r/scarystories

Hey. Before I start, I guess I should say.

“Vote Chris Penton”

Nah that’s shit. I’ve got to workshop a new slogan.

Now that’s out of the way. Hello internet, and potential focus group. I’m here with a weird situation and a weirder request.

I need you to help me get elected.

I mean I’m still considering it. Just want to test the waters to see if I have what it takes. There is one small, tiny caveat, however.

In my town, only monsters get to be mayor.

Like actual creatures, I’ll explain as I go. So yeah, it’s not your typical political scenario. And I kind of have no experience. So that’s why I’m reaching out.

And no, I’m not secretly a monster in need. I am a human being.

And the monsters? Well, they are a fucking problem. So I could really use the help.

Don’t believe me?

One year, the mayor who was elected, was well, you guessed it, a monster. An Orgron to be exact. He gave his little acceptance speech, flapped his little appendices in front of his mouth and then ate the resident mayor secretary.

Right there. In front of the crowd.

See what I mean?

I don’t know when, but sometime in the past, the people in town struck some sort of deal with these creatures. It used to be chaos. Death, fear, war. It used to be a shitshow. But then we came to an agreement. There’s more of us than there are of them. But they’re stronger, more dangerous. So, we decided.

Every five years we get to elect one of them to be our leader.

This was the bizarre… compromise people came up with at the time. The monsters want to rule us, and we just want peace. So, we accept that they become our leaders as opposed to just going on reckless rampages.

Democratically of course.

And don’t bother trying to find us. That’s not a good idea. What we do here is for the sake of other people. Other towns.

You should be thanking us. Other places could face the same issue if it wasn’t for us. We keep them controlled, while they control us.

It isn’t an easy life. I’m trying to figure out who exactly would put a human in the running? You don’t get to run yourself. You’re chosen by a “committee of your peers”. Whatever that means.

So, screw it. Maybe I will run. I just need experience. I need to understand how people think, how they work. I need help. Maybe someone can share their ideas for our town if I explain our issues.

Maybe I should describe the revolting swinging doors of creatures that live with us first.

So, I mentioned Orgrons already. Orgrons are the main monsters in town. There’s like fifty of them. They’re big, they’re disgusting and they eat us. They’re the ones responsible for the greatest number of deaths between humans.

That’s it. Not much more to say. They suck, I wish they would all die.

Starting to see what we’re dealing with? That’s why it’s unheard of for a human to be elected.

There used to be a mass murderer in our town. A human one. He tried to run for office.

He was rejected. You know what they told him?

“We don’t take amateurs.”

Standards are high for politics around here. You’re either a monster or you don’t get to run. Which is why I’m confused to who appointed me.

But there’s more.

There are these, like, shadow things? The umbral they call it. They’re very bizarre. They’re basically shadows that aren’t attached to anything. They’re like little tricksters with a twisted sense of humor.

They kind of attach themselves to your shadow and move you around. One time they made a cat spaz-out mid-air. Poor cat. It was fine afterwards, just super scared. Assholes.

They still kill people.

They made someone vanish once. Attached themselves to someone’s shadow and made the guy translucent. Yes, translucent. Do you know what that means?

Light passed through him. The guy was basically half invisible.

He didn’t have a shadow. He couldn’t absorb heat properly and he eventually got too weak to continue. Every day he was fading away more and more…

I don’t know how they do it. I can’t understand the physics of it. But I know they’re here.

Try not to step on them.

What else is there…

Lempkits. Oh God. I HATE Lempkits!

They are shitty little furry bastards who run around everywhere and are little pieces of shit. I hate them. They don’t do anything much besides being annoying little shits.

They break machines, they clog pipes, they eat everything. They’re like cockroaches with hair, but bigger. They don’t do much individually, but get twenty of them together and they will attack a human.

I saw it once. An old man fell down, on the street. I even started walking to go help him. A Lempkit spotted him first. He sniffed the old man and tasted him with his antenna. It was… so fast. I didn’t have time to react.

They swarmed him. He was dead in a matter of seconds.

It’s not right. We shouldn’t have to live like this. Something needs to change.

This town matters to me. I want to make a difference, to help people. Help my family.

My own family… My uncle. He was a victim of this.

There are these things. We don’t talk about them a lot. Even though we should. They are, well, invisible. But trust me you’ll know they’re there. They are massive, like building size, but they barely move.

My uncle was killed by one of them.

They always do the same thing. You can’t see them but one day you’ll just be walking by and they’ll pick you up. They’ll pick you up until you’re as high as you’ve ever been. Soaring through the sky, like a bird…

And then pop. They twist you.

That’s what they did with my uncle. People can’t see much; you just see a red mist exploding in the sky. I don’t know why they even do it.

People don’t talk about them a lot because they’re the most “peaceful”. Only a death every five years or so. I don’t care. I hate them.

Fuck those things. They are weird. You can see them sometimes. During thunderstorms they become visible. Do you know those old radio towers? They look like that. Or some high voltage tower. They just stand there waiting.

If you are ever going down the freeway during a storm and you spot a radio tower suspiciously in the middle of the forest. Well, watch out. It could be one of them.

You might be close to our town. Don’t go near it.

And finally, Therions. I’m not going to bother talking about Therions. They suck, they don’t do anything useful for society. They don’t even kill people properly.

Everyone hates Therions, from human to monster alike. They’re… They’re just repulsive. Who the hell would like Therions?! They should go back from where they come from as far as I’m concerned.

That’s most of them, I think. It sucks. It’s always the same thing every election cycle. Some creature gets elected, usually an Orgron. They make a bunch of promises they can’t keep, and then their side kills a bunch of people.

The monsters usually try to make things cordial between themselves, but they couldn’t care less what humans think.

That’s why I think I can make a difference. For our side. I need to convince people. Maybe even get the monster’s vote (yeah sure thing).

I mean I can’t be worse than our last mayor. He was an umbral. It was kinda controversial.

He had to resign.

Now you must be thinking. Did he kill someone? Or maybe too many people? And that’s why he had to go? Nope. He had an affair. Cheating on his wife (shadow wife?). That’s not really that unheard of for these creatures. The issue was slightly different.

He had an affair with a human.

I guess that’s going to be our last umbral mayor for a while. Probably back to Ogrons as usual. Those massive invisible things are unlikely to win, they’ve never won an election. I don’t think they even vote.

And hell if I ever vote for a Lempkit. You might assume they’d win a lot of since there’s so many of them. Well, no, each Lempkit counts as one fifth of a vote.

So maybe there’s a chance for me. Maybe I’ll win, I don’t know I think it’s worth trying. So, like I said I’m asking for opinions online and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

I guess I’ll go out there and mingle with people. Try to see what they need in their lives. I’ll also try to figure out why I’m the only human in fifty years that’s in the running. What a shitshow this is going to be.

Catch you later! Don’t forget to vote!

 

 

Update:

Hey Chris here, haven’t updated this in five days. Came to check on it. There’s been some new… developments.

I found out an uncomfortable truth during my absence. I found out who appointed me. It was the monsters, well except Therions (fuck them). I guess it makes sense…

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I was bound to be found out eventually.

It’s not every day they see their eggs smashed by a baseball bat. It’s not every day they see their children being set ablaze by Molotovs.  I really can’t help myself. I wish nothing more but to crush their little skulls.

Even Orgrons. It’s surprisingly easy to strangle their necks when they’re young.

So yeah, I was caught. They found out about me. But it got me thinking.

Why not?

Why not do things different? Who says monsters are the ones who have to kill? Who says we need to have peace?

I think it’s time for a change. I think it’s time to be different. For a new way of thinking. Maybe we shouldn’t just want peace, maybe we should learn something from them.

I guess that’s why I’m in the running. They respect that. It’s the only thing they understand.

 

Hey, I just got the idea for my slogan.

“Vote Chris Penton. For a future without monsters”.

When I was eight, a boy with freckles ran over to me during recess and said, “I’m Sam. Let’s be friends!” 

Two days later, Lara joined us. Orange pigtails and a soft voice.

Then Charlie, glaring and kicking gravel, hand in hand with my Mom. I liked his bright red hair. “This is Charlie! I saw him playing alone, so I figured I'd bring him over.” Mom never has a face in my memories, so I pretend she's smiling.

Charlie grabbed a handful of dirt, and threw it at Sam.

That moment made us BFFs. 

Then, at fifteen, we finally cemented it.

Drunk on wine coolers and spread out under  darkness, clammy, entangled legs and unsure kisses. A constellation of stars. We declared our love for each other; something more than friendship, something that set off butterflies wriggling in my chest.

At twenty seven, I was marrying my true love.

Standing in front of a crystal mirror, I smooth down my  beautiful white gown that pools at my feet. 

“I feel like a Princess!” I whisper, bouncing on inexpensive glass slippers.

“Millicent.” Adora, my fiancée's maid, violently tugs my hair into a braid. After finishing, she lays my veil on top of my head. “What did I tell you?” Adora grips my chin, forcing me to look at her. I can't stop grinning, tears stinging my eyes.

While I am happy, they’re painful.

“Mistress Abigail’s order was to make sure you do not cry until after the ceremony. Do you understand?” 

I collapse into giggles as she drags me from the mirror, but I glimpse my bare feet sticking from my dress. “Wait,” something sharp fills me for a moment, like poison, freezing me in place. I stare down at my toes. But they're so… dirty. I can see filth clinging to my toenails. I blink, my gut twisting. “Where did my shoes—” 

“Mills, are you decent?” A voice yells from outside.

Sam pokes his head in. Half dressed, tie hanging off his collar, five o'clock shadow. “Hi.” He winks at me, before being yanked back.

“Samuel, what did I TELL you?” another maid screeched from outside. “Where’s your suit? 

I twirl again, risking another look. 

My shoes are on my feet— perfect glass slippers. 

I roundhouse kick the air in my dress, just to make sure. 

Adora twirls me around to face her. “You're ready, Milliscent.”

I nod, nerves twisting as she pulls me from my room.

“Can I… ask you a question?” I whisper, as we descend a staircase of diamonds. 

Adora doesn't look at me when we step out onto the beach. An arch of flowers and white chairs filled with shadows await us. I can feel the soft sand beneath my feet, but I’m wearing shoes. “Of course,” Adora hums. “What is it?”

I choose my words very carefully, moving towards the love of my life. She stands in crystal shallow water, sculpted in white, long blonde hair bleeding into the water.

Abigail. My question unravels in my throat when I see her smile. Bathed in radiant light, Abigail is the sun. She is my sun.

“We are gathered here today,” a man begins, when I join the others at the altar. Charlie and Sam wear white suits, Lara and I wear matching dresses. Abigail stands in front of us. She grabs our hands separately as we speak our vows.

“Do you… Abigail Soren take Milliscent Reed, Charlie Simmons, Samuel Hollow, and Lara Atlas, to be your lawfully wedded husbands and wives?” 

The words spill from my lips before I can stop them.

“I do!” 

Sam smiles. “I do.” 

Charlie nods.

Lara’s eyes fill with tears. 

The man smiles and turns to Abigail. “And do you—”

“Milly?!”

The voice is like a knife cutting through me.

Suddenly, reality splits apart. 

Sirens fill my ears.

Men and women in black swamp me.

A woman stumbles over to me with tearstained cheeks. She grabs me like she knows me, cradling my face. “Milly,” the woman sobs. “Sweetie, it's your Mom. It's… it's going to be okay.”

I stagger back, words choking my throat.

“Milly.” The woman's grip tightens. “I've found you.” I pull away, stumbling back into Sam. “Look at me,” she whispers.

“That girl,” she jerks her head at Abigail. “She took you away when you were eighteen! You told me the girl in your classes was crazy, and I didn’t believe you.” Her trembling hands flit through my hair, but her fingers tickle. 

“No…” I find my words, but they're suffocating. 

The woman slaps me, and I see red. Bright, intense red.

The world jerks around, and the crystal shallows of the sea bleed into rough concrete. I’m not standing on a beach.

I'm in the middle of nowhere. I stare down at my toes. My filthy, bloodied toes, chains cutting into my wrists. My dress is half of a torn curtain cruelly stapled to my flesh. 

I slowly run my hands over my head. 

But I feel nothing, only my scorched, rugged skin. 

My wedding ring is melded to my finger. 

If I didn't wear it, Abigail would…

She would…

A raw screech tore from me, my breath ripped from my lungs. I remember how painful the chains are, slicing into me. I remember I'm not allowed to cry—

I'm not… allowed… to cry. 

“Milly.” Mom— something inside me splinters. 

Oh, God, my Mom. 

Mom grasps hold of my shoulders, her nails digging in. “Sweetie,” her shuddery breaths tickle me. “Where are the others?” She demands. “Your friends, Milly,” I'm covered in blood and Mom's grip hurts. Red paints me like I am its canvas, staining and ingrained into my skin. Into all of me. My gaze finds Sam, Lara and Charlie still standing in halo light. 

I am standing on cruel concrete.

While they join hands, walking  away from me into the shallows, Mom jerks my head towards her. “Where are they?” 

To start off, I tried texting my parents as to not alert whatever is in the room with me but neither of them are answering. Now I don’t know what to do.

Me and my sister share a bunk bed together but sometimes when my sister gets scared she comes up to the top bunk with me. She use to just go into my parents room but they would get annoyed by the constant interruptions at night pretty quickly.

Tonight wasn’t any different. I was scrolling on my phone, reading Reddit posts and getting ready to fall asleep when I hear a familiar voice from below me.

“Hey can I get on the top bunk with you, I can’t sleep?

“Sure, sure. Come up here” I said turning from the wall to face her as she climbed onto my bed. She snuggled in next to me and whispered something in a hushed voice.

“Something is in my bed sissy, I’m scared.”

I looked away from my screen to see her beady eyes glistening at me. I huffed knowing she was eventually going to make me go down with her and check.
“You always say that and every time I check, there’s never anything there. Aren’t you getting too old for this?”

“Im only nine” she rebutted as she crossed her arms in exaggerated anger. She then added, “But this isn’t like the other times. I actually felt it get into bed with me.” I figured it was another one of her nightly terrors getting to her so I started moving over her to get off the bed and finally put an end to this charade.

“DONT”, my little sister whispered yelled to me while having an ungodly grip on my arm. In that instant I heard a grown and a shuffle from under the bed. I jumped back into my previous position on the bed wide eyed.

“What the fuck was that” I whispered back to my little sister.
“Stop using swear words or I’ll tell mom” she demanded back. “I told you. I don’t know what it is but I felt it get into bed with me. See I’m not just seeing things”

I then told her to just lay down and I’ll handle it. I didn’t know why but for some reason I decided that needed to actually see if something was down there or if her fear mongering suddenly rubbed off on me.
So I decided to grab my phone, press record, and slowly shuffled my arm down to the bottom bunk. I did so until I felt my shoulder grind against the wall signaling that’s as far as it could reach.

I kept my arm there for a good 20 seconds praying that I wouldn’t see anything and I could laugh this off with her later. I pulled my arm back through the crack and shuffled under the cover as to not wake my sister as she seemed to doze off not long after I told her to lay down.

What I saw on the recording made my jaw drop and heart stop. As the video was playing it showed my phone squeezing between the metal of the bunk bed and the wall then adjusting to the dark as it slowly went down the wall. When the phone stopped it adjusted to a little girl. Sound asleep in the bed. With their steady breathing and I noticed that this was my little sister.

The horrible realization made me hyper aware of how close I was to whatever it was in the bunk with me. I also don’t think this thing was ever asleep cause soon after watching the video it asked what did I see down at the bottom bunk in voice that most definitely wasn’t of anyone I knew or any sound that could possibly come from a human.

What do I do now? No one I’m texting is answering and I’m scared that if I call this creature laying next to me won’t be laying very soon.

The first time I encountered Death was the night my mother died.

I knew it was night because it was dark, and I knew it was Friday because I was drunk.

Not drunk in the fun way. I was not out, leaning over some sticky bar with someone else’s chapstick sticking my lips together. I was drunk, at home, passed out on my couch in the same clothes I had worn since the day before. Whatever app on my TV that was streaming some show I wasn’t paying attention to was asking if I was still watching. Somewhere in my periphery, my laptop screen was glaring with what felt like hundreds of blue-glowing helpdesk tickets, all marked with the same red “urgent” flag by people who couldn’t tell the difference between a candle and a wildfire.

At first I thought it was quiet, the way it tends to be in the hush before dawn. It took a while for enough of my brain to wake up to register that there was indeed sound, and the sound was sobbing. Small, soft, bitten-off sounds, the kind that make your chest hurt as you try to suppress the noises and the feelings until they build so much pressure they have to go somewhere. Usually out. This is important.

As my brain continued tuning back into reality, the sound was given more detail. It had to be one of my neighbours. A woman, probably. But who?

In a split second, the soft sobs turned into an awful wail, and my brain jerked itself completely awake and forced two realisations through me at once. 

The first was that it was, indeed, not a woman. It was a man.

The second was that it was undeniably me who was wailing, though the sound was not coming from my mouth, but from the hallway outside.

Of course, it was not exactly me. It had the shape of my voice, yet none of the things that made it mine: the vibrations of my skull, the resonance in my chest, the small and well-known distortions of breath and tongue and teeth.

Have you ever heard a recording of yourself? It’s so undeniably you yet unbelievable at the same time. 

The wrongness of it all wasn’t only the pitch or the perceived flatness of the vowels. My voice was making a sound I was very sure I had never made, yet one I clearly recognised: complete and utter grief, so deep and dark and breaking that it had nowhere to go but out.

I sat up so fast my head spun and with enough force that my phone, which I had probably dropped on my face at some point as I was falling asleep, slid off me and fell to the floor with a thick thud. My mouth was tacky with an aftertaste of cheap whiskey and cigarettes. I tried to rehydrate the corners of my mouth with my tongue. It did not help.

The wailing rose and fell as if whoever was making the sound was pacing down the hallway. When it began to recede, my phone also decided to let out a scream of unwelcome noise that blurred my vision.

It scared me more than the crying. The crying was impossible, and the soft stupidity of being drunk lets you reject impossible things. That warmth does not extend its welcome to a phone call at 3:13 in the morning.

I watched the phone dance in a small circle on the floor, screen-down, as I considered just not answering. After all, I knew what it was about.

That sounds dramatic. It wasn’t.

If you try to love someone like my mother, you spend years waiting for them to die in a way that somehow still feels premature and unfair, even if it isn’t.

Every unknown number is a hospital.

Every missed call or late knock at the door is the police.

Any distance between the sentences we spoke to one another was tension until it eventually became peace. Rinse and repeat.

We had just recently closed that distance again. Let’s try again, she had said. She always called it that, trying. As if our entire relationship was a knot that you could loosen with enough patience, and not twenty-nine years of us both pulling as hard as we could between the pauses in opposite directions. 

She had sounded better the last time we spoke, and I had believed hard enough in the nuance of her words that I felt mostly anger. So far as my mother was concerned, that was the usual end to whatever hopeful cycle we had begun anew: a sliver of light dressed in irritation, already halfway out the door.

When the nurse asked if I was her son, the only surprise I felt was at the fact that she had, at some point, thought about me long enough to put me down as her emergency contact.

I felt sad, but maybe not in the way that people would think. I would rather call it disappointed in a way that was unavoidable and expected, but never wanted.

I picked up the box three days later. It was small and not very heavy. Also not a surprise. The more useless an object was, the better its chances of sticking around until its last threads frayed in the stale, shut-in air of my mother’s home… wherever that happened to be at the time.

The contents of the box had been chaotically thrown in there by whichever landlord she had annoyed last, namely some grumpy old man with a prickly, unkempt beard and cold eyes. I just opened the lid and gave a little shrug as a weak attempt to communicate something like, yup, that’s it, I guess. The landlord, who had done nothing but grunt the entire time, averted his eyes and squared his shoulders. He did manage to squeeze out a few perfunctory condolences before he gave a final grunt accompanied by a nod and walked away. His hard gaze had given away that he had already formed his opinion of me before we met, and that I was too much like my mother to deserve anything else. 

Asshole. 

Anyway. I left the box on my kitchen table and didn’t bother to look at or open it until its presence felt like it was burning a hole in my neck. Inside were the few remnants of my mother’s life that had survived the storms. 

Below assorted (and expired) bus cards, broken charger cables, and folded receipts from corner shops was a small package. It was wrapped in what I assumed was a reused paper bag, held closed with yellowed nylon string. An envelope had been wedged below it, my name written in one corner in pink highlighter, barely legible.

It was not sealed, and this annoyed me enough that I had to take a break before continuing. I don’t know why. Maybe because even in the case of her death, I was an afterthought.

