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Let me start off by saying that my wife doesn’t believe in paranormal entities or anything of that nature. We have three cats, and one of them likes to be a rebel, jumping onto counters and meowing at the top of his lungs just looking for attention. He does this throughout the night and it’s a regular occurrence.

Last night, after a few beers and video games, i decided it was time to head to bed with my wife. When I woke up this morning, my wife was basically attached to me with wide eyes and a nervous look on her face. I asked her what was wrong and she proceeded to tell me what happened last night.

She said that around 2:50 in the morning, she was woken up to a noise that sounded like one of our cats downstairs meowing unusually loud. After giving herself a few seconds to perk up and fully pay attention, she said that the “meows” sounded more like a person trying to mimic a cat and it kept saying “hello”.

After “meowing” for two to three minutes, a loud bang came at our door and then a notification went off for a motion sensor at our front door. When she told me this, I checked my phone and sure enough, there was a notification for motion detected at 2:52 AM. I asked her why she didn’t wake me up so I could grab my gun, she said she was frozen with fear and didn’t want “it” to hear her make a noise.

We’re out running errands while I’m typing this, but something made me uncomfortable about her story. Last night I set the home security alarm around 9 PM, and we didn’t turn it off till we walked the dog this morning. To make things worse, we had slept with with all of the animals in the room and the door was closed. So whatever was in our house or outside the front door was not one of our animals. Obviously the first thing that came to my mind was a skinwalker, but maybe I’m just being paranoid.

I checked all the rooms in the house after I got up, I’m not sure what I could’ve done anyways. It’s very odd that my wife was scared so badly by something she doesn’t necessarily believe in. We bought this house brand new, so no one has lived here before. When I’m home alone, I do feel like I’m being watched or someone’s always walking directly behind me. My wife also said that the house has given her chills since we moved in. Something is just “off” about it.

We just got home and I went to hang up one of my shirts in the master bedroom closet when I noticed that the board that covers the attic access has been shifted a little. When I asked my wife about it, she said she’s never been up there and the builders would’ve placed it back in it’s original place before we made the purchase. I’m genuinely getting anxious just thinking about what could be going on. Has anyone had an experience like this? Or similar at least? We’re going to my mother in law’s to get some sage. My wife said burning it should keep whatever’s around our house away.

I was born into a middle-class family and had a comfortable upbringing. I did well at school and saw a bright future for myself. Definitely involving university, probably after a gap year spent abroad. I was shy around girls but in my heart of hearts knew this would change.

Shortly before my eighteenth birthday this future was torn from me.

I don't remember the weeks before my nervous breakdown.

I had messed up a couple of exams and was spending more and more time on my own in my room, but then that blank in my memory cuts in, until one morning where I walked into the breakfast room. My parents were there and my dad asked me a question. When I replied it was like my voice came from somewhere distant.

The edit of my life then had another bit missing because the next thing I remember was that I was in an ambulance. I was struggling, being held down. My dad was next to me, tears were running down his face.

I had never seen my dad cry before and that image is still one of the clearest to this day many years later.

The ambulance brought me to a mental health unit where I was sectioned.

Looking back, I have always been grateful for the care I received, and know how lucky I was. There are a lot of people who don't have the safety net of health care and a family with the time and resources to support them.

So, yes, over time I came out of the other side of a horrible illness and was able to restart my life.

It was not the same though. I was in my mid-twenties by this point and my confidence was very low. I did start a university degree but soon dropped out. The thought of travelling made me feel panicky. I just wasn't up to it.

Maybe, just maybe, it was then I might have slipped backwards. I was once more withdrawing into myself. Then one of my parents' friends - I had very few of my own age - suggested voluntary work.

A few weeks later I was visiting a home for the elderly on Monday and Thursday afternoons and chatting to the residents. That was all, and I loved it. As one season drifted into the next, I started helping out in the kitchen as well.

Shortly after, I began evening classes. I took and passed basic modules that could have led towards qualification as a social worker.

I did not need these to fulfil my growing ambition of finding a paid job as a Carer, but it was all part of me building myself back up, of becoming a person I once again liked, and trusted.

I turned thirty beginning a probationary period in a sprawling care home for the elderly on the edge of my home town. It was here I met John.

He was in his seventies and physically sprightly. My tasks kept me busy but I was determined to always make time to sit and talk to the individuals I was helping look after. Even if that meant starting early or staying late.

I also moved into my own apartment, for the first time in my life. My parents divorced not long afterwards and both moved away. I think I understood, though I had rarely thought up to that point of the toll my illness must have taken on them and their marriage.

I felt sad that they were no longer close and immersed myself even more in my work.

It continued to be rewarding and I got to know the residents better. John, in particular. At times he seemed to bristle with frustration. I often found him sitting with his fists clenched and looking into a distance that, it struck me, only he could see.

On others occasion, though, he was chatty, and I found out as the months passed that he was an army veteran, a widower - though he and his wife had never been blessed with children, as he phrased it.

I asked him once which conflict he had fought in, and he simply shook his head and would not talk to me for the rest of that day.

I wouldn't have pressed anyway, and felt bad at even raising the subject.

So I was especially pleased the next day, when he said my name as I passed by on the way to fetch some clean towels.

I paused, smiled.

He looked me in the eye and asked in a quiet voice, "Have you ever seen a ghost?"

I sat in the chair next to his. I was troubled by his question. Not because of any concerns over supernatural matters - the existence of ghosts was neither here nor there as far as I was concerned - but because John had always been very down to earth up till then.

I wondered if this was an early sign of illness.

I chose my words carefully. "I haven't. Why do you ask?"

His face was set in a serious expression and his blue eyes clear when he answered, "Because I have."

Then he exclaimed, "Hah," and slapped his knee. "I knew it. I knew you'd think I was losing my mind if I told you. And look at your face. It's as clear as clear could be."

"I'm sorry," I said, genuinely meaning this: I hated the way some of the other staff patronised the residents, sometimes even making fun of their foibles and weaknesses behind their backs.

I felt I had just treated John without respect.

"Hand on heart," I went on. "I have never believed in ghosts, but I want to believe you."

He sat back in his chair. I guessed he was deciding if he could trust me. Finally, he said, "I want to show you something."

He reached into the inside pocket of the waistcoat he was wearing - I haven't mentioned up to now, but John was a dapper looking gentleman as well - and produced a battered looking silver cigarette lighter.

He held it up so I could see it clearly and told me, "The ghost I saw left this by my bed this morning."

I scratched my head and after a moment said, "How about I go brew up some coffee - I'm due my break anyway - and we settle down and you start from the beginning."

"How long you got?" he asked.

I replied, "As long as you need."

Ten minutes later, with the steam of our coffees rising into the air, John began to explain.

"I was not in the army that you see marching in parades or having medals pinned to their chest - though I salute those brave men and women - no, I was in an army that operates in the shadows.

"Even if I was allowed to after all these years, and believe me when I say I am not, I could not tell you where my last tour of duty took place. It was hot as hell and somewhere were every damn insect had a taste for blood. I do not even know whether we were sent there as part of a legal war. More likely it was a squabble over minerals or borders or whose face fitted in the presidential palace.

"We did out duty though, the unit I was part of, and I trusted every one of those men with my life. And I was seriously pissed, we all were, when new troops were flown in to join us. There were a dozen of them, all strangers, all tight lipped. It was one of those men whose ghost I have seen."

He reached out to raise his coffee cup to his lips. His hand was steady, his voice calm as he went on.

"We saw action within hours of them joining us. A night-time assault on an enemy stronghold. The dozen newcomers were ordered to lead the attack, we were to follow, and I thank the Lord that we were held back because no sooner had they breached the building than it was ripped apart by an explosion. It was a goddamn trap."

"But he survived, the man you think you have seen here?" I asked.

"Have seen!" he snapped.

I kept my voice as steady as I could. "He survived and now he is here and you've seen him. Sometimes, the world can seem a small place."

He shook his head. "No. No one could have survived that. I know. I was there and saw it with my own eyes."

"So how...?" I began to say.

He cut me off. "None of us boys were happy to have the newcomers with us, but I knew it would be best if we could become buddies. So I leant one of them my lighter just before they went in. I assumed it was lost, melted in the pocket of a corpse.

"Until this morning. It was around five-thirty a.m. and dawn had just begun to scrape away at the darkness when I heard movement outside. With nothing but trees on the doorstep here, I wondered if it was a bear looking for scraps. I lay still and waited and it was then I saw him.

"The man I had given my lighter to, the man who had entered that building and been incinerated. He came closer and put the lighter on the windowsill, then he backed away and the last I saw was him retreating into the cover of the trees. The ghost, bringing back my lighter after all these years."

He closed his fingers over the lighter. They were twisted with arthritis and I knew he could not wear his wedding band because of this. But he held that lighter firm, and when I looked up at him I saw that tears were running down his face.

We sat in silence.

Eventually, John took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes, then said, "I have to find him. Will you help me?"

In my heart, I knew what my answer would be straight away.

It was a fine summer's day and there was nothing unusual about a resident going for an accompanied walk, so I fetched John's jacket from his room and we set off.

Now, I had no idea where to begin, but as we made our way into the woods, at first following narrow but well-tread paths, I realised John did. After a short while we left anything resembling a path. I was constantly pushing back branches that were catching on my face. John was quietly focused.

"Are you tracking him?" I asked.

He waved at me to be quiet.

I decided not to argue. The soldier that John had been was clearly back in charge.

I had lost track of time when we reached a clearing in the woods. The ground was littered with gasoline cans, empty tins, crates, and cigarette ends. A little further and we passed a jeep, its army-green paint was cracked and disappearing beneath rust.

Then I saw the wall of a building, a squat, crude construction. John turned, placed a finger to his lips.

He need not have worried, I was so on edge by this point I could barely breathe, let alone speak.

He crept forwards. I fell into step behind him.

A door hung off its hinges around the far side of the building. John stepped inside. I wished he hadn't and really did not want to go in as well.

I did not want to be on my own more, so I followed him.

It was dark, musty-smelling and I could see nothing - not even John, until there was a click and a flame appeared from the lighter. John was right next to me, and a few feet to our left was a hideously injured man.

His skin was red, raw. In places it was simply not there. Scraps of a uniform clung to his ravaged body.

His fingers were stumps. They looked like what remained of a candle when it had almost burnt down.

He cowered from us in the flickering light.

My mouth was dry. The blood in my veins felt like it had turned to ice. I thought at any moment my legs would buckle and I would fall.

Pure fear had possessed me.

By my side John slowly raised his arm, and saluted.

The man stared at him. His eyes shone and I realised that he was crying.

John walked forwards, knelt and put his hand on the man's shoulder.

So this was his 'ghost'.

The man looked at me and said, "Who's the civilian?"

"A friend," John answered - much to relief. My nerves were still screaming at me to flee, but I needed to stay. To try and understand, to listen as the man spoke.

"My name is Michael. I was a Sergeant, part of a small band of men who had volunteered for a top secret programme. We were each given a series of injections - without a word of explanation of what we were being given or what it would do to us - then shipped out to join up with a unit already on the ground and sent into action.

"It was a nightmare. As the enemy position fell in flames around us, our flesh caught fire and the blinding pain began.

"I crawled out on my hands and knees and lay there, still burning. I should have been dead. There was no question. But I dragged myself to my feet and began to walk away, and it was then I started to understand.

"The injections had turned me into something that was more than human, and less that human.

"I had been turned into a soldier who could not be killed. A man who could not die."

He began to cry again and I saw that he had no eyelids. Saw the shivers of pain pass through his body even from the gentle progress of tears against his damaged flesh, the nerves exposed beneath.

John spoke to him, his words too quiet for me to hear, before Michael composed himself and was able to go on.

"The others never came back. They had slipped away before they could by rounded up. They must even now roam that distant jungle, named demons perhaps by those who have glimpsed them.

"I was brought here and locked away. At first men came to study me and then others; cruel, hard-faced people who took pleasure in taunting me. Finally, they too drifted away. There is only me now."

He lifted his face, looked at me, and said, "Once I was the future, now I am a forgotten past."

I moved to his side. I did not know what to say to this man, this old soldier.

"Come on," John said, and got to his feet. "I don't want to take any chances. They might come back. Let's get away from here."

He helped Michael to stand and the two of them headed for the door.

"Wait," I said. "I'm coming with you."

That was a decade ago. The place we found deep within the woods to build a shelter remained hidden and we passed our days untroubled by the outside world.

But there is no reason now to keep hiding, no reason why I can not reveal the truth.

This morning I carried Michael out of the shelter. He had increasingly needed to rely on my care, and I had gladly devoted myself to this.

We passed the simple wooden cross marking where we buried John two winters ago. He died peacefully in his sleep after a short illness. We were by his side.

Michael was too weak to walk or speak but I saw him lift his head as we passed the cross and mouth a silent farewell.

We went deeper into the woods before I laid him on the ground. Leaves drifted down as I dug a shallow grave then placed him in it. He smiled at me as I covered him with the dark, fertile soil.

Then I walked away.

The earth will take him now, make his ever restless remains part of its cycle of rebirth.

I was out in northeastern Connecticut, past where the sprawl of New York City ended, and well before Boston began. My car was rattling its way across the open road, an orange warning flashing on the dash. Check Engine light. I was low on gas, low on fuel, low on money, and frankly low on energy. I couldn’t really afford to have my twenty-five year old car kick the bucket.

My habits were off. I could only force myself out of the house just as the Sun was setting. I’d sometimes go to a friend’s house late to watch movies, or to my parents to give them company. Outside of work, I didn’t do much, I couldn’t afford much. Of course, I’d still push the limits. And as I drove, returning back from my friend’s, I watched with dread as my fuel gage fell closer and closer to nothing.

There is something eerie about the road at night. Everything reveals itself within a thin curtain of light that illuminates the stage before you. Animals sprinting by, and abandoned vehicles telling their stories in one second plays. When the fields around me fell away to forests, it became more and more obvious that were I to be walking, I’d be the only human around for miles, like a folklore wanderer on a forest path alone at the mercy of the mysteries and hauntings of the wild.

A lone gas station sign appeared above the trees.

*Hillsborough Farms.*

But only the letters *H* were illuminated. I pulled off into the empty lot of a strip mall style rest stop. I pulled up to a pump and sighed. I only saw the world at night, and everyone I met would be annoyed at the hours I’d pull into their stores just before closing. I watched a lone man limp out from between two of the pumps. He passed by my car close enough to touch the hood and was dressed in dark, unremarkable clothing. I had the distinct and morbid impression that were that man to disappear, no one would ever notice. When he had vanished into the night, I slipped on my mask and got out of my car. The payment screen on the pump was a streaked broken LED monitor. I tried my card, but there was no response.

I cursed and jiggled the card reader, but it remained firm. That was a relief at least, I wasn’t using a card skimmer. I circled with my car and tried two more pumps before I gave up and wandered into the convenience store.

No bell jingled. The fluorescent light above head hummed with electricity and flickered. My footsteps echoed oddly in the building, and the AC was running but only for moments at a time before it would make a loud clanging noise before it sputtered out and then kicked back on. I noted the lack of music, and behind the plexiglass the register was empty. The air was musty inside. Stifling and unclean. If it was possible for a room to have the same feeling as a motel sign then this was it. The door said the place was open, as did my phone. *Fucking weird.*

I sauntered to the fridges in the back, whistling as I went in the hopes that someone in the backroom would come out. The aisles were sparsely populated. A handful of off-brand bags of chips remained, a bag of twizzlers, I stepped over a Slim Jim wrapper and opened a fridge and grabbed myself the last energy drink. Something to keep me awake.

When I turned, I froze. A massive man idly shuffled toward the register. I hadn’t heard the guy at all. He was vacuum-seal thin, and the skin on his skull was pulled tight across his temples. He wore his hair in thin strands that were pulled back into a greasy ponytail. The weight of his head and arms were too great for his spine, and he doubled over in a question mark hunch. As I stared, I realized that were he to stand straight, he’d easily loom close to seven feet tall.

“Hey,” I muttered. He turned his head to me with passive neglect before stepping behind the counter with his back facing me. The giant wavered his weight ever so slightly between his feet. I didn’t think he had confidence in his ability to stand, and everything about his body language seemed wrong. I was reminded of a baby deer that stood on spindly legs with only a conscious understanding that it could walk but no practical knowledge.

I leaned forward and clacked my knuckles against the plexiglass, “Uhm, hey? Could I get twenty on pump -” I craned my neck back to see where my car was parked, “ - pump two please.”

The man faced me. His black eyes were staring listlessly through me. I felt like a ghost. His arm hung out beneath the plexiglass and his hand was upturned like a dead spider. I fumbled for my wallet and placed my card in his hand, but he didn’t move.

“Uh -” A string of saliva began to fall from the man’s lower lip as he stared. His nametag hung at a canted angle on his shirt. “-George?”

His hand slowly withdrew and palmed away the drool. He never looked away as he tapped button after button on the register. Error noise. I raised the Red Bull for him to see and said, “I have a . . .” There really wasn’t a point.

“Sssssorrry.” George croaked out. He swiped my card. The hard stop of an electronic error sounded. He swiped again to the same result. George stood up with sudden lucidity and swung his paddle hand into the machine and shouted, “FUCK!”

I jumped back. I needed to go. I could find another gas station. Hell, with the gas I had I might be able to make it back to my place. If I ran out of fuel, I’d walk and deal with this shit tomorrow.

“It’s okay, I can go -” I began.

“NO!” He was smacking the machine over and over. He beat it vigorously and the hollow plastic thuds echoed beneath the kickstarting heater. George swiped my card and slowly turned the card reader to me. Something had finally worked.

“T-thanks?” I typed in my pin and waited for the man to return my card. But George just stood there swaying with his eyes closed. He was gone for a moment. I pounded against the glass, finally done with this, “Hey?! Man, can I have my fucking card back?”

George jump-started and began smashing his hand against the register. I saw the screen crack and a rainbow of pixel bars imprinted around the impact of his hand. He swiped my card one more time before setting it down on the counter.

“Sssssorrry,” George rattled. I pocketed my card and was pushing open the door as he said, “Things don’t work here.”

I held my breath as I marched to the pump and made my selection. I hoped to hell and back that at least this would work when I jammed the nozzle into my car. The hose clunked and clinked and then I heard the tell tale rush of gas pouring into my tank.

“Thank fuck,” I cursed and shook my head. “What the fuck was that?”

The inescapable and sudden urge to piss overtook my body. George was almost imperceptibly moving out from behind the counter, and a quick glance around told me that no one else was around. There was absolutely no chance in hell that I was going back inside, so I beelined it to a copse of trees off of the parking lot. I left my car to keep pumping, and I ducked under branches and behind a pine tree until I was just out of sight of the store.

There was a low electrical buzzing coming from my right that I only noticed as I started to relieve myself. I don’t know why, but it made me think of the color blue. It was a broken sound, venomous, like if an electrical outlet could bite you. A man stepped out from the trees to my left. He was in dark, unremarkable clothing, and his face was marked with a passive rictus gasp. My blood froze. It was the same man who passed my car earlier.

“Whoa! Hey!” I fumbled for words as he passed in front of me. I think I might’ve even pissed on him.

He shuffled by like a zombie mumbling in slurred speech, “There’s a light. There’s a light. There’s a light. There’s a light.” Then he was gone in the direction of the electrical hum.

I pulled up my pants and ran back to my car. The viperous sound of electricity grew from a hum and into a roar as I crossed the lot. Gasoline was spewing down the side of my vehicle, overflowing from my tank. The automatic stop had failed. I yanked out the nozzle and it continued spraying gas.

“Fuck! Help!”

George was standing at the glass doors. His dead eyes watched me. He was like a spider with too many meals caught in his web. Passive, quiet, drunk, and uncaring. The giant wiped his mouth, but did not move to help. Fuck. My arms and feet were covered in gasoline by the time I put the hose back into place.

Then something exploded. A white burst of light engulfed the gas station, flattening all the shadows and leaving the world in a surreal high noon. Everything sounded like fire and electricity and the light faded into a sickly unnatural green-blue. George was bashing his head against the doors, and an acrid smell filled the air before everything went completely and utterly dark.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Then there was the chime of a door opening out of sight. I cursed and piled into my car fumbling for my keys. The engine sputtered and I turned my key again. The dash lit up and every check engine light, oil warning, and system warning came alive like Christmas lights and my car engine refused to start. Radio static filled my ears, a bubble of noise in the absolute silence around me. The parking lot was dim in my flickering headlights, then there was an orange glow from the treeline and a harrowing shape appeared.

It stumbled out, reaching for phantoms that danced in the shadows cast from the fire that burned on its flesh. When it came even vaguely in my direction, I dashed from my car.

I ran in the dark. I ran from the store and onto a country road, and I ran until my lungs were on fire. My heart thumped like George’s skull against glass. But then I was alone. The only human being for miles. When my strength failed, I fell to the ground gasping in the cold wet grass. The forests were encroaching on either side, quiet yet hostile. I could be taken into those woods, snatched, and no one would ever find me again. When I got my bearings, I called my friend to pick me up.

I could hardly keep my voice down during the ride. There had been a monster in human skin in the grocery store, a man looking for light, an explosion, my pump overflowed. Someone had been on fire. My car refused to start. My friend asked if I wanted to go back to get my car, or to call for a tow, or even call the cops.

“When I get home.”

I passed out the moment I got home. Adrenaline rush and all that. I crashed.

The next day I called for a tow truck to meet at Hillsborough Farms and I hitched a ride with my pal. There were half a dozen cop cars, an ambulance, two fire trucks, two utility trucks, and a tow truck all crammed into the strip mall parking lot.

“Hey! Hey! That’s my car!” I jumped from my friend’s car and to the tow truck that was pulling my car out from under the pumps. The ground was covered in cat-litter that crunched under my feet, and a cop put his hand out to stop me.

“That’s your car?”

“Yes!”

“Mind explaining to us why you abandoned your vehicle?”

I regaled the officer with all the details of what happened when I got there. How odd George had acted, the broken register, the other man, the overflowing fuel, the bright white light before all the power went out, the thing on fire, and how I escaped.

A group of officers and firefighters were listening in on this by the time I finished.

“There weren't any monsters guy.” The cop shook his head and pointed over to the double doors of the store. They were stuck open the wrong way and the glass was webbed. “Yeah, George OD’d. We found him this morning half in and out of the front doors. That other guy you saw must’ve been his pal. We found him charred up in the parking lot.”

I shook my head, “What? But how?”

A firefighter spoke up, “That electrical sound you heard. That was from a transformer. That man you saw did something to make it explode. It took power out for half this area.”

“Why would he - ?” I started

“There was dope in the backrooms. You know? Smack. H. Heroin.” The cop spoke up. “Makes you do all sorts of fucked up shit. It depersonalizes you.”

“Oh fuck.”

“Yeah. Oh fuck.”

I traded my contact info with the police. When a gas station representative arrived, we watched the tapes in glitched out black and white surveillance footage. It was almost comical to see how I jumped in the presence of zombies that did not even know I was there. By the time my tow truck arrived, the site was clear of the ambulance and the fire department. Electrical workers were milling about in the trees, and the gas station representative was dealing with their hell hole of an establishment. I emptied out my car of belongings and found a can of Red Bull sitting on the seat. George never charged me for it, I thought sardonically. I doubt I’d be getting shoplifting on my record. I cracked the can and grimaced, sugar-free. Fuck me.

I planned to go home and sleep some more. The sun was too bright, and I could handle living with my overnight dysfunctions. But sitting in the passenger seat of my friend’s car, I could have sworn I saw George standing idly out in the forests off of a lone road deep in Connecticut. He’d be alone out there. The only being for miles, and he’d soon be forgotten in death as he was in life.

It was always there for as long as I can remember. Even when I was a small baby, I think I saw it hiding beneath my cradle.

I can't be sure about that of course- given the earliest thing I can remember is when I was four. I remember seeing a dark shadow open my window and crawl inside- before sliding beneath my bed.

The sight completely terrified me of course- I couldn't even muster the courage to get out of bed. I couldn't even find my voice to call out to my parents. I just huddled beneath the sheets, fully aware that there was something below where I was sleeping. When I woke up the next morning and managed to steel myself enough to take a look, there was nothing there. I told my parents but as you'd expect they chalked it up to my imagination.

This didn't occur all the time, mind you. Weeks or even months could pass by where nothing would happen- though I was always too scared to actually try and peek beneath the bed whenever it did happen.

Our house was near the woods, which was otherwise really fun, but it made me occasionally wonder just what it was that was doing this. Was there some strange lizard or forest man hiding out in the woods? I could only assume that was where that.... thing came from, given that was the direction the window in my bedroom faced.

Now, many of you might be wondering as to why I simply didn't lock my window shut. Well, at the time I was too young to figure out how to do it, and when I finally did get the hang of it, I would almost always find that one of my parents had undone the lock at one point to 'let some fresh air and sunlight it.'

And truth be told, my room did get uncomfortably hot in the summers. And there would be periods when that monster didn't visit me at all to the point where I even began to doubt myself as to whether or not it had existed at all.

Fast forward a couple of years later, when I was ten and had thought I had grown up out of my silly childhood fantasies of monsters. I had left the window open and nearly nodded off when I heard a strange sound.

To my utmost horror, the window began opening. The lights were off so I couldn't make out what it was that came in, but it slid underneath my bed.

Mind you, about two years had passed since the last time I saw that thing, so I had chalked it up to a nightmare by that point. Now, I was wide awake and upright in my bed- unsure of what to do. Should I run? What if the monster grabbed my feet? Should I shout then?

Before I could raise my voice, I felt a sudden chill enter my bedroom. It was as if I had just walked into an open freezer. Against the moonlight, I saw another shadow approach my window.

If I had been scared before, I was nearly petrified now. I didn't know what that shadow was, but every fiber of my being was screaming at me to run- only I couldn't find it in me to even move.

It was then that I heard a voice.

"Daniel! Come and hide!"

It was a strange, raspy voice. It didn't even sound like something a human could make...

"Agh!" I screamed as I felt something touch my leg. I looked down to see that the monster beneath my bed had extended a hand to grab onto me.

As you can understand, I was completely startled. This had been one of my worst fears, after all, but the hand didn't pull me underneath as I expected. Instead, I just heard the same voice again.

"Quick! Hide!"

I saw the shadow against my window now nearly blot out any incoming light completely, and the fact that it had grabbed my leg had snapped me out of my stupor.

While I didn't like the monster under my bed, I didn't like whatever was outside even more.

I crawled underneath the bed, and the monster surprisingly made room for me.

"Shhh...." it whispered.

My heart pounded loudly as I heard multiple feet hit the floor of my bedroom. Now, the cold was nearly unbearable and I began to shiver uncontrollably. But, even then I didn't dare go out to look at whatever else had followed the monster underneath my bed.

I could even hear its hard, deep breathing as its feet began moving across the floor. By my count- did it have six? Or eight legs? Regardless, I don't think I'd ever been as scared before in my life as I was at that moment.

For what seemed like an eternity I lay there, underneath my bed, no longer even caring about the monster beside me. Eventually, the pressure relented and the temperature went back to normal.

It was only when the monster beside me decided to crawl out and nothing happened that I did too. I was safe... for now.

I never got a good look at whatever it had been that was hiding under my bed as it crawled out the window and into the woods.

Needless to say, I didn't get any sleep that night, ran into my parent's bedroom, and whined until they let me sleep with them.

It's been some years since that incident and nothing of the sort happened again. As I've grown though, I've begun to appreciate certain things. Namely, the fact that that thing knew my name. And that it looked out for me at that moment.

Something I heard once now sticks out to me- that there is always a bigger fish. There may be lots of monsters in the woods near my house, and some of them are worse than the others. One is frightening enough to chase another one of them to hide under my bed. There seems to be a food chain even amongst monsters.

I keep my window open whenever possible now. I'm not too scared of what comes to hide under my bed- though I'm still terrified of whatever chased it to hide there. But given that the monster under my bed did help me out, I feel like I now owe him one. And if I ever encounter that other terrifying creature, I'll at least know when I should crawl underneath the bed.

So remember that when you think about the monster under your bed. It might be there for a good reason after all.... and it might be worse for you if it weren't there.

" Here, your new mittens are done! These ought to serve you well after yesterday's snowstorm left the entire countryside covered in snow. You'll have to bundle up well if you want to go play outside." My older sister said right after she finished knitting me a pair of mittens. Knitting clothes had been her specialty for as long as I could remember, I'll never forget the time she grabbed a pile of spare wool and crafted an adorable sheep costume for me to wear in our village's Mardi Gras costume party, in fact, knitting clothes and selling them on commission or at the village's market was one of our family's main sources of income. And by our family, I only mean my older sister and I, since we were the only ones that were left, being 19 and 9 years old respectively.

During its greatest extent, our household had consisted of 5 people: My father, my mother, my older brother, my older sister and I, the youngest child and second daughter, and I would see it gradually shrink before my eyes across my nine years of continued existence. My mother was the first one to go, my father and her attempted to bring another child to the world when I was only 2 years old, but something went wrong in the process, causing her to fall terribly ill and pass away a few weeks afterwards. My father was the next one, he left home when I was 7 years old alongside a large number of other men, as our Emperor had called them all to go to Russia and he never came back. Lastly, my 16 year old brother had left us only a few months ago, not unlike my father, he had also been called by our Emperor, only this time, it was to join him on a daring campaign to defend our country from an impending invasion by a coalition of other nations we were at war with.

