​

You push through the French doors into the smell of sour beer and whiskey. The air — like the keys of the pianist — is untuned and still. The Chanteuse is flat and, like the piano, only sings in dead keys. You flare out your duster, and the dust from the bar-stained floor lifts in a pillow of tranquil turmoil. The long-expired taste of Virginia cut fills your cheek, so you take a finger and pluck it from your mouth and to the floor. Your lips split on the seams of dried brown blood, and the taste of iron fills you. You make your way to the tender and find a seat.

The guns on your belt are heavy. You have two Colt forty-fives, one for protection and the other for exodus. You remove the belt with so little care that you question your decision-making, but all you can think about is how sore your feet are and how dry your mouth is.

You dislodge the revolver, remove two bronze bullets, close it, and holster the gun back in its bed. The bronze is cheap, bought and traded with in every post you’ve ever passed, but bronze didn’t always work. Bronze is what killed Guerra. Bronze is what couldn’t stop the raid, and when the dust settled, it was the silver that laid your horse down in the dirt. That was miles ago, days ago. For now, you just thirst for a drink.

The keep inspects your shots and lays down two glasses smudged with who knows how many hands and lips that have taken part in this unholy communion. The liquor pours out of the amber glass and fills them to the top. You thank the man and pick up your drink. You throw it back, and it smites your throat, and before you give yourself time to cough, you do the same again. The fire in the whiskey kills the filthy taste in your mouth. “¿Eres de por aquí, vaquero?”

You look at the long and thin dark-haired woman. She has mutt in her blood, and you don’t know from where, or care.

“No, no hablo,” you say.

She nods her head in understanding and asks, “You need a room for the night?”

Without breaking eye contact with the whore, you lay out another bronze bullet, and before the keep pulls away, you take your shot. “Just company.”

She nods her head, and you follow her upstairs to do what any man would do after weeks of solitude and unload your chamber.

The stairs complain under your weight as if begging you to spare their lives. Each step feels fit to give way, with years of rot crept clean through its veins. You carry the belt over one shoulder, both Colts knocking against your back, and the woman climbs ahead without looking back. She trails her hand along the rail and leaves sticky prints on the wood.

The room is a coffin with a window cut in it: a lamp, a basin and pitcher, a bed that has outlived its host by years. You hang the belt on the bedpost farthest from the door, this time with a good deal more care.

What started as a whisper has left the lamp guttering lower than it should, and the room runs hotter than the night has any right to make it. She lies with her back against your ribs, and she is not warm. She burns like a stove lid. You’ve felt fever on men before. It has never come with a smell like this: copper, and something sweet, like fruit gone over.

She turns to face you, and the lamp finds her eyes. The whites have yellowed like old ivory.

“Fiebre amarilla,” she says, and shrugs as if she were remarking on the weather. “Everybody’s got it this year.”

You’ve been in the sun and dust so long you can’t tell jaundice from lamplight. You’d sooner call it lamplight than name the other thing.

She lifts a thumb to your split lip and comes away with a flake of dried blood. She studies it a good while. She does not wipe it off.

Your mouth is dry again, two shots on and not a drop to show for it, and whatever it wants, you don’t think it’s whiskey.

Downstairs, the piano stops plunking at nothing. It finds one key and leans on it. The note climbs through the floorboards and settles in your teeth. Then the Chanteuse finds it too, and for the first time all night she sings true. Under her, boots, all in time. Not marching, not dancing, just a room full of feet agreeing.

The air that was untuned and still is neither now.

The woman goes still. Not the stillness of someone listening, but the stillness of something that’s been told to. The last thing to stand that still in front of you was your horse.

Her eyes go to the window, where a moon you never reckoned on is climbing. You’ve been counting miles and blisters and bullets for weeks. You weren’t counting this.

“Ya sale la luna,” she whispers. Then, quicker, with the last thin piece of her that’s still hers: “Vete.”

You catch luna. You catch the other one, too, because it’s a word every woman in every language has used on you at least once.

She says it again, and for a second her mouth and the note are arguing. You watch her lose.

The belt hangs from the far bedpost, an arm and a half out of reach, right where you left it. From here you can see the left Colt, the one you’ve never traded a round out of. You think of it the way some men think of church: glad it’s there, hoping not to need it.

On the stairs, a boot. Then a second, landing with it. Then a third, with both. The whole saloon is keeping time, and you are the only thing in it that’s out of time.

Downstairs, the Chanteuse’s one true note quickens, a kettle coming to the boil, and the boots on the stairs break from a walk into a run, every heel landing together like hail on a tin roof. Beside you the woman’s back bows off the mattress, folds, and bows again. Her heels drum the quilt, her black hair whips your face, and the skin that burned like a stove lid a moment ago goes cold as well water. Then she drops like a rag shaken off a line, and for one breath her ribs stop lifting.

You lunge across the bed and snatch the belt from the far bedpost, the mattress shrieking under your knees. The leather is cool and heavy in your fist, and the left Colt clears its holster. Behind you she sits up without bending, the way a plank rises when its far end is stepped on. Her neck turns with the creak of a green branch giving, and the lamp finds her eyes. The ivory has gone to yolk. Her lip peels from her teeth, and the snarl that comes out is no Spanish and no English, only a sound that rattles the pitcher in its basin.

The gun rises with her, hammer back, grip slick in your palm. The Colt bucks and the room goes white with noise. She folds back across the quilt, and a hole the size of a thumb opens dead center in her chest, breathing blue smoke thin as a snuffed wick. Powder coats your tongue, bitter as a burnt match. Scorched hair and hot copper fill the room, and under them the sweet-rot of fruit gone over pours out of her all at once.

The screams come on the heels of the shot, high and ragged, as though the whole house had been the one struck. Fists hammer your door, each blow landing on the beat, and with every beat there are more of them. The swell climbs through the floorboards and settles in your shins. You thumb out the spent shell and feed two rounds of silver into the cylinder, cold as creek pebbles against your fingertips. The silver cross swings out on its cord and raps your breastbone, a small cold knuckle, as you come off the bed.

You ease the hammer back, and the click is loud as a snapped bone. The fists land. You wait for the hush that follows, a gap you could drop a coin through, sweat stinging your eyes, the old split in your lip weeping iron onto your tongue. Then you put your heel through the door.

The door tears off its top hinge, and the hallway opens on a dozen faces the pale yellow of tallow candles, jammed shoulder to shoulder, heads lolling like rotted gourds. Their eyes don’t find you so much as slide toward you, every one of them keeping time to a beat you can feel in your teeth. Their jaws hang wider than jaws should, and the stink rolls over you: fruit gone over, wet wool, grave dirt.

You fire twice into the first faces. The two nearest drop like sacks off a wagon, and the rest step over them without a glance. You shoulder into the gap. Hands pluck at your sleeves, dry and hot as skillet handles, and sour-sweet breath crawls up your neck. The hallway is no wider than a coffin lid. You twist sideways and club the barrel across a jaw, and teeth scatter like dropped crockery. You duck a clawing arm and fire twice more into the thick of them, the muzzle flash strobing their faces yellow, dark, yellow, like a magic lantern jammed on its slide. Numbers are what take a man. They took Guerra the same way.

You break out at the head of the stairs, and the rest of the turned wait below, packed at the foot like cattle in a chute. The Chanteuse flings herself up the last steps with her mouth stretched around that single note and lands a hand’s breadth short of your boots, her nails raking the banister like a bow dragged over a cracked fiddle. A patron hauls himself up the rail hand over hand, the varnish curling under his fingers. The pianist’s grip clamps your calf as you vault the banister, and you wrench loose and leave a strip of trouser leg in his fist.

You hit the floor rolling. The boards hammer your shoulder, and the smell of sour beer and spilled whiskey rises around you, the same smell that met you at the French doors. You come up and vault onto the bar, boots skidding in a slick of something you decide is whiskey. Bang! Bang! The shots crack like a bullwhip, and two of the fallen stop dragging themselves toward you.

You are thumbing fresh silver into the cylinder when fingers close around the top of your boot, a wrist thin as kindling behind them, a grip with no strength in it, wet and shaking like a dishrag. You raise the Colt to club whatever has hold of you and look down at the keep, his face the color of lard, his eyes white all the way around, his mouth working on a plea that makes no sound.

“Hands off me, unless you’re hankering to join your patrons.”

“W-what are they?” The words come out of him in pieces.

“Worse than death.” You snap the loading gate shut and put silver through the last of them as they crawl.

“Who are you?” he asks. “You ain’t just some trail hand or agent.”

“Worse for death, I reckon.” You kick his hand off your boot. “Sorry ’bout the place."

“No, you ain’t,” he says.

A laugh scrapes out of you, dry as a boot dragged over gravel. “Reckon I ain’t.” You reach behind the bar and come up with a bottle, the glass cool and beaded against your palm. “You aimin’ to go fetch the law? Figure you’ll be wanting some questions answered, and I’m short on time.”

The keep scrambles to his feet and bolts for the French doors, boots slipping in the wet. The glass chatters in its frames as he bursts through, and the night swallows his screaming and pays it out down the street, thinner and thinner, like rope off a spool. The doors swing behind him and let the moon in, white across the boards and everything lying in it. You settle onto the bar top and swing your boots up. The cork comes out bitter between your teeth, and the whiskey goes down clean and hot, no smudged glass, no hands but yours, a communion with only one communicant. The drought in your mouth lets go at last.

That morning started like any other: the grating alarm, my usual breakfast of fried eggs and bitter coffee, a rushed scramble out the door. My commute is about thirty minutes, so out of habit I pulled my earbuds from my pocket, put on a podcast, and walked to the subway station.
I got to the platform and waited for the train. It usually shows up in five or ten minutes, but this time I waited more than twenty. I was starting to panic about being late for work, and when the train finally pulled in, I stepped onto the train, relieved to finally be moving.
We passed one stop, then another. The next one was mine. I made my way to the doors and stared into the darkened window, listening to my podcast and watching the tunnel walls flicker past. A few more minutes to go.
Suddenly the voice in my earbuds cut out. I figured I'd lost signal in the tunnel and, lost in my own thoughts, kept staring out the window.
The train kept going. It didn't seem like it was ever going to stop.
A creeping unease settled over me. By my count, we should have reached my stop long ago. Judging by how long we'd been riding, we'd passed it and at least two more. But then I would have noticed us passing them, and all this time there had been nothing outside the window but solid darkness.
Staring into it, I remembered a recent conversation with a coworker. She was a deeply superstitious woman who believed in omens and conspiracies. When I asked why she never took the subway, she said, "People were made to walk on the earth, not ride beneath it. Every subway entrance looks like the entrance to a crypt to me, and nothing on earth could make me go down there willingly."
I'd laughed it off. Now the tunnel walls streaking past the glass really did look like the walls of a crypt.
Then I started noticing strange things inside the car. A subway car is usually noisy, especially in the morning: someone talking, someone's music leaking from their headphones, someone coughing or sneezing. Now, apart from the clatter of the wheels, I heard nothing. In the reflection on the glass I saw what I hadn't noticed before: the people around me weren't moving. If not for the roar of the train, I might have thought time had stopped. A woman standing with her hand raised. A guy with his mouth hanging slightly open. An old man frozen mid-lean over a seat.
I was terrified. At least I was facing the door, so they couldn't see my face. What was wrong with these people? Could they feel anything? Understand anything? Were they even alive? I tried not to move, not even to blink, so I wouldn't stand out from that silent, motionless crowd.
Then a voice rang out from the far end of the car, an elderly woman's, by the sound of it:
"Excuse me, why are we riding for so long? Did something happen? What's wrong with all of you? Why are you acting so strange?... Don't come near me! You're scaring me!... Somebody help me!..."
There was a scuffle, the sounds of a struggle, wild screams and pleading. I heard clothes ripping, flesh tearing, bones snapping. That crunch, dear God, that crunch, I'll never forget it. Then came the wet, greedy smacking of mouths, hungry and ravenous, enough to drive me out of my mind.
My head was ringing. I hated myself for being a coward; I hadn't even tried to help her. I hated the old woman, too, for not keeping quiet, for giving herself away and becoming their prey. I hated that car and those people, or whatever they were. But more than anything, I was terrified. I was shaking, sweat beading on my forehead, my ears ringing. I was afraid I'd pass out and be next.
Then the feast died down, and once again nothing broke the silence but the rattle of the wheels.
I don't know how long we rode like that, minutes or hours. Time stretched into eternity.
All at once a sharp sound slammed into my ears: the podcast had started playing again in my earbuds. I jumped and cried out, certain the crowd would rush me, and slowly turned around. People were staring at me, some surprised, some frightened, the way you'd look at a madman. I scanned the car. Everything was back to normal.
I'd almost talked myself into believing it had all been a dream, or a hallucination, when my eyes landed on a girl at the far end of the car, right where I'd heard that poor woman's screams and the sounds of her horrible death. There was blood on the girl's lower lip, drying in the corner of her mouth. She was looking at her phone. I glanced at the people standing near her: one had a small, barely noticeable drop of blood on his collar; another had a brown smear across his knuckles, as if he hadn't quite wiped his hand clean. Everything inside me went cold, my heart clenching with dread.
The train stopped at my station. I bolted from the car and flew up the stairs to the street. Only when I reached the top did I feel safe again.
I don't know what happened that morning, and honestly, I don't want to know.
I haven't ridden the subway since.
And nothing on earth could make me go back down into that public crypt.

“Is it true we know more about the surface of the moon than our own oceans?”

“No. People love saying that, but we know far more about our oceans than we do the moon.”

The interview process had begun, and Doctor Stefan Krause found himself amused by the wobbling of the purple-haired journalist’s pen, jotting down abbreviations of his words in a neat scrawl. She was part of the new wave of social media personalities — so-called “influencers” who made video essays on the sort of content that used to only be found in scientific magazines. The pencil-pushers topside had decided people like her were one of the new best ways to get word out and procure bonus funding for their costly brand of oceanic research.

What amused him wasn’t her unprofessional appearance though. The fact she was a twenty-something with a grating sense of self-importance and flamboyant purple hair, worn in a pompadour mullet, was so much less funny to him than the fact that all her little toys had been found and confiscated at Surface Point, the sea level base tethered a thousand meters above them.

The Varuna Research Station was a strict no-recording zone. Her cameraman still followed dumbly along as a sort of awkward bodyguard after his equipment had been stripped from him without a fight. But it’d been the influencer herself, ‘Subnautigirl’, or Yessica Bailey, who had so very nearly broken the rules. The search conducted before she was crammed into one of the few submersibles able to comfortably carry people down to the deep sea station and, more importantly, safely dock with Varuna, had been thorough.

All her little button spy cams, microphones threaded into the linings of her black denim jacket, and even her smart glasses had been confiscated, and Yessica had been just a few degrees shy of her boiling point. Krause’s colleague, Doctor Yukiko Adachi, had obviously noticed as well… but short of a few shared smirks and playfully rolled eyes, they hadn’t bothered showing it.

“With the amount we know about the oceans and all the things in them,” Adachi said, taking over for Krause, “we could fill enough traditional encyclopedias to equal almost two percent of the moon’s total mass — if you stacked them together, of course. About the moon itself, we might fill two magazines.”

Those encyclopedias would need very large print and have a lot of pictures, but the idea of it usually cut any other mind-numbingly standard questions off at the pass. And, Adachi liked that little quote of hers. Doctor Krauser took over on cue. “What we always want to know more about, however, is…

This.”

A quick shove of his hands at the door they’d finally arrived at, and the entryway slung silently open for them. No unnecessary noise, no unnecessary power. The large, ovaloid observation room spilled into view.

“… This?”

The dramatic entry hadn’t paid off, but Doctors Krause and Adachi ignored ‘Subnautigirl’s’ question and carried on into the room. The operation’s third scientist, Doctor Miller, swiveled in a well-oiled desk chair to glance back at the group. Then, with a dismissive grunt, went back to the terminal he’d been staring at before their arrival.

The functional space of the room was mostly blank space, and otherwise sparsely occupied by a haphazard scattering of five modest desks situated towards the center of a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree oval of exterior windows. Only darkness was visible in the view of the deep ocean beyond, barring the fleeting glimpse of a pale white particulate floating nearby enough to be visible to the naked eye. But, with a few deft strokes of Doctor Miller’s hands at his terminal, the exterior floodlights opened up to blast the surrounding area with its alien glow.

“The ecosystem. We know just about everything about the geography of the deep, but so much about its life still elude us. Those details are the most fascinating of all.” Doctor Krause turned, fixing the reporter with a level stare and tight smile. “Right?”

Someone who went by the pseudonym ‘Subnautigirl’ would have to be quick to agree . “I mean, obviously,” she said, though her stocky-built cameraman looked somewhere between confused and disinterested.

“Welcome to Varuna — the world’s deepest habitable research station by an order of magnitude exceeding fifty times.” Doctor Adachi flashed a toothy grin, her timelessly youthful features practically glowing in the low light of the observation room. She and Krause been working together at the station since the day it’d first opened its many heavy, airtight doors, but their professional relationship had begun nearly ten years prior, when he’d acted as one of her thesis advisors at the University of Tokyo. She’d hardly seemed to age at all over that decade, or so Krause often marveled.

Miller deactivated the exterior lights after exactly one measured minute had passed, returning the station to its near-silent running. The floodlights were powerful enough to illuminate a wide swathe of ocean, but the power needed and, just as importantly, the noise produced was counter-intuitive to their research. The ‘Medusa’ deep sea stealth camera platforms had proven that nearly fourteen years prior. Minimal running noise and the replacement of traditional light with red light optics had been a wild success, and had immediately formed the basis by which most biological abyssal research operated to present day, well over a decade after it managed to capture the very first video, let alone pictures, of a giant squid in its natural habitat.

“Please pardon the chill. It’s cold down here, and we like to keep our noise pollution to an absolute minimum. Especially here, in the observation room. Central heating is minimal.”

Adachi gestured to the space around them and, for the first time since disembarking the shuttle that’d ferried her down, Yessica was gazing around in subdued awe. The magnitude of it all had finally hit her, and for just a moment the fires of her frustration had been overtaken. It was one thing to read reports and comparative numbers on a Wikipedia page, but another thing entirely to be standing on the precipice of the abyss, beholding the wonders of possibility beyond first-hand.

“So that’s why these doors are unpowered? All the others looked like something out of Star Trek.”

“That’s right,” Miller finally took his opportunity to speak up and answer. “The effect is probably negligible, but we like to think it’s making a difference.”

Krause finished the thought. “Negligible might be the difference between seeing something, and seeing nothing.”

Yessica’s pen was moving quickly now, jotting with a fervent enthusiasm that betrayed at least some level of journalistic passion as she paced the length of the room. She was probably still lamenting the loss of all her cameras, but she was no longer at the knife’s edge of her own irritation. No, she was poised on the escarpment of something much more vast.

“What have you seen?”

She’d stopped at the edge of the curved windows, leaning over them with a pointless wariness and trepidation that all the researchers aboard knew well. They all knew it was senseless… That glass was thick enough to stop just about any bullet known to mankind — it had to be to so consistently overpower the oceanic pressure down there. Still though, leaning towards something so transparent and staring down into depths so fathomless… every single person stationed at Varuna knew the feeling, and sympathized when Subnautigirl ultimately drew back, dizzy, pen hand frozen.

“It’s a sheer, three-thousand-meter drop.” That wasn’t what she’d asked, but Krause answered her unspoken thoughts anyway. “We’re on the edge of the Twilight and Midnight Zones — the difference between meeting a deep-diving marlin, and an anglerfish.

We’ve seen both here.” The addition had Yessica finally peeling her eyes away from the glass to stare at Krause and, suddenly remembering it, returning to the quick writing on her notepad. “Beneath us is the entire breadth of the Midnight Zone… straight down to the Abyssal Zone. It’s almost a sheer cliff.”

The edge of the Indian Ocean’s Broken Ridge… its southern escarpment, plunging straight down into the Dordrecht Deep — all within the borders of the Diamantina Fracture Zone. It was a part of the ocean that had gone so ignored by science in favor of the Mariana Trench and its famous Challenger Deep, until the discovery of—

“The Cathedral of Bones… The Whale Necropolis…”

“That’s right.”

“It’s right below us?”

“More or less.”

Among the most recent and most fascinating of oceanic discoveries was the whale fall mausoleum… A necropolis of immense proportions and inexplicable nature — the gathering point, where dying whales the world over traveled to take their final plunge towards the sacred cathedral of bones seven thousand meters beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean, and let their bones be picked clean by the deepest of sea life.

With a loud clearing of his throat, surly Miller called attention toward himself, striking emphatically at his keyboard.

“What we see,” he began with an irritability that had become painfully normal of late, “is this. Viewed through this, at least…” A series of long screens began falling from hidden resting points in the ceiling over the vast windows, obscuring the raw view outside but replacing it with a new one. Projectors flickered silently to life as Doctor Adachi’s voice narrated.

“We use red light. Life down here has all but lost the ability to perceive anything in that spectrum. It’s why so many deep sea creatures are that color— red might as well be black. But, to brighten things up for ourselves, we use this.”

There was only a subtle shift in the visible luminosity of the space beyond, but Subnautigirl understood. Fish of the deep couldn’t generally see red light, but humans and cameras could. Those cameras, more than a half dozen affixed to Varuna’s exterior, played their visuals out in real time against the screens, though while bumping up the brightness some in post to give more crispness to the displays. The projectors, feeding only black and white to the screens, were kept from interfering with the world beyond the glass thanks to heavy tinting, but the room was otherwise kept quite dark as an added precaution.

The spaces between the individual screens showed the void of the abyss beyond, floating particulates bathed in an unnatural red glow.

The deep voice of the cameraman rose up before anyone else though. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

It was a natural call and response from Miller, whose eyes had been pouring over his terminal in the intervening moments. Ever since the loss of the other two researchers just a few weeks prior, he’d thrown himself harder than ever into his work. Anything mechanical and mind-numbing that needed doing, he was there.

“That!”

A shape on one of the screens, nearly dead center. Yessica jerked back upon noticing it, as though the shape were real and not just a projection. With her new angle though, she was in perfect position to be exposed in the foot-wide gap between the screens, and snap her head towards the flash of visible light in the real gloom beyond. Adachi too, if her startled yet fascinated gasp was any indication. Krause hurried for a position at his own angle to see.

Though barely visible, the shape seemed to be approaching. It was slow, yet inexorably nearing them, a predator wholly unafraid of its prey. Closer. Closer. A new set of bioluminescent flashes outside the window between the screens, far brighter than any anglerfish. Closer— Flash— And closer.

Then a slam against the window that brought Yessica to her knees, yelping. Her cameraman lurched forward to assist against some unknown force, but froze when the he spied the hooked, gnarled tentacles cemented against visible sliver of window. The projectors had lost the shape, cameras poised too low on the observation chamber to be of help. The naked eyes peering through the windows alone bore witness to the hulking, ravenous form.

“Octopus squid!”

Doctor Adachi sounded almost breathless as she gave her announcement, rushing towards the screens and tugging to see behind — before remembering the monumental effort that would be needed to bring another such screen down to their midnight home if one tore. She gestured frantically towards Miller, who tapped in the desired commands and lifted the screens.

Something alive was plastered against the glass, but was rapidly losing interest. Photophores of the creature flashed, two tentacles peeled back and blaring their lights on and off against the glass as if trying to judge why the distance it perceived between it and its prey was impeded so soon. Six other tentacles scratched and skittered over the glass, trying to find a way inside, hooked tendrils of the two meter long squid probing relentlessly.

“Taningia Danae — Dana octopus squid. Aggressive, bright, but harmless. In here, at least. It’s not the first time we’ve seen one attack a camera.”

Neither Subnautigirl nor her cameraman bothered mentioning how the octopus squid hadn’t attacked a camera. Those were down below, and the deep sea predator had attacked the glass directly, as if craving the flesh of those inside. Its hook-laced tentacles were writhing aggressively in search of any sort of purchase. Any way inside.

Their trepidation had no effect on the enthusiasm of the researchers though, with Krause crying out, “This is incredible!” And it… almost was. The exterior cameras weren’t angled right to catch the attack itself, but the partial footage and the written accounts would easily fill at least one sensational article.

“Was it attracted by the flash of the floodlights?”

“Maybe… Possibly.”

Miller and Krause had begun an excited exchange, the former briefly pulled from the funk that had pervaded his attitude for weeks hence. The squid, bearing some of the brightest photophores known to science in two of its tentacles, still rhythmically furling and unfurling that glow, might have registered the vastly superior luminosity of the Varuna’s mighty exterior lights as some sort of threat. Or had it just glimpsed prey inside? The two scientists chattered excitedly, swirling around theories with such fervor that Yessica’s pen couldn’t have even dreamed of keeping up with them.

She wrote what she could while her would-be cameraman recoiled. Everyone was treating this so casually… Even the pretty Asian doctor was just staring at the squid affixed to the window, grinning as it finally started losing interest and pulling away.

If that glass broke, wouldn’t they all instantly die…? There was nothing funny or interesting about some sea freak attacking them. Let alone a creature larger than even he was.

Everyone else’s demeanor showed they disagreed with his thoughts though. They were all excited, pouring over thoughts and footage long after the squid had peeled itself away from the glass and disappeared back into the murky deep. The return of screens had tracked its flight from them for a while, though even that could only last for so long before it was gone in the gloom.

“Yes… Must have been the lights…” Doctor Adachi was breathless as she spoke aloud what her colleagues had been thinking. The reporter had questions though, as her kind so often did.

“Does this happen often…? The lights? The squid? How do I get a copy of that footage?”

“No,” answered Miller, “but in a year, we’ve only used those lights twice.” Yessica’s pen stopped, her brow furrowing, suspicion forming.

“Really? And I’m worth the ceremony? I know I have six million subscribers, but—”

“No, it’s not for you.” Miller’s response carried enough irritation that it slapped the hint of a sneer off Yessica’s face for a few seconds, prompting Krause to take over.

“Well, it was, but just out of convenience. Thought it might be a good show.” It hadn’t been. Not until the squid, which had just been a fortunate accident. Wasn’t it? “Surface Point said it was time to test them. They hadn’t been used in about a year. So we figured… Well, yes, anyway, the footage. You get it from them. From Surface Point. That’s where you can make requests.”

Yessica still looked sour, but her tongue was held by the wagging of her pen over her notebook, big, bold letters etched out to remind herself of when and where in the footage timeline this specific incident could be found. As if Surface Point’s much warmer, safer research team wouldn’t be incredibly aware of, and pouring over it themselves the very moment Krause typed out his incident report.

“Suffice it to say, they work,” Miller’s bitter voice began, tapping at the screen, “so, Doctor Adachi.”

“Yes. Of course.”

Her long hair, tied back in its usual ponytail, whipped around as she moved to her own desk, far opposite Miller’s, and the rapid drumming of her fingers across her keyboard joined his. Doctor Krause, while eager to start his report as the operation’s lead researcher, held himself in check for the time being. Entertaining their guests fell to him for now. He stood at patient attention.

Yessica was still occupied for the moment, eyes shifting in rapid flutters between the projector screens, the two scientists, and her notebook. Her cameraman found his voice though, grunting a few incoherent noises for Krause’s attention before finally speaking up.

“He always like this?”

A big, meaty thumb was jammed the way of Doctor Miller, who pointedly pretended he didn’t hear — though Krause caught the faint, irritated curling of lips.

“No. His wife and… Hm… well, young man, there were five of us a month ago.”

He looked annoyed by being called ‘young man’, but only snorted for a moment before asking, “And now?”

“Now there aren’t.”

Now there were only three.  It wasn’t the most satisfactory of answers, but Doctor Krause obviously didn’t want to elaborate. Maybe the expression on his face reminded the cameraman too much of Miller’s, because the big man instead turned towards Yessica for answers — Doctor Adachi clearly wasn’t going to be of any help, given the enraptured way she was staring at her terminal with a pair of large, heavy-looking headphones seated over her ears.

“There was an accident.” Yessica answered dismissively, showing at least a little talent in the way she knew she was expected to respond, and did so while still performing her primary task. Treating her companion like he was just a member of her live chat back at home. “Vamana Three. Trickled into some news articles. Paywalled, of course. Kept them from spreading, I guess.”

Doctor Krause scowled at the oversimplification — he couldn’t even imagine what Miller was feeling — but neither man said anything. They let the subject slip away, each occupying themselves in tandem by staring at Adachi.

“Vama-what?” The cameraman asked.

“Vamana. Three. Their submersibles. We rode Four to get here, remember?”

The two uninhibited doctors tried to deafen their ears as much as Adachi was able to beneath those hefty headphones.

“So, what? It exploded?”

“No— Just, Jesus— They rode off in it and no one heard fro—”

Bang—

Yessica’s irritation at the constant questions snapped into a jump, a quiet yelp, and a burst of surprised recoiling at the sound of Miller’s fist slamming loudly against his desk. Even Doctor Adachi seemed to have registered, briefly glancing up from her own terminal, though her name being bellowed probably helped in catching her attention.

“ADACHI. What do you hear?”

The interruption was understood. Both members of team Subnautigirl fell into awkward silence, and Yukiko peeled off one cuff of her headphones to reengage with the rest of the world.

“Nothing yet. No cries like last time.”

No one needed to ask what that meant for Krause to fill in the gaps, though expectant glances his way had to wait a while before the lead researcher, staring with furrowed brow at the screens, spoke up.

“The last time we hit the lights, something like whale song bellowed back at us.”

“Same as four weeks ago. Exact same waveform.”

“We had nothing to do with that. We’ve checked.”

Miller scowled, but nodded.

“Still, though…” Doctor Krause, like his colleagues, had secretly been hoping something would happen when they hit the floodlights. They’d been hoping the newcomers would react to those sounds, too. Sounds beyond natural human comprehension, far too low in the decibel range for their primitive ears to comprehend, no matter how powerful the sound. And yet…

“Yeah. Real shame.” And it was, no matter how Miller tried to sound calloused. He wanted answers as much as anyone. Perhaps even more, considering the personal nature of his own wife’s manic plunge into the deep with their other colleague.

It was amazing how well the research station still ran without two of its core members, yet simultaneously oppressive how remarkably lonely it felt.

“What did the lights do the first time?” The researchers had almost forgotten Yessica was still there, but her impudent voice was hard to ignore when its pitch reached a certain high decibel. She was both frustrated and excited with the strange start to this lengthy investigatory interview. The fact that she still had a whole additional day with the team, staying overnight in one of the research station’s empty bunks, did nothing to stymy her impatience.

“It was when we first opened. It’s speculative, but we think a pod of diving sperm whales took offense.”

“Their calls certainly didn’t sound happy, but…” Krause was taking his own turn to scowl again. Irritated… but with his own poor oversight. “The light test was before we were recording. Doctor Adachi just happened to hear.”

“So there’s no record…” Yessica seemed a little annoyed herself, but also fascinated. A scandal had been laid in her lap, and her mind began reeling over the myriad of thumbnail possibilities. Baited right, this video could garner millions of views… No, tens of millions…

“No. No record of that. Nor of the second.” Her expression wasn’t as dreamy when Krause spoke again, but that was mostly thanks to how she recognized the tension in the air. The room felt almost oppressive as Krause and Miller locked eyes. The lead researcher was accusatory, his subordinate defiant. They both peeled their eyes away from one another at the same time though. Mutual understanding after a moment’s misguided enmity.

Yessica pawed and prodded for more details as delicately as her personality would allow, but neither scientist gave any more up. The room remained awkward, information unshared despite tenuous obligations, until—

“Stefan! Stefan, look— oh, ah, Doctor Krause! Listen!”

Yukiko, betraying a brief flash of informality, called for her once-mentor. What she received was the enraptured attention of everyone aboard the lonely research station. All eyes dragged her way, and all but Miller’s were captured for longer than it took for Krause to reach her station and take the headphones.

What greeted his ears was faint. Very faint…

It sounded nothing like the nigh-mournful cries they’d experienced those fateful days prior, but rather like… Song. Yes, truly song, warbling and weaving in its fathomlessly deep tones, the voices of many whales washing over one another in an orchestral display.

“All sperm whales?”

“I think so.”

Possibly the same species as before… Perhaps the very same pod?

All it took was a series of frantic, meaningful points and gestures from Krause for Miller to mash into his own terminal, and brighten the red lights as much as the station could manage. The gloom of the deep sea resisted, fighting against the permeation of a form of light its denizens couldn’t even see, but…

“There!” Eventually, shapes began to resolve. They were faint, a few mere shades of color differentiation from the oceanic backdrop even through the computer’s enhancement, but all of those in the observation room could see them. Two distant whales, plunging as they danced, their voices raising song around them.

“A serenade?” Adachi asked, glancing furtively towards Krause, no doubt craving the headphones she’d passed to him.

“Sometimes, we’ve found…” Krause began, more to their guests than to his fellow researcher, “that whales sing as they dive. The type of dive and the type of song are unique, like a shared ritual.” It hadn’t been Varuna that had first hypothesized this, but the idea of a ‘Whale Serenade’ had quickly spread throughout the scientific community. In past months, Varuna had begun paying special attention. Perhaps too much attention.

Yessica stared. “Is that what made her—”

“No!” Miller’s bark was furious, but distracted. He was the only one staring not directly at the perimeter screens, but beyond them — the rest focused on either Doctor Krause or the screens themselves. Yessica, despite not knowing whether it was her question that was being refuted, or just the mere idea of her asking the question, fell silent. She watched and waited.

“Let me hear!” Adachi’s hand was finally on Krause’s shoulder, warning him a moment before that same hand gripped one of the ear cuffs and inverted it enough for them to share the sound. She could make little more of the noise than Krause himself could, but he inclined his head her way to help in sharing the sound nevertheless.

Only Miller initially noticed the shape resolving itself not only on the camera screens, but in the alien red glow of open space between them. But it took only a few more moments before all other eyes were gluing themselves to the sight.

“Holy shit…”

 

The shape of the third whale must only have been a dozen meters from the station. Even unenhanced, bare eyes could plainly see the sperm whale descending from above in that little gap.

“That’s it! Right!?” The cameraman’s excited voice boomed out, causing everyone else in the room to jump then deliver a chorus of hissed shushes. “But… but that’s it, right? The whole reason you’re here! That… whale fall thing.”

“No. No, it is not.” Yessica reined her subordinate in herself, snapping with uppity frustration. “Those whales are alive. Whale falls are when they’re dead.”

He didn’t understand, but no one explained, and the ferocity of the glares from around the room for interrupting such a spectacular moment had kept him quiet.

Only Miller, uncharacteristically less bothered than the rest by the interruption, had been staring out the window hard enough to see the way the whale seemed to… slow, as it passed by. To see the way one eye, perhaps, might have been staring meaningfully, even imploringly at the research station as the curiously intelligent cetacean passed. He noticed all this — felt it even — but said nothing.

“It isn’t the same. But…!” Doctor Adachi’s voice filled the air after nearly two minutes of reverential silence. It hadn’t taken nearly that long to watch the trio of singing sperm whales vanish beneath, but some respect had been paid to the majesty of the moment. Noises during the intervening moments had been kept at a minimum, outside mutterings of astonishment or awe. Doctor Krause was the next to straighten up.

“It’s incredible. But, no, it’s different. They were probably already diving, and we accidentally called them over. Might’ve thought we were prey.”

The ensuing silence was owed completely to the uncomfortable skittering that crawled down each and every spine, as all realized just how catastrophic it would’ve been if any one of those whales had decided their station warranted an exploratory bump. That kind of mass colliding with the observation room very likely might’ve caused the sort of rupture that would kill them all.

“This station,” Yessica said after a while, “is just for waiting for dead whales. Right? That’s what you told me. That’s what I told my fans. It’s SAFE, right?”

The pause was long. A bit too long. Doctors Adachi and Krause seemed to be deciding which would express their irritation with their guest first. Doctor Miller was still staring blankly out at the abyss. Ultimately, it was Krause who answered.

“Vamana Four is still docked. Want to leave?”

It almost sounded like a threat, but if the influencer noticed, she didn’t act like it. Her answer was immediate. “No, obviously. Where are our rooms? And call me if you see the whales coming back up. Or…” Yessica scowled, then sneered, then gestured vaguely towards the observation screens. “Or whatever.”

She was locked in, whatever her attitude might’ve suggested. But, for the moment, that creeping sensation tickling uncomfortably up and down her spine wouldn’t let her stand in the observation room any longer. She and her muscle were pushing through the doors back towards the rest of the station before their escort had even volunteered.

“I’ll handle it.” Doctor Adachi sounded resigned as she got up, no doubt realizing the laws of seniority meant it would’ve fallen to her anyway. Neither Krause nor Miller seemed like they were about to move — the former was too busy deciding whether he should be fuming, and the latter was too busy treating the middle-distance to his most enigmatic of stares.

The silence that fell over the room when the two men were left alone was almost peaceful.

 

Within ten minutes, the pair was sitting closer together. Cheap, well-oiled office chairs were aligned between the desks, side-by-side, as though they were just a couple guys watching the game on a Sunday evening. Krause had even introduced beers into the equation.

“Been saving them,” was all he offered by way of explanation when the first caps had been pried off. Miller had glanced over and grimaced at seeing the word ‘Light’ on the bottle, but he’d taken it and thrown back a long swig anyway. Even tasteless beers were welcome at this point. “Now seemed like as good a time as any.”

“Yukiko’s gonna be a while. That reporter—” Miller took another deep swig, “—will quiz her ear off. Poor girl.”

“Can’t really blame her. We did more showing than telling.”

“Scared ‘er shitless, too.”

Krause chuckled, but the sound was dry and humorless even to his own ears. “Can’t blame her there, either. It’s not every day you realize your life could end with just one, single malfunction. One tiny mistake. One misplaced hunk of bone and blubber.

What compelled that squid, though…”

“What compels any of this?” Miller had already extended his hand for another beer, which Krause passed over without hesitation. “Why a Goddamn boneyard beneath us? Why do they come here?”

A month ago, Krause would have reminded his colleague that uncovering that answer wasn’t why they were here. They were here to study and record the mid-life of a whale fall — the activity around a descending carcass, especially in this gloomy, transitional depth.

But none of them cared about that anymore. Not since Anne and Ford had abruptly taken Vamana Three in the middle of the day and, right before the watching eyes of their remaining colleagues, angled to dive straight into the abyss.

Miller had tried to question his wife over the radio. Then he’d begged. Then he’d cried.

They’d never responded.

This memory was why Krause merely winced when Miller hurled his first, empty beer bottle across the observation room, letting it shatter against the ground near one of the windows. Frustration dripped from his stress-tensed shoulders. It was why Krause didn’t admonish a subordinate researcher. It was why he just popped another top himself, and threw back another mouthful of dry, near-tasteless brew.

Neither brought the incident up. They tip-toed around it as they delved deeper into their twelve-pack, but no one mentioned the bellow from the deep. They only danced on the doorstep of the subject of all the hours and hours they’d poured into analyzing every microsecond of the intervening thirty minutes between sound and submersible launch. Soon, they stopped talking about work and research altogether, and instead turned their conversation towards brighter topics — the way the sun warmed the beaches of Fiji, or rose so splendidly above the peak of Mount Fuji. Of the hot sands of Cairo and its great wonders, and of the solar glare that would reflect off the peaks of Everest as its great conquerors mounted their final ascent.

All things warm. All things above. All things the sun. All things they could experience again… one day — but not this day. Not even for the foreseeable future. There was far too much yet to uncover, far too much left to speculation.

An hour into their beer and banter, both men fell absolutely silent as hulking shapes rose distantly into view on the screens before them.

One. Then two. Then three.

Three huge, limp carcasses, release of internal gases momentarily allowing them the buoyancy to start drifting back up to the world of the sun. A trio of sperm whales whose perilous dive had lead to some unknown demise.

Krause and Miller stared, feeling a wonder that didn’t quite reach their stoic expressions. Their stillness was broken only by the occasional lifts of bottles to lips as the hulking shapes drifted slowly past.

Neither said a word for a long time. It wasn’t until after they exchanged bottles, each popping the top on their counterparts before politely exchanging them again, that Miller spoke.

“What goes up must come down.”

It would be a long night’s vigil.

Everyone draws inspiration in different ways. Some create a dark atmosphere for themselves, some put on metal music in the background, and some can’t compose without coffee and cigarettes. A writer friend of mine, whom I’m very fond of, says he can’t write stories unless his cousin is studying mathematics behind him. Another filmmaker friend of mine could only write screenplays while listening to Syd Barrett’s song “Octopus”; he would keep the song on loop throughout the entire writing process.

It’s been about twenty years since I discovered my own. I’d been going through that famous writer’s block. Until that day, I hadn’t done anything extra to help me write. I didn’t create a special atmosphere for myself, listen to any particular songs, or wait for a certain time of day. Night, day, noon—it made no difference. Once a week, I’d write a three or four-page story and keep working toward my goal. When I reached a hundred stories, I would start sending my book to publishers.

But I’d hit a wall. I wanted to write, but whenever I sat down at my computer, not a single word would come out. Vague, half-formed thoughts kept drifting through my mind, and even when I came up with a good idea, I couldn’t put it down on paper.

That day, I thought, if that’s how things were going to be, I might as well try some of the famous methods for finding inspiration: writing at night, putting on some soft music, having a cup of coffee, and so on.

I prepared the right atmosphere. I turned off the lights, and now the only thing illuminating the room was the glow of my computer screen. I put on Sigur Rós’s debut album. There was no one else in the house. My roommate had gone on vacation the day before, which added to the atmosphere: being alone.

Of course, it had absolutely no effect. I was already on the third track. I still had a few ideas in my head, but I couldn’t get the first sentence out.

Then I heard a sound behind me. A whisper. Something like a call, as if someone had gone “psst.”

I turned around and looked, but there was no one there. I was a little spooked. I thought I might have heard it wrong; it had sounded very much like a human voice, but it could have come from an object, too.

Then suddenly, the door behind me swung wide open.

I flinched at the sound. I got up from my computer and turned on the light. Anxiously, I left my room and went to the kitchen. I was searching for something without even realizing it, though I had no idea what I was looking for. Sigur Rós’s album was still playing, and I could hear it from the kitchen. I couldn’t make sense of anything, and I didn’t know what to think or which possibility to consider. I drank a glass of water.

I’d never had an experience like it before. My first thought was to leave the house. I stood frozen in the kitchen. Involuntarily, I found myself waiting for another movement, for something to topple over or for some other sound.

Eventually, I’d calmed down a little, since nothing else happened. I spent half an hour in the kitchen, with all my senses on high alert and listening to the music coming from my room. Then, reluctantly, I made my way back to my room.

The urge to write was still there. My routine had been disrupted; I hadn’t been able to write a single word for a month, and now I wasn’t going to let fear get in my way. I wanted my writer’s block to end today. My goal was a hundred sentences. Even if I didn’t finish the story, I wanted to write something. Coming back to my room and hearing the music louder had increased my desire to write.

At the same time, I kept thinking, ''What the hell was that just now?'' But now I was back at my computer.

I put on my favorite Sigur Rós song, “Svefn-g-englar.”