Inside was a single sheet of printer paper folded unevenly twice. 

I’m sorry.

I snorted loudly. Yeah, sure you are. We both are. We both always were.

The words were written slowly and carefully with some kind of fine-liner, in what I could only imagine was an attempt to look sober. Not sure why that would matter to her.

Right as I was about to crumple the paper, I noticed there was more writing at the bottom of the paper in highlighter, yellow this time. The space between the initial line and the last three was large enough that the soft shadows almost made the text disappear completely.

I squinted my eyes.

I know you hate me.

I don’t blame you.

Read it anyway. It’s important.

I was frozen for a moment as every emotion it was possible to feel tried to wrap its tentacles around my heart. 

I know you hate me.

I never hated her. I didn’t particularly like her, but it was never hate.

Hate would have required more heat than I had left for her. What remained was mostly exhaustion. Resentment, when energy allowed. The occasional stupid, embarrassing tenderness that hit me when she sounded sober enough to maybe be a mom. 

Hate or not, something uncomfortably warm flashed by under my skin and collected itself like a clump in my belly. I couldn’t quite articulate what it was, but I knew where it came from. Even in death she tried to steer my emotions toward her interpretations of the world and our relationship. Even in death she made it about herself.

I know none of this excuses what I did after receiving the box, which has led to my predicament. But hopefully it helps shed some light on my mental state at the time anyway. Maybe that’s important. You would know better than me, I hope.

I left the package unopened the same way I had left the box. I don’t know for how long, only that I was four shots deep by the time I had finished reasoning with myself about whether the heartache and potential intellectual damage was worth it.

I tried. I really tried to give her some benefit of the doubt. 

There had been enough therapy-ish between her first week-long disappearance and her latest apology that I had grown to know quite a bit about the behaviors of addicts. You have worth, and it’s up to you, but they can be more than the worst thing they did to you. There is good as well as bad because the world is not, and never has been, black and white, and there is some self-growth in realizing that all the colors of the world can exist side by side. All of it is true and lived, and neither diminishes the other. 

I opened the package. Of course I did. I said therapy-ish.

What was inside was… nothing like the outside. If the outside looked like a neat package, the inside resembled what I imagined compressed trash blocks looked like.

Notes, photographs and assorted papers were layered and pressed around a well-thumbed notebook bound in brown leather, its surface worn into a completely smooth and shiny patina except for where it had cracked shallowly. The only reason I noticed the notebook was because, as soon as I peeled the paper, the trash block pretty much exploded and scattered its contents everywhere. 

Some papers were old and yellowed, some were laminated, some were white printer paper. They depicted maps, documents, lists, photographs, letters — I could go on.

I remember seeing a few handwritten notes on some of them. Black ink, probably fine-liner. At some point, the word CURSE appeared for the first time, surrounded by random exclamation marks and arrows. Once I found the first remnant of a red string under a piece of tape, I stopped looking at them at all. 

Instead, I gathered them all up.

I got myself a trash bag.

I crumpled and forced all of the loose papers inside.

Every. Single. One.

The warmth in my gut had transformed from someone else’s shower setting to fresh out-of-the-oven lasagna, so I broke my records for both how quickly I reached the garbage chute and how much force I used as I shoved the bag inside.

I heard it hit against the walls on its way down before landing with a soft whump. 

My gut did not get any lighter.

The journal was on the table staring at me when I got back inside, and this time anger flashed by. I don’t know why.

I threw it back into the box. Then, I threw the box into my closet, closed the door harder than I needed to, and went to bed.

You’d think that was the end of it, but the morning after was when the feeling appeared.

I wouldn’t describe it as terror, at least not yet. At that point it was barely even fear; fear has some object, fear has to point at something.

My mouth tasted like I had spent the night chewing coins, and as I stood up, my heart gave one very hard and off-beat thud against my ribs that made me shudder, before going back to pretending everything was normal. That’s why I noticed it wasn’t. 

It felt heavy and made it hard to breathe and think through the fog. As if whatever shroud covered the world had become hostile overnight, spitting out invisible and intangible spikes underneath the fabric of reality that were pointing directly at me. 

I blamed the drinking, obviously. My hands felt unsteady as I reached for the glass of water on my bedside table, and someone was knocking down walls inside my skull. 

So, hungover. Grieving. Slept badly. Too much whiskey and too little water. 

I made coffee strong enough to qualify as a checkmark on some mental health self-evaluation checklist somewhere, and got ready for work.

Then I just did normal stuff. My work includes a lot of forgotten passwords and a surprisingly creative mix of “yes I *** turned it on and off you absolute dumb— oh” variants, so I’ll spare you the details.

Coincidentally, some lady in accounting had forgotten her password for the fourth time in a month. I was halfway through trying to compose a polite email when something tapped against the window.

I looked to the side.

There was a crow standing absolutely still on the outside sill. Its claws were folded neatly around the metal edge, and its glossy black eyes seemed fixated on me through the glass. 

I live on the fourth floor. Birds land on windowsills all the time, and crows themselves are not unusual. I probably looked at it for a while, thought that it was neat, and tried to move on with my day.

The crow tapped again. The distinction here is important: it did not peck, it tapped. It wanted me to notice it. I knew this at the time, too, which made the hairs on my arms stand on end. A small shiver ran along my spine as I looked back to the bird, but this time it was different. It had not moved an inch. It was just… staring at me. Its gaze felt impossibly black and dark and dense, as if it was a black hole I could fall through and would fall through if I looked away.

We stared at each other for what felt like forever, or at least long enough for the staring contest to feel so normal that I jumped when the loud ping of a new “urgent” ticket brought me back to the room I was in and out of the impossible dark I had been falling into.

The crow turned its head, lining one of its eyes up with mine, and tapped the glass a third time.

This time, the sound was as impossible as the dark. 

It was not small.

It went through the windowpane, through the desk, through my teeth. My coffee shivered in its mug.

I looked down at it because I had to look at something else. Because if I kept staring at the crow, I had the sudden and absolute certainty that I would stand up, open the window, and put my hand outside. The thought was so clear it felt less like a thought and more like an instruction.

Open the window.

Put your hand outside.

Let it take.

I pushed my chair back so hard it snagged on the floor and gave a terrible wobble. The crow did not move. It watched me stand, watched me back away from the desk, watched me create more distance between us.

It tapped one final time.

This time, it felt impossibly slow. Deliberate.

A small motion of its head, then the sound came from behind me before the beak touched the window.  

I turned so quickly I lost my footing as my sock slipped, and for one horrific second I was completely sure that this was where I would die. There in my kitchen, cracking my skull open on unwashed laminate the color of washed-out vomit.

There was nothing behind me. Of course there wasn’t.

When I looked back, the sill was empty. 

There was a small mark on the spot that the crow had tapped, the only thing that marked that any of it had just happened. Just a small hairline crack with the tiniest chip of the glass missing.

My eyes trailed downward to the floor, where the missing piece was resting. It was vaguely shaped almost like an arrow with its tip pointing straight between my feet.

The rational part of my brain was desperately grasping at straws while sounding every possible alarm and sending out emergency flares in all directions, which made my ears buzz dully. 

Birds fuck with windows all the time. Glass usually breaks in sharp pieces that make strange shapes if you look at them hard enough. Humans are natural pattern-seekers. I was hungover, grieving, sleep deprived, and apparently one spooky bird away from being sent to the nuthouse.

Fine.

Great.

Perfect.

Good to know.

I bent down and picked up the piece of glass between two fingers, the point of the arrow pointing upward as to not cut myself. It felt cold. Pretty normal as far as glass goes, it’s one of its main characteristics. 

I looked at it intently. Just a piece of glass.

Wasn’t it?

The piece felt colder, and colder, until it got so sharply cold it burned my skin. I dropped it before I had the chance to decide whether the sensation was real or not.

It landed in almost the exact same place, tip pointing between my feet.

My laptop pinged again and this time I flinched so hard I almost stepped on the shard of glass. For a moment, I hated that woman in accounting intensely. Instead of dissipating, the hatred mirrored the shard and turned itself inward, until its sharp edge cut deep in my heart and turned to a sense of loss.

I don’t remember what the email said. I just remember I wrote something awfully normal, which was the opposite to anything I was and had been feeling for a long time, and hit send. I do remember it felt satisfying, that something was behaving predictably. At the time, I so badly needed there to be one sliver of reality that still seemed fair. Maybe, if things just kept going the mundane would outpower the weird and potentially embarrass the world around me enough to shift everything back to the way it should be.

It didn’t, but you know that. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. 

The feeling stayed in the odd space between my ribs and the air around me, an intense pressure that shifted and moved and increased until it became nigh unbearable. Like the piece of glass, everything seemed to suddenly mean something. I didn’t know what something was, but I knew it wasn’t good.

I couldn’t in good conscience leave the shard where it was, so naturally I squeezed it tight between a folded paper towel. 

It didn’t burn through the paper. It did not try to escape, or whisper things in my ear, or any of the things that a decidedly cursed object would do if you were about to un-curse yourself by simply throwing it in the trash.

It just sat there, a cold arrowhead in a twist of recycled white paper. 

I threw it in the bin under the sink. Then, I stood still for an embarrassing amount of time and waited for it to… do something.

It didn’t.

It remained silent, just the low groaning of my fridge and the creaky footsteps of someone above. Normal noises in the silence.

It wasn’t funny, but I had to stifle a laugh anyway. The relief hit me too suddenly and too hard, and the only response I could physically muster was a giggle. At myself, at my mother, at the world.

By lunchtime, both the hangover and the worry had eased enough that I had managed to convince myself it had been some kind of episode. I liked that. Episode. Clean, medical, perfectly vague. A nifty little box to hold anything between low blood sugar and sleep deprivation and intoxication without needing to think too hard about the details.

I made more coffee, I answered more tickets. I explained with a great amount of patience that no, deleting the shortcut to the payroll app would not delete the app itself.

That’s the worst part, I think. That the world continued around the feeling of wrong. Forgotten passwords, microwaved fish, crying and laughing and drinking and eating under a sun that continued to rise and set. Its light had just finished moving across the floor as a blurry rectangle and now begun to shrink while hovering over the fridge.

All the while, the feeling remained and kept spinning itself into something larger.

At some point, I got up to pee only to find myself in front of the closet instead. I don’t remember walking there.

Don’t get me wrong. I remember pushing my chair back. I remember my eyes still feeling achy. I remember thinking that if I didn’t get up, I’d probably get a kidney infection and die and that would not be a great way to go.

Then there I was, in the hallway, facing the closet, with my hand on the handle. 

I let go of it so quickly my knuckle hit the wall.

The pain helped somewhat. It was small and immediate and entirely explainable, which felt holy enough to cast a shade over that other feeling for a short amount of time.

I stepped back and looked at the door. It was just that: a door. It looked the same as always, cheap and badly painted with the same gray scuff mark near its bottom from when I had accidentally bashed it with my vacuum cleaner and then promptly decided, like with most things in my life, that fixing it sounded exhausting.

I kept standing there until my bladder reminded me with burning urgency that I had, in fact, originally not set out to stare at a door, but for a completely different purpose.

I waddled to the bathroom, and it went exactly as expected, thank you very much.

The rest of the day didn’t have any answers or revelations, but it was filled with small and maybe stupid acts of resistance. Sipping coffee instead of opening the closet. Making toast instead of checking the bin. Finishing more tickets rather than looking at the window. Pretending, for the last times, that if I just chose the normal thing again and again and again everything would move on.

By evening, there were seven crows perched near the window: four on the roof of the opposite building, and three on the light post closest to my window. 

When I noticed them, I went up to close the blinds. Pretending normal had almost worked.

Below, and beyond, were more. Many more. I do not know how many.

They sat in neat rows along the gutters, and they were all facing my building. I told myself it didn’t matter that it felt as if they were facing me specifically. Hard to tell which exact direction some nearby black fuzzballs are looking after all, and either way that would be absolutely insane. I was not special. My block was not special. There were probably thousands of them, and they just happened to be hanging here for some reason or another, exactly like the odd one that tapped my window.

Then, the middle bird on the light post turned its head, just ever so slightly. Every bird in my periphery followed suit.

I closed the blinds.

At some point, I must have fallen asleep on the couch. A hangover and… whatever else was going on does that to a man.

I woke with a stiff neck. My phone showed 03:13, because of course it did.

The apartment was dark except for my laptop screen, still open on the desk. For a second I figured a notification had woken me, and got annoyed at whichever asshole would be working at this hour in the morning.

Then I heard it again.

The crying.

It wasn’t pacing this time, but right outside my door. 

It was soft at first, and stayed that way while I tried to make sense of it. Small, broken sounds passed through the thin wood of the door and seeped between the cracks.

I did not move because, again, I knew who it was, and that was impossible.

The person that was crying was, without a doubt, my mother.

I knew it with that same awful certainty I had known my own voice only days earlier, but did not have the comfort of drink to suppress the impossible.

And it was impossible, because my mother was dead and either way, it wasn’t… completely correct.

The crying carried the same frailty as my mother’s did, that same sense of small and apologetic. The little break of breath that only appeared when she was sad, or drunk, or usually both. It was the undertone of grief that was wrong, yet again.

My mother had been sad ,often and loudly, but it had never carried that specific emotion. She had never been able to send that sadness elsewhere because it had always been too occupied with whatever turmoil was spinning around inside her head and her heart.

Whatever was outside my door did not have that problem.

I wish I could tell you I did something smart, or useful. I didn’t. 

I stayed put on the couch, very still and afraid to breathe.

Sometimes the crying would soften long enough for me to think it had stopped. Then it would hitch, or catch, or break into something so recognisable and instinctive that my body reacted before I had the chance to reason with myself. My throat would tighten, my eyes would burn. Then it would break into a horrific shriek that made me curl into a ball and shut my eyes tight, hands clasped over my ears.

It continued for over an hour.

I did not bravely resist some urge to open the door, because there was none.

I did not arm myself.

I did not call the police, or a priest, or a therapist, or anyone else whose job description might include standing between me and whatever was using my dead mother’s voice. I did consider calling for an ambulance for myself, but the terror kept me glued to that couch until it went quiet.

The crying didn’t fade gradually, and there was no final sob or soft retreat of footsteps down the corridor. No door opening. At some point it simply cut off. 

I didn’t trust the silence, and stayed put until the sun began to light the corners of my blinds. It took four neighbours to leave for work, audibly, before I had gathered enough courage to go near my door.

On the floor were three black feathers, carefully pushed underneath the door and neatly lined up on the floorboards. 

I did not touch them.

I know how this all sounds, by the way. I don’t think I am dumb or insane. I know what type of person would write this.

What do I want? I don’t know that either. This has all become very complicated and big, and I figured this is as good a place as any to post it. Maybe I need someone to believe me, because I do not think anyone will. Maybe I just need someone to read my story so that I am not so fully alone.

It just keeps getting worse. I don’t know what to do, and when I finally opened the journal it was an unhelpful mess. The only thing I know is that my family seemed to have been cursed with Death, and I think I may have thrown away the instructions on how to break it.

She’ll be back any minute. I have to go.

Shaggy.

Ray Miller gripped the thin plastic steering wheel of his 1986 Chevy Caprice, his knuckles whitening slightly as the V8 idled with a low, rumbling vibration. The word echoed in his mind, carrying the exact, irritatingly sharp cadence of Martha’s voice from breakfast. She had called his hair a bird’s nest. She had called him a caveman. He let out a long, heavy sigh, his thumb brushing against the worn upholstery of the driver’s seat. He loved his wife fiercely-had loved her since they were twenty-something kids with nothing but a dream and a tiny, cramped studio apartment-but her constant, almost parrot-like nagging over the last few months had finally worn his frayed nerves down to the raw wire. After five straight days crammed inside a windowless corporate cubicle fighting with spreadsheets and software updates he no longer fully understood, ordered around by a manager who was young enough to be his grandkid, the very last thing he wanted to do on a Friday evening was sit in a chair and pay a man to hack away at his scalp.

Especially where most men my age have lost their hair; you’d think she’d be ecstatic her husband beat the odds and could still run her hands through it.

He looked out the windshield as traffic crawled forward a mere six inches, and a wave of familiar bitterness settled in his chest. God, he hated what this city had become.

Through the smog-stained glass, the streets of his childhood looked like a rotting corpse draped in concrete. Ray had been born in 1965, watching these blocks thrive with bustling bakeries, movie theaters where young couples could find a quiet, dark seat to neck, family owned hardware stores, and neighbors that actually spoke to one another. Now, the 21^(st) Century landscape was a grim testament to the passage of time and structural decay. The old brick storefronts were heavily fortified now, buried behind thick, rusted security grates and smothered in layers of ugly, neon graffiti tags. On the cracked corner of the nearest corner, a huddle of young gang bangers stood in oversized black hoodies and pants that sagged to a degree that made it seem as if they were only being held up by magic. Their heads turned, almost in unison to watch the passing cars with a cold, predatory indifference, making him impulsively double-check that his doors were locked. The neon sign of a check-cashing joint flickered violently against the grey sky, casting an unnatural, sickly green glow over the garbage tumbling down the gutter. The city had completely outgrown him, leaving him behind in a world that felt increasingly soulless, hostile and foreign. And the Dean Martin cassette he was listening to drove that point home like a .45.

You’re lucky you ain’t here to see this world, Dino.

The only reason Ray hadn’t turned the car around and driven straight back to his quiet, suburban driveway was Frank’s barbershop. It was the absolute last anchor he had to a world he actually understood. He had been parking out front since the mid-eighties, a loyal patron who valued the quiet, unchanging dignity of the place. It was a time capsule where smartphones stayed in pockets, the air smelled of classic clubman talcum powder and cigar smoke, and a man’s word still meant something.

A gap finally opened in the traffic. Ray pressed his foot to the accelerator, the old Chevy leaping forward and around a turning giant Cadillac SUV with a low, throaty roar. He steered the sedan towards the curb, pulling up directly in front of the faded, peeling red-and-white pole that marked his final sanctuary. He cut the ignition, the engine and music dying away and replaced by the low ticking of the engine. Taking a deep breath, he braced himself and stepped out into the gritty air.

Slamming the heavy door shut, he bent down and quickly made sure the door was locked. Walking around to the passenger side, he assured himself the remaining three doors were locked as well. In this neighborhood, leaving a vintage Caprice unsecured even for ten minutes was an open invitation to either a stripped chassis, or spotting it cruising around months later with tiny wheels slapped on it.

 As he stepped onto the cracked concrete of the sidewalk, a battered sedan rattled past, its clear coat peeling away from the hood like dead skin, its amateurishly applied paint job completely faded by the elements. The car was practically vibrating, its sound system and subwoofers blasting an aggressive rap beat that thudded violently against Ray’s eardrums and made the keys rattle in his fist. He stopped, shooting a venomous, deeply annoyed glare at the tinted windows as the car roared past. He shook his head, muttering a quiet curse under his breath about the total lack of civility left in the world, before turning his back on the street.

He reached out, gripping the handle and pulled open the glass front door of Frank’s Classic Cuts.

A chime rang out overhead-the same brass bell that had greeted him for over forty years. Instantly, the oppressive, exhaust-chocked noise of the city streets dulled, replaced by a relieving, reverent stillness. Ray closed the door behind him and took a long, deep breath through his nose. The interior was like stepping through a time machine, insulated against the chaotic collapse of the surrounding neighborhood. The air was heavy and thick, smelling intensely of sweet, powdery Clubman talcum, the chemical sting of blue Barbicide jars, and the faint, copper tang of old steam pipes. The overhead speakers quietly played instrumental Beautiful Music that helped him to relax a little.

Ray let his eyes adjust to the dimness, taking a slow, comforting look around the space. The layout was a masterpiece of mid-century minimalism. Along the left wall sat a row of old, crack vinyl waiting chairs, their stuffing peeking out like yellow foam teeth from decades of heavy use. On the right stood the main workstation; a sprawling, continuous mirror bordered by built-in porcelain sinks and shelves lined with vintage glass bottles or hair tonic and pomade. In the center of the linoleum floor stood the throne-a massive, heavy-duty 1960s Belmont barber chair wrapped in cracked crimson leather, its polished chrome base showing faint swirls from years of industrial polishing. The low, comforting hum of a small, dated floor fan in the corner completed the atmosphere.

Ray tossed his jacket onto one of the waiting chairs, adjusting his salt-and-pepper hair with a thick-knuckled hand. “Afternoon, Frank,” he called out, his deep voice bouncing off the mirror as he stepped towards the back of the room. “Martha finally wore me down. Said I was starting to look like an-”

He froze mid-sentence, his foot hovering an inch about the floor.

The figure stepping out from the breakroom alcove at the back of the shop was not Frank.

