​

By the time they reached the airport terminal, the morning sun was barely up. Exhaustion hung heavy on them, but beneath it was a quiet jitter of nervous energy. Leaving behind two years of city weight and dead ends, they walked toward the boarding gate.

As they walked, James slowed his pace next to Jesse, glancing down at her bag. "Don't you forget to bring your asthma inhaler," he said, his tone carrying that familiar, protective edge. "You might need that on a day like today."

Jesse didn't even look up as she adjusted her strap. "I know how to carry my things," she replied, crisp and fast, shutting down the concern before it could settle.

They boarded the plane, the roar of the engines swallowing the last remnants of the city they left behind. Hours later, the tires slammed down onto a small, isolated runway. The airport near the protagonist's hometown was small, quiet, and smelled faintly of damp earth and pine—a sharp contrast to the concrete haze they had grown used to.

Stepping out into the cool air, they found the cab the protagonist had booked waiting by the curb. They loaded their bags into the trunk and climbed into the back seat. The hum of the engine filled the quiet as the driver navigated the winding roads deeper into the countryside. The protagonist stared out the window at the passing trees, a mixture of heavy nostalgia and unease settling in his chest.

"After two years," the protagonist said, turning to James and Jesse, "I'm finally coming back to my hometown to see my mom. It's been two full years since I last met her."

Before long, the cab pulled up to the front. But as they stepped out, the house didn't look like what the protagonist had expected. It was eerie, still, and completely cold. There was no warmth, no lights on to welcome him, and no sound at all.

Impatience and anxiety taking over, the protagonist rushed inside, throwing the front door open. "Mom? Mom, I'm home!" he called out. He moved through the empty rooms, calling for her over and over again, but the quiet halls offered no response.

Suddenly, a voice called out the protagonist's name from outside the house.

The three of them quickly went back out to the yard to see who was there. Standing near the gate was the protagonist's aunt. Tears were streaming down her face, her eyes red with grief.

The protagonist rushed over to her. "Auntie! Where is my mom? What happened? Why is the house so cold right now?"

His aunt wiped her eyes, her voice trembling. "Your mom died two days ago. We tried to call you, but we couldn't reach you, so we just burned her ashes. I thought you weren't going to come. We didn't have any means to contact you."

The protagonist froze, complete shock and confusion washing over him. "That's... that's not possible," he stammered, his mind reeling. "Mom literally called me yesterday saying she wanted to see me. How could she have died two days ago?" He stood there, completely stunned into silence.

James immediately stepped forward, shaking his head in disbelief. "No way, Auntie, there's no way," James insisted. "We all heard his mom yesterday. She talked to him! She said to come today because she wanted to meet him. There's no way she died two days ago!"

The aunt looked at them in complete surprise. "But... your mom didn't have any phone when she died. She died inside the house."

The world went completely silent around the protagonist, replaced by a deafening, high-pitched buzzing in his ears. His mind was in total chaos. Suddenly, the floodgates opened. Every memory came rushing back all at once—fighting with his mom, the warmth of her hands feeding him, the happy days they shared. All the memories flooded his mind like a breaking dam.

James and Jesse tried to comfort him, but nothing worked.

For nearly an entire day, the protagonist didn't move. He lay in his mother’s bed, clutching her ashes in his hands, thinking only of her. Not a single drop of water or bite of food entered his body. He didn't even actively refuse to eat—his mind was simply somewhere else entirely. Outside the room, his friends watched over him, deeply worried.

By the next day, his mind cleared just a little bit. Sitting up, he talked to his friends, staring into the empty room with the heavy realization that there was no one left for him anymore. He felt completely alone in the world. \*Who cares now if I succeed, get married, or what happens to me?\*

Jesse sat near him and gently tried to offer a way forward. "What if you sell your house? Sell it and make money—don't waste it. We could use that money to start a business. You know how to cook really well, so try to open a restaurant."

The protagonist was entirely against the idea of selling his mother's house. Yet, he had no other idea what to do with it. He knew he had to move on, but the painful reality that he couldn't even see her face one last time haunted him.

Suddenly, two voices echoed from outside. Walking into the house were his young twin niece and nephew who lived next door with their aunt: Sarah and Michael. They came up to the protagonist to offer their soft condolences, talking about his mother quite a lot. They spoke of what a good aunt she was and how her spirit still felt alive, telling him everything that had happened while he was away.

A short while later, the aunt came back inside to the protagonist. "Before your mother died, she told me something really important. She told me to give you this if you came back." She paused, looking at him warmly. "I thought it would never happen, but here we are. This is what your mother wanted you to have."

She handed him a letter and a small box, then turned and left for the garden.

Surrounded by his friends and the twins, the protagonist opened the letter and read it aloud. In the letter, his mother described what she wanted him to do after she was gone. She wished for him to dissolve her ashes in a village nestled between a mountain and a beach—to put her to rest in the sea near where her father used to live during his childhood.

The letter ended with a gentle promise: \*And don't worry, I will always look after you even if I'm gone. Your loving mother.\*

All of a sudden, the protagonist's eyes grew watery and foggy. Looking up, he saw everyone around him crying out loud. James stepped forward—leaving all his usual jokes behind—and gave the protagonist a firm shoulder to cry on. James's quiet comfort and presence truly helped him begin to pull through the crushing grief.

Wiping his eyes, the protagonist finally opened the box. Lying inside was an old, whistle-like object, and a mysterious pendant that glowed with a soft green light, carved with intricate, unfamiliar symbols.

At the same time, miles away in a dark cave, four cult-looking dressed members entered into a chamber that looked sacred and mysterious, carrying a jewel-box-like box inside. Eerie screeching and rattling sounds echoes all over the damp cavern walls. They looked mysterious, and at the same time, dangerous.

Curious and on edge, one of the members stepped a little farther into the darkness to investigate the strange noise.

Suddenly, a terrifying, tentacle-like monster attacked out of the pitch black. The exact nature of the creature wasn't clear, but its brutal violence was instant. It slaughtered all four cult members, tearing them apart piece by piece until only bloody silence remained in the chamber.

Determined to honor his mother's final wishes, the protagonist decides to travel to that very same coastal village where his grandfather was born—unaware of the dark tragedy that just unfolded in the cave nearby.

He prepares to leave, but he won't be heading into the unknown alone. His two loyal friends, James and Jesse, along with his young niece and nephew, insist on joining him. Together, packed and ready, they set off toward the village.

Carl had been complaining about the tooth for nearly twenty miles.

“It tastes like pennies,” he said, pressing his tongue against the replacement molar. “Whole side of my mouth tastes like I’m sucking on loose change.”

Lenny kept both hands on the steering wheel and watched the empty country road stretch into the sinking sun.

“You paid forty dollars for it,” he said. “What did you expect, gold?”

“I expected a tooth.”

“You bought it from a guy working above a laundromat.”

“He said he was licensed.”

“He had a toolbox, Carl.”

“A medical toolbox.”

“It said Stanley on the side.”

Carl grumbled and turned toward the passenger window.

Outside, fields rolled across the deep country in every direction, broken only by leaning fences, telephone poles, and occasional walls of corn. The plants had gone dry and pale at the edges, their stalks scraping together whenever the wind passed through them.

It was Friday evening, and the sun was already touching the tree line.

They had not seen another car in nearly an hour.

Then Lenny’s engine coughed.

He looked down.

The temperature needle climbed suddenly into the red.

“Oh, come on.”

The car shuddered beneath them. Steam began leaking from under the hood, thin at first, then thick enough to curl past the windshield.

Lenny pulled onto the gravel shoulder and killed the engine.

For a few moments, neither man spoke.

Carl clicked his metal tooth against the one below it.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

“Stop doing that,” Lenny said.

“I’m thinking.”

“You sound like a broken clock.”

Carl opened his door and stepped outside.

The country air was colder than it had any right to be. It smelled of dust, dry leaves, and something faintly rotten beneath the sweetness of cut grass.

Lenny climbed out and raised the hood. A white cloud rolled into his face.

“Radiator hose,” he said after a moment. “Split clean through.”

“So fix it.”

“With what?”

Carl looked across the road.

Beyond a sagging wire fence lay a broad field of dead grass. Patches of corn stood throughout it in uneven clusters, tall enough to conceal whatever lay behind them. Far in the distance, between the stalks, Carl thought he could see the black corner of a roof.

“There’s a house out there,” he said.

Lenny looked.

The corn shifted in the wind, briefly revealing what might have been a chimney.

Then the stalks closed again.

“Probably half a mile,” Carl continued. “We ask to use a phone.”

“We have phones.”

Carl held his up. No signal.

Lenny checked his own.

Nothing.

The sun dipped lower.

The road behind them remained empty.

Lenny glanced at the field. “We go straight there and straight back.”

Carl smiled and clicked his tooth.

Tick.

“Stop that.”

They climbed over the fence.

The grass came nearly to their knees. It was brittle and grey, whispering against their jeans as they crossed. The earth beneath it was soft despite the dry weather, giving slightly beneath each step.

The field looked smaller from the road.

Inside it, the patches of corn rose like islands, blocking their view of everything beyond. Whenever they walked around one cluster, another seemed to appear ahead of them.

The roof was gone.

“Still see the house?” Lenny asked.

“No.”

“Great.”

“It was there.”

“I’m sure it was.”

They continued.

Behind them, their car slowly disappeared beneath the rolling land.

Carl began complaining about the tooth again.

“It’s loose now.”

“It’s been loose for six months.”

“No, I mean really loose.”

“Pull it out.”

Carl looked offended. “I’m not pulling out my tooth in a field.”

“Then stop talking about it.”

They reached the first patch of corn.

The stalks were taller than either of them, their leaves curled and brown. There were no proper rows. The plants grew in a dense, tangled mass, forcing Lenny and Carl to turn sideways and push between them.

The sound changed as soon as they entered.

The open wind vanished.

Everything became close and dry.

Leaves dragged over their jackets with a sound like fingernails across paper. The corn husks hung blackened and empty from the stalks.

Lenny could hear Carl behind him.

Breathing.

Footsteps.

The occasional metallic click of his tooth.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

“You better not be doing that just to piss me off,” Lenny said.

Carl did not answer.

Lenny shoved another stalk aside.

The field opened in front of him.

He stepped through, relieved to see open grass again.

“Carl?”

Nothing.

Lenny turned.

The corn stood behind him, trembling gently.

“Carl.”

He waited for the joke.

Carl had always loved stupid jokes. He would jump out, grab Lenny’s shoulder, laugh like an idiot, then complain when Lenny punched him.

“Very funny.”

No answer.

Lenny pushed back into the stalks.

“Carl?”

He retraced his steps, though every part of the corn looked identical. Bent stalk. Black husk. Dry leaves. Soft soil.

There was nowhere Carl could have gone.

Lenny had heard him walking three seconds earlier.

He had been close enough to hear him breathing.

“Carl!”

His voice died inside the corn.

No birds answered.

No insects buzzed.

There was only the faint rustle of the stalks and the beating of Lenny’s own heart.

He found one of Carl’s footprints pressed into the dirt.

Then another.

Then none.

The trail simply stopped.

The earth ahead was smooth and undisturbed.

Lenny stared at it.

There had been no shout.

No struggle.

No breaking plants.

One second Carl had been behind him.

The next, he had ceased to be there.

Lenny pushed wildly through the stalks, calling his name until his throat hurt. He emerged on the far side and scanned the field.

“Carl!”

The sun had almost disappeared.

Its remaining light spread red across the horizon, staining the field the colour of old blood.

Something moved near another patch of corn.

Lenny froze.

A shape passed between the stalks. Tall. Thin. Human.

“Carl?”

It vanished.

Lenny ran toward it.

The dry grass cracked beneath his shoes. He reached the corn and circled it, expecting to find Carl crouched on the other side.

There was no one.

Instead, lying in the grass, he found Carl’s jacket.

Lenny picked it up.

The sleeves were turned partly inside out, as though someone had pulled it from Carl’s body in a hurry.

It was still warm.

There was no blood.

“Carl?”

Far across the field, something clicked.

Tick.

Lenny looked up.

Another click came from inside the corn.

Tick.

Then one from behind him.

Tick.

He spun around.

Empty grass.

“Cut it out!” he shouted. “This isn’t funny anymore!”

His voice broke on the final word.

The last piece of sunlight slipped beneath the trees.

Darkness came quickly after that.

Lenny took out his phone and switched on the flashlight. The beam seemed weak in the open field, illuminating only a pale circle of grass before dissolving into blackness.

He tried calling emergency services.

No signal.

The battery read sixty-three percent.

It flickered.

Twelve percent.

Then forty-eight.

The screen went black.

Lenny slapped the phone against his palm. The flashlight returned, pulsing faintly.

Somewhere nearby, corn began moving.

Not swaying.

Parting.

