r/RedditHorrorStories

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

The first body wasn’t what bothered me.
I’d seen bodies before crime scene photos in graduate school, autopsy reports, evidence binders thick enough to stop a bullet. Death usually made sense. Someone always left something behind.

A fingerprint. A motive. A mistake.

This one left nothing.

The sheriff called me because I’d grown up in Blackwater Hollow and because I had letters after my name that made people think I could explain the impossible.

The victim was lying in the center of an abandoned church, hands folded across his chest like someone had prepared him for a funeral. His clothes were clean. There wasn’t a drop of blood.
The strange part wasn’t how he died.
It was the notebook resting on his chest.
Every page contained interviews with people who had disappeared over the last forty years.
People who had never been found.

At the bottom of the final page was a sentence written in fresh ink.

You’re next.

The handwriting was my own.

The objective is to get a glass of boiling water and drink it.

The plan is not very complicated. I need to remove the blanket, get up from my La-Z-Boy, walk to the kitchen, put water in the kettle, boil it, pour it into a mug, go back to the chair, get under the covers, and start drinking.

Actually, the plan is simple now that I think about it.

The execution is what’s impossible.

How could it ever be possible to do any of that with a demon possessing my body as I type this?

Extra-spicy chicken tenders way too late at night, right before I went to bed, caused me to throw up. I couldn’t go back to bed after that because my wife would wake up and see me with an upset stomach. She’d just do all kinds of unnecessary things that I don’t want.

No, honey. I don’t want green tea. I don’t want dried lime. I don’t want myrrh. I don’t want soup. I don’t want VapoRub. I don’t want Panadol. I don’t want Nexium. I don’t want to go to the doctor. I don’t want a massage. I don’t want sympathies and “awwws” and “ooooohs” and forehead kisses.

I just want to be alone and miserable for a good twenty minutes. Then I’ll be okay.

So instead of going back to the bedroom, I sit in my La-Z-Boy in the living room.

And then it started.

In mid-August, arguably the hottest time of the year, I start shivering as if an ice storm is coming out of my chest and spreading through my organs, slamming against my skin from the inside, only to repel back inward and make the cold even worse.

My jaw is shaking so hard that I have to forcibly stop my teeth from slamming against each other. If I don’t, the force of the impact feels strong enough to literally break a couple of them.

I’m hugging myself as tightly as I can. My body is so stiff that I can’t move a single bone or finger.

My lips are so dry that it feels like one smile would cause a thousand rips of different shapes and sizes to tear across them.

My face hurts. I feel the sensation of a thousand ants eating every inch of it, except for my nose and cheekbones. Those two areas are completely numb, almost like they don’t even exist anymore.

Inside my head, I’m calm.

Well, I’m fucked.

But I’m also calm.

I’m a grown man, and this is just a fever. The strongest, most devastating fever I’ve ever had, true. But it’s just a fever at the end of the day.

That was until I started noticing the patterns.

All kinds of weird triangles, squares, and hexagons with different colors and patterns, almost like I’m having a DMT trip or some kind of fever dream.

I’m still calm. If anything, I’m actually kind of fascinated.

I don’t do drugs anymore, and something about this trippy feeling is strangely nostalgic.

Besides, it’s a good distraction from all the physical torture I’m feeling.

That was until I saw my wife in front of me, worried and nervous.

“Honey, do you want hot milk? Hot chocolate? Hot water? Hot coffee? Hot soup? Hot sex? Death? Pain? Suffering?”

Her face was starting to deform into something else.

She was getting fat. Gigantic.

Her short, slender body was increasing in size, slowly turning into a blob of melting flesh on top of melting flesh on top of more flesh.

“Do you want comfort? Do you want pain? Do you want comfort while pretending to be in pain? Or do you want the pain while convincing everyone that you’re living in comfort?”

The flesh on her face was falling apart like she was wearing a mask that was too big for her head. Her eye sockets sagged downward, revealing nothing but darkness inside them.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.”

All I could hear was her humming in my ear.

Soon after, about eight or nine other voices joined her, talking directly into my ear.

They weren’t screaming. They were talking completely normally.

But they were so close to my eardrums that it felt louder than any scream I’d ever heard in my life.

They weren’t talking next to my ear.

They were inside it.

“Death. Pain. Suffering. Loss. Sadness. Awful. Bad. Hate. Rage. Hu—”

I jolt awake in my La-Z-Boy.

My eyes widen.

I’m back in the physical realm.

“Honey, could you make me a glass of boiling water to warm me up?”

Oh, how nice would it be to just say that?

For my wife to hear it.

For her to simply bring me that glass of water so I could drink it.

If only my throat wasn’t wrapped in barbed wire made of ice.

If only there wasn’t a dead body lying in front of me.

And if only there wasn’t a ghostly figure of the dead girl hanging from the corner of the ceiling, looking down at me with her eyes wide open and smiling.

The dead body is a girl.

The ghost figure is the same girl, with black, gooey liquid spilling all over her face.

I blink a couple of times.

She’s still there.

I look away from the ghost on the ceiling and down at the dead body on the floor.

The dead body is looking at me.

Smiling.

The same smile as the ghost on the ceiling.

I look back up at the ghost.

Its face is inches away from mine.

It’s still in the same position on the ceiling.

Same body.

Same smile.

It has just stretched all the way down to my face.

And suddenly, before I can even recognize what just happened, it screams directly into my face.

All I see is its mouth, wide open.