And then, for the first time in a whole month, I wrote my first sentence: “As he tried to make sense of the dream he’d had the day before, he fell asleep again; it was his favorite thing to think about before going to sleep, the meaning of the dream he’d had the previous night.”

I’d written my first sentence, without even having a story in mind. Normally, I would come up with a story first, plan it out, work out the whole thing in my head from beginning to end, and only then start writing. Starting a story whose content I hadn’t figured out yet with an ordinary sentence was something new for me. I liked it.

I was still afraid. I wanted to turn around and look, but now that I’d started writing, I didn’t want to stop either. By the time the song ended, I’d written the fifth sentence, and in the silence before the next track began, I heard that sound again. “Psst.”

I quickly turned around and looked. There was no one there. Everything felt much more real now. Something was happening. Someone was calling out to me. I was afraid to turn off the light in my room, so it was still on. I nervously turned my head back toward the computer screen. My heart was pounding. I added another sentence. It was my favorite one so far. I liked everything about it: my choice of words, its length, its place in the story.

Then the door slammed shut. I began to hear footsteps inside the room. I was afraid to look. The footsteps wandered around the room. My hands were resting on the keyboard. The footsteps moved toward the door, stopped there, and opened it again. It was as if someone had left the room.

I was frozen to my chair. This time, I didn’t even have the instinct to run away. Whatever that thing was, I was afraid of encountering it. I couldn’t get up from my chair, and I couldn’t look away from my computer screen. I kept reading what I’d written over and over. Six sentences. I’d go back to the beginning and read them again. It was as if the thing was doing whatever it wanted now. I could hear running footsteps.

Then came the sound of walking. After that, my door closed again, and at the same moment, the light in my room went out.

And then another sentence came to mind. I wrote it down. Then another. My fingers had found their rhythm. The sentences kept coming one after another.

“Set me free. Open the window. Set me free.”

This voice wasn’t a whisper, nor was it some strange, otherworldly sound coming from a different frequency. It was unmistakably a human voice. I was afraid to turn around.

I couldn’t remember ever feeling such a strong urge to write or enjoying it this much. I kept writing. My fingers wouldn’t stop. The door opened again, slowly this time. I didn’t turn around. I wasn’t going to look behind me until I’d finished the story. Without spending even a second thinking between sentences, I continued writing as the songs played.

The footsteps continued. I turned off the music. I didn’t question anything. I just kept writing. The fear I felt and the joy of seeing that I could write again were mingled together, unfolding in harmony with each other.

Strange sounds I couldn’t describe were coming from behind me now. I could feel myself developing a fever. My body was reacting, and my mind was urging me to turn around and see what was going on. The sounds seemed like those of someone playing with their own hair. Like things rubbing against other things. I kept writing, resisting the urge to turn around with all my might.

I’d turned off the music because I wanted to focus on being afraid. I’d realized that the more frightened I became, the better I wrote, and the more consistently I could keep going. It was hard not to look for a rational explanation for the sounds, for a human voice telling me to set it free. But right now, somehow, stopping writing seemed even harder.

That thing had now come right up beside me. I could feel it touching my hair. My fear had reached a point where I could no longer bear it. My consciousness refused to accept this unnatural behavior. My instinct to put an end to the fear and my mind’s desire to keep being afraid were at odds with each other.

And I wrote the final sentence: “If all of this is a hallucination, I will never forgive my own mind. If the only beautiful and meaningful thing I’ve experienced in this miserable life isn’t real, I will never trust my mind again, I will never follow its instructions, and I will doubt everything I think until the day I die.”

The sentence came to an end, and just as the pleasure of writing faded away, my fear reached its absolute peak. With the beautiful feeling that had balanced it gone, the fear was left alone, making itself felt from head to toe. As if I’d been struck by a blow, as if a punch to the face had knocked me out, I lost consciousness.

When I came to, my head was resting on the keyboard, and the screen was filled with hundreds of letter h’s.

I sent the story to several literary magazines. Two of them accepted it and published it.

I never experienced anything like that again, and at no point in my life did I ever feel such an overwhelming urge to write or take so much pleasure in writing. I desperately wanted to experience it again, but nothing ever happened that frightened me so much. For days, I sat at my computer waiting for that thing to come back, but it never did. I wrote stories and kept writing. But I never loved any of them as much as I loved the one I’d written that day.

And now, twenty years later, in my mid-sixties, I’ve still never questioned what happened that night. Not even once. Because I was afraid that if I did, I might understand what had happened—and if that thing ever came back, I might not be as frightened.

Part 1

Part 2

The next shift rolled around soon enough, and because the previous one ended particularly late, I was allowed to stay home for the whole day as required break. I took the time to read up more about the airport. With a glass of my favorite “spiked” hot chocolate, which was three parts hot chocolate to one part vanilla vodka, I sat down to read an old DIA schematic from 1994. The previous ramp agent had left it behind carelessly before he left us; he was supposed to have shredded it when he was done with his biggest project that involved foreign delegates for a big sports event last year. I had brought it home from his old locker when the keys were handed to me. 

Most of the layout matched what every ramp agent knew by heart: the automated baggage system’s loops, the central area where the passenger trains ran, and the deep electrical conduits. 

Except for Concourse A, Sub-basement Sector 4-Echo.

On modern digital tablets, it was grayed out, marked simply as DECOMMISSIONED. On this old schematic, however, there was a long winding loop from the now-automated baggage tracks to a vault labeled ROOM 404-ZULU: FOUNDATION ARTIFACT ARCHIVE. 

I took a slow sip of my drink, the sweet warmth of chocolate and the sharp kick of vanilla vodka cutting through the chill that had settled deep in my chest. What exactly is beyond there, I wondered.

I folded the schematic into a tight square and shoved it into the inner pocket of my heavy ramp parka. I wasn’t going back to the airport blind tonight.

I arrived at the employee staging area at 21:15. The locker room was eerily quiet. Miller’s peg had been replaced by a bright red tag: MANDATORY MEDICAL REVIEW – FIT FOR DUTY PENDING.

"Miller took a bad turn while returning home," a voice crackled from behind me.

I turned around. Standing near the time clock was Vance.

Vance was a graveyard lead who supposedly started during the pre-opening trials of the airport in the nineties. He was gaunt, smelled faintly of hydraulic fluid, and moved with a jerky uneasiness. While every other lead carried digital RFID fobs on lanyards, Vance carried a heavy iron ring of notched brass keys.

"Blood pressure spiked off the charts," Vance said, with a voice just like a recorded message played through a blown speaker. "Occupational health pulled him for a tox screen. You're doing 4-Echo solo tonight. Do you know what the scope is?”

I didn’t look into his eyes. I kept my gaze firmly on the brass keys hanging at his hip. "Log the archival seals of 404-Zulu, verify the manifest, return the brass."

Vance’s neck twitched, just half an inch to the left.  "Good boy. Take the freight elevator at the south apron."

I remembered something that Miller once told me. Never look directly at the contents of sealed crates. I went into the strongroom to retrieve a gear-inspection mirror.

“I don’t think you’ll need that, kiddo,” Vance said with a haughty laugh. But I had never trusted him. He was the opposite of Miller: looked like he had good intentions but they never turned out well. I said nothing, and put on my safety gear. After I was dressed, I stepped ahead and pressed the well-worn button to call the freight elevator up. I gingerly took a step in, before pressing the basement button. 

The freight elevator rattled and shuddered as it plunged past the apron, past the automated passenger train tubes, deep into the foundation. When the metal gates scraped open into Sector 4-Echo, the cold air reeked of dried paint mixed with rotten cardboard.

This was the infamous $300-million graveyard of DIA’s automated baggage system. Overhead, rusted steel monorail tracks twisted through the darkness like a phantom ribcage. Hundreds of abandoned metal luggage carts sat frozen on the tracks at weird angles, thick with salt formations and drained de-icing fluid from the surface.

My digital scanner died within thirty feet, its screen turning to static before flickering out completely. I unclipped my halogen lantern, and pulled the 1994 schematic from my parka.

The map showed three rail junctions before the abandoned room. Left at the switchgear, straight past the hydraulic reservoir, right along track 19. I started walking slowly, the heavy lantern swinging slowly side to side with creaks that gave me goosebumps. 

I reached Room 404-Zulu after about eight minutes. Its heavy iron door was secured with a brass padlock. I fitted the notched key from Vance’s ring and turned. The padlock sheared and fell with a deafening crack that echoed down the hollow tracks.

Inside sat a massive wooden transport crate bolted to an iron pallet, eight feet high and twelve feet wide. The exterior was well-worn, with many cracks and wood peeling like hangnails from dehydrated skin.

Stenciled in black industrial paint on the wood was:

PROJECT NEW WORLD: TERMINAL MURAL INSTALLATION #3

ARTIST: L. TANGUMA

RECIPIENT: SPECIAL PROJECTS OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE

STATUS: REJECTED / PERMANENT RETENTION (1993)

I reached into my maintenance belt and retrieved my gear-inspection mirror, the same one we used to inspect landing gear assemblies for hydraulic hairline cracks. Simple, but incredibly handy for precise work. 

I slid the mirror through a cracked seam, angling the beam of my lantern off the floor so that the mirror would reflect the painting.

Reflected in the small glass circle was the hidden third mural: THE FEEDING OF THE FOUNDATION.

The mural’s palette was dominated by sickly blacks, bone whites, and dried-blood reds. It depicted the airport’s 1993 construction: a circle of men in charcoal suits holding matching shovels around the open dirt pit of the Jeppesen Terminal. They were obeying the instructions of a soldier with a gas mask.  Instead of breaking ground, they were shoveling wet gray concrete over an open mass trench packed with screaming people.

In the lower right corner, the oil paint was glistening, dripping onto the crate floor with a soft tap... tap... tap. That part of the mural was dominated by crimson hues. Painted into that fresh red sludge was the tourist from two nights ago, wearing his gray fleece, his neck pillow torn open, smiling a wide Glasgow smile with an invisible seatbelt strapped over his lap.

Standing on the rim of the trench above him was Vance, holding his ring of brass keys, pointing down into the ditch with a grin. And next to the tourist in the pit? There was an empty space. Just a raw, gray silhouette of a ramp agent's parka, outlined in rough, interrupted pencil strokes.

Vance had already been replicated long ago, and the tourist from before was a fresh victim. But the airport was trying its hardest to replicate me. It couldn't. 

Instead of screaming, I instinctively put a hand over my mouth and gasped. 

I knew there was a reason Vance was so happy that I was doing this solo. At least Miller helped me with the rules. 

"You're not on the canvas yet, kid." The voice came through the mirror. Shivering hard, I tilted the small glass circle toward the doorway.

Vance was standing in the frame. His reflection jittered, blurring like oil on water. Through the convex lens, his outline looked two-dimensional, like a paper silhouette someone had pasted over the dark. Where his neck met his collar, there was no shadow and no tendons, but just a seam. 

He wasn't blinking. He wasn't breathing, either. In the freezing draft where my own breath plumed in thick clouds, nothing came from Vance’s mouth or nose.

"The foundation needs four tons of ballast every quarter," his voice vibrated out of the hollow wooden crate beside me. 

"Just turn around," the voice coaxed. "Look into the crate. Let the soldier finish the eyes."

The air pressure plummeted, popping my eardrum. That same freezing vacuum that had dragged the tourist toward the train and the tarmac began to tug at the hem of my parka, sliding my boots an inch across the silt.

Behind the wood, the wet paint hissed like a kettle.

Don't look at it. Never look directly at it. Miller's voice echoed in my head, raw and panicked.

I kept my chin tucked tight against my chest, staring dead at the floor. With shaking hands, I unclipped the spray bottle of concentrated de-icing glycol from my belt.

"I said," Vance whispered, and the shadow in the doorway took one soundless stride forward, "turn around."

Still staring at the concrete, I swung my eight-pound lantern behind me in a blind, violent arc. The impact didn't feel like hitting a man. It was just a sharp, hollow crack, like smashing through a stretched artist's canvas. Without wasting a second, I jammed the brass nozzle of the de-icer through the open seam of the crate and squeezed the trigger until the bottle emptied.

The reaction was instant and violent.

The wet oil paint inside screamed, as if people were drowning under a frozen lake. Through the slats, I caught a glimpse of running gray sludge as the glycol reacted with the paint on the mural. All the faces dissolved into oily runoff, and the penciled silhouette where my face was supposed to go liquefied, washing off the canvas in ropes.

The vacuum snapped. The pressure returned with an explosive pop that knocked me to my knees.

In the doorway, the figure that called itself Vance threw its head back. Its face began to peel away from the bones just like the runoff of oil from the mural. A dry, rustling wail pierced the silence as he stumbled backward into the dark, scraping against the rusted monorail tracks.

I scrambled up, grabbed my lantern, and ran. I kept the beam pinned strictly to my boots, following the turns from the 1994 schematic in reverse: left past the reservoir, straight past the switchgear, sprinting until my lungs burned.

I hit the freight elevator, slammed the gate, and jammed the brass key into the control box, twisting it until the elevator activated. The cab lurched upward, leaving the screeching metal and the smell of dissolved paint behind in the pit. 

When the elevator doors finally scraped open onto the apron level, I pulled up the sleeve of my parka to check my watch, expecting it to be twenty past ten or twenty-five at the latest.

The mechanical hands read 04:38 AM.

My stomach dropped into my boots. What had felt like ten frantic minutes in Sector 4-Echo had swallowed many hours of real time. I spent the remaining twenty minutes in the line-service breakroom, running scalding tap water over my hands until the skin cracked, waiting out the last ticks of the graveyard schedule.

I clocked out punctually at 05:00 AM. The Great Hall was flooded with morning travelers, oblivious and half-asleep, rolling their suitcases toward TSA under the white fabric canopy. Nobody smelled the harsh tang of glycol on me, nor the grey streaks on my boots. 

I walked past Children of the World Dream of Peace, keeping my vision unfocused. High up on the wall, the arm of the gas-masked soldier looked faintly warped. It was almost as if it had felt the chemical burn I gave the mural four floors below.

With a deep sigh of contentment, I leaned on the red metal handrail and stared out over the valley below.

This is so freaking cool.

Underneath me, the old fire watchtower let out a few small creaks in the cool mountain breeze as if in agreement, its painted girders stretching through the green conifers to the ground. My battered old Subaru looked like a toy from up here, parked at the base of the tower inside the rectangular perimeter fence. Aside from the clearing where Tower Eight stood, there wasn’t much else around us to signal the presence of human civilization. One single-lane gravel road spanned the valley between the mountain I stood on and the one across from it, but it was so narrow that the trees almost concealed it entirely. A row of old power lines ran up the opposite mountain slope, but these too were crowded by the vegetation, visible only from certain places in the peaks to the east. This far north in the remote mountains of Idaho, I didn’t even have good cell service or Wi-Fi, just an old army surplus radio in the tower’s main cabin, a black hand-held walkie talkie for mobile patrols, and a winding half-hour drive to the nearest town. To anyone else such isolation might have been unnerving, but for me it was paradise.

“Think you can handle it?” My supervisor, Esko Virtanen appeared at the rail beside me, his blue eyes taking in the landscape with a faint trace of nostalgia. Twice my age, Esko was a man of few words, but he’d explained the job well enough, and we got along fine. It was a far cry from the handful of minimum-wage jobs I’d worked before coming here.

“Absolutely.” I angled my head at the windows behind us, the wide panes present on every side of the 400-square-foot metal box that would be my home for the next three months. “Already have my gear stowed and everything. Thanks again by the way, this is amazing.”

He laughed, though something in Esko’s face strained, as if he were listening to a joke that wasn’t as funny as it used to be. “Yeah, well, we’ll see how you feel at the one-month check in. The quiet can get to a man after a while, especially you kids without your phones. But, hey, I’ve got faith in you. You remember the mainline frequency?”

“Got it preset in the radio and written down just in case.” I stood a little taller at that, proud to be ahead of the curve.

“Good.” Esko lifted his plain white coffee mug to sip from the tar-black concoction inside and gestured down the valley. “Remember, one of us is always listening on the other end, so if anything goes wrong, don’t hesitate to call. If I’m not there, it’ll be Andy or one of the other old-timers, and they’ll back you up. Just stick to the routine, watch your sectors, and you’ll be fine.”

With a nod, I followed him down the metal stairs to the ground where his green Chevy pickup waited. Hitting the button to open the truck gate via its electronic motor, I waved as he braked to a stop just before leaving. “See you in thirty days!”

At that, Esko leaned out of the driver’s window to look me dead in the eye, and any pretense of a smile left his face. Instead, he wore a grim, almost nervous look, the kind my schizophrenic roommate sometimes had back in college when he thought he saw shadow people in the doorway. “You be careful out there, alright? It’s not your job to be a cop, or a hero, just keep an eye out for the things we talked about; fires where they shouldn’t be, smoke in the restricted zone, or headlights in the access roads up to Smoke Point. You’re the last tower we have this far north, so there’s no room for error.”

Once again, I flashed him a thumbs up, though I worried that perhaps he didn’t fully trust me with the job just yet. Had I done something to make him think I wasn’t capable? Had I been too eager? Too confident? True, I had never been a fire lookout before, but I knew I could pull this off. It was just watching for smoke and flames after all. So long as I didn’t neglect my duties, how hard could it be?

Maybe the last guy was just that bad at it.

Esko watched me, as if hoping I might change my mind and hop in my car to speed away. When I didn’t, he sat back in the Chevy’s bench seat with a long, wary glance at the surrounding trees.

“Don’t go wandering.” He spoke without turning his head, still watching the trees as if looking for something, the man’s face a blank sheet of cryptic tension. “It’s easy to get lost out there. Can’t always trust the trails.”

I waited for him to say more, but Esko simply put the old truck in gear and drove off down the gravel road, the chain link gate sliding closed on its automated timer. Within moments, I was alone, likely the only human being for dozens of miles, and as the gate clanked shut, I let out the deep breath I’d been holding.

No turning back now.

Finding a job hadn’t been easy since I graduated from college, laden with debt I couldn’t afford, and blessed with a degree that no one wanted. It seemed every place was ‘hiring’, but they weren’t interested in interviews, never called or emailed me back, and rarely bothered to send a notification that they’d moved on with another candidate. From factories to office jobs, everyone wanted someone with ten years of experience, three different degrees or certificates, and yet willing to work seven days a week for pennies on the dollar. Even listings with slightly more realistic standards were unresponsive, so when I stumbled across the job posting for the Jacobs Fork Wildlife Department, I fired off my resume without a second thought. Apparently, the park I was helping to oversee had been closed for several months due to ‘local government restrictions’, but the staff were hoping to get a few good months of tourism in before winter. They needed watchmen for one of their fire towers, and I needed something, anything to avoid being forced to seek out my parents with my tail between my legs.

Not that there was much to go home to.

As soon as I walked across the graduation stage, my mother and father had essentially kicked me out, declaring I needed to ‘learn how to manage on my own’ while they put the family property up for sale. That two-story farmhouse had been in the Sarden family for over eighty years, survived both world wars, practically rebuilt by my grandfather from the inside out. When I was little, he’d told me the story of how he did all the work himself, brick by brick, board by board, laboring in the evenings while working at the local coal mine during the day. The house was a vestige of him, his soul, his entire life, and the life he’d made for his family. Grandpa meant it to last his descendants for generations.

My parents sold it for a beachside villa with cheap property taxes and a Cuban landscaper.

Yet they still wonder why I don’t answer their texts.

Breathing out an exasperated sigh, I shook my head to clear the angry thoughts away and turned back to my newfound domain. I wouldn’t let bad memories ruin this. Today was my day, and for once, I would be happy.

Being a tower watchman proved a straightforward task. As I was on the night shift, with another fire tower somewhere to my south keeping watch during the day, I spent the morning in my bunk inside the tower cabin trying my best to sleep. Restless from excited disbelief at my new career, I would occasionally get up, pace the rail to check with my binoculars for distant signs of smoke, and settle back down in my cotton sheets with a giddy smile. Once evening rolled around, I made dinner (or rather breakfast, given my schedule) in the tower’s small kitchen and ate ramen noodles with the entire northern mountain range for a scenic view.

In my mind, I was the luckiest man alive.

Before the sunlight could vanish completely, I attended to more basic chores, gathered trash for the dumpster at the base of the tower, and checked the solar battery array like I’d been taught. There was an aged natural gas generator that could act as a backup just in case, but I didn’t think it would be an issue. With the panels mounted high up on the tower, they got all the sun they needed to keep what few electronics I had with me well-powered. As the night drew closer, I switched on the interior lights and found myself adrift on an island of golden warmth, floating in the dark treetops as the stars twinkled in the vast sky above. With a cup of sweet tea in hand, and a book I’d brought along for just such occasions, I spent my first real night in the wilderness checking for distant fires while the crickets sang and the wind whispered through the trees.

It was just after sunrise that I spotted the first marker.

I had reported via the station radio to a ranger named Melonie from Tower Seven and was busy shutting down the ground-level courtyard lights on Tower Eight. My eyes were heavy, my stomach rumbled, and I had a drowsy grin on my face. The first shift had been easy, peaceful, possibly the best day at work I’d ever had. I decided I wanted a nice, hearty breakfast (technically dinner, I guessed . . . this schedule thing would take some getting used to) as a reward, and thought about what I would make from the generous provisions in the tower pantry. Visions of pancakes, sausages, and scrambled eggs danced in my head, and I was just about to turn back to the winding steps of the tower when I saw it.

A little pile of bones sat roughly twenty yards outside the chain-link fence at the base of the tower, half-obscured in the shadow of large tree on the western edge of the clearing. The bones were a pale, yellowish-white, bleached by countless days in the western sun, and held together by what at first looked like overgrown weeds. Upon stepping closer to peer through the fence, I realized it was actual cordage, thin bands of rope or twine spun together from natural fibers, laced throughout the stack to hold everything in its place. Tufts of muck, ferns, moss and who knows what else were jammed between the various bone lattices that made up the four-sided walls of the pillar, like chinking in a log cabin. The whole thing stood no more than a foot or two high at best, and at the very top, nestled among a thick black smear of some unknown source, was a skull.

I swallowed from behind the chain-link, a ripple of unease traveling down my back as I stared into the hollow sockets of the weathered cranium. It appeared to be some kind of smaller animal, perhaps a beaver or otter, but I couldn’t be sure. Despite my new job, I was hardly a wildlife expert and wasn’t much of a historian when it came to Native American folklore. Was that what this was? Some kind of tribal thing? I hadn’t noticed it the day before, but then again, I wasn’t looking that hard either. It wasn’t as if I knew this place that well, I hadn’t even taken a hike down any of the surrounding trails yet. For all I knew, it might have been there for weeks.

Of course it’s been there for weeks, look how faded the bones are. It’s probably just some kind of religious thing the reservation tribes do. No big deal.

Yet the longer I stared into the empty eye sockets, the more a tide of nausea welled in my gut, cold sweat beading across my forehead, and a barely perceptible ringing started in my eardrums. My throat went dry, the walls of my esophagus scraped together like sandpaper, and my head began to ache with a spinning sensation. The cold chain link stung against my fingers, the muscles tight in both hands, and my heartbeat roared inside my veins until it hurt.

I couldn’t look away.

I wasn’t meant to.

“Morning!”

With a gasp, I blinked, my eyes burning and watery as I lurched away from the fence. The ringing faded, the dizziness slowed to a low thump-thump of a headache, both lungs opening at last to accept deep gulps of fresh air. Just as quickly as it had come, the strange sensation was gone, and I turned to squint at the nearby southern trailhead from where the voice had risen.

A hiker sauntered my way, smiling jovially with aluminum trekking poles in each hand, wearing a gray backpack and broad green hat. He sported a red T-shirt with a sports logo on the front, as well as brown khaki pants and boots fit for the occasion. I guessed the man to be in his early to mid-thirties, with close cropped hair the color of damp sand, thin-rimmed glasses atop his crooked nose, skin already glistening with sunscreen that he’d applied liberally. An army-style canteen sloshed at his belt, and a pair of binoculars hung in another pouch on the opposite hip.

“Morning.” I managed to rasp out, my throat sore as if I’d smoked an entire pack of cigarettes.

He stopped on the other side of the fence, and the hiker wiped sweat from his brow with a congenial sigh. “Whew, those trails are no joke. Hope I’m not bothering you too much, but the map said there was a ranger station up this way, so I thought I’d drop by. I have a permit to camp in the upper valley, and I was wondering about your rules on firewood?”

It took me a moment to recover my good senses, and I nodded, gesturing to the surrounding trees as the information from my training kicked back in. “Yeah, there’s a few designated camping areas about ten miles northwest of here where you can set up a fire. It’s all got to be in the metal fire rings though. Gathering dead wood is cool, just no cutting down live-standing trees. When you leave, make sure to put everything out with—”

“Whoa.” His eyes grew wider, and the man broke through my speech to point at me through the fence. “Are you alright, buddy? Your hands . . .”

Brow furrowed in confusion, I lifted my palms up to examine them and found each covered in blood. A line of cuts ran across my fingers and both thumbs, thin and uniform, so that trickles of red dripped down my wrists and slithered over my elbows in long, warm streams. It wasn’t fast, superficial at most, but the pain seemed distant, almost muted in comparison to my shock.

How did I manage that?

My eyes rose to the bone marker, and I swallowed a lump in my throat, tasting metal as I did so. “It’s nothing I . . . I cut myself. On the wire. An accident.”

The hiker’s eyebrows rose, and he let out a sympathetic whistle as he eyed the fence with disapproval. “Man, the government really lets their stuff go, huh? I’d make sure you rinse that out real good if I were you. Don’t want to get tetanus from all that rust.”

“I will, thanks.” I pivoted my hands so he couldn’t see them, blood still dripping slowly from my fingertips onto the pine needles. “Have fun out there. Be careful on the trails.”

The man left with a happy spring to his step, and I waited until he was out of sight to uncurl my fingers. They hurt now, as if him leaving switched on my pain receptors, and I prodded at the shallow wounds in frustration.

You hurt yourself on the first shift. Nice. Way to go, Lucas.

On further inspection, I couldn’t find any sharp edges on the chain link, no poorly maintained areas where I could have sliced myself up, only dried blood in the spot I’d gripped the wire before. Had I really squeezed it that hard? Had the strange episode with the pile of bones actually happened? It seemed like a nightmare, an odd dream that rattled me to my core as I dared to sneak a glance back at the pillar.

Nothing came over me this time, no odd feeling or ringing in my ears, and after a moment of staring, I shook my head at myself.

Maybe I’m just tired. I’ve been up all night. Probably low blood sugar or something.

Though uncertain, I forced myself to put the strange marker out of my head and climbed the steps to the tower. Once there, I washed and bandaged my palms, the cuts not very deep, and then went on to make a full breakfast spread for myself, pancakes, sausages and all. It was a lovely meal, especially with the gorgeous sunrise peeking over the mountains to the east, and I was able to talk myself into a reasonable train of thought at last. Yes, of course it had been my fatigue, my anxiety from the first day of work and who knows how much stress and pressure from the lead up to finding this job. I didn’t have any kind of mental issues or disorders, but anyone could overstress themselves, and human brains were funny things. Perhaps I had simply pushed myself too hard these past few months. I needed a rest, that was all, and by tonight I would be right as rain again.

I did my best to sleep after clearing up the dishes and managed to drift off just as the midmorning sun began to filter through the blinds. What came after was a strange blackness, one filled with whispers of a dream, the shadow of something looming in my mind, but when I awoke several hours later, I couldn’t remember any of it. It was as if the instant my eyes opened, the memory erased itself, leaving me feeling both unsettled and sore from what must have been hours of tossing and turning. With nothing else to do, I rose to shower off the negative sensation and dressed for day two of my new life.

As it was still early in the afternoon, with several hours before shift change, I decided to take a walk in the forest. I had a topographical map from the tower along with some basic hiking gear, and the late-summer day was too gorgeous to miss sitting inside. Eager to burn some calories, and maybe get some nice pictures to post on social media whenever I finally had service again, I headed to the man gate in the chain link fence with the sunshine on my back.

No sooner had I locked the gate behind me and my stomach tightened, both eyes locking onto something in the trees.

To the west, just beyond the first one, another pillar stood a further twenty yards into the woods, made of similar materials and construction. This one was also knee-high, but the skull atop it, taken from some creature unknown to me, looked away to the lonely mountain across the valley. It lay in the cover of some ferns, but was undoubtedly different than the first, and for that reason I found myself stopped dead in my tracks.

No matter how much I tried to think back, I couldn’t remember there being more than one.

I should report this.

It came to me like a thunderclap, a decisive moment of clarity that helped break my shock. As per official instructions, if I saw anything that I found suspicious, I was supposed to call it in to the other rangers. This certainly counted as suspicious, didn’t it?

My hand was on the black walkie talkie that hung by my belt, when once again, icy doubt crept into my mind.

Was it suspicious, though? After all, my first assumptions about the pillars could turn out to be correct; they might be nothing more than art, or religious symbols made by local tribals. In fact, they might be some kind of college art project by kids in the woods, or even a prank by someone giggling in the bushes just out of sight. I hadn’t looked to see if they were there on the first day, and if my observations had been so lackluster, who was to say I hadn’t also missed the second pillar? Besides, our radios were tethered to a park-wide communications frequency; if I called to ask about a few piles of bones like a frightened child, I would look foolish in front of the entire ranger force. They might even reconsider allowing me to go back out for another month-long rotation if they thought I was losing my grip on things. I had to show that I could take care of myself, both to them, and to the nagging insecurity inside my head. This was nothing more than a distraction, one I didn’t need, and the stakes were too high already.

With a deep sigh of annoyance at myself, I lowered my hand and turned my back on the piles. This job was my chance at something better. I wasn’t about to let some stupid trail markers scare me off. Today, I would enjoy a pleasant walk, and later tonight some quiet reading beneath the stars while on duty. If anyone was out there, hoping to scare me with their crude joke, then they would just have to try harder.

Walking proved to be as good for me as I’d hoped, the crisp mountain air, ample sunshine, and gentle breeze refreshing after my idiotic turmoil over the bone pillars. It was invigorating to think that I was being paid, actually paid to be out here walking around in nature all by myself. The beautiful green valley yawned between my mountain and the opposite one, and small streams flowed down to a central river in the valley floor that ran alongside the gravel road, both invisible from this high up thanks to the dense foliage. A few birds sang in the trees, the air tasted sweet of pine and ice from the mountain peaks further up slope, and the narrow trails crunched agreeably under my boots with a carpet of dried pine needles. It wasn’t a silent place, not with the distant hush of the river, the birds and other creatures making noise in the forest, or the wind whispering through the boughs, but compared to my cramped apartment in the big city it was soothingly tranquil. I had no noisy neighbors, no barking dogs, no car horns or occasional sirens to intrude on my thoughts. Here, in this hidden patch of Eden, I felt I could sit and think for the first time in ages without feeling any sort of compulsion to hurry.

I hiked far enough up the northern slope to overlook a distant plain the valley opened into, hemmed in by more mountains farther to the west and east. The town of Jacobs Fork sat there, at the junction of various gravel roads and the river, a tiny outpost of humanity that marked the sole contact I had with civilization for miles. Aside from my fellow rangers in the other towers, I could justifiably say that I was alone in the alien expanse of stone and timber, able to see the human world below but not be caught up in it.

Never in all my life did I smile so much.

I could stay out here forever.

After a brief snack of a few granola bars to mark my progress, I decided to head back down the mountain, retracing my steps since I didn’t know the area as well just yet. Esko had warned me about the trails, and even though his advice was cryptic at best, I figured it wasn’t worth the risk. Today seemed perfect enough; I had enjoyed a nice walk, taken some great pictures, and felt ready to face the next shift. Any memory of this morning’s incident receded within my mind, and I hummed with each happy step I took through the winding dirt paths.

I was halfway back to the tower when I first noticed how quiet the forest had become.

Every step crunched louder in my ears, each breath more ragged and grating, the wind more of a conspiratorial whisper than a soft hush in the trees. No birds sang, no insects hummed, and even the sunlight appeared to weaken in certain thick sections of growth. The normal shadows looked darker, deeper, murky in a way that I couldn’t make sense of. Despite the warmth of the day, I began to feel a chill on my neck, goosebumps rising on the flesh as if it had dropped to late-autumn temperatures in a matter of seconds. True, the mountains often got colder before the valley floors did, but this seemed premature, as if someone had thrown a filter lens over the sun to dampen its radiance for this particular stretch of woodland. The only thing that really stood out to me was a smell, faint at first, but growing in pungency the closer I drew to the tower.

Wet, moldy earth. Rotted wood and stagnant water. Humid air, foreign in this climate, choked with spores and the sickly aroma of decayed carrion that tickled the back of my throat. One scent flowed above them all, startling in how different it was from the rest; a sweet, lush, deep smell, like that of a rich candy syrup, but vibrant enough that I knew it had to be some kind of flower.

For some reason, in my head, I thought of a rose bouquet I’d seen at one of the floral shops in town before my trip up the mountain.

At first, I tried to look around to see if I could locate the source of the smell but found nothing. The more time wore on, the stronger it became, and my head swam with a light dizziness that soon morphed into a headache. My nose stung with each breath, I tasted metal in my mouth, and the contents of my stomach churned into a sour knot. I pulled my shirt up over my nose and tried to walk faster, hoping to get clear of the stench, but it seemed to follow me whenever I took a shuddering breath, thick on my tongue like invisible poison gas. Desperate to get clean air, I broke into a jog and wove my way down the slope with carefully placed steps.

At one point, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of movement in the trees to my left, the vaguest blur of something dark flitting between the gnarled trunks. I turned my head to see what it was, but the shape had already gone, and I thought it most likely a bird hidden amongst the pines. Still, a ripple of warning crawled through the skin on the back of my neck, and as I ran, I did my best to look from side-to-side every so often.

The more I looked, the more I saw, each glance a snapshot of the world around me that rapidly mixed together as I picked my way across the trail.

A shadow that slipped behind a spruce ten yards out, just as my gaze landed on it. The rustle of a shrub from something moving through it. A flash of color that almost looked like blonde hair in a patch of thin sunlight that filtered through the forest canopy. Soft, yet discernable footfalls of limbs meeting cushions of pine needles and moss. Bursts of sun-dried blues, greens, reds, and yellows in places they didn’t belong, like bits of old clothing left to flutter in the wind.

Always just out of sight.

Always moving too quick for me to get a good view of whatever it was.

And always, the smell of roses followed.

When I finally made it back to the tower, I felt exhausted, as if the descent sapped everything I had left for the day, and paused for a moment beside the chain link fence to catch my breath. The smell retreated now that I was in the open, the movement stilling in the underbrush, while the sounds of the forest returned. Birds called, insects chirped, and the fresh breeze whipped up to cool my sweaty brow. Whatever smothering presence had afflicted me on the trail lifted, and my head cleared of the fuzzy sensation, enough that I noticed a change in the nearby tree line.

A third marker.

It sat just beyond the second one, almost invisible for how far into the bushes it was, another little pile of bones held together by twine, muck, and rot. Like the second, this one too bore a small mammal skull, looking off to the west across the narrow valley as if pointing to something, with only the first at the clearing’s edge staring right at me. They were in a line, I realized, not perfectly straight but curved, as though slowly revealing some unblazed path between the stands of creaking firs and spruces. I hadn’t seen it earlier when leaving the tower, which meant that whoever built the macabre pillar waited until I left the safety of the chain link fence. They had been watching me throughout the morning, perhaps in anticipation of this moment.

Considering the things I’d seen on the trail, they may have been following me all along.

Icy chills ran down my spine, and I flicked my gaze to the forest, only to find no additional glimpses of anything unusual. I was alone here in the far northern wilderness.

Or at least, I hoped I was.

Better get inside, just in case.

Tense with that thought, I slipped through the man gate in the perimeter fence and locked it behind me. Shuffling to the tower cabin high above the forest floor, I spent the rest of my free time with the door locked and the curtains drawn, debating on how to proceed. More than ever, I wanted to say something in my evening report, to call the ranger base and tell them about what was going on, but always my mind stopped me. Aside from the markers themselves, I had no proof of the strange smell, the movement I’d seen off the trails, or the odd feeling after looking at the skulls. Virtanen had said that isolation got to people, and they’d let the last guy go to replace him with me, which meant he must not have been up to the task. At any rate, I was supposed to be watching for wildfires, not tracking piles of refuse in the woods, and I wasn’t even a week into this thing; how could I possibly run to the others on the force without looking like the urbanite rookie that I was? As much as recent events had unnerved me, I loved this job, would do anything to keep it, and didn’t really have anywhere else to go. This raging argument paralyzed me from within, and even when check-in time came, I still didn’t know what to do. Unable to bring myself to say anything, I merely took over after Tower Seven signed off, and began another shift in the dark canopy of the forest.

That brings me to the current moment, sitting here locked inside the tower cabin, conducting my watch through the windows with binoculars, the blinds drawn whenever I’m not looking out. I’m still not completely convinced this isn’t some kind of elaborate prank, either by my new coworkers or some random person. However, precautions never hurt, and so tonight I think I’ll stay inside, where the lights are always on and no odd smells permeate through the sealed windows. My thinking is that if they can’t see me, then they can’t plan around my schedule as much as they obviously have been. If I can throw this unknown watcher off balance, maybe I can catch them in the act, and put an end to this problem. That would prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that I belong here, that I can handle myself, that I deserve this post.

For once, I could have something I earned all on my own.

I don’t have any phone service or internet, so I’m typing this on my laptop to save for later as evidence, in case it would turn into an official review by the ranger force. I figure if I record everything as I go, when I eventually report to the others, they might be more inclined to believe me. Worst case scenario, it’s all in my head and these notes will be useless, but I will have some amusing stories to look back on when it’s over.

Either way, I’ve got a long night ahead of me.

Part 1

I clocked in for the next shift, which the whiteboard on the breakroom wall confirmed: Concourse A, Sub-basement Baggage Tunnels. I stood in the freezing corridor of the loading dock, staring at the heavy, steel doors of the freight elevator. The sub-basements are the oldest part of the airport, a sprawling labyrinth of marked tracks and concrete that the public doesn't know exists. I had heard stories about people who worked there, but I never knew anyone who personally had. Before my finger could touch the illuminated panel, a gloved hand yanked me backward by my elbow.

It was Miller, the veteran graveyard ramp lead. He didn't say a word, but he just grabbed my scanner, took one look at the digital assignment flashing on the screen. 

"Fucking hell. You're marked, kid," he muttered, his breath forming clouds in the freezing air. He pulled his own supervisor scanner from his belt,  jamming his thumb onto the screen. "You go down there tonight, you're dead. The system is trying to isolate you." He furiously pressed a series of buttons and finally swiped an authentication lock.

The digital screen on my scanner flashed red, vibrated and then rebooted. My assignment changed.

"You're with me tonight," Miller said, shoving the scanner back into my hand. He turned his back on the elevator doors. "We’re hiding out at gate B91. No scheduled arrivals or departures. Nothing ever happens at B91."

We rode a tug out into the bitter night. The wind chill was at a brutal -5, and the white roof of the Jeppesen Terminal glowed in the pitch-black sky. We drove the perimeter roads in silence, eventually reaching the eastern edge of Concourse B. I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking I had escaped the trouble I was going to face. 

The assignment was standard busywork. We were supposed to clear the tarmac parking area of stray luggage carts, chocks, and foreign objects before the morning rush. I stepped off the tug, my boots crunching loudly on the frost. About thirty feet from the tug, I stopped dead.  The air here didn't smell right. There was no acidic stench of burning Jet-A fuel or the sweet tang of heated de-icing fluid. Instead, the freezing wind carried a suffocating odor. that smelled like oxidized aluminum mixed with the stench of tobacco. I walked slowly toward the center of the gate envelope.

The concrete in front of me was a complete void. As I stared at it, the surface rippled faintly in the wind, like a meniscus of viscous tar. Above me, the glass doors of the terminal's exterior boarding stairs slid open. I looked up. Standing in the doorway was a gate agent.

She was wearing a faded Pan Am uniform: a pale blue dress and the signature white gloves. Her skin was a waxy gray, her eyes empty. She mechanically raised a boarding scanner and began processing a line of passengers in silence. They looked exhausted, clutching heavy carry-on bags. They stared blankly ahead as they shuffled past the agent.

"Miller," I whispered into the freezing air. My hands were shaking too much to use the radio.

The passengers walked down the stairs, but there was no plane at the gate. They marched in a single line down the grating, stepped onto the freezing tarmac, and walked straight toward the rippling black patch of concrete. When the first passenger’s shoe touched the dark patch, the concrete rippled slightly more than usual. He sank suddenly and silently, swallowed whole by the tarmac. One by one, the passengers marched into the hungry ground, descending into the concrete.

Suddenly I felt a pull from the rippling patch, pulling my boots. I took a slow, involuntary step forward. My right boot touched the edge of the black patch. It plunged into the freezing, viscous darkness. The cold bit instantly through my thick wool socks, beginning to numb my feet to the bone. 

I heard heavy footsteps sprinting across the frost behind me. Miller slammed into my back, tackling me onto the solid concrete. The black sludge didn't even try to grab him. Miller has worked this ramp for thirty years, and he was somewhat resistant to the airport. He never looks at the murals, and never breaks the rules. 

"Don't look at them!" Miller roared. He dragged me by my harness toward the concourse. Hidden in the deep shadows was a rusted steel door. Miller shoved a physical brass key into the lock, and kicked it open. He shoved me inside and locked the door.

It was a suffocating, windowless concrete box. The room hummed with old server towers and the pale green glow of CRT monitors. 

"What the hell was that?" I choked out, scraping the sludge off my boot. "Where did they go?"

"They didn't go anywhere," Miller said, with a shaking voice. "And they aren't passengers. Haven't been for twenty-eight years."

He dropped into a metal folding chair in front of a monitor. His thick fingers hammered across a mechanical keyboard.

"Modern radar is filtered to hide anomalies," Miller breathed. He hit enter. The screen emitted a high-pitched whine, showing a scan of the ground beneath Concourse B. "This '93 system isn't."

I leaned over his shoulder. Thirty feet below the concrete of Gate B91 was a massive, pulsating shape. The jagged, metallic T-tail and elongated fuselage were unmistakable.

"Flight 12," Miller whispered. "A McDonnell Douglas MD-81. Its rear-mounted engines are loud enough to blow your eardrums. That’s why they’re nicknamed ‘Mad Dogs’."

"I don't get it," I said, staring at the green mass. "Did it crash?"

"Never took off." Miller pulled a battered flask from his jacket and took two gulps of water. "December 1998. Massive blizzard. Ground stop in effect, but Flight 12 somehow got clearance to push back anyway. The tug pushed them out, and then drove away. But the plane never made it to the runway."

Miller sighed, in a mixture of fear and exhaustion.

"The ground just opened up. Turned to liquid and swallowed a fifty-ton aircraft in thirty seconds. Airport authority locked down the terminal, and all its records were later covered up and wiped out. Officially, it 're-routed' and vanished in the mountains."