A path travelled slowly through the stalks toward him, as though something invisible were walking between the rows.

Lenny backed away.

The movement stopped at the edge of the corn.

Nothing emerged.

He held the light on the opening.

“Carl?”

A voice whispered from deep inside.

“Lenny.”

It sounded like Carl.

Almost.

The pitch was right. The shape of the word was right.

But it was spoken too carefully, as though whoever said it had only heard Carl’s voice once and was trying to reproduce it.

“Where are you?”

A pause.

Then:

“My tooth hurts.”

The corn erupted with movement.

Lenny ran.

He did not know where he was going. The road had vanished behind hills and corn, and the farmhouse roof had not appeared again. He sprinted across the field with Carl’s jacket clutched in one hand and his phone in the other.

Shapes stood in the darkness ahead.

At first, Lenny thought they were people.

Then his light passed over wooden posts and outstretched arms.

Scarecrows.

Dozens of them.

They had been placed throughout a shallow depression in the field, hidden from the road by the rising land. Some wore mouldering coats. Others had burlap sacks tied over their heads. One had been dressed in a child’s yellow raincoat.

All of them faced Lenny.

He slowed.

Their wooden arms creaked in the wind.

His flashlight dimmed.

At the centre of them stood a taller scarecrow, mounted on a black post.

It wore no clothing.

Something pale hung from its shoulders.

Lenny raised the phone.

For several seconds, his mind refused to understand what the light revealed.

Then he saw the hands.

Carl’s hands.

Empty, flattened things dangling from the ends of wooden arms.

Carl’s skin had been removed in a single piece.

It had been draped over the scarecrow like a suit laid out to dry.

The cut began beneath the jaw and travelled down the centre of the body with flawless precision. Every section had been separated cleanly. The face sagged over a sack of straw, its mouth hanging open and its eyes reduced to dark, empty holes.

There were no tears in the skin.

No ragged edges.

No clumsy knife marks.

Whoever had done it had worked with the care of a surgeon.

Lenny could see every wrinkle.

Every pore.

Every fold where the skin rested against the straw beneath it.

Carl’s lips moved in the breeze.

Lenny dropped the jacket.

A sound escaped him, thin and animal.

He staggered backward, shaking his head.

“No.”

The scarecrow’s wooden frame creaked.

Carl’s empty face turned slightly toward him.

Lenny ran again.

He collided with another scarecrow and knocked it sideways. Its burlap head rolled toward him, splitting open when it hit the ground.

Something wet spilled out.

Teeth.

Human teeth scattered through the grass like white seeds.

Lenny screamed and fled into the nearest wall of corn.

The stalks lashed his face. Leaves cut his cheeks and hands. He pushed through blindly until the field of scarecrows disappeared behind him.

He no longer called for Carl.

He knew Carl could not answer.

Not really.

The darkness grew deeper.

Every few minutes, Lenny heard footsteps matching his own.

When he slowed, they slowed.

When he stopped, they took one additional step.

Sometimes Carl whispered from behind the stalks.

“My tooth hurts.”

Sometimes the voice came from directly above him.

“Lenny.”

Once it came from inside the ground.

He kept moving.

His phone battery finally died, leaving him in total darkness.

He felt his way forward with both hands, breathing through his mouth, trying not to imagine Carl’s empty skin twisting in the wind.

Then his foot struck something hard.

Lenny fell.

His hands landed in cold mud.

The smell reached him immediately.

Sweet.

Rotten.

Thick enough to taste.

He crawled backward and fumbled for his phone. The screen flashed once when he pressed the power button, giving him less than a second of light.

It was enough to show him a human skull.

Lenny froze.

He pressed the button again.

Another flash.

Ribs.

Vertebrae.

Long bones stripped completely clean.

The skeleton lay in a shallow hollow between the corn, arranged neatly on its back. Not a shred of meat remained. Even the joints had been picked bare.

Lenny covered his mouth.

The bones were fresh.

Wet in places.

Fine tooth marks covered the ribs.

The screen flashed again.

The skull had turned toward him.

Its jaws hung open.

Inside, set among the remaining teeth, was a dull piece of cheap metal.

Carl’s replacement molar.

For a moment, the field became perfectly silent.

Lenny stared at the tooth.

The skin on the scarecrow.

The bones in the mud.

Everything that had been Carl had been divided and used.

Something stepped into the hollow behind him.

Lenny did not turn around.

He heard dry grass compress beneath a bare foot.

Then another.

A hand settled gently on his shoulder.

It felt warm.

Human.

Carl’s voice spoke beside his ear.

“My tooth doesn’t hurt anymore.”

Lenny looked down at the skull.

The metal tooth was no longer there.

Something clicked inside the mouth behind him.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

The fog descended from the hills just after sunset. It wasn't the usual kind — not damp and raw, but thick, pale, almost tame. It crept along the ground, coiled around lampposts, and peered into windows, as if looking for someone.

In the little town, candles were being lit inside pumpkins. Children in sheets with cut-out eyeholes ran from door to door, shouting "Trick or treat!" and scooping caramels and gingerbread into their bags. The adults glanced at the hill and tried not to raise their heads more than necessary.

Herr Müller, the baker, a man both solid and round in every sense, was also trying not to look at the hill. But his daughter Bertha, who had recently turned eight, was looking precisely there.

"Papa," she said, tugging at his sleeve. "We're going up there."

Müller followed her pointing finger and went cold.

"No, Bertha. No one goes up there."

"But people live there. Their lights are on. Look."

Lights were indeed burning. In every window of the old mansion on the hill — not pumpkins, not oil lamps, but a steady, amber, motionless flame. Black candles. Müller knew what kind of candles they were, and he knew who was lighting them.

"They are... not quite normal people," he muttered.

"All the more reason," Bertha declared. "They probably have the best candy."

And she started up the path. Müller, cursing his love for his daughter, trudged along behind her. Along the way, he tripped twice over roots that seemed to move on their own.

The door opened before Müller could even knock.

On the threshold stood Frau Sahlfeldt. Tall, straight as a candle, in a black dress with a collar up to her chin. Her blue-black hair was pulled back into a severe knot. She wasn't holding a lamp — the light seemed to emanate from somewhere behind her shoulder, soft and golden.

"Good evening," she said. Her voice was low, calm, enveloping. "What guests we have."

Müller felt everything inside him tighten into a hard knot. He opened his mouth, but Bertha was faster:

"Trick or treat!" she blurted out, gazing at Frau Sahlfeldt with delight. The lady was beautiful, like a princess from a scary book, and Bertha appreciated that immediately.

Irina Sahlfeldt smiled. The smile was wide, but her eyes remained amber and still, like a she-wolf looking at the moon.

"Of course, my child. A treat, definitely."

She held out a silver tray. On it lay candies — small, round, shimmering with black mother-of-pearl. Each one was the size of an eyeball. And each one was watching.

Bertha grabbed one without hesitation and popped it into her mouth.

"Mmm!" She squeezed her eyes shut. "Blueberry... and... something else. Very tasty!"

Müller picked up a candy with two fingers. He brought it close to his face. It was warm. And it seemed to blink.

He carefully placed it in his pocket. His appetite had vanished.

"Please, come in," Frau Sahlfeldt said, stepping back into the house. "It's cold tonight. Even for Halloween."

"Oh, no, thank you, we should probably..."

"Papa!" Bertha was already standing in the hallway. "It's so beautiful in here! Look!"

Müller looked. The hallway was steeped in shadow. Tall oak panels, old portraits on the walls, a staircase disappearing into the darkness, and a smell — dry, slightly spicy, like an old book just opened. Somewhere deep in the house, a clock was ticking steadily.

He sighed and stepped inside. The door closed behind him on its own. Silently. Naturally.

The Sahlfeldt family's living room was exactly as Müller had imagined it in his most anxious dreams. An enormous fireplace, in which logs blazed, stacked with perfect symmetry. Heavy velvet drapes, holding the night at bay outside. A glass orb on a separate little table, covered with black silk. And a high-backed armchair, in which sat Herr Sahlfeldt.

Konrad Sahlfeldt was tall, broad-shouldered, and wore a monocle that had caught the firelight and now glinted like the solitary eye of some ancient creature. He was reading a newspaper. Beside him on the table stood a cup of tea, from which no steam rose.

"Konrad," Irina said, "we have guests. Herr Müller, the baker. And his daughter..."

"Bertha," the girl supplied.

"Bertha," Irina repeated with pleasure. "A beautiful name. It means 'bright.'"

Konrad lowered his newspaper, raised his monocle, and examined the guests. Müller felt as though he had been weighed, measured, and the result recorded in some invisible ledger.

"Müller," Konrad said thoughtfully. "Is yours not the bakery on the Market Square?"

"It is," Müller squeezed out.

"Good bread. Especially the rye. Have a seat."

Müller sat down. The armchair turned out to be surprisingly comfortable, but he still sat on the very edge, like a sparrow on a branch in the presence of a cat.

"Tea?" Irina asked, materializing at his elbow. Müller flinched — he hadn't heard her footsteps.

"Thank you."

The tea was black and smelled of herbs. Müller took a sip. The taste was strange — a little like smoke, a little like the forest, a little like something he couldn't name. He took another sip.

"And where is the little gentleman?" asked Bertha, who had already grown comfortable enough to examine the portraits on the walls.

"Otto?" Irina exchanged a glance with Konrad. "He's in his room. Would you like to meet him?"

"Very much!"

Irina nodded almost imperceptibly, and Heinrich appeared in the living room. Müller could have sworn he hadn't been there a second ago. The butler was thin, tall, and resembled an old raven that had accidentally learned to wear a frock coat.

"Escort our guest to Otto's room," Irina said. "And make sure they don't... get carried away."

"As always, madam," Heinrich rustled, and led Bertha toward the staircase.

Otto's room was located in the east wing. To reach it, you had to pass through a long corridor where portraits of ancestors hung on the walls. Bertha followed Heinrich and counted the faces. Looking down at her were men in doublets, women in bonnets, children in little velvet suits. All of them had the same dark, unblinking eyes.

The door to Otto's room was ajar. A faint amber light streamed from inside.

"Young master," Heinrich said. "You have a guest."

"Let her come in," answered a child's voice. Serious, calm, without a single note of surprise.

Bertha stepped inside and gasped.

The room was full of wonders. Not toys — in the ordinary sense — but strange, mesmerizing objects. On a shelf stood jars containing preserved... things. Bertha looked closer: in one jar, glass eyes were floating. They were slowly turning, following her.

On the table lay a deck of cards, but not ordinary ones. Each had a skull drawn on it in a different stage of blooming. On one card, a rose grew from an eye socket, on another — a lily, on a third — a thorny blackthorn.

In the corner stood the skeleton of a bat, assembled from bones the size of toothpicks. Beside it — a microscope and an album of sketches.

And in the middle of the room sat a boy. Small, impeccably dressed, with dark hair and eyes that stared straight ahead without blinking. He held a mechanical bird in his hands, which was slowly flapping its tin wings.

"Good evening," he said, and it sounded as if he were not four years old, but four hundred. "My name is Otto. Do you want to see my collection?"

"I'd love to!" Bertha sat down next to him on the rug. "What kind of bird is that?"

"This is a Nightingale. I assembled him from old clocks. He only sings during the full moon. Tonight is a full moon."

The bird opened its beak and let out a low, mechanical trill. Bertha laughed.

"He sings like a cricket!"

"Crickets don't sing like that," Otto replied seriously. "Crickets sing quite differently. Do you want me to show you a real one?"

He walked over to one of the jars. Inside, on a small branch, sat an insect resembling a cricket, but with transparent wings that glowed faintly.

"This is a Grave Cricket," Otto said. "It sings lullabies for those who sleep for a very long time."

"It's beautiful," Bertha whispered.

"Yes," Otto agreed. "I have something else. Would you like to see?"

And he showed her. A casket of shadows that could be taken out and tried on like gloves. A book that read itself in a whisper — the pages turned by an invisible wind, and the words sounded directly inside your head. And the main treasure: a tiny glass orb, the size of a walnut, inside which snow was falling.

"This is a gift from my great-grandmother," Otto said. "She lives in Romania. Where the wolves are."

"Do you have wolves?"

"I do. But they're not here. They come when they are called."

Bertha watched the snow in the orb and thought she had never seen anything more beautiful. She wasn't scared. She felt warm and cozy, like being by the fireplace when the wind howls outside and you are inside, safe.

"Otto," she asked, "do you always live here?"

"Always," he answered. "This is my home. My family lives here."

"I thought you were scary," Bertha admitted.

Otto looked at her with his unblinking eyes. He was four years old, but he already knew the answer to this question.

"People often think that," he said. "Because we are different. But Mama says: 'Being different doesn't mean being scary. Being scary means not knowing who you are.' We know."

He paused and added:

"Would you like a candy? I have some with cinnamon."

