r/TalesFromTheCreeps

I hope this is the right flair, I want to create a thread of tropes people don't like (feel free to also comment alternatives to the ones you don't like). For example, one of my biggest pet peeves: "this isn't some horror movie, this is real life!" Or comparing tropes to "real life" inside a story.

*Edit: for writers, this isn't to say "never do anything mentioned in the comments", it's just to give insight on tropes that we're tired of seeing/hearing in the bulk of stories. Most tropes CAN be done well, it's usually either A.) seeing them in every story or B.) filling your story with trope after trope that turns people off from finishing your story.

TLDR: live to read + review stories right now

Hello! If anyone wants to hear their story read by fresh eyes for a friendly critique and a live reaction, let me know the name of it, how many parts you want read if it's a multi-parter, and/or any specific areas to focus feedback in in reply to this post! I think that hearing someone else read your writing out loud can help you better gauge if your story is getting the pacing and reactions you intended.

I'm currently streaming on Twitch to cover any stories commented below; the VOD will be around afterwards if you miss the recitation of your story and I'll leave the link to it on this post if I'm able to when the stream is done.

The total number of stories I can read today will depend on when my voice gives / how long they are. I'm aiming for at least four hours tonight, on the weekend if there's more I didn't get to I can do a longer stream then.

I'll be reading from my own story on this sub "I Heard the Midnight Song" until there's a comment with a story to read here; I don't wanna grab someone's work for something like this without permission. If you have the chance to give me some of my own feedback on my story I would be so, so grateful- I'm delaying positing the second half of it until tomorrow to try and get my bearings in this community a bit more first.

I'm super excited to read some stories!

This is my first time trying something like this so we'll see how it goes but I like reading and there's a lot here to be read :)

(Based off of something that actually happened to me a few weeks back.)

It was a half decent day, nothing too crazy, just the same old bullshit. I work nights at a machine shop, so it was rather late when I got home, sometime around 3-3:15 in the morning. I had just gotten out of my car, grabbing my backpack and lunchbox, ready to go sleep in my nice comfy bed with my fiancé when I heard a noise. I turned around, expecting to see one of the stray cats that permeate our neighborhood, when I saw a man briskly walking backwards up the center of our street.

I froze, my entire body paralyzed as I watched him walk, never once turning his head. He had a striking resemblance to my father, wearing similar clothes and even having similar facial hair. It obviously wasn’t my father, my parents lived over thirty minutes away, but still, it took me by surprise at first. He never even looked at me as he continued to walk, his shoes barely making any noise aside from the occasional scuff, the sound that made me turn around initially. I stood there next to my car, unable to move, watching as he quickly made his way up the street. I finally moved, quickly striding over to the steps to my porch, taking them two at a time, and unlocking my door with shaky hands.

I practically slammed it shut as I locked it, rushing upstairs to make sure my fiancé was okay. She was, sleeping soundly in our bed, and as I came in, she turned towards me sleepily like normal to see how I was doing. I must have looked a little panicked, as she woke up more when she saw me. “Andrew? You ok?” I ran over to the bedroom window, having a clear view of the street, but the man was gone. “What the fuck?” I muttered, before turning to my fiancé, Kayla.

“Either I need sleep, or the crackheads around here are evolving. I just saw some dude walking backwards up the middle of our street.” “What?” I shook my head, hardly believing it myself, even though it had happened right in front of me. “I don’t know, I’m gonna go take another look around, check the door camera, and make sure the doors are locked. I’ll be back in a sec.” I quickly moved back to the downstairs, stepping back out onto my front lawn and looking both ways down the street, straining my eyes.

He was gone.

5 minutes later I was back upstairs, getting my pajamas on. “I don’t understand it, Bug, not even the doorbell camera picked up anything. It’s like he didn’t even exist.” Kayla cuddled up as I laid down, staring at the ceiling. “Well, we’ll see if anyone else has seen him tomorrow, ok?” “Alright. Goodnight, Bug.” I turned off the light and turned on my white noise, quickly finding sleep.

There were no posts, messages, or even passing mentions or remarks about the man the next day. It was as if I was the only one who had seen him. Kayla assured me that it was probably someone who wasn’t entirely there in the head, or that maybe I was tired from being on the night shift. I would’ve believed her, if I hadn’t come home that night and seen him again. I saw him every single day for the next two weeks. Same outfit, same time, same everything. I tried to call out to him more than a few times, but was met with silence every time. The one time I managed to get close to him solidified the fact that something was very wrong with his eyes, the entirety of both eyeballs replaced with what looked like a carnival mirror. And somehow I still had zero evidence of his existence, my family and friends now believing I was making it all up.

Then, after exactly 2 weeks, he didn’t walk down the street. I had gotten out of my car and turned, expecting to see my nightly visage, and was greeted by an empty street. Confused, I walked inside, staying up a lot later than I should have, watching out our front window, but he never came. I went to bed, a smile on my face, happy that I wouldn’t have to see that freak any longer.

The next day, I walked out to get the mail, opened the mailbox and stopped. Something wasn’t right. It took me a few minutes to realize what was wrong. The way our front walk is set up is a small fence to grow ivy and flowers on, with the mailbox on a post directly next to it. The mailbox was now attached to the fence, the post completely gone. I hurried back inside and asked Kayla if her parents were over last night and moved the mailbox. “No? Why the hell would they do that?” “I don’t know, but the mailbox moved.” “What?” She leaned over the couch, looking out at our mailbox for a minute, before sighing and sitting back down. “If this is a joke, Andrew, I don’t think it’s funny.” “What do you mean?” I said, tilting my head slightly. “It didn’t move, it’s right where it’s always been.”

Over the next week, more stuff around the house would begin to shift, starting with the less bothersome such as the concrete pad for the trash cans moving over about a foot, to all out pandemonium, such as the ceiling in my home office curling upwards into the attic, the paint and wood cracked and splintered. It had started spreading beyond our house at this point, the sidewalk zigzagging crazily into the grass, the street lights bent over and pressed against the road, powerlines somehow floating disassembled, electricity violently arcing between the loose wires. The worst part was again that it seemed I was the only one who could see it happening. I was frustrated and scared, and that’s what I believe set the argument off.

“How can you not see this, Kayla?? It’s getting worse by the day, the whole damn roof is diagonal, including the tiles and even the fucking chimney!!” She looked worried. I don’t know if she was more worried about my sanity or herself. “Andrew, nothing has changed! I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you need to try to relax, maybe call off work for tonight or-“ “I don’t need to call off work, I need to know that I’m not going fucking insane!! Ever since backwards dude vanished, it feels like the entire world is breaking! Nothing is lining up how it should!” I was practically screaming at her. I still feel bad about that. I hated myself for yelling.

I had stepped out onto my porch, leaving Kayla inside as I was struggling to maintain my composure when I saw a pair of eyes looking out at me through a crack in the floorboards of the porch, carnival mirror eyes. I froze and watched as two hands came up from separate cracks, over twenty feet apart from each other, and started pulling away floorboards and siding. I screamed, turning to run back into the house as I felt something grab my shoe, yanking me hard, the sound of splintering wood as it dragged me under the porch, under my house, under the great splintering world that only I could see, a pair of massive carnival mirror eyes staring into mine, my reflection my own mouldering corpse as I screamed and screamed and was shaken awake by Kayla, her voice cutting through. “Andrew?? Andrew what’s wrong??”

I sat up, covered in sweat and looked around our bedroom. Our completely intact, normal bedroom. I collapsed back down onto the bed, panting. “Nightmare… sorry Bug, I’m okay now.” She did not look convinced but laid back down, the sound of her breathing slowing as she drifted off back to sleep, the memory of the dream already leaving, not far behind the love of my life as dreamless sleep found me and pulled me in close.

The next day I woke up to a sunny room and birdsong. I got dressed, packed my lunch, kissed my fiancé, and went to work like normal. My lathe that I run had a few issues but nothing I couldn’t handle. It was a half decent day, nothing too crazy, just the same old bullshit. I work nights at a machine shop, so it was rather late when I got home, sometime around 3-3:15 in the morning. I had just gotten out of my car, grabbing my backpack and lunchbox, ready to go sleep in my nice comfy bed with my fiancé when I heard a noise. I turned around, expecting to see one of the stray cats that permeate our neighborhood, when I saw a man briskly walking backwards up the center of our street.

When the air is this thick, it puts people on edge. Add coastal fog, the glow of gas lamps, and the silhouettes of Spanish moss hanging from the trees, and you barely even needed the ghost story. Savannah itself felt like it was waiting for ghouls to step out into the night. 

"Now, folks," I dropped my voice into a theatrical hush, letting my Appalachian drawl slip out. "The history books will tell you that Major General Nathaniel Greene is buried right here under this obelisk. But what they don't print in the brochures is that when they moved his remains in 1901, the casket was empty." 

An older woman let out a gasp. No doubt, she was playing it up for her kids. There were about fifteen in the group tonight—mostly middle-aged couples, a college kid trying to impress his date, and a mother with kids who were probably too young for the tour. 

"The truth is," I continued, "the General's remains were stolen. Leaving his soul damned to this earthly plane. Now, if you stand completely still on a night like this, when the fog rolls in off the river, you can often hear the General's boots pacing the cobblestones... looking for his body." 

A woman in the back let out a nervous, high-pitched giggle. A passing car a block away provided a low, rumbling bass that felt cinematic. 

It was a complete and utter lie. General Greene’s remains were exactly where they were supposed to be, and I had made up his damned wandering on the spot. I didn't believe in ghosts, unfinished business, or phantom footsteps. To me, this was a job. The supernatural was nothing more than a commodity—a way to pay for overpriced charcoal pencils, canvases, and the rent on my studio apartment. 

I clicked my flashlight on, flashing a bright, reassuring smile. "Alright, let's keep moving. Keep your cameras ready, in case you get lucky and feel a cold spot." 

As the group shuffled forward toward the next square, I let out a long, silent exhale and fell to the back of the pack. 

"Sumimasen," an older man said. "I was deployed in Nippon in the war." He and his wife looked very proud of their understanding of Japanese. 

I wiped a bead of sweat from my forehead, brushing a stray lock of dark, heavy hair out of my eyes. 

"I exclusively speak English, actually. Also, I'm Korean... and white." 

The old couple looked horrified. I expected the usual "oh sorry," but they simply nodded their heads and turned away. It was true, I was an anomaly in Savannah. I had my dad's sharp, monolid eyes and dark features, but I sounded like I grew up catching crawdads in a holler. It was a mix that usually left ignorant people squinting at me in confusion. After eighteen years of this rigmarole, I was entirely used to it and, at the time, I was too exhausted to care. 

Art school was fun but exhausting. Especially trying my hardest to avoid ending up as an art teacher or a professional barista when it was all over. It wasn't made any easier by the other inheritance from my mother’s side. My mother called it mountain magic. It was an old, deep-rooted superstition, passed down through her family. The way she explained it, women from Appalachia were often a little more "tuned in" to the frequency of the universe. 

It didn't mean I saw dead people; like I said, ghosts were just good for tips. My "mountain magic" was far more bizarre, and far more intrusive. 

When a "vision" or an "episode" hit me, it didn't come with a visual hallucination or a whisper from beyond the grave. It came as a tidal wave of overpowering emotion. I could be standing in the grocery store aisle, looking at a box of cereal, and suddenly be crushed by an intense, suffocating grief. Or I'd be sitting in my color theory class and become entirely enraptured by a hyper-specific concept—like an overwhelming, obsessive intuition about the number forty-two. You know how Southern folk can feel the rain coming? It was like that, cranked up to eleven. 

For most of my childhood, the episodes were basically nonexistent. A slight hunch here, a weird bout of sadness there. It didn't really start until I was about fifteen. My mother always said it was the land that was important—the longer you spent in an area, the stronger it got. She fully believed if you moved to New York, you'd lose the sight completely in a few years. It wasn't until recently, when I moved down here to Savannah, that things had changed for me. 

It was as if the "magic" had mutated. It had gotten sharper. Heavier. Lately, the emotions weren't just sad or happy. They were primal. Animalistic. 

"Alex?" 

I blinked, pulling myself out of my own head. We had reached Calhoun Square. A man in a pastel polo shirt was waving a hand at me. 

"Is this the one with the hanging tree?" Bob asked, pointing his phone camera at a massive, sprawling oak in the center of the square. 

"You know your history," I said, slipping back into character. I stepped to the front of the group, aiming my flashlight up into the dense, twisting branches of the oak. The moss hung down like a shredded shroud. "They say this square is haunted because the city paved right over an unmarked grave. If you look closely at the roots—" 

I stopped. My voice hitched in my throat. It was happening. 

It started at the base of my skull—a low, rhythmic thrumming, like the beating of a massive heart. The muggy air seemed to thicken, and the ambient noise of the city—the distant traffic, the chirping insects, the murmurs of my tour group—all faded into a muffled hum. 

Then came the emotion. It slammed into me with the force of a freight train. It was a paralyzing wave of fury. My teeth ground together so hard my jaw ached. I felt a sudden, desperate urge to drop to the cobblestones on all fours, bare my teeth, and scream. I stumbled backward, dropping the flashlight. 

"Woah, you okay there?" Pastel shirt guy asked, taking a half-step forward. 

DANGER. 

The intuition spiked. I didn't just feel angry anymore; I felt impossibly large. For a split second, gazing up into the canopy of the oak, I felt ancient. I felt a sense of scale and wonder that was terrifying. I couldn't breathe. The raw panic vibrating through my chest was so intense tears were streaming down my face. I was pulsing at a frequency my body couldn't handle. 

"Miss? Alex?" A woman gently touched my shoulder. 

The contact broke the circuit. 

The pressure in my head vanished with an inaudible pop. The roar of city traffic rushed back into my ears. The oppressive fury drained out of me, leaving my knees weak and my hands trembling. 

"I..." I swallowed hard, wiping the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand, trying to mask the shaking in my voice. "I'm sorry. I just... I felt a cold spot." 

The tour group stared at me, their eyes wide with genuine fear. For the first time all night, I didn't have to act. 

I picked up the flashlight. My sight had never hit me like that before. It had never felt so physical, so close, or so... massive. As I forced a smile and led the group quickly out of the square, I couldn't shake the intuition that whatever was out there in the dark, whatever had just flooded my mind with that terrifying rage... it knew who I was. 

We were not even over the state line before I pulled out the jar, mischievous grin on my face like I was holding something sacred. I passed the jar over to my friend Jake in the backseat.

"Roll us up a fattie man, time to relax and feel the road." Sarah just rolled her eyes at us, after what she's been through, she prefers the clear headedness of sobriety, but hey she lets us have our fun.

"you got it shortyshizz" He laughed taking the jar and rolling one up. I felt his nickname was a little cringe, but I let him use it, I've covered his ass on second base enough times by now, were basically conjoined twins on the diamond. "Dude this shit is STANKY, what strain is this?" He asked licking the paper shut.

"What we have here, my good sir, is some fancy....Roadkill Skunk." I reply as he sparks it.

"Fitting." He says taking in the smoke and passing it over the seat to me. I let the sweet pungent smoke fill my lungs and then slow creeping goofyness come into my brain.

"Sure smells like a dead skunk!" Sarah complained holding her nose and swishing a bag of chips around trying to clear the smoke. We all started giggling at that and my mind wandered back to our younger years.

Jake and I may as well have been brothers, and our families joined into one, because that's how we were. My dad is best friends with his dad so they got their homes right next to each others, and my dad made sure I was on his best friends little league team. Makes sense, Jake's dad, Mark, was the best mechanic and the best baseball coach I've ever worked with or played for, well maybe next to our high school coach but that's not important. What was important was the pride I felt, for myself and Jake, earning our bachelor's degree basically on baseball talent alone. So I have a large amount of respect for his dad, hell Mark had even fixed up and sold me the Buick we were using for this post grad trip.

"Hey eyes on the road dopey, you missed our turn off" Sarah poked my arm. I sighed, took another ouff, and since we were the only people on this road today I guess, flipped around and took our proper turn off onto a gravel, two lane sized, small road.

"Yo this is intense stuff Scott, I'm getting mad munchies already." Jake chimed in. Sarah sighing in an over emphasized big sister manner, tossed him a bag of chips and some jerky. She always made sure she took care of us, our big sis.

"You know Jake, you'd think we're married with how much I have to take care of you out and about like this, honestly, if it wasn't for me and Scott you'd be a lost little puppy out here in the real world."

"True, but I bet I'd be a hella sweet one Sarah, you'd scratch my ears right?" He replied taking the snacks. She giggled and lightly grasped his hand as he took the junk food.

"Always, until you fell asleep in my lap. Then I'd boot you right off to go make sweet sweet love to Zach." We all burst out laughing again. No crazy love triangle ever existed within our group. We were two brother and a sister.

As I took another hit I pressed down on the accelerator, I wanted to test the new engine build. As we were hitting a high speed, I felt a small shock under my feet and the car gave a slight shudder.

