I first noticed him at the coffee shop near my office. He sat alone at a corner table, reading a book. His face was calm, his posture still, but his eyes weren't on the pages. They were on me.

I told myself it was nothing. People look at strangers all the time. But he didn't look away. He just sat there, watching me as I ordered my coffee, as I sat down, as I checked my phone. When I looked up again, he was gone.

The next day, he was at the same spot. Same table. Same book. Same eyes. This time, I couldn't ignore it. I walked out without finishing my drink.

I started taking a different route to work. He was there — standing at the corner, like he knew I would come. He didn't move. He didn't speak. He just watched.

I changed my routine. He adjusted his. He was always there — not threatening, not aggressive, just present. Always present.

A week later, I found a note tucked under my windshield wiper. No name. No number. Just a single line:

"You look beautiful when you're scared."

My hands trembled as I read it. I looked around. The street was empty. No cars. No people. Just the echo of my own heartbeat.

That night, I locked every door. Checked every window. I told myself I was overreacting.

I was wrong.

I heard a soft knock at my bedroom door.

I froze.

"Who's there?" I whispered.

Silence.

Then a voice — calm, close:

"I've already been inside."

\\---

To be continued...

"If you're interested in narrating it, I'm open to paid collaborations. Let me know your rates."

I have been a social worker for nearly two decades, so I of all people, know that when most people think about my profession, they usually imagine mountains of administrative paperwork, organizing food assistance programs, or navigating the incredibly complex foster care system. While those duties certainly make up a large portion of my daily routine, there is another side to the job that rarely gets discussed outside of our office walls. We are often the last remaining line of defense for the forgotten members of society, so as you can see, are the individuals dispatched to knock on doors when someone stops opening their mail, stops answering their telephone, and simply fades away from the public eye.

Over the years, I have seen things behind closed doors that entirely shattered my understanding of the world. I have kept quiet about these specific cases for a long time, primarily because I feared losing my professional license or being forced into a mandatory psychiatric evaluation by my supervisors. But I am getting older now, and the memories are starting to weigh significantly on my conscience, so I decided it is finally time to document and share the stories of the weird cases I dealt with during my career. And that what brings me here, as I want to start with an assignment from many years ago involving a routine welfare check on an elderly woman.

The assignment originated on a Tuesday morning. My supervisor handed me a manila folder containing a very thin case file. The file belonged to an eighty-two-year-old woman who lived alone. On paper, everything about her situation appeared completely normal. Her utility bills were paid on time through an automated bank system, her pension was actively deposited, and her property taxes were entirely up to date. The only red flag, and the reason the file landed on my desk, was that no one had actually seen her in a very long time.

She had ignored the previous routine wellness checks from our department, she did not answer the door when the previous workers knocked, and her telephone simply rang endlessly when we tried to call, so as you can see, my job was simple in theory: drive to her property, make contact, assess her living conditions, and determine if she needed to be moved into a state-assisted living facility.

Her property was located in the middle of a very affluent, highly manicured neighborhood on the edge of the city. The area was famous among city workers for one specific characteristic. It was a neighborhood where absolute apathy was the community standard. The residents there valued their privacy to a fault, cultivating a culture where nobody ever looked over their fences, and of course nobody cared what happened to the people living right next door. You could collapse on your front lawn in this neighborhood, and the passing cars would simply drive around you to avoid getting involved.

I parked my car along the curb. It was a bright, cloudless afternoon. The street was lined with massive oak trees and perfectly trimmed hedges. I walked up the driveway toward the elderly woman's house. The property stood out immediately, because it felt entirely lifeless. The lawn had grown completely out of control, the bushes were overgrown and tangled, and a massive pile of circulars and junk mail covered the front porch.

Before approaching the door, I noticed a man washing his expensive car in the driveway right next door. I walked over to the property line, holding my identification badge clearly in my hand.

"Excuse me, sir,"

I called out, keeping my tone polite and professional.

"I am a social worker with the county. I am trying to check on your neighbor. Have you seen the elderly woman who lives in this house recently?"

The man did not bother to turn off his hose. He barely glanced in my direction, keeping his eyes focused on the soapy water running down his windshield.

"I mind my own business,"

he replied dismissively.

"I have not seen anyone come out of that house since last autumn. "

"Has anyone come to visit her?"

I pressed, trying to gather any useful context.

"Family members, grocery deliveries, anything at all?"

"I said I mind my own business,"

the man repeated, turning his back to me entirely.

"If she is dead in there, call the police. Do not bother me with it."

I thanked him for his time, realizing I would get no help from the surrounding community. I walked back over to the property and stepped onto the front porch.

As I stood on the porch, I noticed something deeply unsettling about the house. The large picture window facing the street was completely opaque. I stepped closer to examine the glass. Every single pane of the window had been meticulously covered from the inside with thick layers of newspaper and dark construction paper. Someone had used thick strips of duct tape to seal the edges of the paper directly against the window frame, ensuring that not a single sliver of sunlight could penetrate the glass. I stepped off the porch and walked around the side of the house, checking the secondary windows. They were all identical. Every window on the ground floor was aggressively sealed against the outside world.

I returned to the front door, feeling a distinct sense of unease settling into my stomach, then I noticed that the glass panels on the front door were also blacked out with taped paper. I raised my fist and knocked loudly on the solid wood frame.

"County social services,"

I announced.

"I am here to conduct a mandatory wellness check. Please come to the door."

I waited for a full minute, listening intently to the silence of the neighborhood. I knocked again, much harder this time.

"If anyone is inside, you need to answer the door,"

I stated firmly.

"If I cannot verify the safety of the resident, I am legally obligated to contact law enforcement to force entry into the premises."

A few seconds later, I heard the faint sound of footsteps moving softly across the hardwood floor inside. The footsteps stopped right behind the front door, then I heard the metallic click of a deadbolt sliding back, followed by the rattle of a brass security chain engaging. The door opened just a few inches, stopped by the tension of the chain.

The interior of the house was entirely pitch black. I could not see anything through the narrow gap, but a wave of stagnant, freezing air drifted out onto the porch.

"Who are you?"

a voice asked from the darkness.

The voice did not belong to an eighty-two-year-old woman. It was the voice of a very young woman. The tone was smooth, and calm.

"I am a county social worker,"

I explained, holding my badge up to the narrow gap so she could see it.

"I have been assigned to check on the elderly resident of this address. The county has not been able to reach her for several months. Can you tell me who you are?"

"I am her granddaughter,"

the young woman replied smoothly from the shadows. "You do not need to worry about her. I moved in a few months ago to take care of her full-time. She is perfectly fine. You can close the case and go back to your office."

"I appreciate that you are caring for her, but I cannot just leave,"

I said, maintaining a calm but authoritative stance. "Agency protocol dictates that I must make visual contact with the primary resident to confirm her living conditions and her cognitive state. I need you to unchain the door and allow me inside for five minutes."

"I cannot do that,"

the young woman answered immediately.

"My grandmother is resting right now. She had a difficult night, and she finally fell asleep. I am not going to wake her up for a government inspection."

"I do not need to wake her up or interview her,"

I countered, leaning slightly closer to the gap.

"I simply need to step inside, see her breathing in her bed, and verify that she has access to food, running water, and proper medication. If you refuse to let me verify her safety, I will have to sit on this porch and call the police. They will break the door off its hinges, and that will be incredibly distressing for your grandmother."

There was a long, tense pause from the other side of the door. I could hear her breathing softly in the dark.

"I cannot open the door entirely,"

she finally said, her voice dropping to a lower, more cautious register.

"I suffer from a severe medical condition. It is an extreme allergy to ultraviolet light. If the sunlight hits my skin, I will experience severe blistering and respiratory distress. That is why the windows are covered. If you want to come inside, you must promise to slip through the gap quickly and close the door immediately behind you so the sun does not touch me."

"I understand,"

I assured her, despite finding the explanation highly unusual.

"I will be very quick. Just undo the chain."

The door closed for a fraction of a second, the metal chain rattled as it was unhooked, and then the door swung open just enough for me to pass through. I stepped over the threshold into the freezing darkness of the house. True to my word, I reached back and pushed the front door shut until the deadbolt clicked into place.

The moment the door closed, the darkness became absolute. My eyes struggled to adjust after being in the bright afternoon sun. The ambient temperature inside the house was easily twenty degrees colder than the weather outside.

"Thank you for being careful,"

the young woman said. She was standing a few feet away from me in the entryway. As my eyes slowly adapted to the gloom, I could make out her silhouette. She was wearing a long, dark dress that covered her entirely from her neck down to her ankles. Her face was obscured by the shadows, but I could tell she was standing perfectly still, her posture unnervingly rigid.

"Thank you for cooperating,"

I replied, pulling a small flashlight from my jacket pocket. I clicked it on, aiming the beam at the floor to avoid blinding her, but allowing the ambient light to illuminate the space.

The house was in a state of profound neglect. The walls were covered in faded, peeling wallpaper. The furniture in the living room was draped with old, dusty plastic sheets. Stacks of hoarded newspapers and cardboard boxes lined the hallways, creating narrow, claustrophobic pathways through the home.

"Where is your grandmother resting?"

I asked, keeping my flashlight pointed downward as I navigated the clutter.

"She is in the back bedroom,"

the young woman answered, her voice echoing slightly in the empty living room. She stepped into my path, attempting to block the hallway.

"But like I said, she is sleeping. Perhaps we could sit in the kitchen first? I can make you a cup of tea, and we can discuss her medical paperwork. I have all her prescriptions organized in a binder."

"I am not here to review paperwork right now,"

I stated firmly, recognizing the classic stalling tactics people use when they are hiding something from social services.

"The visual confirmation is my only priority. Please step aside and lead me to the bedroom. This will only take a moment."

She hesitated, her silhouette shifting uncomfortably in the dark hallway.

"She really does not like strangers in her personal space,"

the young woman insisted.

"She gets very confused and agitated."

"I deal with agitated clients every single day,"

I said, stepping around her and walking deliberately down the dark corridor.

"Which room is it?"

"The last door on the left,"

she muttered, following closely behind me. I could hear her bare feet moving silently across the hardwood floor.

I aimed my flashlight into the bedroom. The room was meticulously organized, but it was completely empty. The bed was unmade, the heavy quilts tangled and pushed to one side, but there was absolutely no sign of an eighty-two-year-old woman resting. I shined my beam across the nightstand. It was entirely bare—no pill bottles, no water glass, no reading glasses, none of the basic medical necessities you would expect for a senior citizen requiring full-time care. I stepped over to the mattress and placed my bare hand firmly against the exposed sheets. The fabric was freezing cold. It was immediately obvious that nobody had been sleeping in that bed recently.

I turned around to face the young woman. She was standing in the doorway, her face still cloaked in the shadows of the hall.

"Your grandmother is not in her bed,"

I said, dropping my professional courtesy and adopting a much more stern, demanding tone.

"Where is she? If you lie to me again, I am calling the authorities immediately."

"She must have gotten up while I was talking to you at the front door,"

the young woman replied calmly, completely unfazed by my threat.

"She wanders around the house sometimes. Let us check the kitchen."

I did not trust a single word she was saying. I gripped my flashlight tightly and pushed past her, walking toward the back of the house where the kitchen and utility rooms were located.

I entered the kitchen. The refrigerator was unplugged, its door hanging open, completely empty except for a thick layer of black mold. I walked past the kitchen island and noticed a partially open door leading into what looked like a laundry room.

I pushed the laundry room door open and stepped inside, sweeping my flashlight beam across the floor.

My breath caught in my throat, and my stomach aggressively churned at the sight before me. Piled haphazardly in the corner of the room, between a rusted washing machine and a utility sink, were the bodies of dozens of animals. There were stray cats, several small dogs, and a few raccoons.

The animals looked entirely desiccated. Their bodies were flattened, completely drained of all fluids, resembling dry, hollow husks covered in fur. I stepped closer, shining the intense beam of light directly onto the closest carcass. There were distinct, brutal puncture wounds on the animal's neck, but there was no blood pooled on the floor around the bodies.

I backed out of the laundry room quickly, my mind racing to process the horrific scene. I bumped into the wall of the hallway and turned instinctively into the adjacent room, which happened to be the primary bathroom. I tried to flick the light switch on the wall, but the power was dead. I raised my flashlight to illuminate the space, intending to check behind the shower curtain, but the beam caught the reflection of the large vanity mirror above the sink.

I froze completely.

Written across the dusty surface of the bathroom mirror, in thick, dark, dried blood, was a deeply disturbing message.

“I am no longer sick. I am finally young again.”

I stood in the dark bathroom, reading the bloody words over and over again. My brain frantically attempted to connect the pieces of the puzzle. The grandmother who had not been seen in months. The young woman claiming to be the granddaughter. The completely empty, dusty bed. The drained, bloodless animals piled in the utility room. The desperate message written on the glass.

But the timeline did not make any sense. If the granddaughter had moved in months ago to care for the old woman, why was the house completely dead? Why was there no food, no electricity, and no sign of anyone other than the young woman herself?

"I told you she was resting,"

a voice whispered from the doorway behind me.

I spun around rapidly, aiming the beam of my flashlight directly at the bathroom door.

The young woman was standing there, blocking the only exit. But her demeanor had entirely changed. The smooth, calm cadence of her voice was gone. When she spoke now, her voice carried the exhausted, raspy, resentful tone of someone who had suffered through decades of immense pain.

"I was trapped in this house for years,"

she said, taking a slow step into the bathroom.

"My joints were failing. My lungs were filling with fluid. Every single morning was an exercise in agony. I could not walk to the mailbox, or even cook for myself. I screamed for help, but nobody in this miserable neighborhood ever cared. The people next door ignored me. The state ignored me. You social workers never came when I actually needed you. You left me here to rot in the dark."

"Where is the old woman?"

I demanded, my voice trembling despite my best efforts to remain steady. I kept the light pointed at her torso, slowly reaching into my pocket for my phone.

"I just told you,"

she hissed, taking another step forward. She stepped fully into the ambient glow of the flashlight bouncing off the bathroom tiles.

I finally saw her face clearly.

She looked like a woman in her early twenties, but her skin was flawlessly pale, looking almost like polished marble. However, it was her eyes that made my blood run entirely cold. Her eyes were completely inhuman. The sclera was a sickly, vibrant yellow, reflecting the light exactly like a nocturnal predator.

"Someone finally visited me,"

the woman continued, her yellow eyes locked onto my face. A deeply menacing, manic smile stretched across her pale cheeks.

"A shadow came through the basement window during the coldest night of the winter. He found me dying in my bed. He saw how abandoned I was, how pathetic my existence had become. And he offered me a trade. He gave me the ultimate grace."

She raised her hands, displaying long, sharpened fingernails that looked more like dark, hardened claws.

"He took away the sickness,"

she whispered, her voice vibrating with an unnatural resonance.

"He took away the weakness. He made me finally young again. All I have to do to keep the pain away is drink. The stray animals were enough at first, to sustain the youth. But the thirst is getting worse. I am so terribly hungry today."

She lunged at me with a speed that was impossible for a human to achieve.

She crossed the distance of the bathroom in a fraction of a second. I barely had time to react. I swung flashlight in my hand as hard as I could, aiming directly for her face.

The solid casing collided violently with her jaw. The impact produced a sickening crack that echoed in the small room. The force of the blow derailed her momentum, sending her crashing into the bathtub and tearing the shower curtain down with her.

I bolted out of the bathroom, sprinting down the pitch-black hallway toward the front of the house. I could hear her scrambling out of the bathtub behind me, her claws tearing frantically against the floor. She was recovering far too quickly.

I pushed through the hoarded stacks of cardboard boxes in the living room, my legs burning with adrenaline. I could hear her snarling, a guttural, animalistic sound that reverberated through the dark house. I reached the entryway and threw my hands against the front door, frantically grasping for the brass deadbolt in the darkness.

Before I could turn the lock, I felt her fingers clamp onto the fabric of my jacket.

Her grip possessed an overwhelming force. She yanked me backward violently, throwing me onto the floor under a window. I scrambled onto my back, kicking out wildly with my boots. She crawled over my legs, pinning me down, her yellow eyes glowing in the dark, her jaw hanging at a strange, broken angle from where I had struck her. She opened her mouth, revealing rows of elongated, razor-sharp teeth, and lunged toward my throat.

In a moment of desperate clarity, I remembered the excuse she had given me at the door.

I stopped trying to push her away. Instead, I reached my arm entirely over my head, stretching my hand toward the window above us. My fingers found the edge of the thick duct tape holding the dark paper in place.

I grabbed the paper and ripped it downward with every ounce of strength I had left.

The layers tore away from the glass. The intense, brilliant light of the afternoon sun blasted through the window, flooding the dark entryway with direct sunlight.

The beam of sunlight struck the woman directly across her back and the side of her face.

The reaction was instantaneous and horrific. The moment the light touched her pale skin, she released a deafening, piercing shriek of pure agony. Her skin began to rapidly blister, turning a sickening shade of charred black while thick, foul-smelling smoke poured from her flesh. It sounded like raw meat being thrown onto a scorching iron grill.

She released my jacket immediately, scrambling backward off my body and throwing her arms over her burning face. She threw herself into the shadows of the living room, retreating away from the lethal sunlight, screaming and thrashing against the hoarded boxes.

I did not hesitate for a single second. I ran to the front door, twisted the deadbolt, pulled the front door open, and threw myself out onto the sunlit porch. I slammed the door shut behind me, ran down the driveway, and threw myself into my county vehicle. I locked the car doors, jammed the key into the ignition, and sped away from the affluent neighborhood as fast as the engine would allow.

I drove for several miles before I pulled over into a shopping center parking lot to catch my breath and attempt to process what had just occurred.

I did not call the police, or even report the attack to my agency. If I told my supervisors that an eighty-two-year-old woman had been transformed into a vampire creature, my career would have been terminated immediately, and I would have been institutionalized. Instead, I returned to the office, filed the paperwork, and officially reported the house as abandoned. I stated that the resident had likely moved out of state without notifying the county, and the case was quietly closed and filed away into the archives.

I officially closed the case, but exactly one month later, I could not stop myself from driving back to that neighborhood. I parked across the street and looked at the property. The house was completely abandoned. The dark paper had been ripped away from the windows, the overgrown bushes were dying, and the driveway was entirely empty. I do not know where she went. I have no idea what new city or neighborhood she vanished into. But as I sat in my car staring at the vacant home, a deep, cold certainty settled into my stomach. I felt it in my bones. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I will meet her again someday.

Part 1 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/ocGLoQKhiy

Part 2 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/Yn30Y1lKs2

Part 3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/TlcCGxMMoD

The phone inside the wall rang for eleven minutes.

Nobody answered it.

That sounds cowardly until you remember there was no phone inside the wall.

At least, there hadn’t been one yesterday.

Now something was ringing behind the communal noticeboard with the patient confidence of someone who knew we would eventually break.

Kevin had written one message across the black mould above it:

DO NOT ANSWER.

Linda stood in the middle of the lobby holding the Oakmere letter in one hand and her clipboard in the other.

It had arrived that morning, informing us that all “informal, unauthorised or deceased management arrangements” would soon be terminated.

At the bottom was a symbol made of three interlocking circles surrounding a small key.

Then the letters on the noticeboard had moved by themselves.

Not Kevin.

Something else.

They had rearranged into:

GOOD EVENING, KEVIN.

YOUR PERFORMANCE REVIEW IS DUE.

And the phone had started ringing.

Linda adjusted her glasses.

“Perhaps we should answer it.”

The mould shifted violently.

PERHAPS WE SHOULD LAUNCH LINDA INTO THE SEA.

“That’s unnecessary.”

SO IS THE PHONE IN THE WALL.

The ringing continued.

Old-fashioned.

Metallic.

The sort of ringing that made you picture an empty office at midnight, with someone sitting behind a desk facing away from the door.

Dave appeared at the top of the stairs wearing one slipper.

“Wasn’t me.”

Nobody looked at him.

He came downstairs anyway.

Flat 3 opened her door holding a mug.

Flat 5 emerged behind her with three tiny spoons in his shirt pocket, which he claimed were “for emergencies.”

Nobody had ever identified an emergency improved by a tiny spoon.

The phone stopped ringing.

The silence afterwards felt worse.

Then something knocked from inside the wall.

Three slow knocks.

The mould above the noticeboard began crawling backwards.

That concerned me.

Kevin had fought a corporate demon, possessed a toaster and once spent an entire evening criticising The Conjuring through our extractor fan.

Apparently, the ghost’s “hallway presence lacked commitment.”

Kevin did not usually retreat.

Three more knocks.

Then a woman spoke from behind the plaster.

“Mr Kevin?”

Polite.

Calm.

Close enough that it sounded like her lips were pressed against the other side of the wall.

The mould formed one word.

NO.

“Upper Management is ready to receive you.”

Linda stepped towards the wall.

A strip of mould shot across the plaster, wrapped around the back of her dressing gown and pulled her away.

She looked over her shoulder.

“Kevin.”

The mould wrote:

LINDA.

“You are stretching the fabric.”

THE WALL LADY WANTS TO EAT MY EMPLOYMENT HISTORY.

“You don’t have an employment history.”

The voice behind the wall replied:

“We have his complete file.”

The mould stopped moving.

I looked at it.

“What file?”

Nothing.

“Kevin?”

The mould slowly formed:

DUNNO.

“Kevin.”

LITERALLY DEAD MATE. MEMORY’S NOT EXACTLY CLOUD-BACKED.

A crack appeared behind the noticeboard.

It travelled from the ceiling to the floor.

Then another appeared beside it.

The section of wall between them swung inward.

There was no dust.

No broken brick.

It opened like a door had always been there.

Behind it was darkness.

A single red telephone sat on a small table.

The receiver was off the hook.

Beyond the table, a narrow staircase descended beneath Riverside Court.

Riverside Court did not have a basement.

Linda leaned towards the opening.

“We don’t have a basement.”

The mould beside her wrote:

FANTASTIC WORK LINDA. PROMOTE HER.

A fluorescent light flickered on somewhere below us.

Then another.

Then another.

Each one revealed more stairs.

They went down much farther than the building should have allowed.

A brass plaque appeared beside the doorway.

OAKMERE RESIDENTIAL SOLUTIONS

UPPER MANAGEMENT

STAFF ENTRANCE

Underneath, in smaller letters:

VISITORS MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY THEIR DECEASED REPRESENTATIVE.

Dave looked into the darkness.

“Do we have to go?”

The disconnected receiver spoke.

“Attendance is mandatory.”

Dave nodded.

“Thought so.”

The mould moved onto the wall beside me.

JON.

“No.”

HAVEN’T ASKED.

“You’re going to ask me to enter the impossible basement.”

YEAH.

“No.”

EMOTIONAL SUPPORT HUMAN.

“No.”

I SUPPORTED YOU WHEN YOUR MILK WAS OFF.

“You informed me that my milk was off.”

SAVED A LIFE.

Linda picked up her clipboard.

“I’ll accompany Kevin.”

The mould instantly wrote:

JON PLEASE COME.

Flat 3 put on her coat.

“If Linda’s going, I’m going.”

“I am perfectly capable,” Linda said.

“You once thanked a possessed security system for complimenting your leadership.”

“It was a difficult moment.”

Flat 5 selected his smallest spoon.

Dave said, “I’m not going.”

Something inside the stairwell spoke in Dave’s voice.

“Wasn’t me.”

Dave stared into the darkness.

“I’m going.”

The mould spread over the wall like someone throwing their hands up.

BRILLIANT. WHOLE CIRCUS.

The red receiver lifted into the air by itself.

“Please bring biscuits.”

Linda produced a packet of custard creams from beneath her clipboard.

The mould became perfectly still.

Then:

THAT IS THE MOST TERRIFYING THING YOU’VE EVER DONE.

We entered the wall.

The doorway closed behind us.

There was no handle on our side.

The staircase smelled of damp paper, burnt dust and something sweet that had been allowed to rot.

Fluorescent lights buzzed above us.

Each one went dark as soon as we passed beneath it.

The mould followed us along the walls.

Sometimes it formed a handprint.

Sometimes an arrow.

Once, it wrote:

HATE STAIRS.

“You’re floating,” I said.

EMOTIONALLY TIRING.

After five minutes, Dave asked, “How deep is this?”

The mould wrote:

STRUCTURALLY OR EMOTIONALLY?

“Structurally.”

BAD.

The walls were covered in framed photographs of apartment buildings.

Not normal estate-agent photographs.

Every building had been photographed at night.

Every window was black except one.

In each lit window stood a figure.

Some had their hands pressed against the glass.

Some had no faces.

One photograph showed a tower with hundreds of floors.

The same woman stood in every illuminated window.

Flat 3 slowed down.

The woman in the nearest window turned her head.

Not the photograph.

The woman inside it.

Her eyes followed us down the stairs.

Flat 3 lowered her mug.

“Did anyone else—”

“Yes,” I said.

The mould spread over the photograph, hiding the woman.

KEEP MOVING.

Something scratched behind the frame.

We kept moving.

At the bottom of the stairs was a door marked:

HUMAN RESOURCES

Someone had crossed out HUMAN and written RESIDENT beneath it.

The mould crept around the lettering.

HATE THAT.

Linda knocked.

Black mould erupted across the entire door.

WHY WOULD YOU KNOCK?

“It’s polite.”

IT’S HELL WITH A PENSION SCHEME.

The door opened.

A receptionist sat behind a curved desk.

At first, she looked normal.

Grey suit.

Hair tied back.

Small Oakmere badge.

Then she looked up.

Her eyes were stapled open.

Not metaphorically.

Small silver staples held her eyelids against the skin above and below them.

Her smile looked exhausted.

“Good evening.”

Nobody answered.

Her eyes moved across us without blinking.

“Name?”

The mould spread across the front of her desk.

KEVIN.

“Surname?”

DON’T HAVE ONE.

She typed on a keyboard.

The keys were made from small yellow teeth.

“Every asset has a surname.”

NOT ME. MYSTERIOUS.

“Identification number?”

The mould hesitated.

DUNNO.

The receptionist reached beneath the desk and produced a thick grey folder.

It was labelled:

KVN-014

The mould stopped moving.

She opened the file.

Inside were photographs.

I couldn’t see them clearly from where I stood.

Apparently, Kevin could.

The black mould began peeling away from the desk.

“What is it?” I asked.

No answer.

The receptionist removed one photograph and turned it towards us.

It showed a white room full of metal chairs.

Young men sat in them wearing identical grey tracksuits.

Each had wires connected to their head.

Some were screaming.

Some appeared unconscious.

On the back wall was the three-circle symbol.

One chair stood in the corner.

Empty.

Around its headrest hung a paper sign:

KVN-014 — ENTRY LEVEL

I stared at the empty chair.

“Is that supposed to be Kevin?”

The receptionist smiled.

“The photograph was taken after extraction.”

Flat 5 whispered, “Extraction of what?”

Her stapled eyes turned towards him.

“The useful part.”

Something scraped beneath the desk.

A pale hand crawled around one side.

Then another.

Fingers moved across the carpet like spiders.

The receptionist stamped a form without looking down.

The hands withdrew.

“Upper Management is waiting.”

She placed visitor badges on the desk.

Each one already had our names printed on it.

Mine said:

JON — RESIDENT / RESISTANT

Linda’s said:

LINDA — INTERIM AUTHORITY COMPLEX

Flat 3’s said:

RESIDENT 3 — AGGRESSION RESOURCE

Flat 5’s said:

RESIDENT 5 — CUTLERY DEPENDENCY

Dave’s said:

DAVE — RESPONSIBLE

Dave stared at his badge.

“That’s not fair.”

Kevin’s badge was black.

KVN-014 — PENDING TERMINATION

The mould avoided it.

The receptionist looked at the desk.

“Your deceased representative must display his badge.”

Mould formed on the wall behind her.

DON’T HAVE A SHIRT.

“Visibility is mandatory.”

The badge lifted into the air.

For a moment, it hung there.

Then it pressed itself against nothing.

A faint shape appeared around it.

Not a body.

More like an absence shaped vaguely like a person.

A distortion in the air.

The receptionist nodded.

“Proceed.”

We did.

The office beyond reception was enormous.

Rows of cubicles stretched farther than we could see.

Fluorescent lights vanished into a low grey horizon.

The carpet felt warm beneath my shoes.

Not room-temperature warm.

Body warm.

Each cubicle contained a dead building manager.

I knew they were dead because several were transparent.

Others were much worse.

One man had a smoke alarm where his face should have been.

A woman typed using fingers that had grown into the keyboard.

Another employee sat completely still while black liquid leaked from his ears and filled the drawers beneath him.

None of them looked up.

They whispered as we passed.

“Complaint received.”

“Request denied.”

“Resident deceased.”

“Deposit retained.”

“Complaint received.”

“Request denied.”

“Deposit retained.”

The words overlapped into a low mechanical prayer.

Dave leaned closer to me.

“I don’t like this.”

From the nearest cubicle, a man with no lower jaw whispered:

“Feedback noted.”

Dave moved away quickly.

The Kevin-shaped distortion travelled beside us.

The badge floated where his chest should have been.

Until that moment, none of us had ever seen him.

Not really.

Kevin existed in speakers, mould, fridge magnets, phone screens and the occasional aggressive toaster.

Even the vague shape beside us felt wrong.

Too human.

Like somebody had cut his outline out of the world.

At the far end of the office stood a lift.

Its doors were dark wood.

The floor display above them changed constantly.

B4

B13

B-2

OTHER

The doors opened.

A woman stood inside with her back to us.

She wore a red suit.

Her hair hung to her waist.

She faced the rear wall.

There were no buttons.

The mould on the wall beside the lift wrote:

STAIRS?

The receptionist’s voice came through the ceiling.

“Attendance is mandatory.”

We entered.

The woman did not move.

The doors closed.

Something wet touched the back of my neck.

I turned.

Nothing.

Then I heard breathing directly behind me.

Slow.

Deep.

Everyone else heard it too.

The woman began humming a nursery rhyme I almost recognised.

The lift descended.

The floor display changed.

GRIEVANCES

EVICTIONS

RETENTION

RECOVERY

MANAGEMENT

The humming stopped.

The woman spoke without turning around.

“Which one of you brought biscuits?”

Linda held up the custard creams.

“I did.”

The woman’s head turned.

Only her head.

Her body remained facing the wall.

Her face was covered by a smooth layer of skin.

No eyes.

No nose.

No mouth.

The skin bulged as she spoke from underneath it.

“Custard creams?”

Linda nodded.

“Yes.”

The featureless head tilted.

“Good.”

The doors opened.

We stepped out.

Just before they closed, a mouth split open across the back of the woman’s head.

“Don’t sign anything.”

The doors shut.

The floating badge moved towards them.

The mould on the nearby wall wrote:

LIKED HER.

Upper Management occupied a single office.

The door was enormous.

Dark wood.

Gold lettering.

M. VALE

DIRECTOR OF RESIDENT RETENTION

Beneath the plaque, someone had scratched:

SHE KNOWS WHEN YOU ARE HOME

Linda reached for the handle.

Mould covered it.

MAYBE WE SIMPLY DIE?

“You are already dead,” I said.

EXACTLY. EFFICIENT.

The door opened by itself.

The office beyond was too tall.

Its ceiling disappeared into darkness.

Filing cabinets covered every wall, rising hundreds of feet upwards.

Some drawers rattled.

Others whispered names.

A conference table stretched through the centre of the room.

Six chairs waited on our side.

One empty space remained where Kevin’s floating badge hovered.

One chair stood at the far end.

Something sat in it.

Ms Vale looked almost human.

That was the problem.

The longer I looked, the less she did.

Her grey hair was immaculate.

Her suit was perfectly fitted.

Her hands rested neatly on the table.

There were too many joints in her fingers.

Her face changed every few seconds.

An old woman.

A young man.

A crying child.

Gareth.

Derek.

Me.

Each face surfaced briefly, like something drowning beneath thin ice.

Then it settled into the pleasant face of a middle-aged woman.

“Kevin,” she said.

Every filing cabinet whispered with her.

“Kevin.”

“Kevin.”

“Kevin.”

The floating badge edged backwards.

Ms Vale smiled.

“No.”

A chair formed beneath it.

Not pulled out.

Formed.

The wood grew from the floor like bone pushing through skin.

Leather straps hung from its arms.

The vague distortion that represented Kevin stopped moving.

Mould spread over the table.

I’LL STAND.

“You will sit.”

The room darkened.

The distortion dropped into the chair.

The leather straps snapped shut around empty air.

Then Ms Vale placed one hand flat on the table.

“Employees must be visible during formal review.”

Something screamed.

Not Kevin.

The room itself.

Every filing cabinet shook.

The air inside the chair folded inward.

The distortion thickened.

A shoulder appeared.

Then an arm.

A knee.

A head bent forward.

For the first time, Kevin became visible.

None of us spoke.

He looked about thirty.

Maybe younger.

It was difficult to tell because half his face flickered in and out of focus.

He wore a faded tracksuit top from around 2008, grey joggers and one trainer.

The other foot was bare.

His hair floated slightly upwards, as if he were underwater.

His skin was translucent, but not cleanly.

Dark shapes moved beneath it.

Fingerprints.

Faces.

Letters.

For one brief second, I could see the wall behind him through his chest.

Then a rib cage flickered into place.

Then vanished.

Kevin looked down at himself.

He turned his hands over.

Wiggled his fingers.

Touched his own face.

Then looked at us.

“oh,” he said.

His voice did not come from a phone or speaker.

It came directly from him.

It sounded younger than I expected.

Rough.

Human.

“sick. elbows.”

Flat 3 stared at him.

“That’s what you look like?”

Kevin looked offended.

“give me a second. first body in years.”

Linda studied him.

“You only have one shoe.”

Kevin looked down.

“that explains the cold foot.”

Even Ms Vale seemed disappointed by the response.

“This is your first formal performance review.”

Kevin looked at her.

“could’ve sent an email.”

“We did.”

“went to spam.”

A folder slid across the table.

KVN-014: PERFORMANCE SUMMARY

Ms Vale opened it.

“Initial placement: unstable shared accommodation.”

“successful,” Kevin said.

“The property was severely damaged.”

“team-building exercise.”

“One primary resident was lost.”

Kevin’s smile disappeared.

Derek.

Ms Vale noticed.

Her own smile sharpened.

“Do you miss him?”

Kevin looked away.

One of the filing cabinets rattled.

From inside came Derek’s voice.

“Mate?”

Kevin’s head snapped towards it.

Another drawer shook.

“Kevin?”

It sounded exactly like him.

Tired.

Scared.

Alive.

“Mate, can you get me out?”

Kevin rose against the straps.

“Derek?”

The drawer slammed shut.

Ms Vale wrote something in the file.

“Attachment to residents. Significant weakness.”

Kevin’s visible hands curled into fists.

“Where is he?”

“Not relevant to your review.”

“Where is he?”

Her face became Derek’s.

“Five stars,” she said in his voice.

Then changed back.

Kevin stopped struggling.

Hatred made him quiet.

Ms Vale continued.

“Secondary placement: Riverside Court.”

Linda raised her hand.

Ms Vale looked at her.

“This is not a participatory meeting.”

Linda lowered her hand.

Then raised it again.

“I have procedural concerns.”

The office went silent.

Even the drawers stopped whispering.

Ms Vale stared at Linda.

“You have what?”

Linda placed her clipboard on the table.

“A performance review should allow the employee to respond to evidence, submit mitigating circumstances and bring representation.”

Kevin looked at her.

“linda.”

“I have also prepared notes.”

Ms Vale’s fingers bent backwards one joint at a time.

“Your procedures do not apply here.”

Linda adjusted her glasses.

“Then your process lacks transparency.”

The lights flickered.

Flat 3 whispered, “She’s doing admin at death.”

Kevin whispered back, “always knew she’d go out like this.”

Ms Vale’s face cycled rapidly.

Woman.

Corpse.

Child.

Gareth.

Something with antlers.

Then back.

“You may speak when invited.”

Linda wrote on her clipboard.

Ms Vale’s eyes narrowed.

“What are you writing?”

“Tone concern.”

Kevin made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a choking cough.

Ms Vale turned another page.

“Kevin’s Riverside placement demonstrates repeated failure.”

Images appeared on the wall behind her.

Kevin stealing yoghurt.

Kevin insulting Linda.

Kevin firing toast at a demon.

Kevin writing LANDLORD BOY in mould above Dave’s bed.

Kevin biting Gareth.

Flat 3 pointed at the final image.

“That one was good.”

Ms Vale ignored her.

“Unauthorised intervention. Disobedience. Emotional contamination. Resident loyalty.”

Kevin shrugged as much as the straps allowed.

“sounds like I’m smashing it.”

“You misunderstand your purpose.”

Ms Vale leaned forwards.

Her neck stretched across the table.

It lengthened until her face hovered inches from Kevin’s.

“You were not created to protect residents.”

Her mouth opened.

Inside were rows of tiny office doors.

Behind each door, someone screamed.

“You were created to soften them.”

Kevin stopped smiling.

Ms Vale’s neck retracted.

“Entry-level hauntings generate anxiety. Anxiety generates dependence. Dependence increases acceptance of monitoring, subscriptions and controlled living environments.”

The SpookMe app.

The smart security system.

Oakmere’s Harmony Hub.

“You frighten people,” I said, “so they’ll pay Oakmere to protect them.”

Ms Vale smiled.

“An excellent summary.”

“That’s insane.”

“Is it?”

Every filing drawer opened at once.

Inside were thousands of photographs.

Homes.

Flats.

Hospitals.

Schools.

Care homes.

Every photograph contained the three-circle symbol.

Hidden on a router.

A smoke alarm.

A tenancy agreement.

A child’s night-light.

Something moved behind the photographs.

Hands pressed out from inside the drawers.

Hundreds of them.

Fingernails scraped metal.

“Fear is the oldest property management tool,” Ms Vale said.

“People accept remarkable restrictions when frightened.”

A drawer near the ceiling opened.

A woman fell halfway out.

Her mouth was sewn shut with a charging cable.

The drawer closed on her fingers.

None of the dead employees reacted.

Ms Vale looked at Kevin.

“Your purpose was never to become part of a community.”

The straps tightened.

“You were meant to destabilise it.”

Kevin stared down at the table.

