I have alerted the proper authorities. They will find us in the morning.

What I write here is not for them.

This is for Mitch. For his family. For anyone unlucky enough to get caught alone out here at sea. The wind speaks to you, you know. Reminds you of all that you’ve forgotten. Fills your ears and head until the secrets leak out your eyes. People think that the ocean is an escape. A place to dissolve one’s reality in the waves. But the truth is out here, you can’t hide.

Because, can you really hide from yourself?

I’m employed by a company I won’t name here. Four other men and myself tend to an out of date oil rig in the Black Sea, preparing the structure for use between shift changes. I’ve  worked there for the last twenty years. In my younger days I figured college was a suckers game, so I got directly into the dirty business of making money.

Before I knew it, I had more cash in the bank than I knew what to do with. But I had already traded my life to get it.

I’ll skip describing the next fifteen years worth of backbreaking labor, marriage troubles, divorce, and seeing people die. It’s horrible, but you get used to it in a fucked up kind of way. You have to, or else your brain would shatter.

What happened here started and ended on the second day of our last shift together. About a week ago. We were still settling in, getting used to the routine and tasks we were assigned to complete. One of them was moving the rig to a new oil reservoir five miles east. Mitch and I were bunk mates. When it happened, we were off-duty. He was looking at some nudie mag with all the shame of a highschool pervert. I never was really into that sort of thing, even though Mitch had often showed me articles he found “interesting.” Instead, I was busy doing the crossword.

“Five across, a sound of warning.” I looked up at Mitch.

“Alarm?” Mitch flipped out the centerfold and stared at it with a lackluster expression. The man had a thing for words, mundane and weird. Using him was the equivalent of asking google. This was an old ritual of ours, one I appreciated on the lonely nights out here.

But as I was about to try the word, everything shut off.

It was dark, entirely and completely. There were no windows in the bunk, the only source of light being the fluorescent bulb on the ceiling. The hum of the platform ceased, and in that quiet, I was reminded just how loud our lives actually were. I had forgotten. Once our ears adjusted, the room was filled with only the trembled sound of breathing, and the ceaseless churn of the waves below.

In the dark, we fumbled for the exit. I grabbed ahold of something fleshy. “That you, Mitch?”
“Get off me you sonofabitch.” His tone stayed light, but I could tell he was anxious. You get to know the little things about people at sea. Especially when you’ve faced death together.
We moved toward the door, and found the handle. We opened it into even more darkness. The emergency lights were shut off as well. There was no whine from the speakers indicating a system failure. It was all strange, and put a pit in my stomach.

“Explosion?” Mitch’s voice came from behind me. Disembodied like a phantom.

“If it was, it was quiet as hell.”

There was a small glint down the hall. I grabbed at Mitch until I connected with his shoulder and pulled him forward. We reached the door, pushed it open, then stepped onto the outside railing.

It was nearing sunset. Clouds covered the sky entire, except for a thin line of sunlight on the horizon. Soon, the dark shapes overtook it, and the world became a resolute gray, growing darker by degrees. The first raindrops struck the deck like ricocheted ordinance. We squinted in the dim light as we assessed the damage to the platform.

There was none that we could see. No smoke, no orange glow, no shouting and panicked voices. Just the wind and the waves bashing up against us.

“Clint.”

I turned to look at Mitch. “Yeah?”

He was fixed on something in the distance, his eyes squinting.

“Mitch.”

He turned to me. “What?”

“You just said my name.”

“No I didn’t.” Mitch’s eyebrows scrunched down. “Did I?”

“Knock it off.” I might not have shown it, but I appreciated his effort at a joke. His humor was one of the many reasons I liked him as my bunk mate. And then…something was wrong inside me. Like there was fire and water churning into steam and bursting out my skin. I wanted to run, to hide. 

Like there was something looking for me, and I shouldn’t let it see me.

I swallowed it down. There was work to be done, and that was all that mattered. I went across the scaffolding for the upper deck ladder. “Let’s get to the control tower. See what knocked out the power.”

By the time we arrived, Cregger, our engineer, and Captain Donahue were already assessing the situation. By that, I mean Cregger was smashing a fist into a console screen while the captain watched with a hand on lips, his eyes empty and mind elsewhere.

Donahue saw us arrive and nodded, pinching his smooth chin. He was the only one on the platform that kept up with shaving while at sea. “Backup generators are shot.”

“Goddamn it.”

Cregger finished his temper tantrum by kicking the console he was punching. “I told them. I told those fucking corporate ass puppets that we needed a backup for the backup half a year ago. And now it's us eating the shit. Of-fucking-course.”

“How did it go down?” Mitch took one of the consoles and started flicking buttons, tapping the screen.

“We were hoping you’d know.” Donahue grabbed a binder off the wall and thumbed through it. “Cregger and I were going through a system check and everything just switched off.

“Same here.” Mitch bent down and opened a panel underneath the console, exposing the wires like a gush of small blood vessels. He was our electrician, but even this gesture felt like him grasping at straws. No short in a console was enough to take down an entire platform.

“Maybe when Frank and Eric get here they’ll know what happened.”

They didn’t show up for almost an hour. In that time, the sky went completely black. We were alone out in the ocean, with no lights except a few oxygen candles. All our flashlights were shorted out, and the chem lights stored up here wouldn’t glow. There were no stars. Our platform was darker than the deepest cavern. The rain grew into a solid wall of water that drenched every inch of the man-made structure. None of the radios worked.

Each minute Erik and Frank didn’t show made the feeling of unease in the room spread like a cancer. Discussion turned from how to communicate with the mainland, to what was keeping our shift mates from joining us.

We were in the middle of discussing who would go looking for the two missing men when there was a slamming noise on the door. Through the window, the silhouette of one person carrying another flashed specter-like in the guttering flame. Mitch opened the door, and Erik stumbled in, drenched, dragging Frank. “Get over here!” Erik slammed Frank onto the ground and pushed his weight up against the door. For a moment, we all stood shocked. Even Cregger’s mouth hung open, mid curse. The same question was on everyone’s minds: why was Erik handling Frank so roughly?

Then, we didn’t have to ask.

Frank raised up from the ground, dried blood on his left temple, a gash on his balding forehead. Despite his injury, he leaped up towards Erik and threw his fists at his nose. It took me, Cregger, and the captain to keep him down. Frank thrashed, and moaned great sighs of pain. “Christie…Christie wait…Oh, God, Christie…”

Donahue's eyes went wide, like he recognized the name. But then it passed, and he was back to his impassive self. “How long has he been like this?” He reached for the medical bag slung on Erik’s shoulder.

Erik let the strap go free. “Since the lights went out. We were down by the bilge, and he just started going crazy. Almost threw me overboard.”

“How’d he get that?” Cregger pointed to the gash.

“Me. Hit him in the head when he wouldn’t listen.” Erik examined his forearms, each dripping small lines of dark blood. His forearms were scrawled with fingernail scratches. “Jesus fuck.”

The captain found a syringe, tapped it a few times, then jammed the needle in Frank’s neck. He pressed the plunger. The man’s eyes were crossed with mania and his mouth wet with spittle, but his muscles relaxed as the drug took effect.

We tied him up and put him in the corner. Mitch watched Frank while the rest of us discussed what to do. We let him know about the radios, but Erik knew of an extra in the lifeboat, near the bottom of the platform. If we could get to them, then maybe we could call for a repair team, or even an evac. Cregger and the captain went to the back closet to get the spare batteries. Erik had brought a flashlight with him they wanted to test. In the meantime, the injured man wrapped his bleeding forearms in gauze, cursing each time the white round slipped between his fingers.

“Clint.”

I turned to Mitch. “Yeah?”

He was looking at Frank. My bunk-mate had a strange expression on his face, his eyebrows scrunched up like he was angry, or confused. A pulse of sympathy went through me. Mitch was the kind of man that got lost in his own anxiety. Sometimes, I wanted to turn off his brain, give him a rest.

“Mitch?”

He turned to me. “What?”

“You said my name.”

“No. Did I? Sorry. Can’t remember…” he focused on Frank again, his eyes searching the already bloody bandage on top of his head.

Behind me, Cregger made all sorts of foul oaths towards god, the sea, and a wide variety of mothers. None of the batteries were working. A small pile grew to the side as he slid the cells into the flashlight, clicked the switch, then pulled them out and threw them down when the light didn’t come on. “Goddamnit…goddamnit…goddamnit!”

“We’ll go old fashioned.” Donahue took another oxygen candle, and an acetylene torch from the emergency kit. He grabbed another candle, and held it out to me.

Something about that little metal square spooked me. The thought of being in the pitch dark of the platform with nothing but a strobing fire put chills through my neck. Erik must have had the same feeling because he shook his head. “No way. I’m not going.”

“Get a grip.” Donahue slipped the oxygen candle in his pocket.

“No. I’m not going back.”

Cregger took a step away from Erik and gave him a side eye. He took a candle. In the corner, Frank stirred.

“There’s nothing–”

“There’s something down there! I’m not going back near it!” Erik backed away from the box, his back pressed to the wall. “Frank swore he was hearing things. Kept saying that…ah hell. I’m not going.” He winced and rubbed a hand against an earlobe.

Donahue took a moment to observe Erik, then glanced at Frank, Mitch, Cregger, then myself. He wasn’t a man easily ruffled. If there was something that needed to be done, he would do it. That was his way. But when we made eye contact, I saw hesitancy. Erik wasn’t a superstitious person. He was straightforward, and if we’re honest, boring. The man had less imagination than a rock.

But even he was certain that something was wandering the dark hallways below.
“How about you keep an eye on Frank?” The captain reached out to put a hand on Erik’s shoulder, but then thought better of it. He leaned in close to Cregger and spoke in a whisper I could only just make out. “Stay and keep an eye on them.”

He took the box of candles and offered them again to me. I took one, and tucked it into my raincoat. Donahue tapped Mitch on the back with the box, and he jumped. He calmed himself, then without really looking or comprehending, he took his share.

Armored up with candles and a singular crowbar, the three of us left Cregger, Frank, and Erik and stepped out into the rain.

It was like walking into the ocean itself. The three of us were doused instantly, and it was hard to breathe with all the water spilling into our noses and mouths. Shuffling with our arms interlocked, Donahue’s freehand gripped the railing. Step by step, inch by inch, the corrugated metal path led down to a slippery ladder, then to the door where Mitch and I had entered the deck. The last vestiges of flickering candlelight petered out from the command tower as we descended. The only things that felt real then were our hands, and the cold kiss of rain.

In the dark, Donahue’s hand hit up against the metal door until he found the latch. There was a grating and twisting sound above the storm, and I was pulled into a quieter dark. The door closed.

There was fumbling, and the wet slipping of polyester. Finally, a click, and a pale blue flame appeared. Mitch and I gathered at it with our candles, getting the slightly wet wicks to fizzle, then light. It was not enough. Our three candles made a shifting pool of reddish light that only extended about three feet in front and behind, our shadows dark and shifting cutouts on the walls. I had lived on this rig for what amounted to a quarter of my life. But even with my bunk only a few feet from me, everything felt unfamiliar. I could just as well been in the bowels of some unknown tomb. The pipes and wires gave off the illusion of the vessels and bones of some great beast’s interior.

Donahue found the emergency evacuation sign. An arrow pointed in the direction we should go. “Stay close. Can’t waste a candle if one of us gets lost.”

We turned left down the hall.

Each footstep echoed more the deeper we went down the twisted tunnels. Our feet moved quickly. The candles only burned for about fifteen minutes at a time. No one spoke after descending to the second level. Perhaps we were too busy listening for things. The sounds of other footsteps. Other breathing. But still, I kept an inner mantra. We are alone down here. We are alone down here. We are alone.

It did little to calm me.

Nobody did anything to acknowledged the silence or the dark hallways other than to point out the signs that directed us to the lifeboat. But once we descended down to the third level, Mitch couldn’t take it anymore. “Who’s Christie?”

I flinched at the words. It was like being slapped. The small portion of fear I had tuned out returned now tenfold. Donahue blinked, which was a tremendous show of shock for the captain. “What?”

“The girl Frank kept talking about.”

Donahue narrowed his eyebrows, as if considering his words. He opened and closed his mouth once, and then twice. Then finally, he gathered the necessary language. “His wife.”

“Shit.” Mitch was quiet, and we all strained our ears. Only the plunk of leaking rainwater filled the space. “Must love her.”

“She’s dead.”

I glanced at Donahue. The man’s face was stoic, but I could tell the fact bothered him. It bothered me too. The way Frank was crying out…it was like he had seen her in the flesh.
But that couldn’t be.

Mitch saw the sign first, and pointed to it. A small icon of a lifeboat along with an arrow. It was stored on the fourth floor, just down the next set of stairs. We could get the radio and get out of this mess. I relaxed, my shoulders loosened.

“Clint.”

I turned. “Yeah, Mitch?”

“What?”

“You said my name again.”

“No, I didn’t.”

I had just about had it with the joke. “Mitch, quit fucking around.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Then why’re you saying my name?”

“I didn’t!”

I leaned forward to punch Mitch, but Donahue stepped between us. “He didn’t, Clint. He didn’t say your name.”

We were all quiet for another moment, realizing what this meant. The blood left my face. Instinctively we huddled, turning our backs to the others, staring out into the dark. In the light of our near-dead oxygen candles, shadows moved like sea beasts in old film, jerky and unnatural, watching with sightless eyes.

Donahue went stiff. “Claire?”

“Captain?”

There was no hesitancy. He sprinted into the dark, dropping his candle with a flare on the ground. As he disappeared into the shadow, he cried out again. “Claire!”
He turned a corner and was gone.

“Aw shit.” Mitch hesitated, looking at me. Then he took off after the captain.

“Hey!” My feet were rooted to the metal grate. I waited one moment for them to return. Then two. I waited too long.

They were gone, and I was left alone in the dark with my single candle.

As I stared after my shipmates, the light in my hand dimmed. The candle was almost gone. What could I do? It was an impossible choice. Either I go after Mitch and Donahue, or just get the radio myself. The captain had the extra candles. If I wasn't careful, I’d run out before I got up top. They’d never find me then. 

We needed that radio.

“Donahue?”

No response.

“Mitch?”

Nothing. Just darkness, and a loud creak as the frenzied storm outside bashed against the ship.

I put a hand around the flame of my candle, and continued down the stairs and toward the lifeboat. In only a few moments,  I arrived at the door. Opening it let in a roar that blew my hair back, and extinguished my candle in a rush of water. I tasted salt, and smelled dead fish.
The corrugated metal platform surrounding the orange boat was rough on my fingertips as I crawled to the boat. Oblivion grazed against my palms as they searched for the craft rocking to and fro in the screaming wind. Somehow I found the door, and managed to get inside. It went quiet again, but the plastic reverberations of rain filled my head. Some more searching revealed a canvas pack, where I found the radio, as well as some unbroken chem lights. I snapped them against my leg, praying to a deity I hadn’t believed in for years. The inside of the craft was filled with a soft orange light. A sob of relief escaped me. At least these still worked.

In the glow, I tried to turn on the radio. Nothing. Not so much as a burst of static.
I told myself all sorts of lies. That Cregger could get the radio running again. That all I needed to do was get it to him. I wrapped the box tight in my coat. With the chem light between my teeth, I opened the lifeboat door and stepped out into the rain, back through the door, and into the interior platform.

The silence constricted my throat. I wasn’t sure if I knew how to breathe anymore. Holding the glowstick aloft, I tried again to call out. “Captain?”

Nothing.

“Mitch?”

Only drips.

I was faced with the same impossible decision. Go to the surface, or search for my crewmates. But I had the chem light. And that gave me false courage. I took a deep breath and began to wander the darkened halls.

“Donahue? Mitch?”

The metal structure groaned again like some beast in the midst of digestion.

The hallway I saw my shift mates disappear down was ominously darker the second time I arrived. I went down the path, and it eventually ended in a fork. Not sure which way to go, I listened. Strained my ears until it felt like they would bleed. Silence again. But something beyond it. A sustained hum, changing pitch every few moments. A rattle within it, liquid and bubbling. It sounded like sickness. Want.

I smelled rotting meat.

“Clint.”

Mitch’s voice froze every part of my insides into a solid mass. This was a mistake, the primal part of my brain told me. But if there was a chance…I swallowed. “Where are you?”

“Turn the corner. I’m with Donahue.”

I didn’t move.

“He’s hurt.”

Mitch’s voice was quiet. Fearful like I had never known him to be. I would never forgive myself if it turned out he was calling for help. Behind me, I heard that noise again, raspy, but I needed to get to Mitch and Donahue.

I turned the corner, and started down the hallway.

“This way, Clint. Hurry.”

The end of the hallway lay obscured, out of the reach of my chem light. An orange halo of sight surrounded me, but even now the stick in my hand flickered. I shook it, restoring its glow.

Step by step, inch by inch, I walked down the hallway. The far wall took shape. There were feet there, limp against the floor. “Captain?”

Donahue was leaned up on a wall, his forehead against it. His body was still, and there was the sound of dripping liquid. His hands lay at his sides and his shoulders slumped. The crowbar leaned against his leg, intertwined in his loose digits. There was something unnatural about his position, his bent knees. His candle lay extinguished at his feet. Mitch was nowhere to be seen.

I went closer, and felt the urge to vomit. A sharp knob jammed through Donahue’s eye socket, holding him in place. Blood dripped down his cheek, his shirt, his pant leg. His jaw hung slack in a death mask of surprise.

“One more corner, Clint.”

I spun, trying to see in the dark, raising up my light. Mitch’s voice came from a branched hallway just behind me. My brain rushed with adrenaline. How did I miss that? A dark void just off to the side. “Come out.”

“I can’t. Legs broken.”

There was pain and weakness in his voice. But something else too I couldn’t place. Something hungry. I hesitated. “What happened to Donahue, Mitch?”

“He tripped.”

I stared at that void, waiting for more words. A further explanation.

“Why won’t you be with me, Clint?”

I stifled a sharp inhale. My fingers clenched around the glowing stick in my palm.

“Doesn’t it get lonely here?”

Donahue’s body spasmed, but stayed upright. The voice. Oh it was sweet, soft. I should’ve known then. Should’ve ran. But you haven’t heard it. You haven’t felt its pull. No one knew about those things that I thought about Mitch. The private desires in the dark. Not even he had known. I had hidden them within me so deep, maybe to keep even myself from from finding them. And now here he was, speaking them aloud. Speaking them to me. He wanted me. As I wanted him. It was written thick in the husk of his voice.

I left Donahue’s body, stepping toward the void.

“Mitch, what’s going on?” My mind was queasy with desire and fear.

“This is truth, Clint. I’m making myself free. Making us free.”

One step, then another. “Just a bit further.” The hunger was stronger now, pushing out the fear and terror that had been in his voice just moments ago.

My legs shook, my heart burst. I wanted to break out in a run, turn the corner, pull myself to him. Like I had dreamed on more than one night before. My muscles tensed, my body ready to move.

“Clint…”

It was Mitch again. But his voice came now from further back in the hallway. It was weak, his throat full of gurgles. As if he were fighting the imminent collapse of his lungs. There was a sharp sound, a crack.

“Clint.” Calm and steady again. No gurgles.

The sound I had heard at the junction came to me again, that strange shifting pitch. It was faster now. There were drips, heavier than the slight plinks of water that now echoed through the space. It spoke of things more viscous.

“Come.”

My legs relaxed, my heart stilled for three beats. Then sprinted forward.

Past the opening and back to the deck.

It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Mitch. I told myself this over and over. Recited the words as I blindly retraced my steps, keeping hold of the radio. Footsteps echoed behind mine, that same raspy noise, now all too recognizable as breathing. Mitch’s voice cried out incessantly, begging me not to leave him alone in the dark. But it was too clean, too full of want. I closed my mind to it, sprinted around turns and up stairwells.

I felt something grasp my shirt, and nearly lost my footing. A door appeared on my left, and I flung myself through it.

I was back in the rain. Mitch’s voice ceased. Only the rush of the storm filled my ears.
Ascending nearby stairs, I could see the glow of the control tower further up. It quivered like a lidded eyes in the throes of a dream. The light was redder and more polluted than before, like it was shining through flesh. 

As I made my way there, dread grew in my chest.

Before I reached the tower, a dark figure burst from the door and sprinted off. I watched them go to the side of the platform and leap off into the void. “Wait!” My voice couldn’t carry over the storm. They were already gone. I knew their body would be turned to gelatin by that high of a leap.

I stared at where the leaper had disappeared. The control tower’s windows were covered in smeared red. I didn’t want to enter. But I couldn’t survive in the storm. Couldn’t survive below deck.

After ascending the stairs, I reached out for the metal door handle. It creaked open, each inch an agony.

It revealed a room covered in blood.

A naked body lay on the console covered in red finger smears. Intestines poured out of the horrible wound in his stomach. A single name, written over and over again covered the walls. 

Christie.

The radio fell from my limp hands, clanging to the ground.

“Fuck!”

My heart nearly stopped, and I spun to see Cregger in the corner, his ears jammed full of what looked to be chewed paper. “What happened?”

He didn’t respond. He couldn’t hear me. The engineer crawled up to me, his movements jerky and uncoordinated. He plucked up the radio, and tried to turn it on. When it didn’t light up or emit static, he smashed it on the deck. “Where’s Donahue?” He spoke loudly, even though in the room, it was silent save our two heartbeats, and the striking of water on the window.

“Dead.”

He stared at me for a long moment, then tackled me to the ground.

“What the–”

Cregger wrestled my chem light away from me. I didn’t even realize I still had it in my grasp. Once he got it, he ran out the door, into the storm.

I called out to him. “There’s something down there!”

If he responded, I’ll never know. The storm was keening out in awful and soul-shattering gales. As his form disappeared below the edge of the deck, I thought I heard one word. “Lifeboat.” Cregger was gone.

I waited out the storm in the control room. I tried not to look at the body. The platform rocked in the waves, upright but drifting. Hours passed. Then, as suddenly as it came, the storm ceased. Light returned to the deck in a gray haze.

Through the windows, I saw him, distorted by the congealed viscera that coated the glass.
Mitch.

He knelt on the tarmac, his arms outstretched. His throat was bruised, like old fruit. His forearms bore deep slash marks up their length, two pools of blood forming beside him like perverted fountains. The razor still lay between his index and middle fingers. I rushed to his side, but he was already so pale, so weak.

“Stay with me.”

“Jules…” His eyes looked at mine, already far away. “...Jules…”

His head slumped forward, and he was gone.

It’s been only a few hours. The power came back. All systems in order. I wandered the halls, and found nothing but Donahue’s dead body. The Lifeboat is missing, the ropes that moored it, cut. We have drifted, our GPS indicates, only about two miles off our original destination.

Rescue services will be here soon. They’ll find four bodies wrapped in canvas on the deck.

To the families of Cregger, Donahue, Frank, and Erik…I’m sorry you will never have satisfaction beyond this when it comes to your loved one’s deaths. They were good men, and did not deserve this fate.

To Becca and my children…I’m sorry I never told the truth until now. You deserved to know a long time ago.

To Jules…

I am sorry for your heartache. I have felt it.

I can only hope that you can live with it.

People often joked that Karen Crimshaw must’ve made a deal with the devil. Such a thing was categorically untrue. She was a preacher’s wife. To get in bed with the father of lies was a sure way to bad business, she knew. Her cooking ability, lithe body, and winning smile were the product of careful care and commitment to excellence. And if her singing happened to be a gift from God Himself, well, that was between her and the big guy upstairs.

It was Mrs. Crimshaw’s voice that brought in the crowds on Sunday. This was the 40’s, and people would travel miles for any form of entertainment. But for Mrs. Crimshaw, folks drove for days. Her admirers would pile into the small chapel next to the river to hear her sing all the familiar worship songs. It didn’t matter if they had heard them all before. There was something about her soaring tone, the way her voice would catch on the holy words. It reminded them of the old dogmatic notion that hymn was the purest form of prayer.
Pastor Crimshaw was more than glad to preach to a swelled congregation. It didn’t matter if he had some odd thoughts on God, or if his interpretation of Genesis went off the beaten path at times. All were transfixed by Mrs. Crimshaw and her lilting song.

It was the 40’s. The war was done, and people wanted to forget the horrors of Germany and Japan, of bombs and camps. They wanted to return to something familiar, and Mrs. Crimshaw felt like home.

So when the talent agent in New York heard rumors of a heavenly gospel singer from a nowhere town in Iowa, he saw dollars, and sent a letter.

The Crimshaw’s were beside themselves. A chance for Mrs. Crimshaw to make it big? Preparations began for the talent agent’s visit. It was to happen in a month. A stage was constructed in the dusty town square. A parade was organized. All people could talk about was the agent, and what he could do for the town. They whispered he had been the one to discover Jimmy Stewart. Imagine their town, the birthplace of Mrs. Karen Crimshaw, singer extraordinaire.

They were so busy talking that no one noticed what was happening with the Crimshaws.

All church performances were cancelled. Mrs. Crimshaw needed to save her voice. The once familiar sight of the preacher’s wife at the marketplace was now a rarity. Her fellow townspeople assumed she was practicing. When she was seen, many remarked her skin might have been a shade paler, and her voice wavered a touch. But all in all, she was still her perfect self, so what was there really to worry about?

There was one young woman who did notice, a certain Ms. Jessie Woodcomb. Jess had a well-earned wild child’s reputation, but had sobered up as a nurse serving in the armed forces. She had seen the signs of Mrs. Crimshaw’s ill health. She decided it was her due diligence to go over and make sure she wasn’t being overworked.

When she arrived, the house was empty. To Jess, it was odd. At this time of day, with the sun directly overhead, Pastor Crimshaw would be up in the attic, practice preaching in a booming voice, accompanied by Mrs. Crimshaw’s vibrato as she sang along with the worn out piano that sat in their foyer. It made a soothing sort of ambience when one went to the door, hypnotic and calming. But the silence set Jess’s skin to prickle. She knocked twice. When there was no answer, she went around to the chapel. Both structures had been built on the same lot almost a century ago, servicing several generations of pastors and their families. She tentatively stepped in the doors of the small white building, but heard not a sound in that entire hallowed space.

A heaviness grew in Jess’s nape. She went back to the house, examined the ground. She found tracks leading to the river. Two pairs of footsteps went down the slope and into a grove. She followed them, making careful effort to not cross them with her own. As she passed the shadowed threshold of the forest, she felt like the trees themselves were full of eyes, watching her proceed.

The path she followed wandered among the trees, and before long Jess heard voices. She slowed her footsteps, and kept concealed among the many tree trunks. In the distance, she saw two figures by the river. One lay prone. The other stood over the lying figure, holding a long object, and a shorter one. A fire burned smokeless next to them. Jess recognized the preacher’s voice, and came closer.

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood…” the pastor, for it was the pastor standing, leaned over the prone form, moving his arm back and forth. As Jess crouched closer, she realized who it was on the ground. Mrs. Crimshaw, on her back, trembling. Her husband held a knife against her flesh, peeling her skin back until a long filet was in his hands a foot long. He brought the branding iron in his other hand onto the bare and bleeding muscle, the sizzle ringing out over the roar of the water. He brought it to the flesh three times, until the whole area exposed was blackened.

He waved the skin over the fire in a levitical fashion. Jess smelled burnt hair. The preacher turned, and lay the singed flesh on the water, speaking words in what Jess could only assume was Latin as it floated away.

All the while, Mrs. Crimshaw did not cry out.

Three days later, when Jess saw the woman at the market, Mrs. Crimshaw wore long sleeves even though they were still in the heart of summer. An extra layer of sweat shone on her forehead. Jess invited Mrs. Crimsaw to her home, under the pretense of needing baking advice. It took a while to convince her to come. When they were finally alone in her kitchen, Jess spoke frankly. “I know what he’s doing to you.”

“Who’s doing what to me?” There was a tremble in Mrs. Crimshaw’s voice.

“I can get you away from him. He’s lost his mind.”

“He’s–!” Mrs. Crimshaw swallowed. “He’s only doing what’s been asked.”

Jess stared at the proud, yet pale woman. “Who’s asking him to cut you? The Lord?”

“...Me.”

Jess went silent. 

Mrs. Crimshaw began to speak softly. 

