By the time I found Caleb, we'd been looking for him for 37 hours.

He'd been missing longer than that. His truck was found Friday afternoon at the north trailhead with his wallet in the center console and an empty Gatorade bottle under the driver's seat. The last person known to have seen him was a cashier at a gas station 12 miles away. He bought two bottles of water, beef jerky, and a pack of cigarettes Thursday morning. He wasn't supposed to be gone overnight.

By Saturday, the sheriff's office had opened the search to volunteers. By Sunday morning, they'd divided the woods into grids and started sending us through anything that hadn't already been covered twice.

It had rained most of Friday night, and the woods still held it. The ground smelled of wet leaves and black soil, and water dropped from the bare branches whenever the wind moved through them. The rain helped in some ways. Mud held tracks better than dry ground, and the wet leaves made it easier to spot places where someone had passed through.

I'd done volunteer searches before. There was a routine to them that kept you occupied: a direction, a partner and a piece of ground you were responsible for. You moved slowly enough to notice things you'd normally walk past—broken branches, scraps of paper, impressions in mud.

I was working with a man named Curtis when I found the first cigarette butt.

It was caught between two rocks beside a creek, swollen from the rain. Curtis almost stepped on it before I stopped him. I crouched beside it without touching it. The paper had gone brown, but the filter was still recognizable.

"Could've been there a month," Curtis said.

He was right. We'd been told Caleb smoked Marlboro Reds, but that didn't mean much. Half the men I'd worked construction with smoked Marlboro Reds. I marked the location and called it in anyway.

The creek wasn't part of Caleb's expected route. He'd parked north of us and, according to his brother, intended to hike out to an overlook and back. The established trail never came within half a mile of where Curtis and I were standing.

But people who aren't lost generally don't need to be searched for.

We followed the creek.

The banks grew steeper as we went, forcing us onto the slope above it. Ferns had collapsed under the cold and lay flat against the ground. Mountain laurel crowded some sections so tightly that we had to turn sideways to push through. Every few minutes one of us stopped to look behind a log or down an embankment. We called Caleb's name, waited, then moved on.

Sometimes another searcher answered from far enough away that the voice had lost its words by the time it reached us.

Mostly there was the creek.

It wasn't particularly large, but the rain had given it enough water to fill the spaces between rocks. The sound followed us continuously, rising when we came close and softening whenever the terrain carried us away.

About 40 minutes after the cigarette, I found a strip of blue fabric snagged on a thorn.

Caleb had been wearing a blue rain shell.

Curtis radioed our team lead. We were told to hold our position until another pair could work toward us from the east. About ten minutes later, I noticed a boot print down in the creek bed, pressed into a patch of mud between stones. Once I'd seen it, another stood out farther ahead.

I told Curtis I'd check the next bend while he stayed where he could guide the second team in. I wasn't trying to be a hero. The creek curved sharply about 200 feet ahead, and I wasn't going farther than that.

I'd covered maybe 150 feet when I smelled cigarette smoke.

It was startling because the woods had smelled the same for hours: water, leaves, dirt, occasional pine. Cigarette smoke belonged somewhere else.

"Caleb?"

Something moved uphill to my left.

A man was sitting beneath a fallen tree about 100 feet above the creek. I couldn't understand how I'd missed him. He wasn't particularly concealed. The tree had come down with its roots attached, tearing a pocket out of the hillside, and he'd wedged himself into the dry space underneath.

He had a blue jacket.

"Caleb?"

He stood, and the relief hit me hard enough that I laughed.

You spend enough hours searching for someone and the person stops feeling entirely real. They become a photograph you've been shown too many times: height, weight, jacket color, boot brand, medical history. Seeing him stand up turned him back into a man.

"I found him," I said into the radio. "Curtis, I've got Caleb."

Caleb started down the hill but stopped halfway.

"Who'd you tell?"

"You're all right. Stay there."

"Who'd you tell?"

"Curtis. We've got another team coming in."

His face was hollow beneath several days of beard, and mud covered his jeans nearly to the knees. One sleeve of the rain shell was torn from wrist to elbow. He wasn't looking at any of that. He was looking past me toward the creek.

"How many people?"

"There's a whole team out here looking for you."

He closed his eyes. "Jesus Christ."

I started uphill, assuming he was injured or confused, but he backed away and told me not to come any closer. When I asked if he was hurt, he said no.

"We need to get you checked out."

"I'm not going with you."

Behind me, my radio crackled. Curtis asked if I had visual confirmation. Caleb watched me answer and give our approximate position.

"Tell them you lost me."

"What?"

"Tell them I ran. Tell them I pulled a knife. Whatever you have to tell them."

He wasn't shouting. That made it harder to dismiss as panic. He seemed exhausted more than anything else, but there was a concentration in the way he watched me that didn't fit with someone who had spent three nights wandering aimlessly through the woods.

I told him he wasn't staying out there.

"You don't understand."

"Then explain it."

Caleb looked over his shoulder. It wasn't the nervous glance of someone who thought he had heard something. He looked at one particular place.

"There's something following me."

I followed his gaze.

The hillside behind him was darker than the creek bottom. Hemlocks and white pines had held their needles while most of the hardwoods around them were bare, and their branches broke the afternoon light into narrow gray columns. Laurel filled the spaces underneath.

One of those spaces changed shape.

Something was standing among the trees about 300 feet beyond Caleb.

Gray-brown. Low to the ground.

My eyes kept trying to assemble it into familiar things. A fallen stump. A deer with its head lowered. A bear partially obscured by brush.

It walked between two trees.

Its body was about the length of a large deer, but heavier through the middle. Coarse hair hung from it unevenly, long in some places and absent in others, exposing skin the dull gray of old dishwater. Its front end tapered without forming any neck I could see. Where I expected a head there was only a blunt continuation of the body, slightly narrower than the shoulders.

It had four legs. I was sure of that.

The front pair were thin but unusually long, each bending once beneath the body and again farther down. That second joint made the legs fold outward rather than underneath it. The rear legs were thicker and similarly jointed. It should have stood chest-high on me if those limbs had straightened. Instead its belly hung less than two feet above the ground.

It took three deliberate steps without a limp or hesitation and stopped.

I couldn't find its eyes.

That didn't mean it didn't have any. At that distance, through the branches, there were plenty of things I couldn't see.

But I could see where its face should have been.

There wasn't one.

"How long has that been following you?"

"Since Friday morning."

"You've been watching that for two days?"

"I've been trying not to bring it anywhere."

The thing hadn't moved again. I asked whether it had attacked him, touched him, done anything to hurt him. No to all of it.

That was difficult to reconcile with the man in front of me. Caleb looked more frightened of being rescued than of the thing standing behind him.

"Because it follows," he said.

"So?"

"Other things follow too."

Curtis called my name from below.

Caleb shot to his feet and told me to send him back, but Curtis was already coming through the trees with Renee from the second team behind him. His face opened into a smile when he saw Caleb, the automatic expression you give somebody after spending two days expecting that, if you found him at all, he might not be standing.

"There he is."

Caleb backed uphill and warned them not to come closer. Curtis slowed while Renee stayed near the creek to report our location over the radio.

"Stop calling people," Caleb said.

Curtis tried to calm him down and mentioned that his brother was waiting at the command post. That was the first thing that seemed to get through. Caleb asked if his brother was really there. When Curtis said yes, Caleb looked down at the ground.

When he checked the woods behind him, the thing was closer.

I hadn't seen it move.

It stood about 180 feet away now, half obscured behind a pine.

Curtis followed my stare. "What the hell is that?"

Renee lowered her radio.

We watched it.

Nothing about the woods had actually changed. The creek still moved over the same stones. Water still dropped from the branches. Somewhere downhill a woodpecker struck a trunk in short hollow bursts.

But those sounds didn't feel empty anymore.

Every rustle in the laurel now had a possible source. Every gap between the trunks seemed deep enough to contain something. The woods that had felt open and quiet while Curtis and I searched them suddenly seemed crowded with places where I couldn't see.

I became aware of how far we were from the road.

Renee whispered, "Is that a bear?"

Caleb laughed once. It wasn't loud, but something about the sound made me wish he hadn't done it.

Renee told us command wanted us to hold position until medical reached us. Caleb started backing uphill again. Curtis moved toward him, and Caleb snatched a branch off the ground and held it across his body.

"Stay away from me."

Curtis raised his hands. "Nobody's going to hurt you."

"If you make me go back, you're taking it with you."

He told us he'd already tried to leave.

On Friday he'd found an old logging road west of where we were standing. He'd heard trucks somewhere beyond it and followed the sound until he could see pavement through the trees.

"I thought I was out. I could see the road. I could see the fucking road."

He walked toward it and looked back.

The thing had followed him to the tree line.

Behind it were two deer.

Caleb hadn't thought much of that. Deer had been moving through the woods around him since Thursday. But behind them was a fox, and farther back was another deer.

They were all facing him.

When he moved toward the road, they moved. When he stopped, they stopped. A truck appeared around the bend, and Caleb went back into the woods.

Everything followed.

Curtis asked why a few deer had been enough to send him back. Caleb told him there were seven or eight by then, and they stayed behind him for the rest of the day.

"One of the deer fell around dark. It kept trying to get up whenever I moved. Front legs first. Then the back ones. It couldn't do it anymore."

Nobody interrupted him.

"I left it there. The fox made it longer."

Renee asked what happened to the fox.

"I don't know. I didn't go back."

Now that I'd seen the creature clearly once, I couldn't make it become a stump again. Wet strands of hair hung beneath its body. A patch of bare skin along one flank contracted faintly when it breathed. One front foot was planted against the leaves.

Not a paw.

The end of the limb widened directly against the ground into several pale, blunt projections. They weren't toes exactly. There were too many, and none appeared to have claws.

It shifted its weight, compressing the leaves beneath it with a wet crunch.

That sound did more to convince me it was real than seeing it had.

Caleb watched our faces. "You see it."

No one answered.

"Good. Now leave."

Curtis shook his head. "We're not leaving you out here."

Caleb tried to explain that bringing more people only made things worse, but Curtis was already talking about wildlife officers and deputies. Their argument began circling until Caleb's voice rose over his.

"That's the problem. Everybody keeps coming."

The creek continued behind me. Water dripped from the trees. Nobody spoke.

Caleb lowered the branch.

"Please. Just leave me here."

We didn't.

I still think about that decision, but there wasn't much of a decision to make at the time. We had a missing man who had spent three nights outdoors with little food, probably dehydrated, possibly injured, and clearly not thinking normally. We had also seen an animal none of us could identify.

Those two facts did not add up to abandoning him.

Renee stayed behind to guide medical personnel toward our position while Curtis and I started Caleb toward the logging road. He didn't come willingly, but we didn't have to drag him. Fighting us would only bring more people in, and that frightened him enough to cooperate.

For the first half mile, nothing happened.

That was almost enough to make the whole thing feel foolish.

The creek faded as we worked downhill. The terrain leveled into long runs of bare oak and poplar where 150 or 200 feet opened between some of the trunks. A breeze moved through the canopy, shaking loose water in scattered drops, and without the constant rush of the creek I could hear our boots pressing into leaves, Curtis's pack shifting against his coat, Caleb's uneven breathing.

And, every so often, something behind us.

I checked often enough that I stopped having to search for it. Brush hid it completely in places, but sooner or later that gray body passed through another opening between the trees, holding roughly the same 120 or 150 feet no matter how the terrain changed.

It wasn't creeping from cover to cover. It made no attempt to conceal itself. Across an open patch of leaves I finally saw its gait without branches interfering. The strange construction of its legs made the body roll gently from side to side, one flank rising while the opposite pair folded beneath it. The narrow front swung only inches above the ground.

When it stepped over a fallen branch, something along its underside opened.

A dark vertical slit began several inches behind the blunt end of the body and continued farther back than I could follow. The movement of the leg stretched it open enough to expose a wet interior and something pale within, smooth and briefly visible before the edges drew together again.

My pace faltered.

Caleb glanced over. "Keep moving."

After that, the woods no longer seemed quiet.

They seemed occupied.

I knew the distinction existed mostly in my head. The trees hadn't moved closer. The smells were still wet soil, leaves and pine. Yet every sound I'd ignored that morning now suggested a location. A branch snapping behind us established distance. Leaves dragging across leaves meant something had displaced them. Even the breeze bothered me because it set too much of the forest moving at once.

I wanted stillness so I could tell what belonged to the woods and what didn't.

We reached the logging road shortly after noon.

Caleb stopped with one boot on the gravel.

Medical was coming from the east. Another mile, maybe less, and there would be people waiting for us. Curtis reminded him of that, but Caleb was staring into the trees behind us.

The creature had reached the edge of the woods.

Without brush hiding it, the proportions looked worse. Its body was longer than I'd thought and sagged slightly between the shoulders and hips. Rain had flattened the hair along its back into dark ropes, while the nearly bare underside showed skin with a faint bluish cast beneath the gray. Its front narrowed to that same blunt end with no eyes or mouth where either belonged.

The slit underneath loosened.

Something pale shifted inside.

Caleb eased his foot off the gravel. One of the creature's front legs folded forward.

Both stopped.

Nobody tried to persuade Caleb now.

The road ran south around a bend. Somewhere beyond it were EMTs, deputies, volunteers and Caleb's brother. More people would arrive throughout the afternoon. Cars already lined both shoulders near the command post.

Nothing we'd seen proved Caleb's story about the animals. The thing hadn't attacked us. It hadn't shown any interest in Curtis or me. It hadn't done anything except follow.

Abandoning Caleb because of that was absurd.

Taking him another mile suddenly felt worse.

Movement behind the creature drew our attention.

A doe stepped between the trees.

She was thin, with mud darkening her legs almost to the knees, but otherwise there was nothing remarkable about her. She stood about 45 feet behind the creature, ears twitching toward sounds I couldn't hear.

Caleb stared at her.

"That one's new."

Curtis asked how he could possibly know. Caleb said he hadn't seen a deer since the previous day.

The doe lowered its head.

Caleb stood at the edge of the road, the creature just inside the trees, the deer farther back. None moved.

Curtis broke away and started south by himself. About 60 feet down the road, he turned and found the rest of us still standing where he'd left us.

"Come on."

There wasn't enough evidence.

There would never have been enough evidence.

If Caleb was wrong, we were leaving an exhausted man in the woods because he'd frightened us. If he was right, the only way to prove it was to bring him back to everyone.

Caleb looked toward the bend in the road.

"I got lost," he said. "That's all I did."

His voice had gone quiet again.

"I just got lost."

There wasn't a trespass he'd committed or a rule he'd broken. No place he'd knowingly gone where he shouldn't have. He'd missed a trail sometime Thursday afternoon and spent the next three days trying to undo that mistake.

I asked what he was going to do.

"Go back."

"For how long?"

He looked into the woods.

That was answer enough.

Curtis came back, and we argued over what obligation meant when none of us understood what we were looking at. He was right that we couldn't simply leave Caleb. I was right that we didn't know what we were bringing out with him, or at least I believed I might be. We circled those same facts until Caleb stopped listening.

He stepped off the road.

The creature turned with him.

The doe raised its head.

Caleb walked uphill through the trees. The thing followed at its usual distance, rolling slowly over the wet leaves.

The doe remained at the roadside until Caleb passed between two trees.

Then it followed.

Curtis stopped arguing.

The woods broke the procession apart as it climbed: Caleb's legs vanished first, then the creature's gray body, then the doe moving lightly behind it.

The last thing I saw was Caleb's blue jacket.

We did not follow him.

The official search continued for four more days.

Renee met us on the logging road with two EMTs. We told them Caleb had become agitated and fled when we attempted to bring him out. That wasn't entirely a lie. Curtis and I gave statements separately, and neither of us mentioned the creature or the deer.

I don't know what Curtis told himself afterward.

I told myself we'd made a temporary decision. Caleb knew where the logging road was now. He knew where people were. If he changed his mind, he could come out.

That explanation worked better during the day.

At night I thought about the way the thing's legs folded beneath it and the opening along its underside. I thought about the pale movement inside.

Mostly I thought about the deer.

Caleb's family kept searching after the county stopped. His brother organized volunteers online. Hunters checked game cameras. People walked the logging roads well into December.

Nobody found him.

I didn't participate.

Winter came early that year. By January there was enough snow in the higher elevations that even his brother stopped organizing regular searches.

There were other disappearances that winter. I didn't connect them to Caleb at the time. People go missing in the mountains every year, and once you've participated in a search, you start noticing the notices in gas-station windows and the photographs people share online.

One of them was a man named Thomas.

I remembered his face because his family used the same photograph everywhere. He was 41, with a brown beard going gray at the chin and an orange knit cap. He'd gone out alone on a trail about 20 miles west of where we'd searched for Caleb and hadn't returned to his car. That was in January.

They never found him.

In March, Caleb's brother called me.

A couple driving home late on one of the county roads had reported seeing a man walking along the shoulder. No coat. No flashlight. They slowed because they thought he might need help.

The man stepped off the road before they reached him.

Caleb's brother had spoken to the couple himself after hearing about the report. The description of the first man wasn't good enough to identify anyone, but the location was close enough to the search area that he thought it might have been Caleb.

The couple had seen something behind him.

They couldn't agree on what it was. The husband thought it was a sick deer. His wife thought it was a large dog. Their headlights caught it only briefly before it crossed the ditch.

Behind it came a deer.

Then another.

The second deer was limping badly. One rear leg barely touched the pavement, but whenever it fell behind it lurched forward again.

Behind the animals walked another man.

Orange knit cap.

Brown beard.

The couple stopped.

The husband rolled down his window and asked if he needed help.

The man kept walking.

By then the first man had reached the trees. The strange animal crossed the ditch after him, followed by the deer. The man in the orange cap came last.

The husband got out of the car and called after him. He made it as far as the ditch before his wife started shouting for him to come back.

The couple waited beside the road for nearly 20 minutes, but nobody came back out.

Caleb's brother asked me if the orange cap meant anything.

It did, but I didn't have the heart to tell him.

I still had Thomas' missing-person notice saved on my phone. The description matched exactly what we'd been given.

I asked for the road name.

It ran along the western edge of the search area, less than two miles from the logging road where we'd let Caleb go.

His brother asked what I thought had happened.

I told him I didn't know.

That part was true.

There was one thing I did know.

Caleb hadn't been hiding from whatever he found in those woods.

He'd been keeping it there.

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

The day after CATALOGUE left, nothing happened in my house. For weeks there'd been talking radios, moving reflections, and new things on my workbench. Now there were forty-one objects gone. The dresser, the tank, and the portrait were still waiting on a transport crew. I checked the wardrobe repeatedly that night, listening for creaks or voices. 

I had a lot of time to think this week, and I want to be honest that I hated it.

I hadn't touched a drink in nine days. Not since that night with the radio. I still thought about Alicia's voice coming from it and how I'd sounded answering her. I'd spent so long telling myself our arguments had gone differently that hearing them again felt like being caught in a lie. Maybe the radio had invented some of it. But I remembered enough to know it hadn't invented everything.

I wanted a drink more than once that week. I didn't have one.

On Wednesday, I finally met with the family lawyer I'd been talking to for months. After depositing CATALOGUE's money, I called from the bank parking lot. For once, I could afford to retain him.

We spent an hour going through my situation. He didn't sugarcoat anything. My visitation record was poor, and asking for full custody would get me nowhere. But he said there was room to negotiate, provided I could demonstrate that I was taking things seriously.

He helped me put together a proposal for Saturday's mediation. More time with Toby, a gradual move away from supervised visits, and a review further down the line. Nothing guaranteed, but it was a start.

I walked out with a folder under my arm and, for once, something resembling a plan.

On Thursday I went to see Henry.

Since the sale, we'd only spoken by phone. I blamed his rehab appointments, but that was a lie. I stayed away because I was afraid of looking him in the eye. 

I found him in the last room of the rehabilitation ward trying to open a pack of crackers.

He was using his right hand, and you could see him trying to fight it. I didn't step into the room immediately. He had the packet pinched between his thumb and fingers, trying to yank the corner open. His hand curled partway, slipped, and dropped the corner. He muttered something nasty and passed it over to his left. My heart sank. His left hand had never been much use for delicate work.

Then he got the corner between his teeth and pulled hard. The packet split down the side. Crackers went everywhere, into his lap and onto the floor.

“Shit,” Henry said, with real feeling, and looked up.

I was waiting for him to get embarrassed or hide his hand, but he just gave me this crooked grin, the same look he used to give when he lost twenty bucks on a game. 

“Should’ve told the nurse I needed help with the bag,” he said. “I keep forgetting my hands don't work like they used to.” 

“Let me help.”

“No.”

“Henry.”

“I mean it, Ian.” He started picking crackers out of his lap with his left hand. “If you start opening my stuff now, I’ll be asking you to do it every time you come over. Grab a chair and sit down. You're making me nervous standing there.” 

I sat on the edge of the bed. The room was small and clean, and an orange dolly strap was hanging off the bed rail. I looked at it for a while.

Henry used to take the heavy end of everything. I'd once watched him carry an oak wardrobe up three flights without stopping. Now he couldn't open a packet of crackers. 

“Stop doing that,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Spinning out in your own head. Give it a rest.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“I know that look. You did the same thing while they were loading me into the rig.” He swallowed a piece of cracker. 

“So how’re you actually doing?” I asked.

“Me? I’m golden. Physio says I’m making progress. Give it another couple of weeks, and I'll be carrying your sorry ass up the stairs again.”

“Henry, you can barely open a pack of crackers.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not planning on opening crackers for a living.” He tried to flex his right arm, but the elbow barely hitched before his face went tight. He sucked air through his teeth and let it drop.

“Jesus, take it easy,” I said. “You’re going to rip something.”

“I’m fine.” He leaned back into the pillow, a shade paler, but still grinning. “They’ve got me on the stairs now. Six lousy steps and I felt like I climbed Everest.”

He could barely manage six steps. We spent half our days carrying furniture up stairwells, sometimes four floors at a time. Even if his back healed, there was still his arm. I wondered if he'd ever work again.

Worse, I wondered if he'd started asking himself the same question.

“Anyway,” he said, brushing a cracker crumb off his chest. “How’s the garage holding up without me?”

So I told him.

Henry had this half-smile on his face the whole time, waiting for me to say I was pulling his leg. When I didn't, the smile faded. 

“Jesus.” He put the cracker down. “So it’s real real. It’s not us.”

He was quiet for a second. 

“I had myself convinced it was just us,” he said. “Two dumbasses who bought the wrong storage unit. You can make sense of that. This other shit? This is something else.” 

I told him about the lawn chair photograph, and he looked at the window for a while and didn’t say anything.

“So can they still hurt anyone?” he said finally. “The things you’ve got left.”

“They’re contained.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“The wardrobe’s wrapped. The dresser and the tank and the painting are waiting for a crew. Henry, they sprayed everything. It was like…” I didn’t know how to describe it. “Like watching them put down a dog.”

“And you’re still staying in the house.”

“It’s my house.”

“Ian.” He leaned toward me. “When we got the chair, what did you think?”

“What?”

“When you saw it, the first time. You thought it was your chair, the one that went missing. And then I sat in it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m not trying to get at you,” Henry said. “I’m just telling you as the guy who found out the hard way how fast things go wrong in that room. If the crew isn't coming till the weekend, stay somewhere else. Grab a cheap room, or take our couch. Rachael’s been waiting for an excuse to reach out to you anyway, even if she won't admit it.” 

“I’m pretty sure she hates me.”

“She’s scared of you, but she’ll come around eventually.” He picked up another cracker, then set it back down. “Tell me about Toby.”

I’d been dreading the conversation since I got off the elevator. I told him what I’d told Marshall, blurting it out in a rush. 

Henry took a long time to answer.

“I don’t know, man,” he said. “I’m not calling you a liar. That missing scar is weird as hell. But Ian, I’ve known that boy since he was in diapers. He used to come down to the depot and sit in the cab of my truck for hours, pretending he was driving. He even made me a stupid little card with a crayon dinosaur on it; I’ve still got it framed on my desk at home.” He dragged his left hand down his face, looking exhausted.

“Has he done anything?” He finally asked.

“What?”

“I’m asking whether he’s done anything. Has he said anything unusual? Has he hurt anyone?”

“During my supervised visit, he asked about the closet,” I said. “He wanted to know if it opened.”

“Why would a kid ask that?”

“Maybe it had something to do with the wardrobe.”

“Right,” Henry said, staring down at the bedsheets. “Maybe he's just spooked, Ian. I mean, wouldn't you be?”

I felt the old heat rise in me, the defensiveness I’d been catching in the half second. I let it pass.

“You’re so focused on figuring out what he is,” Henry said, his voice quiet. “Look, I get it. I’d be losing my mind too. But did you ever stop and think about what Toby went through? He got trapped in the dark, and when he came out, you were screaming at him like he was a monster. That’s terrifying for a little kid, Ian. That doesn't mean he’s not your kid anymore. You just scared the hell out of him.” 

“Alicia thanked me for apologizing to him,” I said.

“Good,” Henry said. “You should have.”

“I didn't, Henry. I was in my garage.”

Henry went quiet for a second, then shook his head. “Then Alicia said it for you. She saw you were losing your mind, and she told him you were sorry to calm him down. That’s what parents do.”

“That’s not what she said.”

“What do you mean?”

“She didn’t say I told him you were sorry. She said Toby says we talked. That you told him you were sorry.” I heard how steady my voice was, and it scared me a little. “Toby told his mother that he and I had a conversation I wasn’t part of.”

Henry didn’t answer right away. I watched him searching for an explanation. He was good at that. He’d been finding the angle his whole life.

“That’s weird. But it’s not enough, Ian.” He didn’t sound sure anymore. “It’s not enough to decide who or what he is. Ask him when it’s safe.”

Henry wanted me to be wrong. He had enough to deal with without worrying about me losing my mind. 

I exhaled.

“Maybe you’re right,” I muttered. “Maybe I’m just seeing ghosts where there aren’t any.”

Henry let his shoulders drop, visibly relieved to hear me say it. “I’m usually right when it’s about you. You’re exhausted, Ian. Stop acting like an investigator and get some proper sleep.”

I said it so he’d let it go, but the second the words left my mouth, I felt like a liar. He could rationalize Alicia’s text all he wanted. But you don't just sleep off a missing scar. 

“I want to put some money toward the rehab,” I said. “The payment was more than I’d expected. It covers my lawyer, and there’s enough left.”

“No.”

“Henry, come on.”

“I’m the one who chose to sit in the chair, Ian. If you hadn't pulled me out, things could've been a hell of a lot worse.” He held up his left hand. “I’m not taking money from you because you feel bad.”

“I want you to be able to afford your physical therapist. You’re my friend, and you need help. That’s the reason.”

He studied me for a while.

“Okay,” he breathed out. “But don’t spend all of it. I mean it. Don’t go giving away the whole envelope and eating canned beans because you’re making amends.”

“Deal.”

I left half an hour later. At the door he called my name, and when I turned, he held up a cracker in his left hand like a toast.

“They’re good crackers,” he said. “Don’t let them tell you otherwise.”

Alicia called that evening. 

We'd texted all week about Saturday's mediation and I took the opportunity to mention the investigators from CATALOGUE who'd visited my garage. We weren't on good terms, just too exhausted to fight. 

“I need to ask you something,” she said.

“Okay. What's up?”

“Toby’s been in his room a lot.”

“Is he sleeping?”

“He’s fine.” The phone rustled. “It’s about the toy chest. Do you remember the wooden one? The one I bought off that woman in the next suburb, when he was two?”

I remembered the faded blue pine box. I'd carried it upstairs myself.

“He’s suddenly become obsessed with it,” she said. “After the weekend, he started going in there every single day, dragging things out, piling things back in. I actually thought it was a good sign. He was so quiet and withdrawn when he first got back from your place. I just thought, thank God, he’s finally playing again.”

She paused.

“There’s stuff in there I never bought him,” she said.

I slumped down right on the kitchen floor, my back against the cabinets.

“An orange plastic toy truck,” she whispered. “I think I’d remember buying something that ugly. And that little yellow giraffe he broke months ago. Ian, I threw that out in May. I know I did.” 

Her breath caught. 

“I asked him where he got them. He said a friend gave them to him. I asked who, thinking it was some kid at school. He just looked at me and said, ‘He likes making things.’”

“Did he tell you his name?”

“No. That's the problem. Every time I ask, he just says it's his friend. I've asked him whether it's someone from school or even someone he's met online. He won't tell me.”

She went quiet for a moment.

“Ian, I've been thinking about calling the police.”

“The police?”

“What am I supposed to think? He's six years old. He's suddenly getting toys I didn't buy him from someone he won't tell me about. I've checked the locks and asked his teacher if anyone's been hanging around school.”

“Why didn't you tell me sooner?”

“Because I thought he was making it up. An imaginary friend, something he'd picked up at school. I didn't want to make a big deal out of nothing, especially after everything that happened at your place.” I heard her swallow. “But the toys keep showing up, Ian. I don't know what else to think.”

“Alicia, listen to me. I don't think this is somebody giving him toys.”

“Then where are they coming from?”

I thought about the things that had appeared on my workbench. The chair that had replaced my own. The wardrobe and the pale thing I'd seen crawling out of it.

“I think it might be happening again.”

“You mean the things in your garage?”

“Yes.”

We went quiet.

“Those CATALOGUE people want to run tests on Toby. I told them no, not without your say-so. But let me go through that box first. I just want to see what's in there.” 

There was a long pause.

“I’m not putting him through another investigation,” she said, her voice tightening. “He’s finally settling down, Ian. I am not letting some stranger sit him down in a room to grill him about what happened. He’s six years old. He’s had enough.”

My breath hitched, and the line fell silent. 

“I’m not asking you to take my word for it,” I said. “I’ve got the videos and the emails. I’ll print every damn thing out and hand it to you. If you read it and think I’ve lost my head, I’ll walk out the door and never bring it up again. Just let me look in the box, Alicia. Please.” 

Alicia sighed. I thought she'd tell me to stay away. 

“Tomorrow after lunch,” she said, flatly. “You can come over and look at it. That’s it.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

Her voice dropped into that sharper tone she used when she meant business. “Don’t scare Toby, and don’t go tearing the place apart.”

“I won’t, Alicia. I promise.”

“I don’t care about your promises, Ian. Last time you had him, he came home frightened and barely himself.”

"I didn't mean for any of that to happen."

Alicia laughed bitterly over the phone. “You never do. I’m doing this against my better judgment. Don’t make me regret it.”

My tongue felt like sandpaper. “I won’t.”

“You’d better not,” she said, and hung up before I could answer.

I hadn’t been inside the old house since the day I moved out.

I stood on the porch the next afternoon feeling like a trespasser. There was a new potted plant beside the step. Life was moving on here without me. 

Alicia opened the door before I knocked.

Toby’s sneakers sat by the mat, laces untied. There was a row of his drawings along the refrigerator. I was drawn to the picture of three stick figures labeled MOM and ME and DAD, with DAD a little apart from the others and the biggest of the three.

I stared until Alicia said, “He made it last month.”

“It’s good.”

She didn’t reply. Just turned around and walked back toward the kitchen. The table was covered in unopened mail and a half-eaten bowl of cereal. My place didn't have clutter. I’d spent weeks telling myself I was staying tidy. Looking at her table, I realized it was really just empty. 

“I read your emails,” she said, without looking at me. “The ones you forwarded to me.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with them.” She sat. “Show me the video.”

I played the recording. She watched for ten seconds, then frowned.

“What am I looking at?”

“Just keep watching.”

The thing unfolded from the wardrobe, its long, pale limbs bending in ways they shouldn't have. Alicia stared at the screen, then looked up at me.

“Ian, is this some kind of joke?”

“No.”

“Because if you've edited this—”

“I haven't touched it, Alicia. Just watch.”

She looked back down. Her thumb hovered over the screen. Then the thing reached for the toy, and her expression changed.

“Wait.”

She dragged the recording back a few seconds and watched it again.

“That's Toby's dinosaur.”

I nodded.

She stared at the screen a moment longer, then slowly raised her free hand to her mouth. Her eyes drifted toward the hallway, up the staircase to where Toby was playing.

“That thing was in the house?”

“Yes.”

“With him?”

“I don't know what it did or if it even did anything at all. He was in the wardrobe for maybe half a minute. When the door opened, he seemed fine. That's all I know.”

“Jesus Christ.” Her voice sounded hollow, like all the air had been knocked out of her. “Do you think it did something to him?”

“I don't know, Alicia.”

She looked down at the frozen image, then handed the phone back to me. Her fingers were trembling.

“Okay,” she said quietly. She swallowed. “Okay. Let's go see the chest.”

I saw Toby first.

