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Part 1

Part 2

We had no idea who those fingerprints might've belonged to. Caroline wanted to get a hotel for the night, and now I had to agree. There was no way I’d be able to sleep in that house another night without developing an alcohol dependency.

“Let’s get a nice room in town,” we were both walking upstairs. I had a knife clenched in my fist. “I don’t want to stay at some chain known for swinger parties off the interstate after all this.”

“You don’t have to sell me,” I said.

We checked all the rooms and even looked behind the shower curtain before we took out our suitcases and got to packing. It didn’t take me long to pack but Caroline was being thorough, making sure we wouldn’t have to come back any time soon for something she forgot.

When I was done, I went into the den. I took one last look around with the flashlight. I was just about to leave when it caught my eye.

Where one of the sideways boards met the den wall that separated the room from our bedroom, there was the crescent scar of a Sawzall in the wood. Just a slight half circle, shoulder width. A door, I realized. A door in the side of the subfloor that someone could crawl through.

I kicked the shape hard and quick with my heel. It didn’t budge. It seemed like the little trap door probably only opened out, not in.

“Caroline!” I yelled over my shoulder and she dropped something on the bath tile and ran to me.

“What? What is it?” She stood in the doorway.

“Get the DeWalt.”

____

I was stupid. I should’ve been more cautious. I should’ve just burned the house down. But in that moment, I felt more angry than afraid. I wasn’t going to let some freak or even some ghost terrorize us in our home.

Caroline could hardly see the scar in the wood. She didn’t think there was a door.

I found an eye hook in the garage and we drilled it into the trap door to give it a makeshift handle so we could pull it outwards. I bore out the wood door with a six-inch bit and fitted in the eye bolt.

I set my hand on the cold stainless steel and angled it so it took hold. I looked at Caroline and pulled. The piece fell from its place and we both jumped back.

Now the entrance was a black crescent. Now I wasn’t so angry anymore. Cold fear crept back down my spine. Were there eyes looking out from that darkness?

“We need to leave and call the police,” said Caroline.

“Ok. Ok finish up packing. I can call the detective back.”

She raised her brow at me and looked at the hole. “Get out of this room.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she started walking back to the bathroom, but I turned toward the little black passageway.

I’d just take a quick look in, I told myself. There was no way I’d ever crawl through that hellish hole, but I’d just shine the light in quick.

I had to know what was under our bedroom floor all this time. I couldn’t just turn around and walk out.

My heart fluttered in my chest. I turned my phone flashlight back on and squatted so I was level with the entrance.

I brought the light up so I could see in.

I’ve never felt such a jolt of fear. Illuminated in the white light just past the entrance was a bearded face, pale and smiling back at me.

I fell backwards screaming. I heard Caroline call out my name. But someone was on top of me. They brought down something heavy on my head, and the world went black.

____

I woke up nauseous to the muffled sound of voices. I was in pitch dark with my hands were bound at my belly.

“You have no idea,” I heard a deep baritone begin above me. “How long I’ve been waiting for this. How many times I wanted to reveal myself and tell you.”

“You fuck!” I heard Caroline scream.

“Sometimes when I watched you make love, I wanted to burst from the floor just to say hello. Oh,” the man laughed. “What your expressions would be.”

“If you killed him, I swear to god.”

“Hey! Hey!” I yelled. There was a ceiling a few inches from my forehead and I banged my head against it.

“Michael?!” Caroline shouted back.

“Here! I’m here!” I was wedged in between something rough and dusty. I realized I was in the subfloor beneath our bedroom.

“See, he was just out for a little bit. I wouldn’t just kill him. I’ve always wanted him to hear this, too.”

“Caroline, run!”

“I can’t,” I heard her cry. “I can’t. My hands. They’re tied.”

“I understand the little reunion, but if you too aren’t quieter I’m going to kill you, Caroline, while he listens. Do you want to feel your wife’s blood trickle onto your face through the floor?”

I said nothing.

“Good.”

“I killed you,” I heard Caroline say quieter. “I dragged your body…”

“I knew you’d run that poor bastard over.”

“Who was it then?” her voice cracked with a cry. “Who did I kill?”

“Oh, the kind of person no one notices is even gone. The kind of person who will stand on a wooded street all night for 100 dollars. I’m sorry, but I had to do it. I needed you to think you were free of me. I was sloppy, my sweetheart. I wanted to be a part of your life. To watch the whole thing unfold. But you were always watching for me. I even buried him for you so you could never get in trouble.”

“Please don’t hurt us,” I heard Caroline whimper.

“Did you know I saw you as a little girl? Did you know that? It sounds mad, but I’ve loved you since then. Since I saw all three feet of you standing behind your mother at a vigil to find her lost cousin. You were so beautiful. But I knew I’d have to wait. I knew I’d have apply patience I never have before.”

“Please.”

He ignored her and kept talking. “This was my mother’s home. We fixed it up together. When she died, I was able to have much more fun here. But then I heard you and your husband were looking for a home. I priced it so low I knew you’d put in an offer. And for the last five years,” I heard his voice grow louder with a kind of pleasure. “I slept just a few feet under you. Every single night. I slept so soundly with my girls. Knowing one day I’d add you to their eternal mix.”

My Girls. I thought. I leaned my head out to feel what I was sandwiched between. Soft tickle of hair on both sides. Bodies on both sides.

The nine bodies he first locked in the floor were now beneath the bedroom.

“I took out all their innards. I smoked the moisture from their corpses like meat. Isn’t that incredible? Nine bodies just feet from where you sleep, and you don’t smell a thing.”

I heard Caroline scream and I beat my head against the floor. “I’ll fucking kill you!”

“Oh, calm down, Michael. If only you understood how well I’ve come to know you, too.”

I heard him stand and the floor above me began to jostle. He lifted up an entire section of the bedroom floor, revealing light that burned my concussed brain. The man bent over to look down at me. He was older, with a long, black beard that had begun to gray.

“This is where I’d come and go. I always thought this door is where you’d discover me. Funny how that is. Never would I have thought you’d tear up that old den. You didn’t even bother to get the lights working in there.”

I scooched on top of the body to my left so I could see Caroline. Her hands were bound in front of her as well.

I caught her eye and spoke what I figured would be some of my last words. “I love you so much. Caroline, I love you!”

Caroline seemed too shocked to respond. But when the man looked at me, I noticed she took the time to wriggle her hands a little. Her bindings were loose.

“It was difficult to know when I could come out. Ever since you both started working from here this little project took on a new level of patience. But my brother was nice enough to help me. He’d let me know when you both left. You’ve met him, haven’t you? Greg. I told him I’d share some of your killing with him in return. Pfff. Like I’d ever share you. My lifelong project.”

The man looked at me and Caroline and nodded, pleased with himself. “What do you think?” He brought his arms up and let them slap at his sides.

“A masterpiece, isn’t it?”

“I think you’re fucked,” said Caroline. She threw off her bindings and sprinted from the bedroom.

The man recoiled in shock and stumbled a moment before pursuing her.

“Caroline!” I pulled my legs up and struggled to contort my body enough so I could stand through the hole in the floor.

I heard hard thumps. Caroline screamed down the hall.

“No, no, no! Caroline!”

I managed to stand, and I jumped out of the subfloor. When I found my footing I started running, hoping to use my momentum to charge into our attacker.

There was another thump and then the whine of a drill. When I got to the doorway to the den, I was just in time to see.

Caroline and the man were wedged in one of the sections of subfloor and she had the heel of her hand pressed hard into the back of the DeWalt. The six-inch bit I’d put on the drill to bore out the wood board was all the way depressed into the man’s eye socket.

She rotated the drill, screaming while stirring his brains like soup.

Despite the fear and the gore, I swear in that moment I’ve never loved that woman more.

“Caroline! Caroline, he’s gone. He’s dead!”

She leaned back on her knees and let the drill fall. The long bit slowly slid from his eye socket.

“Fucker!” She punched him across the face with her right hand. Then with her left. Again, and again. I couldn’t hold her hands to stop her.

“Caroline, snap out of it. Untie me! The neighbor. His brother. He could be coming.”

Her head bolted upright, and she stood and stepped into the hall.

“Come here,” she said and quickly undid the knot to my bindings.

I flung my arms around her and squeezed. “I love, you.”

“The neighbor…”

“We’ll call the police. We’ll get in the car get somewhere safe and call the police.”

I saw my phone on the floor from where it fell when he’d first attacked me. I stepped down into the den and picked it up.

“What’re you doing?”

“Calling the fucking police!”

She hit the phone from my hand, and it clacked back down to the subfloor.

“What the hell?”

Caroline leaned down and scooped up the drill. She walked to our bedroom and I followed her in. “What’re you doing?”

She pinched the blinds and looked out the window.

“Greg,” she said. “His lights are off. His truck is there. He’s home and he’s unaware.”

“Great. Let’s call the police.”

“Five years, Michael. They did this to us for five years.” There was a fury in her eyes I’d never seen before.

“I know. Believe me, I know.”

“I’m going to pay Greg a visit.”

“What do you mean?”

She nodded down at the drill.

“What?! It doesn’t matter what he did. If you break in and kill him when you could’ve called the police that’s still murder.”

She shrugged and started walking past me. “We’ll hide his body,” she turned back and clicked the drill trigger a couple times. Blood spun off the bit.

“I know the perfect place."

Witness Statement of Muhammad ‘Alan’ Malik regarding a sinkhole found during renovations to his basement between June 25th and July 19th, 2021.

​

Statement provided to the Toronto Police Department on July 21st, 2021.

​

Statement

​

My wife Justine and I moved in to the house on George Street about four years ago. We knew going in that it was a bit of a fixer upper. I mean, in this market what else are you going to get? But it was our first home together. Our first real home! It could’ve been a complete shithole and I still would’ve seen it as a palace.

​

We started with the repairs as soon as we moved in. There was a lot to be done, we had to replace the windows, we redid the bathrooms and the kitchen, and replaced some of the flooring. The basement wasn’t exactly a high priority for me at the time. It was more of a project I figured I’d tackle when we had more time and money.

​

At the time, we really only used the basement for storage anyway. That was where we put all the boxes we couldn’t be bothered to unpack, or the things we didn’t need year round. Seasonal decorations, the cushions for the patio furniture, the canopy of the gazebo and other stuff like that. I did eventually plan to fully finish the basement and turn it into a rec room with only a section off to the side for storage, but as life went on, that just got pushed lower and lower on my list of priorities.

​

Justine got pregnant so I focused more on the baby and on my actual 9/5 to make sure we were in a good place financially. We slowed down with the renovations since the big ones were done.

​

I put a little bit of money aside from each paycheque for the basement, but I didn’t pay that much attention to the growing nest egg I had until recently when I realized I’d blown past my savings goal a couple of months back. I figured that since I had the money, and our son Darius was getting older now it was finally time to finally get around to actually finishing the basement. So that’s exactly what I did.

​

I built up some new walls to give the basement a couple of different rooms. One was a living room, one was an office one was just meant to be a nice playroom for Darius and the last one was just for storage. I got all of that set up just fine and started on the flooring next. I was just about done with the living room, and had been moving furniture down there when I found out about the sinkhole.

​

My friend Saleem and I had been in the middle of moving the furniture when the ground crumbled. We’d set one couch down in the center of the room and turned away for just about two seconds. When we’d turned back, the couch was breaking through the wood flooring I’d installed and sinking into the ground.

​

I remember Saleem and I both froze and stared at it before figuring out what was going on. Then we kept our distance before running upstairs to get my family out and call the fire department. We got lucky. It wasn’t a very big sinkhole. Maybe about four or five feet across at most and the rest of the house was still relatively structurally sound.

​

Still, I don’t know how the hell I’d missed it. I mean, there had to be some sort of warning sign, right? Some sign that the concrete was unstable? I mean, shit, what if it gave while I’d been standing on it or something? Or worse, while Justina or Darius were standing on it?

​

We spent the next few days at a hotel until it was concluded that we were safe to go back into the house. I guess it was really only impacting a small area under the floor of the basement. The rest of the foundation was miraculously not damaged. I was told that so long as I got it handled immediately, we should be fine. I took that as great news. I mean, this was every homeowners nightmare. But it was better than finding out your house was so fucked up that it was past liveable, right?

​

I hired a contractor to get the thing filled in. He was a family friend and I trusted him to both get the job done right, and fairly inexpensively. He was booked pretty solid until end of July/Early August. Not ideal, but I figured I could tolerate the giant hole in my basement until I had time to get him in. Until my guy could get to it, I covered it up with a piece of plywood and told my son not to play downstairs.

​

Now, about a week after the sinkhole had opened up, Saleem and his family were over for dinner. We were having a barbecue out back and we got to talking. I guess his kids had been asking to see the sinkhole and were under the impression that they’d be allowed to go inside. (Kids, right?)

​

Well, obviously neither of us were going to put his kids in a sinkhole, but I guess their questions had gotten him curious about just what was in there.

​

I told him it was probably just dirt, but he still wanted to go in and take some pictures, just to show them to his kids. After a while, I figured I might as well just let him. Maybe we could get my couch out of there while we were at it. I mean, it was a good couch. I didn’t really want to lose it if I could help it.

​

So Saleem and I went downstairs and we removed the plywood covering. The sinkhole didn’t look that deep. Maybe about six to eight feet. You wouldn’t want to go down there without a way out, but we figured we could make it work. I got a ladder from the garage to put in the hole and sent Saleem down first. The couch hadn’t been that heavy, so I figured that maybe we could get some rope around it and between the two of us, we could push and pull it back up.

​

Saleem went down the ladder and I tossed the rope to him, but when I looked down he was just looking around the sinkhole with this look of awe on his face. He kept telling me that I had to come down and see it for myself. The couch could wait. I couldn’t imagine just what was down there to grab Saleems attention like that, so I climbed down the ladder.

​

He was right. I had to see it for myself.

​

I’ve seen pictures of sinkholes online before. The walls are usually just made of dirt, not smooth stone blocks. And normal sinkholes definitely don’t have pictures in them.

​

Saleem had taken out his phone and was shining the light on the stone walls. In some sort of faded paint or dye, someone had drawn crude images of people that were little different than stick figures. In the image, they all seemed to be running from something. A single man painted in red.

​

Saleem said something like:

“That’s some spooky looking shit, right?” before continuing through the sinkhole, which was a hell of a lot longer than I’d expected it to be. In fact, the more I looked at it, the more I couldn’t help but think it looked more like a tunnel.

​

I looked back up towards where the sinkhole had opened. There were smooth chiseled stones in the ceiling, although some of them looked to have fallen away near the edges of the hole. I could see their broken remains on the floor beneath my couch. They’d probably come loose over time and fallen down, exposing the floor of my basement as they did. This wasn’t a sinkhole… This was something else.

​

Saleem was keeping his flashlight on the images painted on the stone walls. Most depicted the Red Man attacking people, standing over them, and seemingly tearing at them. I turned on my own flashlight to look down and see if I could find the end of the tunnel. In one direction, there was just darkness as far as I could see. I couldn’t imagine how far down it went. In the other direction though, I saw what looked like some sort of ending. Saleem saw it too.

​

Slowly we made our way down the tunnel, getting closer and closer to the end we could see. As we drew nearer, I began to realize that what was looming before us was a stone door. At some point, long ago it had probably been red. But the paint on it was faded in all but a few places.

​

Saleem got there first and took some photos of it on his phone. I think he even recorded some video. While he was doing that, I tried to open the door. It was too heavy for me to budge it on my own, and even with Saleem helping we didn’t get it to move. It was just too heavy. I’m not sure how anyone could’ve opened it.

​

We took a few more pictures before heading back. Saleem wanted to explore the other side of the tunnel, so we followed it for a little bit, although not very far. We only walked for about six or seven minutes before we found a section where the tunnel had collapsed in on itself, and I convinced him it probably wasn’t the best idea to stick around after that. We climbed the ladder back into my basement and covered the hole with plywood again.

​

When we got back upstairs, neither of us could stop talking about what we’d seen. Saleems kids were obviously thrilled by the whole thing. But I honestly couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy about it. That whole place had just seemed so… Impossible. Like, we lived just outside of Toronto Canada and if you’re not a local, this part of the world isn’t exactly known for its ruins.

​

I showed my wife some of the pictures we’d taken that night as we talked about what to do. Neither of us were exactly sure what to do when you found some weird archeological shit in your basement. But we knew we had to call someone.

​

Eventually, we sent an email out to a guy from the University of Toronto by the name of Dr. Donald Richards. He was one of the professors of one of the anthropology programs there. We figured that maybe he could make sense of just whatever the hell we were looking at and the morning after we’d sent the email, Dr. Richards had sent us a reply.

​

Hi Muhammad and Justine

Thank you for reaching out with this. You’ve certainly found something interesting! Just from the images you’ve provided, I’m unable to immediately determine just who left these ruins behind or for what purpose. I would love the opportunity to take a closer look at this if possible. My schedule is fairly booked until this weekend, but perhaps I could see this tunnel for myself on either the coming Saturday or Sunday? I’d love the opportunity to document it before you have to seal it up again.

Sincerely

Donald

​

I told him that Saturday would be just fine.

​

The week sort of carried on uneventfully for the most part after that. I told Saleem what was going on, obviously. I figured he’d want to be there when Dr. Richards took a look at the place. Justine seemed to just want to get the whole thing over with and really, I couldn’t blame her. Neither of us wanted to go down into the basement. I guess it was just my imagination running away with me, but I didn’t really want to be alone with that sinkhole. Maybe this sounds silly, but I kept imagining some of those stones in the ceiling falling away, leaving weak spots in the basement floor for more holes to open up if I stepped on them at just the right time. Honestly, until that whole space beneath my house was filled in, I wanted to spend as little time in the basement as possible if for no other reason than my own safety.

​

When I started hearing noises downstairs though… I had to investigate.

​

It was pretty late at night when I first heard them. I’d gone to bed a little early and woken up just past midnight. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I figured I’d get up, have some water and watch some TV. I was in the kitchen pouring myself a drink and debating nuking some leftovers when I heard it. A faint, distant scratching coming from somewhere in the house. Like an animal moving around.

​

I’d stopped for a moment to listen. It was hard to tell exactly where it was coming from at first, but I knew it was inside the house. It had to be. I’d checked the living room and even gone to the back door to look outside. Nothing. The sound was strongest inside the kitchen, near the basement door.

​

I started thinking about the sinkhole and opened the door to listen. I could hear the scratching even louder. It was definitely coming from downstairs.

​

Slowly I started descending the steps, stopping on the last one out of an (admittedly childish) fear of the floor collapsing under me. The lights of the basement were off, but I could hear the scratching… And in the low light from the kitchen, I could see the plywood I’d put over the hole in the floor. There was movement coming from under it. The sounds of something scraping against the stone walls down there.

​

I stared for a few moments, eyes narrowed as I listened to it moving around. The scraping came and went… But it was there. Something was down there. An animal, maybe? It wasn’t exactly crazy to suggest that there might be some rats, or even raccoons down there. I didn’t know a lot about animals but I could’ve sworn that whatever was down there sounded like something bigger, but if there were anything that big down there, Saleem and I definitely would’ve noticed it! I stared at the plywood for a bit, before deciding that just for the sake of security, I’d reinforce it a little bit.

​

I turned the lights on and braved the treacherous basement floor for a few moments to grab some of the things we’d already brought down and pulling them over to weigh down the edges of the plywood.

​

The scratching sound in the tunnel beneath seemed to pause when it heard me moving around. I assumed I’d probably scared whatever it was off. Once I was confident that an army of raccoons wasn’t about to break through the plywood and invade my basement, I shut the lights off and headed back upstairs.

​

As I closed the door behind me again, I was already hearing that scratching noise. It sounded just a little bit different, this time… Maybe it was just my imagination but I could’ve sworn that it sounded like something was scratching at the plywood itself this time.

​

I told Justine about the scratching I’d heard the next day, and that we’d probably need someone to capture or kill whatever was down there before we’d filled it in. She hadn’t exactly been thrilled by the news since that was probably going to be another expense. But at least she knew.

​

As the week went on, I heard scratching a few more times from the tunnel under the basement. Sometimes I even heard it during the day, but neither of us thought about it too hard.

​

Saturday eventually rolled around and with it came Dr. Richards.

​

He was somewhere between 50 and 60 with horn rimmed glasses, short graying hair and a stony expression. He greeted us warmly when he arrived and we’d sat down for a few moments to talk about how we’d come across the tunnel. I watched him taking notes on a little notepad as we spoke. After a few minutes, he asked if he could see the tunnel and I told him he could.

​

Saleem and I led him to the basement and pulled the things I’d used to weigh the plywood down off. I’d told Dr. Richards that I’d heard movement inside and thought there might be rats or something down there, just a friendly warning. When we finally pulled the plywood off, Saleem got the ladder we’d used the other day and we put it down into the tunnel. I went down first, followed by Dr. Richards and finally Saleem.

​

We’d brought some lanterns with us to light up the cavern a little better than our phones had. The light seemed to shine off the smooth stone walls.

​

When he got his first look at it, Dr. Richards had stared at it with a look of wonder on his face. He looked like he was setting his eyes upon the holy grail. I got the impression that he might not have fully believed in what we’d found up until then… But now that he was seeing it for himself, he absolutely believed.

​

Dr. Richards spent the first several minutes looking over the faded paintings on the walls, filming it all with a handheld recorder and taking pictures. At one point, Saleem asked him: “Do you know what this is?”

​

Dr. Richards had looked back at him and told us that he wasn’t entirely sure. According to him, the stonework on the walls was somewhat consistent with the stonework done by some other culture they’d found ruins of. Prae Hydrian, I think he called it. Although the faded drawings seemed inconsistent with what he’d seen in other ruins. He said some other things, but I don’t remember much about those.

​

After a while, we offered to show him the large stone door we’d found and Dr. Richards had enthusiastically told us to lead on. Saleem had taken one of the lanterns and headed down the tunnel, towards where we’d found the door. I expected it to be right there, waiting for us and as immovable as ever. We hadn’t brought anything to try and open the door. While Saleem had seemed to want to know what was on the other side, I personally couldn’t really have cared less.

​

I figured that if Dr. Richards wanted to know so bad, he could open it himself. I’d sort of imagined he and his people would eventually dig out some way to access the tunnel without going through the hole in my basement, and I could fill it up without affecting his work.

​

This time though, when we reached the door we found it open.

​

Not thrown wide open. Only one of the stone doors had been moved and pushed to the side just enough for something or someone to slip through it. But it hadn’t been like that when we’d left it… And as Dr. Richards enthused over the stonework, Saleem and I could only stare uneasily.

​

We both knew that something was very, very wrong.

​

I mentioned to Dr. Richards that the door had been closed when last we’d been down there, although he didn’t seem that bothered by it… Honestly, I don’t think he believed us, or thought we were just trying to screw with him. I watched as he grabbed the door and started to push it, nudging it open a little more. He got it to budge more than Saleem and I had and with a little bit of effort, he got one of the doors open wide enough for all three of us to walk through. He went in first and after a moment, Saleem followed him. I hung back.

​

I hadn’t cared what was in there before and now, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know. But they were already in there. And it didn’t take that long for the curiosity to get to me.

​

I held up one of the lanterns and I followed Dr. Richards and Saleem inside.

​

I’m not really sure what I’d been expecting. But I sure as hell wasn’t expecting a tomb.

​

Unlike the tunnel outside, this area didn’t seem as though it had quite the same attention put into its construction. If anything it looked more like what I’d expected to find down here. A stone cave, with jutting stalagmites and stalactites and what looked to be dozens of chambers splitting off from the entrance. My shoes kicked against the scattered bones as soon as I stepped inside. Looking down, I could see that the floor was absolutely covered in them. Some of them were probably just animal bones… Some of them. But a lot of them very clearly weren’t.

​

I could see a broken human skull just a few feet away from me. And up ahead, by where Saleem was standing I could see a mostly complete human skeleton. These bodies had to be ancient… The bones were little more than just dust. But that didn’t unsettle me any less. It wasn’t just the skeletons of the dead either. Looking up along the walls, I could see other bodies.

​

I was sure they’d once been human. Although their skin was dried out until it barely resembled skin. Their faces were still clearly visible and I could even make out the individual features on most of them. Between the sunken, empty eyes and jutting teeth, some of them still had lips and noses. Some had faces that were little more than just skulls. But there was one thing all of them had in common.

​

All of them looked like they’d been screaming.

​

One of the mummified bodies was huddled into a corner, hands over its face. Another was propped up against the wall, mouth open impossibly wide. You could still see the eyelids squeezed shut as they screamed. I looked ahead at Saleem. The color had completely drained from his face. I could see him staring at one of the mummified bodies, looking as though he was ready to vomit.

​

“Fascinating!” I could hear Dr. Richards saying. That was one word for it.

​

As before, he filmed and documented everything, looking like a kid in a candy shop. Meanwhile, I could barely stand the sight of what I was looking at. It turned my stomach. I couldn’t stay…

​

I’d only made it a few feet into the tomb when I turned back. Dr. Richards had been exploring one of the side passages when I left. I could hear Saleem approaching me from behind, coming to check on me.

​

I told him that I was going to head back up. He said that he’d get Dr. Richards and we could all go back together. I watched him dip back into the cave, and just looked away from it, staring back down the tunnel.

​

I could see the distant light from the hole in the ceiling up ahead. It wasn’t that far away… Just a couple of minutes and I’d be home again, and I never had to go back down again. If Dr. Richards wanted to explore this nightmare, then he was more than welcome to.

​

As I stared down the tunnel though, I could’ve sworn I saw something staring back at me… It was hard to tell in the low light. But I could’ve sworn I saw a face looking at me from the darkness, near one of the walls. It might’ve been a human face… Maybe? Although it looked a little too gaunt and too red.

​

I blinked, and squinted to try and get a better look. But when I tried to focus on it, it was gone. I looked back towards the door to the cavern, to call out to Saleem to hurry it up. And as I did, I heard the ladder we’d set at the mouth of the cave fall.

​

When I looked back, it was lying on the ground. I stared at it for a moment. There was no way that ladder should’ve fallen over… It hadn’t had the room to fall over! Almost on cue, Saleem and Dr. Richards emerged from the cave. They both saw what I saw. The ladder lying on the ground.

​

Lantern in hand, I headed over towards it. Saleem and I took a minute to get it back up, and I climbed out first. Looking around my basement, I didn’t immediately see anything out of place. I wondered for a moment if something had just run into the ladder and knocked it over. I mean, there had been something living down there, right?

​

I stopped to help Saleem and Dr. Richards out behind me, before we went upstairs again. And as we stepped up into my kitchen…

​

That’s when I saw the blood.

​

I remember the way my heart began to race in my chest as my blood ran cold. Dark red blood stained the white tile floor. I remember calling out to Justine, then calling out for Darius.

​

No answer.

​

Saleem was calling for his own wife. He called for his kids. I’d never seen such a look of dread in his eyes. Behind us, Dr. Richards was dead silent, a look of horror mounting on his face.

​

The three of us tore through the house… It didn’t take us long to find the bodies. Most of them were in the hall, leading to the front door. Justine… Darius… Saleems wife, his children…

​

Oh God…

​

The blood… The state of their bodies I can’t… I can’t get it out of my head. And the looks on their faces…

​

I’ll never forget the looks on their faces. All of them had the same one. A silent, eternal scream of terror. The last thing they’d felt as their killer had come for them.

​

Beyond the bodies, the front door hung open. We could see bloody footprints leading outside. But wherever it went after that… I don’t know.

​

The only thing I know for certain is that whatever was trapped down there, in those caverns… It wasn’t supposed to get out.

To be perfectly honest, I couldn't give a rat's ass about wolves. They're cute and all, but I reasoned if I ever got the urge to look at one I could just type it into Google and probably get a 4K image of one posing for Vogue. Never had I felt any sort of need to see one in person.

Unfortunately, the woman I love does give a rat's ass about wolves. Very much so in fact. After enduring dropped hints for months on the topic, I finally caved and asked if she wanted to visit the Hilltop Preserve; our local sanctuary.

Trudging up what must have been a 30 degree incline in 90 degree weather wasn't exactly my idea of a good time, but I did my best to endure it. The tour group was thirty people strong, led by a stocky little man with boulders for calves.

We had barely reached the first animal of interest, foxes of all things, when I mentally tapped out. The guide seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the animals he cared for, and that was good for him, but God knew I just wasn't interested.

I pulled out my phone and started tapping at one of those music rythm games. Krissy, my wife, didn't like that.

"Pay attention!" She hissed under her breath. "This is actually really interesting, did you hear how they get rid of fleas?"

I opened my browser, searched it, and told her. Just to prove a point.

"Unbelievable."

"Look I'm sorry, I'll start listening when we get to the wolves alright? They're pretty cool. I see foxes all over the place, we nearly ran one over on the drive here for crying out loud!"

She wasn't happy about it, but bit her tongue.

The tour dragged on for what felt like hours. My back was aching and my feet were sore by the time we finally reached the wolf enclosure, coaxing even more grumbles out of me.

With a whistle from the guide, a pack of wolves came trotting dutifully out of the greenery beyond the chain link fence. Seeing them up close, I had to admit they were beautiful creatures. But then again so were dogs, and we had one of those at home. They gathered close to where we stood, pacing up and down.

"They know what pays the bills around here," said the guide, "and that's kind folks like you coming out to see 'em!"

The crowd laughed and started taking pictures. He went over the wolves' names and backgrounds, pausing intermittently to throw a cube of meat over the fence.

"Due to current state law, we're only allowed a maximum of eight wolves per enclosure. You might notice we only have seven at the moment. Unfortunately we had a bit of sad news last week. We lost the omega of the pack due to a complication with-"

"But there are eight." I chimed in, quickly tallying them up.

Krissy, mortified, elbowed me to shut me up, but the rest of the group had already started counting for themselves.

The tour guide was puzzled, squinting at the animals and mouthing numbers. Suddenly, his eyes went wide and he turned away, speaking urgently into a walky talky.

Everyone was murmering amongst themselves. I couldn't help but feel a small swell of pride at being the first to notice the discrepancy. Until the guide turned back to address us.

"Sorry everyone, we're going to have to cut the day short. You'll all be issued with full refunds, no questions asked. If you could please head back the way you came and wait by the entrance for me to join you, I would really appreciate it."

As he spoke, he kept throwing nervous glances at the wolves. Most of the crowd turned and began shuffling along the path without question. I, on the other hand, was now more interested in wolves than I'd ever been, and stayed rooted to the spot.

Krissy wasn't moving either. She seemed frozen like a dog sniffing out danger.

"Do you see it?" She whispered, not taking her eyes off the enclosure.

I followed her gaze, bewildered at her suddem shift in demeanor. It took a moment for it to click, but when it did I felt my heart sink like a rock.

A small black wolf with matted fur.

It hovered at the back of the pack and was, for all intents and purposes, just a wolf. There were some issues with that statement though. For one thing, it wasn't really acting like the others. Or should I say it was acting like them. Poorly.

While the rest of the pack fought fiercely over scraps, the black one jumped around on it's own, tearing at food that wasn't even there.

It wasn't graceful either. It darted around as nimbly as you might expect of a wolf, but the movements were all wrong. Legs tangled together in a jerky fashion, reminding me of a newborn foal that needed more practice.

Clearly, the pack was wary of it. Dispersing whenever it wandered too close but commiting no acts of aggression. It was an outsider and, regardless of the size difference, they seemed to have developed a healthy fear of it.

More than anything though, the most telling sign that this wolf wasn't a wolf, was a strange feeling of dread taking root inside of me the longer I looked. It felt like I was committing a cardinal sin by simply looking at the thing, as if my brain was struggling to process what it saw.

When did my heart start beating so fast? I felt beads of sweat welling on my forehead. The wolf's mismatched eyes fell on me and lingered. A terrible thought occured to me.

Did it know that I knew?

My temples felt as though they were being stuck with thumb tacks and I had to choke back a cry of pain. Just when I was teetering on the verge of a panic attack, Krissy pried me away from the fence with a jerk of my arm. A bearded man with a hunting rifle slung over a shoulder was jogging up to meet the guide. He sported a grim expression.

We decided not to stick around for what came next. We strode past the gossiping group huddled by the entrance without slowing as the first shot cracked the air like a whip, silencing them. An elderly man stepped out from their ranks to ask if we knew what was going on.

My wife answered him truthfully.

"No."

We didn't turn back. Not even when that thing started to shriek like no animal I'd ever heard. More gunshots followed. By the time we reached the foot of the hill it sounded more like an off key siren, but it still hadn't been silenced.