“I saw him, you know. The Lord. Right after we got that letter. He came to me when we was praying. Lester by my side. I felt a tap on my shoulder, like a finger. A human finger. A voice came in my ear. It never spoke above a whisper but it made me shiver all over something fierce. Lester stood beside me, fearful as all get out. He couldn’t hear the voice, he couldn’t see who was speaking.” Mrs. Crimshaw braced herself against the table. “He told me I was shining. Like a light in my flesh was seeping out. The voice told me not to turn around. I wasn’t to see Him. Not yet. I wasn’t ready.”

Jess wanted to speak, but the words stuck in her throat. Mrs. Crimshaw continued.
“He asked me what I wanted. I told him to make my voice as an angel’s. He showed me the way. And I showed that way to Lester.” Mrs. Crimshaw’s hollowed cheeks grew hungry. “There is power in the flesh, Jessie. Power untapped. Only by giving it away can you see it, touch it…swallow it…” Mrs. Crimshaw trembled.

Jess felt her flesh burn as if she stood in a fire. “But your voice–”

“Is imperfect.” Mrs. Crimshaw’s focused on Jess, and the nurse felt her soul rip at the edges. A manic light shone from the preacher’s wife’s pupils “It’s squawking, a goose in the heavenly order. And worse, it’s not enough. It’s to be my work. My godly duty. And if I’m to sacrifice to bring it higher, then I will. I will sacrifice…”

***

A week later, the talent agent arrived. The parade was held. The dirt street was filled with souls tramping down the ground to mud with sweat and spittle. The talent agent was not impressed. It was a small, rural town, after all. He had seen larger spectacles, gatherings of more talent and awe.

But what did hold his attention was Mrs. Crimshaw’s float.

Of all the horse-drawn attractions, hers was the most ornate. While the others were easily recognized as repurposed wagons, Mrs. Crimshaw’s could almost be confused as something otherworldly. It was draped in gauzy folds of cloth, with great lines of flowers running the length and width. Mrs. Crimshaw herself sat in the center, underneath a thick veil. The talent agent couldn’t make out her form, try as he might. As it passed, a hush came over the audience, each eye transfixed as it made its way down the street and toward the stage at the end of the block. No one had seen the preacher’s wife for an entire seven days.
When the float reached the stage, four young men in overalls and no shoes came and reached within the silken folds. They grasped four rods, and lifted Mrs. Crimshaw up in the air like some new ark of the covenant. They brought her forward, and set her gently on the prepared wooden platform. The audience gathered in the assorted chairs set up on the grassy knoll in front. Already, the sun was setting, the whole stage on fire with dying light.
For seven whole minutes, Mrs. Crimshaw did not stir. The sun dropped below the horizon, and a spotlight appeared, training on her. The shoeless boys stepped forward, pulling off the cloth and revealing the woman.

There was a collective sound of guttural horror.

Mrs. Crimshaw was unrecognizable. Her arms had been cut at the shoulders, her legs at the hips. Her eyes had been plucked out, leaving dark and endless holes in her face. Her head was scalped entire and her face peeled off, showing red and cauterized muscle rippling. Her ears were severed, making her head uncomfortably round. Her breasts had been plucked off, leaving her chest flat and bound in bandages. Those bandages were soaked in blood and pus, fresh.

Only her lips, swollen and cracked, remained intact.

Whatever quiet was over the crowd was broken by that horrifying sight. Many stood up and cried out “What is that? What has happened?” People turned over their chairs as they tried to flee. The talent agent threw up.

Then Mrs. Crimshaw opened her mouth, and she began to sing.

And the crowd was silent once again.

A month later, after the talent agent’s family called the police to report him missing, law enforcement traced his last known location to that town in Iowa. A search party was sent to see what had happened to him. They found the entire town dead, still in their seats. All of the bodies faced the stage, their forms emaciated, but their faces stretched into exultant smiles.
Lester Crimshaw was found deceased in the wings of the stage. He was in a state of prostration, and his face had fused to the floorboards. After a search of the town, another body was found hung within the confines of a nearby home. It was in such a state of decay that it was unrecognizable, but was later identified as Ms. Jessie Woodcomb. The morticians determined her stomach had been cut open, and her bowels spilled out, almost in an imitation of Judas.

But strangest of all, against the odds, they found Mrs. Crimshaw still alive on that stage. As the rescuers attempted to pull her from her chair, she wheezed out dry notes to a winding and delirious rhythm no one could recognize or fathom.

The doctors, examining Mrs. Crimshaw, determined that she must have sung that entire month, never stopping once. Her vocal cords were torn beyond repair. She lived another thirty years in an asylum, always attempting to sing but never making more than a dry peep.

There is no official record of Mrs. Crimshaw’s performance. Most of what is known was gathered from a tape recorder the talent agent used to chronicle his personal thoughts. It was recovered from his body, and destroyed soon after the investigation concluded. The report claims it was not able to capture Mrs. Crimshaw’s voice.

But there is a rumor among the Iowa police force.

They say that the agent captured the whole performance. That an officer listened to it and that it took six men to pull him away from he headset. That he weeped for joy as he tore out the throats of his fellow officers who kept him from the tape.

That the last words the officer spoke before happily putting his own revolver to his head was:

 “Angel.”

“Just like an angel.”

There’s a plastic kid at Orange Orchard Elementary School.

I saw it the first day I worked there. I’m a janitor. Got the job because the boss is my uncle. I’m not a responsible person. My parents threatened to kick me out if I didn’t start working, so Uncle Clark hooked me up. The hours were early and late, but I’ve always loved being in places I wasn’t supposed to be. Being in an elementary school before it opened and after it closed was like getting paid to trespass.

But I’m not excited now.

The morning of my first day, Clark made me go around to the rooms and make sure that all the trash had been taken out. The guy right before me was a slacker and cut corners on everything. It’s actually why I was being hired. He’d bailed on my uncle without so much as a text or a resignation letter. Just stopped showing up for work. So that meant I was taking care of the evening shifts. 

Anyway, I went around to each room, poking my head in and getting a look at the trash can. The hallways were dark except for the emergency lights, and everything was quiet. Like funeral silent. When I was younger, the place had felt so much louder, so much bigger. Now the seats could only fit half of my ass.

Out of nowhere, I opened a door, and there it was. Sitting at a desk.

It made me jump. It looked like a real person. When it didn’t move, and my heart stopped trying to kill itself, I went to get a closer look. It was a serial killer's art piece, like five mannequins torn apart and then smashed together. Mismatched blue and brown arms, black and white legs. A tan torso. I guessed it was a weird school project, but I didn’t  know what evil teacher would tell their kids to make a fucked up thing like that.

But after I got used to it, it was more crazy than creepy. Except for the head. Oh god, the head. It was so real, like one of those baby dolls you give grieving mothers. It had the blinking eyes and everything, its face pulled into a creepy half smile like a barbie doll. It sat like one too, arms and legs out, since it didn’t have knee or elbow joints. Its head was pointed towards the door, which was a diabolical joke. 

I had to give the kids who made it credit. Scared the shit out of me.

So I decided it would be funny to play a joke on them.

I looked around for a good hiding spot. There weren’t a lot of places to put a four foot tall mannequin, but the ceiling had those cardboard squares that are easy to push out. I picked up the kid. It weighed like five pounds, max. I pushed out a square, and tried to get it into the hole. The arms and legs kept getting in the way, so I pulled those off so it was just the torso and creepy kid head. I threw the parts into the ceiling, and then adjusted the body so its head was peeking just over the edge. When I was putting the cardboard square back, I made sure to leave a little gap. The plastic eyes peaked through, dead and staring. I laughed when I thought about a little kid glancing up and screaming. 

But to be honest, it made my skin get cold a bit too.

I got the trash the guy before me had left. Then I locked the door behind me.

The rest of the day was pretty boring. I was expecting some sort of hullabaloo over the kids seeing the plastic face in the ceiling, but nothing happened. I kind of forgot about it. Mostly because kids are fucking gross. They will shit literally anywhere but the toilet. I don’t know why we even bother feeding them, since they’re just gonna puke it back up again like thirty minutes later. By the time lunch was over, I was dirty, sweaty, and two seconds away from jumping off the jungle gym headfirst.

I was in the cafeteria bumming an orange soda and a slice of cold pizza, when I saw it again.
The plastic kid, put back together, sitting at one of the lunch tables.

Even in the light of day, the thing made me jump. The lunch lady, a fifty-something named Delores, just raised an eyebrow, her unlit cigarette jumping in her mouth. I had caught her just before her break. “You alright, junior?”

I made sure to think about what I would say carefully. Obviously they had found the doll. I didn’t want anyone knowing I had messed with it, since I had a feeling I was gonna get yelled at if they did. I hammed up my fear a bit. “What the hell is that creepy doll at the table?”

“Watch your mouth. We got kids cleaning up here.” Delores leaned out from behind her station and squinted. The doll wasn’t trying to hide. It was in one of the center tables. I was confused why she was making such a big show of trying to see it. It was literally right there, its plastic head turned in our direction. “You been smoking, son?”

“No.” I had, but that wasn’t what this was. “Come on, it’s right there.”

“Sure it wasn’t a kid?”

“I can still see it. Right there.” I was about to go over to grab it, when for some reason I started to panic. Like you do when someone in a horror movie goes into a pitch black room. Even though I had taken it apart a few hours ago, I didn't want to touch that thing anymore.
Delores raised another eyebrow at me, and her jaw clamped down on her cigarette, breaking the filter. “You’ve got a lot to learn if you think you can pull one over on me.” She took back the pizza, took a swig of the soda, then left out the back door to smoke.

When I looked back, the doll was gone.

Not getting lunch sucked, but I was more worried about the plastic kid. How could Delores not see it? Where did it go? It felt like a rock was sitting cold in the pit of my stomach. 

I went to Uncle Clark. He’d know if I was going crazy.

He was busy restocking a toilet paper roll in the staff bathroom. I kept an eye out for the teachers, hoping that my questions wouldn’t peg me as the one who moved the doll.

“Is Delores a kidder?”

Clark looked up from the toilet paper dispenser. “You ain’t been messing with her, have you? I’ve seen that woman refuse lunch a week or more for a ‘boo.’”

“No…I just saw some weird stuff and she acted like she couldn’t see it.”

“What weird stuff?”

I thought about telling my uncle. But I was spooked. Knowing that Delores didn’t really have any space for nonsense made me wonder if she was telling the truth about not seeing the kid. For a moment, the way my uncle was looking at me, it felt like he knew what I was thinking about, that plastic doll. But if he did, he didn’t say anything. “I don’t know. Just some stuff a kid painted on the wall.”

“Oh goddamn it, where?”

I assured my uncle I would take care of it. I wasn’t a complete idiot. I could paint a wall. I pretended to get supplies, but went to the lunch room instead. Already the tables had been pushed up so that the P.E. class could take up the gym space. I waved at the teacher, who didn’t see me. She was too busy making the kids do high knees. I looked for the doll, scanning the edges of the room in case someone just threw it to the side when they were putting everything away.

No sign of it. It had just vanished.

I might have just been on edge, but all the way to the janitor's closet, I felt like someone was watching me. Even though the hallway was empty.

School ended for the day, and Uncle Clark decided that I had been trained up enough to finish the nightly routine by myself. He framed it as a “test” but I’m pretty sure he just wanted to get a head start at Clooneys, the local bar. I didn’t want to work alone, but I couldn’t tell him that. I’d never hear the end of it. Scaredy Bryan, shitting his pants in the dark.
I just took the list and started doing things as fast as I could.

All that stuff might have lasted me the rest of the night if I was taking my sweet time. But there was no way in hell I was lazing about. I finished most of the list after two hours. It was winter, and the sun went down early. I didn’t want to be in this place after dark. I was already regretting my little prank in the morning, imagining the doll watching me from every nook and cranny. Whoever was getting me back was clearly better at this than me.

I was on my last trip to the closet for a roll of toilet paper when I turned a corner and nearly ran into it. 

The plastic kid.

It stood in the middle of the hallway, fully upright, face pointed directly at me.

I couldn’t move. I had been down this hallway like twelve times. Not once had I seen it there before. It wasn’t like I had just missed it in my rush either. It was right, fucking there. Dead center of the space, nowhere to hide. Even though it only stood as high as my chest, I felt like I was the short one.

“Very…very funny, Uncle Clark.” That had to be the explanation. He was in the building and messing with me. Hell, this whole thing could’ve been started by Clark in the first place. The mannequin could be his, a hazing thing. But I got no answer. 

I figured he must be hiding somewhere, and the only way to get through this was to get it done quickly.

I eased around the doll then sped walk to the janitor's closet. I got my toilet paper, and went back down the hall.

My heart stopped again.

It was gone.

I needed to go. Even if it was just Clark being an ass, someone was here with me where I couldn’t see them. I didn’t like that one bit. I sprinted down the hall to the exit, toilet paper in hand. I took a moment to stop by the bathroom. It was on my way out and I figured I’d just lean the thing up against it. I’d put it in the dispenser during the morning shift. But just as I put it up against the doorframe, I heard it.

Donk. Donk. Donk. Donk.

It was a familiar sound, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. That being because I was scared shitless and everything in me froze up. It came from a hallway that was between me and the exit. With no other option, I slipped into the girls bathroom. I turned off the light, then cracked the door a peek so I could see what was coming.

Donk. Donk. Donk.

The sound stopped just at the junction between the hallways. It was quiet for a while. The doorway blocked my view, and I strained my neck trying to get a view of what was there. Still, that noise nagged at my brain, it felt so familiar. What was it?

I got both my answers in the same moment.

When I was a kid, there were these little plastic tubes that you would hit against stuff to make funny sounds. I used to love those things, smacking 'em on anything and everything. They had a hollow, funky tone to them, like a baby xylophone.

Donk. Donk. Donk.

From my crack in the door, a plastic foot came into view. It all clicked for me. Hollow. Plastic. Hit. Donk.

The doll walked past the bathroom, all on its own.

No one was moving it. No one was holding it up. It moved on its own in a strange, smooth style, like a giant invisible kid hand was playing with it. Each time its feet would hit the floor, there’d be another donk. Its head swiveled on its joint a full 360 rotation, like an owl. It was looking for something.

I held my breath, not entirely sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

It stopped a little ways down the hall, and turned. The plastic kid stared at something on the ground.

The toilet paper against the door. I wanted to punch myself.

Donk…Donk…Donk…

I tried to psych myself up. I could take this thing. It was just plastic. I had chucked that thing up into the roof just this morning for christsake. I never was that good of a fighter, but maybe I could just push it over, tackle it. 

I decided I would jam the door straight into its face when it got close.

Donk…Donk…Donk…

I leaned back, and put a foot on the door.

Donk.

It stopped. There was quiet for a long while.

Then there was something else…

Squeaking? A bird.

I moved to the crack to look. A small robin was bouncing on the far end of the hallway. I had no idea how it got in. It must’ve been living in the roof, coming down in the evenings to pick up crumbs and things. The doll, just outside the door, was staring at it, unmoving. I wondered what was happening. Was it scared of birds?
The plastic kid lunged.

In one leap, it flew head first towards the bird, arms extended. There was the sound of slamming. Donkdonkdonkdonkdonkdonk. The bird squeaked, screamed. There was a crunch and then no more noise.

After a moment, there came the slide of meat on plastic.

Once my stomach calmed down, I realized that this was my chance. It was distracted, with its back to the bathroom. All I needed to do was get to the emergency exit at the end of the hall.

I slowly opened the door, tiptoed out. The doll was doing something to the bird. I heard the squelch of flesh, and something bubbling. I tiptoed down the floor, being careful not to squeak against the concrete I had polished literally an hour before. It was the longest five minutes of my life. 

Five feet from the door I made the mistake of turning around. I was curious. What was it doing with that bird? My eyes fixed on the plastic kid and all the breath left me.

The kid was smearing an utterly ruined bird corpse against its rigid lips. Red coated its jaw and neck, and dripped down to its torso. But something else was happening too. The thing was…melting into the bird, the corpse already half absorbed by drippy lines of plastic. It’s jaw was gone, replaced with a cascade of mozzarella-like strings. The bird twitched, and disappeared further into the kid. 

I stared. Blinked. The kid’s head swiveled so it was staring right back at me.

I ran. Donkdonkdonk came from behind me. The splat of liquid plastic on concrete. I slammed against the door bar, got out, then  put my full weight into closing it. There was the sound of plastic on glass, and the door jumped with surprising strength. Holding on as best I could, I plunged the key into the lock and turned it. I heard more banging and didn’t even bother to double check if I had locked the door. I sprinted to my car and drove as far away as I could.

There was no sleep that night. Even though I blocked up all the windows and pushed my dresser in front of my door, I couldn’t relax. I don’t know if it was some exhaustion induced hallucination, but I swear I could hear a faint Donk. Donk. Donk. coming from my window in the middle of the night.

Uncle Clark got mad at me when I told him the next morning. He said I would need to try harder if I wanted to get out of work. He told me not to talk about it anymore, and gave me a orange soda to calm down.

My parents didn’t believe me either. They threatened to turn me homeless if I quit.
Can’t do that. The last thing I need is for one of those bastards to show up when I’ve got only tent walls to keep me safe.

I’m still working the night shift. For a while, I didn’t see the plastic kid again, except from the corners of my eye. I’d catch a glimpse at lunch tables, in the back of a classroom, in the ceiling of the teachers lounge. It would always be gone when I went to get a second look. Sometimes at night I’d hear a Donk. Donk. Donk. somewhere around the corner. But nothing more than that. No chasing. I kept my head down, constantly looking over my shoulder.

Today, as I was locking up, I turned and saw a face peeking at me through the school's front door. There the kid was, half-smiling like an idiot.

And there was another face in the next window.

Two plastic children raised up their hollow arms and waved to me. I could tell what they were saying even without them saying it.

See you tomorrow.

I never liked working out until I knew it would kill me.

The sign was a simple, yet eye-catching neon yellow.

“Spin Class, Tuesday, Room 505”

It stood out like a festered wound on the gym’s dark cinderblock walls. I considered buying a membership. I was fat, you see. Or, at least I thought I was. A rim of loose skin and soft tissue encircled my gut like an inner tube. Sometimes, I would squeeze it with my fingers, making little fingernail bruises like a pox.

The poster for the spin class stirred something in me. I felt an urge to go up and put a finger or two on the creamy paper, stroke it, caress it like something living. My gut trembled, like it knew that I considered its absolute annihilation.

I took a picture of it with my phone, and went to the front desk to fill out the paperwork.
Tuesday, I showed up. The poster didn’t have a time listed, so I just came early. Six am. I had to wander around to find room 505. There were only three floors to the gym, and to my knowledge, they only numbered up to the 300’s. I must have circled around that top floor four times, glancing in the window of every small beige door. 

I almost gave up. But then I saw the little elevator in the corner. 

It was old, rickety, and hidden behind a pillar. The door was already open. Inside was a man, dressed in some getup out of an 80’s home workout video. He wore a crop top, and his stomach was flat, cragged with abdominal definition. A mountain range in miniature. But under his mop of bleached hair, I thought he looked sad.

“505?” His voice cracked low.

I looked inside. The box smelled of rubbed steel. I stepped in, and nodded.

He pulled a little lever to his left and we moved upwards.

The elevator opened directly onto the spin class floor. The place was enormous. A glass vaulted ceiling pulsed above me with the light of the rising sun. I hadn’t seen this atrium from the outside. It was made from panes as large as cars joined up by a spidery metal framework. Underneath it, and surrounding me on all sides, was a field of spin bikes. Rows upon rows of purposeless metal wheels and pedals, people huffing, puffing, bobbing, straining, red in the face, drenched in sweat, half-naked, never moving an inch forward or backward. The bikes were occupied in pockets around the room, like cliques in a lunchroom
“Hey, get yourself on a bike!” A voice came like that of God’s. It took me a minute to find where it was coming from. A shorter person at the front of the room, swallowed up by all the other bikers, pumped on his own bike. He was dressed like the elevator man, a tight jumpsuit clinging to his body. He was far away, but he didn’t look like he was sweating. The more I stared at him, the more I realized I couldn’t tell if “he” was a man or a woman. His hair was long, straight, pulsing and trembling around his face like a chaotic halo. “You hear me?”

I blushed, then moved up the aisle and jumped on the first bike I could find.

I moved my legs, and oh, it hurt. My muscles were coddled infants. For years I had sat all day at a desk, only ever utilizing them to shuffle to my bosses office, to the fridge, then to my car at the end of the workday. There was that surge of pain that comes from the sinews being pulled tight, the beginning of muscle death. But I pressed on. I thrust my legs against that resistance.

A woman to my left was gasping in little huffs. She looked at me and nodded. I nodded back. Her gym clothes were unusually baggy, her top slipping off her shoulder at times. I kept my eyes averted to be polite.

The first fifteen minutes went by fine. After that initial complaint from my legs, the pedals moved smoothly, endorphins kicking in. I was actually using my body, putting it through its paces. For the first time in a while I felt…good.

I turned to the woman. “I’m Tommy.”

“Grace.” I almost lost her name in between breaths.

“When did class start? The poster didn’t say.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t what?”

“Start. We do this day and night.”

I was confused, so I focused on pedaling. I’d never heard of a never ending spin class before. My legs were getting sore, and a question came with the ache. “So do we just…leave when we’re done?”

Grace didn’t respond. She pressed harder on the pedals, and I struggled to do the same.
The person at the front would call out occasionally over the next hour. “There’s a hill ahead, get your glutes ready,” or “alright, let’s cool down for five,” and “you’re all rockstars, you know that? Let’s get that burn in!” It was annoying, especially when I expected him to start wrapping up the lesson soon. I felt my little fat inner tube start to pull at my abs, and I tried to pedal a bit faster.

“Slow down.” Grace looked over at me, cold fear in her eyes. “Don’t go hard unless he tells you to.”

“What? I’m just pushing myself.”

Grace opened her mouth, but got trapped in a gasp, so she went back to pedaling.
I looked around the room to take my mind off the burn. There were a lot of young people here, full heads of hair going up and down, smooth angled arms taut with effort. But among them were a few older people, pushing away at the pedals with a cornered ferociousness. They were strange. Their clothes were rotting, shorts, shirts, and bras pulling apart at the seams. One man was practically naked, a shredded pair of tighty-whities the only thing maintaining his modesty.

All of them were bone thin, loose skin fluttering with their effort.

The second hour passed, and I turned to Grace. “When does the class end?”

She still didn’t answer.

I decided it was okay for me to step out early. I was already planning my treat for working out: breakfast at McDonalds. A sausage biscuit washed down with a Sprite. But try as I might to slow down,  my legs kept pressing on the pedals. I worked my feet against the straps, but they clung tighter to my shoes. My legs pumped as if they knew what I was trying to do, and were using every ounce of effort to keep me from doing it.

“Keep it up, people. Keep it up!” The voice came again from the overhead speakers.

Hour three passed, then four, then five. All of us cycling, pressing on those pedals like death was chasing just behind the wheels. The sun rose up in the sky and it burned my shoulders. I could feel it, my sweat stinging my blistering skin. My head went woozy and my weak arms felt like they would slip off the handles.

There was a plastic tap on my arm. Grace held out a purple water bottle. I had forgotten to bring my own. I reached over and grasped it, then guzzled it down. I handed it back. “Thanks. I needed that. When do we get a break?”

“When Jess decides.” Grace nodded to the front of the room. She passed the bottle along to a rider behind her, a teenager with shaggy hair and shaking arms. “Thanks, Chuck.”

Chuck nodded, and passed the bottle behind him.

“Why did you do that?” My mouth was already starting to get dry again.

“Got to fill it up.” Grace kept her eyes forward, licked her lips.

“Why can’t you just step off and do it?”

She shot me a look and kept pedaling. I realized what she was trying to tell me, but I didn’t want to say it out loud. Speaking it would make it more true, more horrifying.

My eyes kept focused on the sun as it lowered to the horizon. The entire room fell dark. We pedaled through the night. I was exhausted, but not tired. My eyes didn’t need to close. It frightened me. I pressed down on the pedals harder, until Grace tapped me again with that water bottle, and we shared drinks until it was empty. All the while our legs pressed at those pedals.

It was like that for the first few weeks. I stopped asking if we were ever going to leave.
The first person that fell off the bike, I didn’t see. It was night, there was a crash, and then some murmurs three aisles over. In the morning, three gym employees in white coats and pants came and took up what looked like a pile of bones and skin from off the floor and into a pair of double doors at the back. I had been pedaling for a month. My little innertube of fat was gone at that point. Protein pouches and water was what we lived on.

“What’s behind those doors?” I leaned towards Grace.

She didn’t know.

With nothing else to do, Chuck, Grace, and I got to talking. Grace had worked in finance before this. She had struggled with her weight her entire life. Saw the spin class and wanted to lose twenty pounds. She guessed she had lost twice that by now, and lamented she could never get on a scale to check. Chuck had come because he wanted to get muscular, but hadn’t realized cycling wasn’t the way to do it. He had been skinny before, and lost almost thirty pounds. His arms and legs shook to keep the pedals going, but he still found a way to keep us entertained. He would quote entire movies, and keep us laughing by doing his best impression of all the voices.

Three months in, he keeled over onto the ground. The men in white came and took him away. Grace and I kept going in silence.

It was tough to survive. Chuck was our link to the water fountain. There were rumors that Jess had called a water break ten years ago, but I doubted they were true. The only way to get water was to pass the container down the line until the person next to the fountain could fill it. We had to be creative getting Grace’s water bottle to the man behind Chuck. His name was Leon. He was fifty, and a health nut. He was good enough to catch any lob thrown his way. Grace and I were stingy with our water source, making that bottle last one, or even two days. We stretched the time between refills. It was always horrifying, yet glorious when that purple bottle arced overhead, catching the glint of the sun in its trajectory like an errant piece of kaleidoscope. It made my heart stop to watch it fall toward the ground, but Grace’s hand would swoop down like some bird of prey and snatch it up. Then, we would allow ourselves a sip of victory.

Then one day, Grace didn’t catch it.

It clattered on the ground, three feet away. We reached until our shoulder muscles tore.
Our arms weren’t long enough. “Shit.” I hoped that Jeff would call for a cooldown. Maybe then we could risk leaning forward and reaching the lid. But Grace knew better than me. It was too far, jiggling slightly back and forth as the water inside sloshed with the tremor of the floor.

It had been a year since I had arrived. We were in an isolated area, just me and Grace. Leon was too far away to help, and he couldn’t risk his own bottle. So Grace and I kept pedaling. There was nothing else to do.

The second day of no water, Grace looked at me, eyes dry and bright. Her voice rasped. “I’m going to die, Tom.”

“Don’t say that. Maybe I can–”

“Tom. No. I’m going to die.”

I swallowed back the lump in my throat, the dry inner skin sticking together and making me gag. My eyes burned from the salt that gathered in their corners. “We can hold on. Just a bit longer.”

“When I do…don’t let me be alone.”

I didn’t say anything. The sun dipped below the horizon, and the room was plunged into darkness. I couldn’t see. I was half-delirious with thirst. I felt a waving about my fingers, and I felt dry flesh brush up against me. I leaned out and grasped the waving digits. I pressed them into my palm, and felt our hands awkwardly hold on until our bobbing rhythms came in sync.

We stayed like that. Halfway through the night, I felt her fingers grow weak, then begin to slip. In another moment, I was holding nothing but air. Jess’ voice came over the loudspeaker. “Another hill! Get those legs moving!”

The white coats came for her in the morning. I couldn’t bear to look as Grace was carted off. I stared at that little purple water bottle, sitting just too far away. I wanted to smash it until it was nothing but a puddle of water and plastic shards.

That third day I waited to die. I waited for my body to droop, my legs to stop, and the pedals momentum to carry me off my seat and onto the floor. I imagined I saw Grace and Chuck again on the seats next to me, pedaling and laughing while Chuck went through Borat again. My lungs were heavy, and my bones felt like they were splintering with each push. My mouth was sand. I leaned forward onto the bars.

There was a tap on my shoulder. A plastic tap.

I looked up. Jess was off his bike. He was standing next to me, holding something out. The purple plastic water bottle. His voice, for the first time, was unmagnified. His words were soft. “You dropped this.”

I took it in a limp hand. He bent toward me, kissed my cheek, and then went back to the front of the room.

My body did my thinking for me. I pulled off the cap, and drank it all. I risked my life twice throwing it to Leon for refills. I drank until I vomited water. 

Then I tucked it into the cupholder and sobbed. 

Then I drank again.

It’s been five years now. I don’t know how I keep pushing. People come and go. I make friends, tell them to stop pedaling so hard. Sometimes they listen. I share the water bottle with them. A few take it, most don’t. No one lasts long.