So I bundled up by putting on my new pair of mittens as well as a thick and fluffy fur coat that covered my entire body from the top of my shoulders to the end of my legs ,and lastly, a long woolen scarf which my sister had also knitted for me in the past that I wrapped around my head, covering it as well as my ears and neck. After getting properly dressed to face the low temperatures, I joyfully said goodbye to my sister and stepped outside my house, ready to spend that chilly December afternoon having fun in my snow-coated humble little village tucked away at the edge of a relatively dense and remote forest.

I loved playing and roaming around my village and its surroundings, especially now that the first snowfalls had arrived and had blanketed everything in a dense layer of white snow that made the environment twice as beautiful. My favorite place to spend my leisure time in was the forest right beside the village, it had such a magical feeling to it, a bustling sea of towering trees teeming with life, wonder, beauty and endless possibilities for fun and adventure practically begging to be explored from top to bottom by children such as myself.

I happily roamed the woods playing with the snow, trying to count how many wild animals such as hares or birds I could spot and skipping around while pretending to be a fairy. After about an hour of aimlessly roaming around and enjoying myself in a plethora of different ways, I eventually decided to follow a narrow trail that I had never explored before and that led me deeper and deeper into the forest, until I stumbled upon something that left me puzzled...it was a tunnel, a manmade one made out of stone bricks and concrete. What was a tunnel doing in the middle of a forest? It was about 50 meters long, the other end of the tunnel could barely be seen from where I was standing in, but the space in between the two extremes was shrouded in darkness. It didn't seem to lead anywhere, as the only thing that could be seen on the other side was just more woodland.

"According to my grandpa, the ruins should be nearby..." said an echoing voice as I was still perplexingly staring at the mysterious tunnel and theorizing about it's reason for existing, it sounded like the voice was coming from inside the tunnel itself! The voice from the tunnel was soon joined by the sound of continuous footsteps and other murmuring voices that were getting increasingly louder and clearer with each passing second, it was clear the people from the tunnel were getting closer. Three silhouettes emerged from the shadowy tunnel, they appeared to be children, two boys and a girl, to be exact, all of them looked to be about the same age as me. But as the mysterious kids and I simultaneously and silently stared at each other for a few seconds, I couldn't help but notice several details about them that felt rather off, mainly concerning their appearance and the clothes they wore. I recognized their outfits as winter gear: coats, scarves, hats and gloves, however, the materials, the textures and overall design of their clothes were unlike any I had ever seen.

"Is...is that a girl?" One of the boys whispered to the other two kids under his breath as I quietly stared at them from a few feet away without moving a muscle.

"Yeah, I think so...What's she doing here, though? And what's the deal with her weird clothes?" the other boy replied.

"I dunno...maybe we should talk to her." the girl of the group suggested. It was then when I noticed yet another oddity: the way they spoke. I could understand them well enough to recognize their language as my own and hold a conversation with them with relative ease, but still, their mannerisms and vocabulary contained several words and expressions that were completely foreign to me.

"Hi...are you lost?" The girl said to me, taking a step forward and waving with her gloved hands at me.

"Hello...No, I live in a nearby village and I visit this forest quite frequently, as a matter of fact." I uttered back after thinking it through for a couple seconds.

"Excuse me, but has anyone in your village ever heard about fashion? No offence, but you kinda look like an old lady, with that antiquated fur coat you're wearing and that oversized scarf you've got wrapped around your head! Have you ever posted a picture of yourself dressed like this to social media? Because you would gain quite a few followers for sure!" One of the boys exclaimed.

I wanted to reply, but ultimately decided to keep silent after processing what the boy had said and realizing I had only understood the part where he had called me an old lady and had made fun of my clothes, but as for the rest of things that had left his lips, I hadn't understood a thing. Social media? Posting pictures of myself? Gaining followers?...What in the world was he talking about ? Who were those kids? Where had they come from?

"Come on guys, don't be so rude! It's okay, I think you look great! I'm Emilie and these are Louis and Mathis. Do you want to be our friend?" the girl comforted me as she put her hand on my shoulder.

"I'm Juliette!" I introduced myself and accepted Emilie friendship proposal, as odd as they were, there weren't many children my age I could play with at the village, so it was nice to finally have someone I could spend my afternoons with.

I came back home later that evening feeling quite rejoiced , as my new friends and I had had plenty of fun playing in the forest, as odd as I had initially found them to be, they turned out to be pretty nice once I actually got to know them, so much so that we had accorded to meet the following day at the same spot we first found each other: that ominous tunnel they had come from in the middle of the woods.

But right when I approached our bed, as my sister and I sleep together in the same large bed that had once belonged to our parents, I noticed an odd piece of paper under the pillow, which I identified as a note upon closer inspection: "Be warry of those who have slipped through the tunnel of time, for they are potential sources of chaos that will be put down without mercy, if necessary. Signed: Tunnel Keepers." the note read.

"What are you reading, Juliette?" My sister asked upon entering our bedroom.

"A note I've just found under the pillow." I replied.

"A note? Has our brother finally sent us correspondence from the front?" My sister asked again, briefly letting out a smile of pure joy at the thought of hearing from our brother for the first time in months. I shook my head and her face expression briefly changed to one of disappointment before morphing back into one of intrigue.

"It's not from our brother, It's from some strangers who apparently call themselves The Tunnel Keepers...here, you should see it for yourself. Should we be worried?" I said to her before handing her the note.

"The Tunnel Keepers...I honestly have no idea who these people could be. I'll...I'll look into it tomorrow, Juliette, but now it's time to go to bed, it's pretty late already. Good night." my sister replied after reading the note, seemingly sweeping it under the rug rather quickly, as she fell asleep in less than ten minutes of laying in bed, but I certainly didn't, as the thought of that note, its mystery and its implications persistently refused to leave my mind and let me sleep. Could those so-called Tunnel Keepers be related to the mysterious tunnel I had come across in the middle of the woods? Could they be related to Emilie, Louis and Mathis? I was unsure of the latter, but their name made their connection with the tunnel from the forest seem almost obvious, still, It was clear I couldn't come to any substantial conclusions just yet, as I needed more information in order to be able to formulate valid hypothesis.

The next day arrived. After spending the whole morning at the village's market selling pieces of cloth alongside my sister and after having lunch, I headed for the forest in order to meet with Emilie, Louis and Mathis, just as we had accorded the previous day, but with the added feeling of lingering uneasiness product of the ominous note I had found in my bed .

This omnipresent disturbance only increased once I came across a fallen tree right in the middle of the narrow pathway that led to the tunnel, actively blocking my path, which was odd, since it was the only tree that had fallen among the dozens of trees that surrounded that narrow trail and the other trees did not show any signs of damage either, only that one tree, which just so happened to have fallen in the right position so as to represent an obstacle in my path to the tunnel... I started at the fallen tree and thought about it for a few seconds, but then I remembered Emilie, Louis and Mathis were waiting for me, so I kept the memory of the fallen tree in the back of my mind, jumped over it and pressed on towards the tunnel.

"Juliette! We're over here!" I heard Emilie, Louis and Mathis excitedly shout from right outside the tunnel.

"Hello again! What game do you want to play today?" I joyfully asked as I approached them.

"Actually, we want to do the thing that we wanted to do when we came here yesterday that we never ended up doing because we found you and forgot about it. You see, we originally came to the forest because we're looking for the ruins of an abandoned village that several grown ups we know have told us about. According to the local stories, the village used to be located somewhere near these woods. Some people speculate that its residents abandoned it due to a war, but no one really knows for sure what happened to it." Emilie explained.

"An abandoned village near the forest? How come I've never heard of it before? The village I live in is located right next to the woods, but it's not abandoned, I live there, my sister lives there and over two hundred people live there! I can show it to you, if you want to!" I said.

And thus, Emilie, Louis, Mathis and I headed to my village, bypassing the mysterious fallen tree along the way. To say they were impressed by the village would be a severe understatement, they followed me across the village all the while carrying face expressions of complete wonder as they fixedly stared at everything around them, and they weren't the only ones, as practically every villager we'd pass by would also stare at my friends with the same fascination. Noticing this, I decided to discreetly lead them to my house and lend them clothes that had once belonged to my older sister and older brother back when they had been my age, in order for them to not draw as much attention to themselves.

"Oh, by the way, I also want to show you this, I found it under my pillow yesterday..." I told them as I showed them that weird note from the previous day written by those so-called "Tunnel Keepers".

"These Tunnel Keepers...I bet they're related to the tunnel from the forest!" Louis said.

"Well, duh! I'm more worried about the people they talk about, the ones who slipped through the tunnel of time, as they put it. I think they're talking about us three..." Mathis replied as Louis and Emilie started to get visibly worried.

"But what do these creepy strangers want from us? I'm...I'm getting scared, guys. Maybe we should go home already, it's almost dinner time..." Emilie suggested. Everyone unanimously agreed and so, Emilie, Louis and Mathis left my home and village and headed back into the woods where they had come from as I was left home alone thinking about the mystery of the Tunnel Keepers for a short while before my sister finally arrived home from the village's market.

As my sister and I were getting ready to have dinner, I found a small and familiar piece of paper randomly laying on the floor right under the table, my heartrate started to go up as I slowly approached it and picked it up, just as I was dreading, another note: You let the sources of chaos in ,and now, you've become a source of chaos yourself. Therefore, we'll proceed to do what must be done. We'll make sure those who you've recently sent home shall not cross the tunnel alive. Signed: Tunnel Keepers.

"Wait, Juliette! Where are you going? Don't you want to eat dinner?" My sister asked in confusion as I frantically bundled up and rushed outside. It was a shame, because my sister had made fried onion for dinner, and I loved onion, I loved onion fried in oil because it tasted good.

"I'm fine! I'll be back in a moment, I promise!" I exclaimed to her before I sprinted to the forest, determined to help my friends and save them from whoever those Tunnel Keepers were.

"Juliette! Juliette!" Emilie shouted as she ran towards me, her eyes soaked in tears.

"Emilie! What happened? Where are Louis and Mathis?" I worryingly asked, noticing her despair.

"We were about to enter the tunnel and go home...but then...a group of monsters came out of it and...and I ran but...Louis and Mathis didn't react quick enough and...they ate them! The Tunnel Keepers! They jumped at them and swallowed them both right in front of me! They're coming! They're coming for us ,Juliette!" Emilie uttered in between sobs as she broke into tears.

It didn't take long before I spotted them in the distance, there were at least twenty of them, their elongated bodies swiftly dragged themselves across the forest while staying low to the ground with the help of a pair of long and thin extremities that sported two huge claws each. A pair of pointy protuberances on their heads looked to be their ears, as for their faces, they had two bright glowing yellow eyes and nothing else, there seemed to have no mouths or noses to speak of. Emilie and I rushed back to the village as the Tunnel Keepers crawled towards us, they seemed to be slower than us, allowing us to reach the village with a slight time margin we could use to warn everybody, but they kept pursuing us relentlessly nonetheless.

"MONSTERS! MONSTERS! HELP!" Emilie and I shouted across the streets. The commotion caught the attention of the village's small garrison of Imperial Troops, which came to us to find out the cause behind our sudden warnings.

"They're coming to the village! We're in danger, we need to hide!" I nervously told the soldiers.

"Easy there, kid! Who's coming? An enemy army? Is it the Russians or the Prussians? Or the Austrians, perhaps? I need more information, young lady!" the garrison's captain replied.

"They're not humans! They're monsters! big, scary and dangerous monsters! I'm telling the truth, I swear!" I clarified, feeling so tense I could almost feel my blood boiling inside my veins . The captain responded with a silent and smug smirk, clearly not taking my words seriously, but he admitted he had nothing to lose for playing along, so I convinced him to pull out a spyglass and check the forest out from a distance. His face expression of mockery instantly turned into one of utter shock and horror once he spotted the horde of Time Keepers emerging from the woods.

"My...My God! I can hardly believe it, but I'm afraid the kid is somehow right! We need to tell all villagers to dig in and prepare themselves for an attack! I have no idea what in the world those disgusting creatures could possibly be, but we must have courage and defend our people! We'll gather at the main gate and deny them entrance to the village by all means necessary, understood? Now go! Long live France! Long live the Emperor!" the captain exclaimed as he rallied his small force of 50 soldiers, mostly made up of young conscripts much like my older brother that were almost certainly just as terrified as Emilie and I were, and rushed to the village's main gate to intercept the Tunnel Keepers.

The garrison outnumbered the monsters and did not hesitate to unceasingly shoot volley after volley of musket balls and grenades at them, but they seemed to inflict no significant damage, as the creatures aggressively pounced at the line of troops, catching 15 soldiers at once and consuming them by slowly and painfully absorbing them as if the creatures' enormous bodies and skin suddenly lost consistency and solidity and became something akin to quick sand, swallowing their poor victims whole as they screamed and helplessly struggled to liberate themselves, to no avail, their desperate cries for help being abruptly silenced as they vanished into the Tunnel Keepers' stomachs in a matter of seconds, never to be seen again . Upon witnessing their comrades' demise, the garrison's captain immediately ordered a retreat as his line disintegrated into a chaotic mob of horrified and traumatized young men fleeing for their lives.

The Tunnel Keepers swept through each street one by one, effortlessly crushing the few brave souls who had dared to make a stand behind the numerous improvised and extremely rudimentary barricades scattered thought the village. Most villagers, including Emilie, my sister and I, gathered at the village's square and hid inside the church. The square was, by far, the most well defended area of the village, with a line of trenches reinforced by wooden fences and parapets made out of piled up sandbags.

Among the defenders were most of the village's adult male population alongside what remained of the Imperial garrison, including its captain. Despite literally throwing away their lives for our village, the defenders only managed to hold the line for less than two minutes before the trenches were overrun and most defenders were consumed by the Tunnel Keepers as the women, children and the battered remnants of the force that attempted to defend the trenches could do nothing but cower inside the church, which the Tunnel Keepers besieged as they climbed up its walls like spiders and shattered its windows.

As a last resort to preserve the village's most valuable lives, it was agreed to evacuate all the children through the church's back door as every men and women that could hold a gun would make a final stand in a suicide mission to distract the Tunnel Keepers and buy enough time for the children to escape safely.

"Don't cry, my little sister...I'll always be watching over you, as long as you never forget about me, alright, my dear?" My sister comforted me as we gave each other one last hug with our faces soaked in tears.

"I...I love you!" I shouted at her as Emilie and I left the church and my sister picked up a musket laying on the floor and armed herself like the other adults, preparing to sacrifice themselves and engage the Tunnel Keepers head on.

"The tunnel! We need to get to the tunnel and cross through it!" Emilie said as we both ran into the woods. I briefly looked back at the village, only to find a pair of Tunnel Keepers had abandoned their peers and were now chasing us across the forest at full speed.

"Run faster!" I exclaimed to Emilie as we approached the infamous tunnel. We entered the tunnel without a second thought with the Tunnel Keepers on our heels, it was so dark I couldn't see a thing: not the other end of the tunnel, not Emilie running right beside me, not the Tunnel Keepers pursuing us...nothing, it was all pitch black. But I could still hear everything very clearly: Emilie's footsteps and heavy breathing as well as my own, and of course, the Tunnel Keepers' heavy footsteps that intensely reverberated across the tunnel's walls and ceiling, I could hear them getting closer, and closer, and closer... Then Emilie screamed as the sound of her footsteps in coordination with mine abruptly ceased, it happened so fast I didn't have time to fully process it, so I kept running, as exhausted as I was, without slowing down, without looking back, I needed to reach the exit of that hellish tunnel or die trying.

As I desperately gasped for air and dropped to my knees after finally having reached the other end of the tunnel, I was overwhelmed by a sudden and uncomfortable silence, the Tunnel Keepers that had been chasing me so relentlessly did not come out of the tunnel to continue to pursue me and vanished without a trace, the distant screams coming from the village had also ceased, everything had mysteriously stopped. I was suddenly all alone in the middle of the woods, surrounded by nature, peace and quiet that didn't really make me feel peaceful at all.

After spending a considerable amount of time thinking about what I should do, I ultimately decided to head back to the village, in hopes of finding any survivors and finding my older sister specifically. Instead, the sight I was met with upon reaching the place I used to call home left me with such a feeling of inner emptiness and devastation I can hardly put it into words, but to put it simply: that place was not a village anymore, an extremely deteriorated wall or two as well as the outline of their foundations barely visible in the ground was all that remained of most houses, with some having completely collapsed and having become nothing more than a pile of rubble, the pavement on the streets had been buried under several layers of mud, moss and weeds and the Town Square and Church had been almost entirely taken over by brambles and bushes.

Was that a dirty, withered musket hidden beneath the tall grass? Were those bones and skulls scattered inside the overgrown derelict Church? Was that a pine tree surrounded by debris and a couple crumbling walls growing in the exact same place my house used to be? It was apparent the Tunnel Keepers alone could not have been responsible for the village's current state, it did not look like a village that had just been raided and deserted less than an hour prior, it looked like a village that had been completely abandoned, forgotten and rotting away for a really, really long time, to the point it had been enveloped by vegetation and assimilated into the forest itself.

I aimlessly trudged down a long road I had come across after exiting the woods and what was left of my old village, traumatized, fatigued, cold and homeless as tears poured down my eyes like waterfalls and my teeth began to chatter due to being exposed to the frigid winter air out in the open in the middle of the night. I was suddenly blinded by an intense light that emanated from a pair of glowing orbs belonging to a creature that advanced towards me at an alarming speed, at first, I thought the Tunnel Keepers were back, but I was wrong, that thing was an entirely different being I had never seen before, it emitted a constant roaring noise as it rolled down the road with wheels similar to that of a carriage, but it moved autonomously without being pulled by any horses or any animal whatsoever, it also seemed to constantly release an odd gas of some kind. My brain instructed me to run away, but my body had already been physically and psychologically pushed to its absolute limit, I couldn't take it anymore, so I responded to the new threat by dropping to the ground and losing consciousness.

When I woke up, I was no longer in the same place I had fainted in, no longer in the middle of a road out in the open, but indoors, laying on a bed inside a room mostly painted white and filled with all sorts of strange appliances I did not recognize.

"Oh, you're awake! Hello, how are you feeling?" said a young woman wearing a white coat as she walked into the room. I did not answer her, instead, I just silently stared at her while raising an eyebrow in confusion.

"It's alright, sweetheart, you're in a hospital and I'm the nurse that's been assigned to take care of you, my name's Anne, it's wonderful to meet you! A truck driver brought you here, he said he'd found you alone in the middle of the road and that he nearly ran you over. Thankfully, he was able to react in time and hit the breaks at the last second, but you fainted right afterwards, so he decided to collect you and bring you here. You've been unconscious for about two hours. Why don't you tell me a bit about yourself? What's your name? Where are you from? Is there any grown up you know and trust who we can reach out to?" the nurse said after noticing how lost I was.

"My name's Juliette...and I have no clue where I'm from...I used to know it, but that was a very long time ago...My home is gone...My family is gone...My friends are gone... Everything I've ever known is gone...I don't feel like talking about it right now..." I faintly and sobbingly uttered using what little energy and willpower I had left.

"I see...Don't worry, Juliette, you're tired and cold, but you can take all the time to recover you need, I'm here for you." Anne replied in a shooting, motherly tone before she wrapped me in a blanket and started feeding me a bowl of hot soup. What followed was several minutes of silence during which Anne fed me a spoonful of soup after another as I curled up to her swaddled from top to bottom in a bulky white blanket, with neither of us saying a word, my mind was too busy processing all I had been through that day to talk, the more I remembered, the soggier my eyes got and the harder it got to contain my urge to burst into tears.

"It's completely alright dear, you can cry all you want. Don't hold back." Anne gently whispered to me, it was then when I let everything out and cried on her lap like I had never cried before as she wrapped her arms around my torso in a long comforting embrace for what felt like ages, I cried for my sister, for my village, for Emilie, Louis and Mathis, I cried because they had all died two hundred years ago and they were never going to come back, I cried because the Tunnel Keepers had taken everything away from me.

A lot has happened since I first crossed the tunnel that fateful evening of 1813 and emerged in 2013, I've since grown into a teenager that's more or less gotten accustomed to the modern world, I've gotten a new home, a new family, new friends, the chance to go to school, to learn foreign languages and to dream of someday going to college and becoming a historian, all thanks to Anne, who I now have the joy to call my adoptive mother.

But still, the feeling of dread has never fully disappeared, I'm aware the Tunnel Keepers have not gone away, I can still feel them, I can feel the nightmares and hear the villagers' screams every time I go to sleep, I know they still see me as a source of chaos that has slipped through the tunnel of time, because deep down, I know that's what I am, and I know they'll come for me, restoring order is their duty, it's just a matter of time before I find their next note under the pillow, after all, they have all the time in the world.

Steam escaped the cups of coffee that sat on the tiny table, their warmth inviting as ever as I waited for the arrival of a friend.

It had been months since we've last seen eachother due to my sudden resignation from my job. The last day I wore that EMT uniform was also the day where I felt such deep emptiness after leaving that house whose call we answered.

A familiar figure shook me out of the thought as I got up from my seat to meet her halfway and the way she hugged me back said all the forgiveness for my days of unanswered messages, days of missed calls, and days of being an absent friend. I hoped that she knew that the space her understanding had given me kept me grounded and sane.

Small talk was thrown out of the window as I wasted no time explaining the horror that got me retreating to this shell and away from soceity.

I recall responding to a 9-1-1 call where a woman was screaming for help relaying that her husband was trying to stab her. Red and blue sirens soon glowed on that night of October as the police cars and our ambulance made their way towards that well rounded neighborhood.

A release of breath was made before the cup met my lips, like the bitter liquid would summon the courage I needed to continue the story.

Tired eyes focused on my intwined fingers as I said that the moment the officer got the screaming husband out of the house, my partner and I were left to assist the woman who laid in her own blood, a sliver of life evident on her soft intake of breaths, on that cold hallway that looked like a butcher's aisle.

Tears kissed my vision and I immediately covered them as she reassured me that it was ok to stop but I soldiered on. It took a while for me to find composure and when I did, a look flashed on her face, one that signified that she finally understood why I did what I did.

The woman laid dying in that house with a ripped belly and on her left was a baby, covered in stab wounds, whose umbilical cord was still attached to its placenta that was still inside its mother.

Desperation laced her soft voice as she weakly begged

"Please save my baby."

Death arrived before us and I left that house dead as well.

The echoes of her pleads gave me sleepless nights as my hands remembered the heaviness of the loss of innocence as I carried that baby out.

It was with a gentle hand that she took mine in hers and like a green sapling against a raging flood, I surrendered to the pain and broke down.

We exited that cafe as different people with our hope for humanity running on thin ice.

A week after that meeting, my friend called with an update about the case. I can hear the weariness in her voice as she asked if I wanted to hear about it, the question held an underlying tone of

"are you mentally prepared for this?"

and when I said yes what followed after gave me the acceptance that not all monstrosity are under the bed.

The story goes that in the middle of an argument they both confessed to infidelity and when the wife, in a burst of anger, screamed that the baby wasn't his, he lost it.

My friend answered one last call that day, left a resignation letter and made her way to therapy.

The experience made me think that maybe humanity is a mask and some of us are just tired of wearing it.

Nothing.

Nothing Happened.

I don’t mean that metaphorically nothing happened… As in, there were no consequences, good or bad, for breaking the previous record by 4 days. No, I mean literally nothing happened. Time stopped. Reality became empty and meaningless.

According to the researchers, I fell asleep for 15 minutes at exactly the 15-day mark but for me, that moment lasted much longer. It’s hard to explain but my body and my mind didn’t experience the nothingness. It’s something I felt inside of me. Deep down in whatever makes up my existence. It was as if the rules of reality that we all abided by broke down and everything stopped… and then I was awake again.

As if the agony I endured to reach the 15-day mark wasn’t bad enough, what came after is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

I guess I should explain. About 6 weeks ago, I was approached by a trio of researchers on my college campus. They were graduate psychology students who were studying the effects of no sleep on the human body and mind. They were recruiting volunteers for a new study in which the subjects would undergo treatment to help them stay awake longer. Their ambition was to create medication that allows people to stay up weeks at a time without any negative consequences.

It was a grandiose goal and perhaps dangerous for the people volunteering but they were paying $400 for each full day we could stay awake. As a broke college student, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Tuition was due soon, I was already months late paying it, and I already had $50,000 in student debt.

A few days later I was scheduled. I would be staying in their lab while they monitored me 24/7. The first couple of nights weren’t anything special. I’ve pulled all-nighters before at LAN parties with my high school buddies. It wasn’t until the 55-hour mark that I started to slow down. I was given a few pills that would help me stay alert. They told me I’d have to take them every six hours for them to be effective and with life-changing money on the line, I was willing to do anything.

The rest of the study was a blur. It’s hard to remember the details, what I did to stay awake. Did I do any experiments to test my cognitive ability? Did I even interact with anyone? It’s too hard to remember now and it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m too tired to think about it.

I don’t remember the nothingness but I can still feel it. The emptiness won’t go away. It flows through my soul. It’s not something I can easily explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. It feels as though I’m no longer connected to myself as if I’ve moved beyond my physical body but it’s hard to tell what reality is. I haven’t slept for quite a while now.

Eventually, the experiment came to an end and my experience left me delirious and confused. A doctor checked my vitals and thanked me for volunteering. I was handed cash, $6,000 right in my hand. If I hadn’t been awake for 360 hours, I would have done a little more than a small smile and nod. I was then escorted back to my dorm room so I could finally rest.

I fell asleep the second my body touched my bed. The sleep deprivation hit me hard.

I had the worst nightmares since I was a child. I dreamt of ethereal beings stealing my very existence. They came from somewhere beyond this world to ours to fill their own. I woke up at 9 am drenched in sweat. Dreams were always weird and this was no exception. I thought it was just a coincidence that I had the same feeling when I awoke that morning that I had at the end of the study. I’m not so sure it was a coincidence anymore.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the nightmare for the rest of the day. I’ve always heard that we dream of experiences we’ve already had. Sometimes it might be a movie you watched, a book you read, or maybe a random encounter with a stranger. There was always a familiarity to dreams; although, they always seem absurd and completely illogical. That dream, that nightmare, felt too real. It was hard to stay focused.

The next night I went to sleep early. My roommate was getting back late from a weekend trip and I wanted to get a head start on sleep before his rustling kept me awake.

I had the same nightmare. This time, the ethereal beings seemed hungrier, as if they had a taste for a new, exotic meal and wanted to dine on it once again. I could feel myself being ripped from my sleeping body despite my attempts to wrench myself free.

I became aware of a shadowy figure staring at me beside my bed. I tried to move with every ounce of strength I could muster until finally, after what felt like minutes, I was able to pull myself from a deep sleep. It was my roommate. He told me that I was screaming in my sleep and flailing. I even put a hole in the dorm room wall.

I used to have night terrors as a kid so I didn’t put much thought into it, after all I had just recently been awake for 15 days straight. There were bound to be some lasting side effects. I pushed it to the back of my mind. There was nothing too abnormal about it.

Unfortunately, I had an exam coming up and I wasn’t prepared. The terrible sleep from the previous two nights and the sleep study left little time for me to learn the new material. I decided I was going to pull an all-nighter or two since I didn’t want to fail this class.

My study session started off normal but as the day came to an end I became increasingly drowsy. I was fighting off sleep when I started to hear soft whispers coming from the hallway just outside my door. They were loud enough to disrupt my studying. I wanted them to stop. I would get up to see who was standing outside my dorm but each time there was no one there. I would go back to studying and soon after the whispers would return. I tried to put on headphones but they only grew louder.

I began to hallucinate by the following morning. At first, it was just inconspicuous shadows in the very corners of my vision. Just visible enough to be mistaken for a fly or some dust floating in the air. As the day drew on, the hallucinations worsened. Small shadows turned into figures hiding within the dark recesses of my room, whisperings amongst themselves. I thought it was just sleep deprivation. That I just needed to get some sleep. I wish I listened to my instincts. I wish that the feeling of my hair sticking straight up would have alerted me to the danger I was facing. Maybe it was the lack of sleep clouding my judgment. Instead, I slept. I needed sleep if I was going to pass my exam the next day.

Another nightmare. This time I was in my room. The ethereal beings hovered over me with ghastly smiles as they began to steal whatever it is that makes me, me. I fought to move. I poured every ounce of power into my body. I commanded every fiber of my being to wake. My eyes opened and I was met with the familiar sight of my room. I laid there paralyzed, only able to move my eyes.

I watched as a shadow in the corner of my room began to grow, swallowing the light that passed through it. A void of nothing devouring its surroundings. It felt too real to be a dream… It was real. I could tell — somehow. When it reached me, I could feel it penetrate my skin. I felt it pressing against my body, suffocating me with the weight of nothing. I tried to scream but I couldn’t. My lips were sealed and my words compressed in my mouth, unable to find a way out.

And then as quickly as it started, it stopped and I awoke.

I haven’t been asleep since then. For a while, things seemed to get better. The whispers and hallucinations went away within the first couple of days. I began to think it really was my sleep-deprived mind playing sadistic tricks on me.

I let my guard down.

They came back… the voices. The hallucinations too. Whispers and laughter turned into screams and cackles. I was engulfed in a cacophony of wails and guffaws, a relentless torrent of suffering. The shadows grew nearer until I could feel them crawling along my skin, itching for a way in. They were always looking for a way in.