I’d asked for ten minutes. Alicia took a long look at me, then went to make tea, and Toby came tearing down the stairs the moment he heard my voice. I caught him around the middle and nearly lost it.

He smelled like crayons and cereal, and he said, “Dad, Dad, you want to see?” and dragged me toward the stairs. His room was small, with a bed covered in dinosaur sheets. The toy chest was against the far wall. He’d laid out his toys on the carpet in two rows: a fleet of cars, a menagerie of rubber animals, and a plastic knight with a missing arm.

“These are the new ones,” he said, pointing.

I got down on the floor. 

“They’re great. Where’d you get them?”

“My friend made them.”

“Your friend. Which friend?”

“The one who makes things.” He held up a toy car.

 “That one’s pretty good. Some of them aren’t. He gets them wrong sometimes.”

“Wrong, how?”

Toby laughed. It was a real laugh, and my chest hurt. “There was a truck with the wheels on backwards. And a dinosaur that couldn’t stand because his legs bent the wrong way, like this.” He folded his arm at the elbow and then back the other way. “He fell over every time.”

“How do you know they’re wrong?”

“Because I know how they go.” He gave me a look of deep disappointment.

“Dad. I show him. I roll the truck on the floor. Like this, see?” He pushed the red car across the carpet with two fingers, wheels turning. “And the dinosaur stands up. So he can see how they work.”

“Where do you show him?”

“Do I have to explain everything?” He slumped back onto the carpet. “It’s obvious.”

I nodded, trying to keep my breath even. 

“Where did you meet him, bud?”

Toby fiddled with the toy car. “When we played hide and seek.”

My stomach dropped like a lead weight, and my fingers pressed into my palm hard enough to hurt. 

I’d been pounding on that wardrobe door, screaming his name. I still remembered how raw my throat felt. I remembered the door swinging open all by itself and Toby just sitting there cross-legged in the pitch black, blinking at the light. 

“In the game?” I didn’t even recognize my own voice. “When we played at my house?”

“Yeah.”

“Was he...in the wardrobe with you?”

“Toby!” Alicia was at the door with the tea tray. “Dad’s here to look at the chest, remember? Let’s not make him wait.”

Toby jumped up, losing interest in the conversation, and ran to the foot of the bed to fetch a stuffed rabbit. I stayed on the carpet, hearing my own heart thumping. Alicia looked at me, and I shook my head. Not now.

He'd met his friend inside the wardrobe. But Toby had been missing for less than a minute, and he'd claimed he'd been waiting for me for ages. How long had he really been in there? What had happened to him?

I pushed the questions aside. Something from that wardrobe might now be in my son's bedroom, and I needed to know whether it was dangerous.

I recognised the toy chest, blue painted pine with scuff marks where Toby had dragged it. We'd bought it for him years ago, though he'd long since outgrown most of the things he used to keep in it. Last I'd heard, Alicia had been planning to get rid of it. Apparently, he'd taken an interest in it again.

Alicia stood beside it with her arms folded. I knelt, examining the brass hinge.

I remembered repairing that hinge myself, back when Toby was three. The lid had started sagging, so I'd bought a little packet of brass screws and tightened the whole thing up. I even remembered stripping one of the heads and swearing about it while Toby watched from the doorway.

The hinge was still there. But the screws weren't. Where the heads should have been, the metal didn't end. It was a seamless transition from brass to pine, as though the two materials had grown together. I ran a thumbnail along it. The surface was smooth and faintly warm.

“Did anyone else repair this?” I asked.

“No, nobody’s touched it. The most I’ve done is clean it up a little.”

“There was a scratch on the lid, along the left side. It’s gone.”

Alicia crouched beside me. We both looked at the lid, painted so fresh it seemed wet. “I’d have noticed that,” she said, in a small voice.

“It’s what the other objects were like in my garage,” I breathed out. “Neglected things. They come back...newer.”

“It’s not sitting around forgotten,” she said. “He uses it.”

“Maybe not lately,” I said. “It sat in the corner for months, Alicia. Before the weekend. Before—” The words died in my throat.

I opened the chest. Toby’s old things, and among them were things that weren’t his. I lifted out the first one, and it was a teddy bear.

I say a teddy bear because the shape was bear-like. It had two round ears, button eyes, and a little black nose, but everything underneath was grotesque. Its torso was too long, with a second belly bulging beneath the first, and its arms had too many joints. One of them bent backward when I picked it up. The fur was soft and clean, but the thing had an unpleasant weight to it, as though the stuffing was wet.

I squeezed its middle. Something pulsed under my fingers, and a low, wet gurgle came out of its mouth. It went on for several seconds after I'd let go.

I dropped it.

“What is that?” Alicia whispered.

“Looks like a stuffed toy,” I said. I barked a short, nervous laugh. “If Cronenberg made it.”

I picked up the others, careful not to press too hard. Some were total butcher jobs. Others were so clean I had to check twice. A yellow rubber duck had a seamless, molded-shut beak and mismatched eyes. I was turning it over when Toby appeared in the doorway.

“He’s working on that one,” he said, pointing at the duck in my hand. “That’s an improved one. Do you like it?”

“It’s nice,” I said. “It’s very nice.”

He came in and sat cross-legged by the chest. He pulled out the jack-in-the-box.

It was the kind you’d see in any toy store. He turned the handle. The tune was almost “Pop Goes the Weasel.” 

Then the face came up.

Rather than popping out, it rose slowly out of the box. The face had no features, only a smooth, grinning curve in the shape of a smile. It stopped at the top of its stem and swayed.

Toby clapped. “That’s a good one.”

Then he dragged something out of the corner of the chest. A long string of white segments, linked end to end, and he held it up by the string so it swung. I'd mistaken it for a toy caterpillar. As Toby walked it along the floor, the segments clicked softly. I looked at it a moment longer and realized that the segments were the exact size and shape of vertebrae.

“Put it down,” Alicia said stiffly.

“But Mom, it’s one of the good ones.”

I made myself ask the question gently. “Toby. Does your friend come into your room?”

He frowned, puzzled. “I don’t see him in here.”

“Then how…” 

“I put something in the chest, and I close the lid, and when I open it, there’s something different.” He shrugged. “Like a swap. It’s a game.”

“What do you put in?”

“My broken stuff, or things I don’t want.” He hesitated. “Or sometimes I put in a drawing.”

Alicia looked at me, and I could see the worry on her face. She glanced at the door, then at Toby. Was she thinking what I was? How many times had she walked past this room while he was playing, without knowing what he was playing with? 

“That’s enough,” she said. “No more. Not until we understand this. You don’t open that chest again, Toby. Do you hear me?”

“But he’s not finished!” His face crumpled. “He’s still working on some. He gets sad if we take them before they’re done.”

“Bud, I need you to wait in the hall for a bit, okay? Just while Mom and I look.”

“I want to stay.”

“I know. Just a few minutes.”

He went, slowly, dragging his feet, and left the door half open. I could hear him on the other side trying to listen.

I felt the edges and knocked on the bottom panel.

The timber was solid. There was no wear on the hinges or scuffs in the paint. But when I leaned over and looked down at the toys, the bottom of the box seemed to stretch farther than the outside frame allowed.

“It’s just a trick of the light,” I said, but my hands were shaking. 

“Is it?” said Alicia.

She was leaning over my shoulder, looking at something buried near the bottom of the chest.

“That’s the pony,” she said.

“What?”

“The plastic one with the pink mane. He broke it in the spring, and I put it in the bag for the bin.” She reached. “If it’s the original...”

“Alicia, don’t.”

But she’d already put her arm in.

She leaned into the chest from the shoulder, her fingers closing toward the pink plastic, and her hand went past where the bottom panel should have been. Her wrist disappeared, then her forearm.

She made a small, surprised sound.

“I can’t see the bottom.” Her voice sounded strange. “There’s...Ian, it just keeps going.”

I looked. Past her shoulder, where the bottom of the chest had been, there was only darkness, full of objects packed tight with junk: chair legs, a rusted lamp, a pram wheel, all wedged at impossible angles. 

Alicia tried to withdraw her hand, but it was stuck fast.

“My sleeve’s caught on something,” she said, panic edging into her voice. She pulled again. “Ian, I can’t...”

Then she cried out.

Her whole body jerked toward the chest, and her knees hit the edge of it. Something inside had taken hold of her. I saw her wrist tighten under the cuff of her sweater, as if invisible fingers had closed around it.

I got both hands around her upper arm and pulled.

It was like trying to haul her out of deep water. I pulled her backward, but her arm kept traveling deeper into the wood. The box itself didn't move an inch; it was the space inside that was collapsing, the whole interior tightening down on her arm like a throat swallowing down food. 

“Hold on!” I shouted, which was a stupid thing to say given the circumstances.

The lid began to fall.

It came down slowly as though someone were lowering it by hand. I caught the edge and held it open and felt my muscles shake. Alicia got her free hand on the rim, bracing, and her arm was pulled in nearly to the shoulder.

Henry.

It was all I could think. The chair snapping shut, the sound he made. I had no way to get my fingers into it, because everything I knew about furniture was useless in that moment. I looked for a seam, a joint, a place to pry. There wasn’t one. The whole chest was one continuous surface, and the lid kept coming down.

“Alicia, look at me.”

“It’s pulling—”

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

Deep in the dark, something moved. A piece of the clutter shifted, and from underneath it came a hand.

It was pale and long, bending in places that made my own fingers ache. The fingers uncurled one at a time and reached, not for Alicia, but past her, toward the plastic pony.

It didn’t look like it was trying to hurt her. That’s what made my blood run cold. It was just reaching for that toy like a kid reaching for a dropped spoon. 

Alicia saw it.

She recoiled, and the whole space convulsed. The pressure around her wrist increased. I heard something crack, and she screamed in pain.

“Get off her!”

I yelled straight into the dark. The fingers jerked away for a second, startled by the noise. Then the space contracted again. It wasn't giving up. 

I remembered the garage. It had shrieked when I looked at it and hid behind its hands.

If I frighten it, it just holds on tighter.

“Toby,” Alicia gasped. “Toby, no...”

He was in the doorway.

He'd come at her scream and stood pale-faced, staring at her arm disappearing into the wood.

“Go,” she said. “Toby. Go. Please go.”

He didn’t move. His mouth hung open.

I tried to steady my voice. “Bud. Stay back. It’s okay.”

It wasn’t. The lid pressed against Alicia’s shoulder now. I wedged my forearm underneath it and felt the whole weight come onto me. I thought about the hammer I’d swung at the wardrobe and how the wood hadn’t even splintered. I didn’t know what to do.

“Stop it,” Toby said.

His voice was small, then suddenly booming. He ran into the room, and I tried to catch him and missed, and he planted himself at the edge of the chest and shouted into the dark with everything he had.

“Stop it! Stop it! You’re hurting my mom! Stop it, stop it, that’s NOT how you play!”

I don’t know how else to say it. The pressure didn’t ease, but it held like bated breath. The hand in the dark went still. I couldn’t tell whether it had recognized his voice or had only been startled by the noise.

“Please,” Toby said, and his voice broke. “Please. She’s my mom.”

The hand withdrew slowly, dragging two of the malformed toys with it into the dark. Then a violent scraping sound came from somewhere beyond the chest, and I felt the box shudder.

The interior collapsed to its ordinary size all at once, and Alicia’s arm came free so fast that she flew backward into me. We hit the carpet together, her elbow in my ribs, my head slamming against the bed frame. Toys tumbled out of the chest, and the lid slammed shut with a sound like a gunshot, hard enough to splinter a strip of the surrounding wood.

The room was silent.

I rolled onto my knees. “Alicia. Alicia, look at me.”

She was curled around her right arm. Her wrist was already swelling; the skin beneath her sweater was a dark, shiny red, and a lump had risen under it. When I touched her hand, she hissed in pain, and her fingers didn’t move. She was struggling to breathe, and her left hand pressed against her ribs where she’d struck the edge.

“Don’t move,” I said. “Don’t move it.”

“I’m okay,” she said, through clenched teeth. “I’m fine. I’m...” She started to cry.

Toby stood a few feet away with both fists pressed against his mouth, eyes wide.

“He wasn’t trying to hurt her,” he said, through his hands. “He wasn’t. He didn’t know.”

A wave of heat rushed right up my neck. He was defending it. My wife was clutching a broken wrist on the carpet, and my kid was standing there covering for the thing that did it, treating it like a friend who didn't mean any harm. 

I opened my mouth.

I looked at Toby.

His face was wet and blotched, and there was snot on his lip. 

I closed my mouth. The anger dissipated.

“I know, bud,” I said. “I know. It’s okay.”

I took out my phone and called emergency services. Then I sat on the floor with Alicia’s head against my shoulder and my other hand on Toby’s back, and the three of us stayed that way until the sirens came.

The paramedics asked me what had happened, and I told them that Alicia had gotten her arm caught in the toy box. The younger woman with the ponytail looked at me warily, and I knew she was wondering whether I’d done it. 

“He’s telling the truth.”

I looked over to Alicia. She was strapped to a stretcher, a splint on her wrist.

“Her wrist’s fractured,” the paramedic told me. “Probably her ribs, too. We’re taking her in.”

On the way out, Alicia caught my sleeve.

“Why was it in my house?” she said, low and hoarse, so only I could hear. “Ian. Why was it in my house? And why did Toby recognize it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said they took everything. You said it was over.”

“I thought it was.” I swallowed. “I’m sorry. I was wrong about the whole thing.”

She stared at me for a long second, and I knew she wasn’t forgiving me. But something had shifted between us. For the first time, Alicia didn't have to take my word for it. I wished she still did. 

“I’m not done with you,” she said. And I knew she meant it.

Alicia's younger sister Rebecca arrived twenty minutes after the ambulance left. Alicia had asked her to stay with Toby instead of going to the hospital.

She wasn't thrilled to find me there. She'd supervised a few of my visits before, and we weren't particularly close. But Alicia had apparently told her I was staying, so she didn't argue.

She went into the kitchen to call the hospital, leaving me sitting in the hallway with Toby. The mediation was tomorrow, and now Alicia was in hospital with a broken wrist. I'd have to make some calls. For now, I couldn't bring myself to care.

Toby sat on the bottom stair with a stuffed rabbit in his lap and one of the malformed toys in his other hand, a plastic horse or a cow. I thought about taking it from him. I thought about how it’d play out: his face, the yell, the whole ugly mess. I didn’t want another scene. I sat down on the stair beside him and said nothing for a minute.

“Are you scared?” I said at last.

He shook his head. 

“I didn’t think he’d hurt anybody,” he said.

“Has he ever scared you? Before today?”

“No.” A long pause. “He gets things wrong sometimes. That’s all. And I show him how. I show him, and then it’s better.” He looked up at me, and his eyes were enormous. “Why did it hurt Mom? It’s the same game.”

“It wasn’t the same.”

“But it was.”

I searched for the right words.

“Sometimes people don’t mean to hurt someone,” I said. “But they do anyway, because they don’t understand what they’re doing. That doesn’t mean they’re bad. It just means you have to be really careful around them. Even if they’re your friend. Especially if they’re your friend.”

He considered this. For a minute neither of us moved, and the whole world felt very small.

“Is Mom going to be okay?”

“She’s going to be fine. She’s got a broken wrist, that’s all. They’ll fix it.”

“Promise?”

I wanted to say yes. I wanted to tell him she'd be home tomorrow, that everything would be back to normal, and that there wasn't anything left to be frightened of. But I'd made enough promises I couldn't keep. 

“I promise we'll do everything we can to help her,” I said. “And I'm staying right here with you until we know she's okay.” 

He leaned against me, and I put my arm around his shoulders. 

I'd spent months trying to get more time with him. I'd paid a lawyer, sat through meetings, and rehearsed what I'd say on Saturday. And now here I was, sitting beside my son in the house I'd once called home, while his mother was in the hospital because of something I'd brought into our lives.

I would have given anything for him to be somewhere else. Somewhere safe.

I didn’t push him. None of it mattered right then. There’d be time later to ask the questions burning in the back of my mind. I just sat there on the hall stairs next to my boy. 

Hours later, I called Priest from the porch. Rebecca was inside with Toby, watching cartoons. My hands shook so badly I misdialed the number Marshall had given me.

She picked up on the second ring.

“It’s Ian from the garage.” My voice cracked. “I need to report something.”

“Go ahead.”

I described the altered chest, Alicia's trapped arm, the pale hand, and how it retreated when Toby shouted.

“Stop a moment,” she said. “When you say the interior was deeper than the exterior. Are you certain you weren’t looking at a Return with a manufacturing flaw? Some of the later ones have false depth.”

“It took her arm.”

“Yes, but...”

“It pulled her down into the wood, Priest. It had a hand, the same one from the video.” 

A pause.

“Understood,” she said, and her voice had changed. “I’m writing that down. Go on.”

I told her about Toby's friend, the hide-and-seek, and swapping drawings through the chest. She stopped writing.

“He’s been exchanging items with whatever’s inside?”

“That’s what he says.”

“Has he seen it?”

“He says he doesn’t. He says it’s...a friend that likes making things.”

“And the Ephemera he's been receiving. Are they all toys?”

“The what?”

“The objects he's been receiving. Are they all toys?”

“Wait. What did you call them just now?”

“Ephemera,” she said. “It's our general term for them.”

“That's a new one. Marshall never mentioned it during our conversation.”

“No, I suppose he wouldn't have.”

Something about the way she said that bothered me.

“What's it mean?”

“It's a reference to their transient nature. They appear, disappear, and turn up in places they shouldn't. The name stuck.”

“Right.” I shifted the phone against my ear. “And that's all?”

There was a pause, just long enough for me to notice.

“It's a classification, Ian. Nothing more.”

She sounded irritated, though she'd happily explained every other strange term.

“Okay,” I said. “Yeah, they're mostly toys.”

A silence on the line. I could hear a keyboard faintly clacking away in the background. Then Priest said, very evenly, “Ian, I need you to keep him away from that chest. Don’t let him open it, don’t let anyone else open it, and don’t move it. We’ll send a team as soon as we can.”

“Is it the same one?” I asked. “The creature from my garage. Did it follow him?”

“I can’t say that.”

“You can’t say that, or you don’t know?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “And I won't speculate just so you can turn my guess into a certainty. There may be other reasons it’s here, reasons that have nothing to do with it tracking you from the site.” 

“The chest was abandoned for months. And the toys only started after Toby went back to it. That doesn’t fit what you told me. You said it was related to neglect, the things nobody used.”

“I noticed that discrepancy too. I’m not dismissing it.” There was a faint creak, as though she’d leaned back in a chair. “We don’t have every answer, Ian. You’ve been told that already.”

A week ago, I'd have accused her of hiding something. Now I wondered if thirty years of studying these things had only shown CATALOGUE how much it didn't know. Still, I couldn't shake the way Priest had reacted when I asked about Ephemera. 

“If you take the chest away,” I said, “will it be safe? Will her house be safe?”

“I can’t promise that.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’d need to establish whether the chest has become an Interface itself, or whether it’s a Return connected to an existing manifestation.” She hesitated. “Removing a Return doesn’t remove whatever produced it. If your chest is a door, then closing it only closes that door.”

For weeks I’d been so sure that the danger was in my garage, in the wardrobe under its grey sheet, and that if I could just get it all out, the thing would lose its hold. But I couldn't get how the creature had clutched that toy to its chest like a terrified child, saying I didn’t mean it. And how it stopped the second Toby opened his mouth.

I don’t know if it sees Toby as a person. I don’t know if it’s hunting him or if Toby’s the one pulling it closer. 

What I do know is the wardrobe had never been in Alicia's house.

The only thing connecting those two places was Toby.

And through the window, I could see him sitting on the couch, talking to something that wasn't there.

“No. Dude.” I rubbed my forehead in disbelief - or maybe disappointment. Whichever of the two was the largest, and that wasn’t an easy question to answer. “C’mon, you’ve gotta do better than that. We’re just gonna get the door slammed on us.”

I didn’t think I was wrong. This was supposed to our last hurrah, the last time the three of us hit the pavement on Halloween night before we resigned ourselves to a long, drawn-out lifetime of handing out the candy at the door instead. Fifteen was already pushing it, arguably over the line - but if our costumes were good enough, that wouldn’t be a concern. It was about the passion, not the age. It was about our love for the holiday, showing people that we weren’t just in it for the candy.

I mean, we were. Kind of. But the idea was that we wouldn’t make that very obvious.

Marc just shrugged, leaning against the bottom of the basement railing in a Ghostface mask, a t-shirt, and blue jeans. “I’m Scream,” he said, he voice muffled through the mask. “That’s a costume.”

Lori raised an arm to point at him from her spot on the couch a few feet away from me, the dangling, shredded fabric and faux-chains of her admittedly immaculate ghost bride outfit dragging against the coffee table glass. I snatched the remote out of the way, before it got swiped onto the floor and lost beneath the couch forevermore.

“He’s right, that sucks,” she rolled her eyes. “And his name is Ghostface. Scream is the name of the movie. Have you even... seen it?” Marc shook his head.

“Okay, okay.” I held up my own hands, taking a step between the two of them. I should’ve expected some kind of disconnect here - Marc was never as big into Halloween as we were - he’d stopped trick-or-treating a couple years ago, and he wasn’t even a big horror guy back then. Usually, he’d be a pirate. But, though it was becoming increasingly less true as time passed and we slowly integrated ourselves into different ways of life, he was our friend and we still wanted to include him. That’s why I invited him. Frankly, I didn’t expect him to show up at all, but I supposed the call of free candy is stronger than I thought. “Look. I think we can make this work still.” I nodded my head, the beak of my plague doctor mask bobbing up and down. “I think we have like, a black curtain upstairs. You can throw that on like a cloak and that’s… close enough to Scream.”

“Ghostface,” Lori corrected.

“I meant the mov- okay fine. Ghostface. Are you good with that?”

Marc peeled off the mask, his shock of brown hair erupting from the neck-hole. He sighed, running his hand through the mess atop his head. “Whatever dude. No one’s gonna care, it’s almost nine. There’s not gonna be any kids, and what are people gonna do, throw the candy out?. We’ll go out, get their leftovers, and beat it. We don’t have to pretend to be twelve.”

“I never said we did! I just think we have look like we give a shit. Man, just put on the curtain.”

Despite his half-assed protests, he stayed mostly still while I ran up to fish out the old black curtain from the linen closet. Tied around his neck, he still didn’t look like a very good Ghostface - but it was better than nothing.

Lori nodded in agreement, her plastic chains rattling affirmatively.

It was go time.

---

We started in my neighborhood and branched out from there. House by house, street by street, passing blacked-out houses without the barest attempt to throw up a decoration or two, houses whose denizens had long since given up the hopes of being visited, and the occasional Halloween party - lights and music booming away into the night, oblivious to the outside world. Despite his initial lack of enthusiasm, Marc wasn’t wrong about the candy. Of the few houses that kept their lights on at this hour, most were just eager to get rid of the stuff. They cared… not at all about our age or how we carried ourselves, most people were just happy to see anyone out at all these days - or they were desperate to unload the remnants of their bowls into our pillowcases.

That was the thing. It was quiet. Empty. I remembered when I was a kid - like, actually a kid. I remembered streets crowded with kids up until practically midnight, regardless of whether or not it was a school night. Nearly every house decked out - or close to, anyway - with morbid decorations. Every now again, we passed a small group of older kids, or a family of night owls pounding the pavement, but… it was almost sad, in a way.

It was the first realization I’d had that night. It wasn’t something that I’d ever noticed before, but now that it was almost over for us, I thought about how there’d be one less group of kids out there knocking on doors, yelling “Trick or treat!” at adults who probably just wanted to go to bed and being rewarded for their efforts.

The second thing was, Marc was right about something else, even if he probably… didn’t intend to be. We didn’t have to pretend to be twelve. That feeling just came naturally with the season. We might not’ve gotten the best haul, and it might not’ve been the busiest or most enthusiastic Halloween of our lives, but over the course of that night, things softened. In spite of the darkened streets, everything seemed a little brighter. Any and all conflict over the costume situation died as we started to reminisce,- and Marc stopped gazing longingly at the roaring parties we passed by when we brought up the year my mom made me dress up like a pumpkin.

I was eleven. I wanted to be, ironically enough, Ghostface.

That made him laugh, and from there, everything just fell into place. Clicked like it should. We joked about the few kids we saw in embarrassing costumes, we pointed out cool houses and tried the doors, even if the lights were long extinguished. Lori’s eyeliner got smudged, and it looked like someone’d went and decked her in the face. We laughed about that too, and slowly, over time, our pillowcases only grew in size. It was getting late now, late enough that most of the straggler houses had put out their lights. It was bittersweet, the whole thing. I was glad we did this, glad we had one last hurrah, but I knew now that we’d probably never get another shot. This, as far as I was concerned, was the end of Hallowe-

“Hey,” Marc startled me out of my thoughts, “What about that one?” With this question, he pointed down the street. I blinked, wiping the condensation from the my mask’s lenses, then saw what he was pointing to. A house sat at the end of the street, unassuming in nearly every way save for a thick layer of grime in the folds of the siding and a largely-unmaintained lawn that crept its way between the pavement stones.

Despite the lack of porch light, there was… something else I noticed immediately. A single candy bowl innocently sitting on the patio, nearly full. The sign sticking from the bowl’s edge repeated an age old mantra - a major tenet of the Halloween Code.

TAKE ONE

Lori shook her head. “No way. Nah. We don’t go there.” She beat me to it. Marc didn’t grow up in this neighborhood like we did - he lived halfway across town. When we used to go out together, we’d have one of our parents drop us off in one of the wealthier areas more likely to go hard on the decorations and pass out full-size bars. Or we’d take the bus.

In any case, Marc didn’t know the stories.

“Yeah,” I added. “That’s the Shallow House.”

“The Shallow…” I could imagine his face scrunching up under the mask, “What the hell is a Shallow House? What does that even mean?”

“It doesn’t have a basement, its the only one in the neighborhood like that.”

Lori nodded, her veil swishing in the breeze. “If you’re stupid enough to get close enough to look into the window wells, there’s just concrete behind the glass. They filled it in back in the 90s.”

“Okay, but why? What’s the deal with it? The bowl’s just sitting there. Who lives there?”

“Fuck the bowl,” Lori shook her head. “Anyway, I don’t know who lives there. It’s like eight blocks away, and it’s not like I have a reason to hang out there.”

“So what’s the problem? Let’s just grab it.”

“The problem is that you don’t know the story. Back in the 90s, this family lived there. They were pretty average, as far as I’ve heard, but their daughter was into some weird shit.” Lori thought for a moment. “I don’t remember her name, just that she had her room in the basement and she did… things down there.”

“Things?”

Lori shrugged, the ragged folds of her dress undulating. “Dunno. Some people say she was into occult shit. Her parents would travel a lot, bring back things from around the world. People would look into the windows and see her doing all sorts of shit. Staring at some of these things for hours on end, talking on IRC in servers that didn’t exist, talking to herself in the corner. She’d crawl out of the window at night and just walk around. Nothing else, just walking and walking until the police brought her home.”

“And her parents? What, they just said fuck it and left her be?”

“Hey, I wasn’t even born then. Don’t ask me. One Halloween though, she just disappeared. She never came back Left a note saying that she 'took the stairs down' - but that note was in the basement. It didn’t make any sense. Thing is, after that, her mom started doing the same thing, going down into the basement at night and talking to nothing. Standing in the corner in the dark. Scared the hell out of the dad, and he had the basement filled in. Hence the Shallow House.”

“What?”, I made a face, “No, that’s not the story I heard. I thought the whole deal was that kids used to go missing around the house on Halloween. Just random kids, no pattern. They arrested the guy who owned it, held him in jail for a while, but it kept happening - so they let him out. Then, it really got weird.”

From his body language alone, I could tell Marc wasn’t impressed. I continued anyway.

“From the basement floor, slowly the missing kids started to rise up as statues, concrete and frozen. First the tops of their heads, and then their faces and torsos. They’d move too, slowly every night as they seemed to crawl out of the floor. Anyway, he got freaked out and just filled in the basement altogether to stop it. Or maybe he sold it, and the people after did that. In any case-“

“Where the hell did you get that from?” Lori cut me off.

“Where the hell did you get your version from? Some chick in the basement who disappeared? What does that have do do with anything?”

“I just heard it somewhere, I don’t remember. I was like ten. What about yours? Kids vanishing, turning up as concrete… floor things? Wouldn’t that be in the news?”

“I mean, same. I dunno, that’s just what I heard. I think Nick might’ve told me,” I answered her. I turned back in Marc’s direction, deciding this wasn’t worth arguing about anymore. “The point is, there’s lots of bad stories about this house - so we’ve never really bothered coming here.“

“Well, I heard that you two are weenies. You guys are being stupid. None of these stories make any sense, and they’re totally different. I’m not a baby. It’s a house.” He broke away from us, walking along the cracked, overgrown path to the house, long grass catching against my robe like grasping, paper-thin fingers.

I hadn’t ever been this close to the Shallow House before, close enough to see through the windows set into the depressed wells. It was true, I could see it behind the glass. Solid concrete, poured to the very top of the window frame, and maybe even further to the base of the first floor. I shuddered, imagining the events of… well, either of our stories really, taking place beneath the immense slab. Marc reached the step first, it creaked beneath his feet. One step, then another. He was standing on the patio then, reaching down into the bowl - and then he stopped, his hand deep beneath the ocean of candy.

It only took a moment before his face began to shift, his confident smirk falling away into an ungodly scream as he reached a second hand down, clutching the first as he fell to his knees, arm still in the bowl. Lori froze, I took a step backwards - and then he started to laugh.

“You guys are so dumb,” he snickered, pulling a massive handful of candy from the bowl and stuffing it into his bag - and then another.”

Lori exhaled with a sharp puff, crossing her arms. “Seriously, not cool - and put that back, can’t you read?”

“What?”

“The sign, dude,” I added, “It says ‘TAKE ONE’. It’s a dick move.”

Marc took another handful, more slowly and deliberately this time. “Don’t be a pussy. Do you see any kids around? I don’t. It’s late, they probably just forgot the bowl out. Fair game, if you ask me.”

“Well,” I retorted, “What if you put candy out and forgot about it? How’d you like it if someone rolled up and took all your candy? Maybe you wanted leftovers. Maybe you wanted to use it for next year?”

“Maybe you’re a pussy.”

“Just put it back. It's a Halloween rule.” Lori exhaled again, something between a grunt and a sigh.

“Jesus, what is wrong with you guys? It’s a bowl of candy, who cares?” He leaned down again and picked up the bowl, coming down the steps towards us. Grinning, he reached inside and stuffed the last two handfuls directly into our pillowcases. “See? Wow, look at all the candy. Almost doubled our haul. You’re welcome.” He tossed the now-empty bowl to the side. It landed in the grass with a thud, the paper sign gently fluttering to the ground nearby.

Marc turned and walked past us, back towards the road. “What is wrong with you?” Lori shouted after him. “What gives?”

“What gives?” He answered, looking back. “What gives is that I don’t care about any of this Halloween crap. It’s for kids. I just thought it’d be fun to hang out and get some free stuff. Guess not, because I apparently didn’t notice the sticks you had up your asses.” He reached upwards, pulling the mask from his face and dangling it mid-air. “This?”, he said, shacking the pale mask, “I don’t give a *shit* about this. I could’ve been at a party or something.”

“Then why’d you even bother to show up?”

“Because I thought we’d have fun. I didn’t think I’d get lectured like you’re my mom. First it was the costume, now this shit. Go figure - I was wrong.”

“Yeah… fun.” Lori said quietly, her eyes cast downwards towards the sidewalk. “I guess I was wrong too.”

---

The walk home was awkward, to say the least. None of us talked. We mostly kept our heads low, stared at the ground. Our bags were full, sure, swaying and heavy - but there was dirty candy in there. Didn’t feel right. By the time we got home, Marc seemed like he’d cooled off a bit, but I could tell Lori was pissed. Would barely look at him.

The original plan was that we’d have a sleepover. Make some pizza, hell maybe we’d watch Scream - but any notion of a fun hangout was dashed. Lori just grabbed her stuff and walked home, but Marc didn’t have that luxury. His parents were long asleep, which meant we were stuck. There was no pizza, there was no movie, just silence - save for the occasional nod, grunt, or other noncommital form of acknowledgment. I wasn’t that mad at him, and I doubted he was that mad at me, but I could tell he probably thought he made an ass out of himself.

He was right, but it was fine. I didn’t care. I gave him space anyway. We set up on the couches, and that was that. We went to sleep.

…

I woke up maybe an hour or two later. My mouth felt like sandpaper, and I was too stupid to fill up a glass beforehand, so I slid off the couch and went to grab a drink from the bathroom tap. Degenerate, but… whatever. It was water, it was cold.