The scream itself doesn’t come from it.

It comes from me.

I hear it inside my own head.

I jolt awake again.

The dead body is gone.

My wife isn’t here.

She’s in the bedroom, sleeping.

I can’t scream because my throat still doesn’t work. I can barely keep my jaw from slamming against itself until it shatters.

“This is how people die,” I think. “They’ll look at my body in the morning and think it was a heart attack or some bullshit. Nobody will know what really happened.”

I chuckle.

“Nobody will know about the chicken tenders, or the ghost lady, or the Antarctic cold in mid-August.”

Then I say it.

Not inside my head.

Out loud.

“Water.”

I take out my phone and decide to call my wife.

She answers with a sleepy voice.

“Yes?”

With a shaky, raspy, freezing, dying voice, I say:

“H-h-h-honey… I-I n-need a glas-ss of b-boiling w-water… p-please.”

She doesn’t say anything.

I wait for what feels like an eternity.

Five seconds.

“H-h-hello?”

She doesn’t hang up.

She doesn’t say anything.

Then it hits me.

A wave of fear unlike anything I’ve ever felt since the day I was born.

My wife, ever since I’ve known her seven years ago, has always turned her phone off when she goes to sleep.

“W-who is th-this?”

All I hear is giggling.

Then that same scream again.

Then the line cuts off.

I raise my head again.

It’s the same ghost figure.

But multiplied.

At least ten of them.

One is in the same spot on the ceiling.

One is in the same spot on the ground.

One is peeking through the window.

One is peeking from behind the door.

One is right next to my face, peeking from behind the La-Z-Boy.

And many others are scattered all around my living room.

Maybe I’ve gone insane.

Maybe I’m possessed.

Maybe this is just one hell of a fever dream.

Or maybe this is just a case of really bad chicken tenders.

One thing is for sure.

I’m going to get that glass of water now.

Wish me luck.

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

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

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

“Yes.” the other three said in unison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alright! Then do it! We’re waiting!”

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

*****

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

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

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

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

THUD.

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

THUD. THUD. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The mausoleum…” Eric muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

I’m creating a game called “bloodshade”. Can someone please sent me their stories, it will help me create the game.

Hey everyone, I’ve been working on a serialized episodic horror novel heavily inspired by The Magnus Archives format. It's told through case files, interviews, and journal entries exploring different manifestations of fear and a secretive Archive.
About half the novel is officially up on Wattpad right now, but I wanted to post the absolute start of it here so you can read it directly. I’d love to know what Fear Entity you think this first case file aligns with!

Statement of Marianna Lake, given February 7th, 2023
Archivist: Dr. Lena Hart
[Begin Transcript]

MARIANNE LAKE (nervous, soft voice):
You won't believe me. I didn't believe me. But I have to say it out loud—just once—before it eats everything else. I'm afraid if I keep it inside, it'll start rearranging the rest of my mind.

It started with a hallway.

I live in a student flat near the university, third floor, one long corridor with numbered doors. Mine's 3C. I've lived there two years now, and I could walk it in my sleep—ten steps from the stairs, three doors on the left, two on the right. The building creaks like an old ship in the wind, but it's predictable. It was predictable.

Until last Thursday.

That morning, I came back from a lecture and climbed the stairs like always. But the hallway... felt longer. Just slightly. You know when a room smells wrong? Like, the air pressure's off? It was like that. I remembered stopping by my door, 3C, reaching into my bag for my keys—and realizing the hallway kept going.

There was another door.

A fourth door. On the left. I swear to you, Dr Hart, it wasn't there before. It was matte black, with no number. No doorknob. Just... there. Seamless, like it grew out of the wall.
I stared at it for a long time. I even turned to knock on my neighbor's door—Jay, 3D—to ask if he saw it too. But when I looked back, it was gone.

I don't remember going inside my own flat. I just remember waking up at 3:12 AM, all the lights on, and my phone playing static. Not a ringtone—static. Like an untuned radio. I hadn't set any alarms.

The next day, the door was there again.

Same spot. Same nothingness. And this time, I touched it. Cold As ice, but not metal. Not wood. Something else. My hand slid right across it and my fingers tingled, like they'd fallen asleep. I think—I think—I heard whispering from behind it.

No words. Just.. breath, low and looping. Like someone learning how to speak.

I knocked.
I don't know why I did that. Curiosity, maybe. Or compulsion.

The door didn't open.

But mine did.

My own flat door—-3C—creaked open behind me. I turned fast, thinking it was a draft, but no one was there. And when I looked back... the fourth door was closer. Still shut, but now maybe a foot from me. I didn't see it move, I swear, but it had.

That night, everything in my apartment was slightly off. The furniture was still mine, but the cushions were reversed, the fridge hummed in a different tone, and my bedroom window looked out onto a street that doesn't exist.

I live across from a bookstore. Always have. But out that window—just mist. Mist and a single red streetlamp. No sidewalk. No cars. No Greywell Books sign.

I closed the blinds and haven't opened them since.

The hallway is still changing. The door shows up more often now—black, blank, closer every time. Yesterday I reached out to touch it and felt something tap back.

I don't sleep much anymore. I leave the lights on. I've drawn maps of the hallway, trying to prove it's changing. But the drawings change too. I wake up and they're longer. The walls curve in. One sketch shows six doors.

I didn't draw six.

I don't know what's behind that fourth door. But I think it's waiting for me to open it. And I'm scared that one day, I will.