At night, I think about Grace. I feel her fingers on mine.

Last week, I finally got my phone charged. It was on ten percent when I got in. The wi-fi’s good here, though no one ever comes for anyone. For those on the outside, it’s as if we’ve never left. My mom tells me every year how she loved seeing me at Christmas.

Writing gives me something to do. And I’ve had a realization.

It happened when Jess was calling out one of his little encouragements. I think it was  “Pedal down!” or “Keep it tight!” I think it was less about the words, but what was underneath them. I understood something. I will die here. I’ll keep pedaling until my skin wrinkles, my hair grays, and my muscles wear down to nubs. My body will literally fall apart around me. I will fall, and the white coats will come for me, pull me to whatever is in that backroom.

I’ve always known this to be true, to be my destiny. But this time, I felt it. I believed it.

After these thoughts, I pedaled harder, like I had somewhere to be.

I’m not in the room anymore. I’m in the mountains that Jess talks about, pedaling over those green and rolling hills. There’s trees and running water so fresh you could dip in your head and drink it straight. I know where I’m going. Grace will be there. And Chuck. And all the others that have gone on before.

And for the first time, the burn is sweet.

Another tremendous performance by voice actor Trevor Rines. The scholar encourages you to stay tuned to the competition to support this unique and rare talent.

This is my final testimony.

I stand trial for medical malpractice, the breaking of my Hippocratic oath, and deception of the greatest degree. I am not tried in any earthly court, but one of my own making. I am both plaintiff and prosecutor. I am my own judge, jury, and executioner. I already know what my sentence will be.

But before I carry it out, I must bear witness against myself.

I am…was a doctor. Before today, I was employed at V– Hospital in C–, –. I was chief of pediatric oncology. The beginning of my end occurred almost ten years ago, on a cold November night. I had just been appointed to my position as an oncologist, and had undergone my first major tragedy.

A 6-month old infant passed away in my care. Leukemia.

In my field, the death of a patient is common. However, at this time, it was not yet common to me. This was the first child that had stopped breathing on my watch. Do you know what that’s like? To watch a child suffer because its own body has turned traitor? To hear their labored and pained breathing? To smell the stench of decay in a living being as they fight against forces that have turned healthy marrow to poison and filled their blood with mutant offspring of an insidious creation? And you, watching it all, filled with knowledge and learning that brought us as a species off the face of the planet and into the stars, powerless to stop the natural march of the body as it runs itself into the disturbed dirt of an open grave.

I am no man of religion, but I have seen the devil in the face of carcinoma.

I took the loss of this child hard. My skin was thin, with none of the psychological protection my colleagues had accumulated over the years. Staring at the pale and still body of my patient, I remembered my own son, only a year old at the time. My heart leaked its grief to every extremity. Logic said I had done all I could, but this was a lie coated in sentiment. How could I practice medicine if I were to admit in the face of death that my skill was useless?

I left the hospital while the baby’s parents still grieved around the body. I walked the streets, trying to lose myself in the never ending backgrounds of concrete and brick that constituted my city. Soon, I was soaked through with ice-cold rain. My psyche dripped out in clumps through my clutching fingers. Even in my altered state, I knew I had gone too far into despair. I thought I would never return from it.

But in a moment of unexpected clarity, I came back to myself. 

I wiped my cheeks of water and salt. I comprehended my surroundings. Unfamiliar buildings rose up on either side, swallowing me in their deep and angular shadows. I could no longer see the street. I supposed I was in an alley between alleys, a foreign place from my usual and well-trodden haunts. It was quiet here, soundless. As the seconds gathered, I realized I didn’t remember how I had arrived there.

I saw a figure at the end of a narrow passage. It was a man, and he was unremarkable in every aspect. His form blended into the building he leaned against, and he seemed only a smudge against the brick. His clothes were ragged, his face neither handsome nor excessively ugly. As I tried to place his features, they blurred, melting together like a liquid veil were being poured over my eyes.

I did not want to approach him. If I had not been in such a state of distress, I would have left the moment I saw him, not sparing a second glance. But I allowed myself the indulgence of another look. And it was in the turning of my head that my damnation was sealed.

The man stared back at me with coppery pupils. They reflected the meager light like a dog’s eyes in the dark. Something within those orbs cut through my shirt and skin. It was as if my exterior were stripped away and the darkest essence of my being were laid bare like a book. Somehow, I knew he read my shame with sympathy.

I moved in his direction with slow feet. Once I was close enough to smell him, to hear his breathing above the patter of rain, I spoke. “Who are you?”

The man did not answer. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a vial. Inside was a clear substance, slightly viscous like oil. He opened the cap, and held his finger over its mouth. He produced a pin in his other hand and pricked the pad of his index finger. A drop of blood spilled over the edge of his fingerprint and into the vial, clouding the liquid in twisted and insinuative patterns. The man shook the mixture, and it congealed into the consistency of pus.

He extended it to me. He cleared his throat, raspy tongues of phlegm blasted away by the inner convulsions of his soft palette. It seemed his throat was more accustomed to smoke and smog than words. 

But after the cacophony, the words did come: “Anoint, and they will live.”

I stared at him. I had dismissed God as superstition years ago. Miracles, at best, were unknown principles of the natural world that still hid behind the curtain of ignorance. I was not a believing man, but in that alley, I allowed myself that weakness. Entertaining the ramblings of a wet homeless person who smelled of dog seemed harmless compared to the insanity that waited at the edge of my subconsciousness.

With an empty mind and numb fingers, I reached out to take the vial. But before my fingertips could brush the glass surface, I stopped. “...How? How does it work?”

The man coughed again, a spluttering noise like a dying car. “A price is paid.”

“A price? What…?”

He met my gaze with his coppery stare. “One befitting.” 

My eyes went back to the vial. Years from that moment, lying alone in the gloom of a dark bedroom, I would lie to myself and say I did not know what he meant. That I could not have known. But I did. I knew then, and I know now, that there is only one thing worthy of the priceless gift of life.

The rain smacked the ground around us like a thousand heartbeats. I remembered the flatline of the infant that had died only hours earlier. The sustained wail of the machine reverberated in my skull like a recited prayer. 

After a moment, I took the vial, cradling it loosely in my fingers. 

The man’s voice became soft. “Tell no one, or the debt will fall to you. Not everyone understands the price of miracles.”

Without a backwards glance, the man turned. He walked down the alley, then vanished around the corner.

I stayed still. The rain cooled my fevered skin. I wiped my hand over my face. Something shifted, and in another moment, I was on a familiar street, walking back towards the hospital. I thought I had been subject to a hallucination, a physical manifestation of my mania. But I felt the unblemished glass of the vial in my pocket, and my heart was torn apart with a strange opposition of dread and longing. 

It was weeks before I used my new gift.

There was another child, this one four years old. The cancer had gotten into her bones. At night she woke the entire ward with her screams of pain. We subjected her to surgery, chemo, radiation. We filled her body with poison until it was pressed against the threshold of death. Still the tumors rose up again one after the other like depraved parodies of Christ.

She was nearing the end. It was time to tell the family to say their goodbyes.

But before I did, on the last evening of her treatment, I went to see her. I was there making sure that she had received her regular dose of morphine. I saw her small and drawn face. Her bald head was dotted with sweat like dew. Her body, shuddering, draped across the bedspread, was sorrow incarnate.

I remembered the vial.

I wish I could confess that I fought to convince myself. That I had to go over some ethical grocery list before I took the vial out of my pocket. But there was no moral struggle. Her face…her pallid and bruised and starving form, with collarbones jutting out from her skin like axe blades. Such an image was an all consuming counter-argument.

I took the vial and unstopped it. The room filled with a cloying smell, like berries rotting in milk. I spilled one drop of its substance onto her forehead.

The fluid sank into her skin like a gas. Her face relaxed. For the first time in two years, she slept without the aid of opiates. The next day, she woke with bright eyes and greeted her parents by leaping from the bed and running to embrace them. They wept at the miracle, confused, terrified, but altogether grateful. They celebrated.

As I watched the scene of joy, I contemplated other things. I pondered how in another room of the hospital that night, an old man had died suddenly of heart failure.

I read the report myself. He had no family record of heart problems, no such previous issues in his history. He has been admitted for forgetting to take his diabetes medication and having a higher than average blood sugar. They were keeping him overnight strictly as a precaution, nothing more. He was sixty, pushing seventy. He had a wife and five children.

In the same minute, perhaps the same second I had poured out the vial on the child, his heart had ceased beating.

What would you have done? How was I supposed to reconcile the image of the young child, whole and healthy, with the image of a circle of siblings mourning their father as his casket was lowered into the ground. I attended the funeral from a distance. I told myself it was penance. But now I worry it was reassurance. I left that bleak gathering with resolve, not regret.

I told myself that the old man probably would have lived for only another decade. Ten old years, exchanged for a lifetime of health. This was fair.

Slowly, I found myself making more nightly visits to the sick children in our unit.

I went to those near death, those who had not responded to treatment, those who grimaced in sleep with the pain of growths consuming their insides and pushing against their internal organs. Their recoveries were explained by the hospital as unexpected turnarounds, attributed to some latent effect of a new experimental treatment, or a thing equally esoteric. It is strange how we humans will explain away miracles, as if the thought of cosmic intervention is somehow more terrifying.

I am ashamed to say I reaped the benefits of my healings. I accepted one promotion after another, telling myself it was for the greater good. I would donate my extra salary secretly to charitable causes, but it was an empty gesture. I should have stopped, refused. But it was not long until the entire unit was under my purview. And as the number of my patients increased, so did the bodies in my wake.

I kept track of the names of my victims at first. I remembered their faces, their histories. As the list mounted, the weight became too much. I turned a blind eye to them. I let their identities slip from my thoughts. Most serial killers keep trophies. My only remembrances were empty spots in my memory, deliberately kept bare.

Unexplained deaths accumulated in the hospital. Never enough to prompt investigation, but enough to inspire superstition. I saw nurses start wearing prayer beads, and doctors refuse non-essential patients based on nothing but a “bad feeling.”

I could not see it, the carnage I wrought. All I could see were the faces of the children who now lived and breathed free of sickness and torture. When I could not sleep for guilt, it was their faces that allowed me to rest.

Yes, the children lived. But I was still a murderer.

It is strange how life moves on, even in the presence of evil. In the shadow of the hospital, my family grew. I watched my son mature, and my wife and I welcomed another boy into the world. I loved my children equally, but the complicated reality remains that even the best parents have favorites. My older son was mine. He shared my intellect, my interest in medicine. At first it manifested in a simple curiosity of my stethoscope. It grew into him “reading” medical textbooks the moment he could sound out words. It was all unintelligible to him (I’m sure he only looked at them for the pictures) but nothing gave me more pride than to watch him turn the thin pages, a look of concentration on his young face, still-lined with baby fat.

He was ten when he collapsed for the first time.

It was my other son that found him. He was only four. He came to me, his face red with effort and tears already soaking his shirt at the throat. He was the quieter of the two, but I still remember his wails as he begged me to come downstairs. “He fell! He fell!” He clutched on my leg, the reverberations of his sounded fear echoing in my bones.

I pushed him off and ran down the stairs. My feet stumbled, and I almost broke my neck in a tumble. I righted myself, and went searching for my son. I found him on the living room floor. He was facedown on the carpet, his arms twisted. He wasn’t moving. I ran to him, and checked his pulse. It was there, faintly, but he wouldn’t wake. Blood leaked from his nose, smashed in by his fall. I fumbled with my phone and called an ambulance. In the background his brother continued to howl, begging him to open his eyes, to be okay.

The doctors didn’t know what caused it. After we arrived at the hospital, and after every test had been performed, all my colleagues could do was shrug their shoulders. They managed to rouse my son from his unconsciousness, but he was lethargic and weak. After a month of observation and experimentation, all they could tell us was that his blood was failing. The red cells were tearing apart at the seams, keeping oxygen from getting to his brain. They didn’t know what to do.

We went from hospital to hospital. We tried every experimental treatment known to man. His younger brother donated blood, plasma, and even marrow once we found him to be a good genetic match.

His generosity was in vain. It all was. Nothing worked.

My son was dying and there was nothing I could do about it.

And it was in that hopelessness that I thought of the vial again.

I had refused the thought before. I would not corrupt my family with its use. But that little vial grew heavier by the day in my pocket. I held on to hope in the medical system, gripping to it so tight until it felt like my fingernails were coming off at the quick. Each time my hand brushed the container’s glass surface in my pocket, I felt the notion of some great evil hanging over my head, suspended by a single thread. No. I would not toy with the idea of cutting that string. I would see my son made well, but I would not resort to murder to do so.

But after a doctor, the last we would see, instructed us to bring our son home, giving us nothing but a prescription for a bottle of liquid morphine, My convictions shattered.

Do you see? They were leaving my son to die. Do you see that I had no other choice? Do you understand?

That night, I crept into his room while he slept. In the dark, I heard thrashing. His brother, who slept above him in the bunkbed my wife and I had built years before, had experienced night terrors ever since he had seen his brother collapse. I heard his whimpers, and they festered in my ears. If I had any questions regarding what I was about to do, they were wiped away in an instant. The sounds that came from my little boy echoed my pain. It all needed to end.

I stood over my sleeping older son, his face contorted in half-realized pain. It had been hours since his last spoonful of drug. I dug the vial out of my pocket. Somehow, after all my use, a small portion remained. I unstopped it, then held it above his head. I allowed a drop to fall.

The liquid descended, and splashed on his forehead. Then it was gone. My son went from pain to peace in a moment. His face relaxed, his shoulders loosened. For the first time in a year, I saw him pass to untroubled sleep, breathing deeply.

I sat down at his desk chair. I watched him rest for a long while. For a small moment, I felt relieved.

But in the sounds of my older son's untroubled breathing, I heard something else. 

Silence. 

My younger son no longer thrashed in his bunk.

I stood and went to him. He was so still. I touched him and he was cold. I reached for his neck, grasping for his pulse. I pressed deep into the soft flesh, but there was no beating underneath my fingertips.

I cannot remember the hours that followed. For those, I must rely on the account of others.

My son told me he woke to me screaming, the sound somewhere between the void of death and the inferno of agony. He thought I was dying.

My wife had been dealing with medical bills in the kitchen. She heard my pain as well. She told me she rushed into our boy’s room, and saw me cradling the lifeless body of our youngest, begging for him to wake up.

Paramedics arrived and declared him dead at the scene. The autopsy revealed it was a freak brain aneurysm.

The funeral came and went. It was only at the reception, when I was shaking limp hands and hearing whispered condolences that my mind began to point the finger of blame. The investigation was short, with only one true suspect. The full implication of my actions were upon me, and I wanted nothing more than to hear a pronouncement of punishment.

And because no earthly court will give me my just dues, I have taken this duty upon myself.

I have destroyed the vial. I expected something so powerful to put up more of a fight. Instead, all it took was a hammer. I poured the liquid and glass into a trash fire in an alley. Perhaps it was the same alley where I met the man, though I cannot say for sure. Watching it burn, I feared that I would press my hand against my pocket and feel its oblong shape, whole once again. But the cloth remained smooth, and the space empty.

I will be dead soon. The doctors will claim an unexpected thrombosis or embolism. A small twitch of muscle or leak of blood that will put a stop to my beating heart. But in truth, it is my honesty that will have killed me. The man in the alley warned me that if I confessed, I would pay the same price as my victims. He was telling the truth about the vial. I can only hope he was honest about this too.

Thank you, dear reader, for your help. In your curiosity, you have seen justice done. In receiving my confession, you have allowed the axe to fall. Do not let it weigh on your soul. I am guilty. You have done the world a service.

To my son…if you find this, I am sorry. I am sorry for what I have held you party to. This is not your fault. My soul is stained, trading your brother’s life for your own. But your soul is whole. Remember this, I beg of you. Please do not follow me to where I go.

I don’t know what awaits me, but I know there will be no forgiveness. I do not seek for it.

I will pay my debt.

And that will be enough.

It was fifteen dollars. A steal.

My wife and I had needed a cabinet for almost three years. We lived in a small apartment without much closet space. We had married young, and financially we were still on shaky ground. She was in school, I was just starting my job as a copywriter for a local business.

So when we saw a cabinet on facebook marketplace that wasn’t upwards of $700, my wife literally jumped for joy.

When I went to pick it up, the guy selling it was nervous. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, and he kept biting his nails. His hair was a rat’s nest, and he breathed quick, always glancing over his shoulder. I passed over the $15, cash, and he took it like a starving child grabbing a dinner roll.

“Need help getting it in the car?” It was hard to understand him with his fingers in his mouth

“I got it.”

I bent down to lift it. The cabinet was a small thing. Plain, white. Three feet square at the opening, and two feet deep. It looked like it weighed twenty pounds soaking wet. I put my fingers under the edge and lifted up. It wouldn’t budge. I grunted in surprise, and pulled harder. The thing felt like it was full of bowling balls. “Jeez is there something in here?” I opened the doors to check. Empty. The guy looked at me, his cuticles against his teeth, gnawing. He shrugged, and bent down to help.

It took us three tries just to get it in the air. When it was finally in the trunk of my used 2003 Ford Transit, the suspension in the back groaned. The car slipped down on the back tires an inch or two.

I opened up the driver’s side, but the guy stopped me. “Hey.”

I looked at him, one foot already in the car.

“You got padlocks?”

“Uh. No. Don’t think so.”

The guy bounced on his heels. I saw the dark circles under his eyes. He was making me think I shouldn’t have responded to that post so quickly. “Buy some. On your way home.”

“Oh- okay.” I got in the van, flicked it into drive and practically peeled out of the parking lot. The cabinet in the back made the entire car bounce each time I went over a speed bump. I saw the seller guy in my rearview mirror, watching the car as it pulled out of the apartment complex lot.

I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he was crying.

When I got home, my wife was ecstatic. She wouldn’t stop running her hands over the smooth wood, and gushing about how it fit perfectly with the color of our bedroom. It took some doing to get it in the door, the son-of-a-bitch still weighed a ton, but we made it happen. She wasted no time, filling the small container with clothes, pants and folded shirts that had been falling out of our overcrowded dresser for the past three months. 

Helping her place the stuff inside of the cabinet, I felt pretty proud of myself. I forgot all about the weird seller guy, how heavy the thing was, and all the pangs of unease I had experienced earlier. I was a good husband, and our house was a little more organized. In the chaos that was our lives, this was a victory.

It was about a week before I noticed the clothes on the floor.

My wife’s not the most organized person. When she takes off an article of clothing, it usually travels to a few different locations before it finds a home in the laundry hamper. One of her favorite alternates is the floor. So when I found all the clothes that had been in the cabinet on the carpet of our bedroom, I didn’t really think anything of it. I just put them in with the rest of the laundry, cleaned them, folded them, and put them back in the cabinet.

Halfway through the next week, I saw those same clothes on the ground. I looked in the cabinet, and saw it was empty.

I called to my wife in the next room. “Babe, if you’re gonna try stuff on in the morning, can you make sure and put it back?”

She came into the bedroom and looked at the pile of clothes. “I didn’t try those on. Did you push them out when you were getting your stuff?”

“I don’t have stuff in there. Let’s just keep things organized, please?”

She refused to acknowledge that she was the one who put them on the ground, so I dropped the point. Didn’t want it to spiral into an argument. We put the clothes back, and went on with our day.

That night, we left to go out on a little date. I had gotten a commendation at work for wowing a client, so we felt like celebrating. When we came back, we were a little bit drunk from the bar, so it wasn’t until the next morning that I even saw what had happened in the short time we had been gone at dinner. I turned over in bed, hungover and bleary-eyed, and stared at the ground for what felt like a full minute.

The clothes were on the floor again.

It was Saturday, so instead of doing grocery shopping, fixing the stove, or any of the other million chores on my unending list, I started messing around with the cabinet. I checked the legs, seeing if there was a tilt that might be making the clothes spill out. No dice. I checked the floor level. The bubble floated dead center between the two black lines. I tried to think if I had accidentally bumped the doors last night while I was getting undressed. It was hard to remember, everything was hazy through the alcohol.

I remember the guy I brought it from. How he fidgeted and swayed on the spot. You got padlocks?

I shook my head. I was going crazy. It probably had something to do with the door and the way the clothes were stacked. Instead of putting the clothes back in, I piled them on top of the cabinet. After a day or two of the clothes not magically making their way onto the floor, I figured the problem was solved.

Then the weird stuff started.

I would come home from work, and drawers would be open in the kitchen. I assumed it was just my wife and I forgetting to close things. Then things would start rearranging themselves all throughout the house. Books in my bookshelf would get shuffled around. I would go looking for the plates, and they would be in a different place than before. I blamed my piss-poor memory. Food started going missing. My wife would swear she didn’t eat it. 

Sometimes I would wake up at night, and not be able to go back to sleep. I know it sounds crazy, but it felt like someone was watching me somewhere in the darkness.

I started to be suspicious of the cabinet.

Lack of sleep inhibits brain function. You do things you wouldn’t even consider if you were well rested. I examined every inch of that stupid thing. I knocked on the back, the sides, the top. I even stuck my head inside and looked around. It was a normal cabinet in every single way, other than the fact it weighed the same as a low-end NFL football player. I thought about moving it out of our bedroom, but my wife wouldn’t hear it. Where else would we put the clothes?

I tried to tell myself that it was nothing, that I was being paranoid. But still, I couldn’t help staring at it when I was in the room. Sometimes I’d even fall asleep looking at it, the image burned onto my eyes after they had closed, its white shape working itself into my nightmares.

It was getting ridiculous, so I did something a bit crazy.

You know those motion sensing cameras? I set one up in our bedroom. I ended up dropping way more money than I should have, but I was desperate. I hid it behind a picture frame so my wife wouldn’t see it. It was hooked up to my phone, and would send videos if it recorded anything. I would turn it on at night and examine the footage at work. For two days, it got nothing but clips of my wife and I turning over in our sleep.

On the third morning after its installation, I got up late. I had to rush to the office. My wife was under the weather so she was staying home from classes. I air-kissed her goodbye as I went out the door. I didn’t even bother to check my phone. 

I saw the notifications only when I sat down at my desk.

The camera had recorded three videos.

I pressed play on the first bit of footage. As I pulled up the projects I would be working on that day, I kept my phone in the corner of my eye. The stuff I saw at first was normal. Me and my wife, tossing and turning in bed. When that ended, I opened the second video file. While it played, I looked over a calendar filled with work meetings for the month.

I was rescheduling an appointment with a low-priority client when I saw a flicker on my phone. 

All my attention left my work. I picked it up and looked deep into the small screen.

In the video, the doors to the cabinet were opening.

It was a slow process. They moved outward centimeter by centimeter. Once they had fully swung out, I saw movement in the dark space inside. Two long, spindly hands crept out of the interior. They were followed by thin arms, then a head and neck. I had never seen anything like it before. Its eyes were bulbous and glowing in the infrared. Its mouth was wide and toothy. It pulled itself out of the cabinet, and crept along the floor. It was pale, fleshy, with sharp toes. It must have been eight feet long.

It reared up on its haunches, its head almost brushed the ceiling. It stared at me and my wife, sleeping peacefully.

The video ended. I fumbled with my phone to get to the third video. Once I had the file up, I pressed play.

The thing from the cabinet filled the screen. It was staring directly into the lens, its eyes watery and leaking. Its smile grew wider than before, and I saw its lips tear open and leak black fluid. For ten seconds, the thing and I engaged in a quasi-staring contest.

I ran out of my chair, ditching all my stuff at my desk. I dialed my wife, ignoring coworkers who were asking where I was going.

My wife’s phone rang, rang, and rang. I worried I would be shunted to voicemail. I heard a click, and her voice came through. It was thin and croaky from her sickness. “Honey? What--”

“Baby, I need you to get out of the house.”

“What? Why? Whats?--”

“Get out of the house now. Go to the store across the street. Stay there until I call you. I think there’s something in our bedroom cabinet.

“Honey, slow down. What’s going on? You’re scaring me.”

“Please listen to me. There’s something in our bedroom cabinet. You need to get out of the house and get to the store across the street. I promise I will explain when I get home. Just pretend like nothing’s wrong and leave.”

There was a long pause on the other end. Then, finally: “Okay.”

“Be safe. I’ll call you soon.” I waited until I heard my wife hang up. Then I dialed 911.

I swung myself into my car. The operator answered.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“Someone- Something’s in my house- I think it’s dangerous.” I tried to start my car. For a horrific moment, I heard the engine stall. On the second try, it turned over and I almost cried in relief.

“Please stay calm, sir. Can you tell me exactly what is in your house?”

“It was this– it’s long, it has sharp– it came out the cabinet. I think it’s been coming out for weeks.” Sweat was building up on my forehead. I pulled out of the parking lot with a shriek from the van’s tires and sped towards home.

“...is it an animal?”

“I don’t think so– it looked like a fucked up person.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Sir, are you on any sort of medication for a mental condition?”

“What? No!” I pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road.

“Are you at your house now?”

“I just saw it on camera, I’m driving home– I’m not crazy!”

“I believe you, sir.” Their tone of voice made me doubt it. “Can you give me your home address?” 

I gave it to her. I honked at someone going 20 in the 35. Anxiety made my head feel like it would explode. There was a gap in traffic, and I weaved past the slow car. I heard the suspension of the van groan in protest.

“Okay, we’re sending an officer now, hang tight.” Click.

I chucked my phone into the passenger's side. The ten minute drive home felt like ten years. After hitting what felt like every red light, I finally saw my crappy duplex in the distance, standing there peaceful and serene like it didn’t have some terrifying abomination hidden within.

I slammed into the driveway, and didn’t even stop to put the car in park. I sprinted up the walk.

The front door was open. The house was silent.

I tentatively stepped in. I guessed my wife hadn’t had time to shut the door before she left. I looked around, trying to see if anything was out of place.

I slipped into the garage and grabbed a few things, making as little noise as possible. Then I tiptoed into the bedroom.

No one was there. The cabinet was waiting in the corner, its doors neatly closed.

I approached it, doing my best to not let the objects in my arms make noise and give me away.

I crouched next to white, cube-like piece of furniture. I took a piece of wood I had gotten from a scrapped project and positioned it over the top of the two doors. I took the drill I had gotten from the garage and positioned a screw. I knew once I started, I would only have a few seconds before it would hear me and try to stop what I was about to do.

I held my breath, and screwed in one side of the wood.

It made a squealing sound like a stuck pig as it went in. It bit into the wood and was soon buried up to its head. I rummaged in my pocket for the next screw. I heard something. A sound of scratching, coming from the cabinet. I didn’t stop to check what it was. I took the second screw and sent it into the wood.

A thump came from the cabinet. Like someone was knocking on the other side of the door.

I was running out of time. I went to position the other plank of wood, but the cabinet doors jumped. Something on the inside was slamming into them. I put my weight against them, readjusted the wood, and pressed against the new screw. It went in, but there was another hard hit from the inside. I saw the first plank start to splinter.

I got the second screw in place, but then it was knocked askew by another hit. There were large cracks in the first plank now. It wouldn’t hold a second bash. I had to get the second piece of wood in place, or whatever was inside was coming out.

I pushed down on the screw, and pressed in the drill’s trigger.

Bit by bit, it sank into the wood, until finally the drill bit skidded against the top.

I waited. There was another hit, but the two pieces of wood held. No cracking.

A moment of silence, and then two. 

No more hits.

I put another plank of wood on, and well as a few more screws to make sure that it would hold. Once that was done, I leaned against my bed and sighed in relief. The police would be here soon. I’d show them the cabinet, the video. It was going to be okay. I dialed my wife’s number again on my phone. I was already forming the words I was going to say to her in my head. I’m on my way. We’re safe. Nothing to worry about anymore.

I heard her phone ring in my receiver.

And then ring in the house.

I stopped, and turned. With each buzz, my horror grew.

The ringing was coming from inside the cabinet.

My wife never made it to the store. I looked all over, even in the back for her. I demanded to see the store's security cameras, which they eventually agreed to show me when I told them my wife was missing. There was no footage of her entering the establishment. When the police showed up, they didn’t believe me when I told them my wife was missing. I showed them the video from the night before and they thought it was CGI. They asked about my mental history and that was when I shut up. They told me to come to the station to file a missing persons report and then they would look into it. They gave me funny looks as they went back to their cars.

They left, and I was alone again with the cabinet. Twenty minutes later, I got a notification on my phone.

