Would I have the same crooked smile as the hanging man? Would I have the same curiosity as the cats that I love so much? Or would I step out the fire as a hellhound? All dogs gotta die one day, and I heard there’s a beautiful place where they go. No more pain, no more suffering, just me and the astounding. Will I walk through those gates unscathed, or will the bright lights burn up my face? There’s only one way to find out. 

I woke up.

Once again I sat behind the wheel of my dodge grand caravan, a winding serpent of brake lights as far as the eye could see ahead of me. 

The route home from the office during peak traffic was miserable, but at least at home I had happiness waiting for me. The joy of a home-cooked meal, light conversation with my wife and my little boy jabbering away as he hucked his army men around, recreating imaginary battles in his head he had fought with his friends from day care.

I was not wealthy, but I was rich.

I looked at the clock again, watching the minutes past five push ever onward. There were other ways to get home, sure, but every road that seemed to move quickly with the flow of traffic only worked out to be the same time it would have taken me to sit on Lakehead.

Lakehead was a road much traveled by that wound its way directly from my office parking garage, through the downtown core and eventually leading off into a small section of subdivisions where I lived. The drive from my apartment was about seven minutes, forty three seconds, or twelve minutes ten seconds if I decided to stop at the coffee shop for a bagel and java.

If I followed Lakehead home the same way I found myself to work, it always, always was thirty four minutes on the dot.

I tried leaving ten minutes early from my shift to make up the time later, staying ten minutes late to wait for the rush of oncoming traffic to cease its congestion, I even started praying to God in his infinite wisdom to will it to me the ‘grace of good traffic’ by the time my shift was over. I couldn’t complain though, He gave me everything else a man could ask for, so the thirty four minutes I considered a test of patience and fortitude when I eventually got used to it.

There were attempts to kill time while driving, filling the gap with audio books or podcasts of people who would read to me educational wish-fullfilment. I found a couple that were interesting, but not enough to keep me focused away from the annoyance of brake lights in my windshield. 

There was a time when anger would fuel me, and whatever centimeter of a short fuse I had lit that day would come out in traffic. The embarrassing honking, shouting, and cursing I would spit filled up the van with a cloud of malice that often would have passers by look toward the deranged fellow who should have maybe decided to take the long way home. Stubborn as I was, I packed my foolishness away through grit teeth and the knowledge that at the end of the long journey home, there was also always a pot of gold at the end of this monochromatic rainbow.

Eventually a submissive silence would fill the car on these long drives, always muffled by the music or podcasts I’d listen to, while I avoided the hungry eyes of the homeless. I felt awful for ignoring the tapping at my window when I’d hit a stoppage in traffic, instead opting to politely wave ‘no thanks’ at them from behind the pane of glass. 

This was the safest option, as I unfortunately bore witness to a grisly attack on one such driver who wanted nothing to do from the squee-gee pan handler. Local news outlets would report the man would be in stable condition. I, however, had a front-row seat to the macabre affair as the squee-gee guy, who had enough of being told ‘no’ that particular day.

“Stable” was definitely not the word I would use.

The squee-gee guy propelled himself into the car and bit chunks of what I assumed to be the driver’s cheek and lips away from his face. The carnage was too much to look away from, I couldn’t help but watch as the sanguine effigy of blood slowly made its way down the line of cars before ultimately deciding to flee from the scene of the crime.

Never would my window be down again, never would I look out at the beggars, paupers and addicts.

One overcast day in November though, the tense commute was nothing compared to what would happen to me.

I remember the specifics, but am foggy on the journey. It started with a strange occurrence with my son in the middle of the morning.

It was late at night, but early enough to continue to benefit from sleep when my son Joshua woke at two in the morning. Josh was three, but gifted in a sense that he already had mastery of the English language as much as a three year old could have. My wife Florence rolled over and elbowed me in the ribs after I pretended not to hear Josh’s anguished cries. From what I could tell, they were overly dramatic and after ten minutes he would soon settle.

“Harry, it's been twenty minutes.”

“Alright.” 

She didn’t need to say anymore, nor did I. I got up and quickly dressed with whatever clothes were at the foot of our bed. I could hear Josh repeat himself in whimpers from behind his closed door. He repeatedly said the word ‘no’ through high pitched gasping breaths, and extended wails.

“Hey buddy.” I tried to be as comforting as possible while opening his door. Josh, who was still yet to graduate to a toddler bed practically scrambled over the crib and leapt into my arms. I hugged him close as he dried his wet face on my t-shirt. “Hey, what’s the matter bubba?” I asked him a few times before through his dry heaving he answered muffled into my chest, simply pointing at his bedroom window.

“Face. Daddy. Face window.” He wouldn’t look toward his curtains, though they were drawn, but I did my best to calm him. Based on how he was reacting, I decided it would be best if he slept in our bed for the duration of the night.

“Hey my little man, daddy and I are here, you’re gonna be okay.” Flo mouthed the words ‘What the fuck?’. I responded with a shrug and pointed to our curtains, then made my move to regain any sleep before I needed to get to work.

“Daddy, close window.” Josh said as I walked back to my side of the bed. I sighed and did as he asked, shutting my window tight and drawing the blackout curtain.

“Be right back buddy, you snuggle in with mom. I’m just gonna go deal with your window too, okay?”

“‘Kay.” I stepped into his room as my wife sang to our frightened boy, wondering what it was that he saw. I know our neighbors next to us had a deck that was about window height, but they were far enough away that any ‘faces’ would be attached to the rest of their bodies. Josh knew this when we waved at them from his room the day they moved in.

I brought my hand up to his closed curtain, as my fingers crept closer to the middle parting I felt my heart beat rapidly in my chest. I paused, taking a moment to catch my breath. I reached forward again with the same results. 

“Fuck this.” I muttered, grasping the middle of the curtain and pulling it hard to the right expecting to see a morbid expression awaiting me on the other side of the window. There was next to nothing there, well, almost nothing. The soft tiki lights around our neighbors deck gave off enough illumination that I could make out the residue on the exterior of Josh’s window. It was as if someone had their hands cupped to peek inside my son's room.

We live on the second floor.

I shuddered at the thought and immediately went outside, grabbing the metal shovel I used for gardening.

I wasn’t in the best shape of my life, but I was always primed and ready to dispense street justice for the sake of my child and wife. Any pervert stupid enough to hang around the scene of the crime would be hit by and buried with the same implement.

“Harry?” A voice caused me to jump out of my crocs, brandishing the shovel like a baseball bat. 

It was Nicolas, the next door neighbor’s kid. He was eighteen and stupid, though he grew on me cause he didn’t smoke his pot around my kid and he was always very polite to my wife. 

“Kind of early to be gardening, isn’t it?”

“The only herb out here that you’re interested in is the one rolled in your papers there, huh Nick? No, my kid woke up crying because he said there was a face.” 

I gestured up at the window, noticing some strange markings on the ground directly below it. 

“He must have seen you on the back porch.” I clarified, fixing my gaze upon the divots in the ground, resembling the peculiar spacing of a ladder. I didn’t own a ladder, and this fact disturbed me.

“I’ve been out front at the end of the driveway, haven’t been back there at all.”

I could feel a knot tighten in my stomach. I had to ask.

“Did uh, you see anything?” Nicolas took a drag on his joint as his brain clicked into first gear.

“Yeah, there was some movement like some dog or something run out from the back of your house.” He pointed his finger and traced a path from the corner of the home to the suspicious divots, to down my driveway. “It looked gangly and fucked up, like one of its legs was broken. The thing bolted past me and ran up the road.” Nicolas pointed up the road to the section of woods the city had decided to keep when the community cried out against having one of our last forested areas be leveled to put in more ‘affordable housing’.

“One of the legs was broken?” I’m sure I would have heard some howling, or yipping if the thing was running away in pain.

“Yeah, it was fuckin’ weird Harry. The strangest part of it was the thing didn’t make any noise, just kinda chuffed like it was laughing? The busted up leg was making a weird clicking noise.”

I was too tired to conjure the frightening image to my mind as I stared at a gap in the woods that was roughly dog-sized. I thanked Nicolas for his information, declined a toke of his joint and went back to bed.

The following day was normal as it could be, I waved goodbye to my wife and son as I entered my car, and then went to work. 

Work was, well, work. The excitement of a 9-5 shift in this economy slowly became dull and pedantic as time wore on. I would perform to the best of my ability just enough to not get canned, but would largely flub my way through meaningless meetings of trite conversation only to suffer a half hour commute of a five minute road.

The difference in this day was when I noticed it following me.

‘It’ was as apt a description I could give the thing as I’m quite sure that the thing following me wasn’t technically human.

During my usual Sisyphean task of driving home in gridlock, I first saw ‘It’ when I slowed to a rolling stop at the first set of lights. 

The city I lived in was a commuter town, meaning that all the main roads and highways would become increasingly locked down as five pm rolled around. Lakehead was no different. Though we were on a strip that was connected to our small city lake with water on the left most side and buildings and remnants of forested areas on the right, we still had a decent amount of foot traffic that could remain busy up until late January when our snow would cover any walkable areas. This November was a scorcher, so lots of people would still be out and about, attempting to enjoy the boardwalk and beginnings of night life.

The city where I live in also has a supremely high volume of crackheads and people addicted to fentanyl, much like the aforementioned face-biting squee-gee man. It isn’t an uncommon sight to see a poor unfortunate bent at a ninety degree angle suffering in their own state of jubilation.

One such crackhead had not broken eye contact with me when I spotted them in my rear view mirror.

‘It’ appeared like a middle aged man suffering from drug addiction. Bent forward, mulling to himself before we made eye contact, he seemed like any other wino or addict I would have seen on my route to or from work. Suddenly as I watched, his chin slowly lifted up until a pallid face, with a deep history of drug use looked back at me. What was different about this one, was the sharpness of the eyes, and the mottled unkempt beard that had dried something on it.

A glint of green made contact with me and held my gaze, even after I would look away to slowly move forward when traffic permitted. Each time I looked back, though I was a considerable distance away from the entity, it seemed to move with me.

Still the same shape, the same hunched pose, with the chin tilted up with the eyes fixated on me, looking at me directly from the rearview. I suffered this for another block before absolutely losing my cool, stepping out of my van. I circled the front of my van in the dead stop traffic and shouted at the thing.

“What the fuck are you looking at huh?” Pointing and gesticulating to the man that was seemingly no longer there.

A chill ran up my spine, I heard passers by call out insults or jokes, while the car behind me honked. I quietly got back into my van and continued.

The thing was right back where it was, standing there in the same pose, staring at me.

But this time it was smiling. The anomaly licked its lips and brushed residue out of the beard that was well-worn to its face as I pushed my rear view mirror away from its gaze.

The temptation of driving on the sidewalk flickered in my breast as I made myself harder to view.

I got to the last set of lights, and finally fixed my rear view mirror. I didn’t see anything, until I made the left hand turn to the open road which would take me less than a minute to get home.

The same face was watching me, this time it was standing upright, the head of the figure would slowly follow and track my car as the street wound its way back to my neck of the woods.

I didn’t immediately get out of the car when I got home. I looked all around the vehicle from the inside, triple checking all the mirrors. 

Nothing.

Getting out of the car I circled the vehicle and looked up the street where it would turn to the next avenue, then I followed the street back down and stared at the hole in the woods, large enough for a dog, or maybe whatever ‘It’ was to enter and leave.

Still nothing.

I stared at that opening for a long while until Florence snapped me out of my sentry patrol.

“Harold!”

“Yeah, what?”

“You’ve been standing there for half an hour now. Dinner is cold.”

“Shit, sorry.”

“What the hell are you looking at?”

“Nothing, just… we need to make sure we lock all the doors and windows tonight.”

“Why the windows?”

“I think I was followed home by something.”

“Okay, just come in and eat. Tell me about it after we put Josh down, okay?”

“Okay.” I looked one more time back at the woods. As the sun was setting, I could see the foliage rustling. Visions of the interloper danced within my periphery as beads of sweat fell from my brow.

The alarm bells stopped ringing when I felt the breeze that had shifted the plant life hit my face. I needed to relax. I resolved on choosing another road home for the following day.

During dinner I asked Josh about his day, and what he had learned at daycare. I would get joyful screams and happy noises through each tiny mouthful of meatloaf. When dinner was said and done and it was time for Josh to go to bed, he hesitated.

“Face?” Was all he asked.

“Hey buddy, no face. I talked to Nick next door and he said there was a dog making noises. Come with me.” My son held my hand as I guided him back to his room, he protested for a minute when he could see the curtains were wide open, but after some gentle nudging he followed me in.

“No. No sleep here.”

“Bubba, check this out. Your windows are locked from the inside, nothing out there can get in, I promise.” I looked through the window, down toward the ground.

Nothing. 

I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Why? Why was I so freaked out?

“No. No sleep.”

“Okay, alright. How about this, just for tonight you can sleep with mommy, and daddy will sleep in your room. Deal?” My son panicked and tugged on the sleeve of my shirt.

“No! Daddy sleeps with family!” His little face contorted as tears welled up in his eyes. “Daddy!”

“Everything okay?” Florence poked her head in. 

“Yes mommy,” I hugged my son tight and brought him to our bedroom. “Josh is going to sleep one more time tonight with mommy, and daddy is going to sleep in Josh’s room to scare away anything bad, so it doesn’t happen again.”

“That sounds great!” My wife made the situation sound like it was normal, reasonable, and not at all crazy. “How about we get your teeth brushed and you can read your favorite all time story to mommy?” My son eventually relented.

He was a momma’s boy, and I loved him for that.

“Hey bud, can you go pick out your book and get ready for mommy, I need to talk to her for a minute, okay?” Josh nodded, and padded away to search through his greatest hits of favorite three year old stories. I explained the situation to Florence, and the odd encounter with the homeless man with green eyes. She listened to everything I had to say.