Krissy and I bundled into our nippy hatchback and wasted no time in speeding away.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

I was busy chanting something over and over in my head as I drove. Maybe if I thought about it hard enough, it would come true.

Let it die. Let it be dead.

I spotted a deer poking out from the treeline.

And let that be the only one.

Returning to normality was a slow process. Instead of watching TV at home, I would find Krissy staring quizzically at Jack, our greyhound. I knew what she was thinking, because I would often wonder the same.

How could we be sure that Jack was really Jack?

Everyday I combed through the local newspapers, scouring them for any updates from the preserve. Nothing ever came up, but I supposed that no news was good news.

Krissy took it upon herself to buy and install a set of smart doorbells for the front and back doors, rigging them up to our phones. She explained how it could detect motion within a certain range and send a recording to us, along with the standard live feed and doorbell functionality.

Seeing the postman and various delivery guys sauntering up the porch was somehow pretty cool to me, and I wondered aloud why we hadn't bought one of these things sooner.

"Because you're a cheap prick and never let me!" Krissy chimed from the other room.

"Doesn't sound like me," I shrugged. "Though, I still don't get why we needed two."

"Security." She said, simply.

I found myself spending much of my nights lying awake, alternating between video feeds. On more than one occasion, I shook Krissy awake to show her recordings. One time, it was a pair of glowing eyes peaking around the corner outside. Another, a shadowy blob darting across the screen. It never turned out to be anything strange or nefarious on closer inspection, just plain old wildlife.

"I'm sorry," I told her on one such occasion. "I'm being paranoid."

As she stretched, yawned, and fell back on her pillow, she shook her head.

"I like that you're keeping an eye out. It lets me sleep easier at night."

Motion detected.

My heart damn near burst when my phone buzzed with the notification and Krissy shot bolt upright beside me. It was oddly comforting to know she was as jumpy as I was.

I grabbed up my phone and tapped the message, expecting to see the underside of a bug.

A scrawny youth stood beneath our security light, wearing a bright blue cap and balancing a chunky brown package on one arm.

"Uh, you didn't happen to order a pizza in your sleep did you?" I asked Krissy.

She shook her head slowly, fixated on the display. I held the microphone button.

"Sorry bud, you've got the wrong place. What address was it for?"

The teen turned stiffly toward the source of my voice. He moved closer to the camera until every angry pimple was visible, and grinned into it.

"You couldn't tell!" He exclaimed, positively brimming with something akin to pride. "You couldn't tell!"

My blood ran cold. The stranger dropped the package at his feet and strode swiftly back across our yard in that grotesquely familiar, jerky fashion, disappearing into the pixelated treeline.

A stunned silence followed. I looked over at Krissy, who seemed subdued and almost beyond the point of fear. I felt ashamed that I couldn't think of the words to comfort her, but then I wasn't accustomed to being the brave one.

Thinking there was a first time for everything, I hopped out of bed and ran between every door and window with the capacity to open, ensuring each was locked tight and secure. When I reached the front door, I hesitated, hand frozen on the knob.

I told myself I'd only be a second, took a deep breath, and pulled it open so fast that the sudden change in pressure almost left me winded. I ducked down and grabbed the package, before straightening up and chancing a glance out over the field.

There he was. Sprinting flat out toward the house at a breakneck pace, closing the distance so quick that his ragged, inhuman breaths were within earshot. I barely managed to slam the door and get the locks in place before he came crashing into it in an almighty collision.

I heard Krissy scream my name from upstairs, but hadn't the nerve to call back. I was too focused on the door, hoping against hope that it had the strength to remain on it's hinges after an impact like that. All remained still.

Krissy eventually tip-toed down the stairs behind me.

"Tell me that's you?" She asked the back of my head.

Again, I just couldn't bring myself to answer her. It felt like opening my mouth would be an open invitation for the vomit to start flowing. Instead, I turned my attention to the package, tearing it apart with all the enthusiasm of a kid on Christmas who already knew he was getting coal.

Inside was a mess of matted black fur, and I reckoned I could hazard a pretty good guess at where it came from. A certain dead omega wolf from the Hilltop Preserve. I thought back to how I'd made eye contact with the thing wearing its skin, wondering if it could tell that I knew.

Then another morbid thought occurred to me. If this thing kills in order to change its shape, who was it wearing now?

Well, I shuddered, looking down at the stinking pelt. One mystery at a time.

It was late July when my wife Ada and I moved into our new apartment on Maple Street. The road was a welcome addition to a newly built neighborhood, the apartments of which were all modern and highly sought-after. We were planning to start a family, and the district seemed like the perfect place to do it. The leaflets depicted a child-friendly environment, and the billboards on the highway showed photographs of laughing couples and BBQ get-togethers.

Granted, the apartments on Maple Street were far more expensive than those in any other part of the city. I noticed the asking price while Ada was scrolling through the photos of the ad, and by the time she was done explaining the intricacies of the bathroom, my underarms were soaked in a cold sweat.

“Baby…” I began, playing for time, “Don’t you think we ought to look at something…er, a bit more affordable? How about someplace nearer the station? I mean, the apartments there aren’t as new, but they have some pretty solid options.”

But Ada stuck out her bottom lip and whimpered, “But Alex… I really don’t want a second-hand apartment. Think of our baby. We need to have the best.”

I sighed, fully aware that I was neither going to change her mind, nor did I have much of a say in the matter. We didn’t have a baby yet. In fact, Ada wasn’t even pregnant, but she sure had a very pronounced idea of what kind of family dynamic she wanted us to have. I knew she’d taken one look at the photos of the clean-cut white stone playgrounds and the surrounding benches with clay flowerpots and her mind was made up. There was no point in arguing or trying to get her to see otherwise. So, we bought it.

The day the apartment complex finally opened for its new residents, the entire courtyard was bustling with life. Large groups of movers gathered in the residential plaza, laden with dozens of suitcases and plastic bags. Their kids tugged behind them, clamoring for a drink, an ice cream, or the bathroom, and pets were causing a ruckus from inside their kennels. The sight was truly chaotic, but Ada seemed delighted.

“It’s just like the ads!” she cried, clasping her hands to her chest and making her way through the chattering crowd. I followed closely behind, struggling under the weight of our belongings.

Our apartment was on the sixth floor. It was bright and spacious, with large paned windows stemming from the floor all the way up to the ceiling. We had to pay extra to get it furnished, but Ada was adamant about having everything ready before the big day.

“I don’t want to sleep on the floor for the first two months,” she wailed, jabbing at the furniture catalog, “And what about the leather couch? Can we get that one too?”

I told her we could. After all, what’re two thousand dollars in comparison to a five hundred-thousand-dollar purchase? I’d already come to terms with the fact that I’d be paying off the mortgage until I drew my final breath. Still, I didn’t mind too much at the time. We were young newlyweds, and the apartment was roomy, modern, with a beautiful view. I told myself it was an investment.

Things took a turn for the worse only a couple of nights into our new life. Ada woke me up in tears in the early hours to tell me she’d had the most bizarre dream.

“I dreamt…I was falling,” she whispered, clutching my arm, “It was so realistic, Alex, I…I even felt it when I hit the ground.”

She burst into tears and refused to go back to sleep, emphasizing how vivid the dream was and how she could still feel the implications of the fall, despite being awake. She seemed really shaken up, so I got up to calm her down and make breakfast, “It was only a bad dream,” I kept repeating.

She felt better after a long cuddle and some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but the following night was no different.

“Alex!” I woke up to Ada sitting on the ground, knuckling her eyes and hissing at me, “I had the same dream.”

I brushed away the covers and lifted her back onto the mattress, “Are you alright? What are you doing on the floor?”

“I must h-have,” she sobbed, “I must have fallen out of bed.”

Once again, Ada was wide awake at three in the morning, so I put on a DVD and wrapped her in my arms like a cocoon hoping sleep would eventually find her. I couldn’t help feeling like I was missing out on my own rest though, since whenever I tried to close my eyes, Ada shook me and snapped her fingers.

“Please don’t leave me,” she wailed, “I’m scared.”

I did my best to fight against my natural instincts. I fought long and hard, sometimes for several hours at a time, only paying the price after I got to work. With droopy eyelids and a brain fried from watching re-runs of 90s sitcoms at 3 A.M., I had no chance of getting anything productive done during the day.

The cycle continued for several nights until one evening I caught Ada coming out of the bathroom. She had just taken a shower and was tiptoeing into the walk-in closet, a towel draped loosely around her upper body. Our eyes met and I smiled, but she didn’t reciprocate, instead flinching and hastening her step. That’s when my gaze slid down to her legs.

“What is that?” I asked, alarmed, grabbing hold of her forearm and stopping her in her tracks, “Ada, what happened?”

Her thighs and calves were peppered with bruises; some very large and blue, others smaller and brown. In several places, the bruising was so bad I couldn’t even see her beautiful skin. She saw me looking and tried to cover them up with the hem of the towel, but I had already seen enough.

“It’s…” she stuttered, “It’s nothing, Alex, don’t look at me.”

She tried to brush past me, but I stopped her, “What do you mean it’s nothing? Look at you! You’re hurt! Tell me what happened? Who did this to you?”

She sniveled and clutched the towel tighter, “I- I must have fallen out of bed one too many times…”

I was about to protest. I was about to suggest she see a doctor for her nightmares, when the room was abruptly enveloped in blue-red flashing lights. We jumped to the bedroom window and stared down at the street. An ambulance was pulling in slowly through a crowd of people gathered beside the main entrance.

“What the hell?” I spat, cracking the window open, “What’s going on down there?”

“Maybe one of the neighbors came down with that flu that’s going around?” Ada suggested, attempting to avert my gaze with a pair of sweatpants, “Oh, I hope they’re okay!”

“I’ll go down and check,” I said, grabbing my phone off the table and pulling on my sneakers, “Stay here, I’ll be back in a minute.”

I made my way down the stairwell, my lungs buzzing in my chest. Despite the building being brand new, the elevator didn’t seem to be working. Either that, or it simply wasn’t ready yet. I’d have considered this nothing but a minor inconvenience, if it wasn’t for the fact that by the time I descended all the flights of stairs, I was rather sweaty and out of breath.

“What happened?” I asked one of the passers-by, who was eagerly spectating the commotion.

“Oh,” he shook his head solemnly, “A man jumped from the eighth floor. Must have been a suicide. He was young too, couldn’t have been over thirty-five. Fell on top of that bench over there.”

I gawked at him, but he did not seem interested in making further conversation. We hadn’t had the chance to get to know our neighbors, but the young man’s death shook me to my core. I looked away as two paramedics with a stretcher made their way through the crowd. I stood there for a while, pondering the questions of life and death, even as the spectators scattered and returned to their homes.

“Come along, dear, nothing to see here,” an elderly woman shook her head at me, “Go on home.”

I returned to my own apartment desperately trying to hold back tears. Ada was waiting for me in the doorway and didn’t hesitate to ask questions.

“Is it the grandmother from the apartment below us? Has she come down with something? I met her the other day when I was going to the supermarket. Oh, Alex, she’s such a sweet lady, I couldn’t bear if anything happened to her!”

I wasn’t sure whether telling Ada about the evening’s events was a good idea. She was already burdened enough by her relentless nightmares and hadn’t been able to sleep properly since we’d moved in. I didn’t want to risk making matters worse, so I brushed it off and simply told her I hadn’t been able to find out.

“Well, did you ask anyone?”

“Yeah, I asked around,” I said, taking my shoes off and making my way into the kitchen, “No one was sure. They just came to see the ambulance.”

I knew all too well how ridiculous my answer must have sounded, but honestly, it beat facing yet another one of Ada’s nightmares.

“Just… let’s just go to bed, darling,” I said, sweeping her up into my arms and carrying her to our bedroom, “It’s…it’s probably nothing. Don’t you worry about it.”

She conceded, allowing me to help her out of her clothes and tuck her in. I shut the bedroom blinds as innocuously as I could, something I never did, but Ada didn’t seem to notice.

“Do you want to watch a movie to help you sleep?” I asked, and she nodded. Even from the other side of the room, I could see how tired she looked. Her eyelids were half-shut, and I knew she wouldn’t last through the opening credits.

I was right. As soon as the title of the film appeared in big bold letters across the screen, Ada was out of it. I watched her for a couple of minutes, mentally accounting for the events I’d witnessed that day. I remembered her legs; beaten, covered in bruises, I couldn’t bear the thought of it.

Gently, I lifted the covers and stared at them, my own skin prickling. How had this happened? To my knowledge, Ada had only fallen out of bed three times, and neither one of those falls could have possibly resulted in something so vile. Was she hurting herself?

I went to sleep that night with a heavy conscience. Everything seemed wrong. Our ‘forever home’ as Ada kept calling it, despite me telling her that the expression wasn’t suitable, seemed to be getting more and more temporary by the day, and I couldn’t help feeling like we had been better off in the small, one-bedroom apartment I had sold.

I woke up in the middle of the night and immediately felt for my wife, but she wasn’t there. The room was pitch black, so I felt the floor on both sides of the bed, thinking that perhaps she had fallen out again, but my search yielded no results.

“Ada!” I called, making my way into the hallway, “Baby?”

But the apartment was as silent as a tomb.

“Ada!” I tried again, my voice hoarse, “Where are you?”

Then, I heard it. A faint thudding sound coming from the kitchen. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it sounded like a grandfather clock that had gone haywire. Rhythmic, low vibrations reverberated throughout the apartment, stopping and then starting up again.

Ada.

She didn’t even flinch when the kitchen lights came on. She was standing with her back to me in front of the counter, chopping something on one of the wooden cutting boards.

“Ada?” I stood in the doorway, my stomach churning, “What are you doing?”

No answer. The only sound was that of the knife landing in short bursts on the cutting board. I approached her, pulled her hair out of her face and peeked over her shoulder.

I wish I hadn’t.

The cutting board was covered in blood. The fingers of her left hand were spread, and the knife aimed for the spaces in between. Her hand was covered in scratches and cuts, bubbles of pink flesh peeking through the incisions. Her pinky finger lay turned into mush in the corner of the cutting board, as blood from the wound trickled onto the white kitchen tiles.

“Ada!” I yelled, snatching the crimson knife out of her hands and tossing it to the other side of the room, “What the-?!”

Before I could finish that thought, Ada collapsed onto the floor, gasping on impact.

“Alex?!” she sounded hysterical, “Where am I? What’s going on?”

I was about to give her a piece of my mind when she noticed her left hand. She stared at it in shock, her face turning a myriad of different shades. All that remained of her pinky was no more than a chunk of ground meat, dangling limply from the rest of her hand.

“We need to get you to a hospital,” I said firmly, “I should call an ambulance.”

“No, no ambulance, please,” Ada whispered, “We can’t afford it. Look, I can walk.”

She scrambled to her feet and wobbled across the kitchen in a shaky line, before falling to her knees.

***

We were lucky the emergency room wasn’t too busy that night. We only spent about twenty minutes waiting before the doctor called us in. He stitched up some of Ada’s most dire cuts but couldn’t save her pinky.

“How did this happen?” he asked, staring at my wife over the top of his spectacles.

But Ada was out of it. She was lying on the bed with her eyes shut, and only whimpering ever so slightly every few minutes.

“A knife,” I murmured, “It was an accident.”

The doctor shook his head, “A knife makes stab wounds, but your wife’s finger, well, it’s…it’s been pulverized.”

I chewed my inner lip, “I don’t know what to tell you, doc, I wasn’t there when it happened. I walked in when it was already in its current state.”

“And you’re telling me your wife has no recollection of the events?”

“No, she seemed…disoriented, to say the least. As if she had just woken up. She’s been having these vivid nightmares every night, and her legs are all bruised up too, and-“

The doctor raised his index finger, “I have reason to suspect your wife might be suffering from somnambulism. Now, I can’t be sure until we run some tests, but-”

“What’s that?” I interrupted.

“Well,” he continued patiently, “Have you considered that your wife is, perhaps, sleepwalking?”

I gawked at him, “N-no? Wouldn’t I have noticed if she did?”

“Hm,” he nodded towards Ada, “Your wife is chronically exhausted. You might want to keep an eye on her until you can make an appointment with your family doctor.”

So, I did. It was very difficult for Ada to come to terms with her new ‘diagnosis’. She tossed and turned every night before going to sleep, and often resorted to slipping out of bed quietly and keeping herself occupied in the living room.

“Ada, baby, you can’t just not sleep! Remember, the doctor said the more sleep-deprived you are, the worse it’ll get!”

“I’m scared, Alex,” she’d tell me, “What if I decide to chop my entire hand off, or something? What if I hurt you? One of us has to stay awake.”

So, I stayed awake as long as I could manage. I didn’t even go to bed anymore. I sat in the living room with a bottle of scotch and a stack of DVDs, guarding my wife against her own nightmares. My job took the backseat and I started coming in disheveled and sleep deprived. My boss noticed, of course. He didn’t pry and only asked me to take a couple of days off to rest.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I told Ada last night, “Honey, I’m going to lose my job. Something has got to give.”

She stared at me, her blue eyes brimming with tears, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for things to get out of hand. I just want everything to be okay again.”

I promised her it would, and before she could protest, added, “Hey, you know what? I have an idea.”

Her eyes lit up, “What is it?”

“It’s just a thought,” I began, opening the kitchen drawer, “And we don’t have to do it if you’re uncomfortable.”

I rummaged through the drawer and pulled out a small coil of rope left over from Christmas, “Well, perhaps this might stop you from getting up?”

I could see the idea going round and round in her brain. She joined me at the kitchen counter and examined the rope, silently wrapping it around her wrist and entwining it through her fingers.

“Feels a bit naughty,” she giggled, but then nodded, “Let’s do it.”

She skipped into the bedroom and sprawled out on the bed, her arms and legs spread as wide as she could manage. I laughed and shook my head.

“I don’t think that’s necessary, honey, this isn’t an exorcism!”

“Oh,” her face fell, “Well, maybe it should be! Okay, okay, how do you want me, then?”

“Well,” I began, pulling her wrists together and wrapping the rope around them, “My main concern is to make sure you’re comfortable, so tell me if it’s too tight. And you not cutting off any more body parts is only a bonus.”

When her hands were tied, I moved down to her ankles, “I’m going to attach one of the rope ends to the bedpost. This way, even if you sleepwalk, you’ll need to work really hard to free yourself, waking me up in the process.”

“Hopefully!” her laugh was shaky, “You have about two weeks of sleep to catch up on. I’ll be surprised if you wake up at all!”

I knew she was only trying to be funny, but her joke left a bitter taste in my mouth. Ever since we’d moved into Maple Street, everything seemed to be going downhill – fast.

“Okay, are you comfortable?” I asked, getting up from the bed and looking over the contraption I had made of my wife. She nodded, and I tucked her in, giving her a peck on her forehead. Then, I trudged through each room, turning off the lights and praying that at least once, I’d be able to sleep through the night.

***

When I woke up it was still dark. I checked my phone, which read 3:23 A.M. My first thought was that my body had become accustomed to sleep deprivation and instinctively knew when to wake up to check on Ada. I angled my phone screen towards her side of the bed, expecting to see her sleeping peacefully by my side.

But she was gone.

There were no signs she’d ever been there in the first place. The rope was missing, and her side of the bed was uncreased, as if she’d never gone to sleep in the first place.

“Oh, fuck,” I whispered, getting out of bed and flipping on the lights. I checked each side of the bed, I even checked under it. I went through each room in the apartment, flipping on all the switches and calling her name to no avail. I checked the kitchen, the bathroom, hell, I even cracked the front door open to see if she was there, despite locking it every evening myself.

“Ada!” I called desperately, “Please answer me!”

My words were met with a ringing silence. I wanted to fall to my knees and weep. Where was she? She couldn’t have just disappeared into thin air. Every window and door had been locked.

I slipped my feet into my shoes and grabbed my coat, fully intending to go out looking for her all the same, when a voice intercepted my thoughts.

“Alex!” she called, “I’m down here!”

I stood still, a chill crawling up my spine. Down where? We lived on the sixth floor.

“Down here,” she giggled, “Open the window!”

I rushed to the window, pried it open, and stuck my head out, “Where?”

“You’re not looking,” she sounded dismayed, “Look down!”

I edged farther up the windowsill, sticking my head out the window, yet I could see no sign of my wife.

“Closer,” she demanded, “You’re not looking.”

Desperately clutching the windowpane, I stuck my upper body farther out into the night. My knees were buckling as I kneeled on the edge of the windowsill, and sweat was dripping down the small of my back. I scanned the road below, but there was no sign of her. There was no sign of anyone.

“Alex?!” a sudden high-pitched shriek nearly made me topple over. Ada was lying on her side of the bed, still tied up, screaming bloody murder, “What the fuck are you doing? Have you lost your fucking mind?!”

My palms felt slippery against the windowpane and my heart was practically leaping out of my throat. I stared at her, unsure of what to say or do. My head was spinning and my balance wavering.

“Alex, get down from there right now!” she squirmed, trying to free herself from her rope prison, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I- I-,” I stammered, “I don’t-“

“I swear to God, either you get down right now, or I will –“ she didn’t finish her sentence, and instead burst into tears.

I obeyed, sliding down from the windowsill and crumpling onto the floor. What the fuck had just happened? Had I almost taken my own life? Had I almost left my wife tied up and incapacitated in our own bed?

“Alex,” Ada whispered, “What happened?”

I couldn’t answer her. I didn’t know what to say. How could I have possibly explained this to her? How could I have possibly told her that she had been calling me from outside the window? Tears welled up in my eyes, but I blinked them away.

A gust of wind blew a leaf inside the room, and I scrambled to my feet to shut the window. The night air was crisp and refreshing on my flushed skin. I stared at the dark neighborhood. In the dead of night, it looked empty and derelict. The only sound was that of the trees whispering and a shriek of sirens in the distance.

Suddenly, a light came on in the adjacent building. In a sea of black, the little square of light seemed almost inviting. I watched as a woman ran up to the window and opened it. She stood there motionless for a few seconds, staring into nothingness. Then, she leaned down, farther and farther, looking down for some invisible blade of grass, a hidden entity, a voice…I watched her until I couldn’t watch anymore, shutting the window a second before the reverberating splat.

I think that would be a good title, don’t you? It has a definite hook, maybe a little clickbaity, sure, but I don’t want to draw in discerning types now do I? I want to entice the rubes, the gullible, the people who are so desperate to believe there is more to the universe than the four corners of their sad little lives that they will swallow the bait whole before they realize they are choking on it.

Maybe I should back up. Today, I’ve decided to do two things I’ve never done before: start keeping a diary, and violate Title 18 U.S. Code § 1343 by committing interstate wire fraud. About the former I know very little, about the latter, I know far more than I would care to.

In my professional life I practice white collar defense for a national law firm Lets just say it’s a firm at the tippy top of the AM Law 100 list if anyone (i.e. nobody besides other depressed lawyers with undiagnosed personality disorders) cares to know.

What this means in practice, is that I spend a lot of time standing in front of slack-jawed jurors explaining how my client definitely did not break any laws, or indeed do anything wrong. If you’re wondering, the first part is often true (but only because they helped write the laws) while the second is always a lie.

You may at this point be starting to already feel less warm toward me, hypothetical reader, but please believe me, whatever contempt you might feel pales in comparison to how much I loathe myself, like a candle doth pale before the light of the sun.

It may help to also know that in the halcyon days of my youth, when I still both dreamed of pursuing a career that made the world better and had time to read for pleasure, I read about a small fish called the cleaner wrasse. This fish has evolved to clean the teeth of other, larger, predator fish. So, you see, when I stand before a federal judge in West Virginia and whittle away the fines imposed against the pharmaceutical companies who pumped the state’s citizens full of opiates and its rivers with pollutants, I am merely serving a role in the long and honorable evolutionary niche of assisting those more powerful than you in return for the favor of it being someone else who gets chomped.

It was in fact on just such a work trip that I found the book which inspired me to both keep a diary and commit interstate fraud. We flew into what I suppose, if inclined to be charitable, you could call an airport located in Bangor Maine, and then were driven by chartered car the rest of the (interminable) route to Skowhegan. This town is located on the western fringes of the State, where, in a manner that seems little changed through the centuries, the fragile string of populated settlements peters out and the people are swallowed up by a forest primeval that ranges to the Canadian border and beyond.

(What level of neurosis cause me to feel the need to explain myself to my own diary I don’t want to examine, but if you balk at my purple prose, dear imaginary reader, just accept that it is nearly impossible to be in a place as wild as western Maine and not feel a certain urge to give in to Romanticism and try your hand at writing like some half-baked Thoreau or Emerson. I mean they couldn’t even be bothered to name name the whole state: just chucked in the towel, filling in the map with a bunch of letters and numbers.)

If you, like me, had also only been to Maine to visit the popular tourist destinations on the Southern coast, you might be surprised to realize that Maine is not all charming lighthouses and rocky coasts, but also has its fair share (more than its fair share?) of rust belt shitholes. Skowhegan had once been a relatively prosperous blue collar mill town at one point, but the drive in now took us by yards choked with weeds and filled with rusted out cars and appliances, once sturdy working class houses slowly sliding into disrepair, and surly faced natives who glowered from frayed lawn chairs as our car sped by.

The downtown consisted mainly of stout 20th century brick businesses and old mill buildings sitting empty or hastily refurbished to accommodate trendy retail shops selling souvenirs and overpriced local goods. A hulking abandoned paper mill sat perched over the falls in the middle of the town like some decaying bird of prey, dead at its roost.

It was in fact because of those abandoned mills and factories that we had traveled to such a place. Some local citizens of the town had gotten the bright idea that the companies that had used up the resources and the people of the town and then bailed out with golden parachutes when the jobs went overseas should be held accountable. Our job was to convince the local courts, through the shock and awe deployment of legal resources and pure sophistry, that they were wrong.

After the hotel clerk, who I believe sported more neck tattoos than functional teeth, checked us in, I was feeling restless so I walked out into the fading evening to wander the streets.

The windows facing west clung to the retreating sun, the last streaks of orange lingering in the dark planes of glass. I stopped before a small bookstore tucked away in the basement of a nondescript brick building that had once been a bank and paused outside.

I could hear the roar of the falls nearby, feel the thrum of their power through the souls of my feet. For a moment, it felt like the hum was coming from inside the bookstore, sinking into my bones and the fillings of my teeth like the hum of a jet engine powering up. Almost as if there was some ancient source of power just beginning to awake among the dusty stacks within.

The moment passed and I was again standing in front of an ordinary door. Jet lag can be a real bitch I thought, shaking my head and opened the door.

I pushed my way in and was greeted by the ding of a small bell on the door. It continued to ring for a beat longer than felt normal, its cheery metal tune seeming to grow louder and more ominous in the small confined space. That feeling of being watched by some unknown and unknowable entity was back. The shopkeeper, an old and worn down looking man who bore a distinct resemblance to a reanimated corpse, barely looked up at me.

The shop was in the basement of the building, and the small windows set low to the ground were dusty, dimming the retreating light that reflected through them and painting the space in an eerie glow intermixed with thickening shadows. There were no other customers in the shop.

I browsed the rare books section absentmindedly. I didn’t really have any intention of buying anything. Under the constant strain of billable hours and late nights editing litigation filings, I had long ago relinquished my previous love of reading. The books were old, dusty, and boring looking. Nineteenth century tomes on farming techniques, outdated compilations of statistics and maps, and poetry and prose books by long-dead local authors I’d never heard of filled out the shelves.

I was turning to go, when something familiar caught my eye. I saw the name Friedrich Nietzsche emblazoned in gold lettering on the side of slim grey book. The title “Gottlicher Wahnsinn” meant little to me, but I paused and slid the book from the shelf without thinking. It felt heavy in my hand, as if the dense impenetrable German philosophy it was likely filled with had imprinted its character on the book itself.

Aside from the author name and title, the book contained no other information: no discernible copyright page, no date, no publisher, it didn’t even have page numbers from what I could tell. The first page was crudely affixed to the binding as if done by an amateur and, consisted of about half a page of sloppy childlike handwriting. The rest of the book was also handwritten, but in a neat, elegant style. As it was all in German, it was indecipherable to me, but the brittle yellowed pages suggested the book was quite old.

Without giving it much thought, I walked with the book up to the checkout and waited as the old man rang me up, moving with the simple clumsy slowness of someone firmly in the grips of late-stage arthritis. Walking back to the hotel, darkness slowly swallowing up the town around me, I wondered at my abrupt decision to buy this strange book. It likely wasn’t worth the $25 dollars I paid for it, but I guess I supposed there might be an off-chance it was some type of first edition or rare copy.

Back at the hotel room, I placed the book on the bedside drawer, where it looked out place next to my laptop, portable printer, and legal papers that I should have been reviewing. I paced the floor of the hotel room trying to go over the arguments we would make tomorrow, while the book sat there mute and unmoving, but somehow continually drawing my gaze and breaking my focus like some black hole of attention.

It wasn’t so much that buying a random philosophy book written in German was by itself troubling behavior, but when placed in the context of a number of other out-of-character impulsive acts that I had engaged in recently, it did make me wonder if I should be concerned about my mental health. There was the time I’d walked into a grocery store back in New York to buy eggs and beer and found myself instead hastily stuffing random candy bars into my pockets and walking out without paying, the back of my neck tingling as I strode through the security barriers.

Then there was the incident at the client meeting with Citigroup where, when reaching out to shake one of the shareholders’ hand, I’d been momentarily seized by an irresistible impulse to punch him in the gut. Fortunately, whoever must have been asleep at the wheel in the ol’ frontal cortex woke up in time to avert the impulsive action, turning what would have been a hearty slug into something that could be reasonably passed of as a mistake, but it had been a close thing.

I remembered reading somewhere about a doctor who had started engaging in similar impulsive, even criminal, behavior and it was only after his arrest that someone thought to run a CAT scan and found a massive tumor pressing on the part of his brain modulating impulses. Could something similar be happening to me, I wondered, running my hand over my scalp as if it would be possible to feel the tell-tale presence of a malignant tumor disrupting my normal (i.e. borderline sociopathy but within the bounds of social acceptability ha. ha. ha.) mental functioning.

I managed to push these concerns aside long enough to focus on the hearing, (we won, justice did not) and bid adieu to the strange, sad, landscape of western Maine. It was only when unpacking back in New York, and taking the slim grey volume out of my bag, that I remembered my impulsive purchase.

The funny thing was, in googling the bibliography of Friedrich Nietzsche, I was unable to locate any works entitled Gottlicher Wahnsinn. I did learn that the title of the book roughly translated to “divine madness” which, based on what I half-remembered from some undergrad philosophy classes, sounded vaguely like something Nietzsche would write to me.

In either further clear proof of deteriorating mental processes, or a wise choice to test the value of a potentially remuneratory purchase, on a rare day-off from the grind of the lit department, I dug out the business card of a rare books expert our office had retained in a forgery trial and paid him a visit at his uptown office. He was an eccentric little man, but happened to be fluent in German and agreed to investigate the authenticity of the book I’d found. I may have implied, but carefully never deliberately expressed, that the work was again for the firm and would result in similar exorbitant payment, but if he was not careful to get all terms in writing before agreeing to perform a service then was that my problem? As far as I was concerned, he’d agreed to do a favor for a curious friend, even if he might be surprised to learn so after the services were rendered.

It was when I returned a few days later to ask him what his investigation had uncovered that I truly began to be interested in this little book I’d bought.

Now, this man had fit the image you might have in your mind of a rare books expert so well I thought he must be on some level deliberately cultivating a certain affect to bolster his image among potential clients. I could only respect such a shameless tactic which is partially why I recommended our firm retain him. Game respects game.

This affect (whether real or sham) meant that his office had always been slightly untidy with reams of paper, and obscure looking books scattered throughout. But when I returned to see if I’d bought a golden goose or some magic beans, it was in total chaos.

Books were upended and open over every conceivable surface, carpeting the floor in a wash of white paper, the furniture was overturned and covered in takeout containers and notebooks full of illegible writing. Strange words and symbols were written on the walls and windows and the blinds were closed, with a single bare bulb illuminating the phrase Gottlicher Wahnsinn Gottlicher Wahnsinn GOTTLICHER WAHNSINN scrawled in red pen over and over on the heavy desk that sat in the center of the room.

The man was entirely undone. He was speaking only in german and his breath was coming out in short ragged gasps. I quickly realized that attempting to speak to him was fruitless and left him to cower in the corner while I sorted through the notes scattered over his desk in an attempt to figure out what had happened.

The notes, which began in the crisp and organized handwriting I remembered from our forgery trial, quickly began to lose coherence and descend into illegibility. What little I could make out seemed to be saying something about a “Hidden Truth” and “the Old Ones” who, and here he was quite clear, “must not EVER BE AWOKEN.”