I looked back at the screen. The green blob was pulsating, as if it were breathing. 

Miller whispered, "The plane fused with the passengers, the luggage and the plumbing of the building. 

"The boarding agent... the people on the stairs..." I said in a shaky whisper.

"Bait," Miller said grimly. “It targets exhausted travelers. People who are too tired to notice their plane doesn't exist. They walk into the hungry ground, and the MD-81 feeds on them to keep itself alive."

A line of text flashed at the bottom of the screen.

DECODING TRANSPONDER PING...

"It knows we're here," Miller said, his hand freezing. 

The monitor shattered with a sharp CRACK, dying along with the servers. Red light from the exit sign washed over us. The floor turned to freezing black sludge, sucking at our boots, while the deafening roar of buried jet engines spooled up through the concrete.

"Don't look down!" Miller yelled. "Stare at the red light!"

He unclipped two heavy rubber wheel chocks from his belt and slammed them into the melting floor.

He smashed the glass of an old emergency cutoff box marked PAD B91 - FUEL/POWER ISOLATION and threw the heavy steel lever. The screaming turbines choked into a dying 
whine. The rippling floor instantly snapped back into solid, frozen concrete. 

"Is it dead?" I choked out, scrambling backward.

"Hell no, I just closed its feeding tube to the surface," Miller growled, shoving me out the door into the freezing wind. "It's still alive down there, and now it's pissed."

"Miller," I yelled over the freezing wind as we sped away on the tug. "If the ground is what actually takes them... what the hell are the murals doing?"

Miller didn't look at me. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

"The tarmac just eats," he muttered, staring ahead into the dark. "The murals keep the receipts. And right now, they're still holding an empty spot for you."

We made it back to the locker room alive, but as I clocked out, my phone buzzed with an updated schedule:

Assignment: Sub-basement Baggage Complex, Sector 4-Echo (Hazard Clearance).  Tomorrow 23:00-05:00

Another challenge for another day, and in an even colder place.

Everyone thinks they know the secrets of Denver International Airport. Tourists love taking selfies with "Blucifer," that terrifying blue mustang with glowing red eyes. They also like pointing and laughing at the Leo Tanguma murals on the main terminal walls. They think it's quirky and cool, just something to pose with and show off to friends. 

I am a ramp agent, and I’ve worked here long enough to start noticing things. Like how the soldiers and the weeping children seem to shift positions by a few inches every couple of months. I used to think those were hallucinations, especially because I was perpetually sleep deprived. But those paintings are always changing, observing the people who love to stare at and laugh at them. While they are staring at the art, it is scanning them, cataloging their shapes, their voices and their smiles.

My supervisor gave me one rule when I started. "If Dispatch ever calls a Code Black arrival, don't look inside the aircraft." I laughed. He didn't.

Last night, at 3:07 AM, Dispatch called me. "Code Black arrival. East pad." There was no flight number, no tail number, no transponder. I keyed my radio to confirm, since nothing was scheduled to come in at the time. Dispatch answered in my own voice, "Bring the chocks."

The east pad sits directly over the airport's labyrinthine basements. Out of the thick emerged a Boeing 777. Its fuselage was a matte black that swallowed the amber ramp lights, with no livery or registration. Its landing gear was down, but the aircraft hovered two inches above the ground, completely silent.

When I approached, the forward cargo door opened into pure, empty darkness. Something inside inhaled, and the entire 777 shuddered, creating a vacuum that pulled loose objects inward. 

Then I looked up at the passenger windows. Staring back were the faces from the airport murals: the soldiers, the crying children. They were pressed against the glass, pale and expressionless, with neon-red eyes. One of the terminal gargoyles was perched on the engine, its stone wings twitching. It looked right at me and whispered my full name over my radio. I fled toward the terminal, but the aircraft followed me, gliding sideways across the ramp without moving its wheels.

Inside the terminal, I found a tourist standing right in front of the *Children of the World Dream of Peace* mural, wearing a fleece and a neck pillow. He was staring exhausted at the painted coffins. He turned to face me, stating exhaustedly, “My connection to Dallas got canceled.”

Before I could pull him away, the terminal PA system crackled. It cleared its throat, playing back the tourist's exact voice in a flat, breathless loop: *"My connection to Dallas got canceled."*

I yanked his collar, dragging him toward the underground train escalators. At the bottom, the train doors were already open. Its interior was a dark and empty cargo hold, just like on the 777.

Leaning on the edges of the door was a perfect replica of the tourist: the same fleece and neck pillow, but with entirely hollow eyes. The replica smiled and reached out a pale hand. The tourist entered a trance, dropping his suitcase and taking a mesmerized step forward. When I lunged and grabbed his wrist, a blast of freezing air threw me backward onto the platform. The doors slid shut, and the train disappeared, taking the tourist with it.

I scrambled back up the escalators. The mural had changed, and every painted figure was looking at me. A black 777 now occupied the painted sky, with a painted version of me and the tourist standing side by side below it.

My radio crackled in my own voice: "Don't look behind you."

I looked anyway. The 777 was twenty feet away inside the terminal, having passed through the wall without breaking any window or walls. The engines were gone, the wings folded, and the landing gear elongated. It appeared like a giant insect, with the cockpit windows now living eyes.

The cargo door opened wide. The darkness inside was gone, replaced by thousands of seats stretching into the distance. Every seat was occupied by the dead people from the murals. Right near the front, sitting frozen beside a little girl, was the tourist in his fleece jacket.

The little girl raised her hand, pointed at me, and then pointed to the empty seat directly next to the tourist.

The terminal speakers echoed: "Your shift is over. We are ready for departure."

The cargo hold expanded right into the terminal space, swallowing the walls around me. I can see the rows of seats, and the tourist turning his head to look at me, waiting. There is only one seat left, right beside him and the little girl.

And it's got my name on it.

The letters were stitched directly into the gray fabric of the headrest, glowing faintly in the dim amber cabin light. The tourist kept staring at me, his head cocked at a broken, unnatural angle. Beside him, the little girl kept her pale, unblinking eyes locked on mine, her finger pointing rigidly at the empty cushion.

The freezing vacuum of the cabin pulled at my uniform. I took an involuntary step forward. My steel-toed boot hit the metal track of the aisle. I was crossing the threshold.

Then, the little girl’s expression changed. She stopped pointing at the seat.

She turned her attention entirely to the tourist. She unbuckled her harness, stood up in the narrow aisle, and reached out with a pale, freezing hand. She pressed her flat palm directly against the tourist’s forehead. His spine arched violently against the seat and he let out a wet, heavy popping sound. His eyes rolled completely into the back of his head, exposing cracked yellow veins, and a thin line of black fluid leaked from his left nostril.

The vacuum inside the cabin instantly died. I stumbled backward, my boots slipping on the slick terminal tiles, collapsing hard onto the tiled floor. The tourist went completely limp, dropping like a stone. His neck pillow tore open on the ground, scattering thousands of tiny white beads on the floor like snowflakes.

Inside the cabin, the little girl turned back to look at me. Her eyes bored into my skull. She smiled a grotesque, too-wide smile that stretched the skin around her mouth. She raised a single pale finger to her lips, and backed away into the shadows of the fuselage.

The seats collapsed. The landing gear folded backward into the underbelly and the jet reversed, phasing right back through the drywall and glass before disappearing completely.

The terminal was instantly silent.

I scrambled over to the tourist. He was alive, staring blindly at the ceiling. I grabbed his shoulder. "Hey. Stand up. We gotta move." He didn't blink. His facial muscles began to twitch, spasming violently as his mouth stretched into the exact same smile the little girl had just given me. His trembling hands reached down, grabbed an invisible seatbelt, and clicked it together over his lap.

"Whiskey-Oscar-Seven-Nine-Delta-Echo," he whispered. His voice didn't sound like him anymore. It sounded like a tape recorder playing backward.

A six-character reservation number.

I dragged him to a charging station near Gate B32 and propped him up, tossing a spare blanket I had previously found nearby on his legs. He sat, grinning his bleeding gums at the ceiling.

My radio squawked. It was Miller, the graveyard lead. "Ramp Four, where the hell are you? United 1142 from Dulles is on final for the east pad. Grab the tug and get ground power out there." I checked the time, and saw that it was already past 4. *Damn,* I thought, *the trance had lasted pretty long.*

I keyed the mic, my hand shaking. "Copy. En route."

I rushed down the service stairs and hit the tarmac. Ten minutes later, I was standing under a domestic United 737, shoving a heavy GPU cable into its belly. The twin engines were deafening, loud and dirty. But at least the aircraft was real.

Except, as the fumes of Jet-A washed over me, I realized I couldn't smell it. All I could smell was the musty swamp water from the ghost 777's cabin. I looked down at my hands. They were trembling. Every shadow cast by the baggage carts looked like it was stretching toward me. The airport itself seemed like an otherworldly being. 

Shift ended at 06:00. I didn't want to investigate or play detective. I just wanted to get the hell out of the airport.

I swiped my badge to cross back into the public concourse, keeping my head down. Early morning commuters were already trickling in by half past six, hauling roller bags toward TSA and buying overpriced airport coffee. I watched a businessman in a suit walk right past the *Notre Denver* installation of bronze gargoyles sitting inside open suitcases in baggage claim. As the man walked past, a bronze gargoyle slowly turned its heavy metal head, tracking him. Its jaws were parted, and I could hear a faint, staticky whisper coming from its throat, reciting the businessman's full name.

The floor felt wrong, too. The Jeppesen Terminal is famous for the bronze fossils embedded in the floor. I looked down at a brass trilobite near my boot. Instead of being a bug, it was a flattened and screaming human face, cast in polished bronze, trapped under a layer of floor wax. Hundreds of people were walking right over it.

I wanted to run, and to scream. But I remembered my supervisor's one rule: *Don't look.*

The airport feeds on attention. The tourists taking selfies, the people staring at the murals, they are all willingly offering themselves up. The 777 didn't take me because I broke the tether. It took the tourist because he surrendered to it.

I forced my eyes up. I stepped directly over the screaming bronze face, acting like it was just a scuff mark on the floor. I walked past the baggage claim, keeping my gaze locked dead ahead. I completely ignored the gargoyle that was now leaning halfway out of its bronze suitcase, clawing toward my vest.

I didn't run. Running makes you prey. I walked briskly to the employee exit, swiped my badge, and pushed through the revolving doors into the freezing morning. The sun was up. The sprawling white tents of the terminal roof glowed against the blue sky. I was out.

When I got to my car, my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was an automated text from the scheduling system.

*Shift updated. Tomorrow: 23:00 - 07:00. Assignment: Concourse A, Sub-basement Baggage Tunnels.*

I slumped against the steering wheel, shivering in the cold. *I should quit*. I should drive down Peña Boulevard and never come back. But as I glanced in my rearview mirror, I saw the massive, glowing eyes of Blucifer, the blue mustang statue, staring down at the highway. They weren't just statues. They claimed lives. If I quit, I was just another civilian waiting to be cataloged. But as a ramp agent, I had clearance. I had a radio. And I had the next night's shift to figure out what the hell they were actually feeding down in the tunnels.

[Part 1]

Everyone is afraid of something. Some people avoid their fears. Others learn to control them. I had my friends.

They came to me in a moment of overwhelming uncertainty. The unknown made me anxious, and in the waiting, I tortured myself with what-ifs that were more than unlikely, mere figments of my imagination. So I let my imagination take over, and I built five friends: Mister Cocoa, Mister Wuffles, Lulu, Vivi, and Itsy. Where I used to avoid my fear, I learned to control it.

I couldn’t keep a real friend to save my life, but I never had trouble keeping bullies, Danny being the worst of them. That first night, when Mister Cocoa asked what I needed, I thought of Danny, naturally. I thought about the times he’d taken my lunch money. I thought about the times he’d stolen my glasses. I thought about the beatings. I thought about how he’d taken my name from me. I was a quiet kid, so Mouse stuck. Even some of the teachers, I’m sure thinking it a cute nickname, joined in on the teasing. So when it hurt, I thought about his fears. Everyone is afraid of something, and Danny was afraid of dogs.

I knew the story behind it the way any child learns an urban legend: on the playground. When Danny was in kindergarten, he walked to the bus stop with his older brother, Daryl. About a hundred yards from their house, they came upon a dilapidated trailer that belonged to an even more decrepit old man. Mr. Thibodaux was semi-retired and bred guard dogs for a living. He was a grouch who, instead of giving candy to kids, found it fun to hurl insults and keep every ball that flew over his fence. He got his kicks walking his beloved beasts and letting them yank their leashes taut inches from terrified children.

One morning, Daryl thought it would be funny to run ahead as they passed Mr. Thibodaux’s fence. That left little Danny petrified in front of a row of foaming, snarling pit bulls, each tied to a stake with frayed rope. Daryl called back, laughing, that Danny had better hurry up before Thibodaux’s dogs got him. He barely finished the sentence before one of the pit bulls yanked its stake out of the ground, crawled through a shallow trench under the fence, and went after Danny.

Danny took off running. Daryl dropped a few obscenities, realizing he’d just dropped the ball on being the protective older brother. Danny turned around, tripped on his shoelaces, and before his feet could slap the pavement, his face did. The dog ran over and latched onto his ankle. Daryl, panicking, ran back and kicked it as hard as he could to free his brother from its grip. The bus rounded the corner just then, and a busload of impressionable children watched the whole thing. By lunchtime, it had solidified into playground legend.

From that point on, Danny was deathly afraid of dogs. His father had been leaving for work when he spotted his sons on the concrete, one of them bleeding badly. Without turning off his car, he asked what happened, and before he’d gathered all the details, he stormed over to Mr. Thibodaux’s door and pounded on it with fatherly fury. The old man answered with an expression that said he was ready to scold, and Danny’s dad clocked him in the face, dragged his bleeding son into the car, and drove to the hospital. It took eight stitches to close the wound.

The rumor was that the rabies set into Danny’s brain that day and turned him into the vile child I knew. I know now that if it were true, he never would have survived. Maybe bullying was how Danny took control of his fear, but he always avoided the straight way to the bus stop across Mr. Thibodaux’s yard. Instead, Danny always came from the side.

After the chaos of that day, Mr. Thibodaux got even by pressing assault charges against Danny’s father. That sent him down a dirty rabbit hole of alcoholism, and one day, Danny’s mother had enough. With a black eye and bruises, she kicked her husband out of the house. Some say he moved away to work in the plants between here and Texas. All I know is that I never met him, but Danny idolized him. He was one of those fathers who tried to win back his family’s love with love-bombing gifts, the most recent being the Nintendo 64 and electric scooter Danny got for his birthday.

Danny was twelve years old and still in the fifth grade. When he wasn’t hassling kids for money, he could often be seen collecting cigarette butts at the Circle-K down the road. Whatever happened to him that day changed his life for the worse. A boy his brother once described as timid, even shy, had become a pre-teen who reeked of death and defiance.

I was afraid of Danny. Danny was afraid of dogs. And dogs were the beasts that lorded over the wild. That is, until they became man’s best friend. For when we conquered fear, we conquered the wilderness.

The next morning, I must have counted my money over seven times as I waited for Danny to arrive. He’d promised things would get worse if I came up short. As the minutes passed, I felt certain he would turn up any moment. Like a sprinkler, I turned and scanned the yard, waiting for him to come running down the side streets of our neighborhood. My world was growing gray as the dread of the inevitable set in. But before my heart could leap into my throat, I heard the squeal of brakes. The bright yellow school bus, my chariot to safety, had arrived, and Danny hadn’t. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I smiled and kicked my legs in joy as the bus rolled under the awning at my elementary school. For the first time in months, I made it to class with my money and my face intact.

That morning, peace reverberated through the school halls, as my fellow classmates were spared, too. At recess, I learned that Danny hadn’t made it to school at all. Already, rumors had begun to spread. People said he must be home sick playing GoldenEye 007, or maybe he was playing hooky, smoking cigarettes in the woods. But part of me wondered what the truth really was.

I wish I had never found out. Even though I’d felt better that day than I had in ages, the guilt and shame I came to carry proved too much for me. When I got home from school, I found Mister Wuffles lying on my bed, pawing at his mouth as if to wipe away a mess.

“How was school? Were you safe?” he asked, his deep golden eyes playful.

I nodded and smiled uneasily, because it looked like Mister Wuffles had been eating raw pork, which I cared little for.

“Danny was absent,” I said, matter-of-fact.

“Of course!” sang Vivi. She dangled from my ceiling fan, coiled like a spring, with a swollen middle and a small lump resting in her gut. “Did anything hurt you?” she asked.

Lulu and Itsy crawled out of my closet, curious about Vivi’s question, and as they shut the door behind them, I thought I saw something I wasn’t supposed to.

“Not today,” I said. I couldn’t explain why at the time, but I had a feeling that something was going terribly wrong.

“We brought you something!” said Itsy. “Open the closet. It’s for you.” The silky friend smiled a tiny smile, revealing two fangs I hadn’t noticed the night before.

“I don’t like the closet. It’s dark and scary.” I quivered.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of!” begged Lulu. “Here, I’ll light it up for you.” The rainbows from her lamp shot out across my floor, and as I walked toward the closet, my feet stuck and peeled free with every step.

“Why is the floor so sticky?” I asked.

Mister Cocoa began to laugh, a deep and unnerving laugh. “I spilled my lunch, is all.” The smile spread thin across his face. “Go on now, check out the gift we got you.”

I grabbed the doorknob as they all waited in anticipation. I turned it and pulled with all my might, afraid of what I might see. As the door swung open, something fell out onto the floor with a loud thud. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

It was an electric scooter.

No, he wore that outfit last time and felt overdressed. Something more casual would be better. Just not too casual.

Bob looked down at his phone. Damn, it was nearly eight o’clock already. He grabbed an outfit, put it on, caught a variety of angles in front of the mirror and then checked his watch again. After closing the front door behind himself, he turned to face it while slipping his key into the lock. Then he jiggled the keys three times, rotated the lock, withdrew his key, and patted the door gently, before heading to his car.

The restaurant was only a short drive away, though not a place he’d been to before. It wasn’t really his scene. After parking his car, Bob climbed out of the driver’s seat, closed the door and pressed the lock button on his key-fob. He waved the fob back and forth like a bell as he fluttered his fingers three times, finishing with a pat on the top of the car. Then he headed for the entrance.

The noise inside made him wince. But he pushed on, looking around at the many talking mouths that filled the place up. The hostess took notice, smiled, and approached him, asking a question as she came.

“I’m sorry,” Bob said, leaning in.

“Table for one?” she repeated.

“Oh, no. I’m here for—that is, there’s a reservation under Trish.”

The hostess nodded, then consulted a tablet back at the greeting podium. Lifting a menu from the shelf behind her, she waved Bob on to follow.

He was the last, it seemed, to arrive.

Bob seated himself, took the menu being handed by the hostess, and then offered a smile to the table.

The woman to his right smiled in return, flashing teeth that were perfectly straight and almost unnaturally white. “I’m Trish,” she said, leaning carefully toward him.

“Bob.”

He offered his hand; she moved to offer both arms, intending to embrace. They froze, smiled at one another again, and turned to their menus.

“These things are always a bit awkward,” said a man sitting across from Bob.

“I know what you mean,” said the woman sitting next to him. “I’m Fran, by the way, and this is Kevin.” She pointed to the man.

“You ever been on one of these?” Trish asked the table.

Kevin spoke first, “A group one like this? Yeah, once or twice.”

“Same,” Fran said. Her hair was pulled tight into a ponytail, but frizzy strands stuck out all over. As well, one of her fake lashes had come free at the corner. Bob had to bite his lip to keep from pointing these things out.

“How about you?” Trish asked him, breaking his focus.

“I mean, I’ve had my share of blind dates, but no, never a group one like this.”

“Me either,” Trish said, showing her perfect teeth again. Her mouth, too, had an agreeable kind of symmetry to it.

For a moment, no one spoke. Trish pushed the ice cubes around in her cup using her straw, while Kevin glanced over the menu. Fran ran a hand through her hair meant to smooth it over, but instead it loosened more strands. Bob regarded each of them in turn.

“So, what does everyone do for work?” Kevin said, raising his eyebrows.

“Commercial real estate,” Fran said, turning to look at Trish.

“Oh, that’s so funny, I do residential real estate,” Trish said, reaching a hand across the table to gently pat the back of Fran’s hand.

“And I own a construction company that does both residential and commercial, how funny, and we should definitely exchange information!” Kevin said, and the entire table erupted into laughter, except for Bob, who had taken his keys from his pocket and was now tracing the crooked edge against the side of his finger.

There was a rapid exchange, much of which Bob wasn’t able to follow, being unfamiliar with the lingo. He nodded and smiled occasionally anyway.

Trish turned to him finally, smiling broadly now (he liked her smile even more) and asked, “What is it you do, Bob?”

“I uh… I don’t talk about it much. Shouldn’t say anything really.”

“Oh, come on, we’re just getting to know each other.” She placed a hand on his leg for a brief moment.

Bob could still feel its warmth after it had been withdrawn. “I’m, uh… I’m a Keeper of Doors.”

The entire table went still. Bob shifted in his seat and pretended to wipe something from his chest.

Kevin was the first to speak. “I can honestly say, this is a first for me.” His eyes were wide and gleaming. “Can I just shake your hand, please? This is surreal.”

For a few awkward seconds, Bob didn’t move, but eventually he reached over the table, though Kevin had to make up the longer part of the gap. The shake was brief. Kevin beamed and sat back in his chair.

“I have so many questions,” Fran said, her eyes wide, making her hair look even more wild.

“Seriously,” Trish added, putting her hand on Bob’s leg again, several inches higher up on his thigh. Her body was turned in his direction, allowing him to fully delight in the ideal proportions of her face.

“I guess, I could answer a few maybe.”

“Oh, my god, where to start. I mean, I guess with the obvious. Where are the doors even? Like, where’s the hallway? How do you get to it?” Trish said.

Bob shuffled in his seat. “I can’t really talk about that all too much. Strict confidentiality.”

“Right, of course. Only makes sense.”

“I guess you can’t really tell us what’s behind the doors, then, either, huh?” Kevin said, leaning forward with his elbows on the table. With the light now directly over him, Bob couldn’t help but notice how waxy his skin looked.

“I’m afraid I can’t, sorry.”

“I heard it’s sound,” Fran said excitedly. “Like sound waves. Something cosmic, but if they came through, and we heard them, they would, like, make our heads explode or something.” She pantomimed her head exploding.

Everyone was watching Bob, looking, it seemed, for any sign of denial or confirmation.

Bob watched them back, unblinking.

“Well, I heard it’s just people. Normal people. Just trying to get from some other place to here,” Kevin said, his lips pressed into a smile, creating waxy folds and creases in his cheeks.

Bob ran the jagged part of his key across his thumb.

“Why keep just ordinary people out?” It was Trish who spoke, her left hand still resting on Bob’s leg.

Bob cleared his throat. “We have a saying in the hallways. Always a knock, never an answer.”

Fran was looking at him with her eyebrows bunched up, like some kind of harassed bird. “No need to be rude, Bob. They were just a couple of harmless questions.”

Bob shrugged, his eyes watching Trish’s hand in his lap. She withdrew it then, lifting the menu with both hands.

“So, what is everyone thinking about ordering?” Kevin said, sitting more upright, looking around for their server.

###

There were a few minutes left in Bob’s lunch break, but he was tired of swiping through the dating apps, so he placed his phone in his pocket and pushed back from the stainless-steel table. He considered for a moment the sensation of entering his empty dark apartment at the end of his shift, before standing and heading toward the large orange door at the far end of the break room.

As he walked, he pulled the key from the retractable spool on his belt, twirling it through the air as he whistled tunelessly to himself.

He reached the door, pressed the key into the lock, jiggled it three times, turned it and entered. On the other side of the door was a long white hallway with six other doors lined up to his left and right, twelve in total. He pulled the orange door closed and toggled a series of complicated locking mechanisms, before patting it gently and moving to the first door to his right.

Bob continued to whistle as he tested the knob, ensuring there was no give. Satisfied, he moved on to the next, testing that knob in turn. At the last door along the right side, he tested the knob just as he had the others, but after releasing it, the door began to jump and shake violently.

Whistling still, Bob placed a gentle hand in the center of the door and, after a moment, the shaking ceased. He tested the knob again. It held firm. Finally, he took his hand away slowly and moved on to the next door.

Part 5: https://www.reddit.com/r/libraryofshadows/s/T4yybIa3b3

Day 1829: Friday.
“Here you go, Jamie.”
The receptionist hands me my discharge paper work, and my medications.

“Thank you.”
I exit the building, greeted by a warm summer day, and a Friday on top of that.

This is nice.

I take a seat on a nearby bench. Its cold surface contrasting the heat against my face.

A nurse is walking by me.
I raise my hand to get his attention.

“Uhm, excuse me sir.”
He turns to me.

“Hm? Oh, hello. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Maybe. I was just wondering—do you have a pen that I could use?”

“Of course, here you go.”

“Thank you.”

The muscles in my hand strain to remain still. I can’t even write half of my name before the tremors take over. The pen falls to the ground.

“Is it okay if I help you ma’am?”

I sigh, barely picking it back up.
“Please...”

He fills it out for me.

I let him know my ride will be here soon, he heads inside to grab a phone for me.

I look out at all of the buildings ahead. I can’t see more than 100 feet.

I miss the mountains.

“Here you go.”

I stare at the keypad. I want to try, but there’s no point.
“Can you dial it for me?”
.
.
.
“Hello? Yeah, it’s Jamie. Okay. On the bench near the back. No the- near the ambulances. Okay… love you—Bye.”

I hang up, thanking him. He wishes me well and heads back inside.

I zone out, staring at the concrete.
A pair of shoes appear in front of me.
I look up.

My eyes clamp shut.
“Agh, too close mom.”

“Oh shit- Jamie–I’m sorry I forgot I-“
She covers her mouth.

I calm myself.
“It’s okay–don’t worry I’m fine, I’m okay. Sit down.”

She hasn’t said anything to me yet. I can hear her hands rubbing together, trying to ease herself. We sit in silence for a minute. The wind blows, distant sounds of car horns echo through the streets.

I muster up my courage, and turn to look at her.
.
.
.
.
Shes changed so much…

She always dyed her hair black, but in my time here it’s fallen to a weary gray. Memories of blond decorate the silver. There can’t be more than a few hundred strands left.
Her eyes…
They’re so tired.
She didn’t bother dressing up, and I love that. I don’t want to be welcomed back, I just want to be home.

“It’s good to see you, mom.”

She wipes her eyes, it does nothing. Tears flow without end.
“It’s good to see you, Jam Jam.”

Like magnets–we collapse into each other.
Years of waiting… finally over.

“Mom—Can we go home now?”

“Yes baby, we-“
Her muffled voice vibrates my shoulder, I pull away, hyperventilating.

“Baby?! Oh my god no–FUCK! I’m so-“

The words scrape out of my throat.
“It’s okay, it’s okay–just give me a minute.”

Calm down, calm down, calm down.
Inhale, count to four, exhale.

“I’m fine.”

She whispers
“Okay baby w-“

I stop her, holding her hands.
“Mom. I’m okay—just be you.”

She nods, wiping her eyes.
“Let’s go home baby.”

The drive is fine. The endless expanse of city sucks, but it’s fine. She accidentally ran on some rumble strips on the highway. I start to have a panic attack, but it’s manageable.

We don’t go to the old house.

Her apartment is on the 2nd floor. On the rare occasion I go out without her, it won’t be too miserable to walk up or down 2 flights of stairs.

We enter and it’s plain. Lights are dimmed. The walls are a soft tan color, and the entire floor is carpeted. She doesn’t walk forward yet, she just waits for me to adjust to everything.

“We’re probably gonna have to share the bathroom jams.”

“That’s okay.”
I’m not looking at her.

I look to my sides, sizing up the apartment.
It’s not big at all.

There’s a television in the living room.
Opposite the TV is a large white sofa. I walk to it, slowly sit down, and put my hands in my lap. To my side is a photo taken just after I left. They wanted to go on vacation to try and cheer up a little.
I bring the picture to me, barely containing the tremors.

Mom interjects.
“Jamie—baby don’t look-“

“It’s okay.” I say with a whisper.
“I wanted to see him.”
I feel my eyes well up, but my heart remains still.

“3 years…” I say.
Mom isn’t looking at me anymore.

“I wish I would have came home, mom. I regret it every day. Even when learning to walk. It’s all I thought about.”

She doesn’t say anything.
She can’t.
Any release of air will explode with a storm of sadness and regret.
Right now, she’s turned away from me, hurried breaths escaping her mouth.

I probably shouldn’t talk. But I don’t think.
“I can’t remember anything… did he come and see me any?”

She collapses to her knees, hands stuck to her eyes.
“Yes baby… every day—both of us- we-“
She stops to control herself. I hear her take a deep breath in, and let it out.

She doesn’t say anything else. I feel the cushion next to me depress, and she lays her head on my shoulder. My eyes haven’t moved.

I set the photograph back down.
Hugging her softly.

I calmly pull away, just for a second. I need to ask her something.
She looks at me with red eyes and a quivering lip. The answer to my question’s right there, and we both know it.

“Mom?”
She holds my hands, giving me her full attention.

“Yes Jam Jam?” She says with a faint sob.

“Are you real?”

“Does it matter?”

“No.”

The woman named Cassandra spotted her walking alone again to her apartment as she hid in the shadow of the broken light bulb. Alone and vulnerable and with out so much as a care for the clicking of the heels Cassandra wore as she came out of the shadows to follow her. One toned leg scissoring after the other as her black dress blended in with the shadows. Though not like camouflage as her cutouts were visible from her ample chest to her slightly muscular back to her upper thighs. Her dark blue eyes staring straight ahead as the woman let the complex door shut behind her and Cassandra caught it in time to stop the door from slamming close. That did catch the sandy blonde haired woman's attention as she stopped midstep up the stairs and turned to look back at Cassandra.

The beautiful woman's eyes widened a little at the surprising sight of someone looking like they were going to attend a Supreme ball instead of-

"You're not supposed to be here," the woman's voice laden with abuse from cigarettes spoke quietly but assertively.

Cassandra smiled affably as stuck her foot in the door and she took her hand from behind her back to reveal a white cased cellphone with the letter S emblazoned on the case.

The woman tapped her pockets and then checked in her purse before sighing irritable," Damn it,"
Then her face brightened as she looked back at the mysterious woman with her foot in the door waiting patiently without word and a smile that started to surprisingly warm up to the woman who lost her phone.

"Thank you, miss. I've been so tired lately it's hard to think clearly at all," the sandy blonde haired woman stepped calmly and surely down the stairs before stopping within a foot of the well dressed woman.

"My love," the woman started to speak.

And to the sandy blonde haired woman she thought those two words were heart stopping and in a literal sense as her heart skipped a beat for some reason. A warmth quickly shot throughout her sternum at the cadence as she continued but she noticed the woman caught that little heart flutter as her eyes crinkled in mirth.

"Being tired is nothing to be ashamed of," the well dressed woman eased as she still held the phone.

The sandy blonde haired woman's olive green eyes relaxed at that and she stared into the dark blue eyes of the well dressed woman openly before catching herself with a shake of her head. Something clicked in that stare and she wasn't sure what it was as she felt the sternum heat flash again.

"Oh God I am ashamed. Giving you this much trouble to track me down to return my phone,"  the sandy blonde haired woman bit her lip in embarrassment as she looked down in bashfulness for a moment before meeting that dark blue gaze.

"You look like you're on your way to a Supreme ball or something miss...,"

"Cassandra Cosette," the well dressed woman dared to take the sandy blonde's hand and put her phone in it before turning it over and softly kissing the back of her hand.

There was a dark lipstick mark left behind as Cassandra looked back up at her and asked in a soft voice.

"You don't mind?"

The cadence. The way she disarmed with her looks. The elegance. It was working it's way into the sandy blonde as she looked at the lipstick mark with her lips burning as though Cassandra? Cassandra kissed her there instead.

"I guess you do," Cassandra winked with a knowing smile.

"I don't know what to s-say," the sandy blonde stuttered, trying to hide the blush in her cheeks as she slightly turned her head away.

It was working it's way into her alright.

"You can start with a name...unless you would rather go by your good looks instead Sandy,"

"Shut up!" The woman playfully teased as she put her hands on the woman's collarbone to push her away but instead held her hands there for a moment before realizing again.

She immediately took her hands away and brought a hand to her brow as she quietly muttered to herself, "God I'm a mess,"

"A beautiful mess," the woman softly laughed.

"That's it Cassie, you're getting punished for being so charming," the sandy blonde crossed her arms meaning serious business.

Cassie feigned horror as she gasped in a faux manner.

"Whatever can that be, my love?!"

"Parking your ass on my couch as I bore you to death with small talk, hmph!" The sandy blonde cutely added the last part.

"Oh no! Actually getting to know you! Such a medieval crime!" Cassandra touched the back of her hand against her temple in a swoon as she started to tilt backwards.

But the sandy blonde caught her with a "gotcha!"

"Damn! Small talk it is!" Cassandra lovingly laughed as she looked in the sandy blonde's eyes with a mirth she knew the blonde rarely saw, letting herself be held like that in the foyer openly because she didn't give a fuck who saw.

She gave a fuck the blonde couldn't help but laugh too at the mirth as she held Cassandra in her arms.

"Well damn, Miss elusive, I guess you just want to eye ball me," Cassandra teased as she softly rubbed the blonde's clothed shoulder affectionately.

The blonde stood back up and let go of her as she pocketed her cellphone in her purse.

"Hey, I was serious when I said I wanted to thank you for helping return my phone to me. It was in the Cafe wasn't it?"

Cassandra nodded softly and then she pressed a finger to the blonde's lips as she quietly said," Do you at least bestow the honor of a name to your fair rescuer?"

"It's Savanna. Sorry for-,"

"Stop apologizing. That's disgusting," Cassandra said suddenly serious and serious enough for Savanna to get the point.

"You're right,"  Savanna said as she thought about it again while having this moment to breath.

Savanna wondered what had gotten into her. What made her sternum flare like that, her lips burn like that, that sudden playfulness spring out from her. Especially from another woman. She had a boyfriend out there right now in the night working as construction just a few blocks from their apartment. And she wanted to wait to surprise him with a hug and some coffee when he got home.

But this. This was unexplainable but at the same time never felt so right. Never felt like she was a stranger to whatever frivolous attitude this woman had. And she liked it. Holy fuck Savanna liked it enough to invite her into her apartment.

God I'm so tired, Savanna quietly huffed to herself.

Cassandra huffed too.

"Stop being so cute damn it!" Savanna cried before beginning up the stairs in a hurry and laughing as she was chased by Cassandra Cosette.

But lucky for Cassandra it wasn't much of a chase as Savanna lived on the second floor and near the stairs as she laughed happily and bumped into Savanna as she hurriedly dug into her purse for her keys.

"Oh excuse me ma'am!"

"You're excused...into here candy ass," Savanna smirked before closing and locking her and Benjamin's apartment door close behind them.

"Golly gee wilikers there Sandy. Nice apartment,"

Savanna huffed again and simply said," Sit. I'll make us some coffee,"

Cassandra turned slightly to see the kitchen and the two mugs already there and then her dark blue eyes quickly moved to the portrait of Savanna and Benjamin on the stand near the couch as she gracefully sat and picked up the portrait to look at them together.

She quietly said," I do mean it when I said you have a nice apartment here. Near all the hottest spots like the Cafe and the Solaris. And plus it's the part of town you don't need to carry a gun in,"

"Thank you Cassandra. Benjamin was the one who picked it for us. He lived here long enough to know better. I'm still new to here,"

"Where are you from?" Cassandra put the portrait down.

Face down.

"This quiet little coastal town on the east coast. It's rather beautiful. Lovely actually. I'll show you some pictures on my phone...just wait,"

Cassandra slowly looked from the portrait to Savanna coming to her, and really noticed how well she looked with her breasts filling out her Grey shirt. Her thighs filling her blue leggings to a delicious camel toe. How well her figure was accentuated.

Cassandra softly said," Take your time my love,"

Savanna smiled of course. She couldn't help it as she mentally said fuck it and then grabbed her phone from her purse and came over to the couch and sitting right next to Cassandra as she plopped her legs over Cassandras.

Just friendly convivialness and nothing more Savanna thought as she leaned in with her phone to show her the pictures.

She did not notice the face down picture at all as she pointed out her hometown. She did notice that Cassandra was paying full attention with questions of her own.

Then came the question that made her die of embarrassment.

"Savanna are you always so hot and by hot I mean warm?"

She stiffened and then made a sour face as she said, "You should be glad for your personal heater warming you up from the cold outside,"

Cassandra grinned as she squeezed Savanna's thigh affably before they continued on with a much distracted Savanna.

They oohed and ahhed and laughed sweetly with a few teases thrown in.

And none of the playfulness, the convivialness Savanna was lying to herself with convinced her it was true. And that disturbed her and excited her greatly for a reason more profound than logic. What the fuck is happening to me, she thought as she finally took her legs away from Cassandra's lap. Or rather tried to as Cassandra held her thighs in place.

"Hey there this was fun-," Savanna started before Cassandra interrupted.

"I don't want the fun to end," Cassandra said in a low and sultry voice that immediately aroused Savanna.

Her face a full blush even her light make up couldn't conceal.

And then she did it. It was quick. Too quick. So she did it again and this time it was slower and wonderfully painfully so as she touched her lips against Cassandras. Cassandra let her for a momemt. Let her choose before pushing her against the couch and laying against her as she kissed Savanna back hungrily. Savanna moaned excitedly as she wrapped her thick thighs around Cassandras hips and pulled her against her.

I'll kiss your lips with an aching tooth in my mouth
I'll place my freshly pulled tooth on your ring
I'll mix Apranax in your drink
so that you think
your toothache is gone because you met me
I'll describe the paint color I want for our bedroom
to the ironmonger as tooth yellow.

I'm fifty-one years old, and this is the only poem I've ever written, which I wrote ten years ago.

I don't really like writing poetry, because I'm not good at it. I especially enjoy the sound of poems with rhyming lines; they sound like music to my ears. But I've tried a few times and failed miserably. I couldn't write a good poem. I'd written this poem for my dentist, who knew I was a writer and with whom I had a good relationship. I mean, I hadn't written the poem for her. I'd simply wanted to write a poem about teeth.

She was a very beautiful woman. I had no feelings for her, but she'd misunderstood the poem I'd written and thought I was making a move on her. She'd given me a pretty harsh telling-off. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get her to understand that the poem wasn't written for anyone in particular, and that it hadn't been inspired by any feelings I had for someone.

Anyway, my publisher was telling me that sales of my latest novel were terrible. He kept calling me and bringing me down.

“Maybe you should stop writing horror novels and start writing detective fiction instead. You know me, even two sentences from you are enough to move me. I can't sleep at night. But this latest novel of yours was an absolute fiasco. I seriously regret publishing it.”

I was tired of his calls and him repeating the same things in different ways for two months. He was almost going to ask me to compensate him for his losses. He wanted me to write and finish something else as soon as possible and make up for the losses I'd caused him. He didn't want to wait.

But I'd been overcome by the fear of not being able to write well. I'd been deeply affected by public opinion. Albert, the successful writer of many years, can no longer write... The story's opening is too rushed... The ending doesn't come together properly... Even an elementary school kid could come up with these descriptions... We're sick of ghosts that appear at night... And so on.

If he called today, I wasn't going to answer. He called every other day to ask, “Have you started the new book yet?” Whenever I said no, it was the same old stuff, the same complaints. For the past month, I'd been sitting down at my computer almost every day, but nothing came of it.

As I sat at my computer, waiting for something to come to mind, my phone rang, of course. I didn't even need to check who was calling. I tensely raised my hand to my head and began running my fingers through my hair. I looked around the objects in my room, as if I might find inspiration in one of them. The bed, the couch, an oil painting my sister had made... Nothing came of it. I pinched a lock of my hair between my fingers and pulled. I looked at my hand. There was a clump of hair between my index and middle fingers. I hadn't realized I was losing so much hair.

It was as if an electric current had passed through my head. Then, in one go, I wrote the following:

''In my 1+1 apartment on the second floor
I was drinking Americano by the balcony door
Suddenly I saw a wig falling down below
with bangs and in the color of dark yellow

I thought one of the neighbors upstairs must have dropped it while leaning over the balcony.
I lunged for it on instinct, trying to catch it. And I caught it, everything happened so quickly.

And the wig was now in my hands
I even caught it by the bangs

I waited for a while,
still in the position to catch it,
holding the wig in my hand,
waiting for someone to call.
But there was no sound at all.

Considering the possibilities,
I thought I should look up first.
But someone could have been down there,
waiting for the wig to fall.

While I was looking around upstairs,
someone called out from below:
“Throw it down already.
What are you looking at like an idiot?”
She was tall like a door
She was as tall as a first floor
I downed my Americano
And calmly threw the wig toward her
She jumped and
caught the wig with her head
and suddenly disappeared.''

I had no idea how it had happened. It was as if I hadn't been the one who wrote it. It was frightening. The way the sentences came to me, the way they lined up in my mind—I had never experienced anything like it. Everything was finished in one go, without any planning whatsoever.

My publisher called. I sent him to voicemail. I read the poem from beginning to end. It was as if I were reading it for the first time, as if I were discovering the poem all over again. It wasn't the kind of poem I could have written anyway, not in terms of its subject matter. I wouldn't describe ghosts or entities like this; I would leave them shrouded in mystery. In this poem, the ghost was very concrete.

My publisher called again. I answered this time. I was going to tell him I had an idea or something. I was such an idiot, always telling him the truth: inspiration wasn't coming, I couldn't write, my mind felt frozen, and so on. I picked up the phone, planning to ask him to give me a month and tell him I'd deliver a novel of at least two hundred pages.

“So, Albert, any progress? How many pages have you written?”

Suddenly, my mouth had locked up. I couldn't speak. The words I wanted to say were only passing through my mind; they wouldn't come out. All I could manage were sounds like “mmmh.”

“Albert? Hello?”

I started reciting the poem I'd just written. I read it from beginning to end. My mouth wasn't under my brain's control.

“What is this? What’s going on?”

''Hello?''

''Albert, what's going on?''

I could speak again now. It would have been ridiculous to say that something had taken control of my mouth and fingers. I had to say something, but I was too frightened to think. My mind was in turmoil. I hung up.

My publisher called again. I don’t remember that moment very clearly, but I mumbled something along these lines.

“What was that thing you were telling me about? So now you’re hanging up on me, too. Is this what we’ve come to, Albert? After all these years of working togeth—”

“It’s me, John. Did you like my poem? Jason, I was going to ca— If you want, I can write a few more poems like this... Jason, I can’t spea—I could even write five hundred poems in the same style, if you like. Do you publish po— Jason, my mouth is going numb. I don’t feel well. I’ll call you back in a bi— Listen, I wrote this three hundred years ago.”

I hung up. I jumped to my feet. I licked and bit my lips. I took a deep breath, and as I exhaled, the following words spilled out of my mouth:

''He figured out how to pass through
Walls within a year or two
But he still can't pass through wood
The ghost in my lover's neighborhood.''