“So you think he may be peeping into Josh’s window?”

“I don’t know if it’s that same guy, but I want to sleep in this room tonight by myself and if anything else comes up, I want to handle it. I saw ladder divots from the night before, I don’t want to rule anything out.”

“So if it’s the same guy?”

“Then I’ll shout at you to wake up and call the cops, while I go try to catch him.”

“Honey I don’t know.”

“I just want this to be over, I’ll just chase him away and hopefully the cops catch him or he thinks twice about coming back.” I wondered for how long this thing was staring at me in traffic.

Why me?

Why my little boy?

“Alright, I’ll see you in the morning, just don’t do anything hasty. Love you.”

“Love you too.” I could hear Josh clumsily read over every third word to his mother. I took a last look out of the window. I watched as some storm clouds rolled in on the horizon. A deep pit rose in my stomach as I closed the curtains for the night.

It must have been around 2 to 3 in the morning when the tapping began. During small gusts of wind howling I could just faintly hear it.

Roused awake from the light sleeping I was getting, the sound of tapping on my son’s window startled me awake. It was so odd and not uniform from the gusts of billowing wind. It was done in such a fashion that it could be mistaken for the house creaking, but once listening to it it was undeniably something on the other side of the window.

I’ve got you now you son of a bitch. I slowly rose to my feet and approached the curtain. As my hand reached forward I heard the faintest whisper from beyond the pane.

"Open."

That was it, all that was said. Just the word open, every so often, in the same muffled falsetto whisper. It didn’t sound like a normal person saying the word, it sounded like something trying to say the word that was slowly learning how to talk.

"Op-en. O-pen. OhhhpEN."

Always differently enunciated, always in the whisper. It clung to the harried winds like thick honey. A forbidden temptation was coaxing me to open up the curtains and look.

I did as it wanted and threw the curtains open.

In the dead of night, through the sanguine darkness, I locked eyes with the devil.

The green eyes of the homeless man that plagued me that same afternoon were present, but they were socket-ed in the creeping growth of time around the fetid remains of a sort of lupine creature. A horribly mangled top half pressed its half man paws to the glass, pushing on it tenderly, though if it wanted to overpower and break through I believe it could. The visage of death and all things not right with the world was extended up from the ground, way further than any normal legs should stand.

I could see luminous spools of soapy bubbling drool colored yellow by the decay in the maw of the entity. Breath from the flared nostrils extended to the window and covered it in a viscous substance that could only be called slime. The thing panted as the sinewy muscles in the thin frame pressed harder on the glass. A terrible engorgement at the waist of the creature set off all parental alarms and fury within my body. As the glass material groaned against the weight of the devil, the horror licked up the mucus slime and barked once more.

"OPEN."

“FLORENCE CALL THE COPS RIGHT NOW!” I bellowed as loudly as I could. The entity, amused with my command, cackled something awful as it suddenly dropped from the second story window. 

A horrible cavalcade of snapping bones and popping muscles assailed my ears as the chuffing of the creature rose and fell with the wind from the outside. One last time the deranged mutt looked up at me, green eyes glowing in the night. Three of the four legs worked on it and it began to slowly trot away in the direction of the woods.

I was going to get this bastard. The same shovel I had once used for gardening now gleamed like an Arthurian sword of legend.

The thing guffawed as it increased speed. My bare feet slapped on the pavement as I tore after it. I wasn’t dressed for a sprint, but with the spade in my hand gleaming in the moonlight I wasn’t going to rest until this thing was six feet under. 

It dove into the opening of the woods gracefully as I crashed through behind it.

Heart hammering in my chest, I swung at whatever pantomimed movement nearby. The branches and foliage stood no chance against my uncoordinated rage. As foolish as I must have looked, the terrible chuffing started again.

Looking all around me, like a cornered animal I raised my weapon, ready to strike. 

Within the inky blackness of the woods, the only light source available to me was a detriment as it was from the houses just outside the woods. 

I prayed for more than a sliver of light, but as early as it was, no such guidance would break the perimeter of the woods.

Sensing that I was near my end, the devil began to taunt me. It spoke again in the broken way, as if it was learning words just like my three year old.

‘Y-ou a-are fuh-ood.’

I didn’t have any witty retort to deliver so I just told the thing; ‘YOU FUCK OFF AND GO BACK TO HELL!’ 

A sudden pressure from my side exploded into me as the creature shoved me into the nearest tree. Not relenting my grip from the shovel I retaliated and swung it as hard as I could, completely missing the enemy.

A tearing noise echoed out as I felt a searing pain rake across my chest. Still holding onto the shovel, tighter than ever, the thing assailed me again, kicking me down a gulch where I tumbled until I slammed into a large rock. Still holding onto the shovel, I used it to prop myself up. 

Fairly certain that something was poking into my back and legs, I could feel fire across the soles of my feet and ankles. Standing was a no-go, and I wasn’t sure how long I could keep this up.

The green eyed bastard stood above me, poised to strike.

‘Y-ur fah-mi-ly is fuh-ood.’ It leapt as soon as it finished its sentence. I could see the green eyed monster outstretch kitchen knives for hands with an unrelenting maw of doom closing in on me.

That son of a bitch threatened my family, and I wasn’t about to let him win.

Praying to God, screaming in blind fury, I used whatever strength my adrenaline would offer and swung the shovel from my core. Rotating my hips and broken body, a resounding thwack echoed through the forest as I connected right with the jaw of the monster.

Surprised, it tumbled to a heap before me crying out in agony, not expecting me to ever make contact with it.

Wasting no time, using whatever depleting strength I had left I clumsily mounted the abomination and stabbed the blunt end of the shovel multiple times across its skull and neck. I was out of sorts, shouting obscenities and half formed words to the predator who was now my prey. 

Every great memory of my wife and child flashed before my eyes. Tears streamed down my face as I continued my malevolence into the beast that would never bother me, or any other family again.

When it was done, a blinding light flashed down into the gulch.

‘Freeze! Drop your weapon!’ The shovel clattered to the ground as I strained to get my hands up. ‘What the hell happened down here?’

The cops who I told Florence to call showed up later than I would have wanted, but were aghast at the thing lying dead on the forest floor. Multiple phone calls were made as I sobbed relief, knowing that the thing coming after me and my family was finally dead.

Alongside detectives, ambulances and other emergency responders, some men in suits wanted to have a chat with me. In my delirium they asked me a lot of questions I had no answers for. I gave as best a description as I could to what the thing was, what had happened and where I thought I first encountered it.

‘Thank you sir, we’ll be in touch.’ They didn’t hand me any card, or contact number, but they spoke briefly with the on scene police officers, and left with a body bag of the expired malicious creature. 

A story was spun from the news that I had enacted some vigilante justice among a convenient dangerous criminal who had escaped not too long ago. Much to my surprise, the local news linked it to the guy who had once bit the face of the other driver so long ago. The men in suits returned and offered my family a sizable estate a few miles north away from any curious onlookers or media presence.

We accepted.

Now we live somewhere that’s a smaller town, with not a huge crowd of people. Everybody knows everybody and it’s pleasant. I found work at a local sporting goods store, which came with a firearms safety course. 

I took it.

Things have been slow now, and not much happens to me or my family. Josh has a room with no windows in the house, my wife and I opted for the same. The only window we have is one singular bay one, overlooking the front yard and driveway entrance.

Whenever I feel like I’m being watched, or if I think for a second I’m being followed by one of them again, I wait until it gets dark and sit quietly with my face towards the big bay window.

Once or twice, I heard that same chuffing laughter that I experienced some time ago. 

I find that it stops much quicker now when I chamber a slug into my shotgun and rack it.

They know to leave us alone now, I think.

Heyo! This was a story I wrote for my cousins 11th bday so this is my first attempt at Middle Grade writing!

Eric looked up at the arch over the gateway made of rotting wood and rusting steel. Pinewood Cemetery. He looked back at his friends, Tim, Jeremy, and Carlos. The moon was high in the sky and not a single cloud threatened to get in its way. He shivered standing with them out on the cool September night, but unfortunately for Eric, his shivering wasn’t from the temperature. 

“Do I really have to go in there?” Eric asked, knowing already the answer he would receive in return.

“Yes.” the other three said in unison.

“You chose Dare, dude. This is the dare.” Tim said, keeping an eye out for other people that might be passing by. The wind howled just beyond the gate, mimicking the howl of a wolf. 

“Just walk around the outside path once you get in there, you’ll be done in no time.” Jeremy urged. He hadn’t brought a jacket and Eric could see the goosebumps growing on his skin. 

“I don’t know guys,” Carlos started, “when we were here before dark, the groundskeeper told us to avoid the place at night entirely. You remember that don’t you?” Eric nodded his head, though Carlos left out the other part where the groundskeeper said, “If you end up only seeing a ghost, you’d be in pretty good shape.” He knew that it was childish and silly to hang on the words of a grumpy old man, but he had said it with such sincerity, and uncomfortability. 

“Carlos, stop freaking him out, he’s already being a wuss and trying to get out of it.” Eric felt heat rush to his face with anger. 

“I’m not a wuss! Don’t call me that.” Tim crossed his arms in defiance. 

“If you’re not a wuss then walk through the cemetery quick. It’s not that big, and like Jeremy said, you’ll be back in no time.” Carlos put a reassuring hand on Eric’s shoulder.

“You don’t have to do it, man. It won’t make you a wuss.” 

“Uh yeah…It will. He’d be chickening out of the dare. What’s the point of offering him a Dare if he’s just going to wuss out of it.” Eric felt hot enough that he thought that steam would start coming out of his ears.

“I’m not a god damned chicken! And I’m not a god damned wuss! I’ll show you! I’ll show you right now!” 

“Alright! Then do it! We’re waiting!”

“Hey! Quiet down he said, whispering as loudly as he could while still keeping it a whisper. Eric glanced over at Carlos, he didn’t seem to have any reassurance this time. Without saying another word, Eric opened the gate to Pinewood Cemetery and started to walk. 

*****

By the time Eric got out of ear shot of his friends, his confidence he had built out of frustration and anger had subsided and the fear had returned with a vengeance. The wickedly bent trees above him cause even more wicked and sinister shadows on the ground and headstones. Every breath he took felt like it was going against the eerie silence of the space around him. Each crunch underneath his every step, felt like pulling the trigger of a loaded gun, causing what he thought were echoes all around him. Wherever he glanced, unfamiliar dark shapes danced and swung. 

When he glanced forward he saw that he was coming across a mausoleum, a large one, so large you could see it from the road despite that it was in the dead center of the oblong cemetery. It was already spooky to him in the daytime, with its chipping away off-white stone and crooked black metal barring over the windows. But now that he was coming up to it in the dead of night…it was out right creepy. Half of the building glowed in the pale blue light from the moon, the other half sat in utter darkness, holding whatever secrets its nooks and crannies had to hold. He stopped for a moment, trying to get a grasp on his breathing and only daring to look when he felt it was safe too. Eric didn’t know why, but he felt like the mausoleum was staring at him, watching his every move. 

He looked back toward his friends, he could barely see them due to the only light source around being the moonlight. He wondered if instead of having to walk around the whole cemetery, if he could get away with just sitting on the steps of the building for a few minutes and then slowly start making his way back. He tested this idea by waving toward his group of friends. They made no response or wave in return, seeming to continue on doing whatever they were on about. The slightest bit of tension released from Eric’s neck and shoulders, allowing him to breathe somewhat normally for the first time since he had walked in. He took a seat on the bottom step and pulled out his phone, trying to open Instagram only to see that he didn’t have any service. 

“Of course.” He muttered to himself, resorting to opening up the Solitaire app and starting a game. Before he could make his first move, he heard something from behind him. It was muffled and faint so he couldn’t make out what it was. He raised an eyebrow suspiciously, seeing that the only thing behind him was the door to the building. He went back to his phone and got ready to start his game once again when the noise came again, but much louder. 

THUD.

Eric jumped up, startled at the sudden noise. He could’ve sworn this time that it came from behind him, he knew he was only imagining it, but he also could’ve sworn that he felt the ground shake a little when it happened. He stood there, his shivering returning and now on the verge of tears. 

THUD. THUD. 

The thudding continued, rhythmically, like whatever it was behind the door was keeping time to a song only it could hear. Eric took a few steps back now, scrambling to close out his Solitaire game and turn the flashlight on. As he found the flashlight mode on his phone the thudding stopped. Silence once again blanketed the world around him, leaving only the howling wind, crickets, and his heart thumping madly with anxiety against his chest. For a few agonizing moments nothing happened. Then, the knob of the mausoleum door slowly started to turn. 

Eric wanted nothing more than to haul ass down the path to the gate and run, screw going back to the sleepover, he was going to run all the way home and cry in his mom’s lap while his dad chewed him up for trespassing…but he couldn’t move. No matter what he tried to do, fear had frozen him in place.

After half of a minute of the door knob first squeakily turning one way and then even more squeakily turning the other, the door knob stopped moving and everything was still once again. Eric found that his lip was trembling and that tears had started trailing their way down his cheeks. He wished so badly to be able to run, but he couldn’t, so he now wished that whatever was behind that door would just come out already, enough with the waiting.

As if Eric himself had willed his wishes into existence, the door started to creak open, swaying silently and slowly, inching itself open. When the door was completely open, the sound of scuffling and a low moaning sound came from inside the pitch black building. He raised his hand that was holding his phone and shined the light through the open doorway, hoping to the heavens above that what he was hearing was simply just a critter that had somehow made its way inside…but he knew that wasn’t going to be the case. What he saw when the light shined inside shook Eric to his core.