It was when I came back that I noticed. Marc was gone.

His blanket was on the floor, and I figured he just went off to use the bathroom or something. I waited five, ten minutes, but he never showed. Never heard a flush, or the tap or anything. Maybe he was uncomfortable with the whole sleepover thing now, that’s what I thought - so I looked around the house. Checked to see if he relocated to the living room, my bedroom, but nothing. Did he somehow manage to get his parents to take him home? Well, that didn’t make any sense, because all his stuff was still here.

So, what gives? In a last ditch effort, I took out my phone and shot him a text.

Me - 01:46

Hey, you good man?

Its cool if you went home, no beef we’re good

You forgot your stuff though

I waited a couple minutes. I really didn’t want to have to call him, but I was thinking I didn’t have much of a choice - then, he responded, my phone buzzing on the coffee table. I picked it up, checking the notification.

Marc - 01:46

going home

Me - 01:46

Yeah, but you forgot your stuff.

Do you want me to bring it to school on monday or

Marc - 01:47

dont need it im going home

Me - 01:48

What do you mean? Your mom come and pick you up? You didn’t just leave the candy, you’ve got like clothes and stuff. And your 3DS.

Marc - 01:48

walking not far

down

I almost couldn’t believe it. Walking? He lived on the other side of town, that’d take him all night - and it was dark as hell out there. He was typing really... weird too. I scrolled up a few, and yeah, just like I thought, from earlier that night he was using capitalization and punctuation and the like. Quickly I shot Lori a couple messages too.

Me - 01:48

Hey, you up?

You heard from Marc?

Lori - 01:49

no, fuck marc

dude sucks lol

Me - 01:49

Yeah, I know but he just disappeared and he’s acting weird when I’m texting him

Lori - 01:50

weird how?

like hes not being a fucking dick or what

Me - 01:50

Just weird. He told me he was going home.

Lori - 01:50

good for him

Me - 01:50

No, I mean like he’s walking

Lori - 01:51

thats like a four hour walk, wtf

doesnt he have to cut through the ravine to walk back

hes gonna die lol

Me - 01:51

I know he’s a dick but I think I’m gonna go look for him

Lori - 01:51

wtf why

Me - 01:52

Dunno, he was an asshole but I don’t want him to get hurt

He left like 15 mins ago I think, I was in the bathroom

I can probably catch up to him

Lori - 01:52

w/e

good luck

or not

sleeping now

Helpful, I thought. I switched back to Marc.

Me - 01:53

Hey, dude can you just wait?

Like, stay where you are

I’m sorry the night was shit, I dont have any hard feelings

I get it if you’re mad at me but c’mon

It’s dangerous.

Marc - 01:54

getting closer

going

down

soon

Fuck. Alright, that was it. I didn’t know what the fuck he was even talking about. Was he sleepwalking? Just crashing out? Whatever. I headed upstairs, got my shoes on, threw on my coat, and hit the pavement on my bike. Fifteen minutes - that’s not far. I doubted he was running, and even on the best of days, he wasn’t exactly an Olympic-level sprinter. It had gotten colder since earlier in the night, the wind biting at my skin as I pedaled.

I knew the direction he’d have to go to get home, at least, so I followed the trail I knew, through the various neighborhoods. Left, and right and… there was no sign of him. Not that I could see.Did he manage to reach the ravine already? That would’ve been impossible, even on a bike I’d have to ride for half an hour at least. Where the hell did he go?

I got my answer when I passed the road that ended with the Shallow House.

I squeezed my brakes, the sudden stop almost throwing me over the handlebars. “Marc!” I yelled, “What are you doing?” He was standing on the patio, right about where the candy bowl was. Standing there, his back to me, doing… nothing. “Fuck,” I whispered under my breath, leaning my bike against the nearest streetlight and scrambling towards the house. “Hey! Dude! C’mon! Like I said, I’m not mad at you! Just come back, maybe I can get my mom to take you home, I know it’s late but…”

I trailed off as I walked closer, as I noticed something. The door was open. I’d never seen that door open, I’d never seen anyone come or go, I’ve never seen anyone live there.

“Hey… Dude, just… come on.” My breath was ragged and my nerves were firing on all cylinders. “Get away from there, man.” I reached out a hand, and froze as he turned to look back at me. His eyes weren’t right. His pupils were huge, like after you go to the eye doctor - and his expression just… wasn’t. It wasn’t a neutral expression, like a blank face. It looked like the kind of face you make when you’re in a staring contest and trying not to laugh - but he didn’t look like he was going to laugh. He looked like he wanted to cry, like his eyes were really hurting.

“Home,” he said in a raspy, breathless voice - before he walked straight in.

“Marc!” I called out, catapulting over myself as I ran up the walkway. My body, my brain, and whatever constitutes a human soul were all screaming at me to back off, that this was the Shallow House, that this place was bad news. That something was very, very wrong. The stairs creaked beneath my feet. One step, then another. I was standing on the patio then - and I could see inside. It was dusty, unmaintained with rotting hardwood and. No one had lived here, not for years at least. It was just an empty, abandoned house - but the dread I felt cut through my nerve endings like a knife.

I saw Marc there, his hand on a doorknob in the hallway only a few feet from the door. “Marc!” I called again from the patio. “Okay, yeah you got me. You’re right I’m a pussy, you freaked me out. Now please just, get the fuck out of the-“

I didn’t have time to finish. With one more of those strange, imperceptible looks backwards, he turned the doorknob and opened the door. Red light spilled out from the frame, a sickly, pulsating color that lit up his face in such a horrible way. It was no color I’d seen before. No color I’d seen since. Seconds inched by like eons, and he spoke - the last word I’d ever hear him say.

“One.”

He took a step, and descended the stairs.

My own terror be damned, the adrenaline finally did its work. I bursted through the Shallow House’s doorframe like a heat-seeking missle, hurtling towards that hallway door - but my feet met only concrete beyond its frame. There was no light, there were no stairs. There was just me, a shitty old house, and an inaccessible basement, filled up to the floorboards above with cement.

I turned around, and I went home. What else was there to do?

No one ever believed me about Marc. About the Shallow House - except for Lori, but even then I could tell that as the years went by, she started to believe the story that everyone else did. Marc left in the middle of the night to walk home after an argument, and he was never seen again. Maybe he got abducted, maybe he fell down the ravine and the animals got him. Maybe he just ran away.

Sure enough, we never did Halloween again, at least not trick-or-treating. I’d stay home and hand out candy, maybe put on a horror movie in the background - but no matter what, I’d make sure to go out for a walk past that house every year. Just to see, to check if the bowl’s there. It always is, and sometimes I see kids with their parents walk up to that bowl and take a single piece - just like you’re supposed to. Sometimes I see older kids mostly, grabbing handfuls at a time. Sometimes I wonder about them, about what happens to them later.

I think, if I’m ever a parent, I’ll raise my kids like the former group. I’ll teach my kids the rules of trick-or-treating, rules so old and central to the world that even the Shallow House itself seemed to respect that age old mantra displayed on every sign in every bowl left standing on a patio. I don’t know what’s in that house, in that basement. I don’t know what puts the bowl out - and not for lack of trying to catch a glimpse each October.

Whatever it was though, it knew the rules, and it followed them- just like you should. See, Lori, Marc and I… No matter how we obtained it, willingly or not, we all walked home with the candy from that bowl.

But the Shallow House? Well... it only took one. Thank god for that.

The first one was an accident.

Costa Rica, two summers ago, a cheap trip with a guy from work. I came home with what I thought was a bite on my shoulder that wouldn't heal. It had a little hole in the middle that wept clear, and some nights it moved. I'd be lying there and feel something shift under the skin, a knuckle rolling over, and then it would stop.

The clinic nurse looked at it for about two seconds. She said botfly, the way you'd say hangnail. She cut a slab of fat off the pork in her lunch, taped it over the hole, and told me to sit in the hallway for the afternoon. I sat. After three hours something started pushing up against the fat from underneath, and she came out and peeled the tape back and put a thumb on either side of the hole and pressed.

It came up through the hole backwards, tail first, and every ring of spines on it caught on the way out, and the place it had been closed up behind it, and it was the best thing I have ever felt with my body. Better than sex. Better than the first drink of the day. A cramp letting go that I'd had my whole life without knowing it was there. She dropped it on a paper towel and showed me, a fat white grub with two black hooks, and I said thank you, and I meant it more than I have meant anything.

The hole closed in a week. I did not think about anything else.

The videos were first. There are millions of us, it turns out. People sit at their kitchen tables and film themselves squeezing things out of themselves and out of each other, and the comments underneath are all the same word, and I understood every one of them now. I watched for a month. Then I read the comments more carefully, and under the comments there are forums, and on the forums there is a man in Belize who will put eggs in a sealed tube for cash and a mailing address.

You learn the timing like wine. Botfly is five to eight weeks in the skin depending on where you put it and how warm you keep it. You tape the eggs down on a patch of skin and the larvae hatch off your body heat and go in on their own, and you don't feel it. I put the first one in my forearm so I could watch. Long sleeves at work. The guy from work asked once what happened to my arm. I said a trip. He stopped sitting with me at lunch. I slept with the arm on top of the covers. At six weeks it started pushing against the skin at night, and on a Saturday I taped the fat over it and sat on the kitchen floor with the timer going on my phone.

It was good. It was not as good. I knew what that meant. Anybody who has ever had a second drink knows what that meant.

So I did what you do. Two at once. Then four. The forearm was too easy to watch, and the watching was taking something off the top, so I went to places I couldn't see. A man in Lagos sells cloth. Overnight it, he says, or don't bother. You damp it and leave it against your skin and what's on the cloth goes in, and in nine days you have a row of them, and they come out faster than botfly, with a squeeze, no fat, no waiting. I did a row of six across my lower back and took them out with two mirrors and an arm bent the wrong way, and it took an hour, and when the last one came I had to lie down on the bathroom floor until I could stand.

Then I went deeper. Thigh. Calf. The ones in the calf take longer, and the skin there is thick, and the drag against it when they come is nothing like the arm. The feeling scales with the place. I learned that the way you learn anything, by paying for it.

The man in Belize had something else. He wouldn't say what. He said it wasn't for first-timers and it wasn't for anywhere you needed, and it needed a cut to start from. I gave it one. I put it in my left calf.

It did not sit in a pocket. The others sit in a pocket and breathe through the hole and wait. This one ate. By the fourth day the calf was hot to the touch, and by the sixth there was a smell, and when I finally cut the tape off and looked there was no hole, there was a cavity, and it was moving in there, a lot of it, and the edges were not skin anymore. I drove myself to the ER with the seat all the way back and my left leg out straight.

They flushed it. I watched. I was not supposed to watch. A nurse held my shoulder and said look at me, look at me, and I did not look at her, because what was coming out of my leg into the basin was the most I have ever felt in my life, and it did not stop for eleven minutes, and when it stopped I was crying and she thought it was the pain.

I told them it was a trip. Central America, a river, I didn't know. They believed me because why wouldn't they. They packed it and sent me home with two weeks of antibiotics and a referral I didn't use. There is a hole in my calf now I can set my thumb in to the first joint. It will never fill. I walk with a hitch. I don't think about it.

I thought about the other thing, though. It was bigger because it took more. The feeling scales with what it costs. I tested that, because that is what I am now, a man who tests that.

The webbing between my right thumb and first finger. One egg from the tube, taped. You cannot not watch that one. Eight weeks. When it came out it brought something with it, and it was bigger than the calf, and the finger doesn't close all the way anymore. I am typing this with it. The space bar is the hard one.

I didn't understand the rest of it until this spring.

The holes heal fast. They always healed fast, and I took that as luck, or being young, or whatever you take it as. But they heal too fast now, and too clean. Four days and the skin is tight and smooth and a little pink and a little warm, a bed somebody has made and turned the corner down on. Ready.

And I have not ordered anything since December. The man in Belize stopped answering in October. Lagos stopped in December. I kept meaning to find somebody else. I didn't need to. In February I found one in my thigh, in a site I had used before and never put anything back in, pushing against the skin at night the way they do. In March, two in the back row. By May I had stopped checking the sites I knew and started checking the ones I didn't, and they were there too.

Every one I ever pulled out and dropped in the sink had already left the next one behind, and not always where I'd been. I never saw it happen. I don't know how it happens. I know that fruit is sweet so an animal will carry the seed. I know the best feeling of my life is the feeling of one of them leaving. I know I have carried the seed for two years, gladly, and told myself I was the one running the farm.

I thought the wanting was my problem. The wanting is the part they made.

Which brings me to the one in my leg.

It started nine days ago as a blister on my right shin, on a patch of skin that had gone tight and pink the week before for no reason. Then the blister opened, and there was a white thread in it, and I knew what it was before I let myself know, because I have read everything there is to read, and I have never been anywhere it lives. It is not a larva. It is long. It comes out a few inches a day, as far as you wind it and not a hair more, and the only way to take it is the way people have taken it for three thousand years, wound around a stick, once a day, and if you pull, it breaks, and the rest goes back in, and you start over with a worse leg.

There is a pencil on the nightstand with three days of it wound on.

It is the biggest feeling yet. It is not close. And I get one go at it a day. That is what it is charging me.

That is what I keep landing on. The others I could take when they were ready, when I decided. This one has a schedule. I wind the pencil, a few slow turns with my bad hand, and it is the best thing in the world for about ten seconds, and then it stops, and the next one is twenty-four hours off, and nothing I do makes it sooner. I tried. On the second day I kept going. It held. I could feel it hold, all the way up inside the leg, a rope with something on the other end that knows exactly how much I weigh.

So I wait. I have the pencil and the leg up on a pillow with a towel under it and the phone, and this is what my hands are doing instead of the pencil.

The next one is at six. I set an alarm, which is funny, because I have not needed an alarm in nine days.

After that I'm going to shower and go in to work, first time in two weeks. I'll post an update when it's out. I'll be fine. The sites are all healed over. I've been checking them, and they're ready, and so am I.

It's 5:40. It's not ready yet.

"Today we have a somewhat historic weather report for you all. It seems summer wanted one last goodbye before the start of the cold season. Tell us about it, Jason."

"That's right, folks, 85 degrees," he chuckled. "85 degrees Fahrenheit, no wind, and a cloudless, sunny sky is the weather here today in Ely. This is a historic high for November in Minnesota, so put on your bathing suits and get outside to soak in the sun while you can. This is a real treat from Mother Nature. My name is Jason Sweatman with Northwood News 8, reporting live that the sun feels AMAZING."

The weatherman stretched out his arms and looked up at the sun, smiling widely, before they cut back to the anchors and finished the rest of their segment. I picked up the remote and switched to Cartoon Network.

"That explains why I woke up so hot last night," my sister said, not looking up from her phone.

Dad chortled and pointed through our sliding glass door to the backyard. "Bowser sure seems to be enjoying the weather."

Sure enough, the dog was rolling around in the grass like he always did at the start of spring when the snow finally melted.

My mom finished washing the dishes, patted her hands dry, and said, "Well, I am going to get my book and some sunscreen and join Mr. Bowser out there."

She kissed my head as she walked past and went up the stairs.

"Me too," my sister said, getting up from the table and slapping me on the back of my neck as she followed Mom.

After a minute my Dad put down his newspaper and said, "Well, I think I ought to join the ladies, bud. You going to be okay in here by yourself?"

I rubbed my stinging neck and said, "Yeah, I will just play some video games or something."

There is this condition called Xeroderma Pigmentosum where you really can't be exposed to sunlight for long at all because your skin will begin to blister and burn. I have that condition, so a day like this basically meant I was confined indoors. I didn't really mind. I am more of a homebody anyways, plus I had just gotten an Xbox for my birthday two months ago. The prospect of playing Modern Warfare 2 all day while my family didn't bother me was, in my opinion, the perfect way to spend my Saturday.

I called my buddy Hudson to see if he was already on the game.

"Nah, man," he said. "We all went to Pineridge Park. There are, like, hundreds of people here. I wish you could see it. The sun feels amazing."

I told him to let me know when he got on the game later. We had been playing video games every Saturday night since I got my Xbox, so I knew he would be.

After a few hours of grinding team deathmatch, I got hungry and went downstairs to see what Mom made for lunch. To my surprise, no one was in the kitchen or living room. I looked out the window to the backyard, and sure enough, there they were. All three of them were sitting in the lawn chairs facing the sun. Bowser was lying on his back next to them, panting lightly under the heat.

I opened the sliding glass door and called out, "Hey, Mom, are you coming in to make lunch soon?"

"Uhh, no, honey, but there are leftovers in the fridge from last night, or you can make yourself a sandwich," she said without turning around.

"Are you guys not going to eat lunch?" I asked.

"No, we are enjoying the sun," my sister said as if it were the most annoying question ever.

"It really does feel amazing out here, bud. Come sit with us for a little," Dad said.

Mom reached out and slapped him on the arm. "Oh, you know he can't do that, Chuck."

"Five minutes wouldn't hurt!"

Whatever, I thought to myself, sliding the glass door shut as they bickered. I knew I had no frame of reference for how good the sun felt on your skin, but I struggled to imagine what would make anyone want to spend more than an hour out sunbathing at a time. I made myself two PB&Js and went back up to my room.

I played more team deathmatch, checking my phone between each round to see if Hudson had tried to call me to tell me he was getting on, but I still had zero notifications. Once my eyes started to hurt from the strain of staring at my TV, I finally turned my Xbox off, leaned back into my chair, and checked the time.

"What the fuck?" I said, staring at my clock.

The clock read 7:52 PM. Had I really just played Xbox for five hours straight? I peeked through my blackout curtains, and sure enough, it was as sunny as it was when I woke up. I assumed my clock was broken and went to check the time on my phone. 7:52 PM.

I stepped out of my room and called out to the house but got no answer. I went downstairs to the kitchen and looked at the time on the oven. It said 7:53 PM. It didn't make sense. It couldn't possibly be that late; it was still so bright outside.

Looking out the sliding glass window, my heart sank a little; they were all still out there. In fact, from what I could tell, they hadn't moved an inch since I last came down for lunch. I slid open the door, and to my surprise, all three of them were in a fit of giggles as if one of them had just told the funniest joke of all time.

I called out to them, "Have you all been out here the whole time?"

My sister burst out laughing, and my dad turned around to look at me.

"There he is!" He started laughing too, but what I was seeing was far from amusing. His face was deep red, clearly badly sunburnt.

My mom turned around, smiling ear to ear. "Hey, baby! Come sit with us, just five minutes. The sun feels amazing!"

She reached out a burnt-red arm in my direction, beckoning me to join them.

I stared at them in horror. My own mother, who was always so particular about ensuring I didn't get exposed to the sun, had just tried to get me to come outside.
"Jesus fucking Christ! Have you guys not been back inside yet? Have you been using sunscreen at all?" I said, fear swelling in my chest.

"Woahhh, language!" Dad exclaimed.

"Don't worry," my sister said through fits of giggles. "Bowser has been reapplying it on us."

All three of them howled in laughter. I was so confused and uncomfortable. Were they drunk? Stoned?

I looked over at Bowser. He was panting hard now but still splayed out on the grass exactly where he was ten hours ago. I called for him to come to me, but he didn't. He opened his eyes and looked at me, wagging his tail, but didn't make any effort to stand up.

I called him again and again, offered him treats, and said all his favorite words, but nothing moved him. He just looked at me upside down and wagged his tail. The more I pleaded with Bowser to come inside the house, the harder my family laughed.

Finally, I became so humiliated, scared, and angry that I boiled over and yelled at them, "STOP FUCKING LAUGHING AT ME, YOU GUYS ARE BEING FUCKING WEIRD!" and slammed the sliding glass door shut as hard as I could, causing the glass to crack.

My sister called out, "LANGUAGE!" in her best impression of my dad's voice, before howling in laughter even harder than before.

I ran upstairs, completely forgetting about the fact that it was supposedly 8 PM but completely sunny outside, that we were supposed to have already eaten dinner, and that I was supposed to play Xbox with Hudson any moment now.

I slammed my bedroom door shut, jumped into my bed face-first, and began to cry. I cried and cried and cried, expecting at any moment that my mom or dad would come into the room to console me. Eventually, I passed out from exhaustion, and with tears still in my eyes, I fell asleep.

When I woke up the next morning I immediately felt guilty about my outburst. I had cursed out my entire family and then slammed and broke the sliding glass door they had just gotten installed last summer.

I lay in bed staring at my ceiling, contemplating yesterday's events. I convinced myself that they were probably just drunk and enjoying the nice, sunny weather, two things they did every summer anyway and that I had never experienced. How could I know what that was like, how great it was? It was probably pretty great as an adult, like their version of playing Modern Warfare with Hudson.

I was disappointed with myself. They all worked so hard each week, and the one time they got to unwind with nice weather, I had thrown a fit. My own fears of the sun and the odd timing of the weather had caused me to exaggerate the details of yesterday's events. Of course they had come back into the house. Of course they had made sure to apply sunscreen (my mother was a freak about sunscreen given my condition).

The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous and guilty I felt. I crafted my apology and headed to the kitchen to make it.

No one was there.

The oven clock read 5:36 AM. But the sun was already out, so I had assumed it was later in the day.

Everyone is still asleep, I told myself.

I went over to the glass door to inspect the damage from yesterday's tantrum. Sure enough, there was a big, splintering crack along the pane.

"Damn, goodbye Xbox. Dad is going to kill m—"

I froze.

Outside, sitting motionless in their three chairs
facing the sun, were my mom, dad, and sister. Lying next to them, stiff as a board, was my dog. In that moment I knew that they never came back inside the house, I knew that they never would. 

Hello, my name is Amanda Smith and if your reading these note, I can only presume you made the same choice I did and now, face the same consequences I face.

I won't beat around the bush, twenty years ago I sold my soul to a demon, I was a young, impatient fool. I wanted to fulfill my dream of being an actress but didn't believe I had what it took, there were all these famous, beautiful women already claiming the most desirable roles and I could barely get an unspoken part as a background character. They didn't see my value! So, when I was approached by the most handsome man I had ever seen and offered a taste, a role as the main character in a short horror film, I took that chance. It was the most splendid feeling ever, seeing myself on the big screen, being the center of attention for once! In that moment it confirmed that this is what I wanted to do! I wanted to be a STAR!

However, the glory was short lived, within a few months, the fame died down and I failed to achieve any big acting roles, I was beside myself, I was a tragedy. I thought that all the fame I deserved had been stolen by the latest one willing to sleep with the directors for their own gain. So, I went back to the area I had first met the man, a bar in a small, unknown part of the city and waited.

I went back to that bar every night for a week, finally he arrived, he came to me like before, but he didn't offer me just one small role, he offered me every perfect role I wanted, every role I deserved. In exchange, I would have to give him ownership of my soul once I died and, in my desperation, and desire I agreed. I was young, I would say I didn't know what I agreed to but the way his eye glowed fiery red, told me everything I needed to know. Yet I still said yes.

By the next day, I had been called for twelve main roles! by the end of the month I was a famous actress and as time continued my fame only grew. Yet, the good things can not last forever, on my 50th birthday, I was stabbed to death by a crazed fan. The curse of stardom I suppose. However, I was not met with fire nor flames, I was greeted by a single hotel room, number 305 and received note of my own, from the previous occupant of this room.

You see, the demon is busy, he cannot afford to continuously go back and forth from hell just to drop his latest souls off, so he gathers them all here in a sort of purgaury. One room for one soul, five hundred rooms and once this hotel is filled, he takes us down to hell. The hotel could take years to fill or even decades, for me, it been about twelve years in this limbo.

It hasn't been so bad, the tv replays repeats of your life and only occasionally glitches to fire and screams, you will always have neighbours and occasionally the demon himself may pay you a visit. He is visiting me as I write this, mostly because, he is here to take me and informed me that it is my job as the occupant of this room to prepare for your stay here.

As long as you don't cause trouble, this place can be a place of peace before damnation, just remember these three rules.

• He sees everything.
• He can punish us here.
• You are his.

Have a nice day and I will see you in hell 😄

(Please be nice, first post)

I used to love Halloween. It used to be my favorite holiday. I looked forward to it every year, and I would always become melancholy when November 1st rolled around and the festivities had finally come to an end. Now November can’t arrive soon enough. Now I despise Halloween, and everything that comes with it. It fills me with a heavy sense of dread that only becomes worse the closer we get to that cursed day.

And it’s all because of the Trick-or-Treaters in my town.

They aren’t like regular trick-or-treaters. Where in most places trick-or-treating ends fairly early, usually by about 8 or 9pm at the latest, in my town it lasts all through the night. Trick-or-Treaters can and will show up from before sunset until the crack of dawn, and you better have somebody at the front door with a candy bowl ready to greet them all night long. Work in shifts if you need to—just make sure that somebody is there. God forbid you make it to the door too late, or, even worse, run out of candy to give to them. Making them wait might annoy them, but you can usually get back on their good side if you give them a few extra sugary treats in apology. Getting caught without any candy in the house is a different story. You never know how many will show up on any given Halloween—I’ve had as few as four visitors one year, with as many as over two hundred another—and it’s for this reason that folks around here like to stock up early. Not too early, mind you—you still want to make sure you have a good stash of Halloween-themed goodies for the more picky visitors who wouldn’t eat a regular Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup to save their lives—but it’s not uncommon to see all of the stores in town picked clean of candy well before we even make it into October. And when that happens, good luck finding anything sugary  in town until November. If you find yourself low on supplies for the upcoming night, then you will likely need to drive pretty far out  of the way in search of sweets, and you had better hope that there aren’t too many other people in the same boat.

More strange than their unusual visiting hours is the fact that Trick-or-Treaters in my town don’t wear costumes. No stores in the area even bother selling any for that very reason—it would simply be too poor of an investment to do so. In most other towns, no costume means no candy, but that simply isn’t the case here. I don’t care if a Trick-or-Treater walks up to you in a white T-shirt and a pair of pajama pants—if they say those three magic words, then you had better give them their reward. In a similar vein, most towns have an age cutoff for trick-or-treaters that candy givers like to enforce. We do not. Sure, most Trick-or-Treaters who come through here certainly look young enough to pass for children, but there are plenty whose size and face would get them turned away at the door for being too old in any other town. We don’t turn anybody away here. It’s incredibly unwise to do so. Every visitor gets a treat—or else they get to perform their trick. Trust me when I say that you’re better off not being stingy with your candy.

Another oddity in my town is that the Trick-or-Treaters don’t behave like normal children. Sure, they may resemble herds of eager kids at first glance, but any amount of keen observation allows you to easily see beyond this facade. The visitors don’t talk or laugh or joke around as they move from house to house. They move about in complete silence, and with a complete lack of any sort of enthusiasm. The only words they speak are those three spoken by every trick-or-treater upon arriving at a house, but even then, there is no life behind their voices; no energy behind the things they say. It’s as if this is merely a chore to them—a task to complete each Halloween night. If this is the case, then I wish somebody would tell them that they don’t have to do this every year if they don’t want to. Maybe something compels them to do it; maybe they don’t have a choice. I do not think I will ever know the true reason for their strange behavior, but I would gladly give up the possibility of such knowledge forever if they would simply stop doing this every year. This is just wishful thinking, of course—I know such a thing is never going to happen. The Trick-or-Treaters are here to stay, and we simply have to live with that fact.

Nobody else goes trick-or-treating on Halloween night. Everybody is too busy prepping for the long night ahead to indulge in any festive activities, but even if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be able to partake in the night’s main event. Trick-or-treating is only for the Trick-or-Treaters; to encroach on their yearly ritual is an even worse infraction than not having candy to give them when they come knocking. Nobody but the Trick-or-Treaters have trick-or-treated in this town for generations. If they have it their way, nobody else in this town will trick-or-treat ever again.

I can still remember our first encounter with the Trick-or-Treaters. We had been so unprepared for them back then. I won’t ever let us be unprepared again.

My wife wasn’t happy when I told her the bad news. My job was about to relocate our family for the third time in five years, even though they had promised me that things were finally going to be stable for a while. It is for this reason that, although my new office was in a rather large city, I quickly gave in to my wife’s demands to move to a small town over an hour away from work. To call this place a town honestly feels like a stretch. It’s home to one or less of every type of business—doctor, plumber, grocery store, etcetera—and the only chain establishment for at least ten miles is a single outdated McDonald’s where most of the local teens tend to work their first jobs. The town is about as remote as it gets while still being a reasonable distance from my job, which is exactly what my wife wanted. Moving there brought her a glimmer of happiness during a very stressful, tumultuous time in our lives, so I was more than willing to give that to her.

We had moved into town in mid September. By this point folks were already well into their preparations for Halloween, and most of the stores were already beginning to run low on candy. Our daughter had been getting to know the neighbor kids, who were also her classmates; they seemed to have hit it off pretty well. By the time the beginning of October rolled around, they were already formulating plans for sleepovers. As the early days of autumn droned on and we drew closer and closer to October 31st, our daughter naturally asked her new friends about trick-or-treating plans. She was disheartened when her new friends told her that kids in our town don’t get to go trick-or-treating; they never have, her friends had said, and they never would.

That was the night she told my wife and me about the Trick-or-Treaters. She relayed the same warning to us that she had received from her classmates, which emphasized the important points that I have already discussed regarding Halloween night: always be prepared for the arrival of visitors, always maintain an ample supply of candy that you will give out to any guests who ask for it, and never partake in trick-or-treating.

Naturally, I didn’t believe a word of it. My wife didn’t either. Now I wish that we had.

My daughter, on the other hand, was a different story. She believed everything their new friends had told her about the Trick-or-Treaters, and she was absolutely terrified of them. This, combined with the fact that we were unable to find her a costume at any store in town, is what ultimately led her to abstain from trick-or-treating. We tried to convince her that her classmates were simply pulling her leg, but she wouldn’t have it. Looking back on it, her decision probably saved her life.

The night in question arrived quickly.  Much like with the Halloween costumes, my wife and I struggled to find any candy in town, but I managed to pick up a few bags on my way home from work one evening thanks to my long commute. The candy sat in our pantry for a few days until the 31st finally came, and it could at last be put to use.

Our daughter spent the night dejected in  her bedroom, feeling upset that she wasn’t out trick-or-treating, but also too afraid of what she had been told to actually want to do it. My wife and I tried to get her to come downstairs, but when that failed, we wound up spending the evening on the couch watching a movie without them.

The beginning of the night was quiet, to the point where I began to wonder if we were going to be seeing any trick-or-treaters at all. It was nearly an hour after sunset when our doorbell rang for the first time. I got up from the couch, leaving my wife to keep watching our movie as I made my way to the front door. Upon reaching my destination, I picked up the bowl of candy we had left on a table in the foyer and opened the front door before immediately offering our visitors my first “Happy Halloween!” of the night. What I saw standing there turned my lips downward into a confused frown.

Three figures resembling children, ranging in age from about eight to eleven years old, stood in front of me. They all wore plain, everyday clothing without a single costume between them, and none of them met my gaze as I offered them my greeting; instead they stood by indifferently and stared past me into the nothingness that waited there.

“Trick or treat,” they all said in unison as they held out their jack-o-lantern candy buckets.

“Shouldn’t you kids be wearing costumes?” I asked. My mind flashed back to my daughter’s warning, which my wife and I had ultimately chalked up to being unfounded—a tall tale created by a group of kids to frighten the new girl that unfortunately had done its job. I was beginning to have my doubts about this conclusion.

They all remained silent for several seconds; none of them seemed to react to my question. After a short while they simply repeated their mantra. “Trick or treat.”

My frown persisted, but after a few more moments I ultimately chose to relent. “Well, alright,” I said, offering them the bowl, “but next year make sure you’re wearing costumes, okay?”

None of them reached their hands into the bowl; none of them even looked its way. They merely kept their eyes forward as they held their buckets in the same direction. “Trick or treat.”

A sudden, inexplicable pit in my stomach told me that I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I made them repeat the phrase a fourth time. I hastily dug my hand into the bowl and produced three pieces of candy, which I placed into each bucket. Once their prizes had been received, they simply turned around and disappeared into the nighttime darkness without so much as another word.

I retreated back inside and returned the bowl to its chair. As I walked back to the living room, I once again thought back to the warning my  daughter had been given.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“You’re not going to believe this,” I said, “but they actually weren’t wearing costumes.”

My wife frowned. “Wow,” she said. “I seriously thought that was a prank.”

“Me too,” I agreed. “And if it was just a prank, I highly doubt if any of the other kids at her school would have gone out tonight without a costume just to drive it home.”

“Maybe it’s some kind of strange cultural thing in this town,” she said. “Some small towns have weird stuff like that.”

I shrugged. “I guess it would explain why we couldn’t find any costumes in the local shops.”

