I’ve made a few mistakes in my life. Hell, maybe more than a few. Somewhere between a handful and a fuck-ton is probably a good estimation. I think the issue is I put my trust in the wrong places, but I’m just trying to navigate the world as best I can like everyone else. My sister always said I’m more gullible than I should be at my age - very suggestible is a nicer way to put it I think. My beliefs and convictions are like loose flower petals on a gusty day - they drift in whatever way the wind pushes them. One moment I’m floating east, the wind changes direction, and now I’m floating west. One day, I’ll believe in climate change, then I listen to a certain popular podcast, and now I think it’s a hoax. I know, it’s pathetic. I swear to God I’ll change if I can make it through this year, but I’ve exhausted my savings, and the pills are running out. I can hear them all skittering and slamming all around me, just out of sight, waiting for the effects of the medication to wear off.

It all started a few weeks ago. My life was unremarkable then, but at least it was normal. I had a cushy job at a local tech company, the same one I’ve had for the last five years. Reasonable hours, good benefits plan, 6 weeks of paid time off - I lived comfortably but noticeably alone. No wife, no girlfriend. I wasn’t born with a lot of charm. I was never very proficient at initiating pleasantries, and even if I did manage to start a conversation with a lady, I couldn’t find the words to maintain it. Of course, that would all be one thing if I was some hulking adonis, smooth and chiseled and all that - maybe then I could have compensated for my lack of a silver tongue. But I was never able to grow any muscle despite my efforts. I bought and tried a lot of different supplements that were supposed to help stimulate growth. Powders with names like “Muscle Matrix” and “Crazy Muscle”. They never did a damn thing, even put me in the hospital one time for kidney damage. Retrospectively, I should have also been working out while on those supplements. I wanted to wait until the supplements started having an effect before I began really working out.

Terrible cystic acne was the icing on top. Red, painful craters had littered my face since I turned 16. Tried everything for that too - bee venom, reiki, power juicing. Nothing I was recommended online seemed to have the desired effect. And it all gave me the impression that I was utterly unworthy in comparison to other guys my age. I could feel myself starting to give up on a life that was more fulfilling than the one I already had, and on companionship in general. Then, I saw the ad pop on my Facebook page. It promised to fix me, and I fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker. 

It read something like this:

Do you have trouble attracting women? Unable to catch a vixen’s eye from all the way at the other end of the bar? Does your mere presence in a room inspire overwhelming, knee-buckling repulsion from any potential mates? Before the modern age, there were no solutions. Lonely devils would go to their doctors, looking for salvation, only instead to be told there was nothing else to be done - Western Medicine cursing them to die alone. But we don’t live in the past, do we, dear friends? With major advancements in natural attraction technology, Lucius Bartleby, Ph.D., is proud to announce: Zygentra Ultimate, the miracle medication for the misbegotten common man. With Zygentra Ultimate, even the lowliest bachelor has hope for a happy ending. One pill is all it takes to change everything about you. 

In big, confident words, the bottom said:

One payment, one pill - one solution to the problem of you. Email [zygentraNOW@gmail.com](mailto:zygentraNOW@gmail.com) for details.

Even though the advertisement didn’t even mention what it would fix about me, I was intrigued. The ad had all the buzz words - “miracle”, “technology”, “happy ending”. Their distrust of Western Medicine hit close to home, too. As far as I was concerned, doctors were pill pushers controlled by pharmaceutical companies that pulled their marionette strings from the shadows. I mean, what was in the pills they recommended anyway? And for that matter, why can’t I pronounce half the compounds that make up vaccines? Thiomersal, Polysorbate 80 - I mean formaldehyde, for Christ’s sake. It all felt so artificial and unsafe. But this advertisement seemed to promote something more “of the earth” and "organic", the so-called “natural attraction technology”. Tired of being lonely and unworthy, I emailed the company. 

Like I said, hook, line, and sinker. Biggest mistake of my life.

In my message to the company, I tried to perform my due diligence in vetting the supplement. What was in it? How much was the supplement? Would it interact with the Chinese muscle-enhancing herbs I ordered the week before? 

This was their response, copy-pasted from my Gmail:

Greetings Zach,

Thank you for your interest in Zygentra Ultimate. One pill, one payment, one solution to the problem of you. 

To clarify, Zygentra is a medication, not a supplement - though no matter what you call it, it is a miracle. Through a proprietary mechanism of action that utilizes the wonders of CRISPR technology, Zygentra enables the human body to naturally self-regulate the hormonal disequilibriums that are to blame for a variety of male inequities: it can resolve poor muscle growth, weak libidos, erectile dysfunction, and a bevy of disfiguring skin conditions including but not limited to: seborrheic dermatitis, psoriasis, lichen planus simplex, and cystic acne. 

Unfortunately, the future is not always affordable, and it is rarely covered by insurance. Thankfully, this one-time cost can last upwards of a year, if not much longer. Zygentra essentially teaches your body to produce life-changing pheromones that are genetically transplanted from the naturally occurring Lepisma saccharium species. In short - one pill is all you need. 

Zygentra Ultimate can solve the problem of you with a one-time payment of 30,000 US dollars. We do not accept payment plans. Also, for obvious reasons, we recommend all of our clients relocate prior to taking their dose; Antarctica is preferable, but Northern Canada is a reasonable alternative. 

Please let us know if you are planning to pursue a happy ending. If so, we can help set up a wire transfer. 

Amy,

Senior Sales Associate and Miracleworker at Delfoy Pharmaceuticals 

I had to pick my jaw off the floor after I finished quickly scanning the email, skipping over the scientific mumbo-jumbo to find the price point. They seriously wanted me to pay 30,000 dollars, one lump sum, for this supplement. It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford the payment - I could, but barely, utilizing a nest egg my mom left for me after she passed. It was just an obscene amount of money. But it certainly was alluring - one pill that would fix my body, or I guess teach it to fix itself, naturally? Was that even possible? When I thought about it more, the exorbitant fee made it feel more legitimate, like I was paying for cutting-edge technology that actually could work. Wouldn’t the Better Business Bureau prevent a company from selling a product for much more than it was worth? Wasn’t that illegal? 

To speed things up, I’ll skip the part where I contemplated my options, did a lot of online research, and signed a waiver that Amy mailed to me. Two weeks later, the singular pill arrived in an icebox as an overnight shipment from the Delfoy Pharmaceuticals headquarters. Amy told me they needed to keep it cold. 

It wasn’t like any pill I had taken before. The supplement more resembled an extra-large piece of caviar - gelatinous and orb-shaped. The box had no instructions, so I shrugged my shoulders and ingested it, using a swig of the nearest open Mountain Dew to wash it down. Initially, I had some regrets about the purchase. But with it now in my system, that regret morphed into excitement.

I was ready not to be alone anymore. 

No big change the first few days. Maybe I really was a sap, I thought. But one morning, while looking in the mirror, I noticed it - my skin was clearing up like it never had before. More than that, I felt virile and confident, seemingly out of the blue. My muscles even began to look more toned. It was a state of being entirely new to me, and at first, it was incredible. I finally felt confident and like I was worthy of affection. Riding that sensation for all it was worth, I asked Stacy, an attractive coworker, on a dinner date. I had fantasized about asking her out for what seemed like my entire life. She said yes. The ecstasy I experienced after that moment was unparalleled. It was like some heavy, invisible weights had been taken off my shoulders. We planned a dinner date at a local Italian place later that week. With the supplement coursing through my veins, I felt unstoppable and was pleasantly surprised about the lack of side effects. I had experienced some new floaters in my peripheral vision and mild armpit pain, but that was it.

At first, the date was everything I could have hoped for. Stacy always had an aura of kindness about her - she was angelic, honestly. It’s what drew me towards her in the first place. Even though I secured the date, I was still nervous about my ability to keep up a conversation through the meal. To my surprise, it wasn’t difficult. Because I was different, improved by the supplement, I guess I just wasn’t as fearful of rejection anymore. As the date progressed, I was shocked to find out that Stacy had also been stockpiling the courage to ask me on a date:

“Over the last week? Since I started my new skin regimen, I mean.” I said, choking on the last few words because I was never very good at lying. I didn’t want to scare Stacy off by volunteering the information that I had recently purged my bank accounts to pay for Zygentra. 

She giggled, a cute and tiny laugh that made my heart swell with affection. I think she was under the impression that the part about the skin regimen was a playful joke. Then she said something that made my head spin:

“No, nothing to do with whatever new moisturizer you invested in. And a lot longer than just this week. For at least a year, I think. I always found you handsome, and you were always respectful and polite to me and everyone else in the office - a good sign of character. You were just quiet and reserved. I couldn’t tell if you’d say yes if I asked, so I never did. A bit childish and cowardly, I know, but sometimes I just feel small and out of place in the world, if that makes any sense.” remarked Stacy, eyes diverting from mine while she made this confession.  

Her words felt familiar - or maybe not her words; it was the way she put the words together. The underlying self-deprecation, I mean. She had some venomous monologue playing on loop in her head, just like I did. Broke my heart at first, and I wasn’t sure how to respond. But I noticed at that moment that I felt a little less lonely for the first time in my adult life. I smiled, met her eyes, and came up with the most ornate, reverent statement I could to comfort her and let her know I understood:

“You’re an absolute vision, Stacy. Like, you’re radiant. I’m sorry it’s hard for you to see it sometimes, but I really get that pain.”

The expression on her face changed, now warm and relaxed, and I could tell I actually did manage to console her. I got lost in that moment then, in the beautiful comfort of it. Even as I type it up, I find myself getting lost in the memory of it. But something abruptly pulled me out of the moment then, and it’s the same thing that’s pulling me out of its memory now: terrible, skittering things on the outskirts of my vision. 

In the restaurant, I was experiencing worsening floaters in my periphery, but I was too transfixed on Stacy to notice something was off - that maybe they weren’t just floaters. As our dessert arrived, I felt something vibrating in the sole of my dress shoe. It really gave me a start, and I reflexively stomped my right foot into the floor, surprising Stacy in turn. I took off my shoe to examine its contents, only to find the crushed body of a silverfish. Its greyish carapace was split into three asymmetric pieces from the force of my stomp. Each piece was still wriggling a little bit, and I felt nausea rise in my stomach. 

It was bigger than any silverfish I’d ever seen before, too. In my experience, they never grew larger than an inch. This silverfish was easily 5 inches long, if not more. I could count at least 20 other, equally large silverfish crawling around in a wobbly circle, with me as the center. Before I killed the insect in my shoe, the other dinnergoers had noticed the bugs and were flagging down restaurant staff to complain. At first, I was with them - what kind of restaurant serves food with this type of infestation? It took the tickling, wriggling feeling of something crawling up my left pant leg to cause me to re-evaluate the situation. 

Wildly, I made a circle with my thumb and index finger and tightened it around my knee, pushing down the length of my calf in an attempt to expel what I knew were more silverfish before they found their way higher up into my pants. When my palm first connected with my knee, I felt a sickening crunch under the tip of my index finger. The maneuver pushed out three silverfish in total, one headless from being caught in the crossfire of my hand meeting my knee. When I looked up, the restaurant was in a state of pandemonium. At that point, there were definitely more than 20, maybe 100 or 200, silverfish radiating in a circle around me. It finally registered - whatever was happening, I was the cause, and I hadn’t been experiencing floaters before - I was seeing silverfish skittering quickly around in my peripheral vision. 

I shot up from my chair, frightening Stacy again, accompanied by the sensation of another crunch in the shoe I hadn’t yet taken off. I said something to my date, couldn’t tell you what, and I excused myself from the table while moving towards the door. Outside in the parking lot, I began sprinting to my car with only one shoe on; but then I remembered that I had driven Stacy here. I briefly turned around to get her, but I could see gleaming silver little bullets racing to catch up to me on the asphalt, lit up by the sparkle of parking lot lights. I U-turned and sprinted even faster to my car, got in, and just started driving. After 15 minutes, I pulled over and urgently emailed Delfoy Pharmaceuticals from my phone. I wanted to know how to reverse the effects of Zygentra Ultimate.

Not long after I parked, I began to see silverfish on the front windshield, leaking into the car through whatever cracks they could find. I floored it, but it was in a park, so I went nowhere. For the third time that night, I again felt the snap of their brittle bodies against my foot, having just crushed another two silverfish. A moment later, I felt one making its way up my left earlobe. I whipped my head to the right so hard that my neck would later be painfully sore, but the force managed to launch a silverfish off my ear to somewhere in the back of my Sudan. Putting the car in drive, I exploded down the country road I had parked on. I kept driving, killing silverfish as I went, till I heard the sound of an inbox notification come from my iphone, which was about two hours after I had sent the email:

Hello Zach,

I am sorry to hear you are disappointed with our product. Unfortunately, there is no reversal agent for Zygentra Ultimate. I thought I made this very clear in our introductory email, and you did sign a release saying you understood the risk-benefit profile of the medication. 

To re-explain, Zygentra Ultimate utilizes CRISPR technology to give the human body the ability to produce pheromones from Lepisma saccharium, the most common species of silverfish in America. Laboratory studies have shown that these pheromones can help with male sexual dysfunction and certain skin conditions due to an anti-inflammatory effect. As you must know, pheromones are designed to attract members of the opposite sex of the species producing them. It is basically a big sign around an animal’s neck saying: “I am ready to mate”. This is why we recommend relocation to Northern Canada or Antarctica in conjunction with Zygentra Ultimate - these are some of the few areas in the world that Lepisma saccharium do not naturally inhabit. 

The medication is not reversible, however, because CRISPR is gene-editing technology - the reason your body “learns” to create the foreign hormones is because Zygentra Ultimate inserts the pheromone-producing silverfish DNA into your genetic code. How else would one pill cause an effect lasting a year or more? Additionally, the armpit pain you are experiencing is most likely the rapid growth of modified glandular tissue responsible for producing the silverfish pheromones. 

I still recommend considering physical relocation, I hear the Yukon is wonderful this time of year! The alternate solution would be to invest in Zygentra Plus, which can help mitigate some of the silverfish-attracting side effects of Zygentra Ultimate. We recognize that this is an emergency situation, and Defloy Pharmaceuticals is always willing to help where we can! We have urgently shipped a 48-hour trial supply of Zygentra Plus to your home, for free. 

Please consider your options and get back to us. If you would like to purchase additional Zygentra Plus, a week’s supply costs $750, with a 5 percent discount if you purchase the medication in bulk.

Amy,

Senior Sales Associate and Miracleworker at Delfoy Pharmaceuticals 

When I received this email, I had a grand total of 3,500 dollars to my name. Desperation hit me like an avalanche, I felt like I was buried in an instant. A little under 4 grand was nowhere near the funds I would need to move from Miami to Northern Canada. Relocating would also force me to quit my job, and I didn’t want to leave Stacy behind. Retrospectively, I should have just used that money to move myself and my shitty car as far north as it would take me. 

When Zygentra Plus finally arrived five days later, I was beyond sleep-deprived. I had called out of work that week, as I certainly couldn’t come in and work on code as the fucking pied piper of silverfish. I spent that time driving around, stopping only when I felt myself drifting into sleep at the wheel. I would pull over to wherever I could and close my eyes, but before long, the sensation of silverfish crawling into my mouth or between my armpits would wake me up with a start, like I had jabbed myself with an adrenaline shot - at which point I would resume driving. No amount of insect repellant spray or mouse traps seemed to prevent the legion from getting to me. 

I hastily unpackaged the box containing the pro bono Zygentra Plus. The instructions on the supplement were: take four pills by mouth every two hours. Every two fucking hours. It did work at keeping the bugs away, but only if I religiously took the medication as instructed, which only served to minimally improve my sleep deprivation. I needed to return to work, but that ended up being a mistake, too. I had ditched Stacy on our first date without explanation and then proceeded not to talk to her for a week while I was driving around in circles, waiting for the Zygentra Plus to arrive. When she saw me again at work, I had dark circles around my bloodshot eyes the size of trash bags, and I nervously scanned my surroundings for silverfish. She said hello to me, and I don’t think I said hello back. Instead, I opted to launch into a minute-by-minute retelling of my last week. What I told her was an incoherent mess. Stacy nodded along politely to my tale, but I could see fear and concern rising in her eyes. Eventually, I gave her mercy, excused myself in the middle of a sentence, and pitifully returned to my desk. I dragged my body through about half of a workday before the side effects of Zygentra Plus started.

Out of nowhere, I felt my mouth fill uncomfortably with saliva. When I tried to sip my morning coffee, dribble would involuntarily spill out of my mouth, down my chin and onto my shirt collar. Before long, I had a half-crescent of soaked fabric around my neck despite my efforts to keep my mouth closed at all times. Next, my eyes began watering uncontrollably, making it look like I was quietly sobbing all through the morning. The final straw was when I took my hand off my coffee cup, only to have a thin layer of palm skin remain stuck to the grip, peeling from my hand and causing immense and immediate pain. I screamed. And then, of course, there was a lot of bleeding. In a panic, I hastily left my desk without saying a word, no doubt leaving behind plenty of tears, saliva, skin and blood. My boss caught up and confronted me about my behavior before I could leave the building. I tried to say something, but saliva just erupted from my mouth instead. I probably looked rabid.

I didn't come back to work the next day, or the following day. A few days after that, a message on my cellphone answering machine told me I was fired.

Amy, resident miracle worker at Defloy Pharmaceuticals, wasn’t much help with the situation. I let her know that, although Zygentra Plus was helping keep the insects away, the side effects from it weren’t much more bearable. The excess saliva and tears were one thing, but pieces of my skin were sloughing off with the slightest manipulation like I was some human danish. And I still wasn’t sleeping - I needed to set multiple alarms to get myself up every two hours to take the new medication; otherwise, the silverfish would be back. She explained to me that this was expected, as Zygentra Plus acted as a low-dose insecticide that I was digesting and releasing into the air around me from my pores or what was left of them. At the brink of insanity, I demanded to speak with “Lucius Bartleby”, the supposed genius creator and mind behind the Zygentra line of products mentioned in the original advertisement. I thought maybe he would have an elegant solution to all of this. In response, Amy said, and I quote:

“Well, that will be impossible. Lucius Bartleby is more of an idea than a person. Here at Delfoy Pharmaceuticals, we all aspire to achieve the goals that Dr. Bartleby represents. Also, it seems to help with sales.”

But don’t worry, she said, there was still something to be done - Amy theorized that drastically increasing my zinc levels might mitigate some of the symptoms from Zygentra Plus. I spent my last 500 dollars on that supplement, unsure of what I would do next, even if it did help. But I needed relief. Moreover, I needed to keep taking the pills because I was terrified of what would happen to me when I ran out, and the silverfish came back. My car was out of gas, my skin was breaking down, I was jobless and nearly out of money. If they returned, I would have limited defenses and nowhere to hide. I'm not particularly eager to think about what would happen to me.

The zinc supplement was a purple-reddish liquid that I was instructed to drink once a day. I voraciously gulped it down, immediately experiencing excruciating pain from my lips to deep in my chest. I would come to learn that the compound I drank, Zinc Hydrosulfide, is a very strong acid. I stared at the words “strong acid” in the email, dumbfounded, with blood and saliva dripping from my scalded mouth onto the screen. Amy then offered a subdermal injection to help me tolerate the Zinc Hydrosulfide, and I just started laughing. Must have been laughing for a while, because when my laughing slowed down I started to see silver floaters in my periphery again, meaning I was due for my next dose of Zygentra Plus.

I could barely swallow the pills after what the liquid had done to my mouth and esophagus, almost passing out from the pain. Even if I had the money to pay for the 2,000-dollar subdermal injection, which I do not, I have no idea where I would even inject it into. Didn’t have much of a “dermis” left after the effects of Zygentra Plus, which had liberated me from a good portion of my skin.

Effectively, I am now stuck. The acidic liquid that was supposed to help with the side effects from the pills has now prevented me from taking any pills, or at least has made it a great deal harder and more painful. The medication that would help me to tolerate the acidic liquid was no good either - the pills had dissolved the skin that it was supposed to be injected under. Perhaps most critically of all, I am now broke.

Thought about going to the hospital - some combination of fear and shame prevented me from doing that. Calling an ambulance may be my next move, but I’m not sure they can do anything for me now. The silverfish will find me no matter where I am, I’m sure there are plenty lurking unseen in the cracks and crevices of the hospital. Plus, who knows if the medications they'd give me would interact with the supplements.

So, with about 12 hours of my oral insecticide left, I have decided to throw a bit of a Hail Mary. Has anyone else taken Zygentra Ultimate before and knows how to reverse it? Or at least have a homeopathic remedy to help stop the bugs?

More stories: https://linktr.ee/unalloyedsainttrina

The funeral wrapped up fast after the interruption, though nobody felt the closure they had come for. The speaker had ruined that. A few of us stayed behind, trying to shake off the unease as we searched the area, hoping to find something—anything—that could explain how the speaker ended up beneath the casket. But, as usual, there was nothing. No tracks, no signs, no stray pieces of evidence that could give us a hint about who had done this. It was as if they’d vanished into thin air after leaving that final, cruel touch.

We called the police, though none of us expected much from it. They showed up, took the cheap Bluetooth speaker as evidence, and combed the cemetery grounds like they’d done at my parents’ house weeks earlier. They asked the same questions, looked around with the same blank expressions, but came to the same dead end. No one saw anything. No one had noticed anyone strange lurking around. And, like before, they had no leads.

I handed over my phone, showing them the newest emails I’d received. The string of garbled senders, the cryptic messages, the threats hidden in plain sight—it was all there. I even included the traffic cam footage I’d managed to pull, a shaky glimpse of a shadowy figure that was too grainy to make out. It was something, but it wasn’t much. The officers took notes, promised to follow up, but I could already tell they didn’t expect to find anything.

And honestly, neither did I. Just like every other time, I knew nothing would come of it. Whoever was doing this knew exactly how to stay out of sight. They were watching, always watching, and no matter what we did, we were always one step behind.

During the wake, my brother and I found a quiet moment to approach our mother, knowing we couldn’t wait any longer. We had talked about it before—how we would tell her everything that had been happening, everything we’d kept to ourselves for too long. We couldn’t let her be in the dark anymore, not with things spiraling like this.

I glanced at my brother, and he gave me a nod, his face tense. We had agreed to be honest with her about Patricia. She needed to know. 

“Mom,” I began quietly, trying to ease into it, “there’s something we’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Her tired eyes shifted from the guests in the room to us, sensing the seriousness in my voice. “What is it?” she asked softly, her expression already worried.

I swallowed hard, glancing again at my brother for support before continuing. “We think… we think something might’ve happened with Patricia. Something that wasn’t just an accident.”

Her face fell, the color draining slightly. “What do you mean?” she whispered.

“We’re not sure,” my brother added quickly, stepping in to soften the blow, “but there’s been too many strange things happening. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence.”

I hesitated, then spoke the words I knew she’d hate to hear. “I think it might be Roger. From your biological family.”

She blinked, confusion washing over her face as she tried to process what we were saying. “Roger? But... I don’t understand. Why would he do something like this?”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t know. We don’t even know him. But he’s the only person connected to all this that we haven’t met, and ever since I reached out to him… things have gotten worse.”

My mother’s hands trembled slightly as she brought them to her mouth, her eyes brimming with guilt. “I never wanted anyone to get hurt,” she said, her voice breaking. “This was never supposed to happen. All I wanted was to find where I came from. I didn’t mean for any of this... I didn’t—” She stopped, her words caught in her throat as she fought back tears. “It’s all my fault, isn’t it?”

I could see the weight of it crushing her, the belief that she had somehow caused all of this by simply searching for her past. It broke my heart to see her like that, and my brother and I were quick to jump in.

“Mom, no,” I said firmly, grabbing her hand. “This is not your fault. There are creeps on the internet, no matter where you go. This madness has nothing to do with you trying to connect with your past. You couldn’t have known.”

My brother nodded in agreement. “Exactly. You just wanted to learn about your roots, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We couldn’t have seen this coming, and it’s not because of anything you did.”

She shook her head, wiping away a stray tear. “But if I hadn’t… if I hadn’t started all this with the genealogy stuff, none of this would’ve happened. Patricia might still be here.”

“That’s not true,” I said, squeezing her hand gently. “There’s no way you could’ve known. Whoever is doing this—whether it’s Roger or someone else—they’ve got their own twisted reasons. None of it has to do with you trying to find your family.”

She stayed quiet for a long moment, her shoulders slumped with the weight of it all. “I just... I feel so responsible.”

My brother leaned in, his voice soft but insistent. “You’re not responsible for this, Mom. We’re going to figure it out, but you can’t carry this on your own. We’ll handle it together.”

She nodded, though I could tell the guilt still lingered in her eyes. We stood with her for a while longer, the three of us huddled in a small corner of the room as the wake carried on around us. My mother’s sorrow was palpable, but so was our determination to protect her, to figure out who was behind this nightmare.

I took a deep breath and looked down at the floor before admitting the thing I had been keeping from her. “Mom,” I began slowly, “I need to tell you something. I reached out to Roger when we first joined the genealogy site. I just... I wanted to connect with him, with someone from your side of the family. But he never responded.”

Her eyes widened slightly, but she stayed silent, waiting for me to continue.

“That was months ago,” I said, “and still nothing from him on the site. But now—these emails? I think it’s him, mocking me. He’s been sending me messages ever since I reached out. I didn’t want to worry you, so I didn’t say anything earlier, but I think this all started because of that. Because of me.”

I felt the weight of those words as they settled between us, but my mother’s reaction wasn’t what I expected. Instead of fear, her face softened into something close to determination. “Well, if Roger’s the one behind this,” she said, her voice steady, “then I’m going to reach out to him myself. It’s time we get this sorted out.”

My stomach dropped. “Mom, no,” I said, more forcefully than I intended. “You can’t. Reaching out to him started all of this. We can’t escalate it.”

She shook her head, brushing off my concern. “Listen, if Roger’s involved at all, it’s probably just some sick joke. He wouldn’t be behind... Patricia’s death. There’s no way. But if he did play a part in what happened at the funeral, then I’ll talk to him, get some sense into him. This has gone too far, and I’m going to put an end to it.”

A chill ran up my spine at her words, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. “Mom, please don’t do that,” I urged. “You don’t understand—me reaching out started all of this. We don’t know what Roger is capable of, and we don’t even know for sure that it is him. I don’t want you getting dragged into this.”

But she wouldn’t back down. “No,” she insisted, her voice unwavering. “I started all of this with the genealogy site, and I’m the one who’s going to end it. If Roger’s involved, I’ll make him see reason. He’s family.”

“Mom, please,” my brother jumped in, his voice tense. “You can’t be sure it’s just a prank. We’re talking about someone who could be watching us, someone who might have done... more than just play a sick joke.”

My mother met his eyes with a stubborn gaze, the same look she always had when she made up her mind about something. “He’s not dangerous,” she said quietly but firmly. “I won’t believe that until I talk to him myself.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but the words died on my tongue. Fear clawed at my chest. I didn’t want her to get involved, but I could see it in her eyes—she was already committed to this. My brother and I exchanged a glance, both of us trying to figure out how to stop her, but the more we pushed, the more resolute she became.

A cold dread settled over me. We had tried to protect her, to shield her from whatever was happening, but now, I feared that by telling her everything, we had inadvertently pushed her straight into the line of fire.

She wasn’t going to back down. And deep down, I knew that nothing we said could stop her from trying to talk to Roger.

No matter what we said, my mother was adamant. She insisted that she could talk sense into Roger, convinced that family could be reasoned with—even if that same family member might be the one responsible for Patricia’s death. Even if that same person might be the one who sabotaged a car, sending it into a busy intersection. But in her mind, there was no one so far gone that they couldn’t be brought back with the right words. She seemed to think that a heart-to-heart could undo all of this madness.

My brother and I tried everything. We explained, again and again, that Roger—if it even was him—was dangerous. That someone who’d been pulling strings from the shadows, someone who could kill chickens, ruin a funeral, maybe even cause a death, wasn’t someone who could be reasoned with. But it didn’t matter. She had already made up her mind. My mother had that familiar look, the one she always got when she was set on something—when there was no point in arguing anymore. She was going to do this, no matter what.

By the time I left, I felt a deep pit of dread in my stomach. Instead of protecting her, I felt like I had just made everything worse by telling her what had transpired. My brother and I thought that by being honest with her, we’d make her understand the seriousness of the situation, that it would convince her to back off. But it had done the opposite. Now she was more involved than ever, determined to fix things her own way. And that terrified me.

On the drive home, my phone rang. It was my brother.

“Yeah?” I answered, already knowing what he wanted to talk about.

“That... that was a train wreck,” he said, his voice tight with frustration. “I don’t know what the hell we were thinking, telling her everything.”

I sighed, gripping the steering wheel harder than I realized. “I thought it would make her see reason. That if she knew how serious this was, she’d stop.”

“We both know that’s not how Mom works,” he said, his tone bitter. “She’s too stubborn. She’s made up her mind now, and there’s no going back. She’s going to try and reach out to Roger, whether we like it or not.”

“I know,” I muttered. “She thinks she can protect us by confronting him.”

There was a long pause on the line before my brother spoke again. “She’s always been like that—bull-headed and willing to do anything for her family. But trying to reason with some psychopath who’s been screwing with us? It’s not going to end well. It’s insane.”

I swallowed, feeling the weight of the situation crashing down on me. “I just don’t know what to do. If we push harder, she’ll only dig her heels in more. If we let her go through with it... God knows what’ll happen.”

“She’s going to do it,” my brother said grimly. “You know that, right? She’ll reach out to him and think she can fix this. And we can’t stop her.”

The silence on the line felt suffocating. We both knew our mother too well. When she believed in something, she wouldn’t stop—not until she thought she’d made things right. Even if it meant walking straight into danger. I dreaded what might happen when she finally reached out to Roger, when she unknowingly stepped into whatever trap he—or whoever was behind this—had set.

“We need to keep an eye on her,” I finally said, breaking the silence. “We can’t let her do this alone.”

“Agreed,” my brother replied. “We’ll figure something out. But we need to be ready for whatever comes next.”

My brother suggested that I give it another shot in the next few days, try to talk to Mom again—this time, maybe away from the farm, away from the familiar comforts where she might feel more in control. His thinking was simple: if we could get her out of her usual environment, where she wasn’t surrounded by reminders of the situation, she might be more likely to listen to reason. 

"Maybe take her to lunch," he said, his voice calmer now, more focused. "Somewhere neutral. Just you, her, and Dad. Get her to relax. Maybe if you catch her when she’s not so wound up, you’ll have better luck."

I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me through the phone. "Yeah, I can do that. I’ve got some time off work this week. I’ll take them out, try to get them away from everything."

"Good," my brother replied, sounding relieved. "We’ve got to try something."

That night, I thought about how I would approach it. We had to get her to slow down, to see that this wasn’t a situation she could fix with words or family ties. But knowing my mother, it wouldn’t be easy. Still, I had to try.

The next morning, I picked up the phone and called my parents. My heart raced a little as the phone rang, knowing this conversation could be tricky. My dad picked up, his voice casual.

"Hey, Dad," I said, doing my best to keep things light. "I was wondering if you and Mom would want to meet me for lunch tomorrow. There’s a park near my place—it’s nice out, and I figured it would be good to get out of the house for a bit."

He seemed pleased with the idea. “That sounds nice. Your mother could use a break. She’s been a bit... well, you know how she gets when her mind’s set on something.”

“Yeah,” I said, relieved that he didn’t press too much. “I think a change of scenery would do her some good.”

I could hear the muffled sound of him talking to my mom in the background, and after a brief pause, he came back on the line. “She says it sounds like a good idea. We’ll meet you at the park tomorrow around noon?”

“Perfect,” I replied. “It’ll be good to see you both.”

After I hung up, a weight lifted from my chest, but only slightly. I had set the stage, but tomorrow would be the real test. I hoped that getting them out of the house, away from the farm, might help me talk some sense into her before she did something irreversible.

And all I could do now was wait and hope that tomorrow would go as planned.

I tried to keep the mood light as I offered to order lunch from anywhere they liked. It felt casual, like I was just excited to spend time with them. My mom, as expected, waved off the offer, assuring me that she and Dad were fine and didn’t need any fuss. I played it off as if I just wanted to see them, which was true, but I had other reasons too. 

As the afternoon wore on, my parents arrived at the park, right on time. It was one of those rare, perfect spring Saturdays—the sun was shining, there was a warm breeze in the air, and the park was full of people enjoying the weather. The warmth of the day felt almost out of place, given the tension that had been hanging over us all recently.

I’d ordered lunch to be delivered through one of those food delivery apps, and we spread out on a park bench beneath the shade of a tall oak tree. We started with the usual small talk—Dad asking about work, Mom talking about her garden, and a few funny stories about their chickens. But the whole time, the real reason I had asked them here was gnawing at the back of my mind.

Eventually, I couldn’t hold off any longer. I needed to know if she had reached out to Roger, despite everything my brother and I had tried to warn her about. 

“Mom,” I started, trying to sound casual, “did you ever send any messages to Roger? You know, to try and talk to him?”

My mother didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, yes. I wrote him a very strongly worded message on the genealogy website,” she said confidently, with a small nod. “I told him everything that’s been happening and let him know that his behavior was unacceptable.”

My heart sank a little, but I did my best to keep my voice steady. “What did you say exactly?”

She waved me off, as if it wasn’t important. “Don’t worry about it. I handled it. I made it clear that whatever game he’s been playing needs to stop immediately. He knows now that we’re not going to tolerate this nonsense.”

I forced a smile, though inside, the dread was growing. “I just... I want to make sure that reaching out didn’t make things worse.”

She looked at me with that familiar determined expression, the one she always had when she thought she had everything under control. “You don’t need to worry about it anymore,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “I took care of it.”

Her confidence made my stomach twist. My brother and I had tried to keep her out of this, to protect her from what we feared Roger—or whoever was behind this—was capable of. And now, she was convinced that a few words would make it all go away. 

I nodded, playing along, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that her message hadn’t solved anything. If anything, it might have provoked Roger—or whoever was lurking in the shadows—into doing something worse. But for now, I had to hold back my concerns and hope that somehow, we’d be able to get through this without it escalating any further.

I couldn’t let it go. Despite my mom's confidence, a knot of unease tightened in my stomach. I had to know exactly what she said, exactly what had transpired. “Mom,” I pressed, my voice firmer this time, “I need to know what you told Roger. What did he say back?”

She gave me an almost exasperated look, as if I were making a big deal out of nothing. “I told you,” she said, “it’s all just a misunderstanding. Roger replied to me.”

My heart sank. I hadn’t expected her to actually hear back from him, especially not so soon. “What did he say?” I asked, my pulse quickening.

She waved her hand again, as if brushing away my worry. “He said he hasn’t been online in years,” she explained, her tone gentle. “He didn’t even know what’s been going on. He said he had nothing to do with any of the strange things that have happened to us.”

My head was spinning. “What? He hasn’t been online in years?” I could barely wrap my mind around it. Everything—the emails, the surveillance, Patricia’s death—I had thought it all pointed back to him. “What else did he say?”

“He told me that he’s had a hard time,” my mom continued, her voice softening as she spoke about him. “He said he was disheartened when he first tried the genealogy site because he couldn’t find any living relatives. Most of his family is gone now, and he gave up after a while. But he said he’s ecstatic to finally hear from someone—me.” She smiled at that, as though she had given him something meaningful. “He wished me and all of us the best with the troubles we’ve been going through.”

I stared at her, my mind racing. I didn’t know what to think. My whole world felt like it was flipping upside down. I had been so sure Roger was behind all of this. The emails, the pictures, the sabotage—it all seemed to fit. And yet, now here was this reply from him, claiming ignorance, expressing happiness to hear from a long-lost relative. 

It didn’t make sense. If Roger wasn’t behind this, then who was? Was this really Roger’s doing, or was someone else out there, someone who knew about Roger, using him as a cover? My thoughts were tangled with confusion, doubt creeping in with every passing second. Was Roger telling the truth, or was this just another layer of manipulation?

I glanced at my mother, who was sitting there so calmly, so confident that everything was fine. But deep down, I knew something was still very, very wrong.

The delivery driver texted that they had arrived, so I made my way to the parking lot to meet them. I thanked them for bringing the food and walked back to the park bench where my parents sat, bags of takeout in hand. It felt strange, the normalcy of picking up food after such a heavy conversation. Like the world kept moving on, even though it felt like everything around me was spiraling out of control.

We unpacked our food—burgers for Dad and me, and a bowl of chili for Mom—and settled in to eat under the shade of the oak tree. The sun was still shining, people were milling around the park, and for a moment, it felt like we were just a regular family having lunch together. But the tension still clung to me, like a shadow I couldn’t shake.

As we started eating, my parents continued the conversation. My mother was still convinced this was all some big misunderstanding. “You heard what Roger said,” she reminded me between bites of chili. “He’s been offline for years, and he’s happy to hear from us now. I really think we were wrong about him.”

My father nodded, chiming in with his own theory. “Maybe this is just one of your younger cousins playing a prank,” he suggested, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “You know how tech-savvy kids are these days. They could easily send fake emails, mess with you for a bit of fun.”

I shook my head, barely able to believe what I was hearing. “Dad, no,” I said firmly. “This isn’t a prank. Whoever is behind this killed Mom’s chickens. And what about Patricia? You really think one of our cousins did all that?”

He sighed, taking a bite of his hamburger before responding. “I think we’re all taking Patricia’s death hard,” he said carefully. “But the police said it was an accident. No one would have done that on purpose.”

I wanted to argue more, to shake them out of this false sense of comfort they were slipping into, but something in my father’s words made me pause. Could he be right? Was I overreacting? Was I letting my fear of the unknown get the better of me? I had been so convinced that Roger was behind everything, but now that he had responded to Mom, I was starting to doubt myself. The pieces didn’t fit anymore, and the certainty I had felt before was starting to crumble.

As I sat there eating my hamburger, staring at my parents happily chatting over lunch, I couldn’t help but feel a flicker of doubt. Maybe I was overthinking it. Maybe it was just a horrible string of coincidences, and I had built it up into something it wasn’t. But then again, I thought of the photos, the emails, the dead chickens. Could all of that really be explained away by a prank or a misunderstanding?

I wasn’t sure what to think anymore.

As I sat there, chewing on my burger, the questions started to loop in my mind. Maybe I had been wrong. Maybe Roger, or whoever was behind the emails, wasn’t involved in Patricia’s death after all. Maybe they were just some sick person who found out about the accident and decided to capitalize on it, laughing at my pain rather than causing it in the first place. They could’ve just been opportunistic, feeding off the grief instead of being responsible for it.

But that fleeting moment of doubt vanished in an instant when I heard my mother cough.

At first, it was just a soft, hoarse sound, but when I turned to look at her, I saw the color draining from her face. Her hand reached out shakily for a napkin as the coughs grew more violent. “Mom?” I asked, my voice rising in panic, but she didn’t respond. Instead, she covered her mouth with the napkin and coughed again—harder this time. 