Meanwhile, in the living room, a very different conversation was taking place.

"You have a very... unusual home," said Müller, taking a third sip of tea. The tea was indeed good. It soothed him. Müller had almost stopped thinking about the fact that the logs in the fireplace were stacked with geometric precision, or that the portrait above the mantelpiece seemed to be watching him.

"Thank you," Irina replied. She sat in the armchair opposite him, straight and motionless. Konrad had set aside his newspaper and was now polishing his monocle with a small chamois cloth. "My husband has put a lot of effort into furnishing it."

"It was my wife who put in the effort," Konrad corrected, without looking up from his monocle. "I merely saw to it that everything was... proper."

"You've done a wonderful job," Müller nodded. "Very... proper."

A pause hung in the room. A log cracked in the fireplace.

"Your daughter," Irina said, "is very brave. Not every child would dare approach our house."

"She's not brave," Müller sighed. "She's curious. Those are different things."

"Curiosity is bravery," observed Konrad, setting his monocle back in place. "Bravery without curiosity is merely stubbornness. And curiosity without bravery is tedium."

Müller thought about this. He wanted to argue, but couldn't find the arguments.

"I was afraid to come here," he admitted suddenly. "We all... in town... we're a little afraid of you."

Irina and Konrad exchanged glances. Not a muscle flickered on their faces, but it seemed to Müller that they smiled — with the corners of their eyes, barely perceptibly.

"We know," Irina said. "But you came. For your daughter. That makes you a good father."

"Yes," Konrad confirmed. "A good father is ready to go where he does not want to go, for the sake of the one he loves."

Müller felt something warm spread inside him. Perhaps the tea. Or perhaps not.

Bertha and Otto came down to the living room half an hour later. Bertha was holding a small parcel — a gift from her new friend. Otto walked slightly behind, maintaining an expression of absolute, unwavering seriousness on his face.

"Well," said Müller, rising, "it's time for us to go. Thank you for your hospitality."

"You are always welcome guests in this house," Irina replied.

She saw them to the door. On the threshold, Müller turned around.

"Frau Sahlfeldt... may I ask a question?"

"Yes?"

"The candies. What are they made of?"

Irina smiled her wide, calm smile.

"A family recipe, Herr Müller. Passed down through the female line. My great-grandmother brought it from Transylvania."

The door closed.

Müller and Bertha walked back down the path. The fog parted before them like a well-trained servant. In the town, pumpkins were still glowing. Children were still shouting "Trick or treat!" The world was ordinary.

Bertha unwrapped the parcel. Inside lay three candies, a tiny glass orb in which snow was falling, and a note.

The note was written in careful child's handwriting, but the lettering was too even for a four-year-old child.

"Thank you for the visit. Come again. We will be friends, for a long time.

Your friend,

Otto Sahlfeldt"

Bertha smiled.

"Papa," she said, "can we go to their house for Christmas?"

Müller pulled from his pocket the candy he had never eaten. It was still warm. And it really did seem to blink.

He carefully placed it back in his pocket.

"We'll see," he said. "We'll see."

In the mansion on the hill, the candles burned until morning.

And in the living room, Irina laid her head on her husband's shoulder and closed her eyes.

"A good evening," she said.

"Yes," Konrad replied, adjusting his monocle. "Almost perfect."

"Almost?"

"Müller's pumpkin on the porch. Too orange. It offends the eye."

Irina laughed — quietly, like the wind in the chimney flue.

"I'll speak with him about it next time."

"Do," Konrad nodded. "Tradition is tradition, but aesthetics..."

"...are above all," Irina finished. "I know, my darling. I know."

I got lost when I was 8 and I haven't found myself since.

...

It was a cold winter afternoon, back when winters were still cold and snow still covered the landscape of my hometown. School had just ended for the day and I was on my way home.

Alone.

I’d usually walk with my brother, but he wasn’t there that day for some reason. I didn’t mind it though, not really. You see, our apartment was just a few steps away, just across the creek. And besides, I was a big girl now. I just turned 8 a few days ago.

And then … You offered to join me.

It started snowing just as we were about to leave school. We walked around back, past the playground, towards a small wooded area leading to the creek. Walking by, we couldn’t help but notice the freshly fallen snow behind the playground fence. Still untouched by the hundreds of tiny human feet running around there every day. It was as tempting as those powdered doughnuts cooling on the kitchen counter back home. You know the ones. The ones You were strictly told not to touch before dinner.

We snuck inside through the hole at the bottom of the fence that the teachers never seemed to notice; my go-to move during recess, when I would sneak out of the playground to go climb my favourite tree.

The big willow tree,with its trunk split in half straight across.

I used to climb that tree as high as I possibly could. Sometimes on the left half, sometimes on the right ... And I would watch the other kids play on the ground from afar ...

I remember my teacher finding me up there once. On the top. And it made her cry … I'm still not sure why …

I ran into the open field, launching myself face first into the snow-covered ground. I rolled around and I just stayed there. Staring at the sky. Snowflakes danced on my face, like little kisses from heaven. Each touch, so warm and fuzzy.

Everything around me was completely still. The silence, broken only by the occasional rustling of the branches, caving under the heavy weight of snow.

I could feel myself blending into the background.

I could feel the earth breathing with me.

I closed my eyes to let the gentle touch of winter swallow me whole.

I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to move.

I was at peace.

I haven’t felt like that since.

And then … BAM!

A snowball sharp as a thousand needles pulled me right back into reality.

“Come on! Let’s go build a snowman!” You said.

I started laughing, even though I wanted to cry from the pain. My whole face, burning. You were always a good aim.

So we built Your snowman. We built a snowman taller than the both of us! Even though You were one whole head taller than me.

“He’ll protect us,” You said. “So we have to make him as biiiiiig as possible!”

We gathered stones and branches to give him two arms and a face. And I made sure to give him a smile. I wanted the snowman to feel the joy that I felt in that moment.

I haven’t felt like that since.

It couldn’t have been more than 30 minutes before I noticed a dark silhouette coming towards us through the thick veil of snow. When did it even start snowing this hard?

I haven’t noticed.

I wasn’t scared of the figure though, not really. You see, I was a big girl now. I just turned 8 a few days ago. And besides, I could recognize that figure anywhere.

A tall, skinny man of a sickly complexion. He was dressed in all black to match the long dark hair that hung over his shoulders like a scarf. His woolen coat brushing over the snow.

“Hey, Uncle Andy!” I yelled, running to him. “What are you doing here?”

“Heeey Beck! I’m so glad I found you. Your parents, they … oh, nevermind! Let’s get you home.”

“Awwh, really? But we just started playing, just 5 more minutes? Please?”

Uncle Andy, now towering over me, leaned closer. Only the fence standing between us. “No, Beck. It’s time to go home.”

I stood there for a moment, unsure of what to say. “Okay, I guess. Can I just say goodbye to my friend?”

I turned around to call You, but You weren’t there.

I ran to check behind the snowman, but You weren’t there.

I looked all around the playground to find You, but You were nowhere to be seen.

I went back to my uncle, past our snowman, through the hole in the fence.

“I guess they went home before I could say goodbye.”

“That’s okay,” he took my hand. “I’m sure you’ll see them again tomorrow.”

I haven’t seen You since.

We came home a few minutes later. My parents greeted us with a smile that could light up the sky. “How was your day? Are you hungry? Let’s get you out of those wet clothes!”

They haven’t smiled like that since.

I stopped walking home alone after that. I never got to explore our town as a child ever again. It wasn’t long after that I saw my mother crying in the dark for the first time. My parents got divorced a few months later.

I stopped sneaking out of the playground after that. I never got to climb my favourite tree during recess ever again. It wasn’t long after that I heard the teachers whisper about You in the hallways for the first time. They fixed the hole in the fence a few weeks later.

It wasn’t until my 23rd birthday that I learned what happened that day from my mom’s point of view. “Oh Beck? Yeah, she was always a good kid. Sure, we had our fair share of fights and she would never listen to me and would cry constantly, but she was a good kid. Except that one time … Do You remember?” She glanced towards me as if to ask for reassurance.

I didn’t respond.

“It was winter, and I think she was around 8? Her brother got sick that day so I went to pick him up from school earlier than usual and SHE was supposed to come home right after, because Andy was giving her guitar lessons later …

But she didn’t come home. She was gone for hours!

Her dad and I were going insane trying to find her. I mean, what if something happened to her?! It’s a mother’s worst nightmare!

We were about to call the cops when Uncle Andy rang the doorbell with Beck on his shoulders. He said he found her on the playground soaking wet in the freezing snow. Just playing, and laughing, and talking … all by herself.

And the craziest thing about it? We went searching for her on that exact same playground just before Andy did.

I swear thinking about that day still sends shivers down my spine every time.”

“Huh,” I said. “I never remembered it that way.”

...

The commonfolk, the peasants of the mountain and the hamlet below were fools. Stupid animals. Easily subverted. And taken. 

There were all of them such stupid children. Even the men and women and elders, even the adults. Doddering simpletons that lacked even animal cunning, the innate brains found in a dog, a cur, a flea bitten bitch were beyond these dirt farming swine that feared the dark and the light of true knowledge. 

He hated them. Hated them completely for so many reasons but one of the strongest, one of the most vividly and live wire felt was their fear and blind terror of true knowledge. True power. And the pain it took to wield it. Pain both inflicted and so like a lover, intimately received. 

They feared everything. These downcast sacs of wasted vitality and breath. Not like his master. Not like the Countess. She plunged her bare and unprotected hands into the realm and fiery cascade of fear without bemoaning her fate. 

The Countess took the pain, all of it. She didn't flee or shy away. He had never met a stronger creature. It was one of the reasons for his loyalty. He was bound to her and she knew it. His was tied to her fate long before they stole the castle and Vampire King’s necrophile fangs. Whatever remained of his long jaded and decimated ruined landscape of heart and soul was dedicated to her, and to her alone. 

His services to her, this particular little errand was not strictly necessary. Her power had grown in ways he hadn't previously guessed at or speculated. She did not need him to fetch her food any longer, not at all. Not the child either. They were both incredible bloodhunters demonically innate, favored by the father below. They did not need him to kidnap these fleshling sows…

but he loved them. And for them… it was the clearest and simplest way he could sometimes tell them that. Especially her. Especially the master. Their time together, their history went so far back. 

He loved them. He loved her. He loved to show her. However he could. 

However he can. 

The boy, Astarra, is alone and he is not afraid as the assistant makes his hunting prowling approach. From the dark of the choked growth, buried in the foliage the assistant spied and closed. So much like a cunning and man-eating wild cat, rippling with movement. Glittering bottle of chloroform intermittently darkling as it caught and then lost and then found again the light from above as he moved through the choke of trees. 

Astarra was from a neighboring hamlet, one that has not lost as many children as the sparse villages of the mountain itself and the supplicant place below… he scarcely knows anyone that's been touched by the demon hand of slaughter that has begun again to grow out from Dracula's Mountain. He doesn't believe it. Stupid ghost stories. Baby tales. Children's drivel. Horse shit conjured for fun or to scare kids like him so’s to trick em into behaving. When they really didn't have to. Not at all. God was not watching and he was not here. And neither were any monsters. 

He was here to prove there was no God on this mountain. Nor anything of power or terror or otherworldly and far reaching violence. 

Probably wasn't even any castle either…

He would show them. He would venture the mountain land and the town below and then return, unharmed and smiling and letting them all know the truth. There was no magic amongst the earthen spire of rock. 

Only wolves. Only snow and quiet. 

The assistant prowled in closer, making not a sound as the smiling boy jeered and threw rocks and swung sticks as he audaciously stomped through the frosted forest chill. The small child never heard anything over the sounds of his own braying cries of laughter and thudding graceless steps. 

He was making believe that he was king of this ghostly and deserted mountain when the assistant pounced. From behind, he came upon him. Chloroformed rag coming up in a bestial rapist flash. Smothering the boy's mouth with the sodden thing as he whispered harshly in his small ear, pink and reddened by the chill. 

“For her! For she! For she of the biting chair…” 

the queen upon her dentate throne… my hands and this flesh taken and subdued and thus rendered unto you… master, the both of them are here quivering with blood and animal life for you. 

All will palsy with supplicant terror, dancing like puppets, their livid nerve-endings and thick tendon the strings. Tugged and pulled with ruthless fervor by the Countess. 

And her children. 

They too would like to feed, with their mother, when the sun died its nightly nocturnal death. More peasant blood would have to be nabbed, more fresh flesh coursing with vibrant hot red would need to be acquired. Another good-sized child at least. Another one that was just about the same size.  

The assistant rejoiced as the child became dreamless weight in his arms. Yes! 

Yes! 

He'd captured her favorite! Veal for the master! Veal for the Countess! 

