r/TheCrypticCompendium

I make poison for a living. I’m not proud of what I do, but my family has to eat.

They say legality and morality are different things. Most days I have to believe that or I wouldn’t make it through a shift.

And no, before you ask, I can’t just quit.

The town I live in barely exists anymore. We’ve got two gas stations, a family-owned grocery store hanging on by a thread, and an esoteric shop downtown I’m convinced launders money for somebody. Outside of that? Nothing. The factory is all that’s left here.

The factory's byproducts get placed outside in large plastic crates exposed to weather and wildlife.  I've seen the effects on the birds, stumbling around but the bees are worse. We found a raccoon dead laying five feet from a crate that was leaking, poor bastard still had foam caked in his fur.

I can already hear you asking. Why doesn't the town do anything?  I'll answer that with a question of my own. Would you be able to kill your only cash cow?  So they tolerate the bitter sweet smells that roll out of the building, they tolerate our metal cylinders littering the beautiful landscape. Funny what people are willing to ignore for financial security.

Hell, I'm so numb to it all I can't smell the stench that clings to my clothes. People know what we do, it's no secret. We have a license from the state and everything is perfectly above board.  Knowing that doesn't ease my mind watching the poisoned people.

 The marketing machine churns on and on normalizing hell, even glorifying this foul poison.  Celebrities smile and hold the package as a soothing voice tells you how wonderful everything will be if you just try this wonderful product (poison).  It's not just our factory either, this is being churned out by thousands of factories all over the globe. 

 Every morning I clock in and see the cauldron of bullshit bubbling as the chemical process takes its toll. I see the lab workers making sure our poison isn't tainted.   Imagine someone paid to worry about tainted poison.  But what can I really say? I partake like a lot of people. Hell you may know a few yourself.  I see traces everywhere. Little crosses on the freeway, news articles, and those little cylinders everywhere.  I'm writing this as a way to warn you all.   Anyway, I’ve gotta go.

First shift at the brewery starts in thirty minutes.

It started with a small shrub beside a weathered metal bench on an abandoned lot half a mile outside town.

Caleb dug scoop by scoop, preparing the earth for his offering to the dead. A life gone. A life replaced. He chose the spot because of Joshua. The two of them used to sit there for hours with a six-pack between their boots and cigarette smoke drifting into the trees, talking about life like either of them understood it.

Joshua had been gone a year now, and somehow the lot seemed even more abandoned than before. Caleb stood over his work, one scruffy shrub sitting in a near-perfect circle of freshly compacted soil. A soft breeze in the trees brought the sounds of birds from somewhere beyond the lot.

The compulsion that drove him to plant the shrub was silent for the moment. He smoked a cigarette on the bench, watching the last rays of sun cut through the canopy of trees. Then Caleb went home tired but satisfied. Three days later, Caleb found himself standing in line at Lowe’s, a small apple tree clutched to his chest. He had to balance out the layout. Josh wouldn’t have liked how asymmetrical the lot looked currently. He would make it right.

Caleb arrived on the lot and froze. There was a rose bush on the opposite side of the bench. Freshly compacted black soil surrounded this newcomer. Caleb circled it, looking for traces of who had planted it. The soil seemed damp despite no rain. Stranger still, dark soil spread beneath the shrub he’d planted days before.

Caleb glanced toward the tree line, suddenly feeling like he’d interrupted someone else’s work. When those thoughts finally faded, he found his hands were covered in dirt, nails chipped and grimy. Had he planted this tree by hand? He couldn’t remember grabbing the shovel from his truck, but the soil begged to differ.

When Caleb returned to the lot the next evening, the bench had been scooted back as if to better admire the plants. The discarded cigarette butts were gathered into a tight spiral under the bench, placed end to end. Caleb circled the lot, eyes combing the tree line. He realized he wasn’t alone in keeping it.

As the season trudged by, Caleb would visit the lot. The plants always seemed freshly watered and healthy. He would sit on the bench and talk to his friend aloud sometimes as he worked to extend the spiral one butt after the other. He was about to add another when something pale blue caught his eye. A pacifier hung from the apple tree by a faded ribbon, swaying gently in the evening breeze.

Caleb stared at the pacifier for a long while before finally settling on the only explanation that made sense. Someone else was coming here, possibly understanding the new use for the lot and adding their own mementos. It couldn’t be Josh’s mother; she had died years before he did. Caleb’s eyes crawled over the lot before he saw the circle around the bench. The grass was trampled and worn bare in places.

As spring gave way to summer, Caleb decided to skip work and visit the lot. When he arrived, he saw a man curled at the base of the apple tree, the pacifier hanging limp in the still air. The man didn’t seem homeless. He was dressed in a suit dusted with fresh dew. As Caleb slowly approached, he saw a small spiral of bottle caps pressed into the dirt inches from the man’s hand.

Caleb crept by, careful not to wake him.

He sat on the bench. Thin blue smoke rose lazily in the still morning air. There were more trees and bushes crowding in like they wanted to tell a secret to those who would listen. The man snored softly. Caleb wept.

Fall came as it always does, and brought with it heavy rain and wind. Amber and red mixed with the downpour resembling gold fish at play. Caleb didn't mind. He visited the lot daily now. A small perk of unemployment. With these daily visits he came to see the others.

A mechanic in grease stained coveralls helping an old lady plant yet another bush in the spiral radiating from the bench. They never spoke just a touch of their eyes and nearly imperceivable nods. There were many new additions of mementos as well. A tea cup tucked in between two boxwoods was barely visible. Someone had strung rusty keys on a fishing line between three young trees, making them almost float. Caleb even found the occasional box of cigarettes left on the bench he frequented.

Caleb watched these people come and go. Silent.

Reverent.

Leaving small and large changes to the lot, a woman came very early to water and stood watching the sun rise. A young waitress tucked a tiny shoe under the exposed roots of a tree on the outskirts.

Everyone had their reason, their silent compulsion.

During a snowstorm at the edge of winter, Caleb made his evening pilgrimage. Walking toward the bench, he noticed pockets of people kneeling beside their effigies. He looked up and silhouetted in the driving snow and shadows sat a figure on the bench. A cigarette glowing and fading with each slow inhale. Without a word the figure picked the six-pack between its feet up and scooted over to one side of the bench. Caleb's knees hit dirt.

I’m old now. Might as well get this off my chest now while I’m still breathing. I was never a religious man, but at 85 years old, you start to think about things like that. The afterlife. Who you were as a person. What awaits you when everything goes black.

I think I’m writing this for the both of us. Mimi’s too far gone now to even understand the world she’s living in, let alone the one that could embrace her after she draws that last breath.

Doctors diagnosed her two weeks after her 81st birthday. We didn’t need that diagnosis. Well, I didn’t, at least. I noticed the signs before we even stepped foot in a hospital.

It started with names at first. Calling our son by her father’s name, calling me by her brother’s, and vice versa. That kinda thing, you know?

When she started wandering around at night, though, that’s when I knew it was time to confront the inevitable. It was strange, though. Her wandering didn’t really feel like wandering. She was deliberately going to one specific location. The exact location where it happened.

I’d find her in our shed, staring down at the exact spot where the man had bled out, completely expressionless. I’d expect that even in her state she’d feel at least something, any sort of emotion whatsoever, but, unfortunately, that just wasn’t the case.

Maybe she didn’t need to feel anything. Maybe all she truly felt was drawn to a specific location where she knew something significant had happened.

That thought process changed after about the fifth time, however. I could see it in her face. She knew.

She knew that she had been violated. She knew that the violator faced no real justice for his crimes. And by the way she was looking at me, she knew that I wasn’t going to stand around and let that just happen.

When she spoke his name, I didn’t know if she was remembering what she had forgotten or if she was addressing me personally. All I knew was that she said it with such clarity that, for a split second, it sounded like she had been healed.

From that moment on, every doctor’s visit had me holding my breath with uncertainty. If she went off on a ramble about that night, I could hold her hand. Shed some tears and act like I was losing my sweet girl. But a separate part of me had a different way of thinking.

I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know if I wanted to live with the weight of what I had done anymore. I guess that’s why I’m writing this now.

I know that I don’t feel bad for what I did. How could I? Mimi was an angel. A light in a world full of darkness and hatred. And that man had taken away a part of that light. Changed her in a way that she never fully recovered from.

Even still, a life is a life, and I had taken one. I had acted as judge, jury, and executioner all while my wife watched. “It would help her move on,” she told me. “I need to see it.”

She never moved on. Even now. Even while she drifts away, there’s still a part of her that knows. And maybe this wouldn’t be so difficult if she didn’t continue calling me by his name. Reminding me every day of the person I’ve been trying to forget for nearly 50 years now.

Maybe this is all a sign. A sign for me to finally air out dirty laundry, I suppose. “Every tongue shall confess,” the Bible says. And I think that’s what I’m doing now.