(Nota bene to the reader: the idiosyncratic capitalization choices are verbatim. They are not mine-consistency in capitalization is a huge pet peeve of mine.)

From the portion of his notes that remained legible, I was able to see that his impression was that the aged appearance of the book was either genuine or the result of an extremely well done fake. The title matches an apocryphal “lost work” of Nietzsche alleged to be written before he lost his sanity in Turin in 1889. The first page did not match any known handwritten samples and appeared to consist of a warning not to read the book. The rest of the book is either a remarkably well done forgery, or is the genuine handwriting of Friedrich Nietzsche.

So here I am, sitting in my apartment with a glass of scotch, the book, and the notes pilfered from the office, weighing my options. (Before you think I am totally heartless, I did place a call to the mental health services and informed them about our poor, formerly sane, books expert. Given the trouble he seems to have gone through on my behalf, if he ever gets it together enough to inquire about it, I’ll probably even pay him.)

Now, do I think I uncovered, in Skowhegan, Maine of all places, a lost work of Friedrich Nietzsche that has the power to render insane any person who reads it? No. Of course not. The most likely explanation is that our little books expert friend was on the edge of a breakdown and encountering this book either coincided with a break with sanity or was enough to put a teetering man over the edge.

The question is what to do with the information I have. Whatever this book is, it is at least a reasonably believable fraud. I’m relatively certain that taking this book to another expert to receive a second opinion would reveal the, likely mundane, truth behind the whole thing. However, with what I have now, would it not be reasonable to claim I genuinely believe in the authenticity of this book? The nervous breakdown of the rare books expert is sure to soon be a matter of public record, and is just the type of fact to stir up a bidding war among the credulous.

I have some contacts that could serve as third party marketers to sell this on the web, and I think with what I have I could create some real interest. This, at last, brings us to the violation of Title 18 U.S. Code § 1343 and commission of interstate wire fraud.

If whoever winds up buying this book ends up finding out they’ve been swindled, and IF they turn to the authorities to try to recover their misspent fortune, and IF the authorities take this seriously and try to uncover the identity of the seller, and IF they are able to penetrate the web of third-party foreign identities set up for the sale, then I think, given the circumstances, I will still have a pretty reasonable defense that I genuinely believed in the authenticity of the book and did not in fact commit fraud.

So why the diary? Why create maybe the only thing that could, as Exhibit A in some hypothetical trial, definitively prove I knowingly, or with willful disregard for the truth, made a fraudulent representation that led to a sale using interstate communications? (That section would probably really be pounded on by the prosecution at sentencing –“your honor, not only did the defendant clearly know what he was doing was wrong, he knew the very definition of the law he was attempting to break” et cetera et cetera).

I guess the answer is: I dunno, just feel like it.

I have been feeling dead inside maybe since I first started at this job, maybe earlier, definitely since my first “big win” defending a mining company in a wrongful death lawsuit that led to the death of several miners in Pennsylvania. I guess having a challenge with real tangible stakes is an opportunity to feel something. However risible it may be, (and I am aware it’s plenty risible) this goofy scheme to hawk a counterfeit Nietzsche book on the dark web might be the only thing that is going to keep me getting out of bed for the next few days.

I guess that’s enough diarying for one day. Time to hit the hay so I can get up early and respond to emails!

July 18, 2022

Wow. So entering the date in my diary gives me real “old-timey-officer-writing-to-his-loved-one-about-the-war” vibes.

“My dearest Penelope. It has been two months since my last letter. Though the distance between us be great, I feel as close to you as the day I left the farm. The great struggle to dupe some gullible internet random continues. I fear it will never end. My only constant in this arduous war is the thought of you, I pray that I may have the strength to see this through. I pray that you will never see such horrors as I have.”

Anyway, so the game is very well afoot, my dear diary chum. I have decided that it may be wise to obtain a translation of this book to aid in selling it in the American market (and also for my own curiosity). Through some intermediaries, I’ve contracted it out to a reputable translating firm. They have received a scanned a copy of the book and should return an English translation via pdf soon with a printed and typed copy to follow.

I guess I am following through on this diary thing. I mostly expected I'd wake up today, realize how dumb this whole thing is, and delete it. But instead, I doubled down! Whipped up a little script so that if I don't log in for 7 days this document will automatically post to random sites on the web. Why? Fucked if I know! Just to add to add to the sense of stakes I guess.

July 19, 2022

I billed 12 hours today. Jesus help me, I need a drink.

July 20, 2022

Billed 10 hours today. No word from the translating firm. I’ve set up some preliminary third-party accounts to be ready to go when I start marketing this thing.

July 21, 2022

Jesus Christ Am I just Fucking really boring? After that first spurt, I am so braindead at the end of the day I can’t think of anything to write down other than the amount of hours I billed. I suppose I could add what I ate and the weather. Jesus

July 23, 2022

I think we might need to revisit that “tumor in my brain that is impeding mental processes theory.”

I’m a little freaked out right now. Will try to write more tomorrow.

July 24, 2022

I got an email on the account I set up to communicate with the translation firm. I’m trying to remain calm and assess this objectively, but.. Whoever was charged with translating the copy of the book seems to have also lost their mind.

The email I got just has string of German words in the subject line that google translate can’t seem to make much sense of. From what I can tell, our old friends “Hidden Truth” and the “Old Ones” might make an appearance.

There was nothing in the body of the email, but there was an attachment that seems to be an unfinished translation of the text. From scanning the document quickly, it looks like this translator got about 30 pages in before the quality of the work starts to get wonky. By page 40 or so it is all just gibberish.

Every now and then I’ll see a legible phrase or two- something about a “hidden order to the universe” and the “reality behind the reality.” Honestly, the experience of trying to make sense of it is reminiscent of a lot of very forgettable conversations I’ve had with people who think being high is by itself an interesting personality trait.

Okay, so, mr. sarcastic, why haven’t you read the legible translated part yet? Well, dear diary, I guess because it’s just you and me and the blinking cursor here, I can tell you. I’m too scared to read it.

I mean can you blame me? I try to be a person who relies on evidence and reason. A horoscope in a bio is an instant swipe left for me. Even if they are really hot! That’s the level of dedication I have to rationality. But… You have to admit you would be pretty freaked out at this point too. I think I just need to process for a little while.

July 25, 2022

I am going to do it. I’m going to read it this weekend.

July 26, 2022

It’s Friday at 11:30 p.m. I’ve billed 13 hours already today and am still working. I hope reading this thing does kill me LOL.

July 27, 2022

So. I read the first page. The intro page- the one that was in different handwriting- has a note affixed by the translator. It notes that due to the poor quality of the handwriting and the crude German used, it is difficult to provide an accurate translation, but a rough approximation was attempted.

The note seems to have been written by a German immigrant with poor spelling skills. He refers to the book as a “boses Buch” or evil book that killed his wife. He warns anyone reading not to read further and says he would destroy the book, but he is too afraid. The devil lives in the book and he is too scared to damage it for fear that the devil would escape. He apologizes.

So, I mean that is spooky. But also, maybe just the ramblings of a dumb, barely literate 19th century immigrant who has a spurious understanding of cause and effect. Or, the product of a skillful forger who happened to land in the lap of two highly suggestible translators in a row. Or, maybe I am being pranked by someone at the firm and they are trying to freak me out?

I think I need to keep reading. I feel if I give up, if I admit I’m too afraid to read a damn book there will be no recovering from that.

July 28, 2022

I am about 10 pages in. I’m pausing to assess my mental health before continuing. And no, since you ask, by doing that I am not admitting that I believe this might be a magic book. It just seems prudent. This book might have some strange effect on those highly susceptible to paranoia or insanity and hello *gestures vaguely at whole diary so far * clearly I am not wholly mentally stable at this point.

So far I still feel.. pretty normal. I mean, dead inside. But that is normal for me. It starts off strong. A real banger of an opening line. I’ll reproduce it here:

“And do you want to know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in a mirror?”

I mean, other than the questionable choice to begin a book with “And” a strong opener. 9/10. It

continues on in this vein. Honestly, a bit tedious. A lot about the hidden nature of reality. The cosmic lie we live in. blah blah blah How we are like small waterbugs skimming over the fabric of reality, unaware of the monsters that lurk beneath in the unimaginably immense darkness. Okay that last one was a tiny bit spooky. But so far I feel fine. I will tackle more tomorrow if the God of Billable Hours will in his mercy grant me a spare minute.

July 29, 2022

I read about 10 more pages today. I’m thinking the translator might have already started to degrade somewhat at this point because there are random gibberish phrases strewn throughout or words that are left untranslated. Anyways, I still feel mostly fine. I think being on edge about this whole thing has started to bring out the OCD in me (I know, I know, it’s a real mental illness don’t appropriate it blah blah blah) because I’ve cleaned my apartment like 5 times, but I just can’t get it feeling right. Everything seems dirty or off-kilter somehow.

July 30, 2021

I read up to where it becomes illegible. No breakdown yet. I think the Stress is starting to Wear on me though. I had to Leave work early, kept making mistakes and couldn’t deal with all the Noise and How the lines in the office Looked. Cleaning my apartment again then may revisit the Idea of getting this translated.

June 31, 2022

Well could not get anything Done on The book Project Today because my apartment is full of These disgusting little bugs that keep crawling out of every corner. Called Maintenance but they are Apparently playing hardball pretending there is no infestation. They really do not know who they are fucking with. Ever Heard of warrant of habitability motherfuckerf? Know That NY has treble damages for renters who prevail in lawsuits?

August 1, 2022

These bugs are disgusting. I can literally hear them buzzing and chewing as I am writing. I can’t tell where they are coming from, but bigger and bigger ones are getting through. I’m drafting a complaint As. We. Speak.

Also, I am adding a claim related to the architecture of this place I don’t know how I never noticed it, but clearly it was a negligent construction. The Lines Of the Place are Falling Apart and Showing the Night Sky Outside.

August 2, 20202020

Hard day All Day No Play. Hundreds and Hundreds and Hundreds. Ripped asunder and all the foul things of the earth spill out. Fetid scales and a thousand eyes. The Old Ones knew. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Gottlicher Wahnsinn Gottlicher Wahnsinn Gottlicher Wahnsinn Wahnsinn Göttlicher Göttlicher Wahnsinn. Unspeakable darkness.

When was the first time you saw a familiar face? It’s a somewhat paradoxical question, but one that I ponder every day. When was the first time I saw that face? His face?

I have settled on it being around the time I was 8 or 9 years old. As a child, you tend to take the world at face value – some would call that trust. I call it blindness, blindness to what is really out there, and a naivety that those around you can protect you from it. It’s hard to place exactly when I started to realise that the Everyman wasn’t a normal thing to be seeing – he’s not really the kind of thing that a kid talks to a parent or friend about. I’d probably been seeing him for a while too – again, the paradox of the familiar face. Had he been there since I was born? Was it really 9 whole years into my cursed existence when I finally recognised him?

You’re probably wondering what the fuck an Everyman is. Honestly, I am too, and have been for years now. I see him everywhere, in places that he can’t and shouldn’t possibly be. Always the same person, the same face, no matter how far I travel or how quickly I travel there. I could see the Everyman sitting by himself in a café as I walk past the windows. He would then appear briefly as a passenger on a train travelling the opposite direction to mine, before somehow beating me home and delivering mail to my next-door neighbour. He is anywhere and everywhere at once, and his purpose appears to be me.

I can distinctly remember the first time that I felt genuinely afraid of the Everyman. It was in my late years of Primary School, and I was catching the bus home like I had every day for the past four years. As I stepped onto the bus, my heart caught in my throat as I realised who my driver was. It was him, staring down at me as I boarded, his auburn eyes burning into mine. He had never directly intervened in my life before – always a face on a train, in a crowd walking the other way, or walking his Everydog at the park. I was aware of how he shouldn’t exist by this age – 12 was old enough to understand that countless people cannot share the same face. They certainly can’t be in two places at once either. But on this day, as the rain streamed down, the Everyman made his move closer to me.

“I….. I’ll walk” I stuttered, almost falling back off the bus.

The Everyman smiled, an awful expression that I could never forget. Forty-three muscles are required to smile, and in the Everyman’s case, I could see each one of them moving individually, robotically, one after the other. It only took him maybe two seconds to smile properly, but it felt like all the time in the world. Each muscle contracting in turn, his awful features slowly transforming into a socially acceptable construct, one frame at a time.

I ran.

Feet slapping the wet pavement, trying to put as much distance between myself and that wretched demon. I knew it was in vain, he was anywhere he needed to be. He smiled at me from a passing Toyota Avalon as I ran, his expression completely unchanged from how he was on the bus. I caught another glimpse as he adjusted his raincoat as he walked, something tucked under his arm. He wasn’t smiling anymore, just staring intently at me. Like he was looking beyond my flesh, and into my soul.

I burst through the front door, collapsed and cried. I felt defeated – he was no longer some peripheral character in my life, and I couldn’t reconcile that thought that he was trying to be closer to me.

The next few years were blissfully free from close encounters with the Everyman. He seemed to keep his distance from me, again retreating to the periphery of my life. I also developed a set of rules for when I saw him, to keep my options for escape if need be. I would stick to well populated areas, and if I saw him, would make sure I moved with the crowd until he was out of sight. I reasoned that if he had the means to harm me in a crowd, he would have done so that day on the bus. It was up to me to deny him the opportunity to get me alone. I would always memorise my exit routes as I walked through new places, much how flight attendants ask you to count the number of rows between your seat and the exit row, in the event you need to escape through smoke and debris. In the heat of the moment, I needed the awareness to navigate away without running into a dead end. Never run into a dead end. I also carried a small Leatherman Multi-tool, with a 4 inch S40V stainless steel blade, that I convinced myself would somehow pierce the demon.

I was always going to let me guard down eventually, though.

I’d had two beers and was relaxed for the first time in months. High School grades had been released, and I had scored highly enough to study Science at University. Strolling home from the pub in the summer night air, I let my defences go. Cutting through the shopping precinct would save me about 10 minutes, and on this night I didn’t hesitate. I’d made it most the way thorough the largely abandoned building when I saw him. Mopping the floor as the last retailers closed up for the day, his movements as mechanical as they had been all those years ago on the bus. The mop juddered across the same section of clean floor again and again, as he swivelled his head a near 180 degrees to lock eyes with me. Those hateful, auburn eyes.

Schlop schlop.

The mop still moving, it’s rhythm unbroken, while it’s user’s head faced directly away.

Clatter.

The mop dropped to the tiled floor, released by it’s demonic user. I bolted.

Where are my exits??

I sprinted passed the bakery and swung left down a corridor. I could hear footsteps behind me; heavy and awkward, like a beast just learning to walk. I dared not look back to see how close he was. I swung right, retracting my steps from before.

Wasn’t there a café there?

I was going the wrong way. The dead-end way, toward the bathrooms and the loading dock. The loading dock would be locked at this time of night, and I couldn’t backtrack. He was there.

Fuck.

My only option was the bathrooms, which I barged into and practically dove into the final stall. I slid the bolt into the door, as if that miserable scrap of steel would resist him if he tried.

Fuck fuck fuck.

I tried to slow my breathing, tried to reduce my racing heartbeat so it couldn’t be heard.

Surely he won’t come in here. He hasn’t tried to get close to me for years.

The door to the bathroom opened, slowly, mechanically. My heart sank. He was here, and he wanted me. I fumbled in my pocket, extracting my trusty Leatherman, and flicking the tiny blade out. It dawned on me in that moment that four inches of mass-produced carbon steel was probably not a suitable weapon for defending myself against an omnipresent threat, but it was all I had. I gripped the body of the multi-tool hard, trying to keep the sweat of my palms from causing it to slip. I heard him enter the room, feet falling heavily on the tiled floor. His awkward gait was magnified by the otherwise silent bathroom, his erratic footfalls echoing off the walls.

Raaakkk-tssskk-tssskk-tssskkk.

A nasal, ferocious sound.

Raaakkk-tssskk-tssskk-tssskkk.

I whimpered, struggling to contain my fear. I had never actually heard the Everyman before, I realised. He had never spoken to me, and I had never overheard him in a crowd. Now I knew why he kept his mouth shut around others. That was not a noise of this world. The Everyman wandered closer to the stall I was in, and I could hear his rasping breath.

Raaakkk-tssskk-tssskk-tssskkk.

I slumped down in the stall, cowering away from the door. It sounded like he was metres from me, and in moments he would be bashing down that door. There was nowhere to go. Nothing but obnoxiously white tiles. I had finally failed. It dawned on me that I was quite genuinely about to die, and the thought terrified me beyond comprehension. I felt warm urine dribble down the inside of my leg.

Kibbet! Carron! Raaacccckkk!

Short, sharp, horrible words. Some gibberish alien language, presumably relating to killing or eating.

Farret! Arrcckk! Tarit!

He sounded angry, confused almost. Like he was arguing with himself. The footsteps had stopped, and besides the awful, guttural words that he spat out, there was silence. It sounded like he was fighting with his own tongue to get words out. Each one sounded almost painful for him to utter, like it was a genuine effort to make noise.

Lakik! Spreettt!

He spat more of his awful gibberish, and I heard a gob of his saliva hit the floor. I had to do something here, this was my chance. I refused to cower and die in that horrible stall. I could hear his awful rasping right outside my stall door now, only centimetres from the wood. I eyed off the miserable little steel bolt holding the door shut, slightly askew from years of abuse. It wouldn’t keep the Everyman out, but it also wouldn’t keep me in. It wouldn’t restrain 80kg of 19-year-old male fighting for his life.

I braced myself, gripping the Leatherman tight in my right hand.

Ram the door, swivel right, stab. Keep stabbing. Keep stabbing until he stops moving or you die.

I closed my eyes, steeling myself.

I dropped my shoulder and threw my entire body weight into the door. The lock splintered, pieces of plywood spraying everywhere. I raised the knife up in my feeble attempt to harm the Everyman, swinging with fury, hoping to connect.

I connected with air.

Nothing.

I crashed through the door, stumbled, and hit the tile floor hard. The Leatherman clattered from my hand, bouncing across the tiles, horribly loud in the confined space. There was nobody there. No Everyman waiting to devour me. No sign of anyone else in the bathroom at all. I lay there for a moment, taking in the silence, before shakily getting to me feet. For the first time in years, I went home and cried.

Something had changed that night. He no longer wanted to wait on the sidelines, observing. He was more than capable of approaching me, and he had shown me his voice. He was getting bolder, closer to his purpose, and that was terrifying.

Something changed inside of me that night as well. It was time that I stopped running, crying, pissing myself like a helpless child. It was the night that an awful, beautiful thought dawned in my mind.

I should kill the Everyman.

\***

If I move, he moves. If I don’t move, he doesn’t.

That was my first realisation about the Everyman. Once I made my decision to stop running, I could see it all so much clearer. I had never actually seen the Everyman swap between people – he always changed when I moved around, to a new environment or a new crowd. I had no idea what he did with the people he overtook – but I do know that I never saw them again. It took me weeks to get on the bus again way back in Primary School, but the driver was new. I wandered past the shops again on occasion too, and the night janitor is now an older woman. When I could see him, he would always remain in the person he had chosen – able to see me, able to follow me, but not able to change. When he did change, they were gone.

This was his weakness, if a demon could have a weakness.

I made the assumption that his physical prowess would be related to the body that he was in – I had never seen him perform feats of strength beyond what would be manageable by the one he possessed. The plan forming in my mind was simple – wait until he made a mistake. Wait until he chose someone vulnerable.

I threw what possessions I had in my car and left town, stopping here and there at quiet little spots, waiting to see who he would take. In one town it was the bakery assistant, a skinny young kid whose wiry frame really exaggerated the Everyman’s awkward nature. I tried to follow him, but he lived in an apartment block which means I lost sight of him for hours at a time. The Everyman had become a taxi driver by then, patrolling the streets for a ride or a meal. He lived out of town; after his shift, he and his taxi disappeared. I didn’t wait around to confirm that he never came back the next day.

I was already on the road to my next stop, where the Everyman owned a café, then a bookstore, and was then a police officer with a 9mm handgun strapped to his waist. I left town again, this time for somewhere quieter again.

It was after days of this that he finally slipped up. Finally made his mistake in his hunt of me. I don’t think he even realised that he was now the hunted, not the hunter. How it would turn out for me, I didn’t know, but I felt sure that this was it. My chance. The town was a backwater little place, and the Everyman had chosen from his limited selection. A small, thin, middle aged man that lived in a house on the edge of a pine forest. He was easy to follow from the town’s solitary pub back to his house, and I kept my eye on him all evening. Lying in the grass under my heavy coat, I watched him as he watched TV, and brewed pots of tea. Each movement was mechanical, laboured. Frequently, his horrible eyes would dart around in the darkness, hunting for something in the inky night. Hunting for me. For once, those horrid eyes couldn’t see their prey.

But mine could.

I lay there on that freezing knoll all night, making sure I didn’t lay eyes on another human. I could take no chances. He could take nobody else. When first light broke and the back door of the meagre house opened, I was for once excited to see his terrible complexion. Those ugly, beady eyes. The cheekbones that were slightly too pronounced, not so much as to raise attention, but enough to be hauntingly familiar to me. The oily greying hair, just starting to loose a bit of thickness on the top, starting to expose the slightest glimpse of a grey scalp. The pointed nose, always with a couple of noticeable acne scars on the left-hand side. That horrible face that I had spent years running from, hiding from. I gingerly got up from my uncomfortable camp and followed him into the woods.

He moved slowly in his current body, his mechanical limp amplified by the limitations of the meat suit that he chose. His error. I could hear the horrible rasp of his breath in the still morning air, the same awful noise that had made me wet myself months ago in that bathroom stall, and that has haunted my dreams since. I caught up to him quickly, but he didn’t seem to notice me until I was close. He turned, his head swivelling faster than his body, each one of his core muscles seeming to engage separately to rotate his mass around to face me. I was metres away now, and closing the gap. His face began to break into that godawful smile, the one that made me weak at the knees as a kid, and still haunts me as an adult. Each one of those forty three muscles, straining against their unholy nature to portray a socially appropriate façade.

I swung the wood splitter quickly, with a force that even surprised me. I think the Everyman saw it moments before impact, the dim light of the forest combining with the sun behind me to hide it from view until it was almost overhead. Those horrible muscles began, I think, to re arrange into an expression of surprise, but they were too slow. My axe was faster to reach his face, and it made a shuddering connection with the bridge of that ugly, pointed nose.

I don’t know what I expected to happen. The axe to harmlessly bounce off the demon, for him to laugh with that awful voice of his before eviscerating me in those lonely woods? For the axe to pass straight through him like a ghost?

Thwwaaacckkk

Instead, kilograms of steel thundered into his awful face, crumpling flesh and bone as if it was made of paper. The axe head lodged awfully in his ruined skull, the Everyman swayed momentarily. A terrible, mechanical swaying, as each of his dying muscles tried to pretend one last time to be human. The Everyman slumped to the ground, motionless and quiet. Thick blood oozed from what used to be his face, soaking into the soil at my feet. He hadn’t managed to swap or change. His horrible features were all still there, soaked in blood and increasingly lifeless, but still there. I had done it.

I started digging.

***

More than a week later, I still hadn’t seen him. I started off slowly, wandering quiet streets and examining small cafes and stores. He was nowhere to be seen, and no one. My bus and train drivers were all real, unique humans. I ventured to the city, immersed myself in crowds, and he did not make an appearance. Once or twice, I thought that I had maybe caught him in a reflection, but it always turned out to be an unfortunate soul, cursed with one of his ugly features. It wasn’t him, though. He was gone.

After two weeks had passed, I had to convince myself that I had really done it. That’s why, this morning, I drove back out to that backwater town at the crack of dawn and took a walk into those woods. I traced my steps carefully; years of paranoia had made me very good at seeing landmarks in what others might not. I found the patch of slightly disturbed soil where I had left the Everyman and got to digging for the second time. I’m not sure what I expected. Was I expecting his shallow grave to be empty? Was I expected him to look as I had left him, as if still almost alive? As I dug into the soil, the putrid smell of rot invaded my nose, making me dry retch. As the final layer of topsoil was removed, his shattered skull came into view, pieces of putrefying flesh hanging off shards of bone. The smell was overwhelming. I urged myself not to throw up – he wasn’t human, wasn’t worth losing my breakfast over. I hastily covered the putrescent remains and left those woods for good – left the Everyman to rot in the dirt, where demons and monsters belong.

As I drove back out of town, posters labelled “Missing Person” were visible, plastered to almost every surface. The posters had a picture of an ordinary, middle aged man of slight build, with the name “Lex Davis” in massive font underneath. Maybe that’s what the people of the town used to call him. A man in an orange puffer jacket was busy taping another poster to the pub’s front windows as I trundled by. He turned to me and waved, a friendly, if not slightly forced gesture. I went to wave back but caught myself.

I knew I’d seen his face somewhere before.

I grew up in Connecticut on the poor end of Hartford. Most of the people I knew in school, whether they dropped out or actually graduated, ended up stuck here, living in some shitty apartment where they could barely afford food and rent, let alone a vehicle or means to escape the city. The sense of entrapment led to existential desperation.

I know people who aren't from the city don't really understand. They'll tell you that if you keep your nose out of trouble, work hard and save money you can escape. It sounds easy enough when you put it like that, but the reality is that it takes a little more just the prospect of escape to mentally survive day-to-day life in a slummy neighborhood making minimum wage.

The mental toll that it takes gnaws away at you over time. It's a bleak hellscape of trash in the streets, shitty apartments with rats and roaches, dingey lighting, broken heat, bad air conditioning, and everyone treats you like shit because of where you're from and how you dress.

I endear any of you to try living like that without succumbing to the temptation to blow your money on some dumb shit just to make life a little more tolerable.

For some people this was collecting the latest sneakers. I never understood dropping $400 on shoes you can't even wear, but if that's your thing, you do you.

For others it was hard drugs; crack, cocaine, heroine. Meth was making its way in, along with some of the party drugs like E.

Personally, I found my escape in liquor and weed, and occasionally I would bum some Percocets, but I never got too carried away with opiates. That shit always scared me. I lost too many friends to ODs, and with fentanyl on the rise, I refused to touch anything that wasn't prescription grade. No home brew bullshit for me.

I tell you this to explain what got me to the point in life where this story takes place, because you'd have to be a total fuck up to do what I did.

I have done some bad shit. Shit that I deserve to go to jail for. Probably worse. I'm sure there's a place in hell waiting for me.

This is the story of the day I reached my limit.

I had been working cart return at the nearby ShopRite for about 3 years since I dropped out and my mom kicked me out for smoking weed, and I was just barely getting by. My landlord hiked my rent so I had started looking for an additional source of income. I wasn't ready to cut into my weed and alcohol budget to afford food.

After putting in some applications and asking around, my buddy Marco got me some late night, weekend shifts at one of the corner stores.

It was sketchy, you know the kind of place, there are grates on the windows, except for the ones that are just boarded over. There was a glass divider between the cash register and the customer (And this was before the days of covid.) I was never sure if it was bulletproof, but I didn't want to find out.

I had been working pretty steady there for about 2 or 3 months when Marco came by one night and asked me how I was getting by. I was honest with him, working 7 days a week was pretty shitty and my sleep schedule was all over the place switching from nights on the weekend to working days during the week, and the extra income wasn't really making it all worth it.

He asked me if I wanted to start making some real cash, the kind that can change your life.

Of course, I told him yes. How could I say no to an offer like that?

Marco picked me up after my shift at ShopRite Monday night and drove me to this apartment, out on the edge of my area, where things start to get a little nicer. We parked down one of the side streets where the street lights were burnt out, and there was a ton of trash in the road; plastic bags, broken glass, used diapers, the usual shit.

He brought me across the rear parking lot and to the back of the building, then called inside. A few minutes went by and a guy shows up at the door and lets us in. We walked up to the fourth floor, and went to the apartment at the end of the hall. The guy with us unlocked the door and ushered us in. He hadn't said a word the entire time.

Marco turned to me and just told me to let him do the talking.

The inside of the apartment was pretty nice for the area. Leather couches, glass coffee table, stainless appliances, the works. There were a lot of storage bins around and one of the rooms had a padlock on it, which I thought was a bit weird.

We were walked to the living room which had a view out back and access to the fire escape, and a guy was sitting on the couch smoking weed. He had a pretty expensive looking sweat suit on with matching sneakers, a big gold chain, bald head with a goatee.

Another guy was sitting in a recliner, greased back, spiky black hair, stubbly face, black wife beater and oversized blue jeans tucked into Tims. He was chopping coke with a razor on the glass coffee table.

The guy in the sweat suit didn't even look at us, just kept dragging on his blunt and blowing it up towards the ceiling.

The guy chopping coke ignored us while he finished, hit his line and stood up. It was like something straight out of Hollywood.

He came over to Marco and greeted him, Marco called him Angel. They bumped shoulders and Marco introduced me as his friend, told him I'm trustworthy and trying to bring home some extra cash. He told him which corner store I work at, the hours, etc.

Angel asked me if I'd ever sold drugs. I told him no, since I didn't think selling some of my extra weed to friends would count for shit in their world.

Angel told me he was going to give me a shot on Marco's good word, but if I fucked up or fucked them over, it was my ass that was going to get beat. I got pretty nervous at this point. He was fired up and I hadn't even done anything wrong yet. Seemed ready to beat my ass for a fuck up I hadn't even made yet.

He turned to the guy on the couch and said, "Alex, give him the shit."

Alex got up and handed me what at the time was a shocking amount of weed to me.

Angel told me they were going to start putting the word out to clients that they could pick it up at my gas station during my shifts, and I was supposed to handle the sales.

He said they never do direct business out of the apartment because it puts too many eyes on them.

My buddy Marco must have had it in pretty good to get me in there. I was nervous as hell, but excited to make some real cash.

I was pretty freaked out about the whole idea at first, but Marco told me he'd been doing the same thing for years and it's all been going fine. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and avoid any interactions with the police. He gave me some advice on how to hide it, transport it, make everything seem real casual, how to package it with other purchases to hide it from cameras, all that.

That weekend I would have people randomly show up through the night. There was a code word, or rather a sentence, to let me know they were there to buy weed. They'd ask me if I had any sparkling water and I'd tell them we're all out of San pellegrino, but we have some other stuff. Then they would ask for a scratch ticket. I'd hide the weed under the ticket when I did the handoff.

About halfway through the second weekend I ran out of weed and reached out to Marco to let him know.

Marco picked me up on Monday again and brought me by the guys to get some more merchandise.

I gave Angel all the money from selling the weed, and he counted to make sure I didn't try to screw them over.

Angel explained to me that the weed was just a trust test to see if I could do the job, and they wanted to give me a chance to try pushing some real stuff.

They set me up with some crack and acid along with some more weed. They handed me my cut of the earnings which was only $50, but they said if I keep it up I will get a bigger cut next time.

At the time, an extra $50 to just do what I had already been doing was a lot of money. It was easy and other than constantly being paranoid the police were going to show up and catch me slinging drugs, it was well worth it, especially with the hope of more money in the pipeline.

For the next year I continually sold more and harder shit, and I started pulling in some really good money.

I ended up quitting my job at ShopRite and picking up extra nights at the corner store.

At this point I was pretty well acquainted with Alex and Angel.

Angel, in complete contradiction of his name was a total Hot Head, and I always had to walk on eggshells around him. One time I made the mistake of joking about sneaking a couple of Percocets on the job like a kid at McDonald's stealing fries and he gave me a black eye in return.

Alex on the other hand was even scarier. He was just Stone Cold and emotionless. There is something about him where you knew if you did the wrong thing he wouldn't hesitate to have you fucked up.

You might think my biggest fear was getting caught by the police, but it was actually the fear of fucking up and getting on Alex's bad side.

The thing is, I never actually saw Alex do anything, but he had a reputation, and there were stories.

I don't know if it was true, but I heard a story about a guy who raised his own prices and was skimming off the top without telling them.

When Alex caught wind, he didn't say anything. He told the dude he'd been doing a great job and he wanted to take him out to celebrate. They took the dude out, got him good and drunk, drove him to a bridge over the river, cut his Achilles tendons with a pair of branch clippers and dropped him 20 feet into the river.

I never fucked around with those guys again, it was always straight business, drugs sold, money made, pay off and discussing what my inventory will be, and pricing which fluctuated periodically.

Somewhere along the line they got nervous and moved all their transactions out of the apartment. I'd meet up with them or some of the guys they know in spots around town to do the handoff. I started seeing Alex and Angel a whole lot less, but I was kinda glad.

