r/TheMidnightArchives

I know exactly how this sounds.

Trust me, I've spent the last three weeks trying to convince myself I'm wrong.

Maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe people change. Maybe working eighty-hour weeks for a robotics company called L.I.Z. Technologies simply drains every ounce of personality out of a person.

I hope that's all it is.

Because if I'm right... then I don't know who is that sitting beside me at dinner.

My brother and I are ten years apart. My parents waited over a decade before having another kid. I choose to interpret that as careful planning instead of hesitation.

Growing up, he was less of a sibling and more of a second dad with a criminal record in psychological warfare.

If I left a soda unattended, he'd somehow replace it with sparkling water and act offended when I noticed. Every time we played video games, he'd wait until I was about to win before "accidentally" bumping the console with his foot. When I was thirteen, he convinced me that blinking too much made you go blind.

I believed him for three weeks. It didn't help that whenever we'd roughhouse, he'd snatch my glasses off my face.

"You can't see without them," he'd tease.

He still laughs about that one.

That was just us.

He picked on me more than anyone else in the world, but if somebody outside the family ever tried it, he'd be the first one standing beside me. Whenever life fell apart, somehow I always ended up calling him. Half the time he'd answer with, "What'd you screw up now?" before spending the next hour helping me fix it.

That's my brother.

Or... it was.

Things changed after he started working for L.I.Z.

Whenever I asked what he actually did there, he'd just shrug.

"Can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"Non-disclosure agreement."

"So... robots?"

"No comment."

I always assumed he was making his job sound cooler than it actually was. Then he stopped acting like himself. The first thing I noticed wasn't something he did. It was something he didn't.

He stopped making fun of me.

I know that sounds ridiculous. But if you have an older brother, you know exactly why that's terrifying. I spilled barbecue sauce all over his truck one afternoon. Normally he'd have looked at me like I'd committed a felony.

Instead he smiled.

"It happens."

...

It happens?

Who says that?

A week later we played Mario Kart.

I beat him.

Twice.

He didn't accuse me of cheating. He didn't demand a rematch.

He just smiled and said, "Good game."

I actually paused the race.

"Who are you?"

He laughed. A perfectly timed laugh.

Not too loud. Not too quiet.

Like someone had studied exactly how people laugh.

"You've always been funny," he said.

No.

No, no, no.

My brother would've called me an idiot.

One night at dinner I told the same embarrassing story Mom has been telling since I was sixteen. Usually he'd interrupt halfway through to make it even worse.

This time... He listened.

Then he said, "That must have been difficult."

I nearly dropped my fork.

I called Mom afterward.

"You don't think he's been acting... odd?"

She looked confused.

"He seems happier."

"Dad?"

"He finally is on his own."

Neither of them saw it.

Only me.

Last Saturday, my brother came over to help Dad replace the water heater. I wasn't much use with plumbing, so while they disappeared into the garage arguing over which wrench was the right wrench, I camped out in Dad's office to finish a history assignment.

The house was unusually quiet.

Well... quiet except for the occasional "Hand me the pipe wrench!" followed immediately by "That's not the pipe wrench!"

I had almost finished my essay when I noticed another laptop sitting on the corner of Dad's desk.

My brother's work computer. It was already open. The screen had gone dark from inactivity, but one thing hadn't.

A tiny red light glowed beside the webcam.

I frowned. Maybe it was updating. Maybe someone had forgotten to close a meeting.

Still... The light never turned off. I waved a hand in front of the camera.

Nothing.

No notification. No meeting controls.

Just that little red dot staring back at me.

Watching.

Curiosity got the better of me. I tapped the trackpad. The screen woke instantly. No password. Just a desktop filled with folders I couldn't even pretend to understand. Most of them had names that sounded like corporate nonsense.

Behavioral Mapping.

Neural Replication.

L.I.Z. Internal.

The last folder caught my attention. It was different. Locked behind a firewall icon.

A small window popped onto the screen before I even clicked it.

Camera Access Active

I froze.

The webcam light was still glowing.

Then... For the briefest second... The camera preview opened by itself.

Instead of showing me sitting at the desk... It showed...

Someone looking back at me.

Not through the webcam. From behind it. A face pressed against what looked like glass.

Wide eyes. Frantic. Mouth moving without sound.

Then the preview vanished.

I stared at the screen, convinced I'd imagined it.

A second later, the locked folder opened on its own. Inside was only one file.

Its name changed as I watched. Not all at once. One letter at a time.

H

E

L

P

The screen went black.

For a second I thought I'd crashed the computer.

Then white text appeared.

>

I froze.

Another line typed itself.

>

My hands stopped moving.

More words appeared.

>

Every hair on my arms stood up.

>

I stared at the screen.

Another sentence.

>

Then another.

>

The typing stopped. Several seconds passed.

Then, one final line slowly appeared.

>

The laptop snapped shut. Not by itself. By someone else's hand.

I looked up.

My brother stood beside the desk. I hadn't heard him come inside.

He smiled.

Warm. Gentle.

Almost perfect.

"Caught you being nosy again."

I looked into his eyes, searching for the man who taught me to throw a football, who unplugged my controller whenever I was winning, who spent years calling me every name except the one Mom gave me.

I couldn't find him.

I handed him the laptop without saying a word.

He thanked me.

My brother never thanked me.

He is not him.

Whoever walked out of that room remembered everything about my brother...

Except how to be him.

Warning : This and subsequent posts in this series will contain content that describes abhorrent and graphic child abuse. Reader discretion is advised.

People hear "locked in a closet" and flinch. It's the image everyone already has ready — a door, a dark, a child folded into some small space nobody's supposed to be folded into. It sounds like the worst thing a house can do to a kid.

I'd have taken it. Gladly. Every time.

A closet has walls. A closet has a door, and a door — even a locked one — is a boundary, a line between you and whatever's on the other side of it. Inside it, whatever else is happening, you're contained. You're not reachable. Whatever's coming has to open something first, has to make a decision and act on it, and in that half-second of a door swinging open, there's at least the smallest warning that something is about to happen.

We didn't get a door. We got a position that gave us nothing — no walls, no cover, no boundary between us and a hallway anyone in the house could walk through at any moment, for any reason, or none. Legs straight, hands on the floor, bent all the way forward, for hours, in the open, in the one place in the house everyone had to pass through to get anywhere else.

That's not confinement. That's the opposite of confinement. It's total, permanent exposure, dressed up as punishment, and it comes with its own physical torment built directly into the shape of it — the ache starting in your legs and climbing everywhere else, no part of the position that gives, no way to shift the weight anywhere it might hurt less. A closet asks a kid to endure only the dark and the waiting. This asked us to endure the dark and the waiting and the pain and the exposure, all four at once, with no wall or door standing between any of it and us.

I've thought about this more than I probably should have. Which was worse. And I keep landing in the same place: at least a closet would have let me not be seen. At least it would have made me harder to reach. What we had instead made us easier — easier to kick, easier to hit, easier to have a shoe thrown at from clear across a room — because there was nothing left of us that wasn't already open, already offered up, already exactly where anyone in that house could get to us without even having to try.

That position wasn't the worst thing that happened in that house. It was just the thing that made everything else possible.

No Remorse Part One can be found here : https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1vng0o8/my_family_had_a_tradition_at_thanksgiving_i_was/

(Part 3 coming soon.)

​It was 2:04 AM when the knocking started. Three slow, rhythmic raps against the hollow wood of Room 204.

​Quentin froze, staring at the door from the edge of the sagging mattress. He wasn't expecting anyone, especially not at the Hells Bells Motel in the dead of night. He crept across the stained carpet, held his breath, and pressed his eye to the cold metal of the peephole.

​Standing in the dim, amber glow of the hallway was a man wearing a faded navy uniform with a dingy white apron tied around his waist. He was holding a spray bottle filled with murky red liquid and a stack of stiff, yellowed towels.

​Quentin blinked, leaning closer. The face in the distorted fisheye lens wasn't a stranger. It was his own face. Alternate-Quentin stared straight back through the glass, smiling a stiff, rehearsed smile.

​BEEP.

​Before Quentin could even react or throw his weight against the door, the latch retracted. The door swung open with a soft, heavy click...

​Quentin freezes, his heart slamming against his ribs. He expects a monster, a fight, or a demand. But Alternate-Quentin just gives a polite, rehearsed nod, steps right past him into the room, and says in Quentin's exact voice—just a little too high and cheerful:

​"Just turning down the bed for the night, sir. Can't let the grime settle."

​Alternate-Quentin starts "cleaning," but everything he does is completely backward and wrong.

​He sprays the thick liquid onto the clean mirror, smearing dark residue across it.

Then, he grabs Quentin’s fresh clothes out of his open suitcase, creasing them into impossibly neat origami shapes, and then tosses them directly into the trash can. ​He walks over to the bed, strips the top blanket, and begins tucking Quentin’s own shoes under the mattress.

​Quentin tries to back toward the open doorway to escape into the hall, but when he turns around, the hallway isn't there anymore. It’s just a solid, blank wall of damp wallpaper, completely sealing Room 204 from the outside world.

​Alternate-Quentin turns around from the bed, holding up a spare maid’s apron and a brass room key labeled 204.

​He holds them out toward Quentin with that same stiff, vacant smile.

​"Shift's almost over, Quentin. Next guest checks in at 2:04."

The stone walls of St. Jude’s Convent always kept the cold in, but the draft in the chapel felt like breath against the back of Sister Agnes's neck.

​It was long past midnight, the hour of silent prayer, when the faint sound started.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. A steel nib dragging across thick parchment echoed off the high arches above the altar.

​Sister Agnes held her breath and stepped toward the massive, brass-bound lectern in the center of the nave.

The dark leather cover of the great Latin Bible was already propped open to the blank ledger at the back. The room smelled of old incense and fresh, copper-heavy ink.

​She reached out with a trembling hand, her lantern casting long shadows across the page.

There, beneath the names of dead bishops and forgotten abbesses, a new line had just been carved into the paper. The ink was so fresh it glistened in the flickering light.

​Sister Agnes. August 16.

​Three days. Exactly seventy-two hours. And as she stared at her own name, the iron doors of the chapel locked themselves with a heavy, deafening thud. 

Don’t ever go near national parks.

Especially if you have kids.

Four months ago, I moved my family to a small mountain town in the Rocky Mountain region. The town sits right on the border of a famous national park; in fact, our backyard opens directly into the park. For a while, it was a dream come true; my wife and I loved the views and enjoyed hiking nearly every day, and our two young boys loved exploring and playing in the woods on the park borders.

Something is wrong with this place. I didn't understand that when we moved here. I do now. About two months after the move, I started seeing them: the signs. It started slow; the first one I saw was plastered on the automatic glass door of the local grocery store. But now they are everywhere.

They all say the same thing: “September 7-14^(th) annual week of remembrance. National Park closed, no one will be permitted inside.”

I didn’t think about it much as I entered the grocery store, though I mentioned it to my wife when we returned to the car.

“Did you see that flyer? I wonder what that week of remembrance is.”

“Hmm,” she said, “Probably some local celebration.”

I shrugged. “I guess so, just seems weird that they would close the park for a week. That’s a big hit to business, isn’t that Labor Day weekend?”

“I’m sure they have their reasons.”

If only I knew then what I know now.

From then on, it seemed like every time we went into town, there were new signs. On random businesses, on every church and government building. Before long, the signs were everywhere.

My wife and I were driving through town on our way to pick up the boys from their first day at school. The strange sign I saw in every window and every street corner filled my mind.

“Have you noticed how few kids there are?” my wife asked

“What?” Her question caught me off guard.

“Well, think about it: the town is nearly 5,000 people, and we have the only elementary school in the area, and I've barely seen any kids.”

I stared down the road, pondering her observation

“I asked the boys' teacher this morning.” Her voice was a little lower

“She said there’s only 10 kids in the boys' grade, and only 95 in the whole school. Doesn’t that seem odd?”

I shrugged

“It’s a tourist town; maybe people aren’t here to have a family.”

“I guess.” She said as she chewed on her lip.

We pulled up to the school; our boys and their teacher stood by the curb. My wife and I parked and hopped out.

“Hi, Ms. Johnson. Is everything alright?” my wife asked with concern

The teacher smiled. “Yes, everything is wonderful, you’re boys were just little angels today.”

She handed my wife a yellow paper.

“I’m just here to give you this; the school wanted every parent to get one.”

And with a practiced smile she said

“Have a lovely day.” And briskly walked back towards the school building.

My wife stared at the paper and frowned before handing it to me. All it said was

“Remembrance Week Sep. 7-14^(th): PROTECT YOUR CHILDREN”

We looked at each other, confused. My wife whispered

“What is this?”

I tightened my jaw and looked around for the boys’ teacher; by now she was long gone. But my eyes came to rest on another parent and her daughter, who looked to be the same age as the boys. I briskly walked towards her

“Excuse me, ma’am?” She looked startled as I approached

“Yes?”

“Hi, my sons attend here, and their teacher gave us this.” I showed her the poster.

“Do you know what it’s all about?”

She stiffened slightly as her eyes quickly glanced at the paper in my hand and back to me.

“The park is no place for a child; protect your children.” She whispered before tightening the grip on her daughter's hand and walking away.

“What did she say?” my wife asked

I shrugged. “Nothing helpful”

We got home, and as my wife and sons settled on the couch for a family movie, I found myself in the bedroom. Typing the phrase ‘Remembrance Day’ along with the name of the town into my laptop's search engine, I stared at the unhelpful results. There seemed to be nothing, no articles, no backstory, not so much as a Facebook post that tied the phrase to the town in any meaningful way.

I switched tactics and typed in the national park and the dates September 7^(th)-14^(th). The National Park website confirmed that the park was indeed closed during that week, but the website claimed that it was for ‘planned maintenance’.

I stared frustrated at the computer screen.

“Dad?”