I invented Sweet Jane late on a Tuesday morning while eating reheated chile colorado from a plastic container and drinking a Coke at my kitchen table. That is the first thing everyone gets wrong. They expect something dramatic: a storm outside the window, a flickering candle, a half-remembered rhyme surfacing in the dark. None of that happened. The radiator had turned the apartment into an oven, sauce was drying on the heel of my hand, and the Coke can kept sticking to the table with a soft click every time I lifted it. I had spent the morning reading other people’s horror posts and feeling the particular kind of jealousy that writers rarely admit to. Leftovers, envy, and too much heat: that was the honest beginning.

I wanted something people would share. I told myself I was thinking about craft, about why certain stories spread while others die quietly in their threads, but mostly I was hungry for evidence that a sentence of mine could leave my apartment and live in someone else’s head. The difference between a story and a legend, I decided, was not quality but architecture: a name easy to remember, a rule simple enough to repeat, and enough empty space in the middle for strangers to fill with their own fingerprints.

That was how Sweet Jane began. In the first version she was not really a ghost. She was a mark of contamination, a sign that a story had been handled by too many people. She appeared only in retellings: screenshots, summaries, misquotes, podcasts, angry comment threads. You would know she had entered when someone remembered a detail that was never there.

The post went up at 11:43 AM. By evening it had already acquired a better title than the one I gave it: The Sweet Jane Effect. A narration channel turned it into rain sounds and eleven minutes of empty hallway footage. I went to bed pleased with myself in the small, embarrassing way writers sometimes are.

The next morning she already had a history. People claimed they had heard versions in college, in high school, from older siblings, from dead forums. Then a user named palehorse1987 added the humming. There was no humming in anything I had written, but before I could correct him others had already replied. Not the Velvet Underground version, they said. The Cowboy Junkies one. Obviously. The slower, lonelier cover already sounded like memory. She hums because she doesn’t know the words.

I let it stand. It was better than what I had written, and that was my first real mistake.

By night the Cowboy Junkies version had become canon. People argued over it like there had always been a right answer. I had not written any of those details, but they fit so cleanly that denying them felt pointless.

That night I woke to a cold that had nothing to do with the radiators. My breath hung in the air and the humming was simply there, soft and slow and impossible to locate, seeming to come from the hallway and from inside the room at the same time. I knew the tune before I consciously recognized it. When I sat up and turned on the light, it stopped. The warmth returned almost immediately, which felt worse than the cold had.

In the morning I found a new sentence in the original document, timestamped at 3:17 AM: You will hear her before you believe in her. I posted a correction explaining the leftovers, the envy, the experiment. I thought honesty might disarm the growing story.

It only invited people deeper. They wrote that this was exactly what someone would say if Sweet Jane had already gotten into the original. They wrote that she just wanted to be held. Then someone replied, “Yeah but she hugs too hard,” and six words gave her arms.

The first death was Elise Marrow. Her challenge video was quieter and more embarrassed than the others. She laughed once, nervously, before saying the line. Her breath clouded. The song on her laptop faded under a softer humming that did not belong to the recording. Elise looked toward the corner of the room and said “Oh” in a small voice full of recognition. Her arms lifted as though greeting someone long missed. The phone tipped over, and the last seconds showed only blanket and nightstand while something exhaled close to the microphone.

She was found the next morning with eight broken ribs and both arms wrapped around empty air. People did not just argue about whether the video was real. They worked on it—slowing the audio, brightening the frame, debating the exact moment her arms lifted. Someone made a tribute edit. Someone called her “the first confirmed Jane.” Someone wrote that at least Elise had not died alone, and that comment spread wider than the obituary.

My original post kept changing. New paragraphs appeared in my own font. My name began disappearing from reposts. Some versions now called me only “the alleged creator.” Others placed her origin years before the internet. Messages started arriving that felt less like questions and more like continuations: you gave me room, you let them love me, I practiced.

At 4:04 AM the cold returned, this time with the humming coming from inside my bedroom. The kitchen chair had been pulled out. The Coke can I had thrown away days earlier stood upright in a ring of frost. On the laptop screen was a new document titled THE DEFINITIVE SWEET JANE, with one sentence blinking beneath it: Tell them how to hold me.

I wrote the survival guide because I still believed rules might contain her. A monster is frightening, but rules make danger feel technical. They make strangers believe they can stand closer than the last person because they have read the instructions. I told them not to speak gently if the room grew cold, not to answer the humming, not to relax if arms went around them, and never to pity her. The guide spread faster than the original story.

Daniel Price followed every line. He kept his arms pinned to his sides and did not answer the humming. He still died with his ribs broken from behind. Within an hour the internet had revised the lesson: if you refuse to hold her, she learns to hold you another way.

After that I tried to walk away. I deleted accounts, unplugged everything, burned pages written by hand. For two days the apartment stayed warm, and I began to hope that attention itself was the only doorway.

On Friday night three soft knocks came from the wall beside my bed. There is no apartment on that side. The cold arrived so suddenly that the glass of water on my nightstand cracked. I pulled the blanket over my head like a child. The humming started near the wall, very soft. For the first time I understood she was not humming to frighten me. She was humming to keep herself calm.

She spoke my real name. I should have stayed silent, but I answered. “I didn’t know.”

“You’re here now,” she said.

The mattress dipped. Her arms went around me slowly, like she had learned the motion from instructions. She was cold at first. Then she was not. Her hands found my ribs. She held me gently for one breath, maybe two. Then I breathed in, and she took it as permission.

I woke on the floor at dawn with two broken ribs, a sprained wrist, and bruises shaped like fingers that had tried to be gentle. The laptop was open on the bed. Most of this document had already been written.

There is one detail I held back until now. Sweet Jane stops humming only when some stupid, tender part of you begins to believe she might be harmless—when you think, even for a moment, that loneliness can be survived with kindness. That is when the song ends. Then she listens to your breathing. Then she learns exactly how tight to hold.

If the room gets cold, leave if you can. If you hear the humming, do not try to place the version. Do not pity her. Do not correct the story. Do not share this.

I know the warning is useless. I know some of you are already thinking of the perfect person to send it to, or the perfect correction to make. Maybe, while you are reading this, the room has gone a little colder. Maybe, under the usual sounds of your life—the refrigerator, the traffic, the pipes, the fan in the next room—you can hear it now: soft, slow, grieving. Not the original. Never the original.

Sweet Jane was never the first version of anything. She is what comes after. We made her by repeating her.

If I got any of this wrong, leave it wrong.

“Ma, I told you not to call me at wor—

“I do remember it’s his birt—

“Yeah, I know they’re family, OK? I know they’re family and—” I lowered my voice, because it had gotten pretty loud, and dropped my head below the cubicle wall. “—I still don’t wanna go. Do you understand? I don’t like those people. I don’t have anything in common with—

“No, Ma. Don't cry. There’s no need to cr—

“I didn’t say you were pre—

“I—

“I—

“Listen to me, Ma. I’m a grown man. I make my own decisions. I decide where I go, when I go, and, no, it will not reflect badly on you if—”

So of course I went.

I showed up at my uncle’s house at seven, holding a bottle of wine, which I don’t drink, and a box of chocolates, which I don’t eat, plus a present I wrapped, badly, myself, and a smile that looked like it was pasted on with a glue stick, ready for my humiliation ritual. Because that’s why they invite me: so they can all bully up on me. It’s been that way ever since I was a kid.

The door opened.

“Nice of you to make it, Norm.”

“Yeah.”

I handed the wine over to my uncle’s wife, who’s the one who’ll drink it anyway, probably alone and on a weekday afternoon, and the chocolates to their grandson, who’s as fat as I am but never seems to have any problems with it at school. He has glasses. He stinks. He’s also got friends.

Go figure.

“Thanks, Uncle Norman,” he says, grabbing the chocolates.

“Don’t eat them all at once,” I say, (“you fat fuck,” I imagine adding because deep down I’m an asshole too.)

I mingle.

“How’s your wife?” somebody asks, knowing full well she left me three years ago.

“Fine.”

Somebody else: “How’s work—you making six digits yet?” (“No.”) “Because my Sandra just got a job at Autobox, and they start them at $88,000 per year plus benefits. Maybe she could put in a word.  Would you like that?” (“Thanks, but no…”)

“Look if it ain’t Norma! Sucked any cocks lately, fag?”

That’s my cousin Duffin.

I force a laugh.

“Hey,” another cousin yells, “Norman ain’t one of them. He’s married!”

“He was married,” says Duffin.

“What—Norm, you’re not married anymore?”

“No,” I say. “I got divorced.”

“Because you’re gay?”

“I’m not gay.

“Buf if you’re not gay, then why'd you get divorced?”

By now it feels like everyone’s gone quiet and the only people talking are the people talking about me. “We just—”

“She was fucking around, that’s why,” Duffin says and slaps me in the back so hard I stumble forward, and, before I know it, my face has detached itself from my head and I’m facelessly dripping blood on the carpet, bending down to pick up my face, but there are too many legs in the way, and when I finally straighten up again, I see that Duffin is holding my face like he’d hold raw pizza dough, and he's laughing, keeping my face away from me as I grab for it, and when I almost have it, he throws it to a woman, who catches it and throws it to somebody else, and if I had a face, it would be turning bright red right now, and, “Who’d his wife fuck?” a man asks.