My publisher kept calling insistently. His calls felt like a voice reminding me of my connection to this world. I'd set my phone's ringtone to Radiohead's “Weird Fishes.” The song played throughout each call. I couldn't move; my body was locked up, but hearing the song comforted me. When the song ended, I'd try to take a step, but I couldn't. I'd try to speak, but I couldn't move my mouth. It was as if I'd had a stroke. Then the song would start again. Yes, I'd tell myself, “I'm still alive. The world still makes sense.”

The song had stopped playing, too. My connection to the world had been severed.

I came to my senses again for a brief moment. I sat down at my computer. The screen was covered in dust. I noticed a cloth right next to the monitor. I couldn't remember when I'd put it there. I wiped the monitor clean. The poem looked better now.

I think you've realized that I wasn't the one writing all this story.

It was the summer I had just turned ten that I saw a mysterious object shaped like a saucer cross the hot savanna sky. It was on the path that led straight to the swamp where my cattle usually grazed.  I had gone looking for them.

The object flew above the water, its grey metal gleaming in the blinding sun then its color changed, thinned, and turned almost see-through, as if blending into the air itself. It then swooshed suddenly back in the direction it had come. No sooner had I started running for it that it was gone. I stood dumbfounded, my whip still in hand. I then continued towards the nearby balancing boulders and rested there, contemplating what I had witnessed. I was certain it was no plane, for planes, as I had seen, passed through the sky in a straight line. Then I remembered a word my sister had taught me—camouflage. It was the same word my brother used for his favorite patterned pants, though there was no resemblance between those clothes and this metallic shape. But that was exactly what it had done: hidden in plain sight. I chuckled under my breath.

With the sun sinking and no cattle in sight, I trudged home to my mother’s disappointment. She slapped me twice in anger. I did not shudder in pain. I was too busy thinking of the object to feel the pain of her slaps. That night my dreams were clouded by the object's shadow, and the shadow had huge teeth that threatened to rip me apart.

Monday found me unable to sit still with the weight of my secret. So, when the bell clanged for break, I rushed outside with my two friends, Beka, who was bigger than his age, and Tino, who was thin and tiny and always came to school with his hair uncombed.

After kicking and dribbling our ball, the three of us sat under a tree in the school yard to savor our meals.

"Did you see a flying object in the sky on Sunday?" I asked. "It flew so quickly I didn't blink much and it was gone. You know the place close to those balancing rocks, with the dried-up swamp? It was there that I saw it."

They gasped.

"What did it look like?" asked Beka, chewing his sweet potatoes.

"Can't really say."

"How big was it from where you were?"

"Hard to tell. I didn't have time to see that."

"So how do you know you saw it?" said Tino, eating his fried sunflower seeds.

"I know I saw it. It did this." I stood up, wove my hands in the air, and did a little spin. Beka stared, eyes wide, but Tino looked unconvinced.

"Maybe it was air moving. Air moves like that sometimes."

"Maybe there were witches," Beka said. "You know they like to travel like that. At least that is what I heard."

"I heard they travel at night on the backs of hyenas," I added, "or in reed baskets."

"Well, how do you know? It's hearsay anyway. No one has actually seen a witch fly. If they are to fly they ought to use animals or mats, not any complicated contraptions."

"Better to change into an owl or an insect than to complicate things," Beka said.

"What insect would you change into?"

"A fly." He smiled.

"That sounds horrible."

The bell clanged again and we ran for the toilets, still arguing, and I daydreamed through the afternoon of the object. Had I actually seen it? Did it carry people? Where was it going at such a speed? What was the purpose of visiting my village?

A week passed and I was still obsessed. My cattle still did not come back, and neither did the Mambo’s bull, nor four beasts from the Chief’s herd.

At the cattle dip the adults had begun to talk in the low, hushed voices they use for bad news. There were suspicions that cattle thieves were loose in the area. As for me, I stared occasionally at the sky for a glimpse of the object, without success. A fortnight passed and the village had stopped asking about the cattle. I too had almost buried the incident when I caught sight of the object again.

I had fallen asleep on top of one of the boulders when a piercing light woke me. Above the swamp, the object hung. Heart pounding like a drum, I climbed down and ran toward the water.  Spotting a nearby thicket, I crawled into the tangled foliage, and watched as the earth beneath the swamp opened, exposing a huge tunnel that descended into the ground. The object lowered close to the opening, and out came the cattle, moving down the ramp with stubborn slowness. Ours led the way. I recognized her by the patch over her eye that looked like a spill of milk. Behind her followed the rest: the Nkomo's' bull with his curved horns, and beasts I recognized from the dip tank. They all walked down into the ground as if it were a kraal.

Out of the door stepped four tiny grey creatures. Of the four, three had small, egg-shaped heads, but the fourth one had a head as large as a watermelon. On each of their faces sat small piercing black eyes. The eyes and mouth looked like those of a stingray fish. The big-headed one gestured with a quick flick of its three-fingered hand to the other three and they moved into the veld and standing in a row they casually urinated. Once done, they all climbed back inside. The tunnel closed and the sky reclaimed its color, and the object vanished.

I ran all the way home, falling in the dark as thorny bushes caught my clothes. With bruised knees and scraped elbows, I finally collapsed at the open door of our hut. When I eventually opened my eyes, I found myself lying on a mat in the kitchen, my mother hovering above me. Her eyes carried traces of worry. Beside me, my sister and my brother Musa knelt, clasping my hands.

"Where were you? This is why I say you must come home before sunset." Her voice was both agitated and concerned. "Where did all these bruises come from?"
She took my face in her hands and pressed at the gash on my forehead. I winced as blood rushed out, which she quickly wiped with a towel. My two siblings sat watching silently.
I tried to speak, but no word came out. Finally, I raised myself up painfully and in the presence of my family, I narrated all that I had seen. My mother listened, the towel still in her hand then when I had finished, she said,

"You fell. That is all this is. Don’t go about telling people this story for they will think you have gone mad." My brother said nothing. My sister was the only one who asked a question.

"Did you see the brand?" she said.

I said yes.

She did not say anything else, and that was worse than if she had called me a liar. I had seen what took them, and I knew my mother was wrong.

Many people say Disney is a shady company for many reasons, but not everyone truly knows what's going on with them. Some people say the tunnels hide something; some say there used to be a tropical resort; some even say Disney kills.

Disney World was my favorite place to go to growing up; I always begged my parents to let me go. This lasted for lots of years until I got to be a security guard at the one nearest to my hometown. It was fun, sure; I got to see the park's ins and outs, and I got to talk to the cast members about the place. They said it was really fun to make kids happy; I bet I'd agree if I were them. Though Disneyland and Disney World were always... a bit mysterious, people told me that some abnormal things went on behind the scenes, like all the lights flickering before going off as the parks closed.

Many people said that they felt off about the mascot suits. I mean, yeah, they're a little uncanny, but that shouldn't mean anything too weird, right? The Disney World I worked at in specific had lots of mysterious things going on, like people saying there's an odor in the back room, or the sudden appearance of mice or dust; just in general, a lot of things were getting into a bad condition. People said they'd hear voices or sounds that didn't belong, and suddenly see notes where they work. It was a little paranormal.

Three months after working there, I became a security guard for late nights. It was a little ominous, with the dark, clouded sky and the moon shining brightly onto the park. I'm willing to admit I was a little freaked out by it. I never expected, nor wanted to be a security guard at this time of day, but I had no choice. This is when those rumors started getting in my head, because I heard the noises and saw the lights flicker, but I just kept moving. I even got tasked with checking "Character Wardrobe B-7," which was something that hadn't existed or been listed on any official park blueprints.

When I got there, it looked ruined, dirty, filled with dust and cobwebs, and smelled of damp mold. It felt like it was abandoned by Disney, like something I shouldn't have found or been tasked to check. There were loads of abandoned, ruined, and old mascot costumes with decaying fabric; they felt rotted, and they had peeling, yellowed fabric around their gloves, with accessories falling off or completely detached and abandoned. The netting inside their mouths was tainted and crusted; you could feel the dust soaked into their fabric. I smelled the faint scent of damp fabric clinging to the racks. I didn't know what I was supposed to be checking there, but it was incredibly eerie.

Out of all the ruined suits, my flashlight's beam landed on a specific, old, abandoned, ruined version of the modern Mickey Mouse costume you see in parks today. However, it was weirdly off; its eyes were black, empty, and hollow—no sockets at all—and its smile was eerily large; it stretched bigger than it should have. The ends of its red, clinging, fabric pants seemed to be ripped off, with its white buttons nearly coming off; its yellow bowtie dirty, damp, and swaying to one side. Its white gloves, yellowed and covered in dust and grime, had one black button missing from each glove. Its yellow shoes' soles were nearly falling off; the shoes were damp, oddly wet, and dripping.

The lights suddenly flickered violently as I tried to see what was going on here; they slammed off, leaving me in pitch-black darkness with just my flashlight. I looked around for a breaker or something, but I couldn't find anything; eventually, the lights turned back on, but I was terrified to see what I found. That same Mickey Mouse costume I was staring at had suddenly disappeared as soon as the lights went off; I had no idea where it went. I looked at the other costumes: Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Daisy, Pluto, Clarabelle. But none of the others had moved.

I didn't leave the Wardrobe to check yet. I looked around and found a hidden room with a note that read, "Disney Kills," written in red ink. I was a little freaked out by this, but I just saw it as a little prank someone might've done to scare me. I moved on, but before I left, I picked up the note and put it in my pocket; who knows? It might've been useful, so I left the Wardrobe and the abandoned costumes behind to search for the missing Mickey.

As I left, I walked around, searching buildings, back rooms, bins, trees, ANYTHING to find that costume. But eventually I shone my flashlight onto the ground ahead of me, and I saw a trail of wet, dirty footprints leading away into the shadows. The same damp, oddly wet, and dripping footprints the costume had. I followed the trail and heard faint, echoing sounds in the distance: a distorted Mickey Mouse laugh and a child's quiet giggle coming from a dark, restricted area of the park.

I followed the trail and the sound around the corner and spotted the empty-eyed Mickey Costume alive, standing up and moving, standing under a flickering streetlamp, holding a small child's hand and slowly leading them toward a pitch-black forest far away from the park. I had to get the child away from that... THING.

I ran towards them, the costume's back was turned towards me. "HEY," I said, "DROP THE KID!"

The only thing that happened was the costume's head snapping backwards to look at me. It was disgusting; I hated seeing a costume do that. Its smile stretched wider as it talked; the costume opened its crusted, mesh-lined mouth, and the only thing playing was a loop of vintage cartoon audio, playing "Hiya, pal!" over and over as it stared at me. I pulled out the note because I get it now: "Disney Kills." They use this thing to lure children to their deaths.

"KID, GO, RUN! THAT'S NOT MICKEY!" I say to the kid as I try to run and stop it, but the kid doesn't run; it tries to hug that thing, but the result is Mickey snapping the kid's neck. I was absolutely horrified; I couldn't save the kid in time. The Mickey Costume finally turned its whole body towards me.

I turned around and RAN for my life as the distorted "Hiya, pal!" echoed through the dark forest behind me. It was chasing me at high speed, faster than me, so I went and hid before it could see me hide. When it went away, I sprinted out of there and made it to my car door just in time for me to get inside, drive off, and escape, just as the Mickey started slowly walking towards my car and where I had escaped.

I eventually quit my job and got another job as a game developer, happily living my dream career, while still thinking about THAT incident, that day, the day I quit and how I couldn't save that child. I put up the note, "Disney Kills," in a frame on a shelf in my room. Don't ever ignore a warning when it's right in front of you, or something terrible will happen.

Leathernecks vs Monsters: Observe and Report, (Episode 1)
Seattle, Victoria, and Vladivostok, December 1918 to January 1919

The sleet came off Elliott Bay sideways, and half the faces on Railroad Avenue were masked by squares of white gauze. Gunnery Sergeant Nathaniel Boone Adams stood under the clock tower at the Colman Dock with his collar up and his own mask hooked over one ear. The city had lifted its mask order in November, when the Armistice came, half the city had kept wearing them anyway, because the dying had not stopped. Adams had watched the influenza go through a troopship at Brest in October. He wore his on one ear, as a courtesy.

Beside him Sergeant Olaf Johansson chewed tobacco behind his mask. There was a brown stain on the gauze the size of a silver dollar.

"That's a disgrace to the uniform," Adams said.
"I'm not in uniform, Gunny."
"Disgrace to the mask, then."

Johansson had a trombone case standing between his boots. There was no trombone in it. The Office had shipped the gun in it from New York, crated on the eleventh of November for a war that ended the same morning.

The Victoria express boat had docked at nine. Her passengers had come down the gangway in their masks, and none of them was a Czech officer with a dueling scar and a blue scarf, which was the description the Office had wired.

At a quarter past ten a man came down alone.

Blue scarf. No mask. He walked with one hand inside his coat. He looked back at the boat, then scanned the crowd. Two men were pushing through the crowd, bowler hats, good overcoats, gauze over their faces. They moved like sharks circling a school of tuna, they did not hurry.

"Them two," Johansson said.
"I see 'em."

The Czech saw them too. He turned north along the waterfront at a walk that wanted to be a run, past the shuttered fish counters and the freight sheds, and the bowlers followed him, and Adams and Johansson followed the bowlers.

The Czech took the market stairs two at a time. Up top the stalls were closing under the gas lamps. A Japanese farmer was stacking cabbages. A boy was hosing fish scales off the planks, and the water was turning to glaze where it ran. The Czech went through it and kept his feet. The first bowler went through it without once looking down.

Adams slipped. He came up with fish scales on one knee and the .45 in his hand, a woman in a gauze mask shouting at him to fetch a policeman.

"We are the police, ma'am," Johansson told her, which was not true, and ran on.

The Czech went into the packing house at the north end, where the fish went onto ice. A door banged. Another.

Inside it was colder than the street. Ice stood in blocks in the sawdust, salmon lay across the blocks in rows with their eyes turned up. One electric bulb hung from a cord. The Czech had his back to the far wall and a revolver out, the first bowler was walking toward him across the sawdust with his hands at his sides.

The Czech shot him twice in the chest.

The bowler staggered, then kept stalking forward.

Adams fired from the doorway. The round took the man high in the back and spun him half around. He looked at Adams over the top of his mask with perfectly calm icy blue eyes. Despite the cold of the ice house he gave off no breath mist.

He reached up and pulled the mask down.

A young face. Clean-shaven. Blue at the lips. It was cold enough in the packing house that Adams's breath hung in front of him in a cloud, and Johansson's, and the Czech's, three clouds under one bulb.

The young man opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it.

Johansson had the Tommy gun out from the trombone case. The drum magazine held an alternating mix of Dr. Barclay's Manchurian Special rounds and copper jacketed slugs. He fired from the hip at six yards.

The five round burst took the man across the chest and the magnesium-silver nitrate of the Manchurian Specials caught. For most of a second the man was a lit up like a Chinese lantern. They saw his ribs and spine through the overcoat. Then the light went out of him and he folded into the sawdust with smoke coming off his collar. There was a smell of hot metal, burnt flesh, and scorched wool, and under it something older and colder, the ozone smell of old stagnant sea water.

Footfalls behind them. Johansson turned whipping the gun around. The second bowler stood in the doorway behind them. He fired again, but his boots slipped on the icy concrete floor. The rounds stitched the wall and shattered block ice, but missed the man.

Johansson ran after him down the stairs and out along the pier in the sleet. The bowler hat never looked back. At the end of the pier he leapt into Elliott Bay without breaking stride. The black water closed over the bowler hat, and that was all.

They stood at the edge breathing heavy, ears ringing from the Tommy gun fire, with their breath going white.

"Water that cold," Johansson said, "a man comes up hollering."

He waited.

Nothing.

When he got back to the packing house he saw Adams crouched over the Czech who was sitting in sawdust against the wall his shirt open. He had not been shot, he had been touched. A black frost bitten hand print was burned on his chest. His face had gone the white of the ice blocks, and there was frost in his eyebrows and in the stubble along his jaw. Adams was talking to him, trying o keep him lucid. The man's eyes were wet, and the wet had frozen in their corners into two small beads.

It was forty degrees in the street, thirty in the ice house it wasn’t cold enough for this.

"Captain Novak?"

”Dah, yes,” his voice was strained, his veins and arteries were turning to ice “Don’t trust Whites, get to Dragonov, he will help... You must stop the madness…Vektor.”

The Czech took Adams's gloved hand. His grip was strong and very cold. He pressed something flat into Adams's palm and closed Adams's fingers over it. He could not speak anymore. When he opened his mouth Adams saw rime on his tongue.

His breath came out in a small cloud. Then a smaller one. Then it did not come out.

Adams opened his hand. It was a stiff yellowed card the size of a playing card, punched through in rows of small square holes.

"What's that? Looks like a player piano sheet." Johansson said.
"Don’t know, but nothing I’d like to dance to."

They came out onto Pike Street into the sleet. On the far corner a man in a logger's coat stood on a crate under a streetlamp, bareheaded and unmasked, addressing six other men who were unmasked too. A Wobbly, Industrial Workers of the World, unionist radicals and not people Adam’s had time to deal with.

"There!" he shouted, and pointed. "There's your capitalist police, fellow workers! Look at them!"

"We're Marines," Adams said.

The Wobbly thought about it. Saw the barrel of Johansson’s Tommy gun protruding from under his great coat. Thought better of pressing his luck.

"That's worse," he said. “You soldier boys best git, you ain’t wanted here.”

#

The Butler Hotel had kept the best bar in Seattle until the state went dry in 1916, and it had kept the mirrors afterward, out of hope. Wang Che had taken the private dining room on the second floor in the name of N. B. Adams, Incorporated. When Adams came in the next evening he was pouring Canadian rye out of a blue willow teapot.

"You are late," Wang Che said. "Also you owe for the teapot."
"I don't own a teapot."

"The corporation owns it." He slid a paper across the cloth. It was a bill, made out to N. B. Adams, Incorporated, San Francisco, and it listed one teapot, rye, Canadian, cups, six, and a last line Adams could not read.

"What's that one?"
"Discretion."

Wang Che, the smuggler and Gunn runner turned entrepreneur, had grown prosperous in San Francisco and wore it across his waistcoat in a gold chain. He owned half a block of Chinatown in Adams's name. 

The rest of the team came in out of the sleet one at a time.

Johansson came first, and put the trombone case under the table and his boots on the trombone case. The bayonet crease along his jaw, from a night behind the Austrian lines in 1916, had gone white in the cold. It did that.

Talbot the Times Picayune Correspondent and reckless adventurer came in limping. He said it was the Marne. But it might have been a Paris taxi on the Boulevard Haussmann with Talbot drunk in the back and the driver drunk in the front.

Corporal Dunn sniffed then sipped his rye but could not smell it. He had smelled and tasted nothing since the gas at Belleau Wood. But he could still feel the burn of the whiskey, he nodded to Wang Che in appreciation of at least that feeling.

Corporal Sheehan sat with his left hand under the table and flexed it where he thought no one could see. Haiti 1915, and a run in with a voodoo priestess and her undead minions had left it numb from the wrist down. 

Private First Class Chavez held his cup with the three fingers Mesopotamia had left him and drank slowly.

Private First Class Smith, who was not actually named Smith, sat with his back to the wall. 

Private First Class Hunt sat beside him writing a letter to a girl in Emporia, Kansas. Adams knew about the girl. Everybody did. She had died of the influenza in October. Hunt wrote to her anyway, every night, and folded the letters into his breast pocket, and nobody said a word about it.

Miss Thorpe, the British Agent, came in off the Canadian train in black wool. She had worn black since the autumn of 1915, since Loos, where her brother had gone over the top into the gas and the wire and not come back. She kissed Adams on the cheek. It surprised him. From her face, it surprised her more.

Lieutenant Colonel Alaric Quarterburn, who had been sitting quietly in the back, stood when she came in. He did it with his left hand on the back of the chair. Thorpe looked at the right-hand pocket of his coat, and then at his face, and sat down without a word.

Ms. Bridgette ‘Cherry’ Muldoon came last and loudest, a rifle case over one shoulder and a grudge over the other. The grudge was Adams. He owed her four dollars from a wager in Port-au-Prince.

"You want it now?" Adams said.
"I want it with interest."
"Put it on the bill," Adams told Wang Che.
"It is already on the bill," Wang Che said.
"When was the last time we all sat down together," Talbot said, "was it East Africa Dar. Es Salaam?"
"It was the Rufiji," Muldoon said. "Pretorius ate a crocodile to win a bet off you."
“You ate a crocodile?” Asked Wang Che.
"It was a small croc."
"It was a big bet," Johansson said, the group laughed then remembered, Moore somberly, “ Right before we lost Clark to those Hun zombies,” and that was the last anybody said of Africa.

At the foot of the table there was a chair nobody took and a cup in front of it. Adams filled the cup from the teapot and set the teapot down, and for a while nobody said anything at all. Barclay would have lectured them about their livers. He would have been right.

The colonel had been there before any of them. He sat at the head of the table with his back to the wall and the window where he could see it, lean, gray at the temples, in a civilian tweed suit that did not make him look civilian. He kept his right hand in the pocket of his coat. Adams watched the pocket all evening. The hand did not come out.

Quarterburn stood.

"Upstairs," he said. "If you please."
#

Novak's coat lay across the bed in Quarterburn's room with the lining slit along with the punch card. The sheet that had come out of it was onionskin, covered on both sides in groups of five letters. Behind it, sewn flat, had been half a ruble note, torn corner to corner.

"Czech Legion field cipher," Thorpe said. "The Office gave me the tables in November. They were very pleased with themselves."
"The words under it are Russian," Wang Che said. "Bad Russian. Just my kind."
"The words under it are whatever the tables say they are."
"The tables are wrong."
"The tables are from the finest British code breakers, Mr. Che."
"Yes," Wang Che said. "That is what I am saying."

Forty minutes, arguing the whole way, she and Che worked the cypher. When they were done Thorpe read it out.

"The last engine of Bakanov is running. The station is called Vektor, above the headwaters of the Suchan. Those who pay for it sit inside the White supply commission at Vladivostok. They have decided that if Russia will not be theirs, it will belong to no one. Our people cannot reach it. Yours must. Contact at the Blessing of the Waters. She will carry the other half."

"Blessing of the what?" Hunt said.

"The Russians cut a cross into a frozen harbor on the nineteenth of January," Quarterburn said. "A priest blesses the water. Then the devout go into it."

"On purpose?" Adams said.
"On purpose."
"And they call us heathens."

Thorpe turned her attention to the punched card. She held it over under the lamp and looked through the holes at the light.

"Jacquard," she said. "A loom card. Except that it is not for a loom, it is for a Bakanov-Baggage device. I’d thought we had gotten them all."

She set it down squared to the edge of the table, and Adams saw her hand stop over it a moment before she took the hand away.

Dunn had the wooden box open on the washstand. Barclay had built it in 1916 out of a naval direction finder, a telephone headset, and parts nobody had asked him about, and since Barclay nobody had been able to make it do anything. The needle lay dead on its pin.

Dunn set the card beside the box.

The needle stirred. It swung a quarter inch, and came back, and swung again, and from the headset lying on the washstand there came a small dry tick. Then another. Evenly spaced.

The radiator knocked. On Second Avenue a streetcar went by with its bell going. Nobody in the room said anything for some time.

"Well, call me a rooster," Adams said. "Doc's box likes it."

He had sipped his tea, nodding appreciatively.

Quarterburn stood at the window with his back to them. He looked around the room “The Turks built one for him and we closed it. The Austrians built one and we closed that. This is his last, and it is his own. If it opens, what comes through will not stop at Siberia." He turned from the window. "The war that ended last month will have been the dress rehearsal."

"Rehearsal," Adams said. "She-it, ain’t nobody ready for that show.”

"I will say this once," he said. "Bakanov must die, and his infernal machine with him,” he paused, his right hand a fist in his pocket, “at all cost.”

#

They took the night boat to Victoria on the twentieth, and in the morning Fort Street was full of Canadians soldiers who did not want to go to Russia.

The 259th Battalion was marching from the Willows Camp to the Outer Wharf, and halfway down the hill a platoon at the rear of the column sat down in the road and would not get up. French Canadians, conscripts, most of them boys. They had been told in November the war was over, and they had believed it. An officer shouted. Another fired his revolver into the air. The rest of the battalion was ordered to take off its belts and drive the sitting men back into the column, and it did, and the sound carried up the street between the shops.

The team stood on the curb with its baggage.

A Canadian captain came past them with his revolver still in his hand. He looked at the trombone case, and at Muldoon's rifle, and at Wang Che.

"Who the hell are you people?"

"Detail #7 International Military Observers," Quarterburn said handing the Captain his credentials holding the Canadian Governor's seal, and speaking in his strong but patient voice “and that's who the hell are you, Colonel.”

The captain looked back at his battalion going down the hill with its own bayonets at its back. 

"Observers,” he looked over the mixed group, noted the Marines uniforms and the womens’ militarized and rugged mufti. “Well, sir,…begging the Colonel’s pardon, I hope you’re observing goes a fat site better than this load out." he said. “I’ll have my Sergeant show you to your breathing but, you’ll have to carry your own kit aboard, this lot would probably throw it in the drink.” 

The Teesta sailed on the twenty-second with a dozen men in irons in her hold. They sang songs of protest in French for three days and then stopped. Off the Kuriles the rigging iced until the crew went aloft with mallets. 

#

The Golden Horn was frozen from shore to shore. An icebreaker had ground a black lane through it, and the Teesta came up the lane on the twelfth of January past the gray bulk of the Brooklyn, locked in the ice at her mooring, her Marines stamping on the quarterdeck in fur hats. On the hills behind the city, under the snow, lay more than a billion dollars of Allied stores bought for a Russian Imperial army that no longer existed: shells, wire, rails, boots, stacked in warehouses of their own and rows of unused motor trucks rusting in fenced cantonments.

Every flag the Entente owned hung over the harbor. There were Czech sentries on the station platform in patched greatcoats, Japanese patrols in pairs on every corner, Canadian military police on the quay, French colonial infantry from Tonkin stamping in the snow in kit cut for the tropics, and an Italian armored train breathing steam in the yards. Prices came in yen and dollars and the rubles of three governments, some still in uncut sheets.

At American headquarters a staff captain with a head cold explained General Graves's instructions. The United States took no side in Russia. The United States guarded railways and stores. The United States did not fight Bolsheviks or Cossacks or anyone else if it could help it.

"And as far as this headquarters is concerned," the captain said, "you are not here."

"Assure the General, we will be discreet, it is our byword." Quarterburn said.

The captain wrote that down and then crossed it out.

#

The White Russian stores commission sat in a requisitioned bank on the Svetlanskaya. Colonel Prince Vsevolod Obolov received them in an office with no fire in it, behind a desk the size of a coffin. He did not rise. He smoked the whole time, each cigarette lit from the last, and the smoke hung in front of his face in the cold, and Adams, watching his own breath fog the air, could not have said where the Prince's breath ended and the smoke began.

"The motor trucks," the Prince said. His English was Oxford. "The motor trucks are the property of the Russian Imperial Army."

"Then the Russian Imperial Army is no more, it will not mind," Wang Che said.

The Prince regarded him for a long moment through the smoke.
"No trucks," he said.
#

At four o'clock that afternoon, in Quarterburn's room at the Hotel Versailles, someone knocked twice, waited, and knocked twice again.

Major Sir Alistair Higgins came in with a spirit stove under his one arm and a kettle hanging from his little finger. His left sleeve was pinned to the shoulder with a gold safety pin. He set the stove on the writing desk and lit it and put the kettle on before he said a word.

"Four o'clock," he said. "Hello, Alaric. Hello, Adams. You look terrible. Everyone does. It's the country."

Behind him came a small square Frenchman in a colonial greatcoat with a haversack on his shoulder. Sergeant Pierre LaFontain put his ear flat to the wall beside the door and stood there with his eyes shut for half a minute before he shook anyone's hand.

"Good wall," he said at last. "Nobody behind."

"The Hejaz," Muldoon said. "Romania. And now this."

"Now this," Higgins said. "The French lent him to me. They were very gracious about it. I believe they were relieved."

Pierre simply grinned and pulled route maps of the Suchan and the upper rivers, drawn by hand, the passes marked in red ink, from his rucksack. “But Mon Cher, Cherry, I bring gifts. 

In the street below the window a closed Packard Motorcar went by flying a White pennant. Higgins stopped with the kettle in his hand. He scratched at the pinned sleeve, slowly, where the arm had been, and watched the motorcar out of sight.

"Whose is that?"

"The Prince from the stores commission," Wang Che said. "The one who said no."

Higgins made the tea.

#

On the nineteenth, the Feast of the Theophany by the old calendar, the whole city went down onto the ice.

They had cut a cross into the harbor ice below the Admiralty quay, a cross the length of a whaleboat, and stacked the cut blocks at its head into an altar, and the water in the cross lay black and smoking in the cold. Priests in gold stood at the head of it. Behind them stood the city: merchants in beaver, soldiers of eight armies, Cossacks, Koreans, Chinese, women with children on their shoulders, thousands of people breathing out, and the breath of all of them rose together into a single white cloud and hung over the ice in the sun.

A knot of Japanese officers stood near the quay with their hands behind their backs. They watched the Americans more closely than they watched the priests.

Wang Che andd Adams stood on the edge of the broken ice, Wang Che had the  half ruble. He said a word in Cantonese that Adams knew. Adams looked up.

The old woman stood at the foot of the cross in a red shawl, with half a ruble note pinned to the shawl where anyone could see it. The two men began to work their way toward her through the crowd. Wang Che reached her. She pushed the half ruble into Wang Che's glove and said something in Russian. Then she went into the cross, red shawl and all, and the water closed over her. 

“Russians, they are crazy.”

Wang Che took them sideways along the frozen shore under the warehouses, through a door in a wall that had no business having a door in it, and down into Millionka.

The Chinese quarter went down into the hill under the city in cellars and passages dug for opium and gambling and kept for everything else. Two Chinese soldiers with rifles stood at the first turning. Wang Che said a sentence to them and put something into the nearer one's hand, and both soldiers turned around and studied the wall.

They went through an opium room full of men lying on shelves in the smoke. Not one of them looked up. Adams checked each one going past. Every one of them was breathing normally, as normally as anyone chasing the dragon.

In a room at the bottom of a stair, beside a brazier, Wang Che opened his fist.

"Tsemukhe road," he said. "Verst forty. That is what she said."
"That's all?"
"She also said we were late," Wang Che said. "I did not think that needed translating."

#

The stores of the White commission stood on the Churkin shore behind barbed wire, in sheds and in the open under tarpaulins and snow. Four Ford one-ton trucks stood in a row with canvas over their beds and the drifts to their hubs.

The gate had one padlock. The shed had three. LaFontain took heavy bolt cutters from his haversack, and said a name over each one and snapped them clean.

"Saint Barbara," he said to the first. "She is for the gunners. Saint Rita. She is for impossible things."

Talbot sat on the running board of the first truck with a pencil and a Russian form he had got from God knew where, and wrote out a requisition for four motor trucks in the name of the International Military Observervation Mission, United States Marine Corps, and signed it C. H. Lauchheimer, Brigadier General, in a hand Lauchheimer might have mistaken for his own.

"Needs a witness," Talbot said.

Higgins took the pencil in his one hand and signed beneath. "Witnessed," he said, "on behalf of His Majesty."

There was no alcohol for the radiators anywhere in the commission's stores. There was vodka. The commission had seized it in November from a Chinese bootlegger and stacked it in the same shed as the trucks. Forty-two bottles went into four radiators. Adams poured the last one himself.

"I want it wrote down," he said, "that I objected to this abuse of alcohol."
"So noted," Quarterburn said.

The trucks caught on the third try, and the fourth, and the exhaust came out of them in white clouds, and the radiators steamed, and the whole yard smelled of a Russian wedding.

#

They left the city by the Suchan road before midnight with the headlamps dark, and lit them past the last guard post. The road climbed. The snow drifted. In the lead truck Wang Che counted the verst posts aloud in Russian, and Higgins corrected his pronunciation, and Wang Che corrected Higgins.

At verst thirty-nine Private Dunn settled Barclay's box across his knees. The needle had swung hard to the northeast, and the ticking in the headset came very fast.
At verst forty the headlamps illuminated men. 

They stood across the road in a line from snowbank to snowbank, forty or fifty of them, in sheepskins and army greatcoats and fur hats, with their rifles up. Every one of them was breathing. Adams saw that first, from habit. Then he saw the rifles.

Somewhere in the dark beyond the line a gramophone was playing. Horns, climbing, and a drum beneath the horns. Muldoon, who had toured the capitals of Europe with a Wild West show before the war, said the name of it under her breath. Strauss.

A big voice rolled out of the dark in Russian, and then in bad English.

"Americans! Welcome to the Revolution!"

Fifty bolts went home together.

"Fire!"
###

You can see accompanying artwork, “field sketches” here: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldsEdgeDispatches/s/zY84BdJ64u 

“I had a nice time tonight, Soo,” her date said, standing from the candlelit table and dabbing his thin lips with a napkin. His voice carried the hint of a country dialect she was not wholly familiar with, and the distance between them had widened all night, vast as the craters in the moon hanging high above the city.
 
When she met his gaze, she smiled—possibly the only sincere thing she had done all night. Everything, down to the way she chewed, had been subject to scrutiny in her mind. She did not want to be the reason there was no second date, even if blaming him for it would have been easier. Even if he was honestly, practically perfect.
 
The part of the date she dreaded most was the drive home. Her mother had told her it might help to go out, to spend one night away from funeral calls and quiet rooms, but now Min-Soo only knew she would sit in silence, looking out the window as the rain blurred the passing red lights of cars heading to better places.
 
The restaurant’s greeter bowed as they passed, and her date returned the gesture twice as deeply.
 
At some point, the downpour that had served as the backdrop to their dinner had settled into a steady roar. Her date raised his coat over her head, and she could only offer him a sheepish bow in thanks. “How nice of you,” she said, giving him another small, awkward smile.
 
They hurried toward his car, parked at the curb, the jacket doing surprisingly little beyond the kindness of the gesture. When he left her side to fumble with the keys, she found herself missing the warmth he created. Yet when her door opened and she saw him waiting for her to climb in, she could not move. Something had caught her eye. Rain struck her exposed arms and roared in her ears as it hammered the pavement, overloading her senses.
 
Her arms fell away from her skin. Her attention fixed on the cold alley across from her. She heard her date’s dull question from the driver’s seat, but the storm seemed to swallow it. All she could make out was a moonlike white sphere, level with her eyes, hanging motionless in the air.
 
Inside, she told herself to get in the car. It was probably only a smear of graffiti. Yet the sight of it seemed to empty her of any happiness, and that emptiness held her there.
 
The circle moved—only a little, but enough to make Min-Soo step out from beneath his jacket and fully into the rain. Her hair dampened and began to cling to her shoulders.
 
Heat bloomed low in Min-Soo’s body beneath the circle’s translucent stare. Behind her, a dog began barking—furious and terrified, as if it recognized something she was not meant to see.
 
The barking shook her back from the place that thing had pulled her toward. To her right, the dog stood only a few feet away, teeth bared, spittle hanging from its mouth. Min-Soo stepped back, her chest tight with dread.
 
“Min-Soo?” Her date’s hand settled on her shoulder. In the second she turned toward him, the dog darted in the opposite direction. He pulled the jacket back over her, drenching himself, and watched the dog vanish into the distance.
 
She looked back to the alley. The sphere was gone. Nothing remained but rain.
 
Min-Soo was sitting in the passenger seat before she realized she had moved, the rain now beating softly against the windshield. When the driver’s-side door opened, her heart seized before she recognized her date. His warmth filled the space beside her, comforting in spite of everything she did not feel.
 
When the engine came to life, the feeling did not leave her. She allowed herself only a small peek at his side mirror as the empty alley shrank behind them.
 
In the side mirror, just before the alley vanished, she thought she saw something pale unfurl behind the rain, long and soft as a sheet being shaken loose from a bed.
 
---
 
Min-Soo did not want to get out when they reached her apartment, but the silence inside the car was worse. They both stepped into the dry air beneath the small roof over her entrance. She scanned every open space for whatever had been in the alleyway before her gaze landed on the man inching closer to where she stood.
 
“Are you going to be okay tonight?” His eyes searched hers, and for a moment she thought of inviting him inside.
 
Min-Soo nodded, though she did not look at him head-on.
 
“Okay.” She could tell from his voice that he was smiling sweetly. “I would like to do this again sometime, if you’d like. Maybe next time we could meet on a sunny day.” He chuckled at that.
 
Min-Soo nodded once more.
 
“Well, goodnight, Soo.” Before she could look up at him, he was already in his car, waving from inside. As soon as the car began to pull away and its taillights retreated from around her, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. The solitary fluorescent light above her head flickered as it usually did, but each second of darkness seemed longer than the last, until those seconds felt like nothing but darkness.
 
When the wind stopped blowing, she lifted her small purse toward the red taillights, waving it like a little white flag.
 
---
 
Later that night, her reflection looked back at her, the light from the tiny bathroom casting a thin shadow under her eyes. Through the open door, the man from dinner lay asleep, awake only minutes ago and now oblivious to the world. She looked down, messy hair dangling in her view, and saw the used protection in the trash. Her eyebrows furrowed; one nostril crinkled. She exhaled the night’s decisions and shut the medicine cabinet. The thought came from too many horror movies: a spirit might be standing behind her, ready to pounce or make some terrible sound.
 
She hadn’t always been this afraid of everything. What had changed?
 
Min-Soo turned from the mirror and into the doorway. The darkness beyond the bathroom felt almost warm to her strained eyes. Her hand settled on the frame as if the wood alone could keep her upright. Her fingers tightened anyway. The feeling returned, cold over her skin and burning beneath it, the same wrong heat spreading down her belly and up her thighs.
 
Min-Soo's brown eyes fixed on the corner of the bed nearest the floor. Two pale legs stretched from the shadows, too long to belong to anything human, bending at sharp, bony knees before disappearing around the mattress. The man still slept, unaware that the sheets beneath him had been dragged halfway off the bed and gathered toward whatever waited behind it.
 
She took one step backward, then another, and reached blindly for the bathroom light. If she could turn it on, if she could wake him, if she could put one real voice between herself and that corner, maybe the room would become a room again.
 
Her fingers brushed the switch just as her heartbeat caught up to her fear. The bathroom light snapped off before she could touch it, leaving her in complete darkness except for the pale curtain at the window.
 
A whimper escaped her throat before the sharp pop of a knee stopped it. Whatever owned those long, pale legs was now standing somewhere in front of her.
 
---
 
“Sorry, sir, but where did you say you found her?” Officer Jun-sang set his drink on the table and fought back a yawn. On the clipboard, beneath the date 6/2/02, he wrote Min-Soo’s name.
 
“Oh, um—she was standing in front of the bed,” the man said, pointing at a door across the living room before looking back at Min-Soo. “She’s been like this ever since.”
 
Officer Jun-sang looked over at the girl. Her hair was slick with sweat, dark bags sat under her eyes, and she had been staring at the bedroom door for some time. More than once, he caught her glancing at the floor around her feet. His first impression of her was not a kind one. “Miss Min-Soo?” he asked. She did not answer.
 
“She hasn’t said anything since you found her?” he asked the man from dinner.
 
“Only that someone was in the apartment. I checked the room, but there was nothing there.”
 
Jun-sang stood, his knees sounding their age after long hours, too little sleep, and one too many burgers living in the fat of his stomach. “Dae-Ho?” He waved to his partner, who looked around as if he were ghost hunting. “Finish up here, will you?”
 
His partner placed his cup of coffee on a counter and practically saluted, as if he needed to make up for not being a part of whatever was going on. “Sure thing, boss,” he replied.
 
Jun-sang made his way to the bedroom, opened the door, and let the cool air inside spill over him. He jumped slightly, lifting one foot as Min-Soo’s gray cat darted past. Embarrassed, he glanced back to make sure no one had seen him clutching his hat.
 
He shook his head and leaned into the room, flicking on the light. Careful not to disrespect her privacy, he looked around quickly: a clean room, a bare mattress, a few books stacked neatly on a writing table, and one cover printed with a picture of a grown man standing in a pot.
 
Jun-sang closed the door, and the chill inside the bedroom seemed to retreat, pushed back by the warmth of the apartment.
 
He returned just in time to see Dae-Ho shut his clipboard and slide the pen through the top. His partner looked up and smiled.
 
“All clear?” Dae-Ho asked.
 
Jun-sang nodded and knelt to the girl, stopping when he saw her face. Tears pooled in her wide eyes. Her jaw trembled, and she stared past him at a single point over his shoulder. The muscles in his neck tightened.
 
Slowly, he followed her gaze. It led to nothing but a wall.
 
---
 
Jun-sang opened his eyes to an empty bed, the blank white wall across from him staring back through the dark. It took a moment for his mind to leave that spot before he turned over and grabbed the small phone buzzing on his bedside table. When he flipped it open, his voice came out thick with sleep. “Jun-sang. Mm-hmm... yeah, yeah, I’ll be right there.”
 
He managed to roll out of bed. The longer the years went on, the more the muscles in his neck stiffened in his sleep. Today, they ached more than ever. He rubbed the spot with his palm, fixing nothing.
 
He pinned his officer’s badge to his chest, then paused beside the picture frame on his nightstand. He kissed two fingers and touched them to the glass. The woman in the photo had always faced him while he slept, but lately he found himself turning the frame slightly away before morning.
 
He opened his daughter’s door slowly, careful not to wake her. So-Yeon’s room was dressed in pink, like the top chamber of some tower, only this tower held what might have been the largest collection of stuffed animals in South Korea. Her pet bunny slept on the bed. So-Yeon, however, was wide awake, a paper crown tilted over one ear and a red crayon tucked behind the other.
 
“So-Yeon? What are you still doing up?” he whispered. When he sat on the side of her bed, the bunny between her legs stirred only a little. A drawing rested against her knees: the two of them beneath a yellow sun, his hat much too large and her rabbit wearing its own tiny crown.
 
“Appa, the monster came back again,” she said, not for the first time, her little voice softer these days, shy about everything and missing so much from the people closest to her.
 
Jun-sang placed his hand on her head, wanting desperately to help his baby. So why was it so hard to look at her? Why did every frightened whisper from her mouth sound like an accusation he had earned?
 
“So-Yeon, just try to get to sleep tonight, okay, sweetie?”
 
She nodded.
 
“I made you taller,” she said, tapping the drawing. “So the monster has to look at you first.”
 
As he stood, a small hand tugged at his shirt. He turned back to her and covered her tiny fist with his own. When it relaxed, he placed her hand gently on her chest.
 
The last thing he did before leaving was scratch the bunny between its long ears. “Good night, Your Majesty,” he murmured, nodding to its paper crown. So-Yeon smiled, but he reached the hallway before realizing he had never asked what she called it.
 