Or worse—it will open it for me.

[Statement Ends]

ARCHIVIST'S NOTE (Dr. Hart):
Marianne Lake's account matches several previously recorded anomalies in urban architecture, particularly in proximity to high-density residential housing. No physical record exists of a "fourth door" on the third floor of 41 Hemley Street, and security footage from the date in question is corrupted—repeating ten seconds of hallway footage in a loop.

Marianne dropped out of her program the following month. She has not responded to further contact attempts.

I reviewed the original statement tape today. At timestamp 17:04, there is a faint knocking sound. No one was in the room with her.

I've checked the archive hallway four times this week. Just in case.

Still three doors.

For now.

[Recording Ends]

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the atmosphere and if the Archivist note landed well!
(The first half of the novel is fully available to read for free. I'll drop the Wattpad link in the comments section below so Reddit doesn't butcher the text layout!)

I live in a small town in rural North Texas, and we like telling stories. We've got a bit of an oral tradition, even. Gives you something to do with friends and family that's not drinking, watching football, or listening to talk shows. The internet's still struggling to catch on here. Myself, I only like it for Wikipedia, TV Tropes, Kindle eBooks, and creepypasta: things I'd have gotten hard copies of back in the day, or modern evolutions of oral tradition.

But we like it that way. We like it here. I've been far enough south to attend some Tejas Storytelling Association events, which I enjoyed immensely, and each time returned home with my wanderlust satiated. It's quiet. It's cozy. You can hear the rain on your roof while you're by the fireplace reading a book, and let it play a soothing score for the words, or while you're in bed at night, and let it sing you to sleep.

People talk to you. People listen. You can breathe.

And you can pray.

God, can you pray.

I hope he sends an exorcist. A real one, whatever they're like. I know too much about the internet's crackpot Bible-thumpers to trust myself to ask around there, and this region's home to some of the absolute worst, so not here either. In fact, I have never felt more lost and alone.

So let me tell you a story.

There was a very nice couple who owned a farm not far from where I live. Richard was German-American, and very far from Fredericksburg, where he grew up. His wife Valentina was even further from Laredo, where her parents stayed to take care of her grandparents after they all emigrated from Mexico. She and her two siblings eventually continued north. Her brother picked up a wife, she picked up Richard, her sister got an undergraduate degree, and finally they all settled down here, closer to Oklahoma than to where any of them started.

I put together this outline over the course of many front-porch Arnold Palmers and a few shared lunch breaks. I'm the odd job guy around here, so I have even more than usual occasion to get to know people on top of being single, and sometimes even get to talk to them at their work, as with Richard and Valentina.

And I couldn't help noticing the inexorable trend northward. Why not stay in Laredo with her family? Why not stay in Fredericksburg with his family? Why not stay in Denton with the University of North Texas, where her sister went? You're never much more than an hour's drive from wide open spaces here anyway, not unless you're smack in the middle of Austin, Houston, San Antonio, or Dallas, and get stuck in traffic. You can go almost anywhere to get away from everything else. It is one of many things we Texans love about our state.

So why here? Why north?

Were it as simple, in Valentina's family's case, as "The Land of Opportunity" or "the cartels", I would not have wanted to tell this tale. These good people were actually extremely fond of "The Land of the Sun", and even missed it occasionally. And were it as simple for the others, including Richard, as going with their spouses, there would at least be other witnesses for me to commiserate with.

But ... it was not that simple.

I am calling "it" Strahlender, because I have read too many creepypastas. It is a German name that means, roughly, "The Radiant One". It sounds a little like "slender", and Slenderman's most famous adversary was "Der Ritter", a German knight with bright armor and a bright sword. And German's guttural harshness, at least in an English-speaker's ear, is a further added benefit: this ... creature, demon, monster, whatever it is, is much more violent than the Rake, and only somewhat less inscrutable.

I think the original theatrical poster for The Thing conveys about the right idea: a blinding light shines out of an Arctic researcher's hood as it reaches towards you. Only take away the hood and the researcher. Leave the light and the reaching. Not the hands. Just the reaching.

It was really abuelo and abuela who'd wanted to cross the border when Valentina was about ten years old. Mama and Papa said it was because they'd seen El Sol Velado, "The Veiled Sun". Or thought they had, because a bright light that devours those who consume the Holy Eucharist unworthily could hardly not be a superstition. That was just older Catholics and their weird fancies for you. But what could you do? They were family.

Or rather ... that was what Valentina's parents thought her grandparents thought happened.

Oral tradition ought to be taken seriously. The line between fiction and reality is in truth so thin it almost never matters. Every reality we experience is a kind of fiction related to us through our minds by our bodily senses. Every fiction related to us by a fellow human being reflects their own lived reality.

And it is a curious thing to live among storytellers. The fabulous, the factual, and the more or less embellished coexist splendidly, whether in the living room, at the bar, around the dining table, or on the front porch.

Yet for all the lies floating around, I've found that the oldest tellers tend to have one or two tales they cannot share without an undercurrent of real fear, and usually reticence. There's always something by the time you reach a certain age. Something you really can't explain, or don't even want to, so much that you feel sorry anyone else has to hear about it. And it usually feels personal, even if you can't say why.

Knowing enough about both folklore and Catholicism to suspect a miscommunication, I eventually took the liberty of asking Valentina what her grandparents' exact words had been. Her quiet surprise and uncharacteristic coldness told me I was prying, but still she graciously disclosed:

"They said El Sol Velado comes for those who take living blood."