"Scott, maybe three days into a multi state road trip in the summer isn't the best time to test your rally skills." Sarah said, always the voice of reason. I slowed down shooting Jake a wink in the rearview. He just chuckled and nodded, that knowing nod he always gave me when we knew we were making a double play. The same thing happened as I slowed down, but I decided I'd keep going, we were feeling invincible and I didn't want to let car problems ruin the mood.

The universe however, cared nothing for our mood as the car made a bigger shudder, jolting us in our seats and instantly died, sputtering white-hot steam as it overheating.

I slammed my hands on the wheel in frustration. "What gives Jake, I thought you told me Mark spent three weeks rebuilding this engine?" Jake instantly clenched his jaw and barked back at me.

"Are you questioning my dad's work? Scott you and I both know he would never sell a lemon, let alone let his best shortstop and second baseman drive anything unsafe, how dare you man." He growled, I instantly felt ashamed, I knew his family would never set us up to fail, I was just pissed that our perfect summer was beginning to sour.

"Calm down you two for fucks sake!" Sarah broke in. "Scott, you've been driving like you're trying to get a NASCAR sponsorship this whole time, and we have already driven through two states. This is a rebuild, and it's fucking hotter than a witch's titty out here, it would stand to reason that something like the thermostat would get stuck with your lead foot....no offense but you DO drive like you're in a race....no it's not Mark's fault either Jake, this is normal for a car of this age and use." She instantly cooled the air with her calm explanation.

"Well guess that's fair, thanks Sarah Scott and I would be lost without you." Jake said giving her shoulder an affectionate tap. "Well better assess the damage." Jake said opening his car door.

"I've got just enough battery and one bar of service, I'll see if there's a mechanic that can find us." Sarah said stepping out. I joined Jake and flipped open the hood. After the steam cleared and we took a look at everything, Sarah's explanation was correct, a stuck thermostat. Nothing more than a minor setback in our journey....provided we could get a mechanic and a tow.

As we finished our diagnosis, Sarah began jumping excitedly, proudly waving her phone in the air.

"Found one! And not only can he give us a tow, he's less than twenty minutes away! I'd have never found him if it wasn't for the offline map pin on his shop. He was super nice, and he's on his way, so you boys just cool off and let Sarah handle this." She skipped back to us, and I was re-lighting our joint.

"Well shit man, looks like we'll be back on the road before the cooler warms up, Sarah never fails." Jake said as I passed him the doobie, nodding. As we waited and finished our wacky tobaccy, I let my mind think of her. She had it harder than either of us.

Her parents were killed in a brutal car accident freshman year, her aunt and uncle were left to pick up the pieces, and Sarah, she changed. Before that she was just the girl in our group, the slight tomboy who wanted to be one of the guys. After she moved in with her aunt and uncle, she switched gears. She made sure we always told her where we were going, when we were leaving and getting back, and who we were with. I guess she decided that she would never allow herself to lose anyone again, and Jake and I, we loved her even more for the fierce yet quiet ways she protected the sanctity of our little ring.

As we were burning the last hit and stepping on the crutch, a grey unassuming tow truck came driving up to us. There were no letterings or decals, just some rust in a few places that let me know this guy rarely has to use this vehicle. An older man, going bald on top in grey coveralls that seemed two layers too thick, hopped out and greeted us.

"Hey kids, names Frank, Frank Johnson. Little lady on the phone told me you need a tow for a possible coolant issue? Well you're lucky you had signal, takes a miracle to find my services in a pinch....guess that's what I get for operating out where the secrets stay secret and the rumors never spread."

I thought that a bit unsettling but chalked it up to just an eccentric old country bumpkin who was just happy to have a paying customer.

"why don't you kids climb into the cab and get situated? I'll have this old Buick hooked up shortly so just try and squeeze in best you can." We complied quietly, what choice did we have? I slipped in first, being the middle sized between us it just made sense. Sarah crept into the cab next, with Jake ending the awkward setup closing the door practically on himself. By the time we were buckled in, Frank had finished his work and squeezed his rigid form next to mine. His shoulder rubbed up on me with enough force that I felt....not a normal shoulder, it felt solid and hardened like steel or iron ...again I just shook that aside as some necessary medical procedure for a man with a lifetime spent working on machines far stronger then a human arm.

As we drove a minute, my shifting constantly against Frank's uncharacteristically rigid form, he quipped in with some strange bumpkin banter. He kept telling us things like: "It's lucky your phone had that last bar, no one finds my shop unless they need to find it," and "These trees seem to be getting thicker? These trees know which key needs to turn to get the engine back on the road."

It was cryptic for sure, but fuck it, I was just happy to know our little hiccup was just that....things changed when we arrived at the shop.

We pulled into the yard slowly, slow enough for us to see the twisted forms of cars long past their prime.

"Damn dude, it's like an iron graveyard out there." Jake whispered.

"Everything's been disassembled and ordered as needed, I'll find what makes the keys turn." Frank answered. The tone of his voice—flat, emotionless—sent us all into immediate panic, but we were stuck. We needed him to get us out of this predicament, so we stayed silent as we stepped out into the yard and shambled into the already open bay doors of the shop. A detail I'd wished I'd noticed right then.

We slowly split up exploring the shop as Frank set about getting the Buick set up in the workbay.

"You kids just make yourself at home, old Frankie will get these keys turning again rest assured!" The strange man spoke up, giving our tense group a little bit of ease. I began to explore the shop. It was just your normal single man show, grease rags tossed to a corner, tools strangely in immaculate order....and then my eyes caught sight of the keys...

In one corner, there was a pile of just....keys, all those old to modern fobs...just lying there. I looked up to the pegboard above, there were no current work orders posted...then, why all the keys? Jake poked my arm, and Sarah let out a worried gasp.

"Dude....what the fuck? I know shops, I know what racks hold what....what the fuck are these for?" Jake asked, strikingly sober. My attention turned to the wall on my left. It held cables, hydraulic lifts, and locks that looked....more for a person than anything coming out of the inside of a car.

"You sure don't get many folks getting stranded like this, do ya?" I nervously ask Frank, desperately holding on to hope that I'd get a normal, grounded answer. Again the universe said fuck that.

"Only those I need to, I'll find the ignition that fits the key..."

"Ok, no, fuck this. I'll get us a fucking Uber or something, I'm NOT staying here with this guy and his goddamn keys!" Jake started toward the door, but they quickly slid closed."Fuck you old key master!" Jake yelled, his anger was always his worst friend.Calmly, I looked to Sarah. She was white as a ghost and petrified in stillness. She had already checked. 

She whispered with a quiver,"It's locked from the outside....we're trapped guys."

"FUCK ALL OF THIS!" Jake and I screamed in unison, our baseball instincts taking over. We turned ready to fight, we never got the chance. Frank met our faces with a huge tire iron, knocking both of us out clean.

I woke to my head pounding, a small trickle of blood leaking down my face. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, I realized I was strapped to one of those racks. Then I heard the screams.

Jake was screaming in both pain and fierce anger. I was instantly doing the same when I saw him. He had so much blood....he was strapped up like me, and cut open like he was having heart surgery, various wires hooked up into his body, and his legs were held in massive clamps, bending his legs at an impossible angle. What did Frank do? I had no time to process my best friend's situation however, as Sarah's cries snapped me back to the reality on my other side.

I looked back at Jake, his eyes were frantically passing from Sarah to me, he was raw and bleeding around his bonds from desperately trying to get off that rack and save his friends. I turned back to Sarah. I'll never forget her strapped there, a mass of blood and flesh.

She was screaming in pure agony, hearing that from her forced me into absolute rage mode. The sound of the saw cutting into her collarbone, the random wires, and car parts? Yes, car parts were shoved inside her like they were trying to make her a cyborg or something. That's when I noticed Frank, or what used to be a person named Frank. Whatever this was, this was not human.

With his coveralls around his waist, it made sense why he felt so solid. That shoulder was no longer a shoulder. In its place was a large piston, sewn into the tissue with copper wire. All over his body were car parts, swimming in a mass of his flesh. As he continued his morbid work he kept mumbling.

"I'll find the key that turns the ignition. Time to test the chassis."

Sarah was getting weaker, her screams coming out more like shocked gasps with the occasional raise in tone. Jake was looking at me, he had a hand tear free from his restraint. He was giving me the nod, I needed to distract Frank. I needed to cover second.

With everything I had, I took Jake's lead and pulled my glove hand free, mangled to hell, but free. Jake pointed his own wrecked hand to the service bench and the revolver Frank had left out. I prayed the chamber was loaded.

"Hey asshole, why don't you test this chassis, motherfucker!" Jake shot at the monster we called Frank. He looked up with dead, uninterested eyes, devoid of the color of life. He noticed we were getting free and sprang at a speed no man can match.

He smashed Jake's face so hard I thought he'd killed him, then, after restraining his hand, turned to me with a heavy, giant steel clamp. I gritted my teeth as he forced my hand into the vise and twisted. I howlowed in fury and pain, feeling the bones break. He suddenly stopped twisting and turned to Sarah, picking up one of those fucking keys.

I began slamming the clamp against the wall, doing more damage but it was loosening. Jake was manic at this point—how he was even alive was baffling, but that didn't matter. What mattered was he was still breathing, and he needed his base covered. I never let him down before and I wasn't about to now. I watched Frank as he pointed the key into Sarah's now open chest and exposed, beating heart. He tried to turn it and frowned.

"Engine's still cold, need to try a different chassis."Frank went back to dig through those awful keys, and Sarah, with the last of her strength, looked both of us in the eyes.

"Promise me guys....promise me you'll find a way out of...out of....."And that's all she could manage. The life left her instantly and her heart stopped beating.

"SARAH! SARAH FUCK! FUCK YOU FRANK!" Jake cried through his tears. Through my own, I gave her a silent swear that I would keep my promise, just as the clamp broke open.

Frank was turning his attention to Jake now, finishing the opening he needed for whatever it was those keys did. Jake's screams tore through me worse than any of the physical pain I felt, as I used his voice as fuel to dig my mangled hand against the prying lever of the restraints. It wasn't easy, but I managed to get off that rack and grab the gun.

Remembering how fast he moves, and knowing I had zero time, I quietly let him focus on his grisly task, sneaking right behind him. Being a shortstop my whole life has given me a fairly analytical mind, so it wasn't hard to figure out the best spot to point the barrel. I fired into Frank's own exposed, key-turned heart. He didn't fall. He stood limp, all movement and speech gone. Dead? Then I noticed the black mist rising from his chest. It swirled with a strange dark beauty that was hard to take my eyes off. I traced its flow along the garage to Jake, and I noticed it going into the hole in his chest. The key Frank planted began to turn.

I pleadingly looked at Jake, trembling. Like I said, I'm pretty perceptive; I figured out what was happening, but how could I stop it? Jake's eyes locked onto mine. Though they were fading into the same cold look of Frank, he was still enough of himself to give me the nod. I understood. Time for one last double play.

I raised the gun, closed my eyes......and I covered second one final time.

It was silent then, the loudest silence I've ever experienced. I turned from the monster, now hovering over the keys, and I ran. I ran and I cried until I don't know how long. I finally reached a paved road, and from exhaustion, injuries, and maddening grief, I collapsed.

"Explain it to me again, Scott, just so I can cover my bases."The detective said it looking at me with soft sorrow in his eyes—a man who had seen too many traffic deaths, it seemed. From my hospital bed, I recalled the details in the crafted lie I'd made up."We thought we hired a mechanic," I whispered, keeping my eyes fixed on the blank white curtain. "He gave us a tow, but to a backwoods chop shop. There were three of them. Jake tried to fight, so did I... that's how I got put in here with a shattered hand. They shot Jake, and Sarah was caught in the crossfire. I managed to kill the ringleader by struggling for his gun and turning it on him. The other two fled to God knows where. That's the same thing I've told you three times, Officer Dane. So make sure you keep your end of this bargain."

Of course, Scott," he said softly, nodding his head. "I wouldn't let any parent see that."

He shook my uninjured hand and left, letting my family—all of ours—into the room.

My parents came in first, both embracing me tightly and weeping openly. It was strange—I've never seen my dad cry, and seeing that, I broke down too. Then Sarah's aunt and uncle came in, both looking like they'd never have dry eyes again, followed by the one person in our group who, by deciding to keep the rings trip pure and bowing out, survived: Zach. Sarah's fiancé. He was holding his engagement ring and looked completely hollowed out. I couldn't take seeing them, but then Jake's mom entered, followed by a pale, trembling Mark sobbing. He let everyone greet me first, then sat on my bed and gave me a deep, warm hug.

"I'm so sorry kiddo, I'm so sorry!" he choked out, the proud Little League coach completely broken. "If I... if I hadn't sold you that car... you... my boy would be..."

He couldn finish, and I didn't need him to. Placing my bandaged hand on his shoulder, I squeezed gently.

"No, Mark, it's... it's not your fault. It was... just a bad road. Not your fault, coach."

We all sat and cried for a couple of hours after that.

As everyone was piling out, I asked Zach to stay behind. I knew if anyone could handle the truth and not go looking for that garage, it would be him. He was horrified, but he believed me, and he agreed that our parents can never know Sarah's last plea. They can never know just what it cost for their shortstop to cover his second baseman.

Mark's screen door still squeaks after all these years. I'd only just been here yesterday, but we have our little goodbye ritual like this every year. I walk in to see him sitting in his armchair, greying hair, looking smaller than last year. He's watching a pro game on mute.

"Headed home, kiddo? Thanks for stopping in to say goodbye, it's always great to see you," he said, starting to rise. I placed my crippled hand on his shoulder to steady him.

"No, Mark, it's okay, you don't need to get up. I just wanted to say goodbye and to tell you to take it easy on my old man next week. Softball's not the same, but he never played at our level. Just... don't let him twist a knee."

"I'll take care of your old man, rest assured he's in good hands. Make sure you be safe out on the road today, check your fluids and don't go redlining it." He gets somber now, and I can never look him in the face. "Take care of yourself, Scott. I love you."

Tears already forming, I reply meekly.

"I love you too, Mark." The pain building into a crescendo that I won't be able to hold back, I turn my back and head out the door. "I will."

I sit in my car for a while, windows up, no AC. And I let it out, I let it all out. I scream, I cry, and I grieve for them—for Jake and Mark, for my parents, for Sarah and her family. I cry for all of us who carry the weight of survival.

The drive up the little road into the cemetery is always peaceful. As my eyes begin to dry, I step out into the warm summer heat. There are no noisy saws or pumps here, no screams, no terror. Just the birds. I find the stones next to each other, the names I need to see every time I leave here:

Jacob Mark Vance and Sarah Lynn Evans.

I sat down between them, taking out a new white baseball, and a polished glass stone, the kind she liked to collect, and placed them next to the flowers everyone left the day before. I laugh a bit as I pull out the joint and light it.

"I'm back, guys, letting you know how everything is with me. The world's loud, it's fast, but I manage. I kept my promise, I made it out. I'm living for all of us now. Sarah, I always make sure I bring extra snacks and blankets and first aid, you don't need to worry. Jake.... I've got second on lock, man. Go make that double play."

Then I finish my smoke in the warm bask of my friends and until next year, we say goodbye. The drive back home is never a happy one, but it's important that our little ring stays together.

Tragedy usually has a way of dissolving its survivors in grief and guilt. That is why every year I pack my bags, lock the front door, and make this drive back home.

I have a promise to keep. So no...

...I don't take vacations anymore.

“The tire’s flat.” Her manager said, peaking her head through the driver’s side doorway.

“Okeeey. Whatcha want me to do about it?” Stephanie asked, her nose still buried in her phone.

“Nothing,” her manager grumbled under her breath, “not like you’d help anyway.” 

“How much longer ‘til we get there?” She kicked off her leather boots and propped her feet on the dashboard. 

“I don’t know.”

“Ugh, Margaret’s skatin’ in Rockefeller right now. Of course I’m fucking missing it.” She groaned and slumped further into the passenger seat. “Why the hell did you drag me to bumfuck nowhere?”

“This role is huge. It could b—”

“Close the door, I’m gettin’ cold.” 

“Whatever.” Her manager threw the door shut, zipped up her coat, and shuffled around to the trunk. 

It was humiliating, trudging through a foot of snow in a pair of converses for a girl half her age. She didn’t deserve this. She was famous once. She had dignity once. She had a name once.

Roxie.

It seemed like just last year she was singing in underground clubs. A month ago, she got the best call you could get from a record label. Last week, her first album hit platinum. A few days back, her debut movie bombed. A couple days after that, her second album flopped. Yesterday she got the worst call you could get from a record label. 

This morning she woke up and she was 45. Where did twenty years of her life go? It wasn’t all wasted on wallowing and wondering what could’ve been, right?

It didn’t matter. She didn’t have time to cry anymore. Stephanie needed her to negotiate her royalties and schedule her appearances on talk shows and manage her budget on clothes and pick her up from clubs and wake her up in the fucking morning so she didn’t sleep away the life she didn’t deserve. 