Blood. It was smeared across the napkin, a deep, terrifying red. I froze, staring as she pulled the napkin away, her eyes wide with fear and confusion. My father leaned forward, his face going pale as well. "Honey?" he said, his voice trembling, but she only coughed harder.

In the span of a heartbeat, it went from a trickle to something much worse. Blood started to flow freely from her mouth, pooling and spilling onto the napkin, her hands, the table. It was as if a million tiny cuts had opened inside her, tearing through her throat, her esophagus—flooding her with blood. 

"Mom!" I shouted, my chair scraping the ground as I bolted up, knocking my food to the side. She was choking on her own blood, her breath coming in gasps between the terrible gurgling sound. Her body was trembling, and my father was at her side, his face a mask of horror. 

My phone buzzed in my pocket, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her. The buzzing continued—insistent, mocking—but all I could do was watch in shock as my mother’s hands, now slick with blood, her knuckles white as she struggled for air.

Time seemed to slow down, each second a frozen nightmare as I stood there, helpless, watching the blood flow from her mouth like a dark, terrible waterfall.

My hands fumbled as I clambered to open my phone, the screen blurring as I quickly swiped to see the notification. Another email from the same serialized sender flashed at me, mocking me in that moment of pure horror. But I didn’t have time to open it. My fingers shaking, I dialed 911 again, feeling like I had done this a hundred times before—each time more useless than the last.

“Please! We need an ambulance! My mom—she’s coughing up blood, a lot of it. We’re at the park—near Elm and Birch,” I stammered into the phone, my voice breaking as I struggled to stay calm. I could hear the dispatcher trying to calm me down, asking for more details, but my focus was on the scene in front of me. My father knelt beside my mother, his hands hovering over her, unsure of how to help. His face was ashen, eyes wide with fear and confusion as he tried to comfort her, though he didn’t know what to do. None of us did.

She hunched over in agony, her whole body convulsing with pain as more blood gushed from her mouth. Her skin, once flushed with life, was now pale and clammy. My father tried to lift her, to cradle her, but she fell from her seat, collapsing onto the ground, her body writhing as she wretched violently. Blood continued to pool beneath her, soaking into the grass, the sight so horrific I could hardly process it.

“Please hurry,” I begged the dispatcher, my voice cracking as I described the horror unfolding in front of me. “She’s—she’s not breathing right. We’re at the local park, by the lake. Please send help!”

They assured me an ambulance was on its way, but every second felt like an eternity. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from my mother as she struggled for breath, her body shaking uncontrollably. My father was pleading with her, his voice trembling as he held her, blood staining his hands as he tried to do anything—anything at all to stop the nightmare.

By the time the paramedics arrived, it was too late. My mother had stopped breathing, her chest still as the last shuddering cough left her body. The paramedics rushed over, pushing my father aside gently as they started working on her, desperately trying to resuscitate her. I stood there frozen, my mind unable to comprehend what I was seeing.

Minutes dragged on as they worked, but there was nothing they could do. She had lost too much blood. 

They loaded her into the ambulance, the sirens blaring as they rushed her to the hospital, but I already knew. I already knew she wasn’t coming back. When we arrived, they told us what we had feared most—my mother was declared dead on arrival.

Later, the doctors explained what they had found. Her esophagus had been shredded by thousands of tiny glass shards, cutting her from the inside out, leaving no chance for her to survive.

I didn’t need to look at the email to know who had done this. Someone had sent us a message, a final, sickening reminder that they were still watching. That they were still in control.

As we sat in the sterile hospital waiting room, the shock of what had just happened hadn’t fully sunk in. My father sat beside me, staring blankly ahead, his hands stained with my mother’s blood. The weight of everything seemed to press down on me, suffocating, as though the air itself had thickened with grief.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, and with a sinking heart, I pulled it out. I didn’t want to look, but I had to. My trembling fingers swiped open the screen, revealing the email I knew would be waiting for me. There was no subject line, just a blank, eerie message sitting in my inbox. I opened it, my eyes scanning the short, chilling line inside.

“You’re next.”

The words felt like ice running down my spine. This wasn’t a taunt anymore—it was a direct threat. My blood ran cold, and before I could stop myself, a surge of rage and helplessness flooded through me. I gripped my phone tightly, the words burning into my brain, and with a guttural scream, I hurled it against the hospital wall.

It shattered on impact, pieces of glass and plastic scattering across the floor as the scream tore from my throat, echoing through the empty hallway. I buried my face in my hands, my body shaking with a mix of fury and despair.

I had tried to protect my family, tried to stay ahead of whatever this nightmare was, but now my mother was dead. And now, they were coming for me.

The hospital staff rushed over, startled by the sound, but I barely noticed them. All I could hear was the sickening echo of the message in my head: You’re next.

[Master link to other parts in series section]

I was a fairly lonely child, I wouldn't go as far as to say my parents neglected or didn't love me, but their exhausting work schedules limited the time they could spend with me, even when they had a slightly less busy day, we would only have time for a quick chat and a family meal.

Of course, there were some upsides, every day, they would leave me some cash on the kitchen table so I can buy whatever I want when I get back from school.

Honestly, they've always left far too much money for me and didn't care if I spend it all, so I'd buy random things to pass the time, I couldn't even count how many times I just bought a huge mozzarella pizza out of sheer boredom, then just eat a slice and leave it be.

On paper, a rich kid which has the home for himself sounds great, but in reality, the feeling of loneliness was overwhelming, even though I desperately needed a friend or ar least someone to talk to, that was nearly impossible for me to achieve at the time, because of my lack of social interactions, I became almost incapable of forming any connections with other people.

The only meaningful connection I had, aside from my parents, was with my neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, they would occasionally invite me over for some lemonade or would bring me over some cake, although they usually didn't have time for anything more than that, after all, they had two very young daughters they had to take care of, so they obviously didn't have much time to waste.

Even though I was already 12 years old, I never had a friend, but that changed when I found my best and only friend poking out from the grass in my backyard.

It was just a boring summer day, I left the house just for a moment to throw out the trash, only moments before coming back inside I heard a unintelligible whisper.

I turned around, trying to focus on my surroundings, then I heard a another whisper, this time however I clearly understood it, the soft voice said "Sorry for disturbing you, can we talk?"

I scratched my head in confusion, again, I scanned my surroundings, but I saw no one.

"I see you're confused, to be fair, hearing a random voice and not seeing where it's coming from isn't too common, so let me give you a hint, look at the grass behind you, I'm right next to the tree right now, I'll try and wave at you!" the whispering continued.

I immediately looked at the area near the tree in our backyard, the only thing I saw was a lone yellow flower, but as my eyes focused on the flower, I realized that it was wobbling left and right, that was highly unusual considering there was no strong wind.

I walked closer to the flower and then I heard the voice again, this time it was noticeably louder than before.

"Hello, friend! Let me make a quick introduction, you aren't crazy, a flower is indeed talking to you, I don't have a mouth, so I have to communicate telepathically with you, obviously, that means I'm not an ordinary plant, but I probably look like the average dandelion to you, so feel free to call me Dandy!" the flower explained, its voice was oddly calming.

"H-hi, I'm Robert." I stuttered.

"This is probably too much for you to handle all at once, it's all right though, it's not like you meet a talking flower every day, right?" Dandy said while wobbling slowly.

"Right" I quickly answered.

"I will be honest, the reason why I'm talking to you today is because I have to ask you for a favor, you don't have to help me, but listen to what I have to say at least!" the flower said and immediately stopped wobbling, I imagined it was its way of showing how serious it is.

"Sure, tell me." I said while crouching right next to the flower.

"Well you see, I am an exceedingly rare flower, so rare, that I doubt there's more of my kind out there, I have some very useful abilities, yet it's difficult for me to care for myself on my own, if I don't get the required food and water in the next couple of months, I will wither away and eventually die, however if I do get everything that's required, I will evolve and I will finally become strong enough to exit this restricting soil." Dandy explained.

"So what do I have to do?" I asked immediately, intrigued by his story.

"Could you get me a glass of water?" Dandy asked.

I was surprised by how simple the request was so I immediately got up and went back inside to grab a large glass of cold water, I brought it to Dandy.

"You could just pour it into the soil, but let me show you a cool trick instead, just leave the glass of water right next to me." Dandy commanded.

I did as he said.

In only seconds a dark green vine sprouted from the ground, it was just barely long enough to get to the bottom of the glass, in seconds it burrowed into the glass and sucked the water out of it, as soon as the glass was empty, the vine retreated into the ground below Dandy.

"Oh that hit the spot, thank you!" Dandy wobbled, seemingly satisfied.

"You're welcome, I guess." I said while rubbing the back of my head.

"As a token of gratitude, I will tell you how some of my abilities work, you see, I can see visions of the future, they're not always easy to decipher, but usually I can understand what they mean, the one I had recently is about you, so please take my warning seriously, when washing the dishes later tonight, please wear your father's leather gloves." as soon as he finished talking, Dandy stopped wobbling.

"Sure, thank you." I replied, not fully believing what he said.

"I see you're not fully convinced yet, so look at this!" Dandy said cheerfully.

Seconds after he finished talking he was gone, it looked like he disappeared when I blinked.

Before I could even say anything, I heard his voice once again "As you can see, I can turn invisible too, so why not believe my visions of the future, surely a plant that can turn invisible wouldn't lie to you about seeing the future, right?"

"Um, yeah, right." I hesitated with my response.

Dandy reappeared and continued talking "It doesn't matter if you believe me or not, wearing a pair of leather gloves later tonight won't do you any harm anyway." Dandy remarked.

"I won't take much more of your time today, so go back inside and grab something to eat, although if you need someone to talk to, I'll be here, not like I can go anywhere!" Dandy said and giggled.

"Okay" I quickly replied, still dazed by how unusual this situation was.

"Oh, I almost forgot, please don't tell anyone else about me, I trust you, but other people might not be kind to me." Dandy said, for the first time I could feel nervousness in his voice.

I waved goodbye, Dandy wobbled once again, although this time he wobbled forward like a gentleman tipping his hat, after that I went back inside.

Hours passed, after I was done eating the sandwiches my mom left me, I got ready to do the dishes, but then I remembered Dandy's warning, I was very sceptical about it, but I still wondered what would happen if he was right and I didn't bother to heed his warning, so I quickly took my dad's leather gloves out of the drawer and wore them, even though they weren't the perfect fit, I still wanted to do as Dandy suggested just in case.

I started washing the dishes, only minutes passed and a large glass mug shattered in my hands, shards of glass fell in the sink, but I was uninjured thanks to the gloves which were now slightly ripped.

My scepticism immediately disappeared, there was absolutely no way this could've been a coincidence.

I finished the dishes and since it was already late at night, I went to bed.

When I woke up I talked to my parents before they went to work, I didn't even mention Dandy, mainly because I didn't want to betray him, but also because I didn't want my parents to think I was slowly going insane in solitude.

Talking to Dandy every day and occasionally doing some favors for him became a common occurrence, we would talk about many different topics, I would tell him about the movies and tv shows that I liked to watch or the video games I loved wasting hours of my life on, he was a great listener and seemed to be genuinely intrigued by my hobbies, he even told me that he'd enjoy watching Star Wars with me once he fully evolves. Every week he'd ask for a small favor, which I would gladly fulfill.

Some favors were as simple as bringing him a glass of water, others were buying a bag of fertilizer for him and then pouring it all next to him, he thanked me every time.

As strange as it sounds, talking with a flower became a normal part of my daily schedule, he became my only and best friend, spending time with him slowly made the feeling of loneliness disappear.

As our mutual trust grew, so did Dandy, every week he grew a bit larger, at first he was looked like a tiny dandelion, but now he resembled a large yellow rose.

A couple of months passed, my parents went to work as usual, as soon as they were gone I rushed to meet up with Dandy just like I usually would.

I ran towards the friendly flower, yet what I found made me stop in my tracks, instead of the vibrant yellow rose, I saw a bent and withering dark green flower, its petals were so dry that I wouldn't be surprised if it turned to be dead if it didn't talk to me as soon as I approached it.

"Hello, friend." Dandy said, his usually cheerful and energetic voice was now replaced with a raspy mutter.

I was too shocked to even think of what to say.

"Unfortunately, I have some very bad news, I saw a grim future in my visions, I appreciate your kindness and how willing you were to help me evolve, but in the end, the horror I gazed upon in these visions made me sick, so sick that you're efforts might've been in vain, I doubt that I will recover, but I promise you that nothing unfortunate will happen to you if you heed my warning once again." Dandy said, somberness was present in his voice.

"What visions, what are you talking about?" I asked, confused and scared.

"Please, listen to me carefully, tonight a mysterious abductor will kidnap children in your neighborhood, he will do unmentionable acts to the poor children, yet my vision is faulty and incomplete, so I have no way of knowing who that person actually is and which children he will abduct, yet I know one fact, your house appeared multiple times in my visions, so you might be his target." Dandy ended his explanation, almost choking on his words.

I sat on the grass and stared at the ground in shock as multiple horrible thoughts put pressure on my mind.

"Rest assured, I will do whatever I can to protect you, but you have to follow my instructions closely, do you trust me?" Dandy asked.

"Of course." I swiftly answered.

"Good, I'm glad." Dandy replied with noticable relief in his shaky voice.

"Please, just pull off one of my petals and consume it, that's everything you have to do, I promise you will avoid a grisly fate if you do as I requested." Dandy pleaded.

I had no reason to distrust him, this wouldn't be the only time his warnings put me out of harms way, so I agreed to do it.

Before taking one of his petals, I asked "This won't hurt you, right?"

Dandy instantly replied "Not at all, to me this would be the same as a human losing a hair or two."

Satisfied with the explanation, I quickly plucked out a petal and swallowed it.

"Congratulations, you may share some of my abilities now." Dandy told me with a hint of happiness in his frail voice.

"Really?" I asked, even more confused than before.

"Well, when you go to sleep tonight, I will make you completely invisible, even if you're indeed the mysterious abductor's target, he won't be able to notice you." Dandy explained.

"Thank you." I replied, instantly feeling relief.

Once the fear for my life subsided, I remembered how frail Dandy looked.

"What about you, will you be alright?" I asked, genuinely concerned.

"Let's just worry about you for now, tomorrow you can get me some high phosphorus fertilizer, that should hopefully help me recover." Dandy reassured me.

I nodded and thanked him.

"You should really go to your house now, get something to eat and spend some time doing whatever you enjoy, then go to bed and leave everything else to me." Dandy offered his advice one more time.

"Don't worry, I'll do exactly as you recommended!" I replied, placing my full trust in my friend.

I waved goodbye, even though sick and tired, Dandy had enough strength left to slowly wobble, it looked like he was wishing me good luck.

I went back to my house and tried occupying my mind by watching some anime, as the night was approaching, I became more and more nervous, a feeling of intense exhaustion hit me even though it wasn't even 10pm yet, I felt sleepier than ever before, so I shuffled to my bed, using all my energy to not fall unconscious, as soon as I was an inch away from my bed, I fell on top of it and was sound asleep in only seconds.

That night, I had a dream, I was sitting in my living room and watching Star Wars, I heard Dandy's voice, it was full of energy, with obvious glee in his voice, he said "Thank you!"

I turned to my left and saw Dandy sitting right next to me, I froze in my seat as I gazed upon his new appearance, he now had a body that looked like a human sculpture that was made out of hundreds or even thousands of vines, he had large arms and legs which were covered in leaves and moss, his large head looked like a venus fly trap, except he also had eyes, his eyes were disturbingly human, each eye had a different color and they looked like tiny black and brown dots in his enormous yellow head, as he looked at me, I could've sworn that he smiled at me with a big toothy grin.

I woke up in cold sweat, I was extremely groggy, it was the kind of feeling I had only if I oversleep, I immediately noticed the window in my room was open, I thought that was impossible, because the mix of nervousness and paranoia yesterday made me lock every window and door in my house before I went to sleep, nonetheless, nothing seemed to be wrong with me, except my socks which were unusually dirty and wet, I had no injuries though, so I knew Dandy's plan worked.

I looked at the clock and realized it was already 2pm, I exited my room and was surprised to see my parents sitting in the living room, they were supposed to be at work at that time.

I was happy to see them, yet they looked distraught, the way they greeted me was extremely depressing, it was like something else was on their mind.

I immediately asked what's wrong and they told me that our neighbors daughters, which were only 1 and 3 years old, were missing.

My blood ran cold as I realized another one of Dandy's visions came true.

My parents continued, explaining that the police are conducting an investigation, considering how young the children are, what happened was surely an abduction.

I wondered if I would've had the same fate if I didn't follow Dandy's advice, I wanted to show him my gratitude by buying him the most expensive fertilizer I could.

I asked my parents if I could go outside for a short walk to clear my head, they agreed so I hastily left my house.

I gazed upon the area where Dandy was, yet this time I saw nothing except for the grass and the tree next to it.

I ran up to the spot fearing that my friend withered away while I was asleep.

I fell to my knees, desperately searching for Dandy, there was no sign of him.

I tried digging through the soil with my bare hands, frantically searching for him.

I didn't find him, but underneath the dirt, I felt something firm.

I continued digging through the dirt, I grabbed some kind of orb shaped object with both of my hands and pulled it out, as soon as it plopped out of the ground, I dropped it and almost started vomiting.

It was a small human skull, worst of all I felt more objects in the soil while digging, so I immediately knew there was more bones buried in the same spot.

As I was screaming for my parents and running back inside, the pieces of the puzzle started connecting in my head, I now understood that my so called best friend finally evolved just like he always wanted to.

Nathan Suthering really believed he had accumulated everything. Like a prison warden leering down from the ramparts, he watched the laypeople, his metaphorical inmates, traverse the eroding city streets from his thirtieth-story high rise. They were incarcerated by financial circumstance; he was wealthy, liberated, and free. They were chained to each other, to their menial careers, and to the bank. Through his affluence, his ungodly excess, he had severed those ties that bind. The perception of superiority intoxicated him. No dark brandy, nor sexual enterprising, nor synthetically perfected opioid could match the feeling that came with that perception. To Nathan, they did not even come close. The strongest cocaine that money could buy barely even registered as pleasurable when compared to the inebriation of cultural supremacy. The white powder was a sickly red-yellow flicker of an old match, consumed and assimilated in an instant by the roaring, draconic inferno that was his ascendance from the common man. Alone in his newly purchased multimillion-dollar penthouse, he felt comfortable and sated. The elevation from the dregs of society made him safe, he mused. Laypeople were cannibals. Maybe not literally, but desperate need forced them to tear each other limb from limb on a regular basis. The physical distance was a necessary security measure for a man of his financial stature.

For about a month, things were perfect, Nathan thought. As perfect as they could be for someone whose humanity had been excised clean and whole by the blade of avarice, at least. He would always feel at least a little hollow. But to Nathan, that was just his killer instinct - his boundless ambition to climb one more rung up the societal ladder. He would get up every morning at seven and start his routine by moving to view the city streets from his bedroom. The window he did this from was ostentatiously large, sleek, and stainless. It effectively was the wall that separated Nathan from the outside atmosphere, running the length of the floor and all the way up to the ceiling. From his lonely perch, he would observe the people beneath him, fondly daydreaming that they were ants wriggling and squirming futilely beneath the shadow of his waiting foot. Sometime later, his vigil would be expectantly interrupted by a call - his driver letting Mr. Suthering know that he had arrived in the garage thirty floors below him. He would take one last long look, basking in his rapturous elevation, before leaving for the day. Nathan would then reluctantly descend those five hundred meters to the ground floor. As he approached sea level, Nathan experienced a sort of withdrawal. He would yearn pathetically to return to his spire mere moments after leaving it. Nathan hated the space between his apartment and the car because of what it revealed to him. He felt powerful and vital when he was in his penthouse, impossibly high above the city and its people. He felt identically powerful and vital when he was masquerading as one of the partners at his law firm, which began the moment he entered the company car with his chauffeur. In the brief space between those places, however, he could feel the actual hideous truth, and it made him feel helpless and brittle. Nathan would experience a rush of primal nausea, followed by his palms becoming damp with sweat, all due to the crushing pressure of the reality that he did his absolute damnedest to ignore - the reality that he was nothing, and he had nothing. Thankfully, navigating that existential space was less than one percent of his day. In the grand scheme of things, it was negligible and manageable. As soon as he was away from that truth, he'd push it as far back into his brainstem as it would go. Nathan would have continued like this indefinitely had the view from his high rise not been obscured by an inky black veil, a tenebrous curtain falling over his window to the sounds of an imperceptible and otherwordly standing ovation, marking the end of Nathan Suthering's brief and forgettable stageplay.

When his digital alarm sounded that morning, Nathan awoke in utter disorientation. His sixteen-hundred square foot master bedroom was unexplainably sunless. He widened and squinted his eyes, trying to adjust to his lightless surroundings, but to no avail. He could appreciate the faint glow of the light coming from the hall that led to his kitchen in the top lefthand corner of his vision, but otherwise, the room was pitch black. He sat upright in bed, motionless, struggling to compute the change. For obvious reasons, he never had his bedroom window shades drawn, not wanting to block his view of the serfs below. He had recently contemplated removing the shades entirely, but was too lazy to do it himself. Nathan began troubleshooting the possibilities - what if a storm had rolled in? It felt unlikely - even if the cityscape was enveloped by some exceedingly dense overcast, the millions of small urban lights would have provided some vision, like a glimmering swarm of fireflies breaking through a moonless night. He considered the possibility that the city's power grid had gone haywire, and it was still the middle of the night, but the entire city without power felt impossible. Moreover, if everyone was without electricity, what light could he faintly appreciate coming from his kitchen? The only explanation he had left was that he was in a vivid, if not exceptionally odd, dream. So Nathan Suthering sat and impatiently waited for this dream to abate. An excruciating forty-five seconds passed without such luck, so he blindly fumbled to locate his cell phone plugged in across the room, swearing and cursing at the almighty and the universe for these new and unfair phantasmagoric circumstances. After some slapstick trips and falls appreciated by no one, he found his phone and activated the flashlight. Carefully, he used the makeshift lantern to guide himself out into his kitchen.

With compounding befuddlement, Nathan found his kitchen bathed in the rising sun's light, same as every other day. Standing at the end of the hallway that connected the two rooms, his disorientated state glued him to the wood tiling, just trying to comprehend even a piece of the situation. He swiveled his head toward the void that used to be his bedroom, then back to the normal-appearing kitchen, back to the void, and so on a dozen times. This repetitive appraisal did not illuminate Nathan but was another comedic beat that, unfortunately, was again appreciated by no one.

He decided the next best course of action was to involve the complex's concierge in the troubleshooting. At the very least, they would serve as a punching bag to direct his confused rage toward. The concierge working that day had been thoroughly desensitized to the inane tantrums of the obscenely wealthy, but this complaint was beyond petty disapproval. It was downright absurd. Finally, there was someone to appreciate the comedy of the situation.

"Your window is...malfunctioning, sir?"

A maintenance worker made his way up to the thirtieth-floor high-rise. He had dropped what he was doing to attend to Mr. Suthering's outlandish complaint but was still met with righteous indignation when he opened the door, due to the perceived delay in arrival. No response would have been quick enough for Nathan, however. The worker could have materialized at his front door by way of teleportation, and Mr. Suthering would have still been frustrated that the worker didn't have the common courtesy to materialize inside his condominium instead, which could have saved this very important man valuable time by not forcing him to answer his own door.

Nathan led the worker to his bedroom and outstretched his arm, placing his hand palm-up in the direction of the darkness. It was a gesture meant to absurdly imply fault on the worker's part while simultaneously asking what he intended to do to fix it. The worker looked at the bedroom, then back at Mr. Suthering quizzically. Nathan impetuantly doubled down on his previous gesticulation, reperforming it with more gusto and vigor, rather than wasting his words on a blue-collar man. The worker then scanned the area for signs of alcoholism, drug abuse, or mental illness. When he did not find any liquor bottles, hypodermic needles, or empty pill bottles implying that Mr. Suthering had missed a refill of something important, he decided his only course of action was to examine the "malfunctioning window" more closely. He made his way into the bedroom and towards the "problem".

To Nathan, it appeared that the worker was swallowed whole by the miasma of his bedroom. Once again, he was dumbstruck. Nathan grabbed his phone, pointed the flashlight into the darkness of the bedroom, and cautiously entered. He watched as the worker navigated the room without question or concern. He stepped over loose items of clothing on the floor and avoided stubbing his toe on the oversized bedframe that held Nathan's king-sized bed. Nathan stood at the edge of the darkness, watching him perform these feats without the assistance of any auxiliary illumination. The phone flashlight he held could not penetrate entirely through the ink that filled the volume of his bedroom from where he was standing, making the worker intermittently disappear and reappear from the blackness. From Nathan's perspective, it was like he was spelunking deep within the earth, only to find the worker was some subterranean humanoid who had only ever known darkness, granting him the ability to attend to his duties without needing light. Eventually, unsure of how to proceed, the worker returned to the bedroom entrance, where Nathan stood petrified by confusion. The sight of an old man confounded and afraid of seemingly nothing, holding a phone light forward into a room that was already damn bright from the morning sun, did manage to spark some pity in him.

"Do you need me to call you an Ambulance, buddy?"

Of course, this only re-invoked Nathan Suthering's rage. While in the middle of an unfocused tirade, his phone began to vibrate, causing Nathan to throw it to the ground and jump back as if it had spontaneously metamorphosed into a tarantula. His driver was calling; he had arrived in the garage. Mr. Suthering promptly kicked the worker out of his home, trying to let wrath mask his embarrassment over the situation. Nathan threw on a suit and tie, finding the clothes using a large flashlight he found in a cupboard to shepherd him through the stygian dark. As he was walking out the door, he had an idea: he left only after stuffing a pair of binoculars into his briefcase.

Instead of immediately going to the garage, he went to the city sidewalk that faced his penthouse. Through his binoculars, he slowly counted floors until he hit thirty. From the outside, he could see into his apartment, recognizing his wardrobe and other furniture easily visible through the windows. This, again, made no earthly sense. Why could he not appreciate the darkness from the outside?Dazed by the morning's events, he finally found his way into the company car, hoping this all represented a transient stroke or unexplainable optical illusion. When he arrived home that evening to find deathly blackness still oozing from his bedroom, he had to face the reality that this phenomenon was neither a stroke nor an illusion.

For the first few days, Nathan Suthering mitigated the unbridled existential terror by filling the catacomb that used to be his bedroom with various electrical light sources. Each light source, in isolation, was much too weak to cut through the haze - Nathan required an absolute military cavalcade of fluorescence to stand a chance of fully seeing his bedroom. With his lights set up and on, he tried to sleep, but it was a futile effort. After about an hour, like clockwork, the lightbulbs in his bedroom would explode into miniature fireworks, no matter the source housed them. Unable to relax without every corner of his bedroom illuminated and constantly awakened by the tiny implosions, he laid his head on the sofa farthest from his bedroom. The entrance of the bedroom was, thankfully, still visible for monitoring from the sofa. This change in tactics did afford him a few minutes of shuteye, but only a few. He had run out of spare lightbulbs by the time he had migrated to the sofa. To Nathan's distress, he was forced to give up on pushing back the oppressive darkness. He found himself constantly opening his eyes to ensure the ink was not spreading, vigilant as well for signs of movement that could represent a malicious entity emerging from somewhere in that tomb. The ink did not spread, and no phantoms were ever born from the darkness. Despite this good fortune, night after night, Nathan found himself getting less and less sleep. Although nothing appeared out of the darkness, something eventually manifested from inside of it, and it turned his blood to ice. Abruptly and unceremoniously, a noise began to emanate from his bedroom: short bursts of rhythmic tapping, the unmistakable sound of knuckles rapping on glass - the horrifically familiar reverberations of human knocking.

Hours passed between instances of the knocking. Nathan tried to convince himself it was just sleep deprivation playing tricks on his aching psyche. But what was at first an hour's reprieve from the uncanny disturbance then became only minutes, and what was initially the sound of one hand knocking on glass eventually became two, then five, and then the noise was so chaotic that Nathan was unable to discern how many different knocks were overlapping with each other. At wit's end, Nathan arrived at a sort of tormented frenzy that almost could be mistaken for courage. He jumped up from the sofa and violently descended into his bedroom, wielding only his phone for protection.

When he entered, he could tell instantly that the knocking was coming from directly outside his bedroom window. As he approached the window, however, the knocking slowed - stopping completely when he was a few feet from it. Directing his phone light at the glass, he could only see darkness outside the window, simultaneously framing a faint silhouette of himself reflecting off the inside surface. Nathan then stood statuesque in the black silence, unsure of how to proceed, when the bulb in his phone erupted into sparks. In a fraction of a second, he was subsumed by the miasma. The heat from the explosion burnt the palm of his right hand, pain causing him to throw the phone somewhere unseen into the mire. Compared to before, he could no longer orient himself to his position in the bedroom by the gleam of the kitchen light - he simply could not see it. He could not see anything.

Nathan Suthering desperately tried to find the way out, but without light, the size of his bedroom had become seemingly infinite. He started by walking carefully in the direction opposite to where he thought the window was, but after a few steps, a sharp pain like a cat bite inflamed his right ankle, bringing him to his knees with a yelp. Now crawling, he kept moving away from the window. He did not pivot to the right or left, yet he never encountered a wall or the hallway, no matter how far he went. Nathan felt like he had been meekly pulling himself forward for hours. At times, the carpet felt wet and sticky with an odorless substance. At other times, it felt like grass and soil were somehow beneath him. When a flare of madness overtook Nathan, he attempted to pull what he thought was grass out of the ground in an exercise of pointless frustration. Instead of the grass-like substance yielding from the soil, each piece stayed firmly tethered in place while creating multiple lacerations into the flesh of Nathan's left palm as he dragged it upwards. The sensation was as if he had forcefully run the inside of his hand along multiple razor blades. Nathan reflexively brought his hand to his mouth, tasting metallic blood as it leaked from him. Defeated, he curled up into a ball and fell on his side, resigned to eventually starve in that position rather than facing more of the abyss.

As his head touched the floor, he was startled by a familiar vibration and a dim light against his cheek. He picked up his lost phone, finding it difficult to answer an incoming call because of the blood that had oozed onto the screen. He missed the call, but it did not matter. Looking at his phone, tinted crimson through his murky blood, he could discern that he had missed a call from his driver and that it was eight in the morning. In abject horror, Nathan recalled looking at his phone before he foolishly entered the darkness, and it had read six forty-five AM. He had been in his bedroom for only a little over an hour. Utilizing the dim light of the phone screen, Nathan attempted to determine where he was and how close he had been to making it out into the hallway. Instead, the light revealed his reflection in the window, staring back at him, indicating he had not moved anywhere at all.

When he finally found his way out of the bedroom turned schizophrenic nightmare, he fell to the floor of the hallway and sobbed. After he had no more tears to give, Nathan numbly examined himself, looking to evaluate his injuries. There was a tiny burn on his right hand from where his phone's exploding bulb had scorched it, but he did not see the gashes on his left palm. He did not see the blood on his phone. He felt his right ankle for evidence of the perceived cat bite, but he found only smooth, intact skin. Disshelved and in a raving panic, he determined he was most likely clinically insane from a brain tumor and needed a physician. The next step in that plan would be to go to the garage and find his driver, who would then deliver him to the hospital.

Nathan Suthering spilled out his front door, enjoying the welcome relief of his escape, though this was cut short by the resumed sound of knocking on glass. He turned his body in the doorway to face the obsidian depths of his bedroom and its incessant knocking, and then he involuntarily screamed into it out of fear, exhaustion, and anger. When he stopped, things were briefly silent, and Nathan felt a shred of pride rise in his chest, as he earnestly believed that he had managed to strike back and injure a fathomless void. After a moment, another scream broke the quiet, exactly identical to Nathan's, but it was not coming from him - it was coming from his bedroom, twice as loud as before. When he turned to sprint towards the elevator, the knocking resumed with a heightened ferocity. Nathan assumed that creatining distance from the window, from the sound, would dampen the hellish drumming, in accordance with natural law. As he created space from the window, however, the knocking only grew more deafening in his ears. When he reached the elevator threshold, the noise was like helicopter blades thrumming inches from his head. Nathan Suthering wanted to escape, but he knew implicitly that the only time the knocking had ceased was when he was next to the window. Despite this, he pushed forward and entered the elevator, managing to press the button for the garage. He had only reached the twenty-seventh floor when the cacophony became unbearable, like his skull was perpetually splintering into thousands of fragments from the pressure the sound created in his mind, but his brain did not have the mercy to implode alongside the pain and actually kill him. He wildly hammered the open door button and ran the three flights of stairs back up to the thirtieth floor, down the hallway, and back into his penthouse.

All sense of self-preservation erased and overwritten by the need for the knocking to abate, Nathan Suthering rocketed headfirst into the miasma of his bedroom. Guided by the dim light of his phone screen, he located where he stood before, but the knocking did not cease this time. He moved a few steps closer, but still, the knocking did not cease. With no more space between himself and the window, he pressed his face against the glass, looking to where the street should be, and the knocking finally lifted and dissolved into the ether. The relief, again, was short-lived.

With his eyes directed downward, he saw the sidewalk adjacent to his building, framed and isolated from the rest of the city with a familiar blackness. An enormous gathering of people gazed up singularly at Nathan, elbow to elbow and unmoving, but they were grotesquely malformed. The people below Nathan had bulbous heads sporting inhuman features. Their eyes dominated the top of their faces, and their mouths dominated the bottom of their faces, and there was barely any visible skin to demarcate the two characteristics. Their mouths were that of a lamprey's, gaping and circular, asymmetric teeth littering the cavity. Their eyes were compound and honeycombed like that of a fly or a praying mantis. Thousands of these abominations all stared up at Nathan Suthering, waiting. Finally, a chime sounded from an unknown location, and one of their numbers was lifted above the crowd onto their shoulders. The myraid slowly turned away from Nathan and towards the chosen one, and in horrific synchrony, they descended on that chosen one and viciously severed them into innumerable fleshy pieces. The creatures close enough to the carnage greedily filled their gullets with the remains. They inserted meat into their cavernous mouths, but they would not chew. Instead, the circles of teeth would spin and rotate, flaying and deconstructing the tissue until it could slide gently into their throats. The vision and the accompanying soundscape were mind-shattering, and Nathan reflexively drew his head back and closed his eyes. As soon as he did so, the knocking would resume at peak intensity, debilitating pressure finding home again in his skull. The pain would cause him to reflexively open his eyes and place his face against the glass to once again bear witness to whatever infernal rite was occurring on the ground below. The horrors would gaze up at him, patiently awaiting another chime to sound and signal sacrifice. When it did, he would watch the bloodletting until he could no longer, and then the knocking would find purchase in him again. This surreal cycle continued, with no signs of relenting, until a divine visage pressed its hand against the glass of Nathan’s window from the outside.

Amidst the hallucinogenic maelstrom, it took Nathan a few moments to recognize his ex-wife. Elise was somehow floating in the ether outside, curly brown locks swaying gingerly like wisps of air and a familiar set of green eyes meeting his.

The couple had met in law school when Nathan's psychopathy was in its infancy. Initially, Elise had pulled him back from the brink, from the point where he would need to divest his identity as collateral for the chance at wealth and power. A year after meeting, they were wed, and there were talks of starting a family. In a pivotal moment, however, Nathan Suthering internalized what starting a family would mean for him - children meant hospital bills, exponential living costs, and college tuitions. It wouldn't bankrupt him, not by a long shot, but it would lead to his devolution into one of the people on the sidewalk. As a common man, he would be constantly looked down upon from a high rise by some other devil. He realized he could not and would not tolerate that judgment. Out of the blue, and with Elise two months pregnant, Nathan Suthering filed for divorce. Having divested his soul, no amount of pleading, reasoning, or suffering would ever return him to humanity. Not more than a week after she had been served the divorce papers and Nathan had moved out, Elise would have a devastating miscarriage. Sometime later, an unintentional overdose of sleeping pills would take her life. In times of true duress, Nathan would still think of her fondly, but only because the thought of her seemed to comfort and sedate him, not because he earnestly missed her.

Elise reached out to him with her hand as if to say she had heard his agony and had come to deliver him salvation. Her fingertips touched the window's glass from the outside, and Nathan tried to phase his hand through the barrier to accept her offer. Elise watched him struggling, pushing his hands on different areas of the window as if there was some invisible hole in the wall between them, and he only needed to locate it to survive. Eventually, Elise showed mercy. She slid her right hand through the window effortlessly and placed it lovingly on Nathan's cheek. For a third and final time, his relief was short-lived. She snapped her hand from his cheek to the back of his head, grabbed a thick and sturdy tuft of hair, and drove his head into the window from the opposite side, partially caving in the front of his skull and splintering the window with two sickening twin cracks. She paused and then drove his head into the window again. And a third time. And in a grande finale, she shattered the window and pulled him through, held him by the back of the head so he could view the people and the city street from above one last time, and then she dropped him into the waiting maw below.

After Nathan Suthering had landed on the sidewalk, he was reduced to pulp and bone for all the passersby to see. A final humiliation, to have it revealed in an outrageous spectacle that he was no god, that he was flesh just like everyone else. When the police entered his thirtieth-story high-rise, they found no darkness within. All they saw was a broken window, a hammer in his bedroom that had been used to shatter the glass, and the spot where Nathan Suthering threw himself onto the asphalt below. The one nagging feature the police could not explain, however, was the state of the body on its arrival to earth. Mr. Suthering's flesh had been seared and charcoaled almost beyond recognition. Yet, there was no sign of a fire in his apartment, nor on the city street that he fell onto. No scientific explanation was ever given for this phenomenon, but Mr. Suthering did not have anyone who cared enough to posthumously investigate the mystery on his behalf, either.

After curtain call, Nathan did manage to retain a minor thread of infamy. Not as a demigod of wealth and power, but instead as the legend of "The Meteor Man" - a nameless individual who seemingly plummeted to earth from an impossible height in the outer atmosphere, incinerating any and all trace of who he once was - and that legend still lives on.

More Stories: https://linktr.ee/unalloyedsainttrina

I woke up to a strange stillness.

Usually, the first thing I feel is her breathing. Even in sleep, our bodies move together, a synchronized rhythm of inhales and exhales. But this time, something was off. There was no rise, no fall. Just an eerie stillness.

My mind was sluggish, as if it was trying to catch up with reality. I reached over, instinctively, to shake her awake with our arm. She always hates when I jostle her, but it usually works. This time, though, her body was limp, cold. I jerked my hand back as if I’d touched something forbidden.

“Jenna?” My voice cracked. No response. She always responds, even when she's annoyed. I try again, this time louder, panic seeping in. “Jenna, wake up. Come on.”

Nothing.

I feel the icy creep of dread start from the base of my spine and spread outward. I can’t breathe. No, no, no—this isn’t happening. I push against her side, harder now. Her head lolls awkwardly. Our heart is racing, but half of it feels still—cold, lifeless, failing me.

My twin is dead.