Jun-sang sat in his cruiser and dragged a hand down his face. “Despicable,” he said to the empty air. After a moment, he picked up the radio and clocked in, pulling out of his driveway and toward the worst day of someone else's life.
 
---
 
On the outskirts of Anyang, green mountains rose behind the restaurant, blocking the sky beyond and catching the pink-orange light of morning. Their shadows stretched past the yellow police tape. The glass across the front of the shop flashed red and blue in the police lights. The blood did not shine so bright.
 
Jun-sang pulled in behind the thin wall of onlookers, most of them pedestrians from nearby blocks. Nosy, in his opinion.
 
A young man, maybe sixteen or seventeen, tried edging his way over the tape. As Jun-sang ducked under it, he popped the kid on the head with his clipboard. The boy looked ready to retaliate until Jun-sang gave him a stare that sent him back where he belonged.
 
Dae-Ho, who had been talking to an inspector, raised his head toward his senior. “Jun-sang!” he called. “Over here!”
 
Jun-sang shook his head as he continued walking, noticing an old man sitting on the curb with a cigarette burning between his lips and a blankness settled over his face.
 
“Morning, Officer.” It was the inspector, or so Jun-sang assumed. He was the only person out of uniform, the only man in a button-up shirt among a sea of flat hats and pinned badges.
 
“Chief just needs us to keep the crowd out, Jun-sang,” Dae-Ho said as the investigator left quickly to do whatever important men like him did. His partner led him back to the inside of the tape. The faces in the crowd were familiar by now; no names, only features, the way people moved, how they stared.
 
“How’s little So?” Dae-Ho asked, speaking as if no one else were around.
 
“She’s fine, having trouble sleeping recently,” Jun-sang said. As he spoke, his eyes drifted to the markers near the hole in the restaurant's windowed entrance. A small number one marked where the body was found—just outside the broken glass.
 
“Trouble sleeping?” Dae-Ho asked.
 
“Mm-hmm.”
 
“Well, did you figure out why?”
 
“Normal stuff. Scared of the dark, I think. So, who’s that?” Jun-sang asked, pointing over to the old man, the end of his cigarette black and limp.
 
“Him?” Dae-Ho looked in his direction. “I think the inspector said he’s the dead guy's father. I already tried talking to him. He won't move.”
 
As he said this, two glove-wearing officers came through the open door, stepping carefully around the blood. Each carried a small, soggy bag toward the collection van. Something dripped from the bottoms onto the pavement.
 
Rip
 
Jun-sang gasped as the first bag tore open. Something small and mangled rolled onto the concrete. The crowd behind him swelled with noise as the animal’s head came to rest near the tape, white skull showing through a patch of missing fur.
 
The officer swore and snatched it up again, leaving the severed, fluffy tail behind for the other officer to collect.
 
“What the hell?” Dae-Ho said to his left as he watched the scene unfold. “Was that a raccoon?”
 
Jun-sang nodded, though he was not sure.
 
The day dragged on without another incident. A few times, Jun-sang had to push the crowd back, but eventually he was telling the last pedestrian to go home. By then, the soreness in his neck had become impossible to ignore.
 
“Ready to go back to the station, Jun?” Dae-Ho finally asked.
 
Jun-sang nodded and followed him toward the cruiser. “My wife.” At first, he thought the elderly voice had come from Dae-Ho. When it continued, he looked down at an old man sitting on the wet curb, still staring at the ground. “My wife did the same.”
 
This time Dae-Ho stopped too. “Hm? Sorry?”
 
“My wife,” the old man said. Jun-sang watched his dead eyes flicker up to meet his. “I’ll have to fix my window again.”
 
The old man’s voice droned on, dragged from some darker place Jun-sang did not know how to name. All he could do was stare back. Whatever this man had bottled inside him, Jun-sang recognized it.
 
After all the day’s disturbances, Dae-Ho still found the stomach for his daily ice cream cone, muttering something under his breath as a drop melted down his chin. Once again, it made Jun-sang laugh. Dae-Ho smiled too hard at the sound, as if the laugh mattered more than it should have. Then the chief walked in. Jun-sang stopped smiling and hit his partner in the head. “Don’t act so childish in the workplace. It's disrespectful.”
 
The chief looked unimpressed. “You two, Inspector Eun needs to ask you some questions.”
 
“Sir! We're on break, though!” Dae-Ho demanded.
 
The chief looked casually over to him. “Dae-Ho, I think you’ve had enough ice cream today. You’ll get chunkier. Put yourself to good use.” He looked over to Jun-sang before leaving for his office.
 
Dae-Ho looked ready to throw something. He shot Jun-sang a furrowed brow and a silent curse. Jun-sang raised a hand toward him as they got up, both men quietly blaming each other for the sudden questioning.
 
Inspector Eun’s office sat at the back of the building, a place Jun-sang and Dae-Ho usually visited only to use the restroom. His door stood ajar. Inside was Jun-sang’s idea of a television detective’s office: a whiteboard crowded with victim photos, documents scattered across a desk, and a single ashtray already overfull. The young inspector sat reading a document, his greased hair hanging above one eye, one thumbnail worn raw from biting.
 
After not looking up at them for some time, Dae-Ho cleared his throat. Jun-sang looked back at him as the inspector finally gave them his attention. “Oh, afternoon, officers. Have a seat,” he said. His voice sounded too young for how tired he looked, and Jun-sang found himself hating the man for that youth and for the flat, controlled calm he wished he had.
 
They sat across from him, waiting.
 
“Officers, I hear you answered a call about a young woman last week,” he said, looking at the sheet in his hands. “Min-Soo.”
 
Dae-Ho, who had likely forgotten the woman from a week ago—the one he had called spooky after leaving her home—waited for an answer. Jun-sang, after his partner’s never-ending silence, decided to speak up. “Yes, sir.”
 
“Can you give me an idea of what she said? The report doesn’t go into much detail, I’m afraid. She said she saw something?”
 
Jun-sang looked at his partner, then back to the inspector. “She was practically unresponsive. Hardly said a word to us.”
 
The inspector paused, as if fitting one piece beside another. “When’s the end of your shift?”
 
“About an hour. Why?” Dae-Ho answered before Jun-sang could, always ready to count the minutes until a shift ended.
 
“Would you mind coming with me to her apartment? I’d like to check on her.”
 
---
 
That evening, Min-Soo stood beside the patio door with her phone close to her lips. “Mom, please. I can do more. Just let me help with something.” Rain slicked the glass. “A funeral’s a lot of work—” She paused, interrupted. “I don’t wanna just sit here while Dad’s—”
 
Min-Soo groaned and slammed her phone closed. For a second, she thought she had broken it. She tossed it onto the couch and looked around the brightly lit room. Her apartment had rarely been dark since that night. Still, she could not decide whether closed doors made her feel safer or trapped.
 
If she could trade the moon for the sun, she might have been able to breathe. No matter when she opened her eyes, it felt like midnight. The full moon hung above her patio window night after night. Even with her father’s funeral waiting to be planned, her eyes kept returning to that glass. Always from a distance. Never too close.
 
She had taped a line of paper over the latch that morning, a childish test to prove the door stayed shut. It was still unbroken. That should have comforted her. Instead, it made the room feel more like a sealed jar.
 
On the counter beside the sink sat one of her father’s old matchbooks, warped from years in his pocket. She had found it in a kitchen drawer that morning and carried it from room to room without knowing why.
 
Her only comfort, her gray cat, jumped onto the coffee table. The cat’s long fur parted as she licked beneath her neck. She was the only thing keeping Min-Soo tethered to the room.
 
Min-Soo reached out to pet the cat, and a sharp pain shot up her arm. The cat’s hair stood on end as it jumped to the floor. She winced, holding her palm, a small bead of blood slipping toward her wrist.
 
“No,” she whispered, backing away from the patio. She grabbed the cat’s food bowl and hurled it toward the glass, not to break it but to make noise, to make something ordinary happen. The bowl struck the door, spun once, and settled upside down.
 
Min-Soo held her burning hand to her chest. Two green eyes glowed from somewhere deep in the room. Something inside her seemed to open—hot, wrong, and hungry.
 
Thump
 
Her back was turned to the patio when the sound reached her. It struck once, dull and patient.
 
The glass was fogged as before, but now the moon stared through it like an open eye.
 
As she moved closer to the door, a low growl split the silence. Min-Soo paid it no mind.
 
The moon was so large that, if she stared long enough, she thought she might disappear into it.
 
Clouds gathered around the pale sphere but never crossed it, leaving a ragged darkness beneath, like a scarf trailing from a hidden throat.
 
It tapped on the glass: thump, thump.
 
Something lay at her feet, warm and familiar. A white bed sheet stretched from somewhere off to her right and rose toward that translucent, colorless head. It twisted past her ankles and pinched through the patio door.
 
The taped paper over the latch fluttered once, then tore clean down the middle.
 
The glass gave a soft, delicate crack.
 
The cat growled. She turned and looked at the animal with those cloudy, pale eyes. It was the last trace of familiarity. Her cat knew the face it loved, but not what looked out from behind it.
 
---
 
“Everything okay?” Inspector Eun asked as Jun-sang clipped the phone closed, both hands tight around the steering wheel.
 
Jun-sang kept his eyes on the road, careful not to let the inspector see his stress. “Yes. It’s just my daughter. She likes to call before bed.”
 
From the backseat, Dae-Ho spoke up. “Little So-Yeon still having nightmares?”
 
If they had been alone, Jun-sang might have turned around and snapped at him. Instead, he kept his eyes on the road and gave a tight nod. It wasn’t their business. Besides, it would pass. Whatever So-Yeon had been through, it would pass.
 
Even if there was so much he had never said.
 
Before anyone could say more, the apartment building came into view—a gray tower against a gray sky, already fading into the veil of the coming night.
 
As soon as they stepped out of the cruiser, warm air poured over them. Jun-sang followed the others toward the entrance, but before he reached the door, a memory rose in him.
 
His wife had a round face, soft with age and still beautiful. Her dark hair always fell straight, even after sleep, after showers, after long days spent folding their laundry. He could remember the light around her more clearly than her voice now, and that frightened him.
 
Was this what happiness became after death—scraps of light, scraps of her?
 
His ears rang. At first he thought the sound came from inside his head. Then footsteps rushed past him, and a woman screamed from somewhere to his left.
 
Dae-Ho shouted his name behind him.
 
A parked car sat only a few steps away, its roof crushed inward. A pair of bare white feet jutted from the wreckage, pointing in different, impossible directions.
 
Dae-Ho stood on the other side of the car, hat in hand, his face emptied of its usual humor.
 
The inspector brushed past Jun-sang and ran for the entrance. Jun-sang barely noticed. His body moved toward the car before his mind could stop it.
 
The lower half of the body had struck first. The waist bent at a wrong angle, and the head touched the concrete below. Her neck had folded into itself, disappearing beneath her chin.
 
Min-Soo’s face pointed outward, away from the building she had fallen from.
 
Jun-sang stopped when he saw her face. His body went light, ready to switch off, but his eyes would not move.
 
Her eyes were open, wet with tears that no longer belonged to anyone. They seemed to bore into a past he had spent years trying not to remember.
 
For a moment, he waited for a breath that would never come. Just like before. Min-Soo’s ruined, staring face pulled his wife’s face from the dark.
 
Then he was back in that room, screaming for his wife to come back while saliva slipped from her cheek and nothing he said reached her.
 
---
 
Soon the night flashed with police lights. Yellow tape and wooden dividers tightened around the scene while Jun-sang and Dae-Ho sat on the curb, numb to the movement around them.
 
“Would you like to come take a look upstairs?” the inspector asked, cigarette still burning between his fingers.
 
Beside him, Dae-Ho lifted one hand in refusal. Jun-sang knew he would recover; he was not sure what could truly break such a high-spirited man.
 
Jun-sang stood without a word, keeping his eyes away from the wreckage as the tow truck pulled it aside.
 
The inspector did not extinguish his cigarette before they entered the building, not even when he opened the door to Min-Soo's home. Jun-sang could have sworn his hand trembled as he brought it to his mouth.
 
Min-Soo’s apartment seemed untouched except for the sweet, rotten smell that turned Jun-sang’s stomach. Only a few people were inside. One officer photographed something in the corner of the living room, and as Jun-sang stepped closer, the odor rose from the floor.
 
Gray and red fur lay scattered in pieces across the floor.
 
“God,” Jun-sang muttered.
 
The inspector blew smoke toward the ceiling. He looked much older now. “I had so many questions...” he said, mostly to himself. After a moment, he turned to Jun-sang. “Did she ever describe what she saw that night? When you were called over?”
 
Jun-sang thought for a moment, remembering what little she had managed to say. “I think she said someone was being strangled. A woman, maybe. Then she said she was drowning. It didn’t make much sense. The man who brought her home spoke for her most of the time.”
 
The inspector watched the dead animal being bagged and carried away. When the apartment emptied, only he and Jun-sang remained.
 
“You said her father had died?” Eun asked.
 
“A few days ago.” Jun-sang glanced at the old matchbook on the counter. “Why?”
 
Eun rubbed his worn thumbnail. “I’ve seen something like this before.”
 
“Like what?”
 
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.” Eun glanced toward the bare mattress. “Cases that begin with a death in the family. Later, somebody mentions a child seeing things. Or acting strangely.”
 
“And then?”
 
Eun drew once on the cigarette. “Sometimes nothing. Sometimes someone disappears. Sometimes I read the report too late and wonder why it bothered me.”
 
Jun-sang looked toward the dark bedroom. So-Yeon’s voice came back to him: the monster came back again.
 
Eun watched him. “You have a daughter?”
 
Jun-sang’s shoulders stiffened. “This is about Min-Soo.”
 
“Maybe.” Eun looked at the scattered fur. “Or maybe I’m collecting pieces that don’t belong together.”
 
“What pieces?”
 
Eun pressed the cigarette into the ashtray, though it was still half-lit. “The same ones, more or less. They never fit.”
 
---
 
The department gave Jun-sang more time off after Min-Soo’s death. Once again, the image of a dead woman followed him home. Time away from work should have helped, but the house only sharpened what he tried to bury. Each time he passed the bathroom, memory flooded him. So-Yeon would not know. He told himself she was better off for it.
 
Jun-sang bunched dried leaves into a black bag. He could not remember the last time he had worked this hard on his lawn; mostly, it gave his hands something to do. Naturally, the yard still looked as if no one had touched it.
 
Since Min-Soo’s death, a burning prickle sometimes climbed the back of his neck. He felt it now, standing alone in his yard, and thought of the picture beside his bed.
 
Jun-sang breathed out and tried to push the thought away. It did not help.
 
When he tossed the bag of leaves into the trash, the old man’s face returned to him: seated outside the restaurant, staring forward as if he were the one who had died. Jun-sang wondered if he looked that way to his little girl. Uncaring. Made of stone.
 
The thought scared him. He had not cried in front of So-Yeon, not even after her mother died. He had saved all of that for the bathroom, for the locked room, for the lifeless body in his arms.
 
He had never known his wife hurt enough to do what she did. If the reason had been a place, he would have destroyed it. If it had been a person, he would have killed them. Anything for her. Anything for that wonderful smile their daughter did not carry.
 
He slammed the lid a little too hard, and the air inside the can blew across his face. The smell hit him again, hotter now but familiar. Blood. Fur.
 
He tossed the lid onto the grass and searched desperately for the source.
 
When he found it, he could not move. A bunny lay stiff in the trash, its white fur darkened at the neck, the shape there pressed inward as if molded by fingers.
 
Jun-sang ran for the back door. The house seemed to tilt around him as sweat gathered on his face. He knew where to go. Somehow, he knew.
 
Appa, the monster came back again.
 
How long had he been outside? Minutes? Hours? So-Yeon was alone with whatever waited for her.
 
The bathroom door stood slightly ajar, light leaking through the crack. When he pushed it open, his eyes went straight to the space in front of the sink.
 
Bottles covered the floor, open and leaking medicine across the tile. There was no pattern to what had been taken. How would So-Yeon have known? Who had told her?
 
His child lay in the middle of the mess, still in her pajamas, her shirt lifted above her belly as each breath rose with terrifying slowness.
 
Jun-sang made a broken sound and fell beside her. He slid his hands under her head. Foam gathered at the corner of her mouth. When he wiped it away, his fingers shook so badly he smeared it across her cheek. “Please,” he said, tapping her face, then slapping it lightly. “Please.”
 
In her wet eyes, he saw the thing looming behind him. His breath caught. So-Yeon was not looking at him. She was looking past him.
 
The animals. The glass. Drowning, choking, sheets.
 
His whole body shook. One thought repeated in his head: don’t look at it, don’t look back.
 
His eyes slipped to the porcelain tub a few feet away. The reflection in its surface did not grow clearer, only larger.
 
Now he understood what the others had seen. It was too tall, its thin legs white as the bathroom tile. Its arms hung past its waist, limp and patient.
 
Its hair dripped like water from beneath the sheet wrapped around its head. The fabric crossed its throat too tightly, blue shadows gathered where a neck should have been.
 
Jun-sang closed his eyes.
 
The hand pressed to his daughter’s chest felt the beat stop, replaced by a stillness no parent should ever know.
 
Only a few days had passed since he stood in her pink room, her bunny sleeping between her knees. The paper crown had slipped over one eye while she tapped the tall figure in her drawing. So the monster has to look at you first.
 
Through his closed eyes, he saw the old man outside the restaurant, smoking as they drove away with his son’s body. Then he saw the picture on his nightstand turned toward the wall.
 
Jun-sang opened his eyes and lowered his head to So-Yeon. With trembling care, he brushed the sweat from her face. The red crayon was still behind her ear, its blunt end caught in her hair.
 
He had spent years searching her face for someone else—the tilt of a smile, a familiar look, anything he could keep. Now he saw the crooked paper crown, the too-tall father beneath a yellow sun, the careful joke she had made because he was afraid.
 
His face broke. He pressed his forehead to hers and held her as if the floor might open beneath them.
 
“So-Yeon,” he whispered. The name caught in his throat. “My sunshine, your mother’s watching you from heaven. She’s always watching.”
 
“And so am I,” he said.
 
Then So-Yeon took a deep breath.
 

[FN] [HR] [SF] An Invocation

The study had been built in the manner of a cathedral and kept in the manner of a tomb.

Dark walnut paneled the walls from floor to cornice, its once-glossed surface dulled by generations of hands. The ceiling climbed high above them into a painted dome where constellations wheeled across midnight-blue plaster, their gold edges flaking, whole stars disappearing beneath cracks as fine as veins beneath old skin. Tapestries hung between the arched windows, heavy with dust and age, their saints and kings faded into rust, umber, and bruised purple.

Beeswax, dry leather, and the sweet rot of old paper thickened the air.

Under it all lay another scent.

Metal.

Not blood exactly.

Rain before rain.

Shelves bowed beneath calfskin volumes clasped in black iron. Their spines leaned against one another at uneasy angles, giving the impression not of books stored but of witnesses gathered close enough to whisper. A globe listed in one corner, seas of cracked blue lacquer rolling beneath names no modern chart would recognize. Continents swelled where none belonged. Islands existed in latitudes where there should have been only black water.

At the center of the room waited an enormous writing desk scarred by centuries of use. Ink had soaked into the grain in stains like old bruises. The wood had been cut and recut by knives, compass points, fingernails, perhaps worse.

Fi moved slowly along the shelves. “This wasn’t a study.”

Her voice went upward into the dome and returned strangely altered, softened but multiplied.

“It was a vault.”

She ran two fingers along a row of chained books. “My family called themselves custodians. Words. Prayers. Things churches kept copies of and pretended not to have. Things other families burned.”

Adam sat in one of the leather chairs near the desk, nursing a beer that had gone warm in his hand. “Healthy family hobby.”

Fi ignored him. “My grandfather said some things were hidden because men would kill to possess them. Others because men would kill after possessing them.” She stopped before the desk. “And some because possession was the wrong word entirely.”

From beneath her coat she withdrew a folded parchment.

It was yellowed almost brown, brittle at the edges, and bound shut with a narrow strip of blackened vellum.

The room seemed to become aware of it.

Adam’s smile disappeared. Ari folded her arms. Nate moved closer despite himself.

Fi laid the parchment on the desk. “This was the most guarded thing in the house.”

She cut the vellum binding.

“My grandfather called it a lock.”

The parchment opened reluctantly. The script upon it was black, but not ink-black. It carried the faint oily depth of a beetle’s shell. Some letters appeared hooked into one another. Others resembled circles crossed by strokes so fine the eye could scarcely hold them.

“And he said it watched.”

Adam looked up. “Meaning?”

Fi’s gaze remained on the page. “It names a Watcher.”

Nate frowned. “Watcher how?”

“Not a person watching a door.” Fi swallowed. “One of the wheeled ones.”

That quieted them.

Even Adam.

Fi looked toward the painted dome. “All eyes. Wheels within wheels. The things Ezekiel saw beside the throne.”

Ari whispered, “Ophanim.”

Fi nodded. “My grandfather said our family had preserved one of their Names.”

Adam leaned forward. “One of their names, or its Name?”

Fi did not answer immediately.

“Enough of one.”

That was not reassuring.

Nate put one hand on the desk. “Fi.”

She looked at him.

“We can stop. Translate the full structure first. Identify the operators. Look for correspondences. At least determine what comes after the address.”

“No.”

Too sharp.

She closed her eyes, breathed once, opened them. “No. I know what this is.”

Adam turned the beer can slowly between his fingers. “I’ve watched you flatten a tenured professor with a footnote and a smile. But this?” He gave the parchment a small salute. “This feels less like research and more like touching a fuse to confirm the manufacturer wasn’t kidding.”

Fi’s mouth tightened. “It’s a Watcher. I’m asking it to watch.”

Nate glanced down at the parchment. “Watch what?”

“The threshold.”

“Which threshold?”

Fi hesitated.

That hesitation should have ended it.

It did not.

“It’s what the text says.”

Ari looked from Fi to Nate. “Can it come through?”

“No.”

Fi said it quickly, then more carefully. “No. That’s not what Ophanim do. They’re guardians. Interfaces. They’re not...” She searched for the right word. “Visitors.”

Adam grunted. “Comforting distinction.”

Fi set both palms on the desk. “I’m not opening a gate.”

Somewhere in the wall an old timber creaked.

No one laughed.

Fi bent over the parchment. The script seemed ordinary when looked at directly. At the edge of vision it moved. Not much. A letter lengthened. A circle turned. A hooked character slid beneath another and disappeared.

Fi drew a breath and began to read.

The first syllable was barely more than an exhalation. The second made the lamp flame bend. The third did not sound as though it had come from a human throat.

Nate straightened.

Fi kept reading.

The words emerged slowly, consonants shaped around spaces the mouth was never meant to make. They struck the dome and returned once, then twice, then many times, until Fi’s voice was no longer alone and the room had learned it.

Shelves began to hum. Leather bindings trembled. The tapestries moved though there was no wind. The lead joints of the tall windows ticked rapidly, like teeth in fever.

Adam put down his beer. “Fi.”

She raised one hand.

Not now.

The chant deepened. Their bones took it up. A vibration entered Nate through the soles of his shoes and climbed his spine. Ari pressed a hand against her sternum. Adam’s jaw tightened as the fillings in his molars began to ache.

Oil flames guttered blue.

Every shadow in the room leaned the wrong way.

Then the floor groaned, long and deep, not like timber settling but like a ship carrying sudden weight. The air thickened. Each breath had to be pulled into the lungs.

Fi reached the final line.

She spoke the Name.

Something answered.

The painted dome rippled. Stars elongated into streaks of gold. The darkness between them widened.

\*\*And the air split.\*\*

Not tore.

Split.

Cleanly.

As though the room had always possessed a seam and someone had finally put a blade into it.

Fire unfolded through the opening.

A wheel.

Then another wheel crossing the first.

Then another.

No rim possessed thickness. No flame consumed. Eyes opened along every turning circumference.

Hundreds.

Thousands.

Perhaps four.

The mind failed at the counting.

They looked outward. Inward. Sideways into directions the room did not contain.

Ari made a sound deep in her throat. Nate could not breathe. Adam whispered something that might have been a prayer.

Fi stared upward with tears gathering in her eyes.

“It came.”

The Ophanim turned.

And the universe opened with it.

Not one doorway.

Many.

Its eyes were not eyes. They were apertures. Every pupil looked somewhere else. Every gaze crossed a boundary.

Fi had asked it to look.

So it looked.

And because it looked from both sides at once, the things beyond looked back.

Four eyes widened.

Four distances vanished.

And each of them was seen.

Fi stood in a forest of black crystal.

There had been no transition, no falling. The study remained beneath her feet, yet another place had laid itself across it with such authority that the walnut walls became thin ghosts behind trees sharp enough to cut moonlight.

Branches of obsidian glass trembled in a wind she could not feel.

They chimed.

High.

Beautiful.

Wrong.

Shapes drifted between the trunks. Pale figures. Tall. Narrow. Their limbs were too graceful to be human and too deliberate to be natural.

One turned its face toward her.

Then another.

Then all of them.

They had no eyes, only smooth silver hollows where eyes should have been, yet Fi felt their attention enter her.

Not her thoughts.

Deeper.

Memory moved inside her without permission. Her grandmother’s kitchen. Her grandfather’s hands unfolding old vellum. Her mother’s maiden name written on the flyleaf of a Bible. The smell of cedar chests. A lullaby. A grave.

The figures smiled.

Their mouths opened.

Nothing emerged that the ear could hear, but words formed in Fi’s marrow.

\*Daughter.\*

The trees chimed.

\*Daughter of daughters.\*

Her throat tightened.

\*We remember the road your blood forgot.\*

A pale figure extended one long hand.

\*Give us the rest.\*

Fi did not understand.

Then her surname rose inside her.

Not as memory.

As pressure.

It moved from her chest toward her tongue. Her lips parted.

The pale heads inclined.

Listening.

Learning.

Ari saw a green sea beneath a sky without stars.

The water boiled silently from horizon to horizon. Beyond it stood an island washed in twilight, and on the shore waited a single figure, crowned not with gold but with something brighter.

Its face shifted each time she tried to see it.

Her father.

Then no one she knew.

Then someone she had been waiting for all her life.

Its hand opened.

Ari began to cry.

Not from fear.

From relief.

The figure knew every tired thing in her. Every prayer that had gone unanswered. Every night she had asked for one hour without being required to endure herself.

The sea became still.

\*Come.\*

The voice came from everywhere.

\*You have carried enough.\*

Her knees nearly buckled.

\*Rest.\*

Her childhood name formed in her mouth, the one only her mother used when Ari was sick.

The crowned figure smiled.

\*Tell me who comes.\*

The first syllable slipped between Ari’s teeth.

The thing on the shore repeated it.

Almost correctly.

Adam stood before a city descending into the earth.

No.

Not descending.

Drilled.

Tower after black tower spiraled downward into the throat of living stone. Walls curved beneath impossible weight. Battlements disappeared miles below him, lit by furnace-red windows.

Ranks of figures stood upon them.

Thousands.

Armored.

Still.

Waiting.

Then one stepped forward.

It wore no insignia Adam knew, yet when it raised its hand, his body recognized the salute.

Attention.

Recognition.

Belonging.

\*Soldier.\*

The word struck harder than command.

\*You have stood without orders long enough.\*

Adam’s stomach dropped.

His dead chief’s voice followed.

Then his father’s.

Then men whose faces he had not remembered in years.

His mother’s voice came last.

It spoke his full name.

Tenderly.

Exactly as she had when he was five years old and feverish.

His jaw opened before he knew it.

Across the abyss, the armored figure leaned forward.

Listening.

Its own mouth began to move.

Testing the shape.

Adam bit his tongue.

Blood filled his mouth.

The thing below smiled.

Nate saw twelve black suns.

They hung above a desert so vast that the idea of distance became meaningless. No light came from them, yet every grain of sand was visible.

Something moved beneath the dunes.

Something larger than geography.

A ridge rose.

Then another.

Then a shape miles long rolled beneath the earth.

Nate knew suddenly that the desert was not a place.

It was a covering.

The thing beneath it turned.

The twelve suns turned with it.

A voice entered him, not through hearing but through weight.

\*Mortal.\*

His knees bent.

\*We mark the edge of you.\*

The sand rose in pillars.

\*Speak.\*

Nate felt his own name not as sound but as structure. A pattern. An arrangement of himself.

Something in the desert touched its first edge.

His tongue moved.

The thing below moved with it.

Learning.

Four voices rose in the study.

Fi. Ari. Adam. Nate.

Each spoke one fragment, different syllables drawn from different histories, and together they became something else.

The room received them.

The Ophanim turned.

The four distant worlds leaned nearer.

And something passed through the group.

Not possession.

Resonance.

The invocation had not called four separate horrors. The four human beings had become one calling shape: grief, pride, loneliness, duty, hunger to know, fear of being unknown, all of it braided into a single harmonic wound.

Across the thresholds, things answered according to appetite.

The pale figures in the black forest pressed closer between the trees. The crowned being stepped into the green sea without sinking. The armies in the buried city began to beat spear shafts against stone. Beneath the desert, mountains opened their mouths.

They were not merely beckoning now.

They were listening.

Repeating.

Trying the syllables.

Fi heard her own fragment spoken among the crystal trees, poorly at first, then better.

Ari’s crossed the sea back toward her.

Adam’s echoed down through the ranks.

Nate’s moved beneath the sand.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Each repetition nearer to the truth.

Their Names were being assembled from the outside.

Not stolen.

Learned.

The knowledge of them growing teeth.

Fi tried to stop speaking.

Her mouth continued.

Panic finally broke through wonder.

She had called the Watcher correctly.

That was the horror.

Nothing in the invocation had failed.

The Ophanim had come.

The threshold had opened to sight.

And she had known the Name of only one thing present.

The others were strangers.

Strangers already learning hers.

Then another voice entered the room.

Not loud.

Not soft.

Perfect.

One word.

No.

A Name.

It fell through the chamber with the finality of judgment.

Every lamp flame became a white needle.

The forest shattered. Crystal trees burst into black rain. The pale figures twisted as though seized by invisible hooks, their mouths opening impossibly wide.

The crowned thing in the sea recoiled.

For one instant its beauty failed.

Something ancient and starved looked through.

The buried city convulsed. Towers folded. Battlements cracked. The saluting figure dropped to its knees.

The desert erupted. Shapes larger than kingdoms broke the surface, then collapsed as though their bones had been taken from them.

Across all four visions came the same recognition.

Fear.

Not of the humans.

Of the speaker.

The Ophanim stopped turning.

Every eye fixed upon one point in the room.

A shadow between two tapestries.

The voice spoke again.

Another Name.

Different.

Sharper.

The entities shrieked.

This time there was sound.

Not in the air.

Inside the teeth.

The Ophanim’s eyes slammed shut.

The worlds vanished.

The pull ended.

Four human voices broke off in mid-syllable.

Fi collapsed against the desk. Ari fell to her knees. Adam tipped sideways with the chair. Nate struck the floor hard enough to bruise both palms.

For several seconds the room contained only choking, coughing, and the brittle ticking of cooling glass.

Then silence returned.

It was not empty.

It had learned them too.

A man stepped from between the tapestries.

No one had seen him enter.

His coat was long, dark, and badly worn. Dust crusted the seams. His boots had been resoled more than once and looked made for roads no sensible man would choose. He carried no visible weapon.

That did nothing to make him look harmless.

His face was lean beneath several days of beard. Deep lines cut around his mouth and eyes. Not age alone.

Mileage.

He surveyed the room as a carpenter might inspect a damaged house: ceiling, windows, parchment, people, where it would hold and where it would fail.

Adam wiped blood from his lips. “And just who the hell are you supposed to be?”

The stranger’s eyes moved to him, then Fi, then Ari, then Nate. He looked not at their faces but at their mouths, at the unfinished sounds still trembling there.

When he spoke, each word seemed selected for cost.

“I have had many names. Many I have forgotten. More I have worked very hard to make others forget.”

Adam stared.

The man sighed. “You may call me Bob.”

Adam blinked, then laughed once. It cracked halfway out.

“Hell of an entrance, Bob.”

Fi spat blood into a handkerchief. “You speak a word that makes \*that\* happen and then tell us your name is Bob?”

“Precisely.”

“Bob.”

“Yes.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Names have power.”

His expression did not change.

“Absurd ones have uses.”

Fi glared at him. “Who are you?”

“Bob.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean. The answer remains Bob.”

Ari managed to stand. “You stopped them.”

Bob looked at her.

“No.”

The word fell flat.

“I interrupted them.”

Ari swallowed. “The things we saw?”

“They were beginning.”

“Beginning what?”

Bob’s eyes went to her mouth.

“To say you.”

No one spoke.

Even Adam’s humor died.

Fi straightened slowly. “We summoned the Ophanim.”

“Yes.”

Her face changed, not relief but vindication poisoned by dread. “So that part worked.”

“Perfectly.”

The word landed harder than accusation.

Bob walked to the desk. “That is why you are still alive.”

Fi frowned.

He pointed to the parchment. “You knew enough of its Name to call it.”

“The Watcher.”

“The Ophanim.” He looked upward. “It came.”

Fi’s hands tightened against the desk. “And the others?”

“You didn’t summon them.”

She stared.

Bob touched one finger to the parchment.

“You summoned a threshold.”

Fi shook her head. “No. I called a Watcher.”

“It is the threshold.”

He said it with the patience of a man correcting a measurement.

“A thing made entirely of eyes is not standing beside the door.”

He looked at the dark place above them where the wheel had been.

“It is the door.”

The room seemed to contract.

“You asked it to look,” Bob said. “So it looked. Both ways.”

Fi went pale.

Nate whispered, “Everything on the other side could see us.”

“No.”

Bob turned toward him.

“Not everything.”

That was worse.

“Only the things close enough to answer.”

Adam wiped his mouth again. “Answer what?”

Bob looked at all four of them.

“You.”

He walked around the desk. “Invocation is not a telephone.”

Fi’s eyes narrowed. “I know that.”

“No. You don’t.”

The words were not cruel.

They were simply finished.

“You thought knowing the Ophanim’s Name meant you knew what you were calling.”

“I did know.”

“You knew one Name. You did not know what your own calling would sound like after it passed through the threshold.”

Silence.

Bob pointed at Fi. “You brought bloodline. Custodianship. Inheritance. Pride. Guilt.”

His finger moved to Ari. “You brought exhaustion. Longing. The desire to be relieved of yourself.”

Adam. “You brought duty. Authority. Kinship through command.”

Nate. “You brought hunger for the thing beyond understanding.”

Nate’s face tightened.

Bob lowered his hand. “And then you spoke together. Four voices. One invocation.”

Fi stared at him. “A composite call.”

“Yes.” Bob’s eyes showed the faintest flicker of approval. “Now you’re listening.”

He looked toward the dome. “The Ophanim did not choose what answered. It opened sight across the threshold. Your combined call did the rest.”

Ari rubbed her arms. “Those things were drawn to us.”

“To parts of you,” Bob corrected her. “The hungriest things nearest those parts.”

Adam muttered, “That’s comforting.”

“It shouldn’t be.”

Fi looked down at the parchment. “So the forest...”

“Responded to you.”

“The island?”

“To her.”

“The city?”

“To him.”

“The desert?”

Bob looked at Nate. “God help us, yes.”

Nate’s eyes lifted. “What were they?”

Bob’s expression changed very slightly.

“That is the question your friend should have asked before she spoke.”

Fi flinched.

He went on. “She knew the Name of the Watcher. She knew none of the Names of what might follow.”

Fi’s humiliation turned to anger. “How could I know what would respond?”

“You couldn’t.”

Bob’s voice sharpened for the first time.

“Which is why you do not open a threshold until you know how to close what may answer through it.”

The study went still.

“In invocation, address without taxonomy is suicide.”

Adam sat upright. “Okay. Let’s say I believe every insane word coming out of your mouth.”

“You already do.”

Adam glanced at the dark dome. “Fair.”

He pointed toward where the wheel had appeared. “They wanted our names.”

Bob’s face hardened. “They want more than that.”

“What’s more than your name?”

Bob looked at him. “Someone else knowing how to speak it.”

Adam stopped.

Bob turned back to the others. “The Egyptians understood one part of it. The \*ren\* was not merely a label. Name and continuance were bound together. Preserve the name, preserve something of the person. Destroy it utterly and you commit a second death.”

He paused.

“But even that is only the human edge of the law.”

He looked down at Fi’s parchment. “A true Name is not information. It is relation. Address. Form.”

He raised his eyes.

“And when spoken with sufficient standing... authority.”

Ari’s face drained of color. “Those things were asking us to give them authority.”

“They were asking you to help them learn how.”

Bob walked toward her.

“They do not know your Names.”

Ari’s voice was barely audible. “Yet.”

Bob nodded.

“Yet. That is the important word.”

Adam stared toward the floor. “But I heard my mother say mine.”

“No.”

Bob’s gaze snapped to him.

“You heard something search you for the sound most likely to make you answer.”

Adam’s jaw clenched. “It sounded exactly like her.”

“Of course it did. It wanted you to complete the pronunciation.”

Adam touched the blood at the corner of his mouth. “My tongue...”

“You stopped yourself.”

“Barely.”

“Barely counts.”

Fi looked up. “We gave them syllables.”

Bob said nothing.

Her face changed.

She understood.

“Oh God.”

Ari looked at her. “What?”

Fi whispered, “They repeated them.”

Adam’s eyes closed.

Nate said, “They were learning.”

Bob inclined his head. “Yes.”

No one moved.

“You think the danger is that a thing knows where you live,” Bob said. “No. This told them where to look.”

He tapped the parchment.

“Your voices told them what they had found.”

Ari’s lips trembled. “And the syllables?”

“Pieces.”

“Of us.”

“Pieces of the address.”

Fi’s breath came shallow. “Can they reconstruct the rest?”

Bob waited too long.

That was answer enough.

“They will try.”

Ari whispered, “How?”

“By listening.”

“To what?”

“Anything. Dreams. Prayers. Grief. Anger. Ritual. Blood. Memory. Places where you have been known deeply enough that your pattern remains.”

Fi stared. “That isn’t possible.”

Bob gave her a tired look. “You watched a wheel full of eyes open four worlds over your desk.”

Fi said nothing.

“They do not need to steal your Name.”

He bent toward her.

“They can learn it.”

His voice became very quiet.

\*\*“And every time you answer, they learn how to say you.”\*\*

The study seemed suddenly too full of corners.

Adam rose from the chair. “So something is coming.”

Bob looked at him.

“Yes.”

That single word changed the room.

Adam nodded slowly. “Good. Because for a minute there I thought we were gonna get some comforting bullshit about being on an invitation list.”

Bob almost smiled. “No. Nothing so harmless.”

His eyes went to the windows. Outside, the night pressed black against the glass.

“They have an address now.”

Fi looked up. “Not our full Names.”

“No.”

“But enough to find us.”

“Enough to begin.”

Nate’s voice was low. “What does ‘coming’ mean?”

“Whatever the thing can manage.”

Bob turned from the windows.

“Dream first, perhaps. Coincidence. A voice heard in the room beside you. Someone on a train who knows a childhood nickname. A road you have driven a hundred times ending somewhere it never ended before.”

Ari shivered. “A door.”

“Yes.”

“Opened at the wrong hour.”

Bob looked at her. “Exactly.”

He stepped back toward the desk. “They will beckon with whatever they possess. Rest. Blood. Belonging. Knowledge. They will show you power because power is persuasive. Beauty because beauty disarms judgment. Terror because terror makes people beg. Love because love makes them answer.”

His voice hardened.

“And all the while they will listen.”

Fi whispered, “For the rest of the Name.”

“For the rest of you.”

Adam picked up the crushed beer can and stared at it. “So what’s the endgame?”

Bob looked at him. “Theirs?”

“Yeah.”

“Depends what found you.”

“Fantastic.”

“Some consume. Some bind. Some use.”

Ari lowered her hand. “Use us for what?”

“To enact their will where they cannot stand.”

The lamp gave a sudden pop.

Nobody moved.

Bob’s expression darkened. “Names are not merely handles by which things may be dragged. They are channels through which will may travel.”

Nate’s eyes sharpened. “Through the person.”

“Yes.”

“Possession.”

“Sometimes.” Bob shook his head. “But possession is crude.”

That silenced them.

“A thing does not always need your body. Sometimes it needs your choice. Your obedience. Your surrender. Your invitation.”

He stepped away.

“And if it can Name you well enough, those things become easier to bend.”

Fi stared at him. “So summoning something you cannot bind...”

“...is offering it a road into you before you’ve learned the road into it.”

Bob nodded.

“Exactly.”

Fi’s gaze dropped to the parchment. “I thought the Watcher kept them out.”

Bob’s face went flat. “Your family knew better.”

She looked up sharply. “What?”

“They called it a lock.”

“Yes.”

“Not a wall.”

Fi’s face changed.

Bob continued. “A lock does not prevent a door from opening. It governs who may open it.”

Her eyes returned to the parchment.

“My grandfather said it had never once been asked to look.”

“Then your grandfather was wiser than you.”

Fi flinched.

Ari shot Bob a look.

He did not apologize.

Fi stared at the page for a long time. “Why preserve it?”

“Because one day someone might need the door.”

Bob looked at her.

“That is different from wanting to see what’s behind it.”

The rebuke landed cleanly.

After a time Nate said, “The word you used.”

Bob turned. “Which one?”

“The first. When you came in. You said something and the things recoiled.”

“Yes.”

“You Named them.”

“One of them.”

Fi’s head came up. “Which?”

Bob looked at her.

“No.”

“You knew what it was.”

“Enough.”

“You said its Name.”

“I said something closer to it than it had said of any of you.”

The room seemed suddenly colder.

Adam understood first. “You got there first.”

Bob looked at him.

Adam pointed vaguely at the vanished visions. “They were trying to figure us out.”

“Yes.”

“You figured one of them out faster.”

“Not tonight.”

Bob’s expression went distant.

“I’ve had longer.”

Fi stared. “So that was why they recoiled.”

“Partly.”

“What was the second word?”

“Not a word.”

“Another Name?”

Bob nodded.

“Whose?”

His gaze moved to the darkness overhead.

“Something with more standing than anything that answered you.”

No one pressed him.

Ari said quietly, “Then why didn’t you close it completely?”

Bob looked at her. “Because I cannot undo what you did.”

She swallowed. “You said you interrupted them.”

“Yes.”

“What remains?”

He looked at all four.

“Recognition.”

Fi frowned. “Not enough to bind us.”

“No.”

“Enough to find us.”

“Yes.”

Adam sighed. “So we’re in their address book.”

Bob considered that. “No.”

Adam gave him a weary look. “Come on, man.”

Bob’s eyes narrowed slightly. “An address book implies someone has written your names down.”

He stepped toward them.

“They haven’t.”

A pause.

“Not yet.”

The silence sharpened.

“What you’ve given them is a map.”

Fi whispered, “To us.”

“To the edges of you.”

He looked toward the dome.

“And an invitation containing the first letters of an address.”

Ari hugged herself. “They’ll come looking for the rest.”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

Bob’s expression became almost pitying. “They are very old.”

