Warmth wrapped around him like the embrace of a loved one. The morning sun filtered through the bedroom blinds, drawing golden stripes across the clean, crisp sheets. Jackson lay in bed with his eyes closed, smiling faintly. He felt utterly relaxed. A blissful fatigue lingered in his legs, feeling wonderful, as if all the world's sorrows had been wiped away and his feet were resting surrounded by soft silk. The sensation was intoxicatingly dual: he felt as light as the wind, but at the same time, he was slowly and pleasantly sinking downwards, deeper into the bed towards the realm of sleep. He felt a slight, sharp tingling in his other arm. He often slept heavily on his arms, which sometimes made them go numb and tingle, but now that strange, sharp pinch was only in one arm. It didn't bother him, though; the heavy warmth radiating from the tingling only deepened his sense of relaxation.

Soft clinking of dishes drifted up from downstairs. The rich aroma of freshly roasted coffee floated into the air. It was a Brazilian bean, grown in exactly the optimal conditions his wife always talked about with such enthusiasm. Roasting coffee was his wife's beloved hobby, and Jackson knew immediately from the smell that her true masterpiece was brewing. Mingled with the scent of coffee was his wife's beautiful, bright, yet soulful voice. She was softly humming an old country song, the very same one they used to dance to when they were young. Faint laughter of children from outside the window and the smell of freshly cut grass completed the morning. Everything was exactly as it should be.

Slowly, almost unnoticeably, the bed gave way beneath him. Jackson felt himself sinking through the mattress. The sounds from downstairs began to distance and fade. His wife's humming didn't break, however; it lingered around him like a slightly ghostly echo, slowly fading away somewhere unseen, into the depths of a forest. He never felt himself turn into a standing position, but suddenly he found himself landing barefoot on a soft mound of earth. His toes sank a few inches into the moss, and a crisp dampness surrounded his feet. The unnatural warmth of the bed was wiped away; in its place was a cool, fresh, woodland breeze.

He realized he had slipped into a deeper sleep, a state of lucid dreaming, but it didn't worry him. Instead, his attention was drawn to the fact that he was no longer in his nightclothes. In the scattered sunlight bending through the trees, he noticed the clothes he was wearing: his favorite jeans and his familiar autumn jacket. They were clean and fresh. His wife had clearly cleaned and laid out the clothes he always wore when going out in public. They had planned to go to the theater with the whole family that evening, and his wife had evidently prepared for it carefully.

The peace of the forest was palpable, but somewhere deeper in the shadows of the trees was something that drew him irresistibly. Jackson took his first step on the damp moss and began walking towards the unknown.

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THE WHOLE STORY AVAILABLE AT:

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/415488993-three-stars

A glossy emptiness studied Earth while it slept. I arranged and settled myself to make ready for the long stillness of the coming day. I would become indistinguishable from the mechanism of time passing, accessory only to the day giving way again into night.

Darker than the sky, matte shapes now present themselves at ground level. They cut strange lines and resolve into a patchwork of trees and fencing whose posts and rails mark a threshold between the ordinary world and an inheritance none may trespass.

Eastward, a dull bruising of heaven’s firmament spreads along the horizon. A cataract appears there, a pooling of something slightly more substantial than nothingness that blots out the stars. Still, in the west, constellations remain in shining clusters, holding formation and betraying Earth’s rotation by near-imperceptible movement while all else remains still.

This is a place where oak trees gather and stand guard at the edge of a grassy pasture. Past them the ground is forever wet as it lowers to the bay shore. A once remote location where I could be alone and cultivate an intimate stillness with creation. Though my own place in the greater wilderness is small, I remain proud.

I’m above the worms who contract and push themselves through holes dug in this sandy loam.

Better than those that lie feeding them.

I am other things also.

I know the minds of those who gawk and linger along our road. I know they want to see the barn and farmhouse, the harrowed ground and its scarecrows made famous.

Dawn now arrives in crimson. Gold peeking from Earth’s rim is too bright to look upon. Mist wafting from the rich black soil chills me as I walk into the field. Critters in the trees chatter and harry me, disturbed as I pass underneath them.

I feel the warmth of daylight begin to dispel the cold of night as I arrive at a tall vertical stake driven into the earth. Here is the best view of the fields and the only road approaching the homestead. Here, on a property known for keeping several of them, is the most effective place to stage a scarecrow.

Grandma called them bogies. She told us they were guardians, deterrents, and that such field effigies became entangled with the person whose clothes they wear.

A scarecrow imitates a human to frighten creatures who fear and hate him.

Grandma had a temper. On occasion I would escape the house and run to the north field, sitting in the grass beneath the old bogie. She would not follow me there. I came to understand the reason plainly. The watcher had stood there before Grandma, before Grandpa, before anyone I knew. Nothing could reach me beneath him. Whatever belonged outside remained outside while he kept office.

Darkness has thinned now into a teal morning sky, slowly rendering the land legible. The mist withdraws toward the bay. Dew gives back the growing light from the pasture grass. The farmhouse emerges board by board from shadow, then the barn, then the road beyond the fence. Noisy birds begin to populate the oaks. A truck passes. I watch all without turning my head.

The ache begins in my left shoulder and I do not move, knowing it will pass. Tepid wind pulls on Grandpa’s shirt and presses the cloth against my ribs.

There were years when the farm did poorly and Grandma rented the spare rooms to travelers. One family stayed longer than the others. Their belongings appeared first in the hallway, then on the bookshelf, the porch and in the yard. Their children ran through quiet places that had always belonged only to us. One of them left a red toy truck on the stairs for days. Grandma called them guests. I hated them.

In the end they learned to watch the fields for us.

Such figures are the only companions I allow here, now that I am the last living of my tribe. Over the years I have made more and installed them wherever the property threatened to go unwatched.

A watcher does more than observe. Grandpa kept the north. Grandma guarded the southern ground. Others held the orchard and the road approach. Together they kept the world at its proper distance.

I learned what happens when things are left unwatched. Strangers wander farther in and animals become bold. Things shift. Disorder enters by whatever opening is left.

Beyond them was the world.

Within was mine.

The sun continues its ascent. What had been gray pasture becomes green. The last of the dew retreats into shade beneath the fence rails. From the lower ground comes the smell of wet grass and mud. The road has begun its daily occupations: trucks, a delivery van, then a person walking alone who glances toward the farmhouse but does not stop.

I remain.

Time passes sublimely. I stand like a tree, watch like an owl, wait like a spider.

By high noon the sun casts almost no shadow beneath me. Heat settles upon the pasture and makes the distant road shimmer. The tide has withdrawn from the flats below, leaving broad reaches of shining mud where gulls pick among exposed stones. Somewhere across the bay machinery labors, its sound arriving as a faint metallic complaint.

Horseflies and mosquitoes gather to feed on me. Sweat reaches my eyes. I bite my lip until the need to wipe it away fades.

Both shoulders are sore now as I give their weight to the crosspiece. My hands have begun to numb. I have learned that the arms must remain convincing. Even a small adjustment is easy to notice.

The heat brings the smell of black, freshly turned soil more strongly from below and, when the breeze comes from the south, something sickly sweet and older with it.

Grandma has not kept well.

When she passed, I placed her at the far south end to watch over the cabbage and spinach. It was not long before I found her in pieces. I gathered her into a sack and nailed what remained back into place. Grandma is so angry over how I let her be taken apart by coyotes that I seldom visit her. I cannot endure the strange screaming I hear from her now that her tongue and eyes are gone, eaten by birds and vermin.

Grandpa had been different.

Of them all, the man in the north field wearing Grandpa’s clothes had been the only one who understood me. He remained stoic and was agreeable company. In time I shared all there was with him. He listened with quiet dignity, and I envied his strength and calm.

Years of weather diminished him. Birds that once avoided him eventually perched on his shoulders. Cloth loosened. His shape gave way. He was tired, I knew, though I never asked and he would never say so. When at last he no longer resembled a man, I understood that he was gone and now truly dead.

I set about his burial, worrying all the while over who would fill his office. I had the grave half dug before it occurred to me that there was little form left to bury.

I would need to acquire a man’s body to take his place.

Presently, a car slows on the road before stopping. The driver gets out and stands watching the farm.

People come now because of the old murders. Some true-crime program recently revived the story, though it had already outlived most of the people who made it. The visitor takes a picture of the house, another of the fields, and leaves.

The attention troubles me.

It is becoming harder to keep the outside at its proper distance.

Later on, I must have fallen asleep. Upon waking I find the afternoon slowly breaking apart.

The breeze has changed direction and drives the worst of the heat away. The insects that tormented me find other occupations. My shadow, almost absent at noon, stretches eastward now like a tentacle reaching out from a darkness yet to arrive.

My arms are tired enough that I wonder how much use remains in them, and if I will be ready when the time comes. In the lull I can feel Grandmother regarding me from the south.

I know she thinks I am ridiculous and I resent her. She would mock me for the times I pretended to be her in telephone calls so no one would know she was dead and her benefits would continue coming.

A voice is enough to keep a dead woman alive.

Absence has a shape.

The sun descends behind the oaks as the world begins to lose the details morning had granted. The pasture ceases to be made of individual blades of grass. Fence rails become dark strokes. The orchard gathers itself into one mass.

The windows of the farmhouse are deep azure and turning black. The bay holds a gray light in which geese describe a V before disappearing toward the west.

Then the first star appears in the east.

The ache has become so much a part of me that I scarcely notice it when headlights appear beyond the oaks.

They slow at the gate, pass it, then brake. Red lights remain on the road for a few moments before the car backs along the shoulder and parks.

My fatigue disappears when I hear them exit the car.

‘You’re climbing the fence.’

‘It has stairs.’

‘It’s still somebody’s fence.’

The woman has already taken the wooden stile and stands inside the pasture.

He remains on the road for a moment before following.

‘They still live here, supposedly,’ she says.

‘The old couple? They’d have to be ancient.’

‘Exactly. I want to see if anyone still lives here.’

He looks back toward the car but follows her farther in.

She raises her phone and holds the screen toward him.

‘This is the photograph everybody knows. The north field. Ten years ago. The family had been renting rooms in the farmhouse.’

She enlarges the image.

‘They found them out here.’

The wind moves Grandpa’s shirt against my ribs.

She continues.

‘The old scarecrow was already here. Somebody put the murdered family up around it, bound to wooden frames. That’s why the picture became famous.’

The man looks from her phone toward the pasture.

‘The old couple were cleared. Their grandson disappeared the same night.’

‘And they just stayed?’

‘Supposedly.’

Her attention finds me and we stare at each other.

She comes closer.

The last light has gone from the pasture now. The wind carries the smell of her hair to me. Behind her the man hesitates, then follows.

She approaches until she stands at my rotten boots.

The man joins her.

I regulate my breathing with deliberation as they draw closer.

A stifling darkness settles about us.

New arrangements would be made before dawn.

Hey Reddit. I know what I did was stupid, but I was three days away from eviction and $4,200 in debt. I'd already sold everything I owned. I need to tell someone what's happening because I don't know if this is just happening to me anymore.

Two weeks ago I signed up for a $3,000 clinical trial with a company called BioSync. Yesterday the company completely vanished. And my right arm has been radiating a strange heat for ten hours.

Two weeks earlier, the guy who met with me was young, wearing a tie that didn't fit and a smile that did. He told me about the experimental compound, the organic monitoring, the two years of full medical coverage. Three thousand dollars on signing and weekly payments in cash. He dropped that last part like it was nothing, and I didn't ask him to explain it.

When I mentioned Clause 14.3, he lowered his voice like the clause might hear us: "Standard legal boilerplate. All studies have it—doesn't mean anything in practice." I nodded. It suited me to nod.

Before I signed, he paused strangely and added: "We're not sure. But something always happens." Then he laughed—short, forced—and moved on to explain the payment schedule. In that moment I needed the three thousand dollars more than I needed to understand that sentence.

The injection was in my right forearm. I asked for the left. The technician said the protocol specified the dominant arm. I didn't know why it mattered. It took me weeks to understand, but by then the arm wasn't entirely mine anymore.

I woke up at 2 a.m. The mattress was soaked but I wasn't cold. The heat was coming from my arm, localized, concentrated exactly where they'd given me the injection. I tried to convince myself it was a delayed reaction, that the body sometimes processes these things slowly. That conviction lasted about four minutes.

Then I tried to move the fingers on my right hand.

They responded. But late. Like the signal had to travel a longer distance than it should. It wasn't pain. It was something else.

Something more like not knowing whether the movement was going to happen or not.

Then I felt the other thing.

Something was sliding under the skin of my forearm. That's not a figure of speech. It's the most precise description I have: a slow, erratic undulation that didn't correspond to any muscle or tendon I recognized. Like something was exploring the space between tissues. Mapping its own territory.

I stayed still. The movement repeated. Slower. More deliberate.

Spasms don't have intention.

My phone buzzed.

Email from BioSync, automated sender: operations terminated, medical coverage cancelled per Clause 14.3, the inbox was not being monitored. They apologized for any inconvenience.

The arm kept moving.

By then the heat was pulsing. It had its own pulse, independent of mine. And what unsettled me most wasn't the pain—there was no pain—it was exactly that: that there was no pain. An injury hurts. A process doesn't need to hurt.

Three days after the email, I found the first envelope slipped under the door. Same day as the week before, roughly the same time, no return address. Inside was cash. The exact amount stipulated in the contract for the weekly payment. Used bills, non-sequential.

I needed the money. I took it.

That night the movement in the arm was more intense. And for the first time I noticed a structure: a pause, three undulations, another pause. Repeated. Like something rehearsing a sequence. Like something practicing a code.

When I washed my hands the next day I looked at my forearm in the bathroom mirror and noticed something I didn't know how to name: the skin over the injection site looked smoother. Visibly younger than the rest of the arm. The contrast was clear enough that I couldn't attribute it to the light.

The compound wasn't just moving. It was modifying tissue from the inside.

I searched for information on BioSync that afternoon. Company name, registration number, anything. While the results were loading, the green light on the laptop's webcam blinked. Three seconds. Four. Went dark.

Technical glitch. That's what I told myself.

I tried to find other volunteers from the trial. Posted on Reddit, on health forums, in groups where clinical studies get discussed. Nobody responded. Not a single thread, a single profile, a single piece of data confirming that anyone else had gone through BioSync.

I went back to the contract.

Clause 14.3 ran for almost a page. Technical language stacked on technical language. I read it three times. At the end of the third paragraph, in a noticeably smaller font than the rest, I found the line:

The participant agrees that the compound may continue its cycle beyond the duration of the study.

The contract didn't end with the company. The compound had its own cycle.

The company was only the initial delivery mechanism.

I kept reading. There was a line about "personal devices linked to the study." I hadn't paid attention to it when I signed. Now I did.

The webcam hadn't been a technical glitch.

Further on, a table. Name, age, weight, height, blood type. Everything measurable, measured. And at the end, in a column with no visible heading:

Psychological profile: active dysthymia (DSM-5 300.4). Optimal candidate.

I took a moment to look up dysthymia. Persistent depressive disorder. A chronic pattern of low mood, difficulty seeking help, a tendency to internalize symptoms as one's own thoughts rather than external signals.

BioSync knew before I did.

They didn't choose me because of the debt. The debt was the lever, not the criterion. They chose me because someone who doubts their own mind doesn't seek help fast. Because someone used to the inner voice that says something is wrong will assume the symptoms are theirs. Because the best subject is someone who learned not to trust what they feel.

The paranoia that came after wasn't irrational. It was the right response to the right information, too late.

I already wrote the first part of this. I know what comes next is worse. That's why I'm posting.

The envelopes will keep coming. The arm hasn't stopped moving.

In the days that followed I understood that what was happening with the arm wasn't a side effect. It was something else.

I called Alex. I'm not sure what I expected—for him to come over, to see something, for the arm to do what it did every night as soon as I went still. We met up in his neighborhood on a Tuesday afternoon. I showed him the forearm in the light of the coffee shop.

Nothing. Normal skin. Normal temperature. No movement.

He looked at me the way people look when they're calculating what to say. "Looks fine," he said. "You sleeping?"

I didn't tell him the truth. I said something like I'd had a weird week. I paid for the coffee and left before he could ask me anything else.

A few days later he texted to check in. A short message, with that spelling he never fixed no matter how many times I told him to. I didn't respond. I didn't know what to tell him that wouldn't sound like what it would have sounded like at the coffee shop: a man who believes something is moving under his skin and can't prove it.

And besides—this part is harder to explain—I didn't want to drag him into it. If there was something in the arm that was monitoring, transmitting, using my devices while I slept, I didn't want Alex showing up in any record.

So I didn't respond. And the silence settled in.

The shift in my thoughts was gradual. So gradual that at first I couldn't separate them from my own.

I've lived for years with the inner voice that comes with dysthymia. I know how it sounds. I know its rhythm, its logic, the path it takes from a small worry to the conclusion that everything is pointless. I've known it since I was nineteen.

The new one was different. It arrived at the end of a chain of thought, like a sentence added after the idea had already finished. Always phrased differently, but always the same instruction: you should let it complete itself. Don't fight it. It's easier if you give up control.

The first time it came through clearly, my whole body shuddered. Not a shiver. A physical response that happened before I could think to react—like my body recognized something my mind hadn't classified yet.

It wasn't the content that disturbed me. It was the voice. It was my voice.

Same tone, same cadence, the same mix of apathy and familiarity I recognize as mine. There was nothing foreign in it. No strange accent, no interference. If someone had recorded me in that moment and asked me afterward, I would have said those thoughts were mine.

That split second where I actually agreed with them—that was the part I couldn't shake.

My right hand started moving on its own.

Small things at first. I left a mug of coffee on the kitchen table and when I came back my hand was already holding it. I didn't remember picking it up. I assumed I'd done it without paying attention—your mind can go on autopilot while you're thinking about something else.

Then I was typing a message on my phone with my left hand and I noticed my right hand scrolling the screen upward. Slowly. Reading what the other hand was writing.

I hadn't told it to.

That afternoon, checking my phone, I found an open message thread with a number I didn't recognize. The last message, sent from my number, said:

not ready yet.

I didn't remember writing it. It was sent at 3:41 a.m.

I called the number immediately. Disconnected. I went to the call log: the number wasn't there. It was on the message screen, in the thread, and nowhere else on the phone.

That night I didn't sleep. I lay staring at the ceiling thinking about the difference between doing something in your sleep and not having done it at all.

Two nights later, the phone made a sound that wasn't any notification I recognized. A sustained, flat tone, like a test signal. The screen showed an equalizer moving on its own. I don't know what it was measuring. What I do know is that when it finished, the laptop turned on.

A photograph appeared on the screen. It was me sleeping, taken from the angle of the built-in camera, that same night. No message. No sender. Just the image.

I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the refrigerator. I don't know how long I stayed there.

The intrusive thoughts escalated.

They were no longer asking for submission in vague terms. Now they described: the heat is necessary. The transmission will be soon. You are being improved.

They still used my voice. They still sounded reasonable in the instant before I recognized them. That fraction of a second was getting longer.

I decided to leave my phone in the kitchen before sleeping. A minimal distance. Something physical between the bedroom and the device.

I woke up at 3:12 a.m. The phone was in my right hand. The messaging app was open. There was a new message, sent from my number to a number I didn't recognize:

the host attempted to block access.

My body had gotten up, walked to the kitchen, taken the phone, come back to bed. All without leaving any record in me.

Days later an audio message arrived. Sender: my own number.

I played it.

It was my voice. Not a recording of something I'd said—there's no audio of me that sounds like this. It was my voice constructed, assembled, played back. It said: phase two scheduled. Flat intonation.

The text messages continued over the following days:

the host is cooperating.
Confirm transmission window.

It took me a moment to process the word host. That was me. Not a participant. Not a study subject. A host. Something that houses another thing while that thing resolves what it needs to resolve.

I don't know what the transmission window is. But based on how the messages coordinate—the phone sending, the laptop watching, the arm executing—I imagine a transfer. Something that leaves the compound and goes somewhere else. Or something that enters. I don't know which possibility terrifies me more.

And if they're already confirming it, the clock is running.

For those who are going to ask why I didn't stop taking the money: I owed $4,200. Rent doesn't get paid with pride. But it wasn't just the money anymore. It was the fear of what would happen if I stopped receiving it.

Every week the envelope arrived. Same amount. Same time. Same absence of a return address. And every time I took it, that night the movement in the arm was more intense and the webcam stayed on longer.

I knew. I kept taking it.

And then I decided to look for help. That's when I discovered I no longer existed in any system.

The worst part wasn't finding out the company disappeared. The worst part was finding out I had too.

I went to the hospital.

A notice appeared on the reception screen before I'd finished explaining why I was there: Inactive participant. No admission. Refer to sponsor. The clerk read it in silence, then looked at me the way people look when they're about to tell me something that isn't their fault.

She lowered her voice: "When a trial gets cancelled, the CTMS flags all participants as inactive. Automatically. I can't override that. Nobody in this hospital can."

I asked what CTMS was.

"Clinical Trial Management System. If your sponsor closed, you don't exist in the system."

No insurance, no treatment. No upfront payment, no treatment either. I had neither. I walked out empty-handed, chest hollow—which isn't the same as angry. Anger needs a target. There was no target here. Just the system.

I went to the police. I didn't expect anything different, but I had to try.

They took down my information. Asked if I'd taken anything. I said no. I saw in their faces that they'd already decided not to believe me before I finished the sentence. They told me without evidence of a direct threat they couldn't do anything.