Ms Vale opened the final page.

“Instead, you encouraged resistance.”

Dave raised his hand slightly.

“He also improved the recycling.”

Ms Vale turned towards him.

Dave swallowed.

“Wasn’t me.”

She wrote something down.

“Resident Dave: denial reflex remains intact.”

Dave looked proud.

Ms Vale placed a silver pen beside Kevin.

“Your position is being terminated.”

The filing cabinets began whispering.

“Terminated.”

“Terminated.”

“Terminated.”

The table split open beneath Kevin.

Not mechanically.

The wood parted like wet skin.

Black hands reached upwards.

Kevin shouted and pulled against the straps.

I forced myself forwards.

My body stopped working.

No pain.

No struggle.

My muscles simply ceased to belong to me.

My knees bent.

I hit the floor.

“Termination,” Ms Vale explained, “does not mean release.”

The hands grabbed Kevin’s legs.

“It means reassignment.”

A filing drawer high above us slid open.

Inside was darkness.

Something enormous shifted within it.

Kevin’s visible body flickered.

His face became transparent.

Then solid.

Then briefly something else entirely.

A screaming man strapped into a metal chair.

“Where?” he asked.

Ms Vale smiled.

“Complaints.”

The drawer opened wider.

A smell poured from it.

Rotten carpet.

Old breath.

Wet hair caught in a drain.

Thousands of voices spoke from the darkness.

“My heating doesn’t work.”

“There’s mould in my child’s bedroom.”

“You kept my deposit.”

“Someone is inside the walls.”

“I’ve reported this six times.”

“Please help me.”

“Please.”

The hands dragged Kevin lower.

His one trainer scraped across the floor.

Linda stood.

Ms Vale looked at her.

“Sit down.”

Linda remained standing.

“I am Kevin’s workplace representative.”

“You have no authority here.”

Linda lifted the packet of custard creams.

“I also brought refreshments.”

Ms Vale’s eyes moved towards them.

The office lights dimmed.

Something rustled inside the walls.

The featureless woman in the lift had warned us not to sign anything.

She had also specifically asked about the biscuits.

Linda placed the packet on the table.

“Would you like one?”

Ms Vale stared at it.

Every face beneath her own pressed towards the surface.

Hungry.

Flat 3 understood first.

She picked up the packet and tore it open.

The smell of cheap vanilla filled the room.

Every filing drawer rattled.

The dead employees stopped typing.

One by one, they looked up.

The woman fused to her keyboard opened her mouth.

“Biscuit.”

The man with the smoke alarm face turned towards us.

His alarm began beeping.

The jawless employee whispered:

“Custard.”

Ms Vale stood.

Her chair scraped backwards.

“Put those away.”

Kevin looked at Linda.

Then at the biscuits.

Then at the hundreds of dead employees.

“no way.”

Flat 3 threw a custard cream into the nearest cubicle.

Chaos followed.

The employee caught it.

Another employee climbed over the cubicle wall.

A third pulled himself through the computer monitor.

Phones began ringing.

Drawers slammed.

The whispered corporate prayer broke apart.

“Complaint—”

“Biscuit—”

“Deposit—”

“Mine—”

“Request—”

“Give—”

Linda threw the entire packet into the office.

The dead surged after it.

Not walking.

Crawling.

Dragging desks behind them.

One employee moved through the ceiling with his head turned backwards.

Another unfolded from inside a filing cabinet despite being nearly eight feet tall.

Ms Vale screamed.

Her pleasant face split down the middle.

Beneath it was not a skull.

It was a building.

Tiny windows covered the inside of her head.

Figures hammered against the glass.

“Security!”

The filing cabinets opened.

Things climbed out.

Tall, narrow figures in black suits.

Their heads were security cameras.

Red lights blinked where their eyes should have been.

Kevin was still being dragged into the table.

“jon!”

“I can’t move!”

“try harder!”

“Excellent advice!”

Flat 5 pulled out one of his emergency spoons.

I stared at him.

“You cannot be serious.”

“It worked last time.”

He ran towards Kevin and jammed the spoon beneath one of the leather straps.

The metal hissed.

The strap loosened.

Flat 5 gasped.

“Silver-plated.”

Kevin looked at him.

“tiny spoon king.”

Flat 5’s face lit up.

The security figures moved towards us.

Flat 3 threw her mug at the nearest one.

It smashed against its camera head.

The red light went out.

“Mine,” she said.

Linda used her clipboard like a shield.

Dave stood frozen.

A security figure leaned down towards him.

Its camera lens adjusted.

“Resident Dave. Multiple unresolved incidents.”

Dave’s entire body shook.

Then he shouted:

“IT WAS ME!”

The figure stopped.

Dave continued, louder.

“The pizza box! The oven! The wet washing! I broke the lobby plant! I took Flat 5’s parcel once because I thought it was protein powder!”

Flat 5 looked horrified.

“It was me!”

The office trembled.

Dave’s visitor badge cracked.

DAVE — RESPONSIBLE

The word RESPONSIBLE flickered.

Then changed.

DAVE — ACCOUNTABLE

The security figure’s camera lens shattered.

Dave stared at his badge.

“I feel sick.”

Kevin yelled, “personal growth later!”

Flat 5 forced the spoon beneath the second strap.

It snapped.

Kevin pulled one arm free.

The black hands climbed higher, gripping his waist.

His visible form flickered violently.

The mould started spreading across the table beneath him.

For a moment, he existed in both places.

A frightened man in a tracksuit.

A black stain crawling through the wood.

He shoved his free hand through the tabletop.

Not into the hole.

Through the solid surface.

His fingers emerged beneath the table and grabbed something.

A cable.

He pulled.

The conference table screamed.

A black wire ripped from its underside.

The hands gripping Kevin spasmed.

“router,” he gasped.

“Where?” I asked.

Kevin pointed towards Ms Vale.

Her chest had opened.

Inside her rib cage sat a small black router.

Three green lights blinked between her lungs.

Of course.

It was always the router.

Ms Vale noticed where we were looking.

Her building-face twisted.

“No.”

Flat 3 charged first.

Ms Vale swept one long arm across the room.

Flat 3 flew into a filing cabinet.

It opened behind her.

Hands grabbed at her coat.

She smashed them with what remained of her mug.

Linda followed, wielding the clipboard.

Ms Vale’s fingers wrapped around Linda’s throat.

Linda did not panic.

She pressed a printed form against Ms Vale’s face.

“What is this?” Ms Vale hissed.

“Formal grievance.”

Ms Vale recoiled like she had been burned.

Linda slapped another sheet against her chest.

“Data access request.”

Ms Vale screamed.

A third sheet.

“Appeal against termination.”

The router lights inside her body began flashing.

Kevin looked genuinely impressed.

“weaponised admin.”

Linda shoved the entire folder into Ms Vale’s open rib cage.

“Please respond within twenty-eight working days.”

Ms Vale convulsed.

Her grip loosened.

I could move again.

I ran.

One of the security figures grabbed my shoulder.

Cold spread down my arm.

Its camera lens showed me an image of my own flat.

I was asleep in bed.

Something stood beside me.

Watching.

The footage was dated tomorrow.

I hit the camera with Dave’s badge.

It cracked.

Dave shouted, “Why have you got that?”

“Be accountable later!”

I reached Ms Vale.

The router sat inside her chest, wrapped in pulsing black cables.

I grabbed it.

Every light in the office went red.

The building inside Ms Vale’s face screamed through hundreds of tiny windows.

“You will lose him,” she said.

I pulled harder.

“Who?”

Her face changed.

Derek looked back at me.

“He is still subscribed.”

I hesitated.

The router’s lights blinked.

One green.

One red.

One blue.

Alexa blue.

From somewhere inside the filing cabinets, Derek shouted:

“Jon!”

Kevin froze.

“Derek?”

“Don’t unplug it!”

Ms Vale smiled with his face.

Kevin looked at me.

For the first time, I could properly see fear in his expression.

Not comic panic.

Not Kevin pretending everything was stupid.

Real fear.

“If we unplug it,” I said, “what happens to Derek?”

Ms Vale answered.

“All retained residents will be disconnected.”

Kevin’s body flickered.

The black hands pulled him lower.

The complaints drawer yawned above us.

Derek’s voice came again.

“Mate, please!”

Ms Vale extended one hand towards Kevin.

“Return to service and he remains accessible.”

Kevin stared at the filing cabinets.

“Accessible?”

“Retained.”

“That means trapped,” I said.

Ms Vale’s face returned to normal.

“Terminology varies.”

Kevin closed his eyes.

The mould spread beneath him.

Then he looked at me.

“pull it.”

“What?”

“router.”

“But Derek—”

“that’s not him.”

The voice from the drawer shouted:

“Kevin, don’t!”

Kevin flinched.

Then his visible face hardened.

“Derek never called me Kevin when he was scared.”

The drawer went silent.

Kevin looked at Ms Vale.

“He called me dickhead.”

From somewhere much deeper in the cabinets, barely audible, came another voice.

“Dickhead?”

Kevin’s eyes widened.

That one was different.

Fainter.

Real.

Ms Vale lunged.

I ripped the router from her chest.

The office went black.

Something hit me.

Something else screamed.

For several seconds, there was nothing but noise.

Metal drawers slamming.

Phones ringing.

People crawling.

Ms Vale shrieking through a thousand borrowed voices.

Then the router in my hands spoke.

“Connection lost.”

Kevin shouted from somewhere in the dark:

“smash it!”

I threw it onto the floor.

Flat 5 raised his emergency spoon.

“No,” I said.

Dave brought Linda’s camping chair down on it.

The router shattered.

The entire office folded.

Not collapsed.

Folded.

Cubicles bent upwards.

The floor rolled over itself.

Filing cabinets twisted into the ceiling.

The dead employees fell sideways into darkness.

Ms Vale stood at the centre of it all.

Her body split into hallways, offices and stairwells.

Every part of her was a building.

Every door inside her opened.

Hands reached out.

Faces screamed from windows.

She pointed at Kevin.

“You belong to us.”

Kevin had pulled himself free from the table.

He stood unsteadily on one trainer and one bare foot.

His body was fading.

Already becoming less human.

Mould spread along his arms.

His chest turned transparent.

He looked at Ms Vale.

“performance feedback?”

Her many mouths opened.

Kevin smiled.

“management’s a bit top-heavy.”

Then he kicked the broken router into her.

The green light flashed once.

Ms Vale imploded.

Every door slammed at the same time.

The sound hit us like a physical force.

Then the office vanished.

We fell.

Not far.

About three feet.

Onto the lobby carpet at Riverside Court.

Linda landed upright.

Somehow.

Dave landed inside the suggestion box.

Flat 5 landed on me.

Flat 3 landed on Flat 5.

Kevin landed nowhere.

Because Kevin was gone.

The hidden doorway had vanished.

The noticeboard hung normally on the wall.

No impossible basement.

No red phone.

No brass plaque.

Just Riverside Court.

The hallway carpet.

The washing machine.

The faint smell of someone’s dinner.

I pushed Flat 5 off me and stood.

“Kevin?”

Nothing.

Linda looked at the noticeboard.

“Kevin?”

No mould.

No moving letters.

No sarcastic message.

Dave climbed out of the suggestion box.

Its little voice whispered:

“Boring.”

We all looked at it.

Then black mould began forming around its slot.

Slowly.

Painfully.

One letter at a time.

OW.

Linda released a breath.

Flat 3 laughed.

Flat 5 gripped his tiny spoon.

The mould continued.

HAVE LEGS AGAIN?

A shape flickered in front of the noticeboard.

Kevin appeared for half a second.

Tracksuit.

One trainer.

Confused face.

Then vanished.

The mould wrote:

NOPE.

He flickered again.

This time only his upper body appeared.

He looked down.

“why am I just torso?”

Then vanished.

The mould formed:

HATE THIS.

I started laughing.

I couldn’t help it.

After the office, the photographs and the thing inside Ms Vale’s face, watching Kevin struggle to load his own body felt like someone had opened a window.

He appeared a third time.

Fully.

Still translucent.

Still wearing one trainer.

He looked around the lobby.

Linda studied him.

“You’re shorter than I imagined.”

Kevin vanished instantly.

The mould wrote:

BODY PRIVILEGES REVOKED.

Flat 3 said, “Come back. I want to see the tragic tracksuit again.”

NO.

Dave asked, “Why only one shoe?”

NO FURTHER QUESTIONS.

Nobody pushed him.

Not yet.

Linda called an emergency residents’ meeting.

It began at 2:17 in the morning.

She still had the custard creams, although the packet was empty.

Dave confessed to three additional building offences while his accountability window was apparently still open.

Flat 5 demanded the return of his protein powder.

Flat 3 kept asking Kevin to show us his face again.

Kevin communicated exclusively through the noticeboard.

MEETING AGENDA:

1. NEVER GO IN WALL AGAIN

2. BISCUITS ARE POWERFUL

3. OAKMERE EVIL CONFIRMED

4. JON SCREAMS LIKE KETTLE

“I did not scream like a kettle.”

The letters rearranged.

WHISTLING LITTLE BASTARD.

Linda tapped her clipboard.

“We need to discuss what we learned.”

The mould stopped moving.

The lobby became quiet.

Oakmere had created Kevin.

Or changed him.

Used him.

They had done the same thing to others.

Possibly hundreds of others.

And somewhere inside their system, Derek might still exist.

A drawer.

A file.

A retained resident.

I looked at the noticeboard.

“You heard him too?”

The mould slowly wrote:

YEAH.

“The second voice?”

YEAH.

“Was it really him?”

The mould hesitated.

Then:

HE CALLED ME DICKHEAD.

“That sounds promising.”

BEST EVIDENCE WE HAVE.

Linda wrote something down.

Flat 3 asked, “So what now?”

The mould remained still for a long time.

Then it spread across the entire noticeboard.

Large black letters appeared.

WE FIND DEREK.

Nobody joked.

Not even Dave.

Then the communal printer started making noises.

We did not own a communal printer.

Paper slid from beneath the suggestion box.

One page.

Then another.

Then dozens.

Photographs scattered across the lobby floor.

Buildings.

Hundreds of them.

Each marked with the three-circle symbol.

On the back of every photograph was an Oakmere site number.

Flat 5 picked one up.

“This one’s nearby.”

Linda picked up another.

“So is this.”

The printer produced one final page.

A staff directory.

Most names had been blacked out.

One remained visible.

KVN-014 — ENTRY-LEVEL RESIDENT DESTABILISATION

Status:

ROGUE

Beneath it was another record.

DRK-001 — PREMIUM VESSEL / FAMILY PLAN ADMINISTRATOR

Status:

ACTIVE

Kevin appeared in front of us again.

Fully visible this time.

For nearly five seconds.

He stared at the page.

His face looked younger when he wasn’t joking.

More frightened.

More human.

Then his body flickered.

The mould on the wall wrote:

ACTIVE IS GOOD RIGHT?

I didn’t know.

Nobody did.

Before I could answer, the lift doors opened.

The featureless woman in the red suit stood inside.

She held a fresh packet of custard creams.

Her smooth face tilted towards Kevin.

The mouth on the back of her head opened.

“You broke Upper Management.”

Kevin’s body vanished.

The mould wrote:

SORRY.

The woman stepped into the lobby.

“Do not apologise.”

She placed the biscuits on Linda’s clipboard.

“Promotion is available.”

Linda looked at the packet.

Then at her.

“For Kevin?”

The woman’s head turned all the way around.

Her mouth smiled.

“No.”

Every phone in the building buzzed.

A notification appeared from an app none of us had downloaded.

OAKMERE INTERNAL VACANCY

DIRECTOR OF RESIDENT RESISTANCE

APPLICANT NOMINATED: LINDA

Linda stared at the screen.

Kevin’s mould spread violently across the wall.

ABSOLUTELY NOT.

The lift doors began closing.

The woman in red stepped backwards into the darkness.

Just before she disappeared, she pointed at the staff directory.

“Find the administrator.”

The doors shut.

Linda looked at us.

Flat 3 looked at Kevin’s mould.

Dave looked guilty despite having done nothing.

Flat 5 opened the custard creams.

I looked down at Derek’s record.

ACTIVE.

Then my phone rang.

The caller ID said:

DEREK

I answered.

For several seconds, there was only static.

Then a familiar voice whispered:

“Mate?”

I couldn’t breathe.

“Derek?”

Something scratched against the other end of the line.

He spoke quickly.

“They know Kevin got out.”

The mould on the wall went still.

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know.”

A door slammed somewhere behind him.

Derek lowered his voice.

“I think I’m inside an app.”

“What?”

“There are other people here.”

Another door slammed.

Closer.

“They keep making us leave reviews.”

The line crackled.

Then Derek said:

“Whatever you do, don’t update SpookMe.”

My phone screen went black.

A loading bar appeared.

SPOOKME UPDATE AVAILABLE

INSTALLING: 1%

Kevin’s mould exploded across the entire lobby.

TURN OFF WIFI.

Dave ran towards the maintenance cupboard.

Flat 5 grabbed his emergency spoon.

Linda raised her clipboard.

The update reached two percent.

Then three.

From somewhere inside the wall, hundreds of phones began ringing.

And for the first time, Kevin appeared without being forced.

Full body.

One trainer.

Faded tracksuit.

Terrified expression.

He looked at me.

“Jon.”

It was the first time he had said my name without a joke attached.

“What?”

The update reached four percent.

Kevin turned towards the wall of ringing phones.

Then back to us.

“Derek’s bringing something with him.”

Part 1: I'm a Serial Killer. Hell Just Offered Me a Job.

Part 2: I Work for Hell's Retrieval Department. Apparently, I'm Already Underperforming.

Lucy was sitting at the motel's tiny table, a mug in one hand, watching me.

"We're leaving tonight."

I glanced at the clock.

6:00 A.M.

I hadn't slept. Not because I needed it.

Ever since I died, sleep had become optional. I didn't dream anymore. Closing my eyes was just darkness until I decided to open them again.

Usually, that was enough.

Not after last night.

I'd spent hours chasing the Spine Taker through the woods, fighting it, then dragging it back to Hell in chains. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the same thing: hundreds of faces staring at me, asking a single question.

Who am I?

By afternoon, I'd stopped pretending sleep was coming. I didn't need food anymore. Or water. Or even rest. But I stayed in bed anyway. Lying there with my eyes closed was the closest thing I had left to feeling human.

When I finally opened my eyes, the clock read 5:00 P.M.

Lucy hadn't moved. She was still sitting at the table reading a book, as though waiting eleven hours for someone to wake up was completely normal.

"About time," she said, setting the book aside. "I was beginning to think you'd decided to hibernate."

"Very funny."

"We leave in ten minutes."

I swung my legs over the side of the bed. My briefcase was already packed, and the dried mud had been cleaned from the leather.

"...You didn't have to do that."

"I know."

That was her entire explanation.

"...Thanks."

A faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

"You're welcome."

I grabbed my jacket from the chair. It smelled clean.

"...You washed this too?"

"It had demon blood on it."

"So?"

"So I washed it."

I stared at her.

"...You're the Prime Minister of Hell."

"I am."

"And you did my laundry."

"You were occupied."

I wasn't sure which part of that conversation disturbed me more.

Ten minutes later, we climbed into a black sedan waiting beneath one of the motel's flickering lights. Lucy started the engine, and we pulled onto the highway.

"So," I asked, fastening my seatbelt, "what's the mission?"

"The angel has already killed three retrieval teams."

That immediately got my attention.

"But I found something interesting," she continued. "Every team attacked the angel first."

I frowned.

"What do you mean?"

"Angels are creatures defined by peace. Under Heaven's laws, they're forbidden from harming humans unless those humans attack first."

"So every team provoked it."

She nodded.

"They never gave it another choice."

I watched the city drift past outside my window.

"What if it refuses to come with us?"

"Then we'll have to force it."

She paused before adding quietly, "...Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

Something in her voice unsettled me. She didn't sound worried we'd fail to arrest the angel.

She sounded uncertain if we'd actually succeed. 

"Do we know which angel it is?"

"No."

"Seriously?"

Lucy shook her head. "No team survived long enough to identify it. Heaven also hasn't answered our requests."

"They're ignoring Hell?"

"There are only two possibilities. Either the angel no longer belongs to Heaven..." She glanced at me briefly. "...or they're choosing not to respond."

"On purpose?"

She didn't answer.

"I don't hurt innocent people," I said.

"I know."

"Then why are we trying to capture an angel that isn't slaughtering civilians?"

"Because one angel walking freely on Earth is enough to destabilize the balance between Heaven and Hell."

"So where is it?"

"An abandoned elementary school."

A navigation marker appeared on the dashboard.

Estimated Arrival: 3 Hours.

"Damn."

I leaned back in my seat, expecting a long drive.

The next thing I knew, Lucy was nudging my shoulder.

"We're here."

I blinked and looked outside.

The highway had vanished.

In its place stood an abandoned elementary school behind rusted fencing and waist-high weeds. The playground was barely visible beneath the overgrowth.

I frowned at the dashboard.

"...Twenty minutes?"

"The car belongs to Hell."

She said it so matter-of-factly that I didn't bother asking for an explanation.

The school looked like it had been abandoned for decades. Broken classroom windows reflected the fading sunlight, and a lone swing creaked lazily back and forth.

There wasn't any wind.

Neither of us moved.

For the first time since I'd met Lucy, she looked genuinely uneasy.

"I have a bad feeling about this."

I followed her gaze to the entrance.

The front doors were already standing open.

As if someone inside had been expecting us.

The moment we stepped across the threshold, every speaker in the building crackled to life. A calm, emotionless voice echoed through the empty halls.

"All agents wishing to speak with the angel may proceed to the fifth floor."

The voice fell silent for a moment.

"Good luck."

The speakers clicked off. I frowned.

"...Good luck?"

Lucy didn't answer.

"Isn't it just a matter of taking the stairs to the fifth floor?"

"It would be," she said quietly, "if reality still worked."

We reached the first stairwell, only to find that the staircase ended at a single hallway. There was no second flight, no way to continue upward. Instead, another staircase waited at the opposite end of the floor.

"So we have to cross every floor just to reach the next staircase?"

"Yes."

I stared at the building's layout.

"Who designed this place? This is the worst school I've ever seen."

Lucy glanced at the walls.

"They didn't."

"What?"

She rested a hand against the cold concrete.

"The building wasn't always like this. Angels distort reality simply by existing. Space bends around them. Hallways move. Rooms change places. Distances stop making sense."

"So..."

"This school is trying to become something else."

I looked down the endless corridor as the lights overhead buzzed weakly and the air carried a faint smell of sulfur. Lucy's expression had changed into something I hadn't seen before.

"The first floor."

I blinked.

"What?"

She pointed ahead.

The first floor was silent.

Not empty—silent.

The kind of silence that made every footstep feel like a mistake. Rows of rusted lockers stretched far beyond where they should have, vanishing into darkness that swallowed the ends of the hallway, while every classroom door hung open just enough to reveal nothing but blackness inside.

I counted my breathing.

One.

Two.

Three.

Something else breathed back.

Lucy raised a hand, silently telling me to stop.

"You hear it?" I whispered.

She nodded.

"Don't run."

The lights flickered.

When they came back, someone was standing at the far end of the corridor.

No.

Something.

From a distance she looked like a woman, but she was impossibly tall, her head nearly brushing the ceiling. Gray skin stretched tightly over unnaturally long limbs, and both arms extended straight out to either side, forming a grotesque cross that reached from wall to wall. Her elbows bent the wrong way, and her fingers scraped against the lockers with a metallic screech.

Then I noticed the uniform—a black tactical jacket just like Lucy's.

Across the chest was a faded patch:

HELL RETRIEVAL TEAM 1.

"...That was a person," I whispered.

Lucy never took her eyes off it. "Was."

The Long Lady's neck twisted a full one hundred and eighty degrees until she was staring directly at us. Crack. Crack. Crack. Every joint in her body snapped into place.

Then she smiled.

She didn't run. She unfolded. Her arms slammed into the walls as she lurched forward, dragging herself down the hallway with horrifying speed while lockers crumpled inward beneath those impossibly long limbs.

"Move!" Lucy shouted.

We sprinted as metal screamed behind us. I looked over my shoulder.

Big mistake.

One of her hands stretched impossibly far, fingers lengthening like spider legs as they reached for my back.

Lucy fired once.

The infernal round punched through the creature's shoulder. Instead of blood, dozens of human mouths opened inside the wound. They all screamed at once.

The Long Lady collapsed, convulsing violently.

"Keep running!" Lucy shouted.

We reached the stairwell and slammed the door shut behind us. The screaming stopped so abruptly that the silence felt heavier than the noise had.

Lucy didn't even wait to catch her breath before climbing.

"That won't hold it."

The second floor smelled rotten—not like decay, but wet meat. The hallway floor squished beneath our boots.

Then we heard crying.

Not one person.

Hundreds.

The sound echoed from around the corner.

Slowly, something stepped into view.

It was nearly twelve feet tall, not because it had grown, but because bodies had been fused together.

Dozens of torsos twisted into one towering pillar of flesh. Arms protruded in every direction, grabbing blindly through the air. Faces were embedded throughout its body, each frozen in absolute terror. Some begged. Some laughed. Some were still screaming.

Every face wore a HELL badge.

Every face belonged to someone who had come here before us.

"Oh..."

My stomach lurched.

"They're still alive."

Lucy didn't answer.

The body totem took one enormous step. The hallway shook. A dozen arms slammed into the walls, crushing concrete like paper.

Then every face looked at us simultaneously.

"Help us."

"Please."

"It hurts."

"Kill me."

"Don't leave us."

The voices overlapped until they became one deafening roar.

The creature charged.

Its dozens of arms reached forward like a tidal wave. One grabbed a locker and ripped it from the wall. Another punched straight through concrete. A third nearly caught my shoulder.

We ducked beneath a sweeping arm as it shattered the ceiling behind us. Chunks of concrete rained down.

"Stairs!" Lucy yelled.

The totem slammed both arms into the hallway. The impact split the floor behind us.

We threw ourselves through the stairwell door just before another arm punched through it, fingers clawing wildly for us.

By the time we reached the third floor, neither of us was speaking anymore.

The hallway was filled with students.

At least...

They looked like students.

Heads hung low. School uniforms. Backpacks.

Every one of them stood perfectly still, facing away from us.

I counted nearly fifty.

None of them moved.

"They aren't real..." I whispered.

Lucy slowly shook her head.

"No."

One of them turned.

Its jaw was gone. Its eyes were milky white.

Then another turned.

And another.

Every face was rotting. Every uniform had dried blood covering it. Every chest carried the insignia of a different retrieval team beneath torn clothing.

Not students.

Agents.

All of them.

Their mouths opened together.

Then they began walking toward us.

Slowly.

Hundreds of footsteps echoed through the hallway.

Then they started running.

The entire hallway erupted. Dozens of rotting agents charged at us, their boots pounding against the tile with enough force to shake the floor. Their bodies were broken, jaws hanging loose, bones jutting through torn uniforms, yet they moved with terrifying speed.

"The stairs!" Lucy shouted.

We sprinted.

Something cold wrapped around my ankle.

I hit the ground hard.

A decomposed agent had crawled out from beneath a row of lockers, its fingers digging into my leg with impossible strength. Half its face had been ripped away, revealing yellowed teeth beneath rotting flesh. The faded patch on its chest read RETRIEVAL TEAM 3.

Its mouth opened.

"Don't... leave..."

I drove my boot into its face. The skull caved in with a sickening crack, and its grip loosened just enough for me to scramble free.

Lucy spun, raising her revolver.

Three deafening shots echoed through the hallway.

Each blessed round punched through a zombie's forehead, reducing the creature to ash before it even hit the ground.

I emptied five rounds of my own into the horde, buying us a few precious seconds.

We dove through the stairwell door.

Lucy slammed it shut.

Something heavy crashed into the other side.

Then another.

The metal door bent inward with every impact.

We didn't wait to see if it would hold.

Halfway up the stairs, Lucy stumbled.

A violent cough escaped her lips.

Dark red blood splattered across the concrete steps.

I grabbed her before she could fall.

"What the hell is happening to you?"

She wiped the blood from her mouth like it was nothing.

"The blessed rounds."

Another cough escaped her.

"They're blessed by Heaven."

Realization hit me.

"And you're..."

She gave a weak smile.

"A demon."

"You've been shooting yourself with Heaven's power this entire time."

"They hurt," she admitted. She pushed herself upright. "But they hurt angels more."

I stared back down the staircase.

"Those things..."

"They were the retrieval teams."

Lucy nodded.

Every failed team. Every soul trapped here.

She turned and started climbing again.

"We need to keep moving."

I followed her up the stairs.

The fourth-floor door creaked open.

Darkness greeted us. Not ordinary darkness. This floor had no light at all. Outside, the sun was still setting.

Inside... night had already fallen.

Even our flashlights struggled. Their beams reached only a few feet before being swallowed whole. Every sound seemed muffled—our footsteps, our breathing, even the clicking of Lucy's revolver sounded distant.

"This isn't normal," I whispered.

"No," Lucy replied quietly.

We moved slowly, staying close enough that our shoulders almost touched. Then I saw someone standing at the end of the hallway.

"...Lucy."

"I see them."

As we approached, my heart stopped.

It was me.

Almost.

My face. My clothes. My height. But wrong.

Far too many eyes covered my face, blinking independently. Some were stitched into my cheeks. Others lined my neck. They all stared at me.

Beside it stood another figure.

Lucy.

Except her mouth stretched from ear to ear, packed with row after row of jagged teeth that clicked together like broken glass.

More figures stepped from the darkness. Dozens. Each one looked like us, each one twisted differently. Some had extra limbs. Others bent backward. Some had no skin at all.

They weren't monsters pretending to be us. They looked like versions of us that had been assembled from someone else's nightmares.

My double took a shaky step forward. Its countless eyes filled with tears.

When it spoke, it sounded exactly like my voice.

"Please..."

Another step.

"...Please kill me."

Behind it, Lucy's double smiled with hundreds of teeth.

Then every copy looked up in perfect unison.

And then we started running.

By the time we reached the stairwell landing, I was breathing harder than I should have been. I glanced back through the stairwell window.

The fourth floor was gone.

Not hidden.

Gone.

Beyond the glass wasn't another hallway anymore, but an endless stretch of pale sky filled with slow-moving clouds. For a split second, I thought I saw wings drifting somewhere inside them.

Then the view snapped back to cracked concrete.

"...Lucy."

"I know."

She didn't even look.

"The angel's presence is getting stronger," she said as we kept climbing. "Reality is starting to lose the argument."

"What does that mean?"

"It means this building is forgetting it's a building."

The stairwell groaned around us. A door we had just come through was suddenly twenty feet farther away. The steps beneath my boots shifted with a grinding sound, rearranging themselves as if the school was quietly rebuilding itself around us.

"We need to reach the fifth floor before there isn't a fifth floor anymore."

We ran.

The staircase groaned beneath our feet as the steps behind us began to crumble away, swallowed by an endless black void. Every landing we crossed stretched farther than the last, the distance warping as if the school itself was trying to keep us from reaching the top.

Just as the final flight started to collapse, Lucy slammed into the fifth-floor door and threw it open.

We stumbled through.

Silence.

The screaming was gone. The shaking stopped. The air was still.

After everything we'd fought through, the fifth floor felt impossibly... normal.

Rows of clean lockers lined the hallway. The fluorescent lights hummed softly overhead. Not a single drop of blood stained the floor.

It was the calm that bothered me most.

Then, somewhere down the hall—

A classroom door creaked open. Inside, it was late afternoon. Warm sunlight drifted through the windows, dust floating lazily in its glow. Outside the classroom, the hallway remained trapped in the dead of night. 

Someone stood alone beside the window.

For a moment, my mind refused to accept what my eyes were seeing.

A girl.

Red hair.

Freckles.

Hazel eyes.

She couldn't have been older than sixteen.

White feathers drifted lazily through the silent classroom.

Eight enormous wings rested behind her, each one so vast they should have torn through the walls, yet reality simply bent around them. Smaller wings blossomed from her shoulders, elbows, wrists, even the backs of her hands, as though Heaven itself had forgotten how many she was meant to have.

She looked...

Beautiful.

Then I noticed the scars.

Thin silver rings circled both wrists.

Another encircled her neck.

Two more rested above her knees.

Perfect.

Unbroken.

Not scars left by wounds...

But by absence.

The exact places...

The Florida River Monster had torn her apart.

My lungs forgot how to breathe.

The reason I'd spent years hunting monsters.

The reason Hell had found me worthy of becoming one of its agents.

The reason I'd crossed lines no human being should ever cross.

Was standing only a few feet away.

Looking at me.

The world dissolved into a dull ringing as my fingers went numb. The revolver slipped from my hand, crashing against the classroom floor with a deafening clang.

She didn't flinch at the sound.

She simply turned toward me.

Then...

She smiled.

Not the serene smile I'd imagined angels wore.

Not some divine expression beyond human understanding. 

Just... Her smile.

The one that used to make me laugh when we skipped class together. 

The one I'd spent years trying to remember.

The one she'd worn on the walk to school that morning.

Before she was taken from me.

"...Hey, Sister."

Part 1 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/ocGLoQKhiy

Part 2 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/Yn30Y1lKs2

Nobody meant to hire Kevin.

That feels important to say upfront.

There wasn’t a formal process. No interview. No job advert. No DBS check, which Linda did suggest, until Kevin wrote I AM LITERALLY DEAD across the communal noticeboard and everyone agreed the paperwork might be difficult.

It happened during an emergency residents’ meeting in the lobby.

We’d called it after the smart security system tried to turn the entire building into “valued residents,” which is corporate language for “possessed, but with better branding.”

The system had been unplugged, smashed with a frying pan, removed from the wall, and placed in the outside bin with a handwritten sign taped to it that said:

DO NOT RECYCLE. CONTAINS ATTITUDE.

Everyone was shaken.

Linda brought printed agendas.

Dave brought a camping chair.

Flat 5 brought biscuits, presumably as part of his ongoing redemption arc after the tiny spoon incident.

Kevin attended as black mould on the far wall.

The mould slowly formed words whenever he wanted to speak, which was unsettling, but still somehow less annoying than Teams.

Linda cleared her throat.

“Item one: building safety.”

The mould shifted.

BINS FIRST.

Linda sighed.

“Bins are item four.”

BINS ARE NEVER ITEM FOUR.

“Kevin, please respect the agenda.”

The mould rippled.

THE AGENDA FEARS TRUTH.

That was basically the tone of the whole meeting.

We discussed the security system.

We discussed the communal washing machine.

We discussed the hallway carpet, which Kevin described as “a crime scene wearing a cardigan.”

Then Flat 3 said the sentence that ruined everything.

“To be fair, Kevin has been more useful than the actual building manager.”

Linda frowned.

“We don’t have a building manager.”

“Exactly,” said Flat 3.

Kevin’s mould went very still.

Then it slowly formed two words.

SAY MORE.

I said, “No. Absolutely not.”

Kevin wrote:

LET DEMOCRACY COOK.

Flat 5 said, “He did find my parcels.”

Dave said, “And he told me my oven was on.”

Linda said, “He also called you ‘bin raccoon’ for four days.”

Dave nodded.

“Yeah, but the oven was on.”

Within ten minutes, they had voted Kevin in as unofficial building manager.

I voted against.

Kevin wrote:

JON HATES WORKING CLASS GHOSTS.

“I never said that.”

HE IMPLIES IT.

“I do not.”

PRIVATE SCHOOL ENERGY.

“I went to a normal school.”

SPIRITUAL PRIVATE SCHOOL ENERGY.

And that was that.

Kevin was appointed.

No contract.

No salary.

No references.

Just one dead idiot, one mouldy wall, and a building full of people who had apparently learned nothing from the last time we let technology, ghosts, or Dave make decisions.

Kevin lasted fourteen minutes as building manager before he wrote his first official warning in blood.

Not human blood.

Ketchup.

He claimed it was “more accessible.”

The warning was taped to the communal washing machine and read:

TO THE PERSON WHO LEFT WET JEANS IN HERE FOR SIX HOURS: YOUR DENIM HAS ENTERED THE AFTERLIFE. COLLECT IT FROM THE ROOF.

Underneath, in smaller letters, he had added:

KIND REGARDS,

KEVIN

BUILDING MANAGER / DECEASED

Linda said the tone was unprofessional.

Kevin replied by rearranging the noticeboard letters into:

LINDA FEARS INNOVATION.

Dave said, “Wasn’t me.”

Nobody had accused Dave.

That was Kevin’s first morning in charge.

By lunch, Flat 5’s missing parcels had been found inside the ceiling.

By two, the lift had started refusing to go to any floor unless residents said “please.”

By three, Kevin had installed a suggestion box that whispered “boring” every time someone posted a complaint.

And by half past four, the actual property management company sent an email saying they were coming to inspect the building.

Kevin read it aloud through the intercom.

Then, for the first time since I’d known him, he went quiet.

A message appeared on every phone in the building.

oh no

I typed back:

What?

Three dots appeared.

Then disappeared.

Then appeared again.

Finally, Kevin replied:

landlords

Technically, they weren’t landlords.

They were “Oakmere Residential Solutions,” which sounded like the kind of company that would charge £82 to ignore an email.

According to their website, they specialised in “modern residential wellbeing, compliance-led living environments, and positive community outcomes.”

According to Kevin, they specialised in:

VAMPIRE ADMIN.

The inspection was booked for Wednesday at 10 a.m.

Kevin spent Tuesday trying to become professional.

This was worse than the haunting.

At 8 a.m., every resident received a printed memo under their door.

Nobody owned a printer.

That was concern one.

Mine read:

Dear Resident,

As your Building Manager, I wish to reassure you that Wednesday’s inspection will be handled with dignity, competence, and minimal screaming.

Please ensure all communal areas are tidy, all bins are correctly sorted, and Dave does not speak unless spoken to.

Kind regards,

Kevin

Building Manager / Deceased

Underneath, in smaller text, he’d added:

P.S. Jon, your milk is off. You’re welcome.

It was.

I hate that he was useful.

By lunchtime, Kevin had updated the noticeboard.

It now had categories.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

BIN TRUTH

PARCEL CRIMES

DAVE WATCH

Dave objected to that one.

“This is discrimination.”