“It’s a long list,” says Duffin.

“Please, just give me back my face,” I implore.

“Fine,” says Duffin, and he goes to get my face from where it’s fallen on the floor, but then, instead of walking back to me, he walks with it to a record player, spins the face into more-or-less a disc and puts my face-record on:

The sound of my own breathing, my sobbing, my own inner voice, with all my inner thoughts, fills the room…

Everybody starts laughing.

I press my hands against where my face used to be and feel the exposed vulnerability there instead. It feels like a raw oyster. It feels like a scale model of a self-inflicted gunshot wound expressed in pain and satin, with whatever pride I had prolapsed and hanging from the front like a limp, pink and oozing elephant’s trunk.

“Stop,” I say.

“Stop,” the record player plays, and Duffin turns up the volume, so that the sounds of me wailing, screaming and crying and beating my fists against the wall are so loud I can’t even hear myself think—except I can, because everyone can, and they won’t stop laughing and I can’t stop thinking, and sometimes I’m thinking about my aunt’s cleavage and sometimes about how I pissed on myself once in the office bathroom, and about how lonely I am, and how I always think about jumping off bridges when I walk past them, and they’re laughing. They’re laughing and they’re laughing. And laughing. They’re laughing when, with tears in my eyes, I rip my face off the record player, shove it in my pocket and, trailing a mix of blood, snot and tears like a snail trails mucus, I walk across the room and leave the house and slam the door and walk the seven kilometres home because I forgot where it was that I parked my fucking car.

I take three consecutive sick days.

When I show up to work on the fourth day, which is the day when God created the celestial bodies, I sit in my cubicle with my face taped to the front of my head.

The eye-holes don’t align with my eyes. I have trouble breathing. Plus the tape’s cheap and my face keeps slipping, so I have to constantly re-adjust it.

My co-worker Andy walks by, declaring with pep, “Sure looks like it’ll be a great day today! Doesn’t it, Norm?”

“A great day,” I say with a smile.

And I staple my face, to keep it from falling off.

Yeah, I’m not gonna lie. I think I’m gonna give up on this soon. It’s been like 2 or 3 days now, and this guy’s still breathing. Still laughing like a maniac, begging for more pain.

He made it easy for me. Put up no fight, rode silently in the passenger seat, and didn’t ask a single question. Usually, the people in his position would be begging for me to change their fate by changing my mind. And usually… they all fail.

Not this guy, though. No, he basically led the way to the shed in my backyard. Almost like he was happy to be there. Happy to finally get this opportunity. As if to amplify the point, once he pushed the door open and pulled the string to bathe the room in light, he dropped his jacket on the floor and turned to me.

“Well…” he taunted. “I’m waiting.”

He was kind of taking the fun out of things. He went as far as to strap himself down to the table until only his left hand was left unrestrained.

“Little help here, bud? I’m getting a little anxy.”

I decided firstly to slap him around a bit. Bruise up his face, black some eyes, that kinda thing. All he did was laugh at my attempts, mocking me while I beat the life out of him.

“Gonna have to try harder than that, bud. I read about you in the papers. If this is all you got for me, then I’m in for a real tickle fest, aren’t I, you naughty boy, you.”

He laughed loudly, grinning at me from ear to ear. This gave me an idea. I could almost hear the lightbulb above my head flick on.

With a pair of pliers, I went digging around in his mouth, gripping each tooth one by one while I smiled right back at him, subconsciously trying to outdo his insanity.

The task proved fruitless, however, when, with each tooth I yanked from his mouth… he smiled harder. Blood and spittle ran down his mouth and dripped from his chin, and through it all… he… was fucking… smiling.

“I needed to grow new ones anyway,” he gummed out, breaking into a cackle.

Frustrated, I tossed the pliers to the side. I sat at my chair for a moment, thinking on where to go next. As I sat in my deep thought, the man spoke again… only this time… he was borrowing my voice.

“Come on, champ, you still got it. I believe in you. Who cares that you’re older now? This will be the one, buddy. This will be the one that makes them actually remember your name.”

At this point, I had a new mission. I didn’t want to just kill this guy. I wanted to hear him scream.

I tried inflicting the most physically painful acts upon him that I could think of. Breaking his knees with the sharp part of a hammer, slicing his eye with a razor blade, hell, I even tried putting paper cuts between each of his toes.

It was pointless.

All he did was mock me in my own voice.

“C’mon, son, you’re surely better than this…?”
“Why are you moving so slow? Have you always been like this?”
“I guess you’re just past your prime.”

I knew he was right. I was past my prime. I’d been in the business for nearly 20 years now. My body didn’t work the way it used to. I was getting winded just cutting this guy’s throat.

In a gargled voice, like he was underwater, the man choked out:

“Oh, so close. Unfortunately, this isn’t horseshoes. Gonna have to try a little harder, buddy.”

I continued to saw, deeper and deeper into his neck until the teeth of the saw reached the cloth of the operating table.

Triumphantly, I removed the head from his shoulders. I could only relish in my success for no more than a moment, however, before the newfound silence was snatched away from the room.

“Awww, look,” laughed a voice from my hands. “I get to be a trophy.”

From that moment on, all I could do was sit there, listening to him shoot off increasingly absurd comments.

“Would you looky there, seems as though I’ve lost some weight.”
“Hey, real quick, can you saw off my arm? I gotta scratch my nose.”
“Look, just sew my head back on. We’ll grab a beer after. Pretend this whole thing never happened.”

And after three days of trying… I think I’m finally going to give up and do what he says.

The Tourist Board asked us to stop calling them rules after the woman from Westport complained, which was how Sheriff Walter J. Doyle ended up standing at the Visitor Center desk on a gray October morning, reading three printed pages about “unwelcoming language,” “luxury heritage tourism,” and the emotional impact of municipal signage.

The woman’s point, as far as I understood it, was that the word rules made Mourner’s Crossing sound unsafe. This was apparently bad for the new restaurant week campaign, the Witchwood walking tours, and the twelve-dollar strawberry-rhubarb hand pies now being sold in waxed paper sleeves at every business with a counter.

Sheriff Doyle read the complaint twice. Walter J. Doyle is the kind of man tourists mistake for part of the local charm until he speaks. He has blond hair gone silver at the temples, bright green eyes people sometimes mistake for blue because of the way he squints, and a way of standing still that makes everybody else look like they’re wasting energy. That morning, he held his hat in one hand and the complaint in the other, looking like he would rather be anywhere else, including underwater.

He slid the pages back across the desk to me and said, “Call them whatever you want. If people keep taking selfies at Hollow Line Bridge after dark, the bridge is going to answer.”

I had been working at the Mourner’s Crossing Visitor Center for six weeks, which was long enough to know he was speaking plainly. That was the problem with tourism here. The food was excellent, the shops were charming, the cemetery tours sold out every weekend, and the safety literature kept acquiring teeth.

The first time I saw the laminated sheet behind the front desk, I laughed. The document had been formatted in cheerful teal and cream, with a little silhouette of Town Hall in the corner and a header that said:

WELCOME TO MOURNER’S CROSSING!
A Few Friendly Suggestions for a Safe and Memorable Visit

Underneath that, in the same bubbly font used on the pumpkin festival flyers, were ten items.

Please do not visit Hollow Line Bridge after sunset.
Please do not accept flowers from children you do not recognize.
Please do not photograph the third-floor window of Hawthorne House.
Please do not whistle in Witchwood State Park.
Please do not follow train sounds after midnight.
Please do not knock on the red door behind St. Brigid’s.
Please do not feed the cats unless they approach you first.
Please do not repeat any voice you hear from the well.
Please do not leave mirrors uncovered in guest rooms during storms.
If someone you came with insists they have “always lived here,” contact the Visitor Center immediately.

I thought it was a bit. A lot of towns have bits. Salem has witches. Sleepy Hollow has the Headless Horseman. Mystic has nautical ghosts, haunted inns, and fudge aggressive enough to feel like a minor felony. Mourner’s Crossing had old money, older houses, a famous cemetery, a forest no one agreed on the size of, and a civic commitment to understatement so intense it bordered on pathology.

The woman who trained me, Ruthanne from the Historical Society, said the sheet had been revised twelve times since 1998. Ruthanne was seventy-two, wore silver-framed glasses on a chain, and had a bun so neat it looked engineered rather than styled. She moved through the Visitor Center with the precision of someone who knew where every brochure lived and which floorboards complained. She also had the flattened patience of a person who had explained too many times why the town sold three different kinds of maple candy but no Ouija boards.

“Why twelve?” I asked.

She handed me a stack of restaurant week flyers and told me to put them in the acrylic holder by the door. “Because thirteen tested poorly.”

I laughed again, and Ruthanne looked at me over her glasses.

“Guideline Three used to say ‘Do not photograph Hawthorne House after dark,’” she said. “That was too broad. People need specifics. Give them something general and they assume the bad part applies to someone else.”

“So the third-floor window is the bad part?”

“The third-floor window is the part that photographs back.”

I waited for the wink. Ruthanne gave me a paperclip.