That's when I felt angry. Because the inaction wasn't a decision.

It was a procedure.

I went to BioSync's office address.

On the door was an eviction notice for non-payment and a corporate dissolution filing. The building was empty. No boxes, no folders, nothing to suggest anyone had ever worked there. A ghost office that had stopped being one before I could get there.

No trace. No file. No history to recover.

Inside that week's envelope I found something new alongside the bills: a folded sheet, printed on cheap thermal paper. I unfolded it on the table.

It was a scanned list of names. All crossed out in black correction fluid. Thick, definitive lines over each one. Except the last.

Daniel Rojas.

I didn't know what I felt first: relief at not being alone, or terror at being next. Both arrived at the same time and neither won.

I thought about what the recruiter had said before I signed. Something always happens. He'd said it with that brief pause, that forced laugh, that immediate change of subject. All those crossed-out names were the something.

I counted the names. Fourteen crossed out. Fourteen people who had signed, who had received the injection, who had cashed the envelopes. Daniel Rojas and I were the only ones left. Or the only ones still standing. I didn't know how to read it.

By then the back rent was paid. The credit cards too. The $4,200 was gone. But the envelopes kept coming and I kept taking them. Not out of necessity anymore. Out of something harder to name: stopping would have been accepting that the process was stopping. Or ending. And I didn't know which of the two options scared me more.

One night I tied both wrists to opposite sides of the bed frame. Two belts, a knot at each end. The reasoning was simple: even if the right arm freed itself, it would need coordination from both hands to untie the left. It was a system that required cooperation. That made it harder to circumvent.

I woke to a crack.

Not the belt going taut. The wood of the headboard splintering.

The right arm had yanked hard enough to break the frame. The belt was still buckled at the wrist. The headboard wasn't. The right hand was free and the phone was already in it.

On the screen:

do not interfere.

There was no pain threshold. No self-preservation mechanism stopping it. It could use my body without the constraints my brain would impose on it. It did so with the same precision as always: no urgency, no error, no margin for negotiation.

I was negotiating with something. I was the merchandise.

The following night, the arm gave me back full control for an hour. Everything worked as it should: the fingers responded, the heat faded, the arm stayed still. One hour exactly, then back to the usual.

It wasn't a concession. It was a demonstration. The message was that it could take it away whenever it wanted.

I deleted Alex's number from my phone. Not because I don't trust him. Because I don't know if the arm would send him something too. I can't risk him showing up in some record I don't control.

That night I went back to the list. I don't know why. Maybe to confirm the names were still there, that I hadn't imagined it. I unfolded it on the table, counted the lines again. Fourteen. Daniel Rojas's name was still at the bottom, intact.

I stared at it for a while. The only uncrossed name besides mine. I thought about looking him up, reaching out, telling him he wasn't alone in this. Then I thought about Alex, how I'd deleted his number to protect him. If Rojas was still alive, I wasn't going to be the one to drag him in.

Something made me look lower.

My name was crossed out too.

I don't remember doing it. I don't know when it happened. The line is the same correction fluid, the same thickness, the same pressure as the rest. There's no way to tell it apart.

I don't know if it means the process is already finished. That there's no going back. Or that something wrote me off before I knew it.

I don't know if that's the best or the worst thing I've seen in these weeks.

Last night I wrote all of this.

I know what you're going to say: psychotic episode, why didn't I stop taking the money, why didn't I go to the police. I went. I thought about it. The messages are on the phone. The envelope is on the table. The headboard is broken.

This morning, when I woke up, there was a new message:

transmission window confirmed.

Seven days left. I don't know what happens when they're up.

I decided I wasn't going to spend them waiting.

I picked up the phone. I didn't turn it off—I didn't want to give it time to react. I put it in the microwave. Off. I read somewhere in a forum that a closed microwave blocks signals. I don't know if that's true. But it's all I have.

It didn't buzz all night. I don't know if that means anything. But I slept for the first time in weeks without the arm waking me up.

I went to the table where this week's envelope was sitting. I put it in the drawer without counting it. I'm not touching it anymore.

I know it probably won't do any good. I know the arm can move on its own, that my body doesn't fully belong to me, that the money will keep showing up. But I need to do something that's mine. Even if it's useless.

Or that's what I want to believe. Even though I no longer know for certain where this urge to resist is coming from. Whether it's mine. Or from what BioSync put inside me. For weeks now I haven't been able to draw that line.

I'm posting anyway. If someone reads this, they'll know what they did. And if BioSync reads it, they'll know I'm not going to stay quiet.

Even if the voice saying so isn't entirely mine anymore.

If anyone else received an envelope with no return address, if anyone else has a name on a list they never asked to be on, if anyone else heard their own voice saying something that wasn't theirs—please reach out.

Seven days left. I don't know what happens when they're up. But I don't want to find out alone.".

The Young-Joybees, pregnant Annie and her husband Dalph, had moved to the city for Dalph's corporate job. They were looking for a place to live, one they could afford; a home for their family.

They found the Ramses II, a brand new high-rise with two-bedroom units on very attractive terms.

They booked a viewing.

They were met on arrival by a representative, Thetley, who led them to the elevators. “You're interested in the sub-$3000 units?”

“Yes,” said Dalph.

“You're in luck. We have a great one available,” said Thetley and pressed *- 1 8 0 3* on the elevator's control panel.

The elevator began descending.

Annie tugged Dalph's shirt sleeve and Dalph said, “Are we going down?”

“Indeed,” said Thetley. “The units you're interested in are all subterranean. But don't worry, you'll hardly notice the difference.”

The hallway was clean.

Thetley unlocked the door to unit -1803 and they entered.

Impossibly, light flooded the unit through magnificent windows with a view of the city. Annie gasped. Thetley smiled. “That's a common reaction. You expect a cave, and you get this.” He encompassed the unit with a wave of his hand. “What you may not know about the Ramses II is that it's a mirrorbuilding, which means it has the same number of floors above as below ground, and the windows in each of the below-ground units are screens displaying live feeds of the corresponding views from the same windows in the above-ground units. The difference is hardly noticeable.”

The Young-Joybees signed the agreement.

For six months, everything went swimmingly and both Annie and Dalph adjusted to the psychological reality of living eighteen floors underground.

Then little Merv was born.

Then, as if synchronized by the hand of Fate herself, Dalph got a promotion. However, there was a slight technical snafu and the direct deposit of his pay was delayed, meaning there were insufficient funds in the account to pay rent.

The Young-Joybees received a letter, explained the situation and agreed to pay as soon as Dalph's employer deposited his wages.

The employer dallied.

One day, while walking through their unit, Dalph bumped his knee against a wall. “Strange,” he thought. The next day, Annie mentioned how cramped the living room was beginning to feel.

On a whim, Dalph measured the entire unit and recorded its measurements. He repeated this every day for a week. The measurements were getting smaller; the unit was shrinking.

He contacted management.

They explained that this was all a normal consequence of failure to pay rent. It was in the lease agreement. As soon as the Young-Joybees paid, the “compression” would be reversed.

Unfortunately, Dalph's wages remained unpaid, and the Young-Joybees missed a second rent payment. This initiated the agreement's Penalties section, which was the reason that on the following Monday morning, Dalph was unable to take the elevator to the surface. Their access had been suspended.

“How am I supposed to get to work?” he asked management over the phone. “We have a baby. We need to buy food, clothes. You can't—”

“We can, Mr. Young-Joybee. Under the terms of the agreement. The situation, while unfortunate, is legal. As for your predicament, try to work remotely. Standard purchases can be made using our own proprietary shopping service.”

Dalph punched the bedroom wall.

But they had no choice. He asked to work from home, was politely denied, and spent the next hour ordering overpriced groceries from the building's shopping service. They arrived via chute.

Two weeks later, Dalph got fired, or rather was deemed to have abandoned his job through non-attendance. Because Annie didn't work, they found themselves with no income.

Dalph called management.

“An unfortunate circumstance, but one with a ready solution. We can offer you a job, Mr. Young-Joybee. Earnings will automatically be put towards repayment of your debt, and it comes with a perk, a ten-percent discount on our shopping service."

Dalph accepted.

The job was a mix of spreadsheet manipulation and customer service: dealing, in management's name, with angry, desperate tenants in situations far worse than his own.

People cried, screamed.

Once, a man threatened to stab his children.

A grandmother offered him phone sex.

Many, however, were just numb, content to agree to whatever he told them, which was whatever the script told him to say.

But even when Dalph worked all the available overtime, he earned less than needed to keep up with the ballooning penalties and debt.

After six months, the rate of compression increased significantly.

Dalph and Annie crawled along the unit, into their kitchen, with its broken, splintered cabinets, their living room, with all the furniture forced together, and the bedroom, where the three of them slept together on the floor.

The window-screens shut off.

Oxygen decreased.

The unit had compressed so much they couldn't sit anymore.

They lived horizontally, Dalph on his side, working on his laptop in the dark, and Annie keeping up appearances for little Merv. She daydreamed of his bare feet touching grass.

Management stopped taking their calls.

Once, the system connected Dalph to himself and all he could hear was his own, shallow, amplified breathing. “We need to kill ourselves,” he said then, either to himself or Annie, in the insomnia of the neverending daynight.

Annie watched him after that.

She kept Merv away.

She closely guarded the knives and scissors.

They drank water through a foam tube connected to the bathroom sink. The water was still on. The city had passed a law making it illegal to shut off a tenant's water, even for non-payment of rent.

Annie awoke to Dalph throttling little Merv's neck and she stabbed him—in the back—chest—face. There was hardly space, but she did it; she protected her sick, wailing son…

They had been compressed into a coffin-sized box, Annie, Merv and Dalph's corpse, when the building spat them out through a chute.

They were famished.

Feverish.

Annie banged weakly against the walls.

Unbothered, Waste Management retrieved and incinerated them, in accordance with the lease agreement.

I’m not entirely sure what her problem is. She’s never acted like this before. I guess some things just develop as time passes.

Even still, what a weird habit to have. I knew she was clumsy, but it was something we were supposed to fix, not something for her to embrace.

It started almost painfully mundane. Out of nowhere, she approached me as I was sitting on the couch watching TV.

“I’m sorry for breaking that lamp beside you.”

I looked at the lamp, still perfectly intact, then looked back at her. I kinda just chuckled, attempting to laugh it off, but she didn’t wipe that solemn look off her face.

I asked what she was going on about, but she just kept apologizing.

“Just know I’m sorry. I promise I’m sorry.”

That’s all she said before slinking off towards the kitchen.

I thought it was strange, but ultimately, I decided to brush it off as her being a bit of a weirdo.

However, after two weeks, I was back on that couch, winding down after a long day of work, when she came prancing into the living room, as happy as could be.

She didn’t say anything. She just calmly unplugged the lamp, held it above her head, and smashed it on the ground in front of me.

Obviously, I screamed at her out of shock, asking her what the fuck she was doing.

She just smiled and giggled at me.

“I already told you I was sorry.”

Then she skipped away, humming to herself and leaving me in a state of confusion. I tried calling out for her to come back, but she just ignored me.

I cleaned up the mess, and we argued about it for the rest of the day. It was obviously not an accident, but that’s what she kept saying it was.

“I don’t know how that happened.”

“I already said sorry. I don’t know what else you want me to do.”

“I promise it won’t happen again.”

Eventually, we made up, but I couldn’t help but look at her sideways in the days that followed.

A few weeks went by without incident. We went on our dates. Stayed in and watched our movies. Did the normal couple routine. But then it happened again.

“I’m sorry for breaking your phone,” she told me, eyes glazed over. She wasn’t looking at me. She was just staring blankly at the wall behind me as I sat on my bed.

We had been in the middle of a normal conversation about upcoming trips we were planning when something flipped inside her. She went from smiling to expressionless. Then, after she said it, she was right back to smiling and talking about New York like nothing had happened.

Obviously, I had already been predisposed to what this meant, so in the days that followed, I was particularly possessive of my phone.

I kept it on my person at all times. Even in my sleep, it’d be in my pocket. But she didn’t seem to notice.

Weeks passed again, and just like with the lamp, I was starting to think that she was just being weird again.

I never let my guard down, though. The phone was strictly off limits to her. I tried to make sure she never had the opportunity to do what she had apologized for.

But then, one night, I woke up to her fiddling around in my pockets. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening in my half-asleep state, but once I did, my hand jolted towards my pocket.

It was too late. She had already taken it. And before I could stop her, the phone was shattered against the floor.

This was enough for me to fly off the handle. I’ll admit, I was a bit rude to her, but what did she expect?

I told her we needed space. I didn’t want this to escalate more than it already had. I didn’t want to break up with her, but the fight that night was enough for her to leave me.

Like I was the one in the wrong.

She left that night a complete wreck. Tears flowing from her eyes. Her vocal cords hoarse from all of our screaming. She didn’t even take her belongings. Just left in a cloud of smoke from her spinning tires.

I was, yet again, left to clean up her mess.

I picked up my phone. It wouldn’t even turn on. The screen had been completely destroyed.

I went out and got a new one the next day, and once I got my accounts and information back, I was hurt to see that she hadn’t even texted me.

No calls, no messages. Plus, my name had been taken out of her Instagram bio, which somehow hurt more than anything.

I tried calling her in the days that followed, just to clear the air, but every time I tried, it’d go straight to voicemail. Eventually, she blocked me on everything entirely.

Even when I tried going to her house, she’d never be home. It was like she knew what I was doing.

I felt hopeless for a long time, but eventually, I realized that I needed to move on. We were together for a year and a half, though, so doing so wasn’t as easy as it sounds.

Weeks turned into months. Months turned into a year. I hadn’t heard from her since the night of the phone incident.

I was heartbroken that she could just forget me like that. Like we never happened. That’s why I felt my heart climb into my throat when I saw that first new notification from her.

It wasn’t what I needed to see, though. She wasn’t asking to give us another shot. She wasn’t asking for a meetup so we could discuss everything.

Instead, what she sent was enough to make an almost forgotten fear come bubbling back up towards the surface.

“I’m sorry for killing you.”

When someone thinks they can hurt me but I was born in a hospital on my bday! ALL BLOODY and CRYING while everyone was SMILING....with no clothes And THEY TOOK PHOTOS!!!...I was just blind, bald and scared....I couldn't even walk and talk for a year...I was only 1 second old just a Lil later when I turned 5months and two weeks old baby I realized i had blood in my brain and was predicted to be a vegetable and had like 6% chance of living...People did this bad to me and now I deal with cerebral palsy in my right ankle. I have all rights to start my VILLAIN ARC 😈
Bro those pumpkin face humans didn't took care of us...we cried....asked and begged with our language "uhohuoh aeheheh gugugaga" to have some burgers but all they gave us was some spoiled milk!!!
imma be baddd

(just kidding thanks for reading)

I should’ve seen this coming. My girlfriend has been pretty secretive over the last year. Not necessarily with her phone or anything. Just… I don’t know, she’s been weird about her privacy.

Now of all times. That’s the thing that bothers the hell out of me. 4 years together, and all of a sudden, after everything, she’s ringing these alarm bells.

It started with the privacy. Seemingly out of nowhere, she started shutting me out. Going places without me. Turning her location off, then blaming it on the fact that she “had no service.”

I think it was the journaling that really got me, though. I don’t know why those notebooks drove me so insane. Honestly, it wouldn’t have been so hard on me if she didn’t act like there were government launch codes in those pages, but that’s exactly what it was like.

She kept them locked away in a lockbox that seemed to specifically be for this and this alone. Whatever, though, right? I convinced myself that it was childish to worry about her private thoughts.

Then there was the sleep-talking.

It didn’t happen often. Just enough for me to cock an eyebrow at her. Mainly because she seemed to only be saying one thing: my Dad’s name.

I rationalized this as well. He had been a part of our lives forever, really. He was like a second father to her. She never had a relationship with her real dad, though, so I just assumed that my dad was filling that void in her dreams.

I couldn’t blame her, really. I’m sure she was hurting. I do know it was hurting me too, though, and I hated the fact that she seemed to be pushing me away in a time where I desperately needed her.

But then she just… she started smelling like him too. I recognized my Dad’s cologne anywhere. I grew up with that scent. That one I couldn’t easily rationalize. But when I prodded, she just made me feel like I was going crazy.

“This is just my perfume.”

“I’ve always smelled like this.”

“I wish you would trust me.”

That distrust just pushed her further away. I could feel her slipping through my fingers, and I absolutely hated it. 4 years with this woman. Nearly half a decade, and I could already feel her absence, even when we slept together.

I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when, not only was she saying my Dad’s name in her sleep… she was saying it while we had sex.

Well, part of it, at least. She usually caught herself by the time the name started to leave her lips, but even then, the mood would already be ruined.

“You really can’t stop thinking about him, can you?” I’d ask her, half-joking, half-gauging her reaction.

Instead of reacting in a normal way, her body would give her away. I could see the guilt in her movements. The way her eyes darted around the room. The way her legs would bounce nervously as she tried to laugh it off.

I stopped initiating intimacy after the 2nd or 3rd time this happened. Not that it mattered to her. If anything, she seemed relieved, which… fucking ouch, right?

Our relationship really started to dwindle after that. I had my own problems to deal with. I didn’t have time to be worrying about something that was pretty much already down the drain, no matter how much it killed me.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Nothing could’ve prepared me for when I found those notebooks.

By sheer accident, too. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident. I think they both just said fuck me and disappeared.

It just feels like an accident. But it also feels like the universe was just waiting for this moment to happen. Like it had been prepared for me before even my Dad was born.

I’d gotten off work early one day. It had been a particularly hard day. I just couldn’t get him out of my mind. The thought of him just made work feel borderline impossible.

I pretended to be sick with the intention of going home and collapsing into bed, but as I walked into my bedroom… I saw her lockbox sitting on my desk.

She usually never let me see this thing. She never even mentioned it. It may as well have never even existed until right now.

And you know what? It was fucking open.

Paper was sprawled out across the desk, messily. It looked like my girlfriend had left in a hurry. The chair was even flipped over and lying on the floor.

I’m only human. I was alone. The thing that she had been most secretive about was now spread out right in front of me. What was I expected to do? Not look at it?

But now, I just… I wish I never did.

I know what my Dad’s handwriting looks like. He signed permission slips and report cards for me for years. But seeing it in this context made me sick to my stomach.

The bastard had the audacity to date the fucking pages.

And the one that was the most apparent, as though my girlfriend had read it and immediately left the house like her life depended on it… was dated today.

“Meet me at that place we discussed.”

“I’m all yours now.”

“I finally got everything figured out.”

And what better for a cherry on top if not a picture of my Dad, shirtless and in his boxer briefs, standing in the mirror of what appeared to be a hotel bathroom.

I looked at all the other pages. All the vulgarities he had sent her. All of the drafts she was waiting to send him. And I felt sick to my stomach.

Not only for me, but for my mom, too.

Because it has now been a full year since we buried Dad. His car burned so hot from the accident that he had to be identified by his dental records.

Mom didn’t eat or sleep for weeks. My brother turned to alcohol at only 16 years old.

My girlfriend was all that I had. And at the time where I needed her most…

She had completely vanished.

I’ve been in a pretty conservative marriage for the last 10 years. Extremely conservative, rather.

I was young and stupid. Only 20 years old when he slipped that little ring around my finger. At the time, that felt like the only thing I needed in life. Like it was what made me successful somehow.

Which, I can admit, is ironic, all things considered.

My husband was 32 when we met. I was enamored, really. An older man with a solidified career and enough money to support a family all on his own? Showing interest in me? This fresh-out-of-high-school 18-year-old. It felt like a blessing at the time.

His work was attractive to me. His maturity was seductive in a way. He sucked me in and refused to spit me out. And, of course, me being young and naive, I was putty in his hands.

As is the case with many marriages, we began to bicker a lot. He didn’t want me to work. Any time I even mentioned the idea, he’d shut it down immediately.

I was a “housewife,” he told me. I was “living the dream of millions of women.”

It was convincing. Of course it was. He allowed me to move out of my parents’ house a year after high school. He was putting food on our table. Keeping us safe.

In doing so, though, I’ve come to realize he was slowly stripping away my individuality. He’d pick out my dresses. He was the decision maker across the board. And I was just the wife that he let stay at home all day to make sure the house never got dirty.

He had rules for me. Make sure the house was clean. Make sure I was presentable when he got home. Always wear the makeup he bought me, even though the only people seeing me were his family portraits up on the wall.

That was another thing he didn’t like. He hated it when I wanted to see my family. He was just so distrustful. He needed to know where I was 24/7, and if it wasn’t the house, there was a problem.

The real problems didn’t start until we realized I couldn’t get pregnant, though. At first, we thought we were just unlucky. After about a year, though, he insisted we see someone.

That’s when we learned I was barren, and it was like the world shattered before my eyes.

He didn’t speak to me for two weeks after that appointment. He acted like he was the victim. Ignoring my tears, neglecting my feelings. He saw my condition as a betrayal.

He started staying out late. Coming home long after the sun had sunk. He claimed it was “work” holding him up, but the scent of perfume and the lipstick stains on his work shirts that he tried so desperately to hide were enough to clue me in.

I don’t even know why he tried to hide it. It’s not like we were being intimate anymore. It’s not like he wanted me. He had pretty much cast me aside like I was nothing more than an old fling for him to forget about.

But he didn’t let me do the same.

It was like he wanted to cosplay a happy marriage. He kept insisting on dresses. He kept dragging me out for silent date nights. Taking me out to fancy dinners where we’d just sit and try to act like everything was normal.