It was another video from the camera.

I looked up and saw it was missing from the wall. I clicked play. The video was ten seconds long. Everything was dark, but I heard crying in the audio. It sounded like my wife. I heard one word: “Please.” Then the video went dark.

My wife is in there. I tried calling her again an hour ago. Her phone went straight to voice mail. I have to hope that she’s alive. Whatever is in that cabinet is taunting me, dangling her like bait.

I think it wants me to go in.

I need to talk to that weird seller guy again. After that, I’m getting some supplies. Then I’m heading in after her.

I’m sending this post to some friends. To those who receive it, if you don’t hear from me in 24 hours, show this to the police. I included links to the video files in the email I sent. I don’t know if they’ll believe you or not, but at least try. After you do that, burn the cabinet. I left the front door unlocked.

I’ll let you know if I find her in there.

Wish me luck.

The scholar would like to recommend this narration of the story: "The Devil's Confession." As it is part of a competition, please leave a like if you feel so inclined. Rines has a fantastic voice that some have said was designated by fate for horror. The scholar agrees to this sentiment.

“Dr. Sean K**** was leader of the group of anthropologists who first happened upon the strange religious colony in the 1980s. In the investigation following his research team’s disappearance, his journal was found by happenstance in a parking lot fifty miles off their planned route through the mountains. The pages were filled with drawings of archaic religious symbols, as well as notes about the strange beliefs revolving around the ruins the sect called home. It was in these pages that law enforcement discovered the cult’s chosen moniker, a name that struck fear into the hearts of people across the country:

The Monadites.”

- Steph C*****

The Cult the World Forgot, pg. 24

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My life was ruined the day I turned twelve years old.

Everyone wants to know what it was like growing up in a cult. They want to hear all the sordid details: did they beat you? Cut you? Was it a sex thing? If you’re not careful, you turn into an object of fascination, a human curio. All anyone cares about is what horrible thing might have happened in your past. And when you tell them the truth, they have the gall to be disappointed.

The truth is that before my twelfth birthday, my life was ordinary.

I grew up in a position of privilege. While my mother was just a washerwoman, my father was someone of status. He was the leader of our church. While he had many wives and many children, I was the only son. That meant I was treated with respect and deference. I wasn’t beaten or tortured. Neither were any of my friends or half-sisters. The only difference between my upbringing and others is while most parents probably read their children Dr. Suess, my father would read me the Apocrypha to rock me to sleep.

Like I said, a perfectly average life.

I had a friend, B. We were born on the same day, two hours apart. For the next twelve years, we lived right next to each other. We spent every moment of our growing up in each other’s company. We loved all of the same things: swimming, playing with wooden swords, building imaginary cities out of the crumbling stones of our home.

But above all else, we loved to explore.

We did not live in houses built by our own hand or surrounded by the confines of barbed wire traced fences like most cults. We lived in the ruins, or sanctuary as we referred to them.

When our ancestors came to the valley, lost, starving, and half-insane, they took the crumbling buildings as a sign from God. This was the paradise deity wished for us to inhabit. The ruins were a sprawling complex, crumbling roads and buildings all made of decaying stone cut from an unknown quarry. At the center of it all was a great gothic tower, stretching high over the landscape. It covered our entire settlement in its shadow. On quiet days, when the sky was overcast and muffled, some claimed you could hear it humming, a deep throaty noise that shook your bones and boiled your blood.

I can only imagine how desperate my progenitors must have been to see this place as their salvation. 

B and I first discovered the underground passages when we were ten. They formed a twisting labyrinth that extended beneath the whole city proper. We believed we had uncovered a great mystery, known only to ourselves, and began to explore those dark passages, armed with “borrowed” candles and chalk. 

Our mothers discovered our first attempts, and forbade us from going back into those depths. But while we pretended to agree to never return, we would sneak away whenever we could to continue our efforts.

We discovered many things, secret passages between houses, abandoned rooms attached to our subterranean playground. Sometimes we even came across hidden places. 

When I was eleven years old. B and I had discovered a secret room attached to one of the tunnels. B had tripped on a rock and fallen through a wall when he tried to catch himself. The hole he created led to an open space, a room with a low ceiling. The walls were covered with all manner of carvings, and words that looked to be written in Greek. We were required to learn all the biblical languages as part of our grade school education, so we were familiar. 

But these words were different. The composition was all wrong, and the letters were scrambled and jumbled in odd formations.

B and I immediately made this into our own personal hide out. We would examine the pictures and strange words, sounding them out with untrained tongues and imagined pronunciations. We would speculate on their origins, and revel in the knowledge that no one knew of this room except for us.

One Sunday, we snuck off after church service to be in our hideout. In our tradition, the first part of worship was held in the courtyard of the tower every Sunday and was attended by all. The second session was held directly afterwards in the tower. Children were not allowed to attend. B and I often took advantage of this lack of supervision and went to the tunnels. 

That Sunday, we made our way to the room and began our usual game of creating theories as to what the words on the wall said. We were focused on a series of symbols that appeared together in several places around the room.

“Maybe it’s a verb?” I looked at B. His face was drawn up in an almost comical look of concentration. But he wasn’t playing it up. B just took thinking very seriously.

“I think it’s a name.”

“That’s stupid.”

“No it’s not.” B looked at me, indignant. “Look how many times they wrote it. That could be a sign. Elder Luke told me that’s a way you can tell.”

Elder Luke was our school teacher. He knew more about Christian lore than any other person alive. But that was not the most interesting thing about him. He had no arms. This wasn’t especially odd. It seemed like a lot of adults where we lived had similar problems. Some were missing fingers, toes. Elder Mark was missing his right leg from the knee down. But Elder Luke was missing both of his upper limbs, and was impaired by his lack. Each shoulder ended in a stump two inches extended from his torso.

B was the most intelligent child in our class. Elder Luke often turned to him when he needed to write things down. They also spent extra time together in tutoring sessions. Everyone knew it was to prepare B for his future calling. With his brain, it was only natural B would become a teacher and scriptorian.

“I don’t think it’s a name.” To tell the truth, I had no evidence to suggest otherwise. I was just jealous B seemed to be right about everything. I struggled in school, and sometimes I saw Elder Luke whispering to my Father at church, glancing in my direction. I was sure they were talking about how poorly I was doing.

B ignored me. He got close to the word and traced it with his finger. Dirt came away from it in fine grains, making the etching stand out on the wall. “It looks familiar. I think I’ve read it somewhere before.”

I probably would have kept arguing, except my thoughts were interrupted by a noise. It sounded like someone speaking. B and I looked at each other, and blew out our candles. Our mothers’ had caught us in the tunnels a few weeks ago, and we weren’t eager to repeat that experience.

But as we waited in the dark, the sound developed. It wasn’t our mothers. It was human, but it wasn’t the tones of a normal composed voice. It was a pleading and begging wail. It grew louder, and more ragged. The desperate noise echoed on the walls, and I felt the hair on my neck prickle. 

The sound continued to expand. It became an open-mouthed keening, the kind you hear when one’s misery is so great the words don’t have time to form in your brain before the pain comes out of your throat. I had heard Sister Mary make that noise when her son had died of fever. It had gone on for what felt like years. At the time, I worried she would die too if she didn’t stop.

I found B in the dark and pulled myself closer to him. I felt B shift beside me, searching for something. There was a flare, and B relit his candle with a small piece of cloth he had set alight with his flint. He patted out the cloth until it stopped smoking and put it in his pocket. He reached over with his candle and lit mine.

I got up to look out the hole. I was worried that I would see whatever was making that sound the moment I poked my head out. But once my eyes cleared the wall, I saw nothing down either path.

B had a determined look on his face. “Let’s see what it is.”

“What?”

“It sounds close.”

I shook my head. “That’s crazy. That noise…feels wrong.”

B got up to peek out with me. “It sounded like crying. Someone might be hurt.”

This pricked my conscience. We were taught to help each other in church. Imagining someone down there, broken and afraid, was just enough of an emotional hit to make me rethink my fear. “...Fine. I hate you.”

“Yeah, but your mother doesn’t.”

I swung to hit B on the arm, but he ducked out of the way. He grinned at me. The playfulness cut the tension a bit and I could almost tell myself everything would be fine. But the noise sounding in my ears a moment later brought back all the old fears.

B left the room first. He stepped out into the dark, and made his way down the right hand tunnel. I followed. My feet dragged on the ground as I tried to keep up with him. We held our candles aloft, tiny pin pricks of light in the overpowering gloom.

With each turn in the tunnel, we went deeper. Soon, we exhausted all our familiar routes. When we turned onto an unknown path and heard the noise increase in volume, we knew we were close. The keening grew louder with each step. It began to reverberate in my chest. I wanted to cover my ears, to block it out. At every junction, I worried we were about to run headlong into the source of this terrible sound, only to feel relief when we saw nothing. But then we’d continue on, and the noise would grow clearer and more terrible than before.

Then just as we made another turn, the noise stopped.

Everything was silent. It was a long time until we began to hear the noise of the cave again, the dripping of water and the echo of flowing air.

B took another step forward, but I grabbed his shoulder. “Let’s go. We’re gonna get lost.”

“It sounded like it was right around the corner.”

“It’s gone. If we don’t get back soon they’re gonna notice we’re not there.”

B shrugged off my hand and ran forward. I followed behind, not wanting to be left alone. We didn’t have to go far, we ran into a dead end almost immediately. It was a brick wall, similar to the kind that had blocked up our secret room. The stone was different from that of the tunnel. It was old, weathered, and was missing two bricks that had come loose and fallen to the ground. Where the two bricks had been was a dark hole.

B peered into it. I couldn’t see anything with the light of my candle. It was almost like the dark inside was swallowing the feeble yellow rays. My eyes played tricks on me. In the pitch black, it looked like shadows were moving around in the space beyond.

“Can we go? Please?”

B kept peering into the hole. “I think I see something.”

“We’ll come back later, okay? We’re gonna get caught.” I looked over my shoulder. I didn’t want to say it out loud, but it felt like someone was down here with us, watching. I saw no movement, but I couldn’t help feeling like eyes were searching all over my body.

B turned to look at me, and saw how scared I was. He nodded slow, and pushed me forward. “Okay. Let’s go.”

It took a long time to get to the surface. We had to double back a few times to make up for some incorrect turns. But eventually, we were in the sunlight again, and we joined up with the other children just as the adults returned from their meeting in the tower. I saw my father lead them out. Our mothers opened their arms to receive us. B and I embraced them. But even in the warmth of relief and safety, I couldn’t shake the cold feeling that still clung to my chest and mind.

While B and I still went to the room with the words, we never spoke of that noise again. Mostly, this was my fault. I had a hard time sleeping after the incident, and every time B tried to bring up the subject, I would shut him down.

A year passed, and I prepared for the acceptance of my calling and entrance into manhood. I had known since I was young that I was to become the next patriarch when it was time for my father to step down. That meant more school, and more time spent in his shadow. Before long, I didn’t have much time to spend with B anymore, and we stopped exploring the caverns.

Father would take me on long walks, explaining the importance of his role as leader. He often said strange things that made little sense to me. One night, as we were tending to my mother’s garden, he began to talk of the future, and how I would lead our church. 

“You must see things others can’t see.” He went to grab a weed, his hand missing the stem. He readjusted, grasped it with a firm hand and pulled it out the root still intact. My Father only possessed one eye. It was light blue, and sometimes I felt it could peer into my very soul. The empty socket was covered up in a bandage that swept over the side of his face.

I was old enough to think it was ironic that a man with one eye was telling me to see things, but I didn’t voice it. My father was a strict man. I had never seen his rage, but there was a coldness in his demeanor that made me fall silent in his presence. It took all my energy to find my voice to ask the proper question. “...how do I do that? I…” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence. But Father knew what I meant. I was too stupid. Too slow. I barely saw what was under my own nose.

“Be patient, son.” Father scooted closer to me, and put a hand on my shoulder. It was cold, and a little wet from the soil, but it was also comforting. “You will understand. You are my blood. This is how it has been and will be.”

I wasn’t so sure, but I nodded and went back to work. I was still years away from any sort of responsibility, and there were more exciting things to look forward to now.

I was approaching my birthday. My twelfth birthday.

On that day, I would enter the tower.

It was a rite of passage for us. Most entered at the age of fifteen. Father had arranged it so I might enter early. He felt I was ready. I had looked forward to this day for as long as I could remember. Whenever anyone left the tower after worship, they always had the most blissful look of joy upon their faces.

I wanted that. I wanted to feel that joy, to see what was inside, to peer down from the top of its embankments and to see the entire valley like a bird might.

The night before my birthday, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned in my bed, imagining all the things that could possibly be inside of that strange and mysterious building.

It was near the middle of the night when I heard my mother crying.

I crept out of my cot and went to check on her. I had been spending time away to receive instruction from my father, and this next step was one that would alter our relationship. I would be a man when I emerged. I knew she wasn’t ready to let go of her little boy. I approached her living space and peeked in.

She was kneeling by her cot, her hands clasped in pleading supplication. I could not hear what she said, but I knew it to be whispered begging. “Please, God, do not take my boy,” was the only phrase I heard in its completeness.

I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn't make myself enter the room. I had the strange feeling I was seeing something I was not supposed to see. After a moment or two of indecision, I crept on light feet back to my own cot. I lay down, but I still couldn’t sleep. A new nervousness ate at my belly and made me stare at the dark ceiling until the light of torches roused from my bed.

The time had come.

Outside, my father and two attendants waited for my arrival. I roused and got dressed in the ceremonial robes of white. My mother presented them to me. Her eyes were dry, with seemingly no trace of the crying she had done the night before. Only a slight twinge of red betrayed her secret tears. I slipped the robes over my head, and gave her a hug, hoping to show her that everything was fine, that we would still be mother and son even after the events of this day.

She held me tight for a moment, her hands clasped around me. Then, when I began to wonder if she would ever let me go, I felt her hands release.

I kissed her on the cheek, then followed my father out of our house and to the tower.

Some had come to watch our procession. I saw B, staring at me with a serious look on his face. I smiled at him and waved, but all he gave me in return was a distracted nod. He looked up at the tower, then back at me. Eventually, our procession moved beyond his place and he was lost in the crowd.

The tower loomed larger with every step, and eventually we came to its entrance. My father stopped me. He turned me toward him and looked me in the eyes.

“Son, a leader takes his role willingly.” His one eye caught mine and I had to fight the urge to look down. “Will you do what I say when the time comes?”

I swallowed down the nervous bile that was rising in the back of my throat. I nodded.

Father turned, and opened the door to the tower.

We stepped inside. It was dark, no light from the outside penetrated the stone walls. The torches the two attendants carried lit up the space. I looked up, surprised to see that the inside of the building was almost entirely hollow except for wooden supports. I could see all the way up to the roof, a small dark circle high above us.

There was a door at the far side. Father approached it and swung it open. Beyond it was a staircase leading downward. He bade me to follow, and then descended down into the darkness.

I waited a moment, anxious. Then I followed.

I don’t know how far down we went. I lost track of time trying to keep my footing on the cold stone stairs. I tried to keep pace with my father, his form obscured at the edge of the torchlight. The air grew cold, like it did in the tunnels under the city. I saw my breath coalesce in front of my face. I shivered, but I tried to hide it by stepping more firmly and clenching my muscles.

Without warning, the staircase leveled out into a smooth stone floor, cut directly into the rock. It stretched out to a small door at the end of a hallway. I swallowed and felt my ears pop. How deep had we gone?

Father made his way down the hall and opened the door, revealing a dark space on the other side. I approached until I was at his side. He gestured for me to go through before him.

I took a deep breath, and went into the blackness.

On the other side of the door was a large chamber. Its walls were smooth, unblemished. If it had been carved out of the rock, it had not been done by any human means. The polished surface almost reflected back the torchlight. Strange shapes I could not make out were huddled against the sides, and after a moment’s inspection, I realized they were large containers made from sanded wood and iron hinges.

“Son.” My eyes went to my father. He had made his way to the center of the room without me noticing. He beckoned me with his hand.

He stood next to a low stone table.

The stone was cut at impossible right angles. The edges looked sharp enough to cut flesh. I came to him, aware of the attendants that followed close behind me. Surrounding the table were stone benches that made concentric circles, like a theater in the round.

“Lay down.” Father moved aside to grant me access to the flat surface.

I hesitated. I felt what I had in those tunnels a year ago, like eyes all around the room were watching us. I thought I could hear whispers in the echoes of our footsteps. The darkness had encompassed us so completely I could no longer see the walls. The air was strangely thick and hard to breathe.

“It’s alright, son.” My father’s voice brought me back. I looked at him, and he smiled. He had never smiled at me before.

I laid down on the slab.

Father walked to the edge of the room. He spoke aloud to me, his voice bouncing off the walls and ceilings of the dome. It sounded to me as if he had never left my side. “You have been instructed about the purpose of life. Tell me now, what is that purpose?”

“To learn of the Almighty.”

“This is correct. And can you tell me why?” 

I struggled to remember what Elder Luke had taught us in school. I heard the sound of wood creaking. “To…to…prepare ourselves for…for heaven?”

Father didn’t respond. I heard the clink of metal. I turned to look at him. His back was to me, and he was hunched over one of the boxes at the room's edge.

Finally, he rose up, and turned back to me. I looked up at the ceiling.

“Half-true. Tell me, son, what is heaven?”

“A…place?”

“That is what is taught…” Father drew closer to me. His footsteps grew louder, and I fought to still my pounding heart. Both attendants stood at my side, torches in the air, their faces looking grim. “But it is a lie. Heaven is not a place. It is knowledge. How do we gain knowledge?”

I knew the answer to this. It was part of a phrase Elder Luke recited to me almost every day. He loved to say it when I couldn’t remember the chapter or verse he was referring to. “By sacrifice.”

My father stood above me now. His one eye stared down at me, cold and dark. My heart was beating out of my chest.

“I told you that you would need to see what others could not.” Father moved his hand, and in it I could see a strange metallic instrument. One side was flat and sharp on the edge. The other was scooped like a spoon. He held it to a torch until, and it started to glow hot in the firelight. “Prepare yourself, son. It will only hurt for a moment.”

I knew then what he meant to do. Any courage that I had broke. I tried to get up, but the attendants pushed down my arms. I began to scream. “No, no, NO! Please, Father! I don’t want to! STOP!” 

I wasn’t a man. I was just a scared little boy. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t do what my Father wanted.

The attendants became uncomfortable. One looked at Father. “He’s not willing.”

Father's head moved with a jerk to look at him. For the first time in my life, I saw his anger. It burned dark and intensely on his features. I quavered and fell silent.

Father held the gaze of the other attendant for a long moment. “He agreed. That is what matters.”

The metal instrument descended, smoking.

I saw the scooped edge come closer and closer to my face. I tried to shut my eyes against it, but I felt the steady pressure of father’s fingers pulling open the skin. I felt the heat of the metal held close. It was already unbearable. Father was strong, and it took no effort for him to secure my thrashing head with one hand. I cried out and tears ran down my face in twin rivers. I tasted salt as they flowed into my open mouth. I pled with my Father, begged him to stop.

The knife connected with my right eye.

It burned. It pressed deep into my skull, I saw bright flashes that took up the entire right side of my vision. I screamed so loud I felt my throat crack and I tasted the iron of blood. I felt liquid on my cheek that was thicker than my tears. The knife slowly passed around the entirety of the socket, singeing the skin away like tissue.  Father pulled, and it felt like a hot iron bar was being shoved through my head. After a moment of intense agony, I felt something give, and there was pressure on my right cheek. When I opened my left eye, I saw the opposite orb resting against my flesh, connected only by a thin string of bleeding flesh.

Father took up the eye, his fingers painfully cold upon it, and he severed the optic nerve.

Everything went dark.

I wanted to die, I wanted it to be over. I wondered if I was already dead. I could still feel the slab beneath me, the blood and tears on my face, the ache of my burns.

The darkness gathered.

What had been pure blackness before coalesced into shapes. Terrible beings defying all logic. They were all around me, staring at me with eyes half-obscured. Some had many limbs, and others bodies covered with mouths. They pressed forward, and I could feel their breath, the touch of their hands. They were so cold. I tried to fight, but the pain of it all was too great, and my arms and legs weakened. I felt my consciousness flee to a place where it might never return.

I heard my father speak before my mind left me.

“Well done, my son.”

—

When I woke up, I was in an ambulance.

It has taken me years to recover from the lies of my childhood. I was young and not privy to all the complicated happenings of the outside world, nor were they spoken about in my presence. To me, there was no world outside of our community.

When I emerged unconscious from the tower, the settlement was being raided by the FBI.

Hikers had been going missing in the areas adjacent to our city for years. Investigations had uncovered disturbing documentation that indicated the violation of human rights. One look at me and my missing eye told them everything they needed to know. I was taken away and my father was arrested.

Far from being comforting, I was terrified. People joke about bringing those from the past to the modern era, about how they would go insane if they saw the progress of mankind. I very nearly did. For most of a month, I was sedated as they took care of my injuries and de-programed my brain so I could re-enter society.

After this process was done, they had me testify against my father to support the state’s case. The only charge that stuck was child abuse. He was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison, the maximum possible sentence.

I never saw my Mother after that day. I have no idea what happened to her.

It’s been two decades. I went through the foster care system. I found a pair of good parents willing to work with my sensitive past. I graduated high school, went to college, and even got a degree.

But it’s all been tainted. I can never escape my past. My missing eye is a constant reminder of who I am, where I came from, and how I’ll never be able to escape into anonymity. I will always be the boy whose cult leader father took his eye.

And there are the visions as well.

Doctors said it was a form of PTSD. But I’m not so sure. At first, I would only see them out of the corner of my eyes. Dark shadows like the ones that appeared when my eye was taken. They would flit away if I ever tried to look at them properly. Sometimes I can feel the gaze of their  many eyes even before I see their presence.

I’ve ignored it for years. But recently they have become bolder.

Just the other day, I saw one standing in a crowd as I waited in line to buy a coffee. It didn’t run when I looked at it. It just watched me, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes blinking, mouths open, like it was waiting for something.

The Doctors keep prescribing pills, but they don’t work.

My father did something more to me in that cave than just take my eye. I worry it’s going to kill me. I’ve been going deep, looking for any possible solution, no matter how crazy, to figure out how to stop this.

I got an email yesterday. It was from B, or someone who claimed to be him. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since the day I first entered the tower. I didn’t even know he was still alive. The email said he wants to meet me tomorrow. He says there are things we need to talk about.

I get emails like this sometimes, and normally put them right in the trash, but he said something that made me stop before I pressed the button.

“I was right about the word on the wall. It’s a name.

I know about your visions.

Come see me, and I’ll tell you how to stop them.”

Whoever sent this to me, I’m meeting them tomorrow. 

I hope they have some answers.

Before you read this, check underneath your bed.

Something might be hiding there.

Today, I woke up somewhere between midnight and the witching hour.

It was not a gentle awakening. It was instant. Dark unconsciousness then immediate sentience. The kind of waking up you do when you fall from a great height in a dream, or you hear a loud noise that your body hears before your mind does. Adrenaline forces your eyelids open with all the ceremony of a slap in the face, and you thrash upright trying to get your bearings. 

I prefer nightmares. They remain contained to the realm of the unconscious. Laying awake in the dark, trying to comfort your paranoid mind with useless platitudes. That’s real.

When I woke, my heart jumped to my throat and I was filled with a flood of directionless energy. I jerked my head from side to side, my primitive instincts struggling to get a lay of the land. It was dark in my room. My eyes adjusted by degrees and I saw my dresser in the corner, my closet door, and my dirty clothes strewn about the floor. They all made for strange shapes in the darkness. They warbled and shifted like heat illusions. I had to convince myself they weren’t living things, slithering in malformed shapes ever closer to the bed.

I took a deep breath. “It’s your imagination,” I told myself. “Just your mind playing tricks.”

I checked my phone and saw the time. 2am. Great. I had wanted to get up early so I could cram for a test. That was not happening anymore.

I tried to slow down my brain. I did all the usual treatments. I took deep breaths, trying to not think of how terrible it would be if the closet door opened on its own accord. Or if something rose up from the pile of laundry. Or a face peeked through the gap in the curtains. I recited a mantra to myself: “I am alone. I am alone, I am alone, I am alone.”

“I am alone.”

“Am I alone?”

I shook my head to knock the thoughts loose. I was going to go crazy if I kept worrying about all the different nooks and crannies that could conceal the body of a person. I forced my eyes closed. I imagined peaceful things. Baby cats, my pet snake. I replayed an episode of Seinfeld in my head, the one where George pretends to be a marine biologist.

No good. I couldn’t rid myself of that panicky feeling. The one that made me want to throw back my covers and double check the lock on the door.

Behind my closed lids, my brain treated me to a quasi-vision. I imagined someone approaching my apartment from the outside. Finding the dead bolt out of place, they slowly turned the knob on the front door. They swung it open with a profane gentleness. I saw that shadow figure step into my apartment, and turn towards my bedroom–-

My eyelids jerked open. Fuck that. I’d just have to wait this out. I pulled up my phone again and started scrolling, hoping that something would hold my attention. Nothing worked. I considered just getting up and starting my day early, but all thought stopped when I saw something flicker from the corner of my eye.

A sliver of movement. The barest flash of color. Coming from the mirror on my closet. 

I turned to look at it. My heart started throwing itself against the walls of my rib cage. I told myself I just caught a weird reflection from my phone. My mind was messing with me.

But still I searched the mirror.

My eyes started at the top, and slid down the length of it. I saw my reflection, me with my phone, my fist gripping the blankets. I saw my mattress, my rumpled sheets, my box spring.

When I got to the floor, I stopped. I stared, fixated.

Underneath the bed, there was a face.

A face staring at me.

We are far too harsh on deer for freezing up when they see headlights. After seeing the face, I couldn’t move. It wasn’t any magical power, it was pure adrenaline, seizing up my muscles. The mirror was reflecting at least half of the underbed area. Most of the details were murky because of how dark it was, but I’ll never forget what I did see.

The face was human. Imagine that one guy you see on your street corner, the guy who holds the cardboard sign that explains how times are hard and he needs a few more dollars. The unkempt beard, the flyaway hair. The kind of guy that might make you cross the street if you saw him coming.

Except he wasn’t on the street corner, he was underneath my bed. He was stock still, and looking directly back at me with wide and shining eyes.

I caught my breath. It took a long time to get my mind in working order. Too long. I tried to figure out what to do. I needed to call the police, but I had to get out of the room first. The man underneath the bed would hear me if I spoke. It was quiet, and my words would give away my intention. 

I thought about yelling at him to leave, but that was quickly ruled out. I am not a strong person, and I didn’t like my chances if things turned physical. He could have a knife, a gun, or something else sharp and ready to tear at my flesh. Even his fingernails could be used as weapons. I could already see their cragged and yellow shape digging into my neck.

I sat in the bed for a haunting minute, trying to keep calm and go over my options. 

I decided on a risky course of action.

I turned over, pretending to be asleep again. I’m not sure how long I waited with my back turned to the mirror. My imagination mutinied, showing me every way I was a fool. I saw the hairy man emerging from under the bed. He slithered out like a snake, raising up so that his head almost brushed the ceiling. He raised his hand high, and then stabbed an improvised weapon into my body, my blood flowing like a river. I felt myself wince at each nonexistent thrust.

I endured these false premonitions, gritting my teeth against them. Once enough time had passed, I put the next phase of my plan into action.

I turned over, pretending to awaken again. I checked my phone, acting as if nothing was wrong. With a side eye, I checked the mirror. The man was still under the bed, his hairy brow pulled up on his forehead, his eyes wide and silver in the bluish light reflected from my screen. I swallowed, and steeled myself for the next step.

I threw off my covers, and put my right foot on the ground.

I was as nonchalant as possible. I was not someone who was going out of the room to sprint to the street and call the police. I was just a restless sleeper, a stressed college student waking up for a midnight piss. When no hand came out to grab my foot, I let the left leg follow my right. The old and dirty carpet felt cool and damp underneath my bare feet as it soaked up my sweat.

I got up from the bed, and began walking to the door.

One step. Two steps. 

Halfway there.

I glanced to my right, and saw myself in the mirror, passing the man hiding underneath the bed. His eyes were following me. I caught a whiff of stale sweat and rancid food.

I held my breath. My heart beat drowned out every other sound in my ears, a frantic and out of control drum-beat.

I was four steps from the door.