The Visitor Center sits on the green, between Mallory’s Fine Foods & Provisions and a store that sells candles shaped like local buildings. It is small, bright, aggressively tasteful, and always smells faintly of apple cider even in June. We have glossy brochures for vineyard tours, cemetery walks, Witchwood hiking routes, and seasonal events. We have a map with little icons for cafés, museums, public parking, and “areas of historical sensitivity,” which is what the map calls places where something has tried to eat somebody.

There is a glass display case full of local books by local authors, including six horror novels, two poetry collections, one cookbook, and a children’s picture book called Mr. Thimble Visits Town Hall, which I have been assured is “mostly accurate.” There is also a locked drawer under the desk. Inside are a flashlight, a first-aid kit, a rosary, three iron nails, a spool of red thread, a laminated card with Sheriff Doyle’s personal cell number, and a little silver bell I was not allowed to ring.

“Why?” I asked during training.

Ruthanne closed the drawer with her hip. “Because it works.”

My first week, I thought Ruthanne was hazing me. The Visitor Center gets a lot of seasonal help: college kids home for the summer, retired teachers who like giving directions, people between jobs who think handing out vineyard maps will be peaceful. The first thing Ruthanne taught me was not how to run the register, answer the phone, or refill the rack of restaurant week passports. It was how to tell the difference between a harmless tourist question and a question with a body count.

“Where is the cemetery?” was harmless. “Which grave is the pretty one with the little chair beside it?” required follow-up. “Can we walk to Witchwood from here?” was harmless, depending on shoes, weather, and time of day. “Can we still get to Witchwood if the path behind us moved?” required Sheriff Doyle. “Do you sell cat treats?” was usually fine. “Can we touch the tuxedo cat if he’s staring at my husband?” was complicated.

That was how I met Thimble. He came in during my second week while I was restocking maps, a huge tuxedo cat with a white marking around his left eye that made him look like he had been born wearing a monocle. A family from Rhode Island held the door open, and Thimble walked in as if summoned by poor judgment, hopped onto the desk, and sat directly on the rack cards for the cemetery lantern tour.

The youngest child squealed. The mother raised her phone. The father said, “Look, he wants attention,” and reached for him.

Ruthanne slapped a brochure against the counter so hard the entire family jumped. “Please wait until he approaches you.” Then she added, “He approached the desk.”

The father lowered his hand. Thimble stared at him with the full bureaucratic authority of an animal who had never once paid taxes and still outranked everyone in the room. Then the cat turned toward the map wall and made a low, irritated sound.

At first I saw nothing. Then one of the Rhode Island children, the older one, lifted his arm and pointed toward the map. His shadow stayed against the wall, small and dark and still, as if it had decided to wait and see whether leaving with the boy was worth the trouble.

Ruthanne took the spool of red thread from the locked drawer and tied a loose loop around the child’s wrist. “Did you accept anything today?”

The boy looked at his mother. His mother looked annoyed, then worried, then frightened in quick succession. “A flower,” he said.

“From whom?”

“A little girl by the cannon.”

“There is no cannon on the green,” Ruthanne said, and looked at me. “Call the Sheriff’s office. Ask for Deputy Bellamy if Sheriff Doyle is out.”

The boy’s shadow climbed back into place slowly, like it resented being corrected. The family did not buy cat treats.

By my third week, I had stopped laughing at most things. By my fourth, I had learned to smile without showing tourists I was checking whether their shadows matched their bodies. By my fifth, I could tell the difference between a normal out-of-towner asking where to find the best lobster roll and the kind who had already heard something in the covered bridge and wanted me to tell them it was fine.

People want towns like Mourner’s Crossing to be theatrical. They want fog with good lighting, graveyards with gift shops, haunted houses that stop being haunted when the tour ends. They want the thrill of danger with the paperwork of safety. That is why no one at the Visitor Center says “it’s fine.” We say, “Let’s take a look at your itinerary.” We say, “That area is best enjoyed before dusk.” We say, “The town recommends staying on marked paths.” We say, “Some guests find the cemetery tour more comfortable when they avoid speaking directly to anyone outside their group.” Branding matters.

The second time I saw a guideline save somebody, a man from Boston came in furious because his girlfriend had lost her voice on the Witchwood walking tour. He was thirtyish, red-faced, sunburned, and wearing one of those expensive waterproof jackets that make people look prepared until they open their mouths. The girlfriend stood beside him with both hands clenched around the strap of her purse. She was trying to speak, but nothing came out except a dry clicking sound, soft and rhythmic, like a fingernail tapping glass.

“She’s upset,” the man said.

Ruthanne looked up from the register. “I imagine she is.”

“You people need to warn guests better.”

“We do.”

“She whistled,” he said, and the anger began to drain out of him as Ruthanne took off her glasses.

“On the trail,” he said. “She whistled because we thought we heard someone whistle back. It was a joke.”

The girlfriend shook her head very slowly. Her eyes had filled with tears. From inside her purse, something whistled: two rising notes and one falling note, light and clear and almost cheerful. The woman made the clicking sound again and pressed the purse to her stomach.

Ruthanne told me to lock the front door. I did not ask why. The whistle came again from the purse, then from the map rack, then from the heating vent behind the desk. Each time, the girlfriend flinched. Each time, the man looked less angry and more like someone realizing anger was a flashlight with dying batteries.

Ruthanne opened the locked drawer and took out the three iron nails. “Did you answer it?”

The girlfriend tried to speak and couldn’t.

The man said, “She whistled back.”

Ruthanne placed one nail on the counter, one on the floor, and one on the windowsill. “That was unwise.”

He stared at her. “Can you help her?”

“I can keep what answered from learning the shape of her voice any better than it already has.”

That was the first time I heard the silver bell, though I did not see Ruthanne ring it. She took it into the back office wrapped in her scarf while the man and I waited in the front room and the whistle moved around us in the walls. When the bell sounded, it was quieter than I expected. The fluorescent lights flickered, the rack of vineyard brochures shivered, and the man from Boston sat down hard in one of the visitor chairs and began to cry without making any sound.

Afterward, his girlfriend could speak again, though her voice came out hoarse and strange, with a faint echo behind it. Ruthanne gave them bottled water, a printed list of aftercare instructions, and a coupon for ten percent off at Café Fleur.

“Why the coupon?” I asked after they left.

“People are calmer when they’re holding a coupon,” Ruthanne said.

The complaint from Melissa Harrow of Westport arrived three days before restaurant week. Her name was printed at the top in a font that looked expensive. She had attached screenshots of our website, circled the word “rules” in red six times, and written that the language created an “unwelcoming atmosphere inconsistent with luxury heritage tourism.” She had also included a photo of herself at Hollow Line Bridge, taken at 9:17 p.m.

In the picture, Melissa stood smiling in a cream wool coat, one hand lifted in a little wave. Behind her, the bridge arched black against the evening sky. The old iron railings were wet with mist, and the river below was a pale ribbon in the dark. There was someone standing behind her.

At first, I thought it was a man, tall and thin, with his head bent slightly to one side. Then I zoomed in and saw that he was on the wrong side of the railing. His feet hung over the river. His fingers hooked through the iron bars from underneath. His face had blurred where the camera should have caught it, smearing the features into a gray oval with a mouth too low and too wide.

Ruthanne saw me looking and sighed. “That’s why Sheriff Doyle’s coming by.”

“For the complaint?”

“For the woman.”

Sheriff Doyle came in twenty minutes later, read the complaint, said the bridge was going to answer, and left with the expression of a man who had already had this conversation with tourists, the Tourist Board, the bridge, and possibly God.

Melissa Harrow came into the Visitor Center after lunch with her husband, her sister, and the polished fury of someone who had paid for a beautiful weekend and found consequences waiting at check-in. She was in her late forties, stylish in that coastal Connecticut way where a camel coat can look both effortless and weaponized. Her hair was pinned loosely at the back of her neck. She had a small gold pendant at her throat, a wedding ring she kept turning with her thumb, and one of our town tote bags hooked over one arm. Her husband had the depleted calm of a man who had spent the morning apologizing to hotel staff. Her sister stood half a step behind them, pale and watchful, still wearing the Hawthorne House scarf given to overnight guests.

The tote bag looked damp.

“I’m the one who wrote in,” Melissa said, before I could welcome her. “About the rules.”

Ruthanne, who had been restocking the Hawthorne House brochures, made a small sound behind me. It was the sound of a person recognizing a familiar disaster in a new coat.

I gave Melissa my best Visitor Center smile. “Thank you for your feedback. We’re always reviewing our guest-facing language.”

Ruthanne coughed into her fist.

Melissa set her phone on the desk and tapped the screen. The bridge photo appeared again. She had zoomed in on the figure behind her and circled it in yellow. “This,” she said, “is exactly what I’m talking about.”

Her husband made a strangled noise, and the sister whispered Melissa’s name.

Melissa kept going. “You can’t market a town as charming and then have signage that makes guests feel threatened. We went to the bridge because the girl at the hotel said it was scenic. There was no gate. There was no guard. There was one little sign with a moon on it and some vague warning about dusk. Do you know how many places say things like that for atmosphere?”

