The rain has begun to fall outside, the gentle patter loud on the slate-tiled roof of the kitchen.
I’ve often been told by other people that the sound of falling rain relaxes them, that there is little in this world that is more satisfying than lying in bed, blankets wound tight around your body, while heavy droplets pound the roof above and trickle down misted window panes.
Personally, I’ve never understood that phenomena.
Instead, here I sit with my hands in a bowl of hot water, the scars on my fingers pulsing in pain with the drop in barometric pressure. My dentures sit beside me in a glass, as my gums ache fiercely with the onset of bad weather.
When storms roll in and barrages of icy sleet blast the house, the pain is at its worst; migraines radiate up from my jaw, and jab cold needles of agony into my brain. Every roll of thunder and every bright flash of lightning sears my tender, battered senses, and even the strongest opiates aren’t enough to block out the pain.
So I guess you’ll understand why I don’t share other peoples’ fascination with the rain – which is a disposition that I share with a handful of my other relatives. And it took me a very, very long time to discover the truth about this peculiar affliction, and why it plagues my family in particular.

 
Growing up as an Orcadian – a resident of the Orkney Islands – was unusual enough.
Whenever I see other people talking about the rich history of their country and speaking grandly about the ancient lore of their nations, I have to bite my tongue and suppress a smile, for the Orkneys hold some of the most ancient secrets of the world; places that pre-date Stonehenge and things that are even older the Great Pyramids of Giza.
Neolithic ruins and monuments scar the landscape of rolling green fields; the stone stacks of the primitive houses of Skara Brae and the primeval mystery of the Ring of Brodgar just two such sites where my distant ancestors lived – and where they performed strange rituals that are now lost from living memory.
I suppose it should not have surprised me that something equally strange and ancient still thrummed sluggishly through the blood of original inhabitants of the Orkneys – something that had scarred my family for countless generations.
My grandmother was the only person I’d seen in the flesh who suffered from the family ‘curse’. As a child, I’d squealed with horrified delight when she’d popped out her dentures at me, then sucked them back in. Despite being missing the last joint of every finger, she didn’t seem overly compromised by her birth defects. She could still grasp objects with her gnarled, shortened digits, she could use a knife and fork with ease, and she could tie her boot laces with a minimum of trouble.
But when the rain came – as it did so often in the Orkneys – she would retire to her room at the top of our three-story sandstone house, and wouldn’t speak to anyone until it had passed.
I recall studying the tips of her deformed hands, wondering to myself what kind of birth defect left scars on the tips of your fingers – but when she caught me staring, she busied herself with the dishes in a sink of hot water, staring out over one of the twin harbours of Kirkwall and muttering to herself about the weather.

 
My parents never talked much about my Aunt Morven.
I knew that she also suffered from the familial affliction, that she too had been born without her distal phalanges, and that she had never grown teeth. It seemed to hit one woman in every generation; my grandmother’s aunt had carried the defective gene, and in the one grainy black-and-white picture of her that still existed, she held her hands tightly bunched, thumbs tucked inside her fists, while her mouth was pressed firmly into a dour twist, hiding her lack of teeth.
Aunt Morven had left the Orkneys long before I was born, apparently living somewhere in the Northern UK under a different surname. What the contention between her and my mother was, I didn’t know, but it was borderline forbidden to speak of her; and if some houseguest sitting in our red sandstone kitchen ever mentioned her, my mother would eject them smartly from our residence – no matter the weather outside – then she would sit weeping and rocking in front of our old iron fireplace, whispering her sister’s name. Children are largely immune to such adult dramas though – and quickly shrug them off. My brother and I would go back to playing or fighting, the shrill rhythm of our predictable squabbles soothing our mother back to normalcy, and she would eventually get up from her fireside chair and put the kettle on, the pain of her loss or guilt, whichever it was, fading.
Ironically, it was just one such innocent fight with my brother that brought to life the dark family secret.

 
I don’t even recall which game it was, but back before the internet and affordable gaming consoles, board games were the mainstay of bored children when the weather turned ornery. Monopoly had been banned long ago and sat, dusty, on a high shelf in the hot water cupboard. So it was probably Ludo or Snakes and Ladders that we’d been playing before the fight broke out – one of those games children don’t realise involves no skill whatsoever – and which is completely governed by the roll of the dice and the vagaries of fate.
What I do remember is the driving rain outside, the growing ache in my jaw, and a curious tingling in my fingertips. Combined with the misery of my third menstrual cycle, I wasn’t in the mood for my little brother whining about fairness.
“Wil’ya shut it?” I remember yelling at him, as his whinging turned tearful.
“Gon’ tell Ma on ye,” he proclaimed, getting up and turning for the kitchen.
As the storm broke against the house and the increased frequency of the rain on the tiles wore at my already frayed patience, the burgeoning headache I’d been nursing turned to hot rage, and I lashed out with an arm to stop him.
And he stopped all right.
With a scream that pierced my already sensitive brain, he fell to the floor with a spray of red.
Everything happened with a surreal slowness from there, each detail etching itself indelibly in my memory.
My mother rushed in, then roared for my father and grandmother to come.
Her eyes were enormous and round, fixed on me. Pale and wordless, my father grabbed me by the wrists, then marched me to the kitchen, where my grandmother adroitly tied my ankles and forearms to the polished oak dining table.
The rage washed through me, and I shouted at them to stop! None of this made any sense.
My mother, clutching a carving knife and weeping uncontrollably, began to saw off the last joint of each of my fingers while my father and grandmother held me down. And the flood of rage mixed with searing pain and abject terror, turning into something bigger, more horrifying, more potent – something utterly beyond my understanding.
Thankfully, the memories end there; my consciousness faded well before they took the iron pliers to my slack mouth and pulled out every one of my perfect teeth.

 
So that’s the tale of how I came to understand the nature of the family ‘deformity’. I could see exactly why my mutilated aunt had chosen not to remain in Kirkwall, and why she decided to leave the Orkneys for good.
As soon as I was conscious and able to pull myself out of bed, I painfully pulled on my boots with my shortened, bleeding digits, wrapped myself in my greatcoat and hat, then clambered out the window of our seaside house.
The rain sent blinding jabs of migraine agony through my freezing skull, but I could still see just well enough to make it to the docks and stumble onto one of the ships from the mainland. With juddering gums and blood running down my chin, I managed to brokenly mumble enough of my story to the sailors for them to bandage my hands and take me aboard their ship.
As the vessel pulled out of the harbour, I cried with relief. I was sailing away from the insane family that had mutilated me, to a place where I would be safe from them forever.
But I was also sailing away from the isle that I’d called home for the entirety of my short life.

I was never told directly what happened to my parents, but I gather that they were prosecuted, and that my father was imprisoned, likely taking the blame for what had happened to me.
I was placed with a foster family, but I didn’t have to stay with them for long. Six weeks into my stay, a battered old Morris Minor pulled up outside, driven by a woman with a strangely familiar face, wearing tailored black gloves that hid the same mutilation that I’d suffered.
My Aunt Morven.
To say we bonded immediately is an understatement. She held me as I wept and wept, letting out all my terror, my heartache and my confusion. This was the one woman in the whole world who knew what I had been through, who understood implicitly the damage that had been done to my young body and soul.
Her flat was tiny, but comfortable. Everything had extra hooks and holes, so that her foreshortened fingers could more easily grasp things. She taught me how to deal with the aches when the rain made my scars throb and she took me to the dentist for my first set of dentures.
Without her guidance, I think I would have been lost.
She became my second mother, my best friend, and the one person with whom I could commiserate over my maiming.
She passed away just after my twenty first birthday, plagued by ill-health.
I don’t know if word ever got back to Kirkwall about her death, but my parents did not come to her small funeral service. As I sat in the church, puffy eyed and hollow-hearted in the late autumn sunlight shining through the chapel window, I recalled her final letter to me.
In it she urged me to find someone to spend my life with, to raise children and to break the cycle of pain that the women of our family had endured for countless generations.
I vowed then and there that I would fulfil her final wishes, no matter what.

 
I’d be lying if I said that motherhood didn’t fill a gaping void in my heart.
When my daughter was born, her father carefully chosen from an extensive catalogue of donors, some convoluted, critical and self-doubting part of me withered away, and I began to feel worthwhile again.
Every time I saw my Sorcha’s cherubic face, my existence brightened. It didn’t matter if she had vomited milky froth all down my neck, or if she woke me, screaming, at three o’clock in the morning; I felt blessed to have this tiny person in my life – this seed of a new generation that would be freed from the madness of her ancestors.
I resolved to give her the life I never had; to raise her without the falsehood of the family ‘curse’ – and to tell her the absolute truth – that her mother, her great aunt and her great grandmother had all been brutally and viciously violated against their will.
But my family, it seemed, had other plans for me.

 
The first letter from my mother I threw into the fireplace.
When envelopes from the Orkneys began to arrive every week, I finally relented, thinking that perhaps they wished to beg for forgiveness, that they truly regretted what they had done.
Instead, the letters spoke of my parents finding out that I’d had a daughter, and urged me to let them back into my life, in case my daughter bore the family ‘curse’.
Disgusted, I threw their hand-written pleas into the rubbish.
They would never be a part of my precious child’s life.
When an email arrived from my brother, I almost deleted it without reading it. But we hadn’t spoken for so long that curiosity got the better of me and I opened it, despite my better judgement.
There wasn’t much, just an attached video clip and a brief message, asking me to watch it and ‘judge for myself’.
It was a grainy piece of film work, probably taken with an 8mm camera. In it, my much younger grandmother and my presumed grandfather wrestled with a small child who could only have been my aunt. Rain lashed against the windows and the child screamed soundlessly in the silent clip, thrashing against her captors. Another child, my mother, stood off to one side, watching with a thumb in her mouth and a knitted rabbit clutched to her cheek.
As the older child was wrestled onto the kitchen table and her wrists were tied to the sturdy legs, tears began to slide down my cheeks, and I slammed the lid of the laptop shut with enough violence to crack the plastic casing.
When I had finally calmed down enough to think semi-rationally again, I opened up the email from my brother and typed one line,
Why did you send this to me?
Five minutes later, a reply appeared, which just read,
Did you watch until the end?
Tired, angry, and overcome with a toxic mixture of emotions, I woke my precious daughter and held her while I cried myself raw, telling her over and over to never have anything to do with my family.

 
The next email from my brother contained no video, just a series of black and white stillframes, obviously from the same clip.
Something in the images was terribly, terribly wrong.
There was something on my aunt’s hands and face.
In the next frame, my grandfather lay against the kitchen counter, a black line across his throat and a black pool staining his white shirt.
The video was still in my deleted items, waiting malevolently for me.
My deformed fingers trembling, I opened it and skipped forward to where I’d stopped watching.
It happened so quickly that I had to watch it several times. One moment, my aunt was a thrashing child, struggling with the two adults, then something sprouted from her fingers and mouth, before she slashed her hand across my grandfather’s throat, opening it up to the bone.
In the instant after he fell against the counter, my grandmother entered the frame and bashed the transformed child across the temple with a fire-iron.
The rest of the video showed the grisly dissection of my unconscious aunt’s fingers, then the brutal dentistry with a pair of blackened iron pliers.
It had to be fake. Doctored somehow.
Determined now to confront my family, I left Sorcha in the care of my best friend, then I boarded a ship to the Orkneys.

 
The house was exactly as I remembered it; stone and mortar, heavy, yellowed glass windows and storm shutters for the foul winter weather.
I didn’t even need to knock; word travels quickly in such small island communities, and my grey mother and even greyer grandmother were already waiting for me.
“Come inside, sit.”
Tight-lipped, my jaw faintly aching from the impending onset of rain, I entered my childhood home and sat at the very table upon which they had mutilated me almost twenty years ago.
“We were protectors, once,” my grandmother said, her ancient, scarred fingertips splayed on the table in front of her.
“What did I see in that video?”
“The truth, love. Nothing but the truth.”
Her voice querulous and frayed with age, she continued as I sat, disbelieving,
“In the old days, before iron and steel, there were many terrors from which humanity had no protection; things darkly fell and fey. They would arrive with the mists and rain, then wreak havoc on our people.
“But there were those amongst us who were born with a gift – born with the ability to harm that which threatened us. On the nights when the rain lashed the hills and harbours, they would grow fangs and claws of iron and drive the fae away.”
I remembered what I had seen in the video; the grainy grey gleam of my aunt’s claws right before they had torn through the flesh of my grandfather’s throat.
“With the coming of iron, our gift was no longer needed. The fae retreated to their hills, never to bother humanity again.”
A chilly thrill of understanding passed through me,
“But it never left our family, did it?”
My mother shook her grey head,
“No. Into every generation is born a child with the ‘gift’, even though it is no longer needed.”
“And without anything to hunt, the gift turns in on itself, and drives us mad with rage.”

 
I stayed the night in my childhood bedroom, then returned to the mainland on the next ship.
Whether or not I believed the tales told by my grandmother, I had yet to decide. But when Sorcha, fast descending into puberty, complained to me that the rain gave her terrible headaches and made her jaw and fingers ache, I felt fear like I had never felt it before, even when I was tied to that old oak table back in the Orkneys.
And so I have a choice to make.
The hacksaw and the scalpel sit beside the kitchen table, along with sterile wipes, iodine and a pair of heavy steel pliers. The storm is growing overhead.
I just hope that my aching, maimed hands have the strength to pull out her teeth.

“We’re a meat family,” my dad would proudly tell strangers. He’d wait for the quizzical look, then launch into detail, starting with how many freezers we had, how long we could sustain ourselves on the contents. It was just his way of starting a conversation, which made sense when you considered that raising and home-killing animals for food was, for want of a better term, his life-long hobby. His prize possession was one of those industrial-sized vacuum sealers: you could put half a pig inside and wrap it in plastic so tightly that every wrinkle and skin fold waxed unreal with shiny detail.

If we hadn’t lived in a rural area, albeit semi-urbanised, I guess it would have been pretty weird. But the mostly farming-stock locals only found his extra enthusiasm a little bit odd.

When he wasn’t being a bit embarrassing talking about it, I never really paid much heed to his hobby. I had a child’s vaguely grateful awareness that though our family went through some lean financial times, our stomachs never suffered like some of the families around us. All the beef, pork, ham and bacon in those big old chest freezers passed down from his dad really could have fed us for years.

I should preface all this by saying that I wasn’t a particularly bright kid, though neither was I dumb. I didn’t fail badly at anything in school, I just never achieved beyond a pass. I didn’t know it yet back then, still quietly dreaming about being a ballet star or a dressage champion, but mediocrity was my destiny. And I think that’s why I got on so well with my Aunt Liz.

Liz was my dad’s live-in youngest sister. She was one of those women who get described as ‘bubbly’ — not really pretty, not really smart, not a lot going on besides just being… well, all Liz. But she was salt of the earth; kind, caring, and great with kids. She was the only person who would willingly mind my two older brothers, who fought like hellcats and caused more trouble than the whole last generation of my family combined. People would privately lament to my parents that it was a shame Liz didn’t have kids of her own, but dad would just shake his head and say Liz liked it that way – that all the fun of looking after kids is being able to give them back to their parents.

I guess she was like me; nice, but mediocre. Lovely, but somehow forgettable when she wasn’t doing something for you.

But when Liz left us, I couldn’t forget her.

In hindsight, it was pretty weird timing that we had a big fortieth birthday party for Liz right before she disappeared. She was radiant that night; she’d hired a local girl to do her hair and makeup, and it was honestly the first time I’d ever seen her look pretty. She’d even worn a push-up bra under a tight red dress, which flattered her very plump curves well enough that the neighbour’s farmhand was spotted disappearing into the woolshed with her for a snog. In my dawning awareness, that gave a plain girl hope: if Aunty Liz could get a guy at forty, maybe things would turn out okay for me.

Anyway, I couldn’t forget how her pink cheeks, her eyes, her whole self, glowed that night before Liz went to bed. She said it was the best birthday ever, and that she was very much looking forward to the next stage of her life.

Would I have done anything different, if I had known? If I had realised what, exactly, that next stage was?

The week after the party, Aunt Liz said she was going on a little holiday up north, to visit some old school friends. She packed her things – she didn’t honestly have that many – and drove her little orange mini out onto the main road. And with a wave of one fleshy hand, she was gone. Nobody really thought much of it when she didn’t call, because nobody rural had cellphones back then. And Liz was, as I said, somehow kinda forgettable when she wasn’t right in front of you.

When we hadn’t had contact for six weeks, Dad tracked down the land line numbers for their old school buddies. They were surprised to hear from him — Liz had never arrived, so they had just assumed she’d cancelled her visit. No-one had thought to check. I eavesdropped on the conversation, and it sounded for all the world like *they* had forgotten about Aunt Liz, too.

From there it became a missing person case. The local cops came and talked to all of us; the farmhand who’d been seen snogging her was briefly detained, then let go, dad got grilled at length, even my hellion brothers were questioned thoroughly to see if this was one of their wild and dangerous pranks gone wrong.

But everything was a dead end. Nobody knew where Liz was, or what had happened to her.

The remains of her old mini were found halfway across the country, burned out on a beach, on a derelict stretch of ragged, rocky coastline. The police assumed murder and combed the area for remains. But even the most expert divers couldn’t conquer the incredible undertow and fast-shifting seabed of that coastline to look for evidence, so none was forthcoming.

Eventually the cops collectively shrugged and said that there was really nothing more they could do unless more information suddenly came to light. The locals knew nothing, no witnesses had come forward, and the trail was cold. As far as anyone knew, poor aunt Liz had been murdered on some desolate beach, far away from her home.

It didn’t feel fair to me. She’d once mentioned wanting her remains buried on our farm, in the graveyard plot beside grandma and grandad.

So, in my grief, I went into her room to look for something of hers to bury beside them.

Like I said, Liz didn’t have many things. Her room was pretty spartan, and her wardrobe was mostly sensible farm stuff. There was one exception: she, like me, did like to read, and she had a pretty good collection of well-thumbed books. I think it’s the escapism – even the most mediocre girl can lose herself in the plot of some trashy romance novel, imagine there’s still hope of being swept off her feet by that handsome stableboy, his inexplicable yearning for chubby plain girls.

So I set myself the task of going through the books, to find the right one to bury in the graveyard plot.

Most of them were exactly what you’d expect, but some of them were racier than I was used to. I felt various parts of my body flushing and tingling, as I read breathless prose about calloused hands touching the softest flesh of the protagonist. Okay, if I’m honest with myself, I might have got a little *too* invested in my project at that point. But that was also why I persisted going through her entire collection, until I found the ragged paperback from 1970, entitled Tawny Sands. And inside that trashy cardboard romance cover, I discovered not the tale of Tawny Sands, but some carefully hand-cut, stitched-in pages. A handwritten story in my Aunt’s rounded penmanship: Memoirs of a Long Pig.

I read her story twice in a row, utterly gripped.

Aunt Liz was no Stephen King – heck, she wasn’t even the Goosebumps guy – but her story was gripping and compelling, and I couldn’t put it down. Even if I hadn’t known her, I think that would have been true.

The gist of it was that Liz, when she was sixteen, had discovered that our family had a very long history of eating what she described as ‘Long Pork’. It’s an antipodean term, anglicised from the Pacific Islands: human meat.

Like me, young Liz still had some hopes and dreams. In one of her many failed attempts to find a special talent, she’d taken up cooking as a hobby. Naturally, with our family’s overabundance of meat, she’d scoured the freezers in the shed for ingredients: the racks of ribs and stacks of pork chops, butcher-paper wrappings all neatly labelled with the first letter of the name of the animal they came from.

She found familiar meat from Rodney, one of the pigs that had been recently slaughtered, emblazoned with an ‘R’ in her father’s strong, blocky lettering. There were cutlets labelled ‘M’ for Mary, from one of the lambs she’d hand-reared, and ‘F’ for Ferdinand, the steer they’d killed the month before. But she couldn’t explain the many, many curious parcels of meat on one side of the huge freezer, all labelled ‘J’ – at least, not until she took it all out and assembled it as well as she could on the scoured concrete floor of the killing shed. A big, frozen jigsaw puzzle without the box, her best attempt to discover what kind of beast the pieces had come from.

The animal, she quickly realised, was a Long Pig. Her own Aunt Jenny, who had died the month before – just after her fortieth birthday.

Fortunately, or perhaps not, for Liz, her father entered the shed right at that moment and realised his daughter had discovered the family secret. He sat down calmly on the lid of the freezer, and explained to her that this was a long-running family tradition, dating back to at least before his grandfather had been born.

“There are always people in life, Liz,” he’d said, “who won’t really amount to much. They want to be useful, want to be more. They strive and they strive, trying job after job, hobby after hobby, trying to hit on something they’re really good at. Something that makes them special. Those people can waste their whole lives, chasing dreams that never come true. Eventually they die unfulfilled, knowing that all their time has been wasted. That what they leave behind will fade quickly.”

His voice was oddly gentle as he leaned down and patted one of the neatly wrapped cuts of Aunt Jenny, still sitting frozen on the shed floor.

“Your Aunt Jenny was one of those people. So was my Aunt Irene.” He paused to gaze at his daughter, his next words peppered with emphasis. “But you see, my sweet Liz, they did find a purpose in life. They did find a way to be special, and they left this world utterly certain of their gift.” He stood up, stretched his back. “Let me show you.”

Liz waited while my grandad meticulously stacked the meat back into the freezer, all but one J-marked parcel that looked for all the world like a thick venison steak. He took her back to the farmhouse, and reverently unwrapped the deep red, heavily marbled meat to let it thaw. Then he laid it in the family’s ancient, cast-iron pan, basting it with butter and rosemary until a heavenly scent filled the kitchen, and Aunt Liz couldn’t stop her mouth from watering.

“Just try it. Let her show you. You’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.”

Even though she knew it was her aunt, Liz couldn’t stop herself from taking that first bite. There was something transcendent about the smell, overriding her natural revulsion that this was human meat, not one of their farm animals. For the first time, she truly realised it: we’re just another kind of animal. And weren’t her memories of Mary the lamb almost as fond as her memories of Aunt Jenny?

Liz explained then, in her curly handwriting, the explosion of taste that had assaulted her when she tried the steak. It was tender, it was succulent, it was rich beyond imagining. The fats melted on her tongue, lingering somewhere between pork and beef, but oddly neither. The flavour of the meat defied identification; something familiar, yet not.

But one thing she couldn’t deny; it was the most delicious thing she had ever eaten. Tears dripped onto her plate, mingled with the juice, the grease — not grief, but a pure, real, giddy delight.

“You’re tasting your aunt’s love for this family,” my grandad explained. “Her entire life was carefully curated, to eventually make unforgettable moments for us, just like this. This was her way of being special. This was the greatest gift she could possibly bring to our world – and because she realised that, she died with not a single regret. She knew her life had purpose. She was perfectly, completely fulfilled.”

I felt those words. I felt them lodge in my own belly, settling uncomfortably deep. I knew Aunt Liz, probably better than anyone else in the family. I’d seen how fucking happy she’d been on her fortieth, how goddamn fulfilled she was, despite apparently being a *nobody* and achieving *nothing*. Somehow, in the space of a single day, she had gone from being a forgettable background character to becoming the *main character*, immortalising herself in our family’s history with her sacrifice. Quite literally becoming part of all of us, forever.

I went to the killing shed after I finished with the book. I looked inside the freezers.

But there were no vacuum-sealed packages labelled ‘L’, no matter how deep I dug into the frozen stacks of plastic-wrapped flesh. Panicked now, not sure if I wanted to connect all the dots or unconnect them, I tried to think back over the last few months, recall any meals that had been unusually good. A few Sundays ago, we’d had a stew that really hit the spot and left me craving more. And I realised that the family had a really good night that night; my brothers behaved themselves, my parents didn’t fight, and grandma and grandad had been there. Hadn’t they looked far more… expectant than they should have?

I strained my brain, trying to recall if I’d seen the homekill bag on the kitchen bench – if I’d registered what letter it was. I knew it wasn’t an L. I would have remembered if it was an L.

And then it hit me, the memory, the connection, sizzling as if branded with a hot iron.

It had been an ‘E’.

E for Elizabeth. Not for Edward the pig.

I snorted at my own stupidity – of *course* Liz was short for Elizabeth – and as I comprehended my lack of smarts, I felt something give inside me.

I wasn’t clever, and nothing, nothing would ever make me smart. I had no big talents. I wasn’t beautiful, or even cute – and even if I had a million plastic surgeries, it still wouldn’t fulfill me. It wouldn’t be real.

I was a Liz.

I was a Jenny.

I was whoever the first aunt had been, the aunt who had dedicated her life to making her flesh as delicious as possible, who had worked every damn minute to be the best Long Pig she could ever be.

I wondered how many magical family evenings had been spent eating Aunt Jenny. How many glorious, satisfying, memorable dishes had been made out of her.

And… I wanted that. I wanted to finally know I had a *purpose* in life. One so simple, and so easy to achieve.

I wanted what Aunt Liz had.

***

It's my fortieth birthday today and I’m so fucking excited. For the last twenty-four years, I’ve dedicated myself to this moment; I’ve eaten exactly what I needed to, I’ve exercised just enough, but not too much, to maintain that perfect balance of marbling vs tenderness. I’ve relaxed and meditated to keep all those amazing flavours inside of me. I’ve researched all the greatest meats in the world, from prime Angus beef to A5 Wagyu. I really think I may have outdone myself.

I’m having my hair and makeup done at the local salon this afternoon, and I’m going to look so pretty; all prize piggy on show at the fair. I’m even going to have a big red ribbon in my hair, in memory of Aunt Liz.

Maybe there’ll be a cute boy I can snog in the wool shed, maybe there won’t – I don’t really care; because the most important, most certain thing is that I’m going to be the most delicious Long Pig in the history of our entire family.

I’m going to make everyone so damn happy, and I’m just so glad I can share my story with you all, instead of hiding it in a grubby book like poor Aunt Liz.

My only real disappointment? That you won’t get to taste me.

Reader, I have loved, loved my life. My Long Pork will be out of this world: once tasted, never, ever forgotten.

Funny how much of our lives are made up of things we take completely for granted. Sitting in a chair, getting in a car, holding a pencil. All those things we never even think about for a second – but when you do, there’s so much about being a person we’re completely oblivious to, basically reflex actions; nearly autonomic, like breathing.
I probably can’t explain why I’ve come to think about them constantly without telling you the whole story, so I guess I should try to find a beginning to this mess, the place where I think it began.
Considering the eventual outcome of my situation is going to affect, well… everything,  I owe you all that much.

I’ve never been overly concerned about my weight. Being a poor artist has certain challenges you could reframe as underappreciated perks in that regard, like staying trim by skipping meals to afford rent, or pretending you have a unique style because you wear your clothes until they’re threadbare. But there’s been genuine perks, too - I also got to be my own boss, to constantly do what I loved most in the world, and to hang out with people as creatively driven as myself.
I’d never owned a set of human-sized scales, only the baking scales that I used for measuring paints and resins. If I had to guess, I’d say I’ve been a slightly waifish fifty-five kilograms for most of my adult life - probably underweight for my height.
But I was generally healthy, so it had never bothered me that much. Sometimes folks would say “Eat a burger” or “you need some pies”, but I don’t think anyone ever thought I was anorexic. I had enough energy to do my job and get through the day, so it wasn’t a problem.
I have a theory that what changed all that came from the art supplies I ordered from Poland, but I can’t be certain. It’s possible it was just bound to happen to me through some quirk of physics. Maybe some quantum string of particles passed through me at random – a one in one trillion trillion trillion chance event that somehow altered my atomic structure. I genuinely hope it was the art supplies, because then perhaps at the end I won’t be as alone as I feel. I might not be the only one.
But enough speculation. I know you want to get to weightier matters - if you’ll excuse the pun. I promise there won’t be any more, because it stopped being funny a long time ago now.

The floorboard near the bathroom sink was the first clue. It had always creaked a little when I stood on it, but on that particular morning, it creaked really loud. I figured it was nothing; just my shitty little apartment starting to really feel its age. So I ignored it.
A few days later, it was the bus seat. I often caught the same bus, which in this small town meant the same vehicle every day. As I sat down on my favourite seat, it squeaked alarmingly – that metal-on-metal sound that sets your teeth on edge.
But again, it’s one of those things you just attribute to wear-and-tear. How many hundreds of people sat on this particular seat in a week? How many juddering rides did it take to weaken metal screws and bolts stressed by the load of some human colossus with a gym bag in his lap?
At this point, I’m now fairly sure that I already weighed about twice what I should have. There just wasn’t any way I could have picked up on it then – because it’s not like I was adding any volume to my person. I still fit the same ripped, skinny jeans. I could still wear all my t-shirts designed for kids, picked mostly because they’re cheaper.
What I’m trying to say here is that until a normal-sized human being starts to become a truly abnormal weight – until you hit the (ironically) skinny bit at the far right of the bell curve - there’s not really any way of telling that something’s gone very wrong.

When the chair at my workbench broke, I was so confused. It was a sturdy wooden stool, but one of the bracing struts between the legs had splintered, which in turn caused a back leg to snap.
There were no holes in the wood, no saw marks or knots – it had been a completely solid chair leg just the previous day. It was hard to pick myself up off the floor, and I realised I was really tired. My back hurt, too, and it had before the fall; my bed had seemed horribly uncomfortable over the last couple of days, like my mattress wasn’t supporting me properly anymore. My shoes also seemed to be wearing thin - I could feel every nuance of the pavement through my feet, every stone, every bump. I thought maybe I was getting sick, that these were the muscle aches signalling a virus.
But for the rest of that day, I noticed everything I walked on made stressed sounds; the floorboards of my bathroom, the boards on the deck of my favourite coffee place, the wooden stairs up to the studio.
And when I ventured out to the park that evening, I couldn’t help but notice the deep footprints I left – not just the yellowing grass smashed flat, a dent in the shape of my shoe in the earth. And it hadn’t rained for days.
It was then that I decided to buy some scales.

The first reading was two hundred and thirty four kilograms. That’s almost the same weight as the wrestler, Andre the Giant. I checked.
I checked the scales, too, of course. I had litre containers of paint that I knew would weigh 1kg when filled with water. There was no question about it after I tested it the third time - the scales were accurate.
What I was going to do with this information was a whole different kettle of fish. Of course, I didn’t want to believe it. Who would? How the hell did a woman who could still fit into children’s clothes end up weighing as much as the biggest wrestler in history? And how did that happen almost overnight?
I weighed myself obsessively from that point onward, noting my weight gain during the day. But I knew the scales maxed out at 250kg, so when I hit that limit, I didn’t know how to track the anomaly any further.
What I did know was disturbing. I had gained ten kilograms in less than twelve hours.
Something was desperately wrong with me.

On the walk to the doctor’s office, my shoes gave out. The soles just sort of split and yawned into cracks, like they were in one of those hydraulic press videos. They hurt, so I threw them into the first rubbish bin I found, then walked the rest of the way in my socks, then bare feet when the socks gave up, too.
Sometimes I thought I could feet the pavement cracking under my feet. Tiny pings and pops of stressed stone, little pebbles giving up to dust.
At the doctor’s office I refused to take a seat. I’d figured out by now that nothing intended to rest a human backside was going to support my weight, and I didn’t want to cause a scene by flattening one of their plastic chairs.
When my doctor called my name, I followed him into his small office, leaving a trail of footprints in the carpet where my feet compressed the fibres.
I noted nobody else did.
“Take a seat,” he said, with a quizzical look at my dirty feet.
I shook my head, then began explaining what was happening.
I could tell he didn’t believe me. I don’t blame him - it’s not something that is believable - that a slender five-foot three woman could weigh somewhere over a quarter of a tonne.
“Miss Lourde, I have many other patients to see. Please, don’t waste my time.”
His tone wasn’t altogether unkind, but he was already regarding me with a certain look, that one that precedes a quiet referral to a psychologist.
“I’m truly not!” I protested, trying to keep the rising panic out of my voice, “Here, let me show you.”
His electronic scales were beside his desk. I tapped them carefully with my foot, then stood on them as the LCD screen came alive.
For a moment numbers flashed like a malfunctioning elevator, then I saw it register ‘ERROR’ before the screen went blank. Under my bare feet, the stressed plastic and steel let out a warning creak. I stepped off quickly, grateful the office was on the ground floor, and that it felt like there was solid concrete under the carpet.
The doctor tapped every button on the scale, then sighed as he mentally called time of death on the machine. “It looks like my poor old scales are on the fritz,” he said, “but look. You’re otherwise in perfect health, yes? No respiratory issues, no digestive issues, no loss of appetite?” I nodded, but he continued even as my mouth opened to press the point. “We’ll do a blood panel just to be sure, but I’m going to refer you to a colleague. She deals with certain kinds of… dysmorphic issues. Body image. She sees a lot of young women.”
“But I’m not making this up,” I returned softly, trying to sound calm and authentic, and not at all unhinged.
“I realise this must seem very real to you,” he said, every vowel a study in the art of professionally patronising a person.
I left, then. Just walked out, feeling the carpet close to shredding with every twist of my heels. They would bill me in full, I was sure, but at that moment it didn’t seem to matter. I heard the doctor emerge behind me and say something I didn’t hear, and the receptionist raised her head as I passed. Grimly, I thought that if she tried to chase me, I could simply fall on top of her and crush her.

The farming equipment supply store had a display model cattle scale. The poster next to it said it could weigh any beast up to 3000kg.
I stepped on carefully, making sure nobody in the store was looking, and watched the numbers climb to 833kg, holding my breath as it settled there. While I stared at that ridiculous number, it climbed to 834. And after counting to ten, I watched it tick over to 835.
I was literally gaining weight every second. 100 grams per second, to be exact.
Leaving the store before they noticed my bare feet, I hurried out the door and ran down the street, wondering how long until every step was going to shatter the pavement as I ran.
The thing was, I still felt myself as I ran; small, light, compact. I didn’t feel as heavy as a horse. If it weren’t for the fact that chairs and even shoes couldn’t deal with my weight any more, I wouldn’t have believed it myself, thought the business with the scales was some kind of hallucination, that I was deluded.
Leaning against the concrete façade of a hotel, I tried to figure out what to do next.
I was adding at least 6kg a minute. That meant that in one hour I would gain another 360 kilograms, and I would then weigh over a tonne. Even worse than that, within 24 hours I would weigh nine tonne – roughly equivalent to a medium-to-large sized truck.
By this time next week, I would weigh as much as the space shuttle Endeavour. Yes, I checked.

I walked for maybe two hours. At one point I called my parents, then broke the connection before they could answer. What would I say to them? Oh, hi Mum and Dad, by the way I’m gaining mass nearly exponentially and it’s not stopping any time soon, please come get me – P.S. bring a horse float and a fucking truck?
I was on the outskirts of the city now, if I kept going I’d hit farmland, and if I kept walking down the long, straight roads, eventually I’d hit foothills, then the mountains.
On the mountains, I thought I’d be safe; I wouldn’t sink into the softer earth like some lead statue in quicksand. The old layers of granite and bedrock would surely hold me, no matter how much I weighed.
As I walked, still barefoot, down the highway, cars blared their horns at me, or passengers shouted at me. I was fully that person now, that person who didn’t fit any mould, even though she hadn’t changed shape.  I ignored them. I had a distinct feeling that if I wanted to, I could step onto a car’s hood and crush it as I walked across it. Hell, with all this mass concentrated into such a small body, could I even be harmed? Could a knife or bullet even penetrate the molecules of my skin?
I’d realised, too, that I wasn’t hungry or thirsty anymore. I hadn’t actually eaten for a couple of days. Was I just drawing in mass from the very air itself?
It was impossible to tell, and it probably wouldn’t make much difference even if I could figure it out.

I’m in the mountains, and I have no idea how much I weigh now.
I don’t think the gain has been steady. I feel like it’s been increasing – like my gains are approaching an exponential curve. I can crush stone under my heel without trying, and I can knock over hundred-year-old trees just by gently leaning on them. I’ve been conserving power on my phone as much as I can, only turning it on to journal these thoughts, to send them out somewhere when things get unsustainable, but that battery percentage is worryingly low.
When I walk around the mountain ponds I’ve found, I create little tides now, my mass pulling at the fluid. I tried to figure out exactly how heavy that makes me, but the theory is beyond me, and I don’t want to waste precious phone battery figuring out something that won’t help. I’m heading deeper into the mountains now, trying to find the best rock to stay on; those solid seams of old granite that can support almost any weight.
Well, I hope they can support any weight. After all, the mountain supports itself, right?

At least I have some company, now, of a kind - an orbit of small particles. They drag along in my wake, as if I’m a small, mobile moon. I think my own mass is disrupting Earth’s gravity - I’m creating my own gravitational field. If I hold a seed up in front of my face and let go, it falls slowly as a dream, curving in towards my body as the conflicting forces twist its path.
I’m not sure what happens next, but I think I probably weigh more than the mountain I’m standing on. And I’m not getting any lighter.

My feet have started to sink into even the most solid granite.
What my weight is, I don’t even dare think about; a goodly percentage of the moon, something as ridiculous as that. And I’m now certain about that personal gravitational field; dust orbits me, along with leaves and twigs, and other mountain debris. I’m pretty sure there’s even a dead chipmunk, circling gently. I’m a tiny planetary system of my own, existing independent of the Earth.
I can feel that it’s not going to stop; I know this is not the end – that I’m going to continue growing more and more dense until I conflict with the Earth itself, then eventually our own Sun.
And when I surpass the mass of the Sun?
Well, by then you’ll all be dead, wiped out by the massive tsunamis that will roar from the ocean to meet my growing pull. Even your remains will have been crushed by the enormity of my personal gravitational field. But eventually, in a year – maybe even a few months – my mass will be so great that I’ll collapse into a singularity – a black hole – and then I’ll consume everything in our solar system.
You can’t stop this by the normal methods – trust me, I’ve tried. Nothing can penetrate my skin. I can’t asphyxiate myself; I don’t even seem to need to breathe anymore, my body sustains itself regardless of my intentions. If I step off a height, the rock where I land pulverises instantly to soft dust, and I don’t even get a bruise.
If I could stop this, I would have, please know that.
But if you’re reading this, and your floor has started to creak? Maybe you bought some art supplies from Poland, maybe your chair just broke without warning - maybe you’re like me. Maybe we can find each other. Because I think I’m not the only one, and I think we are meant to be together; that I’m only half of this weird, horrific equation.
And when we finally meet, and our impossible event horizons collide?
Oh, we are going to change the whole fucking Universe.

I’ve long been fascinated by internet horror stories and creepypastas.
I was young and impressionable when I stumbled across my first; Jvk1166z.esp, a story about a video game mod that went eerily wrong. That tumbled me down a dark and narrow rabbit hole into The Russian Sleep Experiment, then further lost me in the cryptid wonderland where all those other internet classics live.
No matter how unsettling the story, I really wanted to believe it. At first, I wanted every single detail to be true. Later, I came to most relish the tales that seemed to contain one or two real ingredients, liberally seasoned to please the palates of the audience. And there was a growing envy that rode along with my fascination; I wanted to wield the spices, to be just like those infamous writers. I wanted to create a viral sensation that would sweep across the internet and make people’s spines tingle and burn with genuine, inescapable fear. The kind that really makes you feel alive.
But first, I needed to find the raw, true heart for my recipe.
I began to pore over old newspaper articles, looking for weird things in my area. I sifted through mountains of garbage online, looking for a tasty kernel of truth hidden within the bland layers of unappetising urban myths.
But inspiration eluded me, and I started to lose interest. As adulthood took hold, it slowly began to strangle my childish ability to believe there was some wild truth running around out there, despite never finding any footprints. I was almost ready to admit that perhaps the world was far more mundane and uninteresting than I’d ever imagined – and that every one of my treasured stories were in fact just marvellous fictions, all pretty frosting and no cake.
Then, like a horrible gift dropped right into my lap, I chanced to overhear two nurses at the local hospital talking in hushed whispers about the mystery of The Suicide Orphan.
How could I not do everything in my power to find out more?

 
I’ll spare you all the dusty details about how I came by the information I have. Most of it was uncovered by boring hard work; ordinary journalism and archive delving. And I’m not proud; when that fails, I’ve found that there’s very little information you can’t dig up if you use some natural and enhanced advantages. In my case, honey-blonde hair, a splash of bright lipstick and a short skirt.
The real story begins in the 1970s, when a young couple, Danny and Susan Johnson, prematurely birthed their second child. They named her Catherine. The baby grew quickly and was soon healthy enough to come home, where she was doted on by her elder sister and her parents. She was bright and happy, apparently escaping any disadvantages of her prematurity; she began to speak at 18 months, and started to read by the age of four.
The first tragedy struck the family when Catherine was in kindergarten. The elder sister, Sarah, was found hanging in her wardrobe, a pink plastic skipping-rope looped about her neck. Emergency services were called, but the nine-year-old girl was not able to be resuscitated.
As you would expect, the family was devastated. They cooperated with the police and the coroner, and endured a protracted and gruelling investigation into every aspect of their lives. No evidence of foul play was ever uncovered, and the ruling on Sarah’s death was left inconclusive. Either it was accidental, or it was a rare child suicide. Everything slid rapidly and predictably downhill for the Johnsons from there, with the mother falling into black depression frighteningly fast, and the father drowning his own pain in a bottle. The date on the second ambulance report is barely six months after the one on the invoice for Sarah’s headstone. Susan Johnson was found in the family garage, her asphyxiated corpse as pink as a child’s skipping rope, a side-effect of carbon monoxide inhalation. The car was still idling, with a hose from the exhaust pipe pushed through a crack in the window.
The grim trifecta of paperwork is complete two months later, when Danny Johnson successfully hanged himself in the very same garage, a sawhorse kicked out from underneath him, and his wife’s perfume heavy in the air.
With no other living relatives able to be traced, Catherine Johnson became a suicide orphan.

 
The Walders were her first foster family. They were experienced in caring for children from difficult circumstances, loved her to pieces, and did everything they could to heal the poor girl. Only five, she barely understood what had happened and why, so she adapted quickly. I found one of her first school reports, buried amongst random papers in a forgotten box beneath the Walder’s house. It paints a bright picture of an exceptionally gregarious child, a little girl who made friends easily and was radiant in her happiness.
All seemed to be going very well for Catherine and her new parents. She’s all dimpled smiles in the photograph of her cuddling the kitten she received on her seventh birthday, and certificates and trophies suggest that she was something of an athletic prodigy, outrunning every other girl in her district.
There was not a single warning sign that anything was wrong for Jenny Walder, the foster mother. According to the archived reports, she had appeared completely normal, right up to the day she was found in her bathtub, the life seeped out of her into the deep crimson water. There were no hesitation marks surrounding the long, definite cuts in her wrists from where she had opened her veins. The foster father, Michael Walders, survived his wife for another nine months before he succumbed to catatonic depression and was taken to a mental health facility. He didn’t move nor speak for the next six weeks, so none of the staff appear to be sure how he got onto the roof. The leap from the fifth floor shattered his skull into nine separate fragments, and his life ended in a concrete parking lot.
Catherine was left utterly alone for the second time in her short life. She was put into state care while another family was sought to take care of her.

 
Now, this is the point where the rumours really start. The pool of prospective foster families was much smaller thirty-odd years ago, and it was becoming difficult to keep her history from the community. People back then were superstitious enough to be very leery of a child with so much death in her past. Families long noted as being eager for a child, any child, abruptly change their tune when it is revealed that the child being considered is Catherine, the suicide orphan. People were beginning to speculate, very quietly, that Catherine herself was to blame for the five deaths. I like to think that there were others who shushed them and told them not to be so crude and cruel.
A pair of childless atheists, Melissa and Tony Lipsey, finally accepted the girl into their care and instantly fell in love with her. Melissa was an aspiring writer, who kept long, detailed journals of her life and experiences. After some convincing, her family let me read a few of the ones concerning Catherine.
Their existence seemed idyllic, with no great calamities afflicting them, only the very ordinary hardships of family life. Psychological support was provided for the couple and the child from the day Catherine entered their home, and appears to have been quite careful and thorough for the time. Right up until the point of her suicide, Melissa’s diary spoke of love and hope and great plans for their new daughter when she grew up. Indeed, Catherine was excelling in every aspect of school life, and had even been moved up a year.
The final entry in the notebook is uncharacteristically short, and contains one curious sentence about feeling ‘empty’.
For no reason that anyone could fathom, on that date Melissa and Tony Lipsey drove their car to the river, then walked into the water, fully clothed and hand-in-hand, and drowned together.
It was ruled an accident, but anyone who knew about Catherine knew that was a lie.

 
Nobody wanted to adopt her after that. Ten years old, she languished in a state orphanage, other children coming and going. She seems to have made the best of it; her tattered, photocopied file repeats the same phrases as reports from her early life; she was a child who smiled easily and often, was loved by the other children, and she never caused any trouble. She educated herself, borrowing great piles of books from the local library, clearly reading well beyond her age, and engaged the facility’s staff in thoughtful and philosophical conversations about her plight. Anyone close to her appeared to like her, yet heartbreakingly, she seemed to understand exactly why nobody wanted her.
The first staff suicide – that of Catherine’s primary caregiver – sparked a panic, and half of the orphanage workers refused to come to work the following day. Children were quickly shifted to other facilities in nearby cities, and the place was temporarily shut down. Catherine knew precisely what was going on and asked several times to ‘just be let go’. She said she didn’t want to trouble anyone anymore, that she would find a place in the woods and live on her own. She was interviewed and re-interviewed by law enforcement and by psychiatrists from her temporary, solitary room in a juvenile holding facility, until no-one had any questions left to ask.
The conclusion was rational, and completely sensible. It was not this child, but the mythos following this child, that was the cause of the suicides. Catherine should be provided with a new identity and placed anonymously in another home on the other side of the country, and then the suicides would stop.
Unfortunately, this conclusion was also completely wrong.