You'd have to be pretty deeply in denial to misconstrue that as referring to the Holy Eucharist. But if her parents had been, Valentina definitely wasn't.

This told me two things: first, that she was hiding something, about which neither comfort, nor condolences, nor further questions were wanted; and second, that El Sol Velado ("ESV") was one of those stories.

I don't know what came over me or what good I thought would come of it, but I felt inspired to follow up my suspicions with an outrageous social experiment.

I went to the National Shrine Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe on a December 12th, its patronal feast. You might possibly face a bigger crowd if AT&T Stadium ("Jerryworld") ever hosted a Super Bowl (the Cowboys themselves would likely not be playing, but still). It is by far the most important holy day for the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex's stupendous immigrant community, possibly surpassing (I leave it to you to decide whether this surmise indicates the idiosyncrasies of Latin American Catholicism, or my total ignorance thereof) even Christmas and Easter.

I parked in downtown Dallas, just barely close enough to walk. And walk I did. And loitered outside the cathedral in the crush. And talked to anyone that I could find an appropriate pretext for.

And anyone I could engage in more-than-superficial conversation, I eventually asked about El Sol Velado.

As you'd expect, most didn't know what I was talking about, and most were polite, although a few were annoyed when they realized I'd concealed an ulterior motive. Some thought I was asking about a weather condition where the sun shines down through fog, haze, or clouds, and helpfully clarified. One fellow, a kindred spirit, talked about descriptions of dim light and occlusion in poetry, which made sense of others who'd thought I was asking about songs or lyrics. After that he and I had a wonderful time talking about all manner of things literary.

But a handful showed surprise that gave way to naked fear, after which they left, often not bothering with an excuse. Two cases bear special mention.

First, one woman immediately turned to her husband, a few feet away with their children, and hurriedly asked if they could leave right away, not knowing or caring that I could follow their Spanish. They did so, although she at least bade me a warm farewell, albeit with a totally fabricated excuse about her spouse remembering something important.

Second, a complete stranger overheard one of my otherwise-unremarkable attempts, tapped me on the shoulder, decked me flat as soon as I'd turned around, and departed without further ceremony. No words were spoken, and this occurred in full view of a police officer. She asked if I was alright and whether I knew the man. I told her that I was, that I didn't, and that I'd probably earned it by being culturally insensitive so would she please forget about it. As far as I know she did.

I felt my suspicion adequately confirmed: whatever ESV really was, it not only felt real to more than a mere handful of people, but they were scared of it, and didn't want to talk about it.

So, returning home, I did the simple math to determine the year in which Valentina's family had left Mexico, and searched up "el sol velado 1985".

There had been two peculiar deaths in their city that year, both people whose houses burned down with them inside. One was considered a tragic accident, the other a still-unsolved arson. News reports mentioned rumors of connection to some bogeyman, which were universally chalked up to local superstition.

But the usual suspects (Reddit and 4chan) were hotbeds of speculation. The more innocent posts ("Someone I know thinks ESV killed some people back in the 80s. Are they crazy?") got replies which contained nothing new to me, but at least confirmed I was onto something: ESV was supposed to be some kind of vengeful spirit that targeted blood-drinkers. Less innocent posts, suggesting ESV was more than an old wives' tale or that the poster had seen it and had hard evidence for its existence, got shut down by moderators, leaving only the shouting matches and snark in the comments, usually about failure to produce any of the alluded-to evidence, as though readers would always take claims of its existence on faith.

Weird, but still no more than an urban legend. Some people persist in thinking that Bigfoot, Mothman, and the Chupacabra are real, and for all I know they are. But where their existence was supported by now-debunked evidence, ESV's was supported by none at all.

... except the silence of the people I'd actually spoken to, their mute dread of a thing whose name should not be spoken lightly if at all. A mere urban legend could inspire any amount of fear, but it would not inspire silence.

So I steeled myself for a mental sewer dive and headed over to 8chan.

Two points of supposed witness evidence stood out as having been ignored, in their opinion, by the police and media: bright lights, and a humming sound like an electric motor.

No other details agreed, and there were the usual complaints about discussions having been locked or deleted on 4chan and Reddit. Then there were retractions, followed by accusations of selling out, retractions following counter-accusations ... but I took this to be the usual inane devolution of all sufficiently prolonged 8chan discussions.

But still no hard evidence. What's more, "bright lights" and "droning hum" are both fairly common alien abduction tropes, and posts reflected this: 8chan had "better" pet theories to shore up than ESV, so many other incidents got folded into the topic. Finally I gave up, satisfied I'd learned all I could for a time (although I've had a strange urge to bathe more often).

Afterwards I did not dare bring up this subject with Valentina or Richard, since I felt myself driven more by morbid curiosity than neighborliness. Christmas that year passed without event, and this was even when Valentina introduced me to the other three: her twin brother Alejandro, his wife Abigail whom he'd met back in Laredo ...

... and her kid sister Solina, who was my own age, angelic, and somehow still single.

---

We reach the end of events I can recall without enormous distress. Thank God it's Friday. I am going to play video games until the pain in my chest subsides, I can breathe more than once every eight seconds, and my keyboard is not in danger of getting ruined by tears ...

---

... it is Sunday evening. I am going to bathe, shave, and make no further mention of breaks I take from writing unless, God forbid, they directly impact the tale.