The trunk of the SUV popped open. She pulled out suitcases and tossed them haphazardly on the side of the road. A strong gust blew through the trees.

“Hurry up and close the doooooor! It’s cooooooold!” Stephanie whined.

“One more second.” Her manager pushed a suitcase aside to reveal the compartment with the spare tire.

“Be careful with that!”

“I am.”

“Good. That shit costs more than your entire catalogue."

The manager gripped the L-shaped tire iron with both hands. Her nails carved crescents into her palms.

Of course, the manager thought, I’ll be extra careful.

The trunk slammed down. 

God forbid your Prada shoes get scuffed, or the heel breaks off your Versace pumps. 

The manager walked past the flat tire.

I know you’d just die if I broke something.

The passenger door swung open. Roxie grabbed the brat by the root of her hair and dragged her out of the car.

She kicked and squirmed and screamed. Clumps of white powder flew up in the air. She shouted, What the hell is wrong with you?! Stop it! HELP! Blah blah blah… How uninspired. She should’ve had her ghost writer write her final pleas. The brat’s head dropped to the ground. A foot came down on her blonde hair. Her cries echoed through the trees. If only someone was around to hear them before their sudden stop.

It took a few good tugs to pry the tire iron from her head. A stream of blood ran down her forehead and outlined half of Roxie’s shoe. 

Death wasn’t enough to satisfy Roxie. That brat didn’t deserve to lay in the snow so peacefully. She jammed the short end of her weapon in the corpse’s mouth and pulled it like a lever. Her two front teeth were knocked in, her lips widened into her cheeks, and finally, her jaw popped out of its sockets. She couldn’t sing anymore.

Next, Roxie moved to her legs. She beat her knees until they were a stew of blood and broken bones. She couldn’t dance anymore.

Now she could finally change that tire. As a treat she could back up on the little brat so, she sure as shit couldn’t act anymore. 

Roxie skipped back to the trunk and grabbed the spare tire. She was already thinking of stories she’d tell the police. I was supposed to meet her up there. Oh, a drunk driver hit her while we were changing a tire. A bear came out of nowhere, she didn’t have a chance. We were—

She was gone.

The tire slipped through Roxie’s fingers and plopped onto the snow. There was a trail of crimson where the body used to be. She squeezed the tire iron until her knuckles turned white.

How is that bitch still alive?

She marched into the forest, following the trail around barren oaks. She couldn’t have gotten far. Snowflakes fluttered down. The track cut left, then right. How deep did she get? The snowfall came down as heavy as raindrops. Wind whistled through the treetops. Her cheeks burned from the cold. She tucked her hands under her armpits. Kill her. I’ll kill her this time. White engulfed the world. The wind whipped and howled. She staggered forward. A silhouette emerged from the blizzard. Kill. Die. Kill. Die. Roxie raised her weapon over her head. DIE BITCH! The tire iron stuck snow.

Her eyes darted wildly, trying to find where the bitch went. The blood was gone. She clawed at the ground and only got more powder. Stephanie was gone. That bitch left her behind again.

Roxie wandered aimlessly until her legs gave out. She shivered. She whimpered. She didn’t deserve this.

“Smile for the camera Leighden!”

Lucy holds her phone obtrusively close to her toddler’s frowning face. He bats ineffectually at it.

“No, baby, smile! Smile, we’re having fun!”

“No mama. I want play.”

Lucy scowls.

“Play later Leighden. We need to work now. Mommy needs a new video, don’t you want to make a new video?”

“NO! NO VIDEO!” Leighden begins to wail the ear-piercing crescendo that he has recently learned allows him to get his way.

Lucy curses under her breath and pockets her phone reluctantly. Leighden had been such a cute baby, but they didn’t call it the “terrible twos” for nothing. As the boy began his first forays into independence, it had become increasingly hard to milk any good content out of him. Her uploads were becoming more infrequent and as a result the mysterious pull of the algorithm had been shrinking her reach dramatically. Fewer videos with fewer views, and the comfortable income she had grown accustomed to was withering away.

If she doesn’t find a way to get more footage out of Leighden soon, her channel risks drying up completely. If that happens, she doesn’t know what she’ll do. The father isn’t in the picture, and she can’t afford childcare if she has to go back to work.

She’ll just have to find some way to carry the content herself.

Newly determined, Lucy points the front-facing camera on her phone at herself. She stops dead in her tracks. She barely recognizes the woman staring back at her in the screen. Wrinkles and stress lines send cracks through the youthful self-image she still has of herself. Plum colored bags under her eyes sink so deep that her face looks almost skeletal.

And the vacant look in her eyes…. She looks so tired. She wallows in the feeling of self-pity for a long time, maneuvering the phone around to find a more flattering angle. It doesn’t work.

She wants to cry. It’s not fair. She’s only twenty-three. This isn’t how she envisioned her future. She’s supposed to be young and carefree, living the best years of her life. Visions of the things she used to dream about play in her head: partying with the girls at the club, fast drinks and hot men - living free. Shallow dreams, but for her, they were the most idyllic thing she could fit into her limited imagination.

Instead, life had caught up with her so fast. She still felt like she was a child, but already had one of her own. It only took one of those hot men to saddle her with his baggage before he fucked off. And she was stuck spending the rest of her life cleaning up their mess. The weight of consequence felt like manacles around her feet. If it weren’t for this fucking kid, she could still be doing everything she wanted. And now the little brat couldn’t even spare a smile for the camera like he used to.

She stops herself from spiraling. She loves her son, she does. But sometimes it feels like she’s going on month number thirty of post-partum depression. Motherhood was the hardest test of her young life, and she was doing it all alone.

She wipes her eyes. She has to make this work. She readies the singsong ‘video voice’ in the back of her throat, befit with the bouncing cadence she’s modelled after other more successful accounts on TikTok. She flexes her cheek muscles to force a proper smile onto her face.

The mask is on. She hits the record button.

“Hey there Honest Moms, it’s time for another day in the life! Leighden is feeling cuh-ranky todayyyy!” she sings with a vibrato. “And let me tell you, ya girl is looking rough. So I thought today we’d do a makeup tutorial while I refresh. Girls, let me tell you, when motherhood comes knocking, the most important thing is self-care! So today we’re gonna be using my favorite pallet from-“

“MAMA!!!” comes the screeching voice of Leighden. The sound is sandpaper to Lucy’s brain, like the high pitched whirring of dentistry machines. The mask falls off.

“What is it?!” she shrieks, not realizing how shrill she sounds until it reaches her own ears. Leighden looks like he’s about to cry. Lucy feels the pain of guilt catch in her throat like she swallowed a razorblade.

God, she’s an absolutely terrible mother.

“What is it, baby?” she tries again meekly and the words echo with the hollowness of someone who knows she’ll never be enough.

“Mama, I need potty.”

Lucy sighs, grumbles, picks the child up. She carries him over to the bathroom and sets him down. He’s old enough now to go unaccompanied, a herculean feat of development that could not have come soon enough. If Lucy never has to change another diaper again it’ll be too soon.

She revels in the precious moment of freedom from her son for just a few seconds before pulling up her phone again. Twists of anxiety worm holes in her stomach when she sees the last frame of the first video attempt. Frozen in the final image, her eyes stare murder at her own child. The wrinkles that made her self-conscious carve the grimace of a witch into her face. She deletes the video.

The second take is much better. She can work with this. It’s going well until she feels a tiny hand tug at her pants leg.

“Mama, I made mess.”

Oh no.

When she turns on the yellow halogen light of the bathroom, her jaw drops. It’s so much worse than she ever could’ve imagined.

Ten minutes later, she’s got cleaning gloves, a scrub brush, a bottle of bleach, and a leftover covid mask on her face. She carefully checks that nothing in the screen will get her video demonetized before recording. The mask muffles her voice while she explains this video will be something she calls ‘Deep Clean ASMR’.

The absurdity doesn’t even register to her. Twenty years of being plugged in nonstop. An entire generation grown in the information age, exposed to every single moment of each other’s lives. Feeling the eyes of the world on every action. She doesn’t even question why the hell she’s videoing and sharing this moment. It’s just what you do.

The final recording is twenty minutes of disjointed scrubbing noises interrupted by the dissonance of heavy grunting and a few nauseating retches.

When she gets out of the bathroom, she shoves the phone in her son’s face as her cheeks flush red enough to match the bloodshot whites of her eyes.

“WHY DID YOU DO THAT LEIGHDEN??”

The boy starts to cry a wailing siren.

“All you do is cry!” Lucy says, all empathy gone from her exasperated face, “Fine, then crying is what the viewers are going to get!”

Lucy has the newest model iPhone, and it’s capturing this entire display in 200 megapixels. She’s abusing her son, even she knows it, but goddamnit she can’t take it anymore. It feels good to give the boy some tough love for the first time in his little life. How’s he ever going to grow without some strict discipline here and there?

She grabs his little hand and yanks on it hard enough to start bruising deep purple. All the while, Leighden yells and yells his little voice hoarse. The camera captures every decibel.

“If you want to throw a tantrum, you can go do it behind closed doors! You little demon! Mommy does everything for you, and this is how you repay me!”

She tosses the boy into the bathroom and shuts the door. His sobs are so loud they vibrate the wood and resonate in the frame with a horrific pitch. Lucy snatches her headphones off the counter and keeps cranking the volume of her favorite song up until she can no longer hear her little hellspawn’s cries.

Just ten minutes, she begs, living second to second entirely by the grace of the sonic shelter blasting through her headphones. Just ten minutes of time-out for him to realize he crossed the line, and then…

And then what?

She’ll let down the only physical barrier she has in this entire tiny studio apartment. She’ll open the bathroom door to her Terrible Twos Tantrum Son. She’ll welcome this living thorn back into her side. Lift her arm up to show her soft exposed ribcage, where he can dig and twist into the skin. Where he will nestle and suckle and scream and control every minute of her life, for the rest of her life.

Motherhood is a delayed funeral. You choose to sacrifice your body, mind, and soul. Everything you are. All in the hopes that this little flesh vessel you pour it all into will survive. Will carry on your legacy. Will love you. Will pay you back one day, when he understands what you did for him.

Your skin wrinkles up like the world’s biggest pale raisin. It’s like all the moisture is being sucked out of your body, because it fucking is, because it’s all being pumped into this little leech that literally fed off of your body for nine months. No different from a tapeworm, this little parasite wormed its way into your ovaries where it grew into a freeloading placenta. Where it hijacked your biology, made your body into a better carrier for it. It put a little cushion of fat in all the right places to pillow its developing stem cells; it expanded your hips for an easier exit out of your most delicate places.

He fucking ruined you.

Lucy puts both hands up to her ears, pressing the padded cups around the cartilage on the sides of her head so hard that it hurts. God, what a pathetic mother she is. What a pathetic woman. She can’t even bring herself to love her own child.

It’s not until this moment, as she descends twenty stories below the earth on the spiraling staircase of borderline personality, that she finally realizes.

Her own child hasn’t made a peep.

It was so easy to leave him in there. So easy to not worry about him for one fucking minute.

When she bursts through the door and looks down at the scene that’s painted halogen-yellow by the cheapest possible lightbulbs – she regrets knowing how much worse this was than the last time she looked in here.

If hell was a real place, and her punishment was being sentenced to making ten billion “Deep Clean ASMR” videos, she would’ve preferred that eternity.

That eternity would’ve been better than the one in which her son will never open his eyes ever again.

That little parasite. That little boy. Her son.

Love is a complicated thing, it really is. Especially unconditional love. The love that will always exist, no matter what, because it’s not the kind of love that asks for anything back.

It’s the kind of love that would make you swipe a knife across your wrists without blinking. The kind of love that would let you miss a meal – hell, miss ten - if it meant your baby boy wouldn’t go hungry. The kind of love that keeps you from taking yourself out of this world, even when you can picture five different ways to do it that would be easier than facing another day: just one quick trigger, one quick medicine cocktail, one quick swipe of a plastic bag over the head – But no, you can’t do that, you can’t do that because he needs you.

That’s the love that Lucy feels bubbling up in her throat, riding on the wave of bile that shoots past her strip-whitened teeth, out of her moisturized and glossed lips, onto the freshly cleaned floor.

The love she tries to hold onto as she watches her son spasm on the linoleum tile floor which is already staining permanently red from the streaks of blood dribbling out of the corner of his mouth.

The love she feels when she covers him, wrapping her sheltering arms around him to protect him, but he doesn’t stop shaking. When she looks down at the open bottle of bleach she left on the counter, dribbling its lethal contents out in a grotesque puddle that mixes with her son’s blood on the floor. When she pulls his little body to her chest and she can feel his rasping rattling through her own ribcage, feel the vibration of his little lungs dissolving as each breath brings more of the caustic fluid up into his alveoli.

When the phone rings endlessly to poison control, but reaches only a dial tone.

For some reason the signal isn’t going anywhere, for some reason the only data leaving this phone isn’t a desperately needed emergency phone call.

No, wrapped in those malicious strands of murderous data is a different kind of message, the last upload that will ever be sent from this phone.

Not a call, but a little video. One last vlog.

Lucy weeps as piercingly as her son ever did. She rocks back and forth, holding his little body that has finally stopped thrashing, finally become still.

Finally. A truly honest glimpse into parenthood.

So I asked a couple weeks ago if people wanted their stories narrated, and a lot of you gave me some great stories!

Although they are still going to be uploaded I am now looking for some short stories to mix in.

During the month of October and the lead up to Halloween we are uploading daily on my show!

If anyone has any 15-20 minute long stories you think would be great and want them narrated Drop them here!

I look forward to reading your stories!

(Again not linking my channel)

“Attention shoppers,” came a male voice over the intercom. “Please move to the back of the store immediately.”

“The back of the store?” I whispered to Daniel. “Don’t they mean the front of the store? To pay for our stuff?”

It was 8:50 pm – 10 minutes till closing time. We’d brought our two kids out on this late-night Walmart excursion in the hopes of burning off some energy; instead, they’d just thrown tantrums for new Legos and Hot Wheels. It was a disaster.

But apparently, the disaster was just beginning.

“Please move to the back of the store immediately,” the voice repeated overhead. “This is not a drill.”

I glanced around—but the other shoppers were just as confused as I was. An old lady looked up at the ceiling, scrunching her face. “What the hell?” a dark-haired woman asked her boyfriend, pushing a cart full of garden supplies.

“Didn’t you hear?” an older man said, leaning over his cart of bottled water and canned food. “We’re in a tornado watch. One touched down in Sauerville.”

A tornado? It was definitely storming outside. I’d seen the black clouds roll in from the east earlier. But it didn’t look that bad.

“Do not stay out in the open. I repeat—do NOT stay out in the open.”

There was a pause. Then, an explosion of sound, as everyone began to mobilize. Carts rolling, panicked voices, feet slapping on the floor.

No. No no no. This can’t be happening…

I hurried down the toy aisle, Tucker in my arms, Daniel and Jackson following me. Three zig-zaggy turns, and then we were in the electronics area. I glanced at the TVs on the wall—

And pictured the four of us, crushed underneath them.

“Stay away from windows and doors,” the voice continued on the loudspeaker. “And do NOT attempt to exit the store.”

“Is this—is it safe here?”

Daniel shook his head. “Big open areas aren’t good. I’m going to check in back, see if there’s a break room or something. You stay here, okay?”

I nodded.

Arms shaking, I sat down on the ground between two shelves of video games. Tucker sucked on a bottle in my arms while Jackson began to giggle. “Is the tornado going to hit the store? And everything will fly around, real fast?” he asked with a big stupid grin on his face.

“I don’t know.”

A tornado. A real-life tornado, like you see in the movies, plowing through our town. It was so… unfathomable. We were New York natives, transplanted here to Indiana only six months ago. I’d never been in a tornado watch my entire life.

Daniel jogged back into view. “Everything’s locked up,” he said, as he joined me on the floor. “But listen. Fairview’s a big town. The chances that it’ll hit this Walmart… I think we’ll be okay.”

“I never should’ve brought us here.”

“You didn’t know. None of us did.” He wrapped his arm around me. “They should’ve warned us. Like an emergency alert on our phones. Or a tornado siren, or something.”

The voice overhead rang out again through the store.

“Do not stay out in the open. Do not make yourself visible. That includes security cameras—please move to a spot that is not visible to any cameras.”

I frowned. “What does that have to do with tornadoes?”

A feeling of unease, in the pit of my stomach. I glanced up, and saw several black globes descending from the ceiling, hiding the cameras within.

“I guess we should listen to them and get out of sight,” I whispered.

I grabbed Jackson’s hand, Daniel picked up Tucker, and we jogged out into the center aisle. The store was an eerie sight—abandoned shopping carts, askew in the aisle, full of everything from pies to batteries to plants. Footsteps echoed around the store from people unseen, as they found their new hiding places.