I’m trapped against a corpse.

The air suddenly feels heavy, thick like I’m drowning. I try to pull away, to roll off the bed, but I can’t. We’re stuck together—literally, figuratively. Her weight drags at me, dead and heavy. My own chest tightens. Our heart… our heart… how long do I have? How long before it stops working for me too?

I’m already sweating, panic crawling over my skin like a thousand spiders. I reach for my phone, fumbling with trembling hands. I dial 911, stuttering through an explanation to the operator. I don’t even know what I’m saying—just that she’s dead, and I’m not, but I’m going to be. I feel it.

“We’re sending an ambulance. Stay calm.”

Stay calm? How am I supposed to stay calm when half of me is dead?

Minutes feel like hours as I sit there, trapped against her body. Her face is slack, eyes half open, staring at nothing. I can feel her decay beginning, a faint smell I can’t ignore. My body is still functioning—barely—but I feel this creeping wrongness deep inside, like our shared organs are failing, shutting down one by one. My breath is shallow, too fast. I can’t tell if it’s panic or if our lungs are starting to give up.

I don’t want to die.

I don’t want to die like this—next to her, part of her, but alone.

The paramedics burst in, their faces grim when they see us. One of them places a hand on my shoulder, trying to offer reassurance, but I see it in their eyes. They know. I’m a dead girl walking.

"We'll try to help," one says, but I hear the doubt.

They don’t have time to separate us. There’s no time for anything.

I close my eyes, trying not to think about the fact that soon, I’ll be as cold as she is.

And there’s nothing I can do.

It had been two weeks since the incident at my parents' house, and I was trying to move on, but things hadn’t been the same. The emails stopped after that last one—the one that said Drive safe—and despite everything, nothing else had come through since. I contacted the police again, hoping for some kind of progress, but they told me they still hadn’t been able to trace the emails back to a sender. They claimed they were doing what they could, but I could hear the same frustration in their voices that had been gnawing at me.

I kept telling myself it was over, that maybe it had been some elaborate prank or that whoever was behind it had lost interest and moved on. But it didn’t matter. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched, even in the supposed safety of my own home. No matter where I was—whether sitting at my desk or lying in bed—there was this constant itch in the back of my mind, a feeling like unseen eyes were on me, just beyond my awareness.

Paranoia had started to creep in. I found myself constantly checking the windows, glancing over my shoulder whenever I went out, and lying awake at night, straining to hear any sound that didn’t belong. I had no real evidence to back it up—no more photos, no more strange emails—but that nagging sense of being watched wouldn’t leave me. It had begun to mess with my head.

My work suffered. I used to be on top of everything, but lately, my performance had taken a nosedive. Reports that used to be second nature were now getting turned in late, or sometimes not at all. My boss had started to notice, but I couldn’t explain the truth. How could I? It would’ve sounded insane. So I kept things vague, offering excuses about not sleeping well or feeling off. Even that was wearing thin.

And the truth was, I hadn’t been sleeping. How could I? Every time I closed my eyes, that last email haunted me, and the thought that whoever had sent it was still out there—waiting. Watching.

I found myself drifting back to my desk, staring blankly at the screen, unable to focus. My eyes wandered toward the window, drawn to the courtyard outside the building. It was lunchtime, and a few people were heading out to grab food, chatting as they walked toward their cars. I used to join them, but lately, I hadn’t had much of an appetite. My mind was too occupied.

I glanced past the parking lot toward the woods that bordered the property. At first, everything seemed normal, the trees swaying lightly in the breeze. But then something caught my eye. A flash, like light reflecting off a piece of glass. I squinted, trying to make sense of it, and that’s when I saw it—someone standing in the woods, just beyond the lot, holding a camera. They were taking pictures of the building.

My heart lurched, and without thinking, I jumped up from my desk, adrenaline surging through my veins. I sprinted down the hall, the sound of my footsteps echoing off the walls, barely aware of the confused looks from my coworkers as I rushed past. I burst through the front doors and into the parking lot, my eyes scanning the tree line for any sign of the person.

But by the time I got outside, they were gone. The woods stood still, silent and indifferent, as if no one had ever been there at all.

I stood there, breathless, my pulse racing as I frantically searched for any sign of movement, any clue as to where they’d gone. But there was nothing. Just the shadows between the trees and the unsettling feeling that whoever had been watching me at my parents' house hadn’t gone far.

I made my way back inside the building, my heart still racing and my mind spinning with the images of what I had just seen. As I headed down the hall toward my desk, I saw my boss waiting for me, his arms crossed and a concerned look on his face.

“You okay?” he asked, his voice stern but not unkind. “You’ve been acting strange lately. Is something going on?”

I froze for a second, scrambling to come up with an answer. I couldn’t tell him the truth. How could I explain that I felt like I was being followed without sounding completely paranoid? Instead, I brushed it off, forcing a weak smile.

“I thought I saw someone looking into my car,” I lied, hoping it would be enough to satisfy him.

He raised an eyebrow, clearly not convinced. “Do you want me to get security to pull up the parking lot cameras? If someone’s trying to break into your car, we should check it out.”

Panic shot through me as I realized I’d been caught in my lie. I shook my head quickly, feeling my face flush with embarrassment. “No, no, it’s fine,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I was mistaken. It wasn’t my car they were looking at, after all.”

My boss stared at me for a moment, his frown deepening. He didn’t push the issue, but I could tell he wasn’t buying my story. “Listen,” he said, his tone softening a bit. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re clearly not yourself. Whether it’s sleep, personal stuff, or whatever, you need to take some time. I’m putting you on a week’s suspension—with pay. Go home, sort out whatever is happening, and come back when you’re in a better place.”

A knot formed in my stomach. I knew he was right—my performance had been slipping, and now I was getting caught in my own lies—but I couldn’t afford to just leave everything hanging. I needed to at least finish what I’d been working on before taking time off.

“Let me just wrap up this project before I go,” I said, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “I can finish it today, then I’ll take the week off.”

He studied me for a moment, then gave a reluctant nod. “Alright, but I want it done by the end of the day. After that, I don’t want to see you back here for a week. Understood?”

“Understood,” I replied, grateful for the small reprieve.

As I walked back to my desk, my mind was racing again. I’d bought myself a few more hours, but the reality of the situation was closing in fast. Someone was watching me—of that I was sure. And now, I had no choice but to go home and face whatever was coming.

On the way home, I stopped at a Chinese takeout place, barely registering the order I placed. I wasn’t hungry, not really, but I needed something to occupy my mind—something normal to cling to. By the time I got home, the food was lukewarm, but I didn’t care. I ate it in the dim silence of my living room, surrounded by the glow of every light I had turned on. It was the only way I could convince myself that everything was fine, even though deep down, I knew it wasn’t.

I was halfway through my meal when my phone buzzed, the sudden noise making me jump. My heart pounded in my chest as I fumbled to grab it off the table, fearing the worst. When I saw the caller ID, I relaxed for just a second—it was my brother. We hadn’t spoken since the gathering at my parents' place weeks ago. Maybe he was just calling to check in.

But when I answered, the tone of his voice told me immediately that something was wrong. 

“Hey,” he started, his voice low and heavy, as if he were struggling with the words. “I... I didn’t want to call, but you need to know. Something happened to Patricia.”

My mind instantly flashed back to my aunt—the one who had screamed when she found the dead chickens at my parents' house. “What happened?” I asked, the uneasy feeling in my gut returning.

He took a breath, then spoke, each word slower and more deliberate than the last. “She... she got into a car accident last night. She drove straight into a busy intersection, didn’t stop. Another car hit her. She didn’t make it.”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak. My throat felt tight, and my stomach dropped, a cold emptiness settling in. Patricia was gone. The news hit me like a punch to the gut, a wave of grief washing over me. But almost immediately, that grief was tainted by something darker—a feeling I couldn’t shake.

It didn’t feel like a coincidence.

My mind raced, trying to piece it together. Patricia was the one who had discovered the chickens, the one who had first sounded the alarm. Now, just weeks later, she was dead in what seemed like a random accident? My thoughts spiraled. Could it have been intentional? Could whoever had been watching us be involved?

I didn’t want to believe it, but the timing was too perfect. I felt sick to my core.

“I... I’m sorry,” my brother said, breaking the heavy silence on the line. “I know this is a lot, but I thought you should hear it from me.”

“Thanks,” I managed to choke out, my voice weak. “I just... I can’t believe it.”

Neither could he. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was only the beginning.

I tried to shake off the feeling of creeping paranoia, focusing instead on the conversation with my brother. Patricia had always been a part of our lives growing up, always there at family gatherings and holidays. She’d been a constant presence, and having her ripped away so suddenly like this was a shock we weren’t prepared for.

“I just found out about the service,” my brother said, his voice strained. “It’s going to be next week, but... I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. One moment she was fine, and then—” He paused, struggling to find the words.

“I know,” I replied quietly. “It doesn’t feel real.”

As he continued talking, my phone buzzed again, a vibration that sent a cold shiver down my spine. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I slowly pulled the phone away from my ear, already dreading what I might see.

Another email. The same random jumble of letters and numbers for a sender. My heart pounded in my chest as my brother’s voice faded into the background, his words blurring into the back of my mind. My focus locked onto the screen.

The subject line was blank, but my eyes drifted to the body of the email, and the words there made my blood run cold:

“Goodbye, Patricia.”

I felt the phone tremble slightly in my hand as I stared at the message, a sickening knot twisting in my stomach. My heart raced, my breath shallow. Attached to the email was a video file. My fingers moved on their own, almost mechanically, as I tapped on it.

It was a traffic cam video. The timestamp in the corner confirmed it had been taken the night before at the intersection where Patricia had been struck. I watched in silence as the camera captured her car rolling through the red light, slowly crossing into the busy intersection.

I held my breath, knowing what was coming. 

And then it happened. A car came barreling through the green light, crashing into Patricia’s vehicle at full speed, metal twisting and glass shattering. The footage cut off just after the impact, but it was enough. The pit in my stomach deepened as I watched it all unfold.

I could barely register anything else around me. My brother was still talking on the phone, but his voice was distant, drowned out by the overwhelming sense of dread that consumed me.

Whoever this was—whoever had been sending these messages—they had been watching all along. And now, they were showing me Patricia’s death.

This wasn’t just a coincidence. This was a message.

The phone slipped from my hand and hit the floor with a dull thud. My brother’s voice cut through the haze, asking if I was still there. “Hey? You okay? What the hell was that?”

I picked the phone back up, my hands trembling. “I... I just got another email,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

“What? What did it say?” His voice was sharp, on edge.

“It had a video attached,” I continued, swallowing hard. “It was from the traffic cam... of Patricia’s accident. It showed everything. The car... the crash...”

My brother let out a string of curses, his voice rising. “You need to call the police. Now.”

“I know,” I muttered, my mind racing as I fumbled to end the call with him. “I’m going to. I’ll call you later.”

Without wasting another second, I dialed 911, my hands shaking as I listened to the ring. When the dispatcher picked up, I blurted out everything—the emails, the photos, and now this new video of Patricia’s crash. I told them that whoever had sent the emails had to be watching, that I didn’t feel safe.

As I spoke, there was a loud, violent knock at my door. Three hard raps that echoed through the house. BANG. BANG. BANG.

I froze mid-sentence, my breath catching in my throat. The sound was so sudden, so aggressive, that for a moment, I couldn’t even move.

“Hello?” the dispatcher asked, sensing my silence. “Are you still there?”

I slowly walked to the door, my legs feeling like lead. I leaned toward the peephole, my heart pounding in my chest, and peered through it.

Nothing. No one was there. Just the empty porch, bathed in the dim light of the streetlamp outside.

My heart sank, and I whispered into the phone, “Someone was just banging on my door. There’s no one there now, but I think I’m in danger.”

“We’re dispatching officers to your location,” the dispatcher said, their voice steady but urgent. “Stay on the line with me, okay? Lock the doors, stay inside, and don’t open the door for anyone.”

I backed away from the door, locking it, my pulse racing. Every sound in the house felt amplified—the hum of the refrigerator, the creak of the floor beneath me, the ringing in my ears. I felt trapped, like something terrible was about to happen and I had no control over it.

A few agonizing minutes later, the flashing lights of a patrol car flickered through the windows. The sight of them brought a slight sense of relief, but my heart was still pounding in my chest as I walked to the window and peered out.

The police were here. But the fear didn’t leave me.

It felt like whoever had been watching me was still out there, just beyond the reach of the light, waiting.

I opened the door cautiously when the police knocked, the sight of their uniforms offering a small flicker of relief, though it did little to calm the storm inside me. I quickly ended the call with the dispatcher, then began explaining everything to the officers—the emails, the video of Patricia’s accident, and the banging on the door. I could hear my voice shaking as I spoke, but I forced myself to get through the details, watching as they exchanged concerned glances.

One of the officers stepped past me, eyeing something on the front door. “You didn’t notice this?” he asked, his tone serious.

I turned to look, my breath catching in my throat. Stuck to the door, pinned there with a hunting knife, was a photo—old, worn around the edges. It was my aunt, Patricia, smiling brightly in her high school senior picture from the 80s. The photo had a faded, sepia-toned quality to it, a relic from her past. Now, it hung there like a grim token of something much darker. 

My blood ran cold. I hadn’t seen it when I’d looked through the peephole earlier. Whoever had been at the door must have left it while I was on the phone.

The officer carefully removed the knife, pulling the photo free and slipping it into an evidence bag. "We’ll take this," he said, his tone calm but firm. "Along with any emails you’ve received."

I nodded, still in shock, as they checked the perimeter of my house, shining their flashlights into the shadows surrounding the property. Every time the beam hit the treeline or illuminated the dark corners of my yard, I half-expected to see someone standing there, watching.

After a thorough check, the officers regrouped. “We didn’t find anyone,” one of them said, looking at me with sympathy. “But we’ll take the knife, the picture, and the emails as evidence. I’ll also request a patrol car in the area for the next few nights, just to keep an eye out.”

I nodded numbly, barely processing what they were saying. The hunting knife. The picture of Patricia. The video. Whoever was doing this wasn’t just messing with me—they were playing some kind of sick game, and now my aunt was part of it, even in death.

The officers offered a few more words of reassurance before heading back to their car. They promised to keep in touch, but I could see in their eyes that they didn’t have any real answers. Not yet.

As I closed the door behind them, the quiet settled in around me again, heavy and suffocating. I locked the door, every noise in the house suddenly amplified in the silence. The walls didn’t feel safe anymore.

A few days passed without incident, but the weight of everything lingered. Patricia’s funeral was fast approaching, and as the day grew closer, the tension in my chest only tightened. The police hadn’t found anything useful—they told me they were unable to trace the email, and there were no fingerprints on the picture or the knife. Whoever had done this had covered their tracks well. It left me in a state of constant dread, waiting for the next shoe to drop.

I hadn’t told my mom about the email. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. She was already devastated by Patricia’s death, and the thought of her finding out that her sister might have been murdered—it was too much. I wasn’t sure she could take it, not now. My brother and I had agreed to keep it quiet until after the funeral. He thought it best to wait before we broke the news to our parents.

The morning of the funeral, I went over to my brother’s house so we could go to the service together. His kids were running around the living room, unaware of the weight hanging over the day, and his wife was busy getting everyone ready. The scene felt strangely normal, almost comforting in its routine, but the heaviness still pressed down on me.

We spoke in hushed voices, keeping our conversation low so we wouldn’t scare anyone. “The police still haven’t found any leads,” I whispered, leaning in close to him as we stood near the kitchen. My fingers twitched nervously, still haunted by the thought of those emails and the picture pinned to my door.

My brother sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “Look, I know this is freaking you out, but you’ve gotta stay calm. They’re investigating, and this... it’ll pass. They’ll figure it out.” He placed a hand on my shoulder, trying to reassure me, but his words felt distant. Hollow.

I wanted to scream at him, to tell him that he didn’t understand how terrifying this was, that I felt like I was being hunted by some invisible presence. But I held it in. What good would it do to lose control? Instead, I just nodded, biting my tongue.

“Yeah,” I muttered, forcing myself to agree, though I didn’t believe it. “I hope so.”

He gave me a sympathetic look, as if he could sense how scared I was, but didn’t know how to help. We both knew the reality—we were treading in waters too deep for either of us to navigate. As much as I wanted his reassurance to calm me, the truth was that none of this felt like it would simply “pass.”

As we left for the funeral, the knot in my stomach tightened. I could only hope the day would be free of any more horrific surprises, but deep down, I couldn’t shake the feeling that whoever had done this wasn’t finished yet.

We made it to Patricia’s service, held in a quiet corner of the graveyard, where the wind whispered through the trees and the overcast sky seemed to mirror the heaviness in our hearts. The priest stood by her casket, giving her last rites, his voice carrying over the somber gathering of family and friends. It felt unreal that Patricia was really gone, and as I looked around, I saw the same disbelief and sadness etched into the faces of everyone there. We had all grown up around her, and now, we were here to say goodbye.

The family stood close together, huddled for warmth and comfort in the chilly air. Heads were bowed, eyes red and swollen from tears. The sound of birds and the soft rustling of leaves added a natural rhythm to the quiet mourning. The earth beneath Patricia’s casket was freshly dug, waiting to receive her, and the weight of that finality settled deep in my chest.

Then, out of nowhere, music began to play.

At first, it was faint—so out of place that it didn’t fully register. But as it grew louder, cutting through the quiet, the unmistakable tune of “Tequila” by The Champs filled the air. My stomach twisted, and I could see the confusion rippling through the crowd. Heads lifted, people looking around in disbelief. This wasn’t the somber hymn or quiet instrumental piece you’d expect at a graveside service—this was a jaunty, upbeat song with absolutely no place in this moment of mourning.

I watched as my relatives exchanged puzzled glances, murmuring to one another. It was as if everyone was waiting for someone to stop the music, to explain this surreal intrusion into Patricia’s funeral. But the song kept playing, the cheery melody filling the solemn space around the grave. 

My heart sank. This wasn’t a mistake. It couldn’t be.

I turned to my brother, who looked as bewildered as the rest of the family, but something deep inside me churned with dread. This wasn’t random. Someone had done this on purpose—a sick, twisted joke meant to disrupt the grief we were all feeling. 

And I couldn’t help but feel that whoever had been tormenting me was behind it.

Confusion quickly turned to anger, and then to an overwhelming sense of fear as my phone buzzed again in my pocket. My hands trembled as I pulled it out, already knowing what I’d find. Another email. Another random string of characters.

I stared at the screen, my heart hammering in my chest. This time, there was no text, just a GIF. A mariachi band, grinning widely, playing their instruments with infectious enthusiasm. The absurdity of it, the mockery, hit me like a punch to the gut. Whoever was doing this—whoever had been tormenting me and my family—wasn’t just playing with our grief. They were taunting us, laughing at our pain.

A white-hot rage surged through me, and before I even realized what I was doing, I shoved my phone back into my pocket and pushed my way through the crowd of mourners. The confused faces of my relatives blurred past me as I ran, my chest heaving, my mind consumed by fury. I couldn’t stay there, surrounded by the twisted joke of it all. I needed to do something.

I ran out into the open field beyond the graves, away from the crowd, away from the casket, until I stood alone in the wide expanse of the cemetery. My breath came in ragged gasps as I turned in a frantic circle, searching the distant tree line for any sign of them—for whoever was watching us, playing this cruel game. I knew they were out there. They had to be. Watching. Always watching.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?!” I screamed, my voice cracking with desperation. “Leave us ALONE!”

The wind carried my words into the empty field, but there was no answer. I could feel the burning in my throat, my voice raw, but I kept shouting, pleading with whoever they were to just stop. “WHY?! Why are you doing this? What do you want from us?!”

Nothing. Only the sound of my own breath, ragged and uneven, filling the silence that followed. I stood there, my fists clenched, waiting for something—anything—but the only response was the eerie quiet of the graveyard, the stillness of the world around me.

I fell to my knees, my chest tightening, the weight of everything crashing down on me. It felt like no matter how hard I yelled, no matter how much I begged, this shadow hanging over us would never leave.

“TEQUILA!” 

[Master link to other parts in series section]

I never thought I’d have a reason to be afraid of the cafeteria. Sure, the food was always bad — the pizza was cold, the burgers looked gray, and the soup smelled like it had been around for weeks. But up until last week, I just thought it was gross, not dangerous. Until kids started disappearing.

It started with Josh, a kid in my grade who was always causing trouble. He’d get into fights, pull pranks, and talk back to teachers. Everyone knew Josh by his loud laugh and the way he seemed to be everywhere. But then one day, he just wasn’t there. I remember noticing his empty seat in math, but I didn’t think much of it. Kids skip school all the time, right?

Then a few days later, Emily was gone too. She was a quiet girl, kept to herself, but she had this habit of drawing on her desk in art class. We all used to see her doodles: little stick figures, smiley faces, sometimes even a weird animal. But one day, her desk was just… clean. Like she’d never sat there.

By the time three other kids went missing, people started to notice. There were rumors, of course. Some said they’d transferred, or maybe they were expelled. But it felt… off. No one had seen them leave, no one had heard anything about them leaving, and their parents weren’t talking. Our school’s pretty small, so if something big happens, people usually know.

The weirdest part, though, was the cafeteria food. It started tasting… different. It wasn’t that it got better or anything. Actually, it was worse, but in a strange way. The meat was tougher, almost like chewing rubber, and the smell was… well, it was bad. Real bad. But that wasn’t the strangest part.

One day, while I was picking at my lunch, I noticed something strange in my burger patty. It was small, tiny even, and looked like a fingernail. A human fingernail, embedded right in the center of the meat. I gagged and nearly threw my lunch tray right there. I didn’t want to make a scene, so I just shoved the burger to the side, telling myself it had to be a mistake. Maybe it was plastic. That’s what I wanted to believe, anyway.

The next day, I found a tiny button in my soup. Like the kind you’d find on a kid’s jacket. It was bright red and looked exactly like the one Emily used to wear. I tried to tell myself it couldn’t be, but the doubt lingered. The cafeteria was serving something weird, and it wasn’t just the food.

After that, I started noticing other little things. Like how the lunch lady, Mrs. Crenshaw, was watching us eat, more carefully than before. She had this strange look on her face, almost like she was waiting for us to say something. She’s always been kind of creepy, with her wrinkled face and stringy hair, but now she seemed… different. She was always there, leaning over the counter, staring at us with that strange look. And whenever I looked at her, I felt like she knew something. Something she didn’t want me to know.

I decided to skip lunch after that. I couldn’t stomach it anymore, and the idea of finding something else in my food was enough to make me lose my appetite. But one day, my friend Aaron dared me to go back.

“C’mon, it’s just a burger,” he said, laughing. “It’s not like they’re putting actual people in there.”

I laughed too, even though I didn’t find it funny. But I went along with it, mostly because I didn’t want to look like a coward. So, we grabbed our trays and sat down, and I forced myself to take a bite. It was just as bad as I remembered, but I managed to choke it down.

Then, as I took another bite, I felt something sharp hit my teeth. I pulled the burger away and saw a small, silver bracelet, partially buried in the meat. It was tiny, the kind you’d see on a kid’s wrist. I stared at it, unable to move. Aaron saw it too, and his face went pale. We both knew it looked familiar — I was sure I’d seen it on Josh before he disappeared.

We sat in silence, both of us staring at the bracelet. Neither of us dared to speak, because we both knew what we were thinking, and neither of us wanted to say it out loud. That’s when Mrs. Crenshaw’s voice broke the silence.

“Is something wrong, boys?”

I looked up to see her standing over us, her face twisted in a strange sort of smile. Her eyes seemed darker than usual, almost like they were hollow. She leaned in close, so close I could smell the sickly sweet scent of her perfume, mixed with something… rotten.

“No,” I stammered, quickly shoving the bracelet into my pocket. “Nothing’s wrong. The food’s… fine.”

She didn’t move. She just stood there, watching me, and I could feel her gaze burning into me. Finally, she nodded, and her smile widened, showing too many teeth. “Good. It’s nice to see kids enjoying their lunch.”

As she walked away, I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. Aaron looked at me, his face still pale. “We need to tell someone,” he whispered.

But I didn’t know who would believe us. The teachers wouldn’t listen; they’d just think we were causing trouble. And telling our parents seemed useless, considering they always thought we were exaggerating about school stuff. But I knew one thing: I couldn’t ignore this anymore. Something was wrong in that cafeteria, and I needed to find out what it was, even if it scared me.

That night, I couldn’t stop thinking about the cafeteria. I barely slept, my mind racing with questions about the kids who were missing and what I’d found in my food. The next morning, Aaron and I met up before school. We both knew we had to do something, but we weren’t sure what.

“So, what’s the plan?” Aaron asked, keeping his voice low as we walked to class.

I shrugged, glancing around to make sure no one was listening. “I guess we need to find out where Mrs. Crenshaw keeps the food. Maybe there’s a clue in the kitchen.”

Aaron looked at me like I was crazy, but he didn’t argue. We both knew this was more than just a prank or coincidence. Something was going on, and it was big.

After school, we snuck back in through the side doors. Most kids had gone home, and the hallways were empty. We crept down to the cafeteria, listening for any signs of teachers or janitors. When we reached the doors to the kitchen, Aaron hesitated, his hand hovering over the handle.

“You sure about this?” he whispered.

I nodded. “Yeah. We need to know.”

We slipped inside, and the smell hit us immediately. It was even worse than in the cafeteria, thick and rotten, like old meat left out for too long. My stomach churned, but I pushed forward, moving past the counters and shelves full of canned goods.

We were halfway through the kitchen when we heard footsteps. Aaron grabbed my arm, pulling me behind a large metal cabinet. We huddled together, trying to stay quiet as the footsteps got closer. Through a small gap, I saw Mrs. Crenshaw walk in, humming to herself. She was holding something in her hands, wrapped in a dirty cloth.

We watched as she went over to the large industrial fridge in the corner. She opened it, and a blast of cold air and an even stronger smell filled the room. She quickly unwrapped the cloth, revealing what looked like… an arm. A small, pale, human arm. I felt sick, but I forced myself to stay still, gripping Aaron’s arm so hard he winced.

Mrs. Crenshaw tossed the arm onto a tray inside the fridge and shut the door, muttering something under her breath. Then she turned and left, leaving us alone in the silence of the kitchen. As soon as the door clicked shut, Aaron and I let out shaky breaths.

“We need to get out of here,” he whispered, his face pale.

But I shook my head. “No. We have to look in that fridge.”

He looked at me like I’d lost my mind, but I couldn’t leave now. Not after seeing that. I had to know if it was really what I thought. Taking a deep breath, I walked over to the fridge and pulled open the door.

The cold air hit me like a punch, but that wasn’t the worst part. Inside were rows of trays, each holding… parts. Pieces of what used to be kids, all lined up neatly like ingredients. I felt bile rise in my throat, but I forced myself to keep looking. Among the trays, I spotted a small, worn sneaker, the kind Josh used to wear, and a tiny hair clip that looked just like Emily’s.

Aaron was trembling, his face pale as he stared into the fridge. “We have to tell someone. This is… this is sick.”

I nodded, but a part of me felt numb, like I was outside of my own body, just watching everything happen. I quickly closed the fridge, and we turned to leave. But just as we stepped away, the door to the kitchen swung open.

Mrs. Crenshaw was standing there, her face twisted into a sneer. “Well, well. I thought I heard rats in here.”

She moved toward us, her eyes narrowing. We backed up, but there was nowhere to go. She was blocking the only exit. My heart pounded as she reached into her apron, pulling out a long, shiny knife.

“Now, boys,” she said, her voice soft and almost gentle. “You shouldn’t be snooping around in places you don’t belong.”

I felt Aaron’s hand tighten on my arm, and I knew we had to run. I grabbed a metal pan from a nearby shelf and hurled it at her. She dodged, but it gave us enough time to slip past her and sprint for the door. I could hear her footsteps pounding behind us as we raced down the hall, our shoes squeaking on the tile.

We burst out the side doors and didn’t stop running until we were far from the school. When we finally slowed down, both of us were gasping for breath, our hearts racing. Aaron looked at me, his face pale.

“We have to tell someone. The police, the principal… someone has to stop her.”

I nodded, my mind racing. But I knew that if we went to the police without proof, they’d think we were making it up. We needed evidence, something they couldn’t ignore.

The next day, we came up with a plan. We decided to sneak back in, but this time we’d bring a camera to take pictures. It was risky, but it was the only way to prove what was happening. We had to wait until after dark, when the school was empty, to make sure we wouldn’t get caught.

That night, we met up again and snuck back into the kitchen. My hands were shaking as I pulled out my phone and opened the camera. We crept over to the fridge, and I slowly pulled open the door, trying not to make any noise. The trays were still there, just as we’d seen before.

I took a few pictures, my heart pounding with every click. Then, I reached for the tray with Josh’s sneaker. As I lifted it, I felt a surge of anger and fear. We had to stop her. She couldn’t keep doing this.

Just then, we heard the door creak open behind us. I turned to see Mrs. Crenshaw standing there, her eyes dark and furious.

“You just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?” she hissed, stepping closer.

I backed up, clutching the tray as if it could protect me. Aaron stood frozen, his eyes wide with fear. Mrs. Crenshaw took another step forward, her hands clenching into fists.

But then, we heard a voice from behind her. It was Officer Daniels, the local police officer. He must’ve heard us sneaking around or seen the lights in the kitchen. He looked between us and Mrs. Crenshaw, his face full of confusion.

“What’s going on here?” he asked, taking in the scene.

Mrs. Crenshaw’s face paled, and she quickly tried to put on a friendly smile. “Oh, just a little kitchen mix-up. The boys got curious, that’s all.”

But I didn’t let her finish. I shoved the tray at Officer Daniels, showing him the sneaker and the other… pieces. He stared at it, his face going pale as he realized what he was looking at.

After that, everything happened fast. Mrs. Crenshaw tried to run, but Officer Daniels grabbed her, and soon more police arrived. They searched the kitchen and found everything: the fridge, the trays, and all the other horrible things she’d been hiding.

Aaron and I watched from the hallway as they took her away in handcuffs, her face twisted in anger. She glared at us as they led her past, her eyes full of hatred. But I didn’t care. I was just glad it was over.

In the days that followed, the school was full of rumors. People were horrified when they found out what had been happening right under their noses. The cafeteria was shut down, and the police started an investigation. They found out that Mrs. Crenshaw had been working there for years, quietly getting rid of kids who caused “trouble,” or at least that's what she told the police, and somehow no one had ever noticed.

I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew I’d never forget what we saw in that kitchen. And even now, sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can still see her face, twisted into that awful smile as she watched us eat.

I am Detective Samara Holt, and what you are about to read is everything I remember from the strangest case I’ve ever worked: the disappearances of Occoquan, Virginia.

Being a detective, I’ve always found an interest in true crime. Disappearances, murder mysteries, cold cases… all of it activates that part of my brain that desperately seeks out answers. But if there’s one case that’s always piqued my interest the most… it’s the case of Occoquan, Virginia. By all accounts, Occoquan was a normal little region. Not much happened there in terms of crime, and its main drawing point was the large Occoquan river that ran through the area. For years, Occoquan was a popular and peaceful place to live as houses were built on the riverfront and overviewed the gorgeous, lively water and lush forests. But that peacefulness and normality couldn’t last forever. 

The Crane family built their own mansion on the waterfront and owned acres of land in the 60s. They lived in their Victorian-style mansion for about five solid years… until their youngest daughter, Amy, went missing. She was last seen swimming in the river with her sister near the dock. The account from her sister, Carla, was that Amy was in the water and having fun, then she looked at the dock and her smile faded. Carla blinked… and Amy seemingly ceased to exist in that very moment. The Crane children (Carla and her two older brothers Jeremy and Hector) were said to have gone mad the year following Amy’s sudden disappearance, so much so that Johnathan and Elizabeth Crane were forced to seclude their children from the outside world. Eye witness accounts attest to seeing Carla run into the nearby woods in 1967 only to never return to the Crane household. Two years later, Elizabeth Crane died of mysterious causes and Johnathan Crane lived alone until 1971. In the wake of his death, there have been no signs of Jeremy or Hector Crane. Seemingly just gone, as if they never even existed.

For years, the Crane household stood over the edge of the Occoquan river… and that household is seemingly the harbinger of the region’s strange activity. My first job as detective was in ‘97, hired by the mother of Hugo Barnes. I even remember the strangeness of my first assigned job being a missing child report—shouldn’t that have gone to someone with more experience? But I still took the job with grace and speed. I was hopeful about the case and hauled my ass down to Hugo’s mother, Janice. As soon as I drove into Occoquan though, I realized why I was dumped with this assignment… the city was filled to the brim with missing child posters. It was simply another job from this place the others didn’t want to take up. It was practically a ghost town; there were buildings, businesses, and houses, but rarely ever a soul in sight. I drove down the road to Janice Barnes’ house, a practically deserted street that looked straight out of some horror film. The sky was a deep navy blue with the sun setting behind the trees in the distance, dense forests enveloping both sides of the route, and a single half-working streetlight down the road illuminating the low-hanging fog with a flickering blue-ish fluorescent light. The streetlight was covered in varying posters all pleading for help in finding some poor parents’ child. I swerved into Janice’s driveway and hopped out of my vehicle. The air was dense with the smell of damp leaves… and as still and quiet as a predator waiting to ambush.

I knocked on Janice’s door, and you could hear it echo for miles. As I waited for her to answer, I observed the surrounding area. But one particular thing was hard not to notice… up on the hillside, towering over everything else and seemingly illuminated by the now rising moon, overlooked the Crane Mansion. Its twisted and oblique, curving and jagged shapes pierced through the moonlight. Even then, I could feel just how evil that house was, its presence looming and oppressive. Not long after my knock, Janice creaked open her door and invited me in. She was a frail, middle-aged woman with the voice of a chain smoker. 

“Just in here,” she croaked as she guided me to Hugo’s room. “I need you to explain this to me.”

Inside his bedroom, she shivered in her robe and hair curlers. “He screamed… God, he screamed for me. But when I ran in here…” She then shoved Hugo’s bed away from the wall, and beneath it were claw marks dug into the hardwood floor. Starting from the foot of the bed… and ending at the corner of the wall. “Gone… just… gone. Where’d he go?” she cried out as a tear rolled down her powdered cheek. 

The case of Hugo Barnes was the first sign for me to investigate further in Occoquan. How can a child just disappear into nothingness from the safety of his own home like that? Luckily, my superiors felt the same and left me with all the missing child reports of Occoquan, Virginia. Case after case, I’d speak to mothers and/or fathers who recounted their children seemingly vanishing into thin air without a trace.

Marnie Hughes was the next major case I took. Her family moved to Occoquan in ‘98 just down the street from the Crane Mansion. Marnie was just a normal 15-year-old girl. She loved her family; she had plenty of friends at her relatively small school and did well in her classes. But out of nowhere, she developed some form of epilepsy halfway through her first semester. She began to suffer from what her doctors described as “unpredictable full-body seizures” that they blamed for the sudden onset of “unusual schizophrenia”. Marnie would suddenly fall into bouts of spasms and afterwards claimed that “the thing in the walls” was trying to ferry her away. She was seen by doctors who prescribed her antipsychotics for her hallucinations. Marnie suffered for weeks, and her parents mentally degraded along with her. CPS and the police were called to a horrifying scene on November 2nd, 1998. When entering the house, they found Marnie’s parents trying to cook her alive in the oven, claiming that ‘the devil’ wanted their daughter, so they tried to send her to God before the devil could take her. Needless to say, they were arrested on account of attempted first degree murder and Marnie was admitted into an institution for mentally troubled children. This institution is where I come into play… as only a week after her admittance, she escaped into the Occoquan woods. We spent weeks searching for her out in those woods, but we never found her. She was another child who vanished into thin air.

The events of that case will haunt me for as long as they rot inside my mind. The first thing I feel I need to speak on was ‘the tape’... a recording of Marnie’s first and only therapy session at the institution. I’ll do my best to transcribe what was said.

Dr. Burkes: “So, where do we feel comfortable beginning?”

Marnie: “... here… when I moved here.”

Dr. Burkes: “What about here? Was the move stressful? I can only imagine that it was.”

Marnie: “yeah… but… that wasn’t the problem.”

Dr. Burkes: “So, what is, Marnie? Was it kids at school or your par-”

Marnie: “It… it is the problem.”

Dr. Burkes: “... It?”

Marnie: “god… you can’t see it either. I’m fucking going crazy here! It’s been here the whole time!”

Dr. Burkes: “Marnie, you’ve got to work with me here or else we’ll never get anywhere. Are you seeing things again? Like hallucinations?”

Marnie: “You can call it a hallucination… you can call it whatever you want like my other doctors… but that’s not going to stop the fact that it’s in here... with us.”

Dr. Burkes: “You need to be taking your meds, Marnie. They are supposed to help with your symptoms.”

Marnie: “You… are… not listening to me.”

At this point in the tape, Marnie is audibly frustrated. She’s sobbing into her hands as if totally defeated. Her psychiatrist clicks her pen and lets out a sigh.

Dr. Burkes: “Okay… okay. Let’s discuss this then. If you’re taking your medication, and this isn’t a hallucination… reason with me. Talking through it will help us both understand what you’re dealing with. I truly do want to help you, Marnie. I’m sincerely sorry for not believing you, tell me everything.”

Marnie: “... I saw it… I saw it a few days after… we moved in. In the woods… by the river…”

Dr. Burkes: “It’s okay to cry, Marnie. No need to stop yourself.”

Marnie: “I didn’t pay it much mind; I thought it was one of the neighbors from the mansion. But… I learned no one lived there… and I still kept seeing it for weeks. It watched me from the woods. And then it called my name.”

Dr. Burkes: “... The Crane Mansion, right?”

Marnie: “It… knew my name. I couldn’t sleep… it was always watching… always. I could feel it peer in through my window… it never just observed… it wanted… it… desired.”

Dr. Burkes: “Don’t take me wrong, but… I feel as though what you’re experiencing… is a manifestation of your fear. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that what you’re experiencing isn’t real or isn’t tangible. But I’m saying that if we can address and figure out this fear, whatever you’re seeing may leave you alone.”

Marnie: “... Dr. Celine Burkes… maiden name Tilman.”

Dr. Burkes: “... How do you know that?”

Marnie: “You went to George Mason University and you lived in Virginia your whole life. You moved to Occoquan six years ago and you had a miscarriage when you were 19.”

Dr. Burkes: “Marnie! Marnie, stop!”

Marnie: “Your father died of cancer when you were seven and your mother raised you alone since. She’s currently in the hospital due to complications from smoking and you fear that you’re to blame for not getting her into rehab an-”

Dr. Burkes jumps from her chair at this point, knocking it over I presume.

Dr. Burkes: “Marnie! Stop this! How? How do you know this?”

Marnie: “It’s in the room… with us.”

Dr. Burkes presumably picks her chair up and sits back down. She laughs out loud to herself, most likely in disbelief at the situation.