He looked at the parchment.

“And patience is easier when you do not die.”

The beam above the windows creaked.

Fi folded the handkerchief around her bleeding lip. “What do we do?”

Bob studied her. “You have two choices.”

Adam muttered, “There are always two.”

“No.” Bob looked at him. “Usually there are several. Tonight you have managed to reduce the field.”

Adam shut up.

Bob faced them all. “You can walk away.”

Fi’s eyes narrowed. “And?”

“And they continue.”

Ari’s shoulders stiffened. “The calls.”

“Yes.”

“Dreams.”

“Possibly.”

“Doors.”

“Eventually.”

“And they’ll keep learning.”

Bob nodded. “Every successful contact gives them more.”

Nate asked, “Until?”

Bob looked at him. “Until one of them can say enough of you to establish standing.”

No one asked what happened after that.

Bob answered anyway.

“Then the invitation becomes a claim.”

The words settled into the room.

“And the other choice?” Fi asked.

Bob’s eyes hardened.

“You learn their Names.”

Adam laughed without humor. “Thought names were the problem.”

“Names are the problem.”

Bob stepped to the desk.

“Names are also the only reason you’re standing here.”

He looked at Fi. “You do not learn them to possess these things.”

“Then why?”

“To recognize.”

He folded one edge of the parchment inward.

“To refuse.”

Another fold.

“To close.”

He looked up.

“And when necessary...”

The last fold.

“...to bind.”

Ari wiped at the last dampness beneath her eyes. “Can they all be bound?”

“No.”

That came too quickly.

Adam sighed. “Of course not.”

Bob ignored him. “Standing matters.”

Fi looked at him. “You said that before.”

“Because you keep behaving as though pronunciation is power.” He shook his head. “It isn’t.”

“What is?”

“Relationship. Authority. Cost.”

He leaned against the desk.

“The old stories understood fragments of it. The Egyptians preserved names because remembrance and being touched one another. The peoples beneath the northern hills learned that naming what listened in the dark invited recognition, and so they wrapped dangerous things in courtesy and indirection.”

His eyes went distant.

“The Norse understood perhaps the cruelest portion.”

Nate said, “Odin.”

Bob looked at him.

“Nine nights.”

“The tree.”

“Spear wound.”

“To learn the runes.”

Bob nodded. “But don’t reduce them to letters. Knowledge with standing costs something.”

Fi looked down at her hands. “And what will this cost?”

Bob’s expression gave nothing away.

“That depends on what has begun learning you.”

Outside the windows the wind finally rose.

Branches scraped the glass.

Once.

Twice.

Then stopped.

Everyone looked toward the sound.

Nothing stood there.

That almost made it worse.

Fi placed her palm over the folded parchment. “I made the call.”

Bob said nothing.

“I opened it.”

Still nothing.

Her jaw tightened.

“Then I’ll learn how to close it.”

Adam rubbed his face. “Well, hell.”

Ari looked at him. “What?”

He reached for another beer, found none, and frowned at the empty table.

“I’m not letting you idiots learn supernatural contract law without adult supervision.”

Nate gave him a tired look. “You’re drinking warm beer in a haunted library.”

“Exactly. Senior management.”

Ari laughed.

It came out ragged and frightened.

But it was laughter.

For one breath the room became human again.

Then Nate looked at Bob.

“What would it take?”

Bob regarded him. “To learn them properly?”

“Yes.”

The humor disappeared.

Bob straightened. His eyes passed over them one by one.

Fi, blood on her handkerchief.

Ari, still pale from paradise.

Adam, whose hands had begun shaking only after the danger ended.

Nate, staring toward the place where twelve black suns had hung.

“A price.”

Nate nodded. “What kind?”

Bob looked toward the painted stars overhead.

“The kind knowledge has always asked.”

His voice fell quiet.

“Time. Blood. Truth.”

The lamp flame drew long.

“And sometimes...”

His gaze returned to them.

“...the part of yourself you hoped never needed naming.”

No one answered.

Outside, night pressed its vast face against the glass. Somewhere deep within the walls an old timber sighed. The lamp steadied, small, stubborn, alive.

No one spoke the next word.

But far beyond the walls of the house, beyond the reach of road and weather and human distance, mouths were already trying the syllables they had been given.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Learning where to place the tongue.

Learning where to breathe.

Learning how to say them.

This is a chapter from a cosmic horror fiction I am writing (and sharing here, chapter by chapter), you can read it for free on my website as well. Link in the comment. Please subscribe (its free!)

Journal Entry 1

For eons we have tried to bury him, and yet he returns every time. If you want me to point to who ‘we’ are, I will not be able to. What little record of the first attempts remains has mostly disappeared, and what survives is widely disputed among those of us still here.

Cultures across the world do not know that he lies hidden in their collective consciousness. If they knew, they would not sleep as well as they do now.

He is not of this world. We do not know if he even ‘is’ in any way we understand existence. To try defining him with our limited language is a pointless exercise.

He hides in religious scripture, miscopied and mistranslated. He hides in political propaganda, wearing masks of necessity and righteousness. He hides in the anger that possesses you without warning. I have written this list twice, and yet each version feels incomplete. He might be in this pen with which I am writing. He might be in the words that my mind is spouting right now. This whole idea of writing it down itself might be breathing life into him.

He is permeable. He is omnipresent. And if you believe you can use him, you are already the most vulnerable to being used by him. Those who have tried have failed inexorably.

My hand hesitates to write what I am about to write next, yet I know that it must be true. Even if it is only part of the truth, it would be a failure to assume his hand was not in it.

He was present at every major historical turning point, and long before history learned how to record itself.

Recorded history is a convenience—one that allows our species to live with itself.

He was there before there was light.
He will remain when that light is extinguished.

Journal Entry 2

The worshippers call him Razpopo.

This is not his name.

It is a failure. An approximation. A crude shape made by human mouths, attempting to mimic with primordial noises something that does not belong to any language. “Some call him Svanteveit. Others: Marus, Grinjik, Bervertometh, Harpookratis.”

None of these are correct.

Some are not even close. He is something older than anything we can name.

Those who came nearest went mad before they could finish speaking.

It was his attention that brought us forth, and his pressure that fed the malevolence already latent within us.

It will be our attention that brings him forth again.

We do not know his true name. We do not need to. All he requires is invocation. A direction of thought. A sustained noticing. He can be called even without a name.

Especially without one.

Journal Entry 3

All our gods have left us.

They have dissipated into abstraction and no longer respond to us.

Rituals fall flat. Altars rot. Nothing answers.

The gods abandoned us because they did not like the taste of emotions filtered through the meat-prison of their own making.

But Razpopo remains.

He does not care.

Every war we waged.
Every time brother turned on brother.
Every time a child died screaming without reason.

Razpopo was watching. Consuming.

He amplified bitterness because, alone among the deities, he enjoys its taste.

\*

Calen read and re-read every single line, trying to remember when he had written this translated version. Nothing really stirred in his memories. He stared at the pages, hypnotized by what was in the journal.

He kept feeling that the moment he took his eyes off the journal, it would disappear. Calen was almost convinced there was someone else on the island, aside from him. Whoever they might be, they seemed to be trying to guide Calen. But to what end?

Calen weighed his options. He could abandon it all. He could call up Ruslan and get the hell out of there, preserving his sanity, but a strange recklessness inside him had reared its ugly, authoritative head. No!

He had never before abandoned a project, and he was not about to start now. What he really desired, needed even, was to know what was happening. That outweighed all other worldly concerns. This is what he was meant to do! Even though he didn’t know exactly what he was supposed to do.

As he stared at the pages, a dark thought clouded his mind. It seemed the more he stayed on the island, the more he found about Razpopo, his memories of himself on the island itself were being replaced rapidly. He shuddered to think what would happen if this continued.

Time seemed to be moving differently, and Calen was left with no means to confirm if this assessment was correct or not. He felt continuously tired and on edge. As if he was half-aware of what came next, just not able to competently define it, or even prepare for it.

He walked up to the bathroom, turning around every few steps to confirm that the journal he left on the dining table had not vanished. Once inside, he washed his face and hands, trying to remove as much of the dirt and blood from his fingertips and nail beds, without hurting the injured parts. When he couldn’t bear the pain of the cold water on the injuries, he stopped and threw some more cold water on his face.

Calen stared at his reflection in the mirror. Who was this?

His eyes had changed. They looked dead. It was not as if the color of his eyes had changed, but there was a certain glaze to his eyes, making them look unfocused. He didn’t know if he was imagining it or not, but his eyes seemed to move more slowly when he tried to move them. The pain in his head increased every time he tried to look up.

“Stop freaking yourself out!” He muttered to himself and realized his voice did not sound like his at all. It was hoarser, and the words felt alien. Each word felt like a projection of a feeling that lost meaning the moment the word escaped his lips. He might have been just making garbled noises from his mouth.

Calen decided to call Alice. The internet allowed the call. He could see Alice, but his video would not stream, no matter how much he tried. So, Alice had to settle for a blank screen. Calen was quite relieved with this setup. He didn’t want Alice to worry more by looking at his face.

Once he had finished telling his story, carefully avoiding mentioning the part where he had blacked out and found upon waking, that the translations were done, and it didn’t look like his handwriting. She didn’t need to know it.

“The story has …” Alice hesitated, trying to find the right word, “Bones” she finished. Her voice came through the laptop clearly, almost in high definition. “I’ll give you that.”

Alice’s voice sounded different, too. Maybe it was because he had not heard her voice without static for so many days.

“What do you mean by story?” Calen asked, a little offended. Granted, he had omitted bits of it so Alice wouldn’t have the inconvenience of worrying for him from miles away when she couldn’t do anything, but to think of it as a lie? That was not acceptable.

“I mean,” she hesitated again, “It’s good writing.”

Calen stared at Alice’s face on the screen. His silent, invisible reproach was so palpable, it seemed to get transmitted through the low-quality internet.

The awkward pause was too much for Alice, who knew she had made a cardinal sin, but something inside her egged her on. She wanted to push Calen a bit, just enough to see how he would react. “That writing retreat you took last year really paid off. My only feedback- The other names, what were they again- grimzaska and – whatever, they just sound like noises. You could remove those names and just keep Razpopo. That name is growing on me.” She half giggled.

“I didn’t write it,” Calen cut in angrily. “I found it under a loose floorboard. I haven’t even translated it entirely yet!”

But before she could respond, Alice’s face twisted in discomfort. A soft, painful groan escaped her lips. She hunched over and disappeared from the camera frame.

“Alice!” Calen shouted. “Alice, what happened?!”

She reappeared, breathless, her voice thinned by strain. “I don’t know. Felt a weird cramp in my bel—”

She doubled over again and bolted off-screen. Calen kept shouting her name, helpless. It took nearly two full minutes before she returned. She looked pale. Drained.

“I threw up,” she mumbled, massaging her belly aggressively. “I have been throwing up quite a lot in the last two hours. I don’t know if it’s something I ate or...” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she was not able to finish her thought.

Calen’s mind, however, had registered something. He didn’t know, as he had no means to measure time, but the time frame seemed to exactly fit the window within which the journal had been translated.

A flash of an image flitted past his eyes. Alice was sitting completely unclothed on the cold ground of the cave, her eyes glazed. Her hand touching the throbbing log held within the cage of roots.

He felt scared for Alice. He also felt angry at her. It seemed she had missed the point entirely. Did she understand this was dangerous information?

Calen wanted to shake some sense of what they were dealing with into her. On the other hand, if she believed in the danger, that might result in him having to return. And he was not ready to return. He wanted to know more, whatever the cost.

“Did you tell your Aunt Becky? You went to see her, right?” Calen said. Aunty Becky, Alice’s aunt on her father’s side, was their family doctor. Alice had told Calen that she had visited her upon returning from Bennet Island.

“Hm…” she murmured, unsatisfied with the solution. She clearly wanted more than a diagnosis from her aunt. “When will you come back, Calen?”

The pleading note in her voice cut through Calen. But he was not budging. He felt too close to the answer that he had been seeking forever. He needed to be on Bennett.

“Two more weeks,” he said casually. His lie evidently was unable to comfort her as Alice’s eyes dropped down to look at her own lap.

She nodded faintly after a while as Calen watched her, his insides cringing. “I’ll call my aunt. Talk later.” She wiped her tears off, and before Calen could even say ‘take care’, she hung up with an angry, decisive click.

Calen sat still for a while, staring at the frozen laptop screen, the lack of sounds settling over him. There it was again. And it was frustrating. He felt guilty, not being with her while she was clearly in distress, but would his being there have changed anything? Would her being here not be disruptive for both of them?

“Why does she have to hang up on an angry note!” He exclaimed loudly to the empty bedroom, banging a fist against the mattress. His fingertips throbbed viciously, and he regretted punching the mattress immediately.

His mind ventured towards his recent memories. When he had left Alice in New York, and travelled alone to Russia, on what seemed like just a whim, now.

*

Calen had heard the continuous thudding and clanging of the metal parts inside the truck he was travelling in quiet down, by quite a lot, which he was mistakenly thinking was a good sign up until then. Apparently, it was anything but.

The Truck was being driven by Viktor, a Russian driver Calen had met by pure chance in a bar in Yakutsk, who had offered to drive Calen to Tiksi, the only available airfield close enough to fly to Bennett Island. The snag was that the Tiksi airfield’s existence didn’t come with an assurance that Calen would get to fly off from it. But that was a bridge Calen had been willing to cross later owing to the fact there were no planes flying anywhere to the north of Yakutsk anyhow, because of bad weather. So, in his inebriated state, Viktor’s drunken promise, of driving him to Tiksi via the ‘Zimnik’, felt like a signal sent by the Gods.

‘Zimnik’, which Calen had understood far too late to be a Russian word for horrifying sections of frozen lakes that truck drivers used during the winters, was the most isolated place in the world Calen had experienced. It was flat white snow covered ‘roads’ with nothing but emptiness, as far as the eyes could see.

Viktor had been driving for the past few hours, time to time putting his ears to the bodywork, like a doctor listening for breath. Calen now understood, what he had previously disregarded as ‘Generic Russian Driver Noises’ were actually noises of disappointment.

“Ve haf choice,” he said finally, more to himself than Calen, “Ve stop truck and check problem or wait till she die.”

“That’s not good…” Calen said calmly, feeling quite proud of himself for not freaking out outwardly, reflecting the fear he felt inside. He didn’t want to seem like a frightened tourist when Viktor kept up his butch demeanor. Viktor, for a second, did look impressed with Calen.

He seemed to consider for a moment before he applied the brakes. The truck slid to a stop.

“Need help American” he said, pointing to a box, which was kept near Calen’s feet. Calen picked it up and was trying to pass it to him when he said, “Ve take it out. Open truck” Viktor started to wear his gloves and his parka. Calen followed him and they both walked out of the truck.

Once out the weather tore through all the layers of Calen’s clothing like a knife through butter. The warmth on the inside had weakened Calen’s resolve against the cold that now clawed at his face unceremoniously. There was no wind, just silent freezing dry air. The surroundings were one step short of beautiful.

An eerie cracking sound echoed in a muffled manner, making it difficult to pinpoint the location of its source. Calen jumped slightly, and immediately hoped Viktor had not seen it. But he had. He snorted his scathing snort and said, “don’t vorry American. Far avay.”

“But what was that?” Calen asked, trying not to sound too concerned. He failed as the words had come out too quickly.

“Splitting ice.”

Splitting ice?

As Viktor worked on the truck, turning different nuts and bolts, checking strange-looking compartments, Calen looked around, box of hardware held ineptly in gloved hands.

Now that they were outside the truck and at ground level, Calen saw a few medium-sized, snow-covered rocks lying around them, that were not discernible while the truck was moving. The truck made a whimpering sound like the raspy breath of a dying man.

“Aha!” Viktor said quietly to himself, without further explanation. Calen was starting to feel more and more discouraged with every passing second. Viktor finally sprung up from his hunched over stance and looked at Calen with a wide smile. Calen didn’t have the energy to smile back.

“She is cold.” Viktor whispered, sidling up to Calen, as if he didn’t want the truck to listen in on this conversation. Calen was unimpressed by the diagnosis.

“What do we do?” Calen asked with gritted teeth.

Viktor snapped his fingers; it made no sound aside from the rubbing of fabric against fabric on his gloves. Then he walked away excitedly without an answer. In a few seconds he was back with a cardboard box that looked like it had been painted black ages ago with some low-quality paint that was now chipping away in places.

“Ve put blanket.”

What the hell was this guy talking about? She is cold, we put blanket on her.

But it was not his truck, neither was he a mechanic. All he could do was, have faith in this person. Reminding himself that Viktor had said he frequented this route every year and trying to believe that Viktor really knew what he was doing, Calen kept his mouth shut and watched Viktor prop up the cardboard outside on the grille with wires from the box in Calen’s hands.

Once the silver KAMAZ logo was half covered, the kneeling Viktor stood up and brushed his hands against each other.

“What do we do now?” Calen asked, a slight hint of impatience that seemed to not fall on Viktor’s ears.

“Now, ve wait.” He said, still smiling.

“For what?”

“Sound change. She breathe better.”

Calen turned around and hid his face inside his parka, only his eyes remained visible. Beneath his jacket, the ticking sound of his wristwatch stuttered, then jumped a few ticks too quick, as if to try and catch up with the lost time.

Inside the truck, the radio hissed momentarily, the noise piercing through the void around them, then snapped into a single, prolonged tone—too clean to be static. It went away as suddenly as it had arrived. As if the noise on the radio was a signal the terrain had been patiently waiting for, another crack sounded in the air, this one, felt much closer, Calen paused mid step, worried the crack might be right under where his next step was about to fall.

Viktor had seen this and called out “You can valk.” Viktor seemed to be enjoying Calen’s confusion in this purgatorial limbo. “Don’t go far.” He added.

Calen put down his step, and something moved on his right. A snow owl, who seemed to have popped up from nowhere, flanked its wings and shook its entire body, looking balefully with its yellow eyes at Calen. Snow fell off its wings and head and Calen realized they had been standing next to this owl since they had arrived. It had been sitting so silently and so well camouflaged with the snow that Calen hadn’t noticed it even though it was just two feet away from them.

It stared at Calen. Calen, dumbfounded and unmoving, stared back at it. He really wanted to take a picture, but all his gear was inside the truck, and he felt if he made a single movement, it would fly away and hide itself.

The sound of the truck was getting better, almost like it was sounding before it started ‘feeling cold’ as Viktor had put it. Calen could hear in the background jubilatory noises Viktor was making paired with the sound of him jumping.

“Nu, nu… ya zdes.’ Ya s toboy. Devushka moya.” Viktor yelled excitedly. “She is doing better American.”

The owl turned its head a full one-eighty to look at Viktor. Perceiving no immediate threat, it returned its doleful eyes to the task of sizing Calen up.

“Sounds like it.” Calen yelled back, a little bit of the faith in Viktor had returned with the incrementally growing familiar sound of “chug..chug..thud” of the truck.

Pondering their conversation in an unimpressed manner the owl clicked its beak, as if demanding Calen’s attention back. Calen obliged and as the black eyes of the owl fell on his, he felt goosebumps on his skin. For a split second something brushed the edge of his hearing—almost words, bobbing, just slightly out of reach. It was gone before he could even try to retain a single meaningful syllable.

The owl seemed to be done with the scene unfolding in its vicinity as the noise of the truck returned to its usual rhythm. It jumped off the rock and took flight without a single sound.
Within seconds it was gone, as Calen watched it disappear completely in the grey sky.

Disheartened, Calen walked back to the truck as Viktor looked at him.

“There was an owl.” Calen said out loud. The youtuber within him wanted to let at least one person know what he had seen even though he had no proof of it. “It flew away. I think the noise of the truck scared it.”

Viktor looked around for a second. Then said, “Good!” as if it should have been obvious to Calen. Viktor took out the flask of tea, drank a large sip, and offered it to Calen, who took it instinctively. Viktor smiled.

“I think American” he said, “You doing good.”

“What do you mean?” Calen was quite taken by this suddenly happy Viktor. It reminded him of the drunk Viktor when he used to frequent the local bar in Yakutsk with him.

“With cold” Viktor pointed with his hand to the surroundings. “With.. Izolyátsiya.”

Calen, who knew a bit of German through his grandparents, was immediately able to infer the meaning as the pronunciation was quite close, even though Viktor said it in Russian.

“I have spent a lot of time in isolated places” Calen said giving Viktor the English word. He felt a little bit of pride he didn’t fully understand. Although it did cheer him up.

“Is that vat you looking for?” Viktor asked, “In Tiksi?”

Calen considered how much he should tell Viktor. He hadn’t yet mentioned Bennett Island to Viktor. Neither had he mentioned the ‘why’ of his decision to go to Bennett Island to anyone, not even his manager. Not even Alice.

Viktor, although he was mostly silent unless he was barking orders, didn’t feel untrustworthy. Furthermore, who would Viktor tell? Other drunk guys at some Russian bar when he had returned?

“I am actually trying to get to Bennett Island.” Then he threw caution to the wind and asked, “Have you heard the name Razpopo?” He immediately regretted mentioning the name as Viktor laughed out, shaking his head in disbelief. “Ty shto, sumasshedshiy, amerikanets?”

“What?” Calen smiled politely, not understanding a word of what had been said. Viktor took an entire minute, laughing out loud. When his laughter subsided, he looked at Calen and said, “I don’t know vat this Razpopo is.”

Calen was a little disappointed. It was to be expected. What he was trying to find out was obscure at the very least. But why had Viktor laughed uncontrollably then?

“Why were you laughing then?” asked Calen a little defensively.

“Vell” Viktor said and it was evident that he found it quite funny, “Who goes to Bennett in the vinter?” Another bout of laughter and then he added, “You are crazy American. I like you!”

Calen didn’t know if it was a compliment or not.

The truck sounded just like it was sounding when they had started so Viktor, still laughing from time to time, shaking his head, and muttering things in Russian got in the truck. Calen climbed in through the passenger side door. The inside of the truck was warm and inviting.

Viktor went to the sleeping quarters in the back and returned after a few minutes with two cups full of hot, melted dark chocolate. Sitting down he took a large sip from his own cup and gave Calen his cup. Viktor smiled and said, “Drink! It’s good. Now ve celebrate with Choco. Tonight, I make Pelmeni.”

Calen didn’t know if it was the truck or his crazy plan that had softened Viktor’s stance on Calen, but it didn’t matter. Once the melted chocolate finally went down his throat he too was smiling. Whenever Alice fought with him, she always made hot cocoa after, to apologize.

At night Viktor really did cook Pelmeni, which Calen found to be delicious. It was meat dumplings slicked with butter and freshly cracked pepper. The whole inside of the truck smelled delicious even as they went to sleep.

His bed felt warm, but Calen found it difficult to doze off. Unwelcome thoughts streamed in his mind. There was no reason, as far as he could see, for these thoughts to have burrowed into his head but now that they were here, they refused to leave.

Sleep came and went until he finally got up from his tiny bed. Viktor, who was still asleep, his back hanging ominously from the small bed frame, didn’t even stir. Calen wondered if he should wake Viktor but decided against it. He walked up to the small kitchenette and heated up some tea and took a cigarette from the box lying on the dashboard. He sat in the passenger’s seat, still too groggy to open his eyes properly.

He cracked the window a little, smoked the cigarette, and drank the tea. A sense of calm had dawned on him since the last day. Viktor having repaired the truck added a lot to that calm, but what had actually added more to his composure after waking up on the fourth day was him having seen an owl, surviving alone in the cold arctic tundra. That felt somewhat reassuring. He secretly wanted the owl to show up again, although he knew it wasn’t really going to happen.

Calen had been looking outside the truck without really seeing, with his eyes hardly open but now that he had had some tea, his eyes were slowly opening. He drew in a sharp breath as what he was looking at came into proper view. The moon had split into five!

Out of habit, Calen withdrew his phone from his jacket. However, as he tried to turn it on, the black screen stared back at him haplessly. Calen blinked hard, believing sleepy unfocused eyes to be the reason for it. But nothing changed, the five parts of the moon stared back at him, measuring him.

Calen pushed his face against the shockingly cold window and all the five parts of the moon flitted for a fraction of a second, distancing itself and then reappearing as if it had teleported right next to the truck.

“WHAT THE-” he exclaimed loudly. Immediately from the sleeping quarters came a muffled crashing sound like something heavy had fallen.

“BLYAD!” Viktor yelled from inside. A minute later, with the sound of shuffling footsteps and groaning in the background, Viktor came out into the cockpit of the truck to find Calen wiping the window with his gloves and trying to look outside.

“The moon has broken!” Calen said, his voice terrified. Viktor looked out the window. The moon indeed had split. The center of the moon was a rhombus while four other parts connected by a halo of white light hovered at the top, bottom, right, and left. The light was intensely bright—intentionally, hyper-symmetrically arranged—and if one looked at it for too long, it hurt their eyes.

Viktor groaned again and rubbed the side of his head. “Trick of light.” he muttered quietly, evidently still as groggy as Calen had been until he saw the moon.

“What?” Calen yelled annoyed at Viktor’s apathy. His heart, trying to beat itself out of his chest.

“It happens American.” Viktor’s reply had a scathing, slightly condescending undertone.

“What do you mean, it happens?” Calen asked, finally taking his eyes off the window for a second.

Viktor looked sympathetically at Calen, like he was a child.

“Bozhe moy,” Viktor said, looking like he was doing his best to not roll his eyes. “You vont survive on Bennet. Scared of little thing.”

Calen was a little snubbed and didn’t care for the patronizing tone. He stared at Viktor, who said, “Its lunnye psy —how you say —moon dog.”

“Jesus Christ! can’t you explain one thing in a way it doesn’t sound like you’re yanking my chain?” Calen exclaimed frustrated.

Calen’s frustration seemed to have cheered the Russian up, “Vat you vant I explain? It’s trick of light. Moon is fine.” Viktor said with a wide grin. Calen looked at the moon again, the broken off parts seemed to twinkle in and out of existence right in front of his eyes. It was an unbelievably creepy sight. Viktor took his time in the bathroom, then prepared some breakfast and came fully jacketed for the fourth day of driving to begin. Calen was still looking at the moon, all its broken parts staring back at him, slowly chipping away at Calen’s mind, draining him of the sense of reality he had brought with him from the humble suburbs of New York.

Calen understood it was a trick of the light yet every time he peeked at the moon, as Viktor started driving, it unnerved him. What unsettled him most, aside from the eerie sight, was the effort it took to keep believing Viktor. As if being fine with disbelief was a cost of entry to this inaccessible, surreal world. He realized, unease flooding his veins, that something inside him had come unraveled. Like a screw that no longer tightened all the way. He wondered how many such unravelling-s were in store for him and how many it would take to leave a permanent mark on him.

The sides of the moon connected by the halo seemed to move every time they moved. Whenever Viktor turned right or left, the sides seemed to reorganize themselves to keep an eye on Calen. Every time they sped up or slowed down, it also seemed to do the same. Try as he might, Calen couldn’t stop himself from freaking out and decided to draw the curtain on his side. The sides of the moon shifted immediately and were still visible on the side of the windscreen. Calen felt like a child trying to hide from a dangerous apparition, which refused to be ignored, no matter how hard he tried.

“Listen..” Viktor said, tentatively, eyes on the road, “Vot this ‘Yankee my chain’ means? Yankee means American no?”

Calen laughed out loud, a little relieved to be provided with distraction. He started explaining what he had said and what he had meant.

After a lunch of bread and Salo, Viktor said, as they started moving again, “Ve vill reach fuel station in some hours.”

“I thought there were no villages on the Zimnik.” Calen had heard the word so many times that he was able to pronounce it without a flaw by now.

“No village.” Viktor replied, “just station.” Calen felt horrified at the thought of an isolated fuel station in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t imagine a scenario where someone would willingly accept the job of staying alone on the Zimnik.

“Hang on” Calen said, “How do you know? I see no landmarks around.”

“Not for you my American friend!” Viktor smiled mysteriously. The only landmark-worthy thing they had passed in the last few was a rock he had seen, that was a bit larger than the other rocks. Wondering how the truck drivers of Zimnik understood where they were considering they were basically on a snowed-up version of a desert; Calen was glad he was with Viktor.

Time passed unevenly on the Zimnik. Sometimes slowing down and sometimes pacing up. It was difficult to track time, so Calen had given up. But in a few minutes (or was it, hours?), Calen spotted the first sign of something man made. Although it was covered in frost, it was unmistakably a light pole. It wasn’t functioning and looked like a relic of some failed human endeavor.

“Now your eyes are vorking.” Viktor said happily. “Now you notice, vat you need notice on the Zimnik.”

*

The valley outside was silent. The hovering steel blue light at the horizon looked muted. Even the opalescent clouds just stared back at Calen, rooted to their spot. Judging him.

Why would Alice think I am making up a story?

There were no answers. In his eagerness to isolate himself on this island, he had forgotten that this barren land would be devoid of answers.

He leaned back against the headboard and opened the journal now with the new added pages. He had read it so many times since he had discovered it that it felt like he already knew it like the back of his hand. He read it still. Every time he read the word ‘Razpopo’, his stomach did an odd flip. He should have been rejoicing in his victory, exhilarated that he had found the existence of the word. That it was not just some fever dream cooked up by his grandfather, repeated fearfully by his father, transmitted to him like some memetic disease that demanded his obsession without any valid reason.

Instead, he just felt smaller somehow.

He thought of starting the painful but necessary work of translating the last two entries. His entire body shivered with resistance. A chill went through from the top of his head to the tip of his feet. He pulled the blanket up to his face, his entire body shaking against the cold he was suddenly feeling.

Before he could think about what was happening to him or even begin to feel the first pangs of concern, his vision went dark and his body stopped moving. His brain half-registered it and yet tempted by the dark abyss now opening up in the ethers of his consciousness, he moved towards it.

The darkness behind his closed eyes quickly transformed into the night forest, as if it had been lying in wait for Calen to doze off. He could hear a deep scratching and creaking noise coming from all around him; the trees were moving.

An enormous, tall silhouette of something loomed far away in the deep darkness of the forest, in the copper red moonlight. The smell of maggots mixed with termite-eaten wood permeated the whole of the forest, wafting up Calen’s nose, making him nauseous.

The ever-familiar sound of drums pounded against his eardrums, and a voice far away screamed in mirth. Calen was half expecting it, but that did nothing to dampen the fear it brought with it. He shivered aggressively against the cold. His feet felt numb.

It took him a second to notice that not only was he barefoot, but he was completely naked. He looked around helplessly, trying to find something—anything—on the snow to wrap around himself. But there was nothing.

He would have felt embarrassed if he were not feeling scared. His lack of clothes made him feel exposed and not just to the environment. He didn’t know why being clothed in the proximity of danger would matter in terms of confidence, but he was sure it did. If he had some clothes, he would have felt a little more secure. Not to mention that the cold that bit his skin incessantly, and the creaking of the tree trunks had already frozen him in place.

Terrified, the more he tried to move, the more difficult it became. He felt tiny skittery movements beneath his feet. The ground beneath had come alive. His body refused to move and try as he might with his eyes, to look at what was passing beneath his feet, his eyes disobeyed his commands, Calen somehow knew it was the roots of the trees. He felt them throb under his numb feet. All his instincts were slowly leaving his body.

Before he could do anything, he saw a horde of people with faces painted deep, dark red and black coming out from behind the trees, as if they had been hiding there. Surrounding him on all sides. Their mouths were moving in unison, as they vehemently uttered the unnerving chant that Calen had heard a hundred times before. It scraped against his ears.

Their gleaming eyes flashed in the scarlet rays of the moon; every last one of them visible to Calen, regardless of how far they were. Even though he couldn’t turn his head, he could feel the eyes of the ones standing behind him drilling into the back of his skull, hurting his paralyzed body.

More people appeared, closing in on him. An unanticipated kick struck the backs of his knees, and he went down hard. His right knee hit a stone hidden under the blanket of snow. Intense pain burned through the entirety of his body; his eyes seemed to phase out for a second as everything went out of focus. His throat ached as unexpressed screams kept accumulating in it, not able to exit. Some of the people converged on him immediately, tying his hands and legs with practiced indifference, tightening knots until his body ceased to belong to him.

They made it quite clear as they turned him this way and that way to get access to tying knots on the ropes they were using on him, that he was not going to be afforded any decency. In a few minutes, he was completely and tightly wrapped in thick, coarse ropes.

Before he knew it, he was being carried like a hunted animal. He tried yet again to scream, but no words came out. From the corner of his eye, he could swear he saw the trees moving, their bark stretching and crunching.

As they moved deeper into the forest, the trees parted. The trail opened into a clearing; a bright orange glow from a fire illuminated a strange, surreal scene.

Calen saw a group of people similar to those carrying him, jumping in place around the fire. A drummer stood just outside the circle, beside a large mound of earth that seemed to be growing taller every second. Slowly climbing towards the full red moon.

By the light of millions of flying embers, Calen saw that it had no face, and yet, he had a distinct impression that the mound was examining him. Even with the haze of confusion that surrounded him, a slight familiarity was starting to creep up Calen’s spine. Was he an offering?

Some of the clan had gathered around him, as the ones carrying Calen threw him near the fire, on a wet bit of grass and moss-covered ground, unceremoniously. A few children, their faces painted black and red, their white teeth gleaming in the light of the fire, rolled him until he was laid on his back at the base of the mound. Unable to move, he was forced to keep looking at it.

It resembled a misshapen, elongated tumor protruding from the earth—glistening, wet, not made of stone or wood at all. It looked organic. A fleshy mound that moved and throbbed in a strangely familiar way. Calen tried to close his eyes, but they wouldn’t.

The chant around him grew louder and faster. The syllables started mixing with each other. Soon it sounded like a guttural whirring sound. As if the very engine that ran the world was being forcibly stopped. Like a wrench thrown into the cogs of machinery.

He dared to look at it again and found it growing, right before his eyes. Veinlike ridges swelled across the mound, and something began flowing in them. The more the flow increased, the more this organic mound transformed.

The top of the mound had shaped itself into an ugly, featureless face now. Portions of it were as black as the night sky, but there were portions where blood red paint seemed to smear and drip out from within, permeating through the layers of its flesh. Even as he looked, more changes kept happening to the mound.

The smell of burnt hair and leather rose from the fire as a huge spurt of flame shot into the air, and the call of a buffalo horn rang through the air, piercing and overshadowing all other sounds. Every last bit of courage had left Calen’s body with the buffalo horn. He was not prepared for what happened next.

One of the people who had been dancing until now left the group. Amongst all of them, he looked in control of whatever was happening. He moved his hands in an up-and-down motion as he walked towards Calen with his back to him. As if his moving hands were a command, the group started jumping around the fire with more intensity. Some of them jumped so high, Calen couldn’t believe it was possible for humans to do that. Calen heard cackles of laughter and jeering from the group. Delighted jubilations and cheers screamed into the night.

Satisfied by this frenzy and uproar he had caused, the man turned around and rushed toward Calen. The man grabbed his feet. Bracing Calen’s shins against his waist and sliding his own arms underneath them. He lifted Calen with inhuman strength and began spinning.

Everything blurred around him as Calen was spun at almost breakneck speed, but the burning ember-like eyes on the top of the mound followed Calen intently.

Within seconds, Calen was airborne, the world blurring—faces, fire—everything spinning faster and faster.

Lasting only a fraction of a second, recognition bloomed in him, but it was too late.

He had seen it—sketched a hundred times across the journal he had found in the cave. Different angles. Multiple sides. The drawings weren’t just drawings. The totem pole!

A red lolling tongue unfurled out of the ugly face on the mound, the tip of it lightly scratching itself around the middle. Fresh blood dripping from it every time the flesh throbbed.

The ember eyes burned into his. A silent scream tore from his lips, followed by a wet thud as his head crashed into the totem. His eyes were open just long enough to see the ember eyes burning in the night one last time, as warm drops of blood from the tongue of the totem pole dripped on his face.

ONE

The diagnosis came on February 29th. Harvey had been out for a run, collapsed, and was rushed to the hospital. Stage four pancreatic cancer with metastases in his liver and lungs. He saw no point in treatment; he would be dead by July.

Despite the bad news, Harvey remained as kind and chipper as always. He sent flowers to his young mother every year on her birthday and Mother’s Day. She hadn’t spoken to him since he married Grace, but she came to visit him in the hospital.

“It’s her fault, you know,” his mother said, “whatever spell she put you under, something she cooked up in that trailer-trash house—”

“Ma!”

“She’s not a natural blond,” she continued. “She’s a Mexican. A real witch under cover, if you ask me. And she’s fat.”

“She was born in the U.S., ma,” Harvey told her. “She’s not a witch, and that’s my wife you’re talking about. She’s married to me, not you.”

“Yeah? Well, we’ll see how long that lasts.”

“It’s already not going to last.” Harvey’s chest turned to stone at his own words.

“Well, then you’re better off dead.” Her eyes widened as if she was the one who should be shocked.

“Is that really what you think?” he said.

His mother said nothing, but slapped him, spat in Grace’s face, and walked out of their lives.

Harvey couldn’t let it go. A few days later, he brought it up to Grace again. She was relatively forgiving and patient, but nothing like Harvey.

“You know I think what she did was absolutely unacceptable,” he said.

“Right,” said Grace.

“But she’s my mom, and I know my mom. She’s just been having a really hard time ever since my dad passed, and maybe she’ll come around. It’s better to show her love and let her know that we want her to be part of our lives. Sometimes hard things in life bring out the worst in people. It’s not who she is. I have to try.”

Grace chuckled, ran her fingers through his hair, and looked into him, eyes sparkling. “I know, and I’ll support you from a distance,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“Nor do I want to, Harv. What she did…I can’t deal with that once you’re…”

“I’ll deal with my mom. All we have to do is focus on the time we have together. I’ll be with you forever, Gracie girl.”

“I love you.”

“I love you,” he said, then looked down at her hand and held it tight.

“Why do you stay here with me?” she asked.

Harvey’s smile drooped. “What?”

“Maybe your mom’s right. Maybe if we lived in a better area, some place with more career opportunities, more money, more family, better health care—”

“Stop,” he said. “You know that’s not true. And if not, then I gotta do a better job.”

They both forced a laugh.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

Cancer chews away the body like rot, separating the soul from the devil within that eats you alive. The slope of Harvey’s decline was glacial—cold, relentless, slippery, and inescapable. Grace watched as death nipped at his ankles, lapping the flesh from his skeleton. He would sleep for hours and hours, worrying Grace to the bone, and when he woke he was delirious. He spoke like he was reading alphabet soup, and he nearly tore his eyes out over a pill he dropped on the kitchen floor. When he was finally lucid again, it conveniently landed on their very first wedding anniversary. It almost seemed like a miracle—or perhaps a final goodbye.

Since it was their first marriage milestone, Harvey booked a stay at a themed hotel. “We’ve never had enough money to go to Paris,” he said, “and I’m not leaving you with a mountain of debt to clean up.”

“I told you I don’t need any of that,” she replied.

“But I do. Let me do this for you…please.”

They went out to a fancy dinner and had wine and chocolates. The room was designed with a jacuzzi in the center, surrounded by planters of fake roses where a makeshift Eiffel Tower loomed overhead. They snuggled up in a warm bubble bath with a glass of champagne and turned on the cooking channel.

“How much do you love me?” he asked.

“Oh, Harvey. I really can’t do this,” she said.

“Why? Is it because you lied when you said you love me more than anything? Don’t tell me you love that schmuck from Grey’s Anatomy more than me.”

Grace laughed. “No. That’s not it.”

“Well, come on, babe. I’m dyin’ here!” he cackled.

But Grace’s smile went cold and flat. “No, Harvey. That’s exactly why. I’m terrified to find out how much I love you once you’re gone.”  

It happened while he was lying on the couch in their hotel. Harvey had gone to sleep after an eventful day—perhaps he’d done too much. His eyes had nearly glazed, as if his eyelashes were already shooing flies. Time stood unaware of how long Grace sat there and cried.

“My sweet Gracie girl,” he said, “don’t be scared. I’ll always be with you.” He wiped her tears, then he pulled her close, kissed her softly, and he was gone.

The young widow’s support groups were useless, completely foreign. Most of the women surpassed her in age by fifteen years. Harvey was thirty when he died. She was now going to turn thirty-one. She stopped attending the sessions after the initial newly-bereaved meetings had ended. Imagine that: newlyweds to newly-bereaved within a single year.

No one had received an invitation to her birthday party, because she hadn’t sent any. She had no true friends of her own—since everyone she knew was friends with Harvey—but some of Harvey’s old friends, Lisa and Harrison Caldwell, tried to reach out and be of comfort. Several days after her actual birthday, they invited her over for dinner and a game night. She could hear the laughter as she walked up the front steps of their house. A few of their neighbors had joined, she was sure, to make things less awkward. The conversation stopped as soon as she entered the room. It was like everyone had seen a ghost, an alien, something so far off from their own understanding that they’d lost the ability to at least try and act normal. Yet they still tried in vain to uplift.

A blond-haired woman who lived up the street—Tiffany was her name—was the first to break the ice. “My husband and I divorced just a little over a year ago, almost around the same time as…Well, I think I know what you’re going through, sweetie. Life’s not easy being alone after that. Tell you what. Hang in there. If you need anything, call me.” Tiffany slipped a folded sticky note into Grace’s palm and patted her fingers. Grace didn’t care what it was. She thanked the Caldwells for inviting her, apologized for not staying, and went out the door.

When she made it back to the car, she cried hot tears of rage. Maybe she shouldn’t have blamed Tiffany; she didn’t know better. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.

The car chuckled and popped and coughed its way to life—just another item on the list of things she could no longer afford. At home, she threw down the keys on the kitchen table next to the spider-web of overdue bills. A plunk, plunk, plunk into a small empty garbage can was another reminder that it had rained while she was out. The roof was leaking again. She tossed Tiffany’s crumpled sticky note into the half-filled bucket and watched as the water slowly drowned the note and dragged it to the bottom.

It was almost shocking how quickly other people stopped calling. The few invitations she did receive were horrible. The office parties and work socials were unbearable. No one dared mention Harvey. Everyone was set off by the uneasiness of their own mortality, to which Grace served as a constant reminder.

Eventually the invitations stopped altogether. All except one.

A year later, Grace got a wedding invitation in the mail. Her baby sister, Alegria, had met the love of her life.

Of course she went. Even now, she would always be there for her family. But Alegria would never get an apology for Grace’s absence. She spent most of the reception in the bathroom concealing dejected tears.

Time went by, and nothing changed. She went to work, came home, sat at the table, and stared into nothing until she finally went to bed.

Christmas was the worst.

An older woman from the neighborhood came by and told Grace she still had so much to live for. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you; you’re so young,” she said. “You’ll find someone else.”

There, just like that. Problem solved. So easily dismissed. What life? Grace thought. What a life. Harvey WAS my life. My life is dead and buried.

But that was until she met someone…and Harvey came back.

