r/nosleep

It's around 10:02 PM. I'm about twenty minutes from the Pennsylvania border and twice that from the nearest state police station.

I think something is following me.

Or maybe I'm getting closer to it. I'm not sure which possibility is worse.

I work as a field technician for a geological and environmental consulting company. Most days, I'm driving between remote sites, inspecting drainage systems, monitoring unstable slopes, things like that. I've spent enough time around old mines and failing hillsides to know what the ground looks like when something is wrong.

Every night when I come home from work, the mountains seem a little closer.

At first, I thought I'd just been lucky with traffic. My commute was supposed to take an hour, and suddenly it was closer to fifty minutes. Then forty. Then thirty. I should've been happy. That's an extra half hour of my life I'd been getting back for free.

But the drive wasn't getting faster. The road was getting shorter.

The first thing that disappeared was a bend along the river. The road just carried on where it should have curved, and the street that used to branch off to the right was gone. I remember the houses along it and the little birdhouse mailbox at the corner that always leaned toward the road. I'd passed it over a thousand times.

There was no closure sign, no construction equipment, no Department of Highway, no rubble. The road just continued straight through the place where the bend and the side street should have been.

I told myself I was tired. A few days later, my truck overheated on the way home, so I pulled over near the northern water tank our county had installed. While I waited for the engine to cool, I looked toward the mountain behind it.

A pale strip cut across the forest.

It looked like a mudslide. We have had a "destructive" summer in terms of rain, so it wasn't an unfair assumption. The problem was that there were no exposed roots or broken trees. The edges were clean. It was a long, smooth scar curving across the mountainside, with both ends disappearing behind the trees.

I took a picture, mostly because I wanted to see if it looked as strange on my phone as it did in person.

The next morning, I had a job near an old mine site a few miles north of town. A contractor had reported a change in drainage, and I was there to check the monitoring points.

The creek was running in the wrong place.

Its old channel was nearly dry, with a few shallow pools left between the rocks. A new one cut across the floodplain forty yards away. The bank was steep and clean, with no debris to suggest a flood. Trees stood along its edge, all leaning at the same angle, their roots exposed on one side.

I checked the GPS coordinates of the monitoring point. The point was where it was supposed to be. The creek wasn't.

The upstream gauge showed no unusual flow, and there hadn't been enough rain to move that much earth. I photographed the new channel and sent my supervisor a report describing unexplained channel migration and possible ground displacement.

I did, however, leave out the mountain.

Over the next week, I found more changes. A culvert sat crooked in undisturbed soil. A fence line that had once run straight now bent in an arc. At another site, the steel rods we used to monitor slope movement all leaned toward the valley. Their angles increased the farther I walked along the ridge, as if the ground were tipping away from something.

From there, I could see the pale scar clearly behind the water tower. It had widened. Farther along the mountain, two more pale strips crossed the trees.

They curved through the forest at odd angles, disappearing beneath the canopy and reappearing farther along the slope. I couldn't find any obvious pattern to them.

So I took another photograph.

This is Appalachia. Old mines collapse. Water finds new spots. Hillsides settle. The ground has been dug into and blasted apart for generations. Each change had a reasonable explanation on its own. Together, they didn't.

That evening, I compared the picture I'd taken at the water tower with a new one. The scar hadn't just widened. Its center had shifted, and the ridge above it sat lower than before. I checked the county's elevation maps against the water tower and a nearby transmission line. I couldn't make the shapes match.

The headaches started around then: pressure behind my eyes, worse when I looked toward the mountains. I blamed the heat and lack of sleep. I took painkillers and drank more water. Nothing helped.

A few days later, I stopped at a gas station on my way to work. I bought a bottle of water, paid, and left. I still had the receipt in my cup holder when I drove home that evening.

The station was gone.

Not closed. Gone.

There wasn't even a foundation left. Just grass beside the road. Even the utility pole at the entrance had disappeared.

I pulled over and scrambled to pull the receipt out of the cup holder. The name of the station was printed at the top, along with the time and date. I looked across the empty patch of land, then back at the paper.

The next morning, I went back. My phone's map still showed the station, but there was nothing there to photograph except the empty patch of land.

When I looked up, the mountains seemed close enough to touch. The pale scars ran down toward the river, their exposed surfaces smooth and faintly lined. For a moment, I had the horrifying impression that I was looking at skin.

I drove away.

That afternoon, the county sent me to inspect a crack in the pavement near a small bridge. It ran from one shoulder to the other, almost perfectly straight. The ground on either side sat at different elevations.

I crouched beside it. Under the road was a pale, dense material threaded with dark lines. I thought it might be a mineral vein until I noticed the lines weren't branching off. They curved around one another, disappearing beneath the edges of the pavement.

I touched the edge with my measuring rod.

A vibration traveled up the shaft and into my palm.

I pulled the rod away. The vibration stopped.

For a moment, I stayed crouched there, listening. Then it came again, low enough that I felt it in my teeth. The dark lines beneath the road shifted against one another.

The far side of the crack rose. Maybe half an inch. The pavement lifted with it, and a stone rolled into the grass.

I stumbled backward and nearly fell. I waited for the rest of the hillside to collapse.

Nothing else happened.

I photographed the crack and left.

On my way home, I crossed the same bridge. The crack was gone. The pavement was smooth, the grass undisturbed. I stopped on the shoulder and checked my pictures. They showed what I'd seen, but in the last one the ground had risen slightly on one side. Behind it, the mountain was crossed by pale lines that joined into a single, broad curve.

I went home and stayed up comparing the photographs. The changes didn't radiate from one point, as they might after an earthquake or a mine collapse. The curves converged beneath the highest ridge north of town.

I enlarged the map until the details blurred. Whatever I was looking at, it wasn't a pattern I'd seen in any survey. I shut the laptop. I'd been awake too long. That was the only explanation I could live with.

The next evening, my truck overheated again near the water tower. I opened the hood and waited for the engine to cool. Across the river, the forest began to rise.

At first, I thought the trees were bending in the wind. But there was no wind, and they weren't bending. The ground beneath them was lifting.

A ridge pushed up from the valley floor, carrying trees, boulders, and a section of fence. The fence posts stayed upright as the earth rose. The river struck the new slope and split around it, spilling into the low ground on either side.

Then the forest opened.

Beneath the soil was a broad, rounded surface, gray and faintly lined, stretching farther than I could see. It emerged from under the mountain like the back of something buried too close to the surface.

I could make out a wrist.

Beyond it, five enormous fingers shifted under the earth. The ridges of the mountains followed the shapes of the joints. Pale scars ran along the exposed surface and disappeared beneath miles of forest. I couldn't see where the hand ended. I couldn't see what it was attached to.

One finger flexed.

The whole valley moved with it.

The road across the river split into sections. Trees slid sideways with the ground beneath them. A utility pole leaned and vanished behind a fold of rising earth. The sound reached me a moment later, a deep pressure that rattled the truck and came up through the soles of my boots.

Then the movement stopped.

The river kept flowing through its new channel. Dust drifted above the exposed slope. The trees settled, still standing on a hillside that hadn't existed ten minutes earlier.

I got in the truck and drove home.

My commute took eight minutes.

The ridge behind my house was different. A pale curve ran down its face, visible above the rooftops across the valley. I locked the doors and called my supervisor to say I was sick. He told me to take the next day off.

I didn't sleep.

At 10:02 PM, I started writing this.

A few minutes ago, the floor shifted beneath my feet. I went to the kitchen window. The ridge behind my house had risen again, lifting the trees with it. A pale line was opening in the grass outside, running toward the foundation.

I can hear the roots tearing.

The road to town is shorter than it was an hour ago. I can see the water tower from my window, though it should be hidden behind the ridge. I don't think whatever is beneath these mountains knows we're here. I think it's only moving in its sleep.

The pale line has reached the house.

The floor is rising.

[removed]

Six years ago, an entire family disappeared from the small town of Hopkins. They seemingly vanished without a trace, leaving an empty house full of their belongings, the car still in the driveway, their shoes inside on the entry mat. A husband, wife, and two children—Janie and Judith, ages thirteen and fifteen.

Authorities found no evidence of foul play.

Recently, after the missing family was at last declared deceased, the only remaining relative, a brother, came to the property to get their affairs in order. After feeling a “malignant presence,” he decided that rather than sorting the family’s personal effects himself, he’d hire an auction company. A trio of staff came to the house to inventory the furniture and other items for liquidation.

In hours, the entire team was dead.

Authorities determined the deaths to be murder-suicide. The brother demanded the local sheriffs investigate further, insisting the tragedy could not have been natural, but the authorities maintained that the physical evidence was unambiguous: one of the auction staff murdered the others and then himself. Dissatisfied with their conclusions, the brother contacted an acclaimed expert on the paranormal, Dr. Goddard.

Goddard and his cameraman brought spirit boxes, EMF readers, and other equipment to the house and successfully recorded strange temperature fluxes before Goddard himself witnessed something that led him to decide the haunting was too dangerous for him to handle alone.

“The entity in this house is malevolent, intelligent, and immensely powerful—it will require the greatest specialists to pacify it,” he declared.

Goddard assembled an expert team—a medium, an exorcist, and a paranormal investigator.

I was brought on to document.

I now find myself in the lobby of a motel, seated around the coffee table with the rest of our team and tapping out notes as Goddard briefs us:

“Gentlemen, and dear lady, the goal is simple…” He spreads before us on the table a folder full of pictures of the house, real estate records, police reports, and so on. “You will enter the house and pacify the spirits within. How you handle what I believe to be an aggressively malevolent entity will be up to your discretion. Each of you brings unique skills—exorcist, medium, paranormal investigator. And of course Guo, our cameraman, and Dawain, our journalist. There is just one rule that you must follow, all of you, at all times:

“No one can be alone in the house, ever, for more than five minutes…”

***

I am sitting here now as Goddard leads the team in formulating a plan for our arrival, making notes in real time, as I will be for the duration in order to give as unfiltered a depiction as possible.

I have a notepad as well as a tablet since I have been warned that paranormal phenomena sometimes interfere with electronics.

This is my first time meeting each of the experts. For privacy, names have been changed, but all other details are as accurate as I can make them:

The exorcist: The old man sitting to my right exudes the sort of gravitas that would lend itself perfectly to cinema. With bristling eyebrows above a priest’s collar, Father Corwin is the stern patriarch of our group. His hands have a tremor when he lifts his coffee cup, and his soft, withered skin suggests he is nearing eighty. Yet to whatever lurks in the house, he may be the greatest threat, as he boasts decades of experience and claims to have successfully conducted dozens of exorcisms.

Six weeks prior to the family’s disappearance, he met with them over the parents’ claim that the girls were “summoning demons.” After interviewing both girls, he judged them to be ordinary troubled teens whose friction with their stepmother was causing family dysfunction. He recommended counseling.

Father Corwin now feels both guilt and obligation to pacify an evil he may have overlooked.

The medium: Chiming in with frequent interruptions to Goddard’s presentation is a plump woman with flowing black hair, rings on every finger, and a jade owl pendant. Internationally acclaimed for her channelings of departed spirits, Madam Savino is the most financially successful of our gathering, with popular books such as How to Read Auras: A Primer for Beginners, and The Third Eye and How to Open It. Her ability to commune with spirits will likely put her center stage—exactly where she seems to wish to be.

She’s chatty, bubbly, and if you were to meet her outside the context of the spiritual and spooky, she might remind you of your overbearing aunt.

The investigator: Rounding out our fellowship is the paranormal investigator who calls himself Coyote, casual in his tank and jeans and sporting the tattoo of a coyote on one arm, a busty woman in red on the other. With a seemingly bottomless supply of blunts in his pocket, he seems less investigator than junkie, his eyes restless from either too much caffeine or ADHD as he bounces his leg.

Coyote is newer to the field, and he admitted to me during a smoke break that his credentials are “ninety percent fabrication, just like most hauntings.” I have to wonder why Goddard hired him.

Then there is Guo, the cameraman.

And of course myself. I am a journalist, and everything I write in this account is what I have observed firsthand. For years, I have been a thorn in Goddard’s side, ever since I published an article about a conference he chaired on the paranormal. I reported that despite compelling anecdotes, Goddard’s theories were not rigorous enough to withstand scientific scrutiny. And maybe this—our history, my skepticism—is the reason he reached out to me for this assignment. Hoping his greatest critic would be converted into a champion of his life’s work.

Or maybe it’s because I once lived in the same small town the killings occurred in.

Now, I pause in my notetaking to glance up and ask, “Why five minutes?”

“That is how long I was alone before…” Goddard trails off. He mutters, “If I were to tell you right now that I saw a pink elephant, you might say my comments influenced you to imagine your own pink elephant. So, I will only disclose the details of my encounter after you bear witness. The cameraman has a sketch I drew, and once you’ve encountered the entity, he will show it to you to see if our experiences match… Suffice to say, what I saw was enough to convince me I need you. And you all will need each other—"

“Teamwork makes the dream work!” interjects Madam Savino. “If we’re together, it’ll be tougher for any malevolent entities to influence us, and even if they do, we’ll be more likely to notice before it’s too late.”

“Precisely,” agrees Goddard. “We know from the police reports that the auction staff were inventorying separate rooms of the house when one of them snapped and murdered the others. The incidents happen when the victim is isolated. And that is why it is imperative you stick together. When you enter, I think it’s best if Madam Savino starts—"

“Abso-posi-lutely,” Madam Savino again interjects. “I’ll see what I can sense with my third eye…” She taps her forehead, glances at me, and explains, “I search for psychic echoes, memories that have stuck to the house or to objects. I’ll try to read from the spirit’s emotions what must be done to allow it to cross over… but if it’s an aggressive entity, that’s where Father Corwin comes in.”

Father Corwin steeples his fingers and nods.

“So Madam Savino locates the spirit, Father Corwin expels it, and Coyote…” I say, pausing in notetaking to glance at the tattooed young man.

Coyote’s eyes are fixed vacantly on the table. Just as I’m about to nudge him, he blurts: “Where did the bodies go?”

“Hm?” says Goddard.

“Who moved the bodies?” He repeats, pointing to the photo of the family—a somber man, a smiling wife, and two young teens.

“Nobody moved them, as far as we know,” says Goddard.

“Exactly.” Coyote seems irked that his question isn’t understood. “Are we so sure they died? Or that there wasn’t foul play—maybe one family member killed the others?”

“Coyote—”

“Bodies stink. They rot. They’re impossible to ignore, unless they’re deliberately concealed. Spirits don’t do coverups. Paranormal entities don’t conceal crimes. So I repeat, who hid the bodies?”

It’s a good question, and it brings all of us up short.

Goddard clears his throat. “And this is why I have chosen all three of you—psychic, priest, and investigator. At the time of the family’s disappearance, there was no evidence of foul play, and the authorities assumed the family had left. Their search of the house and its grounds turned up nothing, but… as Coyote says, where are the bodies? Find the bodies, and you find the answers. That said, I must echo Madam Savino’s warnings. This is NOT like anything you have dealt with before. A salt circle will not protect you. Standard blessings will not be enough. Your skepticism is no shield against what lurks in that house. Your lives, from the very moment you set foot inside, will be in extreme and immediate danger.

“Tonight, rest well. Make whatever arrangements you need for yourselves and your families before tomorrow. And remember…” He stares hard into each of our eyes in turn. “No one, not for any reason, should be alone inside more than five minutes.”

***

Find the bodies, and you find the answers.

Why did the bodies go missing? The more I ponder it, the less sense it makes. Either the family is still alive and in hiding (but why?), or the bodies were hidden by a killer who departed the house without leaving a trace.

The father, Nicholas, was a moderately successful realtor. His first wife died when the children were still young. He married his second wife, Bernadette, some years later. According to Father Corwin, the girls—Janie and Judith—were troubled teens “led astray by the degeneracy of modern American culture.” The younger hated their new stepmother. The older was boy-crazy and pregnant. Still, there’s nothing to suggest why all four disappeared, leaving shoes on the mat, keys by the door, and their car sitting in the driveway.

Could someone local have held a grudge against the family? Maybe the teen pregnancy was the motive? Small towns like Hopkins are rife with secrets simmering under the surface. It’s one of the reasons my family moved. But if someone came to the house and murdered them and hid the bodies…

Where?

I review photos of the property.

A nice house, in pictures. Two stories, large yard and an enormous oak out front. The property is isolated, far from any urban center and with the nearest neighbors several minutes’ walk along the lane. Behind the house stretches several miles of woodlands. An easy place to make bodies disappear…

There are about five hundred homes in the small town of Hopkins, but only this home’s notoriety has spread to the surrounding areas, such that if you mention, “the Hopkins House,” everyone knows which house you mean. But as for how the house became haunted? Nobody knows.

***

10am, and everyone is in high spirits, energized by the motel’s mediocre continental breakfast. Goddard is driving, Father Corwin stoic in the front passenger seat, and our cameraman captures some candid footage of Coyote and Madam Savino bantering: “Hey,” Coyote says, “why did the terrible psychic get hit by a bus?”

“Oh my gawd, I tell this one at every convention!” Madam Savino leans in. “Because she didn’t see it coming!”

“I heard it was to get to the other side—"

—and then all their joking is forgotten as we round the corner of the narrow lane.

A tall, beige house sits on a sloping hill with trees on one side and in the front a large oak with a rope hanging from it. It is not, like some famously haunted houses, an especially dilapidated dwelling. It has tidy white-trimmed windows and a blue front door. Other than the overgrown weeds, it looks like it could have been plucked from any town in America. As I gaze on the driveway leading up to the garage, I feel almost… disappointed. After so much build up from Goddard, this looks far too ordinary to be the site of such horrors.

“I’ll be driving back down the lane,” says Goddard as we clamber out. “If you need to retreat to the van, that’s where to find me, at the bend.”

“Why all the way down there?” asks Coyote, frowning as he glances back down the lane, perhaps calculating the distance.

“Because I don’t know the range of the haunting’s effects. I want to make sure at least one of us is far enough to be able to call for backup if necessary.”

“Backup from who?” asks Madam Savino. “The Podunk police?”

Goddard shrugs and says yes, probably the police.

On a laptop in the front passenger seat, I spot myself standing there awkwardly with my tablet, a notebook and pen under my arm. The cameraman tells us to smile for our future viewers, and Coyote and Madam Savino both grin and blow kisses, while I wave awkwardly and Father Corwin’s eyebrows bristle in disapproval at their mugging for the camera.

“Good luck,” Goddard says.

And then rather unceremoniously, he shuts the van door and drives away, rattling down the lane and out of sight…

… leaving us on the pavement.

It strikes me then that Goddard is afraid of the house. Afraid to set foot inside again after his brief encounter with the spirit. The same realization seems to hit the rest of our group as we turn to face the bright blue door.

“Cue scary violins,” mutters Coyote.

Nothing but us and the house.

***

On entering, the foyer looks normal. Cream colored walls, ceiling light, side table, shoes on the mat. Eerie. Like the family is still home. The house is clean except for dust from years of sitting empty.

From the foyer, a hallway leads to a bedroom and bathroom. The bedroom is painted pink but bare of decoration, though holes in the wall suggest it once had pictures or posters.

In the other direction, the house opens up to the main room, dining room and kitchen, as well as the staircase.

Through windows in the main room I see the yard, grassy and overgrown. Nothing feels out of the ordinary.

Madam Savino keeps making exclamations. “Oh,” she says. “Oh. Can you feel that? The house… it’s full of anger.”

And, “I can feel the sense of ill will… the spirit here is very strong… and very vindictive.”

And, “The feeling of malice… it isn’t human. This entity, whatever it is, is pure evil.”

I catch Coyote rolling his eyes. The cameraman zooms in on Madam Savino, but despite her proclamations, I do not feel anything except emptiness in the house.

We ascend the staircase.

The cameraman says: “You seeing all this?”

“I’m seeing it.” Goddard’s voice sounds tinny and muffled from the cameraman’s phone, affixed to his camera on a video call that Goddard is recording. “Clear picture so far.”

“Faint traces of blood on the stairs,” The cameraman says, zooming in on the carpeted staircase.

“I’ll n…tify Clement,” Goddard’s voice cuts in and out over the poor connection. Clement is the name of the out-of-state brother of the missing family, now trying to sell the house. “That’s good to know about the stairs… he’ll want to replace that carpet. He had the place thoroughly cleaned, but apparently not th…ly enough.”

The speckles of blood are a disconcerting reminder of the second tragedy that occurred at the house. When auction staff came to inventory items for liquidation, one of them used a kitchen knife to stab his compatriots—ambushing his first victim in the study, the other on the landing—before slitting his own throat. The man who committed the murders had no history of violence or mental health struggles before he “just snapped,” at least according to the local authorities. They cited some complaints he’d made against auction management.

Aside from the spattering of blood, the rest of the landing is clean. In one direction lies the master bedroom and bathroom. In the other direction, Coyote sets his hand on the door to the study.

“… the study is where I was when I encountered… it.” Goddard’s tinny voice pipes up from the phone.

Coyote braces himself and glances back at us. “Ready?” he asks everyone. “If it’s a spirit, Madam Savino pacifies it. If it’s a demon, Father Corwin exorcises it. And if it’s a creepy clown…” He turns the knob. “… I’ll go for the juggler.”

… There is a beat, and then a deep sigh on the phone from Goddard, who growls at us to be on our guard. Coyote pushes open the door…

The study is empty.

***

Among the files Goddard sent to me about the Hopkins House is a video file labeled “camera 03/01.”

The grainy video shows Goddard’s encounter with the entity in the study. It was recorded by several stationary cameras Goddard had set up around the house. In the footage, Goddard can be seen twisting dials on a spirit box (a radio wave scanner that picks up fragments of voices and static). His grey eyebrows are fiercely knit together, his lips turned down in a frown as the radio static sputters. The video seems to come in and out as he turns the dial. Then a girl’s voice comes across the radio, loud, weepy: “… the devil. The …aby is the devi—” The static turns to a high pitched noise, then silence as camera03 cuts out.

Cut to camera01, the first floor hallway. Goddard can be seen slack-jawed drifting down the stairs. He mutters to himself, a phrase that sounds like gibberish. He continues for two minutes, his eyes rolling in his head and his body shaking, and then the cameraman’s voice calls, “Dr. Goddard!” and he starts awake. In his notes, Goddard has attempted to decipher the gibberish. He believes what he was saying is: “Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine.”

From the snares of the devil, deliver us, Lord.

***

Having found nothing in the study, we have only the bedroom at the end of the hall remaining. It is a girl’s bedroom, with an excess of pillows and a crib in the corner—not yet assembled. Presumably the older teen, Judith’s, room. Madam Savino makes a beeline for the crib and picks up a baby onesie.

“My baby!” she wails. “My baby is… NO! No, no!” Then she shudders, her eyelids fluttering. “I’m… drowning in darkness… and above, light… an eclipse… an eclipse…”

I catch Coyote rolling his eyes and slipping away. I follow him downstairs and out the backdoor to the yard, where he lights up a joint.

The sun is so bright as I step onto the grass that I squint, blinking against the rays.

“I take it you’re not convinced by Madam Savino’s theatrics?” I ask.

“I mean, a buncha people died or disappeared here. Definitely giving me the heebie jeebies. But is that enough to call it haunted? We’ll know shit’s real when the signs get louder.”

“How do they get louder?”

“Someone dies.” He shrugs, then points at a metal round object jutting from the grass. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

“What? The septic tank?”

Coyote approaches the round metal hatch, unlatches the lid and hefts it open, and both of us stagger back from the wave of rot and sewage that wafts up from the foul liquid below. Coyote leans over the opening, and for a moment I envision him toppling in. Suddenly I understand. A family of four goes missing… and right on the property is a tank that hasn’t been drained since before the disappearances.

“… maybe Madam Savino’s vision isn’t so far off after all. A white light. An eclipse…” Coyote grunts as he pushes the lid closed. “If there was a girl with a pregnancy someone wanted to hide, maybe the last thing she saw…” He raps his knuckles on the tank. “… was this.”

***

Goddard rages at us for leaving the group. “I understand you have not yet seen proof of the house’s haunting. But it is haunted, and both of you need to follow this one very clear and s…mple rule,” roars Goddard’s staticky voice. “Never separate from the team, and never, NEVER—”

“Be alone more than five minutes,” Coyote says, holding the phone away from his ear. “Got it. What about the septic tank?”

“What about it? You said it yourself last night, only a criminal would… eek t… cover a crime. But …olice found no signs of a struggle, no forced entry, no indications of any crime having taken place… and the lid to the tank was not open. And unlike spirits, human criminals do leave physical evidence. There is no reason to …ain the tank.”

He declares we will take a short bathroom break, and when he returns, we will initiate phase two of our mission at the Hopkins House: Father Corwin will conduct a blessing to pacify the malignant presence.

***

It’s been a full forty minutes.

During this time, I’ve cleaned up my prose and typed up some handwritten notes. Goddard has neither texted nor called. The cameraman says Goddard drove to a gas station to use the facilities and because this area is so rural, he likely is out of cell range. He tries for the umpteenth time to reach him and wanders off in search of a better signal. Coyote, meanwhile, is poking around in the garage while the rest of us sit on the driveway. The garage door is up, and I see him hold up a gas can and shake it. “Found some gasoline! If it is haunted and we need to light the place up—"

“Put it back,” says Madam Savino.

“I’m just saying, if the family turn out to be zombies—”

“Coyote.”

“HEY!!!” The cameraman’s shouts interrupt them. “EVERYONE! HURRY UP! COME SEE!”

We join the cameraman at the side of the house and follow his excited gesturing at a bunch of grass and bushes.

No, he’s pointing at something behind the bushes. All but obscured—

A small, dusty window.

“What is this?” asks Father Corwin.

“A… basement window?” says Coyote.

“But there was no basement inside…” Madam Savino says.

“A secret basement.” The cameraman’s eyes glint. “I don’t think even Clement knows this is here—when he showed us through the house originally, he said it was just two floors.”

“It can’t be just the window. There must be an entrance somewhere,” says Coyote.

We head inside to search for a hidden door, staying in a group as we check the pantry and closets, banging around for false walls. We move quickly, nobody wanting to linger too long. And finally, finding no way into any basement, we return to that narrow window. A dusty rectangle of darkness.

Coyote and I squat in the bushes and peek through the glass with our phone lights. And for the first time since our arrival at the house, my stomach flips, my skin prickling with excitement. Because if the cops really didn’t know about this—and it does seem like no one knew since even the brother was unaware of it—then this is a genuine breakthrough. We’ll be the first people inside since the family went missing.

And then, ice blooms in my veins.

What if the missing family is inside?

“So… we think this is where they are?” says Coyote, voicing my fear.

“Nobody’s looked here before…” Madam Savino joins us in shining her cell phone light into the dark. “It makes sense they’re probably down there…”

“Should we call the cops?” I wonder.

Everybody looks at me.

But if there are any gruesome discoveries to be made down there, police would tape it all off without allowing any of us to go in and document. And calling the cops isn’t nearly as good an ending to the article I intend to write as a story in which we, ourselves, go in and find whatever waits in the terrifying blackness below.

“I think there’s a door at the back…” Madam Savino has her face right up against the glass. She shoves branches out of her hair and straightens up. “It might lead to stairs. Someone’ll have to go in and find where it goes.” She looks at Coyote.

“Nope.”

“Quit being a wuss!”

“Wuss!” he says. “Lady, it’s a pitch dark basement full of dead people—”

“Not full,” scoffs Madam Savino. “There might be four.”

“There are definitely four! And anyone who goes in alone gonna make it five—”

“I’ll go,” I interrupt.

Everyone stares at me.

“I’ll go,” I repeat. “I’m a journalist, I’m documenting all of this, and I don’t believe this house is haunted. I’ll go. And when I find the door I’ll bang on it to help you find where it is so you can let me out.”

“RIP Dawain,” mutters Coyote.

“If I scream, obviously call the cops. But I won’t scream unless I’m genuinely in danger. And I don’t believe I will be.”

The more I speak, the more confident I feel. After all, what have we witnessed so far? Some spooky “visions” from Madam Savino, and Goddard’s “trance” in which he spoke Latin? None of it amounts to much. The camera footage of Goddard’s gibberish is by far the creepiest offering, but to be clear—the man has a vested interest in convincing the world of this haunting, so footage of himself under thrall isn’t exactly credible. And nothing I’ve borne witness to has substantiated his claims.

Besides, I won’t even have to break Goddard’s five minute rule to go down there. It shouldn’t take me more than a minute or two to locate the stairs. If I run into anything too spooky, I’ll just come back through the window.