Ruthanne stepped closer. “What girl at the hotel?”

Melissa blinked. “What?”

“You said a girl at the hotel told you the bridge was scenic.”

“Yes. At Hawthorne House.”

Ruthanne’s expression changed by less than an inch, but the air around the desk seemed to tighten. “What did she look like?”

Melissa glanced at her husband, irritated. “Young. Dark hair. Old-fashioned dress, I suppose, but half the staff there dress like they’re in some prestige drama about inherited silver.”

Her sister made a small, hurt sound.

Ruthanne looked at her. “You saw her too?”

The sister shook her head. Her name was Caroline, according to the reservation printout Melissa had slapped onto the counter with everything else. She had the anxious, careful posture of someone used to making herself useful in other people’s storms.

“I heard her,” Caroline said. “Last night. In the hall outside our room. She was laughing.”

Melissa rolled her eyes. “People laugh in hotels.”

Caroline kept looking at Ruthanne. “She said Melissa’s name.”

The Visitor Center seemed to grow quieter around us. Outside, a delivery truck hissed at the curb. Somewhere on the green, a child shrieked with ordinary delight.

Ruthanne reached beneath the desk, opened the locked drawer, and took out the laminated card with Sheriff Doyle’s number. Melissa stared at her.

“Is this really necessary?”

Ruthanne looked at the phone on the counter. The figure in the photo had changed. It no longer stood behind Melissa. It was leaning toward her photographed shoulder, one gray hand lifted beside hers in a perfect imitation of her wave. The mouth had opened wider, and the blur where its face should have been had begun to clear around the edges. Something pale shone inside it, either teeth or the beginning of a word.

Then the figure’s hand changed too. In the first photo, its fingers had been long and jointed wrong. Now it wore a ring: Melissa’s ring. Same gold. Same narrow band. Same small diamond chip set into the side, except the thing wore it on the wrong finger. Melissa stopped turning the ring on her real hand.

Her husband reached for the phone, but Ruthanne caught his wrist before he touched it. “Don’t,” she said.

“I want to delete it,” he whispered.

“You cannot delete something while it’s still arriving.”

The Visitor Center bell over the front door gave a small, nervous jingle, though no one had come in. Outside, tourists crossed the green with shopping bags and coffees, laughing under the clean gray sky. Someone had stopped to take a picture of the scarecrow display in front of Mallory’s. Across the street, the candles shaped like Town Hall glowed in the shop window. Mourner’s Crossing looked exactly like it did on the brochures: charming, historic, memorable.

Ruthanne called Sheriff Doyle. While she spoke, Caroline began to cry very quietly. Melissa stood motionless, staring at the phone as if anger could still carry her out of this. Her husband said, “Mel.” She didn’t answer. He said it again, and this time Ruthanne snapped her fingers once, hard. “Do not say her name.”

The husband’s mouth shut.

The sound came then: a train whistle, faint and far away, drifting through the Visitor Center in the middle of town, though the nearest active rail line had been torn up before I was born. It sounded lonely at first. That was the trick of it, I think. It sounded like distance, like rain, like something passing through and asking to be mourned.

Melissa lifted one hand to her ear. “What is that?”

Ruthanne ended the call and placed the laminated card on the counter. “Sheriff Doyle is on his way. Until he gets here, Mrs. Harrow, I need you to listen carefully. Do not look at the bridge photo again. Do not answer any voice that uses your mother’s name. Do not say your own name out loud. If you hear water, close your eyes.”

Melissa’s face had gone slack. “My mother’s been dead eight years.”

Ruthanne took a breath before answering, and in that pause I saw what her calm cost her. She was steady because someone had to be, not because the situation was small. “That’s why it’ll use her.”

A slow, wet drip fell from the tote bag hanging on Melissa’s arm and spread dark across the old wood boards. Ruthanne looked down, then looked at me.

“Get the bell.”

I opened the locked drawer. The little silver bell sat in the back corner, bright and cold and perfectly still. Behind me, Melissa began to hum. At first, it sounded like a nervous tune from someone trying not to cry. Then Caroline backed away from her, because the tune was not a tune. It was the train whistle, coming from behind Melissa’s teeth while her mouth barely moved.

I picked up the bell. It was heavier than it looked. The moment my fingers closed around the handle, every brochure in the Visitor Center lifted at the edges: the pumpkin festival flyers, the vineyard maps, the glossy Hawthorne House pamphlets, the restaurant week passports with their little boxes for stamps. For one second, all that paper stirred without wind, like a hundred small animals waking in their sleep.

Ruthanne held out her hand. “Not yet.”

The whistle deepened. Melissa’s husband pressed both hands to his ears. Caroline whispered a prayer under her breath, and I could tell from Ruthanne’s face that praying was fine, provided Caroline did not use any names the thing might find useful. The dark stain beneath the tote bag spread in a long line toward the desk. It smelled like river mud and hot iron.

Melissa’s phone buzzed on the counter. The screen lit with a contact photo of an older woman in a sunhat, smiling in bright summer light.

MOM

Melissa made a sound that seemed to tear itself out of her chest.

Ruthanne moved fast. For a woman in her seventies with orthopedic shoes and a cardigan with embroidered pears on the pockets, she moved like she had been waiting fifty years for this exact stupid moment. She snatched the phone off the counter, flipped it face down, and shoved it beneath the stack of restaurant week flyers.

“Mrs. Harrow,” she said, voice sharp now, stripped of customer service. “Look at me.”

Melissa turned her head. For a moment, her eyes were normal: terrified, wet, furious, human. Then the train whistle came from her throat again, and her pupils seemed to pull long, stretching sideways like something seen through running water.

The front door opened, and Sheriff Doyle stepped inside with his hat low in one hand and rain on the shoulders of his jacket, though the day outside was dry. Behind him came Deputy Kyle Bellamy, compact and watchful, with reddish-brown hair, bright eyes, and the careful expression of someone trying not to startle anything that might bolt in a direction physics couldn’t follow.

Sheriff Doyle took in the phone, the stain, the tote bag, Melissa, Caroline crying, the husband shaking, Ruthanne’s hand outstretched, and me holding the bell. “Well,” he said. “That’s inconvenient.”

Ruthanne said, “It has a ring now.”

Doyle’s gaze moved to the photo. His jaw tightened. “From her hand?”

“Yes.”

He looked at Melissa. “Ma’am, I’m Sheriff Doyle. I need you to stay exactly where you are.”

Melissa smiled, barely moving her mouth, which made it worse. From beneath the restaurant week flyers, the phone buzzed again.

MOM

The train whistle sounded from outside this time, close enough that the windows trembled. Tourists on the green stopped walking. A man carrying a paper bag from Mallory’s turned in a slow circle, searching for tracks that had not existed in decades. Deputy Bellamy moved to the door and locked it.

Sheriff Doyle looked at Ruthanne. “Bell.”

Ruthanne nodded. I handed it to her. Her fingers closed around mine for half a second before she took it, and her skin was cold.

“When I ring this,” she said to Melissa’s husband and sister, “do not speak. Do not look at the windows. Do not answer anything you hear, even if it sounds hurt.”

Caroline nodded at once. Melissa’s husband looked at his wife. “What’s going to happen to her?”

Ruthanne did not soften it. “We are going to make sure what’s coming through the picture does not finish arriving.”

“And Melissa?”

Sheriff Doyle answered. “We’ll do what we can.”

That was the first honest thing anyone had said to him, and it nearly broke him. Melissa opened her mouth, and this time her mother’s voice came out.

“Baby,” it said.

Her husband made a choking sound. Caroline shut her eyes and pressed both hands over her mouth. Ruthanne lifted the bell and rang it once, and the Visitor Center stopped pretending to be a gift shop with brochures.

The photo on the phone flashed white through the stack of flyers. The windows went black, as if night had pressed itself against the glass. The dark stain on the floor snapped backward toward Melissa’s tote bag and vanished into the waxed paper sleeve sticking out of the top, where I could see one of the strawberry-rhubarb hand pies from Mallory’s, its crimped edge bitten cleanly through.

Melissa screamed. The sound did not come from her mouth. It came from the phone, the walls, the floorboards, the locked drawer, the brochure rack, and the cheerful teal header on the laminated sheet. It came from Hollow Line Bridge, wherever the bridge was at that moment, because I was no longer entirely convinced it stayed in one place.

Ruthanne rang the bell again. The second note was higher, sharper. The phone cracked beneath the flyers. The old wood floor shuddered. Outside, the tourists on the green began moving again, but slowly, as if they were walking through deep water. Melissa dropped to her knees, and Sheriff Doyle caught her before her face hit the floor.

“Got her,” he said.

Deputy Bellamy crossed to the desk, grabbed the spool of red thread from the open drawer, and looped it around Melissa’s wrist with practiced hands. Ruthanne set the bell down carefully on the counter and took three iron nails from the drawer.

“She said her name?” Doyle asked.

“Her husband did,” Ruthanne said.

The husband looked ruined. “I’m sorry.”

Doyle did not look at him unkindly. “You didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I heard you.”