---

... right. Solina. Christmas did not pass without event that year. She was the event.

I had not been to church in nearly a decade, but this time Valentina and Richard invited me to join them for midnight Christmas Mass. The local parish was by no means large or remarkably beautiful, but I was told they were welcoming and that there would be a light reception afterwards. I accepted.

It wasn't hard to follow along, and I didn't feel obliged to join in with the responses even though I knew them. I didn't receive Communion or even go up for a blessing, but the homily was at least interesting. It's hard not to have some idea of the true "spirit" or "meaning" of Christmas in our post-Dickens world, but the pastor connected gift-giving with not just neighborliness but a much older idea: sacred hospitality, the notion that the widow, orphan, beggar, and sojourner have rights that can only be guaranteed by those better off than themselves. All such people, he claimed, fell under the heading of "guests", or even Jesus' own "little ones", since they are in so many ways smaller than others. He did not mention immigration as such because that would have been political (and, I now reflect, too narrow for his true theme), but it felt topical to me anyway, perhaps because of my recent adventure at the National Shrine. Whatever the case, I shouldn't have been surprised by warm fuzzies at a Christmas service, yet there I was.

All of which is to say that my senses were not entirely overwhelmed by "love at first sight", but it certainly caught me off-guard. Solina was the cantor for that service, so I got to hear her lovely voice more than the rest of their small choir. But until she was in the lectern for the Psalm, she was no more than a voice. Then she was barely more than a pretty face, until finally Richard dropped her name and muttered something about how much she'd been practicing and how far she'd come.

Suddenly she became a person with a name and a history: close family of close friends, who had walked a very long road north together. This gave me tunnel vision until she finished and rejoined the choir. Until then my mind blocked out everything but her face and her voice, intent on convincing me that she was the most beautiful of all God's creatures, that I'd better find an excuse to talk to her, and that I'd better not make a fool of myself. I told it that finding an excuse to talk to her would be making a fool of myself and that life doesn't need my help sorting certain things out, please and thanks. It found this offensive but politely held its tongue.

Then sure enough, apropos of absolutely nothing, Valentina introduced us at the reception by asking how on Earth I'd kept missing her sister at Tejas Storytelling Association events. Solina and I spent a very pleasant two hours coming to the conclusion that no, really neither of us knew how that had happened, by which point people were leaving and cleaning up and oh it was so nice to meet you I guess I'll see you around ...

Then Richard reminded her that I was the person to talk to about some work she needed done on her house, which kept us going until the pastor kindly asked us to leave the empty building. She asked if I'd walk her home so she could show me what needed doing, and there really wasn't much, but we were still sitting on her front porch merrily chatting away when the sun began to rise.

That gave us some pause. She broke it by observing that she really wanted to keep talking but she'd feel a lot better about it if I'd kiss her and ask her to be my girlfriend first. I did so, she accepted, and that was that. We finally parted ways around lunchtime, strangers to an item in a little under twelve hours.

The next six months were the happiest of my adult life. I have been struggling to cling to them in the aftermath of Strahlender's arrival. This has prevented me from adequately grieving. It is good to set that down in stark frankness, yet to let this memory be so tainted leaves me filled with a mix of impotent rage and lingering dread much more enfeebling than sadness. I would prefer to just be sad. I hope spreading the word, even if it is not believed, will be the first step towards that.

I'd felt strongly about women before. At the time it didn't occur to me to wonder what was different about Solina. We shared many interests along with most of our worldviews, and found each other painfully attractive. But we could both say that about a handful of exes as well. Much as I hate to admit it, I think it came down to two very boring, very unromantic things.

The first is that we were both stable and independent adults, she as a music teacher and I as a handyman, odd-job guy, and occasional writer. I usually had at least one project going at her house at any given time, and she'd pay me for them with her own money, which I'd turn right around and spend on gifts or dates. Once she mentioned feeling bad about making me do so much for her and then getting showered with attention, so I showed her the accounting sheet I'd kept. She turned bright crimson and promised never to bring it up again if I didn't, so we didn't, although she agreed with me that it was definitely good for a laugh that time.

The second is that she roped me into praying the Rosary with her. Not always kneeling in a church or sitting across from each other like good, pious kids either. We usually liked to keep our arms around each other and her head on my chest or shoulder, and prayer was a nice way to not lose my mind from all that contact. Meanwhile, talking even briefly about intentions or meditation topics was a shortcut to hopes, dreams, fears, doubts, heartaches, everything, and at a very manageable pace, too. And me about ten years "lapsed", not sure whether she was losing religion on my account or I was regaining it on hers.

Whatever the case, after six months of this I'd begun asking myself when and how I'd propose to her. Then one day in June began the sequel to my half-buried obsession with El Sol Velado.

It was a Monday afternoon, and as I lay on my back working on pipes in her downstairs bathroom, she came home from work early and started sobbing on the couch in her living room. I kept a pretty loose schedule, so although I was welcome she wasn't exactly expecting me any more than whatever had just happened.

So I finished what I was doing before going to check on her, and by that point she'd calmed down enough to pour herself a glass of wine. Or rather, she was on her second glass after the first had helped her calm down. And she was not a habitual drinker, much less an emotional one, so I was already braced for the worst.

She was surprised, embarrassed, afraid, and relieved to see me. She didn't want to be held. She told me she loved me very much but wouldn't hold it against me if I broke up with her. I asked why she thought I might do that. She told me her family was cursed and if I'd pour her a third glass of wine she'd tell me about it. I told her I didn't think more alcohol was a good idea but I'd do it if she let me hold her while she talked. She laughed, sighed, rolled her eyes, and assented.