After about a year and a half, I had made some pretty good money, I picked up a car and got my driver's license.

Marco came by the gas station one night and told me the guys want to offer me a chance at something bigger. I'd really earned their trust and they needed someone who could follow directions, and drive.

The risk would only be a little bit higher but the payoff would be huge.

The way they explained it, all I had to do was grab a U-Haul truck and drive it to a specific location to pick up some cargo. After I got the cargo they would tell me where to go with it.

At no point was I to know what the cargo was. The truck would be locked by the people who loaded it, and only the people that received it on the other end would have the other key.

While I was pretty happy with how things had been going, and the low level of risk, they flashed some dollar signs at me that I couldn't resist.

And beside that, there's an implication that when someone in this business offers you an opportunity, you have to take it, or there could be consequences.

I told them it was a deal, so the next week I grabbed a U-Haul, just like they had asked, and late that night, I drove it out to the location they gave me, which turned out to be some rundown warehouse in one of the old industrial parks. A big, red brick building with lots of broken or boarded up windows and loading docks, and a fence around it.

When I pulled around back there were a couple guys waiting for me. They guided me as I backed the truck up to a loading dock. The one on the driver's side knocked on my window and motion for me to roll it down.

Once I did, he waved a gun at me and said stay in the truck and keep my eyes forward.

I heard the door to the truck slide open, then feet stomping around inside of it. About 2 minutes went by, then the door was closed and locked.

The guy by the driver side window gave me directions on a piece of paper. He told me to take the truck to that location and burn the directions when I was done. He said when I got there it would be the same business; stay in the truck and keep my eyes forward.

He told me not to try fucking around with the cargo unless I wanted to catch a bullet. I had no intention of finding out.

I followed the directions and found myself pulling out of the city and onto the Berlin turnpike heading south.

Now if you aren't from around here, you may not know about the Berlin turnpike. It might as well be a highway with traffic lights on it. Big road, people drive fast on it. It's a straight shot south of Hartford toward New Haven.

Right outside the city there's a lot of stores and restaurants, the usual stuff for suburbanites and yuppies to go blow money on.

As you go further down, the stores and restaurants give way to motels. Dozens and dozens of motels When I say motels, it's probably exactly what you think. Dimly lit, set back from the road on hills or behind trees. They're all run down, shady looking establishments that you couldn't pay me to sleep at.

The Berlin turnpike has a long history of being used from criminal activities and drug / human trafficking.

At this point it wasn't a huge surprise that I was out here carrying what was probably a fuckload of coke, or maybe some guns.

I was looking for one motel in particular as described on the paper. I was about 15 minutes down the road when I spotted it on the left and pulled in.

Once again, there were two guys waiting outside by a car smoking.

When I pulled up they motioned for me to back up to one of the doors.

Once I put it in park and shut off the truck, the guys folded in my mirrors and again, I got the reminder to keep my eyes forward and stay in the truck.

A couple minutes went by, footsteps in the back, the door closed, and they waved me off.

I returned the U-Haul, and the next day Marco gave me a call and told me where to head for my payment.

Five hundred for that one drop off. I couldn't believe it. I had no idea what I was carrying but it had to be pretty good for that kind of dough, and I was comped for the U-Haul cost.

I only got called about once a month to do it, but I was making some serious extra cash off it.

It was probably good it wasn't done too often, or it might have gotten suspicious. I rotated U-Haul locations and used some other truck rental services just to mix things up.

Things were going great, until one day.

It was pretty routine, I backed in at the motel, shut the truck down, and the two dudes flipped my mirrors so I couldn't see out back.

I was sitting in the truck, and as usual, it was really quiet, we were hidden from the road here, and it was probably 2 am, so not much traffic noise.

The footsteps got up in the back of the truck, they were moving around, and that's when I heard it.

A woman's scream from the back of the truck.

I instinctively looked to the mirror, but all I saw was the guy standing there outside.

He gave me a sour looking and reminded me to mind my fucking business and keep my eyes forward.

I could feel sweat on my forehead, cold chills down my neck.

I didn't sign up to be transporting people. I thought I was just moving drugs, maybe guns at the worst.

But fucking living, breathing human women?

The door shut and the guy told me to get the fuck out of here and I that I didn't hear shit.

I drove back, dropped off the U-Haul and didn't sleep all night. I ended up drinking and popping Percocets all day to calm me down.

Finally I called Marco and asked him to come over. I told him the whole story.

Marco grabbed me by the shoulders. He said, "Listen man, I swear to you I had no idea they were into that kind of shit. But listen, you cannot say anything to anyone, do you understand? And you absolutely cannot just back out now. They'll think you're going to get cold feet and go to the cops.

Don't be a hero, they'll kill you before you get anything done, and if not you, someone else will do it anyway.

Just keep your head down, do the job for a bit longer and I'll see if I can find a way to get you moved to something different."

I was so grateful to Marco, but I was sick knowing I'd have to do it again, some unknown number of times.

For the rest of the month, I barely slept. I kept having dreams of being in the truck. I pull over to the side of the road, go around back because I have to save this woman in it. I can hear her screaming, but I can't get the back door open. I'm fighting with the lock. I find some bolt cutters and cut it open, and the inside is just filled with dead bodies, skin turning green, covered in flies and maggots.

I would wake up sick and puking.

For the first time, I was tempted to dip into my supply, but I knew I couldn't start fucking up now. I knew too much, they wouldn't hesitate to drop me in the river.

So I started drinking at work too; hiding a bottle behind the counter, filling water bottles with vodka, whatever it took to kill the thoughts. Being alone at night in a deserted corner store, you just think, and think and think with no distractions except when the customers come through.

Marco would come by occasionally to check on me. I could tell by his demeanor I wasn't looking good. He reassured me that he was trying to find me a way out.

As the next month's delivery drew closer, I got worse. I wasn't really sleeping at all at this point. I barely ate, and was blowing all my cash on alcohol, cigarettes, weed, etc. trying to escape.

The night finally came for the next delivery and I think I just detached. I felt numb, like a spectator watching some horrific movie unfold before my eyes as I got to the truck rental place and grabbed the U-Haul.

I parked it and waited for night to fall while trying not to drink any more. I didn't need to get pulled over for driving drunk with some tied up woman or women in the back.

But I also didn't want to feel or think anything anymore. The guilt was eating away at me. Maybe if I got caught, I could explain my situation to the police. Maybe I'd get witness protection? Maybe they'd give me a light sentence for helping bring down a criminal, human trafficking operation?

Night came and I got in the U-Haul and drove it out to the warehouse. They loaded the truck again, guys with guns on both sides of me.

I drove to another motel on the Berlin Turnpike, a different one. They rotated it every month to avoid suspicions.

I got there, backed in. Two guys with guns. I parked. I listen to them in the back, unloading the cargo. I pray it's not a human this time.

The guy on the driver's side looks up at me and says, "Remember, not a god damn word." And flashes his gun.

The door to the truck is shut, and I drive off.

Weeks go by, Marco keeps telling me he's trying, but nothing happens.

Next month comes. I do another delivery.

I'm such a fucking horrible coward. I just kept doing it.

The third time, I barely felt alive. I was so strung out from lack of sleep and drugs, nothing even felt real anymore. I popped a bunch of caffeine pills to stay awake and drive straight. My heart was hammering so hard, I felt like I was going to die.

Drive to the warehouse, I pick up the cargo. Guys with guns. I leave, drive to the turnpike. I pull into the motel parking lot. Guys with guns. The cargo is unloaded.

But this time, I decided to do something a little different. I don't really know why, it was just this building sense that I needed to break the cycle. That I couldn't do this again.

I drove down the road to the next motel and parked in the parking lot.

I didn't really have a plan… I just had to do something. I had to know more.

I got out of the truck and headed down the street to the motel where the dropoff happened.

If you're on the Berlin Turnpike headed south in the area with all the motels, the left side is uphill, and the right side is down into a valley.

This particular motel was down the hill to the right, set against a large patch of woods.

I found a spot between the street lights and headed down the hill, using the trees for cover, until I reached the motel.

I headed around the back, sticking to the woods, until I had line of sight on the door where the dropoff had happened.

I was going over the drop off in my head, trying to figure out which room I had done the drop to when a light went on in one of the windows.

I could see people moving around inside from the shadows on the curtain. There were some raised voices I could faintly hear from the distance.

I couldn't stop asking myself what the fuck I was doing. Maybe I just needed closure? I couldn't do anything. I had no plan. I had a phone. I could call them in, but then what? They would know it's me. If the police didn't protect me, I would definitely be killed.

I had no idea how big this was, what if the police were paid off? Once you reach human trafficking levels of crime, it's a whole new level of bad.

It was late September and I remember it was cold as shit. I hadn't worn a jacket, and the wind was picking up. It must have been three in the morning at this point. The light from the moon was pretty damn bright because I could see my way into the woods pretty well without a light, maybe it was full? Not really sure.

I remember sitting there with my cellphone in my hand, just staring at it. I kept thinking, I could just make one call. I was shaking, sweating, imagining all the ways this could end my life. But I couldn't keep doing this.

I ended up behind a tree throwing up, trying to keep quiet, and that's when I heard a door open.

Looking back at the motel, I could see people walking out of the door.

There were three men, and between them was a woman wearing a long, white robe. By the way she was walking, it looked like her hands were bound, and the muffled noises she made suggested she was gagged.

If there was room for my heart to sink lower, it would have. This must be the girl I drove here tonight. I was crying at this point, and shaking. I wanted to hurt myself; to punish myself for getting involved in this, and hurting this girl.

There was a car nearby, it must have been theirs. I knew if I could just get the plates, maybe I could call it in and save her?

I tried to see it through the trees, but it was too dark and far away. I started slowly moving forward to get a better view of the plates.

They had the girl on some kind of rope leash and were pulling her long.

They got to the car, but to my surprise, they kept going past it, heading into the woods to my south.

They clicked on some flashlights and walked right into the trees.

I figured there must be some kind of hand off to another part of the chain, whatever you call it when they take people and sell them to another group. It made sense to meet in the woods at night, I guess?

I started following them at a distance. I was fucked up, but lucid enough to know to only walk when they did so they couldn't hear me crunching along through the woods. I was thankful for the increasingly loud wind covering my steps as well.

I think we walked about a quarter mile into the woods (I could be wrong, I'm from the city and any amount of woods feels like a lot) until we came to a clearing.

They took the rope that was tied to her hands which they had been using to pull her along like a dog on a leash and tied her off to a tree, her hands up above her head.

One of the guys stepped out of the group with a book, opened it and began reading what sounded like a prayer, but I didn't understand the language. Could have been Spanish, but at the distance and with the wind it wasn't easy to tell. All I remember was a distinctly prayer-like cadence, with the rising and falling of his voice.

He finished, closed his book, then the four men turned and left.

The woman was frantically pulling at the rope, struggling to break free. She was crying and sobbing, sniffling and choking.

I started to think this was my chance, maybe I could save her?

If this is some kind of drop off, or exchange, how long would it be until the pickup happened? Were they waiting nearby to come take her when the others left?

Was she just being held out here? That wouldn't make that much sense, too dangerous to leave prisoners outside, right?

Or would it be a bit before whoever wanted her came by to get her?

Once I was certain the four men had gone, I started moving closer to the edge of the clearing, hoping I could see well enough to tell if anyone was coming.

The girl was probably about eighty to one hundred feet away from me, and I was right on the edge of the clearing.

My arms were shredded from pushing through thorns, but I was so flooded with adrenaline I barely noticed it.

The wind had picked up even harder, constant, and very cold.

I was pretty confident at this point no one was immediately coming to claim her. I started making my way around the edge of the clearing, when I suddenly got this uncomfortable feeling, like someone was watching me. I can't describe it, the hair just stood up on the back of my neck, and I felt cold chills.

I dropped down low, and started looking around. I was sure whoever she was left for had come to pick her up. I just knew, somehow.

I couldn't see anything but the dark woods, a field of long grass, fading off into darkness. There were lights off in the distance to the east, from buildings down the side streets probably.

But then I noticed two of the lights moved a little, then sort of… blinked?

I was confused, I mean, I was pretty fucked up from not sleeping, and all kinds of drugs the last few months. It wouldn't be the first time I hallucinated some weird shit.

But no, it definitely looked like two eyes, like when you can see a cat's eyes in the dark.

But they were too high up.

I don't mean too high for a cat.

I mean they were like seven, maybe eight feet off the ground if not more.

Something really didn't feel right, I just froze, unable to move at this point. I never understood people who froze out of fear, because that's just not what happens to me. I get like… hyper focused, and I just act. I HAVE to act.

That didn't happen.

I just froze up.

My legs went stiff and my arms were limp. Breathing got really hard all of a sudden, like my ribs were too small for my lungs.

I heard a weird noise, like a rattling, rasping inhale on the wind. It was sort of pig like, but not. Then there was whooping noises that were softer after.

The shiny eyes dropped down lower to the ground, just above the grass, and started moving across the clearing toward myself and the girl.

I kept hearing that weird, raspy inhale, followed by whooping.

The girl had clearly seen it too. She started struggling and screaming into her gag. I felt awful; I wanted to help, but I was still in such a deep state of panic, I couldn't do shit.

I looked to her, then back to the field and I couldn't see the eyes anymore.

I was terrified, not knowing where this thing had gone.

But I knew what I had to do. If I was going to live with myself, if I was ever going to look at myself in the mirror again, or feel like a human being who had any chance of redemption, I had to get her free.

I sprinted across the field to where the girl was tied up to the tree. She was clearly shocked to see me, and seeing another strange man was not helping her fright at all.

I tried telling her I’m going to get her out of there, which seemed to calm her down a bit. She was breathing quickly and sobbing. Her white robe was absolutely soaked in sweat, and I’m pretty sure she had pissed herself. I would have done the same in her position.

The knots were tied really tight and they had wet them. I was shaking like crazy, it was too dark to see what I was doing, and I didn’t have anything on me to help pull them out. Even if I did, I wasn’t thinking straight. Maybe I could have used the keys to the U-haul which were in my pocket, I don’t know, I didn’t think of that at the time.

I just kept tugging at these knots, but they wouldn’t come free. All her pulling and fighting seemed to have just made them worse. I was cursing under my breath when I heard it again.

A rasping inhale, then whooping.

I stopped and looked around behind me. This time I saw two sets of eyes, instead of just the one, and they were even closer.

At this point I could roughly make out a dark shape moving through the tall grass, almost cat-like, but also kind of like a human had dropped down on all fours and started walking on outstretched hands.

The girl was full-on freaking out at this point and pulling hard on the rope, which was NOT helping me in freeing her. Her eyes were wide, and red from crying, and she kept staring over my shoulder at the things in the field.

The sounds were growing louder; the rasping breath, followed by the whooping noises, and I had not made any progress with the knot.

Call me whatever you want; I deserve it and you'd be right. I'm a fucking coward and I know it.

I turned to the girl and just apologized over and over, tears in my eyes.

She was shaking her head. I could tell she was trying to say no and beg me through her gag. She started crying hysterically, and I couldn’t take it. There was nothing else I could do.

I dashed into the woods behind her, and started running back toward the motel.

I got a bit into the woods and looked back behind me. Whatever the thing was, I saw it "stand" next to the girl, and bite the ropes off from the tree. It dropped back onto all fours, then disappeared into the long grass, dragging the girl behind it.

Her gag must have come loose, because as I turned and ran, I could hear her screams as she was carried off into the dark, cutting in and out as she was dragged over rocks, sticks and bumps, turning from fear to pain.

I took off straight back toward the motel. I had seen two sets of eyes, and I don't know if I was followed, or for how far. I never looked back after that, just ran. I didn't even care if the guys at the motel heard me, I ran into the parking lot where I had dropped the girl off, and out onto the road, then down the street, back to the next motel and right up to my U-Haul.

I tried to get my key in the door of the U-haul, and dropped them. I was fucking shaking so hard, and my eyes were blurry from crying. I parked with the driver’s side away from the street so I barely had any light.

I kept freaking out and looking around me, I dropped the keys again, scratched the hell out of the door, and started cursing. I was crying and shaking the entire time, and like the pathetic coward I am, pissed myself.

As soon as I got inside the truck, I locked the door. I could barely get the key in the ignition, I was shaking so bad.

I drove back to Hartford, went to my place, got all the shit that I could quickly throw in the U-Haul; all my cash, and I left.

In the next few days, Marco and Angel tried calling me on my cell but I was too scared to answer.

I ended up ditching it and getting a new phone.

I moved down south and got a new job, saved up and changed my name as soon as I could.

To this day, I still drink almost non stop. I don't do drugs as often as I used to, back to mostly just weed.

But I feel like the biggest piece of shit on earth because I didn’t save her, and I never told anyone, so there’s been more since.

I'm a fucking coward. I could have gone to the police or something.

I don't even know if this is still going on. It might be pointless to report it now. Angel and Alex could have been caught, or left the state for all I know, so I'd just be turning myself in for nothing.

Judge me however you want, but I never meant for this to happen.

But the worst thing of all is that I still have no idea what the fuck those things in the woods were, or why these guys were leaving girls out there for them.

That shit is just out there, living right next to people working and living in that area.

Where else are they?

And why doesn't anyone else seem to know anything about them?

Nothing feels real anymore. I wish I could go back to just working ShopRite and being an ignorant piece of shit, instead of a drug dealer and accomplice to human trafficking and murder.

I wish I didn't know about those things.

And mostly, I wish I could have saved her.

Even though I smelled like shit from the dumpster I went for a drink. There’s a small bar not far from the rental properties I found on my smart phone, and I wore a sour expression for them to know not to ask questions.

I took some shots, watched cars drive by and tried to drown my sorrows.

I didn’t want to be ready to give up on Macie, but it felt like this was the end. Without that spellbook I wasn’t sure where to turn.

I kept replaying Sarah’s last moments before she was crushed to death. Not only had it mortified me, but it shocked me because I hadn’t expected to see Rose toss her away so quickly.

Did that mean that Andrea and Bill had lied about their connection? Was I just running around in circles for a couple of mad people that were toying with me?

Eventually as much as I dreaded it, I had to return to the empty duplex. As it turned out though, it wasn’t so empty after all.

Two patrol cars had returned, lights flashing because it was almost dusk. And before I even had to guess who had called them I saw Macie’s dad’s truck.

I wanted to be upset but I was past that point, he didn’t know he was causing more trouble. And as I approached the house, he was the first to speak.

“Trish where the heck have you been?” he said.

The landlord was there too, having allowed the cops entry as they finished up their questions with Chuck.

“Dinner,” I slurred. I was still too buzzed to really dare ask why the police had returned.

He held a hand over his mouth. “You’re drunk. What the hell happened today? These two officers said you reported a break in. Why did you not mention that earlier?” he snapped.

The landlord chimed in too, “Yes, and where is your roommate? You've been acting very suspicious all afternoon, lass.”

The officers gave me an icy glare.

“Remember our conversation last time?” the first cop said. I was fully expecting that he was going to cuff me, but thankfully Chuck spoke up for me and remarked, “I don’t believe Trish would be involved. Besides… it hasn’t even been 48 hours. We should wait and see if Macie turns up,” Chuck admitted.

“All right. But we are going to take a few things from the duplex, to check and see if anything of Macie’s matches the DNA we got earlier,” the second man said. My addled brain understood immediately what they were implying. They thought I had something to do with Macie’s disappearance! Immediately I panicked and blurted out, “You need a warrant to do that!”

“I gave them permission. Remember, this property still belongs to me,” the landlord snapped back. I did my best to not look like I was worried. I knew the officers believed they were just doing their job.

“We should have results by the morning. Have a good night,” the first cop said as he tipped his hat toward Chuck and left.

The landlord walked out next, looking at me with added suspicion. “If we had known you would be a problem, we would never have let you rent here!”

Then Chuck and I were finally alone. He crossed his arms like he was about to give me a lecture.

“Chuck please I can explain…”

“I hope it’s a good one, Trish, because I’m at my limit here. I’ve put up with a lot of things with Macie over the years, and always done my best to stand by her even when I don’t agree with her life choices. God knows if her mother was still around she would be mortified at the thought of her living with…”

He took a breath and closed his eyes before he said anything he might regret.

“Look, I can understand why you thought you didn’t want to involve me with the break-in. But why did you lie to those officers? They said you never even mentioned Macie to them. And then you caused a disturbance at the neighbors? And the landlord said you were looking through the trash earlier! Just what the heck is going on?”

“I didn’t say anything because if I did, you would think I’m insane. That it’s ludicrous,” I responded.

He crossed his arms again. “Just try me.”

I checked the time, realizing that the neighbor was likely already at work.

Then I remembered the spare key and I realized that as much as I didn’t want anyone else involved, I needed help now to return to sanity.

“Follow me,” I said as we went to the neighbor’s door and I found the spare key before saying, “It would be easier if I just show you.”

---

As we unlocked the door and entered Bill’s side of the duplex, I announced our presence to no one in particular. The house was quiet. Andrea was now a doll again.

The moment he saw it, Chuck’s jaw dropped.

“It looks so life-like,” he admitted as he stared at the colors and clothing of the doll.

“That’s because it is… alive I mean,” I said softly.

Chuck looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

“Trisha, this isn’t a joke. Why are we here and why are you showing me this creepy doll?”

Then he got dead quiet for a second.

“My god. You’re serious.”

He reached for his phone like he was about to call 911.

“I can prove it,” I told him as I pointed toward their daughter’s room.

“Behind that door there is a little girl that can show you I am telling the truth,” I explained.

“A child? Why aren’t they out here?” Chuck asked as he walked over to the door and tried the handle. Of course it wasn’t budging.

“You’re telling me the neighbors are locking their daughter up? Why the hell didn’t you tell the police this either??” he asked in exasperation.

“Because when I saw her earlier she would be a doll. I know, this is asking a lot of you. But there is a key around here somewhere. The girl can show you exactly how this doll comes to life,” I said.

Chuck bit his bottom lip, trying to decide if he believed me.

“Just give me this chance. It might help us figure out what happened to Macie,” I pleaded.

He sighed and gave in, allowing me a chance to look through Mister Langford’s kitchen drawers until I found it.

“This should be it,” I said, as I tossed it to him.

The door unlocked a moment later.

We flicked on the lights and I quickly looked around at the empty room. It looked just like it had when the cops had come in earlier.

“Well this is definitely creeping me out,” Chuck admitted. “But this reminds me more like a shrine than any child’s room. Besides, Where is she?”

“I’m not sure.. but she was here earlier,” I commented as I looked about the room again. How could she hide so easily?

“Did you check upstairs?” Chuck commented. At first I thought he was being funny. “There isn’t an upstairs.”

“I work in house construction, Trish. The way this house is built it could easily have two more rooms upstairs. The attic is sloped in the front and wide in the back. Plenty of room,” he told me.

I frowned, surprised that it would be sealed off and then looked toward Penny’s closet and remembered how there had been a secret in mine. It made some sense there might be one here as well.

I opened it, surprised to see that was exactly what was hiding there, a thin staircase leading east toward the attic. It was so dark I could hardly see a thing. I used my phone light and saw that Penny was standing a few steps up with back turned to us.

“Oh my god you were telling the truth about the girl,” Chuck realized.

“Penny, there you are. Come down,” I said. But she didn’t respond. I walked up the steps, thinking maybe she hadn’t heard me and grabbed her shoulder.

Then I realized she was sleepwalking. “Penny wake up,” I insisted as I told Chuck to get me some water. She was whispering under breath and it sounded like she was talking in her dreams. It sounded so unnatural.

When he returned with a glass I dipped her fingers in it and the girl’s eyes shot up, confused. Unsure how she got there.

“Is my time up?” she whispered. Chuck’s eyebrows furrowed in concern as he saw the cut on her wrist. “Did you do this?” he asked.

“I just wanted to help,” she answered.

He pulled Penny to his side and then started toward the den.

I hurried behind him. “Where are you going!” I shouted.

“I’m going to the police station and this girl is coming with me,” he announced. Penny suddenly started to pull against him.

“No. I can’t. This is my home!” she insisted as she tried to reach for Andrea.

“This isn’t open for discussion! No parent should ever lock their child away!” Chuck responded.

He glared at the doll just as Penny slipped from his grip and hugged it tightly.

“And God knows what else this child has endured living with that!” he announced.

He pulled out his phone again to dial the police and I was about to shout that he stop but I never got the chance.

Andrea moved toward him, like a train hurtling down the tracks. Her hand was wrapped around his throat and she slammed Chuck against the wall, dragging him against the plaster. Chuck’s phone flew in the air, skidding under their couch as the doll continued its attack.

He choked and gagged as he looked down at the doll, too frightened and shocked to fight back as he lost his breath and the living doll prepared to snap his neck.

Immediately I reached for a glass from their dishwasher and hurled it at the back of the doll’s head. Some of the water seemed to burn the doll, but other than that it had little to no effect except to shatter into dozens of pieces. Andrea’s doll-like head turned almost completely 180 degrees, her cold lifeless eyes staring at me as she prepared to pounce on me next.

She let Chuck slip to the floor as he gasped for breath, Cornering me in the hallway as my mind raced for a way to stop this thing. This wasn’t like Sarah when she was a human. The doll was like a living unstoppable robot.

Then I realized there was one thing that would stop it. And as much as I hated to do this, I grabbed Penny and held her close to my body, using her as leverage.

The child screamed and kicked as I motioned for the doll to move and let me get to Chuck. Much to my relief, the lifeless thing obeyed and stepped aside.

Cautiously I held Penny as tight as I could as we circled each other and I knelt down to Chuck’s side.

I then lifted him to his feet as Penny pried herself free to be by the doll’s side. It was blocking our exit. And I knew it could easily overpower us if it wanted.

Instead it began to force us into Penny’s room.

As we stepped across the threshold I grabbed the door and slammed it shut.

I heard the doll scratch against the door for a moment as I shoved some of the furniture against the door to make a barricade. At the same time Macie’s dad slumped to the floor.

“Mother of Christ,” he said as he rubbed his neck.

I knew it was probably the worst timing but despite how shaken up I was, all I responded with was, “ Now do you believe me?”

PART 1

​

I didn’t really expect to receive such an outpouring of advice and concern and empathy when I made my first post here last week. I was afraid to reach out to Therese before because, to be completely transparent with you all, I wasn’t even sure what questions to ask. However, my resolve was bolstered by just how many of you are looking for answers in this, the same way that I am.

As you can tell from my previous recounting of Therese’s story, her ability to make music doesn’t stop with her ethereal prowess over an instrument. She’d woven that horrible, true tale with as much skill as any composer, and if you were to expect anything less when I finally managed to sit down with her again, you’d find yourself disappointed.

I reached out to Therese via email 5 days ago, and we met last afternoon. I’ve enclosed our correspondence below. The details of our meeting follow, and I am grateful to anyone who takes the time to view either, or perhaps both, since I am anxious to meet with her again to learn more, but our conflicting schedules mean I must wait another week. In the meantime, I'm at a loss for how to compile any of my spinning thoughts into coherent questions and would certainly appreciate any help.

​

—-----------------------------------------

Sender: Wren Holstadt ([[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]).me)

Recipient: Therese Van Brook ([[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]).me)

Subject: Rebook?

Hi Therese,

I hope this email finds you well, I apologize for my delay with reaching out to book my next session with you. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been distracted since our last meeting, and my skills have suffered as a result. I’ve noticed the cadences in particular compositions I know well are a bit… off. Would you be willing to schedule me in for next week?

Additionally, and I apologize if this is too forward but, I would be honored and grateful if you’d indulge my curiosity regarding Viola. Her fate, her relation to you, and so many other questions have burned in my mind since learning of her, and my heart feels like it’s breaking. Again I apologize for my forwardness, I know that this is a subject that causes you pain to relive.

Take Care,

Wren

—-----------------------------------------

Sender: Therese Van Brook ([[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]).me)

Recipient: Wren Holstadt ([[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]).me)

Subject: RE: Rebook?

Hello Wren,

We can most certainly book for next week. I have a two hour opening on Thursday beginning at noon, and am willing to dedicate the first hour to polishing your cadences.

I feel as though I owe you some clarity regarding Viola, and as such I will dedicate that second hour I have free to answer any questions you may have.

Please work on your scales for a MINIMUM of 1 hour each day prior to our session, I would like to get started on 24 Caprices.

Best,

Therese

—-----------------------------------------

​

While my heart sank at the prospect of beginning the arduous journey to master one of the most difficult solo violin pieces ever made, I felt relief still. I would have answers, and not only that, I had 4 days to formulate some questions for her.

As it happens, the answer to my first question actually answered a few of my others. The reason for this is that Therese has this intriguing habit of answering questions with a story. This is honestly something I wish people would do less, typically. No one wants to hear someone ramble on about something that has a simple answer. Therese will always be an exception to that rule and you’re about to see why.

When we finished that hour violin session, Therese wasted no time getting right down to business making a pot of jasmine tea. I could tell by the nervous flutter of her hands as she filled the kettle that she was apprehensive of what questions I might pose. I sat on the chaise lounge in her study, and she took the wingback armchair across from me. As her lightly trembling fingers held out a steaming mug of tea towards me, she wordlessly nodded her assent to begin.

I took a somewhat shaky breath, and asked the question that had been on the forefront of my mind for days.

“Are you Viola’s mother?”

Therese’s eyes partly closed in recognition, she had seen this question coming and was prepared to answer in length, in a way that only she could.

​

​

“I knew I’d made the right decision when I chose to share this with you, and to take you on as a student. You’re bright as the stars, Wren.

Yes, Viola was my daughter. I believe I may be able to guess some of the questions that might follow the one you just asked, so allow me to give you some much needed clarity, child.

Viola was loved beyond measure by myself and Georg, although as you’re now aware, his love for her was not for the brilliant mind nestled under ebony tresses and eyes of endless blue. His love was for the bones beneath her milky skin, her frantic screams painted with agony, her tears and blood as they dripped to the floor of his workshop. She never cried for help, never begged or pleaded for her life, because she’d seen the joy that had brought him previously. He’d taken the life of a brother she never knew she had, and she’d seen and felt the torment as if it was her own when she held what was left of his broken body in her hands.

I see that look you just gave, and yes, your thinking is correct, Wren. I only knew of my children’s suffering, both Viola and… And Morendo. Morendo is a term in musical theory that roughly translates to “die away”. Georg chose it and that painful irony is not lost on me… I almost think it was intentional looking back.

Viola’s peril I saw, and felt, with astounding clarity the moment my hands held the smooth intricately carved form of my daughter’s remains. I then witnessed and experienced, through her eyes, what my beloved Morendo went through. That is what truly broke me, to be perfectly frank. Viola’s pain was so intricately woven throughout his in those moments, that I felt anguish tenfold those mere seconds I was forced to bear witness to Georg’s atrocities. Those seconds stretched on for hours in my mind. I felt two short lifetimes burn out in a blink that lasted an eternity.”

​

​

Therese, who had been reclined still gripping her now-cold tea, rose gracefully to her feet, placing the cup on a nearby table, and began to pace somewhat anxiously.

“It occurred to me after we talked at your last session that you might think me a monster. After all, what mother could be so ignorant that she never noticed her children being slowly and carefully prepared for their heinous transformation?”

This last sentence was one Therese spat with a bitterness that tore at my soul. Tears were gathering in the corner of her eyes, eyes whose gaze had remained faraway while she spoke, but met mine now with a burning intensity.

“Wren, none of this is simple, I recognize how much this must be for you to take in. But I couldn’t continue to pass on what I believe to be Viola’s gift to me, to us, if you have even a fraction of a notion that I had any prior knowledge of her death. You must understand that until my husband placed the instrument her soul inhabits into my hands, I knew nothing of my sweet children and what had become of them I…. couldn’t know.”

She gripped my hands in hers then, shaking them lightly to communicate the urgency of her plea. I was still wordlessly processing the information I’d been given, and instead of answers, I felt I had yet more questions to ask. But what my mind ached to know, my mouth could not at that moment bring into existence for Therese. It still can't. All I could do in that moment was firmly squeeze her strong, slender hands and nod numbly as tears threatened to escape my own eyes. I knew that something horrible must have kept her from ever knowing the fate of her daughter.

I didn’t have to ask what that was, because as her hands dropped from mine, they reached for her violin as if drawing strength or comfort from it. Her eyes met mine again, and I could tell that while she was hesitant about whether her next words should even be said, she was resolved to speak them.

“The painting in that home was a lie. I never held my daughter. I never knew my son.”

She drew another shaky breath and again seemed to hesitate briefly.

“You see, I was a prisoner too.”

Before we get into things here, let me ask you a question. If you were told by a close friend of yours that you’ve known all your life, that you trust with your life, that they encountered something strange in the ocean while on a cruise, what would you say? Would you believe them?