The voice of my son Aaron rescued me from the unfruitful search

“Are you going to watch the movie with us?”

With a nod, I closed the computer and said

“Sure thing, buddy.”

The start of the movie pushed the strange poster out of my mind. The next afternoon, my wife picked up the boys while I stayed home to catch up on work. I always enjoyed working on the backyard porch. The view of the untouched wilderness of the park paired with the sounds of nature helped me concentrate; it was one of the main reasons I wanted to move out here.

After about 15 minutes of answering emails and updating spreadsheets, the woods fell silent. The change caused me to glance up from the laptop to the world around me. The sound of the wind had disappeared, though I still could feel it. The birds were silent. The wild land before me was as quiet as could be. It was like watching a muted video of the woods. I looked around; a strange feeling filled me. I held my breath and didn’t move; it felt as though making the slightest noise would break some unspoken rule.

I sat there frozen for what felt like an eternity. Then, from the hills just beyond my property, a loud snap of a breaking twig echoed in the silence. Then another, and another. Something was walking, and all of nature quietly beheld its journey. It moved along the land that passed in front of my home. I looked, trying to find the source of the steps, maybe a hiker, or a rarely seen large animal. But I couldn’t tell what it was; it moved in deep underbrush, and even as I watched intently, I only caught glances of something dark and large. As the steps moved past the area of my land, it was like the world came alive again; the wind and chirping of birds returned. The silence was gone, and so were the steps.

Standing up, I stared where I last heard the steps.

“Must have been a moose,” I muttered to myself.

Soon my family got home; I greeted them at the door, asking my boys how their day was and what they learned at school. Before long, we all sat down for dinner.

“I saw a moose from the porch today,” I said

“Whoa!” said Aaron.

“That’s so cool!” My youngest son Peter replied.

My wife looked at me, amused.

“Yeah, it walked right by the backyard.” I continued

“Will you take us hiking tomorrow?”

“Yeah! Maybe we can find it!”

I smiled

“As long as you two get your homework done.”

The boys and I tossed the football around in the backyard, then we all settled down for a movie to close the night out.

It was late. Well after 2 am when a single word pulled me out of sleep.

“Dad?”

I popped awake, quickly blinking the sleep from my eyes. In the open door of my bedroom stood Peter. He quietly sniffled to himself.

“Peter, what’s wrong?”

He stumbled through his words

“Someone is watching me from the window.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

“What?”

“He’s watching me from the hill.”

I quickly rose from the bed and followed my son to his room. Peter's room faces the national park, with a large pane window that overlooks the untouched hills hulking over our home. We hadn’t yet bought a blind for the large window, and the moonlight illuminated the tall pines and exposed boulders that dotted the hillside.

“He’s gone,” Peter whispered.

“Where did you last see him?” My eyes didn’t leave the hillside

He pointed to a little clearing between the trees.

“Right there”

“He was looking at me.”

I looked down at my young son; genuine fear was caked on his face. I wrapped an arm around him, pulling him close.

“Have you ever seen him before?”

He shook his head.

“No, his face was funny.”

I nodded slowly as I began to realize this must have been some sort of waking nightmare.

“Tell you what, how about you go sleep with Mom, and I’ll take your bed for the night?”

He wiped his nose on his sleeve and replied

“Ok. Thank you, Dad.”

“Love you, son,” I said as I sat down on his bed.

“Love you too.” He walked down the hall.

I lay down on the bed. I was awake for a while as I thought through what had just happened. A change in light caught my eye, and I sat up looking out the window.

Near the top of the hill, a warm orb of light moved quickly through the forest, bobbing and weaving around the trees as if it followed some unseen path. Before long, it reached the top of the hill and disappeared beyond the horizon.

The next day was the last day of August; summer was truly over. It didn’t take long to forget the previous night's events, and I found myself working hard to wrap up before the boys came home so we’d be ready for our hike. The day flew by, and before I knew it, I was leading two very excited boys down a new trail.

I specifically picked a trail that ran near our backyard, so we simply passed through the park markers and walked, and soon landed on the trail. We followed the snakelike path through the woods and up and over many hills. As we began to enter steeper terrain, I began to slow down; it didn’t seem to slow down the boys; they quickly passed me and continued down the path.

“Don’t go too far ahead,” I shouted

“Ok,” one shouted back, and they rounded a bend in the trail. For a while I hiked alone, accompanied only by the sound of my heavy breathing. Reaching the top of the ridge, I was discouraged to find out that it had been a false summit. Continuing up the route, I could hear two excited boys just beyond the near corner. The boys came into view, and with enthusiastic shouts they said

“Dad! Dad! You got to see this!” With that, they ran further down the way.

“Hey, wait up, fellas!” I chuckled to myself

When I finally caught up with them, I saw what they were excitedly pointing to; a little further up the path, nestled organically on the ridgeline was a fire tower. I stared in awe at the structure as we moved closer to it. Our lust for adventure and exploration made me forget any sense of safety, though I noticed the worn chain-link fence and weathered ‘keep out’ signs we blew past them making our way to the base of the tower.

It was old; it looked like it was made in the 60s or 70s. Its worn timber legs seemed to barely bear its weight. It was charred and blackened with the scars of wildfire. The metal grated stairs still stood intact. Aaron ran up the first couple of steps and looked back at us with a smile.

“Come on!” he beckoned

“Careful, it doesn’t look safe,” I responded

He jumped a few times; the stairway shook a little but held.  

He grinned. “It’s fine, come on, race you to the top!”

“No fair!” whined Peter as he tried to catch his brother.

I smiled to myself as I took a slower approach. The stairs creaked under my weight but held. Before long, I met my sons at the top. The little cabin was heavily damaged; like the base, it too was black from fire, every window was shattered, and the door was off the hinges. Yet to my surprise, the inside was not empty. A desk with a chair and old manuals and books sat in one corner. A small kitchen still held cans, and in the corner opposite the desk was a cot. To my surprise, this small bed was kept. It looked new, like a perfect replica of a military cot from the 1960s. The rest of the cabin showed signs of age; layers of dust sat on everything. But not the bed.

The boys were taking turns looking through an old pair of binoculars, and I made my way to the desk. I rustled my way through old notebooks and novels; an old calendar caught my eye. It was from the year 1962, opened to September; a large red circle marked out the 7^(th) through the 14^(th).

“I guess Remembrance Week has been going on for a while,” I muttered

I poked through a few more things and turned back to the boys; they were now using Aaron's pocket knife to carve their names into one of the crossbeams.

“Hey Guys, maybe we shouldn’t do that; let’s be respectful.”

Peter just finished his name, and Aaron turned to me and said

“There’s a lot of names here; I think it's ok.”

I looked closely at the beam and saw he was right; dozens of names were carved into the wood. But every name I saw other than Aaron and Peter’s had a line crossed through them. As I was looking at the names, Peter, who had been looking out the window, came and pulled on my sleeve.

“Dad, I think someone is here.” He said in a low voice.

I moved to the window, looking down.

“Where? I don’t see anyone?” I whispered

Loud metallic steps rose from beneath us.

Clang.

Peter grabbed my shirt.

Clang.

The stairs creaked under something's weight.

“On the stairs,” Peter murmured.

Both boys huddled behind me. I backed away from the door.

Clang.

The footsteps grew louder. And soon reached the top of the stairs. I swallowed hard as the figure appeared in the doorframe. It was a man, a little taller than me; his face was cleanly shaven and wore a forced smile; his eyes were small and bead-like. He was clothed in an old-fashioned park ranger's uniform. His eyes locked onto the three of us as he stood in the entry.

Behind me, Peter gasped quietly and whispered

“That’s the guy who was watching me.”

The ranger stepped into the cabin.

“Sorry, folks, but you can’t be up here; this is property of the Forest Service, didn’t you see the signs?”

His stare was oppressive; my jaw clenched as I replied

“Sorry, we didn’t think it was still in use; it looked abandoned.”

He smirked

“You thought my tower was abandoned?” his tone was light, but his face was hard.

“Sorry, we were just leaving”

He moved to the side to let me past. I held Aaron's hand, and he held his brothers. I had just passed the ranger when he wrapped his hand around my wrist that led Aaron.

“The boys stay here.”

My eyes met his smiling face; he tightened his grip on my wrist.

“They have put their names on my tower; they cannot leave. They have given themselves to me.” His voice was deep and raspy. As the sun grew low in the sky, long shadows hid his face from view.

“Dad?” Aaron said. I could hear the fear in his voice.

“It’s ok, son.” I glanced down at him.

My gaze returned to the ranger's figure.

“Get the hell off of me; we’re leaving,” I said with as much strength as I could muster.

At that, the ranger squeezed my wrist so hard that a loud crunch filled the small cabin. I fell to the floor; my mangled wrist hung limply from my arm as I screamed in pain. Through the fog of my own pain, I could hear my sons screaming; it sounded as if they were getting further away. Soon everything was quiet. Tears formed in my eyes as I held my lifeless wrist.

“Look at me.” A deep voice broke the silence

I looked up; it was the ranger, his face was hidden in shadow. I could feel myself growing tired as I looked at him.

“In a week you won’t even remember them.”

My vision grew fuzzy as I passed out. When I came to, it was long after sunset. I winced in pain as I looked at my wrist; it was numb and swollen, clearly broken. I quickly looked around the cabin; it was empty. I was alone. I stumbled to my feet.

“Aaron!”

“Peter!”

I screamed my son's name into the night, but no response came; they were gone. The only evidence that they had ever been there was Aaron’s pocket knife stuck in the wooden beam next to their freshly carved names, only now new lines crossed out their names.

I rushed down the staircase and frantically searched the surrounding woods. I screamed the boy’s names until my voice grew hoarse. My hands shook, and sweat rolled down my forehead. The boys weren’t there, and there was no sign of where they had been taken.

It was well after midnight when by the time I made it home. My wife rushed to the door as I walked in; clearly, she had been crying.

“Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick.” She froze when she saw it was just me

“Where are the boys?” she whispered

“They're gone,” I muttered

“What?”

“Someone took them.” I was beginning to cry.

“I couldn’t find them.”

She looked down at my broken hand, and with a whimper, tears began to fall, and she ran upstairs, slamming the bedroom door behind her. In a daze, I called the police.

An hour later, the sheriff arrived at the house. The two of us sat down at the dining room table as he took my story.

“Did you get a good look at the man who took your sons?”

I nodded

“He was a park ranger”

He looked up from his notepad.

“A ranger?”

I sniffled

“Yeah, he was wearing a ranger uniform, not like the newer ones, but an older version.”

The Sheriff lowered his voice and asked

“Were you at the tower?”

I was confused

“Yeah, you know about it?”

He stroked his beard for a moment before answering

“They've tried destroying that tower for years. Burning it, tearing it apart, bulldozing the site. Doesn't matter. Sooner or later, it shows up somewhere else.”

I stared in disbelief

“Sheriff, what happened to my boys?”

Sad eyes stared back at me.

“Truth is I don’t really know. We aren’t sure who or what that man is, but he’s tied to the tower, and he only takes kids.”

“Where do they go? What does he do with them?”

He shook his head.

“We don’t know, but if they aren’t found by September 6^(th) they’ll never be found.”

I could feel tears forming again.

“What?”

“September 7^(th) through 14^(th) is when he’s most active; it’s when he finishes the job. Everyone who goes missing in park is completely forgotten by September 15^(th).”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but he continued

“We’ve had hundreds of kids go missing in the park, but when September 7^(th) comes, faces grow blurry in our minds, and by the end of the week we don’t remember their names or who they were. The thing is we know we can’t remember; it’s like we know someone is missing but have no memory of who or when.”

I wiped tears from my face.

“Pictures change, birth certificates vanish. Parents know what they’ve lost, just not who they’ve lost. We call it remembrance week to remember that something is missing that we can’t remember ever being taken.”

I rose from the table.

“You need to find my boys.”

He swallowed

“We’ll try, that’s all I can promise, but my men will search only till September 6^(th;) after that it’s far too dangerous.”

They searched night and day for 5 days; all they found was one of the hiking boots Peter had worn. The morning of September 6^(th,) the sheriff came to my wife and me and said

“I’m sorry, we’ve done all we can.”

My wife is a wreck; she locked herself in our room and refused to eat.

I’m writing this the night of September 6^(th); I’ve packed my gear: food, water, a flashlight, sleeping bag, a tent, first-aid supplies, maps, and pictures of my boys. I’m heading into the park alone very soon. I have to find my boys; it's my fault they're in there. I'm writing their names down one last time before I go.

Aaron. Peter.

I don't know why, but I'm afraid I won't remember them when I come back.

I used to believe that demons only existed inside the minds of men I helped put behind bars. But after years of investigations, I learned that’s not true.

Over the course of seventeen years, I have worked alongside law enforcement and television programs to identify online child predators and bring them to justice. But even with all that we’ve accomplished, there’s still one case that I think about. 

One that nearly destroyed everything I had worked for. 

It all started with a chat room.

I’ve seen a myriad of predators, and Steven fit a profile we had seen many times before. He was a recently divorced, unemployed forty-two-year-old who lived with his parents. He bragged about this while messaging Mandy, a twenty-year-old theater student who we recruited to be our fourteen-year-old decoy, Alexis.

It didn’t take long for the conversation to become sexual in nature. Underneath the screenname ELECTRIC\_HEAD5021, he said their relationship would have to stay a secret.

“No adults. lol. If your mommy or daddy found out, we could get in trouble.”

“what r u talking about??? I hang out with my daddy’s friends all the time.”

“This is different. lol. They can’t know ur my sexy sweetheart. ;)”

Seeing child-like messages juxtaposed with the sexual fantasies of an adult never gets easier to stomach. How could anyone talk to a child like that? It’s something I’ve never been able to grasp. 