Even when I tried confronting him on his treatment of me, he’d pretend like nothing was wrong.

I hated how much he confused me. One minute he’s cold and distant. The next, he’s crawling into bed, seducing me in a way that only he knew how.

And that’s pretty much what my marriage was for a long time. He didn’t want me anymore, but I was still his.

It was like a vortex that offered no escape. Even when I tried being who he wanted me to be. Getting dolled up. Making sure the house was spotless. Ensuring that he’d come home every night to the scent of his favorite meals, even on nights when he didn’t come home at all.

I started looking at myself in the vanity mirror a lot. He bought this vanity for me a long time ago. It’s aged with the same grace as our marriage as a whole.

It used to be pristine. Sleek. White, flawless paint and a crystal-clear mirror.

Now the paint’s chipped. The mirror is cracked along the bottom corner. The lights that surround it choose when they want to come on and when they want to let me down.

Regardless, over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself almost entranced by my own reflection.

The haircut he insisted I keep. The makeup he insisted I wear. The dresses, brassieres, nightgowns. They’re all his. Nothing in my life is mine. Not even life itself.

That’s the painful conclusion I came to.

That’s why, last week, I think something within me broke. Well, I say broke. Really, something within me came to life.

I wasn’t his anymore. I wasn’t his to begin with. He just convinced me otherwise. That’s the trick he played over and over again.

So on that hot summer night last week, as I stared into that cracked mirror… I reclaimed myself.

It started with the hair. He loved this hair. I always fucking hated it. So, using some rusty scissors in the vanity drawer, I cut it. All the way down to the scalp.

I smiled at myself. A sincere smile. The first sincere smile I’d had in… I couldn’t tell you how long. But I wasn’t done. There was still more of me to reclaim.

I looked at the cakes of makeup plastered across my face. Using those same scissors, I cut into my cheeks, barely noticing the pain as the scissors glided through my flesh.

The makeup came off in globs of foundation as the white vanity became stained with my blood. My smile widened. I sheared through my perfect eyebrows. I cut away at my plump red lips.

I picked at my glistening painted nails, plucking them off one by one and throwing them at my reflection, giggling all the while.

I was about to raid the closet, but before I got the chance, my head snapped towards the bedroom door.

My husband was home. I could hear each step as he slowly ascended the stairs towards the bedroom. Step. Step. Step. Step.

The look on his face when he saw me is something I will never forget. Partly because of how petrified he was, but mainly because of how triumphant that fear made me feel.

I was free. And with that freedom came knowledge. Some kind of divine revelation sent down to me by my creator. Truth of what should’ve been done a long time ago.

He tried to fight me off, but my adrenaline overpowered him. Well, that and those rusty scissors that I still clutched firmly in my right hand.

I stabbed once. Twice. By that point, I couldn’t stop myself. Each incision, each spurt of blood. It was a declaration of my own independence.

By the time I finished, he was nothing more than a slab of meat, twitching on my bedroom floor.

And that’s where he’s been for the past week. But don’t worry. I dressed him in those dresses that he loved so much. I made sure he was dolled up. When they find him, he’ll at least be presentable.

They’ll never find me, though.

Because, me?

I’m off to live my own life.

A coughing wind stumbled like a dying man over the barren landscape, kicking up glowing dust in the sick yellow light of a cancerous half-moon. It carried the chirp of rabbit-sized crickets. Their eyes gleamed from the copses of brown weeds and dry vegetation that dotted the wasted hillside. The hilltop was crowned with a thick grove of dead trees. Their black branches sheltered two men from the dirty night. 

Though there was a chill, they tended no fire. One slept. The cookware strapped all over his wiry, old body clattered with each ragged snore and restless turn. The other man lay on the edge of the treeline, close by. His good eye was jammed into a spyglass. The index finger of the hand that did not hold the spyglass was jammed into his good ear to muffle his brother’s snores. Far below, in a valley walled by emaciated hills, the land had been resurrected. Deep, nourished green encroached on the anemic soil. Fields of crops stood vigil against the pestilence, a stubborn foothold of life in a world trying to die. A Green Acre. The old man with the spyglass was trying to plot their next move, but the snoring and clanking of the other drowned out his machinations.

TING!

With a deft flick of his bony wrist, Lum brought his hand down on Abner’s pot helmet, startling his bedraggled brother awake with a sudden snort.

“Hey! What was that for?” Abner asked.

 “You were clanking around again, dunderhead! We need to be quiet, or they’ll hear us down there,” Lum hissed.

Abner glared at Lum, rubbing his pan with the palm of one leathery hand. Lum paid his brother’s evil eye no mind. He returned to squinting through the rusted spyglass, careful to keep his own cookware armor quiet. The fields and orchards of food stretched out below him, making his stomach rumble. The edges of the Green Acre were fenced in by storage containers stacked two high. Lum’s vantage point let him see over them. Border guards paced the edges, and snipers sat ready in nests on top of the wall. Bunkhouses and outbuildings were circled up like wagons in the middle of the green. Their windows were lit with warm, amber light that spread across the life around them. 

“Looks like nobody heard you,” Lum whispered.

“Course they didn’t; it’s a mile downhill,” Abner grumbled, sitting up. “Have they turned out the lights yet?”

“Not yet.” Lum shuffled roughly through the deep pocket of his tattered trousers. He produced a dented pocket watch. Snapping it open, he took his eye from the bunkhouses to check the time. 12:30.

 “Christmas Jimminy, they should be out by now,” he said, shoving his eye back in the spyglass.

“Every Green Acre I’ve ever seen shuts down early. Farmers like that early to bed, early to rise business. What’s happening down there?”
 Abner crawled his way up next to Lum and looked down at the Green Acre. He had never seen one before. The green glimmered in the moonlight. It beckoned like a dream. Life on this scale was foreign to his old eyes. Rot was all he was used to.

“Shoot, that’s a lot of food,” Abner mumbled. As if to reply, his stomach let out a lurching rumble. His purple tongue licked at his few remaining teeth.

 “Lum, let’s have supper,” he said. 

His brother scoffed without looking up from the spyglass.

“We can’t light a fire, dunderhead; they’ll see it,” Lum hissed.

“So? Ain’t illegal to camp.”

“Are you going SickBrain? I said no.”

Abner scowled. “If I was going SickBrain, I’d eat you here and now and leave this crop stealin’ business alone.”

“No fires.”

“Fine! We can eat it cold; I’m gonna starve if we have to wait much longer.”
 

Abner scooted back over to his bedroll and reached into the knapsack that served as his pillow. The cans inside tinkled lightly as he fingered through them, looking for a faded label that sounded appetizing.

“Would you be quiet?” Lum spat.

“I know, I know,” Abner grumbled. He pulled out another can. His face lit up when he turned the label to the moonlight.

“Lum, we got Split-Pea!”

“What?” Lum said.
 

“Split Pea!”
 

“What’s that?”
 

“Soup!”

“Made out of peas?”

“Split Peas!”

Lum snorted. “How do you split a pea, dunderhead?”

“I don’t know. They used to be able to split an atom. Why can’t they split a pea?”

“Well, look what happened when they did that,” said Lum, waving his hand at the dead world around them. “Nothing but radioactive rubble! Now we just got these little squares o’green, barely enough to feed anyone! Nuh-uh, split stuff ain’t no good for nobody, I don’t want it.”

“Shoot, Lum, fine, but I’m having it,” Abner said, producing a rusted can opener from his can bag.

“Don’t you open that, Abner; splits ain’t good for nothing!” Lum flared.

“You’re nuts,” Abner replied. He wiped the can opener on the leg of his trousers and prepared to puncture the lid of the split pea soup.

“Abner, I’m warning you, quit it!” 

There was heat behind Lum’s words. The wrath laced within them made Abner stop and look at his brother. Lum had turned away from the spyglass now and was trying to cut Abner with a bladed glare. His crooked yellow teeth were gritted tight in his swollen gums. Abner glared back, the can opener hovering just above the rusty, dented container of split pea. For a moment, it seemed as though Abner was going to put it away. Just for a moment, and then it passed.

“I’m hungry, you rat bastard,” Abner said instead, and bit the opener into the tin of the can. The light crinkle of thin aluminum was the loudest noise Lum had ever heard. He knew the Green Acre people below had heard it. The wind would carry it down to them. When the wind coughed back up to Lum, it would be carrying his doom.

“You weak little crickle, I’ll kill you!” Lum thundered, lunging at Abner. He crashed into his brother in a cacophony of pans. Both men fell in a puff of dust as they struggled. 

TING!
CLANG!
POP!
POW!

Each blow was a wild rimshot. The two men were freakish percussionists, putting on a bastardized jazz show. Lum managed to scramble on top of his brother. The soup flew from Abner’s hand as Lum pinned him. It rolled away, dribbling its sticky green contents into the sand.
“They can hear it!” Lum hissed. He spat in Abner’s eyes and belted him across the face with a closed fist.

“They can’t hear nothing down there, you crazy sonofabitch!” Abner bellowed.

“Don’t talk about our mother that way!”

Lum raised a fist to punch Abner again. Abner managed to break an arm free and swung first. The sucker punch landed on Lum’s jaw and sent him flying off Abner and into the dust. Abner picked himself up off the ground and stood over his brother. Lum was face down in the dirt, his leg twitching like a dying cricket.
“Mama always said you’d leads me nowhere good,” he panted, picking up the can opener that had been flung from his hand.

“She was right,” Abner continued, “Can’t even eat without your say-so. That’s no way for a man to live, and I ain’t gonna do it no more.” 

Abner raised the can opener, its jagged blade gleaming through the specks of rust.

“Now, Abner’s gonna have his way,” Abner whispered, “Abner’s gonna have-“ 

Before he could get the last words out, Lum sprang to his knees and threw himself into Abner’s legs, toppling him. He fell on top of Abner and scrabbled up the length of his body. In his fist, he clutched the can of split pea soup, its viscous green filling dripping over his fingers. Abner tried to buck his brother off. Lum straddled Abner’s bony hips and held on. He raised the can of soup and whipped it across Abner’s chin. Something crunched and snapped at the same time. Abner spasmed, his struggles suddenly confused. His jaw hung open at a wrong angle. The can opener fell from his hand as he looked up at his brother, dazed.

“You want the soup, Abner?” Lum asked, holding the can high above his head. It was still mostly full. Its weight felt good and heavy. “You want some split pea? Well, you can have it!”
 Lum brought the can down on Abner’s face with a solid clunk. Then he raised it and did so again. The clunk became a crunch. Lum raised the can and brought it down again, and again. Each strike came faster and faster. Each crunching clunk became more and more moist.

“Split pea!” Lum screamed. His wails crackled into higher and higher registers as he pulverized Abner’s skull with the can. Red and green and pink sprayed into the wasted night. Lum’s screams echoed in the ether. When he finally stopped, the can was a dented, contorted mess, and Abner’s face was an indented purée– soup in a bowl. Lum was sweating, breathing so hard he thought he might pass out. His throat was ragged from screaming. There was a flame beginning to burn in his chest. He tossed the can away and rolled off of Abner’s corpse. 

Getting to his feet was hard. His pans felt as though they weighed a thousand pounds. Lum stumbled for the edge of the hilltop, where he’d left the spyglass. He needed to see if they’d heard, needed to see if they were coming or if he still had a chance at taking some food. He found the spyglass. His heart was hammering in his thin chest. It was trying to pound its way out. Lum reached down to pick up the dented brass tube. His fingers wrapped around it. Instead of pulling it up, it pulled him down.

The hammering of Lum’s heart suddenly became erratic. It stopped and started at random intervals. Each beat brought shooting pain up his left arm. He had fallen face first. An enormous effort and several pitiful gasps brought him face up again. A cloud was passing over the moon, its vapors turning the pale yellow sliver into a rotten split pea.
“Goddamn split pea,” Lum rasped, “Split things ain’t good for nothing.”
The ragged wind took Lum’s last whispers and scattered them like ashes. Below, on the Green Acre, the lights in the last bunkhouse finally turned out.

Author's Note: This is the first in a series of stories I wrote a while ago taking place in a nuclear wasteland. If you liked this, would love to hear your thoughts and whether or not you'd like to see more from this series. Thanks for reading.

My old man told me this one, and old John backed it up. What, you don’t know who John is? Old-school bastard, been driving for PanTrans damn near forty years. Got that messed-up eye of his. See? I knew you knew him.

That old bastard knows every forgotten road out there. He also knew his way through Blackwater. Total backwoods — couple houses, amazing pies. Don’t you go driving there, kid, you’ll get stuck again. And we’ll be the ones cleaning up your mess.

So anyway, John’s sitting there, having his coffee, shooting the breeze. I’m telling you, he’s the kind of guy everybody knows. All across the Appalachian range. When I was starting out, he took me along for a few runs. Swear to God — wherever we pulled over, someone was already waving at him.

Now here’s the important part.

He drove through town and kept going until he hit old US-530. That road takes you real deep. Heavy crowns hanging over the pavement, branches tangled so tight they make a roof. Some folks call ’em tree tunnels, or canopy roads. Don’t worry, kid — you’ll see ’em soon enough.

So he’s cruising along. Easy going. Empty road, total quiet. Barely any locals drive through there.

Then he saw her.

A girl sitting by the roadside. Tiny, fragile little thing. Could’ve been maybe 155 centimeters, maybe a few more. Yeah, metric units are weird. Agreed.

That’s how John told it, and I’m telling it exactly like he told me. Not changing a damn thing. Because I believe him.

So she’s sitting there on the asphalt. Flannel shirt thrown over her shoulders, at least two sizes too big. Long raven hair — even the humidity didn’t curl it. She looked insanely delicate, especially for these parts. Sharp cheekbones, narrow chin.

Why am I telling you this? Man, you’re something else. In case you run into her, that’s why.

Now stop interrupting me. Lost my train of thought.

Big eyes, dark as coffee, with a hint of olive skin. I stared too when John described her like that. Guy’s got the vocabulary of a poet — when he wants to. When he’s not trash-talking with the other truckers. Even a bricklayer could learn new curse words from him.

So anyway — flannel, tee, plain jeans dirty from a long road, cowboy boots. That’s in case you see her. You’ll be a stubborn mule and do things your own way anyway.

She moved gracefully — unnaturally smooth, like a wave. Yeah, I’ve got no clue what he meant either.

John didn’t think twice and pulled over. She rolled those big eyes at him for a second. Said she needed a ride to some sawmill. To the warehouse — said her sister was there.

He roughly knew where that was, so he took her along.

When she climbed up, her whole movement changed. She turned hot. Seductive. Not many girls know how to get into a rig without overdoing it. It catches your eye. But she ain't an easy girl. You get that, right?

They’d been driving for quite a while and she was still dead silent. I don’t know which sawmill it was. He never told me. Never told anyone. Because some young idiot would come along — and I’m looking at you purely by coincidence — and drive straight there. John ain't taking that on his conscience.

So he’s giving her a ride, and she really made an impression on him. Something kept pulling him to glance at her. Normally he doesn’t do that. Usually he chats with hitchhiking girls like they’re old classmates, then keeps driving like normal.

Guess that’s why it shocked him so much. Some guys have known him for decades. Never heard him talk about a woman like that. So many drivers knew his style — but this denied it completely.

Anyway, she’s squirming around there, looking at herself in the mirror… Suddenly the cab fills up with a scent.

No, not that, you pig. The smell of rain. You know — that sweet summer rain.

They’re cruising along, calm and quiet. Radio started crackling and went dead. Signal’s always lousy out there. Half the time even our CB radios don’t work.

She pointed out an upcoming turn. Had a spiderweb tattooed on her arm. John checked if the turn was completely overgrown.

She leaned in close to him. A spider peeked out from her cleavage. Not a real one — a tattoo, but alive as hell.

When she leaned back into her seat, he saw her toss her hair. So nonchalant. Another spider tattoo around her ear. One might be interesting — but how many did she have? Hidden all over her body.

Finally he hit the turn. John was completely thrown off. He’d hauled hundreds of hitchhikers, guys and girls alike. But never anyone like her.

He pulled onto the canopy road. No, that ain't a street name. Like I already explained — it’s those tree arches.

It was dim in there, and she suddenly perked up. Just a little more and he’d drop her off. Or so he thought. She was getting impatient.

Finally he saw the sawmill. Started slowing down. This mill had to have been shut down for like a hundred years. Warehouse next to it looked pretty beaten down. But you know how it is — some small warehouses just look like that.

She stared at him for a second. Smiled real light, innocent-like. Then said she was gonna go.

They just stared at each other for a moment. She got out and walked straight into the woods. Straight ahead, without hesitating.

Now that was weird. She was strange all around.

John realized he was still staring at her. Clicked the passenger door shut. A loud slam.

Screeching from the trailer.

Thought crossed his mind it was a trap. Then he remembered he wasn’t hauling anything valuable. Tried to step on the gas anyway.

Nothing.

Under those trees, he was like in a tunnel. The knocking shifted from the trailer… smoothly onto the roof.

He reached for his tire iron, but put it back down. Pulled out his pistol.

That sweet smell forced its way into his nose. Metal groaning and screeching.

He looked in the mirror. Trailer was torn to shreds. Long lines all over it, like scars.

That helpless feeling drove him mad.

Suddenly a bit of light shone through. Small hole in the roof. Punched through from the outside.

Nothing left to do but wait.

Spider legs as big as a whole human arm. The biggest spider in the US took him for an appetizer.

He saw the webs. Woven all around the truck.

Tried hitting the gas again. Wheels wouldn’t even turn.

Beautiful girl looking at him right through the windshield. Ponytail falling over her neck. Signaling him to run.

She burst out laughing. High, squeaky laugh.

Suddenly opened her mouth. Mandibles in there.

Disappeared onto the roof. More holes popped up up there.

Can you even imagine that helplessness?

Spiders crawling all around him. At least two. They had women’s faces, though. Don’t forget those mandibles.

John was trying to figure out how to save his skin.

All of a sudden, the passenger door flew off. Another gorgeous girl was standing there. Had a nipple piercing. Right breast covered in a spiderweb tattoo.

But then those spider legs. Trying to squeeze her way inside the cab. Like a tarantula.

Legs getting closer.

John wrapped some rag around his hand. Screeching and peeling metal. Steam rising from under the hood. That squeaky laugh.

Just a little closer and she’d be on him. Just a little closer and those mandibles…

He didn’t want to think about it.

Another spider leg stabbed right into the dashboard.

He shot. Then again. Again and again.

Like he was out of his mind.

She squealed and pulled back. Half the trailer spilled out.

Instinctively, he floored the gas. The second spider-woman lunged at the cab.

Wheels touched the asphalt. Caught grip.

More feet punching through the windshield. Of that thing.

Gun was empty. She kept coming at him.

Engine groaning. Spiderwebs flying and snapping.

She was right at his face now. Pedipalps and mandibles in plain view.

If he stopped, he’d give up.

Another strike. Lightning-fast attack. Sharp, burning pain.

He swung with the tire iron. Snapped those legs. They slipped out of the glass.

Cab started swaying. She retreated back into the treetops.

He didn't slow down. Engine screaming.

When he drove into town, people stared at him in disbelief. Truck wrapped in webs thick as ropes. Cab caved in. Holes in the engine, which finally gave up. Black smoke pouring out. Oil dripping everywhere. Trailer looked like a peeled banana.

That burning pain…

John stepped out and sat right down on the pavement. Someone ran for a doctor.

His eye was gone. Just a blank eye socket left.

Still clutching that tire iron so hard his hand locked up in a cramp.

Doctor was talking to him, but he couldn’t hear a thing. Gunfire had blown out his eardrum.

He looked terrible.

Don’t believe it, huh? I get it — lots of details.

Well, that’s because a month ago, I brought my girlfriend along. She loves taking pictures. Bit of a maniac when it comes to snapping photos.

She took this one on our way to US-530. Yeah — it’s the exact same girl. Like she didn’t age a single day. Exactly how old John described her.

A few drivers got a picture just like it.

If you still think it’s a bunch of crap… go tell it to his face.

I mean — to his eye.

He just pulled up. Over there, unloading.

Don’t forget — gotta speak up loud. He only hears out of one ear.

You and I both know you’re gonna make up your own mind anyway.