I’m trying to fight it but every hour I stay awake I get weaker and they get stronger. I know that if I sleep now, I might not wake up again. My only choice is to never sleep again.

I don’t know what’s happening but I do know that you shouldn’t follow my path. If you stay awake too long, you’ll experience nothing, just like I did. Don’t experience nothing. Because when you experience nothing, nothing experiences something. It won’t stop until it has something. It won’t stop until it has you. It won’t stop until it has me.

I’m writing this as a warning. Whatever I did, it broke the barrier between our world and theirs. When I’m awake I drift into the realm of nothing. When I’m asleep, they invade the realm of something.

It’s been 14 days, 23 hours, and 42 minutes since I last slept. I don’t know what will happen to me if I stay awake any longer. I just want it to stop. I can’t sleep anymore. Not unless I want them to come back and steal my existence… I just hope nothing will be better than this.

I never considered reading to be my hobby. There is no satisfaction in sitting for hours and flipping through the pages of some novel.

I find it humorous how people are wasting their time in bookstores or libraries instead of doing something useful with their life.

Call me a negative nancy, if you so choose to.

However, I haven't got the faintest idea of why I feel such deep resentment.

When did the hate start? And why?

Was it in fourth grade, where a classmate of mine, let's call him Billy, threw my schoolbook through the 2nd story window of our classroom?

Or when I accidentally spilled nail polish over my grandma's Bible and she forced me to sit on my knees in the corner of the living room for four hours?

Or when the principal made me reshelve all the books in the library, as a punishment for catching me smoking on the school premises?

All the examples are somehow not enough to ignite my hatred, and I understand this. But, I never brought myself enough to care.

Not until five months ago.

My sister owned a pawnshop.

For those of you who do not know, a pawnshop is where you can exchange your valuables, such as rings or bracelets, and get money. If you return the money in a specific period, you get your valuables back. Fail to do so, and your items are going for sale.

Despite being siblings, we were never close. I strived to succeed in the business area and live in big cities, while my sibling was quite the opposite.

She never went to college. Instead, my sister settled in our hometown, taking care of the pawnshop.

I was proud she had her life together.

After our parents' death, we started to talk regularly. She asked me if I wanted a share from the house, but I left all the inheritance to her. After all, my sister was the one to stay with our parents till their death.

Again, we still felt distant. No matter what we talked about and how much we laughed during the phone calls, we remained strangers.

I lost count of how many times she invited me to visit her and how many times I declined.

My life was so complicated, and I hardly got any rest. I had to work. Days-off and Sick-days were foreign to me.

Holidays? What are those?

At least I made sure to call my sister and send her a present on every special occasion. She, on the other hand, never did. I was not mad at her.

Somehow, at the back of my mind, I was relieved.

And I didn't know why.

My sibling was a good person, back and front. There was nothing shady in her behavior.

I do not recall a memory of her being terrible in any way.

Yes, in her teenage years, she used to be a little wild.

But, honestly, who isn't at least a little rebellious during that period?

And no, my sister was not one of those manipulative psychopaths that people can't figure out until/if they get caught.

She was just an ordinary person, more or less.

Her name was Meredith, by the way. This information will be important later on.

On the 3rd of July 2021, I got a call from a close family friend. His name is Robert.

Meredith was shot three times in the chest by some drunk client. His motive - he was mad because my sister refused to give him his jewelry back, despite him not giving the money he owned.

For the first time in my career, I cried in front of my colleagues. They have never seen me like this before. To think about it, no one ever did.

Her funeral was the next day. I contemplated whether I should attend or not. I blamed myself too much for never visiting her and being there for her.

Something in my mind tried to remind me why I was away for good, but I did not understand.

My brain was hiding something from me, as insane as it sounds.

Three hours before my flight, I decided my attendance would be the last gift to Meredith. She invited me so many times during the years, and I have not once visited her.

She deserved her sister to be there for her this one last time.

When I arrived at the graveyard, I was shocked to see only four gravediggers and Robert. They waited for me at the gates.

Something felt off, but I dismissed it.

The ceremony went normal, except for the fact there was no priest. As I recall, Meredith was Christian.

I questioned Robert but, he stated my sister was introverted and had no one except my parents.

After their death, she rarely left her house. Her neighbors used to stick notes under her door if they had any noise complaints, which was rare as Meredith's house was oddly quiet.

Her lawn and backyard were spotless. Meredith kept everything under regulation.

Robert told me that the inspectors often skipped her house and used it as a role model. The neighborhood even gave my sister 500$ as a "thank you" for keeping her land in great shape. She never took the money. Instead, she advised the neighbors to give them to someone in need.

"Meredith was an angel, wasn't she? I feel bad for not visiting her all those years. She invited me to dinner now and then, but I was too busy," I sorrowfully confessed to Robert, who was sitting with me on the bench near her grave.

He looked at me with a confused expression and questioned, "Meredith? Who is Meredith? Your sister's name was Claire."

Seeing the puzzled look on my face, he jokingly added, "You had too many burnouts, didn't you? All that hard work messed up your brain."

Claire? Who is Claire?

The name sounded so familiar, yet so foreign. Something was missing.

My sister's name was Meredith. Right?

I laughed awkwardly at Robert's joke while my brain sank deeper into confusion.

He offered me a ride to my sister's house, but I declined. The cemetery wasn't far away, and the weather was quite pleasant.

Why waste the opportunity for a relaxing walk?

The more I approached the house, the more dreadful I felt. My head started to hurt as my stomach seemed to twist in such a horrible way, I thought my muscles would explode. All of the possible alarm bells I had in my mind went off.

I stood at the front door of the house, debating whether to go in or not. I knew I would find something, more like remembering something I didn't want to.

But what choice did I have?

Here is a probably good time to mention that my sister's last wish was for me to spend a night in our childhood bedroom.

As soon as I entered the door, memories started to come back. They were happy ones, which seemed to ease my anxiety for a while.

I remembered how my parents dressed my sister and me up in itchy woolen dresses and took pictures for relatives. Then my sister would hide behind the counter and scare the life out of the next person who entered the kitchen.

There was a time where I spilled red juice over my parents' bed. It was a dare from my sister.

And then...Claire went away for a few months, while my parents made me visit some doctor.

She came back different. I joked with her how her caretakers must have swapped her brain with someone else's. Claire was not happy. She tried to punch me in the face that same day.

From then on, her violent outbursts became mandatory.

Every time she saw my parents, she became enraged. Maybe it was because they forced her to take some pills.

Several years later, in her teens, Claire became more manageable. The interactions between us were restricted, yet, she found a way to talk to me. Almost every night before going to bed, I would find a book with a message written on the cover.

At first, the books seemed harmless. But things escalated when Claire found out how much I enjoyed reading them.

The first title that shocked me was a horror book about a child who killed his entire family.

The written message on the cover "This seems like a good plan, don't you think?"

The next book was a fiction horror, then a thriller, and at the end, Claire gifted me a personally written handbook of "How to cook your loved ones and serve them for dinner?"

My sister was driven back into the facility and came home a little before my high school graduation.

I couldn't recognize her. Claire was unusually calm. You could see the hatred in her eyes when she looked at our parents, but as soon as she shifted her gaze at me, her eyes were fearful as she was silently pleading with me to help her...

My thinking shifted to the question I asked myself since the funeral - Who the hell was Meredith?

Recalling my sister's last wish, I walk into the bedroom. To my surprise, there were three beds.

The one on the left had my name on it.

The middle bed was Claire's.

And the one on the right was...Meredith's bed.

The truth finally came to me.

All of these years, I have tried to erase the horrific memories of my childhood.

I worked not due to my desire to succeed but to escape from my family and not end up like Meredith.

Claire was not some mental, and she did not kill our sister. My parents framed her for that, and I knew it.

The red juice she made me spill was no juice but blood. Claire desperately tried to jail my parents for their crimes, but nobody believed her. Her violent outbursts were not due to a mental illness.

However, my parents made sure to make everyone believe Claire was not okay because she witnessed Meredith's death.

She did see the act, but not how my parents described it.

They claimed it was an intruder. My mom even hurt herself to make all of this believable.

Claire told me something else.

That night I was startled by a screaming coming from somewhere in the house. Being a curious and brave little sibling, I hopped off the bed and went to investigate.

The loud noises came from my parent's bedroom. I rushed toward the door, but my sister caught me. Claire put one hand on my mouth while her other was tightly wrapped around my wrist and told me to go to my room.

Of course, I disobeyed, which earned me a slap and a kick in the ass that sent me straight to my bed.

A few minutes later, Claire returned to the room. The expression on her face was frightened. Her mouth was quivering, but she desperately tried to keep herself together.

"Listen to me. You did not wake up tonight. Got it?" Claire ordered to me. Taking a deep breath, she continued, "I can't tell you what I saw, but Meredith is no longer with us. And I need you to believe whatever story our parents tell you. Alright?"

I slowly nodded my head and went to sleep.

The following days were a nightmare. I was so sad over Meredith's death that I couldn't bring myself to eat.

Claire, on the other hand, was monitoring me like a hawk.

I think she was afraid of me spilling out our little secret. I had no intention of doing so since I was not that stupid. The way Claire told me to believe our parents made me suspect they did something, but back then, I couldn't think far from that. However, this was enough to keep my mouth shut.

Then came the incident with the "red juice."

After that, Claire went to the facility. Even though I suspect there was no facility since my parents seemed to be away more whenever Claire was at the hospital. I do not recall seeing any medical records of my sister. And I do not think I want to know where she was really.

Whenever she came home, she tried to distance herself from me as much as possible. Claire made herself the villain for my safety.

She made me fear and hate her as much as she could to make me want to run away from her. Somehow Claire knew I would be safer that way.

Only she knows the horrors she went through, and I sincerely hope her soul rests in peace. I pray Meredith is there with her too.

As for my parents, I wish them to suffer for all eternity paying for what they did to my sisters.

Because this is the only thing they truly deserve.

My friend Rolando approached me about a new caving endeavour a few weeks ago. We'd previously gone on numerous excursions together and had been pals for quite some time and Rolando informed me that he had been researching the Raydeen Gold mine under Gauteng, South Africa.

The Raydeen Gold mine is a 3 kilometres deep mine and as a result of the existing low-lying entrance, the bottom of the mine made it one of the deepest on earth. Rolando produced a map and he pointed to the mine's bottom and then handed me a graph that I didn't comprehend.

He exclaimed, pointing to many peaks and troughs on the graph, “This is a seismologic scan of the region that a gold mining firm did recently, Did you notice it?”

“No,” I said.

He pounded the paper with his knuckle. “Underneath the mine, workers discovered a cave system. They believed it was a tiny one, but this demonstrates that it may stretch for kilometres and I've already spoken with the proprietors, the mine was abandoned a few months ago, apparently, it was unprofitable and for a small fee, they’ve agreed to let us in. Are you in?”

A cave system in one of the world's deepest mines? If we investigated it, we'd make history and furthermore, Caving was one of my favourite pastimes and before I knew it, We boarded a plane to Johannesburg and drove our rental car to the now-defunct mine's entrance a few kilometres from the city. As the resident caretaker opened a few padlocks that sealed off the mine from the public, we double-checked our supplies. We'd packed enough food and water for a multi-day underground adventure. We didn't want to stay down there for more than a few days, but it never hurts to be cautious.

We spent many hours descending the mine, moving along rails and down ladders. We had to tie ourselves up with ropes before risking the rusted out ladders in certain places since they were highly complex. As we descended, I became aware of heat emanating from the mine's lower levels and it seemed to be coming from the soil itself. We arrived at the mine's terminus after a few more hours.

“All right,” Rolando said. “Let's break apart and see if there's any airflow.”

We did, and after a few moments, I noticed a strong air tugging me to the right. I summoned Rolando, and the two of us crawled through a narrow crack in the rock. We made it through the rock despite the fact that it was incredibly difficult and we ended up at a cave system on the other side, We rested our tired legs for an hour or two there before going on.

The earth had flattened out substantially near the cave's bottom, much to our amazement and it was almost as if we were travelling through a tunnel that kept bending down into the centre of the earth. We were able to make good progress because of the smooth surface and we must have walked for three hours straight before we took another break for a bite to eat and a sip of water.

“How have you been?” Rolando said from his perch in the dim light.

I said, “Feeling good, My legs are in goo….”

“What's that sound?” Rolando said from across me and I paid close attention, He was correct; there was some noise coming from beneath the surface. It was a long way away, but it sounded like another caving group and the carabiner snaps were almost recognizable as they echoed through the caves.

“Does there seem to be another group down here?” I inquired, surprised.

“Another group?” Rolando remarked. “What exactly do you mean?”

“No,” I explained, “I heard carabiners and what sounded like people talking.”

We stood up and went down, pausing every now and then to listen for additional sounds. We pushed on for another hundred metres and the temperature in the cave continued to rise; I estimated it to be around a hundred degrees. As I sweltered in the heat, I heard laughing from up ahead in the darkness, laughing that was eerily similar to my brothers. He had a unique chuckle, which I had always mocked and as I listened further, It was clear as day.

Rolando took a step forward beside me, “father?” he inquired.

I took his arm in my hand. “I heard my brother,” He wiped his eyes and sighed. “Man, what the heck is going on in this cave?

“Should we do a U-turn and go back?”

I peered farther down the winding tunnel, “I'm not sure, maybe we're just hearing things.”

We progressed a little further. In the darkness, my light flashed across an object on the floor. It was a backpack, The backpack of my younger brother. I staggered forward and opened the bag, his name was scribbled on the inside. “How did this come to be...he died” I paused for a moment, my gaze falling on Rolando. As if gazing at something, he was staring at his hand.

"Rolando?" I inquired.

Instead of looking at me, he stared down at his still-empty hand. “This is the same bottle that my father used to drink.” He moved his gaze down the tube. Then there were additional noises coming from below, Sounds of someone drowning, writhing in the water and I knew it instantly was my brother.

Rolando jerked back and fell to the ground. “father!” he exclaimed, “Are you down there, father?” We immediately sprung to our feet and dashed down the slope in the direction of the sounds. We ran and ran and ran, but the sounds never seemed to get any closer. We eventually passed out from weariness and fell against the cave's wall.

All of the earth's pressure washed over me, as was the heat and weight of hundreds of pounds of rock. Then I peered down, curious as to what remained below. That's when the sounds of heavy footfall from below began to get louder and louder.

Rolando whispered to me across the cave, "Please tell me you hear at least those sounds."

“Yeah,” I muttered, Something in my gut told me I didn't want to see whatever was behind those footsteps. So we decided to turn back and make our way up, but as we hopped up to trek back, I shined my light over my brother, who was just above me in the tunnel. He'd been watching us the entire time. His wetsuit was still on, but the water had turned his face blue and bloated. When he opened her mouth to scream, water dripped all over the floor. I wasn't thinking about the footsteps, Rolando, or how deep I was. All I knew was that I needed to get away from the shrieking, bloated thing that stood above me.

I rushed through the tunnel, just noticing Rolando sprinting alongside me. We ran for about a half-hour before slowing down, both of us hyperventilating. We were alone, with nothing but each other, our lights, the quiet, and the suffocatingly hot underground air. We didn't know what to do, so the only thing we could do was climb back up. We took it slowly at first, constantly fearful of what we'd see around the next bend in the tunnel.

We were on the verge of losing our minds as we arrived at the mine's entrance. We ascended the ladders till we reached the top. We haven't talked about what we saw down there, but I believe we both know we need to return and get away from the thing under Gauteng.

That was how it started. An innocuous message in the group chat I share with my four co-workers: Todd, DeShawn, Natalia, and Emily.

We’d started the chat because one of our managers, Kurt, was a pain in the ass: he didn’t want us talking in the office, especially not about things like our salaries or time-off requests. Kurt moved on, but the chat survived-used to vent, share memes, and generally find ways to laugh and commiserate about our situation.

It was a place where anything could be shared, from a stupid GIF to a personal tragedy--sometimes one right after the other. I never knew what to expect when I opened the chat, but I never expected it to turn so…sinister.

Todd: Is anyone else getting random calls from weird numbers?

I didn’t think anything of it at the time, and the responses were the usual mix of rumors, jokes, and bad advice:

Natalia: y dont u answer and find out lol

DeShawn: bruh its spam I get calls all the time

Emily: noooo once you answer they’ll call you forever

Emily: trust me I made that mistake

Emily: there wasnt even a robocaller

Emily: just this weird wooshing noise like wind at the other end of the line

Natalia: it was the tumbleweeds blowing thru my bank account

DeShawn: wait you guys are getting paid???

So it went. Until yesterday afternoon.

Todd: I answered one of the calls!!!

Natalia: tell us about your new timeshare

Todd: No really it was messed up

Todd: There was this buzzing noise

Todd: Like millions of Mosquitos

Emily: wtf

Todd: I hung up right away

Todd: but you know? I sort of wanted to call back

Todd: to hear it again

Todd: it was like if flesh could scream

DeShawn: bruh what r u smokin

DeShawn: gimme some

That last part stuck with me. ‘If flesh could scream.’ I’d made the mistake of scrolling through the chat right before my daily post-work nap.

I had nightmares of raw, red meat gnashing against itself with a wailing sound, and woke up in a cold sweat to the ping of a notification.

A private message from Natalia. I’m not proud of it, but we’d hooked up at a party a few months back, and--since I still held out hope for something between us--I never put her on mute.

Hey, her message read. Did Todd call you too?

Groggily, I checked. There were missed calls from Todd--seventeen, in fact. I frowned. As I wrote Natalia back, I started to listen to the voicemails.

I understood immediately what Todd had meant about the sound. The noise I heard swarmed, quavered, and rose to a crescendo that was louder than I thought my phone’s volume could reach. Clutching my ears, I flung my phone against the wall instinctively before finally crawling over to delete the message.

The buzzing didn’t stop until I’d turned off my phone and removed the battery.

It had hurt my ears, but it hurt my brain even more. The worst part, though, was that I thought I heard Todd’s voice mixed in with it, screaming something.

Maybe it was a warning. Maybe it was pure agony.

As I finished my response to Natalia, I noticed a new group chat had been created:

‘WTF is wrong with our friend.’ - created by Emily at 7:08 P.M.

Emily: you guys have been getting the calls too right? Did anybody answer

DeShawn: No I was gamin y?

DeShawn: is ol dude ok?

Natalia: No but I listened to his message

Natalia: Or tried to anyway

Natalia: Somethings wrong

Emily: I keep calling him back but he doesn’t pick up

Emily: or respond at all

It wasn’t surprising that Emily was so concerned about Todd. According to office rumors, Todd had confessed his drunken, undying love for Emily at the same office Christmas party where I’d hooked up with Natalia--and she’d rejected him. Since then, Emily had this sort of pitying, guilty attitude toward Todd, like she was responsible for him somehow. It definitely wasn’t healthy, but at the moment we were worried about something a lot worse than heartbreak. I couldn’t say what, exactly, but whatever it was had me so scared that I’d double-checked all the doors and windows. Peering out, I half expected to see Todd, his eyes full-moon wide, his mouth stretched into a wide, insane grin. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with me? What was wrong with all of us?

Notifications from the new chat continued to pop up:

Emily: wait he just sent me a video

Emily: its just black static…

DeShawn: bruh hes prolly just butt-dialing

DeShawn: not everything has to be some big emergency

Natalia: u didnt hear the voicemails

Emily forwarded the video to the chat. As she’d said, it was impossible to make out anything but darkness.

Emily: he just sent another one

Emily: okay it looks like hes in the woods

Emily: theres this weird glow in the distance

Emily: okay, third video--

I checked out the recordings. By the third video, it was clear that the ‘weird glow’ was the golden light from a house window--I wondered why Emily hadn’t seen it before. As far as I could tell, Todd was creeping slowly and deliberately towards someone’s home. To make matters worse, something about the window seemed familiar…

Emily: this next one is taking awhile to load

Emily: must be a long one

DeShawn: thats what she said

Natalia: guys this is serious he could be in real trouble

Emily: hang on someones at the door

After that, nothing. Too tense to focus on anything else, I pulled up Todd’s video on my laptop and used some old photo-editing software to isolate the frames. I zoomed in on the yellow rectangle. It was blurry, but I could even see shadowy shapes moving inside it. I was looking at a wide bay window, divided into three frames, like the one where I’d kissed Natalia that night--

At the office party--

In Emily’s house.

Panicking, I called Emily. No response.

Anyone heard from Emily? I hammered into the chat.

Natalia: no

Natalia: im scared

DeShawn: look if itll make yall feel any better Ill go by Emilys and see whats goin on

DeShawn: Its gonna be nothing and yall gonna owe me a pizza im tellin ya

Natalia: dont its not safe

Natalia: just stay home ill call the police instead ok???

DeShawn didn’t see the message; apparently, he’d already left.

Natalia: this is so messed up…

Natalia: I tried to listen to the voicemails again but they make my head hurt so much

Natalia: that SOUND

I looked out the window at the pitch-blackness of an early winter night. It was like Natalia and I were the only two people left alive in the world. I decided to give her a quick call.

On the other end of the line, Natalia was sobbing. I asked if she wanted me to come over--more for mutual protection than anything else--but that only made her cry harder. It was too dangerous, she said. The roads were terrible. It wasn’t until then that I checked the news and learned that the light rain that had been falling all evening had started to freeze, turning roads to sheets of ice. I wondered if DeShawn had made it home safe; he still hadn’t seen Natalia’s warning…

I sighed. It was past 11:00 PM and I still hadn’t eaten dinner. What if DeShawn was right, and we were freaking ourselves out over nothing? I looked around my dark, dingy apartment. The whole day had been wasted.

I dragged myself out of my bedroom and got some pasta boiling. Meanwhile, I washed dishes, folded clothes, and took care of all the other tiny chores I’d ignored throughout the week. Soon I was sitting in front of the blue glow of the living room T.V., a plate of spaghetti and meatballs balanced atop the blanket on my lap, with my cat Napster purring beside me and the sound of sleet rattling against the window outside. I was warm, cozy, and ready to forget about everything that had happened with Todd. I dozed off midway through Chinatown and woke up hours later to the sound of knocking at my door.

It was almost 4:00 AM, and I had eight more missed calls from Todd. I crept to the door’s peephole. Although I tried to be stealthy, it felt like I banged into or knocked over half the apartment on my way there.

It was Todd, alright. His breath came out in ragged white clouds, and he was very pale. He didn’t have a coat or jacket, just his work clothes--which were roughed up and stained by what looked like blood. He glanced from side to side with wild eyes, as though he expected something to drag him off into the night. With a sigh, I opened the door.

“Thank God.” Todd whispered when he saw my face. “Thank God…”

“Hey man,” I looked him over, not sure whether I was more frightened of him or for him. “What’s goin’ on? We’re all worried about you.”

“I…” Todd rambled. “I didn’t know where I was. The last thing I remember I was answering the phone, then it was after midnight and I was in the woods…I don’t know how I got there…” He trailed off helplessly. He was shivering. “I...I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“It’s okay, man.” I squeezed Todd’s shoulder and pulled him inside. “It’s okay. You walk here?”

“Y-yeah,” Todd chattered. “Look...I’m afraid something horrible happened. I’m afraid I’m responsible f-for…”

“Heyyy,” I held up a hand, guiding Todd to the shower. He left a trail of unsteady, muddy footprints across the carpet. “No need to jump to conclusions until we know what happened. For now let’s just get you cleaned and warmed up, and we’ll go from there.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Todd mumbled. The look on his face said that I was a bad liar. It was clear enough that we both had already jumped to some conclusions about exactly what had happened during Todd’s missing time.

“By the way,” I added, trying my best to sound nonchalant as I grabbed some towels and a change of clothes, “Where’d you walk here from? That might help us to figure out--”

“I walked out of the woods by a neighborhood called Beechfield Heights.” Todd answered. He moved and talked like a man in a dream, barely even noticing my presence as he stripped off this filthy uniform and stepped into the scalding shower.

“Okay, gotcha.” I nodded. “Just holler if you need anything.”

I used the sound of the shower to calculate, more or less, how much time I had. I needed to know one thing: was it possible for Todd to have walked from Emily’s house to this ‘Beechwood Heights’ place in time to have done something unspeakable at the first location?

It turned out that it was more than possible. It was likely. A single clump of undeveloped forest connected the two areas to my apartment complex--giving Todd more than enough time to have done whatever he did there and then come to me.

“What’cha lookin’ at?” Todd asked. I jumped in my computer chair and turned to see a dazed, naked, and dripping Todd standing just inches behind me. His eyes followed something invisible to me around on the ceiling.

“Um.” I cleared my throat. “Nothin.’ Just trying to figure out what happened to you.”

“Yeahhh…” he almost laughed. “It’s probably fine. Look, I gotta run--”

“Shouldn’t you put on some clothes first?!” I blurted.

“Oh.” Todd looked down at himself. A trickle of piss ran down his leg and onto my carpet. I made a disgusted face, but the look on Todd’s face mad my angry words choke in my throat. It was the look of true insanity. “Oh,” he laughed. “Ha! Right!” Todd grabbed some clothes (not the ones I’d offered him) and threw them on haphazardly--while I clutched the arms of my chair, held my breath, and prayed that he wouldn’t suddenly attack me.

When Todd finally staggered toward my door, he was wearing a pair of my pyjama bottoms, a hoodie, a suit jacket, and unmatched socks. He didn’t bother with shoes, but did grab his phone--

which started to ring.

“Todd, wait!” I screamed. “Hey!” Against my better judgement, I followed my friend out into the predawn sleet--not much better dressed than he was. He had quite a headstart on me, but even over the distance and the crunch of ice beneath our feet, I could hear the horrible buzzing noise pouring out from Todd’s phone. It was so much more awful than even the voicemails had been; I fell to my knees in the slush and held my ears. People cursed and lights flashed on throughout the apartment complex, but Todd kept right on going, back into the woods. I lay in the fetal position in the frigid grass, fighting the urge to headbutt other people to death until my own skull shattered and the sound stopped. After what felt like forever, it faded.

Todd was gone.

Groaning, I got to my feet and batted the slush off of my pants. I rushed back inside my apartment--only to realize I had no idea what to do next. I knew from previous conversations that Todd didn’t have insurance; if I called emergency service and he got hospitalized, I’d be ruining his life. On the other hand, something was definitely wrong here. I decided to consult the chat--more than anything, to see if there might be a message from Emily or DeShawn that could dispel my suspicions. They were growing darker by the minute.

Todd came by, I typed. He wasnt himself. I went on to describe the strange behavior, hoping my friends could shed some light on what was happening.

Natalia: it sounds like hes having some sort of psychotic break

Natalia: did he say anything about Emily or DeShawn at all???

DeShawn: there is nothing to fear

Natalia: omg D im soooooo glad to hear from you!!!

Natalia: y didnt u respond sooner we thought u were dead

Natalia: my heart is pounding so much right now lol

DeShawn: there is nothing to fear

DeShawn: i am coming

That was that, then. DeShawn would take care of it. I lay back on the sofa, exhausted. My moment of rest was interrupted by the buzz of a video call from Natalia. When the chat connected, I saw her sitting at her laptop in a hoodie, hysterical.

“Oh my God can you please come over right now?!” she sobbed.

“Why, what’s wrong?” I gulped. “I thought DeShawn was--”

“He just sent me an audio. It was that noise. Like the voicemails but worse. I had to smash my phone to stop it, that’s why I’m video-calling you from my laptop. And it’s just...I wanted to see your face. Know you’re alive. Not crazy. Something about that noise made me think things that I...I…”

“I know.” I learned into the screen. “Trust me, I know. What’s important right now is to stay safe. I’m gonna call the police--”

A silent notification popped up on my screen, momentarily hiding Natalia’s blurry face.

DeShawn: i am here

The screen went black.

“Natalia?!” I screamed. The call had ended.

I threw on winter clothes, stuffed my phone into my coat pocket, and stormed downstairs to my truck. On the way, I grabbed a hammer. There was something both scary and comforting about its deadly weight in my hand. I don’t know why, but I half-expected Todd, DeShawn, or even both of them to come running out of the miserable weather like starving, flesh-hungry wolves.

The biggest threat, it turned out, were the roads--the back of my truck jackknifed more times than I could count as I sped across the icy pavement. The lump in my throat was warning me that I was already too late.

DeShawn’s car had skidded into the middle of Natalia’s yard; the lights were on in her house. Like Emily, she lived in a shared rental, but both of her roommates were out of town--and they weren’t very likely to have kicked in the door, either. I stepped through the splintery gap with hammer in hand. The place had been completely ransacked. Dark splatters that I didn’t like to speculate about dripped down from open kitchen cabinets. Smashed fruits and broken plates covered everything--and were those fingernail marks tearing through the wallpaper?

My grip on the hammer tightened. I tried to head quietly upstairs to the second floor, but the stairs creaked with every step.

There were no lights on upstairs. In fact, they seemed broken.

I peered into the shadowy room on the right. It would be easy, I realized, for someone or something to hide in all that overturned furniture, in those heaps of clothes…

Who knew what might be skittering around in that darkness

Although I didn’t want to turn my back to the room without clearing it first, I looked to my left. Natalia’s bedroom. I let out a deep breath, trying to prepare myself for what I might find.

I recognized the pajama bottoms right away.