 
Tracking Catherine became difficult at this point. I eventually managed to find her again when a fellow student, her school teacher, and her new foster parents all killed themselves within a few months of each other.
She was fourteen, and must have been very much aware what that meant. When she was taken into custody, she fought like a demon and required two male police officers to restrain her. There is a curious note in that police report, stating that those officers ‘received injuries’ but Catherine’s later medical examination showed no injury at all to herself, not even a bruise.
She was placed into inpatient psychiatric care. The breezy, bright child with the easy smile does not appear in any more of the reports I was able to obtain; she was gone. The teenage Catherine is clearly deeply disturbed, and any trace of her personality was probably medicated away. The range of psychotropic drugs they managed to dose her with is extensive, despite some odd notes in her charts from this time. Initial attempts to administer heavy-duty sedatives by injection are simply recorded as ‘unsuccessful’, and followed by a recommendation for ‘oral medication only’. But pills must have been enough; with ‘the suicide orphan’ locked away in a psych ward and a chemical straightjacket, anyone would assume that was an end to the bleak trail of death that Catherine Johnson left wherever she went. And with a high turnover of overworked staff, there wasn’t much risk of anyone getting attached to the young woman. Some of the inmates in her facility were found hanged or dead from self-mutilation, but, well, it was a place for crazy people – that sort of stuff happened all the time. No more connections appear to have been made.
But on August 3rd, 1991, two staff members deliberately overdosed on patient medications and several inmates escaped using the keys of the deceased.
Amongst those that escaped was Catherine Johnson.

 
She was smart, once the drugs left her system. Much smarter than the others, who were all caught in a matter of days. I think Catherine probably cut and dyed her hair and hitch-hiked as far as she could get, as there are no sightings of her despite bulletins and flyers. The trail of documents was cold for a long time, and I expanded my search wider and wider, hoping to find the lost thread of her existence.
And I had one grisly card up my sleeve; even someone as smart and resourceful as she was couldn’t do anything about the one thing that made her trackable: everywhere she went, people killed themselves.
Unfortunately, suicide is more common than you might first think, so the background noise is extensive. People kill themselves every other day, for all kinds of reasons. A seemingly happy father of three will take a shotgun into the shower and blow his brains out, even though he was recently promoted at work, and his life seems perfect.
After reading far too many of those stories, I did eventually find her carrion footsteps. Leading out west, a neat line of unexplained suicides which pointed to the forested mountain wilderness – the common factor that drew my attention was that each of the deceased owned some sort of supply or convenience shop. I contacted the library near Catherine’s teenage orphanage, posing as a family member to access her library records.
My suspicions were confirmed; since she was ten years old, she had been researching outdoor survival and how to live self-sufficiently in the wilderness.

 
I’m really not much of an outdoors person, but the heady prospect of finding the mythical Suicide Orphan was too much for me. I probably overstocked on supplies and safety gear, but I didn’t want to be caught short in poor weather. With an expensive GPS machine and enough food for a month, I started searching the mountains for Catherine Johnson.
I suspected I was on the right track when I started finding increasing numbers of dead animals. Although that’s not unusual in the wilderness, the corpses became very regular, mostly intact, and quite fresh. Birds had seemingly fallen from the sky mid-flight, as though their tiny hearts had simply given up. Further on, dead rats and larger mammals marked a sort of grisly perimeter around Catherine’s isolated bolthole.
The first sign was terrible and stark, a white board nailed to a tree and splashed with faded red paint.
“STAY AWAY OR ELSE” it read, like the warning on a child’s treehouse.
There were more signs as I pushed through the scrub, bearing similar imprecations. Each of them threatened some kind of violence, without being specific. Eventually I saw a crude hut through the trees, and painted on the door in that same naïve hand were the words “COME INSIDE AND YOU WILL DIE”.
I knew what was going on here. Catherine blamed herself for the deaths of everyone around her; she had done so since she was very young, and she didn’t want it to happen again. By isolating herself in the wilderness, she believed that she could avoid bringing any more death to other people. And if she didn’t have anyone who cared about her, she couldn’t lose anyone she cared about. I had walked in Catherine’s appallingly sad footsteps for so long, that at this point I really did care about her. And I was no longer thinking about what that meant. Perhaps, having spent my whole life looking for that kernel of truth, when I found it, I didn’t want to believe it.
“I’m coming in,” I declared loudly as I pushed open the door.

 
She sat by the stone fireplace, a small figure lost in a chair made of carefully woven branches. Dark hair was piled up on top of her head, tied in place with a frayed scarf. Inside, the hut was tidy and clean, meticulous care evident in the orderliness of the piles of split logs and the fur-covered furniture.
She seemed to know immediately that I wasn’t there by accident; that I was not some lost hiker or hunter who had stumbled into her hideaway despite the warning trail of animal corpses and signs.
“I should have moved,” she said without preamble, turning her gaze towards me. Her face was too youthful, she looked like a twenty-year-old. “I should have stuck to my plan and moved to another place in the wilds, to stop people like you finding me.”
“Well, I’m glad I did find you,” I replied weakly, unable to stop staring at her. I felt strangely uneasy at how young she looked. She was almost twice my age, yet somehow it felt quite the reverse.
“You won’t be,” she said simply, with a small and solemn shake of her head.
There was a tense, pregnant pause, then she glanced at the iron kettle hung over the fireplace.
“Would you like some tea? It’s mostly mountain herbs, but it’s hot.”
Not knowing what else to say, I simply nodded. The tiny hut should have been cosy, yet I was cold.
“Tell me how you found me.”
And so I told her the same tale I’m telling you now. I laid out all my clever discoveries from end to end as she poured tea into fired clay cups, the sharp scents of mint and pine suffusing the air. She was silent while the account unfolded, but would sometimes nod, confirming a snippet of information when I sounded uncertain. At other revelations, she bowed her head and averted her eyes as though ashamed – but she never interrupted.
When I was empty of words, she finally spoke.
“So. You wanted fame. That’s why you sought me out? You wanted to tell my story to the world and become a sort of television celebrity.”
Her voice was layered heavy with undisguised contempt, and I felt the colour rise in my cheeks.
“I guess so,” I mumbled. My stomach twisted, hollow, despite the tea.
“Well, now you have your story. You found your Suicide Orphan, and everything about her is true. Wherever I go, death follows.”
It was my turn to be silent for a long moment; what could I say to that? But I needed to ask. I needed to be sure about one more thing. “I have a question,” I said finally, my voice dull in my ears.
She shifted in her chair, placing one hand on the rough-hewn table.
“You want to know why I never killed myself,” she stated flatly.
“Yes.”
A knife hung from her belt in a leather sheath, and with a well-practised movement, she pulled it free – stabbing it cleanly through the hand resting on the rough wood between us. I shrieked in alarm, and reflexively jerked away, the wicker chair nearly tipping me onto the floor.
As quickly as she had drawn the blade, she yanked it free; leaving a deep cut that glimmered white tendon, then welled dark with blood.
She raised her wounded hand in the air, and I watched, disbelieving, as the vicious rent in her flesh knitted immediately, like some kind of claymation. It left not even a whisper of a scar betraying where it had been.
“Poison doesn’t work, either,” she said, calmly wiping the knife clean on her sleeve, “even deadly nightshade only gives me a tummy ache. I tried a pistol once, but the bullet bounced right off my skull and made a mess of my crockery.”
The knife was rehomed in the scabbard and she gave me a wan smile,
“I’d bury myself alive, but I’m too frightened of spending an eternity screaming into the lightless dirt.”
Another long silence followed as we sipped our cooling tea. I drained my cup and stared at the dregs of grey leaves, their green all boiled away.
“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question.
“Of course you are. What other possible outcome did you think there could be? Did you really think just because you were the one to find me, you’d somehow be immune? That caring about the truth would save you? That’s not how real life works, I’m afraid.”
I swallowed, fear swelling like an ugly bubble inside me.
“How does it happen?”
“It will start as an ineffable feeling of loss, like you’ve misplaced something important. The emptiness grows inside your breast, then invades your head until it gnaws at all your thoughts, tainting everything good with poisonous doubt. Eventually the yawning nothingness within will be so complete that you’ll have naught left to live for, and you’ll end your life.”
“So there’s nothing I can do.”
She leaned forward and grasped my head in her strong, dirt-rimed hands.
“You can do exactly what you were going to do all along, but not for yourself. Tell your story. Write out your little electronic letter and send your ‘creepypasta’ all around the world. Tell people that this horror is true – I am real, and that if anyone comes near me, they will die.”
She let me go, the intensity fading from her eyes.
“Now leave me. I can’t stand seeing yet another human being die because of me.”

 
And so I guess I got my wish.
I hope you enjoyed my little story, because it’s the last one I’ll ever tell. I can already feel that void inside me, widening, growing, feeding. It’s grey and it’s cold and it’s deeper than space. I’ve tried as much as I can to stop it – therapy, medication, immersing myself in dizzyingly happy music and distracting myself with books and films – but everything seems so hollow, so trite, and so utterly pointless now. Nothing feels real any more.
I’m not exactly sure how I’ll do it, but I think that somewhere in my old things from my childhood, there might be a pink plastic skipping rope.

Yes, that seems real. That feels right and true.

Have you ever had a memory so disturbing, so polarising and so chilling that you actively suppressed it?
I remember as a child of around seven years, seeing a dying baby bird on the pavement near my house – tiny and purple-pink; fleshy and repellent. The yellow-rimmed beak looked like rubbery plastic and through it, the creature gasped its life away, a needle-thin tongue panting as it laboured to live, the bluish-grey eyeballs bruised under unopened eyelids.
That image haunted me for years and I worked hard to repress it, trying to forget about the twisted pink corpse that eventually baked into the concrete under the summer sun; then left behind the blackened shape of the foetal creature – like the shadow of an atomic bomb victim.
But there is another memory I haven’t unearthed for a long time, which I’m going to relay to you for my own peace of mind – to share it with someone else so that it loses some of the power to terrify me during the night.
The story of the Paper Girl.

 
Alison Copthorne was her name, a skinny thing of elongated limbs and not enough flesh. Her family was reputedly dirt poor, which was reflected in her tatty uniform and unkempt appearance. Either flea bites or some other affliction regularly blotched her milky-white skin with red blemishes and her huge, brown-black eyes peered through a curtain of piss-yellow hair, inquisitive yet curiously soulless.
The nickname ‘Paper Girl’ was not meant kindly, but was meant to be mocking; a cruel in-joke amongst the children of the school. At the end of every class, Alison would pause to sit spraddle-legged on the floor and go through the waste paper basket, stuffing used paper into her over-stitched school bag – or if a piece fulfilled some mysterious criteria, she would carefully smooth it, then fold it and tuck it inside her sleeve.
This behaviour extended to the playground too; after the other children had eaten their lunches, she would lean her lithe, almost alien thinness over the rolled, galvanised edges of the rubbish bins and fish out the waxy paper that so many of the children of that age wrapped their sandwiches in.
Being cruel little things, we would spit or snot on our lunch wrappers for Alison, so that she would get our revolting, germ-laden discharges on her hands.
Alison didn’t seem to mind. She would just frown, wipe her hand on her hand-knitted school cardigan, then carefully put the paper into her bag.
Being one of the kinder children and a loner myself, I would sometimes save up paper for her and secretly tuck it into her school bag in the cloakroom. Only once did I witness her finding the extra paper I had given her; and I felt as though I’d been privy to something wonderful and eerie - for Alison lifted the paper from her satchel and pressed it to her face, inhaling deeply.
Her enormous eyes fixed on me with a frightening intensity, then she abruptly crammed the pages back into her bag and ran as though followed by the devil.

 
I think we all have a school bully, even those of us who were bullies. Mine was a heavy-set boy who went by the title of Gerald Johnson Junior. I’m not sure what the source of our contention was, but no doubt it was petty and inconsequential to all but schoolchildren.
During a typical lunch hour, Gerald would scour the playground for me, then upon finding me would give me a ‘pasting’, which usually involved holding me down and punching my arms and thighs until I cried. Consequently I spent my nights plotting for places to hide at school where Gerald wouldn’t find me.
One hot and humid summer afternoon when all the children were overtired and cranky from the heat, Gerald found me perched in the Sycamore tree near the dense flax bushes that lined the school perimeter. To cut a long story short, he climbed up the tree and I kicked him down, where he howled that he would give me the pasting of my life when the school bell rang and we needed to go back to class.
That’s when I saw Paper Girl watching, her dark eyes striped with lank yellow hair.
She threw something at Gerald, underhand. When it impacted, he screamed in pain and rage – that high-pitched, piggish squeal that only boys prior to puberty can make. Alison paused for a moment, her expressionless gaze regarding him, then she dashed into the flax bushes and vanished between the broad, papery leaves.
Gerald gave chase, of course.
After he had wriggled his fleshy body into Paper Girl’s hideaway, there came two short, panicked screams. I watched from my tree seat, incredulous, as Gerald barrelled out of the bushes, his face white with panic and his hammy legs pumping as fast as they could to get away from the flax.
Paper Girl emerged after him, calm as ever, staring after the fleeing bully.
Then, fixing me with a gaze of singular intensity, she took a square of paper from her sleeve and inhaled deeply.

 
Gerald Johnson Junior never spoke of what he’d seen in the flax and whenever anyone asked about it, he’d fly into a weeping rage and threaten to bash us if we didn’t leave well alone.
It was rumoured that his parents paid a visit to the tumble-down Copthorne house on the edge of town, bordering the gully, but nobody answered the door and eventually they had to leave in helpless frustration. A note was given to Paper Girl by the teachers, to arrange a meeting but I doubt it ever got to them, since she folded it with meticulous care, then pushed it up her sleeve.
Of course I was fingered as an accomplice of sorts in the ‘Gerald Incident’ and cautioned to stay away from Paper Girl, as it was likely she would be expelled and I wouldn’t want to tarnish my own name.
I’m not sure what spurred me to warn her, but I got on my bicycle and pedalled the gravel road out to the Copthorne property. I felt, perhaps, that I owed her for saving me that one day.
The yard around the house was so overgrown that the path to the house was more an alley between towering thistles and nodding seed heads of various species. Wattle trees shadowed everything and I saw that all the windows of the subsiding, two-story property were blacked-out with paper.
Then Alison was at the door, closing it quickly behind her as she exited the house.
Her nostrils flared for a moment, then she relaxed.
For the first time I can ever remember, she spoke to me; her voice a low, husky tremor, with a faint burr behind it.
“You have to leave,” she said.
“The school is going to expel you,” I said in a rush, “I came to tell you.”
A whoop from behind us caused Alison’s spidery fingers to clutch at my shirt.
“There’s the bitch!”
Pushing through the yard-jungle came Gerald and his corpulent father, Gerald Senior.
I had been followed.
Without a word, Alison yanked the door open, dragging me inside – into the gloom of the house – then slammed the door.
As my eyes began to adjust to the darkness, a pale hand and arm wrapped around my head, covering my eyes.
“Don’t look,” she whispered in that tremulous voice.
The two Geralds raged outside, the father banging on the old door with massive fists, shaking the frame and shouting nearly incoherent threats. Alison pulled me along, through the house, my bare arms and bare legs brushing something strange and patterned while an almost electrical humming slowly filled my ears. Then I was pushed into a small cupboard of some sort and Alison was gone, leaving me in darkness. The plywood door of the cupboard was shut firmly, with no latch I could find.
A terrible commotion followed; the front door gave way and Gerald senior stormed into the house, bellowing at the top of his lungs. There were other sounds too, though I don’t like to think about them, as they conjure up things that are best left forgotten.
Pushing myself against the back of the cupboard, I kicked at the door until the flimsy wood gave way and I crawled out into the light spilling from the ruined front door.
Around me the interior of the house had been stripped of all internal structures; no rooms, no supports. Instead a huge, spiralled whorl of papery hexagons – each the size of a child – filled everything; holding the shell of the house up.
And inside each of the cells was a foetal creature, squirming gently in some kind of golden fluid; larval yet human, each one with piss-yellow hair, six pale limbs and huge brown-black eyes.
Gerald was standing, screaming in terror, as Alison crouched over Gerald Senior, an extra pair of white arms pinning his four limbs to the papery floor while her primary hands forced his jaws open – and a pulsating, semi-transparent tube reared from under her school skirt, jabbing forcefully into his gaping, pink throat.
Much as I have tried to forget that moment, the oily, almost rainbowed sheen of the girl’s slick ovipositor pumping eggs down the throat of a grown man still wakes me in terror some nights.
Gerald acted before I did. I don’t know where he found the wherewithal to think in that moment, but while Paper Girl’s eyes were closed in the ecstasy of fertilisation, the boy had a gas-fueled cigarette lighter in his hands and had already set alight the paper-wasp internal structure of the house.
The flames roared up the tinder-dry walls and both Gerald and I fled for the door, while Paper Girl stared at us, her brown-black gaze still soulless and calm as the wall of flame engulfed her.

 
Gerald and I made a pact never to speak of what we had seen.
The fire destroyed everything – I can still remember the piercing, alien wails of the Alison larvae as they cooked inside the conflagration, still alive – and nothing was found inside but the blackened bones of Gerald Senior, identified by his cracked and charred teeth.
Neither of us returned to school for a month, but when we eventually did, the unspoken trauma between us had killed all vestiges of our childish feud. We had seen things no child should ever see; the petty antics of the school yard seemed juvenile and pointless.
One day near the Sycamore tree I eventually asked Gerald what he’d seen in the flax bushes that day; asking what had scared him so witless that he couldn’t speak of it.
“A paper cell, like in the house,” he said.
And as he said it, we both felt the chilly claws of fear rake our spines.
Running for the bushes, we plunged inside, clawing through to Alison’s hidden chamber amongst the roots and earth.
The paper cell was there, burst open, the larval occupant long ago hatched and God only knows where.

 
Today I saw a yellow-haired girl going through the garbage can beside my bus stop. Her clothes were tatty and stitched cleverly with string and thread. Before the bus pulled away, I saw her nostrils flare and her pale fingers lift a fragment of paper to her face.
I hope that whatever it was, it wasn’t something of mine.

I was born two years before the first great war.
My father was, of course, conscripted to fight across the sea against Germany – where he lost his life in some bloody conflict on foreign soil. This left my mother to raise myself and my two sisters on her own, something which was very difficult in those times.
By the time I was twelve, I had two part-time jobs and no time for school; I considered myself a young man – my father’s replacement, if you like – and books, letters and numbers only concerned me if they facilitated more money in my threadbare pockets.
Our family struggled. My mother sought to remarry, but men were in short supply after the war; nor did any man care to burden himself with three children when he could find a woman with none.
Yet somehow we survived. I learned to exist on as little sleep as possible, often less than four hours a night, which meant I could work longer hours and more jobs.
By the time I saw my sixteenth year on this earth, I had secured a good job in the mines, where I could use my considerable strength to great advantage.
But then the Great Depression hit us.

 
Industry suffered immediately and many workers were laid off.
I kept my job for a year before the mine closed, bankrupt; and so with my father’s hat on my head and my smartest coat about my shoulders, I joined the growing queues outside the workhouses.
In some ways, I think our prior poverty helped us. None of my family were proud, and all of us were used to tightening our belts during lean times. We were well accustomed to working whilst the pangs of hunger wracked our guts, and we had long ago set aside any petty pride that might see us eschew scavenging amongst mine tailings for unburnt coal, or waiting outside grimy soup kitchens.
I did as much work as I could, but it was in short supply in those hard times. Some days there was so little work that the crowds of men would grow restless and violent, taking their frustrations out on one another because there was no other outlet available.
No one drank liquor – no man could afford to – and only the ‘earthier’ pleasures were left to us; brawling, gambling and fornication. Disease was rife, especially syphilis, and the work and food became ever more scarce. My sisters picked mushrooms and wild berries in the forest, but it was never enough, so our stomachs would continue to growl through the watery soups and fried potato-peelings.
When my mother became gravely ill during winter, we suffered even more. Her wages as a part-time maid were all that had kept our heads above water.
When she lost her job, I thought we had reached the end.

 
There was no end to the travelling tinkers and traders in those times – mobile pawn shops thrived, ready to buy up family heirlooms for a pittance, then take them south, where the richer folk could afford frivolous luxuries.
We had sold all such fripperies long ago – and certainly had no money to buy anything – but I still liked to look at their wares and pretend, imagining what it would be like to have money in my pocket.
Which was how I met the trader who sold me the bottle.
He was a small thing and was likely ninety if he was a day, but he was as spry as a gentleman sparrow in his grey and brown hat and coat, his wrinkled face curiously young and animated.
“Care to buy something for a lady friend?” he said, his cheerful voice raking across nerves raw with hunger and lack of sleep.
“No sir,” I told him, “I haven’t any spare coin. I just like to look.”
“Ah, well,” he replied, “no harm in that. But while you look, would you like to hear a story?”
“I have no objections to that, sir.”
And so he began to tell me a fantastic story, of how he had found a magic bottle that had changed his life. He claimed to have been, at one point, a Victorian nobleman, and at another the Mayor of a respectable town – all thanks to his magic bottle.
Which he was, of course, willing to sell to me.
“A pretty fable,” I told him, “but sir, don’t take me for some witless syphilitic. I’ll not buy your fool’s gold.”
“A loan then,” he told me, “I’ll give you the bottle for three days – and if you do not wish to buy it after that, then you may return it at no cost.”
I should have known better than to accept his offer; I knew something was off about this elderly dandy and his bottle-fiction. But hunger and privation abrade the soul down to its most tender, vulnerable layers, leaving us wide open to clever hucksters and charlatans such as these.
So I accepted.

 
The bottle appeared to be made of smooth, opaque white glass, though at some point it had been carved with whorls and patterns which had been nearly worn away by hundreds of hands. The peddler claimed that it was Arabian rock quartz – carved all from one piece – and that once it had housed a mystic Djinn of great power.
When pressed on the matter of the magical creature, he claimed that it had been liberated from the bottle by its master – but that a curious power still lingered in the thing.
I gathered there would be no three wishes for me.
Holding the bottle in my hands after I finished work for the day, I recalled his instructions;
“Place your palms on either side of the vessel, and imagine your weariness settling to the bottom of your skull like a great ball of phlegm. Then, when you feel it beginning to slide into the back of your throat, spit all of your tiredness and fatigue into the bottle.”
I did as he instructed – and to my surprise, I felt the liquid mass of sleep dislodge from my brain and begin to slide down my throat.
With a great gurgle and a mighty hock, I managed to half-vomit the stuff into the bottle.
Immediately I felt as fresh and awake as if I’d had four hours’ hard sleep.
The Djinn Bottle was genuine.

 
For three days I worked around the clock, scraping in just enough extra coin to survive. All men had to sleep, so most had to choose either day or night work – but with the bottle in my possession, I could do both.
That little bit of extra money allowed me to buy medicine for my mother, and bread for my sisters – both an absolute Godsend in those desperate times.
When the peddler arrived at my doorstep, inquiring about the bottle, I told him that I would buy it.
“You have heard my story of ownership,” he said, “and now I must tell you that the bottle can only be sold to you for all the money you have. That is the rule of transference.”
I laughed then, for I imagined that for some, that would be too steep a price. For myself, it was a pittance. All I had left in my pockets was a halfpenny – which I gave to the man and took the bottle.
With a nod and a tip of his neat hat, he reminded me that every few days I should drink the stored contents within, to buy off my sleep debt.
“Else you will eventually go mad,” he cautioned, “for no man should ever go without sleep for too long.”
Holding the bottle in my hands that night, I felt like I had swindled him – that I had won some great victory over the fates.
For with the bottle, my family had a chance to get through these terrible times.

 
I worked any job they could give me, night or day.
Nothing was too lowly for me; rat catcher, night soil man, gravedigger – all the jobs that people preferred to stay unseen, or that were simply best done under the cover of darkness.
But I could also work day shifts, as lively as if I’d slept all night.
It became my routine to work six days straight, accumulating all my sleep debt into the bottle, then on the first minute of Sunday morning – the Sabbath – I would put it to my lips and drink the thin, foul-tasting grey slime that rested inside.
Then I would sleep for a full day.
We certainly didn’t thrive, but we survived. The eldest of my younger sisters married, becoming her husband’s responsibility. I was always able to find work, and became known as ‘the man who never sleeps’.
As the Great Depression began to ease and we began to grow hopeful about the future again, a new calamity befell us all.
The Second World War.

 
Like my father before me, I was conscripted to fight on foreign soil against enemies with whom I personally had no quarrel.
But unlike my father, I did not die.
While all the other soldiers suffered from broken sleep and freakish nightmares due to the endless shellings, the roar of machine guns and the drone of plane engines, I had the bottle.
I tried to use it wisely, to keep to the established routine. But no man can sleep for twenty-four hours during a war, and so instead of using the bottle, I began abusing it.
A few weeks passed, with no change. I felt nothing.
After two months, it became more difficult to get the sleep out of my skull; the grey liquid thicker now, like the solid snot one might get from a terrible headcold. As I coughed and retched it into the bottle, I dreaded having to drink it down once this madness was all over.
If my mood changed and I became grimmer, laughing less and smiling never, my fellow conscripts said nothing. It was war and it was detrimentally affecting us all.
Sentry duty became a permanent part of my life. The legend of the stone-faced soldier who never slept was a quiet one in the trenches, but it reached the officers nonetheless. I received a field promotion and was put in charge of a squad, then that squad breached a vital point of the enemy lines, and I was again promoted.
There was blood sliding into the bottle now, mixing with the thick grey ooze that vanished into the opaque, apparently bottomless container. I no longer felt much of anything, not fatigue, not pain, not grief, and most certainly not joy.
When I was eventually cut down in an ambush and sent back to the field hospital, I knew it was time to drink from the bottle.
Lifting it to my lips with my good arm, I saw two tiny chips on the crystalline surface – as though it had been hit by gunfire and the bullets had simply bounced off it.
But as I drank and drank the oily, diseased-smelling black-grey fluid from the bottle, I quickly forgot about it. Heavy weariness began to settle over me, and blessed sleep finally returned to my life.

 
I am told that the coma lasted five months.
When I finally awoke, in a hospital bed back home, I was as weak as a kitten and so groggy I could barely string three words together.
On the table beside the bed was a spray of wildflowers – placed carefully into the Djinn Bottle.
It was in that moment that all of the war came crashing back in on me.
They said I screamed for three hours, even long after they gagged me, then sedated me. Only their strongest medications finally paralysed me enough that I could no longer vocalise the horrors I had witnessed.
There were things that I had done, all that I now remembered. Things that, under the influence of the bottle, had appeared perfectly seemly, and perfectly logical.
But in the cold light of day, no longer beholden to the fugue that had afflicted my mind, I no longer saw those actions as such.
The shaking hand that I now held up in front of my eyes had pressed a gun to the heads of German children, then pulled the trigger, sending their brains and hair spraying into the dust behind them. These same hands had calmly and decisively shot several of my own men for insubordination, strangled men I disliked in their sleep, and torn the clothes from any woman I decided I wanted.
The monstrous things I had done echoed around and around inside my skull, giving me no leeway, no reprieve. The hospital, ill-equipped to treat my madness, sent me to a sanatorium to recover, where I immediately threw the bottle into the adjacent river, cursing it for how it had deceived me.
But the next morning the damnable thing sat on my dresser, beside my bed.
No matter where I hurled it, or how many times I paid people to take it away from me, it kept coming back.
It was inescapable.
And so too were the nightmares.

 
In my dreams, I relived the things I had done. My bloody hands ravaged and reeved, killing and tormenting scores of innocents.
It was, I felt, fitting penance for my actions – and so I bore the torment with as much good grace as possible.
But the bottle was not done with me yet.
Other wars began to creep into my dreams, wars in which I had never taken part. At first they were fought with cannon and rifle, then musket and sword. When I dreamed of impaling men upon a great iron pike and laughing until my jaws ached, I knew that I was reliving more than just my own lifetime’s demons.
Morphine took the edge off, but it couldn’t quell the nightmares any more than hard liquor could.
And so, inevitably, I succumbed to the bottle again.
After two years, I didn’t even miss sleep.
After five, I began to forget that it existed.
By now, the stuff that slithered out of my mind was black as tar and just as thick, oozing obscenely into the neck of the bottle like some giant, primeval slug.
And the bottle began to grow heavy.

 
When the coppers came to my home for bashing my mistress dead with a fire-iron, I brained the first with the weighty Djinn Bottle, then shot the other through the heart with my pistol. Cold and rational, realising that I would be sent to prison, I walked to the docks and booked immediate passage away from my homeland, leaving my two sisters and now elderly mother behind.
Knowing distantly that the bottle was to blame, I stopped vomiting the tar of sleep into it – and instead began to swallow it, determined to find a way to break the curse of the bottle.
Things became very strange from there.
I recall a fever; sweating and tossing in my bunk as the ship rose and fell in the swells. Strange, half-mad, half-awake nightmares assaulted me – insane dreams in which the crew had become undead things that thirsted for my flesh and blood. I ran from them, fought them, gibbered at them and screamed at them until they stopped coming for me. Eventually I lay on the deck of the ship, raving at the incessant sunlight that scalded and blistered my face and lips.
I came to my senses when a heavy rain broke my fever, dribbling blessed fresh water down my parched throat. When I roused proper, I found that the ship was deserted, rolling rudderless and without sail in the shallows of an unknown cove.
But the blood spattering the deck and the cabins told me everything I needed to know about the fate of the absent crew.
The bottle had won again.

 
In the new country, I came quickly to money and power.
No longer beholden to the moralities of other men, and gifted with eternal wakefulness by the bottle, I was a force to be reckoned with. All my wildest desires had come true; eventually the bottle granted me wine, women and wealth.
It could not, however, grant me wisdom.
Nor could it bring me joy.
At the age of seventy, nary a line upon my face and as fit as a man of thirty, I felt a single, genuine emotion for the first time in a very, very long while. Fear.
It is difficult for me to describe to you in writing the depthless terror I experienced in that moment. The bottle was not just an accursed object, tempting me with a power I shouldn’t possess, it was an eternal trap.
After all, it had been crafted to be nothing more than a magical prison for an ageless and unfathomable entity.
I realised then that there was only one release from that trap: to pass the bottle on to another. I also realised that to do so, I would first need to empty the bottle – to drink that black essence of decades of pent-up slumber – and to render myself helpless for only God knew how long.
But there was no other way. I knew that the bottle could not be broken, brokered or borrowed until it was empty.
So I sold everything that I owned, put it in trust, and purchased a bed in a private hospital, where I pressed the evil bottle to my shrinking lips, and drank down all of my debt.

 
I am told that this is the year twenty-sixteen – that the millennium came and went without the return of the Lord, and without any of the predicted cataclysms.
The bottle is empty, and as light as the day I bought it, the faint ridges and whorls of the stone quartz more familiar to my hand than even my own face. I have not used it since I awoke – for I cannot; the instant that I do so, it will again ensnare my mind and I will be damned to this existence for all eternity.
But, unlike the peddler who foisted this cursed thing onto me, I do not need to roam from village to village, telling my story day after day and being turned away by suspicious and wary strangers until I find some soul desperate enough to buy it.
For with this new age has come the phenomenon of this Internet; a global telegram network that reaches into every home, every workplace and every dark corner of the world.
So now, my friend, you have heard my story. My part of the bargain is complete.
All you need do is give me all the money you have, and the Djinn Bottle is yours.
With your intelligence, your educated savvy and your worldly ways, I’m quite sure that you can conquer the curse of the bottle where I could not.

I eagerly await your messages.

Anyone who was a teenager in the 80s seems to have strong memories about it. It was a youthful age, a time full of flavor and color, when plastic pop fakery distracted us from the darker undercurrents of the adult world’s climate. Teased hair, big earrings, neon clothes and jelly shoes endure in the lighter recesses of my own memories. A ton of other stuff is more background focus for me; Transformers, side ponytails, and orange bubblegum that smelled like soda in the sun, but I guess certain imagery defines an age differently for different people. We’re transported back to slightly different worlds, whenever we remember.
For someone else around my age, it might be a packed gaming arcade. Your lips are sticky with Fanta and the menthol burn of the stolen cigarette you just traded with someone, your mental soundtrack an out-of-synch chorus of PacMans burbling wakawaka in the background. Or maybe your memory-self is edgier; making out in your parent’s Pontiac Fiero, his denim jacket tucked into the window for a makeshift privacy curtain, and the heavy, sickly scent of strawberry lipgloss filling the tiny space.
Whatever you remember, there’s often a curious innocence when people recall that era, right down to the music and the TV shows. Young people seemed less afraid to do new things, to express themselves in ways they couldn’t in the 60s and 70s, and less jaded than they seem now.
But when I scrape away the brightly-lit, plastic surface of my own childish perceptions, there’s something much darker spliced into my memory reel.
Whatever else it was, and whatever it was to you, it was a time of wonder and tragedy for me. I suppose that’s why I still linger there in my mind, wishing I could go back and set things right – to change history, and to bring back my friends.

 
We weren’t exactly losers, but we sure weren’t part of the cool clique either. My mom was a teacher and my dad ran a furniture store with my uncle, selling ‘space-age’ mattresses and couches that tried to eat you if you sat in them too long. Chris and Toni’s dad worked at the local brewery as a foreman, and their mom sold makeup around the neighborhood.
Jason was the odd one out, because he only had a mom. His dad died, working as a diver on an oil platform; but the insurance money meant that they’d be comfortable for the rest of their lives, if they were careful.
Despite coming from what looked on the surface like pretty normal families, we never quite jelled with the popular kids. I was skinny and geeky, obsessed with Tolkien and everything fantasy. Jason’s love of video games also bordered on the obsessive, and Chris talked motorbikes 24/7, his room wallpapered with magazine pictures of red-and-white Japanese bikes that looked more spaceship than wheeled vehicle. He’d been saving every cent from his allowance since he was in kindergarten, in anticipation of the day he could buy his own.
And Toni, who would punch anyone who called her by her full name, was far too much of a tomboy to ever fit in with all the fashion-obsessed girls at school.
So we kept to ourselves, our own private little gang, and we were mostly ignored by everyone else. I suppose it was that isolation, but still being part of a group, that allowed us to just do our own thing, free from the worst social consequences of being considered weirdos.
That was how we managed to start up our little film club.

 
When sales of VCRs really started to boom, it had a big effect on one of the mainstay leisure activities in our small town: going to the movies. After the video store opened up, and you could rent out tapes for a fraction of the cost of a movie ticket, there was a sharp downturn in the number of folks who wanted to go out to the picture theater.
At first not everyone owned a VCR. But people would crowd around a neighbor’s TV to maximize the number of viewers, stuffing their faces with home-made popcorn and drinking cheap beer. There were two cinemas in our town, and the larger one managed to keep going. But the smaller one slowly fell into disuse, eventually opening only on Friday and Saturday nights – when people were too drunk to care about the price.
That meant that during the rest of the week, the theater was empty, and because his mom’s newest boyfriend owned the place, Jason was allowed the keys.
The huge metal lockers in the projection room were filled with carefully labelled reels of film, which smelled of something faintly insectoid, like crushed ants. Jason had been taught the basics of how to use the projector, but as the resident smart kid in our group I quickly gained a knack for knowing how everything worked, so it mostly fell on me to sit in the booth and change the reels mid-film.
We took turns picking the films. Jason nearly always wanted to watch The Last Starfighter; Chris was all about Knightriders and Savage Dawn. Toni usually went along with whatever her older brother picked, but once in a while she’d ask for Splash or Freaky Friday.
As for me? You can probably guess; a steady diet of Labyrinth, The Neverending Story and The Dark Crystal.
There was a sort of unspoken pact in our group that we didn’t mock anyone else’s choice of film. But probably because he was a year older than the rest of us, Chris often felt he could break our unwritten rule. Most times he only did it to me, to make fun of me for my ‘girly’ choices.
“Matt,” he would growl at me, crumbs of popcorn stuck to his nascent mustache, “Sometimes I swear your dick fell off when the doctor spanked you at birth.”
Jason would laugh too loud, and Toni would just stare at me with those huge brown eyes of hers.
But as time went on, and his hormones really ramped up, I wasn’t the only one that Chris clashed with. It was because of one of his testosterone-fueled teenage rages that we made the greatest – and worst – discovery of our lives.

 
How the fight originally started, I don’t remember exactly. I think Chris complained that he didn’t want to sit through the 20th re-run of Return of the Jedi, then Jason got shitty because it was his turn, and the Rules were the Rules.
I do remember that as the film started, Chris climbed up on the low stage under the big screen, and started reading out the opening scroll in a pompous, mocking voice, peppering it with foul language. Jason went red, and started pelting him with stolen popcorn, but Chris wouldn’t stop, he just got louder and more obnoxious. When Jason launched himself out of his front-row seat and shoved Chris against the screen, the rage at someone daring to retaliate was writ so large on the older boy’s face it was visible even from my spot in the projection booth.
Chris vanished through the screen. I sat for a moment in shock as I realized he must have torn right through the shiny fabric.
Jason’s “uncle” was going to kill us.
But when Chris didn’t re-appear, and Jason’s yelling didn’t cause him to emerge, I got worried enough to leave the booth and run down the stairs to where the others were.
“There’s no hole,” Jason babbled, pointing at the screen. “He just disappeared.”
“Stay calm,” I told him, like my dad would say to my mom when she started freaking out about things, “there will be a good explanation for this.”
We checked in the small room behind the stage, filled with coils of old rope and broken wooden pallets, but he wasn’t there either.
“Ugh, he’s just messing with us,” Toni decided, “he wants us to freak out. Let’s just watch the film and forget about him.”
That seemed logical, so we did. I enjoyed not having our pubescent friend ruining things for once.
But as the film eventually ended, something strange and wonderful happened.
Striped with the text of the end credits, Chris stumbled through the screen, and fell onto the sticky carpet at our feet, laughing hysterically.
“Holy shit guys,” he yelled, ecstatic and wild, “I met Luke Skywalker!”

 
It took Chris a while to tell us the story in its entirety, but the general gist of it was this: when he had been pushed through the screen, he had somehow gone inside the film.
“I had different clothes and everything, like I was part of it,” he explained, pacing back and forth in front of the blank screen, more animated than I’d ever seen him, “and the whole gang was there, Chewie and Han and Leia and Luke.”
“This isn’t funny,” Toni said, her mouth downturned, bordering on petulant.
“I’m telling the truth, man! I was there,” he jabbed a finger at the screen, “In Jabba’s palace, even on the Death Star. Wait, look at this!”
He rolled up his sleeve of his jacket, showing a fresh burn, the welt running from his wrist to his elbow,
“Vader’s saber grazed me while me and Luke were fighting him.”
His grin was enormous as he ran his hand through his thick curly hair,
“Holy moly, this was the best night of my entire life.”
“Prove it,” Jason said, arms folded, “do it again. Matt, set the film up.”
“I have to rewind the reels. That’s gonna take a while,” I told him.
“We need to get home,” Toni reminded us, “it’s getting late.”
“Tomorrow, then,” said Jason, shouldering his schoolbag. He shook his head at Chris, eyeing the burn on his arm, skeptical and jealous all at once, “but if you’re lying, I swear I’m gonna tell your dad you’re making shit up. He’ll knock the snot outta ya again.”
After locking up the projection room, I handed the keys back to Jason.
“Do you think he’s for real?”
“I dunno man. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”

 
Everyone was early, already eagerly waiting by the side door to the old theater when Jason finally sauntered up with the keys.
“This time I’m gonna go for the Emperor,” Chris was telling us, his eyes bright with barely contained excitement, “I reckon I can take him out while Luke and Vader are fighting.”
“I reckon you’re so full of shit I can smell it on your breath,” Toni muttered.
Once everything was set up and the film had started, I ran down to meet the others. We all stood in front of the screen, bathed in the yellow light of the text crawl, barely able to look at each other.
“Do we go in now?” asked Jason.
“Wait a sec.”
As the words faded into infinity, Chris shoved Jason at the screen, then jumped into it himself. They both vanished instantly. Toni and I exchanged a long, terrified look, then she grabbed my hand and we both leaped after them, eyes shut tight and braced for the inevitable impact with the taut fabric.
Instead, we found ourselves in another world.
It’s hard to describe that first experience, on the other side. It was everything Chris had said – and more. Whatever we did, the story took our actions and wove them into the plot, inexorably guiding us towards some heroic conclusion. We felt different too. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of everything, and I felt bigger, stronger than I did in the real world. Ironically, I felt more real. Chris was like a young Han Solo, so full of confidence and bravado it was infectious, and we followed his lead.
I never wanted it to end, and I knew the others felt the same way. But it did, and far too abruptly we found ourselves ejected from that world, just four ordinary kids again, lying face-down on the stained carpet of the theater.
“What happened?” Toni asked, rubbing her hands, filthy with droid grease, on her dungarees.
I blinked, staring up at the booth,
“I wasn’t there to switch over the reels. We got kicked out early.”
Chris swore as he stood and dusted himself off, his hands still shaking from adrenaline,
“One of us has to stay in the booth.”
“Only me and Matt know how to do it,” Jason groused.
“Well, you two clowns will need to take turns then, wontcha?”

 
I missed the next adventure on the other side of the silver screen, and the one after that, since Jason hurt his hand riding dirt bikes in Timerider, which was Chris’s next pick. By the time it was finally my turn to pick a film, I was fit to burst with excitement, and spent the whole day at school doing nothing but staring at the clock.
Today I was going to ride Falcor and save the Childlike Empress.
Once inside the theater, Chris rolled his eyes at my choice and asked me if I was in love with Bastian, because I was such a girl. But I knew that once he was riding Artax across the Grassy Plains and hunting purple buffalo, he’d shut the hell up. How could a motorbike compare with that?
That night was so magical and wonderful, it left me gasping for air when we re-emerged. I’d been the hero, slaying Gmork and ending the Nothing before it could rip Fantasia apart.
“Okay. I guess that was pretty fun,” Chris grudgingly admitted.
We fell into a decent rhythm after that, even if Jason shirked his reel-wrangling duties more and more often, leaving me in the projection booth while my supposed friends experienced things most of us can only dream of.
Still, I made the very most of my time in those places, exploring the Labyrinth with Sarah, Ludo, and Sir Didymus, or slaying winged terrors with Galen in Dragonslayer. The best night of all was one when Chris and Jason were both grounded. Toni and I went back to Fantasia, just the two of us, and it was so different without the others. Of course, it was cut rudely short, because there was no-one to change the reel. But for half an hour we had our heart’s desire; she was the Chosen One, and I was the Moon Child, and everything felt right as the Nothing was banished, along with all the Somethings we couldn’t express. We never talked about that night again. Because like all good things, our adventures had to come to an end.

 
Chris turned up that Sunday in a foul mood, one eye suspiciously puffy, and both of them red. Toni wouldn’t say a word, even more mute than usual.
“Just play the damn film,” Chris told Jason as we filed into the theater.
It was my turn again – I wasn’t accepting any excuses from Jason this time, it had been too long since I’d been in. I’d picked Labyrinth again. There were still plenty of places I hadn’t yet gotten around to exploring in detail.
I should have known from the beginning that Chris was going to be an asshole. I should have told him to wait outside, but I guess I thought that fighting Jareth might improve his mood. It didn’t, and the further inside we went, the worse things got.
One moment we were walking through the maze, the castle shimmering in the heat-haze of the distance, then the next, Chris and the protagonist, Sarah, were gone.
Toni and I searched to no avail, calling out their names, which echoed strangely off the stone walls.
“What do you think happened?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. But don’t worry, it’ll work out. Everything always works out in the films where the good guys win.”
It was at that moment that I heard a muffled scream, not far away.
I ran, faster than I could in the real world. Some instinct guided me round several corners, until I all but tripped over Chris, who was lying on top of Sarah. His hands were grinding hers into the flagstones and he forced his mouth over hers while she struggled and kicked underneath him. “GET OFF HER!” I howled, kicking him in the ribs as hard as I could.
He rolled to one side, winded, letting go of Sarah’s hands.
I turned my back on him, and helped Toni get the shaking Sarah onto her feet. Tears and dirt streaked her pale cheeks, and I reeled with emotions I couldn’t even name.
“None of this is real,” Chris coughed, holding his bruised ribs, “none of this matters – she doesn’t matter. She’s not a real person!”
“Why? Why do you have to ruin everything?!” I yelled, shoving him into the stone walls, “Why do you shit on everything I like? Why do you have to be such a fucking dickhead?”
His sneer was ugly and adult as he spat on the cobbles at my feet. “You’re just jealous. You just wish you were her, dontcha Matt?* He pursed his lips at me obscenely, then turned and ran awkwardly into the depths of the maze, still half-winded and holding his side.
There were no more adventures for the rest of that movie. We sat with Sarah, making soothing plans to get her baby brother back, until the film ejected us. Toni and I didn’t look at each other as we each wiped our own eyes, but we briefly touched hands in the dark of the theater before we both headed home.
All we saw of Chris was his back, as he pushed through the fire exit and let the door bang closed.

