r/Talesfrommidnight

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.

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

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

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

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

“Yes.” the other three said in unison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alright! Then do it! We’re waiting!”

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

*****

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

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

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

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

THUD.

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

THUD. THUD. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The mausoleum…” Eric muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s going to go over well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Un-freaking-beleivable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The families deserve to know what happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All for nothing.

And somehow, it was all my fault.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bones.

Dozens of them.

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

Always roses.

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

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

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

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

Or taken it.

Bzzzz.

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

New message available.

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

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

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

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

Hello there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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