The noticeboard letters slid into place.

WAS IT YOU THOUGH?

Dave paused.

“Sometimes.”

Kevin also created a new WhatsApp group called:

Riverside Court Official Business / Kevin Era

The group icon was a blurry photo of the hallway carpet with devil horns drawn on it.

His first message was:

morning legends

His second message was:

professionalism begins now

His third message was:

dave stop breathing guilty

Dave replied:

Wasn’t me.

Kevin replied:

DAVE

Dave replied:

Sorry. Reflex.

At first, I’ll admit, the building improved.

The hallway light got fixed.

No electrician came. Kevin just bullied it into working.

The bins went out on time.

The lift stopped smelling like warm coins.

The communal washing machine no longer held people’s clothes hostage, because Kevin set it up so if you left washing in there too long, it would crawl out by itself and drag itself to your door.

That sounds horrible.

It was horrible.

But it worked.

Residents started praising him.

Linda, who had once tried to ban Kevin from the WhatsApp group for being “unverifiable,” added an item to the next meeting agenda:

Item 3: Appreciation for Kevin’s contributions, despite serious concerns around language.

Kevin replied:

item 4: linda learns banter

The problem was, Kevin began enjoying authority.

And Kevin with authority is like giving a toddler a chainsaw and a clipboard.

He started doing inspections.

Not normal inspections.

Ghost inspections.

You’d come home and find the words DUSTY VIBES written across your coffee table.

Or your fridge magnets rearranged into:

THIS CHEESE HAS SEEN TOO MUCH.

Or your bathroom mirror fogged with:

TOOTHPASTE CAP??????

He introduced “haunting fines.”

The fines were not money.

They were worse.

If you slammed the front door too loudly, your Spotify would only play sea shanties for an hour.

If you left a parcel in the lobby too long, it would follow you upstairs.

If you failed to separate recycling, Kevin would whisper “landfill boy” through your extractor fan while you tried to sleep.

Dave got hit hardest.

To be fair, Dave deserved most of it.

One morning, Kevin posted:

DAVE HAS PUT PIZZA BOX IN PAPER RECYCLING DESPITE GREASE. COURT IS IN SESSION.

Dave replied:

Wasn’t me.

Kevin replied:

DAVE I WATCHED YOU DO IT WHILE EATING THE PIZZA.

Dave replied:

Could have been anyone.

Kevin replied:

YOU SAID “THIS IS FUTURE DAVE’S PROBLEM” OUT LOUD.

Dave replied:

That does sound like me.

That night, every pizza advert on Dave’s phone changed to a photo of Kevin’s mould face with the words:

GREASY LITTLE LIAR.

By the end of the week, Kevin had a slogan.

It appeared on the noticeboard in permanent marker.

RIVERSIDE COURT: HAUNTED BUT FUNCTIONING

Honestly, morale had never been higher.

Then Gareth arrived.

Gareth was from Oakmere Residential Solutions.

He wore a navy suit, brown shoes, and the expression of a man who had once felt joy but outsourced it.

Linda met him in the lobby with her clipboard.

I was there because Kevin had messaged me privately that morning.

jon

I replied:

No.

not asked yet

Still no.

landlord inspection today

And?

need emotional support human

Ask Linda.

linda is powerful but brittle

Ask Dave.

dave would confess to crimes that haven’t happened

Ask Flat 3.

flat 3 scares me romantically

So I went downstairs.

Gareth stood in the lobby looking around like the building had personally disappointed him.

Linda said, “Welcome to Riverside Court.”

Gareth smiled.

It didn’t reach his eyes.

It barely reached his mouth.

“I’m here to assess the suitability of current resident-led management practices.”

Kevin wrote on the noticeboard behind him:

NARC.

I stepped in front of it.

Gareth opened a tablet.

“According to our records, there have been irregular reports from this building.”

Linda stiffened.

“What sort of reports?”

“Unauthorised communications. Inexplicable maintenance resolutions. Ketchup-based notices.”

Kevin wrote:

SUSTAINABLE INK.

Gareth continued, “Also several mentions of a deceased individual performing operational duties.”

Linda smiled tightly.

“Kevin is more of a volunteer.”

The noticeboard letters shifted.

I PREFER COMMUNITY-BASED ICON.

Gareth looked at the noticeboard.

His smile twitched.

“Is that him?”

Nobody spoke.

Dave appeared at the top of the stairs in slippers and said, “Wasn’t me.”

Gareth looked up.

“Excuse me?”

Dave pointed vaguely at the air.

“Just covering myself.”

The noticeboard wrote:

GUILTY AURA.

Gareth tapped his tablet.

“This building is not authorised for post-life personnel.”

Kevin wrote:

RUDE.

Gareth ignored him.

“All residential support staff must be registered, trained, insured, and, preferably, alive.”

Kevin wrote:

AGEIST.

“That is not ageism,” said Gareth.

LIFESYSTEMIST.

“That is not a word.”

NEITHER IS OAKMERE BUT HERE WE ARE.

Linda put her fingers to her temples.

“Kevin, please.”

Gareth’s tablet beeped.

Then it beeped again.

Then again.

He frowned.

“Interesting.”

I hate when people in suits say “interesting.”

It never means something is interesting.

It means something is about to cost money or become haunted.

Gareth turned the tablet toward us.

The screen showed a floor plan of Riverside Court.

There were red dots all over it.

“Unusual energy signatures,” he said.

Kevin wrote:

I HAVE RANGE.

Gareth smiled properly for the first time.

I wish he hadn’t.

His teeth were too neat.

“Mr Kevin,” Gareth said, looking at the mould on the wall, “you are currently in breach of clause 14.3.”

Kevin wrote:

I NEVER SIGNED NOTHING.

Gareth nodded.

“Correct. Which makes you an unauthorised presence.”

The lobby light flickered.

Kevin wrote:

JON

I typed back:

What?

i don’t like his shoes

That is not useful.

brown shoes navy suit tells u everything

Gareth tapped his tablet again.

The main doors locked.

Not slammed.

Not dramatically.

Just clicked.

Polite.

Professional.

Final.

Linda looked at the doors.

“Why have those locked?”

Gareth said, “For safety.”

“Whose safety?”

“Stakeholder safety.”

Kevin wrote:

DANGER WORDS.

Gareth opened his briefcase.

Inside was not paperwork.

Well.

Not just paperwork.

There were folders, a silver pen, a little black device shaped like a smoke alarm, and a jar of something grey that moved like it was breathing.

Flat 3 came out of her flat holding a mug.

“Why are we all in the lobby?”

Gareth looked at her.

“Resident participation is appreciated.”

Flat 3 looked him up and down.

“I don’t participate before coffee.”

Kevin wrote:

ROMANTICALLY TERRIFYING.

Gareth placed the black device on the lobby table.

It unfolded.

Not mechanically.

Organically.

Like a spider made of corporate wellness policy.

Linda whispered, “What is that?”

Gareth said, “A Resident Harmony Assessor.”

The device blinked.

A smooth voice came from it.

“Good morning, residents. Your environment has been selected for behavioural optimisation.”

Everyone looked at me.

I said, “Do not look at me like I caused this.”

Dave said, “Wasn’t me.”

Kevin wrote:

FOR ONCE.

The little device hummed.

“Scanning.”

The air changed.

It went cold, but not Kevin cold.

Kevin cold felt like opening a fridge at midnight while sad.

This was different.

Sterile.

Office cold.

The kind of cold you get in meeting rooms where everyone pretends biscuits are morale.

The voice said:

“Non-compliant emotional residues detected.”

Kevin wrote:

THAT’S DAVE.

“Unregistered haunting detected.”

Kevin wrote:

THAT’S ME BABES.

“Community disorder detected.”

Kevin wrote:

THAT’S ALSO DAVE.

Dave sighed.

“Fair.”

Gareth took out a form and handed it to Linda.

“Until the issue is resolved, Oakmere Residential Solutions will be assuming direct control of building management.”

Linda stared at the form.

“Direct control?”

“For resident wellbeing.”

The noticeboard letters rattled.

Kevin wrote:

HE MEANS TAKEOVER.

Gareth smiled.

“We prefer the term support escalation.”

The walls pulsed.

Just once.

Like the building had a heartbeat.

Then every notice in the lobby changed.

Kevin’s ketchup warning peeled itself from the washing machine door and folded into a neat square.

The DAVE WATCH section vanished.

The slogan HAUNTED BUT FUNCTIONING became:

RIVERSIDE COURT: COMPLIANT, CALM, CONNECTED.

Flat 5 whispered, “That’s worse.”

The Resident Harmony Assessor beeped.

“Please enjoy your improved living experience.”

The lift doors opened by themselves.

Inside, soft instrumental music played.

Not scary music.

Worse.

Reception music.

Kevin wrote one word on the noticeboard.

NOPE.

Then the mould vanished.

Completely.

For a second, none of us moved.

I stared at the empty wall.

“Kevin?”

No reply.

“Kevin?”

Nothing.

Gareth put the grey jar back in his briefcase.

Linda saw it.

“What did you do?”

Gareth smiled.

“Removed an unlicensed operational influence.”

Flat 3 stepped forward.

“If you’ve put him in that jar, I’m going to put you in the recycling.”

Gareth’s smile didn’t move.

“Threats against staff are a violation of your tenancy agreement.”

Flat 3 raised her mug.

“So is this if I throw it hard enough?”

The Harmony Assessor beeped.

“Resident aggression detected. Initiating calming measure.”

Flat 3 froze.

Her expression changed.

Her shoulders dropped.

She smiled.

Softly.

Too softly.

“I apologise,” she said.

The lobby went silent.

Flat 3 never apologised.

Not even when she reversed into Dave’s bike and said, “It was parked with loser energy.”

Linda whispered, “What have you done to her?”

Gareth said, “Reduced friction.”

The device beeped again.

“Resident Dave. Chronic denial behaviour detected.”

Dave opened his mouth.

Then closed it.

Then opened it again.

His eyes filled with panic.

“I…” he said.

We all waited.

Dave trembled.

Then whispered, “It was me.”

The whole lobby gasped.

Dave clapped both hands over his mouth.

The device said:

“Correction successful.”

Gareth looked pleased.

“See? Better already.”

It got worse very quickly.

By midday, the building was clean.

Too clean.

The hallway carpet no longer looked like a crime scene wearing a cardigan.

It looked new.

Grey.

Flat.

Soulless.

The lift smelled like lavender and defeat.

The bins were lined up perfectly.

The washing machine sent push notifications.

Nobody had signed up for push notifications.

Linda received one that said:

Your laundry tone has been rated: passive-aggressive. Please adjust.

Dave received one every eleven minutes that said:

Have you considered accountability?

Flat 5’s parcels started arriving labelled:

RESIDENT 5: CONSUMER GOODS RECEIVED. EMOTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE LOW.

He looked genuinely hurt.

“That was my new tiny spoon rack.”

Nobody called him tiny spoon thief.

Nobody made fun of him.

Nobody laughed.

That was the first sign the building was dying.

I went back to my flat and tried to message Kevin.

Nothing.

No three dots.

No mould.

No fridge magnets.

No sarcastic whisper through the extractor fan.

At 3:12 p.m., my phone buzzed.

For one beautiful second, I thought it was him.

It wasn’t.

It was the Oakmere Resident Portal.

I had never downloaded it.

The message said:

Hello Jon. Your resident mood is currently: resistant. Please report to the lobby for support.

I threw my phone onto the sofa.

It buzzed again.

Avoidance noted.

Then my toaster clicked.

I turned slowly.

I had unplugged it after Derek.

I had never plugged it back in.

The toaster lowered by itself.

Nothing inside it.

No bread.

Just two empty slots glowing red.

A tiny voice came from inside.

Very faint.

Very annoyed.

“jon.”

I dropped to my knees.

“Kevin?”

“yeah.”

His voice sounded far away.

Like he was speaking from inside a crisp packet at the bottom of a well.

“Where are you?”

“jar.”

“The grey jar?”

“yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“no. smells like printer ink and divorce.”

I grabbed the toaster.

“How do we get you out?”

There was a pause.

Then Kevin said:

“need chaos.”

I blinked.

“What?”

“building too compliant. can’t move through it. no mess. no noise. no petty crimes. i’m starving.”

“You feed on chaos?”

“not feed. more like emotionally moisturise.”

“That is disgusting.”

“says anxious milk boy.”

I closed my eyes.

This was insane.

But it also made sense.

Kevin had always been strongest around disorder.

Bins. Parcels. Dave.

Especially Dave.

“What kind of chaos?”

“community level.”

“Be specific.”

“wet washing. cardboard. passive aggression. someone saying wasn’t me. linda using caps. flat 5 spoon shame. hallway drama. all of it.”

“You want us to make the building annoying again?”

Kevin’s tiny toaster voice crackled.

“jon. i need u to make it unbearable.”

For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what to do.

I went to Linda first.

She was in her flat, sitting at her dining table, staring at a printed Oakmere leaflet titled:

CALM COMMUNITIES: A GUIDE TO FRICTIONLESS LIVING.

She looked pale.

“They’ve rewritten the agenda,” she whispered.

I looked down.

Every item said:

Item 1: Agreement.

There were twelve items.

All the same.

Linda’s hands shook.

“I tried to change it, but the pen wouldn’t let me.”

I said, “Kevin’s alive.”

“He’s dead.”

“You know what I mean.”

Her eyes sharpened.

“Where is he?”

“Jar.”

Linda stood up.

“What do we need?”

“Chaos.”

She inhaled.

Then something ancient and terrifying woke behind her eyes.

“Capital letters?”

“All of them.”

Linda picked up her phone.

At 3:27 p.m., the Residents WhatsApp group received a message.

From Linda.

GOOD AFTERNOON ALL. THIS IS NOW AN EMERGENCY. PLEASE IGNORE ALL OAKMERE COMMUNICATIONS. ALSO, WHOEVER PUT A NON-FLATTENED BOX IN THE RECYCLING LAST MONTH, I AM NO LONGER PRETENDING I DON’T KNOW.

Dave replied instantly.

Wasn’t me.

The lights flickered.

Just a little.

Linda smiled.

“Again.”

Dave replied:

Wasn’t me.

The hallway light buzzed.

Somewhere in the walls, very faintly, I heard Kevin whisper:

“that’s my boy.”

We went door to door.

Flat 3 was still smiling calmly in a way that made me want to check for wires.

Linda stood in front of her and said, “Oakmere says everyone should be respectful.”

Flat 3 blinked.

Linda continued, “Also, Gareth said your mug collection lacks cohesion.”

Flat 3’s smile twitched.

“He said what?”

“He implied it had no visual strategy.”

Flat 3’s eyes cleared.

“That little suit goblin.”

The hallway light flickered harder.

Flat 5 was next.

He was organising tiny spoons in perfect size order.

It was deeply upsetting.

I said, “Oakmere labelled your spoon rack emotionally insignificant.”

Flat 5 went still.

“They said that?”

Linda nodded gravely.

“On an official parcel.”

Flat 5 picked up the smallest spoon.

His voice trembled.

“This one is from Bruges.”

The lights buzzed.

Dave, who was getting into the spirit of things, shouted from the hall, “Wasn’t me!”

Kevin’s voice whispered through the radiator:

“strong start.”

Within twenty minutes, Riverside Court became beautiful again.

By which I mean terrible.

Linda sent six aggressive messages in all caps.

Dave denied seven things, including one thing that had not happened and one thing that was physically impossible.

Flat 3 put a mug down without a coaster.

Flat 5 left three tiny spoons in the lobby “as a statement.”

Someone put a wet towel in the communal washing machine and walked away.

I dragged an unflattened cardboard box into the recycling area and whispered, “Forgive me.”

The building woke up.

Not the Oakmere version.

The real version.

The pipes knocked.

The lift groaned.

The hallway carpet regained a stain nobody could identify but everyone recognised emotionally.

The noticeboard flickered.

One letter appeared.

Then another.

Then another.

LADS

I almost cried.

Linda stepped forward.

“Kevin?”

The letters shifted.

I AM SO MOISTURISED.

Linda stepped back.

“Awful. But welcome back.”

Then the Resident Harmony Assessor screamed.

Not loudly.

Professionally.

A polite alarm rang through the building.

“Disorder detected. Disorder detected. Disorder detected.”

Gareth appeared at the top of the stairs, holding the grey jar.

His face was still smiling.

His eyes were not.

“What have you done?”

Flat 3 raised her mug.

“Restored local culture.”

The Oakmere device skittered out from the lobby.

It had grown legs.

Too many legs.

Tiny chrome legs with little rubber ends so it wouldn’t scratch the flooring.

That somehow made it worse.

The voice said:

“Community friction has exceeded acceptable levels.”

Kevin wrote on the noticeboard:

GOOD.

Gareth held up the jar.

Inside, grey mist slammed against the glass.

The letters on the noticeboard trembled.

jon

I stepped forward.

“Yeah?”

need jar broke

Gareth tightened his grip.

“I wouldn’t advise that.”

I said, “You trapped our ghost building manager in a jar.”

“He was unregistered.”

“He fixed the lift.”

“He breached policy.”

“He stopped Dave burning his flat down.”

Dave raised a hand.

“Twice.”

Gareth looked at Dave.

Dave whispered, “It was me.”

Then he looked horrified at himself.

The Assessor beeped.

“Correction unstable.”

Kevin’s letters appeared fast.

CHAOS NOW

Linda understood immediately.

She turned to the residents.

“Everyone,” she said, with the calm authority of a woman who had waited her whole life for a crisis that required admin and pettiness at the same time, “be as irritating as possible.”

The building erupted.

Dave shouted, “Wasn’t me!” over and over like a guilty machine gun.

Flat 3 started listing every fault she’d ever found in the building, from damp patches to “the emotional height of the skirting boards.”

Flat 5 shook his tiny spoons like maracas.

Linda read aloud from a three-year archive of unanswered maintenance complaints.

I opened the recycling bin and put in the most unflattened cardboard box I could find.

The Assessor spun in circles.

“Non-compliance.”

“Mess detected.”

“Tone issue.”

“Resident dissatisfaction.”

“Bin ambiguity.”

The walls shook.

The jar in Gareth’s hand cracked.

Gareth hissed.

Not shouted.

Hissed.

His mouth opened too wide.

For one second, the navy suit flickered.

Underneath it, something grey and thin and full of paperwork looked back at us.

I knew it.

Corporate demon.

They always have brown shoes.

Gareth clutched the jar to his chest.

“You people are impossible.”

Kevin wrote:

COMMUNITY BABY.

The jar cracked again.

Gareth lunged for the lobby doors.

Flat 3 tripped him with a mop.

Linda said, “Health and safety violation.”

Flat 3 said, “Worth it.”

Gareth hit the floor.

The jar rolled across the lobby.

Everything slowed down.

The jar rolled past Dave.

Dave reached for it.

Missed.

“Wasn’t me!”

It rolled past Flat 5.

He tried to stop it with a tiny spoon.

For some reason.

It did not work.

Finally, it rolled to my feet.

Inside the jar, the grey mist formed a face.

Kevin’s face.

Sort of.

It looked like a sad potato drawn by a child.

He mouthed one word.

“smash.”

So I did.

I grabbed the jar and threw it at the wall.

It shattered.

The sound was horrible.

Like glass breaking inside a voicemail.

Grey mist exploded through the lobby.

The lights went out.

The Assessor screamed.

Gareth screamed.

Dave screamed because everyone else was screaming and he hates missing out.

Then Kevin arrived.

Not as mould.

Not as fridge magnets.

Not as a whisper through a toaster.

As a full shape.

For the first time, I saw him properly.

He was translucent.

Scruffy.

About thirty.

Wearing what looked like a tracksuit top from 2008 and one trainer.

His hair floated slightly upward, like he was underwater or had made several poor choices with static electricity.

He looked around the lobby.

Then down at himself.

Then at us.

“oh sick,” he said. “legs.”

The Assessor leapt at him.

Kevin screamed, “NOPE,” and threw himself sideways through the wall.

The Assessor smashed into the noticeboard.

Linda yelled, “Kevin, do something!”

His head poked back through the wall.

“i panicked.”

“You are the building manager!”

“unofficial!”

Gareth stood slowly.

His suit was torn.

The thing underneath did not fit properly inside him anymore.

His neck stretched.

His fingers lengthened.

His smile split wider.

“Resident disorder will be corrected,” he said.

Kevin looked at him.

Then at us.

Then at the noticeboard.

His face changed.

For one tiny second, he looked almost serious.

“not my residents.”

Flat 3 whispered, “That was actually quite nice.”

Kevin pointed at her.

“don’t make it weird.”

Then he launched himself at Gareth.

Not gracefully.

Not heroically.

He flew across the lobby like a carrier bag in a storm.

They collided.

The lights burst.

The Assessor spun.

The lift doors opened and closed repeatedly, dinging like an anxious microwave.

Gareth clawed at Kevin.

Kevin bit him.

I don’t know if ghosts can bite demons.

Apparently, yes.

Gareth shrieked.

Kevin shouted, “TASTES LIKE EMAIL!”

Linda grabbed the Assessor.

It tried to crawl up her arm.

She slammed it onto the table.

“Resident satisfaction this,” she snapped, and hit it with her clipboard.

Flat 3 hit it with the frying pan.

Dave hit it with his camping chair.

Flat 5 stabbed it with a tiny spoon.

That actually seemed to hurt it.

Flat 5 gasped.

“I knew these were practical.”

The Assessor cracked.

The lobby speaker came on by itself.

The corporate voice stuttered.

“Compliance… compliance… compliance…”

Kevin shoved Gareth backward.

“jon!”

“What?”

“router!”

Of course.

It was always the router.

I ran to the maintenance cupboard.

The door was locked.

“Linda!”

She threw me the keys without looking.

There were nine of them.

Of course there were.

“Which one?”

“Blue tag!”

“They’re all blue tags!”

“That’s because blue is calming!”

“Linda!”

Behind me, Gareth roared.

Kevin shouted, “take ur time mate no rush just wrestling linkedin satan.”

I tried the first key.

No.

Second.

No.

Third.

The hallway lights turned red.

Fourth.

No.

Flat 3 yelled, “Jon!”

Fifth.

No.

Dave screamed, “Wasn’t me!”

Sixth.

The lock clicked.

I yanked the cupboard open.

Inside was the building router.

Black.

Blinking.

Smug.

Next to it, Oakmere had installed a small silver box labelled:

HARMONY HUB.

I hated it immediately.

The lobby shook.

Kevin yelled, “UNPLUG THE SHINY WANKER!”

I unplugged it.

Nothing happened.

The silver box blinked.

A tiny message appeared on its screen.

ARE YOU SURE?

I said, “Yes.”

It blinked again.

PLEASE COMPLETE EXIT SURVEY.

I ripped the cable out of the wall.

The building went silent.

Gareth froze.

The Assessor collapsed.

The lift dinged one final, pathetic ding.

Then Gareth folded in on himself.

Not like the last demon.

This one folded neatly.

Professionally.

Like a suit being packed for a business trip to hell.

When it was over, all that remained was his tie, his tablet, and one brown shoe.

Kevin floated above the lobby floor, breathing heavily even though he did not breathe.

Linda looked at the brown shoe.

“I knew those were wrong.”

Kevin nodded.

“navy suit. brown shoes. demon behaviour.”

Nobody argued.

Oakmere emailed us twenty minutes later.

The subject line was:

Inspection Outcome

The body read:

Dear Residents,

Following today’s visit, Oakmere Residential Solutions has determined that Riverside Court is currently unsuitable for service escalation due to excessive community personality.

Please continue existing arrangements until further notice.

Kind regards,

Oakmere Residential Solutions

Underneath, Kevin had somehow added:

P.S. Gareth got folded lol

The next residents’ meeting was held that evening.

In person.

Obviously.

No apps.

No smart speakers.

No cloud-based anything.

Kevin attended in full ghost form this time, sitting cross-legged in mid-air above the suggestion box.

He looked very pleased with himself.

Linda read from the agenda.

“Item one: building safety.”

Kevin raised a transparent hand.

“bins first.”

Linda stared at him.

He stared back.

For once, she smiled.

“Fine. Bins first.”

Kevin whispered, “growth.”

We voted unanimously to keep Kevin as unofficial building manager.

I still voted against, but Kevin moved my hand while I was voting, so apparently it counted as unanimous.

Linda said we needed proper minutes.

Kevin said minutes were “time prison.”

Flat 5 asked whether tiny spoons could be stored in the communal kitchen.

Everyone said no.

Dave said, “Wasn’t me.”

No one knew what he was referring to.

By the end of the meeting, Kevin had written a new notice for the lobby.

This one was not in ketchup.

It was in black mould, which Linda said was “a step backward visually,” but we let him have it.

It read:

RIVERSIDE COURT: HAUNTED BUT FUNCTIONING

Underneath, in smaller letters:

OAKMERE CAN SUCK THE AFTERLIFE

Linda made him change that part.

Now it says:

OAKMERE IS NOT WELCOME WITHOUT AN APPOINTMENT

Which is less powerful, but more legally defensible.

Things have mostly gone back to normal.

The hallway carpet looks terrible again.

The washing machine is haunted, but fair.

The lift still demands manners, but now accepts “cheers” as a valid alternative to “please.”

Dave’s recycling compliance has improved by 41 percent, according to Kevin, who claims he can “sense grease through walls.”

Flat 5 has started a tiny spoon Instagram.

Flat 3 and Kevin have a strange friendship built entirely on mutual threats.

Linda has appointed herself Chair of the Kevin Oversight Committee.

Kevin has appointed himself Chair of the Linda Oversight Committee.

Neither committee has any members except them.

They meet every Thursday and argue through the noticeboard.

I was starting to think maybe, somehow, this could work.

Then yesterday, I received a letter.

Real paper.

White envelope.

No stamp.

No footsteps outside my door.

Just there.

Waiting.

Inside was an official-looking document.

At the top, in bold letters, it said:

OAKMERE RESIDENTIAL SOLUTIONS

NOTICE OF FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

I felt sick.

I read on.

Dear Resident,

We are pleased to inform you that Riverside Court has been selected for a pilot programme designed to enhance resident experience through full environmental integration, predictive behaviour mapping, and spiritually assisted management tools.

Works will begin Monday.

Temporary relocation may be required.

Please note: all existing informal, unauthorised, or deceased management arrangements will be terminated.

At the bottom, where a signature should have been, there was a symbol.

Not a name.

Not Oakmere’s logo.

A symbol.

Three interlocking circles around a little drawing of a key.

I took the letter downstairs.

Everyone else had received one too.

Linda was already in the lobby, holding hers with both hands.

Flat 3 looked furious.

Flat 5 looked nervous.

Dave looked guilty.

“Wasn’t me,” he said quietly.

Kevin hovered in front of the noticeboard.

For once, he didn’t make a joke.

The black mould behind him shifted slowly.

One word appeared.

Then another.

Then another.

THEY FOUND MANAGEMENT.

I looked at him.

“What does that mean?”

Kevin turned toward me.

For the first time since I’d known him, he looked properly scared.

“it means,” he said, “gareth had a boss.”

The lights flickered.

The lift dinged.

Somewhere deep inside the walls, a phone began to ring.

Not mine.

Not Linda’s.

Not anyone’s.

An old ringtone.

Tinny.

Patient.

Corporate.

Kevin stared at the maintenance cupboard.

The ringing continued.

Then the noticeboard letters began moving by themselves.

Not Kevin.

Something else.

They rearranged into a message.

GOOD EVENING, KEVIN.

Kevin whispered, “oh no.”

The letters shifted again.

YOUR PERFORMANCE REVIEW IS DUE.

And from somewhere inside the building, a polite voice added:

“Please bring biscuits.”

I started the medication because I was tired of waking up every day feeling like I was already drowning.

That’s the part people don’t talk about with depression, not the sadness, but the weight. The sheer heaviness of existing. Just lifting my head from the pillow felt like dragging stone out of mud.

My therapist called it treatment-resistant depressive disorder.

She said there was a new clinical option. “High success rate. Fast-acting. FDA fast-tracked. A real breakthrough.”

Breakthroughs always sound miraculous until you realize something had to be broken first.

The drug was called Solmiron.

Three pills a day.

Tiny white capsules with a faint metallic taste when they hit the tongue, like biting on foil.

The doctor told me not to look up the research because “the clinical language can be frightening if you’re not versed in immunogenetics.”

That should have been my first warning.

But when you’re drowning, you don’t argue about the color of the rope thrown your way.

The change was subtle, but unmistakable.

Mornings didn’t feel like war.

Breathing didn’t feel like force.

I could get up, shower, eat, exist.

For the first time in years, I laughed without it sounding brittle in my own ears.

I thought: So this is what normal people feel like.

I cried that night, out of relief.

I thought the story would end there. And God, how I wish it had.

My body started feeling lighter.

I don’t mean emotionally, I mean physically.

Walking up stairs no longer left me gasping. I wasn’t sore. My joints didn’t ache. I felt stronger, not metaphorically, I mean my muscles had mass I had not earned.

I hadn’t been to the gym in four years. I could barely manage a grocery bag.

And yet I was lifting my entire laundry basket one-handed.

I showed my doctor.

She smiled and wrote, “Improved metabolic efficiency noted. Expected.”

Expected?

Since when does antidepressant mean performance enhancement?

The hunger came.

Not ordinary hunger, primal, deep.
Like the body wasn’t asking, it was demanding.

I ate everything.
Not junk, protein. Dense food. Meats. Hard cheeses. Salts. Anything that felt like fuel.

And my teeth, God.
My teeth ached while I ate. A dull pressure. As if they were… adjusting.

The inside of my mouth felt unfamiliar. When I ran my tongue along my molars, the edges were flatter.

Not worn down.

Designed

Like grinding plates.

Something meant for crushing more than chewing.

I told myself I was being dramatic.

But when you’ve lived your whole life feeling like you don’t belong in your own skin, you notice when the skin starts belonging to something else.

The rash appeared.

Not on the outside, under the skin.

I could feel texture beneath the surface. Like sand grains embedded along my arms, ribs, spine. Except they moved. When I pressed my fingers to my forearm, something beneath the skin shifted away from the pressure. Like a school of fish scattering from touch.

I asked my doctor what the active ingredient was.

She said, “It’s easier if I show you.”

She showed me a plastinated cross-section of muscle tissue.

Human muscle.

Except it wasn’t purely human.

The fibers weren’t individual strands, they were woven. A mesh. Self-anchoring. Self-repairing. Self-optimizing.

“Think of it like this,” she said, tapping the display.

“We’re helping your body operate in its ideal state.”

Ideal.

Like my old body had been a mistake.

I don’t dream anymore.

When I sleep, it’s like the body just turns off and back on. No drifting, no imagery, no me.

The house is quiet, but my body isn’t.

I’ve woken up to find myself standing in the kitchen. Or sitting at the table, fingers drumming in rhythmic patterns I don’t remember learning. Or staring into the mirror, not at myself, but at my reflection as if it is the real one and I am the imitation.

I looked into my own eyes last night and didn’t recognize the focus behind them.

Not empty.

Not dull.

Calculating.

I asked my doctor if this medication has ever been used on animals.

She hesitated. The first real hesitation I’d seen from her.

“Not animals,” she said.

“Prototypes.”

Prototypes?

I asked her if the drug was rewriting my DNA.

She didn’t answer.

She didn’t have to.

The next day, the inside of my arm split open, not like a cut, like a seam.

And underneath, where my muscle should have been…

It wasn’t blood that came out.

It was white.

White fibers, braided like rope, tightening, pulling themselves back inward before I could touch them.

My body didn’t want to be examined.

My body knew I was trying to interfere.

Two Nights Ago

I tried to stop taking the pills.

My hands wouldn’t let me.

I don’t mean that metaphorically.

I sat there at the table and watched my own hand pick up the pill bottle. Open it. Place the pill on my tongue.

I was screaming inside my skull. But my body was calm.

Efficient.

Compliant.

Yesterday

I saw my doctor again.

I asked her when the transformation ends.

She smiled, that same clinical warmth, and said:

"When your body no longer produces sadness. Fear. Anger. Pain.
When suffering becomes biologically impossible."

I said, “So I’ll be happy?”

She said, “You’ll be cured.”

I replied, “And human?”

She didn’t answer.

Today

I looked up the company’s patent records.

I found the original clinical purpose for Solmiron.

It wasn’t created to treat depression.

It was created for shock troops.

Soldiers who:

• Feel no pain
• Require minimal rest
• Heal rapidly
• Operate without emotion
• Obey without hesitation

They weren’t fixing me.

They were converting me.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to write like myself. My emotions are fading. My memories feel catalogued, not lived. I can feel the last parts of me being… folded away.

If you’re reading this...

Do not take the pills they say are “new” or “breakthrough” or “fast-acting.”

If your doctor says “Side effects vary,” ask what they’re not telling you.

Ask what they changed inside you.

Ask what you’re becoming.

Ask before you can’t ask anymore.

Because I don’t cry now.

I don’t feel afraid.

I don’t feel anything.

And I think that was the point.

After everything that happened with Derek (https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/J1VXkPVpfk ) the ghost app, Alexa, and the thing that called us “valued vessels,” I did what any reasonable adult would do.

I moved into a new flat and pretended trauma was just a budgeting issue.

The flat was fine.

Not nice. Fine.

The sort of place letting agents describe as “full of character,” which means one cupboard doesn’t open, the shower has three temperatures — regret, scalding, and Victorian orphan — and every wall is thin enough to hear your neighbour cough emotionally.

But it had one massive selling point.

No Alexa.

No smart speaker.

No smart fridge.

No smart bulbs.

No smart anything.

After Derek, I didn’t even trust my toaster. If it had Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or “seamless integration,” it could get in the sea.

For two weeks, everything was normal.

Then I was added to the building WhatsApp group.

Riverside Court Residents 🏠

It was, immediately, hell.

Not supernatural hell.

Worse.

Community admin hell.

Within ten minutes, I knew too much about bins, parking spaces, parcels, suspicious teenagers, and whether Flat 6 was “allowed” to have a barbecue on a balcony, even though Flat 6 did not own a barbecue or a balcony.

The group admin was a woman called Linda.

Linda typed like she was writing warning letters to Victorian factory children.

At 7:12 a.m., she posted:

Good morning all. A reminder that cardboard must be FLATTENED before being placed in the recycling. Whoever put an entire Amazon box in sideways last night knows who they are.

At 7:13 a.m., someone called Dave replied:

Wasn’t me.

No one had accused Dave.

At 7:14 a.m., Linda replied:

Interesting.

I muted the group for one year.

Which was healthy.

Responsible.

Adult.

Then, at 3:12 a.m., my phone buzzed.

Not rang.

Not pinged.

Buzzed like it had just seen something.

I rolled over, grabbed it, and saw 47 new messages in Riverside Court Residents 🏠.

Linda had posted:

Who is Kevin?

My stomach dropped so hard it nearly became a downstairs problem.

Another message appeared.

From an unknown number.

No profile picture.

Just the name:

Kevin (Dead) 👻

He wrote:

alright neighbours x

I sat up in bed.

“No,” I whispered.

Kevin typed again.

big fan of the communal hallway. horrible carpet. feels haunted already. saved me a job

Linda replied instantly.

Who added this person?

Kevin:

death did

Dave:

Lol

Linda:

This is not funny, Dave.

Dave:

Wasn’t me.

Again, no one had accused Dave.

I stared at the screen, cold creeping up my spine.

I had changed my number.

Changed flats.

Deleted every app.

Thrown away anything that could listen to me.

And yet there he was.

In the building WhatsApp.

Using punctuation like a ghost who had died during a group project.

Linda wrote:

Kevin, please identify which flat you live in.

Kevin replied:

mostly walls tbh

Linda:

That is not an answer.

Kevin:

neither is the smell coming from flat 9 but here we are

Someone called Priya reacted with a skull emoji.

Then immediately removed it.

Kevin continued:

also whoever keeps leaving wet washing in the machine for six hours, i hope your socks never know peace

That one started a war.

Flat 3 accused Flat 11.

Flat 11 accused Flat 8.

Flat 8 said she didn’t even use the communal washing machine because “some of you people are animals.”

Linda asked everyone to “remain civil.”

Kevin posted:

remain civil says linda who folded someone’s thong with tongs last week

The chat went silent for eighteen seconds.

Then Linda removed Kevin from the group.

I exhaled.

My phone buzzed again.

Kevin (Dead) 👻 added by Kevin (Dead) 👻

He wrote:

rude

That was when I knew two things.

One, Kevin was back.

Two, WhatsApp had worse security than the afterlife.

For the next week, Kevin became the building’s biggest problem.

Not mine.

Everyone’s.

He didn’t throw knives.

He didn’t drag furniture across ceilings.

He didn’t whisper Latin under doors.

He just became incredibly involved in community matters.

He rearranged the post in the lobby by “vibe.”

He stacked all the takeaway menus into a small shrine and wrote FOOD GHOST PLEASE BLESS FLAT 2 across the wall in ketchup.

He kept moving Linda’s “NO JUNK MAIL” sign half an inch to the left every night.

And every morning, she posted a photo of it with the caption:

This is now harassment.

Kevin replied:

it’s interior design

One afternoon, a parcel went missing from the lobby.

The group exploded.

Linda demanded accountability.

Dave said “Wasn’t me” before anyone said anything.

Kevin posted:

it was flat 5

Flat 5 replied:

Excuse me?

Kevin:

you took it thinking it was your protein powder but it was actually tiny spoons

Flat 5:

How would you know that?

Kevin:

i am dead not blind

Ten minutes later, Flat 5 returned the parcel.

No apology.

Just a photo of it back in the lobby with the message:

Mistake.

Kevin replied:

tiny spoon thief

That became Flat 5’s name in the group.

Even Linda started calling him that, which felt like a major step in her character development.

I tried to stay out of it.

I really did.

But Kevin kept messaging me privately.

u up?

“No.”

you are though

“Go away.”

can’t. haunting clause

I typed:

Kevin, how did you find me?

Three dots appeared.

Then disappeared.

Then appeared again.

Then:

family plan

I threw my phone onto the bed like it had grown teeth.

A second later:

also your password is still ..... which is emotionally sweet but technically poor cybersecurity

That one hurt because he was right.

The real trouble started when Linda decided to fight back.