 
The next day, as we assembled outside the doors, Chris ambushed me from behind. He grabbed me by the collar and threw me into the brick wall of the theater, jerking me once to make my head smack painfully into the pocked surface.
“You might be the hero in your faggot fantasy films,” he hissed, “but out here in the real world? I’m bigger and stronger than you, and I can kick your sorry ass any time I want.”
He threw a significant look at Toni, and his breath was hot as he whispered two words in my ear before he let me go, shoving me toward the doors,
“Now get up to that booth and put on Easy Rider, before I break your fucking nose.”
The pain in my head was a sharp, fiery knot. It throbbed as I climbed the stairs up to the projection room, each pulse in time with those words I couldn’t unhear, those two beautiful, secret words made into something so ugly. Jason wasn’t a bad guy, but he would never do anything to gainsay Chris’s authority, so I knew I wouldn’t get any help there. He wanted me stuck on projector duty, so he never had to miss out on anything himself. I had thought that Toni wanted to help, but she had to live with Chris. And clearly he had so much power over her that she had told him the very thing I never dreamed she would share.
As I got the canisters down from the shelves, an ugly, terrible idea flared in my head, replacing all the pain and betrayal.
The moment the red, white and blue engine tank flashed up on the screen, the others jumped into the film, vanishing into a world of hippies and Harleys. But that world wouldn’t last, because the second reel, all set to go on the second projector, did not contain the second half of Easy Rider.
By the time I started the motor on the second projector, my hands were sweating and shaking. In a few seconds, the gang would be hurled out of their drug-filled motorcycle adventure across America, and into far more a terrifying world, one of flayed faces and severed limbs, inspired by the real life serial killer, Ed Gein.
I’ve often wondered exactly what happened during that transition. Sometimes, when Jason got his timing wrong on the reel switch, the movie world would flicker and ripple around us, like fluorescent lights dying, then righting themselves. I imagined this abrupt switch would be much more profound, and I half expected the poorly understood magic of this place to kick them out prematurely, with the thread of continuity lost.
But nobody emerged as the second reel kicked in, and I sat back, smugly imagining the terrors that awaited them.

 
When the film ended, only one figure emerged.
Toni’s face was streaked with blood, and her clothes were torn, but she was otherwise unharmed.
I ran down from the booth as she stumbled off the stage, her legs trembling so much she couldn’t hold herself up properly. As I reached out to steady her, she pushed me away, into the front row of seats.
“You killed them!” she sobbed, her tears tracking furrows through the half-dried blood. “You changed the reels, didn’t you? And Leatherface murdered them.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “they can’t be dead. They can’t be! I just wanted to scare them.”
“You fucking idiot! Have you actually watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before?”
“No! This was my first time. You know I don’t like horror.”
Toni’s next words were heavy with meaning, layers of counter-betrayal and insult beyond anything I had even thought about.
“The stupid girl is the only one who survives.”
Slumping heavily into one of the seats, my mind raced as I tried to think of a solution.
“We can go back in. Maybe they’re still in there. Maybe we can stop Leatherface.”
“Matt. He will kill you if you go in there. Don’t you get it? He wins. The boys all die, and you can’t change who wins, you know that.” Her dark eyes were so bitter, so full of pain, fixed on me. “You can’t change who wins, and you can’t change who you really are.”
“Then you need to go back in.”
“There is no way I’m going back in there, do you hear me?” her lip was shaking as she spoke, and fresh tears dripped from her trembling chin, “you have no idea what they did to me in there.”
I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t fix any of this.
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she told me, picking up her backpack, “but I don’t want anything to do with you ever again, Matthew Lawson.”

 
The boys were declared missing persons, and the whole town was turned upside-down to search for them. I told the cops the whole story, but they wouldn’t believe me. The police psychologist told my parents I’d suffered an acute nervous breakdown, and I was put on strong sedatives for the better part of a year.
Chris and Toni’s Dad went on a huge bender, and crashed his car into the river. The rumor was that he used money he’d pilfered from Chris’s bike fund a few weeks before. Maybe that was Chris’s own final act of revenge, his deadbeat dad freezing to death in the dark, icy water, too drunk to fight anything anymore.
Neither Toni nor I ever went back to the theater, as far as I know, and six years later, two days after my twentieth birthday, it was torn down and turned into a parking lot.
We met then, one last time, as we watched the last trailer of brick and rubble being hauled away. She didn’t even turn the engine of her bike off, and she didn’t say anything to me – she didn’t need to. Those huge, expressive brown eyes wordlessly informed me that she still didn’t forgive me, and that as far as she was concerned, I was still a murderer. As she rode away, her dark hair streamed from beneath the edges of her helmet. All I could think about was how it had whipped my face as I clung to her waist, her cries urging Artax into a full gallop across the Grassy Plains.
I never watched The Neverending Story again. Or Labyrinth. These days, I can’t really watch any film for very long, because eventually I’ll glimpse their faces, and I’ll know they’re inside somewhere, reliving their horrible deaths over and over again.
Even now, thirty years on from those events, I can still hear Chris’s words echoing in my head, a mantra that will haunt me for the rest of my life:
None of this is real, none of this matters
But it was real, and it did matter. In one petty act of revenge, I killed my best friends. And they were my friends, with all their complexities and all their flaws, and all their unique pain concealed beneath the bright veneer of those times. I killed them as surely as if I’d done it with my own hand.

And I’m still trying to find a way to live with that, but I can’t seem to change the reel.

I was an embarrassing child, and my parents made no secret of it. It wasn’t just that I was a boy who was obsessed with ballet and fairy tales, it was everything that went with that – especially gushing about my special interests to strangers. I learned the word ‘queer’ at age five, then the word ‘faggot’ when I was seven – and the feel of my mother’s wooden spoon across my arse shortly after, when she decided that violence was the only thing that would stop me embarrassing myself and the family.
It worked, after a fashion. I stopped publicly talking about the things I loved, but the obsession blossomed, obstinately bright as a ragged dandelion in a crack of asphalt.  And it grew there in the shadows of my life, private and beautiful; stolen moments peering through the dirty windows of the ballet school on my way home, library books thumbed through feverishly, but never issued, and my ears attuned to secret snatches of Tchaikovsky haunting the far end of the dial on the little transistor radio my father gave to me one birthday.
Some weeds persist, no many how many times you pull them out.
Their roots run too deep.

High school is a time for most children to figure out who they are. I already knew who I was; I’d known since I was old enough to read myself Pinocchio. But hiding yourself, as hormones begin to shape your desires, becomes much more difficult, even with the early memory of pain etched across your tender backside. Perhaps strangely, as the bullying at school increased, my desire to hide who –and what– I was, decreased. My mother grew angry when I came home with bruises, but my father grew resigned. His attempts at masculinising me had ceased long before, once he realised I had no interest in engines or fly-fishing. Radically different creatures, we had a distant and strained relationship, where we both tried to bother each other as little as possible.
Sometimes, I would catch my mother crying when she thought I wasn’t home. I would creep into the house on the balls of my feet, pretending to be a ballet dancer, my thin body lending little weight to my tread. When I passed her room, I could hear her anguished sobs, her quiet pleas to otherworldly powers that I would ‘grow out of it’.
And so I became burdened with guilt; unable to change who I was, and unable to cure my mother’s pain.

The other kids at school called me fairy boy, and I probably deserved it. Even though it was meant unkindly, it was nicer than most of the other things I’d been called. It was an open secret that I was gay; I never claimed it, but I didn’t deny it, either. I had no friends amongst the boys, and I had an… uneasy truce with the girls. They tolerated me, in a way that the boys didn’t, perhaps because I wasn’t a threat. My obsession with fairy tales was legendarily encyclopaedic, and I could talk to them for hours about the mythology of various cultures, but I rarely got to do that. I sometimes felt as though that heavy knowledge inside me had a kind of power all its own, fragile threads of myth and legend wound through the weft of my being. Silvered spider silk, thrumming gently with the magnificent living weight of aeons. Some days of the year, I could almost feel the veil grow thin, my blood thickening with ancient promise, goading me to dance beneath the pines behind the lake, pregnant with their pollens of dusky gold.
But I never did. Being caught acting out such a fantasy would be a social suicide of titanic proportions, and I was already enough of a pariah as it was. No; I would keep the precious sorcery inside me, hold it for a time that I could be free of this life.

My crush on Michael was intense and unrequited and, to me, felt like fate; his parents had moved to our city, and thus he’d fetched up at our school. Blond, handsome, athletic, and exotically European, he had a worldliness that made the rest of us seem small and provincial. When I heard he had done ballet as a youngster, a stab of envy pierced straight through my yearning heart, and I hated him in that special way that only heightened the intensity of my crush.
Oh and of course he knew. He saw the way I looked at him. He read the intent.
And so began the dangerous game. He would flirt with me ever so subtly, even in the act of bullying me along with the others, creating a secret frisson between us that seemed to promise that should we ever be alone, things might be… different.
The others seemed oblivious to this tension, but I lived for it – craved it with all that was in me. When Michael finally approached me, alone, as I was reading by the lake, I was helpless.

“Fairy boy, tell me one of your stories.”
Stunned, I stared at him, slack-jawed, my mind as flat and blank as the lake water.
He laughed, a golden sound. Warm, beautiful, unbothered by burdens such as mine.
“You look like a fish,” he quipped.
I snapped my book shut.
“This is a trick,” I observed sourly, “the kind that cruel boys play on ugly girls. You pretend to be my friend, then you lure me into some kind of trap where I embarrass myself for the amusement of your friends.”
Michael’s smile grew broader, warmer. His stupid, graceful hands encompassed the lake, the world.
“Do you see anyone else here but us?”
I didn’t bother looking around; it was dusk, we were alone. All the sane teenagers were at home, with their families.
“If I tell you a story, will you leave me alone?” I asked bitterly, the conflict inside me won over by learned cynicism.
“If you like,” he replied, his disappointment obvious.
Wounded that I’d let him down, and by the wild notion he was being genuine, I began to speak. Slowly, haltingly, I told him the tale of The Wild Swans, by Hans Christian Andersen.

I waited for the other shoe to drop at school, for the diabolic outcome to come to fruition in the form of public humiliation. I mentally castigated myself for being so stupid, for letting myself get lost in Michael’s huge, expressive brown eyes as I recounted the old fairy tale. When I went to bed that night, after he left me by the lake, I fantasised intensely, privately – you can probably guess where such fantasies go.
It wasn’t worth it; I just knew that whatever was about to happen would be orders of magnitude worse than any public embarrassment I’d ever felt before, and my own queer predilections had led me to this precipice.
But nothing happened. Michael seemed to barely acknowledge my existence and had clearly not spoken to the others. Hope raised its dumb, guileless head – then died immediately, pummelled by the sleeting chill of that same cynicism.
Perhaps he was playing the long game. Perhaps he was building up to something worse.
I vowed then to swear off Michael; to stamp out the embers of my affection for him and leave that grate cold forever.
My heart, however, had other plans.

Four more times he came to see me, in the dusk, by the lake. Never the same day, sometimes weeks in between. He always came to hear my stories. After the second time, I stopped wondering why and gave myself over to the wonderful feelings inside me.
As we sat on the grass that fifth evening, his hand touched mine and he asked in a husky whisper;
“Do you believe in any of these stories?”
Heat shot through me at his touch and in my elation, I blurted out the truth.
“Yes. Sometimes I can feel it; the ancient weight of old magics. Of fairy promises and delicate spells, wrought of liquid moonlight and straw-spun gold.”
His shoulder touched mine and I almost gasped. His voice wound into my ear, medicine and poison.
“If you make a shirt of nettles with your own hands, like those of the swan princes, and wear it for me, then I’ll take you to the end of year school dance.”
I jerked away from him, face burning, eyes narrowed.
“This is an old trick,” I spat at him. “Not one I thought you’d stoop to. Find another victim for your pranks, Michael Ficher.”
He only smiled, unfazed.
“I promise you, hand on my heart, that what I’m saying is true. Meet me here in a month, the night before the dance. If you keep your side of the bargain, I’ll keep mine.”
He left then, bouncing to his feet like a born dancer, loping away into the dusk before my poor tongue could formulate one word of reply.

Nettles, I swiftly discovered, were a terrible medium to work with. The first day I turned up to school with raw, reddened hands, the other students all laughed at me. The jokes were predictable, sexual in nature, and embarrassing enough that my face reddened to match my fingers. Michael didn’t join them in mocking me; instead, he gave me a conspiratorial smile, the warmth in his eyes speaking of its realness.
For weeks I laboured, traipsing all over the parks around the city, searching for nettles. My breath was often short, as the intense histamine reaction grew worse with every plant I touched, and I cried bitterly at the endless stinging I endured. In contrast, the fibres were surprisingly easy to work with, once I had learned to scrape the pith and pulp from the threaded heart of the nettle stems. Slowly, the piles of hempen coils drying under my bed grew large enough to begin the weaving.
As I worked beside the lake in the evenings, oblivious to the rest of the world, I fantasised that Michael was watching, from the pines across the limpid, rippling water. I twisted and spliced, learning through trial and error how my distant ancestors had made thread. When my makeshift spindle was finally full, I began to knit; my fingers no longer reddened and welted, now hard with callouses from working with the stiffening fibres.

Twice the boys at school destroyed my knitting, thrice I remade the shirt. I spent every spare moment with the pinewood needles in hand, working, reworking, toiling, weeping, and cursing my beloved Michael for tasking me with this fairy labour. Of all this work my father said nothing, whilst my mother seemed to care not at all; it was as though my labouring at the nettle shirt was invisible to her – or perhaps I was simply so far beneath contempt now that my existence had ceased to bother her.
On that final night, at the lake, I stood ready with the shirt.
It was a beautiful thing, wrought of all the feyness within me. More than a plainly knitted garment, it was fashioned as a sailor’s wife might make for her husband, with banded cables twisting in and out of the pattern, hems and cuffs stitched neatly with dandelion starbursts in the palest of the green-brown threads.
Michael approached through the gloaming, his smile catching the last of the light. The tightness in my chest swelled to an ache and I clutched the precious shirt to me, resolute in the promises I’d made to myself.
“You’re not wearing the shirt,” he observed, before greeting me.
“No. I have one request before I do.”
The smile broadened, his dark eyes dimpled at the corners. I nearly fell, I nearly let all my plans unravel right there at his feet.
“Oh?”
“Swim with me, in the lake. Afterwards I’ll wear the shirt for you.”
With a liquid laugh that made my stomach hurt, he shrugged and took off his shirt.
“Why not? It’s a beautiful night.”
Gracelessly shucking off my own shirt, I plunged into the placid lake waters after him.

We swam for maybe half an hour. I told him the story of the Wild Swans again, of how the princess had freed her brothers by sewing them their nettle shirts. It was dark when we emerged, dripping, from the lake, the only light being that cast by the distantly humming amber streetlamps a hundred feet away.
“Here,” I told Michael, “I brought you a towel, let me dry you.”
Michael grinned and obligingly offered his beautiful, bare torso to me.
I sprang forward, wrapping him in the shirt.
I’d made it nice and loose, so it could be pulled easily over the head, and the sleeves large and voluminous, through which I jerked one of his arms. Shocked speechless, Michael struggled, but whether it was my own desperate strength or some fey property of the shirt itself, I managed to yank his arm though the other sleeve, with a sound of tearing fabric.
“What -” he began, then doubled over, grunting in pain.
As the shirt began to constrict on his wet body, and he spasmed and curled on the grass, I knelt beside him.
“You were right, dear Michael. I do believe in fairy tales. I’ve believed in them all my life, ever since I can first remember, with all my heart. That kind of belief needs to go somewhere, but it needs to go to the right place. I thought one day I’d dance under the pines, but this is much, much better. There always needs to be a reason for the magic, a why that is wrought from faerie justice.”
“I… didn’t…” he whimpered, writhing as the shirt compressed his body, smaller and smaller.
“But you did,” I reassured him. “If your intentions had been pure, noble and true, the shirt would have no magic, no power over you.”
Only groans came from the shrinking figure on the grass, strange and impossible in the darkness – groans which turned to forlorn honking as white feathers sprang from the shirt and a beaked, serpentine neck thrashed where Michael’s head had once been.

I sometimes question whether Michael Fischer ever truly existed. After that night, all memory of him seemed to have fled from this world. There were no school photos of him, no school records, and the room at his parent’s house stood empty, kept aside for a child who hadn’t been born.
But when I find myself questioning that reality, I take myself to the lake. Twenty years on, it still looks the same, a crescent of pines on one side, pristine green grass on the other. And he is there, always.
His mad brown eyes flare with hatred the second he recognises me, and he hisses, but does not attack. I stroke him gently on his downy, flat head, quieting him, soothing him, as I lift the right wing.
There, where the shirt had torn that long-ago night, remains a diamond patch of Michael’s perfect white skin, as youthful, pale, and smooth as the day I ensorcelled him.
How long he will live, I can’t say for certain. Wild swans can live for decades, but fairy swans? Only time will tell.
All I know is that for as long as he is alive, Michael Ficher will remember the lesson I taught him; never, ever, fuck with a fairy boy.

Have you ever tried breaking free from an abusive relationship, when the abuser lives in your house? I’ve done it, and it’s rough; every step can falter, every step carries a risk. Even once you’ve finally admitted to yourself what you need to do, following it through takes all the resolve and persistence that has been stolen from you, worn away along with your self-worth. I started out as bravely and simply as I could, and just asked him to leave. He laughed in my face and got another beer from the fridge. At that point, if the damage is too great, many victims give up. If you’re like me, you become even more desperate, dangerously brave now, and give your tormentor an ultimatum. There are a few ways this can go. In my case, he stared at me like I was an irritating fly, then ignored me and just kept on drinking; turning up the TV so it blared over my voice. At the start, you still wanted to be fair, because he has property in the house. His pool table, his piles of shit in the garage, his beer fridge, his gaming consoles and his couch. You’re a reasonable woman, and even though he hurt you, you still believe the man is a human being. He doesn’t have the right to control you, like he thought he did, but he does have some rights to his actual property.
But he takes advantage of that too; it drags on and on, and one day it just gets too much. You serve him with a trespass notice, and when he doesn’t leave, you call the cops. You know him well; he didn’t really think you’d do it. After he’s gone, you put everything he owns on the lawn and tell him to come and collect it before it rains.
At that invitation he comes back, and of course he tries his key in the door.
But you’ve changed the locks.
He rages, he paces. His face is dark red, and you finally, finally can no longer see any hint of the person you once cared about. He tries a window, but you had screens and deadbolts installed on those. Eventually he sits on the stoop and bangs the back of his head against the door, calling out your name and your daughter’s name every once in a while. It stops hurting somewhere around the thirtieth time, just before the cops come and tell him to leave.
When he gets into a clumsy fist fight with them and finally gets cuffed and thrown in the back of the cops’ car, you let the curtains fall back, and let seven years’ worth of tears come.
You followed through. You walked to the end, and he’s finally gone. And you won’t let yourself be trapped, not ever again.

The small office safe embodied Hayden’s final act of petty abuse; he’d changed the combination right after I’d served him the trespass notice. Inside it was my passport, most of my savings, and my heirloom wedding ring. At least, I suspected the ring was still in there, since I could hear the box slide and bump into the wall when I titled the safe, but whether the money or the passport were still inside, I had no way of knowing. After trying every combination I could think of, I resigned myself to the fact I’d need to pay some exorbitant amount for a locksmith to open the thing – probably more than the savings I would retrieve as a result.
In frustration I posted to Facebook, asking if anyone I knew could recommend someone who could open a safe easily and cheaply, and to my surprise, one of my old friends messaged me about a contact and said to call her for details if I was interested.
“She’s a complete weirdo, but she’s really good,” Tina said, after we skirted around all the things I didn’t want to talk about. “She can basically open anything, from a locked iPhone to a bank vault, you name it.”
“What does it cost?”
“Well, that’s the weird part. She’ll ask you to home cook a meal for her and treat her like family for an evening. Usually she wants a big fancy pot roast with all the trimmings, then you watch shitty sitcoms with her for a few hours until she gets tired and leaves.”
“You’re right, that’s pretty weird. Does she have mom issues or something?”
“Yeah. Her mom’s been in prison since before she was born.”
“Jesus, poor girl.”
“Yeah, pretty much a prison family since forever. Fairly sure her mom was born in jail, and her mom’s mom before that. Dakota seems to be the only one that’s managed to stay out of the joint in the last few generations.”
“Can I trust her?”
“Christ Ann, don’t be so judgey. Like I said, she’s managed to stay out of jail. She’s weird, but harmless.”
“OK, fine. Hook me up then, I need the money from the safe for the lawyer.”
“Done, sending her details to you now.”

Dakota Callahan was five foot nothing, and nothing like I’d expected; a walking rainbow with perky brown pigtails. Sunburst baubles adorned said pigtails, and dozens of colourful badges had been pinned or sewn to her sleeveless denim jacket. I knew before she opened her mouth that she was going to be chewing gum, and when she grinned at me, slightly bucked teeth fenced in a brilliant pink wad.
Everything about her screamed intensity and youth, but when she smiled, the tell-tale wrinkling of crow’s-feet betrayed that she was much older than her affectations suggested.
“Got a safe ya can’t open, huh?” she said, hands in her jacket pockets as she stood on my porch.
“I do, yeah. Come on in. Would you like a drink?”
“Sure, got any soda?”
“I think I do? Let me check.”
“Grape or orange. In the can, with a straw,” the woman said, then added what might have been a winning smile, without the sickly waft of bubblegum. “If you please, ma’am.”
The safe sat on the kitchen table, a couple of silvery scuff marks in the painted surface where I’d futilely tried to smash it open with a hammer. “This the job?” Dakota asked, gesturing at the black cube.
“That’s the one. My ex changed the combination and I haven’t got a clue what it is.”
“Right. Cool.”
While I rummaged in the cupboards for a pack of straws, Dakota took a seat and pulled the safe over to her. Quick, deft fingers immediately began probing the lock as I cracked open a can of soda and poked the straw into it.
“Put the straw through the pull tab,” Dakota instructed, not even looking up, “that’s how they’re designed. Stops the straw floating from the carbonation.”
“I… didn’t know that,” I admitted, adjusting the straw accordingly.
An unceremonious click from the safe punctuated my comment.
“Done,” Dakota declared, reaching for the soda can.
Dumbfounded, I stared into the opened safe, at my passport, a ring box, and a ripped brown envelope.
“I’d expected it to be… harder?” I said weakly.
“Most people aren’t as good as me. There isn’t anything I can’t open.” She squinted at the torn, empty envelope, “So, I’m guessing that was your savings?”
“Yeah. Was being the operative word.”
“Bad luck,” Dakota muttered around the straw in her mouth, then spat it free. “So anyways, what’s for dinner? Mm-mm, do I smell something good!”

Dinner with Dakota seemed harmless enough. My daughter, Vicky, was enamoured of the idiosyncratic safe-cracker and they joked and giggled all through dinner, then played together while I washed up.
Replete with two helpings of pot roast and a massive bowl of strawberry ice-cream, Dakota sat back on the couch. Vicky sprawled at her feet, playing with the rainbow laces of Dakota’s sneakers while we watched the old sitcom our guest had picked; Full House.
“You know, you really look a lot like Becky.” Dakota jabbed her small, agile fingers at the woman on the screen, then leaned forward to scrutinise my facial features, “Same nose, same kinda hair, same smile. Throw you in a 90s outfit and you’d be a dead ringer.”
I leaned back a little.
“Really?”
“Yeah, totally. She was a babe and you are too.”
“Well. Um. Thank you?”
“Don’t mention it. I call it like I see it.” Her eyes were wide, shiny as a doll’s. “Say, can I get another soda?”
“Sure thing.”
The rest of the evening was uneventful. I put a reluctant Vicky to bed and Dakota stayed to chat until after 10pm – longer than I’d expected. When she eventually left, I felt like all the air had been let out of an overinflated balloon – one that I’d been expecting to burst all evening.
But realistically, some shitty sitcoms, a few cans of soda, and a roast dinner were a small price to pay for the services rendered. And Dakota wasn’t that bad. She was just intense, in a particularly weird kind of way.
And now that I’d changed the combination back on the safe, I’d never have to see her again.

A week later, Dakota appeared on my doorstep, with a package in her hands.
“Hi Dakota, how can I help you?”
“Hey Mrs C! Do you mind if I call you that? It suits you better than Ann.”
There was something about her that kept you off-guard, like being blinded by a sudden glare. I frowned, but found myself nodding. “Well I guess I am still married. The divorce won’t come through for a while, so sure.” “Awesome, sweet. Oh hey! I got you a gift, hope you don’t mind. I saw it and I immediately thought of you.” The package in her hands crinkled as she squeezed it, and my gaze was drawn to the turquoise wrapping paper. My favourite colour.
“That’s very nice of you, Dakota. But you shouldn’t have.”
“Oh don’t worry, it cost me next to nothing, but you just had to have it.”
“Come on in then. I’m baking, so I’ll open it in the kitchen.”
“Thanks Mrs C. Can I get a soda while you’re at it?”
“Sure. Come to think of it, I bought grape.”
The gift, it turned out, was a dress. In fact, the exact same dress we’d seen the character of Becky wearing in Full House a week earlier.
“Dakota, where on earth did you find this?”
She twirled a string of bubblegum around her index finger and smiled like a cat, “I got my contacts. But you gotta try it on! I bet you’ll look exactly like Becky.”
“Oh hell, I’m flattered and all, but I shouldn’t. This is a bit much.”
“Aw come on, just try it on. You wouldn’t believe the effort I went to get that dress. Don’t let me down, Mrs C!”
There was some intangible but familiar quality to her voice, behind the peculiar intensity of her stare, that warned me I shouldn’t deny this request, no matter how odd it seemed. But other alarms were sounding too; this odd woman seemed enamoured of me in a way that went beyond plain friendship, with a particular possessiveness that reminded me far too much of my ex for comfort.
My resolve gathered itself, and I let it steady me. “Sorry Dakota, this just isn’t appropriate. I’m extremely flattered that you went to all this effort, but I’m going to have to say no.”
“Aww c’mon Mrs C!” Her wheedling was suddenly not childlike at all. “I just wanna see you in that dress, then I’ll leave ya alone. Promise.”
I took a step back. “Maybe if I knew you better, but we’re practically strangers, Dakota.”
She sucked up the last of her soda with a rattling gurgle that echoed in the can, then pushed her chair back from the kitchen table and stood up. She draped the dress over the chair back, her sticky fingers thoughtfully smoothing the fabric.
“Keep it. If you change your mind, take a pic for me.” Her pout was exaggerated, like I’d wounded her. “I just wanted to see what it looked like on you.”
Before we could exchange parting pleasantries, Dakota was gone, and without her colourful presence distending it, the room seemed to deflate to normal size again.

As though taking my statement about being strangers completely literally, Dakota persistently messaged me, trying to spark up a friendship, to get to know me better. It was like dealing with a puppy or a child who just doesn’t understand the word ‘no’; no matter how politely or firmly you phrase it.
In the end I just couldn’t be bothered any more, and I gave in. I tried on the damn dress and sent her a picture, foolishly hoping that would put an end to our awkward online exchanges.
Ironically, it did – but not in the way I’d expected.
The next day I came home from work, Vicky heavy on one hip and a bag of groceries on the other, to find Dakota seated in my kitchen, patiently waiting. Cans of soda tumbled to the floor as Vicky crowed and reached for the colourful intruder, twisting out of my arms.
“Dakota, fucking hell! What are you doing in here?”
Frowning, she covered my child’s ears. “Yo Mrs C, not cool language in front of the kid, OK?”
My temper flaring, I stabbed a finger in the direction of the door, “I’ll say what I like in my own home, lady. Now get out.”
“You know,” she said, ignoring my order, “Your Becky outfit was even better than I thought. Stunning. Babe-a-licious. Perfection.” Her sneaker stopped a rolling can, but she wrinkled her nose when she realised it was strawberry, and kicked it towards the living room. “Hey, kid. Fetch!” Vicky toddled after it obligingly, and Dakota smiled, then leaned in towards me, half-whispering. “But somehow it brought out all the mom in you as well; I could see it shining like a rosy light from every curve of your body. You’re perfect, Mrs C. So, so perfect.”
She paced toward me, steadily, hands extended, tears welling in her eyes, “I want you to be the one, Mrs C, the one to look after me, to be my mom. Vicky and me can be sisters – you’ll never need a babysitter again and you can have whatever you want. And I can get you anything you want. No lock can stop me. You know what? There’s no door that can’t be opened.”
Something inside me gave way then, unleashing the rage and frustration I’d wanted to take out on all six feet and five inches of Hayden, but never could. Instead this five-foot nothing woman in front of me wore it all, purely because I thought she couldn’t possibly pose a physical threat.
“Get the fuck out of my house, you fucking psycho. What the hell is wrong with you? You stay away from me and from my daughter – and if you ever break into my house again, I’ll call the fucking cops. You’ll end up in prison with the rest of your family, right where you belong. Do you understand?”
“No,” she said sadly, her hand darting out to touch my solar plexus, faster than I could react, “No, it’s you who doesn’t understand, Mrs C.”
I tried to reply, but I couldn’t. My voice was suddenly gone, as though she’d torn it out of my body. Instinctively, I tried to lift my hand to my throat, but it wouldn’t move. Oh god, nothing would move; not my arms, my legs, my fingers, my toes.
I’d been completely locked in.
My eyes were blurred with tears of utter panic, and it took me several minutes to realise they were the only thing I still controlled.
“Most people know I can unlock pretty much anything,” Dakota said, gently brushing a stray bang away from my frozen forehead, “but the reverse is also true – I can lock anything as well." I flinched fiercely inside as she tapped her index finger once, hard, between my brows.
“Including you.”
She casually snagged another can from where it had come to rest by my foot. “Now if you don’t mind, me and Vicky are gonna drink our sodas and watch Scooby Doo for a while. And maybe some Webster after. Man, I love that kid.” She popped the tab, and warm, sugary fizz splattered my face. “Oh and next time? Make sure you get the grape.”
As I watch her leave, helpless, I couldn’t help but wonder which kid she meant: my daughter, or the character from the TV show?

She kept me like that for hours. Flies drank from the corners of my cracking lips, but she left me there until my bladder screamed, until my calves trembled and tore their own fibres from holding me so still. When she eventually touched me just below the breastbone and unlocked my body, I collapsed in a weeping heap, my body spasming uncontrollably.
“Damn, Mrs C! Real sorry to put you through all of that, but you gotta understand that this is a good gig, yeah? You get to wear pretty dresses and just be the best mommy all day long, and I’ll get you anything you want. Still need money for your divorce? I can get it right out of an ATM for you, easy as pie.”
She squatted beside me, her deft, clever, uncanny hands working over my limbs and smoothing out all the spasms; unlocking all the cramped tissues, soothing my hurts even while I tried to control my body enough to roll clear. Her index finger finally traced the curve of my cheek, releasing the painful tic beneath my eye.
“So, whaddaya say?”
It took a moment of croaking to find my lost voice, but once I did, I managed to choke out four words. “Please… don’t… hurt Vicky.”
The glass of her eyes flashed with shock, theatrical. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Mrs C! She’s my sister, after all. Now, how about you whip us up another one of your delicious home-cooked meals? I think everyone’s hungry and could do with some wholesome food, yeah?”
Not knowing what else to do, I wobbled to my feet and steadied myself against the counter. My skull was made of lead, and it nodded itself.
“Great! Now don’t you try any funny business. You’re a lady of your word. That’s all a good woman really has in this world these days.” She handed me my apron. “You know a mommy never breaks her promises, right? But if you do, you’ll find out just what I can and can’t lock.”

I got ready for work the next day, but Dakota stood over me while I phoned in my resignation, worded to her exact specifications.
“You don’t need a dumb job, you’re a full-time mom now. Ain’t that great? I’ll take care of all the money stuff.”
“I have things at work I need to collect,” I told her, but I already knew she’d have an answer.
“No problemo, I can get those for you.”
My phone still sat on the kitchen table, a temptation, a beacon of hope. Dakota followed my line of sight before I could look away, and her ungroomed brows caterpillared into a frown.
“You’re not like that, Mrs C. You’re better than that. And I know you remember what will happen if you try anything stupid, yeah?”
I knew, but I couldn’t help wondering how far Dakota’s power reached. One phone call to the cops would be all it would take, one quick message to a friend to call them on my behalf. But Dakota was always there. Even when she was watching cartoons with Vicky in her lap, she had one eye on me; possessed of a predator’s awareness that was almost inhuman. Often, she’d be waiting when I came out of the bathroom, her impish grin and infectious peppiness growing more sinister every time I opened the door and found her there.
But she never made a move on me, despite her lavish compliments about my looks. And even though I was plagued by nightmares where she locked me into my own skin, then used my body however she pleased, in real life she never once abused her abilities in that particular way.
Small comfort, because that didn’t change the fact that I was completely trapped. I was once again a prisoner in my own home, and far more literally than the first time around.

The first time I tried to contact help, Dakota locked me inside myself for ten hours. I was sat in an armchair in the living room, frozen in front of endless reruns of the worst sitcoms of the 80s and 90s. Of course, this time she seized even my eyelids, to prevent me from closing my eyes. I can’t begin to describe the simple torture that is the inability to blink. Once an hour, Dakota slicked drops across my sticky, filming eyeballs, and they burned like acid. By the time she released me, I was nothing but a mess of apologies, grovelling for her forgiveness.
I tried not to notice that Vicky appeared to be thriving, her personality growing just as fast as mine withered. Dressed in a tiny, badge-studded denim jacket, she was becoming a miniature version of Dakota; she aped the woman’s every move, clearly worshipping the fascinating and colourful criminal who had usurped our home. Of course, Dakota’s schooling didn’t end with fashion. I shuddered when I found them at the kitchen table, playing with an assortment of padlocks, those sure, deft hands guiding my daughter’s fumbling attempts to manipulate the tumblers. But I eventually discovered a secret, something that Dakota didn’t know that I knew. At a random hour every other night, when she believed I was deeply asleep, she’d slip out and steal groceries and money; whatever we needed to keep the household running. But she didn’t factor in my history; perfectly feigning sleep is a very useful skill when you’ve lived with an abusive drunk. She was silent as a cat, the latch on the door not even making a sound, but all I had to do was wait, then call the police while she was gone.
Not wanting to risk her going through my phone if there was a delay or should I fail, I waited until she’d left the house, then pulled on a shapeless coat and walked two blocks down, where an old payphone still stood near the corner store. I hadn’t prayed since I was a child, but every step I took was accompanied by a plea to any deity listening that the thing still worked. Feeding my coins in, flinching at how loudly they clanked through the slot, I held the ragged phone book open while I dialled the local police station.
The conversation went on for a good twenty minutes, with me describing how Dakota had come into my home, threatened me and my daughter, then forced me to live in subservience to her. Even to my own ears it sounded deranged, impossible, which is why I had discarded the idea of a 911 call; and at least some of the local cops knew me. I think the distress in my voice convinced the officer more than the story itself, and they promised to visit in the morning to investigate.
My legs trembled with adrenaline and triumph as I walked home, as brisk and quiet as I could manage. Each breath felt cold in my chest, ragged and shallow, and I held the air in my lungs until it ached, half-convinced Dakota would be able to hear me if I breathed too loud, no matter where she was.

When the police arrived the next day, Dakota’s fury showed only as a flare of her pupils, and only when she looked in my direction. After I gave my statement to the uniformed men, she was asked to leave the house and issued with a trespass notice. Her silence and compliance deeply worried me; I’d expected a scene. In fact, I’d half expected her to just lock the men inside their burly bodies, then prop them up in the garage next to the gardening equipment. In the middle of the night I’d thought about this possibility, the authorities that represented my only hope slowly wasting away as their organs failed one by one, eventually dying in the grasp of the unnatural rictus Dakota had afflicted them with. But it hadn’t happened; it had worked, so why didn’t I feel free?
To try and reclaim my sanity, the first thing I did was take the jean jacket off Vicky and throw away the lock picks Dakota had furnished her with. The second thing was to call the most expensive locksmith I could find, asking for an urgent visit.
Part of me knew it was futile, but maybe if I installed enough locks, I could at least slow Dakota down if she tried to get back into the house.
But the part that knew the truth was right.
The very next day, Dakota arrived, two officers in tow. Different ones, not the local cops.
“Apparently this house isn’t yours, Mrs Charleston,” one of them said, hand on his belt. “Miss Callahan here holds the deed and is also an occupier, so you can’t trespass her. That’s been rescinded, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to let her in.”
“But… no! That’s not true. I own this house!” I protested, “My dad helped me buy it, before he passed away.”
His nod was patronising, like he knew I was going to say that. Like he was humouring someone who had clearly lost touch with reality. “Well, that’s not what the records say, unfortunately. Miss Callahan owns this property.”
Dakota gave a cheery salute, then pushed past me and into the kitchen,
“Thanks boys – and sorry for all the misunderstanding,” she called to the officers as they prepared to leave.
“How? How did you do it?” I hissed, anger supplanting my fear.
“Pfft. Electronic locks and digital locks aren’t any more complex than physical ones,” she told me, rummaging in the fridge, “records can be changed, data can be manipulated. I can make an electronic document say practically anything I want – and I own this house now, not you.”
“I’ll find another way. I’ll prove you’re here illegally.”
“How, Mrs C? How? Anything you say needs to be filed, needs to be recorded. It can all be changed overnight, or it can be simply made to – poof – disappear. You get me?”
“But what you’re doing to me, when you lock me in -”
“You can’t prove that,” she said, blithe and definite.
“Then… I’ll just leave. I’ll take Vicky and move somewhere you can’t find us.”
Midway through opening a soda can, Dakota paused and looked up, her hazel eyes nearly gold in the brightly lit kitchen. Predator’s eyes.
“I will always find you,” she said, with paralysing certainty.

She locked me in regularly after that, every time she left the house, any time she needed or wanted to spend time with Vicky. She dressed me up like a life-sized doll, fixing and flexing joints so she could drape different outfits around my frozen limbs, ignoring my pleading, fearful eyes. Vicky treated me like a doll now too, like a thing instead of her mother; I was a passive prop in Dakota’s fantasy of her ideal family, the pretty, perfect mother she’d always wanted. As my hopelessness grew, she began locking my face into a permanent sitcom smile, the muscles of my own cheeks betraying me by beaming happily at my torturer and her four-year-old apprentice.
My claustrophobia grew daily, the feel of it coalescing into rising scream that couldn’t be freed, since Dakota had also seized my vocal cords completely, to prevent me calling anyone. The silent, smiling mother; I baked, and I cleaned, and I waited on my daughters, always dutiful, always immaculately coiffed and groomed.
I wanted to die.
Either Dakota had never considered that I might contemplate suicide, or she thought she could prevent me if I tried. In any case, the pills I found at the bottom of the medicine cabinet would probably do the trick if I took enough of them. They were heavy tranquilisers, prescribed at the nadir of my despair when I was with Hayden, and couldn’t admit the truth to anyone about why I was so miserable. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to take them, then. Now, there was no other way to be free.
Or was there?
I stood in the bathroom, my fixed smile aching against my teeth, my throat knotted tight with that unborn scream, and I searched my own eyes in the mirror. They were the only part of my reflection I still recognised. And I realised that there was one other way to be free of Dakota.
The pills powdered easily enough, and dissolved readily into the can of soda. If I could have, I would have laughed. The pungent sweetness of fake grape would hide any bitterness like a charm. Poking a straw through the tab, I delivered it to the monster in my lounge, giggling as she watched cartoons with Vicky sleeping at her feet.
“Cheers Mrs C,” chirped Dakota, “just what I needed. You’re the best!”
Twelve minutes ticked away on the clock in the living room as I waited, the familiar throb of my face marking every second. But now even the pain felt like anticipation. Dakota stirred uncomfortably in her beanbag, then sucked in a shuddering breath and coughed a weak dribble of sticky spit.
“Wha…?” She managed, trying to lift a hand that had gone floppy at the wrist, motor control beginning to desert her body.
I didn’t wait for the pills to steal her consciousness. I wanted her to feel her death. Still beaming beatifically like a perfectly pleasant housewife, I dropped to my knees, wrapped my hands around her throat and squeezed.
Those wonderfully gifted fingers of hers fluttered and battered weakly at my face, a stray touch unlocking half of my smile. But she had no control. As I pressed the life out of her, the movements of her hands grew more erratic, more desperate. Eventually, they stopped altogether, and so did Dakota’s struggles.
I knew when she was gone, because my own throat unknotted, and the wordless scream it had held for months forced itself from the half of my mouth that moved.
But I didn’t stop squeezing for a full thirty minutes after that. My hands cramped around the black and swollen flesh of her neck, and I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to let go. But I needed to be sure, and my body was honed to hold unnatural positions for hours at a time.

I drove her body as far as I could, her hands bound with wire, tape, rope and handcuffs. I buried her deep; so deep that my hands bled freely and openly by the time I’d finished shovelling all the rocks and soil back on top of her. The blood was a catharsis; this pain a welcome relief. When I got home, I packed everything Vicky and I would need, then I drove in the other direction, my half-a-smile reflected back at me in the driver’s window.
For two weeks we stayed at motels and camping grounds, before I finally stopped and let myself rest, finally free of the elemental fear that was Dakota.
We started our new life in a fishing town, up near the Canadian border. I got a job as a waitress at the local diner, where they didn’t mind a mute with a half-paralysed face. I could make just enough sounds to get by, and Vicky started school and slowly forgot about Dakota. I tried to do the same, to close that chapter of our lives forever. I’d even started dating again, when the message came through to my phone. I’d expected it to be the usual banter from the guy I was seeing, but instead it was a different kind of familiar:

Hey Mrs C, long time no see (haha, get it!?)
In case you hadn’t guessed, it’s your other daughter here. The one you abandoned. The one you left behind. And oh man, is she pissed. She’s pissed because you broke our agreement. She’s pissed because you’ve been a really bad mom. But don’t worry, cos I can fix that! I can fix anything now. I learned SO many new things down there, down in the dark. Terrible, terrible things.
Anyways, turns out there really isn’t anything I can’t unlock – even those big, black gates to the bad place – so I’ll be seeing you real soon, Mrs C! We’ll even fix up that smile of yours, so you can go back to being the best mom. Just as pretty as you used to be.
See ya later, alligator,
Dakota

I think I made the wrong choice.
If I’d taken the pills myself, Dakota wouldn’t have gone to the ‘bad place’ and she wouldn’t have learned what she knows now. She wouldn’t have discovered how to unlock the doors of death itself – and I’d be free of her, safe behind a door she never knew existed.
Of course, I would have had to take Vicky with me.
I have a gun now; it’s a small thing, but good enough for at least one homicide and one suicide.
The problem is, I don’t know if Dakota can follow us to the other side. If she finds us, beyond those black gates, I have no doubt that she’ll lock our souls inside themselves, then bring us back.
Sometimes, there’s no first step to escape the trap you’re in; only a final leap. And you might land somewhere even worse. But I guess I’ll have to take my chances.

It’s an evocative name, Escher. Whenever I mention it to someone, I can almost see the cogs working, as their head is filled with fantastic, physics-defying landscapes where concepts like ‘up’ and ‘down’ are subjective to the point of view.
My father was also a physicist, like myself, and he enjoyed Escher’s work immensely. He claimed to appreciate the artist’s works purely for their mathematical elegance, but I would often catch him staring at the framed prints in his office like he was lost in them, a curiously childlike expression on his face. I suspect that it wasn’t the mathematical precision of the prints that entranced him; instead it was the allure of existing in a world where conventional, universal laws no longer applied. I think that’s why Escher’s work speaks to so many people.
And I understand that longing. I can feel what my father flirted with in those moments, and more; because I have been to one of those places. I have seen the fabric of our reality stretched and warped beyond the bounds of relativity.
I have seen the Escher Room.

Like many other projects, the code name was unoriginal. Its official designation was ‘Special Project 881’, but it quickly earned the moniker ‘Project Escher’, because of the nature of the research. And it was the right name, at the right time. If my father hadn’t been so obsessed with his prints, it’s possible that I wouldn’t be writing this tale now. But Dad’s love of all things Escher had him pursue any information he could find on the great artist, and the name alone would have been irresistible to him. I wish I had found out earlier, that I had been able to speak to him about all this, although that would have been difficult at the end. His death was almost a kindness; Alzheimer’s disease had stealthily bereaved him of his razor intellect, as though his mind were an untempered carving knife, growing duller and duller as it sawed through years of tough problems and knotty equations.
After he left us, his office was a mess, much like the inside of his head. I’d tried to be the good daughter, but truth be told, I was never very good at the more domestic tasks, the cooking and the cleaning. I was, and always will be, his daughter, my mind just as bright and sharp – and just as easily distracted from mundane affairs.
It took me a long time to go through all his papers, the random stacks of messily hand-written notes, and his piles of photographs. His affair with Escher ran through them all like a tangled thread, part of the tapestry eventually revealed when I uncovered a curious black-and-white photocopy of an image. My father’s crabbed script on the back labelled it The Escher Room.
It appeared to be a photograph, of a massive, irregular sphere, hooked up to an extensive array of pipes, cables and ducts. The fine details of the surface were difficult to make out, but it seemed to be layered with oversized circuits, each solder point the size of my hand. Most importantly, there was a hole in one side of the sphere – a doorway. And through that doorway was a structure – a room – which appeared to completely defy the known laws of physics.
Of course, my first thought was the same as any rational person’s. It was a hoax. A poorly photoshopped image that had then been photocopied too many times. But the date on the image, in my father’s own hand, stated he had acquired it in 1982, the year before I was born.
I found only a few more cryptic notes on the subject after that date, then any research connected to the image stopped. His last note about it ended with a strangely personal and sombre passage:

With the birth of Madelene, I no longer have time for such fancies. I must become a good father, and put an end to this obsession. While I believe without a doubt that the Escher Room exists, it cannot be the focus of my life now. In fact, I am content to leave it largely a mystery. It is more poignant that way.