Not too long after our investigative team confirmed a date for Steven to meet with Alexis, we let the chat be. But it didn’t take long for him to initiate conversation again. In fact, his messages would arrive like clockwork in the days following. But messages weren’t the only way he contacted our decoy.

On a couple of occasions, he called her while his parents were at home sleeping. I remember those phone calls clearly.

“Hey!” Mandy greeted cheerfully.

“Hey baby,” Steven breathed into the speaker. “I missed you.” 

“What’re you up to?”

“Thinking about you…I wanna hold you.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I do. So, so bad.”

You get the idea.

Oftentimes, a lot of the men we contact try to reinvent themselves. But that’s not what Steven did. Rather than fabricate wealth or exaggerate his ambitions, he talked about his obsessions: death and the supernatural.

We initially dismissed these fascinations as another grooming tactic, but throughout the entire time he talked with Alexis he would sporadically ask questions such as:

“Have u seen Bloody Mary?”

“Is there anyone dead that u would want 2 talk 2?”

“How do u want 2 die?”

Just as we thought the conversations couldn’t get any stranger, Steven sent our decoy a picture of a Ouija board. According to him, he had recently purchased it at a yard sale near his parents’ house. He insisted on bringing it. He wanted to use it with her. See how she would react. When we inquired further about his request, his response was as prompt as it was odd:

“because u have good energy. lol They like that lol”.

This ended up becoming the last exchange we would have with him before he arrived at the sting house. 

In the hours leading up to that fateful evening, I memorized my script. No matter how many times I do this, they never go away. The butterflies in my stomach. People always assume the confrontation is the hardest part, but it isn’t. It’s waiting for the knock on the door and wondering whether tonight will be the night that something goes horribly wrong. Experience makes you numb, not fearless.

We had fully intended to follow everything by the book that night. But things got off to a rocky start when Steven was nearly an hour late to the sting house. We thought he had gotten cold feet or had been tipped off to our operation. Thankfully, neither turned out to be the case. What was supposed to be a five-hour venture had become seven by the time 8:12 pm rolled around and he walked up the driveway.

Our various hidden cameras recorded his nervous demeanor as he patiently waited on the porch with the Ouija board.

From our production room that we had sectioned off in another part of the house, I watched Mandy walk toward the door and greet Steven.

“Hey, Steven! How are you?”

“Hi.” He waved sheepishly in response. “Uh, can I come in?”

“Of course!” Mandy stepped out of the doorway and walked toward the kitchen. “What did you bring for me?”

“It’s a-uh, Ouija board.” He followed her and set it down on the dinner table. “I thought we could use it together?”

Mandy flipped her hair and placed her hands on her hips. “Wouldn’t you rather talk?”

“We would be talking. It would just be more than us talking.”

My eyes were glued to the monitors. He was very adamant about using that board. But why?

I heard snickering from Lou, one of our production crew members.

“Can you believe this whack job? He took a bus all this way to summon Casper.”

I shot him a glare, and he acknowledged my look by quieting down. Lou’s an outspoken person for better or worse, and even though he was trying to make light of a potentially volatile situation, I found comfort in knowing that I wasn’t the only one feeling perturbed.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry for being late.” Steven chuckled. “I was an idiot and got Sunday’s bus schedules mixed up with today.”

“That’s okay!” Mandy said with practiced enthusiasm. “I’m glad you’re here!”

“I’m glad you are. I almost thought about taking another bus back home.”

His admission surprised Mandy. “Why did you almost go home? Didn’t you want to see me?”

“I did.” His face turned a slight shade of cherry. “I honestly didn’t think you were real.”

“Of course I’m real, silly!” She teased. “So, what do you want to do?”

I watched the monitors as Steven took a lighter out of his pocket. With a couple clicks he lit some candles on the dining room table. 

“We should step in before things get out of hand.” Lou turned to look at me. “Isaac?”

“Keep the cameras rolling.” I motioned for everyone to stay where they were. “If he’s willing to play with the board, I want to see where this goes.”

“What about the decoy?”

“She’ll be fine.”

Steven instructed Mandy to turn off the lights and sit beside him. Once she had done so, they gently placed their fingertips on the planchette. 

“Are there any spirits that want to speak to us right now?” 

Mandy’s eyes darted back and forth from Steven to the planchette repeatedly. Awkward didn’t even begin to describe the silence that followed.

“Is there anyone that wants to speak with us right now?” 

But just like before, nothing. Steven’s head swiveled, looking in every possible direction of the dark room to locate a response of some kind. 

“You talked a lot of game online.” Mandy teased more confidently than she probably felt. “I thought you were supposed to be THE guy who could do this kind of stuff.”

“I am. These things…they take time to get started.”

Most of the time, a predator talking about their hobbies or interests is just another gimmick. But this was unlike anything I had seen. 

“If you’re here.” He fidgeted in his seat nervously. “Please, give me–I mean, us a sign.”

I eyed the monitors intently. A part of me wanted to intervene, but another part of me was telling me to see this play out. I was torn on which to heed. 

Unexpectedly, the planchette moved. A couple of inches at most. But had I blinked, I would’ve missed it completely.

Mandy instinctively pulled back, the movement startling her. “What was that?” 

“It’s a spirit.” Steven whispered.

“Oh bullshit.” Lou sighed in irritation. “I watched his hand nudge it. This guy’s a fraud.”

Had he? I had watched the monitors the whole time, and it looked like the planchette had moved all on its own.

“Hey,” Steven closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Do you want to talk to us or what?” 

A moment passed, then a few more, but there was still no movement.

“I’m going.” I turned to start heading toward the dining room to intervene. But right as I was about to, the sound of Mandy gasping shifted my attention back toward the monitors. I watched the planchette drag itself across the board toward the word, “YES”.

“You moved the board!” Her accusation cracked with fright.

“No, I didn’t! I swear!”

In response to his adamant denial, the planchette dragged itself sluggishly across the board. Each movement landed on a number.

7 2 3 1 9 9 4

Mandy was at a loss for words. “That’s…” 

Her birthday. 

Not the birthday we had fabricated for investigative purposes, but Mandy’s actual birthday.

Shell-shocked, the investigators pored over the chat logs, but their efforts were futile. No compromising or contradictory information had been exchanged. No mention of her birthday. No mention of any personal information tied to Mandy. Nothing.

I stared in bewilderment. “How is that possible?” 

I hadn’t realized I had asked my question out loud until Lou responded, “It had to have been an oversight. That’s gotta be it.” 

In our line of work, the simplest explanations were almost always the right ones. Even if it’s what you don’t want to hear.

"An oversight?” I pointed toward the investigators on standby. “All of you, check everything. I want an explanation as to how this happened." 

But no one could provide one. Every conversation between Steven and our decoy had been combed through again. Even with another thorough examination, there was no indication that we had erroneously given Mandy’s actual birthday. So, that begged an alarming question. 

*Just how exactly did Steven know?*

One of the production members instructed Mandy to take her hands off the planchette. She did as she was told while Steven kept his fingertips pressed against it. 

“Alexis,” He looked to her for answers. “What was that about?”

“I’m not sure.” She remained calm while still being in character. “That was weird. How did you do that?” 

“I told you, I didn’t do anything.” 

An extensive back and forth ensued. She insisted that it had to be some sleight of hand trickery while he was convinced that an unknown spirit had attempted to make contact. A couple of minutes later, the unmistakable scrape of the planchette against the wood drew everyone's attention back to the board.

With each letter the planchette hovered over, Mandy’s face grew paler.

E L I Z A B E T H

Once the name had been spelled fully, Mandy removed her trembling hands. “H-h-how do you know her name?”

Steven looked just as confused. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He whispered it with enough conviction to make me believe him in that moment.

“Isaac, we need to do something.” Lou insisted, standing up from his seat.”

Even though I agreed with him, a selfish part of me resisted the urge. “No. Not yet. Stay put, and keep watching.”

My instructions provoked the ire of everyone in the room, but nobody objected.

Again, the planchette moved without either Mandy or Steven touching it. Every one of our cameras captured it violently accelerating across the board.

“Who are you?!” Steven cried out. “Stop this!”

Mandy covered her mouth to stifle an oncoming scream as the planchette, completely unguided, began to spell out another name. 

This time, in rapid succession.

P A Y T O N

Payton.

That name. 

It was the reason I went into this line of work. 

I remember feeling unnaturally cold in the moments following. What started off as a slight chill slowly morphed into an uncomfortable, freezing sensation that climbed through my body.

“Shit,” Lou cursed. “Is anybody else in here freezing their ass off?”

I exhaled, and a cloud of white vapor escaped my lips. It was cold enough to feel like I was standing inside a freezer. “Why is it so cold?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Lou shivered, wrapping his arms around himself. “Might be the AC acting up.”

Seconds after his response, the monitors abruptly went black. Amid the frantic scrambling in the production room, a scream echoed from inside the house.

Mandy.

“Eyes on the decoy!” I shouted. “We need eyes on the decoy right now!” 

My heart pounded while everyone in the room desperately tried to get the feed going again. Inexplicably, just as quickly as we lost power, it was restored. 

The first thing my eyes landed on when the monitors glowed with restored life was the sight of the front door. It was wide open. Then I noticed Steven. He was staring directly into a hidden camera positioned in the kitchen.

His eyes were opened wide, but there was no life behind them. He stood completely still, his face bereft of expression, looking less like a man standing and more like a corpse that had forgotten to lie down.

“Decoy is secured. She is outside with law enforcement. I repeat, she is outside with law enforcement.” 

The good news from production room comms wasn’t enough for me to break eye contact with Steven. I was focused on answering one question, and one question only.

*Who are you?*

“*You already know*.”

Chills crept down my spine. It felt like the voice had come directly from the inside of my mind. I looked around, hoping that someone else had also heard it. If they had, they didn’t say a word. How had he been able to answer my question? 

I had two choices: I could either confront him and treat this like any other sting operation, or abandon the show and bring him into custody.

It didn’t take long for me to make my decision. 

“Wait for my cue to come in. I’m going.” 

“Isaac,” Lou grabbed me by the shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do.”

With a solemn nod, I ignored further warnings from both production and law enforcement. In a few short moments, I went from my position in front of the monitors to standing in the dining room.

Upon entry, I was immediately greeted with a wall of freezing air. The worst I had felt in the house up to that point. As I approached Steven, the dim lighting of the room caught the whites of his lifeless eyes, making them gleam as they stared at me.

“Steven,” I said, less confidently than I would have liked. “I want to talk to you.”

“I want to talk to you about your choices tonight.” 

That made me stop dead in my tracks. 

“What did you intend on doing this evening? I have the chat logs right here. It is illegal for adults to chat with minors online. Please place your hands where I can see them while we talk.”  

He said my script word for word, line by line. All at an impossibly frightening speed. But his lips never moved. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes. 

“How did-”

“I know.” The voice held no emotion. It was simply matter-of-fact.

“Why are you here?”

His left eye twitched as he tried to blink. His right followed suit, but neither eye would close. “You know.”

I forced myself to keep talking. “What did you intend on doing this evening, Steven?”

“You ask the wrong questions.” Its words pressed themselves against my skull. “Isaac, why are you here?”

I tensed up but stood my ground. “I’m not answering your questions.”

“I know how you felt when you screamed her name in the woods for hours.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Do you remember what it felt like to learn that Payton was right down the street the entire time?”

I remembered. All too well. I choked up as I thought about that day. The news. The way my parents collapsed in grief. The irreparable damage it did to my family. It all overwhelmed me. I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

“You collect broken families.” He took a step toward me. Then another. Then one more. All in one fluid motion. “Because you can’t save everyone.”

 “People can be saved.” I argued, struggling to believe my own words.

The light in the room dulled as the candles reignited themselves, the flames burning perfectly still. “Is that why her killer took his life in the cornfield?” 

Tears streamed down my face as an overwhelming rage consumed me. It was an emotion that would never fully go away. A truth I had been forced to accept the day I lost my sister. Sixty seconds was all it took for my life to change forever. 

It took a minute to lose her.

It took five days to find her.

“They found her in a vehicle on the side of the road.” It recited my memories back to me, each unspoken word making the discomfort inside my head intensify. “While he died without truly feeling the pain he inflicted.” Seeing tears drip down his cheeks felt like a mockery of my grief. “That’s what you pursue.”

In my earpiece, I heard Lou speaking to me.

“Isaac…don’t…coming…”

I couldn’t understand what they were saying. All I understood was Steven speaking in my voice.

“She was buried with her purple stuffed rabbit, Tilly, on a cold October afternoon. All alone. In the ground.”

My body registered the impact before my mind could comprehend how fast he moved. I hit the floor hard, his weight pressing down on my chest as breathing became more difficult by the second.

“Get…off…me…” I wheezed, struggling to force each word past the weight crushing my chest. He hovered over me, his translucent eyes staring into mine.

“What did your mother sound like when she identified the body?” 

I squirmed in place, but I was pinned to the spot. 

“How many nights did your dad sleep in her bedroom after she disappeared?”

My strength waned as the pressure grew on my chest. 

“What day did you stop expecting her to come home?” 

The strain was getting to be too much. 

“What were your last words to her?”

I was on the verge of passing out. Black blotches formed in my peripheral vision and spread rapidly, nearly consuming the last bits of what I could see. Right as I thought I was about to lose consciousness, I heard a sound.

A sound I’m so very grateful came when it did.

Officers rushed into the room. A flurry of commands left their mouths as they pulled Steven off me and forced him to the floor nearby.

“Ah! Get off me!” he screamed. “What are you doing?”

His voice. 

It was no longer inside my mind.

“What are you doing? Ow!” He cried as an officer rolled him over and pressed a knee into his lower back. “What’s happening?”

Another officer helped me up from the floor and began asking questions about my well-being. I lied and told him I was all right. I leaned against the wall to steady myself while I looked on at Steven being detained by other officers. He struggled and writhed like a cornered animal.