***

I’m about to go in.

My phone battery is full, its flashlight beaming strongly. And yes, I admit, I’m nervous. I’m a little scared to see dead bodies. But also eager. Because if they really are down there, at last we will know what happened to the family.

I will follow up with another post when I am able. Going in now.

Wish me luck.

| Part 2 |

(CW: child abuse)

Previously, I was given a single rule about entering the house:

Five minutes.

That’s how long I can stay before I am officially dead.

Never be alone more than five minutes in the house, our team’s leader, the paranormal researcher Dr. Goddard, warned us. Always stick together as a group, and watch one another for signs of paranormal influence.

I am Dawain, a journalist, and it is my duty to report the truth objectively, without the taint of superstition or mystical or magical beliefs. The truth is that a family in the town of Hopkins went missing, and the authorities found no trace of them, despite the car still in the driveway and the shoes still on the mat and the keys inside. The house, now called the “Hopkins House,” has sat empty for years…

No one has been able to explain their disappearance…

… until now.

Our cameraman, while trying to get signal on his phone, wandered around to the side of the house and noticed a glint in the bushes, low to the ground. A basement window.

A hidden basement.

Six years ago authorities assumed, because of the lack of forced entry or signs of disturbance, that the family left on their own—and after a cursory search, the local sheriffs left the house. They never found the basement. Meaning if our suspicions are correct, we may soon solve the mystery of the Hopkins House and find the bodies—father, stepmother, and two young teens—who have been missing all this time. But with no entrance, the only option is for someone to climb through the window…

… into the house alone.

Our specialized team has deferred this task to me. The exorcist, Father Corwin, is nearly eighty and frail. The acclaimed medium, Madam Savino, is too plump for the narrow opening. And as for the paranormal investigator, Coyote—he’s as wiry, wily, and cowardly as his namesake.

Now, the three of them stand watching—the spiritual “experts” who are supposedly here to pacify the evil in this house, plus the frightened cameraman.

“Wish me luck,” I say.

“Remember, five minutes,” warns Father Corwin.

“You got this,” says Madam Savino.

“Don’t die,” growls Coyote.

I drop down into the darkness below.

***

The first thing I notice is the smell: the air tastes dank. Stale. Is it my imagination, or do I catch a whiff of rot?

Above me, anxious faces huddle at the window. I turn on my phone light, illuminating cupboards and shelves, a toolbox, shovels, crowbar, cardboard boxes, and a door in the corner, ajar. “It’s a storeroom,” I say, “looks pretty ordinary. Gonna go further in…”

I open the door to the next room.

It’s one thing to be standing in the bright sunshine, looking in through that square of basement window and telling myself, It’s only a basement.

… Another thing entirely to stand in the maw of yawning darkness. And while I know, rationally, that there is nothing in this long-abandoned basement that can harm me… I am suddenly keenly aware of how long it would take me to climb back up through the window if I were trying to run—

Stop it, I tell my childish imagination. There’s nothing to run from.

My fingers grope along the wall and find a switch, flip it.

An overhead bulb bathes me in a warm glow—and I’m nauseated by the momentary dread that I’ll see four bodies deep into decomposition, but to my relief the basement appears normal. Wooden stairs in the corner of the now well-lit basement travel up to a hatch door—probably under the main room or hallway. Along the opposite wall lies a small cot and a nightstand, a mosaic lamp, a dresser and a heavy bookcase.

My nose wrinkles at a musty odor as I approach the cot. Tucked under the pillow is a diary. PROPERTY OF JUDY, it says on the inside cover, and in smaller scribble: if you read this without permission you will be hexed!!! Flipping the pages reveals scrawls of DIE, BITCH!!! in jagged lettering. On another page, a polaroid taped to the paper shows a middle-aged woman, her eyes scratched out and arcane symbols sketched around her.

I’m guessing this is the “troubling behavior” Father Corwin mentioned. The teens’ stepmother, Bernadette, came to him with complaints that they were trying to summon demons against her. He was not especially concerned at the time—after all, what teen girl hasn’t tried to hex her stepmother or chemistry teacher or classmate dating the boy she likes?

But while I don’t believe any of the “spells” in this diary actually worked, its contents might contain clues to whatever actually happened on the fateful day the family went missing.

I tuck the diary under my arm and start for the stairs, but my steps slow at the sudden and overwhelming sensation of being watched. All the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“H-hello?” I whisper.

BBBBZzt—

—the overhead bulb flickers.

In the failing light, I see something impossible. Impossible because it has been six years since the family disappeared, and there’s no way a human being could survive down here all that time. But scurrying out from under the cot is a girl—filthy, mouth open in a silent scream, her disheveled wet hair hanging around her shoulders and a tattered dress dripping around her bare legs—

Darkness falls like a curtain.

I fumble my phone’s flashlight to try and catch her in its beam and—she’s there—there on the far wall! Crawling like an insect behind the bookcase as a hand grabs my shoulder—

Yelping, I whirl.

“Hey, hey!” barks Coyote, phone blinding me in one hand—and a crowbar clenched in the other. “You OK?”

“I—I saw someone!”

“It’s been five minutes and you weren’t answering my calls. Now let’s get the fuck out.” He grabs my arm and spins me toward the stairs, and we both make a mad dash. He bangs the crowbar against the ceiling. “HEY!!” he hollers.

“HEY! HEY!!” I bang my palms on the hatch door.

“Here!” Madam Savino’s muffled holler rings down. “They’re here!”

Footsteps clomp over our heads. A moment later the door lifts upward, and Coyote and I tumble out into the light.

***

We stand clustered around the hatch door. Father Corwin, Madam Savino, Coyote, the cameraman and I. It was hidden underneath the shag rug in the main room. Easily discoverable if one were to lift up the rug. But nobody had been searching because, other than the missing family, nobody knew about the basement.

Now that I’m up in the house proper, I catch my breath. Everyone is barking at me, demanding to know why I wasn’t answering their shouts. I show them the diary and babble, “I-I think Judy might be alive—” Then I catch myself. Remind myself that my role in documenting is to record only objective truth. And my brief sighting in the dark could easily have been the combination of adrenaline and imagination. Nevertheless, I relate what I saw. Madam Savino and Father Corwin suggest that I may have glimpsed Judy’s ghost.

I shake my head. “She looked solid. Real.”

“You were in a trance.” Coyote’s dark eyes study me. “You also said she was dripping wet… so if she was real, she’d’ve left footprints…” He casts a reluctant glance back toward the darkness. “Should we wait for Goddard, or…?”

“He’s still out of range…” The cameraman shows us his calls going straight to voicemail.

“Then it’s up to us to find this girl—and her family,” declares Madam Savino, clapping her hands.

Back into the basement we go.

***

This time the overhead bulb remains bright when I flick the basement light on, its harsh glow sharpening the shadows. The atmosphere should be lighter now that I have company, but the low ceiling is so claustrophobic, the darkness so closely encroaching it’s like we’re being entombed.

“… no wet footprints, just lots of dust.” The cameraman pans to collect footage.

“Let’s see what we can find,” says Madam Savino as we fan out.

A large Persian rug covers the cement floor, with the area near the stairs used for storage—a tricycle, old children’s toys, bags and boxes, cobwebbed appliances. Across the room is the sleeping area with the cot, nightstand, dresser, and bookcase. On the far wall is the open door to the storeroom. There’s not much more here than family junk. Coyote rummages through one of the cardboard boxes, pulling out action figures, faded blue jeans, Air Jordans, a Barbie with scissors stabbed into it. “Kid stuff…” he grunts, pushing the box away and then opening another, finding a cracked frame with a photo of a teen boy. “Hey…” He hones in on the photo. “Did the family have a secret son?”

“The family had no sons,” Father Corwin says.

“You sure? I mean, you didn’t exactly know about this secret basement. Maybe they had a secret son too—"

“That’s not their son. It’s Janie.” The priest picks up the Barbie doll from the box. “The teens were rebellious. The younger, Janie, was a tomboy. The older, Judith, was boy crazy and wouldn’t disclose the name of the boy she was seeing when she became… with child. There was a lot of friction between the girls and their stepmother. But…” He twists the Barbie so we can all see the lock of human hair taped to its head, and BERNADETTE scrawled on its plastic torso like a kind of voodoo Barbie. The priest plucks the scissors from its chest. “… This is why she came to me for help.”

The cameraman zooms in on the Barbie. “So this is what caused the family’s disappearance?”

“You’re kidding, right?” scoffs Madam Savino.

“This is just teen girls being silly,” Father Corwin agrees. “This childish voodoo…” He tosses the Barbie back into the box. “… would not suffice to beckon such a terrible evil as haunts this house.”

Madam Savino inhales, spreading her arms out as if feeling for currents in the air. She closes her eyes and suddenly crosses the room, stopping at the edge of the Persian rug. Motions the cameraman and me to move, and then grabs the edge. Yanks it.

On the cement beneath, a large circle scrawled in sharpie and marked with a pentagram and eye covers nearly all of the floor.

Father Corwin hisses a sharp intake of breath. Madam Savino shrieks at the cameraman, “DON’T TOUCH IT!” as he rushes closer to get footage. Coyote toes the outer edge of the circle.

In the center is a wide crimson stain.

***

While Father Corwin utters blessings and prayers, Madam Savino kneels with her palm to the floor to read the psychic echoes left by whatever ceremony was conducted here.

The bloody circle is clearly connected to the catastrophe that befell the missing family, at least according to our expert team. But even if they’re correct (and I’m not yet wholly convinced), so many questions remain—who conducted the bloody ceremony? Whose blood stains the floor? And where is the family?

“Oh… OOOOH... OohhooOOhhh.” Madam Savino snatches her hand back from the sharpie markings. “… it’s like touching an open flame!” The curious cameraman touches a finger to the circle and nothing happens to him, and he casts an inquisitive look at Madam Savino, who ignores him and goes on: “Whatever occurred here was unimaginably evil…” She looks my way. “You find any clues?”

I am skimming Judy’s diary. Unfortunately, there isn’t much here connecting to the family’s disappearance. Her bubbly scrawl tells the story of a girl who hated her rural, small town life and wished to run away from Hopkins. But she felt she could not leave, writing: If I go, Dad and Burn-a-bitch will make Jakey’s life a living hell even more than it already is. Her handwriting gets progressively more raw, the pages filled with apparent attempts to hex both her parents, until a line that reads, I will NEVER forgive her for—

The pages after that are torn out.

“This house has too many secrets…” Coyote growls after I share the contents of the diary. “And…” He glowers at Father Corwin. “You aren’t spilling them.”

“The family’s disappearance is as much a mystery to me as to you,” Father Corwin says.

“But you know their drama.”

“Their drama isn’t relevant.”

“Someone tore out these pages to keep whatever’s in them secret. Secret pages, secret basement, secret son.” He snatches up the photo of the boyish teen who Father Corwin calls Janie, but who Judy refers to in her diary as Jakey. Coyote connects the dots for us as he says: “Maybe it’s just ‘drama’ that Bernadette couldn’t stomach the thought of a trans kid, and that’s why there’s all this boy stuff boxed up down here—which you obviously knew about since you recognized the photo. But THAT—” He points at the bloody stain in the circle. “—isn’t drama. An entire missing family isn’t drama. And there’s one very important secret you haven’t spilled…”

“And that is?” Father Corwin asks stiffly.

Coyote points to the cot in the corner. He reaches below the mattress and tugs out something I missed when I first found the diary. Something that glints in the wan illumination of the overhead bulb—a chain. He asks: “Tell me why the parents restrained their pregnant teen daughter down here.”

***

Coyote and Madam Savino are both shouting at Father Corwin. He raises his hands as if to bat away their fury, insisting they’re jumping to conclusions—

“You’re lying!” Madam Savino shrills. “I can see the chain right there, and her diary was under the pillow, so who else would they have kept down here? And if it was anyone else, that would STILL be a crime!”

“If you’ll just let me explain—” The cameraman zooms in on the chain, and Father Corwin bursts: “They did NOT imprison her down here! I already told you, when Bernadette came to see me, I referred the children to counseling—"

“It was the psycho mom who needed counseling—” interjects Madam Savino, while Coyote snarls, ”You sent the kids back to their abusers—"

He speaks over them:

“The family called me the night of their disappearance.”

Both fall silent.

“… they told me Judith was possessed. That she had… attacked… everyone. That she was feral. Rabid. They wanted me to come immediately but I could not. I was out of the country, on another assignment. They did not want to call police. They knew the police could not pacify what afflicted her. They told me they would restrain her until I was able to come. That chain was not for Judith but for the… thing… that possessed her. I came the very next day, but there was no one home. Just the gardener, who’d come by to mow and told me the backdoor was usually unlocked, and it was, so I let myself in. I called and called. I walked through the entire house. It looked much as we have seen it today. There was no answer. I thought they had left.”

***

The cameraman zooms in on Father Corwin’s sagging countenance. Under the harsh glare of the overhead bulb, the crags of his withered face have deepened, his eyes almost entirely shrouded in blackness. My fingers have been flying across my tablet while the priest spoke, and now, I ask him: “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“The family shared their troubles with me in confidence. It was not mine to tell…”

“Does Goddard know?” asks Madam Savino.

“Oh yes. I disclosed everything to him.”

“That asshole,” mutters Coyote.

I have to agree. It seems Goddard withheld all sorts of information from us.

“I had hoped that by joining this expedition… I might at least know the fate of the family, even if I couldn’t save them. I might…” Father Corwin sighs, shakes his head, reaches into his pocket and pulls out an envelope. “This is the letter their stepmother, Bernadette, wrote to me a week before her phone call…”

Dear Father, I humbly request once again that you help me with the children. Only yesterday, I was in the kitchen and heard a chorus of voices speaking in tongues. When I turned around, they ran away giggling, and I saw they had drawn a pentagram behind me on the floor. I had to scrub it out of the linoleum…

… Janie posted to social media that, ‘if being my true self means being a devil, maybe that’s what I am.’ I have confiscated her phone, which of course has led to more meltdowns…

… Judith says that she is carrying the devil’s child. She is always pushing my buttons. She has told me repeatedly that she hopes I die. That she prays for it everyday…

… the letter is long and meandering, and ends by begging Father Corwin’s help with her “wild children.”

As he folds the letter up and puts it away, he tells us, “I thought their pranks were harmless, and that family counseling might soften Bernadette. But clearly I have failed them. And even now, I still don’t know where the family has gone. Or how. How did they disappear so completely?”

And suddenly my blood runs cold. Because I know. Maybe because I was the one who saw the girl, in those moments after the lights flickered out. Saw her crawling along the wall behind the bookcase…

I’ve been catching a whiff of it on and off, I realize. A bad, old, rotten smell. And I venture to the bookcase and… it’s leaning forward a little, almost like it might topple were it not for the anchor screwed into the wall. And in the gap behind it is a darkness wide enough, almost…

“Dawain?” says Madam Savino as I lean over the bookshelf, peering into the darkness behind it—

And I step back quickly. Take my phone out and turn on the flashlight and look again.

Behind the bookcase, wedged in face-down, is 13-year-old Jakey.

***

A bare foot, shrunken and mummified, is the only part of the teenager illuminated by the beams of our flashlights. The rest of Jakey is lost in the blackness between the bookcase and the wall. I can perceive blue jeans, remnants of a t-shirt clinging to skin that has shriveled after six years crammed in the gap.

“Jesus!” cries the cameraman, zooming in with the camera and then stumbling back. “Fuck. Shit. We have to call this in.”

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Madam Savino screeches.

“Looks like the kid was trying to hide...” Coyote leans over the bookcase so far he’s at risk of falling in next to the corpse—apparently he’s less craven when his parental instincts kick in. His muffled voice calls: “… it’s hard to see from this angle, but I don’t see any marks. My guess is Jakey got spooked by whatever went down in that bloody circle, only to get stuck…” He pulls himself up from peering behind the bookcase. “Poor kid probably suffocated.”

“Oh God… how horrible!” Madam Savino’s hand is at her mouth. “But where are the rest of the family? Are they all down here somewhere?”

“Forget all that!” bursts the cameraman. “A dead body means we call the cops! This is a criminal matter now.” He turns to me, “You know the drill, you’re a journalist, right? At this point anything we touch is evidence tampering. We don’t know the kid died by accident. That’s for the cops to decide. I’m calling it in!” He hurries upstairs, shouting back, “I’m going down the lane to wait for Goddard! I suggest you all do the same and LEAVE. Don’t contaminate any evidence!”

“But we haven’t pacified the spirit!” objects Madam Savino.

Nobody responds as distantly, the front door slams. Coyote looks glum. Father Corwin stares mournfully at the bloody circle, the chain, the bookcase. He sighs, crosses himself, and declares, “I must pray for them…”

***

The cops have not yet arrived.

Father Corwin is still praying, and Coyote has scoured every inch of the basement. Madam Savino makes no more pretenses about searching for psychic echoes and instead is flipping through the diary.

“Seems the kids were very attached,” she tells me quietly. “Judy and Jakey have all these messages of support for each other. They were each other’s rocks. At least until…” She sighs and puts it down.

Father Corwin pauses in his prayers. “I am still not sure where the rest of the family was laid to rest…”

“We know where Judy is. I dunno about resting,” growls Coyote.

“Where?”

“In the septic tank! Didn’t you hear Dawain’s description of her? He saw her dripping wet. There’s no rivers near here, nothing else to explain the water. Her parents called you saying she was possessed, she attacked them. Their bodies are the only ones not in this house. They probably killed her over whatever secret was torn outta those pages, and dumped her in the septic tank, and then left town.”

“You do not know that.”

“No, but I can pretty damned well infer it.” Coyote’s tone is conversational, chill as usual. He isn’t an angry guy by nature. But now, I can see his knuckles popping from his grip on the edge of the bookcase. “We know the parents abused them. Jakey’s—” he emphasizes the name. “—bedroom was bare. All the personality stripped from it, all the kid’s action figures and clothes bagged up downstairs after the stepmom came into their lives. That cot, that little nightstand, that wasn’t something they set up in one day because their pregnant daughter was possessed. It’s been down here awhile—you can see from the clothes in the dresser that it was being used. Not a jump to infer the stepmom made one or both kids sleep down here. She was psychologically abusing them—”

“You don’t know that,” says Father Corwin.

“But you do. Did either or both kids tell you their parents made them sleep in the basement?”

Father Corwin does not answer.

“Bet you didn’t tell Goddard that part, did you? And you know what? I’m not even convinced that girl really summoned a demon. That presence you call malevolent, that you say is so angry, that is rageful and spiteful and furious? The evil spirit you’re so keen to pacify? Could just be the lonely, shattered ghost of the pregnant daughter they murdered and dumped in the septic tank before they fled, having gotten away with it—”

THUD.

The sound comes from upstairs.

Our heads snap up.

“Uh…” Coyote’s eyes flash wide.

“What was that?” squeals Madam Savino.

Coyote grips the crowbar. “OK,” he says, “let’s keep our eyes peeled and be ready in case—Dawain!” he hisses.

I am already heading upstairs and calling out, “Hello?”

“Dawain! Dammit… why does nobody here have a sense of self-preservation? Can’t you stop him?” Coyote pleads with Father Corwin and Madam Savino.

“Hello? Guo, is that you?” I call our cameraman’s name as I hurry through the hall and upstairs and stop, because ahead—something moves. A dark, dripping figure. The girl in the wet dress—she darts into the upstairs study.

I follow her in.

My pulse skyrockets as something skitters behind one of the wardrobe and shelving units. Coyote catches up to me, swearing “Gonna chain you to the cot downstairs,” then he stops and asks what I’m staring at. “You didn’t see?” I say, surprised. “The drowned girl, she just went behind the wardrobe there.”

“Uh, no. I did not see.” He’s looking alarmed.

So only I can see her. For the sake of journalistic objectivity, I will not definitively label my sighting as that of a “ghost.” But in full disclosure, this second glimpse of the drowned girl is the moment that, somewhere deep inside, I realize that I am no longer questioning whether the house is haunted… instead, I am wondering what it wishes to show me. I reach for one of the doors to yank it open and see what’s inside—only for it to not open. The handle is decorative. Coyote is remarking on how it smells musty in here, kinda like in the basement. He sees me tug the decorative handle and says, “Hold up, what’s behind that thing?”

Then he comes over and reaches further up, for another handle, and pulls.

It’s a murphy bed.

The study has a hidden murphy bed, which can be pulled down for guests but otherwise blends into the surrounding drawers and cabinetry. It even has shelving with items on it that fold down to the ground. You’d never know it was a bed.

As we tug it down, Coyote jumps back with a yell, and I hold my breath, both of us staring. “Put it back, put it back!” barks Coyote, and we push it back up. I almost giggle. It seems such a ridiculous response. As if putting it back so we didn’t see it, restoring the wall of cabinetry, would somehow undo what we’ve found. Both of us giggle hysterically. Ok. We’re losing it.

Mummified in the murphy bed is the body of the stepmother, Bernadette.

***

So much for Coyote’s theory that the parents made it out of the house alive. Back in the basement, Madam Savino declares that we need to make like the cameraman and exit, isn’t fifty percent enough of the mystery solved now that we’ve unearthed two of the four bodies? Father Corwin, however, lingers at the edge of the bloody circle.

“Do you know, Dawain…” His voice falters, and I have to lean in as he rasps, “I really didn’t know about the abuse. Janie said they were sometimes made to sleep in the basement as punishment—” (“Jakey,” corrects Coyote.) “—But I… I’d been to the house, and I’d seen no basement. I assumed the children were making it up. And because they’d made that up, I assumed so much else they said was also…” He shakes his head.

Is he looking to me for forgiveness? Grace? But I am not the one who can give that. I tell him all I can do is witness.

“Yes… such is your role.” Father Corwin’s jaw sets, and his watery eyes glint with resolve as he adds, “Just as mine has been set to me by my Lord. And if this tragedy is indeed in part due to… to my own failures, it is my duty as His instrument to correct that failing. The house must be purified, and these souls saved.”

“Your prayers ain’t gonna purify shit!” Coyote snaps. “We need to figure out what this spirit wants in order to put it to rest. The kids got their wish—the stepmother is dead—so why is Judy still haunting the house?”

Madam Savino spreads her hands. “Girl’s not talking to me. But I can feel her rage from the foundation to the roof...”

“Yeah, so she’s still mad ‘bout somethin’. Probably whatever’s in those missing pages. And if she won’t talk to you…” Coyote rakes his fingers through his hair. “I can’t believe I’m saying this instead of ‘let’s get the fuck out of this house,’ but… this angry ghost showed Dawain here where to find the bodies of her brother and stepmother. She clearly wants to communicate. So if we are going to try to do what we originally came here to do, and not just tuck our tails and run… there’s really only one person who can find out the reason for this haunting….”

Coyote looks at me, and so does everyone else… and I’m almost certain I feel another pair of eyes watching me. The same ones I felt when I was alone down here.

Coyote says, “We need to give Judy a chance to speak with Dawain. We need to give him the spirit box and leave him alone for five minutes.”

***

I am alone in the study. I try not to look at the wardrobe. Try not to think about Bernadette’s body lying encrusted in the murphy bed just a few steps away from me.

Coyote hollers up from below: “I’m here if you need! And hey, if you die up there, at least you’ll be really famous when your article comes out!”

“How’s it gonna come out if I’m not alive to finish it?” I call.

“Ever hear of ghostwriting?”

I think I hear Madam Savino warn him: “I will fucking throw you down those stairs…”

The fact I can hear their bickering is a reassurance. Their plan is to leave me up here alone in the study for six minutes—just past the five minute mark. That gives Judy sixty seconds to communicate with me, hopefully without killing me. Am I scared? Absolutely. But I’m also curious. This article, this story, is already shaping up to be the most extraordinary I’ll ever write. But to write it properly, I must understand everything. And that means hearing from Judy herself.

A small part of me suspects my role as a journalist is why Judy chose me. Because she knows that I am the one who will share the true story of the Hopkins House.

“I’m ready to listen,” I say aloud to the room. And then I flick on the spirit box.

It begins scanning radio frequencies, catching mostly static, lots of bits of nothing. My cell phone shows a timer counting down from five minutes. So far it’s only at two minutes… three minutes… four…

At five minutes, there’s a clink—the sound of metal straining—and my heart slams my ribcage as the murphy bed falls open with a deafening CRASH, the mummified body staring at me, sockets gaping and teeth exposed by shrunken lips. My pulse shoots to the stratosphere as the spirit box loudly crackles, and a girl’s voice says: “My baby, my baby is the devi—”

And then my eyes roll up in my head as the world goes blank...

(Note: Apologies, my account is too long for a single post, so I will share the horrifying conclusion of the events at the Hopkins House in a followup. It is... hard to write. I keep wondering if I could have done something differently... forgive me. I will update soon)…

| Part 1 |

The first time I stayed home on Halloween, I was running a 101.8 fever. Low-grade, but enough to warrant a night in. To be honest, I wasn't all that bent up over it. I had just hit that pre-teen age where I started to reject social norms and became embarrassed over literally everything. The thought of facing the neighborhood bullies with a lame-ass costume and an attached-to-the-hip mom and sister was enough to keep me in. It happened to be a stroke of luck I fell ill.

Before my mom left with my little sister, she made me recite her cellphone number thrice. They wouldn't be out long, though. We lived on the corner of a street just before a cul-de-sac, and they planned to only visit our small part of the neighborhood.

"And no scary movies!" my mom said while adjusting Jules' bumblebee wings. "You'll just scare yourself while you're home alone."

"I'll bring you lots of candy," Jules said. She held up her empty, pumpkin themed bucket to me.

"Thanks, Jules."

I turned on a scary movie as soon as they left. It was already impossible to watch one while they were home, and I really looked forward to eating popcorn and cozying up under a blanket until they returned. 

We had set up a "Take One" sign on the door with an arrow pointing to a bucket on a rocking chair so I wouldn't have to get up to greet trick-or-treaters. I always thought people who did that were kind of pathetic, but now I was grateful I wouldn't have to answer the door. The curtains covered the front-facing window, and we didn't have any windows on our door, so no one could tell I was here, anyway. 

I made it about 30 minutes into Sinister before I had to turn it off (mom was right, damn her!). I started channel surfing to find something a bit more kid friendly. In the channel flipping, something weird caught my eye. I clicked the back button a few times before I finally found what I'd noticed.

It looked like a CCTV video where the camera was placed high up on a light pole, and it aimed down at the front of a house. I tried to remember if there were any horror movies that included a scene like this, but nothing came to mind. It seemed harmless enough; there were families walking up and down the street while chatting. Then, a little girl starting to trot up the front steps of the house and—

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

I nearly jumped to the ceiling. I whipped my head around to look at the front door as I heard a muffled "Trick-or-Treat!"

My heart thumped against my chest as I stared behind me in disbelief. I could just about make out a shadow on the window curtains.

A creeping realization burrowed into my head. I slowly turned back to the TV and saw a little girl dressed up as a pumpkin read the sign, take some candy from the bucket, then bounce down the steps of the house back to her family. I heard it all too, but not from the television.

No way, right? I thought to myself.

I crawled off the couch and sat closer to the TV.

Holy shit.

It was my house. My front porch, my painted blue door, our mailbox, that was our goddamn street!

I put my hands on either side of the TV as if I could shake the image away. The static fuzz buzzed softly against my thumbs. 

Maybe the antennae had patched into some security camera, or my mom was setting up some elaborate scare to teach me a lesson.

Was I hallucinating?

I quickly felt my own forehead, but I couldn't tell if the fever had grown worse or not. My eyes were settling on the live footage when I finally noticed something in the lower right corner. 

It was a figure, standing across the street just about making it in frame of the camera. It was dressed in all black, and I couldn't see its face. 

It has to be a prank—surely by one of the older kids, I thought. One of them must have bought a morph suit to prank the littler kids. To prank me.

He began making his way to my front porch, but the way he walked... It was like bending his legs was difficult. Like he had been sitting down for a long time, and his legs had fallen asleep. His arms stuck out a little from his sides and didn't sway like they normally should. He weaved in and out of the groups of families walking the street, but no one seemed to notice him.

My eyes were glued to the screen. I didn't freak out just yet. Creeped out, sure, but there was no way this person knew I was sitting just inside. 

They finally made it up to my door. I anticipated the knock, but he just stood there. I slowly turned around to face the window, and his oblong shadow splayed across the curtain, unmoving. I broke out in a sweat. 

"Trick or treat!" 