We were confused by this revelation, but we chalked it up as a piece of that same strange culture that can come with small, tight-knit towns, and we decided to let it rest.

More trick-or-treaters began to stop by our house as the night continued on. My wife and I passed treat duty back and forth for a while, with each of us handing out candy to a seemingly endless procession of visitors. On one of my turns, I opened the door to see four visitors that reassembled children standing with what looked to be a single adult in their late thirties or early forties. All five of them held out their orange jack-o-lantern buckets, and they all offered me the usual “trick or treat” as soon as I opened the door.

I placed candy into the buckets of all four children, but I hesitated before the lingering bucket of the adult. “Aren’t you a bit old to be trick-or-treating?” I said.

“Trick or treat,” the adult said again.

I frowned. A familiar unease filled my stomach with the second uttering of the mantra. “Insistent, aren’t you?”

“Trick or treat.”

That unease grabbed my stomach and twisted, forcing my hand. “Alright, fine,” I said, reaching into my bowl and producing a piece of candy. I briefly noted that the bowl was already getting low as I placed the candy into the bucket.

The five trick-or-treaters turned and walked away without another word.

I told my wife about the encounter, who did her best to brush it off. “I guess it can’t hurt if an adult wants to trick-or-treat with their kids,” she said. “Maybe a bit weird to be so insistent, but mostly harmless.”

I ultimately decided to agree with her, despite my reservations, and we allowed the night to continue on.

The hour grew late as we finished our second movie of the evening while munching on a few pieces of candy, and as the clock struck 11pm, we finally decided to call it a night. We went upstairs, checked on our sleeping daughter, and made our way to bed, where we expected to remain until morning.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I was suddenly awoken by the sound of our doorbell in the middle of the night.

I shot up in bed, my brain still hazy with sleep as I looked at the clock. It was 3:02a.m. Confused, I glanced over at my wife to see that she was still asleep. The doorbell chimed again, prompting me to struggle out of bed and make my way across the cold hardwood floor to our bedroom door. I grumpily proceeded down the stairs and toward the front door, opening it just as the bell rang for a third time.

Four childlike visitors, cloaked in the darkness of the 3 o’clock hour, stood on the other side of the threshold. Their words, spoken in unison, were almost baffling enough to knock me off my feet. “Trick or treat.”

“Do you kids have any idea what time it is?” I said, more than a little annoyed. “It’s 3 in the morning—well past trick-or-treating hours.”

“Trick or treat,” they said again. That familiar knot immediately returned to my stomach.

“Alright, alright,” I said quickly. “Just give me a second.”

 Temporarily retreating inside, I found the candy bowl sitting on the nearby table and immediately brought it outside. I began handing out candy before they could speak again: one piece, then two, then three, and finally—

My hand scraped the bottom of the bowl. I realized with an odd degree of dismay that I was short one piece of candy. Looking at the final trick-or-treater, I frowned. “Sorry, kid,” I said. “I’m all out.”

“Trick or treat,” the fourth child said. Its words exacerbated the already dense ball in my gut, twisting it like a stiffly tuned guitar string.

“I told you I’m out,” I stammered quickly, not sure why I was suddenly so nervous. “I’m sorry. What else do you want me to say?”

A long silence passed between the trick-or-treater and me, during which I dreaded hearing that phrase again. I felt as though that string of twelve letters would be enough to send me to my knees in an instant. All the visitor would have to do was say those three words, and I would collapse like a house of cards in the autumn breeze.

Instead, the visitor lowered its jack-o-lantern bucket, turned around, and walked away. Its companions remained still for a brief moment before they followed after their friend.

I immediately stepped back and closed the door behind them, breathing a deep sigh of relief. After taking a few moments to compose myself, I returned the empty bowl to its table, moved into the kitchen to drink a quick glass of water, and made my way back upstairs. I had almost reached the master bedroom when I suddenly saw my daughter step out of the gloom. The sight of her almost made me jump out of my skin.

“What are you doing up, honey?” I asked, trying to hide how startled I was.

“My friends told me what happens when you run out of treats,” she said, her wavering voice indicating that she was on the verge of tears. I waited for her to elaborate, but she instead turned and walked back into her room. I attempted to follow after her, but she quickly closed the door before I could. I heard its lock click shut a moment later.

I asked if she would open the door, but I received no response. Concerned, I made my way back into the bedroom and approached my wife lying on the bed.

“Hey,” I said quietly, sitting against my wife’s side of the mattress. “Are you awake? I think something is wrong with—”

I paused when I realized that my wife’s spot was empty. She was gone.

“Honey?” I said, turning on her bedside lamp. “Where are you?”

I glanced around the room in search of her, which is when I spotted the open window for the first time. The cool fall breeze drifted in through the aperture and gently tossed the partially pulled curtains. I approached the window in order to close it, which is when I quickly discovered two things. The first was that the window’s screen was missing. The second was that there was a jack-o-lantern candy bucket resting on the sill.

I stared at the bucket in stunned silence for a few moments before finally mustering the courage to reach inside. From it I pulled a single empty candy wrapper crumpled up into a loose ball. I opened the wrapper, which is when I discovered the single word scrawled on the inside that made my entire body go numb.

Trick.

The wrapper leapt from my trembling fingers and floated away on the cool November wind.

This is a story about traditions and youth—and about why some traditions may be a bad idea.

I’m twenty-five now. This happened when I was nineteen.

Every Halloween, my boyfriend Brian, his best friend James, James’s girlfriend Stacy, and I drove into the woods to tell scary stories. It was our tradition. We thought the stories were better when there were no houses, no streetlights, and nobody nearby to hear us scream.

We were wrong about that last part.

Brian packed the truck while James brought a cooler and Stacy gathered blankets. We drove until the paved road narrowed to gravel, then followed an old forestry track to a clearing deep among the trees. It wasn’t an official campsite: there was no sign, picnic table, or fire ring—just a patch of open ground surrounded by trees, with the old track disappearing into the woods on the far side.

That was how we liked it. Maximum creepiness.

We built a fire and settled in with drinks. We had brought more alcohol than we needed, which seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. We were nineteen, and none of us had much experience recognizing when we’d had enough.

The drinks went down easily. We played music from Brian’s truck, argued about which horror movies were actually scary, and traded stories about people we knew—or people we claimed to know.

Somewhere along the way, the night got away from us.

I remember laughing so hard that I spilled a drink down my shirt. I remember James trying to stand up and nearly stepping into the fire. I remember Stacy telling him he was an idiot, then laughing so hard she had to sit down.

We should have stopped drinking then.

Instead, after the bottles were mostly empty, Brian brought out the weed.

We smoked, telling ourselves it would help us relax. By then, we were drunker than we intended to be, and the combination hit us harder than we expected. The fire blurred at the edges, and conversations trailed off mid-sentence. Every little sound in the woods seemed funny—until we stopped laughing long enough to notice how dark it was.

We were nineteen, sure we were invincible, and far too pleased with ourselves to think about how isolated we were.

Eventually, we started telling scary stories.

My story was about being lost in the woods while someone—or something—chased me. I described footsteps closing in behind me whenever I looked back. The worst part, I said, would be never knowing what was following me.

Brian’s story was about being tied up, helpless and alone, in a place where nobody could hear him.

Stacy told a story about being abandoned somewhere without a phone, without money, and without any way to get home. She hated being stranded. She hated not knowing where she was even more.

James’s story was different.

He didn’t believe in ghosts or demons. He thought most frightening things had ordinary explanations and that people often ended up in trouble because they’d made a series of bad choices—not because they deserved it, he was quick to add, but because actions had consequences.

“Everything has an explanation,” he said, poking at the fire. “Even if you don’t know what it is yet.”

His story was about a man walking alone through the woods at night. He heard footsteps behind him, but every time he turned, no one was there. He heard his name whispered from the trees. He saw lights between the trunks. Each time, the man came up with a sensible reason: an animal, a branch, a reflection, someone playing a trick.

“Then what happened?” Stacy asked.

“Nothing,” James said. “He went home.”

“That’s not an ending,” I said.

“It’s the most likely ending.”

We laughed.

I remember thinking that James had missed the entire point of a scary story. If nothing happened, what was the point of telling it?

We thought we were alone out there. We thought nobody would want to scare four teenagers in the middle of the woods.

We were wrong about that, too.

By then, the fire had burned low, and the cold was beginning to creep through our clothes. Stacy complained that she was freezing and headed into her tent. James followed a few minutes later, after making sure the fire wasn’t going to spread.

Brian and I stayed up longer.

We had our own tent, and we’d been looking forward to having some time alone. We started kissing almost as soon as we zipped ourselves inside. He pulled me close, his hands warm against my back, and I ran my fingers through his hair. We were laughing between kisses, whispering things we didn’t want James to hear through the thin fabric of the tent.

Clothes started coming off. My shirt ended up somewhere near the entrance, and Brian’s jeans were kicked into a corner. We were both drunk, high, and exhausted, but at the time we thought we were perfectly capable of making our own decisions.

I remember Brian kissing my neck. I remember reaching for him and telling him to stop laughing because he was tickling me. I remember him saying something, then pulling me against his chest.

The next thing I remember clearly, I was cold.

I was standing in the woods in my underwear, my arms wrapped around myself.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t understand why I was outside. The ground was damp beneath my bare feet. My knees were muddy, and a twig had caught in my hair. The firelight was gone.

I turned in a slow circle.

No tent. No Brian. No campsite.

The trees looked taller than I remembered, their branches tangled together overhead. The darkness between them seemed unusually thick, and I couldn’t see the moon.

I tried to remember getting out of the tent.

Nothing.

“Brian?”

My voice sounded too small.

I took a few steps toward what I thought was the clearing, rubbing my arms to warm them. I told myself I must have gotten up to use the bathroom and wandered farther than I realized.

Then I heard something behind me.

“Megan...”

The voice was high and thin, as if someone were speaking through a cheap toy voice changer.

I froze.

“Megan,” it called again. “Oh, Megan...”

I knew it had to be Brian. It had to be. I was angry before I was scared.

“Brian, you asshole! This isn’t funny!”

The voice answered from somewhere among the trees.

“Megan.”

Then it came again, closer.

I turned toward it. I couldn’t see anything, but I was certain the sound had come from the left.

Then the voice spoke from directly behind me, so close that I felt its breath against the back of my neck.

“Megan.”

I ran.

I didn’t know which way I was going. I only knew I wanted distance between myself and that voice. Branches scraped my arms, and my bare feet slipped on wet leaves and caught on roots. I tried to keep the clearing in sight, but the trees closed around me. I fell hard, scraping my knees, and for one terrible second I couldn’t get my feet beneath me. Then I heard the voice again, not calling this time, only making a thin, pleased sound, and I scrambled up and ran blindly onward.

I didn’t know that the campsite was only about a hundred yards behind me.

I was running away from safety.

Brian later told me he woke on a wooden floor.

He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. His mouth was dry, his head throbbed, and for several seconds he couldn’t remember where he was.

Then he tried to move.

His wrists and ankles were tied.

He was wearing only his underwear, and the rope around his wrists was tight enough to hurt. He pulled instinctively, then stopped when he felt the fibers biting into his skin.

The room looked like a cabin. A wood stove stood against one wall, with a pot simmering on top of it. A bare bulb hung over a wooden table. A stained shirt lay folded beside a knife, and dark marks discolored the floorboards near the door.

A second chair had been pulled away from the table.

Someone had arranged the room carefully. Brian was certain of that. Nothing looked accidentally misplaced.

He yelled my name.

No one answered.

The door stood open. Beyond it, the woods looked much like the ones where we’d made camp, but the trees seemed unfamiliar. There was no moonlight, no distant glow from the fire, nothing to help him judge the distance to anything.

He started working at the knots.

The person who had tied him up hadn’t done a very good job. The knots were tight enough to frighten him but loose enough that he eventually managed to free his ankles. He worked his hands loose afterward, rubbing his wrists and trying to steady his breathing.

He looked around for a phone, a flashlight, anything that might explain where he was.

There was nothing.

Then he heard something outside.

Footsteps.

Slow, deliberate footsteps on dead leaves.

Brian backed away from the door.

A voice came from the woods.

“Brian?”

It sounded like me.

He took one step toward it.

“Brian, help me!”

He stopped.

The voice had come from the left, but the open doorway showed nothing but trees. He looked back at the room: the stained shirt, the knife, the pot on the stove, and the second chair.

He remembered James’s words.

Everything has an explanation.

“There’s an explanation,” Brian said aloud. His voice shook. “There’s always an explanation.”

From somewhere behind him, a voice answered in his own voice.

“There’s always an explanation.”

Brian spun around.

No one was there.

He told me later that this was the moment he nearly lost control of himself. Not when he saw the knife, or when he realized he was tied up, but when he heard his own voice coming from an empty room.

He stood perfectly still, listening.

The stove crackled.

The pot bubbled.

Then, from somewhere outside, I screamed.

Brian ran through the open doorway.

He didn’t stop to look for a road or a path. He ran toward the sound, stumbling through brush and over fallen branches, calling my name until his throat hurt.

He couldn’t tell me how long he ran. He remembered passing a leaning tree with a split trunk, then seeing a light between the trees. He thought it was a lantern, but when he reached the spot, it was gone.

He kept running.

Eventually, he heard my voice again.

This time, it sounded real.

Stacy told me afterward that she woke because she was cold.

At first, she thought James had pulled all the blankets toward himself, as he sometimes did. She reached across the sleeping bag, expecting to find him beside her.

Instead, her hand landed on a pile of clothes and blankets tucked beneath the sleeping bag.

She sat up.

The tent was empty.

She checked her phone. The screen lit her face with a weak blue glow, and she blinked at the time, trying to make sense of it. She felt groggy, dehydrated, and a little sick from the alcohol. Her mouth tasted awful, and her head hurt.

She crawled out of the tent.

The campsite looked almost as it had when she’d fallen asleep: the blackened fire, the empty bottles, the truck parked near the track. The air smelled faintly of smoke and weed.

“James?”

No answer.

She went to our tent and hesitated before opening it, not wanting to walk in on Brian and me. We were known to be affectionate, especially after a few drinks.

“Brian? Megan?”

No one answered.

She unzipped the tent.

It was empty. Our things were scattered around the floor, and our clothes were still there, but Brian and I were gone.

Stacy stood very still.

Being alone was her worst fear. She didn’t have a good sense of direction, and she’d always relied on James to figure out where they were going, where they’d parked, and how to get home.

Now she couldn’t even see the end of the track.

She called our names again, louder this time.

Nothing answered.

Then she noticed the blood.

A small, dark stain marked the inside of her underwear. Her period had started while she slept, just as she’d expected it might. Ordinarily, it would have been an inconvenience and nothing more. She had supplies in her toiletry bag.

But the bag was inside her tent, and suddenly the tent felt like another place where someone could be waiting for her.

She stood in the open for several seconds, cold air prickling her bare legs, trying to decide whether she could bear to go back inside. Then she felt a warm, damp tackiness against her skin and knew she couldn’t simply ignore it. If she kept moving, she’d stain the clothes she had on, and she had no idea how long she’d be out there.

She switched on her phone’s flashlight and hurried back to the tent, keeping the beam on the ground and the entrance. Inside, every shape looked wrong for a moment: the sleeping bags, the heap of clothes, the empty space where James should have been. She found a pad in her toiletry bag and changed as quickly as she could, one hand holding the phone while the other fumbled with the packaging.

A noise sounded outside the tent.

She froze, listening.

Nothing followed. No footsteps. No voice. Only the faint hiss of the phone’s speaker and her own breathing.

She finished, shoved the used wrapper into her bag, and crawled out without looking back.

She was embarrassed afterward by how much time she’d spent frightened by something so ordinary. But it had forced her into the tent alone, with no clear view of the clearing, and she’d hated every second of it.

She wanted James.

She wanted the truck keys.

She wanted to be somewhere with lights and walls and a locked door.

Instead, she was alone in the woods, cold and uncomfortable, with a dead fire and no idea where her friends had gone.

She called James again.

A little bell rang in the woods.

Stacy stopped.

The sound was delicate and almost cheerful, completely out of place in the darkness.

She waited.

The bell rang again, farther away.

“James?”

Silence.

Then it rang a third time, close enough that she turned toward the trees before she could stop herself.

Stacy backed toward the truck. She could see the driver’s door, but she couldn’t remember where Brian had put the keys. She checked her pockets, then the ground beside the fire, then the pockets again. The cold made her fingers clumsy; the fear made them worse.

The bell rang once more.

“Stacy?”

She nearly dropped her phone.

It was James’s voice, coming from beyond the trees.

For one desperate second, relief came before suspicion. She took a step toward it, then another, until she remembered the story he’d told by the fire: the man who heard voices and found an explanation for every sound.

“James, if that’s you, come into the clearing!” she shouted.

No answer.

The bell gave a single bright chime.

Then James’s voice came from the opposite side of the clearing.

“Stacy, come here.”

She turned so quickly the phone beam swept wildly across the truck and the trees. The voice had not merely sounded farther away. It had moved. Or something had made it sound as if it had.

A soft scrape came from the truck’s far side.

Stacy stared at the vehicle. She couldn’t see anyone beside it, but for a moment she thought a darker shape was sitting behind the windshield, in the driver’s seat.

She raised the phone’s light.

The cab was empty.

The scrape came again, low against the metal, just out of sight.

She ran to the fire and grabbed the thickest blanket she could find. She wrapped it around herself and sat with her back against the truck’s front tire, where she could see the clearing and the track at the same time.

She didn’t follow the bell.

She didn’t go into the woods.

She called for help until her voice grew hoarse, then sat in the darkness listening for the sound of someone approaching.

At one point, she heard footsteps on the track.

She stood up so quickly the blanket fell off her shoulders.

“Hello?”

The footsteps stopped.

“James?”

Nothing.

Then, from somewhere just beyond the edge of the clearing, a voice whispered:

“Nobody’s coming.”

Stacy screamed.

The sound echoed through the trees.

She never saw who had spoken.

James told us his story later, in fragments. Some details changed between retellings. He could never agree with Brian on how long we’d been missing, and he insisted that certain things happened in a different order than Brian remembered.

He woke up on a narrow path beneath the trees.

He was fully dressed. His phone was gone, and he had no idea how he’d gotten there. He remembered falling asleep in the tent beside Stacy, then nothing until he opened his eyes to the darkness.

For a moment, he sat still and listened.

Then he stood and looked carefully at the ground.

The path was covered in leaves, but he could see faint marks where someone had walked ahead of him. The ground sloped gently downward, and he could feel a light breeze against his face.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Someone moved us. That’s all.”

He followed the path.

A few minutes later, he heard footsteps behind him.

He stopped.

The footsteps stopped, too.

James turned around.

Nothing.

“Very funny,” he called.

The trees gave no answer.

He walked on. The footsteps started again.

James turned quickly this time.

A pale shape slipped between two trunks.

He stared at it, breathing hard.

“Someone’s out there,” he said. “That’s what’s happening.”

He kept moving, studying the slope of the ground, the direction of the breeze, and the gaps between the trees. He chose a direction and fixed landmarks in his mind, determined not to chase every sound. The path dipped, curved around a stand of firs, then rose again. He thought he could smell smoke, which meant the campsite might be close—or that someone else had a fire.

A branch snapped behind him.

James turned at once.

Nothing.

He waited, counting slowly to ten. When no one appeared, he crouched and examined the ground. There were footprints in the mud, though the edges were soft and the pattern unclear. He couldn’t tell whether they belonged to him, to one of us, or to a stranger. That uncertainty annoyed him. He wanted evidence, not impressions.

He continued along the path.

Then Stacy called his name.

“James!”

The voice came from ahead, so clearly that he could hear the breath between the syllables.

He didn’t move.

“James, over here!”

He looked for a person between the trunks, a light, or any sign of movement. Nothing. He called back, “If that’s you, tell me where the truck is!”

The woods stayed silent.

A moment later, the same voice spoke from behind him.

“James.”

He turned slowly this time. The sound had shifted without the rustle of someone crossing the leaves, without a footstep, without anything he could use to explain it.

“There’s an explanation,” he said, but now it sounded less like a conclusion than a request.

The path opened into a small clearing. A lantern hung from a low branch, swaying gently despite the still air. Beneath it, muddy footprints led to a tree and stopped. Someone had carved a word into the bark.

WHY?

James approached carefully, looking for wire, a speaker, a hidden track—anything that might turn the scene into a trick. The cut in the bark was dark with moisture, and the edges had weathered smoothly. It looked old.

That was worse than if it had been fresh. If someone had made it tonight, he could imagine a person standing there with a knife. If it was old, then he had no idea what he was looking at or why it had been left for him to find.

He heard a click behind him.

The lantern went out.

Something brushed his shoulder.

James recoiled, striking the tree with his elbow. A laugh came from the darkness—not a distant echo, but a short, breathy laugh close enough that he felt it more than heard it.

He ran.

He ran until the path opened into another stretch of woods, where he finally stopped, bent over and gasping for breath. He told us later that he had never been so frightened in his life.

Not because he believed in ghosts.

Because he no longer trusted his own ability to distinguish an ordinary explanation from a convenient one.

By then, I had fallen hard enough to scrape my knees, and the voice had stopped following me.

That somehow made things worse.

I stood among the trees, shivering and trying to get my bearings. My arms were covered in scratches, and my feet hurt. I had no idea which direction I’d run or how far I was from the campsite.

I tried to retrace my steps.

Every tree looked the same.

Then I saw a light.

It was small and yellow, bobbing between the trunks.

I ran toward it, crying now, too tired to care how foolish I looked.

“Brian!”

The light vanished.

I stopped.

For a few seconds, I could hear only my own breathing.

Then a voice came from ahead.

“Megan?”

This time, it sounded real.

“Brian!”

I ran toward it. A few seconds later, he emerged from the trees, pale and shaking, his wrists red where the ropes had been.

We grabbed each other.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There was a cabin—or something that looked like one. I was tied up. There was blood everywhere.”

I looked at his wrists.

“Oh my God. Brian, what happened to you?”

“I don’t know!”

He sounded angry, but it was fear. I could hear it in his voice.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

A crashing sound came from the woods behind us.

We ran.

We didn’t stop until we reached the campsite.

Stacy was sitting beside the truck with a blanket around her shoulders. When she saw us, she stood so quickly that the blanket fell off.

“Megan! Brian!”

We ran to her. She clung to us, crying and laughing at the same time.

“Where’s James?” Brian asked.

A voice called from the trees.

“Over here!”

James stumbled into the clearing a moment later. He was pale, muddy, and breathing hard. He looked at each of us as if he needed to make sure we were real.

Stacy grabbed his arm.

“Where have you been?”

James opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

He patted his pockets automatically and found the truck keys still there.

For a while, nobody spoke.

We stood together in the middle of the clearing, listening to the woods. Every small sound made us turn. A branch snapped somewhere in the darkness, and all four of us flinched at once.

Brian wouldn’t let go of my hand. Stacy kept looking over her shoulder. James stared at the tree line, his jaw clenched.

I was suddenly aware of how cold I was. My skin prickled in the night air, and my bare feet were filthy. Brian was standing beside me in his underwear, shaking so badly that I could feel it through the hand he was gripping.

Normally, I would have been mortified. I would have wanted to find my clothes, cover myself, and demand to know what had happened.

But I couldn’t make myself care.

I didn’t care that I was half-naked in front of my friends. I didn’t care that my clothes were back in the tent. I didn’t even care about the cold anymore.

All I could think about was getting away from the trees.

“Let’s get in the truck,” I said.

Nobody argued.

Brian moved toward the passenger side, still looking over his shoulder at the trees. James unlocked the doors, and we piled into the cab, all four of us crowding together, leaving the blankets and everything else behind.

James slid behind the wheel. Brian sat beside him in his underwear, his arms folded tightly across his chest, while Stacy and I squeezed into the back.

Only after the doors were locked did I realize that Brian and I were still in our underwear. I pulled my knees toward my chest and tried to stop shivering. Brian kept staring out the windshield, his hands clenched together.

Neither of us said anything about our clothes.

We were too frightened to care.

For the next several hours, we sat there with the engine off, too afraid to go back into the woods and too afraid to fall asleep.

We didn’t talk much. When we did, we spoke in low voices, as if someone might hear us.

At one point, Stacy whispered that she’d heard someone say nobody was coming.

Brian turned toward her.

“What?”

She told us about the bell, the voice, and the shape she’d thought she’d seen behind the windshield.

James stared at her.

“I heard you calling me,” he said.

“I never left the campsite.”

“I know.”

“Then who was it?”

James looked out the window.

“I don’t know.”

Nobody tried to answer that question.

When the sun came up, the woods looked ordinary again. Our tents were still standing. The bottles and blankets were scattered around the campsite. The fire had burned down to a layer of ash.

We searched the immediate area together, staying close enough that we could see one another. We found no building, no lantern, no obvious path leading away from the clearing. The old forestry track continued in one direction, but it was the same track we’d driven in on.

Brian had rope marks on his wrists. I had scratches on my arms and knees. James’s clothes were muddy, and Stacy’s voice was hoarse from calling for us. We all changed and were eager to get home and shower.

We drove to town and reported what had happened.

The police took us seriously enough to ask detailed questions and check the area. They photographed Brian’s wrists and my injuries. They asked about the alcohol, the marijuana, and how much we remembered. They asked whether we’d argued with anyone, whether we’d seen other vehicles, and whether we’d noticed anyone following us.

We answered as honestly as we could.

The problem was that we couldn’t agree on everything.

Brian remembered a cabin with a stove and a table. James remembered a lantern and a carved word. Stacy remembered a bell and a voice. I remembered walking alone in the woods and hearing someone call my name.

None of us could provide a reliable location for the things we’d seen.

The officers followed the forestry track and checked the accessible ground around the clearing. They found old tire marks among the tracks left by our truck and other visitors, but nothing they could confidently connect to what had happened. They found no cabin in the area we described, although none of us could point to the exact place where Brian had been held.

The police didn’t tell us that nothing had happened. They simply couldn’t establish what had happened, or who had done it.

We never learned who had been in the woods that night.

 

My grandpa passed away recently and as such I had been drafted by my parents to help remove his personal effects and items from his home. I was tasked with starting in the attic and working my way down.

When I got up there it was as you'd expect an 86 year old man's attic to be, filled with clutter and junk from decades gone by. I started with hauling the larger items like bulky boxes of clothing, some jewellery containers, an old-timey sewing machine and such.

Whilst moving a particularly heavy shelving unit I knocked some clutter off the top of it and with a thump, an ornate wooden lockbox rolled to a stop at my foot. Normally I'd have kicked it to the side and continued hauling but something about this box caught my eye. Something drew me towards it in a way I haven't felt before.

I picked up the box and as you'd expect, it was locked. One thing I noticed right away though were deep scratch marks all around the keyhole which typically I would chalk up to years of a key being shoddily pressed in at the wrong angle, but they grooves were deep, too deep for a key scratch.

This is where things start to get weird. I took the box to my parents and asked if they knew what it was and upon locking eyes with it, my fathers face turned white as a ghost. He held his composure as he lied to my face about having no idea what it was, so I chucked the box into my hoodie front pouch so I could study it later.

I'm a lock pick enthusiast so it wasn't very hard to gain entry. Sat at my desk I opened up the box and was greeted with a red velvet inlay with two items within. A leather-bound journal and a brass pocket watch. Both looked stained and dishevelled.

I picked up the journal and flipped to the first page.

Oct. 9th, 1878. Cheyenne River.

"Came upon a dead man in a dry wash, not a mark on him, and the coyotes wouldn’t go near. Found a watch in his vest, stopped at five exactly. I ain’t gonna set down what I seen when I took hold of it. Next I knowed I was layin’ in the dirt and the damn thing was tickin’, and I never wound it. Nobody had to tell me the terms. I knowed ’em like I know my own name: five in a year, or I go under and five more with me, and not a one of ’em will ever know why.

Walked off a good half mile and found it in my fist. Traded a skinner at the fort for this book, so I aim to keep a tally here and not lose count. I’ve took to eyeing the men in camp different. That watch runs quieter when I do.

E. Varney"

Then the second page had 3 names on it with crosses through them along with this passage.

"Feb. 2nd, 1879. Fort Pierre.

Three of ’em now. I’ll not set down how. Walt, Ezra, the widow. I wash my hands till the skin cracks and I can still feel the warm of it. I was a soldier once and thought I knowed what it was to be sick over a killing, but this is a different sickness. This one don’t pass.

I said it out loud last night so’s the dark could hear me: no more. Then I took the watch and went down to the river with a notion of settling the matter my own way, and ending it where it started. I’ll not write what I done there. I will only say I woke on the bank at first light with the cold in my bones, breathing, and the watch ticking in my fist like it had been waiting on me. It ain’t done with me, and I reckon I know now what it meant by five more. I can’t even leave it the cheap way without the debt going to somebody else.

It’s took to ticking louder since. Yesterday I looked at the cook a long while, and I liked what I was thinking. That’s the part I can’t abide. Not the doing, but the liking. I put the watch in the river Tuesday and this mornin’ it was in my coat, dry, and the hands set to five 'o' clock.

E. Varney"

A final entry.

"April 12th, 1879. Fort Pierre, in the jail.

The judge read it out as four, and he had it right. I never argued. I hang Friday at sunup. I do not fear the rope.

What I fear most is the count. The watch asked for five and I fell one short, and I have never heard of a debt that dies with the man who owes it. I do not think it will let me go. I think I will be left somewhere between, neither under nor risen, still hearing it tick. I tried to take the watch with me once and it would not be taken. Now I wonder if it was only waiting for a better door.

Amos, I am leaving you this book. I have no land to give you and no name worth carrying, only this. Do not touch it and do not let it be touched.

E. Varney"

The pages after contained various old news clippings, one of which detailed the day Varney died.

"THE PIERRE WEEKLY SIGNAL
Saturday, April 19th, 1879

“THE FIFTH-HOUR FIEND” MEETS HIS END AT FORT PIERRE

Elias Varney, styled by the territorial press “The Fifth-Hour Fiend” for the hour at which the bodies were invariably found, was hanged at sunup yesterday before some two hundred, for the murders of four persons in this vicinity. He mounted the gallows unassisted and declined to speak. The physician pronounced him dead at seven minutes past six. The prisoner’s pocket watch, held by the sheriff, was heard by several to cease ticking the very instant the drop came, and has not been heard since. His effects are to be forwarded to a son, one Amos Varney, near Deadwood, the county declining to keep them."

It's safe to say this set my mind racing. I stared at the watch resting on my desk. There are so many questions unanswered such as how did a western pocket-watch make it's way to my grandfathers attic in London? Did the Sheriff become cursed after contact? What does my father know? Is it reversible in any way?

Unfortunately though, I haven't been entirely honest in my retelling. You see, in the excitement of picking the lock, the journal was not the first thing I picked up...

It's currently set to 5 'o' clock and won't stop ticking...

At 11:43 last Tuesday night, the pedestrian crossing outside my workplace announced that three people were waiting to cross.

I was standing there alone.

I work the closing shift at a pharmacy. There's a four-lane road between the building and the bus stop I use to get home, with one of those talking pedestrian signals for visually impaired people.

Normally, when you press the button, a woman's recorded voice says, "Wait to cross Bell Street."

I've heard it hundreds of times.

Last Tuesday, it said something different.

"Three pedestrians waiting. Wait to cross Bell Street."

I looked around. Nobody on either side of the road.

It had been raining, and the street was practically empty. I figured they'd installed some new pedestrian-counting system and it was malfunctioning.

I didn't give it much thought until Thursday.

That night, I was standing at the same crossing with a man from the takeaway place next door. He had a bicycle and a big paper bag of food balanced on the handlebars.

I pressed the button.

"Four pedestrians waiting."

The guy looked up.

"Four?" he said.

I laughed and told him it had been doing that lately.

He shrugged. The signal changed, and we crossed.

But halfway across, I heard footsteps behind us.

Not unusual, except that the road was wet enough that I could hear each shoe slap against the asphalt.

There were three distinct sets of footsteps.

I turned around.

Nobody.

The guy with the bicycle was already ahead of me. He didn't seem to notice anything.

The footsteps stopped when I stopped.

I got on my bus and went home.

Friday was when I started getting genuinely frightened.

I'd finished work late because our card reader kept freezing. It was almost midnight by the time I got outside.

The crossing was empty.

I pressed the button.

"Five pedestrians waiting."

I actually said, "Oh, fuck off," out loud.

Then I noticed something in the window of the closed dry cleaner's beside me.

The glass reflects the pavement, especially at night when the shop is dark.

In the reflection, there were four people standing behind me.

An older woman in a pale coat. A man wearing what looked like a work uniform. Someone shorter, possibly a teenager, with a hood pulled up.