His eyes darkened as he freed himself from the grasp of the officers. Overcome with inhumanity once more, he snatched a gun from the officer attempting to handcuff him. 

He brandished the weapon as his entire body began to tremble spasmodically.

“My hands.” 

From where I stood, it looked as though he was genuinely trying to lower them but couldn’t. His arms remained outstretched, refusing to budge an inch no matter how hard he tried.

“Why can’t I move?”

Law enforcement raised their weapons, creating a stalemate in which no one dared to act.

“It’s alright, Steven.” I stepped toward him with my hands raised. “Everything’s going to be alright. We’re here to help.”

The darkness in his eyes vanished long enough for him to ask, “Did…did I hurt anyone?”

“No. You didn’t hurt anybody. Just put the gun down, and let’s talk.”

“Please,” he whimpered, straining to move his head, but his body refused to obey. “Don’t let him take me again.” 

“Nothing is going to happen as long as you put the gun down.”

Steven’s arms pulled themselves upward against his will. The barrel inched toward his own temple until it rested against his skin. He fought with everything he had, his muscles straining themselves in order to pull the gun away. But his body betrayed him to some invisible force.
 
“Make it stop…”

“No, Steven. No!” I quickened my pace toward him, but before officers or myself could react, he pulled the trigger.

That sound. The aftermath. The silence that followed. I haven’t felt anything like it before or since. 

That was without a doubt the single worst night of my life. Not only had we witnessed tragedy, but our team came under immense fire from the press. Steven never had his day in court, and that became a point of contention. Had we not encouraged this kind of behavior, would Steven still be alive? Would any of this have happened? 

Steven’s case tarnished our reputation. Protests began forming outside our sting house. People demanded justice. Insisting that we could not be the judge, the jury, or the executioner.

It was difficult to escape the criticism, especially when those voices carried real weight. So much so that our show, along with all subsequent investigations, was cancelled effective immediately.

Steven’s official cause of death was listed as suicide by cop. There were no mentions of the Ouija Board or what occurred following its use. There’s only one piece of evidence regarding what happened inside the sting house that night. 

A video tape. 

It's marked with a label that reads, “Never to be viewed, duplicated, or destroyed”. 

Its whereabouts have been kept secret, and it's best that they stay that way. Because if that footage ever surfaced, I don’t know how the public would react.

But that’s not the point.

I’ve dealt with a lot over the course of my career. Troubled people. Hardened criminals. The worst that humanity has to offer. I think about them all every now and again. But I can’t stop thinking about Steven’s case. Specifically, if I had intervened sooner. Would I have been able to talk him out of using that Ouija board? Would he have been able to face justice if I had done things differently?

No matter how I answer them, I never feel any better. Because they’re just answers. Not actions. 

And I’ll never know.

Despite everything I’ve been through, I continue to hunt monsters in the present day. Aside from the lack of a camera crew or law enforcement support, the only thing that’s changed is what I believe those monsters are. They aren’t just people who hurt children. Exposing them and making them face justice does make the world a little safer for everyone.

But evil doesn’t care about laws. It doesn’t care about the confines of a prison cell. It doesn’t even need a reason to hurt someone.

All it needs is for someone to answer.

The police have asked me the same question enough times that I hear it in my sleep now. They ask it gently, in different words each time, but it is always the same question underneath. Are you sure he was dead.

I am sure.

I watched him stop breathing. I was close enough to see the last breath go out of him and no new one come in, and then I made myself get closer, and I put two fingers against the side of his throat above the collar of the hunting jacket, and there was nothing under them, no pulse at all. I held my own breath and watched the snout of the mask for the small fog a living man leaves on cold rubber from the inside, and there was none. He was face-up in the shallow water at the edge of the creek, and I left him there, and I took the knife, and I walked away from him.

When the police reached the creek a few hours later, there was blood in the water. There was blood on the rocks. There were footprints all over that camp, his and mine and Cass's, pressed into the mud in a hundred directions. There was the stone I had used, with something on it they told me later was hair. And there was Cass.

There was no man in the pig mask.

The part I have not told them, the part I am only writing down now because I have to put it somewhere, is that sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I can still hear him humming.

I should start at the beginning, with the drive up, when the worst thing in my life was that I had been tired for four months and could not seem to stop.

Cass talked me into it, which was how it always went with us. We had been best friends since we were nineteen, a decade of practice at pushing each other slightly past where either of us would go alone. She was the brave one and I was the careful one, and mostly that balance kept us out of the two different kinds of trouble we would each have found on our own. I had been having a hard stretch, work and a relationship ending and my own head being unkind to me, and Cass decided the fix was a weekend in the woods with no signal and no schedule. She kept at it until I said yes.

We took my car because hers made a noise she had been ignoring for a year. We argued about directions before we were out of the city. Cass had the route in her head from a trip she had taken once, and I had it printed and loaded on my phone for the stretches we would still have service, and she was insulted that I had written it down at all.

"You printed directions," she said. "Who prints directions."

"People who like knowing where they are."

"We're going to a creek. The creek isn't going anywhere. You point the car at the mountains and you drive."

She said that kind of thing all weekend, and it was only funny because she did not mean it. Cass was reckless the good way, the recklessness of someone who had always gotten away with it, not of someone blind to the risk. She teased me about my kit the whole drive. I had a real one, a hard case with a first-aid setup and water tablets and a space blanket and spare everything, and she found it hysterical that I had checked it twice before we left.

"If a bear eats me," she said, "make sure you've got the right size bandage."

"I have a tourniquet," I said. "For when you cut your hand open trying to open a bottle with a knife again."

That got her, because she had done exactly that the previous summer and still had the scar. She had brought a bottle of bourbon and a couple of hard seltzers for the trip and had forgotten, I found out later, to pack the spare batteries I had reminded her about twice. That is the kind of thing that stops being a joke very fast in the dark. At the time it was just Cass being Cass, and I let it go, because letting Cass's small failures go was part of the deal, the same as she let go of me needing to know where the nearest hospital was in every town we passed.

We stopped in the last town before the turnoff, a small place with one gas station and one grocery, to top off the tank and grab ice and a few things we had not thought to bring. The woman at the register was friendly enough. She asked where we were headed, making the small talk people in small towns make, and Cass told her the name of the area up past the maintained campground, the primitive sites along the creek.

The woman nodded and rang us up, and near the end of it, without any weight on it, she said, "Pretty empty out there this time of year."

That was all. She was not warning us. It was an ordinary observation from someone who knew the area, offered to two women who did not. I have thought about her a great deal since. I do not think she knew anything. I think she was only right.

We reached the site in the middle of the afternoon.

It was exactly what Cass had promised. The access road climbed and turned for a few miles past the last sign of anyone and opened onto a small clearing beside a shallow creek, ringed with pine and old hardwoods, a couple of blackened fire rings left by campers before us. There was no one else. We had passed no other vehicles the whole way in and found no tents at the site, and there was no sound but the water and the wind high in the trees. The undergrowth was thick enough that you could not see more than thirty or forty feet into the woods in any direction, and the ground rose steeply on two sides of the clearing, which made it feel held, cupped, private. At the time I liked it. It had the feel of a place the world had forgotten, and I meant that kindly.

We set up as we always did, which is to say I set up the tent properly and Cass wandered around with a beer deciding where the chairs should go. We gathered firewood while there was still light. We laid out the folding chairs by the ring closest to the creek. It was good. For an hour or two it was exactly the thing Cass had said it would be, and I felt the knot in my chest that I had been carrying for months loosen by a notch, and I was grateful to her for dragging me out there.

While I was staking down the last corner of the tent I noticed the tree.

It was a big hardwood at the edge of the clearing, and someone had carved into it at about shoulder height. Not a heart with initials, not the usual thing. Stars. Small five-pointed stars, a dozen or more of them, cut into the bark in a loose cluster. Some of them were old, the edges gone gray and healed over with the slow work of the tree. Some of them were pale and sharp and new, the wood still bright inside the cuts.

I called Cass over and showed her.

"Somebody brought their kid," she said, running her thumb over one of the old ones. "Bored kid, one pocketknife, whole afternoon. I'd have carved the whole forest."

That was a reasonable thing to think, and I thought it too, and we made nothing more of it. It was a strange little detail and then it was behind us, and we went back to the fire. The stars did not mean anything to me until much later, when I understood that some had been cut very recently, by someone who had been there not long before us.

After dark we sat by the fire and drank and talked, and for a while it was the trip we had come for.

We talked about the year, the bad parts of mine and the parts of hers she pretended were fine. We told the old stories we both already knew, which is the whole point of old stories with a person you have loved for ten years. The dark stood back at the edge of the firelight and stayed there, and I stopped listening to it.

Then I heard the humming.

It was very faint, from somewhere out in the trees behind me, and my first thought was that it was Cass, because Cass hummed and sang under her breath constantly, always had, it was one of the background facts of being around her. I looked at her to tell her to stop, and her mouth was closed, and she was looking into the fire with a seltzer in her hand and she was not making any sound at all.

"What," she said, catching me looking.

"Are you humming?"

"No."

We both went quiet and listened. The fire popped and the creek ran, and above us the wind worked through the high branches. There was nothing else, and after a minute of nothing else I started to feel foolish.

"Probably another camper," Cass said. "Sound carries out here."

"We didn't pass anybody. There's no car."

"Maybe they hiked in." She did not sound worried, and I let her talk me out of it, because I wanted to be talked out of it. It took about ten minutes for me to let my shoulders down again.

Then it came back.

This time it was a few notes together, enough to be a melody, enough that we both stopped mid-sentence and turned our heads toward the trees. It was slow, and it was pitched low, and it was unmistakable. Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Four notes, then a few more, drifting out of the dark from somewhere upslope, and then it stopped in the middle of the line, on a note that wanted another note after it, and the silence where that next note should have been was worse than the humming had been.

Cass stood up and got her flashlight off the arm of her chair and put the beam into the trees where the sound had come from.

There was nothing in it. Just trunks and undergrowth and the beam losing itself in the dark past thirty feet. She moved it slowly along the tree line, and then somewhere off to the left we both heard leaves shift, a soft dragging rustle of something moving through low brush, farther away than the humming had been.

"Hello?" Cass called. She put a laugh in it, trying to make the thing smaller. "Anybody out there?"

Nothing answered.

I was looking past her flashlight beam, off to the right where she was not pointing it, and that was when I saw the pale thing between two trees. It was low and light-colored and I could not make it out, and for a second my brain offered me the most ordinary answer it had, that it was a plastic bag snagged on a branch, a piece of trash pale in the dark.

Then it moved, only a little, tilting slightly, a small change of angle, the kind of motion a bag does not make on its own in still air.

"Cass," I said. "To your right. Slow."

She swung the beam.

It found a face. A pig's face, dirty pink rubber gone yellow at the edges, one ear torn, the mouth fixed open in a molded grin, and two small dark eyeholes with the firelight catching wet in them. It was maybe sixty feet away, at the edge of where the flashlight could reach, and below the face the body was almost nothing, a suggestion of dark clothing swallowed by the dark around it. It was not moving now. It was standing perfectly still between the two trees and it was facing us, and it did not run when the light hit it, and it did not wave, and it did not speak. It only stood there and let us look at it.

Cass's flashlight flickered.

It dropped to half brightness and buzzed, the beam browning out, dimming down toward dead batteries, and in the second and a half that it was dim I felt the whole night tip over into something I did not have a name for. Then the beam steadied and came back up to full.

The space between the two trees was empty.

We did not sleep for a while after that. We sat in the car with the doors locked, because that was the first thing we both wanted, and we argued about what to do in low voices with the flashlight off to save what was left of the batteries.

I wanted to leave, and I said so plainly, but leaving was not as simple as wanting to. It was full dark. The access road was a few miles of narrow dirt with a drop on one side and switchbacks I had not loved in daylight. We had both been drinking, not a lot, but enough that I did not trust myself on that road in the dark and trusted Cass on it less. We had no signal. Driving down that mountain half-drunk seemed a genuine way to die, one we could picture more vividly than we could picture the man in the mask doing anything, because he had not done anything. He had stood still and looked at us and vanished when the light flickered.

So we made a plan, and the plan was reasonable, and I still think it was reasonable even knowing how it ended. No more drinking, so we would be clear-headed by first light. If anything happened, we would get into the car and lock the doors and lean on the horn. And we would leave the moment there was enough gray in the sky to see the road. It was three or four hours. We could do three or four hours.

Cass was the one who put it into words that made it bearable.

"It's some asshole," she said. "Some bored asshole in a mask who thinks scaring two women in the woods is the funniest thing he's ever done. That's all this is."

And the thing is, that helped. It helped a lot, and I held onto it, because an asshole is a human being. An asshole gets bored and goes home. An asshole can be reported and described and arrested. Everything Cass was saying put the night back inside a shape I understood, a bad shape but a human one, and I wanted it so badly that I decided to believe it. We got out of the car eventually, because sitting upright in the seats was miserable and the tent was ten feet away, and we told ourselves the plan covered us.

I could not sleep. I lay in my bag with my flashlight in my hand and listened to Cass's breathing go slow and even beside me, because Cass could sleep anywhere, through anything, always could. The woods had gone very quiet. Not peaceful-quiet. There is a difference, and I had started to learn it. The creek was still running and the wind was still up in the branches, but the small close sounds, the insects and the settling and the ordinary life of a forest floor at night, had stopped, and everything smaller than us seemed to be holding still and waiting to see what happened.

Then, from outside, close: a crunch.

A single footstep, weight coming down on dead leaves and a fallen branch. Then another, a stride away. Then another. Something was walking around the tent, slow and even and unhurried, one deliberate step after another, and I lay frozen with the flashlight against my chest and tracked it by sound as it went all the way around us in one complete circle and started a second.

I put my hand over Cass's mouth before I woke her, and I felt her come awake under my palm and go rigid, and I felt the exact moment she heard it too. We lay there in the dark not moving, both of us, breathing as shallow as we could, and the footsteps finished the second circle and stopped.

