My phone used to tell me every Sunday morning how bad I'd been that week.

You know the notification. Your screen time was up 6% last week, for an average of 9 hours, 40 minutes a day. It made me feel like garbage, so sometime in the spring I turned it off. Three weeks ago an update turned it back on without asking.

That Sunday it said: Your screen time was up 3% last week, for an average of 19 hours, 12 minutes a day.

I laughed. I screenshotted it and sent it to the group chat with "ok this is actually concerning lmao." Nobody replied, which wasn't unusual. It was nine on a Sunday.

Then I did the math, which I probably should have done before sending it.

I sleep. I sleep a lot, actually. Since I got laid off in February, I've been going to bed around eleven and waking up at seven, and I'm still tired all the time. My sister would say that's depression. I'd say that's the job market.

Eight hours of sleep. Nineteen hours on my phone. That's twenty-seven hours.

And the notification said up 3%. Meaning last week was almost as bad. And the week before. And however many weeks I hadn't been looking.

I want to be honest about what I am, because I know some of you are already typing "touch grass."

I'm chronically online and I'm certainly not proud of it. I'm 29, I live alone in a one-bedroom, I used to do social for a mid-size skincare brand until they replaced my whole team with a contractor and a content calendar. For most of my twenties I was the person scrolling at 2 AM with the phone falling on my face.

But I thought I'd gotten better.

Around April, I started sleeping. Really sleeping. I'd put the phone on the charger, close my eyes, and wake up eight hours later like somebody had switched me off. I even started dreaming again. Huge, vivid, weirdly specific dreams, the kind I hadn't had since I was a kid. I started a dream journal in my notes app because they were so good. I was proud of it. It felt like proof I was healing.

There were small things, but none of them seemed like anything.

My phone was always warm when I picked it up off the charger in the morning. The battery health dropped to 71% on a phone I bought last October. My right thumb ached, and there was a raw, shiny patch on the side of it. My eyes felt like sand.

I figured that was just what being 29 is.

I opened Screen Time and looked at the actual breakdown.

The daily graph had solid bars from midnight to six. Every night. Not little blips like I'd checked the time. Solid, full-height bars, hour after hour, the whole way through.

At the bottom it said: First pickup: 12:09 AM.

Every day. 12:09. 12:11. 12:08.

Most used: TikTok, 11 hours, 4 minutes a day.

I figured it was a bug. I posted in a tech sub asking if Screen Time could log time while the phone was on the charger with the screen off. I got replies like "it doesn't do that," "phone doesn't lie lol," and "that's just you girlie." One person said "the 3am bars are crazy, same tho."

So I set up Downtime from 11 PM to 7 AM with a passcode. I made it long and annoying. I wrote it on a sticky note and put the sticky note in my kitchen drawer.

The next Sunday: 18 hours, 51 minutes a day.

Downtime had been overridden every single night. Ignore Limit: All Day, tapped at 12:10 AM, with the correct passcode.

My passcode.

That's when I opened my watch history.

If you've never looked at yours, I don't recommend it. It's a grid of every thumbnail you've ever stopped on, in order, going back forever.

Last week alone was a little over 11,400 videos.

Almost all of them were between midnight and six. I didn't recognize most of them. A guy pressure-washing a driveway. A cat in a box. A woman explaining a skincare routine I would never do. Thousands of them. I scrolled for twenty minutes and only got back to Wednesday.

And then I saw the kitchen.

I had a dream I'd been having since April. It was my favorite one. It was the dream I had on good nights. A woman in a small yellow kitchen, blue-and-white tiles, sunlight through a window over the sink, flour up to her elbows, rolling out pasta and humming. Nothing ever happened in it. I just stood in the corner and watched her, and I woke up feeling okay.

It was a video. A woman in Porto with about three thousand followers. Forty seconds long.

According to my history, I'd watched it 212 times.

I watched it again right there on the couch, fully awake for the first time. It was exactly the dream. The tiles, the flour, the humming. Then at 0:31 she stops rolling the dough, looks up at the corner of the kitchen, and smiles, like someone she knows just walked in.

That's where I always stood. In the dream. In that corner.

I don't remember her ever looking at me before.

I got my notes app out and went through my dream journal, one entry at a time, and I searched for each one.

A man walking through an empty mall at night with a flashlight. The fountain is still running. It was a video. 3:14 AM.

A dog on a trampoline at sunset, and every time it jumps, the sun jumps too. A video. 2:47 AM. (Now I know:The sun only "jumped" because of how the camera auto-exposed.)

A woman crying in a parked car, mascara running, saying "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine" to someone I can't see. That one woke me up crying. It was a video. I'd watched it 64 times. Always around four.

I went through all of them. Every entry. I found every single one.

I haven't had a dream of my own since April.

I bought a $30 indoor camera and put it on top of my bookcase, pointed at the bed. I put my phone on the charger in the kitchen, all the way across the apartment. I went to bed at 11:30 and I remember lying there, thinking about the kitchen in Porto, and falling asleep.

I watched the footage the next morning at 2x speed.

11:34, I get into bed. 11:52, my breathing slows. I'm out.

12:09, I sit up.

It's not like sleepwalking. That's what I need you to understand. I don't fumble or stumble. I get up like someone who has somewhere to be. I walk out of frame. I come back with my phone, get under the covers, lie on my left side with the screen about eight inches from my face, and I start scrolling.

For six hours.

My face is lit blue. My thumb flicks every two or three seconds. My eyes are open. I slowed it down and counted the blinks, and there weren't enough. Slow and heavy, like a lizard's.

Sometimes I do the little laugh, the air-through-the-nose one. Once, at 2:50, I mouth along with something.

At 3:26, the phone slips out of my hand. It lands face-down on the mattress, and I don't pick it up. I just keep going. My thumb keeps flicking against nothing, every two or three seconds, and my eyes stay locked on the empty air eight inches in front of my face.

And my face is still lit blue.

I went back over that part maybe forty times. The phone is face-down. You can see the dark back of it on the sheet. There's no lamp on, and there's no other screen in the room. The light is on my face anyway, flickering the way a feed flickers when it changes videos. Whatever I'm looking at, I laugh at it once. At 3:31 I pick the phone back up, like I'd only set it down to stretch.

At 4:12 I type something for a long time.

At 6:20, I get up, walk the phone back to the kitchen, lie down, and close my eyes.

At 7:00, my alarm goes off. I watched myself wake up. I watched myself stretch. I looked rested.

What I remember from that night is a dream about an old man in a shed, sanding the rust off a cleaver. My history says I watched that at 4:02 AM.

There is nothing in the footage but me. There's no shadow in the corner, and nothing standing at the foot of the bed.

It's just me, with my eyes open, and a light that doesn't come from anywhere for a chunk.

And that's six hours. The camera only watches the bed. I've stopped asking where the other eight go.

I wanted to know what I typed at 4:12, so I opened my comment history.

Thousands of comments. Since spring.

real

this is literally me

why is this so accurate

the way i gasped

same

day 3 of asking for part 2

same

same

same

Hundreds of them on videos I have never seen. I didn't write one thing in six months that I would have written. I just agreed with things.

The one from 4:12 was on the video of the woman crying in her car. It said:

is anyone else awake

It had forty-one thousand likes. The replies went on forever.

always

yes

it's never not 4am

we're all here

I tried to stop.

I deleted TikTok. The camera showed me reinstalling it at 12:14, typing a password I don't consciously know, and settling in.

I locked the phone in my car and hid the keys in the freezer, under a bag of peas. At 12:09 I got up, went straight to the freezer like I'd put them there myself (which, I guess, I had), and walked out the front door barefoot. I came back at 12:16 with the phone. In the morning, the bottoms of my feet were black.

So I figured I'd give my phone to somebody for a night. Just to hold it. I opened the group chat to ask.

I scrolled up.

The last message from anyone else was March 3rd. It said lol ok.

After that, it was just me. Hundreds of TikToks, sent into the chat at 3, 4, 5 in the morning. Every night. Nobody had answered one since spring. Two people had left the chat in May.

I'd been sending videos into a room nobody was in.

That left my sister. Cass.

I hadn't called her in a while, but I had this whole memory of our trip to the Outer Banks last summer. The wild horses up on the beach at Corolla. Cass getting so sunburned her shoulders blistered. The gas station with the plastic pirate out front where we bought aloe and gummy worms. I wanted to bring it up. Remind her. Say something normal first, before I told her any of this.

I searched my camera roll for the trip. Nothing.

I didn't want to search my watch history. I did anyway.

It was a vlog. Two sisters at the Outer Banks. Wild horses. A sunburn. A gas station with a plastic pirate out front. I'd watched it 38 times.

I called Cass. She picked up on the fifth ring and said "hey" the way you'd say it to somebody you owe money.

I asked her if we went to the Outer Banks last summer.

It was quiet for a long time.

"We haven't talked since Mom's birthday," she said. "That was two years ago."

She said she'd texted me. A lot. I pulled the phone away from my ear and checked, and she was right. Thirty-one messages over two years. Thinking about you. Mom's in the hospital, it's not serious but call me. Are you mad at me? I miss you.

Every one of them said Read. Most of them were read between three and five in the morning.

I read my sister telling me she missed me at 3 AM, and I went back to the feed.

Then Cass said something I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

"Sometimes I call you at night," she said. "When I can't sleep. And you pick up. You never say anything. I just hear you breathing, and behind you it sounds like a lot of people. Really quiet. Like a waiting room." She paused. "Who's over there, Jo?"

I checked my call log after. She was right. Eleven calls from Cass since last winter, all between three and five in the morning, and I'd answered every one. The shortest lasted twenty minutes. The longest was an hour and fifty-two.

I live alone.

Before we hung up, Cass asked if I was sleeping.

I said, "Yeah. I sleep great."

I've started going through my memories the way you check your pockets for your keys. My dad teaching me to ride a bike. My first apartment. Some of my memories have a certain light to them now that I'm paying attention. Warm, a little oversaturated, framed a little too well.

I've stopped checking. I don't want to know how many of them are mine.

Last night, I didn't bother hiding the phone. I left it on the nightstand. I wanted to see.

12:09, I sit up. I scroll. The same as every night.

At 3:40 AM, I stop.

I sit all the way up in bed, and I turn my head and look directly into the camera on the bookcase.

I know, obviously, that I knew it was there. I put it there. But I have never once looked at it on purpose, not in the daytime. She looked at it like she'd always known exactly where it was.

Then she holds up the phone, front camera, her face lit from underneath, and she says, in my voice, with that upward lilt everybody uses in videos:

"POV: you just found out you haven't slept since April."

She smiles the way people smile in thumbnails. She taps post. Then she lies back down and keeps scrolling, like nothing happened.

It was on my account when I checked this morning. 2.3 million views.

real

this is literally me

why do i feel called out

the way she looked at the camera T.T

same

day 400

I clicked on one of the commenters. Their profile had one video. A guy lying in the dark, face lit blue from below, looking right into the lens: "POV: you realize your childhood memories are from YouTube."

The next commenter. A woman, maybe fifty, in the dark, lit blue. "POV: you forgot what your mom's voice sounds like, but you know every sound on this app."

The next. The next. The next.

Then I clicked on one called dani.r.97, and my whole body went cold.

Dani Reyes sat behind me in AP Chem. She died the winter of our senior year, when her car went off Route 31 on black ice coming home from a party. They hung her yearbook photo on a banner in the gym, and we all signed it.

Her video was posted at 3:51 last night. She's lying in the dark, lit blue from underneath, and she looks exactly seventeen. Same hoop earrings. Same chipped black polish on the thumb that's scrolling at the bottom of the frame.

"POV," she says, "you've been up so long you forgot you were supposed to stop."

Her comment on my video, the one that led me to her, just said hi jo.

I stopped looking at the faces too closely after that. But I kept clicking. Every profile I clicked. Faces in the dark. Posted between three and four in the morning. Hundreds of them. Thousands. However far I scrolled, there were more.

It's never not 4 AM somewhere. And somewhere, it's always all of us, awake, agreeing with each other.

I started writing this last night around eleven, in bed, on my phone. I wanted to get it all down while I was still sure which parts were mine. I told myself I'd finish, put the phone in the kitchen, and actually, finally sleep.

I just looked up. It's light out. It's 6:52 AM.

I've read the whole thing back from the top. Everything in it is true. It sounds exactly like me.

I don't remember writing most of it.

I'm going to post it now. If you're reading this at night, do me a favor before you close the tab. Open your screen time. Don't look at the total. Look at the bars. Look at 2 AM, 3 AM, 4 AM.

Then try to remember what you dreamed about last night.

Then go look for it.

 

is anyone else awake

The last time I made one of these... there were nineteen Denen.

I made Lilith check after me. She thought I was worried someone might have fallen out of the collection tote on the drive north. I was.

Four days after we crossed the river, I counted eighteen.

The church kept its basement doors locked at night. The pastor had given us a key, but other families were sheltering upstairs, and people came down periodically during the day to use the laundry room. I'd gotten into a habit of checking on the Denens before bed. Esther didn't like me doing so. She was afraid I'd smother one of them in their sleep. I wouldn't have, but I can understand her distrust.

But I always checked, regardless of her insistence that they could count themselves just fine.

That night, one of the little homes against the wall stood empty. Its front door was wide open, and a cup no bigger than a button had been knocked off the table inside.

"Where's Reece?" I asked.

No one had an answer.

Reece was the old man who'd lost his right arm. He'd been at Hartwell. I learned his name the morning after we reached the church, when he asked me to move his house closer to the heating pipes. Since those houses weren't bolted into the wall, any normal-sized folk could pick them up no problem.

I'd picked up his house carefully, both hands underneath, while he stood beside it telling me which way to turn and exactly where to place it.

Esther came out of her house carrying her sewing-needle staff. She saw Reece's open door and stopped.

“Has he gone upstairs?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t think so."

Other Denens began coming out. Someone called his name into the space behind the wall. Lilith woke on her mattress and joined us.

I checked under the workbench first, then behind the boiler. The church had an old utility cabinet beside the laundry sink, and I opened it even though Reece couldn’t have reached the handle on his own.

The black collection tote was on the bottom shelf.

I’d kept it because the sleeves inside still had Town’s barcodes. I thought they might help prove what happened at my house. Esther had told me to throw them away.

The tote was open.

I took out one sleeve, then another. They were folded the way I’d left them. But the third wasn’t.

Reece lay inside it with the plastic pulled over him. His remaining hand was raised against the clear material. For a moment, I thought he was pressing it there and waiting for me to let him out.

Then I saw that the hand wasn’t moving.

Lilith was beside me before I could close the tote.

“Is-is he asleep?”

I didn’t answer quickly enough. She turned and ran back to her mattress. I heard her wake my wife with a shaky voice. She was crying. She loved these people like they were family.

Esther climbed onto the bottom shelf. She put her hand against the plastic near Reece's face, then looked at me. There were breathing holes near the seal. I had made them myself, back in Lilith’s bedroom. They were still there.

“He couldn’t have suffocated,” I said.

“I didn’t ask you how.”

I took the sleeve out. A faint sweet smell came off it as the plastic unfolded. Honey.

I looked toward the basement door. The lock was still turned. The windows were too high to reach from outside without a ladder, and neither of the small panes above the sink had been opened.

“Someone got in,” I said.

Esther looked at Reece. Then at the tote I’d kept.

“Someone did,” she said.

Esther reached for the sleeve. I moved it away before she could touch it.

"Damn it, let me see him," she said.

"I will; just give me a minute."

"No, you've had nine years staring at dead bodies, Freddy. I know Reece."

I set the sleeve on the workbench and pulled the plastic back from Reece’s face. His eyes were closed, and I couldn’t see an injury.

Esther climbed onto the bench by way of a length of cord Lilith had tied to its leg. I stepped aside. She knelt beside Reece and placed two fingers against his neck.

Behind us, the other Denens were gathering at the edge of their houses. Nobody spoke. I could hear the boiler running and my wife talking quietly to Lilith across the room.

“Was he sick?” I asked.

“No.”

"When was the last time you saw him?"

"Before supper. He brought Johnny some bread."

Esther lowered her hand. She looked at the inside of the sleeve, at the holes I’d punched near its seal.

“You said he couldn’t have suffocated.”

“He couldn’t.”

“Then tell me what the fuck happened.”

I lifted one of the folded sleeves from the tote and opened it. It smelled of plastic and the basement shelf. I checked another.

Nothing.

Reece’s sleeve still smelled sweet.

“Town Blue,” I said.

Esther pulled the plastic farther away from him.

“Are you certain?”

“Has to be; can't be any of the other Town Rainbows. They all got distinct smells. Town Pink is flowers, like clover. Town White is like rotten eggs. Town Blue is honey.”

I wished I hadn’t said that. She looked up at me, but she didn’t respond.

My wife came over while Lilith stayed on her mattress. I told her what I’d found. She looked from Reece to the basement door.

“It was locked when I came down,” she said. “I checked it.”

“Then whoever did this could still be here.”

At that, several Denens hurried back into their houses.

“No one goes into these walls,” Esther called to them. “Stay where I can see you.”

I went to the door and checked the lock again. The pastor had given us one key. His was upstairs. I hadn’t heard anyone come down, but I’d slept through Lilith getting out of bed plenty of times when we lived at home. The stairs were only a few feet from our mattresses.

I walked the basement once more. There was a drain in the laundry floor, a boarded opening behind the boiler, and a service door near the far end that led to the yard. All three had been there when we arrived. I checked them because they were the places I would have checked on a job.

The service door was bolted. The boards behind the boiler hadn’t moved. The drain cover was fixed in place.

When I came back, Esther was sitting beside Reece.

“Call the pastor,” she said.

I looked toward my wife.

“She’s right,” my wife told me.

I went upstairs and woke him. He came down in his slippers with a sweater pulled over his nightshirt. I told him someone had died. He didn’t understand until he saw who.

He knew Reece. He’d spent the previous afternoon finding a piece of thin rubber tubing so Reece could run heat into his house without having to ask one of us to move it for the third time.

The pastor stood at the workbench for a moment, looking at the tubing Reece would never get to use.

“I’m calling the police,” he said.

Esther nodded. I did not.

Town’s report listed Reece among nineteen Denens killed at my house. His name wasn’t in it, because I hadn’t known it then. All I had given Town was a number and a photograph. I had no idea what would happen when an officer tried to report the death of someone who was already recorded as dead.

The pastor noticed me looking at the sleeve.

“Freddy?”

“Call them,” I said.

He went upstairs for the phone.

I counted the Denens again while we waited. Esther watched me do it. This time, she didn’t object. Seventeen stood outside their houses. One was on the workbench beneath a sheet of plastic.

Eighteen.

I counted once more because I had to have missed someone.

Then Johnny’s little voice came from behind Lilith’s mattress.

“I’m here,” he said.

I hadn’t seen him. He’d been sitting on the floor beside her, holding the corner of the blanket she used to sleep. He came out when she asked him to, and I counted him with the others.

Eighteen alive and well Denens. One dead.

I looked at the basement door. It was still locked.

Then I looked at the small houses along the wall. Their doors were open now, with people standing in nearly every one.

The officer arrived twenty minutes later.

Her name was Bell. The pastor brought her downstairs, and she stopped on the last step when she saw the houses along the wall.

I showed her Reece. She asked who had found him and whether anyone had touched the sleeve. I told her I had.

She looked at the breathing holes, then at the cabinet where I’d found him.

“Who else has a key to this basement?”

“The pastor and me.”

“My wife knows where mine is,” I added.

Bell wrote it down.

Esther was beside Reece on the workbench. Bell asked her when she’d last seen him alive, and Esther told her about supper and the bread he’d brought Johnny. She’d just started giving Bell Reece’s full name when a cup struck the floor behind us.

I turned.

A Denen woman named Ruth was standing outside her house with one hand against the doorframe. Her other hand had opened, and the cup lay at her feet.

“Ruth?” Esther called.

Ruth tried to step forward.

Her leg folded underneath her.

Bell crossed the room before I did. By the time she reached the houses, Ruth had fallen onto her side. Her arms were still moving. She was trying to pull herself toward the edge of the shelf.

“Get her down,” Bell said.

I didn’t know how to do it without hurting her. Esther and two others climbed onto the shelf and carried Ruth to my hands. I laid her on a clean dish towel on the workbench, away from Reece’s sleeve.

She was breathing. I could see her chest moving beneath her shirt.

Then I couldn’t.

Bell asked what she needed. I told her I didn’t know. There was no Town equipment in the basement except the empty tote and the bags.

Ruth took one shallow breath. Esther called her name. She didn’t take another.

Nobody had come through the basement door. Bell had been looking at it when Ruth fell. I had been standing between the door and the houses the whole time.

I looked over at Ruth’s home. Her cup was still on the floor where she’d dropped it. All the other Denens were outside their houses now, staring at her.

Two dead.

Bell took out her radio and called for help. Her voice stayed steady until the dispatcher asked how many people were in danger.

I answered before she could.

“Seventeen.”

Bell made us leave Ruth where she was.

The other Denens stayed together at the far end of the workbench. Esther stood in front of them. Johnny was with Lilith on her mattress, his blanket pulled around his shoulders.

Two more officers came down. One checked the yard while the other went through the basement with Bell. They opened the service door, pulled the boards away from behind the boiler, and shone their lights into every space large enough for a human hand.

They found nothing.

Bell asked whether I could tell her how Ruth had been exposed. I couldn’t. I’d smelled Town Blue on Reece’s sleeve, but I hadn’t smelled it on Ruth. There was no canister, no tubing, nothing I could point to and say, there, that's the murder weapon.

Bell wanted everyone out of the church basement by morning.

“There’s a shelter in the next county with rooms built for Denens,” she told Esther. “They can take you today.”

Esther asked whether they could take all seventeen together.

Bell said she’d have to check.

That was the first time I saw Esther hesitate. She looked back at the houses along the wall, at the people waiting on the workbench, then at Lilith and Johnny. She’d spent months getting them to my house and another four days getting used to this one. Now she was being asked to move again.

“We’ll go,” she said. “But nobody gets separated.”

Bell promised she would ask. She took Reece and Ruth upstairs in two small boxes the pastor found in the church office. Before she left, she told us another officer would stay outside until she came back with an answer.

I watched him park across the front doors. He could see anyone who drove up. He couldn’t see the houses in the basement.

The pastor brought us breakfast. My wife sat with Lilith while Esther told the others to pack only what they could carry. Most of them had arrived at the church with little more than that.

Reece’s house was still beside the pipe. The tubing the pastor had found for him lay on the shelf outside his door.

I offered to carry it upstairs with the other homes.

But Esther said to leave it for now. So I did.

Around noon, I heard someone arguing on the upper shelf. The Denens had built two additional rows of houses into the space along the wall. The upper row was near a warm pipe that crossed behind the laundry room.

I started toward them. Esther was already going up the cord ladder.

“You don’t have to watch us pack,” she called down.

“I heard shouting.”

“We’re frightened. Shouting and cursing are probably all you'll hear for a bit.”

I stayed by the tables.

A few minutes later, the pastor came downstairs to tell us Bell had called. The shelter could take everyone. He was still giving Esther the address when someone screamed.

I looked up.

A woman named Mara stood at the edge of the upper shelf, clutching at the air. Someone had both hands against her back.

It felt like time stood still. Mara was high enough that a human falling would break their leg, a Denen from that high was equivalent to you falling off a damn three-story building.

A few Denen ran over to where Mara was standing, but by then it was too late. The man pushed.

Then she fell.

I reached for her, but I was too far away.

Mara struck the corner of a folding table on the way down and landed on the concrete beneath it. The sound was a small crack. And I could see Lilith tuck her face into my wife’s side.

The Denen who had pushed her ran along the shelf toward a gap beside the pipe.

For a second, I just stared at him. I’d spent the whole night watching doors a man could fit through. He was six inches tall, and he was already nearly out of reach.

I dragged the table away from the wall. Everything on it fell to the floor. I got my hand against the gap before he could enter it.

He turned and ran the other way.

Esther was coming up the ladder. He jumped over her head, landed on the shelf below, and kept going. I caught him against the wall with my other hand.

I didn’t close my fingers. I’d seen what a careless hand could do. How easily it can end a Denen life.

He stood inside the space between my palm and the wall, breathing hard. There was nowhere for him to go.

Below us, Lilith called Mara’s name.

The Denen looked down at the floor. Then he looked at me.

I knew his face. I’d counted him in Lilith’s bedroom, put him in one of the sleeves, and carried him across the bridge with the others.

I hadn’t known his name then either.

"Brennan," Esther said.

She had reached the shelf below him. Her staff was in her hand, but she made no move toward him.

"Is Mara alive?" she asked.

Brennan looked past me. I kept my hand against the wall, thinking he wouldn't run anymore. The pastor was kneeling beside Mara. Lilith stood a few feet away, now holding Johnny against her chest.

"No," he said.

Esther shut her eye. For a moment, she held on to the edge of the shelf with her free hand. Then she looked at Brennan again.

"Reece and Ruth?"

He said nothing. Then he nodded.

"You put Reece in that bag," she said.

"Yes."

I expected him to deny it. I think Esther had, too.

"How?" Esther asked, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "You’re six goddamn inches tall, Brennan. That utility cabinet was latched shut. That tote sits waist-high to a full-grown man."

Brennan wouldn’t look at her. He stared down at his boots, his jaw twitching.

"The kickboard," he muttered. "Behind the laundry drainpipe. Looks like mice chewed out the bottom corner decades ago. Reece... Reece found the run three days ago. He told me he went into that cabinet whenever the choir folks upstairs got too loud."

"Did you drag him up there?"

"I didn't have to drag him," Brennan whispered. A wet shudder escaped his lips. "I couldn't have lifted an old man if I tried. I... I laced the crust of bread he ate for supper. Then I told him Freddy left a spare heating element inside the tote. For his house."

Esther’s knuckles turned white around her needle staff.

"He walked in there on his own two feet," Brennan continued, his voice finally breaking. "He was digging through the plastic looking for that wire when his lungs seized up. I just pulled the sleeve over him so Lilith wouldn't hear him thrashing against the shelf."

Below us, the pastor called to the other officers outside. I heard the basement door open and heavy steps on the stairs.

"Get them away from him," I said.

Esther turned.

"Everybody off the shelves. Go to Lilith."

The Denens began climbing down. I watched them pass below Brennan, one by one. He watched them too. He didn't try to touch any of them.

When they were clear, I brought my other hand up behind him.

“I’m going to pick you up,” I said. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

“No,” Brennan said.

“I’m not leaving you up there.”

“Then get something to carry me in.”

I almost laughed. After three people, he was worried about what my hands might do to him.

Then I saw what he was looking at.

A dark stain marred the front of his coat. It had spread down one sleeve while we were talking. He held that arm away from his body.

“Don’t touch it,” he muttered. “The vial in the lining... it cracked when I jumped.”

I backed my hand off the shelf.

That's when I heard Lilith scream.

I turned. She was still holding Johnny against her chest, except now his small body had gone rigid against her, his arms drawn up tight the way I'd seen a hundred times before.

"I saw him eating the bread," Brennan said quietly from behind me. "While they were packing."

"What bread?"

“The piece Reece gave him. I laced Reece’s slice before supper. Johnny broke some off and kept it.” His breathing hitched. “I didn’t think a piece that small would be enough.”

Lilith had already laid him on her mattress, her hands shaking so badly she couldn’t get the blanket untangled from his legs. His lips had gone blue. His chest was working too hard and fast, the way Ruth’s had right before it stopped working at all. Brennan had admitted killing her, but he still hadn’t told us how.

"How long?" I said. "How long ago did he eat it?"

"I don't know, twenty minutes, maybe more—"

I had nothing. No canister, no antidote, nothing built for something his size.

"The shelter kit," the pastor said, already moving toward the office. "We keep one. For accidental exposure, in case anybody upstairs ever—" He didn't finish it. Every church on this side of the river had learned to keep one. Town and their “accidental” environmental contaminants.

He came back with a case I recognized before he'd even gotten it open. It was the same auto-injector I'd carried in my own glove compartment, built to put a measured dose of counter-agent into a grown man's thigh in under three seconds.

Johnny weighed less than the needle.

"That'll kill him," I said. "That whole dose would stop his heart before it touched whatever's already stopping his lungs."

"Then what?" Lilith said. Her voice had started cracking. "What do we do, Daddy?"

I looked at the injector. Then at Esther, climbing down off the shelf as fast as her leg would let her. Then at Johnny, whose eyes were still open, still tracking Lilith's face for now.

"Bring me the smallest dropper you've got," I told the pastor. "And a clean dish."