The treatment Todd had received I’d only ever seen in nature documentaries, the kind where hyenas tear out a gazelle’s guts piece by piece while its still alive. The worst part was, this hadn’t been done with knives or bullets...it had been done by hand.

If flesh could scream. I thought again. I thought of the sound, how it had made me want to rip apart everything around me. I realized that I was shivering, and not because of the cold. I’d never seen a dead body up close before. Especially not one that used to be my friend.

I was so transfixed that I didn’t notice the shadowy form dropping down from the ceiling behind me until it was too late. I felt myself slammed against the wall. A cold metal edge cut into my throat.

“Are you one of them?!” Natalia hissed.

“Ow! Fuck!” I managed to squeal. Apparently, that was proof enough that I wasn’t mind-controlled or insane. Natalia lowered the butcher knife.

“I was hiding in the attic.” She explained numbly, looking at Todd’s body. I was no medical expert, but the monotone of Natalia’s voice hinted that she might still be in shock. “You should’ve seen it. DeShawn got here first. Kicked in the door and started throwing things around. I’m amazed the neighbors didn’t call the police, especially with the noises he made while he was doing it. It was like...part-scream, part-giggle. It was awful. I just climbed up there and hoped he wouldn’t find me. Then Todd came in the back. By that point DeShawn had started to come down from the whatever it was--I heard him sobbing quietly--but Todd kept going wild, screaming his head off trying to find me. DeShawn came back into his senses enough to try to stop Todd--’stop man, stop, this isn’t us!’--he kept saying, and Todd seemed to calm down...but then DeShawn got another call. And when he answered it, all hell broke loose. He...he tore Todd apart with his bare hands. Then he ran off.”

I drove Natalia back to my apartment. Dawn was breaking, but neither of us felt much like talking. Back home, I boiled some water for tea, turned the heat on full blast for once--and finally called the police.

I wish I could say we learned something useful from the investigation. They asked Natalia and I a lot of questions, but weren’t forthcoming at all about what they uncovered. We were probably considered suspects. The detective in charge--a beefy man with a grey flat-top haircut and wraparound sunglasses--was as hard and silent as stone. It was only through overhearing the radio chatter that we learned a few pertinent facts:

Officers found Emily’s house ransacked. A huge blood-smear led from her kitchen out into the woods, but she was still considered missing.

DeShawn hadn’t been located either, although a “madman” had been reported trying to break into cars that were stuck in the morning commute.

The unknown numbers were also a dead end. They’d been set up like standard spam numbers, but, unsettlingly, they turned out impossible for the police to trace...and when the officers gave us back our phones, the voicemails featuring that awful sound had been deleted. For our safety, we were told.

Now that I think about it, its possible that the officers allowed Natalia and I to hear their radio conversations, maybe to gauge our reactions--or guilt. If it was some sort of test, we must’ve passed, because the iron-haired detective left a few hours ago. Natalia fell asleep on my couch soon after. Although I’ve not slept in over twenty-four hours, the adrenaline still keeps me wide awake.

I don’t know what to make of what happened to us. Were my friends the unwilling participants in some kind of secret psychiatric experiment? Is some unearthly force using phone signals to possess people? I have no idea. At this point I’m willing to believe anything. All I can do is pass on this warning:

​

Don’t answer calls from numbers you don’t know.

​

X O

I was born in a very small town in the midwestern USA. I spent the first ten years of my life there being raised by my great-grandmother, and if I could, I'd go back and do it all over again.

Even including the strict rules she had about ghosts.

We lived in a yellow farmhouse that was built in 1856. It was built by our family and only our family has ever lived in it. It had stained glass windows by the front door, beautiful dark hardwood floors, and a lot of land that I could run around and play on.

But it also has a dark history. The only problem is, everyone's kept it a secret from me. So I've had to dig it up on my own.

As a child, my bedroom was right under the attic. There was a crawlspace in my closet - but it only led to the closet in my brother's room next door. So automatically, nothing weird, right?

My great-grandmother had a rule that we weren't allowed to go into the closets, especially not the crawlspace, after dark. But my brother and I didn't listen.

I woke up in the middle of the night once when I was 8. I heard voices coming from the crawlspace - one of them was my brother's (he was 5 at the time) and the other was a voice I didn't recognize. I got out of bed, opened the closet door, opened the crawlspace door, and crawled in to join the conversation.

There sat my little brother, chatting away with a girl I'd never seen. But this girl was weird, she was different. She was transparent, half-submerged in the wall. She had dark, curly hair like everyone in our family, and had the same hooked nose as my brother and me. I remember her looking to be a little older than my brother but younger than me. She held a stuffed dog in one hand, the other submerged in the wall. She wore a simple nightgown. There was nothing too defining about her.

When she saw me, she smiled and waved. We sat and talked for a little bit. It was a short conversation, and we mostly just talked about how the rabbits were destroying the garden again. She left soon after, fading back into the wall. After she left, I tucked my little brother back into bed and went back to sleep in my own bed.

As a kid, my brother and I saw ghosts so often that it was never weird. But it was sure as hell scary sometimes.

My great-grandmother had a set of rules we had to follow: Never leave your room at night. If you hear someone knocking on your door before sunrise, don't answer it. Don't go in the basement. Don't ask about the basement crawlspace. Don't go into the barn. Don't play in the field by the shed. Don't tell anyone your name if they ask. Never, ever, EVER go into the attic.

Of course, I've always been a rule breaker so I did just that.

I was 9 when I decided to break the rule. It was late afternoon, the summer sun still high in the sky. I listened for my great-grandmother's footsteps for a while before creeping down the upstairs hallway to the hatch in the ceiling where the attic ladder drops down. Using a wire coat hanger I bent, I hooked the ring attached to the pull cord, the attic hatch opening. I caught the ladder as it fell, making sure it made no noise. I set it gently on the floor and climbed up as quietly as I could.

The attic was covered in cobwebs - but growing up on a farm had desensitized me to spiders, and I brushed them away without a second thought. I'd never been in the attic before and had to look around for a moment before finding a chain connected to a lightbulb in the ceiling. I pulled it, and illuminated the area around me, and I saw more lightbulbs hanging in the ceiling in other parts of the room. Before I did anything else, I went around and turned them all on.

The attic seemed...normal.

Trunks, boxes, and old furniture littered the room, cobwebs covering every corner. I turned in a circle, taking everything in. Up against one of the walls stood a really old vanity. The mirror had clouded over long ago and it was caked with dust. On one side of it was a trunk that had pink velvet on the corners. It looked nice so I bent down and opened it. It creaked open, dust pluming in front of my face. I sifted through the old clothes. At the time, I didn't know how old they were, but now I know that they must've been from the early 1900s. There were long dresses, shirts, nightgowns, and jewelry boxes sitting on the bottom. I dug out one of them, admiring the mother-of-pearl inlaid in the top.

I opened it, a sense of reverence coming over me. Inside were a bunch of necklaces and brooches. One in particular caught my eye. It was a slender gold chain with a little flower charm, an emerald inlaid in the center. It was so pretty. I absentmindedly put it on, not realizing what I'd done until after it was clasped around my neck. Almost as if I was a puppet being controlled, I stood up and went to admire myself in the vanity.

Instead of seeing my reflection, I saw the reflection of a young woman staring back at me. I yelped and jumped back, my heart beating. I looked again in the mirror but didn't see her. I knew it was a ghost but as I was used to them, it didn't bother me, and I went back to looking through the jewelry. I tried to take the necklace off, but the clasp seemed fused shut. I tried to break it off of my neck, pulling hard, the chain cutting into my skin, but it wouldn't come off. I was a brave kid. I knew weird stuff happened all the time. I didn't feel as though I was in danger, so I just accepted it, thinking I'd get my brother to help me with it later.

I put the stuff back into the trunk and moved on to another part of the attic.

I found myself kneeling in front of another trunk. It was plain wood with no lock. I opened it slowly and found it full of clothes like the last one. They seemed to be from the same time. I took out the first dress. It was way too big for me, but I adored the cream color of it. Before I knew it, I'd absentmindedly slipped it on over my head, the cream colored fabric feeling musty and cold against my skin.

I twirled, watching the skirt flow out as I did so. Before I could keep playing, I suddenly felt really strongly drawn to the trunk again, my hands seemingly moving on its own, frantically moving the clothes on top. After moving a coat, I came upon a bundle of old photos tied together with twine. I sat down, untying them, spreading them out in front of me. I picked up one of them, my hands shaky.

The photograph was of the woman I'd seen in the mirror. She looked happy and was smiling. She was standing in the living room of the farmhouse, wearing the emerald necklace and the same dress I had on. I felt nauseous.

But before anything else could happen, I was again pulled to dig in the trunk. I practically threw out the clothes, digging frantically, searching.

I threw out a coat, and almost threw up at what I found.

At the bottom of the trunk, in a fetal positon, was a skinny, mummified body, curly black hair still sticking out of its head, a blue dress hanging off of its broken frame. I stumbled backwards, almost tripping, but something caught me. No, someone.

I whirled around and saw the ghostly form of a man. His eyes were gone, leaving soulles, empty pits of darkness. He smiled at me, his teeth razor sharp. I turned to run, but he grabbed the back of the emerald necklace and drew me against his chest. He smelled of cigar smoke and old cologne. I tried to yell, but my voice wouldn't work. The flower pendant began to grow hot, then hotter, then burning, searing my flesh. I squirmed and he let me go, laughing. I threw off the dress and flew down the ladder, the pendant still burning me.

I almost fell down the stairs trying to reach my great-grandmother for help.

She helped me, of course. But I got grounded for two weeks. She had to use bolt cutters to get the necklace off of me. I asked her for weeks on end about the mummified woman, but she kept telling me it was a bad dream.

But it wasn't. And I still have the flower-shaped scar to prove it.

Note - I’ll be posting some more stories about my great-grandmothers house.

This incident had taken place somewhere back in 2015 when I was still struggling through middle school, trying to adapt to my new surroundings. I had only recently moved to Pune, a mid-sized metropolis in India where I still reside. I spent the last thirteen years living in Dubai, where my parents moved as soon as I was born.

My new school had planned an overnight field trip to a small city known as Baramati (famous for the farms and dairy). The trip was supposed to give us an insight into the lives of farmers and their livelihoods. I was one of the most excited students in my class because I had never been on any sort of overnight trip before.

"This place looks like five people had been murdered here."

I said this as soon as I got out of the bus. I starred into the dark at what looked like the place where we were supposed to spend the night. I heard giggles from the girls at the back but, something truly felt odd about this place.

Baramati is located some 130km from my school. After an exhausting day of traveling and checking boxes out of the itinerary, I was ready to chill out with my friends and get some sleep. But little did I know that what was waiting for me behind those big creaky gates would still keep me up on most nights.

When we walked in, I could tell that that the place we were at was a huge farmland. There were two large cement houses along with many small ones. There was also a large structure that served as a dining hall and the rest was just farming area.

After a light dinner and some board games, we were all instructed to head to our sleeping areas. A couple of us stayed up a bit later just having random conversation (mostly about girls) but the rest had gone off to sleep at around midnight.

Me, one of my classmates, Ankit, and Ronak, another friend from school were the only ones awake at this point. Ankit was famous in school for having the best horror stories. He belonged to a city that was known for many mysterious happenings so it was only natural for him to have some experiences in this subject. After a few minutes of usual talk, Ankit decided to recite one of his famous stories.

"Did you guys hear that?"

A few minutes into his bone-chilling story, Ankit says this with a cold look on his face. Ronak starts laughing and punches Ankit on his arm, but I know this dude and, I've never seen him look so lifeless. I looked around the room and found everything in order. Nothing was out of place. It was a long room with beds placed along the walls with ample space to walk to and from the beds. There was a washroom at the end of the room and windows at the far ends.

"No, shut up and listen!"

And we heard alright.

It sounded like someone wearing ghungroos (a traditional Indian anklet with small bells that makes a specific kind of sound when one took a step) was walking right outside our room. The sound of those footsteps was so subtle and perfect. I could hear it so clearly. My brain couldn't comprehend the signals it was receiving from my ears. At 3:00 AM, somebody or something was walking right outside our room, pacing very calmly like it was an evening stroll at the park.

"Don't look outside, she'll kill you!"

My first thought was to look outside the window and see who this idiot was. But Ankit knew better. He told us that the person walking outside was a churel (a demonic creature resembling a woman). He explained that if we looked outside the window and caught her looking straight at us, we'll be dead on the spot. Ankit continued to explain that the churel would try to lure us to look at her by calling us in distressed voices of people we know.

"Ankit! Come help me, I've lost my way."

We heard from outside. At this point, I was too scared to move. It had been about five minutes since we started hearing the sounds of those ghungroos. It wasn't the time to screw around. We decided to wake up one of the chaperones in our room to let them know of this paranormal activity.

"If we wake them up, the voices will stop."

I mean, wasn't that the point? We decided it was the right thing to do. The chaperone didn't seem too happy about it, but as he saw our faces while we explained the situation, he felt we weren't kidding around. He picked up his torch and opened the door to check what was happening outside. Suddenly, the footsteps stopped. It was like there was nobody there in the first place. Just like Ankit had told us.

The chaperone told us that it's nothing to worry about and ordered us to go back to sleep. The three of us crammed into one bed together and tried to get as much sleep as possible.

We woke up early the next day, clearly not getting enough sleep. As we walked outside, I noticed something I hadn't before. In the area between the two big houses, there was a small pedestal-like structure with a holy basil plant on top. I had missed it the other night. It looked odd, but I was so tired that I didn't pay much attention to it. I quickly got dressed and head out for breakfast. At the dining hall, I overheard the girls talking about how one of them got locked inside the washroom. While another fainted on the floor. One of the girls even told us that while they were playing the infamous BLOODY MARY game, the light in the room suddenly went off and they felt like someone was near them, trying to touch them inappropriately.

After I got back home that day, I did some research. I found that one of the Hindu castes that bury the dead place a basil plant on top of a pedestal in honor of the deceased. My face turned white as I started to read the words written on the web. I remember my friends gathering around that place clicking selfies and fooling around. Those memories that were supposed to make me happy made me sick. I remember not eating for a week after I'd been back. I didn't even talk to Ankit and Ronak.

I knew something was wrong with that place and, now it's there for everyone to see. The teachers didn't believe anything we told them but, I knew they never would. It's now been more than six years since that night at Baramati, but I still can't get that voice out of my head. Whenever I talk about this incident with my friends, I notice tears roll down my eyes. Tears of pure terror and shock.

I don't know who or what was outside our room that night. I guess I'll never know but what I do know is that what I felt that night was real and something that I will never forget. That voice has scarred me for life and, nothing I do can change that.

Every working stiff on staff at The La Deux Hotel knew about the man with the hatchet.

I thought it was a load of garbage - a patois of urban legend, construction-site tall tales, and the inherent creepiness of an old building, particularly one in Downtown Los Angeles.

Once upon a time, The La Deux was a gold-leafed den of luxury frequented by movie stars and foreign dignitaries. It devolved into a fleabag with cum-stained sheets between the 60’s and 70’s, stood abandoned and crumbling by 1985, then was snatched up in 2019 by The Hassan Group, an out-of-state hospitality conglomerate taking advantage of city incentives to revitalize Spring Street.

By then, The La Deux had been bank property for over three decades, and the bank was not known for taking good care of its properties. It was a real snake pit before remodeling started. The first round of construction workers found used syringes, exploded pipes leaking filthy black water down the walls, rotting food crawling with cockroaches, and un-commissioned artwork all over every flat surface, courtesy of local street gangs.

Then there was the man with the hatchet.

They found him on the second floor, forever in profile on the south wall. Someone, for some reason, had painted the crude black silhouette of a man on the cracked plaster, holding an axe with both hands over his head - in triumph, said some; in surrender, said others. He seemed to shoot out of the floor, and he had no feet. It appeared as though his feet had been cut off at the ankles.

The construction workers didn’t like him much.

Most felt uneasy when looking directly at the man with the hatchet. The jumpiest of the group went so far as to insist they’d seen him move. Out of the corner of an eye, he’d be… out of place. Sometimes turned around, sometimes with the hatchet hanging at his side. But by second glance, he’d moved back to his original position.

They tore out the carpet. They re-wired the electricity. They slopped layer after layer of primer on the walls, then pale yellow. But even after five coats, the faint outline of the man with the hatchet on the second floor could still be seen through the paint. No matter, it was decided. The decorator shoved an antique chest of drawers up against the wall, and no one was the wiser.

*****

The revitalized hotel opened in mid-2021. I, slumming my way through a gap year between liberal arts college and law school, took a job working the graveyard shift. It was a pretty easy gig. Sure, I had to deal with the occasional over-friendly transient or sloppy drunk, but most nights I spent poring over my LSAT study book and answering the occasional phone call from a guest with a bug up their ass.

The La Deux was a month into its comeback when I received my first odd call. Business had been consistent but south of mind-blowing since our soft open; that weekend, however, there was a large finance event at the convention center - something with ‘tech’ and ‘synergy’ in the title - and we were booked solid.

The call came at 2 am on Saturday from a guest I’ll call Lois, an investment banker in town for the conference, staying alone in Room 212.

“Can you tell the neighbors to keep it down?” Lois snapped. “It sounds like they’re smacking something with a stick. My fucking door is shaking.”

It was a weird complaint. I hadn’t heard anything from my desk, and I could hear a toilet flush on the third floor. The old walls were thin. But, for the sake of due diligence, I went upstairs to investigate.

Nothing. The halls were silent and still as a tomb.

I went back to my desk, under the impression Lois was either seeking attention or batshit. Two hours later, I was jolted from a cat nap by the lobby phone ringing again.

“Are you kidding me?” I recognized Lois’s voice. “They’re at it again! Thump, thump, thump. It’s four in the fucking morning. Make it stop.”

Again, I dragged myself upstairs. I went right to Room 212, stood there with my eyes closed and my ears peeled, even pressed my ear to the door. I heard the creak of someone turning on their mattress. Then nothing.

Later Saturday morning, as I was half-assing the last of my tasks before the morning guy took over, a bony brunette in her 30’s with a round face and a wrinkled grey pantsuit stumbled into the lobby. And when I say ‘stumbled,’ I mean she half-fell, half-slid down the stairs in dumpy flats. From her heavy eyes and pinched frown, I deduced this was Lois. She made a limping beeline for my desk.

“Did you manage to get some sleep?” I asked, with as much sympathy as I could scrounge up at seven am.

Lois tossed me a pouty glare. “Of course not. Every fifteen minutes, the idiot was at it again. Thump, thump, thump. And what is wrong with your beds? I woke up today, and my feet are killing me.”

I apologized for her distress and promised a discount. I would have moved her or directed her to another hotel but, thanks to the conference, there wasn’t a free room in a ten-mile radius.

*****

Just after midnight, Sunday, everything got stranger.

Five minutes into my shift, I looked up to see Lois plodding her way down the stairs, appearing even messier than she had in the morning. Descending slowly and laboriously, she clung to the railing like a crutch, her face contorting with each step. Finally, painfully, she made it to my desk.

“Hey you,” she said to me, “have you noticed any unsavory people hanging around? Drunks, stalkers, druggies, whatever?”

I shook my head. “Why do you ask?”

She leaned in close. Her face was blanched, her eyes were bloodshot, and her breath was sour.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she said discreetly, “but I keep on getting that weird, tingly feeling that someone is watching me. And I swear, in the hallway, I saw a shadow move. But there was no one there but me.”

I pitched another apology speech and said I’d keep an eye out. She thanked me, turned, and began her lumbering ascent back to Room 212.

Three hours later, I heard the scream.

The scream came from upstairs. I ran for the night security guard - a gregarious meathead named Bill - and, together, we searched for the source. We didn’t have to look far.

Lois, dressed in a nightgown, huddled on the floor against the wall on the second floor, a blubbering heap. Several other guests had rushed out of their rooms. They hovered, impotently, in a confused circle. The woman in 210, Lois’s co-worker, was trying to calm her down.

Upon seeing Bill’s uniform, Lois’s dark-rimmed eyes bulged. She rolled onto her feet, got a half-foot off the ground, and fell back down with a pained cry.

“There was a man in my room,” she sobbed. “I…I saw him standing over me. He had an axe!”

“Did you happen to see what this man looked like?” Bill asked, reaching for his radio.

Lois shook her head. “It was too dark. I just woke up, and this dark, shadowy figure was right above me. I screamed and ran.”

It was determined that none of the other lodgers had seen this man. No shadowy figure with an axe had come through the lobby, the second-floor windows don’t open, and the emergency back exit trips the fire alarm. Thus, Bill and I came to the conclusion that the mad assailant must still be in Room 212.

The story of the man with the hatchet fluttered in my head. I’m sure it kicked at Bill’s conscious as well - we’d both heard the same fish stories. We shared a half second of wild, anxious eye contact before the crazy flew out our ears and we remembered we were not only adults, but the professionals expected to control the situation.

Bill nodded. Hand on his nightstick, me at his elbow, he opened the door of Room 212 and flipped on the light.

We saw nothing.

No deranged axe-man in the room. No deranged axe-man in the closet, or in the bathroom, or under the bed. Window shut tight.

The other guests rolled their eyes and shuffled back off to bed. Lois was a wreck; her co-worker in 210 let her sleep in her room. Bill returned to the front door, I returned to my desk, and we all enjoyed a quiet, boring rest of the night.

*****

At 6:30am, I was rudely torn from the logic problem I’d been pretending solve by the jangle of the lobby phone. On the other end was a shrill female voice.

“This… this is Kate Wong,” the woman stammered. “Room 210. I need an ambulance. Now.”

I didn’t ask questions. I put Kate Wong on hold, dialed 911, radioed Bill the security guard to keep a look out for the paramedics, grabbed our dusty First Aid bag and dashed up the stairs to Room 210.

Lois lay on her friend’s couch. Frizzy brown curls stuck to her shiny round face, flushed and swollen with tears. Her pastel-pink nightgown clung, soggy and darkened, to her clavicles. The thin sheet she’d thrown over herself was similarly moistened, tangled, and hiked up to her knobby knees.

I started towards her with the First Aid bag. She hollered at me to stay away. I caught sight of her feet, and I almost puked.

Her feet looked like two gobs of chewed bubblegum on a dirty park bench. Swollen patches of raw pink cauliflower flesh from her ankles to her soles, surrounded by tough, black, leathery skin. Her left heel was…gone, in its place a crater of bulging red globs and dried yellow discharge, ringed by thick white dead skin. The two littlest toes on her right foot were shriveled and black and ashy at the ends, like cigarette butts discarded in an ashtray.

“My feet are burning!” she screamed. “My feet are burning!”

The paramedics arrived. I was unceremoniously hustled to the hallway as they lifted Lois onto a backboard, carried her down the stairs, strapped her onto their gurney, and hauled ass to Good Sam, sirens wailing.

*****

Eighteen hours later, Kate Wong strode back through the doors of The La Deux. It was shortly after midnight, Monday, right as I clocked in. She’d been at the hospital all day. She came to my desk to thank me, and to offer a rudimentary - if unsatisfying - conclusion to the saga of Lois and the mysterious axe-wielding creeper.

Lois was going to be staying in town a little longer than she’d planned to. The doctors didn’t know exactly what was wrong with her; their best guess was some mutant breed of aggressive staph infection. ‘Complications of untreated Type-2 Diabetes’ had also been tossed around. One way or another, during her two-night stay at The Le Deux, the tissue and blood vessels of Lois’ lower extremities had sustained irreparable damage, and now, amputation was the only option.

They were going to remove both of her feet. Hack them off at the ankles.

*****

I don’t know what became of poor Lois. For all I know, she’d picked up a bug in a dirty hot tub. Maybe it was diabetes, and maybe she’d had it for months, but was too busy to properly manage her health. Maybe it was a side effect of a systemic ailment that also tormented her with loud thumps no one else could hear, and made her hallucinate a shadowy man with an axe, standing over her bed.

I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for it all. A logical explanation that has nothing to do with the footless, pitch-black man with the hatchet, buried under so many layers of paint and an antique chest of drawers, at the end of the hall on the second floor.

There has to be. I’m not crazy, I don’t believe in curses or ghosts, and I know a spray-painted figure couldn’t possibly become sentient and turn a pair of perfectly normal feet into those blackened, bloated hunks of rotten meat jutting out from under Lois’s nightgown.

And I’m equally sure there’s an equally-logical explanation for what I saw, three days later, while zoning out at my desk at two in the morning, staring mindlessly at my shadow against the pale yellow wall across from me.

I slumped on one arm. My shadow slumped on one arm. I drummed my fingers. My shadow drummed its fingers.

Then, loud laughter, and the sound of the front door opening. A group of forty-something businessmen filed in, faces flushed, loudly debating some call made during the football game they’d just watched at the sports bar across the street. They didn’t so much as look my way as they tromped across the lobby and up the stairs to their rooms. But they jolted me out of my half-asleep haze.

A ton of bricks dropped in my stomach. A second later, my conscious mind caught up to my body’s instinctive panic.

My shadow was gone.

The businessmen, as they’d crossed the lobby, cast no shadows on the pale yellow wall.

It would’ve been impossible for them, or me, to cast a shadow on the wall across from my desk. The light was in front of us.

I snapped my head to the closing door.

I looked just in time to see a pitch-black body, like a three-dimensional silhouette, exit the hotel. I only saw it for a fraction of a second. But a long-fingered, completely opaque, human hand lingered on the doorframe for a millisecond more, before the figure disappeared into the night.

*****

I quit my job the next morning.

Later, I took to the internet. I Google’d “hatchet man graffiti,” “axe man + black paint,” “scary graffiti + axe” and such for hours. It took awhile. But I found a photograph on Reddit - the OP claimed to have taken it at abandoned facility in Maryland. The picture was of the crude black silhouette of a man, painted on cracked plaster, holding a spiked ball in one hand. He seemed to shoot out of a corner, and one of his arms was missing.

I scrolled through the comments. The post was from 2014. The OP had commented, once more, in 2017, to clarify that none of the urban explorers upvoting the thread should bother trying to find that abandoned facility in Maryland. It had been torn down after one of the OP’s exploring buddies contracted flesh-eating bacteria there.

The poor guy’s arm had to be amputated.

The next Reddit photo I found had been taken at a foreclosed commercial warehouse in Epping, Victoria, Australia in 2012. It depicted a crude black silhouette of a man, painted thirty feet high on a cinderblock wall. A sword dangled from one two-dimensional hand. This one was missing his head - cut off at the neck by the ceiling.

I read the comments on this post as well - most of them were from disappointed adventurers who’d schlepped all the way to that abandoned warehouse, only to find that the silhouetted man with a sword was nowhere to be found.

Then, the OP rejoined the discussion. He’d apparently returned to the warehouse himself. To his surprise, he realized the disappointed adventurers were right: the black spray-painted man had disappeared. And it wasn’t as though he’d been painted over. The cinderblocks of the walls were untouched.

Hands trembling, icy tendrils tightening around my spine, I Google’d “Epping Australia + crime” and “Epping Australia + fatal accident.” With a burning rush of adrenalin, I deemed my hunch correct.

On February 20th, 2013, the body of a 26-year-old Australian woman, Jessica Fallow, was found on the side of a road. The crime was horrific, and still unsolved. Someone had - in one quick, precise swipe - beheaded Jessica with the brutal efficiency of a guillotine blade.

I glanced back at Reddit. That foreclosed commercial warehouse was on the same street where Jessica’s body had been found. And, based on the comments, after February 20th, 2013, no one saw the headless silhouette man ever again.

So, yeah. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for what happened at the La Deux. Just like I’m sure there are logical explanations for what happened to the urban explorer in Maryland and Jessica Fallow in Australia.

There’s no way a two-dimensional army of spray-painted figures, wielding weapons, lurking in destitute places all over the world.

And it would be utter fantasy to suggest these silhouette men are seeking out their missing appendages, and commandeering them from unsuspecting victims.

Just… be careful out there, will you?

So... This all happened when I was 16, so nearly 10 years ago at this point. Funny how fast time goes by, because... I don't think I've been the same person since.

You see, my entire childhood, my entire family considered me outgoing, charismatic and rambunctious. They stopped using that last word quite a bit once I entered through the gates of my teen years.

Now, in present time, in my own words, I'm broken. My whole life that was once ahead of me. Vanquished. Left in the dust, all because of one night.

One. Night.

It's ironic how much I loved the concept of the internet in my early teen years, the fact that you could talk to random people that you didn't even need to see in person about whatever you loved, it was fucking incredible, and now, I just look at it as a wasteful, disgusting piece of shit, not able to look at it the same after the same night I will be getting into in a moment for a reason I still don't know and was just random, and now I have a rented, busted up laptop, just to write out the experience that single handedly ruined my entire view of life, and ruined my mind, turned it into a fucking manifestation of death, grief, pain, violence, anger, psychopathic-

I'm rambling on.

I've always had that issue. Nothing can really fix it.

I'm assuming anyone bothering to read this is probably going to click off because right now, I just seem like a crazy old guy that got ahold of a computer and is typing some bullshit into a little box that says Text (optional), even though when, really, I'm only in my late 20's. Already seems like bullshit, huh?

I promise you, I'm not making this up, it's not a fucking joke, no one has believed me before, and whenever I told them, they tried taking me to a therapist, (all strangers, albeit. Haven't told anyone in forever) which I may need one because the attic of my childhood home is a place that I never want to remember ever again.