It was a man in a withered suit, tears all over the jacket and pants, dirt covered almost every inch of the man as well. The skin was pulled taut and ripped in multiple places across the face and hands, showing rotted black flesh underneath. It was missing one of its eyes with nothing but inky blackness in its place. The man was missing hair in many places on his head and blood coated his chin and lips. A dead and mutilated rat hung by its tail from the man’s hand. Both Eric and the rotting man stood silently, neither one of them making a move. After only a few seconds that felt like a millennium to Eric, the rotting man burst forward toward him. Eric, thankfully, found that his legs were no longer frozen and booked it down the path from which he came. 

He could no longer see his friends, clouds had found their way into the night sky and essentially flipped the light switch on his part of the world. A horrid scream echoed through the graveyard behind him, a mixture of a little girl's scream and someone choking on a piece of fried chicken. He didn’t try to hold back his fear anymore, he openly sobbed as his legs pushed him forward as quickly as they could. 

He felt he was halfway there when another one of those horrible screams came again. Eric glanced over his shoulder and saw the rotting man was only ten or fifteen feet behind him, random bones popping and snapping as he pushed to get closer to the boy in front of him. 

“GET AWAY!” Eric yelled and managed to push himself harder.

Finally the gate had come into view. It was hard to tell at first but he quickly realized his friends were still standing there.

“Help! Tim! Carlos! Jeremy! Help me!” They didn’t respond, continuing to chat amongst themselves.

 He slowed down as he approached the gate, quickly getting it open enough to slip through. Before he could fully slip through, he felt the icy cold touch of one of its fingers grazing along the back of his neck. He grabbed the gate and slammed it shut. Then tried backing away so quickly that he ran into Carlos and found himself at his friend's feet.

“Why didn’t any of you come help me?!” Eric yelled. His friends looked at him and were confused. 

“What are you talking about?” Tim asked, looking behind them at the cemetery.

“I was just yelling for your help back there before I made it to the gate!” Once again his friends looked confused.

“We didn’t hear anything, man…not until you damn near ran through the gate trying to get out.” Carlos crouched down with Eric.

“Why were you trying to get out so bad?” Eric looked at Carlos and the rest of his friends flabbergasted. 

“Are you kidding me?! There was a dead man running after me! All the way from the mausoleum! He was running after me like I was his next meal!” The boys stood in silence for a second. Then Tim started to laugh, then Jeremy joined in. Laughter filled the air as Eric jumped up to his feet to look past them, only now Eric was the one confused. The moon was out just as strong as it was when he entered the cemetery. Everything was just as it was before the mausoleum. 

“The mausoleum…” Eric muttered.

“What?” Tim asked, starting to get his handle on his giggle fit. 

“You guys will believe me if you see the mausoleum.”

“No chance. We’re getting back to the house, my mom will notice if we’re gone for too long.” 

“But…but…” Eric started as Carlos gently pushed him along when they started to walk back to Jeremy’s house. When the four got halfway back, Eric asked Carlos a question.

“You believe me right?” Carlos only shrugged his shoulders.

“The dark can play tricks on you, man. I remember a few years ago when I was afraid that the sound coming from my closet was a monster of some sort, but when my dad checked the next morning, it turned out to just be a water pipe that was just above the ceiling tile.” Eric’s shoulders slumped and he felt tears starting to form in his eyes again. 

“So you don’t believe me…” Carlos put his arm around Eric’s shoulders. 

“Look, I believe you saw something that scared the hell out of you. Obviously. I just think that maybe it wasn’t what you claim it is.” Eric didn’t say anything more for the rest of the walk.

*****

They spent the rest of the evening snacking on Doritos and playing Fortnite until they eventually passed out between one and two in the morning. Eric’s friends had him convinced that what he saw was probably just a trick on the mind over a rotting man chasing him through a graveyard in the middle of the night.

When his mom picked him up, he told her about everything they did, excluding the part where he was forced to trespass into a graveyard. On their way home, his mom drove past the graveyard due to construction closing off the normal way home. Out of curiosity, Eric looked out the window. His mom coincidentally slowed down by the gate and Eric saw two things that confirmed that his night wasn’t just a trick on the mind. The first, was that a dead, mutilated rat lay just inside the cemetery gates. The second was that he could see the mausoleum clearly in the daylight, and the door was wide open. Though when his mom started to speed up again, Eric swore that he saw the door start to inch itself close…

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Above the conference room table, the thin metal hands of the clock wound their way around the white face of it. Curls of steam rose from untouched coffee mugs, soft afternoon light filtered through the white plastic blinds, and cars rumbled by outside with muted chatter. The woodwork of the room was showing its age today, scuffed, chipped, and scratched from countless years of administrative work going to and fro. The scent of coffee, glue, and copy paper hung on the air around the table, but with the door to the conference room shut, it seemed to thin in favor of the dry smell of dust that lingered despite numerous cleanings. That was Jabo’s Fork in a nutshell; an old thing still chugging along like an antique car, refusing to submit to the effects of time in the shadow of the mountains around it. Yet, like so many small towns, it too had its fair share of problems, and it was this that brough us here as the other people around the conference table stared in shock at the sheriff.

“David, come on.” Mayor Jonathan Hilco blinked at him with the half smile of a man who doesn’t want to believe his ears. “You can’t be serious.”

Across the flat expanse of polished oak, Sheriff Kowalski nodded, no humor in his stoney expression. “I am.”

Lisa Renfield, dressed in her usual pinstriped pantsuit, shook her head at Kowalski in amazement, hands shaking as if she were watching the money disintegrate before her very eyes. “That property is worth millions. Just the price on the house alone could fund the town’s administration budget for an entire year. Besides, every day the park stays closed, we lose even more money. I can’t believe we’re even discussing this.”

“It’s still a crime scene, Lisa.” The sheriff narrowed his dark eyes at her and jabbed a finger at the louvered blinds covering the courthouse windows. “We’ve got four missing people connected to the Watkins property, three of them local residents. For God’s sake, Cindy Fadro went to school with your niece! Erin Martinelli’s father was on the football team with John in high school! If we sell that place we’ll never get a better chance to find out what happened to those girls, and opening up the park around Smoke Point will guarantee contamination. Every two-bit podcaster this side of the Mississippi will be out there, climbing around with their cameras to look for ghosts, while real evidence might get buried or lost thanks to their tramping.”

Leaning forward so that his prodigious belly mounded against the edge of the conference table, Douglas Finberger tried to calm the situation even as his face reddened with similar levels of disbelief. “Let’s not lose our heads here, yeah? Look, David, we’re all saddened about what happened to Ed Watkins and those two girls, but it’s been several months without a single lead or update. We’ve humored you this long in keeping the park closed, but you can’t seriously expect us to throw away this kind of opportunity based on cold cases. After all, you’ve always said your boys needed more funding; think how much equipment and training we could get from the estate sale.”

That’s going to go over well.

Seated to the left of Sheriff Kowalski, I sucked in a breath and waited for the inevitable eruption to follow the county auditor’s remarks. I’d been a deputy sheriff for years in Jacob’s Fork, and had served under David Kowalski since I was a rookie cop. He was a good man, and a strong leader, but he could get easily fired up when confronted with the bureaucratic red tape of local governance. I had been there when our tiny force went through some really tough cases; the drug ring that came in from Boise six years ago, a Kootenai poaching racket that murdered a hunter four years ago, or last year when a crazed gunman from out of state tried to shoot up an elementary school during Valentine’s Day. Most of the time, being a cop in the forgotten stretches of northern Idaho was easy, but these cases were always fresh in the minds of anyone who stayed on Kowalski’s force. For this reason, he’d been pushing more funding for nearly a decade, and always he got the same excuses about the county budget. To bring it up now, after everything that had happened concerning the Wickenshire House, was tantamount to throwing gasoline on a bonfire.

He swiveled his head to blink at the county commissioner, and I thought for a moment Sheriff Kowalski might explode, his face shading red like an overripe tomato. “Are you kidding me, Doug? We can’t sell that place in good faith, not when this might happen again, and opening up the mountain would be like ringing a damn dinner bell. I’ve got Andy Todd watching the mountain, and there are new markers in the woods as far as the Benson Ranch . . .”

“Oh, good lord, not this again.” Lisa slumped back in her chair, cradling her forehead in one hand with a groan of annoyance. “Andrew Todd is hardly a credible source, especially considering where he was the night of the disappearances.”

“. . . which means our suspect is still at large.” The Sheriff talked right over her words and instead directed his attention to our mayor, who looked more uncomfortable by the minute. “Now I say we seize the property as per eminent domain and seal the mountain off for good. I’ve got some dynamite down at the station from when we collapsed that old copper mine, and it will be enough to make sure the access road is completely demolished.”

“This is insane.” Charles Hubour, head of our local chamber of commerce, looked down his long nose at our badges from the opposite end of the table. “You’re going to mothball a six-million-dollar property and an entire public wilderness recreational area which is fully taxpayer funded because of a few piles of bones? You guys have guns, what are you so afraid of?”

Shifting in my chair, I did my best not to let my temper boil alongside the sheriff’s as the room scrutinized me like a bug on a card. I’d been promoted to detective after I apprehended the Valentine’s Day shooter by ramming his car with my own before the ensuing firefight broke out. Kowalski had overseen the promotion himself, and while he was still as tough on me as the day I joined, I knew he’d been proud. My own father left when I was ten, so to me the sheriff was as much a father figure as I ever had. When he let me take the lead on investigating the Wickenshire vanishings last winter, I gave it my all, only to fall short as none of the clues we found led to anything substantial.

I turned that place upside-down. I know I missed something, I just need more time.

“The markers are a health hazard.” Sheriff Kowalski jerked a thumb over one shoulder toward the distant mountains, though I could see his embarrassment at the words, as he and I both knew the real reason why we never removed them. “And more than that, they’re part of the crime scene. If we want to catch whoever is doing this, we need them intact, and there’s no way we can rely on private owners or nosy hikers to keep them there.”

“Oh please, now you’re just grasping at straws.” With a snort, Lisa crossed her arms and stuck her chin out with a waspish tone to her voice. “Honestly, at this point it looks more like covering up evidence to me. Besides, since when did we authorize you to hold onto explosives?”

Something inside of me snapped, and before I knew what I was doing, my mouth was running. “You know what, maybe next time you stop some maniac from gunning down a room full of kindergartners then you can dictate what we have in our arms locker.”

“Enough!” With a slam of his open palm on the table, Mayor Hilco brought the room to silence once more. “The Smoke Point Mountain is part of the public domain; we cannot keep it closed while the people are paying taxes for it. As it is tied to our administration, I’ll officially sign the paperwork to be reopen it by the end of the week.”

Sheriff Kowalski sighed, and I felt my chest deflate. There it was. Our defeat. Over an hour spent in this stuffy room, and none of them had listened to a word we said.

Un-freaking-beleivable.

Pausing for a moment to straighten his tie, the mayor continued. “As zoning laws are technically gray as to where it lies, the Wickenshire Estate is hereby considered an important local landmark of Jacobs Fork, therefore under my jurisdiction. We are not going to destroy any county infrastructure, not in this economic climate.”

The other officials flashed smug, triumphant smiles at us, but Hilco wasn’t finished.

“Instead,” He angled his head our way, and I could see him and the sheriff exchange a knowing look. “It will be remanded to police custody for an additional month, along with the access road leading to it, after which it will be taken into official holding by the county. If, in that time, the sheriff’s office finds anything substantial to lead to a breakthrough in the missing persons cases, the deadline will be extended by another week. Dismissed.”

Squawks of protest came from the other members of the cabinet, but the sheriff rose to his feet with a grim, yet satisfied look on his haggard face, and I followed suit.

“David.” Mayor Hilco raised a hand to stop us as the others filed from the conference room. “Stay. You too, detective.”

Once the door to the room swung shut behind the last exiting bureaucrat, the mayor sat back in his chair with a sigh, then threw a furtive glance toward the door. From his pockets, he fished out a box of cigarettes, slipping one between his lips. He crossed to the end of the room to push one of the windows open, and from outside the quiet bustle of passing cars and chatting pedestrians flowed in.

“Thought you quit?” Without a hint of judgment, Sheriff Kowalski produced a lighter from his shirt pocket and ran the flame under the mayor’s unlit cigarette tip.

He snorted, and Mayor Hilco pulled in a long drag before exhaling so that little plumes of smoke flowed from his nostrils. “As far as my wife knows, I did. You know, I never had a bad smoke. Bad drinks, bad coffee, bad dates, but a smoke was always a smoke. Damn shame the stuff is so bad for you.”

“Yeah, well, so are the burgers at JoAnne’s Diner.” Leaning against the windowsill beside him, Sheriff Kowalski produced his clay pipe and a small tin from his other shirt pocket, out of which came a small bag of loose black tobacco. “I swear, someday they’re gonna write ‘Bacon’ on my autopsy as cause of death. I’d never make it as a rabbi.”

That brought a tired smile to the mayor’s lined face, and he offered me a cigarette, which I politely declined. I wasn’t a smoker, though I had to admit the smell of Sheriff Kowalski’s cherry pipe tobacco made me want to reconsider. It truly was unfortunate how something so pleasant also caused cancer. Much like the town, it didn’t kill you at first, just crept up on you slow, until one day you realized you were stuck on this path as much as the next person. I wondered in abstract if Cindy or Erin were decomposing on some hidden trail or crevice somewhere on the rocky slopes to our north, trapped forever on their own path that we couldn’t find.

After another few quiet drags, Major Hilco let his shoulders slacken, and tugged at the knot in his tie with a weary groan. “Please tell me you boys can find something up there.”

Sheriff Kowalski glanced out the nearby window, his eyes far away in thought. “We’re doing the best we can, Jon. Anything dead’s gonna be dry bones by now. Anything living . . .”