The silence that followed was heavy and sudden, stretching out like a rubber band pulled taut. For several long, agonizing seconds, Ray and the stranger simply stood there, staring at one another as the speakers launched into a cheery instrumental rendition of Singing in the Rain.

Ray used the quiet to take the man in. He looked to be in his late thirties, possessing a tall, impossibly lean frame that instantly triggered a brief, sour prickle of envy in Ray’s chest-a phantom longing for the metabolism of his own youth, long before decades of desk work had settled a permanent layer of middle-aged thickset around his waist. His hair was dark, trimmed with a sharp, military precision, and his eyes were a pale, glossy blue. They didn’t just look at Ray; they studied him, tracking the lines of his face and the subtle twitch of his hands with a quiet, icy intensity that made the hair on his arms stand on end.

Just as the stillness was beginning to curdle into genuine discomfort, the stranger broke the spell.

“Can I help you, sir?” the man asked. His voice was smooth, flat, and completely devoid of any local accent.

Ray swallowed slightly, finally finding his footing. “Yeah, I was looking for Frank. Where is he?”

The stranger paused, a tiny, calculated hitch in his posture, as if he were mentally sorting through a deck of cards before selecting his answer. He gave a casual shrug. “Frank got tied up with something an hour or so ago. An unexpected emergency. He left me in charge of the shop for the rest of the evening.”

As the words left his mouth, he flashed Ray a smile. It was a wide, beaming expression that exposed his straight, white teeth-but it lasted just a fraction of a second too long. His lips curled back so far that the skin around his cheekbones went taut, while his eyes remained unblinking. Ray felt a moment of unease pass through him.

But his work-weary brain, desperate to just get the chore over with, quickly forced the doubt down. If Frank trusted this guy to look after his life’s work, everything has to be on the level. Frank wasn’t an idiot, after all.

He took a step forward, extending a hand across the chair. “Raymond Miller. Most folks call me Ray. Nice to meet you.”

The stranger looked down at the offered hand for a full second, his expression a complete blank, before his smile returned and his fingers shot out to wrap around Ray’s. His grip was shockingly cold, dry, and tight as a steel vise. “Henry Otis,” the man said, releasing his hand with the same soundless grace he’d taken it with.

“Well, Henry,” Ray muttered, wiping his palm against his trousers to rid himself of the lingering chill. “Are you half as good with a pair of shears as Frank? Because my wife will have my damn head if you ruin a thirty-year streak.”

Henry laughed. “I’m precisely as good as Frank, Ray,” he replied instantly. He gestured toward the chair with a sweeping, theatrical motion of his arm, his gaze already drifting away from him to scan the hooks on the back wall. “Better, perhaps. Please, take a seat, Mr. Miller. What exactly can I do for you today?”

Ray cracked a faint, grumbling smile as he stepped over the chrome base and settled his heavy frame into the seat. Cocky son of a bitch, isn’t he? The leather groaned familiarly beneath his weight. He leaned his head back against the worn headrest, looking up at the water-stained acoustic tiles of the low ceiling.

“Just take a little of the top, Henry,” he said, adjusting his collar. “Just a little off the top.”

He watched through the wide workstation mirror as the man snagged the traditional white smock off the hook. Ray suppressed a snort; declaring himself better than Frank was one thing, but as he slipped his arms into the sleeves, he couldn’t help but notice how clumsy the movement was. Henry didn’t even put the garment on correctly; the collar was twisted, and the fabric hung down a little too much, bunching awkwardly around his shoulders.

Henry didn’t seem to notice. He lifted the heavy black cloth cape from its hook and stepped behind the chair, raising it to fasten around Ray’s neck.

Ray abruptly cleared his throat, his left eyebrow shooting up in a sharp, defensive look. He leaned forward, blocking Henry from draping the cape over him.

For a fraction of a second, the other man paused mid-air. A flicker of genuine confusion passed over his eyes, his long fingers tightening around the edge of the cape. He looked completely taken aback, as if the script he’d been following had suddenly been torn to pieces before his eyes.

Trying to keep the deep annoyance that had settled over him, Ray offered a brief nod toward the back wall. Against the dark wood paneling near the breakroom alcove sat a small, polished rolling cart housing a crystal decanter and a neat row of tumblers. “The drink, Henry,” he muttered.

Henry looked over at the cart, then back to Ray, his expression still blank and unreadable.

Ray couldn’t help but let a short, dry huff escape his mouth. “It’s a ritual of Frank’s. He always offers his long-time customers a finger of scotch before he touches a hair on their head. To take the edge of the week.”

Instantly, the confusion vanished from Henry’s face. His lips pulled back into the wide, taut smile, and he lightly smacked his own forehead with the flat of his hand. “Of course! Forgive me, Mr. Miller,” he chuckled. “Frank did mention the tradition to me before he left, but with the rush of the transition, and well, the fact I’m clearly not used to this shop, it completely slipped my mind. My deepest apologies.”

He draped the caped over his arm and turned, walking over to the cart. Ray watched his back for a moment before settling back against the headrest, closing his tired eyes for a moment as the low, relieving breeze of the fan washed over his ankles. The music had paused for a moment, allowing him to hear the delicate, rhythmic clink-clink of glass meeting, followed by the soft, heavy hiss of the amber liquid pouring into the tumbler.

A moment later, Henry stepped back into his peripheral vision. He extended his arm, offering a short glass filled with a generous double-shot of dark whiskey.

“To a perfect cut, Mr. Miller,” he said softly.

“To not making my wife scream,” Ray countered. He took the glass gratefully, his fingers tracing over the cool sides before raising it, tilting his head back, and downing the liquid in three heavy, burning gulps. The sharp, smoky heat of the alcohol cut through the light taste of talcum powder that had settled in his throat, blooming instantly in his stomach. He exhaled a long, satisfied breath and handed the empty glass back.

“Perfect,” Henry murmured. He took the tumbler, placing it on the porcelain counter beside the built-in sink. He stepped back behind Ray. With a swift, heavy snap of his wrists, he shook the cape and draped it over Ray’s front. He gathered the fabric tightly at the back of Ray’s neck, pulling the collar snug, and pressed the metal snaps together with a definitive click.

The heavy cloth fell over Ray’s lap and chest like a lead blanket, pinning his arms beneath the dark fabric and securing him tightly to the crimson throne. He let his hands rest heavily on the hidden armrests under the cape, grateful for the weekend ahead. A chance to relax and escape the hell of work was just what the doctor ordered.

The heavy, metallic snip-snip-snip of the shears began next to his left ear as the speakers overhead began to play a rendition of The Lady is a Tramp. He watched Henry’s reflection in the mirror, willing his shoulders to relax. The whiskey was already making him feel a bit detached, a pleasant, heavy warmth spreading from his core out into his limbs. To keep the exhaustion he’d held at bay all day, he decided to strike up a conversation.

“So, Henry,” Ray said, his voice sounding a bit deeper in the muted atmosphere. “How long have you been in the trade? How long have you known Frank?”

The shears froze for a split second. Henry stared at Ray’s reflection in the glass, his eyes blinking slowly before he returned to work, his fingers setting the blades back into motion. He gave an identical shrug to the one he had earlier. “I’m relatively new to cutting hair, truth be told. But I took to it like a duck to water. I’ve always been remarkably good with my hands. Precision work, you see.” Ray felt a pang of uncertainty flash through him. Oh, boy. Frank, please don’t have left me with someone who is going to worldly fuck up my hair.

Henry guided the cold metal comb through the strands at Ray’s temples. “As for Frank? I stumbled across him completely by accident. A chance encounter, really. But I became deeply attached to him after we had our first conversation. And I think he did to me as well. He did say he’d go to pieces if I wasn’t around.” He paused, a small, breathy laugh escaping his throat.

Ray’s eyes narrowed slightly in the mirror at the phrasing. For some reason, the wording, followed by that laugh-one that he swore had a private, almost cold amusement to it, had sounded just a little off to him.

“Is that so?” he muttered, his muscles stiffening slightly as the cold steel of the blades brushed the tip of his ear. “Frank’s a good guy. Hard worker.”

“He was,” Henry replied, his voice dropping into a flat, matter-of-fact drone. “A very good guy, indeed. Truly one-in-a-million in this world of ours, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Miller?”

It took a moment for Ray’s mind to catch up to the sentence. But when it did, it locked into place with a sudden, explosive mental snap at Henry’s wording. He hadn’t said is; he’d said was. Looking into the mirror, he saw the man flash him another smile, one that made the hair on his arms rise involuntarily under the cape. What the hell is going on? He started to pay closer attention to the reflection, the pleasant fog of the whiskey beginning to chip away. Henry was handling the tools with an incredibly awkward, jerky stiffness. He held the comb backward for a moment before correcting it, and when he snipped the shears, his wrist clicked unnaturally. Worse, he was guiding the sharp, flashing metal blades dangerously close to Ray’s earlobes and the soft skin of his neck. It didn’t look like the fluid, practiced dance of a seasoned barber; it looked like a child trying to replicate something they had only ever seen on a television screen.

“I was down on my luck for quite a few years, Mr. Miller,” Henry continued softly. “Living in the grey, invisible to the world. Until something happened. Something magnificent that changed the entire trajectory of my life.”

The snip-snip-snip of the shears continued directly behind Ray’s head. He stared into the mirror, his heart beginning to thump against his ribs in a fast, erratic rhythm. The warmth of the whiskey had now curdled into something thick, heavy, and extremely uncomfortable. He felt a growing, desperate urge to just stand up, pull the heavy cape off his neck, and walk out into the safety of the gritty city-gang bangers and all. But he was trapped in the center of the room, with a pair of sharp blades inches from him. Desperate to keep Henry placated while he figured out how to safely exit the chair, Ray forced his voice to remain calm, humoring the man.

“What happened, Henry?” he asked, his eyes locked on the pale blue eyes that glanced over at him with a growing intensity.

Henry didn’t stop trimming. The cold metal blades of the shears brushed against the top of Ray’s right ear, a fraction of an inch from drawing blood. “I was picked up out of the gutter by a goddess, Mr. Miller,” he whispered, his voice taking on a breathless, almost reverent tone. “An ethereal beauty. She gave me everything the rest of this wretched world world refused. A place to belong. Absolute confidence in myself. She even showed me how to find genuine amusement and humor in a world that is otherwise entirely dull.”

Ray’s breathing shallowed. Up close in the mirror, the intense, hunter-focused stare on Henry’s face was terrifying. The shears were moving with an erratic, jerky motion now, cutting closer and closer to the soft, vulnerable skin of his jugular. The reality of his situation was crashing down around him with the force of a tidal wave; he was sitting, wrapped in cloth, completely helpless, having his hair trimmed by an absolute madman.

“But she’s not altruistic, you see,” Henry said matter-of-factly, his tone dropping into a cadence that made the air in the shop feel ice-cold. “She is not benevolent. Occasionally, my goddess demands something from me in return for her gifts.”

A cold panic seized Ray’s chest. He went to open his mouth, desperate to ask what his goddess demanded, to keep the lunatic talking while he mentally calculated the exact distance between the chair and the front door. He wanted to scream at the man to get the hell away from him.

But nothing came out.

His jaw refused to move, his throat a dry, hollow desert. A strange, prickly numbness was rapidly spreading through his lips and across his tongue-a thick, tingling sensation that he rationalized as a sudden, severe spike of panic. Henry glanced up at him, as though he’d heard the unasked question echoing through Ray’s skull.

Finally, the metallic snip of the shears stopped. Henry set the tools down onto the counter with a loud, deliberate clack. He walked soundlessly around the front of the chair, leaning his frame against the edge of the sink. He crossed his arms over the the smock and stared down at Ray, his face splitting into the first genuine, wide grin he had seen-an expression of pure, unadulterated lunacy that exposed his gums.

“She demands blood, Mr. Miller,” he said, his eyes wide and unblinking. “She demands sacrifices. Sometimes, she points out specific individuals she wishes to have as offerings. But other times…other times she allows me to choose fitting subjects on my own. And that, to be truthful with you, is how I ended up stumbling into Frank’s barbershop an hour ago. I saw that faded, timeless, hole-in-the-wall pole spinning out front, and I knew it was the perfect stage for my next choice.”

Henry turned his back on the chair as another soft song began on the speakers, stepping a few paces away toward the back wall. For Ray, this was the moment. The space between the lunatic and the front door was wide open. He didn’t care about his jacket. He didn’t care about the money in its pocket. He just needed to clear the sidewalk and either get to his car, or flag down the first cop he saw.

He braced himself, staring hard at the glass front door in his peripheral vision. He began a silent countdown in his head.

Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Now!

He ordered his legs to shove him out of the chair and find purchase on the linoleum. He commanded his arms to push against the armrest, burst out from under the cape and rip the snaps apart.

Nothing happened.

Ray didn’t move an inch. His body remained still in the crimson leather. A cold, electric jolt of pure panic and terror shot straight to his brain. He tried again, forcing every ounce of his willpower into his right arm, screaming at his fingers to simply twitch against the armrest. His muscles refused to fire. The physical connection between his mind and his flesh had been completely, systematically severed.

What the FUCK is happening?! Why can’t I move?!

Henry walked slowly back into his field of vision, that hideous, wide grin still plastered across his face like a scar. He looked down at Ray, his eyes twinkling with an unholy amusement.

“You see, Mr. Miller-may I call you Ray? I’m honestly getting sick of the damn formalities. Anyways, Ray. I didn’t lie to you earlier about Frank getting tied up in an unexpected emergency,” he said, his tone light as if they were having a conversation about the weather or basketball. “I told you the absolute truth. I simply didn’t afford you the whole truth. The truth is, Frank is back in the breakroom right now, where I tied him up to a chair.”

He let out that same breathy, insane chuckle from before, his shoulders shaking beneath the loose white smock. “And I certainly wasn’t lying when I said he would go to pieces without me here to manage the shop. Because the man truly is in pieces. All over the linoleum.”

A sickening wave of nausea hit Ray’s stomach, but he couldn’t even grimace. His heart was a trapped bird hammering violently inside his chest, the only part of him that still seemed to function. Henry turned away again, reaching for something on the counter.

Desperation churning through his mind, Ray fought with everything he had left. He strained his lungs, forcing a heavy pocket of air up from his diaphragm, trying to scream, to shout, to make any kind of noise that might carry past the music and front glass and alert anyone out on the street to the horror happening inside.

A tiny, wet, pathetic wheeze escaped his lips.

“Whu…hh…”

The sound barely carried over the music and fan, but even still, Henry heard it. He slowly turned back around, a mocking, deeply cruel smirk cutting across his face. He leaned over the chair, his pale face hovering just inches from Ray’s nose, smelling faintly of cheap cologne and copper.

“Ah,” he whispered, his eyes widening. “Have you discovered you can’t move, Ray-Ray?”

Ray could only stare back, his eyes wide with an unspeakable, helpless terror.

“Don’t feel bad,” Henry said, chuckling as he gently patted Ray’s paralyzed shoulder through the cape. “It’s a highly efficient recipe. A generous dose of tetrodotoxin-puffer fish venom-hidden in the whiskey I gave you. I must thank you for pointing out the drink, by the way. I had no idea what I was going to do until you did. It’s a magnificent paralytic. Once it hits the lining of the stomach, it takes barely ten minutes to block all the voluntary muscles in your body. You can’t run. You can’t fight. You can’t scream for help, or for your dear Martha you mentioned when you walked in. In fact, if I simply left you here, soon you wouldn’t even be able to breathe. But as it stands, you’re merely a spectator now, Ray. I hadn’t planned on a double today. But the Goddess put you right into my path. And now you have a front-row seat to the grand finale.”

Henry stepped away from the chair, his footsteps rapping on the floor as he moved to the front of the shop. In the static edge of Ray’s peripheral vision, he watched the killer reach for the glass front door, flipping the faded cardboard sign from OPEN to CLOSED, before twisting the plastic rod of the dusty window blinds. With a sharp clack-clack that, to Ray, sounded like the closing of a coffin lid, the slats turned and fell shut, completely sealing the shop off from the bustling city streets outside.

As he worked, the speakers continued to play, Singing in the Rain beginning to repeat. After a moment, Henry began to hum along with it with a cheerful, merry cadence as if he were simply taking a casual stroll down a sunlit afternoon.

The contrast between the lighthearted tune and the suffocating terror in the room was palpable. Ray’s eyes darted frantically against the edges of their sockets, the only part of his physical being that could still fight. Outside, just twenty feet beyond the glass and the brick walls, the city was alive. Subwoofers were thudding. Cars were idling. People were yelling. People were walking past the shop continuously, completely oblivious to the fact a man was sitting pinned beneath a cape, buried alive inside his own skin.

Henry finished with the blinds and strolled past the chair, appearing in the mirror for a moment before disappearing again. His humming faded slightly as the sound of the breakroom door opening came.

Ray stared helplessly into the mirror. He listened to the agonizing soundscape of the dark. He heard the familiar groan of the door’s hinges. He heard the heavy, metallic scrape of something solid being lifted off the floor, followed by a sickening squelching sound. And then, the slow, deliberate thud of the man’s footsteps coming back to him.

Henry materialized out of the gloom in the reflection, standing directly behind the chair.

Ray’s soul fractured at the sight.

Cradled in the madman’s hands was a heavy industrial fire axe. The polished steel head of the weapon was completely painted in thick, dark, gelatinous crimson-fresh blood that was dripping off the blade, onto his smock and to the floor. Ray knew with an absolute, sickening certainty whose blood it was.

Henry’s expression shifted, his lips pulling back so far that his face took on a jagged, shark-line malice. He stared directly at Ray’s horrified, silently weeping reflection in the mirror, his eyes boring straight through the glass and into the very center of his mind.

Slowly, theatrically, he shifted his grip on the wooden handle, raising the blood-soaked blade a few inches above the headrest that almost matched the color of the blood. He leaned down, his breath hot against the back of Ray’s neck, and delivered a final, almost mocking whisper into the glass.

“Now. You said you wanted just a little off the top…right?”

Hey Chris here. Is this even working? God damn it.

Whatever. Hey internet, can someone help track a location for me? I’m stuck out at sea. I need help. Please.

This is my last means of communication. I’ve tried everything else. Rescue services are ignoring me.

God damn it. Can someone just help me?

I’m stuck on a cruise ship, with my family. We’ve been here for five months. And, well, no one else cares.

I’m not even joking; everyone is going insane. There’s something wrong with the ship. There’s something wrong with these fucking people.

Dam it. Can you just track me somehow!? I’m in the middle of the ocean. Heading towards…uhm… Where were we going?

I don’t… I don’t remember. What the hell? This trip, this boat, it’s affecting me.

How is this even possible? I mean, how am I even surprised. Nothing here makes sense.

The moment I set foot on this boat; I encountered something strange. When we were boarding there was a guy punching tickets. Like old school stuff.

Okay nothing too weird, I thought. When I presented my ticket. He looked at me, smiled and then used his tool on my hand.

The prick pricked my hand.

He just smiled at me and I was forced to keep walking.

Don’t think that’s enough? I get it, that’s just one stupid dude. So let me explain some of the insanities I’ve been living with then.

It wasn’t always crazy. At the beginning, people were just having fun. Dinners, pool, sunbathing. Talking. It was all pretty standard stuff.

The issues started when they announced after a month that our arrival was delayed. This cruise was supposed to only be a month. But when we were supposed to reach… The place I´ve forgotten about, we were just told we had to wait.

Okay, nothing crazy so far. And so, we waited. And we waited. And we waited. And days turned to weeks, and weeks turned to months.

People were fuming.

People started trashing stuff. Demanded to see the captain. Continuously called emergency services, loved ones, the news, anything and everything.

And then one day it just stopped. Everyone just accepted it.

People smile now, they’re happy. They’re enjoying their little cruise. I’m not.

I talk to people in here. They upset me. One day I was discussing it with someone.

“This isn’t so bad” he said.

Hum, yes. Yes, it is. We´re stuck here.

The next day I confronted someone else. They just said.

“It is what it is”.

How?! How does no one care? What is wrong with them.

That’s not the only issue. This ship, something else is happening.

Let me try to explain.

So, remember I said there’s a pool? Well, the other day I decided to go in. Don’t judge me, I’m stressed, I’m angry. I need a break. Everyone around me acts normal. I just wanted some normal too.

That water was the saltiest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.

I left there caked in salt, white streaks of dried salt clung to my skin afterwards. I don’t understand how anyone can enjoy that.

Everyone was happy in it. I think I saw some people drinking it.

That was during the first months. We don’t go in the pool anymore. Something, something lives in it now. It’s not a good idea to swim near it.

That’s not the only thing that makes no sense.