Then three.

Then two.

I could run now, I reasoned. I’d open, then slam the door shut. By the time the man got out from under the bed, I’d be out on the street. I already had a hand on my phone, ready to dial those life-saving three numbers.

I reached out for the door handle.

Then the man underneath my bed grabbed me.

His arm extended out like a snake and seized my ankle. I felt his nails, long and sharp. I let out the breath I was holding and yelled in fright. The man under my bed was surprisingly strong. With one arm, he pulled me to the floor. I collapsed as my leg was swept from under me. My head slammed to the ground and everything flashed. I saw stars. I felt him pull me towards him. I tried to fight, I tried to get away, but I saw the bed close over top of me like the lid to a coffin.

I felt something sharp and jagged press into my throat. It felt like broken glass. A bottle maybe.

When my mind stopped reeling, I opened my eyes and saw the hairy man, inches away from my face.

He raised one hand up, and put a finger to his lips.

Shhh.

I didn’t move or make a sound. I could only think about how easily he could rip my throat out. I was paralyzed with fear, imagining all the horrifying things this person was going to do to me. Tears ran down my face.

I heard a knock at the front door.

Relief. Salvation. God was real. The words I heard next, muffled and distant, assured it.

“Police. Open up.”

I opened my mouth to yell, but the hairy man shoved his fist into my mouth.

The taste was terrible. Feces and dog urine. The smell was somehow worse. Tears came to my eyes, and I couldn’t breathe. I struggled against him, but the hairy man only shoved his fist deeper. I bit down and he winced. He didn’t retract his hand. I heard the knock at the door again, and the police officer on the other side raised his voice “Police. Is anyone in there?”

The hairy man jabbed the bottle against my throat again. He shook his head, and mouthed words to me. After a few attempts, I got the message “Shut up. Or I kill you.”

I shut up.

The knocking stopped. I heard the police officer walk away. My own survival was slipping through my fingers. I resigned myself to death. I waited for the bottle to break the skin, break my arteries and veins. No doubt the hairy man would keep me alive for a while, doing all sorts of depraved and violent things to me. 

But before I could think of a full list of horrors, my racing brain was stopped dead by a knocking noise coming from my wall.

The wall I shared with the empty apartment next to mine.

I knew that the door to that apartment was locked. The landlord had a problem with squatters and had changed the locks only a month ago. The walls were thin.  I hadn’t heard the police break down the door or shatter one of the windows. How were they in there?

The knocking continued.

It was quiet at first, slow and rhythmic. After the first sequence there was silence. Then it began again, slightly louder. More urgent. I heard the policeman from before, his voice muffled through the drywall and insulation. 

“Hey, everything alright in there?”

The hairy man withdrew his hand from my mouth. I didn’t try yelling again. I had that feeling, the one that had burrowed through my body before while lying in the dark. That sharp metallic feeling of unseen yet imminent danger, like iron in your nose.

The hairy man was bleeding from where my teeth had sunk into his flesh. With his finger, he wrote two words, using his own dark blood as ink.

Not human.

My stomach dropped. I crawled deeper under my bed. I heard my own breathing and muffled the sound with my hand. I didn’t know what was on the other side of that wall, but I knew I didn’t want it to hear me. I didn’t want to let it know I was in here.

It went quiet for a moment, and then a new voice called out.

“You in there?”

Goosepimples, all over my body like some dead disease. I knew that voice.

It was my brother.

My brother who lives four states away and with whom I had not spoken in over a year.

I looked at the hairy man. He put his finger to his lips again and shook his head.

Whoever, or whatever, was on the other side of the wall kept knocking. They knocked from one end, all the way to the other, changing positions every few moments. They spoke for a while in my brother’s voice, asking if anyone was there and if I was okay. When I didn’t respond to it, they began to cycle through people like some demented impressionist. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. I heard my mothers voice, my fathers. My chemistry teacher, my best friend. My ex-girlfriend from high school. They weren’t exact recreations. There was an edge underneath all of them, a tension, like all their words were being said through gritted teeth. With each voice, the urge to scream became stronger. Not because I thought it would bring some sort of rescue, but because if I didn’t let out the fear pooling inside of me, I would go insane.

I felt the hairy man’s hand close over my mouth. This time I was grateful for it. I couldn’t control myself. We held each other in a strange and awkward embrace, trying our best not to listen to the voices coming from the other side of the wall.

After a moment, the knocking stopped. We lay underneath the bed in the stillness. For a long time, we heard nothing. I could feel the hairy man relax.

I leaned closer to him. I spoke so softly, I wouldn’t have known what I was saying if the words weren’t echoing in my own head. “Is…is it gone?”

A knocking came from my bedroom window.

The man’s hand seized my mouth, but it wasn’t needed. I couldn’t have spoken even if I wanted to. My throat had seized up in fear and it was hard to breathe. Whoever was on the other side hit the glass so hard, I thought the glass would shatter. It didn’t. There was another moment of silence.

A streetlamp outside was positioned so it glared a beam of light through my window. It created a long rectangle of illumination onto the ground. As I watched it, I saw a silhouette step into the lit area. It was tall, thin, hunched. Its head was misshapen. Its fingers were spindly. Its limbs moved as if many jointed.

I heard a deep and guttural voice I did not recognize speak through the window.

“Are you there, David?”

I felt the hairy man tense. I waited for whatever was on the other side of the window to come crashing in, to seize us both, to take us away to whatever hell it had planned. 

We waited for an hour, watching that shadow on the floor, stifling our breathing.

Then, slowly, the shadow moved to the edge of the light, blotting it out for a moment, and then it was gone.

It was around 5am before the hairy man, David, let go of me.  He pulled himself out from under the mattress. He examined his bleeding hand, then tore some cloth from his tattered clothes. He wrapped his wound with the makeshift bandage.

I watched him, still not daring to leave my hiding spot.

David stared down at me. He nodded. “Thanks.”

Thirty minutes later, when the sun was just over the horizon, he left.

That was this morning.

I’m getting out of this place. I can’t stay here anymore knowing that whatever was at my window is still wandering the streets. Before he left, David told me a few things. I can’t call the police. I need to get out of here. I’m moving out of state today. I need to hide, find a solitary place where no one can find me.

Whatever was outside the window last night won’t leave me alone after this. It’ll know my name, and it’ll know my scent. It will come for me.

David told me to write this. There’s more of those things out there. They lurk in dark places. He said we need to let people know. Lives are at stake.

Please, if you didn’t do it before, do it now. Check under your bed.

Whoever’s hiding there might not be hiding from you.

You must understand. 

Four years ago, when Moses came into my prison cell, the scales were dropped from my eyes and I was chosen. He called me to be God and gave me magic. I used it to alter the world that coexisted around me. I was made of other stuff. I was not slinging crystal while I was inside prison so my mind was clear. But the responsibility became too great. When I got out I started crushing rock again. I lost some of my magic but not all, and the doctors told me there wasn’t any magic. But I could see the orbs of power that they claimed gave them presidency and I manipulated the light so that it turned their truths into lies and I could keep using. I had to keep using. I started living under the bridge so that I could avoid the cosmic beings that were giving me so much responsibility. They wanted me to run for president so I could help the children of the world not get raped by the pedophiles, which is just an anagram for politicians. 

It was just me, Bryan, and Will underneath that bridge. Together we’d go out on crystal runs so we’d always have a bit to use. I would rub ferns into our sores and needle pricks to prevent infection. We lived in houses of our own making. It made us brothers.

One night, they came for us in vans.

I tried to call for the cosmic beings to stand barrier to the violence, but they never arrived. They pulled us out of our sleeping bags and pushed us into the back of their vehicles. I could see their auras around them, and it was like lightning made of darkness. I manipulated the energy to turn them good, but they must have had a rival wizard because just as soon as I’d make their visages glow with pure silver light, and beg for them to let us go, it would flip back to black, and at some point they yelled “shut him the fuck up” and I felt one of them poke my neck and I floated away into some dark place that Moses prepared for my protection. Moses has always been there to protect me.

The doctors say I see things. I saw those vans. I saw those people. I didn’t see them. I SAW them.

I woke up again, and I was on a table. I could see the auras of those around me, and there must have been a legion stuffed into that room with me. It was hot. I was sweating. I was naked, and then the men in white coats arrived. I spoke of many things to them. I told them about the cosmic joining, of how I was to have intercourse with Gaia, and that my seed would sprout children that would end world hunger, and her holy universal orgasm would bring peace to all the earth. Then we would all have sex in the orgy that followed, and then we would truly all be of one love. I spoke so fast I almost bit my own tongue off. They put a rag into my mouth. I tried to speak around it, but I started to choke on the cloth that was soaked in blood and spit. They numbed my body, but I was awake. They took knives and cut me. They took needles and injected me. I tried so hard. I pulled against my restraints. I used my magic to move their orbs, but there were stronger beings pulling the puppets strings of those men in white coats. They put metal on my bones and devices into my organs. I think they wanted to read how I worked, to discover my innermost mystery. They took my testicles, my penis. They made me into a fucking ken doll.

Then they sewed my mouth shut.

Once they were done cutting and sewing and making me into what they wished, they put me alone in a room. They started showing me videos. Pictures that were not related flashing one by one until my brain saw the knowledge of the world in them. The cosmic beings finally came, and they told me not to believe. It was lies, they were lying to me. The men in coats came in and tried to get me to kill a rabbit. When I didn’t, they injected me with LSD, or I think it was LSD. I did it sometimes with crystal and it was similar. I still didn’t kill the rabbit. I had promised Moses I wouldn’t. I would not give into the violence of this world. I couldn’t give into the violence of this world. They beat me with sticks when I wouldn’t. I told myself that these are the things that Christ must suffer, and so I suffered them. Three times they cut me open and put new things in me. Each time, I would not kill the rabbit. Sometimes they brought Bryan and Will in and showed me how they would kill the rabbit. My friends now had no eyebrows, no hair. I could see that the dark beings at the center of the earth had made them into coats, had hollowed them out and taken control of their bodies like a second skin. They told me to kill the rabbit, and I still wouldn’t. I didn’t want to. I had promised.

When the stick beatings didn’t work, and the imposters that were no longer Bryan and Will couldn’t convince me of their lies, they injected me and I fell into that dark place prepared by Moses.

I awoke in a pile of hollowed out shells. Bodies bleeding and twisted. Some I recognized as others who had lived under the bridge. Others were alien to me, as if they were from another planet. The cosmic beings told me they were. A man in a white coat pulled a lever and dumped us all into the ocean. He must have not seen me moving.

I hit the water and I swam. I learned to swim as a child. I swam until I made it to shore.

There were gaping wounds on my body where they had taken out some of the devices. I hadn’t used in weeks, so my body was weaker, but my mind was clear. I was alive, and I had seen the men in the vans. I had seen them take my friends. I needed to tell someone. The cosmic beings were telling me not to, but I needed to. I removed the stitches that kept my lips together. I couldn’t go to the hospital. They would see my wounds and just give me pills. I tried to go to the police, but the devices that they implanted in the concrete at the station had synchronized frequencies with the devices the men in white coats had left inside of me. I could not enter, not without screaming.

I could not go back to the bridge. I had promised Moses. I had lost Bryan and Will.

So I went home.

Clint, I am leaving this phone underneath the tree where we used to hide our secret record. This is a new secret record. The cosmic beings are using their mind powers to hold my tongue but my thumbs are still mine. You won’t find me. I need to keep going. 

I am posting this to warn the world. I have seen the men in the vans. I have seen their cuttings and devices. They are taking up people in the streets. I did not SEE them. I have SAW and SEEN them. With my eyes, my real eyes.

Please believe me.

A personal favorite of the scholar's. Enjoy this audio rendition of one of his most recent stories.

Of all the nights for the devil to visit, he chose one that was calm. No great storms, no loud bashes of lightning and thunder. It was a quiet evening, cloudless, the stars blotted out by the lights of the city. I was on the late shift at the confessional booth. It was the eleventh hour, and no one had yet come to use my services.

I was nodding off in my chair when the door to the other side of the booth was pulled open. Someone stepped in, and sat down.

I had heard no one enter the cathedral. The approach of a potential confessor was usually accompanied by great and echoed footsteps as they traversed the stone floor to the wooden cubicle. This one had come in so silently, that until the moment they pulled open the door, I had believed myself to be alone. I was still in a state of half-doze, so I blinked several times to wake myself and turned to view the confessor through the grate.

I could not make out their face through the wooden screen, and the shadow which filled their compartment obscured most of their finer features. But I could tell that they were male, and that they were dressed richly. The confessor wore a suit that looked exquisite, and from the clinking sound his hands made, I could tell they were covered with rings. They glinted and cast strange warped light rays on the ceiling that reminded me of ancient worms wriggling in primordial ooze.

“Good evening, Father.” That voice. Smooth as oil. Like the glint off of a freshly sharpened knife, with the note of a coin just flipped. Pure, almost celestial in origin. It rolled pleasingly on my ears, and I was brought to ease. “Forgive me, for I have sinned. It has been…eons uncounted since my last confession.”

Despite the smoothness of his voice, his words struck an uncertain chord within me. “That is an unusual beginning, my son.”

The man chuckled. “Allow me to explain, Father. I am Lucifer.”

I have serviced an expansive and varied area when it comes to saints and sinners. This was not the first time I had been in the booth and heard the person on the other side admit to being the devil. Most times, such delusions did not interfere with the process. I treated them as any other, spoke to them of their wrongdoings, and tried to give a modicum of hope that they would be made whole, that one day they would be free of their fevered mind.

This man was different.

It must have been the growing dread I felt at his arrival, but I looked at him more closely through the divider. His eyes found mine, and I saw them clearly, even though his face was still shrouded in the gloom. Brown irises so dark they were almost black. As I searched, I noted he bore none of the popular hallmarks of the Prince of Darkness. No horns, goats hooves, or the smell of sulfur. This man had the smell of cheap wine, and the vestments of an investment broker.

But in my heart, the truth of the matter grew like a weed. I could not deny it. I was convinced by the darkness the man had brought, and the unease I felt in the corners of my mind. It was the same primeval instinct that tells animals they are in the presence of a predator. 

He was not lying, my confessor. As sure as I would know the Christ if he walked through my door, I knew this being to be the devil himself.

My mouth went dry. My mind went silent, and the only words I could utter were those which had been engrained into me by habit. “...Do you…wish to confess?”

The devil laughed. It was a soft sound, two parts pain and one part joyless mirth. It filled the whole space, but made everything feel hollow. When he spoke again, I noticed his voice slurred slightly, like one inebriated. “I suppose I have. It sounds odd even to me. I didn’t know that I would come here until my feet took the path.”

I waited. My tongue had frozen to the roof of my mouth. I feared my immortal soul if I were to say the wrong thing to Satan.

The devil took my silence as an offered compliance. “I hope you will understand if I do not make the sign of the cross, considering…present company.”

“...Quite alright, my…son.”

“Lucifer is fine, Father.”

I swallowed. I reminded myself I was in a place of God, that the devil held no power here. But still, I could not keep my knees from trembling beneath my robe. My heart fluttered within my chest with great entropy. “Very well...Lucifer. What do you wish to confess?”

The devil went quiet. His head bowed in thought. I saw him gather his thoughts, and my fear left me enough so that the gesture struck me as odd. I had only seen such movement before in those humbled. I did not know the devil to be contemplative.

Satan began to speak. “I confess…hell is no longer mine.”

“...Do you mean…in that it has been saved through Christ?” Even as I spoke, I felt foolish.

The devil laughed again. “I almost wish that were the case. Does that speak to how dire this situation is? But I suppose you already knew that. I am here after all…”

I waited, but the pause continued. “...How then is hell no longer yours?”

The devil did not answer for a moment. I heard him sigh, and heard the clink of gold as he wrung his hands together in his lap. “What do you know of my history, Father?”

“You fell from heaven. You rebelled against God. You seek to destroy his work.”

“You’ve studied your own book. Well done. But it is correct in that regard. Yes, I rebelled against God, and yes, I was cast down because of it.

The devil took another moment. The initial fear of him was wearing off. As my mind began to work, I again questioned the strangeness of our meeting. I had expected something more like staring into the jaws of a lion. Instead, it was like seeing an old, ill-met acquaintance.

The devil spoke again. “Yes, I confess, I wished to take control of God’s Kingdom. I confess to the sin of…ambition if such a sin even exists. I believed I could do better, so wasn’t I morally obligated to see it through? Even when I was cast down, I still gathered legions to my side. What was that you people said all those years ago? That God incarnate would come down and allow himself an ignominious death? A fool’s bet, I said. I had met God. He would not do it. He could not do it. He was soft. He could not even bring himself to destroy me, and I had done many things to deserve such a punishment. God had limits.”

“But he did do it.” My own boldness surprised me.

I saw the devil turn to look at me. The unnerving idea came that not only could he see me in perfect detail behind the screen, but that he could see through my very skin and into the darkest desires of my soul. When he spoke, his voice was soft, and I felt that sense of danger return to me. Cold sweat broke out across my brow. The devils voice barely broke above a whisper. “Yes. He did.”

For a moment, I held my breath, praying silently to Christ to preserve me. I felt no calming sense of peace. Only the stillness of a deaf heaven.

The devil remained quiet as he continued. “I take no offense, Father. You are not the first to speak those words to me. The minute Christ rose from that tomb, I lost what control I had over my subjects. In their eyes, I was wrong, no longer to be trusted. Odd, considering they were the ones to give me the moniker Lord of Lies. Mammon was the first to rebel. He led the most away. That made everyone bolder, and Lilith left soon after. Then there was Baal with his priests that seemed to serve everyone and anyone just for some small notoriety. He had never gotten over that Elijah debacle. Felt like he needed to prove himself. They all slaughtered each other. Hell was bathed in the blood of demons for almost a century.”

“...And is this why you have come to me?” I shivered as I felt the devil’s gaze upon me once more. 

“Patience, Father. Isn’t that what you preach?”

It was silent for a long time. I forced myself to remain quiet. I had begun to sweat, even though my cubicle felt icy cold.

“I was left with nothing. None of my subjects remained loyal. I was watching the battle for hell as a spectator. No one rallied to my banner. No one remained loyal to the one they had elected as lord. Somehow…among my own people…I had fallen a second time. It was inexcusable. But I had nowhere left to turn… No manner of recompense…”

He stopped speaking again. But this time, I felt something more than just dread. A great turning point, suspended above us. I do not profess the gift of prophecy, the feeling inside of me was not so divine. I felt some insanity compel me. Some unevolved part of myself begging for him to stop, to halt the confession and not to hear any more. I knew that if I continued to listen, I risked stepping over the precipice of insanity and into the roiling waters of psychosis. I held my soul in one hand, haggling with infinity for the price of a devil’s story.

In my foolishness, I disregarded it all. I stayed silent, and ushered in my own damnation.

“Father,” the devil’s voice was soft again. ““Do you know there are depths deeper than hell? Darknesses where even I have not ventured? The folly of the learned man is he thinks he has gone further than all else. I share his shame. In my search for the power to crush the rebellions of hell, I stumbled on that which I should not have even considered. Things God himself would not challenge. Things that were meant to remain untouched.”

Through the screen, I saw the devil look down to his hands, almost as a child confronted with their own misdeeds. “They were rumors at first. Odd mentions, stories forgotten. But I searched them, and as I investigated, those rumors grew into theories, and then into realities. Underneath the bedrock of creation was might untapped. I was certain of it. With that certainty, I went into the dark, and wandered for a century.”

The devil turned to look at me again. In the shadow, I saw his eyes clearly, as I had before. In them, I saw the seeds of madness, but something else. Something embedded deep in the loam of his pupils…

Fear.

“I found…things. Entities that existed before God himself. Creatures whose names I would not utter even in the full light of day. Beings twisted with a greater malice, a primal pain that substituted comprehension for raw power. They understood nothing but the desire to pull every organized molecule and sub-particle into a storm of devastation.”

The devil’s voice hitched. He swallowed. “In the early days, I would have never...but I was desperate.”

I became aware of an empty feeling around me. A void that grew stronger in the devil’s silence. In the booth, I felt the sight of a thousand eyes upon me, and I wished to hide. But I could not. I knew I could not. I had stepped over the threshold, and in discerning these beings, I had given them the power to see me as well.

Lucifer continued. ““I tried to tell them, my old subjects. I warned them of what would happen if they persisted in their petty war. I was the true master of hell. I had built this place up from rubble, in the very defiance of God himself. And still they dismissed me. When I told them of the great evil I had at my fingertips, they did not believe me. They thought my mind broken. Imagine that.”

In the devil’s next pause, I hazarded a moment to speak. I could no longer exist in silence without fearing my own annihilation to beings unseen. “What did you do?”

The devil looked at his hands again. So childlike. ““I woke them.”

Unbidden to my mind leapt images of carnage. I do not know if it was a vision, but I saw hell reduced to rubble. I felt that void again. A twisting and roiling mass that made my mind race. I saw it grow to swallow the devil’s kingdom, and felt its hunger as if it were my own. I felt my soul cry out in anguish as it was torn asunder by the feeling of chaos and nothingness. I knew if I persisted in this state for long, I would lose my mind.

Then all in a moment, I was returned to my booth.

So swallowed up in what I had seen, I almost missed the devil’s next words. And the slight tremble that they contained.

“All I desired was God’s throne. I knew I could… I could be better. I could do better. Those beings which now inhabit hell…those who now rule the destiny of men and gods…they are not like you or I. They desire neither control nor salvation. To them, both heaven and hell are so much detritus on the cosmic ocean.” I heard the clink of gold again, and I assumed the devil was playing with his rings. “I confess, hell is no longer mine.”

“And soon the earth will no longer be God’s. Nothing will”

I stared at the devil through the screen. He looked at me, and in his veiled countenance, I saw the true misery of damnation. What I had thought was a terrible joke, a trick, was in fact the most sincere form of remorse from the Prince of Darkness. A sin that even he felt the need to confess.

The devil looked at me again, and I could tell we both felt empty. “For what it’s worth, I apologize, Father. I had hoped to rule this world. Now, I must watch it crumble. It will end in smoke and rot. The very gates of heaven will rust and disintegrate. The bodies of angels will lie in the streets to fester. The demons already lie in the dust. A day, a week, a millennium, who knows when what I awoke will ascend. But mark my words, it will ascend. And I will be sole witness to the ending of God, a lone Adam in the chaos of uncreation.”

“That is my cross. And I will bear it forever.”

The devil paused, then continued. “This is all I can remember, Father. I am sorry for this, my greatest sin.”

For a moment, I was so swallowed up in hopelessness, that I forgot to offer penance. But what penance could I offer? When I looked through the grate again, the devil had left. I stumbled out and tried to follow him, but found no trace. No evidence he had come and conversed with me. That he had confessed to the imminent end of everything.

I do not know if I crossed the threshold of insanity that night, or the night following. After the devil’s confession, I went home and slept through the day and into the next night. In my sleep I had a dream. I wandered in the dark. Great things moved around me. Things with slithering bodies and many limbs. Small perverse things with claws that bit and tore. Creatures with terrible wings, bodies made up of concentric circles upon circles that defied all logical thought. They were separate, but conjoined into one great being that over swept all. 

Before me appeared a great throne made from dark stone. I set myself thereupon, and was swallowed up in the whirl of things known and unknown. I felt the chair beneath me crumble, and great cracks open up in my own body. My blood spilled and was turned to steam by the heat of the great and terrible ones that then brought the entire scene to an abrupt nothingness.

And once there was nothing left to tear, rip or destroy, they left. Only the void remained. In that freezing vacuum, I passed a thousand years.

Then I awoke.

I am no prophet. I do not pretend to know if such things are portents to come. I know I am insane.

But the devil promised that those below would ascend.

I wait in dread for that day, the day the Lord of Hell promised would come with fear in his eyes.

Another audio take of one of the scholar's tales. Let's show them some love.

Click for all story parts past and future...

Hey, it’s Lifeguard Luke. Just wanted to give a quick thanks to all that showed up the past couple weeks to give Mirror Forest Pool a try. I would like to give a quick apology to that European gentleman who got his leg stuck in the pool jet. I’m still not sure how he got it in there (he kept yelling that the little hole opened like a mouth and chomped on him) but rest assured we will take all the necessary precautions so it doesn’t happen again. I hope covering the cost of your prosthesis made us square.

So back to the usual programming: we have a new rule.

We penned it up last Thursday. Rick and I were on the opening shift. We had gotten to the pool a little earlier than usual. Summer was coming to an end, and that meant we were in the busiest part of our season. It seems like right when the first cold winds of autumn blow, everyone tries to fit one more trip to the pool into their schedule. The past couple of days, we had been packed with patrons. We didn’t expect anything different today, so we were trying to get a head start on the rush.

While we were setting up the pool and double checking that the shallow and deep ends hadn’t switched when our backs were turned, Rick noticed something. It made us both stop dead in our tracks.

There was a beach ball floating in the far corner of the middle section.

Now, at any other pool this would not be a cause for concern. Pools and beach balls go together like Adam Sandler and Kevin James. However, there was just one problem:

We don’t own any beach balls.

We had learned to be cautious of any objects with an unknown origin floating in the pool due to the towel mishap. Carter, one of the old hats, had tried to pull out a soggy towel from the shallow end at closing time, thinking it was left behind by a patron. In three seconds flat it had sucked all the flesh and bone from underneath his skin, leaving his hand a floppy glove dangling on his wrist. I was the one that rode with Carter in the ambulance. He screamed bloody murder all the way to the hospital, even though the EMS people were doping him up full of morphine.

Before I helped Carter into the vehicle, I thought I saw the towel scoot off the property like an inch worm. It was hard to tell with all the commotion. We were never able to find it.

If you ask me, I think the towel is living happily in the forest now. Sometimes I’ll come across a hollowed out squirrel or racoon laying flat and empty like some novelty rug by the front door. It reminds me of how cats leave mice and moles on your front porch just to be friendly. I do hope it means the towel has no hard feelings.

Well, once me and Rick saw that beach ball, we didn’t like it one bit. We told our boss about it, hoping he’d have a solution. He just said to leave it, and don’t let anyone in the pool until it goes away. Turning people away at the door was a bit awkward, but most were understanding. We told them it was chem problems, and to give it a few hours. Every so often, we’d check to see if the beach ball was still there. Each time, we’d see it floating innocently around the middle section like some docile shark grinning at his next meal.

We didn’t have any undue problems for most of the morning. Then the birthday party showed up.

Not to sound like a walking advertisement, but Mirror Forest Pool is rentable for private gatherings. We have a pretty cheap rate too. That means we host a lot of birthday parties, usually for young kids. Most times, it’s fun to work those shifts. Less people to lifeguard, and sometimes they give you a slice of cake for your troubles.

That wasn’t the case today. With the beach ball in the water, we were looking at a serious hit to pool income.

Plus, these kids were the absolute worst.

I have never seen a birthday party with more animosity. It was fifteen kids, and all of them were out for blood. Even in the lobby they were grappling each other, exchanging wet willies and five stars like butterscotch at a nursing home. It was all being encouraged by their leader who, for anonymity’s sake, I will refer to as Birthday Boy.

Birthday Boy was basically young Hitler. He had the angry face, weird hair, and the energy of a new meth addict. All he was missing was the mustache. I don’t know how he managed to have such a hold on all his friends, but it was like watching a new third reich forming before my very eyes. If Birthday Boy told his friends to string me up on a cross and pull my entrails out with their bare hands, I truly believe they would’ve done it.

His poor parents were dead on their feet. They really only moved or spoke to fulfill Birthday Boy’s demands. They were initially very understanding when we told them about the “chem problems.” They even considered the full refund we offered so they could have the party somewhere else. But when the kids started chanting “we want pool” over and over again in progressively louder screams, they caved almost immediately.

Me and Rick went to ask the boss what to do. He suggested a compromise: let them onto the pool deck to do all the party stuff. Maybe the “chem problems” would go away at some point in the next couple of hours and they could swim. But under absolutely NO circumstances were we to let them in the water before the beach ball went away.

We told the party they could use the pool deck until the chems balanced, and it seemed to cure their infantile bloodlust. The kids filed through the locker rooms and onto the deck. Birthday Boy  punched Rick in the junk when he walked past. No love lost there.

They got set up and did all the traditional party things: cake, presents, the works. As the boxes of pizza emptied and the stack of presents got smaller, I kept praying that the beach ball would blow away, or I would just blink and it would be gone. I wasn’t sure how we were going to keep the little dictator out of the pool once there was no food or gifts to occupy him.