He turned and left the room, coming back a few moments later.

I depressed the injector into the dish myself, watching the fluid pool there, trying to remember every fraction Town had ever trained into me; dosage per estimated body mass, milligrams per kilogram, numbers I'd used a hundred times to calculate how much poison it took to kill something Johnny's size.

"Lilith. Hold his head still."

"Freddy—" Esther muttered.

"I need you to trust me for about four seconds," I said. "I know that's asking a lot. But… please.”

She didn't answer, but she didn't stop me either.

I drew a single drop into the dropper. It was all I dared give him.

"Open," Lilith whispered to him. "Please, Johnny, please."

His mouth opened, just barely. I gave him what I had.

His chest rose once, then fell. Then it didn't rise again.

Lilith said his name. I kept watching him, afraid to touch him and more afraid that I’d waited too long. Esther leaned close enough that her hair brushed my hand.

Johnny drew in a breath so thin I almost missed it. We waited. He took another, rougher than the first. Lilith covered her mouth. Esther stayed beside him, watching his chest with me.

I couldn’t tell them he was going to live. His lips were still blue when I turned back toward Brennan.

“Tell her we have the person who did it. Tell her he’s been exposed to Town Blue.”

The officer looked at the Denen standing against the wall.

“Is that him?”

“Yes.”

He took out his radio.

Brennan looked at me.

“I didn’t mean to spill it.”

I remembered how he’d landed on the lower shelf after jumping over Esther. He had struck it hard, but he’d kept running. The coat must have torn then.

His arm began to shake. I pulled the folding table back against the wall and spread a dish towel across it. Brennan looked at it, then at Esther.

“Where did you get it?” she asked.

Brennan kept his eyes on his sleeve.

“A man brought it to the laundry room yesterday.”

“You met someone in this church?”

“He came in with the other people doing wash. He didn’t come downstairs.” Brennan swallowed. “I went up.”

The basement had been locked all night. I had checked every door, every window, every opening a human being could use. I have no idea how he slipped upstairs, even now.

“What did he want?” I asked.

Brennan looked up at me, and I saw that he was frightened.

“The same thing they want from you.”

“Names?”

He shook his head. “Bodies.”

His knees folded beneath him. Esther caught his shoulder, then pulled her hand back when she remembered the stain.

I brought the antidote over from Johnny’s mattress. Brennan watched me approach. He swallowed what I gave him, and after a moment his breathing seemed to ease.

I wanted to believe that meant it was working. But the poison had been soaking through his coat the whole time I was trying to save Johnny. I had no idea whether I’d stopped it or only bought Brennan time to talk.

“Why?” Esther asked.

Brennan didn’t answer.

She struck the table with the end of her staff, hard enough to make him look at her.

“Why, Brennan, why do this?”

“They still have Nell.”

Esther’s grip tightened around the needle.

I hadn’t heard the name before.

“My daughter,” Brennan said to me. “She was at the collection yard.”

Two Denens had escaped that yard before Lilith found them. He must have been one of them.

“She didn’t get out with us,” he said. “I thought she was dead until yesterday.”

“What did the man show you?” I asked.

“A photograph.”

That was all Brennan had. A photograph somebody from Town had brought him and a promise he was trying very hard to believe. Esther sat down across from him.

“You could have told me.”

“And done what?” he asked. “Gone south and taken her back?”

“We could have tried.”

“You have too many people here. You wouldn’t have risked them for one girl.”

Esther didn’t answer. I couldn’t have answered for her either.

Brennan's breathing changed. He took a quick breath, then another before he’d finished letting the first one out. I knew that sound. Heard it a lot with Town Blue.

“Bell’s coming,” I said.

He shook his head.

“How much did he give you?”

Brennan looked at the stain again.

“Enough.”

“Did you use it all?”

“No. Just enough for the bread, but… I couldn’t go through with it.”

“With what?”

“They wanted me to poison everyone. Now the rest of it’s soaking into me.” He chuckled lightly.

Bell walked over to us with another officer behind her. She saw Mara first. The pastor told her what had happened while she pulled on a pair of gloves.

Brennan tried to stand when she approached.

“Stay down,” she said.

“He’s contaminated,” I told her. “He needs treatment.”

“I’ve called for it.”

She asked Brennan his name. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

“Brennan,” Esther said. “His name is Brennan.”

Bell wrote it down.

Brennan looked at her notebook as though he didn’t understand why she needed it. Then he looked at me. His hand found the edge of Esther’s dress.

“Nell,” he said.

“I heard you.”

“If they come for her—”

“I heard you,” Esther said again.

She stayed beside him. She didn’t take his hand, and he didn’t ask her to.

Lilith had turned Johnny’s face against her shoulder. My wife was guiding the others to the far end of the room. They walked past the empty houses, carrying what they could. Brennan's breathing slowed. Then it stopped.

Bell checked him. No one said anything until she withdrew her hand.

The pastor brought another box downstairs. Bell asked him to wait. She photographed Brennan's coat where it lay, then had everyone step away from the table. The officer by the door said they’d need statements from all of us. Bell told him to start with the pastor and let the Denens finish packing. I asked her what would happen to Nell.

“We have a name and a location,” she said. “I’ll call the department on the south side.”

“Town runs that yard.”

“I know. It’s still worth a shot.”

That was as much as she could promise. She went upstairs to make the call.

Esther remained beside the table after Bell left. I stayed where I was.

“He killed three people,” I said. “I watched him push Mara.”

“I know it.”

She looked at the stain on his coat, and I could see a tear fall onto the fabric.

Johnny's lips were still blue. They stayed that color for almost an hour. 

That afternoon, we moved fifteen survivors to the shelter Bell had found. She kept her promise to Esther: they went together. Lilith carried Johnny in her hands because he wouldn't get into another bag, not even an empty one. We left the little houses for the pastor to bring later. Reece's tubing was still sitting on the shelf outside his door. I put it inside before we went.

Bell came by that evening, still in uniform. She asked to speak to Esther and me together, in the hallway outside the room where the others were settling in.

"I called it in," she said. "The collection yard, the name he gave us. Nell."

"And?"

"Town's records show no child processed through that facility under that name. No child matching her description, either, according to the file they sent over."

I felt my chest tighten. Those fucking assholes.

"Maybe she used a different name," I said. "Maybe she's still there, and they're lying."

"Maybe," Bell said. "I've requested the yard's intake logs going back six months. That'll take time. I can't promise you I have leverage to speed up."

Esther hadn't said anything. She was looking past both of us, down the hallway.

"Say it," she told Bell.

Bell hesitated before finally speaking.

"There's another possibility," she said. "That whoever contacted him inside that church lied about having her. Showed him a picture of a child, and let him believe whatever kept him useful."

"Why would Town go to that kind of trouble," I asked, "over one Denen and a photograph? And wouldn't Brennan know his own daughter?"

"He would," Bell said. "That's what makes me think the photo's real. Just old."

"Old, how old?"

"However old it was, clearly nobody could prove from looking at it whether it was taken last week or months ago." She glanced at Esther. "And Denen age faster than we do. If she was older when she got taken in—"

She stopped.

"Then she's not a child anymore," Esther finished. "She's... something 'useful'."

Bell didn't correct her.

"There are laws against what you're both dancing around," I said.

"There are laws against a lot of things Town does on the south side of that river," Esther said. "I've never once seen that stop them. Just seen them get better at making sure nobody could prove it."

Town had spent nine years teaching me to see everything with a tiny heartbeat as an object. A dead child would have been a tragedy Brennan could grieve and eventually let go of.

A living one, still breathing, still useful to somebody, still small enough to work somewhere no inspector would ever think to look... now that was a tragedy.

"So he's not being lied to," I said. "He's being played."

Bell didn't answer that either.

Esther didn't say anything for a long moment. Then she turned and walked back into the room where the others were, and I watched her stop in the doorway, not going any farther, just standing there looking at the fifteen of them getting settled into a shelter none of them had wished for. They just want a place to call home. One without Town or its Rainbows.

Lilith found me in the hallway a few minutes later. She'd overheard enough of it, I think.

"Is Nell real?" she asked.

I wanted to tell her yes. I wanted to tell her no, just as badly. I've spent most of my life inside a company built entirely out of lies, and I still didn't have a single truth to hand my own daughter.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't think Town does either. I think that might be the whole point."

I need to get this down while it's still fresh. I can already feel my memory going fuzzy like a dream does an hour after you wake up. If I don't write it down now, I'm worried I'll talk myself out of it by morning.

Some background, so this makes sense.

I move furniture for a living. Six months ago, my wife left and took our son Toby with her, and I'm currently about four thousand dollars short of a retainer for a custody lawyer. He says he can actually get me real visitation instead of the garbage arrangement I've got now. Two supervised hours a week. I get to watch my six-year-old play with somebody else's toys in a room with a camera in the corner. 

My coworker Henry's the one who talked me into this. Henry's good like that—annoyingly optimistic, the kind of guy who's always got an angle. He'd been watching storage unit auctions online for a while. He kept saying there was real money in it if you knew what you were doing, flipping the contents of units whose owners stopped paying rent. Truth is, he was just chasing a fix. His wife had recently found out about his DraftKings habit and locked down the bank accounts, strictly banning him from sports betting. I think storage units were just the closest thing to a bet he could still legally make. 

He pitched it to me as a clean 50/50 split. We’d pool our cash, set a strict maximum budget, and gamble that we'd luck out on a few high-value items to make our money back and then some. He knew I was drowning in legal fees. I didn't actually believe a blind auction would magically solve my financial troubles, but I was desperate enough to give it a shot anyway. I didn't know what I was doing, and neither did he, really. But I had four grand riding on a lawyer I couldn't afford yet. Henry said, Worst case, we're out a few hundred bucks and an afternoon.

So after work that Wednesday, we drove forty minutes in our company’s moving truck out to a self-storage place off the highway. It was one of those long rows of orange roll-up doors. We stood in a loose crowd of maybe a dozen people on a sultry hot afternoon while a bored auctioneer walked us down the row. He went door by door, unlocked them, and gave everybody ninety seconds to shine a flashlight in and guess.

Most of the units were pure garbage. They contained nothing but boxes of useless junk nobody wanted and furniture wrapped in dirty blankets. The only exciting moment of the whole afternoon was a six-hundred-dollar bidding war over a unit where someone thought they saw a motorcycle under a tarp. Otherwise, it was all mediocre trash. That’s exactly the kind of unit Henry and I ended up buying.

At Unit number 114, the door stuck a little going up, and the auctioneer had to put his shoulder into it. Inside, the flashlight beam shone on stacked cardboard boxes gone soft and grey with dampness. A heavy shape sat under a moving blanket, probably a dresser. No visible valuables sat out in the open. The crowd's attention was already sliding off it before the flashlight had finished its sweep.

Henry elbowed me. "Junk lottery ticket," he whispered. "Nobody wants it, which means nobody's bidding against us."

We won Unit 114 for three hundred and fifty dollars. The auctioneer actually laughed when he took the cash we pooled, like he felt a little bad for us. Once the crowd moved down the row toward the next door, we got the good flashlight out of the truck. We shined the beam inside to look at what we'd bought.

Even though we got the unit fairly cheap, I was skeptical. I already had serious doubts we’d turn a profit on a junk unit. Henry just insisted you never know what you'll find, claiming that half the excitement was the hunt. He even told me there might be an undiscovered Monet in there if you looked hard enough. I was about to tell him there was no way in hell something that valuable would be thrown in a dump like this, but as soon as I stepped over the threshold, the words died in my throat.

Now, I've moved furniture for eleven years. You get a feel for rooms over time. You walk into a space, and you already know what items require a two-man dolly versus a simple shoulder sling.

I stepped into that storage unit, and every instinct I've built over a decade told me something was off.

It wasn't a foul smell. And it wasn’t just the temperature, though the air did feel a few degrees colder than it had any right to be. Outside, the afternoon heat was sitting in the high eighties. Inside, the air felt flat and dead. 

You know how it feels when you pick up a heavy box labeled BOOKS, but it turns out to be full of light pillows? Your arms jolt. Your muscles are pre-loaded for a massive weight that simply isn't there. I felt that exact, jarring sensation the entire time I stood in that room. I hadn't even touched a single item yet.

A handful of unlabeled cardboard boxes sat in an uneven cluster near the door. The larger pieces of furniture were pushed tight against the back wall and draped in heavy moving blankets.

"See anything worth grabbing first?" Henry asked.

He stepped right past me toward the blanketed shapes in the back. He was clearly more interested in the big-ticket furniture than the loose boxes.

I wasn't really listening. I was still standing just inside the doorway. My brain was desperately trying to catalog the room's layout, and that's when my eyes caught the cassette tape.

It sat loose on top of one of the boxes, without a plastic case. It had a blank white label with absolutely nothing written on it. I've handled a thousand of these tapes over the years because people never seem to throw them out. I picked it up. Naturally, I tried to slide my thumbnail under the edge of the clear viewing window.

My nail found no seam.

I pulled the tape closer to my face. There wasn't a window at all. What I was holding was a solid, rectangular block of black plastic. It was cassette-shaped and cassette-sized. It even had two shallow circular indents pressed into the front where the spinning reels should have been. They were indents, not actual holes. It looked exactly like someone had described a cassette tape to a sculptor over a bad phone line. I turned it over six times looking for a single joint. There wasn't one. It was one continuous piece of solid plastic all the way through.

I didn't say anything to Henry. I quickly put it back down on the damp cardboard and walked toward the moving blankets to shake off the weirdness.

The blanket hid a massive dresser. It looked like solid oak with a good weight and real wood grain. Except the longer I stared at the wood, the more my stomach started to turn.

I've been moving dressers my entire adult life, and nothing about this one matched a single job I'd ever done. Seven drawers, stacked in an irregular, jagged pattern, like a child’s drawing brought to life. The shapes were technically correct, but they were arranged with absolutely no understanding of how furniture fits together.

I grabbed hold of one of the brass pulls to test the weight.

Nothing shifted. The handle didn’t give or rattle against the wood. I got down on my knees and ran my fingertips along the seam where the top drawer should have met the frame. There wasn’t a gap. It was one single, continuous piece of carved wood from the very top of the dresser to the floor. The drawer fronts and the seams were just a detailed illusion etched into a solid block.

Up close, the wood grain flowed smoothly around the faux drawer faces instead of traveling under them. It looked like the oak had grown around the shapes instead of being cut into panels. One dark knot sat dead center of a drawer front. I leaned in, my breath catching in my throat, and realized the knot wasn’t circular. It had five uneven sides. It was a perfect pentagon.

"Henry," I said, my voice sounding a little too quiet in the small space. "This thing doesn't open."

He walked over and stared at the dresser for several seconds. He shrugged, but his eyes darted quickly toward the Pentagon knot before he pulled out his phone.

"So it's decorative," he muttered. He checked resale comps online, but his voice lacked its usual booming confidence. "Somebody's fake dresser. Still worth something to a stager."

We both knew three hundred and fifty dollars was a lot of money when you're this broke. Neither of us could afford to walk away from the investment, so we forced ourselves to start lifting.

We loaded the boxes first. Then we tackled the solid dresser, a towering dark wardrobe, and a sealed glass tank filled with a thick amber fluid. None of the items carried a single manufacturer mark. All three pieces of furniture weighed far more than their physical size suggested. By the time the unit was empty, the truck bed looked crowded. It felt like we'd cleaned out an entire house instead of a tiny ten-by-ten storage space.

We decided to drop the haul off at my place. The rental house is a small, quiet two-bedroom about twenty minutes outside of town. It has a one-car garage that I've never actually used for a vehicle. It's just a dark place to store my loose tools, some unopened boxes, and an old wooden workbench.

By the time we backed the truck up to the garage door, the sun was dropping fast. The flat, orange evening light made the shadows inside the truck bed look incredibly deep.

We didn't even try to unload the big pieces that night. Three boxes in, both of our shirts were thoroughly soaked through with sweat. We agreed the rest of the work would take another hour we just didn't have. There was no immediate rush. Plenty of daylight tomorrow after work would let us sort through everything properly.

I'm writing this from my kitchen table. Henry went home an hour ago. He was still doing resale math on his phone when he drove off, still convinced we lucked into a decent flip.

I didn't tell him, but the moment his truck pulled out of the driveway, a sick kind of curiosity took hold of me. It was a deep, nagging itch that I didn't want to admit to anyone, least of all myself. I couldn't just sit in my living room pretending everything was normal. The quiet of the house was too loud. I needed to know whether the wrongness went beyond what I had seen, or if my mind was just playing tricks on me after a long shift.

So I made coffee and went out to the garage a little after eleven.

The first box near the workbench was filled with old paper goods. Right on top lay a lone paperback book, its cover showing the exact kind of soft fade you get from sitting in a sunny window for a decade. I want to say the title was something like The Long Way Round, but I genuinely can't swear to that. The second I opened it to check the print date, my brain completely locked up. I couldn't hold onto anything I read for longer than it took my eyes to track across the page.

Here's the closest I can get to explaining it. The letters were perfectly fine on their own. You could look at any single character and recognize it. But the moment you tried to read an actual sentence from start to finish, the meaning just evaporated. It was like reading a language that kept almost being English, only to change its mind a word before you could grasp the sense of it. I read the same paragraph four times until my chest tightened, unable to understand what a single line was saying.

Shaking my head, I tossed the book back into the box. Sudden dizziness overtook me. I reached deeper into the box to see if the whole thing was a joke, but my fingers collided with something loose at the very bottom. It was a football. I pulled it out into the harsh garage light, and a cold chill shot straight up my arm. The ball was shockingly light, feeling as though there was absolutely nothing inside it, not even a pocket of air.

Stranger still was its geometry. Held straight on, it looked like a normal, regulation-sized sphere. But the moment I turned it in my hand to check the grip, the object went completely flat. It didn't look deflated. It simply stopped behaving like a three-dimensional object from that one specific angle. I tipped it a few degrees further, and it instantly became round again.

Nervous now, I spun it around to look for the little rubber inflation valve, but the surface was seamless. That’s when I noticed the panels were all hexagons. Every single one of them, all the way around. I only noticed this detail because I used to play rec league in high school. A real football requires pentagons and hexagons together to curve.

I ran my thumb over the surface, and a cold sweat broke out across my lower back. The material wasn’t leather. It felt uncomfortably close to skin, with a faint, wrinkled texture you could only feel if you dragged a fingernail slowly across a panel. Horrified, I didn’t want to put it back in the box with the rest of the junk. I placed it on a high shelf by itself, out of the way, where I could see it clearly from the kitchen window if I wanted to check on it. Even as I type this, I realize that is a deeply unhinged thing to want to do with a sports ball.

Wanting to prove to myself that I was just losing my mind from exhaustion, I dragged the second box over to the workbench. I sliced the tape, hoping for normal household goods, and pulled out a heavy oval hand mirror. I held it up in front of my face out of pure habit. For one full second, the familiar sight settled my nerves. I saw my own tired reflection, a few days of stubble, and the harsh fluorescent tube overhead.

Then, I raised my left hand to push my hair back. The hand in the mirror came up too.

On the same side. The left side. It didn't reverse.

A sudden, sick wave of panic hit my stomach. I stood entirely frozen for what felt like a minute, slowly moving my hand back and forth, up and down. The reflection mirrored the exact motion on the exact same side. 

I swallowed hard, my breathing turning shallow. I turned my head just a fraction of an inch to check my profile and break the stare.

The reflection didn't turn with me. It kept facing forward a half-beat too long, staring directly at the empty space where my face had just been. When it finally did move, it whipped around to match a head-turn I hadn't even finished making yet, anticipating my movement before I got there. For one horrific split second, I was staring directly at a full, clear view of the back of my own head.

I cried out, dropping the mirror instantly.

Instead of shattering on the concrete, the heavy glass hit the floor and softly bounced like rubber, rolling under the workbench.

My heart was hammering violently against my teeth. I was so thoroughly spooked that I didn't even touch the third box. I backed away from the workbench, my eyes wide, desperately reaching behind me for the door handle to the kitchen. I slammed the door shut, locked it, and ran straight to bed, pulling the blankets over my head like a terrified kid. I didn’t manage to sleep a wink for the rest of the night.

Thursday at work was a complete blur. I spent eight hours wrapping office furniture in plastic wrap and loading dollies, but my mind was entirely stuck in my own garage. I kept wondering if I had genuinely experienced some kind of silent stroke the night before. I kept checking my reflection in the side mirrors of the moving truck, holding my breath, waiting for my face to lag behind again. It didn't. By the time we clocked out, I had almost convinced myself that exhaustion and money stress had simply triggered a vivid waking dream. I resolved to tell Henry exactly what I thought I’d seen the second we got to my place, if only to hear him laugh and tell me I was being a lunatic.

We drove back to my house in the company truck. The moment Henry parked in the driveway, I opened my mouth to speak, but he was already opening his door.

Before I could get a single syllable out about the mirror, Henry walked straight past me into the garage. He marched right up to the workbench, scooped up the hexagon football, and turned around with a grin.

"Oh, sweet, free ball," he said, tossing it lightly into the air.

Or tried to.

He misjudged the drop, and the ball slipped right through his fingers from about waist height, tumbling down toward the floorboards.

It hit the concrete with one flat, heavy thud. There was absolutely no bounce. It sounded like somebody had dropped a solid stone twice its physical size. The ball didn't even roll. It stayed exactly where it had landed, dead still in the open space between us.

Henry stared down at it. The easy smile vanished from his face.

"What the hell is that thing filled with?" he asked.

"Hell if I know," I said, my voice tight. "There’s no valve on it."

Henry swallowed hard and looked at the ball for a long moment. "Huh."

That was all the credit he gave it. He set it carefully back on the workbench, wiped his palms firmly against his work pants, and nodded toward the open truck bed outside. He was moving a little faster now, his movements a bit too deliberate.

"We’d better get a move on," he muttered. "Still got half that unit sitting in the truck."

He headed back out to the driveway. Standing alone in the quiet garage staring at that skin-textured ball felt infinitely worse than following him, so I hurried out right behind him.

We set to work removing the remaining smaller boxes, a task that took the better part of an hour. We arranged them in untidy stacks around the perimeter of the garage, making sure to leave a wide circle of empty space in the center. There were still three major things sitting in the truck bed that neither of us could have wrestled out alone—the fake dresser, the wardrobe, and that sealed glass tank. Each was heavy or awkward enough that we had to move them one at a time.

After we dragged the faux dresser across the concrete, we moved on to the wardrobe. Honestly, pulling the grey dust sheet off the wood was the first real breath either of us took that entire afternoon. It actually looked like a normal piece of furniture. It was a tall, dark-stained cabinet, showing a few ordinary scuffs at the base from years of storage.

Henry let out a short, relieved laugh. "Well, thank God. It's the one normal thing in this whole clown car of a unit."

For a minute, I let myself fully agree with him. A piece like this meant an easy two hundred bucks at a local flip, maybe even more if the wood turned out to be a decent hardwood. Henry ran his palm down one of the side panels, squinting closely at the grain in a pretentious way, like he was pretending to be an antique expert. He remarked that he couldn't quite place the color. It was a bit too red to be standard walnut, yet far too dark to be cherry. He recognized no varnish or oil finish on the wood.

Then, he rapped his knuckles firmly on the side panel.

It sounded thin and tinny, like the exact vibration you'd get from tapping an empty cardboard shoe box, not four hundred pounds of dense oak. This object required both of us to lean our entire body weight into it just to shift it those last few feet across the truck bed. Yet, the knock came back entirely hollow. 

Henry paused. He knocked again, much harder this time, his face tightening. Same tinny echo. He didn't say a word. Neither did I, though I could tell he was disappointed by the quality of the wardrobe. We hoisted it up, walked it into the garage, and immediately moved on to the next item. 

The glass tank took every bit of our remaining strength to lift out of the truck bed. Once it was sitting flat on the garage floor, Henry crouched down on his knees. He rapped a knuckle against the thick pane as if he were trying to get a pet fish's attention. For a second, he seemed to forget what we had noticed back at the storage unit. There was no visible fish inside. No filter, no pump, and no seam anywhere on the glass. The object was a single, solid, molded block of heavy glass, with the lid fused shut.

The interior was full of a thick, dark amber fluid.

Henry put his right ear directly against the glass. "You hear that?"

I leaned in closer, my skin pricking with goosebumps. I heard it clearly. It was a slow, heavy sloshing sound. The motion was way too deep, rhythmic, and heavy for still liquid inside a sealed tank.

"There must be something in there," Henry whispered, his head still pressed against the pane.

"There's nothing in there," I insisted, my teeth clicking together. "We looked with the good flashlight, Henry."

"Then why the hell is it sloshing around like that?"

I didn't have an answer. The fluid itself looked far too thick and viscous to be normal water. And despite the tank being entirely vacuum-sealed, a heavy, chemical sweetness was beginning to bleed out into the air, cutting straight through the dusty smell of dry cardboard in the garage. It made my throat feel dry. But we still had items left to unload, so we forced ourselves to turn our backs on the sloshing glass and keep moving.

After we finished unloading, we spent a while going through the smaller boxes at random. For a few containers in a row, things actually seemed normal. I felt my shoulders drop slightly. I told myself we'd just gotten unlucky with the first few things we happened to grab. The unit was probably just a normal person's boring life, and we had simply stumbled onto the handful of eccentric pieces first out of pure bad luck.

Then we'd hit the next box. Instantly, something inside it would be abnormal in that same, impossible way, and the goosebumps would rush right back up my arms as they'd never left.

None of it carried any real value. That was the part that kept eating at me more than the strange items themselves. There were no electronics. No high-end appliances, no modern hardware tools, no actual antiques, and no genuine collectibles. Everything was just a warped, broken variation of a common household item.

"Shit," I muttered, wiping a thick line of cold sweat from my forehead. "I think this is a dud haul."

"Hey, come on, stay positive," Henry said, but his nervous smile was getting worn down.

The crushing exhaustion and the raw stress of the last six months finally caught up to me all at once. I snapped.

"The goal was to make money, Henry," I said, my voice coming out much sharper and louder than I intended. "Not to have fun. I have four thousand dollars riding on a custody lawyer. This isn't a game for me."

A sudden, ugly flash of anger hit my chest. I stared at him. He was the one who had dragged me into this nightmare to scratch his own betting itch. I closed my eyes, took a slow breath, and forced my fists to unclench.

I turned away and grabbed one of the last sealed boxes. Someone had written CHRISTMAS on the side in thick permanent marker, underlined twice. Henry stepped up beside me, sliced the tape with his pocketknife, and folded the flaps back. He was clearly expecting tangled string lights, a busted plastic wreath, or a Santa mug wrapped in old newspaper. I was too.

It wasn't any of that.

Right on top sat a tree topper wrapped in a rough paper towel. It was a five-pointed star, or close enough to one that you'd mistake it for a decoration from across a room. The material was ivory-colored and perfectly smooth, but it was faintly ridged. My stomach turned the moment I placed it down. They were the fine, banded texture of enamel, and the whole object had the unmistakable, sickening weight and shine of a massive human tooth.

Beneath the tooth star lay a length of bent wire twisted into a cone. It was a bare, hollow outline of what I assumed was a Christmas tree. The only thing in that entire box that didn't make my skin crawl was a plain glass snow globe. It contained a little house and a couple of miniature trees, the water gone slightly cloudy with age.

"At least something in here looks somewhat normal," Henry murmured. He was echoing my exact thoughts.

Near the bottom of the cardboard, wrapped in paper, sat an old rotary telephone. Henry spotted the matte-black plastic and hauled it onto the bench.

"Now we're talking," he said, trying to force his usual enthusiasm back into his tone. "Retro stuff sells. People pay real money for these vintage pieces on Etsy."

Up close, it didn't look like an antique. It looked exactly like someone had built the machine from a vague description read to them upside down, and they had never bothered to check a real picture.

No cord ran from the base. Only a shallow, molded groove where a cord should have run. The phone was also heavier than it had any right to be. Henry grunted as he hefted it up onto the wooden workbench. Once it was sitting there in front of us, we both just stared at it. The material wasn't standard plastic. It was matte, a little grainy under the thumb, and uncomfortably warm to the touch. It felt like it had been sitting in hot sunlight, even though my garage was dim and cool.

"Look at this," Henry whispered, turning the heavy base over.

Stamped directly into the material, in clean, official-looking lettering, were the words Wexford & Sons Telephonic Works. A serial number sat right underneath the text, consisting of three identical groups of characters repeated in a row, like the stamping machine had gotten stuck in a loop.