Then the humming started, right beside the tent, a foot from the thin nylon wall, at the level of our heads.

He was close enough that between the notes we could hear him breathe. Slow soft breaths through the mouth of the mask, and then the notes, low and unhurried. Twinkle, twinkle, little star. He hummed the first half of it, right there beside my head, and then he stopped, and the silence came down over us and closed us in.

And then something pressed against the tent fabric beside my head.

One point of pressure, small and blunt. A fingertip. It pushed inward, denting the nylon a few inches from my face, making a small shape in the fabric that I could see against the faint gray of the sky through the tent. It held there. Then it began to travel, slowly, downward, dragging the little indentation down the wall of the tent from the height of my head toward the ground, unhurried, deliberate, and I lay there and watched it descend and could not make a sound.

Then it lifted away, and the pressure was gone, and there was nothing outside but the quiet.

When I finally turned my head, Cass's eyes were open in the dark and fixed on mine, and we did not need to say it. Waiting for first light beside a man who could touch the tent whenever he wanted was not a plan anymore.

We agreed in whispers to make for the car. We had the flashlights. The car was ten feet away. We would get in, lock the doors, and lean on the horn until the sun came up or the battery died, and either way we would be inside metal and glass instead of inside nylon.

We unzipped the tent as quietly as two terrified people can and went out low and fast to the car, and I got the driver's door open and dropped into the seat and put the key in and turned it.

Nothing happened, not a click or a crank, and the dash did not even light.

The hood was up. Not all the way, but popped and resting an inch open on the latch, and I had not left it that way. Cass got it open the rest of the way and I put the flashlight into the engine bay, and it took us a moment to see it, because it was not dramatic. One of the battery cables had been taken off the terminal. It had not been cut or yanked but lifted off cleanly and laid to the side, the work of someone who had all the time in the world and did not want to be heard doing it. He had been at our car, under the hood, close enough to lean into the engine, while we sat ten feet away in the tent telling ourselves a story about a bored asshole.

Cass swore under her breath and got her hands into the engine bay to reconnect it, and I held the light for her, and my hands were shaking enough that the beam jumped around the engine.

That was when the humming started again, from the other side of the car.

We both froze. It was close, right at the passenger side, low and slow. Twinkle, twinkle. He had done this part first, I understood, before any of the rest of it. He had come to the car while we sat in the tent and lifted the cable off in the dark and set it down without a sound, and only then begun the long slow night of letting us hear him. He had decided how this went before we knew he existed. I dropped the beam under the car, and on the far side, beneath the passenger door, there were boots, dark with old mud, standing on the dirt a few inches apart, motionless while he hummed.

Cass made a sound, not quite a scream, and the boots moved, and were gone from under the car, fast.

"Get in, get in," Cass was saying, and we both went for the driver's side, and the cable was on but I never got to find out if the car would have started, because he came around the back of it.

That was the first time I saw all of him at once. The pig mask up close, worse for it, the dark stains along the snout I did not want to think about. The hunting jacket. The gloves. And in one gloved hand, held down along his leg, a long hunting knife gone dull gray in the flashlight beam. He did not say anything and he did not pause to enjoy it. There was none of the theater of it. He came at us fast and low and silent, and the only sound he made was the breath in the mask.

I do not have a clean memory of the next part. It comes back to me in pieces and I have stopped trying to force them into order. There was the knife coming down and Cass shoving me sideways and the two of us breaking in different directions around the car. There was me running for the tree line because it was the nearest dark, and Cass's voice somewhere off to my right, and my own flashlight beam bouncing wildly over trunks and brush as I crashed into the woods with no thought in my head but away.

And then I was alone in the trees, and I did not know where Cass was.

The woods at night are a different country from the woods in the day. In daylight the slope and the brush are an inconvenience. At night, with one failing flashlight and a man behind you, they are a machine built to catch you. Branches took hold of my sleeves and my hair. The ground dropped without warning into ravines choked with deadfall that I went down into and had to claw back out of. The undergrowth that had made the clearing feel private closed around me on every side, and within the first minute I had lost any sense of which way the camp was. Every direction was the same, black trunks and grabbing brush and the small frantic circle of my light.

I heard Cass call my name, off somewhere to my left and below me. "Erin!" Ragged, terrified, but alive, and I turned toward it and took two steps and then I heard, from somewhere between us, the humming.

I stopped.

This is the thing I have never been able to make the police understand. He never once called out in Cass's voice. If he had imitated her, I would have known something was wrong and steered by it. He did not. He only hummed, low and patient, from the dark between me and my best friend, and that meant every time I moved toward Cass's voice I might be moving toward him, and every time I moved away from him I might be moving away from her. He did not need to lie. The truth was enough to freeze me. I stood with my dying flashlight and could not choose a direction, and I hated him then in a way I had not known I could hate anything.

Cass called again, farther now, and I made myself move, angling wide of where the humming had come from, picking my way across a slope in the dark toward her voice.

I found her in a hollow where two slopes came together, crouched behind a fallen tree with her flashlight off, and I almost ran to her with her name already in my mouth.

Then I saw him.

He was maybe twenty feet beyond her, behind the trunk of a standing pine, only the pig face showing around the side of it, pale and angled toward her. Cass had no idea. She was watching back along the path she had come, the direction she expected danger from, and he was on the far side of her, close and still, watching the back of her head. And he was humming, so softly I do not think she could hear it over her own breathing, and the softness was the worst of it, because he was not hurrying and he was not hiding. He was savoring it.

I did not decide to shout. It came out of me.

"Cass, behind you, run!"

Everything happened at once. Cass came up off the ground and the pig face came out from behind the tree fast, and I threw the only thing in my hand that was not the flashlight, a rock I do not remember picking up, and it went wide but it made him flinch, and Cass was already moving, and then we were both running again, together this time, downslope and blind, with the humming rising behind us.

We came up hard against a wall of dark that turned out to be a building.

It was an old hunting shack, or a shed for storing tools, a squat structure of rotting boards with a sagging roof and a single door hanging in a frame that had gone out of true. There was one small window beside the door with a cracked pane of glass in it, gray with age. Cass got the door open and we went in and shouldered it shut behind us, and there was a length of wood on the floor that had clearly served as a bar before, and we dropped it into the two brackets on the doorframe, and for a moment we stood in the black with our backs against the door and just breathed.

It was one room, small enough that a few steps crossed it. It smelled of rot and old animal and something underneath that I did not want to identify. When I finally lifted my flashlight, the beam had gone weak and orange, the batteries nearly finished, and in that failing light I saw the walls.

They were covered in stars. The same five-pointed stars from the tree at the campsite, but here there were dozens, cut into every wall, layered over each other, some gray and old and some pale and new. And they were at every height. Some sat where a standing adult would carve them. Some were very low, down near the floor, at the height a small child would reach if it had stood at that wall with a knife, or had been made to. I did not say anything about the low ones. Cass had gone still beside me, and I knew she had seen them too.

We heard him come up to the building and circle it once, slow, the same unhurried walk from the tent. Then the steps came from one side, and I turned my head to track them, and without any footsteps crossing between, they were on the opposite side. There had been no time for him to go around, and he could not have gone through, because we were in the building.

Then the tapping started. The flat of the blade, I thought, or the point of it, against the outside of the wall. It was not a frenzy and it was not a threat. One tap, then a long stretch of nothing, long enough that we started to hope, and then another single tap from a different part of the wall. Then, after a while, the humming, low, through the boards.

"We wait him out," Cass whispered, so close to my ear I felt the words more than heard them. "It gets light, people come. We wait."

I was going to answer her. And then my dying light fell across something under a low shelf, and I pulled it out, and it was a backpack, old, the fabric stiff and moldy, the color bleached out of it. It was not ours. Inside were the rotted remains of camping supplies and a woman's wallet, cracked leather, with an ID behind a cloudy plastic window, a license whose photograph had faded past reading and whose name I could make out only part of. I understood, kneeling there, that we were not the first. Someone else had ended up in this room with these stars and had not left with her backpack. The shack was not a place we had found by luck. It was a place he used. It was part of it.

I put the wallet down. I did not tell Cass what was in it. There was no point, and there was no time, because that was when the sound on the back wall changed.

It was not tapping anymore. It was a slow, deliberate working at the boards low down near the floor, a creak of a nail giving up its hold, the soft complaint of old wood being pulled. He was not throwing himself at the door or putting the blade through the pane. He was taking the back wall apart, quietly, board by board from the bottom, with the ease of someone who knew exactly which boards would come, because this was his place and he knew how it came apart.

"The floor," Cass breathed. She had gotten down and found it, a section of board at the front corner rotted through into a gap wide enough for a person, opening onto the crawlspace and the slope beyond. While he worked patiently at the back wall, we went down through the front floor one after the other, out under the edge of the shack and into the open, and we ran downhill, and behind us, unhurried, the humming followed us out.

We ran downhill because downhill was away, and it took us back toward the creek. I could hear the water before I could see it, the same creek we had set our chairs beside that afternoon, a lifetime ago. Cass was ahead of me, and then she went down.

She caught her foot on a root or a rock in the dark and she went down hard with a short sharp cry, and when she tried to get up her leg would not take her weight. I got to her and got an arm under her and we tried to keep moving, her hopping and leaning on me, and we were slow now, far too slow, and I knew it and she knew it.

He came out of the trees behind us without a sound but the humming.

I will not lay out everything that happened by the creek exactly as it happened, because I cannot, and because Cass deserves better than to have the worst minutes of her life written out in detail for strangers. But I will say the parts that matter.

We fought him. Both of us, together, while Cass could still stand. She got her hands on a fallen branch and swung it into the side of the mask hard enough that the rubber tore further, the torn ear ripping down along the cheek, and for a moment, in the gray almost-light that was finally starting to come into the sky, I saw a sliver of what was under it. Not the whole face, only a piece of one, a patch of skin gone pale and slack and a single open eye fixed and unblinking. The skin around that eye was pouched and loose and spotted, an old man's skin, far older than the body that had moved all night with such patience and never seemed to tire. And that was the thing that broke something in me, worse than any monster's face could have. Not that it was inhuman. That it was so plainly, ordinarily human, and old, someone's grandfather, a man who had come to these woods and done this before and would have drawn no second glance in a grocery line, and had spent the whole night humming a child's song at us for the pleasure of it. I had wanted, without admitting it, for the face to be something I could not recognize. It was worse that I could.

Then he got the knife into Cass, low, beneath the ribs, and the fight went out of her all at once.

I had run. I need to say that, because I have to live with it. When the knife went in I had already broken a few yards downslope, and it was only when I did not feel Cass beside me that I turned, and I saw him standing over her with the knife, and I saw her on the ground with her hands at her side, and I heard her trying to breathe, a wet catching sound that I still hear. He looked up from her, the torn mask turning toward me, the one eye finding me through the ripped rubber. And then, over Cass's breathing, he began to hum again, slow and low, Twinkle, twinkle, and never once the words.

Something came loose in me then, and it was not courage and it was not a plan. It was rage, the rage of a person who has just watched the thing done that she spent the whole night trying to prevent. The fear never left. But it stopped being the thing in charge, and under it was this other thing, and the other thing wanted him dead.

I ran, and he followed, and this time I was not running blind. I had walked this ground in daylight. I knew the creek was below me and where its bank went steep and muddy, where a fallen tree lay half in the water, because I had noticed it that afternoon when noticing things was only a habit and not a matter of living or dying. I led him toward it. I let him close the distance, and I listened to the humming come up behind me, closer, and closer.

Then it stopped.

And that was how I learned the last thing the humming had to teach me, the thing I had felt coming without letting myself know it. All night the humming had told me where he was. Quiet meant far. Loud meant near. And the stopping, I understood in the half second I had to understand it, the stopping meant he was done closing the distance and was about to strike. The humming stopped, and I threw myself sideways into the mud, and the knife came down through the space where my back had been.

We fought in the mud at the edge of the creek in the gray light, and there was nothing clean or practiced about it, only two bodies and the cold and the slick ground and my hands slipping on his jacket and the wet rubber of the mask. I lost the knife almost at once, knocked into the dark of the brush. The torn snout pressed against my cheek and I could smell him through it, old sweat and old rubber and creek mud, and he got a glove around my throat, and there beside my ear, while he was trying to kill me, he hummed. Soft and slow and patient, the tune right against the side of my head, and I have never wanted anything the way I wanted that sound to stop.

My hand found a stone in the creek bed, fist-sized and cold and solid, and I brought it up into the side of the mask as hard as I have ever done anything, and his grip loosened, and I hit him again, and got out from under him.

The knife. I went for where it had gone into the brush and my hand closed on the handle of it in the leaf litter, and he was coming up out of the mud after me, and I did not think, I turned and drove it into him, up under the hunting jacket, and I felt it go in, and I felt the sound he made more than heard it, the first sound other than humming and breathing he had made all night.

He went backward into the shallow creek and sat down hard in the water.

He tried to get up. That is the part that I think about most, that one wound did not stop him, that he got a hand under himself in the water and started to rise with the knife still in him. So I took the stone again, and I want to be truthful about this because I have decided I am done lying about any of it: I hit him with the stone until he stopped trying to get up. More times than it took. The water around him went dark and spread the dark downstream, and finally he lay back in the shallow creek and did not move, and the pig mask sat facing straight up at the lightening sky, the small dark eyeholes full of creek water.

I made myself go to him. I put my fingers to his throat and there was no pulse. I watched the snout of the mask and there was no fog of breath on the rubber, no rise and fall of the jacket. He was dead. I had done it and I knew I had done it.