He dragged the unconscious child into the dense and dark of the forest growth. The foliage and floor of frosted dead leaves and twigs rustled and crunched with bestial movement and finality as he performed this task. His prodigious strength made it all so simple, like child's play. 

…

Later another child was nabbed, a girl, maybe younger than the boy Astarra maybe slightly older, he'd snatched her in similar fashion as she'd been gazing into a running face of stream, up to her ankles. The assistant didn't know if she was trying to catch small fish or if she was just playing some child's game but it made no difference, it did not matter. What mattered now was what came next. 

The slab. For the both of them. Still unconscious and leather-bound to the cold merciless metal of the surgical table. 

He grabbed the green bottle of frothing translucent liquid. It spewed steam and something heavier like oceanic fog or forest mist from the pinnacle of open mouth at the spire of its slim green neck. He approaches them. 

He stands over the boy, still under, well within the forged strongarm of drugged slumber. He's selected him for the first of the preparatory tasks. 

Jelly pudding…

He set the green bottle down, still belching ghost white in a phantasm pour. He grabbed the small prying-vises, two of them, and then with his large and grubby fingers he forced the drugged boy's eyes open and fixed them with the lid-locks. Vacant stare fixed to the dark of the chambered room ceiling unseeing as the assistant grabbed the bottle once more. 

He held it precariously aloft, over the boy's slumbering face for a moment, relishing the build up. 

Gods below, he loved his work. 

He upended the green bottle by its slender neck. The pregnant bulge of green glass belly replaced the place where the steaming bellowing mouth had been as the alchemically altered sulfuric acid began to pour into the boy's open left eye. Chemically flash frying it on impact in a ghastly and gorey boil-eruption of instantly steaming and red jelled ruin. 

Astarra came awake right away in the most wretched and ungodly torment and pain he could've ever scarcely imagined. He shrieked, unbridled and intense. Spittle flew. Neck rippled and stood out in cords, obscene on a child's small neck, a small boy's throat tensing and flexing bulged with pain unspeakable and never before imagined. 

The assistant's smile never faltered. The bottle upended again and he filled the other eye as the child continued to fill the sepulchral chamber with his terrible noise and screams. He chuckled lightly, pleased with the process, pleased with the work and himself and savoring the moment to come when he brought his master a fresh meal upon waking from her slumber. 

The other one, the girl, was brought to by the boy's caterwauling. Confused at first and groaning and mumbling, she soon joined the boy in making the sounds of bleating captured prey. 

Caught. Caught and squealing. 

Like sow. Like pigs. 

His smile and hatred and sour satisfaction all deepened as he debated…

sever the head… or leave it attached and bring the whole thing like a suckling roast, complete to her highness…? 

The girl was for Carmilla and the mongrel help, his lord's new impaler. She would receive nothing in the way of preparations, nothing special. The children would have to have the girl raw. And share. 

But that was fine. These two morsels of children, saplings really, were just meant to wet the appetite and get their blood moving and on the animal run for the hunt. For the want of bloodlett and slaughter. These two sow-sapling brats were just the first course of the bloodfeast. And moreover…

they were his way of showcasing: he was loyal. It was how he showed he truly loved them. 

Loved her. 

The assistant went to the head of the slab and began to push and roll it out of the room. The boy, Astarra was still screaming as he carried him out. 

…

The Countess grinned vulpine with dark joy as her coffin lid slid to the side and she arose and beheld her assistant's surprise. 

By torchflame glow, a struggling peasant boy bound by straps to a table. His screams were nearly exhausted and he was crying out for his parents in more and more pitiable tones and sounds. 

The Countess arose in full. 

She floated from the confines of the orante blackwood casket and crossed the distance, filling the space ghostly between her deathly bed and the whimpering child strapped tight to the rolling table of the altering blade. 

She gazed into the ruin of the child's face. Admiring the gored open craterous holes in place of eyes, still smoldering and smoking like a freshly prepared and fine regal pudding. 

The scab pudding of his eyes steamed for her and quivered with the sulfuric jellied organ obliterated and quivering with each of his painful and terrible sounds. The child was sweating, profuse, doused and basting soaked in his own fresh and souring fear and ungodly terror. 

The assistant produced a spoon and held it out to her and bowed his head in token of his supplication to the unholy and royal duty of her service. His eyes flitted open cat-like and she caught it. She took the small silver spoon from between his pinched and black gloved fingers. The perfect tiny and delicate little instrument for a proper lady of the house to use when dining fine on a fresh pudding. 

A fresh and graciously given pudding, provided by the locals of the mountain townships. In token of gratitude and friendship. 

Countess Zaleska roared with laughter and the abominated sound drowned out the pitiful cries of the small boy Astarra. The sounds and names of his mother and father were swallowed in the sound of laughter  that was so like tar and pitch as the Countess and undead lord of stolen Dracula's castle began to dig in deep with the small and dull edge of the silver spoon. 

She scooped out a spoonful of still smoking and baking smoldering jelly, ruined and chemically cooked organ destroyed by bastard alchemical science, unholy mixture from one of the many volumes of dusty and ancient forgotten tomes. Astarra, the small missing village boy's screams pierced sound and reached a new pitch. 

But still they were swallowed in entirety by the stygian and obscene mad witch cackles that were issuing forth from the unholy fanged rictus mouth of the hellbound godheaded throat of the undead Countess. 

She enjoyed her dessert of the boy's eyes, her smoking delicacy … then with minimal effort of her great and prodigious living dead strength she brought the dull head of the spoon down and broke through the membrane of thin tissue and wafer bone cracking within the now empty housing of the eye socket. 

It cracked and gave. The boy's howls became something wildly inhuman and horrendous. She brought the spoon up and then down again into the warm and tender orifice of fresh gored and open eye socket. She cracked through it and forced the smooth ladling head of the utensil down into the working of nerves and meat behind the precious seeing organ and its housing of bone and supple succulent pink tissue. Wrenching and working the handle of the spoon, with the ghastly ease of her praeternatural effort. 

Then she began to force her long fingers in. First one, then two and three and then the whole wedge of hand until she was fisting her demon-chimerical claw of delicate and slender lady fingers and rodent/vulture talons. She forced her violent hand into the child's ruined face, his bound struggles now reduced to ghastly spasms as she felt around and squished the brains and viscera and relished the feeling-squelch of gore and warm wet between her fingers. She reached down, ripping through more tissue, her demon hand and arm growing and elongating at dark will’s command until she finally felt the rubbery and meaty tubes of vocal chords. She squeezed them. Pulled them. Wrenched and yanked the slippery organs lubricated in child's blood that was still warm with life and mucus laden with discharge and rupture. 

I've got your voice… I've got your voice box, young boy-thing! You don't look much like a little boy of the hamlets any longer now do you?? – her mind was filled with its own mad hilarity. … She resumed the fervor of her dark and royal feeding, her private bloodfest. 

… she dined of the rest. Plucking off parts at will and demented leisure like a basket of fruit or a suckling sow, tenderloin meat and all ripe and falling off the bone… 

There were hardly scraps in the end. They were thrown to the wolves outside as the other screaming captive girl was given to the children and the Countess took her assistant by the hand and said in a smooth and delectable voice, purred and feline and sensual and felt…

“Now let us tend to matters at hand. Matters about the house and home…” 

He smiled and allowed himself to be led. As before. As always before. 

As always he followed, his servile hand in hers. Knowing she could crush it into so many useless broken pieces if she wanted to. 

The Countess led the way out of the chambered room and to another. One they were quite familiar with by now. But enjoyed with much enthusiasm still nonetheless. 

…

He stood suffering amongst the wild crawling tumult of hideous and living gore. Living crawling semi scabbed blanket of darkling and thick crimson black and red. The Countess and the assistant stood at the mouth of the entrance. Gazing in and admiring the spectacle. The scene of living and moving with glistening sheen, crawling slaughter horror. Henry Frankenstein moaned with a sound wretched and mangled and blasphemous to the ears. 

They relished that sound. 

He moaned, anguished: “Please…! Please… you awful bitch! please …! Please… Let …! Me … ! GO ….!” 

She chilled the room with the bright sound of her cruel laughter. Then she spoke in retort…

“I've not come to release you, fool! I've instead come to admire my gardens, like any respectable woman of a royal house. And I've come to add to my orchard, a dog! A mongrel fit for the pasture! And I'll be returning to you, young doctor, something precious I'll wager you'd thought lost…” 

She then began in an arcane tongue. More of her black magic made by words of misshapen and guttural speech. 

The front of her royal white gown came open and tore apart in ragged bisecting halves by unseen force. The flesh of her full breasts and bosom bubbled and rippled and began to drip and slough away in a greasy bloody runoff like a butcher’s watered leavings. The bones of her ribcage and chest grew and expanded outward, protruded forth in a grotesque swell before they too opened and parted. Red gates of gleaming, glistening bone amongst a growing mass of splitting wet and hectic crimson. A great hulking shape began to belch forth. Spat out. 

In an obscene gush of unholy birth, the wide open jaws and gates of the Countess' chimerical ribcage vomited forth the large sutured nosferatu son of Frankenstein’s obsession. He went to the stone that was blanketed in the crawling living fleshen gore of the garden, hard. The green-blue patchwork monster was unconscious. The charred and blackened remains of its face were skeletal. Like the face of grim death itself, the fleshless face of the reaper. 

The crawling raw of the living flesh immediately began to swim over the Frankensteinian monster, blanketing over him in a tidal wave of wet pink and fresh membranes of blood red. The scabbed and scabbing parts split and broke and oozed a salmon colored pudding and bright scarlet and thick buttery yellow as it moved, always moved. Always moving. 

The Countess' smile grew as her flesh folded back to normal. 

She said: “And now your dog is returned to you, Henry Frankenstein… I hope you enjoy the company and sight of your own failure. And I hope he enjoys you. I don't want you to fret but he may grow hungry, the fruits of the flesh gardens may not be to his liking, he may perchance your hide and red instead, my dear doctor…”. 

She laughed once more at that, her face coning out in a strange stretched marsupial shape, her witch’n cackles turned to braying animal cries as it did so. Mocking dæmoniacal sound. 

And at the sound of her voice and laughter and strange animal noises, the hulking nosferatu son of woven and reflamed meat, sutured and blasphemed with unholy flame and vampiric power, stirred…

… he began to shift, cracking dry groans came from parched cords and dried tongue… he began to try his feet … he didn't understand… why was he in the dark…

why was he blind? 

Then recollection filled his bone faced batshaped skull. The fury of his inner necromantic fire rose and filled his damaged patchwork frame. 

The royal dogs… the royal bitch…

He found his feet and lunged. Scent and ears telling him where she was despite his smoldering and blackened ruin of eyes and face.  

He was roaring. 

“You wretched swell and growth of a cunt! I’ll rip you to shreds for keeping me in there…!” filled with rage, he'd been lost and untethered drowning in an ocean world of hot steaming vile blood that was corrupted and soured and that he could not drink. A world that had violated him and enraged him as it held him bound in a boundless void of red boiling swimming personal hell. Scarlet and frothing and threshing with violence and bubbling with painful torment as it perpetually denied the thirsting needing purse of his phantom charred and long gone burned away scorched undead lips. 

But now he was free. And he was on his feet. 

Lunging. And filled with violence. Filled with unholy anger. He could smell her…

Frankenstein's son of the slab made it within reaching distance of the Countess and her assistant before he was stopped. Suddenly. At a dead halt. She caught him and held him strangling by the throat. 

She pulled him in close and laughed once more. Into the blackened ruins of his vulpine skeletal face, fanged and still warm with recent destruction. Blind and stupid and smeared with the burnt and charred traces of its own recent defeat. The fleshen ash and dead soot that was the ink that spelled out for all time the abomination's own perfect humiliation all over his blind and stupid unseeing face. 

She said simply, “You are not worthy," and then her other hand, clawed, came in sharp and fast. 

The daggering sharp of her knifing hand obliterated the blue-green flesh of scalp and eggshell of reforged skull behind it. The brains were blasted with the impact and the force sent much of the sliming grey matter splashing out in a wild yellow coated spurt. 

The nosferatu thing of the mad scientific table went blind a second time… and then became lifeless weight. 

She gazed deeper into the now still thing… only a flicker… only a demon's flicker of candle left inside. 

Good.

She let go of its throat and it went down in a heap and the crawling gore and gleaming slimed tissue blanketed over the fallen giant in a rippling and shifting pungent reddish fold. 

And although he was lost in his own ungodly world of torment and torture, as Frankenstein watched the Countess obliterate the skull and brain of his most powerful and successful creation… a single tear shed and rolled down his face of blood-seeping pores. 

A single thin tendril worm of coagulation snaked out and stole the precious drop of saline and water. Leeching it off and rejuvenating itself as the water was converted to more blood for the growing crawl of the in-house flesh garden. 