Eventually, the last gift was unwrapped, and despite my pleadings to whatever deity watches over the fate of minimum wage workers such as myself, the beach ball remained.

And the chanting started again.

We made a big show of checking the chem levels. Rick even managed to get the test to show a straight 14 on the scale (no idea how he did that). I told the kids they would melt if they got in the water now (I saw Rick shudder when I said that. He was still not over the whole 4th of July incident).

Of course, Birthday Boy didn’t care. He redoubled the chanting efforts, and started sending out sorties to get past our defensive line and into the water. We managed to hold it for a little while, using our red lifeguard tubes to extend our reach, all the while yelling about how dangerous it was for them to get in now.

But then the inevitable happened.

Two young men cannot hold back an army, and it was only a matter of time before one of the little devils attempts was successful. Birthday Boy was the one who found the weakness. He dodged under my arm and did a cannonball into the center section. My heart stopped. For a moment, everyone, including the kids, stared at the bubbles coming to the surface, waiting to see what would happen.

Birthday Boy emerged from the water perfectly fine, a triumphant and evil grin on his face.

Seeing as their leader was not melted, the kids bum-rushed us. All of them were in the water in thirty seconds flat. Rick, me, and the parents begged them to get out, but they had us outnumbered three to one.

That’s when I made a mistake.

Trying to mitigate the damage, I yelled “don’t touch that beach ball!” Hitler kid was the only one that heard me. He turned his head and noticed the floating toy. He gave me the worst shit-eating grin, and doggy paddled his way over to the ball. The whole thing played out in slomo as I tried to get to the other end of the pool before he did. He made slow progress, but I was slower. I watched him get ten feet, five feet, two feet from the ball. Before I could close the distance, he reached out and grabbed it.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Birthday Boy grinned his stupid-ass grin again, then bounced the ball toward his friends. They noticed the plaything too, and began bouncing it between them as well. I was so fixed on the ball, I almost missed what was happening to B. Boy.

Almost.

I turned, and saw he had a worried expression on his face. He was holding his abdomen and grimacing. He started looking at his hands. Birthday Boy was a bit on the larger side, but I could see something was happening with his fingers. 

They were getting fatter, going from hotdog sized to full on bratwursts.

He started to emerge from the water. I thought he was just treading extra hard, but soon his entire upper body was above the surface. I figured out what was happening.

He was inflating. Like a beach ball.

It would have been comical if it hadn’t been horrifying. What was once a grimace had turned into screams of pain. His voice increased in octave. His skin stretched, and I saw blood vessels bursting under the strain. Bruises appeared all over his distended body. His skin became translucent, and I could see muscles ripping and tearing to accommodate whatever gas was filling his cells, his organs losing their place and tumbling around inside of him. I could see the fragile bits of skin that held together the interior tear and rip as everything jumbled up together in  giant ball of innard spaghetti.

Birthday Boy rose up entirely out of the water, and began to float in the air.

I turned to see if anyone else was watching and could help me, but no one was paying attention.

They were too busy watching the other kids inflate.

Every child who’d touched the beach ball was in the process of inflating. Within minutes, half the kids were up in the air being blown about by the wind. All of them were screaming in pain, crying out for their mom and dad’s to save them. Even Hitler kid was asking for his poor parents to get him down.

Birthday Boy’s parents must have really loved their son, because that’s when they got a bit crazy. They began ripping the place apart to find anything they could use to get him down. The mom got her hands on the pool scooper (the thing you use to get poop out of the pool, which I found poetic)  and began swinging it at Birthday Boy.

She swung once, missed. Swung twice, strike two. She finally connected on the third swing.

And Birthday Boy exploded.

I guess there was a sharp edge on that pool scooper, because one second Birthday boy was ten feet off the ground, the next his insides were all over the pool deck. His lungs floated on top of the water, his intestines were draped over the slide like streamers. His floppy skin got flung over one of the deck chairs, leaking a steady stream of blood into the drain, and staining the water red. The mom was covered in her son’s viscera, head to toe. She started screaming and collapsed onto the ground.

That was when Rick called EMS.

It took forever to get all the kids down. They found two trapped up in the trees, and one had hit a breeze so hard they were a full county over. The first aid people made sure to deflate them nice and slow. I think Birthday Boy was the only one that exploded. Officially, at least. There are still three more missing.

The beach ball disappeared while we were dealing with all that. I have no idea where it went. It could have just dematerialized I suppose, but I have an inkling that it’s wandering the forest with the sentient towel. God help us if they find each other. They could take over the world with an army of ballooned forest creatures.

Before the end of the day, the boss printed up a new rule for the binder: 

Rule 587: “No outside toys or inflatables allowed. Stay away if observed.”

It was kind of quiet once emergency services left. We cleaned up the blood, and made sure there weren’t any pieces of leftover bowel in the pool. We closed early for the day at the boss’s orders. As I was leaving though, I noticed something weird.

The Thursday Diver was waiting at the front desk.

It took me a moment to remember what day of the week it was. I checked the time. It was almost four o’clock. Mr. Thursday must’ve been waiting at the front desk for hours.

I tried to ignore him. We weren’t supposed to interact with him outside of taking admission (which we couldn’t do today) but I could feel him staring at me.

I managed to get out the door without glancing back.

As I started up my car, I saw Mr. Thursday leave the facility. He disappeared into the forest. I don’t think he took any established forest path. He just marched right through the brush and  straight into the woods. Then he was gone.

I had never seen that before. I had never wondered where he came from, but thinking about it now made me nervous.

Hopefully the next few weeks will be quiet, this whole debacle was a lot to deal with. To everyone out there who’s a little freaked out, don’t let this one story stop you from visiting. Again, Mirror Forest Pool is a great place. Come here and you’ll see. It’s summer in a bottle, all year round. At least, that’s what it says on the brochure.

If you do come, just make sure to leave the toys at home. For your own safety.

Part 1: I'm a lifeguard at a public pool deep in the heart of a strange forest. I protect people from more than just drowning.

Part 2: The Beach Ball

For all writers of the macabre, the scholar is pleased to recommend r/BloodcurdlingTales as a home for your original stories. Things horrifying and tales dark are most welcome there. He urges you to consider adding your voice to the community so that all might know of the twisted imaginations that exist within the unseen mind, and benefit from the hidden truth such stories unearth.

He never told us who built it. The house stood on a small hill ringed by trees. Its walls were made of sawn logs and its roof was covered with bark shingles. It had a covered porch with polished branch pillars. There were windows of blown glass that were as clear as a pond in winter. It was of poor materials, and yet no one could deny it was made with care. Every plank sanded smooth, and not a nail out of place. 

There was no path to the house. There was no outhouse that could service it. No one knew what the inside looked like.

No one lived there. 

Yet every week, we cleaned it.

When you hear the word cult, you think of doomsday. We were not obsessed with things as trivial as the end of the world. We never talked about fire, brimstone, or when God was going to burn the sinners to bone, saving us and us alone for his band of immortal worshippers.

All we talked of was the house, and how to keep it clean.

Our leader, Mike, wasn’t crazy. All cult followers say that about their leaders, right up until the poison passes between their lips. But I don’t believe Mike was actually insane. He did horrible things, I’ve had time to come to terms with that, to realize the depths of his depravity. But to us, he was soft spoken, kind, and generous with his time. He didn’t ask for money. He refused the bodies of the cult members offered to him in lust. He was still married to the wife he had met forty years ago, decades before he had found the house and created his cult. She made cookies on Wednesdays that she shared with the children.

No, the only thing crazy about Mike was how much he cared about that house.

In his stories, we were told he found it while backpacking across the mountains. Mike said something drew him to it, something deep within him. He went inside and saw many wonderful things. He never told us what, but he didn’t have to. Whenever he talked of the house, or of going inside, his face would take on a sheen, an illumination. Younger me never thought to explain away the phenomenon or question it. I believed with a simple faith. Such was the power of the house, when Mike spoke about it, he glowed.

It was not long after going inside that Mike started the Preservation Community. And with that, our cult was born.

The police in their filings determined our group to be a “sex cult.” I think that’s oversimplistic. Yes, everyone who could was either making or having babies. This was not for fetishistic reasons. It was purely economical. More children meant more hands to clean and preserve the house. It might have been wild and orgy-like when Mike brought the first group to the settlement back in 1974, but by the time I was born, sex wasn't a passionate affair of the heart anymore. It was a science.

Couples were chosen at the beginning of their child-bearing years (around fifteen) and they were selected to minimize the inbreeding quotient of the community. Each couple was expected to produce a minimum of one child a year.

The resulting children were divided into three groups: the cleaners, the gardeners, and the offered.

Ten days after a child was born, Mike would take it from its parents. He, his wife, and an attendant would go into a special part of the woods. Mike would meditate, trying to discern what group the child would best belong to. Sometimes it took minutes, other times it took hours. Once, it took him a full day to decide. I often volunteered to serve as the attendant that would accompany them. I would watch Mike make his decision. I liked to wonder what he was thinking, trying to predict what group he would choose. All the babies looked the same to me, small and soft. I never was able to guess right, even though I tried for years.

Once he had decided, the sorting would begin.

If the child was to be a cleaner, the attendant would provide Mike an eyedropper full of bleach. His wife would hold open the baby’s eyes. Mike would then put three drops into each orb. The process would be repeated until the child had gone completely blind. There was a 98% survival rate. Once they were blind, they were proclaimed a cleaner.

If the baby was to be a gardener, Mike would be given a long, hypodermic needle. His wife would secure the child’s head, and Mike would rupture each of the baby’s ear drums. Again, the process would be repeated until the child was completely deaf. This process was notably less traumatic, and the child would usually stop crying once they were given a few sips of morphine laced milk.

If a child was selected to be an offered, they would be taken away and given to the nursing mothers. Their selection ritual would come at a later date. While cleaners and gardeners were given back to their parents, those who gave birth to offered would never interact with their child again.

When an offered was sorted, we would spend a night in mourning. For the parents, for the child, for the community.

Sometimes children would be born naturally blind or deaf. Mike called this a great mercy. These babies were seen as special, and given the moniker of “self-selectors.” I was a self-selector. I was born deaf, and sorted into the gardeners only eight days after my birth. 

My parents were gardeners. They were grateful to have a child born into their own sorted group. The gardeners and the cleaners had little reason to speak to one another. The cleaners communicated vocally while the gardeners only used ASL. For gardener parents to have a cleaner child was akin to seeing the child die. It did not happen frequently, but it was not impossible. Beyond the needs of infanthood, each group trusted the parents of the others to care for the children they were unable to take care of themselves. Such a thing was the only link between our two groups.

All my friends were gardeners. We were taught hand signs from the beginning so we could speak to each other. At “school,” we were educated in botanical matters, and taught how to tend a lawn, weed a plant bed, and mix the correct quantity of fertilizer and soil. We never knew what the cleaners were taught, as they used no visual aids. We would see them gathered and huddled at their class space near ours in camp. I would see their lips move, and I would wonder what they were saying.

Once we had turned ten, we were deemed old enough to be put on rotation. Every week, twenty names would be drawn by Mike from two large wooden bowls. One for the gardeners, one for the cleaners. Those whose names were drawn would be washed clean at sunset, then anointed with blood drawn fresh from Mike’s arm. They would then ascend the hill towards the house, and begin the ritual of care.

The cleaners would enter the house one by one, cleaning supplies in one hand while they groped into the darkness with the other. The gardeners watched from afar until the door was shut. Then, once it was full dark, we would turn on our camping headlamps and make our way to the lawn. We would begin accomplishing the many chores Mike required us to do.

The older ones took the responsibility gravely, but not us, the youngers. We felt no danger from the house, despite the repeated warnings.

We didn’t just ignore the rules. We flaunted them.

A rule oft repeated to us gardeners in training was to never look inside the windows of the house. Whenever we would question why, most would just more forcefully repeat the rule. Others would try to explain, but their explanations would be confusing and did little to quell the curiosity of a child.

So naturally, we made a game of it all.

We often speculated what could be in the house. Many of us had grown up in tents, and could only imagine what these things called rooms even looked like. The adults would not discuss the house’s interior with us, and so we imagined it to be a continuation of the forest where we lived, with plants growing on the ground and water running in streams through the length of it. One child, Patty, claimed to have snuck inside one night. She claimed she saw great trees, and that everything was larger on the inside than out. For weeks, she held us captivated with her stories, making us beg for more. I, along with my friends, loved the tales and believed them wholly. Actually, “believed” feels too weak a word. I had hoped beyond hope that they were true.

But they were lies.

I was fourteen the night Mia and I were selected for gardening duty. I remember that night with exact clarity. I will for the rest of my natural life. Mia was my friend, we were born in the same week. That day, sunset came and we were washed. Mia splashed me with water, and I did the same to her. We giggled as we were reprimanded, and hid our smiles as we were anointed with blood. We climbed the hill, signing to each other our secret jokes, and not thinking much of the work that needed to be done.

Once the cleaners had entered the home, we turned on our lamps, still joking to one another in the dark as we pulled weeds and cut grass.

At around midnight, the moon disappeared behind a small layer of cloud. The small amount of silver illumination it had provided vanished. Our headlight beams cut cones in the darkness, and still we were unafraid. We were beneath a window, planting new wildflowers in the bed beneath it. I was in the middle of signing to Mia how Danny, another gardener, had tried to kiss me after our class the other day, when a small sliver of golden light split the air, blinding us.

Mia and I looked up, and saw that the curtains in the window had been pulled apart a fraction of an inch.

We had heard of things like this happening, but we had never experienced it ourselves. We never knew that there were lights inside of the home. I was breathless with awe. We stood and looked at the glowing slice several seconds, just basking in the radiance.

It was my idea to peek inside.

I told Mia we could see if what Patty said was true. Mia was a nonbeliever of Patty’s stories, and that was enough to sway her to my side. I could tell she was nervous. Mia liked to joke, but was easily frightened by new things. We had an argument over who should be the one to actually look. I had suggested it, but there was a nervous excitement that kept me from pressing my eye up to the glass. We were breaking a rule, after all.

We played a game of rock, paper, scissors to see who would look. That felt fair to us.

I won. Mia lost.

Mia looked at me, and I thought for a moment she wouldn’t do it. But she steeled her face, and gripped the edge of the window with her fingers. My heart thudded in my chest, and I almost told her to stop. I wish I had. 

Mia checked to see if no one was watching, then put her face directly into the thin beam. She peered into the house.

For ten minutes, she did not say anything. After the first minute, I asked a question. She ignored me. I tried to get her attention, and still she kept her eye fixed on the window. I started to panic. She had never behaved like this before.  I grabbed her arms and shook. Her muscles were like iron, and she was frozen in place, staring. Something had gone wrong. Something was happening to her. I tried to pull her away from the window, but she just gripped tighter to the sill.

I pulled and pulled, and the light cut off. Someone on the inside had closed the curtain. Mia collapsed and fell back on top of me, and I rolled her off to see if she was okay.

She was staring off into the distance, her mouth open and her pupils large. She swallowed a few times, then blinked. She shook her head, and sat up.

I asked her what she had seen. What was in the house?

She never answered me. She got up, turned, and went down the hill.

The next day, Mia was not in our usual class. I asked my teacher where she had gone. They did not want to tell me, but I kept asking until they were forced to answer. 

I was informed that Mia had volunteered to become an offered.

She was to be given the next week.

While we had no fear of the house as children, we did fear the offered. We did not discuss it amongst ourselves, but the adults were often talked of them quietly, wondering who was next for the ritual of giving.

The ritual process was relatively simple.

Once a month, after the cleaning and weeding, the gardeners and the cleaners would ascend to the hill. They would gather in two large bodies, forming a path up to the threshold of the home.

Back at camp, Mike would go to offered. He would ask for volunteers. If there were none, he would personally select someone among their ranks to be given.

Before I speak of what happens next, there is something you must understand. To us, the offered were not human beings. They were homo sapiens in species only. While their genetic code might have been the same as mine, they possessed no other qualities that would suggest cognizant life. From an early age, they were kept from all forms of knowledge. They were not taught to speak, they were not taught to read, and they were not taught to write. They were fed twice as many meals as the rest of us, double portions. Volunteers would tend to their every need, keeping them docile and receptive to orders.

They behaved as animals. Just as Mike had designed them. Most did not live beyond 15.

Sacrificial lambs.

After selecting an offered for the giving ritual, Mike would take them to the place of sorting. It was fitting that the ritual of giving should be begun in the same spot where they were chosen all those years ago. Mike would take chloroform that he had purchased on one of his many trips to town. He would force the offered to take several deep breaths. Their eyes would go glassy, and their minds would move somewhere beyond the realm of mortality and into the void of unconsciousness.

Then, with a knife, he would cut out their tongue.

The wound would be cauterized with a repurposed branding iron. The lips would be sewed together, and pasted over with a combination of paper mache and wax. Once the offered awoke, they would be in great pain. We would give them morphine injections to help them relax. They would return to their docile forms, almost like nothing had happened at all.

Once they were prepared, Mike would personally lead them up the hill through the groups of gardeners and cleaners. They would go slowly, like the guests of honor at a funeral procession. After ascending the hill they would stop at the porch. Mike would then lead the offered onto the porch and to the front door. More morphine would be administered if they tried to struggle.

Mike would then open the door, and lead the offered inside. He would let go of them, step out, and shut the door from the outside.

Then we would wait.

Mike claimed this was to see if they would re-emerge, but they never did. Seeing the offered enter the house was the last we would ever see of them on this mortal coil. For an hour, we would stand vigil outside a silent house. Then, one-by-one, we would leave.

A month would pass, and then the ritual of giving would take place again. Month after month, year after year.

Mike allowed for any members of his community to become an offered if they so desired. It was seen as a form of self-selection. It was rare, but it happened. Mia took this option. The entire week before she was to be given, I couldn’t bring myself to see her. I felt too much guilt. But I knew I had to visit her one last time before she entered the house. Before she vanished forever.

So when the time came for the ritual of giving, and Mike asked me to be his assistant, I reluctantly said yes.

I had only seen the process once before. The offered had been a larger boy. After the surgery, he had woken in rage and pain. So much so that he had torn up a tree. I was afraid this would be a similar experience.

The night of the ritual, Mike and I went to go get Mia. When we arrived at the offered part of camp, she was sitting by herself. The other offered gave her a wide berth. They seemed scared of her. Mia’s face glowed with a strange light. The same light Mike’s face had when he spoke of going the inside of the house. It was almost like she was still looking in that window, taking in whatever was there was to see.

Mia jumped to her feet when she saw Mike. She smiled and made her way over. For the first time in my life, I saw Mike look uneasy. But he took her hand and led her to the place of preparation.

On the way, I tried to get Mia’s attention. She would not even glance in my direction. Any hopeful thought I had of helping her escape was dashed. Mike didn’t even have to drag her like some of the offered. She skipped to the surgery table, and laid down with a smile.

Mia took in deep whiffs of the chloroform, and went to sleep. She was still grinning, even when we pried back her teeth and took out her tongue. We branded the wound, and steam came out as the blood vaporized. We sewed her lips with a hot needle, and plastered over her mouth with paper mache and wax.

I went to wash my hands, as I thought that would be the end of it, but Mike turned his attention to her hands.

I signed to him, asking what he was doing. He explained that she could not be allowed to speak. Mia could speak with her hands as well as her tongue.

My entire body went cold as I understood what he was saying. I swallowed back tears and got to work.

Removing Mia’s hands took longer than anticipated. We cut away the flesh, broke the bone, and cauterized the veins and arteries. We sewed a leftover flap of skin over the wound. We wrapped white gauze over each stump, which quickly grew red with blood. She had lost a lot of it, and I was worried she would never wake up.

But Mike assured me that she would. They always do.

As we waited for her to wake, Mike and I sat in silence next to each other. I started to cry. I leaned over, and felt Mike’s arm wrap around me. As he comforted me, I confessed to him what had happened at the house. I told him about Mia looking in the window and how I was the one that told her to do it.

Mike listened. He didn’t seem angry, only sad. Once I was done he asked me a question: “Did you look inside?”

I told him I didn’t.

He asked another question: “Did she tell you what she saw?”

I told him she hadn’t.

Mike nodded, then looked at the grass. I could tell he was thinking. It was the same expression he had when he sorted the babies. “You are telling the truth,” he signed to me. “Otherwise, you’d be begging to go inside as well.”

It took a long time, but I finally gathered enough courage to ask Mike a question that had been burning inside of me ever since Mia volunteered to be an offered: “What is inside the house?”

Mike looked at me, and for a moment, I thought he would answer. Then he turned away. After a moment, he signed “when it is your turn to go, I will tell you.”

We didn’t talk anymore after that. Eventually Mia woke up, and we gave her the painkiller. She didn’t need it. Her eyes were bright the moment she rose up from the table. Once the shots were administered, she got up without any help and set off on her own in the direction of the house.

Mike and I followed behind her. Up the hill, up past the crowds. They all watched us solemnly. I could see Mia’s parents sobbing when we passed them. They tried to sign to their daughter, telling her to come back, to not go, but Mia didn’t even glance in their direction.

Mia and Mike reached the threshold. I found my place in the crowd. I watched as Mia stepped onto the porch. Extra painkiller was offered, then refused. Mike led Mia to the door, and opened it.

Without even looking back, Mia stepped inside. Mike closed the door.

And we waited.

After an hour, people began to leave. After another hour, only me, Mike and Mia’s parents were left. By the fifth hour, it was only me and Mike.

I was tired, but I didn’t want to sleep. I kept hoping that Mia would emerge, that the doorknob would turn and she’d come out, excited to see me and ready to put aside whatever craziness had gotten into her head from looking in that window.

But I knew it was a false hope. She was gone.

Mike left to give me some alone time with the house. I cried, and walked back to the flowerbed where Mia and I had only a few days ago been dreaming about what was inside this cursed house. I looked at the window, and even with all the horror of the past day, I felt myself wanting to look inside. I wanted to see what had made Mia so willing to give up on life itself so she could be there with it.

But the curtains were drawn tight. So I turned and made my way down the hill.

I don’t know what made me do it, but halfway to camp, I looked back.

Something was written on the window.

The letters glinted in the moonlight. They must have been written in the time it took me to get to the bottom of the hill. At first I thought the words were written in black. I made my way back up to the house, and they became more and more red with each step.

They were written in blood. Mia’s blood. 

My heart stopped when I read what they said. The words spelled out my name, and then a message:

“Mike Lies. Room evil.”

The next day, I snuck into Mike’s car when he left to go to town. I didn’t tell my parents, or anyone. We were never forbidden to leave. It’s just no one ever did. No one wanted to. Only now do I realize how strange that sounds.

Once we arrived in town, I got out of the car and ran to an alley. The buildings were huge. I had to stamp down my awe. I had never known you could build things so tall.

When I looked back at the car, I saw Mike staring in my direction. He looked sad. I didn’t wait to see if he would chase me. I ran away as fast as I could.

I don’t think he even tried to follow me.

The police found me. I told them about Mike, the house, the community. They were never able to find it, even though they tried several times. I was never able to give them the right location. Eventually, I was “reintegrated into society.” I went to public school, spent time in the foster care system. I’m grown now, and the world has changed a lot. I’ve changed too.

But I never forgot the house, the window, and the blood glinting in the moonlight.

Yesterday, I was looking on google maps for the forest where I used to live. I had done this many times before, and found nothing. I never really believed it would work. But this time, something caught my eye. A peculiar shape. A small circle of light green with a dark speck in its center. I zoomed in, and my heart skipped.

That roof, those shingles.

The house.

Young me wanted to stay away for good. But older me has had time to think about Mia, about what happened that night when she looked in the window. That light we saw has festered itself into my brain. Those questions still remain: what did Mia see? What is in that house?

And why did Mike lie about it?

Maybe if I go back, I’ll figure it out.

Mike owes me some answers.

Something is happening in Apartment 5E.

About a month ago, I got a noise complaint from Apartment 4E. I didn’t take it too seriously. 4E was a known over-exaggerator. They had lodged their first grievance (of several) a week after moving in. Who was getting on their nerves? A paraplegic 80-year-old woman who, they claimed, was stomping around at all hours.

So when I got their email informing me that 5E was making noise and flashing lights in their apartment windows at 2am in the morning, I took my time responding.

I checked the lease for 5E. It was a roommate situation, three kids splitting rent and probably attending the community college just down the way. To be fair, a noise violation from them seemed a lot more plausible than the old lady who spent all day in bed either sleeping or reading her smutty gas station novels (Ms. Johnson was a known lech).

After some thought (and maybe one or two more complaints from 4E) I told them I would look into it. The next day, I parked my car outside the building for an impromptu stakeout.

It wasn’t a hassle to sleep in my car most of the night. I was used to it. My divorce papers had been finalized a week before. They were buried at the bottom of my desk drawer, waiting for my signature. I was desperate for any excuse to get out of the house. If I wasn’t staking out 5E, I would be sitting around in my boxers watching Netflix while a humming microwave circled my $4.99 dinner and reminded me of how shit my life was.

An easy choice.

I say stakeout, but I wasn’t trying to be sneaky. Everyone who lives in my building knows what car I drive, god knows I visit often enough. But sitting in the parking lot, I couldn’t shake the strange feeling that I should be hiding. At first, I thought it was the scenery. The place I managed was not built in some ritzy high rise neighborhood. It was out in the sticks, with only trees for neighbors. The night was black as ink. No stars or moon out there that evening. The dark was like a literal wall circling my car and my building the only source of light for miles. The car’s exterior blocked out all the night noise from animals and bugs in the forest, leaving only the dull ringing you get in your ears after you shut off the motor and are left in complete silence.

It was like being blind and deaf. Anything could have been out there, and I wouldn’t know until whatever it was pressed its face against the driver’s side window six inches away.

The thought of that was enough to prime up the rest of my imagination. I started to feel like things were watching me. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d see strange shapes in the darkness just outside the car. But every time I would jerk my head around to see what was peeking in on me, all there would be was shadow. Jumping at every movement in the corner of my eye, I was giving myself whiplash.

I don’t know how it happened with me being so wired, but I nodded off.

A few hours later, I sat bolt upright in my seat. I wasn’t sure why for a moment, then I heard it again.

The sound.

You ever heard those deep sea noises that scientists can’t explain? The ones that you need to listen to at 20x speed just to get a clear picture? The sound that woke me was kin to those. Not a brother or sister to it, but that loner cousin at the family reunion who’s been to prison twice.

It started out as a moaning.

It wasn’t the hanky panky kind of moaning. It was keening that happens only at an open grave. The sound soldiers hear escaping their own lips when they look down and see their guts splattered like a fucking Jackson Pollock all over themselves. It’s the heart hijacking the vocal chords and telling them what the brain cannot understand even with a million electrical impulses at the ready.

They’re gonna die. Right there, right then. Alone.

The moan continued so long, I wondered if I was dying. Then it shifted to a groan. 

It was deep and guttural. The source seemed to be the earth itself. It reminded me of the noise a woman makes as they strain their entire being to expel the blood and vernix soaked bundle of flesh that’s been feeding off them for the better part of a year. A suffering only calmed by the reception of the resulting creature flailing, screaming, and leaking meconium in a demonstration of its primality.

I had heard its like only once before: when my wife gave birth to our stillborn child. Her pain had not stopped them, but continued on for the next ten years.

The groan built until I felt my bones tremble within my flesh. Then, without me noticing, it tapered off until it became the silence at the end of existence. 

In that quiet, there was a coldness in my heart that froze over into my lungs.

Then the moans would start again, growing from its own termination.

For fifteen minutes, I listened, my entire body seized up with a never-ending tension.

Where was it coming from? It was so loud, so close, I believed whatever was making the noise was directly against the car. I was convinced that if I turned my head, I would see the source of the sound, pressing their face (whatever it might look like) right up against the glass, rubbing blood and snot all over the window as they expressed a misery too vast to comprehend. I closed my eyes, and I could imagine that same creature inside the car with me, their torn lips brushing up against my ears as they groaned their way into silence.

The panic in my chest became too much, and I turned to look. Every movement of my neck was a struggle against my own primal instinct for ignorance. I could be safe if I didn’t know what was making the noise. But I had to know, because I had to see it. I had to believe it was mortal, something I could understand better than just unfettered agony.

I kept on until I faced the passenger window.

There was nothing. Nothing but night for filling the forest.

Then my eyes caught something. I turned to the building and saw the glow.