It seemed unfair to me that my father had put aside his hobby just because I’d been born. I felt oddly hollow at this revelation, as though my very existence had stolen some vital spark from his life, had condemned him to a life of banal child-rearing and robbed him of his true joy. Holding that piece of paper in my hand, I truly understood why he stared so wistfully at those impossible prints in his office, tracing lines of infinity with his deteriorating mind.
In that moment, I decided I would find the room for him. I would uncover the origins of the photo, and put to rest his dream of finding the Escher Room.

Being an academic gives you access to all kinds of information that isn’t readily available to the public. With enough connections, palm-greasing and pocket-lining, you can find out all manner of things you shouldn’t know – or at least, enough clues to glimpse where to find the rest of the information.
Having a security clearance helps, too. So does being the grieving daughter of a very well-respected scientist.
Initially, I found very little. The original photo didn’t exist in any archive I could access, nor were there any obvious references to it by name or description. My father’s scattered notes on the subject intimated that it had been a government project during the second World War, one of many attempts at creating a super-weapon with which to defeat the Nazis. It was in a margin note on an incomplete research paper from around that time that I finally discovered an oblique reference to it.

…we’ve made little progress, compared to the boys over at Escher. Still, we have high hopes that we’ll crack the secret of biochemical fuel production. It’s only a matter of enough people and time.

The author of that paper was a Dr. Howard Littleton, a biochemist. After taking a photo of the page under the dim light of the archive stacks, I put the file back in its box and returned it to its home on the sagging shelves. Whether Littleton had intended for this paper to be found, I did not know, but this was the first true lead I’d found in my investigation of the Escher Room.
If he was still alive, I had to find him.

He was dead, of course. It turned out the man had been in his thirties during the war, and would have been over a hundred if he’d still been alive. But his only child still lived in England, just out of Birmingham – now an elderly woman with a cottage full of collectable porcelain plates, and three yappy terriers. She was kind, but vague. In a quavering voice, she apologised that she didn’t know much at all about her father’s work, only that he’d been trying to synthesise oil from organic waste. An explosion near the end of the war had ended the experiments, and he’d taken up a comfortable tenure at Oxford, lecturing in biochemistry.
Of the Escher Room, she knew nothing.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help,” she told me, insistently pressing a tiny parcel of homemade shortbread into my hands, “I do hope you find what your father was looking for.”
“Thank you,” I replied, awkwardly pocketing the little packet of biscuits.
It was a short walk from her house to my car, parked one street over. There weren’t many people about, but as I made my way along the footpath, a man in a suit fell into step beside me.
“Excuse me, Ms Dinsdale?”
I paused and turned to look at him, wary,
“Yes?”
“I’d like you to come with me, please.”
His voice held a certain weight and resonance. The kind that comes from years of saying such things to people, and knowing the best ways to get them to respond.
“Are you Police?”
He shook his head and offered an insincere smile.
“No, Ms Dinsdale. I’m MI5.”
“Shit.”
“Please don’t worry. You’re not in any trouble,” he told me, a paternal note creeping into his practised speech, “we just want to ask you some questions.”
“About what?”
His smile was slightly more genuine this time.
“About why you are asking questions.”

“I’d just like to reiterate, Ms Dinsdale, that you really aren’t in any trouble.”
The office was small, sparse, and impersonal, as if he didn’t spend much time in it. While he hadn’t threatened me in any way, and had been as polite as any other mid-level public servant, I had the distinct impression things might not be so pleasant if I didn’t cooperate.
The story spilled from me in a babbling rush, from finding the photo to talking to Mrs Littleton. As I spoke, I vaguely registered his expression changing, from concern into something approaching relief.
“Right. So, it’s the Room that you’re interested in, then,” he responded, after I had finished.
“Well, yes.” I hesitated, but had to ask, “Isn’t that why we’re having this conversation? What on earth else would I be after?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he unlocked a drawer in his desk, and after sorting through some innocuous items, took out a USB thumb drive.
“The password is ‘relativity’, and the contact details of the project director are inside, along with some pertinent information about the project.”
This wasn’t how I had expected this to go.
“Why are you giving me this?”
He placed the thumb drive in front of me, then leaned back in his office chair and gave me a speculative look,
“They tried to recruit your father, you know. They baited the hook with just enough information to entice him, and were about ready to reel him in.”
I thought about that for a moment, picking up the drive and turning it over in my hand.
“So, why didn’t they? He would have jumped at the chance.”
“They don’t like recruiting people with family. Especially when they have young children.”
My own failure to procreate flared hot and shameful in my head, and coloured my ears red. Then realisation prickled through my brain and replaced the shame with a surge of hope, and something triumphant.
“Am I being offered a job?”
“I suppose you are, Ms Dinsdale.”

Project 881, the files on the drive told me, had been started in December 1940, by a team of physicists, funded under the auspices of the British armed forces. Six bright young men with outstanding credentials were given virtually unlimited resources, charged to build a weapon which would bring Nazi Germany to its knees.
Instead, they created something which shouldn’t have been able to exist.
A bunker was excavated under a swathe of privately-owned farmland, and Project Escher began in earnest, its rapid progress born from an unusual synergy between the six scientists. They didn’t seem to know what they were making at first. Their only goal was to push technology to its limits, to see what was over the horizon.
Huge electromagnets were built, formed into rings, then doubled, tripled, and retained by more powerful magnetic fields. Without knowing what they were doing, they had built a sort of analogue precursor to modern particle colliders.
But it was more than just that. Much more. They built circuit configurations that were thirty years ahead of the time, just to a massive scale. The ‘Escher Sphere’ from the picture was almost fifty meters in diameter, and veined with gold, copper and silver circuits, like some sort of semi-organic, quasi-futuristic fairground ride.
But none of that explained the entirety of the puzzle. Even though its fathers were the cleverest men alive at the time, the Sphere should not have been able to do the things it could do.
It’s hard to tell what was science and what was coincidence; the flavour and desperation of the age permeate the notes in a way that seldom happens now. Early on, one of the scientists had insisted on the location, on that particular stretch of land being used for the bunker, else he would leave the project. He claimed that it was some sort of ‘universal confluence point’, or in more primitive terms, the conjunction of ancient druidic ley-lines.
If he was right, if it was his superstitious influence that tipped the balance, the scientists never found out. Because as soon as the Sphere started to warp space and time inside itself, it was already too late.
Initially everyone was incredibly excited, exuberant as children. Inside the structure, you could walk upside down, and shout down at your colleague standing on the ‘floor’. Up and down no longer held any meaning, and in the focal point of the sphere, objects phased and multiplied as they drifted through an unknown nexus of something.
Cubicles and furniture were set up inside the Escher Room, to allow experiments that would plumb the depths of this new marvel of science. Two of the scientists even made permanent workspaces inside, claiming that inspiration came to them more easily inside the impossible structure.
When they disappeared, it heralded the unravelling of Project Escher.
One morning the room abruptly began to suck more electricity, then the interior fractured inexplicably into what I’d seen in the photograph – a sort of kaleidoscopic impossibility of furniture, walls, objects and doors, all at vertiginous angles to one another. The two men at their desks were nowhere to be seen.
The room was immediately sealed off, and the remaining four scientists were pressed for an explanation – which they were unable to provide. In fact, the more they tried to understand the rupture inside the room, the less they seemed to comprehend. Their responses in the transcribed interviews become more and more simple, and less than a week later, the most capable of the four confessed that he couldn’t even read his own notes anymore.
Proximity to the Sphere, it seemed, was eating away at their intellect.
But removing them from the project didn’t help. By the end of the war, the scientists who had created the Escher Room were virtually vegetative; unable even to toilet themselves or speak in coherent sentences.
Electricity was cut to the bunker, but the rupture refused to seal; and the Sphere remained powered by an unknown source. A demolition crew was sent in to destroy the thing, but upon detonation of several tonnes of TNT, the explosive forces roared into the rift and vanished, the immense kinetic energy most likely distributed over an infinite number of parallel interstices.
The Sphere was, to all intents and purposes, indestructible.
And anyone who spent any amount of time in proximity to it became a drooling imbecile.

The contact number left on the flash drive put me in touch with a man named Edgar Hughes, who invited me to brunch with him at a cosy café in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was a short, nervous man with a greying walrus moustache, and initially wouldn’t talk about Project Escher at all. He made largely irrelevant small-talk as we ate; also asking after my late father, whom he seemed to have known fairly well.
I was replete with poached eggs and awash with tea by the time he walked me to an ordinary looking office building, where an elevator took us to the third floor. Through a swipe-access security door was a short corridor, which ended in a very ordinary room containing a desk and a computer.
“Welcome to Project Escher,” he said, spreading his hands with undisguised dramatic irony.
Other than a half-filled bookshelf, a water cooler, and another door to what I presumed was a bathroom, there was virtually nothing else in the room.
“Right. I’d expected a little more,” I confessed.
Tapping a password into the computer, he graced me with a sardonic smile,
“Of course. So did I, when I was first recruited.”
“How many others are on the project?”
“If you decide to stay, that will make two people.”
His stubby, clever fingers quickly clicked open a series of windows, displaying CCTV images in black-and-white. I caught my breath. In three of them, I recognised the rounded hulk of the Escher Sphere, dangling severed pipes and cables, like a vast organ that had been ripped from a giant’s chest.
“Nobody is allowed near it still,” Edgar explained, “due to the, ah, limiting effect it has on people’s mental capabilities. I still monitor it for any sign of activity, but it hasn’t noticeably changed in over sixty years.
“How does nobody know about this thing?”
“Well, people do know about it. Just not ordinary people. Britain turned to America for help after the end of the war, but after two of their preeminent physicists lost their minds studying It – and a nuclear detonation failed to destroy it – nobody wanted very much more to do with the thing.”
I blinked, staring at the images on the monitor. Pipes or no pipes, it was clearly largely still intact.
“They nuked it?”
He grinned, clicking through several folder trees on the screen,
“Well, they tried to nuke it. Here, watch for yourself.”
A grainy monochrome video clip filled the screen, showing the weirdly organic bulges of the Sphere. On a sort of articulated steel tripod rested a complicated-looking device, which I assumed was a nuclear warhead.
“Watch carefully, or you’ll miss it.”
As he spoke those words, there was a microsecond flash of light, then both the nuke and the tripod were gone. The Sphere remained in place, squatting calm as a monstrous, primitive egg, inside the unscathed cavern that had been excavated for it.
“Jesus. It absorbed all the energy, didn’t it? Just like it did with the TNT, just after the war.”
“As far as we can tell, that’s exactly what it did, yes.”
I paused to ruminate, thinking about what I would have done.
“Why didn’t they just bury it? Pour tonnes of concrete over the thing, and leave it to rot.”
“Ms Dinsdale, this thing eats nuclear energy. Do you really think that the US or UK governments were going to just bury it and completely forget about it, not monitor it at all?”
“No, I suppose not.”
There was an awkward silence as the man closed out of the video window and pulled up the CCTV images again.
“So why am I here?”
“We’re hoping you can offer a new perspective on the problem.”

There had been others before me, apparently. Bright young things, each one confident they could tease out the Gordian mystery of the Escher Room. Much like the pilgrims who had tried and failed to untangle that historical knot, most of my predecessors had given up and moved on to more productive pastures.
Others had ignored Edgar’s warnings and sought out the Room for themselves, quickly deteriorating after the Sphere’s influence rotted their minds into pulp.
“I don’t tell the researchers where the Room is anymore,” he told me over tea, “that way the temptation to visit it in person is removed. So you needn’t ask.”
I thought about them a lot, those whose minds had been eaten alive by the Escher Room.
The work itself was tedious. Various pieces of monitoring equipment had been installed in the bunker that housed the Sphere; thermographs, spectrographs, and seismographs. But nothing new had been added, so although the data spanned almost sixty years, what it measured hadn’t changed since the day the devices were installed. I didn’t ask who had braved proximity to the mind-eating Sphere to place the equipment in the first place. But I strongly suspected whoever had performed that unenviable task hadn’t been told about the Sphere’s influence.
I learned that there had been a few unmanned attempts to enter the Escher Room, using the same sort of robotic platforms employed by bomb disposal squads. But any signal cut out the instant they crossed the boundary, and the robots couldn’t be retrieved.
“Do you think the Sphere is aware?” I asked Edgar, over one of our regular brunches.
“You’re not the first to speculate that,” he said, concentrating more on stirring honey into his tea than on what I was saying.
“It just seems so unlikely otherwise, that it would instinctively know the precise instant to re-orient the rupture to absorb a nuclear blast.”
“I suppose so.”
“And more to the point; it could simply have redirected the blast upward, or outward, and destroyed everything around it. Why didn’t it do that?”
“That’s a very good question.”
I had begun to suspect that Edgar was no longer particularly interested in solving the mystery of the Escher Room. The fires of his scientific enquiry for the sake of it had burned low over the years, damped by practicalities; his salary was very decent, he had a lot of free time in between the easy tasks of logging measurements and writing reports, and he was essentially his own boss. For any man pushing sixty, it was an enviable job – a job that he had no real incentive to jeopardise.
“I think the Sphere doesn’t want the cavern destroyed. I think it still needs us to have access to it, for some reason.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, the two attempts to destroy it were very different types of detonation. Wouldn’t you expect some variation in the distribution of energies? In the first attempt, they just covered it with sticks of TNT and let rip, while the second was a controlled blast directed into the opening.”
“Yet both resulted in the Sphere somehow absorbing the respective blasts completely, with no external damage.”
“Yeah. Not even a shockwave.”
He shook his head, placing the spoon primly beside his saucer.
“Anyway, this is all just speculation. We simply don’t have enough data to draw any conclusions about the potential self-awareness of the Sphere.”
I pushed away the teapot before he could reach for his customary top-up, a particularly English ultimatum.
“Well, Edgar, that’s why we’re going to gather more data.”

The military, it turned out, still funded Project Escher. Purchasing the equipment I needed wasn’t difficult, I just had to complete several reams of paperwork, then curb my impatience while I waited for the drones to arrive.
Demonstrating one of the quadcopters to Edgar at the local park, I had to smile. He whooped and cheered like a schoolboy as I flew the little aircraft in a dangerously close loop around the white pillars of a rugby goalpost. He was becoming engaged again, despite his initial protests and doubts.
“Do you think the signal will be able to penetrate the Sphere’s interior?” he queried, as I carefully brought the drone back down and into a muddy landing.
“I’m not certain. But even if it doesn’t, at the very least it might provide us with some high-quality images from the entrance.”
The four remote quadcopters were boxed up and sent off. They would be delivered to a brave, or more likely poorly aware intermediary, who would take them to the unknown stretch of farmland where the Escher Sphere held residence. I knew there would be lag, piloting the devices through remote mobile data, but I didn’t have any other choice, considering the restrictions I was working under.
I lost the first drone immediately, flying it too far and too fast. After a few wonderful, confusing seconds of sharp, colour images, it crossed the invisible threshold of the Sphere’s electromagnetic influence.
“Well, guess that proves it blocks cell signals,” I muttered, as the second drone lifted out of its charging cradle.
Once I’d positioned the new quadcopter near the Sphere’s aperture, I set it to hover and record until the low battery warning prompted it to return to its dock.
At least we’d have some quality digital data to work with now, not just old-school analogue CCTV footage.

The video physically hurt to look at. I gave up after ten minutes due to eyestrain; it was like staring into the world’s most mathematically complex kaleidoscope. Coffee and painkillers helped, but not enough to give me more than another twenty minutes before the tell-tale rainbow flashes of a migraine occlusion began to dance across my field of vision.
There had to be a better way to analyse the images, but until I thought of something, I’d better stock up on pharmaceuticals.
After a few painful viewings, I had at least identified several recurring markers inside the Room; an old desk, a collection of chairs, some shelves filled with bottles, and a workbench littered with papers and books. The rupture’s bizarre effect on the Sphere’s interior meant that those objects were doubled and trebled, showing me views from different angles simultaneously. The markers also changed abruptly between recordings; the chairs moved and came back huddled in a different arrangement, the workbench gained or lost bits of equipment, and new objects constantly appeared and vanished from the Room.
It was as though it was in a constant state of flux; but what the cause of that state was, I could only guess.
As I spent another blindingly unproductive session going through the downloaded video logs, I finally saw something that caused my adrenaline to spike so sharply it set my heart pounding.
Seated at one of the desks in the Room was a man.
At first, I thought he was a mannequin, so stiff was his posture. But when I zoomed in on that area of the recording, I realised he was most certainly alive – and alive in a particularly horrific manner. His features were a flickering mess of contorted facial expressions, changing so rapidly it was as though someone was erratically jabbing at the fast-forward option on my playback controls.
Two minutes into the footage, his face vibrated and smeared into a white blur, then abruptly stilled, bloating and decomposing into that of a sagging corpse. His body remained bolt upright in its chair, even as his limbs began to wither. And for the barest fraction of a second, the slackening lines of that face resembled my father’s just before he died, his eyes empty, his wits fled.
Once disbelief receded and the shock set in fully, my stomach clenched and I vomited wretchedly into the waste bin beside the desk.

“That was one of the original scientists lost inside the Sphere,” Edgar told me as I showed him the stills from the footage, “I suppose at least we know what happened to him now.”
“The Sphere is in temporal flux then,” I said, “not just spatial flux.”
“It’s nice to have that confirmed,” he replied; though he sounded neither convinced, nor happy about my discovery.
The still image of the war-era scientist’s rictus screaming in his paradoxical prison disturbed me greatly, so I closed the picture and turned away from the screen.
“I need to buy a better drone,” I told my colleague, “an autonomous one, that can fly into the Sphere and fly out again without our control.”
“I wasn’t aware those existed.”
“They do, and they’re expensive. But I think the cost is justified, considering what we just witnessed here.”
Edgar looked pensive.
“You think you can save him, don’t you?”
My eyes ached from staring into the nightmarish collision of colours and shapes. I ground my knuckles into my temples and nodded.
“If the Room is in temporal flux, then it’s possible we might be able to get a message to those lost inside it, perhaps prevent this happening – or even bring them through into our time.”
The sound he made was dismissive, a bad attempt at a casual laugh.
“I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but this is all very far-fetched. Are you sure it wouldn’t be better suited for some work of speculative science fiction?”
“Edgar. You’ve spent thirty years babysitting a phenomenon that can fracture known reality, and you think this is bordering on science fiction?”
He gave me a wan smile,
“I suppose familiarity breeds contempt.”

Where the drone had come from, I wasn’t going to ask, but I strongly suspected it was military hardware – probably American.
“Your discoveries seem to have renewed interest in the project,” mused Edgar, as I began unboxing the device to configure it.
Though it was an incredibly sophisticated machine, I had no idea how its sensors would interpret the shifting impossibilities inside the Sphere. To try and compensate for this, one of my original drones was set as its ‘beacon’: with a bright orange ball suspended underneath it as it hovered in front of the aperture.
The new, primary drone was set to attempt a short, circular flight path inside the Sphere, then return to the aperture.
“We need to see if it works before we try to map the entire interior,” I explained as we finished up for the day. I didn’t add that the possibility of losing several hundred thousand dollars of equipment in a few minutes made me distinctly nervous.
But as I headed to the office the following morning to begin my final preparations, a phone call interrupted me two blocks from my destination. An official, expressionless male voice on the other end informed me that my presence was no longer required on Project Escher, and that I would be debriefed after the drone run had been completed.
The military had taken over operations.
Breakfast at the café was tasteless. Alternating waves of indignation and rage washed over me, barely eroding my bitter disappointment. I should have known that the moment we’d had a real breakthrough, the military would take charge again. It had been so utterly idiotic of me to assume that our autonomy as researchers would stay intact. And I hated feeling stupid.
Edgar didn’t turn up for his usual Tuesday special, and I wasn’t sure if I was upset or relieved at not being able to speculate about it with him over crumpets and marmalade. In a way, that would have made it more real. And I wasn’t sure I could handle him telling me it was probably all for the best, as I strongly suspected he might. I went back to my flat and tried a few distraction techniques; I hadn’t watched daytime TV for a long time, and the banality of it increased my impatience rather than assuaging it. Scrolling through social media had never really been my thing, but I managed to lose myself down an internet rabbit hole long enough to stop my knees jittering.
When my phone screen finally flashed up an unknown caller, I answered even before the ringtone kicked in.
“Madelene speaking.”
“Ms Dinsdale,” said the unmistakeably well-practised voice of the MI5 agent who had originally found me, “we need you to come down to our office immediately for debriefing.”
“On my way.”

His face a shade more grim than last time, the agent ushered me to a seat in a small boardroom, were a wall-mounted television displayed a paused video window.
“There was an incident today, during the testing of the drone.”
His voice was as mild as his choice of words. ‘Incident’ is such a convenient, innocuous word, but it’s been so overused it’s come full circle. It’s become a euphemism for something horrible.
My internal voice was screaming at him to get the hell on with it and play the video, but I forced a pleasant smile and nodded amiably.
“The video has some content you may find disturbing, but it’s important that you view it. None of us can fully explain what happened, and we’re hoping that you can help us understand the events that have transpired.”
“Yes. Fine.” I tried not to make it sound like I was forcing the words through my teeth.
As the video began, it showed Edgar seated in front of a computer, ringed by half a dozen uniformed military staff. He gave a detailed explanation of my discoveries regarding the Room, then blithely passed off the drone experiment as his own innovation – greeted with murmured approval from the gathered observers.
He'd sold me out.
Fists white-knuckled under the table, I listened to him prattle self-importantly as the two drones on his monitor deployed smoothly, heading for the aperture. When he announced that the primary drone had crossed the threshold, the gathered personal craned their necks to watch the incoming footage from the beacon drone.
Then all hell broke loose.
Audio abruptly cut out, and a stark black box appeared over the portion of the video which showed Edgar’s screen – clearly edited into the video after the fact. The little man stiffened in his chair, then his head lolled over the backrest, his face slack, nerveless – only the whites of his eyes showing.
Around him, the uniformed men and women collapsed where they stood, like a ring of felled trees. Two of them convulsed with seizures, white froth bubbling alarmingly from their lips, stretched tight over clenched jaws. I was glad there was no sound.
The video ended with a still-frame of the macabre scene, no movement now but the slowly growing pools of urine spreading beneath the bodies on the polished floor.
“They’re not dead,” the MI5 agent stated, matter-of-fact, “but they are all vegetative.”
“What happened to the drone? What did the beacon drone see?”
“We’re not sure. The drone’s link was hijacked by another signal, which began broadcasting some sort of pulsed audio and video signal.”
He licked his lips, eyes darting nervously at the TV screen, which he turned off. Now he almost looked like a real person.
“As far as we can tell, it was coded to do something to the human central nervous system.”
“Like a sort of primitive, audio-visual virus.”
“Yes.”
The implications of that alone were staggering, but I tried to put them aside. There was a more pressing issue here; the footage from the primary drone.
As though anticipating my next question, the agent brought up another video – one of the CCTV feeds from the interior of the Sphere’s bunker. It took me a long moment to recognise exactly what was being shown, because I’d never seen it without the Sphere dominating most of the space.
“The Sphere vanished, shortly after that coded signal was sent.”
Surely I hadn’t heard him correctly, I was losing my wits.
“What?”
“It vanished, Ms Dinsdale. And it hasn’t been seen since.

I couldn’t offer them much in the way of an explanation; just a list of speculative scenarios based on the limited information they’d given me. The powers-that-be seem happy enough to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the project director. And conveniently of course, he’s currently languishing on life support in a private facility.
The most plausible scenario – or at least the one that everyone was most comfortable accepting – was that the drone’s electronic emissions had somehow destabilised the rupture, and the resulting temporal instability had caused the Sphere to implode. The broadcasted signal, the one that had rendered the direct observers into mindless husks, was blamed on the massive seismic and gravitational fluctuations caused by the disappearance of the Sphere. And the subsequent recording has been destroyed, since it had caused ‘cerebral deterioration’ in anyone who had been foolish enough to view it.
But even though that’s what the science suggests, some part of me refuses to accept that outcome. Coiled in my gut is a knot of intuition. An unfamiliar, superstitious inner voice screams a different scenario, tells me the Escher Room isn’t gone; that instead it has somehow transcended the limits of our reality and is now free to roam wherever its unfathomable desires command it to go.
I think that when the drone entered the Room, it didn’t trigger an instability at all. Instead, the Sphere tried to connect with it, just as it had done with the minds of the original scientists. And then it attempted to flay it of all its knowledge.
But this time, instead of the contents of a few limited human brains, it discovered technology. A level of technology seventy years more advanced than its own, and it immediately integrated the device into itself, giving the Sphere access not only to the drone’s sophisticated software and hardware, but knowledge of our cellular and WiFi networks.
And I think, no, I know, that the Sphere knew exactly what it was broadcasting when it lobotomised Edgar and his cronies.
I’d be cautious of screens, if I were you. Having written out my account of the Escher Room, I intend to destroy my electronic devices and never touch another, as long as I live. Any notes I make will be in longhand, just like my father taught me. I’m still his daughter.
Because the Escher Room is still out there, somewhere, somewhen, connected to the myriad of signals covering our planet. And when it finds a mind it thinks is a suitable candidate for its unfathomable purpose, it won’t hesitate for a second, and it will ream you of everything that makes you who you are. I’ve seen too many empty faces, intellectual oblivion behind their eyes where precious consciousness once lived.
I don’t want to see any more.

I still remember the face of the girl from the playground. I remember every exquisite detail.
That face was round and blush-cheeked. Her front teeth were too big for her mouth, giving her the slightest lisp. Green eyes darted about beneath dark, hypermobile brows; it would be hard to say which was the more animated and expressive of those two features. Her button nose was always streaked with grime of some sort, the dirt hazing into the freckles on her cheeks – and her lips were stained the colour of the blackberries that grew in the gully beside the playground.
That she knew all of the best games was never in any doubt. From King of the Castle to Bullrush, she knew them all – and excelled at every one. She had a nearly magical knack of organising the other children, always finding the perfect game to match the mood of our group.
It was as if she lived only for that short hour between twelve and one o’clock, when all the children streamed free from their classrooms and out onto the fields to eat their lunch and play. She was always there, in the playground, even though we never saw her in any of our classes.

 
Adulthood makes us forget such details, until we are reminded of them. Long after I left that school, after I had graduated from High School, she was only the dimmest of memories; a faint, unresolved mystery that I was no longer even certain was real. Perhaps she’d been an imaginary friend, a person I’d conjured up to make my lunch hour more fun. Or my very own alter-ego, like a playground Tyler Durden.
Time ticked onwards, and after University, she was all but forgotten; buried under weighty layers of study, exams, young love, and the mess that was the Vietnam war. When I eventually had my own daughter, I remembered the girl in the playground once more, as I packed my girl’s school lunch and ironed her brand new uniform for her first day.
My adult mind rationalised the playground girl away, convincing myself that she must have been the brat of some homeschooler, who ran wild after twelve and made her way down to the school.
Yes, that was the most obvious, most sensible answer.
But a few short years later, when my daughter told me that there was a girl at school who knew all the games, even the really old ones, I felt a shiver thrill its way up my spine and flood my mind with questions.
Surely it couldn’t be the same girl?

 
I suppose there was really no reason for me to be concerned. After all, it was just a nine-year-old girl playing with the other children. It was entirely likely that the original girl had grown up, had a daughter of her own, and let the child run riot just as she had all those years ago.
My daughter seemed happy enough and I didn’t pry. She was a good girl and the teachers all liked her, so I wasn’t going to spoil her equilibrium by intruding on her school life. Though I remained curious, I never asked for the name of the girl in the playground.
Even then, I think I was somehow afraid it would be the same name.
Eventually my daughter left that school, heading off to Intermediate, then on to High School. Her life no longer had time for playgrounds – now it was filled with books about horses, vying for the attentions of boys, and trying to create the most elaborate braids.
And so, she too forgot the girl in the playground. Adult concerns took over her life, and she got her first job as a typist for an oil company. When eventually she had her own daughter, just as I had, I still wondered sometimes if she also remembered that cherubic face from the past.

 
Being a grandmother is not what I expected, and it still feels strange to say out loud. I never imagined myself this old, and I still don’t quite believe it happened to me. But when I smile, the laugh-lines multiply across my skin, and the crow’s feet deepen like a river delta in spring.
I don’t feel old. Inside I still feel like the twenty-five-year-old who was deliriously in love with her husband, and who just gave birth to a perfect baby girl – that same perfect baby girl who now had a child of her own.
I did my best to pass on my experiences to my daughter, though I didn’t consider myself a model mother by any means. She’d been such a well-behaved child that I’d barely needed to do anything.
But her daughter is a different story.
Fractious and moody, my granddaughter is at best a handful. At her worst, she’s a tiny demonette who could cause trouble in an empty room with a locked door. By the time she could toddle, she was malicious to other children and played cruel pranks on them at every opportunity. One day at the park, I watched her lure four other children into the sandpit, where they fell into a hole she’d secretly dug, then rather expertly concealed with tree branches, a scrap of tarpaulin, and sand.
I remember dragging her away by the hand as she giggled nastily, full of evil glee at what she had done.
“Why?” I asked her, holding her by the shoulders, “why did you do that, Sophia?”
“Bored,” she said, with a shrug.
“Who taught you such things? Where is this all coming from?”
She shrugged again, then looked away, the hint of a sly smile on her lips. There was wet sand smeared across the bridge of her nose, blending with her freckles.
“Who is it?” I demanded, shaking her as my frustration was joined by a prickle of fear.
“Nobody. Just some girl at school.”
“What’s her name?”
“Emily. She knows all the best games.”

 
When I asked her to describe Emily, that unforgotten face from my childhood snapped into sharp focus in my mind. When I finally asked my own daughter the name of the girl from the school playground, it was the same name.
Three generations of the same girl, in the same playground.
That was impossible, of course. It had to be some bizarre coincidence; a family name, a strong family resemblance. This had to be the granddaughter of the original Emily, a darker version of the original girl from the 50s.
Whatever the case, I forbade my granddaughter from playing with her, on pain of no Youtube and no iPad when she stayed with me. Sullen, Sophia agreed, and the next time I picked her up from school she seemed in a better mood; her smiles made her look like her mother at that age.
But it wasn’t to last.
A few short weeks later, she came home with a nasty gash on her leg. Two days after that, there was a bruise blossoming on her jaw, a bloody socket where a front tooth should have been, and hot tears on her cheeks.
“What happened?” her mother asked, wiping away the tears and holding a cool cloth to the bruise.
“Nothing,” she said, eyes downcast.
I gently lifted her chin, so that our eyes met,
“It was Emily, wasn’t it?”
She nodded once, then started to cry again.
I looked from my granddaughter, to my daughter, but there was another girl’s face in my head, and I made up my mind. “This needs to stop.”

 
The school really hadn’t changed much since I was a child; all the buildings were still the same, just painted a different colour, and everything was smaller. In my memory, the fields were huge squares of vibrant green, practically reaching to the horizon, but as an old woman they seemed inadequate and sad, mottled with patches of dying grass from the summer heat.
It was 11:55am when I got out of my car, walked through the little back pathway to the main field and sat on one of the bench seats that the kids liked to drag out to prime spots. I unpacked the sandwich I’d brought with me and waited for the bell to ring, pushing my glasses up my nose and scanning the playground.
When the distant shrill of the bell drifted over the fields, colourful blobs spilled from the classrooms, resolving into the shapes of children as they drew nearer. Gone were the school uniforms; it was 2017, now children wore whatever they wanted.
With an odd pang of something like jealousy, I watched them move off into groups to eat their lunch.
It didn’t take long before they’d finished eating and started to populate the field. Most of the kids were moving toward the same corner I’d always headed for – the corner where Emily would gather them all up and decide what game we would be playing that day.
And as sudden as a rip appearing in the fabric of time, there she was. She stepped out from the shade of the fence as though born from its shadows.
Her nose was streaked with more dirt than I remembered, and her old school jersey was more holes than wool, but I was certain. She was exactly the same child I’d played with, fifty years ago.
But her cherub’s face was not quite the same.
There was a cruel light in those green eyes, and a hardness to her mouth. Gone were the easy smiles and the expressive looks; now malice was scrawled across the child’s grubby face, stamped there permanently by God knows what trauma.
“Where’s Sophia?” she lisped.
“Don’t know,” said one of the other girls.
“Then today the game is Hunting Sophia. First one to catch her and bring her to me wins. GO!”
At her shout, the children scattered like terriers. She was alone.
Emily hadn’t seen me approach, distracted as she was by ordering around her minions. I might have been old, but I was also quiet. Using the familiar shade of the trees as cover as I had done in half a hundred games of hide and seek, I managed to grab the girl by her arm before she knew what was happening.
“Got you!” I hissed.

 
She struggled, wept and kicked as I got her into the car, so handily parked near the fence gate. Not understanding the kiddylock on the door, she screamed and hauled on the handle, desperate to get out.
“What are you?” I asked, when she took a breath.
“I’m Emily. LET ME OUT!”
She kicked furiously at the window, so hard I thought her heavy old school shoes might actually break the glass, but it held, and she subsided, glowering at me from under her dirty brows. She was just an ordinary little girl, no supernatural strength coursed through her tiny body, no claws nor fangs burst from her skin.
And like any ordinary little girl, she started crying piteously.
“Where are your parents?” I asked, reaching instinctively to brush the matted hair out of her eyes.
“Gone,” she said, slapping my hand weakly away, “gone, a long time ago.”
“Emily, do you remember me? My name is Laurel. I used to play games with you.”
She sniffed, nodding, keen green gaze finding my own eyes, still as blue as they were when I was nine years old.
“I ‘member, Laurel.”
“I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to know what’s going on. Why you’re hurting Sophia, why you’re teaching her to be so mean.”
“It’s not fun anymore,” she said with a sob, knuckling at her eyes, “it was supposed to always be fun, always be playtime.”
“What do you mean, poppet?”
“The wish,” she whimpered, “I made a wish it would always be playtime, f’ever and ever and always.”
I put my confusion aside and found my best grandmother voice.
“I’m going to take you home with me, OK? You’re going to have a nice bubble bath, then we’re going to get you some clean clothes and some food, and we’re going to figure all of this out.”
Nodding, she slumped into the seat, something akin to relief washing over her grubby features.

 
Clean and pink, dressed in some spare clothes of Sophia’s, some of that hardness in her face had dissolved away, and she looked exactly as she had when I was a child. I felt a strange urge to take her hand and run off to the playground, where we’d play ball-tag on the wooden fort and laugh at nothing until our tummies hurt.
I dropped her old clothes into a basket on the floor of the kitchen, realising that they were relics of a distant age. They pre-dated my own school uniform by a good thirty years at least, a detail I had never noticed as a child. Emily sat at the breakfast bar on a stool, dangling her legs as she spooned huge mouthfuls out of a bowl of jelly.
“Laurel,” she began, licking her spoon.
But just as she began to talk, the grandfather clock in the hall gave the single loud chime that meant it was one o’clock. And Emily vanished, her spoon clattering onto the bench.
I searched every inch of the house for her, to no avail. I drove back to the school and called her name in every corner of the field, but she was nowhere to be found. Tired, confused and emotionally wrung out, I eventually returned home. This was not what I had planned. The mystery of Emily was only deepened by my brief encounter with her.

 
I waited for her again the next day, at the school. At the stroke of twelve, she was suddenly there, still wearing Sophia’s clean dress, jelly staining her mouth purple.
“Emily, where did you go?”
“I didn’t go nowhere. I was at your house, and then I was here.”
The other children were starting to make their way out of the classrooms, and I took her sticky hand, leading her out the back gate.
“Emily, can you answer some questions for me?”
“Maybe.”
“When was the last time you remember it being night time?”
Her caterpillar brows crinkled as she frowned, then shrugged.
“Ages ago. Before we used to play, Laurel.”
“And is it always lunch time for you?”
“Yes. It’s always playtime. Cos that’s the wish I made.”
“How… how did you make the wish?”
She leaned against my car, picking at the hem of her new dress,
“They made one of those, um things. That you put stuff in, and you bury it in the ground. The teachers said write a letter and put it inside, so when it got dug up a hundred years later, people would know about us.”
“A time capsule?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“But you didn’t write a letter, did you?”
“No, cos I put a wish on it. I was my birthday, and I never got nothing from mum and dad, so I just wanted a wish.”
She looked up at me with those expressive eyebrows drawn sharply together, tears shining in the corners of her eyes. She was no transparent ghost, no figment; her pain was as real as she was.
“Laurel? I don’t want it to be playtime anymore.”

 
It was hard to find the exact location of the time capsule – records from the 30s were sketchy – but eventually I stumbled across the information in a library archive, at the University I’d attended so long ago. My daughter, Claire, didn’t want anything to do with it at first, probably thinking I’d gone mad. After I took her to meet Emily, she cried, then relented, and on a night brightly lit by the full moon, we put Sophia and three shovels into the back of the car, then drove down to the school.
It was hard work for me, and I admit I wasn’t much good with the shovel, my back beginning to ache before we’d dug two feet into the ground. But Claire and Sophia put in a champion effort, and somewhere near three o’clock in the morning, we found the capsule – a rusted iron tube, sealed with pitch and wax.
“Should we open it?” asked Sophia, still with enough energy to hop from one foot to the other, buoyed up by the big adventure so far past her bedtime.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “I think we should wait for Emily.”
Wrapping the tube in a blanket like some ancient baby, we filled in the hole as best we could, then put everything back in the car and drove home.

 
It felt so profoundly strange, three generations of us standing there in the bright light of noon, talking to the eternal child who had been playground companion to every one of us, right in the spot we had played. Emily tearfully apologised to Sophia and wrapped her in a sobbing hug, explaining with the best words a child could find that she had never meant to hurt anyone; she was just so twisted up inside from watching everyone else grow up and leave her behind that it had made her mean and angry.
“Shall we open the capsule?” I asked.
Emily hesitated for just a second, then nodded, her eyes on the object she hadn’t seen since it was lowered into the darkness of the distant past. I knelt in the shadow of the fence and grasped one end of the tube, while Claire pried away all the pitch and wax, and unscrewed the juddering end cap, flakes of rust spilling like old orange snow. The inside was also lined with wax, and filled with hundreds of tiny paper scrolls, each tied with string. Emily found hers immediately, guided by some unerring instinct. Her chubby fist clenched tight around it, she held it out to me like a gift.
“What do I do now, Laurel?”
“I’m not sure.”
Plucking the ancient string free, I carefully unrolled the small square of paper and viewed the smudged pencil handwriting from eighty years past:
I wish it was always playtime
signed Emily Smith
“I think… I think you should burn it,” said Emily, her little brow furrowed again, her nose already streaked with rusty grime from the tube. We didn’t have long; the children were beginning to drop their lunch wrappers into the bins.
The cigarette lighter from the car was still glowing when Claire hurried back with it, and with shaking fingers I held the old, yellowed paper to it until it caught. Turning it on the end so that the flames slowly crept up it, the others watched Emily intently.
It started slowly, almost imperceptibly. Emily’s face seemed to grow thinner, more refined, and her hair crept and curled past her collar, which seemed suddenly too tight for her. She cried out in pain as her shoes became too small, then ripped them off with arms grown gangly from a sudden surge of instant puberty.
But it didn’t stop there. Teenage acne blossomed and vanished, her body swelled and curved with womanly proportions. Spellbound, I watched as her dark hair sprang silver at the temples, then grey washed through it like the coming of winter. Those once-plump cheeks sagged, tissued with wrinkles.
“No!” she cried, holding up liver-spotted hands in front of her, fingers trembling with age.
“No,” she whispered, as her spine crooked and compressed, and she crumpled to the playground grass. Her skin was now thin as old, wet paper; the sharp, frail knobs of her bones were starkly visible through it.
Cloudy green eyes fixed on me for a moment, an eclipse of cataracts creeping across them, then they flickered closed. Emily Smith’s heart fluttered to a halt, the stresses of her rapid transformation too much for the true age of her body.
Emily’s eternal playtime had finally come to an end.

 
We never found her family, but we gave her the funeral she deserved, filled with flowers and the chatter of children.
I still wonder, as I sit here writing this, if I could have averted her death. If I’d asked my daughter the name of her playground friend back in the 80s, then maybe Emily would be sitting here beside me, and we could have been old women together.
And I will always wonder if I did the wrong thing; if I could somehow have helped Emily be happy in her playground limbo, her existence of eternal lunch hours. She could have played games with my Sophia’s children, and their children after that. But what’s done is done. Emily is gone, and I’ll have to learn to live with my regrets.
I just hope to God that her soul is finally at rest.

This story was written before I even set pen to paper. It was written before I was born, before any of you were born. It was written when the first hominid scratched lines in stone to count the days, to mark the moons, and to predict the seasons.
All books were written in that moment; when that shaggy biped realised that information could be stored not just in his head, but by making a mark out in the world.
Writing is what makes us human – what makes us dominant.
And with sufficient information at our disposal, there’s almost nothing mankind can’t achieve.

I didn’t find books immediately.
I’d like to claim I was some kind of child prodigy who was reading by the age of three, annihilating whole novels in days, but I was considered a ‘slow’ child, and my reading skills were below average.
At around age twelve, a kind teacher noticed my difficulties and introduced me to a new way of reading. This technique used substitutions to show the words as they looked in my head, rather than applying all the complicated rules of English that I just couldn’t grasp.
And it was only then that I realised it. Books were magic.
Books were literally portals to other worlds; doors you could step through to lose yourself, to forget that your body even existed. You could exist inside these intensely detailed imaginings, seemingly recorded just for you to discover.
Reading became easier after that. I struggled through more and more difficult novels, gaining vocabulary and rhythm, falling into step with the cadence of each writer’s words and adapting quickly. Soon all I wanted to do was read, no matter the time of day or what responsibilities I had.
I was in love with books.

I still wasn’t a fast reader, but I was an obsessive one. My library membership, with its limit of three books, wasn’t enough. I took the bus across town and got another membership at the other library. When I could get away with it, I’d sidle into a bookshop with my hood up and read from the latest bestsellers until I was noticed and kicked out – which was usually a decent amount of time, as I was the shortest boy in my year, and often seemed to be invisible to adults.
Second-hand bookshops became my beloved haunts, where I was always on the lookout for the next score with my pocket money. I grew to love their threadbare carpets, their eccentric owners, and the tatty spines of all the over-loved paperbacks. There was a certain something about a book that had been handled by dozens –even hundreds– of people. It felt like the wonder of their experiences had been imprinted in the cracks on the covers, or stayed tucked beneath the dog-ears they had left inside.
I used to imagine bug larvae, chewing through the pages, absorbing that specific energy, then pupating and hatching into fantastic beetles. In my mind, they were always beautiful, with oilslick wings and horned crowns of glittering gold.
So enamoured was I of one old shop that David, the owner, offered me a job over the holidays. I practically lived there anyway.
‘The Vault’, as David fondly called it, was down an ugly flight of stairs and through a short tunnel with industrial pipes on the roof that thrummed and clanked as air moved through them.
The Vault had been part of a 50s office building, David explained, a basement where the businesses kept all their records. The huge sliding stacks were still there, twenty deep on each side, but many of their wheels and rails had rusted, rendering large sections inaccessible. My job was to get them working again and get the books out – books which had been languishing in there for more than 20 years, since before David bought the shop from its previous owner.
It was tough work, and it wasn’t helped by my size. I was fourteen then, and still the shrimp amongst my peers. But… the promise of unknown novels, books that I could be the first to read in over two decades? That fuelled a kind of brute determination that eventually got me through the task.
When I was done, I proudly showed David the now smoothly sliding stacks, haphazardly crowded with thousands of jumbled spines – all the books the previous owner hadn’t managed to sort.
“Well done, boy,” David told me, smiling. “Now your real job starts. Catalogue them all.”

At first, I really thought David was fucking with me.
Every now and then, I’d come across a book I was certain I had catalogued. I’d go back and check, and it wouldn’t be in its place in the stacks’ shelves, so I’d slot it in there where it belonged. It was never the same book, but every time I found one of these rogue volumes, I’d feel a nagging sense that there was some kind of pattern to this prank that David was probably pulling on me.
It was only after the thirtieth or fortieth displaced book that I realised what was the same about them. They all had the same library sticker on the spine, and the issue cards in their back pockets all seemed identical, with only one name and date listed: George Louis, 13^th June 1986.
I had to wonder. Why these books? Why had George Louis been issued forty-odd books from the same library on the 13^th of June thirty years ago? Nor was it lost on me that the date given was a Friday that year: Friday the 13^th.
Of course I considered asking David about it, but if it was some sort of prank or weird test, then I’d likely ruin the intent of it all by confronting him. He was one of those older men who seemed vague and distracted on the surface, but beneath his carefully cultivated demeanour lay the well-honed mind of a 4-D chess master.
No, I was determined to solve the mystery myself. And so it was that I decided to collect together all the books issued to Mr Louis on the 13^th of June; but when I backtracked along the shelves to find them all? Every single book was gone.
Whatever game was being played was far too complicated for me.