He watched as the Countess strode through the garden and plucked meaty organ fruits as if they were apples or plums from fleshen raw stalks of sinew and cartilage and gore. Orifices made belched licking green tongues of flame, of pink and orange and emerald witchy goblin fire. 

He watched them … and he watched the crawling abominated red blanket of life swim and steal over the twitching hulk of his patchworked son, child of the slab, of the necromantic grave… 

lobotomized. Reduced. And like its master, left to its own horrid prison world of ruin…

And naught else. 

…

In the moist night silence, the putrid and repulsive sounds of splurches and sucking and lightly bubbling viscous fluid gurgles filled the sour fetid air like the mud of the squalid earth all around had a rotten working mouth. 

The gunfire rang out cacophonous. Filling the wet splurching night.

Florin and Griffin halted the struggle of their mud soaked advance. They gazed wide eyed ahead, into the shifting veil of swamp fire amongst wet blanket mist dancing with goblin faces and features and the vague outlines of things that may or may not really be there. 

The building on the low rise of hill was gaining visibility, gaining definition. Coming into reality and being amongst the wet rank of the quagmire wormland hell. 

The building was alight inside. It was absolutely alive with gunfire. 

Pistol shots unceasing and overlapping like several layers of madness rang out from the place. There were no screams or other discernible sounds. Not at this distance. 

And then all at once the maelstrom fury of gunfire just stopped. Dead. Altogether, all at once. …

And then all was silent again in wet wormland. As quiet as a mortuary mouse at the unprecedented infernal lip of the precipice edge of hell.  

A beat. 

“Not sure we should." Florin stated flatly. 

“How do you mean?" asked Griffin. 

“Towards that place I mean of course. Not sure it's a good idea to make for it if it's filled with more trouble.” 

Murder and violence. Not spoken but understood. 

Griffin didn't have much of an argument against that. But what he did realize was their lack of alternatives. There was no other structure or place, no other landmass of simple solid ground anywhere within discernible sight. Not in this vast and putrid waterlogged hellscape. 

They had no other choice. Far as he could make out. 

He said as much. Then asked the boy if he could think of any plausible and safer alternatives. 

Florin admitted he could not. 

“And doubling back is out of the question…” Griffin stated the fact but they both felt it. 

The strange and temperamental bandaged man didn't come right out and say it but the young man had been showing good sense as of late. Better yet, usefulness. Ingenuity and initiative. He'd devised wide lattice work devices for their feet to wear over their shoes some miles back, akin to snow shoes, to help traverse the fetid land by dispersing the area of one's step. 

Like back home, he'd said… then fallen silent. Leaving it there. 

The swamp shoes were a great aid in their surmounting the quagmire swampscape, and he'd shown incredible courage anytime the worms had come to call, sliming and swimming like snakes, coming in for maneating surprise attack. He'd held them back and driven them off by torch alongside Griffin and had never faltered. 

It had been a long time since he'd felt anything like friendship, not since the good Dutch doctor – the long dead vampire slayer, the hunter Van Helsing…

It had been even longer since he'd felt…

pride…? 

He wasn't sure that was the right word. But he felt uplifted to see the young man using his head. Alas…

it was to no avail. 

There was naught but forward. 

And the hellmouthed swampen land of the wombmind in wormland, now falling behind them gave them no choice in any case. Quivering subterranean hungry and angry, pustule swimming birthing orifice sac of vengeance and fury – she would have them! – the wombmind orifice-ing jell shot forth one last violent spew, one last angry desperate discharge in rage and woe, one last attack…

…she shot forth with all she had left. With a scream as well, gurgled and immense. The mudland quaked and bubbled with the final charge of the night as she too began to move and swim up… and forward. 

She was following her children. She'd decided to come up as well. 

Florin and Griffin felt the swamp and yellow land of stagnation and moist rotting death shake and rumble with titanic tectonic movement. Geysers and great spews and pillars of swamp water and mud began to erupt all around them in growing numbers. The wormland quagmire became volcanic and violent all around them. It began to rain urine colored water and fat thick droplets of caking mud the color of ink. It rained down on the pair as they gazed around themselves in awe at the tumult world of raining filth and quagmire rot. 

And then the worms, in countless number, began to join the volcanic spew. Launching obscene and naked and dripping their subterranean slime as they came up flying into the air hundreds of feet with the pillars of swamp water and then down in raining sheets. 

“Run!" 

It was Griffin who yelled it. But he needn't have bothered. They were both taking to their awkward flight, trudging through the last of the bubbling and sucking mud in their makeshift lattice work shoes. Desperately trying to move as quickly as they could. Remembering the horse, remembering the man that had been screaming about his family … remembering the little girl and the last and only thing she said …

thirsty

 …. before being pulled under. 

They made as quickly as they could. As the foul world of up churned and erupting wormland hell became maelstrom all around and beneath their feet as it rained down around them. 

Florin screamed. Griffin was ahead of the boy and stopped suddenly to see something that made his blood curdle. A scream froze in his wrapped and bandaged throat. 

The boy was going under. The quagmire was swallowing him. The worms were raining down and joining their earthbound brethren in a full immersion and envelopment as they swam over and around him. Trying together in their hivemind blindness to pull the young man under to join the filth earthen world of the sludge and the brine. 

Griffin screamed, No, then launched himself towards the boy in a desperate dive, hands outstretched for him as he plunged and landed prostate and within a few feet of his sinking body. 

Within reaching distance. 

Their hands smacked together in a clap and clasped together. Florin's a desperate and strangling hold: Don't let go… 

Griffin was on his feet with some difficulty but he managed it, his hands still clasped to Florin's. He began to pull with all of his strength. Florin kicked wild with his submerged feet, mad like an animal caught. Together they worked against the terrible pull and hold of the bubbling mud. The worms slithered and snaked around and Griffin took brief respites from pulling the boy free to swat them away and crush them when he could as they attempted to wrangle and wrap and subdue Florin and himself. They splattered and burst open and became foul putrid cream and watery jelly, and still they pulled. Pulled and fought against the struggle of mud one last final time as they both unknowingly shared a single focused thought, singular and intense. 

No

They both felt it and might have thought to speak of it later if not for everything that came next, but they both suddenly felt a great surge of strength warmly fill their bodies from the tops of their heads to the tips of their sodden toes. 

With one last great pull and kick from both ends they managed Florin free. Griffin nearly going over as he wrenched him out of the terrible mire. Miraculously they both kept their feet as the putrid swampland rain continued to pour. He whirled the boy around by the shoulders and yanked, bellowing over the violence and maelstrom raining world of worms and thick sludge. 

“To the building! Lose the snow shoes! We don't need em!" 

They ripped them from their feet as they galloped forward, suddenly flying across the last several yards of putrid quagmire earth like miracles. Miracles they would've sworn by. If they lived. 

If they survived. 

Far away, still so far away… Florin's mother Anastasia wiped away tears of longing and pain and hoped with all of the immense love of her heart that the Lord had answered her prayers and her precious boy was alright, that he was safe and going to make it home…

They came to solid ground at last at the base of the hill. They didn't break their pace but doubled it. Charging up the hill and toward the large and dark quiet building that crowned its rise like a silent sentry alone and cursed out here in this terrible place. 

The greatest and loudest sound – a scream, brought them both to halt just before the buildings small meager yard. They spun around and beheld her. 

The wombmind of wormland.

She had just surfaced with her children. 

A great mouth and immense wide orifice gate of spoiled pink sliming yellowed green in great thick gobs like corpse jelly. The putrescence of her mouth spittled and rained and flew with the great rain of mud and swamp water and her writhing worm children, all of it rained and spewed and erupted volcanic as the great mouth of the swamp bellowed in great blasts of words that were felt as much as heard. Heard and felt in the marrow and sinew of their shaking frames. Eyes wide and hardly believing but receiving the sight all the same. 

Florin thought the words were sad. Lonely. As well as great and immense. He thought the great mouth and pustule fleshen worm mother looked like a whale. A sad mother whale… one he remembered from illustrations of his childhood years, stories told by his mother and father. 

The wombmind worm mouth - orifice whale bellowed: –

“NOOOOO…!!!!! DONT LEAVE! DON'T LEAVE! WHYYYYYY…!!!?!? 

“DONT LEAVE ME ALONE HERE IN THIS LOST GARDEN…! COME BACK…. COME BAAAACK AND JOIN ME….! JOIN YOUR MOTHER IN THE WARMTH OF THE UNDERBRINE…! COME BACK! NOOOOOO….!!!!” 

Griffin and Florin spun on their heels and made for the door. Needing to be inside and away from the wretched sight and its bomb blast of horrendous torrential sound. They ran together and refused to look back again. They made the door, it was unlocked and they threw it open and plunged themselves into its belly of darkness. 

The mother of wormland gave one last great titanic and lonely wail. Its eyes watering and lonesome and blinking away pain and loss…

Finally she gave up and with a great and final tumult swirl of landmass churn of stagnant mud and fetid water, she sank back down again to her foul and lonely fathom depths. 

Cropsey watched her great monstrous form resubmerge into the sour bosom swell of her wormland domain and smiled. From the window he'd watched it all. And he was excited. Elated. 

He was so happy to have a pair of brand new visitors. 

He grabbed his gloves. Pulled them on. Tight. Then he grabbed the garden shears. The large hedge clippers, the forked blades shining in the dismal light of Willowbrook. 

He strode out. Still smiling. Off to greet the new patients of the school. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

It was the summer of my junior year of high school.
For the first time since seventh grade, when I had come here with my parents, my younger sister Anne and I traveled alone to visit our grandparents’ cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.
But from the moment we arrived at Knoxville Airport, Grandma kept repeating the same strange phrase.
“Michael, Anne, my darlings. Grandma didn’t see anything, and Grandma didn’t hear anything.”
At first, I assumed she was simply getting older and becoming forgetful.
Anne and I sat in the back seat of the car, exchanging worried glances before quietly laughing.
“Do you think Grandma’s starting to lose it?”
We whispered it like a joke.
But we had no idea then.
That those words were not the ramblings of old age.
For several days, we wandered through the misty forests, gathered mushrooms with Grandpa, caught smallmouth bass in the creeks, and helped haul firewood.
“You’ve become a real young man now.”
Grandpa said it as he handed me the handle of the wagon.
When I was younger, that had always been an adult’s job.
Now it was mine.
It was a small thing, but I felt strangely proud.
There was something else Grandpa always did.
Whenever he brought something back from the forest, he would take out a piece of bread and leave it behind.
One day I finally asked him.
“Grandpa, why do you always leave bread?”
He chuckled softly.
“To pay for what we took.”
“To whom?”
For a moment he stared into the trees before answering.
“You give something back when you take something away.”
Little Anne looked up innocently.
“To the bears?”
Grandpa laughed.
“Yeah. Something like that.”
It sounded like something an old Taoist sage from a fantasy story would say.
At the time, I thought Grandpa was the coolest man in the world.
Every evening we stayed up late eating Grandma’s cookies and talking together.
But there was one thing that felt wrong.
As soon as night fell, Grandma became obsessive about closing every curtain.
One evening Anne said,
“Grandma, I want to hear the crickets.”
Grandma froze.
Then she hurriedly changed the subject.
“Would you like some wild raspberries? They’re very sweet.”
Anne laughed awkwardly.
But in that moment, I knew.
Grandma was hiding something.
On the final night before we returned home, Grandma prepared a dinner that looked more like Thanksgiving than an ordinary meal.
Turkey.
Pecan pie.
Gravy.
Far more food than usual.
After dinner, Grandpa quietly spoke with Grandma.
I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying.
But Grandpa sounded close to tears.
“Just let me have tonight with our babies.”
That was all I caught.
Then he held Grandma for a very long time.
Afterward, he sent us up to the attic.
Before leaving, he gave us one final instruction.
His voice trembled.
He placed an old revolver beneath my pillow.
A knife beneath Anne’s.
Then he looked directly at me.
“Tonight, your grandmother and your sister are yours to protect.”
He fell silent.
Then he added something I would never forget.
“And if there are three rounds left when it’s over… you’ll know what to do.”
With that, he picked up his shotgun and went downstairs.
Though it was only early autumn, he lit the fireplace.
He turned on every light in the cabin.
Every faucet dripped.
Every room glowed.
Then he sat on the couch and played an old Super Bowl recording over and over through the night.
But I knew.
He wasn’t watching football.
He was waiting for something.
After Grandpa went downstairs, Grandma stuffed clothes into every crack around the attic trapdoor.
Then she pulled Anne and me close and eventually fell asleep holding us.
That night, sometime after midnight, there came a knock at the door.
Then a voice.
My father’s voice.
And my mother’s.
The same mother who had called us from California only days earlier, smiling through a FaceTime call before dinner and telling us how beautiful everything was.
But something was wrong.
Her voice sounded like a broken announcement system.
It repeated the same words again and again.
“Let me in.”
“Let me in.”
“Let me in.”
“Let me in.”
“Let me in.”
“Let me in.”
“Let me in.”
Then came Grandpa’s shouting.
A stream of curses.
And suddenly—
A gunshot.
Then another.
Then only Grandpa’s ragged breathing.
My mother’s voice disappeared.
I tried to run downstairs.
But Grandma grabbed me from behind.
She covered my mouth.
Pulled Anne and me tightly against her.
The woman who had always been warm and gentle was shaking with terror.
Tears poured down her face like a waterfall.
The next morning, we were already packed.
Grandpa was loading our suitcases into the truck.
His eyes were red.
Wet.
He looked at us for a long moment.
Then wrapped us in the tightest hug I had ever felt.
Grandma was making pancakes far larger than usual.
When we came downstairs, both of them embraced us as if we might break.
At the time, I did not understand what that embrace meant.
Five years later, Grandpa died.
Grandma was moved into a nursing home near our town.
My father, my uncle, and I returned to the cabin to clean out the property.
While we worked, my uncle quietly said,
“Want to see something interesting?”
Then he pried up a section of the floorboards.
Beneath them lay sheets of parchment covered in dense writing.
The letters looked medieval, decorated with elaborate flourishes as if they belonged in a history book.
“Uncle, what is this?”
“A Bible.”
“It doesn’t look like English.”
“It isn’t. It’s Gaelic. Irish.”
The old pages had been hidden throughout the house.
Behind the walls.
Beneath the floors.
Layer upon layer.
But it was more than a Bible.
My uncle opened an old notebook Grandpa had given him before he died.
Inside were records stretching back centuries.
According to the journal, one of our ancestors had come from Ireland and settled in these mountains long ago.
From that day forward, our family had kept an ancient pact connected to the primordial forest surrounding the cabin.
At first it sounded like superstition.
Yet the same warnings appeared again and again through generations of entries.
“What is taken from the forest must always be repaid.”
“Never trust the voices heard after sunset.”
“If something outside wears the face of family, do not open the door.”
My entire body went cold.
Grandpa’s words.
“All debts must be paid.”
It had never been the harmless habit of an old mountain man.
It was a rule our family had followed for centuries.
And Grandma’s constant phrase—
“I didn’t see anything, and I didn’t hear anything.”
That wasn’t forgetfulness.
It was something else.
A ritual.
A denial.
A way to survive by refusing to acknowledge what should not be acknowledged.
After a long silence, my uncle spoke.
“Your grandfather didn’t follow these rules because he believed them.”
“Then why?”
“Because he saw what happens when you don’t.”
I couldn’t answer.
Only then did I understand.
Why Grandpa had prepared so carefully that final night.
Why he had given me the revolver.
Why he had spent his entire life leaving pieces of bread in the woods.
He wasn’t afraid of monsters.
He simply knew what his duty was.
We burned what needed burning.
Loaded the truck.
Drove into town for lunch and spent an hour talking about nothing important.
When we returned to finish cleaning and were finally ready to leave, something cold brushed against my hand.
I turned.
And saw it.
The steel reinforcement plate bolted to the inside of the front door.
Across it were deep claw marks.
So deep they had nearly torn straight through the metal.
It was autumn.
Years later, as an adult, I returned to the cabin one last time.
I sat on the old pine stump where I had played as a child.
I lit Grandpa’s pipe.
Watched the forest.
And spoke quietly into the wind.
“Grandpa.”
“I hope you’ve found peace wherever you are.”