It sounded like an old man trying to tighten his voice and imitate a younger kid. The shadow didn't move, and neither did I.

I gulped, and as quietly as I could I made my way over to the door. We had a peephole. One of the ones where you couldn't see in from the outside. I stood up on my tippy toes and looked through it.

Black.

THUD THUD THUD

I fell behind on my ass and crawled backward as quick as I could. He laughed from the other side, but it was muffled as if he was covering his mouth with his hand.

Anger swelled inside me. Of course it was some older teenager trying to scare kids on Halloween. I reminded myself that I was safe inside, and, with my new found courage, I yelled out.

"Fu-fucking asshole!" 

I wish I had come across a little more brave than I ended up sounding. My voice came out just above a squeak. Surely, now whoever was out there knew for certain I was inside. I mentally kicked myself for that one.

There was a shimmying clink coming from the door, and my eyes raced to look at the handle, but it wasn't jiggling.

The mail slot cover moved; opened just a little bit, then closed again. 

clink, clink clink

My breathing quickened as a black finger slid through the slot and opened up the little hatch. 

A black face with fake, sewn-on eyes stared back at me. The eyes weren't perfectly attached to the suit, but instead one drooped a little lower than the other in an uncanny fashion. 

"I see you. Heh. Right there, I see you!" he said in that same mocking, tight voice. His long black finger was pointed toward me. I fell too far back to make out any other features, but it would've been covered by the suit anyway. If it was someone I knew, I couldn't tell from his fake voice.

I didn't want to look away from those fake plastic eyes, but I had to glance at the lock. I needed to make sure he couldn't get in. Thankfully, it was secure. Surely if he tried to get in, someone from the street would see and come help. Everyone was out tonight. Everyone except me.

The man and I stared at each other. My body was moving up and down from the excessive breathing while drips of sweat rained down on my forehead, but the man did not move. He was eerily still. I just stared into those dummy eyes for as long as it took me to try and calculate the time it would take for me to get up and run around the corner to the house phone.

Shit, what was mom's number again? No, no, I need to call the police, I need to—

The man pressed his face into the letter box. The plastic eyes tinked against the metal frame as he forced his head through the slit. There was this stretching and crunching sound as more of his head moved through the opening, like he was Play-Doh molding into the opening of the slit.

I couldn't help but let out a yelp as I scampered to my feet and ran to the back door on the other side of the house. I looked back once to see he had gotten his head all the way through, and it bounced back into its original shape. Then his shoulder started to push through.

I tried bursting through the back door, but was quickly met with a locked door. My hands fumbled around the handle, but sweat was pouring into my eyes and my hands were shaking too terribly. I could hear shuffling behind me, and I had to rid my mind of the idea that the intruder was already to his feet and making his way toward me. I couldn't bear the thought of looking back; I just might have frozen in fear.

Finally, with a click, I unlocked the door and ran through the backyard, not daring to turn back. My vision began to blur; a mix of the sweat, tears, and my fever reaching its peak. I ran up the side of the house and through the side gate out into the street. 

It happened all at once. I screamed for my mom, and then suddenly I was by her side stammering about a man dressed in black, seeping through the door. 

"Jesus, Codey, you're burning up," she said, kneeling in front of me with her hand on my forehead. It was like she wasn't even processing what I was saying.

I don't even know if I explained what I truly saw. I was a blubbering mess, and even Jules began to cry at my terror.

"There was—" sob "—someone in the house!"

My mother's face turned somber, then stern. "You're not messing with me? You're certain?"

I nodded my head, and she must have seen the truth in me somewhere. 

The cops claimed to have searched every corner of the house, yet they came up empty-handed. I asked of the television, explaining to them that I saw live footage of our front door. They said that all that was playing were the end credits to Coraline. 

I did end up confessing that I watched a bit of a scary movie alone. The glances that were exchanged between the two cops told me they were taking a statement from a fever-ridden, scared little kid, but my mom believed me. Even after her and the cops talked for hours on the porch, she was still disappointed by their nonchalance.

She made me tell her the story many times. While I was still sick, after I had gotten over it, days after, and weeks after. A month before the following Halloween, she made me tell her again. It was the same story every time.

We don't go out on Halloween anymore. Instead, we stay inside, and watch movies and eat popcorn. My mom holds Jules and I close while keeping her phone on the arm of the couch, pre-dialed with 911. 

We keep a bowl of candy out, but under no circumstance do we answer the door, no matter what. We ignore the thuds, the knocks, and the clinks of the mail slot. 

I'm far too scared to ask my mom when it first started happening to her.

“No one ever calls,” Is what my boss told me while he was trying to sell me on this job. “It’s an easy job. You keep the music running, announce the weather, and maintain the machines. Plus you get free room and board. Best job you’ll ever have.”

My dad always told me, “if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” But I was strapped for cash and living in my car, so this seemed like manna from heaven.

I moved into the station the next day. I say “moved,” which consisted of the duffel bag I was living out of in my car, and a few bottles of warm beer.

It was a tiny ramshackle building that looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 70s. Carpet everywhere, including the bathroom. A cot and nightstand in the “bedroom” which I think at one point was a closet. The bathroom consisted of a sink, toilet, and no shower; and the kitchen was a table with a hot plate and a bucket for a sink. And two huge windows that sat right in front of what I would call the “DJ station” basically the place I would sit with all of the equipment. I couldn’t help but thinking I was gonna need to put up some curtains.

What immediately struck me was the actually radio set up they had in contrast to everything else. It was pristine and looked to be the latest tech, not that I really knew what I was talking about. I’d had a short stint as president of AV club in highschool.

“All this for a town of 50 people huh?”

My boss chuckled nervously before he said “The people in this town depend on the radio station, they don’t like when it goes down. We had a few incidents last year with our old set up, this-this stuff is more reliable, it keeps everyone safe.”

He handed me the keys to the station and left in a hurry. Mumbling something about check the instruction manual before he sped off.

After I unpacked my meager belongings I started combing through the manual. It seemed like standard stuff at first, and pretty easy. How to operate the equipment, simple maintenance, where I can find the latest weather updates, and how to switch out the tracts.

Then it started getting really specific.

1)Keep music playing at all times, you can set the music to play on a loop while you sleep.

2)Announce the weather everyday promptly at 7:00am. If you forget to announce the weather, WAIT 30 MINUTES, then apologize for being late, citing the reason that our weather update was delayed. Then announce the weather as usual.

3)Don’t go outside the station at night.

4)There should never be a call in. If there is, DO NOT ANSWER IT.

5)If someone knocks on the station door after 5:00pm, DO NOT ANSWER OR ACKNOWLEDGE.

Any normal person would’ve hightailed it out of there. But I was broke with nowhere to go but my car. Even with the slightly unsettling rules, this was the best gig I’d had in a while.

It was just after five, and the music had been playing seamlessly since I’d arrived. After going over the manuals multiple times I felt I had a good grasp of the equipment and had been messing with the stations getting my bearings. Staring out the windows in front of me I couldn’t help but feel like a goldfish in a bowl.

It had gotten dark early and I hadn’t heard or seen a car on the road for hours. No road noise, no noise at all actually. No birds, not even the wind. Complete silence. I cracked open the now slightly less warm beer, and started switching the tracks when I heard a knock at the door.

I looked back towards the windows. I hadn’t seen any headlights or heard anyone pull in. Not even kicked up dust. I was just about I get up to answer when I remembered the rules in the manual. I sat down again as the knocking became more persistent.

I tried to ignore it but the knocking became louder and louder until it suddenly stopped, and I heard a dry voice say “Delivery.”

Again I didn’t know much about running a radio station, but I don’t think they got many deliveries.

“Delivery, I need someone to sign.”

I started doubting myself, maybe this was legit, and I needed to sign for some new equipment or something. As I was reasoning with myself my personal phone rang. It was my boss.

“Hey boss just the man-“

“Don’t answer the door.”

I froze in my tracks, hand on the door knob. I asked him how he knew.

“I have access to the security cameras, you should too. It’s in the manual. Don’t answer the door.

I realized I may have skimmed a few parts of the manual. I asked him if he was sure, they were saying it was a delivery and I needed to sign for something.

“There isn’t anyone out there. DO NOT ANSWER THE DOOR.”

“What do you mean I heard-“

With that he hung up, cutting me off mid sentence. I was officially on edge. I needed to get access to those security cameras. I grabbed the manual again and started flipping through it.

All the while the knocking started again. I finally found the instructions for the security cameras, and started to boot up a laptop that was tucked into the corner. After a few mishaps with caps lock I was in.

Just as I opened that camera feed that was linked to the front door the knocking stopped. And I was in the fishbowl again. Eerily silent. The only sound was the low hum of the equipment running.

There was no one there. Save for a few moths attracted to the light fixture above the door. I tried to convince myself that they must’ve just left. They would’ve have to pass right in front of my window, that was the only way to access the way out to the main road. The radio station was backed up against acres of national forestland, there was nothing back there.

I started going through the saved footage and went back to the time stamp when the knocking first started. All I found was a few fuzzy frames with no audio, the file must’ve been corrupted. Out of the few frames I could see, it showed no one standing there.

I downed the rest of the beer and was in the midst of convincing myself that this was all from exhaustion and the stress of nearly being houseless when the phone rang.

And then I did something I shouldn’t. It was a reflex I swear. My body acted before my brain could catch up and I picked up the line.

I instantly realized what I did and had enough sense not to say anything. The call was mostly silent, other than the faint sound of something breathing into the receiver.

I didn’t want to hang up. For some reason I felt like I was in danger, and hanging up would make the situation worse. And then a voice came over the line.

“I know you’re in there. I can see you.”

I stopped breathing and slowly turned my head towards the window. It was too dark out. I couldn’t see much more than what the outside lights illuminated. I couldn’t see anyone.

“Why didn’t you answer the door earlier?”

I hung up the call and dropped to the floor, crawling to the bathroom and locking it. The phone started to ring again. It rang for 30 minutes straight with no signs of stopping.

I debated running to my car, but that would break another rule and I’d already broken one. I decided staying in the bathroom was my best option. After another hour the phone finally stopping ringing.

Thinking I was in the clear I opened the door just enough so I could peek outside the window. I didn’t see anything. I’d started to walk out of the bathroom when I heard another knock at the door.

I sprinted back into the bathroom and slammed the door, my phone lit up and there was already a text from my boss.

“Turn off all the lights, hide. And whatever you do, don’t let the music stop playing.”

The music. I hadn’t switched it to the overnight track. I had about a minute till it the old track ran out.

At this point I didn’t care. I threw the door open and frantically ran around turning off the lights before switching over the track just as the melody for the last song was fading out.

I ran back to the bathroom and locked the door. It took me a minute to realize the knocking had stopped.

My boss found me the next morning curled up in the bathroom. He had a master key and had let himself in after I didn’t answer the door.

We didn’t even need to exchange words as I slowly packed up my stuff and drove away. I never looked back.

A couple weeks later while I was sitting in a coffee shop, scrolling on my phone looking for a a job, a listing popped up. “Tiny town in need of radio host, great benefits + easy work.”

I kept scrolling.

The straw scarecrow stood in the middle of the fields, its arms wide. One of the men walked to it and put its hat on. I waited my turn, then walked to it and put on its black jacket.

"Thank you," I said, bowing.

The other man nodded and patted my back. 

"Another safe autumn," one of them said, and we all walked back home.

It was still early afternoon. I sat down on the couch and put on the TV, waiting to cook dinner until my son Adam came home.

The sun had set when the door opened, and Adam walked in. My stomach was already growling. He was 30 minutes late, but the way he averted his eyes made it seem like something worse was going on.

"What’s up, Adam?"

"Dad, I…"

"It’s okay that you came late. No need to worry about it."

"No, it’s that I, I know it’s bad, but I took the jacket off the scarecrow."

My hands clenched the couch cushions.

"What?!"

"I took it off. I’m really sorry, Dad. I feel so bad. I know I shouldn’t have."

"Where is it?"

"In my bag."

I picked up his bag and unzipped the top pocket. The black jacket stared at me. 

"Adam, this is bad news."

"I’m sorry, Dad. The boys dared me. I didn’t want to look like a chicken."

I looked out the window. The sun had already set, but not long ago.

"Okay, there might still be time." I stuffed the jacket back in the backpack. "We’ll go back right now, put it on, and not tell anyone. If the boys at school ask you, just say…"

Three knocks echoed on the window. I almost ripped the backpack’s zipper off. The empty straw face stared into our house.

"Dad?" Adam said in a shaking voice.

"It’s okay, Adam. We’ll give him the jacket, and it might be okay." My voice shook too. I wasn’t sure I believed anything I said.

I walked to the door and opened it. The outside air was cold. The scarecrow's empty face looked down at me.

"Here. Take it. Please."

I held the jacket up and stared at the ground. The scarecrow stood still for a few seconds, then walked right past me. The straw scraped the floor as it moved.

Adam sat on the couch, his wide eyes staring at the scarecrow. The scarecrow came right up to him and pointed its blank face at him.

"Dad, what’s going…" He didn’t finish. The scarecrow’s hand shot forward, grabbed him off the couch, and held him to its side.

"Dad!" Adam screamed, kicked, and pushed against its arm, but the scarecrow’s grip was strong.

"Adam!"

I ran toward him and pushed the scarecrow, but it barely moved. The scarecrow turned around and flung its arm. It hit me right in the face. I fell on all fours. Dull pain spread through my head. Adam’s cries echoed as my world went dark.

When I woke up, my head was banging. My mouth tasted like iron. I tried to get up, but my world spun so fast I had to sit back down. 

But Adam was out in the fields somewhere. I had to help him. I got up and bolted out of the house onto the road, struggling to keep my balance. 

The moon shone down. The air was still cold. Only when I reached the fields did my world stop spinning. I almost wished it hadn’t.

In the middle of the field stood the scarecrow. Its blank face stared into the night. It had its hat, but instead of the jacket, Adam’s mangled body was draped over it. A quiet dripping echoed as Adam’s blood seeped into the sown dirt.

I fell to my knees and wept. The real autumn had now begun.

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

I didn't sleep much Saturday night. Toby, somehow, slept fine.

I finally dropped off on the couch near dawn, and when I opened my eyes again, he was standing about six inches from my face, asking whether we had pancake mix. I made pancakes and let him eat them in front of the TV. He had already moved on from yesterday, and that was the part I couldn't wrap my head around. He asked if Uncle Henry was coming over later. Nothing about the wardrobe, or about hearing me scream his name from somewhere impossibly far away. When he'd finished, I told him to stay on the couch for a few minutes while I checked something in the garage. The kitchen chair was still wedged under the handle, and the deadbolt was still thrown. I dragged the chair out of the way.

The second I opened the door, the smell hit me again.

It had been there since the day we hauled the glass tank home: something halfway between industrial cleaner and fruit left too long in the sun. That morning it was stronger and impossible to ignore.

I pulled my shirt up over my nose and switched on the fluorescent light.

The mirror and the football were still wrapped separately in moving blankets and packing tape for the buyer Henry had lined up for Monday, which I'd done after Toby fell asleep: three layers around the mirror, two around the ball, each shoved into its own cardboard box. I knew packing tape probably didn't mean anything anymore, but it made me feel safer. Then I looked at the workbench.

My screwdriver was sitting on it. So was my adjustable wrench, and the utility knife lay beside them like somebody had set a table. Directly beneath the second pegboard hook hung the pry bar I'd spent several frantic minutes looking for while Toby's voice faded away inside the wardrobe. I stopped breathing for a second.

I had emptied those drawers. Yet every tool I'd previously lost sat neatly together in plain sight, as if they'd never been gone.

I picked up the pry bar. It was mine, down to the strip of faded blue paint around the handle and the shallow notch near the claw. 

"Okay," I said, and my voice sounded strange in the garage. "Sure. That makes sense."

I put the pry bar down, and that was when I noticed the corner was empty.

My folding lawn chair was gone. I'd been sitting in it Friday night cataloging the boxes. I'd shoved it back into that corner before Alicia dropped Toby off, and I remembered doing it because one of the legs had caught on a flattened cardboard box and I'd nearly gone over. Now the corner held the old shop vac and the two paint cans the landlord had left behind when I moved in, and nothing else. I checked behind the workbench, then beside the dresser. Nothing. The tools had come back, and something else had disappeared.

Before going back inside, I stopped beside the glass tank. The smell was definitely strongest there.

A couple of you suggested after my last post that the whole thing might be chemical, some kind of solvent or hallucinogen leaking into the garage. A leaking container made infinitely more sense than a wardrobe swallowing my son. So I crouched down next to it and looked for the obvious answer: a crack, some condensation, or a vent.

The tank was still what it had always been, a single molded block of thick glass with no lid or opening. I laid my palm against it, and it was colder than the room. Where my hand touched the glass, my skin had gone translucent. I could see the veins underneath, thin blue branches spreading through my palm and down into my wrist, finer vessels threading off into each finger. I yanked my hand away, and it returned to normal. Very slowly, I set it back against the glass.

Transparent again.

Behind me, the liquid moved, one slow, heavy slosh from one end of the tank to the other, and then it went still.

I left the garage after that. By the time I got back to the kitchen, I'd decided I didn't care whether the smell was making me hallucinate. Hallucination or not, that stuff was leaving my house.

Henry picked up on the second ring, thick with weekend sleep.

"You know it's Sunday morning, right?"

"We're doing the garage sale."

A long silence filled the line. "Today? I thought we killed that idea."

"I changed my mind."

Another pause. When he spoke again, the sleep was gone from his voice. "Did something happen?"

"Nothing happened. I want you to come over and help me get this crap out of here."

Henry went quiet, and I could practically hear him combing through his head for an explanation. When he came back, he tried a different angle. "Give it a few more days. I've got messages out. There are people who will pay for the rest of this stuff, collectors, and the forum guy already wants the mirror and the ball. If we start throwing everything on folding tables for five bucks a pop, we're pissing away the only good thing that's come out of this."

"There is no good thing that's come out of this."

"Don’t forget that you still need the money."

He was right. I was still four thousand dollars short of a retainer, and the hearing was still sitting out there on the calendar like a storm front. That was the miserable little hook these objects kept hanging from. No matter how scared I got, it all came back to cash.

"We’re doing the garage sale today," I said, and my grip tightened on the phone. "Everything we can safely move. Today."

"Ian—"

"I mean it."

"We sunk time and money into this mess. You're going to regret selling half this stuff for nothing."

"I already regret buying it."

I heard him swear under his breath and exhale, and I knew I'd won. He told me he'd be there within the hour, all enthusiasm drained from his voice. 

Toby looked up from the couch when I hung up. "Uncle Henry's coming?"

"Yeah, bud."

"Can I help?"

"Not this time. I need you to do something really important for me, okay? I need you to stay inside and watch cartoons."

His face fell. "That's not important."

"It's the most important job there is. Somebody has to keep an eye on the TV."

"That's not even a real job."

"It's a real job," I said, and it came out softer than I meant it to. "Please, buddy. Just for today."

He slumped back into the cushions, arms crossed, and turned the volume up two notches to make his point. Henry showed up forty minutes later with two coffees. He stood in the garage doorway and immediately started muttering about how little we'd get for it all.

I walked him over to the workbench and showed him the tools. He turned the screwdriver over in his hand and shrugged. "You must have left them there."

"I didn't."

"You've barely slept in three days, man. Maybe you woke up, moved everything, and passed out again." 

"And my chair?" I pointed at the empty corner. "It was right there."

Henry looked at the corner for a while. "Probably buried somewhere. You've got half a storage unit crammed in here."

"It isn't."

"Ian—"

"It isn't, Henry."

He looked at me then, and I think that was the moment he understood I wasn't asking for an explanation. He took a slow sip of coffee and let it go.

We set the rules in the garage. The mirror and football stayed wrapped. Nobody touched the wardrobe or the tank. Anything from Unit 114 that looked even slightly off went into the corner pile, and what was left was, as far as either of us could tell, just stuff. We'd been through every box we'd opened together, argued over it, and laughed nervously, and in both our minds was a list of what belonged to the collection. We hauled the folding tables out to the end of the driveway and set up. Henry made a sign out of a flattened cardboard box and propped it against the mailbox. Then we stood there in the morning sun with our coffees, looking at our driveway full of other people's cast-offs. For the first couple of hours I told myself we were doing fine.

People wandered along the tables, but nobody haggled or even asked what anything cost. They drifted from one table to the next with subdued politeness, like guests at a stranger's funeral, and after three or four minutes they'd find somewhere else they had to be. Henry kept glancing at the cash tin. Around ten, he said, flatly, "We're still at zero. We may as well be standing out here burning four thousand dollars. At least it'd be warm." 

"Give it time. People take a while to warm up to a sale."

Every time someone walked off empty-handed, some small, ashamed part of me exhaled. If no one bought anything, no one took any of it home. Not that everyone was spared. A man who looked to be in his fifties picked up a little brass reading lamp and asked if he could test it. I ran an extension cord across the driveway. He clicked the switch, the bulb lit up with an electrical hum, and he held his palm under it and frowned.

"Is this thing working?"

"Should be."

"It's on." He moved his hand slowly back and forth. "It's just... if anything, it's darker."

Directly beneath the bulb sat a dense little patch of shadow. It wasn't around the lamp but under it. The rest of the driveway sat in clear morning sun; the filament was glowing, and the one spot it should have lit looked several shades dimmer than everything around it.

"Sorry," I said, and unplugged it, my heart thumping. "It must be defective."

He laughed awkwardly. "That's one hell of a defect."

I handed him a candle from another box on the house, and he left looking more confused than anything. I carried the lamp behind the table and set it on the ground as if it might bite.

The woman who approached me with the snow globe was much more skeptical. It had been bagged in with the Christmas decorations, and her daughter picked it up off the table and shook it gleefully. The tiny house and trees jumped and rattled about. Two miniature plastic people jittered side to side inside the dome. The snow never moved. Dozens of white flecks hung perfectly still in the water while the whole world around them shook itself apart.

The mother noticed first and came up to me. "My daughter wants the globe, but something's wrong with it."

"I'm so sorry," I said, easing it out of the girl's hands as gently as I could manage. "That one's not supposed to be out here. I think it got mixed in by mistake."

She studied me for a long moment, plainly weighing several questions about what exactly we were selling, and thankfully decided not to ask. She took her daughter by the hand and steered her toward the next sale down the block.

I put the globe beside the lamp, and by then nobody was slowing at the sign anymore. A little before eleven, Henry got to his feet and stretched, pressing his hand into the small of his back. "I'm sitting down before my spine turns to powder," he announced.

"There's nowhere to sit," I said.

"I’ll find something," he said, and disappeared into the garage.

A few minutes later, he was dragging a folding lawn chair out of the garage by one arm, the frame scraping across the concrete: A faded green seat with cheap plastic armrests. 

"Where'd you get that?" I said.

Henry flipped it open with a clatter. "Garage."

"Where in the garage?"

He shrugged. "By the workbench. Told you it'd turn up. It's just a chair, Ian." 

For about two seconds, nothing registered, and I just felt relief. There's my chair. It was in there the whole time; Henry was right, I'm losing it. Then I realized, and the relief just evaporated. This chair had never been part of the haul, and I'd turned that whole garage upside down that morning looking for mine and found nothing. 

"Henry, wait—"

He was already lowering himself into it before I could warn him. And in the half-second I had left, I saw it. The hinges were wrong, and the jagged tear on the left armrest where I'd dropped a paint tin last spring was gone. It wasn’t the same chair I had lost that morning. 

When Henry sat down, the chair didn't collapse. It snapped.

Both sets of metal legs whipped violently inward at the same instant with a sound like two car doors slamming beside my head, and the frame folded around Henry like a closing trap, driving his back into an unnatural bend. I’ve witnessed a fair share of injuries in the years I’ve worked as a mover. I've seen crushed hands and broken legs. I have never in my life heard a human being make the sound Henry made.

For a second, the garage was dead silent except for the metallic ring of the frame still vibrating. My brain refused to accept the reality of what was happening. 

Without realizing it, I already had both hands on the frame and was pulling, but it wouldn't give. A man from across the street came running, and then another, and the three of us hauled on that steel until it finally opened enough to ease him down onto the concrete. I noticed that he wasn't moving his legs. He kept saying he couldn't feel them, over and over, in a small, disbelieving voice I'd never heard from him before. The next twenty minutes come back in pieces. Henry lay white-faced on the driveway, his eyes fixed on the sky. Paramedics cut his shirt away and talked over him in calm, quick voices. Neighbors stood on their lawns with their hands over their mouths. When they had Henry strapped to the board, one of the paramedics pulled me aside.

"Is he allergic to anything? On any medications?"

"No. I don't think so. His wife would know."

"We're taking him to St. Luke's." He hesitated. "I'm going to be honest with you, his condition’s not looking good. The injury's to his spine. Until they scan him, I can't tell you what it means. But with something like that, there's a real chance he won't be walking out of there."

As they lifted the board toward the ambulance, Henry's hand shot out and caught my sleeve, and his grip was white-knuckled. The paramedic said something about keeping still. Henry ignored him. His jaw was clamped so hard the muscles jumped under the skin, and his eyes found mine and held.

"Ian." His voice was thin and scraped out. "Look at me."

"I'm here. I'm right here, man."

"You kept saying it wasn't right." He dragged in a rattling breath. "I told you they were props. I even made jokes about it." He stopped, and his face twisted, and for the first time since I'd known him, Henry didn't have an angle. 

"Henry, don't. Save your—"

"Get rid of it." His fingers tightened. "All of it. Burn it, smash it, bury it. I don't care; just don't sell it. Don't give it to anyone." His voice cracked, and a tear slid sideways into his hair. "Promise me. Don't let anybody else sit in that thing, and keep it away from Toby."

I would have promised him anything. I said it twice, because I couldn't tell whether he'd heard me the first time. "I promise. I swear to God I will."

His hand went slack, and they slid him into the ambulance, and the doors shut with a sound that went through me like a nail.

Henry was in that ambulance with a spine that might never work again, and he'd spent his last words worrying about somebody else, and that was what finally broke me. Right there on my own driveway in front of every neighbor I'd never spoken to, I started crying, ugly, gulping sobs I couldn't stop even after the ambulance had turned the corner. 

Somebody put a hand on my shoulder. A woman's voice asked if there was anyone she could call, and I heard myself say "no," and then "I don't know," and then nothing.

Henry had dragged me into this, and I'd spent half the week resenting him. I'd have given every cent I'd ever owe a lawyer to hear him make one more joke.

Eventually the neighbors drifted back to their lawns and their garages, and the sale ended. Within minutes, the street had emptied. 

I stood alone in the blood-spotted driveway beside the folding chair. It had opened itself again, perfectly ordinary, sitting in the sun as if it had never done anything wrong. I crouched down and looked underneath. There were no bolts and rivets. I ran a finger across one of the hinges, and there wasn't a hinge, not really. It only looked like one. I knew every inch of my chair’s underside, and this wasn't it. I wanted to stamp it flat. I wanted to take it apart and find out what it was made of, except there was nothing to take apart, no bolts, no seams, nothing for a wrench to bite on. It sat there in the sun with a smear of Henry's blood on the seat, and for the first time since Wednesday, what I felt wasn't fear. I hated it. 

This chair had never been in Unit 114. Henry and I had unloaded that unit ourselves, box by box, and there hadn't been a folding lawn chair in it. Mine had vanished sometime in the night, and hours later something that looked almost exactly like it had turned up in its place.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and stood in the empty driveway, my thumb hovering over Rachael's name for what felt like forever.

Henry's wife picked up on the second ring. I told her that there'd been an accident at the sale and that Henry was on his way to St. Luke's.

"What kind of accident?"

"A folding chair. It folded up on him. It…It closed on him, Rachael."

The silence on the line went on so long I thought the call had dropped. Then, in a very small voice: "A chair."

"I'm so sorry. I don't know how to—"

"Ian." Her voice had gone deathly quiet. "What did you two do?"

I had no answer for that. How do you even explain this situation? How do you tell a woman that her husband might never walk again because of a lawn chair that wasn't there that morning? All I could think about was Rachael getting a hospital bill on top of everything else and Henry not knowing when—or if—he'd be able to work again. I'd spent a whole week agonizing over four thousand dollars, and now it looked like pocket change. 

She hung up before I could reply. I stood there with the dead phone against my ear until my arm started to ache, then turned and drove my fist into the side of the nearest folding table so hard the cash tin jumped, and a stack of picture frames slid to the ground.