Ruthanne placed one iron nail on Melissa’s phone, one on the tote bag, and one on the floor where the stain had been. The room smelled less like river mud now and more like hot dust on an old radiator. Melissa lay against Sheriff Doyle’s arm, shivering. Her eyes had gone back to normal. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out.

Ruthanne crouched beside her. “Do not try to speak yet.”

Melissa’s hand twitched. Her ring was still there. In the photo, the figure’s hand had gone bare.

Deputy Bellamy wrapped the cracked phone in Ruthanne’s scarf. Sheriff Doyle lifted Melissa carefully, and for a moment she looked smaller than she had when she walked in. The camel coat was still expensive. The gold pendant still shone at her throat. Her fury had gone wherever fury goes when it finally meets something older and hungrier than itself.

Caroline followed them to the door, then turned back. “What happens now?”

Ruthanne picked up the laminated sheet from the counter and smoothed one curled corner with her thumb. “Now,” she said, “we update the website.”

After they took Melissa away, Ruthanne made me sit in the back office with a paper cup of water until my hands stopped shaking. Neither of us mentioned that the bell had left a silver smell in the room.

The next morning, I arrived early and found Ruthanne already there with a bucket, a scrub brush, and a fresh stack of Visitor Center maps. The dark stain on the floor had faded to a faint shadow between the boards. It looked almost ordinary, which in Mourner’s Crossing meant nothing useful.

Melissa Harrow had been taken to St. Brigid’s first, then to the clinic, then to a room at Hawthorne House with the mirrors covered and the windows locked. Sheriff Doyle came by before eight and said she was alive. He also said she had not spoken yet, though she had written her mother’s name twelve times on hotel stationery before Ruthanne took the pen away.

The Tourist Board sent an email at 8:47 a.m. After careful consideration, they agreed that rules sounded too severe. By noon, the website had been revised.

WELCOME TO MOURNER’S CROSSING
Please Review Our Guidelines for a Safe and Memorable Visit

At 12:15, a couple from New Jersey came in holding coffees from Konditori Oxenstierna and asked whether Hollow Line Bridge was walkable from the green.

I smiled. “It is,” I said, reaching for a map. “But the town recommends visiting before sunset.”

The man laughed. “Why? Ghosts?”

His wife elbowed him lightly, embarrassed. I marked the safest route in blue pen and handed them the map with both hands. Outside, the green was bright with afternoon sun. The scarecrows in front of Mallory’s leaned cheerfully in the breeze. Somewhere nearby, a cat yowled with what sounded like civic disapproval.

“After sunset,” I said, “the bridge gets less scenic.”

The man looked like he wanted to make another joke, but his wife took the map from me before he could. She read my face. Then she read the first guideline on the sheet beside the register.

Her smile faded a little. “Thank you,” she said.

That was the right answer.

When they left, Ruthanne came out of the back office and stood beside me at the desk. She had the silver bell in one hand and a fresh label from the office printer in the other.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

She peeled the backing off the label and placed it neatly inside the locked drawer.

The label said:

FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY. IF UNSURE, YOU ARE SURE.

Ruthanne closed the drawer. The bell did not ring. Across the green, the couple from New Jersey stopped at the corner, looked toward the road that led down to Hollow Line Bridge, and chose the bakery instead. Ruthanne watched them go and said, “Good.”

Me and my wife have been together for nearly 5 years now. We were high school sweethearts. Went against our parents’ better judgment when we ran off and got married fresh out of high school.

What can ya do, right? We were young and dumb. But, hey, I was financially stable enough to support us. Get us a nice little double wide trailer on the outskirts of town. Put food on the table. Keep cable on the TV. That sort of thing.

She knew it wasn’t forever. She knew that I’d keep my promise and get us an actual house. Put us somewhere nice. An HOA neighborhood without the HOA.

I think her pregnancy scared her. I mean, she was only 20. Of course it scared her. But when we found out we were having twins? That’s when she really started to slip off the deep end.

I blamed it on the pregnancy at first. Her mood swings. Those violent bursts of anger and frustration right before tears started to stream down her face.

But when the symptoms progressed even after giving birth, they became harder to just ignore. We got the best of both worlds. A little boy named Jackson and our sweet little Roxanne.

I can’t even describe it… it was like she hated them. She’d scream at them when they cried. Just get in their faces and scream for them to shut up at the top of her lungs.

Countless fights were started solely because I tried to calm her down during her routine fits.

That’s when her anger became more focused on me, personally. And, look, I get it, okay? Don’t have ’em if you can’t support ’em. I love those kids, and I will never call them mistakes. God’s plan is what they were.

Even still, they were two new mouths to feed. I think that’s what bothered my wife so much. Her hopes of an actual home had just been pushed back by a significant margin.

“You need to ask for a raise.”
“You need to ask for a promotion.”
“You need to look for another job.”

Her words rattled around in my head like loose sticks of dynamite. I knew I needed to step up. I knew that this couldn’t be our life forever.

I started working double shifts, leaving my wife home to take care of the kids. 14 hour days, 7 days a week. And still it wasn’t enough. My cache of savings was hardly even touching 1000 dollars, and I was slowly killing myself.

My wife wasn’t doing too well either. I think the constant childcare may have been taking a bit of a toll on her. She was looking more and more exhausted every day. Her hair was constantly a mess, and her eye bags looked to weigh at least 20 pounds each.

I wanted to take over. I wanted to give her a night out, but I couldn’t. I was working constantly. All of my money was going straight towards bills, food, and college funds.

God, I can’t even say I was surprised when I came home today to find the house eerily silent. No cries, no screams, no laughter. Just long, agonizing silence.

“Honey,” I called out.

“Down here, darling.”

Her voice was coming from the basement. She sounded more chipper than usual, but not exactly in the most pleasant of ways. It was an unhinged kind of delight. Like she was overcompensating for something.

I made my way to the top of the stairs, where I found two distinct streaks of blood leading down each step. The sounds of chains and locks echoed from somewhere in the basement.

I reached the bottom step and found my wife standing beneath a single overhead light that illuminated both her and the suspiciously stained meat freezer. Chains wrapped twice around the thing, and a big metal lock held them in place.

My wife turned to greet me in her blood-soaked nightgown. She wore a fake smile on her face so depraved that she barely looked human.

“H-honey,” I choked. “Where are the kids?”

She started laughing. Giggling at first, but it soon turned into a full blown meltdown of laughter.

“Oh, you know,” she laughed. “I’m sure they’re around here somewhere.”

I never thought I’d be so grateful to be a parent. For a long time, I viewed parenthood as a curse. 18 years of your life being borrowed. That’s why I swore I’d never have any kids.

Unfortunately, life has a way of giving you exactly what you didn’t ask for, and for me, that happened when I myself was still a child.

I was 17 when my little Joshy was born. 8 pounds, 6 ounces. A winter baby.

I don’t know. I guess I was just scared at the time. Scared of all the responsibility, sure, but more than anything, I was scared that I didn’t have what it takes. Me and his mother had only been together for 2 years before we made the same dumb mistake as every other teen parent in the country.

I thought about what this meant for me. What I was going to have to become in order to support this new life outside of my own.

I was almost reluctant when I had to start working. Maybe reluctant isn’t the word for it. The word I’m looking for is probably closer to resentful. Of course, that feeling only lasted for around a year or two. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe it followed me around all the way up the corporate ladder, as I went from employee, to supervisor, all the way up to district manager.

I didn’t get the pride of knowing I’d done it for myself. I hadn’t made something out of myself because that’s what I wanted for myself. I did it because I needed to. I may have been resentful, but I was not the kind of person to let my baby starve. I wasn’t the kind of person to not show up for my baby’s mother.

Even still, she noticed how withdrawn I’d become. How she was the only one singing his lullabies at night. Tucking him in. Kissing his forehead. Comforting him. For a long time, the extent of parental bonding between me and my son was when I gave him the occasional bath or when I changed his diapers. In my mind, my only job was to keep food on the table.

It drove a wedge between me and his mom. During those early years, we found ourselves fighting nearly every night. She demanded a kind of presence that I just didn’t believe I possessed.

Of course, Joshua was there to witness all of it. The screaming fits, the wall punching, the kind of things that no toddler should see. It got to a point where we didn’t even know what we were doing anymore. Why we were even still together.

I guess the answer was Joshy. Because despite what I felt, there was still a part of me deep down that wanted to give my son a good life. Even if I didn’t know how to show up for him emotionally, I could still fight to make sure he lived comfortably.

When his mother died, though, it was like I became numb to absolutely everything. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. No superficial hope of maybe someday being an actual functioning family after I stopped being so pathetic. God made sure that I learned my lesson in the most eye-opening way imaginable.

It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t some unexpected tragic loss. We had to watch her. Watch her as she dwindled away more and more every day. Watch her cheeks sink in and darken. Watch her lose her hair. Lose her weight. We watched her take her last breath on that hospital bed before the beep of her heart monitor left both of us crying our eyes out.

Joshy was only six years old when she passed. Too young to understand the concept of death, but old enough to know that his mom wasn’t there anymore. Old enough to feel the pain that came with knowing she wouldn’t be coming back.