And a fourth person standing so close behind me that I could only see part of their shoulder.

I spun around.

Empty pavement.

When I turned back to the window, all four were still there.

They weren't looking at me.

They were looking across the road.

I tried moving sideways.

My reflection moved.

Theirs didn't.

Then the woman in the pale coat raised her right arm.

I watched her reach toward the pedestrian button.

The actual button, beside my elbow, clicked.

Nobody was touching it.

The speaker repeated, "Five pedestrians waiting."

I backed away so quickly I nearly tripped over the kerb.

Something brushed against my coat.

I felt it clearly. Fingers, right between my shoulder blades, pressing through the fabric.

I ran back to the pharmacy.

Our manager hadn't left yet. I told him somebody had been following me, which was technically the truth as far as I understood it.

He walked me to my car, which I'd left in the staff parking lot that day because I'd planned to take the bus and collect it the following morning.

I drove home instead.

Over the weekend I reported the crossing through the city's maintenance website. I described the announcement and the button apparently activating without being pressed.

I left out the people in the window.

Monday afternoon I got an email saying a technician had inspected the equipment and found no faults.

He also wrote that the signal didn't have pedestrian-detection capabilities. The recorded announcements were standard messages programmed into the unit.

It wasn't designed to count anyone.

I forwarded the email to my manager. He told me to stop worrying about a broken speaker.

I wish I had listened to him.

Last night I finished at 11:30.

I'd parked on the opposite side of the road specifically so I wouldn't have to use the crossing, but when I reached my car, I realized I'd left my bag in the staff room.

I considered driving around the block.

Instead, I walked back toward the crossing.

The speaker was silent. The little red hand was illuminated.

I didn't touch the button.

"One pedestrian waiting," it said.

My stomach dropped.

I stood completely still.

After a few seconds, it repeated itself.

"One pedestrian waiting."

I started to back away.

"Two pedestrians waiting."

There was a soft scraping sound behind me. Like a shoe being dragged over concrete.

I looked at the dark window of a furniture shop across the road.

In its reflection, the woman in the pale coat was standing beside me.

Closer than she'd been on Friday.

Her head was tilted toward my shoulder.

I could make out her face this time.

Her eyes were closed. Her mouth hung slightly open, and something dark had dried around her lips.

I couldn't see her in the street itself.

Only in the glass.

"Three pedestrians waiting."

The man in the work uniform appeared behind her.

I ran.

I made it maybe fifteen feet before something caught my left wrist.

It was a hand. There is no other way to describe it.

Five cold fingers wrapped around my wrist, squeezing hard enough to hurt.

I looked down.

There was nothing there.

But the skin above my watch was being pushed inward, and my hand was turning white.

I screamed and pulled.

It didn't let go.

Then the crossing announced, very calmly, "Walk sign is on to cross Bell Street."

My arm jerked backward.

Not toward the pavement.

Toward the road.

My shoes scraped across the concrete as something pulled me off the kerb. I tried grabbing the signal pole with my free hand but missed.

I remember seeing the headlights of a delivery van coming toward me.

Then there was a horn, a terrible screeching noise, and I fell.

The van stopped a few feet from where I landed.

The driver got out shouting. I was on my hands and knees in the road, crying so hard I couldn't explain what had happened.

He helped me onto the pavement.

I kept looking behind him.

In the shop window, all four figures were standing in the road.

The woman in the pale coat was closest.

Her arm was still extended.

Then the pedestrian countdown reached zero.

Every figure in the reflection turned toward me.

All at once.

The crossing announced, "Wait to cross Bell Street."

The figures disappeared.

The driver wanted to call an ambulance. I asked him to take me back to the pharmacy instead. I couldn't stand the idea of being left alone beside that road.

He did.

Before I got out, he asked me something.

"Who was the woman?"

I froze.

He said he'd seen a woman standing just behind me as he approached the crossing. He thought she'd pushed me into the road.

When he braked, he lost sight of her.

He hadn't seen anyone else.

I asked what she looked like.

He said she was wearing a light-coloured coat.

My manager drove me home. I've taken two days off work.

My wrist is badly bruised. There are five distinct marks around it, including one just below my watch where a thumb would have been.

I haven't told the police about the reflections. I've given them the driver's information and explained that someone grabbed me, but I never saw the person directly.

I don't know what else I can reasonably tell them.

This morning I was looking at pictures of the crossing on Google Street View, trying to work out whether there might be a hidden camera or something reflected in the shop windows.

One thing bothered me enough that I called the city's traffic department again.

In the pictures, the crossing has two pedestrian buttons, one on either side of Bell Street.

Both are identical.

Both have small speakers mounted underneath.

I realized something I hadn't thought about before.

Every time I heard the announcement, I was standing on the pharmacy side of the road.

But last night, I was on the opposite side.

And the speaker said, "One pedestrian waiting."

It didn't say two until I started backing away.

There was already someone standing there when I arrived.

I just couldn't see her.

I've been thinking about that all morning.

Because on Friday, the signal counted five.

And I only saw four people in the window.

It was a minute past midnight and the moon outside the castle was deliciously bright and round. I stood admiring it at the window, the fire crackling in the hearth behind me, shadows dancing along the flagstones. Though none were cast at my own feet.

Beyond the castle, the black cliffs crumbled away into a deep ravine, where dark trees bundled together like matchsticks, and a gushing river swelled between the rocks like a silverbacked serpent. The wind whistled through the broken casement of the window, chilling the air and threatening to extinguish the fire.

There was a whisper of movement on my left and one of the sisters appeared beside me, bowing her head. Her dress was a deep red, the same colour as her eyes.

“It’s a pleasant night,” I mused, raising the collar of my black coat against the chill as the moonlight dusted the windows. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders as she raised her head.

“Yes Master,” she said in a subdued tone. “However, I fear I shall ruin it with my tidings.”

I turned to her fully, examining the grave expression on her face. Her lips were pinched. “Why is that? What tidings do you bring?”

Her red eyes glowed in the firelight. A long shadow was drawn across her features. “A peasant house is in the midst of construction beside the castle.”

I stared at her for a moment. The fire crackled sharply. “A… peasant house?” I finally repeated, scoffing at her words. Surely she was mistaken. The area around my castle was a perfectly barren wasteland; the peasants in the settlements knew better than to encroach on my land without permission, never mind erect a building on my grounds. “What is this trickery?”

“No trickery, Master. Come see for yourself.”

The vampire sister turned and strode towards the opposite side of the tower, her long red gown trailing behind her like a pair of folded wings. Curious, I followed her, our footsteps silent on the stone floor. I assumed I had misunderstood her, for nobody would be foolish enough to even approach my castle. Unless they were naive or ignorant of my nature.

But as we paused by the window, and she lifted a hand to point outside, I stood aghast at what I saw. A short distance away from the front gates of my castle, visible through the fog, there was indeed a house being built. Beneath the cold glow of the moon, I saw piles of stone and wood, the loose structure of rafters and foundations already laid. What sort of fool would dare build a house so close to my castle? Who would dare to become my neighbour without first consulting the master of this tower?

I was furious and intrigued at the same time. Only the dumbest, and perhaps bravest, of men would do such a thing. And I found myself feeling very much inclined to meet him.

“The house seems deserted now,” the vampire sister observed, resting her hand against her cheek. “Perhaps they have given up?”

“Or perhaps they only build during the day, knowing the weakness the sunlight inflicts upon us creatures of the night,” I said with a harrumph.

“You are wise, Master,” she said. “Shall I take my sisters over there and tear it down? It is a stain upon your grand castle.”

I pondered her offer. “No. I should like to meet the fool first,” I decided, extending my fangs below my lips. “Perhaps he would see fit to grace my castle with his… delicious presence.”

The sister covered her mouth with a low chuckle. “I understand, Master. You would see it fit to make a meal of him?”

I nodded. “Leave the peasant house for now,” I told her, turning away from the window with a flourish of my coat. “I wish to see how far he dares to go.”

The following night, as I rose from my coffin at the heart of midnight, my first thought was of the house being built by the castle. Had more progress been made, or had the owner seen the measure of his own foolishness and deserted? It would be a shame if he had fled before a meal could be made of him.

It had been a while since I had anything to amuse me on these long nights, just as long as it had been since fresh blood had passed these lips. The peasants in the surrounding settlements had grown wise to my nature and seen fit to ward their houses, stringing garlic and crosses upon the threshold. I was only able to feed when an unwitting traveller passed by, or a fool decided to build a house directly beside my castle.

The tower was quiet as I made my way to the top, winding through the warren of rooms and climbing the narrow, crumbling stairways. The sisters were nowhere to be seen; perhaps frolicking outside in the moonlight as they so often did. I reached the highest point of the castle and strode to the window that overlooked the barren grounds. From this height, I could even glimpse the closest settlement in the far distance; a small cluster of thatched houses and burning torches that lit the foggy hills like burning eyes.

But my concern was much closer. Lowering my gaze to the land right outside the gates, I saw that the house had changed. There were more walls than yesterday, denser foundations, the first signs of carpentry. The fool really had continued building the house. Had he not been warned of the dark Count that occupied the castle? Had he not heard the rumours of the blood-feasting creatures that stalked these lands once the sun went down? Why else would he choose to dwell in my vicinity, if not for ignorance?

I shook my head, almost pitying the poor halfwit for what he had brought upon himself. But I should delight in showing him the truth soon enough; that he had elected himself a willing sacrifice for me and my hungry brides.

It was a shame that he vacated the house during the night, for I would have to wait longer to lay my eyes upon him. Would he not show himself before the house was finished?

“I see the building is progressing,” a voice whispered behind me. I’d been too lost in my thoughts to hear them approach. I turned, seeing two of the sisters behind me. They too were observing the house through the window. Their wild, windswept hair and bright eyes confirmed my suspicions that they had been dancing outside.

“Yes,” I muttered. “It would seem so.”

“What a blight upon the castle,” the other sister said, her fair skin glittering in the moonlight. “I hope the trouble is worth the meal.”

“It will be,” I said, casually flicking my hand towards the half-built dwelling, “if only the fool would hurry up and be done with it.”

The next night, more progress had been made on the building, but the owner had still not shown himself. I grew more agitated that I was allowing this to happen, but reminded myself that I would soon enough be able to quench my thirst.

So night after night, as the moon began to wane, the house’s shadow grew bigger, and my hunger grew stronger. The fool always fled before night fell, leaving the evidence of his daytime activities for me to observe. The dwelling had taken on the same shape of the peasant houses in the surrounding settlements; white stone and timber, with a long thatched roof. He had even tilled the soil into a small garden, erecting a wooden fence around the plot in front of the building. But compared to my grand castle, with its dark crumbling bricks, spiralling towers and winding, labyrinthine rooms, it was a blight. And I wanted it gone.

Finally, more than a week after the house was little more than a pile of stone and timber, one of the sisters woke me with news that the structure was finished.

I rose from my coffin, sluggish and weary from slumber, and fastened my coat about my neck. The sisters had already lit the fire, but the air was chilled.

I followed her to the window and set my gaze upon the house. A single candle sat in the windowsill, guttering in a draught. A lit candle. Did that mean the house was occupied? The fool had not fled this night.

“It’s time,” I announced, “to show this fool once and for all what happens when you anger the Count.” The other sisters joined us, and I turned towards them with a slow smile. “I hope you are hungry.”

The three sisters screeched in delight, grasping each other’s hands and dancing in circles, their gowns fluttering around their legs. The fire roared in the hearth.

But as I began to cross the room, one of the sisters stopped me with a gasp.

“Master, wait. There’s someone at the gate.” She was pointing out of the window. I peered down at the large wrought-iron gate that fronted the castle, my eyes narrowing. A figure stood by the fence, carrying a lantern. His face glowed in the flickering light, revealing a sharp, sloping nose and dark eyes.

“Who would be foolish enough to call upon me at this hour?” I snarled, my black coat twisting around me as I turned from the window.

“Perhaps your new neighbour,” one of the sisters answered, “has come to hasten our feast.”

“Perhaps,” I said, already striding towards the doorway.

The sisters swept after me, whispering amongst themselves. Flames guttered as we passed lit candles, stirring the dust at our feet and disturbing billowing cobwebs. There was a haste to our movements as we descended the tower. It had certainly been a while since we’d had prey wander into our arms like this.

Crossing the foyer, the long red carpet spilling out like blood, I threw open the doors and stepped out into the chilled night, the three sisters stepping in my wake. The moon was a pale sickle, its silvery glow dancing around my shadowless feet as the stranger at the gates called out to me.

“Hello there!”

Struck by his brazenness, I almost flew at him in anger, but restrained myself. Ignorant minds really were unfathomable. With a flick of my wrist, the gates began to creak open. The man remained at the threshold, holding his lantern aloft as he stared back at me. He was of medium build, with stocky shoulders and a mop of thick tousled hair. His clothes were poorly made, covered in dirt and patches. He had the audacity to smile at me as I glared in return.

“What business have you here at my castle?” I demanded, wanting to sate my curiosity before I sated my hunger.

The man cleared his throat, raising his lantern to the crude house sitting barely thirty metres behind him. So this was indeed the proprietor of the building; what a brave, albeit dimwitted, man he was to present himself before me like this. “I’ve just this morning finished constructing my house,” he said, not seeming to notice the displeasure on my face, “and a slight issue has come to my attention.”

“An… issue?” I repeated, my brows arching sharply.

“Yes. During the day, the leftmost tower of your castle casts a shadow over my garden,” the man said regretfully. “I hoped that you might be amicable enough to remove it. Or at the very least relocate the tower, so that it does no harm the roses I am trying to grow. All life needs sunlight, after all.”

I stared at him, completely aghast. Behind me, even the sisters had been stunned into silence. The audacity of this imbecile, to ask me to change my own castle for his benefit. The man was not right in the head, surely.

“How dare you–” I began to seethe, but the man interrupted me, lifting a finger as if hushing a child.

“I do understand it is a large undertaking I’m asking of you, but my gratitude would be immense,” he added.

“You think I care about your gratitude?” I sneered at him, clenching my fists beneath my coat. The gall of this man. Who did he think he was? “Do you know who I am?”

The man stared at me, the lanternlight dancing over his blank expression. “You are the owner of this castle, I had presumed?”

“Precisely. And what makes you think that I, as the Count of this castle, would do the bidding of a mere peasant?”

The man scowled at me, a shadow encroaching upon his face. “I shall ask you again, and I do hope you will be quite civil this time. Will you remove the tower from your castle so that my roses might see the light?”

“I don’t give a damn about your roses,” I snapped.

“Now, there’s no need to be rude,” the man said, his voice turning bristly. The shadows deepened around his eyes as he narrowed them. “I’m asking for a simple favour–”

I scoffed in his face, my rage burning beneath my skin. It took a lot to make a vampire’s blood burn hot. I almost couldn’t believe what he was saying. This fool considered the reconstruction of my ancient castle a mere favour? Asking me to tear down part of my fortress so that he might grow some roses.

I took a measured step towards him, lifting my shoulders to appear taller. My fangs were itching to taste his blood. For all the disrespect he had shown me, there was no escape. I would suck this man dry by the night’s end, leaving nothing but a fleshless husk.

“Once again, I implore you to consider my–”

I was no longer in the mood to listen to his insane ramblings. He had agitated me far too much to go back from this. I would show him, and anyone else who might learn of tonight, what happens to those who cross me.

Baring my fangs, I lunged forward, ready to sink my teeth into his neck.

In one swift motion, the man pulled his hand back into a fist and threw it towards me. Blinded partially by the lanternlight, I did not see the attack until his knuckles met my face.

Pain exploded through my jaw, and there was a terrible snap as my left fang bore the brunt of his punch, splitting completely in half. The hit landed with enough force to send me staggering backwards and, incredulous and in shock, I fell to the ground.

Dirt bit into my eyes as I landed face-down, my broken fang scraping against my lower lip. Sputtering, I raised my head, just as the man lifted his light and calmly made his way back to his house.

Behind me, the sisters watched him leave in a choked silence, before hastening to help me back to my feet.

To say I had been dealt a great humiliation was an understatement. How did a mortal man possess such strength? Enough to break one of my precious fangs and completely overpower me.

With a bruised face, and an even more bruised ego, I hobbled back into my castle, the three sisters trailing silently after me.

By the following night, the leftmost tower had been partially disassembled, leaving a gaping wound in the side of the castle. Wind gusted through like howling wraiths, immediately extinguishing any fire I tried to light, leaving a heavy chill in the air. The sisters, at least, seemed to delight in the pool of moonlight that was cast upon the open ground.

Workers had been swarming the castle all day, interrupting my sleep with their banging hammers and chiselling tools as they took the tower apart brick by brick, but I had little choice. The man had made his demands, proven his strength, and forced my hand. Now I had to destroy my own magnificent tower so that the fool might grow his roses. And I hadn’t been able to harvest even a drop of blood either.

This was a defeat, and a humiliation, that would take centuries to heal.

‘You get what you pay for’ doesn’t even come close to explaining my last apartment. It was cheap, but it was still almost more than I could afford. A top floor apartment in a run down building, nothing glamorous, pipes hissing and bumping around, thin walls, an unreliable elevator, but still manageable. It was my new home. It was good, for a while. 

For the first couple of nights, I was passed out on my bed from hauling and rearranging what little I owned, but after that, I started hearing something strange. 

Footsteps. 
Above me. 

Not creaking from the building settling, not bumps from branches hitting the roof once or twice, clear enough steps moving around on what could be the attic or something. The first day after I noticed it, I was able to trace it to my living room. They seemed to be making circles around the room above, slow steady footsteps, not stomping, simply walking in a circle. When I asked the landlord about it, he seemed confused too. “No workers are gonna be up there that time of night. You're on the top floor. There's no sixth floor. There's a little maintenance space above part of the hall, but nothing over your apartment. I’ll ask the super.” 

Shrugging it off, I assumed that was it. The super or janitor were just weirdly moving things around or maybe had zoned out. Not a big cost for living on the top floor, I planned to just ignore it and move on, maybe turn up the volume when I vegged out on the couch. After a couple of nights of hearing that, I decided to go up and check it out, maybe I’d make a new friend and get some extra help around the house if they were already up. 

Finding the stairs up, I went to check on the space above me, but it was locked. It also looked like a half-floor or something. Not enough height to fully stand up, with a narrow door. So the new friend idea was a bust. That night, they started moving heavier things around. It sounded like furniture, maybe a couch or some shelves? Every night for the next week, I heard some scraping or shuffling, step after step that seemed to start around midnight. Then the routine started changing when I turned up the volume of the tv enough that it could block out most of the noise. The footsteps moved from just the living room. They started moving in another pattern, from above my living room, to the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom, ending above my bedroom, then back again. A new pattern, with the footsteps sounding a bit more solid, but not like stomping…yet. 

After a week, the landlord finally got back to me via text. He told me no one had gone into that room in weeks, maybe months. That couldn’t be right. I texted back that I heard someone the night before, and every night for the past 2 weeks or so. Since just after I moved in! He didn’t believe me, said it might be an animal stuck up there or something, and that the super would go up there to chase it out. 

Frustrated by the lack of concern over a possible homeless person or madman squatting up there, I decided to record the noise that night. Every time I tried though, my cellphone didn’t pick up anything. It had me thinking that I really was just imagining it all, but it sounded so real. Annoyed that I couldn’t prove it, I decided to ignore it for a while, and it seemed to work, the footsteps went back to their shuffling more than full steps. 

Eventually it seemed to calm down again. I decided to have a friend over after work, we’d both had a long week and needed to relax for the weekend. 

They heard it too. 

They confirmed that it sounded like someone was taking slow steps every few seconds. I had told them about it over work after I moved, and they thought it was something like a ghost story to freak them out before I invited them over. After turning off the tv and looking up to listen more clearly, they looked a little freaked out anyway, “Why does it sound exactly like your apartment?” 

I hadn’t really noticed it before, simply thinking it was cluttered, but it DID sound like they were following the same floor plan. We decided to turn the tv back on at a much louder volume and try to ignore it again. The night was pretty much over after that, they decided to split after finishing a movie and it seemed like they definitely wanted out of there asap. 

The following day, I tried the landlord again, waiting until I could talk to them face to face. This time he got visibly uncomfortable. He asked me, “Have you responded to it?” Which got me really confused. 

“What?”
“Knocked back. Banged on the ceiling. Said anything?”

When I told him I hadn’t he got this relieved look on his face and just said, “Good, keep it that way.” before walking away. I stood there, confused and wondering what that whole interaction was about before realizing he hadn’t answered any of MY questions…or maybe he did. 

Feeling even more weirded out, I returned home and tried ignoring them again. It sounded like the landlord knew something, but didn’t want to share. Maybe it was an illegal apartment, maybe a family member was staying without paying or something. Either way, I was going to ignore it all. I was. Really. That was the plan, until the footsteps stopped one night. Right. Above. My head. 

Then they knocked three times. 
Whoever “they” were. 

I tried to resist the urge, I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help letting out a quiet, “hello?” No response other than the footsteps moving on again, more clearly this time. It annoyed me, but I thought nothing more about it. Maybe they were just happy to be acknowledged? 

That’s what I thought, until I returned from work the next day. In the elevator there was a new button. I was supposed to be on the top floor, 5, but now there was a button with a number 6 on it, just above mine. I stood there for a long time before texting the landlord to come and see it. The landlord arrived after a few minutes and saw the button. He immediately went pale, told me not to press it and just ignore it. The next morning it was gone again, and the panel was smooth, like it never existed. I wanted to press it last night, but the landlord stayed in the elevator the whole ride up. Going to the stairs, I went back up them to see if the door was unlocked now or something, but the door was gone. The stairs ended in a fresh plastered wall now. 

That wasn’t the end of it though. Even more strange things started happening. One morning, I woke up and saw a vent near my kitchen wall, it looked brand new, but I hadn’t heard any cutting or installation work last night. I even smelled some fresh cookies coming from it. From above. Another day, I heard water coming down from above. Not rain water, but water from a sink or something else. Then they turned on their own tv, I could barely hear the muffled sounds coming from above, sometimes a show, sometimes sports, but they seemed to settle on one channel a night. It was getting louder now, and the footsteps were still continuing, regardless of any other changes. 

Since the landlord was ghosting me now, I decided to check up online, see if I could find any records of the building, maybe some old tenants of the same floor. I found a picture from when the building was first completed. It had five floors. There were some articles about the building changing hands every few years, then an article about a fire on a sixth floor. Another about reconstruction up to the fifth floor. Then another article with the full six floors. Again and again, back and forth, until the last articles I could find were all mentioning the reopening with only five floors. 

After that, I noticed something else. The footsteps, they stopped moving in their usual circle. Now they were following me. A few steps behind, every time, stopping when I stopped, and continuing when I started again. I would go into the kitchen to make dinner, open some cabinets and close, then I would hear the sound a few seconds after, the cabinets slamming shut, almost like they wanted to make sure I heard them closing the cabinets too. I would get out of the shower and they’d have their own still running. The footsteps started around 10 seconds behind me. After a few days they were around 5 seconds behind, clattering plates and noise from the kitchen getting closer behind me every day, until one day I realized they were matched up, even when I cut a shower short, or stayed longer than I would have. 

At that point, I was almost ready to throw in the towel, looking up new apartments and thinking of taking any penalties for breaking my lease early. The night I heard them catch up, I lay awake in bed long after I should have. That’s when I heard it. Whispering above my bed, or maybe they were just that muffled, but I could finally hear a voice coming from above. They seemed to be talking to someone, maybe on the phone, but when I strained my ears to hear it more clearly, I ended up wishing I hadn’t. The voice I heard above my bed was my own. My voice. Talking about something I couldn’t catch clearly. I heard a few things about new apartments I’d looked up, work, and finally, hearing clearly for a second; 

“There isn't an apartment below mine.”

Nope. Nope nope nope. I went to stay over at a friend’s home that night. I started texting my landlord about moving out, even if I had to get my things shoved into a storage locker before finding a new place and couch surfing until then. I still had to get some things for work out of there, but when I did, that time I saw the button for the sixth floor in the elevator. Tapping it, nothing happened, so I went the other way. Checking the stairs again, I saw that there was a sixth floor landing now. With a door and everything, but I was NOT going to check that right now. I just grabbed some things and left again. 

At least, that was the plan. 

Turning around to walk down from the landing, I heard someone crying inside. They didn’t sound like me, instead, it sounded like someone younger. I know I shouldn’t have gone in, but if someone else had been lured up here for some reason and I left them there, I would’ve felt awful. I would have been like the landlord, ignoring the problem in front of me to protect myself. Psyching myself up, I tried the door and found it unlocked. Taking the first step into the apartment, I was stunned by what I saw. 

It was MY apartment. 
At least, at first glance. 
Same furniture arrangement.
Same dishes.
Same photos.
But subtly wrong.

Walking up to one of the pictures, I was standing next to a woman I didn’t know in one picture. Another had me visiting a landmark, some giant dinosaur. 
There were a few others, all with strangers or in places I’ve never gone. 
Walking into the kitchen, I checked the fridge, and all of the food inside had strange brands on them. Close enough to the ones I bought, but…not. 
I walked into the bedroom and found a closet of different clothes. My size for sure, but nothing in my style. 

Walking around the apartment, I saw another door, leading to a staircase that kept going up. Shutting that door quickly, I realized that the crying sound was gone. It had been gone since before I saw the pictures, and now I heard footsteps again. Below me. 

They walked from the living room to the bathroom, to my bedroom, and stopped there. I heard the bed creak a little as something dropped into it and got comfortable. I started rushing out of the apartment when my cellphone buzzed again, ringing with a call from the landlord. Picking up with trembling hands, before I could say anything I heard his tired voice on the other side, “You weren't supposed to answer it.” I shouted at him, demanding to know what the hell lived on the sixth floor, and he replied with no emotion in his voice, “Nothing. That's the problem. It builds itself out of whoever notices it.” 

Rushing out of the apartment, I started running down the stairs. I had to get out of there. I had to not think of it anymore. 

Running down.
Five.
Four.
Then, at the next landing, I saw Five again. 
Running down the next. 
Six
Every visible landing had a “Six” now

Every floor said the same thing. 
Then the knocking started. Behind every door. At the same time. 

I was freaking out too much, I looked for the fire escape and rushed down the stairs there, the alarm blaring after forcing the door open. Stumbling out of the door, instead of the alley I was in a forest. Looking around confused, I heard the knocking getting closer, coming from the other side of the fire escape’s door, so I started running. 

Moving through the woods, the knocking kept coming, from the trees, from branches, from the ground close to my feet. Turning away every time the knocking got too close, I eventually saw an orange glow in the distance, like from a Campfire. Crashing through the last bushes, I almost fell into the clearing, and saw several people turning around to see me. Normal people and none of them looked like me. I started babbling, trying to tell them what happened, why I was there, “There was an apartment…” One of the people said, “Above yours?”
 
Knock. Knock. Knock.

It was coming from the air above the clearing, 
Only I looked up. 
The others didn’t.
Nothing but stars.
 
An older guy in a green hooded coat held up a hand, “don’t answer.” He waved me closer to the Campfire, “Stay where you can see the fire.” When I asked why, he turned back to the tending the fire before responding, “Because if you wander far enough away tonight, you'll find your hallway.”

I have always known the Moon-skinned Man. I’m beginning to realise that. Memories, dreamsongs, they’re all adrift on the air of the coming end, and I have nothing to do but pluck them. Dissect them.

The first time was when I was four, I think. I was a fussy child. Or, so I’ve been told: a terror of the playpen, a regular Houdini in the booster seat. Got my mother pulled over once crawling onto the parcel shelf, waving joyful farewells to passing motorists and surly traffic officers. She loves that story. But it isn’t the one I’m telling.

No, it was my father that first day in the supermarket’s ivory halls. Always a softer touch, he would make any excuse to pluck me into his arms, or loose me on a shelf to giggle and toy with the celery tufts. Most of the other children would wail in their trolley cages, red as Spring’s Eve, their fat little fists all abuzz like five-legged mayflies. But not me. I was so fascinated by it all: the rolling produce mists, those cold fronts that swept the sleep from my eyes; the water-stained tiles that I would divine like tea leaves, reading bedtime stories on the PVC; the strangers so strange.

It’s a wonder I wasn’t lost sooner. Oh, dad did his best, kept his eye when he could, put toys in the basket as Ariadnean lures. But the labyrinth took me anyway. How could it not? It held the promise of more tastes and sights than my little life could hold.

My first memory, my first real memory, is of the toiletries aisle. Which is why I know what comes next is true: a nightmare would have a better sense of foreboding. As it stands, I snapped to consciousness before the plasticine smirk of a cartoon rabbit. A toilet roll unspooled from its paws, a Möbius strip that twisted and curled. Having been trained on so many restaurant place mats I was determined to reach the maze’s end. It wasn’t until I grew bored of the trying that I realised I was alone.

That first time when you look over your shoulder and the sweet, smiling foundations of your entire, tiny life, are no longer a whimper away from sweeping you clear of uncertainty, of pain… it is a fear you only feel once. But it is not one you forget.

I looked around. The walkways so wide, the towers so tall; their promise had rescinded. Now barren, they had become something else. Something cold. It wasn’t long until I started crying, but neither was it before I stopped. What would be the point? The only answer was the patter of salt and a strange, far off crooning. The tannoy most like, piping whatever radio scuff it could scalp that day. But then, stretched as it was by the Doppler effect and its own rotting wires, it had become a… well, I didn’t have the words. A lament, maybe.

I tottered there for a while, swaying to that wordless drone. Lulled to a waking dream of a kind reserved for office workers and the hospice dead. I hardly noticed the hand on my wrist, until it began to lead me away.

“You okay there?” The grown up said. Not my father: smaller, lankier, with a head slightly too big for his neck. He looked half a child himself, with his stippled shirt and thin hair the colour of wet straw, and eyes so blue they were almost white. The only thing that betrayed the odd ageless ugliness of the man was a narrow slash of moustache that did not quite meet in the middle.

“Hey? You okay? You okay there?” He said again. His hand closed tighter. He was sweating. “Hey, let’s get you away from here, yeah? Let’s get you away.”

I didn’t move. Not because of some survival instinct, any sense that something was wrong with the man. I like to think there was; that what happened next saved me. Or maybe that’s just the thing I tell myself, during those long nights, when I stare up at the ceiling and wonder why the Moon-skin chose me.

The name came later. There, in the aisle, with the cool air that tasted of bleach and deli, it was just the shadow. The shadow that peeled itself from nothing, from a crack in the wall where there had never been so much as a scratch, and hasn’t been since. From the place between nowhere and nevermind it stepped. Into the shade of the sweaty man who held my wrist.

“Okay? Yeah, yeah you’re okay. Just follow me, your mum’s asking for you, just out front.”

But I wasn’t looking at him. Because the shadow moved. It was… I can’t describe it. I’m sorry, but I can’t. I have tried, and in the trying may have slighted it; that man-shaped scar, Orion without his belt. It stood without standing on black feet that were not there, shuffled soundlessly as the lights bent around the space it did not fill. The only thing to it, was a strange, fuzzy membrane: drifting hair strand tendrils of many colours, greens and greys and blues, and some I had not lived long enough to name. They wavered like seaweed from a thin white base, an outline loosely in the shape of a person. Like a toddler’s sketch, or the space left behind when you cut from a photograph with blunted scissors.

I watched as it stepped behind the sweaty man, and knew that if it had eyes they would be affixed to mine. Then, it raised its… I suppose you’d call them hands, to its absence of a face. It held the pose for a long, dark moment. Then it splayed them, the membrane strands twitching like tasstles. Theatrical, almost, the display of a panto villain. I knew the game, and smiled. I felt it smile back.

The man smiled too, though as he did his white eyes spun.

“Hurry now, okay? The running game, you like the running game?”

The shadow made the motion again, covered and splayed, covered and splayed. Giggling, I followed suit. Peakaboo.

“What are you-“

And then he screamed. It lasted less than a heartbeat before another sound replaced it. A gentle plinking, like a pebble breaking a pond. Then nothing. I stayed like that for a while, my hands to my eyes, giggling at all the funny noises, wondering when it would be my turn. But it never came. After a while I frowned and let my hands fall. An empty aisle greeted me; no man, no shadow. In fact the only sign they had ever been there at all was that slimy warmth at my wrist where the grown up had grabbed me, and even that was dissipating.

Disappointment filled me, but not fear; I didn’t know enough to be afraid. To my toddler brain it was another in a long line of senseless things that happened at me more than to me. Another absurdity that someone would surely explain when I was older. So I returned to the waiting and the droning, until at last my father - red faced and tousle-haired - rounded the corner at a sprint and swept me up. I began to babble at him, about the shadow and the silly man and the screaming game. But he pressed my face to the crook of his neck, and drowned me out with pleads of : “don’t do that again, don’t you EVER.” It is only then I began to cry, and as the tears rolled down my cheeks the memory went with them.