I reached for the mask. I got my fingers on the torn edge of it, by the ripped ear, and I meant to pull it off, to see the face of the thing that had done this, to know. And I could not. I knelt over him in the freezing creek with my hand on the edge of the mask and I could not make myself lift it, because some animal part of me was certain that whatever was under there would be worse than the mask, and that if I saw it I would never be able to stop seeing it. So I left it on him. I left the mask on his dead face in the water, and I took the knife, because I was not going to walk out of those woods unarmed, and I left him there and I climbed the bank and I went to find the road.

It took me most of the morning to reach the access road and hours more of walking down it before a forest service truck came up the other way and the ranger inside it saw a woman covered in mud and blood walking down the middle of a mountain road holding a hunting knife, and stopped.

I told him Cass was dead. I told him I had killed the man who did it, and where, and how to get there. He called it in, and more of them came, and eventually I led them back up.

They found everything I had told them they would find. The torn campsite and the collapsed tent and the car with its hood up. The lifted battery cable. The shack with its walls full of stars and the old backpack under the shelf. The trampled ground and the blood and the drag marks. And by the creek they found Cass, and they were gentle with me about that in a way I could not appreciate until much later.

They followed me to the place in the creek where I had left him.

There was blood in the water and blood on the rocks. There was a wide dark stain in the shallows exactly where he had sat down and where I had finished it. They found the stone I had used, half in the water, and one of them crouched over it for a long time and I heard him say something quiet to another one about hair, about tissue. Everything I had said was there.

Except him. There was no body in the creek. There was no pig mask facing up at the sky with water in its eyeholes. There was the blood and the stain and the stone and no man at all, and no trail leading away from the spot, no drag marks, no bootprints climbing either bank, nothing to say that a dead man had gotten up out of that water and walked or been carried anywhere. They brought dogs in later that day. The dogs worked the campsite and the shack and the woods without trouble. But at the creek, at the edge of the water where the stain was, they would not go. One planted its feet at the bank and pulled back against its handler and would not be made to put a paw in that water.

The police were as decent to me as they could be. The evidence was not in question. Someone had attacked us, killed Cass, disabled our car, and kept two women running through the woods for most of a night. All of it was written into the ground for anyone to read, and they did not doubt that part.

What they could not do was tell me where he went. A man I had checked twice, whose pulse I had felt for and not found, was not where I left him and had left no trace of going. I could see them turning over the possibility that I had been wrong, that he had risen from the creek after I climbed the bank and walked out under his own power leaving no marks. They wanted that to be the answer, because it was the only answer with a living man in it.

But I checked. I know what I felt and did not feel under my fingers. I know he was not breathing. And I know that dogs are not afraid of a man who got up and walked away.

They let me go home eventually, though home is not the place I lived before. I am staying with family now, in a town nowhere near those mountains, and I keep the lights on when I sleep, all of them, because the dark has a sound in it for me now that it did not used to have. I cannot listen to certain songs. There is one I will never be able to hear again, and every parent I pass humming it to a child in a store puts my heart in my throat, and they never understand the look I give them.

I have been mostly all right in the daytime, in the months since. It is the nights.

A few nights ago I woke a little after two in the morning. The room was silent, the ordinary silence of a house asleep, and I lay there in the light of the lamp I keep burning and tried to work out what had woken me. There was a sound from somewhere outside the room, low and intermittent, and my first thought, my hopeful thought, was that it was the plumbing, the pipes ticking in the walls as they do in old houses.

Then it resolved, sharpening into sense once my ears finally agreed on what they were hearing, and it was not the plumbing. It was coming from the hallway on the other side of my closed bedroom door. It was very faint, and it was slow, and it was a tune. Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Someone in the hallway, humming, low and unhurried, the first half of it and then a pause where the next note should be.

I sat up in the bed. I did not turn on another light, though every light in the room was already on, because I keep them that way now. I sat with the blanket in my fists and I listened, and I made myself look at the bottom of the door, at the thin bright strip of hallway light along the floor.

The humming stopped.

Something broke the strip of light. Two shadows, side by side, set into the brightness where it came under the door. The shadows of two feet, close together, standing just outside my room. They were pointed inward, toward the door, toward me. And they did not move, and they did not shift their weight, and there was no second set behind them and no sound of breathing through the wood, only the two feet and the stopped humming and the light broken around them.

I have been writing this ever since, because writing it is the only thing that has ever made him stop. I have not heard him hum again since I started. But the shadow under my bedroom door has not moved.

Three years of training. 

That’s what it took to win the honor of The Gift. 

Having been top of my class at The Military Academy, I was obviously the first picked when it was announced The Raven was dying.

How they had such an advanced warning, I never found out. Simply removed from my dorm in the middle of the night, blindfolded, and placed in a secret facility to train with 9 other young men for the opportunity to inherit his powers. 

One Thousand Ninety Five days later, I was named the successor. Having expected some intensive ceremony for the transfer, I was taken off guard when the tall man covered in a dark cloak approached me and simply grabbed my hand. Instantly, blinding blue light began to radiate from our hands. 

Not just my body, but my whole being began to scream as fire surged through it. I cried out, the agony unlike anything I’d ever felt.

After what was an eternity to me, but likely only a few seconds in actuality, he collapsed to the ground and the crowd cheered around me.

The beginning of my Hero’s journey, started with the end of another’s.

The title The Raven is symbolic of the looming death The Power’s bearer constantly has creeping behind them.

No one knows the origins, or how far back The Power goes, but somehow we know one thing for certain. Without The Raven? The world will perish. 

No hows or whys, simply the ever present knowledge that my death prior to passing on my abilities would bring about the end of the world. 

That persistent thought has led me to this very moment. 

The particle collider’s explosion contained 2.3 Terajoules of energy. 

Lucky for the surrounding 10 blocks, I somehow managed to absorb it all.

Unlucky for the world, I can already feel my life slipping away.

It’s a miracle I’m not dead. I do some quick calculations in my head based on how far we have tested The Powers in the lab. 

I have approximately 30 seconds until I explode.

30 seconds to find someone, in a facility I personally evacuated myself. 

29.

29 seconds to run up and down these 5 sublevels and make it to the outside? Impossible.

28.

If I don’t, some world ending bullshit will happen. I don’t know the details! But it doesn’t matter. I HAVE to find someone, anyone.

27.

I race as fast as my legs will take me, every room I pass in the desolate bright hallway I turn my head and take a desperate peek. But there is no one there. 

26.

“HELP!!!! ANYBODY!!! I NEED SOMEONE RIGHT NOW!!! IS ANYONE STILL HERE???”

My footsteps are flying down the hallway, every empty room a second closer to death for everyone. Everything. 

25. 

The door leading to the stairwell is moving ever closer. Maybe I can make it. I HAVE to make it. 

24. 

Three years I trained for this. Five before that at the academy. It took me almost a decade to be granted this power.

23.

Now? Hopefully, in the next 20 seconds it will go to a stranger. We are in a government facility, so I may luck out with a Marine or a high ranking military professional.

22.

As desperate as I am to pass these powers on, knowing the consequences otherwise, I can’t help but grieve.

21.

Not for my life, I’d accepted long ago it wouldn’t be a long one. But for the loss of a competition. 

20.

To view the spectacle of 10 young men fighting desperately for the honor to be YOU.

19.

That’s all I’d been looking forward to these last 10 years. No wife. No kids. No true friends. That one moment of honor was EVERYTHING I’d spent my life working for. 

18. 

Wasted.

I finally reach the stairwell, the door slamming open as I sprint up the stairs. 

17. 

I continue screaming, hoping maybe someone will hear and meet me halfway. If only these were normal sized sublevels, there are 4 sets of stairs between each floor.

16.

I stare up, focusing on the distance to the surface. My legs are beginning to ache but my will never letting up. 

15. 

I think, in a perfect world, of what this would be like. Who would the perfect replacement be?

14.

We had begun making periodic visits to the boy’s training schools, deciphering if any of them may be worth keeping an eye on as they aged.

13.

There was this one, Kyle, big burly kid.

He was nearly my height, despite being just 12 years of age. His dark black hair perfectly matching the aesthetic of The Raven.

12.

I realize that thought sounds ridiculous, but I have run my brand for appreciation and recognition these last years. I’d fantasized about The Raven as a child, and I wanted the next generation to continue to see me with such awe.

11.

I run past the 3rd floor sign. I’m so close. I’m starting to think I may actually be able to do this.

10.

I was still a kid when my father saw my athletic ability and decided I **would** be the successor. At the time, all I saw was an opportunity to be a superhero, and for all my friends to love me.

9.

I’d never even given thought to what death might be like. I worked to push the idea from my mind every time it tried to claw its way into my thoughts. 

8.

I made it to the second floor sign, only 8 more flights in my way. I desperately pray someone worthy is standing just outside the exit. 

7. 

It almost seems unfair. To be given the power of a god, millions of adoring fans, more money than you’d ever wished for. Yet, to be crushed by the responsibility that's forever been sewn onto it. 

6.

I scream louder as I push every ounce of strength I have left into running, faster, FASTER.

5. 

I wish I’d lived. 

That’s all I can think about.

I know these are my final seconds, whether I make it or not.

You would think, as a superhero, my life would’ve been great. Parties. Awards. Praise. But, it’s so lonely.

4.

Everyone is afraid to be your friend, your *lover* for the consequences it may unknowingly bring them.

Despite this, my only true desire is to save them, here and now. 

3. 

At least one last time. I’m at the door. 

2.

I push it open, and make eye contact with a soldier 50 feet away. I’m gonna make it. 

1.

I reach out and scream as we both frantically attempt to initiate contact, the burning inside of me now visibly pouring through my skin. 

The agony is unbearable. It will all be over in-

0.

I no longer believe I am the last living thing on Earth. I believed it for four years. I stopped believing it three days ago, and I did not stop because I found another person.

I stopped because something has been following me.

I am writing this from a room on the tenth floor of a hotel in Manhattan. I have pushed the bed, the dresser, and a heavy armchair against the door. I have a pistol and three magazines and a flashlight, and I have enough fuel in the small generator to keep one lamp burning until morning. I have set the lamp on the desk beside this notebook so that I can see the page. I do not think the pistol is going to help me, and I have thought about that for a while now, and I am writing anyway, because writing is the only thing left that feels like doing something.

I should explain how much of the world I have seen, so that you understand what it means that I never found anyone until now.

Four years ago every person on Earth disappeared. Every animal too, everything larger than the last joint of my thumb. There were no bodies. Nothing crashed, there were no cities burned by unattended kitchens and no highways filled with fresh wreckage.

Whatever took everyone seemed to have left the world more carefully than it should have.

It was only empty. I have never decided what to call it that feels right. In my notebooks I call it the Silence, though I am sure other names existed in the first few days, on radios and in the mouths of people who were about to be gone.

Before the Silence I worked on cargo ships. I was a marine engineer, which is a long way of saying I kept the engines running and the generators turning and the fuel moving where it needed to go, and I could fix most of what broke on a vessel with what was already aboard. That skill is the reason I am still moving.

A person who did not understand engines and fuel systems and navigation would have run out of working cars within a hundred miles of wherever they started. I did not. I have crossed oceans in a small commercial boat I taught myself to run alone. I have driven the length of countries on fuel I stabilized and filtered myself.

I searched North America first, coast to coast, every city I could reach with a road still under it. Then I took the boat across and searched what I could of Europe, Britain and France and Germany and Spain, and down into the north of Africa, and I crossed again and worked my way along the eastern coast of South America. I went into hospitals and walked the wards.

I went into military bases because I believed, for a long time, that a government somewhere would have put its people underground when the disappearances started, and that if I found the right door and the right stairwell I would find the rest of us waiting it out below the surface. I found the doors. I found the stairwells. I went down every one of them, and the rooms at the bottom were as empty as the streets above.

I have found meals turned to gray stone inside ovens. I have found clothes still hanging in closets, arranged by color. I have found cars stopped at intersections with the doors open and the keys in them, I have found cars stopped at intersections with the doors open and the keys still inside, as though the drivers had stepped out moments before the world emptied.

I have found photographs, more photographs than I could count in a hundred lifetimes, of faces that do not exist anymore, in frames and wallets and phones and albums, in every house in every country I entered.

In four years I never found a single person.

I want to be precise about the other thing, because it is the part that took me the longest to understand and the part that frightens me most now. I never found an animal either. Not a dog shut in a house. Not a horse in a field. Not a bird on a wire, not a rat in a grocery store, not a fish in the shallows where I anchored the boat. Nothing large enough to make a sound I could hear.

The only living things left besides me are the small ones, the insects, the cockroaches and the silverfish and the ants and the moths and the flies, and I spent a long time wondering what it was about me and about them that had been worth keeping. I never found an answer. I stopped looking for one. That was a mistake, though I did not know it was a mistake until three days ago.

Until three days ago, in all that empty world, I had never once heard footsteps that were not my own.

I came back to New York for the same reason I always come back to large cities. In a dense city the things I need sit close together, and I can gather medicine and batteries and fuel additives and maps and cold-weather clothing in a few weeks of careful work instead of driving for months between towns. I know Manhattan. I have staged supplies here before. I planned to spend three or four weeks working through the pharmacies and the hardware stores and the parking structures where the vehicles have been out of the weather.

The city has gone soft at the edges in four years, but it has not fallen. Grass has come up through the seams in the intersections. Tree roots have lifted whole slabs of sidewalk and tipped them. The streets are still packed with cars, most of them with a door hanging open, and rainwater has filled the lower stairs of the subway entrances and turned them into still black pools. The buildings stand. The glass is mostly unbroken. From a distance, on a gray day, you could believe the city was only holding its breath.

The thing about an empty city is the sound. With no traffic and no voices and no birds and no machines, every noise you make travels much farther than it should. I have learned to move quietly, but I cannot move silently, and when my boots come down on the sidewalk the sound of it goes down the avenue ahead of me and comes back off the buildings. For four years that was the only footstep sound in the world, and I had long since stopped hearing it. Repetition had worn it down into silence, the same silence a heartbeat keeps under everything a body does, present and unlistened to.