We dodged a shopping cart full of soda, ran through kitchenwares, and then stopped in the Easter decoration aisle. There was a camera in the central corridor, but as long as we stayed in the middle of Easter aisle, we’d be invisible.

The four of us crouched on the floor, next to some demented-looking Easter bunnies. “I’m hungry,” Jackson whined.

“Sssshhh.”

“Mommy—”

I grabbed a bag of colorful chocolate eggs and ripped it open. “Here. Candy. Happy?” I whispered, thrusting them into his hands. Then I leaned back against the metal shelves, panting.

But I didn’t have long to rest. A mechanical whine overhead, and then the voice came through the speakers again.

“Keep away from aisles with food. If you have food with you, leave it and move to a new hiding place. If you have any open wounds, cover them with clothing.”

What… the fuck?

That had nothing to do with keeping safe in a tornado.

“We should make a run for it,” Daniel whispered to me, starting to stand.

“But… the tornado—”

“I don’t think there is a tornado. Listen. Do you hear any wind?”

I listened. But all I heard was silence. No howling wind, no shaking ground, no projectiles clanging against the metal roof.

“Maybe… maybe it’s still coming. I know what they’re saying doesn’t make sense but to go outside—”

“We need to get out of here. Now.” He grabbed Jackson’s hand as he held Tucker in his arms. “Come on.”

“Daniel, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I whispered.

But the next words from the intercom changed my mind.

“Assume a fetal position and place your hands on your head. Close your eyes and do not open them for any reason.”

“Let’s go.”

We broke into a sprint and ran down the central aisle, cameras be damned. The front door appeared in front of us—a little black rectangle looming in the distance.

And as we got closer, I saw Daniel was right.

There was a tree at the border of the parking lot, under a streetlamp.

It was perfectly still.

We continued running, past the clothing area, past the snacks lined up at the checkout lines. I ran towards the sliding glass doors as fast as my legs would carry me. Almost there. Almost there. Almost—

The doors didn’t open.

“No. No, no, no.”

Daniel slammed his body against the door. It rattled underneath him. I tried to squeeze my fingers into the gap between them, to try and pull them apart.

They didn’t budge.

“They… they locked us in,” I whispered.

“I want to go home,” Jackson said. Tucker was beginning to fuss too, making little noises like he was about to start full-on wailing.

I turned around—

And that’s when I saw him.

A Walmart employee.

He was sitting on the ground at the end of one of the checkout aisles. Facing away from us. Wearing the familiar blue vest with a golden starburst.

“Hey! Let us out!”

He didn’t reply.

“Did you hear me? I don’t care if there’s a fucking tornado. Unlock the door and let us out!”

Again, he said nothing.

But in the silence, I could hear something. A wet, smacking sound. I stared at the man, slightly hunched over, still facing away from me.

Was he… eating… something?

The speaker overhead crackled to life.

“Attention. Please do NOT talk to any Walmart employees.”

My blood ran cold.

The smacking sound stopped. And then, slowly, the man began to stand. He placed his palms on the conveyor belt and pushed up—and I could see that they were stained with blood. I backed away—but my legs felt like they were moving through a vat of honey.

No, no, no—

Fingers locked around my arm and yanked.

“Come on!” Daniel shouted.

I sprinted after him, deeper into the store. Tucker stared at me over his shoulder, and Jackson ran as fast as his little feet would take him. I was vaguely aware of the slap-slap-slap sound behind me, but I didn’t dare look back.

Daniel ran into the clothing area and I swayed, dodging circular racks of T-shirts and wooden displays of baby clothes. He skidded to a stop and ducked into the dressing room area. “In here!” he whispered, motioning at one of the rooms.

We piled inside and locked the door.

“Daddy,” Jackson started.

“You listen to me very carefully,” I said, crouching to his level. “You have to be absolutely silent. Do not say a word. Okay?”

Jackson looked at me, then Daniel—then he nodded and sat down on the floor.

“I’m going to try to call 911,” Daniel whispered, transferring Tucker to me and pulling out his phone. He tapped at the screen—then frowned.

“What?”

“We don’t… we don’t seem to have any service. I don’t—”

Thump.

I grabbed Jackson and pulled him away from the door. The four of us huddled in the corner. I held my breath.

Thump.

Under the gap of the dressing room door—men’s feet in black shoes. They slowly took a step forward, deeper into the dressing room.

“Don’t… move,” I whispered, holding Jackson.

The man took another step.

Don’t make a sound. Don’t move. Don’t—

Tucker let out a soft cry.

The man stopped. His feet turned, pointing at us. No. No, no, no. Tucker let out another cry—louder this time. My nails dug into Daniel’s hand. No—

A hand appeared. It slowly pressed against the floor, stained with blood. And then his knees appeared, as he lowered himself down to the gap.

No.

Could he fit under? The gap wasn’t small—it was like the stall door to a bathroom. If he flattened himself against the floor… there’s a chance he could fit under.

I watched in horror as his stomach came into view. His blue Walmart vest, as he lowered his body to the floor. Then he pushed his arm under the gap and blindly swept it across the floor.

As if feeling for us.

This is it. We’re going to die.

And then he lowered his head.

His face. Oh, God, there was something horribly wrong with his face. He smiled up at us with a smile that was impossibly wide, showing off blood-stained teeth. His skin was so pale it was nearly blue. And his eyes… they were milky white, without pupils or irises.

I opened my mouth to scream—

“Attention shoppers,” the voice began overhead.

No no no—

“Please make your way to the front of the store and make your final purchases. We will be closing in ten minutes.”

… What?

And then—before I could react—something unseen jerked the man out of view.

A strange dragging sound followed. As if someone was dragging his body out of the dressing room area. I stared at the door, shaking, as Tucker’s cries rang in my ears.

But he didn’t come back.

And within ten minutes, the usual hubbub of Walmart returned. Voices. Footsteps. Shopping cart wheels rolling along the floor.

Shaking, I finally got up and unlocked the door.

The store looked completely normal. People were lined up at the cash registers, placing their goods on the conveyor belts. Employees were scanning tags, printing receipts. People walked towards the glass doors, and when they did—they slid open.

As we slowly walked towards the exit, I spotted the older man who’d warned us about the tornado earlier. “What—what was that?” I asked, unable to keep my voice from shaking.

He shrugged. “I guess the tornado missed us! What a miracle, huh?”

Giving us a smile, he disappeared out the glass doors and into the night.

It starts just like a yawn.

That’s what they’ve said across online forums and all through the rumor mill. And now they’re saying it on the news, too.

Just like a yawn. You take a deep breath, and your jaw opens wide. It happens without you even thinking about it. But then you can’t close your mouth. The muscles in your face stiffen, and they keep pulling your mouth open, wider and wider until they tear your jaw loose.

“Involuntary contraction of the pterygoid muscles” is what the CDC calls it. They have an epidemiologist on screen now, wearing a very worried face for their interview.

A reporter asks questions from the safety of his home office. “Has anyone determined a cause?”

“At this time,” the epidemiologist sighs, “it’s still unclear. I know there are a lot of theories floating around, but no one knows for certain.”

“Do you know how it spreads?”

The epidemiologist looks away from their monitor like he’s avoiding eye contact. “We don’t know.”

I’ll never forget the first time I saw it. I was standing on a subway platform a few days after the first confirmed cases cropped up in my city. I had just missed my ride, and as the doors closed in my face, I heard someone scream.

Through the window, I saw people leaping from their seats and running off in a panic. In the middle of it all, a woman sat shivering, head tilted up and mouth open as wide as it could go. And then something snapped. I know I couldn’t hear it, but I could nearly feel the pop as her body flinched and her jaw dropped down to her collarbone.

I stopped taking the subway after that.

I had to stop driving soon after, too.

One morning, I was heading to work, and the car in the next lane over started swerving. I figured it was a distracted driver, but when I turned to offer a helpful gesture, I saw the fear in his eyes.

That wide, quivering wail was spreading across his face, lips splitting at the corners. Shaky hands were clawing at his jaw, trying to close it.

And that’s all I saw. A moment later, he swerved into the oncoming lane.

I insisted on working remotely after that. My request wasn’t approved, but I haven’t been to the office in weeks. I’ve barely been anywhere lately. I try to stock up on groceries, but everybody else has the same idea, and groceries were already expensive. I’ve been eating a lot of rice and ramen.

And I do my best to keep from yawning. I try to go to bed early, but it’s hard to fall asleep. Maybe it’s all the coffee. Maybe it’s the anxious internal flinch I feel every time someone around me yawns. I never look. As soon as I see someone’s mouth open, their chest rising to inhale, I leave. It’s alienating and it’s exhausting, but at least I can keep my mouth shut.

Of course, some people say I’m overreacting. There are plenty of folks who insist that the sickness isn’t even contagious. If the experts don’t know what’s going on, the rest of us can only guess.

Have you ever played that game where everyone puts their hands on something in the dark and tries to guess what it is? Nobody’s wrong until you turn the lights on, and right now, we’re still in the dark.

But I’m afraid of what I’ll see when the lights come on, everyone I love dead and slack-jawed like mummies in the catacombs. I miss my friends and family, but the thought of them going through that awful death stings my eyes with tears. It burns my throat. I feel a pulling in my neck. It’s tugging at my lips. I try not to think about it. I keep my mouth shut.

When the sickness became too widespread to ignore, Senator Howell held an outdoor rally. I hate election years. I already planned to vote for the other guy, so I wasn’t really listening. It was just something to watch. He was saying something about “fear itself,” but he started to slow his speech.

Then he stopped talking. His jaw shivered and he held a hand to his lips. He yawned, long and silent, then his teeth clacked as he shut his mouth.

“Excuse me. It’s been a long day,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead.

The crowd gathered under his tent responded with low whispers and uneasy laughter.

But the senator never resumed his speech. His face shivered like he was fighting back a cough. He clasped both hands on his podium, the state seal rattling like it was the center of its own little earthquake. The muscles around his mouth bulged as his face burned red. Then his jaw swung open with a dry gasp.

In obscene call and response, the crowd shivered and groaned, heads whipping back and jaws separating, a chorus of screams, tears, and snaps.

After that, the CDC had to name the sickness, so they’re going with “involuntary contraction of the pterygoid muscles.” Nobody calls it that.

“Howell’s Disease” made rounds for a while, but that’s still a mouthful, and nobody wants to waste their breath saying the senator’s name. Somewhere along the way, we shortened it to “the howls.”

That’s enough news for today. I should turn off my TV and go to bed. It’s not too early. My body just needs sleep. I sense how badly it wants rest. I can feel fatigue coming on. That’s all. I can feel it pulling in my throat, suppressing my tongue, and tugging at the corners of my lips. I know I’m just tired. 

Many years ago, when it was Christmas and I was eight years old, I went outside and I did what I always did. I built a snowman.

I’d start by making a big pillar of snow, taller than myself. I’d get a stool out from my dad’s shed so that I could mold the head into a blank, featureless oval. Then I’d make the arms. Long spindly things with pointed ends that, frankly, should have fallen off at a slight breeze. Somehow they never did. Then to top it all off, I’d get some coal from the fireplace in the living room - the two biggest chunks I could find - and press them into the face, making two round, dark eyes.

Now you may wonder; where’s the hat? The scarf? The mouth? The carrot for a nose? Well you see, the way I built snowmen - that’s how I saw people when I was a kid. In fact, sometimes I still see people like that. It’s not scary. At least not to me. I’m used to it. It makes them more interesting to me.

My family always found it strange how I would make these things and then I’d sit and talk to them, sometimes for hours. Other times I’d just stare at them and imagine them coming to life. I did it with pictures, clay models, anything I could use to create things that interested me.

Sometimes I would catch my mother staring over my shoulder, looking at the things I conjured from my warped little child’s brain. She would ask me why I drew those things and I would keep quiet. Something told me it wasn’t a good idea to say anything.

But I was talking about the snowman. I sat in front of it. This slender, looming snowman with big dark eyes of coal. Its legs - well, it didn’t really have legs. If it did then they were both fused together into one, rooting it to the ground like a tree. I wondered if it would be more interesting if people were like that. Like if they didn’t walk around and just stayed rooted to the ground, only able to talk to the people immediately around them.

What if people had big black eyes, no nose, mouth or ears, and couldn’t move at all? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

I looked down at my bare hands. Soot from the coal covered my fingers. I rubbed it between the tips, spread it around as much as I could. I liked the way it looked against the snowman’s glistening white skin. I tried to imagine it spreading all over me, turning me as black as the snowman’s eyes. Like I was a snowman’s eye.

The snowman’s arm came down. No, it didn’t just come down. It was knocked down. My brother had thrown a snowball at it. He was two years older than me and this was the usual ritual. I’d make something, he’d come along and destroy it. I’d learned long ago that crying made no difference. Whatever my brother did - at least to my parents - was only ever a joke. Everything, no matter what, was just a joke and I should stop being so petty.

So I didn’t cry. Not even when I looked down at the icicle-like arm sticking up from the ground at the base of the snowman. I wanted to cry. I could feel its pain. Just like if it was my arm that was broken off.

I turned and glared at my brother. He grinned back at me. Like it was all some big joke.
Our mother called us in for dinner and my brother ran inside, his job of terrorizing me done for the day. Before I left I said goodbye to the snowman. I felt it only polite.

That night I had trouble sleeping. That’s not strange. Children always have trouble sleeping on Christmas Eve. But I wasn’t awake because I thought I could catch a glimpse of Santa and his reindeer. I was awake because I could see the snowman’s eyes everywhere. They were little black holes covering the walls and doors and ceiling, gaping across and down at me like dark stars.

There was one. It was on the wall across from the foot of my bed. It was bigger and darker than all the others. I could have fit my whole body into it. In fact, something told me I should. It didn’t scare me. It still doesn’t. That very fact probably scares me more than the idea of the snowman’s eye itself. I’ve tried everything over the years to induce even an ounce of rational fear of that abyss into myself. But no matter what I do, there is always something within me that says that was what I was supposed to do.
Maybe if I had, what ended up happening may not have happened at all.

I heard something outside. It was like a footstep. The crunch of a boot compacting fresh snow out in the garden. Any other child - perhaps one lacking in my strangeness - might have thought, “Santa!” But I knew it wasn’t Santa. If he existed which, even at that point, I was certain he didn’t; it wouldn’t interest me anyway. But if he did exist then he wouldn’t be so careless as to approach on foot and alert everyone to his presence.

I got up, went over to the window. Perhaps whatever it was would take my mind off the holes and crawling inside them.

The snowman was there. Snow was falling slowly, blanketing the footprints my brother and I had left, making it new and excitingly blank again. The snowman’s arm - callously knocked off by my brother earlier - seemed to have reattached itself. Snowy sinews slithered up from the arm still sticking out of the ground and meeting with the shoulder once again. The other arm still stuck out at the side like a gnarled tree branch. His head was bent in a strange tilt that made him undeniably interesting.

I couldn’t see where the snow had been stepped in, nor could I hear anymore movement. All I could hear was the wind whistling just beyond the glass.

There was a creaking noise from outside my door. I turned to look, expecting to see my mother walk in and ask what I was doing staring out of the window so late at night. Trying to catch Santa in the act? Again, he didn’t interest me.

When I turned back the snowman was closer. Something else was different too.

He had legs.

Two long, thin legs that spiked deep into the snow just like his arm had been. That arm was now raised and pointed in a peculiar direction, I couldn’t tell where. I kept focusing on his eyes. They were bigger now. The howling of the wind grew greater still and then I realized that it wasn’t coming from outside. It was coming from the room itself. From the holes in the walls.

I could feel the chill from the cold abysses that surrounded me and I began to shiver. I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around myself. I could have gone back to bed and kept warm but I couldn’t. Something kept me ratcheted in place like I was one of those people who didn’t have legs and couldn’t move. When I opened my eyes again the snowman was gone and before I could even wonder where he was I heard it. A scream of pain so ice-shattering I can still hear it in my ears when I feel the winter wind against my skin. And when I heard it, I suddenly knew where the snowman was pointing.

It was pointing at my brother’s room.

My parents were shouting, running down the hall towards my brother’s room. More yelling, screaming from my mother, cursing, calling for God to help them. I looked down at myself. Ice clawed through my blood and I frantically wiped my hands against my pajamas. It wasn’t long before my mother came into my room. She was pale and didn’t say anything. She just sat me down on my bed, held me in her arms as she cried and cried and cried. I kept silent. She didn’t seem to notice the holes in the walls. I suppose they didn’t interest her.

When the ambulance came and mum left me to go downstairs I made sure to look outside. Sure enough, there he was. Standing right where I left him. Legs fused back together, arm severed and sticking up out of the ground. It was like he’d been there the whole time.

I saw my brother for the first time after he was brought into hospital. My mother and father sat by his side. He lay on his back, quiet, eyes wrapped in gauze. I was left by him while the doctor took my parents aside. As he explained that they had no idea how the coal could have gotten into his eye sockets and there was no way to remove them without fracturing large sections of the skull; I couldn’t help but think my brother seemed much more interesting this way.