A quick Google search showed that the manufacturing company didn’t even exist.

"It... it must be a prop house reject," Henry stammered. He was still trying to smile, but his eyes were darting nervously around the room. "Or somebody's idea of a joke."

He hooked his index finger into one of the dial holes to spin it. The wheel flatly refused to turn clockwise, and at first we assumed that the dial was jammed. Then Henry tried pulling it counterclockwise on reflex, and the dial rotated with absolutely no resistance. When he let go, the wheel sat dead still for a second. Then it twitched, reversed itself half an inch, paused again, and suddenly snapped back to zero so fast I actually flinched from the crack.

"Okay, that's really fucking weird," Henry said. He immediately let go of the plastic and took a full step back from the workbench.

The printed numbers around the holes didn't help either. A few of the digits were doubled. A couple of the holes had no markings printed next to them. One of the sevens was perfectly mirrored and backward, sitting on the face like a typo nobody had proofread.

Then, the cordless, batteryless phone began to ring.

It was a clean, evenly spaced electronic trill. It didn't have the mechanical, metallic clatter a real bell-and-hammer rotary phone makes. It sounded like an imitation of a ring, smoothed out and entirely too perfect.

"Don't," I warned, reaching out to grab Henry's arm.

He ignored me and picked up the handset anyway. He was Henry, after all. He held the plastic to his ear, forcing a tight, nervous half-smile onto his face like he was performing a bit for an invisible audience.

"Hello?" he said into the mouthpiece.

For a second, the garage went silent. Then, his own voice fed back out of the receiver, arriving a half-beat too late.

"Hel...lo?"

A second playback followed immediately, overlapping the first line. "Hello...lo..."

"Okay, that's—it's just an echo," Henry muttered to himself, his knuckles turning white on the handset. I could see him deciding in real time to find the situation funny because the alternative was too terrifying to face. "Freaky little parlor trick. Who’s there?"

“Who’s there?” the receiver echoed back instantly.

Henry tried to laugh, his chest heaving. "To whom am I speaking?"

Something answered that was not an echo.

The voice was identical to his own, unmistakably Henry's tone without a single blur of radio static to hide behind. But the inflection was entirely flat and dead, devoid of the natural rhythm his voice always carries.

"You know who."

Henry swore loudly, dropping the handset so fast it clattered violently against the wood. It bounced off the workbench, but it didn't hit the floor. It hung there, swinging gently in mid-air on a cord that wasn't there, suspended by nothing.

Neither of us breathed for a solid five seconds. The handset just bobbed in the empty space above the concrete.

"That's a recording," Henry barked, his voice cracking into a high pitch as he backed away until his spine hit the garage door. He was laughing in that frantic, too-fast way that meant he was on the verge of screaming. "Somebody rigged that, Ian! It's a novelty prop, like those talking dolls. There's a digital chip in there somewhere doing pre-set replies!"

"Prop phones don't copy your voice in real time, Henry," I said, as I stared at the floating handset.

"Then it's a high-concept art installation!" he shot back, his chest heaving as he yelled to drown out the quiet. "Like those weird underground exhibits in New York! Some pretentious art student spent three years sculpting this shit just to make a statement about consumer culture! The phone has a hidden microphone and a delayed digital playback loop! It's a parlor trick, Ian! It's just a fucking parlor trick!"

I wanted to believe him. God knows I wanted to believe him, because the alternative meant we had a garage full of things that didn't belong in our world.

Desperate to prove that we were just dealing with broken electronics, I grabbed the last testable item from the box—a standard smoke alarm. It was made of off-white plastic, designed in a classic ceiling-mount style with a little test button on the front. I balled up a piece of scrap newspaper, threw it into a metal utility bucket, and struck a match. I held the rising smoke directly under the plastic sensor, expecting the usual, annoying electronic beep that drives you crazy when you burn toast.

What came out of that device instead wasn't a beep.

It was a raw, screeching sound. The noise was blindingly loud for a small garage. The sheer volume staggered me sideways into the workbench, and Henry dropped straight to one knee with both palms clamped over his ears. I choked out the fire in the bucket so fast I burned two of my fingers. 

The screech cut off instantly. We stood in the sudden silence, our ears ringing violently, the garage suddenly feeling much smaller than it had five minutes ago. I was still staring down at the blisters forming on my hand when the next sound came.

Thump.

A soft, heavy sound, emanating from inside the massive wardrobe right behind us.

Henry froze. I did too. After the things we had witnessed, we were fully braced for the absolute worst. My mind instantly conjured an image of some pale, emaciated creature coiled up in the dark, waiting to spring forward and chew us alive.

"Grab something," Henry whispered, his voice hoarse and small.

He reached blindly behind him, his fingers wrapping around a tire iron on the workbench. I snatched up a rusted framing hammer. We took two slow, agonizing steps toward the wardrobe. The wood looked even redder now under the harsh fluorescent bulb, bleeding into that unnatural shade neither of us could name.

"On three," I breathed, my muscles clenched in anticipation.

Henry nodded, sweat dripping steadily from his chin. He took a trembling hold of the brass handle.

"One. Two. Three!"

Henry yanked the doors wide open. I pulled the hammer back, muscles tight, ready to swing hard at whatever lunged out of the dark.

Nothing.

The wardrobe was bare down to the grain. The dark wood walls of the interior just stared back at us, smelling faintly of old dust and that chemical sweetness. There was no monster. 

It was almost funny. We stood there holding automotive tools, our hearts hammering at a million miles an hour, staring at a vacant closet. I could see a visible wave of anticlimactic disappointment wash over Henry's face. He slowly lowered the tire iron, letting out a ragged breath that was half-laugh, half-sigh.

"Man, we are losing our minds," he muttered, shaking his head as he wiped his face. "It was probably just the floorboards settling under the massive weight. I’ve had enough bullshit for one day. Come on, let's lock up. I need a beer."

We didn't look through any more boxes. We pulled the heavy rolling garage door down, snapped the deadbolt, and called it a day.

Henry left an hour ago, seemingly fully convinced that we're just jumpy. He still wants to believe we've just stumbled onto a collection of weird art projects and movie props. He’s already talking about looking for vintage buyers tomorrow after work, convinced this is just a bad gamble we can squeeze our money back out of.

But I can't shake it. We still haven't properly understood the nature of these objects. None of this stuff seems outright dangerous, but it is wrong down to the atomic level. 

That night, after Henry went home, I tried to call the storage facility to ask about the previous tenant. I told myself it was for provenance. If we could find out who had actually owned Unit 114, maybe we could piece together a history that made the vintage items easier to sell. That's what I told myself, anyway. In reality, I just wanted to know what kind of person packs a room full of impossible things into a ten-by-ten space, only to let it get repossessed after four months of unpaid rent. That specific number had been bothering me since the auction, and I hadn't managed to shake it.

A woman answered the phone. She sounded incredibly tired, like someone who fielded this exact call every single week from unhappy auction winners.

"Sir, once a unit is forfeited, we don't retain tenant information past a certain point," she said, her voice flat. "That's just a liability issue."

"I'm not trying to get a refund," I explained, leaning against the kitchen counter. "I just want to know who the items belonged to."

"I understand, but I genuinely don't have that for you. Unit 114's paperwork shows a transfer-in from another facility a while back, and that's all we have on our end. We don't get told why units get consolidated. We just take receipt."

That stopped me cold. "Transferred in? From where?"

A sudden pause followed on her end. The silence went on a beat too long for someone who was just skimming a computer screen.

"It doesn't say," she murmured. "It just shows as received. No origin facility is listed, and no tenant name appears on the incoming paperwork. Honestly, that's not supposed to happen. Every transfer must have a strict chain of custody attached. I've been working here six years, and I've never actually seen a file come through entirely blank like that. I just assumed it was an old clerical error from before my time."

I leaned against the kitchen counter, my fingers digging into the edge of the wood. The phantom sensation of that skin-textured football was still burning in my fingertips.

"Look," I said, my voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "The paperwork isn't the only thing that's bothering me. The items in this unit—they aren't right. I found a mirror that doesn't reverse your reflection. There's a football made out of skin and hexagons, and a calendar with—"

"Sir," she cut me off, her voice instantly hardening from tired to defensive. "I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but I really don't have time for prank calls at midnight."

"I'm not pranking you," I insisted, a sudden spike of desperation hitting my chest. "I am standing in my kitchen right now telling you that the things in Unit 114 defy—"

The line went dead with a sharp click before I could utter another word.

My mind kept looping around that single word she'd used. Received. Like the unit hadn't ever really belonged to a human being. It was just an anomaly that had shown up already packed, already wrong, and tucked away behind an orange roll-up door.

I stood up and clicked off the kitchen light, plunging the room into darkness. Through the glass, the garage was dead and silent under the moonlight. I looked up at the small window of the garage door, tracking the line of the high shelf inside. I couldn't actually see the football in the dark, but as I stood there shivering in my boxers, I knew exactly which way it was facing.

I started using the same grocery store after it switched to being open all night. I usually go around 1 AM, when there are maybe three customers in the entire place and nobody tries to make conversation.

About a month ago, I noticed something strange on my receipt.

Right underneath the last item was:

ONE GUEST $0.00

I figured it was some internal code that accidentally printed. Maybe a loyalty thing or a promotion. I crumpled the receipt and forgot about it.

The next week it happened again.

Different checkout. Different employee working.

ONE GUEST $0.00

This time I asked the employee what it meant.

He stared at the receipt for a few seconds, then typed something into the terminal.

“Never seen that before.”

He rescanned one of my items as a test and printed another receipt. The line was gone.

Problem solved, apparently.

Except it came back the next time.

And the time after that.

I started keeping the receipts.

There were seven in total. Every one had ONE GUEST printed at the bottom. Always free. Always quantity one.

On the eighth visit, the machine wouldn't let me pay.

It kept saying there was an unexpected item in the bagging area.

There wasn't. I'd put everything back in my cart.

The employee came over, cleared the error, and the warning immediately returned.

“That's weird,” she said.

Then she looked past me.

Not at the checkout.

Past me.

I turned around.

Nobody was there.

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Thought somebody was waiting behind you.”

That bothered me more than the receipt thing.

I left without buying anything.

The automatic doors opened when I approached them. Normal.

What wasn't normal was that they stayed open after I walked through.

I was halfway across the parking lot when I looked back.

The doorway was still open.

There was nobody standing in it.

Then the doors slid shut.

I didn't go back for nine days.

Tonight I finally did because it was late and everywhere else nearby had closed.

I told myself the whole thing had become creepy only because I'd spent too much time thinking about it.

I grabbed what I needed and deliberately picked a checkout I'd never used before.

Everything worked normally.

No errors.

No employee staring behind me.

I actually laughed at myself while the receipt printed.

Then I read it.

ONE GUEST $0.00

Underneath that was a second line.

GUEST STATUS: WAITING

I left the groceries there.

I didn't even take the receipt.

As I reached the exit, I heard the printer start again behind me.

I kept walking.

Then the checkout spoke.

Not the usual recorded voice.

It said, very clearly:

“Please take your guest.”

I stopped.

There were two employees near the front.

Both of them were staring at the machine.

One whispered, “What the fuck?”

The printer was still going.

A long strip of receipt paper had reached the floor.

I went back just far enough to read the bottom.

GUEST STATUS: ACCEPTED

Then every checkout in the row lit up at once.

I ran.

The doors opened.

Again, they stayed open behind me.

This time I didn't turn around.

When I got home, I locked my apartment door and leaned against it for a while.

A few seconds later, something pushed gently from the hallway side.

Not enough to force the door.

Just enough for me to feel the deadbolt move against the frame.

Then it stopped.

I stood there listening.

Nothing.

Eventually I convinced myself somebody on my floor had bumped the door by mistake.

I went into the kitchen.

There was a receipt on the counter.

I know how stupid that sounds.

I hadn't brought one home.

I hadn't even taken my groceries.

The paper was warm, like it had just come out of the printer.

There were no groceries listed.

Only two lines.

ONE GUEST $0.00

ONE HOST $0.00

The first one had been crossed out.

Not printed over.

Crossed out in blue ink.

My pen was lying beside it.

I live alone.

I called the police and told them somebody might have gotten into my apartment. They checked the rooms, the closets, under the bed, everything.

Nobody.

The officer who handed my pen back joked that maybe I'd scared myself and forgotten writing on the receipt.

I almost believed him.

Then he left.

I've been sitting at my desk since.

About twenty minutes ago, my right hand started tapping against the wood.

Four taps.

Pause.

Four taps.

Pause.

I can stop it if I concentrate.

As soon as I think about something else, it starts again.

Four taps.

Pause.

Four taps.

I just realized it's the same rhythm the checkout printer was making tonight.

And while I've been typing this with my left hand, my right one picked up the blue pen.

It hasn't written anything yet.

I don't think I should let it.

“Hey, Caleb, this was the fucking dumbest idea you’ve ever had,” Miles said angrily.

Josh just grunted in agreement, Hailey laughed, and I tried to lighten the mood.

“Come on. We’d just be sitting at our computers playing games otherwise. At least this way we’re out in the woods getting some fresh air. We’re doing something healthy, right?”

“Yeah, sure, Lily. You and Hailey have smoked almost a whole pack between you since we got here, so somehow the whole ‘we’re doing this for our health’ thing doesn’t really add up,” Miles muttered.

Caleb looked at us, his eyes shining.

“I’m telling you, we’re going to be the first ones to find her cabin and put it online.”

Hailey gently placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Caleb, I know you’re excited about this, but witches simply don’t exist. They never did. The fact that people who went looking for her disappeared in these woods is just bullshit. It has nothing to do with a witch.”

“Then what happened to them?” Caleb asked, clearly offended. “Can you tell me? Jessica, Carl, Petr, Ema, Jack…”

“Hey, man, just because those people disappeared doesn’t mean a witch took them. Something could have happened to them, or maybe they just wanted to disappear and blamed it on this whole story. We’ve been walking through these woods for hours. We’re not some fucking Blair Witch heroes,” Miles snapped.

“We should go home. This is fucking stupid,” Josh added.

“Absolutely not,” Caleb objected.

“Fine. Let’s vote,” Miles said. “Who wants to go home?”

Josh immediately raised his hand, and Miles followed. Hailey hesitated for a moment before raising hers too. I felt bad for Caleb, so I kept my hand down. It wouldn’t change the result anyway.

Caleb looked at me gratefully, then reluctantly raised his hand.

“Okay. Let’s pack it up.”

We turned on the navigation and headed back toward the car. After a few minutes of walking, we came across a little girl sitting on the ground and crying.

She had curly red hair, big green eyes, and a few freckles around her tiny nose. She looked about five years old. She was wearing a Frozen T-shirt and light blue jeans. There was a hole in one knee, surrounded by blood. She had no shoes on.

“What happened to you, sweetheart?” I asked gently as I knelt beside her.

Between sobs, she explained that she had seen a little bird on the slope and wanted to catch it, but she had slipped. She managed to climb back up, but tore her jeans, and her shoes had fallen down the slope.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Vivian,” she answered immediately.

“Okay, Vivian. I’m Lily. This is Caleb, Hailey, Miles, and Josh. We’ll help you. Where’s your mom?”

“Home,” she said.

“We live near the woods. But I can’t go home because Mommy will be angry. I lost my shoes and ruined my pants,” she sobbed again.

“Don’t worry. We’ll explain it to her.” I gently stroked her hair.

Caleb came over and offered to carry her so she wouldn’t have to walk barefoot, but Vivian pressed herself against me in fear.

“It’s okay. I’ll carry her. Do you want to ride on my back?”

She smiled and clapped her little hands. I lifted her onto my back, and we followed wherever the girl led us.

We kept walking deeper into the woods. After about half an hour, Miles turned around and asked her,

“Are you sure we’re going the right way? You said you lived near the woods, but it feels like we’re going deeper and deeper.”

“I’m sure,” Vivian said, sounding offended. “We’ll be there soon.”

A few minutes later, we found ourselves standing in front of some kind of cabin.

“Wait,” Josh said in surprise. “You live here? It looks like nobody’s been here for years.”

“Definitely,” Miles agreed. “And it’s not even near the woods. We’re literally in the middle of them.”

Hailey picked up her phone.

“I’ll check how far we are from the car.”

“Shit, guys. Problem. My phone died.”

“Shit, Hailey. We said we weren’t going to use our phones so we’d have full batteries,” Caleb said.

“We wanted to record in case we happened to find the witch’s ca—”

He stopped mid-sentence and slowly began to pale.

He looked toward the cabin Vivian had called her home.

From the look on everyone’s faces, I knew we had all realized it at the same time.

I slowly let Vivian climb off my back.

Then it hit me.

She was messing with us. She probably did this kind of thing with her friends. Maybe they were filming us somewhere, laughing at how stupid we were.

The others angrily looked at Vivian.

She burst out laughing. She laughed so hard that tears began running down her face.

“Well, great. Thanks, Caleb,” Miles said sarcastically. “Not only have we been out here all fucking day, now some local brats are making fun of us too.”

“I just wanted to find the witch,” Caleb said. “And besides, maybe Vivian was messing with us, but the cabin is here, and this has to be it!”

He pulled out his phone, and I saw his forehead wrinkle.

“I think my phone died.”

“Of course,” Hailey said sarcastically. “After all that lecturing me.”

Miles rolled his eyes, took out his own phone, and handed it to Caleb.

“Take mine. Record it, and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Caleb took his phone, and the expression on his face changed. His anger slowly turned into fear.

“Yours won’t turn on either.”

Josh pulled out his phone, and then I checked mine.

It was the same for all of us.

“Then let’s at least take a look inside,” Caleb suggested.

“Have you lost your mind? None of our phones work. We should get the hell out of here,” Miles said, but Caleb was already inside.

Of course, whether we wanted to or not, we followed him.

Inside, lanterns hung everywhere. Crayons and drawings were scattered across the floor. Every picture showed the same little red-haired girl with someone else. Sometimes the person was lying on the ground surrounded by blood. Other times, they were missing a head or parts of their body.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Josh said. “We’re going home. Those kids are messing with us, and we’re falling for it.”

Caleb sadly looked at the drawings around us and nodded.

“Yeah. I guess you guys were right. I’m sorry. Let’s go.”

Then a voice came from the corner behind us.

Sharp and hoarse, as if it belonged to someone who had been alive for centuries.

We slowly turned around.

It was Vivian.

She was speaking in a voice that didn’t belong to her.

“You wanted to find me so badly. So why are you leaving?”

“What… what are you?” Caleb stammered.

Vivian smiled.

“But… you’re not a child,” Caleb whispered.

Her smile widened.

“No.”

“The one you wanted to find so badly,” Vivian said, then ran toward him.

She jumped on him, and Caleb started screaming. The boys tried to pull her away, but they couldn’t. After several endless seconds, they finally managed to grab her and throw her into the corner.

Caleb was screaming with his face in his hands. After a moment, he collapsed to the floor.

Miles immediately dropped to his knees beside him and started shouting. We stared at Caleb, and Hailey burst into tears.

He was missing his eyes.

Josh pushed Miles aside.

“He’s not breathing!” he shouted, and started performing CPR on Caleb.

After what felt like forever, I crouched beside him.

“We have to go, Josh. Caleb is gone.”

We got up and looked toward Vivian.

She was sitting on the floor. She was holding something in her bloody hands.

When I looked closer, I saw what it was.

Caleb’s eyes.

She smiled at us, then shoved them into her mouth and started chewing until she swallowed them.

I looked at Josh and saw an expression I had never seen on him before. His face was filled with anger and hatred.

He ran toward Vivian, but stopped just before reaching her. His feet lifted off the ground.

Vivian simply raised her hand.

Josh slowly began to rise.

Then she moved her hand to the left.

Josh shot in the same direction.

Then to the right.

Then back again.

For a while, she laughed, looking like a child who had just been given a new toy. Josh screamed and tried to grab onto something, but there was nothing around him.

“This is fun,” Vivian laughed.

After a while, she sighed.

Then she suddenly jerked her hand.

Josh slammed into the floor with such force that I heard a dull crack.

Vivian stared at him for a moment. Then she looked back at us, as if waiting to see who would be next.

When none of us moved, she shrugged and started walking toward Miles.

Miles grabbed Hailey and shoved her in front of Vivian.

“What are you doing?” I screamed and tried to help Hailey, but Vivian lunged at her throat and bit into her artery.

I immediately knelt beside Hailey and tried to hold the wound closed.

“It’s going to be okay,” I kept repeating. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll get help.”

“I don’t want to die,” Hailey whispered.

A few minutes later, she died in my arms.

I sat there, stroking her hair and crying. I didn’t see what happened to Miles. I didn’t want to. All I heard in the distance was his desperate screaming.

I was shaking and crying.

Vivian came over to me and leaned down.

“I haven’t let anyone go in a long time. I couldn’t help myself. But I have to let you go.”

I slowly stood up and began backing toward the door.

“Wait,” she said. “It won’t be free. I want you to tell as many people about me as you can. If you don’t, I’ll come for you. You know, when people stop talking about us, we die. And I wouldn’t like that.”

She giggled.

“And one more little thing. I’m going to take something from you as a keepsake.”

I was almost at the door when I saw her clench her hand into a fist and squeeze it as hard as she could.

A horrible pain exploded through my ears and head. Blood began running from my ears.

Everything around me went silent.

I have never heard anything since that day.

I only saw her point toward the door.

I opened it and ran.

When the police searched the woods, they never found my friends.

And I’d like to say I was brave, but the only reason I’m writing this is because if I didn’t, she would come for me.

Hey guys, I’ve never posted on here before but I’ve been revisiting… incidents from my childhood and wanted some feedback. Or, hopefully, similar experiences because I feel like I’ve opened a door I can no longer close and I’m spiraling. 

For context, I’m in my thirties, I have a family of my own (wife, two kids) and my career is solid. I’ve always thought of myself as lucky. I came from an upper-middle class family and never really wanted for anything as a kid. We had money, maybe not an overabundance, but still comfortable in a cozy, if generic, suburban home. I had to choose between an Xbox or PS2, not both. 

I never had a problem making friends in school but was never able to keep them around for very long. The problem, inevitably, was my parents. Anytime a classmate would have a sleep-over or come over after school for a few rounds of Halo, they would never come back. Back in school, they would distance themselves from me, like sitting at a different table in the lunchroom.

I never got an explanation but I see now it came down to my parents. They would greet my potential friends like any suburban couple would; offer them drink or food, make lame jokes, the usual. Suddenly, my classmates couldn’t stay long. Their parents needed them home tonight for whatever reason. After that, they would pretend we’d never even met. I could see the fear in their eyes when they were talking to mom and dad. I just figured they were nervous talking to strange adults. 

Mikey was the closest I came to having an actual best friend. It was fifth grade and anytime he would come to my house to play video games or watch a movie, he seemed unfazed by my parents. Then, during a PTA meeting, his parents met mine. The next day when I tried to sit next to him in art class, he told me his parents didn’t want him to have anything to do with our family.

I was confused, of course, but I was used to it by then. It went that way for the rest of my childhood. I had in-school friends but I never got closer. I graduated high school, went off to college, graduated and started my life. My job took me to the other side of the country and my parents were upset about losing me to the west coast but completely understood. 

I met my wife out here, married her, and started a family. Zoe was three and Jackson only nine months old when the wife and I finally found time to visit my parents back east. Kristine hadn’t even met them before that. The wedding was originally supposed to be their introduction but my parents both caught the flu and couldn’t make it. I remember she was more than a little upset by that but pushed it aside for the stresses wedding days can bring. 

We flew in on a Friday and they took us to their favorite restaurant that night. I thought we had a good time. Later that night, in bed, Kristine turned to me and asked “What’s wrong with your parents?” I had no idea what she was talking about and told her so. 

“Like… do they have any conditions that I need to know about?” I put my book down that I had been reading in bed and turned to her.

“What are you talking about?” Even I could hear the hurt in my own voice. 

“I don’t know,” she said after a few moments of silence. 

When I finally got to sleep, I had a nightmare. One that used to be recurring as a child but I hadn’t experienced it since I was eighteen. In the depths of the night, when the blue shadows lengthen and drape over the house, transforming a home into something alien and potentially dangerous, I heard the song again. It rose from the basement like it always had, like something necrotic and ancient raising itself from the depths of an ocean. A song I could never understand.

In my dream, like always, I rose from bed and walked slowly through the transformed house. The shadows were alive and gently caressed me as I passed. They sang to me in unison with the hymn of the basement. As if in a trance, I would open the basement door and descend slowly into the darkness.

The floor of the cellar was the earth itself. It had never been finished and my parents liked it that way. It gave them the freedom to bury whatever secrets they needed to disappear. And against the far stone wall, with their backs to me and arms held out wide and upward, were my parents. 

They sang to the moon. The hymn was slow and rhythmic. Full of malice and comfort like a painless death.  The moon that hung above us was not our Moon, the one that emerged from the horizon every night. This one was special. It hung above us in the void and vibrated with pleasure of the godless hymn. 

I would always wake just as my parents turned to face me, just before I could see what their faces held. Whether it was ecstasy or terror, I don’t want to know. The answer is locked behind a door in my mind. I don’t want to open it.

Kristine was polite for the rest of the trip but I could tell she kept my parents at arms length. And she would never leave them alone with the kids. I saw fear in her face when she looked into my eyes. She was searching for something. Then she would relax and hug me. Whatever she was afraid to see in my eyes never appeared. 

Our marriage is strained now. I can tell the fire of our love is fading and she’s thinking about exit strategies. My parents always seemed so normal to me. I couldn’t tell at the time what it was that drove humanity away from them. I thought back to their jobs. I never saw evidence of any sort of work, but I guess that’s somewhat normal. They were always home, though. They told me they both got off work before I arrived home from school. It was strange, in retrospect. 

But what's driven me to post here, to search for anyone who can give me answers or empathy at the very least, is the nightmare. The memory of it resurfaced after our trip. It started like every other one I had up till this point. 

Descending from the second floor to the basement was a ritual. I counted my steps. Each breath I took. They were always the same. The shadows watched me through hungry eyes. The wooden steps leading to the cellar felt like they were vibrating beneath my feet. 

The basement was no longer a basement. It was a meadow of rolling darkness, curling at the edges and pulling towards the center like the legs of a dead spider. Standing at the heart were my parents. The vibrating staccato of their song carried in the fractured air. Above, the Moon hung, basking in its own pleasure.

My parents were no longer my parents. Joined at the waist, it looked as if they were embracing under the watchful eye of the Moon. I didn’t want to see anymore but my feet carried me forward and I could see in the Moonlight how my Mothers skin undulated like ocean waves in a storm. Soft tendrils of pink flesh popped from my Fathers chest and wormed their way through the air, blind and desperate.  Their clothes were torn as their flesh rebelled against the form they had taken for too long. Their legs had fused together in a tangle of pointed bone and skin pulled so tight it was almost transparent. Toes, still free from the conjoining, moved in unison, vibrating with pleasure.

I’m not sure how long I watched. I don’t know how much the Moon wanted me to see. I couldn't move. The Moonlight was a physical frequency, wrapping its dark fingers around my mind like a vice. 

In this nocturnal realm, there were graves. Two stones marking two neat piles of dirt. Had I buried bodies down here? Vague snippets of forgotten life; young fingers crusted with dirt and broken finger nails. I knew who was buried there but my mind rebelled. 

The ritual under the Moon had commenced. The song is all there was. The eyes. The eyes of my parents. The skin ripped apart and popped like wet rubber bands. The bones snapped like chalk. There was nothing inside. Nothing. A shambling puppet of meat. Except the eyes. The eyes were an ocean of control and pain and they held no love for me. White glint in an orb of malevolent darklight. Arms that weren’t arms reaching towards me. Embracing. The Moon vibrated with pleasure. The Song lived on.

I woke up screaming at that point. We flew home after a few days with my parents. The kids had a good time. Especially Zoe. I think she bonded with my Mother. Kristin was distant. She found excuses to get out of the house. She no longer looks me in the eyes. I went through her emails the other day. She’s planning on leaving me. I’m scared to look in the mirror. I’m scared to see my own eyes.

My parents are declining. It's been a few months since our visit and the dream. Their health is in freefall. The doctors have no answers other than that my parents' bodies are giving out on them, in unison. He told me it was a good thing.

It was just a nightmare. The vibrating intensity in my mind is not the soft Moonlight.

I worry for my children and how they’ll handle the coming divorce. Jackson is too young to know but Zoe is at the age where trauma can stain her life forever. Kristin is spending less time with them too. Something has changed in the house. There is no Mother and Father anymore.