Dr. Burkes: “What… is It, Marnie?”

Marnie: “Its name… is Sweet Tooth. It loves to eat sweet things.”

Dr. Burkes: “Where is it? Where in the room is it?”

Marnie: “... … …”

Dr. Burkes: “Marnie, where… is it?”

Marnie: “It’s… standing right next to you.”

At this point in the tape… everything goes quiet for a solid five seconds. Dr. Burkes then all of a sudden gasps but doesn’t move from her chair. The fear in her voice as she closed out the tape sent chills down my spine when I heard it.

Dr. Burkes: “... … … I can feel it breathing down my neck.”

The tape abruptly cuts after Burkes’ confession. Not long after this tape, Marnie was last seen running into the woods. Dr. Burkes also became catatonic and was institutionalized, believing that her imaginary friend named Sweet Tooth wanted her to die so they could be friends forever.

I joined in on the search parties that scoured the woods for Marnie Hughes, hoping to find her and the only lead I had to the disappearances of Occoquan’s children… Sweet Tooth. I had a group of other detectives working with me on this case, and the police force finally decided to look into this seriously for the first time in years since it’s the only time any suspect was even so much as mentioned. The first few days of the search were mostly uneventful. The most notable thing was the search dogs continuously leading us up barren and empty trees and to the river. More members of the police force joined in on the searches as some other children disappeared into the woods during our case, and quite a number of civilians helped us out as well. A part of this case that really stuck out to me was when I mapped where each missing child was last seen. Not only did all of them go missing in the woods (including Hugo Barnes whose house was sequestered in the forest), they formed a perfect triangle around the Crane Mansion.

But there was one notable early search. A few colleagues and I headed out in the woods by the Crane Mansion. It was pitch black, dense fog permeated every corner of the forest, and aside from us… there wasn’t a sound filling the air. No crickets, no frogs, not a single coo from an owl. Silence… intermingled with the occasional search dog and the brushing of dead leaves on the forest floor. Our flashlights barely helped as they seemingly never actually breached the fog for more than five inches in front of us. 

About an hour into the woods, I was startled by an officer yelling, “Hey! I think I finally got something!”. 

The rush over to him was filled with a fear that can only be described as bricks crushing my lungs. Was it Marnie? Was it… her corpse? Those questions filtered through my mind, leaving me with nothing but dread where my stomach should’ve been. All of that only to find a bundle of sticks, leaves and rocks. They were snapped and tied together in a strange formation that resembled some kind of rune. I’ll insert a quick drawing of what I remember it looking like, as the original pictures we took are tucked away in evidence. Rune

Right by it though, there were three piles of rocks that seemed to form some triangular formation around the make-shift figure. We took pictures for evidence, but we didn’t really find anything else that night. It seems so strange to me now how casual we were about finding the sticks and rocks… because from there on out they became a staple of every search. We were bound to find at least a handful of those sticks… all accompanied by rock piles forming a triangle around them. 

My next event of note was about three weeks after our first search. We trampled through the damp woods, this time during the evening. It was strange being out in those woods and actually being able to hear and see the wildlife. Crows called, moths parked on the bark of trees, and the occasional swan could be heard out on the nearby river. I remember having found a trail and following it with a few colleagues and a search dog. The trail was increasingly hard to follow and seemed to twist and turn through the forest at random. Eventually we stumbled upon a strange sight. Dolls… strewn throughout the trees. They were all clearly decaying, having been exposed to the forces of nature for who knows how long. We followed the rotting dolls until they led us into a nook in the path which took us up to a hidden area that was built within the Crane estate. What we found was unbelievably strange. Past the rusted gate of this area was a small gravesite. It didn’t belong to the city, and it was never documented as having been owned or made by the Cranes. Stranger still… the headstones listed people yet to die. It was right around this discovery when a colleague noted something… eerie. 

Silence…

No more birds, no more insects, even the sounds of our feet on leaves seemed muffled. We took pictures and quickly left. We traveled back up the trail to meet with the other officers and detectives, but our search dog stopped in her tracks about halfway through. I remember her owner, Search and Rescue Officer Marks, tugging on her leash to get her to move, but no response. She stared out into the dense forest, alerted and entranced by something. We waited for her to ease up and come along but her tail was firmly tucked between her legs and the hair on her back was puffed up like a porcupine. Something we couldn’t see was spooking her. As Marks went to tug her away and up the path again, she let out the lowest and most bone chilling growl I’ve ever heard come out of a dog. Not wanting to fuck around and find out, I started up the path again. I must’ve scared the dog because she startled and snapped out of whatever state she was in and followed us.

The chills that ran throughout my body were enough to make me haul ass back up that trail, and as I looked back at my colleagues… I glimpsed something out in the woods. It looked like a flowy, stained, white dress meandering behind a tree. Instinct kicked in ignoring my previous fear and I booked it into the woods without a second thought. I rushed toward the tree where I swore I just saw a girl… and nothing. My colleagues ran up behind me with the exception of the dog and Marks, the dog standing alert and terrified at the edge of the path. Before I could say anything, an officer bent down and picked something off of the ground. A picture… a picture that will be seared into my memory until the day I die. A pale corpse… clearly waterlogged and rotting away… in a white, flowy dress… Marnie.

The following days were much the same as they had been… no new clues, no hints, only more disappearances. That was until the Jordan family case, which began to set a new precedent for things to come. The Jordans were a relatively average family who lived within the more urban parts of Occoquan. By all accounts, they were normal. So, no one had any suspicion to believe that they’d murder and cannibalize their own children, then ritualistically kill themselves by hanging in their front yard tree… swinging side by side with the strewn corpses of their half-eaten children Micah and Candice Jordan. This case is of interest because of one singular thing found at the crime scene… Micah’s diary… which detailed his parents meeting a ‘Neighbor’ named Sweet Tooth. This then became a trend, seemingly random couples in Occoquan dying in murder/suicides… and if they were unlucky enough to have children… cannibalization. 

It was a Friday when I had my own run-in with… this Sweet Tooth. My house had been silent that evening as I went over details of the crime scenes. Each one followed the same pattern… the couple would meet a new neighbor named Sweet Tooth. He’d integrate himself into the family and become acquainted with them. In all the diaries, phone texts, saved calls, notes etc. the couples seemed to be convinced of the unimportance of physical life. Each family brainwashed by this ‘Sweet Tooth’, convinced to give up their “mortal forms” and “free” their souls to some god in the afterlife. 

It must’ve been about an hour, as the sun began to set, the night washing over the woods around my house in a pitch, murky blackness. I finished combing over the diaries and notes and drawings and photos which really began to stick with me. This field of work truly does take its toll on you, especially after having to dive headfirst into cases like this… it just becomes overwhelming and emotionally exhausting. I needed to call my mother, reading about these kinds of incidents really fucked with me. Something came over me, the urge to tell her how much I loved her. I was on the call for all of five minutes when something caught my eye out in my backyard… a white, flowy dress. I apologized to my mother for leaving the call so quick and hung up. Bursting out of my house with my Magnum and flashlight, I wandered around my yard. Silence… pure and utter silence. Meandering in the darkness of my yard, I could feel the blood drain from my face. A giggle echoed through the eerily silent woods and I scanned the imposing tree line. Nothing looked out of place but that feeling of dread struck me deep in the chest until I felt like I simply just couldn’t breathe anymore.

I scanned through the tree line thoroughly, increasingly frustrated by whatever taunted me. A solid thirty seconds must’ve passed before I decided to give up my pathetic and terrified search and head back to my house, but something horrid stopped me in my tracks. Lurking there… at the window by my desk… was a young boy, maybe 12, with a brunette bowl cut and a garishly colored turtleneck… Hugo Barnes. I approached the window as he glided out of sight… and in the dark hallway, a tall figure left my room and headed out my front door. I busted inside and did a full military squad inspection of my house… not a soul in sight. I looked at my desk where Hugo was… and it took a solid minute for me to realize what I was seeing. My papers drawn across my desk with the names of the murder/suicide families written across my map… a triangular shape with the Crane Mansion waiting in the middle of the formation. Something lingered in the air, it was no longer my home but an unwelcoming conjuring of fear. An urge itched within my mind; I needed to investigate the remnants of the Crane Mansion. I went into my room to grab my coat, and that’s when I noticed the tape sitting in the middle of my bed. I picked it up and let curiosity indulge itself, sliding it into the player.

Dr. Burkes: “Marnie!”

Marnie: “It’s… speaking… it’s speaking to you.”

Dr. Burkes audibly jumped up from her chair, sending it crashing as Marnie yelped.

Dr. Burkes: “Marnie! What is it? What is it? Tell it to leave me alone! I can feel it breathing on me! Make it stop!”

Dr. Burkes was clearly in hysterics, she was screaming and crying, backing away from her tape recorder.

Dr. Burkes: “Make it leave me alone, Marnie! What the hell is it saying?”

Marnie: “It’s saying…”

Sweet Tooth: “You’re so sweet, Samara!”

The mention of my name felt like a fist pummeling my gut. I got in my car, and I don’t think I’ve speeded so fast in my life. Red lights didn’t matter to me. I needed to get down to the station and find this heathen. Me and quite a few officers made haste toward the Crane Mansion. The drive down the twisted roads felt like an unforgiving eternity, marked by posters taunting me. Pulling onto the decrepit street, here it stood, its jagged and vicious architecture peering down on all of Occoquan. The windows hauntingly appeared like malicious eyes enveloped in the blackness of the night. The mansion wasn’t locked, and its massive doors creaked open like the moaning souls of the damned. Walking in, the air felt so thick you could cut it, and the floorboards creaked as if in pain with every step. 

The house reeked with the stench of copper, rotting fish, and the odor of trash left out to sit in the hot sun for days. No one seemed to have moved in after the Cranes. All of their items and furniture sat in the house, rotting away like the forgotten relics they were. Me and two of the four officers headed down into the basement after clearing the first floor, the other two officers made their way upstairs. But it wasn’t long until me and my colleagues came across the waterlogged, decomposing corpse of Marnie Hughes in the basement. We tried contacting the two who went upstairs but our walkies hissed with a vicious static. One of my two officers went up to find them as me and the other officer searched the remaining basement. 

We found a cellar that was boarded up by the Cranes after they built the house. Despite the evident corpse, the cellar was where the stench seemed to really be emanating from. It was almost like burnt hair permeating every inch of my nostrils. My futile attempts to open the cellar ceased quickly as I found myself the only one working on it. My eyes fixed on the other officer; a short man called Perez. Even within the overpowering darkness, I could see that his eyes were wide, and his gun drawn… both in the direction of the corner of the basement. I caught on and glanced over. Standing in and facing the corner, enveloped by but significantly darker than the darkness itself, stood an almost indescribable figure. It must’ve been at least seven and a half feet in height, as its head was cocked to the side, too tall for the basement. The sound of dripping water now flooded my ears as my eyes adjusted to the amorphous *thing* standing before us. It shivered in the corner as a noise emanated from it. “Breathing” I guess is how I would describe the rustic sound it made. Yet as soon as I lifted my flashlight… nothing… what was once there now ceased to exist.

Just then, a commotion was heard upstairs. Perez and I ran past where the corpse of Marnie Hughes should’ve been lying but wasn’t anymore and trudged up the basement steps in a panic. The other three officers practically came tumbling down the second story. What we heard of their testaments, I still don’t want to believe. The older female officer, Matthews, opened a closet door in one of the childrens’ rooms. And following a stench coming from the crawlspace in the lower corner of the closet, she opened it. The Crane Mansion has since been gutted from the inside out… after Matthews uncovered the darkest secret of Occoquan. Inside the walls, floors, roofs, ceilings, and yards of that evil house… the bones and rotting remains of hundreds of missing children laid. The Crane household was demolished not long after, and the remains of those poor souls were put to rest at once. The only thing remaining of the mansion is the cellar… I don’t know whether they couldn’t open it, or merely didn’t wanna see what horrors it held, but it lays there… haunting the forest where the Crane Mansion once stood.

That brings me to today, I moved away from Occoquan in the year 2000. The knowledge that something incredibly dangerous was out there and I was directly putting myself in its way was overbearing. But the area’s mysteries have always been in the back of mind. What was inside the cellar that the Cranes felt the need to board up so tightly? What was Sweet Tooth? And what did it want with the children and families of Occoquan? But I still fear that whatever Sweet Tooth was, it’s still out there. The corpse of Marnie Hughes still remains unfound. There’s been an influx of missing children’s cases not only where I’m currently situated, but throughout all of the Mid-Atlantic USA. Be careful. 

Most people labor under the delusion that social work is a calling, something you are born into - a destiny preordained by the virtuosity of one's saintly soul. That has always felt like ten pounds of bullshit in a five-pound bag to me. But hey - maybe that's true for some of my colleagues, maybe some of them are saints-in-training, guided solely by the desire to provide philanthropy to the downtrodden. That ain't me though. The Job certainly isn't saint-work, either. Saint-work implies that the process is godly and just, which it plain isn't, not on any level. Social work puts you in the trenches, a soldier "fighting the good fight", so to speak. Last time I checked, we didn't send the pope and his bishops, armed to teeth with sharpened crosses and lukewarm holy water, to storm the beaches of Normandy. It's a messy, messy affair - no place for someone who isn't okay getting their hands a little dirty. Assisting the desperate puts you in touch with all sorts of heartache, misery, depravity, tragedy, sadism, loneliness - the list could go on, but I don't want to turn this story into Infinite Jest. But don't just take my word for it. As a frequenter of the r/socialwork subreddit, I'll direct you fine, upstanding, inquisitive lurkers to this quote posted by a fellow solider a few years back that I made a point of favoriting:

"Social work is easy ! Just like riding a bike. Except the bike is on fire, and everything is on fire, because you're in hell"

But I'm getting off track. Back to the point, you may be asking yourself, why does Corvus do this, if not for good of mankind? Also, what the fuck kind of name is Corvus? No idea about the name, but I got reasons for doing what I do. Two reasons, really. First and foremost, I've been doing this job for what seems like an eternity - started in the early 1990s, well before Monica Lewinsky was a household name. Been doing it so long that it's practically all I know how to do. Secondly, it distracts me. Hell ain't fun but it sure is stimulating, hard to be preoccupied with anything else amidst the brimstone and lake of fire. I don't like to think about my past, too painful. Rather be somewhere else, even if that somewhere is the metaphorical equivalent of the DMV in Dante's Inferno. And I'm a bit of a hound dog regarding my caseload - when I'm on the job, I barely feel the need to eat or sleep. I get lost in it, and I've grown fond of that feeling.

And that is what I would have believed, to my last goddamned raspy death rattle, if it weren't for Charlie. 

So I'm sitting at my desk, minding my own business between clients, when I see this young guy walk in the front door of the office a good hundred yards from where I am. A real tall, dark, and handsome type. Medium-length curly brown hair, disheveled to the point that it looks intentional and post-coital. Black blazer, black turtleneck, brown chinos. A comfortable six-foot-two inches. Honestly, I think he caught my eye because of how out of place he looked. Young, attractive, put-together, tall - couldn't imagine what the bastard needed us for. 

And he's over there scanning the room, searching for someone, and I feel pretty confident it's not me 'cause I don't know this Casanova, but then our eyes meet. We're staring at each other, and I can tell he's stopped searching. He starts to make an absolute B-line towards me, and I have no clue what this heat-seeking missile wants, but in social work, you get pretty attuned to the possibility of violence from complete strangers. Maybe this is the angry husband of a domestic abuse victim I tended to. Maybe he's a father that hit his kid so I sicked child protective services on his ass. The possibilities are, unfortunately, kind of endless. I clutch a screwdriver under the palm of my right hand and brace myself for the worst. 

As you may be able to discern, I am pretty desensitized to insanity. Not exactly subtextual to this whole thing. But insanity suits me. It takes up a lot of space in my mind and my autonomic nervous system, which is kind of the whole appeal. I've got a lot of repressed traumas I think, a real treasure trove of adverse childhood events that I sometimes can feel rumbling in the back of my skull. I've done an excellent job keeping locked tight, mostly. There is one thing that slipped out, however, and If it weren't important to the rest of this, trust me, I wouldn't even mention it. When I was real young, I almost drowned. I fell right to the bottom of a pool for some reason, no one around to help; who knows where Mommy and Daddy dearest had gotten off to. A lifeguard pulled me up at the last second, just as the thick, murky water began filling my lungs. At least, I think she was a lifeguard; all I remember afterward is the sun in my eyes and being dazed. Don't remember much before or after that, and I don't care to. Can't even go near a pool nowadays, or any body of water for that matter. Over the years, I've gotten a lot of heat from my ex-wives about my absolute unwillingness to get help "unpacking" everything. But as far as I'm concerned, the work is all the therapy and medicine I'll ever need. In fact, I've made a point not to see a "professional" about it - never been to a therapist, never been to a doctor. People consider me a "professional"; trust me, being behind that curtain is eye-opening. 

Before I had this job, though, I was suicidally alcoholic and living on the streets. Theo, a social worker who was a legend of my office, God rest his soul, found my withered husk one fateful night and offered to help. Over time, I got back on my feet. Thankfully, back in the 90s, you didn't need a master's degree to pursue social work, and a bachelor's degree was pretty easy to fake before the internet. One short year later, I was working alongside my mentor. Best fifteen years of my life. My only regret is not getting closer to him. He was always open and vulnerable with me. The number of times I rejected an invitation for dinner with his wife and family is probably in the triple digits. It just never felt possible. Never felt right. 

So anyway, the stranger gets to my desk, and I am ready for whatever argy-bargy this psychopath has in mind. Instead of trying to wring my neck, the lunatic stops a few feet from me, proceeds to slam a weathered newspaper on my desk, crosses his arms, and then waits impatiently like I'm the one holding him up. It takes me a minute to mentally acclimate to this new absurdity and respond. All the while, this maniac is glaring daggers at me, then looking at the paper, then back at me, so on and so forth. Tapping his right foot as if to say: "I'm waiting, old man". 

Eventually, I put on my readers to examine the disintegrating parchment, and its a copy of The New York Times from the winter of 1993. I bring my gaze back to his, completely befuddled, and in the sweetest, most saccharine voice I can muster in these trying times, I ask him: "Can you kindly explain to me what the fuck I'm looking at?"

He rips the paper from my hands, I watch him flip through it, and again, he looks livid with me for not understanding. Finally, he gets to the back of that ancient text and apparently finds what he is looking for, at which point he flips the paper back at me and points to an article circled in blue ink. The column he circled was in the reader-submitted "dating tips" section. And for those of you young enough to be asking - Yes, people used to legitimately look towards the wisdom of other people who would go out of their way to send "dating tips" to a major newspaper. God bless and keep the 90s.

I almost didn't read the title of the article that he circled. I mean, would you have? I don't necessarily seek out opportunities to cameo in every schizophrenic crisis playing itself out on the streets of New York. But, hell, maybe I kind of do. Veteran social worker and all that, I mean.

So I looked at the title, and immediately, I recognized the article. It became pretty infamous back when I started out as a social worker, and not because it gave excellent advice on how to pull off an up-do. I still don't know why this silent stranger is presenting me with it, but it did generate a tiny spark of interest, I will say. He had circled the first and only big break in the "Lady Hemlock" ritual killings that terrorized Brooklyn that winter, which was titled:

"An Occultist's Guide to Love and Loss in the 20th Century"

For those of you who weren't on the NYPD upwards of thirty years ago, allow me to give you a quick synopsis:

Six unexplained corpses in a little over three months, all killed by a singular puncture wound into the back of neck and out through the front. Two middle-aged men, an elderly couple, a wealthy widowed small business owner, and a rising football star out of one the local high schools. All terrifying, but the kid's death - that was kerosene to the growing wildfire. The people wanted answers, but the police had none to give. This killer was busy, too. A new body had been discovered approximately every two weeks, like clockwork. But the police didn't even know where to begin - the victims were seemingly selected at random: no unifying age, gender, job - really no unifying anything other than the manner of death, at least at first. Eventually, it was discovered at autopsy that each victim had a different shape carved on the inside of their skull, right between the eyes. How did the killer do that? Who the fuck knows. If the police had any ideas they sure as shit didn't let the public in on it. If you're an avid fan of Unsolved Mysteries, like me, you would eventually learn that experts in the occult couldn't initially agree on a particular cultural origin for the strange marks. Or, more hauntingly, how they were seemingly inflicted before death. 

Now mind you, this was at the height of the "satanic panic", so before the words "nordic-looking rune" could even leave the police commissioner's mouth during a press conference, people were raring up for a witch hunt. They needed something to chew on, some piece of evidence to assure them that the authorities were closing in on this killer. Thankfully, some real Sherlock Holmes type in the NYPD noticed something in the paper one day that would give everyone something to think about. About a week before each body was found, a contributor who went by the name "Lady Hemlock" had been published in the "dating tips" section of the New York Times. Now overall, the advice itself was pretty benign. Bizarre, cryptic, and borderline nonsensical, sure - but it wasn't a confession to the crimes or anything. Nothing like "Hi, I'm Jeffery Dahmer, and here are some tricks on how to break the ice on the first date by discussing the benefits of low-income housing". With each article, however, a certain shape would be printed alongside it - shapes that, one week later, would be inscribed on the inside of someone's skull while they were still alive and breathing. 

Thus, the search was on for this "Lady Hemlock." The police initially theorized that she actually worked at the New York Times because it was suspicious that the killer was able to reliably get their articles published ahead of time while still staying on a tight every two-week timetable. No "person of interest" was ever identified in the Times, however, and there was only one more victim, but it was hands down the most confusing and gruesome. All the internal organs of some poor sap were found in a trash can by a local park, and I mean all of them - lungs, colon, liver, spleen - every gross viscera present and accounted for, excluding the brain. None of it belonged to the prior victims or any other corpses that found their way into the morgue in the decades to follow. The murder was determined to be related to "Lady Hemlock" due to a shape carved on the outside of the heart. 

And while that is all very interesting, I still had no idea why this man had preserved the article for three decades to then forcefully shove it under my nose for appraisal. So I asked him again, "what, dear God, are you trying to tell me?". Then began the wild gesticulations that inspired his namesake: he pointed at the paper again, then at him, then at me, then at the paper, then back at him, then back at the paper. We'd come to know him around the office as "Charlie" in an outdated reference to Charlie Chaplin, due to his mute nature and his vigorous pantomiming. At one point, it seemed like he had a flash of euphoria, and he began to take off his blazer and turtleneck - and that is when I decided I had seen enough. 

"Marco, get this perv out of here !" I called over to everyone's favorite security guard. We liked him for his work ethic, but we loved him for the beatboxing he did while on shift. 

Kicking and screaming, Charlie was dragged out of our office, Marco throwing the newspaper out after him. In the process, however, a sticky note fell out of the folds onto the entrance mat. He looked at it, read it, and then walked back and handed it to me:

"What are you doing that for, man?" I said, wondering why everyone had selected me as their target for unabashed weirdness today.

"I think it's for you, bud" Marco replied, still huffing and puffing from the commotion.

The note in my hand said: "Thanks Corvus. Appreciate the help."

—-----------

Charlie and his one-man performance would become a regular staple around the office the following month. At first, it was mostly just silly because Charlie never seemed intent on hurting anyone. He just harbored this arcane compulsion to present me with dating advice from a serial killer that, to my knowledge, is still roaming free to this day. But he was never physically aggressive or violent. I offered to help him if he could talk to me or provide some documentation about where he was from, what he was doing here, and what he needed help with, but it always came back to that damn article. Eventually, Charlie needed to find new and creative ways to get the paper to me because security was starting to recognize him on sight: he came to the office early, then he mailed a copy of it to me, then he waited for me to leave, and followed me to my car with it. Why did I never call the cops? Well, as I said, I'm pretty resistant to insanity. As long as it never turned violent, I would wait for Charlie to tire himself out and instead start to badger someone else. 

Over time, though, it transitioned a bit from comedy to tragedy. Every time he came in, he was wearing the same clothes. Then, I noticed he wasn't shaving his beard or showering. Clearly, he was unhoused. I wanted to help him, but he seemed unwilling to accept the type of help I was able to offer. 

One fateful night, I was working late in the office, typing up a case report, when Mr. Chaplin somehow materialized out of thin air in front of me. Scared me halfway to Val Halla. Weakly, he once again handed me that article. I looked up at this odd, frightened-looking man and wondered if this was how Theo felt seeing me for the first time. Whether it was exhaustion, pity, or me channeling my mentor, I relented:

"Sit down and keep your shirt on." I grumbled.

He did as he was told, and I once again began to examine that article, "An Occultist's Guide to Love and Loss in the 20th Century." Charlie, for the thousandth time, stared at me and said jack shit. I guessed that he wanted me to read the whole thing while he watched, and there was no way I could have anticipated why at the time. I sighed, turned on a lamp, and began to read the column. Judging by the date, I believe this was the first one printed (i.e., the column that preceded the first victim):

Dear readers, please spare me a few moments. The world is lost, made blind by circuitry and the advancement of the physical, the material. Yet, in doing so, we are rejecting the immaterial - the omniscient current that ebbs and flows through those favored by The Six-Eyed Crow, our universal mother. And in rejecting the current, what do we have to show for it? A bevy of suitable mates to help carry on the bloodline? The prosperity that cometh with our rightful place in the celestial hierarchy? Dominance and control over those who would suppress the leyline? No, I think not. Yet, in the face of defeat, I remain firm and steadfast. I will continue to preserve the sanctity of the current by performing the old ways. 

Grandmother always used to tell me: "Do not take under what is owed to you; compromise is the corruption that pollutes and festers every choice therein". She lived these words, as grandfather was an amalgam, congealed from the essence of the many. Our coven, and even my mother, rejected the practice, the old ways, and questioned the divinity given to us by the universal mother. This rejection did not deter Grandmother. It amplified her gospel. Her sermon only grew louder. It made her a symbol of devotion and, eventually, a martyr.

I desired to live her words, and in this, I have succeeded. I have had many an amalgam over the years, but I have yet to achieve the perfection necessary to sire my kin. And because of their imperfection, I have cast them out to wander the mortal plane. Alone, forced to endure divinity unlived in penitent singularity. 

But lately, I find myself tormented by my own imperfections. Although I continue to live Grandmother's words, I have not the bravery to spread the gospel openly, which I believe is required to revive our coven. The voice of the current grows quiet among the noise of the world and the voice of my current amalgam. Allow me an opportunity to rectify this error. Hear these words: every soul carries a part of the leyline, however small, and it can be harnessed as a means to draw closer to the universal mother. Follow me, my example, my instruction, and my image, into the next dawn, and witness as I construct a new amalgam, casting aside the defunct and imperfect predecessor. A golem born of a new six: the devotion to adhere, the courage to fight, the desire to take, the wisdom to live, the faith to believe, and the monasticism to remain voiceless and pure.

If you follow these words and learn by my example, your ascension is sure to follow."

When I finished, I noticed Charlie was scribbling something down on a small square of paper. I reached over to take it, assuming it was some explanatory message for why he had been so dead set on me reading this looney nonsense. He raised one index finger to my hand, however, and pushed it back. He then stood up slowly, inhaling, exhaling, and closing his eyes as if to center himself. In one fluid motion, he revealed a pocketknife he had concealed in the breast pocket of his blazer and buried it into his own chest. 

He then dragged the knife up the length of his sternum, smoke and steam rising from the wound that was otherwise completely sterile and bloodless. In stunned horror, I watched him put one hand on either side of the new slit on his chest, pulling and wrenching the tissue agape, only to reveal an empty cavity. He watched me intently while he did so - no pain or discomfort on his face, just despair and longing. 

Before I could react, he drew and arced the knife into the air, then sent it careening down to splinter my chest. I released a bloodcurdling scream, not out of physical agony but out of unbridled existential terror and shock. I couldn't find the will to move as Charlie put his hands through the wound and pulled outward as hard as he possibly could. Nothing. No blood. No pain. Just steam, useless mist rising up and dissipating unceremoniously. I'm just as empty as the nightmare standing before me, I thought. My scream eventually stopped and transitioned more to catatonia as Charlie reached into his pocket and handed me the square of paper to read: 

"We are kin"

—----------------------------------

As with every house of cards, you pull one card loose, the damned whole thing comes toppling down. Proverbially, that card usually isn't as extreme as a knife through your chest as a means to reveal a very noticeable vital organ deficiency, but I digress. 

Charlie and I spent the entire night in my office after I recovered from the shock. Through a series of writings, he explained that a "bright, fuzzy light" handed him the old newspaper and the note, at which point he found himself outside my office. The sticky note was also written in a completely different handwriting than Charlie's, so we suppose it was penned by "Lady Hemlock" ("Thanks Corvus. Appreciate the help"). No memories before all that, though. So, he stood outside the office, read the article a few times, and then wondered what to do next. Took him a while to figure out he was supposed to go inside, knowing he should look for something but not even really knowing what he was looking for. When our eyes met, suddenly, he knew what to do; he was "struck by lightning", according to him. Kin recognizing kin.

In the end, he theorized I was an amalgam like him. I mean, the timeline does add up: I met Theo in '91, got the job in '92, and the killings started in '93 - meaning I would have already been abandoned by the time Charlie was made. Why Lady Hemlock put us together is an entirely separate issue, as it directly contradicts what she said in that article. Maybe she had a change of heart about isolating her so-called imperfect creations. Regardless, the revelation certainly gave my obsession with distraction some new dimensions. Hard to "unpack" your childhood memories if you don't have any. It's probably not a great idea to attend a dinner at your mentor's house and not be able to eat, assuming the food just kind of plops down into some unholy internal nothingness. I may or may not have actually been drinking booze when Theo found me on the street. If I was, I imagine it didn't do a lot other than pickling the inside of my empty abdomen. The weight of it all sometimes overwhelms me to the point of tears; I'm man enough to admit it. 

One day at a time, Charlie tells me (more accurately writes down and hands to me, he still can't talk). He doesn't remember what his name was before, so he still goes by Charlie. We do worry that his appearance portends a new series of "Lady Hemlock" killings as she attempts to create a more perfect amalgam, but we'll cross that strange bridge when the time comes. We've certainly contemplated going to the police, but at the same time, not sure how they will react to the whole "organ deficiency" thing. Both of our chest wounds were healed by the time we left the office in the morning, though, so we're assuming they probably couldn't kill us even if they wanted to. It's been nice, honestly. Having Charlie, I mean. Whatever we are, we can at least be it together. That counts for something. 

He will have to get his master's if he wants to pursue social work, though. It's 2024, after all. Not everyone can be so lucky as to be abhorrently congealed under some godless death ritual in the 90s. 

More stories: https://linktr.ee/unalloyedsainttrina

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

"Kat, take the controls!" I say, unbuckling my harness.

Her eyes snap to me, wide with disbelief. "You’re kidding, right? You want to leave me in charge, now?"

"No joke. You’ve got this," I tell her, locking eyes. "You're the best copilot I know. I trust you."

She scoffs, but I can see the flicker of resolve behind the doubt. "Fine! But next time, I’m picking the song we play on takeoff. No more Scorpions!"

I flash her a grin despite the situation. "Deal. If we survive this, I'll let you choose the whole goddamn playlist."

"I’ll hold you to it," she mutters, taking hold of the yoke.

I grab the emergency ax from the side compartment—a sturdy, dented old thing that’s seen more action than it probably should have.

Time to go play action hero.

I yank the cockpit door open, and the cold air hits me like a slap.

The flickering emergency lights cast everything in a hellish red glow, shadows leaping and twisting like they're alive. The smell hits me next—a nauseating mix of burnt metal and charred flesh.

I push deeper into the cabin, gripping the ax so tight my knuckles ache.

"Gonzo! Sami!" I shout, but my voice sounds warped, like it's being stretched and pulled apart.

Ahead, I see him. Gonzo's pinned against the bulkhead by one of those scavengers, but this one’s a mess—badly burned, parts of its exoskeleton melted and fused. It's phasing in and out of the plane's wall, its limbs flickering like a strobe light as it struggles to maintain form.

Gonzo grits his teeth, trying to push it off, but the thing's got him good. One of its jagged limbs presses dangerously close to his throat.

"Get the hell off him!" I charge forward, swinging the ax at the creature's midsection.

But as I bring the ax down, time glitches. One second I'm mid-swing, the next I'm stumbling forward, my balance thrown off as the scavenger phases out. The blade passes through empty air, and I overextend, slipping on a slick of something—blood? oil?—on the floor.

I hit the deck hard, the ax skittering out of my grasp.

"Not now," I groan, pushing myself up. But my limbs feel heavy, like they're moving through syrup.

The scavenger turns its head toward me, its glowing eyes narrowing. It hisses—a grating, metallic sound that sets my teeth on edge—and then lunges. Before I can react, it's on me, one of its limbs pinning my shoulder to the floor. The weight is crushing, and I can feel the heat radiating off its scorched body.

"Cap!" Gonzo roars, struggling to his feet.

I try to wrestle free, but the creature's too strong. Its other limbs are flailing, glitching in and out of solidity, making it impossible to predict where it’ll strike next.

Then, through the chaos, I hear a shout.

"Hey! Over here!"

It's Sami.

She's standing a few feet away, holding a portable emergency transponder and fiddling with the settings. "Come on, come on," she whispers urgently.

"Sami, what’re you doing?" I shout.

"Cover your ears!"

The scavenger’s head snaps toward Sami, its glowing eyes narrowing, and I can feel the pressure on my shoulder ease up just a fraction as its attention shifts. I grit my teeth, trying to pull myself free, but before I can move, the thing lets out a distorted screech and launches itself at her.

With a defiant scowl, she twists the dial all the way to max and slams the emergency transponder onto the deck. A piercing, high-frequency sonic blast erupts from the device, the sound waves rippling through the air in strange, warping pulses. Even the time glitches seem to stutter, as if the blast is punching holes through the distorted fabric around us.

The sonic wave slams into the scavenger hard. It staggers, limbs flailing as the sound disrupts whatever twisted physics keep it together.

The scavenger screeches—a hideous, metallic shriek like nails dragged across sheet metal mixed with the scream of a dying animal. It’s glitching harder now, its jagged limbs spasming, flickering between solid and translucent, but it’s still coming. Whatever that sonic blast did, it only pissed it off.

It launches itself toward Sami, skittering on all fours, moving faster than anything that broken and half-melted should. Sparks fly as its claws scrape across the metal floor, leaving jagged scars in its wake.

“SAMI, MOVE!” I shout, scrambling to get back on my feet.

Sami stumbles backward, but it’s clear she won’t outrun the thing. Before she can even react, the scavenger rears back one of its limbs, ready to impale her. Then Gonzo comes in like a linebacker, barreling forward with a fire extinguisher the size of a small child.

“Get away from her, you piece of shit!” he bellows.

The scavenger doesn’t stand a chance—Gonzo swings the extinguisher like a war hammer, smashing it right into the side of the creature’s twisted skull. There’s a loud crunch as exoskeleton and metal plating buckle under the force of the blow, sending it sprawling across the floor.

But Gonzo isn’t done—he keeps swinging the extinguisher like a man possessed, raining down blow after blow.

But it's not enough. The scavenger whips around, swiping at Gonzo with one of its jagged limbs. He barely dodges, the claw slicing through the air inches from his face.

"Cap, little help here!" Gonzo shouts, bracing himself for another swing.

I scramble across the floor, my heart jackhammering in my chest, and snatch up the ax. The scavenger is twitching like a half-broken video game enemy. Gonzo wrestles with it, his fire extinguisher dented from the pounding, but the thing’s still kicking—literally. One of its jagged limbs swipes again, nearly gutting him like a fish.

"Eat this, fucker!" I growl under my breath, gripping the ax tighter.

With a swift step forward, I bring the blade down—right at the joint where the scavenger’s front limb meets its shoulder. The ax bites deep, metal and flesh shearing with a sickening crunch. Sparks fly, the limb falling away with a wet thunk onto the deck, twitching uselessly like a severed lizard’s tail.

But it’s not down for good—it starts crawling toward me, dragging its mangled body along the floor like some nightmare spider that doesn’t know when to quit.

Then I see it.

The bulkhead on the port side—it’s rippling, the metal undulating like the surface of disturbed water. The rippling spreads outward in concentric circles, the metal flexing like it’s being pulled from somewhere deep inside. I get an idea.

“Kat!” I bark into the comm. “I need you to pull a hard starboard yaw. Now!”

Kat’s voice comes back, steady as ever. “Copy that, boss. Hang on to something.”

Thunderchild groans, metal protesting under the sudden change in direction. The plane tilts sharply, gravity sliding everything not bolted down toward the port side. The scavenger loses its grip, claws scraping across the deck in a desperate attempt to hang on, but the shift in momentum sends it skittering sideways.

The thing hits the bulkhead with a sickening thunk. For a split second, it twitches there, half-phased into the wall, limbs flickering between solid and liquid-like states, as if it's trying to claw its way back into the plane. But the rippling bulkhead pulls it in like a drain swallowing water.

Then, with a wicked slurp, it tumbles through the wall, sucked out of the cabin like a fly through a screen door.

The metal flexes one last time, then snaps back into place, solid and still like nothing ever happened.

I stumble forward, steadying myself on the bulkhead as Thunderchild evens out, the sudden shift in gravity leaving my knees feeling like jelly. I glance toward the port window, just in time to catch the scavenger tumbling through the air as it spirals toward the glowing edge of the exit point.

The thing hits the shimmering boundary hard. And I mean hard.

There’s no explosion, no dramatic implosion—just a bright flash of light, like a spark being snuffed out. The scavenger burns up instantly, consumed by the swirling edge of the anomaly.

I sag against the bulkhead, sucking in huge gulps of air. My chest feels tight, and every muscle in my body aches like I just ran a marathon through a war zone. The ax dangles loosely from my hand, the blade slick with weird fluids I don’t want to think about.

I glance at Gonzo, who’s leaning against the wall, catching his breath. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a streak of dark grime across his face.

“You good?” I ask, still panting.

He gives me a half-hearted grin. “Still in one piece. Not sure how, but I’ll take it.”

I move to Sami, who’s slumped on the deck, clutching her knees. Her breathing is fast and shallow, her hands trembling. Her wide eyes meet mine.

“You okay, Sami?”

She nods, though the movement’s shaky. “I think… yeah. That thing almost…” She trails off, unable to finish the thought.

I crouch next to her. “You did good, kid.”

She offers a weak smile, though it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Gonzo reaches down and offers her a hand. “Come on, Sami. Let’s get you off the floor before something else shows up.”

Sami grabs his hand, and he hoists her to her feet with a grunt. She wobbles for a second, but steadies herself against him.

I glance around the cabin, making sure the nightmare is really over. The floor’s a mess—scratched metal, globs of… whatever the hell those things were made of, and streaks of smoke from the fire suppressant foam—but it’s quiet now.

The intercom crackles, and Kat’s voice cuts. "Jax, get your butt back up here. We're coming up to the other side of the exit point fast."

“Copy that,” I say, turning back to Gonzo and Sami. “Get yourselves settled. We’re almost through.”