And you know what I did? I made him sleep alone. In the dark. In his own bed.

God, I know. I fucking know I’m a terrible person, but fuck me, I am trying, okay? I’m trying to do better.

For 6 weeks, I made him sleep alone in that room. I pretended to be asleep when he asked to sleep in my bed. I outright refused him sometimes.

I was afraid of needing him. Afraid he’d need me too. I learned a lot during those 6 weeks. I was in the dark too. The amount of responsibility that now fell on my shoulders was so overwhelming that it numbed me. I couldn’t fail if I didn’t try. That’s what I truly believed, what I had convinced myself of in a state of vulnerability and exhaustion.

But I was failing. I had, without question, failed harder than I had ever failed in my entire life. And when I came to that realization, I made a vow to myself to step up. To be the man that my son needed me to be.

I started letting him sleep in my bed routinely. Singing to him every night. Rocking him in my lap until little snores escaped his throat.

I took him to the park every day. Bought him new toys every week. Watched movies with him. Played with him. It was like I was trying to make up for all of the lost time.

Josh became more comfortable during this period. He talked to me more. Opened up to me about things.

I finally learned what he actually liked. His favorite foods, favorite superheroes, that kind of thing. For the first time in my life, I actually felt attentive. More than just a paycheck and the occasional bath.

He also revealed some things that troubled me a bit. The kind of things that made me worry that his mom’s death had hit him harder than he was letting on.

Like, for example, I had been talking casually with him the other day while we ate cereal and watched some Saturday morning cartoons.

I think we had been joking around about one of the scenes from SpongeBob when we heard a dish crash in the kitchen. Now, me personally, I had nearly jumped out my skin at the sudden burst of noise, but Josh, he hardly even flinched.

“That was just mom, I think,” he cooed as calmly as possible. “She comes up here sometimes.”

Of course, I couldn’t help but look at him sideways.

“Is that right?” I asked intuitively. “You think that’s your mom in there?”

“Yeah, probably. I hear her walking around sometimes. She’s super loud.”

My heart broke for him. The imagination of a child does some miraculous things when grief is involved. I wouldn’t be surprised if he really did think his mom was still just hiding around the house.

“Well, I’ll have to keep a better ear out. Hopefully I’ll hear her too one day.”

Josh’s head turned slowly in my direction. He stared at me for a moment before responding.

“You don’t already? She talks about you all the time.”

I felt a chill run down my spine.

“I wish I did, buddy. What exactly does she say about me?”

“It’s hard to hear her sometimes. She’s usually always in the basement. I think she cries a lot.”

A silence lingered in the air for a long while as I thought about how to appropriately respond. Clearly, he was hurting. Trying to make sense of a terrible thing. It had to have been a part of his process.

I didn’t like the sound of his whole “she’s usually in the basement” comment, though. It was oddly specific. It didn’t sound like something he just told himself to cope. It felt real.

I guess that’s why I started listening so intently at night. Training my ears to pick up even the slightest of noises while the house was silent. I knew she was gone, but a part of me still believed I could catch a glimpse of her.

It was delusional, but I was weak. Vulnerable.

Some nights, I really thought I could hear her. Her whispers flowed faintly through the ventilation. Soft cries snaked their way into my eardrums at odd hours of the night.

My son started acting strangely around this time. I’d find him standing silently in front of the basement door. Staring blankly at the door with hollow eyes. It’d be 3 o’clock in the morning, and there he’d be. Unmoving.

I caught him talking to himself. Whispering under his breath as though someone else were in the room with him. All I’d ever manage to catch were brief glimpses of the conversation, though. However, what I heard was still enough to make my heart throb.

“He’s doing better.”
“He spends time with me now.”
“He tells me he loves me.”
“I don’t want to leave him yet.”

I found it wholesome. It was pretty heartwarming to know that I was redeeming myself in his eyes. I allowed myself to have hope that I was doing something right for once.

The feeling proved to be short-lived, unfortunately. In the weeks that followed, Josh actually became withdrawn and distant. It almost felt like he was avoiding me, and I wanted to find out why. So I asked him.

“You’ve been pretty quiet lately. Anything you wanna talk about?”

He looked up from his bowl of cereal, spoon in hand, before staring at me for a moment. Analyzing me. Analyzing the room before gesturing for me to lean down so he could whisper in my ear.

“Mom says I shouldn’t talk to you.”

“Why would she tell you that? She knows you can talk to me about anything,” I replied, almost offended.

“She says you hate me. She says you don’t love me cause I was born.”

His words hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d been working so hard. Putting so much into making my mistakes up to him. And now it was like my heart was shattering into a million pieces. Apparently, so was his, because I could see the tears welling up in his eyes.

“She says you want to hurt me. She can feel it. She, she knows what you think. She hears it for me because she says you don’t like to say it out loud.”

Through tears and with a broken voice, I did my best to respond to him.

“Joshy, honey, no. No, no, no. I would never hurt you. Daddy had you when he was still a baby too. It’s scary, buddy. But all I ever wanted was to make sure you grew up happy.”

“I don’t feel very happy.”

There was a huge crash in the living room, causing Josh to jump and reside within himself.

“It’s okay. I’ll go check it out. Just stay here for me, okay? I’ll be right back.”

When I entered the living room, I stopped so hard my socks slid across the hardwood. Every single family photo of ours lay broken in a neat little pile in the center of the living room. The broken frames looked deliberately placed, and glass glistened atop the hardwood.

As I stood there in shock at what I was seeing, my son snaked past me and disappeared into his room.

“She heard me. She heard me. Oh, gosh, she heard me.”

I must’ve spent a solid 45 minutes picking glass off the floor, and my mind raced the entire time I cleaned. I couldn’t get Josh’s words out of my head. I didn’t hate him. I never hated him. God, you have to believe me.

Trash bag in hand, I headed downstairs to toss the garbage into the bin. That’s where I found him. Staring at the door to the basement. Swaying back and forth. Whispering to himself.

“Please don’t make me go.”
“Please don’t make me go.”
“Please don’t make me go.”
“Please don’t make me go.”

The basement door slowly opened on its own, revealing near complete darkness.

Josh turned towards me slowly.

“She’s just trying to protect me.”

Those were his last words to me before he disappeared down the dark stairwell.

I felt frozen in place. Completely glued to the floor for what felt like hours before I broke out of my trance and instincts kicked in.

I crept down the stairs. Calling Josh’s name every few steps. I received no reply. In fact, everything seemed more still than ever before.

I searched the basement up and down. Combed through every square inch of the room. Josh was nowhere to be found. He just disappeared without a trace. Without a single sound.

I tried to fight the panic, but it seeped through the cracks. Left me running in circles, repeating Josh’s name over and over again to no avail.

I ended up calling the police. They searched the house themselves, and they too found nothing. When I explained what happened, they looked at me like I was insane. It was as though they thought it was somehow my fault, and when they told me they’d be in touch, there was a bit of an accusatory tone in their voice.

I went to bed that night feeling empty. Lost. Completely shocked and broken all over again. I couldn’t even sleep. All I could do was stare up at the ceiling fan. Watching the clock on my nightstand.

11 PM
12 AM
1 AM
2 AM

At around 2:30 in the morning, I started hearing things. I thought I was losing my mind at first, but the more time went on, the more clear the noises became.

I heard giggling. Whispers and laughs coming through the walls and nesting in my eardrums. It was hard to decipher when it started, but by the end, I heard what was unmistakably my son.

“Dad… Mom says you can come down now.”

As someone from rural Spain, I thought I understood strange roadside culture. We have old pubs older than America itself and roundabouts that appear to have been designed by the devil himself.

But nothing, nothing, prepared me for Buc-ee’s.

Mi amor, Sadie, had insisted we stop there during our road trip.

“You gotta experience it,” she said with the excitement of someone taking me to Disneyland.

We pulled off the highway into Luling and I nearly mistook the place for an airport terminal.

The parking lot alone could host a small war.

Cars. Trucks. RVs. A horse trailer for some reason.

And towering above it all was that thing.

That massive smiling beaver statue.

Its buck teeth gleamed in the Texas sun. Its little red tongue poked out cheerfully. It stared down at me with black cartoon eyes so empty and wide they felt almost human in the wrong way.

“You alright?” Sadie asked.

“Why is your petrol station so large?” I muttered.

She laughed.

“Wait till you see inside.”

he doors opened.

And I swear to God I heard angels sing.

It was enormous.

Rows upon rows of snacks, merchandise, drinks, jerky, fudge, sandwiches, hunting gear, candles, shirts, home décor, taxidermy, barbecue sauce, and things I still cannot explain.

The floors gleamed like polished marble.

Not a crumb anywhere.

Not a stain.

It was too clean.

Far too clean.

Everyone inside smiled.

Not regular smiling.

The kind of smile where teeth show just a little too much.

The kind of smile people wear when trying not to blink while their picture is being taken.

“Howdy, welcome in!” one employee chirped in a thick southern accent.

Her face was unnaturally smooth. Plastic almost. Like someone had stretched skin over a mannequin.

“Try the brisket!” another man shouted.

His smile never faltered.

I leaned toward Sadie.