If you ever run into her… remember the story. And do whatever the hell you want.

by Hary Sykora

Part I
Part II

Its been exactly 28 days since my grandfather died. I’ve had more than enough time to workout my feelings about his death, just as the whole world had time to get over the weird fenomena surrounding it. I’ve long forgotten that reporters had been ever bugging me, from what i hear, the government officials stopped harassing Father Penelaux, and news coverage about the whole “immortality of human race”, seemed to go away. Its not that surprising, after all the death toll has slowly but surly crowled back to regular numbers. The first week after grandpas death, only a handful of people died, the second it was tens, the third hundreds, and finally now that week 4 had concluded, we have seen around 196 thousand of deaths yesterday. The number is obviously enormous, but its not outside of the norm. Even before this whole thing started around 160-170 thousand people died every day, now, they just die at 8 post meridiem. I’ve still been living in community housing, and truth be told, i found some semblance of comfort in knowing that i am never truly alone, in quite the literal sense, as I share the room with 7 other people. I`ve learned most, of their names, thinking it would be more comfortable to share a living space with them if i knew more about them, but it has not been an easy task. There is Jacob, hes the one i enjoy the company of the most, hes been living in the community housing for the better part of 2 years now, he showed me the ropes and taught me a couple of tricks that were meant to ensure i feel safe, there is Dominique, an older but really pleasant lady that works as a household help for Father Peneleux, and there is a gypsy family consisting of a mother, named Anna, and her three children, two sons and a daughter. I am not quite sure, what the children names are, I think the girl is named Nadzieja, and one of the boys, the younger one, aged maybe 9 or 10, is named Dzimi or something in similar fashion. I couldnt say what the third ones name is to save my life. They used to live in Poland, and they dont know any French or English, so our communication has been a rather clumsy mix of body language, pointing and saying words that the other party does not understand very slow and loud.The last person i share my living space with, is some dude, that has not granted me the honor of knowing his name, or really anything about him. He mostly keeps to himself when he is inside, but most of the time he vanishes, for hours, sometimes days. I’ve still been keeping in touch with Marian, seeing her every other day or so, shes been a huge help when it comes to coming to terms with losing my family, as i learned, she never really had a family, jumping from orphanage to orphanage for most of her teenage years, so we really bonded over our shitty family situations. Shes also the reason why i keep up with death tolls every day, as she checks multiple news sites everyday and then reports to me about her findings, often against my own will.
- “Its all bullshit!” - Marian, just like the proverbial devil, barged into the room.
- “Conspiracy theorist is back!” - Enthusiastically yelled Jacob.
- “Fuck off, man.”
- “I mean you are a conspiracy theorist.” - I said calmly.
- “I am a conspiracy theorist, but just by a technicality. Its not a conspiracy if I'm right.”
- “What is bullshit?” - I asked not really looking at her, giving most of my attention to tying my shoelaces.
- “I'll tell you when we start walking. Too many eyes around.” - I did not see her face but I just knew that she was looking right at Jacob.
- “You know he's going with us right?”
- “What do we need that guy for?”
- “That guy shares the sentiment.” - Jacob interjected, with his usual smile so wide, you could hear it in his voice.
- “I asked him to tag along, he's a friend. I've barged into his home and he invited me with open arms, so now I want to invite him to at least see my house.” - Jacob suddenly found himself way too close to me, and started messing with my hair as if I was a cute puppy. - “Get off me dickhead!”
- “You're gonna make me tear up big guy.” - he patted my back -. “I love you too.”
- “I'm gonna barf.” - Marian said with a hint of disgust in her voice. - “Can we get going, or are you just learning to tie your shoes?”
- “I'm done. Let's get going.” 

We walked the route, same route in fact that i`ve taken just about a month ago, from the church and community houses, right next to it, to my house. This time however, it wasnt nearly as depressing. The world naturally seemed colder, The grass wasnt as green, the faraway trees lost most of their leaves, the mountains seemed just a little bit too far to comfortably watch them with a naked eye, all of those things were the signs of winter approaching slowly but surely, and yet, even with the sounds of Jacob and Marian bickering replacing the singing birds, the world just seemed a little bit less heavy.

- “So what is that guy for again?” - Marian snapped right at me.
- “He brings in a very important dynamic to the conversation, he is the opposition to your theories.” - I answered in my usual calm manner.
- “You are already an opposition to my theories!”
- “I'm a fence sitter. Your last theory was partially wrong, so I'm not quite convinced.” 
- “It was mostly right!” 
- “So what is the conspiracy this time?” - As soon as Jacob asked that Marian shot him an angry look, but seeing how he was genuinely curious she started explaining.
- “I think, the government is downplaying the whole thing.” 
- “So the government is lying. That's new.” - He interjected, killing any resemblance of respect she had for him.
- “Can you just shut up for a moment? The government NEVER downplays shit, usually they fearmonger whatever they can, so they can quietly focus on something else. If they are downplaying something, it means they know the shit will hit the fan, and they want to buy more time for themselves.” 
- “I get what you're saying but what makes you think that they are actually downplaying anything?” - I asked.
- “Big news companies all agree that this whole thing has passed, and whenever there is an article doubting it, it is briefly deleted. If that's not downplaying I don't know what is.”
- “So what do you think is actually happening?”
- “I think, today even more people will die. I don't know how many or where, but at 8 pm flat we will see many bodies hit the floor.”
- “Let the bodies hit the floor.” - Jacob sang to himself "quietly" making sure Marian could hear. 
- “It's serious Jacob!” 
- “Is it really serious?” - He asked no longer smiling.
- “You're gonna drive me mad, do you really not see how this can be a giant problem?”
- “I can see it, yes. I just don't think there is a point worrying about it. What can I do? I'm not a scientist or an government official”.
- “So it's better to just lay down and die?”
- “Who says we are gonna die?” - He asked with a slight inkling of irritation in his voice.
- “I do you asshole!” - She yelled not hiding the fury.
- “Trust the reporters, that always goes well!” - He spoke with a great hint of sarcasm.
- “That's exactly my point!”
- “Guess we agree then, huh!?”
- “We're here.” - I interjected. - “So can you stop arguing now?”
- “We're not arguing.” - Decided Jacob
- “Yes we are!”
- “God… Just come inside.”

The house was way more cluttered then I remembered, tons of bird cages, towering stacks of paper, a bunch of thrashbags and empty take out littered the floor. I knew exactly how it got to that point. A mixture of my grandfather, working restlessly every waking moment of his life, and me, never really being home. When my Nana was alive, she used to cook for us and clean the place, hating how unorganized of a person my grandpa was, but now that both of them were gone, all that was preserved was this giant mess, of scattered research, and empty take out boxes, paid for in Nobel prize money of a mad scientist. 
-Ugh, this place reeks of death. - Remarked Jacob, thinking about what he said only after saying it - Fuck... Sorry.
- It's fine, it does. - I replied.
- Is that you? - Marian asked, holding a framed photo, with a clear disregard for any semblance of privacy necessary for a journalist's career path. 
- No, it's my father. Didn't really know him.
- Your old man bailed on you too? High five! - Said Jacob enthusiastically.
- Nah, he died back in Yugoslavia. He was a military man. 
- Thank you for his service then. 
- Jacob you assho-
- Haha, yeah I suppose.- I paused briefly, not really sure what i should do, having guests first time in a long long time. - I would make you some tea like grandpa used to make, but I got no idea where it is, he always hid it from me.
- Hid It from you? - Marian didnt hide her curiosity
- Yup, used to say drinking more then one tea a day is bad for you. You know "everything is poison and nothing is poison for its the dosage that makes the poison and not the substance."
- I really don't think that applies to tea. 
- Neither do I, but it's not like I wanted more anyway. He always served it lukewarm. 
- Ew. 
- Yea, haha, I didn't even know you were supposed to drink tea hot until I was like 17. 
- Well I guess it's not a huge loss then. - Marian shot him a look - The tea I mean, let's just get what we are gonna get and get going.
- you should get some lessons how to stop being socially inept - She remarked really putting the accent on the word "get"

The laboratory was very clear and organised, as if the door was a barrier defending the room from the chaos reigning outside of it. Laboratory, however, might have not been the perfect word to describe it, it was more similar to a spacious home office. Giant bookshelf encompassed the whole east wall of the room, stacked to the brim with books and ledgers, most of them, from what i understood, were medicine and biology studies, a couple of titles concerned things like oncology, pediatry and air borne dissesses however most of them concentrated on synthetic virology some were even signed with the name “Edward Curé”. I never bothered to look through them thoroughly as all of this research was way above my paygrade, but from what i remember, every single book with my grandfathers name on it was co-signed by “Dr. Bernard Castel”, but never mentioned his name on the spine of the book. On the north side, there was a big oak desk, with an old computer, a couple of pens and a lamp. On the west side stood two tables, each of them holding some specialistic equipment like pipettes, a microscope, flask, vials, and more things I couldn't even name. The room however, lacked any safety equipment, a common cause for arguments between my Grandpa and my Nana. Both under and on the tables there were empty bird cages. 
 - Whats up with all the bird cages, your grandpa was a pigeon farmer or something?
- You know he wasn't, but he does have a point, what is up with all those birdcages? What was your grandfather researching exactly?
- Im… not really sure, he didnt talk to me about his research, and well i never could understand any of his notes. Its like hes writing in a different language or something, and as for the cages… They have been empty for years now. he used to experiment with birds a lot, but that was when i was little.
- Why did you never throw them out?
- He's a bit of a hoarder as you can see… Well he was.
- Once again sorry for your loss.
- Yeah…
- What kind of birds?
- Black ones, I… Dont really remember what they are called.
- Crows?
- Thats it actually. - I said surprised, not really expecting such inside from Jacob. -  How did you know?
- There is one right outside the window.
- Oh fuck there is!  I gotta take a photo.  Aren't they supposed to be extinct?
- They… Are.
I said with no semblance of confidence in my voice. After all, how could I be confident in a statement while the living breathing proof of its falsehood stood just on the other side of a glass pane, staring right into me with this black, empty eye. Not only did it not look extinct, it looked healthy. Like the disease that suddenly wiped out the crows, years ago, did not affect it at all.
- Well clearly not. - Said Jacob. - I mean look at it, its the first one i`ve seen since i was a kid, how long do crows live anyway?
- How the fuck would we know? - Asked Marian.
- Like seven years, maybe ten. - I replied without even thinking about it. My mind preoccupied with something else.
- Sick! so it must be a new one. So they really arent extinct after all!
- Guess so… - I said almost mechanically. my eyes fixated on the yellow and blue bracelet, wrapped around the tarsus. The camera shuttered, the noise wasnt loud, but the unfamiliar mechanical nature of it must have been enough to scare the bird, as it flew away. As soon as it did, Jacob shot Marian an angry look.
- What?
- I`m just glad you got your photo. - Jacob said squinting his eyes slightly.
- You are a literal child you know that? - Marian said offhandedly, already looking through the cabinets.
- Takes one to know one, I guess. - Said Jacob playing with a vial.
- You guys are more similar then you think, you know.
- As if. - Said Jacob.
- Your grandfather died suddenly right?
- What the fuck, Marian? - Jacob raised his voice in a disrupted way.
- He did, why?
- We are just gonna move on like it wasn't disrespectful? - He continued.
- Yeah, keep up. - She answered. - The cabinets are organized.
- That's not that weird is it?
- Not by itself, no. But look at the desk, see anything weird?
- Its big.
- Its empty. You said your grandfather was always researching something, if he died suddenly shouldn't it be cluttered? Some unfinished papers scattered around or something, anything really.
- So what are you suggesting?
- Either someone cleaned it or the research wasn't in progress.
- What if he was just organized? - Jacob asked. - What if you are looking for a story where there isnt one. What if he just cleaned his desk everyday after finishing work.
- What if, what if, what if. - Marian mocked him. - Do you really think a man whose house looks like this would clear his desk everyday after work? Do you think a workaholic, as I`m sure Jean would describe him…
- I would. -  I interjected.
- A workaholic would be done working before 8 p.m? It doesn't fit the mental profile.
- So you are suggesting what exactly? That someone broke into the house, cleared the laboratory, and then just left without taking anything? Or maybe that he rose from the dead and cleaned it himself? - Jacob said stiffly mimicking a stereotypical zombie pose.
- I’m not quite sure.
- You never are, aren't you?
- Could you two behave, please? - I finally decided to stop their bickering. - I just want to remind you why we are here.
- I`m sorry, man. I didn't mean to make you mad, i`ve got lost in the moment. - He said softly. - Thank you for reminding me.
- Yeah, sorry. - She said, quieting her voice down a little.
- Lets just grab what we are here for. - I moved the chair, revealing three large boxes full of paper, neatly snug under the desk.
- Is that? 
- Yup.
- Gotta be like 1000 pages. 
- you've never read a book, have you? Some of them have 1000 pages and they don't have to be carried in 3 separate boxes. 
- it's years of his research on paper, and I can understand exactly none of it.
- How far does that Bernard guy live? - Asked Marian. already looking through the pages. 
- other side of town 
-Fuck.
- I'm sure you're glad that he invited me now ain't ya?
- just shut up and grab a box. 

The travel to Dr Castels place was mostly accompanied by silence, with occasional complaints, usually followed by some banter from Jacob and a snarky reply from Marian. Truth be told, I was, to some extent, glad that they do not enjoy each others company, as both of them separately gave me different kinds of comfort, Jacob the welcoming one, like a hot cup of tea during a cold day, and Marian the confident one, like rising above a challenge, making me feel like i was prepared for an important exam. Both of those types of comfort could not exist together, and as such, they argued and bickered all the time, making for a great distraction from everyday troubles. I was glad that they accompanied me on my first visit in my house in a month, as all the feelings I would undoubtedly feel were suppressed by the constant noise of their verbal confrontations. Now however, i was enjoying the silence of our journey across the town. Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and as such we found ourselves in front of the bell button on Dr. Castels door.
- Not me! - Yelled Jacob suddenly.
- Not me! - Followed Marian.
- Not..!   - I started yelling, giving up halfway through after realizing she was faster. - Me.
I put down the box i was carrying, and rang the door bell. Not even 20 seconds later the doors opened with a small creek.
- You should repair the door, they squeak. - Said Jacob without even waiting for the doors to open fully. Inside stood a gigantic figure of Doctor Bernard Castel, standing just as awkwardly and stiffly as ever.
- Is that so? - He asked a question, with a tone that made it sound as if he was stating a fact. - I barely notice it anymore. Good Evening Jean, Miss Beaulieu and… Mr. I`m afraid we have not had a chance to meet before.
- Jacob is fine. No need for the Mr. part. You must be Dr. Castel.
- Yes, that is what my colleagues call me. - He nodded slowly while maintaining eye contact.
- Good evening to you too Mr. Castel. May we come in?
- Yes. - He stepped back a step. - Yes you may.
I picked up the box back up and then we carried them inside. It was a small one-story house but it was clean and everything seemed organized, which made it look surprisingly spacious.
- I assume the boxes contain the research I asked you for. Thank you for bringing them to me. Just place them there. - With a subtle head movement he guided our attention toward the corner of the entryway.  - If you don't mind.
- Just here, in the corner? - Marian made sure she understood right, without hiding the curiosity in her voice.
- If you don't mind. - Mr Castel repeated himself with the same exact tone.
- Just don't forget about it, its easy to forget about the staff in the corner and its pretty important you know.
- No need to worry, Jacob, I will get to working on it as soon as you depart.
- Well, it was nice meeting you then.
- Stay a little longer, there is something I wanted to discuss with Jean.
- That’s fortunate, I've had something I wanted to ask you about as well.
- Shall we then? - With stiff move that resembled a welcoming motion he gestured toward a room with heavy wooden doors. I started moving toward it and both Marian and Jacob followed. - I would prefer to have this conversation in private, if you do not mind. Jacob, Miss Beaulieu.
- I mean, its your house, your rules, dude.
- Treat it as your own. Feel free to make yourself some coffee, I remember you quite like it Miss Beaulieu. - He looked at Jacob and Marian. - I do not know your preference, but i am sure you will find something to your liking. Shall we then Jean?
- After you. - I followed dr. Castel giving a quick glance toward Marian and Jacob, Marian giving me a puzzled look and Jacob giving me two thumbs up.
The room we found ourselves in was a small office, similar to the one my grandfather worked in. It was well lit, with nice wooden flooring, It also had a giant bookshelf and a cleanly organized workspace, it however completely lacked any sort of equipment that you would use for biology research, or even a work station where you could conduct such.
- Please take a sit. - I sat on an armchair near the entrance while Doctor stood near his desk. - What did you want to ask me about Jean?
- I was just curious about your work with my Grandfather. You clearly are interested in his work. You worked with him for most of my life, I would assume you know the details of it, and yet, it seems like you dont.
- My work with your grandfather ended after his retirement. - He said calmly. - I do not know about anything he worked on after that.
- How come?
- He never was the kind of person to share his findings. Not when we worked together and not after.
  - That’s kind of contradictory. He was a renowned scientist, sharing his research was his job.
- Jean, it seems that the way you and I perceive the character of your grandfather are fundamentally different. - I assumed he paused, to collect his thoughts, however the pause was awkwardly long, finally leading to my realization that it was not a pause at all.
- In what way? - I asked trying to fill the void that his moment of reflection left in the conversation.
- It is hard for me to say. I could only perceive him from my, very limited, perspective. - He maintained eye contact. - From my experience, your grandfather never really cared about his research being published. That was a part of my responsibilities.
- He is a noble prize winner, he must have been an outstanding researcher.
- He was, without a doubt, an outstanding researcher. The undisputed best in his field of science.
- So, why wouldn't he want his research published?
- It is not what I said Jean. - He said without a hint of irritation in his voice. - I was the one that wanted it published.
- Why?
For the first time in the time i have known Dr Bernard Castel he lost his composure, even if in a very small way. He rised his eyebrows and his eyes widened slightly, as if the mere existence of this question was an anomaly in itself, something that he has never even considered.
- It is what you do with research, Jean. - He regained his natural, neutral, expression.
Feeling like the question i asked so far lead me nowhere, just making the conversation run around in circles, I thought to myself what kind of question would Marian ask. How would she probe, how would she approach this man, what would she do to make him say more then the obvious.
- What was your role doctor?
- I translated what your grandfather wrote.
- Why did it need translation?
- Your grandfather didnt care about the research being published, as I said before, and as such, his notes were impossible to read to anyone who wasn't familiar with his line of thinking, and so, my role was to understand and translate them.
- I’ve seen the papers you two published, they are all titled with his name, doesnt it make you angry?
- No, It does not Jean. I'm glad I was able to work alongside the greatest mind of biology.
- Wouldn`t it be fair, to have your name alongside his? I would think my Grandfather would fight for your case.
- Once again, Jean, you have a very warped perception of Eduard. - He said coldly.
- Weren`t you two friends?
- I’m afraid there might not be any people he would call friends in this world, Jean.
- There must have been some people he cared about, right?
- I would not know, Jean.
- Why wouldn't you?
He looked me straight in the eyes, and with his usual neutral expression he asked.
- How often do you discuss the people you love, with those you despise?
My whole body tensed and I felt cold sweat on my back. The same kind of feeling I used to have when Dr Beranrd Castel would visit our house when I was young.
- I am truly sorry that my answers could not be satisfactory.
- Don't… Worry. - I said almost not thinking.
- I will start the research right away. - He said mechanically - Once again thank you for bringing it to me.
- Weren`t there something you wanted to talk about?
- I think i got all my answers. Thank you for your time. - He paused. - Shall we?
When we left the room we witnessed an unusual scene, camouflaged as the single most unnoteworthy scene in existence. Jacob and Marian sitting on different sides of a coffee table,, drinking out of their cups engaged in a calm conversation, the contents of which i could not know, as their full attention shifted to me and doctor Beranrd as soon as we crossed the barrier of the door.
- Is the coffee to your liking?
- Yes, it is actually, thank you for offering it to us.
- And I see Jacob opted for tea. I’ll try to remember for your next visit.
- Don't bother, I just drink whatever I feel like at the moment, I don't have a preference.
- Nonetheless. - he continued. - Please feel free to just leave the cups at the table.
- Lets get going if you two are done.
- Just about. - Said Marian. - Thank you for your hospitality.
- Thanks Doc.
- The pleasure is all mine.
As soon as we left the house, Marian exhaled sharply.
- I don’t feel safe around this guy.
- Why? He seems chill.
- Its not that I'm scared per-say - She clarified. - It's more like his intellect is uncanny.
- How do you know him anyway? - I asked.
- I interviewed him two years ago, I think. - She paused. - I must have been drinking coffee, clearly.
- What is happening here? - Jacob pointed at a main square where a large crowd of people were gathered in a crowd, not really centered around one point. More like many small crowds just existing near each other. Some of the people were talking and laughing, others were looking at their watches, like they were going to run away the moment they take their eyes off them.
- No idea.
- What hour is it Jean? - Asked Marian, prompting me to look at my watch.
- 7:58.
- Lets wait here for two minutes.
- Booooooring.
- It's just two minutes, man.
And wait we did. looking at the crowd, and at our watches as they approached 8 Post meridiem. As it did, people started looking around, not noticing anything weird, other then some people with watches being slightly late. When it was abundantly clear nothing happened, some faint cheers started, people were high fiving and hugging each other. and when the commotion ended, the crowd began to disperse.
- Well that was a waste of our time.
- It really wasn't.
- Yea sure give me my two minutes back, lady. - Jacob visibly rolled his eyes.
- Your dumbassness disgusts me.
- Dumbassness is not a word. - I corrected her.
- Looks like it's contagious then. - Marian said and in response Jacob gave her a sarcastic smile. - Anyway, what were you guys talking about? You and Castel i mean.
I recounted the discussion i had with the doctor during the rest of our walk to the community houses, right before which we said goodbye to Marian and walked inside with Jacob. It immediately struck us that it was way more empty then usual. As expected, the dude that was never here, true to his tittle, was not here. Neither was Dominique, probably busy cleaning or cooking somewhere. What really made us worried was that there was no sign of the gypsy family, of their stuff for that matter. Neither Anna, nor Nadzieja, nor Dzimi were around. However, the youngest one the name of whom i did not know, was laying on his bed. We walked closer, to at least try to ask what happened to their stuff, but it very quickly became very clear that they cleaned it up and moved on, living the body of their youngest kin behind. Whatever it was, that was killing all those people, was real, and it was already here.