My mum loved her nonsense songs. She had sang them all her life, a habit passed down by her own mother who - even towards the end - would rock in her chair, muttering odes into the cheap flaxen blankets. And that night, when the scoldings had died down and the first seeds of an “almost lost him” story began to sprout, her singing was as clear as birdsong.

I still remember the sheet smell as she pulled them up beneath my chin, somehow both earthy and bleached. Not a pleasant scent per se, but as with all things the grit is what lodged the moment in my mind. I was looking up at her as she smiled down, her eyes clear and bright even in the afternoon wanness, as she began her little ritual. She would always start by whipping her head left, then right, as if she were a performer glancing off stage. Then, her props decided, she would sing of plush toys and supermen and fire engines all asprawl and wailing their klaxons. The room was a poor soundstage, but I loved them all the same.

Only not that night. That night, as she swept her gaze from corner to corner, it lingered on a space beside the wardrobe. A sharp slit of dark where the plaster roof jutted just a little bit lower. She seemed to frown at it, though her playful smile did not falter. In fact it grew wider as she turned back to me, her eyes bright as a spiders in starlight.

“I’ve got it,” she announced with a little giggle. “I’ve got one.” Then she began to lull:

“Moon-skinned, smooth skinned,
Hiding in your room’s skin.
Corner creeping, window peeping,
My my my.
Moon-skinned, soon skinned,
Touch upon your cool skin.
Watching and a-waiting
For a sweet young eye.”

She had never sang so beautifully. Smiled so wide. I think I saw her crying, the droplets catching on the evening dust like dew drops to cobwebs. I joined her in that. I told her I didn’t like that one, that it was scary, though I couldn’t put into words exactly why. Her smile-frown only deepened.

“Oooooooh don’t say that,” she said in a girlish, secret-sharing whisper. “He doesn’t like thaaaaat.” Then she pointed to the dark space. Only it was not quite so dark: though the protrusion remained, the space beneath had somehow lightened with night’s falling. “Oh,” my mother laughed, shaking her head. “He’s hiding. He’s on the inside.”

The next morning, with a mouth full of cornflakes and a head full of sleep, I asked her not to sing the Moonskin song again; it had followed me into my dreams, with dark spots and blue hands. She gave me a strange look. Then she told me she hadn’t sang to me that night. That she had been out with Auntie Lisa, that dad had read to me by lamplight instead.

I nodded along, said that I remembered now. But that night I watched the corner grow dark again, saw long strands branch in all their greens and greys like anti-shadows, and when they moved they rang with catgut songs. The introductions had been made, and the Moon-skinned Man was eager to play.

There were other days. All my young life the Moonskin danced, skipping stomach-pit stones across the river of my childhood. I got a dog when I was 10, a yappy little thing all fuzz and blur. Slept at my feet every night to gnaw at the nightmares. One night I awoke to a soft whimper from the bedroom corner, then a familiar plunk sound. A shade stood at the foot of my bed, and smiled without a mouth. I don’t have a dog anymore.

I began to name them, the games we played: The nights, when it would creep and sink through wallpaper tunnels, were Peekaboo; the days, where it would stain distant windows and doors like a cataract, were Keep-away; and when a playmate would vanish from the nursery, only to be found bloated and broken, with black, brackish water leaking from their death masks… I never liked Hide and Seek.

The final game - The Creeping Game - began when I was 11, though I wouldn’t know it until years later. It was the day I got glasses: my parents had taken my stories of ‘crawling, smiling shadows’ for early signs of some growing blindness. There were tests, bright lights and probing fingers. Letters to be read, flickers to be noted and catalogued. They took to my pupils with torchlight, prising the iris wide like a crowbar to a hinge, and reflecting my every vessel and vein back at itself. They grew in bloody brambles until all I could see was red and black, black and red.

‘Lenticular astigmatism.’ That’s what they decided. My eyes had been built wrong, squeezed in the womb like softened grapes, animating shadow and light into candle flame and turning all else to a wavering mulch. I hadn’t noticed; it’s always difficult to divine the ways you’re twisted from the inside. I wanted to ask if astigmatisms could walk and grin and play. But my parents were in the room, and I had learned early that they did not care for stories of the Moon-skinned Man.

So it was that I left that day with a pair of bulky specs worrying at my bridge. For the first time things were clear. Sharp. Cutting. The brush was all razors and spines, the people that passed uncanny in their clarity. My father’s face, that had been rendered so simply in my child’s mind, was now a mesa, deep and coarse; my mother clay, lovingly sculpted, but sculpted all the same. I hated the things. They brought with them an absolute reality, chiselled the haze to stone and certainty. I felt robbed of… I don’t know. Interpretation, maybe; of a choice in what my world was carved from.

As soon as I was home and safely tucked within my room I tore them loose. But they were cheap, catching things, and a tuft of my hair had become entangled in the gears. When I pulled the clump came with them, an awful sucking screech playing in my skull as it did. Pain like fire, pain like frost, my scalp welling with thin blood even before my cheeks began to trickle. I clutched my head and groaned in the dark.

And the Moonskin groaned with me. A sound like ancient stone, seaweed-caked and porous. A wet, shattering moan that rang siren peals.

I lurched back, sending a patter of blood flecks arcing across the room. They fell at the feet of a rising shade, with fungal feelers of dire purple and lilac. It too was reeling, one absent hand clutched to a head without mass. Monkey See, Monkey Do: a recent favourite.

I turned from it to the glasses, clutched between my shaking fingers like a cigarette; smoke dark hair wavered from the hinge, each end tipped with a cone of salmon-pink matter where the roots had been loosed. And a thought occurred: had I ever seen this thing, that had so completely defined my life? It had always been a shadow, a shape. But perhaps it swam with features, darker darks, explanations writ in the faceless grins I could not see and yet still felt. Slowly, I began to raise the glasses. As I did the Moon-skinned Man did the same, raising a hand in perfect tandem. The fishing-line strings flexed as it did, trailing from the blurry anchor of moon skin. My eyes did not move from the place where its should be as the glasses drew higher, higher. Scalp throbbing, pumping, my pulse tapped out its trepidation in a frantic Morse as I slipped them on and saw… nothing. No migraine smear in the shape of man. No strands, bronze and platinum, drifting like the drowned. For the first time in a long, long while, I was alone.

In the years that passed between now and then, I could have called the Moonskin an imaginary… well, friend is the wrong word. But with the world in its sharpest relief, I never saw the thing again. My only games were between other children, and when next we played Hide and Seek not a one was found with anything but sweet breath in their lungs. Perhaps, I thought, it had been a juvenile nightmare that I had finally outgrown. But I never did take off the glasses. Even when caked in grime I would just take them to shower, letting the cool water run like winter rain to a window pane. Not even to sleep: I trained myself to lay abed with one shoulder pressed to the wall, and the other buffeted by a stack of pillows. It made for some uncomfortable conversations during the occasional sleepover, but was not strange enough that I drew more than a raised eyebrow and a smirk.

When time came for university, the glasses were as much a fixture as a mole, sunk with deep, enduring roots down to the bone. Not the same pair, of course. There had been some trading, always done with the quick, fluttering fingers of a man defusing a bomb. Seconds, less than seconds; I was a creature of habit, my neuroses well practiced. Perhaps that’s why I got lazy.

It happened last year. I didn’t even want to go to that damn party; it was hosted by a friend of a collegue of a bloody flatmate, a flatmate I didn’t particularly like. But exam season had come to a close and God above I needed something to drink.

I knew from the moment I entered the kitchen of that squat, ugly little flat that I had made a mistake. It stank of drink and prurience and tongue-tipping vomit. The air was stained a smokers brown; tasted of it too, all chew tobacco and copper. A speaker blared from atop a rank fridge cacked in rust spittle, pump-pump-pumping a sound too loud to divine. The crowd danced anyway, their feet screeching as their soles tore from the glue of spilled drink. I would have left, but I was blind and deaf and drunk; a half-pint of sour gin brewed poisons in my gut from the pre-drinks at home, and a stupor was descending.

I joined the maul. Sparks flew where bottle and bangle caught the light, as acid-crusted teeth strobed. Limbs like gale winds snapped at the thin air, head and hair roiling like sea foam, shoals of pale flesh churning, burning. They turned me. Soon I too was a whirl and passing from hand to hand, body to body. No pause for breath, only drink.

I never saw the blow that broke my nose. A spike of pure, concentrated agony punched through my face and out the back of my skull. My head snapped back, my teeth clashing like drawn swords as blood sprayed hot and cold, running in magma furrows down my lips. The only thing that kept me upright was the mass, the flesh, the living Bosch. I fought them like an avalanche. Adrenaline and alcohol crackled through every nerve, every synapse, my eyes blaring alarms of each shade and hue, eardrums screaming.

Eventually I was spat against a countertop. Blood hammered time against the marble, wafting iron petrichor as it cooled. My head was all moss and cotton and pain, my nose full of needles. I pressed my hands to my face to keep it from slipping away.

“Hey mate, you alright? These yours?”

A clatter followed the call as something was thrown beside me. I glanced in a haze to find the speaker, but already the throng had reclaimed them. Even if it hadn’t, I would never have found them: my eyes were thick with salt-flecked frost, tears and blood. I scrubbed them away and squinted, but the world refused to focus. It was then that fear began to supplant the ache. How badly was I hurt? Did I have a concussion? Had a clot been unstuck in the blow, working its way at that very moment to rupture and fill my head with firework viscera?

It wasn’t until I gave my eyes another desperate scrub that the obvious struck. My glasses. I looked back to the countertop to the place where the clatter had sounded. There they lay: standing on a single shattered leg, their lenses blind with cobweb cracks that drank the rich, dark blood. They looked for all the world like some clockwork insect, smashed to a ticking, winding death.

My heart slowed. Each pump came hard, and deep, and certain. I tracked my gaze from the specs, to a shard of glass that had spun further than the rest, to the bluish light that gleamed in its dead eye. Then, all pain forgotten, I traced the light to its source. And froze.

A window hung amidst the grime, through deep brazen lids that danced with stars and twine. Between the slits, a shimmer cut swathes of the party gloom into a zoetrope of jagged, juddering motion. Beyond it lay a large, rain slicked field. I had seen it on my way in: the flat was one of the cheaper lot, due in part to the crowds that would pack at its doorstep when the rugby season began. But there, with my shirt dying a crimson brown, I saw only the wine-dark grass, the endless spires of the goalposts… and the figure that swayed beneath them.

I swore.

The Moon-skinned Man stood in the arch of the pale, reaching poles with a lipless, mouthless smile. Its fingers flexed and plucked and snapped the strands that drifted from its outskirts, each curling about its very own star. The tendrils - now pink; now silver; now gold - caressed each so delicately, I could have believed they actually cradled those things so many billions of trillions of miles away. Its hands rose to its blank, grinning face… then splayed.

Peakaboo.

Then it began to creep.

Whatever alcohol still clouded me was burned out by a flush of primordial terror. I snatched the glasses from where they lay and pressed them back to my face, ignoring the volts that sparked behind my eyes where they touched my swollen flesh. I turned them on the window, and for a moment they held: once again there was clarity, and an empty field as moonless as the sky. The illusion kept for a single, cruel second before the frame creaked its last, and the final lens fell to the linoleum.

It was closer. Not by much. But enough to notice, it had made certain of that: hunched in a mockery of sneaking, it moved in a tip-toe play act as slow as glacial death.

I fell back against the crowd, their bodies a pandemonium of bone serpents and liquid snakes that spat and gouged against me. The music, Hell in notation, rose to a wild scream as I was sucked back into the mound. I scoured their faces desperately for the driver that had brought me to that place. But the air had been spiked with an all-taking joy, every face twisted into leering satyr masks, snapping and jeering, laughing and bellowing. I peeled myself from the fold like a scab and reeled against a wall. Still blind, the others had become little more than the churn of an evening tide, the window a canvas of pure white… but for the shade that stood within its frame.

I fumbled for the doorframe and half-stepped, half-threw myself through it and back into the hall. Behind me there came a God-deafening crash as the window shattered like ozone skies, and the screams of ecstasy twisted into screams of terror. I left them to it. I’m not proud of that fact; but I lived long enough to feel ashamed.

Shoving through the front door I sprawled across the driveway, barely saving my face from indenting the ruddy pink Nissan that slept upon it. I craned to look over my shoulder. The screaming had stopped, the window that looked upon the kitchen dark, so dark. I took a shuddering breath and squinted, hard. The shadows stared back.

How did I get home? Now, that’s a question. I lived near five miles away, and they were not gentle ones. I was loathe to walk them sober and sighted. But maybe that was it, I was too drunk for apprehension to take.

All I can say is that perhaps the fear had not sobered me quite as much as I had thought, because the next thing I remember is the familiar rose gold of daylight spidering across my ceiling. I was tucked abed, with wasps behind my eyelids stinging the soft tissues of my back and brain with warm agonies. I groaned and sat. That was a mistake: all at once my face was full to bursting with heat and static, blood ballooning, vomit rising. Every evil and malady worked in a tandem that middle managers could only ever dream of, unspooling gyrus and grey matter into flaxen strands. I died then, with eyes wide and screaming. But only for an instant.

Not a dream, then.

I didn’t even need to check to find my glasses missing: the familiar contours and stains of my flat had been smoothed, sanded to a uniform blur of off white mud. Outside, the city seemed to have been dropped with its paints still wet, homes and hostels little more than coffee table stains.

I dredged myself from my sheets and into fresh clothes. It was difficult work. The thought of pulling my crimson-crusted shirt over the rawness of my face was agony itself, so instead I cut it from my body with a pair of blunt kitchen scissors. I traded it for a button up - black, to hide any fresh drippings - and left for opticians.

It was a November Saturday, the sun and moon casting cold auroras across the weekend crowds. There were hundreds of them, thousands: a marketplace had made a weekly habit of spawning in a nearby allotment, choking the streets with jabbering, tote-carrying tendrils. They were frustration enough when I could see, but near enough blind? It would have been easier to navigate waist-high molasses. My heart quickened. The roads would be closed too, or so gridlocked it wouldn’t matter, so a bus was out of the question.

Side-streets, I decided, reluctantly. They, at least, would be empty. Mostly.

There was an air about the alleys and backstreets, an uneasy mist that had thickened over the last few months. They had found a boy in those tunnels, fourteen, fifteen maybe; no-one ever came to confirm it. Someone had buried a knife in his softness and ripped it wide, left him to clog the gutter drains. There were too many stories like that to count, too many even to call them tragedies. So we had left them to the ghosts, and those without choice. I passed a few: men and women with wiry knit hats and old coats drawn like hospital gowns. A few had dogs, thin, blotchy things with yellow teeth and grey muzzles, and for the first time I was glad I could not see; it made looking through them easier as they called for copper scraps.

You don’t want what I have to give, I wanted to say, but to slow would be to lose whatever head start I may have already slept away. How fast was the Moonskin moving? I knew its games, its rules. They were coming back to me like long forgotten dreams: it had its pace, and it would maintain it. That… eerie creeping, with the knees drawn high and the hands out, stretched, grasping—

“Spare something?”

I started, looked to the voice. It was a girl, sat within a small brick alcove and clutching a guitar between her knees. I couldn’t make out her face, nor did I squint to try. I wouldn’t have stopped at all had I not been so surprised.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, and tried to wave her away.

“I could busk for you,” she replied, swinging the guitar across her lap in a practiced motion. “I can sing.”

“Please, really, I can’t.”

She shrugged. Then, as I regained my stride, I heard her give a gentle laugh. And she began to play:

“Moon-skinned, smooth skinned,
Hiding in your room’s skin.
Corner creeping, window peeping,
My my my.
Moon-skinned, soon skinned,
Touch upon your cool skin.
Watching and a-waiting
For a sweet young eye.”

And then I was four years old again, my narrow ribs squeezed taut around my lungs and heart, the marrow pitter-pattering in time as I watched the thing that looked like my mother but did not love me a mote sang in that same tone, with that same voice. I turned.

Just in time to reel back, as the hands of the Moon-skinned Man closed about the space where my head had been.

I fell, staring up in silent horror at the figure, the slice of blackness that cut the heart from the morning’s dawn. As close as it had been in years. It tilted its head with an animal curiosity, hands yet to drop as its membrane flesh pulsed, squeezed, grew and shrank its featureless face. It seemed disappointed.

I scrabbled backwards, broken glass and cobbles scaring my palms and leaving sluggish trails of skin and blood. The Moonskin watched them form. Then it put its arms out to its sides, stretched in a capital T shape, and walked along the path I had left. One foot in front of the other. Tottering, as if on a tightrope, the strands that hung from it lapping at the gory trail. Still it played its awful, awful games.

I flipped to my knees and launched myself upright, fighting to keep my footing as I ran. I didn’t have the luxury to look anything other than insane as I tore down the side streets like a man possessed, spraying the reddened gravel that had embedded itself in my hands.

Eventually I found the exit onto the highstreet and barrelled through, knocking a few vacant pedestrians to the ground. I stepped over and on them, desperately keeping balance, shoving and kneading my way through the dough of shoppers. I hadn’t known exactly where the side streets would spit me out, but I had gotten lucky; the opticians stood not a hundred metres away, tucked behind an old merry-go-round squealing with rust and children. I jumped onto it to a chorus of gasps and slipped through the bars as they turned, turned, grasping the waggling tongues of fibreglass horses to keep myself steady. Then I was through, and stood in the greenish glow of the glass doors. They were automatic, damn them to hell, and in the millisecond they took to trundle apart I took another look at the path I had carved.

The Moonskin walked the furrow like a pastor amidst his flock. Ten metres away, less, a floater in the eye of the world and drifting closer with every kind, gentle step. I looked away and passed through the doors.

A receptionist said something but I darted by, making a b-line for the racks where dozens of glasses looked down at me like a jury delivering their verdict. I went to the rack with the ‘Reading Glasses’ header, and began to snatch pair after pairo. No time to read the prescription; I grabbed a handful of each kind and pressed my back against the wall, looking out at the doors where the Moonskin drew closer. I tried the first: blurry, painful. The Moonskin reached the doors. I tried the next: the world warped to fishbowl glass. The Moonskin entered. The next, the next, the next; haze, migraine, blur. The Moonskin reached through it all, a metre away, a half metre, a centimetre. Its face drew inwards as if to kiss me, swallow me, as I snatched the last pair and slipped them on with a cry of terror.

And my vision cleared. The Moon-skinned Man was gone.

I slipped to the floor, dragging stands and mirrors down with me, and wept.

They let me go. There was some talk of calling the police, but after flashing a look of pure, grey faced mania across my broken face, the staff decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. So I limped back onto the high street with a pair of fuchsia reading glasses a size and a half too small. They were a vice at my temples, but better than the alternative. I shuddered.

I can’t live like this, I thought. Trading out glasses until the day I was just a second too slow on the draw. There had to be a something I could do. Something permanent.

The solution came so readily I almost dismissed it out of hand. The game had its rules; if I could see, I was safe. And if I knew the rules, I could break them. Despite the pain and the waning fear, I found myself smiling.

It took all the money I had to hand. Even the formerly untouchable car fund I had spent the last year accruing. Surprisingly, that was the difficult part; the appointment was made within the hour, and the following morning I was inside the clinic, discussing payment plans with a stout ophthalmologist.

“Is this for the one eye, or both?”

“Both.”

“Mhm.”

He tapped something into a desktop computer that looked to have seen the millenniums turn, then looked back to me. “You’re rather young for the procedure. Ideally, we’d wait until around twenty five when your prescription has stabilised.”

“I’m not waiting.”

“Mhm.” He brushed a thick, wiry thumb across the stubble at his jaw, studying me a moment. Then he shrugged. “Not my business, I suppose. When are you available?”

“Now,” I snapped. Then, after a shallow breath: “Today, please.”

“Today?” The doctor raised his eyebrows, bushy as cattails, and gave a little smirk. “Optimistic, aren’t you?” He looked back to the computer and clicked through a few grinding tabs. “Next week, that’s our earliest. That alright?”

I bit my lip. I wanted to spit, to tell him that no, it wasn’t all bloody right. But from the impassive look he gave I knew he was well versed in desperation, and didn’t care for the taste. If I fought I would only lose ground.

“Next week,” I managed to choke.

For a long moment, his only reply was a steady, curious look. Then he gave another shrug. “Thursday then, 8:15. Now remember, no contacts, no perfumes, no lotions around the eyes. And you’ll need someone to drive you home afterwards. The laser’s been known to sting a bit.” He gave a wry smile. “Or so I’ve been told.”

After a few sleepless, furtive days thick with nightshade terrors, I stood once again in the clinic’s limelight. I would never have left at all had I not feared the Moonskin catching up, taking me in that tight sliver where I would be tied down and helpless, my eyes held wide by speculum and dread. I hoped that I had spared myself that, at least.

The doors clicked open at a minute past the hour, a minute drawn like a razor down the length of my spine. I hurried inside, gave my name, and ripped my nails ragged until I was called into a small room that smelled of wet wipes and toothpaste.

There are no words to describe how strange it felt. To have my eyes peeled like orange skins, to have the sweet jellies beneath touched in a manner they had never - should never - have known. Even numbed as they were, I still felt the coldness of the blade as it slipped beneath and gently gouged, lifting the corneas back on their plasticine hinges. And then the laser: etching, rewriting, scratching out the imperfections with nothing but a quiet, whirring song and the scent of burnt tissue. I hardly recall the aftermath, the payment, the stitch up or the exiting. But I will remember those sensations until the end.

All told, I was lucky. Aside from a slight dryness and the sensation of sand when I blinked, my vision began to recover within the first two hours. Not in the sharpest relief, but relief all the same: passing faces were more than scabs, their bodies no longer clay-limbed and worming with dark, quivering rot. I could see, without stain, without pain. I spent the day trekking through familiar paths and taking the sights in all their absolutes, their clarities. The park scampered, scuttled, things four legged and many, things chittering and singing, and I could see them all. I began to laugh.

The Moon-skinned Man laughed with me.

So gently. So kindly. A brook’s babble, a petal’s last falling. A sound certain, and clear, and so, so awful. I looked to its source.

There. At the end of a long, arcing path that swayed beneath trees both dead and dying, the shadow of their branches dyed amber in the growing sun: the familiar figure stood. And it had never been clearer.

No, I thought, my eyes burning with anguish. No this isn’t right. I solved it, I beat you.

But had I? I had spent so long assuming that sight was the trigger, the glasses a means to a temporary end. But in that moment I finally understood. The eyes, after all, are the windows to the soul; all I had done was take down the barricades.

The Moonskin began its slow, steady descent down the gently sloping trail. It grew larger as it did. Not just in perspective; the legs and arms thickened, widened. The chest, once starved and slim, began to swell. The membrane flesh had turned a brilliant azure, and with my newly fixed gaze I saw now that it was not just a featureless line jutting a scant few roots, but roots that had twisted themselves into silhouette, like maggots outlining a scrap of mulching meat. They curled in their millions, each swelling grotesquely as the Moonskin stepped closer, closer, grew wider, wider. And amidst the horror… a familiarity. Beyond nightmare, beyond memory. What the hell was it, what did it look like.

It wasn’t until the thing was thrice the size and a third of the distance that the comparison clicked. All those years ago. In the office, with the doctor, and his little prising light. They showed me. The inside of my own eye.

I stepped back on shaking legs, taking in the immensity of the thing, the living iris, the all-swallowing pupil, the glimpse of moonlight that had made itself a man. It grew ever wider, flattening its every feature until it was a shadowed disk arcing with twitching, undulating branches that shone every colour of the rainbow, latching the daylight and leeching the sky, making all the world its hideous, staring sclera.

And here I sit. In my home, my knees drawn tight and blanket wrapped about my head. A childish guard that will not save me when the horizon is swallowed and the new dark sun’s rays touch me. The city is screaming below. The city is silent. There are people running for their lives. There are people who were never born at all. But as I overlook the swelling, eternal eclipse, I see none of them. I hear only the faintest plucking of guitar strings; that sweet, gentle song.

“Moon-skinned, smooth skinned,
Hiding in your room’s skin.
Corner creeping, window peeping,
My my my.
Moon-skinned, soon skinned,
Touch upon your cool skin.
Watching and a-waiting
For a sweet young eye.”

(Part 1)

Update: I stayed awake but it didn't matter.

I said I'd stay awake and I meant it. Coffee at 11, at 1, at 2:30. Three alarms set for 3:00, 3:05, 3:10, all different sounds. I sat on the couch facing the front door with my keys in my hand, because I had this idea that if I held the keys she couldn't take them.

At 2:47 I was awake. I checked the time and thought, twenty-five minutes, I can do twenty-five minutes.

Then it was 5:04 and I was in bed. Covers pulled up. All three alarms dismissed. My phone was on the nightstand, plugged in, which I never do. My coat was on its hook and the hem was wet. I don't remember getting up. I don't remember any of it. It's not grogginess, it's just gone, like someone cut those hours out and pressed the edges together.

The camera had the clips. 03:12:33, door opens, coat, key, gate, left. 05:01:48, back up the walkway, key, deadbolt, knob. Same as every night.

But this time I watched differently. I wasn't looking at her face, I was looking at her hands. They're empty. Every clip, all seven nights, her hands are empty. She's not carrying anything. She's never carrying anything.

I went to the bridge yesterday afternoon. I told myself I was just going to look at the mud, confirm what I already knew. The white caliche was on my shoes within ten steps of the embankment, chalky and pale, exactly like what's been on my coat.

Under the bridge, where the concrete meets the dirt, there's a trench. Shallow, maybe six feet long, the mud piled neatly to one side. Like whoever's digging plans to come back and finish the job.

In the trench there was my lamp. The brass desk lamp with the green shade, the one stolen off my step three weeks ago. Clean. No rain on it. Set down carefully, like someone carried it there with both hands and placed it.

I stood there a long time. Here's what I kept coming back to: her hands are always empty in the footage. She's never holding a shovel. She's never carrying the lamp. So she didn't dig that trench, and she didn't put the lamp there.

Something else did. Something that wanted me to find it.

I've been thinking about the Sunday clip, the one where she looked into the camera and mouthed something. I said I couldn't tell what she was saying. That wasn't true. I knew the first time I slowed it down and I didn't want to write it.

She said my full name. Not the name I go by. My birth certificate name, three syllables, the one nobody's called me since I was a kid.

And here's the thing. It wasn't her mouth. I know how I look when I talk, I've seen myself on video calls a thousand times. The way the mouth moved, slow and deliberate, like sounding out something unfamiliar. That wasn't me trying to say my name. That was something wearing my face, saying my name the way you'd say the name of someone you've been waiting for.

When I was nine I walked out of the house at night and my mother found me two streets over at the edge of the ravine, barefoot. She told me I was sleepwalking. She told me the scar on my arm was from an accident. She never said what kind of accident. She put up a fence and we never talked about it again.

I called her yesterday. I asked what really happened that night. She went quiet for a long time and then she said, "You were awake, but you weren't you." She said I looked right at her and didn't know her. She said she grabbed my arm and I fought her, and that's where the scar came from, her nails. She said she's been afraid every day since that if she ever told me the truth, it would hear its name and come back.

I've lived by that freight line for six years. I've always known what time the 3:12 came through, in my body, before I ever saw a clip. The train goes over the bridge and the whole ground trembles. I think that's when it wakes up. I think that's when it calls.

The trench is six feet long. It's almost finished.

Tonight I'm going to follow her. I'm not setting alarms. If she gets up, I'm going with her. I'll update when I can.

I moved into my apartment at the beginning of the year. It was an older building with six apartments on each floor and pretty thin walls. Hearing footsteps, conversations, or doors closing in the hallway was normal. None of it bothered me until someone started knocking on my front door in the middle of the night.

The first time happened around 2 AM. I was watching something on my laptop when I heard three quiet knocks. I checked the peephole, but nobody was there. I assumed someone had knocked on the wrong door and left, although I hadn't heard any footsteps. A few nights later, it happened again. Three identical knocks. I reached the door almost immediately, but the hallway was empty. I even opened it and checked the stairs and elevator. Nothing.

Over the following weeks, the knocking continued, always between 2 and 3 AM. My neighbor across the hall hadn't heard anything and suggested teenagers might be playing tricks. It sounded reasonable, except I couldn't understand how they disappeared without making a sound. Eventually, I started wondering whether the noise was actually coming from another apartment.

I decided to record it using an old phone and a voice recording app. For two nights, nothing happened. On the third, I woke around 2:30 AM to the familiar three knocks. I stayed in bed and checked the recording the following morning. The knocks were clearly audible, but there was something else. About ten seconds before them, I heard a faint scraping noise, like something being dragged across the floor. Strangely, it sounded much closer to the phone than the knocking did. I listened repeatedly, but couldn't identify it.

A few days later, I was brushing my teeth when the knocking started again. I reached the front door within seconds and looked through the peephole. Nobody was there, and the hallway light was off. That seemed strange because the motion sensor usually activated whenever someone walked past my apartment. Then I heard another knock, just one, much quieter than the others. I was standing right against the door, but the sound seemed to come from somewhere near my knees. I looked beneath the door, expecting to see someone's shoes or a shadow. There was nothing. Then someone whispered my name. It was barely audible, and I couldn't tell whether the voice belonged to a man or a woman. I stood there for several seconds before backing away and locking myself in my bedroom.

The following morning, I spoke to the building manager about security cameras. Unfortunately, there weren't any on my floor. He suggested contacting the police, but I had no idea how to explain what was happening without sounding ridiculous. That evening, I pushed a small chair against my front door. I knew it wouldn't stop anyone from entering, but I figured I'd hear it move if someone tried opening the door.

I went to bed around midnight. At 2:46 AM, three knocks woke me up. I sat upright, staring toward my bedroom door. A few seconds later, I heard that same scraping sound from the recording. This time, it sounded exactly like the chair being dragged across the floor. I waited, barely breathing. Then came three more knocks. But they weren't coming from the front door anymore. They came from my bedroom door, only a few feet from my bed. I knew I was alone in the apartment. I hadn't heard the front door open, and there was no reason for anyone to be standing outside my bedroom.

I immediately switched on my bedside lamp and stared at the closed door. I couldn't bring myself to get up, so I grabbed my phone and messaged a few friends. Two of them stayed awake talking to me while I sat there, watching the door. Nothing else happened that night. When morning came, I finally gathered enough courage to check the apartment. Every window was closed. The front door was locked. Nothing appeared to have been touched. And the chair I'd pushed against the entrance was still standing exactly where I'd left it.

I had gotten the last tube on at Warren Street heading for Brixton as I just got done finishing work, it was around 00:28 and I was absolutely exhausted from the day, so i found a seat and put on my headphones. The train had stopped at all the usual stops until we left Stockwell, I started getting up and grabbing my belongings as I knew we were going to pull into Brixton in about 2 minutes, but those 2 minutes turned into 5 and then 10. by the 10 minute mark I began getting confused as to why we're still in the tunnel and haven't arrived at Brixton as we would've been there by now. I started looking around at other people who had a confused look on their face, checking their phones, frantically texting and a few were looking towards the windows as if they expected to see something different. The train was still moving at what felt like its usual speed. There was no sign of it slowing down, and no announcement explaining what was happening. I sat back down in my seat and went on my phone to see if there was any issues on the Victoria line but when i checked TFL's website the only line that had issues was the Bakerloo and Central line with minor delays while it showed "Good service on all other lines"

At that point i started checking all other social medias i could think of, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, news apps, anything I could think of to see what was going on but nothing said anything unusual was happening on the Victoria line, Meanwhile, we were still hurtling through a tunnel that seemed to have no end. I asked the man opposite me if he had any idea what was going on and he just looked up from his phone and said "That's what im trying to figure out mate, we left stockwell ages ago. So when the hell are we arriving at Brixton?" I then hear a loud banging and i look to my left and it was a man frantically banging on the driver's door "Can you hear me?, What's going on? Why haven't we arrived at Brixton??" yet no answer on the other end. "Oi! DRIVER!" He banged on it a few more times before stepping back and looking around at the rest of us. A woman sitting nearby shook her head. "I've checked TfL. It says there's good service. There's nothing about a train being stuck." I said to the man. 
"Well, clearly something's wrong, isn't it?" another passenger snapped. "Trains don't just drive around in tunnels for half an hour!"
"Maybe we've been diverted?" someone suggested from the other end of the carriage.
"Diverted where? This is the Victoria line!"
A few people started talking over one another. I could hear someone trying to call their partner, another person repeatedly refreshing the TfL website, and a man near the doors telling everyone to calm down. 