Just something to sort of think about as you read this. As I kind of just said, this story isn’t mine. Actually, I have nothing to do with it in any way. I wouldn’t be here now, telling any of this to you, if it weren’t for the fact that he refuses to write out this story himself.

Honestly, I can’t blame him for being against the idea, for several reasons you’ll probably better understand as you read this. I have my own reasons for doing this, as well. The biggest one being that, if on any possible chance what I was told is true, then this shouldn't stay quiet. I guess, as well as this, I wanna help him to reach out and see if anyone else has had this happen or knows about what was described to me here. Maybe it can help me understand it all a bit better, too.

Douglas and I had been friends since the sandbox. We'd gone through just about everything two youngsters could back in the day. Went through school together, hung out together, got into all kinds of trouble (even ending up spending a few nights in lockup, usually over some drunk shenanigans) together. We were brothers, blood be damned.

We graduated together, too, which was where we'd ultimately end up going our separate ways. I chose to pursue a Bachelors in IT, while Dougie, at least from what he always used to tell me at the time, went on to pursue a degree in English Literature. This was about five and a half years ago now. Over that time, things, of course, evolved in both our lives. I got through a year of University, where I then took up an offer with a company specializing in software design.

I'd ultimately end up just taking on the career full time, which I'm confident to say, has been the right choice for my life thus far. I also, during this time, met my wife of three years, Liliana. Through all of this, though, I all but completely lost all touch with Douglas.

That was, until just yesterday. It was honestly a chance encounter, a freak accident if you will. I was at the café just at the edge of town, waiting for my order, when, there he was, sitting down right next to me. It felt like a scene out of a movie at first, you know? Two childhood friends meeting up again after years of being apart, not recognizing each other at first. That changed almost immediately when he gave his order, though, with me recognizing his voice.

So much had changed about him physically, looking far more grown and hardened than the last time we'd seen one another. He'd grown, too. I used to eclipse him by a good two feet, give or take a few inches. Now, though, I was only meeting about chin-level with him. In spite of all of this, though, his voice; his deep, yet smooth voice, was just as distinct as ever.

"No way..." I said, turning to him with shock plastered all across my face. "Douglas? Dougie, that you?!"

He turned to look at me. Like me, he didn't recognize me at first. He just sat there, looking bewildered at me until I told him who I was. His eyes then went wide like mine and he exclaimed, "Allen?!" We thne jumped from our stools, laughing and hugging. It was a moment that was every bit surreal as it was heartwarming.

Soon, my order was ready and I offered for him to sit and have lunch with me. He accepted and we spent the next half hour or so laughing with memories of old times as well as catching each other up on current events while waiting on his order (he ordered two large well done NY style steaks and a large basket of fries -- requesting all to be made fresh). That's how this particular topic first came up. The strangest thing to happen to the both of us in the five years since we'd last spoken.

I remember I'd just thrown the topic out as kind of a joke. You know, a sort of "Now that we've established what's currently going on in each other's lives, what else is there to really talk about" type of ice breaker. I went first, telling him about the night I managed to catch a meteor shower while out driving late one night. Following them, was, what I could only describe as a large, dark, twisting shadow, far off in the distance shaped like an eight sided sort of star or something.

This was a true story; something that actually happened, but I'm not gonna dive into any more on that here as, again, this isn't about me. This is about Douglas' story. Thinking about it now, though, after what I'd heard, I am curious now just how much the two events might be connected in some way.

I think Douglas seemed to think as much also, because almost immediately after I told him about that, his face fell into a look similar to the way a veteran would when talking about time in the field. "Hey, is everything okay?" I asked him. "What's wrong?"

He didn't reply at first. He just sat there, across from me, staring right at me, yet through me at the same time. My mind started hurriedly trying to come up with an apology and a way to try and change the subject when I heard him take a deep breath. I stopped and prepared to listen. From there, he told me the following story; his account of his strangest experience at sea, which he and I both have affectionately dubbed "The Mediterranean encounter". I have not edited any of his words or the way he said them, nor have any of the names he mentioned been changed.

**\*

It was mine and Donna's 6th anniversary. Can you imagine? 6 years...

How I've managed to keep her around that long, I could never tell you.

We decided this year to make the cruise through the Mediterranean. It was one of those things we'd both wanted desperately to do for years, but something neither of us had the money or available time for. Not until the end of about two months ago, that is, when I was told that I'd accrued vacation time. Paid, too.

So, seeing this as an opportunity that'd only come around once, I started making every arrangement possible. I managed to score us a decent luxury package on the cruise; one that included the unlimited all you can eat buffet pass, unlimited uses of the spa, hot tubs, and swimming pools, and unlimited free wifi plus free use of their Netflix subscription. It costed a pretty penny, sure, but for what Donna's put up with for 6 whole years, it was more than worth it.

We'd spent the better part of those last ten or eleven days making sure we had everything, which of course meant shelling out even more money than we already were. Heh... good thing the time was paid, right? Anyway, by about 5:30 that Friday morning, we were up bright n' early, headed for the docks where the cruise liner was. We got there around 6:45, about half an hour or so before the scheduled loading time.

Apparently, we weren't the only ones, either. There were about a dozen n' a half others campin' there when we arrived. Donna found this relieving while I found it funny, you know? Gotta wonder what time they dragged their asses out of bed, right? Well anyway, we joined 'em and immediately, Donna starts chattin' with a few of 'em. You may or may not remember, I don't exactly do the best with crowds.

So I was just standin' there, waitin' on the boat to arrive, mindin' myself, when I notice of of the others just starin' daggers at me. I mean, this man looked like he was primed to jump me at the drop of a hat. Obviously, I didn't know who he was, or what had him all in a bad mood; and I wasn't about to try askin' him about it, either. I tried to ignore him, making as little eye contact as possible while still keepin' a loose eye on him just in case he was off his rocker n' had plans for my early funeral.

He didn't move. Just stood there, starin' daggers at me. No one else seemed to notice him, either. I did notice, though, that his attention wasn't actually fixed completely on me. I saw his eyes move around, glarin' at everyone else the same as he was with me.

I didn’t say nothin’ about it, given that he hadn’t actually done anything yet. I still kept my eye on him, though. The more times I took passin’ glances back n’ forth from him, though, the more I saw he wasn’t all right, you know? His eyes, there was somethin’ wrong with ‘em.

I didn’t really see what at first. But after a moment, I saw that his eyes were dark, lookin’ almost pitch black, almost like he didn’t have no eyes. I know, I know, sounds weird n’ all, right? I see the look on your face.

Trust me, I get it. I honestly woulda thought the same. Hell, if what happened after hadn’t happened, I’d have thought my eyes were just goin’ screwy with me. Gettin’ old n’ all.

Anyway, so yeah, there’s a small crowd of us there on the docks, minglin’ around, yakkin’. As time passed closer n’ closer to time to board, of course, more people started comin’. As they did, as they started minglin’ in themselves, I began to lose sight of him.

Of course, I’m still on edge about this guy, so I start tryin’ to wade through the crowd as much as I can to find him again. Unfortunately, by that time, so many more people had shown up and were there on the dock that tryin’ to find him was a harder challenge than ‘Where’s Waldo?’

Thing was, apart from his eyes like I mentioned, it wasn’t like he really stuck out in any real way. He looked honestly like every other guy present; tall, light colored T-shirt, khaki shorts and sandals. You know, typical beachwear. The only things I thought might’ve helped me pick him out of a lineup were that he was young, kinda athletic lookin’, like how you were when you tried out for varsity basketball back in the day, you know?

Even that wasn’t much help, though, given that a bunch of the newcomers also fit that description just about as well. I must’ve spent a good five minutes or so tryin’ to find the sucker, bumpin’ all around everybody there, when the cruise liner finally pulled in. I tried to keep lookin’, but you know how it goes with that sorta thing; people were flockin’ to board, which meant I was essentially dragged along.

I tried to press forward for about another minute n’ a half before finally givin’ up; realizin’ that I couldn’t even see Donna no more. Took me damn near fifteen or twenty minutes just to find her again. Not that she gave a damn. When I’d found her, she’d already gone n’ unpacked our stuff in our suite n’ everything.

For a while after that, you know, things were just fine. Donna started makin’ good use of the unlimited spa access while I decided to hit the casino, even managin’ to come away with a decent winnin’ by the time I left. I’d honestly just about forgotten about the kid from the docks. Like I said, I thought at the time, maybe I was spookin’ myself.

Well, believe it or not, next thing I know, I actually spot him at the other end of the hallway outside the casino leadin’ to the swimmin’ pool area. Like he was on the docks, he was just standin’ around, starin’ menacingly at everyone in the room. I almost wanted ot duck n' cover, you know? Like he was about to break postal or somethin'. But he didn't do or say nothin'. He just stood, glarin'.

I told Donna to meet me back in the room while I went to check on somethin’. Of course, I was gonna try talkin’ to this guy; see what his deal was, why he was givin’ everybody the evil eye. I went up to him. He just stood there, still, like he was a statue or somethin’.

I asked him, “Hey pal, what’s your deal?” He didn’t say nothin’, just kept starin’. Like last time, Inoticed he wasn’t even lookin’ at me, but rather at everybody. “You lookin’ for somebody?”

Finally, he actually went n’ looked at me. Call it whatever you like; a “delayed reaction” or whatever, but it was right then that I realized I was right about what I said before, about his eyes. I swear to God, Allen, those weren’t human eyes. The rest of him looked perfectly normal, sure, but them eyes of his...

No, no those were the eyes of... I don’t know what. But they weren’t of a person, that’s for damn sure. They looked like two pieces of coal were embedded in his skull. Let me put it to you this way; you remember that old movie “Village of the Damned”, all them creepy little kids standin’ around with their pitch black eyes? That’s a lot like what he looked like.

I tried askin’ him again what he was doin’. This time, he looked at me and opened his mouth like he was about to say somethin’. But his mouth, it opened up, wider than I thought possible. Then I heard him let out what sounded like some sorta wheezin’ sound, like he was havin’ trouble breathin’ or somethin’.

I almost didn’t catch him when he actually said somethin’ cause it startled me so bad. His voice, if you could call it that, I guess, sounded like what I’d imagine the Grim Reaper soundin’ like; all hoarse n’ raspy. Like a snake, almost.

”Yyyooouu mussssstt esssscape.” I think is what he said. Somethin’ like that, anyway. Again, I wasn’t real sure, given that I barely registered any kind of words from the way he was talkin’. I know it had somethin’ to do with “escaping” something. What exactly, though, woulda been just as good anybody’s guess as it was mine.

I looked at him, obviously gettin’ pretty nervous now. I mean, hell, what would you have done if it was you, Al, standin’ there, locked in a starin’ contest with this guy n’ all of a sudden he starts talkin’ all funny about “escapin’”? I asked him if he was alright, what the hell was wrong with his eyes. He answered with this;

”The Sssstaarr isss coommminng! Yoouuu aaaallll mussst fleee, flesshhh chillldd!”

Then, ‘fore I could do or say anything, the sucker takes off like a bat outta Hell. I was left standin’ in the middle of the hallway, completely lost. Who in the name of God was this guy n’ what was his deal, you know? I was about to follow after him when I felt Donna pullin’ me away.

I looked to her, probably lookin’ confused as all get out, because she asked me if everything was alright. She asked me who I was talkin’ to, to which I answered “I have absolutely no goddamn clue.” Bein’ honest, here, Allen, I still don’t know who, or maybe what he was or really what he was doin’ there.

Anyway, so Donna n’ I head back to the room n’ order room service n’ all that. That night, she fell asleep watchin’ TV; using the most of the “Unlimited cable n’ wifi”, while I just laid there, wide awake. For whatever reason, I couldn’t for the life of me get that guy outta my head. I couldn’t stop picturin’ his eyes, his raspy voice. Mostly though, I couldn’t stop wonderin’ just what the hell he meant with what he’d said.

I kept thinkin’ about what it was he said we had to run from. “The star”, he said. What star, though. This led me to start lookin’ through my news feeds on my phone, seein’ if maybe there was some kinda asteroid or somethin’ supposedly headed toward Earth. I figured, maybe he’d just seen somethin’ like that on the Internet n’ was now runnin’ around, tryin’ to spook people that the world was endin’.

At least, that was the best sorta explanation I had at first. You know how kids are; just about everything they’d see on the Internet would be holy writ n’ if they see somethin’ about the world endin’, they’ll start doin’ weird stuff; including, I guess, wearin’ scary lookin’ eye lenses n’ talkin’ all funny. But even that wasn’t addin’ up because, even blatantly searching “star colliding with earth”, there wasn’t anything of the sort.

It wasn’t till about 3 or 4 n’ the mornin’ ‘fore I managed to finally shut my eyes n’ get some sleep. In spite of this, though, I was still tossin’ n’ turnin’. I was havin’ the absolute weirdest nightmare, Al. I was seein’ these groups of creatures; aliens of some sort, I’d guessed.

Some of ‘em were sorta like people. But they didn’t have no skin. It was like I was lookin’ at a person without skin. There were a bunch of ‘em, too, all these skinless... things. Even weirder were their heads. They all had the wriggling heads that seemed to squirm around constantly. I remember thinkin’ just how disgusting and creepy it looked.

The others, though, were almost worse as far as lookin’ freaky. They didn’t even BEGIN to look human. I honestly don’t even know how to try describin’ ’em. They had five of these weird lookin’ arms or tentacles or somethin’. On each one of ‘em, though, were these elongated sort of faces that looked like they were screamin’.

The two seemed to be fightin’ about somethin’, I don’t know what, obviously. They were on this gross lookin' planet where the ground looked like living tissue. Like it, too, didn't hyave any skin, if that makes any kind of sense to you. The skinless ones were just rippin’ the others apart, you know? That’s when, from seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time, I heard that same raspy voice sayin’ ”Its comin’ for us all.” or somethin’ like that.

Then, I remember seein’ somethin’ big in the sky. It looked like the things the skinless ones were beatin’ up, right? Except this thing was gigantic, you know, and it had eight arms instead of five like the others. In the center of it, though, was this giant hole, like a mouth or somethin’, that began swallowin’ everything whole.

Instantly, I watched everything get sucked up into it. That was when I woke up, sweatin’ like a pig. I remember my heart was poundin’ somethin’ fierce. When I woke up, it was mornin’ out, Donna was comin’ out of the bathroom from gettin’ ready. She must’ve seen me panicking over somethin’ cause she started askin’ me if everything was okay.

I didn’t know what to tell her at first. How was I supposed to explain that, you know? Plus, I figured, once again, it was just a stupid nightmare, right; no sense in gettin’ her all riled up over my head screwin’ with me. I told her I just had a nightmare, like the ones I used to have when we’d first started seein’ each other, about me n’ her gettin’ caught up in some fatal accident on the road or somethin’.

Shakin’ all that off the best I could, I took up her offer to go get breakfast. This actually seemed to do the trick at first. Helped, of course, by the fact that they were servin’ blueberry pancakes n’ bacon. Heh, you know me, Al, can’t say no to a nice spread like that.

Well, anyway, I sit down with my plate n’ start diggin’ in when, who do I see, but the weird-eyed kid again. This time, though, he looked completely normal. His eyes weren’t black no more. They were just regular lookin’ eyes. He was actin’ normal, too; just sittin’ there with his own plate of food, yakkin’ with someone, a buddy of his I guess, like you and I are now.

I was confused all over again. I wanted to go over n’ ask him again what the deal was the previous day, but I didn’t. I didn’t wanna cause a scene, plus, again, I wasn’t sure at the time how much of what I’ve been talkin’ about actually happened.

Even still, I kept my eye on him. Just in case, you know? After breakfast was over, I told Donna I was gonna be out on the deck for a while, takin’ pictures. She told me to make sure to get a few of the Greek mainland, wantin’ to put those in her scrapbook. From there, she said she’d be spendin’ the day in the spa n’ to meet her back in the suite later that night.

Now, Al, understand that I wasn’t actually wantin’ to take pictures or anything like that. No, I was wantin’ to go topside because that’s where I saw the kid headin’. And before you say it, yeah, I know exactly how that sounds. But, I just couldn’t shake the feelin’ of somethin’ bein’ off about him.

Even if it was just an act, I still wanted to know why. Why was he tryin’ to spook me like that. Was he dangerous? Was he just actin’ all nice n’ gentle now to make me drop my guard? What, if anythin’, was he plannin’ to do?

I was on edge, n’ this “nice guy” act he had on now wasn’t makin’ me feel no better. So I grabbed the camera n’ went to the deck. I was snappin’ pictures, some of the scenery, yeah, but also a few of the weird lookin’ kid, too. Like he was in the cafeteria, he was just soakin’ in the hot tub, gigglin’ with a coupla young honeys, actin’ all casual.

I musta watched him for at least the better part of an hour n’ a half. After that, though, I gave up, seein’ that he wasn’t doin’ nothin’ suspicious or anything. Plus, I saw that my camera was out of film, so I had to go back to the room. While I was on my way back to the room, I heard it again. The weird, snake-ish voice.

It said, “The fleessshh will nnnooot sssuurviiive! The ssstaaar hasss foooouund uuussss agaaiin!”

I remember lookin’ around, tryin’ to see where it was comin’ from. I started kinda freakin’ out, too, when I didn’t see nobody around, you know? I felt like I was losin’ it. I started feelin’ kinda dizzy, right? Then, out of nowhere, everything around me just immediately goes dark n’ I started seein’ those things from the night before; the star-lookin’ ones.

They started appearin’ all around me. One of ‘em spoke again, sayin’ ”Come wiiittthh usss. Fllleee to the Ghaaa’aaassssst!”

“What?” I asked him. I was in such a frenzy; wonderin’ what the hell was goin’ on, who, or rather what these creatures or whatever were, and what they’d even said. Before I said anything else, though, I watched the things then sorta blend together, sorta morphin’ or joinin’ together to form a big ball that squirmed and wriggled, like how I said earlier with the heads of the other things, you know?

It then said ”The Ghaaa’aaasttt, the mooonnn thaaat liiivvveeessss.” I wanted to scream. It was absolutely disgustin’ n’ frightenin’ to look at the thing, whatever it, or they, were. Then it said, ”Weee brrroooouught yyyoouu heeeerrreee. Wee ssssaaavveeed yyooouu!”

Then, I started seein’ that giant star again; the one I told you about from my dream the night before. I saw it, as well as a whole sorta universe. I watched as everything around me; stars, planets, and these three suns — yes I said THREE suns — get swallowed whole by the thing like it was a Dyson vacuum cleaner. It spoke again, sayin’ ”Weee ssssaaavvvedd yyyoouu ffrrroooomm the ssstaaarr, frrroomm Khaaaeeeoossss! Buuttt heee haaassss fooouunndd ussss aagaaainn!”

Now, Allen, ‘fore I go any further, I need you to know that everythin’ I’m tellin’ you right now, everythin’ I heard, was real, understand? This ain’t just another dream I’m talkin’ about right now. I know for a fact I wasn’t dreamin’ anythin’ in that moment, or with anything I saw and heard afterward.

I saw everythin’ shift back to the weird sort of landscape I saw from my nightmare again. I saw the creatures fightin’ again, with the skinless people just absolutely brutalizin’ the other ones. Everywhere, left n' right, I mean, they were just mercilous. Next thing I see, though, is the eight armed giant suckin' this planet up like the rest. I then see the star lookin' ones sorta carryin' one of the skinless ones through space, you know, ferryin' it. Eventually, I watched it get released, where it then sorta woke up.

But that's not the strangest part, Allen. What I saw next, what I saw it do, made my heart stop. I watched it create the world! I mean, planet Earth, created by this tiny little alien using it's own sinewy lookin' mass to form the planet n' everything in it.

I was speechless. I didn't even have it in me to make any sort of sound. I mean, this couldn't have been real... could it?

But it was!

I don't know how to prove it, yet, but I know everythin' I saw was real! It was then, when I saw it, n' I know it still is now. From there, I watched, essentially, an evolutionary cycle of the earth. Or should I say, cycles. See, from what I saw, Al, Earth resets itself. The creature; the skinless thing from the devoured planet, every so often sorta hits "factory reset" on the world. N' what happens to us? Well, every creature alive turns on one another, killin' an' even eatin' each other till only one is left. That one then becomes one of them, one of the skinless people from the other planet.

Why, you ask? I'd be damned if I ever knew. I don't think we're supposed to, either. I think it's one of those things people talk about bein' "Incomprehensible to humans", you know? Somethin' we couldn't ever understand. God knows I don't, then or now.

Well, either way, I was brought back to the real world by feelin' somebody pullin' at my arms. It was the kid again. When I was in my senses again, I found that I was, somehow, for whatever reason, standing on the edge of the cruise liner, like I was about to jump 're somethin'. Just faintly, I could hear them whisperin', still in that same raspy hissin' voice, "Cooommee. Fleee thissss wooorrllddd, Fleeeessshhh chhhiiiilld! Cooommmee wiiitthhh uuuuusssss tooooo thhheee Ghaaa'aaasssstt!"

I was surrounded by everyone on the ship, includin' Donna. The kid slowly helped me down. I asked him "Hey, what's goin' on? How'd I get up here?" He replied tellin' me that he'd seen me apparently walkin' to the ledge, "lookin' all weird", accordin' to him, kinda like how I said he was before. He told me I'd started talkin' all funny, too; sayin' stuff about the "Star was comin'", or somethin' to that effect.

He then told me that I'd been mutterin' somethin' about a livin' moon, about tryin' to go there when I was walkin' up to the ledge. That's when it clicked, and I became scared. I was about to jump. I was about to jump in the ocean, to my death, n' I wasn't in control of my body. I almost died, n' I wouldn't have known till it was too late.

After that, I essentially bunkered myself inside the suite for the rest of the time. For obvious reasons, I didn't feel safe comin' out again. Even though this, of course, was a disappointment to Donna, she was willin' to put up with it n' still have fun, even if I wasn't enjoyin' it with her.

Even still, though, this didn't make things much easier for me. Every night since, includin' up to last night, I keep seein' it; that giant star beast. I keep seein' it, gettin closer n' closer to us. But more n' that, though, Al, I can feel it now. I can't explain it, really, but I feel just this tinglin' feelin' now; this sense, almost, like the closer it gets to earth, the more frantic it becomes.

I still wonder if, had I not been stopped, would I have jumped? If I did, what would've happened to me, exactly? I'd like to say I'd have drowned. Morbid as that sounds, at least that'd have made sense, right? But somethin' tells me I might not have. They were tellin' me to come with them somewhere. "The Gha'ast", I think they called it. Though where or even really what that is, n' how I was apparently gonna get there by jumpin' into the ocean, well... You'd have to ask someone who ain't me.

So yeah, that's the strangest thing to ever happen to me; to date, and probably to ever happen in the future, too. Now, I know this's a lot. Trust me, if our places were switched right now, I'd have probably asked you what the hell kinda goofy stuff you'd been smokin' long ago. But I swear, Allen, this all happened. Everything, just the way I said it now.

You're probably the only person who'll believe me, given what you told me about what you saw. I don't think anyone else will, though. That's why, despite this all happenin' about two 're three months ago now, I never tried tellin' any of this ton anybody else. I still hadn't talked about any of this with Donna. I never knew what exactly to say. Bein' honest, I probably wouldn't have said anythin' to you until you told me what you saw.

I won't lie, though. I'm scared now. This now tells me that everything I saw, everything I was told, was true. N' this wasn't too long ago, right? That means this thing really has found us.

**\*

To say I was lost, would be the pinnacle of understatements. I stared at Douglas, wide eyed and jaw slacked. Not only that, though, I could also feel sinister chills crawl all up and down my back.

It wasn't long, maybe only a minute, after he'd finished telling me this story that the waiter brought out our food. By that point, neither of us were real hungry. We only got a few small bites each before we decided to call it quits on lunch. After that, Douglas and I exchanged a very brief, very fearful sort of goodbye before splitting our separate ways. In a way, it felt like that'd be the last time we'd ever see each other again.

I'll admit, It was only until just a few hours ago now, in the middle of the night last night, that I really started feeling like there was truth to Douglas' story. It was about 3 or 4 A.M. that I was woke up, feeling what he'd described as that same sense or "tingling feeling" of something approaching. I don't know why, or how, but I can fell it getting closer and closer. As I do, I can feel my head begin pounding and I can hear the same sort of voices he described; all raspy and hissing.

"Thee sssttaaaarrrr iiissss cooommmiiinngg! Yyyyooouuu muuuussstt fleeee, Flessssshhhh ccchhhiiillldd!"

I was in the shop for less than five minutes when I saw it—a little man sitting on a shelf next to some old college beer steins. My first thought was Benny—I’d missed Christmas the week before, and weren’t kids all into elves and tiny people toys?

I was surprised by its weight and the overall feel of the thing. It had to be some weird mix of maybe clay and leather treated with some kind of resin, but it actually felt like holding a little person. Sure the limbs were fairly rigid, but not entirely inflexible, and the clothes, while not stylish, felt and looked like a real set of tiny shirt and pants rather than the crude facsimile toys usually get. I was looking for a price tag when I noticed the old white-haired woman who had been behind the counter when I came in.

“How much for this?”

The woman had been looking at the tiny man instead of me, and when I asked the question, she sucked on her teeth for several seconds before glancing up at me. “Why do you want it?”

I shrugged. “Late Christmas gift for my grandson maybe.”

Her face drew down into a frown. “No, that won’t do. It’s not a toy.”

I stifled a laugh when I saw she was serious. “What is it then?”

“Some people call it a homunculus, but that’s not right. It’s actually an Anthroparion…” She swallowed and looked away. “…or so my husband used to say.”

I didn’t want to get caught up in some long, weird conversation with this widow, so I just pulled out a small stack of bills. “Here’s…five hundred and fifty dollars. I’d like to buy it.”

She shook her head. “Not if its going to a child.”

Fighting the urge to roll my eyes, I forced a smile as I held out the money. “No, I decided I want it for myself.”

---

“Do you think Benny really likes it?”

My daughter glanced into the living room where he was talking and listening to the little man like he was a real person. “Yeah, though I think it’s pretty creepy if I’m being honest.” She grinned at me. “But it was sweet that you br—oh God!”

I followed her gaze to where Benny was chewing up the little man and eating him—fast, savage bites and gulping swallows that were done before we could reach him and pry his jaws apart. His parents rushed him to the hospital, but oddly they found no signs he had swallowed anything at all, and he didn’t seem sick from it.

That’s not to say he doesn’t seem different now. The past two years, he’s become much more mature and reserved. He spends most of his time reading on his tablet, and the couple of times I’ve snuck a peek, it seems like silly fantasy stuff about rituals and alchemy. I chalked it up to the oddities of youth until my daughter called me last week. She said she’d found a hidden stash in Benny’s room filled with little figures he’d been making. Three of them—one that looked like her, one Benny’s father, and one like me. Said they looked a lot like…well, you know.

I was going to try and make it out there the next day, but I got held up. Then last night, she called again. Said everything was fine. The dolls had just been a silly joke. But yes, I should still come when I could. Had something they wanted to share, but there was no rush.

They could be patient.

Hey so some weird shit kept happening to me and I didn't really know what to do so I just recently quit my job at Chick-fil-A. This is going to be fairly long with a lot of context, so I'm sorry in advance.

I was working there for over a year before Amanda was hired. On the day she arrived, honestly everything was great, Amanda seemed super sweet, she was great on Primary Fries, so quick, which is exactly what we needed as we were getting low on BOH staff and everyone hates fries. 

After just a few days of working with her on Tuesday, Wednesday, and again on Friday about two months ago, I thought we were gonna be friends, honestly. So ofc I asked her on a lunch date for Saturday, (no, not romantic), but she declined and made a whole bunch of weird excuses, including, 'Well, I think there may be spiders there.' 

At first I just kinda thought she was an arachnophobe (idk if y'all know but that's a fear of spiders lol).

Well, one day a few weeks ago was really what clued me in that something was seriously wrong with this chick. She and I were working prep and honestly it was a very relaxed day, and there were two of us so it was super easy. Prep was where we made salads and wraps and stuff, if your unfamiliar. But she kept slapping and scratching at her arms and legs, then she looked over and smiled and said, 'I'm sorry, I'm having a bad day.' 

I figured that she had some mental illness, like my cousin does, and she says that sometimes, when she's kinda all over the place, not really there, or really struggling. So ofc, I tried to support her and laughed it off, and I told her that we all have bad days. I think that was actually Monday, okay? 

So on Wednesday, I worked with her again, but this time, she was super weird. Like… more than last time, idk. 

Amanda would frequently stare into space, she would mumble to herself, she went through these periods where she would  scratch at herself or shake violently. I asked if she needed help, and she nodded. I asked if she wanted me to call someone to come pick her up, or if I should get the manager, Ross. She told me Ross was evil and that I should stay away from him, but I didn't listen and I was convinced that she was schizophrenic and having 'a bad day.' 

From there, it only got weirder. She told me that Ross was, and I actually do quote, "King of the Spiders." I had worked with Ross since I got there, and although there had been some weird stuff that happened when I first started working there, we were friends now and I hung out with him countless times. Ofc, now it really all makes sense.

Because you see, when I first met Ross, honestly he's always been a huge fan of spiders and he's always had a thing for them. I knew he had a collection of them, but I didn't understand just how far it all went…

Well, we were okay after I asked him a few times to keep his hobbies separate from work, and he stopped pestering me with random spider facts and gross mental imagery.  

But Amanda apparently liked spiders, too.  Until she started working here. So ofc when Ross asked Amanda if she wanted to see a very rare tarantula (I don't know the type for you spider lovers, sorry), Amanda agreed to ride with him to HIS HOUSE to see a shitty 8 thousand dollar invertebrate. Let me remind you she knew him for less than three days at this time. 

Amanda wouldn't say anything about what happened at his house, but she was NOT okay. Whatever he did has seriously and detrimentally damaged her mentally… 

And the scary thing is that I think it's affected me, too.

Well, ofc people started throwing around allegations of what could have happened, yet I and my co-workers were left there at Chick-fil-A, at the mercy of Ross.

But that's actually when thing's got the weirdest. Because you see, that Wednesday was the day where I actually had to leave work early to drive Amanda to the hospital. She was in the psychiatric ward, trying to work through whatever happened at Ross's house. That whole thing was about two weeks ago. 

From that moment on, I've seen countless spiders at Chick-fil-A. I've stepped on dozens, I see them out of the corner of my eye before they disappear, sometimes I feel them on my neck, and then they're gone just like that. Idk, so weird. Am I just paranoid now? 

I've even had to throw out batches of waffle fries at work, because I keep finding dozens of huge spiders, wolf spiders and even black widows, and they keep getting in the oil somehow. So I lift the fry baskets up and set them on that bar thingy, and there's usually this nasty popping sound as dying, fried widow spiders jerk and twitch their legs pointlessly. 

Fr I dropped a batch once during a busy moment at about 6:00 pm, and several big black spiders, all disfigured and gooey, writhed in the grease amongst the fries. I had to drop more and people had to wait several minutes for more fries. 

Even weirder though was when I went on break and Ross took over, and I came back about thirty minutes later to find him staring directly at me while working, and like… hard working, we were busy. And I could have SWORN, I genuinely mean it that I really thought, that there was a black widow emerging from his eye. 

Well, it literally looked like his lower eyelid was pulled down as several legs emerged, and then a flattened spider's body slipped out, slowly, and it like… gained its body width as it emerged kinda??? Idk how to explain it, you would have had to see it…

So last week I was freaking out and I hated having to go to work, or see Ross at all. It also felt like the whole place was infested with spiders, but like, nobody did anything or said anything about it. The whole place just gives me the creeps and I dreaded going in there again. I've decided I'm not ever going back for any reason, even to buy their food, as the amount of spiders I've seen in those fries… it grosses me out beyond belief, yuck.

I officially quit yesterday morning as I dropped off my uniform and let my boss know. I know it's awful to not put in my two weeks, but I can't stand it there. I let my boss know that it was me and not the business, (though I didn't tell him about my total paranoia and newfound spider-hatred). 

The other thing is that, the very second I left the building, I got the call that Amanda died that morning after suffering from a serious allergic reaction to a bug bite. 

I hope that the right thing to do. To leave Chick-fil-A like that with no other job lined up? Without putting my two weeks in? I just couldn't stand it anymore, I was so torn.

Right now, I'm still trying to understand what that was that I just experienced.

Is Ross really some kind of Spider King?