I made myself go back inside. Toby was waiting in the living room, sitting very still with both hands pressed flat on his knees. He'd watched the whole thing through the window. 

"Is Uncle Henry okay?"

"The doctors are looking after him, bud."

"I want Mom."

I swallowed before I could answer, then sat down beside him and pulled him against my side. "I know. She'll be home soon." I held him there for a while, and for a minute I didn't think about the garage. 

My phone had buzzed twice in my pocket while I was dealing with the paramedics, and I knew without looking that it was Alicia. When it lit up a third time in my hand, I let it ring out. I couldn't talk to her yet. I knew exactly how it would look, but I had nothing to tell her that wouldn't make it worse. I told Toby to stay on the couch where I could hear the TV, and I went into the garage because I'd already decided that every item in there was going to be destroyed, and I needed to start before I lost my nerve. I told myself it would take thirty seconds. I was still standing in the doorway when I noticed the cardboard box on the workbench, the one I'd packed the football into. The tape around it was broken, and when I picked it up, the box was empty. Then I heard Toby yell. 

I ran back through the house. The living room was empty, the TV still on, but the front door stood wide open.

I found Toby on the front path, sitting where he'd fallen with both hands wrapped around his right knee, which was scraped raw and bleeding in a wide, dirty strip. A few feet away on the lawn sat the football. It sat there facing him.

"It came in," Toby said, and his voice shook. It made me want to scoop him up and drive until we ran out of road. "I was watching my show, and it rolled over and stopped by my feet. I kicked it away, and it came back, so I ran outside, and I tripped."

"Okay," I said. "Come here." I scooped up Toby and grabbed the football with the other hand. The second my palm closed around it, I felt that faint, wrinkled texture again, and I hurled it over the side fence as far as I could manage. Once inside, I sat Toby on the kitchen counter and cleaned the scrape with a wet cloth while he sniffled and kept talking about the football. How it kept getting closer every time he looked. I told him I believed him.

I reached for a bandage and stopped.

There should have been a scar on that knee.

It was small and curved, maybe an inch long. He'd gotten it last winter, a couple of months before Alicia left, at the old house. I'd worked a double that week, come home wrung out, and stretched out on the couch for what I swore was ten minutes while Toby played in the backyard. I woke up to him screaming. He'd gone down the concrete back steps and opened his knee on the edge of one. He needed eight stitches. I remembered Alicia's face when she walked into the emergency room and saw the two of us in a curtained bay. I remembered the nurse's careful note in the chart, and that same note showed up months later in a folder on a mediator's desk. 

I turned his leg toward the light and checked the other knee. I ran my thumb over the exact spot where I knew it should be, but it wasn’t there.

"Toby," I said slowly, "Which knee did you hurt on the steps? At the old house?"

"What steps?"

"When you were little and got those stitches."

"I didn't have stitches."

"You did, buddy. Remember? The doctor gave you a sticker."

He frowned, genuinely trying, and I watched his face for any sign that he knew what I was talking about. "I don't remember that."

Of course he didn't. He was six, and it had been months. Maybe it had faded, and I hadn’t noticed. I rarely saw him these days, after all.

A day earlier, I'd have given a great deal for that scar to be gone. I stood there with his knee in my hand and couldn't have told you why I didn't feel better. 

"Dad," Toby said, wriggling, "you're pressing too hard."

"Sorry, bud."

I put the bandage over the fresh scrape and smoothed it flat with my thumb. "You're okay," I told him, and I don't know whether I was talking to him or to myself.

I got him settled on the couch with a movie. Then I walked to the front door to check it was still locked, and my hand froze on the handle before I could turn it. I bent and looked through the peephole.

The football was sitting on the doormat. It was dead center, close enough to the door that whoever opened it would have to either step over it or pick it up. I kept the door firmly shut.

Four days of dread had burned down to something simple and ugly. Everything already wrong in my life had been waiting for me, and then I'd spent three hundred and fifty dollars to carry the worst of it into my own garage. I didn't want an explanation. I wanted it gone, and I wanted it to hurt. 

Henry's voice was in my head, thin and desperate. Burn it, smash it, bury it. Promise me. I went into the garage and got the hammer off the pegboard.

I ripped the box open, tore the blankets off the mirror, and propped it against the workbench, angled so I could see nothing in it but the ceiling. Then I swung with everything I had. 

The glass didn't break. The hammerhead sank into the surface like I'd struck thick rubber, and the dent held for a second before the glass slowly pushed itself back outward, like a scar healing in fast motion. A shallow depression stayed behind. I hit it again and again and again, screaming at it. "Give it back. Give it back, you son of a bitch!” I didn't even know what I meant. Henry's ability to walk, my son, the last six months of my life. 

I turned on the wardrobe. The first strike numbed my arm to the shoulder, and the wood didn't even splinter. The harder I hit, the more I wanted to tear it down board by board. 

When that failed, I went to the tank and swung with every ounce I had left. The glass flexed inward, visibly, the whole thick block of it bowing around the point of impact, and the amber liquid surged away from the blow. Something inside shifted, heavy enough to displace the fluid around it.

I dropped the hammer.

"No."

Another slow slosh.

"No. No, you don't get to do that." My voice cracked in rage. "Fuck you. Fuck all of you." 

If I couldn't break it, I'd burn it.

I knew it was illegal. The county had issued a burn ban the week before because everything was so dry, and a day earlier the thought of Alicia seeing me do this would've stopped me. Right then, I couldn't bring myself to care. I tried to shoulder the dresser, and it didn't shift an inch. I'd moved it with Henry, and it had been murderously heavy, but it had moved. Now it might as well have been poured into the foundation. The same applied to the rest of the furniture.

So I took what I could carry. I dragged the lamp out, the cassette, and a stack of those unreadable books. I piled everything in the middle of the front lawn, found an old fuel can, and poured every drop over the heap. I lit a strip of cardboard and dropped it, and I thought, absurdly, of Henry standing by the cash tin that morning, joking about burning money.

The flame took the packaging first. The cardboard curled and the grass scorched in a ring under it. The cassette sat in the middle of the fire untouched, and the pages of the book stayed as pristine as the day they were printed.

I stood over it with my chest heaving and the fuel can still in my fist, willing it to catch, to blacken, to do anything, and when it didn't, I kicked the edge of the pile hard enough to send a book skidding across the grass. It landed open in the sun. I screamed at it, but I don't know if I said anything coherent. 

In that same moment, the smoke alarm went off inside the garage.

It was the same shriek we'd heard the first time we tested it. Only this time it kept screaming, loud enough to rattle the windows in the house. I ran inside. Toby was on the couch with both hands clamped over his ears, and his face crumpled, crying so hard he couldn't catch his breath. I dropped to my knees and tried to pick him up, and he flinched away from me.

A car door slammed out front.

I didn't hear her come through the house over the noise. One second I was kneeling in front of my son, and the next Alicia was standing in the doorway with her bag still over her shoulder. She wasn't due back until Monday.

She looked at me. She looked at Toby, red-faced and shaking. 

"I saw smoke outside. What the hell is going on?"

"Alicia, I can explain—"

She turned straight to Toby. "Shoes on. Now, baby."

"No, wait. Please, just—"

"Toby."

He ran to her and wouldn't look at me. I followed them into the kitchen, and I'll never forget how tired her voice was. 

“I called you this morning, and you wouldn't answer. I called again from the airport. Six times, Ian.”

"I know, I know. Henry's in the hospital."

That stopped her for half a second. "What?"

"He's hurt. It was a chair; it was part of the—he might not walk again.”

Every word came out in the wrong order, and I watched her face close a little more with each one. 

“Alicia, there's something wrong with those things. I know it sounds crazy, but the chair that hurt Henry wasn't my chair. Yesterday the garage door was locked, and Toby somehow got inside it, and when I opened the wardrobe, he wasn't there even though I could hear him, and today the football followed him into the living room, and the scar on his knee is gone, the one from the steps. I swear to God it's gone—"

"Stop."

"I'm not making this up, please, you have to listen—"

"Just stop talking."

She stood very still for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was low and tight, and her knuckles had gone white on Toby's shoulder.

"There's something seriously wrong in the garage," I said.

"I don't care."

I stared at her. "What?"

"I don't care what's in the garage, Ian." Her voice cracked on it. "I don't care if you're telling the truth."

That shut me up completely.

"I pulled up to a fire in the front yard and someone screaming in the house. And you want me to believe it's something in your garage."

"Alicia, please—"

"I let you have him for one weekend. One. I ran out of people to call, and I told the mediator that you deserved a real chance. I told my own lawyer to back off." She wiped at her face with the back of her wrist, angry at the tears. "And in barely a day you tell me your friend is hospitalized and our son is crying."

"You don't understand."

"No. I don't," she breathed out. "And that's the whole problem, don't you see? Even if every word of it were true, I still can't trust you to keep him safe. And that's the only thing that has ever mattered."

I had nothing. I stood there, mouth open, unable to get a single word out.

"You're not getting any more unsupervised time before the hearing," she said. "I'm telling my lawyer everything that happened here today."

"Please."

"I'm sorry. I really am. I wanted this to work. But I can’t do this anymore."

Toby wouldn't look at me when she carried him out to the car.

I stood in the driveway until her taillights turned the corner. The fire had mostly burned itself out by then, leaving a ring of grey ash and blackened cardboard, with the objects sitting untouched in the middle. I dragged a tarp out of the garage and threw it over the whole pile because I had no other idea, then went inside. 

I sat down on the couch and thought about the room with the camera in the corner. Two hours a week had felt like the bottom, and I'd been wrong. Alicia had gambled on me for one weekend, and I'd lasted a day. Tomorrow there'd be a new page in the folder on the mediator's desk. I could have written it myself, and every line would be true.

I keep picturing Toby being carried out. He's only six. One day he's going to ask why he only ever knew his dad through a screen, and I won't have an answer that doesn't start with today.

Eventually I found a bottle of bourbon in the kitchen. One glass turned into two, which turned into carrying the bottle with me. 

Some time after dark, I remembered the tarp. I went out onto the lawn, lifted a corner, and found nothing underneath but scorched grass and a few flecks of ash. I didn't need to check the garage to know where the items were, but I did anyway.

Everything was back. The lamp, the snow globe, the books—everything. They were neatly arranged on the shelves and stacked in their boxes exactly the way they'd been before the sale, as if I'd never touched any of it. The mirror leaned against the workbench with the barest trace of a dent, the ball sat on the workbench, and the folding chair stood open beside it, mocking me. I stood in the doorway with the bottle in one hand and something hot climbing my throat. They were all back, smug and put away, like I'd been the one making the mess. I picked up my wrench off the bench and threw it at the wardrobe as hard as I could. It struck the door with a flat, dull sound and dropped to the concrete without leaving a mark.

"Is that it?" I yelled. "Is that all you've got? You took everything. What else do you want?"

The tank sloshed once, slowly. Then the fury drained out of me all at once, and I stood there shaking. I dragged one of my kitchen chairs into the garage, set it as far from the folding one as the room allowed, and sat down with the bottle. I don't own a folding chair anymore. I'm not sure I ever really did.

Henry is lying in a hospital bed because of something I brought home. Rachael won't answer my calls, and I don't blame her. Alicia is on the phone with her lawyer, telling him I can't be trusted with my own kid. I still don't have the four thousand dollars. We sold nothing, not a single thing. The forum guy is still due at two tomorrow. I'm calling him first thing to cancel, because Henry told me not to let anyone near any of it, and I'm no longer sure any of it can leave anyway. I know what some of you are going to say, and you're right. I made choices. Nobody forced me to bid on Unit 114. Nobody forced me to bring any of it home or put it out on a driveway when I already knew it wasn't right. I'm not asking anyone to take it off my hands.

But I'm sitting here staring at these things, and I have never hated anything the way I hate them. Not the guy who hit my car, not the lawyer who quoted me four grand, nothing like this. I hate them for every second I can't take back, and I keep thinking how much easier my life would have been if Henry and I had just walked past that storage unit. If we'd looked at those boxes and said, "Nah, not this one," like everyone else in the crowd did.

I keep hearing Henry on that stretcher. Burn it. Smash it. Bury it. I promised him, and I couldn't keep it for a single afternoon.

Tomorrow I'll find out what can destroy them. I don't know how yet. A quarry, a scrapyard crusher, a favor from someone at work. I don't care what it costs me. The wardrobe door is open an inch, but I won't close it tonight. It can stay that way. 

I know this is probably such a common and very cliche thing to say, but I SWEAR on my life I saw something in those woods. I saw it a lot. That's the part nobody ever gets. It wasn't once.

I suppose context is good.

I did deliveries for the elders on a reserve up north in Ontario. For almost three years I was the one people called. Nothing official. The people I delivered to hadn't driven in decades, or just couldn't get a car on welfare, so somebody had to bring them their prescriptions and groceries. I had a quad and a lot of free time, so it became my job. Pills, insulin, a bag of flour, sometimes just a carton of smokes and a note from a grandkid. I'd load everything into one big canvas bag, swing it onto my back, and go.

The roads reach all of those houses, but nine times out of ten it's just faster to cut through the forest on the muddy trails. Going by road could take over forty minutes one way. The trails were more like 15 to 30 minutes there and back. I guess it's easier to cut trees than to pave roads. I'll also say the residents don't love it when I fly past their houses on the road, so the trails kept everybody happy.

People who've never ridden a quad at night don't understand how small the headlight actually is. You get maybe five meters of trail, and everything past that is pitch black with a little moonlight. Your eyes stop trying to see ahead of the light. You stop looking at the trees and start looking at the ground in front of you, because that's all you can see. And if you're not looking at the ground, you're looking at your phone, trying to figure out where you are on the trail.

The first time, I thought it was a post. Something tall and thin standing off the trail, right where my light barely reached. Then my light swung across it while I was dodging a puddle, and it wasn't a post anymore. It was a guy. Just standing there, or maybe jogging, I couldn't tell. I never got a proper look.

I figured he worked late, or he was heading home from a buddy's place. Plenty of people walk the trails out here, same as me. I didn't think about it much.

But I saw him again. And again. Always off to the side, always right at the edge of where my light gave out. Never closer. Never farther. I'd get a glimpse of a hoodie or a shape, and then my light would move on and he'd be gone. I never thought about it for longer than a few seconds. It was just the guy who's always out here. After a while, I stopped noticing I was noticing him.

Anyway. It was a Tuesday, a few weeks ago.

The order was for an older lady, a pill bottle with a bunch of long names on it that I couldn't pronounce. It was my last order of the night, and it was far out, near the land boundary of the reserve. It was one of those addresses where the paved road stops and the gravel starts. Google Maps said about 30 minutes one way, and I wasn't about to spend an hour out there if I didn't have to. The trails were quicker, so I took the trails.

There was one trail I almost never used. It cut through a stretch of cedar swamp, ten feet wide at most, maybe a few hundred feet long. On a quad that's under a minute, even going slow. The cedars grow so tight out there that the trail feels like a tunnel, and the branches would sometimes end up across it, so I'd have to get off the quad and drag them out of the way. Cedars have shallow roots on all that rock, so whole trees come down every time the wind picks up. That's part of riding trails. It always felt more like a hallway than a trail. I never liked it, but I never thought about why. I'd never timed it, because who times a few hundred feet? You're through it before you've even finished being annoyed at the branches.

That night was a lot darker than usual. The clouds had rolled in, and the ridge was blocking whatever was left of the horizon, so there was no moonlight, only my headlight. Five meters of trail, then nothing. I had the bag on my back and my phone in one hand. The blue dot showed I was about 200 feet from the entrance, give or take. The trail wasn't on the map, and service is garbage down in there anyway, so I had to go off memory for where it headed.

I rode into the narrow part and kept my eyes on the ground like always.

The trees sounded different in there. I can't explain it better than that. On the open trails you hear the wind, the engine, and the bag rustling against your jacket. In there, it was like the engine was the only thing making noise in the whole forest. Everything else was holding still. The air smelled sweet and wet, like moss and cedar, and it was cold in a way that didn't match the season.

I figured I was almost through, so I looked down at my phone to check the dot.

I had only moved about 50 feet. It felt like I'd driven 200. Huh. Probably spotty data and bad GPS out here. That's normal.

The weird part was that I felt like I'd been riding for 30 minutes. For a few hundred feet of trail. I should have been out the other end already, and the trees on either side of me were exactly as close as when I started.

So for the first time ever, I started counting. The moment I hit 10 minutes, I was out. Ten minutes, for a stretch I could have walked in two. I was on a gravel road, and would you look at that, there was a porch, a light, and a house. A blue house, just like I'd been told. Okay. She took her pills, thanked me, and told me to drive safe. I rode back through the trail and it took under a minute, like it always had. I told myself I was just tired, and that was the end of it.

The next week I had another delivery for her. It was late again because I'd had so many stops, and all I had left was her order. The clouds were gone this time. The sky was packed with stars.

Same trail, because it's always the same trail when you're running late. Except this time I only made it halfway in, or whatever halfway is in that place, before my light hit a big cedar lying across the path. It had blown over, soaking wet and covered in moss, with its roots clawed up out of the ground and slabs of rock still stuck in them. I killed the engine but left the key on so the headlight stayed lit, and got off to drag it out of the way. It took a while. It was heavy, and I was already annoyed.

I turned around to walk back toward my quad, headlight right in my eyes, and there was something standing on the trail behind it.

My light didn't reach back there. It only points forward, and with the engine off and my foot nowhere near the brake, the taillight was dead too. That whole stretch behind the bike was black. But the trees open up a little right over that part of the trail, and the stars were bright enough to cut a strip of sky out of the dark. He was standing dead center in it, twenty feet past the bike or so. I couldn't see a face or any detail. It was only a shape against the sky. It looked like a younger guy in a hoodie and baggy pants, I think. And I knew that shape. I'd seen it a dozen times at the edge of my light, and I'd never once asked myself why it was always keeping pace with me.

Now, there was something wrong about him besides the fact that it was 10pm and he was standing on a muddy trail. I don't judge, walking these trails beats the road, same as me. But he looked wrong, and I can't describe it. Every part of me said I was too close. It was a deep, hollow feeling in my chest, the same one you get swearing in front of your mother for the first time as a kid, or almost falling.

He spoke in a voice deeper than anyone his size should have. "Hey, it's late. Why are you out quadding?"

It didn't sound sincere. It didn't sound like a real question. It had the tone of a parrot imitating a person. It was wrong. It was so, so wrong.

I have never moved so fast in my life. I jumped on, started the engine, and gunned it so hard I couldn't even feel the bumps anymore. I looked back over my shoulder and he was walking toward me, a bit too fast to be walking, but it didn't look like running either. I turned back to the trail just as my front wheel caught a slick shelf of rock under the mud. The bars ripped out of my hands, I slid into a ditch, and BAM. Lights out.

I woke up the next morning. I looked to my right and my quad was in the ditch, rolled over against a tree. But I was lying flat on my back in the middle of the trail, and not like I'd taken a nap. It was more like I'd been placed there. My bag was sitting on my left, zipped.

It took me a few minutes to realize I wasn't dreaming. I rolled over, got up, and went through the bag. Nothing was missing except the meds. The meds I was delivering. I climbed down into the ditch and got the poor quad back onto her wheels. She was flooded and sunk into the muck up to the axles, and she wouldn't even turn over. I wasn't getting her out on my own. But I wasn't dead, even if I felt like shit.

My phone screen was cracked, and only one message showed through: "Thanks for the delivery!" along with an e-transfer for about 60 bucks from the lady. She normally paid me 30.

Now, I never actually made it to her house. I want to be clear about that.

I left the quad where it sat, looked around, and walked back the way I came, out toward the road. I jogged most of it, and I kept an eye out the whole time to make sure that thing wasn't nearby.

The nearest house on the road belonged to an older man. He took one look at me, patched up my head and hands, and called 911. They said it was "probably sleep deprivation," and the doctors agreed, even though somehow I didn't have a concussion. A few days later I'm back home, wondering what the fuck happened.

I know people will say it was lack of sleep. I slept a few hours before I got on that quad for those deliveries, and you don't get that tired in three hours that you start seeing and hearing things. Not like that. Not with a voice that asks you a question that isn't really a question.

Once I could move properly, I went back with a buddy on his bigger quad. He hooked a tow rope to my poor baby and pulled her up out of the muck and onto the trail while I steered.

I keep coming back to the message. I never reached her door, and she still thanked me.

My only real takeaway is that there's something in those woods. Or someone. And it wasn't asking a question.

I haven't called her. I keep telling myself I will. Her number is still in my phone, and so is the e-transfer, the extra 30 dollars and all. I can't bring myself to delete it, and I can't bring myself to ask.

I don't take the trails at night anymore. I take the road, the long way, forty minutes one way, and I don't mind it. Sometimes I still catch myself looking at the edge of my headlight, at the spot where it gives out.

Whatever stood on that trail knew her name, her address, and what she was owed. It knew I was late. It knew exactly what to say to me, and what to say to her.

I just keep wondering what she saw when she opened her door.

Hello, everyone. This is a story I've told many times. I've been praised for my imagination and for the way I tell it. Someone even laughed once, which I still don't understand.

I decided to share it with you too, on the off chance you'll believe me. Because it's not fantasy, it's not a dream, and it certainly isn't a novel. It happened to me. I experienced it, and I survived it.

It all started around a year ago. Me and three friends, who I'll call Emma, Justin and Steven, decided to take a trip to the mountains. The beach was too expensive for us at the time, since we were all jobless and had just graduated from college. I found the Airbnb online for only twenty dollars a night. I know it sounds suspicious now, but back then, it didn't really matter to us. Fifty five-star reviews were enough for us to book it for three nights.

We somehow managed to fit all our luggage into the trunk of my comically small car, and we were off. The drive was long, longer than it should have been because of the Friday morning traffic.

I felt a chill run down my spine the moment we reached the foot of the mountain. It made no sense to me back then, and honestly, I can't blame myself for not realizing what it was. The music was loud, and Emma's laugh drowned out any worry that might have formed in my mind, so I ignored it.

I wish I hadn't.

It was past midnight when we finally made it. It was so dark that if it weren't for the faint light coming from inside the Airbnb, we wouldn't have been able to see each other. The lack of any other light around us creeped me out a little, but I didn't want to ruin the trip.

"Steven, use your cat eyes and find the key," Emma joked, pointing at him.

"They're green, not glowing," Steven said, rolling his eyes, and my shoulders relaxed.

We grabbed our bags, found the key under the flowerpot by the door as the owner had instructed, and entered the small apartment. I closed the door behind us.

Closing that door would turn out to be the biggest mistake anyone made that night.

It looked nothing like the pictures; that much was obvious. A single room, with an old carpet covering the wooden floor. A wooden table in the center, with four matching chairs around it. The walls were decorated with all sorts of odd ornaments on run-down shelves, and with paintings I tried not to look at for too long, because it felt like they were watching me.

"Well, we should have expected this," I said, trying to ignore the growing tension in the room.

Steven laughed and let his bag drop to the floor.

"We can always report it through the app," he assured us. "A friend of mine got moved to another Airbnb nearby for free."

"Sounds good," Emma agreed, pacing around the room.

Justin already had a cigarette in his mouth and was patting down his jacket, looking for his lighter.

"Going out for a cig. You coming, Vi?" he asked me.

I nodded and turned to open the door. I stopped dead in my tracks.

There was no door.

Just a smooth, wooden wall. The windows were gone too. I stood there, petrified. I didn't know how I was supposed to react to something like that, so I just stared at it, hoping it would go back to normal.

"Is this a prank?" Justin asked confidently, though the cigarette in his mouth was trembling a bit.

"Where are the beds?" Emma added, scratching her head, something she did when she was nervous but would never admit to.

Steven raised his phone toward the ceiling.

"Signal's gone."

We all turned to look at him in disbelief.

"You know what this is?" Justin started. "One of those dumb TV shows where they take random people and put them in stupid fucking situations."

He nodded, pleased with his explanation. Steven nodded too and looked at Emma, whose foot was bouncing under her.

"Ye-yeah," she said. "I agree."

I should make something clear, in case it wasn't already. We didn't believe we were on TV for even a second. We were just clinging to the hope that there was a logical explanation for our situation.

That was when I took a closer look at the paintings. There were five of them, all the same: four people sitting around the table in the middle of the room. In front of each of them was something red.

A balloon.

I looked at the table. In front of every seat, there was a needle and a small square compartment that looked like it could open.

"Alright, let's play along, then," Justin said, and took a seat.

Steven did the same, giving up on finding a signal. I sat down opposite Justin, with Steven to my right. Emma sat down last, to my left, reluctantly. The light flickered, and my heart skipped a beat.

All four compartments opened at once, and four red balloons floated out. They stopped at head height, one in front of each of us. They weren't tied to anything, and I couldn't figure out how that was possible.

"See? This is a game. There's no way someone would set up something this stupid just for fun," Justin said, grinning.

I looked closer at my balloon. Through the red rubber, I could make out something white inside it, the shape of a playing card.

Justin had found his lighter at some point and had already popped his balloon with his cigarette, even though we'd told him countless times that smoking indoors was a dick move. Sure enough, a card landed on the table in front of him. He read it out loud.

"You are the Hunter. Your job is to kill the Visitor."

He looked up, exhaling smoke toward the ceiling.

"At least I got a fun role," he laughed, tapping the table.

Something else came out of his compartment. A revolver.

We all stared at it, and then at Justin, who was already picking it up. He checked the cylinder. It was loaded. Then he aimed it at me.

"Hope it ain't you, partner," he said with a smirk, in that horrible fake Western accent he always used.

"Put it down," I said, my anxiety growing.

"Relax, it's not real. See?"

He aimed at the ceiling and fired. The bang was deafening in the small room, so loud that it made my ears ring. Emma fell backward off her chair, staring at our friend in sheer terror. Steven had instinctively lunged at Justin and grabbed his arm.

Justin was breathing hard now. He looked up at the bullet hole in the ceiling.

"This can't be for real..." he finally said, setting the gun down on the table very carefully.

"Alright," Steven said to no one in particular. He let go of Justin's arm and started pacing around the room. "Joke's over. You win. Let us out. This is stupid."

There was another noise. This time it was a pop, and it came from my left. I slowly turned my head toward it.

Emma had popped her balloon.

"One of you has a card with a clue about the exit," she read, her voice trembling.

She looked at me and Steven.

"Guys, are we seriously playing this?" Steven asked, his hands on his hips.

Emma reached for Justin's pack with shaking hands and lit a cigarette, something she almost never did.

"Steven... Steven, sit down."

It sounded like she was forcing herself to get the words out, which she probably was. After looking at her a second longer than necessary, Steven sat back down to my right and popped his balloon.

"Mine's blank," he said, and showed it to us.

Then they all looked at me. I still remember their faces at that moment: the mix of fear and helplessness, and the hope that my card would show us the way out. I popped my balloon carefully and let the card fall onto the table.

I picked it up and read it silently.

One of you is not real.

I bit my lower lip so hard I tasted metal. I looked at them, swallowing hard, unsure of what to do.

I don't care what you think of me. Whatever this was, I was going to survive it. Justin had a loaded gun and a reason to use it. The last thing he needed was a reason to point it at one of us.

"The key to finding the exit is somewhere high," I said, making it up on the spot, like the horrible friend I was.

Justin stood up, letting out the breath he'd been holding since I picked up my card.

"Let's get this over with," he said, leaving his lit cigarette on the wooden surface of the table, and started going through the shelves.

Emma followed his lead, though it took her more effort, being as short as she was. At one point, she dragged her chair over to reach a higher shelf. I was about to stand up too when I noticed it.

Steven hadn't gotten up.

Steven was staring at me.

"Everything alright?" I asked, my heart pounding in the middle of my chest as if it were trying to jump out.

His hands were trembling, and his eyes were wide. He tapped his index finger on his card, which had been blank just a second ago.

Violet is lying.

"What's your card, Vi?" he asked, doing nothing to hide the fear in his voice.

Tears ran down my face, and my voice caught in my throat. I put both hands over my mouth, trying not to alarm the others. I slid my card toward him. He read it. Then he looked at me.

"You made the right choice," he whispered, and patted my shoulder softly. He slowly stood up, wiping away a tear that had escaped his eye, and started searching the room.

I felt her gaze before I even saw it. Emma was staring down at me from on top of her chair. Her pupils were so dilated that her irises had turned completely black. Her head was tilted slightly, and she'd stopped breathing altogether.

"Why are you so quiet, Vi?" she asked.

Justin and Steven turned around to look at me.