While everyone else was freaking out, i looked into the other carriage and could see people panicking as well. another person from that carriage opened the door and came to bang on the drivers door again "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WHY HAVENT WE ARRIVED AT OUR DESTENATION?" he shouted at the door before a man sat near him said to him "Someone else already tried that, no answer on the other end." He then looked at the man confused before saying "Well we got to somehow figure out how to break this door down or something"  a woman sitting across from them interrupted. "That's a good idea because what if the driver is unconscious? What if there's something wrong with the train?" A few other passengers began gathering around the driver's cab. One man suggested pulling the emergency alarm, while another insisted that someone should try contacting TfL again.

I decided to speak up.

"Guys, why don't we just call 999?"

A few people turned to look at me.

"999?" the man standing by the driver's door repeated.

"Yes! The police, the fire brigade, whoever can help us. We've been travelling for ages, we can't get hold of anyone, and the driver isn't responding. Surely someone needs to know what's happening!"

"He's got a point," the older gentleman said, reaching into his pocket for his phone.

Within seconds, several passengers were dialling 999. I did the same, holding my phone to my ear as it began ringing.

For the first time in what felt like hours, I thought we might actually get some answers.

Then the call connected.

"Emergency services. Which service do you require?"

"Police, please," I replied quickly. "I'm on a Victoria line train heading towards Brixton, but we've been stuck in the tunnel for-"

I stopped.

We weren't stuck. The train was still moving.

"Sorry, we're on a Victoria line train. We left Stockwell ages ago, but we still haven't arrived at Brixton. The train won't stop, and we can't get a response from the driver."

There was silence on the other end.

"Sir, could you tell me which station you got on from?"

"Warren Street. We went through all the usual stops. We were supposed to arrive at Brixton hours ago."

Another pause.

Then the operator asked a question that made my stomach drop.

"Sir, are you certain you're on the Victoria line?"

"Yes! I'm looking at the destination display right now. It says Brixton!"

I heard faint typing in the background.

"Sir, I'm going to need you to stay on the line while I check something."

I waited, watching the other passengers staring at me expectantly.

A few seconds later, the operator spoke again.

"Sir, according to our information, there are currently no Victoria line trains operating between Stockwell and Brixton."

I looked at the man beside me.

"What do you mean, no trains?"

The operator didn't answer immediately.

Then she said:

"Sir, the last train to depart Stockwell towards Brixton was reported as having arrived at Brixton 1 hour ago."

I felt my blood run cold.

"That's impossible," I whispered. "I'm on it right now." 

The Operator then asked me if there was anyone else on the train to which i answered yes. "Can you see any station signs or identify your current location?" she asked. I told her no and that we've just been travelling through the tunnels for god knows how long now. I then heard the operator speaking to someone in the background, although I couldn't make out what she was saying. "we've received several emergency calls from passengers aboard a Victoria line train this evening. However, all of those calls appear to have come from the same location which is Stockwell station. Officers and Station staffs have confirmed that there's nobody on the platform at all and that every single tube is in the depot" 

"THEN WHERE THE HELL ARE WE?!" I shouted at the phone, i was confused but scared at the same time.  

Then the call disconnected, I tried calling them back but the Phone kept ringing over and over again. I've texting my friends, co-workers, parents about what's going on, they're confused and are doing everything they can to help me. Other passengers have tried breaking the window, breaking the driver's door and even suggested tried leaping out via the walkway but everyone is too scared to try that. It's been 5 hours since and im relying on my power bank to keep my phone charged but i know it's going to die eventually as well as my phone. Honestly im posting here because im scared and confused as to what's going on and just don't know what to do.

I don’t really expect anyone to find this shift log, mostly because the gravel road outside the main gate doesn’t lead back to the highway from where it came anymore. If you’re the relief guard taking the 6:00 AM turnover at Blackwood River Lumber, or if you ever find a blue plastic company binder left on a kitchen table anywhere in Nova Scotia, don’t read the entries. Don’t check the dates. Just burn the fucker, and walk away.

I took the twenty-four-hour watch to escape the mundane emptiness that has become my life. Out here, where the northern spine of the Appalachians drowns its sorrow-filled tail in the Atlantic, the woods don’t make a sound. The spruce trees stand thick and dark against the gray winters, less like living timber and more like a painted backdrop. They don’t sway when the fog rolls off the bay. They just wait—beautiful, stoic, and hungry.

The guard shack is a six-by-six concrete box between the tree line and the automated saw sheds. It smells of stale coffee, zinc-plated sheet metal, and cold diesel. I’ve spent three months learning the sterile math of this box: the quiet digital hum of the truck scale under the floor, and the way the faux-leather chair squeaks two distinct notes—a sharp C and a flat D—every time I lean back to check the perimeter monitors.

Routine is a fresh bandage on an old wound. Which is why the blue binder on the desk feels like an anomaly.

Company policy requires the solo watchman to log the yard status every two hours, from 6:00 PM to 6:00 PM. At midnight, I pulled the binder toward me to sign off on the perimeter fence. The pages are standard college-ruled, smudged with the grease-stained thumbs of men who quit years before I arrived.

Three pages back, the handwriting shifted.

The ink was blue gel—the exact shitty pens I buy in bulk from the pharmacy in town. The slant was mine. The tiny, impatient hook on the capital T’s was as well.

I leaned closer. The entry was dated October 24th, 2026. Written in my hand, matching my shorthand right down to the sloppy margin lines. But October 24th isn’t for another two weeks. I haven’t lived those hours yet. Yet there it was, dry and permanent, documenting a night I hadn’t witnessed. The book wasn’t predicting the future. It was holding it captive.

“12:04 AM,” the ink read. “Heard a single, heavy click against the north-facing glass. If you turn around, the distance between the desk and the door changes.”

My watch clicked. 12:03 became 12:04.

Behind my skull, exactly three inches away through the bulletproof glass, a single sharp fingernail tapped the pane.

The chair squeaked. High C. Flat D.

I didn’t turn around. I kept my eyes on the green static of Monitor 4 until my old Casio read 12:05. When I finally looked, there was only my pale reflection and the jagged outlines of frozen spruce in the dark. I reached for the door handle. The steel knob was too cold. The door, which usually opens with a heavy shove, didn’t budge.

I sat back down and turned the page.

The next entry was dated 02:18 AM.

“The digital scale just registered a weight,” my handwriting said. “Forty pounds. Then eighty. Then one-twenty. It is a single point of pressure, moving across the concrete pad toward the shack window. Do not look at the monitor. If you look, it stops moving, but it inches closer.”

I looked at the scale. 02:17 AM.

At 02:18, the red LEDs flickered. 40 lbs.

The yard was empty. Spotlights threw white cones over gravel and stacked timber. Nothing there.

80 lbs.

The number jumped. I heard a deep vibration through the pads—not footsteps, just a heavy settling of mass, one haphazard step at a time.

120 lbs.

The weight was consolidated right outside the glass. The air thickened with the smell of undisturbed topsoil and wet frost. I kept my eyes on the desk, hands shaking. I didn’t look at the window. I didn’t look at the monitor. I waited for the clock to turn.

When the scale went back to zero, I packed my thermos and unlocked the deadbolt.

My boot didn’t hit gravel.

It hit the thin gray linoleum of the guard shack floor. I had walked straight out the front door and seamlessly entered from the opposite wall. The door clicked shut behind me.

I threw my weight against it. It opened easily. I stepped out again, faster this time.

My chest slammed into the edge of the steel desk. Back inside.

I tried the window. The glass didn’t roll down. When I pressed my palms against it, the reflection didn’t match my movements. My reflection was still sitting in the chair, staring at the blue binder, pen in hand—writing.

The trucks, the lumber, and the spruce had become a flat projection trapped behind the glass. The only thing left was this six-by-six box, the green static, and the book.

It’s 5:30 now. My shift is almost over. The gray light outside hasn’t changed by a single degree since midnight. The clock on my wrist keeps ticking, but the world is stuck in a frozen dark fog.

I turned to the last page. The final entry is timed for 06:00 PM—the exact minute my relief is supposed to walk through that door.

The handwriting is still mine, but the ink is jagged, the letters stretched like someone was pulling them apart.

“06:00 PM,” it says. “The door will open. It will look like him. It will have his jacket, his boots, and his name tag. But when he sits in the chair, the notes will change. High C. Flat E. Do not let him see that you know the math is wrong. If he realizes you know, all that’s left of you will be the reflection.”

I can hear tires crunching on the gravel. Headlights flash through the fog. Someone is walking up to the door.

My hand is hovering over the pen. I have to write the next line before the handle turns god hel—

The pen touches the page.

The ink flows before the thought fully forms. My hand is steady now. The shaking stopped the moment the headlights cut through the bellowing fog. But it isn’t my mind guiding the hand anymore. I can only watch from somewhere deep inside my own skull as my fingers grip the plastic casing, forced into motion by a cold, heavy weight that has settled over my shoulders—as a cold, ink-black darkness bubbles down from behind my eyes.

I try to pry my fingers away. They won’t unlock. I am an unwitting passenger in my own skin.

06:01 PM

The door opens on the hinge that always sticks halfway. He steps in with the same heavy, slightly uneven gait. Same faded Carhartt jacket with the right pocket torn. Same scuffed boots tracking old diesel and sawdust. Name tag reads J. Hennessey. Right on time.

He doesn’t speak. Silence fills the six-by-six tomb. He just nods the way men who work alone nod—acknowledgment without invitation. He sets his thermos on the desk where mine was three minutes prior.

He drops into the faux-leather chair.

High C.
Flat E.

My body keeps its eyes glued to the binder. The last line is still wet.

He flips back a few pages out of habit. Past the 12:04. Past the 02:18. Past the weight readings. Past the looping door. He doesn’t flinch. Just turns the page with a thumb that leaves the same grease smudge the older men left years ago.

Then he looks up.

Not at my face. At the space three inches behind my skull. His pupils are a little too still, like the spruce outside.

“You’re early,” he says. His voice is almost right.

I try to scream, to tell him to run, but my mouth opens and only tastes wet topsoil and frost. The monitors are all green static. A rhythmic droning fuzz overwhelms every sense. The scale reads zero. The fog has stopped moving. Even the headlights outside are frozen mid-beam—as if to stop and taunt.

He leans forward. The chair complains again—High C, Flat E—louder this time. He slides the binder toward himself, then stops. His finger rests on the final entry, the one my hand is still actively forcing onto the paper.

“You wrote it,” he says. Not a question.

My head is forced to nod once.

He smiles the way a reflection smiles when it finally decides to stop copying. The corners of his mouth move a half-second too late.

“Good,” he says. “Then you already know how this ends.”

He turns the binder so the blank page faces the desk. The pen is still in my hand. The ink is still wet.

Outside the glass, the spruce lean a fraction closer—like gripping hands trying to pull me down into the dark.

And that’s when the perspective snaps. Suddenly, I am no longer looking out at Hennessey. I am looking through the heavy, bulletproof glass of the window, staring in at the guard shack.

Down in the chair, my physical body is sitting perfectly still, vacantly staring at the paper. Standing directly behind my body is Hennessey, looking over my shoulder, his hand resting on my paralyzed neck.

From out here in the dark, frozen woods, I can see the pen in my reflection’s hand moving across a page I can no longer read.

Write the next line.

The handle has already turned.

Have you ever heard of the drowned house?

The text lit up my phone. At the top of the screen read 3:01.

Outside snow fluttered down, sparkling like stars in the night against the street lights. Another text pinged my phone.

Come on, I know you’re awake.

I should have pretended I was asleep—could have, easily. She wouldn’t have believed it. 

What do you want? I texted.

She responded almost immediately.

I want to show you something.

I sigh and roll over in bed. My bedroom was bare and cold as the outdoors. Window partially ajar, small flurries carefully whisked through the opening. All the posters and flags and trophies sat in boxes in the closet. Didn’t mean anything anyway. Her purple sweatshirt still sat on the foot of my bed. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. Some spectre of  a warmer time. Another ping.

Carter, please. I’m sorry. I miss talking with you.

I dug my palms into my eyes. I shouldn’t respond. She’ll take the hint.

Please, I’m outside.

Snow flurries stuck in my hair and clung to my pajama pants. Julia was out there, standing under the oak tree at the end of my parents drive way.

She was an awkwardly tall, skinny girl, almost to eye level with me. Her long auburn hair was not in her usual messy bun but braided down her back—just how I liked it. She wore a beanie and a long blue coat that ran almost down to her ankles.

She smiled when she saw me. A blade turned in my gut. I took a deep breath.

“Hey you,” she said.

“Hey,” I mumbled

“You’re looking warm.”

“What do you want, Julia?” It came out gruffer then I meant.

“I-I wanted to see you,” she stuttered.

I raised my arms, “here I am.”

“You walk with me? I want to show you something,” She stuck out her hand, 

Don’t follow her. Don’t follow her.

Our parents were friends; as such, Julia and I practically grew up together. Our folks always gave each other knowing smiles, little elbow nudges. They were so happy when we made it official—our mothers were already planning the wedding. I never told them the truth about why it ended, maybe I should have. They hate me. I hate me. I shouldn’t, but I do. 

Julia led me across town, trying and failing to make conversation. We stopped near the Scott Bridge, an old truss bridge that spanned the river cutting through town. 

“You really haven’t heard of the Drowned House?” Julia asked, leading me down a small foot trail that took us closer to the water. 

“Mm-mmm.”

“Well, there’s an old urban legend around it, back when our parents were kids. My mom told me about it actually; it’s where her and my dad used to make out. She said it's haunted, but, if you’re lucky, one of the ghosts there grants wishes!”

“Cool.”

Why was I following her? What was there to gain? Closure? I had closure. I saw the truth with my own eyes. Couldn’t I just enjoy the night? Forget all the memories?

Something about hearing her talk again, the little glances she spared back at me, it made my heart flutter like it used to. It wouldn’t last. I knew that. Like a final meal on death row. Why couldn’t I just enjoy the moment?

Icy water rushed past us mere inches from our feet. The water level was low, a dry autumn and a summer drought had done numbers on the river. Still, the current was strong enough to whisk someone away if we weren’t careful.

“It’s up here,” she said.

In the darkness of the starless night a small island appeared in the middle of the river. No, not an island. The lines were too sharp; not the gentle curves of God but the straight cuts of man. It was a house.

“Ta-Da!” Julia said, doing jazz hands as if completing a magic trick.

A few boulders peeked out from beneath the grey water, convenient stepping stones to cross the current. They looked slippery, either from mud or water. Julia led the way, getting halfway across before waving for me to follow her. I did.

In the end, the Drowned House was nothing special. Just an old  single room brick building now covered in river mud. What wood or glass there was now long gone. The walls were thick and tall, well out of the water. There was a small section of wall with a blanket draped over. 

Julia took a seat, letting her legs dangle off the wall and patted the space next to her.

“I wonder if we’ll see any ghosts,” she teased.

I didn’t like scary stuff. She knew that. 

I sat beside her. She smiled and stared down at the water, kicking her feet like a little girl. 

God she was beautiful. I remember when I confessed my feelings for her. The way she blushed. That day I was the happiest man in the world. Even then I could still feel that familiar warmth blossom in my chest looking at her. 

The wind picked up. A high pitch whistle blew through the Drowned House. 

“Ooooh, must be the ghost,” she teased, bumping my shoulder.

I smiled. I wanted to enjoy the moment. Forget what came before and enjoy her presence. Like old times.

“If you could wish for something, what would it be?” She asked.

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“Oh come on, there has to be something.”

I chuckled, “like what? A big purple unicorn that farts flowers?”

She laughed. God I missed making her laugh like that. A pit settled in my stomach as an ugly realization struck me.

Despite everything, I still loved her. 

Her hand rested on the wall. Slowly, it inched closer to mine. She reached out, hooking her pinky with mine. It was like being struck with lightning. I recoiled.

“What?” She asked.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing. I just thought…”

I scoffed. “What? You thought what?”

“I don’t know! I thought we were having a moment.”

“A moment? What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know! I just…I don’t know…okay?”

“What? Did you think you could lure me out here and we would–what?--make up?”

She blushed and turned away.

I chuckled. “Oh my god, you did didn’t you?”

“Carter, please. I miss you.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and stifled a laugh. It was the best I could do to not cry,

“Sure doesn’t feel like it,” I muttered.

“I made a bad choice, okay? I messed up.”

“Oh you messed up huh?”

“Yes!” We were screaming now, “I fucked up! Is that what you want to hear?”

“You didn’t just fuck up, Julia. Jesus Christ, I saw you!”

Tears rolled down my cheek. Hot against cold skin. 

They both said the same thing. I was never supposed to find out. One time. Mistake. Didn’t mean to hurt me. But I saw them together. Their bodies tangled together in the back seat of Logan’s Bronco. A deformed spider of human legs and arms and bodies. The sounds of pleasure they made. The way she moaned his name. The fear in her eyes when they slipped from his face to mine. 

All I could do was laugh. He was never interested in girls and she told me she wanted to wait till marriage.

What a fool I was.

“I told you, I fucked up!” She was crying now too. Ugly, body raking sobs. She’d never cried in front of me before that day. She’d done it a lot since.

“You know my parents’ barely talk to me?” I ask, “They think I broke your heart.”

“I’m sorry,” she managed meekly.

“What would they think if I told them the truth?” I would never. But I wanted to hurt her, wanted her to panic.

Her eyes went wide, “No! No, you can’t!”

“What do you want from me, Julia? What do you want?”

She opened her mouth to say something, flem making her lips smack. “We could…please, Carter, we could try again.”

The world seemed to slow. Soft flurries still fluttered to the ground around us—glinting like stars. But it was silent. No distant sirens. No howling wind. Just two tear streaked faces, sniffling through shaky breaths. 

Silently, I stood up.

“Carter, please,” Julia quietly managed. She grabbed my hand. She was so cold, fingers like ice. 

“Julia, please let go.” I couldn’t look at her.

Wind whistled through the drowned house.

“How can I fix this? Fix us? Please, just tell me!”

Don’t look at her. Don’t look at her.

“Goodbye, Julia.” My fingers slipped free from her hand.

“Please, Carter! I wish I could be the monster you see me as! But I am not, I am just a person. A person who—” She started coughing, “A person who still loves–”

Julia started to gag. I turned only to see her clawing at her throat. 

“Julia?”

Her eyes were full of panic. Her hands moved from her throat, to her stomach, and back to her throat. I took a step forward but before I could react, Julia fell backwards into the Drowned House. With a THUD she hit the ground and began convulsing in the mud.

“Julia! Shit! Shit!”

I fumbled for my phone. There was little service but I still dialed 911. I couldn’t steal my eyes away from her as she seized.

“I’m sorry, the number you…” I hung up and tried dialing again.

Slowly, something began to press against the inside of her throat. It wormed its way up her esophagus like a child in the birth canal. Tiny red worms crested in her mouth. Pulling at her tongue, her teeth. No, they were not worms. Fingers. Long and skinny and blood covered fingers pulled their way free of her mouth, stretching her lips so far apart they began to split.

I couldn't breathe.

Julia wept. She screamed. Muffled and choked as it was. She grasped and pulled at her coat. Her stomach started to roll like something pushing and worming around beneath her flesh. Something pierced through her skin. A fingernail. Arms burst from her gut. Tearing free from her winter coat. Dripping blood, grasping and clawing at her, the mud, the walls. 
My phone slipped. Tumbling from my hand and splashing in the water below.

I cried. The fingers grew and multiplied in her mouth. Snapping of bone and popping of muscle. More limbs tore free of her body. Fingers and arms and shoulders and legs and spines. 

Tears spilled down her cheeks. Her eyes, crazed and wild and scared, swirled in her skull. I watched in horror. Too frightened to move. Too cowardly to help.

What could I even do?

The wind picked up, the whistle returning with a rage.

I couldn’t steal my gaze from her face. The pain, the terror; writ large across her body. Oh God. I should have never come here. Her gaze, wild, frantic, glossed over mine before locking onto me. There were no words shared, but a thousand thoughts conveyed.

I closed my eyes and took a deep, shaky breath. Julia…

A text pinged my phone.

Have you ever heard of the drowned house?

Tears still dotted my eyes and soaked my cheeks. A light breeze whistled through my open bedroom window. I rolled over in bed and swung my feet out from beneath the covers; wood floor cold beneath bare feet.

Another ping.

Come on, I know you’re awake.

I worked my way towards the window. There she stood. Outside, beneath the pine tree at the end of my parents driveway. The purple sweatshirt she wore speckled with snow. I watched her for a time, letting the pang of sorrow and regret flush through my body until I was numb. A third text lit up my phone.

Carter, please. I miss you. I just want to talk.

My heart beat thudded in my ears. I loved her, right? I could have her back. Have what we lost. I want that. Don’t I? 

I blocked her number and closed the window.

Looking back, it began with a single piece of paper posted in the campus commons.

Having made up my mind that I wouldn’t be returning in the fall (of course, my grades had sort of decided that for me), I had gone by to close out my student mailbox. I was making my way out, trying to avoid making eye contact with anyone, when two words printed on a standard piece of paper in a large, red print caught my eye: HELP WANTED.

God knows what might have happened had I simply ignored it and kept walking. Might have spared myself a whole lot of heartache. Instead, something (probably the attractive blonde girl in the red bikini smiling underneath the red text) spurred me on, and I walked over for a closer look.

”Are you Red Cross certified? Looking for a summer job? Riley Estates is now hiring lifeguards for this summer!

• Competitive pay

• Onsite lodging

• A welcoming community

Interested? Call the number below!”

I had lifeguarded the summer before and hated every minute of it. Unfortunately for me, with my future now in flux, anything was better than trying to avoid my parents and their questions about my next steps. So, rather than studying for a final I had no chance of passing, I found a quiet spot and called the number on the paper. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for me, they answered on the first ring.

“Who is this?”

“This is Luke Sullivan. I was calling about the lifeguard job posted at Salem Commons?”

“Oh- yes. You’re Red Cross certified?”

“Yes.”

“And will you require lodging?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds good. How soon can you start?”

“…tomorrow?”

“Perfect. We’ll pencil you in for orientation at 10am.”

The woman hung up.

I decided to hold off on telling my parents for the time being. After all, there’s no good way to inform the people paying for your college education that you’ve just effectively burned $30,000 at the stake.

——

I arrived at 9:45 the next morning to a guarded gate.

“Here for work?” asked the guy at the gate. Stocky, medium height. Looked about my age.

“Yep. Lifeguard training.”

I’m nearly certain he winced, because he tried to play it off like nothing had happened.

“Straight ahead. Take the first right. They should keep you busy.”

I thanked him and drove ahead. Found the pool easily according to his direction. Fortunately, the door to the clubhouse was open, with a whiteboard propped outside reading “Lifeguard Orientation” leaving no questions as to where I should go next.

The door opened into a small foyer. Locker rooms to the left - the only way through to the pool deck. Straight ahead was the guard office, with a window counter to check guests in. I noticed it had blinds for some reason. There was another larger, wraparound window on the far wall of the office, facing the pool. The main room, where orientation would be held, was off to the right.

There were four people already in there - three at a white folding table at the front, and another guy standing next to a large flat screen on the wall. Underneath the flat screen was a fireplace, with a mantle atop which rested two very old looking shotguns.

The man - Vitaly, according to the name stitched onto his Riley Estates polo shirt - handed me a packet and invited me to sit down next to the other three - a very pretty blonde girl, a lanky guy with glasses that looked like a high schooler, and a dude who looked around my age.

Vitaly stood looking at the clock for another five or so minutes, then walked over to the TV and turned it on before pressing a few buttons on his phone.

A man appeared on screen. Older, early 50s. Graying hair. Fit. He wore a navy blazer and a striped shirt.

“Hi. I’m Craft Dunn. Welcome to Riley Estates and thank you for serving our community. We are confident you'll have a fun summer if you follow a few rules.

1. All of you will take at least one overnight shift a week. Our pool has been fitted with an innovative cleaning system that runs overnight. Contact with it is fatal. You will watch the pool from the guard office and make sure no one gets in.

2. Riley Gospel Church rents our clubhouse for weekly services. Saturdays at 11pm. Whoever is on shift will let Pastor Josiah Patterson in to set up, and clean once the service is over. The church is invitation only, so please do not ask to attend."

The video ended. Vitaly turned off the TV.

"Fill out your sizing and banking information. You start this afternoon."

I raised my hand.

"Lodging is the guest house across the street," he said, before I could ask. "The HOA has graciously waived rent. Food is your responsibility."

He left to get our uniforms, and the rest of us introduced ourselves. Cody was a rising sophomore at Boston College. Viktoria, mid-twenties, worked for the same pool company in Macedonia as Vitaly. Ricky was a rising junior who'd repeated a year; his parents had effectively kicked him out for the summer.

I had a feeling we'd get along just fine.

______

After getting our uniforms - white shirt, red trunks, and red hoodies for us guys and a red two-piece for Viktoria (it occurred to me that she looked very similar to the girl on the flyer) - we collectively made our way across the street to the house we would be staying at for the summer.

Vitaly had made it clear that, due to employee dress codes, any non-provided clothing was strictly off limits, with a 3-strike rule for offenders.

Cody, who had guarded last summer, waited until Vitaly was out of earshot.

"A guard got his third strike last year. Craft took one of those antique shotguns off the mantle and walked him into the woods out back. I showed up right as it happened. He said he'd pay my tuition at BC if I kept quiet."

He glanced around as he said it. I assumed he was joking. Viktoria, who didn't, punched him in the arm.

"Don't say shit like that, Cody! He seemed like such, how you say, a grandpa!"

He shrugged and winked at me. "Just telling the truth." I stifled a snort.

Ricky chimed in.

“What’s the deal with the deep end? It’s hella hazy. Like you can’t even see the bottom.”

Cody snapped back at him, surprising us all.

“How would I know? I’m not the one cleaning it every day.”

I think Ricky could sense something like incredulity in his tone, like he couldn’t believe Ricky could ask him such a stupid question, because he didn’t press it any further.

But it wasn't annoyance in Cody's voice, it was defensiveness. I was almost sure of it.

He'd guarded here last summer. What did he know?

_______

We spent the afternoon moving in, then an hour on Ricky's Switch, where Viktoria, who swore she'd never played Mario Kart, destroyed all three of us.

We arrived 10 minutes before the pool opened to an annoyed Vitaly. While the pool did actually clean itself (how this happened was never elaborated upon, and when we asked him how, he grew tight-lipped and refused to go any further), we needed to arrive no later than 15 minutes prior to the pool opening in order to set everything up.

After clocking in, we entered the pool deck for the first time. There were only two guard chairs, so we’d have more than enough time to relax and reset between shifts. Vitaly had already started setting up the chairs and umbrellas (which, as he had already remarked several times, he did not like doing), so the pool was already halfway done. He assigned us different areas of the pool to take care of.

Perhaps it was just my luck that I was told to take care of the deep end.

____

Ricky’s “Hazy” didn’t do it justice.

It almost looked like it was filled with static. Like something was off about it. The depth marking next to the pool said 5 feet, and yet it looked as though it quite literally didn’t have a bottom.

When a hand slapped my back, nearly startling me out of my skin, I realized I had been staring at the deep end for the better part of five minutes. Or had it been holding me? Looking back, I’m not 100% sure.

“Jesus, man!” I let out a startled laugh. “I could’ve fallen in!”

“Shit.. sorry bro.” Ricky grinned sheepishly. “You were just…staring at the pool. I wasn’t sure if I should say something.”

“Nah…you were good. But you’re right…it’s super foggy. Like, hasn’t been cleaned in weeks.”

“For real. Must be some super high-tech shit if it’s gonna be cleaned when this place opens in…a minute. Shit.”

Fortunately, there were only a couple chairs in that section, so we finished relatively quickly.

The first shift was, by all means, uneventful. A couple runners. But, overall, pretty boring. It had been a long day, though, and we were all pretty tired. So, we got a rather unwelcome surprise when Vitaly announced at the end of the night that we would be drawing straws for the night watch on the first shift (he had some administrative matters to take care of and unfortunately couldn’t do it).

I volunteered to go first, thinking it would be the best way to maximize my odds.

I pulled a straw. Prayed it would keep going. It didn’t, and as the others sighed with relief, Vitaly smiled awkwardly and took the cup from me.

“Thank you, Luke.”

“…yup.”

I watched the others pack their things and walked with them to the gate to see them off.

“Sorry, bud.” said Cody, a guilty look on his face.

I shrugged. “Nothing you could do about it. Just shit luck on my end.”

He nodded.

Ricky slapped me on the back. “Promise we won’t get down to too much fun without you.”

“Mhm.”

Viktoria hugged me. It lasted a second longer than a thank-you hug needed to, or maybe I just wanted it to.

“Thanks for taking one for the team, Luke.”

I followed Vitaly to the gate, where he slipped me a gold credit card.

“Didn’t want the others to see this… but since you’re taking the first overnight, I wanted to give this to you as a thanks. Anything you want tonight, my treat.”

I looked at him, slightly confused. “Shouldn’t this be an easy shift? Why is everyone acting like I’m making a huge sacrifice?”

“…well, it should be an easy shift. It’s just the first overnight of the summer, and I know you’re tired, and I feel bad that I can’t be here to do it myself. So, snacks and drinks tonight on me.”

I thanked him and watched him get in his car. Wandered into the guard office. Plugged my phone in. Settled down for the long night ahead of me.

___________

An hour later, I was looking through restaurants in the area for delivery options when there was a knock on the door of the clubhouse. I walked over to open it, assuming it would be Vitaly in need of something.

It wasn’t Vitaly.

A man in a suit stood there with a bag in hand. Close cropped black hair. Glasses. Looked like an accountant that was just dropping by for some laps after work. Nothing unusual.

“Hi, sir. We closed for the night about an hour ago. So sorry.”

“Oh, I’m not here to use the pool.” He smiled politely and stuck out his hand. “Josiah Patterson. Pastor of Riley Gospel Church. I’m here to prepare for tonight’s service.”

“It’s Monday, though. You meet on Saturdays, right.?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve been coming down from an illness, so we had to change schedules this week. Were you all not informed?”

“…No.”

“Well, I’m most terribly sorry to hear that, and I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. Now... if you’ll excuse me, I just need to go prepare the clubhouse for our service tonight. I would absolutely love to invite you to join us - the Good Shepherd is always accepting new members to his flock - but due to…extenuating circumstances we unfortunately cannot accept any new members at this time.”

I nodded understandingly. He was so polite I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was a cradle Catholic to my core and hadn’t been to church since before the pandemic.

“If you wouldn’t mind…please leave the front door open. We have it arranged with the HOA. My parishioners will just let themselves in. I promise we won’t be a bother.”

“Absolutely.”

"Oh, and one last thing. If you wouldn't mind keeping those front blinds shut? Some of my parishioners are rather...shy."

A little... odd? But I wasn't in a position to question things. "Of course."

“Thank you so much. Have a pleasant evening.”

I propped the door open. Walked back into the office, shut the door, and as asked, the blinds, and settled on a burrito from Abuela’s Cantina, a Tex-Mex joint down the road.

__________

It was about 30 minutes later when I realized I hadn’t heard a peep from Patterson or any of his supposed parishioners. No footsteps to signify arrivals. No preaching. No singing.

It was then that I realized as well that the blinds on the pool had been drawn the entire time. Vitaly must have closed them against the afternoon sun. I somehow hadn't noticed and had spent an hour and a half doomscrolling instead of watching the pool.

I got up to open the blinds. That was when the chanting started - not from the next room, like Patterson had said.

It was outside, right in front of me. By the pool.

Loud, guttural chanting that, as it went on, made me realize that it was in a language I had never heard before. The hair on my arms started to stand up. I had attended a service at an evangelical church for a religion class in the fall, so I had a vague understanding of what speaking in tongues sounded like, and it wasn’t that either. I also knew, just knew, that I wasn’t being duped.

Whatever was going on was real, and, as it continued, I became more and more certain it had no connection to any of the thousand existing sects of Christianity I was aware of.

My hand was on the cord, about to start raising the blinds, when the keening started, freezing me in place. It was muffled, like someone was moaning in anguish. I knew I needed to pull the cord and open the blinds, to make sure no one got in, but the noise was so...awful I couldn't make myself do it.

I had this gut instinct that as soon as I looked, I would find whoever was participating in whatever what was going on outside standing at the poolside window, staring blankly at me, as though they had been standing there the entire time.

My thoughts were interrupted by a sudden, heavy splash. The keening stopped, but the chanting continued, and I remembered what Craft had said earlier. “Contact with the pool is fatal.”

So, instead I just sat there. Frozen. Watching the clock tick as I wondered what, exactly, was going on outside? And what had been tossed in the pool?