Silence reigned once more, but after a moment, the mayor lifted his eyes to me. “You both have my support, you know that. The park opening was a necessary concession; I want this solved as much as anyone, but it’s been over six months since the fire. I can’t keep the others at bay for much longer. Find something for me to hold over their heads, or we’ll be forced to move on with the property.”

I straightened up, sensing the wight in how he addressed me first. This was still my task, my investigation to see through to the end. They were both relying on me to find new evidence. I couldn’t let the sheriff, or the mayor down, not when so much was at stake.

The families deserve to know what happened.

“I’ll find something.” I nodded, in a bid to inject more confidence into the statement than I truly felt.

“Good man.” Whether he believed me or not, the mayor bobbed his head in a similar gesture of approval and waved us off with a tired sigh. “I’ll be at a commerce summit in the Moose Lodge for the afternoon. Call my personal number if you need anything.”

With this signaling the impromptu meeting to be over, I followed the sheriff as he put out his pipe, the two of us making for the conference room door.

We slipped through the maze of corridors to the stairwell of the county courthouse and finally emerged onto the town square. It was a sunny day for Idaho, golden rays dancing on the courthouse green as we trudged for the sheriff’s pickup.

“Go ahead, say it.” I shook my head at myself as we rounded to our respective doors on the weather-beaten truck, its green and tan paint chipped from thousands of kicked up pebbles on backroads.

Sheriff Kowalski raised an eyebrow that bore faint traces of gray, settling into the driver’s seat and adjusting his faded gray Stetson with the grunts of an aging man. “Say what?”

Leaning an elbow on my own door, I noticed how worn the dark navy sleeves of my coat were. It hadn’t been more than a year since my promotion, and already it seemed like twenty. “That I should have kept my mouth shut. Renfield’s been gunning for a police budget cut for years; I just gave her enough ammo to make that happen.”

To my surprise, a wry grin slid over my boss’s lips, and he chuckled as we rumbled on down main street, a warm southern breeze flowing into the cab. “She can’t do nothing she couldn’t do yesterday, Derrick. If anything, it’s good she got some return fire for once. Ever since she headed that park commission, Renfield’s had stars in her eyes over running for mayor once Hilco leaves. One of these days all them spoiled uptown fools will vote her in and she’ll try to melt our badges for the silver, but it ain’t right now.”

As the streets of Jacob’s Fork rolled by, I watched the people on the sidewalks and in the windows of local shops, talking and shopping with relative peace. A few even waved as we passed by, noting the sheriff’s emblem on the truck door. One young woman tucked a strand of light blonde hair behind one ear, and I thought back to the missing person’s files, those faces I’d poured over for hours.

Two young women, one old man, one middle-aged hiker. No connections between the hiker and the first three, save for the location and circumstances. No footprints, no scent trail, no bodies.

“You really think we’ll find anything?” I voiced aloud my gloomy reservations and tried not to think about how any one of the people outside my window could be our suspect.

He let out another deep sigh, and the sheriff’s weathered face reflected my own doubts. “After this long? I don’t know. It’s like I told Hilco; if there are any bodies out there, they’ll be in pretty bad shape, but if somehow they are still alive, then we’re looking at some nasty business as far as trafficking is concerned. After this long, those girls could be in Yemen for all we know.”

My stomach knotted at that, and I winced at the sudden realization that I would honestly rather find their corpses than know the victims might still be suffering an unknown fate. “I’ll give the house another once-over this afternoon, to see if I can dig something new up. Did the reservation elders ever come back with any information?”

Steering the pickup around another turn in the sleepy streets of our town, Sheriff Kowalski frowned. We were on decent terms with the local Native American reservation many miles across the county from Jacob’s Fork, helped by the fact that the sheriff himself was a half-blood relative to their tribe. Still, there were tensions between the two communities, primarily around drugs and gambling, which drew both tourists and troublemakers alike. “Nothing useful. They’ve got enough problems of their own with the casinos, alcohol, petty crime, you name it. If one of theirs snatched our people, we’ll never know about it, and wouldn’t have the jurisdiction to go after them even if we did.”

We reached the police station on the opposite end of town and parked in the small lot where the other patrol vehicles waited. Ours was a small department, perhaps a few dozen or so deputies on the force in total, but we did have extra staff for administrative and forensic work that could help pull some of the weight. With an entire county to manage, and the upheaval surrounding the Wickenshire case, many of us had pulled 14-hour shifts for multiple nights in a row when the vanishings first happened. Between increased patrols around Smoke Point Mountain and search teams looking for evidence to pass on to the forensics lab, some of our boys had resorted to sleeping in cots set up in the rec room just to avoid falling asleep at the wheel. As the weeks went by, with nothing to show for it, this titanic effort had been scaled back, until all that was left was a hefty dossier on my desk and bad memories.

“Hey, Sloan.” As we passed through the front lobby and into the offices beyond, Sheriff Kowalski turned to wave at a nearby deputy seated behind another desk. “Drop what you’re doing; you’re on assignment with Junger in the field. Grab your files from evidence and get on it.”

Deputy Clyde Sloan looked up from his paperwork, saw the two of us, and understanding crossed his face in a measured grin. “You got it, boss.”

Turning to throw one last glance at me, the sheriff flicked his eyes toward the station doorway, which lay in the direction of the northern mountains. “Try to be back by dark.”

I said nothing, but we both knew what he meant as the man lumbered away to his office.

Clyde and I had been partners back when we were both cops on the beat, developing a close friendship and working on several cases together. Always the team player, Clyde applauded my promotion to detective, but I felt bad leaving him behind to the regular roadwork. Despite a habit of running his mouth to the irritation of most polite sensibilities, or his enduring love for chewing tobacco that he’d been trying to kick for years, Clyde was a good cop. He’d been with me when I brought down the Valentine’s Day shooter, and the only reason I got credit for the kill was because he went left around the wrecked car while I went right, thus engaging the suspect first. Loyal and headstrong, he deserved a promotion of his own, but the sheriff couldn’t just hand out pay-raises like candy, not when the local bureaucrats wanted to trim the budget every other year. Still, that never stopped him from working like a dog to earn his keep, and in less than fifteen minutes we were rolling along the lonely backroads of northern Idaho, the mountains looming closer as the warm summer breeze flowed through the open windows of my car.

“Still hard to believe it’s August already.” From the passenger seat, Clyde shuffled through the files within the overstuffed binder, paging through weeks of evidence to unearth a property map of the Wickenshire Estate. “At least we won’t be knee-deep in snow this time. Where are we fixin’ to start?”

I leaned over to tap on a section of the map north of the house, a spot marked with multiple little X’s inside of circles. “Boulder fields. That’s where the hunter went missing, and where they found Erin’s phone. We’ll try there while we have light, then the house when it gets late. Power should still be on; I don’t think the county ever bothered to shut anything off up there.”

For a few moments, we sat in silence as the car rumbled along, the mountains drawing closer, green trees flashing by along the roadside.

“Heard they want to sell the place.” Clyde drummed idle fingers on his knee as he stared out the passenger window, the evidence folder lying in his lap. “What kind of fool came up with that idea?”

“Renfield.” I turned onto the final route leading to the mountain road, civilization falling away behind us as the wilderness swallowed us up. “With some help from Hubour and Finberger. They’re going to open the whole park back up in a few days.”

He hissed a curse between his teeth, and Clyde rolled his eyes as he fished in his shirt pocket for a tub of chewing tobacco. “Ain’t never seen someone so money-hungry. Place has four bodies on it, and she wants to turn a dime on their graves. If that snooty pencil-pusher ever gets in as mayor, I’m moving to Florida, I swear to God.”

Despite the grimness of the setting, I couldn’t help but feel a thin smile crawl over my lips at his complaints, reminiscent of older days on the force together. “Still set on being a swamp man when you retire?”

“Yessir.” The twinkle returned to his eye, and Clyde nodded with an amused chuckle at his own vision of paradise. “I’m gonna build a little house by the water, a good fishing boat for the dock, and mix up a nice cold drink while I watch the sun go down on the gulf. Just me, the gators, and my dog. A man could live his whole life anywhere else and never have it that good.”

We laughed, but the looming shadow over us dampened the jovial mood as the trees closed in, the harsh stony tip of the mountain towering upward into the sky. Smoke Point Mountain wasn’t especially grand when compared to other, more notorious places in the US like Denali or Olympia, but it was prominent enough for our little valley that everyone’s eye was drawn to the granite peak every time they looked across the horizon of Jacob’s Fork. Supposedly local miners had used it as a communications point way back in the olden days, sending up smoke signals like the Kootenai did to let their bosses know another train load of iron ore was on its way down from the nearby range that the mountain sat detached from. Eventually telegraph lines came in, and made the smoke signals useless, but the name stuck, and the mountain stood by its lonesome, like an outcast before the other line of tall stone crags, good for hikers, hunters, and not much else. It had been made into a public park in the 1970’s during the environmental push, but the Wickenshire House escaped absorption into government ownership by remaining the one private homestead left on its cold slopes.

Every bump in the gravel road that wound its way up the mountain side brought back memories, dark flashes of countless days and night searching for signs, for hope, for anything to let me know I was close to the truth. So many hours spent combing the forest, pouring over topographically maps, even a few helicopter rides to scout for unseen trails from above. Seemingly endless calls from concerned locals, the numerous emotion-heavy pleas from the families of the missing, the accusations from pot-stirring journalists that wanted to find something juicy for a story that could go viral on social media. They were all disappointed, angry, confused, even fearful when the days dragged on and I continued to discover no further clues. They vented their fury at me, the only one they could point a finger at, despite the sheriff doing his best to vent the backlash away from our department. How could they know how many times I walked the grounds of the estate, paced through the silent halls and corridors, and gazed out the lifeless windows into the wilderness beyond? How could they know how many nights I went without sleep, abused gas-station alertness pills, drank gallons of the worst sort of coffee, beating myself to death over the failure to find anything? All for a dead end.

All for nothing.

And somehow, it was all my fault.

At last, as we pulled up the narrow driveway, the thick rows of evergreen trees fell away, and a spindly shadow or rusted cast iron reared upward into the fading sunshine. The gate was more rusty than last time I’d laid eyes on it, as if whatever oil or paint on it had given up the fight long ago. Around it, the long stone walls of the courtyard stood cracked along the mortar joints, settled with a kind of age that radiated a weary grief I felt in my bones. It was like seeing an old friend slowly choke to death on cancerous lungs, a place that I remembered fondly from better times, when I myself was nothing more than a boy.

“Still burned out.” Clyde spat tobacco juice into a plastic Coke bottle and shook his head in amazed dread at the landscape around us. “Not a single blade of grass, even with all the rain we’ve had. Scorch must’ve gone deep.”

The fire had happened on the night of the first disappearances, burning the entire 100-acre plot of the Wickenshire Estate from the property line inward, right up to the stone wall. There, inexplicably, the flames had stopped, not so much as tarring the stonework, leaving the enormous house and its manicured gardens intact. A strange anomaly of fate, it left a small oasis of greenery in a large field of barren rocks, dead soil, and crumbled remnants of what had once been plant life. Above this towered the house itself, an edifice of a bygone era, once a thing of immaculate beauty, and now . . . now I felt sick at the mere sight of it.

Unlocking the thick steel padlock we’d left to keep random people from accessing the property, I drove us through the gate, right up to the front of the house itself. It was a tall building, two stories high but it seemed much higher, built from local quarry stones over a hundred years ago. Victorian in its design, there was not another house like it in all of Idaho, a strange misfit of architecture among the timber-framed rustic ranch houses and log cabin-themed ski lodges that dotted the land. Wooden shutters lined every window, the sills carved from smooth granite, and the roof bore uniform rows of slate that would likely outlive me. A wide wooden porch covered the front half of the house, the pillars shaped like those of the Greek Pantheon, and beneath the eves of its awning stood the double French doors that had devoured Erin and Cindy whole.

I didn’t have to tell Clyde on what to bring for the trek up the mountainside. He was as experienced as I was and kept up with me as we shouldered our packs, making our way through the ornamental gardens within the courtyard walls to the back gate that led to the burned expanse beyond. Once we traversed this, we finally passed into the forested sections of the mountain slope that hadn’t been touched by the fire.

It was a quiet, morose place. Many people often didn’t understand how silent the mountains could be, especially if they came from a place filled with noise like the city. Tourists would ask us if hunters ‘killed all the animals up there’ or if ‘there wasn’t enough oxygen’ which I found amusing, given the evident lack of awareness in their statement. The truth, as always, was that there were animals in the mountains, they just had to be pickier than their lowland cousins, more cautious of how much energy they expended, and often moved down into the lowlands throughout the seasons. Hunters didn’t kill them all, there certainly wasn’t an oxygen problem for so insignificant of a peak, and it was often the case that the noisy, clumsy, inexperienced urbanites had been right next to a bird or critter that they never saw simply because that animal didn’t want to be seen.

However, this part of the mountain had changed since the vanishings, and even as a local, I noticed the heavy, oppressive silence. No birds sang, not in the distance or around us, and I couldn’t see any movement flitting through the branches overhead. No signs of recent deer or other tracks dotted the sparse portions of earth, and even the stones that clattered under our boots echoed too loudly in the quiet. At one point, we did spot a single, black crow rustling about in a stand of blackberry bushes, and Clyde called out to it with a friendly ‘hello there’, only for the thing bolt off into the treetops as if we’d startled it. Wind whistled and wailed the higher we climbed, mournful and chilly despite the season, the daylight slanting lower in the sky as the evening wore on.