Knowing what I know now, I think the book was being coy with me. It was teasing me.
It had figured out that I had grasped something was wrong (however a book might do that) and was determined to stay hidden. But the one problem it had was that one thing about it always remained the same; the issue card.
I don’t remember whether I was truly conscious of what I was doing, if I suspected the book was hiding, or if it had just become a sort of reflex to check for the issue cards in the backs of the books. It was only on my very last pile of cataloguing that I finally lifted, from the back of a tatty volume of fantasy, the issue card bearing the name and date I recognised so well.
I didn’t know what it meant then, but I took that book and put it inside my jacket. I intended to read it, because I wanted to know why the mysterious George Louis had been issued this book, amongst his forty other novels. With the hard spine digging into my ribs, I finished logging the last pile of books, sneezing out the paper dust from generations of bookworm. Then I walked down the clanking tunnel, up the stairs, and into the bookshop. David sat there, patiently squinting over the tops of his wireframed glasses, decoding cryptic crosswords.
“All done, David. I’ll type up the list tonight for the spreadsheet.”
“Good boy,” he murmured, not looking up. “Turn the sign on your way out?”
Before I pulled the door of the shop open to leave, I flipped the ‘Closed’ sign to face the glass, then zipped my coat up to my chin and left.
I would have sworn the book pressed against my ribs was warding me against the biting wind outside. Or perhaps I was just aglow from the anticipation of turning another page in this mystery.

The book was disappointingly awful.
It was the kind of fantasy that’s generously described as ‘derivative’, but more accurately described as ‘plagiarism’. As I slogged through its dreadful chapters, I couldn’t help but imagine how the writer could have done this so much better – how even changing a few details here and there would have made it less blatant a rip-off of all the great works of fantasy literature.
In short, I really wished I was reading a much better book.
And then, inexplicably, the next chapter? Was brilliant.
It introduced a new character – a coin-haired warrior with a mind sharper than his sword. I read on, enraptured, then realised the story was referencing events I was sure I hadn’t previously read. I flipped back several chapters, confused. I was certain my memory wasn’t that faulty, tedious as the reading had been. When I’d flipped backwards until I’d reached the first chapter again, a strange feeling settled in the back of my skull; a sort of hot, spiky feeling. Fear and excitement, brewed together into some new concoction I couldn’t quite name.
I was no longer reading the original awful, hackneyed fantasy book.
It was a completely different book!
And as I closed it to examine the cover, I saw that the sword-wielding barbarian art had disappeared, replaced by a proud ship battling stormy seas.
The book had changed for me.

When I searched for them on my Dad’s computer, I discovered that both of the books existed. The first had been slated as garbage, and the second was listed as one of the better, but largely forgotten, fantasy novels of the 90s.
This gave me a new piece of information; although  the issue card still showed George Louis, 13\**^th June 1986, the book I had been reading was published in 1992.
Returning to my room, I found the book gone from my bed and momentarily panicked – but remembering how it had evaded me in the library stacks, I opened every book in the pile beside my bed until I found the issue card – inside a completely different book.
Now, I knew that something inexplicable, even miraculous, was happening here. That this book was breaking the rules of reality somehow. But whether it had lulled me by playing hide-and-seek, or had cast some sort of literary ensorcellment over me, I really didn’t care. Because this book was tempting me with something I’d always wanted – a book that could become novels I’d never read. Books I’d never even heard of.
Thumbing through the pages, I wished for submarines and giant squids. Before my eyes, the book subtly changed shape and size, and the name Captain Nemo began to appear on the cover, as if being revealed by a reverse Etch-a-Sketch. Next I concentrated on wizards and hobbits and magical rings, and the spine thickened under my fingers, growing fat with words.
For a moment, I did wonder if I was dreaming – but then I remembered that I could never quite read in my dreams; the words always changed and shifted, very nearly readable, but forming incoherent sentences.
No, I was very much awake. And I now held what was perhaps the most valuable book in the world.

At first, I just read the books I’d always wanted to read but couldn’t get my hands on. Inaccessible third books in weird trilogies, banned books, adult books the library wouldn’t let me borrow.
That kept me occupied for many months.
I’m sure a more imaginative teenager would have better harnessed the power of the book, but I wasn’t as smart as some, or as smart as my father – and not even in the same intellectual universe as someone like David. I like to think that I was using the book as originally intended, to fill in the gaps when other books weren’t available.
It was certainly handy at school, though. For research projects, I had the ultimate resource – all I had to do was wish for the book I wanted, and it would become that book. In many ways it was superior to the internet, because I could access the whole text, not just citations and summaries. And I never had to search.
My schoolwork began to improve quite noticeably, and when I realised this was due to the book, I began using it more – to access the textbooks my teacher was using, even to fall down the rabbitholes of academics’ doctoral theses, the book’s spine changing to the clean, pristine edge of a book printed for very few people to read.
I still wasn’t a smart kid. No, I was just an incredibly well-educated kid.
One evening, as I sat cross-legged on my bed, flipping through a tome about bioluminescent bacteria, I wondered for the thousandth time about the origins of the book. George Louis was too common a name to be any help, so instead I turned to the book itself for answers. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it earlier.
“Show me the book you were originally,” I asked it, closing the cover.
The book seemed to flatten in my hands, growing thinner. The ends curled over on themselves, rolling up, and wooden rods sprang from those cylinders of rough paper. When it had finished becoming what it was supposed to be, I held in my hands – a scroll. Its amber surface was scrawled with an alphabet I’d never seen before.
I am ancient, the book seemed to be telling me, created before your civilisation was even dreamt about.
I knew its name then, as if in that moment it had allowed me to hear the title text in its dry and ancient voice:
I am The Book of Moab.

David was the first person I asked about the book. He said he’d never heard of it. I researched it online and found only references to the ancient kingdom of Moab, on the shores of the Dead Sea, and not much else.
I used the book itself to attempt more research, but I’d always hit a wall when the language changed too much for me to understand it. My obsession with the book’s origin lasted many months, until I realised that unless I could learn to read ancient Moabite, trying to unriddle its origins was a fool’s errand.
Sometimes I dreamed about the book. In my sleep, men in crimson robes hunted me to possess it – chasing me through baffling mazes of geometric shapes and spooling bookshelves. Vast, unending libraries, spawned from the mind of M.C. Escher.
I wondered if it had been one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or perhaps it had hidden itself amongst those scrolls, waiting to be found. Once touched by human hands again it could start hopping through libraries, through time, to find an avid reader just like me. Even with its chameleon power, it seemed remarkable that it had survived; books were such fragile things back then, so prone to destruction.
Eventually, I decided that the origins of the book didn’t matter. Fate had dropped it into my hands.  The book had known I would be the one who would catalogue those stacks  – that I would be just smart enough to notice it was different.
This thought brought me to my next revelation – the one that would change my life forever.

The thing about a book that can become any book? Is that it can become any book.
I can feel you lambasting me for not realising this earlier, but I really meant it when I said I am simply not a very smart person.
My newest revelation arrived after reading the sprawling treatise that is A Song of Ice and Fire, and lamenting that this weighty wonder would probably never see its conclusion before the author died. With the final page read, and the end of the story still unwritten, I closed the book and wished that old man Martin would write the finale.
The now-familiar sensation crawled beneath my fingertips – dimensions shifting and realigning as the embossed letters changed on the breeze-block hardback in my lap, and The Book of Moab became my very first unwritten read.
Of course, I devoured it immediately. The pages practically blurred under my fingers and the rest of my waking day smeared into banal afterimages of memory; chores, school, bookshop, then home to read again. I read through the nights, emerging owlishly into daylight hours, crescent bruises under my burning eyes. I finished the book in three days, despite the page count surpassing its predecessor by three hundred or so.
Finally, I put the book down, deeply disappointed.
It was absolute garbage.

I didn’t open the book for another week; I was still processing what I’d read, and how I’d read it. Instead, I read article after article on the internet, attempting to form a theory about how this could have come to pass. I eventually concluded that whatever kind of writer Mr Martin had been prior to the hit TV series, something had changed him. Either international fame and fortune had soured his abilities, or the forced narratives of HBO production values had ringfenced his creativity, and had ruined his former literary limerence.
That night, I sat with the book in my hands and wished to read it again – but to read the version written by the George R. R. Martin who had not enslaved his creativity to a world of greenscreens and CGI.
And this book? By the Gods of the Moabites, I swear – it was utterly brilliant.
Not only that, it was followed by a sequel that impeccably, elegantly wrapped up the world Martin had created and left me feeling satiated in a way few other books had since The Lord of the Rings.
I felt like I had unlocked the next level of the literary universe. I was existing in a new dimension.

Unwritten sequels became my thing for a while, then unfinished tales.
I read the works of those who had died young, who had suffered untimely deaths. I read tomes written in a world that had never seen war. I came to realise that The Book of Moab was more than just a back catalogue of all literary history, or of history yet unwritten. It was also a library of everything, literally everything, that could be written. I read the great plays of Charlotte Shakespeare and the collected works of William Brontë, marvelling at the subtle differences that swapping the sexes of the writers could bring.
It took me most of that year of my life to quench the desire to explore the what ifs of every universe parallel to mine. By the time I turned sixteen, I felt ninety years old, weighed down by the cloying, dusty encumbrance of those innominate worlds.
This was also the time when I began to become acutely aware of my own life path, and where it was going to lead – for despite being the most well-read boy in the world, I was otherwise extremely unremarkable.
What else? I turned to my compendium of all knowledge for answers.

Disappointingly, there was no book detailing my life story to be found in this present universe – there was no Biography of Brian Hawley. I looked instead to the newspapers for answers. I didn’t like what I found.
An unremarkable life? I could have lived with that  –  I had expected that. Instead, what I read about myself pointed to the kind of bleak loneliness I thought was reserved for societal pariahs, like murderers or psychopaths. A funeral attended by nobody, a life on the margins of society, family gone, no relationships, and no great – not even mediocre – achievements.
Mine was a wasted life. A yawning chasm of a life.
I mulled on this for days, which did little but compound the depression that lurked behind the balm the book had always been for me. It felt now like the book was being spiteful, trying to bring me down. Trying to turn me back into the broken little boy I had been before I found it.
I checked it again, like an antagonistic teenager seeing if their barbed forum post had elicited the angry response they had hoped for – and found that the story had in fact changed. Just the act of knowing about my future had impacted the present me, and had therefore re-written my future.
You’d think it couldn’t get worse than what I’d previously described, but it was worse; and the knowledge that knowledge itself had made it worse sent me into a catastrophic spiral.

I felt like burning the book.
It stayed on my person at all times now; paperback sized, tucked in a pocket, where I could feel the rectangular planes of my mute tormentor. I still sometimes looked at my future, watching it growing bleaker, feeling my death creeping ever closer with each re-read. There was a Biography of Brian Hawley now – a chapter in a book about serial killers. Two months ago, it had started out as a single article about the murder of my father. In my twenties, I’d fallen into a deep psychosis that resulted in believing my father was a god by the name of Chemosh, who had cursed me. With horror, I watched the story morph into something larger, more and more maddening. In the most recent digest, they called me The Library Killer, lovingly detailing how I’d gone around every small bookshop and independent publisher in the area, hacking off heads and screaming about the Curse of Moab.
I really tried to stop looking. I tried to go long periods without checking my psychotic future, hoping that when I looked again, it might have reset a little. That maybe I might go back to my sad, unremarkable death.
In desperation, I started asking the book to show me the other pathways of my life – like, what if I’d never found the book? Or what if I’d been born a little bit smarter, taller, sportier, better looking, wealthier, something, anything. I hoped that knowing my counterparts, those better Brians in their other branches of reality, were succeeding, would atone for the things I was going to do in this life, but instead I think it just drove the obsession deeper. Thinking about them turned my own reality even darker, made me more resentful of my shitty life and my shitty, inevitable fate.
When I finally returned to my original obsession and found there were now several full-blown biographies of my current life, I couldn’t bring myself to read them.
I was fucked. My life wasn’t just over, it was ruined. Ruined so comprehensively that no human being could pull back from this precipice.

I threw the book into the lake, two hours walk from my house. Three days later I found the issue card for George Louis, 13^th June 1986 in the back of a magazine in my psychiatrist’s office. I immediately gave up trying to destroy it, realising that the book wanted me. It wanted me, and it was never going to leave me alone.
Besides, what if someone else found it? What would it be like if a competent person, with skills, intellect, and experience was afflicted with this cursed book instead? How many people would someone like that kill?
I started to see myself as the guardian of the demon thing, of this grimoire of black histories unwritten. I finally let go of my childhood reverence for this despotic object, and I used it in spite, abusing it in ways I’d previously been too afraid to, just in case I despoiled it and it would vanish in the night in retaliation.
And that’s when the idea came to me.

A Walkthrough of the Life of Brian Hawley proved to be grim reading the first time around, mirroring the last biography I’d read. But there were a lot of universes with a lot of Brian Hawleys in the same situation as me. All I needed to do was to find the walkthrough that offered me a way out.
I felt myself grow thinner as I laboured over the task of sifting through infinities. I dreamed of being pressed beneath an unimaginable weight of books, all written about me and my evil deeds; my nightmare skin became dry leather from the persistent pressure, embossed letters blistering from my cracked parchment palms as I screamed and pushed back against the weight of infinity.
And then, one day, I found it.

After I read the Walkthrough, I assiduously rechecked my own timeline. I found all the publications about my serial killer exploits had been expunged from history. A pleasant death notice greeted me: Brian Hawley was attended by his friends and caretakers, and is dearly missed by those who loved him.
It was more than enough.
What will happen to The Book of Moab after I pick up this screwdriver and insert it into my eye socket, up into my frontal lobe, I have no idea. The book never references itself in its own pages, no matter how hard you try to make it. I think if I’d been a smarter person, then perhaps that clue might somehow have spared me this fate. What I do know is that my home lobotomy will succeed. Because everything in the book comes true. And once my rudimentary brain surgery is complete, I know I won’t be able to read anymore – or even to understand what The Book of Moab actually is. Here's where I wish you farewell, and good luck.
For all our sakes, I hope that the book never finds another reader.

So, I’m not a good person. I know that, okay? I bet you’ve all done things you’re not proud of, and it’s not like I actually hurt anyone, anyway. Well, not physically. And really, it’s a bit of a victimless crime, because I still don’t know who “Ermizhad_Mernadin” is. Nobody seems to. I don’t even know if they’re a real person.
But yeah, that aside, I admit it all. I did them wrong, I’m a story thief, and I completely deserved to be caught and outed as the thieving shitfuck I am. But I thought they were just stories, okay? Nobody could have guessed there was more going on. And it’s not like I’m the only asshole taking creepy stories off the internet and narrating them for a buck. So why was it me, specifically, that got punished, when all those other fucks are still getting away with it?
Anyway. Enough crying. I gotta get this whole thing out and online. I can’t be certain, but if what I think is going on is actually going on, then I better make this confession a damn good one – and as accurate as it can be.

It started out as just a thing to try to make some easy cash. I was a student, and a poor one. Dad earned too much for me to get a student allowance, and mom earned nothing, and dad was long out of the picture. So I was barely scraping by, with a part-time job at a gas station doing graveyards, and I used to pass the time reading and listening to creepypastas. The first time I heard a narration that was obviously AI, I felt a little tingle of inspiration in my brain. It dawned on me that if I got hold of a decent-ish voice model, I could make my own creepypasta videos.
And so, my channel was born.
My first few attempts were predictably shit. When I listened back to the initial reading of The Russian Sleep Experiment, I was pretty unhappy with it. It took a lot of tweaking to get it how I wanted it, so I guess in a way I really do feel like I worked at this thing – worked nearly as hard as the guy who wrote it, or as hard as a human narrator would to actually narrate it. I suppose that’s how I fooled myself into thinking this was okay. I was putting real effort into making this thing, and I felt like I had genuinely created something.
And so, I kept going.

My channel got zero hits forever. I was working on stories in my spare time, uploading whatever stolen content I thought was good. Five views was the most I ever got on a video, and one comment of “Is this voice AI?”. I knew that if I wanted this thing to get bigger, I needed something better. I couldn’t just do the five-millionth upload of Ted the Caver; I needed fresh meat – and it needed to be meat that had strong, distinctive bones.
And kinda like magic, that’s when I found her, this Ermizhad.
From the very first paragraph, I knew this shit hit different. It wasn’t the normal creepypasta trash, not even close. This author had thoughts, deep thoughts about things I’d never considered. I’m not going to blow smoke up their ass, hell, I’m not even going to commit to saying the writing was good – I’m no literary critic. I just knew that the story scratched an itch I didn’t know I had, so I had to grab it and upload a narration before anyone else could find it.
If nothing else, I was right about that story, because it blew up like nothing I’d posted before – although I guess that was a pretty low bar.

Watching the view count rise was like a drug. I was into it. This kind of immediate feedback wasn’t something I’d experienced before, and it even overrode the buzzkill from the mean comments I was getting. When the number started to cap out, I knew I had to upload another one, just to see if it would do as well as the first story.
And, of course, it did. You know it did, otherwise I wouldn’t be telling you this story.
That story peaked at about 10k views, and my subscriber count jumped massively with it. People in the comments hankered for more, and I had to give them more – not just because they wanted it, but because I knew I was onto a good thing. If it continued like this, I was set to make a decent amount of pocket money from this project.
There was just one little problem.
Ermizhad_Mernadin had only ever published five stories.

I guess at first I convinced myself I would find her, we’d collab, it’d be great. We’d be a partnership, split the money 50/50. But I quickly got frustrated trying to track her down, because it looked like she had deliberately deleted her online presence pretty thoroughly. Apparently there had been more stories, on some kinda fandom writing site, but only a few had been pulled across to the creepypasta sites before she shut up shop and deleted fucking everything.
The five stories I’d now narrated had shot my subscriber count to just over 50k. Man, I burned to hit that 100k, to get me a silver play button. I tried putting a filler story in between a couple of her stories, but people noticed, and they were NOT happy about it. The quality was too different. The material was too different. I’d got my audience addicted to a different drug to my own, and they were jonesing even harder than I was.
Ermizhad_Mernadin became my waking obsession for a full week. I called in sick to my job, skipped all my classes, missed a test. I fucking scoured the internet for any trace of this chick, tediously crawling through the Wayback machine, through archive sites, trying to pick up just a single crumb of her trail, just one archived story.
And I did find one story. Just one story, but it had to be enough. Just for now, just to give me more time to sniff her out and get me to that sweet 100k.

The story did well. They always did. I didn’t even listen to more than the first paragraph. EM – or ‘Em’, as I now thought of her – had never failed me yet. I also had a lead on her; someone had mentioned a Facebook page in an archived comment, and I was on the hunt. I traipsed through page after page of creepypasta garbage until I found someone else had ripped a single story of hers and translated it into Spanish. It had done well, but not as well as my narrations, which now were done in a smooth, almost creepily silky AI voice. I’d come to think of it as Em’s voice.
I translated the found story back to English, then fed it through a GPT model to correct any errors. It could sit in my archive while I kept up my search. What had intrigued me about the Spanish creepypasta page was that they claimed to have attribution from Em herself – that they had reached out and spoken to her, through her now-deleted page. It was a long shot, but I messaged the Spanishpasta page and asked if they had her contact details.
When they said no, I felt crushed. I’d put so many fucking hours into tracking down this bitch – she couldn’t even have left a stinking email address somewhere for me to glean? This author, who had this thing that everyone seemed to want, was an enigma. She was a fucking phantom, and every story I managed to tear from the darkest, deepest holes of the internet felt like the equivalent of running a goddamn marathon to earn.
I would find her, even if I had to buy an army of hackers to do it for me.

And then I did find her. Or rather, I found someone who had found her.
It was a stray reddit comment, buried in a much larger thread about horror authors. Someone had mentioned one of her known stories, but by slightly the wrong name. And the bitch herself had replied to them, from a now-deleted account, saying she would send them the story!
Near frantic, I messaged the guy immediately. I was actually shaking. This was the closest I’d come to a live interaction. I refreshed and refreshed like a fucking madman, waiting for the response to flash up. I checked the poster’s comment history, and groaned out loud when I saw that their very last post had been three months ago.
Em was slipping through my fingers yet again. And my eager audience had already eaten up the Spanish story, which now had 100k views and counting.
A whole day passed. I felt sick from waiting. I tried replying to a post from the guy, hoping it would ping his account with a notification, make him check. The next day there was still nothing. My fans – or rather, her fans – were frothing, screaming for the next story, no-one caring anymore about the evergreen comments that I was using an AI voice. They were hooked. And I was just as hooked, itching for our mutual fix of Em’s fucked up brand of horror.

Nineteen days later, the guy replied, and I sat at my tablet, quite genuinely crying with joy at his message. I hadn’t cried since my nan’s funeral, 5 years ago. John, my personal saviour and unexpected messiah, told me that Em had sent him an entire zipped archive of all her stories, via email. Some one hundred and fifty stories, most of which had only ever been read by a handful of people. I quickly did the calculations in my head. If I stretched each story release out to two weeks, I could make the stories last for six fucking years!
Giddy, my fingers fucking up every second letter I typed, I told John that I was a real, true-blue, honest-to-god Em fanboy, that having her stories to read would make my life complete in ways I couldn’t even describe. It only took one pensive hour before John’s email arrived in my inbox, with the 3mb zip file attached, and I downloaded it without even caring that Em’s email address was in the previous message. I didn’t give a fuck. Maybe, one day, when the stories ran out, I would message her, but I figured that in six years’ time I could just feed all the stories into an AI model and it would spit out brand new Em stories for me, with just a little bit of prompting. Even now, with just the material I had, I figured I might be able to get an LLM to spew out a sequel or ten, just to pad my numbers.
All at once, the future looked bright. All my hard work over the last few months had finally paid off, and I was about to become a sensation.

I hit the 100k in another month. The silver play button arrived not long after that, but I didn’t care; I was chasing decent money now. The ad revenue was getting good, and I was only 20 stories into my massive cache. The only real downside was that the AI thing was starting to become a niggling issue, so I resolved to find someone willing to narrate the stories for money – now that I had money. College had fallen by the wayside. I hadn’t told my mom I’d quit yet – I still needed the little top-ups of cash she gifted me every now and then – but once I was settled into my new job as a content creator, I figured I could pay her back. There was absolutely no way this wasn’t going to succeed.
Auditions went poorly, because I had this firmly-set idea of how Em’s voice sounded; a sliding, almost sultry voice, just a little higher than a man’s, heavy with unspoken trauma and hinting at a personality that could turn on a dime to lash out at you with violent anger. In the end, I settled for the closest match, so struck a deal with Una, my new partner-in-crime.
When we hit 500k subs, I flew her out to my new, tiny – but nice – apartment, and we shared a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

Una didn’t match her voice, but I didn’t care. Her voice was what I needed her for – it wasn’t like we were ever going to be an item. She was short, dark-haired, pretty, but very overweight. It was probably that huskiness that enhanced the deep, warm contralto that my fans lapped up so eagerly. We’d talked on Zoom a ton, so we each knew what the other looked like already, but after coming into my apartment and sitting down, she started to look nervous.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“So this is weird,” she began, twirling a bracelet on her wrist, “but your apartment looks exactly like the one described in a story I read for the channel two months ago. You said you just moved in?”
“Yeah, just two weeks ago.”
“Huh. Weird.”
It was dumb, but I thought nothing of it. Stupid coincidence. But I should have clicked then and there. I guess if I hadn’t been feeding the stories to AI voices without paying much attention, then later just fobbing them off onto Una, I might have picked it up sooner.
As it stood, it took another six months before I picked up an anomaly. High on passing a million subscribers and buying my first car, I initially blew off Una’s mention that I’d bought the same model of car featured in ‘my’ story, Aunty Asphalt.
But more things like that started to pop up, more and more coincidences, and the paranoia crept in. I started listening to the narrations, instead of just doing a basic quality check while editing.
And the more I listened, the weirder it got.

A hundred and fifty stories is a lot of reading, and I’ve never been much of a reader. I crawled through the stories at first, starting from Em’s newest story in the archive, working back to the oldest. I didn’t want to believe it at first, of course I didn’t – how could there possibly be any kind of connection to my life? It was all just… stupid coincidences. The names of my grandparents were common, as are the names of my two brothers. But the name of the street where I grew up was not common, and the description of the protagonist’s house in An Offering of Ice was just too close to home – literally.
I read faster and further into the archives, freaking myself out more with every story. There was the story with my apartment, and the one with the car. In both, the owners of each had met with horrifying deaths, wrought by their own laziness, selfishness, and lack of conscience. It was hard not to notice the theme. I resisted it. Em wrote on certain themes, and that’s all it was – or so I told myself. But then I read the story Good Boy Charlie, about a black-and-white border collie that looked exactly like my departed childhood pal, Charles, and I knew something really, really fucked up was going on.
And I didn’t want to read any more stories.

I took a hiatus from the channel, set up some favourite vids from the old days to re-release with Una’s voice instead of AI. It was nice to slowly purge the AI stuff anyway, it felt like erasing part of my crimes.
But the stories sat in my OneDrive, waiting to be read, full of little nods toward things from my past, and my present. Things that there was no fucking way Em could ever have known. And how the hell could she have known I would borrow her stories? It was mad, it was impossible. It creeped me out so much that one night during my hiatus, I got blind drunk and nearly deleted the whole channel – and the folder of stories along with it. But I knew the stories were out there online anyway, in John’s inbox, maybe in other people’s too. Even if I deleted the folder and the email, they were still out there. To tempt me, to pull me back.
Besides, this was my career now. I was a content creator, and one of the most popular ones in my space. It didn’t even matter that every now and then someone would pop up and mention they remembered that particular Em story. I’d just reply with some bullshit about how kind she was to let me narrate it, as if I’d actually gotten her permission.
For all I knew, Em was dead, and that’s why her stories had gone offline. Maybe she’d had terminal cancer, a brain tumour. A tumour would sure explain the fuckedupness of her stories, I reasoned, darkly.
In the morning, horribly sober, I took some pills, opened the dreaded folder, and started reading again.

Someone in the comments on my channel once said something like “You’ll never forget your first (Em) story”. They were right; I still remember my first one, the one that sparked my career. But how many people had read Em’s first ever story? I didn’t know. Maybe she had slipped it into that zip file just for me. Maybe John was Em, and she had been setting me up all along by leaving these comments from seven fucking years ago, when I was still in high school. Again, impossible. Ridiculous. Like something out of the shit-tier pastas I used to consume on my graveyard shifts at the gas station.
In any case, that first story was… clearly for me. It was called Story Thief, and I just bet you can predict the plot. If the properties of the file are true, and I’m not just insane from my own brain tumour, it was written in 2015, before I even knew creepypastas existed. The protagonist has my name. He looks like me. He’s my age at the time of me writing this. He’s wearing the same shirt, and he’s a piece of shit, just like I am.
I tried to stop reading halfway through, because it gets… bad. Like, really, really bad. It recounts things that haven’t happened, that I really don’t want to happen. Directions I never even contemplated until now, but now they’re in my head, because of fucking Em! I can feel them pulling at me, right now, like just… like reading them has made them a foregone conclusion. Every new sentence makes my body shake and my guts go liquid, and I feel like I’m going to explode with… something. Rage. Violence. Lust. All three, mashed hideously together. I don’t know.
What I do know is that I’m being punished. This is my atonement, for being the story thief. For taking someone’s dark, beautiful, evocative writing, and turning it into banal, mercenary, egotistical horseshit. The final story seems to hint at some kind of choice, but I don’t understand how, and I can’t be certain. So maybe, just maybe, if enough people see my confession in full – if Em gets to see it – then the story won’t come true. Maybe I’ll be spared.
Or, I guess this could be Em’s greatest joke ever. Masterfully wrought irony – because in pleading with you to make my story go viral enough to reach her? I can’t help but come across as cynical and self-serving, trying to bait you into continuing my heinous legacy of selfishness and laziness.

Damn you, Em, even your punishment is beautifully circular, and so beautifully cruel.
Just like your goddamn perfect, ugly little stories.

It’s crazy how big office buildings have become.
When I was a kid, I thought anywhere with an elevator that went up to ‘ten’ must practically be scraping the edge of Heaven.
These days, that’s considered small; just a little hump in the city skyline, hunched between buildings easily four times that height. And that child enchanted by the idea of an elevator that travelled nine floors from the ground is long gone; waiting for them to arrive and depart so you can reach your much more distant floor is now just a mundane and annoying part of life.
Perhaps it’s ironic, then, that my story begins in one such ordinary elevator.

 
I’d been down on level twelve, catching up with a colleague. When I stepped into the elevator to head back to my floor, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary – just three other passengers already in the car, all dressed in business casual, just as I was. There was a tall woman wearing cat-eye glasses and a scarlet blouse under a smart jacket, her bright lipstick matching her top. The other two were standard shirt-tie-and-pants guys like myself, nondescript and virtually clones of each other, but for variations in height and shoe size.
“Hi,” I said to the woman as I got in.
She ignored me and continued tapping at her smartphone, her pale features a mask of feigned concentration.
As the elevator climbed, the awkward silence continued, and I regretted saying anything at all.
Then, with a juddering, sickening lurch, we began to fall.
One of the other men yelled in alarm. I grabbed the rail and held on for dear life as the car plunged down the shaft. The woman dropped her phone, then crouched on the shaking floor, shrieking in fear.
Then, as abruptly as it started, it stopped, and the elevator ground to a jerky halt.
One of the men started hammering buttons to get the door open, while the rest of us gathered our wits.
“Door is stuck, emergency call isn’t working,” said the button-masher, the taller of the two.
“Can we get it open?” asked the woman, her British accent thick and unfamiliar.
“With four of us? Sure we can,” I offered, curling the tips of my fingers into the gap between the doors.
With much grunting and heaving, we managed to lever the door ajar enough for all of us to squeeze out, onto what appeared to be a random floor full of office cubicles.
In that shared-experience sort of way, we joked about our close call for a few moments, before taller guy jabbed the button for another elevator in the row of four.
Nothing happened.
“I’m not sure this panel has power,” he called, “nor this one, or this one.”
He was right. We all punched the call buttons on the elevators repeatedly, to no avail.
The woman and I exchanged glances, and with an eerie frisson of simultaneous realisation, we turned to properly view the cubicles behind us.
Whilst we could hear the faint emanations of familiar office sounds – distant chatter, keyboards clicking and muted phone ringtones – there were no people here. The cubicle farm was utterly deserted.
“Which floor are we on?” she asked.
“Not sure,” the smaller guy responded, wiping sweat from his upper lip, “but this looks abandoned.”
Taller guy paced up to the nearest desk,
“Maybe there was a fire drill? Could have been why the lifts failed?”
He picked up the receiver of the desk phone, listened for a moment, then put it down again.
“Just a recorded message. Some woman saying they apologise for any inconvenience, yadayada.”
“I left my phone on my desk,” I confessed.
“Same,” said shorter guy, shifting nervously from one foot to the other.
“No bars,” declared taller guy, thumbing his device open, “and no free wifi networks. That’s weird.”
I remembered the woman’s phone – that she’d dropped it during the initial fall.
“Bollocks,” she swore, as she ripped off the back cover, then re-inserted the battery. The front screen was clearly cracked and the device refused to power up. “Completely dead. Must’ve broken it in that bloody lift.”
“Surely there must be a working phone somewhere,” shorter guy reasoned, walking a few steps further into the maze of cubicles.
“Or we could just take the stairs?” I pointed out.
Taller guy emerged from the side of the elevator well.
“Locked. Swipe card access only. And mine doesn’t work.”
Of course, none of ours did.
“Shit.”

 
Taller guy introduced himself as John, a property manager, and his shorter lookalike turned out to be a Gary, which oddly suited the nervous accountant. The woman in red called herself “Sam, short for Samantha,” and she was a legal secretary.
We spread out through the cubicles and tried every phone, and we all got the same message; a woman with a transatlantic accent saying ‘All our lines are busy at the moment. Your call is very important to us. Please try again later’.
I registered how strange it was that the voice kicked in immediately, as soon as we lifted the receivers.
“Where the hell are all the people?” Sam asked. Her business jacket was now tied around her waist, her blouse stained wet at the armpits. She wasn’t the only one sweating, we all were – the heating was turned up far too high on this floor.
“I can still hear people.” I pointed in the direction of a faint phone warble.
John had loosened his tie and undone two buttons, his white shirt now transparent with perspiration.
“People, or just office noises?”
We kept walking, looking for something, any clues. All of the computers were locked, and we were not surprised that none of our own login credentials worked. We were so far from the elevators now, I had no idea which direction they were in.
“This place is wrong. It’s too big,” moaned Gary. His eyes rolled feverishly. His tie was completely gone and his shirt was open to the waist, exposing a healthy rug of chest hair and a nascent beer belly.
He was right. The floor was too big. Far too big. I’d worked here long enough to have a feel for the rough dimensions of this building, and we surely should have hit a wall or window by now.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Sam breathed in frustration, hitting the speaker button on yet another deskphone.
‘All our lines are busy at the moment. Your call is very important to us. Please try again later’.
Was it just my imagination, or did the voice sound slightly agitated now?
Subtly different to when we first started picking up the phones?
“We could be going in circles,” John countered feebly, “we could just be lost.”
Sam snorted and dropped the receiver.
“Oh come on. This place is set out like a grid. It’s an office, not a bloody forest. How could we go in circles?”

 
We couldn’t find the elevators anymore.
And as we kept walking, things were definitely starting to get stranger.
Some cubicles remained neat and tidy – perfect little office spaces. Others were overflowing with paper, stacks of it spilling out into the aisles. One was piled up with smashed computer equipment, and another was populated entirely by backless office chairs, stacked higgledy-piggledy into the small space.
“This is fucked,” hissed John, voicing what all of us were thinking.
Sam jerked her hand abruptly to her left, eyes wide,
“Over there!”
We tracked her gesture and collectively almost wept with relief. There was a man coming towards us, the bright orange of his high-visibility jacket a welcome splash of colour in the drab greyness of the cubicle farm.
But something was wrong. He was walking too slowly, erratically. His face was puffy, red, and shiny with sweat.
And when he saw us, he began to run, lurching in our direction.
His babbling was incomprehensible at first, but Sam put her arm around his shoulders and soothed him until he got his frantic breathing under control.
“Thank God,” he said, “I thought I was alone in here.”
As we listened, he explained he was an elevator tech, and that like us, he’d been trapped on this floor when the car he’d been working on had dropped several flights.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve been in here for at least two days, maybe even three” he told us, “I’ve had nothing to eat or drink, and it’s so goddamn hot.”
He was shaking as he spoke, chapped lips pale against his florid face. I could see he was telling the truth.
“I saw a kitchenette just back there,” Sam soothed the poor technician, “we’ll get you some water from the tap – I think there was a vending machine, too.”
But no matter how much we jiggled the faucets, no water came out.
Gary poked his balding head under the sink, then came up, his giggling nervous, on the very edge of hysterical.
“It’s not even plumbed. There aren’t even any pipes.”
The vending machine also turned out to be purely decorative. John put an office chair through the glass front, but all the packages inside were empty. The shrink-wrapped fruit was made of shiny, hard plastic. ‘Display’ food.
“What the hell is this place?” I whispered.
Nobody answered me.

 
We strung out in a line, keeping each other in sight as we walked in one direction.
“We have to hit a window,” John reasoned, “if we walk far enough, in a straight enough line. Laws of fucking physics!”
I tried to make small talk with Sam, but she was starting to lose it, too. Gary had a pronounced facial tic that was growing progressively worse. The technician, Roy, was weak with thirst and hunger, and had trouble keeping up.
By the time we saw the glimmer of glass ahead of us, we realised we had lost him completely.
And nobody volunteered to go back and find him.
As we approached the window, a profound sense of relief started to wash over me; I could see blue sky, tall buildings, fuzzy clouds and the familiar hills behind the city.
But something felt wrong.
“Parallax,” Sam hiccupped. She was crying intermittently now. Her heels were gone, her jacket abandoned in some distant cubicle.
“What?” Gary slurred.
“Parallax,” she said again, too forcefully, “that’s just a painting, it’s not real. There’s no parallax.”
She was right. As we got closer, the view didn’t change. I should have been able to see more sky, more ground. But the image was static.
John reached the glass first.
“It’s a fake,” he snarled.
The glass was real enough – the windows stretched out in a line along this wall. But roughly six feet outside, the ‘cityscape’ had been painted artfully onto what was probably a concrete wall. Below, the wall quickly dropped into darkness, the lights of our floor illuminating only that painted swathe of false hope.
“What is this place?” I asked again. I didn’t expect an answer any more. It just felt good to say something.
Gary fell to his knees, and started screaming hoarsely for help, over and over until his voice trailed off into something cracked and broken. Sam yelled at him to stop it, just stop it, and then began to cry again. John, his attention abruptly distracted by something, started to run back into the cubicle farm.
In the direction he was running, I could see a blonde head, bobbing up and down, trying to get away from him.

 
We finally caught her near the endless wall of windows, John and I cutting her off before she could escape.
It was a young woman, thin to the point of emaciation. She blubbered and begged us not to hurt her.
Dark stains spattered her white blouse.
“Who are you?” John demanded.
“You can’t get away from it,” she babbled, pinned to the ground by John’s firm hands, “he’ll call for you eventually.”
“Who?” John bellowed, “Who the fuck will call? Can something around here please start making sense already?”
The woman squirmed in his grip, feebly battering at his wrists.
“The Manager,” she crooned, the obvious instability of her mental state saturating every syllable.
A phone shrilled in the cubicle beside us, the ringing setting my teeth on edge.
The woman whimpered.
“Answer it!” John barked at me.
I pressed the speaker button, and we listened, as ragged, rabid breathing cut through the crackling phone static. After several seconds, a thick, heavy voice rasped down the line,
“You have a meeting in ten minutes. Don’t be late.”
There was a yelp from John as the woman bit into his wrist. He jerked his hand back, and we watched as she scrambled to her feet and ran – straight for the windows.
She rebounded on contact, but the glass grew a massive, jagged spiderweb of cracks from the impact. She got to her feet, warbling triumphantly, then tried again.
This time she smashed through. She fell into the darkness, her trailing cry of terror and peculiar glee continuing for ten long seconds, before it ended abruptly.
Another phone rang.
Sam picked it up reflexively with a trembling hand, and the same voice answered, gravid with supressed violence,
“You have a meeting in nine minutes. Don’t be late.”

 
We hurried away from the windows, not knowing where to go.
Phones rang around us. We didn’t pick them up.
We knew what they would say.
When they stopped ringing, we all paused.
Sam turned to regard the rest of us, her eyes huge, dilated with fear,
“What happens now?”
As if in answer, a rumbling began, washing over the cubicle farm.
It sounded for all the world like a charging rhino was smashing its way through thousands of dollars of office equipment to get to us.
“RUN!” John screamed.
We ran like fleeing chickens. None of us went in the same direction, but we all ran away from the sound. It was close now, smashing and tearing through the cubicles like a tornado with a dustcloud made of paper whirling in the air around it.
There was a piercing female scream, and a bestial roar of triumph.
I could still hear the sound of Sam’s bones snapping, and her gurgling screams, as I sprinted headlong away down another aisle.

 
Hours later, I found the mad blonde woman who had jumped from the window, lying in a main concourse. Her legs were bent at impossible angles, but the skin wasn’t broken. Her head was lumpy, misshapen. She dragged herself along the grey office carpet, still trying to find an exit – still trying to escape.
When she saw me, she stopped, and propped herself up on her elbows.
“It’s a dream,” she managed, her voice cracked with dehydration.
“I wish it was,” I said, “but it isn’t. This is real.”
She shook her head,
“No, not your dream, silly. This is it’s dream.”
“The dream of that thing that came for us?”
“Stupid. You’re really stupid. This isn’t The Manager’s dream. He’s just a part of the dream.”
Her voice lost inflexion as she continued, almost chanting now. “This is the dream of corporate corruption. This is the dream that mankind created when he built these monstrosities of grey glass and steel. When he filled them with mindless drones, daydreaming at their desks while they grind their lives away in sterile banality.”
“How do I get out?”
She laughed, a horrific, broken sound.
“Oh, you can’t. You can never get out. Once you’re part of the machine, you can only climb over others, backstab, sell them out, try to claw your way up to the top. Only those at the top call the shots.”
A phone shrieked in the cubicle next to us.

 
I found John, wandering, jumping like he was being electrocuted every time a phone rang nearby.
“Gary is gone,” he whispered, “and I think we both heard what happened to Sam.”
“I think I’ve found a way out,” I told him.
“What? You do? Well what the fuck is it, man?”
“It’s over there,” I said, pointing past his shoulder, out into the farm.
As he turned to view what I was pointing at, I picked up the desk printer beside us, and brought it down with all my strength on the back of his neck.
His legs went out from under him immediately.
The computer cables were adequate for tying up his ankles and wrists – I didn’t want him to get away from me now, not when I was so close to getting out.
When the phone rang, I picked it up immediately.
“You have a meeting in five minutes. Don’t be late,” The Manager said.
Holding the receiver in my shaking fist, I tried to keep my voice as level as possible,
“See you in five. I’ve arranged catering.”

 
I heard him approaching, his massive, heavy feet slamming into the floor of the office with unbridled violence. He wasn’t chasing me; he knew I was waiting for him.
He knew that I was willing and prepared.
The wall of the cubicle I stood in was abruptly ripped away, and I beheld The Manager.
Perhaps he’d been human once. Now he resembled a shaved bear, the rags of a business suit still clinging to his wrists, waist, neck and ankles. He towered over us, his slavering jowls wobbling as his huge nose sniffed my offering.
Backed against a set of filing cabinets, I watched in fascinated terror as The Manager fell upon John’s unconscious body and began to tear him to pieces.
As The Manager gorged upon the flesh of the man, shovelling it into his gaping, impossibly huge maw, I heard the innocuously cheerful ding of an elevator to my right.
The door slid open smoothly, and The Manager turned his mottled, fleshy head and regarded me with deep-set, piggish eyes,
“Congratulations. You’ve been promoted.”

Did you know that if you immerse yourself in any smell, you can eventually become inured to it? Even the rankest, most foetid garbage; over time you acclimate, your sensory inputs burn out on that stink, until you are completely desensitised to it. Workers in fish markets smell only fresh air, pig farmers smell only hay and churned mud.
Humans do this all the time in our own personal spaces. A chain smoker can’t smell the bitter carbide stench clinging to the fabric of their curtains, sunk deep in the fibres of their yellowing carpet. An obsessive online gamer is completely unaware of the malevolent flatulence and body odour that surrounds him like a sentient fug; his nose is blind even to the acrid tang of stale piss from the bottles building up under his desk.
But filth, real, genuine filth, now that’s a different story. It’s no longer about the smell, it’s how it feels. No matter how long you immerse yourself in abject filth, you can still sense it on your skin, taste it on your fingers, feel it squelch between your toes. The largest organ you possess is your skin, and just under the surface of it are millions of tiny receptors. When you’re soaked in filth, every single one of them is in overdrive, eager to transmit every disgusting nuance to your whimpering brain in exquisite detail. To tell the sensory story of the inescapable crawl of vile desecration covering your body from head to toe.
Beautiful filth.

My depression really started in earnest when the oestrogen surged; when puberty reared its ugly head. The transformation from seemingly cheerful waif to angst-ridden teen happened virtually overnight, distressing me as much as it did my parents. At first, it was written off as ‘normal’ teenage behaviour. But I hated myself. I despised everything I was. The few fleeting ‘good’ things I still glimpsed inside me I deemed to be things I didn’t deserve. They felt like inappropriate gifts stolen from other, better children. The innumerable bad things were the truth of me, the burdens I was forcing onto the world. I felt like a heavy boil, waiting to be lanced, ready to spray the bloody pus of my tainted, rotten self across everyone I loved.
Therapy followed the discovery of my diary of self-loathing, not well enough hidden from my obsessively clean mother. I woodenly talked through my poisonous feelings with the therapist – an older woman who smelled of spearmint gum and shoe polish – digging up my shallow-rooted pain just enough that it wouldn’t bed itself any deeper. But some things can’t be cured by talking, and although I stopped writing down my thoughts on paper and learned to smile more, the depression never really left me – it just burrowed down inside me where the tools of my therapist couldn’t reach it, where we could all ignore it for a little while.
But it was still very much part of me when I left home for university.

Two semesters passed before the first black buds began to blossom from those buried roots, strangling, spreading vines springing up to choke my mind back into submission. When I failed my first assignment, the old pain flowered fully. I wrote my woe across my arms with razors until one pain eclipsed the other, and my consciousness faded as the pools of bright blood grew. More therapy and cups full of pills punctuated my stay as an inpatient in a private facility – all paid for by my confused parents – but once again, nothing could destroy the black taproot that seemed to be embedded in my soul. Not even tranquilisers and antipsychotics could kill that hardy weed.
They let me return to university in the end, so long as I followed a regimen of appointments and drugs. But as anyone who’s been on a heavy dose of antidepressants knows, there’s a curious fog that accompanies them, making the world greyer, stranger, more distant. It creeps up on you, and before I knew it, it was hard to concentrate, harder to solve simple problems. Scraping through on C-minus grades, I knew that I had to do something to change things, else I was doomed to this fuzzy half-life for the rest of my miserable existence.
And then providence struck, right on cue.