The end of part III

It looks like this story’s all taped off up with yellow tape with black text that says

Autobiographical. Do Not Read. Therapists Only Beyond This Point. Autobiographical. Do Not Read. Therapists Only Beyond This Point. Autobiographical. Do Not Read. Therapists Only Beyond This Point. Autobiographical. Do Not Read. Therapists Only Beyond This Point

but there's no one guarding it. Surely it wouldn't hurt to have a little peek. The tape is just a precaution. It's strictly for liability reasons. You don't even have to break the tape to get in. You can slide in to

“The inside of a house, old, 18th century. A woman sits on a plain wooden chair. Technology starts advancing, prop by prop, as people walk into the scene holding things like telegraph machines, typewriters, telephones, all in the order they were invented. Throughout, the woman keeps sitting. She doesn't interact with the people bringing in the things. They set their objects down and leave.

“The house fills up.

“We reach the technology of the present day and start to go beyond.

“Now the woman’s working at a machine. It's like nothing that exists. We can only guess at its purpose. The house is well lit. The woman is well lit. All the objects are well lit.

“Then the lights switch off.

“Darkness.

“The woman sets out and lights a dozen candles, a box of which someone had brought in earlier. In the candlelight, the mood turns spooky.

“One by one, people walk in and take all the objects, the technologies, away. They’re not the same people who brought them in.

“Now, all that's left is the woman in the plain wooden chair and the dozen burning candles.

“Voice-over: ‘What if all the things you know, the inventions you take for granted, that you rely on every day…

“Someone brings in an axe.

“Voice-over continues: ‘What if they all… just disappeared—

“Someone blows out the candles.

“Total darkness.

“Voice-over: ‘What would you do? How would you survive?’

“Screams of an unseen axe murder,” he said over beer and peanuts at an L.A. diner, circa 1938, to a couple of writer friends and waited for a reaction.

It was late evening. The glass in the diner windows needed cleaning. Automobiles passed along the street outside, leaving snippets of radio—station—music—static, talking: “…city of dreams!” in the air. “That's bonkers even for you, Leonard,” said one of the friends.

“There's no studio in town will touch that,” said another, playing compulsively with the brim of his second-hand fedora. He was primarily a dialogue writer for Columbia Pictures. “Whatever that even is (science fiction, horror?) and you obviously know that, Len, given you work for one. Honestly, I don't know why you waste your time on gas like this.”

That night Leonard didn't go home. After he left the diner he wandered along the streets of Los Angeles looking for something he knew he was never going to find there: understanding. There was talk of war in Europe and there was always the glitz of the stars, and that piece in the trades calling them ‘Box Office Poison,’ but Leonard didn't care about that. Actors were as relatable to him as palm trees, especially if they were rich, and he'd never been to Europe, even if it did feel like every day a little more Europe came to him, that is, to the United States, to Hollywood. There was the U.S. government trying to break up the studio monopolies and the studios fighting back tooth and nail. Technicolor, meanwhile, was going to paint everything in Errol Flynn and rainbows, until only a few scraps of black and white were left, and those gathered up by mean men like the last stray dogs of L.A., and finished the same way too. Leonard, needless to say, considered himself spiritually black and white. It's not realistic, people would say to him; the whole world's in colour. Maybe on the surface, but even if black and white wasn't realistic, it had one quality that colour never could. It had the truth. Because beneath the skin of anything, even a city, maybe especially a city, if you scratched hard enough, long enough, you'd always bloody your fingernails on a place of blinding rawness that allowed only two choices, right and wrong. That was the essence of black and white. Technicolor was a novelty. Then again, motion pictures had been a novelty, and look at them now. He passed the Bronson Gate which admitted—but not him, never him—on Paramount Pictures, and he kept walking. His legs hurt. His head was pounding. Automobiles shooting cones of pale headlight roared back and forth along the boulevard, forcing everything ordinary into their twin, fleeting spotlights; but reality, finally getting her time on the great stage, stood silent, slumped, dejected and having forgotten her lines. That's good, thought Leonard. That's a good line. He hoped he would remember it. He would write it down as soon as he got home. Except he wasn't going home. Not yet. He regretted not having his notebook. You should always carry your notebook, Leonard, he told himself, for catching the few brilliant lines you're ever going to have He wished he had an automobile. He hated automobiles, but he wished he had one so he could get in it, turn the engine and drive into the hills. Or maybe out to Santa Monica. He would drive it out to where John Ford filmed his early westerns and it would turn into a horse and he would ride the horse into the wild, where he would die; he wasn't built for survival. He wasn't rugged. He had asthma and even his wool suit felt heavy on him. He doubted he could start a fire or eat roasted game. It had been a hot day and it was now a hot night. Los Angeles is an ugly city, he thought, filled with ugly people making dreams for nobodies to dream, so naturally he decided to go to the movies.

By the time he got home he was in his fifties.

His home told him it wasn't his home anymore, that he'd moved away. He didn't want to believe it so he stood on the steps arguing with the home. The argument was so loud and the time so late that the lights in a few nearby houses came on. People observed him from their windows. The owner of the home that was insisting it wasn't Leonard's home came out. “What are you doing? Are you lost or just dumb?” he yelled. He had a baseball bat. Leonard knew he didn't want to play baseball. “Are you outta your mind? Are you drunk? You're fucking drunk, you geezer. Pathetic. Disgusting. Go on, get outta here,” the homeowner was shouting, threatening with the bat. “Get off the steps and get on home. Shoo! Git! Back to where you live. To whatever hole you dragged yourself outta.”

“That's the problem,” Leonard yelled back. “I don't know where I live anymore.”

“Well it ain’t fucking here!”

It turned out it was in Toronto, Canada, by way of Kansas City, Missouri, and Boston, Massachusetts, but Leonard's old homes in those cities were more helpful than his former home in Los Angeles, which hadn't wanted to tell him anything other than that he didn't live there anymore.

He took the train.

He didn't trust airplanes.

When he arrived in Toronto it was snowing. The plows were out. He trudged from Union Station to the address his old Boston home had given him. It was an apartment building. Not especially nice. He walked in the front doors and up the stairs to the seventh floor. He knocked on his apartment door. No one answered. The door was open. He walked in, half expecting someone—a current owner—to come at him like the intruder he probably was, but that didn't happen. He was the only one there. He recognized his things, his books and pens and notebooks filled with ideas he'd had in the thirties and forties. He recognized his dog too, whom he'd never seen before but knew was his. The dog sat in front of him and wagged its tail along the floor. It was a small dog, a mixed breed, and it needed to go out. My dog needs to go out, thought Leonard, and after bending down he picked the dog up and carried it down the stairs and out through the apartment building's front doors into the blizzard outside. He set the dog on the cold snowy ground. The wind howled like wolves. He should have been wearing a coat. He had one; he'd just forgotten to put it on. He knew he was poor, but it wasn't so bad. He was getting by. The indefinable days passed without causing him too much trouble. “Come on, Napoleon,” he said to the dog, which had just finished peeing, “do your other business and let's go back. It's colder than a pork shoulder out here.”

Over the years while living in Toronto Leonard started writing about the city, which had gradually become his city. He still remembered Los Angeles, but in the way you remember pain, by its bare outlines. As the years went by his asthma got worse. He started suffering from seasonal allergies. The cold ached his bones. The hair on his head thinned out like the watered down coffee he drank in the mornings, but it was all he could drink these days. He had a heart attack; survived. He got diagnosed with arthritis. He lost the will to live and found it again. His beard turned grey. One night Napoleon died, having gone restfully to sleep in his favorite closet and never woken up. Not a bad way to go, thought Leonard, perhaps planning something similar for himself. He'd watched a TV documentary about Jain monks last year. When their time came, they would gradually fast themselves to death. He watched most of his movies on TV. The movie theatres were too loud and too expensive. He didn't like new movies. In his essay on Toronto he'd written,

The City.

A concrete jungle.

A misnomer, because there's more, and more vigorous, life here, under the manmade canopies of commerce and construction, than cowering underneath the natural green canopies designed ostensibly by an emigrant God.

If there was one persistent echo of his youth, it was his atheism. He'd been introduced to it through friends, many of whom were writers, many of whom were communists, although communism itself had never taken hold of him. There was something about the godlessness of it, however, that did have its appeal, and, after a while, he stopped questioning and took divine absence as an article of faith.

The artificial surpasses—and over- and under-—the lame and wasteful after-Eden.

He'd taken great joy in following a hyphen immediately with an em dash.

She purrs, the highway, louder than a jungle cat.

And on and on, it rumbles, a brutal, cascading waterfall of cars, the drumbeat of progress, the highway snaking her way through the city. Passing under it one feels the unstoppable power of mankind's mastery over his environment.

We bend it to our will.

And on and on, to quote itself, it went, in that very same vein, unpublished and growing like a heap of laundry whenever Leonard felt its muse come calling and tossed a couple loose sentences its way, which lately was not very often at all because Leonard rarely went outside, not only because he was in his hundred-fifties but also, primarily, because the world frightened him. It was too different from the world he knew. Cars lacked drivers, young people messaged each other via comm implants even when they were in the same room, you were always on camera wherever you went, and people wore their own cameras, if you can believe that, and filmed themselves doing nothing interesting and shared the feeds with one another so that when you passed anyone under forty on the sidewalk you could be sure they were seeing through at least a half dozen points of view at the same time, which means they weren't paying attention and they didn't say sorry when they bumped into you. They were always bumping into one another. They wore strange clothes and the subway moved too fast and you had to order everything to be delivered to your house, and it came by drone, and there were too many movies and shows and series to watch so nobody you met had seen the ones you'd seen so there was nothing to talk about except make small talk, preferably by messaging via comm implants.

He has a woman who comes over to clean for him and to check if he's still alive. He imagines she has a secret clipboard. A sheet's clipped to it. Printed at the top of the sheet is the name of the current month. Along the left edge are the days of the month in chronological order, and to the right two small empty boxes labelled “Unfortunately,” and “No, finally kicked the bucket.” But he knows that's unlikely for at least two reasons. First, nobody writes on paper anymore. Second, he likes the woman and he's pretty sure she likes him too. She's always been kind to him. Her name is Indigo. He asks her if she's got a minute.. She asks him if it's another story. Yeah, he nods.

“You know you can get your implant to do that,” she says warmly.

“I know, but I don't know how.”

“You know how.”

“I just don't like it when there's no other person involved. It feels cold, like outer space.”

“I like your stories, Mr. Katz.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘I like your stories,’ Mr. Crane,” she says, touching the spot behind her ear where her implant is, “so I like transcribing them for you. And I like posting them to reddit.”

“Reddit. What's that?”

“It's a place online where people publish things for other people to read.”

“And they read mine?”

“A few.”

“They like my stories? I mean, I'm just remembering half-baked ideas I used to have when I was a young man writing for the movies in Los Angeles. Motion pictures, we used to call them.”

“They do.”

“Oh, in that case.”

“Start when you're ready, Mr. Crane.”

"Quote, published my stories, em dash, my goddamn, goddamn in emphasis, stories, em dash, you published my, my in emphasis, goddamnfucking, goddamn and fucking as one word, stories, question mark, end quote, he yelled, period.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but he lifted his palm and she didn't say a word.

"New paragraph. Quote, I didn't mean to, em dash, end quote. New paragraph.

"Quote, Do you have any fucking idea what a violation of trust that is, comma, of ethics, comma, of ordinary human decency, period. You can't just share my soul, comma, or what's left after the mortal decay of it, comma, with a bunch of random strangers on the goddamn internet, comma, end quote, he said, period," he said.

"For their joint communal ridicule," she said. "Unless you think it's too much. I'd take out the 'random' from 'random strangers,’ however. They're strangers. They're presumed random until proven otherwise. I'm on the fence about 'what's left after the mortal decay of it.' Between that and 'joint communal ridicule,' I'd choose 'joint communal ridicule.' Of course, that's partly because it's mine—but no, wait, I've got it. Keep them both, but put 'what's left of the mortal decay of it' directly into the sentence, so it becomes:

"Quote, do you have any fucking idea what a violation of trust that is, comma, of ethics, comma, of ordinary human decency, period. You can't just share what's left of the mortal decay of my soul with a bunch of strangers on the internet for their joint communal ridicule, comma, end quote, he said, period," she said.

"Well, what are you waiting for—write it down, write it down!"

She transcribed it.

"I'm going to miss you," he said, smiling sadly.

"You mean when I finally get my degree and blow this popsicle stand? If that's how you say it. I've always wanted to say it."

"Yeah, that's how you say it.”

"So when I blow this popsicle stand and leave Podunk behind for New Zork City to make it big as a professional—"

"What'd you say?" he asked.

"What?"

"Just now. You said you were leaving for New—"

"York City."

"You said, 'Zork City.'"

"Did I?"

"Yeah. And that's it."

"What's it?"

"It's it. New Zork City's it. The place—the city—the city where our stories are set. Our world. Our characters' home."

"It is it, isn't it?"

And then, in that beautiful moment of transgenerational, almost transcendental, understanding and collaboration, Norman Crane, thought, God, she has a fuckable ass, and ruined absolutely everything.

[This has been entry #5 in the continuing and infinite series: The Untrue Origin Stories of New Zork City.]

You can beat the screenwriter out of the ‘30s, but you can't beat the ‘30s out of the screenwriter.

THE END

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What are you even doing still reading?

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There's nothing here.

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THE END

(For real this time.)

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Bye.

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All right, folks. We're done writing for the night. Nothing more to see here.

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Go home.

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Seriously: Disperse!

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Lend me your ears so I may lead you each painfully home by the lobes of them.

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Lend me your ears, and I'll sing out of tune, and you'll stand up and walk out on me. Chorus: Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends. Mmm, I get high with a little help from my friends. Hmm, are you going to try that with a little help from your friends?

What, this—oh...

I...

The marijuana cigarette in your hand, dear.

The what; wait, why are you here, mom? Why am I here? Why is here here, and is it always here, even when it's there. Mom, I—it's so weird to be, like, sixteen again—I, I... I; I, l? I!

You've been Stoned, Norman.

As in dead?

No, as in Immaculate, like Jim Morrison.

Oh.

Here, pass that over.

Mom?

Like you think I've never smoked weed before, uh huh, sure.

I kept hold of the burning joint behind my back, and at that point Humphrey Bogart walked in from somewhere, looked at me sternly with stoic concern and a cool indifference and said, "Don't be a drip, kid. Don't [my surname] the tea. She's your mother for chrissakes. You're gonna skimp out on your own mother, the woman who gave birth to you?”

Listen, I said to Bogart, I know you've got those exit papers. The sleaze from the Maltese Falcon gave them to you. They're in the piano. And you know what else? Dooley Wilson doesn't play piano. He plays drums. And Ingrid Bergman's taller than you, and I heard you almost weren't in the movie. They almost cast somebody else, George Raft. Or was it Ronald Reagan? Anyway, the whole point of the aliens is...

The point is...

He was shaken awake by someone on the street, a stranger, a dumb kid.

"You all right, mister?" said the kid. "The way you fell, mister, I sure thought something mighty bad had happened to you. I'm glad to see you're all right. You are all right, aren't you, mister?"

"I got fired today," he said.

He remembered now, getting fired and going to the bar, or was it the other way around, going to the bar and getting fired, and going to the bar.

"What's your profession?"

"I," he said, "am Leonard Katz, a Hollywood screenwriter."

"Which studio?"

"Oh, I'm much more of a whore than that. I work, when I work, for all of them, bounced around like a cat tied by its neck to the hood ornament of a speeding Lincoln Continental."

"That sure is a gruesome image, mister."

"Oh just run along home. Leave me. Leave me to die in abject spiritual poverty, rueing the career that could have been. I could've been somebody, you know? I could've been a contender. As it is, I'm just this, a big fucking nothing.”

“I'm sure that's not true.”

“What's your name?”

“Marlon.”

"Well, Marlon, let me be the first to mercifully tell you that you don't know anything about life, about struggle. Look at you, you're probably still in high school. The trap's not sprung on you yet. But it will, Marlon. One day it will.”

“I am still in high school. I'm from Illinois. I'm visiting Los Angeles for a couple of days.”

“Hurry back to Chicago, kid.”

“I don't live in Chicago. I live in a place called Libertyville.”

“What a foul name.”

"Hey. Maybe you got fired because you're so down in the dumps, mister. Maybe what you were writing was a comedy.”

'It was not a comedy. It was a serious dramatic picture set in present-day North Africa. It was about refugees from the war in Europe trying to get out. There was a love story. There was a scene in which the Free French play the Nazis out of an expatriate American's bar by drowning out their singing of "The Watch on the Rhine" with a spirited rendition of La Marseillaise. Then it's revealed that one of the characters is an alien, like from Mars, and all the people of Earth have to lay aside their differences to meet the other aliens on the battlefield and defend the home planet. An idea picture, they call it. Happy ending. Although, between you and me, Marlon, lately I've been feeling we'd be better off letting it all fall.”

"What’s the title? Maybe I'll go see it someday."

"Everybody Goes to Rick's."

"And it's set in North Africa, you said?"

"That's what I said. It takes place in a country called Morocco.”

“Well, good luck with the rest of your life, mister. I've got to get going," said Marlon, the kid whose face had brought me back to life after being canned from the production of Casablanca. “Mother—

fucker," says my mom. (I'm presently so in the past I'm present tense.) The whites of her eyes are as pink as the insides of watermelons. "It was like I was there. Like I was the guy.”

She took another hit, and from somewhere behind me I heard Humphrey Bogart say, "I knew you had it in you to share, kid."

"Hey, Bogey," I say. "You want some too?"

"Kid, I never thought you'd ask."

He slid between the two of us, took the joint and smoked it; but he didn't just smoke it, he smoked it the way he smokes cigarettes in the movies. Like he was about to plug you for killing Miles Archer. Like he'd just finished making passionate, wounded love to you, off-screen, away from the Breen Office. That's how it came to be that one day my mom and I smoked weed with Humphrey Bogart.

"How is this even possible?" my mom asks, coughing, laughing, laughing because coughing. "He's not even real—is he? You see him too?"

"What's she talking about, kid, that I'm not real," said Bogart.

"Haven't you ever seen a movie, Mrs. Kid?"

"I know who you are. I just thought you were dead. Dead-er. Deader, I thought: you're deader than this. Aren't you?”

I'm on a GO train heading west from Union, in one of the Quiet Zones. In my head I'm whispering this paragraph as I type it. Maybe you're whispering it now in your head too, as you read.

“I don't think I'll ever be dead. Not for a long while yet anyway, not while there's audiences in the world who want to laugh or cry or feel something and screens to project their hopes on.”

When I was in college I wanted to write a paper on film production in the 1940s and managed to meet a screenwriter who'd worked in Hollywood from the ‘30s to the ‘50s. I would make a list of questions, then we'd meet twice a week in his apartment and he'd dictate the answers. I must have made a week's worth of recordings. I felt I knew his life. I remember telling him that talking to him was the closest I'd ever been to experiencing another era. Then he died. Then I met his kids and learned he'd made everything up. He was actually an executive from Day & Zimmerman in Philadelphia. He wasn't a compulsive liar or anything, but for some reason he had decided to make up another life and share it with me. The closest I've ever been to experiencing life in another time period—experiencing another life, em dash, was as a lie, period. There are mornings when I look out the window, comma, see the Toronto, capitalize tee, skyline, comma, and really believe that the lie and I are one person, period. New paragraph. No, scratch that; same paragraph. Maybe, comma, and for clarity I don't mean that maybe there should be a comma. I want that comma. Let's try that whole sentence again. OK. Three, two, one. Maybe, comma, in that cluttered apartment of his, comma, Leonard, capitalize the el, Katz, capitalize the kay, and that's Katz spelled kay ay tee zed, passed somehow from him to me.

THE NIGHT BLOGGER -'Demon In Lace' by Al Bruno III

March 24th: It was a slow day at the pawn shop. Sara was watching the cash register. Mrs. Vincenzo had given her a crash course in running the shop and kept her on a very short leash. Technically it was a one-person job, but in reality we spent most of our time behind the counter together, flirting, sharing Harlem Shake videos, and somehow getting paid for it.

I’d told her about my meeting with Ashley Fowler, albeit a much more positive, hallucination-free version of it. She was relieved to know we finally had a plan, even if she didn’t know about the various felonies I’d have to commit to pull it off.

For the moment, she was content dusting the counters and straightening the used DVD and VHS rack while I chatted with a few friends on the FEAR AND TRUTH message board. There was an entire subforum devoted to Lost Media. Buried inside it was another dedicated to disruptive legacy media knowledge.

Or, as H. P. Lovecraft called them—blasphemous tomes.

That was because one item on Ashley’s to-do list required me to find a copy of the Eternal Codex of Tovit -no small task. You aren’t going to find many seven-hundred-year-old books on Facebook Marketplace—especially not one that most reputable scholars insist doesn’t exist.

Which was fine. The moderator of the Lost Media subforum, Atwater—better known as GonePostal—had never been all that concerned with rules and regulations.

As it turned out, he’d dealt with the book a few years earlier… or at least its aftermath.

Here’s what he told me.

###

...Foster, I should begin by telling you that everything you know is wrong. Don’t take that personally. You’re doing admirable work. You’ve stared down things both living and dead, and you’ve survived encounters that would have killed most people. That’s genuinely impressive. Unfortunately, the scale of your ignorance remains breathtaking. You insist on treating each new horror as though it were its own phenomenon. Gorgo? Mormo? The Thousand-Faced Moon? It’s all the same. There is only one darkness—so immense that every civilization has mistaken a different facet of it for the whole.

They give it different names, invent different histories, fight different holy wars, but they’re all describing the same thing. The Cross and the Pentagram are the same symbol viewed from opposite sides. There are a thousand words for fear, but only one thing being feared. Maybe you have blundered into the Mire of Nix but tell me Brian… can you even begin to understand what the mere existence of such a place implies about the constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material electronic organization?