"You lied to us, didn't you?" she went on, slowly climbing down from her chair.

"Emma..." Steven said, stepping between us.

Justin looked at both of us, and then at the revolver. He picked it up, keeping the barrel pointed at the floor.

"Violet, what did your card really say?"

How would Emma know? Had she overheard me and Steven? It was a small room, and the adrenaline might have tricked me into thinking we'd been quiet. But I was certain we had been.

I stared at the floor between my feet, hoping that avoiding eye contact would make it easier. It didn't.

"That one of us isn't real," I said, slowly and carefully.

The silence that followed stretched on for way too long.

"That's the clue..." Steven finally said. "Maybe we... Justin. Justin needs to kill the Visitor."

I looked up at Justin, who had gone pale.

"I'm not shooting anyone. Guys. Snap out of it," he managed to say, sweeping the revolver across all three of us.

"Justin, calm down," Emma said slowly, raising both hands.

"Don't fucking tell me what to do!" he shouted, aiming at her.

"Why would she lie about her card? Think about it!" Emma shouted back, jabbing a finger toward me. "It's obvious!"

"Let's all calm down and be civil," Steven said, trying to de-escalate.

"Shut the fuck up, Steven!" Emma snapped, then turned back to Justin. "Justin, shoot her and we'll escape. That's not Violet."

Justin looked at me. I could see something behind his eyes. It looked like hatred. Determination. Justin was a smart man, even if he didn't show it. He wasn't easily manipulated, and he always made the most logical choice.

That's why I was sure it was the end for me.

I closed my eyes when he pointed the gun at me, and finally broke down.

I heard the gunshot. I heard the thud.

I opened my eyes to see Emma lying lifeless on the floor, a thin stream of smoke rising from the barrel of the revolver.

Justin was breathing uncontrollably, and the gun slipped from his hands. He sank to his knees, staring at what used to be our friend.

The compartment in front of Emma's chair opened once again. Another card slid out.

Steven walked over to it slowly and leaned over to read it.

"Emma was not the Visitor," he read out loud.

Justin looked up at him, and then at me. I'll never forget the look in Steven's blue eyes. It's been burned into my memory ever since, and I see it every time I close my eyes.

We were all fools. How did we not notice it sooner? When did it even happen?

Our Steven has green eyes.

I'm sorry. I need to stop here for now. I'll write the rest when I can. Writing it down made it real again, and I've spent the past year trying to convince myself it wasn't.

If you ever see a Craigslist ad for a "residential psychiatric caretaker" at a private estate in upstate New York, offering double the standard salary and free room and board, keep scrolling. Don't email them. Don't answer if they call from an unlisted number.

I took the job because I was desperate. I had a suspended nursing license, a mountain of debt, and nowhere to go. When Dr. Arthur Vance interviewed me in the mahogany-paneled library of what they called The Oakhaven Institute, he didn’t ask for my references. He just asked if I had a strong stomach and a tight lip.

I signed a sixty-page NDA. They took my smartphone at the gates, handing me a two-way radio and a heavy ring of brass keys in exchange.

Oakhaven doesn't look like a hospital. It looks like a gothic fortress built for Gilded Age royalty, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and miles of dense, silent pine forest. There are no computers. The charts are thick, yellowing paper kept in heavy metal binders. The nurses don't wear scrubs; we wear stiff, starched white dresses and caps that make us look like ghosts drifting through the dim corridors.

I figured it was just an eccentric retreat for the ultra-rich. The patients were all heirs, disgraced politicians, or unwanted socialite daughters, hidden away for a steep price.

Then I met Claire.

Claire was fourteen. She was in Room 3B, a tiny, windowless cell on the third floor. According to her chart, her parents admitted her for "acute hysteria and rebellious mania.” That’s a diagnosis that hasn't been in the DSM for decades. In reality, she was just a teenager who had caught her wealthy father in an affair and threatened to tell her mother.

The first time I brought Claire her dinner, she was shivering in the corner of her cot, wrapped in a coarse wool blanket. Her hair was damp, plastered to her forehead, and her lips were faintly blue.

"Did they send you for the straps?" she whispered, her voice trembling.

"What? No," I stammered, the heavy metal tray suddenly feeling awkward in my hands. "I'm just... I just have your food."

She looked at me with eyes so hollow they seemed bruised into her skull.

"Don't let them put me back in the water," she begged, grabbing my wrist. Her skin was freezing. "Please. I’ll be good. I won't cry anymore. Just don't let Dr. Vance order the water."

I didn't know what she meant until my third day, when I was assigned to the basement ward.

They call it the Hydrotherapy Wing. I opened the heavy oak doors and was hit by the overwhelming stench of mildew, bleach, and old sweat. The room was lined with six deep, clawfoot porcelain tubs.

Inside the tubs were patients.

They were submerged up to their necks in ice water. Heavy canvas sheets were stretched taut over the tops of the tubs, featuring only a small cutout for their heads, strapped down with thick leather buckles so they couldn't move. Their teeth chattered in a haunting, rhythmic staccato that echoed off the tile walls.

Dr. Vance stood at the center of the room, checking his pocket watch.

"Ah, our new arrival," he smiled warmly, gesturing to the tubs. "Continuous bath therapy. A lost art, truly. Modern medicine relies on chemical restraints, turning patients into zombies. But cold water? Cold water shock resets the nervous system. It draws the blood away from the inflamed brain. It forces compliance through endurance."

I stared in horror at the tub closest to me. The woman inside had been there so long her skin was macerated, her eyes rolled back into her head.

"How long have they been in here?" I choked out.

"This batch? Forty-eight hours," Vance said casually, making a neat checkmark on his clipboard. "We'll pull them out for insulin therapy tomorrow."

Insulin coma therapy. Lobotomies. Electroconvulsive therapy without anesthesia or muscle relaxants. Oakhaven wasn't a quirky retreat. It was a time capsule of psychiatric torture, operating entirely off the grid, funded by families who paid millions to make their problems disappear.

I knew I had to get Claire out.

Last night, I found her name on the surgical registry for this morning. The procedure listed was Transorbital Leukotomy. The ice pick. Vance was going to sever the connections in her prefrontal cortex because she had cried too loudly during room inspection.

At 2:00 AM, I crept out of the staff quarters. The halls were dead quiet, save for the hum of the radiators and the occasional muffled scream from the basement. I had a crowbar I’d smuggled from the groundskeeper's shed and my brass keys.

I made it to the third floor. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the keys twice before unlocking 3B.

The room was empty.

The bed was made. The heavy leather restraints were unbuckled and hanging off the sides.

Panic seized my chest. I ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time down to the basement. I didn't care about the noise. I didn't care about the NDA. I just wanted to get that kid out of this nightmare.

I burst through the double doors of the surgical theater.

The lights were blindingly bright. Claire was strapped to a heavy iron chair in the center of the room. Her eyes were wide, darting around in absolute terror, but a tight leather strap across her forehead kept her head completely immobilized.

Standing over her was Dr. Vance. He didn't have a surgical mask on. He was humming a soft, classical tune. In his right hand, he held a thin, sharp steel orbitoclast. In his left, a small silver mallet.

He looked up when the doors slammed open. He didn't look surprised. He just looked disappointed.

"I told you," Vance sighed, setting the mallet down on a stainless steel tray. "You need a strong stomach for the work we do here."

Two male orderlies stepped out of the shadows behind me. I didn't even hear them move. One grabbed my arms, twisting them painfully behind my back, while the other seized my hair.

"Let her go!" I screamed, thrashing wildly. "You're a monster! This is illegal!"

"Legality is a construct for the poor," Vance said gently. He stepped away from Claire and walked slowly toward me. "The families who pay for Oakhaven don't want cures. They want quiet. And the old ways? They are exceedingly good at producing quiet."

He reached into his pristine white coat and pulled out a heavy syringe.

"You're clearly suffering from acute hysteria," he whispered, right in my ear. "Don't worry. We have a bed waiting for you."

I did the only thing I could think of. I threw all my weight backward, crushing the orderly's foot beneath my heel, and bit down on the arm holding my throat. He howled, his grip loosening just enough.

I bolted.

I heard Vance shouting, the heavy thud of boots chasing me up the stairs, but adrenaline made me faster. I threw myself through the first-floor window of the laundry room, shattering the glass and tearing my arms open. I hit the muddy ground outside and ran into the woods. I ran until my lungs bled and the flashlights behind me faded into the dark.

I've been hiding in a motel two towns over. I bought a cheap burner smartphone with the cash I had in my pocket. I tried calling the police. I told them everything—the tubs, the ice picks, the unmapped facility.

The dispatcher put me on hold for ten minutes. When she came back, her voice was completely devoid of emotion.

"Ma'am, there is no facility by that name at the address you provided. The owner of that estate has reported an escaped patient in acute distress. Since you're calling from a prepaid device, I cannot pinpoint your exact coordinates. Please provide your current location so we can send medical transport."

I hung up.

I’m typing this on the burner right now, just to get it out there. Once I hit post, I might smash it to pieces just to be safe. I’m packing my bags. I have to keep moving. But whenever I close my eyes, I don't see the dark of the motel room.

I see Claire, strapped to that iron chair, waiting for the tap of the mallet. And I know she isn't crying anymore. Because Dr. Vance finally made her quiet.

I'm writing this down because I don't trust what I'll remember next week.

My wife, Helen, says to put everything in, even the boring parts. Especially the boring parts. I'm posting it here instead of keeping it on my laptop because once it's somewhere public I can't quietly go back and change it. I don't know why I think I'd want to. I'd just rather not be able to.

My daughter started waving at the house across the road about two weeks ago.

She does it during breakfast. Maya is five, which means breakfast takes roughly forty minutes and involves almost no actual eating. She sits at the end of the table nearest the front window, pulls the crust off her toast even though I've told her approximately six hundred times that the crust is also bread, and waves at the upstairs window of number eighteen.

The house has been empty since before we moved in.

I've never seen anyone go in or out. There are newspapers melted into the concrete beside the letterbox, and there used to be a FOR SALE sign out front until it blew over during a storm in August. Nobody has bothered putting it back up.

I didn't think much about the waving until one morning I asked who it was for.

"The girl."

I looked across the road. The upstairs window was dark.

"What girl?"

She sighed in the way five-year-olds do when an adult has failed a very basic intelligence test.

"The girl in there."

"There's nobody in there."

"There is."

"Okay."

That was the whole conversation. Maya went back to mutilating her toast and I went back to packing her lunch.

Helen leaves for work before seven three days a week, so mornings on those days are mine. Lunchbox, hair brushed badly enough that Maya usually makes me redo it, then the eleven-minute drive to school while she asks questions like whether fish get thirsty. The girl became part of that routine. Maya waved. I didn't look. Sometimes she'd say, "She's there today," and sometimes, "She's not at the window yet."

Once she told me the girl had different hair.

I asked what she meant.

"Down."

"Down how?"

Maya pulled her own ponytail loose to demonstrate, then became furious because I'd apparently made her ruin her hair.

That was more or less the level of concern I had about it.

Two days ago, somebody waved back.

I was standing at the kitchen bench cutting strawberries when Maya said, "See?" She sounded excited.

I looked.

A little girl was standing behind the upstairs window.

I nearly cut my thumb.

She was far enough away that I couldn't make out much. Dark hair, pale face, maybe Maya's age or slightly older. She was standing very close to the glass with one hand raised beside her head.

My first thought was the sensible one. Someone had bought the place. A family was looking around. Maybe the owner's kid was there while they cleared it out.

Then the girl moved her hand.

A slow wave.

Maya waved harder. "Hi!"

The girl kept waving.

I put the knife down. "What?"

Maya was grinning at me. "She did it."

I stepped closer to the window.

The girl stopped moving. Her hand stayed raised.

It took me a few seconds to work out what was wrong. Maya was sitting right up at the window. I was at the bench, a couple of metres further back. If the girl had been waving at Maya, she'd have been looking down, at the window itself.

She wasn't looking down.

She was looking past Maya, into the room.

At me.

I lifted my hand without really deciding to. Not a proper wave. More that stupid little half-raise you do when you accidentally make eye contact with someone.

The girl's fingers moved once.

"She likes you," Maya said.

I told her to finish her breakfast. When I looked back, the window was dark.

That was at about seven thirty.

At eleven, I remembered buying June the rabbit cup.

I was at work when it happened. There's nothing interesting about what I do. I deal with insurance claims, mostly property damage, which means large sections of my day are spent looking at photographs of wet ceilings and asking people whether they still have receipts for televisions they bought in 2018.

I went to make coffee and somebody had left a pink mug beside the sink. That was all. Pink mug.

And suddenly I remembered standing in a shop holding two children's cups.

One had a rabbit on it. One had little yellow flowers.

June wanted the rabbit. I told her the flower one was nicer. She crossed her arms and said, "Then you have it."

I laughed. In the memory, I mean. At work I was just standing there.

I could see the shop clearly. Bright lights. Grey floor. A display of lunchboxes behind her. June had her hair in two uneven plaits because I'd done them myself.

I remembered buying the rabbit cup.

Then I was standing in the office kitchen with my hand under running water.

I hadn't turned the tap on.

I shut it off.

There is no June. I have one child. Maya.

I stood there for maybe a minute trying to work out where the name had come from, and eventually I decided it had been a dream. That's genuinely what I thought. People remember bits of dreams during the day. Something sets one off and for a few seconds it feels more real than it has any right to.

I went back to my desk. By half past eleven I was embarrassed I'd let it bother me.

I didn't think about the house again until dinner.

Helen had made spaghetti. Maya had eaten about four mouthfuls and was trying to wind one piece around her fork without touching it with her other hand, which she apparently considered cheating.

I said, "June, just eat it."

Nobody reacted straight away. Including me.

For maybe two seconds the name didn't feel wrong.

Then Helen said, "Who?"

I looked at Maya. She was staring at me.

"Sorry."

"Who the hell is June?"

"I don't know."

Maya put her fork down. "The girl."

Helen looked at her. "What girl?"

"The window girl."

I asked Maya what she'd said.

"Her name's June."

"How do you know that?"

She shrugged. "That's her name."

"Did she tell you?"

Another shrug. Maya does that when she thinks the difference between yes and no is unimportant.

Helen asked what we were talking about, so I explained. I expected her to laugh. She didn't. She went to the front window and looked across the road.

There was nobody there.

"Probably someone viewing the house."

"That's what I thought."

"So?"

"So I called Maya June."

Helen gave me the look she normally saves for when I've spent twenty minutes trying to repair something that should have taken five minutes to replace. "You've heard her say it."

Maya said, "I didn't tell Daddy."

"Sweetheart, you just told him."

"No. Before."

Helen rubbed her forehead. "Can we please eat dinner?"

Maya picked up her fork. Then she looked at me and said, very casually, "She said you'd remember."

Helen stopped rubbing her forehead.

I didn't ask Maya anything else. I wish I could say that was because I didn't want to frighten her. Mostly I didn't want to hear the answer.

That evening I put her to bed. She has a routine involving one story, one glass of water and an increasingly complicated series of negotiations over whether the hallway light stays on. I read half of The Gruffalo before she interrupted me.

"Do you remember when I hurt my chin?"

"Yes."

I kept reading.

"When?"

I stopped. Maya was watching me over the top of the blanket.

"You fell over."

"Where?"

"The playground."

"Which playground?"

I knew this. She had split her chin open badly enough to need glue at the hospital. Helen had been at work. I'd taken her. There had been blood all over her shirt.

Except when I tried to remember it, the shirt was yellow.

Maya didn't own a yellow shirt like that.

June did.

I could see her sitting on the kitchen counter with a tea towel pressed under her chin. She was crying. I was telling her not to look at the blood because it always looked like more than it was. Her dark hair was stuck to one cheek.

"Daddy?"

The bedroom came back. Maya was still looking at me.

I said, "The park near Grandma's."

Her face changed. "No."

I knew I'd got it wrong before she told me.

"It was school."

"Right."

"You came."

"I know."

"Mrs Price called you."

"Yeah."

"Then we went to the hospital."

"I remember."

I didn't.

I knew it had happened.

That's not the same thing.

There were facts in my head. Mrs Price. The hospital. Skin glue. Maya getting an icy pole afterward because she'd been brave. But if I tried to see it, I saw June.

Helen found me sitting on the edge of our bed about twenty minutes later, and I told her everything. The cup, the shop, June's hair, the yellow shirt.

She sat beside me without saying anything for a while. Then she asked me what Maya wore on her first day of school.

"That purple backpack."

"What did she wear?"

"Uniform."

"What shoes?"

I got annoyed. "I don't fucking know, Helen."

She went quiet. I apologised.

She said, "She wore those black ones she hated because they rubbed her heel."

And then I remembered.

June standing beside our front door in black shoes.

June pulling one foot backward when I tried to take her photograph.

June saying they hurt.

I stood up so quickly I hit my knee against the bedside table. Helen followed me downstairs.

I don't know why I went to the window. That's probably the stupidest thing I've done in this entire situation, and I've had plenty of time to think about it.

The upstairs window at number eighteen was dark.

Then the curtain moved.

June stepped into view.

I knew her immediately.

That was new.

Dark brown hair to her shoulders.

A pale blue nightdress.

A round face, a slightly crooked front tooth, a little mark beside her right eyebrow.

I knew that mark.

She got it falling off her scooter.

I carried her home while she cried into my neck.

I cleaned gravel out of her palm.

She asked if she needed stitches.

I told her no.

Behind me, Helen said my name.

I couldn't answer.

June wasn't looking at Helen. She wasn't looking toward Maya's bedroom.

She was looking at me the way kids look at you when you've finally turned up to collect them.

I stepped away from the window.

The memory stopped changing. Or it stopped getting bigger, anyway. It didn't go anywhere. I didn't know yet whether that was a rule or just luck.

Helen hadn't seen her. By the time she got to the glass there was only the curtain. She called the police anyway. "If there's a kid in there, somebody needs to know. If there isn't, I want somebody who isn't you to tell me."

Two officers came about forty minutes later. I stayed in the hallway, away from the window, while they walked round number eighteen with torches. Front door locked. Side gate chained. Afterwards one of them told Helen the place had been shut up since the owner went into care, and that streetlights do funny things on old glass.

Helen said, "Okay," in the voice she uses when she's stopped arguing, not when she agrees.

The next morning we kept the curtains closed. Maya complained because she wanted to wave. Helen snapped at her. Maya cried, and then Helen cried because she'd snapped at her, and I burned two pieces of toast. Nobody ate much.

At about eight, Maya asked why I was being weird.

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm tired."

"Are you cross at me?"

"No."

"Are you cross at the girl?"

I didn't answer. Maya pushed cereal around her bowl.

"She looks at you more."

"What do you mean?"

"She looks at you when I'm not there."

Helen was standing at the sink. She turned around slowly. "When you're not where?"

Maya pointed toward the window. "Sometimes I go get dressed and she's still looking."

"At the house?"

"At Daddy."

Helen looked at me for a long time. Then she took Maya to school.

I called in sick. I should have gone with them. I can't really explain why I didn't, except that leaving felt like a decision and I didn't have one in me. So I sat in the living room with the curtains closed and tried to remember my daughter.

That sounds ridiculous. I know who Maya is. I know her birthday. I know she hates bananas unless they're blended into something, which makes absolutely no sense. I know she sleeps diagonally. I know she says "aminals" even though she can pronounce "animals" perfectly if you make her slow down. I know she has a little brown patch in her left eye.

But when I reached backward, things started going.

Her fourth birthday.

Fine. I could see it.

Her third.

Mostly fine.

Second.

Pieces.

The first time she walked?

June.

The first time she said Dad?

June.

The first time I held my daughter's hand while crossing a road?

June.

Every missing space had something in it.

I'd been calling it forgetting all morning, in my head, because forgetting was the least bad word I had. It wasn't forgetting.

I was replacing her.

Helen came home shortly after three without Maya. She'd taken her to her sister's. I was relieved enough that she noticed.

"I think we should stay there."

"Yeah."

"For a while."

"Yeah."

She sat opposite me. "What do you remember?"

I told her. She didn't cry. Helen gets practical when she's frightened. She got her phone out and started showing me photographs. Maya eating birthday cake. Maya asleep on my chest. Maya sitting inside a cardboard box we'd turned into a car.

I recognised every photograph. But some of them felt like photographs of things I'd been told about.

I know they're mine. They just don't feel like mine.

Helen put the phone face down on the coffee table.

"When you said June at dinner," she said, "I thought you had another kid somewhere."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"I spent all day wishing that's what it was."

We packed enough clothes for a week. Helen told me to leave everything else.

I went upstairs for my charger. On the way back down, I passed the narrow pane of glass beside the front door.

I had forgotten about it.

I saw number eighteen through it.

June was at the window.

She was up on her toes, I think. Only her head and shoulders showed above the sill.

A memory hit me so hard I dropped the charger.

I was kneeling beside a bathtub. June was maybe three. She had bubbles on her chin and was holding a plastic cup full of bathwater, trying to drink it while I told her, for what felt like the hundredth time, that bathwater was disgusting.

She laughed. I laughed.

The memory was warm. It wasn't frightening at all.

It felt exactly like loving my child.

I grabbed a jacket from the coat hook and covered the pane. Helen shouted from the car asking what I was doing. I told her nothing.

We stayed at her sister's last night.

Maya slept between us.

At about two in the morning I woke up because she'd kicked me in the stomach.

For a few seconds I didn't know who she was.

Not in some dramatic way.

I wasn't screaming.

I just woke up next to a small person and there was a blank space where recognition should have been.

Then it came back.

Maya.

My daughter.

I went into the bathroom and was sick.

She found me sitting on the floor afterward. Helen was still asleep. Maya sat beside me.

"You don't remember me?"

"I remember you."

"Some things."

I didn't answer.

She leaned against my arm. Then she started telling me.

Not about June. About us.

She reminded me about the time I dropped her birthday cake carrying it from the car. She reminded me that I used to call her Potato when she was a baby because she had no hair. She reminded me about a pigeon stealing half her sandwich at the zoo, and me chasing it because she wanted the sandwich back.

I remembered that one. Properly.

I laughed. She laughed too.

Then she said, "Remember when I hurt my chin?"

I tried.

School. Mrs Price. Hospital. I knew all of it. But when I reached for the memory, June was sitting on the kitchen counter in a yellow shirt.

Maya must have seen something in my face.

"That's mine," she said.

She's five. She didn't say it like something out of a horror film. She sounded annoyed.

Like June had taken one of her toys.

I hugged her.

I could remember a hundred times I'd hugged June. I couldn't remember holding Maya after she hurt her chin.

I carried her back to bed and lay down next to her and didn't sleep.

At some point I picked up my phone and checked the temperature. Four degrees. I'd been looking at it for a while before I understood why I wanted to know.

There's no power at number eighteen. There hasn't been for years. She's in a nightdress, and as far as I know nobody has ever fed her, or put a blanket over her, or argued with her about the hallway light.

I know how that sounds. I know she isn't a child, or isn't one in any way the word normally means. I don't know whether the memories I've got of her are real ones that belonged to somebody else or things she made up, and at three in the morning I couldn't find the part of me that thought it made a difference.

I lay there next to my daughter and worried about the other one.

I haven't told Helen.

We're not going home today.

Helen's brother is going to get the rest of our things. Work clothes, Helen's laptop, the bag of Maya's toys she keeps asking about, June's school bag. He thinks there's somebody squatting in number eighteen and that I've scared myself after seeing them.

Fine. He can think that.

I've told him not to look at the upstairs window. He laughed. I've told him again.

Maya has started making what she calls my Dad Book. It's printer paper stapled together. She draws pictures of things we've done and makes Helen write underneath because her spelling isn't great yet.

THE ZOO.

DADDY DROPPED MY CAKE.

MY FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL.

THE TIME I WAS SICK ON DADDY IN THE CAR.

Apparently that last one needed preserving.

There are seven pages so far. I remember five of them.

Helen asked me this morning whether I thought staying away would stop it.

I told her I haven't had a new memory of June since we left the house, which is true. I watched her decide to be relieved.

I didn't mention two o'clock. Nothing of June came in at two o'clock. Maya just wasn't there for a few seconds, and then she was. I've been telling myself all morning that it's a different thing, that it's tiredness and shock. I don't believe it enough to say it out loud.

She also asked why it was me and not Maya, when Maya had been waving at that window for two weeks.

I don't know. Maybe it was me waving back.

Helen's brother rang about an hour ago. He's got everything. He said he didn't see anyone, and that he'd only looked from the car anyway, just so he could tell me he had.

I wanted to ask him to go back and look properly. To see if she was all right.

I didn't.

Before he hung up he said, "Tell the girls I said hi."

He calls Helen and Maya the girls. I'm almost sure he always has.

Maya brought me another page while I was writing this.

It's a picture of the two of us standing in our old kitchen. I'm extremely tall and my hands come directly out of my shoulders. She told me it's the morning she started school.

Underneath, Helen has written:

Dad cried after I got out of the car but waited until I couldn't see him.

I told Maya I remembered.

She asked me what colour her backpack was.

Purple. I got that right.

Then she asked me what she'd said when I dropped her off.

I couldn't answer.

I remember June saying it.

I can see her standing beside a school gate in black shoes that hurt her heels, holding both straps of her backpack.

She looks back at me.

She smiles.

And she says, "Bye, Dad."

I don't know what Maya said.

She does. She won't tell me yet. She says I have to try to remember it myself.

So I've been trying.

I haven't got it. I've got the gate, and the shoes, and the way she held both straps. Every time I go back for it, that part is a bit clearer.

I'm going to keep trying.

Take it from an expert.

Stay out of the woods.

I’m a wildlife biologist, and for the last several years I’ve been posted to a conservation outpost deep in the Rocky Mountains.

My coworkers and I are overseeing the reintroduction of timber wolves in this region. Most of my work involves tracking the wolves. We monitor their populations and study their movements using tracking collars we've placed on several members of the pack.

For months, everything was going better than anticipated, but about two weeks ago we noticed something strange. According to our trackers, the pack had started avoiding one particular valley.

It started slowly; we noticed the pack spending less and less time in a pristine valley. Up until this point, the wolves had been roaming the valley quite regularly, but we just figured they were settling into a different part of the region. Soon we realized that wasn’t at all the case; the pack was still in the area. They just avoided the valley. The trackers painted a clear picture: the wolves were going everywhere, but not the valley.

We had a staff meeting to discuss what could be causing this.

The ten of us shuffled into the small, rarely used conference room.

Mike, our lead researcher, stood up and passed around some diagrams. Making his way to the front, he said

“Take a look at the printout.” He paused for a moment as the room filled with the sound of rustling paper

 “We've mapped every collar ping we've received over the last two weeks. As you can see, the pack is still moving throughout the region.”

He pointed toward the map.

“But they aren't entering the valley.”

He paused.

“Not once in the last two weeks.”

“The boundary is almost perfect. They approach it, turn around, and go somewhere else. So, what are we looking at?”

The room fell silent for a moment as eyes stared thoughtfully into the distance or blankly at the handout.

“Maybe another predator has settled in the valley,” Frank spoke up

A mocking laugh rose from the other side of the room

“Like what?” Amanda said

“Bigfoot? Come on, Frank, you should know better; even a mountain lion wouldn’t be enough to scare an entire pack from its territory.”

“Well, what’s your bright idea?” Frank sarcastically said

Amanda shrugged

“Probably bad water.”

At that, the room erupted with both critique and defense of Amanda’s explanation. The argument lasted a few minutes before Mike spoke up

“Alright, that’s enough!” he loudly commanded

“Does anyone here have an explanation that has evidence?”

The room was silent.

“I didn’t think so.”

 Mike looked down at the map again.

“Whatever is happening, we're not going to figure it out sitting in this room. We need someone on the ground. So I’m asking for two volunteers to go into the valley and find some evidence.”

I don’t know why, but I raised my hand

“Great, thank you, Chris. Who else?” Mike said

“I’ll go,” Will said from across the room.

“Great, get your packs ready. Tomorrow morning I’ll drive you two to the trailhead.”

The sun was barely up, but Will and I had already been bouncing around in the back of Mike’s Jeep for over an hour. A ten-mile, all-wheel-drive-only road separated the research facility from the only trail into the research region. It was slow going; the road was barely that, and more like a rocky, dry riverbed winding its way through the wilderness.

As we neared the trailhead, Mike shouted back to us

“It’s going to be just you two for a while; I’ll be back in three days to pick you up, sound good?”