I still go to see my family at Christmas. We don’t really celebrate the holiday. There are no trees or lights or turkey. No snowmen. We simply spend time with each other. My brother speaks little. He certainly says nothing of what happened to him that night.

But what’s interesting is that whenever I’m near him I always get the feeling he’s watching me. He can’t be of course. But it always seems like he makes a point of knowing precisely where I am.

I’m typing this out on my phone, sitting in the living room with my family now. I think this may be the last time I see them. Last night the holes in the wall were back. When I looked out the window of my old room I saw him standing out in the snow just like back then - calling out to me, asking me to join with him.

I can’t tell them of course. They’ll put me away. They would have put me away years ago had I only told them the truth about what I saw back then when I opened my eyes and heard my brother scream.

When I looked down at my hands and saw the black soot from the coal spread all over my fingers.

My dry eyes cracked open. It was so dark I couldn’t even see the tip of my nose. My hot breath bounced back at me from a not so distant wall. My whole body ached terribly. I started upwards when my forehead cracked against something hard. I fell onto my back, the pain rolling through me in waves. My arm met my forehead, rubbing the pain away. I felt around me. I was enclosed in something small. The room around me was minuscule at best. My hand drifted towards my pocket, retrieving my phone. I clicked the flashlight button. In an instant the horror around me came to life. Surrounding me, 4 wood walls. “No, oh no.” I silently cried. I dropped my phone and punched violently. My knuckles cracked against the dense wood, the sounds of the punches being deadened by the soil above it. After my knuckles began bleeding I slowly stopped. My mind raced. Where was I before this? What was I doing? How did I end up here? Panic began rising in my throat. My breathing quickened. I couldn’t think straight, all I could do was scream. I screamed, scratched, slammed, punched, I did everything I could do. My sore body eventually gave out on me. As I laid in the coffin my mind slowly began to work. I slid my hands around me, trying to feel for anything, anything at all. My fingers slid across smooth finished walls before they met a rough spot in the coffin. I craned my neck to see what it was. A small carving in the wood. “L Pckt.” My hand slipped into my left pocket. A small knife met my sweaty fingers. I flipped it open and pressed it into the lid. My eyes met another small carving at waist level. “Not first.” I began carving away at the lid, making a hole large enough for me to climb through. The wood chips rained down into my face. Small pieces of dirt slowly replaced the wood. I dropped the knife to my side and began punching. The wood cracked violently. I punched harder and harder. The wood broke free. Dirt flooded into the coffin. I pushed it down towards my feet. The flow of the soil began flooding in too quickly. I tried clawing my way up, but was trapped under the weight on my legs. The soil rained in covering my face and chest. As I breathed the soil flew into my mouth, then down my throat. I coughed, sending soil deeper into my lungs. I swung my arms trying to move the soil anywhere but on my face. My arms began slowing, breathing became harder. I let my arms fall into the soil, and closed my eyes as more soil flooded in.

My dry eyes cracked open. It was so dark I couldn’t even see the tip of my nose. My hot breath bounced back at me from a not so distant wall. My whole body ached terribly. I started upwards when my forehead cracked against something hard. I fell onto my back, the pain rolling through me in waves. My arm met my forehead, rubbing the pain away. I felt around me. I was enclosed in something small. The room around me was minuscule at best. My hand drifted towards my pocket, retrieving my phone. I clicked the flashlight button. In an instant the horror around me came to life. Surrounding me, 4 wood walls. “No, oh no.” I silently cried. The realization set in. I stuffed my panic down as I ran through my options. My eyes slid over to a small carving about waist level. “Not first.” A faint memory drifted into my mind, the feeling of being choked by dirt distant and tucked away somewhere in my brain. I scanned the walls of the coffin. There were carvings everywhere. The smooth finished walls of the coffin tainted by man. The carvings all had small 2 to 3 word phrases, don’t wait, “L pkct, not first, danger outside, climb fast, oxygen gone, 362, the man above.” Slowly memories flooded back to me like old dreams. Distance scenarios, Déjà vu like memories. I felt in my left pocket, my sweaty fingers meeting the pocket knife. I began carving at the lid of the coffin, eventually weakening it enough to break it. I shoved the dirt towards my feet loading up the bottom of the coffin. As the dirt pile began moving towards my waist I swung up into the dirt pile. I shuffled side to side while pushing more dirt down into the coffin. My head broke the surface of the dirt. I crawled out of the soil and rolled out onto the ground. I breathed deeply taking in the fresh air. My eyes opened after my orgasmic enjoyment of the air. Four white walls surrounded me. A bright, hospital-like, light shone down on me. A large metal door sat tucked in the corner of the room. I stood and walked towards it leaving the dirt hole I was birthed from. The handle fit coldly into my palm. I twisted it slowly, it spun gently. The door opened freely. I entered the small dark hallway. I examined every inch of what I could. The light from the room barely penetrated the hall. The only thing my sense picked up was a wet breathing coming from the other end. I strained my eyes. The outline of something stood at the other end. Its shoulders rose and fell with every wet breath it took. I slowly backed away. In an instant it began sprinting down the hall. I slammed the door shut and held the knob. The door violently slammed against me. Whatever was on the other side was much stronger. The knob twisted away from my hand as the door launched open, sending me flying back onto my face. My hands swiftly met the ground as I tried to push myself up. I rose to my knees afraid to turn around. The wet breathing was loud in my ear. I turned slightly to see a smiling mouth. I closed my eyes as I felt the hands slowly squeeze my shoulders, and kept them shut as the hot breath engulfed the top of my head. I kept them closed as the sharp teeth punctured my forehead. The blood trickled down my face, the breath drying out my eyes. The teeth tore away at me before I slipped away from consciousness.

My dry eyes cracked open. It was so dark I couldn’t even see the tip of my nose. My hot breath bounced back at me from a not so distant wall. My whole body ached terribly, but not as bad as my head. My head felt like it was being ripped in half. I rubbed my head lightly, each rub bringing back each second of being torn apart. My hand found my phone with ease. The flashlight lit up my coffin. A single carving stared back at me from the lid. “1,207 don’t open the door. Don’t let it eat your brain.”

Hello,

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My Partners Perspective

“Hello, welcome to Pizza Palace. How can I help you?"

I shoved as much fake hospitality into my voice as I could manage, but eight straight hours of serving barely mediocre pizza to asshole customers, with nothing but the constant drone of fluorescent lights and the occasional flicker overhead for company, has a way of killing your ability to pretend you're happy to be there. 

The dad across the counter from me looked like he was about to collapse, eye bags stretched halfway across his face, two raucous little kids chasing each other around the lone table in our tiny excuse for a dining room behind him.

“Can I have two large cheeses, a medium pepperoni, and a large chef's salad, please”

He read the list off a text message, his voice as flat and exhausted as mine was. He paid in cash, let me keep the change, and turned around to wrangle his kids as I ducked around the corner to give the order to Angi.

“Girl, if I have to welcome one more person to the Pizza Palace, I’m gonna throw up,” I said, handing her the order. “By the way, did he text me back yet?”

Angi looked up from spreading sauce across a pizza crust. She'd confiscated my phone an hour ago after catching me typing out what would've been my fourth ‘just checking in’ text to Dave. 

“Oh my god, you need to get over him. He's not gonna get back together with you, plus he was a douchebag anyway; you’re better off without him.”

She was right, of course.

Dave was a cheating douchebag.

Unfortunately, knowing that and actually getting over him turned out to be two completely different things.

Angi slid the pizza into the oven and haphazardly wiped her hands on the front of her apron.

“Oh, speaking of things you need to get over, there's a huge estate sale tomorrow morning right outside of town. You're off work, right?” 

I glanced at her sideways. “What does that have to do with Dave?”

“Just something to take your mind off things’

“With an estate sale?”

“Not just any estate sale.” She lowered her voice like she was telling a campfire story, despite the fact that the only other person in the kitchen was the dishwasher who had been listening to the same radio station for six hours and couldn't have cared less. “ You know that psychic lady who lived on Stenton Lane?”

I scrunched my face, searching my memory.

“The one who does free tarot card readings at the solstice festival every year?” 

“That's the one.” 

I snorted in disbelief. “You're telling me Elesandra died?”

“Yeah, just last week. I mean she was ninety-something years old; it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah. Anyway, her daughter is throwing an estate sale at her house tomorrow. I thought it would be fun to go. Find some magical wand to get rid of your heartbreak.” She giggled and threw her hands up, wiggling them like she was casting a spell. 

I rested my head on the takeout deck.  “You know I don't really believe in that stuff, Ange”

Angi shrugged. “I heard she's got all kinds of weird stuff. Crystal balls, old spell books, tarot decks, candles, magic jewelry, whatever the hell psychics keep around their house.”

“Love potions, perhaps?” I asked sarcastically. 

“Oh absolutely, but I would never let you buy one.” 

I laughed.

“I'm serious, we should go. It'll be fun.”

“Why?”

“Because you're pathetic. I can't stand to see you mope around anymore. And… if there is a love potion of some kind, maybe we can buy it.”

I gave her a light smirk. “Oh? And who for?”

She thought about it for a moment. “Dave's hot dad?”

I laughed despite myself and threw my rag at her. “What time?”

“Doors open at 9 am! I'll pick you up?”

“It's a date!” I shouted over my shoulder as I made my way back to the front counter to take another order.

For the first time since the breakup, I was actually looking forward to tomorrow.

I woke up the next day to the sound of Angi’s horn blaring outside my apartment. I rolled over and checked the clock. 8:30. Shit!. I called her and tripped over apology after apology while I frantically threw clothes on and bolted out the door.

I spotted her little red Subaru idling along the side of the road, its windshield washed in the pale gold of the morning sun. Her faded dreamcatcher hung from the rearview mirror, its feathers stirring gently from the air conditioner. I ran to her car, still pulling up my jeans, opened the passenger-side door, and climbed inside.

I saw her little red Subaru idling on the side of the road, dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror, and climbed in.

“What part of ‘I’ll be there at 8:30 tomorrow morning’ is so challenging for you to understand?” Angi teased

“Actually, you never gave me a time to be ready, so….” I shot back sarcastically.

We exchanged small talk on the drive out of town, and I watched absentmindedly as the sidewalks gave way to trees and the side streets grew fewer and farther between. The typical sprawling suburban landscape sank behind us as we meandered through the back roads. The only sign of civilization beyond the power lines was the occasional homestead. The lots grew larger and larger as we headed further away from downtown.

Eventually, the house came into view. If you had told me old lady Elesandra died a decade ago rather than a week ago, I would have believed you. The place looked abandoned; the faded and cracked siding was overgrown with dead, rotted vines, and the porch sagged in the middle like a worn-out mattress. One of the posts had cracked and was ‘fixed’ by a sloppily nailed two-by-four.

As we walked up the driveway, I noticed that even though we were late, there was only one other car in the driveway. An old, beat-up pickup truck with a middle-aged man sitting in the driver's seat, staring blankly out the front windshield, clearly not the typical demographic for an estate sale.

I was about to comment how lucky we were that we had made it before the crowd, but right then at least seven more cars had pulled up in unison. 

“We better get in there fast before all the resellers get their hands on that love potion,” Angie commented, skipping up the drive faster now. 

We were one of the first ones inside, only beaten by the strange man we saw earlier. He seemed frantic, rummaging through bins with reckless abandon. If there was something specific he was looking for, it would have taken hours. The place was a mess of old eccentric clothes and spiritual paraphernalia.

Dozens of bins and folding tables were spread out through the house; it looked like one of those hoarder shows you see on shitty daytime television. It smelled like old sage, cheap perfume, and cheaper cigarettes. Angi was having the time of her life, ooing and awwing at tarot cards and apparently rare crystals, but nothing really caught my attention.

I meandered through the house, absentmindedly leafing through racks of musty clothes and tables of aging books and psychic accessories. Angi was focused on a table covered in protective charms, aging Ouija boards, and strange jars filled with I-don’t-know-whats; occasionally shouting at me across the house about her latest find.

I wandered into a back room and found a table covered from end to end in stunning jewelry. The aging silver and gold shimmered in the early morning sunlight as it crept through the window, begging me to take a look. Rings, bracelets, and necklaces from decades past, all simply beautiful.

And there, on the end of the table, was the most incredible piece. A large gemstone pendant; the deep, wine colored ruby seated gently against sterling silver. Unlike everything else in the house, this looked brand new. It was polished and shining, seemingly immune to the passage of time. I had to have it.

I slipped it over my head and let the heavy crystal rest gently against my chest. I didn't bother to check the price tag as I walked to the checkout table. It didn't matter how much it cost. I needed it. More than anything before in my entire life, I needed it.

“That’ll be one hundred thirty-five dollars,” Elesandra’s daughter huffed. I started to reach for my card, but she cut me off. “Ah- it's cash only. Sorry, miss.”

I wanted to scream. I needed to have it. I didn’t have the money on me, but I would sooner die than leave empty-handed. I tried to maintain my composure as I looked for Angi. I passed by the strange man during my search. He was staring at me with noticeable intensity, and it left me on edge.

I finally found Angi and immediately started to beg her “Angi please, you don't understand, its like it calls to me, i need it so bad, isn’t it gorgeous, please, please help me pay for it, please, I just need a few bucks, you know I’m good for it Angi, please, I need it” I exploded my frantic, desperate pleas onto her. She said no. She said she didn’t have any money left over after buying her things; I believed her and her many heavy bags, but it did nothing to quell my craving. I would simply have to steal it.

I had never stolen anything before, especially not from a sweet old lady whose mom just died. But this was different. She didn’t deserve the pendant. I did. I had a right to it. If anything, she was stealing it from me. I walked into the secluded back room I found it in, and slipped it off my neck and into my purse. 

As I looked at it there, I began to doubt how good of an idea this was. Did I really need it that badly that I was willing to steal from a woman who just lost her mother? I paused for a long moment and stared at the pendant, the large gem somehow still shimmering back at me, beckoning me. It really was beautiful, but I knew I couldn't just take it. I decided I would put it back, go to an atm, and hope it was still there when I returned. Just as I reached into my purse to place it back on the table, someone walked in behind me. I snapped my purse shut and hurried out of the room, desperately trying to avoid eye contact.

I rushed to find Angi; critical thought had given way to gut instinct, and all I cared about was getting out of there. I rounded the corner and saw her standing by the door. I shot her a glance that said, “We need to go now.” Just then, the strange man from before stopped me.

“Where is it?” He barked, just short of yelling at me

“What?” I replied

“The pendant, the necklace you were wearing earlier. I saw you wearing it, the one with the big red gemstone. Where is it?”

I nearly choked. Why was he asking me about the pendant? Had he seen me put it in my purse? I barely managed to sputter out, “Oh, I went and put it back, sorry.” I gestured to the room behind me, and he shoved past to look.

I grabbed Angi and dragged her out to the car. Once again, my encounter with the man had left me on edge. I  I had to get out of there before he could find me again, and before anyone noticed the missing pendant.

I waited until we got down the road a ways before opening my purse again. Looking down at the pendant, I felt guilt wash over me. I really had just stolen. From a sweet old lady. Whose mom just died.

I pulled the pendant out from my purse and held it up to the sun. It really was beautiful. I slipped it over my head again, and as the cool silver rested against my chest, I felt the guilt fade away. This was the right decision.

Angi looked over at me and nearly crashed the car when she saw the pendant around my neck.

“OH MY GOD, IVORY, DID YOU FUCKING STEAL IT!?” she screamed

“YEAH, I DID,” I screamed back. “YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, OK? I HAD TO HAVE IT, I KNOW THAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE MINE! IT WAS JUST TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LEAVE THERE!”

“Ivory…” Angi sighed. “When I said you needed to do something to get over Dave, I didn’t mean this…”

“Who the hell cares about Dave, Angie? That lying bastard has nothing to do with this. You don't get it. This pendant is special. There's something about it, something that calls to me. I just… I had to have it, ok?”

Angi didn’t  talk to me for the rest of the  ride. I could tell she was upset with me. I wanted to make it right, but I didn't know how. Maybe if she tried on the pendant she would understand; maybe she could experience its true beauty.

After stealing the pendant, I started to wear it all the time. To work, the grocery store – the bank. Wherever I went, it went with me. I even wore it on a few rebound dates, but nothing ever came of those. It became like a safety blanket for me; I felt naked without it. I even started sleeping with it on.

I had the pendant for about two weeks at the time when the strange man from the estate sale showed up at Pizza Palace. When I saw him walking in I was overcome with anxiety. I slipped the pendant under my shirt and ducked  into the kitchen. Something about him screamed that he could not be trusted.

I was working with Matt that night, I think Angi had been avoiding me and must have requested to not be scheduled with me. When I asked Matt, he said I was being silly and that she was probably just taking some “mental health days.” I responded with maybe so and then asked him to take the order of the guy at the front so I could “use the bathroom.”  for me. I watched from the small window in the half wall between the check-out counter and the kitchen as he ordered his food. He tried his best to act innocent, play it off like some kind of coincidence, but his eyes kept shooting glances past Matt  to  me. I didn’t know what he wanted, or how he found out where I worked, but I knew this creep was after me.