There’s an entertainment crew on board. They were supposed to play every week, which they did. It’s an animal show and it’s just two dudes, with either dogs (three Labradors) or those big parrots (I don’t know their names).

Since last month they started performing shows with larger animals. Like, seals and even donkeys.

I have no fucking idea how that’s possible. It was always just the dogs or the parrots. But it’s getting “worse”. The animals are getting bigger.

Lions. Last week they had fucking lions.

There are no, I repeat, NO lions aboard this ship. There are no cages for them, there is no space for them. When the show is on, they don’t even put any fencing or protection around. You can be five feet away from a lion. After the show, the animals just go inside a small utensils closet. And that’s it.

They impossibly stop mattering. They’re just there, or somewhere else. I feel like I’m going crazy.

Next week the show is with sharks.

I tried talking to the staff here. But there’s something wrong with them. They kind of just ignore me? They just look out to sea, yearning for it. Their eyes are always towards the sea.

They look like they want to jump off.

Each month things get progressively weirder and weirder.

One day I was just walking around the deck. Like, there’s nothing around us. No landmasses, no reference points, not even birds. There’s just water.

I was walking around and I noticed five people standing around in a group. I was flabbergasted by what they were doing.

 They were fishing? I don’t understand if it’s normal to fish on a cruise ship. They just had a massive fishing pole and they were all giddy about something.

They pulled a man out. With the fishing pole. He floundered around like a fish.

Then he just stood up and looked at them.

“Good day.” he said. And then wandered off.

I don’t know what the fuck is going on anymore!

There’s something weird the upper staff do as well. Starting last month, every day at exactly 5:55 PM. They all stop and line up. Then they start shouting.

“All hail the king. All hail the professor. To’Kempus, To’Kempus, To’Kempus. All hail the Rebis.”

Yeah, no idea what the fuck that is. They say it like it’s some military chant. It’s unsettling. I don’t like it.

There’s also the captain of the ship. Oh boy.

He’s just called “The Captain”. No, like seriously. That’s it. That’s what you need to call him, the captain.

Last person who didn’t do that. Well, let’s just say I don’t want to get sucked through the air vents like he was.

He’s a… peculiar figure. He’s hard to stare at. I can’t seem to really remember what he looks like.

There’s something wrong with my family too. They just accept things now. My dad, my mom, my younger sister. They just eat, they talk, they have fun. They live…

They’re part of it.

I tried reasoning with them. Tried to snap them from their trance. But they fight back. They say I’m “ruining the trip”.

Fuck. What else can I even do.

Oh, I guess there’s something off about the food as well. When I go to have dinner. I see a bunch of people standing around tables. But they don’t move, they just stay put.

And I watch them, it perplexes me. Their minds, their faces. In fear… In fear, and lust, and pain. From pain to last, and from last to east. Under the water, from sea to gray. And all for the king.

And from pain, to lust and lust to brain and brain to stone and stone to earth and earth to sky and sky to lust and lust to eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat AND EAT.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the fish tastes a bit weird. Like they put too much thyme.

I should specify that we haven’t stopped for supplies for four months and there doesn’t seem to be any shortages of food or water.

Now, even granting all of that. I wouldn’t be so concerned, but something happened recently. Sure, things are weird and impossible. But you get used to it.

But last week… It’s… it’s too much.

We were just having dinner. A big ballroom, everyone eats, everyone talks. There’s always music playing. All the time. Constantly. And it’s not recent stuff. It’s old, classical, fancy. It’s kind of calming to be honest.

A man started choking on his food. And everyone, well, they ignored him. He was trashing and kicking, basically fighting for his life… I couldn’t, I don’t know why I didn’t help.

He died. And then everyone started dancing.

I’ve never been so uncomfortable and afraid in my life. They were so fucking happy. Like it was the most fun they’ve ever had. The man on the floor died with a huge smile on his face. It was like he was happy to entertain them.

This place is wrong.

I am not a strong person. I’ve talked to emergency services innumerable times. They ask the name of the ship and when I do, they just laugh and tell me to “Enjoy the trip.”. I pleaded with my family but they just say I’m some Debbie downer.

I…I… jumped off the boat yesterday. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I remember dying. I remember hitting metal. Hard. And feeling immense pain.

And today I just woke up back in bed. Like nothing fucking happened.

I can’t escape. I can’t leave. I’m trapped here.

That’s why I’m begging for anyone to track me down and save me, save us. I’ve had enough of this shitshow. I think I’m going to find the captain and demand answers.

If I die then I die. At least I’ll be free. Either way I’m leaving.

Wish me luck.

 

Update:

Sorry for not updating this, I’ve been busy. It’s been five days since I last checked in here. I did it, I confronted the captain. He barely said anything. Barely looked at me. He just looked at me and said I was a “good boy”.

Things are… Wait, the intercom is blaring, there’s an announcement coming.

I…. I can’t believe this. The captain announced we’re staying one more year on this ship before we get to our destination. I don’t understand. Why!? Why is he doing this to us?!

He can’t do this. I can’t be here a year.

I thought I was a good boy! I love this ship! I don’t want to leave!

The community here at Cedar Ridge wanted to celebrate the 4th of July. It seemed like a good idea. The weather was hot, the pools were clear and cool, and the refreshments were flowing. The neighborhood kids were playing around the pools with sparklers and water guns. Scaring each other with those little Snap Its.

As the celebration carried on. The Jack was flowing and I got so very high that I decided it was the perfect time to get on my soap-box.

Well, yeah. Think about it. What if they manufacture the illness, then create the test for said illness to require a nasal or oral swab? All in the name of public safety and concern. See, they care about you. They love you.

There’s not an easier way to collect, catalog, and store the DNA of an entire school, or hospital. Then it spreads to acquiring the DNA of a whole city, or state. So now, they've built the illness, aka ‘the scare.’ Then they roll out a test for the illness, aka ‘the solution.’

The test gives you a heads up if you’re infected, seeking help while it’s still early gives you the best survival rate. Get it? But, you see, in exchange for that early warning, you gave up your DNA, and WILLINGLY, at that.

*I packed another bowl and held a large hit. Letting out a long exhale followed by a coughing fit that would put a tuberculosis patient having a flare up, to shame.*

Now…now, you’ve got your scare, and you’ve got your little safety net. Ya know, your early warning test.

You’ve traded your genetic code and your identity away, and for what? Now they come out with this… this vaccine where it doesn’t even prevent you from getting it, or make you completely immune from it. It only lessens your chances of getting it and in countless cases, has killed the recipients from one complication or another.

They swear it’s safe, and they promise those cases are rare. Here’s the kicker, you have different pharmaceutical companies arguing over which stab is safer and more effective. After that, they push boosters out every few months, like they were new fucking Pokémon or something people were trying to collect them all. I dunno.

I gestured my hand vaguely but aggressively at the guy that I thought was standing behind Stoney.

“Hey, right here big guy.” – Stoney waved at me, “Ya fuckin’ pothead.”

“I see you, ya fuckin’ dickhead. I just swore I saw someone behind you.” I looked over at Cal. “You saw it?”

“Saw what, psycho? I didn’t see shit.” – She playfully poked me in the side.

Continuing my rant, just then the music shut off, the party lights lost power and the solar night lights kicked on. I guess our 4th of July party was cut short, happy birthday America, sorry your party fuckin’ sucked.

It’s all the same, It’s not like we deserved to celebrate anything, but that’s been true for the last, oh I dunno, several decades. Curfew wasn’t even extended on a patriotic holiday like today.

Cal and I started walking back to our place, but not before I grabbed a plate full of grilled hotdogs and another with other cookout paraphernalia. Cal didn’t leave empty handed, she grabbed a bottle of Jack. Some old habits die hard, I suppose.

We weren’t even halfway down the row when somebody screamed.

Not the fun kind. Not the firework kind, the kind I’d half expected all night despite the world being what it is now. This was the kind of fuckin’ scream that goes straight through you, the kind your body reacts to before your brain even finishes processing what it heard. We both stopped and turned towards the commotion.

Then the alarm kicked on. That high, looping siren we only ever heard during drills, the one that meant something had gotten through the fence, or worse:

Something had already gone wrong inside.

“That’s containment.” – Cal dropped the bottle of Jack on the ground and was already moving. The sidearm handgun she definitely shouldn’t have brought to a cookout suddenly became very much not optional. “Move, Dres. We gotta go.”

We took off. Running back towards the noise in what used to be a celebration. What I saw when we got there is the kind of thing I wish my brain would let me forget, but apparently that’s not how this works.

Ruiz was on the ground. Stoney was on his knees next to her, hands hovering like he didn’t know where it was safe to touch, because not even twenty years of combat experience hadn’t prepared him even a little bit for this.

He kept saying her name, soft at first, then louder. Like volume alone could drag her back from wherever she’d gone. Not a soldier shouting orders. Something closer to a father. It was absolutely heartbreaking.

“Lizzy. Hey Private. Come back. This is your Captain speaking.” – He whispered a begging command. “Lizzy.. please.”

A crowd had already started forming around them, the way crowds do, drawn by the scream and the siren and that particular human compulsion to look even when every instinct says don’t. I recognized about half of them.

Mrs. Alameda was there, hand pressed flat against her own chest like she could hold her heart in place through sheer will. Theo had a hand clamped over his baby sister’s eyes, a little too late, both of them already crying. That hopeless, gut-wrenching cry. Let’s hope you never cry like that.

Ruiz’s eyes were the first thing wrong. Not glassy, not bloodshot the way you’d expect from somebody sick. Full. Sclera completely flooded red-black, like the white had just given up entirely. Like the blood had nowhere left to go but to pool under the surface, right there.

Then she started seizing. That’s when the rest of it happened.

It started slow. With the corners of her mouth, where it ran down her chin in thick dark ropes, almost black under the camp’s emergency lighting. Nothing like the bright red you’d expect.

A trickle from her ear, a dribble from her nose, and finally a torrent from her eyes. All the streams reconvened on her chin, as the thick warm fluid flowed down her face like a leaky fuckin' faucet.

Her back arched off the ground at a wrong angle that made my own spine hurt. The sound was bone-cracking, like the sound of a thousand knuckles popping in unison.

If that horrendous noise wasn’t enough, something in her throat made a sound I can’t describe and won't try to. It was a wet and tearing sound, like her body was trying to scream and didn’t have a working throat left to do it with.

Someone in the crowd was praying. I don’t know who. Just a voice. Quiet, fast. The kind of praying you do when you’ve run out of anything else to offer. “Mother Mary, I beg of you. God the father, I pray to you.” It was the sort of prayer that makes even the atheist in me hope for a miracle.

“Get the fuck back.” Cal’s arm shot out across my chest, shoving me a full step back before I’d even registered I was moving toward them. “Dres. Wake up! Get back. Now.”

I didn’t listen. Not all the way. I got far enough back to not be standing in it, but I couldn’t make myself turn around, couldn’t make myself stop watching, the way you can’t look away from a car wreck even when every part of you is screaming to.

Ruiz’s hand shot out and grabbed Stoney’s wrist, grip impossibly tight, knuckles white, and for one second, one terrible second, her eyes found his and there was something still in there, something still her, drowning underneath all that red.

“Mikey… p-p-please.” Just those two words. Barely a whisper, wet and ruined, blood bubbling at the edge of them. That gurgle at the end, I'll never get it out of my head. That despair.

Then whatever had been holding on let go. For a moment things were soft and quiet.

Then she sat straight up and went right at Stoney’s throat. Her hands spread and her teeth clenched, mouth snarling. Black blood now pumping throughout her veins, popping all across her withered body.

Stoney was rapidly losing the struggle with what used to be his patrol partner. The remnants of Ruiz yanked Stoney’s arm with an inhuman strength. He resisted, digging his feet in the ground. Any effort he could take to avoid her viscous teeth.

Cal jumped to action and instinctively reached for her patrol gun. Stoney caught a glimpse of what was about to unfold, but he just closed his eyes and kept pulling against the creature’s vice grip on his arm. I could see his lips moving, but I couldn’t make out the words.

Cal raised the gun steady and sent one dead shot through Ruiz's left temple, mercifully putting her down for good. That ear-shattering crack echoed out for far longer than gunshots usually do. It was truly a surreal moment.

She fell limp, crashing onto the patio. Her whole body convulsed violently once, hard enough that Stoney lost his balance and fell backward onto the pavement. And then she went still, really still, the kind of still that you don’t come back from. The blood kept coming anyway, like her body hadn’t gotten the message yet that it was supposed to stop.

Cal turned into me and I hugged her hard. Her wet tears began soaking my t-shirt

“She didn’t feel it babe, she was already long gone, my love.” – I whispered against her ear.

I gently caressed her cheeks, wiping away the cascading tears that steadily rolled from her eyes. I was strong for her right then. But, I broke down in the middle of the night. So I could be all alone and vulnerable. In that moment, I had to focus on Cal, Stoney, and everyone else that witnessed the horror.

Nobody moved. Not for the long few seconds that felt a hell of a lot longer than they actually were.

Mrs. Alameda was the one who broke first, making this awful, keening sound, both hands over her mouth like she could push it back in. Then a few of the others followed.

Not screaming, no, not anymore. Just this low, ragged wave of grief moving through everyone standing close enough to have seen it happen.

Theo’s sister was sobbing into her brother’s shirt. Someone I never saw kept saying, “She was just a kid,” over and over, quiet, like a prayer all of its own.

She never got a chance to live, to have a family of her own. I never realized how much she looked after the neighborhood kids until a nine-year-old I'd never seen before was sobbing over her body, until she was pulled away.

Beside me, Cal made a sound I’d never heard her make before. Small. Sharp. Just once, like something had cracked loose in her chest before she could stop it. I looked over and her jaw was tight, eyes still wet, glassy in the emergency lighting.

For half a second the Captain wasn’t there at all, just Caleigh, a regular person watching another person die in the street. She caught herself, blinked hard and set her jaw back into place like she was physically forcing herself back into the shape she needed to be right now. I’d never seen her do that before. I hope I don’t see it again.

Then the response team was there- full hazmat with faces I couldn’t see behind visors, pulling Stoney away from Ruiz's body, while he screamed her name like that would change anything. Two more of them crouched over what used to be Ruiz with the kind of clinical, practiced motion that told me, more than anything else that night, that this wasn’t the first time they’d done this. Apparently, it wouldn't be the last either.

Cal pulled me back another step, then another, her hand fisted tight in the back of my shirt.

“Dres. Dres, look at me.” Her voice cut through whatever static had taken over my brain, steady again, or steady enough. “We need to fucking go. Now.”

I looked at her instead of Ruiz, because I think some part of me knew if I kept looking at Ruiz, I wasn’t coming back from it either, not all the way.

“Yeah.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. “Yeah, okay.”

We walked silently, the alarm still screaming behind us. Red emergency lights washing the whole camp in a color I was going to be seeing behind my eyelids for a long, long time.

I didn’t sleep that night. I don’t think anybody in Cedar Ridge did.

I'd had my beautiful long haired tabby for sixteen years. 

The sunset is a welcome distraction, streaks of late afternoon gold illuminating the horizon over the stream of  evening traffic. Callie sits in the backseat.

She's silent. I'm not really surprised, she knows exactly what's going to happen. 

It's not the first time we've been on this journey.

The last time was a checkup appointment, and the following, my decision to put her down. She screamed and howled the whole time, and I didn't tell her to stop.

I couldn't. My heart was breaking.

Sixteen was so young. I thought I'd have more time with her. More memories. 

My husband brought up the idea of evading euthanization. The law came into force two years after her tenth birthday.

Sick cats were to be humanely put down.

Canada was welcoming sick cats over the border, regardless of their condition and diagnosis.

I thought maybe I could do it— pack up everything and move Callie to Canada.

But there was logistics; my parents were law abiding.

They supported the current government, while my husband was heavily against them. He begged me to consider Canada. 

My mother sat me down and told me Callie was ready. “It won't hurt her, Elizabeth,” she whispered, grasping my hands and squeezing.  “It's Callie’s time.” 

She was right. Right? Callie was sick, she would just suffer. 

Her quality of life was already deteriorating. Letting her go was better.

That's what I told my husband when I handed him the euthanization papers, and I'll never forget his face.

Wide eyes, lips curled into a snarl, like he was going to hit me. 

He didn't respond, silently walked upstairs to grab his bag and a few necessities, and left me. 

He tried to take Callie with him, tried to justify letting her suffer. But she was my baby. “You're an evil bitch,” he told me, burying his face in our cat's hair.

He was sobbing, screaming, demanding I reconsider.

I tore my sweet tabby from his arms, and let him leave. 

Callie cried after him, yowling and scraping at the door as if she wanted to follow. 

She didn’t move from the door, hissing at me when I tried to gently pull her into the lounge. 

Callie had always liked my husband more. 

She hated my parents, ignoring them when they visited and hiding when they tried to talk to her.

I locked her in the house that night, just in case my sweet, sick kitty tried to run away.

“Callie, baby are you okay?” 

No response. She doesn't even bite me anymore. 

That's a bad sign, especially with cats diagnosed early. 

It meant giving up. Resignation.

“Callie,” I repeated, blinking back tears. I cranked the radio up. Callie loved Olivia Rodrigo. But she's silent. In the corner of my eye, she's curled up on her blanket, head tucked between her legs. “You know I don't want to do this,” I hesitated, my heart lodged in my throat. “It's for the best."

No response, again. I stab the radio on to avoid the conversation I don't want to have with her. Saying goodbye. What would I even say to make it hurt less? How could I possibly say goodbye to my long-haired tabby without breaking apart?

So, I don't.

I save the goodbye for when she's gone, and I can't show her I'm ashamed.

Pulling into the parking lot, I scan the significant amount of cars.

I don't turn around, grabbing toilet paper from my glove compartment and swiping tears from my cheeks. 

“You're okay.” I force a smile, reassuring myself more than Callie.

I jump out of the front, and gently coax her from the back seat. She's so warm, already panicking, already trying to fight back.

“Shhh,” I whisper, stroking her hair. “It's going to be okay.” 

My phone vibrates and I pull it out. 

“Beth.” Adam’s voice feels like needles in my spine. “Please tell me you didn't do it.”

His shuddery breath sent me spiraling, my heart already full of doubt.

I squeezed my eyes shut instead of speaking. If I did, I'd say something I'd regret. If I let Adam brainwash me, just like my mother said, I'd jump back in the car and tear our baby’s euthanization papers. 

“I'm just down the road,” Adam whispered. “I have enough gas to get us to the border. I've packed your bag, Beth. Just come and meet me, and we can forget all this.”

His laugh broke me. “I told your Mom to go fuck herself.” 

“Adam.” I say, my words tangled and wrong.

I swallow my words when Callie leaps out of the backseat. 

“Callie!” I shriek, as she darts into the road. 

“Is that Callie?” Adam yelled. “Beth. Listen to me. You love her? Right? You love her more than anything.” His voice cracked. “Then let her go.” 

But I'm already grabbing her. 

My mother’s words suffocate me. “She’ll suffer, Elizabeth. Do you want Callie to suffer?” 

No. 

Callie screams and yowls, trying to bite me.

“It’s okay!” I don’t know how many times I’ve said it.

Okay doesn’t feel right.

She’s not going to be okay, is she?

Callie is going to die, and I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life.

“Beth.” Adam whispers. “I’m here.” 

“I'm sorry,” I whispered, and ended the call.

Stepping inside, I tightened my grip on Callie. The waiting room was full, dogs and cats with wide, frightened eyes. I sat down, ignoring Callie’s whimpering. 

A golden Labrador came over, his gaze glued to my baby. I shooed him away, an oldish looking woman violently yanking him back. 

“Callie McLester?” Her name was called.

I stood, pulling Callie with me. 

“Mom,” Callie whimpered, as I pulled my long-haired tabby inside a room of pristine white.

My long-haired tabby.

That's what Mom told me to envision.

A beautiful, blue eyed long-haired tabby. 

Not my autistic daughter. 