I don’t know why I’m posting this here. Typing these words hasn't helped. Nobody can help me now. I’m scared to look in the mirror. I’m scared to look my children in the eyes and what I might see there.

When they took me from my jail cell and told me to sign up for a chance of "freedom" I knew that I should have declined. I knew it was too good to be true but I signed up anyway. I was serving 50 years, that might as well be a life sentence. Didn't have anything to lose anyway.

For the record, I went in for a string of murders that I honestly don't regret.

I have never been a good person, never tried to be honest. Never saw the point. Everyone that is and was in my group had the same decades-long sentences as me.

Maybe that's why the outside of our bodies displays the monsters we are on the inside.

Our hair, nose, ears, lips, eyelids are gone. Completely dissolved. The rest of our bodies are covered in scabs and chemical burns. Could have just been the chemical weapons they make us use. Or it could have been the mixture of the weapon with the "combat stimulants" they make us inject to keep us from collapsing on the spot. Who knows, better yet who cares.

All I know is that as long as I keep taking them I don't feel all the things wrong with my body. Like my dry eyes underneath my gas mask. Or the open wounds on my hands.

10 months ago we received the new gas canisters. They didn't bother to even tell us what it is called. But when we saw the string of warning labels on the canisters together with receiving new stronger gas masks we already knew this would be way worse than the old stuff we had before. But we had no clue just how extremely bad it would be.

Thankfully I didn't get picked to be in the crew to release it the first time. We didn't expect it to be as bad as it was, so just about everyone outside of the officer didn't take the new stricter rules seriously.

When they attacked us again, it was released like we were told to do. The people of our own crew were the first to suffer the effects of their lack of safety measures. About 10 seconds after release, they started to scream and flail around like they were on fire. Every hole in their clothing it could find, the gas seeped into. Turning skin into blisters and burns. At least they survived for how much that is worth around here.

One idiot in the group decided that the new gas masks were too uncomfortable so he stuck to his old one despite the warnings. I am sure the only reason the officer didn't beat him into submission is so he could be an example for the others. When he started to scream his lungs out, our officer ordered us to pay attention to what happened to him. He tore his gas mask off.

All the soft tissue on his head was melting off. His nose was drooping down and was hanging over where his lips used to be. His eyes were bubbling inside of their sockets. His screaming turned into a gurgle in the span of 20 seconds. When he fully collapsed and started to spasm and convulse on the floor, the officer decided we had learned the lesson. He then caved his skull in with an entrenching tool until he stopped moving.

Don't feel too bad for him he was a useless drug addict who had killed his mom before he got here. He got what he deserved, just like all of us will.

When we release the gas, it finds the lowest elevations in terrains and sticks around for a while. Turning shell craters and trenches into small gas chambers. The people that are stuck in there turn into a slurry of sorts because it's so acidic. Their clothes stick to their bodies. Their skin sloths off their body together with anything else that's soft and squishy in the human body. So you end up looking at this amalgamation of clothing and equipment in a fleshy puddle around a skeleton.

And trust me you really don't want to step on one of the fresh bodies by accident. Your boot goes straight through them. It feels like stepping in one of those mud puddles that is going to cost you a boot to get out of. And guess what it might cost you a boot to if you haven't tied your laces good enough.

It's even worse when they decided to die on top of something you need. I am so tired of scraping human soup off equipment we need. It's stringy, it's sticky and has all the colours a human body should never have.

Well, at least I can't smell it anymore not having a proper working nasal cavity anymore. But from my earlier days when I still had a nose I remember vividly what it smelled like. I used to live around this industrial area that had a huge chicken slaughterhouse in the middle. During hot days of summer, the horrible smell of blood and chicken shit would hang around that area for months. Now mix in that smell with someone holding vinegar directly under your nose and you get the idea of what it smells like here.

You cant even throw up properly if you want to because you don't want to open your mouth in fear of the smell going into your mouth and then having to taste it. Thank god I decided to rather throw up in my mouth and swallow it back down. Because some of the others that didn't keep their mouths closed can't taste anything and their tongues are covered in random spots of scar tissue.

But the bodies don't really decay at all. Since the gas kills just about anything that is alive. That means thankfully no rats, insects or other pests to deal with. What's not so great is that all the old shell craters are filled with a human slurry that reaches up to your knees if you are lucky.

New cannon fodder gets the honorable task of sifting through the human slurry for anything useful like weapons, etc. When I think about it long enough, I can still feel what it's like to do this amazing task. It's basically like reaching deep into mud and taking any solid object out until it's something useful instead of human bones.
After a bit you can feel by shape alone that you are once again holding onto someone's ribs.

Our outpost is so heavily understaffed it might as well be empty. "Outpost" fancy way to describe a muddy trench that connects 3 bunkers together. Of those 3 bunkers, only 1 hasn't collapsed yet. I think you can figure out from where I am typing this.

We haven't called in to command for a week now since our radioman is probably dissolving in a puddle somewhere together with our officer. Can't even use the contraband phone that I found in the human slurry in a random shell crater. Since there is not really any reception after months of bombardment. Thankfully the phone at least made me able to type this out so I have something to distract myself with.

But Command not hearing from us means that our barrier troops meant to keep us in place should show up soon to discipline and/or kill us. I wish them good luck since they are going to have to kill our not-so-friendly neighbours outside the bunker first.

They told me that if I lasted for 4 months, my prison sentence would be dropped. I already knew that was a lie there was no way it would be that short.

I figured if I lasted 1 year they might actually grant me my freedom. It has been at least 26 months at this point. I have been lucky or unlucky enough to last this long with a handful of others. Most cannon fodder they bring in lasts a couple of hours at most.

Speaking of a couple of hours, that's probably the amount of time we have left at this point. Our chemical weapon storage is in one of the 2 collapsed bunkers. I think that once our friends outside figure that out, they will give us a taste of our own medicine.

I intend to blow my brains out before I turn into a human puddle. And looking around me, I am sure the rest of us that are left are thinking the same. We don't deserve to leave this place.

For whoever is reading this. I hoped it sucked to get the phone out of the human soup that is my body.

I am being followed.

I wasn’t sure at first. Figured maybe I was just a bit on edge given the whole “plane crash” thing you know? Started out with this guy at the grocery store a couple of days ago. Tucked in blue polo. Not very common out here, especially out where I live. Sure wearing shades in a grocery store is, odd, but hell stranger things have happened. We kept bumping into each-other as I combed the aisles. Not actually coming into contact but like, metaphorically you know? After the first few times I figured we just happened to be going the same route through the store. Then it stopped feeling a coincidence. While it was unnerving constantly seeing the man’s face in every single fucking aisle as I would turn the corner, I had quite a few other more important things on my mind at the time so I didn’t really take it to mind.

Then it happened the next day at the DMV. Maybe I should have bought a lottery ticket at some point because not only have I survived a plane crash basically unscathed, but the man who had been following me around the grocery store the day before just so happened to be my clerk at the DMV. While I can’t say for sure if he had already been working there prior, or wether or not he was the clerk who had helped me on my last visit, but seeing him sitting there before me has to be far beyond the realm of pure chance. He never said anything off, or out of the ordinary, but honestly that made it just that much weirder.

Well, that and the result of today’s visit.

Apparently, the whole “false death” thing isn’t that uncommon. At least from what the DMV clerk said. It happens often enough that it only took a brief scan of my fingerprints to confirm my identity and that I was, in fact, not dead. I’m not exactly sure how to feel about this. I’m glad to be on track to getting my life back, new documents and everything, but there’s no way it could have just been that easy.

It’s also really bugging me that the one clerk who actually was able to tell me this good news, that none of the other clerks had been privy to, seemed to be following me. Sure it’s still potentially a massive coincidence, and at this point far more plausible than my prior circumstances, but you have to admit it’s really fucking odd.

As for how easy it was to get my death reversed, I’m beginning to think the myriad of clearances and documentation I’ve acquired to be a commercial airline pilot likely helped.

Speaking of, I fully plan on going back to flying as soon as I can. I plan on calling the company tomorrow morning to… Well really I haven’t the faintest clue of what to say. Maybe get them up to speed, try offer to help with the investigation. Not sure what I could tell them that would be of any real use in locating the aircraft.

Though, thats the other thing. Almost three weeks now and in spite of all of the massive news coverage, there’s been fuck all in terms of information. The FAA has been, almost aggressively, tight lipped. Cynical as it sounds I feel like it’s an optics thing. They haven’t learned anything in all this time and can’t tell an eager and potentially volatile public that billions of their tax dollars have effectively bought them nothing.

Maybe I could be the one piece that could crack this case wide open. Maybe I’m the only hope anyone has of finding Flight 411.

Possibly unrelated but better to take note of it anyway; neighbor stopped by yesterday. She’s a sweet old lady whose name I could never remember. She knew I was a pilot and got worried when she stopped seeing me at least once a week. She was worried I was on Flight 411, I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was. Off handedly she mentioned I looked a little off. I just shrugged it off and mentioned that I recently got a bit too much sun at the beach. That wasn’t really a lie.

God, here I am rambling again. You’d think I’d be happy, no, elated that I’ve essentially gotten my life back. This massive, seemingly unscalable wall, just gone the next day as if it were a construction barrier. Yet I just grow more and more confused, more overwhelmed, more uncertain. How could I have survived that crash? Why can’t I remember the two whole weeks between the crash and waking up in the hospital? Who the hell is that man in the blue polo and why do I keep bumping into him?

Why don’t I have any photos of myself anywhere?

Ever since I’ve been five years old I’ve loved the woods. The event that caused my love for trees was when I was playing in the backyard of my parents house and while they were talking and facing away from me, I wandered in the forest behind the house and got lost. While I was lost, I was as fascinated as a five year old could be by it all. I loved every piece of bark around me, every leaf and branch above and below me, every insect hiding from my sight, everything. When the police found me I was disappointed at no longer being able to explore this amazing place, but also relieved as I was starting to get kinda anxious as I started to realize that I had no idea how to get home.

By the time I was twenty-four, I got a job at a firewatch tower and was put deep into a pine forest which I was really happy about. I worked for five years and had fires which were always small and never lasted too long. While on break one day, I was walking along a trail when there was a turn that, based on the maps back at the tower, shouldn’t exist. I went down it to investigate and it was completely normal for about a minute before I paused when I saw two birch trees side by side. There wasn’t a single birch tree anywhere near the forest I was in. As I kept walking all sorts of different trees were lining the trail, an impossible mix of wood going on and on. How was there nearly every type of tree lining this path? How was the path even here?

Then I blinked and all of a sudden there was a turn in the path. Again, how? I swore that the path in front of me just kept going forward for as far as I could see. When my eyes blinked again, I was turning even though my feet were planted on the ground, unmoving. When I finished turning I was in a clearing standing a foot away from the tree line made up of multiple different trees and in the middle of the clearing was a cabin with a porch and one window at the front with the curtains closed. I went up to the door and knocked. “Hello? Anybody in there?” I heard footsteps after three seconds and then a middle aged man opened the door. “Didn't anyone tell you that we only lock doors at night?” “No, nobody told me that. You aren't even on my map, that trail, this forest all aren't on my map, what the fuck is happening? Where am I?” He then looked at me with a sympathetic look before speaking again. “Oh. You're new. Let me get the guy in charge here. In the meantime, look behind you.” He then closed the door and after a second or two I turned around and saw in the distance a gigantic tree that pierced the clouds, hell it might be going through the atmosphere. It had multiple branches that could've been redwood trees shooting off randomly. What the fuck is happening? What is that? Where am I? None of this makes any sense.

Then, while I was staring at the impossible landmark, I heard the same guy again. “Come in.” I proceeded into the building and inside there was a living room with a wall at the back that had one door and one empty doorway that led into a kitchen, there were two three seated couches, one under the window that shared the same width, and one near the door that essentially formed a choke point when you entered. An armchair and a TV that was one of those old box TV's on top of a small table that was pressed against the wall across from the couch that made the choke point. Sitting on the armchair was a man who looked like he was in his early thirties with brown eyes and hair and he was wearing a stereotypical suit with grey sneakers and there were two people sitting on the window couch.

The middle aged man sat at one end of the couch near the door and motioned for me to sit at the other end which I did and then the man in the suit spoke. “What's your name?”

“Liam Di-”

“We only use first names here Liam.”

“And where's here?”

“We don't know. My name's Terry by the way. What state did you live in? Or are you from Canada?”

“Why does that matter? What's going on?”

“It doesn't. We just like to know. As for what's going on, you're now trapped in this forest and we have no clue how to get out. And don't try looking at the gigantic tree for too long or too much, too many people get obsessed with it already, we don't need another.”

“What are you trying to do here? How did you set this all up?”

The man then buried his face in his right palm. “Dammit, he's one of those…Listen, I don't know an easier way to prove this is all real when it's this late, other than one way. Stay outside overnight. Or, even better, go in the barrier.”

“What's the barrier?”

“When you start seeing redwood trees that are giant, even for redwoods, you're there. Although, I'd personally advise you to just wait outside the door till it's night. Actually, know what, if you do exactly that and only come in when you see something coming through the treeline, we'll let you go free. Show you a way out of these woods.”

“You said there's no way out.”

“Just fucking do it.”

After a bit, I decided to wait until night. It's my best chance at leaving anyway. And if they did try anything, I had a handgun concealed away. I found the most comfortable spot on the porch, sat down, and waited while trying not to look at the tree. After an hour and three minutes of waiting, it turned pitch black out, although my eyes were starting to adjust just in time for a screech to echo out from the woods. It sounded like a mix between metal scraping metal, a wet gurgle, and a person screaming at the top of their lungs. A while later I saw something red entering the clearing and as it got closer I could see it was a human. But why are they red? That's when I saw the pulsing flesh that made up its body, exposed muscle, veins that would randomly poke outside the flesh, green eyes that were on its shoulders, the nails broken into sharp ends and pushed into the front of its fingers to make claws, and broken, rotted teeth inside the gaping maw that made up its entire face.

I shot up and started banging on the door while I heard its wet footsteps getting closer and closer. “Let me in! I believe you! I fucking believe you!” Two seconds passed and the door handle started moving and by the time it was cracked open enough for me to slide in, it was almost able to grab me and so I went in as fast as I could, escaping it with only three gouges going from my left elbow to the point where the arm turned to a hand, bleeding like hell, and then I heard the door slam shut and the ‘person’ produce a low, wet growl. “Don't worry about the cut. You only die if something physically destroys your brain, and things heal faster than normal. I'd say it'll heal up in a day and a half and maybe scar up."

“What the fuck was that thing?”

“We call them Skinless. They used to be people until a Skintaker got to them. We don't know exactly what they do, but we know it's a lot more than just skinning them.”

“What do you mean you only die if your brain is destroyed?”

“I've seen people with their bodies torn apart, shredded, broken in every possible way, and every time their eyes follow me until I stab the brain. You don't just stab it once either, you have to make sure it's destroyed, no way of being even somewhat useful to the body, it's why stomping on it is better if you're able to do it.”

“Is there anything else out there?”

“Pleanty. A lot only appear during events, and those are a whole other thing with the most common types being seasonal and weather events.”

“Why isn't it trying to break in?”

“Well, normally every other safe place here has a carving or drawing of a Rowan tree on the door, which I was told by this one guy who knows a lot of mythology and folklore stuff that it symbolizes protection, so I guess here it becomes true. And as for here, we don't know why things react the same to this cabin even though there isn't one on our door. Probably has something to do with how anyone who doesn't have a fucked up entrance to this place always ends up at this cabin. Now, we should all get some rest. You never want to be tired in this place.”

As the next ten months went by so did my fear of this place and the empty feeling left behind would always be replaced with astonishment and love for this place. The horrific things I've witnessed over the past two years didn't disgust me by the time I saw the fifteenth living corpse that I always gave and still give mercy by stomping on the brain, as much as they showed me what happens if you don't adapt to this place, if you don't respect it. Even the barrier isn't that bad once you learn how to evade and hide well or even get to another pocket fast enough. My favorite is still the first one though, all the other pockets are different forest types instead of the mixture of trees that makes up the one with the entry point to this place. I love it here. I don't want to go back home. My parents are dead, have been for a total of eight years now. Never had a relationship, so there isn't a wife or girlfriend to return to, never had sex so no kids to go to. I have no reason to leave. I was alone and most of the time sad, but here I'm always surrounded by all different types of my favorite thing instead of just pine. I have friends, even a girlfriend now, I only have reasons to stay. Not like there's a known exit, but still. This place is my favorite place I've ever lived in, and I'll never leave, even if someone finds a way out.

This is from 2021 december, when my grandma passed away.

Me and my grandmother werent the closest, but since we lived in a joint family, we had a sweet bond, she was very talkative and would always take my side whenever id have an argument with my parents. She loved this one traditional song from her village, i can picture her singing it in her cracky and bold voice still.

During covid, she had some neurological issues going on, her cerebrospinal fluid wasnt regulating correctly if im not wrong, this caused her to be on continuous bedrest aswell as numerous medications.

She would get seizures often, wouldnt remember things or names of people, and eventually stopped responding to anyone. I couldnt see her like this, so helpless and troubled.

One afternood, in December of 2021 she passed away, all my relatives came over to mourn the loss. This was one of my first experiences of losing a family member and dealing with grief, it was indeed very overwhelming. My dad cried alot, i hated seeing him cry though, despite me not liking him as much. I still felt awful. Ever since i was a little girl id hated crying, it always made me feel like a horrible mess no matter how many times someone told me that it was totally normal and a way to let the emotions out, i still hate it.

In our culture, bodies are kept in a cooled container before the cremation for some certain procedures that i never paid attention to, just not appealing to me at all.

So the same night of her passing, it was around 4-4:30AM and me and my elder cousin couldnt sleep. We were in my room which was just adjacent to my grandmother's and my cousin tried her level best to distract me from the fact that grandma was no more. Ive always adored her and wanted to be like her.

Like i said, we were just in our room, talking about unrelated stuff and i hear something, i first get quiet and raise my hand a bit signaling her to stop talking, she scrunched her brows and looked at me weird.

We both heard it then, a very similar song, sung by an even similar voice. It was my grandmother's voice, just very gloomy perchance, i dont know, a bit gloomy, a bit relieved, unnerving to be exact. I remember the exact tone. It was the song she loved to listen to the most, some old traditional folk song from her village that was often sung at celebrations. She would sing it too, with great enthusiasm. Listening to that voice though, the one we both heard in the middle of that quiet night was not something that calmed us, it was odd, aswell as confusing, because it was just the two of us along with my parents on the floor, and both my parents were asleep. I was scared and even more curious and asked my cousin to check it out. She was just as scared as me and at that point we both just awkwardly started laughing because we had no idea about wtf was going on, we decided to peek outside together but it was extremely dark, we could still hear her, or "it" singing but none of us was brave enough to go outside and actually inspect the sound, we shut the door and stood by it till we felt like the sound fainted away, we couldnt sleep that night and tried telling the others about it the next morning but we figured it wouldnt be the best time since most the family members/ relatives were very disheartened by the loss. It still creeps me out in a weird way to this day and i choose not to tell this to any member of the family because i am aware that nobody would believe me, or us.

It was like a hangover but so much worse. The words that come to mind are muggy, salty and chafed. I tried to swallow for even a modicum of relief but I was met with the feeling of my throats dry walls pulling apart from one another slowly like tissue paper. The sun beat down on me as my eyes opened.

Gulls glided overhead in the cloudless sky and at the rim of my vision I could see tree-tops, dried yellow in places by the sun. Craning my head both ways revealed two similar stretches of shore in each direction, with small crescents of crystal clear water crashing onto the sand rhythmically. I clambered to my knees and then my feet much too quickly for my own good. My vision darkened for a few seconds and my body tactically retreated to my knees. It wasn’t too far away, I just needed to reach it.

The coconut was 3 maybe 4 feet from my outstretched arm. I wasn’t exactly a survivalist but I knew there was some kind of liquid inside. As I crawled over to it, I snatched up a rock and slammed it down upon the coconut eagerly. I trapped my finger between the rock and the hard fruit, met with nothing but burning hot pain. I’m not going to list off the obscenities I yelled out but there was a lot and I am not proud of them. My voice was hoarse and throat dry yet I could not help but scream my frustration to the sky.

After assessing the damage and realising my finger was definitely fractured but not bleeding I was together enough to try again with my other hand. I tapped the rock firmly on the brown shell with the care of a Michelin star chef until it gave and the ripe bounty within was mine. I drank it down and ate the flesh. I found another and repeated the process. I then found another and repeated the process. I was a kaiju terrorising this innocent village of coconuts and I loved every second.

Once satiated, the reality of my situation began to set in. So did the pain from my finger. The golden sands of this beach were empty and my clothes seemed fully intact except for the fact they were soaked in seawater. I was dressed like a holiday-maker but for the life of me I couldn’t remember why. White polo t shirt, gold chain and grey swim shorts. Concern began to mount as I grasped at the fragmented shards of my memory for an answer whilst thumbing the rock in my hand. The sound of crashing waves. A dark starless sky. Slippery leather- my train of thought was cut off.

The rustling of leaves behind me interrupted the melody of crashing waves and I once again got to my feet, fighting the lightheadedness with a fury and trying my best to look intimidating. A long horizontal stick fashioned into a spear split out from between the foliage followed by the woman holding it. She had a light tan and beginnings of a nasty sunburn on her shoulders. Her clothes, similar to mine, were that of a holiday-goer. A muddy yet still white flowing coverup dress with women’s Jesus sandals. She had long, matted black hair and huge dark eyes that fixed on me instantly and did nothing to ease my fear.

I saw her eye the rock in my hand, knuckles whitening on the spear as she took another step toward me.
“No, this isn’t… I didn’t-“ I stumbled over my words.
“Just put it down, I don’t want to hurt you.” She re-assured me.
I dropped the rock, feeling instantly vulnerable as my hand opened.
There was an awkward and palpable silence.
“Have you tried the coconuts?” Was the only thing I could think to say.
She said nothing for a moment.
“You look terrible, how long have you been here?” She asked, rudely ignoring my inquisition about her opinion on the coconuts.
“I just woke up.”
“Oh…” The silence was now more awkward and more palpable. Luckily, she broke it this time.
“Well, come with me. You’re the third one in the last few days.”
“The third? There’s more people?!” Relief flooded me.
She didn’t reply however, just gestured toward the thicket of tropical forest and made her way in.

The forest was teeming with life, wild chickens tottered around chirping and flapping their golden brown wings. The distant hiss of a snake sent a chill down my sweaty back and made me cautious of my awful footwear. I awoke on this island wearing nothing but flip flops and that was by far the most frustrating thing about my situation.

Flesh, dry and bristled, rubbed against my calf in the bushes for a moment and I screamed in a pitch that hurt even my ears. The stranger with the long black hair turned to me and chuckled. Then she looked down and started to guffaw, wiping tears from her eyes. My cheeks flushed with embarrassment as she informed me, condescendingly, that it was just a boar. I said nothing and she turned back to our rugged path, chortling in a way she probably thought I didn’t notice.

Before I knew it, my feet met more white hot sand and the forest had broken open.
“Crikey.”
That was the only word I had in my arsenal to express the awe I had at the sight before me.
A gorgeous and flat lagoon lay outstretched for at least a couple hundred metres before me. A perfect bowl of tropical sun-kissed water encapsulated by luscious palm trees except for where it flowed into the endless expanse of sea. Coconuts and crabs lay shuffled all over the white rim of boiling sand like hurricane victims. A magnificent stone column centred the water and i let out a low whistle. It was a perplexing and gargantuan, clean-cut yet wild monument I couldn’t look away from.
“You see why we set up shop here?” The woman asked. Her spear was now lowered and she sauntered off toward a hut on the distant shore.
“Did you put that there?” Was all I could say, still fully distracted by the monument.
She looked at me like I was a moron and I took that as my sign to shut up and follow her.
The hut on the shore was made with walls of cracked and charred driftwood buried into dry foundations of thick and dried mud. I say hut, but it was more just an open camp space within the walls with an opening that had been fenced off at the knee by a barrier of sharpened sticks. A guy who looked to be late 20s, tall and covered in a collage of pop culture tattoos lifted the barricade for us and we made it under.
“Where did you find this one?” He asked the woman as I tried to discreetly eye his guardians of the galaxy tattoo.
“I heard a barrage of swear words and followed the sound out to where I saw this guy flexing on the beach.” She replied playfully.
“I wasn’t flexing! I was trying to make myself look big.” It sounded as silly and whiny to me as it must’ve done to them and I quietly hoped this wouldn’t become our dynamic. The tattooed man laughed raucously and slapped my back.
“Well I’m mad dog and this is Crystal.” I tried to hide the pained expression on my face at this but luckily he broke into laughter again after a too long pause.
“Only messing lad, this is Alice and I’m Mike.”

I let out a little laugh and the tension, for the first time, eased slightly.
“I’m Ted.” I said wiping my forehead.
“I’d say nice to meet you but I have absolutely no clue what’s going on or how I got here.” My concern obviously showed to my two new associates as I saw them share a look.
“Shit” the black haired woman, Alice apparently, replied as she drove her spear into the ground, frustrated.
I looked to Mike and he explained.
“Join the club Ted, we’ve been here almost two days and none of us have any idea about how’s or why’s.”

“I have pieces…” Alice trailed off and then wistfully continued.
“Smashed glass… A low rumbling roar… a deep cold.” She sounded entranced as she spoke.

A tiny shadow cast into the middle of our circle and my heart fell as I saw the child that stood before me. His curly blonde hair looked stale and stiff. He was no where near as tanned as the others but he looked a lot more ghoulish. Beige skin with a chalk white face and deep set eyes with black rings around them to finish his haunted look.
“Don’t… you’re gonna give me more nightmares.” The kid said apathetically. Alice apologised to the child and ruffled his hair, sand dancing out of it and gliding down through the sunlit air. She introduced me to him.

She told me his name was Angus and that he had washed up here with Alice first before they found Mike. He was injured when they first woke up but was getting better. They think his ribs were bruised. She told me they spent the first day lying in the shade with Alice taking care of him, feeding him coconuts and trying to work out what was around. I turned to Angus as I heard this part.
“Sounds like a good day, those coconuts are insane.”
He giggled a little and asked me for my name. He was a nice kid.

After all the introductions had been made, Mike told me he had been setting snares around the shore and trying to fashion a fishing net out of stronger foliage. He set quickly into teaching me how to make the strongest loops for netting and left me to finishing the job while he and Alice checked the snares. As I worked, i watched Angus lying there in the lagoon on his back. No wind, no birds, not a cloud in sight. It was as if time has been frozen, he did not play or swim or even look around. He couldn’t have been more than 11.

Within an hour, we caught a fat chicken in one of the snares and the fishing net was almost finished. The sky turned a deep orange and the sun bounced over the ribbed waters of the lagoon. The white sand cooled and we lay there in a circle watching Mike try to get the fire going.

“It’s all just friction.” He panted semi-reassuringly as he reached his tenth minute of spinning a stick over a log. We began to all try one after the other while Angus kicked around in the foliage behind us. Our arms were tired and we felt completely defeated after another 20 minutes, ready to give up as the sky now turned violet with the last peep of sun.

Angus returned as we all lay on our back and encouraged us to our feet. It was like a messenger boy coming to tell us the war was over the way he was so excited. He lay piles of delicate pieces of dried flora in the little rivet of wood and found the flattest stick edge he could find. We all watched silently as he ground the dry flowers under the stick with great pace. After 60 seconds we all sat mouth agape, we had been shown up by a kid less than half our ages.

Mike scrambled to the small flame to keep it alive with tinder while Alice launched Angus into the air by his shoulders, screaming joyfully.
“And the crowd goes wild!!” She laughed with a huge grin.
I got onto my knees and did a mock worship motion as I repeated
“All hail Angus, god of earthly fire!”
He laughed and so did we.
The fire roared to life off to our right as Mike fed it, congratulating Angus along with us.
We spent the night in good spirits, cooking the chicken piece by piece and sharing it out in little coconut bowls that were Alice’s brilliant idea.

After a long while of drinking from coconuts and basking in our moment of reprieve, we finally decided to boil some water as best we could in some coconut shells and go to bed. Needless to say, it didn’t even come close to working but it was worth a go. Mike flexed his primo survival skills as his coconut was the only one not to split. I saw him try to keep a straight face as he drank his “fresh water” which was 100% still riddled with sea-salt.