We spent hours looking through the boulder field, a massive plain of rocks and rubble left behind by ancient glaciers. Clyde scanned the area with a set of binoculars, I checked every gap between the stones with my flashlight, and we marked our progress with chalk on the boulders as we inched over the slope yard by yard. We used a metal detector to look for old shoe islets, belt buckles, anything that might indicate where a body could be. I sent up a drone the department had been given during the first search operation in December to scan the area from the sky, circling round and round in hopes of spotting something from a different angle. We combed that placed front and back, until the light got low enough that I couldn’t put it off anymore.

“Let’s go.” I zipped up my backpack and shined my flashlight toward Clyde, who stood not far off down the slope, prodding at another crevice. “We’re out of light, and we still need to search the house. Sheriff’s going to get antsy if we don’t report in soon anyway.”

Clyde turned to respond, but his face hardened into an alarmed frown as he starred past me into the trees, and he slid one hand toward his service pistol. “Junger . . .”

I spun around to spot a strange object hanging amongst the branches of a nearby spruce, swaying to and fro in the cool evening breeze. Even from this far away, I knew we hadn’t missed it on our first walk through, the object dangling right over the path we’d taken into the boulder field, dull and pale in the gleam of our flashlights. It hadn’t been there five minutes ago, I was sure of it.

Together Clyde and I stalked forward, closer and closer until we stood mere feet away from the thing in the tree, stunned into mutual silence.

The thing was held suspended by an odd form of hand-made twine, which looked to be twisted together from roots, vines, or even thorn bushes, until each strand was as thick as my pinky finger. Each strand interconnected with another in a crude net, almost like a spider’s web, the knots tight and strong. These supported a basket of sorts, made from what at first glance looked like branches, circular in shape, with white and yellowed patches showing in the flashlight beam.

Bones.

Dozens of them.

Four broken sections of elk antler were circled together as if an embrace, stripped of any flesh or meat at the base, dried out from endless days in the Western sun. More smaller bones were interwoven with mats of reeds and thorny stems, the gaps pasted shut with a thick, black sludge decorated with a carpet of ebony petals. I’d seen markers like this in searches before, had seen them appearing more and more in the landscape around the house, and knew why the sheriff did his best not to mention them in his reports. They were all like this, odd, eerie things that appeared from nowhere, but they were all on the ground and, save for five pillars built around the house itself, were no bigger than knee-high. We still didn’t know what they meant, or who left them, but we knew it had started around the first vanishing. This one was hanging as if left for us as a gift, and the smell that emanated from it nearly knocked the air out of me, a pungent mixture of wet dirt, wood rot, decayed flesh . . . and roses.

Always roses.

Even then, it was what lay in the middle of the macabre basket that drew me forward, until my hand reached out almost without my beckoning to scoop the tiny item from its place.

With a cracked glass screen and sun-faded purple case, the cellphone looked as though it had lain on the mountain for months, but no sooner was it in my hands and the tormented display lit up.

As soon as my eyes registered the face on the lock screen, I swore under my breath, Clyde doing the same, and rivers of ice flooded my veins.

Cindy Fadro stared back from the phone, smiling in the stillness of the background picture, with pretty features, blonde hair, and sky-blue eyes. We’d never found her phone the night she disappeared, only her friend Erin’s. After so long without a charge, exposed to the elements including Idaho’s vicious winter snows, it shouldn’t have been working. The only way this device could still be functional was if someone had kept it.

Or taken it.

Bzzzz.

The phone vibrated in my hand once, and an icon slid up before my eyes.

New message available.

Heart pounding, I dared to tap the screen, and found no entry code blocking me, the device opening up for us to access Cindy’s message files without complaint. They were old, most of them several months old, missed calls and texts from dozens of people who wanted her to be alive, to be okay, to come home.

According to the phone, she’d never viewed any of them.

One new message glowed at the top of the roster, and as I clicked on it, I tasted metal on the back of my tongue, my ears ringing with a shudder of unease. It was a picture, grainy and blurred by motion as if whoever had taken it was moving while doing so, but the subject was clear enough to make out.

It was us, Clyde and myself, walking through the woods on our way to the boulder field. Our backs were to the camera, leaves from a blackberry bush half-obscuring the unknown watcher, and under the picture, a single line of text appeared while my friend and I blinked at one another in horrified realization.

Hello there.

There once was a town where the small Whos would play, with a winter sun over them, day after day. No Who ever guessed, not the great nor the small, that a snowflake beneath them supported them all.

It settled on ice, all silver and wide, where a deep frozen lake let it peacefully ride. The snowflake sat still through the cold and the snow, so the Whos never wondered what rested below.

The Grinch watched the skies while the Whos sang their song. "I don't like that sun. It's been up there too long.” But the Whos all kept singing and laughed in delight. "The days are long now. It's so merry and bright!"

Then one morn a pond had filled up the square. “A new thing,” they thought, “has just appeared there!” Where their town tree had stood, it shimmered so blue. "It looks like it's waiting for all of us Whos!"

They splashed in the water from morning til night. They floated on flotzels and squealed with delight. They turned themselves bronze as they tanned in the sand, While the Grinch, feeling dread, asked “What is at hand?”

The pond then grew bigger, then bigger some more. It swallowed the parks and the squigmallow store! "It means," laughed the Whos, "there is more room to swim!" The Grinch tried to warn them, "This whole thing is grim."

The water kept climbing. It wouldn't stand still. It wandered through Whoville with watery will. It filled up Who-houses and swept through Who-gutters. Red fish and blue fish swam right past Who-shutters.

The Grinch cried, "Climb quickly! There's no time to waste!" So every last Who climbed Mount Crumpit with haste. They climbed and they climbed to the tippity-top. At the water below, they shouted “Please stop!”

The sun glowed more golden with every new hour, as ice became water beneath all its power. The Grinch and the Whos raised their voices on high. "Can somebody help us? Oh, please tell us why?"

Then Cindy Lou Who, who had newly turned three, said, “Mr. Grinch, please. What will happen to me?” He choked back a sob, held her up to the sky, and prayed that the child would grow wings and fly.

Their shouting flew upward. It drifted away. No ear ever heard it. And on that same day

The mountain slipped under. The singing was through. The tip of Mount Crumpit sunk just below view.

Then children came laughing where spring flowers grow. They tossed little pebbles where melted drifts flow. “Let's play!” said the Cat. “It's a lovely spring day!” Not knowing the Whos had all floated away.

Genre: Deep Sea/Psychological Horror

Length: Short Story

The Problem at Echo Station

His earpiece clicked.

"Martin, you read me?" Talbot's voice crinkled over the comm, breaking the hum of the ventilation fans above.

"Go ahead."

"Most systems are down except the oxygen. Good news is I think it's just a matter of resetting some fuses. There must have been a huge power spike down here that blew everything except the emergency generators. The control monitor's on backup, but I can't access much without credentials. Going to be a pain unless we find an access card. You'd think they'd have given us an admin card. What on earth were they doing down here?"

"Must be a 'need to know' kind of thing," Martin replied. "Let's make this quick. Gabby, how's our ride up?"

A click filled the earpiece with a grunt. "Well, we got here in one piece. We'll be fine on the way up as long as we don't go any deeper."

"So a tour of the trench is a no go?" Martin asked.

"Unless you want to be in a crushed can, I'd advise against it," Gabby said. "There are a few things I want to check with the sub to be sure. The station's surprisingly well stocked, they even have my favorite pistachio bars of all things. I'll freshen us up and we'll be good to go. Kind of need power though to take a better look."

"Didn't take you for a foodie, Gabby." Talbot snorted. "But yes, power, I get it. I'm trying over here."

Martin pulled a dry square of ramen noodles from his jacket pocket and snapped off a corner, crunching into it raw. "Why'd I even pack this?" he said to himself, letting out a sigh.

"As usual, I don't care about your opinion, Talbot, I just want you to flip the 'ON' switch," Gabby shot back.

"Alright, alright, calm down you two, just keep us updated," Martin said. He paused, looking down the corridor. "Think they'd have an access card in the barracks?"

"Probably a good place to look," Talbot said. "Then we're going to have to check the Mess Hall somehow. Need to find a way past the lockdown to find out what happened. Given the lack of survivors, I'm guessing it might be ugly."

"Walking into this blind gives me the creeps," Gabby said. "Is it weird that I'd be less anxious in space than a base almost three miles deep into the ocean? I can just feel the weight of the water on us."

"Not at all, at least you have light in space," Martin said, and then scoffed. "I'm looking through some of the data and it's just a mess. There's scribblings and writings in the margins of all these logs. I can't tell if they are even from the same person." He dropped his pencil, took his glasses off, and rubbed his eyes with a long exhale.

Martin shuffled the binders and stood. An ache in his lower back made him stretch. "Better get moving," he muttered.

The base left little to the imagination. Claustrophobia was the interior design; sterile was the decorative choice. From the Medbay, a simple hallway ran pipes and cords along the ceiling. Nothing was hidden.

"Alright, Barracks," Martin mumbled. "Let's see."

The bulkhead door was cracked. Martin moved it easily. Flipping the switch granted limited visibility, but it was enough to see lockers, desks, and bunks. Everything had its place. He rummaged for access cards. Lockers were unlocked, showing typical wear, but lacked personal belongings. They all held the same items: lab coats and toiletries. Clack, clack, clack, one after the other. Except the last one, which was padlocked.

Martin looked for a key or something to jar it open. As he sifted through the desk drawers, a noise crept into the room.

He paused, the hairs rising on his arms. The squeak of the door was constant, as if a gust of wind were blowing it shut. Turning, Martin watched the steel door pivot. It ran out of momentum inches from the frame, leaving a vertical line of pale light from the hallway.

"Talbot, Gabby," Martin whispered, clicking his comms. "Please say one of you is by the barracks."

No answer. Static invaded the channel—a constant weight of white noise, as if someone held the button down. It grew so loud he tore the headpiece off and stepped back from the door to gather his bearings. Soft metal clanks of his boots and the hum of the vent fans were all that remained.

Through the crack, a shadow walked past. Martin froze. Another shadow walked the other way, shifting in the corridor. Then a giggle echoed down the hallway—the sound of a child playing.

Pat, pat, pat.

Bare feet clapped against water on the ground, running laps down the hallway, both near and far from the door. Martin stood dumbfounded. He reached out, his hand trembling as his fingers wrapped around the cold metal of the door latch. He needed to seal the gap.

He shifted his weight, easing the door forward an inch.

The pattering stopped.

The giggling cut off mid-breath, and for a moment the hallway held nothing at all—no footsteps, no fans, not even the hum of the lights. Martin's hand hovered on the latch.

Then the feet came back, fast, closing the distance in a sprint. Before he could brace, something struck the door in a wet splatter that he felt through the metal against his palm—small, wet, and close, like a body hitting it at full speed and stopping dead an inch from his face.

Martin didn't move. Didn't breathe. Whatever was on the other side of that door wasn't running anymore. It was standing there, waiting the same way he was.

He leaned in, his ear pressed to the seam.

A wet, shifting sound pressed against the metal opposite his face. Then came a whisper through the crack—a child's voice, thick and bubbling, like it was speaking through a mouthful of water it couldn't quite swallow.

"I've... made a mess. Shhh—shhh—sorry."

A pause, wet and small.

"They're all sh-sleeping now. No one wants-sh to play with me."

A thin trickle of water seeped under the door and touched the toe of Martin's boot.

He didn't answer. He stayed pressed to the door, listening, not trusting himself to move.

The whisper thinned into something smaller, almost a hum, the words dissolving back into the wet sound of breathing through water.

The door began to shake, and a low rumble rolled across the station. Before Martin could react, the door burst open and sent him reeling. A wall of freezing seawater surged through the opening. The force hit him square in the chest, ripping the air from his lungs and flinging him backward.

Hitting the floor hard, the phantom tide swallowed him. Salt water filled his mouth, and he gagged, spitting it out, coughing. He squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the weight of the ocean to cave his skull in.

One second. Two seconds.

The pressure never came.

Martin opened his eyes with a gasp. The room was bone-dry. The fluorescent lights hummed above with their sterile flicker, undisturbed. He sat on the floor, his clothes dry, though his skin felt impossibly cold. He spat at the floor, but there was nothing. The brine was gone.

"Come—come on, Martin," he muttered, the words catching on their way out. "You're an M.D. What the hell was that? Hypoxia?"

He pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw bursts of light, forcing his brain to reset, then crawled forward, scooped up his headset, and slipped it over his ear. His hand shook as he hit the toggle.

"Talbot? Gabby? Report. Are you two alright? Did you feel a pressure spike? Gabby, is the sub secure?"

The line clicked open.

"Easy there, Doc," Talbot said, sounding unbothered. "Everything's green. Monitor's still just asking for credentials. You OK? Find anything weird in the barracks?"

"I'm fine," Gabby chimed in, her breathing steady. "Just trying to balance this ballast. What's going on, Martin? You sound like you just ran a marathon."

Martin swallowed hard, looking at the dry, undisturbed barracks. "Nothing. Just the air. It's heavy. I heard some metal moaning and got the shakes."

"Well, even though we're researching an accident, I can promise you it's from the inside. The outside is an engineering marvel," Talbot said. "Just find an access card for us so we can get out of here."

"Working on it," Martin whispered.

He forced his legs to find purchase on the smooth metal deck. Grunting against the same stubborn ache in his lower back, he reached upward, his fingers wrapping around the brass padlock of the final locker to haul his weight up.

He pulled.

With a sharp snick, the padlock was free. Martin stared at it.

Had it been unlatched this entire time?

He placed the lock back on the handle and yanked the locker open.

Inside, there were stacks of access cards. Confused, he grabbed the top one, which bore the Olokun Company logo along with a name: Dr. Aris Vang.

Martin stared at the photo as his other hand shut the locker and set the lock back in place. She wasn't on the manifest. There were only supposed to be eight.