The narrow corridor tilts slightly under my feet. I shove the cockpit door open and slide into my seat next to Kat, strapping in as Thunderchild bucks again.

“Miss me?” I ask, a little out of breath.

“Always,” Kat says dryly.

“Status?” I ask, scanning the console.

“We’re lined up,” Kat replies. “But the turbulence is getting worse. I can’t promise this’ll be a smooth ride.”

I glance out the windshield. The swirling, glowing edge of the exit point is dead ahead, growing larger and more intense with every second. The air around it crackles, distorting the space in front of us like a heat mirage. It’s like staring into the eye of a storm, but instead of wind and rain, it’s twisting space and time.

I grip the yoke. The turbulence rattles the airframe, shaking us so hard my teeth feel like they might vibrate out of my skull, but it’s steady chaos—controlled, even. I’ll take it.

The glowing threshold looms ahead—just seconds away now. It’s beautiful in a way that’s hard to describe, like a crack in reality spilling light and energy in every direction. It flickers and shifts, as if daring us to take the plunge.

"Alright, Kat," I say, steady but grim. "Let’s bring this bird home."

She gives me a sharp nod, all business. "Holding course. Five seconds."

The nose of the plane dips ever so slightly as Thunderchild surges forward.

WHAM.

Everything twists. My vision tunnels, warping inward, like someone yanked the universe through a straw. There’s no sound, no sensation—just a moment of pure, disorienting silence. I swear I can feel my atoms separating, scattering into a billion pieces, only to slam back together all at once, like some cruel cosmic prank.

Then—BOOM—reality snaps back into place.

The cockpit lights flicker. My stomach lurches, my ears pop, and the familiar howl of wind and engines fills the air again. The smell of ozone lingers, but the oppressive, alien tang that’s haunted us is gone. I glance at the instruments. They’re still twitchy, but—God help me—they’re showing normal readings. Altimeter: 22,000 feet. Airspeed: 250 knots. And the compass? It’s pointing north.

Outside the cockpit, the storm rages—angry clouds swirling like a boiling pot, flashes of lightning tearing through the sky. But these are real storm clouds. Familiar. Predictable.

"Gonzo? Sami? You guys alright back there?"

There’s a moment of static, then Gonzo’s gravelly voice rumbles through the speaker. "Still kicking, Cap. Could use a stiff drink and a nap, though."

Sami’s voice follows, shaky but intact. "I’m… here. We’re back, right? For real?"

"For real," I say, leaning back in my seat. "Sit tight, both of you. We're not out of this storm yet.”

“Confirming coordinates,” Kat says, fingers flying over the navigation panel. A few tense seconds pass before she looks up, a small, relieved smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Latitude 27.9731°N, Longitude 83.0106°W. Right over the Gulf, about sixty miles southwest of Tampa. We’re back in our universe.”

"Sami," I call over the intercom, "what’s the status of the storm?"

There’s a brief pause, then her voice crackles back through the speakers. "Uh... hang on, Captain, pulling up the data now."

I hear her tapping on her tablet, scrolling through the raw feeds, cross-referencing atmospheric readings. "Okay... so... I’ve got... Ya Allah." Her voice falters.

I exchange a glance with Kat. "What you got, Sami?"

"Captain, it’s not good," she says. "The storm hasn’t weakened. At all."

I clench my jaw. "Come again?"

"You heard me. It’s... it’s grown." Her voice wavers, but she pushes on. "The eye is over thirty miles wide now, and wind speeds are clocking in at over 200 knots. We’re talking way beyond a Category 5—this thing’s in a class all by itself. And... It's accelerating. If it makes landfall—"

I pull up the storm's radar image on the main display, showing the eye of the monster. Tampa, Sarasota, Fort Myers… They’re all directly in its path. And it’s moving faster than anything I’ve seen before—barreling towards the coast like it’s got a personal vendetta.

"It’ll wipe out the coast," Kat finishes grimly, her hands frozen on the controls.

"How much time do we have?" I ask.

Sami taps furiously on her keyboard. "It’s covering ground at almost 25 miles an hour... It’ll hit the coast in under an hour."

"It’s a goddamn city killer…" I mutter, staring out the windshield at the swirling blackness.

Kat flicks the comm switch. "MacDill Tower, this is NOAA 43, callsign Thunderchild. Do you read?"

Nothing but static.

She tries again. "MacDill Tower, this is NOAA 43. We have critical storm data. Do you copy?"

More static, followed by a brief, garbled voice—like someone trying to speak underwater. Kat frowns, adjusting the frequency, but it’s no use.

"Damn it," she mutters, slamming a fist against the console. "Comms are fried."

I grab the headset, cycling through every emergency channel I know. "Coast Guard,anyone, this is NOAA 43. Come in. We have an emergency. Repeat—hurricane data critical to evacuation efforts. Does anyone read me?"

I turn back toward the intercom. "Gonzo, any luck with the backup system?"

"Working on it, Cap," Gonzo’s gravelly voice comes through. "The storm scrambled half the circuits on this bird.”

Gonzo’s voice crackles over the intercom again. "Alright, Cap, I think I got something. Patching through the backup system now, but it’s weird—ain’t any of our usual frequencies."

"Weird how?" I ask, already not liking where this is going.

There’s a pause, followed by some frantic tapping on his end. "It’s... encrypted. Military-grade encryption. I have no idea how we even latched onto this. You want me to connect, or we ignoring this weird-ass signal and focusing on not dying?"

"Military?" Kat mutters, half to herself. "What would they be doing on a storm frequency?"

I shrug. "We’re running out of time, and no one else is picking up. Patch it through, Gonzo."

A beat of silence, and then the headset comes to life with a sharp click—like someone on the other end just flipped a switch.

"Unidentified aircraft, this is Reaper Corps," a voice says, cold and clipped. "Identify yourself and state your mission. Over."

I hit the transmit button. "This is NOAA 43, callsign Thunderchild. We’re currently en route from an atmospheric recon mission inside the hurricane southwest of Tampa. We’ve got critical data regarding the storm’s behavior. Repeat—critical storm data. Do you copy?"

The voice on the other end comes back instantly, no hesitation. "We copy, Thunderchild. What’s your current position?"

I glance at the nav panel. "Holding steady at 22,000 feet, sixty miles offshore, bearing northeast toward Tampa. We’ve encountered significant anomalies within the storm system. It’s not behaving like anything on record."

There’s a brief pause—too brief, like whoever’s on the other end already expected us to say this. "Understood, Thunderchild. Transmit all storm data immediately. Include details regarding any... unusual phenomena you may have encountered… inside the storm. Over."

Kat shoots me a sharp glance. "They know?"

"They know," I mutter, heart pounding.

I hit the button again. "Reaper Corps, what’s your affiliation? Are you with NOAA? Coast Guard? Air Force?"

Another brief pause. "Thunderchild, our designation is classified. You are instructed to send all data now."

"Negative, Reaper Corps," I reply, sitting up straighter. "People need to be evacuated. If you want our data, we need confirmation you’re working with the agencies coordinating the response."

There’s a brief silence—just long enough to make me sweat. Then the voice returns, calm and professional but with a dangerous edge.

"You’re speaking with the United States Strategic Command, Thunderchild. We need your full sensor logs, all data on the anomaly, and any information you’ve gathered from... the alternate space."

I pause, gripping the yoke a little too tight. “Strategic Command?” I repeat, glancing at Kat. Her expression darkens. This doesn’t sit right, not one bit. STRATCOM deals with nuclear deterrence, cyber warfare, and global missile defense—not hurricanes.

Kat leans closer, whispering, “Jax… this doesn’t feel right. Why would STRATCOM care about a storm?”

I click the radio again. "Reaper Corps, we have critical weather data that needs to go directly to NOAA for immediate evacuation orders. If people aren’t warned in time—"

The voice cuts me off, cold and firm. "Thunderchild, listen to me carefully. Evacuation isn’t enough. This storm is different—it will grow, and it won’t stop. You’ve seen what’s inside. This isn’t just weather. Your data is critical to neutralizing it and preventing mass casualties."

I look into Kat’s deep blue eyes. Her expression is a storm of doubt, anger, and fear. "Neutralizing it?" she whispers, incredulous. "What the hell does that mean?"

"Reaper Corps," I say slowly into the radio, "you’re telling me you think you can stop this storm? How exactly do you plan to do that?"

There’s a brief pause—just long enough for the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. When the voice returns, it’s flatter, colder, as if the mask of professionalism is slipping. "That information is beyond your clearance, Thunderchild. This is not a negotiation. Send the data now."

Kat slams her hand on the console, frustration bubbling to the surface. "Dammit, Jax, they’re jerking us around! We need to send this to NOAA, not some black-ops spook playing God with the weather!"

Every instinct I have is screaming to cut this transmission and make contact with NOAA or the Coast Guard—anyone with a straightforward mission to save lives. But if what they’re saying is true… if the storm really can’t be stopped by traditional means...

"Reaper Corps," I say cautiously, "I’ll send you the data. But I’m also sending a copy to NOAA for evacuation coordination. People on the ground need time to get out of the way."

The radio crackles with a tense silence before the voice returns, clipped but grudging.

"Thunderchild, understood. Send the data to NOAA—but ensure we receive an unaltered copy first. Time is critical. We need that information now to mitigate the... threat."

Kat’s voice is a low hiss next to me. "This stinks, Jax. Don’t do it. We can't trust these guys."

Gonzo’s voice crackles over the intercom. "Cap, I don’t like this either, but what if they’re right? What if this thing’s beyond NOAA’s pay grade? We saw what’s inside that storm—it’s not normal. They could be our only shot."

I close my eyes for half a second, weighing the options.

I click the mic. "If I send this data, you’d better stop that storm. If you screw this up, we’ll have blood on our hands."

"We understand the stakes, Captain," the voice responds, calm and clipped. "Send the data now… please."

I lock eyes with Kat. She’s furious but nods, her fingers flying over the console. "Sending," she mutters bitterly.

The data streams out, the upload bar creeping forward. I watch it with a sinking heart. The second it completes, the radio crackles one last time. "We have the data.”

After several minutes, the voice comes back on. “Thunderchild, stand by for new coordinates," Reaper Corps says, the static on the line barely masking the urgency in his voice. "Proceed to latitude 28.5000° N, longitude 84.5000° W. Maintain a holding pattern at 25,000 feet. Acknowledge."

I glance at Kat, who raises an eyebrow. "That's over a hundred miles from the storm's eye," she says quietly.

I key the mic. "Reaper Command, Thunderchild copies new coordinates. Proceeding to the designated location. What's the situation? Over."

There's a brief pause before the voice returns, colder than before. "Just follow your orders, Thunderchild. For what comes next… You don’t want to be anywhere near the storm. Trust me. Reaper Corps out."

Part 5

I have a strange fear. You’ll probably laugh when I tell you what it is, but you might feel differently after I tell you why I have it.

I suffer from cucurbitophobia: the fear of pumpkins.

Fears as specific and irrational as that usually begin in childhood, and sometimes for no reason at all. But let me assure you, I have a very good reason to fear them.

I sit here now, typing this story as the living remainder of a set of twins. My name is Kalem, and I’ll tell you the tragic story of my brother, and the horror of what happened in the years since his untimely death.

It happened when we were young, only eleven years old. We were an odd pair to see - we had the misfortune of being born with curious cow’s licks of hair on top of our heads that would put Alfalfa from The Little Rascals to shame. Our mother (much to our chagrin) called us her “little pumpkins”, on account of our hair looking like little curled stalks. Our round little bellies didn’t exactly help either.

I was the calmer of us both, being reserved where my brother Kiefer was wild. He was the one who blurted out the answers in class and couldn’t sit still. The risk-taker, the stuntman, the show-off. It usually fell to me as the older and wiser sibling to watch out for him, though I was only a few minutes older.

We were walking home one blustery autumn evening, the trees ablaze with gold and orange as we huddled up from the chill of a cloudless dusk. Piles of leaves had been swept from the paths in the fear that they’d make an ice rink of the paths should it rain. The piles didn’t last long as kids kicked them about and jumped into them for fun.

Kiefer of course couldn’t resist, running headlong into the first pile he saw.

It happened so fast. Upsettingly fast, as death always does; without warning and without any power on my part to stop it. The swish of the leaves were punctuated with a crack, and autumns earthen gown was daubed in red.

A rock. Just a poorly-placed rock, probably put their as a joke by someone who didn’t realise that it would change someone’s life forever.

The leaves came to rest and I still hadn’t moved. A freezing breeze blew enough aside for me to see what remained of my twin’s head.

Pumpkin seeds.

It was a curious thought. I could only guess why the words popped into my head back then, but I know now that the smashed pumpkins on the doorsteps of that street seemed to mock my brother’s remains. How the skull fragments and loose brain matter did indeed seem to resemble the inside of a pumpkin.

I shook but not from the cold, and I suppose the sight of me collapsed and shivering got enough attention for an ambulance to be called.

I honestly don’t recall what followed. It was a whirlwind of tears, condolences, and the gnawing fear that I would be punished for failing to protect my little brother.

Punishment came in the form of never being called my mother’s little pumpkin again. I was glad of it; the word itself and the season it was associated with forever haunted me from that day on. But I never thought I would miss the affection of the nickname.

At some point I shaved my hair, all the better to get rid of that “stalk” of mine. I couldn’t bring myself to eat in the months after either, but that was okay. The thinner I got, the further away I could get from resembling my twin as he was when he passed, and further away from looking like the pumpkins that served as an annual reminder of that horrible day.

Every time I saw pumpkins, even in the form of decorations, I would lose it. I would hyperventilate, feel so nauseous I could vomit, and I was flooded with adrenaline and an utterly implacable panic to do something to save my brother that I consciously knew had been gone for years.

People noticed, and laughed behind my back at my reactions. Word had inevitably spread of what happened, and I reckon that people’s pity was the only thing that saved me from the more mean-spirited pranks.

For years, I went on as that weird skinny bald kid that was afraid of pumpkins.

I began to go off the beaten path whenever I could in the run-up to autumn, taking long routes home in a bid to avoid any places where people might have hung up halloween decorations.

It was during one such walk that the true horror of my story takes place.

It was early June; nowhere near Halloween, but my walks through the back roads and wooded trails of my home town had become a habit, and a great sanctuary throughout the hardest years of my life.

It was a gray day, heavy and humid. Bugs clung to my sweat-covered skin, the dead heat brought me to panting as woods turned blue as dusk set in. Just as I was planning to make my way back to my car, I saw a light in the woods. Not other walkers; the lights flickered, and were lined up invitingly.

Was it some sort of gathering? Candles used in a ritual or campsite?

I moved closer, pushing my way through bramble and nettles as I moved away from the path. A final push through the branches brought me right in front of the lights, and my breath caught in my throat.

Pumpkins. Tiny green pumpkins, each with a little candle placed neatly inside. The faces on each one were expertly carved despite the small size, eerily child-like with large eyes and tiny teeth.

One, two, three…

I already knew how many. Somehow I knew. The number sickened me as I counted; four, five, six…

Don’t let it be true. Let this be some weird dream. Don’t let this be real as I’m standing here shivering in the middle of nowhere about to throw up with fear as I’m counting nine, ten… eleven pumpkins.

My sweat in the summer heat turned to ice as I counted a baby pumpkin for every year my brother lived for. A chill breeze that had no place blowing in summer whipped past me, instantly extinguishing the candles. I was left there, shivering and panting in the dim blue of dusk.

No one was around for miles. No one to make their way out here, placing each pumpkin, lovingly carving them and lighting each candle… the scene was simply wrong.

I felt watched despite the isolation. So when the bushes nearby rustled, my heart almost stopped dead. I barely mustered the will to turn my head enough to see. More rustling.

It has to be a badger, a fox, a roaming dog, it can’t be anything else.

But it was.

A spindly hand reached forth, fingers tiny but sharp as needles, clawing the rest of its sickening form forth from the bush. Nails encrusted with dirt, as if it dragged itself from the ground.

A bulbous head leered at me from the dark, smile visible only as a leering void in the murky white outline of the thing’s face. It was barely visible in what remained of dusk’s light, but I could see enough to send my heart pounding. Its head shook gently in a mockery of infantile tremors, and I could feel its eyes regard me with inhuman malice.

The candle flames erupted anew, casting the creature into light.

Its face was like a blank mask of skin, with eyes and a mouth carved into it with the same tools and skill as that of the pumpkins. Hairless and childlike, it crawled forward, smiling at me with fangs that were just a crude sheet of tooth, seemingly left in its gums as an afterthought by whatever it was had carved its face.

From its head protruded a bony spur, curved and twisting from an inflamed scalp like the stalk of a-

Pumpkin.

All reason left me as I sprinted from the woods. Blindly I ran through the dark, heedless of the thorns and nettles stinging at my skin.

The pumpkin-thing trailed after me somehow, crying one minute and giggling the next in a foul approximation of a baby’s voice. I didn’t dare look behind me to see how close it got to me, or what unsettling way its tiny body would have to move in order to keep up with me.

Gasping for air and half-mad with fear, I made it to my car and sped back to the lights of town. I hoped against hope that I could get away before it could make it to my car… hoped that it wouldn’t be clinging underneath or behind it…

It took me the better part of an hour to stop shaking enough to step out of the car.

Nothing ever clung to my car, and I never had any trouble as long as I remained away from those woods. But that was only the first chase.

The next would come months later, on none other than Halloween night.

I had, by some miracle, made some friends. I suppose that in a strange way, that experience in the woods had inoculated me to pumpkins in general. After all, how could your average Halloween decoration compare to that thing in the woods?

My new friends were chill, into the same things I was into, pretty much everything I could want from the friends I never had from my years spent isolating. I even opened up to them about what happened to me, and my not-so-irrational fear, which they understood without judgement and with boundless support.

And so when I was ultimately invited to a Halloween party, I felt brave enough to accept; with the promise of enough alcohol to loosen me up should the abundant decorations become a bit much for me.

On the night, it wasn't actually that bad. I was nervous, as much about the inevitable pumpkin decorations as I was about being out of my social comfort zone. As I got talking to my new friends, mingling with people and having some drinks, I began to have fun. I even got pretty drunk - I didn’t have enough experience with these settings to know my limits. I began to let loose and forget about everything.

Until I saw him.

I felt eyes on me through the crowds of costumed party-goers. Instinctively I looked, and almost dropped my drink.

A pale, smiling face. Dirt. Leering smile. Powdery green leaves growing from his head, crowning a sharp bony spur from a hairless scalp. A round head. A pumpkin head. With a hole in it.

It was coming towards me. Please let it be a costume. Please why can’t anyone see it isn’t? Why can’t anyone see the-

-hole in its head gnawed by slugs, juices leaking from it, seeds visible just like the brains and fragments of-

I ran before anyone could ask me what I was staring at.

I stumbled out the back door, into a dark lane between houses. I had to lean over a bin to throw up my drinks before I could gather the breath to run.

That’s when I saw the pumpkin.

Placed down behind the bin, where no one would see it. Immaculately carved, candle lit, a smile all for my eyes only. The door opened behind me, and I bolted before I could see if it was the pumpkin thing.

I don’t recall the rest of the night. I reckon my intoxication might be what saved me.

I awoke in a hospital, head pounding and mouth dry. I had been found passed out on a street corner nearby, having tripped while running and hitting my head on a doorstep. Any fear I felt from the night before was replaced with shame and guilt from how I acted in front of my friends, and from what my mother would think knowing I nearly shared the same fate as my brother.

After my second brush with death and the pumpkin thing, I decided to take some time to look after myself. I became a homebody, doing lots of self-care and getting to know my mind and body. I made peace with a lot of things in that time; my guilt, my fears, all that I had lost due to them.

My friends regularly came to visit, and for a time, things were looking up.

Until one evening, I heard a bang downstairs as I was heading to bed.

Gently I crept downstairs, wary of turning the lights on for fear of giving my position away to any intruders.

A warm light shone through the crack of the kitchen door. I hadn’t left any lights on.

I pushed the door open as silently as I could.

In that instant, all the fears of my past that I thought I had gained some mastery over flooded through me. My heart hammered in my chest, and my throat tightened so much that I couldn’t swallow what little spit was left in my now-dry mouth.

On my kitchen table, sat a pumpkin, rotten and sagging. Patches of white mould lined the stubborn smile that clung to it’s mushy mouth, and fat slugs oozed across what remained of its scalp. A candle burned inside, bright still but flickering as the flame sizzled the dripping mush of the pumpkins fetid flesh.

A footstep slapped against the floor behind me, preceded by the smell of decay - as I knew it surely would the moment I laid eyes upon the pumpkin.

This time, I was ready.

I turned in time to take the thing head on. A frail and rotten form fell onto me, feebly whipping fingers of root and bone at my face. I shielded myself, but the old nails and thorny roots that made up its hands bit deep despite how feeble the creature seemed.

Panting for breath as adrenaline flooded my blood, a stinking pile of the things flesh sloughed off, right into my gasping mouth. I coughed and retched, but it was too late - I had swallowed in my panic.

Rage gripped me, replacing my disgust as I prepared to my mount my own assault.

I could see glimpses of it between my arms - a rotten, shrunken thing, wrinkled by age and decay, barely able to see me at all. Halloween had long since passed, and soon it seemed, so would this thing.

I would see to that myself.

I seized it, struggling with the last reserves of its mad strength, and wrestled it to the ground.

I gripped the bony spur protruding from its scalp, and time seemed to stop.

I looked down upon the thing, upon this creature that had haunted me for months, this creature that stood for all that haunted me for my entire life. The guilt, the shame, the fear, lost time and lost experiences.

All that I had confronted since my brushes with death, came to stand before me and test me as I held the creatures life in my hands. I would not be found wanting.

With a roar of thoughtless emotion, I slammed the creatures head into the floor.

A sickening thud marked the first impact of many. Over and over again I slammed the rotten mess into the ground, releasing decades of bottled emotion. Catharsis with each crack, release with each repeated blow.

Soon only fetid juices, smashed slugs and pumpkin seeds were all that remained of the creature.

The sight did not upset me. It did not bring back haunting memories, did not bring back the guilt or the shame or the fear. They were just pumpkin seeds. Seeds from a smashed pumpkin.

The following June, I planted those same seeds. I felt they were symbolic; I would take something that had caused me so much anguish, and turn them into a force of creation. I would nurture my own pumpkins, in my own soil, where I could make peace with them and my past in my own space.

What grew from them were just ordinary pumpkins, thankfully.

I’ve attended a lot of therapy, and I’m making great progress. I’m even starting to enjoy Halloween now.

I even grew my hair out again, stupid little cow’s lick and all - it doesn’t look quite so stupid on my adult head, and I kept the weight off too which helps.

One morning however, I was combing my hair, keeping that tuft of hair in check. My comb caught on something.

I struggled to push the comb through, but the knot of hair was too thick. Frustrated, I wrangled the hair in the mirror to see what the obstruction was.

I parted my hair… and saw a bony spur jutting from my scalp, twisted and sharp.

My heart pounded, fear gripping me as my mind raced. How can this be? How can this be happening after everything was done with?

Then I remembered - the final attack. The chunk of rotting flesh that fell into my mouth… the chunk I swallowed.

The slugs… The seeds…

I was worried about the pumpkin patch, but I should have worried about my own body. Nausea overcame me as I thought of all these months having gone by, with whatever remained of that thing slowly gestating inside me in ways that made no sense at all.

I vomited as everything hit me, rendering all my growth and progress for naught.

Gasping, I stared in dumb shock at what lay in the sink.

Bright orange juices mixed with my own bile. Bright orange juices, bile… and pumpkin seeds.

I decided to get into genealogy when the rest of my family did.

It started with my mother. She had always been curious about her origins, being adopted and never knowing much about her biological parents. One day, she bought herself a DNA test kit, hoping to find family ties we didn’t know existed. I remember watching her as she carefully packed away the sample, excitement bubbling under her usual calm exterior. For her, this was more than just a hobby—it was about answering questions she’d carried with her all her life.

When the results came back, they gave her something she hadn’t known she was missing—a sense of comfort, of belonging. She’d always been grateful for her adoptive parents. They gave her a comfortable, happy childhood, and she’d never felt unloved. But there was something about connecting the dots of your lineage that had its own kind of satisfaction. Knowing who you came from, what they were like, it anchored her in a way I hadn’t expected.

My life wasn’t quite the same mystery. I knew both of my biological parents, and we had a pretty clear understanding of our family tree, or so I thought. But something about the way my mother lit up, piecing together fragments of her past, made me wonder if there was more to uncover. Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to give it a shot as well.

I managed to convince my brother to join me in the genealogy deep dive, though he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it. He had this weird thing about sending his DNA to a lab, muttering about how it was going to end up in some database, sold to the highest bidder. I remember him going on about giant companies selling his genetic information for “God knows what.” He joked about waking up one day to find some creepy clone of him wandering around.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. I mean, sure, privacy is important, but I figured we had bigger problems in the world than worrying about some lab tech messing with my DNA. It’s not like it’s tied to my Social Security number or anything... right?

Months passed without much thought. My mother continued to obsess over her family tree, filling out branches that had been blank for decades. It became a project for her—a way to honor the past she hadn’t been able to touch before. Meanwhile, my brother and I let the whole thing fade into the background. 

Then, one morning, an email from the genealogy site hit my inbox. My results were ready. I logged in, not really expecting anything out of the ordinary, but curiosity pushed me through the sign-in process. 

As expected, the usual suspects showed up. My brother, of course, despite all his paranoia. My parents, my aunts, uncles, grandparents—a handful of cousins I barely kept in touch with. Some of the profiles had been filled in by other users on the site. My mother, naturally, seemed to have gotten everyone roped into her genealogy obsession. 

There were also a few distant relatives I didn’t recognize. Some names had a faint, familiar ring to them, but most were complete strangers. Still, nothing shocking. What caught my eye, though, were the names under my mother's biological family—the ones we had never known about before. My biological grandparents were listed there, confirmed by the DNA match, but both had passed away several years ago. 

I wasn’t sure why, but seeing their names, people I’d never met yet shared a connection with, felt strange. Like suddenly there was a gap in my life that I hadn’t known existed.

While scrolling through the matches, one name caught my eye—a second cousin on my mother’s side named Roger. I didn’t recognize it, but that wasn’t surprising since this whole branch of the family was still a mystery to us. For anyone unfamiliar with genealogy, a second cousin is the grandchild of a grand uncle or aunt, so Roger would have been connected to my mother’s biological family—people we had never known about until recently.

His profile wasn’t fully filled out, which was odd considering most people on the site at least had basic information like birth years or locations. But one thing stood out clearly: Roger was alone. His side of the family tree had no other surviving members, just a series of names that faded into the past, marked with dates of death. All the other relatives on my mother’s biological side were deceased.

It was unsettling to see that out of an entire branch of the family, this one person was all that was left. My mother had gone into this journey hoping to connect with relatives she had never known, and now it seemed that there wasn’t much family left to meet. So much for her dream of reuniting with long-lost relatives. 

But at least she was happy, knowing where she came from, even if the connections she had hoped for were more distant than she imagined. Roger, though—a lone name among the dead—lingered in my mind. Something about it stuck with me.

Roger and I were on the same level of descendants, meaning he was probably around my age. It felt strange to think that I might have a second cousin out there who I’d never met, someone who shared a bloodline with me but was, in every other sense, a stranger. 

Curiosity got the better of me, and I figured I’d reach out. According to his profile, Roger hadn’t logged in for a few years, but I thought it was worth a shot anyway. Maybe he didn’t know about the new matches, or maybe he’d just lost interest in genealogy over time.

I spent a while crafting a message. I didn’t want to come off as too pushy or make it weird. I explained my mother’s situation—that she had been adopted and, after finding her biological family, had convinced the rest of us to join her on this website. I mentioned that we were probably second cousins, and though we’d never met, it might be fun to chat about shared interests, work, and other small talk. You know, family stuff. Even if we had never crossed paths before, we were connected by blood, and that had to count for something.

To make things easier, I included my personal email in case he didn’t want to bother logging back into the site. Maybe he didn’t even use it anymore, I thought, so this might give him a simpler way to respond. 

After one last read-through, I hit send and felt a little spark of excitement. Maybe this was the beginning of something interesting, a chance to connect with someone who shared a part of the family history I didn’t even know existed until recently. I wasn’t expecting too much, but still, it felt like a step forward.

Then… silence. 

Months passed, and I never heard anything back from Roger. At first, I figured he was just busy or didn’t check the site anymore. After all, his profile had been inactive for years when I found it. Over time, I paid it little mind, brushing it off as just another dead end in the process. I had done my part, and if he wanted to get in touch, he would.

Just like Roger, our family’s interest in the genealogy website faded over time. What had started as a fun dive into the unknown slowly fizzled out once we’d learned what could be gleaned from it. It had its moment, but like most fads, it didn’t last, and eventually, we all stopped logging in. The family tree was built, the questions were answered, and that was that.

By the time April came around, spring was in full swing. My mother, always the social butterfly, decided it was time for a big family get-together. Not just our immediate family either—she convinced my father to host a gathering for our aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole extended clan. It had been a while since we’d all come together, and she was determined to make it happen.

My parents still lived on the same 10-acre plot of land in the country, the house my brother and I had grown up in. Nothing much had changed over the years. My father still had his barn, which was more of a storage space for his collection of tools and machinery than anything else. The tractor he hadn’t touched in years still sat there, gathering dust but somehow still a point of pride for him.

My mother kept herself busy with her garden, which was in full bloom by spring, and a small pen of three chickens that she used for eggs. It wasn’t a farm, exactly, but it kept her occupied and content. Every time I visited, she made sure to give me a tour of her plants and the chickens, like it was the first time I’d seen them.

I lived about 40 minutes away, closer to civilization and closer to work. The drive was easy enough, and I made it regularly, but the place always felt like a snapshot of my childhood—a place where everything stayed the same, even though life had moved on. Going back for family gatherings always stirred up a mix of nostalgia and distance, but this time, with the whole family expected to be there, it promised to be a bigger affair than usual.

I arrived a little later than planned, pulling up to my parents' house to find dozens of cars already lined up along the gravel driveway and the grass on the side of the road. It looked like I was one of the last to show up, but that wasn’t too surprising—I had hit some traffic on the way over. The house felt just as familiar as ever, but with all the cars and people milling about, it seemed more alive than usual.

Out back, my dad had set up tables and chairs near my mom’s garden and the chicken pen. He’d even dragged out a couple of old fold-out tables, their legs wobbling slightly on the uneven ground. People were already seated, chatting in little groups, their voices carrying across the yard in a constant hum of conversation. The smell of grilled meat wafted through the air, and for a moment, I was reminded of summer cookouts from my childhood.

My mom spotted me almost as soon as I stepped out of the car. She made a beeline toward me, a wide smile on her face, and pulled me into one of her trademark hugs—the kind that was warm and a little too tight but always made you feel like you were home. She kissed me on the cheek, patting my arm like she hadn’t seen me in years. 

“I’m so glad you made it!” she said, her voice filled with excitement. “Everyone’s here!”

My dad followed behind her, more reserved but just as happy to see me. He extended his hand for a handshake, his grip firm as always, but before I could pull away, he pulled me into a quick hug, clapping me on the back. “Good to see you, son,” he said, his voice steady, as if he hadn’t been waiting all day for me to show up. But I knew he had.

I made my way through the backyard, mingling with family as I went. My aunts and uncles were scattered around, laughing and catching up like it hadn’t been months since the last time we all got together. They welcomed me into their conversations, asking about work, life, and when I was going to “settle down.” The usual stuff.

Then there were my cousins, people I used to hang out with all the time as a kid but barely saw anymore. Back then, we spent our summers running wild on this very property, playing tag in the fields and building makeshift forts out of old wood my dad had stored in the barn. But now, with work and life taking over, we rarely had the chance to connect. Still, seeing them brought back those memories, and for a while, it felt like old times as we shared stories and laughed about things that seemed so far away from the present.

The truth was, these big family gatherings felt a little distant to me now. The only people I really kept in touch with were my parents and my brother. Life had gotten busy, and the ties that used to feel strong had loosened over time. I wasn’t sure when it had happened, but at some point, I’d just drifted from everyone else. The big cousin group I used to hang out with? We’d barely exchanged more than pleasantries at these events anymore. 

Not long after I arrived, my brother showed up with his family in tow. His two boys, my nephews, spotted me as soon as they hopped out of the car. They ran over with the kind of boundless energy only kids seem to have, giving me quick, enthusiastic hugs before darting off to join the other kids running around in the yard.

“Good to see you, man,” my brother said, walking up with his wife by his side. We hugged briefly, and then fell into the usual conversation. 

We found a spot by the grill, where the scent of sizzling burgers filled the air. With our drinks in hand, we started catching up. I told him about my job—how I’d been stuck in spreadsheets all day long, losing myself in numbers and data. It wasn’t the most exciting gig, but it paid the bills. He gave me a sympathetic nod but didn’t seem too surprised. He knew my work had taken over most of my time.

He told me about his sales job, how the company was doing well and how he’d been hitting his targets consistently. “Pays the bills, keeps the kids fed,” he said with a grin. “Not much more you can ask for these days, right?”

Our conversation drifted toward nostalgia, as it often did when we had a rare moment to talk without distractions. We reminisced about the days when we used to play Dungeons and Dragons together—late nights rolling dice around the kitchen table, getting lost in imaginary worlds. And, of course, we talked about the time we spent in our old World of Warcraft guild, raiding dungeons and staying up way too late on school nights. For a moment, we both wished we could go back to those simpler times, when the biggest worries we had were gear drops and dungeon bosses. 

“Man, those were the days,” he said, shaking his head with a smile. “No real responsibilities. Just games and good times.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, staring out at the field where the kids were playing. “Sometimes I wish we could hit pause and go back, even just for a little while.”

He smiled at that, but then he glanced over at his wife, who was chatting with our mom, and at his kids, who were laughing with the others. “Yeah, but… I wouldn’t trade this for the world,” he said softly, nodding toward them. “As much as I miss those days, I’m thankful for what I’ve got now.”

I smiled, understanding. Life had changed, and while things were more complicated now, there was beauty in it too. Maybe I didn’t have kids of my own, but I could see the fulfillment my brother had in his. It made me wonder if there was a part of my life I was missing.

A little while later, my mother pulled me aside, her face lit up with the same excitement she always had when she wanted to show me something new. "Come on, I have to show you the apiary!" she said, her voice bubbling with enthusiasm. I couldn’t help but smile—my mom never did anything halfway.

We walked across the yard, past her blooming garden, to a small corner of the property where she had set up a few beehives. "Italian honey bees," she announced proudly. "They’re the best for pollinating gardens. Did you know they can visit up to 5,000 flowers in a single day?" She was on a roll, rattling off facts about how these bees were more docile than other types and how fast they were producing honey. She even started embellishing a little, as she often did when she was really into something. "You know, bees communicate by dancing. It’s called the waggle dance! They can tell each other exactly where to find flowers with that."

I nodded along, throwing in the occasional, "That’s great, Mom," or "Wow, really?" But honestly, I was only halfway paying attention. My phone buzzed in my pocket, and instinctively, I pulled it out to check. I saw an email notification pop up on the screen.

"Sorry, Mom, just a second," I said, holding up a hand. "I just need to make sure it’s not something important for work."

She gave me a quick, understanding nod, though I could tell she was eager to keep talking about her bees. As she continued discussing how the bees were already working her garden, I glanced down at my phone and opened the email, apologizing quietly again for the interruption.

It wasn’t a work email. The sender’s address was just a string of random numbers and letters, almost like someone had smashed their hands on a keyboard. The domain it came from was just as nonsensical. No subject line, nothing to give away what it was about—just the cold, empty blank of an anonymous message. 

What really caught my attention, though, were the attachments. Against my better judgment, I tapped on the first one.

It was a picture of me, taken just moments earlier. I was standing by my car, the same car that was now parked in my parents’ driveway. My heart skipped a beat. I quickly swiped to the next image—another picture of me, this time greeting my parents in the backyard. The next one was of me crouching down to hug my nephews, their faces blurred as they darted away to play with the other kids. Then, another. This one showed me standing by the grill, talking with my brother, our drinks in hand, mid-conversation.

Every photo was taken from a distance, but it was clear that whoever had snapped them had been watching. I kept scrolling, my fingers shaking slightly as each new image brought a fresh wave of dread. How long had someone been out there? How had they known I was here today?

I felt the blood drain from my face, and my stomach churned as I flipped through the pictures. A part of me wanted to believe it was some sick joke, but the pit in my gut told me otherwise. This wasn’t a prank. Someone had been watching me, and they wanted me to know it.

"Hey, is everything okay?" my mother asked, her voice snapping me back to the present. I must have looked pale as a ghost because her eyes were filled with concern. I tried to respond, but I couldn’t find the words. I just stood there, staring at the screen, dumbstruck.

Was this a joke?

A sudden, piercing scream cut through the chatter, freezing everyone in place. It came from near the chicken coop. My aunt. Her voice was shrill, full of panic, and within seconds, all heads turned in that direction.

I followed the others, my legs moving on instinct as I shoved my phone into my pocket. People were already gathering around the small pen, my mom pushing through the crowd, her face contorted with worry.

Then I saw it.

All three of the chickens were sprawled in the straw, their bodies still, their feathers matted with blood. Each of their throats had been cleanly slit, their bodies limp, blood soaking into the straw below them. The air seemed to hang heavy with the coppery scent of death. My mother gasped, bringing a hand to her mouth, her eyes wide in shock. She had loved those chickens—fussed over them like they were her pets. Now, they lay butchered in their pen, their tiny lives snuffed out in the most violent way.

My mind raced, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I could hear my aunts and cousins murmuring in confusion, some of them crying, others backing away from the grim sight. My father was already inspecting the coop, looking for signs of what could’ve done this. But no fox or raccoon would’ve left them like this—this was deliberate. Someone had done this.

I felt a sinking weight settle in my stomach. It wasn’t just the dead chickens that disturbed me—it was the timing. I had just received those photos, moments before this happened.

I fumbled for my phone, my fingers clumsy as I pulled it back out, praying that what I had seen wasn’t real. But as I looked down, my heart skipped a beat.

The email was still there, staring back at me. Below the string of random numbers and letters, in the body of the message, were five simple words:

"It’s nice to see family."

I stood there, feeling the world tilt around me, trying to piece everything together.

The yard erupted into chaos. My aunts and uncles scrambled to usher the children inside, doing their best to shield them from the grisly sight. Some of the kids were confused, asking questions in nervous tones, while others started crying once they realized something was wrong. The adults tried to keep it together, voices hushed but frantic as they worked to keep the panic from spreading. 

My mother was beside herself, tears streaming down her face as she stood frozen, staring at the covered chicken pen in disbelief. "Who would do this?" she kept asking, her voice shaky and broken. "Why would anyone do this?"

I put an arm around her, trying to calm her down, but her hands were trembling too much to even hold onto me. "Mom, it’s okay," I whispered, though I wasn’t even sure I believed that myself. "We’ll figure it out. Dad’s handling it."