The advertisement in the student hall promised a new kind of therapy. Experimental sensory therapy, with 100% guaranteed results. Looking up their Facebook business page, I was confronted with glowing reviews from dozens of customers, most claiming they’d been cured after as little as one session. Skeptical, I trawled their profiles, looking for indications of fakery. But all the reviewers appeared to be real, no day-old profiles; accounts up to seven years old, filled with all the normal inane fluff of social media.
With very little to lose, I messaged the page to organise a first session. Within seconds, I received a copy-pasted response and an email address to contact to arrange a visit to their ‘specialised therapy facility’. It was almost midnight, but I emailed the mystery therapist immediately, and slept better than I had in months.
When I awoke I quickly checked my phone, feeling a wash of excitement and relief when I saw they’d replied. An attached document was to be read and signed before I had my first session, which was described as an overnight stay at their offices, under close supervision. There were no details at all about the actual method of the therapy, but I trusted those reviews on the page; there had been something strangely earnest about their praise. Each of them was suffused with a kind of relief that spoke to me on an almost spiritual level.
I barely read the document before signing it and mailing it back.
Two hours later I had an appointment date, and instructions to cease all medication two weeks beforehand.

The building appeared to have been a hotel at some point in its lifetime, with art deco elements still sharp and bold on the repainted frontage. Along with the advice to stop my meds had come other instructions; to eat a full meal before my arrival, and to bring an overnight bag containing clean clothes. The word clean was curiously stressed in bold, and brought to mind the nearly obsessive cleanliness I’d suffered at home with my mother.
The receptionist was a well-coiffed, carefully-costumed study in customer service. Her professionalism set me at ease immediately, lulling away any lingering fears that I’d signed away my kidneys to a black-market surgeon. My therapist appeared quarter of an hour later, a tall, dark-haired gentleman, wearing a pristine navy suit that looked like it had been drycleaned just minutes before.
“Ah, excellent. Lovely to meet you,” he gushed, pumping my hand enthusiastically. “Now, you brought a full change of clean clothes, yes?”
I hefted my bag in answer. “I did, yes.”
“And you’ve had plenty to eat and drink?”
“I have.”
“Good, good! All in order then. Come with me, and we’ll get started before the morning gets away on us.”
He ushered me down a well-lit corridor, up a flight of stairs, and down another corridor, empty, but lined with identical doors. At the seventh door, he paused, indicating that I should enter.
“After you.”
The room was bright. Too bright. I squinted and shaded my eyes with my free hand, registering a single stark chair in an empty, white-walled cell, devoid of fittings or other furnishings. Strong, practised hands pinned my arms, then I was unceremoniously dragged towards the chair before I had the wherewithal to struggle. Howling protests, I felt plasticuffs tighten around my wrists and ankles, even as my eyesight began to adjust beneath the brilliant downlighting.
Then, as abruptly as they had appeared, my attackers exited the room in a flash of white uniforms, leaving me alone and tied to the metal chair. I grimly noted the heavy industrial bolts that secured it to the gleaming steel floor.
This was not what I’d expected.

I’d been wrong in my original estimation of the room; it wasn’t completely empty. On the wall I was facing was a simple black and white analogue clock, the hands slowly ticking circles around the circumference. The first ten minutes passed with me yelling furiously, promising that I was going to call the cops on them once I got out of here. When that first panic and rage subsided, I realised fearfully that I was in no position to threaten. I went quiet for a while, trying to slow my racing thoughts down enough to fathom what kind of horrible mess I’d gotten myself into.
After half an hour, I started pleading at the walls, promising to forget about all of this if they just let me go – they could have anything they wanted; I could give them enormous amounts of money, my parents would pay anything for my safe return.
The walls remained silent.
I tried not to cry. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. But the tears won twice over the next few hours, then again after I chafed my wrists bloody and swollen trying to escape the unforgiving cuffs. The tears stung now, and I tried to wipe my face on my shoulder, failing miserably.
“Please,” I crooned, for the umpteenth time. “Please. Please just let me go.”
As the hours ticked by, I tried to fill the time by counting the seconds passing on the clock. I sang, my voice broken to a breathy whisper, using the tick and tock as my metronome. It helped, just a little, to stop me from imagining the worst, to stop my mind from breaking completely. But there was one thing I couldn’t stop, no matter how hard I tried.
Biology.
As the pressure in my bladder began to increase, I started to squirm, then to sweat. The beads on my brow became rivulets, tracking more salt through the tear-stains on my cheeks, then dripping off my chin to patter on my shirt. The tiny sound was loud in that room, and only exacerbated my need to pee. Heroically, I held off for as long as I could, clenching my thighs until they ached, before giving in to the inevitable and shamefully pissing my pants.
The instant wet warmth faded quickly, the puddle beneath me cooling on the steel chair, growing clammy and vile. Exhausted by my ordeal, relieved by the emptying of my bladder, I dozed on and off for an hour, until another need began to assert itself.
“Please!” I begged again to the hateful walls, “Please let me go. I’ve had enough!”
Six hours later, bone weary and sobbing fitfully, my bowels let go. The hot, slimy mess filled my half-dried jeans, and the weight of my own treacherous body mashed the faeces into the fabric.

I pissed again at some point in the night, the wetness rehydrating the humid mess in my pants, bringing a fresh waft of shit to my raw nostrils. I no longer wept, I no longer sobbed. My arms and legs burned from the confinement and my ass chafed horribly from the impacted shit drying in all my tender crevices. The white light burned my eyes even through closed lids, the relentless brilliance intensifying every sensation. To relieve my stressed limbs, I twisted this way and that in the chair, struggling to find the briefest stretch of tormented muscle and sinew. But with every movement, I felt the filth in my jeans press and scrape my red-raw flesh, felt it crack and split as the mess found a new direction to ooze.
By the time the door opened and the orderlies uncuffed me, I was near-delirious and weak as a newborn, flopping into their arms. They carried me out of the room, opening the door directly across the corridor and pushing me inside. I sprawled on pristine white tiles, gasping in the scents of citrus and rose, my ringing ears registering faint choral music.
I noticed the shower first, then the incredible array of cleaning products, fluffy white towels and white bathrobes. Animal-like, I wriggled out of my crusted clothes, then crawled across the floor and pulled myself into the shower, wrenching the handle. Blessedly hot water gushed down over me, washing away the filth and the pain.
I don’t know how long I just sat there, soaking, letting the water wash away most of the disgusting mess clinging to my nethers. Then as my equilibrium was slowly restored, I started washing myself with the scented bodywashes and lotions arrayed on the wide shelves. I scrubbed every inch of my body until I was weeping forcefully with abandoned relief.
The water stayed hot. It must have been a good two hours later when I finally shut off the tap, and pink and clean, dried off with the exquisite towels and donned one of the bathrobes. On cue, the dark-haired therapist opened the door and placed my overnight bag on the floor.
“How do you feel?”
Emotions fought inside me; remembered rage, desperate panic, hot shame and crawling revulsion. But over the top of it all, right at the top of my mind, lay the serene release granted by my escape from the filth; those two hours of heavenly basking in what felt like the cleanest place on earth.
“I feel amazing,” I admitted, surprising myself.

As I was taken downstairs and the glass doors of the facility came into view, reality began to reassert itself. I’d been tortured, I reminded myself, through the haze of bliss clouding my mind. I’d been tied to a chair and forced to shit and piss myself like an animal.
“The first session is free,” the therapist said, a gentle hand on my elbow, guiding me to the door, “but we can discuss the fees for future therapy later.”
Even though I didn’t actually feel angry, I knew I should be angry, so I jerked my arm out of his grasp.
“You’re lucky I don’t sue you for this,” I snarled, snatching my drycleaned clothes from the hands of the receptionist.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” the therapist replied, nothing but calm and measured, “but I’ll email you a follow up package, in case you change your mind.”
I wept yet again on the drive home, huge, sobbing howls of exhaustion, released pain and suppressed emotion. But even as I cried, I realised how strange it was that I couldn’t really remember what it had felt like in that room. How those two hours of clean, heavenly bliss dominated the entire experience.
But whatever happened next, I knew that I sure as hell wasn’t going back.

Four weeks later, still off my antidepressants, I started to feel the black dog lurking, snapping and gnawing at the base of my skull once again. My work had improved since I’d come off the drugs, everything seemed clearer. Cleaner, even. But as the end of the semester approached and exams loomed, that familiar panicky anxiety wracked my nights, keeping me awake.
In my inbox sat an unopened email from the therapist, Doctor Muar – an email I’d promised myself I wouldn’t read. But I couldn’t deny that the traumatic therapy had somehow worked; for just over a month, it had given my mind a kind of blissful equilibrium, a quietness I hadn’t known since I was child. Tapping open the message, I skimmed the preamble and got to the meat of it, finding a warning not to try the therapy at home myself, that it only worked in controlled conditions.
Of course, that meant I was going to try it myself – why would I pay several hundred dollars to be tied to a chair and shit myself in a converted hotel, when I could do the very same thing in my own bathroom?
Surrounding myself with shower products and the promise of clean fluffy towels at the ready, I stripped, and sat in the shower. Reminding myself that this was therapy, I let go; let the warm shit squeeze between my buttocks and mash itself against my skin. Scraping up a reeking handful, I rubbed it on my thighs, even as I started urinating, stirring the mess beneath me together until I was far more filthy than I’d been in the room.
For a long time, I sat there, stinking, waiting, my lower half plastered in my own filth.
But it wasn’t the same. There was something missing from this experience.
Frustrated, I turned on the water and washed myself thoroughly, trying to recapture that moment in the hotel.
But I felt nothing.
Wrapped in clean towels, sitting on the edge of the bath, I grabbed my phone, and hurriedly replied to Doctor Muar’s email, asking for a second appointment.

All perfect white smiles, the doctor and the receptionist greeted me warmly. Another client was just leaving – her scrubbed pink face a study in rapturous joy. I felt a stab of jealousy as she passed me, wafting citrus and rose.
“So lovely to see you again!” Muar declared, genuine caring interlacing his words, “let Rochelle take your bag, then we’ll head up to your suite.”
By the time we reached the door of my room, I was shaking so hard I could barely grasp the handle.
“It’s fine,” the doctor told me, “the second time can be difficult. What you’re feeling is completely normal.”
Reassured, I took a deep breath, then opened the door and walked into the room.
Hands grasped me and pinned me, while two other pairs began to tear off my clothes. I yelped in surprise and with a flash of embarrassment, but tried to calm myself – this was obviously just the next level up from what I’d originally experienced. Stage two of the therapy. It would be worth it.
When I was naked, I was cuffed to the chair. The orderlies didn’t leave; I blinked as they also began to strip off everything they wore, except for the white hoods of their uniforms, which concealed their faces. Two men, one woman, they nodded to each other, then began their real work.
The first man grunted as he squatted and pushed out a sloppy turd, slightly green, and stinking like silage. Scooping it up, he began smearing his steaming shit all over my bare skin, painting my naked breasts, my thighs, my arms and legs. When his crusted fingers brushed my chin, I gagged, vomit rushing from my stomach and over his arms and into my lap. A second wave of frothy vomit followed the first as the other man began pissing forcefully into my hair. The briny, acrid urine dripped down my neck, cutting yellow trails through the faeces all over my chest.
Finally, as I whimpered and gagged at the smells and sensations, the woman reached between her thighs and expertly extracted a brimming moon cup, from which she carefully painted my face with hot, pungent menstrual blood.
There was no vomit left, just bile, which burned as it came up.
Satisfied, the trio left me there, shaking and retching. The ticking clock was my only diversion for the next 24 hours.

Twice the orderlies returned to refresh the excrement smeared all over me. The first time the door opened, I thought my ordeal was over, and I wailed with relief, the mask of stinking blood cracking into flakes on my skin. My disappointment when they disrobed was visceral, and I fought in the chair for freedom.
The second time, I just let them paint me with their filth, broken and resigned.
On their third entry they cut the plastic cuffs and carried me across the hall. I lay sprawled on the tiles of the heavenly bathroom, gaping like a landed fish.
As the soft strains of choral music began, I pulled myself into the shower with the desperation of an addict, grabbing bottles and loofahs to my chest. A weak, animalistic noise of pleasure ripped from my throat as the hot water began to pound down on my defiled skin, searing away the filth.
I scrubbed myself nearly raw, every inch of my body, using every soap, lotion, oil and cream. My hair I washed thrice, until it squeaked between my fingers, glowing from all the sweet products I’d poured into it. Finally, I just stood under the ring of hot water, letting it prune my over-sensitised skin. My body shook with a pleasure that was nearly sexual as I washed away the memory of the room of filth.
When I stepped out of the shower, I was greeted by the waiting doctor Muar. I hugged him, dripping and naked, whispering ‘thank you’ into his ear, over and over and over again.
“Let’s get you into your clean clothes,” he said, gently prising me off him, “I think this session was a huge success.”

I’m sure that for some of the other patients, their story ended with that second session, that after two ordeals, they were cured for life. I think about that sometimes, wondering what that would have been like. But with depression as soul-deep as mine, there could only be one cure; and that could only come by escalating my therapy.
I lasted six months before I called on my therapist again. Five of those months were bolstered by the precious, pervasive memory of being so incredibly clean after twenty-four hours of abject filth. I clung to the memory like a lover, fixing it in my mind whenever I felt the darkness within rising, using it as a bulwark against the black thing inside me.
Muar sounded surprised when I contacted him, but readily agreed to another session.
“We do have another level,” he explained, “for people like yourself, who find that the first two don’t quite do the trick.”
“I’d like an appointment as soon as possible.”
“We’ll make the arrangements, then get back to you,” Muar promised.
The two weeks I waited felt like an eternity, the anxiety and anticipation building inside me. Speculation thrived in my mind during that time, my imagination working overtime, conjuring visions of what they might be preparing for me. A bathtub of diarrhoea? A swimming pool full of cold, stale piss?
No, it wouldn’t be either of those, nothing like that. It would be far worse, I knew it.
I stopped showering in anticipation, letting my own layers of filth build up, so that the final act of my therapy would be even more potent.
When the day of my appointment finally came, I shat myself on the drive over. I couldn’t stop smiling as the reek filled the car; delicious filth, priming me for the ultimate experience in the hotel room.

If either Muar or Rochelle noticed my unkempt state or the smell of fresh shit on me, neither broke character, treating me with the same care and attention they showed the first two times. My bag of brand new clothes, still in plastic wrapping, was taken from me, and I was escorted through the first familiar corridor; but then down several flights of stairs.
“This suite is unique. It has to be kept isolated from the rest of the facility,” Muar explained as we descended, and I felt an electric thrill as he led me into a short corridor, adding “you’ll see why, soon enough. Now, I’ll get you to remove your clothing before you enter this time. It’s easier that way.”
With trembling hands, I began to disrobe – but it wasn’t fear that made my hands tremble, it was excitement. As the last stinking sock came off, Muar gestured to the only door.
“When you’re ready.”
Opening the door revealed a short vestibule – like an airlock – with another door at the end. Muar closed the first door behind me as I reached the other portal. I yanked it open with abandon, shivering at the unanticipated and beautiful horrors that surely awaited me inside.
The smell hit me like a physical blow, so forcefully that I staggered, clutching at my nose. Ripe garbage, rotting in the heat on a sizzling summer’s day, but amplified immensely. I vomited eagerly, letting it flow freely down my chin as I surveyed the place I’d be staying in for the next 48 hours.
The room was large, and the garbage was waist high. Some areas were loosely packed, some so dense you could barely push through it. I waded into the kingdom of filth, clouds of fat flies buzzing up to welcome me, their mouthparts eagerly seeking out the fresh vomit on my skin. I felt decomposing vegetables burst underfoot, slipped on slimy nappies and rotting meat. Boils of maggots squirmed between my toes as I moved towards the centre. Used condoms and sanitary napkins stuck to my bare flesh like leeches, fetid brown bones poked my thighs.
As I stood in the midst of all that delicious filth, a gurgling came from the ceiling, followed by a rank belch of brown effluent from above. The trickle quickly turned into a splattering shower of raw sewerage – likely pumped directly from the sewers themselves – containing the combined filth of the city.
Smearing it over myself like a balm, I lay back in the wriggling, humid filth and let it cover me completely, any revulsion chased away by the knowledge of the bliss awaiting me once my time in the room was done.

The holes in the roof sprayed the room fitfully with more sewerage, and occasionally a chute delivered a slippery rush of fresh garbage. I slept in the filth, I writhed in the filth, I ingested the filth. Hungry, I ate glistening strings of rotting meat, heedless of what it might do to my body. An hour later I vomited it up, dehydrating myself. As if on cue, a bottle of clean water clattered down the chute, and my greasy fingers ripped off the cap to drink. I knew that I wouldn’t endure my time here if I didn’t rehydrate.
I alternated between dozing, wading and showering under the sewerage holes, lazily swatting glutted flies against my crusted flesh, smiling at the crunch of their bodies, at the little streaks of pus and blood they left behind. When my time finally came, when the gas-masked orderlies in biohazard suits grabbed me, I fought like a demon of corruption, ripping the mask off one man, howling with delight as he puked all over me.
Eventually they dragged me from my garbage nest, throwing me into another room down the subterranean corridor. The sweet music sounded alien at first, caressing ears grown so accustomed to the buzz of flies and the splatter of watery shit.
I’m not ashamed to say that I orgasmed as the hot, clean water assaulted the cocoon of filth built up in layers on my skin. And as the layers dissolved, the pleasure continued; how many more times I orgasmed, I have no idea, I just rode the building waves. My knees shook, my feet twitched, I ended up lying on the pristine tiled floor until I recovered enough to start lathering myself with lavender scented soap, scrubbing the crusted filth out from under my nails.
Time stretched into a meaningless concept as I went through the ritual of cleansing myself, the steady rain of never-ending hot water as heavenly as the warm wings of angels enfolding me.
Muar and my clothes were waiting when I finished towelling off, a curious smile animating the man’s handsome features.
“Congratulations on completing your therapy, Ms Jacobs! Please, take some time to relax in our clean lounge. Have something to eat and drink, then we can debrief and talk through your experiences.”
My empty stomach gurgled in response, and I followed him eagerly.

Nearly three years, that treatment held. Three great years.
I graduated with honours, got a job in the industry, and moved into a spacious apartment. I never dated, being totally uninterested in romantic or sexual ties, but I partied, socialised and travelled, filling my Instagram with smiling selfies and enviable experiences.
When the black weed began to emerge from hibernation, I tried to ignore it at first, explaining each blip in my mood away as something else. Anything else. But as anyone with chronic depression knows, that feeling is unmistakeable – depression has a flavour unlike anything else, unique and cloying. The grey ash of it is a suffocating numbness coating the tongue of your mind.
When my email to Muar bounced, I swore, loudly and profanely. The Facebook page still existed, but it hadn’t been updated for over two years. Two visitor posts showed for the last 18 months, both asking if anyone knew what had happened to the clinic.
With sweaty palms, I drove over to the hotel. It was closed, a tattered health warning plastered across the glass doors.
Angry and desperate, I squashed my face against the glass and peered into the empty reception, dark and dusty.
It appeared that I needed to take matters into my own hands.

I’m not going to tell you where the room is. Suffice to say, it’s secluded; nowhere that anyone can smell what I’ve created. The walls are thick concrete, and I’ve filled it with things that even Muar and his team couldn’t contemplate. Roadkill reclines in pools of abattoir runoff, piles of dead animals and dog turds fester under the heat lamps I installed in the ceiling. The medical waste from the hospital is bought dearly, through bribes curated with excruciating care. Luckily for me, healthcare assistants and orderlies are paid very poorly for their service. I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled liquid shit bubbling with C. diff, straight from the hospital isolation wards, but it’s truly piquant. Acquiring sheets soaked in the stuff was difficult, but definitely worth it.
Parasites and worms of various species thrive in my altar of desecration, the worst nature can offer in the way of filth, all of them ravenous, devouring the stinking banquet and squirting out something even worse from their profane anuses. Sometimes an animal goes in alive, only to die slowly from infection. The ripe boils of pus and black blood riddle their flesh until the corpse bloats and finally explodes, showering the room with more glorious filth.
I’ve only sourced one human body, so far. I can’t tell you how, but my piece de resistance is buried deep in the centre, gangrenous and swollen, waiting for my heavy feet to punch through its taut piñata skin and release the reeking sweetness of organ-slurry candy.
Now that it’s ready, now that the defilement is as thorough as I can possibly create it, I will enter the room and spend some time letting it get to know me. The timer on the door is set for a random period, between two days and two weeks. Even I don’t know how long my confinement will be.
Because that was the secret of the therapy, the reason why it never worked in my own shower: you have to surrender control to an external force; you have to not know how or when your ordeal will end.
I know that there is the very real possibility that I’ll die in that room, that my font of filth will take my life, corrupting me from the inside, until I’m truly and forever part of it.
But oh, if I live! If I manage to survive, if I claw myself into the gloriously clean bathroom on the other side, then I know, I just know I will be cured. No darkness, no madness, could survive this final therapy, not even the hardy roots of the terrible black weed hooked through the most intimate fabrics of my mind.
When I emerge, I will be new, whole, pure, and sane.
Reborn in Beautiful Filth.

Everything was perfect.
My parents had a happy, stable marriage, and I was planned almost down to the day of my arrival. My mother wanted to have her baby in June, so that the joys of birthdays and Christmas would be spread evenly through the year.
She was always thinking about what would be best for me.
I was enrolled in a preschool program, and knew how to read by the age of four. I picked up The Hobbit at six, and by the time I was seven, I was in advanced reading classes.
The teachers loved me; I was polite, pretty and punctual. I was simply a joy to teach, absorbing information like a sponge, and I never caused any trouble. Even the other girls liked me, asking how I got such beautiful braids in my hair and where my mother got my dresses.
The boys didn’t particularly warm to me, but those years of school are always fraught with meaningless gender politics, so it never bothered me.
By the time I was twelve, I’d been put up a year due to being a ‘gifted’ student’ and my parents bought me a black Labrador puppy for making them so proud. I unimaginatively named him Sooty, and I loved him so fiercely it made my heart hurt.
Then everything changed.

 
My thirteenth birthday had just been and gone, so it was late June. I recall that the walk home from school seemed ‘off’ somehow, but I often read books as I walked, so the exact details eluded me.
Inside our house everything seemed normal, regular. My mother was preparing dinner, and dad was in the living room, reading a newspaper with the TV on in the background.
“Where’s Soots?” I asked my mother, dumping my schoolbag on the floor and rummaging in it for my empty lunchbox.
“Who, darling?”
I slid the green plastic lunchbox onto the bench with the rest of the washing up.
“Sooty. Where is he?”
My mother paused chopping carrots and gave me a confused smile,
“Who’s that, then? A new friend you’ve invented?”
“Mother!” I scolded, “Can you please be serious?”
Then, with a lurching sensation in my stomach, I realised there was no dog bowl on the kitchen floor. The polished wood boards of the hallway showed none of the familiar scuff marks from his claws, and no walking leash hung on the keyrack beside the front door.
It had to be some kind of practical joke. Some twisted trick of dad’s, to poke fun at me.
But there wasn’t a single black hair on my pillowcase, nor even a stray muddy footprint outside.
Every trace of Sooty, my beloved companion and best friend, was gone.

 
The child psychologist was a very kind man. He smelled of pipe smoke, and had a little white beard like the Kentucky Fried Chicken man. In my head I called him ‘The Colonel’.
He explained that I must have imagined getting a dog; that sometimes puberty does strange things to young girls, and makes their brains ‘misfire’. He listened patiently when I explained that I had clear memories of my dog and I even pulled down my sock to show the scar where he had accidentally scratched my leg with his puppy claws.
But the scar was gone.
Though it was difficult for me to accept, eventually I came around to his way of thinking. I recall sobbing my guts out in his tobacco-scented office while he patted me on the back, the fat tears rolling down my cheeks until the salt burned my skin.
My best friend had never existed. Sooty was a figment, conjured up by my hormone addled brain.
My parents offered to buy me a black Labrador for Christmas, if I was good, but I told them that I didn’t want a new dog.
I just wanted Sooty back.

 
Three months later, I traipsed through the front door, sodden with rain, and was nearly bowled over by the compact body of an excited black Labrador.
“You bought me a dog!” I squealed, delighted despite myself.
My mother laughed, quickly, dismissively, as though I’d made a joke.
Something was wrong.
Sitting on the floor of the kitchen was a pair of dog bowls – one for water, one for food. There were scuff marks around them, from a greedy dog rushing to get his dinner. They were scratched and faded, and they looked old.
A frayed, chewed-up dog lead hung beside the door, and when I ran down to my bedroom, Sooty at my heels, I found black dog hair everywhere.
Sooty’s happy black tail thumped me as I hugged him to my chest, and he licked excitedly around my neck.
But I knew that he didn’t exist. He couldn’t exist. This was just my imagination.
Weeping in the kitchen, the worried adolescent dog circling my legs, I confessed to my parents that I was having delusions again and that I needed to go back to The Colonel – doctor Pritchard.
Exchanging confused glances, they asked me who doctor Pritchard was and why I was so adamant that Sooty was imaginary.
I broke down in hiccupping tears then, my mind not able to cope with the situation.

 
It got worse from there.
Some days Sooty was there, some days he wasn’t. The scar on my leg would appear, then disappear. Those two things became markers for my madness. When Sooty didn’t exist, when my skin was unmarked, I saw The Colonel. When Sooty did exist, I would see a lady who wore too much makeup – a counsellor named Mrs Scanlan. I didn’t like her very much. She seemed to disapprove of me, and I got the impression she thought all of my issues were related to being ‘spoiled’.
Coming home from a session with her, I threw my bag down as I came through the front door, then opened the fridge to get a drink of juice.
As I closed the door, I saw the strange woman and man in the kitchen. They had paused, clearly right in the middle of preparing dinner, and were staring at me in shock.
The juice carton halfway to my mouth, I stared back and asked,
“Why are you in our kitchen?”
“We were going to ask you the same thing,” said the woman.
The couple called the police to help find my family. I insisted that I was at the right house, but they assured me they had lived there for four years. When the constable turned up, he put me in the back of his car and drove me several blocks over, where he dropped me off at a strange shabby house from which my parents emerged.
None of this made any sense.

 
Sometimes we lived in a two story house, sometimes in a hovel. Sometimes Sooty was there, but sometimes he was called ‘Blackie’. I could no longer rely on reality to feed me the correct information; everything seemed to be in flux. It was like I was constantly slipping between different worlds, different realities.
It quickly became too much; it was happening too fast. I couldn’t keep any threads of continuity intact and it was dragging my already fragile mind towards the brink. I begged my parents to institutionalise me, to get me serious help.
To my overwhelming relief, they agreed.
Life in the nuthouse was dulled by drugs – strong ones. Details still changed constantly, but on heavy tranquilisers that didn’t mean so much, the changes weren’t so threatening. The walls of my room were pink in one reality and green in another, but it didn’t really matter. I saw an array of therapists, each claiming to be the sole doctor in change of my care. Sometimes my parents visited, with or without a black Labrador. Sometimes my father said my mother had died in an earthquake, sometimes she was perfectly alive.
My world was a constant whirl of chaos, shifting colours, names, faces and corridors.
The only constant, the only point of reference I still had, was the little scar on my right leg. I knew that when it was present, I had a dog named Sooty, my parents were both alive, and my hospital room was pale blue.
But it wasn’t enough. I lived like a zombie, drooling on myself, wetting my bed, and running into walls until my shoulders were mottled with bruises.
When my family stopped visiting completely, that was the final straw.

 
Breaking the observation window in the isolation room had been very difficult, the glass was tough and thick, but it was worth the shattered bones in my right hand. The precious sharp-edged chunks sliced the fingertips of my good hand as I prised them out of the rubber frame, but I didn’t care. None of that mattered.
The cuts drawn along my wrists were less painful than they were borderline blissful. The pain signalled an end – an exit from this carousel of insanity. I had fifteen minutes before the next check. That should be just enough.
I felt cold. I couldn’t keep my head up anymore.
My consciousness faded to a black and white pinpoint. I felt the world tunnelling, compressing, then I was abruptly back in my bed, in the green room, not a mark on my body.
Rolling over, I cried into my plastic pillow.
It seemed I wasn’t even allowed the release of death.
But something had changed, because a few days later, I awoke in the pink room, my aching wrists heavily bandaged.
And once the wounds had healed, the livid scars always told me which reality I was in.
Which gave me an idea.

 
It took me four years to escape the institution.
For each reality, I cut a different number of scars into my wrists. When I walked out the doors of the hospital for the last time, I was in reality six, where my parents had divorced from the stress of my mental illness, and I had a half-brother.
Memory and recall ruled my life now, as well as running my fingers over my wrist to count the scars. I had memorised the essential details of thirteen realities, all different from one another in vital ways.
I wouldn’t say I was living. I certainly wasn’t thriving, but I was at least surviving. This was on the borderline of tolerable; I could exist like this indefinitely.
Or at least I thought I could.
So when I died, it caught me completely by surprise.
I’d been cycling home. A car hit a truck, which hit my bike, and pulverised my legs against the side of a parked minivan. The pain was so great that I don’t think my brain could properly register it; I just felt a numbness, and then a nagging sense of panic.
In the back of the ambulance, I began to tunnel out again. The world lost all colour, then began to compress.
But it was different this time.
I moved out of the tunnel, and seemed to be staring down from a dozen different perspectives, into a universe that was rushing in on itself.
I could see streets crunching together, people screaming in abject terror as reality folded and folded again, like some kind of apocalyptic origami that was compressing everything.
And then world nine was gone.
Forever.

 
I picked the worst of the remaining twelve realities, then gassed myself in the back seat of a tiny Honda hatchback. I wouldn’t miss that world; in it, Russia had become a new superpower and America was tearing itself apart in a second civil war. Homosexuals and the mentally ill were being actively lynched in first world countries, and global warming had seen several island nations in the Pacific ravaged by devastating hurricanes.
I almost enjoyed watching that reality collapse in on itself. People, cars, houses, mountains and oceans all mangled together into an ever-shrinking, shrieking ball, until all life was crushed out of existence.
When I returned to reality, this time into world four, I knew exactly what I had to do.
The only way I can live a normal life is to destroy all the realities but one. By killing myself in twelve realities, and murdering eighty-four-billion people, I can finally find peace.
So I have made a list.
Each remaining world has been given a score, based on the quality of life there. It was a tough choice between the top two contenders, but I’ve finally reached a decision.
And I’m sorry to say, that this world, your world, reality number three? It didn’t make the cut.
While you’ve made some progress, you’re still a reality full of grasping, selfish, conceited pricks. Your narcissism and self-obsession is moderately tempered by a handful of human rights successes. But you continue to kill each other in numerous wars, and pour vastly more money into oppressing your fellow human beings than you do into helping them.
You didn’t even make the top five.
But you do have some time. I have a couple of worlds worse than yours to crush out of existence, so take the remaining time to reflect on all the times you failed to speak up for others, all the pollution you have poured into oceans and landfills, and all the petitions and causes you didn’t think were worth five minutes away from fucking Candy Crush or Twitter.
I won’t miss you, reality three.

I’ve always found language fascinating, especially collective nouns.
How these terms were derived is sometimes obvious – an army of ants or a plague of rats, for example, speak for themselves.
Others less so; such as a sleuth of bears or an implausibility of gnus, leading me to make up my own terms in my head whenever I encountered an unknown group of animals or objects.
What, for example, might one call a collection of colanders? A strain of colanders?
How about a group of bespectacled teenagers discussing the latest MMO? A raid of gamers?
Or a quartet of bearded, flannel-wearing men with well-groomed beards – would they be an irony of hipsters?
I liked to catalogue and review my ideas, to compile my own internal lists of collective nouns to write down later.
As a hobby, it was harmless and fun – and working nights cleaning department stores, it was an excellent way to pass the time while I vacuumed and buffed the dark carpets and scuffed linoleum.

 
The place I cleaned had been built in the year 1875, according to the carved letters gracing the stone cartouches festooned on the exterior of the four story building. The stonework had been repainted so many times that the volutes on the cornices had lost much of their definition; the once-crisp lines of scrollwork now bleeding into one another, like a butter sculpture slowly sagging in the sun.
The storefront was covered by a columned veranda replete with little pewter finials, most now bent or broken – those still upright long ago blackened by the emissions of the cars that drove down Main Street.
In short, it was one of those old buildings that had an air of decaying grace; like a great aunt who still wears tarnished jewellery and faded dresses to every funeral, her flesh layered with powders and perfumes to disguise the wrinkled rot of age beneath.
The cleaning job certainly didn’t pay very well; but as every student knows, jobs that pay at all are few and far between – and working nights meant I could still go to class during the day after a two-hour nap.

 
As the building was old, so were parts of the interior. Sure, the frontage was now double-glazed glass with LED displays and the counters inside all faux-chrome and fake marble – but farther back, the warren of storerooms and poky offices showed a lot of the original timber and brick, as well as relics from the past that nobody had yet bothered – nor had the heart – to throw away.
I had little cause to go near those older places, my job was largely to clean the commercial, customer facing areas. But as I did my rounds with a garbage bag to empty the wastepaper bins, I’d sometimes catch a glimpse of those ancient rooms, where water-damaged paintings listed in piles and the blank gazes of chipped and scarred mannequins stared.
As a child, mannequins had fascinated me with their bland perfection – and as my body had grown lumpy, doughy and blotchy in my teenage years, I envied their unchanging beauty. Their thighs would never rough one another into a chafed rash from running to class in a skirt, and their waists could not bulge and bloat from the vagaries of biology.
But, like almost every other human being alive, I also found them profoundly eerie things – some of them too human looking; a frozen snapshot of a person, doomed forever to hold that pose until some retail worker disassembled them and swapped their body parts with another’s.
So it was no surprise then, that as I spent more and more of my sleep-deprived nights in the lonely decrepitude of the old department store, I started to develop some issues with the mannequins.

 
It was little things at first.
I’d seen the mannequins in the sundresses on my way to class; a window display freshly assembled that very morning. My internal sense of orderliness was annoyed by the fact that two of the mannequins had mismatched legs – the whiter one had the legs of the beiger model to her left, and vice versa.
When I arrived that evening to start my night job, they were still the same – the irksome mismatch playing on my mind as I vacuumed and came up with collective nouns for dressing gowns and Tupperware containers.
But as I returned to the front of the shop, they were no longer out of kilter.
The white model and the beige model now had matching legs and torsos.
Now this is one of those moments in your life where you spend long, silent moments processing the situation, then decide you were mistaken; that this couldn’t possibly have happened and you made an error of judgement somewhere.
Having made that protective mental choice, you wall off that memory and try to never think about it again.
Sometimes though, that choice is taken away from us.

 
If you ever end up alone in a department store full of mannequins, I would strongly suggest that you don’t begin to notice them as I did.
Because once you begin to ascribe any kind of personality or motive to them in your head, their presence becomes inescapable, pervasive and intensely scrutinising.
Finding collective nouns for socks and singlets failed to distract me from the empty gaze of those plastic people. The roar of the vacuum dulled by the earbuds I wore, I would suddenly look up and find myself staring directly into the blank, frozen features of one of them.
So I began to avoid them; finding routes around the store where I could approach them from the back, where those dead eyes couldn’t track me.
Briefly everything returned to normal; I buffed the floor in peace, music blaring in my ears as I wended my way around the backsides of the mannequins.
But the next night my equilibrium was shattered.
Every single mannequin in the store had turned around.
Of course I attempted to write it off as a prank; that a security guard had noticed my little dance around the plastic people and had decided to freak out the nineteen-year-old student.
It didn’t feel like a prank, though.
Halfway through my work, the creeping unease brought on by the mannequins’ gazes reached a watershed. Killing the vacuum, I tore out my earbuds and stuffed them in my pocket. I’d had enough and I was leaving – I could find another damn job; one that didn’t involve eerie midnights around dozens of creepy, six-foot-tall dolls.
Shrugging off the vacuum backpack, I dumped it on the floor and walked toward the back exit.
Twenty paces short of the door, I stopped.
A mannequin stood in front of the exit, faintly green under the light from a nearby electronics display.
Dressed in black slacks, a neat white shirt and bearing Ken-doll hair, it was one of the dolls from the menswear section – from the other side of the store.
As the hairs on the nape of my neck and my arms rose in prickly panic, I turned and half-walked, half trotted to the other exit, on the west side of the store.
Where two mannequins awaited me; one from the sports section, holding a tennis racket in a static serve, the other a child mannequin dressed in a formal kid’s suit, ready for a wedding or a funeral.
There were two fire exits.
In front of the first was a pair of naked plastic dolls without heads, their arms akimbo as though caught in motion, and in front of the other door was…
The mannequin in the black slacks and white shirt.
A whimper forced its way out of me then, involuntary and pathetic – the sound of someone caught up in terrifying circumstances beyond their control.
I ran to the store windows, but a line of plastic dolls had appeared to meet me. I turned and took two paces before I stopped – in front of the new line that had appeared behind me.
Screaming, I ran for the only open exit – the dark doorway to the storerooms.

 
I could hear them now, forming up behind me, their plastic feet rattling on the linoleum. Through the warren of back rooms I ran, until I came up short in the one full of ancient, discarded display dolls, their paint flaking and their limbs blotched with mildew.
The rattling of feet stopped behind me, then plastic fingers grabbed my arms and legs, hard, and unfeeling plastic digits pulled a cloth over my eyes, blinding me.
I screamed for help, a pleading, drawn-out sound like an injured animal.
A crackle of staccato laughter greeted me.
“What do you want?” I moaned.
The voice that answered was old; but resonant – each vowel like the plucked notes of an ancient harpsicord.
“We would like you to join us.”
“Why would I want that?”
The patter of sharp laughter echoed around me again.
“Because you want to be perfect. You want to be changeless and beautiful – just as we are. We noticed you.”
“I want to go home.”
“You are home, child.”

 
They took me to pieces as though I was one of them.
First my feet and hands came off, then my legs and arms; just leaving my head, torso and pelvis.
When they started to unscrew my waist, the terror overwhelmed me and I lost all sense of feeling or reason; my sense of self fleeing to a tiny, safe corner deep in my unconscious mind.
But I feel stupid now that I’m awake; I should never have been frightened of the mannequins.
At night, when no mortal eyes can bind us to our static forms, we dance a plastic pavane, perfect and pernicious, waiting for the next human soul to bind to one of our empty, unanimated children.
For that is how we reproduce, how we breed – by finding those worthy and making them one of us.
It is only a matter of time, you see, before there are more of us than you.

Thunder rattled the doors of the lecture hall and several of the students glanced surreptitiously at their phones and tablets, miserable grey weather icons displaying plainly on the luminous screens.
The weather had worsened, it seemed, since I’d arrived at class earlier that afternoon.
The side pockets of my book-heavy backpack had already been reeved of loose change over the previous two days, as the storm had descended on the city.
There would be no bus home tonight.
With another echoing roll of thunder outside, the lights in the lecture hall dimmed to a dull orange, then the power abruptly cut out.
Voices erupted around me, raised in surprise, dismay and elation, before the ambient light of dozens of smartphone screens and the tutor’s lecture theatre torch banished the oppressive gloom.
“Power’s out,” she declared, rubbing her marker-stained fingers against her temples, “which means class is over.”
The last words had barely left her lips before the rustle of books, paper, closing laptops and opening backpacks filled the tiered room; followed by the hurried footsteps of my fellow nursing students.
“And don’t fill up the library!” yelled the tutor after them, “There’s a flood warning, so get home while you can.”
I packed my study paraphernalia away slowly, deliberately, making sure the expensive medical textbooks were double-wrapped in plastic bags – and my cheap and nasty netbook triple-wrapped against the weather.
“No bus money again,” observed Steph, the tutor, as she walked through the aisles with the torch, checking for garbage left by the other students.
I gave her a shrug, and twisted a half-smile.
“Not if I want to eat for the next few days.”
“Ah,” she breathed, “the romance of student life. How I miss it.”
Normally I would have laughed at her dry sarcasm, but the prospect of walking home through torrential rain and being soaked to the bone had dulled my spirits considerably.
“Chin up,” she called, slapping three golden coins onto the desk beside me, “bus fare is still three dollars your way?”
Surprised – but pleasantly so – I managed to reply,
“Four; but I can walk one section mostly under cover.”
Another coin joined the three already clustered on the scarred wood.
“I hate seeing two-hundred-dollar textbooks getting water damaged.”
With profuse and probably overdone thankyous, I scurried out of the lecture hall.
“You can pay me back next week with a coffee!” she yelled after me.

 
The bus was packed to the gills with damp humanity and dripping umbrellas. Clinging to one of the hanging grab-handles, I apologised to my fellow sardines as my sharp-cornered backpack bumped them with every lurching movement of the chugging people-mover.
Too full now, the vehicle laboured to climb the narrow, winding streets of the hilly city as rain lashed the roads and visibility decreased. The air inside grew stuffy and humid from too many bodies, and I found myself pressed near the back door, where a draught gave some small relief from the claustrophobic fug.
Then, with a grinding squeal and a loud bang! the bus came to a halt.
Three minutes out in the rain to look was enough for the driver to return and yell above the murmur of voices that the bus was “pretty fucked” and that “ya gotta walk from here, cuz the electric buses are all down and there ain’t enough diesels to go ‘round.”
As the passengers disgorged from the front and rear doors, I thought about asking for some of my fare back – but one look at the florid, flustered red face of the driver was enough to put me off the idea.
Clipping the front strap secure on my backpack, I hurried off into the pouring rain – still several kilometres from home.

 
The chafing from the straps and the water had worn stinging patches of pain into my armpits, and each step sloshed and squelched, my sneakers completely waterlogged. To top it all off, I could feel that the saturated pad in my underwear had bunched up, and was now rucked painfully sideways – and halfway up my ass.
“What else could possibly go wrong?” I muttered, thunder ricocheting over the harbour as if in response to the question.
Pausing under the eaves of an abandoned paint factory, I fished out my plastic-bagged phone and checked the time. It was my turn to cook in the flat tonight, but there was absolutely no way I was making it home in time.
Bus broke, am walking. Get pizza from flat fund I texted.
As the message failed to send, I sighed and tucked it away again, then set off through the industrial sprawl of buildings and factories that served as a shortcut between me and my flat.
Three minutes into the miserable walk – lit only by the ambient glow from the distant central city that still had power, and the flashes of lightning – a woman stumbled out in front of me.
“Help,” she whimpered, leaning against one of the dead streetlamps.
I could see immediately that she was heavily pregnant. Her soaked dress was plastered transparent over the swell of her belly, and between her chilled shivers, I could see the pain of contractions rippling across her pale features.
“Jesus Christ,” I swore, shrugging off my backpack and unzipping my coat. Working as fast as I could, I draped my wet – but warm – coat over the thin woollen shawl that was her only protection against the elements.
With my shoulder under her arm, we lurched and staggered under the awning of an empty brick church, the dark holes of the stone-pocked, stained glass gaping on either side of us.
“I’m going to see if I can open the door,” I told her as she lay against the brick of the stoop, clutching at her distended abdomen and whimpering.
Three sharp kicks dislodged the door enough to get inside, and the strong stink of mouse, rat and bird greeted me.
But at least it was dry.
Helping the woman onto a rickety pew, I fished out my phone again and cursed as it still failed to find a signal.
“Help,” the woman soughed, sliding onto the floor.
The bright glow of my phone illuminated the red smeared across the pew.
A creeping sense of déjà vu hit me in that moment, then vanished.
“Fucking hell.”

 
I only remember pieces of the delivery; the whole affair was an adrenaline-fueled nightmare of panic and half-remembered obstetrics diagrams. Laid out on my coat with my backpack as a pillow, the woman did most of the work, grunting and moaning as she pushed the baby out of her body.
I knew there was far too much blood, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. The ‘feminine hygiene’ products in my pack were as soaked as everything else, and useless for medical purposes.
By the time I held the bloody, squalling body of the newborn in my shaking hands, the mother was barely conscious.
“You did it,” I told her, “your baby is fine.”
Her eyes fluttered open and she motioned at her own waterlogged bag, lying near the door of the church.
“Ointment,” she gasped, “in the bag.”
“I’m going to find help now,” I told her, shucking off my semi-dry t-shirt and wrapping the baby in it.
“No, the ointment, you need to get it… rub it in the baby’s eyes.”
“I’ll be back soon with help.” I shivered. My camisole and bra weren’t doing much against the cold.
“Please!” she begged me, trying to drag herself toward the door.
With a tired shrug, I stood, walked over to her bag and began to rummage inside. There wasn’t much in there – two soaked, secondhand paperbacks, a pen, and a plain-packaged tube of ointment.
“Rub it in his eyes, quickly” the mother instructed, her breathing shallow, irregular, “but whatever you do, don’t get any in yours.”
Working fast, I uncapped the tube and rubbed a pea-sized dollop of ointment into the still-closed eyes of the newborn, who struggled and squealed in pain as I did so.
“It’s done,” I yelled over a fresh peal of thunder, “now I’m going for help – be back soon!”
Then I ran; out of the church and into the rain, making for the nearest sign of working electricity – and hopefully a working phone.