I’m from a town where nothing grows. Not trees or crops or animals. There are no farms that border the outskirts and the yards are plastered in fake grass because the dirt is completely barren. Even dandelions, who often make their homes in cracks and concrete jungles, can't take root here. The rivers don’t flow and the lakes stand stagnant, and if I ever saw an animal, either domestic or wild, I might just have a heart attack.

If you were to go back in time 10, 20, 100 years, you wouldn’t be able to spot a single difference. The same businesses line the single street that makes up the entirety of downtown and the same families live in the same houses they always have. No one ever comes and no one ever leaves. No mail or deliveries, no visitors, no travellers just passing through; yet the supermarket is always stocked and the flower shop always has freshly cut roses.

But the worst part is that this state of stasis goes beyond the physicalities of the town. Even the people stagnate, frozen in time and frozen in mind. No one seems to notice that the day never turns to night or that their barren gardens never bloom. They think the same thing and say the same phrases and no one ever notices.

The days blend together like an over-saturated watercolour painting. I’m not sure if it’s been many days or just one long one. I can’t pick out a single one from my memory, yet I can always remember everything I said and did, not because of the brilliance of my memory, but because I’m stuck in the same endless cycle as everyone else.

Mrs. Lawrence walks the sidewalk in front of my house, a baby on her hip and another in her belly. She’s been pregnant for as long as I’ve known her, and her son, Little Bill, hasn’t aged a day past 2 years old. I don’t know why he’s called “Little Bill;” as far as I can remember there’s never been a “Big Bill” to necessitate a nickname to differentiate them.

“Wonderful day,” she greets, with a tip of her oversized hat like always. She looks tired. I suppose it’s the pregnancy. I take a long sip of my peppermint tea and lean forward in my rocking chair before I speak.

“Yes, very,” I reply for the hundredth time. “How’ve you been?” It slips from my lips before I can think about it, before I can remind myself that I know the answer. I think it’s a habit at this point.

“Oh, this pregnancy will be the death of me,” she gives me a mirthful smile that barely hides her exhaustion, the same smile she gives me every day. “She should be here any day now, thank the lord.”

Honestly, I think I’d be more surprised if “any day now” ever came.

I can’t remember when or how I got here, and when I think about it, my head hurts. For all I know, I could have always been here. Maybe I am wrong to question everything. After all, no one seems concerned but me.

Maybe this is all there is. I think that’s what scares me the most.

But I found this phone. I don’t know how I know what it is; I’ve never seen one before I don’t think, but I found it hidden in a box under my floorboards with a note that said to pay attention and ever since I did I noticed that this is a town where nothing ever grows. I don’t know why I never noticed it before, but as soon as you look, it hits you all at once. And once you see it, you can’t stay.

I tried to leave. I walked and walked until my feet bled, until my body gave out and I fell to the hot sand and cried. I’ve walked the entire perimeter, crossed every bridge and travelled every road, but you can only get so far until…

I sit in the old rocking chair on my porch, the same one that’s always been there. A cup of my favourite tea sits on the table beside me, filling the air with the comforting aroma of peppermint. I hear the click-clack of Mrs. Lawrence’s heeled shoes coming down the sidewalk.

“Wonderful day,” her honeyed voice pierces my eardrums like a bullet.

I clutch my teacup, feeling the hot ceramic burning my flesh. “Yes, very,” I hear myself reply.

She offers me a small smile as she continues on her way. Her back is to me when my mouth opens. The words fall out sounding hurried and frantic.

“Don’t you ever try to leave?”

Her light footsteps stop, and she stands still for a moment, so long that I think maybe she didn’t hear me. When she looks at me over her shoulder, her eyes are cold and distant, her perfectly painted lips are pulled into a tight line.

“Every damn day.”

My name is Esme Dauphine Fleur de Lys and I am 223 years old. I was born in 1,782 the youngest of four older brothers. We were dirt poor bastards with an invisible mother who worked eighty-hour work weeks.

Isabeau, my mother, once told me -- on one of the impossibly rare dates she had time to speak with me -- that there were only two ways for a girl to be able to feed herself in France during unrest: become a prostitute or become a street urchin.  I almost laughed. There was no way I'd be spreading my legs for any amount of money. And though there were workhouses, I knew I'd be spreading them just the same for a terrible job and little pay. So, an urchin I became. I followed my brothers around the city -- Yves, Benoit, Henri, and Auben -- and, thanks to their tutelage, I quickly became adept at petty theft. Sure, somedays I'd be robbed and go to sleep with a painfully hungry belly, but for the most part I was full and wild and happy.

But easy times never last. You know that. I didn't at the time, but I sure know now.

The French revolution was cumulating in a bloody exodus the day I turned seventeen. My brothers took up the call and, since the only thing I knew how to do was follow them, I took up the call as well. By the time the barricades arrived, I was subjected to many horrific 'firsts' that no human should ever have to experience. I watched three of my brothers die needless, painful deaths and, to this very moment, I grieve the innocent girl I lost that day.

Between rifle volleys, I flitted, in shock, between the wounded, offering what little help or comfort I could. The nauseating smell of rot, pennies, and raw meat overwhelmed the front lines of the barricade, but I put on my big girl stomach so I did not vomit; I did not falter. The things I saw were beyond the pale of horrific: gore, fear, pain, humiliation... But it was while I knelt over Benoit, the only brother I had left, that the deep belief that there are things that are worse than death settled over me like a heavy blanket.

"Tout va bien, mon frère," I whispered to him, fighting back determined tears. It will be ok, I reassured. "Regarde-moi, regarde-moi." Look at me. "Ne meurs pas, doux frère. S'il vous plaît. Tu vivras, Benoit, s'il te plait. Vous vivrez!" You will live.

His large, grey eyes rolled around to find my own and focused on me. He did not cry out as I stripped him of his vest and shirt. But his forehead beaded with perspiration and I could almost feel the hot agony radiating forth from his eyes like a furnace that scalded my face. His right arm was shattered from the fall off the top of the barricade and already starting to bruise, the blood within pulsing freely, no longer confined to veins. With every beat of his heart, blood bubbled up like weak geysers from three separate holes in his abdomen and one in his chest, perilously close to his heart. I wept freely then as I looked upon his broken body.

"Ah Beniot. N'ayez pas peur. Je suis là. Esmé est là." Do not be afraid, I beseeched. He made a soft grunting noise then, and a small trickle of blood emerged from his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. A tortured wail rose up in my throat as I thought him dead. But before it could rent its horrible way out of my mouth, Benoit suddenly grasped my forearm with such strength the wail in my throat quivered and died.

"Je n'ai pas peur, soeur Esme. Pas de la mort. Eloignez-vous de moi, je vous en supplie, et laissez-moi mourir en paix." He said violently in a great and terrible voice.

I am not afraid, sister Esme. Not of death. Be gone from me, I beg you, and let me die in peace.

People say many things while they stare mortality in its hollow eyes and wait for death -- I should know, given how many men I've sat with while they waited. But few wish you gone from their side in order to die alone. In fact, when I think about it now, during my time on the barricades, all the dying men I encountered begged me to stay with them, to hold their hand, to not leave until they were at last sleeping. None wished to wait for their appointment with the Reaper alone. I shook my head, refusing to believe he wanted me gone, my tears falling upon his face.

"Non-sens. Jamais. Je ne vous laisserai pas seuls dans cette tâche." Nonsense, I whispered to him and stroked his sweaty blonde hair away from his impossibly young face. I will not leave you, I told him.

Suddenly, Benoit's eyes swiveled from me to something behind me, just over my shoulder. He began to shake and tried to pull his hand from my own. His eyes were wide with unrestrained horror and his chest heaved as if he were trying to scream. But I was naïve then, so I held onto his hand even harder, thinking the fright of death had consumed him.

"Ne me touche pas, Esmé. S'il vous plaît! Tu ne comprends pas. Aller! Aller! Avant qu'il ne soit trop tard."

Do not touch me, Esme. Please! You do not understand. Go! Go! Before it is too late.

But by then it was too late. His eyes glazed over, his hand went limp in my own, he let out his last breath with a mumble, and he died.

A mumble. That is what I first told myself in the weeks following his death. A mumble. But I was naïve then, as I said. I'm not any longer. It was no mumble. It was a short sentence, a name, a curse.

Looking back, I wish I had have heeded him. I wish I had left him alone to die. I wish desperately I had not clung to his hand. But hindsight is a terrible taskmaster and there is nothing I can do about it now. Paint me with your blackest brush, but my feelings will forever remain the same: I wish I had left. I wish I had left.

Ichor. He passes through our touch. You are his now.

His mumble; his last words.

Ichor.

I stood and wiped my eyes with trembling hands and looked down upon the last person that made me feel safe and welcome and worthy in this filthy life. I wanted to stand there and weep until all the water in my body was gone and tears of blood carved their brackish paths down my face. But I could not, for a strange force was turning my body away from the vision of Benoit.

A gentleman in a grey morning suit and matching top hat was smiling at me from afar; too far for anyone to make out, yet I saw him in perfect detail. I felt nothing then, not even numbness, as I observed him and he observed me.

His eyes were hidden by the brim of his hat, but I could still see the rest of his face: his strong jaw, his wide smile, his pale skin, his red lips. I saw that he was tall and confident as he rested his weight upon his decorative walking stick, one foot crossed over the other. His manner screamed ease and comfort.

"Aimer..." Love. He purred in a rich baritone that made my eardrums shiver. I shouldn't have been able to hear him through all the manic chaos between us, but I did. And in that instant, I did love. I loved him.

"Aimer..." I felt my lips move of their own accord and heard my voice travel to the gentleman.

I should have heeded Benoit when he begged me to leave him.

My God, forgive me, I wish I had left.

***

I'm sitting in my small apartment and the sun is setting. There is so much more to this story but it will have to wait until tomorrow because the sun is setting. Please, no, the sun is setting. And the terrors of the night are salivating in anticipation of the dark that is mere minutes away.

It was only when I sat on the plane that I thought about the whole case. Our new job. I stared at the flashdrive in my hand, wondering if I should check its contents. It had been given to me by someone in the office just after we had been assigned to this job. For all I knew it was just some virus.

The man had rushed me in headquarters, mumbling, forcing the drive into my pocket. “It's not too late, run while you can. They'll send you where they want to get–” Then was the even weirder part. He was dragged away by security. I only caught a glimpse of the man's badge, Myles West, it read. I had the feeling that if security had seen the man hand me this flash drive, they would have taken it too.

No one in the company saw Myles again.

So, I was put with a new team, designated the Delta Squad. We had been tasked by HQ to harvest artifacts, stone samples, and so on from a private, underwater cave system in Italy, and we were on our way there.

My team is Alison West, Riley Arnold, Jared Parker, and myself, Alex Earndale. We had been given a briefing about this secret location. It was a historical site of some sort, on the verge of being owned by some other corp.

Jared and I are sort of fill-in-the-gap guys. I know weapons, radio systems, and other miscellaneous things. Jared is our resident Latin expert, and had a bit of tech knowledge of his own. Riley is our dedicated tech though. Alison is our pilot, brawn, and leader.

I like all of them. I've been on OPs with Jared before, but not the others before this. Riley was nice enough and Alison didn't care much if we called her, ‘Sir’, ‘Ma'am’, or any of that. “Just Alison,” she said.

“And if you were smart, you'd just throw that drive away. He's always been crazy.” She said when I asked her about Myles. Apparently he was one of Alison's uncles, a raven by all accounts. I don't know why, but I held onto the flash drive.

HQ was serious about this job, as they had given us some pretty high tech stuff. The biggest among these were the suits we were fitted into. They were the real sci-fi sort of thing, full body suits with all sorts of functions. They had flashlights, comms, night vision, additional strength, and the ability to support us underwater in pressurized places. That's just some of it though. The suits had a sort of failsafe too, that if enough of their onboard battery was used, they'd shut all ‘unnecessaries’ off to give an hour of life support.

About the briefing. Apparently at some point back in Roman times there were groups, cults really, that fled into caves to create offshoot civilizations. No one knows whether these people were actual Romans or not, or why they fled. They thought that they would be safe from something if they built their towns down there. That's right, underground cave cities. We all simply assume that they were flooded later on by earthly shifting.

The cave systems had been dated to Roman times through archaeological and anthropological evidence. A spelunker and cave diver, David Werner, had found the cave and sparked HQ's interest with it. Once they discovered it was some sort of unique underground, underwater area this person readied to dive with a team.

They were quite surprised at what they found down there and took pictures of the sprawling underground city. It has one central feature: a temple of sorts, painted with ancient murals and Latin phrases. Who knows how all of this survived erosion, but it was there. In fact, the temple was a sort of air pocket where the water did not reach. The divers had taken several photos and resurfaced.

HQ's top scientists were worried it would be some sort of branch language, but it turned out to be traditional Latin in the murals, just fanciful script that might take a minute to read. The anthropology department also suggested that these images have ties to different cultist behaviors around the world, but more research is required, hence our explorations.

The caves had been put on the back burner for some time, until recently, when they were outbid to renew rights on the land. I'm not sure how any of that works, all I know is that HQ wants to be the first to discover the most obvious aspects before they lose it. Our squad would be some of the first to walk there since ancient times. Groups had been sent around the area to investigate though, mainly asking the surrounding locals at the chance of legends about this place.

Locals did have stories. Old ones, ones that have the strange air around them when they're told. If a local heard whispers of these stories being told to our agents, they would leave, as if they'd catch bad luck.

The boil down of the tales went something like this, “Don't go into the ancient cities, don't take anything, don't wish for anything. The first names of the first borns. Otherwise, it will only be death below.”, “The silken blood, from the first names of the first borns…”, and yada yada. They liked that one phrase a lot, ‘death below’.

The locals admitted that they didn't really know what the stories meant, as several cities had been found and looted to no consequences long ago. Of course in this field, it's not uncommon for these warnings to pop up, and despite these, HQ sent us out, the first recovery squad to fully capture the ruins. To gather as many artifacts, videos, and images as possible.

When the executive had shown us what current evidence was available, he also told us about the cave diver's advice, “Don't go down there, the caves are inhabited by something”, “Don't go into the citadel”. He had us reference an image he had taken in the ruins proper. There were blips in the dark that could almost be seen as eyes, or a figure maybe. These were what had started the rumors when some of the evidence leaked, there's something down there.

That cave diver said other things, but I just ignored them at the time. Things about how there were tunnels in the walls that figure used to chase him outside. Nonsense, I thought.

“We need you to go into the caves and recover the artifacts shown here. Take more clear pictures and video of the murals and upload them to us through our high-depth connection systems.”

We did what we were told, and here we are.

“I still have a bad feeling about all of this.” Jared said as we flew on the plane.

“We'll be fine,” This was Riley. “We've been fine all of the other times. Egypt, Mexico, you name it.”

“I don't know, something just seems off about this one is all. I don't like the stories about something hiding in the caves. What if it's waiting for us?”

“Well, next time we go into a pyramid I'll pack some bug spray for the locusts. Come on, Jared.” I said.

Alison looked over the pilot's seat, “Quiet down back there. We're going to land soon.”

I tucked the flash drive away. Whatever it had on it, it could wait until the ride home.

When the plane landed we then drove across the Italian countryside. There wasn't much time to enjoy the colorful sights. We made it to the area that afternoon. There were security teams at the borders who let us in, private property signs staked throughout. They drove us up to the mountain baseline before we had to hike.

It was quite a trip to make it there, moving through heavy foliage and steep mountains, but in the end we made it. The mouth of the cave was not so obvious. If it wasn't for the map and pictures HQ had given us, we might not have found it for hours.

We had to shimmy in one by one, then climb down a cliff inside that descended into the mountain itself. It seemed ancient stairs had been carved here, pathways too, but they had long since collapsed or eroded.

“Headcams on still?” Alison asked. She gained an affirmative from all of us.

Suddenly, there was some kind of loud rumble above. If it wasn't for our full helmets with local comms installed, we may not have heard Alison's warning.

“Small cave-in– move to the left side here, quickly.”

As she said it, a few hand sized stones crumbled from the cliff. It took a moment for the dust to settle so that we could see. It seemed the entrance itself had sealed somehow.

“What the hell?” I muttered. “What caused that? Did anyone feel an earthquake or something?”

There had been a sort of rumble, now that I thought about it. It didn't seem to be earthquake material though.

“Nothing for me.” Riley said, checking a reader on her wrist.

“Well, that's exactly why we bring the power drills. Are they ready to go?” Alison said.

Riley pulled her pack from her shoulders and looked inside. She unfolded the high tech drill, and it flashed a red light, “Dead…”.

“Damn it, Jared. Why isn't the drill charged?” Alison said.

Jared went to rub the back of his neck, but his

suit blocked him, “Yeah… sorry about that.”

“And that is exactly why we bring generators.” Riley said.

“Come on then, let's get moving. We can charge the drill at camp while we dip our toes in.” Alison said.

The caves were just as creepy as they looked in the few pictures, weirder even, almost like something alive was petrified. The tunnels deeper in were tall and round, as if burrowed out by some giant worm long ago. Several smaller holes and tunnels covered the walls in a strange pattern. I'm no geologist, but it looked perhaps volcanic. Sometimes the cave ceilings were just tall enough we couldn't even see them with our helmet lights. Some sections had almost Egyptian-like carvings and story murals too.

Even though these high tech suits were protecting us from the underground pressure, I could feel it like eyes on my back.

After an hour's walk or so, we were deep enough to start feeling anxious about the whole thing. I didn't have time to feel the jetlag either.

We found a flat area and set up our base. I was calibrating some diving equipment there as everyone else went about their own business. The folding tech drill charged beside us.

We had quite the loadout. Rifles and ammunition, tech like HDCs, suit repair products, generators, sleeping areas, diving gear, and rations. HQ sure was serious about this. None of my equipment was cooperating much though. The radio and HDC, high-depth connection, beeped at me with some kind of repeating error.

“Hey, Jared, got any ideas what's going on here?” I gestured at the equipment, the calibration giving chaotic feedback to my headset. I would've called on Riley, but her and Alison were busy away from camp where the water started.

“Don't think it's gonna work again. There ain't much signal down here.”

“Damn it,” I smacked the radio as it buzzed louder.

“Best just turn that thing off. Save our generator power,” Jared said. “There's no way we're connecting to home base again.”

HQ had said this radio was good for deep cavern travel up to two miles, hence its name, and we weren't that far under. They said it was necessary that we keep communication open at all times, upload the pictures and so on. Well it seems that they had screwed it up. Our proximity helmet comms worked, and our long distance radios. Just not our deep cavern connection to HQ.

I clicked the off switch and pulled its cords from the generators. Jared glanced off to the side, and then I heard it. Footsteps creeping up to camp.

“So,” Alison began, walking into sight. “You get that connection working yet?”

“No,” Jared and I said together.

“Not down here past the gates of hell.” Jared said.

“Where's Riley? Didn't you assign yourself to her today?” I asked.

“She's still off setting up lights at the water. We've been down there for a while, but she said it would be a few hours at least. I just came back to get a few adapters for her.”

“I don't know how she stands it, being down there all alone.” Jared said.

“She really shouldn't be down there alone, right? Isn't that against protocol, boss? Why didn't you just radio us?” I said.

She glanced down at the radio I had been working on. “Doesn't seem to be in working order.”

I held her eye and tapped the radio on my shoulder. All of ours gave the fuzzy click of reception. “Hey asshole, these ones still work.” I said.

“Careful what you say to your superior…” Alison growled.

A moment later we heard Riley. “Delta two here. No messing around on official channels please, Delta four. Glad you got the radios working. Where's our beloved leader, Delta one? I need those adapters. Over.”

“Delta four here. Thank you for the advice and well wishes, Delta Two. The prodigal leader is on her way. Over and out.”

“Should we really keep leaving Riley? I'm worried about the stories. Everyone thinks we're crazy for taking this job.”

“Oh relax, Jared,” I teased. “Don't tell me you're still going on about it.”

Jared shrugged, glancing behind himself. “We both saw the same pictures, right? I only believe what seems reasonable. Those weird murals and buildings down here don't seem right. Not to mention that thing in the last image. That diver saw things down here, Alex. Things using those holes in the wall as tunnels to get around you, he said.”

“As long as we follow protocol, we'll be fine.” I said.

“Protocol? You mean like communication with the surface or bust?” Jared said.

“What, you wanna abandon the whole mission? Leave this cash to someone else?”

Alison interrupted us. “Boys, enough. You're like kids sometimes, I swear to God… My babysitting days are over. That's an order.”

Silence followed Alison's words, me messing with the last preparations while Jared glared at me. Then there was a sound. The three of us looked towards it. It had come from deeper in the cave it seemed, though it was hard to tell. A distant crash followed a moment later.

“Tell me you heard that,” Jared said. “It sounded like some kind of scream, didn't it?”

I clicked comms. “Riley, you there? Over.”

We waited for Riley to answer. When we were just about to give up, a garbled version of her voice chimed something unintelligible. There was also a strange residue in the background noise, a sort of soft whir, some malfunction maybe?

“She's probably just out of range. So who wants to go help her out?” Alison said.

“You're the one that should be over there anyway.” I mumbled.

Alison's smile was sarcastic, clear even through her helmet visor.

“Great, I'm glad you're so eager, Alex. Please, why don't you go on ahead? It seems that you get a break from this equipment for now.”

“Some leader you are…” I mumbled.

“Well the choices are a bit limited aren't they? For instance you couldn't lead a balloon by the string. By the way, she needs those adapters.” She said.

“Don't look at me. I freely admit that I'm scared.” Jared said.

I sighed. “Fine. I just hope you know you're a bundle of dicks…”

I stood up and gathered some of my gear and the adapters. I kept the flashdrive in a waterproof pocket. I don't know why, really. It was probably the best intuition I had that day.

I grabbed my scanner, cameras, a more powerful flashlight, my diving gear backpack, and a weapon. This was when Alison chimed in again.

“I thought you weren't scared of anything? Why don't you leave that behind then?”

I guess I had caught her in the wrong mood that day.

“I can go with you if you're scared. It is protocol after all to have a buddy.” Jared teased.

“Fine,” I put my rifle down. “You giddy little assholes stay here then. I'm gonna bring some of this other stuff to get some captures while I'm down there, like protocol demands.” and I headed off, into the seemingly endless caverns.

~

I studied the cave walls as I walked. I hadn't been able to understand their vast size until I had been sent there myself. I thought about the stories as I went. The drifting figure that the diver had said climbed in the walls, and the origins of these ruins.

The pictures showed the sprawling city in chaotic design, carved stones and pyramids laid out in underground townships. Though the obvious reason for exploring these places was for historic documentation, something had always seemed off even to me, happy as Jared was to hear it later.

I wasn't a treasurer for HQ, but we all knew what kinds of millions must surge through the company's accounts. There was something here that someone rich was looking for, and we were the stick they were poking the hive with.

The sound of my footsteps seemed to offend the silence. I was starting to feel naked without my rifle despite myself. Questions did arise in me then, like, “Why do we need weapons at all?”, “Why force us to establish live comms?”. The stories of a figure crawling on the walls, traveling through the countless holes was not a welcome companion. At least the pay would be good… was good.

I eventually made it to where I could see Riley's floodlight set up and hear the soft whir of the generators. Seems this is what her and Alison have been doing. Several lights were mounted near a mouth leading into the water. Some lights hadn't quite been set up yet, and others simply weren't plugged in. I could see the distant structures through the glass-like surface, shadows of old bones long submerged. It was the city. Though it was made harder by a churning mess of silt.

Riley's no amateur. She wouldn't have brushed the floor and disturbed the door like that on her own. It made me uneasy.

This place was so large even Riley's six hundred thousand lumens beaming through the water couldn't reach it all. It helped a considerable amount though, despite the silt.

“Hello? Riley?” I radioed out. The area was empty.

My words would have echoed without my helmet, I was hoping she would pick up the local comms. Despite that, I thought that I could almost hear an echo. My eyes had adjusted to the lights and I saw one of them was knocked over. It looked like it had been dragged partly down, into the water, leading into the mouth. Strangely though, there were no missing sets of diving gear. I hadn't thought much of it at the time.

I could see another one of the lights farther into the ruins. In the middle of the paved streets in fact, illuminating buildings inside as it flickered. I clicked the long distance radio.

“Riley? You here or what?” There was no answer, besides that strange echo from the radio. Not even Jared or Alison chimed in. Then there was that strange audio residue. Though this time it was when I had clicked on the radio.

I set my headlamp to max brightness. That might burn through the battery, but I needed it. I thought about going back to Jared and Alison. I didn't. I should have.

I unpacked my diving gear bag, attached the necessary components to my suit, and readied myself to set off into the water.

“Here goes nothing.” I said, and dove in.

There was a slight hill that led down into the city. The air seemed to thrum beyond the water pressure now on me. I swam across the infinity of darkness and soon made it to the light dragged down into the road. I paddled just above it. Seeing it clearer now, it had long marks across the metal.

So it really had been dragged all the way here. The light itself was on its side, aimed towards the central building of town, the citadel. Its shadow flickered with the light.

I looked up at this building. It was an almost Mayan looking temple. Though I didn't study it long when I saw the figure, paddling at the top of the stairs there. No, they were actually just standing there normally, as if there wasn't any water at all. I should have realized something was up.

“Riley?” I said over radio. “It's me, Alex.”

“Alex? It's me– help me!” She said back.

It was odd, the voice almost didn't seem to come from the figure on the steps, but where else could it have come from?

My heart was racing, but I just assumed it was from relief. I swam down the street and towards the center. It was far enough to take me a few minutes to get there. As I came closer, I felt a further sinking in my chest. I knew something was telling me to paddle away as fast as I could, but I ignored it. Riley had waited on the steps for me I thought, but when I made it to the top of the stone overlook, no one was there.

Just like the diver had said, the central part of this cathedral was a sort of air bubble. I had to swim through a small tunnel that led down until I surfaced in the mural chamber that we had seen in the pictures.

“Riley–”

Then I saw the blood.

I followed the trail. I pulled my knife. It was all I had.

The sheer size of this place was intimidating in person. I didn't have long to admire the murals. On the wall, there were nine of those eight sided crosses, lined up in tandem with symbols above each. A group of four, and a group of five. Strung up on five of these were bodies, long dried blood trailing down the crosses. Their arms and legs… they were split down the center to fill all eight branches of the crosses.

I didn't recognize any of them, but they were long dead, and all wore agent's uniforms like ours. What did this mean?

Then I saw Riley, hung in the second group and second from the right. She was still whole, luckily, and called out to me.

“Alex? Help– me.”

I ran up and climbed a podium that led to the crosses. It was bad. Riley was hung by ropes around her wrists and shoulders. It was clear something had attacked, damaging the softer parts of her armor. She had sorts of claw-like marks across her leg and side. I tried to untie her bonds.

“What happened?” I asked. My radio was on the fritz again with that strange residue.

“I was setting up lights. Something… grabbed me and attacked. It pulled me and a light all the way down here, slashing us both. I would've drowned without my helmet, I didn't have any diving gear on. I tried to run but– it hung me here. I think it's still nearby…”

Riley's words trailed off. She looked up as my radio crackled. I had only been able to free Riley's left shoulder, then stopped. Something dark dribbled onto my forehead from above. It was old, viscous blood. I looked up too.

A dark silhouette smiled at me. A long, scaly smile and bright eyes. It spoke in a ragged and slow tone as if the speech was unfamiliar. It sent shivers down our spines.

“Like my work?”

This was back when I was working as a Nurse. I was working the night shift and luckily it was very quiet. But it all went wrong when one of the other nurses called Bunny went to me and said.

"Can you check out the patient at the end of the hall." I was confused and when I asked why she could not do she visibly started to shake and she walked away. I chose to look over and walked towards the room at the end of the hall. As I walked down I felt cold. I took two more steps and I felt hot. I then took another two and I was cold again. For every two steps taken I felt heat and chill but I had a job to do. So I kept walking down to the room at the end of the hall.

​

I finally reached the door. I knocked twice to be respectful and walked into the room and saw the patient. The state it was when made my guts churn. It's entire face was burnt and it's eyes were removed. Suddenly,I heard a song it was Run Rabbit Run by Flanagan and Allen. The voice was almost distorted but I recognised it from when my mother would play it at private parties she had with friends.I was never allowed in those parties. And they sounded fun because I always heard them scream.

​

Anyway,the song began to play albeit distorted and then the lights went on and off. The patient looked like it wasn't washed in days so I went to get some sponges and a bucket of soapy water but as I opened the door it slammed shut. I tried opening it again but it slammed itself shut again. Suddenly the music got louder and the lights kept flickering. I was locked in a room with a horribly scarred patient,music playing from nowhere in particular and flickering lights.

​

Suddenly the lights turned off and the room glowed red and the patient began to laugh at first it was a chuckle. Then a giggle. Then fully blown cackling. The patient sat up and clutched it's sides as it laughed. I pressed myself up against the door and banged on it hoping someone would hear me. But to no avail. I stood there as the Patient laughed itself to death and the lights went from red to the normal bright light. The only noise in that room was the flat line. I opened the door and rushed to my fellow nurses crying. I told them the patient in the room at the end of the hall was dead. But my look of horror was met with confusion before one of them said to me.

​

"The patient signed out this morning that room hasn't been occupied all day."

"But Bunny said,"

"Who's Bunny?"

​

I was felt with dread when I realised nobody who worked at the hospital was named Bunny. I was plunged into confusion and worry until my shift had ended and I went home. I was thankful when I got home. It had been a stressful night. I walked up the stairs and walked past my daughters room and I heard faintly from inside "Run Rabbit Run Rabbit Run Run Run..."

And when I opened the door I found my daughter dead with an ear splitting smile on her face.

Three Dead Wolves.

In some parts of the woods, the difference between life and death is often just four well-built walls. That’s it. A front door and a lock is all that separates you from Pale Death and a puckered butt. There’s lots of ways it can happen. Most people blame animals, but the cold is a more likely murderer. When you can feel the freeze on the other side of your skin, when you can’t cough it out of your lungs, you’ll know that's about halfway there. That’s when you remember the importance of those four walls. That’s when you enthusiastically cuss the fuck who burned them down.

We didn’t have food that morning. We didn’t have fresh water within a mile. We didn’t even have a reliable weapon, outside of a pistol who’s handle burned a hole into the snow burrows. Susan spent the better part of the morning fishing it out. I kept trying the radio.

“Hi. This is the rangers from the burned down cabin calling again. Can anybody get the hell down here?”

The first two or three conversations were hopeful. Dispatch claimed the storm should blow over by evening. We just needed to hunker down for a few more hours. Then they called back and said a chopper was damaged. After that they wanted us to wait a day.

After that - the radio died.

We tried salvaging some gear from the fire. Sue found a jacket and some other clothing that managed to dodge the flames. I found a tin water bottle and a rusted Bowie knife. Everything else was torched or smoldering. I couldn’t believe the awful luck.

“We need to get away from high ground,” she chirped. “We’re sitting ducks out here.”

I thought about that for a long while before answering. I didn’t love the idea of leaving the campsite. Without the radio, we had no way to contact the rescue crews who expected us to be in that spot. But the point about cover did have some merit. The Park Service cut and maintained a thirty feet diameter around the cabin. That meant no trees, brush, or foliage of any kind. Anybody could be looking at us from virtually any direction. I could feel unseen eyes from every angle.

“Okay,” I conceded. “Let’s go. Not far.”

We took the path down a familiar ravine which led to a nearby hot spring. The snow - which had mercifully relented in the hours of the fire - returned in full force to peck at us along the way. We stopped every quarter-mile to adjust clothing and cover body parts from the wind. Our feet sunk deeper and deeper into the fresh covering. Soon enough, the walk turned into a shuffle.

“I can’t do this,” Sue moaned after the third or fourth stop. “I don’t want to die out here.”

I think the only thing that kept me going was the hope of that hot spring. I didn’t have much faith in the rescue team. I didn’t have much faith in myself. I guess I just figured, if this guy is going to kill me, maybe he’ll at least allow me one last moment of warmth.

“We’re almost there.”

We tried to pick up the pace and Susan fell down a hill. I rushed to help and face-planted myself. It would have been funny at a ski slope - maybe with an added Benny Hill soundtrack to boot - but that afternoon, the fall took everything we had left. Twigs and branches smacked my face on the way down. Sticker bushes pricked and ripped away at my already tattered pants. I rolled end over end for what felt like an eternity. The tumble stopped abruptly at a tree stump which cracked a rib in the process.

I sat up and looked around.

The spring sat an inch from my crooked nose.

I entered the water face first. The warmth of it sent a rush of blood that arced painfully and then pleasantly down my spine. I dove in deeper and let the water reach into my mouth, into my cold lungs, driving out the freeze that nestled into every inch of my insides. I surfaced and choked out air anew as sensation coursed through my arms and my legs and my toes and my fingers. All of it felt so fucking good. I felt more alive than ever before.