Will and I nodded, and I glanced in Will’s direction; his face showed a strange mix of excitement and fear. He was the youngest member of the team, fresh out of college and barely 23.

“Hey,” I shouted to get his attention.

His blue eyes turned towards me.

“Don’t worry about this; just think of it as a camping trip.”

He nodded and forced a grin.

“Yeah, it’ll be fun.”

“Keep the radio on.” Mike interrupted

 “If you get into trouble, call me.”

“Got it.” I gave him a big thumbs up.

“And don't get separated.”

“We won't.”

The Jeep came to a stop in a tiny clearing; a narrow trail disappeared into the pines. I reached for my pack and jumped to the dirt; Will followed me. Mike called to us as we moved towards the trail

“Stay safe, keep the radio on!” With that, he backed up and headed back down the road. The noise of the jeep resounded in the forest for a while, but soon all was quiet. Almost too quiet: no birds, no wind moving through the trees, just silence.

I turned towards the trail, and then towards Will. With a hand, he beckoned me to go ahead.

“After you.” He said.

According to our maps, the valley was roughly 5 miles from the trailhead. The going was slow; the trail was rugged and steep in places. But what slowed us down the most was the research we were gathering.

Every mile, we stopped and examined the area for signs of wolves. In the first three miles, we found very little evidence of wolves, but in miles four and five, we found quite a lot of tracks and scat. This confirmed what the trackers had shown; the wolves were still in the area of the valley.

At the top of a small ridge, we stopped. Below was the valley. It was roughly 6 miles in length and 2 miles in width. Various groves of aspen trees dotted its open prairie, as well as the occasional pine tree. A healthy creek flowed from one end to the other; a beaver dam formed a small pond near the center of the valley.

“Well, there it is.” I declared

Will nodded

“Sure looks different than that map we’ve been staring at for weeks.”

“Sure does,” I said as I pulled out the map with the tracker data points.

“Looks like the boundary Mike was talking about is about 100 feet ahead.”

“Let’s check for signs there,” Will replied

We made our way to the perimeter of the valley; there we found a high volume of wolf tracks. The tracks formed a path along the border of the valley. It was strange to look at; it was like the tracks simply refused to go any further into the valley. On the valley side, the land didn’t bear a single track.

The two of us marveled at this unusual behavior. I turned to Will and said

“Let’s follow the tracks for a bit; you go to the left, and I’ll go right, meet back here at the trail in an hour.”

With a nod, he replied

“Sounds good.”

I followed the tracks to the right for about a mile and a half, but could see that they continued much further; the tracks curved around the perimeter of the valley, without one wayward pawprint crossing into the valley. I also began to notice marks on the trees along the perimeter. They were everywhere. Not on every tree, but close enough that I could almost follow them from one to the next. And every one of them was on the side of the tree facing the valley.

Making marks on trees is not an uncommon practice in the natural world. Bears do it; deer and elk do it. But these were different; I’ve never seen marks like this. The bark had been ripped away in long, uneven strips. Some of the gouges were more than an inch deep, exposing pale wood underneath. I couldn't think of a single animal in the area capable of doing that.

When I got back to the trail, Will was already there. His eyes were wide with concern, but he gave a smile as he saw me.

“Did the tracks go around the valley?” I asked

“Yeah.”

“Did you see marks on the trees?”

He swallowed and nodded

“Yeah.”

I tried to play it off

“Not a big deal; a lot of animals do that. Could just be one marking its territory; maybe Frank was right, and there’s a new predator in the area.”

He thought about it before replying

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

He stared down at the valley

“Now what?” he asked

I pointed toward a grove of aspens near the pond. The ground there looked flat, and we'd have easy access to water.

“Let’s set up camp near those trees, and then we’ll record these findings.”

It was mid-afternoon by the time we had finished setting up camp. I lazily rested in the hammock I had packed, while Will tried some fishing in the pond. The valley was quiet and peaceful. And the combination of exhaustion from the hike and the soothing rocking of the hammock sent me into a deep sleep.

When I woke, Will was tending a fire and setting up the small camp stove we had brought. I stepped out of the hammock and walked over to the fireside.

“Hey,” Will said with a smile

“Hey,” I yawned. “What time is it?”

“A little after six. Are you hungry? I was going to get dinner going.”

I nodded

“Yeah, I could eat.”

Moments later, we enjoyed rehydrated beef stroganoff around a warm fire. The setting was beautiful; in that moment, I was glad I had volunteered for this outing.

“Did you catch anything?” I asked Will

He shook his head

“Nah, I gave up pretty quick.”

He stared off into the valley

“You good?”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know.”

I stared at him, waiting for him to continue

“It’s just that, I’ve looked around while you were asleep, and I can’t find evidence of any animals living here.”

He took a drink from his water bottle

“I haven’t seen any tracks of any kind; I haven’t heard any birds since we’ve been in the valley; even the beaver dam is abandoned. Haven’t seen any fish in the pond either.”

I shrugged and replied

“Could just be the ecosystem adjusting to the reintroduction of a predator into the food chain.”

He smirked

“Come on, man, you know it’s never this drastic; there’s something else happening here.”

I looked at him; his eyes told me he was serious. I nodded in agreement

“Ok, you’re right. This is unusual, but we need more evidence before including this in our report.”

His jaw clenched

“Morning. Our priority will be trying to find evidence of any animal; if we can’t, we’ll add that to our findings, then our focus will shift to finding a cause for this.”

“Sounds good.” Is all he said.

An hour or so later, we both prepared to go to bed; dousing the fire, we entered our individual tents. Several hours later, I was awakened by loud howling and yipping. Peeking my head out of the tent, I saw that Will was already up, so, slipping on my boots, I quietly made my way to him. He held our night vision camera in his hand.

“What is it?” I whispered

“It’s the wolves,” he whispered back

“They’re at the edge of the valley.”

He handed me the camera, and I pointed it to the perimeter. There were so many wolves about fifty; they stood there on the edge of the valley; some ran up and down their path of tracks, others stood still, looking into the valley, howling and barking loudly. It was like they were behind glass.

We watched for a while, and at some point a fight broke out within the pack; several larger wolves surrounded a smaller one who tried to defend itself as best as it could, but the bigger wolves began to push it towards the perimeter of the valley, the night air filled with the sounds of angry dogs and the whimpering of their target. Eventually, the weaker animal lost as the attackers pushed it into the valley. The pack went silent, and only the whimpering of the frightened animal was heard. The Wolf looked wildly around and then, in a panic, it ran down into the valley; it passed our camp running deeper into the valley, whining all the way, and vanished into the darkness of the night.

The pack on the outside of the valley stood and quietly watched; then the alpha turned and walked away the others followed.

“What the hell?” I muttered

Will and I stared in the direction the wolf had run; it was further north. We hadn’t been in that part of the valley yet. As we looked in that direction in the distance, we heard a scared yip of a wolf, then the rest of the night was quiet.

We made a small fire and sat around it. Will finally spoke

“What was that?”

I stared into the fire

“I’m not sure,” I replied

The fire grew cold, and we finally returned to our tents.

Morning came, and Will and I silently prepared for the day. It wasn’t till after breakfast that we spoke to each other.

“I think we should try to find where that wolf went.” I broke the silence

Will stared at the pond and tried to skip a stone across the water

“Okay,” he slowly nodded

We gathered our gear, located the wolf’s tracks, and followed them. The tracks continued across the valley’s open prairie, making their way to the thick clusters of pines on the opposite end. The tracks disappeared behind a large clump of bushes. Behind them, we found the wolf, or what was left of it. Lying in the dirt was the body of the wolf. Its skin had been carefully removed and was missing. Its exposed muscles, bones, and sinew were wet with blood. It smelled awful, but not a single fly or maggot could be seen. All four of its paws had been cleanly cut off just about the ankle joint.

I looked to Will; his face was as white as I’m sure mine was.

“Get back to camp,” I muttered

Will didn’t need to be told twice. The body of the wolf was about two miles from our camp, and we ran the whole way. We were nearly back to camp when I stepped in a gopher hole. I heard my ankle pop, and I fell to the ground.

“Damn it,” I muttered in pain. Will pulled me to my feet and helped me hobble back to the camp. I twisted my ankle, and it was very swollen. I winced as I removed the boot; it was painful to move.

Will was near panic

“We need to get out of here.” He declared

“I know, but I can’t with my ankle like this.”

I winced in pain

“Call Mike on the radio”

He handed it to me. I turned it on

“Mike, do you read? We need help; I’ve injured my leg.”

Only static replied

“Mike, are you there?”

Again, only static.

“The mountains must be blocking the signal,” I said to Will

 “We’re going to have to wait till the swelling goes down.”

He clenched his jaw but finally agreed. For the rest of the day, we remained in camp. Will rarely looked away from the direction we found the wolf. Every thirty minutes he tried the radio; no one ever responded. At sunset, we heard a scream from where we found the wolf. It sounded like a woman screaming for her life. Will looked at me

“It’s a mountain lion. That’s what’s been causing this.”

I nodded; the roar of a Mountain lion sounds like a woman screaming.

“I agree, but it’s unlike a mountain lion to do something like that to a wolf.”

He shrugged

“Doesn’t matter if we can find a track or scat; that’s enough proof, and we can be done with this.”

“Ok, tomorrow let’s find the proof, then get back to the trailhead.”

“What about your leg?” Will asked

“Don’t worry about it; it’ll be better tomorrow.”

That satisfied him, and he headed to his tent. I went to mine shortly after.

The next morning I found a note on my tent; it said

“You rest, I’ll find the cat. Will”

“Damn it, Will,” I muttered as I looked around the area.

He was gone, probably had been for a while. My foot was still swollen, but not nearly as painful as last night. I hobbled my way over to the camp stove and prepared some breakfast. Deciding that if he wasn’t back in an hour, I’d go after him.

An hour came and went, and there was no sign of Will. Rising to my feet, I called out to him

“Will!” his name echoed across the valley with no reply

“Will, where are you?” I cried again; still nothing.

Choosing a stick for support, I slowly made my way down the valley. It was afternoon by the time I reached the wooded section of the valley. I passed by the skinned wolf; it didn’t seem to be decaying in any way. I stopped and called for Will

“Will! It’s Chris, are you ok?”

The quiet forest gave no response; it was there that I saw Will’s footsteps going deeper in. I followed them as best as I could. The footsteps went around a large boulder. I’ll never forget what I saw there. The limp, skinned body of Will lay in a blood-soaked clearing. It looked like his skin had been perfectly peeled from his form. His feet and ankles were gone. His blue eyes had been pulled from his head and placed gently on a flat rock.

I could feel vomit rising in my throat. I turned away; the sight and smell were too much for me. My eyes flooded with tears. I wanted to leave, but the nearby snap of a twig froze me in place. Another twig snapped, followed by loud rustling in the bushes. It was close, no further than fifty yards. The rustling and snapping twigs moved with purpose, then stopped. All was quiet for a moment, then a dry, haunting voice echoed off the trees.

“Will! It’s Chris. Are you ok?”

It was my voice, a poor, inhuman mimic of my voice; it lacked all cadence and emotion.

“Will, where are you?”

It copied me again, then the rustling continued. Adrenaline filled my veins, and I moved as fast as my foot would allow. I didn’t stop to pack my tent or grab my pack. The sun was setting as I returned to the trail. As I left the valley, the voice spoke again from behind me. Only this time it wasn’t my voice; it was Will’s

“Chris, are you ok?”

“Chris, where are you going?”

In the dark, I stumbled my way along the trail. There was no moon that night, and I didn’t have a light with me. But I kept going. I couldn’t stop; every time I did, I heard strange noises behind me in the distance. It sounded like bone grinding on bone. It was a little before sunrise when I stumbled off the trail into the small clearing where Mike had left us. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait too long to hear the distant rumble of Mike’s jeep moving up the mountain. Relief flooded me when the vehicle came into view. A smiling Mike excited the jeep

“Good to see you, Chris,” he explained, but looking around, a frown filled his face

“Where’s Will?”

“Will’s gone,” was all I could say

“What?”

“He’s gone.” Tears began to form in my eyes

But a noise came from the trail, loud footsteps then Will came into view.

“Sorry,” this Will said with a grin. “Had to take a piss; fell a bit behind.”

He looked at me

“Hey Chris, you left your pack back there.” he headed my pack to me

“Didn’t want you to forget it,” he said, and a sly smirk stretched across his face.

I stared in disbelief and fear

“Great,” Mike said. “Let’s get you boys out of here.”

I turned to him, wide-eyed

“Why didn’t you answer the radio?” I whispered

A puzzled look crossed his face

“What do you mean? Will was in contact with me the whole time.”

“Yeah,” the thing acting as Will spoke up

“Don’t you remember Chris? You asked me to deal with the radio,” it said with a wide smile

I stared at the ground in confusion

“Sounds like you could use some rest, Chris,” Mike said

“Hop in; we’ll debrief back at the station.”

Absentmindedly, I climbed into the back of the jeep. ‘Will’ followed. In the back of the jeep, we sat opposite each other. I stared at it, and it stared back; a wide, lazy smile never left the face of my dead friend. Dull yellowish-green eyes sat behind his skin. With each bump in the road, the stolen skin grew loose on a face it didn’t belong to. At one point, the skin surrounding the left eye socket was knocked loose, and gravity pulled it down the cheek, revealing blackened bones and decaying muscle that hid beneath. The thing calmly used one finger to pull the skin back up and stick it in place. All while smiling and staring at me.

The moment we arrived at the station, I hopped out of the jeep and hurried to my living quarters. I’m still there as I write this; I don’t know what to do. The thing is at my door; I see its shadow under the door and hear its heavy breathing. I’m writing this because I doubt anyone here would believe me, and at the moment I’m not sure any of us are leaving alive. Please listen to my warning; there are things out there that we were never meant to find.

Stay out of the woods.

You never know what will follow you home.

He died in February. Mom died seven years before him, so my sister Megan and I have been clearing out the house to get it ready to sell. We only found the room because of a water stain on the ceiling of my old bedroom. The roofer went up into the attic to take a look, and about ten minutes later he came back down and asked if we knew somebody had put plywood up behind the insulation.

We didn't know anything about any plywood.

The attic is low enough that you have to crouch between the rafters to get around. Dad kept the Christmas decorations near the hatch, and when we were kids we weren't allowed any farther in than that, because he was convinced one of us would put a foot through the ceiling.

Behind the plywood was a space maybe six feet long and three feet wide. Inside it we found a sleeping pad, a bunch of food wrappers, a plastic cup, two pencils worn down almost to the wood, one of our old water jugs, and the portable camping toilet Dad bought when Megan was little because she refused to use the campground restrooms after dark. There were also thirty-seven drawings.

The first one I picked up was drawn on the back of an electric bill. It was my parents' bedroom, seen from above. Mom was asleep on her side and Dad was on his back. I recognized the headboard right away because Dad had built it himself, with three square panels across the top, and whoever drew the picture had bothered to get all three of them right.

Dad's eyes were open.

The drawings weren't all equally good. Some of the early ones were rough, with crooked beds and hands that were basically lumps, and it was obvious whoever made them was a lot better at furniture than at people. The later ones were different. The lines got lighter and more confident, and the faces started to actually look like faces. Dad improved fastest. I know how that sounds, but it's true. By the later pictures I could recognize him before I'd even worked out which room he was in. Whoever it was had learned the crease between his eyebrows, the way his hair went flat on one side after he'd been lying down, even the shape of his hands. The rest of us mostly stayed simpler.

The first thing that came back to me was the granola bars. Mom bought them for our school lunches, and two or three at a time would just disappear. She blamed me, I blamed Megan, and Megan blamed me right back. Dad said it was rats. Then bread started going missing, and cookies, and once half a roast chicken. That one turned into an actual argument, because Mom was sure Dad had eaten it after everyone went to bed and Dad swore up and down he hadn't. She told him that if we had rats big enough to carry off half a chicken, he needed to do something about them.

That weekend Dad bought insulation. I remember him spending most of that Saturday up in the attic. The noises stopped for a few days and then came back.

What I remember is creaking more than scratching, something shifting above my room and then farther along the ceiling. Sometimes I heard it over Megan's room too. Dad still called it rats.

When I was ten I tried talking to them. It was a hot night (we didn't have air conditioning upstairs back then) and the box fan by my bed clicked every time it turned. Something creaked above me. I had a plastic baseball bat next to the bed, so I flipped it around and knocked the handle against the ceiling three times.

After a few seconds, something knocked three times back.

I thought this was the greatest thing that had ever happened. I knocked twice, but before anything could answer, Dad came into my room and took the bat away.

"Don't do that."

He wasn't whispering. He was just a lot quieter than he usually was when he caught me doing something stupid. I asked him why, and he said, "Because I told you they're rats."

The next morning he went up into the attic, and not long after that there was a metal sliding bolt on the hatch. I asked what it was for.

"Rats."

I told him rats couldn't open the attic hatch, and he said, "Exactly."

Megan came upstairs while I was looking through the drawings and made it through about three before she went back down. When I followed her into the kitchen she said we needed to call somebody.

"Who?"

"The police?"

"And tell them what?"

She just stared at me. "Someone was living above our bedrooms."

She had a point. She called the non-emergency line while I called the roofer back. Two officers came out and photographed the hidden space, and the roofer pulled back more insulation and found a flattened path running along the joists over the bedrooms. Above mine there were two tiny holes in the drywall. There were more over Mom and Dad's room, and one over Megan's. From underneath, they disappeared into the ceiling texture. I'd slept under two of them for twelve years.

The roofer went over the rest of the roof space and couldn't find a second way in. Nothing through the garage, no usable opening at the eaves, no vent big enough for a person. Whoever had been using the attic came and went through the hatch.

When he climbed back down, I asked him how much I owed him, and Megan said, "Seriously?" But it was still the first thing I asked.

The police gave us a case number, told us not to throw anything out, and left. Megan and I sat on the upstairs floor with the drawings spread out between us.

One of them showed me asleep with a cast on my left wrist. I broke that wrist when I was eleven, two days before summer vacation, which meant the bolt was already on the hatch by then. Whoever made the drawings was still up there after it went on.

Dad was in eleven of the pictures, and he was awake in every single one. In one he was sitting next to my bed. I remembered that night. I'd been sick and kept waking up, so he sat in my room with me for a few hours. In the drawing I'm asleep, and Dad isn't looking at me. He's looking at the ceiling.

Dad wasn't easy to talk to, but you could count on him. When the water heater burst in my first apartment, I called him before I called a plumber, and he showed up with towels and a toolbox and didn't ask how I'd managed it until the floor was dry. That was how he handled most things. He fixed whatever part of the problem he could get his hands on. Getting him to explain anything was a lot harder.

Megan remembered something else, which was that Dad used to close our bedroom doors every night. After we'd gone to bed he'd walk the upstairs hallway and pull them shut if we'd left them open. He said it kept the heat in. He did it in summer too, and neither of us had thought about that in years.

We went back through the drawings. In every picture drawn from above one of our bedrooms, the door was shut.

Then Megan found the one of Dad in the attic. He's crouched near the hatch holding a plate with something rectangular on it, probably a sandwich, and he's looking toward whoever was drawing him.

Megan said, "No," and then again, louder, "No."

Until that moment I'd forgotten that Dad sometimes used to take food upstairs after dinner. It wasn't every night, maybe once or twice a week as far as I can remember. If Mom asked, he said he was putting bait down. I don't remember any traps, or dead rats, or an exterminator ever coming to the house. What I remember is the plates coming back downstairs. Sometimes.

Megan picked up the water jug. "Wasn't this ours?"

Dad used to write our last name on all our camping gear because he was convinced people stole stuff at campgrounds. Most of the marker had worn off, but you could still make out part of it. And the toilet was definitely ours. For about a minute that felt weirdly reassuring, in a way I can't really explain, like at least Dad hadn't just left someone up there with nothing. Then I started thinking about what using either of those things actually involved. The jug had to be refilled. The toilet had to be emptied. And once or twice a week isn't nearly enough food for a person to live on.

Megan worked it out at about the same time I did. She sat back against the wall and said, "So he opened it." I didn't say anything. "Obviously he opened it."

Maybe whoever it was stayed in the attic nearly all the time and Dad brought up everything they needed. Maybe once or twice a week was really a lot more often than that, and I just didn't notice. Or maybe the hatch usually wasn't locked at all. The bolt only went up after I knocked on the ceiling, and that was the first time it had occurred to me.

Megan got angry when I said that out loud, though it was less real anger than her needing me to stop. She said maybe it was family. Maybe Dad thought calling the police would only make things worse. Maybe this was exactly the kind of dumb thing he'd decide he could handle on his own. That last part sounded like Dad. It didn't make me feel any better.

I took the drawings home with me and started putting them in date order, which I should have done at the house. A lot of them were drawn on junk mail and scrap paper, but eleven were on something with a date on it: bills, permission slips, the back of a letter from the county. Others I could place roughly by what was in our bedrooms at the time. The earliest dated drawing was from March 1999, and the latest was from November 2005, when I was fifteen.

That bothered me, because that's about when Dad stopped talking about rats. It wasn't dramatic. The noises just stopped being a family thing. Megan remembered him taking the bolt off the hatch when he repainted the upstairs hallway, and she thought that was around Christmas 2005. I remember the repainting, but I don't remember the bolt coming off.

I called Megan and asked her where she thought the person went. She was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped, and then she said, "How would I know?"

We went through every relative we could think of, and nobody fit. Nobody went missing in 2005, nobody suddenly showed back up, and there was no uncle we weren't supposed to talk about. I went through all the paperwork Dad left behind too, the bills and tax stuff and receipts and manuals for appliances we hadn't owned in twenty years. There wasn't a single name I didn't recognize.

Once the drawings were in order, one thing got a lot more obvious. Whoever made them stopped drawing Megan first. There are no pictures of her at all after she moved into the downstairs bedroom when she was fourteen. There are still pictures of me, and of Mom, and of Dad.

The last six drawings are mostly Dad, and he isn't asleep in them. In one he's lying in bed with his eyes open. In another he's sitting at the kitchen table very early in the morning. I know it's early because of the time on the microwave clock. That one couldn't have been drawn through a hole in the ceiling, and I have no idea how I missed that at the house. Another one shows Dad at the bottom of the stairs, drawn from somewhere above him, and he's looking up.

That was when I stopped thinking of the hidden space as the place where whoever it was had lived the whole time. It might have been where they slept. That's not the same thing.

The last dated drawing is on the back of an electric bill from November 2005. Dad is standing under the attic hatch with one arm raised. You can't see his face because he's looking up, and the hatch is open.

I stared at that one for a long time. Then I turned over the drawing of me with the broken wrist. I'd never checked the back, because there was writing on it from school and I'd assumed that was all there was.

There was another drawing under the writing. Same pencil, same cast, same room, but it isn't drawn from the ceiling. The angle is low, right beside my bed, like whoever made it was crouched in the narrow gap between the bed and the wall. I'm asleep with the cast resting on top of the blanket. The bedroom door is all the way open, and Dad is standing just outside it. He isn't blocking the doorway. He's off to one side with one hand on the doorknob, and his other hand is raised to his mouth, one finger pressed against his lips.

I haven't shown Megan that one.

After I found it I went back through all thirty-seven drawings again. Every drawing of one of us asleep has the bedroom door shut, except that one.

The attic hatch only locked from our side.

I recently went through a nasty breakup, and a group of my friends, including my brother, decided that I needed some cheering up. Despite my very loud and very clear protests, I was outvoted.

The plan was simple. We were going camping near the local beach. I went there a day early because there wouldn’t have been enough room in the car anyway, and having some peace and quiet before being surrounded by a bunch of people would do me good. At the campsite, I set up my tent, got everything ready, and went out to explore the area. I put on some music and headed out.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about what I had done wrong to get dumped. I came across a sign that said “NO TRESPASSING,” but it looked like it had been painted by children. I wanted to take a closer look when someone suddenly touched my shoulder.

I screamed in fright and took my headphones out of my ears. It was some elderly couple. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were two hundred years old combined.

“Son, turn around and go back. You have no business being here.”

“Jesus, you scared me half to death. Why can’t I go in there? What’s there?”

“It’s a dangerous area. You’re in danger there,” the old man said, and then immediately asked me where I had come from.

I honestly told him I was staying at the campsite and just wanted to clear my head. He introduced himself as Carl, and the woman as his wife, Nora. They apparently lived not far from the campsite. I talked with them for a while. They were a nice couple.

When we said goodbye, I pretended to be heading back to the campsite, but as soon as I saw them disappear from sight, I turned around and went back to the sign.

I know it wasn’t exactly the smartest decision. But when someone is at rock bottom and has nothing to lose, they tend to keep pushing their boundaries further and further.

I walked past the sign and continued for a while. I eventually reached a cliff. It was probably the most beautiful place I had ever seen. It wasn’t very high, but the view of the ocean was incredible. If I wanted to, I could have jumped straight into the sea and gone for a swim. If those two old people meant this place when they talked about danger, then I was glad I hadn’t listened to them.

Then a figure emerged from the sea.

“Could you help me up?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, leaning down.

It was a girl. She had light blue eyes like the sea with the sun shining on it and medium-length blonde hair. She was beautiful. But when she smiled, she suddenly seemed completely different.

When I pulled her up, she introduced herself as Eleanor.

“I’m Matt,” I said.

She walked a few steps away and pulled some clothes out from behind a rock.

“Could you turn around, please?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, quickly turning around.

She needed to take off her wet swimsuit and change into the hoodie and shorts she had hidden there. She told me that she had also come from the campsite and, to my surprise, that she was recovering from a bad breakup too.

I laughed.

“Well, I guess it must be fate, because so am I.”

She laughed too.

“Did you meet those two old people?” I asked.

Her face seemed to pale.

“Yeah, I did. You did too?”

“Yeah.”

“And what did they tell you?” she asked sharply.

“Nothing special. Just that I shouldn’t come here because I was supposedly in danger. They probably meant this little cliff. You know how old people are, they’re always afraid of something. And besides, I’m glad I didn’t listen to them.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because I wouldn’t have met you.”

We talked for what felt like several hours. She was amazing. Apparently, she was studying medicine and spent her free time going with her friends to cheer up sick children. I had never met anyone like her. She joked the entire time, and I laughed so much, probably more than I ever had before. I even completely forgot about my breakup.

“Do you want to go swimming?” she suddenly asked.

“I don’t know. It’s getting dark. It’s not exactly warm anymore, and I don’t even have a swimsuit.”

“Can’t swim, or are you scared?” she teased me and started taking her clothes off until she was standing completely naked in front of me.

I was shocked and couldn’t say anything. I just stared at her. Then she turned around and jumped into the water.

“Come on, Matt. This is the best thing that could have happened to you,” I encouraged myself silently.

My brave side won.

I took off my clothes and jumped in after her. She swam farther and farther away, and I swam after her.

Then she suddenly stopped, wrapped herself around me, and kissed me. Then she pulled away, and I saw it.

The worst thing I had ever seen.

A mouth full of teeth.

And then I felt the pain. An insane pain that completely clouded my mind. I started screaming like crazy. Before I lost consciousness, I heard my brother’s voice calling my name and saw flashlights shining toward the water.

I woke up in the hospital. My brother was on one side of the bed and my parents were on the other. They were all looking at me worriedly. My mom was holding my hand. I wanted to touch her with my other hand, but I couldn’t move it.

When I looked toward my hand, I screamed.

It was gone.

Apparently, I had gone swimming and been attacked by a shark. I was lucky my brother found me in time, otherwise I would have bled to death. Apparently, I had been on that cliff for two days. My brother searched everywhere for me until he came across the elderly couple, who told him they had seen me moving around near the sign, but strongly advised him to stay away from it, which luckily he didn’t do.

When I was discharged from the hospital, I decided that I had to visit the married couple.

I stood outside their door and rang the doorbell. After what felt like an eternity, the door opened and Carl was standing there. He looked at me, and his eyes stopped on my missing arm. Then he invited me inside.

Nora made me some tea and put a slice of cake in front of me. We were all silent for a while before I broke the silence.

“You knew about this, didn’t you?”

They nodded.

“We told you not to go there. We didn’t just tell you. When we told them the truth, they thought we were crazy. When we tried other ways, they still didn’t listen to us.”

They put an album in front of me. I started flipping through it. There were newspaper clippings about people who had gone missing.

Suddenly, I saw her.

“That’s Eleanor!”

The couple looked at each other and shook their heads.

“No. That’s not Eleanor. That’s our granddaughter, Emma. Whatever you saw there, it wasn’t her.”