After that day I started seeing him all over the place. I would go to my favorite coffee shop, , and he would be there. I would pass him and his dusty old truck on the road. The gas station, the grocery store, the movies, he was almost always there. I swear I even saw him outside my place one night, just idling on the side of the road.

I think hes fucking with me somehow, like some kind of witchcraft or something. That night he was outside of my house. I had the weirdest nightmare. I was wearing the pendant, like normal, but it felt different. I was strangely aware of it’s weight as it hung around my neck. My whole body felt foreign to me, like something else was controlling it and I was an invader in my own skin. I felt myself get out of bed and walk over to the window in off-beat, shambling steps. His truck was there, just like it was when I went to bed, but where before was fear now sat searing hatred. I lurched through my house, bumping into door frames and riding my walls until eventually I found my kitchen. I watched, powerless, as I slowly grabbed a steak knife from the butcher block on my countertop, turned around, and threw myself at my front door. In that moment I knew what my body wanted. From deep within my bones screamed death. I was going to kill him. I wanted…to kill him. 

I threw the front door open and charged with alien athleticism. The sudden shock of November midnight tore me from the awful dream. Drenched and sweat and gasping for air—I shot up like a bolt before realizing where I was. I decided to lie back down to catch my breath. After several minutes  of convincing myself it was a dream, I got up to check my window. The truck was gone but I thought I saw something on my face in the reflection of the window. A draft wrapped around my ankles as I walked to the bathroom to take a closer look in the mirror. Creeping from my nose, across my face, and down to my chest, a meandering river of dried crimson flowed down to encircle the pendant.

As I washed the blood off my face I tried to figure out what could have possibly caused this. I've never had a  nose bleed, not even a minor one.  

I thought back to last night, head pounding as I tried to focus on the blurry memories. I remembered seeing the strange man outside before I fell asleep; I saw his mouth moving as he stared not at me but through me, a faint glow spilled from his mouth, and then I blacked out. He must have put some kind of curse on me, to make me fall asleep and then corrupt my dreams. That could explain the nose bleed, but why did it pool around the pendant like that? It must have been protecting me, but if the nightmare was that bad with its protection, how bad could it be without it. I determined from then on I would never, ever take the pendant off.

I walked into the kitchen to make myself coffee and call off work, but I couldn't shake that draft. My house was old, maybe even older than Elesandra’s, so the occasional draft wasn’t that uncommon. It was a fair trade for the cheap rent, in my eyes, but outside of snowstorms it was never this bad. I hung up the phone, it took some fake coughing but Pizza Palace granted me the day off, and I reached into my freezer drawer to grab a breakfast burrito. I tossed it in the microwave and set the timer for six and a half minutes, the box said to do five but I knew better. Sitting there watching my breakfast spin, and trying my best to ignore the chill, I noticed something in the foggy reflection of the microwave glass. My front door was wide open.

I kept having strange dreams. Those semi-lucid nightmares haunted me every night as I watched my body move entirely on its own. It would draw runes on the walls and floors using the blood dripping from my nose as ink, and then I would wake up. I had to be sleepwalking. There was no other explanation for why I felt so well-rested, yet the fresh runes painted on my walls proved I wasn't staying in bed.

  
I tried researching them. Normally I would ask Angie, she's an expert on this kind of stuff but she’s also not talking to me anymore; so I had to do it on my own. I searched through countless occult message boards and wikipedia pages on ancient religions and found nothing that looked similar to the runes. I even rented as many relevant library books as I could and still found nothing. I was sure they were protection runes because when I got close the pendant gave off a faint glow, but beyond that I had no idea.

Weeks went by and I was starting to break. I couldn’t sleep, I was barely eating, my body felt weak and heavy all the time, Angie wasn’t talking to me, Pizza Palace fired me. My life was falling apart, and it was all his fault. 

That disgusting, vile man. He must have cursed me, that's the only option. I saw him casting some kind of something that night and ever since my life has gone to shit. Every single night I’m plagued by those awful possessive dreams. I can feel the pendant aching, I think it's struggling to keep whatever curse he casted at bay. I know he's trying to take the pendant way from me– I won’t let him steal the only thing protecting me from him. . I’m certain he’s still following me; the next time I see him , I’m putting an end to this.

I keep seeing his tuck around town. Every time I pass by I want nothing more than to slam my car into his shabby old ford and then beat the living shit out of the man that steps out. I hate him. I hate him for stalking me. I hate him for destroying my life. Most importantly I hate him for trying to take my pendant. Every time I see him I want blood, but something tells me I need to wait. Wait until the time is right.

After weeks of hunting him, the perfect opportunity presented itself. I was watching his motel room. Cigarette smoke climbed out his window, past the cracking sickly-yellow wall, and out into the inky nighttime sky.

Across the road I sat waiting, the air was tense with opportunity; I watched as he  put out his cigarette, slipped his coat over his shoulders, and walked out the door of his room. The time was now.

He stepped out into the parking lot and I let the possession overtake my senses.  The fear that I felt upon its first nightly abductions was gone now, in its place was hunger.

He climbed into his truck and started the engine. Right as the door closed I felt my body erupt forward, joints snapping to impossible angles as I threw myself at him 

He began to back out of his parking space, slow and absentminded as I’d seen him do over and over. He was completely unaware of my presence as my body tore across the asphalt, unwavering.

I picked myself up from a gallop into a two-legged sprint as I came upon the truck. Dropping my shoulders and bracing for impact–he finally noticed me. His indifferent thousand yard stare melted into terror and I slammed myself into the driver side door.

The car door crunched and buckled under the weight of my fury; I felt my shoulder crack with it, and my arm fell limp. Glass rained down over me, leaving slivers of blood in their wake. I couldn't feel a thing. I reached in through the now open window with my still functioning hand and grabbed his  collar.

He was screaming now. The sharp smell of rust burned in my nostrils as I tried to pull him from the vehicle. I dragged half his body over the remains of the window before he really started to put up a fight. He moved like a desperate animal, arms and legs swiping wildly for anything to grab on to.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO ME!”

The voice bellowed from my mouth, but it wasn’t mine. It was a twisted perversion of my own voice; pitched down and folded over into itself thousands of times.

“I KNOW ITS YOUR DOING”

I gained another few inches in the fight dragging him, glass crunching and squelching under his weight. He had stopped screaming, but was growing more and more desperate.

With one final heave I ripped him from his seat . The sudden release left me tumbling to the ground. I heard the crack of his skull against the concrete several yards behind me, and clambered to my feet.

Somehow hehad gotten to his feet, but he was shaky and struggled to keep his balance. Blood dripped from the split on his forehead like a leaky crimson faucet. 

My arm had started to really ache now, a reminder of my humanity that pounded in sync with my rapid fire heartbeat. The blood was pouring from my nose again, and the slew of cuts that painted my body were growing angrier.

It would catch up with me soon, but I couldn’t give in now. I needed answers.

I willed myself forward, each step shot ropes of agony up my spine. I could see in his eyes he wanted nothing more than to run, but his body was  managing to stay upright and resolved.

I made my way to him. In the glow of the vacancy sign there seemed to be something else mixed with the terror in his eyes. Was it pity? I had beaten him within an inch of his life and he looked at me with pity?

I grabbed him by the throat, his eyes bulged and breath sputtered as I lifted him until he could barely touch the ground. He desperately scraped at my arms with what little fight he had left.

“Talk.”

The voice came again, less beastly now.

He choked out “Its… the pendant.. It -”

The cold asphalt violently cut him off as I threw him to the ground.

“THE PENDANT IS MINE”

Beastly again.

He scuttled away from me, struggling to find footing in the slick pool of our blood. He tried to stand but his knees buckled under him immediately.

“I DON’T WANT THE PENDANT!” He screamed, , “I don't want the fucking pendant, but thats whats doing this to you. Its not me I swear”

“YOU LIE, I’LL KILL YOU, I’LL KILL YOU RIGHT HERE DON'T FUCKING LIE TO ME”

“I swear…I’m not lying, the pendant… its cursed. It makes you paranoid, takes over your body and -”

“THE PENDANT ISN’T CURSED, YOU CURSED ME, I SAW YOU DO IT YOU BASTARD”

“I didn’t curse you, I promise. I’ve been trying to help you–”

“THE PENDANT HELPS ME, IT PROTECTS ME, IT IS ME”

“No, it doesn't. Please, please, you have to believe me. Just take the pendant off and I’ll show you.”

“NO! YOU JUST WANT IT FOR YOURSELF! THE PENDANT IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN KEEP ME SAFE, I WILL  NEVER TAKE IT OFF!”

I jumped on top of him, I was done with his lies. I pulled my fist back and let it fall. His body lurched in objection as I felt his rib crack. He was coughing up blood now. Again I pulled my fist back, this time I slammed it into his jaw. His head snapped over and he spat up a few teeth.

“I won't let you do this to me anymore.” I spat.

My fingers curled around his throat. I squeezed with all I had, but the blood loss was getting to me. His eyes began to fade as he fought to get me off of him, losing strength with every passing second. His sputtering and desperate silent whimpers grew weaker, and I knew it was almost over.

A sharp and thunderous crack shot through the silent parking lot. Then a second, and a third. I turned over to see the motel owner, rifle shouldered, lining up his sights. I threw the man out from under me and tried to run as best I could, but my body was giving out. The only thing keeping me going was the anger, the hunger, the curse.

“GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAND!””

His shout was followed by a fourth gunshot. This one connected. The bullet ripped through my leg and I collapsed immediately. The searing pain tore me from my newfound strength  in an instant. The dull ache of my broken shoulder turned into a scream, and the sharp sting from my cloak of lacerations became all too apparent.

As I came crashing to the earth I couldn’t help but scream. It sounded normal this time, my voice was mine again. I stayed conscious just enough to hear the blaring sirens down the road, and then I blacked out.

Next thing I remember, I was handcuffed to a hospital bed, waking up to a battered, slouched, sorry excuse for a man in a cowboy hat staring directly at me, cigarette lit in his mouth.

My Partners Perspective

The motel coffee tasted like burnt tires, the ice machine had been broken since I got here, and the neon VACANCY sign outside my room buzzed loud enough to rattle the window every few seconds. I caught myself glancing at it more than once, half expecting the thing to shower the parking lot in sparks.

The once presumably bright yellow paint of the motel walls had faded into a shade of old nicotine that started flaking off, leaving long cracks that exposed the aging brick. Rust bled from the second floor railing and creeped its way down to the foundation. The lot was a patchwork of original faded blacktop and newer fresh tar covering various cracks and pot holes. A few pickup trucks, a work van, and a faded blue sedan sat scattered between empty spaces, each wearing a layer of road dust.

I’ve stayed in worse places, I’ve definitely slept in better, but after a while they all blur together.

I stood beside my truck, my sad excuse for a coffee in hand, and reached into the passenger side window pulling out a worn manila envelope. Newspaper clippings threatened to slide free every time I opened it. Receipts, photographs, handwritten notes, names I'd crossed out months ago. Six years of work had fattened the file with the illusion of progress.

Six years.

Six years of pawn shops, antique stores, storage auctions, newspaper archives, and people who very confidently didn’t know what they were talking about.. Every lead ended the same way. Someone had sold it. Someone had inherited it. Someone had stolen it. Then the trail disappeared when their bodies were found, and I packed my bags for another town.

Just like the last several times, this time felt different. I reached into the envelope to pull out the same road map I'd been using all this time. It was covered in circles, arrows, notes scribbled in different colored ink from different points in my life. Every mark was another place I'd been too late.

I traced a finger to the newest circle.

Just down the road was my next lead. Another seemingly innocuous Nowheresville, with one grocery store, a gas station or two, a church, and a mom-and-pop pizza shop. I'd driven through hundreds of towns that looked just like this one– sun faded storefronts, quiet sidewalks, and enough history peeling off the buildings to fill a library. They are almost never as quiet and innocent as they seem.

I folded the map, tossed my empty coffee at the overflowing trash can on the sidewalk, watched it bounce off the piled up trash, and climbed into my truck.

I had an address. A psychic's house, according to the records. I wasn't surprised. I’d found her obituary in the paper while I was staying in the last town over. She'd been well known around there, apparently.

I figured if I could talk to one of her family members I could ask about the pendant. If they asked why I wanted to know, I’d tell them what I always did. That I was a collector, looking for that pendant for a long time. People were more willing to talk when they thought you were just another weirdo with too much money and a strange hobby.

The address took me to the far edge of town, where the houses began giving way to larger lots and longer stretches of unbroken road. The pavement narrowed, the sidewalks disappeared, and the lawns became less manicured with every turn. By the time I reached the end of the street, the houses were separated by enough trees that I could no longer see more than one or two at a time.

Her house sat at the end of a gravel drive, behind a fence sagging into the damp soil. A colonial-style home, once grand, left to rot as it aged — the siding gone from white to a weathered gray, the porch dipping in the middle. A cracked porch post had been braced by an old two-by-four, more scar than repair. Dead vines choked the front windows, their thick stems soft and brown, rotted through where they'd once climbed.

A rusted wind chime hung from the porch roof, swaying in a quiet rhythm.

I pulled the truck up the drive, tires crunching over stones that hadn't seen a rake in years, and killed the engine a good twenty feet short of the house. I sat for a second before getting out, looking at the house through the windshield. The place seemed to age by decades in the few seconds between the road and the end of the driveway.

Muscle memory grabbed the envelope from my passenger seat before conscious thought put it back. I needed to avoid making a scene as much as possible. I could already tell I was going to stand out, and lumbering in with a fistful of strange paperwork wasn’t going to do me any favors.

I climbed the porch steps carefully, tentatively pressing the dip in the middle with one foot before committing my full weight.. The rusted wind chime kept its rhythm above me, tinny and off-key.

I didn’t even bother testing the doorbell; the yellowed button hung from its socket by a rusted, fraying wire, the frame around it cracking with decades of dry rot. I reached out and knocked, gently, afraid that the door might crumble too.

There was nothing for a long moment. Then footsteps, slow ones, and the particular hesitation of someone checking a peephole. The door opened on a chain first. A woman's face appeared in the gap. She looked to be at least in her mid-sixties, silver hair pulled back into a tight bun; grieving eyes did a quick scan, head to boots, testing if I was friend or foe..

"Can I help you?"

"Sorry to bother you, ma'am. My name's—" I gave her the fake name I was using at the time, I can’t remember which one. "I read about your mother in the paper. I'm sorry for your loss.”

Her face sank. "You knew her?”

"No, ma'am. I never had the pleasure. But I've been looking for something for a long time now, and her name came up more than once while I was asking around. I'm hoping you might be able to help me, or at least point me toward someone who can.”

She didn't unhook the chain but moved closer to get a better look at me. "What kind of something?"

"A pendant. Old piece, silver, with a dark stone set in the center — I've heard it described a few different ways over the years, so I can't say for certain. I collect items with some history to them. This one's had a long road, and your mother's name kept surfacing as its last known owner.”

The woman's face changed. Not much — a tightening around the mouth, a stillness that hadn't been there a second before. It was the same look I'd learned to recognize in a dozen other doorways in a dozen other towns. The look of someone who knew exactly what I was talking about.

"Wait here," she said, and shut the door.

She came back a minute later, not with the pendant but with a flyer, handing it over uninterested. "Estate sale," she said. "Tomorrow morning. We're clearing the house out. Mom had forty years of things in here, and none of us have the patience to sort through it piece by piece anymore. Easier to just sell it all off.”

I took the flyer. Cheap printer paper, a little smudged, the kind you run off a hundred copies of at the library and staple to telephone poles.

A grainy photo grid took up most of the page, each square capturing another corner of the house: stacks of mismatched furniture wedged into narrow rooms, cabinets overflowing with cloudy glass bottles and chipped crystal balls, shelves crowded with tarot decks, bundles of dried herbs, tarnished pendulums, and little jars filled with things I couldn't quite identify. There were boxes of costume jewelry tangled together with strings of beads and protective charms, old Ouija boards with their corners worn smooth, bundles of sage gone gray with age, and framed photographs of people I didn't recognize, their faces half-obscured by dust and the poor quality of the pictures. Even the dresser drawers appeared to have been emptied onto the floor, spilling necklaces, polished stones, feathers, bones, candles, and handwritten scraps covered in cramped, faded symbols.

And there, in the bottom corner of the jewelry photo, small enough that I might've missed it if I hadn't spent six years training my eyes to find it: a dark stone set in tarnished silver, catching just enough light to throw a glare across the picture.

I kept my face unfazed.

"Everything's priced and laid out by nine am," she said, glancing back over her shoulder into the house, half her attention already gone from me. "Cash only. If it's on the table, it's for sale.”

"Appreciate it, ma'am," I said, tilting my hat down to her.