For a few years me and my friends have been seeing stuff in the woods you know things that you really can't explain we heard weird noises seen weird things but nothing to abrupt nothing to out there but one day we start we decided to start taking pictures of the woods to see if we could see anything else you know we look back at the pictures later to catch anything that we might have not seen in the moment and the first few times we didn't really see anything until we started doing it more and more and we started seeing things things that could be explained but are just too much of a coincidence to be nothing and we were seeing these for a few months and then we stopped because we saw something unexplainable we saw a face in the woods it was it was a clown face but not like a circus clown like a killer clown it was it was missing a jaw it had its jaw removed and after that we stopped taking pictures of the woods and we kind of just forgot about the whole thing until recently we had a friend stop over and hang out with us so we had a trio so we thought you know since he was here we could do it with him because we also we used to do these things as a group together and since he came back you know he moved away since he came back we could do these things again as a trio so we decided to go and take pictures of the woods so it was it was dark out it was about 9:30 it wasn't completely dark but it was dark enough to where we had to use night shot on our phones so we were walking on the outskirts of the woods taking pictures into big open clearings now the sky outside was blue it wasn't completely black but inside the woods was pitch dark because of all the trees this happened in summertime so everything was in full bloom so the woods were completely and totally dark and we were taking the pictures into the woods and we didn't think much of it now me and my other friend will call him James for the sake of being anonymous me and James used to do this all the time before other friends who will name Kyle for the same reason came to hang out with us so me and James would do this all the time and we've seen things through the pictures that we shouldn't have been seeing long lanky creatures tall ones standing in the street lights ladies and white dresses with long black hair with no Jaws we've seen some things and every time we see it we run so we run and we don't stop running until we get to safety being the house so so we know what to do when we see things now in previous times I've taken the picture and through the camera lens I've seen these things and right before the picture was about to be taken they would if they would run away and they would only catch the picture would only catch the black spot where they were now because of these things that were happening we knew to be very careful about the things in the woods so we were walking on the outskirts taking pictures and in the corner of my eye I saw something I snapped a picture of it and I was about to keep moving when I saw the thing move and when I saw it move I gave the signal to me and my friends to run me Kyle and James ran as fast as we possibly could until we got to safety then when we got back to the house we reviewed the pictures and in the pictures we saw four notable things one of them was a lady she was white she was clear she was not human you could see her through the woods she was very bright and when we took we scrolled back because I took pictures of the same spot multiple times and when I looked back at the other pictures she was gone and I do have proof of this too you just have to DM me for it so we took the picture and we were scrolling and we kept scrolling until we saw a face now at first it was just a face it looked like a clown you know it had the nose the mouth the mouth had serrated teeth in it it had a balding spot on the top of its head normal clown well as normal as I can get then we look down and we saw its hand the hand was holding a knife now we took multiple pictures of that spot too and in every single one of the pictures the clown was there holding the knife until the very last one were it disappeared and that's when me and my friends started to run and then we went back to the house after we started after we were done taking the pictures we started hearing something tapping on the Windows rattling then we heard a baby crying and I really cannot explain to you guys what it was but that's what we heard and after that you know with much trouble we went to sleep and nothing happened, but yeah that's it that's the story, PS sorry for the long story but It needs tk be heard all names were changed but this happened in staten island.

It wasn't out of the ordinary. She drew pictures all the time, putting crayon to paper every waking moment.

Such a sweet kid. Tragic circumstances.

Never said a word. Just smiled and handed you a drawing.

Sometimes she would spend hours on one picture, trying her hardest to get it just right. Other times she'd scribble a line or two, and then it'd be onto the next. The staff collected each one and put them into a large binder, so she could revisit them later on. But she never did.

The staff doted on her constantly, making sure she always had everything she needed, and then some. There were stacks of paper and boxes of materials for her to use, along with dolls and other toys.

But she liked to draw.

Most nights, she would fall asleep holding a crayon, then wake up in the morning and continue where she left off.

Sometimes we'd find her drawing in the middle of the night. No light at all, just scribbling away. The sound of wax dragging against paper cutting through the dead silence.

It was her therapy, and we hoped it would help her remember something.

Remember anything.

But despite her situation, she was always smiling. I wondered what she was thinking and how I could reach her. To help her get past that mental barrier. Then we could find out what really happened to her family.

Strangest case I've ever heard.

A family of 6 is found deceased except for the little girl. They are essentially crushed, or imploded, by an unknown force, with no exterior signs of trauma. That information wasn't on the official report.

The child has not spoken since. No other family. Communication is minimal.

Sometimes I felt she wanted to say something, but then would freeze abruptly and turn back to her pictures.

She loved sitting at the large bay window that overlooked the forest and mountains. Day and night.

Every morning she would look up from her drawing and greet me with a smile, and I would ask the routine questions, hoping her situation had somehow improved overnight.

Things went on much the same for many months.

But on one particular day, something changed.

For the first time, I saw sadness in her eyes. I approached her, but it felt like she was not happy to see me. Visibly upset.

She finished hastily scribbling the last of her lines, turned the page over and pushed it towards me. Almost reluctantly. Truth be told, I don't even remember picking up the damn thing.

The image wasn't of the usual happy-go-lucky people, places and things. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was looking at a strange figure, hiding in darkness.

Flooded with nausea, a suffocating dread consumed me.

It was hiding in shadow, almost imperceptible. But very much there.

Smiling.

My mind tried coming up with a reason as to how and why this child would create such horrifying imagery. A glimpse into a moment that should not be seen.

It was all done in a muddy mix of colors. Limbs too long for its body, with the faintest red pin pricks floating above the smile. It was so frightening that it stole any good thoughts left inside my head.

It felt like the embodiment of... Evil.

There's no better way to describe it.

The stare was horrifying. But I couldn't look away.

Something was watching me. Latching onto me.

All of this from a damn piece of paper. A stupid scribble. A kid's drawing.

I tried shaking it off, but it felt like something was pulling me down.

The patient was back to drawing her regular artwork shortly after, and I sat cowering in my office, wondering about the picture that lay face down on my desk.

Obsessing over it.

Doubting what I saw.

I wanted to take another look to confirm my suspicions. Just a quick peek would do. But I was dying inside.

So I burned it.

I took it into the bathroom sink and set it on fire. Pile of ashes and soot flowing down the drain. Long gone. I can't take it back now, but I really wish I could.

Because that's when I started seeing things.

In the periphery of my vision when I'd wake up.

Looking in the rear-view mirror when driving to work.

Peeking out from the open doorway while I watch TV.

Kneeling beside me as I'm falling asleep.

It's always watching me. The figure.

At this point, I don't think it will ever go away.

It's been days since I've gone back to work. 'A family emergency,' I told them.

But little do they know. I can't face them. Not like this.

I still have so many questions. Why did it have to be me? Has she drawn these pictures before? Will it happen to someone else?

It's watching me type this out right now.

The figure.

I wonder if it can read this.

It's filling up more of my vision each day.

It was barely noticeable at first, but now it's trying to trick me into looking at it. Acknowledging it.

I don't even want to open my eyes anymore.

I'm scared.

I still haven't looked directly at it.

But I can tell it's smiling.

I’m a long-haul trucker.

Or at least I was till the shipping company I had hauled for fired me after I lost a shipment last winter.

“Sorry, Mitch, we just can’t take any chances.” The regional manager said as he handed me the severance package.

I spent months applying to various trucking groups, but with no luck. No one wants to hire a driver who flipped an 18-wheeler on the highway, nearly crushing a family’s minivan. I was about to give up my search and change my career path when a new listing caught my eye:

DRIVERS WANTED

The Waylon Shipping Company is looking for talented drivers to haul across the western United States. If you want to join our family, apply below!

REQUIRMENTS

Willing to drive overnight; we don’t operate in the daytime hours.

Able and willing to drive alone.

A calm and level head.

Willing to relocate to Ely, Nevada

PAY AND BENEFITS

We are happy to offer a generous $2.20 per mile!

We provide eye and dental!

I stared in disbelief at the ad; that pay was nearly triple what my former company offered. I reread the listing three times, convinced I had missed a decimal point somewhere. When I couldn't find one, I submitted my application. After a week, I hadn’t heard anything and figured they had seen my record. So, I was quite surprised to receive a call from Nevada.

“Hello?” I answered

“Yes, hello. Am I speaking to Mitchell?”

“Yes, that’s me,” I replied

“Fantastic! My name is Harvey from the Waylon Shipping Company. We received your application and are excited to see if you are a fit for our driving family. Do you have some time for a few questions?”

I perked up at that. “Yes! I’m free now.”

“Great, well, first question: are you willing to relocate to our hometown of Ely, Nevada?”

I shrugged to myself. “Yeah, I got nothing tying me down.”

“Good to hear,” the phone replied. “Next question: have you ever had an accident?”

I swallowed. “Unfortunately, yeah. Last winter I rolled a semi; it cost me my last position.”

The phone was quiet for a moment before saying

“I see. Well, here at Waylon, we believe in second chances; everyone makes mistakes and that certainly doesn’t disqualify you.”

I was shocked; every other interview I had ended the moment I mentioned my crash. Stammering I replied

“Well, thank you, that’s really kind of you.”

“Of course, next question: have you ever picked up a hitchhiker?”

It was an odd question, but I answered honestly, “No, never.”

“Excellent. We haven't had much luck with drivers who pick people up.”

I was silent, but the voice continued

“Last question, Mitch, are you a family man?”

That question rubbed me wrong; with a dry throat, I said

“No, it’s just me.”

“Makes this job easier, Mitch. Thanks for your answers, and I’m pleased to be able to offer you a position at WSC. If you accept, are you able to relocate within 72 hours?”

Glancing around my already bare apartment, I answered

“Yeah, that shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Wonderful, report to the Waylon headquarters at 7:30 PM three days from now.”

 It took a grand total of 4 hours to get all of my earthly possessions packed in the back of my pickup truck. Driving from New England to Nevada is no small feat, and I was thankful that I had been given several days. The drive filled me with hope; nearly everyone had given up on me. And I nearly gave up on myself. I wasn’t going to waste this second chance Waylon was giving me.

Two days later, I arrived in Ely, Nevada. I checked into an extended-stay hotel that would become my home for the time being. I spent the third day relaxing and familiarizing myself with Ely. Nevada has a way of making you feel like you’ve left true civilization behind. Ely felt like the last town before the map just gave up. It felt isolated in a way I'd never experienced back in New England.

That evening, I prepared for work; I realized that I didn’t know if I’d be driving tonight or just going through some sort of orientation. Even though I doubted they would have me drive my first night, I decided to be prepared just in case. I packed a little overnight bag with fresh clothes and toiletries. Along with snacks and plenty of water. Then I hopped into my truck and drove over to Waylon’s.

Waylon’s headquarters was nothing exciting, just a small old building on the outskirts of town. It had a large fenced-in lot that was home to about a dozen semis. Every truck was identical. Same black paint. Same bright yellow ‘W’ on the door. Even parked side by side, it was hard to tell one from another. In front of the building was a small, cracked parking lot, guarded by a large sign that read: “Waylon Shipping Company: We drive because We care.”

I walked in the front door to an old, musty lobby. It looked like it hadn’t changed since the late 90s. Sitting in the corner was an older man. As I entered, he slowly rose to his feet. Slowly, he hobbled over to me. He reached a wrinkled hand to me

“You’re Mitchell, right?”

“Mitch,” I corrected him as I grasped his hand. “Yeah, that’s me.”

He nodded. “Harvey couldn’t make it and wanted me to get you squared away. I’m Bill”

“Good to meet you, Bill.”

He gestured down the hallway as he said

“Let’s move to the back; we got a lot of ground to cover.”

I followed him to a small conference room in the back. It was grimy and smelled of cigarette smoke and Febreze. As we took our seats, Bill looked at me and gave a slight smirk.

“I bet you got a lot of questions huh?"

I nodded. “A few come to mind, yeah.”

“Well, I’ll start at the beginning. Waylon Shipping is an essential part of the infrastructure of eastern Nevada and western Utah.”

He swallowed before continuing

“We’re one of the few companies hauling goods to the small towns that make up this region. The route we run, the one you’ll get really used to, is along Highway 50 from here in Ely to South Lake Tahoe.”

I nodded, urging him to continue.

“Now this stretch of road is empty, real empty. It’s the most barren stretch of road in the lower 48. That’s part of the reason bigger companies don’t run it, and it falls to us. We always run at night because we’ve found that the high heats of the day are hard on the rigs. We’ve had less break downs since switching to nights.”

He stared at me for a moment before resuming

“What you’ll be doing is making runs. Twice a week you’ll drive an empty trailer down to South Lake Tahoe, spend the day at a hotel, then return the following night with full trailer of goods from our suppliers. Got it?”

I shrugged and said

“Seems simple enough.”

He ran his hand through his hair

“Yeah, sounds that way doesn’t it?”

I was about to ask what he meant, but he quickly changed the subject

“So what do you say? Ready for your first run?”

“What? You mean tonight?” I said surprised

He nodded. “Yep, we’re currently down a guy, so it’s all hands on deck. I just need a copy of your license, and you’ll need to sign the contract.”

After I signed the contract, Bill and I walked out to the lot. He pointed to one of the Black semis

“You’ll be in number 3 for now.”

As he stared at the truck, I noticed his jaw tighten.

“This was Brad’s truck.”

He swallowed hard

“But he’s not with us anymore, so she’s all yours,” he said as he turned to me

“Any advice before I head out?” I asked, hoping to get as much information out of him as I could.

“There are a few jerry cans in the cab, and I recommend filling them up before you leave town. There are very few gas stops along the way, so you really need to plan out your stops and make sure you have enough fuel.”

I nodded slowly, suddenly becoming nervous.

He ushered me to the truck.

“Go on, you’ll be fine, just follow the rules.”

"What rules?"

Bill didn't answer immediately, but when he did, all he said was

"They're taped to the wheel."

Without another word, he turned and walked away, leaving me alone in the lot.

Shrugging, I walked to the truck and climbed up into the cab. Shutting the door behind me, I quickly looked around at the standard cab I was in before turning to the steering wheel. Taped to the steering wheel was a single sheet of yellowed printer paper. It read:

RULES FOR DRIVING HIGHWAY 50 AT NIGHT:

1.     The only real gas stop is the BP in Austin; DO NOT STOP AT ANY OTHER GAS STATIONS.

2.     Eureka, Dayton, and Fallon are daytime-only cities. Never stop there at night.

3.     If you pass a weigh station, pull in and weigh the trailer, even if the lights are off. Your trailer is empty on the journey out.

4.     If another Waylon truck passes you heading east, call dispatch immediately and report the truck number. There should never be more than one Waylon truck on Highway 50 at a time.

5.     Do not enter any town that appears before Austin. There are no towns between Ely and Austin.

6.     If you hear someone knocking on the cab, do not stop to inspect it. Continue driving until you reach Austin.

7.     If your truck breaks down, call dispatch and do not exit the cab. The only places you can get out of the truck are Austin and anywhere between mile 362 and mile 401.

8.     If every radio station goes silent at once, pull over and wait 12 minutes.

9.     If you see lights in the desert that remain the same distance away for more than ten miles, stop watching them.

The bottom of the page was roughly torn, as if it had been hastily ripped from a notebook. I snorted.

"Very funny."

I looked out the windshield, half expecting Bill to be standing somewhere in the lot watching me through the darkness. Nobody was there. The lot sat empty beneath the yellow glow of the floodlights. I turned the key in the ignition, and the engine roared to life. The black beast of a vehicle shuffled its way out of the lot as I began my first and my last journey with Waylon.

The first leg of the journey was short. Roughly about 10 minutes from Waylon’s lot to Ely’s nearest gas station. It was a run-down, locally owned place with heavy greenish-white lights that lit up its small parking lot and the desert that surrounded it. As I stepped down from the cab, I looked around and realized this was the final stop for quite some time; I had better get the most out of it. I started the gas pump and slowly walked into the gas station.

It was a dingy little place, its flickering lights illuminated old shelves filled with dusty, probably long-expired snacks. I found my way to the lone drink cooler and snatched a few cheap energy drinks. Behind the counter was a middle-aged man who clearly didn’t care for his appearance. His rounded belly peeped out from beneath a too-small, stained T-shirt, and a patchy, unkept beard covered his face. He nodded lazily at me as I approached. He scanned my items, and as he did, he glanced out the window at my black semi.

“You’re drivin’ for Waylon, huh?” he proclaimed in a gruff voice

I meant his gaze, “Yeah. Just got hired, first night, actually."

He nodded slowly before declaring

“Tell you what,” he slid the drinks over the counter

“This one's on us, welcome to the area.”

I smiled, “Well, I appreciate it, thanks a lot.”

As I walked out the front door, I barely heard him quietly say

“Good luck tonight, mister.”

It didn’t take long for all signs of humanity to disappear in the rearview mirror. The only evidence that any human had ever set foot here was the worn and cracked asphalt path that snaked its way through the tree-dotted hills. The road was wide open and completely empty. I couldn’t help but smile and relax a bit. I thought to myself

“If this is the route, this will be the best job I’ve ever had.”

I flipped on the radio and found a classic rock station, and cracked open one of the energy drinks. Soon, I realized I should have grabbed some food in Ely as I was beginning to get hungry.  Looking at the GPS, I saw that there were no stops until Eureka, nearly an hour and a half away.

“I’ll have to stop there and grab a burger,” I muttered to myself.

The desert was beautiful under the gentle light of the moon. I had never seen such a clear night sky. I settled into a passive enjoyment of the drive. In the thirty minutes I had been driving, I hadn’t seen any other cars. The isolation was both calming and eerie. And as the radio continued its tunes, I found myself humming along. Then I heard it. A gentle, quiet tapping.

It was on my right; it sounded like a single finger tapping on a window

Tap

Tap

Tap

I jumped slightly at the unexpected sound before quickly glancing over to the passenger side window, half expecting to see a horrible creature filling the whole window, but there was nothing, just the countryside flying by. I tried to convince myself that it was nothing, maybe a stray pebble bouncing off the windshield, or background noise from the radio. These explanations largely satisfied me, and I soon went back to enjoying the drive. But about five minutes later, I heard it again, a little louder, a little firmer

Tap

Tap

Tap

I swallowed hard and slowly turned my eyes to the empty seat next to me. The window was empty. I silently told myself to get a grip as my focus returned to the road. Five minutes later, it was back. Too loud to be a pebble, too clear to be from the radio.

Tap

Tap

Tap

My hands grew clammy, and I forced myself to ignore it this time. But five minutes later, the tapping was replaced with loud pounding

Bang

Bang

Bang

It shook the cab, and right away I told myself

“There must be something loose over there.”

That thought was followed by

“I got to pull over and secure it.”

But right as I was preparing to pull over, I saw something fast approaching in front of me. It was a roadside, something I hadn’t seen since leaving Ely. The faded green sign only had one location listed. It said

“Camon Exit 4: 6 miles.”

I eased my foot toward the brake before stopping myself.

"Don't be an idiot," I muttered.

Pulling an eighty-thousand-pound rig onto the shoulder in the middle of nowhere over a little banging was how people got killed.

“I’ll stop there for a moment and check for damage,” I told myself

The pounding continued for the next six miles.

Before long, a lone exit appeared on the horizon. A weathered sign said “Camon 1 mile”. I followed the new path, and in the darkness of the desert, the lights reminded me of every tiny farming town I'd ever driven through. As I turned off the highway, the pounding lowered again to a low tapping.

Camon was a small dusty desert town, and slowly my truck entered its perimeter. And as I did, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and my palms grew sweaty. Surrounding the road on both sides stood dozens of people. Young and old, men and women, they stood perfectly still, and their faces were emotionless, though all their eyes followed the truck as it passed. They wore old-fashioned nightgowns and striped sleeping clothes that looked like they belonged in faded black-and-white photographs. I pulled into an empty lot on the far side of the town. The truck stopped moving for the first time that night. Nearing panic, I quickly shifted into reverse. As I did, a low, icy voice froze me in place.

“You actually stopped,” it mockingly said

A cold but firm hand grabbed my shoulder from behind the driver's seat. I wildly swung my other hand up to my shoulder, fully expecting to connect with a foreign hand, but only hit my own shoulder. Quickly, I turned around to confront the voice, but I was alone. The space behind me was a small storage space that only held my duffel bag. I could feel my heart beating wildly as I searched every inch of the cab. But there was nothing. The chaos inside the cab made me momentarily forget the strangeness of Camon. But soon I remembered, and hopped back into the driver's seat, reversed the truck, and prepared to face Camon again, but it was different. In fact, it was gone. There were no people, there were no buildings, and there weren’t even any street lights. Just a long dark road leading back to the highway. Camon was gone.  

I glanced down at the yellow paper I had crumpled and tossed into the cupholder. I picked it up and straightened it out, carefully rereading it. Two of the mysterious rules caught my eye:

5. Do not enter any town that appears before Austin. There are no towns between Ely and Austin.

6. If you hear someone knocking on the cab, do not stop to inspect it. Continue driving until you reach Austin.

“You got to be kidding me” I muttered aloud as my feet found the pedal and the truck began moving towards the highway. As I travel this barren road, it began to change. I noticed that it seemed to grow more worn and cracked, and suddenly it shifted from an old asphalt road to a dirt road, similar to a country road in the Midwest. As I neared the highway, vegetation and uneven terrain overtook the dirt road that used to be a highway exit. As I remounted the highway, I was quite sure that the road I had just traveled had disappeared, just as the town of Camon disappeared.  