TWO

One night she stepped outside—she always let the dogs out back before bed—when she heard whistling. Since they lived in a trailer park, she thought nothing of it. At first she thought it might have been a prank, some bored neighborhood kid, until she recognized the tune. It was the song they chose for their first dance. Their wedding song. The whistling came closer, drifting out of the densely packed trees of the backyard. It got louder and louder until it stopped.

The next night she came out with the dogs just the same. She waited in the quiet, listening, expecting. Nothing came. So, she thought she might help it along, like an echo, a call and response. She whistled the tune as best she could through chapped lips. And sure enough, like the breeze in the trees, the whistling came drifting back, like the strangest echo she’d ever heard.

In the morning, she was leaving for work when her next-door neighbor stopped her and told her about some whistling he’d heard in the night. “Sounded like it was coming from over your way,” he said. His name was Chance, an older fella in his seventies who did nothing but sit on his porch during the day and blast the news on his television at night.

“Yeah,” said Grace. “I was just whistling a little tune to cheer myself up a bit. Sorry if I disturbed you.”

“Oh, it ain’t about that at all,” said Chance. His brow scrunched, and he looked at her funny, like someone might look at a hairless cat. “You sure it was you whistlin’?” he asked.

“I’m…pretty sure,” Grace chuckled nervously.

Chance was still looking at her, something strange. “You know about these woods?” he asked. “Anybody ever told ya about ‘em?”

“Uh, don’t think so. What about them?”

“There are some rules that folks follow around here, especially going out in the woods at night, or being near ‘em.” He held out his hand to count on his fingers, first with his pointer, then middle, and so on. “No whistlin’. No singin’. No runnin’. And if—”

“Hey, Grace!” It was her neighbor from down the road. Dean. He was a single guy with an odd disposition and no restraint. He passed by her driveway every day on his morning run—probably timed it perfectly. “What ya guys talking about?” he asked.

Chance interjected before Grace could answer. “Ain’t you the Miller’s boy?” he asked.

“Uh…yes, sir!”

“Well, why don’t you run along and say hello to your mother for me. We’re having a bit of a private conversation here.”

“Oh, yeah…okay. I was just going to ask Grace if she was free tonight—”

“Actually, she’s having dinner with me,” Chance cracked. “Now run along before you make the poor young lady late for work.”

“Right, of course. Have a great day! See ya later, Grace!” Dean ran off, but his eyes lingered for far too long.

Chance smirked at Grace and gave a sly wink.

“Thanks for that,” she said. “I owe you one.”

“Forget me,” barked Chance. “You best stay inside tonight. No funny business.”

“Awww, no dinner?”

“Stay. Inside.” His face was a bit paler than before.

“You got it.”  

She sat at the table for longer than usual. She could feel two sets of eyes patiently watching her. When a paw touched her leg, she snapped out of her trance. The first pup, a black lab named Jupiter, stamped his feet with his tongue out and tail whipping. Pluto, a female golden retriever, watched longingly from the comfort of the couch. Grace wondered where she would be without the two of them.

Unfortunately, for two pairs of big brown eyes, staying inside was not an option, so reluctantly she watched from the sliding door as they finished their business and came back inside. Before she could slide the door closed, she heard it. But now the whistling had lifted to a breathy hum.

Grace had heard things from the other women at the support group—about how they had reconnected with their husbands’ spirits after they had passed. Everything had been so tasteless and gray for months. Whatever this was, she didn’t care what some old croak had to say about rules.

She left the door open a few inches. The hum drew closer. The latch rattled as if touched by the wind, then the door threw itself open, slamming into the end of the rails. Grace jumped back onto the head of the couch. She was surprised the glass hadn’t cracked.

The night air was frigid, stinging, so cold she snapped to her feet. The humming had moved back to the fence line, drawing her eyes to the dark dancing trees. A wind like this shouldn’t exist, she thought. It bit into her skin bone-deep, yet it called her to action. One foot after the other, no shoes or socks, she stepped outside. The hums lingered near the fence and stopped, perhaps sensing her approach. The wind whipped the gold-tipped remnants of her black hair into her eyes, and with the dark, made the night into a tornado of twinkling shadow. A harsh breath rasped in her ear, then nearly knocked her off her feet when the humming popped up again, right beside her. It floated along for a moment, hovered near the sliding door, then drifted inside and down the hall.

She followed the eerie tune into their bedroom where she half-expected to meet a calmness, a warmth, something familiar—maybe even Harvey himself. But she found nothing.

Tears soaked her eyes as she ripped the sheets from the mattress, gutted the space below the bed, tore sweaters from closet hangers. The shower curtain didn’t survive, being rend from its rings, and the bottles of cleaner bowled from their place underneath the sink. Next were the couch cushions, flung about the living room, the ottoman disemboweled of its blankets and pillows, but still no Harvey. The humming was gone.

After the passing of Hurricane Grace, she climbed past the tattered curtain and into the tub, turned on the cold shower, and sat fully clothed. She shut her eyes and wished and wished. She wished that if this storm wouldn’t pass, it would take her. She wished she could go back, do things differently. Maybe she could’ve caught Harvey’s illness sooner. She reasoned that this world was too cruel, too filthy without someone like Harvey Trist to keep the balance. But then she realized she sounded selfish. Perhaps it was her fault that he wasn’t here. Maybe she was undeserving of his presence, his thoughtfulness, his love. Maybe Harvey’s mother was right. Maybe she was just a fat girl swept away in a fairytale never meant to last.

The water chilled her bones, and she cried, and cried.

Something happened again the next night—something wrong. She stepped out, let the dogs out as normal, and stood in the cool, darkened breeze. It felt good, filled her with breath, fed her soul. She closed her eyes for a moment and let it pass through her, carrying away the sickness and the emptiness to a far-off place.

But when she opened them, she saw it.

It looked like a person, cloaked in a long robe or gown, floating above the treetops, arms outstretched in invitation. Grace blinked rapidly in denial, and the figure vanished. The breeze turned to a harsh wind, stirring the trees to life once more. The dogs barked at the chain-link fence, hackles raised in alarm. Grace tried to quiet them for what felt like an hour until the wind abruptly died. The dogs turned their attention to her, then walked past her and into the house. The woods were utterly silent, not a wisp, twig-crack, or cricket-chirp. She gave one last look at the petrified trees beyond the fence line and turned to go back inside.

She took one step onto the old deck stairs with a creak when it shot up from behind her. Harvey’s whistling had come back. This time it was down-tuned, slow and off-beat. It wafted along the air like a frigid draft so thick she could touch it. She stood there scanning the trees for a while before she called “Harvey!” into the night. “Harv, is that you?” she shouted. She watched for a moment longer until she realized how wide she had stretched her eyes searching and—

Had she really just called out her dead husband’s name into the woods at night?

Slowly, lazily, the whistling faded into the dark. But as Grace turned her back to the trees, gooseflesh crawled up her spine and nested in the back of her head.

The next night the rain came. It had nearly become a self-loathing ritual by now, stepping out into the night, hopeful that somehow Harvey’s spirit would return to give her one last night of warmth in her bed.

Tonight, she sat wrapped up on the edge of the deck, drawing circles with her shoes in the mud. A loud snap and scrape came from beyond the fence. Something sounded like footfalls in the undergrowth. She stood and shielded her eyes from the rain. A beam of light swept around the neighboring wood fence.

“What the hell are you doin’ out here?” roared Chance, blinding her with his flashlight. “Open up this gate. Come on, let’s go.”

Grace hurried to the man-door in the fence, unlocked and unlatched it. Chance came stomping into her backyard. “It’s been three nights I heard you out here callin’ and ugly cryin’, Lord have mercy.” His jowls jiggled when he got real upset. “Now look atchya, trying to get soaked to the bone, and for what? So you can feel something?”

Chance stared for a moment. Then the old man’s face drooped. His eyes went soft, and his jaw stammered. “I-I’m sorry, angel. Forgive me. You know how an old man can be. I just want you to understand what you’re dealin’ with. I know you’re probably sick of hearin’ what other people have to say, but you don’t know these things like I do. I was here when they took them kids; I remember. I thought I’d heard the news wrong, wished I had, when they started talking about kids.”

“What happened to them?” she asked.

“They disappeared. Vanished. Nothing, not a single hair, no clothes, no teeth. It was like they never existed. Both were only children of two single mothers. Jesus, the way those women were killed keeps me up at night. Maybe I shouldn’t find out what happened to the kids. It’s better they just blipped, gone. But it was something that came out of the woods, or lured them in, I’m sure. Either way, it’s been the last nail in too many coffins for my sake to let you go wandering around out here.” He wagged his finger at Grace like she was his grandchild.

“Thank you, Chance. Do you wanna come inside?” she asked. “I’m frozen.”

Chance took a wary look out into the trees. “Yeah. Maybe I’d better.”

Grace made them chamomile tea and set Chance up on the couch while she sat on the coffee table.

“I’m sorry we never got better acquainted,” she said.

“Oh, hush,” Chance croaked. He sipped his tea and licked his lips, staring at the rim of the mug with his eyebrows raised in delight. “You know, my wife passed away a couple of years ago. I know it’s not the same, e’en though it might shock ya to know I’ve got an ounce of brains in me.”

Grace tried not to chuckle. “I did know,” she said. “I’m sorry. And it doesn’t matter if it’s the same. A loss is a loss.”

He smiled. “You’re a good kid, Gracie. I know it may seem like it’s all over…When Annie passed, shit, I was a ball o’ sap. An old ball o’ sap. Imagine that—an old croak like me, lyin’ in bed at night, staring at the cold pillow on the empty side of the bed, soakin’ my own with tears, not carin’ if I had a mouth full of salt.”

“You’re a sweet man,” said Grace with glittery eyes.

“You’ve got family, dontchya?” he asked. She nodded and wiped her tears.

“Who?” he asked.

“My mom and younger sister,” she said.

“No dad?”

She shook her head.

“Well, shit. Sorry about that.” He sat forward on the cushion and set his mug on a coaster next to Grace. “Well, I’ve got my grand-babies, little ones. It gives me something to look forward to, something to do. Though it breaks my heart for them not to have their Gammy, I suppose it could be worse. You don’t have any kids, do ya?”

“No. Sometimes I think about how it would’ve been if we had. But then I almost feel grateful we didn’t. It might have ruined them.”

“It don’t make sense, ya know. When someone wants to die, they’re spared. When someone’s got their best life to live, it’s taken. Harvey was one of those. All good and not a splinter of bad in him. I never told you this, but when y’all were first married, I’d just had the funeral. Harvey didn’t know much, but he came over after I got home, gave me flowers, a case of beer…and he’d framed a picture of me and my Annie. Lord only knows how he got it.”

Grace looked up at the ceiling with soggy lashes and wet cheeks, trying to air them out.

“Tell ya what, kid,” he said. “The tears don’t stop. The pain don’t go away, not all of it. You’re gonna miss him. Ya are. Hell, I do too.” He choked on his words. “You don’t have to be strong….It’s okay. It’s okay to wanna give up. Just so long as you keep trying. There’s things worth livin’ for, trust me. You'll find them.”

He wiped his tears with shaky hands. Grace snatched one of them and held on dearly, fighting tears of her own.

“I don’t want to do this any more,” she sobbed.

“You’re telling me, kid. C’mere.” He pulled her in for a hug. “I think I’ve made enough mess for one night," he whispered. “I’ll call ya in the morning.”

THREE                       

She woke up to water dripping on her forehead, and the mattress was moving, undulating like it was…breathing? She startled awake and sat up. The pillow was dry, nothing on the ceiling. She thought maybe there’d been a new leak. She touched her face—dry. Strange, but never mind that. She couldn’t shake this filthy feeling, like she’d gone camping for a week with no shower. No, worse. She felt like she’d been touched. Like she could feel the remnants of poking, prodding fingers on her ribs and hips.

She showered before eating, this time with warm water, no clothes, and a new curtain. And no matter how much she scrubbed, she still felt the sensation of fingers in her sides.

TO BE CONTINUED...

On the edge of the forest crouched a little House made of logs and bricks, with some bird droppings that were mostly just for decoration. Its insides were warm and cozy against a winter night, and it had only ever eaten one person.

House had a squarish design with a potbelly breakfast nook where the morning sun liked to sit and discuss all the goings-on of the forest, such as the on-going cold war between the squirrels and the beavers.

House had been built by a family. House had been very young back then, and so only had flashes of memories: a white dog with a gray spot chasing a tiny human; a woman with long hair who danced while she cooked; a man who read stories to medium-sized humans snuggled under blankets; a general feeling of joy and safety until the day the inhabitants put everything in brown boxes, walked out, and left forever.

And so House sat alone for a long time. One day a man with a shiny head came, looked at House, and sighed deeply. He brought with him a sofa, a bed, two chairs, and a large rectangular box that made too much noise. The man would sit in the breakfast nook, mindlessly eating the children of the birds and staring at the walls. At least, he did that until the day that House ate him instead.

House hadn’t had anything against the man, whose name House never knew. House simply called him Shine, though the man didn’t really deserve it. Nothing about him was shiny except his head, which sometimes even the Sun found too reflective for its taste.

Then one magic day, a Great Event happened. A short, roundish woman with a laugh like bells appeared, carrying a pink rectangle. Shine called her his sister, and House had loved her immediately, all the way down to its basement.

House was 83% sure her name was Feather, and 100% sure she loved dusting. She did it every day, tickling the baseboards while she sang songs about sailing and pillaging. She’d once sung them while playing the piano at a gathering of her friends, who she assured that the songs were just old Viking lullabies. Her ancestors, she said, were Vikings.

When she told the people about her Viking heritage, Shine had scoffed. House had creaked in vicarious embarrassment for Feather. But Feather just rang her little bell laugh and asked Shine to duet with her. He refused because he had eaten too much bird at dinner. House tried to sing with her instead, but it just sounded like more creaking.

In addition to refusing to sing, Shine was boring. He would sit and watch a little box that made loud sounds of people cheering, though Shine never cheered along. Sometimes he would raise his feet if Feather needed to dust the wooden floors beneath him, which House supposed was better than not raising his feet but not as good as, say, helping Feather.

Feather, on the other hand, had bright blue eyes, freckles, and an inability to sit still. She planted asters and sunflowers in the front garden and promised Shine that the flowers would bloom big and bold the next season, and so would he. House did not understand how a man could bloom, but it loved the way the flowers smelled and how the bees would flit about and whisper secrets from the meadow. Feather washed House’s walls both inside and out. She’d bought spices and organized them in alphabetical order, then made everything smell of cardamom and cinnamon, opening the windows so that the delicious aroma could dance with the scent of crushed leaves.

Then one day, Feather announced that she must leave. She patted Shine’s head and told him he’d be fine on his own, and it was time to let Lorraine go. Shine only harrumphed and muttered that it was Lorraine or no one. Feather gently said he must move on.

But Shine did not move on. He didn’t move anywhere, actually. He just stayed on the couch as the dust coalesced into bigger and bigger balls of fluff. The fire went out of the hearth. The walls got dirty again, and House smelled of worn socks and old food. The sounds from the rectangular box got louder. Rain ate at House’s shingles and ice got into the holes and pushed them farther apart. Insects began to feast on House’s planks. One particularly windy day, a tree flung its branches and cracked a window.

Please, House begged Shine. Help me.

But Shine only muttered that the creaking was too loud.

House could not hold back its resentment. Why would Shine not move, would he not help, would he not call Feather and ask her to come back, please come back? The flowerbed began to wither and House began to panic. Feather had loved House the way that no one ever had. Shine did not deserve Feather. Shine did not deserve anything. Shine did not seem to want to exist, he just wanted to let things die and break, he just wanted to ruin everything, he was probably the reason Feather never came back and so—

One morning, House simply ate him.

One moment, there had been a man with a shiny bald head eating eggs, and the next minute there had not. Even House was not sure how it had been managed, and Shine’s bones grated uncomfortably against House’s innards. But House decided it did not care, because the important thing was: now that Shine was gone, Feather could come back. Let the scrape of bones be a reminder of her love.

So now House sat and waited, watching the little box that Shine had never turned off. Any day, Feather would come back. No one else would do, and if they tried, House would feast. Feather would dust and they would be happy again, forever. House would never let her go. Together, they would sing.

Twelve hours later, the mighty carcasses hadn’t yet returned. It was only vain hope anyway — that neither would currents sweep them out elsewhere in the vast ocean, nor would they take the typical days, if not weeks to descend again. Krause and Miller, half-drunk at the time, had just been speculating that the immense initial depth at the time of their rise would help them fall sooner. That, and any ample opportunity for scavenging along the way.

The chill of the observation room had danced with the deep bitterness of the station’s coffee to keep them awake. All the beer bottles had been cleaned up except the one that’d been shattered in Miller’s outburst, its pieces still scattered near the screens. When Doctor Adachi entered though, nursing her own mug of steaming coffee, she didn’t even notice the glittering shards of amber glass dotting the far floor. Her eyes traveled from the two men to the window they were fixedly staring out of.

She blinked a few times in rapid succession, then squinted to make sure sleepiness wasn’t playing tricks on her.

“What is that…?”

Only at her voice did the two men turn. They both gave vague smiles of greeting, but only Krause spoke.

“You look like hell.”

“Speak for yourself.” She looked tired, true, but it was nothing compared to the heavy bags under Krause’s eyes, and fatigued husk in his voice. Miller looked little better. “Our guest kept me delightfully busy with her questions for nearly seven hours. You owe me overtime, boss.” She smiled. Krause did too. But both sets of eyes were soon back on the observation wall.

The two central screens in the array had been lifted halfway. The enhanced view from the suite of cameras still shone from the halfway point up; a safeguard so the whale fall couldn’t be missed from that angle, but something at least fractionally as interesting was faintly visible through the window below.

“Couldn’t be more than a hundred meters away,” Miller yawned, “since lights can only reach so far down here.”

There, in the far distance, the star-shaped impression of what must have been an impressive set of photophores glowed. The five points were strikingly distinct.

Doctor Adachi didn’t even bother vocalizing the same thought that had occurred to the other two doctors. She tucked her lips behind her mug, sipping quietly, coming to the same realization they had. Despite the shape, it couldn’t be any breed of sea star — the mere idea of finding one of them suspended away from the ocean floor was absurd. So, some new squid, perhaps? Like the octopus squid from the day prior, perhaps? Flashing suspected prey to lure them in? To dazzle them? Or to judge distance?

“It’s been there for the last four hours.” Her eyes tracked down to Krause, who paid her a brief glance and a half shrug in return. “Might be some new species. Doesn’t look like any of the usual suspects.”

Probably realizing the mathematical gears turning in her mind, counting the hours and questioning why they’d been up, he quickly filled in the gap before shifting his gaze back to the distant, glowing organism. “The whales came back up. Dead. We were watching for their fall. Didn’t sleep.”

“Ahhh.” She hummed her understanding, likewise not bothering to point out the reasonable likelihood the whales would fall again quite far from their current point. She’d have done the same thing as them — just in case.

Doctor Krause rose just a few minutes after she’d pulled her own chair over to join their vigil, taking his and Miller’s empty mugs. “My turn.” And he was off to fill them. Not without pausing in the doorway though, and casting one last glance towards the strange, star-shaped illumination in the distance.

“The cameras don’t show it any more clearly?”

“No.” Miller’s short response bordered on rude, but if Adachi cared, she didn’t show it.

“Any movement? Behavior?”

“Seems to be getting closer.”

“How quickly?”

“Very slowly.” She didn’t answer this time, but Miller could clearly feel her staring at him. Patient, expectant, and probing. Eventually he gave in, adjusting wearily in his seat. “Seems just to be floating, suspended. Gradually drifting this way. It’s a little bigger than it was at first. Just a little closer.”

Satisfied, she nodded. “Strange, though, that the cameras can’t clear it up. There’s nothing more? No silhouette? Just photophores?”

Miller grunted, nodding. “Nah. They see what we see.”

“Too far away…? Or, no, is the equipment failing?”

The second question earned her a frustrated glance — as though questioning the integrity of their equipment was an insult to Doctor Miller himself. “Neither. I keep a careful eye on our—” Adachi’s sheepish, apologetic smile and swift raise of placating hands cut him off, silently stating ‘I meant no offense’. With another grunt, he continued. “Can’t be that far. Imagine the lumens to cut through so much abyss. Nah, probably just some weird new jelly. Or maybe a siphonophore.”

Adachi’s excited grin was response enough, and the two fell into silence as their watch continued. Even Krause’s return with two refilled mugs was silent, save for yet another grunt from Miller. This time in thanks, at least.

The silence lasted over the next couple of hours, barring a few moments spent debating whether the organism was getting larger — and thus closer — still. Settled when Miller summoned up the energy to roll over to his workspace and check the camera playback, confirming in moments that, yes, it was. Fractionally though.

Their next audible exchange had come when Adachi had offered to refill everyone’s coffees, only to receive refusals. Headaches. Too much caffeine, both her colleagues said. So, she sat back down, not commenting on the light ache she, too, had begun feeling.

 

Their peace only lasted another hour.

“Where the HELL is the creamer in this place? Refrigerator? KITCHEN? I can’t even with this plain coffee thing, and my head’s THROBBING.”

Their guest had awoken. Adachi smirked to herself — it was the boys’ turn to entertain Subnautigirl, and they knew it. She’d paid her dues.

Miller kept his eyes on the shape through the windows.

Krause sighed.

“We’re not a hotel. No little creamer pods here. No refrigerators, no extra noise and vibrations. And no kitchen. Space is at a premium.”

Yessica looked equal parts shocked and offended, and spent an inordinate amount of time scoffing and sputtering, saying nothing. The last part had been a slight lie, and she probably wanted to call them out on that, but she’d already done her search of the facility and had found nothing. While not huge, Varuna Station was fairly big. Day one though, the researchers aboard had all agreed they didn’t need some intensive modern kitchen at the onset. Save that funding, get the project launched sooner. They could skimp on that little luxury, right?

Every Goddamn one of them had come to regret that decision by the end of the first week.

There was definitely room for a kitchen. But, zero chance of one being brought down now. It was a logistical impossibility. Their little Keurig and a portable burner for endless supplies of canned food was all they had now.

“There might be some chocolate you can melt in it somewhere. Check the—”

“I don’t WANT chocolate, I want… God! Did you people forget I was coming or something? This is unacceptable! I want to speak to— … the hell is that?” She paused briefly, clacking her mug of scalding coffee down on Krause’s unoccupied desk. “Wait, no… don’t answer yet, I need my—” And she was gone, scurrying back through the station to fetch pen and paper.

“I think I hate her.” Miller’s voice sounded distracted. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the luminous shape through the windows. But, his sentiment was still echoed by his colleagues to varying degrees.

“She’s quite the handful,” Adachi agreed,” but she has a lot of subscribers. A million views each video.”

“How?”

“Informative and researched material,” she began thoughtfully before settling into a faint grin, “and some very low-cut tops.”

Miller scoffed. “We should get some of those for you, then. That’s better than babysitting journalists.”

Krause cast a reproachful look at his colleague, but Adachi just laughed, and it wasn’t long before the sound of it had him grinning too. Miller, though, just kept staring out the window. His only other action was to rub at his forehead, as though that might alleviate the throbbing within.

 

Yessica’s return was only slightly less offensive the second time. Freshly equipped with her notepad and pen, the scientists were quizzed on everything to do with the mysterious shape in the distance, then subsequently yelled at for not “fucking waking her up” when the whale carcasses had drifted up past the windows, only to be placated when Krause impatiently pointed out just how brief an event that had been.

“Besides,” he continued, “you’re awake now, and they might fall again any minute.”

“You seriously think so?” She sounded skeptical and impudent, but at least the yelling had stopped.

Her camera-less cameraman had shown up shortly thereafter, contributing absolutely nothing with his presence besides groaning and griping about his own headache. A few words of bitter agreement from Yessica had finally prompted Adachi to get up and promise she’d hunt through the station’s few medical kits for some ibuprofen, though through the interview-filled hours to follow, not a one of the denizens of Varuna Station could have claimed the medication had done anything at all to help them. If anything, the headaches had intensified.

“So what,” Yessica asked, stubbornly ignoring everyone’s worsening mood, “does this latest event say about the Cathedral of Bones? The Whale Mausoleum? Three whales dove, then died right below us, but why? Did you see anything else? Hear anything?”

She’d asked some variation of that question half a dozen times already, but the reason for the constant fishing was obvious, at least to her. She needed some quote or phrase that could work as a lynchpin phrase in her video essay. She didn’t get one though. Instead, she got a couple callous words, then a flurry of activity from one of the doctors.

“It doesn’t say anything yet. It just raises new questions.” Krause said.

“Hear…? Did we hear anything?” Adachi followed.

And with that, she’d shot up from her seat and swept over to her desk, forsaking a chair to crane over her terminal and type frantically. Miller kept staring out the window at the slowly enlarging shape of the photophoric star, but Krause snapped his head Adachi’s way — then understood.

They’d all been so focused on what they had seen, and what they hoped they might soon see again. Neither he, nor Miller, nor even Adachi when she’d later appeared had thought to check the audio feeds. Yessica had fallen silent, watching Adachi with keen interest that grew even more intense when the other woman’s head finally reappeared from over her monitors, gripping her headphones with shaking hands and regarding the room with an expression of anxious awe.

“Stefan… I-it’s back! It—”

She never finished her sentence. No one would have heard it anyway. Not even the soft coo of her voice unprofessionally whispering his first name could have drawn Doctor Krause’s eyes from what they’d fixed on.

 

The Whale Fall.

 

The three, gargantuan shapes descending from above in nearly the exact spacing, the exact formation as last time. A distant pair resolved themselves first, ragged corpses that had clearly already been predated upon sagging down their field of view, visible in the mighty red light projected onto the screens thanks only to their immense size. Then the third whale, much closer. So close that the three individuals in the room who were on their feet took involuntary steps back as a massive pectoral fin rubbed horrifyingly against the observatory’s glass on its way past.

Latched upon it, a legion of squids. Dozens of huge octopus squids, repugnantly writhing and ravenously feasting. Hook-riddled tentacles were latched deep into whale flesh, and furious beaks ripped away endless chunks of blubbery meat. As they passed, all squids in unison lifted their two, photophore-tipped tentacles and flashed the station. Warning. Warding. Threatening.

“My God… Stefan, look…”

Adachi’s hand was trembling as she pointed. Through the window, beneath the screens, visible to the naked eye, a shadow passed over the surface of the luminous, abyssal star.

A very distant, very colossal shadow belonging one falling whale, silhouette wriggling with its myriad of feeding squids.

A colossal shadow that couldn’t fully eclipse the cyclopean glow of that luminous shape as it passed in front of it.

In front of it…

The whale, huge and distant though it was, was neither more huge nor more distant than the star-form creature beyond.

Adachi’s headphones were off again — she’d dropped them noisily to her desk when she’d tremulously pointed out the window, stepping away from her desk to settle nearer the other doctors, but Miller darted to take her place. His eyes were fixed on the shape, but with a completely different glint to his eye than the one of mixed horror and fascination felt by the others in the room. The cameraman was babbling frantically, making sure everyone else knew just how much he wanted to leave for the surface immediately, but all ears were deaf to him. Miller even drowned him out completely by clamping on the headphones, listening with enraptured focus.

To the rest, nothing else in the world existed. Adachi had taken Krause’s hand as they stared. The partial eclipse of the shape had ended, the whales slowly sinking beyond the station’s view, but the distant thing remained.

All minds were as similarly plagued by headaches as one, burning question swirled. What could possibly be so large, and yet look like that…?

“It must be a siphonophore… It HAS to be a multi-organism… Nothing else could be that size and feed enough this far from the surface…” Krause speculated aloud, though the only sound Adachi gave as she gripped his hand just a little tighter was a soft expression of incomprehension.

Those abyssal collections of countless tiny organisms, coming together to form a single, massive creature had never been observed like this, in so definable a shape. But what other explanation could there be?

“I can hear them… I can hear them…”

Only the cameraman noticed Miller mumbling to himself, repeating the same four words over and over. Krause had released Adachi’s hand to crane over his own terminal as the whales finally fell fully from view, typing madly with her soon crowding his side. Yessica still hadn’t pulled her eyes away from the distant glow. The out-of-place fifth person was still the only one paying attention when Miller threw down the headphones and rushed out of the room, still muttering to himself.

All he could say was, “Where are you going…? What do we do…?” in a strained gasp. He didn’t share the tense fascination of everyone else in the room. He wanted the known security of the surface world — for the safety of the sun to wash over him.

Soon, Yessica was crowding Krause’s terminal as well. No one bothered shooing her away from the equipment, the working doctors allowing her to lean in and write furiously on her notepad, deaf to the incessant scratching of her pen. The cameraman stood dumbly by the door, staring.

“The footage is good. It’s perfect! Amazing!” Krause’s excitement was dulled just a moment later. “But I can’t raise Surface Point. The signal… too weak for some reason…”  The concern this revelation should have given him only manifested as irritation.

“The audio—” Adachi finally peeled away from the crowd, back to her own terminal, headphones slammed on. Miller’s absence went unnoticed as they fell into a pattern of working individually, and it fell to the big man in the back of the room to notice the third doctor again when he reappeared minutes later.

“Wh-what the hell is that!?” Though he didn’t recognize Miller. No one did at first. The others in the room looked up expectantly, but were initially just as baffled as the cameraman.

There was a shape out there, beyond the glass. A long, sleek shape, clutching something mechanical, trailing a dark cloud. It was with a scream that Adachi understood first.

“Miller! Stefan, it’s—!”

At the limit of human possibility, the depth where their body’s constitution started crumbling beneath the pressure, unraveling on the cellular level, was Doctor Miller. He’d changed far too rapidly into a wetsuit, missing one flipper and one glove, but had thrown on all other equipment. He clung to one of the station’s small but powerful diver propulsion vehicles, the sea scooter flaring out a jet of red bubbles as he soared into the abyss.

“What— what the hell is he doing! Yukiko, call him! Get him back! He can’t— He can’t—!”

A flurry of terrified activity overtook the station. No one could reach him. Nothing could draw him to turn back, and it wouldn’t have mattered even if they could. The glow of the red lights failed to hide the obvious fact that the crimson spray jetting out behind him was tinged with tendrils of blood as his body began the horrifically gradual process of collapsing in on itself.

Krause’s frantic activation of the immense floodlights only cast that realization in even starker glow. The deep ocean for hundreds of meters burst into dazzling illumination, but all the attempt at getting Miller’s attention accomplished was revealing the cloud of red, bloody decay trickling out behind him.

From the gloom, three new shapes emerged. Their two flashing tentacles were lost in the dazzling brightness of the floodlights, but all aboard knew their shapes by this point. As they raced after Miller though, they showed no sign of preparing to latch onto him. Tentacles stayed patiently away from his crumbling flesh. They soared with him, ever nearer to the distant, abyssal shape.

 

Miller never made it to his destination. The speed of the sea scooter carried him deeper and deeper, but in stubborn horror, the waning sanity in his fractured mind realized the shape hadn’t grown even a fraction larger. A hundred meters… then two…

He was effectively no closer by the time his consciousness dissolved into nothing, and only then did his squid escorts finally set upon him, ripping the remains of what had once been a man to pieces. In his haste, he had failed to secure a real way to reach it — to know it. He was unfit to sink into the deep. He was unfit to contribute to the Cathedral of Bones.

Excitement had bled from the room. In its wake, it left behind a miasma of uncertainty, fear, and grief.

To see their prior colleagues sail off in the abyss aboard a submersible was one thing. There was plausible deniability in it — the hope that maybe they’d made it somewhere safe, even to the surface. To see Miller soar off into the far distance, humanly, outside of protective gear, and dissolve under the pressure of the deep was another thing entirely. Even Yessica paid the moment its solemn dues before fearful mewling began.

Krause and Adachi barely registered her demands for answers or the surface. Even when she’d taken hold of Krause’s shirt to try to shake him to his senses, the doctor had simply stood there, stunned, staring horror-stricken into the abyssal depths the floodlights tried their best to illuminate.

Even with their immense beams, that far, glowing shape was no brighter and no clearer. But unlike the octopus squids and their two tentacle-born photophores, the floodlights didn’t outshine the brightness of the great star shape either. They could still clearly see it.

Pushing Yessica aside, Krause finally powered the lights down and slumped into a chair. It was Miller’s chair, though he’d no longer be needing it. Of that he and the quietly crying Adachi could be certain.

Their heads still throbbed, and Krause rubbed his temples while awareness of what their guest was frantically shouting at him started to register. A lot of “What the hell is happening,” and “Get me out of here now”. Fearful pleading. Fearful threats. Krause understood, but didn’t yet have enough command of his voice to answer her and, eventually, after long enough spent staring into the doctor’s haunted eyes, the reporter went quiet, save for the sound of her panicked, heavy breathing.

“He kept saying he can hear them…” The cameraman said numbly. “Then he ran off…”

“Yukiko,” Krause croaked, casting his eyes her way for some sort of answer. She’d been listening too, right? But in answer she just shook her head, trembling as tears were dried on her sleeve.

“I don’t know. It was just the same— the same low frequency tones as— as last time.”

She did her best to slip back into some semblance of professionalism, but couldn’t fully stem the sobs breaking her voice.

“Yess, we need to leave NOW.”

“Get. Us. OUT!”

Doctor Adachi kept listening through her headphones, trembling with just the occasional furtive glance cast towards the panicked influencer. Her vivid purple hair swung wildly as she snapped her head from one doctor to the other, practically snarling with the ferocity of her fear, and the presence of the thick-fisted cameraman by her side finally had Krause acknowledging them with an expression he meant to look like a reassuring smile, but just came off as a haunted grin.

“We can’t yet. Look—”

“I said NOW!”

His hands rose in passive placation. “Connection to Surface Point… we don’t have it. Without it, we can’t call you a submersible.”

“You HAVE submersibles!”

“We are not leaving him, Stefan.” The chilly edge in Adachi’s voice caused even the shrieking influencer to pause for a moment. All three stared at Adachi’s ashen face, face set with grave intent despite her quivering lip. Anyone in the room could have pointed out the simple, obvious fact that ‘he’s gone’. They didn’t need to directly witness his implosion and predation to know that much. The sentiment lingered powerfully enough despite all calls to reason, settling over them as oppressively as the gloom of the fathomless, abyssal waters beyond their observation chamber.

“Let’s go, Yess. We can…” The meaty hand of the cameraman closed around her arm, voice lost as he leaned in to mutter quietly through her bright violet hair. Her terrified indignation flickered on her face long enough for her to nod shakily, glare at the room, then storm out with her companion. Only Krause felt a sigh of relief escape his lips, whispering out reprieve from the mounting tension. Adachi was still boring a hole through him with her stare.

Eventually, he had to acknowledge it.

“Yes… yes, we must…” he began, then faltered, “we can’t let…” The words wouldn’t let themselves be released from his aching mind. His final remaining fellow researcher understood anyway. With desperate purpose, they each sat down at their terminals, taking in as much as they could and notating everything they couldn’t.

The abyssal star drew ever nearer.

Its speed was ferocious — its intent felt like a terrible lurking shadow. In the repressed recesses of their minds, they knew it demanded of them.

It, or whatever loomed behind it.

An hour crawled by, and more resolved. Adachi heard the suggestions of oceanic disruption before Krause saw them, but it took the two working in tandem to piece it together. The shape was massive, and its mere movement had begun registering as a roar in her headphones, but there was more wriggling around it. The smaller disturbances were presumed to be attached octopus squids… until Krause was able to observe through the cameras that the shapes were truly attached — a part of it. Tendrils belonging to the stygian sea star, lashing the surrounding waters in hateful anticipation.

And it was he that first saw that there was more beyond.

At first, the hours creeping by did nothing to show either scientist that the faint, extra set of luminosity in the far distance was anything but a trick of their eyes, or a reflective oddity. Eventually though, neither could deny it. The horizontal stitch of a cephalopodan pupil was visible in each new glow. The eyes of the abyss glowered up at their research station.

‘Now get us out of here—’ a voice filled with static crackled through the observation room’s speakers. Both doctors narrowed the source to the docked Vamana Two in unison, but filled with such wonder and terror, neither did much more than dismiss the continued frantic sounds. Subnautigirl’s team had stuffed themselves into the one remaining egress from Varuna Station, and status lights on Krause’s computer commended the fact that the pair had even managed to launch it.

The god from the deep continued to reach for them, uncoiling from its place of deathly slumber, surrounded by the innumerable offering of bones in its palatial mausoleum.

Voices from the submersible screeched over the speakers. First the pair spoke to one another, but then, as the intricate controls eluded them as they clumsily made their ascent, they called out for help. They knew someone could hear them, but neither Krause nor Adachi could answer. Their minds were reeling, bodies aching from the stress of impossible discovery. They’d risen from their seats to stand weakly in front of the windows. Neither could have said for sure which of them had torn feverishly at the screens obscuring their view, but the tattered remains lay scattered all around them as their horrified, enraptured attention locked on the abyssal star—

—on the hand reaching towards them from the deep, as callous and uncaring as if they were a blighted mosquito that needed swatting.

Barely a flick of their eyes were paid to follow the sudden rush of a legion of squid-shapes as they rushed past the station in pursuit of Vamana Two. Neither of them listened as the startled cries from the craft transposed into a shrill melody of terror. Soon, they couldn’t hear anyway.

If it was theorized that the full blast of a sperm whale’s voice could rupture human eardrums and deny vital organ function at close range… what, then, could a god of the deep unleash?

A bellow beyond mortal understanding smote the sea. Varuna Station quivered, nearly unraveling the scientifically perfect welds of its mighty seams. Mugs beside the coffee machine shattered in a typhoon of porcelain. Krause and Adachi screamed, but the gush of crimson blood from their ears refused to allow either to realize their companion was screaming too.

Vamana Two also screamed, but their voices were cut short. Within minutes, nothing more existed of the influencer’s team. The squids saw to that. The roar of their god demanded it.

Krause and Adachi fell to their knees before the windows as the abyssal star drew near. It filled all realms of sight, its impossible glow denying all other knowledge. Its light was a great and terrible shadow, beneath whose mighty glow mortal men need no longer dream of the sun.

The pair held hands for the last time, then raised their limbs in unfettered supplication.

They prayed. They thought of their lives beneath the ocean’s waves, and of the great many things they’d communicated to the world above, who would not yet know the truth of what lurked beneath.

Then the impossible hand collided with Varuna Station, and they thought no more.

She was always at the window. Not the one in the front room where guests had once gathered and chortled on merry nights. Not in the kitchen where meals were prepared for our house of three. Her days were spent in that room, now set for guests that were not coming, but once dressed for one that would never return. The three became two. A full bed and an armchair where there was once a rocker and cradle. 

In the weeks after loss infected our home, she had taken to sitting in the armchair, staring out the window. I would kiss her head and ask her what she is watching. She only answered in opaque murmurs. What could I do except nod and carry on loving? Grief strikes both in these matters, but the mother worst of all. So much so that when neighbors asked what took her, I only answered with, “A broken heart.” 

The three became two became one. 

I buried her next to him under the oak by the stream. Her eyes watched me as I carved her place out of the earth. I tried to say goodbye, but the words dug heels deep into my chest. I laid her in, covered her, and went back to the house. There I spent the rest of the day and most of the night deep in my own sobs and wailing. I had remained strong in the time she was still here, but now there was no one to be strong for. No one to burden with my tears. 

Golden light awoke me the next morning. Not from my bedroom window, for I had the curtains drawn, but from the cracked door to that room. That room with the window where she spent her last days. I arose and opened the door, peering over to the window and the now empty chair. I approached it, part of me still hoping to find her there so I might ask her what she sees and kiss her head once more. I round it and see the empty seat. The fresh wounds on my heart pulled open again and bled through my eyes in fresh droplets. I eased myself into the chair, proposing to myself it might bring me closer to her. Through the blur of my tears I gazed out that old window. 

My sobs ceased. The wells of my eyes dried in an instant as my sorrow was replaced with bewilderment. Through the window I saw him. My son, running through the tall grass and playing like I had seen him do before. Surely, it could not have been him. His face was averted so I could not say to be sure. I rose from the chair and flung the window open to call for the boy. But when I opened the window, he was gone. 

Breathless, I surveyed the now empty garden with a furrowed brow. A trick of the mind I thought. I relented, closed the window, and fell back into the seat. When I looked out the window, I saw the boy once more. I leaped from the chair and flew to the back door, but again, he was gone. Back to the window, I saw him again. 

After some time I determined that this boy, whoever he was, only existed in the panes of the window. I sat in the chair watching him play for two days, always his face turned the other way. His hair, his clothes, the manner of his movement all remind me of him. But without seeing his eyes, I may never be sure. Could this be what she saw all that time? Perhaps she too was enraptured by the chance of seeing our boy’s eyes once again. I believe she never allowed herself to look away for a chance of missing them for I found myself transfixed in the very same way.

While watching him play, perhaps four days since I had started, another enters. It’s her. My dearest wife. At least, as far as I am able to see, for she too keeps her eyes averted. My heart flutters, my sobs erupt freshly. I don’t dare open the window or rise from the seat. I called to her from within. If she or the boy heard me, they make no sign of it. 

Finally, I could take it no longer. Again I rose from the chair and ran to meet them outside. I wanted to grab them by their shoulders and spin them round to face me so that I might see their eyes and know. If they were my family I wished to hug their necks once more and never release them. If they are something else, I wish to rid myself of their taunting. 

I ran out, the door slamming behind me. Alas, I am alone in the garden. I fall to my knees, clenching the dirt in my hands and break into tearless sobs. I look up and see the old oak tree by the stream. Surely, I tell myself. That is where your ones truly lie. IF you wish to see them, see them there. I rise to walk and visit their graves, but something catches my eye. Rather something that isn’t there. Beneath the tree I had stood two headstones. I had carved them myself and set them the day I laid them to rest. But where I set them, there was nothing. Where her fresh covering of dirt was just days before was now an unbroken patch of grass. How could this be?

Behind me, a familiar sound. Something I had heard in days long gone. Something I had grown too used to living without. Laughter. The sound of a boy. My boy. He was laughing. I turned to see. He was not outside. The laughter sounded again. It was coming from within the house.

I ran to the door and tried to open it, but it was locked. The laughter continued, answered by giggles from the woman. My wife. I ran to that window. Inside I saw them. I saw their eyes. The armchair and bed were gone, exchanged for a cradle and a rocker. There, she sat, the boy in her arms. He was a baby. I watched her rock him. I heard her sing. I heard him laugh, and cry. For hours I watched. 

Every time I try the door, it remains locked. I look through the windows around the house, each one shows me a different view and a different time of them. In the kitchen I see him refusing to eat green beans. In the front room I see him playing with wooden toys. In his bedroom, she is always rocking him. In our room he runs in and wakes her up to start the morning.

I thought of breaking the door, but I cannot bring myself to do it. If I breach the house, would they still be there? If I break a window would I shatter them along with the glass? 

No, I will remain here, just outside their senses. If the cost to keep their essence reunited is my starving and them just out of my reach, then it is no cost at all. I will give myself in this life and the next for their joy.