A couple weeks ago I began to notice a decline in the insect population around my house. Months of hanging up fly paper and cleaning my home vigorously had done little in the way of curbing the infestation. It seemed to be a yearly occurrence at this point. Summer would begin to set in, followed by a mass migration of creepy crawlies trying to find a cool, shaded place to hunker down. I have little tolerance for squatters and, last time I checked, none of these bugs were paying rent—so they had to go. 

At first I thought that the sudden scarcity of unwanted guests had been brought upon by my own skillful use of bait, traps, and chemical sprays. I’ll regretfully inform you now that this was not the case. 

My first causes for concern were the exoskeletons. I should have been more clear before. When I said that the insect population was declining, I meant the living population. Since about two weeks ago I’ve been finding these—shells in various corners of the house; dead bugs that seem to crumble apart like dried leaves under small amounts of pressure. I almost jumped out of my skin the other day when I heard a dry *crunch* sound come from beneath my foot. I had just stepped out of my bedroom, and when I looked down I was met with a small pile of dead beetle remains. While this was an odd phenomenon to say the least, it paled in comparison to my next discovery.

I found it in my dresser.

It happened early in the morning while I was getting ready for work. I was running late and desperately trying to make up for lost time by eating breakfast on the go. With half a bagel clenched between my teeth, I remember opening up one of my dresser drawers to grab a top. As I reached down towards a neatly-folded shirt, my eyes locked onto a small, dark form and I immediately drew my hand back and let out a shriek—which was only slightly suppressed by the bagel ejecting from my mouth.

There, sitting on one of my shirts, was a large brown spider.

Its legs, nearly the same diameter as a golf ball, twitched slightly as I scrambled backwards. Almost tripping over my bed, I grabbed a dirty shirt from the top of my laundry basket and bolted out of the room. Spider be damned, I wasn’t going to be late for work again this week. I’d have to deal with it later. 

However, when later came, the eight-legged intruder was nowhere to be found. I spent about twenty minutes creeping around the house, expecting to catch a glimpse of the arachnid in a dark corner or on one of my walls. The search turned up nothing. Feeling defeated and sufficiently fatigued from the eventful day, I gave up the search and decided not to let it ruin my evening. Out of sight, out of mind. 

The next morning, about four days ago now, I awoke dangerously close to noon. Sure, it was my day off, but I’m not the type of guy to sleep half my day away for no good reason. Groggily, I sat up and wiped the sleep from my eyes. I rolled out of bed and began to stretch, but paused a few seconds after my bare feet made contact with the floor. 

It was a weird feeling. Somewhere between a light tickling sensation and an itch. I looked down as I felt the sensation travel from the top of my foot to my ankle. When my eyes locked onto the cause, I felt all of the blood drain from my face. 

It couldn’t have been the same spider as before. No. This one was nearly twice the size of that one. It had stopped moving upon my discovery and now laid flat against my leg, just below the knee. I could see the late morning light reflecting off of its three pairs of eyes. It was a horrifying sight.

I made a sound that’s about as hard to describe as it is to replicate. Shaking my leg like a leaf in a hurricane, I grabbed my phone, took off out the door, and didn’t stop running until I was standing shirtless on my front porch. I took a moment to catch my breath, then dialed the number for my local pest control company.

After three or four rings I was answered by what sounded like a middle-aged man. I asked if he could come by my house today to take care of my spider problem. He claimed that his whole crew was booked out for the day, but assured me that he would come by personally first thing tomorrow morning. I begrudgingly accepted his offer and hung up. I can survive another day, right? It was just a spider after all. The little monster would probably be hiding away until the exterminator showed up. Still, I wasn’t taking any chances.

For the rest of the day, I kept my head on a swivel. I checked every doorway before entering the next room and made sure to inspect all items closely before picking them up. Something about knowing this thing was in the house somewhere had brought upon me a paranoia that I had never before experienced. Every dark corner was a potential lair. Every crevice was a possible trap. My safe haven had been violated and I doubted I could relax until I knew the threat was removed.

That night was a restless one. I kept picturing spindly appendages feeling their way over the side of my bed, waiting for me to make a sudden movement. I felt like prey. Even the few times I managed to slip into unconsciousness, it would be a brief respite followed by sudden wakefulness and subsequent panic. How many were there? There had to be at least two of the things. I pictured thousands of small, brown masses moving between the walls. Gritting my teeth, I attempted to blink those thoughts away.

When morning finally came, I felt like a wreck. My eyes were puffy and my mouth was dry. I almost didn’t notice the sound of my doorbell ringing. I made my way to the front door as quickly as my tired body would allow. The man standing on my front porch looked exactly like expected: Average height with a receding hairline, five o'clock shadow, and belly that his button-up shirt must have been seriously struggling to contain. I welcomed the man inside and gave him a quick tour of the house while explaining my situation in further detail than our brief phone call had allowed. As we made our way through the dining room I noticed the man kneel down and reach towards the floor. He brushed his hand around one of the dining room chairs while mumbling something under his breath. When I asked him what he was looking at, he pointed out a wispy little web. I met his eyes with a puzzled expression. 

“Fiddleback.” He stated.

My confused silence prompted him to elaborate further. 

“Fiddleback.” He repeated. “It’s what we call those little fuckers from the Sicariidae family. They’re pretty common in this part of the country, but they’re not the type of spider you want to be messin’ around with.” He continued while stooping down to look under the dining room table. 
“Most folks just call ‘em recluses. They’re ugly and quick, and if you’re not careful they’ll leave you with a nasty bite.” He turned toward me and held up one of his hands for me to see. It was then that I noticed the pinky on his right hand had been amputated down to the first knuckle.

“A spider did that?” I choked out in stunned horror.

He nodded. “But thankfully my doctor chopped it off quick enough to keep the toxin from spreading. I could’ve lost half my damn hand.”

My eyes widened and my throat went dry.

“But there’s no need to worry,” he said. “They’re pretty shy by nature, and don’t usually bite unless provoked or–” He stopped. “What the hell–” The man slowly withdrew from underneath the table, holding something in his hand. I nearly vomited when I saw what he was holding. 

Thin and almost translucent in color, it appeared to be the molted exoskeleton of an abhorrently large arachnid. Nearly eight inches across. 

I excused myself and beelined it to the front door. I walked across the driveway, got in my car, and began driving away. After my breathing had returned to normal, I called the exterminator and told him that I would be spending the night in a hotel and would not set foot in that house until it had been purged of everything with more than two legs.

“I don’t care what it takes! Gas the whole fucking building if you have to! I’m not coming back until that–that thing…and any other thing like it is dead!” I hung up.

It’s been three days since that call. All of my attempts at reaching the man have gone to voicemail.

I didn’t cry the day my husband was cremated.

At the Universal Funeral Parlour in Hung Hom, I greeted relatives, answered calls, and checked which folder held which documents.

People took my hand and told me how sorry they were. I nodded and thanked them.

I heard the same words so many times that, eventually, I stood up automatically whenever anyone approached.

In his funeral photograph, Jayne was wearing that blue shirt. When I took it, I’d told him he was grinning like an idiot.

“I’m looking at my wife. What do you expect?” he’d said.

Now everyone said I’d chosen a lovely photograph.

I hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep in days. There were things to hand over at his company, funeral arrangements, insurance forms, calls from the police, and court appearances I’d already been scheduled for. Everything needed an answer from me.

I’m a prosecutor with the Department of Justice. I’m used to dealing with problems.

That day, I kept dealing with them until GIGI tugged at my clothes.

She stood beside me, holding her stuffed rabbit in her other hand.

“Mommy, where’s Daddy?”

The relatives nearby fell quiet.

I crouched and straightened her collar. There was nothing wrong with it. I just needed something to do.

“Daddy’s gone away on a business trip. Somewhere very far away.”

“When’s he coming back?”

My hands stopped.

“Mommy doesn’t know yet.”

She thought for a moment, tucked the rabbit under her arm, and reached for my handbag.

“Then let’s call him.”

I gently caught her hand.

My phone was in the bag. His number was still in it. So was the voice message I hadn’t been able to listen to.

I didn’t know what to say.

Someone called from behind me. There was a document I needed to check. I stood, held GIGI’s hand, and told her to sit with Grandma for a little while.

She didn’t make a fuss. But after a few steps, she looked back.

I lowered my eyes to the paperwork and pretended not to notice.

Later, when the last relative asked if there was anything else they could do, I opened my bag and checked everything again.

As if finding one unsigned form would mean he wasn’t completely gone yet.

But there was nothing.

Everything was done.

Four-year-old GIGI fell asleep in the car on the way home. I carried her to bed, took off her shoes, and went to sit in the living room.

I only meant to rest against the sofa for a moment. I hadn’t even put my phone down. But my eyelids grew heavier, and once they closed, I couldn’t make them open again.

I don’t remember when I fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes, my head was resting on a school desk.

There was a scratch in the surface. I remembered it. Part of a math test lay beside me.

Someone picked my jacket up off the floor and draped it over my shoulders.

I looked up.

Jayne was sixteen.

He startled, looked away, muttered that he’d just been passing, and hurried off.

We weren’t together yet. Back then, he could barely manage a whole sentence while looking at me.

I watched him walk away and couldn’t help smiling.

Then someone pulled at my hand.

“Mommy, I’m hungry.”

I woke up.

The living room had gone dark. A gray blanket had been tucked around me.

I assumed GIGI had put it there.

The fridge was full of food he’d portioned out: marinated pork chops, ground meat, chopped vegetables. Every container had a date on it in his crooked handwriting.

Jayne used to say I treated the kitchen like a crime scene. I’d take everything out and forget to put any of it back. So he prepared things ahead of time.

He’d told me to check the dates. Once something was past its date, I was to throw it away. No feeling bad about wasting it.

I stood in front of the fridge and suddenly couldn’t remember what day it was.

The pork chops had three days left.

He didn’t even have tomorrow.

After we ate, GIGI and I sat together in the rocking chair in our little garden. The moon was full. She rested her feet across my legs.

“Daddy comes home when the moon is full,” she said.

I stroked her hair.

“With Daddy away, you’ll have to help look after your clumsy mommy. You even put a blanket over me earlier. What a sweet girl.”

She shook her head.

“It wasn’t me. Daddy did it.”

“Yes. Daddy used to help Mommy with lots of things.”

She looked at me as if she wanted to say something else. Then she just leaned against me.

I didn’t ask.

I wanted her to be right so badly that I couldn’t let myself believe her.

A sentencing hearing in a manslaughter case had already been fixed. It couldn’t be moved. Before I’d had time to recover from the funeral, I had to return to the High Court as scheduled.

The defendant had pushed her husband during an argument. He’d fallen down the stairs and died. She had pleaded guilty to manslaughter and accepted all the facts.

After the defense made its plea in mitigation, I stood. I only meant to add one thing.

“He was already trying to walk away. Why did you have to keep pushing him?”

“I’m guilty,” she said, looking down.

“If you’d just listened to him—”

“I’m guilty. I’m not making excuses.”

I stared at her. My chest felt unbearably tight.

“Did you ever think about the fact that he would never come home again—”

“Counsel.”

The judge’s voice cut me off.

Defense counsel was already standing. The junior prosecutor beside me was watching me, too.

“The relevant facts have been established,” the judge said.

I lowered my head and sat down.

The hearing continued. I stayed on the same page of my file, never turning it.

Afterward, my junior reached for the case papers.

“Please, take a few days off. You’re exhausted. We can handle things.”

I wanted to say I was fine.

In the end, I just let go of the file.

The second dream came a month later.

I was studying for my university exams.

Jayne sat beside me, keeping me company. He was already nodding off. I told him to go home. He insisted he wasn’t tired.

In the dream, I went to the bathroom.

When I returned, he was taking apart the lid of my insulated cup, fitting a little rubber ring into it.

That cup had been leaking for ages. I’d always thought it stopped because I’d finally learned to screw the lid on properly.

When I woke, the lid of the cup I’d been using for years had been fixed.

The tools were at the far right corner of the dining table, the screwdriver resting on a tissue.

That was how he always left them.

GIGI said Daddy had spent a long time fixing it the night before. He’d told her not to touch the tiny pieces.

I checked the locks. I called my mother and asked if she’d been over.

She hadn’t.

I still thought I might have done it myself.

You can forget things when you’re that tired.

The third time, I dreamed about an argument I’d forgotten years ago.

We’d only just started dating. I was refusing to speak to him over something trivial and gathering my things to leave.

He wrote an apology on a scrap of paper, folded it into a little shirt, and slipped it into one of my shoes by the door.

When I bent down to put my shoes on, I saw a corner of paper sticking out.

I pulled it out and couldn’t help laughing.

“Are my shoes your mailbox now?”

He stood beside me. When I finally spoke to him, he smiled too.

The little shirt had a corner missing from its left sleeve.

He’d folded it wrong the first time. After that, he kept making it the same way, mistake and all.

It became our private agreement.

Whoever wanted to make up would leave a paper shirt in the other person’s shoe. Whoever was ready to forgive would move it to the window.

When I woke up, there was a little paper shirt on the table.

No writing.

A corner missing from the left sleeve.

GIGI was eating cookies. I asked who had folded it.

“Daddy.”

“You saw him?”

She nodded.

“He made two. The first one wasn’t very good.”

There was another, badly folded piece of paper in the wastebasket.

I sat there for a long time.

That argument had happened before our daughter was born.

We’d never kept any of the shirts. I’d never told anyone about them, not even my closest friend.

I started checking the calendar.

All three dreams had happened on nights with a full moon.

I remembered what GIGI had said.

“Daddy comes home when the moon is full.”

At the time, I’d thought she just missed him.

Now I was beginning to think she might be telling the truth.

I wanted to find out for myself.

On the next full moon, I asked my mother to keep GIGI overnight.

She assumed I needed some rest and didn’t ask questions.

I put the paper shirt in one of my husband’s shoes.

They were still by the door. I’d never been able to put them away.

Standing there, I felt ridiculous. By day I demanded evidence in court. By night I was talking to an empty pair of shoes.

Finally, I said quietly, “If it’s you, you remember what to do.”

I hadn’t been drinking. I hadn’t taken sleeping pills.

I sat on the sofa and waited.

Eventually, I fell asleep.

In the dream, Jayne sat beside me. He was the age he’d been during our marriage, wearing that old T-shirt with the stretched-out neck.

I asked why he wouldn’t speak.

He just looked at me.

When I woke up, it wasn’t light yet.

The paper shirt was gone from his shoe.

It was by the window.

I ran outside. The garden was empty.

But the rocking chair, which had been still, moved a little.

“Jayne?”

No answer.

I went closer and touched the back of the chair.

It felt warm. I didn’t know if that was just the warmth of my own hand.

That was when I finally cried.

I said so much. Whatever came into my head. I repeated some things. Others I couldn’t get all the way through.

I told him the washing machine was broken and I didn’t know how to fix it. That when GIGI had a fever in the middle of the night, I’d sat in the car downstairs for ten minutes with my hands shaking. That his clothes were still in the wardrobe. I hadn’t moved a single one.

Then I talked about the day of the accident.

We’d argued.

I’d just finished work and was too tired to talk. He called to ask about dinner. I snapped at him for asking me about every little thing and told him to stop calling.

Half an hour later, I regretted it.

I texted him to come and get me.

He never arrived.

The time the police later gave me was exactly when I’d been standing downstairs, waiting for him.

“If I hadn’t asked you to come, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I knelt beside the chair.

“If I could go back, I wouldn’t be with you.”

The wind stopped.

“Then you wouldn’t have to die.”

The chair stopped moving too.

Before dawn, I heard a faint sound from the side of the house. Like someone walking past.

I went after it.

There was water on the steps from the night before. I didn’t see it.

After my foot slipped, all I remember is the moon sliding out of sight.

When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed.

My mother sat beside me.

She was much younger.

She scolded me for not watching where I was going, even as she touched my forehead and asked if it still hurt.

“Where’s GIGI?” I blurted.

“Who’s GIGI?”

I stared at her. Before I could answer, I noticed the date on the television news.

I threw back the covers and rushed into the bathroom.

A teenage girl looked back at me from the mirror.

I froze, then leaned closer.

That face.

Wasn’t that me, years ago?

I touched my cheeks. My fingers were trembling.

My mother followed me in, saying I’d just had a fright and should get back into bed. I stayed where I was, staring at the mirror.

How could I be back in the past?

If it really was 2003, Jayne was still alive.

But what about GIGI?

Where was my daughter?

That night, I sat in the hospital bed and wrote down everything I could remember. My husband’s name. My daughter’s birthday. Our address. The date of the accident.

When I wrote about the rabbit GIGI slept with, I cried until the paper was soaked.

I didn’t know how to get back.

But perhaps if I could save her daddy first, everything would be all right.

The solution seemed simple.

Don’t fall in love with him.

When I returned to school, I changed seats.

Jayne stopped in the aisle with his books in his arms. He saw me sitting on the other side of the room and said nothing.

I avoided the activities we’d once done together. I took a different route home. I refused the things he offered me.

He didn’t follow me around asking why.

When I made it clear I didn’t want him near me, he stepped back.

But sometimes I’d look up and catch him watching me.

That look hurt.

I knew it too well.

I’d seen it from the kitchen doorway. Outside the delivery room. In the middle of the night when he tucked our daughter in.

For years, I kept avoiding him.

I’d thought that if we never dated, if we never married, there would be less to lose.

Then one day I saw a blue shirt in a shop window and stood on the pavement crying.

I knew I still loved him.

So I decided to find him someone else.

My closest friend was willing to have dinner with him. She thought Jayne was a lovely person. I arranged several meetings and always asked what they’d talked about.

Eventually, she refused to go again.

“You’re the one he likes.”

I said that wasn’t possible.

She looked at me. “Every time you ask about him, you look more miserable than he does. What are you trying to do?”

I asked Jayne to meet me.

I was cruel that evening.

“Jayne, listen to me.”

“You can’t fall in love with me. Don’t even think about it.”

“You and I are never going to happen. Do you understand?”

He listened without interrupting.

I turned to leave.

Behind me, he asked, “Did GIGI tell you Daddy comes home when the moon is full?”

I stopped.

People were walking past. Traffic was loud.

Suddenly, I couldn’t make out any of it.

I turned around.

The young Jayne stood where I’d left him, his eyes red.

“I never thought you’d come here.”

I asked him so many questions.

The blanket. The cup lid. The paper shirt.

The things I’d said in the garden.

He knew all of it.

At last, I touched his hand.

It was warm.

I held on tightly, afraid that if I let go, he’d become that funeral photograph again: the blue shirt, that ridiculous grin.

He told me that after he died, he could go home on nights when the moon was full.

GIGI could see him. When I was asleep, he could come closer and do a few of the things he used to do for me.

The rest of the time, he came back here.

To our past.

He didn’t know why. He didn’t know how long he could stay.

“You knew who I was from the beginning?”

He nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He looked down at our hands.

“You said you didn’t want to be with me.”

I wanted to argue. I couldn’t get the words out.

“I wanted to see,” he said, “if you’d really be happier without me.”

I hugged him.

He hugged me back.

After so long, I could finally hear him breathing beside my ear again.

I told him I only wanted him to live.

He said he’d chosen to come and get me that day.

He’d wanted to make up too.

“Asking me to come doesn’t mean you made that car hit me.”

Friends and relatives had said that to me before.

This was the first time I heard it.

We got together again.

I still studied law. I still did the work I wanted to do. He never asked me to give it up, and I didn’t give everything up to prove I loved him.

But some things changed.

He stopped saying everything was fine when it wasn’t.

Once, when I canceled a date at the last minute, he told me he’d been waiting downstairs for a long time. That it really did hurt.

I went back to see him.

When we argued, I stopped hiding in my work and waiting for him to come and make things right.

Before we married, he folded another paper shirt.

I teased him for still not being able to get it even after all those years.

He showed me carefully.

Leave a little corner missing from the left sleeve.

Give the right one an extra fold, like the floppy ear on GIGI’s rabbit.

At the mention of our daughter, we both went quiet.

Later, in this life, she came to us again.

The first time I held her, I cried so hard at the sight of that familiar little face that a nurse thought something was wrong.

I knew there was another four-year-old GIGI waiting for me in the world I’d left.

I couldn’t stay here forever.

But the days passed. There were meals to cook, a child to pick up, work to do. We still got tired and impatient. We still argued over little things.

Living those days once already didn’t make them matter any less.

One night, I came home late from work and found them both asleep at the dining table.

Jayne still had the unfinished food labels in his hand.

I didn’t wake them.

I finished writing the dates, put the food in the fridge, and draped a jacket over his shoulders.

Half asleep, he caught my hand.

“You’re home?”

I told him I was.

2026 arrived.

The closer we got to that date, the more frightened I became.

Once, I reached for Jayne’s arm. I was sure I’d touched him, but my fingers closed on nothing.

I froze.

He turned and took my hand. His palm was still warm.

I told myself I was too anxious. I’d simply missed.

On the day of the accident, we didn’t go out.

We turned off our phones and put the car keys in a drawer.

GIGI drew pictures in the living room. He and I sat at the dining table.

I kept looking at the clock.

The time of the accident came and went.

He was still there.

Another hour passed. He asked if I was hungry.

I laughed through my tears.

That evening, for the first time, I told him we should get a wider rocking chair when we were old. One big enough for us.

He said we would.

A few days later, my hand closed on nothing again.

He was sitting right beside me. I reached for his hand, and my fingers landed on the armrest.

I tried again at once. His hand was solid in mine.

“What is it?” he asked.

I shook my head and said nothing.

Then, one night, moonlight fell across his hand, and I saw the grain of the table.

Through his skin.

I switched on the light.

The wood grain disappeared.

His hand lay on the table as it always had.

He looked down at it too.

Neither of us spoke.

But it kept happening.

Sometimes, when he stood by the window, I could see the frame through his shoulder. Then he would turn, and there would be nothing to see.

I started leaving the lights on all night.

Eventually, even the light couldn’t hide it.

He sat in front of me. I could just make out the back of the chair through his clothes.

“Yan.”

I didn’t answer. I reached for his hand.

This time, I could only feel it if I held it very gently.

“I think this is as far as I can go with you.”

I shook my head and tightened my grip.

My fingers closed on air.

He was still sitting there, looking at me.

Slowly, I loosened my hand and tried again.

This time, I could feel him.

I didn’t dare squeeze.

The accident hadn’t happened.

But I finally understood that he still had to leave.

On the last night, he asked if we could sit in the garden.

We went outside together.

The moon was full.

He sat in the rocking chair and asked if I regretted it again.

I knew what he meant.

A long time ago, I’d knelt beside another chair and said that if I could go back, I wouldn’t be with him.

I shook my head.

“I’d still choose you. Even if I had to do it all again.”

“Good,” he said.

I still cried.

Living those twenty-three years again hadn’t taught me how to let him go.

But I no longer wished those years away.

He told me not to shoulder everything alone. To ask for help when I needed it. He reminded me that GIGI could put on her own shoes now. I didn’t need to crouch down and do it for her every time we were rushing out.

He always remembered things like that.

I held his hand and said I would.

As dawn approached, his hand began to fade in mine.

I curled my fingers around it. There was only air.

His outline grew fainter.

Through him, I could see the back of the rocking chair.

Then the chair was empty.

I didn’t reach for him again.

I sat there until the sun came up.

The next time I opened my eyes, I was back in the hospital.

My mother was older again.

She held my hand and said I’d finally woken up. That I’d frightened her terribly.

I asked where GIGI was.

At home, she said. Being looked after. Then she scolded me for still not watching my step at my age.

I listened to her scolding and cried for a long time.

Twenty-three years hadn’t passed here.

When my daughter threw her arms around me, she was still four.

Back home, I found a little paper shirt by the window.

A corner was missing from the left sleeve.

The right had an extra fold, like the floppy ear of a rabbit.

It was the fold he’d taught me later.

I put it somewhere safe.

That night, I finally played the last voice message my husband had left while he was alive.

It was only ten or so seconds long.

He asked how much longer I’d be. Said the pork chops were marinating. Reminded me to eat them the next evening.

When it finished, I didn’t delete it.

GIGI and I still sit in the garden.

Sometimes she says Daddy came by. That he helped her find her rabbit, or told her not to leave cookie crumbs in bed.

I don’t interrupt her anymore.

On the last full moon, she sat beside me, looked up at the sky, and said it again.

“Daddy comes home when the moon is full.”

I pulled the blanket over her legs.

“Yes,” I said. “He’ll watch over us, just like the moon.”

She leaned against me and kept telling me about kindergarten.

After a while, she stopped and looked at the empty chair beside us.

“Daddy says you remembered the blanket this time.”

I didn’t turn around.

I looked down at my daughter and tucked her bare foot under the blanket too.

Then she kept talking.

And I kept listening.

I'd come from school. I was standing on the sidewalk opposite our vinyl sided house. A big car was in our driveway. It was a Cadillac, the colour of cream. I didn't know who it belonged to. Who does it belong to, I wondered.

It was a hot, still day.

I felt the warm concrete sidewalk slabs through my sneakers’ worn soles. No birds chirped. The sky was cloudless.

I thought I could hear the sun buzzing like an old appliance.

I walked slowly towards the car.

Its windows were darkened. I put my hands on the driver's window and my face against my hands. I looked inside.

A man was inside.

He was reclined on the leather driver's seat.

The seat was red.

The whole inside of the car was red.

The man’s face was pale. His hair was grey. His hands were thick with veins. His eyes were closed. He looked dead. He was breathing, but his eyes were closed and he looked dead.

He opened his eyes.

He didn't look more alive with open eyes than he had with closed eyes, and I leapt backwards away from the car and screamed.

I hadn't screamed.

I stood.

A cloud had passed between me and the sun.

My throat was dry.

I tasted blood.

I saw dark blood running down the sides of the Cadillac's windows. The car was filled with blood. I was blood. It covered the man. I covered the man. He was rising through us. I was listening to the roar of a distant lawnmower. I stood silent, looking through the car's tinted window at the man, whose eyes were closed. He was sleeping. The grass was green. The lawn was neat. I walked inside the house.

My mother was in the kitchen.

She was drinking tea.

Her hands were shaking. The bottom of her teacup was clattering against the saucer she was holding in her other hand.

“There's a man,” I said, “in a car in the driveway.”

My mother opened her mouth to speak.

My father walked in.

My mother closed her mouth.

“That man is your uncle Larkin,” my father said, and my mother looked away. My father looked down at the floor. Ants were walking single file along the grout between the floor tiles.

I didn’t know either of my parents had a sibling.

“Will he—” I asked.

“No,” my mother said. “He won't come in,” said my father.

My mother set her empty cup and saucer on the kitchen counter, by the sink. The faucet reflected the sunlight. Blood dripped from it. I imagined blood dripping from the faucet into the kitchen sink. My mother's empty cup was full of blood. “I asked if I could play with my friends after I finish my homework,” I said.

“Asked whom?”

I hadn't meant to say it like that.

I felt warmth and shame. I had peed myself. The ants were still walking along the floor. “It's best you do not go out today,” my father said.

I showered.

I put on dry clothes.

My mother had finished mopping the floor when I came downstairs again. We ate dinner. We drank cranberry juice. I watched my parents scrape the meat off chicken bones with their teeth.

My parents drank red wine.

I drank milk.

I wondered if we would bring anything outside for my uncle Larkin, but nobody did. Even the dogs were inside. Even though it wasn't raining.

The sun went down.

I watched the Cadillac in the driveway from my upstairs bedroom window.

I watched it instead of going to sleep.

I couldn't sleep.

I had a fear of being dreamed.

I had a fear that if I slept something might wring me in its dream as if I was a rag used to clean blood from somewhere after a crime so I sat in my bedroom with the lights off looking at the Cadillac in the driveway from my upstairs bedroom window instead of going to sleep until the driver's side door opened and from my bedroom window I saw the driver's side door open.

The driver's side door opened.

It was one in the morning.

The car door opened, and Uncle Larkin stepped out into the moonlight. He moved like tree branches. The veins on his hands were golden. His hair looked like thick grey wires. He parted his lips and ate the moonlight, then walked away down the dimmed street.

The hour felt raw.

He was gone, but I kept watching.

The car was still as a coffin.

The points of starlight in the sky stretched into shimmering lines of spiderweb…

He returned before dawn, holding a small child by the hand.

I couldn't tell if the child was a boy or girl.

The child was younger than me.

They walked up the driveway to the car. He opened the back door.

I saw the long red leather back seat. He helped the child inside. He got in too. Then he shut the door. The car, the moonlight and everything was as it had been before.

There was stillness.

It was dawn.

The stillness was fake like plastic plants.

I was in my bedroom with the curtains closed and a pain in my stomach that felt like knots of jealousy, screaming and disgust.

In the morning, the car was gone. I brushed my teeth until my gums hurt. My mother was making breakfast. It was eggs and bacon. I watched the bacon sizzle in its own melted fat.

I wasn't hungry.

I ate.

Two police officers came by that afternoon.

They were very friendly.

They were asking my parents if they had seen anything unusual last night. I wanted to leave, but my father caught my hand. “What about you?” one of the officers asked. “You're old enough to answer for yourself. Aren't you, son?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I didn't see anything.”

My mother petted my hair.

“Good boy,” he said, and I felt myself of innocent blood.

Hey y’all, It’s been a minute.

I wish I could say I have good news, answers to all the mysteries, bring closure to this chapter of my life and the lives of the other souls on Flight 411.

But I don’t.

Every time I think I’ve come close to a major break through, close to finding any sort of answers, I’m just met with another rabbit hole.

The black box was deemed unsalvageable. So the CVR, the FDR, all of it’s just scrap. The wreckage was in a pretty bad way too. Only about half of the plane had been recovered, and one of the engines. The FAA are reaching the limit of what they can learn from the crash. Hell even with a living, breathing, witness they couldn’t find anything useful in my testimony.

Speaking of, that’s where I’d been the last little while. In and out of closed hearings with the FAA and some other politicians on some committee. We went over every detail of the flight from the pre-flight route planning and paper work, to my last moments on Flight 411.

We came to the conclusion that my survival was nothing short of a miracle, an act of god maybe. No doctor has been able to adequately explain my two weeks of memory loss. No expert had been able to explain how I ended up on a beach back home after surviving a near Mach 1 crash into the middle of the pacific. Nobody could find any fault in myself or my copilot. Nobody was able to concretely identify the cause of the crash based on the pitiful amount of wreckage recovered.

Nobody in that room came out with answers, just more uncomfortable questions.

The FAA closed the case. Based on the totality of the damage, and the blessing that was the media’s ignorance to my survival, they ruled that the accident was, to the dismay and anger of the general public, an act of god. That is, an accident that could not have been avoided. I found that pretty strange, seeing as how the FAA tends to stray away from saying such a thing to preserve the safety of commercial aviation. I assume it’s due to the public scrutiny, that a shitty answer is better than no answer.

Given that, while I was found innocent of any wrong doing despite having only my word to go on, the FAA had expressly prohibited me from ever flying commercial aircraft again.

I was crushed.

Flying was the only thing I really had going for me. Without it I’m nothing. I got to keep my private license, but it’s not the same. I don’t have the money to rent a hangar or maintain my own aircraft, doubly so without a job, and no offense to the general aviation folks out there, but a Piper Cub doesn’t rile me up the way a 737 does. Even a 717, no slander, but those babies were designed for short hauls. I’d be content if that were all I was permitted to do, I just missed the whining of turbofans.

Guess I’ll supplement it with my own whining then.

The man in the blue polo hasn’t been around since the DMV. Maybe it really was just a coincidence. Or maybe I’m still being watched.

I searched my emails for anything relating to this “Gemini” memory I mentioned. Nothing. Web searches were useless, Gemini is such a vague yet specific name that I’d have no way to confirm what I was even looking for.

Truth be told, it feels like this is all getting swept under a rug. Usually I’d expect the government to be in on it, maybe we got shot down by a fighter or something like that Korean Air flight back in the 80s, but I’d argue they’re just as in the dark as I am. Cautions for sure, lots of red tape, but none of it felt like they wanted to hide what happened. More so that they wanted to keep tight lipped to stop rumors and misinformation.

Begs the question then, if not the G-Men, then who? Or what? And why?

But I keep asking those questions, sending it out into a universe that I pray to for answers. Oh how naive I must be to believe this universe cares enough to answer. It gave me a second chance at life, maybe I should be grateful for that.

Maybe I should leave all of this behind and just try to make some sense of whats left of my life.

Maybe I should try to just forget about all of this and move on.

Maybe I am dead, well not ME me but you know, the Captain of Flight 411. Maybe he died on that flight and “I” survived. Maybe I’m a different person, not a pilot, maybe something else. Something different.

Hah, I feel like an imposter wearing someone else’s skin.

Maybe I am.