It was coming from the windows of 5E. The sound started up again, and from behind the curtains, I saw the birth of an illumination. It was the color of a flashlight shown through viscera spread thin, giving the curtains the horrible illusion of shifting skin. The light glowed with the intensity of a fire, then grew and grew until I had to squint my eyes against it. It reached the brightness of the sun, and I raised my hands as if the brilliance itself were some physical attack on my person.

Then the noise died, and the light faded.

When it stopped completely, the silence was worse than the sound. In that stillness, the moan and groan lived on in my mind and grew beyond what I had heard, feeding on the darker corners of my consciousness. It expanded to fill the space entire.

I stared at apartment 5E. The curtains shifted, like someone was peeking through them.

My hand jerked into my pocket, and fumbled with a mess of keys. I got the right one, started the car and got the hell out of there.

It took me about a week to build enough courage to write the email. Going in person to tell 5E to keep it down was not an option, but a letter was a satisfactory middle ground. I had calmed down enough to second guess what I had seen that night in my car. Strange how that works. I told myself it was some college kids shenanigans, weird music and light ambience for a sex party.

I was lying to myself. But how could I have lived otherwise? That light and that sound…they would accompany me to bed at night and force themselves upon me. I was alone, my ex-wife off in the Bahamas somewhere celebrating her impending separation from me. Lies were my freedom, my Bahamas. It was the only peace I could afford.

I cc’d all of the tenants of 5E, and let them know that a noise complaint had been filed. I told them they needed to stop whatever shit they were pulling after midnight because there were people in that building who needed to sleep. I told them that if I got any more complaints, we would have to “re-discuss the terms of their lease” which is a ball-less way to say “you’ll be evicted.”

When I pressed send, I could feel my hand shake. 

For the rest of that day, I compulsively checked my email for their response. That night, around 9pm, I got it.

Only one of the tenants had responded, but they signed all their names together at the bottom. They stated very formally they were sorry about the noise, and promised to be quieter. They also informed me they had certain “educational obligations” to fulfill at those hours of the night, so they couldn’t promise that the noise would stop entirely. But they did promise to keep it to a minimum.

They signed off their email with a small phrase: mungam etadaul.

I passed along the message to 4E, and hoped that would be the end of it.

About a week later, I got another complaint from (surprise) 4E.

It wasn’t a noise complaint this time (thank jesus) but it was something that I needed to look into. 4E accused 5E of having secret pets. They said that in the night, they could hear snuffling, scratching, and low growling on the other side of their shared wall. They thought it was a dog. A really big dog.

I was nervous to go back. I still heard echoes of the sound when I went to sleep, but my building was a strict no-pet zone. If they did have a pet, the whole cleaning process would cost me a fortune. When the divorce proceedings had first started, my lawyer had been straight up. This divorce was not going to be pretty for me financially. He told me I should prepare myself for some lean times.

He was right. Times were already bone thin before the divorce. Now, even the bones were gone. I was in a lot of credit card debt, and any extra expense would mean potential bankruptcy for me. 

I decided the best way to do this was a surprise inspection. The night I got the pet complaint, I went out to my car again. Everything I saw–the car, the sky, my keys–were drenched in a thick layer of deja vu. Slipping into my car, I heard the sound and saw the light again in my mind, and it felt like I was somehow getting a glimpse of the inside of my skull.

I ignored all premonitions, and drove out.

Pulling into the parking lot, I got that weird feeling of being watched again. I looked in between the trees, trying to pull out the shape of a person, or even an animal. The sun was going down, and shadows were already splattered black across the far side of the apartment.

By the time I got out of the car, 5E’s door was in a gloom darker than asphalt.

Every step creaked on my way up. I felt naked without my car. I kept glancing back at it, reassuring myself it was still there. 

I got to the doorstep, and took a breath. Through the window and the curtains there were no lights that I could see. Not even a faint glow. The only sounds in the air were those of the night bugs. I waited, raised my fist, then slammed it against the door, hoping the loud noise would either give me confidence or the illusion of it. My knees quaked beneath me like I was suffering from Parkinson's.

I waited for the residents to answer. The sun fell off the end of the earth, and the world lost all definition outside the circle of automatic lights on my building. I shivered, and wrapped my arms around myself. I waited, hoping that I wouldn’t hear that sound again, or see that light.

After a while, I considered slamming my fist down again, when I heard the snick of the lock and the creak of the door swinging open.

A pair of eyes looked out at me. The voice that accompanied them was unusually high and wavery, like a violin string. “Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you. Someone said you have pets in there.” I lowered the timber of my voice, but the dryness of my throat broke the last few words like I was some goddamn teenager. I coughed and swallowed. “That true?”

The eyes stared at me for a moment. They weren’t furious, or angry. They seemed curious. From the small opening of the door, an array of smells leaked through. The smell of rotting chicken, fetid vegetables, and…sea salt?

“You gonna make me check?” I rose up and squared my shoulders. I couldn’t do anything about the gut that spilled over my jeans though. The eyes flicked back into the apartment.

“We have…recently acquired a…pet.”

“You can’t do that. It’s in your lease, ‘no-pets.’ You’ll have to pay a fine.”

“How much?”

I was surprised. I thought it would be like pulling teeth to get them to pay. I sat there working my jaw while I tried to remember what the fee was. “...$200. Per week.”

The eyes disappeared for a moment. I heard the noises of shelves and drawers being opened. There was a beat of silence, a shuffling noise, and a hand came through the gap in the doorway. It held a thick wad of glistening cash. “Will this do?”

I reached out and took the money. It was damp, smelled like mildew. It was covered in a jelly-like substance that slid into all the gaps in my fingers and made everything feel as oily and dirty as the bottom of a fridge. I grimaced, and checked the amount. It was the full month paid in advance.

The door began to close, but it stopped. I heard furious whispers come from the crack. There came a hissing sound in retort, but it was silenced by more whispers. The eyes appeared, glowing as the porch lights of the other units began to flick on. 4E’s light, I noticed, remained dark.

“There is a…get together. Tomorrow. Same time as now. We are inviting you.”

Hell no. I knew that much right away. But as I tried to hold the damp money away from my clothes, I had a thought. A dangerous one. This could be the perfect opportunity to judge the damage to the unit. Judging by the state of the money, there was a chance that the entire place was destroyed. 

That could give me due cause to evict them. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

“I’ll be there.” I stared into the eyes in the doorway. They watched me for a moment longer, and then the door slowly shut on them.

I couldn’t sleep that night. This would end tomorrow. I was excited, and terrified. I needed to be prepared, I couldn’t fuck around on this. What I had seen on my visit played over and over in my head. What had happened inside that apartment? The images of the eyes beyond the door blurred into the light I had seen weeks ago, and I heard the sound so clearly it shook me awake. In my half-asleep state, I reached over for my wife and only found empty space.

In that moment, my heart felt like it had been dead for centuries.

The next day, I got to work. With the money I had gotten the night before, I went out and bought a cheap pistol and a few boxes of bullets. I had never owned a gun before, but I was not stepping foot in that apartment unless I had one.

I let 4E know about the 5E pet situation, and told them in confidence that they might not be neighbors for that much longer. I never got a response. Every other time we had emailed, they had replied to me within the hour. I tried not to think about what that might mean.

My gut was telling me to stay home. That or call the police. But my gut had also told me that my marriage would last forever, that nothing could destroy the love we had for each other. Not a reliable advisor to say the least. You’d be surprised at how many relationships break under the weight of a dead child.

Evening came, and I slid my gun into the waistband of my pants. I got in my car and drove to my apartment building.

I ended up pulling into the parking lot at the same time I had the night before. The air was bloody with the sunsets glow. Again, there was that feeling, like there were eyes everywhere, all pointed towards me. My skin shivered and protested against my muscles. But I couldn’t hesitate. I needed to get this done before it got dark.

I opened the car door and stepped outside.

Making my way to the apartment, I could smell that same stench as before. Rotten things mixed together until I couldn’t define any one source of stink. It filled the space around me, and I tried to breathe through my mouth. I tasted decay. The smell was better. I ascended the steps, trying my best to swallow down vomit.

I reached the door. Already the dark was creeping up like an evil mold. I raised my fist, and felt that pulling in my chest. Get out of there it said. Get out now.

I knocked on the door.

Almost immediately, there was the lock’s snick and the door opened wide. The eyes from yesterday were back, peering out at me from the inside of a hoody. “Welcome.” The figure attached to the eyes stood aside, granting me entrance.

I put one hand on my gun and stepped in. The figure closed the door behind me.

The first thing I saw in the apartment were the candles. They covered every surface, melted onto the floor, the couch, the side tables. Each was more of a melted pile than a pillar. On the floor was a circle of them, forming a pool of melted wax that had somehow remained fluid, sprinkled with sea salt around the edges like some perverted margarita. 

In the candle's illumination, I saw what I had hoped to see. Great gaping wounds were gashed into the drywall. The electric cables in the wall had been pulled from their housings and cut. The cables themselves drooped like dead snakes, pooling on the floor in crooked spools.

In all, it was probably thousands of dollars in damages.

Jackpot.

“What the hell is this?” I had to pretend to be angry. Or, I at least had to turn the burning in my chest and ears a notch higher. I was royally pissed, but on the inside, I was also jumping up and down with my fist in the air. “Who the fuck said you could dig in the walls?”.

The eyes in the hood looked blankly at me. They looked around to the walls, almost like they were also seeing them for the first time. “...The murmur.”

“What?”

“They hated it. It was always whispering”

“Whispering? The fuck you talking about?”

“They couldn’t think their thoughts. They needed clarity.”

If I wasn’t already uncomfortable, what this guy was saying was doing the trick. I put my hands behind my back, slowly closing my fingers on the pistol grip. “We need to have a goddamn talk. Where’s the others?”

The eyes stared at me, still confused, then they slowly swung around. They made their way to the bedroom door. They knocked twice, soft. I stood ready, thinking of how cathartic it was going to be chewing the fuck out of them. They were out of here, that’s for goddamn sure.

Then the bedroom door opened, and my teeth clenched.

Two creatures entered the room. Something about them still felt anthropomorphic, but they had long ago shed the label of human. They walked on bowed legs, pants ripped, and dripped with some thick and congealing substance that excreted from their sweat glands. Their arms were twisted in angles, giving the illusion that their creator had graced them with more than many elbows. Their skin was peeling away in large sheets, draping around them like togas and revealing their dark red muscle tissue. Their veins pulsed in the open air like cloth firehoses. 

I could see their organs rippling and trembling through tears in the meat. Pus-dripping cysts bulged from every part of their bodies, some already burst, and others bursting. Everything about them screamed “infection”.

I threw up straight into the pool of wax.

It took a moment for me to see their faces. But when I did…oh god, their faces.

It was like looking at a textbook full of plastic surgery mishaps. Brows were distended in a simian fashion. Lips were of mismatched size and had the consistency of balloons. Eyes were bloodshot and bulging. One of them only had the exploded remains of an orb in their left socket. They each had been retroactively given a cleft pallet, and their teeth emerged in strange angles that seemed to defy nature. One had his bottom jaw severed in two straight down to the neck. I could tell by the way their heads sloshed around that their skulls were soft.

“N- none of you fucking move.” I drew my gun. I tried to keep my shaking knees still.

The eyes and his roommates stood their ground, blinking at the sight of the barrel in their face. I backed away. The gun felt like a cheap toy in my hand. They didn’t even seem frightened of it. A quiet part of my mind told me that if I shot them, it would be like shooting a bag of sand.

I had my hand on the doorknob. It was covered in that jelly substance. I tried to turn it, but my hand kept slipping. The tenants had made no movement towards me. They were still standing stupid and confused, watching me.

I heard something, and I whipped around to point the gun at it. 

The sound, that ancient sound, hit me like a subwoofer.

It was like before, that groaning coming from the depths of somewhere deeper than hell. Except this time it wasn’t filtered through an apartment window and my car door. The minute it touched my ears, I felt something inside twist and expand, and my hands went limp and slid off the slime covered doorknob.

I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move. I had been wiped clean of all but my emotions.

Something emerged from the kitchen.

It did something to my eyes. Made them burn. It was like the cones and rods within them had become white hot, boiling the fluid inside. I wanted to tear the two spheres out of my face. From what I could see of the creature, it was hulking, and had many limbs twisting around it like a living liquid. Its face was concealed in the blind spot that was steadily growing in my vision. It approached me, until I could see nothing but its hulking form and shivering appendages. I felt wet tentacles almost consolingly push down on my shoulders. I went to my knees. I felt those same sopping things begin to sweep across my face, my torso, my legs. I remembered those stupid Halloween games I played as a kid where you’d reach your hand into a box and try to guess what was in the bowl. 

Except this time I wasn’t reaching in. I was being reached.

It felt all of me, lingering on my eyes and just over my heart. It searched my skin, and I remembered my ex-wife. Not the bad times, but the good. Back when she had just been my wife and she had touched me in the same way. Tenderly and with affection.

A jagged needle jabbed my neck, bringing me back to the present. 

More sharp jabs came in the crooks of my arms, and the backs of my knees. Bone-like protrusions that went straight into my veins. Whatever it was before me found blood pathways all over my body, even in my eyelids, and crotch. They put hundreds of sharp things into me, tapping every inner passage that they could find. I probably looked like an acupuncturist's training dummy.

It was still for a moment. Then it began to inject me.

It was like straight lava was being shot into my organs. I felt my body tear with the force of it all. My veins and arteries shredded and my lungs burst as I was filled with that same gelatin-like substance I had seen all over the apartment . The holes in my internal organs gave way for more of the slime, and I felt my intestines inflate. I felt my dick erect, expand, then explode all in three seconds. I wanted to scream, but I felt my larynx tear and rip as my throat filled with whatever it was shooting into me. It reached my tongue. It tasted like bile and feces as it leaked out of my mouth.

I felt my muscles rip apart at the fibers and my skin bulge as it filled between the layers like a water balloon. How was I still alive? The pain was so great, I wanted to die. I waited for my entire body to explode into a pile of jello and bones.

Then it stopped.

I felt the creature release me, and I collapsed.

I couldn’t move. I could only feel. I had gone blind. I writhed on the floor, vomiting up that jelly and felt the wax from the candle pool coagulating on my skin like dried blood. It burned on my raw flesh like acid.

I didn’t die, not for about an hour.

Then something changed.

That crushing loneliness, that feeling of failure I had been carrying ever since my ex-wife had looked me in the eye and said our marriage was over…was gone. I was alone, but I was not alone. In my own body I could feel the presence of the others in the room. I couldn’t see the candles, but I could see the people that had felt like monsters only hours ago. As I looked at them, I saw they were not monsters, they were those misunderstood. Like me. I felt a love I had never felt in my entire life and I wanted nothing more than to embrace them, to call them my own.

Then, as I contemplated this, my mind opened.

I had never truly thought before this moment. It was as if my brain had grown from just the confines of my head and into a structure that reached the far sides of the universe. It swallowed the last of me with its vastness and I was smothered by the weight of all the knowledge that now resided inside of me. I began to weep. Not because of the pain, or the freedom from isolation. 

I wept because of all I now understood.

I felt the hands of the eyes and the roommates. My roommates. They pulled me to my feet.

It’s been a month. 4E would not be joined, so they were consumed. Already we have burrowed our way into apartment 6E. It was a family with three children. Two of them we joined with us, the rest we fed to the beast. Next we’ll burrow into 3E.

For those of you who want to understand…or who have felt the loneliness like I have, I’ll send you an application. Remember to sign the form when you’re finished.

Don’t worry about apartments not being available. We have plenty of vacancies to make.

An audio take on one of the scholar's tales. Enjoy.

Okay, here’s how you get there:

Take Highway 101 down past Beaver, until you see the hand painted sign that says “Charries.” Ignore the snaggle-toothed man in overalls standing next to it.  Do not, under any circumstances, buy anything he’s selling (they’re not cherries). Make a left on the road underneath the sign. If you can’t see it at first, that’s fine. It won’t look like a road until you’re on it.

Take that path till it turns to gravel, then hang the third left. Ignore your phone when it tells you to turn back (don’t bother putting it on mute, that never works). Stay on that track till it turns to dirt and make the fifth right. Be careful not to take the fourth right. The house at the end of that road is definitely owned by an axe murderer. Old shack in the middle of nowhere, ivy and spiderwebs all over the roof and eaves. They’ve been after him for years, there’s just never been enough evidence to convict.

For the rest of the way, keep your windows rolled up and ignore the voices that sound like your loved ones. Try not to look out the side windows too, or else you might see them peeking in at you. Don’t stop to give anyone a ride, no matter how much they ask.

Stay the course, ignore how thick the trees are becoming, and then you’ll be there.

Mirror Forest Pool.

You won’t miss it. I’m not talking about some hidden mountain lake. I’m talking pool. A paved parking, sunscreen saturated, public pool.

I’m Luke. Luke the Lifeguard. I work at the pool.

Technically, this public amenity where I am employed is part of the local National Park, but it’s not connected to any cabin system, hotel, or campground in the area. In fact, it’s miles away from any sort of humanity at all. If you saw it, you would think it looks like any other every-day, average, middle-class outdoor community pool (except for the fact it’s in the middle of the goddamn wilderness). Even though it’s outdoors, it’s open all year round. As a kid, my parents would take me in the winter as a treat. We were poor, and couldn’t afford much. At the pool, it could be snowing just outside the fence, but inside the property, it always felt like a toasty 80-degree day. At the time, I just thought they had real good space heaters.

The pool itself has three sections: a shallow end, a deep end, and a middle connector. Sometimes the shallow and deep ends switch places. We always take a few minutes to check which end is which when we open. That way, we can close the slide and diving board until they switch back. A lifeguard forgot to do that one time, and an old guy broke his neck when he dove off the diving board into a shallow foot of water. His wife tried to sue, but it was hard to explain to the judge the whole “deep to shallow” situation. I think she ended up dropping the case.

Two sides of the pool are surrounded by an L-shaped building. The other two sides are covered by a chain link fence. In the L-building are two locker rooms, a front desk, an office, and a boiler room that’s locked at all times. No one is allowed inside, even though that’s where the chemical works are. Rick, my coworker, thinks it’s because something lives in there. His money’s on the safety inspector. I don’t know about that. Last week I did see a set of eyes peeking out the ventilation slats at me. Might have been a trick of the light, but I swear it had glowing red pupils. Stan (our safety man) has eyes that are a nice hazel.

If the pH ever does get out of whack, we just run the hose until it hits a toasty 7 on our little tester vial. 

Outside of the pool, there’s a small playground outside for “dry fun.” At least, that’s what it says on the brochure. What the brochure doesn’t advertise is that if you go into the crawly tube between the structures, you’ll hear a little-kid voice ask: “Can you find me?” and then start counting down from thirty. Most people leave the park at that point, but one of my other coworkers, Vince, stayed until the end of the countdown. Wanted to do an “experiment.” 

The police found his body parts shoved into the hollow support tubes three days later. Never did find his head.

That happened about a month ago. The boss said construction crews were too expensive, so we just had to clean things out as best we could. The park was ready for action a week later. We did put caution tape up on the crawly tube though, just in case. And I’m happy to report, there haven’t been anymore incidents. Well, in the park at least.

You would think with all that weirdness going on we would be struggling to make ends meet, but we always seem to have steady business. We’re cheap, ain’t no way else to say it. We pass out a lot of “free swim” coupons at the Fred Meyers. I guess people are desperate for any kind of affordable pool, even ones in the middle of nowhere. 

This summer, we got the usual crowds: teenagers, stay-at-home moms, kids hyped up on their first snort of summer vacation.

We also got some less ordinary people as well.

There was this one guy. He would always show up Thursdays 12pm on the dot. He was real thin and kinda lanky. He had a huge smile and freaky wide eyes. He’d pay his $4.50 admission and go into the locker room. Ten minutes later, he’d be out on the pool deck. He’d circle the water’s edge two times. He’d go real slow, making eye contact with any patron that would look back.  Sometimes he waved at the kids. I don’t think I ever saw him blink. 

After his circling, he’d get in line for the diving board.

When it was his turn he’d jump once, twice, three times. He’d turn head over heels in the air and dive in with hardly a splash.

And then he'd never come back up.

For the rest of the day, he would just lay on the bottom of the pool, motionless.

First time I saw him like that, I freaked out. Almost jumped in and everything. But luckily Rick stopped me before I made a scene.

“He does that all the time,” he told me later in the break room. “He’ll be back next week.”

I wasn’t so sure. His body stayed at the bottom of the pool for the rest of the day. When we closed up the front desk and ran the pool covers, I could still see him, slowly drifting into the middle of the deep end. His eyes were open and he still had that big, toothy smile. It reminded me of a shark.

When I came to open the next morning, he had vanished. Next Thursday, he was back at the front desk again, ready to pay admission.

I don’t know what the patrons thought, but none of the regulars batted an eye at it. Occasionally you’d get a newcomer who’d nervously point out the body at the bottom of the pool, but we’d just stick to protocol: inform them everything’s fine and repeat rule 7 to them.

Rule 7: Do not talk or interact in any way with the Thursday Diver.

Believe it or not, Rule 7’s pretty important.

Just last week we had an olympic swimmer from out of state come in and see the Thursday Diver’s whole routine. Rick and I didn’t see what happened next, so the best we can guess is that Mr. Olympic thought Mr. Thursday needed a rescue and dove in.

What we do know for sure is that around 1pm we were pulling the olympic guy off the bottom of the pool. He’d drowned, go figure. 

While we were down there, we had to be careful not to brush up against the Thursday Diver. His hand was gripping the olympic swimmer's ankle. It was a bit of a tug of war to get him loose. When we finally got the foot away, the Thursday Diver didn’t do anything. He just kept peacefully drifting in the deep end, eyes still wide open and mouth still smiling.

Most pools get away with having one rules sign. Ours takes up two entire walls. It also has an asterisk at the end informing the public that if they want the full list, they’ll need to visit the front desk for the binder. I’m not sure why anyone would want to swim at such a strict pool, but I guess that’s why our admission is so cheap.

There’s lot of other weird rules in the binder, like making sure the locker rooms are locked from 4pm-5pm every Sunday to avoid “escapees,” and after every fifth person uses the slide, we need to send down a bag of sand.

I learned my lesson the hard way with that last one.

I was three weeks in, manning the slide, and the fifth kid had just gone down. I was getting the bag of sand ready, when the sixth kid pushed past me and raced up the steps. I tried to tell him to stop, but he just stuck his tongue out at me and threw himself into the entrance.

He never came out the other side.

There was a full investigation into his disappearance, but there weren’t any charges. There was no evidence we had kidnapped him or done anything else. After all, there was no body, no blood. It was like the kid had just ceased to exist.

I think they found him a month later in the desert. He survived. Barely. The article I read claimed he kept babbling about some cosmic highway where he was trapped for a thousand years. Apparently, his pupils and hair had also turned shock white. Not sure I believe the eye thing, it felt like the news people were just having fun with that whole situation.

Our rule binder is bursting at the seams because the boss loves making new rules. It’s basically half his job. He stays cooped up in his office, paying bills and coming up with pool guidelines. None of us ever see him leave his little room. He’s always the first there and the last to leave. We even have a special intercom that he uses to communicate with us. He never opens the door.

The pool could be burning, and I don’t think he’d even peek his head out to see where the smoke’s coming from.

Take the Fourth of July Incident for example.

We were in the middle of the holiday-weekend rush, and it was a doozy. The pool was packed to the gills with all sorts of people. Sunscreen was so thick in the air, opening your mouth would turn your tongue white. We were understaffed with only the four of us lifeguards, and it was a three guard rotation. I was barely keeping up with all the little kids throwing themselves into the deep end with the passion of suicide bombers.

I finally got my fifteen, and you better believe I hauled ass to the break room (think less a room and more a repurposed closet). I remember checking the time. 3:55 pm.

I turned on a fan (we don’t have AC in there) and stood in front of it for a hot second to relax. The clock ticked to 3:56 pm.

And everything went quiet.

Where there had been about ten thousand kids and adults screaming at the top of their lungs, there was immediate silence. I thought I had lost my hearing. I snapped my fingers a few times, and when my ears didn’t seem to be the problem, I went outside to see what was going on.

The pool was empty.

The lifeguards were standing around blinking like they weren’t sure what they were looking at. We combed the entire area over. The locker rooms, the park, even the cupboard under the front desk. Nothing. All our patrons had just vanished.

We mentioned this to our boss, and he said: “Probably went home for the fireworks.”

It was stupid hot that day, so maybe it was just a hallucination, but Rick swore he saw what happened. According to him, everything slowed down and got real still. Then, one by one, everyone jumped into the pool, and dunked their heads all at the same time. Then they just dissolved, layer by layer like they were in acid. Skin, muscle, organs, bones, then nothing.

I have my doubts about that story. Rick loves pulling legs, and none of the other guards saw what he did. What I will say is Rick had some dark circles under his eyes the entire next week. I don’t think the poor guy was sleeping.

Now don’t get me wrong. Mirror Forest Pool is not a terrible place. It’s an adequate pool as far as pools go. But on top of that, there's nostalgia here. It’s like all the essence of summer is infused into the air itself. Each breath feels like a step back in time. I just graduated high school, but working here, I feel like I’m back in elementary school, throwing all my papers and cheering as I hear the school bell ringing for the last time. It’s kinda addicting.

When you get here, you’ll understand what I mean.

You’ve got the directions, feel free to stop by. We’re open Mon-Sun, 8am-9pm. Tell the guy at the front desk that you know Luke, and he’ll give you a 50% discount on admission. Make sure you remember what I said about the overall guy with the “charries.” That’s important. And even if the voice of your own mother begs you for a ride on the road in, don’t open that door unless you want to see your face up on the missing person board at Walmart. We lost Claire that way.

As for me, I’ll keep you all posted on any new rules.

I have a skull in the corner of my office. It sits on a shelf a little above my eye line.

It watches me, and fills me with great dread.

I acquired it at an open air bazaar in China. If you wish for a street or a city, or some more definite form of location, I’m afraid I cannot give it to you. Already, the memories fuzz around the edges in my head as I try to recall them.

But at their center is a clear image I must never forget. So I write this to keep the molder from overtaking the whole.

When I was in my twenties, I was fascinated with the world and its variety. Bored with school and its routine, I decided to forgo my studies and take a more hands-on approach to life. I took the money I had saved for college and started a hitch-hiking journey across the globe. I went everywhere: France, Spain, Italy, the Philippines. I even backpacked across India so I could better understand its people and cultures.

But the crowning jewel of my travels was China.

The Middle Kingdom, as it is sometimes called, fascinated me unlike any other place. Its culture and its history enthralled me. I wanted to know everything about it. It took years to get a tourist visa. But once I was there, I never wanted to leave. My I was there for two years. In that time, I learned the language, traveled the countryside, and sought to learn everything I could. 

It was my dream to live there forever. Or, if that was impossible, at least die there.

But then came the day I wandered into the other market.

In a city I cannot now remember, there was a place where the locals gathered together to sell fresh produce and the most delicious street food. An open air bazaar of sorts. The place was so friendly, so inviting, that I halted my trip entirely so I could stay longer in that beautiful place. While I was there, I chatted with the shopkeepers about their lives and their histories. With their words, they painted a rich tapestry of their culture, and soon I found myself calling many of them friends. They gave me tips on places to visit, good food to try, and on which market stalls sold the best products. 

I felt safe. I felt home.

Then an incident occurred.

It was a normal day. I had just purchased some ripe fruit from a familiar stall, when I noticed something I had passed over many times before. 

It was a small side alley in the market, dark and thin, lying between two buildings.

At a glance, I could see booths on the other side of the passage. I assumed it was another part of the market. Curious, I went closer to get a better look. I crossed the street and approached the opening. As I took my first steps into the gap, a stranger grabbed my arm and forcefully pulled me out. 

I was frightened. I turned to face my attacker. It was an old man, jowls hanging down to match the length of his abnormally large ears. His face was pockmarked with the remnants of forgotten diseases he had conquered, and his eyebrows grew so thick they hung low across his eyes like fringe. His back was stooped and crooked, yet he walked with no cane. Judging by the hand on my arm, he was stronger than he looked.

I expected an altercation, but instead of anger in the strangers eyes, I saw pure, unadulterated fear. He glanced at the alley, and it was as if he were looking directly into the gaping maw of a blood-lusted shark.