Papa had died. Mama had been very distraught about the fact that they'd fought recently and not made up. He went out for a motorcycle ride around midnight and didn't come back.

Fire engines dispatched to smoke plumes about fifty miles outside town the next afternoon. At the epicenter, his charred remains, split clean in two at the waist. In a ditch off the side of the highway halfway back to town, his crashed motorcycle, and the kind of godawful splatter you might get if he'd hit cheese wire at ninety-odd miles an hour. Only then his bike would have been damaged too, and it wasn't.

Therefore, a freak accident with a flatbed trailer and some badly secured cargo, as the police seemed to think, given the alternative was a passing motorist with a ... a broadsword? A polearm? And there you had it. The whole trouble was how obvious that sort of fellow would have been, and how they'd moved the body twenty-five miles, started a brush fire, and departed, mostly in broad daylight, and all without being seen.

But all my own imagination cared about was: fire, bright lights, and a humming sound like an electric motor.

So I went out on a limb and asked Solina if she thought it was El Sol Velado. She'd been doing okay until then, but I might have been more sensitive: shocked to hear that name in the mouth of her own dear gringo, she spit out a mouthful of wine all over her coffee table and proceeded to blurt out the whole sordid history between sobs.

They had a craving for blood, she and her siblings. They were pretty sure it was hereditary and went back at least two generations, but neither parents nor grandparents had ever talked about it. Abuelo y abuela were hyperreligious wackadoos, and mom and dad were both stormy, passionate types with a tendency to get too physical, so there wouldn't have been much reason to listen anyway. But Valentina and Alejandro had been close enough to figure it out for themselves, and believed the previous generations had been coping with the same problem in different ways, or failing to.

They'd lucked out that it hadn't become a problem for them until they were in Laredo and both hitting puberty, a few years after Solina was born, and that they quickly hit on a solution: morcilla or moronga, a blood sausage especially popular around Christmas time. No wonder mama and papa got along better at that time of year. Solina's hermano y hermana didn't tell her until after they'd taken her to Fredericksburg, where blüdwurst could be found in the German cuisine. The move had been Abigail's idea, since she and Alejandro had actually bonded over their shared fondness for that dish and turned out to have the same problem, as had Richard a few years later.

Which of course begged the question of why they'd kept moving if they'd been managing, however barely.

Solina was born two years after the move to Laredo. Her siblings were both twelve years old. Alejandro and Abigail were high school sweethearts who dated through college and got married right after.

They'd hardly gotten back from their honeymoon when one of Abigail's cousins died: run off the road and burned to death in his pickup truck. What did his traumatized wreck of a date tell police after she'd regained enough lucidity to talk, the pain of her own burns kept down by morphine?

That there had been bright lights, and a humming sound like an electric motor.

"El Sol Velado!", abuela had said, and been screamed into a corner by mama for peddling her base superstitions to the bereaved. "It comes for those who take living blood", she had continued, repeating the warning of more than a decade previous, then adding, wary but unfazed, "Be careful of your friends, it does not care if the innocent stands too close to the guilty", and mama had thrown her out to live in a motel with abuelo for a month for speaking ill of the dead.

Everyone else except the "kids", two of whom were now grown (three if you counted the new inlaw), chalked the survivor's testimony up to the cocaine she'd been on along with the deceased. But Alejandro and Valentina were the opposite of sure about that, and shared their concern with Abigail, who promptly made arrangements for the three of them to go to Fredericksburg, where she was originally from. Then, with no confidence in their ability to discuss the real problem but with compelling excuses about their careers and Solina's social life, her older siblings determined to convince their parents to send her with them.

This was hard, because it meant staying to care for their aging elders unaided. But Valentina had the bright idea of throwing them under the bus, asking her mother if she really wanted Solina to come of age in the shadow of superstitions that had already caused so much trouble. And ironically, that did the trick (serendipitously, it also meant they missed the wave of violence following the formation of Los Zetas by the Gulf Cartel, while their forebears did not).

At this point I interrupted to ask what evidence there was for El Sol Velado's motives. Had any of its known victims consumed blood? Solina told me that she'd never known for sure, but the risk was serious enough to be worth avoiding, especially since they'd known some fellow immigrants to "joke" about being vampires, and some of Abigail's acquaintances about being werewolves. In such company the probability of collateral damage from El Sol Velado seemed high, whatever you thought of the local average sanity level.

But yes, and this was particularly hard for her, mama had mentioned that papa had bitten her and drawn blood during their fight. He'd never done so before, and it hadn't sounded too bad, but mama had otherwise glossed over it because their arguments were so physical anyway.

Yes, physical. Not violent, not abusive: physical. That was how Alejandro and Valentina had described them to me in our earlier conversations, and even Solina spoke of them that way. They didn't often leave marks on each other, and involved the children even less. The kids had gone on to decide they didn't want that in their relationships, and so far had avoided it. But as for mama and papa, that was just how they were. And yeah, it was probably wrong, but could you tell them that?

... not any more, you couldn't. Not papa, at least.

Solina was ten years old when they arrived in Fredericksburg, old enough to understand the fear and the arguments but still in the dark as to her siblings' benevolent conspiracy. She enjoyed school, made friends, and had as good as two sets of parents once Richard came along. His and Valentina's courtship had been brief, almost perfunctory, but their love had been real and had lasted. Valentina got an associate's degree. They wanted for nothing. Life was good.