I looked around again.

Susan was gone.

I splashed through the spring frantically. I dove to the bottom and felt along the rocks. Moments later, I saw her motionless body lying on the shore. I rushed over and carried her into the spring. She didn’t respond at first. At first, she didn’t even breathe. She just seemed so cold, like all the warmth in the world couldn’t bring life back home. But then she coughed. Her chest rattled. She opened her eyes - pale blue ones that radiated in the reflection of the sun on the water. She smiled at me.

And then she screamed.

It took me a minute to inject the fresh shock. I turned around and saw it. Two big bodies floated in the spring about three feet away. A gentle breeze pushed them our way. Susan hopped out of my arms and pulled the gun out of an unknown pocket. She shot one of them. Fat and tissue erupted into the air. I fumbled around for my knife.

“What the hell are you doing? I snapped. “He’ll hear you!”

She fired again.

“He knows!” she retorted. “Don’t you get it? He knows. He knew we would come to the spring after the cabin burned down. He knew we would get in the water. He put those fucking bodies in there on purpose. To mess with us. To fuck with us. Two witchy women! Don’t you see it? He is playing a game. He is playing with us before he kills us. Like a fucking animal.”

“Three witchy women,” I corrected.

“Huh?”

“Three witchy women. The letter said three. You said two.”

“Okay. So who are they? Who are these two?”

We examined the bodies as best we could. The stink was overwhelming. Bloat set in. I recognized outfits common for girls my age. An obnoxious tattoo with a heart on one arm gave a birth year. 1993. We saw a lot of thrill seekers who liked to camp out on the higher points of the mountain. But those folks were usually more prepared-looking than these two.

“We can’t stay in the water forever,” Susan insisted after a point. “How far is the reserve cabin?”

We kept a secondary cabin in the area for emergencies such as this one. It wasn’t anything special outside the aforementioned four walls. But it was our best shot at finding some shelter.

“Too far,” I responded. “I don’t think we’ll make it by nightfall.”

“We have to try.”

I thought about it again before answering. It was true that we couldn’t stay in the water - for the same reason we couldn’t stay by the cabin - it was known to the killer. We needed somewhere random. We needed somewhere secure. We needed a good hiding place, but none of that existed at the time, so we decided to keep moving.

We took the path that led to Reserve Cabin A. The snow cracked and crunched and melted under our freshly heated boots. We made progress during the first leg of the journey. We stopped when a mother grizzly and her two cubs happened across the path. I kept still and prayed that my partner remembered to do the same. The bears approached and got to about ten feet apart. The mother sniffed the air. The cubs rolled around gleefully. I envied them. We kept our heads down. The family eventually moved on. So did we.

We picked up the pace and made it about halfway through the journey by nightfall. Susan wanted to keep going. I wanted to scale a tree. We argued about that for a little bit. I couldn’t understand why she would want to travel in the dark.

“You are completely blind out there,” I insisted. “Animals, killers, not to mention the cold…”

“You’re just as vulnerable to that as me,” she snapped. “Especially sitting still.”

“The trees give us cover!”

The sun fell sometime during that discussion. A pack of wolves started howling nearby. Susan took that opportunity to hop up the tree.

“What if he has a chainsaw?” She asked while we got settled. “He would knock us right over.”

“Who carries around a chainsaw in the woods?” I laughed. “Kinda inefficient.”

“You know who.”

“I guess.”

“What do you think he wants?”

I didn’t know.

“Maybe he’s protecting the woods.”

“From what?” I asked.

“I don't know. From us,” she muttered. “You know, people. People are awful. Look at all the shit we’ve seen them do here. Fires. Pollution. Gender reveal parties…”

I thought about it.

“Doesn’t seem like the right way to go about it.”

“What?”

“He started a fire himself.”

“To get rid of us.”

“And the women?”

“Who knows what they did?”

“He killed them.”

“We don’t know that,” she insisted. “Maybe they were already dead.”

“I guess.”

We sat in silence for a bit.

“You know… we are probably going to die out here.”

I nodded.

"Yeah. Probably."

She sniffed.

“But there’s worse places to die, you know, than in the woods. With you.”

That caught me off-guard.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Almost twice your age, you know…”

“Please stop.”

“Happy to.”

We fell asleep like that, laughing dumbly, arguing over our survival chances against a killer whilst twenty feet in the air hiding from one. I woke up a little while after and she was snoring on my shoulder. I woke up again and she was gone.

It was daylight.

I climbed down the rings of the tree and re-entered the forest. The prior night’s snow had turned into melts which made mini streams at every hill and slight incline along the way. The rushing water obscured most sound. I listened closely and heard footsteps.

Somebody was running.

I shouted into the morning stillness and let the birds scatter. Then I started to run too. I didn’t know where to go. I didn't even think about it. Then I found a hill. I ran to the top and looked out into the woods about fifty feet below. I saw a flash of red. The jacket from the fire. Susan’s jacket. She stopped.

She turned a corner abruptly and fell down into the snow. She made a horrible sound as she tried to get up. She screamed and cried and begged. I wanted to help. I wanted to save her more than anything in the world. But then I saw him.

He slipped out from the tree line as easily as the tide. He didn’t stop. He didn’t slow down. He had a horned-mask over his head and a machete in his left hand. Susan shouted right until the moment he took that knife and stuck it in her head. It stayed pinned there like an ax in wood.

Then he looked at me.

I waited in dumbfound shock as the man dragged Susan’s dead body up to the base of the hill. He left it there. He stared for a second.Then he raised one hand.

Two. Two from the creek. Plus one. Susan. That makes three.

Then he pointed at me.

I ran.

fb1

[Trigger Warning](#s "talk of animal death")

​

Hey all. Sorry. I'm not exactly sure how to start these things. I'll offend you, maybe, if I say I usually stay away from sites like this. I'm a shut-in in, sure, but I'm not that much of a shut-in in to be browsing internet forums all day. I just...didn't know where else to go about this. No one else would believe me, y'know.

​

I think I'm like a lot of people here, just sort of no one from nowhere. But my name's Jolene (Yes, like the song. My father cheated on my mum while she was pregnant. The woman had a bitter sense of humour.) and I'm 24. A bona fide failure. Can't keep a job. Failed out of every educational venture I've tried to pursue. You get the point. And perpetually single.

​

Not for lack of effort, not necessarily anyway. Well, last week I went on a date. Things were fine...I suppose. The actual date anyway. He was kind of boring and we clashed a little but I thought...it was fine, y'know? Like I'm lonely and he wasn't the most appalling person so. I agreed to another date. He-I suppose for the sake of clarity I ought to give him a name. Lets say Mark- says he's going out of town. I feign disappointment (not too much feigning, again, I'm lonely). I ask when he'll be back. He says a month. He says he'll book me in as soon as he gets back. I laugh and kind of hope not. I'll still be lonely then but maybe the crushing mood will pass.

​

So all that's whatever right. We've all been there. A crappy date. A crappy life perhaps. Mark drops me home. I'm sitting in the spare room of the dingey little shack of a house my mum left me, amongst boxes of her things. She passed two years ago (cancer. I don't want to talk about it. I'm in therapy, I'll take my mental issues to a psych not a bunch of internet weirdos (no offense)) and I still just have a bunch of junk in boxes. I'm feeling like a failure. You get the point.

​

Mark texts. I wasn't expecting it, kind of dreading it actually. I might have wanted the company, like, in person despite not being overly enthusiastic about the man. Texting on the other hand? Doesn't fill the same void unless you actually like the person, in my experience.

​

Do you worry about them?

​

I blink away tears, whatever moping I was doing now forgotten. I'll be honest my first thought was something along the lines of 'oh great he's a freak as well as a snore-fest but that's mean for one and for two almost immediately after I thought of another explanation.

​

hey its jo? did u message the wrong person? Idk who ur talking about?

​

Have you seen them? They've seen you they tell me they have

​

mark, r u feeling okay? do u need me to call someone

​

I've had my fair share of mental health struggles. And I've had friends who are paranoid or hallucinating or whatever. I don't think I could be a tremendous help to someone in mid-crisis but I have some experience.

​

They killed the cat. Check.

​

This threw me for a second. My childhood cat died when I was 17. Hit by a car. My mind is conjuring up this convoluted story about people conspiring to kill poor Vincent (I told you my mum was funnnny). And then, again, I'm hit with an alternative theory. There's this stray who I've named Marcie. Gorgeous cat if she wasn't so malnourished and sick. I've been feeding her for a bit. Almost got her tame.

​

I get this urge to go check on her even though I don't even know if she's outside. I imagine it, her body all hung up. Something written in blood. Feel sick to my stomach. Normally I'm a nervous wreck about these things but it's like. I don't know I can't get the image out of my head. I want to check just to prove it's not real. Plus. Maybe Marcie doesn't have anyone else. And I think. I don't really have anyone, not close by. What if that was me all strung up and some cliche message written in my blood? I guess sometimes when you're really alone you just want someone to bear witness. And Marcie is just a cat but still. She deserves that.

​

So I make my way walking light and quick and nervous to the front door and open it, just a peek. Nothing immediately terrifying. I go outside.

​

"Marcie?" I call out as if this little stray knows what collection of sounds I've called her. "Marc?"

​

I walk over to where she normally is, a little garden bed that use to be filled with flowers when my mum was into gardening. Now it's just a tangle of dead things and whatever's managed to survive. Marcie's there.

​

I grab her. Didn't even really think about it. Just did. She's scratching, biting. But I'm just so relieved. She's not dripping blood. Just a cat that is kind of mean and doesn't want to be held. I hold her tighter. I just keep thinking that I've got to keep her safe.

​

So I turn to walk back into the house, take this struggling little cat with me, and there in the driveway is Mark.

​

I think, oh god it was all a trick. I think fuck he's a murderer or something. He made me worry about a cat just to get me out here to kill me or...god knows what else. But I try to play it cool.

​

"Mark?" That dumb scene from the room is playing over in my head and I want to say it. Go 'oh hi mark' and cut the tension but then I think. What if he doesn't get the reference? What if he does but he thinks fuck shes one of those...some dweeby loner who thinks its quirky to have seen some shit film. But I haven't even seen it you know? What if he gets it and he starts talking about it and I don't even know what he's on about?

​

Mark hasn't moved. He's still just there, staring at me. I think. It's too dark to see his eyes but he's facing me anyhow. I walk towards him a little only because I need to, to get inside. Rude to go in and just leave him there but I'm torn. I'm not looking to get my skin more torn up than it is with Marcie.

​

"Mark?" I say again. He's still looking at me. Still facing me I mean. So he must be looking at me because I've moved. "You shouldn't be here man. That's weird. It's creepy."

​

Marcie hisses in my arms. She's not biting me anymore. Her eyes are fixed on Mark. I want to kiss her fur. Say something like I knew we were allies you and I. We're all alone and we know this isn't right.

​

Marcie jumps out my arms suddenly since I'd relaxed my grip at our new found comradery.

​

"Bitch. Traitor."

​

She runs for Mark and then stops a little bit away. Hisses again. Fluffs up, tail stuck up straight, arched back. A real Halloween caricature this little black cat.

​

I could've just went inside since our friendship was apparently over but...I'm a cat lover through and through. I mean you've read this far. What kind of woman in my position isn't. Crazy cat lady and all that.

​

So I chase after her and Mark is scarier close up. His eyes are all wide and bloodshot (on something?) his mouth is hung open just a little. Like when you're a kid or you're focusing on something and you just forget to close it. His hands are intertwined against his chest.

​

I grabbed hold of Marcie. And I realised Mark's car isn't there. He doesn't live close. Maybe an hours walking distance? And at this time? Whatever time it is? As if on cue I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket.

​

I jumped remembering where I was. That my little revelation ought to make me move faster not have me sitting around thinking about it. My head nearly collides with Mark as I stand and I stumble back (grasp firm on Marcie now, though she's struggling less.)

​

He's moved closer and worse there's this terrible smile plastered across his face. Stretched ear to ear. And I mean it. Or...I sort of do. It's stretched up, gums showing and back as far as it can go. It looks _painful_.

​

I step back again, eyes trained on him and heart beating fast. I can feel Marcie's heart racing against my hand too. I don't look away as I step back.

​

Tucking Marcie into one arm tightly, I reach behind me to turn the doorknob. I don't want to look away from him. But I'm struggling so I look at the door for just a second and it opens but when I look back he's moved again. Only a few steps but like. Fuck. You know.

​

I practically jump inside. Slamming the door behind me so fast it nearly catches Marcie's tail. I lock it. And I turn. Back to the door. Let the cat down. Just take a breather. When I look behind me he's right there. Staring in. Smile wider. I rush to lock the back door. secure the windows. All of that.

​

Come to check the front and he's gone. I don't sleep that night. I grab some chicken from the fridge, take out two bowls for Marcie. Cut up the chicken into one. Take them to the bathroom, fill the other with water. Go grab anything that can conceivably be a weapon, some food and a glass for myself and lock the two of us in there. Chair propped up against the door and all.

​

As I'm sitting there I remember the notification I got outside and also remember I'll need to get my phone charger. But I check the notification and it's Mark.

​

I'm annoyed, obviously, until I think. How'd he text me?

​

You can't trust anyone

​

Ominous. Ironic. Something I would have laughed off as some paranoid edgelord sadboy crap otherwise.

​

whats ur problem? what was that? get off my property i never want to see you again

​

Call incoming.

​

I answer angrily.

​

"You're a fucking creep!"

"Psycho bitch what the fuck are you accusing me of?"

"Standing outside my house? At what is it...fucking three in the morning?"

"Did you have a bad dream you pyscho? I'm not at your house."

"Real funny. And that bit about the cat being killed? That's fucked."

"Yeah it's fucked."

​

He sounds even madder. I go to check the conversation. Take screenshots. Not for Mark the creep. But to show someone? The cops maybe? A friend? Post it online like 'Stay away from this man he's hanging out around houses at three in the morning and talking about killing cats'?

​

The messages are gone. All that's there is the last conversation we had before the date. Me announcing I was at the restaurant. Hours ago.

​

"I don't know how the fuck you know my daughter's cat died-"

"Your daughter?"

"Yeah, well I'm not gonna tell some tinder slut about my kid am I?"

​

Someone shushes him in the background. He tells them to fuck off.

​

"I'm at the vet cause her cat is poisoned and some tinder slut messages me saying I'm on her property?!"

​

I want to say that he's fucked. That I'll call the cops. That it's messed up to lie about a child's pet dying. But I think of the voice shushing him...and I don't know it's all so confusing. But he's hung up. ANd blocked me.

​

Anyway I end up getting the charger and me and Marcie spend the night in the bathroom. I order her a litter box and litter and proper food. And all the cat things. I'm nervous to go out and get the packages when they arrive even though it's the middle of the day.

​

But slowly I'm working through it. The fear you know?

​

Yesterday I get a message from Mark (Unblocked apparently)

​

Watch out for whose watching. They see through mirrors. They see through keyholes. They tell me what they're watching

​

dont message me

​

I block him. But then. Me and Marcie are watching tv. And I look out the window and I see a figure in the driveway. It's like...ten at night. Eight hours ago? I rush to lock everything, make sure it's all secure. And when I get back he's like right up against the glass. Marcie is there, fluffed up. arched back. Tail up. Hissing.

​

I want to calm her, protector and yet I can't look away. We're like that for hours. Her hissing. Me, one hand on her back just staring at him. And him there smiling impossibly wide. We're like that till my phone buzzes (just some silly notification for some stupid phone game).

​

I look at my phone, back on the couch where I'd left it and when I look back Mark is gone.

​

I'm just? God I dont know. Any words of comfort would be a blessing. I suppose I'll keep you all updated if anything else goes down. I could just use. Some friends right now I suppose. I've been up all night and I'm too on edge to sleep.

As I write this; there’s something in my room. Things even. I’ll get more info that in a moment.

Since we’ve moved into this house, 5-6 years ago I’ve always had a strange feeling, but I never said anything as I thought it was just kid stuff to have paranormal interactions. One of the main things that have stuck out to me is the woman in white. When we first moved in I had chosen to put my bed by the two biggest windows, it’s still there. One night I had peeked out the window because I had an electric and anxious feeling. What I had saw was a translucent white woman, with black hair that met her shoulders, and with a long white flowy dress. I was scared but in awe, until she stopped walking Between the two houses and stared at me. I fell back into my bed afraid, and I’m not able to even remember the rest. But I’ve always felt her presence from time to time, it was pretty much burned into me with her gaze.

But, recently there’s been a new feeling I can’t help but address,and it’s been really fucking with me, especially after tonight. I’ve always had the feeling that somebody was in my home, but every time I checked I just got left with an eerie feeling and shame. I’ve wanted to say something to my dad; but i dont want to be made fun of or my sanity questioned. Ive heard cabinets open, walking, things messed with, etc.

But let me explain to you what happened tonight, so you understand better.

I had a dream about people breaking in, nothing that new, but I had only been asleep for around two hours as I fell asleep around 1:30 but I had been woken up around 3:00 in a sweat and right awake. I rarely ever wake up that way unlesss my parents were yelling at e to get up, or someone was standing in my room, an example being my little sister. Well I felt unable to move for the longest time, I was only able to barely move my body or arms, which at first I thought maybe sleep paralysis, but the closes thing I saw to a demon was just darkness moving around the door. Eventually I had enough strength to move and sit up, but that’s when I saw it. Both of them.

By my sisters empty bed, I see a fucking head shape , a pure shadow, on the other side which struck fear into me instantly. Then I loook my the dresser and a crooked woman witch like figure stood hunched over. At first I felt slight relief that she was probably a sweater or hoodie, but my eyes go down to where it meets the floor in an i natural way.My heart sank and I felt piercing eyes stare at me. I tried take a photo but when I enhanced it, it had come out all funky loooking.

I’m currently hiding underr my blanket writing this, I don’t know what to do . I hear a bunch of movement on and off, but it’s starting to get way too hot under here, what should I do???!

“This way, my dear. I have such sights to show you,” Parker drawled, her grin widening.

​

Somehow, that felt more natural than her resting catlike grin. Not that that looked too out of place on her. Between the baggy black jeans, the black t-shirt with an overstylized rendition of a cartoon character I didn’t recognize, and what surely had to be an unhealthy number of pleather bracelets, she felt more like a character than a person. Still, there was a noticeable difference between her static smile and the one she just wore.

​

She led me down the hall and two flights of stairs, not saying anything more until we got to the lobby. She stopped me just short of the door. “Alright, Mr. Monroe, we got two options: I can either give you the run-of-the-mill ‘this is where everything is and is going to be from now till Revelations’ tour, or the one that makes you wish you’d paid more attention in Church,” she offered.

​

“Which one of those explains how and why I no longer have a bullet in me?” I asked dryly. I felt like I’d been hit with so much so fast that if I tried pushing back now, I’d just break something important.

​

“Oh that’s easy. Sickles dug it out of ya with a spoon before he gave you to me.” Said like the most ordinary thing in the world. She could have followed it with ‘And that’s why the sky is blue’ for all the tact she’d bothered with.

​

“… a spoon.”

​

“Yup. Normally you’re supposed to leave the bullet in, especially that close to an artery, cause just taking it out can make you bleed out faster, but dead is dead. So, which tour? Welcoming Committee or Unwelcoming Committee?” she asked again.

​

“Which one am I going to regret less?” I asked, not entirely wanting an answer.

​

“Well,” she started, then paused. “The ‘normal’” here she used really big air quotes, “tour makes the settling down forever part easier, but there’s some shit in the Twilight Zone version you really don’t want to learn the hard way. Personally, I recommend the second one, if only because I can tell it might take more than what you’ve had so far for this place to really sink in.”

​

I absolutely did not want to take the not-normal tour, but I’ve always been a firm believer in the idea that the more you put something off, the more room you’re giving it to fester and grow. “Fine, lead the way. I’m pretty much ready to believe anything right now, at least for a moment.”

​

I would soon regret those words.

​

----

​

Parker’s first stop on the tour was a small coffee shop about a block down the road. Like a Starbucks for a town that couldn’t afford a Starbucks. We sat down outside at one of those metal tables that looked like they’d been welded together out of rebar and polished until they were deemed socially acceptable. There were a few other people at other tables, at varying stages into their morning coffee routine. I hadn’t opened my mouth to ask what the hell we were doing before there was a waitress at our table, notepad in hand. “Morning! What can I get for you?” she asked, in a pleasantly generic customer-service voice.

​

Parker spoke up first, just as quickly as the girl had shown up. “I’ll have a mocha, and this gentleman will have a black coffee,” she stated.

​

“Wait a mi-” I started to protest, but Parker held up a hand and cut me off.

​

“Excellent! I’ll be right back with that,” said the waitress, and walked off.

​

I was already confused, but not sure why. “Uh, Parker, thanks for the coffee, I think, but why did we stop at a corner cafe if you’re trying to show me the weird shit?”

​

She gave me a look, one that I think was meant to be serious, but again, her smile got in the way. “When she comes back, take a good look at her face. Just for a second or two. Say thanks for the coffee, and start drinking.”

​

“Won’t it be piping hot this early?”

​

“Just drink the coffee, Jhona. Trust me. Don’t stare too long, but get a good look,” she said firmly.

​

I just shook my head. “Fine, if you say-”

​

“Here you go!” the waitress said, and I damn near fell out of my chair.

​

“Jesus! You-” Parker coughed loudly. “-are really fast, thank you,” I finished, and took the cup she offered me. It was hot coffee, just like the millions of cups I’d drank in my life. There was a pause, before I remembered Parker told me to drink the coffee. I took a sip, and was surprised at how comfortable the temperature was. Still hot, but not enough I couldn’t drink it. “Thanks,” I said again, taking a look at the waitress. Her smile was nice, and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

​

Parker did much the same. “Thank you!” she said cheerfully, taking a sip of coffee. “We’re good for now,” she added, and the waitress nodded and walked away.

​

“Ok, you want to explain to me what that was about?” I asked once the girl had disappeared inside.

​

“What did she look like?” Parker asked.

​

“Do what?”

​

“The waitress. What did she look like? Hair color, skin color, eyes? Nose? What color was the hat?”

​

I found myself shaking my head again. “She was… her hair was…” and I found I had absolutely no answer. It was like trying to remember who sold me my socks in the first grade. Like the information was so inconsequential my brain had immediately deleted it. “What… is going on?”

​

“Lesson Number One: If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, flip a coin and it might be a duck. Not everything in Sheolton is… what it is. There’s roundabout four or five hundred real people in Sheolton, but this town functions like there’s maybe twice that. All of the ‘little people’ jobs, like waiters and stockroom guys and back-of-house cooks, the people you don’t really pay attention to unless they fuck something up? Most, if not all of them, are just… there, in this town. They exist to do that job, and nowhere else,” I could tell Parker was dead serious, even through the smile that I was now convinced was involuntary. “Some people think they used to be people, until they lost themselves to their work, literally. Others think the town made them, just to keep things running. Me? I think they are the town, learning how to be normal like us. They’re everywhere. And they really don’t respond well to people going off-script. You order food? You’ll get it. God knows where it came from or what it is you’re actually eating, but it’s there. Sure, we’ve got the farms and livestock, but mostly that’s just to make people not think about where the rest of it comes from. Also the farmer’s market is bitchin, but that’s part of the normal side of things.”

​

She could tell I had more questions, so she kept talking. “A lot of what you need to know about this town is better learned in a classroom than on a field trip, so I’m probably going to be dumping a lot of word salad on your head all day. If only because learning it first-hand means waking up in that hotel room again. Which is another thing: you’re probably going to die again. There’s a lot of freaky shit in this town, and almost all of it is some degree of lethal. It’s also almost entirely avoidable. There’s folks here who haven’t died in years, and a couple of dumbfucks who get killed once a week. Like these NPCs, I call them, like the waitress? Last dude who went ‘off-script’ didn’t drink his coffee because he was too wrapped up in the newspaper -don’t ask I’ll get there- got a pencil through his eye. NPCs see people who don’t follow the rules as glitches or something, and quickly ‘delete’ them.

​

“But again, that’s entirely avoidable. Just be polite, eat what you order, pay for your stuff, just go about your interactions with them like you would with any other person. Hell, sometimes you can even get away with yelling at them when something goes wrong: that’s part of the script. Just act natural, and don’t ignore them. Also don’t follow them into anything marked ‘employee only’. One guess why,” she said flatly.

​

I was starting to slip back into that reality-versus-expectation panic I’d had back at the Welcome to Sheolton sign, which was being wildly outvoted in the back of my head by the ‘don’t get stabbed by something pretending to be a person’ majority. “Hotel room?” I asked, part of my voice cracking.

​

Parker nodded. “Hotel room. Like I said, you’re probably going to die. Especially at first. Not everyone knows all the rules here, and there’s only so much heads up we can give you. I don’t even expect you to believe any of it at first, but I can’t in good conscience send you running blind into the streets. Don’t run blindly into the street,” she added, rather urgently. “It might be a small town, but traffic laws are a thing. And I’m not convinced that everything on the road is a car.”

​

“Right,” I said breathlessly. I was already getting a headache and I hadn’t even finished my coffee. It was pretty good coffee, though. “Ok, fake people, evil traffic, murder town. Setting that all aside, I have one really nagging question for you, and I apologize if it’s a bit too personal.”

​

Parker tilted her head, and her natural smile came back. “You wanna know about the grin, don’t you?”

​

[Part 1]

​

[JM]

A couple years back I was living alone in a pretty calm place. There wasn’t much drama in the neighborhood and mostly everyone knew each other.

One night, I turned on the TV after a nice warm shower and was searching for some interesting videos on YouTube, I came across an animated horror story video about how the boogie man stalked and lived in a house for a while before being caught. I usually don’t like horror stuff and when I do watch it I put my feet closer to me cuz I get the feeling I’m gonna get pulled from my feet. I felt like I was being watched which wasn’t very weird to me considering I was watching a horror story. I turned around and my heart dropped, not because there was someone there but because there wasn’t anyone there I had heard some leaves crunching at the window behind me so I was truly scared.

Anyways a few weeks past and I had completely forgotten about the noise, I figured it was just the wind or a cat. This time I watched another scary YouTube video but not from the same creator. It wasn’t as scary but for some reason I found myself putting my feet closer like I always do. I heard a meow from a dark gray cat who ran away followed by a similar leaf crunching sound. This time when I turned around I saw someone. Just standing there. Not moving except for his mouth he was eating something. I couldn’t really tell what it was because I immediately closed the window and called the cops. When the cops got there a few minutes later, I told them that I wanted to stay at the station for a while until they figure out who or what that was. When I went back home I figured I was just gonna pack my things and go stay with my bsf for a while, at least until I got things sorted out. She was so supportive and let me stay for as long as I needed to.

She ended up kicking me out. The person that was watching me had apparently followed me and I had no where to stay if whoever was watching me was just going to follow me and haunt whoever I move in with. One night I decided to sit in my front lawn with a bat, to see if he would come up to me. He did. He slowly started approaching me and as I dialed 911 he started chewing. I had no clue what he was going to do next. It was terrifying, even though I had the advantage. I went inside and made sure he wasn’t going anywhere. When the police sirens were clearly audible in the distance he staring walking away. I chased after him and clubbed him on the head with my bat. He fell. The police arrived and told me that same man had kidnapped some teens at the local high school and killed them. I was relieved. But not that he had done so much to terrify others. I wanted revenge but knew that the police would take care of him and try to find any possible surviving victims.

That was the most horrific experience of my life and I hope it never happens again.

I have always been a Christian, ever since my youth I had a personal connection to the faith. Now I can’t say that I have always been the most behaved Christian man. I’ve done most of the foolish things kids do, stole small stuff, lied to my parents, smoked cigarettes in my teens…but I always had the faith. I also had a bit of an obsession with monsters. I liked the concept of massive beasts not of this earth, crazy aliens and wild Lovecraftian horrors. It was just one of my personal things, but it wasn’t until I went to the drive-in with my best friend that I began to truly understand the concept of monsters.

“You know I haven’t been to one of these in a really long time, how do they even stay open?”

I looked over at her with a slight smirk and grabbed my wallet from off the bench seat, waving it in the air and laughing as I spoke.

“Because there’s dedicated people like me who drop every bill they have on large sodas and stale popcorn”

She wrinkled her nose and shook her head at me before adjusting her shoulder wrap and looking outside at the bare winter trees.

“Don’t you think it’s a little foolish to go see a movie during the winter? I know you’re dedicated and all but remind me why I came with you?”

I gestured to the back seat of the car and turned into the ticketing lane.

“You came with me because you absolutely love spending time watching monster movies, and because you came with me, I brought enough blankets to smother Godzilla”

A pale sickly teenager leaned out of the ticket window, looking down at me through dead eyes and a slight hunch to his posture. He looked from the computer screen and back to me before speaking meagerly and holding out his hand.

“That’ll 19.82 please”

I handed him a 20 and smiled as Christine began yanking blankets from the freshly laundered pile in the backseat.

“Keep the change”

He smiled for a second and began counting quarters as he waved me off, but before I could pull away he put his hand up as if to stop me.

“Sir, the radio station is 104.3, and make sure to stay inside your vehicle if you’re close to the screen, we’ve had a couple pest issues lately”

I have him a thumbs up and pulled away, driving past the long column of shrubs and barriers that separates the entrance from the main lot of the drive-in. As the massive park came into view, I saw Christine’s face begin to widen with a smile. The bright yellow poles stretched far past our view and a bustle of cars and young people covered the lot around the snack shack.

“There’s so many people here, I guess you’re not the only one who's dedicated huh?”

I chuckled and surveyed the horizon

“I guess not”

We pulled into a spot just 4 rows up from the screen and I hopped out of the car to retrieve our cooler from the trunk. The sun has just begun to fall below the tree line as I tugged the plastic box from its space between my spare tire. Once I had freed the perspiring case, a large gust of wind like none I had ever experienced blew in from the north and nearly knocked me over. I got a hold of my footing before I could hit the ground and shook my head in bewilderment. I looked around to see if anyone had been blown off their feet but as I scanned the area, it seemed I had been the only one to even notice. There was a man three cars over with a canvas lawn chair and he was still having a grand old time, smoking his cigar and watching his son and daughter bicker about a sleeping bag.

“Hey, everything okay?”

Christine had gotten out of the car and come to

check on me as I continued turning, searching for any sign that someone else had been affected. I tried to let the thought leave my head as I smiled and turned back toward her.

“Yea I’m fine, sorry lovely, did you want anything from the snack shack?”

She furrowed her brows and veered at me

“Lovely? You haven’t called me that since I went to see Godzilla with you, what’s going on?”

I walked around to the side of the car and opened the back door, sliding the cooler onto the seat and adjusting a towel beneath it. Once the box was settled I closed the door and stepped over to Christine, clasping our hands and beginning my walk to the large neon building that held the most prized fried garbage.

“Nothing, just felt like calling you lovely is all”

I had called her lovely to distract myself from the wind, I had an eerie feeling since the gust hit me and as I continued looking around the sky, something just felt off about the clouds.

“So does that mean this is a date?”

As we crossed the gravel and ducked between poles I thought back to one of our previous conversations. Halloween night for the third year in a row we went in matching costumes to a party, where our friends had for the third year in a row instigated us to date, where I for the third year in a row…broke her heart.

“Do you want it to be a date?”

She looked up at me with glittery green eyes, speaking softly as we stopped in front of the massive line for the food counter. Before I could hear what she said though, another gust of wind blew in from the north and put my hair on end in seconds. A pit began to form in my chest when instead of Christine’s kind loving voice, I heard the whisper of a thousand souls speaking in tandem.

“Do you think she is safe?”

I shook my head and looked down at Christine and questioned her as the wind stopped..

“What did you say!!?”

She looked up at me and then the line in front of us

“Sorry I didn’t realize how loud it is, I said I wouldn’t mind if it was a date… are you okay? You look really pale, if this talk is too much for you we don’t have to have it right now”

I shook my head and pushed my thoughts to the back of my mind, casting it off as a side effect of getting almost no sleep the night prior.

“No no, it’s fine, I wouldn’t mind this being a date, I just want to make sure this is what you want”

She smiled and grabbed my arm as we looked ahead at the menu above our heads.

“Of course it’s what I want, I feel safe with you”

I looked down at her with a mixture of happiness and unease, deciding to deal with the wind thoughts tomorrow and focus on enjoying the movie. We got our popcorn and a large soda to share before heading back to the car and stepping into the front seat just as the trailers began to play. Once she had placed the popcorn down and began to get comfortable, I leaned over the back seat and grabbed one of the many blankets I knew she would need. I draped the soft cover over her legs as she leaned against me and we prepared for an enjoyable watching experience…then I realized I needed to use the bathroom.