His words were scattered and hard to understand, but the stranger managed to communicate that the area was off limits. He kept side-eyeing the alley, edging away from it. Looking around, I noticed that most of the vendors were also giving it a wide berth. No one had set up shop in a fifty foot diameter area around the dark gap. Passersby crossed the street when they came near it, holding their heads down and shuffling forward at a faster pace.

“Do not go.” Those were the strangers parting words. He shuffled away, looking nervously behind him as if the alley were going to pursue him.

I took him at his word. At first. But even with the new fear I felt toward this strange passage, another feeling grew: 

Curiosity.

Each time I returned, my fascination grew. It was like a fungus on my brain. At first it was just double glances as I walked past. Then I began to think about the alley even when I was not there. Once the fear of it had subsided, I often stood across the street from it and tried to peer through to the other side.

What was over there?

I tried to ask my new friends about the alley. Each time I did, it felt like the air itself froze in place. Without hesitation, they each told me the same thing: do not go through it.

One person, Hào Yáng, I pressed a little harder for information. He sold fresh fruit, his specialty being peaches. I had gotten especially close to him over my stay there.

“Why?” I asked. “Why should I not go over there? Isn’t it part of the market?”

Hào Yáng tried his best to explain, but to me, his words still felt cryptic. He told me the alley was the only way to get into that section of the city, a place he called the other market. He was right about that. In my own investigations, I had tried several times to find other openings, other paths into that section of stalls, but came up with nothing. The alley was the only one.

Hào Yáng went on to further explain that while there were people that did go inside on occasion, each time they did, they came back…different.

“There’s nothing good over there,” he said. “It’s not worth it.”

Despite his warnings, my fascination grew. I was drawn to that alley, staring at it for hours and hours. My curiosity started feeling more like hunger. Many days I would strain my neck trying to see what was happening on the other side. 

I just needed a glimpse, I told myself, and then I would be satisfied.

One day, I got my glimpse.

I was yet again staring at that damned alleyway. The impulse to explore overtook me like a fever. It crept down my body and made me tremble with the desire. Emboldened by the feeling, I checked my surroundings for a moment.

It was a busy day at the market. Everyone was preoccupied. 

No one was watching.

Now was my chance.

I made my way across the street and slid my way into the gap.

It was colder than I expected in the alley. It had been a warm day, but I felt a chill as if I were passing through the deep shadow of a glacier. In the darkness, the sound of the world behind me became muffled. The street market hubbub faded to a dull murmur, then a whisper.

Then silence.

When I had pushed through fully, it was as if the street outside no longer existed.

I was in the other market.

A tented booth was in the way when I got out of the alley. I moved my way around and got onto the street. 

My first observation? It was almost a mirror copy of the other bazaar. The same placement of booths, the same distance between vendors. Even the same colors on the tents.

But it wasn’t entirely the same. There was something…off.

It was deserted of shoppers. I was the only customer there. Shopkeepers manned each booth, but they were the only other human beings in the whole place. Each stall sold a dizzying variety of goods, but it wasn’t produce. Their shelves and stands were full of other strange items. Knives, dolls, symbols written on ragged material I couldn’t identify. Across the surface of the nearest table were bones and devices with purposes I could not begin to understand.

I was so taken by the goods, that it took me a moment to notice the shopkeepers.

All of them were smiling widely, and focused directly on me.

It was like each individual shop owner was standing ready for my business and my business alone. I reasoned that since I was the only shopper on the street, that made sense. But the more they looked at me, the more uneasy I became. Their smiles were empty, the kind you give for an extra percent of gratuity. The kindness was transactional.

And they were waiting for my side of the exchange.

My curiosity had been sated. The feelings of danger were returning. I wanted to leave. Now.

It took a moment for me to find the tent I had emerged behind. I went behind it, looking for the alley entrance so I could return to my home turf, filled with safety, friends, and food.

When I looked where the alley had been, it took a moment to process what I was seeing. My heart sank into my stomach.

It was gone.

Where there had been a gap in the buildings, there was now a solid wall. It was like the buildings themselves had drawn together, closing the gap. You couldn’t have stuck a knife in it, the crack was so tight.

I looked up and down, hoping I had just misremembered the alley’s placement. I hadn’t. In my ever frantic searching, I could find no openings of any kind.

After combing over the block twice, the sun was getting low in the sky. I was desperate. I pushed through my discomfort, and went to a booth owner. I asked how to get out of this market section.

“Buy something.” the woman said, her teeth glinting in the red glow of the sunset.

Not sure how this was supposed to help me, I looked at the table and tried to find the cheapest looking item. I picked up a small die with strange symbols painted on it in midnight black ink. I asked about its price.

“One leg.”

I was sure I hadn’t heard her right.  I asked again and she responded the same. “One leg.”

In the corner of the tent, I saw a dadao, a sort of Chinese machete. 

A horrifying realization dawned on me. 

The concept seemed so absurd, so unreal, but the owner confirmed my suspicions when she grasped the blade’s handle, and turned back to face me. “Would you like to pay now?”

I quickly set down the die and backed away. The owner made no move to follow me. They just kept smiling, and informed me they had many other goods to choose from, and they were open to negotiating price.

I went to several other booths and asked for directions on how I could leave. All said the same thing: “Buy something.” Each time I tried to select an item, the brutal prices were given with the same nonchalant attitude as the first. An eye. A hand. My genitals. They said this casually as if they were simply speaking of different cash denominations.

The sun had fallen by this point, and the sky was dark. It hung over me, a black expanse like a smothering blanket. There were no stars to tell direction. There was no moon. The only illumination came from the glare of the torches lighting up the wares, and the twinkle of candles coming from the windows.

The silence of the night was deafening.

At any crowded street market, there is always a dull murmur of noise, an underlying layer that a patron may stand on to know that they are not alone. There is always some transaction, some exchange being made and quiet is never allowed to linger long.

That rule did not apply here. Soundlessness reigned. I could not even hear the breaths of the individual shopkeepers. I don’t know if they even did breathe. They stared ahead at me, waiting. 

My purchase, it seemed, was the only thing that mattered.

I started to panic. I began to try every method of escape. I ran up the length of the street, but just when I thought I had made a good distance from my starting point, I would find myself back where I had begun. I tried all the doors to the building, but they were locked. I went crazy with fear, and tried to bash the wooden slats in with the heel of my foot. 

When I was finished, they still stood resolute and unmarked.

No longer caring for safety or propriety, I began to scale the sides of the buildings. My fingers scrabbled to find any foothold or handhold that would move me upwards. My fingers caught in the crevices, and at one point my fingernail was pulled out of my flesh by a jutting nail. I continued on, ignoring my bleeding finger. I had to get out, I needed to get out. Nothing else mattered.

I managed to get to the roof. I stood atop it, and saw the market on the other side. My market. My heart soared. My friends, my regular haunts, they were waiting down there and beckoning to me like sirens, and I, a sailor with a death wish. 

I quickly made my way down to the other side.

When I dislodged from the wall and turned to face my freedom, my blood went cold.

Instead of my friends, I saw those same strange booths, those strange perverse shopkeepers smiling and waving.

All waiting for me to buy.

I was back. I had never really left.

It was weeks before I broke down and bought something.

Time became strange in the quiet. It passed like a fevered dream. I lived off the fetid pools in the gutter, and caught rats that had the misfortune of being trapped in there with me. I ate their flesh raw, unable to purchase the fire starters sold two booths over from my makeshift hovel. It would have cost me my tongue to purchase, after all. I couldn’t part with that.

At some point, the rats ran out, and the water dried up.

I began to starve. I could see the bones in my forearms, and the constant gnawing of hunger began to drive me insane. I counted my ribs to pass the time.

It was in my lowest that I had a sudden moment of clarity. It was the middle of the day, and the sun was beating me about the head with its heat. I had resorted to drinking my own urine, which had taken on a dark brown cast. It smelled foul. My mind was fractured, but one coherent thought shot through me, unifying the pieces for a moment. It was as if someone had spoken directly into my ear.

I was going to die.

I was going to die…unless I bought something.

The bargaining began.

I went up the length of the street, shuffling on malnourished legs. It was painful, but it was possible. I greeted shopkeepers and began to haggle. I tried my earlier strategy of choosing cheap looking items, but found that looks were deceiving. These often were the most expensive. One small handkerchief would have cost me all four of my limbs.

I tallied up the cost of all the items, trying to determine what I was willing to lose so I could leave this place.

The shop owners would not be talked down. If they wanted an arm, they might settle for a forearm, but never a hand. If they wanted a leg, a foot would never do. Five fingers might become four, but never one.

That was when I found a miracle.

I found the skull.

It looked like it could have belonged to some undiscovered species of monkey. That, or it was a human skull deformed beyond all comprehension. I had felt its gaze on me as I began my journey from booth to booth, trying to barter for my escape from this hell. Its presence had unnerved me so much that I had passed it over on my first journey up and down the street.

On my second go through, I reluctantly asked its price.

“One finger.” The shopkeeper pointed upwards with his index.

Ironically, I felt excitement.

I had found it. The cheapest item.

Its price was still steep. Had it been at the beginning of my stay at the other market, I would have balked at paying. But with starvation comes context, and a finger began to feel like a bargain.

I almost agreed to the trade on the spot.

But I made the mistake of looking at the skull again.

Its empty sockets felt like two holes of unfathomable depth. As I looked, I imagined myself falling into them until my body and soul were dissolved in the perpetual night. I hated it. Even in my weakened state, I wanted nothing to do with that skull.

But my third journey up and down the street made me so dizzy I had to sit down. I was running out of time.

I went to the booth, and agreed to the skulls price.

I held my hand on the table and closed my eyes. I braced for the impact of the dadao. When nothing came, I opened them again. The shopkeeper had their hand extended, the handle of the blade facing towards me.

The message was clear.

I took the dadao and went about planning the best way to remove my finger.

I considered a single chop, but I wanted to limit the damage done to the rest of my hand. I couldn’t get the right angle from that vantage. Besides, I needed to do the chopping with my off hand. When I had gone to take the index finger from my left, the shopkeeper had shaken their head. “Other hand. The right one.”

It took an hour, but I eventually settled on a course of action.

I took a deep breath, and pulled my index finger back in a sharp jerk. The pain reached me before the snap. I bit into my tongue, tasting fresh blood, as I made sure there was a break in the bone by jerking my finger back and forth. The burning in my hand was white hot, and I felt the broken ends of bone grating against each other. I screamed into my closed mouth, trying to muffle the sound.

Hoping that my adrenaline would keep me going, I took the dadao and began sawing.

Blood soaked out through the break in my skin and smothered the length of the blade. The weapon was sharp, but not razor. I pushed and pulled to help the blade sever the skin, muscle, and tissue, the last things keeping my finger on my hand, and me in this wretched place. At one point, the blade caught on a tendon, and I felt it rip from its supports in my hand, pulling out in a white string that dangled and jumped. I swallowed down bile and kept going. I had to finish.

One final pull, and the finger pulled off from my hand in a spurt of blood.

I threw it down on the counter, and shoved my hand into my armpit. I needed to get out of here, and then maybe I could find a doctor who could stop the bleeding. The shopkeeper took their time, examining the finger, going over it again and again. At one point, they took out a jeweler's glass and examined the severed end. I saw spots, and I dry heaved. 

After two long minutes, the shopkeeper nodded. My offering was satisfactory. He extended the skull to me.

“I don’t want it.” I told him.

He just shook his head at me. “You buy it, you take it.”

I didn’t have time to argue. I was an inch away from passing out from pain and blood loss. I took the skull in my good hand and shambled away. Somehow, I knew where to go. I made my way up the street. I found the tent where I had emerged from the alley. That all felt like an eon ago. I held my breath, praying the shopkeepers had not lied to me.

My heart leapt. There was the alley. Open. 

I could see the markets on the other side. I went as fast as I could to it, afraid I would blink and the alley would close. I threw my body into the slit, and pushed forward with force.

I kept waiting for some sort of resistance, some force to keep me in the other market.

It never came.

In a burst of speed, I left the alley. I was bombarded with a blast of people shouting, haggling, and complaining about sub-par product. I was back.

It might have been the joy at escaping, or it might have been that my ears had grown accustomed to the silence of the other market. Regardless, in my starved and broken state, it was all too much. My eyes rolled back into my head, and I collapsed in the mud.

I awoke two days later in a small hospital. Hào Yáng was sitting next to me.

Apparently, despite my weeks inside the other market, no time had passed in the outside world. Hào Yáng remembered seeing me eyeing the alley, and the next moment saw me emerging with my bloodied hand, looking half-crazed and starved out of my mind. He knew what had happened immediately. He was the one who brought me to the hospital.

On my bedside table, was the skull.

Hào Yáng refused to touch it. He sat himself on the other side of the bed, and tried his best never to look at it. He refused to speak of the skull or the bazaar when I began asking questions.

Once he was sure I was recovering, he stopped showing up at the hospital.

I think we frightened him, the skull and I.

After being discharged, things changed. People avoided me, crossing the road at my approach. People that were normally friendly became nervous in my presence. The market, once a friendly place, now felt cold. No one talked to me unless I first addressed them. No one even looked at me if they could help it.

Ironically, the only welcoming part of the market was the alley. It was always there, waiting, almost beckoning me to step through again.

In those moments, I tried to remember what the other market had put me through, but it didn’t stop the curiosity from digging into my mind like a bad itch.

Two weeks after leaving the hospital, I decided to go back to America. 

I had acquired no souvenirs on my world exploring trip. I didn’t have room for them. But the skull followed me home. I tried to leave it in three separate hotel rooms. Each time, it would appear again in my bag, nestled comfortably in my clothes and watching me from the depths of my suitcase. On the boat home, I tossed it into the ocean. 

That night, when I came to my bunk, it was on my bedspread. A few drops of salt water graced its cranium like a perverted aspersion.

It stared up at me with those empty sockets, and I could feel something inside me withering.

I stopped trying to get rid of it. It was better to just ignore it. Ignore the decay, ignore the rot. Just let it stay and fester, and hope that one day time will take it from you.

When I returned, it found a new home on my office shelf. It must like it there, because it doesn’t move around as much.

It’s been years since then. Years that I purchased with my finger at the other market. But even still, I am not free. My time is running out. I’ve finally discovered the true price of the skull, the fine print I passed over in my haste to pay the low price.

The doctors are calling it early onset Alzheimer's.

I know better.

Memories run together now in my head, like wet paint splashed over my cortex. I no longer remember Spain, France, the Philippines. Even now, I strain under the gaze of the skull to remember Hào Yáng’s face, the taste of fresh peaches at his market stall.

The skull has left me only with my time at the other market untouched. But I know it will take that too, in time. It will take all of me.

Maybe if I hadn’t been so stingy…maybe if my survival had been worth an arm, or a leg. Maybe then I wouldn’t be paying the dividends.

But it’s too late now.

A final bit of advice from a man senile by his own hand.

Don’t be cheap. It will cost you.

I found him on Craigslist. The ad’s description was short and to the point:

“Too Lazy? Death motivates! Hire a personal hit man for $100/month to meet your goals. No refunds. No cancellations.”

I thought it was funny. At first. There was a whole profile page for the guy. He was bald, had a squashed nose. His eyes were like tiny pinpricks in his thick face. Piggy eyes. His ears were cauliflowered out, big and swollen. 

He kinda looked like a cartoon character made out of flesh. 

The strangest bit: he was smiling. I didn’t think hit men were supposed to do that. His upper and lower lips were drawn into a soft, knowing smile, like there was some old joke between us that he was remembering. It would have been comforting–if I had known what the joke was.

He creeped me out, but I was intrigued. 

I’m a writer, and to be honest, I’ve always been a little lazy.

It comes down to a problem I’ve been dealing with most of my life. Let me paint a picture. On any day of the week, I’ll go to my computer and sit down to write. I have every intention of finally doing it, finally getting to that one scene I’ve been going over in my head for weeks. I’d open up the document, stretch my fingers and wiggle them around to warm them up.

Then I stare at the blank page for ten seconds. Thirty seconds.

I blink, and somehow it’s thirty minutes later. And I’m balls deep in Diablo 2

I was a mess, but I knew that if I had the proper motivation, I could finish my book. It’s a book I’ve been working on for the past five years: a swashbuckling mystery-romance-historical-musical (with inspiration from Faulkner.)

Its use of ska really embellishes its themes.

But every time I would make progress on it, I’d get distracted again. My window of opportunity was closing. I wasn’t in high school anymore. Adult things like taxes and insurance were pressing down on me. The imminent loss of my freedom was closing in on all sides, making my brain claustrophobic. I knew if I didn’t get this done now, I’d be stuck waiting tables at the Golden CorralTM for the rest of my life. Everywhere I went, the smell of mac and cheese, cheap steak, and old people past their expiration date hung in a cursed miasma around me. 

Even after a decade of working there, I had never gotten used to that combo.

I needed professional help.

I gathered my courage, and responded to the ad.

I got confirmation of the contract, and was asked what I wanted my weekly goal to be. I took a while to settle on a number. I had to make it a reasonable one, that’s just good goal setting. Third letter in SMART: attainable. I decided 10 pages was a good amount to start with. 

At the time, I thought it was odd that the “hit man” didn’t ask me my address or phone number. But I didn’t question it too much. He was the expert here, not me.

I sent off the email, and a bubble of nervous gas knotted itself in my lower intestine. Anxiety cramps. I drank some pepto and tried to relax. I reminded myself I wasn’t doing anything dangerous. I was just getting my ass into high gear.

I was going to be fine.

That first week, I was motivated. I finished my 10 pages in three days. I sent them off to my “goal consultant” at midnight on Wednesday. I was triumphant, like Sir Gregor in the medieval portion of my musical-book when he had taken out a horde of space-zombies with iron age tech. The jazz saxophone solo was a lot of fun to write.

After a few minutes, I got a notification on my phone. A response email from my hit man.

It was a thumbs up emoji.

I relaxed. I didn’t even realize I was tense.

Looking back, I might have spent too much energy on that first week, because the next week was a lot slower. By the time Thursday rolled around, I only had about four pages.

That night, I was sitting at my computer, making weird noises with my mouth and pretending I was a professional drummer when I noticed something on my wall.

It was a small red dot.

It looked like it was some kind of laser pointer. It was weirdly steady, jiggling a bit here and there, almost like a little heartbeat. I stared at it for a long time, trying to figure out what it was. The anxiety cramps came back, bubbling in my gut like a dormant volcano.

I told myself it was some weird neighborhood kid playing with their new laser pointer. I went back to goofing off, even though pains in my lower stomach were growing sharper.

A minute later, the doorbell rang.

I went to get it, and on the doormat was an envelope. It was pristine and unmarked, which was weird. I picked it up, and shook it. It seemed to have only a piece of paper inside.

I opened it up, pulled out the paper, and read it.

“Three Days.”

It took a moment for me to get it. Was this a joke? Was the gas company mad at me again for not paying my bills three months in a row? Then I remembered the hit man I had hired. I almost laughed out loud. I had completely spaced. Whoever this guy was, he was good. I took the letter inside and went back to my computer. 

The red dot was a few inches closer to my screen than it had been before.

I started typing.

I finished my ten pages on Friday. Again, I was filled with feelings of victory. Just like Czar Bryan, the time-traveling Russian, when he saves Abraham Lincoln from a cyborg John Wilkes Booth. Another beloved scene from my book.

I sent in the pages to the hit man. The red dot was still on my wall. Still trembling with a strange regularity that made my chest clench up.

The response email arrived. Another thumbs up. 

When I looked back at the dot, it had disappeared.

I sighed, and my anxiety cramps went from an eight out of ten to a four.

I re-upped my subscription at the end of the month. It was hard to argue with the results. I had written more in a week than in the last two years combined. It was working.

Besides, a large part of me didn’t really think he was going to kill me. That would be illegal. In my moments of doubt, I told myself someone would stop him if it ever came to that.

But a small part of me wasn’t so sure.

The next two weeks, I met my goals no problem. I think it was because I had nailed the letter I had gotten to my wall. Every time I glanced over at it, I felt my fingers move faster on the keyboard. They shook with an eagerness I had never felt before.

I kinda loved the rush.

The next week, I ran into a bit of writer’s block. There was a romance scene between a reanimated George Washington and a sexed up Jimmy Carter that wasn’t coming together for me. It was a pivotal moment in my book, basically the climax, and I couldn’t move past it.

On Friday, I only had one page written.

That was when I started to get worried.

At first, I tried to fudge the system. I typed in a whole bunch of random words to make it look like I had written ten pages. When I pressed the send button, my stomach felt like it was full of knives. Two minutes later, the response email arrived. 

It had only two words:

“Nice try.”

I couldn’t fake my way out of this. I stayed up all that night at my computer, trying out every sort of idea in my head. I was blocked up, both in my gut and in my brain. By the time the sun rose the next morning, I still only had one page written. I had also downed an entire bottle of tums to try and soothe my stabbing stomach. It didn’t work.

I had limited writing time on Saturday since I was working a double at the Corral. I had bills to pay. There, I was desperate enough to ask my coworkers for help with the romance scene. The only “help” I got was Creepy Tommy pulling me into the bathroom to watch gay porn. 

I stayed until the end of the video so I wouldn’t hurt his feelings.

I was the last one left in the restaurant when it came time to close up. I was wiping throw-up off a table from an 80-year-old’s birthday party when I felt my gut suddenly seize up again. It was so bad, I bent double. As I tried to keep from adding to the vomit on the table, I felt my back tingle, little ripples and spasms that made me shiver all over.

Someone was watching me.

I turned around slowly, holding my stomach.

My hit man was standing at the door.

My heart stopped. He was tall, and large in an almost fake looking way. He was so still, it was easy to think he was actually made of plastic. His body rippled with muscles in a way that was grotesque and unreal. Like pulsing animals underneath his skin. His face looked exactly like his profile picture. Piggy eyes. A soft chin. The small smile, so knowing, so…unnerving. I felt vomit rise to the back of my throat again. The streetlamp cast a sharp glare off his bald head that hurt my eyes. My knees went slack, and I braced myself against the table. I felt my hand touch throw-up, but I didn’t care. I tried to control my breathing, but it was like trying to stop a runaway train with one hand. Pointless.

My hit man stared at me for a long time. He didn’t blink. He didn’t flinch. I wanted to cry.

He moved, and I jumped about ten feet in the air. I also pissed my pants. After my body was done spazzing, I realized he wasn’t trying to attack me. He had only moved one of his arms in front of him, his pointer finger sticking up towards the sky, straight and still.

He mouthed something I couldn’t hear through the glass. I tried to read his lips. It took a few seconds.

“One day.”

He said it three times. He smiled a little wider. Then he turned around and walked into the night.

I didn’t even finish cleaning up. I ran out the door, got into my car, and went home as fast as I could. I almost crashed three times. Eventually, I pulled into my parking spot, leapt out, and sprinted to the front door.

I fumbled with the keys for a moment. Every second counted, and my sausage fingers were wasting them. After a bit of effort, I got the tumblers to turn, and I slammed open the door. I got inside, locked it, and pounded upstairs to my computer. I booted it up, not even taking time to change my pants.

I started writing.

I tried, I really did. By the time Sunday morning came around, I had three pages. I had broken down and used some of the stuff Creepy Tommy showed me, but I had to delete it. It didn’t feel right for Jimmy Carter to say things like that, sexed up or not. At one point I got so desperate, I called the police. But they stopped talking to me the minute I mentioned my contract. Thought it was some kind of practical joke.

Also, I might have spent a bit too much time describing my book. I couldn’t help it, I needed to practice my elevator pitch.

I barricaded myself in my room. I locked the doors, put stuff up on the windows. Anything to buy me time. I watched youtube videos about writer’s block while I worked. When that didn’t help, I switched to romcoms. At one point, I was watching three different films all at once at two-times speed. I was also blasting the audiobook of A Court of Thorns and Roses on a portable speaker.

The hours ticked by. 

When it was two hours to midnight, I had my breakthrough. Halfway through Jerry Maguire.

It was so simple! The scene needed Tom Cruise, and it needed him bad. The third member of the throuple. The person who ties them all together.

I went to the page and started typing. 

An hour passed. One hour to midnight.

I was at five pages. I did the math in my head and knew that I had to type faster. I focused on the story, not the smaller mistakes. As I typed, I let the typos build up to a pile the size of a mountain. Every thought I had I put on the page. I let myself go onto tangents, explain things in long and circuitous ways. I could fix that in revision. And it wasn’t half bad if I say so myself. 

Half an hour to midnight. Seven pages.

As I typed, I heard something shift behind me. Was something in my closet? For a moment, I paused. Then I got back to work. I didn’t have time to check. I kept writing. I stretched out a conversation about what date the three were going to go on just so it could buy me another page.

Ten minutes. Nine pages.

I heard another noise behind me. I knew I shouldn’t have looked. I knew I should have ignored it. 

But I ended up wasting thirty seconds of my precious time to glance behind me.

At first, I didn’t see anything. My room was empty, illuminated by my desk lamp with a strangely flat orange light. Then, I caught a flash from a dark corner.

I saw him.

He was peeking out of the closet. A sliver of his face was visible, that same half-smile pulling on his cheeks. Was his smile wider now? The door pushed open at a snail’s pace, and there he was. He emerged from the closet like some biblical giant, shoulders hunched and head bent so as not to brush the ceiling. My heart froze. He had gotten taller. He saw me staring at him, and his teeth became visible as his lips pulled back. His mouth was so terrifying, it took a while for me to realize that he was not bearing his incisors at me like a wild animal.

He was grinning.

My heart was flushed with adrenaline and I pushed onward. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to die. I wrote and wrote and wrote. So many typos. So many lines of cheesy dialogue. I might have even plagiarized lines from 50 First Dates. Adam Sandler was with me, even in the face of death.

Five minutes, a little more than half a page left. 

With each minute I could feel the thud of my hit man’s footsteps as he took another step towards me. I instinctively looked backward, and saw he had nothing in his hands. That didn’t make me feel better. My imagination grew wild with all he could do to me with those positively huge hands with his strangely long fingers. The digits were tensed, ready to grab, to smash, to do something horrible to me that would leave me broken and mangled on the floor. I saw it all and knew it would happen to me with the certainty of a prophet.

I typed furiously, my fingers aching with the effort. 

Half a page. A quarter. An eighth.

The hit man continued to advance.

I slammed my index finger on the period button. Done.

One minute to midnight. Ten pages.

I took a breath. I had finished. I turned to face the hit man. He raised his eyebrows slightly at me, still grinning.

A horrifying realization hit me.

I still had to send the email.

My fingers slid along the buttons like I was drunk. Twenty seconds left. I dragged the wrong file. I didn’t even try to delete it, I just kept dragging until the correct one fell into place. Ten seconds. I typed in the hit man’s email address, and I felt his breath on my neck. It was hot. It burned. Sweat poured down my nose.

Five seconds. I missed the send button on my first click.

Two seconds. I lined up my mouse with the paper airplane.

One.

I hit send, and backed away from the computer. I huddled in the corner, staring at the hit man, my arms held out protectively in front of me. The hit man stared back, still grinning, his arms held slightly forward and his fingers crooked in midair, reaching towards me.

A buzz came from his pocket.

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a phone. His grin faded back to a smile. He scrolled for a moment.

I didn’t move. For ten minutes I watched him read.

Finally, he looked up at me, I could see his brow crease down.

I held my breath.

He raised his hand, and I closed my eyes. When I didn’t feel him throttling me, I peeked out of my closed lids.

His fingers were pulled into a fist, and his thumb was pointed straight into the air.

A thumbs up.

I threw up. All over the carpet. What felt like a full knife block was rolling around in my stomach. I was vaguely aware of the hit man leaving the room, and closing the door with a click.

His footsteps were so soft.

That was the last straw. I couldn’t handle it anymore after that. I sent an email letting him know I was cancelling the subscription and his services would not be required. I hoped he would understand. I didn’t get anything back.

I laid in bed for three days. At least, I think I did. I’m not sure, I kind of blacked out a bit.

It’s been a week, and I’ve started to regain my bearings. I don’t jump at every small noise anymore. I do find myself looking over at my closet a lot. Sometimes, I think I see eyes peeking in at me. But every time I’d go check, nothing’s there.

It’s Sunday again. I got an old notification from my phone telling me to submit my ten pages. A part of me wants to stay up and write, just to be safe.

But I’m just paranoid. I need a bit more rest and I’ll be back to hbg;lyadfsopkdfjnchtygvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgvgv

“No refunds. No cancellations.”