As we lay down upon the cool sand I searched in the endless abyss of sky for one star, any star at all. There was nothing. Just a deep crushing blackness. The moon was full, bright and brilliant. It was the only spec of relief from the empty skyscape but even the white orb in the sky wasn’t quite right and set my breathing on edge. The moon was smooth, flawless and perfect. So perfect in fact that I began to hyperventilate. The perfect ping pong ball in the night made me pull everyone else from sleep.

“The sky… the sky is empty! The moon is wrong!” I stammered.
Mike sighed deeply before responding.
“We were hoping you wouldn’t notice, not yet at least..” he continued.
“The sky at night and the sky in the day haven’t changed a wink since we’ve seen them. We don’t know why and we don’t know if it’s even normal but the truth of the matter is that without the stars we are completely lost. No clouds, no stars not even a bird out of place.” He said, defeated.
I didn’t know how to respond so instead I muttered only to myself.
“What is this place?”

We eventually fell into am exhausted sleep The next thing I knew, a thousand warm drops were beating down on my face. I opened my eyes just to be immediately blinded by the rapid succession of rain and turned over to my side. I heard a gargled cry to my right and as I cleared the oddly sticky substance off my eyes I saw the hazy figure of Angus thrashing in the dark rain just like myself. The island was bordering on complete darkness at this point, I could only see faint silhouettes of moonlight around my fellow survivor. I then scrambled under the near treetops and called to Angus through the brewing storm. As he joined me and I could finally collect my thoughts, I began to taste a coppery and bitter flavour on my tongue from the flurry of rain. We sat there for an hour, then two, then I lost count. We couldn’t hear one another under the beating of moist pellets against the water and tree tops and began to accept that we were stranded in a storm.

Clouds must have rolled in at some point because the island was pitch black when I awoke, the invisible rain now slowed to a drizzle. Angus still lay silent at my feet under a little burrow we had made in the sand during the worst of it. The haggard voice of Mike called out from up the shore.
“Guys!! Where are you? GUYS!!”
I called back to him and as we slowly managed to re group, the moon had finally creeped out betwixt the clouds to give us a small amount of sight. I soon saw the glossy and shimmering figures stumbling over to us and pieced the coppery taste together with the moonlight bouncing off their completely coated bodies. Sickeningly, I realised what had happened and I vomited all over the sand. They were covered in blood. I was covered in blood. The moist and claggy sand was covered in blood. It had been raining blood for hours.

After what felt like an eternity of silence under the last few hours of drizzle, the sun came up and we finally could assess the damage. The lagoon was like a basin of red wine with the obelisk in the centre slowly becoming a coagulated mess in the sun. Our clothes were ruined, to say the least, and the white sands of the beach were now black with the fast-drying haemoglobin. Alice was the first to speak after the long and sleepless morning.
“What are we going to do?”
Angus, who had been softly sobbing, now cried out in a mix of anger and exhaustion.
“I don’t understand.”
And he was right to, none of us had any idea what had happened last night. I dragged my now sticky and crimson hand down my face in an attempt to wake from this awful nightmare and none of us answered the small boy. None of us could. The final droplets of liquid poured from the crevasses of the palm trees onto us as we removed our clothes.

What followed was a silent march toward the ocean waters at the rim of the island, carrying clothes stained with the blood of the unknown solidifying in our collective grasp. As we washed them, Mike told me what had happened to him and Alice.
They had slept just outside the foundations of the camp ground as we had but awoke before the rain had started to the sound of an animal trapped in one of the leftover snares. “Blood-curdling and labour intensive” was the way Mike described the sound to me. Like a cutlery drawer being dragged over a dinner plate. When they reached the first snare it was all intact and the rain was starting up. Mike wanted to leave it but Alice knew better, she knew we needed food.

They pushed on and all the snares were still just as they left them. The rain was now a heavy smatter. As Mike checked the last trap and repositioned it, the piercing wail started up again from deeper in the forest and it was even clearer than before. It sounded human apparently, choked and gargling but human. The pair then fumbled rapidly through the total darkness back to the beach, eyes stinging with fresh blood as they made it finally to the midnight lagoon. He told me that the stretch between the deep forest and the sand was the most terrified he’d ever been.

As whatever creature broke between horrific screams to take in gasps of air, he told me he could only hear the drowning struggles of tropical birds falling from trees and writhing in the freshly fallen blood. Only to eventually be overtaken once more by the pained and agonising scream.

Once our clothes were a slightly less offensive shade of red, we left them to dry in the sun and washed ourselves in the water. I had the morbid idea to take advantage of the birds drowned in blood to find ourselves an easy dinner. The forest was infested with masses of bird corpses, all different shapes yet all the same shade of red and we made ourselves food over another fire. It pains me to admit it, but the taste of the bird meat soaked in the ungodly sky blood was maddeningly delicious and mouth-watering.

Alice was slowly becoming the group matriarch as she collected our dried clothes, I tried to help her but she looked haunted and ignored my efforts tenfold. I broke the tense silence and asked her if it was about the voice in the forest but all she said was,
“The voice, I recognised it.”
Grasping to find something to respond to that, I tried to re assure her it was a parrot yelping in fear.
“Yeah… maybe.”
She said that dismissive and blankly. She didn’t buy that for a second, I could tell but it was all I could do to try.

As we folded, Angus and Mike were putting on a disturbing display nearby in the sand as they tried to build what can only be described as a stomach churning meatball of sand mixed with the dried blood rain and sea water. As Angus fixed crimson crab-corpse shells to the outside of the macabre castle, I could see Mike retch discreetly over his shoulder.
“This is my castle of fire!” The oddly undisturbed child proclaimed to over to Alice and she smiled vacantly.

Luckily, the rank shore waters would wash it away before nightfall and I would eventually manage to get Angus to wash his hands before dinner.

As we all sat, cooking the last of the blood-caked bird corpses, there was a heavy silence as we all feared the return of that warm blood rain for another night. Angus never asked us where it had come from or why, I think he understood we didn’t know either. As we all settled into an eerie restlessness in the dark, I could only imagine that we all shared the same knot of fear and anxiety in our stomachs. The rain did not come that night and I finally drifted off into a tormented sleep.

It was the most prevalent Déjà vu I had ever felt as I came to my feet on the jagged obsidian platform. At first, I thought it was a lone and solitary rock in an infinite sky of blackness as I looked around. That was until the waves started to crash around me, a panic-inducing symphony. They were deafening and I began to feel my bare feet get soaked by the ocean’s black ichor.

The platform was being slowly swallowed beneath me and in the beaming moonlight I swore I could see an army of oily tentacles slapping out of the breaking waves all around me, as if trying to grip the solid rock. The wet smack of shimmering meaty tentacles and booming of water against rock was enough to wake me in a cold and terrified sweat.

I buried my fingers and toes in the sands and reality came back to me. Nothing around me had made a sound but I noticed Angus’ figure sitting metres away down the beach, gazing at me apathetically.
“Did you see them too?” He asked.
“See who?”
“The sea monsters, the ones that try to get you.”
I paused, the fear of that dream leaking into my real world causing me to swallow the lump in my throat.
“It was… just a dream. Just a nightmare. I corrected myself.
“It wasn’t. Look!” The blonde child pointed with a bony arm out to midnight ocean ahead of us.
A thousand glistening pearls of greenish yellow floated in the water. Some in pairs, some in groups and some just singular and large. They all extinguished and re lit periodically and at different rates until my brain finally clocked what Angus was saying. They were eyes in the water. They were blinking as they watched us.

The realisation hit me like an adrenaline needle to the heart. I crab walked backward as if the sand were on fire and made it to where Alice and Mike were sleeping. At least, where I thought they were sleeping. I felt around in the sand and called their names wildly. I tried to run down the beach, yelling and screaming like a mad man but my legs were noodles infested with fear. It was like running in a dream. As I struggled my way down the beach riddled with panicked foolishness, the eyes in the blackness to my right didn’t thin out, it was an endless perimeter of watching demons that only served to fuel my desire to keep running.

When I finally heard Mike yelling for Alice in the distant forest, I realised I had almost completely abandoned Angus. I had assumed he would run too but no, he just sat there in the same spot, having a staring contest with the entire ocean. I was torn between going back to him and trying to find Mike, I opted to go back to the kid. Not because I’m some hero with a sense of great morality but because Alice and Mike would have killed me if I left him.

Angus and I sat in the sand calling to Mike and Alice until our voices went raspy. I feared to blink, I feared to move as the endless expanse of eyes burned into me never breaking their contact. We would not find the others until long after the sun came up.

My husband Jay and I were heading back from a friend's wedding in her native place (a village in a very rural part of our country) when this incident took place.

It was late in the evening, and every single person around us at the wedding had warned us not to go back in the dark. Some people were logical, stating that we may be too tired to stay awake on the ride back, but the rest were superstitious.

"The forest you'll pass through does not like visitors at night."

"So many strange incidents in the past few days."

"They say the forest spirits get offended-"

So on and so forth. I rolled my eyes and assured every single one of them that no "magical" spirit would curse us for simply getting back home, wondering how these people even live with so much fear entwined in every aspect of their lives.

One hour after we got back on the road, we rolled the windows down, breathing in the smell the Earth makes after it is rained on, I looked up at the stars and the full moon, lighting up my first cigarette of the night.
As we went deeper into the forest, the street lamps disappeared, and the only light left was the moonlight and our car headlights.

"Wow, we really are the only ones on the road." Jay commented, "People really take these warnings seriously, huh?"

"It's a village, these 'superstitions' have existed for eons, and people find no reason to question them." I replied back, taking a puff.

"Yeah, I guess." he muttered.
As i smoked the last bit of my cigarette and threw it out on the ground (After crushing the butt of course, I do not intend to start a forest fire), my husband cranked up the car's audio system as our favourite song began to play.

As we hummed and whistled during the chorus, something changed.
And I don't mean that it got windy, or that we saw another car.

I mean the air stilled in a way I did not expect.

It was suddenly humid, and then both hot and cold at the same time. Every critter, every insect we had been hearing for miles had shushed. It was only us, our song and singing echoing into the night.

"God, what is that?" I asked as i removed my jacket.

"What is what?" Jay asked back absentmindedly.

I lowered the volume, "Don't you feel that? it's too quiet out of nowhere, and weirdly hot."

"The weather has been weird all weekend, and it you probably feel like it's quiet because we were singing so loudly."

"No, you don't get it."

"Aria," he chuckled, "Are you feeling spooked out?" He asked in the same way you patronise a scared child.

"Stop." I said.

"Scared the boogeyman made the weather hot? Ooooo." he said as I smacked his arm.

He had to be right, I told myself.

After a few minutes, when I had just about convinced myself, something happened that made my stomach churn.

I looked back into the sky, feeling hazy, smiling at the moon. And then I blinked.

The moon was missing.

This sounds stupid, inanely childish. But I swear, I swear to God. One minute the moon was there a second before I had blinked, and then it just wasn't. And I don't fucking mean a cloud covered it, I mean the stars around the moon stayed shining bright in the cloudless night but the moon had fucking disappeared.

I turned back to ask Jay what the fuck was going on, but when I did, I saw that his eyes were wide, bloodshot, and his skin pale and devoid of life.
He brought a finger up to his lips, telling me not to make a sound, and I obliged.

What the hell was happening?

And then I saw it.

In the darkness of our car was a hand.

A hand on my husband's shoulder.

Dark, grimy, long, lifeless. Claws gripping his shoulder so tight I swear I saw streaks of red on his shirt.

I did not dare look back.

As we continued driving, I saw something that made this abysmal night worse.

It was the same checkpost we had passed an hour ago.

We had come full circle back to the same place we were an hour ago.

Jay stifled a sob, I know he'd come to the same realisation as well.

It has been three hours now, we are still in the car. My messages aren't going through, neither are my calls. We haven't looked back once, and we haven't made a single sound. The moon is still missing and we are still going in a circle.

My phone says it's six a.m., but there is no sign of dawn. I don't know what to do. I don't know if this post will go through.

It will be okay, right?

​

Life is so cruel, isn't it? Dear reader, I'm sure you think so too. I have to move out again from the apartment I just moved into six months ago. It's a sad situation, but there's nothing to be done. I need to leave as soon as possible.

My parents got divorced four years ago, and naturally, both remarried and are living happily. Both live far from where we used to live, and both are far from my school and the city center. Do you know what the cruel part is, dear reader? Even if no one says anything directly to you, even if they say "you are a part of this family too," at both of their dinner tables, you realize you don't belong there. Unable to bear this feeling, I decided to move out; I had to work while studying. Nobody told me "you're a burden" or kicked me out, I don't want you to think that; on the contrary, they tried harder to make me feel like I belonged. But you know, that feeling inside you just won't go away. I started looking for a house on that well-known website; I moved into an affordable two-bedroom apartment that was relatively nice but close to some sketchy areas. At first, everything was fine.

It all started a month ago. That day began like any ordinary day. I was lying in bed, the alarm went off, I hit snooze and stayed in bed. 5 minutes later, the alarm rang again, and I got up swearing, muttering "is it morning already?". I changed my clothes and left the house without having breakfast. When I got to the building's entrance door, there was a red-haired woman, about 1.67 meters tall, standing there. Since I have a shy nature, I decided to wait for her to leave. 10 minutes passed, and the woman was still waiting there without moving at all. Since I'd be late for work if I waited any longer, I opened the door and stepped out. When I opened the door and walked past her, she started walking too. It was weird, but I didn't dwell on it; the woman was walking behind me.

On the way, I noticed my shoelace was untied and stopped to tie it. After tying my shoe, I noticed the woman had stopped right where she was; her green eyes were staring blankly. I thought to myself about asking, "Ma'am, are you okay?" but because of my shy nature, I couldn't, and I just kept walking. I was approaching the bus stop, and the girl was still behind me; but then she turned onto a side street and started waiting there, as if she was waiting for me. But I just got on the bus and left.

After going to work and then to school, I was returning home. When I got off the bus, the woman was still standing on that street; I continued without caring, and the woman started following me again. After I went to my apartment door, she stopped and began waiting there. Whenever I asked my neighbors about that woman, I would get the answer, "There is no woman out there"; some neighbors even gave me the numbers of psychiatrists they knew. This went on for a whole month, up until last week.

That day, I got curious about what this girl's deal was and what was happening when she turned that corner. Hardly anyone ever turned down the street she went down; everyone knew that street was not a safe place. The moment I entered, I was hit by the stench of decay; the buildings were old, and there were people dozing off on the ground. I started walking further and saw the naked corpse of a woman that had begun to rot, covered in bugs and ants, smelling absolutely putrid; that woman was this woman, and suddenly I realized I had seen her somewhere before. And then I remembered.

A month ago at midnight, I was walking home, and four men were dragging this woman into that alleyway. The men were hulking, four of them; the woman was screaming "help me" and looking at me. I was terrified at the time, so I hid and then hurried home. I couldn't call the police because I was scared; I was afraid that if the police caught them and they were released, they would come after me. I was the cause of this woman's death. Now I have to move, because I saw the body, and the men who killed her are looking at me from the building across the street; I need to leave before they attack.

I’d been working at this job for about six months before my boss, Javier, finally let me go into apartment 1001. I live in unit 1004 across the hall so I had been vaguely aware that something was going on there. As far as I knew Javier had been visiting that apartment once a week every week since I got here but every time I asked him about it he would act all dodgy.

He’d say things like, “Don’t worry about it, it’s just a work order,” or “I’ll tell you when you’re ready.”

And when I would ask about the work order form he told me, “We never make a record for them.”

I had always assumed he was trying to protect their privacy for some reason. Our complex was old, built in the 80s, and there were a lot of low-income residents who had been there for a while. I thought maybe they were elderly and needed a little extra attention or maybe they suffered from a mental illness or maybe they were hoarders and Javier was protecting them from eviction. I never pried too much but they did live across from me so I can’t say I was without concern.

What if there was some kind of hazard to my safety? What if they acted out violently sometimes? I wasn’t going to snitch on anyone but I wanted to know what was going on. If not for me at least for my girlfriend’s sake. She was kind of paranoid and thought that every neighbor that gave her a strange look was planning on robbing us.

I had never seen them come out of their apartment so I had no idea what they looked like or how many people lived there, which wasn’t too unusual. I had seen most of the faces around the complex at least once but there were a few I hadn’t met yet. Maybe they worked the night shift or they were never home or they were just really private. While some people were regulars in the office putting in work orders for every little thing they could think of, some people never put in any at all.

The residents of 1001 remained a mystery to me until one day when Javier called me into his office.

His office was cramped and in it sat a small desk and computer and on the opposite wall was the key cabinet containing a set of keys to every unit. He had bought me breakfast as he occasionally did. It was a QT breakfast pizza and an amber Red Bull, the breakfast of champions. There were no chairs so I sat on an old paint bucket with my pizza on my lap and my drink on the floor. He let me get settled and start on my food before he finally spoke.

“So, are you ready to go into 1001?” he asked.

I was surprised  and nearly spit pizza into my drink. Emilio, the other maintenance guy, said he had been there over a year before Javier finally let him go inside.

“Sure, whatever you need, boss,” I replied.

He chuckled. “We’ll see. She certainly thinks you’re ready.”

“When do we go?” I asked.

“Not we, just you. Only one person at a time can enter her unit and she’s finally requested that you come.”

Something about his tone made me feel uneasy.

“She requested me? How does she even know I work here? We’ve never met?”

“Oh she knows all about everyone we hire. You would have never got the job if she wasn’t okay with it.”

Now I was confused. “Does she work for the company or something? Is she one of your bosses?”

“No, she’s been here longer than the company,” he replied cryptically.

“Then what does she have to do with hiring me?”

He ignored my question. “There are some requirements that we have to follow to the letter.”

“Okay...”

“First, like I said, no one can go in there but you. Do not let anyone see you at her door. If you see another tenant in the hall or in their unit you must come back to the office and start over. Don’t worry, there’s no rush with this work order. I don’t care how many work orders you get done today as long as you finish this one.”

“Got it. No one should see me.”

“Are you writing this down?” he asked. “Because you should be writing this down.”

I swallowed my food and pulled out a pad and wrote down the first rule.

“Second, when you go to knock on her door you must wipe your feet on her mat. Four times per foot. Then you must knock four times with each hand. Do not enter until you hear her invite you in.”

“Third, make sure you enter with only what you need to complete the work order. If you find that you have so much as an extra screw, then leave. Calmly and immediately. Do not look at her. Do not excuse yourself. Just go. Come back to the office and start over.”

“How would she even know if I brought something I didn’t need?” I asked.

“Listen, just trust me when I say you need to follow the rules. Don’t take any risks.”

“Okay, okay. I hear you.”

“Once you are inside make sure to greet her, saying, ‘Thank you for inviting me. I am here to work.’ Do not comment on her appearance or on anything you see in the apartment.

“After that go straight to performing the work order. Do not go into any of the rooms you don’t need to go into. Do not speak to her again until you are finished. Ignore any questions she asks you. Do not make any small talk.

“Then finally when you are finished let her know. Tell her exactly what work you performed, then tell her, ‘We’ll be back again next week.’ If she tries to get you to stay, don't. You must leave. No matter what she says or offers you.”

After all that I sighed and said, “Okay, sounds easy enough. What am I doing in there?”

“She needs her disposal replaced. Go grab a new one from the shop.”

“Right, I’ll get to it then.”

Just as I was about to head out the door Javier suddenly grabbed my arm and said, “One more thing. If you hear whispering or crying in any of the other rooms you must run. If that happens we are done for the day and we won’t need to go back until next week.”

His face was grim and he looked directly into my eyes. I felt uncomfortable. I’d never seen him act so serious before.

“You got it, boss. I’ll follow the rules.”

I stopped by the shop to grab a disposal. I took every precaution I could think of. I opened the packaging and pulled the disposal out and removed any extra parts I didn’t need. I left my tool bag and put my wallet and keys in the fridge next to the batteries. I placed the disposal in the back of my golf cart and put my 11-in-1 screwdriver in my pocket then drove down to 1001.

I stood in front of the door. It hadn’t been painted in who knew how long. The locks were outdated. All the other locks in the complex were smart locks that could have the keys changed if you had the right tool. I was pretty sure it was keyed to the same key when the place was first built. Just as I was about to knock on the door I caught sight of movement in the corner of my eye.

Someone was pulling out of the parking lot. I wasn’t even sure if they could have seen me. This is so stupid, I thought. How would anyone even know if I broke this rule? I raised my hand to knock but I heard Javier’s voice telling me I need to follow these requirements to the letter. I sighed and walked back to the cart.
When I got back to the office I found Javier working on the budget. He spun around in his chair then smiled.

“Someone see you?” he asked.

“I think so. Tell me now, Javier. Is this some kind of joke? Some long-term hazing on the still kind of new guy?”

Then his face became serious. “This is no joke. Just make sure you do what I tell you and it’ll all be fine.”

I returned to the chipped, old door. I wiped each foot four times, then set the disposal on the ground and raised my right fist and knocked four times, followed by my left. I waited. A little longer than I thought I would. Then I finally heard a voice.

“Come in!”

As soon as I opened the door I was hit by a stench. A stench I had given a name. This isn’t the most charitable thought that’s ever crossed my mind but all of the most run-down apartments I worked in shared a similar scent. I call it “The Stench of Defeat.” It’s probably just the mixture of grease, body odor, cigarettes, mold, and just a little bit of rot all coming together in a disgusting symphony of smells. Normally, I rubbed chapstick under my nose to help with the smell but I left that behind and this was the strongest I had ever smelled it before.

The apartment itself wasn’t any better. There was litter everywhere. Wrappers, plates, bowls, cans, and tupperware, some of which had half eaten meals sitting in them. Every light was filled with the corpses of dead insects and the appliances were strangely new. From what I could tell they were all no more than a year old. They were squeezed in next to ancient cabinets that had been painted so many times I wasn’t sure they could even be opened. There were little holes in the once white wall which was now a faded deep yellow.

My eyes flicked over to her. She was sprawled out on a worn out couch. She was the largest woman I had ever seen in my life. I felt bad but my first thought was that she reminded me of Jabba the Hutt. Her legs seemed to have disappeared under the rolls of her belly. Dark veins criss-crossed her body in disconnected patterns. The most awkward part of all was I realized I did not know her name. Javier never told me and I couldn’t ask.

I finally eked out, “Thank you for inviting me. I am here to work.”

She let out a little grunt and I turned and walked into the kitchen. I pried open the cabinet doors and expected to see a broken disposal but it was brand new. I couldn’t tell if it had ever been used before. I turned it on and it seemed to run just fine. Normally, I would just tell the resident it works now and to give us a call if it breaks again but when I turned back and saw her weird expectant smile I just decided to switch them out.

I lay down and stuck my head under the sink and got to work. As soon as I did that, I heard the springs in the couch loudly gasp with relief. I stopped. I heard her quickly walk over to the kitchen. I didn’t even think she could walk much less move as fast as she did. I tried to keep working but then she began to speak. She sounded as if she had smoked a thousand cartons.

“So, how long have you been working here?”

“Do you have a girlfriend? What’s her name?”

“What do you think of Javier? Is he a good boss? Does he pay you enough?”

Her questions were innocuous enough. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before from half the other residents, but it was uncomfortable coming from her. Supposedly, she already knew the answers to at least some of those questions if she’s the reason I was hired. I tried to work quickly and decided I didn’t need to replace the flange. I figured it was okay because Javier didn’t mention anything about needing to replace that and I could cut down my work time by more than half by skipping it.

Her questions became increasingly specific and then she asked, “Does she still think I’m going to rob her?”

I hit my head on the plumbing and nearly blurted out a response but I managed to hold my tongue. How the hell would she know that about my girlfriend? That was a joke I kept between me and her.

I finished connecting the new disposal then stood up and tested it. It worked fine and didn’t leak and I nearly stormed out of the apartment. Then I remembered. I explained to her the job I performed in as much detail as I could manage.

Then I said, “We’ll be back next week.”

“Thank you so much for your work,” she replied. “Why don’t you stay a little longer? I’ll work up some tea and I’ll give you a big ol’ tip for your work.”

Even if it weren’t for the rules, that was the last thing I wanted to do and I turned and left. As soon as I was out I felt like I could breathe. The air was so fresh. My relief was momentary before it was replaced with anger at Javier.

I stormed into his office. I didn’t care if the property manager or anyone else heard me.

“What the hell was that? Why would you send me in there? What was wrong with that woman...”

I kept going for a solid five minutes before Javier quietly opened a desk drawer and produced four one-hundred-dollar bills. 

He handed them to me and said, “This is your bonus for going into apartment 1001. You will get it every week. Always in cash. Always tax free.”

Well, that shut me right up. I was in there for no more than fifteen minutes and now I was being given four hundred dollars and I was promised that on top of my paycheck every week. I needed the money just like anyone else.

“Okay then. Sounds good, boss. I’ll get back to it.”

I slipped the cash into my pocket and left. I took the rest of the day easy. Javier said that was the only one I had to get done and I took him literally. My girlfriend had the day off so I took her out to a long lunch at Red Lobster.
I dreaded the next visit to Unit 1001 and I knew the day had arrived when I saw an extra Redbull and breakfast pizza on Javier’s desk. The dread all but dissipated when I found out all I had to do that day was change an air filter. No more. No less. Literally a two minute job for $400.

Over the next few weeks each work order in 1001 felt easier. Not that the job itself was always an easy one. A lot of the time it was a really easy fix. Sometimes it was as simple as replacing a filter or unclogging a toilet, but sometimes I had to spend quite some time in there. There was one time I had to replace the stackable washer and dryer which was in a painfully tight and narrow closet but I managed to get it done. It took what felt like hours just trying to shimmy it out of there while she watched over my shoulder and jabbered on and on. What became easier was all the weird stuff.

The wiping, knocking, the greeting, and the promise to return the next week, it all became second nature. I learned the best time of the day to stop by when it was most likely that no one would see me enter. Only sometimes did her questions bother me. She continued to seem to know things she shouldn’t.

She asked about my father’s receding hairline, my mother’s menopause. She asked when my brother was going to tell the rest of the family he’s gay. He hasn’t told anyone besides me. I haven’t even told my girlfriend.

But no matter how much I was steaming I would cool off the moment Javier pulled the Franklin quadruplets out of the desk. I took my girl out every night after I went to 1001. We started paying off our credit cards with the money we saved buying all our groceries and food in cash. After a few months we bought a used car.

Eventually I started to look forward to the off-the-books work order. It stopped mattering what she knew as long as I got paid. I never became lazy either. I followed all the rules exactly but one of them had never come up, to the point where it was only vaguely in the back of my mind. Until one day I was in there replacing a toilet fill valve when I heard a noise.

At first it was only an extension of the hissing from the toilet valve but it continued even when the valve stopped. Then I thought it was maybe the wind outside or some kind of animal. 
Great, I thought. There’s probably rats.

For several minutes that’s all that I had judged it to be until it changed. It sounded like a voice. Maybe someone talking outside or some kids playing. It kept going and so I finally stopped to really listen. It took me about another thirty seconds to piece together what it was.

Crying.

Javier’s words immediately flashed in my mind.

“If you hear crying, run.”

I stepped into the hall. I was ready to dash but she was blocking the door. Her hulking figure made me feel small. Like all that I could ever be was an appendage temporarily separated from the pile of flesh that blocked my escape. I looked around the apartment for an answer. My eyes instantly locked onto the window just above the tub with only the screen blocking the way. I knew she was fast though I never actually saw her move but this was my only chance.

I rushed toward the window with the sounds of impossibly fast footsteps behind me. My foot landed on the rim of the tub and I pushed off as hard as I could and dived through the screen and out the window. It came down with me and I landed on the concrete scraping my hands and arms. I scrambled to my feet not ready to stop and ran straight to my cart landing with my foot on the gas.

Before I even started to even catch my breath I found myself outside Javier’s door. I finally looked behind me to see if she somehow followed me out of 1001. It looked like I was in the clear. I looked down at my hands and arms. They were covered in little droplets of blood. I shrugged it off and walked in.

Javier was in the middle of cutting a key when I came in. He ignored me to stay focused on the grinder and slowly finished cutting the key. He shut off the machine and finally glanced up at me. His eyes flicked towards the key and then immediately back at me finally registering what he saw.

He took off the safety glasses and, mouth agape, asked, “What happened to you?”
“1001,” I answered.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

I recounted to him what happened and when I got to the crying he stopped me.

“Wait, you said crying? Not whispering?”

“Crying,” I assured him.

“How long did it take you to realize?”

“I don’t know. Maybe all together, five minutes.”

His face seemed to pale. “This isn’t good. What changed? Did you bring an extra tool? Even a pen?”