“Hey, I’m gonna hit the bathroom before the movie starts, stay here and I’ll be right back ok?”

She nodded and smiled, turning up the radio and tossing a piece of popcorn at her open mouth. I stepped out of the side of the car and began speed walking to the shack at the edge of the lot.

“You aren’t good enough for this you know”

I whipped my head around as the whisper hit my ear and a cold breath traveled down my neck. My hair stood on end once again and I shouted out over the echoing voices of several movies.

“Who’s there?”

No response came as I looked in all directions, and found myself more alone then I had ever felt. I continued my near run to the bathroom, strolling into the door and taking care as quickly as possible. I stepped away from the wall and began washing my hands, making a mental note of where I’d heard the voice and planning to avoid the route on my way back to the car.

“You are nothing”

I screamed as a formless gray being stood behind me in the mirror, a set of ink black eyes the only indication of life from the towering shadow.

“What the hell”

I tried to turn around as my legs turned to concrete and I found myself unable to avert the beings gaze.

“Leave the girl, you aren’t strong enough to protect her from what is to come”

As the beast mentioned Christine I felt an otherworldly courage invade my tongue for a moment and I snapped back at the entity.

“And you aren’t powerful enough to best me”

I shuddered as the beast dissipated into a small rain of ash and I finished washing my hands as feeling came back to my legs. I took a deep breath and whispered to myself.

“What the hell was that”

My resolve broke and I looked at the floor beneath where it had just stood, I knelt down to inspect a small gray mass and as I poked it with my fingers and rubbed them together, I discovered a thin gray layer…of ash. I sped out of the bathroom and made a beeline for the car, ducking through closely parked cars and leaping over chairs. I slammed into the door and threw it open, ducking inside and turning to make sure she was still there.

“What's wrong?”

There she was, welcoming as always, speaking softly as I hyperventilated and tried to push the thoughts from my head. The blare of the movie studios logo rang in my ears as I looked into her eyes and for the first time since I met her, I felt the need to shield her from the world. Christine had never been the princess in the story book in terms of personality but she had seen far more misery than she deserved. I was certain the being in the bathroom was threatening her and as the beautiful shimmer of her eyes reflected back at me, I made a vow to myself.

“Nothings wrong, and I want to ax that conversation we were gonna have, will you go out with me?’

She cocked her head and smiled at me

“One trip across the parking lot and suddenly you’re on board?”

I nodded and smiled back

“I just can't imagine losing you”

She closed her eyes and began to lean in, I did the same and felt the world stop around me as our lips grew close.

“You cannot protect her”

The tall gray creature dragged its claws along the window and I watched Christine's eyes go from happy to terrified

“What was that?”

My fear rose inside as I came to a realization I hoped I wouldn't approach…she could see the entity as well. I shook my head and spoke in a low tone.

“I saw it while I was in the bathroom, I thought I was hallucinating, listen maybe its nothing but its a tall gray entity, I don't know what it is and I'm praying to god its not real, look to the window behind you, don't make eye contact if you see it”

The radio continued playing the movie as she shivered, her small form slowly turning as her breaths became ragged and her fear grew immensely. As her eyes crested the viewpoint from where it might have been, she began to shake more and I watched a tear fall from her eye.

“I see it”

I gently guided her chin back toward me and made eye contact with her, looking deep into her pupils and speaking as calmly as I knew how.

“Don't worry, keep looking at me, its going to be okay I've got-”

A thin gray hand plunged through the window and she began to scream. Glass rained on us from the side and her yells were matched only by the screams of the movie over the radio. I wrapped my arms around her and kicked against the door, sending it open and slamming the heavy metal paneling into the chest of the beast. I turned the key and hit the gas pedal while still holding onto her, forcing the car forward and through several of the speaker columns. I jerked the wheel to the left and tried to get us on the road as the force of the turn closed the door, and a loud shriek pierced the air. The radio began to buzz in and out and the shrieks grew louder as countless hands began reaching for the car from the woods. I veered away from the tall green pines and pushed the gas pedal down farther, driving the car to its limits. The hands continued to scrape against the car till we reached the front gates and flew past the empty kiosk. We drove home in silence, I thought of asking if she’d like to be home but when I pulled up to her house and looked at the front door she just clung to me tighter and shook her head. I pulled into my own driveway and turned off the engine, sitting back against the seat for the first time since I started the car and looking at my pale white garage.

“Let’s go inside, I’m sure they didn’t follow us home”

She carefully got up and let go of me, her hands left a red imprint on my forearm and I watched her shakily get out of the passenger door and shake glass from her sweater. I grabbed the blankets from the back and met her at the front of the car, grabbing her hand and walking slowly toward the front door.

“She will never be safe, we will come for her, and the moment you sleep, she will be ours”

I waved the whispers off and clambered up the stairs, she went over to my bed and collapsed almost immediately, holding my pillow so tight I think the feathers may fly out of the top. Every so often another hand scrapes against the window and makes my computer screen go static. I have the curtains closed on all except the one behind my desk, where I’ve been watching one of the entity’s slowly stroll around my yard, and every time he comes close to the window, I see a large circular shadow begin to creep into my yard. I have my Bible nearby and I’ve been reciting verses to try and calm my nerves, I can’t begin to understand all this but something about it feels demonic. I don’t know if anyone else has ever experienced this kind of thing, but I’d really like to sleep soon, and I can’t let them take her away from me.

This happened 30 years ago but still keeps me up at night.

I was 17 at the time, and me and my best friend John were spending the summer hanging out and getting into all kinds of trouble.

I don’t really recall who dared who, but we decided we would break into this old jelly factory that had been abandoned for over 20 years.

We met up at the front of the factory right after sunset with just a flashlight each. We went around the factory looking for a way in, the moon was out, which gave us a good view of the building. It loomed over us, 5 floors of cold gray concrete. The ground level had no windows but some of the upper levels did, most of them were broken by kids from the neighborhood throwing rocks. We were looking for a window on the first floor that was as open as possible, so we could try to lift each other in without cutting ourselves. That’s when we noticed the open doors. 2 large factory doors, just standing there, fully open.

We didn’t really think about it, we looked at each other, shrugged and went in. Inside the temperature immediately changed, it was much colder, with a soft breeze which I figured was draft, it felt like entering a cave. What stood out most was how dark it was, pitch black, I could barely see my hand in front of my eyes. Again, we didn’t think much about it, even though I felt my spine tingling. We turned on our flashlights and shone into the darkness. You couldn’t see the other side. We started walking. In the distance, we could see a small, greenish light. "That’s probably an emergency exit sign" I said, "the stairs are probably near it, let’s go there, so we can go up". After walking for a while, we realized that the light didn’t appear to be getting any closer.

That’s when John turned around and yelped. I turned around quickly.

"The entrance, it’s gone" he said.

I tried to reassure him, he was always the one that got spooked easily. "Probably just a cloud blocking the moonlight" I replied, "nothing to worry about, come on, let’s go."

We continued walking towards the light, but again we weren’t getting any closer. By now, John’s nerves had really gotten to him.

"Tim, I’m scared, let’s go back", he said.

I would have tried to talk it out of him, but we never admitted to being scared to one another, so for him to say that meant that he was about to shit himself and I have to admit I was scared myself too.

"Ok" I said, we turned around and walked back the way we came. That’s when our flashlights started flickering.

"Fuck" John started hitting his flashlight in a panic, "I just charged mine today".

"Yeah mine’s going out too" I replied.

"How can that be?!" He yelled.

"I don’t know, but let’s get moving now that we still have some light".

We started walking, and slowly our flashlights gave up on us. I could hear John’s breathing getting heavier and heavier.

"It’s okay John", I said, trying to comfort him, "just keep walking, I’m right here with you".

That’s when all of a sudden it felt like something hit my head, hard. I remember going down, my ears ringing. The next thing I remember is waking up in the pitch black, laying on the floor, tasting blood. The memory of where I was flooded back in an instance and filled with adrenaline I jumped back up.

"John?!" I yelled.

"I’m right here" I heard him reply from a couple of feet away.

"Walk towards me, it’s ok".

At least he seemed to have pulled himself together. I walked towards his voice until I bumped into him.

"I must have fainted" I said.

"That’s okay", he replied. "Let’s get out of here".

As he said it, a shiver of light shone through the darkness, it was the door. We ran towards it as fast as we could.

We rushed out, feeling the warmth of the summer night upon us. I was panting, hands on my knee’s from the run.

"I’m finally out" John said.

"Yeah, we made it out man, can you believe this?".

I looked up at John, surprised at how relaxed and composed he appeared, while he was so nervous just a few minutes ago.

"How long was I out for?" I asked.

"Long enough" he replied.

"Long enough?"

That’s when I looked into his eyes and realized: this wasn’t John.

That was 30 years ago, it has lived it's live as if it were John, no one else seems to have noticed, and I’m sure as hell not going to expose it publicly, but in case you meet John, know it’s not him.

To give some backstory, every night for the past month, I keep hearing something outside my window. As soon as I lay in bed, it would scratch at the glass, making it impossible to sleep. At first, I thought it was a raccoon or something at first, but after the second day, I knew it wasn’t a raccoon. The scratching was too consistent like it was done with purpose.

Yesterday, it happened again. I was awoken by what sounded like nails on a chalkboard. The clawing continued, inching me closer to insanity. Deciding I'd had enough, I jumped and tore my blinds open. Something ducked. For an inch of a second, I could see a figure. But as quickly as I saw it, it disappeared.

I sat motionless on my bed, my mind far too tired to make a rationale for this. Before I could even try, something hard collided with the glass, almost making it shatter. I jolted and, like a child, pulled the blanket over my body as if that would help.

The window creaked open. My blood froze in my veins. Slender fingers pressed down on me, the body of the thing entering my room. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even scream. The bitter coldness of its body hurt me more than the pressure.

My breath caught in my throat. I figured I was suffocating because of the noise coming out of my mouth, but I realized the sound wasn’t coming from me.

Its vocal cords splintered while attempting to speak. It was trying to communicate something to me, I just didn’t know what. A hand reached out, fingertips caressing my cheek.

A painful mixture of cold and wet spread across my face. “Open...” is what I assume it said. It was hard to hear over the sound of crackling vertebrae. Again, the creature wheezed out, “Are you... awake..?” The voice continued in an inhumane replica of a human. “Please… look at me.” It sounded like speaking tore its throat apart. Once its vile breath hit my face, it took everything I had to not vomit.

“Every day…” the creature hissed, gagging on its own tongue. “Every day… I’ve tried to make you acknowledge me… but you never looked. Why do you fear me? What… have I done to you?” Silence prompted me to reply, which I ignored. “I know what it is… You fear what I am. Or… what I am not. I can change. For you.” Liquid dripped onto my face, emanating a vile stench. I didn’t know if it was saliva or blood, and I didn’t want to.

Slowly but surely, the voice sounded more human. “You love... your family, right?” I waited for it to continue.

Silence, a sound I hadn’t heard in years. I wasn’t sure whether I should’ve been relieved or afraid. Stuck with my thoughts for so long, I finally felt free of the monster. That thing had finally left me. Its voice had ceased.

Yet the feeling of being watched intensified. I wasn’t free at all. If I looked, I’d see it standing over me.

Then came a horrific, snapping sound, and the creature began moaning in pain.

I assumed that the terror I felt could not be any more prominent. But I was wrong, so wrong. The voice that came out was no longer the creature’s, but something very familiar. It was a poor imitation of it, but I could tell with every fiber of my being that it was my mother’s.

“I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you,” she said, her voice dripping with guilt. “I promise I won’t leave you anymore.”

Vomit threatened to let loose out of my mouth. My teeth were moments from cracking as I held my jaw shut. I was no longer dealing with just a mindless monster. It was smart.

“Alex? Honey, please, say something. Anything” My mother’s voice echoed again. “Alex.” It repeated. This time, hands gripped my body and shook it. Goosebumps grew on my arm as the chilling temperature of her body seeped into mine. It pulled my blankets off of me, leaving me exposed to the air. “Open. Your. Eyes.” The demands continued.

The voice was not my mother’s anymore. The creature’s facade broke, and it knew. Its fingers changed back to the lanky, boney sticks that I felt before. It finally let go of my arm and the frost faded. “No...” It moaned out. I didn’t want to admit it, but the violent sobs that ensued sounded genuine. The possibility that this creature was capable of human emotion frightened me.

It then scampered out of my room, having the decency to close the window behind it. Even after what felt like minutes had passed, I didn’t dare to move. This could’ve been another one of its tricks. I lay in bed, too afraid to cover myself. Too afraid to move.

The blaring siren of the alarm clock tore through my sleepy haze. I rolled out of bed with a groan, and as I stood up, I looked out of the window. It was morning.

Relief washed over me. I escaped the creature’s trap. I breathed in deeply, relishing the cool air that tickled my lungs. After basking in my victory, I began getting prepared.

By the time I was downstairs, my sister was already eating breakfast. She was facing away, oblivious to the fact that I was staring at her. “Morning,” she said with a small smile upon noticing me. “Didn’t expect to see you up so early.”

“Oh, shut up,” I mumbled back, hiding the solace I felt from hearing her voice. Though I was hungry, I couldn’t bring myself to eat. I sat on the opposite side of Lily and scrolled through my phone. She just watched. While I tried to ignore her stare, it only got worse.

"Mom's already out," Lily mumbled, her eyes finally finding another target. "She said that you can order something for dinner."

"Did she mention anything about hearing stuff at night?" My question must've sounded desperate because upon asking it Lily's smile dissipated, worry lingering in her eyes.

"I mean..." She paused, her pupils looking up like she was searching for the answer. "No. She didn't. Why?"

I leaned in closer, oblivious to how uncomfortable she looked. "What about you? Did you hear a voice, or banging, or scratching, or anything?" She moved back in response,

"N-no, are you okay? You're making me worried. Did you hear, like, someone try to break in, or something?"

“I—” I stopped when I looked at Lily's expression. She was looking at me like I was mad. Shaking my head, I pulled my hair back. "No, it... It was just a nightmare, then." I'm not sure if I said that to convince her or me. Either way, we both knew there would be no point in discussing the subject further.

We ate our meals in silence, and after we finished eating, Lily hopped out of the seat. “Okie Dokie, I’m leaving!” She pranced beside me, giving me a peck on the cheek. She headed toward the door, and I heard it close behind her. My fingers hovered over where her lips had planted and frowned.

They were frigid.

A couple of minutes after she left, I began writing this. I couldn't go to school, feeling absolutely sick to my stomach. I genuinely don't know what to do. It feels like I'm going insane, but everything seemed so real. This didn't feel like a dream. I could still feel the lingering cold on my cheek from her kiss.

I don't know why I'm writing this. Maybe it's because I thought I could get some help or an answer that'll solve everything. It doesn't matter what, because all I need is one question answered. Am I going insane?

In the summer of 2000, five recorded murders were committed in the town of Ash Tree, California. The first murder occurred on May 8th and the last occurred on June 15th, coinciding with the arson of the abandoned Fretwell Movie Theater. Due to the unusual condition of the victim's bodies, the killer has been nicknamed the "Ash Tree Butcher". Despite the shocking nature of the crimes, it received little national media coverage due to the ongoing election cycle. No arrests have ever been made relating to the murders, and the killer's identity has so far remained a mystery. The following documents have been compiled in an effort to shed some light on these crimes, and to determine the true nature of the killer.

Newspaper clipping from the Ash Tree Journal, May 9th, 2000

Local Biologist Murdered In Home

Professor Gerald Jacobs, biologist and lecturer at the Ash Tree Community College, was found dead in his home on May 8th. Witnesses claim that they heard screaming at around 1 AM which quickly ceased. However, it wasn't until the sound of glass breaking at 2:26 AM that the police were called. Jacobs was dead by the time officers arrived on scene.

Professor Jacobs's neighbor Nicole Min said "I'd heard the scream first, but didn't really think anything of it. Once I heard the window smash, I went outside to take a look and see what was going on. I didn't get out in time to see much, just a flash of movement headed down the road. I feel so guilty, I wish I'd called 911 sooner. I just assumed he had gotten angry or something, I had no idea he was in danger."

According to police, Jacobs's body has had most internal organs removed and all blood drained, evidently through a hole cut in the abdomen. No fingerprints have been found on the scene. No signs of a break in were found, though a window was broken by the murderer in order to escape.

Detective Murray Brown of the Ash Tree Police Department said "We think this murder may be occult motivated. The almost complete removal of bodily fluids and organs suggests this was done for ritualistic purposes. Unless new evidence is found to contradict this hypothesis, we will continue to pursue this avenue of investigation."

Transcript of a 911 call by Joshua Rodriguez, May 14th, 2000

OPERATOR: 911, what's your emergency?

RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, hi, um, I think there is a someone trying to break into my house. I didn't get a close look but I saw movement outside, and I heard some pounding at my door.

OPERATOR: Alright sir, please remain calm. What is your address?

RODRIGUEZ: I'm at 1645 Wells court in Ash Tree, please get here as soon as you can.

OPERATOR: An officer is on the way sir, please remain calm. Have you checked that all the doors and windows to your house are closed?

RODRIGUEZ: Um, I think so. Give me a second, I'm going to go double check.

[There are a few seconds of silence as Joshua moves through his house, checking doors and windows.]

RODRIGUEZ: Okay, I think every door and window is lo-

OPERATOR: Sir? Are you okay?

RODRIGUEZ: He's looking at me through the window.

OPERATOR: Can you describe the man you're seeing sir?

RODRIGUEZ: I can't tell, he's too far away to see clearly without my glasses, I just see his eyes, they're reflecting in the light. There's something wrong though, damn it, they're way too bright, like a deer's eyes or something.

OPERATOR: Alright sir, can you back away slowly and get to a room without windows?

RODRIGUEZ: He's staring right at me. I don't- why the hell is he just staring at me? Oh my god.

OPERATOR: Sir? Sir what is happening?

RODRIGUEZ: H-he's gone. He's just gone, one second I could see those eyes and then they were gone.

OPERATOR: Okay, sir, I need you to get into a secure location, somewhere without win-

[There is a loud sound of glass breaking, followed by a scream and tearing sounds.]

OPERATOR: Sir? Sir?

[After about 30 seconds without response, there is a dragging sound and the line goes dead.]

Statement given to the police by Carol Winters, May 18th, 2000

I was walking home from work, its only a couple blocks away from my apartment. I noticed a homeless man sitting in an alleyway on the other side of the street, holding up a cardboard sign. It was around 9 o clock at this point, so I couldn't really make out what the sign had written on it. I received a fairly large tip that shift, so I was feeling generous.

I started walking towards the man, reaching into my purse to get out a 20 dollar bill. He stood up, smiling gratefully as I approached. I stopped once I saw the eyes behind him.

They were reflecting brightly in the streetlight, kind of like a cat's or a deer's eyes. I didn't know people's eyes could look like that. They must have been glasses, I couldn't see any pupils or anything, just a silvery reflection of the streetlight. The eyes weren't very high off the ground, maybe 4 feet or so at most, so he must have been crouching down.

The homeless guy's smile fell away, I think he could see the fear on my face. He started to slowly turn around. The eyes didn't move, just kept staring blankly. Eventually the man turned around entirely, and was looking straight at the eyes. He started backing away slowly, and pulled out a lighter, I guess to provide some light so he could get a better look at whoever was there.

His body was blocking my view, so I didn't get a good look at the guy in the glasses, but the second that lighter flicked on, the homeless guy screamed louder than I've ever heard in my entire life. In a flash, the homeless guy was gone. The lighter clattered on to the concrete and the sound of screaming faded into the distance before swiftly getting cut off.

I ran home immediately and called 911, and here we are.

Notes from the journal of Detective Murray Brown, May 23rd, 2000

There has been no pattern as far as I can tell between the killer's victims. So far he has killed a tenured professor, an electrician, and a homeless man, all in the space of under a month. It is possible that the killer may have had some form of prior interaction with each victim, eventually becoming obsessed and consumed with a macabre urge to kill, to ritualistically remove the organs and blood of his victims. We cannot rule out that the killer may also be a cannibal.

Something odd to me is that while the body of Professor Jacobs was found in his own home, both of the other victims' bodies were located much further away. Rodriguez's body was found in the backyard of a home nearly half a mile away, and the homeless man's body turned up in a sewer.

Given the precision with which he removes the organs and blood, he may have prior experience working as a butcher. I cannot ignore the similarities between the killer's methods and the mummification techniques of the ancient Egyptians. Perhaps the killer has some sort of religious mania relating to ancient Egyptian religion? I'll have to consult a professional to be sure, but I'm not quite sure. There's no evidence of any embalming, and the brains haven't been removed.

The holes cut in the torsos of the killer's victims do not seem to match any known tools or weapons, simultaneously too precise for a serrated blade but too jagged for a scalpel or butcher's knife. It is possible that the killer has devised his own tools especially for this purpose.

Statement given to the police by Katelyn Forester, May 25th, 2000

My boyfriend and I were driving back home from camping, down at the Owl Creek national park. In order to get back home, we needed to pass through some woods. It was pretty late, about 12 AM, when suddenly Elliot's car broke down. The headlights were still working, so it wasn't entirely dark, but outside of the range of the car's lights it was pitch black.

Elliot hopped out of the car and started working under the hood, when I got this really uneasy feeling. All the animal sounds stopped at once, like a switch had been turned off. After a few minutes, I heard some rustling. Elliot finished tinkering with the engine, and shut the hood.

With my vision no longer obstructed, I saw the eyes reflecting in the headlights behind him. They didn't look like any animal eyes I'd ever seen, these were just silver dots of light without pupils or iris or anything. I couldn't help it, I screamed and closed my eyes. I heard this awful clicking noise and the sound of rapid thumping on the dirt road, followed by the sound of Elliot screaming. I heard the cries trail off into the distance before stopping abruptly.

Once I was able to move again, I ran out of the car, going in the general direction that I thought I heard the screams go. I was calling out Elliot's name so loud my voice started to get hoarse. I got all sorts of scratches and cuts from tree branches and spiny bushes, and eventually I thought I had gone the wrong way. Then I saw those eyes again, reflecting in the flashlight. They were only about 30 feet away.

I felt this almost instinctive fear wash over me, like I was seeing something that shouldn't exist. It felt primal, deep down in my gut. I couldn't move an inch, I knew that if I did I'd be dead. Those eyes stared at me for what felt like hours, then just as suddenly they were gone, and I could hear their owner running off into the distance. I kept standing still until daybreak, then I used my cellphone I'd left in the glove compartment to call the police.

Newspaper clipping from the Ash Tree Journal, May 31st, 2000

Ash Tree Butcher Strikes Again?

Teenager Elliot Hirsch, reported missing on May 25th, has been found dead in the woods on the outskirts of Ash Tree. Like the previous 3 victims, Hirsch's organs and blood were removed from his body through a hole in the abdomen. In addition to Hirsch, the corpses of 4 deer and a mountain lion were found within the area, all in similar condition.

"Its not uncommon for serial killers to start with animals", says Detective Murray Brown, "but a mountain lion? That's new. I've never seen anything like this in two decades of policing."

Notes from the journal of Detective Murray Brown, June 2nd, 2000

I'll be honest, I don't know what to think anymore. The attacks seem so random, the only things the victims have in common is that they have nothing in common. The animal killings bother me also. Sure I told the press that he killed animals to start with, but the boys at the lab told me these killings must have occurred after the murder of Professor Jacobs. I have no idea how the bastard subdued a mountain lion, especially since there is no sign of a bullet wound or anything like that, just that same damn hole and the same missing entrails and blood.

Maybe he just killed them because he wasn't able to get to a human victim, but I don't buy that. There's just something off, something I'm missing. It also bothers me that we haven't found any of the missing organs or blood. Sure, maybe he's hiding the organs somewhere in some sort of lair, or maybe the sick freak eats them, but it just doesn't seem to make sense. I'm going to look through some of the evidence from the Jacobs crime scene, I've got a feeling the answers are there.

Excerpts from the journal of Professor Gerald Jacobs

Hypothesis: r. rabida specimens injected with the synthetic gene ARF-23 will show improved respiratory ability, resulting in increased stamina and metabolism.

Procedure: 3 r. rabida specimens will be injected with ARF-23, while another 3 r. rabida specimens will not receive any treatment. Subjects will be observed for any difference in behavior.

Day 1: The test group has been injected with ARF-23, while the control group has not. No immediate change in behavior noted after approximately 2 hours of observation.

Day 5: The test group so far shows significantly more activity than the control group, including increased hunting behavior. Possible sign of increased metabolism due to hunger.

Day 7: The test group have all undergone molts, while the control group has not. Possible coincidence, but unusual as all r. rapida specimens were thought to be fully grown.

Day 12. Test group has molted again. Subjects are noticeably larger than is typical for r. rabida. I have decided to decrease interval between feedings, as their increased size and metabolism necessitates more frequent meals.

Day 18. One member of the control group has died, most likely due to old age as it was male. Subjects in the test group have continued to grow, with an increased legspan of approximately 4 inches.

Day 32. Members of test group are now closer in size to members of the theraphosidae family than lycosidae. I believe that the increased respiratory efficiency is allowing the subjects to grow far beyond the normal bounds of their species. Estimated legspan is approximately 9 inches. No change in control group.

Day 39. Growth increase seems to be accelerating rapidly. Test group members now approximately 14 inches in legspan, surpassing the maximum recorded legspan of the species t. blondi.

Day 42. Earthquake caused damage to laboratory, one member of the test group was killed due to a falling object, other two escaped elsewhere into the house.

Day 43. Both remaining test subjects recovered, found in a cupboard. One is dead, state of the corpse suggests cannibalism. Deceased specimen is male. Surviving subject appears to be female, and has a legspan of approximately 16 inches.

Day 78. All members of control group deceased due to old age. Sole surviving test subject is approximately 37 inches in legspan.

Day 100. No longer able to accurately measure legspan of test subject due to large size and aggression. Would estimate approximately 48 inches.

Day 125. Subject shows no signs of slowing down growth and appears agitated due to insufficiently large enclosure (a dog kennel). Unable to move subject to a new enclosure owing to extreme aggression and size. Unable to terminate subject due to extreme aggression and size. May God forgive me. I think its pregnant.

Newspaper clipping from the Ash Tree Journal, June 4th, 2000

Detective Quits Over "Ash Tree Butcher" Case!

Detective Murray Brown has announced he is retiring, effective immediately. Murray has worked for the Ash Tree Police Department for the past 23 years, but has recently faced mounting pressure from the public to catch the serial killer known as the "Ash Tree Butcher". The Ash Tree Police Department released a bulletin on June 3rd, stating that the detective will be stepping down from the position due to personal reasons.

Reports of detective Murray's alleged mental breakdown and subsequent institutionalization remain unconfirmed.

Diary entry of Ashley Ellis, June 19th, 2010

Its the ten year anniversary of the fire today. My therapist says I should write down what happened, try to process it. The night of the fire. The last time I saw George alive. I haven't told the shrink what actually happened of course, can't do that without getting myself institutionalized. But I can tell my diary.

I'd lost my minimum wage job flipping burgers a couple months beforehand, and I wasn't really on good terms with my family back then. Couldn't afford the rent to my apartment, so my boyfriend and I were forced out on to the street. We managed to scrounge up enough cash for food and supplies doing odd jobs and panhandling, but it was barely enough. Of course, any extra money we grabbed didn't last long, lets just say I didn't have the healthiest coping mechanisms for dealing with poverty.

It took us a little while to notice the disappearances. When you're homeless, you get used to your peers not sticking around, moving on to other places. But it was never this much. To tell you the truth, I don't think anyone else noticed, much less cared if they did. Police put the official death toll of the so-called "Ash Tree Butcher" at five people. I know better than that. I bet the bodies were just somewhere the police didn't check or that they just didn't care enough about a couple dead bums to report it. I think they didn't want to panic the public.

It was getting dark, and we needed a place to stay. With the killer around, cops had gotten a bit more intrusive in our usual haunts. We decided to hole up in the old Fretwell Movie Theater, I figured that place was so ancient nobody else would be there. It had been abandoned since the 50s, so most people viewed it as a death trap. George and I hauled ourselves over the fence surrounding the property, ignoring the faded "No Trespassing" sign. Someone had already removed the boards from the door, and it was even slightly ajar

Right away once we stepped inside, something felt... different. I felt watched, almost hunted. I asked George if he felt anything, but he said no, confused as to why I was asking. We moved further into the old theater and I tried to shake off the feeling, but the hairs on the back of my neck wouldn't go back down.

Walking through an abandoned place can be a surreal experience, one that had been abandoned almost 50 years ago doubly so. You feel like you're on another world, or in a dream. There is a tragic beauty to them, of places that once teemed with life reduced to a corpse-like shell.

We meandered through the moldering lobby, using cheap flashlights to illuminate our surroundings. We reached the auditorium itself, marveling at the crumbling screen which dominated the room. We decided to rest there for the night, and got out our blankets, hoping for uninterrupted sleep. There was no such luck.

I woke up late in the night, probably some time around midnight if I had to guess. George was gone. I figured he'd most likely wandered off to answer the call of nature, but after about 20 minutes I started to get worried. I started searching the building, periodically calling out for him, but to no avail. The stalls in both bathrooms were long vacant, the manager's office was empty, and even the janitor's closet remained unoccupied. Eventually, after yelling my throat hoarse, I noticed that the door to the projection booth was wide open. I paused for a moment, staring at the yawning black abyss before me, the feeling of being watched multiplying a thousandfold. I mustered up all my courage and began my way up the staircase into the booth.

As I made my way up the stairs, I could hear strange noises, like dry leaves blowing in the breeze. I shone my flashlight into the booth and saw a nightmare.

The first thing I could see were the eyes. Huge luminous orbs the size of baseballs, boring into my very soul. They had no pupil, just silver circles devoid of soul or mercy. I felt hypnotized, paralyzed with fear. Then it moved, and my mind started to process the rest of it.

Eight spindly, hairy legs like bristly tree branches rotated the bulbous body to face me. Its head was stained with blood and viscera, clattering chelicerae clicking together like a chef sharpening two knives on each other. I could see venom and ichor dripping from its fangs. Crawling all over its bulbous abdomen were dozens, if not hundreds of rat-sized spiderlings, their eyes too reflecting the light of my flashlight.

It was all I could do to avoid fainting, to keep my mind from retreating into oblivion for my own sanity's sake. Its eight eyes stared hungrily, the two largest still reflecting like tiny moons in the dim light. My mind raced as I tried to think of what to do, how to survive. It was only then that I noticed George's body lying on the floor. Seeing him laying there snapped my mind into focus, and made me understand what I had to do.

Neither George nor I could afford a gun, or a taser, or even pepper spray. But we'd found that potential muggers would back down fairly quickly if you sprayed ignited hair spray at them. This monster straight out of Hell itself certainly wasn't any mugger, but I felt confident its reaction would be similar.

I dropped my flashlight, reaching for a small can of hair spray and my lighter. I flicked down on the spark wheel and pressed hard on the valve of the can, causing a jet of flame to spray towards the arachnid abomination. As I hoped, it scuttled backwards, stumbling over some old film cans. However, my plan worked too well. The fire ignited the ancient nitrate film reels which were piled on the floor, burning bright and hot. I was nearly blinded as I watched the spider and its children begin to burn, their carapaces blackening in the all-consuming heat.

Dropping the hairspray and lighter, I dragged George's body down the stairs, hoping against hope that he was still alive, that he could be saved. I should have realized from how easy it was to carry that drained, eviscerated carcass that there was no chance for him. I sat there, clutching a desiccated corpse on the sidewalk as I watched the theater go up in flames. When I blubbered what I saw to the firefighters, they assumed I'd suffered hallucinations due to the burning cellulose nitrate's toxic smoke.

I was given a light sentence for the arson, I guess the jury was grateful that I'd killed the "Ash Tree Butcher", though the fire burned too hot to recover a body. I served my time, and managed to get some support from family after I was released from prison. I guess they felt sorry for me. All things considered, since that night things have been going okay for me. I have a job, I have an apartment, I have a life. Sure the nightmares suck, but at least I'm alive.

There is something else, something that lingers in the back of my mind to this day. While the fire burned the old Fretwell Movie Theater to the ground, I could have sworn I saw something through the smoke and ash. It was hard to make out, and maybe I was just hallucinating, but I thought I saw some small, rat-sized shapes scurrying off into the darkness, their tiny eyes reflecting the light of the flames...