Then Solina got her first cravings, not too long after hitting puberty, and her sister noticed the signs. Solina wasn't convinced until she noticed the unusually pleasant effect that locally-made blüdwurst had on her, and was grateful she'd agreed to try it.

Learning to cope was a team effort, and she did well. It grated on the others that the Holy Eucharist seemed to work better than anything else for her, which meant near-daily Mass attendance and some extremely unpleasant reminiscences of their zealous grandparents. But care for Solina won out, and it got easier once they figured out how to take turns chauffeuring her from school and back in the middle of their work days.

And life was not just good, life was better, because they'd faced something dark and awful together and come out closer and wiser on the other side.

Eventually Solina turned fourteen. She was getting ready to start high school. Everyone was excited.

Then one night, which had been noisier than usual with emergency sirens, Richard called Abigail, who backed him up when they talked to Alejandro and Valentina, who were frustrated and heartbroken but supportive: everyone would have to leave again.

Richard explained that he had not heard of El Sol Velado before meeting his wife, but it felt uncannily like something he had heard of: Der Blutmond, "The Blood Moon", a peculiar urban legend about the lunar eclipse which worked out similarly to "The Veiled Sun".

More than two generations ago there had been a family of cannibals. Their homestead was fairly remote from Fredericksburg, but they were connected to a series of disappearances from there. The law arrived to apprehend them and found the whole property ablaze and the owners' dismembered corpses in the cold storage, scattered among the remains of the victims. They assumed an outraged local had taken the law into their own hands, and it was just as well they lacked the evidence to pursue them, because they lacked the motivation.

A blood moon had been out that night. Mere window dressing on a gruesome case, except that families wanted closure, and following up on the victims' stories for them revealed an extremely unsettling pattern of full moons. Not all on exact nights, but never more than three days before or after. And with fourteen confirmed "vanishments" spread out over several decades, this was too much to be chalked up to coincidence: these man-eaters had either been werewolves, or thought they were.

This morbid local trivium was kept out of the press. In theory the police wanted to keep Der Blutmond's file open, which meant keeping investigative follow-up out of the public eye. But there was also the tricky business of giving attention to a vigilante that many, including some cops, saw as a hero. Journalists in turn found themselves unequal to walking this fine line, especially given the blatantly fantastic circumstance of the full moons. There had been no formal gag order that Richard knew of. None had been needed.

Some years later a woman was found with an arm amputated at the elbow, staked through the heart to the ground with a fencepost uprooted from nearby, her wirecutters left daintily on her chest as if in accusation. None of the livestock were harmed or had gotten away, and she had no criminal history. But she'd died on the night of a full moon, nay, a blood moon.

Therefore?

Must have been infected with the ways of those old cannibals, and been dispatched by Der Blutmonde for her trespass. This vile rumor, Richard confessed, had gained the force of legend from fear, and the case left untouched despite obvious foul play.

Tonight was, he shuddered to point out, a blood moon. He had been working late in the family butcher shop, and heard a loud humming sound like an electric motor, unlike any of their machinery, and growing louder as though approaching. He'd run toward it to investigate, through several rooms to the other side of the building.

At its loudest he had to forage a spare key to their long-term storage, locked from inside: the sound came from inside, and a bright, steady white light poured out from under the door. By the time he got the door open the light had faded and the sound was receding. Within he found his sister bleeding out on the floor from a single diagonal cut down her torso, too deep for a knife and too clean for claws. He immediately called 911 and did everything he could, but she soon lost consciousness, and died in the ambulance.

Her last words to him before slipping away, spoken with great effort and a tone of desperate urgency?

"Der licht ... der brummen ... der ritter, DER RITTER!"

The light, the hum, the knight, the knight. She saw her attacker, and thought it looked like a knight.

Friends, partake briefly of the ludicrous mental image from which, hearing this development in Solina's account, I could no longer escape:

There is a centuries-old monster hunter, not unlike Slenderman's foe, who went up against the greats of history and prevailed, only to be worn down by time and bloodshed until nothing remained but a vengeful specter, totally bereft of humanity. It stalks the Earth, eternally crusading against what it identifies as the forces of evil and darkness, but no longer driven by anything save passionate, pitch-black hatred of "sin". If vampires and werewolves are real, and if their true nature is as often hidden from themselves as from others, and if they are ultimately people just struggling to get along like you and me, then it is their most pitilessly unrelenting persecutor.

I will henceforth refer to "The Shining Knight" as Strahlender for simplicity. You know now why I call it that. There only remains to finish telling what it did to us.

Richard feared his sister's death would be attributed to Der Blutmond, and that the resulting notoriety would spell the end of their peaceful life in Fredericksburg. The others agreed the danger sufficient to uproot again. Depressingly, Richard's future communications with former acquaintances proved him correct.

Whence Solina began high school in Dallas ...

... and finished it in Fort Worth after Strahlender took a favorite teacher. Then around the time Solina graduated, Strahlender took several refugees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. They agreed they couldn't run forever, but Solina wanted to study music education at the University of North Texas anyway, and north they went again.

Strahlender made no further appearances after that move, or if it did, they didn't catch wind of them. But Denton County is a core production area of the Barnett Shale, and their house was close to a compressor station. Read: floodlights on the horizon, and 24/7 low-frequency industrial droning. Soundproofing and blackout curtains solved those problems, but it was not fun to drive past at night.