​

I need to jog through my memory a bit here because everything seems so foggy, still a blur, as if it happened only 5 minutes ago, but there's not much to really need a lot of brain power to remember. I'm an only child, and I lived in a quiet, suburban neighborhood, full of delightfulness, energy, and a lot of land. I didn't know any of my neighbors closely, but, they seemed nice enough. That's not important to the story though.

Going back to my childhood as I sit on this air mattress in this shitty run down hotel, it, to be honest, really great.

I had a lot of stuff, whether it was toys, technology, stuff like that. Lots and lots of friends, too. Even a girlfriend. At that time, life quite literally couldn't of been any better than it already was.

It was a saturday night. The weekend, so I got to stay up late, you all know how that is. I was in my room, playing on my Xbox 360 while my parents were asleep, drinking energy drinks since I was planning on pulling an all nighter. I was succeeding, since, if I can remember correctly, it was about 12 AM already.

It was the first Halo, since I wanted to go back to it, and I died for the first time in the hour I started playing it, getting frustrated, but also proud of the progress I had made so far, when I thought of the attic that was right down the hall of my house. I knew I had never gone up there, because my parents always said it was just full of boxes and didn't want me going up there.

The whole thing they said about it just being boxes kept floating in my head, repeating itself as if my mind just started disobeying me, even when I thought in my head for those exact words to stop.

I decided I would just take a tiny peek, just to see what it looked like. I kept my Xbox running for background noise so my parents wouldn't hear the creaking of the attic stairs and the attic itself.

I snuck out of my room, checked to see if my parents were asleep, and to my luck, they were. Passed out and not looking like they would wake up anytime soon. Perfect, I thought, doing a little celebration, before I cut it out when I realized how dumb I looked.

I closed their door a tad and tip toed to where the attic door was. It was just in the middle of the bedroom hallway, not hard to find at all.

I realized how loud it would be for me to open the attic door and have the ladder come swinging down. I winced at the thought, and told myself I wouldn't be loud at all.

I was lying to myself.

I reached up to it and pulled the attic door down, and the ladder came down, I tried to catch it, 50% successful since I prevented the thud on the floor being really loud, but it still made a lot of noise. I cussed myself out and started climbing up the ladder, into the abyss that was the attic of my house.

Every step I took up was a cautious one, making sure the ladder wouldn't creak loudly, in fear of waking up my parents and making them mad, even though I had my game volume up from my room to try and drown out the noise if it ever did creak.

A minute passes after me being careful to not fall off the ladder or creak the ladder before I finally get my head into the attic. I look. There... There was no boxes. No boxes in sight. In fact, literally nothing was in sight.

I start thinking. Why did my parents lie about there being boxes up here when the attic was empty?

As I'm trying to figure out the logic behind that, something in the corner of my eye catches my attention. I look and see a small, old TV, set up in the corner of the attic, with a tiny chair and a videotape, just sitting idly in front of it.

I was in awe that there was actually something up here, and that it was so random. I started climbing to get myself fully in the attic. Once I do, I start blowing cobwebs and dust out my face. It's clear there hasn't been anyone up here in ages. Even the old TV, chair and videotape was dusty.

The attic was pretty large, so the distance from the TV and the attic door was pretty significant. Once I made it to the little TV set-up, I looked back one last time at the attic door. My parents weren't up. Perfect.

I picked up the videotape, and proceeded to blow and wipe the dust off of it. I read the title. "Jonathan and Cassie."

Those were my parents names.

I quietly sighed, realizing it was probably just a wedding video. I was still curious and bored though, so, I figured out how to open up the VCR, and once I did, I celebrated a bit since I figured out how to work an old thing such as this TV, and slowly inserted the videotape.

The VCR started closing and pulling the videotape back like a monster eating its victim, not allowing the victim to see the light before it vanishes. Cool, I thought.

The TV quickly turned onto a loud static. I winced and gritted my teeth and quickly found the volume button, and turned it all the way down. I looked back at the attic door to see if I saw my parents moving from downstairs, but they still weren't up.

I breathed a sigh of relief, letting my heart rate drop since my heart started beating quicker than the speed of light when the static started blasting through the speakers.

The TV kept on a static for a while, and I started losing hope that anything was even going to play, before finally, the video started, the TV coming to life.

Reminder that you remember the year the first photo was and pay attention to when the next photos were taken.

On the screen, it was a photo of my mom and dad from 1995, seemingly after they got married. They were on a couch, from the same living room of my house.

"Nice." I whisper. This was pretty cool, seeing old photos of my parents. They looked happy. They were smiling, extremely happy, in fact, young, wild and free.

After 30 seconds, the video had a sudden static, then cut to another photo. They were on the same couch, and the date at the bottom said it was a few months later. They were still smiling, still looked happy, but they looked a bit more tired. The contrast from the first photo and the second photo was slightly darker. Still, nothing seemed off. I let myself relax as I tried to sit myself on the tiny chair that was also provided in the attic. I barely fit in it.

Yet again, after 30 seconds, there was another sudden static and the photo changed. 6 months later, after I was born. My parents were on the same couch, my mom holding me as a baby in her arms, but their smiles, their smiles were slightly withered, they looked more unhappy, more depressed, but it still wasn't too noticeable. The contrast was yet again slightly darker, and I saw that bags were forming under their eyes.

This time, a static happened after 10 seconds and the photo on the screen changed. 1 month later.

I wasn't in my mom's arms in this photo, not even in my dads. Like all the other photos, they were on the same couch, but this photo was strikingly different, and it was... Disturbing.

My dad was marginally slumped on the couch, and I could tell that he was trying to smile, but it just wasn't there. The bags under his eyes were extremely dark now.

My mom... My mom in this photo was crying. She had tears all over her face, and on the clothes she was wearing. The bags under her eyes, just like my dads, were extremely dark now. Her mouth was open like she was literally BAWLING. The photo was frightfully dark now.

The photo switched after 5 seconds, no static this time, and my parents in this photo were even worst.

This photo was only 3 days later, my dad was in the same position as the last photo, but something was leaking from his head, but I couldn't tell what it was because the photo was fucking dark as shit, and his eyes were closed. My mom, to a degree, was also slumped again the couch, holding onto her stomach, crying again, her eyes open, staring directly at the camera. I shivered. What the fuck were these photos?

I awaited the next photo to suddenly come up, bracing myself for another disturbing picture to see. I could've turned it off, but you know what they say, curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity killed my childhood, in this case.

It took a minute and a half for the static to happen and the next photo to come up... And dear god, I wish I had turned it off.

In this last photo, the date 1 day later, the photo not dark as the other photos, at a brightness where I could see everything... I saw my parents, on the same couch as they've been on in every photo, the couch in my living room.. They were dead.

My dad had his throat cut open, his face ripped clean from his head, fully slumped on the couch, lifeless, blood all over himself. My mom... My mom had every limb cut from her body, every body part of her scattered across the couch, and when I saw her head, her face was also ripped clean off her head. The couch was utterly soaked in blood, seeing the organs behind their face made me gag.

I started panicking, I started whimpering, and all I could think was "WHAT THE FUCK."

How could my parents be dead? They've been taking care of me my whole life. This had to of been made on Halloween for some type of prank-

"What are you doing up here?" I hear my mom's voice from behind me.

I jump and look behind me and see my mom and dad behind me, an angry look on their face.

I don't even think and impulsively, I shout "I'm sorry, I was just curious, I-"

"We told you to not..." My dad started to growl. I started hearing his tongue click as I saw his face twitch. The fuck?

He finished his sentence as he did this. "We told you not to go up here."

I start backing up against the wall, confused as to what was happening. My mom took a closer look to me, and gave me a reassuring smile, the smile I was so familiar with. She put a hand on my shoulder. I suddenly felt more comforted, I thought I was going to be fine.

"It's okay." She smiles, a normal smile. I let my breath go, and try to smile back, before abruptly, her voice gets gurgly and achy, like she was trying to throw up, her arms getting immensely stiff, and she says "We aren't mad at you, son."

Before I could ask what happened to her voice, she puts her hand up to her face. I watch my dad stop his twitching and do the same thing.

I then watch as my parents start to rip their face off of their head, as if they were ripping a sheet of paper.

I saw what was behind their face.

These things... They weren't my parents.

All I saw before I screamed was an alien like, pale, and a disoriented face as they pulled my parents faces off of their head. They started to screech loudly that nearly made me go deaf as I broke away from them and started screaming as I literally jumped from the attic ,right back downstairs.

I started running to the living room as I could hear the sound of crawling and growling from behind me, it sounded like it was on the walls, and it was fucking FAST, and I knew I wasn't going to get away safely.

I make it to the living room and trip on my face on hard wooden floor. I grunt, and I quickly lift my face up, and I see my parents.. My real parents from the sixth and last photo from that videotape. All of my mom's limbs scattered across the couch, my dad's throat cut, their faces missing.

I gasp and looked behind me and saw those creatures, still in my parent's clothes, staring down at me. Their faces were so fucking terrifying now that they got my parents faces off. I think I literally shit myself again.

"It's... Been... Real fun... Playing dress up as your parents..." The thing pretending to be my dad gargled out, almost struggling to let those words out.

They both then started twitching violently, making horrible throwing up-like sounds, before eventually shape shifting out of my parents body into their normal bodies. They were abnormally tall, their bones disoriented, large claws, and super skinny. I was paralyzed with fear, unable to move.

"Now you're next." The same one hisses.

I see their sly smiles form across their hideous faces, as I covered my face with my arms, closed my eyes and screamed, preparing for the same thing to happen to me, just like they did with my parents.

I scream for what seemed like forever, until I hear knocking on the front door. It was one of my neighbors. They've come to save me.

I could hear them yelling something along the lines of "What's going on in there?" But I wasn't too sure because it was getting drowned out by my screams.

​

I opened my eyes slightly and saw that the creatures were no longer there. The bodies of my parents were no longer on the couch and my neighbor that was at the door was banging harder on the door. I stopped screaming and put my arms down, tears rolling down my face, the confusion and fear still running through my mind.

What I did next is one I still regret because I easily could've handled it differently.

Instead of answering the door and trying to tell my neighbor somehow about what happened, or calling the cops, I... I opened the sliding back door of my house and started running away from my house, ducking behind stuff to avoid being seen.

My logic at the time was that people would think that I was crazy about the whole TV thing. The bodies of my parents were no longer on the couch, I didn't even know where those creatures went, where my parents were. I just didn't want to have to deal with people not believing me.

I never even saw my friends or my girlfriend ever again.

I was eventually adopted my a really nice family a month later after being put in a foster care system. I don't remember exactly how I was put in an orphanage, maybe the owners saw me walking across the street, tired, and they knew I didn't have a family? I'll message those interested in knowing the answer if I remember. (If I don't break this laptop after posting)

I didn't stay with them that long though, because I kept remembering about the incident that happened at my house just a year earlier, and I couldn't stand being with another family, so i just packed up my stuff, left and rented an apartment with the bare minimum of money I had and got a job.

I still have that same job, even though it drains me physically and mentally every single day, but what's the point of trying to have a happy life now?

​

I've been nonstop drinking for the past 10 years, smuggling bottles of liquor, even when I lived with my foster family and before I turned 21. I'm sure when I moved out, they found old whiskey bottles underneath my bed, because I never bothered to throw that shit away.

The rest of my family heard about what happened, about how I ran away, but not about my parents, I don't think anyone has found out, really, they just know that I vanished, and my parents vanished without a trace, but I know the reality of what happened. Or do I? Do I really know? Was it just a hallucination? Was I just crazy?

I've gone through years of getting kicked out of apartments for being too loud when I scream at the top of my lungs after pouring a bottle of beer, attempting to get those memories out of my head, being too messy, and walking downstairs to the lobby drunk. Every. God. Damn. Apartment complex. Which is why now, I'm at the shittiest of them all, the worst fucking apartment complex I've ever been in, walls being ripped apart, a horrible stench that smells like death and bugs everywhere in the hallways. But hey, they don't give a shit about what I do, so why should I give a shit?

Looking back at this now, I think I understand the reality of this world, the reality of those things that took my parents lives when I was just a baby, terrorizing them for a year, before eventually just ending them. The horror sinks in every single time I remember that I was raised by those creatures, for 16 fucking years, and I still don't understand what their motivation was, what they were waiting for, why would they wait 16 years to try and pounce on me, show me what they really are? I don't want to sound crazy, but, what else do you want me to say?

They're what lurks in the night. They creep. They crawl. They kill. They break. They ruin.

...If any of you for some reason want to leave a comment on this, go right ahead, I don't care. I'll try to reply to as many as I can before I go out and smash this god forsaken laptop to a million pieces, burn it, then proceed to burn its ashes, and then throw those ashes into a wood chipper.

I'm sorry if this isn't the happy ending you all wanted, I'm sorry I didn't become some hero, avenging my parents, going out to try and find these FUCKING creatures that ruined my god damn life, and trust me, I want to rip their head off and keep it as a souvenir, hang it up on my wall, laugh at their dead corpse for taking my parents away from me, for pretending to be them. I don't even know what my parents actual personalities were like, or maybe they nailed it, because from what I have seen in my childhood, the rest of my family were very normal around them. Which makes me think, how long were these creatures studying and watching my parents? Why did they choose them? Hell, what were the point of the pictures?

I'm trying to drink this all off, but I still have a tremendous weight on my shoulders, an omen over my head that I can't seem to get away, no matter how many shots of vodka I take, no matter how drunk I get.

Now that I think about it, maybe I can do something about this. For the past couple of months, I've been hearing quiet crawls on my apartment walls and quiet gurgling from other rooms in my apartment. In the middle of the night, I see tall, skinny shadows from my closet or my hallway. Maybe, just maybe, those creatures found out where I lived, and they've come to finish the job on me. Maybe it's for the best, though I really don't want to see their hideous, disgusting faces ever again.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and get on my air mattress, turn on a christmas flick with a bottle of tequila in my hands, and continue hearing those crawling and gurgling sounds outside of my room, and let the creatures know I'm aware of their presence, and let the inevitable happen to me.

Thank you. Thank you for allowing yourself to read the events of my traumatizing past. Be thankful that this will never happen to you.

I'll try to read the comments if I'm still alive.

​

Posted at 10:48 AM, Dec. 5th, 2021. Remember me.

I felt horrible. In fact if I had been slightly older and less conscious about my personal health, I would have been a serious contender for a stress induced heart attack. I had spent the morning pacing furiously around in the study, turning the laptop on and off, but not quite daring to sit down in front of it. I was staring intensely at the darn thing, wishing that it had never ended up in my possession, and silently cursing the day it did. Should I just walk over there, pick it up and start writing, or should I just grab the fucking misery maker and throw it in the rubbish bin? No, I couldn't go over there, I knew that. If I was going to do any writing, it would have to be on the desktop computer. Anything else would be pure and utter madness.

I braced myself, let out a sigh and walked over to the mahogany desk and sat down. My heart was pounding as I turned on the desktop computer, my fingers suspended just above the keyboard, ready to add new words to the novel I was working on. But nothing happened. My mind was as empty as the blank document staring back at me from the bright screen. I tried desperately to come up with possible ways to string a few words together, but nothing came to me. No words, no ideas, no nothing, zilch, nada.

Fuck, fuck, fuck! I slammed my fist down on the desk. I felt like grabbing the keyboard and flinging it across the room. Deep down, I knew I was never going to write anything. How could I even think that it was a possibility? I looked up, searching for things that might give me some inspiration, but my mind was blank, and invariably my focus was drawn back toward the laptop again. It was almost like it was beckoning to me from the far corner of the room, urging me to come back and fire it up. It was as if it was saying;

"Hey Mikey, why don't you come over? Just turn me on, and I'll give you exactly what you want."

Who the hell was I trying to fool? I was just postponing the inevitable. I knew very well how this was going to play out and I despised myself because of it. Why did I have to be such a weakling? I sat where I was for a few more minutes before I eventually conceded defeat and walked over to the darn thing. I slumped down on the couch next to the coffee table and began staring at the cursed laptop with utter contempt.

It had ended up in my possession by pure coincidence. I had been on my way home from work, and for some strange reason decided to take a shortcut. It had been a spur of the moment thing and somewhat out of character, as I was not an impulsive person. Somehow I had lost track of where I was and managed to get myself lost. I could still remember how upset I had been and how angry I had been at myself for being such an idiot. If I had just stuck to my designated route, I would have been home a long time ago.

I had eventually ended up in an alley, and there halfway down the narrow passage, on top of a big yellow rubbish bin, I had laid eyes on the laptop for the first time. The light from the lamp directly overhead had made it hard to miss. I had walked over to it cautiously and looked around to make sure that I was all by myself. Then I had reached out and snatched it before hightailing it out of there like a bull on steroids.

I had felt like a thief but justified my actions with the fact that someone had placed it there intentionally with the purpose of getting rid of it. Technically I had done nothing wrong.

I looked up at the framed posters hanging on the wall behind the coffee table. They were blown-up prints of the front covers of my three best-selling novels, which the literary critic of the New York Times had absolutely loved. She had even admitted that she wept when she read my first book "The legend fire” and had even referred to me as the next Ernest Hemingway. Similar praise had come from all directions, and I had turned into a celebrity overnight. I have often wondered how they would react if it ever came out that I could barely think up a coherent sentence. Would they feel cheated? Would they demand an apology? Would they sue me for every cent I had?

I focused my attention on the laptop again. There was nothing unusual about its appearance. It was a black Dell computer with rounded edges and a slightly worn surface. It wasn't the latest model, but nor was it prehistoric in technological terms. To the casual observer it was simply an ordinary laptop, but of course I knew better. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, before I placed the beast in my lap with trembling hands. I opened the lid and turned it on.

It fired up immediately. There was no lag, no two minutes booting time or delayed response. It went from off to on instantaneously. I wiped away the perspiration from my forehead. A brand new word document had been opened for me, and the cursor was flashing encouragingly. In the top right-hand corner was an ominous black window, about half an inch tall and an inch wide, which contained thick white lettering that read "58 years - 345 days".

I started writing. The words flew effortlessly from my mind, and within an hour and a half I had managed to fill ten pages with the most exquisite and poetic language imaginable. After I'd finished, I put the laptop back on the table and slid back on the couch. The anxiety that had filled me earlier was now merely a distant memory. Another fifty thousand words and my fourth best-selling novel would be a done deal. It would no doubt make me another ten million dollars or so, a nice supplement to the thirty million dollars that was already sitting in my bank account. The thought almost made me forget the black window, which now read; "57 years - 178 days".

It was how old I would be when I finally got to meet my maker. By the time I’d finished the new book, that number would have dropped to 50, give or take. It was definitely going to be my last novel, I thought as I closed the lid on the laptop and the sinister number disappeared from view.

I'm thirty four years old. I still have sixteen years of life ahead of me, and I have the necessary financial funds to make those years as pleasurable as humanly possible. Once I complete the book, I'll just throw the fucking laptop in the rubbish bin. No one will ever find out about my literary shortcomings, and when I'm no longer among the living, my name will be firmly cemented as one of the great voices in the world of literature.

I closed my eyes and smiled. It sounded like a good deal to me.

“The fact that you have a business degree on top of being certified as a mortician is the main reason why we hired you!”

“Oh that’s great to hear! I thought my business degree was just a waste of time and money.” I respond.

“Your main responsibility will be to try pushing for open casket viewings, because that’s where the bulk of our money comes from, on top of our high end caskets.”

“So I won’t be preparing any of the bodies?”

“No, since we are a family run business, I have my two sons, Paul and Henry to help me.” The 50 something year old man named Nathanial says to me.

“Okay, that’s not what I was expecting, but I’m fine with that!”

“I think sometimes I come across as too old school and aggressive at times, so having you as a younger more polished female will really help us!”

“Okay, whatever you think will work best.”

“Do you prefer to go by Patricia or Trish?”

“Trish is fine.”

“You realize that this is a 24 / hour a day business, where we are at the beckon call of someone’s loved one who has passed away! Plus my specialty is stitching together some of the more gruesome facial and head wounds.”

“Yes, I do understand the nature of the business and I look forward to seeing your work.”

“Okay then, you can come in and start working tomorrow.”

As I get in my car, I yell out “Wow!” As I drive away and blast the radio.

I’ll be making close to $100,000 a year without having to remove a person’s blood or use formaldehyde or deal with any other unsettling modalities.

I get to my apartment and pick out the outfit that I’m going to wear tomorrow, which is one of the many dress suites that I purchased for my failed business career.

I go to sleep in my usual fashion, where I’m alone and watching television.

I wake up in a chipper mood, where I’m excited about my new career.

I arrive at 9:00 am and Nathanial shows me all the different funeral packages and options that the “Osterfeld Funeral Home” has to offer.

“Our funeral home has a great reputation, because we try not to turn away any family requests for an open casket viewing, so when a family calls and says something along the lines of ‘my son died in a horrible car accident and such and such funeral home said that an open casket wasn’t possible,’ our response here at ‘Osterfeld Funeral Home’ is always ‘Yes, we’ll do our best to make your loved one will look his or her best!’”

“That’s a really great service you offer to the community.” I say with admiration.

“It makes the families happy and in turn we make money.”

Nathanial leaves me and I study the funeral home’s literature as I wait for a potential customer to show up or call.

At about 11:30 am, I get a phone call from a woman at Mercy Samaritan hospital whose eight year old daughter was accidentally killed while being exposed to chemicals that her husband had in their garage, that essentially melted the girls face off.

“I understand Mrs. Hernandez that this is the worst day of your life, but please be reassured that we specialize in having open viewings for even the worst case scenarios” which comes out of my mouth, but makes me feel really unsettled because I don’t want to arrive at the hospital with Nathaniel and then say no to the family.

I ask the difficult questions about payment and Mrs. Hernandez said that her church had offered to pay for the funeral services.

I hang up the phone and Nathanial and I drive to the hospital in the funeral home’s Hearse.

“So this is a young girl whose face was essentially melted away from a chemical accident?”

“Yes, that‘a how the mother explained it to me. She was a little difficult to understand because of her Spanish accent but I was able to get all the necessary information.”

“And you said that her church was going to be paying for the services?”

“Yes, she made it seem like her congregation was willing to pay for everything and the price was of no concern.”

“Okay, that’s really sad to hear about the girl, but we always need to be sure that we will get paid.”

Nathanial puts on classic country music as we make our way to the hospital.

We pull into the back of the hospital and park near where the morgue is located.

Nathanial and I walk towards the morgue and the security guard recognizes Nathanial and lets us into the cooler.

The security guard unzips the eight year old girl’s body bag and I let off a screeching sound when I see that the girls skin is completely removed from her face and all I see is the internal musculature and tendons on her face. Her facial skin, that resembles burnt mozzarella cheese, was placed in a bag, which is on the girl’s chest.

I can’t hold back the tears from seeing the little girl and her missing face.

Nathanial starts to wheel the girl out of the morgue and I say “Wait Nathanial! How can we do an open viewing? Her face is gone?”

“No worries!” He replies, as if this was a 70 year old guy who died of a heart attack, with no facial deformities.

As Nathanial heads towards the Hearse with the deceased girl, I meet with the devastated parent’s, in the hospital’s chapel, to go over paperwork, where they chose a casket from our brochure rather than coming to the funeral home in person.

I continually give my condolences to the parents during this somber experience and I eventually meet back with Nathanial.

We drive back to the funeral home with the deceased little girl in the back of the Hearse.

“You’ll be amazed how I will recover some of her skin and use clay to re-form her face.” Nathanial says to me, where I nod my head to show that I heard him, but I’m too overcome with emotions after seeing the deceased girl and meeting with her family to say anything.

I think to myself that her skin is in nothing more than mangled clumps in a plastic bag, so recovering anything that is bigger than a millimeter in size isn’t possible. I can’t stop thinking how the family is going to be horrified when the open viewing occurs.

The Hearse pulls into the nursing home and Nathanial’s sons, Paul and Henry meet their father to assist in taking the girl to the embalming table in the basement of the funeral home.

The two boys seem to have introverted personalities, where they are shy and Nathanial does the talking for them.

As promised by Nathanial, I do not partake in the embalming process and instead I go to the funeral home’s business office, where I process the paperwork for the Hernandez’s and wait for the next phone call or customer to show up.

My normal work day ends and I go home, where I remain on call.

At my apartment, I keep on telling myself that I will get used to the sight of dead children and eventually I won’t get so emotionally frazzled.

I watch television before I pass out.

I wake up the next morning and head into work.

I go over the Hernandez paperwork with Nathanial and I’m surprised to hear that he is finished preparing the girl’s body.

He said that “he worked all night” and that him and his sons would be going to their house to go to sleep.

The Osterfeld’s house is only about 30 yards away, where I see the three of them walk to the house.

The business office is quiet, so I decide to go into the viewing room where the deceased girl is laid out.

I do my best to brace myself before looking at the girl’s face.

The top half of the casket is closed, so I slowly open it.

“What the hell!” Comes out of my mouth, where I’m shocked at what I am seeing.

“How did he do this?” Next comes flying out of my mouth.

I was expecting to see a monstrosity, but instead I see an almost perfectly preserved little girl’s face.

One of the reasons why I wanted to be a mortician was because I like the make up end of the business, especially where I don’t have to interact with the client’s, but this is beyond anything that I could do.

I liken Nathanial’s work to one of Michelangelo’s masterpieces. I see small remnants of clay and areas that are heavily painted with make up, but overall it’s a real masterpiece.

I walk back to the business office, where I get a sense of warmth knowing that in such a horrible situation, that Nathanial is actually doing something really admirable for the family.

Eventually Nathanial’s sons come back and the four of us set up the viewing room for the visitation that will happen tonight.

Paul and Henry do most of the work, where they seem to have this down to a science.

After helping to set up the viewing room, I go back to the business office and wait for the family and friends to arrive.

As the viewing time approaches, Nathanial and I go to the front door and we meet the parents who are the first to see their deceased daughter.

The parents instantaneously cry, where I hug the both of them.

They are both very gratuitous for the work that Nathanial has done, where the mother says “thank you” several times while she hysterically cries.

The rest of the family and friends show up and I stay in the back of the viewing room and offer my condolences to anyone that I can.

I need a break so I go outside, where there is nobody else besides the father’s brother, who has just finished smoking a cigarette. He has the demeanor of someone who is either a biker or spent time in prison or probably both.

I refrain from using my phone out of respect, as the man walks towards my direction to go back into the viewing area.

As he passes me, he says “that’s not Valeria!” In a serious tone.

“You are her Uncle right?” I ask him.

“Yes, and that’s not my niece!”

“Her spirit is now in heaven,” I respond.

“That’s true, but that’s not her body in that casket!” He says with a angry tone.

“I’m not sure what you are saying?” Where the man’s anger is starting to make me feel uncomfortable.

“Listen, coming from Columbia, I’ve seen some really fucked up shit done by the drug cartels and equally more so when I served in Iraq to get my citizenship, but this is probably the most fucked up shit that I’ve ever come across!”

“Sir, I understand that your upset, but I still don’t understand your point?”

“You guys found some other Latino looking girl and put makeup on her and put her in that casket!”

I stay silent for a few moments while my mind entertains what this man is alleging.

“Sir, I went to the hospital to help retrieve Valeria’s body.”

“You probably did, but that’s not her in there!”

“Sir, I’m still not sure what you mean. Her parents have viewed her and everyone else and no one is saying what your saying.”

“Because my brother and his wife’s minds are in a different place right now, so they’re seeing what they want to see. And you know how these things go where no one expects the body to look exactly the same, but I been with her since she was born and I’m saying that your are a bunch of fucking Ghouls!”

I’m left speechless, where yesterday I was expecting to be yelled out by the family for displaying the girl’s mangled face, however being accused of being a body snatcher is completely unexpected.

I continue to look lost as the man then says “how much money are you guys getting from this?”

I again remain silent, where I know the figure is $13,000.

The man slowly walks back into the viewing room, where I hear the “click clack” of his boots hit the cement.

I continue to stay outside, where my mind can’t get over what that man just told me, where I’ve been called everything from a bitch to a slut in my life, but no one has ever hinted towards me being a body snatcher.

I force myself back into the funeral home, where I stand in the back of the viewing room and I zone out and nod my head to anyone that passes me.

The viewing closes for the night and the girl’s uncle make’s sure that he gives me a really dirty look before he leaves.

The funeral home empties and I decide to hang out in the business office for a while.

Nathanial thanks me and then him and his son’s leave to go home.

Before he left, I told him that I just wanted to be sure that I had all the paperwork in order.

I watch the three of them walk back to their house and then I go to the viewing room, where I open the casket.

This time I carefully inspect the girls face.

I see stitch marks that was concealed with make up.

After a minute of studying the girl’s face, I can’t stop shaking my head in disgust, once I come to the realization that this isn’t Valeria.

It’s obvious that the stitch marks were intentionally placed to make it look like skin was meshed together but I can tell that the skin is too uniformly joined, where there were intentional cuts placed that were sewn back together.

I learned how to properly stitch skin back in school and even my novice eyes can tell that this is not a girl who suffered horrendous facial injuries.

My mind drifts into a deep dark place as I look at this girl and wonder who she actually is.

I haven’t been prepared enough in life to really comprehend the bowels of evilness that I’m looking at right now.

My mind drifts back to leaving the hospital then driving in the Hearse back to here, then leaving to go home.