"Mm." She grunted, already closing the door. "See you tomorrow, young man." Followed by the door latching shut behind her.

I stood on the porch a moment, looking down at the flyer. An unfathomable darkness thrown into a jewelry box on a folding table next to teacups and tarot cards.

I folded the flyer along its crease and walked back down the porch steps, past the dead vines and the crooked two-by-four. Nine o'clock tomorrow. Cash only. I'd be there at eight.

I was there at eight. The people running the sale were already moving around inside, but there was no reason to draw attention to myself before the doors opened. I sat in the truck and watched.

A woman carried a box of old books through the front door. Another man hauled a Tiffany-style lamp out to the porch. At eight forty-five, another car pulled into the driveway. Then another. By nine, the place had become a slow-moving stream of people carrying coffee cups and reusable shopping bags, already talking about what they hoped to find. A few of them had the practiced eyes of resellers, scanning tables before they had even stepped through the door.

I waited until the first rush had started. Then I went inside. The smell hit me first. Dust, old fabric, incense, something floral and stale beneath it all. The air felt thick with decades of smoke and perfume. Every available surface had been covered with something. Candles burned down to their metal cups. Dried herbs hung from bundles tied with twine. Shelves bowed beneath books with cracked spines and titles I'd seen before in occult shops, antique stores, and the private collections of people who knew just enough to get themselves into trouble.

I kept walking. I had learned a long time ago not to look too interested in anything. The fastest way to get noticed at an estate sale was to stare at one particular object for too long.

So I looked at everything. I picked up a brass pendulum, turned it over, and put it down. I thumbed through a box of photographs. Then I found the jewelry room. My stomach tightened.

The photograph hadn't done it justice. There were tables everywhere, covered in rings, bracelets, watches, brooches, necklaces, loose stones, and little velvet boxes. Some pieces had been arranged carefully. Others had been dumped together in piles, tangled chains wrapped around themselves until they looked almost organic.

I moved slowly along the first table, nothing.

Second table, nothing.

Third, nothing.

I reached the end and turned toward another folding table when I saw it.

The silver setting was unmistakable.

The stone sat in the center, deep and dark, red only when the light caught it at the right angle. Six years, I had spent six years looking at that shape.

I reached toward it when a woman stepped between me and the table.

I pulled my hand back, she must not have noticed me. She was younger than most of the people wandering through the house, maybe late twenties. Blonde hair, casual clothes, the distracted expression of someone browsing without any particular thing in mind. She looked at the jewelry, then at the pendant,

and stopped.

I knew that look.

Her hand hovered over the pendant for a second before she picked it up.

My chest tightened and I took a step forward. My mouth opened but nothing came out. I have to say something, anything!

Don't touch that.

Put it down.

I'll buy it.

I'll give you ten times what they're asking.

Instead, I froze.

Her fingers closed around the pendant. My heart kicked hard enough to hurt. She turned it over once, studying the silver, then smiled to herself. I watched the chain rise, as she lifted it over her head. The pendant disappearing beneath her hair for a second before settling against her chest. Her expression changed, the muscles in her face calmed and her shoulders relaxed.

Her fingertips came up and rested against the stone.

I took another step forward but it was too late. She was already making her way to the front table to pay by the time I snapped out of it.

I followed, keeping my distance, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do. I couldn't just grab it from her, not here, not with everyone watching.

I watched her as she showed it to the psychic's daughter. Then she told her the price, one hundred and thirty-five dollars. She reached for her card when she was told “cash only.”

I almost laughed. Because maybe, for once, something had gone right.

She looked defeated, looking down at it in her hands, like she was owed it and not buying it. She turned around, panicked, and made her way back through the house, by my guess, looking for her friend.

I watched her find her friend and start begging for her help. I couldn't hear everything, but I heard enough.

“Please.”

“I need it.”

“Please, Angi.”

Her friend refused. In that moment, I saw her face turn into some sort of resolved expression rather than sadness or anger. She then turned on her heels and made her way back to the jewelry room.

She walked away, and I followed. I stopped outside the doorway and watched through the narrow gap between the door frame and the hinges.

She looked around, slipped the pendant off, and shoved it into her purse.

My stomach dropped. Was she really going to try and steal it? I hadn't spoken to her once, but she didn't seem like the kind of girl to steal anything, let alone a dead lady's stuff. I asked myself for a second… Was the pendant already working itself on her?

I stepped forward, but someone came down the hallway and I pulled back. By the time I looked up again, she was gone.

I immediately wandered around in a hurried panic, trying to spot her again when I found her at the front door with her friend.

I stepped right up to them. “Where is it?” I barked.

She looked at me wide-eyed, trying to act confused. “What?”

“The pendant, the necklace you were wearing earlier. I saw you wearing it, the one with the big red gemstone. Where is it?”

Her face went white. For half a second she just stared at me, searching my eyes for a reason as to why I cared.

Then she stammered, “Oh, I went and put it back, sorry.”

She gestured toward the jewelry room.

And yet again, I didn't say a damn thing.

I stood there for a moment, staring at the doorway she'd disappeared through. Six years of chasing that fucking thing across half the country, six years of being too late, and when I finally had it within arm's reach, I had let some girl walk out the front door with it.

I pushed through the crowd and stepped outside but her car was already pulling away. I watched the red taillights disappear down the road, knuckles turning white at my sides. I could have stopped her. But what the hell was I supposed to do? Accuse a woman of stealing a cursed pendant in the middle of an estate sale? Rip open her purse and explain that the piece of jewelry she'd just decided she couldn't live without had a history of leaving dead bodies behind? She wouldn't have believed me. I barely believed it myself when I started looking into it.

I climbed into my truck and slammed the door on my finger. “Fuck!” I grunted through gritted teeth. For a few seconds, I just sat there holding onto my limp finger and desperately searching for a plan.

I pulled my map from the passenger seat and found the circle I'd drawn around this town and stared at it. The pendant had found another bearer and judging by the way she'd looked at it, it had already started working on her.

I started the truck. I wasn't leaving this town anytime soon. She had to live around here and I needed to find her before she became a lost cause.

I knew roughly how old she was, which narrowed things down considerably. Late twenties, early thirties at the oldest. She'd been young enough that I doubted she'd been out of high school for more than a decade.

So, I went to the local library. The librarian barely looked up from her computer when I asked if they kept old yearbooks. Thankfully, they did.

I spent the better part of the afternoon sitting at a table in the back, flipping through them one year at a time. I started with the oldest she could reasonably have been in and worked my way forward, scanning hundreds of faces until my eyes began to ache, and my head was pounding.

Then I found her. The same blonde hair, although it had been shorter then, a little younger, obviously, but there was no mistaking her. Her name was in bold font, centered underneath her picture. Ivory Perkins. I quickly took my phone out, took a picture of the page, and wrote her name down on my notes.

It turned out to be almost useless.

I searched the public records I could access; I checked old newspaper articles, local directories, anything that might give me an address or a current employer. I found nothing.

So for five days I walked around town. I started my search at the only coffee shop they had. If I learned anything about women it's that they definitely frequent their local coffee shops. I checked the grocery store and the little boutiques and antique stores along their Main Street. I checked their gas station, half because I needed more cigarettes. I even stopped into a couple places where I had absolutely no reason to believe she worked, simply because I'd run out of places to look.

I showed her picture when I could.

“Have you seen her?”

Most of the time all I got was a shrug. By Friday, I was getting sick of hearing myself ask the same question. “Do you recognize this girl? She's my niece, Ivory Perkins. I haven't heard from her in a couple days and I'm worried about her.”

No.

Maybe.

I don't know.

Sorry.

The last time I asked someone it was a cashier at the post office. She looked at me like I was a serial killer and told me to “-ask the police if I was that concerned.”

I couldn't blame her considering how I must have looked. Five days without sleep had left me with bloodshot eyes, a face covered in uneven stubble, and the general appearance of a man who had recently crawled out of a ditch. My black clothes were wrinkled, my cowboy hat was pulled low over my eyes, and the stale smell of menthol cigarette smoke had practically become a second skin.

I decided that I needed a break when I nearly fell asleep behind the wheel and a cop pulled me over for swerving. At least for a couple days; I'd spent nearly a week chasing a woman who, as far as I knew, had no idea what she'd gotten herself into and left the state. Every lead had turned into a dead end, every conversation ended with someone looking at me like I was insane, and I was beginning to suspect I was starting to look the part.

I needed sleep and food, preferably food that didn't come wrapped in plastic and tasted like a motel microwave. I figured I'd get a pizza, grab a six-pack, and spend the weekend doing absolutely nothing. Maybe I'd find a hiking trail somewhere outside town. Get some fresh air. Remind myself that there was a world beyond this damn pendant. I remembered that there was one pizza restaurant called Pizza Palace in town so I headed that way.

I parked, climbed out, and walked inside. A little bell chimed above the door.

“Hello, welcome to Pizza Palace. How can I—”

Then the voice quickly stopped.

I looked up, and there she was. The one place I hadn't checked yet.

Ivory.

Her eyes met mine and recognition flashed across her face before she ducked behind the counter. Slowly, I reached up and adjusted the brim of my hat.

“Shit,” I muttered. So much for my weekend off.

I looked toward the counter. And Ivory, who had just been standing there, was gone, though I could see the top of her blonde head visibly behind the half wall separating the register from the kitchen.

I almost laughed. She was hiding from me.

I walked toward the counter slowly, trying not to make a scene. The place was nearly empty, save for a tired-looking Mom wrangling three kids at one of the tables and a dishwasher somewhere in the back, judging by the muffled clatter of dishes.

I leaned against the counter when a young man stepped out from the kitchen. “Hey, welcome to Pizza Palace. What can I get you?”

I glanced toward the kitchen. “I'll take a large pepperoni.”

“Anything to drink?”

“Beer, whatever's cheap.”

He hesitated. “Uh, we don't sell beer.”

I sighed. “Right. Of course you don't.”

I reached into my pocket for my wallet. “Just the pizza then.”

He punched the order into the register. “Name?”

I gave him the name I'd been using.

He nodded and handed me a receipt.

“Twenty minutes.”

I took it and found a table with a clear view of the kitchen and sat down. A few seconds later, I saw her. She peeked through the little window in the half wall, just enough for me to catch one eye. The moment we made eye contact, she disappeared again. I rubbed my hands over my face. She was scared of me and I couldn't blame her.

From her perspective, some strange man had followed her around an estate sale, practically accused her in front of everyone that she stole something, and then just so happened to walk right into where she worked. Not to mention the fact that someone may have told her I was asking around about her, claiming that I was her “uncle.” In hindsight, I should have thought about that idea a little more than I did. I had to admit, when you put it that way, I didn't exactly sound innocent. But I didn't have the luxury of explaining myself yet.

The pendant was under her shirt. I could see the faint outline of the chain against her neck whenever she moved.

I sat back in the booth and lit a cigarette, ignoring the sign taped to the window telling me not to.

Ivory was still behind the counter glancing at me every couple of minutes. After a while, she didn't duck. She just watched me and I watched her back.

I took a slow drag from my cigarette and threw it on the ground before smashing it with the heel of my boot.

I got the pizza, thanked the kid behind the counter, and made a point of leaving through the front door without looking back at Ivory. I climbed into my truck, started the engine, and pulled away from the restaurant as casually as I could manage.

I passed on the motel. ​Instead, I cut down a narrow alley behind the strip mall, and pulled into a spot beneath the low canopy of an oak tree. From here, the gap between the buildings offered a clear shot of the Pizza Palace lot while keeping the truck swallowed in shadow.

I killed the engine. The pizza was already losing its heat, but I tore into it like a wild beast. I quickly checked my phone: closing time was forty-five minutes out. Perfect. I leaned the bench seat back, pulled my hat over my eyes, and set an alarm.

​The vibration against my thigh snapped me awake. My neck was stiff, my mouth tasted like a kitchen sink, and the pizza box was on the floorboard. I checked the time–thirty minutes past close. ​I bolted upright and scanned the lot through the windshield.

I was right on time. ​Ivory stepped out of the shop, tugging her jacket tight around her waist. She crossed the lot, unlocked her sedan, and rolled out onto the main drag. I let her get a full block ahead, waiting until she hit the red light before I turned my key. I kept three cars between us as the town bled into backroads. Getting burned wasn't on the agenda. I just needed an address—and to see if she had started lurking yet.

​She turned off into a quiet subdivision and pulled into the driveway of a low-slung ranch house. I coasted past, killing my lights before cutting the ignition four doors down. ​A moment later, a warm yellow glow cut through her living room blinds. Her silhouette moved across the glass, disappearing, reappearing, drifting like a ghost through her own home.

​The light killed, then reignited in the kitchen. She stood in the pale glare of an open fridge, poured a glass of water, and downed it. Then darkness again.

​Finally, the corner bedroom lit up.

​Through the sheer curtains, her outline moved with quiet routine—opening a drawer, unbuttoning her coat, fading below the window frame as she climbed onto her bed and cut the bedside lamp off.

​I reached out, clicked the radio to a low hum, and settled in for the night.

“Hotel California” hummed low from the dash, a small mercy keeping the quiet of the night from getting too heavy. I pulled out my menthols, smacking it against the steering wheel before putting a fresh cigarette to my lips and lighting it. I must have fallen asleep at some point; when I came to “Hotel California” was playing again but it had started from the beginning. The station had already gone through a full cycle.

I rubbed sleep from my eyes and was shocked to find my cigarette had been cleanly put out on my ash tray.

When I had finally looked up at the house Ivory had been standing at her window, face smashed up against the glass like she was trying to will her way through it. And her eyes…they were staring directly at me.

My shoulder slammed into the door frame as I jolted upright. "What the fuck."

​She didn't move at all, she didn't blink, I couldn't even see her breathing. Where there should have been a hint of fog on her window, there was instead a long strip of saliva. She was just a pale shape behind the pane, pinned in place like a moth on a board.

My hand fumbled wildly on the center console, fingers finally wrapping around the heavy steel casing of my flashlight. I dragged it up, clicked the switch, and jammed the beam straight through my windshield. It worked its way across the lawn and straight into her window.

The harsh white light caught her face. “Come on,” I muttered, my pulse hammering in my ears. “Wake up.”

I twitched the beam, angling it sharp into her eyes. “Ivory, damn it, snap out of it!”

Her neck snapped back upright, and then she didn't step back– she simply dropped. She vanished beneath the window sill as if the floor had opened up and swallowed her.

“Shit.”

I leaned over the wheel, sweeping the flashlight around the window to see if I could get a better look, but I couldn't see a fucking thing.

I put my hand on the gearshift to put my truck into reverse, but right as I did, her front door burst open from the frame, cracking against the exterior wall like a gunshot.

She erupted onto the porch on all fours, her limbs working impossibly fast at impossible angles. The moonlight caught a dull flash of steel gripped tight into her fist as she hit the lawn. Tearing across the grass towards my bumper with a wet, raspy wheeze echoing in her throat.

I scrambled frantically for my safe's lock under the passengers dash, panic locking my lungs.

Ten feet from the truck, her body violently rebelled. It was as if an invisible cable snatched her backward. Her legs buckled with a sickening snap of fabric and tendon, hitting the grass hard. The knife flew from her fingers, thudding into the dirt.

I froze, my pointer finger glued around my only safety. She lay crumpled in the damp grass, completely motionless.

Then one finger twitched. Slowly, excruciatingly, she pushed herself up. She looked wildly confused as to how she had ended up outside as she made her way back to her porch. As she stepped under the yellow porch light, the harshness of it caught her face.

A thick, dark stream of blood was pouring from her nostrils, painted heavily over her top lip, pooling in the dip of her chin, and soaking her skin around the pendant on her sternum.

She stepped inside and the door clicked shut behind her. She didn't even notice me.

The lurking had begun. I put the truck into reverse and took off.

After that night– I knew the countdown had officially started. Lurking. That's what I had started calling it…years ago. Once the pendant forces its host into that active trance state, it’s a death sentence. The stone acts like a parasite, flooding the host with adrenaline and paranoia while systematically destroying their body and sanity from the inside out. The point is, once the lurking starts they don't survive.

For the next few days, I tried to shadow her from a distance, but every time I caught a glimpse of her, my stomach dropped.

Was she even aware of how much her body had changed, how her eyes had sunken in, and how there was now a permanent blush colored stain beneath her nose? She was rotting away right in front of my eyes. Sitting in my truck blocks away from her house or watching her through the window at the pizza shop, I watched her transform into a shell. Every few seconds, her hand would reach upward to clutch the dark stone hidden in her shirt. A few days in, I noticed her leaving the shop in tears, her name tag no longer on her worksheet.

​I spent my nights trapped in my motel room under the buzz of the neon sign, drowning in six years of my own scribblings. Newspaper clippings, police records, translated occult texts—I tore through every page of that manila envelope, hunting for a miracle.

​Every past case file offered the same gruesome answer: you don't. And I already knew this, but I tried desperately to find another answer. Every time it’s the same, the host's paranoia escalates until they murder someone, or until their body simply gives out under the strain.