“This can’t be real.” I said as I lightly slapped my face and pinched my forearm, hoping I was dreaming. But I remained awake.

“This is real,” I stated, defeated.

I lowered my eyes momentarily to the center console, the rules stared up at me. I was unsure if they were a helpful guide or a harsh judge.

The road was quiet for the journey to Austin; however, the whole time I felt like I was being watched, as if someone stood directly behind me. 45 minutes later, a solitary sign welcomed me to the isolated town of Austin. Austin felt real, as if people actually lived here, as if it was supposed to be here. I found my way to the BP, and after starting the fuel pump, I briskly walked into the small truck stop. A bearded old man stood behind the counter and watched me as I entered. Turning to him, I asked

“Can I get a few packs of Camel Crushes?”

He stared for a moment before turning and picking out two packs from the wall behind him. Before turning back to me, he looked out the window at my truck, then slowly turned back to me. His eyes stared intently at me as a simple phrase escaped his lips

“You got dirt on your truck, did somethin’ happen?” his eyes never left me

I stared at him as he stared back I didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t wait for me to ask

“You didn’t stop, did ya?” he whispered

I swallowed hard

“Yeah,” was all I could say

I could see his jaw tighten before he pointed to the showers

“Go take a shower now, and use lots of soap, he can’t stand the smell. I’ll take care of your truck. Go now.”

I didn’t ask, just turned and headed to the showers.

After my shower, I walked to the front, where the old man met me. He handed me the cigarettes

“Here’s your smokes,” his eyes glared at me

“Don’t do that again.”

I felt like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar, as I meekly replied

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded in agreement

“Go on, get out of here, you got a long way to go.”

With that, I walked back to my rig, opening the cab door, I was met with the overpowering smell of commercial hand soap, no different than the stuff you find in any public bathroom. The old man must have cleaned the cab. The driver's seat was lightly damp as if he dumped a whole carton of the stuff on it. I glanced back and saw the man staring back at me. He tapped his wristwatch to signal to me that I need to get going.

I felt a twinge of fear as I left Austin; the lonely road disappeared into the empty darkness. According to the rules, the only other place I could stop and rest was at mile 362, nearly a four-hour drive. I took a deep breath as I began the long, desolate stretch.

The first three hours were uneventful, even boring. The adrenaline that fueled me earlier that night was quickly vanishing, and in its place, exhaustion set in. My mind began to fantasize about the cheap hotel bed I would enjoy in the morning. I turned up the radio in a futile attempt to distract my mind.

Suddenly, the horizon was lit up by two bright headlights. It was a shock to my system. I had nearly forgotten that encountering other vehicles was possible. This was the one I had seen out here all night. The vivid headlights made it impossible to see the vehicle as it approached, but based on the power and brightness of the lights, I could tell that this was another semi.

As we passed each other, I was able to monetarily see the truck. And my heart skipped a beat as I saw a pitch-black truck with a big yellow W painted on the side. It was an exact copy of my truck. I froze, hoping I had made a mistake, maybe it was a trick of the light, or the error of tired eyes. But in my heart, I knew there was no mistake. My hand reached for the two-way radio, but before I reached it, the speaker crackled to life.

A smooth, charismatic male voice resounded throughout the cab

“Hey there, partner, I see we’re with the same outfit. How’s your run going, buddy?”

The voice was easy-going, yet simple. It sounded like the voice of a lifelong trucker. I pulled my hand back from the transmitter, unsure what to do. A moment later, the voice continued.

“Come on, friend, I know you can hear me. So why not talk to me? Don’t get much conversation on this lonely stretch.”

I thought for a moment before taking the transmitter in a shaking hand.

“What’s your name? I was told there wasn’t any other Waylon guys out tonight.”

A loud crackling sound filled the speakers for more than a minute. I had wondered if we had lost the signal, but then the voice returned, only more serious and deeper.

“I’m not surprised that they have forgotten about me.”

I swallowed

“Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter, Mitch, I could be anyone.”

“How do you know my name?” I squeaked

Loud laughter filled the cab

“I know everything about you, Mitch. I know your mother never loved you, or at least not as much as she loved the bottle. I know how you’ll die. Would you like to know?”

Clenching my jaw, I quickly flipped off the radio, realizing the mistake I had made. Only the radio continued speaking.

“Wasn’t done talking, Mitch.” The voice was far darker and full of malice

“You’ll die alone and unknown, a weak man the world will not miss.”

A loud, high-pitched squeal came from the speakers; it grew louder and louder. The sound hurt my ears, and I thought my head would explode. Thankfully, before it did, the speakers popped, as the radio died, one final sentence escaped

“See you soon, Mitch.”

As the radio grew silent, a painfully bright light filled my rearview mirror; the headlights of a truck were behind me. I watched as the semi behind me sped up and realized it was going to stop. Mere seconds later, the cab shook violently as a loud crash signified that our two trucks had met. Panic filled me as I realized that the second Waylon truck was trying to kill me, or at the very least run me off the road.

I began to swerve defensively, taking up both lanes of the road. But it did little good. The mystery driver didn’t relent, using his bumper as a weapon. I tried my best to avoid his attacks, but far too many connected. Soon I heard what at first sounded like a gunshot, but it didn’t take long to figure out it was the sound of one of my back left tires exploding. Moments later, the other one gave out. And then he began attacking the right side. Soon, one of my right back tires was gone. I had lost nearly all control of the back of the truck, and it began to dawn on me that I might not get out of this one. I started to slowly apply pressure to the brakes, hoping to avoid a rollover. I could hear the metal of bare tires scraping along the highway. In the chaos I managed to notice a small green mile marker fly by, it read Mile 361.

A spark of hope filled my mind as I realized that if I could make it one more mile, maybe I’d find some safety. That last mile felt like an eternity. By the time the sign was visible, I had lost all the rear tires, and controlling the semi was nearly impossible. I managed to grind the truck to a stop just barely within mile 362. Glancing in the mirror, I saw the headlights of the attacking truck. But the vehicle itself was stopped, directly at the mile 362 marker. It sat there for a few long minutes before backing up and speeding off in the opposite direction. With shaking hands, I opened the cab door and cautiously stepped down onto the open highway.

The chilly desert wind blew around me. I could’ve been walking on the moon and not be this lonely. In the vast Nevada desert, I heard nothing. No insects. No traffic. No truck. Just my own footsteps. Making my way to the back of the trailer, I finally saw the full extent of the damage. All four trailer tires were shredded, leaving behind exposed metal wheels. The trailer itself was battered and dented, with one corner completely crumpled in on itself. I removed my hat and ran a hand through my hair as I realized I didn’t have the tools needed to repair all four tires. The trailer was in no shape to continue.

Not sure what to do, I pulled out my phone and dialed the number for the Waylon office. As it rang, I hoped someone was still there to answer.

“Hello, Waylon Shipping Company, how can I help you?”

I recognized that tired voice; it was Bill. Relieved to hear a familiar voice I relayed the situation, though I left out the reason for the trailer's damage, and he didn’t ask, though I’m sure he had an idea of what happened.

“Sorry to hear you’ve had some trouble, but it’s not a big deal; the trailers are empty after all. Leave it there, and we’ll have it towed in the morning. What mile are you at?”

“Mile 362,” I replied

“Good,” Bill said, “that’s a recoverable location.”

I wanted to ask more, but Bill simply continued

“Stay safe out there, see you when you get back.”

With that, he hung up. And the deafening silence returned. I turned back towards the cab, but as I did, a calm voice broke the silence.

“Hello, is everything alright?”

Quickly, I turned back around and was greeted by a figure. A tall, thin man stood just barely on the other side of mile marker 362. He wore a full three-piece suit, with a matching fedora. His perfectly shined dress shoes clicked against the asphalt. A sly grin filled his face

“I just happened to be walking on the road and noticed your rig over on the side. Hopefully everything is alright.”

“I’m fine, thanks, who are you?”

He clicked his tongue quietly, “Well, I go by many names, let’s start with you, who might you be?”

Something felt off; his smile felt forced. I avoided his question

“I got a schedule to keep, so if you don’t mind I’ll be going.”

I walked over to the front of the trailer to start unhitching, the stranger continued

“Well, if you’re going that way,” he pointed down the road, “I’d sure appreciate a lift, I’ve been walking so long.”

I didn’t even look his way

“Sorry, I can’t pick up anyone, company policy.”

He chuckled, “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind you being a good Samaritan, mister… I’m sorry I didn’t check your name.”

“That’s cause I didn’t offer it,” I replied blankly

He went silent, so silent that I began to wonder if he was still there. Then his voice returned, only it was different, less cheerful, more angry.

“You’re in Brad’s truck. But you aren’t Brad, so who are you? Tell me now.”

By now, I had finished with the trailer and turned again to the stranger. Though now his face was hidden in shadow, where his eyes had been before were now two tiny white dots in a sea of nothingness.

“I could help you,” the voice sounded less and less human. “I could share with you the mysteries of the universe, I should share the knowledge known only by the ancient unseen things. Things a human mind can’t fathom. You need only tell me who you are.”

A shiver ran down my spine, and I stared in disbelief at the two tiny dots that floated in a dark face. As I stared, I felt a calm overtake me, as if the thing before me was a friend. But something, some instinct in my mind, told me this was the furthest thing from a friend. It took great effort, but I managed to turn my gaze away from the stranger's face.

A weak “No” was all I could say, but it was enough.

The stranger lurched forward, fueled by wrath, but he couldn’t cross the mile marker; there, he stopped as if pressed against an invisible wall.

“Give me your name! Give me your name! GIVE ME YOUR NAME!” it screamed

I ran back to the cab and climbed in. As I did, I glanced back and saw the stranger evaporate in a cloud of black smoke, though the screaming continued. The truck was free of the trailer, and I quickly pulled away, leaving mile 362 in the dust.

The sky grew lighter as dawn approached. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw a sign welcoming me to South Lake Tahoe. The GPS guided me to the vendor location. But it was closed, the hours on the door said it opened at noon. so I found a nearby Best Choice Hotel and pulled my truck into the lot. I was relieved to be off the road. I exited the truck, reaching behind the chair to grab my duffel bag. Pulling the bag from the truck, it knocked an old yellow paper onto the ground. Not wanting to litter, I picked it up and shoved it into my pocket, then I walked into the hotel. A few minutes later, I opened the door to a modest hotel room, and a queen-size bed never looked so good.

Tossing myself onto the bed, I emptied my pockets onto the nightstand. Along with my wallet, keys, and pocket knife the crumpled yellow paper sat on the stand. Curious I unfolded it and my blood froze when I read:

“Rule 10: Only stay at the Motel Eight, all other hotels are traps.”

I hadn't even opened the first box in my new place before I heard a knock on the door. As I looked through the peephole, I could see an older man, his hair tied back in a ponytail, his graying mustache ruffling a bit under his breath. It was my landlord, Henderson. I wasn't sure if it was his first name or last name.

As I opened the door, he said, "Hey, new tenant. How are you doing? Getting settled in?"

I nodded. "Yeah, just, you know, unpacking my stuff."

I had managed to find a decent place in my price range in a relatively trendy neighborhood full of people my own age, a small apartment block with maybe six units total. I just happened to email him on the right day to get a quick response; before I knew it, I had paid my first month, last month, and a security deposit, and started packing up to make the move.

"Good to hear. Listen, I was going over some stuff."

Great, I thought. Typical landlord, waiting for me to bring the last box in before telling me something is wrong with the apartment. I just hoped it was something small, and not the air conditioner, because that would suck with how hot and thick the air felt.

"It's just the paperwork, you see," he continued. "One last page you forgot to initial."

He reached into his pocket, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper. I looked it over and felt a strange sense of familiarity. When he had first passed the lease agreement over to me, he had just handed me a loose stack of about five papers, not stapled or held together in any way. At the time, I thought this specific page had been a joke that accidentally fell into the pile.

Because the contents were ridiculous as I read them again.

>1. The vents are old and sometimes rattle. You do not hear voices in them.

>

>2. Henderson does not have a brother. If anyone claims to be his brother, notify Henderson immediately.

>

>3. Absolutely no returns of deposits.

"Sorry, I thought this was like a joke of some kind," I said plainly.

"No, it's part of our standard paperwork."

"Do people really think they hear voices from the vents?"

"It happened a long time ago," Henderson said. "One of our old tenants kept calling me up and saying someone was talking to her from the vents, so I added it just sort of as a warning for new residents."

"Alright. Kind of weird, but okay."

"Do you need a pen?" Henderson asked, reaching into his other pocket and pulling out a black ballpoint pen. He clicked it and handed it to me.

As I placed the crumpled paper on a box, preparing to sign, I asked, "Thanks... so, you don't have a brother?"

"Nope."

I read over the line about it one more time. "So, does someone try to pretend to be your brother?"

"It's a strange tale," Henderson replied. "Another thing that happened once, but I don't want to bog you down with sordid tales from years ago."

I was sort of glad that he didn't want to relive his past; it was starting to get dark outside.

"Alright," I replied, putting my initials on each line and doing a quick scribble at the bottom before handing the paper back to him.

"Thank you. Well, I guess it's time to start tying them on. I don't live too far from here," Henderson said. "I missed beer thirty earlier, so I've got to make up for it. But if you have any issues, just let me know, in the morning, of course."

He gave a quick wave and walked to the front door. I did the polite thing and escorted him out, watching from the landing as he climbed into an older pickup truck and drove off.

Turning back inside, I opened the first box, the one with all my books, and began pulling them out, stacking them neatly on the floor. It was hard to find deals in the city, especially in neighborhoods that catered to young professionals like myself. So even if Henderson was a bit of an oddball, I could live with it.

As I moved on to the next box, I heard a loud, rhythmic sound. It was like someone keeping a steady beat on a tom drum. I started exploring the apartment to trace the noise, treading through the small living room and being mindful of the boxes scattered around me. I headed into the tiny kitchen, which featured an oven and just enough counter space for a microwave. Just because I was a young professional didn't mean I could afford the luxury of abundant counter space, or a newer fridge, for that matter, I thought as I opened the dated refrigerator and looked inside.

The noise wasn't coming from here.

I walked into my modest bedroom. My full-size mattress took up most of the space, but I could still hear the sound coming from somewhere else. I checked the closet like a child looking for a monster. The steady, rhythmic beat kept going as I walked into the final room: the bathroom.

It contained just a toilet, a sink, and a small shower. The noise was loudest here. As I searched the space, I realized the absolute last thing I wanted to deal with on move-in night was plumbing.

But as I finished checking all the piping, I turned and saw the vent above the doorway. That was where the noise was coming from. Henderson had called it a "rattle," though I felt our definitions differed significantly judging by the sound coming from it.

There wasn't much I could do about it now. I walked back into the living room and started to open up more boxes, slowly pulling things out and trying to mentally map out where everything would go. As soon as I left the bathroom, the sound ended. If the noise was only temporary, I figured maybe it wouldn't be that big of a deal.

The sound of a car pulling up broke the temporary quiet of my apartment. A moment later, I heard car doors open, followed by the sound of footsteps, chatter, and laughing. The group seemed to stop right in front of my door, noticing the light spilling out from my window.

I heard a female voice say, "Looks like we got another new neighbor."

"For now. The girl who lived here before didn't stay long," a male voice replied. "I feel like she just left in the middle of the night."

I heard the two laugh as their footsteps faded into the distance, followed by the sound of a door shutting. I hoped they were just exceptionally loud and my walls weren't actually that thin.

I tried to continue unpacking, but then the noise from the bathroom vent started up again, that same rhythmic thumping. I felt myself losing patience with the whole situation. Marching back into the bathroom, I reached up to try to close the vent, but it was just high enough that I couldn't get a proper grasp on it.

I ended up hopping around and struggling for a moment before I finally forced it shut. I took a heavy breath, only to be greeted by a loud thud at my front door.

Had I been too loud while jumping around like a fool to close it?

Another heavy thud echoed out. This one was more aggressive.

"Hello?" I called out.

There was one more heavy thud, but this one was slow and deliberate. I heard the sound of a hand sliding down the wood after hitting it. I walked over to the entryway and looked through the peephole.

Whoever had knocked wasn't standing right in front of my door; instead, they were almost six or seven feet away. It was dark outside, and they were far enough from the dim outdoor light of my apartment that details were obscured, but I could make out two things: they had unkempt hair, and they were completely naked. Even in the darkness, I could tell the person was older. Their body was covered in wrinkles and sagging skin.

I froze, not knowing what to do. I thought about just leaving it alone, but then I saw an unnatural twitch, their body contorted violently while standing out there in the distance. I stepped back and immediately grabbed my phone.

Another thud echoed through the wood, followed by a muffled, raspy voice. "Please... let me in."

I forced myself to look through the peephole again. This time, I saw a gray mustache ruffling under the unruly hair. The man looked exactly like Henderson.

"Um... why?" I asked, my voice shaking.

He pressed his mouth directly against the keyhole, revealing dark, stained, and cracked teeth. "Because my brother put something in there that I need."

"The landlord says he doesn't have a brother," I replied, my stomach in a knot.

"He does," the voice hissed. "And he makes him live in a maintenance closet."

"Why would he do that?"

"Why does he hide what he has in your apartment is what you should be asking," the thing replied, pressing its mouth even more against the peephole.

"What does he have in my apartment?"

"Let me in and I will show you," he growled.

"That's not happening," I said. "Go away or I will call the police."

"I will be gone before they get here. Now let me in," he demanded.

"Back to the maintenance closet?" I countered. "Couldn't I just tell them you're there?"

"I am the only one who can stop it, and stop what will happen to you."

I stepped away from the peephole and scrolled through my phone to find Henderson's number. "I am calling your 'brother' right now!" I shouted toward the wood.

There was only silence from the other side of the door. After a few agonizing rings, Henderson answered. "Hello?"

"Hey... so, I don't really know how to explain this," I stammered, "but there's a naked guy outside my door claiming to be your brother."

"I don't see how that would be possible," Henderson replied, his voice heavy. "But I can't help you right now."

"So I should call the police?"

"No, no, they wouldn't be able to help you," he urged. "Do you have anything made of actual iron in your home?"

"What? Why?" I blurted out. "I am just going to call the police."

"Listen, I am going to be honest with you," Henderson replied. "I am a little drunk right now, but I sober up fast and I can help. But I need your help first."

"Yeah, I don't think I am going to do that. I think I am just going to call the cops."

"Six months. Free rent."

"Say that again?" I asked, entirely thrown off. Did he just offer me free rent? In 2026, a deal like that was completely unheard of. "Did you say free rent for six months?"

"I did. And to sweeten the deal, I won't raise your rent by twenty percent when you renew your lease."

In this economy, it didn't take long to make up my mind. "So, what do I have to do?"

"I need you to buy me some time to make a pot of coffee and drive back there," Henderson said. "If you could lure him back to the maintenance closet, that would be great."

"Um, how do I do that?"

"Find something made of iron and threaten him with it," Henderson replied. "I will be there as soon as I can."

He hung up, leaving me to figure out if I even owned anything made of actual iron. Then, another heavy thud rattled the door.

I pressed my eye to the peephole again. This time, he was pressed right up against the other side. Sticking his own eye into the glass revealed a hollowed-out, bloodshot stare.

"He will eventually get you too," the thing rasped, "even though you aren't the normal type."

Normal type?

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Usually, the spell is used on women," he replied. "Like the last few tenants."

"Alright, this is just crazy," I muttered, backing up a step. "Weird lease agreements, twin brothers, and now magic."

"He's not my brother. He just says that when I try to save the poor souls he rents to," he hissed. "And I bet he told you to hit me with iron, too. It doesn't matter what you hit me with, it hurts the same either way. But iron, iron really hurts him."

The figure stepped away from the door, melting back into the shadows of the walkway.

I put the chain lock on my door and cracked it slightly, poking my face out. "So then what is the Henderson who was here earlier?"

"I don't know what he exactly is." The figure turned his head. "But that unit you are in right now? It's where he does all of his weird magic crap."

"Here we go again..." I muttered.

"He's had about four tenants in this unit over the last eighteen months," the creature continued. "They've all done the exact same thing you are doing right now, talking to me. But they all end up the same. Hollowed husks that he eats. At this point, half of them don't even fully unpack before he does it."

"He eats them?"

He gave an unnatural nod, his head twitching violently as he did it. "He does it not for the meat, but for the soul. All the proof is in your unit."

He took a step forward. "Are you going to let me in or not?"