He thumbed his comms button. "Talbot? Gabby?"

"What's up, doc?" Talbot said, trying to stifle a chuckle.

"I found a keycard," Martin said, his eyes tracing the plastic. "Dr. Aris Vang. Does that name mean anything? Was there a ninth crew member down here?"

"Beats me," Gabby said. "Sounds sketchy. At the same time, this place doesn't exist, so probably not out of the question there's an unknown crew member down here."

Martin sat for a moment with the card in his palm before slipping it into his chest pocket. His hands had stopped shaking, at least. Outside the barracks, the hallway waited the way it always did—quiet, white, indifferent to whatever had or hadn't just happened to him. He stepped into it, let the door swing shut behind him without looking back, and kept his eyes forward as he made his way toward the heart of the facility, listening to nothing but his own boots and the low hum of the air recyclers.

He rounded the corner into the central control station—a wide, circular hub of dark server racks and curved monitors. In the center sat the primary console, its screen pulsing with an amber prompt: CRITICAL LOCKDOWN: INSERT CREDENTIALS.

The room was empty.

Martin walked straight to the terminal, pulling the lanyard from his pocket. "Talbot, I'm at the main console," he said, tapping his earpiece. "Got the card."

A click echoed. "Perfect timing, Doc," Talbot responded, backed by the metallic rattle of a socket wrench. "I'm behind the server bank, in the crawlspace. Some cabling got knocked loose in the lockdown—trying to get it back together. Give me two seconds."

"...damn bolt is stripped..." Martin could hear the muffled curse through his earpiece.

"Take your time," Martin said, leaning an elbow on the console.

"Really need to lose a few when we get back, this is ridiculous." Talbot grunted, followed by an unintentional bang. "Alright. That should do it. I've bypassed the local lock. Slide that card into the terminal."

The terminal accepted Vang's key with a crisp chime, and vibrations began rattling through the deck plates.

The amber lighting was replaced by brilliant, sterile white. Fans roared in the server racks. Text raced down the monitor as systems came back online—directories, timestamps, a wall of restored files. Martin's eyes snagged on a couple as they rolled past:

ECHO STATION SYS v2.14
THE OLOKUN COMPANY — ALL MATERIAL CONFIDENTIAL

INITIALIZING.................................OK
MEMORY CHECK.........................OK
POWER GRID...............................ONLINE
LIFE SUPPORT.............................ONLINE
O2 SCRUBBERS..........................ONLINE
COMMS RELAY.............................OFFLINE
HULL INTEGRITY.........................STABLE
FIRE SUPPRESSION...................ONLINE
=>MESS HALL ACTIVATION ON........07/13/2028 @ 13:41:28
OPERATIONAL FEEDBACK........STANDBY

WELCOME BACK, ARIS VANG.

He frowned, reaching for the keyboard to scroll back to it, but before his finger found the key, the screen flickered and reorganized itself, resolving into a palm tree beach desktop background and a scatter of icons. Something else caught his attention.

The forward wall was a massive viewport of reinforced acrylic. As the power grid stabilized, floodlights erupted outside the hull, cutting through the black at twenty thousand feet. Martin rose from the office chair he found himself in, awestruck. The lights illuminated a vast white desert of abyssal silt stretching toward the drop-off of a deep-water trench.

Martin pressed his hands against the acrylic as his breath fogged the glass. Nothing stirred, and it seemed as if he was on another planet.

Except for one thing.

About forty feet out, hovering at the edge of the light, a single small fish held perfectly still, like a needle floating in oil. It drifted closer. Martin could almost see through it, down to the tiny organs. It stared directly at him, and Martin squinted to try and get a better look. The fish broke from its trance and darted forward, gathering enough speed to become a blur, and collided squarely with the glass at Martin's face level. He pulled back in reflex and confusion.

The fish floated listlessly into the dark, dead from the impact. A small imprint of pale scales remained on the acrylic. Is this something they were studying down here?

THUD. THUD.

More fish came into view and drove themselves into the station. The darkness beyond the lights began to move—dozens of pale, blind ribbonfish and fangtooths racing toward the station, hitting the glass in a frantic barrage. Plumes of blood erupted into the water, and the shock sent the rest of the deep-sea life into a frenzy. Out of the trench, massive shapes ascended—eels, ancient sharks, things Martin had no name for—throwing themselves against the glass, jaws snapping. Loose eyes drifted free of ruptured sockets in the churn, and somehow every one of them still seemed to find him.

The viewport became a wall of white bellies and gills. The acrylic groaned. Spiderweb cracks bloomed across the center—right where the scale imprint had been.

The glass was giving way.

Martin stumbled backward, lost his footing, and fell hard onto the deck. He let out a ragged yell, staring up at the cracking, bleeding window. The sound of rushing water was surely to follow, his body vaporized in the next instant by the rapid loss of pressure.

The sound of rushing water never came.

Slowly, he dragged his eyes back up.

The window was clear. The floodlights lit the same empty white desert. No sharks. No eels. No blood. The acrylic was smooth and intact.

Except for that one thing.

Right at eye level, marring the clean glass, was a small smudge—a faint, grease-slick circle, patterned with the imprint of fish scales.

Martin stepped closer and pressed his finger against it. The acrylic was thick and cold, vibrating faintly with the hum of the revived grid.

"Doc? Doc, you read me? Why were you yelling?" Talbot's voice burst through his earpiece. "What's going on out there?"

Martin pulled his finger back, leaving a clean print beside the scales. "I'm here," he said, his voice flat. "I'm—I'm alright, I just lost my footing. The terminal's unlocked."

"Thank god," Talbot let out a breath. "Man, your scream echoed through the vents. You sure you're good?"

Martin looked at the oily smudge. "Yeah. Must've been—" He trailed off, turning toward the console at the sound of a few faint beeps.

The desktop sat undisturbed until he sat down. It flipped and switched into a DOS black screen. Amber lights turned back on, as if there'd been another power failure.

Behind the wall, the clink of Talbot's wrench stopped. "Whoa, Doc, what just happened? The power loop on my end just went cold. Did you hit the master switch? Swear it wasn't me."

Martin didn't answer. His eyes were glued to the dark monitor.

A single name typed itself across the glass in a toxic green.

MARTIN.

The cursor dropped a line and began to repeat it, over and over, the name filling the screen.

MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN

With an unsteady hand, Martin's fingers found the keyboard.

HOW DO YOU KNOW ME? He hit enter.

The scrolling froze. The screen reset, save for a pulsing green underscore.

Then the cursor fired again, slow and deliberate.

EVERYONE DOWN HERE KNOWS YOU, MARTIN.

A line drop.

BECAUSE YOU MADE A MESS.

Another line drop.

YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN.

Martin stared, an unreadable mix of confusion and dread locking his jaw.

Gabby's voice buzzed in his earpiece. "Martin? I'm seeing a power draw and a lot of flickering lights over here. What are you doing in there?"

YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN. YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN. YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN. YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN. YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN. YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN.

He couldn't bring himself to speak while the screen just repeated over and over.

Then the cursor cut out, and the screen flipped into security camera footage. It seemed to be mounted high in a corner, looking down at the crew.

There was a long table inside a metal room. People sat together, talking and passing rations. A fire alarm blared briefly in the background—a short, unremarkable beeeep-beeeep—then cut out.

Someone groaned. "Oh, come on. How hard is it to just watch a pot of noodles?"

Laughter rippled down the table.

"At least it was just the detector," Vang said, not looking up from a tablet in her hands. "Let it cool off and take a look at this." She turned the tablet toward the table. "New readings from the trench. See? It's clearly a pattern."

A man across from her squinted at the screen, humor still lingering in his voice. "Whale calls bouncing off the seafloor isn't an Old God from the deep, Aris."

"I didn't say Old God," Vang said, an edge creeping under the joke now. "A pattern. It's rhythmic and has structure. It's getting louder by a few fractions of a decibel every night."

Someone else at the table waved a hand. "You've been staring at spectrograms too long. Maybe you need to go get checked out for hypoxia."

The table laughed again, easier this time, the sound rolling on under the hum of the vents until—

The video cut.

The screen snapped to black. Martin stood frozen in the amber light, his heart hammering, waiting for the black screen to show some kind of life.

Numbly, he tapped the glass.

The screen lit up with a figure's face directly in front of the camera, coughing and screaming.

"LET US OUT!"

The force of it hit him like a train. He flew backward, his heels catching the deck plating, his body slamming to the floor.

The angle shifted to the wider room, and they were all coughing and gagging, smoke everywhere, making the people barely visible. Fire suppression systems were filling the room, driving out every breath of oxygen. One staggered past the frame, coughing into the sleeve of a lab coat. A clear plastic badge on the breast pocket read: VANG.

The video cut to black again, and the cursor returned.

Martin lay on the floor, his ears ringing, his chest heaving. Slowly he dragged himself up.

"There, that should do it," Talbot's voice came through his earpiece.

The lights slammed back to sterile white. The fans wound back up to their normal, quiet rhythm—an insult to his fractured brain.

Martin let out the longest breath of his life. It didn't last.

A flashing alert replaced the menu. The lights dropped into crimson as an alarm began to blare.

"Whoa! What did you do down there, Doc?" Talbot's voice shrieked, backed by the clatter of tools sliding across the floor. "The whole power loop just went critical!"

A panicked transmission cut over his line.

"Martin! Talbot! I need help in the Moon Bay!" Gabby's voice, distorted under a second alarm. "The station just triggered an automated launch! The clamps are cycling and I can't override the hatch from here!"

"Gabby, sit tight," Martin said, slapping his palm on the console desk. He grabbed the keycard out of the reader. "Talbot, get out of the vent and stay at the console!"

He turned and bolted from the hub, taking the western corridor, then north, toward the upper deck. Red LEDs pulsed against the walls in rapid flashes. His boots hit the deck hard, his breath short, as he sprinted past the empty frames of the barracks.

He rounded the final corner and slammed his palms against the door of the Moon Bay observation suite.

The room was a sealed pocket behind thick glass, looking into a hangar. In the center sat the pool—a dark cut of open ocean water. Suspended over it by heavy clamps and straps was their sub.

Martin's eyes locked onto the local control panel. A timer counted down in red: 00:14... 00:13...

"Martin, do you read me?!" Gabby's voice screamed into his headset, the sound of her scrambling against her own board bleeding through the line. "I'm trying to dump the ballast to hold it down and it's not responding! It's going to drop!"

"I'm at the keys, Gabby! Hold on!"

Martin threw himself at the terminal, fingers mashing the keys.

00:04... 00:03...

He palmed the execution button.

The numbers froze at 00:02. A groan resonated through the mounts below as the sequence reset. The alarms died, leaving only the low hum of the fans again.

Martin leaned against the console, letting out a ragged breath. "Gabby. I got it. It's holding."

There was no answer.

Martin frowned, stepping closer to the viewport window. In the room, the dark pool began to churn. A low, rhythmic sloshing echoed through the frame.

Then the water erupted.

A dark tentacle sprang out, slamming against the sub's hull with a thud that vibrated through the glass. More arms breached the surface, wrapping around the hull.

The lights in the Moon Bay began to flash and stutter, plunging the room into a strobing dark.

Through his headset, Gabby began to scream—a raw, piercing sound cut under by the shriek of metal tearing from metal. The tentacles ripped the sub off its mounts and dragged it down into the water.

The room went black.

Martin stood paralyzed, the echo of the splash ringing in his ears.

Bam.

The lights snapped back on.

Right on the other side of the glass, inches from his face, Gabby was floating. Her face was a bloated husk, her eyes wide and colorless. She slammed her palms against the window, choking on brine as she screamed, "MARTIN! LET ME OUT! PLEASE HELP ME." Black water sprayed against the glass from her mouth as she pounded a hand against the pane one last time.

The power cut instantly. The room went black again.

Two seconds passed.

The lights flickered back on.

The glass was clear. Gabby was gone. The only thing left on the acrylic was some droplets of water.

Martin staggered backward, his breath catching, then forced himself back to the window to look at the pool. Ripples lapped against the concrete. But the clamps were intact. No torn metal. No shattered steel. Everything in place.

The sub was gone.

His hands shook as he pressed his headset toggle. "Gabby? Gabby, answer me!"

Static. Then her feed cut in, faint and buried under white noise. "...tin... it's... dark... falling... Mar..." Her voice drifted further away until it dissolved into a flat hiss.

"Martin! Do you read me?!" Talbot's voice, heavy with panic. "Power grid just went haywire and I lost Gabby's audio. What's happening?"

Martin collapsed against the console, his voice cracking. "We lost her, Talbot. We—we lost Gabby. Something dragged the sub down. It's gone."

A long, stunned silence. "What do you mean something dragged it down?" Talbot asked, his voice tightening. "Doc, breathe. Leave the Moon Bay. Come back to Control. We need to regroup." The comms stayed silent as Martin placed his hands over his face.

"Martin, do you hear me?"

As Martin tried to regain his footing, he stumbled toward the pool and stared at the dark water below, then at his own reflection in the glass above it—pale, hollowed out, a man he barely recognized.

The reflection didn't move when he did.

He blinked. It caught up a half-second late, his mirrored hand still rising to his headset after his real one had already dropped away from it. He stared at himself, waiting for the image to settle, to match him again. Instead of regaining the reflection, something emerged from the water.

It was himself, except it was wrong.

The other Martin's head rose just above the surface, his mouth never reaching the air of the station. It just stared at him. Stern and emotionless. Just as fast as it appeared, the figure descended into the black abyss. A couple of air bubbles were the only proof his reflection had become flesh.