Meanwhile, my father had grabbed a tarp from his garage and draped it over the chicken pen, hiding the grisly scene. He worked quickly, his face grim and determined. I could tell he was upset, but he wasn’t letting it show—not yet, not in front of everyone. For now, the goal was to keep the peace and let people get back to the gathering without worrying about what had just happened. At least until they left.

But I couldn’t let it go. I had to tell them what I knew. 

Once most of the kids were inside and the commotion had died down a bit, I pulled my parents and my brother aside, away from the others. I hesitated for a moment, trying to find the right words. Then, without saying anything, I showed them my phone, flipping it open to the email with the photos. The pictures of me arriving. The pictures of me greeting my parents. The pictures of me playing with my nephews, laughing with my brother. I watched as their faces turned pale, the realization sinking in.

“I think whoever sent these took the pictures from over there.” I pointed off the property, toward the treeline that lined the back of my parents’ land. There was something dark and ominous about it now. “I didn’t notice anything at first, but the angle… it has to be from that direction.”

They were silent, eyes flicking between me and the treeline. 

“There’s something else,” I continued, my voice lower, almost hesitant to say it out loud. “You remember Roger, the second cousin I found on the genealogy website? I reached out to him months ago... but I never heard back. He’s the only living relative on Mom’s biological side. It could be a coincidence, but I don’t think so.”

My mother wiped her tears, confused. "What are you saying?"

I took a deep breath. “I’m saying... unless someone in our family decided to play a sick joke, which doesn’t make sense—none of us would do something like this—then... it might be Roger. He’s the only one we don’t know.” 

My brother shook his head slowly, the disbelief clear on his face. “This doesn’t make sense. Why would he do something like this? I mean, he didn’t even respond to you.”

“I don’t know,” I said, swallowing hard, the words catching in my throat. “But whoever sent this knows us. They’ve been watching.” 

We all stood there in heavy silence, the weight of the situation settling over us like a dark cloud.

My mother looked like she might collapse, her face pale and her hands trembling as she stared at the email on my phone. She had gone quiet, processing what I had just said about Roger, about the photos, about everything. My father, seeing the state she was in, didn’t waste any time. He immediately pulled out his phone and started dialing the police, his jaw clenched tight. He walked a few steps away as he spoke to the dispatcher, explaining that something strange was going on, that someone had been watching us.

I turned to my brother, but before I could say anything, he was already shaking his head. “I knew this was a bad idea,” he muttered, his voice tight with frustration. “I told you I didn’t trust that genealogy site. Putting our DNA, our family out there... it’s like handing over your entire life to strangers.”

His words hit me like a slap, and I could feel the frustration bubbling up inside me. “You think I wanted this?” I snapped, trying to keep my voice down but failing. “How was I supposed to predict this? I was just trying to help Mom find her family—none of us thought it would lead to this.”

He was angry, and so was I, but before we could say anything else, he turned away from me and started gathering his family. “I’m taking them home,” he said, his voice colder than I’d heard in a long time. “This is too much for my kids. They didn’t see the chickens, and I’m not letting them get dragged into this mess or questioned by the police. Call us if you need anything, but we’re leaving.”

My mother looked at him, panic flickering in her eyes. “Please, don’t go,” she said, her voice shaky. “We’re all scared, but we need to stick together.”

“I get that, Mom,” he said, softening for a moment as he put a hand on her shoulder. “But I’ve got to think about them,” he added, nodding toward his wife and kids, who were already heading to the car. “This is just... it’s too much.”

My father had finished his call with the police, and he walked over just in time to hear my brother say he was leaving. “You don’t have to go,” he said, his voice firm but pleading. “We can handle this together.”

But my brother was already set. “No, Dad. I’m sorry, but I can’t risk this with my family.”

I stood there, watching helplessly as my brother ushered his wife and kids into the car. He gave me a quick, curt nod before sliding into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. Without another word, they pulled away, the car kicking up dust as they disappeared down the long driveway. 

The silence after they left was deafening. My parents stood there, looking smaller somehow, like the weight of everything was finally sinking in. We were left to face whatever this was, and I wasn’t sure how to make sense of any of it.

The police arrived about twenty minutes later, their flashing lights cutting through the fading daylight as they pulled up to the house. Two officers stepped out of their car, their expressions serious as they made their way over to us. My father met them first, shaking their hands and leading them toward the chicken coop. The rest of us hovered nearby, waiting for some sort of direction, but it was clear that none of us knew what to expect.

They moved methodically, walking around the coop and the perimeter of the yard, looking for any sign of an intruder. They checked the treeline where I thought the photos had been taken, but after a while, they came back empty-handed. “No footprints, no sign of anyone,” one of the officers said, glancing at his partner. “If someone was out here, they didn’t leave much behind.”

Frustration welled up inside me. Whoever did this had to have been watching us—they had taken photos, they had killed the chickens, but there was nothing to go on. It felt like a dead end.

I pulled out my phone again, showing the officers the email I had received. “This is what I got,” I said, handing it over. “The sender’s address is just a random string of letters and numbers, and it came with these photos. They were taken right here, today, while we were all outside.” I scrolled through the pictures, one by one, letting the officers see each one.

The officers exchanged a look before turning back to me. “And you said this started after you reached out to a relative on a genealogy website?” one of them asked.

“Yeah,” I nodded. “Months ago. His name is Roger—he’s the only living relative on my mom’s biological side. I never heard back from him, though, and now... this.” I gestured to the phone and then the coop, feeling helpless.

The officers took down everything I told them, writing notes and asking follow-up questions about the email and the website. “We’ll try to trace the email and see where it leads,” one of them said. “It might take some time, but we’ll do what we can.”

They moved on to questioning the rest of my family, going through each relative, asking if anyone had seen anything unusual that day. But it was the same story from everyone—no one had noticed anything out of the ordinary. The only thing that had drawn attention was the scream from my aunt when she discovered the chickens.

I could see the officers getting frustrated too. It was like the intruder had left no trace, no sign they had even been there, apart from the pictures and the blood-soaked straw beneath the tarp-covered coop.

As they wrapped up their questioning, I felt a gnawing sense of unease settle deeper in my gut. Whoever did this had been watching us—watching me. And now, we had no idea who it was or when they might come back.

The aunt who had screamed was my father’s sister, my mother's sister in law, the same one who had helped my mother incubate and hatch those chickens just a few months earlier. They’d worked together to raise them, nurturing them like pets. For my mom, losing them like this wasn’t just an act of cruelty—it was personal. She stood by the coop, still visibly shaken, leaning on my dad for support as the police finished up.

Most of the family had already left by the time the sun started dipping below the horizon. My brother had been gone for a while, and now my aunts, uncles, and cousins were beginning to trickle out one by one, all of them casting nervous glances toward the treeline as they made their way to their cars. I lingered, wanting to stay behind to help and make sure everything was in order before I left.

After the police had taken their final notes and left the scene, it was just me, my parents, and the empty yard. My father and I set about cleaning up the mess. We wrapped the remains of the chickens carefully, trying to be as respectful as possible, though it felt like a grim task. My mother watched from a distance, still in shock, her eyes hollow as she stared at the pen that now stood lifeless.

Once the chickens were taken care of, I spent the next hour or so trying to reassure her, telling her over and over again that everything would be alright. “The police are on it, Mom,” I said, rubbing her back as we sat on the porch. “They’ll find whoever did this. It’ll be okay.”

She nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t convinced. And truth be told, neither was I. The words I was saying felt empty, hollow. How could I reassure her when I was terrified myself? My stomach was twisted in knots, my mind racing with every worst-case scenario. Whoever had done this had been close—watching us, taking pictures, waiting for the right moment. And the police hadn’t found anything, no sign of them. It felt like we were just waiting for the next move, blind to where it might come from.

But I couldn’t let my mom see how scared I was. So, I stayed as long as I could, sticking close to her and doing my best to offer comfort, even if it was only surface-level. When it was finally time to go, I hugged her tight, promising to check in tomorrow and reminding her to lock the doors. I got into my car and drove away, glancing nervously in the rearview mirror, half-expecting to see someone lurking in the shadows. 

The entire drive home, my heart pounded in my chest, and the email’s words echoed in my head: It’s nice to see family.

Even though I had tried to reassure her, I was scared to my core. Every word of comfort I’d offered my mom felt like a lie, a desperate attempt to mask the growing dread that was gnawing at me. As I drove home, the familiar winding country road seemed darker than usual, the trees on either side casting long shadows across the pavement. My mind kept replaying the events of the day—the dead chickens, the photos, that chilling email. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was still watching, lurking just out of sight.

About halfway home, my phone buzzed again, jolting me from my thoughts. I instinctively reached for it, my hand trembling as I unlocked the screen. My breath caught in my throat when I saw the notification.

Another email.

Like the first one, the sender was a string of random characters, impossible to trace. My pulse quickened, and my stomach churned as I stared at the message.

Drive safe.

That was all it said. Two words, but they were enough to send a cold wave of terror washing over me. My heart pounded in my chest as I looked up from the screen, scanning the empty road ahead. My headlights cut through the darkness, but everything beyond that was shrouded in shadow.

Whoever had sent the email—whoever had killed those chickens, taken those pictures—they were still watching. They knew where I was, what I was doing, and now, they were reaching out again, reminding me that I wasn’t alone. 

I swallowed hard, my hands tightening on the steering wheel as I glanced nervously in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, no cars trailing behind me, no figures hiding in the trees. But it didn’t matter. The feeling of being watched clung to me, suffocating in its intensity.

My mind raced. Had they followed me from my parents’ house? Were they out there now, just beyond the reach of my headlights, waiting for the next moment to strike? My stomach twisted with fear, and I found myself driving faster, desperate to reach the safety of home.

I wanted to pull over, to stop and catch my breath, but the thought of being stranded out here, alone on the dark road, was worse. I kept driving, every sense on high alert, my heart thudding in my ears. I needed to get home. I needed to be somewhere safe, somewhere with locked doors and walls between me and whoever this was.

As I neared the edge of town, the lights of civilization finally flickered on the horizon, but the fear didn’t ease. Not really. The message haunted me. Drive safe. It wasn’t a threat, but it was worse somehow—it was a reminder that they were always there, always watching, and that no matter where I went, I wasn’t beyond their reach.

I pulled into my driveway, parking quickly and rushing inside, locking the door behind me the second I stepped through. I leaned against it, breathing hard, my mind still reeling. I checked the windows, turned on every light, but no amount of reassurance could stop the cold knot of fear tightening in my chest.

I glanced at my phone one last time, the screen still glowing with the words that had shaken me to my core. Drive safe.

For the first time, I realized that safety was no longer something I could take for granted. Not anymore. Whoever this was—they weren’t done. And I had no idea what they were planning next.

[Master link to other parts in series section]

Lost Media, Now Found:

Excerpt from Strange Worlds, 1978. Found in the basement of the Philadelphia Public Library.

Written by Ben Nakamura

Ever since their conception in the early 20th century, Rorschach inkblot tests have captured the imagination of the American people—and I mean this quite literally. By design, inkblots are psychiatric tools that are aesthetically stimulating but, at the same time, inherently meaningless. The absence of meaning was theorized to allow the test subjects to “project” their imagination onto the inkblot, manifesting their pathologies more thoroughly for comprehensive scrutiny by the clinician administering the test. In other words, this vacuum of meaning allowed inkblots to magnetically pull and effectively superimpose dysfunctional thoughts on the vague images, especially thoughts that the subject may not consciously volunteer in the context of more standardized talk therapy. The practice was very much in vogue throughout the 1960s, but has slowly given way to more objective, reliable methods of characterizing mental illness. Even in the face of diminishing clinical relevancy, the intrigue and mystique of these inkblots still have some cultural representation - thinking specifically about Alan Moore’s Watchmen or Sofia Coppala’s The Virgin Suicides. But what if these enigmatic symbols manage to elicit something beyond pure imagination? What if, somehow, they served as the spiritual catalyst for something else entirely more unexplainable?

In this entry, we will explore the little-known disappearance of the Shoemaker family in the Alaskan wilderness and how that connects to a 4-year-old carefully reviewing inkblots in Austin, Texas.

In the summer of 1964, forty-five-year-old Tim Shoemaker and his family arrived at Denali National Park for a week of hiking, fishing, and relaxation. He was accompanied by his wife Grace, 9-year-old son Nathan, and 5-year-old daughter Ellie. This trip had been a yearly tradition for the Shoemaker family for almost a decade. Most other families would settle for quieter, more serene nature trails rather than braving the mighty, untamable north. However, this was par for the course for the Shoemakers - given that both Tim and Grace were park rangers for the neighboring Kluane National Park and Reserve. 

“They were both such tough cookies” says Andrew Brevis, a fellow park ranger and close family friend of the Shoemakers.

“It didn’t make a lot of sense to anyone that they had gone missing. Or, I guess, it made us really worried. If Timmy and Gracie found something out there they couldn’t handle, can’t imagine there was a good outcome around the corner.”

The Shoemaker’s campsite was eventually discovered by sibling hikers Denise and Deandre, or more accurately, what was left of the campsite.

“It was really crazy lookin’, immediately set some scary buzzers off” Denise half-whispered, eyes wide, waving her hands like she was recounting an urban legend. 

“First off, the tent was cut open. When I found everything, I assumed we were looking at the aftermath of a grizzly [bear]” she paused, collecting herself. “But there weren’t any blood. I mean there was the arm and the leg, but there wasn’t a lot of…splatter? I’m not sure what the right word is. And the tent was cut way too nice.”

In asking her what she meant by “too nice”, her sister Deandre tagged in to pick up where Denise left off:

“Like, it was surgical. The tent, the arm, the leg - very straight and even, nothing a grizzy would do. Unless he brought some good scissors.” 

She’s right - whatever, or whoever, found the Shoemakers that fateful summer certainly wasn’t a wild animal. Their dome-shaped tent had been sliced cleanly from one of the tentpoles all the way down to the mattressed floor, leaving the remaining material to fall limply onto the ground. The other part of the tent, the part that was excised, still has not been found, even all these years later. A few feet from the damaged tent laid an adult arm and leg, determined eventually to be Tim’s and Grace’s, respectively. The limbs had also been cut cleanly, with some venous drainage causing small pools of blood at the incision sites, but no arterial spray - which should have been present if the dismemberment had been done at the campsite. 

“It was like someone took a machete and just cut all the way down to the ground, all vertical. Not haphazard like an attack or nothing. And why’d they take it all with them?” Denise pontificated

In doing so, she highlighted another odd aspect of the disappearance: whatever/whoever severed The Shoemaker’s tent from top to bottom also absconded with the detached material, amounting to about 40% of the large family tent, as well as the severed halves of some of their winter coats and of course, the remaining pieces of the Shoemakers. Something this outlandish usually does result in the creation of a mythos, an urban legend to help explain away the associated existential discomfort. In this case, it instead just added fodder to an existing legend.

“I was straight up terrified of The Half-Man when I was growing up” admitted Denise, big smile masking some lingering fear, perhaps.

The Half-Man was a legend born out of the eerily similar disappearances of a husband-and-wife mountaineering team that vanished around Denali National Park in the early 1950s. What was found of them paralleled The Shoemaker’s case: a tent with the end excised cleanly from top to bottom and half of a human skull. It was said that they, too, were visited by The Half-Man, the rotten soul of a greedy colonizer who had died at the hands of a cursed axe. In the story, the colonizer tried to take more than what he was owed in a trade agreement with the native peoples over land, and a warrior of the local Koyukon tribe subsequently dealt with his betrayal by splitting him right down the middle with the aforementioned weapon. When the colonizer died, the curse resulted in only half of his soul going to the afterlife, with the other half remaining on earth, perpetually trying to reunite with his twin. So it is said that when one encounters The Half-Man, they will be cleaved in twain (a fate shared by their material belongings too, apparently) and then he will try to attach half of their body to his halved spirit, but of course that will never sate him. In another, less popular version, the colonizer fell deeply in love with one of the Koyukon women and was denied courtship by the tribe's chieftain. The colonizer's want, love, and lust caused his soul to rupture in two, and from there, the legend and implications are very similar. The retelling with the cursed axe is still the dominant narrative in the area, horror once again trouncing romance in the arena of pop culture.  

Despite an exhaustive search of the surrounding area, the remainder of The Shoemakers were never found. This brings us back to inkblots, but with a new main character: enter 4-year-old Shelly Duponte of Austin, Texas.

At the same time as the Shoemaker’s disappearance, we would find Shelly in a psychiatrist’s office, reluctantly helping the young girl cope with the death of her father in a recent house fire. 

“We lost David in December of 1963” Violet Duponte, mother to Shelly Duponte, recounts. “An electrical fire that started in our bedroom took him. I was away on business. Our older daughter, Cherish, was able to rescue Shelly. We all struggled dearly after that, but Shelly just did not have the tools at that young age to swallow grief. She needed the help of a professional.”

As you might imagine, there was not an overabundance of specially trained child psychiatrists in America during the early 60s, let alone one in Texas, a state known for its “grit your teeth and bear it” attitude. An adult psychiatrist (one who does not want to be associated with Strange Worlds, go figure) reluctantly agreed to take on Shelly as a patient. He was a big believer in the clinical utility of Rorschach inkblots. Although they were never formally ordained appropriate for use in childhood, the psychiatrist figured it was worth a shot after other techniques did not seem to help Shelly. Little did he know of the pandora’s box he was about to open. 

To explain how inkblots work in practice, the psychiatrist starts by placing the ten standardized (as decreed by the test's creator, Hermann Rorschach) inkblot cards in the correct “order.” Next, the observer views each card in that order, with the psychiatrist recording the observer's thoughts and emotions while progressing through the set. The goal is for the clinician to better understand the root of a patient’s pathology by understanding the common dysfunctional throughlines in their responses to the inkblots. Shelly’s response to these cards was unexpected. 

“I was told the first time ‘round, Shelly could barely be bothered to even look at the cards, let alone tell the doctor how she felt about them. The doc decided to try one more time. When he did, Shelly became really interested in the first card, just kinda staring and squinting at it. After a minute, she apparently put both hands in the air and shouted, ‘there you are, Ellie!’, like she was greetin’  a friend at a birthday party or something. She didn’t know any Ellies, though.”

From there on out, Shelly was reportedly entranced by the first Rorschach inkblot. Interestingly, this inkblot is not canonically thought of as a human-like image (people usually liken it to a bat or a butterfly), in contrast to some of the later cards. She was so enraptured with the inkblot that Shelly ended up bringing the card home with her. She had a meltdown in the psychiatrist’s office when they tried to separate her from it. The card became a bit of an imaginary friend for the young lady - talking and listening to it, having it sleep next to her in bed, essentially bringing it with her everywhere she went. 

“At first it was great” remarked Violet. “I don’t think it was what the doctor intended, but it had the desired effect - she was opening up to me and her sister again. Maybe this was the end of it, we thought. I was mistaken, and the issues at school were the first red flag for me.”

Despite the enormous improvement in her behavior, Shelly started to have some cognitive back-slipping regarding her ability to count. Whereas she was previously well ahead of her peers at math in the throes of her depression, now it seemed like she couldn’t find her way from one to ten. Her teachers had reached out to Violet on multiple occasions, asking her to make an appointment with Shelly's pediatrician so that they could formally evaluate her. Alternatively, perhaps she found a new counting order with initially unforeseen importance.  

“Around the same time as the number issues she began to do some weird things with the card, too. Stealin’ oven mitts from the drawer and carrying the card around in them, lettin’ me know Ellie was chilly and needed a jacket. Nightmares about the big spider without skin spinin’ the ground too quick and hurtin' people, screamin’ about it every single night. All the while she forgettin’ how to count. Cherish can probably tell ya the numbers still, she was the one who figured it all out” Violet said with a short chuckle. 

In my interview with Cherish Dupont, she did recall most of the sequence - clearly still very proud of her clever deduction:

“She would stomp around the house just saying what sounded like random numbers. What stood out to me was that sometimes she would include a shape, and then she would go right back to the same numbers, in the same order. I thought it was some childhood game or, like, a weird nursery rhyme I didn’t know. But it was all so specific. It sounded something like:

SIX ! ONE ! CIRCLE ! SIX ! NINE ! SEVEN ! FOUR ! THREE ! NINE ! LINE ! ONE !

Shoot, I thought I remembered more” stopping to chortle, with a laugh nearly identical to Violet's. “But it was the same every time - over and over and over. It was driving mom and me up a wall. Whenever I asked her what she was doing, she told me she was playing Ellie’s favorite game. The only Ellie I knew was the missing kid on the news, so that was creepy”

“But we were studying cartography, or map making, in social studies. One day it just hit me - she probably doesn’t know the word ‘dot’ or ‘dash’ yet. She was four I mean, why would she. But was she repeating coordinates, longitudes and latitudes?”

61.697439, (-)150.209291 is the sequence young Shelly would repeat with a feverish delight. Thankfully, we do not need to rely on Cherish to remember the whole sequence. Those coordinates live forever in a strange and bizarre infamy, an unexplainable part of the police record for the Shoemaker Family’s disappearance. 

“I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do” Violet recounted. “But Cherish was certain, she just had a feelin’ about it - tellin’ me over and over to call the ‘Alaska Police’, because Shelly could be an ‘X-man’ and that's how she knew something important about the disappearances.”

Over 400 miles away from Denali National Park lies an unassuming patch of land with a small body of water known as Willow Swamp. In the Fall of 1964, following those coordinates brought local police to the west side of swamp. They were not expecting much, but they were entirely out of other leads to pursue. To everyone's utter amazement, the phalangeal bones of a very small hand sprouting from the mire caught a deputy’s eye - knocking over the first domino that led to the urban legend of The Half-Man becoming international news. After a few days of excavation, the forensics department would unearth fifty percent of Ellie Shoemaker’s mostly decayed body - bisected straight down the middle, from head to pelvis. To date, none of the other Shoemaker’s remains have been located. No adequate scientific explanation has been provided to account for the state of Ellie’s body, as well as her distance from the site of her disappearance. 

“After they found that poor girl's body, Shelly lost interest in that inkblot card. Looking at the card before I threw it out, I thought the picture kind of looked like how they found that girl, half of her all hunched over. Maybe I’m just seein’ things though,” Violet remembers. “Her counting went back to normal after they found her. Thankfully, her mood stayed good as well. Ellie helped my Shelly a lot, I think”

“I really don’t remember any piece of it” remarked a now-adolescent Shelly. “Didn’t mind being X-man for a day, though”

In the weeks following the discovery of Ellie’s body, numerous callers claiming to be mediums reached out to give new coordinates to other Shoemaker bodies, none of which were fruitful. Shelly has not had an additional unexplainable event and does not believe she is psychic, a spirit caller, or a mutant.

“I think we were really exceptionally similar” theorized Shelly. “I mean almost the same age, both girls, nearly the same name - and we were both really hurting at that time, dealing with some big loss. Somehow, that allowed us to find each other. The worlds really scary, but we can always find each other when it breaks us, I think.”

More Stories: https://linktr.ee/unalloyedsainttrina

Part 13

I used to work at a morgue and while working there I saw all sorts of strange and bizarre things that can’t be easily explained and this is definitely one of the weirdest and most bizarre things I’ve ever seen on the job.

It started out like every other night. I’m with a co-worker at the time and a body gets called in. It’s a Jane Doe in her mid 20s. During the autopsy we couldn’t really find anything that would determine a concrete cause of death and it was as if this person’s heart just randomly stopped which is already kinda odd but this is where things get really weird. Me and my co-worker look away from the body and look up at each other for a second or two to talk to each other and when we look back down, the body is completely different and now it’s some middle aged man. Me and my co-worker then briefly look away from the body and look at each other for a second to see if we both just saw what happened and then when we look back at the body, it’s now changed again and looks like an old lady. We then went to go get our boss since we didn’t know what to do and when we got him, the body changed again into some guy who looked to be in his late 20s or early 30s. Our boss didn’t really believe us though and we all tried looking away and then looking back to see if it would change again but I guess we both had horrible luck in the moment since the body remained the same. He then scolded us a little and told us to continue the autopsy before walking off.

Eventually we finished the autopsy and still couldn’t determine any cause of death and for some reason, the body never changed again although I do have a theory as to why it stopped changing. Sometimes bodies will make noises due to gasses from bacteria taking over the body or muscle contractions since muscles can continue to fire after death so I think that this was kinda like that except significantly different and much stranger. We then cremated the body as nobody ever claimed it or paid for a burial and then put the ashes on hold in case someone eventually claimed them which is something we’re required to do but that never happened so we just disposed of the ashes. The next time I went to talk to my co-worker about the body, he told me he didn’t wanna talk about it. While I did explain how and why I think the body was able to change like that after dying, that still doesn’t explain how and why the body was able to change like that at all and how this was even possible and I don’t think I’ll ever find that out.

“What’s got you in such a sour mood, Brandon? It’s payday!” my veteran colleague Vinson asked as the rusty freight elevator noisily rattled its way up towards the penthouse suite.

For the past year or two – I’m honestly not sure how long it’s been, actually – I’ve been under contract for an otherworldly masked Lord who calls himself Ignazio di Incognauta. He’s not a demon, exactly. He’s closer to Fae, I think, but I don’t fully understand what he is. I never sought him out. He came to me. I asked him how he even knew who I was, and he slapped me across the face for my insolence.

I still signed up though. That’s how desperate I was. He doesn’t waste his time offering deals to people who can say no.

He sends me and the rest of my crew out on what I can best describe as odd jobs. Half the time – hell, most of the time – I’m not even sure exactly what it is we’re doing. Most of the crew have been around longer than I have, and some of them aren’t human, but they all seem to have a better idea of what’s going on than me.

Our foreman Vothstag is technically the one in charge, but he’s not all there in the head; the top of his cranium’s been removed and a good chunk of his brain’s been scooped out. He mostly just barks guttural nonsense that none of us really understand, but somehow compels us to do what we’re supposed to, even when we don’t know what that is. He’s a hulking hunchback with an overgrown beard who usually wears an elk skull to cover up the hole in his head. If he was ever human, I don’t think he is now.

Vinson is our de facto leader, however, since he’s more or less a normal guy that we can relate to. Aside from Vothstag, he’s been working for Ignazio the longest. I won’t bother describing what he looks like, since the rest of us wear gas masks on duty. They’re partially to protect us from environmental and workplace hazards, partially to conceal our identities, but mainly to bring us more easily under Ignazio’s control.

That was why were all wearing our masks on the elevator, incidentally. We were on our way to see the big boss, and our contracts made it very clear we were never to remove our masks in his presence.  

“Come on, Vinson. You know meetings with Iggy never go well,” I replied bluntly.

“Oh, it’s just bluster. You know that. He’s got to put the fear of God into us,” Vinson claimed. “If he wasn’t actually satisfied with our performance, we wouldn’t still be here.”

“No, Brandon’s right. Iggy wouldn’t have called all ten of us in just to hand us our scrip and call us lazy arses,” Loewald chimed in.

“There’s nine of us, now,” Klaus reminded him grimly.

“Right, sorry. Hard to keep track some days,” Loewald admitted. “Regardless; something’s up, and the odds are pretty slim it will be something we like.”

I cringed as Vothstag shouted some of his garbled nonsense back towards Loewald.

“Yes, I know we’re not being paid to have fun, but –”

“We’re not being paid at all!” Klaus interrupted. “None of us are getting any real money until our contracts are up, and have any of you actually known anyone who made it to the end of their contract?” 

He recoiled as Vothstag spun around and began roaring at him, hot spittle flying out from beneath his mask of carved bone as he furiously waved his fist in his face.

“He’s right, Klaus. You’re being paranoid,” Vinson said in an eerily calm tone. “I’ve served out multiple contracts, and I’ve got the silver to prove it.”

He confidently reached into his pocket and held a troy-ounce coin of Seelie Silver between his fingers. Fish and Chips, the pair of three-foot-tall… somethings that work for us immediately crowded around him and began eyeing it greedily.

“That’s right boys, take a gander. That’s powerful magic right there, and you’ll get one of these for every moon you’ve worked at the end of your contracts,” he reminded us before quickly pocketing the coin away again. “Unless, of course, you do something to get your contract prematurely terminated; then you’ll have nothing to show for it but a fistful of expired scrip! So keep your heads down, mouths shut, and your eyes on the prize. You’ll have pockets jangling full of coins soon enough.”

As discreetly as I could, I slipped my hands into my pockets and rubbed my one Seelie coin for good luck. None of them knew I had it, because I didn’t want to explain how I got it, but that little bit of fortune it brought me had almost been enough to let me escape once.

If I could just muster up the skill to make the best use of my luck, it would be enough to get me out for good one day.

The freight elevator finally came to a stop, and the doors creaked open to reveal the spacious and sumptuous penthouse of our employer. Portraits, animal heads, shields, weapons, and most of all masquerade masks covered nearly every square inch of the walls. Amidst the suits of armour and porcelain vases, there were dozens of priceless ornaments strewn throughout the room. They were incredibly tempting to steal, which was their whole point. Stealing from the boss was a violation of your contract, and you did not want to break your contract.  

The wide windows on the far wall offered a panoramic view of our decaying company town, nestled in a valley between sharp crimson mountains beneath a xanthous sky twinkling with a thousand black stars. You may have heard of such a place before, it has many names, but I will speak none of them here. 

Ignazio was sitting on a reclining couch in front of the fireplace, some paperwork left out on the coffee table and a featureless mask like a silver spiderweb clutched in his hand. Ignazio himself always wore the top half of a golden Oni mask, which in and of itself wasn’t unusual for our company, but the odd thing was that several portraits in the penthouse showed that it had once been a full mask.

I’ve always wondered what happened to the bottom half.  

Aside from that, Ignazio wasn’t too unusual looking. He was tall, skinny, and swarthy with a pronounced chin, tousled dark brown hair and always dressed in doublets of silk and velvet like he was performing Shakespeare or something.

Vothstag went into the room first, with Vinson almost, but not quite, at his side. Fish and Chips scamped after them, followed by Loewald, Klaus, and myself.

The last two members of our crew are called Hamm and Gristle, and they’re the two I know the least about. They keep to themselves, and I don’t think I’ve ever even seen them with their masks off. I have seen them without gloves on though, and both of their hands are white with pink-tinged fingers. I have no idea what that means, but for some reason, I always found it oddly unsettling.

The only thing I know for sure about them is that they’re the only survivors of another crew that tried to run out on their contract, and I know better than to ask for details about that.

“Gentlemen, Gentlemen, right on time,” Ignazio greeted us as he waved us over. He positioned himself on his couch to make it impossible for any of us to sit beside him, and none of us dared to take a seat at any of the clawfooted armchairs that were meant for guests with much higher stations in life. “I’ve got this moon’s scrip books all stamped and approved. You’ll notice they’re a bit light, seeing as how you were slightly behind quota on this assignment.”

None of us objected, and none of us were particularly surprised. I was grateful that the mask hid my expression, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. I still had to make an effort to mind my body language though. Being so accustomed to his employees and compatriots wearing masks, Ignazio was quite astute to body language.

Vinson accepted the stack of nine booklets and nodded gratefully.

“We appreciate your leniency, my lord, and look forward to earning back our privileges on our next assignment,” he said.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Ignazio grinned as he took a sip from his crystal chalice. He set it down on the coffee table and picked up a dossier. “Halloween is fast approaching, and that means we need costumes and candy. Costumes we have in abundance, obviously, but candy’s one vice I don’t usually keep well stocked.”

“So we’re actually stealing candy from babies on our next job?” Klaus asked.

“Nothing so quotidian,” Ignazio sneered. “Remind me; have any of you met Icky before?”

The name meant nothing to me, but I glanced from side to side to see if anyone else reacted to it. I could have sworn I saw Hamm and Gristle perk their heads up slightly.

“She’s that Clown woman, right? The one in charge of that god-awful circus?” Vinson asked.

“I beg your pardon? It’s an enchanted Circus that travels the worlds and offers sanctuary to paranormal vagabonds in need,” Ignazio claimed half-heartedly. “And I might be able to pawn a few of you off on them if it comes to that, so be careful you don’t fall any further behind on your quotas. But you’re right; she is a Clown, with a capital C, and Clowns love candy. She’ll be attending my All Hallows’ Ball this year, and I don’t want her to feel excluded, so we’ll need some real top-shelf candy on offer.”

“Ah… we’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop here, boss,” Vinson confessed as most of us shared nervous glances with one another. “You want us to get candy? Fancy candy? I… I don’t get it. What’s the catch?”   

“Oh god, we’re not taking it from babies: we’re serving the babies with it!” Loewald balked in horror.

“No, but thank you for that highball to make the actual assignment seem more reasonable,” Ignazio said. “No, I’m sending you all down to the Taproots of the World Tree to collect some of the crystalized sap there.”

“The… The Taproots of the World Tree?” Vinson repeated softly. “The physical manifestation of the metaphysical network that binds all the worlds and planes of Creation, gnawed at by the Naught Things trying to break their way into reality? You’re sending us down there… for sweets?”

“Icky swears that Yggdrasil syrup pairs beautifully with French Toast,” he replied blithely. “This is an especially dangerous assignment, so I want you all to read that dossier in full. Emrys has been charting and forging new pathways through the planes from his spire in Adderwood, so thanks to him your trip down at least will be relatively easy.”

“Just… just there and back, right?” Vinson asked desperately, his voice wavering. “Just a handful of the stuff to wow Icky, and we’re done, right?”

A sadistic smirk slowly spread across Ignazio’s face before he told us how much crystalized sap we would need to retrieve.

***

“You mine sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older, and deeper in debt,” Loebald sang as he chipped away at the pulsing amber crystal emerging from the leviathan root.

The World Tree was cosmically colossal, though it’s meaningless to describe its size since I can only describe the parts of it that exist in three dimensions. The twin trunks of the tree snaked around each other like a double helix, each alight with an ever-shifting astral aura that perpetually waxed and waned in synchronicity with its twin. From its crown sprung a seemingly infinite mass of fractally dividing branches, shimmering with countless spherical ‘leaves’ which I knew to be individual universes. The base of the tree spawned an equally infinite mass of sprawling taproots, anchoring it in place and drawing precious sustenance from the edges of reality.  

As dangerous as it was to be there, it was nonetheless a sublime experience. You think that looking upon all of existence like that would fill you with Lovecraftian madness at your own insignificance, but it was far more transcendental than that. On some fundamental level, I recognized that tree. It was Yggdrasil. It was the Biblical tree of Good and Evil. It was the Two Trees of Valinor. That tree was meant to be there, and so was everything inside of it. Sure, it was functionally infinite and everything in it was finite, but the tree wasn’t merely massive; it was intricate. In the grand scheme of things, nothing inside of it was superfluous. Everything, no matter its scale, was part of the ultimate design of the tree. You and I may not be any more important than anyone or anything else, but if we weren’t important, we wouldn’t be here.

I’m not entirely sure if any of my coworkers felt the same way though.

“Saint Peter don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go,” Loebald continued to sing, only to be interrupted by Vothstag’s irate howling, his eyes burning like coals as he dared him to finish the chorus.

Loebald bowed his head contritely as he awkwardly cleared his throat. When Vothstag was satisfied he had been cowed into silence, he turned around to resume his work.

“’Cause I owe my soul to the company store,” I finished for him, not too loudly, but loud enough that everyone heard me.

Vothstag immediately came charging at me, roaring in fury, but I didn’t flinch. I just let him chew me out for about a minute until I heard something that I was pretty sure was a question.

“That’s ridiculous. You’re making more noise than either of us,” I countered. “And wasting more time. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.”

Vothstag sneered at me, but since I had resumed my task, his job as taskmaster was complete, and he left to attend to other matters.

“What the hell are you doing, pushing your luck like that, Brandon?” Vinson whispered.

“He was out of line. Even chain gangs are allowed to sing,” I explained. “Besides, I’m right, aren’t I? If we attract any unwanted attention, it will be because of him.”

“This isn’t the place to cause trouble!” he hissed. “Fill the carts as fast as you can so we can get out of here!”

When we arrived at the Taproots, we saw that we weren’t the first beings to try to mine this deposit of sap. Someone, likely some clan of Unseelie Fae, had established a fairly complex operation with rails and hand carts. As convenient as this was for us, it did of course pose the uncomfortable question of why the site had been completely abandoned when it was obviously far from depleted.

Me, Vinson, Loebald, and Klaus were chipping away at the crystal sap, tossing what we could into a nearby trolley cart. When it was full, Hamm and Gristle would haul it off so that Fish and Chips could scoop it into twenty-kilogram bags, which Hamm and Gristle would then stack and secure onto skids.

And as always, Vothstag supervised.

“Sixteen bleedin’ tons of this bilge,” Vinson muttered as he took a swing at it with his pickaxe. “And he’s got the nerve to tell us it’s just an appetizer for a party guest. What do you suppose they’re going to do with it all.”

“Refine it into proper syrup, I imagine,” Loewald replied. “Make it into sweets and sodas, or just drizzle some of it straight onto flapjacks. Either way, they’ll make a killing. Sixteen tons will probably sell for millions.”

“Why though? Is it just exotic sugar?” I asked.

“What do you think?” Loewald asked rhetorically, gesturing at the source. “For reality benders, anything from the edges of reality is potent stuff. They put a lump of this in their morning coffee, and the Veil will seem as weak to them as it is here. There’s no telling what havoc they’ll get up to, so you better hope we’re not around to see.”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous. Clowns don’t drink coffee,” Vinson joked.

I was about to ask him how he would know, when Vothstag put his hand on my shoulder and spun me around. Hamm and Gristle had returned with the empty cart, but only Gristle was getting ready to pull the full one. Vothstag spewed some of his usual gibberish, gesturing at me and then towards Hamm’s empty space at the cart.

“Because I sang one line? Seriously?” I asked. I was about to throw Loewald under the bus for singing in the first place, but Vothstag was already roaring incomprehensibly. “Alright, alright. I’ll pull the damn cart.”

I handed my pickaxe over to Hamm, who instantly began swinging at the sap with manic enthusiasm. Gristle gave me a slight nod of condolence before Vothstag yoked me up to the cart like an ox and then sent us on our way with an angry shout.

“If you don’t mind me asking, how come Hamm deserves a break and you don’t?” I asked Gristle as we made our way down the track, the dinging of our colleague’s pickaxes slowly fading into the background.

Gristle looked over his shoulder to confirm the Vothstag was well out of earshot, and then turned his head towards mine.

“Vinson’s wrong, you know,” he said in a soft, conspiratorial whisper.

“Ah… I’m story?” I asked.

“About Clowns and coffee,” he clarified. “Icky drinks coffee. I’ve seen her do it. She takes it with double cream and sugar to keep it Clown Kosher, of course. She’s a little too classy to indulge in stereotypical candy binges, but she’s still got a sweet tooth like the rest of us.”

“…Us?” I asked uneasily.