I took a hotel about ten floors up, high enough to see the streets and to feel some distance from them. I slept in one room and stored what I gathered in the room beside it. I marked out a safe route, a loop that connected the hotel to a pharmacy, a hardware store, and a parking garage with cars I could get running. For the first several days I worked the loop, and nothing happened, and I was as close to content as I get.

Then, three days ago, I was walking north on Fifth Avenue a little before sunset, and I heard four hard impacts on the pavement behind me.

Clop. Clop. Clop. Clop.

Even and heavy and deliberate, the sound of something solid striking stone. I stopped. The sound stopped with me, on the same beat, close enough behind that the fourth impact and my own last step almost landed together. I turned around. The avenue ran back for several blocks, straight and wide and full of stopped cars, and there was nothing in it. No shape between the vehicles. No movement in any doorway. Only the long empty street and the low sun laying orange light along the west side of it.

I stood there for a while. I told myself it was a slab of loosened facade coming down somewhere behind me, or a section of scaffolding finally giving way, the kind of slow collapse the city has been performing on itself for years. I did not fully believe it, but I made myself accept it, because the alternative was a sound I had no place to put.

I walked on. After maybe thirty yards it came again, and this time it was closer.

I turned at once, fast enough that I nearly lost my footing, and there was nothing behind me but the street. I went to the nearest storefronts and pushed inside them, one after another, expecting to find the ordinary source I needed, a hanging sign swinging on a broken chain, a piece of debris rolling in a draft, anything with a reason. I found dust and stillness and my own reflection moving across dead display glass.

When I stepped back out onto the sidewalk, the hoofbeats started again from the intersection behind me, from the open space where the two avenues crossed, and this time they did not stop when I turned. They went on for several seconds, coming from somewhere past the corner of a department store, hard and clear and unhurried.

Then they stopped on their own.

I followed them. I want to be honest about why. Part of it was fear, the need to see the thing that was making the sound so that it would stop being a thing I could not see. But part of it was worse than fear, and older. Even an animal would have been the first large living creature I had encountered in four years. Some part of me that I had thought was dead stood up at the sound of something alive and moved toward it before the rest of me could vote.

I rounded the corner of the department store. The cross street ran away empty in both directions. There was a layer of fine pale dust across the whole width of it, undisturbed, years deep and unbroken, and there was not a single mark in it, no hoofprint and no track of any kind. Nothing had crossed that street, and something had been making the sound of crossing it a moment before.

I started back toward the hotel then, and I did not run, but I walked faster than I had come.

Halfway back, on a block I had walked a dozen times, the skin on the back of my neck drew tight, and I knew before I looked that something was watching me.

At the far end of the block, a face was looking around the corner of a building.

I took it for a mannequin at first, one of the display figures from a store, pale and still and set at the edge of the wall. That is what the mind reaches for. It was a narrow face, and only a small part of it showed past the brick, one cloudy eye and a section of cheek and several teeth, and the teeth were wrong, because they were coming through the skin of the cheek from the outside, growing out through torn flesh where no teeth belong.

The eye moved. It slid in its socket and found me, and it was not glass and it was not paint, and the face drew back behind the building.

I ran toward it. I closed the distance to the corner in a few seconds, faster than I had moved in years, and I came around the wall with my hand already going to the pistol on my hip. The street beyond was empty. There were no open doors on that stretch, no alley mouth, no broken window at ground level, nowhere that a thing the size of a person could have folded itself away in the time it took me to reach the corner. I stood in the middle of the intersection turning in a slow circle, and behind me, close, a single hoof struck the pavement.

I spun. There was nothing there.

I made it back to the hotel with the light almost gone, and I climbed the ten floors, and I sat down at this desk to think, because thinking is what I have instead of company.

I went through it as I would an engine that had failed for no clear reason. You do not start by assuming the impossible. You start by checking yourself. I considered exhaustion, because I had been pushing hard through the supply loop and sleeping poorly. I considered dehydration, and I drank a full bottle of water while I sat there and did not feel any different.

I considered carbon monoxide from the generator, and I checked the placement of it and the ventilation of the room and found both correct, the exhaust routed out the window, the air moving. I considered spoiled food and old infection and the simple long grinding effect of four years without another human voice, which I knew could bend a mind in ways the mind would not feel bending. I put my hand to my own forehead and found it cool. I had no fever. I was tired, but I was not sick, and I was not, as far as I could measure myself, losing my grip.

Then I remembered the camera.

I carry a small camera clipped to the shoulder strap of my backpack. I started using it years ago to record the insides of the buildings I searched, so that I would not have to rely on memory for what I had and had not already been through. It had been running all afternoon. I pulled it off the strap and connected it to the small screen I use and I watched the walk back through the city, the empty avenue, the storefronts, the corner of the department store.

The camera had recorded the streets exactly as I had seen them. Empty. It had recorded the sound of my boots on the sidewalk, clear and steady. At the moment I had seen the face at the end of the block, the camera had been pointed a few degrees off, and the corner of the building where the face had been sat just outside the edge of the frame, so that the recording showed the empty street beside it and not the thing itself.

And in all of the audio, under my footsteps and my breathing, there were no hoofbeats anywhere. The sound that had filled the avenue and come off the buildings and stopped me in my tracks was not on the recording at all.

I sat with that for a long time. I could have told myself the camera had missed the face by bad luck of the angle, and I would have half believed it. But a camera hears whatever reaches it. If the hooves had been striking the pavement in the world, the microphone would have caught them along with my boots. The microphone caught my boots. It did not catch the hooves. Which meant the sound had not been in the air the way my footsteps were in the air. It had arrived some other way, into me and not into the recording, and there is no version of that I know how to be comfortable with.

That was the night I stopped being able to tell myself it was not real. It was real. It was simply not real in the way the street and the dust and my own boots were real, and I did not have anywhere to put a thing like that, so I set it down on the page and kept going.

That night, late, I heard something moving along the street beneath my window.

The impacts were slow and far apart, one and then a long pause and then another, heavy and unhurried, passing along the front of the hotel. I lay in the dark and did not go to the window. The sound went on down the block and faded, and I let my breath out and thought it had gone. Several minutes later it began again, and this time it did not come from the street. It came from inside the building, from the lobby ten floors below me, the same slow spaced impacts moving across the hard floor of a space that should have been as empty as everything else.

I switched off the lamp and lay still and listened. The stairwell door in that hotel is a heavy fire door, the kind that drags and booms when it swings, and I have opened it enough times to know I would hear it from my room. I did not hear it open. I heard only the footsteps, crossing the lobby, and then stopping, and then a single hard strike on what I knew was the first stair.

It started to climb.

I counted. I lay in the dark with my eyes open and counted the impacts and tracked them up through the floors of the building beneath me. It reached the second floor. It reached the third. And as it climbed, the sound of it changed. At the bottom it had the rhythm of a person climbing in hard shoes, one foot and then the other, two even impacts to a stride. Somewhere around the fifth floor the rhythm came apart, and it was no longer two impacts to a stride but four, striking unevenly, a gait that did not belong to anything that walks upright on two legs.

Then, several floors below me, it stopped. It did not start again. I lay awake with the pistol in my hand and the lamp off until the window went gray with morning, and the sound never resumed, and nothing came the rest of the way up.

When there was enough light I went down into the stairwell to look. I went carefully, with the flashlight and the pistol, down to the sixth-floor landing, and there I found the marks. In several of the concrete steps below the landing there were shallow cracks, each one a rough circle, pressed into the surface of the stone, the print of something narrow and enormously heavy that had come down on each step with its full weight in a single point. They climbed the flight in sequence, one to a step. They stopped at the sixth-floor landing.

There were no marks above it, and there were no marks leading back down. The thing that made them had climbed six floors and had not descended, and it was not in the stairwell now.

I went back up to my room and wrote the marks down and drew them as well as I could, because I have learned that if I do not record a thing while I can still see it clearly, the version in my memory begins to soften and reshape itself within a day.

I decided the hotel might not be safe, which was a strange thought to have about the only place in the city I had made into anything close to a home. I needed to move some of my supplies, and I had a cache near an abandoned subway entrance a few blocks south, so I went for it in the full light of the middle of the day, when the sense of being watched sat lightest on me.

The station had water standing in its lower levels but the platform I needed was dry. I went down with the flashlight, and I was working through the cache when I heard the hooves again, behind me, on the stairs I had come down. Each impact rang off the tile and the concrete and came back multiplied, so that the sound seemed to come from everywhere in the station at once. I moved deeper onto the platform, putting the columns between myself and the stairs, sweeping the flashlight between them.

The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs. They crossed a short distance onto the platform, and then they stopped, and the sound of them settled behind one of the tiled support pillars perhaps forty feet from me.

I raised the pistol and pointed it at the pillar. I told it to come out. My voice went out across the empty station and came back to me thin and strange, the first time in a long while I had spoken loudly enough to hear the room answer, and for several seconds nothing moved.

Then the face came around the side of the column.

I saw more of it this time. The skin was gray and it had a wet shine to it, slick, either sweating or newly come up out of water. One nostril sat high on the face, above the eye, in a place a nostril has no reason to be. The lower jaw had been broken once and healed crooked, set sideways from the upper, so that nothing on the top of the face lined up with anything on the bottom. Along the outside of the cheek ran a row of small teeth, growing out through the skin in a neat line where no mouth was.

And then the face rose. It went up along the edge of the column, higher and higher, and the part of it I could see did not tilt or lean. There was none of the small roll a person's head makes when they raise it. The visible edge of the face stayed flat against the tile and simply traveled upward, carried straight up on something behind the pillar that could extend without the shoulders moving at all.

I fired.

The shot was loud enough in that tiled space to land as a physical blow against the ears. The face was gone before the round struck the column, pulled back out of sight faster than the bullet crossed the distance, and the tile behind where it had been cracked and sprayed dust. And then the hoofbeats broke into full motion, a hard fast drumming that came out from behind the pillar and began moving among the columns toward me, and I put the flashlight on the spaces between them and there was nothing in the spaces. The sound crossed from column to column, closing on me, and no body ever passed through the open gaps between the columns where a body would have had to be.

I ran. I went up the stairs and out into the daylight and I did not stop until I was two blocks away with my back against a wall and the pistol still in my hand.

That was when I decided to leave the island entirely.

I loaded what I could carry into a truck I had running in the parking garage, and I drove for the nearest bridge. I kept my eyes on the road, but the mirrors kept catching movement, small shapes of motion at the edges of the glass, a suggestion of something keeping pace along the sidewalks or between the buildings. Every time I looked directly into a mirror to find it, the street in the glass was empty and still. I stopped looking at the mirrors. I watched the road.

Near the approach to the bridge, a spill of metal debris across two lanes took out my front tire before I could weave through it, and the truck pulled hard to the right and went into a row of stopped cars along the median with a long tearing crash. I was not hurt. I got out, gathered what I could carry on my back, and went on toward the bridge on foot.

Halfway up the approach, walking the long rising curve of the roadway, I heard the hooves again, and they were beneath me. They were down inside the hollow structure under the roadbed, the service space of girders and catwalks that runs below the deck of a bridge, and they were keeping exact pace with me, one impact for every stride I took, tracking me from underneath the road I was walking on.

At the next concrete divider, the face came around the barrier. It came sideways. The head was turned so that the forehead was nearly against the pavement and the one visible eye was rolled upward to keep me in its sight, and it slid out from behind the divider low to the ground, and it kept sliding, and more of the neck came into view than could possibly have been folded behind a barrier that width. I fired at it.

The face pulled back behind the divider, unhurried even then, and an instant later the hoofbeats were no longer beneath me and behind me but ahead of me, up the roadway, between me and the far end of the bridge, blocking the way off the island with the precision of something that had reasoned out where I meant to go and moved to cut me off.

I turned around and went back toward the city, because the city was the only direction left open, and I understood that this was the point.

I have not slept in more than two days now. I know what that does to a mind, and I can feel it doing it, the edges of things going loose, the quiet filling up with sounds that resolve into nothing when I turn to catch them. I have started talking out loud, constantly, because the silence has become the worst part, worse than the hooves, and my own voice in it is the only thing that keeps me anchored to the fact that I am still a person having thoughts. I talk to the thing that is following me.

I have accused it of hiding from me. I have told it to come closer, to stop showing me an eye and a cheek and a mouthful of wrong teeth and show me the rest. I have asked it whether it did this, whether it emptied the world, whether the Silence was its doing. I have asked it how long it has been behind me.

That last question is the one that has gotten into me and will not come out, because once I asked it out loud I could not stop following it backward. I have been alone for four years, across two oceans and a dozen countries, in ten thousand empty buildings. And I have begun to wonder about all the small things I dismissed in all those years. A tapping in a stairwell in Marseille that I decided was water in the pipes. A pale shape behind a second-floor window in a town in Spain, there and gone, that I told myself was a curtain moving in a draft I could not feel. Marks in the dust of a hospital basement in Argentina that I had walked past without letting myself look at directly. I do not know. I cannot know. It may be that this thing found me here, in Manhattan, three days ago, and has never been anywhere else. Or it may be that it has been at the far edge of every empty room I have ever stood in, keeping just out of the frame, for four years, and only now has decided to let me hear it. I have no way to weigh the two, and the not-knowing is its own kind of horror, and I have made myself set the question down because following it in circles was pulling me apart.

I cut through an office building to stay off the open street, and it was there, in a corridor on the ground floor, that I saw more of it than I had seen before.

The face was at the far end of the corridor, around the edge of the last doorway, and this time part of the body had come with it. There was a shoulder, and the shoulder sat far below the face, much lower than a shoulder sits below a head, so that a long run of something pale connected them. The torso behind the shoulder was folded hard against the wall, bent at an angle a torso does not bend at. One narrow limb reached down to the floor and ended in something dark and polished and solid, a single hoof set flat on the tile. Another limb was bent up and back behind the body, high, and I could not decide, looking at it, whether I was seeing a leg or an arm, because it had qualities of both and belonged to neither.