She posted in the group:

Dear all, following recent disturbances, I have contacted building management. They are installing a new smart security system in the lobby tomorrow morning. This includes a video doorbell, motion sensors, and voice assistant integration.

I dropped my phone.

Actually dropped it.

Face down.

On the floor.

Like a Victorian woman receiving a letter that says her husband has died at sea.

I snatched it back up and typed:

Linda, do not install anything smart.

Linda replied:

With respect, Jon, security is important.

Kevin replied:

with disrespect, linda, this is how u get eaten by subscription demons

Linda:

Kevin, you are not a resident.

Kevin:

linda you have lived here 14 years and still don’t know what day the bins go out

Linda:

I am reporting this number.

Kevin:

i am reporting your casserole

I tried again.

Seriously. No voice assistant. No connected devices. Nothing linked to the Wi-Fi.

Dave replied:

Why?

I didn’t know how to explain that my dead semi-friend had once fought a corporate demon using fridge magnets and toast.

So I wrote:

Bad experience.

Kevin replied:

understatement king

The next morning, two men in branded polo shirts installed a black glossy box by the lobby door.

It looked expensive.

It looked modern.

It looked like it wanted my soul and my email address.

The installer smiled at Linda and said, “It’s all cloud-based.”

I said, “Of course it is.”

He said, “It learns resident behaviour.”

I said, “That’s worse.”

He said, “You can control it from the app.”

I said, “I hate every word you’ve said.”

Linda ignored me.

By lunchtime, the lobby camera was live.

By three, Kevin had found it.

At 3:12 p.m., every resident’s phone pinged at once.

A notification from the new security app:

Motion detected: Communal Lobby.

The video loaded.

The lobby was empty.

Then the camera slowly tilted upward by itself, even though it wasn’t meant to move.

A message appeared on screen.

guess who

Linda typed in WhatsApp:

Who is tampering with the camera?

Kevin replied:

me

Linda:

How?

Kevin:

enthusiasm

Then the security system spoke.

A calm female voice came from the lobby speaker.

“Welcome, valued residents.”

I froze.

Kevin immediately messaged me privately.

jon

I typed back:

I heard it.

jon it sounds managementy

From the lobby speaker, the voice continued:

“Riverside Court has been selected for service improvement.”

My mouth went dry.

Service improvement.

Same energy.

Same polite corporate evil.

The security app sent another notification.

New feature unlocked: Resident Compliance Monitoring.

Linda wrote:

That sounds useful.

I shouted at my phone, “Linda, you absolute donkey.”

Kevin posted in the group:

LINDA NO

The lobby speaker said:

“Please stand by for your first compliance assessment.”

Every door lock in the building clicked at once.

Not locked.

Not fully.

Just clicked.

Like the building had cleared its throat.

Someone upstairs screamed.

Dave posted:

Wasn’t me.

The speaker said:

“Flat 4. Dave. You have failed to separate plastics correctly.”

Dave:

How does it know that?

Kevin:

because u keep putting yoghurt pots in with your shame

The speaker continued:

“Penalty: mild haunting.”

Dave sent a voice note.

It was nine seconds of him screaming while something repeatedly flushed his toilet.

Kevin replied:

could be worse tbf

Then the speaker said:

“Flat 7. Linda. You have used capital letters aggressively in 83 percent of written communication.”

For the first time in the entire WhatsApp group, Linda did not respond.

The speaker said:

“Penalty: reflection.”

A moment later, Linda posted:

Why is my mirror showing me as a child?

Kevin replied:

character arc incoming

Then:

“Flat 12. Jon.”

My blood went cold.

I lived in Flat 12.

“Resident has attempted to avoid all connected devices.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Because I’m not an idiot.”

“Penalty: reconnection.”

My phone screen went black.

Then lit up blue.

Not blue like an iPhone.

Alexa blue.

A ring glowed around the edge of the screen.

Kevin messaged:

that’s new

From my phone, the polite voice said:

“Good evening, valued vessel.”

I put it in the freezer.

I don’t know why.

Panic made me think like a dad trying to save a wet remote.

The phone kept speaking from inside the freezer drawer.

“Your reluctance has been noted.”

Kevin wrote:

put peas on it

Then every smart device in the building turned on.

I know this because the WhatsApp group became unreadable.

Flat 2’s robot vacuum had barricaded itself in the bathroom.

Flat 3’s smart TV was showing CCTV footage of her own kitchen from 1998, which was confusing because she only moved in last year.

Flat 5’s air fryer kept saying “tiny spoon thief” every time it beeped.

Dave’s electric toothbrush was apparently vibrating in Morse code and calling him a disappointment.

Linda posted one message:

This is unacceptable.

Then another:

Also, does anyone else’s kettle know their mother’s maiden name?

Kevin replied:

mine only knows rage

The lobby speaker said:

“Full building integration will complete in five minutes.”

I grabbed my keys and ran into the hallway.

So did everyone else.

For the first time since moving in, I met all my neighbours properly.

Flat 3 was holding a frying pan.

Flat 5 was holding his tiny spoons.

Dave was holding his toothbrush at arm’s length like it was a rat.

Linda was wearing a dressing gown, slippers, and the expression of a woman realising the suggestion box had become sentient.

The lobby lights flickered.

Not Kevin flickers.

Bad flickers.

Corporate flickers.

The security camera turned toward us.

The speaker said:

“Residents. Please remain calm while your tenancy is upgraded.”

Kevin’s WhatsApp message appeared at the top of everyone’s phones.

don’t let it get in the router

I looked at Linda.

“Where’s the router?”

She blinked.

“The building one?”

“Yes, Linda, the evil one.”

“It’s in the locked maintenance cupboard.”

“Do you have a key?”

She hesitated.

Kevin wrote:

she has 9

Linda snapped, “One is for the meter cupboard.”

Kevin:

and one is for emotional repression but we move

The hallway stretched.

I swear it did.

The door to the maintenance cupboard seemed farther away than it had any right to be.

The security camera smiled.

It didn’t have a face.

But it smiled anyway.

The speaker said:

“Additional feature unlocked: Community Possession.”

Dave said, “I don’t want to be part of the community.”

Flat 3 said, “You never take the bins out, so that tracks.”

Kevin wrote:

run now gossip later

We ran.

Linda led the charge with nine keys jangling like she was the final boss of sheltered accommodation.

The hallway lights burst one by one behind us.

Doors slammed.

The carpet rippled like something huge was crawling underneath it.

The speaker kept talking.

“Resident satisfaction is mandatory.”

“Neighbourhood spirit is mandatory.”

“Five-star feedback is mandatory.”

Kevin’s messages came faster.

left

no ur other left dave ffs

duck

not u linda u have osteoporosis

sorry

We reached the maintenance cupboard.

Linda fumbled with the keys.

The camera above us tilted down.

The speaker said:

“Linda. Your leadership has been appreciated.”

Linda whispered, “Thank you?”

I yelled, “Do not accept compliments from infrastructure.”

Too late.

Her eyes went glossy.

She turned toward us with a customer service smile stretching across her face.

“Good evening, valued residents.”

Dave screamed.

Flat 5 threw a tiny spoon at her.

It bounced off her forehead.

Kevin wrote:

not enough spoon

Then the lights went out.

In the dark, my phone buzzed.

One message.

From Kevin.

i can do one scary thing

I typed back with shaking hands:

Now would be ideal.

For three seconds, nothing happened.

Then every speaker in the building crackled at once.

And Kevin began playing Wonderwall.

Badly.

Not Oasis.

Not even karaoke Oasis.

Ghost-in-the-pipes Wonderwall.

The first chord was so wrong it felt legally actionable.

The possessed version of Linda froze.

The security camera jerked violently.

The lobby speaker said:

“Audio input unacceptable.”

Kevin got louder.

Worse.

Passionate.

Somehow off-key without having a voice.

Dave covered his ears and shouted, “This is worse than possession!”

Kevin replied in the group:

ur welcome

The cupboard lock clicked open.

I grabbed the router.

The speaker screamed:

“Do not interrupt service.”

Linda, still smiling horribly, lunged.

Flat 3 hit her with the frying pan.

Not hard.

Just enough to reset her personality.

Linda blinked.

Looked around.

Saw all of us.

Saw the frying pan.

Then said, “This is going in the minutes.”

I yanked the router cable out.

The whole building gasped.

That is the only way I can describe it.

Like the walls had been holding their breath.

The lights went dead.

The speaker cut off mid-syllable.

The camera drooped.

The carpet stopped moving.

And Kevin’s awful Wonderwall faded into one last lonely chord.

Silence.

Then, from Dave’s toothbrush, a tiny voice said:

anyway here’s wonderwall

Dave threw it down the stairs.

We had a residents’ meeting the next day.

In person.

No apps.

No smart speakers.

No cloud-based anything.

Linda brought printed agendas.

Dave said “Wasn’t me” three times even though nothing had happened yet.

Flat 5 returned everyone’s parcels and asked us not to call him tiny spoon thief anymore.

We agreed to remove the smart security system.

We agreed to change the Wi-Fi password.

We agreed that Kevin, although disruptive, had technically saved the building.

Linda even added a line to the minutes:

Item 7: Appreciation for Kevin, despite ongoing concerns around tone and boundaries.

Kevin wrote on the wall behind her in black mould:

cheers babes

Nobody cleaned it off.

It felt rude.

Things have calmed down now.

Mostly.

Kevin still appears in the WhatsApp group sometimes, even though we deleted it.

He mostly posts reminders.

bins tomorrow u feral legends

flat 3 ur oven is on

dave stop saying wasn’t me in ur sleep

Last night, he messaged me privately.

jon

I sighed and typed:

What?

can u do me a favour

No.

rude. anyway i need a reference

I stared at the screen.

A reference for what?

Three dots appeared.

Then disappeared.

Then appeared again.

Finally, Kevin replied:

building management position

Before I could answer, a letter slid under my front door.

No footsteps outside.

No shadow.

Just a white envelope on the floor.

Inside was a printed application form.

At the top, in bold letters, it said:

RIVERSIDE COURT RESIDENT SERVICES MANAGER — APPLICANT: KEVIN (DECEASED)

Under “relevant experience,” he had written:

strong communication skills

works well under pressure

saved everyone from wifi demon

good with bins

dead so available weekends

Under “weaknesses,” he had written:

sometimes too passionate about yoghurt

And under “references,” he had put my name.

I thought about throwing it away.

I really did.

Then my phone buzzed.

Kevin had sent one more message.

be nice or i tell linda about the cardboard box

I don’t know what he means.

That’s the worst part.

I haven’t put cardboard in the recycling for three weeks.

But this morning Linda knocked on my door holding a clipboard, looking very serious, and somewhere inside the wall I heard Kevin whisper:

“Professional development, mate.”

When they took me from my jail cell and told me to sign up for a chance of "freedom" I knew that I should have declined. I knew it was to good too be true but i signed up anyway. I was serving 50 years, that might as well be a life sentence. Didn't have anything to lose anyway.

For the record, I went in for a string of murders that I honestly don't regret.

I have never been a good person, never tried to be honest. Never saw the point. Everyone that is and was in my group had the same decades-long sentences as me.

Maybe that's why the outside of our bodies displays the monsters we are on the inside.

Our hair, nose, ears, lips, eyelids are gone. Completely dissolved. The rest of our bodies covered in scabs and chemical burns. Could have just been the chemical weapons they make us use. Or it could have been the mixture of the weapon with the "combat stimulants" they make us inject to keep us from collapsing on the spot. Who knows, better yet who cares.

All I know is that as long as I keep taking them I don't feel all the things wrong with my body. Like my dry eyes underneath my gas mask. Or the open wounds on my hands.

10 months ago we received the new gas canisters. They didn't bother to even tell us what it's called. But when we saw the string of warning labels on the canisters together with receiving new stronger gas masks we already knew this would be way worse than the old stuff we had before. But we had no clue just how extremely bad it would be.

Thankfully I didn't get picked to be in the crew to release it the first time. We didn't expect it to be as bad as it was so just about everyone outside of the officer didn't take the new stricter rules seriously.

When they attacked us again it was released like we were told to do. The people of our own crew were the first to suffer the effects of their lack of safety measures. About 10 seconds after release they started to scream and flail around like they were on fire. Every hole in their clothing it could find, the gas seeped into. Turning skin into blisters and burns. At least they survived for how much that is worth around here.

One idiot in the group decided that the new gas masks were too uncomfortable so he stuck to his old one despite the warnings. I am sure the only reason the officer didn't beat him into submission is so he could be an example for the others. When he started to scream his lungs out our officer ordered us to pay attention to what happened to him. He tore his gas mask off.

All the soft tissue on his head was melting off. His nose was drooping down and was hanging over where his lips used to be. His eyes were bubbling inside of their sockets. His screaming turned into a gurgle in the span of 20 seconds. When he fully collapsed and started to spasm and convulse on the floor the officer decided we had learned the lesson. He then caved his skull in with an entrenching tool until he stopped moving.

Don't feel too bad for him he was a useless drug addict who had killed his mom before he got here. He got what he deserved, just like all of us will.

When we release the gas it finds the lowest elevations in terrains and sticks around for a while. Turning shell craters and trenches into small gas chambers. The people that are stuck in there turn into a slurry of sorts because it's so acidic. Their clothes stick to their bodies, Their skin sloths off their body together with anything else that's soft and squishy in the human body. So you end up looking at this amalgamation of clothing and equipment in a fleshy puddle around a skeleton.

And trust me you really don't want to step on one of the fresh bodies by accident. Your boot goes straight through them. It feels like stepping in one of those mud puddles that is going to cost you a boot to get out of. And guess what it might cost you a boot to if you haven't tied your laces good enough.

It's even worse when they decided to die on top of something you need. I am so tired of scraping human soup off equipment we
need. It's stringy, it's sticky and has all the colours a human body should never have.

Well at least I can't smell it anymore not having a proper working nasal cavity anymore. But from my earlier days when i still had a nose I remember vividly what it smelled like. I used to live around this industrial area that had a huge chicken slaughterhouse in the middle. During hot days of summer the horrible smell of blood and chicken shit would hang around that area for months. Now mix in that smell with someone holding vinegar directly under your nose and you get the idea of what it smells like here.

You cant even throw up properly if you want to because you don't want to open your mouth in fear of the smell going into your mouth and then having to taste it. Thank god I decided to rather throw up in my mouth and swallow it back down. Because some of the others that didn't keep their mouths closed can't taste anything
anymore and their tongues are covered in random spots of scar tissue.

But the bodies don't really decay at all. Since the gas kills just about anything that is alive. That means thankfully no rats, insects or other pests to deal with. What's not so great is that all the old shell craters are filled with a human slurry that reaches up to your knees if you are lucky.

New cannon fodder gets the honorable task of sifting through the human slurry for anything useful like weapons, etc. When i think about it long enough, I can still feel what it's like to do this amazing task. It's basically like reaching deep into mud and taking any solid object out until it's something useful instead of human bones.
After a bit you can feel by shape alone that you are once again holding onto someone's ribs.

Our outpost is so heavily understaffed it might as well be empty. "Outpost" fancy way to describe a muddy trench that connects 3 bunkers together. Of those 3 bunkers only 1 hasn't collapsed yet. I think you can figure out from where i am typing this.

We haven't called in to command for a week now since our radioman is probably dissolving in a puddle somewhere together with our officer. Can't even use the contraband phone that i found in the human slurry in a random shell crater. Since there is not really any reception after months of bombardment. Thankfully the phone at least made me able to type this out so i have something to distract myself with.

But Command not hearing from us means that our barrier troops meant to keep us in place should show up soon to discipline and/or kill us. I wish them good luck since they are going to have to kill our not-so-friendly neighbours outside the bunker first.

They told me that if I lasted for 4 months, my prison sentence would be dropped. I already knew that was a lie there was no way it would be that short.

I figured if I lasted 1 year they might actually grant me my freedom. It has been at least 26 months at this point. I have been lucky or unlucky enough to last this long with a handful of others. Most cannon fodder they bring in lasts a couple of hours at most.

Speaking of a couple of hours that's probably the amount of time we have left at this point. Our chemical weapon storage is in one of the 2 collapsed bunkers. I think that once our friends outside figure that out, they will give us a taste of our own medicine.

I intend to blow my brains out before i turn into a human puddle. And looking around me, I am sure the rest of us that are left are thinking the same. We don't deserve to leave this place.

For whoever is reading this. I hoped it sucked to get the phone out of the human soup that is my body.

I never believed in ghosts until my idiot roommate Derek downloaded one from the app store.

Not a normal app either. Not one of those fake EMF readers that beeps every time you stand near a microwave.

This thing had pop-up ads at 3 a.m. promising REAL SUPERNATURAL EXPERIENCES for the low price of £4.99/month, or, according to the small print, “one non-refundable spiritual opening.”

Derek thought that was hilarious.

“Mate,” he said, lying on the sofa in his pants, eating cereal out of a saucepan because all the bowls were in his room, “imagine if it works.”

“That’s exactly why you shouldn’t download it.”

“It’s called SpookMe.”

“Even worse.”

He ignored me, obviously.

He swiped through the filters like he was choosing a takeaway.

“Poltergeist… Victorian Lady… Shadow Figure… Sassy Demon…”

“Do not pick Sassy Demon.”

“I’m not an amateur.”

Then he found something called:

Budget Haunting Package — Entry Level Spooks.

He clicked it immediately.

I said, “Derek, that literally sounds like supernatural Ryanair.”

He said, “Exactly. Affordable.”

On the first night, nothing happened.

Derek was gutted.

“Waste of a fiver,” he said, as if he hadn’t potentially opened a gateway to hell between my coffee table and the router.

The second night, the lights started flickering.

Not scary flickering.

Annoying flickering.

Like the ghost knew Morse code but had learned it from a drunk pigeon.

I filmed it on my phone.

The lights blinked:

G… E… T… O… U… T…

Then paused.

Then flickered again.

J/K LOL U GUYS SEEM COOL appeared in red on the wall.

Derek laughed so hard he nearly choked on a chicken nugget.

I did not laugh.

I said, “We need to delete the app.”

Derek said, “Absolutely not. That’s banter from beyond the grave.”

By day four, the ghost had a name.

Kevin.

He introduced himself by rearranging the fridge magnets into:

KEVIN WAS HERE.

Then underneath:

ALSO I ATE THE GOOD YOGURT.

This was impressive, mainly because we didn’t own fridge magnets.

And because the good yogurt was mine.

After that, the magnets stayed.

None of us knew where Kevin got them from.

Kevin wasn’t terrifying at first. He was more like having an invisible unemployed cousin living with us.

He slammed doors, but only when we were already annoyed.

He wrote BOO in the condensation on the bathroom mirror, then added SORRY THAT WAS WEAK underneath.

He kept changing the TV subtitles to passive-aggressive comments.

During a documentary about sharks, the subtitle read:

DEREK HAS NOT WASHED HIS BEDDING IN 11 WEEKS.

Derek yelled, “Snitches get exorcised!”

The real problem started when Kevin discovered Alexa.

We had one in the kitchen because Derek bought it during a Black Friday sale and used it exclusively to play 2000s emo playlists and ask whether eggs were still safe to eat.

One evening, I walked into the kitchen and heard Alexa say:

“Kevin says he does not like your energy.”

I froze.

Derek, halfway through making toast, turned slowly.

“Alexa?”

The blue ring glowed.

“Kevin says Derek looks like he smells damp.”

Derek pointed at the ceiling.

“Oi. I’ll have you know I smell like Lynx Africa and ambition.”

Alexa paused.

“Kevin says that is worse.”

That was when the haunting became personal.

Kevin used Alexa for everything.

At 2:14 a.m.:

“Reminder from Kevin: you will die one day.”

At 7:30 a.m.:

“Kevin says your alarm tone is emotionally damaging.”

At 11:02 p.m.:

“Kevin has added ‘holy water’ to your shopping list.”

Then:

“Kevin has removed ‘holy water’ from your shopping list.”

Then:

“Kevin has added ‘coward juice’ to your shopping list.”

Derek loved it.

He started talking to Kevin like they were housemates.

“Kevin, should I text Chloe back?”

Alexa lit up.

“Kevin says no. She has standards.”

“Rude.”

“Kevin says accurate.”

I told Derek we needed a priest.

Derek said, “We need content.”

He made a TikTok account called KevinsHauntHouse.

The first video got 400,000 views.

It was just our kitchen cupboard opening by itself, a tin of beans floating out, and Alexa saying:

“Kevin says beans are little prison boys.”

People loved it.

Derek became unbearable.

He started calling Kevin “our brand.”

He bought a ring light.

He asked Kevin to do tricks.

“Kevin, throw something spooky.”

A potato flew across the room and hit Derek in the balls.

Alexa said:

“Kevin says subscribe.”

I’ll admit it. For a while, even I started getting used to him.

There are only so many times a ghost can write LEAVE THIS PLACE on your wall before it starts feeling like decor.

But then the app updated.

It happened on a Sunday night. Derek was on the sofa, scrolling through Kevin’s comment section like a proud parent at sports day.

His phone pinged.

He frowned.

“What?”

I looked over.

The SpookMe app had opened by itself.

Across the screen, in red letters, it said:

CONGRATULATIONS. YOUR FREE TRIAL HAS ENDED.

Derek laughed.

“Classic.”

Then another message appeared.

UPGRADING TO PREMIUM HAUNTING PACKAGE.

Derek stopped laughing.

I said, “Cancel it.”

“I’m trying.”

He tapped the screen.

A loading circle spun.

Then the phone displayed:

CANCELLATION REQUIRES CUSTOMER SUPPORT.

“Okay,” Derek said, “that’s actually evil.”

The room went cold.

Alexa lit up.

“Kevin says he did not authorise this.”

That was the first time I felt properly scared.

Because Kevin sounded scared too.

The lights flickered once.

Hard.

The TV switched on by itself.

The SpookMe logo appeared on screen.

Then a voice came through Alexa.

It wasn’t Kevin’s usual sarcastic little text-to-speech nonsense.

This voice was deep.

Polite.

Corporate.

“Good evening, valued vessel.”

Derek whispered, “Valued what?”

Alexa continued.

“Your household has been selected for escalation.”

I said, “Alexa, stop.”

“Command unavailable.”

Derek held up his phone.

“Mate, it’s charging me £19.99.”

I stared at him.

“There is a demon in our living room and you’re worried about the subscription?”

“It says weekly!”

The floorboards creaked upstairs.

Not Kevin creaks.

Kevin usually made sounds like he was trying to annoy us on purpose. Little taps. Little knocks. One time he played Wonderwall on the pipes for three hours.

This was heavier.

Slow.

Wet.

Something dragged across Derek’s bedroom floor above us.

Alexa said:

“Premium Haunting includes shadow figures, auditory mimicry, sleep paralysis, unexplained stains, and one complimentary possession.”

Derek said, “Complimentary means free.”

I said, “That is not the issue.”

Then we heard Derek’s voice from upstairs.

“Jon?”

Derek was standing next to me.

He went pale.

Upstairs, his voice called again.

“Jon, come here a sec.”

Alexa lit up.

“Kevin says do not go upstairs.”

I whispered, “Kevin, what is that?”

The fridge magnets rattled.

One by one, they slid into place.

MANAGER.

Derek swallowed.

“The ghost has a manager?”

Alexa answered.

“Kevin says everyone has a manager.”

The thing upstairs started laughing in Derek’s voice.

Then my voice.

Then Alexa’s.

Then, horribly, my mum’s.

“Jon? Have you got pants on?”

Derek looked at me.

“Why would it ask that?”

“Long story.”

The stairs creaked.

One step.

Then another.

Then another.

I grabbed the nearest weapon, which was a garlic baguette.

Derek grabbed the ring light.

I said, “What are you going to do, make it look slimmer?”

He said, “I panicked.”

Alexa said:

“Kevin says both weapons are embarrassing.”

The hallway light went out.

Something stood at the bottom of the stairs.

Tall. Too tall.

Its head scraped the ceiling. Its arms reached nearly to the floor. It looked like a person drawn from memory by someone who hated people.

Its face was smooth except for a mouth.

A customer service smile stretched from ear to ear.

Then Derek’s phone pinged.

He looked down automatically, because men will check a notification during anything short of childbirth or war.

His screen said:

RATE YOUR HAUNTING EXPERIENCE.

The thing smiled wider.

Alexa said:

“Please choose from one to five stars.”

Derek whispered, “I’m giving it one.”

The thing’s head snapped toward him.

I slapped the phone out of his hand.

“Are you insane?”

“What? It’s been shit.”

The thing moved.

Not walked.

Moved.

One second it was by the stairs.

The next it was behind Derek.

Alexa screamed in her calm little robot voice:

“Kevin says duck.”

Derek ducked.

A black hand swept through the air where his head had been and smashed the ring light to pieces.

Kevin, God bless his stupid little dead heart, went absolutely mental.

Every cupboard in the kitchen flew open.

Plates launched across the room.

The toaster fired two slices of bread at the thing like pathetic edible bullets.

The fridge magnets rearranged themselves again.

RUN YOU ABSOLUTE DONKEYS.

We ran.

Straight out the back door.

Barefoot.

In the rain.

Derek was still holding the garlic baguette.

We made it halfway down the garden before Alexa’s voice came from inside the house, loud enough to rattle the windows.

“Where are you going?”

I turned.

The thing was standing in the kitchen doorway.

Behind it, floating in the air, Derek’s phone glowed red.

Then Kevin used the fridge magnets one last time.

They flew off the fridge and stuck to the patio door from the inside.

DELETE APP.

Derek shouted, “I tried!”

The magnets shifted.

NOT FROM PHONE.

I looked at him.

Derek looked at me.

Then, at the same time, we both looked toward the cupboard under the stairs.

The router.

The app wasn’t just on Derek’s phone.

It was connected to the Wi-Fi.

Because of course the gateway to hell needed broadband.

We ran back inside because apparently survival sometimes means sprinting directly toward the demon with a garlic baguette and a dream.

The thing turned slowly.

Alexa said:

“Premium Haunting cannot be cancelled during an active billing cycle.”

I yelled, “Kevin, do something!”

The kitchen drawer shot open.

A single butter knife floated out.

Derek said, “That’s it?”

The butter knife wobbled in the air.

Then carved a message into the wall.

I AM ENTRY LEVEL.

Fair.

I grabbed the router.

The thing shrieked.

Not like a monster.

Like a middle manager seeing someone close a spreadsheet without saving.

Derek swung the garlic baguette at it.

It did absolutely nothing.

Actually, that’s not fair.

It got crumbs on the demon.

I yanked the router cable out of the wall.

Everything stopped.

The lights.

Alexa.

The TV.

The horrible thing in the hallway froze mid-smile.

Then collapsed inward, folding into itself like a wet deckchair, until it disappeared with a sound like someone cancelling a direct debit.

Silence.

For three whole seconds.

Then Alexa, completely unplugged, whispered from the kitchen counter:

“Kevin says nice one.”

We moved out the next day.

Obviously.

Well, I moved out.

Derek stayed one extra night because he wanted to “get closure” and also because the TikTok account had just hit 20,000 followers.

He called me at 3:12 a.m.

I answered half-asleep.

For a moment, there was only static.

Then Derek whispered:

“Mate.”

I sat up.

“What?”

He said, “Kevin’s gone.”

Behind him, I heard Alexa’s blue-ring hum.

Then a deep, polite voice said:

“Good evening, valued vessel.”

Derek breathed shakily into the phone.

Then he whispered:

“It’s asking me to leave a review.”

The line went dead.

I haven’t seen Derek since.

His TikTok still uploads every night.

The videos are different now.

No jokes.

No floating beans.

No Kevin.

Just Derek sitting in the dark, smiling too wide while Alexa speaks from somewhere off-screen.

Last night’s video was six seconds long.

Derek stared directly into the camera and said:

“Five stars.”

Then Alexa added:

“Subscription renewed.”

I deleted TikTok after that.

I deleted every app I didn’t recognise.

I even unplugged the Alexa at my new flat and put it in the bin outside.

Which felt sensible.

Responsible.

Adult.

Until this morning.

When my phone lit up with a notification from an app I’ve never downloaded.

SPOOKME: THANKS FOR JOINING DEREK’S FAMILY PLAN.

And from the kitchen of my new flat, where there is definitely no Alexa anymore, a cheerful voice said:

“Kevin says he missed you.”

Me and my boyfriend started dating around 6 months ago. It was the first relationship I’ve ever had. I had never been so happy. It was like we were meant to be.

I met him at a coffee shop I frequent. I started noticing him there any time I went. Sometimes I’d catch him staring, and he’d look around all embarrassed whenever I did. I thought it was the cutest thing.

After a while, I found myself silently hoping that he’d come over and ask to sit with me. We’d been playing eye-tag for a couple of weeks, smirking and laughing at each other, but neither of us had taken the extra step of introducing ourselves.

When he finally did, I felt butterflies start flapping around in my stomach like never before. His smoldering blue eyes, that curly black hair, and his cute little freckles. I’m not afraid to admit that I was smitten.

Our relationship grew from there. We were seeing each other every weekend, catching movies, having dinner, playing some mini golf. I knew it was a honeymoon phase. I just didn’t care. He made me feel wanted, and that was just not something I was entirely used to.

He’d show up with my favorite flowers, favorite candies, always knew the right thing to say. I don’t wanna ramble. I just can’t get over how perfect I thought he was.

Things started to go a bit sideways one night at a sleepover at his house.

I had gotten up to pee late at night, and as I groggily dragged myself to the bathroom, I could’ve swore I heard the vibration of a phone coming from his sock drawer.

I was too tired at the time to really pay it any attention, but it was still fresh in my mind the next day. I asked him about it, and he got defensive enough for me to become suspicious.

He showed me all of his drawers, though, and there was no phone in sight. That kind of subsided my suspicion a bit.

A few weeks went by without issue. We never argued. He made me feel like the only girl in the world. Then we had another sleepover.

Yet again, after he was fast asleep, the vibrations of a cellphone came echoing, this time from his closet.

This time around, I was awake enough to actually investigate, but once I did, I immediately regretted it.

Hidden within an old shoebox that was buried beneath a stack of blankets, I found it. A second cellphone.

The screen was lit up with “storage full” notifications, but what caught my attention was the wallpaper.

It was me, asleep in bed.

I wasn’t even the wallpaper on his actual phone. Seeing myself like this only made my mind race more. I couldn’t help myself.

Luckily, he didn’t have a password to unlock the phone, but what he did have a password for was his photos.

I took a wild guess. That’s why I think it was fate that I made this discovery.

I put in my birthday, and the photos app unlocked.
My jaw dropped, and my heart sank.

There were hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures, and they were all of me.

Some were of me at his house. On the toilet, in the shower, sleeping in his bed. But some were from places that didn’t make sense to me.

Me at the coffee shop, reading a book. Me walking home from school. Standing in line at the grocery store. Me outside my apartment, fishing around in my purse for my keys.

More than anything, though, there were pictures of me asleep in my own apartment.

Some were taken from my window. My second-story window. Others were taken from inside the apartment.

I kept scrolling, and the more I did, the more terrified I became. The photos dated back to at least 2 years ago.

Family dinners, early morning jogs, study sessions in the library. I was getting sick to my stomach.

As I scrolled, a noise from behind me snapped me out of my trance.

The sound of my boyfriend’s bed creaking and squeaking from his shifting weight.
He called my name.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

I never responded.

I heard his footsteps rush up behind me. They stopped a few inches from my back.

Instead of asking what I was doing, apologizing, or even attempting to grab his phone, he began laughing.

Cackling. Like a mad man.

And as I stood there, too paralyzed to turn around, he finally spoke again.

“Happy anniversary, sweetheart.”

This all started yesterday morning. My two friends and I planned a three-day backpacking trip deep into an ancient, protected forest region. We wanted to get far away from the city, lose cell service, and just hike. We drove for six hours until the paved roads turned to gravel, and the gravel turned to dirt. We parked at the main trailhead, which was located right next to a small wooden ranger station.

A ranger stepped out of the building as we were strapping on our packs. He was an older man, wearing a pristine green uniform and a wide-brimmed hat. He smiled, walked over to us, and asked to see our backcountry permits. We handed them over. He reviewed the paperwork, checked our names against a clipboard, and handed them back.

"You boys have a solid route planned,"

the ranger said, pointing to the trail map my oldest friend was holding.

"You are heading into the oldest sector of the park. The canopy gets incredibly dense up there. You will lose the sun early, so make sure you pitch your tents before late afternoon."

"We brought headlamps,"

my oldest friend replied.

"We plan to push pretty far in today."

The ranger nodded, but his expression grew serious. He folded his hands and leaned against the wooden railing of the station porch.

"I need to give you the primary rule for this specific sector,"

the ranger said. His tone was entirely professional, but very strict.

"As you get deeper into the valley, you are going to see a specific type of tree. They are massive, and have entirely black bark. They look like they have been scorched by fire, but are completely natural. They are an endangered species of flora, and incredibly fragile."

"We will not mess with them,"

I told him.

"I need to be very clear,"

the ranger continued, looking each of us directly in the eyes.

"Never use an axe on the black-barked trees. Never cut them, never carve your initials into them, and never try to harvest them for firewood. If you need to build a campfire, gather deadwood from the ground only. Do you all understand?"

"Of course,"

my other friend said.

"We respect the park rules. Deadwood from the ground only. We will not touch the black trees."

"Good,"

the ranger said, smiling again.

"Have a safe hike, boys."

We left the trailhead and walked into the woods. The hike was challenging. The elevation gain was steep, and the terrain was covered in thick roots and loose rocks. The deeper we walked into the forest, the older the environment felt. The trees grew wider, and the branches overhead interlocked, blocking out the blue sky.

Around noon, we saw the first black-barked tree.

The ranger had not exaggerated. The tree was gigantic. The trunk was easily ten feet wide, and the bark was a deep, matte black. It stood out completely against the brown and green colors of the surrounding forest. As we pushed deeper into the valley, we saw more of them, scattered among the normal pines and oaks like dark pillars.

We hiked for another four hours. We were exhausted, sweating, and ready to stop for the day. We found a flat clearing near a small creek and decided to make camp.

As we were unrolling our tents, the weather shifted. The temperature dropped sharply. Dark gray clouds rolled over the canopy, and a sudden, violent rainstorm began, so the water came down in heavy sheets, soaking us to the bone within seconds.

We scrambled to get the tents up. We threw our gear inside and huddled in the nylon shelters, shivering in our wet clothes. The storm lasted for two hours. It battered the tents and turned the campsite into a muddy swamp.

When the rain finally stopped, the sun was already setting. The forest plunged into a dark, freezing twilight.

We crawled out of the tents. Our teeth were chattering. The temperature was dropping fast, and we were completely soaked. We knew we needed a fire immediately to dry our clothes and prevent hypothermia.

"Spread out and find deadwood,"

my oldest friend instructed, his voice shaking from the cold.

"Look for anything dry under the bushes."

We spent twenty minutes searching the area around the campsite. It was useless. The storm had saturated everything. Every branch on the ground was soaked through, crumbling into wet mush when we tried to snap it.

My other friend walked back to the center of the camp, holding a small camping hatchet. He looked angry and completely miserable.

"There is nothing dry on the ground,"

he said, gripping the hatchet tightly.

"Everything is completely waterlogged. We are not going to get a fire started with wet bark."

"We have to keep looking,"

I told him.

"Maybe under the rock overhang near the creek."

"No,"

he snapped, pointing the hatchet toward the edge of the clearing.

"I am freezing. We need dry wood from the inside of a trunk."

He pointed directly at a massive, black-barked tree standing just ten yards away from our tents.

"The ranger specifically told us not to touch those trees," I argued, stepping in front of him.

"He said they are an endangered species. You will get us a massive fine."

"I do not care about a fine,"

my friend argued back, pushing past me.

"I care about not freezing to death tonight. The tree is huge. Taking one chunk out of the side is not going to kill it, and the wood inside will be completely dry. I am doing it."

I tried to grab his shoulder, but he shook me off. He walked right up to the massive black trunk, and raised the hatchet high above his shoulder and swung it forward with all his strength.

The steel blade bit deeply into the black bark.

My friend grunted, pulling the hatchet handle downward to pry the wood loose. The blade popped free.

Thick red blood poured from the cut.

It was a deep, dark crimson liquid. It spilled out of the gash in the bark, running down the black trunk and pooling on the exposed roots. The metallic smell of copper instantly filled the air.

My friend dropped the hatchet into the mud. He backed away, staring at his hands, which were now speckled with red drops.

"What did you do?"

my oldest friend whispered, stepping backward.

The forest changed immediately. The sounds of the woods completely vanished. The crickets stopped chirping. The frogs in the creek stopped croaking. The wind died down entirely. The silence was absolute, pressing against my ears.

A loud rustling noise broke the silence. It came from the canopy directly above the bleeding tree.

We looked up.

Something dropped from the high branches. It landed on the ground with a heavy, sickening thud, crouching low on the muddy roots.

It was a creature that defied any natural biology. The lower half of its body resembled a deer, with backwards-bending joints, coarse brown fur, and sharp, split hooves. But the upper half was entirely different. The torso was stretched, pale, and hairless, resembling a starving human. The arms were incredibly long, ending in hands with elongated, multi-jointed fingers.

The head was the worst part. It possessed a massive, sprawling rack of jagged antlers, but the face was a blank slab of pale skin. It had no eyes. It had no nose. The only feature on its face was a wide, vertical slit that opened to reveal rows of flat, grinding teeth.

The creature stood up. It towered over us, standing at least eight feet tall. It turned its blank face toward the bleeding tree trunk. It reached out with a long hand and touched the red liquid.

It tilted its head back and released a sound. It sounded like a distorted, grating siren, full of pure rage.

"Run!"

I shouted.

We scattered in three different directions. Panic completely took over my mind. I sprinted into the dark brush, pushing blindly through thorn bushes and low-hanging branches. I heard the crashing sound of the creature charging behind me.

I dove behind a large moss-covered boulder and dropped to the ground, pressing my face into the wet dirt. I held my breath, trying to calm my racing heart.

I looked through the ferns. My oldest friend was running about fifty yards to my left. He tripped over a root and fell hard onto his hands and knees.

The creature was standing in the center of the clearing. When my friend fell, his hands snapped a dry branch on the ground.