The cold makes my skin feel brittle. My body reduces itself to a fine powder. Here I will stay, waiting to be called to my own grave. Perhaps then I may join them, but for now I will watch and enjoy their laughter from the other side of the pane. 

On the night that Agatha was born, the midwife fainted. The child: Agatha, had clawed her way out of her mother’s womb, sporting a full fur coat, and scales.

Rightfully believing something was wrong with the girl, the hospital ran every test it could think of. The results were shocking.

Genetically, Agatha was completely normal.

A month passed. The doctors watched her. Her parents waited. The coat of fur shed, and the scales peeled away. Everyone was stunned, but relieved, whatever had been wrong had passed, and now she looked like a normal baby girl.

This stayed true for about five months.

When she got her first tooth, it grew in sharp, and misshapen. Appearing at the front of her mouth, it seemed to be a misplaced canine. “Strange,” her parents thought, but maybe baby teeth were just like that. Then the rest grew in. Each tooth was a different size and shape, though all were sharp, giving Agatha a smile like a drawer of knives.

And she only grew stranger with time.

At age two her nose broadened and flattened, growing to take up most of the real estate on her face. Along with her nose, her brow morphed, thickening to protrude from her face and over her increasingly bulbous eyes— which were great big haunting things.

She was a proper horror to look at.

At night, when she had trouble sleeping, she would rouse her parents and they would blink awake and shudder at the sight of her.

You should not take this to mean that Agatha’s parents loathed their child. They loved. Unquestionably they loved her. Doted on her. That they were some times scared of her was only human. More than anything they feared for her.

Parents are practically obligated to love their children. The world? Not so much.

When they dropped her off at kindergarten for the first time, they stayed awhile, watching her approach the other children. Their hearts thrashed against their sternums as the first boy looked up at their daughter.

The boy gave Agatha a confused look, cocking his head. He raised a finger, pointing at her, and alerted the other children of her presence. This put ice in the veins of Agatha’s parents. Ice that thickened when the boy laughed, and then quickly melted when he patted the spot beside him. Agatha screeched with joy. So did the other children, who seemed curious rather than scared.

The parents were relieved.

Agatha was smitten.

The boy, was none the wiser.

Agatha wouldn’t do anything about her little playground crush until she hit the third grade. By then she figured that a “young lady” such as herself shouldn’t be afraid to express her feelings. So, on valentines day, when everyone gave out cards and candy to each of their classmates, Agatha made a special one for the boy. It was handmade, and filled with full sized candy to set it apart from the other store bought cards with bite sized morsels. This was technically against the school policy, but Agatha didn’t care. She was a rebel. A rebel in love.

The boy who had accepted her on her first day of school took the card and made a strange face. He looked at the card, and then at Agatha. She assumed he was being shy. Later, she would realize that the look on his face had been pity.

The card had asked the boy out on a “date”. In third grade, that meant playing basketball together during recess.

“Why me?” The boy asked, his cheeks burning as he dribbled the ball.

“I don’t know,” she had replied, which was a lie. She hadn’t not thought about the boy since her first day of kindergarten.

“Oh,” said the boy, who had missed his shot.

Agatha smiled at him, and went to retrieve the ball. When she came back, the boy looked sad.

“Aggie,” he said, “I don’t like you like that. Is it okay if we just stay friends?”

“Yeah,” she said, dropping the ball. “That’s okay.”

But it was not okay.

For the next week, she sulked in her room. From the moment she got home, until dinner, and then again after until she had to wake up for school, Agatha hugged her pillow, and cried.

Agatha and her crush had always had fun together. He laughed at her jokes, and she laughed at his. They liked the same movies. They loved the same shows. So why didn’t he like her back?

She ruminated, and could only come up with one reason. Her face. Her teeth. The horror of her.

Agatha had always known she looked different from her peers, but that week was the first time she really felt ugly.

As Agatha festered in her newfound self loathing, she developed a rash at the nape of her neck. She scratched at it, until it was red, and raw; she scratched at it until the skin at the nape of her neck peeled away, and revealed hard, keratinous scales.

She gasped the first time she felt them. She also felt shame. Why? She couldn’t say. Perhaps, deep down, she knew those scales had been born of something dark.

Agatha’s little heart never stopped yearning for affection. As the years went on, puppy love and crushes came and went, and with them, more rejection.

And with the rejection, more sulking, more self loathing. More scales, and eventually, fur.

By the time she hit puberty, the patch of scales around her neck had progressed all the way down her back, spreading to just before her shoulders. The fur coat which had been present at her birth, had also returned. This did not alarm her at first, as she had been told that hair in new places was normal for a girl her age. But even the relatively normal hair growth that begun in her groin soon went down to her thighs, cutting off just before her knees.

For a blessing, her peers continued to treat her like anyone elese. Not that that helped her self esteem. As R.S. Thomspon once wrote: The furies are at home in the mirror.

This period of serious self isolation drew her to more reclusive hobbies. She took up playing MMO’s. Massive online games where she could style an avatar that was “normal” looking— nevermind that the characters in video games were themselves idealized and unrealistic portrayals of beauty.

It was in one of these games that she met a player named “Ian Proudheart”.

She had been wiling away the weekend chopping digital trees— she needed them to craft a cute outfit for her character. Nothing special. When, passing by, was another player. He hopped in place in front of her, and seemed to be trying to get her attention.

Agatha looked at his hopping avatar in confusion. Until she remembered that she had set her chat settings to private, so that only people who she friended could send her messages. And she had no one on her friends list.

She was thinking about changing her settings, when a trade window popped up. A stack of ninety-nine of the trees she needed was being offered without demand for anything in return.

She blinked, and hit accept. The generous player hopped in place a few more times, and then walked away.

Agatha stared at her chat log.

Ian Proudheart has gifted you 99x Iron Wood Materials.

Her starved heart thumped in her chest.

She hovered the cursor over his name, which popped up a list of actions. Among them “Add Friend”.

Gulp.

She clicked it, and not long after, she received a piece of in game mail.

It’s difficult to say when acquaintances become friends, and when friends become something… more. The transition from “Hey what’s up?” to “How was your day?” is subtle enough. The transition then to: “good morning” and “goodnight” less so. Chats about in game activities turn to chats about what happened in class, what happened at home.

“How are you feeling?”

“Not great.”

“Why?”

“I feel especially ugly today,” is written, and quickly erased. Replaced with: “Just a bad day.”

“If you need me, I’m always here for you,” is written, and after a moment of doubt, erased. In its place: “That sucks.”

Years passed. College came and went. More yearning, more loss, more rejection. Agatha’s heart darkened, but never fully gave up. Ian was there, and if she had Ian, she had hope. But for this same reason she always held him at a distance.

Often Ian would want to connect out of game, or on a different platform. Agatha outright dodged or ignored such requests. She had more than a crush on him, and sometimes, she thought she felt something not-quite platonic coming from him too. She worried that if he ever saw her, that would fade.

In her ideal fantasy world, they would remain forever apart, and yet somehow together.

Then, one fateful day:

“Let’s meet up. I’m going to be in town for work anyways,” said Ian, whose full name was actually Ian Thompson. “It might be nice to finally meet. Face to face.”

Agatha made a sound that came close to “meep”. Thankfully, her mic hadn’t picked it up. The silence, therefore, was deafening.

“Oh… uhm…” stammered Ian. “Sorry, I know you’re a super private person… I just…”

“No, lets meet up!” she said. If you asked her what had compelled her to say yes, she would not have been able to say. On the one hand, Ian seeing the true horror of her— which had only gotten worse since she finished puberty —was her worst nightmare. On the other, she yearned to finally meet him, to have him hold her in his arms.

“Really?” cried Ian. “That’s awesome. I can’t wait!”

“Yeah. Stellar!” she wasn’t sure how convincing she sounded.

They hashed out the details over the course of their gaming session. If everything went well, they would meet in a week’s time. A week which passed too quickly, and too slowly.

She flipped through several states of horror and delight. In the valleys of her despair she would envision Ian seeing her for the first time and simply turning away from her. In her wildest fantasies he fell in love with her on the spot, and his work trip would end with him proposing. Most of the time, she found herself bargaining.

“Let him be horrifying too,” she thought. “Let him be a monster like me. So that he has no choice but to love me back.”

The day came. She waited at the station with a giant poster card that read: “Proudheart”.

When a man’s voice called out her name, she almost felt like she was going to die.

“Aggie?” Ian gasped. At first Agatha thought it was a gasp of shock, but as she turned to see the man who had addressed her, she saw a large smile, and open arms. “Aggie!”

He was just that happy to see her.

His excitement, and his smile made her knees weak.

He said her name again, but this time with unrestrained excitement, embracing her. She was stunned. Her appearance hadn’t phased him in the slightest.

“Uh…” she stammered.

Hearing her, he jumped back.

“Oh shit. Sorry.” He backed away from her, and straightened himself out. “I uh… I was excited to meet you is all. In the flesh I mean.”

She was slack-jawed, staring up at the man who was nearly two full feet taller than her.

“No it’s uh…” She wanted to ask him if her appearance bothered him at all, but was also afraid that it might break whatever magic or spell seemed to have him acting so nonchalant about it. “It’s just… It’s good to see you too.”

“After all these years it’s nice to put a face to a name.”

“Yeah,” said Agatha, half choking on a sob.

Then: “Ian?” It was a new voice. Someone searching for Ian. The voice sounded feminine. And pretty.

A blond woman appeared behind Ian. When her eyes fell on Agatha, her face twisted in disgust. Most people aren’t rude on purpose. Really though, that only made it hurt worse. The blond woman quickly reigned in her face, but it just turned into a look of pity.

Agatha could have lived with the disgust. It was the pity that got her.

“Is this her?” asked the pretty blond, blinking at Agatha and Ian.

A well of anger rose in Agatha. Almost literally her vision was full of red. It scared her how angry she became, but there was no helping it. “Who was this girl?” “Why was she so familiar with Ian?” “He never mentioned a girlfriend”.

Ian smiled at the girl.

“Aggie, this is Brenda, my sister. Brenda, Aggie.” Ian pointed at both the girls with finger pistols as he introduced them.

The well of anger vanished inside of Agatha. In its place was a large, uncomfortable void.

Agatha’s Cheeks burned.

The pretty blond girl, Brenda, looked at her brother, and then at Agatha. Again there was that pitying look.

“Nice to finally meet you,” said Brenda.

“Same,” said Agatha.

Both women had been vaguely aware of each other before, but neither had so much as heard the other’s voice.

“My mom made her come with me after she heard I was meeting you for the first,” said Ian, sighing.

Brenda laughed.

“She still thinks of Ian as a baby,” she said. “But he’s a grown man, I don’t need to be chaperoning him. Anyways, you two do what you want, I booked myself a separate hotel. Toodles.”

Brenda rolled away with her luggage, and then it was just Ian and Agatha.

The two shared an awkward pause.

“So… shall we?” said Agatha.

“We shall,” said Ian.

The two departed for Agatha’s apartment. She had offered to host him while he was in town. Partly out of kindness, but she would have been lying if she didn’t admit to herself that she was hoping something more would happen. Wild fantasies, naturally.

Once at home the two settled into a groove. Agatha was surprised by how natural it felt. Ian didn’t look at her the way his sister had, with disgust and pity. It was just like being in voice chat. Not one normal boy and one horrible monster, but two people, enjoying each other’s company.

They wiled most of the first day away chatting in her kitchen.

When the evening came they parted to shower and change. Presumably they were winding down to sleep, but after drying her hair (and she had a lot of hair), and after Ian finished changing, neither felt particularly sleepy.

“Wanna watch a movie?” Ian asked.

For some reason, the question made Agatha’s face feel like it was burning.

“Uh… sure.”

Agatha’s heart thumped loudly in hear chest. They’d watched movies together online a million times, but naturally this was different.

Agatha sat down on the opposite side of the couch from Ian.

It was a special kind of agony. The small cushion’s length that separated them felt like a chasm.

The movie they chose was a lighthearted thriller called The Eye From Outer Space. The movie was mostly noir sleuthing with long actions scenes, but there were also moments of strange artistic horror. One scene in particular, featured a tentacle sprouting from the head of a psych patient, caused Agatha to jump, and cling onto Ian.

She felt so safe with Ian that she had hardly noticed she was clinging onto him for half the films runtime, and by the time she did notice, she realized that he had become stiff as a board.

She yelped, and recoiled from him.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s okay,” he said, blushing, but suddenly relaxing. “I don’t mind if… you don’t mind.” His face was burning at this point.

“Oh…” Agatha thought. Is this really okay? “Thanks… it’s just… kind of scary movie is all.” The movie had its moments, but it wasn’t that scary. Still…

She settled back into Ian. Draping his arm over her, she rested her head on his chest. She listened to the sound of his breathing, the sound of his heart, and forgot about the movie entirely.

So warm, she thought. It was like when they were talking earlier, only more so. Agatha forgot herself, and soon fell into a warm, restful sleep.

When she woke up the next day, she found herself alone on the couch. She panicked, and felt a terrible hollowness knowing that Ian wasn’t there anymore. For a moment she wondered if she had dreampt the whole thing, but then Ian appeared from the hallway.

“Hey,” he said smiling, blushing. “You didn’t feel like getting up last night, so I tried to set you down gently. Sleep okay?”

“I think that’s the best sleep I’ve had in a while.” She said it before she could consider not saying it. Her hands came up to cover her mouth.

Ian didn’t seem to react negatively.

“Yeah… I slept pretty well last night too.”

There was an awkward pause between the two that only ended when Ian offered to start up a pot of coffee.

The next hour was spent chatting. Ian’s work thing also didn’t start for another day, so they were also thinking about how they would spend the day. They’d discussed some ideas before he showed up, but now that he was here, they both settled on a simple trip to the mall. And while the mall near Agatha’s home was hailed as America’s second best mall, which Agatha guessed made it trip worthy, the idea in the back of her head— Ian’s as well —was that a trip to the mall seemed the most date-like of all available venues.

Being out was typically something that Agatha didn’t do. While most people were polite enough not to mention her monstrous appearance, it was almost impossible for them not to hide their true feelings upon first seeing her. Eyes wide, mouths agape, side glances that made her feel other. They couldn’t help themselves, and if she really thought about it, she couldn’t blame them. She was a true horror.

She was prepared to be uncomfortable all day if it meant spending time with Ian on a pseudo date. But she found, especially as the day went on, that with Ian beside her, the rest of the world became a blur. And whenever the terrified glances of the world around them began to encroach, Ian would cast her a glance, or touch her shoulder, and they would all melt away.

In the end, she found herself clinging to his arm, and ceasing to care for anything besides how great it felt to hold and be held.

All seemed well, but jealousy would soon rear its ugly head.

It happened at a coffee stand inside the mall. Agatha excused herself to use the restroom. She had only been gone a minute, but when she returned, Ian was talking to a woman. A gorgeous, voluptuous, normal looking woman. and had come back to Ian talking to another woman.

Agatha’s heart raced. Something in her cracked, and the muscles under her furred scales rippled. There was a tingling at her fingertips. Something in her urged her to act. So she did.

She crossed a nine meter distance with two supernatural strides, grabbing hold of Ian’s arm.

In response, Ian recoiled. His reaction made her feel like dying.

“Ouch,” he said. “Agatha what the…”

Ian paused and looked at his arm. He was bleeding.

Agatha blinked at the trickle of red where she had grabbed Ian’s arm. She looked at her hands, and blanched. Her hands had transformed into razor sharp claws.

“I’m sorry,” she cried, “I didn’t…”

“No, it’s alright,” he said, and, excusing himself from his conversation with the pretty woman, pulled Agatha away.

Away from the coffee stand, and around the corner with a semblance of privacy, Ian hugged Agatha.

“I didn’t mean to,” said Agatha, crying into chest.

“I know, I know,” he replied, patting her back. “It’s okay. Really. It is.

Really it wasn’t. Agatha knew that, and a part of her felt that Ian must know that too.

When Agatha’s crying had calmed to a whimper, he gave her one last squeeze, and said: “Wanna stay in for the rest of the day?”

Without saying anything, she nodded, and they left the mall, hand in hand.

At home, they huddled together on the couch and watched another movie.

The movie felt like pretense this time. Agatha didn’t wait to jump into Ian’s arms, she settled in at hitting “play”.

This time, they were watching a romance.

When the scenes began to grow steamy, Agatha began to trace circles around Ian’s chest. She wasn’t doing it on purpose at first, but when he didn’t stop her, she continued, not realizing that her claws were tearing open his shirt. By the time she noticed his bare chest, Ian had started tracing circles on the scales of her shoulders. Feeling his touch, she figured that they were already in for a penny, so they may as well go for the whole pound.

“Oops,” she said, snipping that last bit of cloth holding Ian’s shirt together. “Oops.” And again for his best and a pants.

Ian, returned the favor. His hands were clumsy, and unpracticed removing her clothes— things she found charming, and endearing. She would no have wanted practiced hands. She wanted clumsy hands, hands that had only known her.

The night ended with two souls having become one.

In the day, they parted unwillingly, but Ian had to get out of bed at some point. It was technically a work trip after all.

But for the remainder of the trip, the two shared a bed.

After Ian’s trip, the two decided to try something long distance, at least to start.

Ian made regular trips, as did Agatha. Until at last, the two decided to live on Ian’s side full time.

With Agatha’s family and friends, there was loud, vocal excitement for her new found love. There were also whispers of disbelief. Agatha tried to ignore these. Listening to them for too long made her scales itch, and her claws tingle.

On Ian’s side there were quiet polite quips. Loud gasps were made on occasion, especially from his mother, who subsequently proceeded to try and pull the couple apart. She would often ask— in front of Agatha —“why couldn’t you date a normal girl?”.

Naturally this created wall between Ian and his family, primarily his mother. Though he never completely cut them off.

Agatha endured the comments from Ian’s mother. At least on the outside. On the inside, she burned. She became more and more embittered with each attempt. And so, despite Ian’s best attempts to reassure her, Agatha’s monstrous features developed further. First she grew taller, then, her scales thickened into armor plates, and finally, when Ian’s mother all but offered to pay her to leave her son, she finally developed a proper tail.

The sight of Agatha’s further developed form inspired only greater resolve in Ian’s mother. And when at last he announced that he planned to propose to her, she decided on one last ditch effort.

She would arrange a secret date between Ian and a childhood friend of his.

Ian was a creature of habit. She knew where he would be spending his lunch, and knew that it would be one of the few times that Agatha wasn’t with him.

She ambushed him during his lunch break, creating a serendipitous moment between him and an old friend. An attractive woman that Ian had been sweet on in his childhood.

Naturally, Ian, good Ian, lovely Ian, was happy to see his friend. They had a great lunch, enjoying each other’s company.

But Ian’s mother was not the only one that had planned to surprise Ian on his lunch that day. Agatha had been there. And she had watched the whole time. Seething.

Agatha never really grew past her jealousy. In all that time, in all those years, no matter how much Ian reassured her, she never became comfortable leaving him out of view. She feared he would wake up one day and realize that he didn’t have to be with her. It was a terrible, unjustified fear. How many times had he reassured her of his love? She had lost count. He had never been unfaithful, and he had never so much as allowed his eyes to wander. He was wholly devoted to her.

And yet.

A much darker part of her, the part that grew the scales, sharpened the claws, and whipped the tail, spoke: He will wake up one day, and remember he has options that aren’t you.

NO! He loves me! Cried the part of her that remained sane.

But for how long?

Forever!

There’s only one way to be sure.

That night, when Ian came home, Agatha was waiting.

She confronted him about his lunch date.

Ian tried to explain, but Agatha wasn’t listening. It wasn’t really about him. It was about her. Her insecurity. The bitterness of a life lived on the outside.

Agatha had decided they would be together forever, joined as one.

She ate him in three bites, and didn’t let a single morsel go to waste.

Agatha had decided they would be together forever, joined as one.

She ate him in three bites, and didn’t let a single morsel go to waste.

The Case of Eggo Adorne

By Jarrod Scott

On the psychiatric ward of Raddale Hospital, Dr. Davenport stared at the folder on his lap. He hadn’t opened it since the detective had given it to him a week ago. He had heard about the crimes from The Times, The Independent, Metro, Daily Mirror, Raddale Local, even Financial Times. And he refused to read any of them, preferring his mind unbiased before he opened the file or spoke to the “patient.” But some of things Eggo E. R. Adorne was accused of had slipped through—mostly because his wife listened to a whole host of crime podcasts—and what he had heard really put him off the idea of opening the folder.

The ward he sat on was cold and wore the droll personality of a prison. The walls were bare brick, painted a shade of white he called Insanity (for obvious reasons), and the floor had a discoloured mohawk running from one end to the other. The edges, the spots beneath the row of chairs he sat on, were the blue of a summer sky. Thoughts of passenger jets cutting a cloudy streak through the sky filled him with a strange and comforting sense déjà vu.

Dr. Davenport shuffled to the edge of the chair; his legs crossed at the ankles beneath his seat. There was always some anxiety before meeting a patient, some sweat on his neck, a niggling droplet fussing with the fine hairs at the bottom of his back. But today… it was like he had gone swimming and forgot to dry off.

The steel door he had come through buzzed, a red light above it came on, and the door pushed open. RC Howard bent through the doorway into the hall. If Davenport was still a kid, he would’ve called this man a brick shithouse, because it was funny to say shit. But the description wasn’t entirely inaccurate. The man was large. Him lowering his head to get through the door wasn’t the only thing he had to do to pass through; he had to turn his shoulders inwards and tilt his body a little to the right. When he was in the hall, and standing up properly, his balding head almost touched the ceiling.

Dr. Davenport fumbled to his feet, still staring up at the man. He almost dropped the folder and had to slap his hands together to catch it. Davenport felt like a garden gnome next to this giant; David next to Goliath. He wondered how much food this man had to go through per day just to operate, and pounds signs began ka-chinging in his mind.

‘Are you the doc?’ Howard said. ‘Silly question, I know, you being the only person here. And they don’t let anybody through. But I’ve gotta ask.’

‘Doctor Davenport.’ He put out his hand. Howard’s paw gripped him with a gentle strength that put thoughts of crushed bones into the doctor’s mind. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’

‘Do you have any pens or pencils on you? Anything sharp at all?’

‘Yeah,’ Davenport pulled his pen out of his breast pocket. ‘Just this.’

‘I’m gonna have to take it.’

‘What am I supposed to write with?’

‘I’m not sure you want to write any of this down.’ Howard took the pen and slid it into his pocket. He looked down at the folder. ‘I’m sure you’ve got enough in there.’

‘I don’t know.’ Davenport stared at the folder again, a kind of distance appearing between his hands and his eyes, as if he was holding it at arm’s length. ‘I haven’t read it yet.’

‘I think you probably should’ve looked in that before you decided to come here.’

‘Is it really that bad?’ Davenport asked.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ RC Howard said. ‘I don’t think anybody has. It’s… I don’t know a word for it.’

‘You’re making me nervous,’ Davenport laughed. Nervous sweat tickled his eyebrows.

Eggo Adorne’s room was the furthest down the hallway. RC Howard walked a little ahead of Davenport, taking one step to the doctor’s three. As they got closer to Adorne’s room, the doctor became more and more certain he could smell Butterkist toffee popcorn. But there was something about it that he didn’t like, a vein of sour milk running right through it, and it made him feel sick. All of this made him feel sick. Holding the folder made him feel sick, as if it was poisoning him. He bit down on his tongue, hoping the taste of blood would ease the nausea.

Howard’s keys were on a chain connected to his belt. He pulled them out of his pocket and searched for the key, though it didn’t take much searching; the key for this door was the biggest on the loop and wore a red duct tape headband.

‘Dr. Houghton had the chairs and table removed from Adorne’s room, so you’ll have to sit on the floor. We thought about putting pillows in there to save your knees, but the Doc thinks Adorne will take that as a sign of good things to come. Or something like that.’

‘My knees will be fine. My wife insists on me taking a yoga class once a week.’ Then, due to nothing more than nerves, Davenport added, ‘Don’t tell her, but I go three times a week. Sometimes twice on a Friday.’

RC Howard unlocked the door, the bolts inside thunking cleanly. He stopped before opening it and took a deep breath through his wide nostrils. Davenport clung onto the folder like it was a shield and he was about to step into the dragon’s den. In a way, he felt like he was about to cross some divine threshold, as though he was waiting for the Pearly Gates to open.

‘I’ll tell you one thing that’s stuck with me since I read it,’ RC Howard said. His thick neck jerked as he swallowed. ‘Adorne’s father is still alive. Poor bastard.’

Howard pulled the door open. The smell of sour milk and popcorn intensified. Davenport fought against his gorge, trying to breathe through his mouth. The air grew thicker, almost as thick and real as water. Davenport stepped into the room and the door was closed behind him.

The room was as bare as the hallway. The floor was covered in cream linoleum; brown and reddish speckles were dashed across it to break up the monotony. Then he set eyes on Eggo Adorne, and his testicles ascended into his throat. Eggo looked perfectly normal. With the way RC Howard had gone on, and the things Davenport had heard through his wife, he had half-expected to see Hannibal Lecter or the Devil sitting in this room. That’s not who he was seeing. Eggo looked like your average young adult; a shaggy mop of hair obscuring his brow and a few hairs on his chin. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, hands on his knees, as if he was meditating.

Finally, Davenport opened the folder. The first page was basic information and a photograph of Eggo. Davenport looked from the photo to the man himself. It was the oddest thing; he looked exactly the same: same length of hair, same light stubble on his chin, same complexion, same tired eyes. It was like they had just taken his photograph, right before Davenport stepped into the room.

The name typed below the photo drew Davenport’s attention next: PVT Eggo E. R. Adorne.

‘Private?’ Davenport said unconsciously. ‘You were in the army?’

‘No.’

‘PVT? Isn’t that a military abbreviation for Private?’

‘No.’

‘Private is your first name? Spelled P-V-T?’

‘Yes.’

‘Interesting,’ Davenport said. He walked over to Eggo and stopped. He wasn’t sure he wanted to sit down. ‘Was that your mother’s or your father’s idea?’

‘I decided upon it,’ he said slowly. ‘With the help from my mother.’

‘Interesting. Why did you decide on such a… unique name?’

The rest of the information on the first page was typical stuff: height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, tattoos, patient number, primary doctor’s name—Doctor Joanna Houghton—identifiable features, and diagnoses. Under the final line a great big N/A had been slashed in with a biro.

‘I’ve had a lot of thinking to do while I’ve been locked up here,’ Eggo said, diverting the conversation. ‘Joanna says I should think about what I’ve done, but most people have seen what I’ve done. Instead, I’ve been thinking about my childhood.’

Davenport got down on the floor, far enough away from Eggo that he’d have time to react if he were to do something stupid. ‘Do you think your childhood has something to do with your murders?’

‘Murders?’ He said, a confused look on his face. ‘I’ve never murdered a single person in my life.’

‘You’ve fooled the country, then,’ Davenport said. ‘At the very least, you’ve fooled the newspapers. They seem to think you’re a murderer.’

‘Is that where you get your information from? I thought you were a professional.’

‘I tried not looking at the newspapers, but sometimes you can’t help but peek. If I remember correctly, the Daily Sun claimed you have murdered at least seventeen people. With a possible limit of thirty-seven.’

‘Can I tell you a story?’ Eggo stretched out his legs in front of himself, pressed on the top of his knees until they clicked. The soles of his feet were black with dirt.

‘What kind of story?’

‘A story from my childhood. I think it’ll give you some perspective.’

Davenport closed the folder and laid it on the floor, between himself and Eggo’s dirty feet. If this folder is my shield, and this room is the dragon’s lair, does that make Eggo the dragon? Davenport thought.

‘Alright.’

‘September 6^th, 2009; I was twelve. That morning, I got dressed for school, fixed my tie. I preferred the kind you tie yourself, as opposed to the clip-ons the school was trying to force on us. My mother was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with what I thought was a birthday card in her hand. It was her birthday after all.’

‘Did you get your mother something for her birthday?’ Davenport asked.

‘My father and I bought her a book she wanted. A leatherbound, older than our entire family, both immediate and distant, combined. My father tracked it down to a bookstore in London.’

‘Sounds like a special gift. An expensive gift.’

‘What she was reading was a letter from my father. He had scribbled it out some time through the night. Mum let me read it. It said: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep living this lie. It’s not fair. I met someone last year. Somebody who makes me feel… great. She makes me feel like I’m living on a cloud. Don’t try to find me. I don’t want to live this life anymore.’

‘That doesn’t make much sense.’ Davenport scratched the spot between his eyebrows. The smell of sour popcorn was giving him a headache. ‘If your father bought her an expensive gift, why did he leave in the middle of the night?’

Eggo stretched his toes out. ‘It didn’t make any sense to me, either. I thought about the book, it was his idea to get it for her, he was the one who scoured the country for it. But a lot of the things my parents did didn’t make any sense to me.’

‘Can you give me an example?’

‘We had a basement. I was strictly forbidden to go down there. I wasn’t allowed to go with Mum or Dad. And they kept it locked. Two bolts, a latch, and a padlock.’

‘What did they do down there?’ Davenport asked, leaning forward, feeling himself getting sucked in.

‘I wasn’t privy to their private life,’ Eggo said. ‘Whenever I asked them, Dad said they needed a space to themselves. Mum said it was “adult stuff.”’

‘Continue.’

‘My life began to change that night.’ It took Dr. Davenport a minute to recognise the change in Eggo’s voice; he had been talking with the voice of a man, a slight growl that matched his face. All of a sudden, Eggo sounded like a boy of twelve. ‘I was lying in bed after a couple of hours of illicit reading, when the noise started. Shkk—shkk—shkk… clear as day, coming from under my bed. There was no mistaking the sound. Shkk—shkk—shkk. That was the first time I believed in the monster under my bed.’

‘The monster under your bed?’

‘The next morning, I woke up in a right state. Shaking like mad. White as a ghost. Sweating so bad I thought I was going to drown. And my eyes were so heavy, like they were going to fall right out of my head. I felt like I was dying. Then I remembered the sound from the night before and… I started shrieking. I’m not afraid to admit that.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were.’ Apparently, the yoga wasn’t helping. Davenport’s knees were on fire, and his feet were falling asleep.

‘I bolted out of the room faster than I’ve moved in my whole life. I’m not even sure my feet touched the floor. I went screaming to my mother. She didn’t believe me. Why would she? She took me back upstairs, telling me to, “keep breathing,” as we climbed the stairs. I wouldn’t go back in my room. I stood at the top of the stairs and shouted to her. Through the crying, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Davenport agreed.

‘She disappeared into my room. I stood in the hall, my heart beating in my spine, listening to the creeeaaks of the floor, the squeeaakkks of her shoes as she got down on her knees and went under my bed. At the time, I didn’t know what she was doing. She told me all this later. I was deathly afraid that she wouldn’t come back out. I was deathly afraid to be all alone. I tried to scream.’ Eggo touched his throat with his long fingers. ‘But my voice wouldn’t come out. Nothing came out. I hadn’t even realised I had pissed myself.’

Dr. Davenport found himself focusing not just on the words Eggo spoke, but also the voice he spoke with. His childish voice seemed to be melding with his face, or perhaps it was his face that was melding with his voice. Davenport opened the file and looked at the photograph. The hair was the same shaggy style hanging above his eyes, yet his chin was softer, his eyes more youthful. Even the light sprinkling of stubble around his mouth had disappeared.

‘When my mother came out of my bedroom, I shrieked. Partially out of relief, mostly out of fear. I was afraid she was going to be dead. I was afraid I was going to be alone with the monster under my bed. If it had eaten my mother, it wouldn’t have had an issue eating me. I was a frail child.’

‘Did she find anything under your bed?’

‘Not a thing.’ Eggo took a deep breath, expanding his chest, and reached forward and grabbed his ankles. He brought his legs in, soles together, cords of muscle tensing in his forearms. Then he leaned back, stretched his arms up above his head, the vertebrae crackling up his back. ‘Though I found out she was lying.’

‘How?’

‘The scratching—*Shkk—shkk—shkk—*went on for three nights. Never louder, never quieter. The exact same thing every night. I don’t think I slept for a fortnight. Obviously, I told my mother every time it happened. Though she seemed… preoccupied… with my father’s absence. I thought she missed him. I thought I heard her crying, but when I asked… she said nothing.’ Eggo’s voice was beginning to deepen, a greyish hue was beginning to show on his lower face, and the baby fat around his jawline was receding. Davenport stared as the incremental changes happened in front of him, like he saw this phenomenon every day of his life. ‘Every morning, I told her about the scratching. Every morning, she went upstairs and looked under my bed. Every morning, I got a little closer to my bedroom door.’

‘And what did you see?’

‘I saw my mother go under my bed, look around with a small torch, and come back out. She wasn’t lying about that. She was lying about what was under there.’ He swiped the hair away from his brow. A thin pale scar ran along his hairline, disappearing at the corners. ‘It happened again on the fourth night. Shkk—shkk—shkk. It was louder, harder, I could feel it shaking in the mattress. I was terrified… more than I had been the day before… but the thought of telling my mother that the scratching was happening again filled me with more fear than the scratching, and the thought of a monster beneath my bed, ever did.’

‘You were afraid to tell your mother about the scratching?’ Davenport said. ‘You were twelve. You were a child. Surely your mother would’ve understood.’

‘It wasn’t about my mother,’ Eggo said. His voice was deep and crackly, the voice of a middle-aged man who smokes ten packs a day and likes a bowl of gravel for breakfast. ‘The problem was me. A twelve-year-old shouldn’t go running to their mother every time they’re afraid. I understood that all at once, as I laid in bed listening to the shkk—shkk—shkk beneath me, as if the sound itself told me I shouldn’t go running to mummy anymore.’

‘That’s a big step,’ Dr. Davenport said. ‘Deciding to face your fears instead of running to your safe space. It’s a big step for an adult. At twelve years old, you must’ve been more mature than you’re letting on. I think you’re doing it on purpose.’

‘Why would I do that?’ Eggo leaned forward, his stubbled jaw jutting outwards. His teeth poked through his glistening lips like crooked tombstones.

‘Sympathy, would be my guess.’

‘I didn’t tell my mother that I had heard the shkk—shkk—shkk again.’ He forced his jaw to the left and to the right, the joint creaking, then slammed his teeth together. ‘I waited until it was light outside before I went under my bed. And I found proof that my mother had been a lying bitch!’

Davenport nodded. He was getting used to the sour popcorn smell.

‘I slid under my bed and looked and I found proof.’

‘Proof of what?’

‘Proof my mother had lied to me, of course. Proof that I wasn’t going mad. I crawled under my bed, rolled onto my back, and found chunks taken out of the wooden frame. Like something had been chewing on it.’

‘Rats?’ Davenport asked.

‘Not even close.’ Eggo stared at his long hands and smiled. His eyes were surprisingly uneasy, shifty in their aged sockets. ‘Sometimes, I wish it was rats. Rats would be easier to explain.’

‘Is it really that difficult to explain?’ Davenport asked.

‘Have you ever tried to explain the monster under your bed?’

‘No. I can’t say I have.’

‘Then you don’t know what it’s like,’ Eggo said, his voice rising a little. ‘I went down to have breakfast with my mother. She asked me about the scratching, if I had heard it again. I said, “No.” She said, “It’s probably rats. No need to be scared of them. They’re only little.” But I was little, too. And I knew it wasn’t rats before she had even said it, and after she had said it, I knew for a fact that it wasn’t rats! She was smiling when she said it, like she was poking fun at me for being afraid, for pissing myself!’

Eggo interlaced his hands, steepled his fore and pinky fingers. It reminded Dr. Davenport of a nursery rhyme he used to recite: Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, look inside and see the people. Except there were no people inside.

‘I promised myself at breakfast that I wasn’t going to be a pussy anymore. Mum wasn’t going to laugh at me again. I was going to wait until nighttime, until the scratching started, then I was going to get out of the bed and see what was making that sound. And that’s exactly what I did.

‘I was almost petrified when the scratching started. All night, as I laid in bed, I was begging my body to fall asleep. Fall asleep, fall asleep, fall asleep. Begging, begging,’ Eggo slammed his fist into his palm. ‘Begging! Do you know what that’s like. No, you don’t. Your mother sang to you at night, read you a book; if you were scared, she’d take you down to the living room and setup the settee for you to sleep on while she fell asleep in front of the tv.’

Dr. Davenport blinked. He felt his eyelids come together slowly, like automatic doors closing. He could see his mother asleep in front of the tv, her pink pyjamas bathed in the light of whatever she was watching. At that time of night, nothing good was on. She’d have to sit through reruns, the tv almost mute. In the near silence of night, Davenport could hear the tv. He’d look up from his pillow and watch parts of Judge Judy or Coronation Street or Gladiators, his heavy eyes slowly closing.

He brushed hair from his forehead, trying to figure out how Eggo Adorne knew about his childhood. Could it have been a clever guess? Was he really that simple?

‘Shkk—shkk—shkk! It got louder and louder, like it was daring me to look. Like it knew I wouldn’t and it was making fun of me. Just like Mum. Making fun! It took me almost an hour to get out of bed, but once I was out, I was buzzing. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t pissing myself. I was up and brave and determined to lay witness to the monster under my bed.

‘Slowly… I got down on my knees. Felt every breath. I put my hands on the cold laminate. I laid down on my front and opened my eyes and…’ His voice trailed off. He looked up at the ceiling, his slender throat working.

Then he snatched up the folder with a preternatural speed and rose to his feet without the need of his hands. He began pacing, looking into the folder. Dirty black footprints were tattooed where he stepped. Davenport stumbled to his feet. He wasn’t going to be on the floor while Eggo was getting worked up.

‘It’s all in here,’ Eggo whispered. ‘But you didn’t look. You never look. You want to get a feel of them for yourself, without the aid of files and photos and all this bullshit!’ He threw the folder up into the air. The pages fluttered upwards with a sound like pigeons taking flight. Pages fell around him like snow. He stepped on the ones that hit the floor, printing his black feet on them.

Dr. Davenport hadn’t realised Eggo was holding a stack of photographs until he began throwing them down at the doctor’s feet. They all landed face-up. Photographs of victims that were nonsensical to Davenport. He couldn’t see victims; he couldn’t see people.

‘Molly Davies, Arthur Evans, Oliver Lem, Joseph Wilde.’ He was throwing them down like he was dealing cards at a casino. ‘Lily Raine, Thomas Sullivan, James Taylor… need I keep going on, Doctor? You’ve had these photos long enough to have looked at them. And you want to know what I saw under my bed?’

Eggo threw the stack of photos over his shoulder—all of them landing face-up—except for one that he held in his hand. He stepped towards Davenport with a threatening stiffness in his shoulders, and thrust the photograph at him, as if the key to all his troubles was in this photograph.

After a moment, Davenport dragged his eyes from the reddening face of Eggo Adorne, a monumental task in itself, and looked at the photo. Still, it didn’t make any sense. If they were supposed to be photos of Eggo’s victims, they were poorly taken. He couldn’t see a person in frame, he couldn’t see the usual blood or severed limbs or dislocated eyes that usually accompanied victim photos. The worst he had seen was a photograph of a twelve-year-old girl inside a bin liner, not a drop of blood in sight.

And then, coming at him all at once, as though the photograph changed in the way Eggo’s face had changed, he saw the eyes. And a great clawing strike cleaved through his sanity. He saw the underneath of a bed, as if this photo was taken by Eggo’s twelve-year-old eyes. He saw the splintered wood of the bedframe Eggo had mention. But he also saw the… man; no longer a man; no more than a thing. It was a pulpy monstrosity of writhing, churning flesh. A separate body twisted in agony beneath its roiled skin, like legs kicking under a blanket. One single arm poked upwards from its middle, fused from shoulder to elbow, the arm it used to scratch—Shkk—shkk—shkk. Davenport could hear the scratching shrieking in his ears.

‘Tell me, Doctor!’ Eggo shouted, shoving the photograph closer. ‘Am I mad?’

Davenport slammed his hands over his ears and turned his eyes away. He saw the truth in the photographs that encircled him; men and women transformed into grotesque cocoons. Pleading eyes stared up at him. Shkk—shkk—shkk screaming madly inside his mind.

‘The monster under my bed! Dearest daddy never stood a fucking chance!’ Spit flew from his mouth. He clamped his uneven teeth down, shattering the noisy room into silence.

Davenport ran, half hunched, hands still over his buzzing ears, for the door.

‘Mummy lied.’ Eggo’s voice had regressed to its twelve-year-old tone. His higher pitch was filled with tears.

Dr. Davenport stopped at the door and looked back. Eggo looked the same as when Davenport first walked into the room: perfectly ordinary. That was something he could never get his mind around: how perfectly ordinary looking people could do some of the most heinous and despicable things; things that were, frankly, unimaginable.

‘What did she lie about?’ Davenport heard his own voice as he pulled his hands away from his ears. The room had become a mess. All the photos were face-down.

‘She lied about the basement.’

‘How did she lie?’

‘She said I couldn’t go down there.’

Davenport swallowed hard. ‘You went down in the basement? How? What did you find?’

‘We don’t have a basement.’

Davenport stared at him for a long moment, trying to decipher what he had said. If they didn’t have a basement, how did they have a door, why did they lock the door with all manner of devices? As he was staring, playing over Eggo’s words in his mind, it came to him: Eggo did not say, “We didn’t have a basement.” He said, “We don’t have a basement.”

‘Doctor, before you go—’

‘What?’ Davenport snapped.

‘Tell me your name. First and last.’

‘Doctor George Davenport.’

Eggo nodded. ‘I thought so.’

Davenport decided Eggo’s words were nothing more than psychotic ramblings. A man would have to be psychotic to inflict upon people what those photographs suggested he had done. Hell, Davenport was feeling crazy after seeing them. They were burnt into his mind with a hot brand; the seared edge of his brain thumping with unease.

He snatched open the door and stepped out. He didn’t stop to think (he didn’t want to think about those photographs ever again) and pulled the door shut behind him. To make sure it was good and locked, he pulled on the handle, then pulled and pulled. The door didn’t move, but that didn’t soothe the anxiety burning a horrid hole inside him.

He didn’t move a muscle. Everything ached. Pain infiltrated his tight, yellow knuckles. Sweat lashed off him like he had been caught in a wild torrent. Where his stomach had been, a hole opened up and began guzzling down his innards. He felt sick being in the same building as that man. PVT Eggo E. R. Adrone could go to hell in a handbasket for all he cared. But the thought cut off his breath, filled his mind with racing doubts and panic. All of sudden, he wished he could take it back. He was sorry he had thought it; sorrier than he had ever been.

From his left, a sound reached out for him. Shkk—shkk—shkk… the sound creeping along the discoloured linoleum… shkk—shkk—shkk echoing in the tight brick hallway, louder and louder, stretching and creeping and growing. The sound—*shkk—shkk—shkk—*coiled around him like a snake, tightening with every twitch of his muscle.

Dr. Davenport turned slowly, first his eyes rolling to the left, pain flaring inside his sockets. Then his head came around, the cords of his neck creaking. And he saw RC Howard at the end of the hall; no longer a man.