Martin grabbed his head and shook it violently. "WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?!" The scream tore out of him in complete surrender to his own madness. He swept a handful of materials off the desk nearby and hurled them against the wall, where they landed in a pile of debris among the rest of the office clutter.

As the last manila folder landed, Martin went back to the pool.

The water sat glassy and still while his madness lingered a little too long.

"Rapid pressure shifts.” He chuckled, short and wrong. “Drowning would be the last problem, wouldn’t it?”

He took a step closer to the edge, his boots silent on the wet deck.

"Every soft thing you're made of gets pushed into something else. That's it, that's the whole science of it — and there's no scream, there's no time for it, there's just—" He stopped, swallowing hard, his eyes fixed on his own faint reflection in the black water. "It's just quiet.”

He crouched at the edge, his fingers grazing the surface. It didn't even ripple.

"It would be so quiet," he whispered, and for a moment his voice wasn't afraid of that idea. "Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be—"

"Martin."

The voice cracked through his earpiece like a slap, and he flinched backward from the water as if it had reached for him first.

"Martin, are you there? Talk to me." Talbot's voice was tight with fear, but stern. "Get back to Control. There's nothing good over there for you now."

Martin blinked, and the glassy water was only water again.

Before he could answer Talbot, a click echoed in his earpiece—quieter than the others. The ambient sound of Talbot's breathing cut out, replaced by a private channel.

The voice wheezed, then coughed. It came in short pulls of breath, like someone speaking through a throat that hadn't fully cleared. "Really? That's how this was all going to end?"

Martin's mind scrambled backward through the static, trying to place the cadence. The grainy footage from the cafeteria flashed behind his eyes. The woman with the tablet. The name on the floating badge.

Aris Vang.

"Vang," Martin whispered, his voice trembling. "You're still alive down here?"

"You know—" a pause and a short catch of breath, "—where you need to go, Martin." Her voice carried a faint hiss on every consonant, like air escaping something not quite sealed.

Martin looked around as he considered what the voice said. "What's going to be in there?"

The comms clicked with a long pause. "A mess, Martin. Why else are you down here?"

He thought to himself for a moment, then walked through the threshold out of the Moon Bay and into the hall. He did not turn toward Control.

"How are you doing this?" Martin asked, his boots making a dull, hollow thud on the deck. "I saw the footage, Vang. How are you alive?"

"Alive is a—" another catch, longer this time, like she was gathering enough air to finish "—flexible word, at twenty thousand feet, Doctor." Her voice sounded close, as if she were a few steps behind him in the dark. "You worry too much about the how. You should worry about the what."

The lights near the Mess Hall were failing, throwing long shadows across the walls. The air grew colder, smelling of rust and standing water.

"You locked them in, including yourself," Martin said, hardening. "The logs showed the isolation doors were manually overridden. Did you gas the Mess Hall and kill the crew because of whatever's down in that trench? Why did you do it?"

Her breath rattled faintly into either a scoff or a chuckle.

"So you start talking to a dead person and that's what you ask?" She sighed into a short cough. "Go to the Mess Hall. You need to know wha—"

A burst of static cut her off.

"Martin!" Talbot's voice broke through, yelling now. "Where are you?! Just tell me where you are. I'll come, just stay put. Don't move."

Martin didn't answer. He didn't stop walking, either—something had a hold of him now, a steady pressure at the center of his chest, pulling him forward and down all at once. The corridor thinned at the edges of his vision. The overhead lights started faltering down the hallway, one by one, not going dark so much as going absent.

Then the floor wasn't there.

He was falling, and he wasn't. No wind, no impact—only that same steady pressure, drawing him down through the station and past it, through decks and pipe runs that thinned to outline and then to nothing, until there was no station left around him. Just endless water.

Just the trench.

His body drifted over the gaping mouth of it, the limitless dark of the abyss stretching below. He shouldn't have been able to see anything down there at all, and yet the shape of it kept unfolding beneath him anyway, level after level, as if the dark had its own way of being seen. He stared in awe, his eyes stinging, the black of it filling his vision until there was nothing else to look at. This had been here the whole time, mere feet below the station. It was ageless. It had been here long before him, and it would go on long after he was gone.

Martin didn't feel fear, though, floating over the crevasse. He felt something worse. If a deep-sea monster had reached up and dragged him down, at least he would have felt like something knew he existed—like something had considered him, even as food, even for a moment. To matter, in some small way. But there was no monster down there to fear. Only something vast enough not to notice him at all, and that, somehow, was its own kind of monster.

It didn't reach for him. It didn't need to. Martin understood. It hadn't noticed him at all—from wherever it was, he felt like a small, warm, breathing accident, suspended for one instant in a place that had no reason to know of his existence.

That was the part that broke something loose in his chest. Not fear of being eaten. Fear of being nothing.

He tried to scream and made no sound. The pressure kept drawing him down, and somewhere very far above him, a voice found its way through the black.

"Martin."

It came from everywhere and nowhere.

"Come back to the room, Martin. You need to see what's inside it."

The pressure reversed, hauling him back the other way, fast, the trench and the dark and the ripple of silt wrenched away from him all at once.

Martin came back to himself on his knees in the corridor, both palms flat against the cold deck, his chest heaving in short, useless pulls of air. His arms shook too hard to hold his own weight. For a long moment he stayed there, folded over the floor, waiting for his body to remember it belonged to him.

Slowly, he pushed himself upright. Ahead of him, unchanged, sat the door to the Mess Hall.

He put the card into the access slot, and the door turned from the crimson red of lockdown to a sudden green.

The door swung outward on its own weight, and the smell hit him before anything else—not rot, not blood, just a slight acidic sting in the nostrils.

The Mess Hall was dark except for the glow of a single overhead panel, flickering weakly over the long steel table. Trays were still out. Someone's fork sat balanced across a cup, like the meal had just been paused.

Some of them were still in their chairs—heads down, hands loose in their laps, a few slumped sideways against each other, the way people sit when they've heard the same alarm too many times. But two chairs were pushed back and empty. A woman lay collapsed near the door, one hand still flat against the release panel—the lack of a keycard had made her attempts futile. Another body lay inside the vent housing itself, as if he'd climbed in to rip out wires and kill the fire suppression by hand.

At the end of the counter, a thin black streak ran up the wall above a stovetop, and a pot sat cold on the burner, its bottom scorched through, a dried brick of noodles fused to the metal beneath a crust of boiled-over water.

Martin walked the length of the table, past faces slumped over and turned away, past a woman slumped forward with a half-eaten pale green nutrition bar still in her open hand.

Pistachios.

"Where's Vang," he murmured, scanning the slumped shapes around the table. His eyes settled instead on the suppression nozzle above the table, black and spent.

He reached up and touched it. Cold.

"There wasn't even a fire," he said softly, to no one, to all of them.

His earpiece clicked.

"Doc." Talbot's voice, careful now. "You in there?"

"I'm here," Martin said. "They're all here, Talbot. Everyone. I found them."

A pause, longer than it should have been. Then, quieter than before: "Everyone who, Martin?"

Martin opened his mouth and found he didn't have an answer ready. He pressed the back of his wrist against his eyes, quick, almost absent. His hand came away wet. He wiped it on his pant leg and didn't look again.

"I don't—" His voice shook. "I don't know, Talbot."

"That's alright, bud," Talbot said. "Come on back to Control. We'll figure it out together."

"I—I will, in a minute," Martin said. "Need to do something first."

He stepped over the slumped body, and as he left the room, he felt compelled to close the door behind him. That compartment, that mess, could stay where it was for now.

Martin walked back to the Moon Bay, to the inky black pool lying motionless. He took the keycard from his pocket and looked at Dr. Vang's picture.

"I—I'm—" Martin stuttered, and held back. He dropped the card into the water. Watching Vang's picture fade quickly into the dark, he wiped his face dry.

As the card fell to the bottom of the abyssal silt, it found its new home amongst several other key cards, and several other pictures of Dr. Aris Vang.

Somewhere in the walls, the hum of the grid shifted, dropping half a register, like a held breath finally let go. The lights along the corridor dimmed a shade duller, settling back toward standby.

Martin didn't notice. He never did.

He walked past the Barracks, toward the Medbay, and found his binders exactly where he'd left them, open on the counter. He flipped back a page, running a finger down the manifest, his own handwriting crowding the margins. He brushed away a few noodle crumbs and reexamined who was on the ship's logs.

His earpiece clicked.

"Martin, you read me?" Talbot's voice crinkled over the earpiece.

"Go ahead."

A lonesome night. A theater. An audience of only forty or so had shown up for a showing that was yet to be known. They murmured amongst one another in their finest fabrics, standing tall and sophisticated. Our fellow, minding his own, stood in the corner. He wore a plain black suit, white dress shirt, and a black tie. There was a time and place when he would’ve spent an hour or more getting himself ready, pressing his pants and dress shirt, steaming his jacket, and even trimming his beard. Nowadays, he’d be lucky if he could convince himself to take more than the average five minutes it took him to put this everyday ensemble together.

After seeing and critiquing what had to be thousands of productions at that point, it was just another show on an ordinary night. It was a different show with a different cast playing the same characters he had seen over and over again. It would end up being another critique in the newspaper the following morning, having to give a polite but harshly accurate professional opinion about the night’s performance.

But something about this particular night had a different feeling to it. The tension. The tightness. But also…Uncertainty…Nervousness…an unsettling vibration hung in the air of that lobby where he and the other forty-some attendees idled while waiting for the doors to open. Our critic removed the playbill from the inside jacket pocket, remembering the odd fellow outside in the ticket box.

It was an elderly man, with wrinkles beyond imagination and an extremely slouched posture, almost akin to a hunchback, a man who had bid farewell to his young years many decades ago and hadn’t dared to look back. The ticket box man never spoke a word during their short interaction, only looked at him with blank knowing eyes upon his tall wooden stool and used his fingers to show ticket prices when asked. When he received the ticket stub, he was handed a playbill along with it.

The playbill was another mystery. It was only a single page folded in half like a booklet. On the front, only the words “PLAYBILL”, and in the center where the title would traditionally be, was “A Play on A Stage”. He flipped to the center of the one-page booklet only to find five lines of text, two on the left side and three on the right. In order they listed, A Man, A Woman, A Boy, A Girl, and the strangest line of all, An Audience.

Our critic started to wonder what this whole thing was. From the outside and the lobby, he couldn’t help but find the structure absolutely gorgeous, a marvel of what he assumed was Victorian architecture. He couldn’t wait to see the theater itself, especially since he was about to get a box seat. What a view he hoped it would be. He then wondered if this was possibly an Experimental Theatre experience. He’d heard of it before when he was a young lad, finishing his master’s degree at university. Avant-garde it was called. But he learned that when speaking to the general public of unusual and niche things in theatre, to just use layman’s terms.

He thought about the lack of information and advertising, was it part of the experience? It certainly made a person think, explore the possibilities of what could be. He hadn’t experienced many examples of this type of theatre, but for that night, he could get behind it. It wasn’t the same old thing he had always seen, and for that, he was ever thankful.

He placed the playbill back inside his jacket and glanced again around the room. The walls were filled with framed paintings of all different shapes and sizes, he found it quite hard at times to stop and look at just one. There were depictions of ancient battles covering all eras of time, of angels and demons, portraits of men, women, children, and everything in between with every range of emotion. One could spend an entire night alone looking at all of them, just like a trip to an art gallery.

Along the corners and edges were slates of carved, silver trim going well with the off-white color base of the walls behind the paintings. Other than that, there were two simple but large chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and a single set of oaken double doors that stood on the opposite side of the lobby from the outside entrance.

The lights then blinked in slow intervals. The set of double doors opened quietly, and the small crowd started to filter in through the doors. It was dark once inside the doors, a small hallway between the lobby and theater. A woman stood off to the side wearing an ushers uniform holding a jet-black box with a slot in the center of the lid that people were dropping their ticket stubs into. Yet another thing that struck him as peculiar, but he assumed that it could be a part of the show and didn’t think beyond it. He dropped his stub in the box and asked how to get to the box seats, explaining that he hadn’t seen a sign anywhere. The woman simply pointed to her left, and then to her right, all without looking, then stared back ahead and continued to smile at the other passing guests as she had before.

Sure enough, there were dim, candlelit staircases on either side of her, no more than twenty feet away. When climbing the staircase, he couldn’t but feel that something was eerily strange and ominous about it, the candlelight only causing enough light to barely see where the stairs were, the walls were painted black as night and so were the stairs, and each step he took was followed by creaking sounds from beneath him.

Once he reached the top of the steps, he was greeted by a hallway of similar fashion, candles lining each side and black painted walls. But this time the floor lined with carpet of some sort; he couldn’t quite tell. It didn’t seem to be a long walk though, he could see the light at the end of the hallway, no more than one hundred feet he imagined.

When he reached his box seat, he was blown away just as he had hoped to be. He had stepped foot into a grand theater. Despite being in one of only two box seating arrangements it had to offer, he looked out over the hundreds, possibly over a thousand seats, with the few audience members scattered about. He was too far away to count, but he guessed that there were sixty rows, twenty seats to each row. The mezzanine that partly hung over the floor seating had to have at least twenty-five rows, twelve or thirteen seats to each of those. He’d never seen a room that could hold this many people unless one was speaking of stadiums, arenas, or racetracks. This theater was none of these things.

He took a seat and found it to be surprisingly comfortable, not the usual worn-out seat that felt hard as steel that he had become accustomed to over the years. He started to reach for his tin of cigarettes in his jacket when he saw a metal ashtray on a stand get set next to him on the right. It was the usher from the entrance, still smiling…only this time she looked at him, her unblinking stare gave him chills up and down his spine.