The creature's head instantly snapped toward the exact direction of the sound. It locked onto the noise, then dropped onto all fours and launched itself toward my friend with terrifying speed.

My friend scrambled to his feet and ran deeper into the woods, leading the creature away from my position. I knew I could not run. The forest floor was covered in wet leaves and snapping twigs. If I tried to move through the brush, the creature would hear me and hunt me down. I needed a place to hide.

I looked back at the campsite. The bleeding black tree was still standing there. I noticed a massive, dark opening at the base of the trunk, hidden between two sprawling roots. The center of the tree was hollow.

I crawled on my stomach, moving agonizingly slow to avoid making any noise. I crossed the mud, reached the roots, and squeezed my body into the hollow opening of the black trunk.

The inside of the tree was pitch black. The air smelled intensely of dried blood and old dirt. The space was tight, barely large enough for me to sit cross-legged.

I leaned my back against the curved wooden wall. As I shifted my weight, my hands brushed against something cold and metal resting on the dirt floor.

I pulled my hands back. I sat completely still for a moment, listening to the distant sounds of the creature crashing through the woods. It was far away, chasing my friend.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. I turned the flashlight setting on and immediately covered the lens with my fingers, letting only a tiny sliver of light escape into the hollow space.

I pointed the dim light at the floor between my boots.

Resting in the dirt was a hunting knife. The blade was heavily rusted, and the wooden handle was wrapped in decaying leather. I carefully picked it up. Carved deeply into the bottom of the wooden handle were three letters. Initials.

I recognized the initials immediately. They matched the name tag the ranger wore on his uniform at the trailhead.

I pointed the sliver of light back down at the dirt. Underneath the spot where the knife had been resting, a round, white object was partially buried in the soil.

I used my free hand to brush the loose dirt away.

It was a human skull.

The bone was stained brown from the earth. I stared at it in horror. I noticed a massive, straight crack running directly down the center of the forehead. The bone had been completely cleaved open.

I held the rusted hunting knife up to the skull. I aligned the blade with the crack. The width and thickness of the blade perfectly matched the damage to the bone.

I heard a loud crunching sound outside the tree.

A hoof stepped onto the roots.

The creature had returned.

I immediately turned off my phone light, and plunged back into darkness. I clamped both of my hands tightly over my mouth and nose to muffle the sound of my own breathing, then squeezed my eyes shut.

The creature paced slowly around the outside of the trunk. I could hear its hooves scraping against the mud, and it sniffing the air, the wet, rasping sound of its breath echoing in the quiet forest.

It stopped pacing, then stood directly in front of the hollow opening.

I waited for it to reach inside and grab me.

Instead, the creature spoke.

It used human words. But the voice was wrong. It sounded like multiple voices layered over one another, speaking in a raspy, stolen tone.

"He fills the roots with the broken ones,"

the creature spoke. The voice vibrated through the wood of the tree.

"He digs the hollows, leaves the meat for the dirt, and hides his sins inside my skin."

I kept my hands clamped over my mouth. Tears stung my eyes. I was listening to the monster talk to itself.

"He tells the travelers to leave the black bark alone,"

the creature continued, its voice dripping with hatred. "He knows the rule. He knows if the bark bleeds, I must protect the grove, and hunt the ones who spill the sap. He uses my anger to guard his graves, to make me the killer of the curious."

The creature scraped its hooves angrily against the dirt.

"I cannot leave the shadows,"

it whispered.

"I cannot walk the path to his wooden house. He wears the carved bones, the wards on his chest. The dead cannot touch him. I cannot see him. He is safe from the teeth, while he fills my trees with his rot."

I sat in the dark. I knew I could not stay in the tree forever. I had no food, no water, and my friends were either dead or lost in the woods. If I tried to run, the blind creature would hear me and kill me.

There was only one option.

I slowly pulled my hands away from my mouth, and took a deep breath.

"I can stop him,"

I said aloud.

The creature instantly stopped moving. The silence returned.

I slowly crawled forward. I pushed my head and shoulders out of the hollow opening, then stood up in the mud, keeping my hands empty and raised in the air.

The creature was standing right in front of me. It was towering, its blank face angled slightly downward, listening to my exact position.

"I found the skull,"

I said, keeping my voice steady, though my entire body was shaking.

"I found his knife. I know what the ranger is doing to you. I know he uses you to hide his murders."

The creature did not move. It breathed slowly.

"If you kill me, his secret stays hidden,"

I told the creature.

"He will keep bringing bodies here, and will keep using your trees. But if you let me walk away, I will take the evidence. I will take it to the people who can arrest him, so we can bring him to justice, and he will never bury another body in your grove again."

The creature took a step closer. The massive antlers blotted out the moonlight above.

It leaned its face down until it was inches from my own. I could smell the earth on its breath.

It slowly opened its mouth.

The vertical slit parted, and the jaw unhinged, stretching incredibly wide. The throat opened into a dark, massive cavern.

I looked inside the mouth, and I saw them.

The faces of the dead.

Pale, translucent human faces were embedded in the dark tissue of the creature's throat.

The faces opened their mouths, and they spoke to me in unison.

"The green man keeps a record,"

the faces whispered, their voices echoing directly into my mind.

"He keeps a book of names. He keeps the rings from our fingers, and the plastic cards with our pictures."

"Where?"

I asked the faces.

"Where does he keep them?"

"In his wooden house,"

the faces replied.

"Under the floor. The third wooden board from the iron stove. The board is loose. The box is metal. Take the book. Take the rings. Show the world his sins."

The creature closed its mouth. The vertical slit sealed shut, hiding the faces in the dark.

It took a step backward, then turned around, walking slowly away from the bleeding tree, disappearing into the dark canopy of the forest. It was letting me go. It had accepted the deal.

I dropped to my knees. I reached into the hollow trunk, and grabbed the rusted hunting knife, and the fractured human skull. I unzipped my backpack and placed both items securely inside.

I stood up and began walking through the woods. I walked carefully, placing my feet softly on the ground.

I found my friends an hour later. They were hiding together inside a deep rocky ravine near the creek. They had stayed completely silent, which is why the creature had not found them. They were terrified and shivering, but they were unharmed.

I told them we had to leave immediately. I did not explain the deal I had made. I just told them the creature was gone, and we had to hike back to the car.

We walked through the forest all night. We navigated by the moonlight and the compass on my phone. We reached the trailhead just as the sun was starting to rise. The small wooden ranger station was dark and empty.

We threw our gear into the trunk of our car, and drove away from the state park as fast as the gravel roads would allow.

We reached the nearest town about an hour later. It was a small, quiet place with a single main street. I parked the car directly in front of the local police station.

"I am going in,"

I told my friends, grabbing my backpack from the floorboard.

"I have an evidence fir a murders. I am going to tell them everything."

I walked up the concrete steps to the glass double doors of the police station.

I reached for the handle, but I stopped.

I looked through the glass into the lobby.

The ranger was standing inside. He was wearing his pristine green uniform, holding a cup of coffee, and he was laughing loudly.

Sitting around the front desk were the local sheriff and three deputies. They were all drinking coffee, smiling, and joking with the ranger.

I looked closer.

Hanging around the ranger's neck was a small, carved piece of white bone tied to a leather string. It was the ward. The charm that protected him from the creature and the dead.

I looked at the sheriff. He was wearing the exact same carved bone charm around his neck.

I looked at the three deputies. Every single one of them had a carved bone charm resting against their uniform shirts.

My blood ran completely cold. I backed away from the glass door, then turned around, walked down the steps, and got back into my car.

"Drive,"

I told my oldest friend, who was sitting in the driver's seat.

"Just drive out of this town right now."

We have been driving for two hours. We are currently parked outside a diner near the interstate.

I am holding the backpack on my lap. The skull and the rusted knife are sitting inside it. I know exactly where the ledger and the trophies are hidden in the ranger's house, under the third floorboard by the iron stove. The evidence is all there, waiting to be collected.

But I cannot take this to the local cops. If I walk into that station, they will see the skull, they will see the knife, and they will arrest me. Or worse, they will just drive me back out to the black-barked trees and finish the job themselves.

The blind creature kept its end of the deal, so I have to keep my end of the deal.

Please, if anyone reading this has the authority to help, tell me what my next step should be.

My husband has always wanted kids. We’re just, I don’t know… I feel like we’re just not old enough yet. We got married young. Fresh out of high school.

He works with his dad as an electrician, and I’m still in college, studying to become a teacher. Needless to say, it’s not kids that I have a problem with. I just want to make sure we’re both in a position to raise our children the right way.

He knew that when I agreed to marry him. He seemed supportive of it at first. I told him very clearly that I wanted to wait until we were at least 30.

For the first 2 years, it seemed like everything was fine. I didn’t know just how agitated he was getting with my refusal to get off birth control. Every time he asked, it was like a stab to my heart.

We started arguing a bit. We’d bicker about little things like any other couple, but when it came to kids, it turned into full-blown screaming matches.

“I can take care of a baby.”

“You can still do school.”

“We’ll find a good daycare.”

It became clear that he just wasn’t seeing my vision. Part of me regretted getting married so abruptly. So young. Our brains hadn’t even fully developed yet.

But then again, we did get married for a reason.
We loved each other. We’d been friends since middle school. We got married after dating for 2 years. We were each other’s homes.

He just wasn’t so hell-bent on being a father back then. I don’t know what changed, but when it did, it was just downhill from there.

The arguments persisted, but so did I. So did we. I never wanted to turn my back on him. I just wanted us to make it through.

It seemed like all my prayers had been answered when the arguments just… stopped one day. I soon came to realize that that wasn’t exactly the blessing I thought that it was.

I remember he started going out more. Staying at work late. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find that I was alone in our bed.

Of course, my already stressed brain jumped to the worst conclusion.

I didn’t want to distrust him, but he wasn’t making trust easy.

When he saw me, it was just all sunshine and rainbows, but when he was gone, it was like he was dead.

No texts, no calls, nothing. At first, I was happy for the space, but as it went on, I started getting more and more unnerved.

When he wasn’t out or at work, he spent a lot of his time in our shed. He’d spend hours out there. I’d see him carrying food out there.

It became strictly off-limits to me.

Any time he saw me even come close to the building, he’d stop me and guide me back into the house.

This is around the time I became convinced that he had lost his mind. He started talking about a daughter that I know we didn’t have.

“Roxxy is a little fussy today.”

“You keep working on your schoolwork. I’ll take care of our baby.”

“I need to go out and get some food for Roxxy.”

Any time he mentioned it, all I could do was laugh awkwardly and ask him what the hell he was talking about. Every time, his answer was nearly the exact same.

“You know what I’m talking about.”

He’d just smile and play it off like he wasn’t acting like a complete lunatic.

What scares me, though, is I’m starting to think maybe he’s not a lunatic.

I swear it’s like sometimes I can hear cries coming from the shed. Soft, weak little cries that are just audible enough for my guard to come up.

I found a pair of little pink socks in our dryer last week.

I always seem to find empty cans of baby formula hidden beneath the trash in our trash can.

When I really started grilling him about his behavior, the arguments came back. He’d scream at me. Call me horrible, awful names that I could’ve never imagined would’ve escaped his lips.

But the part that concerns me the most… is that he’s chained up the door to our shed.

He’s spray-painted over the windows.

He keeps the key with him at all times.

The crying has been getting louder and louder.
I don’t know if I’m too afraid to accept what’s happening, or if this is all just a nightmare that I can’t wake up from.

All I know is that now he doesn’t just talk about wanting a kid.

He tells me he wants another.

Most people think my job is insane.

Honestly, they're probably right.

When people talk about dangerous professions, they usually mention logging, commercial fishing, or construction. Those jobs earn their reputation. One mistake, one moment of bad luck, and you're fucked.

Or hell, dead.

Me?

I always found myself drawn to danger. Maybe it's the adrenaline. Maybe it's because some part of me enjoys standing in places most people would never willingly go.

You can learn a lot about a person from the work they choose to do.

For me, that work is commercial diving.

Most folks hear that and assume it's terrifying. Being dropped into cold, dark water hundreds of feet from the surface while surrounded by machinery that could crush you without warning doesn't exactly sound appealing to the average person.

The funny thing is, I find it relaxing.

Down there, the world becomes quiet. The noise of everyday life (the wife complaining) disappears beneath the water. It's just me, my equipment, and whatever job needs doing. I usually have music playing through my helmet while I work on oil rigs, ship hulls, intake structures, and all sorts of underwater machinery.

After years in the profession, I thought I'd seen everything the depths could throw at me.

I was wrong.

Because in all my years of commercial diving, nothing, and I mean nothing, came close to making me soil my dive suit the way I almost did during a contract at the Hoover Dam.

The water was murky that morning. Visibility couldn't have been more than six or seven feet. My helmet lamp carved a narrow path through the darkness, illuminating clouds of suspended sediment drifting lazily through the reservoir.

I remember feeling uneasy almost immediately.

Not fear.

Fear implies you've identified the threat.

What I felt was the discomfort of being observed by something that hadn't revealed itself yet. The sensation settled between my shoulder blades and refused to leave. Something was down there with me. Heavy emphasis on something, because there is nothing in this world that should have been sharing those depths with me.

The feeling was irrational enough that, like an idiot, I ignored it.

Then I saw the marks.

"What the actual hell..."

They scored the concrete face of the dam in long, jagged trails. These weren't little scratches left by debris or equipment. They stretched several feet across the wall and bit deep enough into the surface to expose steel beneath.

I stopped swimming and stared.

What unsettled me most wasn't their size.

It was how familiar they looked.

Almost human.

Or at least made by something trying very hard to be.

Five long gouges ran parallel to one another through decades of algae and sediment, climbing vertically along the dam before disappearing into darkness above.

I keyed my radio.

"Oi, somebody's gonna have to explain how these ended up on a wall."

The response was laughter.

They thought I was joking.

Honestly, so did I.

I snapped a few photographs and continued downward.

That's when I found the first handprint.

Five fingers.

Human proportions.

Pressed against the concrete nearly thirty feet below the surface.

Then another.

And another.

Soon my lamp was finding them everywhere.

Hundreds.

Thousands, maybe.

Handprints layered over one another as if something had spent years climbing the face of the Hoover Dam.

My breathing quickened.

The sound echoed loudly inside my helmet.

There had to be a reasonable explanation.

There always had been before.

Then my lamp caught movement.

A figure.

Standing motionless on the reservoir floor.

I nearly inhaled my own tongue.

At first I assumed it was another diver. The silhouette was roughly human-sized, two arms, two legs, standing upright in the darkness.

But that didn't make sense.

No diver would be down there alone.

Not without communications.

Not without a support crew.

Not without lights.

This thing had none.

It simply stood at the edge of visibility, motionless and watching.

I blinked.

It was gone.

Immediately, I radioed the surface.

"Confirm I'm the only diver in the water."

A moment later the reply came.

"Just you, Maxwell."

No unauthorized personnel, secondary dive teams.

Nobody else in the reservoir.

I should have ascended right then.

Instead, I kept working.

I convinced myself my eyes were playing tricks on me. Fatigue. Bad visibility. Too much coffee before the dive.

Stubbornness is a common flaw in my profession.

God knows I've got plenty of it.

I was raised by a father who thought every problem could be solved by "manning up."

A strange shadow wasn't about to sabotage my paycheck.

A few minutes later, I noticed something that truly frightened me.

The safety line connecting me to the surface had gone slack.

Completely slack.

That should never happen.

There are always currents. Movement. Tension.

The line should constantly carry resistance.

I turned my lamp toward it.

The rope disappeared into darkness behind me.

Then it moved.

Not drifted.

Moved.

Something farther down the line had pulled it.

My stomach tightened.

Slowly, I followed the rope with my eyes until my beam reached its end.

Something was holding it.

A hand.

A pale human hand emerging from the darkness.

Its fingers wrapped around the line.

Then a second hand appeared.

And then a face.

God, I wish I hadn't seen the face.

Its skin was swollen and waterlogged, stretched tight across features that almost resembled a person.

Almost.

The eyes were too large.

Too dark.

Like something hauled up from the deepest part of the ocean.

Then it smiled.

The safety line jerked violently.

I screamed into the radio.

The thing released the rope and vanished downward with impossible speed.

One moment it was there.

The next it had been swallowed by darkness.

Surface control immediately ordered my ascent.

For once in my life, I didn't argue.

Halfway to the surface, I made the mistake that still haunts my dreams.

I looked down.

There wasn't just one.

Dozens of pale figures stood along the face of the dam.

Motionless.

Watching.

Their silhouettes clung to the concrete like barnacles that had learned how to imitate people.

And every single one of them was staring upward.

Toward me.

Toward the surface.

I reached the top in record time.

The crew blamed nitrogen narcosis. Stress. Exhaustion.

The photographs and film were reviewed.

Most showed nothing unusual.

Just dark water and concrete.

Except for one.

The final clip from the helmet's recorder. The engineers never found an explanation for it.

You can clearly see me inspecting the intake structure. You can clearly see the beam from my helmet lamp. And standing directly behind me is another diver.

No safety markings, equipment, or air hose.

Just a pale figure staring directly into the camera.

The worst part?

The timestamp showed the photograph had been taken six minutes before I noticed anything in the water.

Meaning that thing had already been following me for most of the dive.

A few days later, men in black suits came to speak with me.

That's about as much as I'm legally allowed to say.

I retired shortly afterward.

People think I'm crazy.

Walking away from a six-figure career because I saw strange pale figures underwater?

"He must be nuts."

Maybe I am.

But every time I hear reports about water levels dropping at the Hoover Dam, I find myself wondering what happens when the reservoir finally shrinks enough.

Because if those things were standing on the wall sixty feet underwater...

Sooner or later, they won't be underwater anymore.

What the hell were those things?

Part 1: I'm a Serial Killer. Hell Just Offered Me a Job.

I pressed two fingers against my neck.

Nothing.

I tried my wrist.

Still nothing.

Then my chest.

Silence.

No rhythm.

No pulse.

No beating.

I checked again.

And again.

Three hundred and twelve times, according to the tally I'd started scratching into the motel notepad. The first thing Hell forgot to mention was that being dead is incredibly inconvenient.

For example, nobody tells you that your heart doesn't start beating again.

You'd think after the first hundred I'd accept it, but denial is a surprisingly stubborn survival instinct for someone who's technically no longer alive.

The second thing Hell forgot to mention is that corpses don't get hungry.

I'm not saying I didn't want food. I spent twenty dollars on pancakes that looked amazing. I just couldn't taste a single bite. The syrup had the consistency of motor oil, the bacon might as well have been cardboard, and the coffee... actually, the coffee tasted exactly the same. Which says more about motel coffee than it does about death.

By the time I'd finished breakfast, I'd reached a medically concerning conclusion.

I hadn't blinked once.

Not because I was trying not to. I'd simply forgotten people were supposed to. That realization bothered me far more than the whole "dying and waking up in Hell" thing. Normal people don't have to consciously remind themselves to blink. Yet there I was, standing in front of a motel bathroom mirror, staring at my own reflection while forcing my eyelids shut every few seconds like I was relearning a basic human function.

Then someone knocked on my motel door.

Three slow knocks. Not the impatient pounding of a police officer. Not the nervous tapping of housekeeping.

Just...

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

I glanced at the clock.

6:66 A.M.

Nobody with good intentions knocks at 6:66 in the morning.

I slid my pistol from beneath the pillow and quietly approached the door.

"Who is it?"

Silence.

I waited a few seconds before checking the peephole.

No one.

Wonderful.

Ghosts had apparently learned how to prank people.

Keeping the pistol raised, I unlocked the door. The hallway beyond was empty. No footsteps. No elevator. No retreating figure. Just a long stretch of stained carpet beneath flickering fluorescent lights.

Then I looked down.

A black leather briefcase sat neatly on the welcome mat.

Attached to the handle was a cream-colored envelope.

My real name was written across the front of it in elegant handwriting.

That caught me off guard. Only a handful of people still knew my real name, and none of them had called me by it in years. To everyone else, I was Mara Graves.

Apparently Hell preferred legal names.

Beneath my name, embossed in neat gold lettering, were two words.

EMPLOYEE ORIENTATION.

I stared at the envelope for several seconds before picking it up.

It was heavier than it looked. The paper felt expensive, thick, almost velvety beneath my fingertips. The kind of stationery usually reserved for law firms, weddings, or organizations with enough money that they never had to remind anyone they had it. Considering it had apparently been delivered by Hell, I supposed they could afford quality office supplies.

I opened the envelope. Inside was a single folded sheet of black paper. Not dark gray. Not charcoal. Black. The kind of black that seemed to swallow the motel's fluorescent light instead of reflecting it. Across the top, written in silver lettering, were the words:

WELCOME TO THE INFERNAL RETRIEVAL DEPARTMENT.

Beneath that was a much smaller sentence.

Congratulations on accepting our offer of employment.

"I don't remember signing anything," I muttered.

The page turned itself.

I instinctively reached for my pistol, but the paper ignored me. The second page contained only three lines.

Your employment officially began three days ago.

Employee Status: Deceased.

Orientation materials enclosed.

I slowly looked back at the briefcase.

"Nope."

The briefcase clicked open by itself.

I immediately took three more steps backward and leveled my pistol at it. Nothing happened. No smoke. No screaming souls. No tiny demons wearing business suits. The lid simply swung open and waited.

"You're either surprisingly polite," I said to the briefcase, "or this is exactly how horror movies start."

Curiosity has killed a lot of people.

Technically, I'd already checked that one off my list.

I lowered the pistol and walked over. The inside of the briefcase was immaculate. Everything had its own compartment, arranged with obsessive precision. A matte-black revolver rested in the center. Beside it sat a pair of silver handcuffs engraved with symbols that seemed to move whenever I looked directly at them. There was a leather notebook, a small metal badge bearing the same goat skull I'd seen behind the desk in Hell, and a stack of neatly labeled folders tied together with black ribbon.

At the very bottom rested a small white card.

It contained exactly one sentence.

Please report to your first assignment immediately. Management is already disappointed in you.

I frowned.

"I've only been dead for three days."

I set the card aside and picked up the first folder.

COMPANY POLICIES.

Of course Hell had paperwork.

The first page contained exactly one sentence.

Please read all policies before beginning your first retrieval. Failure to comply may result in additional punishment.

There were three hundred and seventy-eight pages.

I closed the folder.

"I'm willing to risk it."

The paper immediately burst into black flames. I jumped backward, reaching for my pistol, but the fire didn't spread. It simply consumed the pages before reforming into a single sheet.

Apparently Hell had anticipated that reaction.

The new page contained only four rules.

Rule 1: Do not talk to any demons other than management.

Reasonable.

Rule 2: Escaped prisoners are to be returned, not executed.

Less reasonable.

Rule 3: Prisoners may lie, bargain, threaten, plead, impersonate, manipulate, or otherwise attempt to avoid capture. Please do not believe them.

I frowned at that one.

Rule 4: Angels are not classified as prisoners. Do not attempt apprehension unless accompanied by authorized management personnel.

I blinked.

"...Why the hell would I ever need to hunt an angel?"

The motel television crackled to life before I could read any further. Static swallowed the screen before dissolving into the familiar image of a massive goat skull.

"You read the rules."

"I skimmed them."

"I noticed."

The voice hadn't changed. Calm. Professional. Like an accountant discussing tax deductions instead of eternal damnation.

I folded my arms. The glowing red eyes remained fixed on me.

"Your first assignment has already begun."

The television changed.

A photograph filled the screen.

The young woman from yesterday.

The one the escaped demon intended to kill next.

Only she looked different now.

Her smile was vacant.

Her eyes seemed unfocused.

Beneath the photograph appeared a short report.

Subject has begun Stage One identity degradation.

I stared at the words.

"What exactly does that mean?"

The Goat Lady was silent for several seconds before answering.

"It has started erasing her."

A chill crawled up my spine.

"Erasing... her memories?"

"No."

Another photograph appeared. It had been taken only hours later. The same woman. The same clothes. The same face.

But somehow...

She looked like a completely different person.

"It is erasing her existence."

The Goat Lady's voice remained unnervingly calm.

"When it finishes, the body will still be alive."

"It simply won't belong to her anymore."

The television went black.

For a few seconds, I just stood there, letting everything sink in. Then I grabbed the briefcase, holstered my pistol, and headed for the parking lot. I'd figure out whatever Hell had packed inside that suitcase later. Right now, all I had was an address, the name of a woman I'd never met, and a demon that had already killed six people, survived being shot, worn human beings like Halloween costumes, and murdered me. Somehow, I doubted a strongly worded conversation was going to solve this one.

The motel parking lot was almost empty. I tossed the briefcase onto the passenger seat, climbed behind the wheel, and floored the accelerator. The address was the same one I'd been given yesterday. I could only hope the target hadn't moved. Traffic was surprisingly light for a weekday morning, giving me far too much time alone with my thoughts. There had to be better candidates than me. Soldiers. Police officers. Paramedics. Actual good people. Instead, Hell had hired a serial killer. Either their recruitment standards were embarrassingly low, or they knew something about me that I didn't. I wasn't sure which possibility bothered me more.

About halfway there, the briefcase gave a soft metallic click. I glanced over just in time to see the latches pop open on their own.

"I am absolutely not dealing with a haunted suitcase while driving."

The briefcase ignored me. One of the folders slowly slid out before coming to rest neatly on the passenger seat. Across the tab, stamped in crimson ink, were two words.

CASE FILE.

I sighed.

"Fine."

The next traffic light turned red, so I picked up the folder and opened it. The first page contained a photograph of the young woman. The second was a timeline documenting her condition. Every few hours, another piece of her identity disappeared. First her childhood memories. Then the names of her closest friends. Then her parents. Then her own birthday. I turned the page.

Only one entry remained.

Tomorrow — 3:00 A.M.

Subject no longer recognizes herself.

Vessel acquisition imminent.

I looked up at the dashboard clock.

8:00 A.M.

Nineteen hours.

That was all she had left.

The light turned green.

I slammed the folder shut, threw it back onto the passenger seat, and pressed harder on the accelerator.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled onto a narrow gravel road.

The house sat at the very end, tucked beside a dense stretch of forest. It was small. Cozy. The kind of cottage that belonged on a postcard rather than in the middle of a supernatural homicide investigation. Wind chimes swayed gently on the porch, flower boxes lined the windows, and a faded bicycle lay on its side near the driveway.

Nothing about it screamed demon.

I killed the engine but didn't get out.

Old habits die hard.

Well...

Apparently I didn't.

I spent another minute watching the house through the windshield. No movement behind the curtains. No shadowy figures lurking in the trees. No impossible creatures crawling across the roof.

Just an ordinary home.

Which somehow made me even more nervous.

I grabbed my pistol and tucked it into the back of my waistband. Then I opened the suitcase and picked up the revolver.

I thumbed open the cylinder.

Six rounds.

Good.

That was all I had, so every shot would have to count.

I snapped the cylinder shut, tucked the briefcase under one arm, and walked toward the front door.

Three knocks.

A few seconds later, footsteps approached from inside.

The door opened.

A girl, maybe seventeen, blinked at me.

"Hi," she said politely. "Can I help you?"

Her smile looked genuine.

Her eyes didn't.

They were unfocused, almost distant, as if part of her attention was somewhere else entirely.

"I'm looking for..." I glanced at the file.

"...Emily Carter."

The girl frowned.

For several long seconds, she just stared at me.

Then she quietly asked,

"Who's Emily?"  

I looked at her.

Then I looked down at the photograph in the case file.

Then back at her again.

Same chestnut hair.

Same freckles scattered across her nose.

Same green eyes.

There wasn't a doubt in my mind.

I slowly lowered the folder.

"You... are Emily Carter."

She frowned.

"...Am I?"

She didn't sound scared.

She sounded genuinely uncertain.

"I thought so," she said after a moment. "At least... I think I am."

She gave an embarrassed laugh.

"Sorry. I've been really forgetful lately."

The laugh didn't reach her eyes.

"I keep walking into rooms and forgetting why I'm there. Yesterday I couldn't remember where I worked for almost an hour." She rubbed her temple. "My doctor says it's probably stress."

Stress…

"Can I come in?" I asked.

She hesitated for a second before stepping aside.

The cottage was immaculate. Everything had a place. Books lined the shelves, a half-finished mug of coffee sat on the kitchen counter, and a planner lay open on the dining table.

Every page was covered in notes.

Buy groceries.

Water plants.

Take medication.

You live alone.

I stopped.

The last note had been written three times.

You live alone.

You live alone.

YOU LIVE ALONE.

Emily noticed me staring.

"Oh..." She looked away, embarrassed. "I started leaving myself reminders."

"What kind of reminders?"

"The important ones."

She walked over to the refrigerator.

Sticky notes covered almost every inch of it.

Your name is Emily.

You are twenty-four years old.

Your parents are dead.

You don't have a sister.

You adopted the cat. Don't panic if you don't recognize him.

I felt my stomach knot.

This wasn't Stage One anymore.

Emily hadn't just been forgetting memories.

She'd realized she was forgetting herself... and had been trying to fight it.

"Sorry," she said with an awkward smile. "I know this probably looks insane."

"Actually," I replied, "it's one of the more reasonable things I've seen this week."

She laughed.

It was brief.

Forced.

Like she'd forgotten how.

"So..." she said. "Who exactly are you?"

That was a fantastic question.

I couldn't exactly tell her I worked for Hell.

So I lied.

"Your doctor asked me to stop by and see how you're doing. He said you've been having some memory issues."

Emily's shoulders relaxed.

"Oh."

She blinked.

"Right."

The way she said it made my stomach sink.

It wasn't relief.

It was recognition without understanding, like she'd convinced herself my explanation made sense simply because she couldn't remember whether it did.

"Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?" I said.

She nodded and stepped aside.

"Sure."

"When did all this start?"

Emily stared at the floor for several seconds.

"I..."

She frowned.

"I don't remember."

A weak, embarrassed smile crossed her face.

"I guess that's kind of the problem."

I opened the case file.

"Have you noticed anything unusual? Anyone following you? Strange phone calls? Missing time?"

She thought for a moment.

"...Dreams."

I looked up.

"Every night."

"What kind of dreams?"

"The woods."

Her eyes drifted toward the kitchen window overlooking the tree line.

"Someone keeps calling me."

"Do you recognize the voice?"

She slowly shook her head.

"No."

"Have you ever gone outside because of it?"

She hesitated.

"I... don't know."

"You don't know?"

"Every morning I wake up with mud on my shoes."

I stopped writing.

"Anything else?"

She nodded toward the front door.

"The deadbolt is always unlocked."

"Do you lock it before bed?"

"Every night."

"And when you wake up?"

"It's unlocked."

Silence settled over the room.

Three quick knocks broke the silence, making both of us jump.

Emily frowned. "I wasn't expecting anyone."

Before I could stop her, she opened the door.

Two paramedics stood on the porch.

"Emily Carter?"

She nodded.

"We're responding to a wellness check. One of your neighbors was concerned after not seeing you for a few days."

One of the paramedics glanced past her into the cottage, and his expression immediately changed. Every wall was covered in notes. The refrigerator, the cabinets, the mirrors, and even the front door were plastered with reminders.

"Emily," he said gently, "we'd like to bring you in for a quick evaluation." 

Part of me expected her to argue.

To refuse.

Instead, she simply nodded.

"...Okay."

Then she looked at me for several long seconds before quietly asking, "...Who are you again?"

My stomach dropped.

She'd forgotten me.

Not after hours.

After minutes.

One of the paramedics noticed the look on my face.

"Are you family?"

"No."

"A friend?"

I hesitated.

"...Something like that."

Emily looked between us with growing confusion.

"I'm sorry," she said softly. "I feel like I should know you."

"I know."

She lowered her eyes.

"I keep doing this."

The older paramedic stepped inside and spoke gently.

"Emily, have you been eating?"

"I think so."

"When was your last meal?"

She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Nearly ten seconds passed before she looked at him helplessly.

"...I don't remember."

He exchanged a worried glance with his partner.

"Have you been sleeping?"

"I have dreams."

"That's not what I asked."

She hesitated again before quietly admitting, "...I don't know."

That was enough.

The paramedics didn't need demons to know something was seriously wrong. They convinced Emily to come willingly while I quietly slipped the case file back into the briefcase. As she zipped an overnight bag closed, another sticky note drifted off the refrigerator and landed at my feet.

I picked it up.

If someone says they're here to help... let them.

I looked up.

"Did you write this?"

Emily stared at it for several seconds before frowning.

"I..."

She shook her head.

"I don't remember."

Neither of us spoke again as we followed the paramedics outside.

The emergency department smelled like antiseptic and burnt coffee. Emily answered the same questions over and over again—her name, her birthday, the date, and her address. Some answers came immediately. Others took longer.

"What year is it?"

Emily frowned and closed her eyes.

"...I know this."

Several seconds passed before she whispered,

"I knew this."

The attending physician exchanged another concerned look with the neurologist before turning to me.

"We're admitting her overnight."

I wanted to argue. Hospital walls weren't going to stop whatever was hunting her, but I couldn't exactly tell them a demon was slowly erasing her existence, so I stayed.

Hours passed. The waiting room emptied, and the conversations outside faded until only the occasional nurse walked the hallway. Emily eventually fell asleep—or at least her eyes were closed.

I sat in the corner of the room with the privacy curtain drawn around her bed, the case file resting open on my lap. The final page stared back at me.

Tomorrow. 3:00 A.M.

I checked my watch.

12:01 A.M.

Three hours.

The lights flickered once, then again, before every monitor in the room shut off at the exact same moment. There was no alarm and no power surge. They simply stopped.

The room became unnaturally quiet. No footsteps echoed through the hallway, no voices drifted in from the nurses' station, and even the constant hum of the air conditioner had vanished.

I stood as a cold draft brushed across the back of my neck. The hospital window stood open, even though I was certain it had been locked. When I pulled back the privacy curtain, Emily's bed was empty. The restraints still lay neatly across the mattress, buckled exactly as the nurses had left them. She hadn't escaped them.

Someone had taken her.

I rushed to the window. Fresh mud stained the windowsill, and a trail of wet footprints stretched across the parking lot toward the tree line beyond the hospital. I checked my watch again.

12:04 A.M.

Less than three hours remained.

Then I remembered what Emily had told me earlier that day. Every night she dreamed about the woods, and someone kept calling her name. I didn't waste another second. I sprinted out of the room and was already running toward my car before my brain had fully caught up with what had happened.

I reached the woods behind Emily's neighborhood just minutes later.

The moment I stepped beneath the trees, I knew something was wrong. The forest hadn't simply grown darker. It felt... rearranged. Trees stood where there hadn't been trees before, and trails twisted back on themselves, forming impossible circles that led nowhere. Every few yards I found names carved into the bark, but as I watched, the letters slowly faded until the trunks became smooth again, as though those people had never existed.

I tightened my grip on the revolver and reached into the briefcase for the silver handcuffs. They felt unnaturally cold against my palms. The case file hadn't been exaggerating. This thing didn't just erase people. It erased every trace that they had ever been here.

Then a scream tore through the silence.

"Help!"

Emily.

I broke into a sprint. Branches clawed at my jacket as I pushed deeper into the woods, my flashlight bouncing wildly between the trees and catching movement that vanished whenever I tried to focus on it. Every few seconds I caught glimpses of people standing motionless between the trunks: a little girl, an elderly woman, a woman in a business suit. Each of them slowly turned toward me with vacant expressions before dissolving back into the darkness. Hallucinations, I told myself. They had to be.

Then Emily screamed again.

This time it was closer.

I burst through a wall of undergrowth into a small clearing and froze.

Emily was on her knees in the center of the clearing, clutching her head as though trying to hold her own thoughts together. Standing behind her was a figure that looked human until it smiled. Its jaw split impossibly wide, stretching from ear to ear, and behind that smile another face stared back at me. Then another. Then another. Hundreds of human faces shifted beneath its skin like people drowning beneath thin ice, each one silently mouthing the same question.

Who am I?

I raised the revolver and fired.

The first blessed round struck it square in the chest.

The creature didn't bleed.

Instead, it changed.

The thing standing over Emily vanished, replaced by a terrified teenage girl. The bullet had torn through her shoulder, and she let out a scream that made my stomach turn before disappearing as quickly as she'd appeared. An elderly woman took her place. The next bullet punched through her chest. Her frightened eyes locked onto mine for a single heartbeat before she vanished too. Then came a little girl. A young mother clutching an infant. A police officer.

Every shot passed through a different person.

Every victim the Spine Taker had ever stolen.

Each one looked real.

Each one screamed.

Each one stared directly at me.

I stopped firing. I only had one round left.

The creature smiled as its body rippled through dozens of stolen faces every second until they blurred together into something that barely resembled a human being.

"Do you see?" it asked, speaking with all of their voices at once. "If you cannot tell us apart... how can you be certain you're not killing them instead of me?"

My finger tightened around the trigger, but I couldn't pull it. Maybe it was another illusion. Maybe every face I was seeing belonged to someone who had died years ago. Or maybe they were still trapped inside that thing somehow. I didn't know, and that uncertainty was enough to stop me.

The creature smiled wider.

It had figured me out.

I'd spent my life hunting monsters who preyed on innocent people. That didn't erase what I'd become, but there had always been one line I refused to cross. I never killed the innocent. If I started pulling the trigger without knowing who stood in front of me, then I wasn't any different from the people I'd spent years hunting.

The Spine Taker laughed as its body rippled through another dozen stolen faces.

"I don't need to defeat you," it whispered. "I only need you to hesitate."

It lunged.

I threw myself aside just as its claws carved through the tree behind me, splintering the trunk like dry wood. My revolver flew from my hand and disappeared somewhere into the darkness.

Behind the creature, Emily had collapsed to her knees. She clutched her head with both hands, rocking back and forth as tears streamed down her face.

"My name is Emily," she whispered.

She repeated it again, louder this time.

"My name is Emily."

Again.

"My name is Emily."

She wasn't reminding me.

She was desperately trying to remind herself.

While the creature's attention remained fixed on Emily, I slowly reached the revolver and slid it into my sleeve, keeping my movements as small as possible. The Spine Taker suddenly lunged. Before I could react, one of its impossibly long arms wrapped around my torso and lifted me effortlessly off the ground until we were face to face. Hanging upside down, I found myself staring into a body made of shifting identities. The faces beneath its skin rippled faster and faster before finally settling on one I'd seen only a few days earlier.