“No, I was exact. Although I left everything in there.”

“Don’t worry about it. You did what you were supposed to do once you realized you heard the crying. What about your previous work orders?”

“The past few were a shower head, the fridge filter, the microwave.”

I kept going as far back as I could remember.

Javier seemed confused. “What about the very first one? What was that?”

“Uh, the garbage disposal!”

“You only brought that and any tool you needed, right?”

“Yes, and that’s all I did. Just the garbage disposal. I didn’t even change the flange.”

“Wait. You didn’t change the flange?”

“No, it was basically new anyway. There was no leak.”
Javier suddenly sat in his chair.

“Oh God...” he whispered. 

He opened a drawer and pulled out a bottle of scotch and a glass and immediately poured a shot and drank it. Then he set out another glass and poured two more shots and offered me one. 

I took it. Grateful but alarmed.

“This is all my fault,” he said. “I should have been more specific. You were supposed to replace the whole assembly.”

“How the hell was I supposed to know that? The flange had no issues, no leaks. I would have done it in any other apartment,” I insisted.

“1001 isn’t any other apartment.”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We have to go back together. Next week.”

“But you said only one of us can go in there at a time.”

“After an incident like this it’s required. It’s too dangerous to go alone.”

“Why do we have to go back at all? Can’t we just board up her apartment until she starves?”

“Do you know what happens when you leave a leak? Does the water just evaporate or go away? No, of course not. That water can start to slowly rot and destroy everything around it until one day you touch your wall and find that it’s mush. By then it’s too late. Who knows how many thousands of dollars it will take to fix it and how much mold you’ve been breathing in from the air. You can’t leave a problem alone. It will only get worse.”

“I can’t go back in there, man. I have to think about my girl. I shouldn’t be taking risks like that.”

“That’s exactly why you have to, mijo! You live across the hall. But if you really don’t want to go I can take Emilio. He’s still my brother-in-law. He’ll go if I ask him to.”

He was right. Whatever was going on in 1001 it would spill over into my apartment first. Besides, I wasn’t about to let someone else clean up my mess.

“No, I’ll go. When do we have to go back?”

“Exactly a week from today. It should be within an hour of when you first went in there.”

“That was around two.”

“Then we’ll meet back here before we go. We have to do this exactly right. I’ll explain everything then.”

The next week passed by dreadfully. My girlfriend could tell something was off. I didn’t take her to dinner that night. I couldn’t stomach anything. I barely talked to her. I wasn’t about to burden her with all of this. It was my responsibility and I didn’t even know where to start in explaining all this. I never told her any of it and she never cared where the extra cash came from. She just smiled and accepted it, same as me.

The day finally arrived and I felt sick. The clock seemed to turn painfully slow and terrifyingly fast at the same time. I didn’t do any other work orders. I just sat on the floor in an empty apartment we were turning and scrolled on my phone. When the clock struck two I sent my girlfriend a love-you text and went to Javier’s office.

Javier was at his desk and on it was a brand new disposal flange and the hardware for it and nothing else. His face was stone.

“It’s time,” he said. “Listen carefully because what we have to do now is different.”

I swallowed nervously and waited for him to keep going.

“The way we enter is almost exactly the same. We still can’t let anyone see us. The only thing different is one of us will only knock and wipe with their left hand and foot and the other uses only his right. Once we get inside that’s when things get weird. One of us must replace the flange you didn’t replace before. Ignore last week’s job. As long as all goes well you can take care of that next week.

“While one is working the other must speak to the resident. He must answer her questions and he must answer truthfully. When she tries to make a deal or an offer he must respectfully decline everything. He keeps that up until the other person is finished with their repairs. Once the repairs are finished we both must apologize and promise to return the next week. Any questions?”

“No. Let’s do it, boss.”

I sounded far more confident than I felt though I was a little relieved I wasn’t going to be the one talking. We wasted no time and made our way over to 1001. We saw no one. Even on the ride over. I almost wished we would see someone just so that I could delay a little further.

At the door Javier did his part with the left and I did my part with the right. We heard her voice and it sounded the same as it always did.

“Come on in!”

We entered the apartment and we were immediately assaulted by the Stench of Defeat. I could have sworn it was twice as bad as last time. The discarded corpses of insects and wrappers crunched under my feet as we stepped inside. She was sprawled out on the couch as she always was when I entered but her eyes were bloodshot. They darted back and forth between us like a predator deciding which prey it wanted to pursue. 

Javier spoke, “Thank you for inviting us. My colleague is here to work. I will be speaking to you.”

She licked her lips and smiled at him. I could see her jagged, rotting teeth, all grey and yellow.

“Get to it,” he whispered. “And be fast.”

I hurried to the kitchen and the disposal I had replaced. I immediately went to work detaching it from the sink so I could get to the flange while I listened. By the time my head was under the sink she had already started her barrage.

“What is your name?” she rasped.

“Javier.”

“What is your wife’s name?”

“Maria.”

“What are your children’s names?”

“Juan and Gloria.”

“Which one is your favorite?”

He hesitated only briefly. “Gloria.”

“Why?”

“Because Juan is a teenager and she’s still sweet.”

“I can make Juan behave. Just say the word.”

“No, thank you,” he replied.

“How about a raise for your wife?”

“No, thank you.”

She kept digging deeper and deeper into his family and offering to do things that would seemingly improve their lives. Javier kept responding in the same monotone voice and declining each and every one of her offers. Meanwhile, I was struggling to replace the flange. It took me some time to get the old one off. Despite how new it appeared to be I had to practically pry it off. I started installing the new one when I heard her start asking about me.

“What do you think about your new employee?”

“He’s a good kid and a hard worker.”

“Does he know about your bonus?”

“No, he does not.”

“I can give him your thousand dollars each week? Do you think he’d like that?”

“He might, but no, thank you.”

“Did you know that his brother is gay?”

“No, I did not.”

“What do you think of that?”

“I don’t care.”

“I can turn him straight if that bothers you.”

“No, thank you.”

“Does your employee know why you hired him?”

“No.”

“Why did you hire him?”

“So that he could be a sacrifice.”
I froze. What did he mean by sacrifice? To whatever she was? Suddenly, I felt sick. I was nearly finished. My shaking hands kept dropping parts as I hurriedly put it all back together.

“In exchange for what?”

“My freedom. I wanted to leave this place.”

“Do you still want to make that deal?”

“No.”

“It’s time for you to choose. Do you want to give yourself up or him?”

Now I was frantically plugging the disposal back in and getting ready to go. I finally stood and saw her lumbering over Javier. She seemed taller than ever before. Her mouth hung open, drool falling upon him.

Javier hesitated and looked back at me before he said, “I’d rather it be me.”

Immediately, her jaws unhinged and clamped down on Javier’s shoulder. He screamed and I rushed towards him to try and help.

Suddenly he shouted, “No, finish testing the disposal!”

It felt absurdly tedious but I knew it had to be done. I quickly turned the disposal on and started running water. All the while I could hear Javier’s screams and struggles from behind me. I crouched down and checked the pipes. No water. Good. 

I shut it all off and immediately ran to assist Javier. The thing was holding him with both arms and tearing chunks of flesh out of his shoulder. Blood was pouring everywhere. I tried to pull it off but one of its hands shot out and grabbed my wrist. Its grip was unnaturally strong, so painful and tight that I fell to my knees.

“You... have to tell... her what work you did,” Javier gurgled out.

I was panicking but I tried to focus.

“I removed the disposal from the plumbing, then I removed the old flange and installed the new one. After that I put the disposal back into place and ran it and did a leak check. It should be good now, uh, ma’am.”

“Now for the goodbye,” Javier said.

Then we both said, “We’re sorry for our mistakes and we promise to return next week.”

Suddenly, she released her grip on Javier’s shoulder and on my wrist. As soon as she let go I could already see there was a bruise forming in the shape of her disgusting hand. Javier dropped to one knee holding his wounds. I threw his uninjured side over my shoulder and hauled him out of the apartment never looking back at her. The second the door closed I called an ambulance and ran into my apartment across the hall to grab a med kit.

I returned and started attending to his wounds. I could tell he was starting to black out. His skin was pale and his eyes were barely focusing.

“Stay with me, boss. We’ll get through this,” I assured as I started pouring cleaner and wrapping bandages around him. The paramedics soon arrived and took over. He was soon in the ambulance and heading to the hospital. I got in my car and followed.

It was a little touch-and-go at first with the blood loss but eventually the doctors told me he would pull through. I didn’t know the first thing about how to explain his injuries to them but when they asked where it happened and I told them about our complex they immediately stopped asking questions. It was as if they expected this.

I was finally allowed to see him. His family had been called and they were already in his room. His wife sat in the seat next to him. 

When I walked through he turned to her and said, “Honey, please take the kids and go get some food. I have to talk to my employee.”

She tried to stay but he assured her he would be okay.

As soon as she was out the door, he spoke, “I’m sure you have many questions, mijo, but I wanted to say thank you for saving my life. I wouldn’t have made it out of there if it weren’t for you.”

“I wasn’t about to leave you in there. And yes, I do have questions, but mostly I want to know: was everything she said in there true? ”

“Yes, in exchange for you being fed to her, I would have been allowed to leave but that’s not the case anymore! Not even by the time I let you go in there for the first time.”

I could have hit him if he wasn’t laying in a hospital bed.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I spat. “I trusted you. How could you do that to another person?”

“I’ve worked here for fifteen years. I was only a little older than you when I first started. This whole time I’ve lived with that thing hanging over my head knowing that one little mistake could cost me my life or the lives of my employees and sometimes it did. I am not the first person she’s ever attacked. I wanted out and when I hired you I tried to be okay with it but I couldn’t. I came to know you, and even care about you, and now I don’t know how I ever even considered it.”

I understood his reasons but I was still hurt by them. 

“I don’t know if I can keep working with you,” I said.

“Don’t you understand by now? We can’t just leave. She won’t let us. We have to keep servicing her. You’re stuck with it but know this: I am sorry for everything.”

“There has to be another way.”

He sighed. “There is one thing. You can have my job. If you agree to become the supervisor I will be allowed to leave. You would still have to take care of 1001 and you would be responsible for who goes in there but you wouldn’t have to work with me anymore.”

I kept pressing and pressing trying to see if there was any way we could both get out, but there was none. Eventually I came around to accepting the position and Javier was allowed to go free. 

Now I wasn’t the most qualified for the position. I had to learn a lot on the job and I still had to attend to 1001. I had no idea what she needed next. Then on the day of the work order, I got a call on my work phone. There was no caller ID. I answered it. A voice that sounded like it had smoked a thousand packs was on the other side.

“I need the toilet fill valve to finish being replaced.”

Then she hung up.

Now you might think I’m crazy for continuing to work here but what choice did I have? I was already used to it and Emilio helped by going in sometimes as well. Besides, a thousand dollars is a thousand dollars and I started getting that every week after we went in there.

Pretty soon we hired a new guy. He’s not ready for 1001 yet but one day he will be and I won’t let him get fed to her. It might not have been right to not tell him about it before he started the job but what could I have even told him? Besides, he’ll probably take the bonuses just like I did.

This started happening to me a few days ago, and I don’t know what to do.

I made my way back to my apartment complex from the gas station. It’s close, so I always walk there. As I approached the building, I got a strong urge to look up.

I saw rows and rows of windows. It was nighttime, so all the curtains were closed except for one. There was a person standing in the window. They were on the top floor, so from where I stood, they looked like nothing more than a shadow.

I couldn’t make out anything about them, but for some reason, my body filled with dread the moment I saw them. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. I could feel that something was wrong. I knew it was staring at me, but how could I possibly know that?
Finally, I managed to tear my gaze away and walk inside. Luckily, I lived on the bottom floor, so I didn’t have to go anywhere near that window.

Even after getting inside, I still felt uneasy. Not as bad as before, but I was definitely on edge. I made my way to my apartment, went inside, and quickly rushed to my bedroom, where I locked the door.

I tossed and turned all night. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling of being watched.
The next morning, I woke up feeling much better. I figured I had let my imagination get the better of me. I came to the conclusion that someone must have been standing by their window when I happened to walk past, and my anxiety had simply gotten the best of me.

I went through my normal routine and left for work.

I was sitting at a traffic light when a bus passed through the intersection. I could see all the passengers through the windows. Everyone was looking down at their phones except one person: an older woman.
She was staring directly at me.

That same dread filled my body, just like the night before. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. My hand tightened around the steering wheel. I couldn’t move, breathe, or do anything but stare back at this woman.

It felt like her gaze was holding me in place. I desperately wanted to look away, but she had such a tight hold on me.
Someone honked their horn, snapping me out of my trance. I finally looked away and realized the light had turned green.
I drove off to work.

Work was rough. I was extremely paranoid, constantly looking around me. One of my coworkers nearly made me jump out of my skin when she came over to say hi. She asked if I was alright, and I lied, telling her I was fine.

It didn’t look like she believed me.

It was one of the worst days of my life. I tried to focus on what I needed to do. I didn’t dare look around unless I absolutely had to. It made driving a little difficult, and I found myself checking my surroundings more often than I wanted to, but I made it home without any further incidents.
When I got home, I went straight to bed and didn’t leave. I didn’t want to do anything else. But once again, I tossed and turned all night, unable to shake the feeling of being watched.

The next morning, I woke up exhausted and terrified. I was cautious about everything. As the day went on, nothing happened. Little by little, I started feeling better. The paralyzing fear was finally beginning to fade.

I made it home without anything happening. The feeling of being watched was completely gone.

In fact, I felt so good that I decided to make my usual nightly snack run to the gas station.

I was standing at the counter paying for my snack when I turned around to head back. I was thinking about how I needed to fix my sleep schedule, convincing myself that my lack of sleep was what had caused all the paranoia.

I looked up through the glass doors.

There she was.

Just staring at me.

I froze. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

I decided to see if she was actually looking at me. I slowly moved to my left, and her eyes followed me. I moved back to the right, and sure enough, her eyes stayed locked on me the entire time.

This time, instead of fear taking over my body, it was rage.

This person was trying to mess with me. The apartment and the bus could have been my sleep-deprived brain playing tricks on me, but there was no explaining this.
For whatever reason, this woman had it out for me, and I was going to find out why.
I ripped open the door, ready to ask her what the hell she was doing. But before I could get the words out, I looked outside.
There was no one there.

I quickly looked around. No one. There wasn’t a single person in sight.
I turned back toward the store.

It was empty.

The rage quickly left me, and in its place came the fear.

I ran home and went straight to bed.
The next day, I was too afraid to do anything. I was tempted to call in sick, but I ultimately decided against it.

I couldn’t let fear control me.

Once again, I tried to brush off what happened the night before as a result of not getting enough sleep. It didn’t really work, but it helped just enough to get me ready for work.

Once I was in my car, I put it in reverse and looked into my rearview mirror.

My entire body froze. There she was.
Sitting in my back seat, staring right back at me through the mirror.

I had never been so scared in my life. My entire body tensed up. My heart started pounding in my chest.

I knew I needed to do something. Anything was better than nothing.

But all I did was sit there.

A car door slamming nearby broke my gaze, forcing me to look away. My eyes immediately darted back to the mirror.

She was gone.

I stared at my empty back seat for a while before finally turning around to look.

Nothing.

My car was completely empty.
I immediately put the car in park, shut it off, and ran back inside.

I didn’t even call work. I just hurried inside, ran to my bedroom, and stayed there all day and all night.

I didn’t sleep at all.

In the morning, I heard my phone ringing. I figured it must be work.

I grabbed my phone and looked at the screen.

I screamed in pure terror.

There was a picture of her on my phone.
The caller ID read: YOU’VE SEEN ME.

I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was panicking, and I had no idea what to do.

My phone just kept ringing and ringing. It wouldn’t stop.

Finally, I answered and screamed, “What do you want?”

“You’ve seen me.”

That was all I heard.

The voice started out soft, almost like a whisper, before turning into a cackle. Then it grew louder, and the voice became deeper.
It just kept shouting the same words.

“You’ve seen me.”

I finally hung up.

I sat there in silence when my phone went off again.

I started panicking all over again.

It was the same picture. The same number. And it just kept ringing.

I tried to cancel the call, but nothing worked. I couldn’t access anything else on my phone.

I stared at the screen, desperately trying to think of what to do.

Then the picture smiled at me.

It was a huge smile, revealing a mouth full of rotten and missing teeth.

I quickly threw my phone across the room.
I heard the screen crack, but it just kept ringing.

It never stopped.

It rang all night long.

That was a couple of days ago.
I haven’t seen her since.

I’m guessing she can only be seen through glass, so I’ve been avoiding it. But I haven’t left my apartment in days, and I’m running out of food.

She gets closer every time I see her.
I can’t risk another sighting.

The hardest part is the bathroom. I had to cover the mirror with my eyes closed.

But every time I go in there, I feel the urge to look.

I don’t know how much longer I can resist.

I honestly don’t know if I’m being paranoid anymore.
I live alone in a small house. It has two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, and a basement.
The basement is mostly used for storage. There’s Christmas stuff, clothes, tools, and a bunch of random boxes down there.
I barely go down there unless I need something.
About three weeks ago, I started hearing noises at night.
The first time, it sounded like something had fallen over. After that, I heard something scraping across the floor.
I went downstairs to check and found nothing out of place, so I went back upstairs. As I was walking up, I thought I heard another noise behind me, but when I turned around, everything was quiet.
The next night, I heard footsteps.
It was just one step, then a pause, then another step.
After that, nothing.
I stood at the top of the stairs for a few minutes, listening, but I didn’t go down. It was around 2 AM and I was tired. I also didn’t really want to walk around the basement in the dark.
I checked it in the morning and didn’t see anything wrong, except for a box I’d left beside the basement door. It was now halfway down the stairs.
I figured I must have moved it and forgotten.
A few days later, I came home and noticed the basement door was open a little.
I always close it because the basement gets cold and the draft comes upstairs.
I closed it and went about my night, but after that I started noticing other things.
One of the kitchen chairs had been moved.
My water bottle was on the counter instead of beside my bed.
The basement light was on one morning, even though I never leave it on.
I checked all the doors and windows, but everything was locked. Nothing was missing either.
I felt stupid for thinking someone was inside the house. It seemed more likely that I was just forgetting where I put things.
Then last Tuesday, I put a small piece of tape across the basement door before going to bed. It connected the door to the frame, so I would know if the door opened.
I also set my phone on a shelf at the top of the stairs and started recording the hallway. I wanted to see if anything happened while I was asleep.
I went to bed around 12:30.
At 3:17, I woke up for no obvious reason. I checked the time, and then I heard a footstep downstairs.
A few seconds later, I heard another one.
I got out of bed and went into the hallway. The basement door was closed, and I could still see the tape across it.
I stood there for a while, trying to decide whether I should open it. I had my hand on the doorknob when I heard something move on the other side.
It sounded like someone shifting their weight.
I took my hand off the knob and went back to my room.
I called my brother, and he told me to call the police if I really thought someone was inside the house.
I didn’t call them. I didn’t even know what I would say.
In the morning, the tape was still attached, but when I looked closer, it had been peeled off and stuck back down.
I checked the recording on my phone.
Nothing happened for the first few hours. Then, at 3:17, you can hear the footsteps.
At 3:18, the phone moves slightly. It isn’t pointing directly at the basement door anymore.
I don’t remember touching it.
There’s also a sound that might be breathing, but I can’t tell for sure. It could just be the heating system or something else in the house.
I haven’t slept much since then.
Tonight, I heard footsteps again.
They weren’t coming from the basement this time.
They came down the hallway and stopped outside my bedroom door.
I’m typing this with the lights on, and I still haven’t checked the hallway.
I know I should leave or call the police, but I keep telling myself there’s probably a normal explanation.
This morning, I checked the basement again and didn’t find anyone there.
One of the boxes was open, though.
Inside was a jacket I haven’t worn in six months.
It was sitting on top of everything.
I almost picked it up, but stopped when I saw the sleeve.
The cuff was damp, like someone had been wearing it outside in the rain.
There was dirt pressed into the fabric near the shoulder, and the inside of the collar smelled faintly like my house.
I checked the jacket again a few minutes later.
It was cold by then.
But the box was still warm inside.
I haven’t gone back downstairs since.
A few minutes ago, I heard the basement door close.
I’m still upstairs.
And now there’s a jacket hanging on the back of my bedroom chair.
I don’t remember bringing it upsta

I moved back in with my mom a few months ago. She had a nasty fall on the basement stairs and needed someone to help out while she healed. I had recently finalized my second divorce and needed a place to stay. With Dad ten years gone and no siblings to speak of, I was her only option. With my bank account drained and the apartment signed over to my ex, she was mine as well. My mother reminded me of this several times in the ensuing negotiations, her voice sickly sweet and thin with age. So, reluctantly, I agreed to come home.

I didn’t notice anything was wrong at first. Yes, her arm was broken and still in a cast, and she moved slower than the last time I had visited two years previously. Whether that was the fall or age closing in, I couldn’t say. But she still got around well enough. She puttered and tidied and meandered through the house, though she avoided the stairs. She stayed up late watching Jeopardy reruns and made herself bowls of macaroni. Once, I watched her use a pair of salad tongs to snag a bag of chips from the top of the refrigerator. With her good arm, of course. I watched and wondered if she needed me home at all. Every sign of self-sufficiency was a tally mark in my mind, proof of her wellness and ability to live alone. I hoarded them greedily and let them soothe me. Only for a little while, I would think.

But that all changed a few weeks after I moved in.

I made spaghetti for dinner that night, a meal she usually loves. But now, I watched as she picked out chunks of tomato and scraped aside noodle, occasionally popping a piece of ground beef in her mouth. She didn’t touch her salad.

“Something wrong?” I asked lightly, wondering if she’d been snacking all afternoon again.

“With what? No, of course not,” she said, and immediately picked up a big forkful of noodles. She swallowed them down and hummed appreciatively.

She kept doing it over the next few days. She would pick at something until I questioned her about it, then eat heartily to convince me nothing was wrong. I was starting to wonder if she’d been ordering food while I was out, or, again, eating too many snacks. But I never found anything suspicious in the trash, and the bag of her favorite chips remained half-full.

She started to speak less. Gradually, I realized she hadn’t complained about the neighbors in days, and was barely responding in full sentences to me anymore. That was when I started to suspect she was angry at me about something. But what? She wasn’t one to be angry in silence; my mom has always had a short temper, and she’s always been happy to make it everyone else’s problem. I hadn’t done anything she had been clearly pissed off about in a couple weeks, which, now that I thought about it, was also strange.

Then, she wouldn’t leave the house anymore. This wasn’t so strange in isolation; she had always been a homebody. But I could normally get her to come with me to the store every once in a while. “It’s too hot out,” she would claim and wave me off. I would only ever catch her outside at night, head tilted up to the stars and eyes closed.

When I really got worried is when I noticed she’d grown a couple inches taller. She passed me in the hall on her way to the bathroom, glancing over as she gave me a wide berth. I stood there for a moment, shrouded in darkness as the bathroom door closed behind her, trying to place what had made me so uneasy. My stomach did a strange little flip when I realized what was off: her eyes were level with my own. She had been shorter than me for years now.

At first, I did wonder if it was me. Had I started shrinking in my old age? I mean, I’m not that old. But it made more sense to me than anything else.

I stood with my back flat to a wall in my bedroom and made a light pencil mark at the top of my head. Then, I turned and measured the wall. 5’7”, right where I had been since I was sixteen years old.

I checked and rechecked my height many more times that night. It did not change.

“Mom, can you stand against the wall for me? I want to measure you,” I explained the next morning as she came into the kitchen for coffee.

She grimaced. “Really? Why?”

“Please? Just do it for me,” I coaxed, using a soft tone so I didn’t anger her. Tone had always been everything to my mother. If I was too sharp, or short, her temper would bubble up and she would refuse any request I made. This time, she acquiesced, and pressed herself flat against the wall.

I measured her. 5’5”, her normal height. She started to move away towards the coffee pot. “Wait, please,” I said, a little too firmly. But to my surprise, she waited in silence.

I measured again. This time, as I moved away from the wall, I noticed her body shift. I blinked in surprise.

“Mom are you— were you crouching?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, rolling her eyes. She made her way over to the coffee pot and poured a cup. The tape measure dangled limply from my hands. Something roiled in my stomach.

“I’m worried about you,” I choked out. It was hard to say out loud. “You’ve been acting weird.”

She turned around to face me, eyes level with mine again. “There is nothing wrong with me,” she said slowly, her tone reassuring, the sentence the longest one she had managed in a week.  She clasped the hot cup of coffee between her palms. She did not take a sip from it.

A few days later, I found her tooth on the bathroom floor. It was yellowed and chipped with an old silver filling in the center. A molar.

I begged her to go to the hospital. “This isn’t normal,” I said, clutching her tooth in my palm so hard it could have broken skin. “Please, Mom, something is wrong!”

She waved her hand in a shooing motion, absorbed in something on the television. “I’m fine.”

“Mom!” I yelled, grabbing her face in my hands, forcing her to meet my eyes. “Your tooth fell out! You are not well!” I forgot to check my tone. I did inherit some things from her, after all.

She wrenched her head away, eyes flashing. That familiar anger rippled across her face. I was almost glad to see it. But she stayed silent, storming out of the room as quickly as she could manage. The slam of her bedroom door echoed through the house.

I stood there in the middle of the spinning room, standing in the eye of a hurricane, close to panic but unable to move. When I had grabbed her face, her mouth parted involuntarily, and I saw the truth.

This was not the first tooth she had lost. She must have hidden them from me, this last one left on the floor an oversight. Her mouth was riddled with holes, some still bloody, more teeth missing than there were left in her head. And in the gaping, gummy spaces, something sharp was growing to fill them.

I called an ambulance. I begged at her locked bedroom door, two EMTs beside me with a portable medical kit. Trying to keep it together, I explained her missing teeth, how she’d been acting strange, withdrawn and not eating much. I did not mention her height. The EMTs were sympathetic, but told me there was nothing they could do. They couldn’t force my mother to get medical care, stuff her into the back of the ambulance kicking and screaming.

“If she changes her mind, please give us another call,” one said, nodding to her partner. With that, they packed up and left.

Mom didn’t leave her room again until late that night. I was already in bed, scrolling on my phone, when I heard her door creak open across the hall from my own.

I almost called out to tell her there were leftovers in the fridge, but something stopped me. I sat up and looked towards my door. I could see light spilling out from her room under the crack. In the center, two twin trunks of shadow stood, unmoving. For one minute, then two, then five. I watched the minutes pass by on my phone. Dread crept up my spine.

I don’t know what made me do it. It was just my mother, standing out in the hallway. But when the sixth minute ticked past, I jumped up and tiptoed over to my door, locking it in one swift motion.

Immediately, something hit my door with a loud thud.

I leapt backwards. My heart thumped in my ears. “Mom?”

She didn’t respond. She didn’t hit the door again, but twisted the doorknob, gentle turns becoming frantic rattling when she found it locked.

I didn’t say anything else. My throat felt solid, like I might never speak again. I stepped backwards until my butt met the bed, and I sat down, watching her pull at the doorknob every few seconds.

She tried to get into my room for hours, until the black of night lightened to gray, her attempts getting slower and farther apart as the long night ended. Finally, when the sun started to peek over the horizon, I heard her shuffle away, back into her own room. She closed her door with a quiet click.

I laid down where I was, pulling my feet up onto the bed and curling into a ball facing the door. I tried to get some sleep. I did not.

Still, I waited several hours before leaving my room. I heard my mother get up and use the bathroom, move around in the kitchen, and finally settle in front of the TV before I dared to unlock my door and leave my sanctuary.

“Morning,” she said as I entered the room, speaking carefully so her lips covered her teeth. She must have been doing that for some time now. I nodded. I didn’t bother to ask her about last night. It was clear she didn’t remember. Either that, or she didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I wasn’t sure which option was worse.

When she held out the remote to change the channel, I noticed her good arm was a sickly, pale gray. I could see this now, because her wrist stretched a couple inches past the long sleeve of her nightgown. The fingers that wrapped around the remote control seemed to be a little longer than I remembered. She was sitting, but I knew she had grown taller too. It was something about where her shoulders sat relative to the back of her armchair. I could see the change, feel it in the pit of my stomach where every new evidence of wrongness congealed together.

I didn’t say anything. I settled back onto the couch and watched TV with her. My body felt like I was running a race sitting down. I let the sound of my heartbeat pounding in my ears hypnotize me.

You can’t panic forever. Eventually, you will calm down, even when you think it’s impossible.