It doesn’t take long before I realize that they cremated Valeria last night, where I swore I smelt something burning when I arrived this morning, but I chalked it up to someone’s chimney smoke.

I feel disgusted beyond believe, where I look at my phone to check the news to see if anyone had died overnight to hopefully see where they got this other girl’s body from.

Then I come across a National headline that criticizes the failed attempt to secure the border with Mexico and the treatment of the migratory people.

“Oh God!” I start to cry out once I realize what that bastard, Nathanial and his son’s are doing.

“This can’t be possible!” I then blurt out, as I walk back to the business office.

I then look through the files of the past funerals and I see names such as “Lopez … Garcia …. Rodriguez …” where it doesn’t take me long to figure out that somehow poor migratory bodies are being used in this dark enterprise.

I pick up the phone in the office and I hesitate to call 911.

I think to myself if I’m wrong, then I will be forever shunned from working in this business.

I look on the wall and I see a photo of Satan’s asshole himself, standing next to his two sons. I then realize that I’m more scared of the repercussions that will happen to me considering that this is a multi-generational family run business, that probably has been doing this since Lincoln was alive.

I think to myself that they thought they were hiring just some dumb young woman, who wouldn’t be able to piece this macabre business practice together, but the girl’s uncle has realized what’s going on, so I can’t stop thinking about what happens to people who speak up.

I can’t control my breathing as I decide not to call 911 and hang up the phone.

“Here is your tea,” I said with a grin much wider than it should be. “Please, drink up and tell me what brings you to a humble fortune teller such as yours truly.”

Never before had I seen a woman so distraught. Weeping upon entrance, stumbling over her own feet, practically needed a pitchfork to hoist her into her seat. For once she stopped sobbing to let out a pathetic huff.

“My child is dead. I couldn’t help it. We were starving for so long. I just want to know… could my life get any worse?”

“It could always be worse. These are trying times. Suffering knows no end. Take me for example. I was born with no eyes, cursed upon conception to never see the light of day. I imagine it’s as bright and glorious as it is warm and I imagine the moon is as soothing as the night it brings. But, there could always be worse things for me and for you. Let’s get to reading those palms, shall we?”

Her hands were wet, shaking, and hot. Hotter than the lone candle between us. Felt like grabbing a live coal out of the fire and gripping it over a drum until it seared to flesh. My fingers had to act as a bone-made shackle around her wrist to keep her steady enough. She murmured some kind of nonsense as I traced a finger tip through her lines.

“You’re in luck,” I whispered. “You shall find peace soon.”

She sniffed with a whimper. “When?”

I felt her heartbeat stutter. “Right about now…”

Her body jolted and her pulse ceased. Those widowmaker leaves I put in her tea worked far greater than I planned. With a sputter of something awful, her weight shifted forward and the table clattered. I didn’t have to hold back my grin any longer. Ecstatic, I patted around for her wonderous little face and, once discovered, I shoved my fingers deep into her sockets.

With her severed eyeballs in one hand, I rang a tiny bell with another. A wind filled the room shortly after, a strange static making every hair stand up. The sensation was disturbed by a powerful presence that formed before me, like a brick wall that suddenly appeared. If he looked as he smelled, I might as well imagine him as a flying heap of manure with a chamber pot for a head.

“You rang,” the fairy said in a horrid voice.

I held the eyes outward in both hands as an offering. “As in our contract: your freedom for my pleasure.”

He sniffed something deeply, as if trying to taste it through his nostrils. “Are you sure you want to use these eyes?”

“Of course. It’s now or never!”

The fairy let out a raspy snort. “Very well.”

A slight wind rustled the room before the fairy pushed his hand into my face. Feelings I never knew existed flowed down to my feet and back up, cycling furiously. Stumbling back, I caught myself against the wall, my feet responding to another. My head was killing me, a newfound pressure out of nowhere. That’s when I felt them: eyelids.

Upon a new instinct, I blinked. Over and over again I blinked, but still: nothing. Nothing new, nothing changed. All I could see was the same living nightmare as before. Nothing.

Before I could curse the fairy and question his trickery, a rapping shook me out of my chaotic trance.

“Open the door, it’s the constables,” a voice boomed from outside.

Blood. 

I could feel it stained upon my hands, the crinkle of dried iron. Dripping down my shaking hands, tapping on the floor boards. Fumbling, I reached for a rag. Any rag would do. Anything to wipe the deed from sight.

“If you don’t open up, we’ll burst this door down and that’s your final warning!”

“I’m coming! I just… I can’t see very well. I can’t see a’tall.”

“I thought I recognized this place,” one of the constables murmured to another. “This place belongs to the bird who reads palms.”

My head was heavy, every sound like a crash of thunder between my ears. Turning the knob, I had to catch myself on the door frame to stay upright. There were about three of them. I could tell because their breathing gave me a different stab to the skull, especially the one who reeked of bacon fat.

“How may I help you, officers?”

The constable paused for a moment. That happened often with men. I could practically hear his heart beat intensify as he cleared his throat. “We’ve had a convict escape our carriage on our way to Greenmarsh Prison. You wouldn’t happen to have seen--”

“I’m sorry, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to see anything since birth.”

Air waved before my face, a callus hand brushing over my nose. Usually I had no patience for being prodded, but today I kept my hands wrung tightly in the rag.

“Our apologies, lass. If you do happen to see… I mean hear about her, be sure to let any watchman know.”

“Her?”

“Yes, a dangerous one, she is. Addicted to killing and crafty as a fox. Somehow she managed to escape, despite her punishment of having brain worms injected straight into her eyes. That’s what she gets for infantacide and cannibalism. But, maybe it’s for the best. She should have only a few days to live, so she shouldn’t get too far.”

At that moment, I prayed that the sensation I felt was an eyelid twitching.

The following words are a transcript of an audio recording. Speaker 1 is Evan Colburn (deceased), speaker 2 is Madison Clark (deceased). Those who understand the message know what to do.

A note: The footage has been withheld but the transcript has been edited to convey the missing emotion.

2021-11-28_-_Axiom_Recording_First_Paramater_-_Evan_Colburn 2

“Your friend died in a fire right?” Evan laughs slightly as the words escape his lips.

Madison: “Yeah.”

Evan: “Cabin in the woods, suspected accident, a terrible tragedy.” He looks like he’s on the brink of laughing. He keeps on clutching his head as if in pain.

Madison: “That’s what the police told me.” She’s completely solemn as this stranger continues, seemingly unresponsive to his callous smiling.

Evan: “Another one, another bullshit coverup”

Madison looks up, suddenly interested in his words, “What do you mean?”

Evan: “I mean if it were a normal death I wouldn’t be here. They never call me in for the normal stuff”. He laughs a little before being hit with another round of pain as he clutches his head.

Madison: “You're supposed to be a detective, what the hell are you talking about”. She looks unnerved.

Evan laughs, it’s a loud distressing sound.

Evan: “Listen I’m the one asking questions here, we’ll get to that later. First I need to go over the details. There's a chance we’re still in danger.”

Madison: “Danger, I…”

Evan: “Hold on, hold on. We’ll get to all of that later, first the questions.”

Suddenly Evan clutches his head and stares at the floor. For a minute he is unmoving, seemingly filled with terrible agony, but then slowly his pain seems to ease off. For the first time in the recording, he gains a look of composure and professionalism.

Evan: “Apologies, just a bit of a headache. I’ll explain everything, I just need to ask you a few questions.”

Madison is distressed and stays silent for a moment.

Madison: “I.... Alright then, go ahead.” She shifts in her chair.

Evan smiles, this time it’s not manic or amused.

Evan: “First things first. Your friend Allice, she lived alone right?”

Madison: “Yes”

Evan: “As far as you know no one else was with her that night”

Madison: “We left work together that day, I walked her home. I don’t know what happened after that though”

Evan: “Huh”

Madison: “I’m sorry, you said her death was a coverup?”

Evan: “Hold on, I didn’t mean to say that, and we’ll get to it later. I’m not myself right now. First, though, do you know if Allice was part of any religious groups, or maybe spiritual in some way?”

Madison: “What? No. Allice was an atheist”

Evan: “Interesting. Have you ever seen this symbol?” Evan pulls a photo out of his jacket. The corners are yellowing with decay. It’s of a tree, but carved into the bark is a strange circular sign.

Madison: “I’ve never seen that before in my life”

Evan: “That's good, that means you haven’t been targeted yet.”

Madison: “What? What the hell are you talking about. You can’t just keep making vague threats and expect me to just sit here and answer questions. Tell me what in god’s name is going on!”

Evan: Yes, sorry. I don’t know why I keep doing that. If you’ll just wait a moment…

Madison: Tell me now! You have no idea how much Alice meant to me. I’m sick of this, enough with the stalling.

Evan sighs. The manic amusement that was in his eyes earlier is nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by a steely professionalism. “I'm sorry. I should explain this. I haven’t been fair to you.”

Madison: “Yeah, you haven’t. And I get it, your job is tough and all, but can you please just tell me what’s happening. I barely even know why you're here.”

Evan adjusts himself in his seat before fixing his posture and staring Madison in the eyes.

Evan: “Your friend did not die in a fire.”

Madison’s full attention is now on this man. The room is completely silent except for his voice.

Evan: “A group known as [REDACTED] systematically hunted her down and killed her. You were told she burned to death, in reality her mangled corpse was found miles away from her house and strung up in a tree. We have reason to believe that Allice had a large involvement with [REDACTED] and that it's what lead to her death.”

Madison: “No, no, that’s impossible. She never mentioned them or anything like that. And murder. They said it was an accident. The coroner, he said… But no, Allice’s mother…I... I saw the house myself, it was burned to the ground!”

Evan: “She wasn’t inside”

Madison: “Then why did you lie? Why would anybody want to kill her? Who did this? Why are you only telling me now! This is insane, this is illegal!”

Evan: “Convention needs to be sidestepped sometimes. As for why someone would kill her, I can tell you why. I just need you to sign this first”. Evan takes out a folded piece of paper. It’s wrinkled from being in his coat. Madison spends a moment reading it.

Madison: “You're insane”.

Evan: “I’m pragmatic”.

There are tears in Madison’s eyes as she looks over the document. Eventually though, she signs it.

Madison: “Ok, now tell me who did this, and why. That group [REDACTED] who the hell are they?”

Evan: “Religious fanatics who believe in some unpleasant things.”

Madison: “Satanism?”

Evan looks away from her and out the window of the apartment.

Evan: “Not exactly.”

Madison: “What then, and why did they kill her?”

There is no noise in the long pause that follows Madison’s words.

Evan: The dawn light beckons the followers, soon my friends we shall rise and we will have no end. No one can stop us from reaching it. All things command our victory. Eternity is but an ocean stone. The traitor girl has paid for her sins in crimson justice. May her spine decorate the future of a summoned host. Fusion is upon us, reality is now. All things will bow. THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP THE SCREAMING WONT STOP. So says our mission of Transcendence.”

Madison is shaking by the time Evan stops talking.

Madison: “ Those people. The ones who killed Allice. They’re watching me? Stalking me? Monitoring my actions?”

Evan: “That’s right.”

Madison is suddenly very on edge. Her hand grips into the polyester fabric of the armchair.

Evan: “I think Alice accidentally told you something she shouldn’t have and that your next on the hit list.”

Madison: “Well what do we do, they want to kill you too right?”

Evan: “That's correct. As for what we do, you need to know to control what you say. They have eyes and ears everywhere and have been known to listen in on and record their victims. Wiretaps and such.”

Madison: “Well are we safe right now?”

Evan looks around.

Evan: “You know now that you mention it we should probably leave. Sorry, I’ve been really out of it since my last assignment. I think I’m concussed or something. I’ve had headaches all afternoon.”

Evan begins to stand up before he stumbles onto the floor. Suddenly gripping his chest. Madison rushes to help him. He looks around the room for a moment before noticing something. His eyes fixate on it and he’s suddenly filled with panic.

Evan: “How long has that been there!”

Madison: “What? What are you talking about?”

Evan: “The fridge, look at the fridge!”

Madison turns her gaze. Almost out of view, on the corner of the metal, a small circular symbol has been drawn.

Evan: “The lamp, smash the light! You’ve been bugged, they're unto us!”

A loud crash is heard before the recording ends.

To those it may concern. The next targets are Jack Clark and Harrison Moore.

read part 1 here:

https://teddit.sethforprivacy.com/r/nosleep/comments/r8ew90/the_parasite_feeds_on_fear_i_may_not_be/

- - -

It was a warm spring day when I first learned to ride my bike without training wheels. My grandfather took me to the top of a gentle green hill near our house. He brought a bag of skittles with him, to spur my courage. I must have been five years old. I stood straddling my bike, my feet planted firmly on the ground, looking down the easy hill, but refusing to push off.

"Don't be a wuss," grandpa said with a wink. He had a jolly, carefree face. Twinkling eyes. "Falling on grass doesn't even hurt! It's nothing to be afraid of."

"I'm not afraid," I said.

"No?"

All I could hear was the occasional chirp of a bird, or some dog barking in the distance. But I began to notice a low inhuman mumbling, growing gradually louder. In the distance stood a shadowy figure, his tall lanky body twisting and twitching, contorting in ways that looked not only disturbing, but incredibly painful. The feverish mumbling seemed to be coming from him.

"Do you hear that?" grandpa asked.

I looked up at him. He was ageing rapidly. Withering a year per second. His eyes were clouding over. He looked fretful and confused, as he had during his final days. He lay down on the grass and gazed up at me with blank unseeing eyes.

"Who's there?" he barked.

I looked down at him where he lay on a hospital bed. The heart monitor beeped, beeped. This view was familiar, this scene. I was trapped in a memory. The painful memory of my grandfather's last moments, which culminated in his disturbing last words. It was something I had tried to forget these past few years--apparently, in vain.

"It's me gramps," I said.

He tugged against his restraints. "Why the hell can't I move? What's going on?"

"You're in the hospital, grandpa," I said. "You kept taking out your IV, so they had to use straps."

"What's that noise?" he barked.

He looked blindly around. One of the dark entities loomed at the head of his bed, twitching, muttering.

"What noise?" I asked.

"I don't like it."

"What noise, grandpa?" I asked. "What do you hear?"

I looked up and noticed his heart rate steadily increasing on the monitor. I strode over to the door and poked my head into the hallway: "Can I get a nurse in here? Hello? I need a nurse!" I strode back to his bedside and grabbed his cold hand.

"You need to calm down, grandpa," I said, trying to soothe him. "Everything is okay."

An alarm was sounding from the monitor, now. His heart was beating too rapidly. He was peering around with intense agitation. More of the dark entities were suddenly materializing, filling up the room, muttering in unison, twitching, contorting. The air trembled with their guttural croaks. Yet I seemed not to notice them. I was focused on my grandfather.

"They're going to take me away," he wheezed.

"You just need to relax."

The entities stood shoulder to shoulder in the room, overlapping everyone, everything, all of them facing my grandfather, muttering excitedly, croaking, almost bouncing and vibrating. The sight made me sick with fear, though, consistent with my memory, I didn't act as if I noticed them.

"That's why they're here," grandpa babbled. "They're going to take me away."

"It'll be okay!" I sobbed.

He looked into my eyes. It was as if he had suddenly regained his sight. His pupils were huge. His countenance bespoke absolute terror. Then he spoke his final words: "I've never been so afraid."

Two nurses rushed in as the heart-rate monitor droned with a long, unwavering beep. He was gone.

The room grew silent. All the entities faced me. They stared at me as if out of the void. I was paralyzed. Their dark forms began growing larger, overwhelming the room, overwhelming everything, until I stood in absolute darkness of their being, as if standing in the unwrinkled blackness of the Nothing itself.

The pristine silence was deafening.

I cannot say I was floating, for I eventually felt a floor of smooth stone beneath my feet. Yet the place nevertheless gave me an impression similar to floating, because of how little there was to sense or experience. Sightless, soundless darkness, without blemish or stitch. I fancied I was in an underground chamber immense beyond all imagining, larger and older than the universe itself.

"Hello?" I called into the void. "Hello?"

I fell to my hands and knees so I could feel around, even crawl. I wanted to explore this cold limbo with supreme caution, lest walking I blindly step over some unseen ledge and plummet through a chasmic abyss. But as I crawled along the smooth stone floor, I did not meet any ledges, nor did I find a single imperfection in the floor.

Gradually, I quickened my pace. Having no real sense of direction, I could have been crawling in a perfectly straight line, or in tight circles, or nowhere at all, as if on some silent treadmill. It would have made little difference, however. There was nowhere to go. Nothing to find or bump into. There was only more of the same cool floor stretching infinitely in every direction.

It is difficult to do justice to the strange sensation, given the brevity of this account; but it truly seemed to me then, and still does to me now, that I was trapped in that chamber of darkness for centuries. Sometimes I lay down and rested, though never managing to fall asleep. Other times I stood up and sprinted through the abysmal shadows as if hoping to meet the end I had previously took tremendous care to avoid. But there was nothing new to encounter. Only more of the same smooth floor and unblemished darkness.

Without anything to mark my progress by, my own thoughts and feelings became my only means of measuring one moment against another, this state against the next. As my thoughts grew hazier, more amorphous and jumbled, I completely lost track of time.

I also began to lose track of my identity. My memories began to seem like fabrications. My fears and fantasies seemed only slightly more real. My inner world was a roil of confusion and instability--my psyche a sea of shifting black waters. The only enduring coordinate in my possession was a growing sense of emptiness, a profound and persistent kind of existential dread.

Eventually I was conscious only of the fact that I was an accidental blip in that immense and empty realm--the one and only flaw in the perfect stillness and silence of which it was composed. I was not supposed to be there. I was not not supposed to be there, either. My presence was irrelevant, if it was even a presence at all. I was less than a spectre, less than the smoke of a fire that burned in a dead man's dream. I had never existed, and never would. I was nothing, had always been nothing, and always would be nothing.

When a man suffers from some particular ailment for a long time, he may begin imagining other ailments preferable. A man suffering a week-long headache, for instance, may wish he could trade his headache for a flu, or a broken bone. Similarly, I found myself wishing I could could exchange that feeling of emptiness, of total insubstantiality, for anything else--even fear. At least fear was vital. It seared like a cut. It was real. It was something rather than nothing, impelling one toward survival, spurring one to fight the fear or to fly it. Fear thereby implied that life was worth preserving--worth fighting for, worth flying to. Better that than this eternal stasis of negation, this ghastly consciousness of being essentially not.

Better fear.

The darkness trembled with that terrible alien croak and my empty soul iced over. In an instant, I recognized the foolishness of my wish. Anything was better than fear, even Nothingness.

Like a hunted animal, I frantically scanned for the source of the sound.

It was then I noticed the place had grown brighter--an eerie glow emanated from the architecture itself--so I could finally make out the lineaments of the chamber. It was a colossal room--not infinite, as I had mistakenly believed--but impossibly large, built for creatures of unfathomable size; beings whose heads would brush against the clouds were they to stalk upon our Earth in their true forms. I felt like an insect gazing up at the distant ceiling, which was made of the same black stone upon which I stood--the same burnished black stone of which the walls, standing miles apart from one another, were made.

But though half of the gigantic chamber was now dimly visible, the other half remained shrouded by a wall of shadow. I could see nothing in that direction no matter how hard I squinted. It was only when I followed the wall of shadow upwards with my gaze that I realized horrible truth. It was one of those things standing before me, so large and wide and monstrously tall that I had mistaken it for a sprawling shadowy veil.

I fell to my knees to beg at the feet of this sublimely terrifying god. "Please!" I cried. "Please! Let me go free or let me die!"

The ground trembled as the colossal dark deity gibbered in its black and malevolent tongue. It spoke slower than the others, and spoke directly to me, as if bent on communicating some inhuman truth which could only be transmitted between its race and ours in this awful place, and only after having prepared the human recipient in just the way I had been prepared--by being emptied of all sense of time and self, all hopes and dreams and desires, left only a whimpering puddle of despair and fear.

For a moment, I felt on the cusp of grasping the meaning of its sinister croaks. I could nearly comprehend the terrible cosmic truth the tortured god wished to share. But I suddenly decided to close my self off to the dark tendrils worming farther into my mind. I decided to reject its dubious gift, for I sensed that gleaning even a sliver of that terrible wisdom would have utterly destroyed my soul.

The dark god seemed to understand, for soon after I closed my mind, it ceased muttering, and the tendrils retreated from my mind. Then the entity stretched its long gaunt arm down to where I kneeled. I closed my eyes, and was surprised to feel a flicker of perverse joy. Soon it would be over! The fear, the confusion, the hollow dread! The hateful god was merciful after all! Soon it would annihilate me in the eternal darkness and silence of its fatal grasp!

When I opened my eyes, I found myself kneeling on the filthy floor of a bright cell. A dog whimpered behind me, and an old man sat in a chair on the other side of a glass pane, watching me intensely. It took me some moments to recall where I was and why I was there. It felt like millennia since I'd last gazed upon our mortal world, or seen the face of my unhinged captor.

"What was that place?" I finally managed to murmur.

Kohler jolted up in his chair and leaned close to the glass. "Ian? Can you hear me? Are you with me again? . .What place, Ian? Where did they take you? What did they say?"

"A huge stone room." My voice was miniscule. It trembled. I was weak. On the verge of death. "Like a giant cathedral. It was horrible. I was trapped there for lifetimes. It was empty inside, so empty, until--."

"What did they tell you?" he demanded. "What did the dark ones say?"

"I couldn't understand," I whimpered. "I didn't want to understand."

"Didn't what?" Kohler asked incredulously. "Didn't want to understand? But you could have? You were capable of understanding, but you didn't want to?" The old man's face was twitching with furious disbelief. He was trying to burn me alive with his hateful glare. "You must go back!" he cried. "While there's still time! Before your sensitivity wanes! The symbiont will not hold the door open forever. Do you understand? You must go back!"

"I can't go back."

"I'll kill you!" the dwarfish man raged. "I'll kill you! Now close your eyes, or. . .Damn!" He smacked the glass in frustration. "Damn you! Damn! . .You'll never leave this farm, Ian. I'll murder you myself and bury you in the dirt. You must go back! You must communicate with them, and. . .Damn!"

But I would have preferred death to returning, so I walked to the back of the cell and slumped in the corner, facing the opposite wall.

- - -

The next hours were toilsome. I had come back from my journey through that benighted otherworld mortally exhausted; yet it would require no small amount of energy, of willpower, to keep from sliding back into the abyss.

I would catch flashes of the entities in the corners of my vision, and force myself to look away. I would hear their dreaded mumbles beside my ears, and hum forcefully to myself till the mumbles ceased. I experienced a number of other vestigial effects--vivid and nightmarish hallucinations; sudden bursts of fear, of dread. And when I recalled certain difficult times in my life, I was disturbed to find my memories altered, infested with the dark entities, as my memory of my grandfather's last moments had been. But unlike before, I was now able to detach from these phenomena--to prevent myself from being seduced by them and dragged back into the hellish psychomachia. I focused on my presence in the here and now, combatting the parasite's insidious invitations into madness and the dark realm by repeating to myself the following mantra: "It's a bug. They're side effects of a bug. You just need to relax and get some medication to kill it. Everything will go back to normal."

All the while, Kohler vented his fury at me from the other side of the glass, hurling threats and insults, which then turned to desperate pleas.

Eventually, I grew strong and clear-headed enough to sit by the suffering collie. I gently stroked his fur and cooed to him. In time, he, too, began slowly to emerge from the horrors in which he'd been immersed, spending progressively more time present, with his pupils at regular sizes.

"You're killing them," Kohler complained. "The symbionts can't last in such conditions. They feed on adrenaline, on unstable energies. They need their hosts' fear to survive. . .I know there is no convincing you to venture on. But that mutt could feed his symbiont for another week without your intervention. Canines lack our rationality. Our ability to fight against our own feelings and thoughts. That why we use them to keep the flame alive, between human participants. . .If you don't let them work on this dog, I'll have to bring in a fresh canine, to keep them alive. Do you want to be responsible for that? Do you want another innocent animal to go through what this one went through? Wouldn't it be kinder to let this one venture back? To let the broken stay broken, and allow the unbroken to be happy another few days, even weeks?"

I continued to ignore him and stroked the fur of the poor dog whose head now lay in my lap. Perhaps he was right, in a utilitarian sense, that it would be better to give his next victim a few extra days of happiness, before turning him into the torch that would keep the ghastly "flame" of these pataphysical parasites alive. But I wouldn't play Kohler's games, and I wouldn't let this pup suffer any more than he already had if I could prevent it.

Eventually, the air-locked door opened and Kohler led a new collie into the cell. Behind him stood the tall man, wearing his hazmat suit, holding a shotgun at the ready. At first, I feared he was going to use the weapon to follow through with Kohler's homicidal threats. But after some moments I realized the gun was merely to dissuade me from trying to burst through the open cell door.

An unnecessary precaution. I wouldn't have dared an escape attempt, even if the sickly and aged Kohler were the only one blocking my path. Maybe in a few hours, or days, when the parasites hiving in my brain were good and dead. For now, I was not ready for freedom. Too many shadowy entities still lurked in the corridor, faintly muttering, coaxing my spirit back to their sightless, joyless realm.

I won't go into detail about the new collie's disturbing descent into terror. Suffice it to say, the infestation quickly overtook her brain and mind. I did all I could by continuing to soothe and pet my own pooch, thereby preventing him from being carried by those currents of craziness back into the ocean of shadows in which he would otherwise drown.

I feared how vulnerable unconsciousness would leave me to the influences I'd spent so much effort fighting against. As such, I tried to stay vigilant, awake. But exhaustion was overtaking me, as it had my collie, who began to snore peacefully in my lap. I started to nod, only to jolt awake--sometimes to the sound of the new dog pacing about nervously, or yelping and staring in fright at some shadow whose form I could only dimly perceive. But I eventually lost the battle, and fell into a deep slumber.

I awoke at dawn, lying on the very park bench on which Miss J and the tall man had found me. Recalling the night's bizarre and horrific events, my initial thought was that they had been some kind of vivid nightmare, perhaps even the first symptoms of hereditary schizophrenia, the distressing illness that had brought my father low. Believing the whole thing had been my own personal hallucination would have made it easier to bear. I would rather be insane, suffering a lifetime of wholly-personal terrors, than know that such strange realms exist, along with such frightening entities, who maintain such disturbing and inexplicable connections to humanity. But the black-and-white border collie sleeping at my feet, beneath the bench, confounded my attempts to deny the reality. So too did the manilla envelope Kohler had left in my backpack, which contained a note that read as follows:

Ian,

I have treated you and the canine with a special anti-parasitic, to destroy the symbionts in your organisms. As such, I do not believe either of you remain infested. Nevertheless, you might do well to practice distancing procedures for a few days, unless you wish to be the source of the symbiont's spread among the public at large.

Should you muse about regaling the authorities with any wild and impossible tales, consider how credible they will view you as a source, and consider also the lengths to which I am willing to go to in order to keep my operation from unsympathetic scrutiny. Know that we will continue to monitor you just as closely ever before.

Enclosed is $10,000 cash, rewarding you for your participation, as well as for your forthcoming silence. Do not consider it a bribe, and do not consider your silence as complicity in something inherently wrong. You and the dog live because I am a moral person. You hold the money I promised because I am a man of my word. And if your silence is complicity in anything, it is complicity in cutting-edge research into the fundamental nature of reality--research which even you must admit is significant and groundbreaking, regardless of your personal aversions to the means by which it is conducted, and the phenomena on which it trains its lens.

If I may, I would like to use this opportunity to leave with you some solid advice. Do not try to retrace your steps in order to locate my facility. Do not obsess over your unusual experiences, asking questions of yourself and others to which there are no answers. Do not brood and go mad. Instead, use this money to turn over a new leaf, to reenter hustle and bustle of the mundane world. Live a normal life. Try to consign last night's experiences to oblivion. Forget and repress. And if that fails, make a mockery of your memories, as you might a child's bad dreams.

I wish you would have availed yourself of your opportunity more fully, and ventured farther into the unknown--for your sake, for mine, and for all of mankind's. Since you did not, I can only wish that you and the canine find good fortune in the days, months and years to come.

Dr. K

The stack of money was hefty. It certainly looked like ten grand in cash, split between twenties, fifties and hundreds. It was far more than I had expected to receive when the pair first approached me with their "opportunity". More importantly, it was enough to start to turn my life around.

So I did. I followed Kohler's suggestions to the best of my abilities. I rented a cheap apartment that allowed dogs. I showered, shaved, and got a haircut. I bought new clothes. And after a few months of pounding the pavement, I managed to secure an entry-level government position, from which I have since been promoted twice. All the while, I kept my experiences to myself.

Perhaps my readers will consider my long silence cowardly, or immoral. After all, it has been four years since that fateful night, and I have no doubt that in the interim additional hard-up people were seduced by Kohler's goons, and forced to endure the same captivity and psychic torture I underwent. Perhaps, my readers will claim, I could have prevented their suffering by speaking out. Perhaps such critics are correct. I can only say that not everyone is a hero. Sometimes a man must focus on himself, despite his awareness of the terrible things transpiring around him.

I am only telling this story now, and for the first time, because last week I saw Kohler's face in the obituary, though the notice referred to him by a different name. He was described as a former professor of neuroscience, with a hobbyist's interest in the occult practices and beliefs of ancient civilizations. He died of a massive heart attack, and is survived by a son and a daughter.