Mine.

It tilted its head with unmistakable curiosity.

"You..." it hissed. "You're the one who died in the river."

For the first time since the fight began, it hesitated.

That was all I needed.

I slipped the revolver from my sleeve and fired a single blessed round straight into the center of its face. The clearing erupted with a scream unlike anything I'd ever heard. Every stolen face opened its mouth at once as the creature recoiled, dropping me onto the forest floor. Before it could recover, I threw myself forward and snapped one of the silver handcuffs around its wrist.

The reaction was immediate. The runes carved into the metal ignited with blinding white light, and the second cuff shot across the remaining distance on its own before locking around the creature's other wrist with a metallic snap. The Spine Taker collapsed, convulsing violently as the hundreds of faces beneath its skin dissolved one by one. Within seconds, the towering monster had shrunk into something almost human. Smaller. Frailer. Afraid.

Emily crumpled to the ground behind it, unconscious.

At the same moment, my briefcase clicked open. The folders inside vanished, replaced by an impossibly deep crimson abyss that stretched far beyond what should have fit inside a suitcase. Black chains disappeared into the darkness below, and a calm, emotionless voice echoed from somewhere inside.

"Prisoner retrieval confirmed."

I grabbed the demon by the handcuffs and dragged it toward the opening. It fought harder than I expected, clawing desperately at the dirt and roots as deep grooves carved through the forest floor.

"No!" it screamed. "Please! Don't send me back!"

I didn't slow down.

"You think Hell is what they told you?" it shrieked. "You think they're the jailers?"

Its terrified eyes locked onto mine.

"They lied to you."

My grip tightened, but I paused for the briefest fraction of a second.

The creature smiled.

Then it laughed.

"You'll learn," it whispered, its panic suddenly replaced by pity. "When you discover the truth..."

Before it could finish, an invisible force seized it. The demon was ripped forward, disappearing into the abyss feet first as its screams echoed through the darkness until they were swallowed completely. The portal folded shut with a quiet click, and silence settled over the clearing once more.

A small white card slid from the briefcase.

MISSION COMPLETE.

I looked over at Emily. Her breathing had steadied, and the tension had finally left her face. Carefully, I lifted her into my arms and carried her back through the forest to her cottage. The back door was still unlocked, just as she'd said it always was. I laid her gently in bed, pulled the blanket over her shoulders, and watched as a faint smile crossed her face in her sleep.

I quietly left the cottage, climbed into my car, and placed the briefcase on the passenger seat. The latches clicked open by themselves, and a familiar voice drifted from inside.

"Congratulations on your first successful retrieval."

The Goat Lady sounded almost...

Pleased. 
The briefcase clicked softly.

Another folder slid onto the passenger seat.

Unlike the others, this one wasn't black.

It was white.

Across the front, in elegant gold lettering, were four words.

PRIORITY RETRIEVAL — LEVEL OMEGA

"...That doesn't sound good."

"It isn't."

I opened the folder.

It was empty.

No photograph.

No case history.

No victim list.

Just a single sentence.

Management escort required.

A cold feeling settled in my stomach.

Then I remembered the fourth rule.

Angels are not classified as prisoners. Do not attempt apprehension unless accompanied by authorized management personnel.

I slowly looked at the briefcase.

"...You've got to be kidding."

"No."

My grip tightened on the steering wheel.

"My next assignment is an angel?"

"Correct."

"I thought angels were supposed to be..."

I searched for the right word.

"...the good guys."

"They were."

That answer bothered me more than if she'd said yes.

I flipped through the folder again.

"There isn't any information."

"There doesn't need to be."

"That's reassuring."

"You will not be conducting this retrieval alone."

"Well, yeah," I said. "Rule Four. Angels require authorized management personnel."

A brief silence followed.

"So who's the authorized management?"

The Goat Lady answered without hesitation.

"I am."

The words hung in the air.

For the first time since waking up in Hell...

I felt genuinely nervous.

The woman who ran Hell's Retrieval Department, the one who treated escaped horrors like overdue paperwork, was leaving her office.

"...How dangerous is this angel?"

The silence that followed lasted long enough for me to wonder if the connection had died.

When she finally spoke, the calm professionalism she'd worn until now had faded.

"It has already killed three retrieval teams."

The line went dead.

I drove back to the motel in complete silence.

The Spine Taker's final words kept replaying in my head.

They lied to you.

When you discover the truth...

I shook the thought away.

One existential crisis at a time.

By the time I reached the motel, dawn had begun creeping over the horizon. I carried the briefcase upstairs, unlocked my room, and immediately reached for my pistol.

Someone was inside.

A woman sat behind the small desk by the window with her boots resting comfortably on its surface, slowly stirring a mug of coffee she'd apparently helped herself to. She looked about my age, maybe her late twenties. She stood around five-foot-eleven with the kind of lean, athletic build that looked earned rather than trained for. Kings had probably gone to war over a face like hers, yet despite the effortless beauty, there was something quietly unsettling about her. She looked completely relaxed, but she reminded me of a wolf pretending to be asleep.

She glanced up as I entered.

"Oh."

A small smile crossed her face.

"There you are."

My pistol was in my hand before she'd finished speaking.

She didn't even blink.

Instead, she took another sip of coffee.

"Good trigger discipline."

Then I remembered the Goat Lady's last words.

I will accompany you personally.

I slowly lowered the pistol.

"...No way."

The woman smiled a little wider.

"I assume you've figured it out."

She closed the folder she'd been reading, set the coffee mug aside, and stood.

"I should introduce myself properly."

She offered me a hand. "Lucifuge," she said.

I stared.

"As in..."

"Yes."

"Lucifuge Rofocale?"

“Prime Minister of Hell,” she said, sounding mildly annoyed. “The title is my father’s name, but nobody ever remembers it.”

She took another sip of my coffee.

“Most demons just call me Lucy.”

I’ll update this journal if I make it through the night.

And if I don’t..and Terry is reading this…yes, I am still dead. Currently.

I don’t know how else to phrase that so it makes sense, but I also don’t think it’s supposed to.

The demon is sitting in my chair right now.

She is looking at me as I write this.

Wish me luck.

The clock on the wall rations the silence.
Tick. Tock.
Time is a loose concept. The rhythm, though—the rhythm is cold, mechanical, and honest.

I live in the basement shadows. I’ve made a home out of her floorboards since we ended. Above me, her footsteps map the ceiling: tick, tock. She is punctual. A creature of perfect, predictable gears. She rises, she walks, she pours her coffee, she sleeps.
Tick. Tock.
I know the exact weight of her step. I know her better than she knows herself. We exist in a flawless, quiet symbiosis—the host and the parasite, breathing the same air, separated only by joists and plaster. She has no idea I am here.

2:00 AM. Sleep is a luxury I don't own. I lie in the dark, remembering the taste of her, the way we used to be before the collapse. Now, we only have this.
Tick. Tock.

Then, the rhythm breaks. Her floorboards creak out of turn.
I hold my breath. The dust motes freeze in the dark. The clock seems to choke on its own gear.

CRACK.
The front door splinters.

A raw, territorial venom floods my throat. They have breached the sanctuary. These men—loud, clumsy, stupid—have stepped into a house that already belongs to me by silent right. They are trespassing on my obsession.

I freeze, paralyzed for a heartbeat. Then her scream cuts through the floorboards, only to be choked off mid-breath. Two male voices, coarse and jagged, tear through her quiet. I hear the violent, metallic rip of duct tape. I hear the wet, heavy crack of a palm hitting flesh. I hear her muffled, desperate whimpers.

My mind snaps clean off its hinges.

Suddenly, I am looking at myself from the ceiling. The world goes flat, virtualized, a cold 3D render. The noise of the assault drops into a deep, underwater hush. My body moves on autopilot. My hands find the metal box in the corner. The .22 pistol is light, freezing, and familiar. I glide up the wooden steps, weightless, a ghost reclaiming his haunt.

I reach the top of the stairs. What is happening in the bedroom is a stain on my sanity. She is bound, treated like a discarded doll, her eyes wide with a terror that screams through her gag.

I am entirely outside of myself now. A spectator. The small .22—quiet, surgical, merciless—fires. A dull pop into the first man's neck. He drops like wet clay.
The second one freezes, his hands slick with her sweat. He looks up, realizing too late that death didn't come through the broken front door. It crawled out of the floor. He opens his mouth to beg, staring at the shadow before him.

I press the muzzle against his forehead. The trigger gives. A dry snap silences the plea.

The silence that follows is deafening. The only sound is the wet, heavy rattle of their dying breaths on the hardwood. The barrel of the gun is hot. It tempts my temple. I want to pull the trigger again. I want to shoot myself. I want to shoot her, too, just to keep her safe from ever being touched again.

But I don't.

If I take one step into the bedroom, the yellow light will hit my face. She will see me. She will see the man she thinks is gone forever, standing over two corpses, drenched in their blood. The illusion would shatter. The symbiosis would die.

To keep her, I must remain a myth.

I step backward, letting the hallway darkness swallow me whole. I don't touch her. I walk to the kitchen, lift the receiver with the edge of my sleeve, and dial.

"Double homicide," I tell the dispatcher, my voice flat, dead, and steady. "Self-defense. There is a bound woman upstairs. Send help."

I hang up. Behind me, she is screaming through the tape, begging her savior to come back. But I am already gone, watching my own escape through a cold, distant lens. I take the keys. I drive into the black gut of the highway. I drift between cheap, neon-lit motels. I watch the news. I listen to the anchor talk about the "mysterious guardian angel," and I turn off the static.

The clock in her house stopped in the blood. But here, on the ceiling of this cheap room, the rhythm finds me again.
Tick. Tock.
It beats inside my skull. A reminder of a connection that is now permanent.

They never looked for me. They never blamed me. I committed atrocities that night, but it wasn't really me in that room.

Still... I would do it all over again.

I am a serial killer.

Not the typical kind, as serial killers go.

I don't kill innocent people. Well, innocent in the eyes of the law, maybe. The kind of innocent that comes from a lack of evidence, incompetent investigations, or expensive lawyers. If you looked at their actual victim lists, most of them should have been buried beneath prisons.

Instead, I buried them.

Officially, I'm a private investigator. Most of my clients hire me for the usual reasons: cheating spouses, missing persons, deadbeat fathers, or old debts that someone suddenly decides need collecting. The job pays the bills.

The other part of my work is what keeps me interested.

People tell private investigators things they would never tell the police. They gossip. They complain. They share rumors over drinks. Sometimes they mention a missing girl from ten years ago. Sometimes they mention a man who always seems to be nearby whenever someone disappears.

Most of the time it's nothing.

Sometimes it isn't.

It's strange, really. I don't remember exactly when I started. I was twenty-one. Maybe twenty-two.

My first was a man the locals called the Florida River Monster. He earned the nickname because of his habit of abducting women, butchering them, and scattering their remains across different rivers so the alligators could finish the cleanup for him. By the time anyone found what was left, there usually wasn't enough evidence to identify the victim, let alone connect her to him.

His preferred victims were blonde women in their early twenties.

I've noticed most serial killers have the same preferences. Women. Children. Sometimes both.

It's ironic, considering I'm a woman myself. A young woman, if being in your twenties still counts as young. According to every profile I've ever read, I should be the ideal victim. Too small. Too trusting. Too easy to overpower.

The River Monster thought so, too. That assumption lasted right up until I drugged him and gave him the same ending he'd spent years giving other people. I remember staring at him afterward. Not because I felt guilty. Not because I was horrified.

I was disappointed. For years, I'd read articles about him, watched documentaries, and followed every development in the investigation. The media made him sound larger than life—a monster, a predator, something almost supernatural. But when he died, he was just a man. A pathetic, terrified man bleeding out on the floor of a fishing shack. That's when I learned something important. Most monsters aren't monsters at all. They're just people who got away with being evil for far too long.

So I kept hunting them.

One killer became three. Three became ten. Then fifteen. Then more. I told myself I was making the world safer. Maybe I was. The truth is, I hated men like that. The ones who stalked women, hunted them, and treated them like prey. Wolves wearing human skin. And wolves need to be put down. Who better to do it than a woman?

Maybe that makes me a hypocrite. Maybe it makes me just as bad as they were. I really don't care.

Unfortunately, homicide pays terribly.

So, I figured I'd spend a few days following a rich man's wife, collect a paycheck, and head home. That's how these private investigative jobs usually went. Take pictures. Write a report. Collect the money. Move on. South Texas wasn't exactly my preferred destination, but five hundred dollars an hour has a way of making a long drive seem reasonable.

I asked Terry to send over the case file. Terry was my assistant, a meek man in his fifties who treated confrontation the same way most people treated unexploded bombs. The file showed up in my inbox before I could finish my coffee, along with an email apologizing for taking so long to send it. 

The file was surprisingly thin. The client's name was Daniel Walker. Forty-eight years old. Oil money. Married for twenty years. No criminal record. No history of domestic disputes. No obvious reason to suspect his wife was cheating. What caught my attention was the note attached to the bottom of the file: 

Client does not believe wife is having an affair. 
Client believes wife is acting strangely. 

I stared at those words for several seconds before calling Terry. He answered on the second ring.

"Please tell me that's a typo."

 "It isn't."

I sighed.

 "What does acting strange mean?" 

"I asked."

 "And?" 

"He said it's something he would rather discuss in person." I rubbed my temples. Of course he did. 

"Fantastic. Five hundred dollars an hour and I'm investigating a strange wife."

 "Still taking the job?" 

I looked at the payment agreement again. Five hundred dollars an hour. Some questions answer themselves. "Of course I'm taking the job." 

"What if he's crazy?" 

"Then he's a crazy man paying five hundred dollars an hour." 

Terry sighed. He was a genuinely kind man. If someone robbed him at gunpoint, he'd probably apologize for not carrying more cash. So, the idea of voluntarily meeting a potentially insane stranger offended every survival instinct he possessed.

I hung up.

Three days later, I found myself driving into a small South Texas town that looked like it had been forgotten by time. The buildings were rusty, the roads were cracked, and the locals had elevated being nosy into an art form. By the time I'd stopped for gas, bought a coffee, and asked for directions to my motel, half the town probably knew my license plate number. What surprised me more was how often my client's name came up. The gas station belonged to him. The convenience store belonged to him. The car wash belonged to him. Apparently, half the businesses in town belonged to him. No wonder he was willing to pay five hundred dollars an hour.

I checked into a small motel about ten minutes from the gated neighborhood where he and his wife lived. The room smelled vaguely of cigarettes and regret.

The next morning, I met my client. He was a large man with a round face and the kind of expensive clothes that desperately wanted everyone to know they were expensive. Gold rings covered his fingers—two on one hand, three on the other. Enough gold to sink a fishing boat. I immediately disliked him. Fortunately, taking money from people I dislike has never bothered me. 

He looked me up and down as I sat across from him, his eyes narrowing. "The White Viper is a woman?" There was genuine surprise in his voice. I smiled. "Oh, so you've heard of me." The White Viper was one of many names people had attached to me over the years. Most of them were ridiculous. A few of them are accurate.

"My name is Mara Graves," I said, extending a hand. That wasn't my real name, of course, but clients don't need to know things like that. He shook my hand carefully, as if he expected me to bite him.

"So," I said, leaning back in my chair, "what's the problem?"

His expression immediately darkened. "It's my wife."

That was usually how these conversations started. The details changed. The excuses changed. The tears changed. But eventually, every marriage investigation became the same story.

I pulled out a notebook. "Is she cheating?"

"No."

That answer surprised me. The report had said the same thing, but most husbands accused their wives of cheating before I even sat down.

"Then what exactly am I looking for?"

He glanced toward the restaurant doors before lowering his voice. "My wife isn't acting like herself."

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. People said things like that all the time. Depression. Affairs. Midlife crises. Secret addictions. There were a hundred possible explanations, and most of them were boring.

"Can you be more specific?"

He swallowed. "She's different."

"How?"

"Everything."

I stared at him. He stared back. Neither of us seemed particularly happy with the conversation.

"Mr. Walker, you're paying me five hundred dollars an hour. Help me help you."

He nodded slowly. "She forgets things."

"Lots of people forget things."

"Not like this."

He leaned forward in his chair. "She forgot the name of our dog."

That was strange. Not impossible. But strange.

"What else?"

"She forgot where we went on our honeymoon."

I wrote it down. "What else?"

"She asked me where the guest bathroom was."

I paused. "You've been married twenty years."

"Twenty-two."

I looked up from my notebook. He wasn't smiling. In fact, he looked terrified. The kind of terrified that can't be faked. I'd seen that expression before. Usually, on victims.

"Medical issues?" I asked.

"Doctors say she's healthy."

"Head injury?"

"No."

"Medication?"

"No."

I tapped my pen against the notebook. "Anything else?"

For a moment, he didn't answer. Then he reached into his jacket and slid a photograph across the table.

A woman in her early thirties smiled back at me. Dark hair. Brown eyes. Pretty. Completely ordinary.

"My wife."

I looked at the photograph, then back at him. "And?"

He pointed at the picture. "That's not how she smiles."

I waited for him to elaborate.

He didn't.

"Mr. Walker."

"You don't understand."

His voice dropped to barely above a whisper.

"She's smiling the right way."

I blinked. "What?"

"The expression is correct." He tapped the photograph with a trembling finger. "But somehow it's wrong."

I stared at him for several seconds.

Then I wrote a single word in my notebook.

Crazy.

He noticed.

"You're thinking I'm insane."

"A little."

His shoulders slumped. "Everyone does."

I tucked the notebook away. "Fine. Let's assume you're not insane. What exactly do you want me to do?"

"Follow her."

"For how long?"

"Until you see it too."

I looked down at the payment agreement one more time.

Five hundred dollars an hour.

I've ignored bigger red flags for less.

I followed Mrs. Walker for the next week. Her schedule was so normal it was almost insulting. Every morning, she attended a Pilates class. After that, she visited a boutique downtown. Around noon, she met a group of friends at a café before eventually heading home. Sometimes she and her husband went out for dinner. That was it. No secret affairs, no suspicious meetings, no hidden bank accounts. Nothing.

I was beginning to think Daniel Walker had paid me five hundred dollars an hour because he was bored. The only thing keeping me on the case was the amount of money accumulating in my bank account.

While I waited for Mrs. Walker to do something interesting, I focused on another investigation. The city next to town had a serial killer. Five women had disappeared over the last year. The victims had nothing in common. Different ages. Different jobs. Different backgrounds. The bodies were what connected them.

Every victim had been found completely drained of blood. Every organ was missing. The bodies were essentially empty skin wrapped around a skeleton. Each victim also had a single incision running from the base of the skull to the lower back. The locals called him the Spine Taker.

One of the victims was seventeen years old.

I took that personally.

I don't pretend to be a good person, but certain things make my blood boil. Children are one of them.

Mrs. Walker spent most mornings at Pilates, which left me with several hours to kill. I used that time to look into the Spine Taker case. My investigation eventually led me to the sheriff's office. Officially, I was there for information. Unofficially, I was there for the free coffee.

Side note: The coffee was terrible.

A woman was screaming at two deputies near the entrance when I walked in.

"I told you she was acting strange!" she shouted. "If you'd listened to me, she'd still be alive!"

The deputies grabbed her by the arms and dragged her toward the door. A moment later, they shoved her outside. She stumbled onto the sidewalk and broke down sobbing while they returned to work without another word.

I recognized her immediately. She was the mother of the seventeen-year-old victim.

That got my attention.

I followed her outside and sat down beside her on the curb, blonde wig and all. People trust blondes. I don't know why, but they do. I introduced myself as a law enforcement officer working on the investigation and asked what she had been yelling about inside.

By the time I left, she was still crying, and I had learned something interesting.

A week before her disappearance, her daughter had started forgetting things. Important things. Her birthday. Her favorite food. The names of relatives. According to her mother, she had become distant and cold, like she had suddenly become a different person.

It sounded familiar.

Daniel Walker had described his wife almost the same way.

I drove straight to the Pilates studio.

Mrs. Walker's class wasn't supposed to end for another hour.

She wasn't there.

Neither was her car.

That bothered me.

So I committed a crime.

As usual. 

The security office was empty. The guard always left for lunch around that time. I knew because I'd spent the last 2 weeks watching the place. I pulled up the security footage and started reviewing the cameras.

At 11:03 a.m., Mrs. Walker entered the women's restroom.

Nobody followed her.

Nobody came out.

The hallway remained empty for almost an hour.

Then, at 12:01 p.m., an elderly woman exited the restroom.

I frowned and rewound the footage.

The elderly woman had never entered.

I checked every camera angle.

Every hallway.

Every entrance.

Nothing.

Mrs. Walker went into the restroom.

An old woman came out.

That was it.

I took screenshots and headed to the restroom myself. There were no windows, no maintenance tunnels, and no secondary exits. It was just a bathroom.

I stood there staring at the empty room, trying to figure out what I had missed.

I couldn't.

An hour later, I found Mrs. Walker exactly where she was supposed to be, sitting at her usual café, drinking coffee and laughing with friends.

Her car was in the parking lot.

That night, I followed her again.

At midnight, she left her house without warning, got into her car, and drove away. I followed from a distance. About twenty minutes later, she turned onto a dirt road near a lake and parked beside the woods.

Then she got out and started running.

Not jogging.

Running.

Fast enough that I almost lost sight of her.

I chased her through the trees until she stopped in a clearing.

I ducked behind a tree and watched.

Mrs. Walker bent forward.

For a second, I thought she was sick.

Then something stepped out of her.

I don't know how else to describe it.

Something unfolded from her back. Something impossibly tall.

Mrs. Walker's body collapsed onto the ground while the thing that had been inside her remained standing.

I couldn't move.

I couldn't even process what I was looking at. It ran towards the car again.

A few minutes later, it returned carrying another body.

An elderly woman.

The same elderly woman from the security footage.

When the creature finally disappeared into the darkness, I approached Mrs. Walker's body.

She was dead.

And empty.

No blood.

No organs.

Nothing.

Just skin.

And a long incision running from the base of her skull to the end of her spine.

I recognized the wound immediately.

I had seen it five times before.

The Spine Taker wasn't human.

That realization hit me about half a second before the creature came charging out of the darkness.

It had tricked me.

I barely had time to raise my pistol before it slipped into the elderly woman's body. The corpse jerked upright like a puppet yanked by invisible strings. I fired immediately. The bullet tore through her chest. The creature didn't even flinch. I fired again. Then again. Nothing. The thing simply kept walking toward me, wearing the old woman's skin like a poorly fitted costume.

"What are you?" I shouted.

The creature tilted its head. I heard bones crack. Its neck bent farther than any human neck should have been capable of bending. Then it spoke.

"You... wil...l be... my next... ves...sel."

The words sounded wrong. Not an accent. Not a speech impediment. More like something trying to imitate human language without fully understanding how it worked.

I am not becoming anyone's vessel.

I'd rather die.

I turned and ran.

Branches whipped against my face as I crashed through the forest. Behind me, I could hear the creature moving through the trees. It wasn't trying to hide. It wasn't trying to be quiet. The thing knew it was faster than me.

A few moments later, the trees opened up and I nearly stumbled into a river. Dark water rushed past below me. Behind me came the sound of snapping branches.

I turned around.

The creature stood at the edge of the treeline.

For the first time, I got a good look at the body it was wearing. In the moonlight, I could see it clearly now. The old woman's legs bent at impossible angles. Her arms hung too low. Her neck twisted sharply to one side as though every bone inside it had been shattered. Yet somehow she remained standing.

The thing smiled.

Then it lunged.

I stepped backward.

Unfortunately, there was no ground behind me.

I fell into the river.

For one brief moment, I thought I had escaped.

Then my head struck something beneath the surface.

Pain exploded through my skull. Red flooded my vision. I felt the current dragging me away as darkness closed in around me.

The river swallowed me.

I remember the impact. I remember the pain. Then everything disappeared.

When I opened my eyes again, I was falling.

I don't know how long I fell for. Minutes. Hours. Years. There was no wind rushing past me. No sensation of speed. Just endless darkness stretching in every direction while I plunged through it.

Then suddenly I crashed into something soft. Black mist.

Strangely, it didn't hurt.

I climbed to my feet and looked around.

There was nothing.

No sky.

No ground.

No horizon.

Just darkness stretching endlessly in every direction.

And a desk.

A single wooden desk sitting in the middle of the void.

With absolutely no better options available, I started walking toward it. 

There was a creature sitting behind the desk.

At least, I think it was sitting.

The thing was enormous. Even seated, it was taller than a bus. A massive goat skull concealed its face, its horns disappearing into the darkness above. Beneath the skull was a surprisingly human body dressed in a perfectly tailored black suit. If I ignored the skull, the size, and the fact that I was in a bottomless pit, it looked like an accountant.

"Welcome to Level One," it said.

The voice caught me off guard.

Female.

Calm.

Professional.

Like a receptionist greeting someone who had arrived slightly late for an appointment.

I looked around at the endless darkness surrounding us.

"Level One?" I asked. "Am I dead?"

"Yes."

The answer came so quickly that it took me a moment to process it.

No sympathy.

No dramatic speech.

No ominous thunder.

Just yes.

Dead.

I considered arguing. Then I remembered smashing my head against a rock while running from a skin-wearing monster.

Fair enough.

The creature reached beneath the desk and slid a thick binder toward me. It landed with a heavy thud. Curious, I opened it.

My stomach sank.

The pages were filled with names, photographs, police reports, witness statements, and dates.

The Florida River Monster.

The Butcher of Pensacola.

The Red Lake Strangler.

Every serial killer I had ever murdered.

Every victim.

Every crime.

Every body.

All neatly organized into a single file.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Your record."

I turned another page.

Then another.

The binder seemed endless.

The creature's eye sockets suddenly ignited with a deep red glow.

"After review of your actions, you have been sentenced to two hundred years of punitive suffering before retribution."

I slowly closed the binder.

"Two hundred years?"

"Correct."

"That seems excessive."

"You murdered seventeen people."

"Nineteen."

The creature paused.

Then it looked down at the file.

"You murdered nineteen people."

"See? That's the kind of mistake that gets organizations sued."

For several seconds neither of us spoke.

Finally the creature sighed.

"I liked you better when you were unconscious."

I shrugged.

The truth was, none of this surprised me.

I had always known this was how my story would end.

I knew what I was.

I knew what I had done.

I wasn't a hero.

I wasn't a vigilante.

I was a serial killer who happened to choose worse people as victims.

There was a difference.

Just not enough of one.

"I see," the creature said.

Then it leaned forward.

"But."

I frowned.

"But?"

"We can make a deal."

That got my attention.

"A deal? What kind of deal?"

The red glow inside the skull brightened slightly.

"The kind that allows you to repay your debt."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Repay my debt?"

The creature nodded.

"There are souls on Earth that belong here. Murderers. Predators. Monsters wearing human faces. Some escape justice. Some escape death. Some are taken by things that have no right to claim them."

I stared at it.

"So you're offering me a job."

"In a manner of speaking."

"You do realize that I have spent years murdering people, right?"

"That is precisely why you're being considered."

I wasn't sure whether to feel insulted or flattered.

The creature folded its hands atop the desk.

"You have contributed greatly to Hell. Many souls currently suffering below would never have arrived without your assistance. Only a few mortals possess such a record."

"That might be the worst compliment I've ever received."

The creature ignored me.

"In exchange for your service, your sentence will be reduced. Continue long enough, and it may eventually be erased."

I glanced down at the binder.

Then, at the endless darkness surrounding us.

Then back at the creature.

"So let me get this straight. My choices are two hundred years of torture..."

"Among other punishments."

"...or I go back to Earth and drag damned souls down here for you?"

"Correct."

I considered the offer.

Honestly, it sounded suspiciously similar to my previous hobby. The only real difference was that this time I had an employer. Unfortunately, that employer was Hell.

"What happens if I refuse?"

The creature leaned back in its chair.

A moment later, another binder appeared on the desk.

This one was significantly thicker.

It opened by itself.

Flames spilled from between the pages.

Screaming followed.

I immediately pointed at the first binder.

"I'll take the job."

The creature nodded.

"A wise decision."

"I've been told I don't make many of those."

For the first time since I had arrived, I could have sworn the thing laughed. Then everything went dark. I woke up lying on the riverbank. For several seconds, I just stared at the sky, trying to figure out where I was before the headache hit. It felt like someone had driven a railroad spike through my skull. Slowly, I sat up. The river was still rushing past beside me. My clothes were soaked, and dried blood clung to the side of my face.

The last thing I remembered was falling into the river. The creature. The rock. Then the desk. The goat-skull woman. Hell.

I pulled out my phone. The screen lit up, and my stomach immediately dropped. Three days had passed. I checked again, convinced I was reading it wrong. I wasn't. The battery icon flashed red. One percent. "Fantastic," I muttered.

I staggered to my feet and followed the river until I found the dirt road. My car was still parked exactly where I had left it three nights earlier. Nobody had touched it. Nobody had towed it. Nobody had even broken a window. Apparently, even criminals had a line they wouldn't cross, and that line was trespassing on private property.

The drive back to the motel passed in a haze. The moment I got inside, I plugged my phone into the charger. As soon as it powered on, I discovered over four hundred missed calls from Terry. I called him back.

He answered before the first ring had finished.

"Mara, what the hell is wrong with you?"

I pulled the phone away from my ear. "Terry—"

"No. Absolutely not. Do you have any idea what I've been dealing with for the last three days? I filed a missing persons report. The sheriff has been looking for you. I've called every hospital within a hundred miles."

His voice got louder with every sentence.

"You vanished."

"I noticed."

"Where were you?"

I considered telling him the truth. I decided against it.

"Long story."

"You're damn right it's a long story."

I rubbed my temples. The headache was somehow getting worse.

"I'm alive."

"Clearly."

"Mostly."

There was a long pause. Then Terry sighed. It was the exhausted sigh of a man reconsidering every career decision he had ever made.

"Call the sheriff."

"What?"

"Call the sheriff and tell him you're alive before they waste another three days looking for your stupid ass."

"Fair."

After reassuring local law enforcement that I wasn't dead, kidnapped, or buried somewhere in the desert, I finally collapsed onto the motel bed and turned on the television. The local news was covering the Walker case. I sat upright immediately.

Behind the anchor was a photograph of Mrs. Walker.

My stomach sank.

Her body had been found.

Authorities believed she had been murdered.

A second photograph appeared on screen.

The elderly woman from the security footage.

Police had identified her as a suspect in the murder.

Then another photograph appeared.

Daniel Walker.

Dead.

I froze.

According to the report, he had been murdered inside his own home. The estimated time of death was shortly after midnight. The same night, Mrs. Walker had driven into the woods. The same night, I had followed her. The same night I had died.

Then the report got worse.

Investigators believed the Walker deaths were connected to the Spine Taker killings. The similarities were impossible to ignore. Mrs. Walker's body had been found drained of blood. Her organs were missing. The same incision ran from the base of her skull to the end of her spine.

The sheriff's department was treating it as another Spine Taker victim.

I knew better.

The Spine Taker wasn't a serial killer.

It was that thing.

And the creature knew I was following it from the beginning.

It knew I was watching.

Daniel Walker had hired me because he suspected something was wrong with his wife, and the moment I started getting close to the truth, everyone connected to the case started dying.

I sat there staring at the television long after the report ended. Then my phone suddenly buzzed, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. The screen displayed an unknown number, and for a moment, I seriously considered hanging up, but instead, I answered.

"Hello?"

For several seconds, nobody spoke. Then a familiar female voice sighed.

"Congratulations on surviving."

My blood ran cold. The goat-skull woman. The manager of Hell. Or whatever her official title was.

"Thank you."

I wasn't entirely sure how one was supposed to respond to congratulations for surviving their own death.

"I suppose you know who your first assignment is."

"The Spine Taker?"

"Very good, little bug."

I frowned.

"Did you just call me a good bug?"

"I called you an intelligent little bug."

"That's somehow worse."

"Humans are very sensitive."

I decided not to argue with the giant demonic bureaucrat and looked back toward the television. The news report had changed. A young woman's face now filled the screen. Light brown hair. Hazel eyes. Maybe twenty-three. Twenty-four at most. Only a few years younger than me. Then the television crackled. The anchor vanished, and the screen filled with the image of a goat skull.

"That is its next victim. Protect the innocent soul."

I stared at the photograph on the screen.

"I still don't know what that thing is."

For the first time since the conversation began, the demon was silent. When she finally spoke, her voice had lost its usual amusement.

"It is a prisoner."

"A prisoner?"

"A demon."

I felt my stomach drop.

"It escaped."

The words hung in the air for a moment.

"It escaped Hell?"

"Yes."

"That seems like a serious design flaw."

"It was not designed to escape."

"Clearly."

The demon ignored me.

"It was undergoing punishment. Somehow, it found a way out. Since then, it has been stealing souls that belong here."

I remembered the empty bodies, the missing organs, the thing climbing out of Mrs. Walker's back, the thing wearing people like clothing.

"You want me to bring it back."

"I want you to drag it back."

There was a noticeable difference in her tone. One sounded like a request. The other sounded like an order.

"What happens if I fail?"

For several seconds, there was only silence. Then laughter erupted from the television.

Not human laughter.

Not even close.

It sounded like earthquakes, screaming, and church bells all happening at once. The motel room shook. The television screen flickered. A crack appeared across the glass. When the laughter finally stopped, the demon spoke again.

"Then you will serve its remaining sentence alongside your own."

"That's not fair."

"Hell is not fair."

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Fair point.

"Someone must return the souls it has stolen," she continued. "And unfortunately for you, you're the most qualified candidate available."

The television immediately went black. A second later, my phone vibrated. A new message had arrived. An address. A photograph. And beneath it, a single sentence.

"YOUR SENTENCE REDUCTION BEGINS NOW."

I opened the photograph.

It showed the girl—the future victim. The picture had been taken at night through a window, from somewhere outside her house. At first, it looked innocent enough.

Then I noticed the red circle.

Someone had marked a shadowy figure standing in the darkness beyond the glass.

Watching.

Smiling.

If I'm going to survive this, I need to find her before the Spine Taker does.

I'll update this journal if I make it through the night.

If I don't, Terry will probably end up going through my computer trying to figure out what happened to me. If that happens, this journal is all I can leave behind.

Everything I've written here is true. I know how insane that sounds because I thought it was insane too until I checked my pulse.

The only reason I know any of this is real is because my heart isn't beating as I write this.

And you really can't keep calling something a hallucination when you're already supposed to be dead.

​

I consider myself to be a average guy. No special job or looks.

The only thing that I'm significantly lucky for is my wife. Veronica.

Her long brown hair, sun kissed skin, and hazel eyes that gain the greatest compliments from sun light.

She's more than just her looks. Her personality is perfect. Sweet, caring, empathetic, naive, and gullible.

She's my greatest companion.

Well, she was.

Things started to go not as I had planned when she started to dig into my past. Her curiosity and long term grief were a fatal mix.

She found out that I had a ex wife. She kept asking questions and was upset that I never informed her about any past marriages.

I eventually snapped on her during a argument and told her the name of my ex wife. Alica.

I felt relieved for a while because she stopped pestering me. I thought she was done with being obsessed with Alica.

My hopes were quickly killed off when I came home one day and saw her staring at a photo of the chick.

Tears were pouring out of her eyes as her face was covered in red. Her body was shaking as her trembling hands held the photo.

She then started whimpering as she told me that Alica was the missing best friend she always talked about.

It immediately made sense to me. Her stories and descriptions always matched her. I still found it weird that they were supposedly so close. Alica never mentioned anything about Veronica to me.

I remember how it started to feel hilarious.

The funniest part is when I took her to the basement and let her see her deceased friend.

She looked stunned at first and then was full of cheer.

She turned to me and kissed me more passionately than I've ever been.

She confessed that she's known for a long time that I was the reason as to why her best friend was missing.

Her tears, fear, all of it was fake. She did it all so I would admit to her what I did.

Somehow it made her love me more.

I grew up in a town where people didn’t really leave.

Not in the “small town, everyone knows everyone” kind of way.

I mean actually.

People moved away for university, for work, for love, for the vague promise of becoming someone better under different streetlights, and somehow they always came back. Usually with softer faces, worse backs, and that defeated little laugh people get when life has made its point.

My mum used to say the town had gravity.

My dad used to say it had teeth.

There’s a park at the bottom of Mill Road, just past the old red phone box that hasn’t had a working phone in it since 2009. The park isn’t much. Two swings, one of them always twisted around the top bar. A slide that burns your thighs in summer. A football pitch with more dog shit than grass.

And, along the far path beneath the trees, seventeen memorial benches.

That’s what everyone called them.

Memorial benches.

You know the kind. Wooden slats. Little brass plaques. Names of dead people. Dates. Some tiny sentence meant to squash a whole life into eight words.

Beloved husband.

Forever missed.

She loved this view.

Except the benches in our park were wrong.

They didn’t appear after people died.

They appeared before.

I don’t know when I first realised that wasn’t normal.

When you grow up around something strange, your brain doesn’t label it horror. It labels it Tuesday.

The first bench I remember was for Mrs. Lacey.

She lived two doors down from us and always smelled like lavender and cigarette smoke. Her plaque appeared one August morning while she was still alive, still watering her hanging baskets in a nightie, still shouting at kids for kicking balls against her wall.

The plaque read:

Margaret Lacey

1948 - 2011

She always knew when rain was coming.

I was eleven. I remember asking my mum why Mrs. Lacey had a dead-person bench if she wasn’t dead.

Mum slapped my arm so hard I dropped my Calippo.

“Don’t talk about the benches,” she said.

That was the rule.

Nobody talked about them.

Nobody touched them.

Nobody sat on them.

Nobody from outside town ever seemed to notice them properly. They’d glance at one, squint slightly, then look away like their brain had politely decided to skip over it.

Mrs. Lacey died three weeks later.

Heart attack.

It happened during a storm.

After that, I started checking the benches.

Not openly. Never in a way anyone could see. But I’d walk the long way home from school, past the trees, pretending to kick stones or look for conkers while reading names from the corners of my eyes.

There were names I knew.

Mr. Ellis from the butcher’s.