The face withdrew around the doorway. And the entire corridor filled with the sound of hooves, from ahead of me and behind me at once, more impacts than two legs or four legs could make, and I went back the way I had come.

After that it stopped hiding, and the last of whatever calm I had left went with it.

I still never got a clean look at all of it at once. But I saw enough, over the next stretch of running, to understand that its shape was not fixed, that it arranged itself differently depending on how it needed to move. It unfolded out of doorways, coming apart into more limbs than it had seemed to contain. Sometimes it went upright, tall, on two of its points. Sometimes the body dropped low and several more points came down and struck the concrete, and the gait multiplied. Through all of it the face stayed turned toward me, angled to keep me in the low eye, even when the body was moving in a direction the face was not.

The face would appear at the corner ahead of me while the hooves still sounded from behind me, and I stopped being able to hold in my mind that these were the same creature in two places, and I began to be unable to answer whether there was one of them or more than one. I did not decide that there were many. I only lost the ability to be sure there was one, and I want to be exact about that difference, because it is the difference between a fear you can name and a fear you cannot.

I ran through the ground floors of buildings to stay off the avenues, through a supermarket gone to rot and a restaurant kitchen full of dead steel and the back service passages that connect the buildings on a block. Every time I looked behind me the passage was empty.

Every time I faced forward again the face was at the next corner, waiting, sliding back out of sight as I came on. In the dark lobby of one building I put the flashlight up and found it on the ceiling, crossed over the whole span of it above me, its limbs folded flat against its body and hooked into the ceiling like broken scaffolding, the face hanging straight down from the middle of it and turning slowly to keep me in view as I passed underneath.

I reached the hotel. I climbed the ten floors with my lungs burning and my legs failing under me, and I pushed the bed and the dresser and the armchair against the door, and I sat down at this desk and began to write the account you have been reading, because I wanted there to be a record, and because I was out of anything else to do.

I have been writing for a while now. A little way into it, the hooves came into the lobby.

They started to climb, and this time there was no pause. I counted the floors out of habit more than hope. And as it came up through the building the rhythm of it went past anything I could hold in my head. It began as two impacts to a stride.

By the third floor it was four. By the fifth it was six, striking in an order that did not repeat. And then, still climbing, it became a fast blurred sequence, too many separate impacts landing too close together, no longer feet on stairs but a great many hard fingertips drumming all at once on the concrete, rising toward me flight after flight.

The footsteps reached my floor. The hallway outside my door went completely silent.

I got up from the desk and went to the door and put my eye to the peephole. The corridor curved away in the fisheye of the little lens, lit gray by the daylight from the window at its end, and it was empty. I waited. I kept my eye there and I waited, and I made myself keep waiting, and then the face rose slowly into view from below the peephole, from down near the floor, coming up until it was level with the lens and filling it, pressed flat against the other side of my door.

This is the clearest I have seen it, and I am going to set it down while I still can.

It is not simply damaged. It is unfinished. Beneath a layer of skin thin enough to see through, there are human features that do not belong to one face, overlapping one another, more eyes and more mouths than a face has room for, laid over each other and pressing up against the underside of the skin.

As I watched, an eye opened inside the mouth, wet and aware, between the teeth. The teeth themselves were moving, each one shifting on its own, independent of the others, turning slightly in the gum. And the cheek was flexing, bulging and easing, something underneath the skin of it trying to turn itself around in a space too small to turn in.

I fell backward away from the door and struck the floor and did not feel it.

Then, slowly and gently, from the other side, the handle of the door was pressed down. The mechanism turned as far as it would go and stopped against the lock, without force, without any shove behind it, the pressure of something that was not trying to break in but only showing me that it could reach the handle. The barricade held. The door did not move.

It has not tried again.

It is still out there. It has not pounded on the door and it has not thrown its weight against it and it has not made any attempt to force its way into this room. It is simply standing in the hallway on the other side of two inches of wood, and I can hear it breathing through the keyhole, and the breath does not sound like one breath. It sounds like air being drawn through several throats at once, layered and out of time with itself, a sound no single body makes.

And I have begun to understand something, sitting here with my back against the barricade and this notebook on my knees, and it is the last thing I understand and I think it is the true one. All this time I have believed it was chasing me. It was never chasing me. A thing that can put its face at the corner ahead of me while its hooves sound behind me does not need to chase.

It has always known where I was. It cut me off from the bridge not because it was faster but because it did not want me to leave, and it herded me back into the city and up into this building and behind this door, and it has waited outside without breaking in, because being caught was never the point. It was bringing me here. It has been bringing me here the whole time, and I only ran the route it opened.

There is one more thing, and it is the worst thing, and I am putting it down last because once I write it I do not think I will write anything else.

The insects have started to move.

They are coming out of the walls of this room, out of the cracks around the window and the gap under the baseboard and the seams of the old plaster, the cockroaches and the silverfish and the ants, every small living thing that shared this dead world with me.

They are not scattering the way disturbed insects scatter. They are moving together, in one direction, across the floor and across the carpet, toward the door, toward the gap at the bottom of it, and they are going under it, out into the hallway, toward the thing that is standing there.

For four years I wondered why the Silence took everything with a spine and left me and the insects behind. I thought we had been spared. We were not spared. Maybe I was left because it wanted something to walk the world and eventually find its way here. Maybe the insects were left because they already knew what was waiting.

The lamp is beginning to flicker. The generator is almost out of fuel, and when it goes I will be in the dark with whatever light comes through the window, and I do not think I will finish this notebook by that light. Out in the hallway the weight of it shifts, and several hard points scrape once across the carpet, settling, and then go still.

The hooves have stopped. It is outside my room door, and I think it has been waiting for me to finish writing this.

On XXXXXXX a missing persons report came in. Two girls: Clair Tons and Emily Hart, university students from Canada. They’d set out on a road trip. Started in Winnipeg, planned to drive through North Dakota toward Yellowstone National Park. They wanted to see North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. Last seen near the town of Balta. The investigation confirmed they passed through a local gas station.

A tape from the station’s security camera was secured—barely. The camera points toward the pumps, and in the corner you can partially see the entrance. The footage is so awful that when it’s not covered in static, white stripes crawl across it. The owner kept asking when the tape would be returned. It’s the only tape he has for the camera, and he just rewinds it over and over. The fact that the girls’ recording survived is a miracle.

You can see one of them—Emily Hart, 22—getting into the car. She suddenly turns her head toward a white vehicle. The other girl isn’t visible. Both left the station in their gray sedan. The only other thing we could confirm is that they made it as far as our town. The tape also shows a white 1966 Dodge Coronet with no license plates.

The owner insisted he needed the tape back. So did I. His urgency felt wrong. Why did she turn? Who was she looking at? And why the hell does someone in 2007 have one VHS tape for security footage—with no audio? It felt like the universe was conspiring against me.

Missing:*   Clair Tons, 23*   Emily Hart, 22

Students at XXXXXXX University, Winnipeg. No criminal record, no drug or alcohol issues. Their families provided a photo from the start of their trip.

Two clean souls from Canada vanish in our plains. What were they even looking for out here? Did they find it—or did it find them?

Time to check out that car. Because right now, I’ve got nothing else to hold onto.

Everyone within fifty kilometers knows that Dodge. It belongs to the Olson family—or clan, which is probably more accurate. They’re… strange. Private. With relatives and sympathizers, they’ve practically built their own little town. A few houses forming a kind of street. Big silos, warehouses. From a distance, it looks like a fortress in the middle of endless corn. Honestly, it reminds me of the kind of place a cult would build. But they’re old settlers. Probably here longer than our town.

Their Dodge is always parked by the road. That’s the problem—everyone uses it. So the only person who can tell me anything is their leader: Urg Olson. Easy to describe—the kind of man you don’t want to meet at night. Quiet, two meters tall, a hundred kilos, long hair, a full beard, and eyes like a wolf.

Now I just had to get information out of him.

The Olson settlement is an isolated community. Scandinavian roots. Non‑aggressive but extremely closed off. They don’t cooperate with local police. Their main—and usually only—voice is Urg.

When I stopped in front of the settlement, time froze. Everyone who saw me stopped what they were doing. Great. Another miserable day. I stepped out, checked my badge, and walked toward the houses. Before I even passed the first one, he already knew I was there.

Urg Olson stood there, wrapped in some kind of cloak, staring down at me. Strange—he normally doesn’t wear anything like that.

“Detective.”One word. A start. Now to get a whole sentence out of him.

He gestured for me to follow and started walking. A little stroll, why not. Kids stared at us like we were zoo animals. Their parents looked away. The air felt thick.

“I need to know who was at the gas station with the Dodge Coronet.”

He nodded slowly, thinking—which was already getting on my nerves.

“That car belongs to the community.”

What else did I expect?

“Who took it to the station? I don’t need to remind you it has no plates.”

He stopped, as if deciding whether to throw me out or break me in half. And you’d believe he could.

“The paths of travelers are unpredictable.”

I showed him the photo of the girls smiling, taking a selfie.

“No one saw them? No one invited them in?”

Urg scratched his beard.

“What a pointless loss. Nature gives, and nature takes.”

I nodded, defeated. I had no idea what he meant. Getting anything out of him was beyond me.

“No one from your people saw them either, I assume?”

He looked at me the way a parent looks at a child who just said something stupid. Silent. Watching. The silence stretched until I couldn’t take it. I looked away. His eyes made my instincts scream—like he could leap at me any second. It didn’t match his calm demeanor. Something was wrong on a primal level.

Looking away led me to something interesting—a structure. A tornado shelter. A small brick entrance into the ground, one door half open. Stairs leading down, candlelight flickering. I saw strings, maybe little figures made of twigs. Or one hell of a big spider. In the back, a wooden statue.

Urg moved his hand and one of the clan members rushed over, slamming the door shut so hard it echoed. Then he stood guard in front of it. It looked deep. Where did it lead?

Urg’s stare burned into my back.

“Nothing that would interest you, Carter.”

He gestured toward my car and walked away. He was used to respect—and to people following him, in every sense of the word.

“If anyone remembers anything, you can call.”

He stood there like divine wrath. Behind him, strong men—probably his brothers. I’d never seen them inside the settlement. They guard their privacy fiercely.

“Sure,” I said. His last word sounded polite, but I didn’t feel that from him at all. Even as I drove away, I felt his eyes burning into me.

So I grabbed another coffee and dove into the archives and local legends.

“The Corn Monster”—a mythos every corn town has. Desperate men cling to straws.

Possible connected disappearances:

*   1967—A man from Bowman, name unknown. Bet he could walk into the corn and prove nothing supernatural was there. Never seen again. Reportedly drunk, stumbling, slurring.

*   1987—A young woman. Her body found during harvest, heavily decomposed. Jane Doe.

*   2007—Clair Tons and Emily Hart—current case.

Only connection: all happened near massive cornfields.

"Geez, this whole fucking deal just doesn't make a lick of sense."How do you vanish on a straight road without a trace? Hardly anyone drives through there—someone should’ve seen them. I’ve driven that route ten times. There’s nothing there. No turnoffs. No scenic spots. Just endless corn.

Locals talk about the old legends—something happening in the fields. A bad season, strange things. After every bad season, someone revives the story.

A new clue came in from truck driver Jack Smith. A photo found at the gas station parking lot. The girls in a cornfield. Based on their clothes, it’s them. Burlap sacks over their heads. Tied to what looks like a cross.

I was driving through the fields again when they called. Someone dropped the photo—or placed it. It’s awful. The girls tied up, filthy, strapped to a cross, covered in what looks like blood and mud. Only the camera flash lights them. Corn everywhere. Always corn. I feel like I’m always driving through corn. Wading through corn. Sinking in mud. Looking worse every day.

Back to the case. Could be a ritual. A cult? One case is too little. A fanatic? Worse—no ties, impossible to track. Another coffee. Focus. And those wolf eyes watching me again. I hoped I wouldn’t have to go back to that settlement anytime soon.

Worst case—a serial killer. But no similar cases nearby. I checked for hours. A rage killing? No—he wouldn’t build crosses.

I have nothing. One useless tape. Two photos squeezed dry. Nothing to hold onto.

Maybe talk to Urg again. The thought made me shiver. Our conversation was the longest he’d had with anyone outside his community in years.

Today I’ll drive the route from their settlement and then the straight road again. I can’t sleep. More coffee. More corn. How the hell did they disappear?

A potential witness contacted us. He has information but will only share it in person. He’s afraid for his safety. He set the meeting at 2 AM. At a cornfield.

Of course. Where else. Not a rest stop—a cornfield. Suspicious, but I have to go. I’m close. I know it. I’ll find those girls. There’s something bigger behind this. No one understands why it’s eating me alive. The chief suggested medical leave. Colleagues say I’m exhausted and irritable.

I have to figure it out. It gnaws at me. I noticed a pattern—twenty years between cases. Why twenty? Why is each one different? Why can’t I let it go?

This is personal now. I have to go. I have to move forward.The corn will tell me.

User: CarterPD17 uploaded a new post.

A single photograph. Carter stepping out of his car. Headlights blinding him. The photographer caught it so it looks like it was taken in absolute emptiness. After brightening and editing, corn stalks appear in the background—and the shadow of someone standing in front of the headlights. Carter is crouching, trying to see what’s happening. Metadata shows only the time: 2 AM. Same time as the meeting. All other metadata erased.

Detective John Carter was declared missing.

His notes were posted 14 days later—he used a delayed-posting program.

His vehicle was found overturned in a ditch, partly in a cornfield.

Police continue searching and ask the public for help.

Urg Olson stated that neither he nor anyone in the community saw Carter.

The case was later suspended due to lack of evidence.

The person who uploaded Carter’s photo remains unknown.

by Hary Sykora