It was during the reign of Queen Victoria in 1860. A time of exciting new inventions, change, and progress—although the rich prospered, the middle class suffered. Even young children had to work if their families needed them.

Young Charles Bradington was among the rich. The Bradington family built invaluable machinery in city factories that benefited companies but displaced workers experiencing poverty.

Charles never saw much of this in person. Out of the five children in the Bradington family, he was the youngest, the most childish, and the greediest.

While his other four siblings were kind and modest, Charles lived in the shadows of his peers and played with the money that was given to him frivolously. Charles slept on the most luxurious steam trains, wore the finest silk, cotton, and fur coats in the winter, and linen in the summer.

During his travels, he listened to a plethora of music on his brand-new gramophone.

On the Metropolitan Railway, returning from Manchester to London, Charles sat in his seat, watching the countryside roll past him.

As he stood, he failed to realize he had incorrectly placed his suitcase under his chair, causing the lip of his black and gold suitcase to jut out. As he stood, he took a meaningless fall, landing awkwardly and twisting his arm.

A dull, aching pain lingered as he departed the train for the Bradington Estate.

Charles did not enjoy any pain. He hated the sting of calloused hands, the throbbing pain of sore feet after a hard day's work, and more than anything, he loathed the ache in his arm. He swore he would never ride the Metropolitan Railway again—"they don't know how to treat nobility," he thought.

However, he was neither technically nobility, nor was the whole incident anyone's fault but his own.

The pain nagged at him.

Two days later, on an expedition walking from St. John’s Wood to Highgate, he spotted something peculiar.

It was a travelling salesman.

The stranger stood next to his private carriage—owned only by the elite of elites—and with the door open and the steps down, one could see a small mahogany table within.

On the chairs on either side of the table were small boxes of knickknacks, all of a scientific variety, too complex for Charles to name.

The salesman wore a well-fitted, sturdy wool frock coat. Beneath the coat, he donned a waistcoat in a muted burgundy. His trousers were tailored and tapered, and he wore polished leather boots. His accessories included a top hat perched jauntily on his head, and he held a leather satchel. He had a well-groomed mustache. When the salesman spotted Charles staring, he tipped his hat courteously, aiming to be kind to a potential customer.

The streets were crowded, as always, yet nobody walking past so much as glanced at the salesman, as if he belonged in this wealthy neighbourhood.

“Afternoon, sir!” the man chimed. “You seem intrigued. Come, take a look at my wares. I am on my way to Covent Garden, but the wheel of my carriage has stalled.”

Charles always judged a book by its cover. The man appeared to be the best-dressed of men and spoke with a kind confidence. Charles, being a young man, none the wiser, approached the salesman and peeked inside.

“A curious collection of jars and bottles. What do you sell?”

It was customary to introduce oneself before engaging in conversation, but Charles didn’t feel the need to introduce himself to a salesman, and the stranger didn’t seem to mind.

“I sell miracle potions.”

“More of those?” Charles almost laughed. “Medicine is for doctors to toil with. Are you a doctor?”

“Indeed, I was. But when I discovered the secret of this potion, I was promptly fired—a cure-all would put doctors out of business. I was a threat.”

Charles couldn’t help but rub his sore shoulder at all this talk of cures and pain.

“A tall tale,” he mumbled. “Do you really think the shoppers at Covent Garden will buy your stories?”

That’s when the salesman paused. He glanced at Charles’s arm.

“You seem to require a cure yourself. Allow me to take a look at your arm. As a thank you for looking my way—everyone else in this part of London seems inclined to keep to themselves.”

Charles saw no harm in letting a doctor (perhaps a quack) examine his arm. The salesman pressed into Charles's upper bicep, and suddenly the pain became a hundred times worse. Charles swore at him, and the salesman stepped back with his hands up in mock surrender.

“Oh no. Sir, this injury is much worse than you think. The muscles are torn, the ligaments damaged. I urge you to take a potion of mine for free. The ingredients are written on the bottle—nothing to hide here. I offer it only because I would hate for a kind young man like yourself to suffer such pain.”

A wiser man would have recognized snake oil when he saw it—but to Charles, the greenish-blue bottle with swirling green liquid looked like any other medicine. He read the label on the dirty-brown paper: “*Jamaica Ginger, 30% alcohol*.” He almost laughed; these ingredients were nothing new or special!

Charles looked back up at the man...but he was gone.

\*\*\*

Over the following months, day after day, the pain that had begun in the crook of Charles’s arm worsened steadily. It crept up into his shoulders, slithered down his spine, and eventually settled into his hips and thighs.

Yet, despite the relentless agony, he refused the miracle potion, keeping it tucked away in the drawer of his bedside table.

Desperate, he sought out local doctors, but each one concluded there was nothing wrong with him beyond his claims of excruciating pain. There was no swelling of the muscles, no tearing of ligaments—nothing tangible to diagnose. It was, they told him, phantom pain.

By the fifth month, Charles could no longer get out of bed. His father, Bradington the First, stormed into his room in a flurry of harsh words, expecting his son to rise and carry on with the family legacy. But Charles, consumed by his suffering, remained bedridden. His failure to meet his father’s expectations led the family to slowly ignore him, treating him like an afterthought.

Charles began to long for his former self. He wished more than anything to rid himself of the insufferable and unyielding pain.

By the sixth month, he could take it no longer and drank the miracle potion.

Within minutes, the pain that had soaked his body like a heavy, wet cloth was wrung away. He leapt to his feet, flung open the curtains, and laughed aloud in sheer ecstasy. His butler, entering the room at that moment, was startled by the sight of his master’s sudden transformation. Perceiving Charles to be mad, he quickly retreated, leaving the young man to revel in his newfound vigour.

Charles’s entire body buzzed with energy. "*Oh, to be alive* *agai**n*!" he thought, his heart racing with excitement. He wanted nothing more than to thank the mysterious salesman who had given him this miraculous cure. Without hesitation, he ordered the carriage to be brought to the estate gates. Within the hour, Charles found himself in the bustling heart of Covent Garden.

Located in London’s West End, Covent Garden was famous for its vibrant and lively atmosphere. The market teemed with life, a place where both the wealthy and the working class converged. Traders hawked fruits, vegetables, flowers, and an array of exotic goods, while the cacophony of haggling filled the air. Horse-drawn carriages clattered over the cobblestone streets, weaving through the market’s narrow lanes, where taverns and shops lined the way.

Street performers dotted the area—musicians strumming lively tunes, acrobats balancing on precarious heights, and magicians wowing the crowds with sleight of hand—all in hopes of earning a few coins from passing spectators.

It was near a juggler, standing at the mouth of an alleyway, where Charles spotted the salesman. His heart raced as he shouted, “Stop the carriage!”

Charles didn’t wait for the driver to lower the steps; he leaped out, eager to catch the man.

“Sir! SIR!” he called, waving his arms to get the Salesman’s attention. The man was busy adjusting the reins of his horse, preparing to leave.

“Young Charles,” the Salesman greeted him with a smile, “Long time, no see. I’ve been working these markets for months, but alas, I must soon bid the city farewell.”

“Not just yet,” Charles insisted, fumbling through his pockets for his coin bag. “Do you have more of those potions?”

“Why, of course,” the Salesman replied with a glint in his eye. “I have plenty more where that came from.”

That was all Charles needed to hear. Without hesitation, he dropped the entire coin pouch into the man’s cupped hands. The Salesman raised his brows in surprise, but before he could speak, Charles shushed him like a giddy child.

“I’ll take all of your Miracle Potions. No questions asked. And the next time you're in the city, come to the Bradington Estate. I will see to it that you sell your stock tenfold. We may yet be business partners.”

“The enthusiasm of youth,” the Salesman chuckled, pocketing the heavy pouch of coins. “It will be done. Have your carriage brought around, and we shall fill it with a case of my finest brews.”

\*\*\*

"*A bottle a day keeps the pain away*." Whenever Charles felt the pain in his body returning, he downed a bottle of Miracle Potion. The following year, he met his betrothed for the first time, Miss Alma Hill, and began courting her.

With his newfound energy, he took her to the Opera House to watch ballets and classical concerts. She, in turn, took him to the horse races. Alma Hill was loud, perhaps a bit boyish, but full of life—and for the first time, Charles began to love someone other than himself.

His family noticed a change in his behaviour. Instead of spending frivolously on material things, Charles began buying Alma Hill gifts—flowers, chocolates, dresses, and shoes. Nothing was out of reach for Alma Hill. Even the ring Charles bought her was diamond and gold.

The day before their wedding, Charles had just finished drinking his last bottle of Miracle Potion. By this point, he didn’t even know if he truly needed it; it had just become a habit to drink a bottle every morning.

Miss Alma, defying her father's wishes, visited Charles to see her fiancé before leaving to collect her wedding dress from her mother's shop.

When Alma saw the love of her life, Charles, standing in the center of his bedroom, his brown hair a mess and his beautiful blue eyes gazing at her lovingly, she knew this was heaven. She knew she was one of the lucky ones to have found a man who had made himself truly good.

Alma approached the young man, Charles, and gently kissed him. Almost immediately, a strange taste lingered on her lips. At first, she thought it was the metallic tang of copper—no, it was sharper, more distinct, like the taste of iron, thin and unsettling as it trickled down her chin.