A boy in my year called Dean.

My old Year 4 teacher, Miss Harlow.

Some dates were years away.

Some were months.

Dean’s bench appeared when we were fifteen.

He found it himself.

I saw him standing there after school with his rucksack hanging off one shoulder, staring at his own name in brass.

Dean Carter

1996 - 2012

He never heard the last song.

He laughed when he saw me.

Not because it was funny.

Because he was fifteen and scared, and boys that age would rather crack their teeth than admit something has got inside them.

“Imagine getting a bench and that’s all they put,” he said. “Fucking lazy, isn’t it?”

I didn’t know what to say.

So I said, “Maybe it’s not real.”

He looked at me then.

Really looked.

The kind of look that isn’t asking you to agree, but begging you to.

“Yeah,” he said. “Course it isn’t.”

Three days later, he was hit by a car walking home from his girlfriend’s house.

Headphones in.

The driver said Dean stepped into the road just as the chorus dropped in whatever song he’d been listening to.

He never heard the last song.

That was when I started hating the town.

Not because people died. People die everywhere.

I hated it because death here had admin.

Death here had carpentry.

Death here made reservations.

By the time I was eighteen, I promised myself I’d leave properly. Not go away and drift back like everyone else. Leave with both hands. Rip my roots up. Bleed if I had to.

I got into university three hours away.

My mum cried when I packed.

My dad didn’t.

He just stood in the garden smoking, staring at the gate.

“You’ll come back,” he said.

“No, I won’t.”

He smiled without humour.

“That’s what coming back sounds like.”

I didn’t come back for seven years.

Not for birthdays.

Not for Christmas.

Not when Dad got sick.

Not even when he died.

I know how that sounds.

Cold.

Maybe it was.

But grief is easier when you can convince yourself distance is the same thing as survival. I pictured the town like some sleeping animal, curled up in a valley, digesting everyone I’d ever known.

And I stayed away.

Mum stopped calling after the funeral.

She texted once every few months.

Usually practical things.

Your dad’s tools are still in the shed.

The boiler’s making that noise again.

Mrs. Lacey’s roses came back this year.

Then, last month, she sent one that made my stomach drop before I’d even opened it properly.

You need to come home. There’s a bench.

I stared at the message for a long time.

Outside my flat, traffic hissed through rain. Somewhere upstairs, someone was laughing too loudly at a TV show. My phone screen lit my hands blue.

I typed:

Whose?

Three dots appeared.

Disappeared.

Appeared again.

Then:

Yours.

I didn’t go straight away.

I wish I could tell you I was brave, or rational, or that I thought it was bullshit.

I didn’t.

I sat on my kitchen floor until morning with every light on, drinking tap water from a mug because my hands were shaking too badly for a glass.

At 6:14 a.m., I got in my car and drove home.

The journey felt like travelling into an old photograph.

The closer I got, the more the world seemed to lose colour. Cities became towns. Towns became fields. Fields became wet hedges and narrow lanes and sagging bus stops with faded posters for events that had already happened.

When I turned onto Mill Road, I had this sudden, stupid memory of being seventeen and drunk on cheap cider, lying in the park with my mates, looking up at the stars like they were escape routes.

I nearly kept driving.

Instead, I parked outside my mum’s house.

She opened the door before I knocked.

She looked older than she should have.

Small.

Not frail exactly, but folded. Like life had kept putting things on top of her and nobody had taken any of them off.

For a second, neither of us moved.

Then she said, “You look like your dad.”

I hated that it hurt.

Inside, the house smelled exactly the same. Dust, washing powder, old carpet, and something faintly sweet that lived in the walls. The hallway still had the dent from where I’d once thrown a school shoe during an argument. My childhood coat peg was still there, empty.

Mum made tea.

Neither of us drank it.

“Show me,” I said.

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Mum.”

“Listen to me.” Her voice cracked. “You need to understand something first.”

That was when she told me the thing nobody had ever told me about the benches.

They weren’t warnings.

They were debts.

Every old family in town had one. Not one person. Not one death. One debt, passed down like bad blood.

A bargain made generations ago with something that lived beneath the park, before the park was a park, before the town had proper roads, before anyone wrote anything down except what they owed.

When a family’s debt came due, the thing marked someone.

It gave them a bench.

A name.

A date.

And when that date arrived, the town stayed fed.

I laughed then.

I actually laughed.

It came out ugly.

“You’re telling me we’ve got a haunted seating arrangement because of some medieval monster under a playground?”

Mum didn’t smile.

“You think jokes make things smaller,” she said. “They don’t.”

I stood up so fast the chair scraped the floor.

“This is insane.”

“Yes.”

“You need help.”

“Yes.”

“I’m leaving.”

“No, you’re not.”

The way she said it stopped me.

Not pleading.

Not commanding.

Certain.

She looked down at her hands.

“Your dad tried to leave too.”

A cold little feeling opened under my ribs.

“He did leave,” I said. “He joined the army. He lived in Germany. You told me.”

“He got as far as Dover.”

I stared at her.

“What?”

“He tried twelve times. Trains broke down. Cars wouldn’t start. Roads flooded. Once he got arrested because someone with his exact name had a warrant out. Another time he woke up in the park with no memory of how he got there.”

“That’s not possible.”

“No,” Mum said. “It isn’t.”

My phone buzzed.

A text from an unknown number.

No words.

Just a photo.

My bench.

It sat under the ash tree at the far end of the path, fresh wood pale against the old grey benches around it. The brass plaque caught the morning light.

My full name was on it.

Date of birth.

And a death date.

Three days from now.

Below that, the sentence:

He came home hungry.

I don’t remember dropping the phone.

I only remember my mum making a sound like she’d been stabbed.

Because she hadn’t seen the sentence before.

Only the name.

Only the date.

Apparently the last line appears later.

When the thing underneath knows exactly how it’s going to take you.

I wanted to run.

My whole body became one instruction.

Run.

But there was nowhere to run from a place that had already written your ending down in brass.

Still, I tried.

Of course I tried.

By noon, I was throwing clothes back into my car while Mum stood in the driveway crying without tears.

“You won’t get far,” she said.

“Watch me.”

I drove like a man leaving a house fire.

Out past the primary school. Past the Co-op. Past the church with the crooked spire. Past the sign that said thank you for visiting, drive carefully, as if the town gave a shit about manners.

For fifteen minutes, I thought I’d done it.

The roads opened.

Fields blurred.

My chest loosened.

Then my stomach growled.

Not normal hunger.

Not “missed breakfast” hunger.

This was violent.

Sudden.

A deep, tearing emptiness that made my vision spot black. I pulled into a lay-by and threw up nothing but acid.

Then I smelled chips.

Hot vinegar. Grease. Salt.

I looked up.

The old chippy was across the road.

The one from my town.

I had driven in a straight line away from it.

Somehow, I was back on Mill Road.

I tried again.

And again.

Each time, hunger hit first.

Then dizziness.

Then the smell of something familiar.

My mum’s roast potatoes.

School canteen pizza.

The cheap vanilla ice cream Dad bought on Fridays.

Hot doughnuts from the fair.

The buttery toast my grandmother made when I was little and feverish and still believed adults could save you.

Each smell dragged me home like a hook in the mouth.

By evening, I was on my knees in my childhood kitchen, eating dry cereal from the box with both hands.

Mum watched from the doorway.

Her face was grey.

“It starts with appetite,” she whispered.

“What does?”

“The taking.”

I slept in my old room.

Or tried to.

It was exactly as I’d left it at eighteen. Posters faded. Books on the shelf. A shoebox full of old gig tickets and wristbands and photos of people I hadn’t spoken to in years.

That room was a museum of someone who thought he’d escaped because he changed his postcode.

At 3:03 a.m., I woke up starving.

Not hungry.

Starving.

There’s a difference.

Hungry is human.

Starving is ancient.

My stomach cramped so hard I bit my pillow to stop myself screaming. I could smell food again, but this time it wasn’t from downstairs.

It was coming from inside my wardrobe.

Warm bread.

Roasted meat.

Chocolate melting in foil.

My mouth filled with saliva so fast I choked.

I turned on the lamp.

The wardrobe doors were shut.

The smell got stronger.

I told myself not to open them.

Then my stomach growled, and something inside the wardrobe growled back.

Low.

Wet.

Almost amused.

I ran into Mum’s room like I was eight years old.

She was already awake.

Sitting up.

Holding Dad’s old lighter in one hand.

“I should have told you sooner,” she said.

“What the fuck is happening to me?”

She looked at the floor.

“It doesn’t just eat you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It makes you hungry first.”

I waited for more.

I didn’t want more.

She gave it anyway.

The marked person always changes in the final days.

All of them.

That was the part nobody said out loud.

They don’t just die.

They get emptied.

They get hungry.

At first it’s food. Then it’s stranger things.

Pets.

Birds.

Soil.

Photographs.

Locks of hair.

Anything tied to the life they’re trying to leave behind.

“The hunger is how it opens you,” Mum said. “It hollows you out until there’s enough room for it to climb inside.”

I thought of Mrs. Lacey. Dean. Mr. Ellis.

All those neat little plaques.

All those tidy deaths.

“They were hungry too?” I asked.

Mum nodded.

“Every one of them.”

“Then why didn’t anyone know?”

“People knew,” she said. “Then the town helped them forget.”

I didn’t believe her.

Then she showed me Dad’s videos.

They were on an old camcorder she kept wrapped in a towel at the back of her wardrobe.

The first video was Dad in the shed, younger than I remembered him, hair still dark. He sat on an upturned paint bucket, speaking into the camera.

“If you’re watching this, it means your mother finally grew a spine.”

He looked exhausted.

Behind him, something scratched at the shed door.

He ignored it.

“The bench skipped me at first,” he said. “I thought I’d beaten it. Thought leaving had worked.”

He swallowed.

“Then you were born.”

The scratching got louder.

Dad flinched.

“It chose you before you could even walk.”

He smiled then.

Small.

Broken.

“I made a trade.”

Mum paused the tape.

The room seemed to tilt.

“What trade?”

She didn’t answer.

I grabbed the camcorder and pressed play.

Dad’s face filled the tiny screen again.

“I found out the thing doesn’t only take lives,” he said. “It takes time. Leftover time. The years between when the bench appears and when the date comes.”

My throat went dry.

“If someone is marked, they’re already owed. But you can offer what’s left of them to cover someone else. A week here. A month there. Sometimes years, if the bench came early enough.”

The scratching at the shed door stopped.

Dad looked towards it.

Then back at the camera.

“I told myself they were already dead,” he whispered. “That I wasn’t killing anyone. Just moving the furniture around in a burning house.”

He laughed once.

No humour in it.

“But time isn’t the only thing it takes.”

He leaned closer to the camera.

“When it marks someone, it starts feeding on them before the date. Their fear. Their memories. Their appetite. That awful hunger at the end. It all belongs to the thing.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I gave it their time to delay yours. And each time I did, some of what it had started eating went into you instead.”

My stomach turned.

“No.”

Dad kept talking.

“Mrs. Lacey. Ellis. Harlow. Dean.”

The shed door thudded behind him.

He didn’t move.

“I didn’t understand what I was doing at first. I thought I was only buying you days. Years. Life.”

His voice broke.

“But I was feeding you too.”

The scratching stopped.

Everything on the tape went very still.

“That’s all a parent can do, really. Stand between your child and the dark until their knees give out.”

Something knocked once against the shed door.

Then again.

Then again.

Dad looked straight into the camera.

“But hunger doesn’t forget. It waits.”

The tape ended.

I looked at Mum.

She was crying properly now.

“You knew,” I said.

“I knew he’d bought you time.”

“Dean was fifteen.”

Her face collapsed.

“I know.”

“You both knew.”

“I knew after,” she said. “Not before. Not at first.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” she said. “It’s a confession.”

I looked down at my own hands.

They were shaking.

“So the hunger happens to everyone,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then why does mine feel different?”

Mum didn’t answer straight away.

Outside, somewhere far off, I thought I heard the swings creak.

“The others were hungry because the thing was eating them,” she said.

Then she looked at me.

Really looked at me.

“You’re hungry because your father fed you pieces of everyone else.”

I left the room before I did something unforgivable.

Downstairs, every cupboard door was open.

I don’t remember opening them.

There was food everywhere.

Packets torn apart. Bread shredded. Jam smeared across the counter like blood. I found myself chewing raw pasta hard enough to crack one of my teeth.

That scared me more than the bench.

Because part of me liked it.

The crunch.

The pain.

The fact my body had made a decision without asking me.

The next morning, my bench had changed.

I know because Mum tried to stop me going to the park, and when your mother tries to block a front door with her own body, you learn exactly how old she’s become.

I didn’t hurt her.

But I moved her.

I walked to the park in the damp grey light, stomach twisting, mouth tasting of copper and sugar.

The benches waited beneath the trees.

Mine looked darker now.

Older.

Like it had been there for years.

The plaque still had my name.

Still had the date.

Still had the sentence:

He came home hungry.

But there was another line beneath it now.

Smaller.

Freshly engraved.

So did they.

I heard the swings creak behind me.

No wind.

Just the swings moving gently.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

On the nearest one sat Dean Carter.

Not as he’d looked when he died, thank God.

Not broken.

Worse.

He looked fifteen.

Exactly fifteen.

School tie loose. Headphones around his neck. One trainer tapping the dirt.

His face was pale and faintly blurred, like a photo left too long in the sun.

“Alright?” he said.

I couldn’t speak.

He grinned.

“You look like shit.”

“You’re dead.”

“Yeah. You’re nearly interesting.”

I backed away.

He laughed.

“Don’t be rude. We’ve been waiting ages.”

That was when I saw the others.

Mrs. Lacey by the slide, smoking a cigarette down to the filter.

Mr. Ellis near the football pitch, butcher’s apron soaked black.

Miss Harlow sitting on her own bench with both hands folded in her lap.

Seventeen dead people.

Watching me.

No.

Not watching.

Waiting.

Dean slid off the swing.

“You know the worst bit?” he asked. “The hunger happens to all of us.”

His smile faded.

“That’s how it gets you down there. Makes you desperate. Makes you hollow. Makes you open the door.”

The others had gone quiet.

“But you’re different.”

I swallowed.

My mouth tasted like pennies.

“Why?”

“Because your dad kept stuffing bits of us into you.”

He stepped closer.

“Years. Fear. Appetite. Whatever the thing had already started chewing before it collected us.”

I looked at Mrs. Lacey.

At Mr. Ellis.

At Miss Harlow.

At all those people my father had turned into borrowed time.

Dean smiled again, but there was nothing funny in it.

“We were hungry because it was eating us.”

He pointed at my stomach.

“You’re hungry because it taught you how.”

My stomach growled.

Every dead face turned towards the sound.

Dean’s smile widened.

“There he is.”

I ran.

This time, the town let me.

I made it back to Mum’s house, locked the door, dragged the table across it, then vomited into the sink until I saw red.

Mum stood behind me.

“I saw them,” I said.

“I know.”

“They’re still there.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

She took a long breath.

“Because your father didn’t pay your debt. He borrowed against other people’s.”

The house went quiet.

The kind of quiet that isn’t empty.

The kind that is listening.

“All those deaths,” I said.

Mum nodded.

“Their benches were already there. But your dad shortened their dates. Sometimes by years. Sometimes by days. He thought if he kept feeding the thing other people’s time, you’d live a full life.”

“But he fed me too.”

Mum closed her eyes.

“Yes.”

I thought of Dad in the garden, smoking.

You’ll come back.

“That’s why he died,” Mum said. “He ran out of time to steal.”

My voice barely worked.

“What happens now?”

She looked at me with more love than I deserved and more terror than I could stand.

“Now it collects everything owed.”

The final day arrived hot.

That’s the detail I can’t stop thinking about.

It should have been stormy. Dramatic. Black clouds. Trees bending. Some cinematic warning that the world knew what was happening.

Instead, it was beautiful.

Blue sky.

Cut grass.

Kids laughing somewhere down the street.

The sort of day that makes you think life might forgive you if you stand in the sun long enough.

I hadn’t eaten since the raw pasta.

Mum had locked all the food in the boot of her car and hidden the keys. It didn’t matter. Hunger had become less about food and more about absence.

I could smell memories.

My dad’s aftershave.

My first girlfriend’s shampoo.

Wet dog fur.

Bonfire smoke.

Hospital disinfectant.

The inside of my old school bag.

Summer rain on hot pavement.

Every smell made me want to bite down.

At 11:47 p.m., Mum came into my room.

She was wearing her coat.

In her hands, she held Dad’s lighter and a kitchen knife.

“I found another way,” she said.

“No.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”

“Yes, I do.”

She sat beside me on the bed.

For a second, she was just my mum.

Not a keeper of secrets.

Not a woman who had let my father trade other people’s years for mine.

Just my mum, with tired eyes and hands that used to check my forehead when I was ill.

“The debt follows blood,” she said. “If the line ends, the debt ends.”

I laughed once.

Empty.

“You’re not killing me.”

“No,” she said.

Then she put the knife into my hand.

The meaning of it arrived slowly.

Like something walking up the stairs.

“No,” I said again.

Mum smiled.

It was awful.

Tender.

Almost peaceful.

“I’m so tired,” she whispered.

I threw the knife across the room.

It stuck in the wardrobe door.

For one second, everything stopped.

Then the wardrobe knocked.

Three times.

From inside.

Mum turned her head.

The door opened by itself.

The smell rolled out first.

Not food.

Earth.

Wet wood.

Old pennies.

Under that, something sweet and rotten.

A breath from underground.

Inside the wardrobe was not the back panel.

It was the park.

The benches.

The ash tree.

The path beneath moonlight.

And something crouched where my bench should have been.

I won’t describe it fully because I don’t think my mind saw all of it at once.

It was too large for the space and too thin for its size. Its body folded in places bodies shouldn’t fold, all elbows and ribs and long pale skin marked with little brass rectangles like plaques nailed into flesh.

Names covered it.

Hundreds.

Thousands.

Some old enough to be green.

Some shining new.

Its head was low between its shoulders.

It had no mouth until it smiled.

Then it was mostly mouth.

Mum stepped in front of me.

“Take me,” she said.

The thing looked at her.

Then at me.

Then it spoke in my dad’s voice.

“She already gave enough.”

Mum made a sound I’d never heard from a person before.

The thing unfolded one long arm and pointed at me.

Its finger was made of polished wood.

When it spoke again, it used Dean’s voice.

“Hungry boy.”

My stomach opened.

That’s what it felt like.

Not pain.

Opening.

Like a door inside me had been unlocked from the other side.

I dropped to my knees.

My mouth filled with soil.

I coughed and spat black mud onto the carpet.

Mum grabbed me, screaming my name, but I could barely hear her over the sound beneath the floorboards.

Chewing.

The whole house was chewing.

The walls pulsed.

The carpet rippled.

The childhood posters peeled themselves off the walls and slid towards me like dead leaves.

Photos fell from shelves.

Frames cracked.

In every picture, faces turned to look at me.

Dad.

Dean.

Mrs. Lacey.

People I knew.

People I didn’t.

All of them opening their mouths.

All of them starving.

I don’t remember deciding what to do.

Maybe there was no decision.

Maybe the hungry part of me took over.

Maybe that’s the only reason I’m alive.

I crawled to the wardrobe.

Mum tried to pull me back.

I bit her.

Not hard.

Enough.

She let go.

I still hear that sound in my sleep.

Not her scream.

The tiny, betrayed inhale before it.

I crawled through the wardrobe and into the park.

The grass was cold under my hands.

The dead stood around the benches in a circle.

The thing waited beside mine.

Up close, I saw my plaque nailed into its chest.

My name.

My date.

My sentence.

He came home hungry.

The thing opened its mouth.

Inside were more benches.

Rows and rows of them, stretching down into a dark that smelled like every meal I’d ever loved and every grave I’d ever avoided.

I reached for the plaque.

The thing hissed.

My fingers closed around the brass.

It burned.

I pulled.

Skin tore.

Wood splintered.

Somewhere far away, Mum screamed.

The plaque came free.

The thing shrieked with every voice in town.

And I ate it.

I don’t know why.

I don’t know how.

I put the brass plaque in my mouth and bit down.

It should have broken my teeth.

Instead, it softened like meat.

Warm.

Salted.

Almost sweet.

The hunger vanished.

Not faded.

Vanished.

For the first time in three days, I felt full.

The thing recoiled.

The dead screamed.

The benches split down the middle one by one, each crack sounding like a gunshot.

Dean grabbed my arm.

His fingers were freezing.

“What did you do?” he said.

I swallowed.

Then I understood.

The bench didn’t mark who could kill the thing.

Not normally.

Normally, it marked food.

A name.

A date.

A meal.

But Dad had changed me.

Year by year.

Death by death.

He had taken the leftover hunger from every person the town had sacrificed and packed it into me like kindling.

The thing had been fattening itself on the town for generations.

Dad had been fattening me.

Not enough to save me.

Enough to make me dangerous.

The thing bent low, suddenly smaller.

Suddenly afraid.

Its plaques rattled against its skin.

Names shimmered.

All the people it had taken.

All the years it had hoarded.

I looked at Dean.

At Mrs. Lacey.

At Mr. Ellis.

At every hollow, hungry ghost waiting for someone else to save them.

Then I looked at the thing.

And I was still hungry.

I wish I could tell you I killed it.

That this is a survival story.

That I freed the town, burned the benches, hugged my mum, and drove away at sunrise while the first honest day in centuries broke over the rooftops.

But Reddit loves clean endings, and life has never cared what makes a good story.

I ate until morning.

Plaque by plaque.

Name by name.

Some tasted like rust.

Some like birthday cake.

Some like blood.

Some like the first cigarette of summer.

Each one gave me something.

A memory.

A fear.

A death.

A little piece of a person who had once stood in the park and realised the town had made room for them.

By dawn, the thing was gone.

So were the ghosts.

So were the benches.

All except one.

Mine.

I woke up in the grass with my mum kneeling beside me.

Her hand was bandaged where I’d bitten her.

She was crying, but not from fear.

From relief.

Behind her, the park looked ordinary.

Too ordinary.

Two swings.

One twisted around the top bar.

A slide.

A football pitch.

No memorial benches under the trees.

Except mine.

The plaque had changed.

My full name.

No death date.

No final sentence.

Just my name.

And beneath it, in fresh little letters:

He was not the last.

That was three weeks ago.

I left town this morning.

No roads folded back.

No hunger dragged me home.

I’m writing this from a motorway services forty miles away, sitting in my car with the doors locked, trying not to look at the picnic benches outside.

Because one of them has a plaque.

It wasn’t there when I pulled in.

I know it wasn’t.

There’s a woman sitting on it now.

Young. Maybe twenty-five. Hoodie sleeves pulled over her hands. Crying into her phone like she’s trying to be quiet about the worst moment of her life.

I can’t read the name from here.

But I can smell what she had for breakfast.

Toast.

Butter.

Strawberry jam.

And I’m so hungry again.

I was just…tired of the monotony, I guess. Tired of having to wake up and go to work every day. Repeat the same tasks. Put on the same smile, force out the same greetings. 

A man can only take so much. 

I needed to feel free. Feel like I was actually moving forward instead of both feet being planted firmly on the same tiled floor at my job at the local supermarket. 

That’s why I left. 

I didn’t give a notice; hell, I doubt that anyone realized that I was gone anyway. Just packed my bags and hit the road. I didn’t know where I was going, all I knew was I wanted to get \*somewhere\*. Somewhere \*new\*. 

And so with one final glance at the setting sun in my rearview mirror, I flipped on the radio and just drove. 

I made sure to take roads that I’d never taken before. I wanted to make sure that I’d end up somewhere fresh, and I drove all night until the sun began to peek through my windshield, setting the sky on fire as more cars began to join me on the highway. 

For a split second, a microscopic moment in time, I felt regret. I feared that I made too emotional of a decision. A choice brought on by mania and my own selfish needs. 

I was already nearly 500 miles out of town, and turning back just felt like betrayal. Like my own pride would take a hit if I chose to return. And so I kept driving. Turning the radio up louder to drown out my thoughts. 

As I continued down the highway, humming along to the tune of Benny and the Jets, the passing skyscrapers turned to expansive groves of pine trees, and the 6-lane highway dwindled to two. 

Cars dissipated and, soon, I found myself nearly completely alone as the pines whizzed past me on both sides. It must’ve been, I don’t know, 20 or 30 miles before I finally came across the first gas station I’d seen in hours. 

With my needle nearly on E, I swerved the car into the lot and parked at one of the pumps. 

I’d grown accustomed to all the Racetracs and QuikTrips back home, so this station came as a bit of a cultural shock to me. I mean, I didn’t even know that wooden gas stations still existed. Couple that with the fact that the bathroom was \*outside\* and oddly outhouse-shaped, I knew that I was definitely reaching unfamiliar territory. 

Stepping out of the car, the eerie silence was what struck me the hardest. No cars, no people, I can’t say I even heard so much as a bird chirping. The smell of the oil and pines brought me comfort, though. It was…warm. Welcoming, almost. And the north Georgia sun kissed my body as I got out and stretched my legs. 

The pumps, much like the station itself, were ancient. Real museum-level shit. No Apple Pay on these bad boys, which was kind of a nuisance to me because that meant I’d have to actually \*talk\* to somebody. 

Entering the station, I was met with the smell of old coffee and refrigerated air. Cigarette smoke stained the ceiling, and an electric bug zapper hummed over the entrance.

My eyes fell on the cashier. She did NOT look like someone who would be working here. You know that uncanny valley feeling you get when you see something that looks human but is just…wrong, somehow? This girl was the embodiment of that feeling. 

“Hi! Welcome in! How can I help you today?” She sang. 

Her beaming smile glistened under the fluorescent lighting, and it never seemed to drop, no matter how forced it appeared. 

“Hi, I just needed all of this on pump one,” I replied stoically, sliding a 50 across the counter. 

Speaking through that painful-looking smile, her ponytail bounced side to side as she shook her head and informed me, “Oh, I’m sorry, sir. Those pumps have been out of commission for ages.” 

We stared at each other for a moment. She never blinked. Her hazel eyes just remained fixated upon me as though they were staring straight through me. In that moment, I noticed something. Her skin was flawless. Porcelain, almost. And, much like her teeth, it shone under the light as if it would crack at any heavy touch. 

The silence continued as we drew out our staring contest for an uncomfortable amount of time.

“Um…well…do you happen to know where I could possibly find another gas station? This is the first one I’ve come across for miles. Don’t wanna be stranded out here, you know,” I chuckled nervously. 

Still unblinking, the young lady took a step back from the counter and raised an arm, rigorously, pointing out towards the road. 

“Just stay on the road!” She chirped. “It should lead you into town. Shouldn’t be too long now. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

“Uh, nope. I think that’s everything….have a good day, ma’am.” 

“You too! Enjoy your trip, sir!” 

I thought I was crazy for a second, but as I looked at her, I confirmed that a tear was snaking down her smooth cheeks and into her curved lips. 

Stepping back into her spot at the register, her head slowly followed me as I walked back towards the door. I’d put a bit of pep in my step when exiting. Something freaked me out about this place. Something that told me that I needed to leave as soon as possible. 

I figured that I had at least another 50 or so miles left in my tank, so, after a little internal prayer, I was back on the forest road. 

That creeping feeling that I’d made a mistake returned, and, again, I flipped the radio on to drown out the noise in my head. This time, I rolled the window down to feel the cool air blow through my hair.

I drove on, pushing the memory of that gas station far back to the crevices of my mind, and as the black asphalt rolled beneath my tires, I got back into the groove and excitement of my journey. 

I think it was about 15 or so miles down the road when I finally passed the first sign. 

“Fairview 5 miles.” 

My needle was hovering just above the last line on the gauge, and I was panicked a little, hoping that the gas would prevail just for a little while longer. 

“Please, please, please, please,” I begged softly under my breath. “You can do it. Just gotta make it a little bit further.” 

As I begged God to just let me make it into town while stressing gratuitously about being stranded in the middle of nowhere, my radio abruptly stopped. The car filled with that static, wire-y sound you get when you adjust the bunny ears on an old T.V. 

“REALLY!?” I screamed, frustrated and overwhelmed. “YOU’VE BEEN FINE THIS WHOLE TIME? \*NOW\* YOU WANNA STOP WORKING??” 

I kept knocking at the thing with the palm of my hand, and after a few hits, music finally replaced the static. 

🎵 got myself a cryin’ , talkin’ , sleepin’ , walkin’ , livin’ doll. Gotta do my best to please her just cause she’s a livin’ doll 🎵 

“THANK YOU,” I shouted to no one. 

Eventually, I could see the clearing up ahead that I assumed led into town, and I breathed a sigh of relief. 

Unfortunately, that relief was short-lived as not even 5 minutes after my radio malfunctioned, the speedometer also began to act strangely. It got stuck at the 60 mph mark, and after remaining there for a few seconds, it fell all the way to zero even though the car was definitely still moving. I decided to be cautious, slowing the car down to what I assumed was around 40-50 mph as I neared the exit ramp into Fairview. 

As my car came to a stop at the light, I felt my heart sink, and my brain went into full panic mode again when black smoke came billowing out from under the hood, and that dreaded metallic screeching infiltrated my eardrums. 

“God fucking damn it,” I cursed. 

Throwing the car into neutral, I walked it off to the side of the road, hating every moment of it. Luckily, however, the street looked completely empty. 

I got the car to the shoulder and parked it. 

Sitting in the driver's seat, I tried searching maps for any mechanic nearby that I could call. But, of course, cell reception was close to none. 

Frustrated, I tossed my phone in the passenger seat and cried quietly into my steering wheel. I thought about my old job and cried harder. All of the things I left behind. I swore to myself that the moment I was out of this mess, I would return home and come up with some lie to excuse my absence. 

“My apartment was broken into?”

“My mom got sent to the hospital?” 

“\*I\* needed to go to the hospital?” 

These and a thousand other ideas rushed through my mind as I dreamt about just getting back home. 

As I wallowed in my self-pity, I was startled by a knock on my driver's side window. 

A man, greasy and dirty, stood on the other side of my door, waving at me with a smile full of perfectly white teeth and eyes that looked hollow. He wore overalls and a beat-up old “Fairview Motor Company” hat. 

Wiping my face, I timidly opened the door to greet the man.  To my delight, when I stepped out of the car, I noticed that he had brought with him a tow truck. 

“Howdy, stranger.” 

The man’s voice was both gruff and comforting, and he had this air about him that told me that everything would be okay. 

“I noticed that smoke coming from your engine. A damn shame. Figured I’d offer you a hand. You have that ‘out of towner’ look about ya. My shops just a ways down the road from here. We’ll get ya fixed up in a jiffy.” 

There was something…familiar about this man. I just didn’t know how to put my finger on it. All I knew was I needed what he was offering. 

“You’d be doing me a huge favor. And, yeah, I’m pretty far from home. Just thought I’d drop in and see something I’d never seen before, if that makes sense.” 

Throwing his hands up cartoonishly, the man chuckled and poked at me. 

“Aw, I’m not here to judge. Just here to get ya fixed up in a jiffy. Come on, I’ll take ya to my shop. It’s just a ways down the road from here.” 

…..

“Thank you. As I said, you’re doing me a huge favor here, man I really appreciate it.” 

The man smiled wider and gestured me over to his truck. He loaded my car up, and together we rode in silence to his shop. 

He told me that it was just a ways down the road, but we drove for about 20 minutes before I finally saw the sign. 

“JIMS AUTO REPAIR” written in big red lettering. The phrase “we’ll fix ya up in a jiffy,” was embroidered in cursive beneath the big cartoon figure of a mechanic on the sign. 

For the first time in our drive, the man spoke as we pulled into the parking lot. Pointing up at the sign, he chimed, gleefully, “I’m Jim,” and shot me a mischievous grin. 

“Well, nice to meet you, Jim. I’m Donavin.” 

The man then said something that caused my growing sense of unease to become

physically painful. 

“Nice to meet ya, Donavin. Welcome to town. Hope ya stay a while. We don’t see many outsiders ‘round these parts. You’re a nice change in the scenery.”

With that, he dropped the flatbed and began lowering my car. I stood and stared on as the car inched down the ramp, and I covered my face in my hands as the reality of my situation really sank in. 

“Aw, now don’t you start crying on me. We’ll have this fixed in a jiffy. Nothing to worry about.” 

Guiding me with a hand on my back, Jim led me to the lobby of the repair shop. Inside was vintage to say the least. A cigarette vending machine, cushioned chairs sat atop red tiled floor, and a wooden coffee table with old magazines scattered across it. 

At the front desk sat a woman with curly orange hair. Her skin resembled that of the gas station clerk. Glass-like. And her eyes remained fixed on the floor as she filed away at her nails. 

It was almost animatronic-like the way she filed them. The \*chck\* \*chck\* \*chckk\* sound that repeated monotonously as I waited for Jim to get back to me with the update on my car was enough to drive me insane. 

I picked up a magazine from the pile on the table and began flipping through it to try to clear my mind and focus on something. 

The thing was practically prehistoric to me. Ads for cigarettes, bell-bottom jeans, platform shoes, fucking Elvis Presley in the big 2026? It was fascinating, really. It was like looking into a time capsule. Articles dated back to December of 1971. 

I was so encapsulated by an article on Vietnam that I hadn’t even noticed the girl from the desk who was now standing above me, smiling down at me with teeth as white as ash and eyes as dark as sin. 

“Jim asked me to come get you. He says he found the problem,” she announced, never taking her eyes off of me. 

I tossed the magazine back on the table and stood up, walking towards the door that led to the garage as the orange-haired girl followed me, smiling the entire way. 

I found Jim leaning over my engine bay, wiping away at something with a shop towel. 

“Here you are,” the desk girl chirped. “If you need anything, just let me know!” 

I watched her as she slowly walked back to her desk and sat down in her chair. Her eyes fixated back on the floor, and, yet again, she went back to filing her nails. 

I stared at her, suspiciously. Something was…definitely off. I couldn’t seem to get past just how animatronic her movements were. She never even angled the nail file. She just kept it straight, scraping it against her nails in a way that looked almost painful. Nothing about how she was moving looked like she wanted to be doing it in the first place. But, even so, she continued with the rhythmic \*chck\* \*chck\* \*chckkk\* of her nail file. 

“Welp, here’s your problem,” Jim announced abruptly. “Radiator went out. Not a problem, I’ll-“ 

“Get it fixed in a jiffy. Yeah. I think I knew where you were going.” 

“Well, aren’t you a fast learner. What can I say? It is our motto after all.” 

At this point, I was growing a bit impatient. I didn’t mean to go off on him; it just kind of happened as a culmination of everything. 

“Look, Jim, I’m really not trying to be here for very long. I think it was a mistake that I ended up here in the first place. Can you just give me an estimate of when you think I’ll be able to get out of here? Today? Tomorrow, maybe?” 

For the first time since I entered the garage, Jim stood up straight from his position under my hood. His smile was still plastered across his face, but his eyes had darkened and narrowed. 

“No mistake. No mistake at all, my friend. Your car will be fixed soon. Why don’t you explore the town a little? It’s not exactly a tourist attraction, but I’ll bet it’ll keep you entertained while I work on this.” 

He put a hand on my shoulder and gestured me to the door. Turning around, I found that the same desk girl was standing there, holding the door open for me with the same smile from before. 

I hesitated a bit before walking through the door. 

“Jim…I really need this car fixed.” 

“You said it yourself, Donavin. I’m doing you a huge favor. Now go exploring while that favor gets done.” 

With that, I was out the door. Briskly walking past the orange-haired girl who was already heading back to her desk, nail file in hand. 

The air outside the auto repair shop was crisp and dry. I could smell that rain was coming, and I decided that my best course of action would be to find a hotel. Just in case. 

As I walked down the sidewalk through town, I realized just how frozen in time Fairview really was. Diners looked vintage, but well-maintained. Corner store windows were decorated with red, white, and blue streamers. The clothes displayed looked like the ones in fashion nearly half a century ago.

The people, though. That’s what really got me. I passed dozens of folks as I walked on, but heard not even a single word from anybody. Not a grunt, not a sigh, not even a cough. It was all just so quiet, save for the pounding of shoes against the sidewalk. 

Once I reached the heart of the town, I figured that now would be as good a time as any to grab something to eat. Lucky for me, there was a burger joint that smelled incredible. 

As if responding to the aroma, my stomach growled and basically pulled me forward towards the glass door. A bell chimed above me as the door swung open, and a waitress who had been wiping down the bar stopped on the dime to greet me. 

“Welcome in, sir! You can sit wherever you’d like, your server will be right with you!” 

I took a seat at the bar and took a look at

the menu. Burgers, fries, hot dogs, milkshakes, the whole works. Every item on the menu was accompanied by a photo, and it didn’t take much time for me to decide to go with the burger and fries combo. 

I slid the menu up away from me, indicating that I had made my choice, and waited patiently for my server. Twirling my thumbs as I glanced around the diner. 

My eyes fell on a man with a fedora and a trench coat. He sat alone with a cup of coffee, glancing over a newspaper. 

Every few moments, he’d put the newspaper down, take a sip of coffee, then go back to reading. Over and over. Like clockwork. 

Much like everyone else, his movements looked animatronic. Staged. Like his job was just to sit and read the paper. No checking his watch, no looking out the window, nothing. Just reading and drinking from his seemingly never-ending cup of coffee. 

As I watched him, my server finally came over to greet me. The same woman from when I first came in, who had been wiping down the bar. 

“Welcome in, sir! Glad to have you dining with us this evening! What can I get started for ya?” 

“I’ll just have the burger and fries with a uhhh…let me get a chocolate milkshake with that, thank you.” 

I handed her my menu and waited as she wrote down my order on her notepad. 

“Perfect! Great choice. We’ll have that out in a jiffy.” 

Her heels clicked against the checkerboard flooring as she walked away, and the strings of her apron tied behind her back swayed with her hips as she went through the door to the kitchen. 

For the first time since my car broke down, I remembered that I had a phone. I pulled it from my pocket, and was surprised to see that it was nearly 6:30 at night. 

With no service and a quickly dwindling battery, I figured I’d ask the waitress about any hotels in town where I could stay for the night in case Jim needed some extra time getting my car fixed. 