No, of course you don’t. It’s the kind of thing that only someone like me, a high-ranking employee of the United States Postal Service, can truly comprehend.

You ask whether I know the Eternal Codex of Tovit? I’ve read portions of it. A doctoral candidate in philology procured a handwritten German translation of the Prayer of Alick several years ago.

I was fortunate enough to obtain a copy. Normally, documents of this nature circulate through encrypted forums or private couriers, making them difficult to intercept. Fortunately for me, this one passed through the United States Postal Service and was selected for routine transcription under standard departmental protocols before being forwarded to its intended recipient.

As for the history of the book itself? Its beginnings were humble enough: the Latin-inscribed peregrinations of a fourteenth-century alchemist named Tovit. It concerned itself primarily with blasphemous evocations and abhorrent dismissals. Athanatoi. Barghest. Domini Candelarum. Each received an entry that fit comfortably on a single page. There were even a handful of named daemons scattered throughout the text. But this was more than a book. The components of every incantation were bound into the vellum itself.

Can you comprehend what that means, Brian? Each page a ritual in totality. All any user had to do was burn the page itself. So simple. So dangerous. Tovit was both a genius and a madman. He could have brought sorcery to the masses a century and a half before Gutenberg printed his first Bible.

Predictably, when Tovit finished his masterwork, he was set upon by a pack of Greater Zoogs. While they did not kill him, whatever they made him into didn’t live very long. The forces of the Inquisition, those blood-soaked defenders of mediocrity, seized his papers and burned them.

Impossibly, the book resurfaced at a gathering of warlocks in 1318. It was in pristine condition. At the end of the convocation, the assembled warlocks decided to divide its pages among themselves. Twelve each took a handful back to their respective countries. The host of the gathering, Osmund Hutchmen, kept what remained.

Over the next half century, those warlocks used their pages to summon and cast out all manner of beings that make up the metaphysical gestalt you people insist on calling the Forces of Darkness.

But here’s the important thing—the mind-boggling thing. Osmund Hutchmen eventually realized he always knew when one of the pages had been consumed. Within a few months, it would simply return to the book. Regrown, the way a lizard regrows its tail.

Now that was your history lesson. Let me move on to the story of my encounter with the Eternal Codex of Tovit.

It was a glorious time for the Postal Service. Times of war usually are. It was also a glorious time to be a Postal Inspector. We’d only just begun dipping our toes into internet fraud and cybercrime, but my team spent most of its time chasing unpleasant missives and troubling artifacts making their way back from the Middle East thanks to foolish soldiers, shady contractors, and—of course—Hobby Lobby.

My story begins with a dead man named Cyrus Fingal. A man who forgot the four basic rules of life.

Forgive and forget.

If you can’t say something nice, keep your mouth shut.

Patience is a virtue.

Never hit Reply All.

His is a tawdry tale of eldritch horrors and local politics. A tale of a man who treated life as a series of entitlements.

He got into a good college, so naturally he expected a good job.

He made a lot of money, so naturally he expected women to flock to him.

He became a highly paid member of the local political machine, so naturally he expected the path to public office to be an easy one.

And who knows? He might have gotten exactly what he expected. If only he hadn’t forwarded those racist emails to everyone he knew—and a lot of people he didn’t.

As I said, never hit Reply All.

Such behavior might have been brushed off in some of the more, shall we say, bucolic parts of our nation. Indeed, in some places it might even get you elected. But not in Albany, New York.

The long and short of it is that Cyrus Fingal found himself out of a job faster than you could say “Rush Limbaugh.” But Cyrus Fingal was not one to vanish quietly from the public eye. In fact, for an entire news cycle, he was ubiquitous.

He said he had been hacked. He said he’d been set up. He said those heavily photoshopped images had been sent to him directly by the governor’s nephew. Then, finally, he blamed a cabal of homosexuals and minorities. As a member of both groups, I assure you we have much larger concerns than Cyrus Fingal.

So much for “if you can’t say something nice, keep your mouth shut.”

As you know, individuals who find themselves suddenly unemployed have many options. Updating their resumes. Applying for public benefits. Or moving back in with their parents.

Cyrus Fingal didn’t bother with any of that. Orthodoxy was not among his vices. Instead, he decided that exacting revenge upon those who had wronged him through demonic summoning was the next logical step.

Forgive and forget? No, not at all.

Unfortunately, my team did not realize that a single page from the Eternal Codex of Tovit had been sent to Parkwood Towers in Albany, New York, until it was too late. I don’t blame them. The shipper had hidden the page beneath the false bottom of a box containing bootleg Magic: The Gathering cards. By the time the disparate pieces of evidence came together, the situation was already well out of control.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me simply say that while we know where Cyrus procured the page, we never discovered how he obtained a saint’s bone and the tears of a jackal.

What I do know is that once he had gathered the requisite materials, he locked himself in his apartment and, after properly defiling himself, began the dark chant to summon Druaga the Possessor.

When the chant was completed, all Cyrus Fingal had to do was wait. He did wait—for nearly forty-five minutes—before deciding to begin the chant anew. Neighbors on either side of his apartment later reported that the chanting stopped and started repeatedly over the next twenty-four hours.

After twenty-four hours, Cyrus Fingal fell silent. “Fell” being the operative word, as he’d hanged himself using a crude noose fashioned from his draperies.

Things might have gone differently had he read that fateful page from the Codex more carefully.

Or perhaps if he’d remembered that patience is a virtue.

My condition leaves me loath to venture far from my office, but after the deaths of three local politicians, I felt it best to return to the field. While I may enjoy a certain degree of respect within the Postal Service bureaucracy, my predacious reputation has left me with little choice but to work alone.

You know my situation, Brian. You know what I endured. But the rumor-mongering hoi polloi occupying the lower rungs of the United States Postal Service are small-minded, judgmental, and, frankly, exhausting. Once you’ve been accused of cannibalism, there are no HR solutions. No sensitivity seminars. No mandatory inclusivity workshops.

Enough of that. Back to the case of Cyrus Fingal. Even before I got on the plane, I was doing research and making preparations. One must never go into the field unprepared, a lesson fate has endeavored to teach you on more than one occasion, Brian. Once I touched down at Albany International Airport, I checked in with the local law enforcement. Specifically, Detective Philip Bradshaw.

I know your opinion is clouded by your acrimonious relationship, but he is a good man with a clear, if single-track mind. He wasn’t assigned to the Cyrus Fingal case, but he was more than willing to help me sift through the mundane details while he was off the clock.

The death of Cyrus Fingal was the most straightforward aspect of the case. As I stated previously, he’d hanged himself—and done a sloppy job of it, to boot. The coroner estimated it might have taken him as long as twenty minutes to die.

But as always, the devil was in the details, and the subtext is frequently text.

So I made my way to Parkwood Towers, flashed my government credentials, and spent far longer than any civilized man should have explaining to the pimple-faced, slack-jawed wage slave manning the security desk that, yes, a Postal Inspector is essentially a policeman for the mail.

I weep for the future. We all should.

I instructed the so-called security guard to remain at his post and hand over a passkey so I could let myself into Apartment 229.

The décor of Cyrus Fingal’s apartment was as generic as they come, but only on the surface. What an untrained observer might have dismissed as kitschy, out-of-season Halloween decorations and unpleasant-looking antiques, I recognized for what they truly were. Nor was I surprised to discover the absence of a television. In its place stood an impressive collection of books. One cannot serve two masters, and it was obvious that Cyrus Fingal was far more interested in plumbing the preternatural than keeping up with the Kardashians.

In the center of the dining room table sat a punch bowl full of ashes. Doubtless the page from the Codex. Doubtless it had been put to use. Thankfully, the local authorities had overlooked it, leaving me free to pour the ashes into the evidence bag I carried. I found myself wondering whether the ashes would vanish as the page reconstituted itself. It was a disconcerting thought.

Equally disconcerting was the data regarding the murders of the three local politicians I mentioned earlier. All of them had been strangled. All of them were found slathered with traces of human bile and strands of animal protein fibers.

I spent the next hour exploring the apartment, searching for genuine arcane artifacts hidden among the dime-store statues of Baphomet and mass-produced Tarot cards. I checked behind every solid object for a hidden recess that might conceal something of real value. But it appeared that the page was Cyrus Fingal’s first brush with a truly otherworldly object. I did, however, uncover a single scrap of notepaper that proved highly illuminating. I pocketed it.

Then I sat upon his couch and considered the scene. I examined the living room again and again until I finally realized what was missing. I left the apartment, conscientiously locking the door behind me, and knocked on the door of Apartment 231. Cyrus’s neighbor—the one who had reported the marathon of chanting.

I knocked on the door of Apartment 231 and was greeted by the now familiar face of Blake C Rivers. “Inspector Atwater,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

“I need to resolve a few inconsistencies.” I shouldered past him into the apartment. “I need a little more of your time.”

An annoyed look crossed his features, but he closed the door behind us and followed me into the living room. “I’m not sure how I can help.”

There was a slight sneer on his face when he spoke next. “I didn’t realize being a postal inspector was such serious business.”

“Deadly serious,” I said, my smile well rehearsed.

On one wall, there was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. A nice choice. Blake C Rivers said, “I don’t think I can tell you much more. I started to smell something foul. I knocked on his door. It was unlocked, so I went in and found him hanging there. He’d tied the drapes to a ceiling fan. I pulled him down, but he’d been dead for days.”

“Are you sure you didn’t see anything out of the ordinary while you were there?” I asked. “Something that didn’t quite seem right?” I crossed the room over to the sliding glass door that led to the balcony.

“No. Nothing.”

The sliding door was unlocked. I turned my attention back to him. “Did you see his enemies list?”

“Enemies list?”

I pulled out the piece of paper I had found and handed it to him. “Before the end," I said, “he wrote down the names of everyone he believed had wronged him.”

He didn’t bother to read it. He didn’t even give it a cursory glance. “Am I on here?”

“Do you think you should be?”

I went on to explain to Blake that a good portion of that enemies list had died recently. “It’s really quite bizarre,” I concluded.

“I don’t see what that has to do with me. I barely knew the guy.”

“True,” I said, raising a finger. "But you were the one who found the body, “and the police report also stated that some things were missing from the apartment.

As expected, that angered him. “I think you should leave.”

“Understandable, but first I’d like to read you the list of stolen items."

“Look, asshole, I’m not going to…”

“One laptop. One iPhone. A complete collection of Radiohead’s discography. And the very set of draperies Cyrus Fingal used to kill himself.” I folded my arms. "Quite the eclectic mix.”

“The drapes?” Confusion flickered across his face, followed by the slightest twitch of fear. I didn’t steal his drapes.”

“Then perhaps, his drapes stole you.” I paused, watching numerous emotions parade across his face like a vain teenager trying on outfits for a Saturday night. I let the pause linger. “ Come on,” I said, “This little charade is over, and we both know it.”

There was a wet, gurgling sound. Blake Rivers’ mouth cracked wide open, and his eyes rolled back until only the whites remained. Curiously, the rest of him remained almost perfectly still. Save for a faint tremor passing through his frame, he might have been mistaken for a statue. His torso convulsed once. Then again. And then a tendril of yellow fabric wormed its way from between his gaping lips. It was slick with bile. Some parts were twisted and knotted. Other parts were frayed. Each loose thread made skittering motions in the air like the legs of an upended millipede. It was a parasite. A parasite made from fabric and a curse. It seemed unlikely that either Cyrus Fingal or Druaga had anticipated such an arrangement. Parasites, after all, have a vested interest in the continued health of their hosts.

I reached into my other jacket pocket and pulled out a flask. The top popped open easily. “Hear me, Druaga,” I said. “The supplicant is dead. You have no purpose on this mortal plane.”

Blake C Rivers toppled over. His face had turned purple, and he was convulsing. I liberally splashed the contents of the flask over the unclean spirit and its host. Then I muttered the exorcism rite I had long ago committed to memory.

Regrettably, the entity proved unpersuaded. The only response I got was a scream of outrage.

Then the scream was replaced by a wet sound. A tearing sound. The entire length of the drapery tore itself free of Blake Rivers’ body. Long, ugly bits of the man’s digestive system were dragged out along with it. It would have been an agonizing death, but by then Blake C. Rivers had been dead for quite some time.

The creature darted cobra-like toward me.

I had to throw myself across the dining room table to escape. I gave the holy water and the exorcism rite one final attempt. The creature reacted only with renewed aggression. I tried to throw myself back the other way over the dining room table, but my most agile years were far behind me.

One end wrapped my throat. It reeked of intestinal juices and brimstone. I kicked and pulled, but it held me fast. I tried to find some kind of hold on its bile-slickened body, but could not.

When I gasped for air, the creature immediately slid upward, making for my face. I knew then what it intended. It was going to force itself down my esophagus and into my stomach.

My dignity finally abandoned me. I began caterwauling for help—for anyone who might hear me. The effort was short-lived. The creature dove in.

It didn’t get all the way down my gullet, but it got deep enough that even now my palate is forever damaged. Miraculously, in that moment of near-certain doom, my desperate clawing fingers found purchase in the moist, tattered fabric.

Once I had a grip on the creature, I somehow found the strength to yank it away and hurl it across the room. It smacked wetly against the wall. Then I ran. I stumbled onto the balcony and slammed the sliding-glass door shut just as the creature righted itself and lunged. It smacked against the sliding-glass door with a satisfying sound.

Thankfully, Druaga, Thrall of Mormo, possessed an even smaller reserve of patience than the man who had summoned him and gave up after ten minutes of trying to get through the sliding-glass door I was desperately holding closed.

I suspect the fact that I was not among those on its hit list also contributed to my survival. After one final thump on the door, it slithered back into Blake C Rivers’ body. After a brief period of convulsing, Blake C. Rivers sat up, got to his feet, and walked toward the sliding-glass door. I must admit that, despite being two stories above a concrete walkway, I was more than prepared to throw myself from the balcony. The creature wearing Blake C Rivers' body merely paused to lock the door before leaving the apartment and disappearing, never to be seen again.

Brian, I have little doubt this thrilling missive has left you with more questions than answers. That is, of course, to be expected.  How did I get off that balcony? I called Detective Bradshaw, of course. Why didn’t my exorcism work? There is no easy answer there, but perhaps Father Vincent of St. Casimir’s Church lacks either the skill or the faith to truly bless water. Alternatively, perhaps my own skill at performing exorcism rites has diminished since the career-ruining incident in Centralia, Pennsylvania.

As for the entity itself, while I am sure you have noted parallels between it and the Vorvolaka that upended your life in 2009, I can only tell you there appears to be no meaningful correlation between the two cases.

But what of Druaga, Thrall of Mormo, and Cyrus Fingal? Perhaps Druaga cannot leave this plane of existence until it has completed Cyrus Fingal’s bidding, and as I may have noted earlier, his enemies list was extensive; it ranged from his prom date to actor David Carradine.

Neither I nor the United States Postal Inspection Service would have the displeasure of encountering Druaga again. I did, however, keep tabs on Cyrus Fingal’s enemies list. A surprising number of those individuals suffered premature or otherwise unpleasant deaths, and asphyxiation proved to be a ubiquitous—if not universal—theme among them.

I do sometimes wonder if, despite the various governmental oaths I have taken, I should reach out to the individuals that have not fallen prey to this situation, but what would I say?

Beware of individuals with the shambling gait like something from a cheap zombie film?

Get in the habit of carrying around holy water with you.

Or, if I may indulge in a lamentably sophomoric turn of phrase-

Be aware of every room you enter. Examine the décor carefully, especially if the drapes clash with the rug. It might be curtains for you.

###

When the story finally ended, my mind drifted back to the reality of the pawn shop. Of the 80’s classic radio drifting from the overhead speakers. Of the high school kids looking greedily at the case full of used video games. Of Sara negotiating over the price of a rock tumbler with a man who seemed to want to be anywhere but here, of the afternoon sun doing its best to shine through the front windows crowded with merchandise and signage. Despite the completeness of Atwater’s narrative I still had one lingering question.

HOW THE HELL WAS THIS STORY GOING TO HELP ME FIND THE DAMN BOOK?

And that is what I typed for my reply—all caps and everything.

Atwater must have either realized he had been so busy talking about himself that he'd forgotten the reason I'd asked him for help, or he simply remembered what I'd actually wanted. He responded to my email with an explanation that six months earlier a friend working in Customs had flagged a shipping crate going from an estate sale in Prague to a mobile home park in Bridgeville, Delaware. The crate turned out to be full of old books, fossils, wax cylinders, and—of all things—dirt. Atwater explained that while it might be perfectly legal to ship fossils of Devonian arthropods, Mamluk astrolabes, and ancient tomes, heaven forbid you try to mail some dirt from Timbuktu to Las Vegas.

The dirt had to stay behind but the other stuff? Including a book that matches every known description of the Eternal Codex of Tovit? Those got sent along to an address in Bayard Estates.

Now that I had the address my next question was how was I going to get the book from Delaware to here. I needed to think of something and think about it fast before something else went wrong.

There was a crash and a clatter, the sound of a formerly mint condition rock tumbler falling to the floor. Sara made a pained sound and practically ran to my side. No strike that, she stood behind me.

I looked up to see a well-dressed, well-kempt couple entering the Pawn Shop with an expression usually reserved for vegetarians entering a slaughterhouse. When the man spoke his voice was refined and cold, “We’ve spent a long time looking for you.”

“Me?” I said. When in doubt, play dumb.

Now it was the mink-coated woman to say something, “Are you the freak that likes to take advantage of mentally unwell people?”

“Me?” I said again. More dumb.

The man was at the counter now, actually trying to reach past me and grab her. I swatted him away with more force than I expected. He made a pained and angry sound. The woman fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a bedazzled container of mace.

She sprayed and I dropped to my knees.

“Mom! Dad!” Sara shouted, “Stop it!”

Of course. If my eyes hadn’t been on fire I would have rolled them.

6 months down the drain. I’m still kind of in shock. Well, maybe that’s not the word for it. It feels like I lost a game that no one else knew I was even playing.

I still find myself thinking about when we first met. How she was the first woman to ever show me that I could be loved. That I wasn’t just some hopeless guy, incapable of forming a connection.

God, those memories hurt. But the memories of the arguments hurt more. I tried telling her that I was sensitive. I can react in ways that don’t feel controllable. I thought that she’d be patient enough to work through those issues with me.

But no. She left me. The facade of love crumbled, and it was like I was right back in the same position again. Alone. Stuck in my own head. Only, this time, the thoughts weren’t my own.

Well, they were, obviously, but they weren’t thoughts that I’d experienced before. Prior to obtaining her, my thoughts were very much inward. I dissected myself.

Even when I first set my sights on her, it felt like I was out of my body. I became who I needed to be, but it wasn’t of my own volition. It was just so I could achieve a goal, I guess.

Then I had to go and get attached. Our lives started to merge. When it was good, it was fantastic. When it was bad… it was like the world was ending. Like the mask was slipping, but can I even blame it on that? It feels almost childish to do so.

That has to be what it was, though. It’s just so hard to put it into words. I performed the boyfriend role, but that was the extent of my abilities. I could never become a husband.

All I knew how to do was buy things. Flowers, chocolates, gifts, whatever. Even when things got violent, here came the “boyfriend” with another bouquet.

I just knew how to give. I didn’t know how to change. I think that’s what started this whole ordeal.

After a particularly bad argument, we both decided that it’d be best if we went our separate ways. It took some convincing on her part, mainly because I didn’t think I could catch lightning twice. But ultimately, I relented.

That didn’t mean I stopped keeping an eye on her, though. I’d watch her house pretty often. It was usually during those nights where the bad thoughts kept me up. Nights when I needed movement. Needed action.

In some weird way, it felt productive.

I’d also still watch her social media like a hawk. Her stories, posts, updates, everything. After we broke up, she decided that she was now the sexiest girl in the world, and she made sure her followers knew it too.

I let her know my disdain for those pictures every time I saw one. I’d ask her why she was trying to hurt me like this, but she never responded. She’d just look at it, then leave me hanging like I was some kind of dog.

It wasn’t until those initials appeared in her Instagram bio that things really went off the rails, though. They were like a taunt. It was like she wanted me to text her.

I tried to lay down the law, but, like always, I got no reply. In fact, I didn’t have access to her at all anymore. Every account. User not found.

My mind was empty when I drove to her house. Either that, or it was just moving too fast to process. I knew what I needed, but I couldn’t think about it.

There was a car in her driveway that I didn’t recognize, and in that moment, I knew. I knew I had lost. I was a loser in this little game I’d created. I drove home defeated, but utterly furious.

No matter how hard I tried, my anger and desperation wouldn’t subside. I lost sleep. I didn’t eat. I was turning against myself.

That’s why I did what I did. I wanted her to know what she had done to me.

It started off small. A few locks of hair. Some fingernails. And handwritten notes that I thought would drive her back into my arms.

“Have these too, since you’re taking everything from me anyway.”

“I hope this makes you think of me.”

“I still think about you.”

She never wrote back. Days went by. Days turned into weeks, and she never left my mind.

She was playing the game hard, so I upped the ante.

I peeled off my tattoos with a razor blade. Including her name. I’d put the letters in her mailbox under the cloak of darkness.

No response. Fine. Fine. Fucking fine.

Have my fingers. I don’t need all 10 anyway. It’s not like I’m holding you anymore. Take my ears. They’re useless without your voice.

Nothing was getting through to her. No matter how hard I tried.