Charles stared back at her, his expression mirroring her bewilderment. His lower face felt peculiar, as though tiny bubbles were forming beneath his skin, their surface tension popping and giving way to something unnervingly fluid. His flesh had an icy, liquid quality, like a thin veil of cold water. Both Alma and Charles froze as they watched something drop to the floor.

Their eyes followed it down. Lying on the smooth, polished hardwood was a small, round object—unidentifiable, yet disturbingly familiar.

It was Charles’s jaw.

\*\*\*

Charles awoke, staring up at an ornate ceiling marred by peeling paint. A narrow window, barely wide enough to let in the light, cast a thin beam of daylight that barely brightened the dim hospital room. He was lying on an iron-framed bed, stiff and unyielding, with thin, threadbare sheets tucked tightly around his body. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and something else—something metallic. On a nearby wooden bedside table sat a ceramic bowl filled with murky, blood-tinged water, a frayed cloth draped over its edge. The rhythmic ticking of a distant clock merged with the occasional coughs and groans of other unseen patients, separated only by the thin, faded white curtains surrounding each bed.

He blinked, disoriented. "*Was it all just a dream*?" The thought echoed in his mind as he shifted uncomfortably, trying to push himself into an upright position.

Just as he struggled to sit up, the shadow of his movement caught the eye of a doctor passing by the doorway. The doctor appeared, stepping around the corner with quiet urgency, having noticed the subtle stirrings from the hall.

The doctor wore a tailored black frock coat, paired with a waistcoat and stiff collars. His hair was neatly styled. He moved the bloody ceramic bowl aside and placed his leather medical bag, full of instruments of the trade, on the table. He opened the bag and took one of the bottles of Miracle Medicine. Next, he pulled out a hand mirror and carefully placed it next to the bag so Charles could not see his reflection.

“Charles Bradington, I think we should get right down to the matter.” He took the bottle and rotated it in his palms to allow Charles a full look, as if he hadn’t seen the bottle hundreds of times before. “This bottle does not contain Jamaica Ginger and Alcohol.”

As the man spoke, Charles lifted his hand and touched his face. He felt his ears, his cheek, his tongue, and his teeth.

“This isn’t Miracle Potion. It is Radiation Water.”

The doctor lifted the mirror and faced it toward Charles.

Where his lower jaw should have been was nothing but a small pink tongue dangling out of his face; his muscle, skin, and tendons had all been surgically removed up to the jugular.

\*\*\*

Three days later, Charles had melted from the inside out; his official cause of death was radium poisoning.

Before he died, Charles wrote on paper about the salesman at Covent Garden. However, no one else had met such a man, and no one had sold “*Miracle Potion*” during the year the salesman was accused of selling it.

To this very day, Charles's body remains buried deep underground, his bones still emitting radioactive waste.

Part IV

Patches of grass thrown into the air as the limping abomination stomped the ground with all its weight. A faint grunt echoed in the quiet, cold air.
The glowing red eyes danced around the twilight like a pair of sparks coming out of a bonfire.
It was coming for me.

“Fuck fuck fuck, what do I do?” I screamed.

In the previous life threatening situation it was resignation and acceptance that flowed through my body. Now it was fear and despair.
I had gotten too far to die now, fighting was out of the question, I was too tired to keep on running, besides I don’t even know if I could outrun that thing.

“You have to hide.” Said Audrey from what seemed like right next to me.

“What? Where? If he finds me I’m fucking dead.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll help you.” Reassured Austin from behind me.

“Fuck my life.”

I started looking around for a good hiding spot, the rooms around the first floor had all kinds of furniture in them. I opened each room and realized they had all the same layout: Bed, table, wardrobe, toilet. They were fancier holding cells.

“God help me.” I prayed as I got inside the wardrobe of the fourth room, the one just before 505.

The room was already dark but as I closed the doors of the wardrobe it somehow got even darker. I took deep and slow breaths to calm myself. I needed to be as quiet as possible and hyperventilation would not have helped. My mind went blank, nothing but what was happening in the moment mattered anymore.

After what must have been two minutes the all too familiar heavy footsteps broke the silence of the house. I heard the main door snap under the force of the monster’s claws.
It was pissed.

I tracked it through the house with my ears. It was hard not to, the grunts of rage and the unrelenting search brought about harrowing sounds that belonged nowhere but in a horror movie. Woodwork cracking, glass shattering, furniture crashing to the ground.

That thing smelled blood and was not in a mood to play hide and seek. I imagined the bottom floor to be a wasteland by now; the sort of post-apocalyptic landscapes that a tornado leaves in its wake. The thought of the first floor being next in line crossed my mind but was immediately shut down by the sheer concentration I needed to not explode into a fully fledged panic attack.

The abomination made its way back towards the entrance, loud thumps accompanying every step; then he turned to the stairs.

Disturbing stomps highlighted every step that lead upstairs; I imagined the unrelenting lumbering malforming every tread like it did the first time it came up.

The same routine began again.

Fits of rage destroyed the door to the first room, tiny little pieces falling onto the ground like shrapnel from an artillery shell.
Deafening roars of disappointment accompanied each unsuccessful hunt for me.
Then the second and third room.

It became clear to me at that point that it was not interested in wasting time trying to find me; the destruction it brought only meant one thing. It doesn’t matter where you are, you’re going down with the ship.

This was it, my turn.
As I expected for yet another loud crack I was met with the slow creak of the door gently opening. It somehow startled me more than the previous sounds; I questioned for a moment whether someone else had opened it, someone less threatening, more normal.

That thought was quickly erased by the revolting putrid stench that invaded my nostrils, I only ever smelled it once before. It moved with caution, with purpose. This time it was looking, not just destroying.

I heard the bed frame get lifted into the air and then back down, again, gently. The table was also moved away with a skin crawling screeching sound.
I felt the heat of its breath break through the doors of the wardrobe, the light of its glowing red eyes filtering through the cracks.
I closed my eyes.

BANG.

A heavy thud came from the other side of the floor; I opened my eyes, it immediately reacted to it, turning its attention toward that direction and letting go of a soft grunt.

“Saved by the bell.” I thought.
Not quite.

It quickly pivoted back to the wardrobe, the white smile meeting my gaze through the keyhole.

It raised its claw and in a single sweep it snapped the top half off, the rest falling down on its side along with me.

A roar of excitement filled the room.

I crawled out of the wreckage and  sprinted towards the door.
A second later and I would have been crushed under the leg of the abomination that shattered the rest of the wardrobe into a thousand splinters.

I made it out of the room and headed for the stairs. I made it about five feet before I tripped on the Persian carpet under the mural.

I desperately crawled away.

As the inevitable footsteps approached behind me, I turned to look death square in the face.

The looming figure stood above me high and mighty, the human smile greeting me, its dark red eyes peering into my soul, the foul smell threatening to empty my bowels; the bright light coming from room 505 highlighting every grotesque feature of its body.

It raised its claws in the air, ready to make a mist out of me, I surrendered myself.

That’s when two figures appeared out of nowhere, each one grabbing the monster’s arms, stopping him with seemingly superhuman strength.

I quickly recognized both.

Audrey was on the left, holding the raised up claws ready to smite me.

Her long beautiful copper hair was the first thing I noticed, running down to her hips. A vibrant mesmerizing pair of green eyes looked back at me, the plump red lips holding a cigarette were distorted into a struggling grimace, freckles all over her nose.

Austin was on the right, keeping the other arm from moving. Short blonde hair coupled well with the pair of glacial blue eyes that stared at me. He wasn’t smiling anymore, nor did he have a frown. A confident expression characterized his face; a face that looked too young to love and too old to cry.

They were both wearing long white dresses, decorated with golden motifs of flowers and stars. They were so white it seemed like they were glowing; almost blinding.

The monster struggled; I could feel its surprise and astonishment at what was happening, the once mighty harbingers of death and destruction were rendered useless and immobile by a pair of kids. It pushed and pulled and roared and fought, to no avail; the firm grip the two saviors had would not budge an inch.

I wept tears of joy, looking up at them like some kind of idols; I saved them and they saved me in return.

Suddenly, something coming from Audrey’s dress dropped to the ground onto the carpet.

She looked back at me once more. She didn’t say a word, just a slight nod that floated between respect and command.

I looked down at it while the abomination thrashed around like a kid throwing a tantrum, unable to conclude anything despite its unbelievable strength.
It was a lighter; a zippo to be exact.

I reached for it and grabbed it, in that moment I felt possessed. My mind went blank, command over my body crumbled and a strange and intrusive thought weighed on my shoulders; I was feeling like a stalked prey.

I instinctively lit up the zippo, sparks ignited the flame that rose strong and fierce. I looked down at the carpet, then back up at the monster.

Calmly, I let my arm fall down to the ground.

The fibers that were visible on the surface of the carpet immediately caught fire, generating a chain reaction that soon spread to the other parts of the Persian nylon.

I gained back control over my body, the overwhelming urge had been satisfied and I didn’t mind its consequences.
I crawled away from the carpet that was soon engulfed in flames; my two friends standing firm on it, maintaining their post along with the unwelcomed guest.

As the flames reached them I could finally hear the pain of the abomination; its hooves heating up, its fur burning, its skin melting.

Audrey and Austin didn’t flinch, the flames engulfed them too but to no effect.
Their skin remained smooth and soft looking, their dresses clean and intact; their resolve unwavered.

I started laughing, hysterically laughing.
The stress and adrenaline of the moment released into an exhilarating mood, it felt like I was high on weed, maybe I had inhaled too much of the smoke pouring out of the burning carped, I don’t know.

Something about defeating evil felt amazing; that was it, the motherfucker would burn to a crisp, I would be able to get out and finally go back to my life.
I laughed and laughed like I had never laughed before.
I felt invincible, I had conquered life; my fears were shattered, my doubts a distant problem.

What a spectacle it was, watching that thing burn, be consumed by a righteous fire. Its screams filling my ears and its pain filling my eyes.
It wasn’t a fantasy, it was real.

As the fur was burned into ash and the flames had completely engulfed the creature, reaching the very top of its horns, the skin began to melt away, dripping into the burning inferno under it, fueling the fire.

It dripped and dripped and dripped, faster and more with each second that passed until entire chunks of its flesh began to slide away.

The hooves crumbled away into a thousand pieces, the hairy chest dropped like a bodybag onto the floor, the face melted away like a consumed candle.

So did its arms, falling onto the floor at the speed of light.

Audrey and Austin were left hanging, their hands grasped nothing but smoke and sparks.

As the whole grotesque body fell lifeless to the ground, the two remaining pawns looked at each other, proud of their achievement, ready to begin again.

I laughed the whole time as my body was finally able to relax and release the stress, despite the burning inferno that laid in front of my eyes and that would soon expand to the whole building.

Suddenly a figure emerged from the ashes like a triumphant phoenix. Breaking from the burning shell a silhouette charged at me with unimaginable speed, the only feature I could see was…

A bright white smile.

The humanoid lunged at me and grabbed me by the throat, I wasn’t laughing anymore.
The charred body that sprung from within the monster was a featureless dark entity.
Cracks opened on its face where the eyes should have been, revealing a burning inferno within them.
The smile cracked open.

“I told you, smoke always gets in your eyes.”
barked at me a distorted, amplified voice.

I couldn’t breathe anymore, the combination of the smoke filling up the room and the burning hot hands choking me was slowly but surely signing my death certificate.

Audrey and Austin rushed to help me immediately, appearing before me on each side of the assailant. They quickly grabbed him to get him off of me but to no avail.
Much like the monster’s grip, it wouldn’t budge.

The situation became even more hopeless as the fire spread throughout the building, quickly catching on wooden tiles and pieces of the furniture that had been destroyed by the fits of rage of the abomination.

If I wasn’t gonna die by asphyxiation, I was going to burn alive.

The mixture of the smoke in my eyes and the unrelenting gasping for air made my eyes an unredeemable mess. Tears spilled everywhere desperately trying to comfort the irritation.
My vision was getting blurry, my conscience slipping.

“Hold on!” kept on repeating Audrey and Austin.

Their pleads slowly drifting into the distance.

Sweat and tears came out of every pore, dripping down to my neck into the enemy’s hands.

As I laid there between life and death a sudden relief shook my body.
The tension on my throat eased out and the weight on top of me scaled back.
My hands reached for my eyes in a hopeless attempt at regaining some of my vision.
Screams of pain echoed all around.

“Wake up Angela.”

“Wake up!”

I slowly gained consciousness again just to be exposed to the horror in front of me.

As I sat up helped by my two friends, the first image that appeared into my line of sight was the dark silhouette kneeling in pain.

His hands had begun to melt away, this time for good; sizzling like meat on a grill, wet like a fish out of water.

The fire was consuming everything in its path, quickly spreading towards the stairs and, eventually, the bottom floor.

“You have to go Angela, you have to get out.”