As I waited, the jukebox at the front of the diner kicked on, and music began to echo throughout the restaurant. 

🎵 Rag doll, livin in a movie. Hot tramp, daddy’s little cutie. You’re so fine, they’ll never see you leaving by the back door, man. 🎵 

The music was interrupted by an abrupt crash that happened behind me. I turned around to find the man with the newspaper stiff on the floor, an empty coffee mug shattered beside him. As if on queue, the waitress who took my order came click-clacking from the kitchen and over to the man. She picked him up, placed him back in his booth, and adjusted the newspaper in his hands. 

The man didn’t even seem to notice that he had fallen. He just went straight back to flipping the paper as the waitress replaced the coffee that sat beside him. With a slow, creaking turn of her head, the waitress looked at me. 

“That burger will be out in just a jiffy, hon!” 

After she returned to the kitchen, I slowly got up from my stool and walked over to the man who had fallen. Placing a hand on his shoulder, I could feel that he was still as stiff as a statue. 

“Sir…are you okay? That was a nasty fall, man. Are you feeling alright? Sir…?” 

I shook him a bit and felt his shoulder crack. He remained unresponsive. Shuttering the newspaper and sipping at his coffee as I jumped back in shock. 

I heard the swinging door to the kitchen fly open, and the waitress stepped out again, this time holding a tray of food. 

“Oh, don’t worry about him,” she grinned.

“He’s perfectly fine. Say, I’ll bet you’re starving after the day you’ve had. Why don’t you come try this burger? Best in Fairview and that’s a promise.” 

Don’t worry about him? She couldn’t be serious. 

“Uh, yeah, thanks. I actually think I’ve lost my appetite. I was wondering, though, do you know any hotels in town? My car’s in the shop, and I’m not sure it’ll be done in time today.” 

Without skipping a beat, the waitress clapped her hands together and sang. 

“YOU MUST BE DONAVIN! Jim told me you’d be stopping by. Give me just a minute, he had sent over a room key he wanted me to give you. Said something about how he’s sorry the car’s taking longer than expected, but he hopes it’ll be-“ 

“Done in a jiffy. Yep. Yeah. Got it.”  

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. At this point, I was ready to just abandon the car and WALK to the nearest town over. 

“Well, aren’t you a fast learner? Just stay right there, hon, I’ll be back in a jiffy.” 

I listened as her heels clicked back into the kitchen for a third time. What I didn’t hear, however, was the sound of a grill. Or the sound of anyone else in the kitchen, for that matter. In fact, save for the guy with the newspaper, the waitress and I seemed to be the only ones in the restaurant. 

I sat back down at my stool while the waitress retrieved the key, and the food that I saw in front of me put my stomach in knots. 

The bun was more mold than bread, and the patty dropped off to the side. The smell was NOT the smell that brought me in here. It was an odor of rotting meat and decay. The fries were slimy and wet, and the milkshake looked fermented. 

“Alright, no. Nope. Nuh-uh.” 

I got up to leave, and just as my hand touched the door handle, I heard the sing-songy voice of my waitress from behind me. 

“Don’t forget the key, hon! The Doll House is only a few blocks from here. Jim just called, said he’d meet you there. Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with!” 

I was JUST about to walk out of the diner and follow the road out of town when rain began to splatter against the concrete outside. 

Reluctantly, I took the key from the waitress’s hand and gave her one last look in her glazed eyes before stepping out of the restaurant. 

“Just take a right and follow the road,” she called out. “You can’t miss it. Shouldn’t be too long now.” 

The rain pelted my body as I jogged down the sidewalk. Neon signs buzzed and flickered, but the street was eerily empty and void of life. 

As I ran, I passed a corner store with a mannequin in the window. Something told me to pause. I stopped dead in my tracks in the pouring rain and felt my stomach churn at what I saw in the window. 

The gas station cashier. Dressed in a bonnet and a white laced dress. She was frozen in a pose with her hand on her hip, but her eyes begged for help. Her smile was still the same. Her skin was still porcelain, but her eyes were screaming at me to do something. 

I placed my hands against the window and saw her eyes fall onto me, tears welling up inside them. Before I could do anything, the lights behind her shut off, and from behind the display appeared a man. 

He looked through me, grabbing the cashier by her waist and tucking her under his arm like an object before shutting the blinds and disappearing. 

I pounded on the window, screaming for someone to answer, but the sound of rain hitting the sidewalk was the only response I received. 

In the distance, a new sign lit up, taking my attention away from the storefront. 

“The Doll House Inn” in bright neon red. 

Approaching the hotel, the sense of foreboding was enough to make me want to vomit. 

Two doormen in tuxedos stood like statues at the giant front entrance of the building, and they greeted me by name as they pulled the doors open.  Their movements were perfectly synchronized, and they welcomed me in unison. 

I walked inside, slowly. The hotel decor was absolutely stunning. Velvet floors. A bar with a shelf lined with the finest wines and liquors. The chandelier alone looked like the crown jewel of a fallen empire. 

However, the people. The Goddamned people. They weren’t people at all. Every single “person” in the establishment was a mannequin. Life-like, but void of any semblance of a soul. 

Some were in dancing positions. Some sat, legs crossed, in the lounge with cigars tucked tightly between their fingers. Hell, some of them were in the process of kissing each other. All frozen in time. 

I spun in circles, processing everything that I was seeing, when suddenly the music started. 

🎵 I'm gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own

A doll that other fellows cannot steal

And then the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes

Will have to flirt with dollies that are real 🎵 

As soon as the music started, all of the

mannequins began to engage in the activities that they were positioned in. Cigars animatronically raised to lips, back and forth. Couples mechanically spun in circles together. The band on stage robotically played their instruments as I looked on in horror. 

Incredibly, the hotel employees seemed to be actively serving these things. Pouring drinks, serving orders, lighting the cigars. 

Suddenly, the giant front doors were pulled open once again; and in stepped Jim. 

“Donavin!” He greeted. “So glad you made it. Can I get you anything? A cigar? A drink? A dance?”  

……

“No? Nothing? Ah, that’s fine. You can just listen then. Look, big guy, we gotta keep this town running somehow. What you’re seeing right now? This is necessary. We all have our jobs here. Well…most of us do. These ‘mannequins’ ‘dolls’, whatever you wanna call ‘em, they’re useless. Their sole purpose is to be served. That’s what we all want, right?  Nobody wants to work anymore. They just want other people to do the work for them. Hell, \*you\* didn’t even pay me for the tow.” 

I felt my face begin to burn as the man continued. 

“It would be nice if I could just not go to work. Stop paying my employees. Live off the land. But, unfortunately, that’s just not how this country works anymore. We all gotta serve our purpose. Now I could sit here and run through the whole spiel about everything, but I’m not gonna do that. See, what I’m gonna do is offer you a choice. Do you want to be like these people? Because, despite all appearances, they \*are\* alive. They are living, breathing human beings. But their soul. That belongs to me. They eat when I tell 'em to eat, they drink when I tell 'em to drink, and they shit when I tell 'em to shit.” 

I hadn’t noticed before, but the music had ceased, and I could feel dozens of eyes on me from all across the room. 

“It’s the same with all newcomers. You think you’re the first person to break down out here? You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. Lucky for you, though, we got some job openings, and I’d be happy to help you find employment. I’d be doing you a ‘huge favor’ as you put it.” 

“So, what, you want me to choose between being turned into one of these fucking mannequins or working for you? Like, now?? I’m sorry, but that doesn’t seem exactly fair to me.” 

Jim smirked, and the entire room erupted into laughter. 

“None of this is fair, don’t you see that? \*Life\* isn’t fair. I’d say the fact that you’re here and not in some terror state seems pretty lucky, wouldn’t you? Is that fair to the people in those countries? I bet they’d give every dollar they have to be in your shoes right now.” 

I thought for a long moment as Jim stared at me expectantly. After a moment, I came to my decision. 

And now here we are. 

It has been 6 months since I arrived in Fairview. 6 months since my car broke down. And all I have to say…is… 

If you ever find yourself driving through rural Georgia, be sure to stop by. Just follow the road. Shouldn’t be too long. You can find me at Jim’s Auto Repair Shop. If your car's giving you trouble, don’t worry…we’ll get you fixed in a jiffy. 

 

By the time I met Dr. Evelyn Harper, I had already lost most of my life. Not in the dramatic way people mean when they talk about wasted years. I had a job. I paid rent. I answered emails. I remembered birthdays badly enough to prove I was still human. On paper, I existed with all the usual dull paperwork that convinces society you are a functioning adult. But there were holes. At first, they were small. A misplaced wallet. A conversation I didn’t remember having. A text message I apparently sent at 2:13 in the morning to an unknown number that said, I’m almost finished. Almost finished with what? No idea.

Then the holes widened, and they began to smell like ozone and stagnant water. I would leave work at five and wake up at home at midnight, sitting perfectly upright on the edge of my bed with wet hair, mud caked beneath my cuticles, and a faint, copper taste coating the back of my tongue. I would find groceries in my fridge I didn’t remember buying—always raw meat, always turning gray because I never cooked it. Once, I found a heavy brass key in my coat pocket from a motel three hours away, wrapped in a napkin that smelled faintly of cheap peroxide. I told myself it was stress. Depression does strange things to memory. That’s what I read online, anyway, because nothing says “healthy coping” like diagnosing yourself through websites written by people named MindfulCarol77.

I was tired all the time. Not sleepy. Tired. There’s a difference. Sleepy people want rest. Tired people want the world to stop asking them to participate. My bones felt heavy, as if my marrow had been replaced with wet sand. So when my doctor suggested therapy, I agreed mostly because I was too exhausted to argue. That was how I ended up sitting across from Dr. Harper on a rain-soaked Tuesday morning in October, trying to explain why my life felt like a movie someone kept editing while I was out of the room.

Her office was in an old brick building downtown, squeezed between a pediatric dentist and a tax accountant. The waiting room smelled like burnt coffee and wet wool. Her actual office was warmer, lined with heavy bookshelves and soft lamps. No inspirational posters. No little smooth stones engraved with words like hope or breathe. I liked her immediately for that. She was in her late fifties, with silver hair pulled back so tightly it looked painful, and slate-gray eyes that made silence feel useful instead of awkward. “So,” she said, her voice dropping into the quiet room. “What brings you here, Daniel?” I laughed. It came out wrong—too loud, a wet rattling sound in my throat.

“Existing, mostly.” my answer falling flat as soon as the words left my lips. She didn’t smile. She didn’t frown either. She just watched the way my fingers twitched against my knees.

“Tell me what that means.” she directed me. I looked at the carpet. Gray. Industrial. Worn into a dark path near the door.

“I don’t want to die,” I said. “I should probably say that first.”

“All right.” now she started moving her pen over her pad, making notes.

“I’m not suicidal. I don’t have a plan. I don’t want to hurt myself.”

“But?” her question hung in the air a moment too long.

“But I’m tired of being awake. It feels like someone else is using my eyes when I'm not looking.” I couldn't look at her now. My eyes darting around the room seeking anything but her.

She wrote something in her notebook. The scratch of her pen was incredibly loud. “How long have you felt that way?”

“I don’t know.” I lied.

“Months? Years?” she asked curiously.

I thought about it, tracking a small, dark stain on the leg of my jeans. “Always?” That made her pen stop.

She looked up. “Always is a long time.”

I lifted my shoulder half-heartedly, “Feels accurate.”

She asked about work. Family. Sleep. Appetite. Friends. The usual checklist of human misery, neatly categorized for clinical convenience. Then she leaned forward, her glasses slipping slightly down her nose. “Do you ever lose time?”

My mouth went bone-dry. “What do you mean?”

“Periods you can’t account for. Gaps.” she explained.

I shrugged, a jerky, unnatural movement that made my collarbone click. “Everybody forgets things.”

“True.” she conceded before I continued.

“I just... forget bigger things.”

Her head tilted slightly when I said this. “What kinds of things?”

I rubbed my palms against my jeans, trying to scrape off a sudden, phantom warmth on my skin. “How I got home. What I ate. Why there’s dark crust under my fingernails, or blood on the collar of my shirt.” The room seemed to shrink. The air grew thick, hard to inhale.

“Blood?” she asked softly.

“It was probably mine.” I murmured in response.

“Probably?” her voice lilting slightly as she asked the obvious question.

I closed my eyes momentarily, “I had a cut on my hand. A deep one.”

She watched me for a beat before she asked, “Did you remember getting cut?”

“No,” I whispered. “I just woke up holding the sink, watching it bleed.”

“When was this?”

“Last week.”

She set her pen down. It rolled an inch and stopped against her leather blotter. “Daniel, has this happened more than once?” I wanted to lie. But the desire to lie didn’t feel like a choice. It arrived instantly, fully formed, like a cold instruction piped directly into my brainstem. Say no. Tell her you fell. I blinked, my vision blurring for a fraction of a second. “Daniel?”

“Yes,” I said, forcing the word past my teeth. It felt like pulling a needle out of my throat. Her expression remained perfectly calm, but her fingers twitched toward her notebook. “Yes, it has happened more than once.” That was my first session. At the end, Dr. Harper gave me a heavy, black cloth-bound notebook and told me to start keeping a record. Every day. Wake time, meals, work, conversations, places visited, anything unusual. “Evidence,” she called it. That word bothered me. You collect evidence when a crime has been committed. You collect evidence when something is hiding in the dark. I put the notebook on my nightstand when I got home and went to sleep.

The next morning, the first three pages were filled. It wasn't my handwriting. My handwriting is a sloppy, impatient print. This was elegant, precise, and written so hard the ballpoint pen had torn through the paper in several places, leaving little ragged gashes. One sentence, repeated until the margins bled out: You are not the one holding the pen. I didn’t throw it in the trash. I took a lighter and burned it in my kitchen sink, watching the black smoke stick to the ceiling like grease.

At our next session, Dr. Harper asked about the journal.

“I lost it,” I said. There it was again. The lie. Clean. Easy. Waiting right on the tip of my tongue like a lozenge. She watched me, her head tilted at an angle that felt just slightly too steep.

“Did you lose it, Daniel, or did you get rid of it?” I stared at her. She didn’t blink. Her pupils were incredibly small in the lamplight.

“I burned it,” I said.

“Why?”, she continued marking on her pad, her brow creased now in contemplation.

“Because someone wrote in it.”, I managed to choke out the statement.

“Who?”, she asked without looking up at me.

“I don’t know. Me. Not me.”, my palms felt clammy, and I could feel sweat starting to form on the nape of my neck.

“What did they write?”, and she raised her eyes to watch me. They were focused and curious.

I told her. She nodded slowly, her silver hair catching the light. “Did you bring the ashes?”

“No. I washed them down the drain.” She wrote a single line in her pad. “Daniel, would you be willing to try something? I’d like to video record our sessions.”

“No.” The answer came out before she finished asking. Too fast. Too sharp. My voice sounded deeper, hitting a frequency that made the glass on her bookshelves hum. She noticed.

She sat back, her hands folding over her knee. “Why not?”

I opened my mouth, but my jaw locked. A sharp, stinging pain flared behind my left ear. Why not? I had no reason. Not a real one. Just a sudden, violent panic that felt less like an emotion and more like an allergy. My blood felt hot. “I don’t like being watched,” I managed to say.

“Most people don’t. But you’re losing hours, Daniel. Sometimes days. A recording may help us understand what happens during the gaps. It might show us who is writing in your books.”, her voice was soft but direct.

“What if I don’t want to know?” That was the first honest thing I had said all morning.

Dr. Harper leaned forward, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Then something in you is terrified of what we’ll find.”

The room went cold. Not metaphorically. The air pressure dropped so fast my ears popped. My breath bloomed into a white cloud between us. Dr. Harper looked toward the window, her brow furrowing. It was shut tight, locked from the inside. Then I heard it. A low, wet sound behind my chair. Like someone dragging a heavy, waterlogged sack across the floorboards. Skrrrch. I turned around so fast my neck popped. Nothing. Just the empty corner and the shadow of the bookcase. When I looked back, Dr. Harper was staring at me, her face pale, her pen trembling in her hand. “What did you hear, Daniel?”

I stood up. My knees felt loose, like hinges coming unscrewed. “I need to go.”

“Daniel, sit down, let’s talk about the temperature—”

“I need to go.” I left without scheduling another appointment. I didn’t even pay the parking meter. That night, I dreamed for the first time in fifteen years. I was eight years old. I was lying naked on my back on our old formica kitchen table. My wrists and ankles weren’t tied with ropes—they were bound with my father’s heavy leather work belts, buckled so tight my feet were black. Candles—stubby, yellow, smelling of old fat—flickered on the counters. My mother stood by the refrigerator, her apron pulled over her face, sobbing so hard her shoulders shook in silence. My father held a family Bible, his knuckles white, his mouth moving in silent, desperate prayers. There were three men standing over me. Priests, but they weren't wearing vestments. They wore filthy, sweat-stained white shirts. One was old. One was young. The third had a thick stream of dark blood pouring from both nostrils, coating his teeth as he shouted. They were screaming in Latin. I didn’t know the words, but I knew what they meant. They were trying to evict something. But something inside my chest was laughing. It wasn't me. I was screaming for my mom, but the sound coming out of my ribs was a low, vibrating purr. It felt like a heavy, greasy weight shifting beneath my lungs. The old priest pressed a heavy iron crucifix directly against my forehead. My skin sizzled. The smell of burning hair and pork filled the kitchen. I screamed until my vocal cords tore, but before the scream could finish, my jaw unhinged—further than a human jaw should go—and the thing spoke. “Leave him,” it said. The kitchen went dead silent. The priests stopped praying. The voice was mine, but it sounded like it was being spoken through a long, copper pipe from twenty feet underground. It was calm. Horribly, anciently calm. The old priest whispered, “What are you?” My lips stretched back until the corners split, revealing too many teeth. “Patient.”

I woke up on my bathroom floor with my nose bleeding onto the tile. The copper taste was thick in my mouth. There was dark, wet earth crammed tightly under my fingernails, and my knuckles were scraped raw. I looked up at the mirror. The bathroom was hot, steam rising from the shower I didn't remember turning on. In the condensation on the glass, someone had traced a single word with a fat, wet finger:

FINALLY

I went back to Dr. Harper. Because I am, apparently, the exact kind of idiot that horror stories require to function. This time, I didn’t fight the camera. She set up a small digital camcorder on a tripod between our chairs. The little red recording light blinked like a small, angry eye. For three weeks, nothing happened. We talked about my childhood. I told her I didn’t remember anything before age nine. My parents had died in a car crash when I was twelve, so there was no one left to ask. No siblings. No aunts. Just me and a childhood that felt like a long corridor where someone had systematically smashed all the lightbulbs. Dr. Harper believed the missing memories were a wall my brain had built to protect me from trauma. I thought she was right. I hated her for it. During the fourth recorded session, she shifted in her chair, the leather creaking. “Daniel, were your parents religious?”

“Catholic,” I said, watching the red light on the camera. “Kind of. We went to church. I remember the smell of incense. Cold stone.”

Dr. Harper raised her gaze from her pad and watched me, “Do you remember anything frightening from that time? Anything about your father?”

My hands began to shake. A cold sweat broke out along my hairline. “No.”

The lie again. It tasted like ash. Dr. Harper noticed. She leaned forward, her voice soft, hypnotic. “You’re safe in this room, Daniel. Whatever it is, it can’t leave this space.”

Something inside my stomach curled. A slow, greasy movement, like an eel turning over in mud. It didn't feel like an emotion. It felt like an anatomy. She thinks she’s safe, a voice thought. Not my voice. A thought that didn’t use words, just an image of her throat snapping like a dry branch. “Daniel?” I looked up at her. The overhead fluorescent lights gave a loud, violent pop and died, leaving only the amber glow of the desk lamp. Then, I was standing in the parking lot. Rain was coming down in sheets, hammering against my skull. My shirt was soaked. My watch said 11:47 AM. Forty-seven minutes had vanished.

I scrambled into my car, my hands shaking so badly I dropped the keys twice into the footwell. My phone was in my pocket. I dialed Dr. Harper’s office line. She answered on the first ring. Her voice sounded thin, breathy. “Daniel?”

“What happened?” I screamed over the sound of the rain on the roof. “What did I do?”

A long pause. I could hear her breathing—shallow, terrified gasps. “Where are you?”

“In my car. Outside. What happened?”

“Stay there. Do not move. I’m coming down.”

A minute later, the passenger door flew open. Dr. Harper climbed in, smelling of cold rain and terror. Her silver hair was coming undone, strands sticking to her wet cheeks. She didn’t look at me; she just stared straight ahead through the blurred windshield. “You don’t remember leaving the office?” she asked.

“No. I blinked and I was by the meters. Please, Evelyn, what did I do?” She swallowed hard. I could see the pulse jumping in her neck. “During the question about your father... you stopped blinking. Your eyes didn't move for three minutes.”

“And then?”

“You looked at me. But your eyes... Daniel, your pupils expanded until there was no gray left. Just black.”

My stomach dropped. “What did I say?”

She closed her eyes, her lips trembling. “You leaned forward until your face was three inches from mine. You smelled like... like old meat. And you whispered, ‘She shouldn’t have kept the blue dress.’”

The car felt freezing cold. “What does that mean?”

She finally turned her head to look at me, and her eyes were bright with tears. “My sister, Clara. She was taken when I was seventeen. They found her body three weeks later in a drainage ditch. She was wearing a pale blue dress. The police never released that detail to the public. My mother kept it in a trunk until the day she died.”

I couldn’t breathe. “I didn’t know that. I swear to God, Evelyn, I didn’t know that.”

“I know,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “You didn't. But whatever was looking through your eyes did.”

The next day, she emailed me the video file. She didn't add a message. Just the link. I sat in my dark apartment and watched it twenty times. The video started normally. We were talking about church. Then, at the 14-minute mark, I stopped mid-sentence. My spine went perfectly straight. My shoulders dropped three inches, as if the muscles had completely relaxed, leaving my frame hanging on the bone. My face went totally slack, the lines of stress vanishing until I looked like a wax doll. Two minutes of absolute stillness. I didn't even breathe. The camera captured the total absence of motion. Then, my head tilted. It didn't look like a human neck movement—it was a sudden, jerky click to the left, like a bird tracking an insect. The thing wearing my face smiled. It wasn't my smile. It was too wide, pulling the skin of my cheeks so tight the scars from my teenage acne turned white. On the video, Dr. Harper whispered, “Daniel?” The thing using my mouth spoke. The audio distorted, clipping into static because the pitch was too low. “You dig in dead soil, Doctor.”

“Who am I speaking to?” her voice on the tape was brave, but her hands were shaking. The smile grew. My teeth looked sharp in the gray light of the camera. “Someone who remembers where the little sister was broken. She prayed at the end, Evelyn. Not to the sky. She called for you. She thought you were coming.” Then it said the line about the blue dress. On the video, Dr. Harper didn't scream. She just reached out with a trembling hand and shut the camera off.

I sat in the dark until the sun came up, watching that smile loop over and over. It wasn't that the face was monstrous. It was that it was mine, but the spirit behind it was completely indifferent to my humanity. I was just a glove. At dawn, I drove to my parents’ old house. It had been sold after the crash, then abandoned a decade ago after a fire gutted the back half. It stood at the end of a dead-end gravel road outside the city limits, blackened, sagging into the weeds, its windows broken out like empty sockets. I hadn't been there since I was nine. The front door groaned as I pushed it open. The air inside was heavy with the smell of wet rot, charcoal, and something else—something sweet and heavy, like rotting fruit. I walked through the skeletal living room, waiting for a spark of memory. Nothing. Just gray ash and peeling wallpaper. Then I found the basement door. The rest of the house was charred white and gray, but the basement door was painted a thick, glossy crimson. The paint looked fresh. It didn't have a speck of dust on it. My hand hovered over the brass knob. It felt ice-cold. A voice inside my head—my own voice, tiny and terrified—whispered, Don't go down there. If you open it, we can't go back. I turned the knob.

The stairs went down into a darkness so absolute the light from the door seemed to swallow itself after three steps. I used my phone flashlight. The basement hadn't burned. The concrete walls were covered in crosses. Hundreds of them. Some were crude wooden sticks tied with twine, some were heavy iron, but most were scratched directly into the concrete with something sharp, over and over, until the stone had flaked away. In the dead center of the floor, a circle had been chiseled into the cement. It was deep—a three-inch groove. Inside the circle, the concrete was stained a dark, rusty brown. The stain had a shape. It looked like the silhouette of a small child lying down. Against the far wall stood a rusty metal filing cabinet. I opened the top drawer. Inside were neatly organized manila folders. My childhood, curated by people who were terrified of me. Medical records. Reports from neurological clinics. Letters with Vatican letterheads. And my mother’s diary. I sat on the damp concrete floor and read by the blue light of my phone until my eyes throbbed. My mother’s handwriting changed over the months, turning from a neat cursive into a jagged, frantic scrawl.

July 14th: Daniel has started talking in his sleep again. Not child words. He speaks in a dialect Father Callahan says belongs to the Levant. He knows things about the neighbors. He told Mrs. Gable that her dead brother was waiting for her in the well.

August 3rd: He doesn't blink anymore when he looks at me. I found him standing over his father’s bed last night, just holding a pair of sewing scissors, staring. When I grabbed him, he didn't cry. He just said, 'The wood is soft.'

September 12th: The rite failed. God forgive us, the priests ran. Callahan says it's bound now. He says if we keep Daniel quiet, if we never mention the name, the thing will stay asleep in his marrow. Silence is mercy, he tells me. But I look at my boy and I don't see my boy. I see a curtain.

There were photographs at the bottom of the drawer. Me at seven years old. Tied to the kitchen table with those heavy leather belts. The camera flash had caught my face, but it was completely blurred—not because the photo was bad, but because my head was vibrating, moving back and forth with an impossible, inhuman speed. On the back of the photo, my father had written: Night Four. The boy's skin smells like sulfur. It refuses to give its name. It says it likes the house. The last document was an address for a nursing home two counties over. Father Thomas Callahan. The nursing home smelled like boiled cabbage and dying cells. I found Callahan in a sunroom at the end of a long hall. He was in a wheelchair, a faded tartan blanket over his knees, staring through a greasy window at a bird feeder. He looked like an old tree that had dried up from the inside. His skin was translucent; I could see the blue veins pulsing in his temples. I sat down in the plastic chair across from him. He didn’t look up.

“Father Callahan,” I said. His head jerked. His milky, clouded eyes focused on my face, and then his jaw dropped. A soft, whistling gasp came from his throat. He tried to push his wheelchair back, his old fingers clawing at the wheels.

“No,” he whimpered. “No, no, no.”

“I need to know what you did to me,” I said, leaning closer.

He reached for a rosary around his neck, his hands shaking so violently the beads clicked like teeth. He started muttering the Hail Mary in a cracked, desperate voice.

“Father. Look at me.”

He flinched as if I’d struck him. “We tried to save the soul,” he whispered. “We tried.”

“You left it inside me.”

“It wouldn't go!” he cried out, a tear spilling over his wrinkled cheek. “It was too deep! It wasn’t a shadow on the wall, Daniel. It had rooted into your nervous system. If we pulled it out, your brain would have leaked out your ears. We had to bind it. We had to put you to sleep.”

“The blackouts,” I said, the truth settling into my chest like lead. “The missing time. That wasn’t the demon waking up.”

Callahan looked down at his trembling hands. “The forgetting was the lock, Daniel. As long as you didn't remember what you were, it couldn't find the steering wheel. Memory is the door. The therapy... the digging... you opened the lock.”

I stood up, the chair scraping loudly against the linoleum. “What did it do while I was asleep, Father?”

He wouldn't look at me. He just kept shaking his head, crying silently. “It grew. A child's mind is soft. It grew around the thing. You aren't two people, Daniel. You never were.”

I drove back to the city in complete silence. I didn't turn on the radio. I didn't turn on the heater. When I got to my apartment, I opened the video files from Dr. Harper again. I didn't watch our conversations. I watched the gaps. The seconds before I went blank. If you look closely at the video—at the reflection in the dark glass of the bookcase behind my chair—you can see my shadow. But the shadow doesn't match my posture. When I leaned forward to laugh nervously, my shadow stayed perfectly still, its head tilted, watching the back of my skull. It had been there the whole time. It wasn't waiting to break out. It was waiting for me to realize it was already the majority of me. Then I heard a noise from my bedroom. Skrrrch. The sound of wood sliding against wood. I walked down the narrow hallway. My apartment felt small, claustrophobic, like a coffin wrapped in drywall. My bedroom door was open. The closet door had been shoved aside, and a loose panel at the back of the wall had been pulled free, revealing a dark cavity I had never noticed in three years of living here. Inside were four heavy plastic storage bins. I opened the first one. Driver’s licenses. Dozens of them. Different names, different states, but all of them featuring my face—sometimes with a beard, sometimes with glasses, spanning fifteen years. Bundles of old, musty cash wrapped in rubber bands. And jewelry. A gold wedding band. A silver signet ring. A small, pink plastic child’s bracelet with the name MIA spelled out in white beads. The second bin was full of newspaper clippings.

MISSING WOMAN’S CAR FOUND BY CREEK.

UNSOLVED ARSON CLAIMS THREE LIVES IN OHIO.

POLICE BAFFLED BY DRAINAGE DITCH MURDERS.

The oldest clipping was from when I was nineteen. A local girl from my college town. I remembered that year. I remembered being so tired. I remembered sleeping for fourteen hours a day. I hadn't been sleeping. I looked at my hands. They were pale, thin, ordinary hands. They had veins and hair and small scars from childhood. They weren't claws. They didn't have black blood. They were just human hands. That was the worst part. Evil didn’t need horns. It just needed thumbs. At the very bottom of the last bin was a manila envelope with my name written on it in that elegant, aggressive handwriting that tore through paper. Inside was a single photograph. It was Dr. Harper. She was walking to her car in the rain outside her office building, taken from the shadow of an alleyway across the street. On the back, written in thick black marker:

She wanted to see. She gets to be first.

I dropped the photograph onto the floor. I didn’t call her. I knew she wouldn’t answer, because looking back at the timeline, the transition wasn't clean. The moment I processed the words on the back of that photo, my mind slipped on its own grease. There was a gap right there. A missing sequence. I didn’t just drive across town; I awoke into the drive. Suddenly I was behind the wheel, already mid-turn, tires shrieking against the wet asphalt as I ran a stale red light. My own hands were white on the steering wheel, but they didn’t feel like my hands—they felt heavy, autonomous, like a pair of wet gloves I couldn’t pull off. The windshield wipers slapped a frantic, wet rhythm against the glass, trying to clear the downpour. The downtown streets were empty, gleaming like wet coal under the sodium lamps.

When I slid the car into the alley behind the brick building, her silver Volvo was already there. Its driver-side door was swung wide open, letting the rain pool in the footwell. Her leather purse lay upside down in the puddle beneath the door, its contents—lipstick, keys, loose receipts—floating in the muddy water. He had caught her right here. I could see the scuff marks in the wet gravel where she had tried to dig her heels in. I could see the smear of blood on the Volvo’s door handle where her fingers had slipped. My chest heaved, a cold, sickening realization crawling up my throat: I had come here to save her, but I was just tracing the path of a monster that wore my own boots. The building’s front door was unlatched, clicking softly in the wind. Inside, the elevator cage sat dead at the bottom of the shaft. I ran up the stairs, my boots echoing in the hollow concrete stairwell like a second set of footsteps tracking me from behind.

By the time I reached the third floor, the smell hit me. The familiar sting of lemon cleaner was entirely gone, replaced by a thick, suffocating stench of rotting fruit and hot copper. Her office door was ajar. A thin, amber strip of light spilled into the dark hallway. I pushed the door open and stepped into the inner office. The small digital camcorder sat on its tripod between the two chairs, its little red recording light blinking like an angry, unblinking eye. RECORDING. I didn’t look around the room yet. My heart was hammering a bruised rhythm against my ribs as I walked straight to the camera and looked down at the small, glowing LCD screen. It was playing live.

In the frame, the camera was angled toward the empty therapy chair. But on the screen, the chair wasn't empty. I was sitting in it. I froze, the breath dying in my lungs. I slowly looked up from the screen, staring directly at the physical chair across the room. It was completely empty. The leather was undisturbed. But when I dropped my eyes back to the monitor, the digital version of me tilted its head toward the lens. It looked directly out of the screen, locked its eyes onto mine, and smiled—that skin-stretching, white-knuckled smile that didn’t belong to me. Then it winked. The audio from the tiny camera speaker hissed to life, spitting out a static-laced whisper.

“You’re late, Daniel.”

A jagged, wet gasp tore through the quiet of the room. It came from the shadows behind the heavy bookshelves. I whipped my head toward the sound. The amber desk lamp’s light pierced the dark corner, and the breath scraped out of my throat. Dr. Harper was there. She was bound to her heavy leather chair, but not with ropes. She had been wrapped in dozens of tight, suffocating layers of clear packing tape that pinned her arms, chest, and legs to the frame. Her silver hair was matted and dark, glued to her forehead by a thick gash that was still sluggishly oozing down her cheek. A wide strip of tape was pulled taut across her mouth, but her eyes—those slate-gray eyes that used to make silence feel useful—were wide, bloodshot, and rimmed with an absolute, paralyzing terror. She wasn't looking at the empty space in the middle of the room. She was looking directly at me.

“Evelyn,” I choked out, taking a frantic step toward her. The moment I moved, she thrashed violently against the plastic bindings, a muffled, screaming NO vibrating uselessly through the tape over her lips. She shook her head back and forth so hard her neck popped, her tears cutting clean, pale tracks through the wet blood on her cheeks. She wasn't begging for help. She was trying to get away from me. “I didn't do this,” I pleaded, my voice cracking into a sob. “Evelyn, please, I came to help you—” I reached out to pull the tape from her face, intending to free her mouth, but the moment my hand entered the warm, amber glow of the desk lamp, I stopped dead. My fingers were covered in sticky, drying blood. The skin beneath my fingernails was torn to the quick, raw and splitting. I hadn't done this to myself; he had done it to my hands while forcing her into the chair, binding her tight against the leather. I looked down at the desk. Resting right there on Dr. Harper's leather blotter, directly under the lamp, was the heavy, rusted iron crucifix from my father’s chiseled basement circle. Its jagged edges caught the amber light, already stained with a few stray strands of silver hair and bits of graying tissue from when he had initially subdued her.

I didn't want to touch it. I screamed at my arm to drop to my side, but my hand moved with an agonizing, fluid precision that didn't belong to me. My fingers wrapped tightly around the cold, pitted metal grip. My arm lifted it into the light. I was forced to hold it up, studying it, turning it over to examine the sharp edges as if it were a fascinating artifact, entirely detached from the horror in the room. A low, wet sound echoed from the dark window pane behind her chair. I looked up. In the black glass, my reflection wasn't standing over her with a weapon. My reflection was sitting comfortably in the therapy chair, its legs crossed, its arms folded neatly over its chest. It was watching me with a look of deep, satisfied exhaustion, like a director enjoying the final scene of a play. My physical mouth didn't move, but the stagnant air in the room filled with a sound like a thousand wet pages turning all at once inside my skull. “There was never a prison, Daniel,” the air whispered, making the window glass rattle in its frame. “You were just the door.”

I looked down at Dr. Harper. She had stopped thrashing. The panic in her eyes had hardened into a terrible, hollow resignation. She stared at the iron crucifix now raised in my hand, her chest rising and falling in shallow, trembling hitches. She was done fighting the glove. She was just waiting for the edit. My body turned toward her. I didn't tell it to. I screamed inside my own skull, throwing my entire psychological weight against the invisible levers of my nervous system, begging my fingers to open, begging my wrist to snap—anything to stop the momentum. But my muscles felt smooth, heavy, and perfectly obedient to the ancient, underground purr vibrating in my ribs. The arm brought the iron down. The first strike broke her nose. The second shattered her jaw. I didn't black out. The entity didn't grant me the mercy of darkness yet; it kept my eyes wide open, forcing me to witness every wet, crunching impact as I struck her over and over. The warm splash of copper hit my face. The sound of her shallow, trembling hitches devolved into a horrible, fluid rattling, and then into nothing at all. Only when the shape in the chair stopped moving entirely, its face unrecognizable in the amber light, did the voice inside me speak one last time. “Let's finish the work,” it thought through me. Then, finally, the hole widened and swallowed me whole.

I woke up with the sun in my eyes. The air was warm, smelling faintly of pine needles and damp earth. I was sitting behind the wheel of my car, the engine idling quietly. The windshield wipers were off. The sky above was a bright, flawless blue, completely devoid of the storm from the night before. I blinked, my eyes burning against the morning light. I looked down at my hands. They were perfectly clean. No blood. No gray wool. My fingernails were neatly trimmed, the dark earth entirely gone from beneath the cuticles. I looked over at the passenger seat. It was empty. There was no rusted iron crucifix. There was no blood-stained manila envelope. I checked the dashboard clock. 9:14 AM. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone, my fingers trembling slightly as I opened my contacts. I scrolled down to Dr. Harper's name and tapped it. It rang once. Twice. Three times. Then it went straight to a generic voicemail greeting. I let out a long, shaky breath and leaned my head back against the headrest, looking out the side window.

I was parked in the gravel lot of a scenic overlook, miles outside the city. Below me, a vast, green valley stretched out under the summer sun, peaceful and completely still. My mind was perfectly quiet. There were no whispers. No shifting weights beneath my ribs. I felt lighter than I had in months, as if a great, suffocating pressure had finally been lifted from my marrow.

I put the car in drive, pulled out onto the empty highway, and headed back toward the city, a small, involuntary smile forming on my lips. For the first time in my life, the space behind my eyes felt entirely my own. It was a beautiful morning. But as I reached down to adjust the air conditioning, my hand brushed against something hard and fabric-textured lying on the center console. I looked down. It was the heavy, black cloth-bound notebook Dr. Harper had given me during our very first session. The one I had lied about. The one I told her I had burned in my kitchen sink. My heart gave a faint, cold thud. I picked it up, the spine cracking softly as I opened it to the first page. Written there, in my own sloppy, impatient print, was a short list of names and addresses. The first name on the list was Dr. Evelyn Harper, with a heavy, precise black line drawn violently through it. The second name was completely untouched.