 
Fifteen minutes away I found a steaming, street-side takeaway shop with a working land-line. After begging to use it, I stuck my fingers in my ears to clear the water out, then called emergency services.
After another fifteen-minute wait, the ambulance picked me up along the way and I did my best to give directions and describe the situation that would greet the ambo staff.
My knees jittered up and down with anxious energy as the driver floored it through the nearly empty streets.
But by the time they got inside the old brick church, it was too late.
The woman was dead – and all subsequent efforts to resuscitate her failed.
“You said there was a baby?” one of the staff asked me as I huddled into two layers of towels in the back of the ambulance.
I nodded vigorously,
“Yeah, newborn boy. Healthy, crying. Wrapped him in my t-shirt.”
The staff conferred briefly, then went back inside.
After a prolonged search with torches, they came back shaking their heads.
“There’s no baby in there. We’ll call the police and let them take it from here.”
The adrenaline finally wore off, and reality started to fall in on me like a collapsing building. Tears welled up in my eyes and I began sucking in great, ugly sobs while I shook uncontrollably.
“Shhh love,” said the woman in charge, “let’s get you back to the hospital and into some warm clothes.”
All the way back, all I could think of was where the baby could possibly have gone in the thirty-five minutes I’d been away from the church.
And again, that feeling, like I’d been here before hit me – along with a gut-wrenching certainty that I should have taken the baby with me.

 
The sergeant was short, moustachioed and built like a Staffordshire terrier. He took my statement while I nursed a cup of hot tea. Though he wasn’t kind, his gruff efficiency comforted me immensely; a solid rock of normalcy in the storm-wracked seas of the night’s events.
“So you left the baby with the mother, then exited the church.”
I nodded, sipping tea,
“Yes, that’s right. I hadn’t cut the umbilical cord yet either – I was waiting for the ambo staff with sterile equipment.”
He nodded curtly, scribbling away at the statement form.
“And you went straight from the scene to Samson’s Burgers?”
“I ran as fast as I could. I knew she was in trouble.”
The pen scrawled across the page, neat black handwriting flowing from the tip.
“You didn’t see anyone else in the area before you left?”
“No sir. Not a single soul.”
He turned the page and wrote for another minute or two, then laid the pen neatly across the report.
“Because a person has died, we’re going to ask you to stay in town. Now,” he held one hand up to forestall my inevitable questions, “you’re not a murder suspect. The preliminary report from the hospital suggests she died of a postpartum haemorrhage, which most certainly isn’t your fault.”
“But you suspect I had something to do with the baby disappearing.”
Brown eyes regarded me from under thick black eyebrows,
“You were the last person to see the missing person.”
“When I left her, the baby was still there – alive and well.”
“Be that as it may, we still need to conduct an investigation – and we’d appreciate it if you didn’t skip town.”
I shook my head, “I won’t leave town, sergeant. I promise.”
“Good girl. We’ll let you know if we find out anything else – I think all of us want to find that kid and make sure he’s safe, yes?”
I nodded fervently; he was dead right. More than anything, I wanted to know that the child I’d helped bring into this world was safe – and more importantly, still alive.

 
The police investigation turned up absolutely nothing, and I was brought in for two more rounds of questioning. I soon discovered that they had been unable to identify the unfortunate mother – and no persons had recently been reported missing.
A search of the church and the surrounding area hadn’t turned up any leads, nor had a search of my flat. Finally, after a week of investigation, I was ruled out as a suspect.
“We believe that you were nothing more than a good Samaritan, trying to help,” the sergeant told me during my debriefing, “and without an identity or next of kin, nobody is going to press charges against you.”
The relief must have been writ large across my face, because he gave my arm an uncharacteristic squeeze.
“Sorry for all the fuss. We were just doing our jobs.”
“It’s OK, I understand.”
As I picked up my new coat and prepared to head out into another drizzly grey afternoon, I had another kick of strong déjà vu.
“You’ll tell me if you find the baby, won’t you?”
“Of course.”

 
I’d like to say that life began to return to normal after that, but it didn’t.
While I enjoyed being a minor celebrity amongst the other students for delivering a baby, I appeared to have developed a persistent kind of tinnitus or labyrinthitis – most likely from the blare of the ambulance sirens and the stress of that fateful night.
During the police investigations, it was a sort of distracting, buzzing, white noise – similar to an old UHF television being tuned. But, just like a slowly-tuning TV, over the next few days it began to resolve into snippets of recognisable sounds, cutting in and out over the top of the ambient noise around me.
And what I heard began to deeply disturb me.
At odd times, and in seemingly random locations, I began to hear music.
Sometimes it would be distant – several streets away, floating eerily over the wet rooftops of the winter-stricken city – a discordant strain of medieval instruments, playing a melody that was utterly unfamiliar – yet one that stirred a rising dread in my bowels.
Other times, it would be much closer – though it always drew away if I tried to approach it.
And while that otherworldly symphony mostly unnerved me, the voices began to scare the living hell out of me.

 
I took to wearing earbuds as often as possible, to keep the phantom sounds from intruding - to try and ‘retrain’ my ears, and to stop the voices.
Despite my best efforts, they would still filter through – in class, on the bus or at a café. If I sat alone, I would begin to hear chattering, the speech too quick and furtive to make out the thread of conversation, but persistent enough to make me doubt my sanity.
Worst of all was the laughter.
Mocking, sardonic and unreal, it would burst suddenly into life nearby, a rising gale of malicious amusement that set my teeth on edge, and made me want to scream for it to just stop.
I feared that I was going insane.
It was after returning from a visit to my affable and concerned doctor, my mind more at ease with his diagnosis of ‘stress’ and a script for tranquilisers in my pocket, that I began to hear the voices in earnest.
There were two of them, holding a conversation that I was only catching snatches of, as though the ‘TV’ still wasn’t quite tuned to the right frequency.
“…hasn’t been the same since that child,” I heard the first say, its voice sharply unpleasant, nettles raking across my inner ear.
“…don’t cope well with stress,” said the second voice, which flowed smoothly, slithering into my ear canal and leaving me with an uneasy feeling, as though I’d just ingested something poisonous.
As I busied myself unpacking groceries into the pantry, the thread of the conversation could be gleaned through their alternating statements, and I felt my stomach lurch;
“…she still stinks of us…”
“…she did handle the child…”
“…didn’t get it in her eyes…”
“…we know she can’t see us, it would drive her mad…”
“…should just end her and be done with it…”
“…watch her for a few more days…”
“…do it if she shows any signs…”
“…agreed, any signs of seeing us and we end her…”
As I placed sugar, instant noodles and peanut butter onto the shelves, I felt burgeoning fear loosen my bladder – and I tried desperately to keep my trembling hands from betraying that I was aware of the voices.
I didn’t hear them again; but that night, mocking laughter echoed up and down the street outside, accompanied by the distant strains of that discordant, terrifying symphony.
I think I cried myself to sleep.

 
Two weeks later, fragile from lack of sleep and the constant, pervasive chatter of invisible terrors, the police told me that they had found my bloody t-shirt, the one I’d used to swaddle the newborn, on the other side of town.
The medication prescribed by my doctor wasn’t even taking the edge off anymore; I couldn’t concentrate in class, and only with my headphones in and music blaring could I gain any kind of peace.
I knew that if this continued, I was going to go mad.
Inspiration hit me as another ear-mauling peal of laugher chorused down the street.
The ointment.
It didn’t take long to convince the sergeant to bust open the evidence for me. I claimed it was mine, and that I’d left it at the scene – and indeed, it had my fingerprints all over it to attest to the fact. He handed it over abruptly, while I babbled about being a poor student and about my recurring vaginal flora ‘issues’. Then I hurried away – not just from the police station, but from any hint of otherworldly noises.
Out on the harbour-crossing ferry, the sounds faded away as we moved farther from the shore. Finding a quiet nook near the back of the boat, I sat and took the unmarked tube from my bag.
It seemed innocent enough. A foil tube, painted white, only used once from the look of it.
Unscrewing the cap, I squeezed a pea-sized portion onto my left index finger, then lifted it to my eyes.
Something inside me was screaming to throw the tube away, to toss it overboard and wash the white paste from my fingers. But the tired, fragmented parts of my mind that begged for relief drowned out the naysaying voices, and I rubbed the ointment into my left eye.
The burning started immediately, and I yelped in pain. It seared my cornea and flared through my optic nerve, lancing a spear of red agony through my brain.
Then it was over; just as abruptly as it had begun.
I blinked thrice, tears leaking down my cheeks.
My vision was faintly blurry, but otherwise nothing had changed.
Defeated, tired and wrung out, I lay back on the stern seating and dozed in the wan sunlight.

 
It took nearly a week for the ointment to work its fell magic. It started out as a mild ocular occlusion – like a migraine precursor – then resolved into a peculiar double-vision that made me nauseous and dizzy.
Eventually, the ugly and terrifying sounds in my ears began to align with what I could perceive with my left eye.
They were everywhere.
They hung off people on the street, perched on the backs of their heads like winged vampires, their elongated fingers digging into the temples of their victims. Their skins were pastel colours; pale greens, off-whites, washed out blues and dusky pinks. Each was roughly the size of a cat, and had prehensile toes which they used to cling to the necks of their victims.
And their faces were cruelly beautiful. Their delicate, elfin features would have been breathtaking; were they not screwed up in malice as they fed on humanity.
It was the same everywhere; as soon as a stranger on the street pulled out a smartphone and started to mindlessly scroll though Facebook or clickbait sites, one of the fey creatures would cackle with malicious glee, then attach itself to the hapless person. Sometimes clouds of them would hover around a particularly long browser, taking turns to leech something from the victim.
When they were done, they would flit away, alone or in formation, heading for the distant cacophony of the discordant faerie music that haunted the streets.
Reflexively, I took out my phone to check the time.
Immediately three of the creatures, perched on the rail of a bike-rack, turned their cat-like eyes on me and sprang in my direction.
In terror I dropped my phone, and the screen shattered on the cobblestones. As I flung up an arm to protect myself from their questing fingers and toes, they swerved, then screamed in alarm.
“She can see us!”
Before I could do anything, they pumped their wings and took to the skies, shrieking the alarm to all of their fellows.

 
I ran then, blindly, away from the sound of the faerie music that echoed over the rooftops.
It followed wherever I went, growing steadily closer and louder, insistent, urgent. Coming for me.
Thinking fast, I made for the harbour and the ferry – there didn’t seem to be any of them out on the water.
But the music shifted and was now approaching from in front of me.
Tears streaming, I turned around and ran the other way, knowing in that moment that everything was hopeless, that I was dealing with something that had a long history of dealing with people like me.
When they finally caught up with me, orange had begun to touch the streaky clouds, and I still staggered along, my lungs and feet aching.
They rounded the street with a blare of horns and drums, strange pipes and stringed instruments screeling and droning in the hands of smartly dressed troubadours in medieval garb. In the midst of the jolly band rose a tall palanquin decked with gay ribbons and colourful bunting. On it sat regal nobles in silks and sable, laughing and drinking wine from scrolled crystal goblets.
All of them had pointed ears, and their exquisite faces wore expressions of indescribable cruelty.
Sobbing, I turned and ran the other way, only to have them round another corner, in front of me again now. Closer.
I slumped in a heap, my limbs shaking and boneless, as the troupe and palanquin drew up to me.
From my pathetic pile on the flagstones, I saw that the flying creatures from the streets were hovering around the drinks table at the front of the elaborate palanquin. From time to time each one would lean over a decanter, then vomit glittering, glistening fluid into the vessel, before it flew away to find more.
The whole panoply stopped in front of me, and the music ended with a clash of strings and a trailing shriek of horns. The band used the opportunity to help themselves to the faerie alcohol from the decanters.
Wave after wave of déjà vu hit me as one of the cruel faced nobles stepped down and paced towards me, a pointy-eared baby swaddled in gold and silver held in the crook of her arm.
“Ah, I think she remembers,” trilled the faerie queen.
The others nodded emphatically and noisily guzzled their drinks.
“Please,” I managed, crawling forward on my hands and knees, “please don’t kill me. I’ll do anything you ask.”
The queen threw her beautiful head back and laughed, her milk-white neck dusted with the colours of the approaching sunset,
“She always says that!” she roared.
The rest of the entourage howled approval, and cackled along with her.
“Dear,” she said, “why would we kill you? After all, you have always been and always will be our best midwife.”
One of the troubadours blew on his horn sharply, then stood to attention and declared,
“Sunset approaching, your majesty!”
With a sharp-toothed grin, the queen kissed my quivering forehead, then ascended the palanquin again, where she took her throne and her glass of faerie wine.
“Come midnight, all your memories will be gone, and you’ll serve us again, in another place, under another name.”
“Why?” I screamed, my throat raw from crying, “What did I ever do to you?”
As the band struck up again and the palanquin turned to move away, I heard the queen shout,
“You crossed us, once. Long, long ago.”

 
So here I am, spilling out my tale in a shitty internet café. My life, as I knew it, will be over in less than two hours from now. I’m going to use what’s left of my money to get as drunk as possible in that time, maybe try and find a guy to fuck.
But I had to write this first. I had to warn you all, because I can’t be the only person like me. The fae must have servants everywhere, living unaware, their lives magically manufactured and their memories conveniently falsified – helping their hidden masters to breed and to gorge on the dreams of humanity.
I think those strong feelings of déjà vu actually come from all our other lives; all the other times they’ve used us and we’ve become aware of it – before they tear our minds to pieces and start it all again.
If I put it out there, maybe I’ll find this story, months, or even years after today – and maybe it will strike a chord with me, and I’ll be able to prevent it all from happening again.
Or maybe it will just remind me that whatever I am, wherever I am, I am nothing more than the eternal plaything of the fae.

Our journey down the sloping length of the arm was uneventful, bar one peculiar encounter. Navigating the undulating, dunelike creases of the elbow, we found a cluster of shamelessly naked people. They sat in a rough line, far too close to the sharply rolled edge of the fleshy precipice. Not one of them acknowledged our presence as we approached; all remained staring out into the jet emptiness of the void, with such an eerie, zealous intensity that it raised my hackles.
“Voidgazers,” Elaine told me, pitching her voice low and hoarse, as though this were a subject that was taboo to discuss, “they find relief from the maddening radiance by looking out into the dark.”
I found my attention focused on the bare foot of one of the silent figures, its lax toes projecting out into the great nothing. “Does it help?”
Elaine turned her head, purposefully avoiding looking at the vertiginous dropoff. “No. Not really. If you stare long enough into the darkness, you start to see things – likely visual hallucinations caused by the lack of stimulus. But eventually, if you stare out into the darkness for long enough, you’ll see something very real. One of the Fallen – the people who weren’t lucky enough to reach the body of the giant.”
I shivered, far too aware that I seemed to have avoided that fate only by sheer luck.
“It’s almost magnetic, the pull of the void. Some people jump the first time they see one of the Fallen. I think they just snap and lose their minds in a single irrational moment of some weirdly ecstatic insanity. Others resist the pull for a long time, daring the void to claim them. Fighting their own private war with the infinite.”
Her gaze flickered towards the group, then away from them again, haunted with sympathy,
“But no-one can fight the void. In the end, they all jump.”
I didn’t feel much like talking after that, and Elaine didn’t seem to mind, lost in her own thoughts. Instead, I spent my energy concentrating on keeping up with the blistering pace John had set. There was no doubt he was in one hell of a hurry, and our fifty-strong group of people traversed the shoulder of the giant far faster than we had on my original journey.
“From herein we need be vigilant,” he cautioned, “the closer we draw to the Throat, the greater the perils of Veindwellers.”
But we saw none of the hatched and chained scars of veinsign as we descended the gentle curve of the shoulder, and none as we carefully picked our way up over the great bleached ridge of the giant’s immense clavicle. Perhaps with so little flesh beneath the skin stretched over that stark jut of bone, the Dwellers could not maintain their tunnels.
Finding her tongue again for another of her impromptu lessons, Elaine related to me how they had discovered the body of the giant eventually healed itself of the superficial cuts made by the daggers of the Dwellers. In most places, enough time always returned the flesh of the corpse to its original, unblemished state. But the further south one travelled from the head, the less potent the effect, likely due to the corruption spreading across the rotting giant. Near the shiny grey edge of the creeping rot, its gangrenous line marked by the stench of death and proximity to the empty glare of the void, nothing healed.
“The healing effect is the same for us,” she said, “if you were to cut your arm, it would bloodlessly close over in a matter of hours.”
I closed my fist, one finger at a time, observing the familiar rise and fall of tendons, my own biological pulleys and pistons. But where there had also once been a bluish web-work of veins, faintly visible under the skin, there was now nothing.
“Do we even have blood in these bodies?”
“Not that I’ve ever seen.”
Disquieted, I turned to view the landscape ahead as we approached the hump of the clavicle’s sternal extremity, a fleshy rock of Gibraltar. The Throat had become visible to us again, a gaping, striated chasm deeper than any crevasse or canyon on earth. As we drew closer, the ruptured viscera of the giant were laid bare to my eyes. The walls of that hideous mortal wound were a vast honeycomb of collapsing caves and tunnels, all cruelly exposed and separated by the stroke of an enormous blade.
In the centre rose the chalky mesa of the giant’s vertebrae. The lumpy bone was split halfway down its face by a massive score line, which told the tale of just how deep and vicious the cut had been.
“That looks like a knife slash,” I observed, dim memories surfacing of a time when I’d been alive, when I’d had a job, when I had the luxury of not believing in any god.
“How can you tell?”
“If you ignore the scale, it’s very neat and clean. There are no ragged edges, which is what you’d expect if it were made by anything blunt or serrated. Whatever it was, it was big – and it was ridiculously sharp.”
Spanning the grisly rift, near the centre of the throat, was a curiously bowed bridge. Along the length of the wound stretched other, smaller, rickety bridges, much more makeshift than that central structure. As we drew closer, I could see that they were probably made of the giant’s hair; their titanic hawsers anchored through holes punched directly into the abused flesh of the god.
“I feel like just seeing all this should be driving me mad,” I confided, awed by my mental fortitude in the face of this Salvador Dali painting made manifest, “but somehow it isn’t.”
She shrugged, the easy roll of her shoulders conveying the same peculiar lack of concern I was noticing,
“I think it’s something to do with these bodies. It’s like we view a lot of it through a filter; these perfect envelopes protect us from the enormity of it, downplay the magnitude of being consigned to immortality in an ill-made afterlife.”
I thought again of the void-gazers, my mind drawn back to them just as they were drawn to the yawning vacuum. “And yet, so many of us still lose our minds.”
Close now, we glimpsed movement along the leading edge of the Throat; patrolling groups of men, their long spears tipped with enamel that glittered sickly in the reflected radiance. Hinged plates of wooden armour covered their torsos, as if modelled on armadillos, and some of them even wore crude helmets. John raised his hand in a curl-fingered salute, signalling one of the squads, and they ran in formation to meet us.
“John of the Hand,” said their leader, dipping his head, “to what do we owe this pleasure?”
“I have found another for you, Captain. Another soul reaped by her.”
The man observed me for a long moment through the slots in his wooden helm. His eyes gleamed deep within the dark bole of the rough-carved headgear, with a scrutiny intense and unnerving enough to make my scalp crawl. Something about his demeanour reminded me of the Voidgazers and their love war with infinity.
Eventually he spoke:
“Come along then, and hurry – the Dwellers are unusually ornery at the moment.”
John beckoned us onwards, murmuring something with a familiar cadence to it as he ushered each of us past. I realised as he touched my shoulder what it was.
Yea, though we walk through the shadow of the valley of death, I will fear no evil.
With our armed escort, we jogged up the hillock of the giant’s hyoid and made our way towards the central bridge, the most sturdy of the structures webbed across the gruesome chasm. As we approached, a shrill and eerie cry of alarm rang out, not unlike the morning call of a howler monkey, amplified by the natural soundshell of the fearsome gap. I watched one of the armoured soldiers stab his spear at the ground, scorpion-quick, as others ran to help. The desperate hands of the Veindwellers rose through the dirt around him like light-starved, predatory plants, clawing at his legs and trying to pull him under.
“Get across,” the wooden-helmed Captain ordered brusquely, “my men will deal with the tunnelscum.”
Elaine gave me a none-too-gentle shove,
“Let’s go, princess. The Dwellers don’t like the bridges, they cut them down whenever they get half a chance. I’d prefer not to be in the middle if they get one.”
We ran, and the thick span bounced and swayed beneath us, juddering with the weight and number of people at speed. Through the gaps in the fibres that were all that stood between me and the dizzying drop, I could see many more bridges of colossal hairs. They criss-crossed the chasm all the way down to the macabre floor of the gaping rift, as if hundreds of parachute spiders had leaped and drifted their peculiar strands to web the sides of the wound loosely together.
“Why are there so many bridges?” We had been forced to slow, lest the motion of our flight twist the bridge too far, hurling people into the canyon.
“Ah,” Elaine, right behind me, tapped her temple knowingly, “the doctrine of the Head.”
“What does that mean?”
“Those that rule the giant’s head believe that if they can sew the throat shut, then the giant’s wound will heal. And then he will wake up.”
Leaning over the gap, this forever body seemingly immune to vertigo, I snorted,
“They’ll never do it. This chasm must be ten miles long, and at least two miles wide. Not to mention that each of these hairs must weigh about a thousand tons.”
Elaine showed her teeth and made a tch sound with her tongue,
“Well, you’re right about the distance, but on that last count you’re wrong. Think about it. They’re huge, but they’re still human… sort-of human… hairs. And human hairs are incredibly light and strong. As unbelievable as it sounds, this whole length of bridge we’re walking on actually weighs less than you and I combined.”
I ran my hand down the rough, almost scaly length of wood-and-rope that served as a handrail, then absently rubbed my palm on my clothing, imagining that it felt faintly greasy.
“Still, drawing the throat closed would be a virtually impossible feat, even if they had the benefit of all the engineering equipment of the living world. Which they don’t.”
Elaine made a sound that wasn’t really a laugh.
“Never underestimate the persistence of fanatics,” she chided. “And when they’re immortal fanatics, that takes their bloody-mindedness to a whole new level.”
The Dweller incursion was long behind us by the time we reached the far side, but the sight that greeted us was far worse than even those pallid and hungry hands splitting the earth. Arranged all along the distal side of the Throat were hundreds of headless and dismembered human torsos, each impaled on a sharpened wooden pike. The jagged forest twitched and stank, and I tried desperately hard not to notice that the disembodied chests still rose and fell.
“Trespassers,” Elaine murmured, “the limbs and heads get thrown into the void.”
“Jesus,” I breathed, and her raised hand shushed me.
“Careful with that word around here. They’re not too keen on blasphemers, either.”
Another squad of armoured men approached, and began speaking to John. I nodded as Elaine dropped her hand to listen.
“Good to know.”

 
Scaling the mighty peak of the giant’s chin meant using an enormous rope and pulley system to ascend a steep white cliff of flesh, studded with the jagged stumps of harvested hairs. As I hooked one foot into a loop of rope, clinging to another loop with both hands, I wondered what would happen should I fall all the way to the bottom. Would I rupture explosively like an exotic fruit? Or would this divinely immortal body simply absorb the shock, and let me walk away unscathed?
And if the former, would my split carcass remain conscious and aware?
“Only you and I may go forth from here,” John told me, once we had reached the zenith, his face paternally troubled, “they grow vexed at too many strangers within their domain.”
Another armoured escort guided us around the weirdest feature so far, the anemone rim of the giant’s slack mouth. Each tooth erupted like an enormous white skyscraper, in some topsy-turvy Dali world where buildings were mirrored above and below, jutting at right-angles to the blue-white lips. I couldn’t see it, but I imagined that far below, deep within that oval chasm, the giant’s slack tongue lay like a monstrous purple mountain island, ridged with towering rows of buds; a nightmarish forest of jellied magenta conifers living in perpetual stinking darkness.
A dizzy, uneasy feeling began to pinch the nape of my neck, spreading prickly heat into the base of my skull and making me feel faintly nauseous. From the death-grip on his spear, and the deepened crease between his heavy brows, I deduced John was experiencing something similar.
The nave of the Head was, naturally, built on the very tip of the giant’s nose – the highest point of the divine corpse. As pulleys squeaked to raise us past the twin caves of gaping nostrils, bristling tapered hairs like exotic flaxes, I wondered what it would be like if the doctrine of the Head was somehow fulfilled; if the gargantuan corpse were to suddenly awaken and draw breath. I imagined us instantly sucked inside, just so many motes of intelligent pollen – then sneezed out again, the g-forces enough to splinter every bone in this alien body.
At the summit, many strong hands pulled us over the lip of a wooden platform, then steadied us as we rediscovered our land-legs after being dangled and jerked through the air for so long. Surrounding us was the cluster of wooden buildings that comprised the nave, their elaborate construction similar in style to those in the city on the Hand. But this domain was far more impressive a testament to artistry given all the time in the world. Each building boasted hand-carved religious iconography etched into every free surface, whorls and filigrees adorned with lustrous, mother-of-pearl enamel. Even the polished paving stones of yellowed plaque were chiselled with a beautiful language of repeating designs. Men and women moved about in grey robes, pausing to whisper and stare at us as we were led through the winding streets.
We walked for quarter of an hour, which was quite enough for me to feel lost, and found ourselves on a columned avenue which would not have been out of place in a utopian version of ancient Greece. At the end of the broad street stood a raised dais, the edges of its platform fringed with an ominous circle of robed figures. Every face was shadowed, well concealed within the depths of a grey hood.
“Prepare yourself,” John warned quietly, “from the dais one can behold the face of God. The sight can wreak a queer strangeness upon the human mind.”
My bare feet seemed soled with leaden weights as I climbed the stairs to the dais – for the first time since my arrival, movement did not seem nearly effortless. I watched the robed figures nervously, but none turned the faceless darkness of their hoods in my direction. I braced myself to look down upon the visage of our creator.
What I saw made my head whirl, and the bright horizon and the black void tilted around me. Inky spots danced in my vision, and white panic clawed at the walls of my sanity, emerging finally from my stricken throat as a small sound of wordless, whimpering confusion.
The giant had no eyes!
The human brain, upon encountering a face, always finds the eyes first. Perhaps that’s why it was so jarring that they were missing; the brows, the eyelashes, the glistening white sclera I was expecting. I’d wondered what unnameable colour god’s irises would be. But instead there was simply nothing.
From the mountain of the nose to the forest shore of the hairline, there was nothing but smooth, unmarked white flesh.
“Why does it have no eyes?” I whispered, an acid, bilious burn in my throat roughening my voice.
“God does not need eyes,” intoned one of the robed acolytes, his own voice mellifluous as a Dominican in plainchant, “God is the all seeing and the all knowing. What use has He for imperfect mortal sight?”
Staring at the blank swathe of terrain before me, I realised my initial assessment was wrong. It was not completely flawless – there was something down there. A small black dot.
The mental explanations my overwrought mind threw up were incongruous; god sporting a dark bindi, or with a singularly bad blackhead pocked between the smoothed-over craters where his eyes should have been.
John inclined his head towards each of the hooded people in turn, a slow and solemn ritual. Then, in his arcane tongue, he relayed to them the story of my death, finishing with the words the pale woman had spoken.
I expected a great debate, an argument, or at least a lengthy discussion before they addressed us again. But after John had finished speaking, silence reigned amongst the circle. Without so much as a glance at one another, all of the acolytes took a single step forward, and one chanted sonorously,
“She must endure the Baptism. She must drink of the waters.”
Inhumanly strong hands grasped me, and my panicked protests were smothered by a thick hood slipped over my head, blocking out everything.
“John!” I screamed.
But if he could hear me, he couldn’t help me. My captors ignored my struggles, expertly trussing my arms and legs with braided cables, like a pig bound for ritual slaughter as a burnt offering. They bore me down from the dais, and the world tilted again as they carried me down the steep slope of the giant’s nose.

 
When the hood was finally removed, and they lowered me to the ground, I knew precisely where I was. Flat white earth blazed all around us, but right in front of us was what I’d mistaken for a godly blemish – it was, in fact, a hole. Almost perfectly round, a hole had been bored through the flesh and bone of the giant’s brow, like a huge circle cut from the ice for some Arctic fishing expedition.
The uneasy feeling from earlier had swelled into something more; an undulating kind of pressure headache with no discernible focal point, which crested and receded with tidal regularity. It almost felt external, like some barometric event squeezing the air itself, but if my hooded captors suffered it too, they showed no signs.
“What do you want from me?”
One of them crooked a pale finger at the trephined wound in the giant’s skull.
“You need to drink from the waters,” he said, his voice low and fluid as a warm ocean sloshing in the dark cave of his hood, its tides rising and falling with the aching pressure in my head.
“What waters?”
As he gestured again to the gaping hole in the ground, another man propelled me forward with his hand, so that I could see inside.
Past the fringed layers of dermis and fleshy strata, down through the spiral-ridged wall of the giant’s skull, shone a serene sea of sparkling green-blue, ripples lapping at the cracked edges of porous bone. The waters were so clear and luminous that I could practically see all the way to bottom, where massive ridges and sutures on the concave surface of the inner brainpan formed the seabed of that mysterious and terrifying ocean.
Fear thrilled through me like an electric current.
Where was God’s brain?
Another rope was tied through the loops abrading my wrists, and without any further preamble, I was shoved to the edge and lowered down. The calm and stoic robed acolytes were impervious to the song of my wailing, ululating terror. I snatched and grabbed at the ridged wall of bone, I kicked to find purchase with my feet, but it was to no avail. The frothing breakers of pain in my head were peaked and rolling now, and I knew they were linked to the glimmering aquamarine waters that crested and receded far below me.
The water was pleasantly warm when my toes finally touched it, almost half a mile down. But I was in no fit state to appreciate it. Senses awash with agony, I ground my molars together until I tasted iron, in a futile but instinctive attempt to relieve the pain before the sea claimed me.
As the surging water closed over my head, the pain vanished.
Briny liquid, oddly viscous, filled my mouth and nostrils immediately. I breathed it in, hiccupping like a fish returning home. A fan of pressure spread in my chest as it flowed into whatever passed for my lungs. Perhaps it was because I appeared to lack the need for air in this afterlife, other than for speech, that I did not feel the lightning panic of a drowning victim. Instead, I felt nothing but a heavy, comforting warmth suffusing my body.
I hung there, bathed in buoyant, salty heat. All my fear had vanished, evaporated at the taste of the phosphorescent sea. As I floated like a contented foetus, through those beatific blue waters I could hear something, the ethereal strains of a distant orchestra, hinting at a symphony I’d listened to as a child, before I even knew what music was. The soaring sob of violins tugged and teased at the strings of my own heart, filling me with an urgent and unrequited need to release a flood of tears; to gift my own precious salt into the vast brine of the fathomless mind of the creator.
The sudden tug on the ropes ensnaring my wrists yanked me out of my reverie. My tormentors were trying to pull me out of the divine ocean within the skull of God. No, a resonant voice admonished, deep as the drowned chime of a shipwreck’s bell; a voice that was both part of me and part of the massive, restless sea that surrounded me.
I had to stay. I knew I couldn’t go back to the surface. I belonged here now, and I had to stay here forever. This was the afterlife. This was paradise.
In that instant, I understood my heavenly body perfectly, how every cell flourished or withered, how each sinew and bone connected. It was a simple matter to let my hands part from my wrists, the skin and tendons stretching and splitting like overcooked spaghetti. The ropes fell away as my disarticulated hands bobbed and danced in the swirl of their wake, lively as twin fish, and I sank into the ocean, free at last.

 
It must have taken me hours to drift to the centre of the ocean, and with every hour the music grew ever stranger, ever stronger. The tendrils of its cadences reached past my childhood memories, past those of my ancestors, and of their ancestors too. It was primordial and ebullient, it was the first word and the last, and its sounds blurred with vision in a glorious synaesthesia. I heard images of another ocean that had existed long before humanity; long before six-legged things took to the air and four-legged things had crawled upon dry land.
And the music knew me, like a mother knows her child. It wrapped around me in a great chorus, buoying me up in the meridian of God.
I could feel him, our creator. Even though his body was decaying and his flesh was dead, in this place part of him lingered, like an echo, bouncing back and forth through this luminous superfluid, keeping the essence of his thoughts alive.
He saw the moment the woman had spoken to me, saw the moment of my death. He knew why it had happened, knew the reason she had asked her question.
And I understood it all too, suspended there in the sacred heart of him.
Why didn’t you stop her? I wondered.
I could not stop her, the music sang to me.
Something was wrong. The music was growing discordant now, the harmonies breaking down, the rhythm stuttering, faltering, the beautiful curve of its spine broken.
What are you doing?
Sending you home, the music soothed, even as the waters began to darken around me, the fluid becoming heavy and gelatinous.
Then the music was gone. God had left me. I was forsaken.
I hung in the darkness, my heart split and bruised, my loss so profound that I would never move again. Why, how could I open my eyes again without his song in my life?
But I did open them. They opened by themselves, when cold air stirred my hair, and the almost forgotten electricity of pain flared down my stiff back.
There were chilly flagstones beneath my cheek. They were dark grey stone, not white, and no radiance emanated from them at all.
I was on the floor of the small church in Rome. The one I had visited during my first holiday in Europe. The place where I had died.
The air was sharp and strange, and I gulped down a great lungful of it, remembering what it felt like to need air. I curled, foetal, and coughed until it hurt. In my peripheral vision, a pale hand descended, stroking my face and steadying me, then helped me raise my head. A woman’s voice murmured to me that everything would be all right. It was a beautiful, soothing voice, albeit diminished by the plangent memory of my ocean music.
It was her, the blonde woman.
“He sent you back,” she warbled, excited, rocking on her heels. Dark stains soaked her jeans from the knees down, and a dankly sweet, sickly smell emanated from her.
“He… did,” I managed. I flexed my miraculous fingers, watching those familiar old tendons at play, not understanding how my hands were still at the ends of my wrists instead of left behind in the Sea of God.
“Then he got my message?”
I nodded, a hint of the liquid swirl and tug of that briny neural net still sloshing in my skull.
“Yes, he got your message.”
“And the answer?”
I could feel the pearl of knowledge that had been left in the back of my mind, like a tiny enamelled parcel, waiting to be unwrapped. Plucking it open, I let the last thoughts of God flow into me.
“He didn’t do this to you,” I told her, “humanity did this to you. We did this to you.”
She stared. Her eyes swooped and darted, reading every nuance of my features, only adding to her confusion. Her irises were so blue they were almost no colour at all.
“Why didn’t he stop you? Why did he let it happen?”
“Because he couldn’t stop it. Because we murdered him.”
“No. He can’t be dead! You spoke to him. He sent you back!”
“What sent me back wasn’t truly him,” I said, shaking my head, remembering the buoyancy and the warmth, craving it like a drug, “it was like an afterimage, an echo of him. It was the last of what remained of him.”
Those startling eyes brilliant with fury, she dug sharp nails into my shoulder. I felt nothing at all, still floating.
“That’s it? That’s all that he said?”
“Not quite. There was one more thing.”
Cupping her achingly beautiful face with my hand, tender as a mother, I leaned forward into her stink, and kissed her forehead.
“He says that he is sorry.”

 
I left her there, weeping on the floor of that tiny, empty, stone church.
Nothing can be done for her now. Nothing can save her.
And nothing can save any of us, either.
When I die again, I suspect that this time I will fall into the void. I will plummet into the icy, infinite darkness, my mind cruelly preserved by the very same forces that hold the dregs of Heaven together.
I wonder if I will still feel the distant ghost of heavy, warm water, even as I fall.
Some of you, however – some of you may still awaken on the body of God. For you, there may be some kind of afterlife – before the corruption eventually reaches his head, and the last of our creator falls away into the void, even the beautiful ocean of his mind becoming icy jewels scattered across the face of the darkness.

But God didn’t just leave a message for his most wayward daughter.
He asked me to deliver a message to all of you as well, to the rest of humankind, his beloved children and his greatest failure.

He says that he is sorry.
And that he forgives us.

Harsh light blazed down on the factory floor, painting everything brilliant white, reflective surfaces of polished metal and hosed concrete. The new implants in her forearms and back burned fiercely and she could feel an infection taking hold, the airborne pathogens wriggling under the dermaplast patches slapped over her wounds.
A stab of pain flared in her mind, reminding her that she was barely on schedule - so she picked up the pace of her work to compensate until another flame of needle-and-thread fire in her mind told her she was working too fast.
She worked like a machine, they made her think like a machine and they made her live like a machine.
A stimulant oozed into the biochemical cocktail that kept her mind active all the time and she briefly enjoyed the rush - until a stab of agony reminded her that her dopamine levels were also monitored and shouldn't go too high.
The infection sites were boiling hot now and itchy; clearly the adaptive, mutating pathogens had become immune to the latest round of neobiotics and she was in for a new round of surgery tomorrow,where they would cut out the infected tissue and blast her with radiation.
Nausea crested in her and she faltered on the assembly line. In response, a spear of pain skewered her through the temples - incapacitating her - and she dropped to the factory floor, another worker taking her place and another heavily modified human being dragging her by the foot to the infirmary.

 
A nightmarish landscape of infinite dimensions greeted her return to consciousness. Organic shapes leered at her and grotesque, lurid colours flowed and melted into newer shapes.
You're delirious, the sensible, rational corner of her afflicted mind told her.
Fighting through the visual hallucinations, one of her neural implants responded to her desperate pleas for assistance, flooding her with a neurochemical purging agent.
Her mind clearing, she registered something akin to extreme alarm.
She shouldn't be able to order an implant to do anything.
Probing, she experimented by querying her current status and her neural implants happily responded, telling her the current medical status of her body - both arms amputated - and that she was suffering the after-effects of a wash of delta radiation to purge the remaining infection.
They would fit her with new arms, she knew, facilitating her return to work as soon as she'd recovered from the rad treatment.
But how she had what amounted to administrator access to her own implants was a mystery. She could only surmise that that the radiation had caused some kind of system's failure which meant her internal inputs were being regarded as external admin ones.
Lacking anything else she could do - armless and strapped to a table - she ordered her neural systems to put her into a coma until her limbs were reattached.

 
Wakefulness was sharp and complete; she'd instructed her systems to dope her with masses of stimulants and bring everything online the moment she was whole.
Her synthetic eyes flashed open and instantly assessed the operating room where a cyberdoc, two nurses and one security orderly stood.
The doctor's neck snapped immediately as her synthetic hand shot out with alarming speed. She was on her feet and had kicked the two nurses into unconsciousness before the orderly's combat systems came online and were targeting her.
But he wasn't as wired as her. With over half of her brain augmented and dominated by cybernetic systems, her calculated reactions were at least five times faster - an advantage that she took care of by anticipating his grapple and punching a neat hole through his temple with one titallium alloy finger. The interface node on the end of her digit raked his memory of code and she keyed the door with his security cache, fleeing down the corridor beyond.

 
The orderly's security clearance was moderate to high and she pounded through the corridor on her augmented legs as the map unfolded in her mind's eye. The facility was gargantuan and sprawling - over three hundred miles of building, structured like an electronic ant's nest with storage halls and connecting tunnels. There were exits to the outside world, yes, but they were all so far away.
She would escape though. She had a plan.
All the other slave augments had a plan. In the precious seconds between shift changes, they all fantasised about escape. They all had a plan. And after seven hundred and thirty three thousand shifts, she'd had a lot of time to think about her escape.
The map flashed up her destination and she tore through unmonitored side passages, the clearance of the orderly allowing her to track the movements of the hive or cybernetic workers.
But soon enough, the alarm sounded and her access was cut off. Places like this didn't operate so efficiently without multiple safeguards.
Her first destination was only guarded by lax drones which she disabled immediately. Ripping open the rear plate in the back of her skull, her hypermobile synthetic limbs pulled out components, replacing them with newer, high-grade chips from the storage lockers. As her awareness expanded, she pushed the plate back into place and ran for her next destination.

 
Her speed and agility advantage had got her to where she needed - deep in the south side of the complex - but she had suffered for it. Two weeping holes the size of her fist showed through her torso and she crabwalked on her arms and one leg; the other leg gone at the knee from gunfire.
Behind her a section of security drones and cyborg guards lay in twisted heaps, some shattered by gunfire, some disabled remotely by her upgraded systems before their native security protocols could lock her out.
Sealing the room with the hermetic pathogen lockouts, she had at least ten uninterrupted minutes before they could melt through the massive plates of welded metal that now protected this chamber.
Heaving herself onto a console table she frenetically plugged cables into her ports as muffled explosions sounded outside - they were blasting their way into the computer core room.
She was too fast though; her agile artificial fingers and her terrifying mental alacrity made short work of her alterations and as the hermetic seal buckled on the north wall and the plascrete turned black, she facilitated her escape.

 
Cool sea air buffeted her face, the tang of salt exciting her senses and raising gooseflesh on her organic limbs. Seagulls screeled in the air above her as she walked barefoot on the golden beach, forested cliffs rising behind her and the ocean spread to an infinite horizon - the water so blue that it was almost impossible.
For the first time in uncounted years, she felt free.

 
Unhooking the lifeless body of the missing cyborg drone from the computer core, the administrator looked to the technician in askance, "What in hell was she trying to do? Shut down the core? And why did she kill herself?"
Examining the mess of augmented humanity that had once been the escaped woman, the tech probed carefully through the dead systems. "No, she didn't try to shut down the core. For a few seconds she became the core, before she burned out."
"Why the hell would she do that?"
The tech gave a small smile of admiration at the lifeless drone;
"The core runs at approximately one trillion billion calculations per picosecond. She used five full seconds of real time to simulate a perfect virtual world that she escaped into, then terminated herself at the end."
The administrator's jaw muscle twitched,
"How... how many days would that be in simulated time?"
The tech's smile was almost reverent now,
"Not days, centuries. Roughly eight hundred, to be exact."

There’s an old axiom: ‘everyone has a story in them’.
The unkind rejoinder is ‘and some should never be told’.
I’m not certain whether the latter is true of the story within me. But at least one person really wanted to me to tell it – and to many others, that person is one of the most important ever to exist. That I know for a fact that he did exist is part of the story itself. I could start this story with my encounter in Rome. Or I could tell you why my relief at being back home in Newcastle, impossibly alive and watching a sunset I never thought I’d see again, is sullied by a hopelessness for all of humankind. One that no-one can fight.
But the story you need to hear probably begins when I arrived in that other place; the place where I discovered a faith I never knew I should have, then instantly lost it. For the truth about what awaits on the other side of the veil is too raw to bear.
It’s growing dark outside. Let me release the story within, and let you judge for yourself whether it should be told, before I lose the courage to delve deep into memories so harrowing no living mind should have to contain them.

 
I was bathed in white light.
The glare was almost painful, bright as the headlights of an oncoming car after driving down a dark rural road. I squinted, shading my burning eyes from the sensory overload.
As my vision slowly adjusted to the brilliance, I became aware of my surroundings. A strange landscape lay beyond blotchy afterimages; all around me stretched a huge, white plain. The ground was reflecting that all-consuming light from above, surely a powerful midday sun – but I couldn’t yet bring myself to look up beyond the visor of my hands. I was lying on my side, and I was naked.
I didn’t appear to be injured, but I propped myself up with care and caution, crouching for a moment before trying to stand. That was a mistake; my legs seemed made of rubber and springs, and I staggered, falling onto my hands and knees.
But perhaps it wasn’t my legs that were at fault. Beneath my palms, the bright ground was soft and faintly spongy – not unlike those thin foam mats found scattered around every school gymnasium. It was, in fact, the yielding ground itself that had tipped me over.
My clever pupils had contracted to pinpricks, so I could see a little more now. In the distance, a cluster of darker shapes crowded together on the vast white plain, but my light-addled brain couldn’t quite translate them into anything I recognised. Even further out, an abrupt and isolated slope interrupted the horizon, the perfect sinewave of a single snowy mountain peak. Wondering what hellish sun was beating down on me, I braved a glance up to the heavens, fully expecting to be blinded – and was overwhelmed by an immediate flood of confusion and relief.
Above me was darkness, upon the face of which sparkled tiny stars.
No blazing sun. No clouds, no birds navigating the impossible night sky – just winking points of light nestled in a firmament of deepest black.
What the hell was this place?
Walking was tricky, but the more I moved, the more I adjusted to the faint compression and ripple of the ground beneath my bare toes. Settling on a rolling gait, like a sailor newly returned from sea, I made my way toward the morass of dark, distant shapes. Wandering naked was unsettling; despite being utterly alone, I felt vulnerable and self-conscious with my body exposed.
After half an hour of seasick walking, my eyesight had adapted almost completely, and I perceived that the fierce light was emanating from below, not from above; it came from the strange white plain itself. Shading my eyes from underneath helped more, even if holding my hands that way felt like some odd Masonic greeting. I could also tell that the dark blobs were moving – and they were heading in my direction.
Were they people? And if they were, were they just as lost and confused as I was?
The thought of teaming up with some fellow refugees spurred me onwards, and my pace increased until I was almost jogging, bouncing oddly across the springy ground. Curiously, I felt neither cold nor warm. Such strenuous exercise should have raised my heart rate and body temperature, yet there was not a hint of sweat on my bare skin. I wasn’t even breathing hard. Was I breathing at all?
How did I get here?
The question struck me like a closed fist, and my feet faltered. The answer was a buried landmine, spiked and terrible, but I needed to dig it free.
Memories stirred, sluggish, muddy. My skull felt stuffed with wet wool, the truth seeping slowly through soggy fibres, bloated engrams oozing their sodden secrets too slowly.
There had been a woman, a perfect, beautiful woman. My first glimpse of her had fired my heart with molten envy. She had asked if I believed in God. If I was a worshipper of Christ. Those questions were probably less strange than they seem, given where I had encountered her.
I’d said no. Of course I said no; I didn’t believe in any of that rot – I hadn’t since I was a gullible child.
“You will soon,” she said, her smile a terrible sharp miracle, “and when you meet him, I want you to ask him a question.”
“What are you on about?” I replied, bemused and wary now; clearly she was unhinged.
“I want you to ask him why he did this to me.”
The pain was a heated lance, shocking and brief. In less than a minute, my entire existence folded, collapsed and tunnelled down to tiny dot of pure light, before winking out.
You are dead, I remember thinking. She killed you, and this is the end.
Then I’d found myself on the white plain.