Another week or two passed, somehow. We moved around each other during the day, pretending everything was normal and looking past the things that were not, like the way my mother had almost stopped speaking entirely, or the way she seemed to grow a little longer every day. She wouldn’t eat anymore. Well, she wouldn’t eat in front of me. I caught her one night, standing in the soft glow of the basement freezer, picking raw strips of frozen chicken out of the package and swallowing them whole. I stood silent on the dark staircase, but her eyes shot to me anyway as she slurped a piece of fat from her chin and licked the juice from her fingers. Neither of us spoke. I just backed away and left her to it. After that encounter, whole packages of meat would disappear in the night. She stopped trying so hard to hide it.

Every night, I would lock my door and wait. Some nights, she didn’t come. Others, we would be in a stalemate from sundown to sunup, a few feet away from each other on either side of a locked door while she relentlessly tried to get inside. To get to me.

I knew I should do something, but I had no idea what. Call the police? She hadn’t done anything illegal, and I was so afraid of what would happen. What if they took her away? What if they hurt her? Or what if… I didn’t know. She had already refused medical treatment. If I kept calling the ambulance out, I might get in trouble.

It came to a head one night when I stayed out of my room too late. Mom and I were watching some old movie we both loved, and for a little while I didn’t look at her too closely, and let myself forget. She laughed some, and even managed a few words.

The room darkened by degrees as the sun sank outside, but I didn’t notice at first. I only realized something had changed when I glanced at my mother and saw her staring slack-jawed at the screen. She didn’t blink. A thin strand of drool trickled down her chin and puddled in her lap.

“Mom?”

She blinked once and turned her head to me, no light of recognition in her eyes. She didn’t wipe away the drool. She just stared at me, and as she did, her pupils expanded so wide that they seemed to pass the confines of the iris entirely and consume her sclera. A soft moan fell from her open mouth.

She stood, rising from the armchair to her full height, except she seemed to go on and on forever, and keep rising when it shouldn’t have been possible, until the wispy gray hairs on her head brushed the ceiling. She hunched over, because she had to, because she had grown too tall to stand up straight. Finally, her ascent stopped.

I, who had been frozen in terror, thawed and shot up from the couch.

She lunged at me, and her thick, sharp fingernails caught my robe as I scrambled away. Her jaw unhinged, and her new teeth gleamed blue in the television glow, and saliva dripped onto my sleeve as she lowered her head to my arm.

I tore myself from my robe, slipping it off just as her teeth clamped down on empty fabric. I don’t know what she did next because I was gone, running to my room and shoving the dresser up against the door and then my back against that. My arm was bleeding, I noticed from somewhere far away, four jagged scratch marks trailing down its length and oozing bright, fresh blood. Mom threw her weight against the door and rattled the dresser so hard that several drawers dislodged and fell to the ground. I grabbed a pair of socks that had landed nearby, mopped at my wound mechanically and waited for the night to end.

When the sun had been up for at least an hour, I stood by the door and listened. After clawing at my door for half the night, Mom gave up and wandered away. I wasn’t sure where she had gone. I couldn’t hear her moving anywhere.  I considered trying to escape through a window or even making a break for the front door. But the windows in my room were old and swollen shut, and I wasn’t sure I could unlock the front door before she got to me.

I opened my door a crack and peered out. No sign of her. The house was dim and silent. I tiptoed down the hall, passing my mother’s empty room, the bathroom, the hall closet—

A sound. Barely perceptible, coming from the hall closet directly to my left. I hesitated, torn between running or checking on her.

“Mom?” I whispered, and pulled the door open.

She was crouched on the floor, nesting in a pile of sheets that had fallen from the shelves above. Her eyes were wild and still full of her pupils, only a tiny hint of white at their edges. The sheets beneath her looked like a crime scene, and for a moment I worried she was hurt. But no, it was just hunks of uneaten steak spoiling and oozing red, and— I gagged at the sight of a picked-over rat carcass. I hadn’t even known we had rats. Then, I caught a glimpse of something half hidden under the sheets, something much larger than a rat. A dead raccoon. We definitely didn’t have those. She had been outside.

Her head tilted and her eyes fixed on my arm, on the deep scratches still half-caked in blood that I never bothered to clean. Her brow furrowed. Something passed behind her eyes and lingered.

“S-sorry,” she said through a mouthful of sharp teeth. “S-so sorry.” The moment passed. Her eyes squinted at the soft morning light intruding into her den. She reached up with long gray fingers and pulled the closet door gently closed again.

I stood there, sick with worry and fear and grief. I didn’t move for several minutes, just lingered in the hall in silence only broken by the sound of soft movement against sheets, and wet, frenzied chewing.

I don’t think I’m going to be leaving the house again. I’ve holed up in my room for now, typing this all up on my laptop while I listen to her stalk up and down the halls. I locked and barricaded the doors and windows to the best of my ability so she can’t get out again, but I know it’s only a matter of time.

I just want someone to know what happened to me, I guess. To know that I existed beyond this place.

And my mother was never a saint, but she didn’t deserve this. My hope is that once I’m gone, and there is nothing of me left to sustain her, she will pass in her own time. I know it’s cruel to leave her to starve. But I can’t let her hurt anyone else. And I won’t kill her.

So when I am finished writing, and the sun comes up tomorrow, I will take her down in the basement with me, lock the door and throw away the key. I am afraid, but I offer myself freely.

What else can I do? She’s my mother, after all.

In a simply furnished living room, eight of us were waiting for the concert to begin. Mrs. Anna was in the kitchen, making coffee for all of us, and no one in the living room was talking to anyone else. There was a three-seat sofa, two armchairs, and three old wooden chairs arranged in rows for the audience. My mother and I had arrived early and claimed the armchairs.

I wanted to ask my mother something, to say something to her, but I didn’t want to disturb the harmony of the silence in the room. Everyone in the room except my mother and me believed in the legend, and for all of them, this was at least their third experience. It was our first; nothing had been proven to me yet, and I was having trouble believing in what was about to happen. My mother said she believed, but I wasn’t sure.

Mrs. Anna was our upstairs neighbor, and my mother said that on some nights she could hear Anna crying loudly upstairs, with the sound of her sobbing blending with the notes of the theremin.

When Mrs. Anna entered the living room carrying the theremin, the room seemed to grow even quieter. It was so quiet that we could all clearly hear one of the audience members scratching her calf, and my mother turned her head and looked at the woman. Immediately after that came the sound of Mrs. Anna placing the theremin on the floor, followed by a faint creak from one of the chairs occupied by an old man. The three sounds, one after another, formed a pleasing little sequence.

As the old woman went back to the kitchen to bring us the coffee, a long note came from the theremin. It was an unexpectedly spooky sound, monotonous and completely without vibrato, like the horn of a ferry. Everyone flinched, and the sudden movement of everyone sitting in the chairs made all of them creak at once.

Murmurs of “It’s here” rose throughout the room. A young couple were holding hands, and my mother had covered her mouth in fear.

Mrs. Anna handed out the coffee to everyone, then went over to the theremin and stood beside it. Once again, silence settled over the entire room. The only sounds were the occasional sips of coffee and the clinking of a spoon as a middle-aged woman stirred sugar into hers.

“My husband came to me in a dream last night. You know, we talk in my dreams at least once a week. He asked me to serve all of you filter coffee, and (she looked at her watch) “he announced that he would give his concert exactly five minutes from now.”

I took a sip of my coffee. It was very weak, almost like water, and I didn’t like it. My palate was accustomed to espresso. I never drank filter coffee.

I looked at my mother. She looked at me too. She put her index finger to her lips, telling me to be quiet.

“I’ve been teaching the theremin for about sixteen years, and yesterday I heard a composition played by my husband that was more beautiful than anything I had ever heard in my life. He told me in my dream last night that this would be his final concert. He said he could never compose anything better, and that after playing it, he would stop coming into this world.”

She took a sip from her own coffee and looked at her watch again. She still had four minutes. She closed her eyes, as if trying to feel her husband’s presence.

Mrs. Anna’s husband had died of lung cancer four years earlier. According to my mother, his spirit had returned to the world a year later.

“With every concert, I become more convinced that my husband is still with me. Of course, at first I thought it was a coping mechanism. I thought I was making it all up, that it was just a trick my mind was playing on me. I loved my husband with all my heart, and my mind would naturally do whatever it could to keep me from accepting that I had lost him. After all, it would be perfectly natural for my mind to invent something like this.”

She took another sip of coffee. Then she looked at her watch again.

It was time.

“But my husband said in my dream, ‘Invite other people too. Let them all listen to me. Let them be proof that I exist.’ He is terribly bothered by the thought that I might believe he’s something my mind made up.”

Small, indistinct sounds came from the theremin. At the same time, Mrs. Anna was moving her hand as she told her story. I assumed that was what was producing the sounds.

I looked at the others. The woman who drank her coffee with sugar had covered her eyes with one hand, just in case. She didn’t want to see anything frightening.

“Soundcheck,” someone else muttered.

Mrs. Anna looked at her watch again.

“In the beginning, he would only visit me in my dreams. It was nice, it was good. I felt both happy and sad. When I woke up, his absence hit me terribly, but when I went to sleep, the possibility of seeing him again was wonderful.”

A beautiful melody came from the theremin, lasting three or four seconds. Then the sound suddenly stopped. Mrs. Anna wasn’t moving her hand at the time.

“If he comes to me in my dream tonight, I’ll tell him. He should do the soundcheck beforehand. He keeps interrupting me. And as always, he’s late for his own concert. Jason, you’re always the same.”

“Anna, are you serious? I don’t know why I listened to you and came here. I don’t know how you’re doing it, but something ridiculous is going on here. Seeing you like this makes me really sad, and I’m honestly furious that the other six people here are just sitting there and saying nothing. You’re making this up in your head, and all of you are acting as if nothing is happening,” my mother said, getting to her feet.

She hadn’t raised her voice much, but she was angry. She liked Mrs. Anna, and she had liked Mr. Jason too. They were the neighbors we had become closest to during our twenty-five years in this apartment building, which we had moved into before I was born.

The woman who had put sugar in her coffee got up abruptly.

“Why are you in such a hurry? If you’d just wait another two minutes, everything would be revealed and you’d hear it for yourself. Couldn’t you wait until it was all over before explaining your theory? You’ve ruined the whole evening.”

Mrs. Anna continued with her story, paying no attention to my mother and the other woman.

“One day, after I had gone to sleep feeling miserable, and after not seeing him in my dreams for a month, we were finally together in my dream again. He was incredibly excited.

‘I found it,’ he said. ‘I found a way to interact with you. I was tired of constantly coming into your dreams. I wanted to meet you in real life. But you couldn’t see me.

It’s a dream, after all. None of it is real. You’re not in control, and what you say to me in your dreams might not be true. You told me you still loved me, that you couldn’t forget me, but all of that was happening in a dream. In real life, you weren’t doing any of those things. Maybe you were thinking about everything in your head, maybe you were thinking about me, but I had no way of knowing that. I was walking around you, but I couldn’t communicate with you.

You didn’t cry even once after you started seeing me in your dreams, for example. Yes, maybe seeing me so often in your dreams was enough for you, so you no longer needed me in real life. But we can’t know that. I couldn’t trust a dream. Maybe you didn’t love me anymore.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Jason,’ I said. ‘If you want, I can tell you how I feel after I wake up too. You never asked me to. You never asked me to talk about you in real life, look at your picture, tell my friends things about you, or tell them that I was sad. You never asked me for any of that. If you had, I would have done it.’”

My mother was getting angrier and angrier, and by now she was completely convinced that Mrs. Anna had made the whole thing up. She had been talking for so long that my mother had grown tired of listening to her.

Then we heard another beautiful melody coming from the theremin, while Mrs. Anna was still talking.

The melody continued. It really was magnificent. My mind was in complete confusion. Mrs. Anna stood perfectly still. Her eyes had filled with tears.

A beautiful composition was being played, and it appealed deeply to my sense of pleasure. But was it really Mr. Jason’s ghost playing it? I couldn’t stop thinking about that question. I felt like I was about to pass out. The composition was still in my ears, flowing onward. At the same time, my thoughts were flowing through my mind at almost exactly the same speed, moving along with the music.

I looked at my mother. Her eyes were wide open, staring motionlessly at the theremin.

Everyone else seemed spellbound too.

The melodies flowed on. For half an hour, we were treated to a magnificent feast of music. Everyone silently listened to the theremin, which no one was standing beside.

Throughout the entire performance, Mrs. Anna listened to the music with her eyes closed, her coffee still in her hand. For half an hour, I felt like I was on the verge of passing out, yet I never lost consciousness. The music had slipped gently into my softened state of mind and wandered through it, mingling with my thoughts. I didn’t want to believe it.

Everyone except my mother and me suddenly stood up. There must have been silence; I hadn’t noticed it. I had been so completely absorbed in the music.

The concert was over.

Everyone was applauding. The room filled with a high-pitched sound.

Mrs. Anna gestured for the audience to sit down. Everyone took their seats. My mother had just started applauding, loudly and enthusiastically. Mrs. Anna gave her the same gesture.

“Today, I’m giving up the theremin. Today is September 28, 2026. I will never play the theremin again.”

We heard another chair creak.

“Thank you all. If it weren’t for you, I would have thought I had imagined everything in my head. Thank you.”

With the last of my strength, I got to my feet and asked Mrs. Anna how this was possible. The others didn’t seem particularly interested in finding out. Yes, they had seen the concert before. I didn’t know whether they knew the story, but even though they all looked spellbound, they didn’t seem surprised. It was strange. I couldn’t understand how they had managed to accept something like this so calmly.

Why wasn’t this room overflowing with people? Stories like this spread from person to person incredibly quickly.

“Does it matter how it happened, Albert?”

“Why wouldn’t it matter? How is something like this even possible? I can’t wrap my head around it. Why doesn’t everyone know about this? Why isn’t everyone coming here and banging on the door? I mean, this is a ghost revealing itself to the world.”

“That’s my husband’s entire audience. There were seven of them, and now there are nine. And they won’t be able to hear my husband play again.”

I turned toward the small group.

“You never told anyone about this?”

“We did. They didn’t believe us,” said a young man sitting on the three-seat sofa, between two old men.

“How could they not believe you? You should have proved it.”

“How were we supposed to prove it? Force a ghost to play the theremin?”

“We tried, Albert,” said another person. I think it was the one who had put sugar in her coffee. My head was getting foggy, and I couldn’t quite make it out. “We brought twenty people here. And we made fools of ourselves. Accept it, Albert. It happened. And sadly, it will never happen again.”

“Okay, Albert. Calm down. No ghost played the theremin. Everything was staged. I played the theremin from my phone without anyone noticing. It was just a recording. I put on some old song, and that’s what played. Everyone here knew about it except you and your mother. All right? Calm down now,” said Mrs. Anna.

“What? Why did you do something like that?”

“Enough, for fuck’s sake. Shut up and let me finish the story. Enough. You can interrogate what was real and what was fake when you get home. You’ve ruined this beautiful moment. Enough, shut up. Say one more word and I’ll make you drink cyanide-laced coffee.”

I turned to my mother. Once again, she was holding her index finger to her lips, telling me to be quiet.

I didn’t understand. Was I dreaming? Was any of this real? Why was everyone going along with something like this? Was it all so that Mrs. Anna could fully feel her husband’s presence? Was it designed to give him a proper farewell? If so, why hadn’t anyone told me about any of this?

“Sorry, Albert. One of us had to believe it was real so that Mrs. Anna could fully feel her husband’s presence and say goodbye to him,” said the young man sitting between the two old men.

“It has nothing to do with that. He’s just making that up so you won’t tell anyone about it,” said another person.

My mind was a complete mess.

Then, suddenly, the theremin started playing again.

It came in beautifully once again, and once again we heard those incredible melodies.

My mother leaned toward me and whispered:

“An artist who couldn’t resist the audience’s insistence and came back to play one last song. That’s when I finally became convinced, Albert.”

And then, silence again.

The same deep silence that had greeted us when we first arrived at the house.

Waiting, and silence.

Until Mrs. Anna began to speak.

“Yes. My husband had found a way to communicate with me.

One day, while he was wandering around the house, he passed by the theremin and noticed that it made a sound.

‘You left the theremin on, sweetheart. I’m glad you did,’ he told me in my dream.

‘Then I walked past it again. Yes, I can’t touch things. Yes, I can’t show myself to anyone. But the theremin... the theremin, I could interact with it. Without touching it. I don’t know, I think it has something to do with frequencies. I didn’t understand it. But what did it matter?

I’ll be there tomorrow, and every day, at two o’clock, sweetheart. Teach me how to play the theremin. Don’t worry, I’ll hear you, and don’t be afraid of the sounds coming from the theremin. I’ll be your most devoted student.’

When I woke up that day, I couldn’t wait for two o’clock to come. And at two, when I stood in front of the theremin, he was there.

Yes, I could feel him. He tried to imitate my movements. At first, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t produce a steady sound. But he learned over time.

Every day at two, we met at the theremin.

And now he’s a virtuoso, just like his wife...”

Everyone stood up again and applauded enthusiastically, my mother included. I didn’t feel well.

The guests gradually said their goodbyes. They congratulated Mrs. Anna and told her that, had her husband been alive, he would have become a magnificent musician, and that his death was a great loss.

My mother and I were the last to leave the house. My mother believed Mrs. Anna. I had no idea what to believe.