At night, it felt like Strahlender watched them from down the road, confidently concealing itself in the activity rather than feeling threatened by it.

But another move north, to the middle of nowhere, solved that problem in turn. And for six years they enjoyed unsullied peace and contentment for the first time since Fredericksburg. Solina even found me.

Did papa's death mean it was all over again? That Strahlender had returned? Would mama be safe? Would anyone? They'd need to have another emergency meeting, and had scheduled it for tomorrow.

It was getting late by the time Solina finished bringing me up to speed. I offered to take her out to dinner. She accepted, but we hardly spoke. Taking her home, I asked to continue our conversation since I'd had some time to think. She accepted.

I shared the account of my adventure to the National Shrine in Dallas, and the independent research I'd done afterwards.

I shared my conviction that Strahlender only reliably came for blood-drinkers and flesh-eaters, and that its mercuriality otherwise was not far beyond that of cancer, road accidents, or any other violent criminal.

I shared my deep admiration for how she and her family had borne up under its assaults, and how privileged I felt to count them as friends.

I shared my willingness to stay faithful to her, whatever they needed to do next, and even to follow them if they moved again, if they would have me.

She was struck silent. By the light of the one lamp we'd turned on, her face was a battlefield between horror, relief, disgust, and gratitude.

This awkward pause extended until I felt moved to propose to her. Shocked and at first disbelieving, she accepted.

It was not ideal, but it was romantic enough in its way. When the time for the meeting came, and Solina asked me to join as her fiance, we unanimously decided to stay: the others, more than a decade older, had already developed the sense of resignation that Solina only just arrived at. And they approved our match, as did mama, abuelo, and abuela when I met them at papa's funeral in Laredo.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving ...

The shadow of Strahlender hangs over us but is not as black as when papa had just died. Marriage preparation is going splendidly. I've begun joining Solina for Mass every now and then, and she's becoming more and more affectionate in public, which makes me feel like some kind of superhero. We are recovering the joy the proposal lacked.

I walk her home. It's snowing unseasonably early. Our hands and lips are chapped. We step inside, and she's so passionate I start to wonder if she'll invite me to bed, which her religion would frown on but I wouldn't refuse.

Until she breaks our kiss suddenly with a hurt and terrified look, runs upstairs, and locks her bedroom door behind her. I wait, stunned, for about five minutes, then realize that my chapped lips have opened and are bleeding.

I get a text from her saying she loves me and it's been wonderful but she has to leave and never come back. I text her back "blood?" and receive no reply. I wait downstairs for about half an hour, desperately hoping she'll change her mind or that I'll think of something, before deciding that nothing I can do will influence what Strahlender does. I text the others a brief description of what's happened, but do not receive any replies.

I go home and lay awake until emergency sirens jolt me out of bed. I call Valentina to ask if she's heard from Solina. No answer. I try Richard, Alejandro, and Abigail. No answer. Finally, I try Solina herself.

She is in her car, driving and sobbing. Barely audible in the background, but getting louder, is a humming sound like an electric motor.

"It's behind me." she manages to say, "I'm so, so sorry ... "

A collision, screeching tires, and her screams as she is run off the road. She pants with terror as her car comes to a stop. The hum continues. There are squelching, crunching footsteps in the dirty snow. They have a subtle but distinctly metallic clink to them.

"I love you. Really, I do." are her last words.

"I love you t-" I am cut off by breaking glass and her screams as Strahlender reaches through the window, grabs her, and yanks her out through it. She is flung onto the ground but does not beg for mercy or even pray. She cries out weakly as she is stabbed, and falls silent as she dies.

I hear Strahlender pick up the phone. It pauses. The hum continues. Then footsteps in snow. Footsteps on asphalt. It drops the phone onto the road and crushes it under its boot. The call ends.

In a daze, I walk out into the night in my pajamas towards the sirens, which still blare. Her siblings' houses are both burning down.

I stay out long enough to introduce myself to the first responders as a close family friend.

I stay out until it is clear there are no survivors.

... that was two weeks ago. The police helped me call down to Laredo to break the news, which went as wretchedly as you'd expect. Since then I have been left alone with my thoughts. It did not take long to decide to write up this account: there is nothing I can do about Strahlender except warn others.

And there you have it. "They all died. The end."

Part of me wonders how Strahlender would judge me, as close as I was to

---

I was drawn away by a bright white light through my window and the humming of an electric motor pulling into my driveway. It seems I shall indeed find out what Strahlender thinks of me.

It opens the front door effortlessly and without force. Footsteps in the hallway. My own door op

---

My computer says I last modified this draft yesterday. I do not remember working on it, nor any of the people or events it describes. I have no way to know if I was carried away by madness or inspiration, or if I suffer some kind of amnesia. The outcomes would be the same, and (down this road lies madness, but ... ) Strahlender somehow wiping minds, erasing evidence, and discrediting witnesses would do much to explain its supposed elusiveness.

But there is really no use speculating.

I feel an awful emptiness. Everyone around me has become a stranger, the more so the better I knew them. I no longer have any plans for the future, nor hopes, nor interests. I am going to complete this draft and post it anyway so that I can delete it from my computer and leave whatever it represents behind with everything else, because this place does not feel like home any more. In fact, for me it has gone so far to hell ...

... yes, I think I shall go to Mexico.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

---

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

---

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