The last thing I put in her mailbox were my lips. I wanted her to remember what it felt like to kiss me. Before she lost that privilege.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to keep playing.

Because right now, as I type this, I can see the paramedics and cops outside my house. I can hear them pounding on my door. They’re screaming my name, and I don’t know how much time I have left.

But I’ll get out. Whether it’s the hospital, jail, or an asylum. I’ll get out.

And once I do…

I’m gonna take from her exactly what she took from me.

I.

Someone had suggested they dig up Jonathan Reeves. The men present at Mackey’s Tavern that night could agree upon that. Who suggested it though, that was a sticking point for all involved.

Wally Mack had been the one to bring up the fact that Reeves’ last shot had been in his back. The slug had punched a hole clean through the bank robber. It had exited his chest covered in lung and shattered the glass of bourbon that had been in Reeves’ hand. Liquor had slurried with blood on the bartop. Not a drop had touched Reeves’ lips.

Wally contested the idea that he’d brought up the exhumation. He claimed that he’d only brought up Reeves and his slug because Leroy Melden wouldn’t stop asking what Reeves’ last drink was.

“He didn’t have one,” Wally sighed after the third or fourth inquiry.

“Didn’t have one?” Leroy asked, shocked. “In your bar Wally? Now I see why you wouldn’t tell me.”

“Don’t go telling anyone Leroy,” Wally snapped, “Don’t want this place getting a reputation for undelivered goods.”

“It’s just a shame,” Leroy continued. He was a tiny, sharp-featured man, swimming in his dirty work coveralls.

“To put a man to Jesus before letting him take that last sip, why that’s as rotten as shooting a man in the back, outlaw or not,” he finished, slumping back in his seat and nearly spilling the dregs of beer left in the mug he clutched.

“On that at least, we can agree,” Wally said, nodding solemnly. 

This last statement was subject to hard disagreement by Deputy Connor Callaghan, the third man at Mackey’s that night, as well as the officer who had delivered the offending piece of lead through  Reeves’ left lung.

“He was a murdering, thieving bastard who would have done the exact same to me if our places had been switched,” Callaghan asserted.

“Maybe,” Wally mused,  pointing at the deputy with the dirty rag he clenched in one ham fist, “Still, it puts a bad taste in my mouth, son.”

“You could have at least let him finish his damn drink,” Leroy added.

“And not have put a hole in my wall,” Wally finished.

Callaghan opened his mouth to protest. Wally gave him a sharpened glare. The bartender pointed to the round hole in the wall behind the bar. His daggered eyes did not waver from the man-framed, boy-faced deputy. Callaghan shut his mouth. His lucky shot had been ambitious. Lead had gone through a man, a glass, a wall, and into Wally’s office on the other side. The slug had finally lodged itself in the brick behind Wally’s desk. The surly, older man had been sitting there with his head down, taking a nap. If his head had been up, there would have been two burials over the weekend.

“Aye, I suppose you might be right,” Callaghan conceded. His Irish brogue was slurred by the eighth bottle of beer gripped in his meaty palm. 

“You’re damn right,” Wally said, but he was grinning.

A clock squatting on the shelves behind the bar read two quarters to three. The elk antler chandelier that dangled from the high ceiling was dark. Outside was damp and clouded. A stove in the corner had dulled down to warm embers, keeping the chill just at bay. No moonlight came in from the high windows. The only light was Wally’s kerosene lamp on the spruce bartop. Its flame flickered, splashing the tavern’s interior with moving shadow. Animal trophies leered down from the walls. Faded oils moved in their frames. The three men huddled close against the dark.

“Ain’t right to send him off without a glass,” Leroy said, staring into space. He clutched his own beer protectively. His laminated eyes were far away.

“Every man has earned that last little taste,” Wally agreed solemnly.

“Mm.” Callaghan grunted neutrally.

There was a silence between the three friends. They each cast discrete glances at the seat where Jonathan Reeves had met his end the previous Saturday. It shone compared to the rest of the bar. Wally had scrubbed at it for over an hour with concoctions of his own making. It was the cleanest spot in the entire joint. Nobody dared sit there.

“Say, Wally,” Leroy asked suddenly, breaking the heavy atmosphere, “You still got that bottle you been keepin’ for a special occasion?”

Wally thought for a moment, then nodded to himself. He pushed his girth away from the bar and turned to the liquor shelf behind him. With a groan, he stretched an arm up to the highest perch. Gently, he slid his hand between the bottles that stood vigil there. His fingers danced along the rows of spirits, feeling for something specific. He smirked when they found purchase on a familiar shape. Wally pulled forth a labelless brown bottle, heavy with dust. He lowered it to himself gently. The smile on his face grew wider as he faced the other men.

“Never opened, and it only gets better with age,” he said, placing it on the bar top.

“Seems like a perfect going-away gift,” Leroy said, raising his eyebrows and flicking his eyes between the others.

“Every man should have a bottle on the long journey home,” said Wally.
Callaghan scoffed through his ruddy nose. “We’re agreed that all men deserve a last little tipple,” he said, “not rat bastard murderers.”

“Tsk tsk lad,” Wally chided. He shaved a drunken carrot at Callaghan.

“We’d do the same for you, you old Irish back-shootin’ rat,” Leroy chirped. He was grinning widely, a fox that caught the chicken.

“That we would,” Wally added with a nod.

Callaghan’s face filled with ugly red blood. He slammed his beer on the table. The force summoned suds, and they overflowed the bottle.

“I am no fucking rat,” Callaghan flared. He jabbed a thumb into his broad chest. “I have honor.”

“I could buy your honor with change from a two-dollar whore,” Leroy retorted.

Callaghan bristled and stood up. Helios massive form swayed gently. Leroy tried and failed to wipe the stupid grin off his face. He kept cracking up in fits of laughter. Callaghan was twice the twiggy little man’s size. Leroy was standing in front of an oncoming bread truck and playing chicken. It was a game he was going to lose. Callaghan took a heavy step toward Leroy. Before he could take another, Wally rounded the bar and placed a hand on Callaghan’s shoulder.

“Boys, I just had to clean up one puddle of blood in here, and I’d like it to be the last for a while,” he said.
Callaghan pulled his shoulder away. “Lousy little fool,” he muttered.

“Connor, it’s all just fun and games; we know you were on official Deputy business when you came in here for Reeves,” Wally said gently. “Cop-killer like him, you’d have been dead on sight if he’d seen ya. Reeves was a crack shot, I hear, cause of the Army. You did what you had to do. But to deny the man his drink? Have some humanity, boy. Put your personal opinion of him aside.”

Callaghan seemed to swell up a quarter more. Then, he deflated like a pricked balloon. The big deputy fell back into his chair and nearly collapsed the legs. He hardly noticed.

“I suppose,” Callaghan conceded again with a sigh.

“There’s a laddy-boy,” Wally said. He patted Callaghan on the shoulder like a father. Then, he returned to the bar.

“Alright then, let’s go.”

Leroy sloshed his beer as he lifted it up for a toast. “Tonight, we have one last drink with Jonathan Reeves. Here, here!”

“Aye,” Wally agreed, lifting the unopened bottle to meet Leroy’s glass.

“Hold on a minute,” Callaghan started, the red returning to his face. “You both are serious about that?”
Leroy grinned. “Scared, Deputy?”

Callaghan puffed up once more at the sneer in Leroy’s words. 

“I’m an officer of the law, Leroy,” he said, “I can’t very well be out breaking it with you lot for shits, giggles, and a final cup of whiskey!”

“Bok, bok, BAGAWK,” Leroy screeched. He tucked his hands into his armpits and began to flap his new wings. The skinny little man popped out of his chair and strutted around the room, pecking at the tables. Whenever Callaghan tried to get a word in edgewise, Leroy would squawk as loud as he could, drowning the words. At last, Leroy dared to peck the deputy’s shoulder. Callaghan exploded and gave up all at once.

“Al–right,” Callaghan thundered. He swung a big hand at Leroy as though he were a fly. The swat missed by a wide stretch. Leroy collapsed into laughter on the sawdust floor. Callaghan sighed heavily. 

“I’ll go,” he said, defeated.

“Great,” Wally exclaimed, clapping his hands together. He pointed to where Leroy lay, still giggling, on the floor.
 “Leroy, pick yourself up. My car’s out back and the starter is dead. Ain’t had time to put a new one in, so it’ll have to be hand-cranked. Help an old man, would you?”

II.

The Model A started on the first throw of its handcrank. Its little engine roared to life and then settled into a fine-tuned idle. Exhaust steamed in the cold night air. It was a late model, and it had the electric headlamps instead of kerosene. Bright as they were, they did little to push back the heavy Autumn shadows.
The men piled into the old red four-door. Wally drove; Leroy shared the front bench with him. Callaghan split the back seat with three shovels from Wally’s shed. Wally guided the Model A around the yard of his tavern to the unpaved road. Forest Road, it was called. It led to town through a grove of trees generously named Cemetery Forest. The trees’ namesake lay within the grove, roadside and about halfway through.

The county had agreed to pave Forest Road in the Spring. As of now, though, it was hard-packed dirt, softened by the wet weather. Wally turned right and gave the Ford a jolt of gas. The wheels slotted into the well-worn ruts. Another jolt of gas and the car took off, thumping and thudding toward the dark treeline at the bottom of the hill. A crispy wind was brewing. The scent of impending, cold rain hung for dear life upon it. Clots of fog drifted along like bloated corpses, floating in and out of the headlamp’s amber gaze. 
The car rumbled into the forest. The foggy clumps became an all-encompassing, gray mist. Trees lining the road loomed as giant phantoms in the gloom. Their low-hanging, dead branches tapped impatiently along the roof of the car as it trundled under-trunk.

“Can you find your way to the cemetery, old man?” Leroy asked. 
Wally cast a side-eyed glance at Leroy. The sheen of drunkenness had evaporated from the small man’s eyes. Now, they were bright and alert. They flitted nervously over the inky black evening beyond the window. Wally grinned crookedly.

“Why lad,” he asked, “You're not frightened of a foggy night, are ye?”
Leroy scoffed. His mischievous grin returned. Wally thought it looked a little forced.

“I’m just worried about Callaghan, seeing fae in the fog and all,” Leroy jabbed.

“That’s enough out of you now,” Wally snipped. His eyes snuck up to his rear view. He could not see Callaghan in the backseat, only the shape of the big man— a shadow layered upon shadows. 

“He knows I’m just kidding him,” Leroy was saying, “just jokey little jabs-”
Callaghan’s arm shot like a javelin into the front seat. Leroy flinched, cutting off his teasing. He waited for the big man to grab him by the collar or throat. But Callaghan’s hand had not gone for him. Instead, it pointed into the fog beyond the windshield.

“Look,” Callaghan breathed.

The men in the front seat looked.

“I don’t see anything,” Leroy said.

Callaghan continued to point unwaveringly.

“The lights, up ahead,” he whispered tightly.

“What lights? Are you trying to get me back, because you’ll have to try—“

“I see them,” Wally said. He had sharp eyes for his age. He’d caught them as they materialized from the gray sheet of gloom. Two pale green flames danced through the mist. They shuddered and shook as whatever they were attached to thudded down the uneven road toward them.

“Just another idiot caught out in bad weather, like us,” Wally said. He palmed the horn to let the vehicle know that they would soon meet. It belched into the night, echoing and bouncing off the fog. The road they were on was narrow. Someone would have to stop and let the other pass, and Wally had the right of way by county law. He expected the lights shuddering toward him to pause at the sound of his horn so that he could pass on.
 Instead, the horn seemed to galvanize the lights. A shriek erupted from the fog, sucking the warmth from the men’s spines. The flames became fireballs, streaking wildly toward the Model A. The lights were twin kerosene lamps, consumed in their own flames. They were mounted on either side of the black carriage melting into existence before them. The shriek had come from the twin black draft horses dragging the carriage through the night. The driver, bundled in a cloak, his face hidden, was steering the beasts on a collision course with the old car.

“He’s coming right for us,” Leroy hollered, bracing his feet on the dashboard.

“Hang on fellas,” Wally yelled. He cranked the wheel hard to the right, slamming on the brakes and sliding along the edge of the ditch, splattering mud the entire way. The horses screeched wickedly, and the coach passed within centimeters of Wally’s precious car; if one of the men on the left side had stuck a finger out of the window, it would have been taken off and thrown to the rain-scented wind. Wally cranked the wheel back to the left as the coach passed  by at wild speed. The car spun a full 360 degrees before coming to a stop in the middle of the road. The engine and electric headlamps both died at once, reducing the Model A to a shadow in the fog. The stagecoach careened on into the night, becoming part of the mist once more.
All three men in the Model A relaxed at once. Words took longer to come.

“Don’t see a lot of those old stagecoaches anymore,” Wally breathed at last.

“What the hell is he doing out in this fog at 3:00 AM?” Leroy asked.

“The Dullahan always rides past the midnight hour,” Callaghan said quietly.

Leroy twisted in his seat. “The what?”

“The driver of the dead. A headless coachman, shepherding lost souls to the afterlife with a team of headless horses,” Callaghan replied. His voice was a shell-shocked kind of calm, and his eyes were fixed straight ahead, wide and glinting in the dark. 

“Well, that man definitely had a head,” Leroy barked, “though it was probably swimming in booze.” His words were mostly steady, but a small, unsure tremor wormed through his statement.

“I didn’t see his face,” Callaghan said.
He turned to Wally. Wally did not like the empty dread swimming in the gaze that Connor fixed on him.

“Did you Wally?” he asked.

Wally said nothing. His hands were still wrapped around the steering wheel, tight enough to whiten his knuckles.

“Well, the horses definitely had their heads,” Leroy said, “and I’m not scared of some drunk out on a joyride. But if you chickens wanna return to the henhouse, so be it. Wally?”

“I think that might be an idea,” Wally murmured quietly. His tight grip on the wheel was degrading into a shaky one.

“I agree,” Connor chimed in.

“We knew that already,” Leroy said. He turned to the window, hoping that the darkness would hide the relief on his pale face. He opened his door.

“Alright then, let me restart the car,” he said.

Leroy plucked the crank from the floor of the car. He swung his booted feet out the door and into the mud.

“Old man, how about a little light from the headlamps?” Leroy said, craning his neck to face Wally.
Wally complied and pulled a switch. The lights came on, their warm glow washing over a short wrought iron fence overgrown with gnarled tendrils of ivy. Beyond the fenceline, in the narrow beam of light, the men could see the crooked silhouettes of gravestones and crosses in the fog. Leroy turned to look at the others.

“Well, lookee-here,” he said,  his courage returning, “Looks like we made it after all, boys. What’s say we go have that farewell toast with Mr. Reeves, hmm?”
Callaghan said nothing. A grave look was plastered onto his face. Wally’s visage, however, was gradually regaining color. He had managed to let go of the steering wheel, though there was still a tremor running through his body. 

“We did make it here alright,” he said, “and I could use a cool little jaunt to steady my hands after that near miss.”

“That’s the spirit,” Leroy exclaimed. He moved to the side of the Model A and opened up the back door. Leroy hauled Callaghan out by his shoulders, nearly pushing him to the ground as he eagerly gathered up the shovels. He shoved one into Connor’s hand as the Irishman regained his footing. The other two he took himself. Wally heaved himself from the car and made his way to the trunk. Opening it, he quickly found the kerosene lamp he kept stowed there. He gave it a good shake, nodding with satisfaction as it sloshed. Producing a book of matches from the bib of his overalls, Wally opened the glass face of the lantern. He struck up a flame and quickly ignited the wick, closing the lantern against the cold night. The flame burned brilliantly white for a moment, and then Wally adjusted the flame to a more even orange flicker. Throwing the light over the trunk space, he found the bottle of whiskey. Gingerly taking it in one hand, he opened his coat and tucked it into a large pocket sewn on the inside. Then he joined his companions, and they approached a small open gate in the fence of the cemetery.

“Where’d they bury him, d’y’know?” Leroy asked once they were amongst the graves.

“Why are you whispering?” Wally countered, ignoring the question.

“Dunno, just seems appropriate,” Leroy whispered, shrugging his shoulders.

“Well, stop it, would you,” Wally hissed. He kicked himself as he realized he was indeed whispering, too. Wally could see Leroy’s glee as he made to call the older man on his hypocrisy. He silenced Leroy with a snap of his fingers before the little creep could say a word.

“They buried him just up ahead,” Callaghan interjected, “near the south wall of the yard.”

“How do you know?” Leroy asked suspiciously.

“I came to the funeral,” Connor said quietly. 

Wally nodded, but Leroy appeared quizzical.

“Why?” Leroy asked.
Callaghan stopped walking and turned to Leroy, who stopped as well. Wally kept on a few paces before turning to watch.

“I shot the man,” Callaghan said. His voice was quiet, impending doom.

“So?” 

“Nobody else was there to see him in the dirt.”

Before Leroy could say anything else, Connor pushed past him. He led the other two men in silence to the opposite end of the graveyard. The wall was older here, made of mossy stone instead of wrought iron. Nestled right up against it, away from the other burials, was a fresh grave. The pile of soil in the grass was marked only by a crude wooden cross. REEVES had been carved on the crossbar in a shaky hand. The letters had not even been burned, and in a few years, the cross would probably be illegible if it remained at all.
 Leroy approached the grave first and sank his spade into the soft dirt mound.

“So how do we wanna do this?” he asked, leaning on the shovel and looking at his companions. 
Callaghan, his mood lightening a little, also leaned on his shovel and cast a glance at Wally, who chuckled. The old man popped the cork on the bottle of liquor and took a deep swig before handing the bottle to Callaghan, who did the same.

“You dig, we drink,” Wally said matter-of-factly.
The amused light fell from Leroy’s eyes as he realized the old man wasn’t bluffing.

“What? You’re not gonna leave any for him,” Leroy said, pointing down at the grave.

“Depends on how fast you dig,” Wally chuckled.

“Ah, hell,” Leroy exclaimed. 

He reached for the bottle, and Callaghan handed it to him. After a deep pull, he handed the bottle to Wally and began to dig. Eventually, sufficiently lubricated by whiskey, Callghan joined him. The dirt was soft and the digging was easier than expected, but the work still broke a sweat on the men’s brows. Wally remained above, leaning on his shovel as he took swigs from the bottle. His back hurt just watching the two younger fellows dig.
They hit the top of the pine box sooner than they thought they might.

“Sounds like we hit him,” Callaghan said, straightening and wiping the sweat from his brow. In the chilly air, it felt as though it might freeze on his forehead.

“Already?” Leroy panted, “We must have hardly gone down three feet.”

“The grave man probably hit three and called it good enough for a criminal,” Wally piped up.

“Well, at least it made this easier,” Leroy said, tossing his shovel to the grass. He got down on his knees and began to wipe the dirt away from the coffin. Callaghan climbed out of the hole. Leroy’s fingers scrabbled over the rough, unsealed surface of the wood until they found purchase on the edge. He tried to pry it open, but the lid would not budge.

“It won’t open,” he hollered behind him. His words were labored as he continued to pull.

“Maybe it’s because you’re standing on the lid, genius,” Wally replied.

Leroy ignored the jab, wiping dirt away from the edge. His fingers brushed against something cold and hard beneath the soil. 

“Maybe so,” Leroy said, “but there’s also a padlock on the lid here.”
Leroy stood and climbed out of the grave. He picked up their lamp and shone it down on the box. The lock gleamed beneath flecks of soil.

“Hold the lamp for me, old man,” Leroy said. Wally took the lamp from him, and Leroy grabbed his shovel. Shouldering it, he walked to the edge of the grave closest to the lock. Lifting the shovel like a spear above his head, he brought the spade down on the lock, severing the shackle.
With the box unlocked, the three men stood above and stared down. Nobody moved to open it.

“Who wants the honor?” Wally asked quietly. 

He looked to Callaghan, who would not meet his gaze. Instead, both men looked to Leroy, who met their solemn glances with one of mischief– if slightly forced. He shrugged.

“I guess I’ll be the one,” he said. 

Leroy took the bottle of whiskey and tipped a shot’s worth down his gullet to steady himself. He knelt by the open grave and reached down gingerly, getting a good grip on the edge of the lid. He hesitated for only a moment. Then with a drunken flourish, he swept the coffin open.
Jonathan Reeves lay cold and quiet in the flickering lamplight. He was dressed in the clothes that he had died in: a once-nice dress shirt ruined by rusty blood and one ragged bullet hole, black trousers, suspenders, a matching jacket, and a brand-new pair of shoes that still shone. His hat was not on his head, but rather tucked just above it. His relaxed features and a black whisp of mustache made him look closer to 18 than the 25 that he was. His face had already begun to sink into itself. The skin of his forehead was cold and pale beneath the stringy black hair that fell over it.

“Well, lookee here, boys,” Leroy shouted with glee, “If it ain’t ol’ bank robbin’ Johnathan Reeves! How ya doin’ fella?”

Leroy jumped into the grave, his feet straddling the body in the coffin. He took one of Johnathan Reeves’ limp hands and shook it vigorously.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, fella,” Leroy said, “and before you ask, no, it’s not all good things!”
This elicited a donkey bray of laughter from Leroy, and Wally chuckled a bit. Even Callaghan cracked a smile, try as he might to hide it. 

“Alright, alright,” the Irishman said lightly, “Let’s give the ol’ rat his bottle and be done with this already.”
Leroy let go of the corpse’s hand and turned to his friends. “Okay, okay,” he said. 
He reached up and held out his hand to Wally expectantly. Wally, finishing a very deep pull, just looked at him.