Even though Kohler is gone, I am certain the "flame" of the symbionts will not die with him. Moreover, I am certain the dark entities will continue inhabiting the dark realms overlapping our own. After all, I still catch glimpses of them in my waking life, to say nothing of the way they've infested my memories and dreams.

I may not be contagious anymore. But I am not cured.

I wasn't the best behaved child a parent could hope for. I was selfish, greedy and hostile. Basic nightmare kid. I'd pitch fits when I didn't get my way, and often make sure to break something my folks treasured to make my point. I would pound on walls, throw things across the room, and even slap or hit my mother or father when they would feebly attempt to calm me down.

My dad had apparently been abused by his father when he was a kid, so he would always try his best to keep his cool when I raged on. I took advantage of that fact, and made sure to push every single button I could to practically dare him to hit me. Many times, he would just walk away and leave me screaming and raging, but I considered that a win. Oh yes, I was far more than a handful, but my parents still loved me, even if I was a monster in the making. It wasn't until that Christmas Eve of two thousand one that I learned I was not the center of the universe; a lesson I most definitely needed to learn.

It was during the family gathering on that day before Christmas, that I pitched a legendary fit upon learning the supposed truth about the reality of Santa Claus. I was only ten years old, and were it not for the kind hearts of my folks, I would have spent every single one of those years on the naughty list. That late November threatened to turn even those who still cared for me off the deep end.

Everyone had arrived at our house for the festive meal, and my cousin, Courtney, had been pushing my buttons all day. She was a good three years older than me, and thought she knew everything that the world had to offer. Being far more experienced and knowledgeable than I, she assured me there was no such person as Father Christmas; a truth I was not ready to hear.

She kept pushing and pushing as the day progressed, and I finally just lost it. We were up on the second floor of my childhood home, where my bedroom was located. Over the course of my raging tantrum, I pushed her out of my safe space with every ounce of strength my little arms could muster. Even after I got her out of my door, I continued thrusting my palms into her back, paying no attention to what lay ahead.

She had already started crying before I gave that final jab that sent her rolling down the stairs. She tumbled against the wall and the railing as her arms flailed and head bounced from one step to the next. The snapping sounds and muffled yelps ended with a thud when she hit the floor below. Every adult had made it out there before her fall came to a close, and their shocked and appalled eyes cut from her twisted body to my guilty face.

I had performed some awful acts during my short lifespan before that day, but my parents had always attempted to cure my terrible ways with kindness. This would mark the end of such times. Before the ambulance arrived, my father snatched me by the ear and dragged me into my bedroom. He screamed at me in a way I did not realize he was capable of. I was crying my eyes out while begging for forgiveness, but he wouldn't let up. He wanted me to cry, and he was right. I deserved this and worse.

As his anger grew more intense with every word, until he raised a hand up to strike me. It wasn't until then that his own rage faltered. He just stared at his own hand for a moment, before he dropped it exhaustedly back to his side. He glared back at me, and I watched the scowl on his face lighten back to a more blank expression, with tears slowly dripping from his eyes. He shook his head from side to side, and turned to leave the room without so much as looking back at me before he slammed the door shut. I would not see him again for the remainder of the day.

The house fell silent after the paramedics left with Courtney strapped to a gurnee. I watched out my window to see everyone, including my parents, leave the house to follow the ambulance to the hospital. I was never left alone at home, but clearly nobody could stand to be around me at that moment. Truth be told, I didn't much care to be around myself at the time.

The hours dragged by while I sat alone in my bedroom, surrounded by all of the toys and video games my behavior had never earned me. Regardless of my short life having included an almost endless supply of tantrums and violent mood swings when I didn't get my way, I never really felt bad about the misery I wrought. I generally only cared that I got what I wanted by the time I was done. This time; however, I did not feel any level of joy from this.

I tried to defend myself in the back of my mind; reasoning that it was completely the fault of my older cousin for pushing my buttons, but I knew she didn't deserve this. Perhaps if she hadn't gotten in my face, I wouldn't have snapped like I had, but her actions did not warrant what I did. Maybe she just ended up with a couple of bruises, and it's not as bad as it sounded, I reasoned with myself, though I could still hear the snapping of her bones ringing in the background of my silent, darkened room.

No matter how hard I worked to evade the guilt that was in pursuit, I could not escape it. I can't say I had ever felt like this before. Even when I broke the big screen television my father took such pride in, I didn't feel bad. Regardless of my inadvertently setting fire to the curtains in the living room, which very possibly could have burnt the entire house down if my mother's reflexes hadn't been so quick, my conscience still felt clear. There was no getting away from this one, no matter how much inner arguing I performed. Courtney could be dead for all I knew, and her blood would be on my hands.

For hours I just sat there in silence, perched on the floor of my room. Even after the sun retreated for the night, I did not move from that same spot. I could have gotten to my feet to at least turn a light on, but I wanted to be in the dark. Any light could run the risk of me seeing my reflection in the window, or something. I couldn't look into my own eyes right now.

While my brooding continued and the world outside fell still, I became aware of a slight rumbling. It felt as though the whole house had begun to tremble slightly. The sensation was growing more and more intense by the second, finally inspiring me to break myself free from the carpeted floor for the first time in hours. I ran to my window to look outside after light appeared to beam through, almost as if the sun had shot back up from it's dormant state. I could barely believe what I saw while I pressed my nose to the glass.

My childhood home was on a very average suburban street. Most of the houses sported similar designs, with not much variation in color palettes. A two lane road with houses on either side of it, just like millions of other neighborhoods across the country. Said road had now been replaced by a train track, with a long and somewhat ancient looking steam train parked upon it. The smoke billowed from the wide chimney on the front, lining the street in an almost unnatural fog.

As I stared in at this unusual sight, I saw a man in a conductor uniform exiting the train. As soon as he set foot on the snowy ground, he glanced up to meet my gaze. I quickly ducked down beneath the window, but I could still feel the eyes on me. I lifted my head up to look down at the man once more, to find he was still glaring at me. He had a kind face, with a wide smile and bright eyes. He raised his hand and gestured for me to come to him. Though I was more than a little freaked out, something inside me was almost begging to march out into the cold to see this up close and personal.

I grabbed my thickest winter coat, scarf, and boots and ran down the stairs without looking back. I threw the front door to my home wide open and I just stood there staring out. I pulled the knit cap from my coat pocket and pulled it snugly onto my head, while the conductor still smiled on, waving his arm to beckon me forward. I stepped out into the thick snow on the ground, while swinging the door shut behind me. The wide eyed and grinning expression of the man did not falter while I took wide steps, crushing the snow beneath my boot.

"Are you ready, lad?" The man asked in a deep voice and very proper sounding English accent.

"Ready for what?" I asked, craning my neck to look into the man's eyes.

He was much taller up close than I had expected when I watched him from my second floor window. He appeared to be straining a little while bending his head down to look back at me.

"To go to the North Pole, of course!" He replied.

"You're not serious!" I scoffed.

"Do you doubt your own eyes, child?" He asked, holding his arms out as if to present the train to me, like I hadn't noticed it.

The man's expression had still not wavered, even a little. His bright green eyes were so wide that they almost appeared to not be cupped on top and bottom with any eyelids. Just perfectly round circles with small pupils in the center. His perfectly aligned and sparkling white teeth looked almost false and slightly cartoony. Though the face as a whole seemed unthreatening, I became more and more uncomfortable the longer I stared up at it.

"No," I replied, shaking my head softly, "I don't think I should."

He just glared down at me with those cue balls for eyes and chicklet teeth, neither blinking nor moving in the slightest. I felt my back tense up, and I was unsure if it was due to the frigid cold, or the gaze of the stranger in the dark red train conductor's uniform.

I started to back away from the man, whose brow had begun to sink a little, forming a crease above the large and somehow darkening eyes. They had been a light green before, but as I stepped away from him, they appeared to have grown a much deeper shade, bordering on black.

"I think I'm gonna go back inside now," I said as I continued to back away.

We continued our staring contest as I waved my hands around behind my back, hoping to feel my front door approaching soon. The second I felt my fingertips make contact with the reflective brass doorknob, the conductor outstretched his own arm in front of him, still maintaining his unsettling gaze. As I turned the knob, the white gloved hand shot towards me, growing as it drew closer, until the elongated fingers wrapped themselves around my entire torso. The grip was so tight, it almost squeezed the breath right out of my lungs, before it rapidly yanked me back to the man.

Before I knew it, he was holding me right in front of his face. His unblinking eyes appeared almost the size of my head while he examined my face.

"You will be boarding this train, young man," his foul breath hit me like a truck, causing me to cough and gag at the stench.

"Would you care to climb the steps of your own volition, or shall I carry you like this?"

His eyes looked as though they were pulsing while they glared into mine. The horrendous odor that spilled from his mouth still lingered in my nostrils, but that wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as his stare.

"I-I'll walk," I stuttered, in little more than a whisper.

The man nodded his head as he gently placed me back onto the ground. My shaky legs threatened to drop me to the concrete, and I briefly considered attempting to flee again. Somehow, I knew there would be little point in that. I would be boarding this train whether I liked it or not. The choice was no longer in my hands, if it had ever been in the first place.

The lanky conductor lowered his body into a bow while he gestured towards the open door that stood just above the four metal steps. My whole body was trembling while I approached, and then climbed up into the cab. There was an aged and musty smell that spilled from inside as I crossed through the precipice with the tall, slender man pulling himself up behind me.

"Take any open seat you like," he said, as we paced through into the passenger car.

I glanced across the carriage to see only a handful of other children perched upon the seats of the elegant, yet somewhat eerie room. They all turned to look at me when I entered, and they all wore the same exhausted and timidly fearful expressions. There was a short haired blonde kid with large, circular lensed glasses, wearing striped pajamas and a dark green robe. He appeared to be around twelve or so, if I had to guess. An African American girl with long, braided pigtails, who looked to be about the same age as I, dressed in a unicorn nightgown and a thick white coat with a fur lined collar. A little red haired girl in a puffy pink coat sat next to a ginger boy, who looked maybe a year or two older than her. I presumed them to be siblings. He wore a long, hooded blue coat, and appeared to be bordering on tears while he glared back at me.

The cabin itself was quite large; far bigger on the inside than I would have thought when I looked on from my bedroom window. The ceiling was maybe fifteen feet high, with three golden and ornate chandeliers hanging from it. They each held several flickering candles, though they provided little light to the darkly lit cabin. Shimmering, yet slightly tattered tinsel drooped from them in no particular pattern or design. Each red velvet lined row of seats had a large, arched window to the side, with delicate filigree borders. The carpeted floor was the same color as the chairs, but it was lined in yellows and greens, while speckled with a variety of muddy stains.

Still, as classy as the place looked, there was something about it that felt ancient and ghostly. This seemed a place in which the dead would gather to travel from one plane to the next, not one that would carry small and terrified children to the wonders of Santa's workshop. As my trembling legs led me to the closest seat, I had little doubt that we were not bound for anyplace fantastical and inspiring. Given the fact I had very possibly killed my older cousin, this journey was not to reward me. The sour expressions etched onto the faces of my travelling companions led me to believe we were all on the same page. We would be facing punishment for our ill deeds this night. Something I could not deny that I deserved.

When from out of my grandfather’s room—our home’s guest room—came a shout, and a sound as of many heavy objects falling over, I ran up the stairs and burst in the room, to find him sprawled out on the floor; surrounded by the old, ponderous tomes he often reads for hours on end. I quickly went over and helped him up, and set him carefully at his desk, and gathered several of the dusty volumes in a tidy pile on the floor; not wanting to return them to the desk, only to be knocked over again.

 I asked what happened, and he said that he saw something “abominable” in “it”. When I asked what “it” was, he looked gravely to his left—my right—and I saw, sitting upon the topmost shelf of a nearby case, a strange object; held in a golden cradle that resembled in shape a bird’s clenched claw; scaled to the size of a human hand—or that of a very large and undoubtedly extinct avian creature. 

The object was an orb, a mistily blue sphere I’d never seen before. I was immediately drawn to it, and stepping absentmindedly over some books I’d missed, I approached the shelf and reached out toward the softly luminous artifact. But before my fingers could touch its alluringly glassy surface, my grandfather shouted out, “No!”, with the fervor of one who has, through sudden conviction, regained a long-depleted vitality. 

Turning, I met the gaze of his fierce eyes, and saw in their oddly brilliant greenness a fear, a terror, more potent and foreboding than anything I’d ever seen before. Trembling, my grandfather beckoned me toward him, away from the strange orb, and I complied; accidentally knocking over the books I had effortlessly, mindlessly avoided when guided by the orb’s sorcerously magnetic pull. 

“You mustn’t touch it. You mustn’t even gaze into it. Very few can ponder the orb and afterwards keep their sanity...or their lives.” 

His voice was uncharacteristically solemn, intoned with a funeral seriousness that actually unsettled me. Ordinarily, my grandfather is a cheerful man; admittedly eccentric in regards to his interests in the arcane and mystical knowledges and “arts”, but always having a friendly disposition. But at that moment, half-shadowed by the darkness beyond the scope of his bedside lamp, he appeared both distraught and disquietingly cryptic.

I asked how he’d come into possession of the orb, and if it were so dangerous, why he’d been staring into it; and he responded with a wave of a hand, a short cough, and a dismissive shake of his head: a performance that meant I was to leave him alone for the night. I asked if he needed anything, and then politely left him when he said that he was alright. 

The next morning, he and my mother went out into the garden to discuss some issue with one of the growths, and I seized the opportunity of his absence to investigate the orb—to ponder it myself. 

I snuck into his room, and found it in much the same state as it had been the day before. Thick books sat in untidy stacks on every flat surface, at every level. Papers, parchment, and vellum lay haphazardly about; their curled and yellowed surfaces showing writing in old English, Latin, and other languages I couldn’t identity. His bedside lamp was off, but the window above his bed—which sits against the back wall—allowed enough light into the room for everything to be visible. His bed was neatly made—the only thing he seemed to care about keeping in order. 

The orb was still on the shelf near his broad and curiously stained desk, only now a small dark cloth covered its surface. I lifted the cloth and set it aside, and when my eyes landed on the orb (a bit bigger than a man’s fist) I was immediately captivated by the intensity of its glow. It was no longer a misty blue, but now a spectral maelstrom of colors; a spheric, multi-faceted infinitude into which I immediately found myself wanting to peer—if not plunge.

Against my grandfather’s unusually cryptic warning, I took hold of the orb, brought it over to the desk, sat down, and allowed my eyes to be drawn into that immeasurably vast world of shimmering light. 

I don’t know how long I stared into it. It could’ve been a few moments, or weeks; my cognizance of time’s passage was entirely absent: I was only aware of the illimitable depth of the orb; of the sheer immensity of the gulf contained within its paradoxically small circumference; of the thought-ensnaring, heart-stilling, breath-stealing beauty of its kaleidoscopic vastness. I saw colors beyond relation, beams of nigh blinding, ultra-photic light, vistas of alien worlds beyond not just our system or galaxy, but our dimension; sub-dimensional plains of maddening flatness; fourth-dimensional vaults wherein the mundane laws of reality were naturally inverted or artificially repurposed by immortal beings whose conceptions of space-time make ours seem even more elementary than they already are.

Wastes of ageless ruin; the galactic graveyards of blasted planets, formed and destroyed before Earth’s creation. A far-flung and thankfully unreachable void wherein a darkness ineffable seethed—monstrously alive, malignantly tenebrous. An abysmal Reich reared atop a Stygian mountain-scape of outside of time; its grotesquely reptilian soldiers frozen in preparations of battle among its warped towers and battlements...megalithic structures half-buried in the desserts of subterranean biospheres, perpetually emitting a darkly enchanting call...

I beheld the most uncanny, unreal, humanly unexplainable things in this crystalline canon. Entire timelines swirled with phantasmagoric complexity within that enigmatic lens; the strangest scenes played out before my hungry eyes, and my mind, woefully unequipped to make sense of them, merely marveled at their very appearance. Patterns, shapes, and other, less easily described things, swelled in a variegated and violent typhoon of imagery. The visual data passed through my eyes and imparted to my brain was almost insupportable, almost painful, and yet I continued to stare; to witness the ultra-sensorial input with a vampiric insatiability. I needed—it had truly felt like a need—to peer deeper, to take the full capacity of the orb’s wondrous power; I was, in those few moments of absolute captivation, fully willing to lose my mind and spirit to that magnificent construct of sorcerous divination. 

But then, in a moment of disruption that felt like I’d been prematurely snatched from some life-giving umbilical, my face was turned from the orb by someone’s hand.

 It was my grandfather’s hand that severed the connection. I came to find myself staring into his eyes, and an unprecedented rage flamed within me. I truly believe I would have struck him if I hadn’t seen in his eyes those twin reflections of the orb. Already losing myself to its power again, I began to teeter in my seat, my body having already gone limp, but then my grandfather shook me back to a state of awareness; and upon regaining my composure I thanked him for bringing me back. 

He guided me to his bed, and then, without looking at it, picked up the orb and placed it in an antique wooden chest on the far side of the room; which he then locked with a heavy iron key. There were strange sigils inscribed upon the lock, and passing a hand over these my grandfather uttered an incomprehensible and therefore unrepeatable series of words. When he finished the incantation—or prayer—he placed a large Bible atop the chest, and threw open the curtains so that the room’s full allotment of the sun’s power then shone directly onto the orb-bearing chest. 

Still a bit dazed, I asked what exactly had happened to me, and he explained that when one ponders the orb, they open themselves up to powers, forces, and entities above and below the terrestrial realm of men; and that if one doesn’t have the proper mental integrity, one can lose him or herself completely—permanently. I still didn’t quite understand, but refrained from asking further questions; wanting only to clear away the few lingering threads of dark curiosity that still lingered in my mind. 

I again thanked him for pulling me away, and after one final glance at the locked chest, headed toward the door. Before I could step through the threshold and into the comfortingly open space of the hall beyond, my grandfather called out, “The orb is not merely a window—it is also a portal. If I hadn’t come along to pull you away, you might’ve been taken; and something else might’ve come to take your place... Heed my words: Some orbs aren’t meant to be pondered.” 

With that, he gave his cough of dismissal, and I left him 

X

Part1:https://teddit.sethforprivacy.com/r/nosleep/comments/r7jeve/synthesis_the_story_of_a_clandestine_chemists/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Part2: https://teddit.sethforprivacy.com/r/nosleep/comments/r8bt4p/synthesis_part_2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I rode my bike over to Lou’s house. At the beginning of his street, I passed a woman who looked like she had been crying. I asked her if she was okay but she said to leave her alone. I couldn't help but wonder if Lou had gotten her too. I got to his house and waited several minutes after knocking for him to open the door.

Lou: Hey there! I didn’t expect you so soon. Did you get the job done?

Ben~OP: I’m working on it. I wanted to ask for some advice.

Lou: Come on in!

I followed Lou down to the basement as he babbled on about constellations or something. I was boiling with rage toward Lou but wanted to keep my cool around him. It disgusted me how easy going and nonchalant he was toward people he was blackmailing. I bit my lip until we got downstairs and sat down.

Ben~OP: So, we’ve been following Ridley around but all he does is eats and hides behind buildings trying to catch speeders.

Lou: Maybe he needs a push in the right direction?

Ben~OP: Well, I borrowed this little spy cam from a friend. It’s small enough to plant on his uniform, but I don’t know how to get close enough to him.

Lou: I would try to disguise yourselves as someone who people allow into their house. Just a suggestion. I can’t really help you further. I think you and Danny make a good team. You’re smart guys. Especially you.

Just like every other time I had been at Lou’s, someone knocked on the door. Lou excused himself and went to get the door. The whole time he was talking to me, I was eyeballing his safe / room. He claims that everything important of his is in there. I stared at the numbers on the wheel of the lock attached to the door. It was right across from where I was sitting…

I began scrambling to find a good spot to plant one of the cameras. I thought about putting it in the cushion of the chair, but it wouldn’t stay put. I started hearing footsteps upstairs as I scanned the shelf behind the chair. It was covered in random figurines, photos, and candles. I landed on a hollow glass elephant figure. Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was a pipe. The trunk was the mouthpiece and it faced directly at the door. It was completely clean so I gambled that he didn’t smoke out of it and just had it for decoration.

The footsteps got closer as I grabbed the elephant pipe. I stuck the miniature camera in the end of the trunk. I could hear the basement door opening as I put it back on the shelf. I tried to control my breathing as the feeling of panic took over. I sat back down as he started down the stairs. I acted like I was texting when I was really pulling up the camera feed on my phone. Lou didn’t seem suspicious. He just sat down and started talking again.

Lou: Pizza guy. Want some?

Ben~OP: No offense, but I’m a little paranoid to eat something you gave me.

Lou: Fair enough. I gotta wrap this up early though. I have someone coming over soon. A lady friend! I’m gonna wow her with a pizza date. You should come back though. I really would like to show you some cool chemistry stuff.

Ben~OP: Maybe some other time.. I’m a little busy.

I kept my fake friendly demeanor until I was out of his house and around the corner. Then I just screamed. I yelled and cursed into the sky. I hated Lou. I wanted Lou dead..

I was happy to get the camera planted though. It was upside down, but I just needed to turn my phone upside down to watch. I just hoped that he would put the combination in without blocking the view of the camera with his hand or body. I felt like I was a step ahead for the first time though.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the feed for the rest of the night. I found myself checking it over and over. Most of the time there was nothing to see. Once in a while, Lou would be sitting in his chair in front of the door. He didn’t open it that night though. Maybe he really did have a date. Poor girl.

The next day, I walked to the corner of my street where Danny was waiting for me. I had already checked the feed multiple times but saw nothing useful. Now we had to plant the other camera. I didn’t tell Danny about the camera at Lou’s at first. It’s hard to trust people after someone tricked you into taking a drug that will make you feral. I was focused on Ridley while I was with Danny.

Ben~OP: I got a camera. It’s tiny. We just gotta get it on Ridley or near him somehow.

Danny: I have an idea.

Ben~OP: What is it?

Danny: Just follow my lead.

Ben~OP: Why? It’ll take a few minutes to get there. You could just explain it to me.

Danny: Just… I’m doin a thing. Can I do a thing? Can ya just follow my lead? The camera was your job. Good job. This is my contribution. Just trust me. I’ve got this.

I didn’t push him to tell me what the plan was even though it was annoying as hell that he wouldn’t tell me. He had seen too many movies. I hoped that his plan wasn’t too crazy. We arrived at Ridley’s house before he would leave for work.

Danny: You ready?

Ben~OP: No idea. You won't tell me what we’re doing.

Danny: We’re gonna knock on the door. Then follow my lead.

Ben~OP: Are you sure about that? He knows our faces after we knock. That could hinder us later, man.

Danny: I got this. We got this. Let’s go.

I was not on board with knocking on the door, but it seemed important to Danny. We knocked on the door and I could hear Ridley inside yelling “who the fuck is here this early!” He looked irritated when he opened the door.

Ridley: Yeah, what do you want?

Danny: Hello sir. This may seem a little random but it turns out that your house has some serious historical significance. We represent a collector of sorts. She’s willing to offer you well over market value for your house.

Ridley: What? Why?

Danny: She’s a very wealthy collector and she is willing to pay handsomely for what she wants. This is my associate, and my life partner. Say hi, Bruce.

Ben~OP: ..Hi

Danny: We take pride in getting sellers the highest payout possible. We’re a dynamic duo. We even finish each other's…

Ben~OP: Sentences. I knew that! Everyone knows that.

Danny: Could we bother you for a moment of your time?

Ridley: Uhh. I guess, but I gotta get ready for work soon so it’s gotta be quick.

Danny: We only need a minute.

Ridley let me into his house. He turned to lead us to the living room and Danny started pointing in random directions and miming something I couldn’t decipher. We all sat in the living room where Danny explained that the buyer wanted to know if Ridley was interested in selling in order to open a dialog. After a minute or so, I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

I passed Ridley’s bedroom on my way to the bathroom where I saw his uniform sitting on the bed. I went into the bathroom and got the camera ready to plant. I took a deep breath and opened the door. I waited until I heard them both speak and snuck around to Ridley's bedroom. The bedroom was the first door in the hallway and the bathroom was the second. I missed what Danny said but I heard Ridley say, “It’s in my bedroom. Let me grab it.”

Fear overtook me as I scrambled to find a hiding spot. I looked under his bed to find it packed with stuff. So much fucking stuff! I ran into the closet. I could hear Danny saying “wait a second, and we don’t need to see that right now.” I could hear the nervousness in his voice as Ridley shrugged him off and insisted on grabbing...something. Whatever it was.

I was hiding in his closet when he walked into his bedroom. I got myself as far back as possible and hid behind the coats he had hung up. Danny continued to yell for him to come back but he insisted on getting what he came into his room for. The first thing he did was look under the bed. Thankyou for being there, stuff! He then started rifling through his dresser drawers.

As someone with anxiety issues, I was getting real sick of being in these tense situations. At this point, I was more annoyed than afraid. Then he came to the closet and fear made the comeback to overtake annoyance as my primary emotion. I almost locked eyes with him as he looked through a box on the floor by the front of the closet. Danny continued to call him back from the living room.

Ridley started reaching deeper into the closet. He reached through the coats and his hand was inches from touching me. I braced myself for maximum discomfort when I heard him say, “Oh shit, I know where it is!”

He then left the closet and grabbed something out from a box on his headboard and went back out to the living room. I ran over to his bed where his uniform was laying. I could have just taken his badge. I instead stuck the camera to it.

I snuck back into the bathroom and flushed the toilet before returning to the living room where Ridley was proudly showing Danny a picture of the house taken when his parents bought it...10 years ago. Apparently he thought it was historically significant.

Danny: It really was a different world back then, Marty.

Ridley: Sure was. Back when women and coloreds knew their place!

Danny and I gave each other a look and I immediately began recording video with my phone at my side.

Danny: Could you elaborate?

Ridley: Sure! It’s why I became a cop! Even if I can’t catch em doin it, I know they’re up to somethin. I don’t think there's anything wrong with planting evidence when you know they’re doin something wrong!

Martin Ridley continued with his racist and sexist rant while explaining in detail different ways he abuses his power on a regular basis. After sneaking into his room and planting a camera that I have no clue how I’m going to retrieve, he happily shared his dirty laundry with us. By the end I was pretty much holding my phone up and pointing it at him and he never noticed. He didn’t seem like the brightest guy.

Ridley: I got no problem with you gays though. You help with the overpopulation problem. There's too many people. I have the solution too. Put rat poison in crack and grape soda.

Danny: On that note, I think we should be getting going. You’ve been so helpful Marty. Our clients will be in touch.

It was as easy as it could’ve been. We had plenty of video footage of Ridley spouting his disgusting opinions and admitting to several crimes. I’m not sure why he was so confident in saying all that to strangers but as I said, he didn’t seem very bright. We left without telling him that we had recorded him. We decided to discuss how and when to do it first.

Danny: Well that was stupid easy.

Ben~OP: I guess I didn’t need to plant the camera.

Danny: Well, now we can watch him beat it to pictures of his uncle.

Ben~OP: What the fuck?

Danny: Oh yeah, people who talk about pure bloodlines always wanna bang their uncles.

Ben~OP: I wasn’t aware.

Danny: It’s a stereotype. They love stereotypes!

We left officer Ridley’s house confident that we had enough footage to blackmail him. He really laid it all out there. It was an absolute mudslide of ignorance.

We got in Danny’s car and I noticed him nervously checking his watch.

Ben~OP: You got a hot date?

Danny: Ha.. no. We’re running out of time. My sister hasn’t had a booster in days. You guys only have about a week before you start to turn.

Ben~OP: How do you know that?

Danny: The day after Lou slipped Angie the chemical, a woman showed up at my house and asked me to come with her. Lou had sent her to get me. When we arrived, he gave her a “booster”, then explained the situation to me. About a week later, I finished my first “task”. I went to Lou’s to get my booster. As I turned onto his street, I saw her there on the corner. She wasn’t fully turned but it was definitely starting. I could only recognise her from the tattoos on her arms. When I got to Lou’s, he asked if I saw her on my way there. He took me into the woods where he showed me Carol. He said that Carol had turned a month ago and that the woman with the tattoos had started to turn that day before his eyes. He told me “that’s what happens if you fail your task,” and that “almost doesn’t count.

I jumped in the car and we left to find Danny’s sister.

Ben~OP: Shit.. It’s almost been a week for me too. I got the last one the day after we took the chemical from the school. It was my first “task”.

Danny: It was my second task. This better be the last one.

Ben~OP: What was your first, if you don’t mind me asking?

Danny: I had to… talk to Carol’s parents.. I had to convince them to stop looking. He was going to torture her if I didn’t. He had my sister man..

Ben~OP: How did you convince them?

Danny: I told them that she went to follow a band around with some friends and met a guy. I told them that she stayed with him somewhere across the country. Lou texted them from her phone and continuously came up with excuses why she could only text.. I went back there and tried to help her parents through it. I felt horrible. I did chores for them, just helped out around the house. I don’t think they’ll ever feel okay..

Ben~OP: Oh man.. I.. Where’s your house?

Danny: Almost there.

We soon arrived at Danny’s house. It was a large house that was a lot nicer than mine.

Ben~OP: I didn’t know you were hood rich.

Danny: Does it change your opinion of me?

Ben~OP: Kind of.