By Friday night, I was out of options and out of time. I knew I couldn't keep watching her die from afar. I was going to drive to her house that night, break the door down if I had to, and drag her away from that stone before it dragged her into hell with it.

​I pulled my coat over my shoulders, put out my menthol, and stepped out into the cold night air.

​I never even saw her coming.

​I climbed into my truck, slammed the driver’s door, and turned the key. The engine turned over with its usual guttural growl. I threw the truck in reverse, glance floating lazily to the rearview mirror as I began to back out—

​A shadow exploded out of the dark.

Before my brain could process the shape, something heavy and fast slammed into the driver-side door with the force of a wrecking ball. Steel buckled inward, punching straight into my ribs.

Glass shattered across my lap as she tore through the ruined window frame, her fingers locking around my collar with horrifying, ungodly force.

​I lashed out wildly, kicking at the dashboard, grabbing for the steering wheel, the headrest, my safe, anything. Jagged glass and sheared metal tore through my coat, biting deep into my stomach and chest. Glass crunched and squelched under my weight as she gained another few inches, pulling half my body out over the jagged door frame.

​"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO ME!”

​The voice roared from her throat, but it didn't belong to the girl from the estate sale. It was monstrous and vile.

​"I KNOW IT'S YOUR DOING!"

The sheer horror of her voice cut the screams right out of my throat. Glass crunched and ground beneath my back as she gained more leverage, hauling my upper body straight through the window frame.

​With one last violent heave, she ripped me clean out of my truck.

​I went airborne and smashed head first onto the asphalt. My forehead cracked hard against the concrete, sending a white-hot flash of light across my eyes and filling my mouth with the hot, metallic taste of blood.

​Through sheer adrenaline, I pushed myself up. My legs were rubber, my vision swimming as I tried to hold my balance, blood running down from a deep split on my forehead.

​I forced myself to stand my ground, every instinct in my body screaming at me to run. I looked across the pavement at her as she clambered up. She was a ruin of her previous self. Yet underneath the horror of what she was doing to me, a sickening wave of pity washed over the terror in my chest. She was being chewed up and spit out…and had no idea.

​Ivory dragged herself toward me with agonizing, galumphing, steps.

Before I could raise my hands in submission, her good arm snapped forward. Her fingers clamped down on my windpipe like a vice, shutting off my air intake instantly. My eyes bulged as she lifted me, my boots barely scraping the asphalt while I clawed uselessly at her wrist.

​"Talk," she rasped. The monster in her voice had dropped, leaving behind something flat and dead.

​"It's... the pendant..." I choked out, my fingers continuing to scrape at her arm as my lungs burned. "It—"

​She didn't let me finish. She drove me downward, slamming my spine hard back into the asphalt.

​"THE PENDANT IS MINE!" the monster in her voice roared through her again.

​I scrambled backward on my hands and knees, my boots slicking in a puddle of blood on the pavement. My legs gave out, pinning me to the ground.

​"I DON'T WANT THE PENDANT!" I yelled, my voice cracking in pure panic and frustration. "I don't want the fucking pendant, but that's what's doing this to you! It's not me, I swear!"

​"YOU LIE! I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL KILL YOU RIGHT HERE, DON'T FUCKING LIE TO ME!"

​"I swear... I'm not lying!" I gasped, wiping blood from my eyes. "The pendant... it's cursed! It makes you paranoid, it takes over your body—"

​"THE PENDANT ISN'T CURSED! YOU CURSED ME! I SAW YOU DO IT, YOU BASTARD!"

​"I didn't curse you, I promise!" I held my bloody hands up in front of my face. "I've been trying to help you—"

​"THE PENDANT HELPS ME! IT PROTECTS ME! IT IS ME!"

​"No, it doesn't! Please, please, you have to believe me! Just take the pendant off and I'll show you!"

​"NO! YOU JUST WANT IT FOR YOURSELF! THE PENDANT IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN KEEP ME SAFE! I'LL NEVER TAKE IT OFF!"

​She tackled me, pinning me to the ground under her entire weight.

​Her fist came down like an iron weight straight into my ribcage. A sickening snap echoed inside my chest, and a wave of blood welled up into my throat, forcing a jagged cough out of me.

Before I could catch my breath, her second punch caught me flush across the jaw. My head whipped sideways, and I spat two loosened teeth out onto the blacktop.

​"I won't let you do this to me anymore," she spat, her real voice breaking through the other for a split second.

​Her hands clamped tight around my throat again. She squeezed with everything she had left, choking out the last bit of air in my lungs. My hands fell limp against her arms, my sight dimming around the edges as my strength drained away. I couldn't even make a sound. I was seconds away from dying on the pavement.

​BOOM.

​A gunshot shattered the night, vibrating straight through the ground.

Then a second, and a third.

​The crushing pressure on my neck slackened just enough for me to pull in a ragged, burning gasp of air. Through my swollen eyes, I saw the old motel owner standing up on the walkway, a hunting rifle pressed against his shoulder, lining up his target.

​Ivory threw herself off me, scrambling to get away, but her body was falling apart. The dark strength in her muscles was wearing off, leaving behind a broken human frame.

​"GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAND!" the old man screamed.

​BOOM.

The fourth shot caught her square in the leg. ​The bullet tore her straight out of the trance. The rage vanished, replaced instantly by a sharp, human scream of unimaginable pain. Her broken shoulder and dozens of cuts seemed to hit her all at once as she collapsed hard into the damp dirt.

​She lay there weeping, her voice completely normal again, just as the distant wail of police sirens began to echo down the highway. Then she went still.

​My own vision started to blur, the dark pulling me under.

​The next thing I knew, the sharp smell of hospital antiseptic was burning my nostrils.

​I was sitting slumped in a plastic chair, chest taped tight, jaw wired on one side, and my skull throbbing to the beat of my heart. I pulled a menthol from my pocket, lit it, and let the smoke drift toward the ceiling tiles.

​Across the small room, Ivory shifted on the hospital bed, the steel chain of her handcuffs clinking against the rail. I sat beneath the brim of my hat, battered and quiet, watching her open her eyes.

I'm pretty annoyed right now. Just got banned from the third home improvement forum because I asked a simple question. 

“Irrelevant content” they say. I ask them to explain themselves. They just tell me that their forums are no place for “horror stories.” 

I'm not trying to write horror stories. Typing is hard enough as is right now. I just want to fix this damn leak. Gary and I are frankly stumped.

Maybe I ought to explain everything from the beginning. That should paint a clear picture for you all. And please be sure to actually read this before assuming I'm a “troll.”

It started this morning. I just got home from my job when I noticed there was an inch of water covering the kitchen floor. Hopped on HomeNet just a few minutes later. I've been using the forum for years at that point, and never ran into any issues prior.

GDon2:
Water’s been flooding my kitchen. I have century-old hardwood floors. Gary says it’s whatever’s under the sink, but I don't know how to deal with it. Can’t afford a plumber. I’m not too shabby with the tools of the trade, just need to be pointed in the right direction. Photo attached.

I didn’t get any replies for a bit. Tried my luck with some more details.

GDon2:
Hey, I hope I'm not flooding, no pun intended, haha. This is a bit urgent. I think it's a hair clog or something. Photo attached.

Bloop. I get a notification a minute later.

parsk00:
Fake.

Then another one.

bigMOISTy:
Seriously, what the **** is that?

Ten minutes go by. I get one last ding, a notification that my post has been deleted, along with a comment from a forum moderator. 

JGordo63 (MOD):
This is a plumbing forum. We appreciate the traffic, but no. Go post this on nosleep. 

I messaged the moderator immediately, asking for an explanation. I took several more photos for proof. Even asked Gary to curl up next to the mass as best as he could for a size comparison. This just got an angrier response.

JGordo63 (MOD):
I'm not interested in your creepypasta.

JGordo63 (MOD):
The decision on your post is final. We will not discuss any revisions or reposts. If you want to continue using the HomeNet forums, we recommend posting RELEVANT DISCUSSION ONLY. Please do not make another post for at least 24 hours. Thank you.

Twenty-four hours? The pressure in my head felt like the pipes which exploded hours earlier.

GDon2:
I don’t know what a creepy pasta is I just want to fix my sink

JGordo63 (MOD):
Bye bye, troll.

Bloop. A notification in my inbox. I click on it.

Sorry. You have been permanently banned by the moderators of HomeNet.
Reason: gore / trolling / harassing mods

I couldn’t access the site anymore. All the threads were locked from my view as though I hadn’t had an account for the last seventeen years. 

“Damn…!”

Gary craned his long neck around the corner, into my bedroom.

“Problem,” he grunted

“I'm working on it.”

“Get bigger.”

I got up from my chair and followed his lanky behind out the door.

Yeah. It definitely got bigger. The cabinet door over the sink wasn’t shutting anymore. The hair bunched up, starting to crawl along the inner frame, propping it open ever so slightly. Yuck.

“How long did you say this has been going on?”

A few of Gary’s eyes blinked. None of them were looking at me. 

“How long, Gary?”

He gestured two big circular motions with his arms. 

“Two hours, huh?” I wiped my brow. “You uh…do anything with the sink beforehand?”

“Gary dumped mupmup.”

Oh no. 

Full disclosure, I don’t know what “mupmup” is. I mean, I know what he’s referring to, but I am unsure what it is actually composed of. I just know it’s slimy and really hard to get out of my clothes. 

“Down the garbage disposal?”

Gary nodded his head. Spittle graced my cheeks from the motion. I wiped it away.

“Okay, Gary. This is your problem as much as it is mine. Do you have any idea how we fix this?”

“Have the glupglup?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Hungry.”

“Just—one minute, okay?”

I headed back to my room and got the computer out of sleep mode. Back to browsing. 

Next on my brief list was the Handyman Hank company forums. Maybe I could get a bite with them. 

Donald G: Hey there. I’ve been dealing with a pretty bad leak. It’s been going on for two hours. My roommate dumped some “mupmup” (photo 1) down the drain. It created a large obstruction of hair, I think (photo 2). If anybody could help me identify what “mupmup” is I would really appreciate it. 

No responses this time. The post was quietly taken down by moderation and my account was given a day-long posting ban. 

I stood up and ran my hand through my hair. Gary was standing right behind me, drooling. 

“Hungry!”

Right. We missed feeding time because of the leak. I was already an hour behind schedule. 

Gary snarled and lunged at me, biting my hand. Thankfully he’s pretty lightweight, despite his head usually scraping the ceiling. I didn’t have too hard of a time fighting him over toward the kitchen. I got the fridge open with my foot, used my free hand to dig open the locked drawer, and pulled free some specially-cured meats. I clocked Gary on the side of the head, causing him to let go, opening his mouth wide. One of my fingers plopped to the floor, getting blood all over the countertop on the way down. Goddamn it. I impatiently stuffed the meat into Gary’s mouth. He started suckling it like a toddler. 

I grit my teeth as I swaddled my hand in a hand towel. The pain was dull, rising by the second as my adrenaline stopped working its magic. 

“Every night with you…! God!” I tried to wiggle the pain out. No use. I really wanted to go to a hospital, but I couldn’t risk it with the leak going on. My precious hardwood hung in the balance. 

Not like I got a chance, anyways. The cabinet door beneath the sink blew open very suddenly. Tendrils of hair wrapped around my wrists and dragged me to the floor. Gary cried, cowering from the mass. 

The hair had grown teeth. It kinda looked like the inside of an electric pencil sharpener, looking down its mouth. A sloppy sound like stuck gears emanated from within. I was getting pulled toward it.

“Gary! Your problem! Help!”

His eyes scanned the room, three-hundred and sixty degrees. They all landed on the butcher’s knife. He clumsily grabbed it by the blade and shambled toward me.

“What do?” he quivered.

“Hurty side down! On the hair! Back and forth, like you're brushing your teeth!”

He got to work. I was freed within a few seconds, thankfully with no extra cuts. Crawled away as fast as I could, picking up a jug of isopropyl alcohol that the thing knocked onto the floor.

If I had balls, maybe I would have used it to set the thing on fire. But the damage to my kitchen was bad enough already.

I decided to go to the hospital instead. Reluctantly. Gary is watching the fort while I'm gone.

In the waiting room, I posted everything to the plumbing subreddit as one last hail mary. Predictably, at this point, that post now sits at zero upvotes and twenty-three comments saying I'm posting in the wrong community. 

So I guess this is the right one, then. Since apparently I'm living in a horror story. It's news to me. 

Not even going to bother posting the pics this time. They keep getting flagged as gore and I don't want to be banned from Reddit either.

I really just want to fix this leak.

Part 1
The farm

I've never felt like this life was right for me. I guess I just went along with where life took me, the wife that led to kids, the farm that led to nothing. I don’t even know why I’m writing this, maybe I’m hoping that someone will be able to relate? Probably not with the specifics though. I also don’t expect anyone to believe me. Hell, if I was reading this a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have believed it, but I guess I just need to get it out. It’s not like I can talk to anyone, especially not my wife, but you’ll see why I say that. 

I might get a bit graphic during later parts of this, sorry if that’s not your thing. I know some of this is going to sound strange. Believe me, I know how it sounds. But I’m going to tell it exactly as it happened, even the parts I’d rather leave out.

Anyways, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning. I was born in 1990 to a couple of conservative farmers out in the middle of bumfuck, Kansas, meaning that my whole life I’ve known my path. Find a wife, settle down and raise cattle. That’s it. That’s all I’ve ever known and all I’ve ever expected, until recently.

I went to school with 104 other kids, kindergarten to senior year. It wasn’t uncommon for folk to go to college, but I didn’t see the point in it personally. Why build up debt when my future was already sealed? 

Anyways, all of this is just to say, while, yes, there is community, and yes, everyone knows your business, you’re mostly expected to get by on your own, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, as they say. And I’ve always lived like that. It made it easier to hide that I’ve been living a lie. Hell, I’ve even been lying to myself for the past 36 years. I’ve always known deep down that this isn’t who I am, I’ve often fantasised about more, but it never felt possible, until now. 

That brings us to about a month ago, in early July, when my main concern was keeping myself and the cattle alive through the summer heat. I’d just moved them into a fresh section of pasture when I noticed something strange. None of them were grazing. They were just standing there, staring straight ahead. They weren’t scattered across the field like usual, but instead, they were standing in a pattern, all facing the same direction. 

I walked up to one of them and patted her back, hoping to get some sort of reaction. But nothing. She wasn’t even blinking. I ran through the usual possibilities in my head. Heat stress, illness, something they’d eaten. I didn’t think it was any of those, and I’d never seen them act like this before. 
I put it down to the heat, thinking maybe I should move them over to the trees? But they weren’t budging and there was nothing I could do to change that. 

I shook it off, maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe the farm life was finally getting to me, making me see things. After all, the isolation, physical strain and 24/7 nature of the work was sure to have a negative effect on anyone. 

As I made my way back to the house, I glanced back. The cattle were grazing as usual, scattered across the pasture with no sign of the strange formation from earlier. I breathed a sigh of relief, mostly because whatever had happened didn’t seem to have affected them. The last thing I needed was a sick herd and a vet bill for something I couldn’t fix myself.

I stepped into the house, glad to close the door behind me and settle into my chair at the table.

“How was your day?” Allison asked.

“Fine.”

“Everything alright?”

“Just tired.”

She nodded and went back to her food before attempting to tell me about what she and the kids had got up to in town that day, though she barely got through a sentence without one of them interrupting her.

Then as usual, after dinner I did my rounds on the farm, securing the perimeters, checking the feed and water before doing a quick head count and taking myself to bed.

I decided against telling Allison about the cow’s unnatural behaviour. I didn’t want to stress her out, especially now that they seemed to be acting normal. 

The next few days were the same old, same old, working on the farm, battling the heat and keeping the wife and kids happy. 

That’s when the dog started acting strange. Rudy, our sixty-pound Australian Cattle Dog, had always been a docile, happy-go-lucky guy, but suddenly he became almost skittish. He wouldn’t go outside, as he usually did, after dinner. I had to coax him through the door so he could go use the bathroom. I just figured he’d seen a coyote or something. Thinking back, that’s also the first night he refused to even look in the direction of the pasture. 

That takes us to two weeks ago. It was a normal evening, right up until I started counting the cattle.
Six cows were missing. 

I counted again. Six were still missing. 

It was getting dark, so I quickly checked everything was secure before heading back to the house to grab a flashlight. 

I didn’t bother getting Rudy. I knew he wouldn’t come. 

“I’m going to check on the cows again.” I shouted to Allison. She gave no response so I headed out into my truck. 

After a few minutes of driving, I reached the field at the northern end of the farm. At first, I was relieved. What looked like a huddle of cows was gathered beneath some trees. 

As I got closer, though, I realised something was wrong. 

It was far too large to be cows.

I stopped the truck and switched on my flashlight, the beam cutting across the field towards the shape. 

That’s when I saw it.