We just stared at each other, a naked man in the humid night, and a guy who had just been hoping to unpack his things, looking out at him from a crack in the door.

He took another step forward, his head cocking toward his shoulder with an odd, involuntary jerk.

"What if you are just making all of this up?" I asked.

"Why would I do that?"

"I don't know. What if you're just some sort of tweaker?" I grunted. "Like, you twitch all the time."

"It's because of his magic," he insisted. "Every time he has to cast the spell, he takes a little piece of me with him."

"Or you're a drug addict with a real far-out story. One that happens to line up real nice with a guy who wants free rent."

Something shifted in his face at that, like I'd finally said the one thing he couldn't argue with.

"You think I chose this?" he said, quieter now. "You think I like standing out here naked, begging some kid half my age to believe me?"

After another violent twitch of his neck, he charged.

I fell backward as his hand smashed through the crack in the door, reaching inside my apartment. His fingers slammed wildly against the wood and its frame as he shrieked, "I am trying to help, you goddamn fool! I am trying to save your life!"

That's when a truck skidded into the parking lot, the exact same one I had seen Henderson drive off in earlier.

"Let me in! We can stop him together!" he shrieked.

Fuck this, I thought to myself, scrambling backward across the floor to reach my phone.

But before I could grab it, I heard the one sound I absolutely didn't want to hear: the sharp snap of my door's chain lock breaking. The links clattered loudly onto the floor. He burst through the doorway, throwing his weight onto me and grabbing me tightly by the collar of my shirt.

"Why won't you let me save you?!" he screamed at the top of his lungs.

"How did you escape that maintenance closet?" Henderson growled.

He lunged forward and clamped his hands around my attacker's neck, tossing him off me as if he were nothing more than a ragdoll. The naked man crashed heavily against the half-unpacked boxes, sending a stack of my books flying across the floor.

I scrambled away, seeing my phone on the floor and trying to grab it, but Henderson noticed this and grabbed it away. "What are you doing?" I cried out.

"I can't have you calling the cops," Henderson directed, his voice tense.

My head started to swirl as I stood up, looking down at the naked old man lying among my books and belongings. He looked stunned, coughing and struggling to push himself up from the floor.

"See? He needs me close... what more proof do you need?" the man coughed out.

"Shut up!" Henderson screamed.

"What does he mean?" I interjected, looking between the two of them. "Why can't we call the cops?"

"Because he can't take my blood anymore," the naked man replied from his hands and knees.

Before he could say another word, Henderson delivered a bone-cracking kick straight to his ribs.

"I told you to shut up!" Henderson roared.

"What is he talking about?" I shouted out.

"The answer is in the vents," he pleaded. "It's all in there, vials of my blood and the deed to this property, from before they took it over."

"What is he talking about, Henderson?!" I shouted, backing away toward the kitchen.

"Why hasn't anyone come to investigate?" the old man gasped, clutching his bruised ribs. "Why hasn't anyone called the cops?"

I froze. He was right. We had caused a violent commotion, yet not a single neighbor had opened a door. There was no shouting, no pounding on the walls. It was as if the neighbors expected this, or worse, as if they knew better than to interfere.

"What is he talking about?" I repeated, my voice barely a whisper.

"Don't listen to him," Henderson said, his voice dropping an octave, losing all its neighborly warmth. "He's not well."

"Then why do you keep him in a maintenance closet instead of getting him help?"

Henderson turned to me. The shift was absolute, the way he stood, the coldness in his eyes. "Because he's right. I do need him alive. And he's right about the other thing, too. No one is calling the police because, as he said... we took this over."

"He's going to kill you..." the old man wheezed from the floor.

I felt a massive lump form in my throat. "So... are you going to kill me?"

"That depends, honestly," the thing wearing Henderson's face replied, entirely casual now. "Help me drag him back to his cage in the maintenance closet, and the same deal stands. Free rent for six months, and absolutely no increase when it's time to sign your next lease."

"But you won't kill me?" I pressed, trying to find my footing.

He shook his head smoothly. "You will simply be a human living among the fae. And I will move my feeding room to another empty unit."

Suddenly, it all started to make sense. No human landlord would ever offer a deal that good, especially in 2026. Once again, it didn't take me long to decide.

I just nodded along, grabbed a pair of ankles, and started helping him drag the real Henderson out of the apartment.

My girlfriend has always been a creative type. When we first started talking, it seemed like the conversation would always shift towards either sketching, drawing, or painting.

I found it admirable. I loved that she had something that meant so much to her. Something she could be passionate about. The more time went on, the more that passion grew.

It wasn’t until we started dating that she felt comfortable enough to show me her work, though. I love her more than anything in the world, but good lord, I hate to say it… she was not good.

Her shades were off. Her lines were crooked. Her portraits bordered on stick figures.

Of course, I didn’t want to let on exactly what I thought of what she was showing me, but I can only pretend so much.

That’s the thing, though, any time I offered her advice, she’d just get so defensive. She was just so convinced that she was gonna be “the next big thing” in the art world.

I wanted her to succeed. Of course I wanted her to succeed. But in order to do that, she just had to listen to me. I’m not an artist myself, but even as just an everyday Joe Shmoe, I could still see where she was falling short.

I’d nudge her. Critique her in the nicest possible way I could muster. And it only led to her becoming more closed off with her work.

Unfortunately, the more closed off she became with her work, the more closed off she became in general. It was like her main talking point. And here I was, feeling like an asshole for taking that away from her.

I tried apologizing to her and explaining that I was just trying to help her, but she’d just keep that same blank expression on her face.

“I’ll try to get better for you.”

That’s all she’d tell me.

I wanted to believe her, but it seemed like she wasn’t even trying anymore. I never saw her sketching. I never saw her drawing. I never saw her painting.

It created this friction in our relationship that made every situation feel tense. We didn’t even argue. We’d just try and converse awkwardly before we both went back to our phones.

At the peak of her withdrawal, that’s when she started taking classes. She didn’t seem excited about it. She didn’t seem eager to be better. She seemed like she was doing it out of spite. Like she was defeated but ready to prove me wrong.

She’d be gone 3 days a week from 5 PM to 10 PM, and after about a month of this, she started bringing home her work.

She never showed it to me.

I’d just find colorful canvases hanging up around the house. In the kitchen. In the living room. Hell, even the bathroom had a few.

She had definitely been improving. Her lines were straighter. Her shades were more on point. Her paintings wowed me rather than making me force out a fake smile or a “that’s so good, honey!”

At first, she was bringing home paintings of landscapes. Mountain ranges. Ocean horizons. Forests.

Then it turned into infrastructure. Castles. Mansions. Shacks and sheds.

Then it was people. The most detailed portraits she had ever produced. Her mom. Her dad. Her teacher from class.

I wish that’s where it would’ve stopped. She had proved me wrong. She had convinced me. She had nothing else to prove. But it didn’t stop there. She couldn’t have just been happy with the progress she had made.

I came home from work one day to find the first painting she had done of me personally. It had been hung up along with the dozens of other random paintings in our living room. I saw it and immediately became sick to my stomach.

It was me just… disassembled. My head was in one part of the canvas. My legs and arms sprawled out across the painting, with the most gruesome depictions of gore I had ever seen her produce.

I heard her humming to herself in our bedroom.
I approached her carefully as she sketched wildly in her sketchbook.

“Honey,” I whispered. “Why did you do that painting of me?”

Continuing to hum without even looking up from her sketchbook, she responded, “Eh, just how I was feeling today,” as she continued scribbling on her page.

In the weeks that followed, more and more pieces began to pop up around the house. Each one depicting different versions of my death.

She never seemed angry or agitated. She just seemed distant. Distant but at peace, and that’s the part that hurts me.

She seemed to have this obsession with dismemberment. In every piece, I was dismembered in some way or another. Held together by wires. Forced to be a scarecrow. One showed me to be ornaments strewn about a Christmas tree.
At this point, there’s at least a dozen of them. But that’s not the part that concerns me.

What concerns me is that I’ve been waking up with outlines drawn around the circumference of my legs and arms. My neck and torso. Like she’s figuring out a design.

She always denies any involvement whenever I question her, but who else could it be? Does she think that I’ll believe I’m just doing this to myself?
I don’t know what to do.

I just wanted her to be the artist I knew she could be.

For my whole life, something has been knocking on my bedroom door every night at random times. Sometimes I would hear it at 10PM, other times at 4 in the morning. It was never loud enough to wake me, and sometimes if I pulled an all nighter on my Xbox I would faintly hear it through my headset. I would only ever hear it whenever it was dark outside.

It never bothered me or scared me. My parents told me it was normal and not to worry about it. I trusted them so I trusted the knocking. My parents would tell me that it would happen to them too, so that always made me feel better. I just had to follow one simple demand.

Never acknowledge the knocker in any way.

I always thought it was strange but I’ve grown so accustomed to it that I hardly even thought about it. It was almost comforting to hear the knocking, a reminder that it was there for me. Of course I see now how creepy that really is, but at the time the thought of someone I didn’t know knocking on my bedroom door every night being scary never even crossed my mind. When you grow up with something for long enough, no matter how unusual it can be you end up just getting used to it and that’s exactly what happened to me.

Growing up I’ve never had many friends. I’ve thought of myself as the introverted type, always afraid of social interaction or saying the wrong thing to people. I only really had one friend, Max.

Me and Max met when we were 9 years old and he was my one and only friend for many years. Max and his family moved into the house next to ours. The day they moved in, my parents thought it would be fun to invite them over for dinner and get to know them. My dad forced me to hangout with their only child, Max. He was easy to talk to and watched the same movies and tv shows as me. We grew up together, hanging out nearly everyday.

One night in particular, Max came over for a sleepover on a Saturday night. We were both 15 at the time so sleepovers were still a big deal to us, but this time it was different. Max insisted on spending the night at my house. We usually did sleepovers at his house because he had a nice gaming setup that we would play on for hours. I was at his house so much our parents used to joke about it being my second home and my second family, but of course the other reason I never invited him over was the knocker.

My parents told me to not tell anyone about the knocker, mostly because they thought people would think I was crazy. It wasn’t until I was 10 years old that I found out not everyone has their own door knocker. It made me feel special or unique in an odd sort of way.

I really wanted to tell him, especially since he would be hearing it if we were still awake, but I couldn’t. When you’re a kid your biggest fear is getting in trouble, and I didn’t want my parents to find out I told him. All I could do was hope it would knock whenever we were sleeping.

Max came over to my house around 7PM, just after dinner time for both of our families. We spent the next couple of hours playing video games on my Xbox. The longer we were awake, the more aware I became of the time. At 10:15, my mother called me over to her room. She looked worried. She pulled me into her bedroom, closed the door and spoke in a quiet voice.

“You need to get Max to go to sleep.”

I didn’t need to ask her why, I already knew and I was worried about it myself.

“I don’t think he will, he usually stays up really late.”

She cursed under her breathe, I was starting to panic myself. I’ve never seen my mother so worried.

“Ok well just try to get him to go to sleep. If he hears it tell him it’s nothing. I can’t make him go home, his parents told me they needed a break.” She said.

I nodded. All I could do in this situation was try to do what she said. I walked back to my room and I got right to it.

“Hey Max, we have to go to bed soon. My mom told us she needs us to.”

Max looked at me, confused.

“What why? We usually stay up way longer than this.”

I was about to sputter out something about how we would get in trouble but before I could mutter out a word, it happened.

Knock knock

It was a gentle knock, as it normally was. The knocking came much earlier than usual tonight. My eyes widened and I put a finger over my lips, but Max didn’t listen to my gesture.

“What was that? Is that your mom?”

I shook my head no and put a finger over my lips again, but Max just wouldn’t listen to me.

“Who is that?” He asked in a much louder voice than I would have liked.

I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve always followed the rule so I had no idea what would happen if I didn’t, and Max was definitely breaking it. He had acknowledged it.

We stood there in silence for about a minute, both of us not saying anything. For a small second in our silence I considered the possibility of the knocking to be my parents trying to get us to go to bed, or playing an awful joke on us. But this thought didn’t last when we heard it again.

KNOCK KNOCK

It was much louder this time, and I was certain my parents could hear it. At this point I was in a panicked shock, fear of the unknown completely overtaking me. I had never heard it knock a second time and my instincts told me that we were in real danger, I had no idea what to do. I was never told what to do if this ever happened.

“What's going on?” Max whispered. I could hear in his voice he was terrified.

I didn’t know how to answer him. How do you explain something like this to someone? I just told him to be quiet as we tried to make as little noise as we could. What else could we do? I wanted to go get my parents but I would have to open my door to be able to get to them. We didn’t have any options.

Just then the knocking came again just as gentle as the first. But with it came a voice.

Knock knock

“Hello? May I come in?”

The voice was identical to Max, it sounded just like him. Max looked at me with so much horror in his eyes I thought he was about to cry, but I’m sure I looked the same. Just then, Max took a step back and whispered something I couldn’t hear. I didn’t know what he had said but it was audible.

It began pounding on the door at a rapid pace, it knew we were here now. I screamed for my parents but they didn’t come to our help. The walls were shaking around us and the noise was so loud I was sure if I heard it for too long I would go deaf.

Then suddenly the noise stopped as quickly as it begun, the room filling with silence once more. For a moment I thought it was gone, but the feeling of relief was short lived when I saw the light in my closet turn on. Just behind the door frames I could see a large black shape so wide it almost took up the whole closet. The only visible part of it's body being it's eyes. They were huge. The two eyes almost a foot apart from each other. They were an impossibly dark yet bright green, it's a color I can't describe. A color that no human should be able to see.

Whatever this was, it had no business here.

The lights were turned off. Then we heard it yet again.

KNOCK..KNOCK..KNOCK

It was knocking on my bedroom door again, this time the noises being a second delayed from each other. The sound of Max's laughter echoing from the other side.

Max was now openly crying, shaking so badly I thought he would have a seizure. He was whispering under his breathe.

"I'm sorry... I'm sorry... I'm so sorry"

I couldn't tell if he was saying it to me or himself.

Then I had an idea.

We would get out of the room through my window which led into the backyard. I screamed at Max to open the window and he began to frantically pull on it. I looked at the door and it looked like it was beginning to break down through its frame.

Eventually Max pulled the window open, then whatever was hitting the door instantly stopped. I didn’t know what was going to happen next but I wasn’t going to stick around and see. Max was yelling at me to go and I ran towards the window at a great speed. Right as I stepped outside, the window slammed shut.

Max was pulling onto the window on the other side, i could see the fear in his eyes. I wanted to help him but I couldn't, the window only opened on the inside. I was forced to do nothing watch and hope he would find a way out.

I jumped as i heard the door being knocked down from the other side. It was so loud I was sure it woke the whole street. I watched in complete despair as i saw Max for the last time. He was screaming and looking helplessly at me with a kind of desperation and sadness in his eyes i hope nobody has to see.

I simply blinked, and he was gone. Vanishing as if he never existed in the first place. The whole neighborhood being as quiet as it usually was.

I just stood there at the window, frozen.

The reality of the situation kicked in after a few seconds and I ran back inside as fast as my legs would allow back to my room, but I didn’t see him. I turned around to see my parents at my door, both of them angry.

“What are you doing?” My dad said in a defeated, pissed off tone.

Now I was angry.

“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? MAX DISAPPEARED, HE’S GONE. I WAS SCREAMING FOR YOU GUYS” I yelled.

“Who the hell is Max? Go to fucking sleep, we’ll talk about this in the morning.” my mom said, sounding even more pissed than my dad.

My dad flashed me a look and with that they both turned around and walked back away.

I was left alone in my room, confused and angry. I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night. There was too much to think about. Where did Max go? Why is my mother acting like he wasn't just here?

The next morning I tried to explain to my parents what happened but they claimed they had no idea who Max was. I looked next door to see a completely different family, moved in as if they lived there for years.

I couldn't find any pictures me and Max had together, couldn't find him in my yearbook photos, and nobody ever knew who he was after I started asking around. I could never find any trace of him, I’ve been trying for years.

When I became old enough, I moved out and cut all contact from my parents. They didn’t help me when I needed them, and they never tried to warn Max or his parents. After the night Max got taken I only spoke to them when I had to, but they didn't seem to care. I'm much older now and still we only talk in emergency situations.

I never heard the knocking again, it had stopped completely. It was at first difficult to adjust to the new change, but I was happy about it. I still think about Max everyday, my childhood best friend. My best friend that nobody remembers. He didn't deserve his fate and I find myself nowadays, wishing I warned him and ignored my parents rule.

I don't know what that thing was, or what it's purpose was, but I'm better off not thinking about it.

All I know is next time I hear that familiar knock, I'm ignoring it.

My wife and I spent almost seven years trying to have a child.

At first, it was exciting. Every month we convinced ourselves this would be the one. We bought pregnancy tests in bulk. We stopped drinking. We changed our diets. We tracked calendars and temperatures and ovulation cycles until our lives revolved around numbers instead of days.

Eventually, excitement turned into routine.

Routine turned into disappointment.

Then disappointment became something we stopped talking about.

People meant well, but after hearing “Maybe it just isn’t meant to be,” enough times, you stop wanting sympathy. You just smile, change the subject, and go home.

When my wife finally got pregnant, neither of us believed the test.

She took another.

Then another.

Then we went to a clinic because we were convinced they had to be wrong.

They weren’t.

Nine months later, our daughter Lily was born.

She had my wife’s eyes.

My nose.

A tiny birthmark tucked behind her left ear.

She cried constantly for the first few months and kept us awake almost every night.

I have never been happier in my life.

Everything we owned slowly became hers.

The walls filled with finger paintings.

The refrigerator disappeared beneath drawings she’d proudly bring home from school.

There were tiny shoes by the front door.

Plastic duck in the bathtub.

Half-finished puzzles scattered across the living room.

The house finally sounded alive.

Then, on a Saturday afternoon, everything ended.

My wife was upstairs folding laundry while I was in the garage looking for a screwdriver.

Lily was running through the hallway pretending the floor was lava, laughing every time she jumped from one rug to the next.

I remember telling her to slow down.

A second later, I heard a foot slip.

Then the sound of her body tumbling down the wooden staircase.

One step.

Two.

Three.

It happened so fast that by the time I reached the front door she’d already stopped moving.

She was lying at the bottom of the stairs on her side.

One arm was twisted beneath her.

There was blood spreading across the hardwood floor beneath her head.

A jagged crack ran along the side of her skull where she’d struck the edge of the bottom step.

My wife came running down behind me.

She dropped to her knees, screaming Lily’s name, trying to wake her, brushing the hair away from her face even as her hands became slick with blood.

I couldn’t move.

I just stared.

A few seconds earlier our daughter had been laughing.

Now the only sound in the house was my wife crying and the old grandfather clock ticking in the hallway.

I took Lily’s hand.

It was still warm.

I kept telling myself that meant she was still in there somewhere.

Then—

*Crack.*

A sharp, wet sound.

I thought it came from the floorboards.

Then another.

*Crack.*

My wife looked at me.

“I… did you hear that?”

Before I could answer, Lily’s body twitched.

Not like someone waking up.

Violently.

Her back arched so hard I heard her spine pop.

Her tiny fingers curled until her nails snapped backward.

Her jaw hung open impossibly wide.

A thick stream of blood poured from her mouth and ran down her neck.

My wife screamed and reached for her.

I grabbed her arm before she could.

Something was wrong.

Very wrong.

Lily’s stomach began to swell.

The skin stretched tighter and tighter, veins rising beneath it like blue roots.

It looked as though something inside her was pressing outward.

Then her ribs started moving.

Not breaking.

Moving.

One by one they bent outward beneath her skin, each accompanied by a sickening crack that echoed through the room.

The flesh split between them.

Blood spilled across the hardwood floor.

I could smell it immediately.

Hot.

Metallic.

The opening widened on its own.

Muscle tore apart in long, stringy strands.

Her chest peeled open with a slow, wet ripping sound I’ll hear for the rest of my life.

Something inside her moved.

Not organs.

Not bone.

A hand.

Small.

Covered in blood.

It gripped the edge of the torn ribs like someone climbing out of a hole.

Then another hand appeared.

My wife collapsed beside me, sobbing so hard she couldn’t breathe.

I couldn’t look away.

The little girl forced herself through the opening, twisting and wriggling as pieces of flesh clung to her shoulders before snapping free.

She landed on the floor with a heavy, wet slap.

She was covered from head to toe in blood.

Bits of skin and tissue still hung from her hair.

The room smelled like a slaughterhouse.

She tried to stand.

Her legs shook beneath her like a newborn foal taking its first steps.

She stumbled twice before finding her balance.

Then she looked up at us.

She had Lily’s face.

The same freckles.