A chill ran down my spine. Apparently, I could consider myself lucky that I had ended up “only” losing an arm.

None of us could remember how we found the room inside the mall.

One day it meant nothing to us, and the next, it was an unspoken part of our after-school routine. Felt like it’d been our little hideaway for as long as we'd known each other, but that was a lie. The room slipped silently into our memories and we never even thought to question it because its presence in our lives was just so…plausible. 

Poor kids hole up in abandoned places all the time, don’t they?

There were five of us back then. We all went to different schools, and we all were different ages, but none of that mattered. We were united by deeper things, harsher truths. The aches of neglect and the bites of puberty. Camaraderie that resembled love. The comfort of a family that wasn't constricted by blood.

Sophia with the dirt-caked skirts and the paint-stained fingers. 

Omari with the thin frame and the thick lisp. 

Alex with the wild blonde curls and the feral imagination. 

And Ian, my best friend, the kid with the cloudy scar across his right eye that he didn’t care to talk about. 

The two of us would travel there together every afternoon.

We'd meet at rundown multiplex movie theater, taking broad street west for a few miles until we reached our city's outskirts: a barren, shell of a place that even the junkies seemed to avoid.

Under the rust-stained fence, across the empty parking lot and into the derelict mall, climbing through the shattered window beneath the “R” in the “FOOD COURT” sign.

Past the pretzel shop, sharp right at the fast-fashion boutique with the half-naked mannequins piled out front, down the paralyzed escalator. Then, a few yards ahead, between the remnants of an arcade and a Hobby Lobby, there it was: a wooden door without a label. 

The room beyond the door was empty. 

Four windowless walls above a layer of frizzy brown carpet. Five hundred square feet of asylum from our lives outside the mall. 

It was always clean, but we never cleaned it. 

We never could agree on what color the wall was painted. Omari and Ian saw two separate shades of red. Sophia saw ocean blue. I saw a pure, unfiltered white. 

We could’ve made the space more hospitable, scavenged chairs from somewhere else in the mall, but Alex was vehemently against furnishing the room.

“It’s already perfect,” he said, lying on the carpet, staring up at the ceiling like it was as vast as the night sky. “Can’t make perfect more perfect, right?” 

I didn’t think of Alex as our ringleader. Ringleader implied organization, direction, a method to the madness. He was more like our engine. A force that propelled us, but to no discernible end. Alex kept things interesting. We never knew what he'd do next.

Which brings me to the day that room became something more. 

We were hanging out like usual. Sophia was turning failed math tests into origami. I was next to her, hunched over, carefully unsealing a pack of Magic: The Gathering I’d pocketed from a convenience store on the way over. Ian and Omari were comparing belt-shaped bruises, playfully arguing about who had the nastiest one, a means of disarming the horror. Then, out of nowhere, Alex stood, strolled to the middle of the room, and began clearing his throat like he was about to give a speech. 

“Okay, okay, okay: I’ll start.” 

Ian and Omari went quiet. Sophia and I shared a confused glance. 

“Start…what?” I asked. 

He shook his head and gestured for us to come sit. I smiled, excited - and the tiniest bit fearful - for whatever Alex had planned. 

With the four of us at his feet, he started.

“Once upon a time…” 

“Once upon a time?” Omari snorted, his lisp causing the words to buzz with static. “What the hell is this? The fairy-tale slam-poetry hour?” 

Ian sent an elbow into his rib cage. The jab wasn’t meant to injure, but it wasn’t gentle, either. A snarl surged across Omari’s face, but quickly dissipated. Alex watched the exchange with a vacant sort of grin, the motionless smirk of an animatronic stalled mid-performance. 

After a long inhale, he started again. 

“Once upon a time, there lived a mirror-toothed boy. He had no mother. He had no father. Far as he could tell, he hadn’t been born; he just was. He didn’t know what his purpose was, but he knew his gums hurt, and he knew he needed to bite.” 

Alex audibly chomped. The sharp clack made Sophia gasp, then giggle. 

“Course, everyone in town was afraid of him. He wanted to bite them, but they could see him coming a mile away: his mouth was a mess of jagged glass, and it was blindingly bright, even after the sun had set, because his teeth reflected everything, moonlight included.”

I felt something. A sizzle in my fingertips. Slow electricity spreading into my palms. I looked to Ian. His eyes were fixed on Alex, and they were gleaming. 

“So, for centuries, his gums throbbed, and the people were safe, but then, there was a change. The boy had an idea. A plan.”

Alex leaned forward. Lowered his voice to a wet growl. 

“A way to make the people come to him.” 

Silence fell heavy. 

Alex’s eyes slithered over us, one by one. 

After a small eternity, he clapped and said: 

“Cool! Cool cool.” 

The electricity in my palms abruptly vanished.  

“Rosie, you can pick up where I left off tomorrow.”

“Pick up what?” 

“The story! Like when a teacher wants their class to read something popcorn-style, y’know? Jumping from person to person? It’ll be like a game. A contest to see who can make the scariest ending.” 

He shrugged. 

“I dunno, sounded fun in my head.” 

Ian piped up. 

“I can try tomorrow!” 

Alex plopped down, lay back, and yawned. 

“Whatever. Just make it scary.” 

I wasn’t sure what to expect the next day. 

Ian was jittery the whole ride over. About halfway there, his arm spasmed, and he nearly crashed into a dumpster. As we hid our bikes in the mall’s overgrowth, I shot him a concerned look. 

“You good, dude? Everything OK at home?” 

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “I mean, it’s not actually OK, but it’s not any worse than usual, either. Dad’s still looking for job, though he ain’t finding many at the bottom of his fuckin’ Smirnoff bottles…” Ian trailed off, staring blankly at the shattered glass scattered around the weeds.

My best friend snapped back like he’d been struck by lightning. 

“But yeah! I’m good. Just nervous is all.” 

I walked forward, about to wrap my arm around his shoulder. 

“Alright. If that changes, you know I’m always here for - “ 

Electricity shot through my skin. 

I shrieked and leaped back, stumbling, falling hard on my ass. Ian rushed over.

“Rosie! Jesus, are you OK?!” 

He knelt down and placed his hand on my back. I winced, anticipating pain, 

but there was nothing. 

“What happened??” he asked. 

“Uh…I don’t know.”

Through ragged breaths, I examined my arm. No blood. No marks. Didn’t hurt anymore, either. 

“Just…like…some static, I guess.”

He offered me a hand, but I pretended not to notice. I dug my fingers into the dirt and pushed myself upright. 

“I’m fine, Ian. Surprised me is all.” 

He nodded. 

We continued inside. 

As I swung the door open, I saw Alex, lying face-up in the middle of the room. He was a grade ahead of us, which meant his school day ended slightly earlier, so he always beat us there. Sophia and Omari stepped in a few minutes later. 

With little preamble, Ian gathered us at his feet and picked up where Alex had left off. 

“The mirror-toothed boy had an idea,” he rasped, curling his upper spine so he could loom over us like storm clouds. “A plan. A way to make the people come to him.” 

I leaned back, grinning, awed by the theatrics. Seemed like my soft-spoken buddy was finally emerging from his shell. 

That was a good thing, right? 

“He’d shrink. That’s what he’d do. He’d rip out the sharpest tooth in his mess of a mouth and he’d carve into himself, cutting away the excess, every rib he didn’t need, every organ he could live without; he’d tear himself to shreds until he appeared very, very small. All the while, a pale red rage would fill his tattered body, blooming like a cancer.”

Once again, I felt my fingertips begin to sizzle. Ian was pacing. His cloudy eye quivered in its socket. 

“You see, the boy treasured his pale red rage. It kept him hopeful. One day, they would come, and they would get what they deserved.” 

Electricity ran up my arms and dove into my chest. My grin faltered. Nausea squeezed my gut. I swallowed bile and looked around: the room’s pure white walls were starting to give me a headache. 

“The people would stagger from the safety of town, shouting at the boy, calling him awful things with fermented breath, wondering why they’d ever been afraid of something so small, so harmless…and once they were finally close enough…” 

“…he’d bite,” Omari whispered. 

I was on the verge of passing out. 

Suddenly, Alex began applauding. 

Sophia and Omari promptly followed suit, filling the room with claps and cheers. 

Oxygen flooded my lungs. 

The static in my veins simmered.  

Ian was beaming. His lips curved into a trembling smile. His scarred eye was shimmering. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him so happy, so triumphantly alive. 

He took a bow. 

When he lifted his head, his gaze darted to me, expectant. 

I couldn’t let him down. 

So, even though it felt wrong, I began clapping too. 

The next day, Omari told his version of the story. It was similar to Ian’s. He wasn’t a copycat, there was just a shared throughline: the underdog toppling their overlord. His rendition was decidedly more violent, though. He reveled in the gory details. The vicious bite and the blood-soaked aftermath. 

At first, Sophia’s version seemed like a much-needed palate cleanser. Restrained. Poetic. Though, in the end, it was just as disturbing. According to her, the mirror-toothed boy spent years erecting a circle of marble sculptures around the town's perimeter. Eventually, the beauty became overwhelming. Bewitched, people would abandon their homes in the dead of night, and when they got close enough, the bite would come, but in her story, the teeth were different. Venomous. Dripping with a black toxin that altered the composition of their flesh. Made their bodies like clay: soft, dry, and malleable. Her story culminated with the town’s few survivors fixed on the horizon, eyes locked on the boy’s magnum opus: a twenty-foot-tall sculpture of himself, molded from still-living flesh.

“And they never looked away, but it wasn’t ‘cause they couldn’t; they just didn’t want to,” she whispered. “If only they’d realized the boy’s potential before it was too late.” 

After Sophia, it was finally my turn.

I didn’t have the faintest clue how I was going to tell the story, so the first day Ian didn’t show up felt like a stroke of luck. I had more time to figure out my version. 

But two days passed. 

Then three. 

Then a whole week. 

My parents knew what’d happened - they’d read about it in the paper - but they didn’t bother to tell me. No, my goddamned TV set broke the news. 

Everyone talks about growing up like it's a gradual process, some steady metamorphosis that takes years to complete, but it ain’t like that: growing up is a single, painful moment. The change is instantaneous. Something happens, a circumstance that forces you to touch the cold heart of reality, and the cotton-candy insulation of childhood molts away like snake skin. 

The grainy picture showed Ian’s dad being dragged from their mobile home in handcuffs. 

I collapsed into a sobbing heap on our living room floor. 

He’d finally taken it too far, just like Ian always feared he would. 

My best friend was gone. 

Over the next few weeks, I learned finer details. 

Detectives were confident they knew what befell the missing kid. His Dad was insistent that Ian just never came home one night, but between the various bloodstains discovered in the mobile home and his lengthy criminal history, no one believed he was innocent. The case never went to trial, though. The night before the proceedings were due to start, Ian’s dad died of cirrhosis. His brain quietly swelled like a wet sponge and the bastard just drifted away. 

In the wake of everything, we stopped telling stories about the mirror-toothed boy. Just didn’t seem right to continue without Ian. 

The grief was devastating. 

My mind moved like mud. Every muscle in my body felt ice-cold, useless. I couldn’t manage to eat anything other than Pop-Tarts, and, of course, my family was no help, no help at all. My reliance on my friends and the room grew. I didn’t feel safe anywhere else. 

Then, one afternoon, something inside me just seemed to…break. 

Omari was shadow boxing. Sophia was scribbling in her sketchbook. Tired of sulking in the corner day in and day out, I sprang up, paced over to the boy lying flat in the middle of the room, and made my demand.  

“Let’s do something.” 

Alex peered up at me. 

“Been waitin’ for you to ask.” 

So, we began to play a new game. 

Every day, it’d be someone’s turn to perform. 

The goal was simple - outperform the person who came before you. 

Alex went first. 

He bit his cheek until it bled, dabbed his fingertip along his gums, and wrote his name on the wall.

We clapped and cheered. 

Omari was next. 

Gritting his teeth, he wrenched at his thumb until it dislocated, then snapped it back into place. 

We patted his back and helped splint his injury. 

Sophia went third. 

She flipped to the back of her sketchbook and read some poetry. A haunting and delicate piece, a thinly veiled metaphor that recounted the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her uncle. None of us knew she wrote poetry. None of us knew what’d happened to her, either. 

We gathered around and embraced her. 

There was no question anymore: I’d grown to enjoy the strange electricity that cascaded through my body with each performance. It was pleasure with a lick of peril. An excess of physical sensation. A reminder that I was truly alive. That said, something new began to accompany the electricity. A wispy sort of itch that trickled across any exposed skin. I thought I’d suddenly become allergic to the carpet, but when I examined where I’d felt the itch, there’d never be a rash or anything. I did my best to ignore it. The show had to go on. 

Eventually, it was my turn, and despite my burgeoning love for the room and its games, I couldn’t suss out my performance. I arrived that afternoon and approached Alex, figuring he could provide guidance or inspiration. 

My vision went black. 

The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes, at home and under my covers. 

Sunlight drizzled through the blinds. I had no recollection of the previous twelve hours, but I felt awful. On the edge of vomiting and critically exhausted. I lurched out of bed. As soon as I hit the floor, fiery pain flared across the soles of my feet. I buckled. Cracked the bridge of my nose against my nightstand on the way down. Groaning, I lifted my head and yanked my foot into view. The bottom was covered in hundreds of tiny, intersecting cuts. A purple-red latticework I couldn't even begin to explain. 

I still biked to the room that afternoon. 

The rhythmic agony of my sneakers slapping the pedals was infinitely preferable to staying at home. 

As I approached the city limits, I felt a certain sort of anger bubbling in my chest, a gnawing betrayal. 

What the hell had they done to me? 

Or, even worse, what the hell had they allowed me to do to myself? 

I limped down the rusty escalator and marched toward the room, raring to give those assholes a piece of my mind, but the moment I swung the door open, my friends rushed over, grinning wide, praising me like a newly minted war hero. 

“There she is!” Sophia exclaimed, leaping forward and throwing her arms around me. Before I could even get my bearings, Omari grabbed my shoulders and ripped me from the embrace.

“Can’t stop thinkin’ about what you did yesterday…fuckin’ savage. You’re a goddamned legend, Rosie, you know that, right? I mean, no way Alex tops you today.” 

I didn’t yell. 

I didn’t ask what I’d done to earn such acclaim. 

I just…I just smiled. 

“I’m sure he’s got something in his back pocket.”  

The performances continued, and they got worse. So much worse. 

Each afternoon, a new horror. A sharpened pencil disappearing into an ear canal. Toenails slowly displaced and stacked into a neat little pile. A shoebox brimming with cockroaches, its contents crushed and eaten. My blackouts lengthened. The resulting damage grew increasingly grotesque, and I never had the stomach to ask what in God’s name I’d done to myself. 

On, and on, and on. 

The mood became perverse. Our cheers soured into animalistic shouts. Our claps devolved into closed fists thumping the floor, giving the spectacle a primal rhythm. The electricity coursing through our veins turned to lightning, and all the while, I felt that nagging itch, a soft wind tickling my exposed skin, desperate for my attention. I should’ve said something. Talked some sense into my friends, because we all knew where our performances were heading, but I couldn’t do it. What if they didn’t want to stop? They were all I had. I’d risk my life before I risked rejection. 

After months of the macabre pageantry, my body was broken and my mind was numb, so when Alex mumbled those words - the last words I ever heard him speak - they barely even registered. 

“Today’s the day. We’re ready. I can feel it.” 

It was Omari’s turn. 

I collapsed at his feet, nauseous about what was to come but desperate for the release. 

“Before I…start…I just wanted to say something. Two things, actually.” 

He paused. I cocked my head.

“First off, what I’m about to do - well, it’s not my idea, but Alex said that wasn’t against the rules.” 

I fought the urge to tell Omari to hurry the fuck up. The itch was bad that day. I fidgeted like mad, but I couldn’t get comfortable.

“Secondly…” he gulped, reaching into his pocket with a trembling hand. 

I leaned back and laid my hand onto the carpet. A seething itch ravaged my palm. I cursed under my breath and lifted the hand. 

I’ll never forget what I saw. 

“…this is for you, Ian…” 

On the floor, peeking out from the frizzy brown fibers, bulging with incomprehensible terror, 

a single human eye with a cloudy scar. 

It blinked. 

The wispy caress of batting eyelashes washed across my entire body. 

“…I can’t wait for all of us to be together again.” 

Sophia gasped.  

“Omari! Don’t - !”

A wet squelch pierced the air. I flipped around. 

Jagged, emerald-tinted glass protruded from Omari’s abdomen. Blood seeped from the wound, blotting out the half-visible beer logo with thick crimson. He gripped the edge, took a shuddering breath, 

and kept carving. 

Electricity exploded down my spine. 

The room transformed. The walls moaned, deforming, rippling like molten wax. A hellish uproar erupted above us. My head shot up. The ceiling had been replaced by a writhing mass of faces and limbs, kicking, twitching, pleading, screaming with pain, screaming with pleasure, a relentless aggregate of sound and motion. 

Sophia lunged toward Omari.

She grabbed his forearm with both hands and wrenched it back, ripping his palm from the improvised knife, but something happened at the point of contact: a melding of flesh. A seamless connection. She couldn’t pull her fingers away, and from behind Omari, a figure rose. Alex. A blonde-haired boy with diamond-white eyes and the mouth of a lamprey, gaping and circular, adorned with a blinding array of reflective, razor-sharp teeth. 

I turned and bolted toward the door. 

My sneakers stuck to the carpet like it was quicksand, pulling thin strands of liquid carpet up with each agonizing step. Sophia’s shrill, buzzing scream layered into the cacophony. Then, a crashing, thunderous clack silenced her. I didn’t think. I didn’t look back. I kept moving. The door frame was drooping, distorting, melting down. I threw my hand out. The skin of my palm adhered to the knob like it was made of flypaper. I twisted my wrist, threw the door open, squeezed my body through, and spilled out into the mall. I didn’t hear it slam shut behind me. 

Everything was quiet. 

I lay in a crumpled, breathless heap on the cold tile floor, until the thought of Alex slithering through the dissolving door forced me to scramble to my feet. 

But there was no door. 

Only an unremarkable stretch of wall.

It took a long, long time for me to bike to the nearest police station. 

My mind was shattered. My right palm was a bloody, skinless mess. I burst into the lobby with no plan. Just screamed that my friends were hurt and they needed help. To my relief, I was taken seriously, right up until I told the officer where they needed help. 

He scoffed. 

Rolled his eyes. 

Looked at me like I’d told him they were on the surface of the moon. 

“I’m not going out past city limits, kid. It ain’t safe.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. 

“Didn’t your parents ever tell you? Sit you down and give you…uh…the talk?” 

I slowly shook my head no. 

He sighed. 

Slumped down next to me, handed me a cup of tepid water, and placed a warm hand on my shoulder. 

“You see, that’s precisely what the boy wants you to do...” 

By the end of the month, Sophia’s obituary was published online.

Omari’s was posted a few days later. 

But no matter how hard I searched, 

I never could find an obituary for Alex. 

- - - - -

Life as a teenage runaway was rough. 

Though, to be clear, I didn’t leave the city. No way in hell. Just got as far away as the geography would allow. Laid low during the brief, half-hearted search attempt, and then voilà - I was free to start again. 

Let’s skip forward. Past the drugs, the pain, and the sleepless nights. None of it really matters, and whatever you’re imagining is probably pretty damn close. 

Social work isn’t exactly glamorous. 

The pay is shit. The hours are grueling. Worst of all, you clock in knowing that - most of the time - the effort you put in won’t change anything in the long run. But it just felt like something I needed to do, you know? Giving the support that I always wished I’d had. It was penance. Something to scrub my conscience clean. 

It helped. 

But it didn’t help enough. 

Lately, I’ve been dwelling on what happened. Sophia. Omari. Ian. None of them were prepared for what was out there, and yes: I was complicit. I was a coward. I was a failure. But remember: I wasn’t prepared either, and the only reason I’m still around is that I got lucky. I wasn’t consumed by the mirror-toothed boy because I was afforded the opportunity to run. 

I didn’t fail. We didn’t fail. The world failed us. 

So, with each passing day, my resentment has festered. 

It grew and grew and grew, and then, suddenly, I felt it. 

The tiniest, most infinitesimally small blip of static in my fingertips. 

I could’ve suppressed it. 

Would’ve been the virtuous thing to do. 

But I didn’t. 

Instead, I harnessed it. 

Made a wish. 

An invitation of sorts. 

And then, like magic, there it was. 

A door. 

A door on the wall of my office, in the center of my city. 

I can see it from my desk as I type this. 

I’m terrified. I’m ashamed.

But I’m excited, too. 

I hear their voices behind the door. 

I see their shadows dancing under the frame. 

I want to be with my family again, my real family, and if that means letting Alex into this city, well, that’s fine by me. 

He’s hurting too, isn’t he? 

He didn’t choose his life either.

So you know what?

Fuck it. 

Fuck it all. 

I say: 

Let

the poor kid

bite. 

Back when I was 16, I had a scary experience. I was going to bed, and my room got so dark that I couldn’t see a thing. Not the usual kind of dark, but the kind where you can’t even sense the position of your hands. I had to blink a couple of times to make sure my eyes were even open. It was terrifying; I thought there was something outside blocking out the sky. It wasn’t. Turns out, it was the first symptom of my deteriorating vision.

My vision got worse for several years. They tried a bunch of treatments to see if they could slow the progression, but I was informed that there would come a point where I would go completely blind. It was a certainty; the only variable was time. I had a biological clock that would snatch my sight away.

That made me want to work with something visual, and I got really into 3D-modelling. CAD programming, to be specific. I tried to get used to working with accessibility features, keeping my eyes closed or even blindfolded. I didn’t want to be stuck without a job or skill when my vision completely disappeared. I kept having these nightmares about being lost in that absolute darkness, unprepared and alone. And yeah, I couldn’t stop that darkness, but I could come prepared.

 

After years of practice, I ended up getting a junior position for a company working with CAD models. It didn’t take long until I got my first assignment. I was making molds used for vacuum presses. They used them to put together storage boxes for snowmobiles. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but that one model has been used to make hundreds of boxes. Hell, if you know a guy with a snowmobile, you’ve probably seen one.

I’ve done plenty of jobs since. I worked exclusively with accessibility software, allowing me to use hearing and touch to better align the models. And I want to be clear; I’m not a second-hand choice. I’m a professional. I’m not a cheaper option, and I don’t produce damaged goods. I challenge you to find someone who has better hands-on experience with their models than I do.

But, one morning, the darkness was there. There’d been a sudden inflammation that worsened my condition, causing irreversible damage. There were no more treatments left to try, no more suggestions. I was stuck in the dark, but at least I was prepared. Still scared the shit out of me, and I barely kept it together as I realized I hadn’t practiced dialing 911 with my eyes closed.

 

I had a lot of visitors in the hospital. Friends and family, of course. They meant well, but my mother had this amazing ability to voice all my anxieties out loud. ‘You won’t get to see your bride when you get married,” she sobbed. Bawling her eyes out as if she was the one hurting. Love her to death, but come on.

Before I left the hospital, there was one last visitor. I didn’t know him, but he seemed eager to meet me. I thought it was someone from the insurance company, but he introduced himself as a representative of a company. A big one. Think international.

“You’re in a unique position,” he explained. “You have years of experience working with spatial models, and you weren’t born blind. You can handle visual elements and representative modeling tools.”

“I’m well aware.”

“More importantly, it offers us a possibility.”

“What kind of possibility?”

“I’m glad you asked.”

 

Turns out, they’d been working on something. They called it an interpretive vision module, or IVM. I got to touch one of the prototypes; it’s basically a headband with two cameras mounted on the side. I could imagine it looking a bit goofy, but he explained how you could easily hide it under a baseball cap.

“We use a small electromagnetic implant, right by the side of your temple, to receive visual signals. The device interprets the environment and renders it in a gradual model.”

“What exactly do you mean when you say render?”

“It would allow you to interpret your environment, seeing a digital representation of the world.”

“So, it would allow me to see?”

“Think of it like this; the machine would see things for you and tell you what it sees in a way that you can understand. The data it would provide us is invaluable, and you would be given the opportunity to-”

“To see.”

“Yes, to see.”

It sounded a little too good to be true, but the more I looked into it, the more it appealed to me. The reason they’d reached out to me was because of my experience with 3D modeling. Apparently, being able to think spatially helps interpret the signals from the implant. I was in a unique position to be the first person to see without the use of my eyes.

And in a worst-case scenario, the implant was reversible. It was less commitment than a tattoo. I’d be an idiot not to try it, right?

 

I got the implant under local anesthesia a couple days later. There was a calibration process where I had to sit and fiddle with a Rubik’s cube, but when they turned the thing on it was like magic. Disorienting, blinding magic.

The entire world was rendered as these low-polygon basic shapes. Squares, spheres, cones, cylinders… all of them with simple pastel colors in a world without shadows or light sources. At first I couldn’t understand what I was looking at, but after a couple of seconds the entire scene rendered again. Shapes sharpened. The walls got a texture rather than color. I could see elevations in the floor. I could see my hands. They were a bit blocky, but I could see them. I could count my fingers.

I wept. It felt like stepping out of the darkness. I’d resigned myself to never seeing anything ever again, and now I could. It was a miracle.

It took a couple of weeks to properly tune the IVM. Sometimes, it would have trouble interpreting things in low-light environments, but it got better over time. If I saw something I’d seen before, it remembered how to represent it from previous encounters. There could be a bit of lag if I moved fast, so I wouldn’t be driving anytime soon but that was to be expected.

I remember coming back to work. I opened the doors myself. It took the IVM some time to capture and render the human faces of my coworkers, but it improved fast. There was this eerie quality to the faces though, where they would move mechanically and switch between captured states like “smile” or “frown”. I had a good laugh at how it interpreted my boss’ face as frowning, despite him trying to smile.

 

I used the IVM for about three months with little to no issue. It took some time to get used to constant visual stimuli without being able to blink it away, but there was an option to add artificial blinking. I skipped that. There were a couple of minor calculation errors, but the device quickly became part of my daily routine. Most of the quirks got resolved automatically through a forced re-rendering, and if push came to shove, I could just plug it in and run a manual diagnostic. The software was simpler than the CAD stuff, it was basically plug-and-play. For example, I modeled a little bug model and imported it. I was tired of seeing ants as little blobs; I wanted to differentiate them from breadcrumbs. It worked like a charm.

There were a couple of other quirks, too. For example, it assigned base colors to people whenever it had trouble rendering them. Irene, who worked at the front desk, had this bright pastel yellow. My boss Emil was a wine red. I’d see them as these square blocks with a sphere head for a second before the rendering kicked in, giving them a more detailed model. It was still like living in a video game at times, but you kinda trick yourself to seeing past it.

Irene was great. While I was probably okay to drive, I wasn’t legally allowed. We’d carpool to and from work every day, chatting all the way. I’ll be the first to admit, I had a bit of a crush on her. It’s weird to catch feelings for someone that looks like a video game character, but you have to remind yourself that it’s a real person.

 

One day, as I finished work, I went out to the parking lot to wait for Irene. She had a couple of calls left to make, so I waited by her car. As I got there, I noticed my boss Emil standing by her passenger side, looking at something. My IVM had trouble rendering him, showing him as a collection of red cubes and a sphere head. I waved at him, giving him my best practiced smile.

“Hey, boss,” I said. “You good?”

There was no response. The model moved a little but refused to render. I tapped the button on the headband, forcing the IVM to re-render. There was a flash as the world went dark, then everything came back into focus. The parking lot turned from a flat gray to a texture, using the light from the sun to cast shadows on the cracks. The cars came back into focus. Everything looked as it should; except for my boss.

I took a step forward, looking at him again. His model looked bigger. The tone of red was slightly different. Less wine, more chili red.

“Hey, boss,” I repeated. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time, I-“

My phone rang. I picked it up and answered, holding up a finger asking him to give me a second. It was Irene, calling from inside.

“Sorry,” she said, “I’ll be out in a minute, Emil found a bunch of unfiled reports that I gotta put in. You okay for another five, ten minutes or so?”

“Wait, Emil found them?”

“Yeah, why?”

The model was still standing there. Red squares and a sphere. It hadn’t moved, and it hadn’t said anything; it might as well have been a glitch. As I opened my mouth to ask Irene one more question, the model moved. It slid across the road, frictionless, disappearing behind a long-haul service station.