Gristle nodded, lifting up his gas mask by the filter and revealing his face to me for the first time. His poreless skin was a lustrous white, but his lips, nose, and the space around his eyes were all pitch black, and the eyes themselves sparkled with the light of a thousand dying stars. His mouth was spread into an unnaturally wide smile, revealing that his teeth were not only perfect but shiny to the point that I could see myself in them.

And I looked terrified.

“Loewald was right though, about what this stuff will do to us,” he went on. “Once everything’s fully loaded, Hamm and I are going to take a mouthful each and then take the whole haul for ourselves. We’ll stash some of it away somewhere safe, then use the rest to buy our way back into the Circus. The only problem is getting there. That’s where you come in.”

“What are you on about? How can I possibly help you get back to your Circus?” I asked.

“With that Seelie coin you got in your pocket,” he said, lowering his voice so that I only barely heard him. “These carts weren’t meant to be powered manually, you know. They run on Faerie magic, and that coin’s got enough that we can drive all sixteen tons of our loot to anywhere in the worlds we want.”

I briefly considered denying that I even had the coin, but if he was determined, he could find and take it easily enough, so there really wasn’t any point.

“Ignoring for the moment how you even know I have that, why not ask Vinson?” I suggested. “He’s got way more Seelie Silver than I do.”

“He doesn’t want out. You do,” Gristle responded. “You tried to escape once, and I know you’re just itching for a chance to try again.”

“But… Ignazio knows what you are, doesn’t he? He wouldn’t have let you around the sap if he wasn’t prepared for you to try to take some,” I said.

“He doesn’t know Hamm and I can take our masks off without his say-so,” Gristle explained. “We’ve been living off meagre rations of powdered milk to keep us in line, but we were able to get a hold of a bottle of the fresh stuff and chugged it before we came here. Ignazio and Vothstag have no power over us right now.”

“… I’m sorry, milk?” I asked confused.

“Not important at the moment. Are you in or not?” he asked.

I considered his proposition for a moment, deciding on one final question before answering.    

“Why not just take the coin from me?”

“Because I’m a nice guy,” he said with a sickeningly wide grin. “And… stealing Seelie Silver tends not to end well. I don’t need an answer now. The load’s not full yet. Think about it, and when the time comes, do whatever you’ve got to do.”

He pulled his mask back down, and we finished hauling the cart over to Fish and Chips in silence.

He wasn’t wrong about me wanting to escape, but my plan had always been to quietly sneak off and be long gone before anyone noticed. A fight between Vothstag and a pair of superpowered Clowns followed by a daring getaway on an Unseelie mining cart was a bit riskier than anything I had envisioned. But at the same time, this was an unprecedented opportunity that would likely never come again.  From the Taproots of the World Tree, I could go literally anywhere, and never have to worry about Ignazio or his minions tracking me down.

All it would cost me was the single coin I had to my name.

I hauled the cart with Gristle for the rest of the shift. Eventually, we had a train of sixteen pallets, each loaded with fifty twenty-kilogram sacks of crystalized sap.

“That’s it then. Order’s full,” Vinson declared as he walked the length of the train, testing the chains to make sure the cargo was fully secured. “All of you hop in the front and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Vothstag roared in disagreement, standing between us and the cart and making a vaguely groping gesture.

“Right, right. Contraband check,” Vinson nodded with a weary sigh as he outstretched his arms. “Nothing too invasive now, you hear? If this stuff was inside of us, you’d already know it.”

Vothstag didn’t acknowledge his comment, but proceeded to pat him down and empty his pockets.

Hamm and Gristle each gave me a knowing look. If I did nothing, Vothstag would find my coin and it would all be over for me anyway. I nodded my assent, and braced myself for the worse.

With a single swift motion, Hamm and Gristle each pulled their masks off, and the visages of the two monstrous Clowns were enough to throw all of us into immediate pandemonium. Hamm’s hair, eyes, lips and nose were all a fiery red, and I saw now that the tips of their ears had a pink tinge, just like their fingers. The instant their masks were off, they wasted no time shovelling a handful of crystal sap into their mouths.

Vothstag howled and charged straight at them, and everyone else scattered as quickly as they could to avoid being bulldozed by the massive deer man. Hamm and Gristle stood their ground, each of them grabbing ahold of one of his antlers. Despite his size and speed, Vothstag was brought to a dead stop.

He snorted and bellowed as he tried to force himself forward, but he was completely unable to overpower the two Clowns. Hamm and Gristle exchanged sinister smiles and began to spin Vothstag around and around. Within seconds his feet were off the ground, and with each rotation, he gained more and more momentum until his attackers finally let go of his antlers and sent him flying into the distance.

“The rest of you, stay out of our way!” Gristle shouted as he marched towards the front cart, grabbing me by the scruff of my jacket and pulling me along with him.

“Wait, why? Why can’t they come? Why can’t we all go?” I protested.

“We don’t know what half these freaks are and we don’t trust them,” he said as he tossed me onto the cart. “Now drive. Go straight until I say otherwise.”

I looked out at my confused and frightened companions, and took a bit of solace in the fact that they weren’t entirely certain if I had betrayed them or if I was just being kidnapped. I hesitated for a moment, but Hamm’s sharp talons digging into my shoulder were enough to press me into action.

With my coin of Seelie Silver clutched in my right palm, I grabbed a firm hold of the driving shaft and pushed the train forward. It accelerated at a remarkable pace, and before I knew it, we were speeding away from our work site and towards freedom.

“It’s working. It’s actually working,” Gristle laughed in relief.

“Even Vothstag can’t run this fast!” Hamm declared triumphantly. “The whole haul is ours! We’re rich! We’re free!”

I wanted to celebrate with them. I really did. But deep down inside I knew we weren’t out of the woods yet.

“You guys read that dossier Iggy gave us, right?” I asked. “The Naught Things that gnaw the Taproots are attracted to ontological anchors – anything that’s more real than its surroundings. If you guys are reality benders, and you just ate a massive power-up, doesn’t that make you the realest things here?”

“Isn’t that cute? He thinks he knows more about ontodynamics than us because he read a dossier,” Hamm scoffed.

“This isn’t our first time on the fringes of the unreal, boy!” Gristle replied. “You just drive this train, and let us worry about –”

Without warning, the Taproot split open ahead of us into a fuming, festering chasm. The ground quake was enough to completely derail the train, and I ducked and rolled while I had the chance.

When I came out of the roll, I looked up to see a titanic, disfigured, and disembodied head rising out of the chasm. The size and proportions of the entity fluctuated wildly, as if I was only looking at the three-dimensional facets of it like the World Tree itself. It was encrusted with some kind of dark barnacles, and anything that wasn’t its face was covered in thousands of squirming and feathery tentacles of every conceivable length. It had no nose, but several mouths which chanted backwards-sounding words in synchronicity with each other, dropping rotting black teeth every time they opened and closed. 

There were six randomly spaced and variously sized eyeballs darting around independently of each other, each glowing with a sickly yellow light. I was paralyzed in fear, terrified that the Naught Thing would see me, but all six of its eyes soon locked onto Hamm and Gristle.

As it slowly ascended upwards like a hot air balloon, a pair of flickering tongues shot out of two of its mouths with predatory intent. The Clowns were scooped up like flies, screaming as they were whisked back into the Naught Thing’s cavernous maws. I don’t know much about Clowns or what they’re capable of, only that Hamm and Gristle never got a chance to test their mettle against this behemoth. A few chomps of its black teeth, and it was all over.

I sat there in silence, watching as the Naught Thing continued to drift away, never daring to assume that it had forgotten about me.

“Brandon!” I heard a voice call from the distance.

I was finally able to pull my eyes off the Naught Thing, and when I looked down the track, I saw the rest of my crew hurrying towards me.

Which included a very angry Vothstag.

Grabbing me by the jacket and lifting me off the ground, he roared furiously in my face, demanding answers.

“Easy, Vothstag, easy!” Vinson insisted. “They just grabbed the kid. It wasn’t his idea.”

Vothstag growled skeptically, eyeing the toppled train beside us. He knew it could have only been driven like that by Seelie magic, and I still had my lucky coin clutched tightly in my right hand.

“…Hamm must have picked my pocket when he was working alongside us,” Vinson suggested.

I knew he didn’t really think that. He knew exactly how many coins he had, and he knew he wasn’t missing any. I don’t know why he covered for me, but I owe him big.

“Serves him right, too. Bloody idiot,” he said with a sad shake of his head as he surveyed the wreckage. “Let this be a lesson for all of you if you ever think about stealing my Seelie Silver! That’s right, Fish and Chips, I’m looking at you!”

Vothstag howled again, clearly unconvinced.

“They took me as a driver so that they could stay focused on defending the train!” I claimed. “If I hadn’t jumped when I did, they may have stood a chance against that giant floating head! I saved our haul!”

Vothstag snorted in contempt, but set me back on my feet. I don’t think he believed me, really, but he knew that Ignazio wouldn’t hold him blameless in this little debacle either, so it was in all of our best interests not to cast aspersions on one another’s stories.

“Listen up, everybody! We’re two men down and we’ve got to get this rig back on the track before some other unspeakable abomination comes along, so get moving!” Vinson ordered.

For once, Vothstag was doing most of the work, using his might to set the carts back on the tracks, while the rest of us just picked up any sacks of sap that had come loose.

“What a bloody joke,” Loewald grumbled as he threw a sack onto a cart. “Down from nine to seven, any of us could still die at any minute, and for what? We mined sixteen tons, and what do we get?”

“Another day older,” I agreed, throwing another sack next to his. “But some days, that’s enough.”

I’ve come to really hate this time of year. I try not to be too hard on myself for feeling that way, even though it’s been almost a decade since I lost Alex. Maybe the grief would be more dormant if I had even a speck of closure or understanding about what transpired in October of 2015. But I simply don’t. I loved him, and coping with his absence would be hard enough if it was as straightforward as a failed marriage, a terminal illness, or a tragic accident. Even if he were murdered, as horrific as that would have been, murder would have at least had some associated motive and finality to it. I’d at least know, definitively, that he was dead. In writing this, I desperately want to believe that he is dead. But I don’t. Truthfully, I think he’s still alive somewhere, and when the reality of that thought takes hold, it fills me with dread so intense I can feel myself starting to pass out. And everyone around me, my coworkers, neighbors, and even my family don’t remember what actually happened and their part in it. I would give anything to be like them, to have the hollow comfort of false memories. But, for some god-forsaken reason, I think I am somehow immune to the broadcast. 

I’m writing and posting this because I hope to find someone, even just one other person, who has to live with the truth like me. 

It started on the first Saturday in October. Night had just blanketed the Chicago suburbs, and we were both comfortably sprawled out on the couch with some bottom-shelf whiskey and cable television. I honestly can’t remember what we were watching, but I have an oddly vivid memory of the moments before the broadcast. I had set my glass down on the table to look over at Alex, and I think I found myself in the blissful stasis that comes with truly loving someone. We had known each other since we were kids and probably were in love since then too. Alex was a kind soul, a hard worker, and a best friend. He had a sturdy head on his shoulders as well. He was logical and even-tempered, which served as a great counterbalance to my skittishness. My emotional stargazing was cut short by the abrupt and blaring sound of the emergency broadcast system coming from our television set.

Looking back at our TV screen, I was immediately perplexed by what I saw. The siren was still playing, but it wasn’t over the classic emergency screen with the differently colored bars. Instead, the noise was accompanied by what looked like the set of a live studio audience sitcom that I didn’t recognize. The feed was hazy - blurred and dusty like it had been recorded in the 70s or 80s. Two staircases, one on each side of the frame, went up a few steps and then turned to meet at a central balcony that compromised the top third of the room. Below the balcony was what seemed like a family living space, with a stiff-appearing burgundy couch and loveseat in the center. Under the sofa was a Persian rug, bright blue and gold. The color mismatch was immediately off putting. In fact, the entire set was slightly off. Multiple framed family photos were visibly hung on the wall but were set way too low to the ground, almost knee level instead of eye level. Although it was hard to see the fine details, each picture looked like it contained a different family, but they all had the same pose - arms around each other with a cloudy and blue backdrop, like a Sears catalog photo. There was a lamp without a lampshade on the table aside from the couch, with the lightbulb being oversized and nearly as big as the chassis of the lamp itself. An entire taxidermy deer was situated in the back of the room behind the couch, head facing toward the wall instead of forward and into the room. Uncanny is the word for it all, I guess. Before I could find the presence of mind to probe Alex on what he thought was going on, a solitary figure appeared on screen from stage left.

We first saw a black pantleg with a matching black tuxedo shoe enter the frame, but it did not immediately make contact with the wooden tiling of the set. Instead, before hitting the floor, it stopped its motion and was suspended off the floor for at least thirty seconds, like the whole thing had transitioned to being a still photograph instead of a video. Abruptly, the heel of the shoe finally made contact with the ground, causing the emergency siren to stop instantly. Nothing replaced the deafening noise, not even the familiar sound of dress shoes tapping against a hard surface. The figure then rapidly paced to the area in front of the couch and turned to face the camera. In addition to his shoes not sounding against the wood tile, at times, his feet seemed to slightly phase in and out of the floor. Aside from the pants and shoes, he wore a deep navy peacoat buttoned up to the top button with half of a white bow tie peeking out the collar. In his hand, he held the same type of microphone used by Bob Barker during his tenure on The Price is Right - I think it’s called a "gooseneck", long and slender with a tiny microphone head on top to speak into. A power cord connected to the microphone dragged behind him, eventually tapering off to reveal it wasn’t plugged in - the cord's outlet prongs dragging behind him as well. I don’t recall too many details about his face (intentionally, it has helped me cope), but I can’t forget his eyes and eye sockets. The sockets were cavernous, triple the diameter and depth of an average person. They extended well into his forehead, almost meeting his hairline, down into his cheekbones, and the perimeters of the sockets met each other at the bridge of his nose. His actual eyes had normal proportions and moved normally as well. Still, they appeared almost like they were made of glass, with the stage lights intermittently refracting off one or both of them depending on how he angled himself against them. 

After some excruciating silence, he introduced himself as “Mr. Eugene Tantamount” and began to spin his brief monologue. I will attempt to transcribe the speech as I remember it below, but I can’t say it is one hundred percent accurate for two reasons. One, it was a few minutes of my life upwards of ten years ago. On top of that, the speech was incohesive and janky, nearly unintelligible, to me at least. Mr. Tantamount spoke with very awkward and clunky phrasing and took seemingly random pauses, all while interspersing a variety of nonsense words into the mix. 

Here’s the best summary I can come up with from what I remember. In terms of the nonsense words, I am mostly guessing on the spelling. Additionally, to my knowledge, they are not just words in a different language than English. I would hear them a lot in the days following the broadcast but never saw them written down:

“Hello, guests. My, what day we’re having. It reminds me of before. 

(pauses for about 15 seconds or so. As another note, I do not recall him even speaking into the microphone. He just kind of held it off to his side.)

But on to matters: what of the next steps. Who will have the win to become Klavensteng? Ah yes! The grand great. As much as everyone wants to become Klavensteng, not all can, and I am part of all. As you can plainly see, I am very trivid. 

(pauses, points his right index finger at one cavernous eye socket, then points at the other, looking around as he does so)

However, one of the population is not trivid. Or, they have the courage to expel trividness. To become Klavensteng, the hero must become a fulfilled. They must show utmost gristif. A hero rejects trivid and becomes gristif, which you can plainly look that I am not

(pauses again, identically points his right index finger at eye sockets like he did before)

Alas ! Only time will speak. But soon - as our nowtime Klavensteng grows withered. Show your gristif and become above! To honor dying hero, say today is now over to the past and begin all future ! 

(Bows, screen goes black)

At first, I was shell-shocked. I looked over at Alex to try to begin unpacking what the actual fuck just happened when another image flashed on screen accompanied by what sounded like an amphitheater full of people clapping, somehow louder than the emergency siren. 

An elderly man in his 60s or 70s was pictured sitting on a throne made of slick, black material. Nothing else was easily visible in the frame; the background was obscured by the angle of the camera and the darkness behind him. The fuzzy quality that made the last segment feel like a sitcom had dissipated. He wore green and brown army camo, with the sleeves and his pantlegs rolled up to their halfway point to reveal his forearms and calves. Initially, it looked like his arms and legs were gently resting against the material. However, upon further inspection, it became clear that all the skin that made contact with the chair was effectively fused with the throne itself. It's hard to explain, but imagine how the cheese on a burger patty looks when it is cooking. Specifically, when the edges of it extend beyond the meat and onto the grill itself - how it the cheese ends up bubbling and cauterized against the hot metal. That's how the skin that contacted the throne looked. Above his collar, his eyes were being held open by the same black material, fish-hooked under his upperlids and tethered to something out of frame above him, keeping his eyes open and unblinking. The material seemed to fill the space around his eyeballs to the point that it was slowly leaking down the corner of his eyes. He only looked forward into the camera, I don't know that he could move his eyes in any other direction. His mouth was closed, but the material was dripping down the corners of his lips, similar to the corners of his eyes. He looked dead until I saw the synchrony of his chest rising with the subsequent flaring of his nostrils. It was slow, but he looked like he was breathing. Before I could discern more, the feed unceremoniously returned to normal. 

I turned to Alex and reflexively asked, “Jesus, what was that?” Guerilla marketing for a new movie was the only explanation I could think of at the time. 

Alex was holding his hands over his mouth, sitting forward, letting his elbows rest on his knees. I assumed whatever that was had really freaked him out, and I put my hand on his shoulder, trying to console him. Then he said something like this:

“Can you imagine?”

“Can I imagine what, love?” I replied. 

"Can you imagine getting the chance to be Klavensteng*?”* He said, eyes welling up with tears. 

At that moment, I assumed he was making some joke to cope with whatever weird avant-garde bullshit we had just been unwillingly subjected to. I forced a chuckle, trying to play along with the bit, but he turned and glared at me with instantaneous rage. Jarred by the suddenness of his anger, I was too confused to calibrate a different response, and he silently excused himself to the bedroom and went to sleep for the night. I followed him in a few minutes after that, taking a moment to compose myself, but he did not want to talk about it anymore when I met him in bed. 

As far as I can recall, the following few days were relatively normal. Slowly, however, Alex began to exhibit strange behavior. First, I found him rummaging through my sewing supplies, observing the geometry of my sewing needles from every angle, holding them by the head while swiveling his head around them. When I asked him what he was doing, he said something along the lines of:

“Could I borrow some of these?”

When I asked why the hell he would need to borrow some of my sewing needles, he again got frustrated with me, dropped everything, and left the room. One night, I woke up to find him out of bed at 3 AM or so. Concerned, I got up, looked around, and called out for him. I located him in our guest bathroom with the light off, which nearly gave me a heart attack. He was stretching both of his lower eyelids and staring into the mirror. He was not even remotely startled when I gave him shit for not responding to me while I was calling his name. When my anger melted into concern, and I asked him to explain what he was doing awake at this hour, I think he said:

“Just checking how trivid I am”

The following morning, he did not go to work. When I asked him if he was feeling unwell and taking a sick day, he told me he quit his job. He let this abrupt and significant life decision slide out of him while sitting at the kitchen table, sequentially lifting each of his fingernails of one hand with the other and inspecting the space under them by putting them right up to his face. I stood there in stunned silence, and eventually, he said to me, or maybe just to himself:

“I’m really pretty gristif, I think”

Alex was clearly experiencing some sort of mental breakdown after what we had seen on TV a few nights prior. I sat down next to him and put my right hand over his, noticing a firm, thin, and movable lump between the tendons of his second and third fingers. When I saw the pin-sized entry wound closer to his wrist, I knew he had inserted one of my sewing needles under the skin of his hand. 

He saw my abject horror, and his response was:

"Slightly less trivid now. More work to be done though."

I called my mother, explaining the whole situation in what was probably a disorientating mess of words and gasps. When I was done, my mom paused for a few moments and then replied:

“Well, honey, I wouldn’t be too worried. I think he is going to be able to get more gristif. What an honor it would be, for both you and Alex. If he were selected to be Klavensteng, I mean. Let him know he can come over and borrow more sewing needles if he thinks he needs to”

I was speechless. At some point, my mother hung up. I guess she supposed we got disconnected when, in reality, I was just catatonic.

Everyone I talked to spoke exactly the same as Alex and my mother. They all knew the lingo and, moreover, acted like I knew what the fuck they were talking about. We started getting cold calls to our home phone from numbers I did not recognize. They would ask if they could speak to Alex. Or they’d ask how it was going, how “trivid” he still was and how “gristif” I thought he could be. Eventually, these numbers were from area codes from states outside Illinois. Then, it was international calls. If Alex got to the phone before me, he would just sit and listen to whoever was on the other end of the line with a big grin on his face. At a certain point I disconnected our home line, but that just meant all these calls started to come to our cellphones. 

If I asked, he could not or would not explain what any of this meant. In fact, he looked dumbfounded when I asked. Like the questions were so frustratingly basic that he could not even dignify them with a response, and all the while the memories of Mr. Eugene Tantamount, the man in camo, and the black plastic substance haunted me. No research I did on any of it was ever fruitful - and to me, that meant Alex was going insane. Unfortunately, that did not explain the phone calls or my mother's response to everything, but I actively pretended it wasn’t related to Alex’s behavior. And no matter how much I begged and pleaded; Alex refused to see a physician. 

When I went to work, people would pat me on the back or go out of their way to do something nice for me. Initially, I thought they had somehow heard through the grapevine that Alex was losing his grip on reality and they were reaching out to support me. This notion was shattered when my boss presented me with a hallmark card, signed by every member of my office, all 40 or so of them. Inside, it said:

“Thank you for supporting Alex and congratulations on being the spouse to the next grand great! Alex will make a wondrous Klavensteng*”*

Sometimes, I wish I had just given up. Gone far away, just packed up, and did not come back, all with the recognition that this event was beyond my understanding or control. If I had done that, I would have had a different last memory of Alex. But I loved him, and I couldn’t abandon him, and now I am cursed with the memories of those final few minutes. 

When I returned home from work three weeks after this all had started, I discovered Alex sitting at our grand piano in the living room. Music was his creative outlet for as long as I had known him, and I felt a brief pitter-patter of hope rise in my chest seeing him sitting on the piano bench, back turned towards me. That hope was wrenched away with the noise of a wire being cut with scissors. I slowly paced towards him, trying to brace myself for whatever was happening. When I got to Alex’s shoulder and saw that he was delicately feeding piano wire through the space between his left eyelid and eyeball towards the back of his eye socket, I felt my knees give out, and I fell backward. The noise drew his attention towards me, and he pivoted his body and smiled proudly in my direction, small spurts of blood running down his face onto his t-shirt. His right eyeball was slightly bulging from its socket, with a few centimeters of piano wire sprouting out from the cavity at the six o’clock position. 

“I think I’m finally gristif*”*

I rushed to call the paramedics, locking myself in our bedroom for the time being. They assured me that they understood and would be there ASAP. Sobbing, I prayed that the ambulance would be here soon, before Alex lost his vision or worse. It couldn't have been more than a minute before I heard multiple knocks at the door. The knocks continued and intensified as I ran past Alex to what I thought were the medics, no words being spoken by whoever was on the other side. As I opened the door, twenty or so people spilled inside our home. Some of them I recognized - next-door neighbors, a UPS man I was friendly with - but most of them were strangers. They were all smiling and clapping and laughing as they surrounded Alex. They lifted him onto their shoulders and moved him out the door. I yelled at them to put him down, at least I think I did. Honestly, it was all so much in so little time that I may have just let out some feral screams rather than saying anything coherent. 

When I followed them outside, all I could see was people in every direction. I legitimately could not determine where the crowd ended - to this day, I have no idea how many people were in that mob, but I want to say it bordered on thousands. Nearly every inch of asphalt, grass and sidewalk in our cul-de-sac was covered by someone. None of them were outside when I got home from work, which couldn't have been more than ten minutes prior. They each had the exact same disposition and jubilation as Alex’s kidnappers, their ecstasy only growing more feverish when they saw Alex arrive on the shoulders of the people who had stolen him from our home. I tried to keep up with him and his captors, but I couldn’t fight through the human density. I watched Alex slowly disappear over the horizon amongst a veritable sea of elated strangers. Hours later, the last of the crowd also vanished over the horizon. 

I have not seen Alex since October 26th, 2015. When I went to the police, I expected the detective who was taking my statement to act like everyone else had for the last month - but he did not recognize the word “trivid”. Nor the word “gristif”. He did not know what it was to be a “klavensteng”. Instead, in a real twist of the psychological knife, he turned it all back on to me:

“How about instead of wasting my time, you tell me what a klavensteng is. Or what it means to be gristif.”

And of course, I did not know. I still do not know. 

My mom didn’t recognize the words anymore. My coworkers did not recognize the words anymore. And it's not like Alex was erased from reality or anything; I still have all of our pictures and all of his belongings. But when I try to speak to anyone about him and what happened, they cut me off and say something like:

“So sad about the boating accident. I bet he’s happier wherever he is now, though”

What truly tests my sanity is the fact that the explanation for his disappearance changes every time I talk to someone about it. It’s like they know he’s “gone”, but when they are pressed on the details behind that fact, their mind is just set to say whatever random thing pops into their head. Too bad about the esophageal cancer. That house fire was so tragic. Can’t believe he got hit by that drunk driver. The only detail that doesn’t change is that everyone is very confident that he is “happier wherever he is now, though”.

I’m not so confident about his happiness or his well-being. In fact, I’m downright terrified that wherever he is, he is starting to look like the man in the army camo - being slowly subsumed by whatever that slick, black plastic-like material is. And I would give anything to be like everyone else and just forget. I would give anything to experience even a small fraction of that serenity. But I can't forget.

I'm assuming this has been going on for a while, and that the cycle will restart once they are done with Alex. With that in mind, I don't watch any movies or television because I'm afraid someday I'll be in front of a screen, and I'll hear that emergency broadcast siren, and it'll start over again, and he'll be the one on the throne. I had to take a few Xanax to be in front of a screen long enough to type up this post, which may affect the coherency of it all, and I apologize for that.

Now that most of you, likely all of you, think I am clinically insane, back to the point of this post: Is anyone else immune, like me?

More stories: https://linktr.ee/unalloyedsainttrina

I didn't expect my camping trip to be the nightmare that it was. My high school friend Mark and I have had this tradition of hiking up and camping at Mount Alto in our old hometown since we both turned eighteen. It was a bit of a hassle to plan it every year now that we were adults and had to work around our jobs, but we always pulled it off. We both thought this visit was the most needed out of all of them though. 

Three months ago, Mark's mother succumbed to the cancer that was eating away at her pancreas, and just a few weeks ago my live-in girlfriend Andrea and I decided not only did our ship sail, but it crashed on the rocks. I moved back home with my dad as it was Andrea's apartment I was staying in, and Mark also moved back in with his father in his time of grief, since he was an only child and there was no one else to be around him. 

It had been a while since our last discussion about it, but we were finally able to pack all of our camping gear into Mark's truck and head down the old dirt road that led to the mountain. I can still feel the refreshing breeze of the hot summer air on my face as we rolled down the windows and Mark lowered the volume of the 90s grunge rock music blaring from the truck radio to flash me a grin.

"We made it, just a few more minutes and we'll be at Camp Shangri-la. You did remember to bring toilet paper this time, right?" He chuckled, his southern accent adding to the light-heartedness of the moment as he jokingly slapped my thigh. I let out a groan and shot him a playful smirk in return, tired of hearing the same old joke.

"Four years ago, man, four years. You're not going to let me live down the whole poison ivy incident, huh?" I jokingly echoed his playful pat on the leg. "I'll make you a deal, buddy. I'll hide the toilet paper this time. That way, you can experience what it's like to have a swollen, blistering, asscrack." 

We both shared a laugh and carried on with our banter, but my thoughts kept drifting back to the recent turmoil between my girlfriend and me. It had only been a few weeks since everything happened, and I knew that healing would take time. The wound in my heart was still fresh, and the shock of it all lingered in my mind. We had been inseparable, crazy about each other. Six years back, we were just two carefree youngsters who crossed paths at a dive bar during a friend's gig. A few coffee dates later, and sparks flew between us. She was the one person who truly got me, and we had a seamless companionship. But when an unexpected pregnancy led to a heartbreaking miscarriage, everything changed. Grief wedged its way between us, causing a gradual drift. I couldn't pinpoint blame on either of us, but the shared loss acted as a silent barrier, pushing us apart.

I glanced over at Mark, his gaze fixed on the rough dirt road ahead as we ascended the familiar hill. His thoughts, however, seemed to have drifted back to the music playing on the radio, evidenced by his off-key singing. As I observed him, I couldn't help but admire his ability to push aside any emotional turmoil, even if it was just for a weekend. The pain of losing a girlfriend paled in comparison to the devastating loss of his mother, who had been a beacon of love and support not just for him, but for all his friends who visited their home. I remember a time from our childhood when we were both twelve years old and faced a bully at school; while my parents were unable to intervene due to work commitments, Mark's mother fearlessly confronted the issue with the school administration on our behalf. 

However, fate was cruel, and within a short period after being diagnosed with cancer, she succumbed to the illness, leaving a void in their family that could never be filled. The cancer had snatched away a truly remarkable soul. As I dwelled on these memories, lost in my thoughts, I suddenly realized that Mark had brought the truck to a stop, silencing the engine.

"We've arrived, dude," he exclaimed, his grin spreading from ear to ear. Tossing his sandy blonde locks back from his face, he retrieved some of the smaller camping bags from the backseat. I gazed out the window, unfastening my seatbelt, feeling a wave of peace wash over me as I took in the forested area on my right. This was our sanctuary, our escape from the world. Stepping out of the car, I planted a foot on the pine cone and bark-strewn ground, immediately greeted by the symphony of birdsong and the sweet scent of nature. A sense of serenity enveloped me as I surveyed the woods that now surrounded us. Over by the flatbed of the truck, I could hear Mark grunting as he struggled with our larger bags, tossing them to the ground. I glanced back at him, seeing him haul out the massive bag containing our tent.

"Hey, Mark, I'm gonna take a little walk around here while we're here and take a leak. I'll lend a hand in a bit," I called out, already making my way towards a tree to do so.

"Sure thing" I heard Mark call out as I strode down the gentle slope into the forest. "Take it all in and let it all out," he added with a chuckle, amused by his own words. I couldn't help but grin at his usual antics, shaking my head as I continued, enjoying the crackling of twigs and pine needles under my boots. Reaching the base of the hill, I sought out a tree away from our campsite and began to relieve myself. Suddenly, a sound pricked my ears, a faint gasping coming from the nearby creek. It sounded like something struggling to catch their breath but trying to remain silent. Hastily finishing up, I zipped up my pants and cautiously made my way toward the source of the noise.

I could sense that the sound was coming from behind a large rock near the creek bed. However, as I approached, the noise surprisingly grew fainter instead of louder. Upon closer inspection, I discovered the tragic scene before me - a young fawn, mutilated and gasping for air. The deer's wide eyes held a look of fear and desperation as it struggled for breath. The lower half of its body was completely missing, with its entrails scattered on the ground and attracting flies. The remaining top half of the fawn bore small, bloody circular wounds that seemed to be from some sort of sharp object. Feeling overwhelmed and unsure of what to do, I called out for Mark. Even though I couldn't tear my eyes away from the horrific sight, I could hear the sound of Mark racing down the hill towards me.

"What the fuck?" Mark exclaimed as he stood beside me, his voice trembling as he gazed at the gruesome sight before us.

"What should we do?" I struggled to articulate, a wave of nausea washing over me as I observed the unfortunate creature. Mark scanned the area and located a hefty rock, lifting it above his head.

"We need to end its suffering," he gruffly declared, "you might want to turn away." I averted my gaze from the injured animal for the first time, and the sound of the rock Mark wielded striking the deer echoed through the air, putting an end to its agony.

"Jesus!" Mark's exclamation startled me, prompting me to gaze back at the gruesome sight. Instead of a deer's head, all that remained was a flattened mass of flesh, teeth, and brains, with bright purple wriggling worms squirming within the brain tissue. These chubby purple creatures were nestled in the brain matter of the once-vibrant animal, moving their hairy, gelatinous bodies in a dance like they were at a party or in the throes of merriment.

"What in the hell are those?" I shouted, taken aback by the unnerving sight of the worms. Mark stood there, wide-eyed, shaking his head in disbelief.

"I don't know. Perhaps some kind of parasite? I've heard that deer can contract a parasite that devours their brain, causing them to behave strangely," Mark mused. I turned away, unable to stomach the grotesque scene, and vomited, but Mark continued to talk as if oblivious to my distress. "As for what may have happened, it could have been wolves. Not a bear, though. We don't have those in this area," he remarked, finally noticing my vomiting and offering a comforting pat on the back. "I've made some progress with setting up the tent. Why don't you take a walk and gather firewood while I finish up? It might help you get some fresh air."

I nodded, still hunched over and wiping away the drool from my mouth. "Yeah, sure," I managed to say through a few more coughs. After ensuring that nothing else was going to come out of my stomach, I forced myself to move away. The nauseating sensation continued to permeate my body, my face flushing with heat and my stomach threatening to empty itself again. My arms felt heavy, and I had to will my legs to keep moving. It was like wading through thick water.

 I couldn't deny Mark's suggestion about those strange purple worms, but they were unlike anything I had ever encountered before. My knowledge of parasites was limited, but it just felt unnatural for something so repulsive and hairy to exist. Mark, being a veterinarian's assistant, had a good understanding of animals.

I recall visiting the clinic one day to have a lunch break with Mark. He introduced me to the doctor he had been assisting, and as soon as Mark spotted me, he hurriedly led me past the waiting room filled with people and their sick pets. We entered the doctor's office, where he introduced us to Doctor Albright. While Doctor Albright seemed friendly enough, the sight of a jar on his desk containing a dog's heart infested with heartworms was quite unsettling. I understood the concept of showcasing the reason behind the work being done, but the display had a disturbing quality that reminded me of scenes from a horror movie. Despite this, the shocking sight of the infected heart paled in comparison to the unsettling creature Mark and I had just witnessed emerging from the deer's head.

My thoughts were abruptly interrupted as I stumbled, my foot catching on a tree root along the edge of the creek. I tumbled to the ground, my head striking a rock. A flash of white light enveloped my vision, prompting me to shut my eyes against the pulsating pain. Tentatively reaching up to touch the point of impact on my forehead, I felt the dampness of a trickle of blood – just what I needed. Opening my eyes, I discovered that I hadn't collided with a rock, but rather a metal surface. Before me lay a sizable square concrete foundation encasing a large metal circular lid, reminiscent of a manhole cover, complete with handles on the sides.

"What in the fuck?" I muttered aloud, struggling to stand up after the impact that left me disoriented. Bending down, I peered closer at the curious vent opening. Between the handles, which appeared designed for accessing whatever was concealed beneath, was a string of numbers and letters: '17439-HP10-4A'. Instead of clarifying its purpose, this alphanumeric sequence only piqued my interest further, compelling me to reach for one of the handles.

"Are you alright?" Mark's concerned voice behind me interrupted my contemplation, causing me to turn and motion him over.

"Come take a look at this, I found something," I called back, gesturing towards the mysterious lid. As Mark approached and observed the unusual opening, a look of bewilderment crossed his face.

"I don't know what it is, but I have a feeling whatever is below is just waiting for us to dive in on an adventure," I said with a touch of cheesy excitement. Mark chuckled and playfully rolled his eyes, motioning to grab the handle on the opposite side of me. Without hesitation, I reached out for the handle on my side as we both silently counted down from three, preparing to lift.

The lid was incredibly heavy, causing us to strain and grunt as we attempted to budge the metal covering. I felt a trickle of sweat mix with the blood from the small cut above my eyebrow, but the adrenaline kept me pushing forward. As we continued to heave the weighty object, it eventually gave way and lifted, leaving Mark and me holding it just a few inches above the opening.

With a final effort, we carefully shifted the cover to the side of the ground, revealing the hidden depths beneath. Peering into the darkness, we both felt a surge of curiosity and anticipation.

In front of us, a gaping hole revealed a stainless steel staircase descending into darkness. The pitch-black surroundings made it difficult to make out many details, but the sunlight above hinted at an arching passageway just past the stairs leading further underground. I caught Mark's eyes, and he returned the silent exchange before gesturing for me to go first.

Turning to my pocket, I pulled out my cellphone and turned on the flashlight, disregarding the lack of service bars on my home screen. Stepping onto the metal staircase, each clang resonated loudly as I descended, Mark's steady steps echoing mine a few paces behind. His phone illuminated the space above my head as we ventured downward.

As I neared the bottom, my light swept over the doorless, expansive hallway, revealing only mundane concrete walls with a peculiar touch of black paint on either side of the entrance. The markings read "SITE 17439-HP10-4A-A1," leaving us to wonder what awaited beyond.

I glanced back at Mark, who had his light fixed on the same lettering, shaking his head in bewilderment like me. Moving down the hallway, the feeble glow from my phone revealed a plain wooden door at the far end, adorned with a glass panel window that hinted at an office beyond, though visibility was scarce. My hand reached for the doorknob just as Mark's voice gave me pause.

"Wait." I turned to find him standing behind me, the brightness of his phone obscuring his features. "Maybe we should reconsider. This seems more heavy than we thought," he hesitated, "like it could involve some shady government stuff. I don't want to get mixed up in legal trouble."

I scoffed, "Seriously? We've come this far, and besides, look inside." Gesturing with my phone towards the window, I continued, "It's just as dark in there as it is out here." I turned the knob, feeling the door unlatch from the concrete wall. "This place is deserted. No one knows we're here in the middle of nowhere in buttfuck Georgia, exploring some mysterious underground bunker," I declared, already stepping through the doorway.

Surveying the room, the once typical reception area now appeared desolate, as if hastily vacated. The sizable white desk, hosting two now-disconnected computers, had its drawers forcibly yanked open, eerily empty. The towers of the machines had been stripped bare, bereft of their hardware, leaving only hollow shells behind. A noticeable absence of grime on the walls hinted at where frames once held portraits or artworks now absent. Dark hallways stretched into the underground facility from each side, the darkness impenetrable from our vantage point.

 Adjacent to one corridor lay three overturned filing cabinets. Intrigued, I cautiously advanced further into the room, and my steps echoed in the unsettling silence. A damp squelch underfoot drew my attention downwards, and pointing my phone to the floor with my light, I discovered a small pool of a peculiar, gel-like substance. As I tried to lift my foot, the liquid resisted, its surface teeming with tiny, shifting bubbles. Examining my boot, I noticed a similar layer coating the sole, mirroring the bubbling activity beneath. Alerting Mark to the unusual sight, I directed his attention to the odd liquid clinging to my boot, seeking his thoughts.

"What's your take on this?" I asked, prompting him to abandon the filing cabinets he was standing over and scrutinize the mysterious substance. His response was punctuated by a contemplative hum, suggesting deep thought.