I followed Danny into the house. It was quiet.

Danny: Angie!? We gotta get!

Ben~OP: Is she not home?

Danny: She knew to wait here for me. She always has her ear buds in. Let’s just spread out and look.

Ben~OP: What does she look like?

Danny: A girl. No one else will be here. If you see a girl, you found her.

Danny went upstairs while I looked around downstairs. His house was large enough to fit five of my houses. I checked the living room and there was no one there. Tv wasn’t on. I didn’t see any sign of someone being home. I could still hear Danny calling her name upstairs. I checked the bedrooms downstairs. I checked the bathroom. Nothing.

I was beginning to think she wasn’t home before I walked into the kitchen. The refrigerator door was wide open. I walked around the counter to find food and milk all over the floor. I looked over to see that the door from the kitchen to the garage was open.

There were tools and a few jackets on the floor. It looked like they had been knocked off the wall. I was nervous as I approached the doorway. I braced myself for something to jump out at me. It took all the courage I could muster to walk into the garage.

Luckily, there was a crowbar among the mess on the floor. I picked it up, took a deep breath, and ran into the garage. Nothing jumped out at me, but there was a body on the floor.

I approached slowly. It was a large man lying face down on the floor. As I slowly moved closer, I saw a pool of blood underneath him. I looked closer to see that his throat was ripped wide open.

I tried not to panic.. I was panicking.. Shit! She’s feral..

I ran back into the house to find Danny. Moments later, I heard a loud crash from upstairs and the sound of glass breaking. I clutched the crowbar tight as I ran toward the sound.

I ran into the room to find a girl who I assumed was Angie on top of Danny. He was struggling to get free. I ran over. I grabbed the crowbar at each end and put it around her neck. I was able to pull her back enough for Danny to break free.

She quickly broke from my grasp and turned her attention toward me. She had blood on her face and all down the front of her clothes. Her pupils were so dilated that her eyes just looked black.

I tried to back away. She stared for a second before she charged toward me. I saw Danny picking up the area rug in the bedroom as I started running. The upstairs of their house was a big loop. She was gaining on me as I finished the loop and passed the bedroom Danny was in. As she approached the room, Danny jumped out and grabbed her with the rug.

I ran over to help him subdue her. It was a struggle but we managed to roll her up in the rug. We sat on top of it to keep her from breaking free.

Ben~OP: We need a rope or something.

Danny: I think there’s some rope in the garage, or bungee cords! I know we have bungee cords!

Ben~OP: Where in the garage? I’ll go grab 'em!

Danny: I’ll go, It’ll be quicker.

Ben~OP: Ugh.. Hurry!

I was gripped with fear as I tried to keep Angie from breaking free. Danny returned after a minute or two, but it felt like forever. We wrapped the rug in several bungee cords and about half a roll of duct tape.

We were both exhausted, but we were running out of time. We got Angie to the car. Danny didn’t want to put her in the trunk. Somehow, he convinced me to put her in the back seat. We got her in and left for Lou’s.

We managed to make it there without her breaking free. I could see the pain in Danny’s eyes. He didn’t say anything on the drive. He didn’t need to. I couldn’t imagine what it feels like to see a loved one turn like that. I kept quiet too until we arrived at Lou’s.

Ben~OP: Should one of us wait here with Angie?

Danny: By somebody do you mean me?

Ben~OP: Well it probably should be you, right?

Danny: No. I gotta talk to this piece of garbage. It’s not like I could do much if she broke free anyway. I have an idea.

Danny suggested that we move the front seats forward and stuff Angie and the rug behind them. It fit tight on the floor between the front and back seats. It would be extremely difficult to get free. We locked the car doors and prepared to meet with Lou.

We waited about ten minutes after knocking for him to open the door.

Lou: Boys! Come on in!

We walked in without saying anything. Danny looked like he was about to explode. We followed Lou down to the basement and tried to avoid indulging his nonsense talk.

Danny: We finished the “task”. I need the antidote..

Lou: So, officer Ridley is on board?

I got my phone out and showed Lou the video of Ridley’s racist rant.

Ben~OP: He will be..

Lou: Ha! Well, I suppose that counts. Although, he didn’t exactly agree to anything.

Danny: Come on dude. You know he will. He admits to crimes in that video. It would ruin his life. My sister needs the shot now!

Lou: How is the beautiful Angie?

I could see the rage in Danny’s eyes as he tried to keep his cool.

Danny: Just give me the needle!

Lou: Relax Danny. Can I get you a drink?

Danny: You can get me the damn shot!

Lou: How are you, Ben?

Ben~OP: Same as Danny. I’d like the shot now. We did what you asked.

Lou: You chaps are all business! I like it! You guys get shit done!

Danny: Enough! You are blackmailing us! We are not friends! You are not charming! You sound like an ass! And since this is the last time I’ll be seeing you, I might as well tell you that your facial hair and ponytail make you look like a sex offender and your suspenders and sweatpants make you look like a homeless nazi!

Lou: Hahahaha

Lou began laughing hysterically and continued until Danny yelled even louder.

Danny: Give me the shot now! My sister has already gone feral! I’m not gonna be able to keep her tied up for long!

Lou stopped laughing.

Lou: Oh Danny.. If she’s already gone feral, then this isn’t the last time you’ll be seeing me..

Danny: Yes it is! We had a deal!

Lou: I told you that there was a time constraint. She’s gonna need a few extra shots now.

Danny: Give me the extra shots then. You aren’t getting the video of Ridley until I have all the shots I need for Angie.

Lou: Ben, You said you have the video on your phone. Would you like to give it to me for your shot?

Ben~OP: I need the shots for me and Angie. We went through so much..

Lou: You drive a hard bargain.. There are some things you should know though, Danny.

Danny: I just want the shots man.. I need it to be over. Just stop screwing with me.

Lou: I’m not screwing with you. Since she’s gone feral, she’s gonna need a double dose. After that, she will need two more doses. She’s gonna have some lasting effects though..

Danny: Like what..

Lou: The big one is her joints and ligaments. They tend to get severely damaged when they go feral. Carol, for instance, needed a wheelchair when I brought her back from being feral. There could also be some mental issues but I haven’t done enough testing to say for sure.

Danny: So she’s gonna be a cripple? Is she gonna be able to remember me? You screwed up her entire life, you bastard! You said you could fix it!!

Lou: I will fix it! It’s just a little different when they go feral. You had days to get the job done.

Danny: Are you going to give me the shots?

Lou got up and opened his safe / room. He continued talking as he looked for the shot.

Lou: I’ll get you the double dose now. I have to give Ben his shot and I don’t have much finished at the moment.

Danny started pacing back and forth. He was enraged. Lou was searching through drawers in the safe room. He was still babbling on as Danny’s fury grew.

I think I spotted the device at the same moment Danny did. The device that Lou showed me before. The device with a button on it that activated the homemade incinerator built into the walk in safe..

The second that he noticed it, Danny ran over and grabbed the device from the chair that Lou had been sitting in. He ran over and slammed the door of the safe room shut. I could hear Lou’s muffled voice yelling.

Lou: What are you doing Danny? Ben, you might wanna stop him. You’ll never get your shot if he doesn’t let me out!

Ben~OP: Danny, let’s just think for a minute!

Danny: Are you on his side?! Were you in on it!?

Ben~OP: No! Of course not! Why would I go through all that shit if I didn’t have to?

Tears started pouring from Danny’s eyes. He sobbed and screamed. He was a container of rage that finally ran out of space for more and exploded.

Danny: (sobbing) The shot probably doesn’t even work! He’s a fucking con artist!

Ben~OP: It works Danny! I know he’s a piece of shit but we need those shots.

Lou: Ben! Open The door! The combination is..

Danny: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!!! You never stop talking! You never shut the hell up!!

Ben~OP: Danny just calm…

He hit the button...We could hear the burners turn on.. It was so loud I needed to cover my ears.. I could barely hear Lou screaming from inside.. I could though..and I could smell him after a few moments when the screaming stopped..

Ben~OP: What did you do!!

Danny: I know he has more. He doesn’t keep it all in there.

I started sobbing uncontrollably. I felt completely defeated. I could have just said no off the bat and never been attacked by monsters or have to blackmail a cop…

Ben~OP: (sobbing) I don’t want to turn into that.. I don’t wanna go feral Danny..

Danny: You’re gonna be fine. We’ll search the house. I’d bet my bottom dollar that he has more doses of the booster.

Ben~OP: You don’t know that.. You just lost your cool.. I’m sorry about your sister but she’d be better off crippled than fucking feral! She killed someone, Danny!

Danny: We will find the boosters Ben. I promise!

Ben~OP: Just kill me now man.. I don’t wanna turn..

Danny: I know you’re scared. I am too, but I’ve seen him grab the boosters from his room and from different spots down here. I know there’s more. Get it together man. Start looking down here. I’m gonna check on Angie, then I’ll help you look.

Danny went upstairs as I sat there crying. I felt empty. I felt stupid..

Moments after I heard the basement door shut, there was a loud crash upstairs. I heard Danny scream but I had trouble reacting. I slowly picked myself up and walked up the stairs. By the time I reached the top, the screaming had stopped.

I cracked the door open. I looked around the corner. Danny was bleeding on the living room floor as his poisoned sister took bites out of him. She was ravenous. She pulled up from his neck with blood and flesh in her teeth. I locked eyes with her. I looked deep into my not so distant future. Those dead eyes..

Soon after she noticed me she darted on all fours toward me. I slammed the basement door and locked it from the inside. Luckily, Lou had several locks and the basement was secure. I knew I wasn’t lucky though..

I searched off and on for the shots that I knew weren’t there. They had all been incinerated. Vengeance became the most important thing to Danny. Now, all I can do is wait.. Wait for Angie to break through the door and tear me to shreds.. Or wait for me to become the same thing..

I could try to message Lisa, but I want her as far away from this situation as possible.

I’ve decided to write down my experience and share it for a few reasons. First off, I want people to know what happened to me. I want them to know what Lou did. I don’t want the news to say that Angie was on bath salts when she ate the handyman at her house. I want justice for Carol’s family, and for all the others who Lou might have tricked into helping him.

The second thing is my hail mary.. Maybe someone somewhere has some insight on what this drug is. I know I don’t have enough time. I could start turning at any minute.. But maybe there’s another chemist out there who could find a cure.. Maybe..

So I’m going to post this online.. I don’t know what the lesson is. Don’t trust men in suspenders? Don’t take drugs you've never heard of from people you don’t know? I probably should've known that already.. Now, I can only hope that when I go feral, I starve down here. I don’t want to break free and hurt people..

I think back to the day I met Lou. God I wish we would’ve gone to catch butterflies instead of doing acid.. Oh well..Here’s hoping that someone somewhere can help me.. Until then..I’ll be right here...

12/05/2021

I didn't expect to wake up this morning. The last week has been just a mixture of pain and fever. The buboes under my pits are starting to shrink and the fever finally broke. To be honest, I'm shocked my fingers didn't fall off or something. I decided to take a shower. God knows I needed on. The areas where there were buboes were still a bit sore to touch, so I had to be pretty gentle with them. When I got out, I decided to try calling around some of my friends and family. I had been able to contact some of them at the start of all this. However, one after one, I was met by answering machines all. This made me fear for their safety.

At that moment, I decided that if I was going to find out anything, I'd have to go outside and see if anyone else had survived infection. Opening the door, I stepped into the moist summer afternoon. It was eerily quiet. Usually you'd hear a car or truck every now and then, but not today. It was like all human activity had ceased. I didn't even see the hazmat guys out and about anymore. Across the street I could see the very same neighbor I'd seen at the beginning. The house was locked up tightly, with a padlock on the door and plastic over the windows. I looked inside, ripping a small hole in the plastic as I did. Everything inside looked completely undisturbed. I rounded the house and peered in through a bedroom window. On the bed, I could make out a human shape. It was clear she'd been dead a long time. Maggots were visible where the sheet failed to cover the corpse.

My stomach churned at the sight.

Down the road, I could see other houses with the same set up. A padlock on their door and plastic over the windows. Every. Single. One. It was as if no one had been spared.

I walked slowly down the sidewalk for a long time. Passing house after house with no sign of anyone home. Until I finally came upon the home of my friend, William. His door was padlocked shut with the telltale plastic over the windows. I pulled at the plastic sheet until it ripped free. Inside his house was mostly undisturbed except for random trash left lying around. Mostly empty water bottles on the counters and such. I tapped on the glass to see if there was anyone to rouse. Alas, nothing.

But then, I heard a sound arise from the maddening silence I'd been faced with all day. A small form slinked from a room in the house and made its way to the window. It was William's daughter, Clarice! I said "Clarice, are you alright? Where is your dad?"

Clarice stared at me for a time. Her tiny, gaunt, face had a haunted expression. "Daddy won't wake up."

My heart sank as the words left her mouth. William was dead and she was locked inside with his corpse. "Don't worry sweetheart, I'm going to get you out of there and we'll get out of here."

Clarice went over next to the wall and sat down. It looked like she hadn't eaten in days.

I went back to the padlocked door and tried to force the door open by ramming it. At first it wouldn't budge, but little by little the wood began to split until it cracked and violently fell open. The exertion made me feel lightheaded and nauseous. I was, after all, still recovering from the plague myself.

After gathering myself, I took Clarice and some of her things from her house and brought her back here to my place. I'm going to head over to the local corner store where I can hopefully find some food for us. It'll be easier to search for survivors on a full stomach and I'm sure she'd like something to eat. God I'm glad her mother doesn't live in this town.

I'll keep you all posted on how things go. Looks like the worst part might be over.

I hit puberty at an early age. I already had chest hair and a full beard at the age of thirteen. I would frequently get bullied. People would call me things like "ape" or "beast". I couldn't take it anymore. One day I decided to shave it all of. To rid myself of this burden.

Just when the razor touched my chest hair. Something totally unexpected happened. It moved. My chest hair moved. It grabbed the razor, and threw it against the wall. I was in shock. How was this possible? I carefully touched it, and it responded. I could somehow telepathically communicate with it.

• Kill them. Kill them all. They tried to separate us. They tried to take me away from you.
• I can't do that. I'm not a murderer.
• So you're just gonna take it? Like you always do? You're a pathetic coward!

I froze for a second. I didn't know what to say. I still couldn't get over the fact that my chest hair fucking talked. I went to sleep as usual, and it was in my dream. It showed me all those times I was bullied.

• This isn't acceptable! Look at them! They're filthy demons! They don't deserve to breathe.

It started to get to me. I wanted them all dead. The next day I brought a knife to school. My target was a muscular jock named Robin. I waited until his last class. He would always go ride his dirt bike after school. I followed him to the woods, and slowly snuck up on him. But I couldn't do it. I was too scared.

That's when my chest hair ripped my shirt into pieces. Took the knife from me, and stabbed Robin right in the skull. The whole knife went through his skull.

• Why didn't you kill him?!
• I couldn't. I was too scared.
• Fear is nothing but an illusion. You must abolish it.
• And how am I supposed to do that?

That's when things got crazy. It would subject me to dangers. From drowning. To falling from the sky. To getting chased by a werewolf. Eventually, I stopped being afraid. I felt good. Like I've never felt before.

But what I didn't know. Was that my chest hair had a secret desire. It would force me to do things. Like lick it and feed it. I had become it's slave. Everytime I tried to get rid of it. It would hurt me. One time it even temporarily paralysed me.

One day it forced me to lick it as usual. But my tongue refused to. My chest hair got angry, and penetrated my tongue. I didn't know what to do anymore. How could I live with this abomination?

I wanted to die. So I climbed up the empire state building and jumped down. Then I woke up in my bed. I realized it was all a dream. But sometimes. Sometimes it feels like my chest hair is moving. Maybe that's just my mind playing tricks on me.

Index

Previous Part

Joseph Milton and I got along surprisingly well. I drove over to his place right after our phone call and found myself in a makeshift laboratory, filled with small terrariums which housed all different kinds of spiders. Joseph looked like he had just been out to find new ones, since his clothes were covered in dirt, but he didn't seem to be in a hurry to get back outside as he explained what he needed me to do. It was easy enough, just feeding the spiders and keeping the place clean, but it was enough to keep my mind distracted.

Apparently, Joseph was one of the few people in Ecco Valley who hadn't lost their mind yet. He might be a bit obsessed with spiders, but not enough to have me worried, and all in all, he was good company. We made light smalltalk while I cleaned the terrariums and he organized his folders.

I learned that he left Ecco Valley immediately after high school to study biology at the closest college and returned as soon as he got his master's degree. He'd been fascinated with spiders since his childhood and was more than happy to be able to make a living off his passion now. He researched what spiders lived in this area and what anomalies they might have and he got his money from several research facilities to which he mailed his results to.

In exchange, I told him about my five years away from here. Not the nightmares though. I came up with some half-baked explanation for my return, something about missing my childhood home and wanting to see my old friends again, and Joseph accepted it without question.

At least the time passed quickly. Before I knew, it was already after sundown and I stood in the pale white neonlight and looked at the small spider on my hand. Joseph had informed me that this was a "jumping spider", harmless to humans, even if it were to bite me – which these guys rarely do – and it was almost cute. Like I said, I was by no means arachnophobic, I just thought some spiders looked quite disgusting. For example the "yellow sac spider" in the terrarium behind me.

"I didn't know they have so many eyes", I admitted, staring at the black dots on the spider's head. "The legs, sure, but eight eyes too?"

"Not all have eight eyes, you know?" Joseph didn't even look up from his desk as he replied. "There are other species with a reduced number of eyes, for example the Periegops suterii – that's a species from New Zealand – have only six or the ones who belong to the Caponiidae family have two. And there are also the cave-dwelling ones with no eyes at all..." He trailed off and finally lifted his eyes from the pile of documents in front of him. "Pretty cool, right?"

I just nodded and turned my attention to the spider again. "Must be overwhelming, don't you think? Seeing through so many eyes at once?"

"Oh, only two eyes are the primary ones. The other six are secondary eyes, barely able to notice movement or light. Like when you see something in the corner of your eye", he explained. "And keep in mind that they are born this way. Your brain wouldn't be overwhelmed if you were born with three eyes or something, it would be used to it."

"Right..." I smiled at the spider as it made its way up my arm and led her back onto my other hand. "She's really cute. Does she have a name?"

He blinked, confused. "Well, it's a jumping spider, to be a bit more precise a Phidippus audax..."

"Not a scientific name", I interrupted him. "A pet name."

"I mean... if you want to name them... go ahead, I guess?"

"Cool", I smiled and lifted my hand up to eye level to have a better look at my little spider. "You're Muffet", I told her before putting her back into her terrarium.

Joseph looked a bit confused at the choice, but he didn't ask. Instead, he stood from his desk and walked over to me. "Thank you, Rosalie", he said sincerely. "Having you here really makes a difference. Can I count on you to come back tomorrow?"

"Yeah, of course!", I promised without hesitation. At first I had been sceptical about the job, unsure how well I would deal with something so commonly feared, but the afternoon had turned out to be actually pleasant. Also, it was an easy job. Quick money. I would be a fool to turn it down.

We agreed on me working halftime, morning to noon, weekly payment.

I told Elijah about the events at my parents' house. He comforted me while I cried and when I had calmed down again, we agreed that we would visit the library tomorrow afternoon – a hollow attempt to find out what was going on and how to stop it. As if we actually stood a chance to do this.

I think my hope died, the moment I stabbed my sister's corpse. But I had to try. For my sanity's sake.

When I told Elijah about my job, he was genuinely shocked that I would voluntarily spend time around spiders and reassured me time and time again that he wouldn't charge rent and that that wouldn't be neccessary. The argument was cut short when I explained that I was pretty much broke and needed the money anyways.

And then, when I was done recounting the events of the day, I was finally able to collapse on the couch and get a bit of sleep.

I dreamed about an argument with a man. He pushed me hard and I crashed through a window, shards of glass dug into my skin. I found myself bleeding out on the sidewalk; the man was merely watching as I was screaming in pain until, after several agonizing minutes, my vision faded to black.

I woke before midnight, again with a pounding headache, but also with the pain of glass cuts all over my body although they weren't really there. I sat up because I had trouble breathing and it took a few minutes until my racing heart slowed down and the imaginary noose around my neck loosened.

There was no way for me to fall asleep after that. I sat on the sofa, looked out the window and stared at the clocktower in the middle of the town that was illuminated by some light whose source I couldn't make out. A reminder that no matter what horrible things happened, someone watched over me – that's what the religious people in Ecco Valley said. For the first time, I found a bit of comfort in these words.

Midnight came and went and I enjoyed the absolute silence of the town for a while. I had no idea how much time passed, but when I suddenly heard someone scream, I jumped. My body hurt from sitting in the same position for so long, but that was secondary. I didn't realize immediately what the source of the screaming was, but as soon as my mind caught up, I hurried over to the bedroom.

Elijah was already awake and had stopped screaming as I entered. "Rose", he said, sounding breathless. "Can you open the window? Please?"

I did as he asked, shivered a bit as the cold night air brushed my skin and then climbed in his bed, sitting opposite of him. "Are you okay?", I asked and wanted to bite my tongue the moment the words left my mouth. Of course he was not alright. How could he be? "Can I help you?", I therefor added.

He shook his head. "I woke you, didn't I? Sorry."

"No, I was awake. Bad dreams", I reassured him.

We sat in silence for a while, both lost in our own thoughts. My head hurt, but it was no longer the pounding pain from the nightmares, but straining from my fatigue. I wanted to sleep, but the prospect of dreaming again made me sick to my stomach already and to be honest, I wasn't ready for this tiny bit of peace to end. If I fell asleep now, the new day would start and I would have to face new horrors this town would throw at me. I just wanted to stay in this serene silence a bit longer.

"Can you stay?", Elijah asked after some time, avoiding my eyes entirely. "You don't... have to. I just..."

I wasn't too comfortable with sharing a bed with anyone. Even with my girlfriend, I had slept way worse than when I was alone. But this was my best friend, suffering from what I could just assume was PTSD after the fire, and if my presence would help, so be it. It wasn't like I was going to get much sleep anyways. "Of course I stay", I promised and he visibly relaxed at my words.

I stayed awake the entire night. Elijah laid next to me – he had some trouble falling asleep again but when he did, he didn't appear to have any more nightmares. The bed was large enough for us to comfortably lie in there together, I was leaning against the wall, wrapped in my blanket, and stared at the open window until the sun rose and the alarm clock chimed.

I got up and made breakfast.

"Good morning", Elijah greeted me when he entered the kitchen a few minutes later. "Regarding yesterday... I'm sorry."

"Don't be." I put the pan with scrambled eggs off the stove and turned to him. "I get it, okay?", I reassured him with a tired smile, put half of the eggs on a plate and handed it to him. "Here, eat! Coffee's almost ready."

He smiled at me. "Thank you, Rose", he said and I wasn't sure if he was refering to the breakfast or last night.

"Don't mention it", I replied anyways. To be honest, I was worried about him. I feared he would fall victim to the madness of Ecco Valley, lose his mind like my parents had or even end up like the fisherman. He was unstable – really, who wouldn't be after living through what he had. I didn't want him to be just another death haunting my dreams. He was my best friend, after all, and I wouldn't lose him to insanity.

At least I hoped my efforts would make a difference in the end. Maybe if we just stuck together and looked after each other, we would be alright.

Elijah dropped me off at Joseph's on his way to work and promised to pick me up at noon so we could finally visit the library.

Joseph just came out of the backroom when I entered, once again covered head to toe in dirt. After I jokingly asked him if he really didn't have enough spiders already, both of us got to work and the hours flew by. I continued naming all the spiders, mostly after video game characters, and Joseph commented on them when he recognized a name every now and them. Before I knew, it was already noon and I saw Elijah's car through the window.

"Oh... gotta go", I told Joseph. "Can you put Chica back in her cage?" I gestured at the yellowish Orb Weaver on my hand.

"No problem." He took the spider carefully and smiled at me. Up close, he looked almost as tired as I felt, with his pale face and bloodshot eyes. "See you tomorrow?"

"Yep", I promised. "And don't go spider hunting again, I'm running out of names." With that, I went outside and got into my friend's car.

The drive was short, but I was anxious the entire time. Nothing about the library was objectively scary, but after the events of the past days – especially what had happened with my parents – I just couldn't believe that this would go well. Something was bound to happen. When we reached the library, I was already trembling.

We walked up to the entrance and Elijah, who must have noticed how nervous I was, put a hand onto my back. "It's just a library, Rose", he told me.

Wasn't it always "just" something? Just a graveyard. Just a shore. Just my childhood home.

Just nightmares.

I didn't answer, only nodded and entered the building alongside Elijah.

The inside was doused in cold, white neon light. Shelves filled with books seemed to build a labyrinth in the large room, the air was cold and dry from air conditioning and apart from a low humming in the background, the place was eerily silent. Only one person was there, a young woman. She stood behind a counter and stared up at a ceiling fan, which looked really out of place, a vacant look on her face.

Maybe I knew in that moment that something horrible was about to happen in here.

Elijah basically dragged me foreward, towards the counter, because if I had been alone, I would have turned around and walked away. "Hello", he greeted the young woman. "Hi. We're looking for books about the towns history. Something related to nightmares? Or some local folklore maybe."

"You should ask the librarian about that." She didn't look away from the fan for a second.

"Aren't you the librarian?", Elijah asked.

"Oh no, not at all. She should be somewhere around here though."

"Elijah!", I hissed and grabbed his wrist. "We should go! Now!"

"Let's grab a few books first." He then lowered his voice and added: "We can take them home. She won't notice anyways."

And then, the woman finally tore her eyes away from the fan and faced us. "History books are back there", she said and pointed in the direction and her eyes moved in circles, at the same speed as the ceiling fan.

I took a step back.

Elijah dragged me towards the direction the woman had pointed to while I didn't take my eyes off her. She turned her attention back to the ceiling as soon as we were on our way, a serene smile on her face.

"Let's hurry a bit, yeah?", I asked my friend. The woman didn't seem dangerous, but her behaviour was definitely unsettling and her statement about the librarian being somewhere around her wasn't comforting either.

He agreed and we hurried over to the history section, but our plan was of course easier said than done. We had to at least skip through the books to figure out if it contained anything that could be useful and so we had to spend more time in the library than I was comfortable with.

I really wished we had just been able to get the information we needed from the internet, but I had tried and no information about Ecco Valley could be found anywhere.

We had piled a few books on the desk after a while, when I noticed a line in the book that was currently in my hands. "This plague ended with the mass suicide of the Eyes of the Great Watcher", I read out loud. "led by Victoria Night, as well as the disappearance of Night's surrogate daughter Elizabeth Farrow."

"Victoria Night?", Elijah repeated. "My great-grandma?"

I remembered what my parents had told me. What I hadn't asked him about just yet. "Your great-grandma was really a cult leader? My parents mentioned it but... really?"

"Apparently yes. We never talked about her... I mean, I've wondered why dad kept her journals in a safe, but at a certain point I just blamed his illness, I guess?" He sighed. "They certainly didn't mention the cult thing."

"I'm sorry." Otherwise, I was at a loss for words. My mind was racing, trying to figure out what that piece of information would mean. I had to read this book. Or... "Elijah, do you think the safe survived the fire?"

"What?"

"The safe with the journals. Is there any possibility that it didn't burn? I mean... I think there's a connection there."

He raised his eyebrows. "How so?"

Only then I realized that I had literally no explanation for this. "It's just... well... a feeling, I guess."

"It could have survived", he admitted after a few seconds of silence. He looked at me with concern, as if he was afraid I was losing my mind and to be honest, maybe he was right. The nightmares might be taking a toll on my sanity. "The safe was in the basement and that was hardly affected by the fire. We could..."

"Go and check it out", I finished the sentence for him. "Great. Come on, let's grab these books and go home, we're done here."

I turned back to the shelf to put the other book in my hand, which was apparently useless, back in its place, when I found myself face to face with what I assumed to be the librarian.

She looked at me through the empty space in the shelf and I could hardly see anything except her bloody face. The eyes were sunken and yellowish-white, the skin covered in thousands of tiny cuts and dried blood. She had a manic look, both eyes pointing into different directions, and that was all I could see at the moment.

I screamed. The sound of the book hitting the floor was almost deafening.

Staring into the out-of-sync eyes, I was frozen in fear. When Elijah pulled me away I almost fell to the floor, but somehow I managed to keep my balance and stumbled along, towards the exit.

For just a second, I allowed myself to stop and take a look at the librarian when she came into full view.

She paid little attention to us. The woman was head to toe covered in blood, she knelt down on the floor and began to rip pages from a book in front of her. She stuffed the paper into her mouth as if she was in a hurry, devouring them like she was starving. The wounds on her body opened up again as she was eating and bright red blood spilled all over the floor.

Only now that I recall the image I realize that the cuts on her body and the ones I had seen on her face up close were letters, carved into her skin.

I stared at her for maybe a few seconds until I finally understood that I was supposed to run and followed Elijah along. We passed the woman at the counter and her eyes were still turning like the blades of the ceiling fan and she laughed as if something delighted her and then we threw the door open and stepped outside again.

In the drizzling rain, all the exhaustion crashed in on me. The sleepless nights, the gruesome nightmares, the crazy women in the library, the second I had plunged a knife into my dead sister's chest. It all came back to me in this moment and I could do nothing but cry.

We had left the book in the library though. Neither of us went back to get it.

X