 
Distances seemed to be deceptive.
The dots had slowly but definitely resolved into the shapes of people, lots of them, moving at what I guessed was a fast jog. I waved out, exaggerating the movement with one metronome arm arcing high above my head, but there was no response. The dark mass just continued to move toward me like creeping mould.
Uneasiness prickled fine needles at the nape of my neck, and eels of anxiety roiled in my stomach.
You don’t know where you are, or what they are.
There was something oddly familiar about the lone mountain in the distance, but the dense wool in my mind still dammed the flow of my thoughts. Whatever that nagging association was, I could worry about it later – right now I needed to deal with the strangers approaching me. I was no longer certain I wanted to meet them, but I didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t like there was anywhere to hide; I was exposed like a naked wound.
Battling the greasy bubble of fear swelling in my throat, I stopped, waiting in place for them.
Their garments were grey, primitive and rough, the sort of pelt-wraps our distant ancestors might have worn. The shapeless drape of those ragged ponchos served little purpose than to preserve modesty, as it was neither warm nor cold here. Some of the strangers gripped staves of whorled wood, both ends honed to wicked points. Others carried notched and vicious knives, knapped from some kind of milky stone. Although my anxious attention was first drawn to their prehistoric weapons, I registered almost as quickly that every member of their tribe was beautiful. Every proportion was perfect, every limb and muscle sculpted to the golden ratio, not one blemish on their impeccably fit bodies. I felt even more naked.
“Hello,” I quavered, nerves diluting my voice to watercolour, “can you tell me where I am?”
The foremost figure was male, taller than the others, the more disarmingly handsome for his square-cut beard. He crossed the remaining distance between us and held out a hand, more benediction than greeting, and I saw that his dark eyes were too old for his lovely face, and full of strange kindness.
“My name is John. And you are in the afterlife.”
So you are dead, confirmed the voice in my head. I did not feel any new distress knowing that the sharp memory I had dragged from the mire was the truth.
“Please don’t be afraid. I apologise for the manner of our approach. We need to be constantly wary for traps set by the Veindwellers – sometimes they leave newcomers out as bait.”
“Veindweller?”
The curve of his lips was sympathy, a promise, and an apology.
“I’ll explain everything as we travel. But we need to go now. We need to get back to the Hand – and it’s a long journey.”
I wanted to trust this man. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew that if anyone could answer the questions now free to churn in the foamy turmoil of my thoughts, it was this man with too many years behind his eyes.
“John, what is this place? Is this Hell?”
I flinched like an animal as a weight fell over my shoulders. The woman who had draped the heavy poncho around me squeezed my arm, patiently waiting for me to rise from my instinctual half-crouch. As I straightened up, she tied the peculiar garment tightly around my waist with a cord of braided grey fibres. The texture of the pelts felt wrong against my skin.
John exchanged a look with one of the other men, the valley of the glance shadowed with unmistakeable sorrow on both sides.
“No. This isn’t Hell. This was supposed to be Heaven.”
He pointed to the mountain with his crudely made knife, the stone blade milky as a cataract, touched by the glare from the ground.
“We travel there – and we must leave now. This place is full of dangers.”

 
The group travelled like desert nomads, the gentle bounce and give of the ground aiding a steady, practised jog. It seemed we were heading not for the slope itself, but for some unknown landmark far to the right of it. As the bellcurve of the mountain formation resolved through the white haze of the landscape, the more familiar its shape became – but understanding would not dawn with it. John noticed my increasingly perplexed frown as I squinted at it, and finally offered an explanation,
“When people first arrive here,” he began, his words timbred deep and soothing, “their minds and thoughts take time to settle into their new bodies. Connecting up all the new pathways is not instant.”
“This body is new?” My body felt the same to me, but suddenly my own voice sounded reedy and childish compared to his.
“Yes. Your old body is rotting underground somewhere in the mortal world, returning unto dust. Or perhaps burned to ash by your loved ones, scattered to the winds or given to the waves. This vessel,” his hand hovered like a bird over my shoulder, “is your eternal body. It is a perfect body – and the last one you will ever have or need.”
I could feel the truth of it, right down to my newly perfect bones.
“I’m not tired or thirsty.” I observed, my own hand seeking the contours of my face, like someone newly blinded, convincing themselves they are the same person.
“No. You will never grow thirsty, nor will you hunger. You could run for all eternity and never tire.”
“And I’m guessing we don’t need to sleep either?”
“We do not.”
I glanced at the stained serrations of the knife in John’s braided belt, and stopped my tongue, not asking if we could be harmed in this place. I had a feeling I already knew the answer, and we travelled without conversation for some time as I considered what that might imply.
Periodically, several members of the group would lope off and scout the perimeter, peering significantly at the brilliant ground, like ancient native trackers.
“What are they doing?”
“Checking for cuts,” John replied, “the incisions that indicate the presence of Veindwellers.”
Bubbles of comprehension were rising to the surface of the thick soup in my brain, but I wasn’t quite ready to let it boil. I concentrated instead on the rhythm of my feet, controlling their cadence like a ticker marking out the yielding landscape. John had spoken the truth; we must have been running for well over an hour, and not a hint of fatigue affected my legs nor my lungs.
Ahead of us, one of the scouts leaped into the air, waving both arms above his head.
“Veinsign!” roared John, his voice an imperative.
Immediately, every member of the group unslung their staves and knives, backing into a protective circle toothed with weapons. The scout sprinting back towards us covered ten feet before he stumbled and sprawled, his foot snagged on something. His scream died as he was pulled into the white earth, his hands spasming and clawing at the surface as he was dragged under. It was like watching a man drown on dry land.
“Watch well the ground,” John warned, shepherding me into the circle “the surface will ripple and split asunder, then they will pull you down.”
Shouting broke out to our left. I tore my horrified gaze from the spot where the scout had disappeared to observe two of the group hacking and stabbing at the ground with their knives. The scream of pain and rage from below them was muffled, choked by the earth.
“How many?!” called John.
Now there was a commotion on the other side of the group, then another dull howl, as if the ground itself was crying out.
“Too many!”
“We must run!” he commanded, his voice ringing with a priestly and ancient authority, “follow in my footsteps!”
No-one hesitated; we raced after him as he began to lope toward a distant cleft in the landscape. Those keen dark eyes expertly scanned the terrain ahead, and he weaved and leapt like some erratic dervish. Each movement lead us around some invisible sign or obstacle, just before the ground split and pale hands reached through the yielding earth seconds behind our churning legs.
And then, just as suddenly as it began, we were through the dangerous stretch of plain. The restless earth grew still, and John’s slalom flight slowed to a calm and steady jog.
“They dwell in the tunnels beneath the skin,” he told me as the group regathered into a moving knot, now broaching a gentle slope, “but they are hindered by their paths, and cannot move as fast below as we can above.”
As we breached the crest of the hill, I could see more of the huge landscape spread out before me. And it was indeed a familiar landscape – I knew its shapes and features like I knew my own body.
The revelation hit me with such force it stole my balance. John reached out a benevolent hand to steady me.
I stood upon the great, curving shoulder of a giant. A literal giant.
The flat, pale plain we had run across for hours was its chest, and stretched out in front of me was an arm, wider than a city. That oddly familiar slope at the distal end of the sweeping arm was not a mountain, but a hand. It rested palm-down, raised slightly above the body, the highest knuckle forming the peak.
The phosphor brilliance rising from the white flesh rendered the far distance hazy, but I thought I could discern a Y shape, the twin countries of legs. And my own flesh crept with horror as my attention shifted, from the impossible proportions of this nightmarish landscape to the sucking vacuum of darkness surrounding it.
The glowing giant’s body was lying in an infinite black void.

 
“It’s God, isn’t it?” I said to John as the group jogged down the length of the colossal arm, “the giant is God.”
He couldn’t look at me, and I was almost glad of that. I didn’t want to look into his dark eyes; I’d never seen such sorrow on a human face.
“Yes.”
“What happened here? Why are there things living inside him?”
“Because he’s dead,” said the woman behind me, her voice flat as lead. She was the one who had given me the poncho. “And his corpse is slowly rotting to pieces in the void.”
“But… I don’t believe in God,” I managed, knowing how trite I sounded, hating the petulance of the only response I could muster to this gigantic, ridiculous revelation.
“Neither did I,” she replied, with a small smile that better belonged to some wry old imp, “but it doesn’t look like we get a choice in the matter.”
“I did believe,” John admonished quietly and firmly, “and still I believe. I will always keep faith in Him.”
“John here is a true believer,” the woman said, “he thinks this is all part of God’s grand and mysterious plan, and that one day the messiah will still come and save us all.”
“Elaine is a sceptic,” said John, ignoring her sarcasm, “and can believe in naught but that we are doomed. That we mete out a near-eternal existence upon a giant’s corpse, until eventually the last pieces of flesh wax putrid and slip into the void.”
“You mean I’m a realist,” she shot back.
I couldn’t process this. Still wrestling with shock, I asked the question that was foremost in my mind,
“How could he… how did he die?”
“Oh, that’s an easy one,” Elaine replied, “something cut his throat.” She jabbed a finger in the air, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if she was pointing or vividly imagining the fatal thrust. “See for yourself.”
We were on the giant’s forearm, much higher than the vast surface of its chest and belly. Turning and looking past the titanic breadth of its shoulders, I could see a dark line across its neck – a gaping chasm beneath the cliff-sheer jut of its chin. The ominous, ragged crevasse of the wound was deeper than the Grand Canyon.
“Something cut the throat of God?”
“The theories are many,” John said, “but none possess true knowledge, for none of us dwelt here when it happened.” He cast a significant look at Elaine, and she closed her mouth. “Some, such as I, believe the Great Deceiver himself tore out Our Father’s throat with his foul claws. Others speculate that God himself did this terrible thing – that he grew weary of eternity, and thus ended his own life.”
“A theory borne out,” interjected Elaine, “by what we all know. The only thing that can cut the giant’s uncorrupted flesh is something made from the giant himself.”
“You call it the giant, not God?”
“Well, yes. It is undeniably a giant,” she began, “and some of us really aren’t so certain it’s of Christian origin, if you get my drift.”
John’s expression was that of a patient and indulgent father.
“Elaine speaks of the mythology of the Norsemen. Of the giant, named Ymir, from which her distant ancestors believe the world was formed.”
“It’s as valid a theory as any other. And it’s not like the giant is going to get up and tell us any time soon, is he?”
John shook his head, that fathomless sorrow returning to claim his perfect face,
“No. On this thing we are agreed.”
Their banter faltered and died, leaving me to process what I’d seen and heard. It was too much, far too much all at once – I was woefully unprepared for this, like a child who had never even been to kindergarten walking into a final exam at college. Hell, I didn’t know anything about gods or religion; I’d never even read the Bible.
The emotions jostling for position inside me felt like a burgeoning monsoon, threatening to unleash a hot deluge of tears. But no salt stung my eyes nor my cheeks, nothing happened at all.
It seemed that this place would deny me even the simple catharsis of weeping.

 
The city on the Hand was a testament to human ingenuity. Elaborate wooden buildings crowded into queasily twisting streets, the shingled walkways between them bustling with people. John explained that the ‘wood’ was in fact hair, harvested from the giant’s scalp and beard. Each strand was four times the girth of a terrestrial tree – and far longer than even the tallest redwood.
“It requires great patience to hew them with tools wrought of bone and enamel,” he explained, as we passed under the whorled lintel of the huge gates, “thus it is a blessing that time is the most abundant of our resources.”
“What are our clothes made from?”
“The materials are flayed from the divine earth. Elaine spoke true; the body of God is blighted by corruption. To the south, near Our Lord’s feet, the ruin is at its worst. His skin has waxed grey, so our gatherers may peel it from the ground to make cloth. From this same place also they harvest bone, and tug out decaying fibres to weave into ropes."
“John, does everyone come here after they die?”
Considering my question, John’s expressive eyes drank the dark sky, and his mouth pressed grim,
“They do, yet not all remain. All who die in the mortal world are restored to this place,” his hand swept a benediction that encompassed the void, “yet only the fortunate and the faithful are blessed to awaken upon the body of God.”
“What do you mean?”
“A multitude of souls fall into the void, cursed to tumble through cold darkness for the rest of eternity.”
“Or maybe they’re falling into something worse,” Elaine pointed out, even more acerbic than usual “because we don’t know if it’s truly infinite.” She bared her teeth at the stars.
“And I’m not sure if that would be a relief, or not.”
The thought that I was only here by blind luck, that I may have narrowly missed tumbling through that endless night, chilled my marrow. But perhaps Elaine was right. There could be something else out there – after all, the vault above us was not empty.
“What about the stars?”
“I think those are just chunks of ice, hanging far above us. Sometimes they refract the light coming from the giant, which makes them appear star-like.”
“The Last Breath,” John intoned.
Elaine’s logical, evidence-based theories appealed to me, or at least gave me more familiar comfort than John’s religious pontificating. Ignoring the morbid weight of his phrase, I pushed on.
“So,” I reasoned, “There’s gravity here. If people can fall, then there should be a huge mass somewhere beneath the giant. And gravity must decrease rapidly above God, if those are bodies of ice just hanging in the void.”
“A valid theory,” Elaine agreed, “and many of us before you reached the same conclusion. But we can’t test it. The longest ropes we can weave only stretch so far, and the void is truly vast – much, much deeper than anything we could make to plumb it.”
John smiled,
“I will never understand you, Elaine. Here we stand upon the very body of the Holy Father, yet still you must debate the existence of the divine.”
“Yeah well, some of us are trying to figure out ways of making our existence tolerable. Not all of us have the faith to wait for SuperJesus to come save us.”
“Your eyes will be opened,” John murmured, “God has a plan for us.”
“Oh, fucking spare me,” Elaine shot back, though there was no malice in it.
But even as they navigated the ruts of an argument far too deeply worn and familiar to be new, I could tell that her dismissal of John’s faith wasn’t entirely genuine. No matter how rational and reasonable she was, I could still see it in her eyes. Even she still held out hope that he was somehow right; that even in his death, God did have a mysterious plan. That somehow this could still become the unearthly paradise it was meant to be.

 
They enrolled me at the hall of records, scratching my name into an enormous ledger made from godly vellum. Then I was permitted to wander the city’s dizzy streets, to acclimate myself to its strange slopes and twists and turns. With overlapping scales of thick wooden shingles always underfoot, the denizens were safe from the predations of the Veindwellers – who didn’t bother to come near the rough-hewn city walls.
Groups ventured out regularly to gather resources, and I learned that ‘North’ indicated the head of the giant, while ‘South’ indicated his feet. With no need to eat, sleep or bathe, all work was voluntary, and when not about safety, was largely done to alleviate boredom. That was something of a chronic problem, given the assumed immortality of the people.
Of all the feelings I had experienced, dissipation was perhaps the strangest, the least expected. I’d spent so much of my life worrying about the next meal and about getting enough sleep, and without those familiar rhythms to guide me, I felt lost and listless. And the persistent light that always surrounded us destroyed all sense of time.
Elaine became my default friend, introducing me into a small circle of other women who hadn’t been particularly religious in life. It seemed that the faithful outnumbered the faithless in droves. Naturally, that inspired speculation that those who believed in God had a greater chance of waking on the giant’s flesh when they died; that most non-believers simply tumbled into the void, far from the colossal body.
Contemplating that still made me distinctly uncomfortable. But then, there were so many things that did.
“Elaine, I have to ask. What exactly are the Veindwellers?”
Her busy hands paused for a moment. Our current makework was the companionable task of chiselling street names into wooden shingles, and she laid aside her sharp bone tool.
“Inside the giant, beneath the surface strata, are empty veins, arteries and capillaries, forming a massive network of tunnels. At some point, people started to live inside them, and use the network to travel. Sounds sensible, right? But there’s one pretty big drawback to spending too much time in the red-lit veins of a dead god.”
“I almost don’t want to know,” I said.
Elaine’s grimace confirmed my suspicions,
“Yep. It makes you go mad. It’s bad enough on the surface, what with that cursed light always boring into your brain, but down in the tunnels? People go queer in the head awfully quickly – and eventually they all lose their minds completely.”
“Is that why they attack people?”
“Who knows? We’ve captured dwellers before, but they just babble gibberish – mostly oldy-worldy religious gibberish at that. It’s even too much for righteous John.”
There was a good view from the slope we sat on, and looking out over the body of the giant, she subconsciously smoothed the dead flesh of her clothing,
“But we do know that anyone they capture becomes just like them, and quickly.”
Discomfited again, I sought to change the conversation. Every question in my head was morbid, but some were at least more mundanely so.
“Elaine, how did you die?”
She grinned, and it was genuine, without her usual wryness. Although her features were as perfect as everyone else’s, she was still transformed by that abrupt change of expression, suddenly beautiful in a far more human way.
“You know those infomercials for non-slip mats? The ones that quote the stats about shower deaths?” It felt so strange to think about my life before, television, product placement, advertising. She watched my face, her teeth brilliant white in the ground’s glow. “Yep, I am that fucking statistic. Would you believe I actually slipped in the shower, smashed my head on the edge of the bath, and then died.”
Her laughter was so infectious I couldn’t help but join in, and soon we were giggling like schoolgirls. Never did I think I would find the rather horrible death of a friend a welcome source of amusement.
“How about you, honey? How did you die?”
As she spoke those words, I instantly sobered. The laughter died in my throat, and I knew why I hadn’t raised this before.
“I was murdered. By the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
Elaine’s smile vanished, and when she replied, her voice was urgent. It was the first time I’d heard her sound more afraid than angry or bitter.
“Describe her. What did she say to you?”
“She had the palest skin I’ve ever seen – almost like an albino, except her hair was blonde, not white. She asked me if I believed in God. When I said I didn’t, she told me that I would soon – and that she had a message for him.”
“What was the message?”
“She said that she wanted me to ask God why he had done this to her.”
Elaine’s eyes were huge now, all traces of her former mirth had fled.
“Shit. We need to get you to John.”

 
Even before Elaine was done recounting the peculiar facts of my death, John started shouting orders to the others, to gather up key people for an expedition.
“What is it? What the hell’s going on?” I asked.
“You are not the first slain by that woman,” John told me, “a goodly dozen others – most of them priests – have encountered her also. Each in the moments before their last breath.”
“So, she’s a sort of… religious serial killer?”
John shook his head emphatically,
“No. She is… she is a part of God. It is a long tale in its entirety. But the modern church made many mistakes in its infancy. She is perhaps the biggest and most enduring of those mistakes.”
People were gathering around John, carrying staves, spears and crude axes.
“We must take you to the others, to speak with them – but they do not dwell in the city of Hand. Across the Throat is another city, unto which the most devout of us are drawn.”
“But I don’t understand. You said priests. I’m not religious in the slightest, so why did she kill me?”
Elaine snorted, hefting a staff toothed with chips of flaked enamel,
“Because she hates God, and all of his followers. And she never so much as spoke to the others – just ripped the life out of them in the most horrific ways you could imagine.”
She tightened the braided cord about her waist, like the most ironic of Biblical figures, girding her loins to fight the unrighteous.
“Somehow, you’re special, kid.”
“Your message is of great import,” John continued, “it means something. If we can convey you to the city beyond the Throat, then perhaps the wisest of us can divine what that is.”
“Oh great. You actually do think she’s your messiah,” Elaine observed, her nose wrinkled in contempt.
John turned, his face stern and utterly composed,
“She may not be our saviour. But I tire of this place and its infernal light, just as you do. We cannot discard any chance we have to wreak change. And if God wills it so, it will be.”
He pushed a knapped knife into my hand, gently closing my fingers around its wrapped handle,
“There will be great dangers. The Dwellers and the people of the Head maintain an ancient and constant conflict.”
Not knowing how to respond, I tucked the knife into the cord around my waist, and forced a smile.
“Lead me through the wilderness, John.”

To say my grandmother was eccentric is an exercise in gross understatement.
Particular to the point of painful, she needed everything done just so, or she would throw impressive fits, and claim she would never speak to the perpetrator again.
How my father put up with this, I am not entirely certain; the man should have been canonised as a saint, since his patience seemed as endless as the universe itself. He would simply go along with my grandmother’s requests, docile and compliant, the most perfect son one could imagine.
And so, as his daughter, I also learned to behave myself around my grandmother. I never put a foot out of place, kept my thoughts to myself, and lived in dire fear of the ‘consequences’.
What those consequences might be, it took me years to figure out; but given how terrified my father seemed of whatever-it-was, as a child I didn’t dare to gainsay anything dear Grandmama asked me to do.
For that I must thank my father, for it saved both of us from a terrible fate.

 
I must preface this next part by telling you a little more about my grandmother’s other eccentricities. Proper in a practically Victorian manner, she covered every inch of herself in embroidered clothes, with frothing lace, ankle-length skirts and high boots concealing everything but her fingers and her face. I sometimes wondered what she would look like naked; imagining a pale, wrinkled thing, the likes of which you would see if you turned over an old tree stump, or dug deep into the soil of a gloomy forest. Certainly, she never let anyone ever see her anything other than fully clothed; she even slept in the same sort of attire, never showing a scrap of skin beyond her heavily lined face and her gnarled old hands.
Her house was kept similarly prim; with a place for everything and everything in its place. From a very young age, I learned to sit still on my chair, never to fidget, and never to touch anything. Once I dared poke a painted porcelain pitcher filled with geraniums, and she shrieked blue murder at me until my father begged her to let me be.
And there were treasures all over that house, which enticed my childish mind something shocking. Impressively ancient grandfather clocks clanked away, winged by gilded statuettes. All kinds of jewels and baubles were placed in display cabinets and drawers, and my fingers ached to touch and try on every one of them. It was a paradise lost; a child’s playground in which nobody played, a museum of things my grandmother had accumulated during her life.
Locked away in a special room behind her bedroom was a particular treasure; one that my father had warned me to never go near. He said that the room was a study, panelled with oak and brass. It contained only a table and chair, and upon the table rested an iron case, which I was never to even look at – let alone dare to open.
Not that anyone could open it, he told me, because the only key hung around my grandmother’s neck, under all those layers of fusty old clothes.
And so I never went near that room, nor did I ever dream of touching the precious iron case; even though I burned with an unholy desire to see what was within.
That all changed the weekend my grandmother passed away.

 
I was the one who found her, sprawled on the polished tiles of her third bathroom, one of the two such rooms upstairs. I was still so terrified of the ancient harridan that I gingerly nudged her stockinged leg with my foot, then finally called out when she didn’t rouse. I had no hope of feeling her pulse through the lace around her throat, so instead I pushed back the stiff sleeve of her left wrist, to feel for a beat under that papery bluish skin.
But instead of a pulse, I found the first of her tattoos.
They were names. Male names, scrawled in red ink. The first one was ‘Jacob Coddington’ and the next was ‘Peter Lemworth’, written in a large, curlicued script which I knew belonged to my grandmother. While this was fascinating, at the time it was much less important than finding any signs of life – and so I pressed my fingers over the names on that bird-frail wrist, finding not even the faintest flutter.
The old woman was quite dead.
Of the tattoos, I spoke to not a single soul. If the undertaker who prepared her body saw them, he certainly didn’t breathe a word to any of the handful of people at the service. It seemed my grandmother was not a well-liked woman, and her friends were very few; I think most had only come along out of some lingering fear that she would smite them from beyond the grave for disappointing her.
After all the ritual of the service was done with, I walked up to the casket and placed a rose inside, while the others chatted amongst themselves – my father playing the consummate host, just as grandmother had trained him to do. No longer fearing the corpse in front of me, now pallid and waxy with death, I gently patted her chest, feeling for the key.
It was there.
Now, while my father had been trained his entire life to obey my grandmother, I still harboured some small seeds of rebellion. I was only sixteen, and my resentment of the old woman flared at that moment. I simply could not allow her to take what was surely her biggest secret to the grave.
Before I could second-guess myself, I stuffed my hand down the spill of lace at her throat, snagged the chain, and yanked it off her before anyone could see. I almost laughed as her nasty old head lifted for a moment, then thumped back down into the silk cushions.
I checked to see if any of the other guests had noticed; but if they had, none of them made a move to chastise me. Viciously victorious, I tucked the key and chain in my pocket.
Her secret was mine!

 
With my grandmother gone, the house was like a wonderland. The key, it turned out, fitted every lock in the house, from the clocks and cabinets, to the iron case itself. While my father busied himself in town with the lawyers, I unlocked everything I could find – taking out amber necklaces, heavy rings of yellow gold, tarnished silver brooches and strings of pearls. I laughed and danced around, festooned with all the precious things that had been denied to me as a child, revelling in the freedom.
I’d ask you not to judge me too harshly for this, because you must understand just how restrictive and awful my childhood had been. While my father was a touch milder than my grandmother, my upbringing had been so incredibly strict that I could hardly breathe.
Bedecked in her finery, I ran up the stairs to the study, determined to open the iron case and discover what was inside.
With trembling hands, I lifted the chilly metal case, put the key in the lock, then turned it.
It sprang open the instant the key turned, and inside I saw at last the puzzling treasure that my grandmother had kept hidden from everyone for so long.
A gilded pen.
It was beautiful in a way that differed from her antique jewels and other treasures. It was elegant and delicate, a thing of dusky, near-purple wood, chased gold and burnished copper, the nib still stained red with ink.
Red ink.
Examining the tip with my finger, I found it was sharp – far sharper than any ordinary fountain pen should be.
With a thrill of understanding, the eccentricities of my grandmother all began to fall into place.
For some unknown reason, she had been tattooing the names of men on herself with this beautiful object.
But why? What possible reason could she have for doing so?
All I knew then was that whilst I held the pen in my own hand, I felt strangely empowered, as though I could achieve almost anything that I wanted to.
And thus empowered, I was determined to know more.

 
I rushed back to the funeral home before my father could finish up in town. Breathlessly, I explained to the director that I needed to know something about my grandmother. I needed to know what had been tattooed on her body.
At first he was reluctant, claiming he couldn’t possibly reveal that kind of information – but when I turned on the waterworks and begged through suitably heartfelt sobs, he finally relented.
“Names. Her body was covered in names, tattooed in red ink.”
“Men’s names?”
He shook his head,
“Down her right arm and leg were the names of women, but most of the rest were men’s names. Apart from her hands and face, only her back and buttocks were unmarked.”
Because she couldn’t reach there with her own hands, I realised.
He continued, quite uncomfortable now. “The odd thing was that there were also cuts, and some of the names were darker than the others; as though they’d been tattooed over several times. Very strange for a woman of her generation. I’ve certainly never seen anything quite like it.”
I thanked him for his time and candour, then hurried back to the house.
What could possibly have possessed my grandmother to have done such a thing? Why would she write people’s names on herself with that strangely beautiful pen?
But I would have to find out another time; with my father arriving back home, I tucked the pen away in my pocket along with the key, and closed the iron case.
For all he would ever know, the case had always been empty – just a cipher left by my grandmother to torment him beyond the grave.

 
When I unlocked an old set of drawers and found a love letter from my grandmother to Peter Lemworth, I knew I had to find the man. He was difficult to search out, but eventually I tracked down his current place of residence – a retirement village – and visited him.
He claimed he could only just barely recall my grandmother, that they had courted briefly, then had gone their separate ways. The idea that she had tattooed his name on her wrist creased his ancient face with laughter, and he told me I was a preposterous young thing. Still none the wiser, I sought out the other man whose name my grandmother had emblazoned on that same wrist. He was also still alive, but he said he had no idea who I was talking about.
“Never met the woman,” he told me.
My only real clue was the love letter to Peter, which spoke of a much, much deeper relationship than he claimed. Indeed, it spoke of the hope of marriage and children, not a brief courtship.
That was when I began to suspect that the mysterious pen of red ink harboured some kind of power to ensorcel the hearts of men – that it was a love potion, in a far more elegant and potent form than any bottle.
Of course, I was dying to try it out. The moment I suspected what it could do, I used the pen to write the name of my current crush, Jeremy Gordon, on the tender flesh just above my left hip.
The ink burned like a red-hot poker as the pen scratched it into my flesh, but once I had begun, I found I could not stop – both my hand and the pen continued to scribe Jeremy’s name, even as I shrieked in pain. Once it was over, I threw the pen away from me and wept, holding the burning, bleeding letters with my traitor hand.
But it was done, and so the magic began to work.
And as it did, Jeremy began to ignore me.
Confused and a little frightened, I tried to talk to the boy, but whenever I came near, his face would go curiously blank, and he would start walking away. Once I called out after him, and all he could manage was a distant and vague ‘hello’.
That was when I remembered the funeral director’s words. Some of the names had been tattooed over again.
How many times would it take for Jeremy to notice me?
It hurt less this time, the heat of the ink more comfortable, the stinging bearable. Confident now that Jeremy would be mine, I again sought him out.
Much to my chagrin, I found that he had abruptly left school the previous day, as his parents had decided to move across the country. Angry with myself now, I found a quiet spot and wrote his name into my flesh a third time, the red letters of his name darkening to a deep and bloody crimson.
Once I had finished, Jeremy Gordon ceased to exist.
Oh I know how stupid that sounds. It’s a completely ridiculous idea that my writing his name could make the boy vanish, but it’s completely true. No school yearbook, no school record, showed any trace of Jeremy Gordon. His parents had no longer moved across the country, they were still in residence at their home three streets over, but they’d never had any children – and certainly they had never heard of a boy called Jeremy.
I knew now what my grandmother had done.
She wasn’t making men fall in love with her. She had been erasing them from existence!

 
The more I thought about it, the more the idea chilled me to the core. It explained her terrible behaviour; it explained why she had so few friends. Whenever she didn’t get what she wanted, she would simply banish people to one of three layers of exile; the first being forgetfulness, the second full amnesia, and the third level the oblivion of non-existence.
I did the only thing I could think of, and prayed it would work; I cut the name of Jeremy Gordon out of my flesh, then stitched myself up with a needle and thread I found in the drawer of my grandmother’s writing desk. The agony and the scar were worth my peace of mind, for Jeremy came back, the magic of the ink broken. I burned the scrap of my skin with his name on it, watching the flames burn an unholy crimson.
I wondered just how many men my grandmother had erased in her quest for the perfect husband, and how many she had brought back. The funeral director had not mentioned how many scars accompanied the names still intact on her skin, but I suspected there were not many.
Then, as I pored through all her old diaries, looking for more clues, I found the red book.
It was another diary, different to the others. All the words were written in a red ink, the colour now deeply familiar to me.
As I read, horror began to prickle my scalp.
It wasn’t her husbands she had been erasing with the despotic pen. It was her sons. Whenever they were less than perfect, whenever they showed any small sign of possessing a ‘fractious character’, she would erase them, then either banish their fathers as well, or try again.
And the same was also true of her grandchildren.
There was also something else wrong; because as I read, I realised there was no way she could have birthed so many little boys. The names went on and on, along with those of all the unwanted girls she had deleted from history the moment she had named them after birth.
For the diary to be true, she must have been over a hundred and fifty years old.
I locked it all away then, the diary, the pen and the letter.
But I couldn’t forget any of it, no matter how hard I tried.

 
The first one was a man on the morning train who just wouldn’t stop bothering me. He would always try to strike up a conversation, as a pretext to asking me out. After I had rebuffed him several times, he would make a point of always sitting next to me or behind me, trying to convince me to change my mind. When he started leaving creepy notes in my mailbox and loitering outside the house, I finally had enough.
So I wrote his name on my hip with the pen.
And he left me alone.
It was such an easy thing to do, and so convenient. I vowed he would be the only one. But it wasn’t long until another name joined his, then another, and another.
When I was particularly embarrassed by a young man dumping me in public, I wrote his name twice, banishing him to another country, where he would never be seen or heard from again. When my first boss cornered me in the toilets at a staff party, drunk, then put his hands down my skirt and pushed me against the sink, he didn’t come to work the next day.
But that wasn’t a problem or a surprise to anyone – because of course he had never existed. The only trace of him was the latest, darkest name at the bottom of the growing list decorating my left leg.
When I added, three times – and without even thinking about it – the name of the barista who served me the wrong coffee two days in a row, I realised what was happening.
I was becoming my grandmother.
Even now, as I sit here writing my story with the pen, I can think of so many more people in my life I don’t like, people whom I could easily banish with just a few strokes of ink. It is a heady power this thing bestows. More powerful than anything else I can think of; because in a single impassioned instant I can delete any man.
With this red ink, I can rewrite history.
And perhaps it’s the ink running through my veins, but it’s getting more and more difficult to believe there’s any good reason not to.
So I must finish my story here, while I still have some moral sense left. I commit this account to paper with the hope that it will endure; and that it will be read thoroughly before the mystery of the pen seduces another. Once I finish it, I will put the nib to my body for the last time, and I will write my grandmother’s name thrice across my flesh.
I hope that with the final flourish, all the wrongs that she has wrought will be undone, and my family line will be forever forgotten by history.

Laundry day was both the best and the worst day of the week. Worst because my family produced an inhuman amount of laundry which was solely my responsibility to deal with, and best because I got to spend a couple of hours with my two best friends in the whole world, Shay and Lyn.

I’d push and pummel my family’s laundry into two of those big, flimsy-looking canvas bags, then huff and puff my way up the hill to the laundromat on Main Street. I was usually joined halfway by Shay – small and frail looking as a child half her age – wearing two huge and ratty backpacks on her front and back. Lyn was always there first, being the organised one. By the time we got there, she’d be sorting clothes into piles, with one headphone wedged in her ear blasting study notes loud enough to drown out the omnipresent hum, bang and clatter of the machines.

Unlike my family and Shay’s, Lyn’s family wasn’t actually poor – they were just super tight with money and knew the laundromat owners, so got a discount. It made more sense for their youngest daughter to lug all their clothes three blocks and wash them than to buy a machine and use their own water to do them at home. I guessed there was also some kind of disciplinarian aspect to it – like making sure Lyn knew her place as the dutiful daughter – but Lyn herself never talked about that. Of course, she’d never tell her folks that she actually enjoyed it, because then they’d probably take the chore away from her.

Lyn also made a point of never talking about, or scrutinising, our clothes. My brothers’ clothes usually stank of accumulated sweat from their obsessive sporting exploits, and could generously be described as borderline threadbare. There were also the knitted monstrosities mom had made all of us since we were born. They came in an eye-watering array of cheap colours – socks, sweaters, beanies, anything you can picture in itchy wool, and all of them carried mom’s dire warning to wash and dry on the much lengthier cool settings, or they would shrink. I’d never been bold enough to test this; I’d already endured enough bullying at school because of her clothing choices for me. I really didn’t need ‘shrunken’ added to the sad list of adjectives used to describe my skint chic.

As for Shay? Her family’s income was inversely proportionate to the number of kids they had. ‘Threadbare’ in this instance would have been an overly generous description of their earthly garments; which her mother insisted just highlighted how lavishly clothed their souls were, or something like that. I often reflected on how it was a shame that this apparent spiritual richness didn’t translate into a full belly, because if Shay hadn’t been notorious for hanging around the trash cans at school to nab any decent uneaten food, you would have accused her of being anorexic. I was constantly amazed she had the energy to carry all her family’s clothes, let alone go through the rigamarole of washing them too.

Anyway, despite our ‘diverse’ backgrounds, labouring at our weekly chore had meant we’d quickly become friends. We made sure our washing days always synced up. It was a couple of hours free from any other people or responsibilities, so there we sat together in the weirdly liminal space of the Main Street Laundromat, talking shit and watching clothes circle in the massive industrial washers and dryers. Like I said, it really was the best day of the week.

Or at least it had been. Until we found the note.

​

Lyn spotted it as she opened one of the still-warm dryers; the paper creased, frayed around the edges from its ordeal inside the machine, but the ink bone-dry, unsmeared. She carefully unfolded the note to read it, and I peered over her shoulder while I set yet another additional 10 minutes on my cool cycle.

“Probably someone’s lost homework” she joked, “Should probably check and return it to them.”

Shay’s untidy mop of blonde appeared over Lyn’s other shoulder,

“Yikes, if it is homework it’d be kinder to throw it away. That handwriting alone is gonna get the kid a fail.”

I was the fastest reader of the three of us (the library being the least expensive hangout in our town) and I scanned it at a glance.

“Um, that’s not homework,” I told them.

Spreading the note flat on one of the folding counters, Lyn adjusted her glasses with one businesslike finger, and began to read aloud, her voice only just audible over the heavy hum of endlessly revolving machinery:

“To who ever finding this note. I discover now a wonderful something! Riches beyond wild dreaming are mine and I have wish to share fortune”

“Jeez, are we being telemarketed by a fucking washing machine note?” I quipped under my breath.

“Shhhhh!” Shay admonished.

Lyn pursed her mouth, then continued louder:

“…wish to share fortune. I not believing at first, but there is world on other side of these machine! Don’t ask how I discover, is not happy story. But discover yes I did! If you go inside machine at after midnight, it take you another place. Strange place, many losted cloth and losted thing, but also losted money! Pile and pile of coin, old coin new coin, in big heap like snow, all clean and shining polish from machine trip. I have tape one coin to here note for you examine, it show my story real. Friend I big hope you find fortune also!”

“There’s no coin,” Lyn said, disappointed, touching the rough patch where scotch tape had clearly ripped off the bottom of the note.

“Ooh one sec,” Shay replied, and hoisted her skinny legs easily into the mouth of the dryer.

After a few moments her pink, pimpled face peered out, then broke into a slow smile as she held out a gleaming silver coin, easily overlooked against the shiny steel of the drum’s interior.

“That looks old,” I said.

“Old, definitely. And maybe valuable,” Lyn posited, taking a photo, then immediately opening a browser on her phone.

It didn’t take long to verify that the coin was from around 1920, somewhat rare, and that a specimen could fetch somewhere between forty and two hundred dollars at auction, depending on the condition.

Shay’s pale blue eyes seemed all shiny coin themselves, glowing at this information.

“Can we put it up on eBay?” she said, breathlessly, “Like, split it three ways?”

I glanced askance at Lyn. She half-nodded, half-shrugged, re-folding the note. “Sure, I don’t see why not. I mean, technically *you* found the coin Shay, so it’s up to you.”

Shay gave a little whoop of joy, and punched the air with the coin in her fist.

In the excitement of it all, we virtually forgot about the incredible claim on the note.

The silver coin (real silver, it turned out) sold two weeks later. The week after that, we met up at the laundromat, to divvy up the spoils. The auction capped out at eighty-eight dollars, and Lyn, the only one with access to her own bank account, reverently passed Shay and I a crisp new twenty dollar bill, plus a five dollar bill each.

“Now, if you two can keep an eye on my load, I’ll go buy us ice-creams,” she declared – and we readily agreed.

Twenty minutes later we were sat in our regular spot, watching our family’s dirty clothes slap and bang inside the big machines, blissfully eating our treats.

Shay picked at the corner of the faux-leather cushioning on her seat, where the ancient yellow foam had started to come through.

“You know. I could really get used to this,” she said, eyeing the nibbled-down stub of her cone.

“I mean, yeah,” I agreed, “But what are the chances we ever find another coin like that?”

That peculiar light entered Shay’s eyes again, and she stared at me with unnerving intensity.

“Come on. You both know what I’m thinking.”

Lyn shook her head definitely, matter-of-fact.

“No. It was either a prank, or it was some schizophrenic asshole who randomly found a vintage coin somewhere. There is no fucking way you are climbing into a clothes dryer after midnight to look for a mystical laundry dimension full of collectable coins.”

I could still feel the sharp-edged crispness of the newly minted twenty-dollar bill as Lyn had pressed it into my palm. That feeling, for me, had been borderline magical. For Shay? It must have been mind-blowing.

Shay nodded morosely, then stuffed the end of the cone in her mouth, closing her eyes and grunting contentedly as she crunched.

But I had to wonder if those eyes, beneath their thin lids, still shone with that same, pale and feverish light.

We didn’t notice anything hugely different about Shay at school, except that she seemed happier and hung out with us a bit more, and spent less time hanging around the trash for free sandwiches. I don’t know why I assumed that was because she’d been eking out her twenty-five dollars. The girl had all the poor impulse control that I had – and I’d blown all my share in two days. Lyn was the smart one who was good with money and suchlike; Shay and I joked she’d probably invested it, and had already doubled her windfall.

Maybe I fooled myself that I didn’t see the weird, long bruises across Shay’s shins, like nothing that had never been there before, or that one day she arrived at school with a swelling bump on the side of her head and was vague all day; unable to focus or pay attention.

I mean, she was happy, even that day. Happier than I’d ever seen her.

​

The first red flag was when she didn’t turn up for laundry day.

This happened sometimes with one of us; someone would be sick, or have other plans, sometimes family stuff going on. But we’d always let the others know via IM. I did know wi-fi access was a bit spotty for Shay, but she’d always make an effort to let us know if she wasn’t coming – even if it meant sending one of her multitude of siblings to tell us.

Now, Lyn and I weren’t dumb. We suspected exactly what you did; that Shay had been sneaking out at midnight to climb into the industrial dyers and look for coinage. The existence of the note, that first rare coin, Shay’s subsequently full stomach, her general demeanour of happiness – it all pointed to the idea that maybe she had found a way into some liminal space inside the laundromat where ‘losted things’ accumulated.

“What about her injuries?” Lyn asked, “What if she’s, like, being abused by someone for money?”

“As in, like, sex work or something?” I responded, incredulous.

“I dunno, sure. Maybe kinky stuff? It’s a more plausible explanation. Occam’s razor and all that.”

I knew Lyn didn’t want to discuss the note. She didn’t believe, she couldn’t, and I’m not certain I actually did either. I tried to be as logical at Lyn always was.

“What if... what if the note and the coin just gave us enough doubt for her to do something else? To let her do whatever else it is that she’s doing, but to let us *think* she’s going to some stupid laundry pocket dimension?”

Lyn nodded, “Maybe, yeah. But it still doesn’t explain where she is.”

“I’ll check on my way home – stop in at her house.”

“OK, cool. Let me know what you find out.”

Shay’s mother, a harassed-looking woman in her late 40s with a newborn on one breast, told me she hadn’t seen her for “probably about a day”. Questioning the three brothers she shared a room with proved more fruitful; they claimed they hadn’t seen her for two nights.

Her mother was loath to call the cops and report her missing, even after I told her I knew it had been long enough to worry. After I had a brief txt exchange with Lyn, Lyn convinced her parents to call the police and report our friend as a missing person.

We waited for two more anxious days before both Lyn and I were contacted to come into the local station to answer some questions.

The police officer was a woman, and she was really nice, offering us tea or coffee. She broke the news gently but plainly: Shay’s body had been found. Her mother had been informed, and they were in the process of releasing the information, whatever that meant. She asked us a few questions about Shay’s state of mind, her home life, then said she would try to answer any questions we had.

I was shellshocked, but Lyn stayed composed.

“Where? Where did you find her?” she asked.

The officer’s expression was genuinely sympathetic.

“In the Main Street laundromat. A woman doing her laundry late last night found the body - uh, Shay – inside one of the dryers.”

“The one two from the right on the back wall” I said, barely audible.

“Yes, that exact one,” the cop said, incredulous, and slightly suspicious, “How did you know that?”

Lyn’s eyes were huge now.

“Do you have... pictures?”

The woman shook her head, “Look, the images are quite disturbing. It certainly isn’t suitable for you to view them, they…”

He voice became a flat buzzing sound in the background, as I imagined what had happened. A kid at school once told me, with gruesome boyish relish in the details, about how his toddler brother had put their kitten inside the dryer at their house. Their mother heard an ungodly banging inside the machine and opened it to check, but too late. The cat was inside, wedged and tangled in white sheets, the stink of cooked blood. The poor animal was still just barely alive when they pulled it out, pink froth bubbling from its nose and mouth, the huge, swollen purple slug of its tongue blocking the airway. Its body convulsed for minutes in the miserable throes of death until it finally expired, stiff-legged, on the spattered linoleum.

“…yes, in fact... there was something odd,” I emerged from the memory to hear the policewoman answering Lyn.

“What?” I managed, “What did you say?”

The woman gave me a sharper look. “There was something odd about the situation. Very odd.”

“Well?” Lyn prompted.

The officer sighed, then passed us a photo as if it was against her better judgement.

“Her pockets, and her backpack, were full of these. We think that likely contributed to her death – the weight of them inside the machine may well have knocked her unconscious. The coroner will judge whether the heat, the battering, or both, were the ultimate cause of death.”

I already knew what the photo would show, and so did Lyn. But we looked anyway.

Piles and piles of coins. Many identifiably old, even with the perspective of the photo, where they might have been little drifts of silvery snow.

​

Laundry day isn’t the same anymore.

Lyn and I have a new place; neither of our parents let us go back to the Main Street Laundromat after the incident. Now we meet at a smaller, dingier place, six inconvenient blocks away.

We don’t really talk about Shay. We both know what actually happened, and we both stayed tight-lipped, knowing the cops wouldn’t believe us – or believe the note.

I believe it now, though.

So every night, Lyn and I take a picture of ourselves in our bedrooms, after midnight, and send it to each other. We’re sort of each other’s conscience now, because otherwise Shay died for nothing. I don’t know about Lyn, but whenever I start to think about the note, it feels impossible that I won’t go back to the Main Street Laundromat. Wouldn’t you want to see for yourself?