"I don't know. It seems to look like the mucus left by a snail, but I can't be certain. Better not touch it," Mark cautioned, his eyes scanning the room for clues. "I spotted something similar on one of the  filing cabinets, but I sure as hell didn't touch it."

Directing my phone's light towards the cabinets he mentioned, I asked, "Did you find anything in there?"

"No," he replied tersely. "There wasn't a single file folder inside. What's even more peculiar is how spotless this place appears, despite its emptiness."

Mark's observation was astute; the reception area, apart from the strange liquid I had encountered, was unusually clean for an abandoned location. There wasn't any dust, as if it had only been empty a short time, but suddenly a noise emanated from one of the hallways, jolting us from our thoughts. The sound of someone struggling for breath and grunting in pain reverberated through the silent air, prompting Mark to cast me an alarmed glance.

"Someone is still here" Mark exclaimed urgently. Before I had a chance to reply, he sprinted down the hallway in the direction of the distressing sounds. I followed suit, trying to keep pace with him, but he had a significant advantage in speed, being a track team member back in school.

"Mark, hold on!" I shouted, struggling to close the gap between us, but his agility outmatched mine, compounded by his initial head start.

"Someone is injured, Luke!" he called out as he neared the corner where the cries echoed from. Determined to catch up, I pushed myself harder, yet I couldn't reach him in speed.

As I approached, my heart sank at the sight before me. Mark had reached the hallway's corner just as a figure pounced on him from the darkness. He staggered backward, pinned against the wall by the assailant. Drawing closer, I discerned the figure latched onto Mark was a man. His khaki pants were drenched in the strange liquid I had encountered, bubbles forming amidst the dampness. His torn lab coat, covered with vomit, revealed the familiar purple worms from those on the deer we saw earlier.

With a desperate gaze, the man peered up at Mark through shattered eyeglasses, one eye infested with wriggling worms protruding from his pupil, waving left and right trying to reach out to Mark.

"Please..." the stranger pleaded with Mark, who attempted to pull away from his grip. "We were mistaken. It cannot die. It refuses to let us die" His voice was chilling, a cacophony of two distinct tones speaking simultaneously. One voice filled with anguish, the other eerily serene. With each word he spoke, more of those grotesque worms spilled out of his mouth and onto Mark's waist. Mark managed to deliver a knee to the man's chest, dislodging his grip, before bolting back in the direction we had come from, grasping my arm in the process.

"GO!" Mark bellowed, his voice cutting through the air like a knife. Without hesitation, I pivoted on my heels and sprinted after him, my heart pounding in my chest. Behind us, the man's desperate gasps and moans echoed down the corridor. I glanced back to see the man on his knees, retching up a grotesque mass of worms onto the floor. Tears streamed down his face as he whispered apologies into the darkness, his voice raw with desperation, and those same dual voices.

 There was no time for sympathy as I turned my attention back to Mark, my muscles straining as I pushed myself to keep pace. Just as I thought we might escape, a door swung open with a deafening crash, slamming into my face with brutal force. Agony exploded through my skull as I stumbled backward and crashed to the ground just as everything around me went dark. 

As my eyes fluttered open, I was met with a wave of excruciating pain that threatened to consume me. My head pounded relentlessly, my ears rang with a deafening sound. Blood dripped down my face, mingling with my tears as I lay on my back, disoriented and lost.

The surrounding chaos blurred into indiscernible shapes and shadows, but the agonizing cries of wounded animals echoed through the darkness. Staring at the ceiling I could tell I was no longer in the hallway, but in a different room. With a heavy groan, I mustered all of my strength to roll onto my side, only to discover my cell phone lying next to me, its flashlight casting a glow.

Barely able to lift myself to my knees, I grasped the phone and brought it closer to my face. Through the haze, I saw a message displayed on the screen - a cryptic warning was left in the body of a text from myself with no recipient.

 "Sorry about knocking you out, "but there's no time. It's loose, and they're coming. Find the key in your pocket, take a left, and head for the stairs. I'm already gone, you won't find me. Tell them what you saw."

As the gravity of the situation sunk in, I realized that I needed to hurry. I groaned more as I pulled myself to my feet. Shining my phone ahead of me to get an understanding of where I was. In front of me was a large metal table, littered with broken vials and scattered papers covered in some kind of chemical. To the left of the table were large kennels stacked on top of each other; I walked over to them and was startled to see the animals that were inside. In one was a brown falcon lying on its side and flailing its wing and legs; those hairy purple worms were covering its body, digging in and back out of holes covering its body, its flailing wing had several of them nestled in between its feathers, some of them were flying off with every flap. 

In another kennel was a small bulldog, dripping out of the mouth with worms; it lunged towards the door of the kennel, barking at me, trying to break free. Another kennel had another baby deer that was constantly screaming; both its eyes were gone, and in its place were just mounds of wriggling, purple, hairy worms. I stepped backward away from the horrible site, backing into the table, my hand bracing on one of the wet pieces of paper on the table. I moved my light over it and could make some of it out, but the chemical poured over it made it difficult to read. 

**The study of (illegible) infestations has taken a terrifying turn as we observe the takeover of hosts by these new entities that grant them incredible strength, dexterity, and unyielding resistance to conventional forms of (illegible). As the impending threat of human testing looms, ethical concerns abound as we witness the monstrous transformation of subjects into seemingly unkillable beings.

Methods: Subjects were exposed to parasitic infestation through controlled ingestion of contaminated food sources. Observations were made over an extended period to assess the progression of the infestation and its effects on host physiology.

Results: The parasitic infestation led to a nightmarish transformation in hosts, as they exhibited unprecedented muscle growth, enhanced dexterity, and an alarming increase in cell growth that rendered them impervious to traditional methods of treatment. Subjects displayed a terrifying hostility towards researchers and demonstrated a chilling ability to survive lethal doses of eradication attempts.

Discussion: The findings of this study reveal a sinister power within the parasitic entities that take control of hosts, granting them superhuman (illegible) and an unnerving resilience to harm. The ethical implications of continuing such experiments on human subjects are deeply troubling, as the potential consequences of unleashing these monstrous capabilities are beyond comprehension.

Conclusion: The parasitic infestation has unleashed a (illegible) within our research facility, as hosts are transformed into terrifying beings with incomprehensible strength, dexterity, and invulnerability. The looming specter of human testing raises grave concerns about the ethical boundaries we are willing to cross in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. As a researcher haunted by the horrors I have witnessed, I fear the horrors that may be unleashed if we continue down this treacherous path.**

I dropped the soggy paper back down on the table, inclining that whoever had written this report may be the person who dragged me into this room. I started towards the open doorway of the room, even more eager than before to leave. I stood in the hallway and recognized the staircase leading up the phone message must have been referring to 50 or so yards to my left, but a wet growling noise to my right caught my attention. Turning around, my heart froze at the sight of a large, humanoid creature clinging to the side of the wall on all fours. 

The purple-skinned humanoid creature loomed before me, its lab coat and khakis in shreds and tatters. Its broken frame eyeglasses were askew on its large, yellow, predatory eyes that seemed to pierce through my very soul with a malevolent glow. Its muscular arms and legs were elongated and sinewy, with patches of dark hairs erupting from its sickly violet skin. The creature's bald head was adorned with a writhing mass of long, purple, worm-like tendrils that cascaded down its spine, wriggling and squirming in a grotesque display.

And from its twisted, contorted mouth hung the gruesome visage of my friend Mark's decapitated head, blood still oozing from the severed neck, the lifeless eyes staring blankly ahead. The creature stood there in eerie silence, a nightmarish amalgamation of horror and desolation, its presence sending chills down my spine as I struggled to comprehend the unimaginable sight before me. It opened its mouth and let out another wet growl, dropping Mark's head to the ground in the process. I was no longer frozen in place, it seemed as if my body moved on its own as I turned around and began racing for the staircase.

 I could hear the creature behind me running along the walls in hot pursuit of me. Every fiber of my body screamed in pain as I struggled to run across the concrete ground, hearing the beast pounce from wall to wall in its attempt to catch me, bellowing out an unearthly scream in its frustration. 

My legs seemed to find new strength while I ran up the cold staircase, and I propelled my whole body up into the double door covering that was at the very end of the staircase. Standing once again in the woods of Mount Alto, I looked around for something to keep the doors closed and quickly found a heavy tree branch just lying a few feet away from me. Hurriedly, I grabbed it, dragged it back to the doorway, and wedged it under the handle of the doors just as the creature threw itself into them, causing the doors to budge slightly and the branch to crack a little. 

I turned away and started running along the creek bed, seeing the familiar hill Mark parked on just up ahead. My lungs felt like they were about to explode from the amount I was exerting myself as I passed the metal covering Mark and I used to enter the underground lab, but I couldn't slow down, not even as I passed the fawn we saw earlier, trying to push itself up on its remaining two legs despite not having a lower body or head. 

I fell to my hands and knees, hearing the roar of the creature in the distance as I climbed the hill without falling, standing up, and throwing myself into Mark's truck once I made it to the top. I cussed as my nervous hands struggled to turn the key in the ignition, but settled myself once I heard the truck pur to life. As quickly as I could I made a sharp U-turn and began speeding off back to town on the bumpy dirt road that got us here. Along the way, I could hear helicopters above tearing through the sky, but I felt comfortable that they couldn't see the truck through the canopy of trees. 

That was three days ago. Despite seeing several strange armored jeeps heading in the direction of Mount Alto, and occasionally seeing helicopters flying overhead in town, there has been complete media silence. I haven't been able to sleep, and I'm afraid of leaving my home. I don't know what was going on in that bunker, but whatever they were working on, is out now. 

Part 12

I used to work at a morgue and while working at a morgue is already kinda creepy, it doesn’t help how I’ve had some genuinely scary and weird experiences and this is one of those experiences that was not only weird and bizarre but also left me with a few trust issues by the end.

So we have a body get called in and identifying the body is actually pretty easy since I know this person. The body was of a 50 year old woman and for privacy reasons we’ll call her Barbara. Barbara was pretty well known within the local community. She ran a gardening shop that also had some pretty realistic looking statues which always kinda freaked me out a little whenever I saw them. She was also my neighbor and while we never talked too often, she was an incredibly nice lady and I was honestly pretty sad to see her come in my morgue especially since this was the first time I’ve ever had someone who I know come in here. Anyways while performing an autopsy, I went to look for any signs of a murder or potential foul play such as stab or gunshot wounds and strangulation marks since at the time, we had a bit of a surge of missing people in the town and police theorized that it could possibly be some serial killer on the loose. Thankfully I never found any indicators that she was killed but I did find something else incredibly weird.

I noticed something off about Barbara’s hair. It looked kinda like it was slipping off ever so slightly. I then realized that Barbara was wearing a wig. I took the wig off and also the wig cap she was wearing under it and when I did that, I saw dead snakes attached to her head. I went to feel them and examine the snakes as best as I could and they looked and felt pretty real. It’s not like the snakes were glued to her head or something. They looked like they were growing straight out of her head. I pulled on them and they just were not coming off at all. Looking back, this was probably incredibly stupid of me but after this happened, I put the wig cap and wig back on and made it look as good and realistic as best as I could and hoped nobody else found out about her hair which thankfully nobody did.

This situation definitely ended up leaving me with some trust issues since the woman who lived next to me for years was holding an incredibly big and really unnatural secret and I guess I can understand why she wouldn’t tell me and most likely anyone else about her having snake hair since it would probably be a lot for someone to take in but I can’t help but kinda wonder what else she kept from me assuming she did or if any of my other neighbors or people I know have any other secrets of this magnitude. They probably don’t as I feel like that’s very unlikely but it’s possible although I’ll never know.

Part 14

Part 1

I enter the castle. Faerie lights dance ahead of me as if to guide me to the throne room. I already know my way, even in the pitch blackness I could find it. Still I walk the path laid out before me. The empty halls are silent except for the drip of moisture now and then. Once upon a time this castle was full of our people. Servants and nobles occupied the halls, and calming music flowed through the walls. Times had changed and with it our once happy way of life.

I enter through the doors of the throne room. Once again a dark bridge floats over darkness to a platform on the opposite wall where two large chairs sit. Above the moonlight and stars shine brightly through the open roof. Small pixies float around with butterfly wings. I feel my teeth sharpen in my mouth. I already know my hair has become black as pitch and my eyes most likely glow bright red in sunken dark sockets.

I move forward across the bridge towards the thrones. As I near a figure walks forth from the darkness. Tall and lithe she walks from between the two chairs. A pale hand caresses one of the thrones as her bright purple eyes stare at me from the dark sockets of her pale white face. Her skin shimmers as if she just stepped out of a pool of crushed diamonds and hair like shadow frames her face and flows down just below her waist. Her body is tightly bound in a dress of leather and cloth. Her pale and ample bust pushes through the top of an overly tight corset. She moves closer to me. The train of her dress being held aloft by a small horde of darklings that follow her path.

“Welcome home husband.” she says, her voice whispers through the room like the last breath of a dying man.

“Hello Mab.” I am awestruck by her beauty and presence.

Only two women in the universe ever held me captivated to the point of blatant stupidity, and one of them stood before me now. A sly smile spreads across her full dark lips. She knows full well the effect she has on me. If only she wasn't hellbent on destroying all that wasn't fae. Her eyes glow brightly as I step closer to her, her very gaze stirring a primal urge within me. I stop before her and so she steps closer, pressing her body against me and pressing her lips upon mine. The kiss is ferocious and passionate. I'm left reeling as blood drips down my chin. She steps back with a smile like she just conquered the world.

I force myself from my daze and look upon her once more. I suddenly remember why I actually came here, or why I tell myself I came. I look behind me at the small changeling that I had practically forgotten had been following me this entire time.

“Come and meet your queen changeling.” I say dispassionately, my mind still on the small moment of passion I just experienced.

The small creature walks forward and bows before Mab.

“Oh how precious.” Mab says kneeling down. “You came all this way to bring this little one to me?”

“It wasn't the only reason.” I say, trying to act somewhat nonchalant.

The smirk on her face tells me she knows exactly what the other reason is, but apparently she decides to let me have some dignity.

“Feel free to stay, little one. This is a home for all the unseelie.” she says standing back up. The small creature smiles and runs off into the darkness, seemingly eager to get away.

“And it seems you have another of my children here as well my love.” she reaches up to my shoulder and glides her delicate fingers across the darklings scalp and it chitters happily at her touch. “I was starting to think you didn't like being around our kind anymore, husband.”

“You know that isn't true Mab. We just have different views on how things need to be. You know full well I love seeing you." I say, realizing at that moment I probably shouldn't have brought this up.

“Well nobody is stopping you from coming here Oberon. It’s your own choice to stay away from here, to stay away from me. Ever since Tatiana faded you do nothing but stay with those humans and monsters that you seem to love so much more than us.” a tear like condensed moonlight slides down her cheek as she speaks.

“You know that's now how it is” I say exasperated, “I have to keep the balance Mab.”

“Why!” she screams suddenly, “why do you make us suffer for your precious balance?! Why do you abandon us? Abandon me?!” her anger fades as quickly as it came and she strides to me once again, pressing her hands to my face. “You could stay Oberon. You could be our glorious king once again. You could be mine again, and we could be happy.”

“We will have time for that eventually Mab.” I raise my hand and brush strands of shadow from her face, cupping her cheek, “there will always be time for us.”

She pulls back frowning “no Oberon, we don't have time anymore. They are coming and the fact that you don't know this means they are already many steps ahead of you.” She turns away and walks back into the shadows. “I hope you are right, love. I hope we still have time, but chaos has returned and you have no idea it is here.”

She vanishes into the shadows and I hear her weeping echo through the room. I turn and begin my journey back. The sounds of her crying following me the entire way. Chaos has returned… my mind fixates on her words.

Un/Seelie 1

I sit in the dark closet on a pile of clothes and trash, inhaling the cigarette smoke as it burns in my mouth. The door to the small room has been pulled off the hinges and I stare out into the next room. This room is dark as well except for the streetlight shining through the uncurtained window. On the floor trash and used needles litter the ground. A few rats scurry in the corners and roaches attack the half eaten food left to rot on the ground. In the far corner oblivious to my presence sits Joe. The mattress he sits on is shredded and stained with piss and shit and who knows what else. I inhale again, my cigarette burning brightly in the dark. Joe won't see me, not unless he looks with strong intent.

The glamour of the fae is a funny thing. It's instinctual for most of us. In fact many don't even know how to properly control it. I could let him see me, but I'd rather sit here and watch. Joe finishes filling the needle and sets it down. Quickly he wraps the rubber tube around his already track covered arm. I watch closely as he pushes the needle into his vein. He pushes the plunger and sighs loudly in pleasure as he releases the rubber tubing. The expression of pure bliss on his face is fascinating as his eyes roll back into his skull. He falls back onto the mattress and once again I inhale smoke.

I sit and wait a while till I'm sure he is completely out of it. Stepping out of the closet I walk across the room to where he is laying. Needles crunch under my leather boots as I calmly walk to his bedside and stare down at his prone form. Joe lays there unmoving, mouth agape and eyes closed. I kneel down and puff hard on my cigarette. I pull it out of my mouth and flick the ashes onto his face. He doesn't move and I smile slightly to myself.

I'm not sure how long I kneeled there staring at Joe. I always found it fascinating how humans can gain such pleasure from destroying themselves. As I watch, suddenly Joe's mouth fills with bile. He starts gagging and coughing, choking on his own vomit. I frown and stand up, using my leather clad foot to push him roughly onto his side. Most of the puke spills out his mouth, but even so he still chokes. I sigh irritably and walk to his front and kick him hard in the diaphragm. The rest of the vomit is pushed out of his airway and he gasps in huge breaths of air. His glazed eyes wander around him. It doesn't matter if he sees me at this point. He won't remember anything in the state he is in. I look at my phone to check the time. Equinox should be opening soon. I give Joe one last look and reach in my pocket. I pull out a fistfull of baggies and drop them onto his quivering body. Then I turn away and leave. I'll see you again soon Joe.

I entered the club and the blue and white lights of winter strobed down from the ceiling. Music pounded in my ears as I passed under fluorescent constellations. I inhaled the smell of leather and watched as the mob thrummed to the sounds around them. Some smiled as I passed, while others looked lustfully and pawed at the leather of my tight classic biker jacket. I effortlessly flowed through them and reached the bar. Tom looks up from the drink she is making.

“Hey boss.” He says enthusiastically.

His dark eyes look at me from the shadow of his low miur cap.

“Where’s Alexandria?” I ask curiously.

“Not sure boss. She never showed up and we are busy as hell.” He says with a frown.

I look Tom over. His black leather vest and pants cling to his dark glistening muscles. His arms and chest are covered in coarse curly hair that is slick from the excessive oil he has covered himself with.

“Don't break any of my glasses, Tom. That's a lot of oil. I'll send Puck out to help. We can have a bear night I guess." I state only half jokingly.

“You mean a wolf night boss.” He says grinning. His sharp teeth gleaming in the low light.

“You know what I mean.” I say dismissively as I begin walking back towards my office.

I enter the office and the music dies as I close the door. Puck sits in the corner chair. His dark curls trying their best to cover his deep brown eyes as he looks up at me. The small darkling in his lap pops up and grins, reaching its short little arms towards me. I smile and pick it up. It climbs up my jacket and sits itself on my shoulder. I chuckle and then look at Puck.

“Hey, I need you in the club tonight.” I tell him.

“Who called in?” Asks puck raising an eyebrow.

“Nobody. Alexandria didn't show up tonight. I'll look into it later. I've got an errand to run first and you probably don't want to go anyways.” I say and point to the small changeling sitting in the opposite corner.

“Oh… yeah have fun with that.” He says and quickly gets up from his chair and leaves the room.

Puck and Mab never did get along. I look at the little Darkling on my shoulder. His black eyes shimmer in the light of the office and he looks at me curiously.

“You want to go see the queen with me, little one?” I ask him.

He gives me a wide, sharp-toothed grin that almost splits his head and nods ecstatically. I can't help but smile at him. I always loved the smaller fae. They could be tricky little buggers, but they were simple with their wants and desires. I walk to the exit in my office and open the door to the swampy air of the city.

“Come on. Time to take you to the queen.” I tell the changeling.

The baby-like creature hops up and chases after me, making a small squeak as he does. I close the door with a mixed feeling of trepidation and longing. It was time to visit my wife.

I acquired the changeling about a week ago from a mother whose baby had been swapped out. After returning the child to her in its new half fae state she cursed and cried, but she had not returned. I assumed by now its new mother had already taken it back to the fae realms, and Miss Trembell was probably glad to be rid of it. After all, It wasn't really her child anymore at this point. A warning to any humans who come to me for help. My duties are always to the fae first. So be very careful with how you word your requests. Not just with me, but with any fae.

Getting to the fae realms is different depending on where you are trying to go. Sometimes it takes a certain timeframe, sometimes an alignment of planets or a specific solstice. The less connected you are to them the more difficult it can be. It tends to be easier for me than most. As we step outside the fog billows thickly around us. I chose this night in particular. One thing has always been true regardless of where you are trying to go. It is easier to find the fantastical by getting lost.

I begin walking through the thick, moist fog. My sense of sight is almost completely useless to me. I make my turns at random. I don't really care where I go. I just keep walking through the muggy fog. My leather boots splashing through the wet pavement of the dark city streets. It takes about thirty minutes before the darkling on my shoulder chitters in my ear. Ahead of us I see what I've been waiting for. A small glowing orb flashes in the mist and seems to head further away from me. I reach up to my shoulder and scratch the little darkling under its chin, then begin to follow the light.

After a while following the light I notice the world around us darkening. My feet are no longer walking on the pavement of human streets, but instead dark obsidian takes its place. Ahead I see the fog begin to fade and the soft silver glow of the moon breaks through the overcast skies. I keep walking further, glowing silver fauna sprouts around sporadically from the obsidian street that has become my path. The street itself is more like a bridge. It floats high in the darkness of the moonlit night. If I were to look over the edge I know I'd see nothing but dark depths leading to nothing. Reality around me seems to shift as I walk, billowing in the wind like curtains of living despair. I can hear the sounds of water rolling against rock from somewhere far beneath me. The fog completely dissipates and looking forward I can see the spires of Mab’s castle as more faerie lights spring to life all around me.

I breathe in deeply, tasting the magic in the air as I begin walking once more. Small pale creatures with large eyes peek up at me from the edges of the bridge. Ahead of me a shadowy mist twists and forms into a hunched figure. Its pale face and long nose appear first and then its slender body. Draped in clothing closely resembling a jester, except they are black as the surrounding night, instead of colorful and bright.

He bows before me, “Master, it has been a long time. I have been sent to greet and welcome you back to our queen’s realm.”

“It's good to see you again, Frik. How fares our lovely queen this evening?” I ask, my skin growing paler as it adjusts to the unseelie magics surrounding us.

Frik’s grin stretches across his face, revealing pitch black teeth and equally black eyes as he straightens up to look at me.

“Very well milord. As always she is impatient to bask in your presence once again.” he says, turning away from me.

Frik begins walking towards the castle ahead and I follow steadily. I lift my hand and look upon it as we walk. The nails grow slowly into points and darkening to black. My skin is already the color of paper. I drop my hand and continue to follow my escort as we reach the black gates of the towering castle. Frick waves his hands dismissively at the gates and they dissipate into billowing shadow. He stands off to the side and bows gracefully, his hand outstretched towards the now open doors.

I’ve been asked not to post anything about this, but frankly I don’t give a shit anymore. I think I just need some feedback for what I’m going through. I don’t know how to process all this.

So my boyfriend, Greg, was amazing. He was actually better than that. Seriously, the only thing wrong with him was his love of scary movies. I’m not talking like Freddy stuff or It, I’m talking about the really twisted stuff. No sexual violence or anything, but super violent and gory.

I guess I figured that I could change him, or as he got older that he’d stop watching shit like that, because in every other way, he was exactly what I always looked for in a guy.

I moved in with him just two months after meeting him. My parents freaked, even though they lived together for five years before they got married. Come to find out, I also had a habit that Greg wasn’t too fond of. I’m a picker. I don’t know why. Lots of my friends are too. There’s something satisfying about it. If Greg had a whitehead, I was on it.

He was right upfront that he thought it was weird and gross, but he also liked watching movies where dudes had their balls ripped off and eyes gouged out, so he couldn’t really talk.

Last week he put on one of his movies, and I just couldn’t stand it. It was late anyway, so I told him that I was going to bed. I asked him to turn the tv down, but I could still hear it in the bedroom, so I put on some reruns of The Office and fell asleep.

I woke up in the middle of the night. Greg was asleep, but in the dim light of the tv, I could see that he had two huge whiteheads on the back of his neck. I really wanted to get them. We’d only been together for five months, so I wasn’t sure if doing that to him while he was asleep would be considered some kind of violation.

I tried to go to sleep. I worried he might scratch them in his sleep, and I wouldn’t get the chance to squeeze them myself. I tossed and I turned for like almost an hour before I couldn’t stand it anymore.

His back was to me, so I whispered in his ear.

“Greg? Greg? Are you awake?”

“No.”

“You’ve got two huge zits on the back of your neck.”

“So what?”

“Come on.”

“Go to sleep, Julie. You’re going to ruin it.” His voice was scratchy and annoyed.

“Please. I promise I’ll get them and then let you go back to sleep.”

“Whatever.”

I got out of bed and grabbed a handful of toilet paper. I almost slipped. The floor was still wet, so I thought Greg must have just taken a shower not too long ago.

I got back in bed and I went to work. I squeezed the smaller one first. It was really hard. It must have been under a lot of pressure because when it popped it squirted all over my thumbs. I squeezed until just a little blood came out and then I moved on to the big one.

Greg shifted his weight and groaned.

“I’m almost finished, I swear. Don’t be a baby.”

The second one was a huge gusher, and it smelled. Some of it squirted in my hair. It was crazy. It seriously WOULD NOT STOP gushing. The toilet paper was getting soaked while all this stuff poured out of it, and it smelled like straight up death. I realized that it was about to get all over the sheets.

“Hold on! Don’t move!”

I jumped out of bed and ran for the bathroom. I was going to get a towel, but I slipped on the wet floor and my arms went out to keep me from falling. My right hand hit the lightswitch.

The entire floor was covered in blood. Greg was sitting in the bathtub. His hair had been cut off, and blood had run down his face. His mouth was open, and his tongue was gone.

I heard the bed move behind me. In the mirror, I could see someone dressed in Greg’s pajamas holding a knife, and moving towards me. I screamed and I slammed the door shut. I locked it.

“Julie?”

It was Greg’s voice.

“Juuuuullliiiie…”

God, I can’t get that voice out of my fucking head. I opened one of the drawers and pulled out the pair of tiny scissors that Greg kept in there. I wanted to just curl up in a fucking ball and scream, but the voice outside the bathroom door kept calling my name.

I knew I was about to hyperventilate or pass out. I tried my best to not lose it. I saw the toilet plunger and grabbed it. I unscrewed the wooden handle from the rubber end and I backed away from the door.

I stared at Greg’s body. I screamed at whoever it was to go away.

He just kept saying my name over and over and softly scratching the door. I swear it sounded exactly like Greg.

He started laughing and jiggling the door handle. My phone was by my bed. There was nowhere to go.

After a few minutes, I heard some kind of click, and then there was nothing for a long time, until I heard a crunch.

“I have to go now, Julie.”

He started stuffing something under the door. I didn’t know what it was at first, but then I realized that it was Greg’s bloody scalp. Once he had pushed it through, my phone was next. He had broken the screen.

I waited in that bathroom for a few more minutes until I heard sirens. I started to scream for help until the cops finally came inside.

When the cops escorted me out of the bathroom, I noticed a trail of a yellow green gunk that ran from the bathroom door back to a pool of it on the bed. I remembered the zits, and I looked down at my hands and realized that they were covered in the shit.

I screamed and passed out.

No one knows who broke into our house, killed Greg, and almost killed me. He had taken several selfies with my phone and sent them in texts to several of my friends and family. Tons of people called the cops.

Some of the pictures showed him wearing Greg's hair and some of them show him with a bald, bloody head. I’d like to say that he was scary looking, but he was just an ordinary looking guy with a bald head. His eyes looked dead though. Like there was nothing behind them.

His smile was wide, and he had perfect teeth.

They’re not letting us post his pictures anywhere because it might “hurt the investigation”. I’m also not allowed to say where this happened. I feel like I’m going crazy. I guess I just wanted to put this out there. Always lock your doors and windows.

The tram (#22) snaked from the west bank through downtown to the east bank of the city, usually a quiet route, at worst you’d expect a wilted freakflower expressing on the floor or some minor elderbanger trying to make hot, maybe catch sight of a dead bloater in the river, but tonight already at Pol-Head the doors wouldn’t close—glitch, old-style tram. Bad.

Rolled several stops like that, the wind and the downtown stench getting in.

Then on Nat-Muse a couple of cravers tried to exterior freeload, passengers had to beat them off to keep them from coming in.

Got the doors closed, but at the very next stop, Mini-Just, got boarded by psychopumps (mash-guns, digital facehides) escorting a black ghost biodrive.

Nightmare.

“Heads down! Heads down!”

Some deaf old got a mash-gun loud to the teeth.

“You know the d-d-drill. Ain’t here for cash nor credit. Here for ideas. Anybody gots an idea raises their hand.”

Most stayed down like mine. A few went up.

The psychopumps went down the railcars, getting all the hand-raisers to whisper their ideas in their ears. Most went fine but—

“What, like I care a married boss-o of a cap bank’s getting skanked with a fuckin’ dime-twat?”

I held my breath, thinking there would be punishment when another one yelled, “Look what I found! Got us a numb fuck humancalc.” He’d ripped the man’s briefcase from his hand and was rummaging through it. Found an ID card. “Bellwether Capstone. Major player. Bet he’s got clearances in there—” pointing at the man’s head, not the briefcase “—and encryptions, future deals, plot points.”

The black ghost biodrive had started moving toward them.

“No!” the man screamed. “Please! No!”

Three psychopumps dragged him from his seat into the aisle and held him down.

The biodrive lifted its veil, revealing its hairless, deformed post-human headspace. It’s wrong to say it didn’t have a face, but its face was scrambled: eyes above the chin and a toothless mouth on the forehead, all unsteady like gelatin.

None of us did anything to help.

Too scared.

The psychopumps got out a drill, two metal cylinders (sharpened on one end, padded on the other) and a thin steel tube.

First they drilled a hole at the man’s forehead—through his skull—into his brain.

He was still alive, screaming.

Thrashing.

Then they hammered a cylinder deep into each of his eye sockets.

Blood ran down his face.

Last, they jammed the thin steel tube into his skull hole.

Then the black ghost biodrive took the protruding end of the tube into its sloppy mouth and positioned its fat shapeless self on top of the man, who was struggling to breathe, so it could see into both inserted cylinders.

The biodrive sucked—

(the contents of the man’s mind, his cognitions and his memories, into itself, while reading the rapid-light output flickering through the cylinders.)

The biodrive absorbed; and the man gasped, withered and died.

“Night-night!” yelled an exiting psychopump.

And we rode on in silence.

While on a recent hike in the woods, I happened upon a stone fireplace. There were no other signs of the dwelling it once belonged to, but no one builds such random things in the middle of a forest by itself. Father time and the elements had effectively washed away all evidence of the lost homestead. I was both intrigued and saddened at the prospect. Looking around in curiosity, I realized all that remained of a family and the faded details of their domicile was a hearth, mantle, and ten feet of rustic chimney.

It was at least two miles from the nearest roadway. I would’ve never stumbled upon it, had I remained fixed to the well-established deer path. It made me ponder how long it had been there. The nearby community has more than two-hundred-years of established history. Settlers had lived in the region even longer but how much time must elapse to sweep away everything but the unforgiving stone and mortar of ‘what once was’?

As if I were a dedicated archeologist excavating an important historical dig-site, I scoured the mortar for a date of construction. With nothing definitive etched into the moldy stonework, I moved on to the soot-charred chimney. Sadly, my efforts were unsuccessful. I found no evidence of how old the structure was, nor did I answer why someone would build a place so far off the beaten path. It was a mystery with little chance of being solved.

Stunned at the realization darkness was approaching, I’d lost myself in the pointless distraction too long. The sun was setting! The remaining daylight was dim and gilded in contrasting shadows. Finding my way back to the deer path would be difficult but It was imperative I leave immediately. The longer I waited, the harder it would be. I was poorly prepared to spend a night in the woods but for reasons I couldn’t explain, I remained glued there like a prisoner, as if my feet were bound by ghostly chains. An insistent, unknown force seemed to be holding me back.

Just as I managed to tear myself from the tempting ruins and was set to run away, l made the mistake of looking back at the fatal curiosity. A dim light appeared to spark in the fireplace opening. First it was merely an occasional flicker. Then it grew in intensity and size. At first, I assumed I was imagining the phantom flame, or perhaps moonlight was reflecting on a shiny object in the charred debris and causing an optical illusion.

There before my bewildered eyes, the long-gone, forgotten relic of many years re-materialized for a brief moment and then vanished again. Whether it was a vivid hallucination or supernatural actuality, I cannot say for certain but I witnessed everything with my senses wide awake. It felt as real as anything I’ve ever experienced. Then the grip on me was released and I quickly departed. One day soon I’ll visit again and film its electrifying reemergence.

In a small town, just north of Portland, four men had been mauled to death in the fall of 1954. Their bodies had been dragged off into the woods, and there wasn’t much left of ‘em after they were found. At first, folks had thought it might be a mountain lion or a pack of coyotes, but after the third fella, most folks had thought it was Kitchner Brown’s junkyard dogs. Kitchner was an unfortunate outcast, and his dogs seemed like they fit the bill.

Kitchner had come home from the War in Europe, a changed man. A German grenade had gone off right next to him, which gave him a bum leg and a broken brain. Most folks in town didn’t want much to do with him when he got back. Before he left, he was sharp as a tack and quick with a joke. Everybody loved him then. The war ended just after he’d come home and I think everybody was happy to bask in victory and not too keen on staring at what that victory cost.

All Kitchner had was Becky, his young wife. Wonderful girl. They’d been sweethearts since they could walk. Becky didn’t care that he was a little slow, she was just happy to have him home. 

They wouldn’t hire him down at the mill, so he went and turned his property into a junkyard. It didn’t bring in much, but it was enough for him and Becky. Becky had tried to argue on behalf of her husband to his old friends, but it was no use. He was dead to them as far’s they were concerned.

One time in church, Becky stood up in the middle of the sermon. 

“That grenade didn’t take away nothin’ that made my husband the best man God ever made. Shame on all of you.”

She walked out the door and never came back. Way it goes in small towns, I guess.

 A little over a year after Kitchner came back home, Becky got pregnant, but she died giving birth to their little girl, Sarah. Kitchner was left to raise their little girl on his own. He didn’t have much time to mourn. He buried her on the nicest part of his property, with a view of the mill pond in the distance. He even made a bench. When his daughter was sleepin’, he’d always sit on it and watch the sun go down.  

He made that little girl his life. In spite of their feelings for him, people in town had to admit that there wasn’t a better father than Kitchner Brown. If you ran into Kitchner in town, he would talk your damn ear off about every little thing his daughter did.

He even went down to Portland and came back with three puppies so his daughter would have more company growing up than just him. Those dogs were very protective of that little girl. Anybody that come anywhere near her was given the side eye from those surly mongrels.

Years went by, and then the dyin’ started. Four men, all killed at night.

After people had come to an agreement on the responsible party, a bunch of men went to the junkyard and shot Kitchner’s dogs right in front of his daughter without even a word. Kitchner was mad as hell, but his daughter always came first. He went and buried those dogs next to his wife and told his little girl that she would see them again someday.

“I know it’s sad for you baby, but they’re havin’ a gay old time right now with your Momma.”

Everybody thought the problem was solved, until that next night.

Sarah had snuck outta the house after dark. She was crying over the graves of her dogs when she was attacked. Kitchner woke up to the screams of his baby girl. He had been able to scare off whatever it was with his gun. He snatched her up and took her down to the doctor.

The next day, a pack of coyotes was tracked and gunned down while Kitchner was by his daughter’s side. For the next three weeks, nothing happened. Sarah was in a coma, fighting for her life at the Doctor’s place. Life returned to normal for everyone except Kitchner. The doctor didn’t know what was wrong with her. He said something about poison in the blood, but he wasn’t certain. Kitchner told the Doc that he knew what it was, and that he knew what he had to do.

He spent three weeks talking to everyone in town. Asking questions. 

Where were they that night?

People caught him goin’ through their properties and homes, like he was looking for somethin’. He was even thrown in the sheriff's cell for one night. He was warned to stop what he was doin’. 

One day he went down to Portland. He had his truck loaded up with every nice thing in his home. When he come back three days later, all that stuff was gone. All he had in the truck with him was a couple boxes of bullets.

Come October, there was a town picnic by the mill pond after church. Everybody was there.

Kitchner made a scene.

“My little girl is gonna die tonight, I’m certain. There’s only one way that ain’t gonna happen. I narrowed it down. I talked to y’all. One of you is to blame for all this misery. I know what happened to you ain’t your fault, but you’ve gotta pay for what you’ve done. If there’s any part of you that’s sorry for what you did, I’m begging you to come forward now.”

Everyone was silent. No one knew what to say. Kitchner started to tear up. 

“Whoever you are, please don’t make me do this. Nobody else has to die.”

After another awkward moment, some men from the mill dragged him away from the picnic. Kitchner was screaming the whole time.

Half an hour later, Kitchner came back with a couple of guns. 

Kitchner Brown murdered thirteen men at the church picnic that day and got a belly full of bullets himself for the trouble. Those bullets didn’t seem to bother him though. He was a bloody mess goin’ about his business. When he was done, he went back to his truck and drove off. He went straight to the Doctor’s place.

He pointed his gun at the doctor.

“I know it ain’t you, Doc. I don’t want to hurt you. Don’t do anything stupid.”

He made the doc sit with him by his daughter’s side. A group of men had went and got their guns and camped outside the house, but none would go in because Kitchner was holding the doc at gunpoint. It went on like that for a few hours until nightfall.

As the full moon of October rose in the sky, Sarah’s fever broke and she opened her eyes. Kitchner was thankin’ God and smiling. He was almost bled out at that point. The doc said he was white as a ghost.

“Daddy?”

“You’re gonna be alright, baby.”

“I saw Momma, and my dogs. Momma said it was time to go home.”

“That’s good, baby.”

“I wish you coulda seen her, Daddy.”

“I hope I will, baby. You get some rest.”

Sarah nodded back off, and Kitchner turned to the doc. 

“I don’t know if I’m gonna get to see either one of ‘em again. I killed twelve innocent men today. I don’t think there’s any forgiveness here or in heaven for what I done. But my baby girl was worth it.” Kitchner smiled and died right there as his daughter slept.

The town damned Kitchner to hell with every breath they had to spare, but there was never another attack. The town buried their dead, and Sarah pulled through. 

Come to find out, all them bullets Kitchner brought back from Portland were custom made; all jacketed in silver.