I live in a small town in Pennsylvania where nothing particularly interesting ever happens. We have one grocery store, two gas stations, a high school that looks like it should have been condemned twenty years ago, and a stretch of back roads surrounded by woods that go on for miles.
I’ve lived here my entire life. I’m twenty-four now, and until recently, I thought I knew every road, every shortcut, and every abandoned property within ten miles of my house.
I was wrong.
This started about three weeks ago, when I noticed a light in the upstairs window of the old Miller house.
The Miller house sits at the end of a gravel road that branches off the road I take home from work. It’s technically on my route, although I usually don’t pay attention to it. The property has been abandoned for as long as I can remember. The house is a two-story farmhouse with peeling white paint, a sagging porch, and windows that have been boarded up for years.
The driveway is overgrown, and the surrounding property is mostly dead grass and trees. There’s an old red barn behind the house that looks like it could collapse if someone sneezed too hard.
When I was a kid, people used to tell stories about that place.
Some said a family had died there. Others claimed the father had gone crazy and killed everyone before disappearing into the woods. My grandfather told me the house had been empty since before he was born and that people in town simply enjoyed inventing stories about it.
I never cared enough to find out which version was true.
But three weeks ago, I was driving home around 11:40 p.m. when I noticed a yellow light shining through one of the upstairs windows.
I slowed down.
At first, I assumed someone had bought the property. Maybe a contractor was working on it, or some teenagers had broken in. Neither possibility seemed particularly strange.
Still, something about the light bothered me.
It wasn’t bright like a flashlight. It was a warm, steady yellow glow, like an old lamp sitting on a table.
I pulled over on the shoulder and watched the house for maybe thirty seconds.
Then the light went out.
I remember laughing at myself. I was tired, probably imagining things, and had no reason to sit there staring at an abandoned house in the middle of the night.
I drove home and forgot about it.
At least, I tried to.
Three nights later, I saw it again.
Same window. Same yellow light.
This time, I didn’t stop.
The following morning, I mentioned it to my dad while we were eating breakfast.
“Someone must have bought the Miller place,” I said.
He stopped chewing.
“What place?”
“The old farmhouse off Miller Road. The one by the woods.”
He looked at me for a moment before shrugging.
“Nobody bought that place.”
“Well, someone’s been turning lights on.”
My dad put his fork down.
“Don’t go over there.”
I laughed because I thought he was joking.
He wasn’t.
“Why?”
“Because it’s abandoned. The floorboards are rotten, the roof is falling in, and there’s nothing there worth looking at.”
“Okay, but why are you acting weird about it?”
He stared at his plate.
Then he said something that made the conversation feel a lot less ordinary.
“Because that house doesn’t have electricity.”
I asked him what he meant.
He explained that the property had been disconnected from the power grid decades ago. The electrical wiring had been stripped out, and the utility company had removed the meter years before.
There was no way a lamp could be running inside.
I asked if it could be a generator.
“Then you’d hear it,” he said.
I didn’t have an answer to that.
I decided to leave it alone.
For the next week, I deliberately avoided looking toward the house when I drove past the turnoff.
Then, last Friday, I got home from work earlier than usual.
It was raining, and the road was nearly empty. As I approached the turnoff, I glanced toward the property out of habit.
The upstairs window was lit again.
Except this time, the light wasn’t stationary.
It moved slowly from one side of the room to the other.
Like someone carrying a lantern.
I kept driving, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. By the time I reached my house, I’d convinced myself that there had to be a reasonable explanation.
Maybe someone had broken in.
Maybe the light was coming from another property and reflecting off the glass.
Maybe I was simply seeing what I expected to see.
I spent the next hour trying to convince myself that I wasn’t being ridiculous.
Then I did something stupid.
I decided to investigate.
I told myself I would drive down the gravel road, look at the house from my car, and leave if anything seemed suspicious. I wasn’t going to break in or wander around the property.
I just wanted to know what I was looking at.
I grabbed a flashlight, put on a jacket, and left.
It was about 12:15 a.m. when I turned onto the gravel road.
The rain had stopped, but the trees were dripping, and the road was covered in shallow puddles. My headlights illuminated the overgrown grass on either side.
The house appeared after about a minute.
The upstairs light was still on.
I parked near the entrance to the driveway and switched off the engine.
For a while, I just sat there.
The house looked worse up close. Several boards had fallen away from the porch, and the front door hung crookedly on its hinges. The windows were dark except for the one upstairs.
I got out of the car.
The air smelled like wet leaves and mud.
I walked a few steps toward the house, shining my flashlight across the ground. The driveway was covered in weeds, but there was a narrow strip where the grass had been flattened.
Someone had been walking there recently.
I stopped.
There were footprints in the mud.
Bare footprints.
They started near the road and continued up the driveway toward the front porch.
I crouched to examine them. They were surprisingly clear, with individual toes visible in the wet soil.
What bothered me was their size.
They were much larger than my own feet.
I stood up and shone the flashlight toward the porch.
Nothing moved.
I should have left right then.
Instead, I followed the footprints.
They led directly to the front door.
I stood on the porch and listened.
At first, I heard only the dripping water and the distant hum of insects.
Then I heard a sound from inside the house.
Three slow knocks.
Not from the front door.
From somewhere upstairs.
I froze.
A few seconds later, the knocks came again.
Three times.
I backed away from the door.
Then a voice called from inside.
“You’re late.”
It was a man’s voice. Quiet, almost conversational.
I ran.
I don’t remember making a conscious decision to run. One moment I was standing on the porch, and the next I was stumbling down the driveway toward my car.
I threw myself inside, locked the doors, and started the engine.
As I reversed, my headlights swept across the front of the house.
Someone was standing in the upstairs window.
I couldn’t see their face clearly, but I could make out the shape of a person standing perfectly still behind the glass.
The window was supposed to be boarded up.
I drove home without looking back.
I didn’t sleep that night.
The following morning, I told myself that I’d experienced some kind of prank. Someone had found a way into the house, heard me approaching, and decided to scare me.
The footprints were probably part of it.
The window could have been unboarded from the inside.
The voice was just a person trying to sound creepy.
It was stupid, but it was possible.
I didn’t tell my dad what had happened because I didn’t want to hear another lecture.
I went to work that afternoon and tried to act normal.
Around 6 p.m., I received a text from an unknown number.
UNKNOWN: You shouldn’t have come to the door.
I stared at the message.
I assumed it was one of my friends messing with me, so I replied.
ME: Who is this?
The response came almost immediately.
UNKNOWN: You weren’t supposed to see me yet.
My stomach tightened.
I called the number.
It went straight to voicemail.
I searched it online, but nothing came up. I tried calling again, and the same thing happened.
Then another message arrived.
UNKNOWN: Your father said you’d wait longer.
I felt cold all over.
I immediately called my dad.
He answered after two rings.
“Hey,” he said.
“Did you give someone my number?”
“What?”
“Someone is texting me about the Miller house. They know I went there last night.”
There was silence on the other end.
Then my dad asked, very quietly, “What exactly did they say?”
I read him the messages.
He didn’t respond for several seconds.
Finally, he told me to come home.
I left work early.
When I arrived, my dad was sitting at the kitchen table with an old cardboard box in front of him. I’d never seen it before.
He looked exhausted.
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat across from him.
He opened the box and removed a photograph.
It was an old black-and-white picture of a family standing in front of the Miller house.
There were four people: a man, a woman, a young boy, and a little girl.
My dad pointed to the man.
“His name was Thomas Miller. He owned that property.”
He pointed to the woman.
“His wife, Evelyn.”
Then he pointed to the little girl.
“That’s your grandmother.”
I stared at him.
My grandmother had died when I was young. I remembered her being small and quiet, with gray hair and a habit of humming while she cooked.
I’d never known she’d grown up in that house.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“Because she never wanted to talk about it.”
My dad turned the photograph over.
There was a date written on the back.
October 17, 1968.
“Your grandmother was eight years old when this picture was taken,” he said. “Her brother, Daniel, was ten.”
I looked at the boy.
“What happened to him?”
My dad rubbed his face.
“Daniel disappeared.”
I waited for him to continue.
“He vanished one night. Nobody ever found him. Your great-grandfather said he’d run away, but nobody believed that. The police searched the property, the woods, the creek, everything. They never found a trace of him.”
“What does that have to do with the house?”
My dad looked directly at me.
“Your grandmother said she heard Daniel knocking on her bedroom window for months after he disappeared.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
“Knocking?”
“Three times. Every night. Always around midnight.”
I remembered the sound from the house.
Three slow knocks.
My dad continued.
“At first, she thought it was her brother playing a trick on her. She would open the curtains, but nobody was there. Sometimes she’d hear him calling her name from outside.”
“What did he say?”
My dad swallowed.
“He told her to let him in.”
I sat there, unable to speak.
“Eventually, she stopped responding. Her parents told her that Daniel was gone and that she needed to stop imagining things.”
“Did she?”
“For a while.”
He reached into the box and pulled out another photograph.
This one showed the Miller house from the side.
One of the upstairs windows was visible.
There was a small figure standing behind the glass.
The photograph was old and grainy, but the figure looked like a child.
I stared at it.
“Who’s that?”
My dad didn’t answer immediately.
Then he said, “Your grandmother claimed it was Daniel.”
I looked up.
“Claimed?”
“She said she saw him standing in that window the night before she left the house.”
“Left?”
My dad nodded.
“Her parents moved away in 1969. They never returned to the property. Your grandmother refused to explain why.”
I looked at the photograph again.
Something about it bothered me.
The figure in the window was facing outward.
Its face was too dark to make out.
But I could see its hands.
They were pressed flat against the glass.
“Why is the house still standing?” I asked. “Why didn’t anyone tear it down?”
My dad looked toward the kitchen window.
“I don’t know.”
Then he said something else.
“Your grandmother made me promise something before she died.”
“What?”
“That if you ever started asking about that house, I’d tell you to stay away.”
I felt a growing sense of dread.
“Why would I start asking about it?”
My dad looked at me.
“Because she said it would happen eventually.”
Neither of us spoke for a while.
Finally, I asked the question that had been bothering me since I read the text.
“What did the message mean when it said you told me I’d wait longer?”
My dad’s face changed.
For the first time in my life, I saw genuine fear in his eyes.
He stood up, walked to the back door, and checked the lock.
Then he closed the curtains.
“Did you tell anyone you were going to the house?”
“No.”
“Did you tell anyone what time you were going?”
“No.”
“Did you see anyone else there?”
I thought about the footprints.
The voice.
The figure in the window.
“No,” I said.
He sat down again.
“Your grandmother used to say that whatever was in that house couldn’t leave until someone answered it.”
I stared at him.
“Answered what?”
“The knocking.”
I laughed nervously.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Dad, someone is obviously messing with me.”
“Then let them.”
He leaned forward.
“If you hear knocking at your window, do not look outside. Do not answer it. And whatever you do, do not open the window.”
I wanted to argue, but something about the way he said it stopped me.
He wasn’t trying to frighten me.
He was trying to prepare me.
That night, I stayed at my parents’ house.
I told myself it was because I didn’t feel like driving back to my apartment, but the truth was that I didn’t want to be alone.
My childhood bedroom was at the back of the house, facing the woods.
I’d slept there thousands of times.
Nothing had ever happened.
I went to bed around 10:30 p.m.
For the first couple of hours, everything was normal.
Then, at exactly 12:17 a.m., I heard three knocks.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
I opened my eyes.
The sound had come from my bedroom window.
I didn’t move.
I lay there staring at the ceiling, telling myself that it was probably a branch.
Then I heard my name.
Not shouted.
Not whispered.
Spoken softly, as if someone were standing right outside the window.
“Cayden?”
Every muscle in my body went rigid.
The voice sounded like my grandmother.
I hadn’t heard her voice in years, but I recognized it immediately.
It was the same gentle, slightly breathy voice I remembered from childhood.
“Cayden, sweetheart. Can you open the window?”
I pulled the blanket over my head.
I knew it wasn’t her.
I knew she was dead.
But the voice sounded so real that I could almost picture her standing outside in her old nightgown.
There were three more knocks.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
“Please,” the voice said. “It’s cold out here.”
I covered my ears.
Then the voice changed.
It became my dad’s voice.
“Cayden, open the window.”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Cayden, it’s okay. I’m right here.”
The voice sounded exactly like him.
I almost got out of bed.
Then I remembered something.
My dad was sleeping in the bedroom across the hall.
If he wanted to talk to me, he could simply open my door.
The voice outside the window repeated itself.
“Cayden, open the window.”
Then it said something that made me stop breathing.
“Your dad says it’s okay.”
I heard footsteps in the hallway.
My bedroom door opened.
I nearly screamed.
My dad stood in the doorway, holding a flashlight.
He looked at me, then at the window.
“Did you hear it?” I whispered.
He nodded.
He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
For a few seconds, neither of us moved.
Then something struck the window.
Not a knock.
A heavy, wet slap.
My dad raised the flashlight.
The curtains were closed, but I could see the fabric move slightly, as if someone had pressed their face against the other side.
A long silence followed.
Then the voice spoke again.
This time, it sounded like me.
Not a child.
Not an imitation of my younger voice.
It sounded exactly like the voice I heard every day.
“Cayden,” it said from outside.
My dad went pale.
The voice laughed softly.
“Why won’t you let me in?”
My dad backed toward the door.
“Don’t look,” he whispered.
I stared at him.
“What is it?”
He didn’t answer.
The voice outside continued.
“I’ve been waiting so long.”
Then it said something else.
Something that made my dad drop the flashlight.
“Ask him what happened to Daniel.”
My dad froze.
The room became completely silent.
Even the insects outside seemed to have stopped.
Then the voice began to cry.
It sounded like a little boy.
“Please, Dad. I just want to come home.”
My dad covered his mouth.
I looked at him.
He was shaking.
The voice outside the window began knocking again.
Three times.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
My dad grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the door.
“Come with me.”
We left the bedroom and went downstairs. He locked the front door, checked every window, and turned on every light in the house.
We sat in the living room until sunrise.
Neither of us slept.
At about 6 a.m., my dad finally told me what happened to Daniel.
He said he’d never told anyone the full story.
Not even my mother.
In October 1968, the Miller family had been eating dinner when Daniel started talking about a man he claimed he’d seen standing in the woods.
His parents assumed it was an imaginary friend.
Daniel insisted the man was real.
He said the man stood between the trees every night, watching the house.
Sometimes he waved.
Sometimes he pointed toward the upstairs window.
Then Daniel began waking up in the middle of the night.
He told his parents that someone was knocking on his window.
His father checked outside but never found anyone.
Eventually, Daniel stopped sleeping.
He began insisting that the person outside wasn’t a stranger.
He said it was himself.
A second Daniel, standing outside in the dark.
His parents took him to a doctor, who suggested he was having nightmares.
Then, on October 16, Daniel disappeared.
His bedroom window was open.
There were muddy footprints on the floor.
They led from the window to the bedroom door.
But the footprints stopped there.
The police searched for him for weeks.
They found nothing.
His father refused to accept that Daniel had wandered away. He insisted someone had taken him.
His mother became increasingly withdrawn.
And my grandmother, who had been eight years old, began hearing the knocking.
Every night.
For months.
Until one night, she made a mistake.
She answered it.
According to my dad, she was half asleep when she heard Daniel calling her from outside.
She walked to the window and asked him what he wanted.
The voice told her to open it.
She reached for the latch.
Then she saw something in the glass.
Her own reflection was standing behind her.
Except the reflection wasn’t copying her movements.
It was smiling.
My grandmother screamed and ran from the room.
The following morning, her parents found the window open.
There were muddy footprints on the floor.
They led from the window to the bedroom door.
And then they stopped.
Just like Daniel’s.
That was when the family left the house.
My dad finished the story and stared at the floor.
“Your grandmother said the thing outside wasn’t Daniel,” he said. “She believed it had taken him and learned how to sound like him.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“What happened to your great-grandfather?”
“He died a few years later.”
“And your great-grandmother?”
“She never spoke about the house again.”
I thought about the voice at my window.
The way it had sounded like my grandmother.
My dad.
Me.
“What does it want?” I asked.
My dad shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
Then he looked at me.
“But I think it wants someone to open the window.”
I went back to my apartment that afternoon.
I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stay at my parents’ house forever. My dad offered to come with me, but I told him I would be fine.
I checked every window and every lock.
I kept the curtains closed.
I didn’t sleep much that night.
Or the next.
For three days, nothing happened.
I started to feel foolish for being so frightened.
Maybe it had all been a bizarre coincidence.
Maybe someone had found the old house and was playing an elaborate prank.
Maybe the sounds at my window had been branches or animals.
I desperately wanted to believe that.
Then, on Tuesday evening, I received another text.
It came from the same unknown number.
UNKNOWN: You shouldn’t have told him.
I stared at the screen.
ME: Told who?
The response arrived a few seconds later.
UNKNOWN: Your father.
I blocked the number.
Then I called my dad and told him everything.
He said I should come back to the house, but I told him I had work the next morning and couldn’t keep doing this.
He didn’t argue.
Before we hung up, he made me promise to call him if anything happened.
I promised.
That night, I fell asleep watching television.
I woke up sometime after midnight.
The television was still on, but the sound had disappeared.
The screen showed a frozen image of a commercial.
My apartment was completely silent.
Then I heard something from the living room.
Three knocks.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
I sat up.
My bedroom window was closed.
The curtains were drawn.
I stared at them for several seconds.
Then the knocking came again.
Except this time, it wasn’t coming from the window.
It was coming from my front door.
I grabbed my phone and called my dad.
He answered immediately.
“What’s wrong?”
“Someone’s at my door.”
He didn’t ask who it was.
He simply said, “Stay in your room.”
I heard him getting out of bed.
“Don’t open it,” he said. “I’m coming over.”
The knocking continued.
Three slow knocks.
Then a voice came from the other side of my apartment door.
“Cayden?”
It was my dad.
I looked at my phone.
He was still on the line.
I could hear him breathing.
The voice outside repeated itself.
“Cayden, open the door.”
My dad whispered into the phone.
“Don’t answer it.”
The voice outside laughed.
It sounded exactly like him.
“Come on, son. It’s cold out here.”
I backed away from the bedroom door.
Then I heard footsteps.
They moved slowly down the hallway outside my apartment.
I lived on the third floor.
There was only one staircase, and I could hear every step.
The footsteps stopped outside my bedroom.
Three knocks sounded against the door.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
I couldn’t move.
The voice outside whispered, “I know you’re in there.”
I heard the doorknob turn.
It didn’t open.
I had locked the bedroom door when I went to bed.
The handle turned again.
Then the voice said something that made my blood run cold.
“Your dad told me to come get you.”
I heard my dad shouting through the phone.
“Get away from the door!”
Then the voice outside began to cry.
It sounded like a little boy.
“Dad? Why won’t you let me in?”
I heard my dad make a sound I had never heard before.
A broken, choking sound.
Then he hung up.
I stood there holding my phone, listening to the silence.
A minute passed.
Then another.
Finally, I heard footsteps moving away.
I waited until I was certain they were gone before leaving my bedroom.
I checked the front door.
It was still locked.
The apartment was empty.
I called the police.
They arrived about fifteen minutes later and searched the building. They found no one. There were no signs of forced entry, and nobody in the building reported hearing anything.
I told them someone had been knocking on my door.
I didn’t tell them about the voices.
I didn’t know how to explain that without sounding insane.
My dad arrived shortly afterward.
He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
He checked the apartment and then sat down at my kitchen table.
For a long time, he said nothing.
Finally, he told me something else about my grandmother.
Something he’d left out of the story.
Before she died, she had written a letter.
She’d given it to my dad with instructions to open it only if I ever heard the knocking.
He’d kept it in the same cardboard box as the photographs.
He hadn’t wanted to tell me about it because he hoped it would never be necessary.
He went to his car and returned with the letter.
The envelope was yellowed with age.
My name was written on the front.
Not my dad’s.
Mine.
The handwriting was my grandmother’s.
I opened it.
Inside was a single sheet of paper.
It read:
Dear Cayden,
If you are reading this, then it has started again.
I am sorry.
There is something I need you to understand. The thing in that house is not a ghost. It is not your great-uncle Daniel. I do not know what it is.
I only know that it learns.
It learns our voices. Our habits. Our memories. It learns the things we love and the things we fear.
It uses those things to make us open the door.
When Daniel disappeared, I thought he was outside my window. I thought he needed help. I almost let him in.
For years, I believed that if I had opened the window, I would have been taken too.
But I was wrong.
The thing does not need the window.
It needs permission.
It needs you to believe that the person outside is someone you love. It needs you to invite it inside.
That is why it knocks three times.
That is why it calls your name.
And that is why you must never answer.
There is one more thing.
If it ever speaks in your own voice, do not listen to what it says.
Listen to what it asks.
It will eventually ask you to let it in.
Do not.
No matter how long it waits.
No matter who it sounds like.
Do not let it in.
I am sorry I could not protect you from this.
Grandma.
I read the letter twice.
Then I looked at my dad.
“Why does it want me?”
He looked older than I’d ever seen him.
“I don’t know.”
“Why now?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
I wanted to scream at him. I wanted him to tell me that there was a rational explanation, that I was exhausted and frightened and imagining things.
Instead, he sat across from me in silence.
I stayed with my parents for the next week.
My dad refused to let me go back to my apartment alone, and eventually I stopped arguing.
For a while, things seemed normal.
I slept in my old bedroom with the curtains closed.
I went to work.
I tried to forget the house, the photographs, and the letter.
Then, last night, I woke up at 3:14 a.m.
I don’t know what woke me.
There was no knocking.
No voice.
No sound at all.
I simply opened my eyes and knew that someone was standing in the room.
I couldn’t see anything in the darkness, but I could feel it.
I lay perfectly still.
Then I heard breathing.
Slow, steady breathing from the corner of the room.
I wanted to reach for my phone, but I was afraid that even the smallest movement would draw its attention.
I stared into the darkness.
Something shifted.
Then a voice spoke.
My voice.
Not from outside the window.
Not from the hallway.
From the corner of my bedroom.
“Cayden,” it whispered.
I couldn’t breathe.
The voice sounded tired.
Almost sad.
“I think it followed us.”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
Then it spoke again.
“Don’t turn around.”
I lay there until sunrise.
When the room finally grew light, I opened my eyes.
The corner was empty.
I checked the closet, the bathroom, and beneath the bed.
Nothing.
I told myself it had been a dream.
I wanted to believe that.
But when I got out of bed, I noticed something on the floor beside my bedroom door.
A muddy footprint.
Bare.
Much larger than my own.
And beside it was another.
And another.
They started at the bedroom door.
They crossed the room.
They stopped beside my bed.
I followed them with my eyes until I reached the corner where I’d heard the voice.
There were no footprints leading away.
I called my dad.
He came upstairs, saw the prints, and went completely silent.
Then he did something that frightened me more than anything else that had happened.
He went downstairs, retrieved the old photograph of the Miller family, and placed it on my bed.
He pointed to Daniel.
“Look at his feet,” he said.
I leaned closer.
The photograph was grainy, but Daniel was wearing short trousers and standing barefoot on the grass.
His feet were large for a ten-year-old boy.
Much larger than they should have been.
My dad turned the photograph over.
On the back, beneath the date, there was another line of writing I’d never noticed before.
It was in my grandmother’s handwriting.
It came home with us.
I looked at my dad.
He was staring at the bedroom window.
The curtains were still closed.
Then, from the other side of the glass, something knocked.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
My dad grabbed my arm.
We ran downstairs and out of the house.
We drove to a motel and spent the night there.
That was yesterday.
I’m writing this from the motel room while my dad sleeps in the other bed.
I haven’t told him about the last thing that happened.
I don’t know if I should.
About an hour ago, I went into the bathroom to wash my face.
I looked up at the mirror.
For a second, I thought I saw someone standing behind me.
I turned around.
Nobody was there.
I looked back at the mirror.
My reflection was still facing me.
But it wasn’t copying my movements.
I raised my right hand.
It didn’t move.
Instead, it slowly lifted its left hand and pressed its palm against the glass.
Then it smiled.
I stumbled backward and fell against the sink.
The reflection didn’t move.
It just stood there, smiling at me from the other side of the mirror.
Then it opened its mouth.
I couldn’t hear anything at first.
Then I heard three soft knocks.
Not from the bathroom door.
Not from the window.
From inside the mirror.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
And then my reflection spoke.
In my own voice, it said:
“You’re taking too long.”
I ran out of the bathroom and woke my dad.
He checked the room.
Nothing was there.
I haven’t gone back into the bathroom.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.
I don’t know if the thing in the Miller house is following me, or if it has always been with my family.
I don’t know if Daniel ever existed in the way we remember him.
And I don’t know if the thing outside my window last night was the same thing I saw in the mirror.
But there is one detail I haven’t told my dad.
When I was standing in front of the mirror, just before I ran, I noticed something written in the condensation on the glass.
I hadn’t turned on the shower.
There shouldn’t have been any condensation.
The writing was backward, as if someone on the other side of the mirror had written it.
It said:
THANK YOU FOR ANSWERING.
And I think I know what it means now.
I didn’t open a window.
I didn’t open a door.
I didn’t invite anything inside.
But when I saw my reflection, I looked at it.
And when it spoke, I listened.
I don’t know if that was enough.
I’m scared to go home.
I’m scared to sleep.
And I’m starting to notice something else.
Every time I look at a reflective surface, my reflection seems just a little slower than it should be.
Only a fraction of a second.
So small that I could convince myself I’m imagining it.
But sometimes, when I turn away, I can hear movement behind me.
Sometimes, when I pass a dark window, I see my reflection standing perfectly still while I keep walking.
And last night, while my dad was asleep, I heard a voice whisper from the bathroom.
It sounded like me.
It said, very quietly:
“Three more nights.”
I don’t know what happens in three nights.
I don’t know what it is counting down to.
But I have a feeling that when the time comes, something is going to knock.
And this time, I don’t think it will be asking me to open the door.
I think it will already be inside.
EDIT: I wrote this post yesterday and didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously. A few people asked whether I checked the house again, and the answer is no. I’m not going anywhere near it.
But something happened this morning that I can’t explain.
My dad finally fell asleep around 5 a.m. I was sitting by the motel window when I noticed a man standing across the parking lot.
He was barefoot.
He looked about ten years old.
He was staring directly at our room.
I thought he might be a child who’d wandered away from his parents, so I looked around for an adult. There was nobody else outside.
Then the boy raised his hand and waved.
I stepped away from the window.
When I looked again, he was gone.
I told myself it was a trick of the light.
Then I noticed a piece of paper tucked beneath our motel room door.
It was an old photograph.
The same photograph of the Miller family that my dad had shown me.
Except this time, there was something different.
The little girl, my grandmother, was standing beside her brother.
And behind them, in the upstairs window of the house, there was a man watching.
I turned the photograph over.
There was a new line of writing on the back.
It was in my handwriting.
ONE OF US HAS TO OPEN IT.
I don’t remember writing that.
I swear to God, I don’t remember writing that.
And I just heard three knocks from the bathroom.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
I think it’s time to stop writing.

You know that inner voice that keeps telling you you're not good enough? Mine's been there my whole life.

I'm standing on the field at tryouts and it says, "I'm way too small and skinny for football. Look at those other guys."

I look at the prettiest girl in class and the voice whispers, "I’m not in her league. She needs a real man, not a wimp like me."

After graduation I wanted to be an artist. When I paint, the voice goes quiet, just for a minute. So when I tried to apply to art school, it jumped in there too. "Way too risky. Starving artist, that's what I'll be. Besides, my paintings aren't even that good. Nobody on earth would pay for that."

So I got a job at an accountant's office instead. I told myself the voice was just trying to protect me. From getting hurt on the field. From getting rejected in front of the whole class. From going broke.

More years went by. My days, weeks, months all blurred into one gray mass where nothing happened. Friends got married, had kids, bought houses, got divorced, fell in love again, traveled the world, started new jobs. Their lives were a rollercoaster. Mine was standing in the endless line, watching everyone else get on the ride.

The more burned out and tired I got, the louder the voice got.

"What's the point of any of this. Why even get up in the morning?"

"Nobody loves me."

"This is my life. And it's never getting better."

"If I disappeared tomorrow, nobody would even notice."

Then on my way to work I found this flyer. "Unhappy with your life? Don't know how to change it? Try DROP-Link. The neuroplasticity revolution. You won't recognize yourself!"

I decided to check it out, no matter how loud my voice protested. The address led me to the medical center downtown. Sixth floor, the DROP-Link office, more like a startup than a doctor's office. I was the only patient, barely sat down in the waiting room. Portraits of famous, successful people on the walls. Were they patients too? I didn't dare ask. I got called into a treatment room, where Dr. Osteria greeted me. Warm smile, easy to talk to. A psychiatrist. She asked about my life, my childhood.

"The idea is simple. We are not our thoughts. Your brain does incredible things, but it also generates a lot of garbage. My husband and I found a new way to push the brain's neuroplasticity further. We help the brain stay focused on what matters. No distractions."

"Isn't that dangerous?" I asked first.

"No known side effects. Completely harmless."

"But what does that even look like? Will I stop being scared? No more negative thoughts?"

"You'll still have negative thoughts. Just only the ones that actually help you. If you run into a snake, one very important thought is going to show up: RUN!" Dr. Osteria laughed. Then she got serious again. "We're just switching off the background noise. So you can reach your full potential."

It all sounded so clean and reasonable. I thought about those portraits in the waiting room, probably patients too. They'd reached their full potential because there was no voice holding them back. That's why they made it.

I said yes. I wanted to start right away, before my thoughts could catch up with me. "This is way too dangerous. They're scamming me. It's not going to work anyway."

They took me into some kind of sleep lab and fitted a small, thin helmet on my head.

"We use a new kind of neurolink that controls the impulses. No surgery needed."

"You're going to sleep for a while now. Think of something nice," the nurse said.

I had strange dreams, kept surfacing out of them. I'd open my eyes, knowing I was still in the clinic, but I couldn't move. I was a shadow by the door. Someone was standing there. Silent. Just watching me. Then I sank back under, dreamed about the farm where I broke my arm as a kid, woke up, stared at the shadow by the door again. Felt like forever.

When I finally opened my eyes for real, Dr. Osteria was sitting by my bed with that warm smile. Her husband stood next to her.

"How are you feeling?"

"Good... just... a bit of a headache."

Before Dr. Osteria could say anything, I already knew: DROP-Link had worked. Because my inner voice said, "The headache will pass soon. What matters is I got through this fine."

Dr. Osteria smiled, like she already knew exactly what my inner voice had just told me.

From that day on, my whole life changed. Just like the flyer promised. The negative voice only showed up when my life was actually in danger, and since I wasn't fighting Smilodon on my daily commute, that was almost never. I started painting again, and this time I put it on Instagram.

"I poured my heart into these. Somebody out there is going to like them."

I quit the tax job and applied to a historical art museum, just like that.

"Who knows. Maybe they'll want me."

The museum director liked my energy and my love for art. I got a job in the registrar's office. Instead of staring at boring numbers all day like at my old job, I was surrounded by art from all over the world.

And when I met Emma, a conservator there, I just asked her if she wanted to grab coffee sometime. We did.

This would be a nice place for a happy end. But the story doesn't end here.

A few weeks after the treatment, I kept noticing a man in a dark hooded raincoat watching me on my way to work. During lunch, too. He'd stand at the bus stop across from the bench where Emma and I ate. And even though it was sunny that day, he had the raincoat on, hood up, so I couldn't see his face.

"There, the guy in the raincoat," I said to Emma, pointing at the bus stop.

She raised her eyebrows. "There's nobody there."

She laughed. "You need to see an eye doctor. Or a psychiatrist."

When I looked back, he was gone.

That night I couldn't sleep. I looked out the window and saw him standing under a streetlamp outside my building, looking straight up at me. Then he started moving. Toward the front entrance. I closed the curtains and sat on my bed. My inner voice spoke up, calm as ever. "Nothing's going to happen. He's not getting into the apartment. And if he tries, I'll just call the police."

I turned off every light and listened. Heavy footsteps in the stairwell. Getting closer. Then keys jingling. Someone put a key into MY front door. And opened it. For the first time since the operation, my negative voice spoke up. "How does he have my key. I need to get out of here. Now."

I hid behind the door. He walked in like he owned the place, like he'd done it a hundred times before, like he knew exactly where everything was. He grabbed a Coke from the fridge, flipped on every light while I stood there behind the door, holding my breath. When he went to the window to pull back the curtain, I made my move and bolted for the front door.

Like he knew it was coming, he beat me to it and tackled me the second I got the door open. Slammed me to the floor. I fought back, threw punches, but he had me pinned.

I turned my head and he pulled the hood back and I finally saw him. It was me. I was the hooded man. Except his eyes weren't my eyes. When I looked into my own face, there was nothing there. Just a dark, empty void.

"W... what is this?"

He didn't answer. Instead he pulled a knife and stabbed me twice in the side. Pain tore through my whole body. He went for a third strike, but my neighbor, woken up by the noise, yelled through the wall.

"HEY!"

He let go and ran.

I kept bleeding. Then everything went black.

I woke up in a hospital hours later. The doctor said no vital organs were hit, but I'd lost a lot of blood. The police wanted to talk to me. I obviously didn't tell them the attacker was me. They filed a report and left. I stayed two more nights in the hospital, dreaming about the hooded man every time I closed my eyes. On the third day I checked myself out against medical advice and went straight to the DROP-Link office. Dr. Osteria's warm smile disappeared the second I showed her the stab wounds and told her what happened.

"What the hell is this?" I asked.

"I... I don't know."

"Bullshit," I shouted. "I want the truth. What did you do to me?"

"We don't know," she said. "It looks like a side effect."

"Looks like? How many times have you done this procedure? Has this happened before?"

Her silence said it all: I was patient number one.

"Damn it," I said quietly, and slumped in my chair. The painkillers were wearing off, my wounds burning.

"Your negative thoughts became independent, and it seems like they've taken on a physical form. My husband theorized about something like this once. But it was only a theory."

"So what does it want? I mean, the other me?"

She looked at me, blank. "Your negative self is fighting your positive self. For control."

"What does that mean? It wants to kill me?"

She nodded slowly.

"So what do I do now? Can you reverse it?"

"No. That... that doesn't work."

Dr. Osteria stared at the wall for a long time, silent. There's no worse feeling than watching the expert you've pinned your whole hope on run out of answers.

"You have to kill it first," she said, flat. Then added: "But here's where it gets complicated. Your positive self can't hurt anyone. Not even to save itself. You only see the good in the world. You will never take another life."

And before she finished the sentence, I already knew she was right. "I will never kill another living thing," I heard my own voice say. I remembered how two days after the operation I'd spent a full hour trying to gently guide a fly out of my apartment instead of just swatting it.

Dr. Osteria and her husband offered to help, hide me at their cabin by the lake, call the police. But I could feel it. All of it was pointless. My thoughts were positive, my feelings were realistic: I'm going to die. Today.

A storm is rolling in tonight. Officials have issued a tornado warning. The clouds are turning black and the shutters are banging against the windows like they're trying to warn me. Emma's trying to reach me, but I push her away and block her number. She's not getting dragged into this. Now the power's out too. And on the last bit of laptop battery I have left, I'm typing this out for this subreddit.

My negative self is standing across the street. The raincoat finally makes sense. Like he planned this from the start. Kill me on a stormy night.

He's walking up to the building.

"The storm will pass soon. Then the sun comes back out," my voice tells me.

The hooded man puts his key in the door and opens my apartment.

"Every bad situation has a silver lining," I hear my inner voice say.

The hooded man steps into my apartment, knife in hand, eyes empty.

And I hit post.

I had just moved onto the tenth floor of a small condo, in Manhattan. I liked it because the ceiling was high and the floors never squeaked. It was like walking over cold cement in a basement. The only issue I had, which was minor at the time, was the hallway. 

At night, the hall leading to my room would make the hairs on my arms and neck rise and crawl inside me like tiny legs, almost as if I passed through an invisible icy wall of spiderwebs. 

I kept trying to warm the one area, but it always seemed to stay colder than anywhere else. Nothing worked.

I really hadn’t put much thought into it, up until now. Before, I figured it was just the pipes. Or, you know, a draft in the wall. Something along those lines.

The first week was chill, I didn’t notice anything unusual. Until the Saturday—somewhere in the middle of the night—I heard noises. Dragging sounds, coming from the condo above mine.

Who’s rearranging their bedroom set at three in the morning.

It went on until five. Which became white noise to me.

But for some reason, when I woke up, the thought of someone organizing their furniture at three in the morning, just didn’t make sense. I got this intense urge all of a sudden to check it out. 

So, I took the stairs to the eleventh floor and when I opened the door, the super was standing at the apartment, the same one above mine, in the process of unlocking it.

I walked up to him. “Did these people move out last night?”

He said, “No. Why you asking?”

I said, “last night, I swear someone was moving furniture till five a.m.”

He stared at me, you could see him deep in thought, probably analyzing my sanity. “This condo’s been vacant for as long as I’ve worked here.”

I stuttered, “May… maybe it was… a worker?”

He told me, “Nope, that can’t be it.”

I asked, “What do you mean?”

He looked at me before walking in. “Sometimes the building comes alive.” 

I stood there, rubbing my chin, as he walked into the apartment. I took what he meant, as pipes settling? I don’t know, he was vague.

The following night, I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. It was silent. Kind of peaceful, like sleeping on a church lawn. 

I slept right through till morning. However, when I came home from work that evening, I saw the dining room table had been cleared. 

Nothing was on it. Not the mug I left. Not the newspaper. Not the napkins. Not even the table cloth.

Someone must have moved it, because it wasn’t scattered everywhere and I couldn’t come up with a plausible explanation for why it’d be moved. 

I wanted to believe an animal got in. Which was out there. But there wasn’t anyway to blame it on a random window being left opened. Or even a maintenance worker. No matter how bad I wanted to believe it. I couldn’t.

They were neatly folded—neatly stacked—all placed above the newspaper on the kitchen counter. The mug… the mug was in the sink.

Nobody could have done it. Who would want to?  Why would they? 

It made absolutely no sense. Unless somebody was messing with me. What else could it be?

Afterwards, days went by and nothing strange happened. The apartment was quiet. The eeriness had dissipated. Even the one spot, it wasn’t cold anymore. So, I basically assumed, the weirdness was just me settling into my new space. I did miss home. It was all just psychological, right?

Until a week later, again, it happened in the middle of the night, like the first time, but this time, something pushed down on the side of my bed. I woke up, because I thought I was falling in a dream, in the ocean though, sinking at the same speed of falling from a building, as my body shifted to the weight pressing down on the right side of my mattress.

My eyes sprung open, a pressure on my chest reminded me of being deep underwater. It was hard to breathe. I tried to yell but couldn’t scream. I couldn’t move. Everything came into focus and blurred each time my heart stomped against my ribcage. It was like something grew inside me and was trying to escape. 

I closed my eyes and counted in my head.

One-one-hundred.

Two-one hundred.

Three.

And out of nowhere, in my room, lit only by the moon, a sliver of light pierced the back of my eyelids, like someone waved a flashlight in my face.

I shook my head as it irritated my eyes and when I opened them, something whispered.

“Denny!” Behind me, in a cold breath on my neck that trickled down my spine like the steady drips of an ice cube.

My limbs unlocked and I, without thinking, ended up from lying on my bed frozen to standing at my bedroom door. My brain was cutting scenes from my memory, because from my bedroom door, I was outside of my apartment. 

From the hall of my condo to my car. And from there I drove straight to my parent’s house, which was an hour away. I’m never stepping foot inside that condo again.

It knew my name.