The same crooked smile.

The same missing front tooth.

She blinked.

Tilted her head.

And in the exact same sleepy voice she’d used every morning before school…

“Daddy?”

Then she smiled at my wife.

“Mommy?”

We buried what was left of our daughter before sunrise.

Neither of us spoke while we dug.

We wrapped what remained of Lily in an old bedsheet because neither of us could bear to look at what her body had become. There wasn’t much left to recognize anyway. Bones, blood, torn skin… an empty shell that looked as though something had hollowed her out from the inside.

We buried her beneath the old oak tree at the edge of our backyard.

Then we walked back into the house.

The little girl was asleep on our couch, curled beneath one of Lily’s blankets.

When she woke up, she smiled at us.

She remembered everything.

She remembered her birthday.

Her favorite stuffed rabbit.

The song my wife used to sing while brushing her hair.

She even asked why I’d buried her blue shoes with “the other me.”

Neither of us had told her we’d done that.

For weeks, we barely slept.

We watched her constantly.

We searched for bruises, scars, stitches, anything that might prove she wasn’t our daughter.

There was nothing.

She laughed the same.

Cried the same.

Ran through the house the same.

Eventually, we convinced ourselves God had given us another chance.

Until she died again.

And another Lily crawled out.

Then another.

And another.

Each one remembered every death.

Each one became a little colder than the last.

The first time one of them tried to kill my wife, I convinced myself it was an accident.

The second time, it wasn’t.

I’ve buried more daughters than I can count.

Every one of them had Lily’s face.

Every one of them called me Dad.

Every one of them came back.

I’m writing this because I don’t know what else to do anymore.

There are countless little graves in my backyard.

And my daughter is standing in the doorway behind me.

Waiting for me to finish.

She was waiting for me when I returned from the hospice. Outside, by the door.

I barged by her, or through her- I was so discombobulated that I don’t know which- and went in.

She didn’t follow me. Just stood by the door. I think she can’t come in. I’m certainly not about to ask her.

I don’t understand why she’s doing this to me! She lived a full, respectable life, and she was a catalogue of aches and pains that I can’t begin to list. She chose to die freely and openly, after lots of discussion.

Well, some discussion.

I told her about the option, you see. The medical staff in our region aren’t allowed to raise it with patients- after some scandal about homeless or disabled or mentally-ill people being pressured into it – I forget which. Some local busybodies took to the press and made a huge fuss, and the sanctimonious old geriatrics who run this place quickly put a fuck ton of extra rules in place.

But there’s nothing to say that a loving grandson can’t gently talk about the option to his suffering grandma.

Especially since Grandma has a nice house, and I was forced to live with my parents (it’s the economy, stupid), until Grandma moved to the hospice and someone- I forget who it was- suggested I might as well move into her house since it was lying empty and she has all these plants need watering and it can be sorted out later.

Oh yes it will be sorted out. It’s later now. And I put the plants out by the pavement the second day- I don’t have time to waste on plants, they were dying anyway! All those creepy long yellowing stalks, brushing against me wherever I turned. The night before her death- before she chose to die, please let’s not forget that, one of them caught at me when I got up to pee, Jesus Christ, I don’t think I ever screamed so loudly. I’m surprised the neighbours didn’t call the police.

Yeah, they were out on the pavement that morning. Ugly things.  

Anyway, I had the conversation with Grandma. Grandma looked at me as I told her, her eyes bright and unclouded. She was wearing a very pretty lacy blue nightgown. It looked expensive, and ancient.

“Thank you Nicholas” she said deliberately. I didn’t tell her about the plants, and she didn’t ask.

Mom told me about her decision later that day, struggling to hold back tears. “She wants us all there, Nicholas, singing her favourite song.”

Auld Lang Syne. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at the attention-seeking old bag.  I showed up. We all stood around the bed, she held Mom’s hands, who was sobbing uncontrollably and unable to sing, and I sang and watched the stuff being pumped into her veins. She watched me. I think. I was trying not to look.

Everything went well. Grandma closed her bright eyes. I was out of there. My parents agreed I could stay in her house until “we sort things out”- honestly I don’t think they enjoyed having me with them either.

She was there when I returned to the house.

I genuinely thought it was just a random old lady in a blue dress standing by the door. I remember wondering why she didn’t have a coat on.

Then I went up- she turned to me, and I froze.

She opened her mouth, and I saw very clearly the gaping black hole.

I heard her voice, very deliberate and slow “my plants, Nicholas”. The hole grew wider and wider and moved closer to me, starting to swallow me up.

I unfroze and barged in.

She was still there, standing. I knew I can move past her, if I move very fast. And I knew she’s not going anywhere.

But neither did I.

We get used to everything, they say. After a while, I got used to Grandma standing on my doorstep, I got used to zipping through her as she opened her horrible mouth to cry out about her plants. I am thankful she can’t actually come into the house.

Sometimes I feel trailing yellowing leaves brush against my skin as I move through the house, from the kitchen, now open and spacious thanks to me, to the living room and back, as I go about my day. I don’t let it bother me.

I am alive, she is not, I have the house, she does not, she made the choice, and we will both live on with that, in our own ways.

 

 

Hey, one of the lurkers here. Trying to ask around the internet for some advice over a really bizarre situation I’m facing. Things have gotten… out of control. Yesterday was another long night of nonstop arguing from my parents. I’m not exactly a kid, but I still live with them.

I know some of you probably have to deal with situations like this too. It sucks I know. But… my case is different. There’s something wrong with my mom. Every night, she argues with my dad, but the topic… is me.

My mom is convinced that I’m dead.

Like, not emotionally dead. Not “I did something wrong so you’re dead to me” dead. Physically dead. It’s… she’s not well. My father has started setting appointments with mental health professionals. Well, he was.

I guess I’ll explain later. Maybe someone can help me out. I’m desperate. God… I guess I’ll start at the beginning.

So, I’m just an ordinary guy. Nothing much to say about me. Like I said, there was nothing I did wrong. It was just another average day. I was just talking to my mom; we were having breakfast. Out of the blue, she just turned to me and said.

“It’s a shame what happened to you. You were so young. It’s a shame that car hit you and you lost your life.”

Excuse me?

I think I drooled some milk and cereal out of my mouth. I was pretty shocked.

You see my mom is …well, she’s a proper lady. Old school. She always kind, always warm, she barely yells ,and she never cusses. But she also doesn’t tell jokes, especially dark ones like that.

So, when she said that I was completely floored. It was one of the most out-of-character things I’ve ever heard her say. I basically just ignored it as a weird joke and went on with my day. When I got home, she was arguing with my dad. About well… you know what.

The first couple of days were really weird. We couldn’t tell if she was being serious or not. She would say I’m dead and my dad would just point at me and say something along the lines of “That’s not funny”. After a bit, she'd stop, then continue again the next day.

Things have…escalated.

She started arguing, like a lot. Coming up with comments that are largely nonsensical. I’ve heard stories of how I’ve been burned to death, drowned, electrocuted, hit by car, shot and dropped in acid apparently. I’ve given up on trying to convince her… Me moving around and talking to her doesn’t seem to faze her. She still persists.

My day-to-day has become beyond bizarre. She asks me constantly what the afterlife is like. I tell her that nothing much has changed.

What the hell else am I supposed to answer?! I’m not dead, I’m right in front of her. Doing the same thing as ever. I just largely ignore her at this point.

I know what you’re thinking. Well, your mom has gone insane. Yes, I know. I thought so too. But then something happened.

One day, my grandma came to visit. I love my nan. She was just in the living room, minding her own business. Eyes closed, hands clutched together.

I passed her not sure if she was asleep. She opened her eyes and I said hi to her. She just smiled and said she was praying. (She’s quite religious.)

She said she was praying for me. Cool, I guess. But then she turned to me and explained why.

“I’m praying for you, so that your soul can rest in peace.”

What?

I think I froze in place for like a minute. I don’t know how. I don’t understand it. But my mom convinced my grandma that I’m dead. I... I couldn’t believe it. There was a tiny chance my mom was joking, but my grandma? It… it wasn’t possible.

I should explain something. My mom kind of “rules” the family. She’s kind, she’s sweet, she’s very convincing. She doesn’t get the last say all the time, but when she wants something people usually just… go along with it.

I have no fucking clue how she managed to convince my grandmother. But it’s clear that something is going on, I just don’t understand what.

This situation, like I said, escalated.

The other day I was taking a nap in my bed. I suddenly smelled smoke? It was so alarming that I jerked myself out of bed. The burnt smell was coming from me. My mom had taken a lighter to my clothes and tried to set me on fire.

“Maybe you’ll pass on if you get cremated” she said.

What the fuck. She was smiling as she said that.

This was the first instance of her trying to actually harm me. I keep my distance from her nowadays.

After that incident I went to my dad. This was going too far, she needed help. Maybe my grandma was going senile? But my mom needed help.

I talked to my dad, he just looked around awkwardly. I couldn’t believe it…

She managed to convince my dad.

Like he’s starting to accept the idea that I’m actually dead. I don’t know what the fuck is even going on anymore.

This family is breaking apart. Or it’s uniting I suppose, on the most bizarre and twisted idea I’ve ever heard of. Life isn’t normal anymore.

We went to the beach the other week. It was the last time I tried to do anything normal with my family. I fell asleep laying in my towel. When I woke up, I saw my mom above me, smiling.

She had buried half of my body in the sand. I could barely move.

I screamed and jolted away. The sand felt coarse against my skin, and heavy to move out of. But it was right before it felt like solid stone, that I squirmed free and got some distance from her.

I think she was trying to bury me alive.

I fucking yelled so much at her. The whole beach was looking at us. Yelled about this sick joke. About this fucking idea she has that I’m dead. I had enough of it. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my life before. She just looked at me, silently, a small smile on her face.

“The dead shouldn’t yell.”

Fucking hell. What have I gotten myself into.

But it doesn’t even stop there. It’s getting worse.

She managed to convince people at my school. My friends, my teachers. No one pays attention to me anymore. When I raise my hand to ask a question the teacher ignores me. One time she said:

“The dead can’t ask questions”

It’s unreal. My friends pretend I’m not there. My family doesn’t cook food for me anymore. I’m a stranger in my own home, a ghost wandering.

The other day I saw her on her phone. She called me over.

“Look at this Chris.”

I went to check. I’m very apprehensive about her nowadays. Our relationship is basically non-existent. And it is going to stay that way until she gets medical help.

It was coffins. She was looking at fucking coffins.

“You’ll look nice in this one.”

I can’t really express it. The feeling of a loved one casually talking about your death. Of intending it. It’s not… It’s not right. And everyone is starting to take her side.

This ordeal is taking too much of a mental toll on me. I’m getting ready to leave town and go somewhere, anywhere. I need to get out.

I’m writing this to ask if anyone has encountered anything similar. I know mentally unwell people exist, but to manage to convince basically my entire family and everyone around me?!

Is this some kind of mass psychosis? If anyone has experienced this, please let me know, I’m packing my bags to leave. I need a break, I need to get out first, I’ll fix this shitshow later.

I can’t deal with my mom browsing what embalming fluids to use on me. I have to leave before I do something drastic. Something I’ll regret.

I'm not

-Wait update, I was home alone but my parents just got home. They came in a... van? I don’t really understand it, we don’t own a van.

What the fuck, what’s going on? There’s like ten people with them. I… I don’t... What the hell is going on? What the hell is this?!

They’re all carrying shovels!?

Marcus died on a Tuesday. Heart attack at 43, at his desk, which is the kind of thing that makes everyone in the office buy standing desks for a week and then forget about it.

IT deactivated his credentials that Friday. I know because I was CC'd on the email.

Which is why I don't understand the activity logs.

I'm a systems administrator. Checking logs is literally my job. Three weeks after Marcus died, I saw his username pull a report from our HR database at 2:14 AM. Not a scheduled report. A manual query.

I flagged it to my manager. She said it was probably a ghost process, some automated task that hadn't been cleaned up properly. That made sense. I let it go.

Then it happened again. Different report. Different time. But the same username.

I pulled the full access history. Marcus's credentials had been used eleven times since his death. Always between 1 and 3 AM. Always pulling personnel files. Always the same small group of employees.

My file was in that group.

I escalated to IT security. They investigated and found nothing. No breach. No active session. The logs showed the access but the access, technically, had not happened.

Last Thursday I stayed late to finish a deadline. I was the only one on the floor. At 2:14 AM my monitor flickered and a report opened on my screen.

I hadn't touched anything.

The report was a single page. Marcus's personnel file. Termination reason listed as: cardiac event.

At the bottom of the page, in the notes field, something had been typed.

The notes field had been empty the last time I checked his file.

It said: Tell them it wasn't.

I haven't been back to the office since.

Even though the grooms aren't supposed to be excited and interested in their wedding preparations, I was.

Melanie's bridesmaids, a close group of her girlfriends she had known forever, giggled, calling me "metrosexual" as I heatedly discussed the various flavours of cake and shades of napkins but I didn't care. And when Melanie and I had a screaming row over the flower arrangements (lilies? really? Can we think just a little bit outside the box darling?) they actually took my side.

I liked her bridesmaids fair enough. For the first year of our relationship they had been an amorphous blob of vaguely interchangeable "Melanie's girlfriends", and I never quite got round to learning their names. After all, Melanie mostly hung out with them without me. As the months past, I learned there was the tall one, the curvy one, the one who looked like non-actress version of Julianna Margulies, and the bitchy one.

And now the wedding preparations were fully underway, and I was starting to tell them a bit apart. But still, perhaps it was their habit of dressing in generally similar styles, often in each other’s clothes, and doing their hair and make-up similarly too, that often led me to confuse them. But so long as they went along with the vision we had for our perfect day, it was all good.

In fact we were talking about the bridesmaids dresses when I first realised there might be a problem. Melanie casually mentioned Elaine, one of her bridesmaids.

It didn’t first register with me. Melanie kept talking about the dresses.

"But she really dislikes the sage-green we've picked for the colour of their dresses. I told her that was all you darling."

Suddenly my brain did a double-take. "Elaine? Your childhood friend?"

Melanie nodded. "She's so excited for the wedding! and to be a bridesmaid! She never got to be bridesmaid while she was alive, so I'm so happy to do this for her."

I sat down heavily and suddenly, and looked at Melanie, who was staring at her face carefully in the mirror, contouring her cheeks. Ugh- she was using that shade of bronzer which made her look like a white actor cast by Hollywood in 1970s Technicolor as "Cherokee warrior 1". I had told her many times not to use that.

Then I focused.

"Melanie- Elaine is dead. You told me- she died of cancer, just a few months before we started dating."

Melanie turned and I couldn't help wincing at her makeup. But the expression in her eyes was real emotion: pure anger. "I know what I told you. And I told you too, she is always with me- she will always be with me. And if you have a problem with that, or any of my girlfriends-"

I held up my hand to staunch the Spice Girls rant that I had heard several times before. "Melanie- no! Of course I don't have a problem- I thought you meant, like metaphorically, spiritually, you know. Like people always talk about their dead grandma or whatever looking out for them! But now you're talking about her wearing a bridesmaid dress! At our wedding!" My voice rose incredulously and I could hear a tinny note of panic creeping in. Our whole relationship was flashing before my eyes as I remembered all the times Melanie had casually said something like “and we were at Happy hour when Elaine said- and we all died laughing!” “and Elaine told me not to worry about it, she would sort it out, and you know, the next day it was all fixed!”

The doorbell rang. Melanie ran to the door, and a second later the high chatter of excited women filled the air as all the friend group trooped in. They were all dressed quite similarly as always, in stripy crop tops revealing various parts of their body, and cargo pants. And that dreadful orangish contouring.

Melanie said "Ladies- this fella here doesn't think Elaine should be one of the bridesmaids!"

The chatter subsided, giving place to a nervous tense silence. The girls exchanged glances.

Then Julianna spoke up. "Look- you don't want to do that. Elaine is really happy to be a bridesmaid, plus you don't want to make her mad at you. She um, really cares about Melanie, they were like sisters growing up you know."

The air in the room seemed to thicken slightly. I couldn’t quite tell how many there were. The orange contour gave them an almost animalistic quality, and they stared at me with their hostile strange eyes, which yet were not devoid of some sympathy.

Suddenly I yelped out- something was burning me in my pants pockets. I snatched my phone out, which was glowing bright hot, and immediately dropped it on the floor, my hand scalded.

We all stared at the phone, the red glow fading harmlessly. I held my blistering hand, my shock numbing the searing pain.

"That was Elaine" murmured the Curvy One.

Melanie came up to me, looking up into my eyes beseechingly. "Please, don't make her spoil our perfect day- we’ve been planning this for so long. She has to be there- she has been waiting for this, just try to understand. She loves us all so much"

Tall One spoke up. "Melanie passed a cyclist too close the other day driving home, and he gave her the finger. You don't want to know what Elaine did to him. She draws strength from caring for Melanie you know, his head was almost cut off by his bike chain, it was wrapped so tightly round his throat."

Melanie nodded solemnly. "It cut right through his spine, I could see his vertebrae poking out, covered with blood."

I looked at my phone and tried to quell the shaking that was threatening to take over me. I didn’t want to appear scared and witless in front the bridesmaids.

My hand was starting to throb. The girls moved around, all still looking worried at me. I still didn't know how many there were- four or five?

"Of course" I muttered. "Of course Elaine should be one of the bridesmaids".

A sigh of relief went up. Then Melanie threw her arms around my neck. “Oh darling, we’re going to have the best wedding ever!”

I never minded being home alone until last Wednesday night.

My girlfriend went out for her usual Wednesday night book club meeting at the library downtown. I used that time to catch up on a Steelers game that I had missed from the weekend before.

It was the start of the second quarter when my dog, Chase, started barking from downstairs. I just assumed he heard a neighbor outside or something. It wasn't unusual for the neighborhood hooligans to ride their dirt bikes down the street after 8:00 p.m.—an event that had pissed off quite a few neighbors and their pets.

I hollered for Chase to settle down and turned my attention back to the game. He stopped for a moment before starting up again, this time whining and whimpering louder than before.

Frustrated, I got up and called for him from the top of the stairs. That's when I noticed he was cowering in front of the door. I had never seen him scared like that before, which concerned me.

I made my way to the door and peeked through the peephole. For whatever reason, I half expected some horrible, demented face to be staring back at me from the other side.

What was there was almost worse.

I couldn't make out many details, but there was a dark figure wearing a hoodie that obscured their face. The weirdest part was that the figure stood perfectly still, like some kind of statue looking back at me. I could also see something in their hand, but it was too dark to tell what it was.

Every hair on my arms stood up. I locked eyes with Chase and mulled over what to do next. In retrospect, the obvious thing was not to open the door, but I wanted them to just go away.

I told Chase to sit and looked through the peephole one last time before opening the door.

To my surprise, there was no one there.

You might think that would have been a relief, but to me it was like that joke about the spider in your house not really being scary until you no longer know where the it went.

I made my way around the house, sneaking looks through the blinds to see if the person was around the side or back but there was no one there.

After a few minutes, I finally convinced myself that whoever had been out there was gone and called Chase upstairs. I shut him in my office while I went to the bathroom.

I had just started my business when I heard Chase start barking again.

I remember thinking at that moment that getting robbed while you're doing number two had to be one of the worst times.

I sat there, hoping Chase was just worked up from earlier, when I heard a shoe squeak on the stairs.

I desperately wanted to believe my girlfriend was home early from book club, but deep down I knew that wasn't true.

I heard whoever it was stumble as they made their way on to the landing.

I fumbled for my phone as they stopped in front of the bathroom door.

I was doing my absolute best to stay quiet, but anxiety had not done my stomach any favors.

I clenched every muscle in my body, praying it wouldn't betray me.

I was literally fighting for my life in that bathroom.

Then it happened.

My body let loose.

I watched as the feet on the other side of the door slowly backed away.

The person hesitated. I could tell they were processing what just happened. Then they began to cough and quickly made their way down the stairs.

After sitting completely still for at least thirty minutes, I finally mustered the courage to look around.

When I didn't find anyone in the house, I called my girlfriend and explained everything. She confirmed that she had not come home early from book club, but she refused to believe I had scared someone away simply by farting. When I finally convinced her I was telling the truth, she insisted that I hang up and call the police.

I questioned whether or not to call the police. My worry was that they'd either think I was making the whole thing up or, even worse, believe me, and I'd forever be known at the station as the guy whose flatulence prevented a home invasion.

After the most embarrassing phone call of my life, a patrol car showed up. I explained what had happened, and the officer informed me that there had been a string of burglaries in the area and that the suspect was considered armed and dangerous.

He cracked a smile when he said,

"I guess you are too.”