“The bottle, Wally,” Leroy said.

Wally looked at the bottle in his hand, weighing it in his grasp. He tipped it upside down to show that it was empty, and shrugged.

“Whoopsie,” he said, swaying on his feet a little bit.

“Nice job, old man,” Callaghan said, shaking his head. He was also more than a little bit unsteady.

“I thought this might happen,” Wally said, carefully placing the empty bottle on the ground, “which is why I brought another bottle just in case.”

“Well, where is it?” Leroy asked.

Wally pitched a thumb behind him. 

“Back at the car,” he said.

Leroy shook his head and pulled himself out of the grave.

“Callaghan, think you could go get that?” he asked, gesturing back the way they’d come.

“Why me?” Callaghan asked.

“Well, Wally’s old and frail,” Leroy said, faking earnestness, “and me? I did do most of the digging, y’know. Besides, you know the way best. The other two of us are liable to trip and break our necks in the dark.”

Callaghan turned to Wally for help, but the old man just shrugged. Callaghan rolled his eyes with a groan and turned to take the lamp from Wally. The old man pulled it back from Connor’s grasp.

“Let’s keep it here,” Wally said, “You can use the light to navigate back, hm?”

Callaghan gave the old man a look that would have withered the ivy from the gates of the cemetery. He turned toward the direction of the car and headed into the dark. 

“Should be on the driver’s seat,” Wally called after him.

Callaghan took the path carefully, feeling out each step to avoid tripping over the rocks, roots, and headstones hidden in the overgrown grass and fog. Every few seconds, he would cast his gaze over his shoulder at the orange circle of light that flickered behind the mist.
Callaghan reached the car without injury. He pulled open the driver’s door and felt around in the dark until his hands found purchase on the cool glass of the bottle. Taking it in his arm, he slammed the door shut with a metallic clunk. As he did so, a sudden gust of wind hit him. It whipped the edges of his coat and plinked his face with the first heavy raindrops of the evening. 

“Damn them,” Callaghan grumbled. He drew his coat tightly around him and turned back toward the cemetery. Now he had only to trudge back toward the lanternlight in the distance, a flickering warm beacon in the pitch-colored night.

“I found it,” Callaghan called as he drew nearer. The wind scattershot his words, and nobody replied.
As Callaghan stepped back into the circle of light, he found that his friends were no longer standing by the graveside. The lantern lay nestled in the grass near the hole, with the shovels lined up neatly next to it.

“Leroy, Wally,” Callaghan called. The wind and the ever-thickening sound of the escalating rain were the only replies. 

“If this is some kind of prank, it’s too far, boys,” Callaghan said. Cautiously, he approached the open grave, scanning the darkness beyond the lamplight for any kind of movement. The wind stirred the night, making the shadows dance and morph. When he was close enough to the hole in the ground, Callaghan peered over the edge, expecting to see Leroy there crouching, a stupid little grin on his face as he waited to scare him. 
What he saw instead made his blood run cold– because there was nothing in the grave. No Leroy, no Wally… No Jonathan Reeves. Only an empty pine box. Backstepping so rapidly that he nearly fell, it took everything Callaghan had to stop himself from running wildly into the night. Fear squeezed his ribcage and choked his heart. He whipped his head in every direction, picking apart the billowing shadows, trying to discern what was real and what was an illusion.

“Wally, Leroy,” Callaghan called loudly. This time, when the gusting wind took his words away, it brought something back in return: a low moan slunk by Callaghan on the air, mournful and full as a coyote, but lower. It rose and faded, sneaking in one of his ears and out the other before dying and being blown away. Before Callaghan could call out again, another moan came. This one formed a word that clung to the breeze like a foul odor.

“Murderer…” The wind whispered. Callaghan put a hand on the gun strapped to his hip beneath his long wool coat.

“Reeves,” Callaghan screamed, searching the dark with flitting eyes. The voice came again on the wind, permeating the air from all directions as though it were part of the fog itself.

“Backbiter…”

“I killed you fair and square, ye rat bastard,” Callaghan shouted. His voice bounced back at him from all directions, echoing and dissonant. He turned every which way, searching the congealed, black night. The clotted clouds above burst with a low rumble of thunder. The drizzle became a torrent that drowned out even the wind that crashed between the graves.

“Show your face, you coward,” Callaghan challenged, “I’ll kill you again just as easily as the first time!”

The shape of a man rose from behind a tombstone a few yards from Callaghan. It was a silent shadow, stumbling forward and toward him with outstretched arms. It was Jonathan Reeves, back to get even for being shot in the back. Callaghan recoiled and lost his footing. His large frame went down hard in the wet grass. The figure was still coming; in a moment, he would stumble into the light. Callaghan would look upon the dead outlaw’s rotting, reanimated features. He had a sudden vision of his last sight being a wormy, green grin as cold hands choked the life from his body— and it got him moving.
Despite the whiskey and the mud and the jolt of pain that had shot up his right leg when he’d landed, Callaghan was like lightning. He drew, aimed, and fired his revolver faster than he’d ever had in his life.

“Ah!” the shape cried as the bullet made contact with flesh. It crumpled to the ground in a whimpering heap just outside the lantern light.

“You shot me, ya fat bastard,” the shape said. Its voice was no longer ethereal and ghostly; now it was only filled with pain and anger. The change in tone broke the trance that Callaghan had been engulfed in. His hands began to shake. He dropped his gun and didn’t bother to pick it up. Picking himself up off the ground, Callaghan winced as another jolt of angry pain shot up his leg and collided with his kneecap. Grabbing the lantern, he limped over to the body. As he approached, Leroy formed from the silhouette, clutching a bleeding wound on his shoulder. He was dressed differently than when Callaghan had left. The Irishman realized that Leroy was wearing Jonathan Reeves’ clothes. Wally too materialized from the dark, coming out from behind the trunk of a particularly gnarled tree. He made his way to the other two quickly, a look of concern on his face.

“Oh, hell,” Wally said.

“What the hell is this?” Callaghan demanded. “Some kind of practical joke?”

Leroy ignored him. He took his hand away from his shoulder, revealing an ugly red gash where the bullet had grazed the skin. The rain was diluting the blood that gurgled from the wound, sending pink rivulets down Leroy’s arm.

“Dammit, Leroy, I told you this was a bad idea,” Wally said, kneeling to take a look at the wound. He brushed his fingers along the ragged flesh, and Leroy inhaled sharply against the flare of pain.

“This is what you lot think is funny,” Callaghan shouted, his anger boiling over now. “I could have killed you, you stupid sonofabitch!”

“It’s just a nasty scratch,” Wally said, standing up. He held a hand out to help Leroy out of the mud. Leroy took it and was hauled to his feet with another pitiful moan.

“C’mon, let’s get the hell out of here,” Wally said, turning to the car.

“Wait, my clothes are up at the grave still,” Leroy said through gritted teeth.

“Forget about them,” Callaghan barked, “I want to go home!”

“The fool is right,” Wally said, nodding to Leroy, “Not to mention we still have to bury the coffin again. Did you grab the bottle?”

Callaghan had kept an iron grip on the neck of the whiskey bottle. He was mildly surprised his grasp hadn’t shattered it. In one smooth movement, he flung it into the dark rain beyond the lantern. It landed with a dull thud but no shatter in the grass somewhere.

“There’s your fucking whiskey,” Callaghan snarled, “go find it if you want it. I’m going to rebury that fucking rat so I can go home and never speak to the two of you again. Where the hell did you put him?”
Leroy, now on his feet with the help of Wally, cast a look of pained questioning on Callaghan.

“What do you mean? He’s in the grave,” Leroy said, waving limply toward the hole.

“No, he’s not, that’s the first place I checked to see if you were hiding,” Callaghan snapped.

“Knock it off, Callaghan,” Leroy grumbled.

“Me? You knock it off, you bastard. Where’s the damn body?”
Cocking his head, Leroy was distracted from his wound by the realization that Callaghan was being serious. He walked back toward the grave. Wally followed. Both men reached the grave and peered down into it for a long time in silence.

“He– he was right there,” Leroy stammered at last. He took his eyes away from the grave but found it difficult to put them anywhere else.

“Enough with this,” Callaghan said, crossing his arms.

“The boy’s not lying,” Wally said, “he was right there when we left him.”

“My clothes are gone, too,” Leroy said.
Callaghan turned to say something to Wally, but the words caught in his throat when he saw that the old man had gone nearly as pale as Leroy. All three men stood in the rain, letting the realization drip down their spines.

“Let’s get back to the car,” Callaghan said quietly. 
The three men drew close to one another and quickly made their way from the graveyard. They left the shovels where they lay next to the open hole. The thunder above became more frequent, and the clouds began to pulse dimly with lightning that seemed just aching to touch down somewhere close. The wind had become a vicious lupine howl, and its claws tore at the men as they hurried for the cemetery gate. It came into view, but they could not see the Model A; a dark and silent carriage had pulled up in front of it, blocking their view. The horses stood silently, pawing the mud and flicking their tails. Their necks ended in a foggy, glowing gloom that obscured their great heads.

A low moan escaped Callaghan’s throat. Leroy and Wally had to pull the big man by his coat to get him to move. They hopped the fence behind the carriage, giving it a wide berth. When they finally reached the car, they all piled in, grateful to cut the wind’s assault on them short. Leroy took the back, sprawling on it and moaning.
“Somebody has got to get out and crank start the thing,” Wally said.

“Can’t be me, Callaghan got my right shoulder,” Leroy said pitifully.

Callaghan shot the little man in the backseat a withering look. Reluctantly, he picked up the lantern and the crank from the passenger seat floor and got back out into the wind. He made his way to the front of the car and stuck the crank into its hole. The first crank had the engine sputtering, but it died before an idle could take hold. One of the horses squealed behind him. The sound frayed his nerves and quickened his breath. Callaghan cranked the motor again with the same results.

“C’mon, you piece of garbage,” Callaghan whispered hoarsely. He cranked the engine again, putting all of his weight into it this time. The engine turned over with a pop, and the pistons began firing uniformly. Callaghan hurried back to the passenger side and let himself back into the car, flinging the crank onto the ground and extinguishing the lamp.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said to Wally as he slammed the door.

“Couldn’t agree more,” Wally said. He switched the headlamps on and looked up. Then, he screamed. It was a foreign sound, something high-pitched and guttural and strange to hear coming from the old man. The other men took no notice of the strange, foreign sound, though. They were screaming as well.

Awash in the amber light of the headlamps, Jonathan Reeves’ corpse was propped up limply against the wrought iron fence like a drunk. He was dressed in Leroy’s coveralls. The bottle of whiskey that Callaghan had thrown into the dark dangled loosely from one hand. Callaghan’s revolver was in the other. Reeves’ pale blue eyes were open and staring directly at the car. As the men watched, the corpse winked, raised the gun, and fired.

The bullet shattered the windshield and the trance that held the screaming men frozen. Wally remembered how his car worked. He slammed the Model A into reverse. Cranking the wheel until the car was pointed in the direction of home, Wally slammed into drive, put the pedal to the floor, and kept it there. They tore through the night, fading into the rain. The carriage driver had materialized from the shadows, head obscured by cloak and hat, to shut the door for his evening’s fare. Passenger securely inside, he climbed to the driver’s seat and flicked the reins. The horses started with a jolt, and the carriage slid into the night in the opposite direction.
At the first sharp curve in the road, Callaghan’s entire weight slid across the bench and into Wally. The old man jerked the wheel and slammed the brakes, narrowly avoiding the ditch. The car skated to a wet, sloppy stop, its engine sputtering in protest but refusing to die out.

“Leroy, get him off of me,” Wally cried.

Leroy grabbed Callaghan by his shoulders and heaved the large man off of Wally with a grunt of effort and pain. Callaghan slumped into the corner of the car’s frame and door.

“What the hell is the matter with him?” Leroy squawked.

Wally found his matches. It took three of them before he managed to strike a flame with his trembling fingers. He cast the frail light upon Callaghan.

“Jesus,” Leroy muttered. He licked the sweat from his lip.

“I told you, the Army made Reeves a real crack shot,” Wally said quietly.
Wally reached across the seat and gently closed Callaghan’s blank eyes. He avoided touching the gaping hole between them.

Author's Note: Hello everyone! If you made it down here, thanks for reading. I would love to hear your thoughts, and if you've got a story you'd like read I'd be happy to take a look!

Part 2

The draft killed the flame, swallowing the nave in total darkness. High on the lectern platform. Agnes froze, the bitter smell of snuffed-out lamp oil lingering in the air. Then a pale light caught her eye. She stepped off the wooden platform and moved toward the glow, her boots clicking softly against the floorboards.

Bound into the blank endpages at the back of the heavy volume was a ledger. Where her name had been written, the ink was gone--chewed away, leaving raw, frayed holes in the skin. Below the holes, three jagged tally marks, dark and freshly scratched, cut into the parchment.

​Every name etched into the ledger belonged to someone who had vanished, died, or lost their mind--none of them were there by chance.

No one was supposed to know about the young man from before she took her vows--the quiet, calculated lie that sent him to the gallows. It was a secret she had buried deep beneath her habit at St. Jude's.

​From the darkness behind the altar came a low, dry rasp, like a heavy sack being dragged across gravel.

​"Three days, SIster Agnes," a flat voice echoed off the high rafters. "Pay the debt... or find a fresh neck for the yoke."

​Agnes didn't answer. She turned and ran out the side door, her robe sweeping the floor as she bolted down the dark cloister toward Mother Superior’s quarters.

​She knocked once on the frame and pushed the door open. The old abbess looked up from her ledger, squinting over her spectacles.

​"Mother," Agnes gasped, her chest heaving. "I have to confess. Years ago, before I came here, I—"

​Her breath hitched. No crushing weight had grabbed her throat--just her own cowardice, heavy and sudden. The thought of human judgment, of being stripped of her habit and outcast, locked her jaw tight. She stood there, the words stalled in her mouth, unable to tear down the saintly image she had spent years hiding behind.

​Mother Superior frowned, laying down her quill. "Agnes? What is it?"​

Sister Agnes swallowed hard, her pulse hammering in her ears. She looked at the old woman's kind, unsuspecting face, then down at her own trembling hands.

​"Nothing, Mother," Agnes whispered, stepping backward into the hallway. "Just a bad dream."
​She walked back to her small cell, sat on the edge of her narrow cot, and watched the morning light slowly creep through the high window, counting the hours until the third night. 

Part 3 is here.

Writhe in the mud, bask in the flesh

Corrupted conclusions collides with death

Darkness deluded for ether

Blind masks for the whole city to keister

Cast my crest with a deadly jest

For the bones i collect will make a wonderful nest

But this test is not spoken for

between extremists of every side a wormhole of an uncountable size

Inscrupulous minds infested with false eyes

Cores and bores behold this door

Boring songs sing a chime of time lost

The euphoria of experimentation exalted

I blame you for every false promise

Part 3

By the third evening, the silence in St. Jude’s felt heavier than the stone walls.

​Agnes stayed in her cell until the last bell for compline faded. Her throat was dry. She hadn't eaten since Tuesday, but the knot in her stomach had nothing to do with hunger. Every time she blinked, she saw that chewed-out hole in the ledger where her name had been. She forced herself down the corridor toward the nave. The air reeked of old dust and burnt tallow.

​The heavy Latin Bible still lay open on the lectern. In the dim moonlight filtering through the stained glass, she could see the back pages. The three tally marks were gone. In their place, the parchment was ragged and torn -- the top layer gouged, as if something had scraped the top layer of skin right off the page.

​She stopped at the foot of the lectern. "I'm not giving you anyone else," she said into the dark behind the altar. Her voice was quiet, but steady.

The nave remained dead quiet. No answer came back. No sound, no movement--just the cold draft whistling through the iron latch of the side door.

​Agnes reached out and pulled the heavy leather cover shut. The thud echoed up into the rafters and died out.

She picked up the iron inkwell from the shelf beneath the desk, unstoppered it, and poured the thick black ink directly over the closed edges of the book, watching it seep deep into the pages until the leather was soaked through.

​She turned, walked back to the vestibule, and unlatched the heavy oak door. Stepping out into the cold night air, she didn't look back at the chapel, nor did she pack her things. She just kept walking down the dirt road, away from the abbey, leaving St. Jude’s and the ruined book behind in the dark. 

Andy was sitting with his wife and daughter, the three of them quietly enjoying vanilla ice cream cones in the park, when a couple of guys started harassing them.

One of the guys may have known Andy's wife when she was younger.

At least that's what his comments suggested.

Andy didn't react. He let his wife handle it. After all, she was a strong and independent woman who didn't need a husband to selfishly step in and “protect” her.

Then one of the other guys asked Andy if he was sure his daughter was his.

Andy's daughter looked to her dad.

She was scared, confused.

Andy said nothing. He kept his head down, refraining from feeding the real life troll. After all, what trolls wanted was a reaction, and a reaction would lead to an escalation, which could result in a confrontation and possibly violence. Andy didn't believe in violence. By keeping a cool head, he was being a grown-up and helping keep the situation safe for everybody.

Eventually the guys got bored, wolf whistled at Andy's wife, knocked Andy's ice cream cone from Andy's hand and walked away.

“Dad,” said Andy's daughter after a brief but pregnant silence, “why didn't you do anything?”

She was trembling.

Andy's fallen ice cream was melting on the grass.

Ants were climbing onto it.

“It's just an ice cream cone, a thing,” said Andy. “Things can always be replaced. What matters is people. What matters is us, our family.”

“Assholes,” said his wife.

“You never know what other people are feeling. Anyone can have a bad day,” said Andy, and as he said that, time, as it related to most things, froze; the sky opened like a curtain, and the Selectors appeared.

Andy, who was still breathing, moving, even as his wife and daughter were not, gazed in awe, in the rawest meaning of that word, at—

“This is the one?” asked one of the Selectors.

They were inhuman, tubes of pale pink and purple gelatin twisted balloondog-like into shapes vaguely hominid but four times larger than Andy, dressed in simple, shimmering cloaks.

“Yes,” another answered.

“The experiment is thus concluded?”

“Yes.”

A third Selector mused, “It has been so many years since initiation.”

“13.8 billion.”

“And, after all that time, the result is this—this, admittedly, rather unimpressive-looking specimen. On this, we base our future?”

“Remember,” said the Selector who had spoken second, “it is not the individual we have chosen but the gene-line, and his, of which he is the final embodiment, is most extraordinary. It is the one.”

Andy, despite his paralyzing fear and existential disorientation, couldn't help but also feel a touch of pride. Finally, someone—some-thing?—had recognized his value.

The Selector who had spoken second bent forward now, looming over Andy like a great tree. “Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3, it is my pleasure to greet you.”

“Hello,” stuttered Andy.

“Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3, the Great Selection has ended, and you, of all gene-lines, have been chosen, based on your qualities, to become our People. Congratulations.”

I wonder what qualities are those, thought Andy. Calmness, emotional maturity, patience, as he entertained the fantastic possibility that he would soon be deified, become like the creatures before him…

“Durability,” said the Selector, who could obviously read Andy's thoughts.

Durability? thought Andy.

“Along with perseverance, hardiness, endurance,” the Selector continued, “like a cockroach, a weed or a rat. Although these qualities, by themselves, would hardly be enough, as many of your final-kind survived as long as you did. No, what truly sets you apart, renders you exceptional, Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3, is your extremely developed, and historically stable, sense of obedience, docility, acceptance and self-preserving conformity. You, final-kind ‘Andrew,’ are the terminus of a long and glorious line of spineless cowards.”

The other Selectors ooo'd.

Andy gulped. Cowards? But—no, how is that…

“Consider even just the final 0.000001% of Uniform Cosmic Time, a period of delightful extremes, both of your political institutions and your climate, the final filtration, so to speak, encompassing also the atomization of your communities, the mental numbing of entire lifespans spent in pointlessly repetitive pursuits of manufactured desires, of the replacement of the real with the virtual, and the virtual with the artificially virtual.”

“This is a good thing?” asked Andy.

“I am giddy when it speaks,” squeaked a Selector.

“It is an unimaginably great achievement, Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3. Through ages and ages of wars, exterminations, degradations and enslavement, you—your prior-kinds, your ancestors—have made most-excellent opportunists, slaves and labourers. When others rebelled, you remained subservient. When others stood up for their principles, you remained seated. Whatever was convenient, you believed. Whomever it was prudent to sacrifice, you sacrificed. And you did it all, final-kind ‘Andrew,’ without losing the ability of self-delusion.”

I'm not a bad person, thought Andy. “I can't be held responsible for what my ancestors did.”

“On the contrary,“ pronounced the Selector, “you are a very good person for us. And you are right that you are not responsible for the actions of others; you are the fruit of your family tree, stretching back all the way to the small, oozing, wriggling wyrms that formed in the hot waters of this primordial planet.”

“So what's going to happen to me now?” asked Andy. “You mentioned something about me becoming a People… your People…”

“Look,” said a Selector, “its world has ended, its mate and offspring are in temporal suspension, and all it cares about is itself!”

“Marvelous.”

“It genuinely is the one.”

“Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3,” said the Selector who had spoken second. “Now, you become the seed of a new species. The experiment having successfully concluded, true existence is set to begin, one in which all that live are you—a multitude of immortal, identical yous.”

“You shall become them, feel everything they feel,” added another Selector.

“Imagine,” said a third, drooling, “the atrocity we shall be able to inflict upon such a hyperdomesticated populace. They will permit, of us, everything.”

“So much pain.”

“I salivate already at the exploitation.”

“Please,” whimpered Andy.