 

Coming home that day, everything was normal. I said hello to my next-door neighbor, Job. Funny guy; newly divorced with six kids, neither of which ever came to visit. He was a quirky fellow, complaining about how there’d been ‘Bible thumpers’ going door-to-door.

“Don’t trust ‘em,” he mumbled. “Keep your door locked. Miss Mannon thinks they’re stealing her cats.”

“If ever there were cats that deserved to be stolen, it’d be hers.”

“Harsh, but fair.”

I was a bit distracted thinking about that strange rendering error by the car. I wondered what it’d been. It could have been a stranger, but I didn’t hear any footsteps, and it disappeared a little too fast. Also, why wouldn’t it show them even after I forced a re-render?

I plugged the IVM into my home computer and ran a diagnostic. I went back in the timeline, checking all registered objects. The moment before it registered my call with Irene, there was an object list. I filtered the list based on the lowest certainty, and the result cleared.

Whatever it was, it was registered as ‘Humanoid Figure’. No prior model, no recognition pattern. Six failed interpretation attempts; no database matches. It’s like the device had been screaming at the software to tell it what it was looking at, and all the thousands of interpretive models had given it a shrug back. Humanoid figure was the closest approximation, but only at about 22% certainty.

Something was standing less than 10 feet from me and could only be interpreted as 22% human.

 

I was a bit skittish about it for the next few days. I would look out the window before going into the parking lot, giving the IVM some extra time to check for, and render, unknown objects. I’d get this sort of “pop-in” effect whenever I saw something for the first time. It’d go from a vague basic shape to a detailed model in about a second. I would keep an extra eye on Emil, but there really was nothing to see. His base model had been similar to whatever was in the parking lot, but there were some distinct differences. I’d just been inattentive; he had nothing to do with it.

At times, I’d wait a little longer for Irene to finish her work so I wouldn’t have to go out there alone. If someone was with me, and that thing returned, I’d be able to get a proper description. Inadvertently, we ended up talking quite a lot at the front desk, accidentally keeping her from doing her job a little longer.

There were times when I saw models that didn’t load in properly, but most of it was due to perfectly normal circumstances. Low-light environments, bad connections, buffering errors, that kind of stuff. I wasn’t able to find that particular entity again, and I couldn’t replicate whatever problem I ran into in the parking lot. No matter the excuse, I couldn’t find a simple answer to whatever I’d faced.

One evening, as I was cooking, there was a knock on the door. I was hands-deep into a bowl of tomatoes, so I had to take a second to wash my hands. As I hurried to the door and checked the peephole, I couldn’t see anyone outside. That got me a bit nervous. Peepholes didn’t work well with the IVM, the lighting was too bad, so I decided to check through a window.

Moving into my bedroom and opening the blinds, I peeked out the side. If I stood at just the right angle, I could catch a side glance of whoever was by the door. Doing so, I hoped to see a neighbor, but part of me was convinced I’d see a poorly rendered red base model. I held my breath, leaned a little, and let the IVM render the scene for me.

There was no one there.

I opened the front door a little. I started thinking I’d been pranked, but that’d be a first. I didn’t see any flaming bags of dog poo outside my door, but there was a rectangle on my welcome mat. Looking a little closer, the IVM rendered the cover.

It was a Bible, and it had a bloody handprint on it. There was also a piece of fabric. Something tough, like a backpack strap. No backpack though. No person, either.

“Hello?” I called out. “You dropped something.”

No answer. Nothing.

 

Later that night, as I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I’d taken off the IVM for the night, and I kept feeling hyper-aware of my body. It’s like, when my sight went offline, I couldn’t stop thinking about what other things I was experiencing. Everything felt uncomfortable, and I kept getting out of bed. First time I got up, I used the bathroom. The second time, I got a glass of water. I could navigate my own apartment without the IVM for a bit, even if I’d gotten used to it.

As I stood in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, I heard something. It was this muffled noise coming from outside the kitchen window. I still had my IVM by the bed, so I couldn’t even guess what it might be. I just had to listen a little closer. I moved up to the window, feeling for it with my hand. I touched the curtains and leaned in.

At first, I thought it was a gust of wind. Then I noticed it had a rhythm. Not like a breath, but… similar. And it was close. Right there, on the other side of the glass.

I stepped back, holding my breath. As I did, someone outside spoke to me. A muffled, droning voice that stuck to its consonants like dripping molasses.

“Hey, boss.”

I ran to get my IVM, almost tripping on the living room carpet. I snapped it on, powered it up, and threw myself back toward the windows. By the time I was back in the kitchen with my vision online and my finger on the emergency call button, there was nothing to see. But I did pick up on a strange hand-shaped imprint left on the outside of the glass.

 

I talked to my neighbors the next day. I asked if anyone had seen anything, or if there’d been any strange people knocking on their door. They had no idea what I was talking about. A couple of them had been visited by a, to quote, “Bible guy”, but that was it. Job was convinced it was miss Mannon’s cats desperately looking for someone to take them in. I wasn’t so sure. I hadn’t seen them for some time.

While I was anxiously worrying about whatever was happening around my apartment building, Halloween was rapidly approaching. We were having a company party, and I was having some trouble coming up with a costume. I ended up going for a cheap Aragorn costume. I completely forgot that it was Irene’s favorite character, from her favorite movie series. Happy accident, I suppose.

It was a pretty standard company party. Bring-your-own-booze kind of deal, and no hard stuff. It was a weird experience. The IVM was going crazy trying to figure out how to interpret the various costumes and what they were supposed to be. The idea of a costume party wasn’t really programmed into it. Sometimes it would just cast the base model and an error, other times it would actually render people as the thing they were portraying. For example, this one guy who worked customer service was dressed as Peter Pan, and the IVM just rendered him as the actual Peter Pan.

Irene was so enamored by my costume that we ended up talking about movies all night long. She was a fountain of trivia, and it was a genuine delight to listen to. We talked until the party ended, and when she dropped me off at my place, we decided to talk a little longer.

But, uh, yeah. We didn’t do much talking.

 

It must’ve been somewhere around 2:30am. My IVM was on the nightstand. I was in bed with Irene cuddled up against me, letting an open window cool us. We’d been quiet for a while, waiting for someone to say something. Irene broke the silence.

“Why’d you get that thing?” she asked. “The headband, I mean.”

The question snapped me back to reality for a moment. The answer felt obvious, but in another way, it wasn’t. I’d prepared for blindness for years. I knew how to handle it. So why did I resist it?

“It’s a big change,” I admitted. “Sometimes the change is scarier than the thing itself.”

“So you don’t mind losing your vision?”

“I mean, it’s inconvenient. But, you know, I feel pretty damn good.”

I smiled at her. I couldn’t see her smiling back, but I knew she did. I could hear it.

 

I put on the headband and got up to get Irene a glass of water. I wandered into the kitchen, letting the cool breeze from the open window dry me off. I had a glass of water and filled a second one for her. I checked the freezer for some ice cubes, but the IVM was having trouble rendering the contents of the freezer. It was a little too dark.

I could hear Irene tip-toeing into the kitchen behind me. I opened the fridge to get a little light and turned around to hug her.

It wasn’t Irene.

The IVM rendered the kitchen. The blue and white checkerboard walls, the off-white ceiling, the simple stone floor. I could count the knives in the knife block and trace the shape of the ceiling lamp. But standing there, just a couple of feet away, wasn’t Irene. It was a simple collection of squares, vaguely resembling a person, with a sphere head. It was a bright red chili pepper color.

It was much larger than an ordinary person. At least a head taller than me, but it seemed to change. With its every awkward breath, it seemed to grow and shrink. It took a step closer. I stepped back, almost tripping over my own feet as I fumbled around for a knife. It spoke to me, its voice low and monotone.

“Hey, boss.”

I could hear Irene call out from the other room. She was asking something. I slipped my hand around a knife handle and readied myself to strike. The thing leaned in closer, but the IVM kept bugging out. The model would snap back and forth, as if the position was hard to estimate. I couldn’t take a swing at it, and I couldn’t even raise my hand to remove the headband. I was frozen, leaning against the counter.

Something reached past me and gently closed the refrigerator; removing the last light in the kitchen and glitching the rendering even further.

“Hey, boss.”

 

I circled to the left, slowly. In the dark, the thing seemed to teleport. The IVM couldn’t make sense of it. Its position was uncertain, and the size was hard to estimate reliably. It didn’t attack. It just stood there, and as I circled it, it circled me back. I couldn’t even hear its footsteps; they were too soft.

“Hey… boss?”

“Hey there,” I whispered back. “How’d… you get in?”

“Hey, boss.”

“Yeah,” I nodded, backing away. “Hey to you too… boss.”

I made it all the way around the kitchen, ending up with my back to the hallway. Taking another step away, I grasped the kitchen door and slammed it shut. There was no lock, but it could buy me some time. The moment the door closed, the thing made this awful shrieking cry. It was so loud that it seemed to mess with the IVM, rendering the vibration in real time as a sort of visual spaghetti shimmering across my field of vision.

I wanted to run for the front door, but I couldn’t leave Irene. I could hear her getting out of bed. I decided the bedroom window was the better bet. I ran back and saw Irene on her feet with a blanket wrapped around herself. I threw away my knife and pulled up the window. I grabbed Irene and ushered her forward, but before she could get her first leg out, the kitchen door broke off the hinges. I pulled her back.

We fell to the floor and crawled under the bed. I was having trouble breathing, so she put her hand over my mouth. I wouldn’t say it calmed me down, but forcing me to feel the air rush through my nose emphasized the odor of the thing. I could smell it from afar. It’s hard to describe it; something akin to grass growing in wet old sugar.

It entered the bedroom, huffing. It walked around a little, then leaned in – and closed the bedroom window. That seemed to calm it down. It didn’t seem interested in pursuing us.

There was no way it didn’t know we were under there. It dragged its feet back and forth, occasionally bending down to sniff the bedroom carpet. Every now and then, I’d hear a mumbling variation of ‘hey boss’, almost like a verbal tic.

 

I have no idea how long we were under there. I couldn’t reach my phone and call for help, and the IVM was running out of batteries. I hadn’t gotten the time to charge it. Irene curled up next to me and we tried to stay as still as possible.

Then, we heard something. It wasn’t the thing pacing my bedroom, it was something else. Something outside.

Something scratched on the front door. All the way from the top to the bottom. Over, and over, and over. There was a groaning noise, and the thing standing in the living room didn’t seem to like it. I could see the polygon model expand and shrink, like an animal rearing up to make itself look big. It made this barking noise in response to whatever threat it perceived.

“Hey! Boss! Hey! Boss!”

It took a couple steps forward and slammed something into the door. It didn’t seem to want to break it; it was more of an effort to make noise. Like it was scaring something away. As the battery to the IVM ran out, I leaned my head against Irene and whispered.

“I’m going dark. I can’t see.”

“I can’t either,” she whispered back. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

The lights died. We were both left in the dark, listening to one thing and another, holding a conversation of their own. One barking my own words, and something responding with tooth and claw.

 

We stayed under the bed all night. At some point, Irene poked me on the shoulder to check if I was awake, whispering that the sun was rising. It was over. The thing was gone. I could hear birds singing; it’d left the front door wide open, and we hadn’t heard it leave. Then again, I never heard it enter to begin with.

We got up and got dressed. I put the IVM in the charger as Irene took my hand, leading me outside. I could hear the other neighbors out and about. Job was on the phone, having an elevated discussion with someone on the other end. Irene squeezed my hand and leaned in.

“There are claw marks on the wall,” she whispered. “A lot of claw marks.”

“What’s it look like?”

“Looks like something tried to get in.”

The building manager came by shortly after, followed by the police. It didn’t take long for someone to notice the marks going up the side of the building, having seemingly climbed on the wooden panels. Not long after that, someone got up on the roof. There were bones up there. Cat bones, and a broken femur that looked suspiciously human. Something had gathered twigs, grass, and blue sunflowers from a nearby field and made that roof into a nesting ground. It must’ve been there for months.

 

This was all some time ago. I still use the IVM, but I got some bad news a couple months back. Turns out the neural pathways in my brain necessary to send visual signals are deteriorating when I’m not using my physical eyes, meaning there will come a point where the IVM can no longer function. It’s an early prototype, so I’m not surprised. There are some glitches already, and it doesn’t work at all in low-level environments anymore. I usually walk around with a flashlight to help it render. This puts me right back in the place where all this started; waiting for the darkness to come.

Things are different though. Irene and I moved into a place of our own in January last year. I still work in CAD programming, while she got into veterinary school. She still drives me to and from work every morning. I still dress as Aragorn every Halloween; I just update the costume. She pretends to be annoyed by it.

But every day I wake up wondering if the darkness is there to stay. So far, I can turn on a little light, and there’s something to see. It won’t always be like that, and there’ll come a day when nothing happens, but I’ll take it as it comes. I don’t fear it as much as I used to. Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy the digital morning interpreted through my degrading pathways, watching a simulated sun rising over static pine tree models.

Every now and then, there’s a spot of red rendered in the distance. Rough squares stacked as a vague humanoid, peeking out from behind a tree. I don’t know what it is, but I always raise a hand to it. I like to believe it raises one back. Then I say, just loud enough for it to hear;

“Hey, boss.”

And sometimes, it says it back.

I think I’m finally ready to talk about this.
About a year ago, I got a generic email from a long term care facility, not far from my childhood town, letting me know that my mother had been admitted, and asking me to contact them. Apparently, my mother had developed dementia.
Now, my mother wasn’t a kind woman, especially not to me. I don’t feel comfortable speaking too much on it outside of therapy. Let’s just say I hadn’t spoken to her since she kicked me out at 18. As far as I could guess at the time, she had been living completely alone in our hometown after that, with me being the only living relative. It made sense that I had been contacted.
I did go and visit her. I was curious to see what had become of her. It helped that a place as well staffed as a care facility didn’t register as dangerous to my nervous system.
My mother barely registered my approach when I entered her room; I remember her weak, veiny hands dangling limply over the ends of the armrests, and she was looking down into her lap. I also remember exactly what she said when she eventually lifted her head to look at me: “You came back,” a smile, “you came back up.” She spoke with so much warmth and love that it made me feel sick.
She died that night. I found out because, apparently, I was still in her will. Maybe she just forgot to take me out, or maybe it was one final bit of torment.
There was only one other person at the reading. She was about the same age as my mother, perhaps a friend of some sort. I certainly never found out. She turned around in her chair when I entered, and her eyes went wide with an expression I can only describe as fearful. She spent the entire reading staring at me. I really tried to ignore it, recognizing I was already on edge just by being back in town. Yet, it was obvious that my presence was somehow distressing for her. I could feel her gaze on me as I kept my own eyes straight ahead, and I could hear her breaths coming faster, hitching and wheezing in a horrible way that only served to feed my own irritation.
After we were dismissed, I couldn’t take it anymore. I snapped at her, demanding to know why she was staring. She didn’t say anything, just freaked out, screamed in fact, and ran away.
I told myself it was a problem with her, not me.
Among the things my mother left me was a photobook, one that I did not open at the time.
I did not attend the funeral, but I did eventually decide to visit the cemetery. I was more than a bit drunk at the time, enough that going out in the late evening to spit on my mother’s grave sounded like a good idea.
When I reached the plot, I managed to trip over something in the low light. As I lay, cheek smudged against the wet dirt, I registered the expected sight: two old graves, those of my father and my stillborn sister (the lucky one), alongside the new grave of my mother. The dirt was still fresh on hers. However, as I lifted my head, I found that I was lying below a fourth, slightly weathered headstone:

Lillian [Middlename] [Lastname]
1991-2021
Beloved Daughter

It might not seem clear with the censorship, but that is my full name!
I don’t think I can fully articulate the kinds of feelings seeing your own grave fills you with. I think I ended up laying there for hours, shaking in the dirt and foliage, just filled with absolute dread. All the emotions I’d been dealing with the past week seemed to hit me all at once.
I went back to town when the cold became too much to bear. The only place that was open was a bar. I wasn’t looking to get more drunk; I just wanted to warm up.
I can understand, after the fact, why the bartender reacted the way he did. I must have terrified him, shambling into his establishment covered in grave dirt and dead leaves like I had. He chased me out, yelling, making sure to let me know that I was, in fact, supposed to be dead!
I had a lot of questions (I still do). My first guess was that this was the story my mother had come up with when I disappeared not long after turning 18, but to go as far as to stage a burial? It didn’t seem likely.
Eventually I did flip through that photo album. It mainly consisted of photos of me, each given a brief description in my mother’s handwriting. Things started out normal enough, with stuff like Lillian, Age 2, At her birthday party or Lillian, Age 13, Twirling in her new dress. It was odd to see this kind of affection when I’d received none of it in my daily life, but I suppose even the worst people are complex. Things stayed normal all the way up until Lillian, Age 17, Walking the stage at graduation, but the pages went on.
I’ll remind you, again, that my mother kicked me out at 18. The next entry showed my mother, arm and arm with me, both of us smiling brightly, possibly mid laugh: Lillian, Age 19, Out on a walk with me. And it just kept going like that. Image after image of someone who looked exactly like me, getting older alongside my mother. Whoever she was, she was indeed identical, right down to the little things like the two moles on my neck, or the small scar on my lip. I even compared the photos in the album with photos I had taken at various ages to confirm, and found that she had aged exactly as I had. The main difference, and the one that somehow disturbs me the most, is just how happy she is standing next to my mother. I’d never smile like that for her.
The last photo in the album was of an open casket. Whoever she was was lying in it, dressed in a blue sundress I’d left behind when I was forced out. It was also labeled: Lillian, Age 30, At her funeral.
I did a bit more research online, discovering that there had indeed been a funeral, and my “tragic death” had been reported in the local newspaper. I ended up booking a longer stay at my hotel in order to investigate. I think I freaked some people out when I insisted that I was Lillian; everyone who apparently knew “me” insisted that I had died, and that I was simply delusional, or playing a cruel joke by pretending to be “her”. Eventually it all got too hostile, and decided to go home.
There was a time I obsessed over this privately, but I have no explanation. I don’t know who is buried in that grave, and at this point I’m not sure if I want to know.

Ever since my final year of high school, I'd been avidly listening to ASMR maybe a little too much, almost to the point that I couldn't sleep without something playing in the background.

It'd even gotten to the point where I went out of my way to buy an overpriced pair of headphones just to increase the quality (In hindsight, I wouldn't recommend doing this).

While I'd never gone too deep into the "darker" areas of ASMR, I had considered it during my low points.

So, when I found myself doom scrolling late into the night on YouTube, I just chose on the first thing I saw and tried to rest without even reading the title or giving the thumbnail a good look.

At first, it felt like a regular video: a soft-speaking lady with a gentle accent rubbing her hands over the microphone with occasional cuts to her tapping and playing with random toys and everyday objects you could find on Amazon- nothing out of the ordinary.

The only thing that made me uncomfortable at first was the occasional pause in any kind of sound from the lady that seemed to occur randomly, though I justified it in my head as awkward pacing in the editing.

Then, after about twenty minutes, I heard a sudden squelching sound in my right ear. Besides the slight echo, it sounded so real that I actually thought it had happened next to me.

I paused the video and, skipping back ten seconds, I replayed the video.

Again the squelching sound played, this time accompanied with visuals that I'll try my best to describe. Forgive me if it's rudimentary.

It was a large, open room with a glass wall at the far end, which seemed to be the only source of lighting besides the flash of the phone camera. There were several pieces of what I could only assume was furniture covered by thin, white sheets. The floor and walls looked dirty, as if they were only half-painted. Looking back, I believe it was some kind of store that was in the process of refurbishment.

The oddest part, however, was what was in the middle of the room and what was clearly making the aforementioned squelch.

It was a man who was sitting on his knees. He was completely nude from head to toe with the exception of one of the white sheets placed on his lap. He wore what seemed to be a cheap Halloween mask of a pig or a hog, though with the video's quality it could've been almost any animal.

In his hands was a large chunk of uncooked meat almost thicker than the man's arm and about half as long as his torso. He proceeded to drop the meat onto the floor, causing the sound.

The rest of the video proceeded on as normal, with the lady resuming to the usual tapping and rubbing.

I checked the title.

It read, "♡ LOVE ASMR | 30K Special | Mic Rubbing + Talking Sounds ♡".

I checked the comments. All were the typical ones you'd see in any regular ASMR video, with many of them congratulating the lady for the milestone, not a single one mentioning the clip.

I tapped on the channel's profile and scanned through what was immediately in front of me.

LOVE ASMR @love_asmr_dot_com - 30.1k Subscribers • 57 videos.

Each video seemed largely the same with generic titles, just like the one I had just watched.

Curiosity got the better of me and I selected yet another video, this one being her most recent one.

I turned the video's Playback Speed to 2.0 and skimmed through it. The video was completely normal up until the last few minutes where yet another interruption played.

This one confidently disturbed me more.

It was in a different setting now: an old house with flowery wallpaper and wooden framing. The floor was covered in a fluffy material. It felt very distinctly like an old person's house; the kitchen was visible from a corner in the hallway.

Lying on the floor was a man, maybe in his 40s, bound by tape, his hands and feet behind his back as he used his front teeth to drag himself forwards closer to the camera, though he didn't seem to give the person holding it any mind, seemingly wanting to go past them.

I closed the video, not even caring to check the comments.

On my laptop, I searched "love asmr" just to see what I would find.

Oddly enough, the channel had its own subreddit with just under 90 members. Despite the low amount, it was very active.

Each and every post was of two different kinds- either a favoured section from the "normal" parts of her videos or more disturbing, five-second clips of people doing more deranged things. The titles of these videos were typically full stops or commas, stuff like that.

Curiosity made me play a few of them. Some things remained constant- each one was in a different place with seemingly different people each time, with the camera quality always being atrociously poor.

The first one I watched- easily the longest at 7 seconds- was a video of a family all sat around a dining table.

It was a family of four, featuring two couples: one elderly and one young. They all were holding hands and seemingly in prayer, though the food on their plates was, again, uncooked meat, though this time it had been chopped up into many tiny, uneven slices.

The lady- the elderly one- seemed to sob occasionally, though she hid it well.

Looking around at the rest of the room, I almost jumped in my seat as I noticed, in the corner of the room, was another young man standing completely still, staring at the camera. He was nude and was also wearing a plastic mask, this one too far away to make out. He didn't move or seemingly breathe once during the 7 seconds, though it was too hard to tell.

The next one I watched- and the last one I'll be describing- was the worst in my opinion.

Sure, the others were disturbing, but nobody seemed like they were in any actual pain and one could easily assume it was just some weird online fetish or even some wannabe cult.

This one proved me wrong.

It was a group of men- yet again, all naked and wearing masks- surrounding a woman who was laid out carefully on a table. They were seemingly performing a lobotomy on her, though her open eyes made me think she was completely conscious. The video cut off right as the ice-pick sunk deep into the lady's head, her sharp scream getting cut off.

That night, I didn't get any sleep. I did as much research I could on this channel and its subreddit, intending on reporting it to someone who'd do something about it.

I couldn't find anything meaningful besides what I'd already seen.

If anybody else has seen this, please tell me. It can't just be me that's found this.

Hey to whoever is reading this, I don't know if this is creepy enough to post here but I randomly remembered this weird memory from when I was 10 and it caused my parents to divorce.

I tried to ask my mom about it but she just said with a sour expression that “I don't want to think about it.”

It was 2006 some time in March I think. I was coming off a fever, and got to stay home from school.

My mom checked my temperature and placed the thermometer on my dresser next to my favorite blue lamp.

A faint glow from the TV, stacks of DVDs my dad brought me resting next to it, and Nightmare on Elm Street playing. If I remember right it was kinda boring but what else can you do when you're sick.

About an hour or 2 passed and I scanned through the DVDs Cannibal Holocaust, Pulp Fiction, The Toxic Avenger, Battle Royale, Hostel and Madagascar.

Before I could pick a loud rustle came from behind me and I turned to see a large stocky clown was standing behind me. He had a grimy cheap look to him, like he was supposed to be performing on the street barely making rent.

“Hey there kiddo what's your name? Mines Dare, Mr. Dare the clown!”

He was all upbeat and positive, but had a raspy low voice. I did think a random clown coming out from under a little kid’s bed was weird but weirder things have happened.

“Are you gonna molest me?” I was pretty confident he was.

“JESUS, I'm a clown not a weirdo? I swear that fuck Gacy fu-”

He stopped himself putting back that upbeat raspy clown voice.

“No I'm not, I'm Mr. Dare, so let's play a game!”

His voice got grating and annoying, but I bite my tongue.

“Sure I'm bored, why not?” I say a little intrigued.

Mr. Dare reaches into his pants cartoonishly digging around. Faint cartoon clown sound effects came from him.

The clown suddenly pulls out a large box placing it down with a thud on my floor.

No idea how he did, his pants were baggy but not nearly baggy enough to hide a 5 foot by 5 foot wooden box.

“There kiddo, let ol’ Dare teach you how to juggle.” Mr. Dare's still having that goofy raspy voice.

Dare crouches holding out a bunch of knives. A big grin on his pure white face and painted black lips. I remember feeling uneasy; it felt like a dumb idea to juggle knives.

“Uh… no I’m good, How about balls or something?” I asked.

He looked shocked at me, shaking the knives seemingly trying to entice me; I just shook my head.

He drops the knives in the box and stands up straight.

“W-wadda you mean no, You serious?” His voice now all raspy, no hint of pretending.

With a sigh he ran a hand over his face. The paint either put on perfectly and unyielding or the paint was part of him.

“Fine, let's see what else this old egg has to play with.”

That dumb fucking voice is back.

As Mr. Dare digged through his wooden box I thought “What a fucking dumb looking clown.” Like a gay hobo clown, balding, and orange hair only on the sides, so maybe god didn't love him enough to give him hair, that why dad said he was bald. My thought interrupted by him pulling out a gun.

The gun was a revolver with a ridiculously long barrel, like the ones that when you shoot it a small flag with “BANG” written on it sticks out. He grabbed the barrel, and pointed the grip of the gun towards me obviously wanting me to do the bit.

“No, I'm good. It's definitely just a gun isn't it?”

I said not trusting this suspicious fat clown.

He threw his head back pissed I won't play along. He drops the gun and rubs his temples accidentally forcing his nose to honk.

“MY GOD… Will you just fucking kill yourself kid? You are making this so fucking difficult. What do you have to lose, you're ten?”

His large clown shoe tapped in impatience.

“I have xbox.”

My words must have pissed him off and he got in a squat to talk to me face to face, I could notice how much uglier he was up close, he needed a tic-tac.

“Listen you little motherfucker! I am a deity and I'm not taking shit from some brat, you're home alone and no one can help you.”

Mr. Dare's voice low and angry, a gloved white finger tapping my chest to accentuate his point.

“No, my dad's passed out wine drunk.”

I said pointing to the door the news loudly playing, suffocating any noise that wasn't in my room. He shakes his head and pulls his hands back.

“I’m done fuck you and this dumb fucking room.”

He turned packing his stuff into his box before kicking it under my bed where it disappeared in a faint red glow. Mr. Dare's escape would be short lived as my mother just got home, and stood in the doorway.

“JESUS CHRIST GET THE FUCK BACK TOMMY!”

She shouted and swung her bag at the clown, Mr. Dare blocked it but my mom cocked a leg back and kicked him in the chest with a painful sounding crack, all air ripped from his lungs as her heel hit his diaphragm directly. His back snapping back on my dresser.

The clown groaned in pain.

He tries to get up but my mom grabs the lamp, and all star baseball swings it into Mr. Dare's face.

The bottom of the lamp forced its way past his lips and into his mouth bending the incisors, tearing the gums alongside it.

HIs head crushed between the dressing and the lamp, his nose crushed and broken under the swing.

Teeth flying out to the floor followed by screams.

Ceramic glass exploding in pieces, the weird clown man writhing on the floor yelling and covering his face.

“STOP YOU CRAZY BIT-”

His desperate pained pleas went nowhere as my mother grabbed his orange hair and pulled his head back a few feet and swung his head into the heavy wood dresser, teeth dropping to the floor with each swing. Crunches switch to dull thuds as there isn't anymore bone to crack, now just frail bruised muscle slamming against a blood soaked dresser.

My mother showed mercy letting him go and his body dropping to the floor.

“GET THE FUCK OUT BEFORE I KILL YOU!”

Mr. Dare scuttled hurriedly under my bed and disappeared with a red glow. My mom looked under the bed just to double check. She turns to me checking to make sure I'm ok.

“Are you ok sweetie?” I nod and she hugs me.

That's about all I remember; she divorced my dad shortly after.