There was nothing behind her eyes, nothing whatsoever. It felt as if he was looking at the shell of a human being, a robot only programmed to serve the most basic of tasks. He could’ve sworn those dead eyes could burn pits into his own, and for some reason, he couldn’t turn away. She smoothly turned around and disappeared into the dark hallway behind him. He shook it off after a few seconds and lit his cigarette. Some people just grow up to be weird, he knew that. Hell, he could probably argue that he was one of those people himself, but that woman was outright creepy. He breathed in the smoke and sat back in his seat, hoping it was just a spell of paranoia and nothing more.

He had just finished his smoke when the lights came down to complete darkness. A lone violin started a melancholy tune, ringing, spreading throughout the theater. How tremendously it rang in his ears. A spotlight shot down onto center stage, just where the silver curtain was starting to part, opening up to reveal a barren stage.

A second stringed instrument joined now, following the melody in a lower octave, making him think it was . A woman, dressed in brown pants, a black shirt, and white dancers shoes glided her way to the spotlight. She was tall, slender, and graceful with every move she made. The epitome of a ballet dancer. She danced slowly, with intention and passion, letting the music guide her. Then a second spotlight appeared, just off to the right hand side of the stage. A boy no more than ten years of age made his way out. The woman smiled as the boy held out her hand in an invitation to dance. They met in the middle and started a slow heart-warming two-step to the simmering tempo of the music. It felt like a mother and son, which he figured was what they were getting at but still found fitting. Not long after, a little girl anywhere between the ages of eight to eleven ran out to them. Two more stringed instruments joined the mix, a cello and a standing bass.

The trio interacted in beautiful glee, bringing a genuine smile to his face. It reminded him of simpler times, happier times, back when he was a child and had nothing more important to do than figure out how to enjoy the day ahead of him. It felt like a scene you might see from something akin to The Sound of Music.

The music suddenly stopped as one last spotlight appeared, pointing to the back left corner of the stage. Moments passed in utter stillness. No music, no dancing. The actors watched with unbreaking focus. Everyone’s attention was now on the spotlight in that back left corner.

One footstep echoed, then another, then four or five more as a tall, burly man in a plain black suit walked out. The children ran up to him and jumped in his arms. The woman slowly walked in the other direction, an expression of anger stretching across her face. The man put the children down and they ran off stage. The woman stayed distant, brewing in an unfound anger. The man came up behind her and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled back at him unconvincingly. The children came back on stage, skipping and playing, the man went over to them to play with what could be assumed were his children.

The woman put a hand to her mouth and mimicked a motion of calling out to her children and they once again disappeared off stage. The man turned around confused, why had she called for them to leave? She walked up to him, no longer attempting to fake her happiness at his return. She started her slow, solemn dance once again, this time around the man, touching him every now and then with longing but also with hints of reserve. The critic started to question what was happening in the scene now. They had started as a happy family. Mother, son, and daughter. But then the father came home, and the children were overjoyed…but the mother had other opinions. Why? What was it they were missing? Was he putting on a front for his children, just waiting to let the real man show himself? The “husband” started to fall to the floor, first to one knee and then the next. He would’ve fallen flat on his face if he hadn’t caught himself. The woman’s once light touches had turned into what looked like hits, shoves, jabs. The man held on to his left side, breathing quicker and quicker. The music started back up, intense, getting faster, and faster with every second. The instruments were no longer in time with one another, all off on their own erratic journey.

Sweat started to develop across the critic's forehead, his heartbeat quickened. He felt he could hardly keep himself seated. Where was this going? What was this? He glanced around at the rest of the theater and the other patrons were watching the show as if nothing was amiss. The boy child then walked out calmly as the woman stopped and faced the man. The boy held a familiar black box and brought it to the woman. The man was now bleeding, a pool growing larger and larger on the ground on his left side. She propped open the box, tossing the lid to the floor, and removed a single shot pistol from it. The stringed instruments started scraping and scratching, no longer making what the critic considered music, just sounds and noise he felt were made to make a person go mad.

The woman then pulled a slip of paper from the box, and breathed in a deep breath. She gently lifted the man's face to see hers, before he knew what would happen next, she pulled the trigger and removed him from existence, the smoke rising from the end of the barrel as he dropped head first to the ground.

The critic tried to get himself to stand and run. It was insane! This wasn’t a theatre experience, this was an execution, planned and choreographed to the very step. He had to get out of there. But something was wrong. He wanted nothing more than to leave and inform the police but he was frozen in place. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get his legs to move or his arms to lift him out of the chair. He glanced back down at the stage and what he saw terrified him more. The woman and the children were now staring at him. Unwavering. Not a single blink amongst the three of them. He then glanced around the theater, the patrons were staring at him too. He then started to feel drowsy, suddenly exhausted and in need of sleep. He fought hard against his heavy eyelids but knew within five seconds that it was a failing battle. As he drifted into unconsciousness, he saw the dead-eyed face of the usher tilt his head back.

---

When he awoke, the drowsiness was still heavy in his chest and limbs. A bright light was now striking his eyes with the intensity of the sun. He rolled his head over and began to open his eyes. Without a doubt, he was no longer in his box seat. He was laid flat on a hard black surface, his shadow stretching out a few feet beyond him. Without a second thought he attempted to lift himself up. He had to get out of here, wherever “here” was. But only moments after getting himself to his knees he was hoisted up onto his feet and carried. 
His eyes adjusted and unblurred as reality began to take hold. He was still in the theater, but he was on the stage. The spotlight followed him and whomever was carrying him as if he was a doll over to a wooden chair in the center. The critic moved his head around the best he could, trying to come to terms with the situation but two things perplexed him. Where was the man? If he’s on the same stage as the one he was watching, the body should still be there. And even more importantly…where’s the blood? The stage was just as clean as the beginning of the performance, only a few skid marks here and there from the years of use. 
He was lightly set down into the wooden chair now, the blinding light shooting back into his eyes. He could hear the murmurs and whispers out beyond as the strings began to play yet another tune. The woman, boy, and girl started dancing again, this time with the original glee and beauty that they had started with. But the critic was sweating rivers, breathing quickly, trying his damnedest to keep his train of thought to one thing at a time. How long have I been here? He asked himself. It would’ve had to have taken hours to get all of the blood cleaned up. Had he been here for hours already? 

He attempted to shoot forward, to jump off the stage and run through the oaken doors he had come in from, for as fast and long as he possibly could. But he only found himself on the ground again, having smacked his head and right arm in the process. He looked down to see that his torso, wrists, and ankles had been strapped down with leather straps. When did this happen?! He almost screamed. Laughter roared from the audience, creating a cacophony of echoes all at his expense. Nothing was making sense. Why had they chosen him? Why were they doing this? He stopped fidgeting and took a few deep breaths. The music was intensifying and the performers were still dancing behind him. He took a sideways glance out at the crowd, finally being out of the spotlight. All of the seats were filled now. Only forty or fifty seats were taken when the show had begun…but now there wasn’t a single seat left open. His breathing became erratic as quickly as he had slowed it down. He was yanked upright again and dragged slowly back to the center of the stage. The woman, boy, and girl, just like they had with the man before him, started dancing in a circle around him. The music had taken on a new tone. This one wasn’t nearly as fast and crazy. This one was slower. Lower. Each note drawn out in a stretch of notes that brought on the most ominous dread. The creeping motion of the piece had made it hard to breathe, as if some demon had his hands around the critic's throat and was subtly adding more pressure and cutting off just a little more oxygen. Then with a single, bone-cracking whack, all of the wind was knocked out of his chest and he was sent back to the ground. The woman now stood over him, a brutish well-loved club in her right hand. The spotlight had already coasted slightly over from where they were at the center. Slamming backwards had broken the chair significantly. He was able to freely move his limbs again…but he wasn’t able to make himself move. He only had to graze over his chest to tell that multiple ribs had been broken when he was hit. It explained why he could only let out short raspy wheezes. The boy and the girl now joined the woman, with clubs of their own in their hands. The critic looked at them up close for the first time. Despite being on stage with them for only god knows how long, he hadn’t had the chance to truly look at these people. They all seemed…ordinary. Bland normally colored hair, dark eyes, and cold expressionless faces. He couldn’t even fathom how they were able to keep a blank expression when committing such violence. On the other hand, how were they able to keep the same expressions when they were dancing the way they had? All questions he’d never muster. In a flash, the boy had reached back and swung the club at his left ankle, taking it out from under him and snapping it clean in half. In the moment that he was going to scream, the girl had swung and taken out his right ankle too. The agonizing pain only let him release a silent, hoarse scream. One that couldn’t be described, only shown or experienced. He couldn’t just lay there any longer. He had to get out of there…even if he had to crawl and suffer more and more from the performers' abuse until his body was nothing but broken bones and bruised skin. He could faintly see a staircase down to one of the audience aisles out of his peripheral. His crawl was painfully slow in every way conceivable, only having his arms and will power to keep him moving. As he moved inch by inch, the music continued and the performers continued as well, dancing and hopping over him as if he was just a prop on the stage to avoid. After a minute or so, he was within just a few feet of the staircase…that’s when the boy made a long leap and stomped on his left elbow, crushing the bones and joint beneath it. He wretched and heaved with the agony that followed. Then the woman came over to hold his other arm out straight. He did his best to fight her, throwing jabs and half-assed elbows. But she was able to easily grab hold of his wrist and shoulder and shove them flat to the floor. The little girl was only a few feet away waiting patiently. He knew what was coming next and again tried fighting against it. But there was no use, she had him pinned down…and she wasn’t letting him go anywhere unless she wanted him to. Only moments later, did the familiar snap and crack follow, and another fiery round of pain shot through his body. He could do anything but move his head now. He was battered and essentially paralyzed. The audience was excited, anxious, causing the theater to rumble with their reactions. Finally, the critic had started to silently shed tears. He didn’t understand what was happening. He was just doing his job, going to see a show that didn’t have a lot of details about it. Now, he was battered, broken, and most of all…he was most likely going to die for no reason other than the fact that when they pulled that slip of paper from the black box, that his ticket stub must’ve been pulled. It’s the only reason he can think up that would explain why any of this had happened. As he continued to silently cry, letting his tears drip onto the stage and start to mix with own blood that started to seep from the corner of his mouth, he was hoisted up onto his butt. The woman hooked her arms under his armpits and started to drag him towards the center once again. He hardly felt anything at this point, he was going through so much agony that his body must’ve sent him into a state of shock, numbing everything to the point of nothingness. He looked down and saw the grotesque view of his legs, primarily how his broken ankles pointed in every which direction and tossed and turned as he was dragged along. He didn’t even dare to look over at his arms, he could only imagine the catastrophe they both were. The spotlight followed them until it stopped, and he was dropped flat on the floor. He just stared at the ceiling for a second, hoping that any moment he would start to see a light and then he would go after it as quickly as possible. Then he was whacked in the chest again…and again…and again. With every swing, he could feel more bones breaking, more organs being ripped, more blood filling up places they had no business being in. There was a stop to the brutalizing. He hoped this was the end, he didn’t want to hang on. He started to cough up blood, covering himself in his own phlegm and blood. The woman then stood over him, her feet shoulder width apart. The club in her hand was now painted red. With her expressionless face she looked out to the audience. They roared with satisfaction. They were at the finale, the moment they were waiting for. She turned her stare back down to him and raised the club over her head. She held it there for a while, letting a couple of drops of blood and viscera drip onto him and herself. Then she brought down the club and his vision went black.

---

The critic shot up out of bed as he woke. He was sweating puddles into his sheets and his heart going a million beats a minute. What the hell was that? He muttered as he took inventory of his surroundings. He was at home in bed, the alarm clock on his night stand showing it was a quarter past one in the morning. He then remembered the brutality he experienced and scrambled to check his chest and arms. Everything was intact and seemed fine. He ripped the sheets off of his lower half and other than seeing that he had lightly urinated in his pajama bottoms, nothing was broken, let alone shattered and left useless. It was just a dream…thank fucking god it was just a dream. A large sigh of relief shot out of his chest and he laid back down for a minute, just catching his breath. After this lone moment, he had to take on the task of having to shower, change out of his pajamas into clean ones and having to change his sheets. What was even worse was that he knew his cleaning lady would greatly peeved if he didn’t leave a bigger tip for all of it. After all of that, he double-checked that his alarm was still set for nine and then drifted off into a thankfully dreamless sleep.

---

When he woke he ate breakfast, dressed in a simple brown suit and tan dress shirt, and went to his office at the local newspaper. While there, he was editing an article he had written about a horribly acted performance of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” when his boss stepped in and gave him a new assignment. There was a show that one of their scouts had heard rumblings about and he wanted his best guy (the critic) on the job. When the critic asked about any details, his boss said that he didn’t have any. Only an address for the theater it was supposedly being put on at. His boss gave him the slip of paper with the address written on it and then left. Later that night, the critic went to the address. On the taxi ride there, part of him wondered if maybe his nightmare from the night prior meant something. He had heard about premonitions and visions. But after just a moment, he waved it off. He didn’t believe in that sort of thing ever before in his fifty-six years on this earth and he wasn’t going to let a silly nightmare change that now. At just before seven-thirty the taxi dropped him off in a quiet part of town. At first he was about to ask the cab driver if they were in the right neighborhood. Then a little farther down the street he saw the glow of the theater lights and a small line formed just in front of the ticket box. He walked half of a block or so down to the theater and got into line. No one paid him any attention as he quietly waited. There was something familiar about the outside of the venue that he couldn’t put a finger on. He looked around the rest of the block and there wasn’t anything significant to look at. There weren’t any stores open, no lights in any windows. Just a slightly run down neighborhood that seemed to have seen better days. After ten minutes or so, he had finally gotten to the front of the ticket line. His heart instantly jumped into his throat and caught his breath…as the veiny wrinkled hand of a horribly familiar face had reached for his cash to pay for his box…