“Why do they all look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like they’ve never had an unhappy thought in their lives.”

She snorted and walked off toward the jerky counter.

That was when I first saw him.

The mascot.

Inside.

Full costume.

Just standing near the drink fountain.

Watching me.

Its massive beaver head tilted slightly.

Still smiling.

Still staring.

I blinked.

Looked away.

Looked back.

Gone.

I found him again in the chips aisle.

Half-hidden around the corner.

Watching.

Then by the fudge counter.

Then behind a display of beaver-themed pajamas.

Never moving when I looked directly at him.

Just… appearing.

Always staring.

That big obnoxious smile.

“Sadie,” I whispered, “why is the mascot following me?”

She looked over.

“What mascot?”

“The beaver!”

She frowned.

“There’s no mascot in here.”

I turned.

Gone again.

My stomach twisted.

Either I was losing my mind or Texas was significantly more cursed than advertised.

Then I remembered.

The mushrooms.

Earlier that day Sadie had convinced me to try some “road trip gummies” from Austin.

“Just enough to make the drive fun,” she’d said.

Brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

I was tripping in a giant American beaver supermarket that was also an airport of a gas station.

I rushed toward the bathroom.

The restroom was somehow bigger than my flat back home.

Marble walls. Spotless stalls. Better maintained than most hospitals.

I was stunned at how well kept it was. It was too perfect.

I locked myself in one stall and bent over breathing heavily. I was prepared to puke when suddenly, the chatter outside all came to a stop.

Then I heard it.

Heavy footsteps.

Soft at first.

Then stopping outside my stall.

I looked behind.

Brown furry feet.

Flat cartoon mascot shoes.

Just standing there.

Waiting.

I froze.

“Hola?” I squeaked.

Nothing.

Just silence.

Then slowly…

the feet bent downward.

As if crouching.

Trying to look under the stall.

I screamed and kicked the door open...

Darkness

The bathroom was gone.

The whole store was dark.

Bathed only in red candlelight.

I stumbled backward.

People stood in black robes in the center of Buc-ee’s.

Employees.

Customers.

Everyone.

Still smiling.

Still too wide.

Bucked tooth galore.

They chanted in unison around a massive stone altar.

And on it, someone screaming.

Blood spilled over polished tile.

The manager stood at the front.

I recognized him instantly.

His face stretched unnaturally tight, swollen with too much Botox, lips trembling in that permanent smile.

His front teeth were filed into points like giant buck teeth.

He raised a knife to the heavens.

“ALL HAIL THE BEAVER!” he shrieked.

The crowd roared.

At the center of them towered the enormous Buc-ee’s statue from outside.

Only now its eyes glowed red.

Its mouth split wider than should be possible.

The stone cracked.

And the thing inside moved.

A voice suddenly shrieked through the darkness.

“BRISKET!”

The entire congregation snapped their heads toward the deli counter in unison.

Then chaos erupted.

The robed worshipers screamed like starving animals and charged, trampling over one another in a rabid frenzy toward the glowing carving station. I stumbled back as dozens of them piled atop each other, clawing and biting for scraps while wet, animalistic noises filled the air.

The beaver-toothed manager stood behind the counter, hacking violently with a butcher’s cleaver.

THWACK. THWACK. THWACK.

Chunks of meat flew onto wax paper.

The worshipers shrieked in delight.

“FRESH BRISKET! FRESH BRISKET!”

One woman tore into a slab beside me, grease and blood dripping down her chin.

Then I saw the hand.

A human hand.

Still wearing a wedding ring.

My stomach dropped.

The “brisket” wasn’t brisket.

It was someone, hacked apart on the cutting board while the crowd devoured him in fistfuls, chewing and moaning with bliss as blood soaked the tile beneath them.

The manager looked at me, smiling impossibly wide.

“TRY A SAMPLE?”

Before I could run, hands seized me from every direction.

Cold fingers.

Too many of them.

They grabbed my arms, my legs, my throat.

I screamed as they dragged me kicking across the polished floor while the congregation chanted louder and louder.

“COWARD! COWARD! COWARD! COWARD!”

They tore my clothes from my body in frantic jerks, shredding fabric until I was bare and trembling before them.

The beaver mascot approached slowly, carrying a rusted bucket sloshing with thick red liquid.

My voice cracked as panic overtook me.

“¡No más, por favor! ¡No más!”
(No more, please! No more!)

Dios mío… sálvame… por favor, Dios…”
(My God… save me… please, God…)

The first splash hit my chest warm.

Sticky.

Metallic.

Blood.

They painted it across me with their bare hands, smearing symbols and words over my skin while the crowd shrieked with laughter.

Across my chest, in dripping crimson letters, they wrote:

COWARD

Then they dragged me outside.

The night air hit my skin like ice.

Above me towered the great Buc-ee’s sign, glowing against the black Texas sky.

They hoisted me upward with ropes, lifting me naked into the air beneath the massive smiling beaver logo.

I swung there helplessly, blood dripping from my body, suspended beneath the neon sign as the crowd below dropped to their knees in worship.

The mascot stepped forward beneath me.

Tilted its head.

And in a deep, guttural voice that sounded like gravel forced through a throat unused to speech, it finally said its first words.

“He was not worthy of the Beaver.”

I woke up screaming in the bathroom stall.

Lights normal.

Everything clean.

Silent.

I stumbled out drenched in sweat.

No candles.

No blood.

No cult.

Just Buc-ee’s.

Normal Buc-ee’s.

Sadie found me pale and shaking near the clothing area.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I think your gas station is cursed.”

She laughed so hard she snorted.

“Told you not to take that many gummies.”

We walked outside.

The warm Texas air hit me like freedom itself.

I laughed nervously.

“Right. Hallucination. Obviously. Just the drugs.”

We climbed into the car.

I buckled in.

Took one last glance toward the store.

And there he was.

Standing beneath the giant sign.

The mascot.

Motionless.

Staring directly at me.

Head tilted.

Smiling.

He slowly raised one gloved hand.

And waved, goodbye.

I went through a pretty rough breakup recently with a girl who was really into crystals and what have you. Her whole room was decorated with dream catchers and things of that nature.

She was great, if I’m being honest. Nothing particularly wrong about her or anything. She just was so into spirituality and dark magic that it turned me off to the point of resentment.

That kinda thing is so childish in my opinion. You’re literally playing with rocks. Thinking that the world and stars are communicating with you. Dumbest thing I ever heard.

At the point of our breakup, though, we’d already been together for about seven months. Attachment had become a real thing. And I think it was more prominent in her than it was with me.

That being said, the breakup was not taken lightly. There were fights. Screaming matches. All manner of verbal assaults that ensued within the following weeks.

I stood firm in my decision.

Every time she tried to contact me from some fake social media account or number, she’d be blocked within minutes. Only for her to try again the next day. And the next day. And the next day.

Even after I got my new girlfriend, she’d just keep trying to fix things. Force things to work, even though I’m sure she knew deep down that they never would.

Day by day, I’d hear from her against my will. That is, until all of her communication stopped entirely. Not gradually, either. One day she just up and stopped trying.

I’d thought she had given up. Realized that we weren’t meant to be and started the process of moving on with her life. And for a few days, that seemed to be the case.

I was ecstatic, with the emotional weight finally being off my shoulders. However, that joy was pretty short lived.

I’d woken up in the middle of the night one night in absolute agony.

I couldn’t pinpoint the source of my pain because, frankly, it was everywhere. All over my body from head to toe. All I could do was stumble blindly into my bathroom, feeling around to guide myself through the dark.

I made it to the bathroom, found the light switch, and what I saw in the mirror when I flipped the switch was enough to make my heart stop in its chest.

Hundreds of tiny holes filled my body. Thousands, even. Too many to count, but I literally could feel the tiny streams of blood trickling out from each wound.

Obviously, I wanted to call the police, but as soon as I went to find my phone, it was like a force field encapsulated my entire body. I couldn’t move even an inch.

Suddenly, my arm began to bend against my will. Pulled behind my back by an unknown force with the strength of a gorilla. I felt the pressure build more and more until… *snap*

The pain was enough to make the world feel quiet. I couldn’t even hear myself scream because it was like every portion of my brain was too focused on the pain.

That’s when my leg began to bend against my knee. Further and further. I could hear my own bones creaking until, again… *snap*

All I could do was stare at the bone sticking out of my leg in utter shock and disbelief. I cried at the top of my lungs, screaming for God to help me.

I laid there for a moment. Breathing heavy and trying to make sense of everything. My concentration was interrupted, though, when I was lifted into the air and thrown violently against the wall. Again. And again.

Blood poured from my broken teeth, and I knew that my nose had been broken, but the pain in my arm and leg were still the center of my attention.

After one more toss against the wall, I was out cold. Knocked unconscious on the icy bathroom floor.

I awoke hours later from the pain, but instead of finding myself on the floor, I found myself in bed. Tucked in tightly underneath the covers, with a familiar woman standing over me and stroking my hair.

With a wink, a smirk, and a kiss on the forehead, she left me with one final sentence.

“Now you know not to ever leave me again.”