I rose to my feet in a stumbling and unbalanced manner, sustained by the sheer will to survive and the lack of rationality.
The whole structure was collapsing, the roof was quickly crumbling and the heat became unbearable.
As I made my way over to the stairs, I looked back, like I had done many times before.

Audrey and Austin looked back at me, untouched by the chaos around them; their arms lifted in the air in a friendly goodbye, a gesture they had tried countless times but that never worked as intended.

Behind them the kneeling figure screamed in rage, defeated; the surroundings collapsed in on him, sealing his fate, the final nail in the coffin was the big wall on which the mural sat. It too finally fell down, burying everything along with it.

I stumbled down the stairs and out the main entrance.

Bruised and battered I limped along the main dirt road, now finally illuminated by the burning Shining that was crumbling behind me.

Halfway through, distant sounds of sirens cut through the crackling of the fire and the howls of burning wood; a pair of red and blue lights were heading towards me at speed.

They stopped just in front of me.

“Miss, are you alright? Do you need medical attention?” a voice reached out to me.

I collapsed on the ground, exhausted.

As the policeman called for backup and an ambulance, my eyes slowly closed. The Shining collapsing into a big burning fireball was the last thing I saw before losing consciousness.

I woke up the next day.

“Good morning Miss Angela, my name is Anna, how are you feeling?”

I was feeling comfortable, I was in a warm and soft hospital bed and the sun was shining all around me.

“Wh-Where am I?” my voice was weak and raspy, I struggled to speak and my vision was blurry, out of focus.

“You’re in good care, do you remember what happened?” asked the nurse.

“Yes-yeah, the Shining it…burned down…am I okay?”

“Yes, you only had minor injuries, mostly to your lungs and eyes due to the smoke and some superficial physical injuries, certainly nothing to worry about, you must rest however.”

“I will, trust me.”

“Good, oh and by the way, I think you made a new friend, we just couldn’t keep him away from you.” The nurse pointed at the foot of the bed.

I peeked over to it and saw a black circle; it quickly moved closer towards me and I could finally see it clearly, it was Berry, greeting me with a soft meow.

“We patched him up too best we could, you should probably get him to a vet, just in case.”

“Thanks, I think I’ll take care of him, don’t worry.” I smiled.

I spent a couple more days at the hospital, most of them sleeping and resting as much as possible. Berry stayed with me the whole time, he was injured as well, likely from the fight with old man Michael or…whoever that was.

He was missing part of his ear and a scar across his right eye. He looks badass if you ask me; he saved my life in more than one occasion, the least I could do was promise him the gift of a comfortable, long life indoors; filled with love, treats and cozy beds.

On the day of my release the police came looking for answers, they naturally had to open an investigation into what happened and I was really the only suspect. A couple of detectives came around, boring as hell, nothing but empty suits. I fed them a bullshit story that I went out to camp in the woods and got lost during the storm, ended at the Shining and got out once I saw the flames.

They bought it, nobody cared about that old decrepit building. Naturally they found nothing in the rubbles, no bodies, no monsters not even any furniture; as far as the world is concerned, the Shining was and always has been an old abandoned house.

I asked them about old man Michael, I wasn’t scared of the truth, I had been through worse. They said they knew nothing about it and that there’s never been any other houses in that area, not surprising but also not expected. It didn’t matter, it was all over, I could finally go back to my life or rather to building one.

I treated it as a fresh start, leave everything behind, begin again. If there’s one thing I learned from all of this, is that finding the strength to keep going, that’s not the hard part.
It’s letting go.

I went back home and sort of fell into a dull, boring life. I guess everything became boring after what I went through but I recognized the beauty of the slow life. The nice thing was that I got to keep the money the job offered, so that was good.

I could count on a new sense of purpose, that whole experience…that’s how I like to call it; it offered me a new look at life, it profoundly changed me and the things I believe in. If you’re asking yourself if I started believing in God, the answer is no, God is still dead to me. But that doesn’t mean there’s nobody out there, that nobody is watching over us from somewhere.

I believe in something beyond this earth, it can be good and it can be bad but if there’s one thing I’m sure of is that It’s love that keeps us together, a lot more than hate. In a world full of uncertainty and misery it’s nice to know that, in the end, there is light in the darkness.

It’s been a few months since what happened and very little has changed. I got a new tattoo, can you guess what it is?
It’s a little firefly.

Other than that I have been enjoying the summer with Berry, turns out he really likes watching me play videogames and loves to eat Bologna.

You may be asking yourself what prompted me to write all of this if I have been handling it well.
Today I got some mail.
One of them was an envelope with no return address.

Inside, was a small, black pawn.

Episode 1: They Saved My Wife

My wife should have died that evening.

By the time I reached the accident site, her jeep had rolled nearly thirty feet down a rocky slope.

The windshield was shattered.

The driver's door had been ripped off.

I ran down the rocks expecting the worst.

"Meera!"

She slowly opened her eyes.

"I'm okay..." she whispered.

Relief hit me like a wave.

Then I noticed something that made no sense.

The deep cut on her forehead had already been cleaned.

A fresh bandage covered the wound.

Her broken wrist had been splinted perfectly using bamboo and medicinal leaves.

Someone had treated her.

I looked around.

No ambulance.

No villagers.

No forest guards.

Only the sound of the wind moving through the trees.

"Who helped you?" I asked.

She looked past me...

...towards the forest.

"There were eleven old men."

I turned immediately.

Nothing.

Only trees.

"They carried me here," she continued.

"They all wore white shirts."

"Brown trousers."

"Black leather shoes."

"They spoke softly."

"They treated my wounds."

"I turned away for just a second..."

"...and they disappeared."

I searched the entire area before sunset.

No footprints.

No broken branches.

No tyre marks.

No evidence that eleven people had ever been there.

That was the first mystery Kallamalai Forest gave me.

It wouldn't be the last.

---

My name is Aravind.

I had been working in the Forest Department for eleven years before I was transferred to Kallamalai Forest Range.

In those years, I had arrested poachers, chased sandalwood smugglers and spent nights tracking elephants through forests where even experienced guards refused to enter after dark.

People often asked me whether I believed in ghosts.

My answer was always the same.

"No."

Forests don't hide ghosts.

They hide people.

That was exactly what I believed when I first arrived at Kallamalai.

The village welcomed my wife, Meera, and me like family.

Children ran behind our jeep laughing.

Women greeted us with sweet rice.

The men unloaded our luggage before I even asked.

It was one of the warmest welcomes I had ever received.

The oldest man in the village sat beneath a huge banyan tree.

Everyone called him Periya Ayya.

He was completely blind.

Yet as I walked towards him, he smiled as though he had been watching me from a distance.

"Welcome, Forest Officer."

"I hope this forest protects you... the way it has protected us."

I thanked him politely.

At sunset, I witnessed something unusual.

The entire village gathered beneath the banyan tree.

A healthy black goat was brought before Periya Ayya.

Nobody looked frightened.

Nobody cried.

Instead...

Every face carried gratitude.

The old man gently placed his hand on the goat.

"For another month..."

"...thank you for protecting our village."

He untied the rope.

Then, without saying another word, he walked alone into the forest.

Nobody followed him.

Nearly an hour later...

He returned.

Without the goat.

Curiosity got the better of me.

I asked one of the villagers,

"Who takes the goat?"

He smiled.

"The Eleven."

"You've seen them?"

He shook his head.

"My grandfather did."

"My father did."

"My wife has."

"I haven't."

He said it so casually that I almost laughed.

I dismissed it as another village legend.

Three days later...

My wife met with an accident.

And according to her...

That legend had just saved her life.

When we returned to the village that night, Periya Ayya was already waiting beneath the banyan tree.

Before either of us spoke...

He smiled.

"They have accepted her."

No one asked Meera what she had seen.

No one questioned her story.

Every villager simply bowed their heads in respect.

I looked towards the dark forest.

For the first time in my career...

I wasn't looking at trees.

I was looking at a mystery.

To be continued...

The Mumbai airport was a wall of noise, trolley wheels clattering, boarding announcements blaring, a hundred families saying goodbye at once. Yet Kunal only heard his mother’s voice.

“Study hard, son. Make us proud,” his father said, hugging him tightly enough that Kunal felt the old man’s heartbeat against his own chest.

His mother wouldn’t let go of his hand. Her eyes glistened. “I know you will do great things in England. We will miss you so much.”

Kartik, Shubham, and Rohit hovered behind his parents, slapping Kunal on the back and making him swear to video-call every week. His older brother stood a little apart, quiet. He was the one who had co-signed the loan, the one who had convinced their parents this would be worth it. The debt sat on Kunal’s shoulders like a second suitcase.

Vishaka had come too, though she had said her real goodbye the night before in the quiet of her room. Now she simply squeezed his arm. “Don’t you dare forget me over there.”

“It’s time, beta,” his father said, glancing at the gate.

Kunal nodded, nervousness and determination tangled in his chest. He would study cybersecurity. He would build a career. He would pay back every rupee his family had risked. He hefted his bag, turned once more, and waved. His mother kept waving long after he had disappeared through security, long after there was nothing left to wave at.

London met him with a grey sky and a cold that slipped straight into his bones. The train from Heathrow was half-empty, rain streaking the windows as rows of identical brick houses slid past. Somewhere near the station, a fox screamed—an actual, honest-to-God scream—and Kunal nearly dropped his suitcase. He had read that London foxes sounded like murder victims. He hadn’t believed it until now.

The street where he would live was quiet. Mr. Sayed, his landlord, met him at the door, a wiry man in his sixties with a habit of finishing sentences before he’d fully started them.

“Top floor. No lift. Good for you. Keeps the legs young.” He jangled the keys twice before handing them over, as if he didn’t quite trust Kunal to catch them.

The attic apartment was small but freshly renovated: a kitchenette, a furnished sitting room, and a bedroom with a sloped ceiling that forced Kunal to duck near the window. He pictured Vishaka visiting on weekends, away from their families’ watchful eyes, and allowed himself a small smile, the first since the airport.

That evening he video-called his parents, propping the phone against a stack of books so they could see the room. “Everything’s perfect,” he told them.

It wasn’t a lie yet.

That night, in the dark, he heard it for the first time.

Three knocks. Faint. Coming from somewhere behind the headboard.

He sat up, listening. Nothing else. No voice. No cold breath. Just three knocks, and then a silence so complete he could hear his own pulse.

He told himself it was pipes, and eventually he slept.

In the morning he searched the wall anyway, ran his hand along the skirting board, pressing his ear to the plaster, checking behind the wardrobe. Nothing.

Over breakfast he mentioned it to Mr. Sayed, half-embarrassed.

“Old houses complain,” the landlord said without looking up from his toast. “Ignore them. This one’s been groaning since before your parents were born. You get used to it.”

The indifference was strangely contagious. Kunal decided the flat simply had character, the way old houses did in period dramas. He went to his first lectures feeling almost foolish for having worried.

The next two weeks were mostly good. He found his footing at university, a network security module he genuinely enjoyed, a study group that met in a café with a broken espresso machine no one ever fixed, and a professor who remembered his name (though he mispronounced it as “Kunail” for weeks). One free afternoon he walked along the Thames and sent Vishaka a dozen photos of places he swore he would take her.

Vishaka came up for a weekend in October. They wandered through Borough Market, laughed at how badly he mangled “Leicester Square,” and cooked a simple dal-chawal in the tiny kitchenette, filling the attic with familiar smells and the shrill beeps of the smoke alarm. For two days the flat felt exactly like the future he had pictured back in Mumbai. But on the last night, as they lay together, she traced the new shadows under his eyes and asked if something was wrong. He kissed her forehead and lied.

The night after she left, the knocking returned, not from behind the headboard this time, but from the wall by the window. Three knocks, evenly spaced, patient, like someone waiting to be let in.

Kunal lay very still.

It was harder to believe it was nothing the second time.

He began treating it like any other problem: something with a source if he could only gather enough data. He downloaded a spectrum analyzer app, sketched floor plans, marked every knock with timestamps. 2:14 a.m., headboard wall. 2:47 a.m., window wall. Always three. Always the same rhythm.

None of it helped. The app showed nothing but a flat line even while the knocks sounded in his ears. He built a beautiful, useless spreadsheet.

One night he left his phone recording on the nightstand, propped against a mug so the mic faced the headboard wall, and made himself lie still through the whole thing rather than burying his head under the pillow the way he usually did. The knocks came at ten past two, three of them, close enough that he felt the faintest vibration through the mattress springs. In the morning he made tea before he let himself listen back, as if the ritual might soften whatever the phone had caught.

He played it through headphones at full volume, eyes on the waveform crawling across the screen.

Flat. Not even the hum of the radiator, not even his own breathing, which he knew for a fact had been there. He scrubbed the timestamp back and forth three times, certain he'd missed it, that the sound was hiding somewhere in that dead stretch of silence. It wasn't. The knocks that had been loud enough to rattle his ribs did not exist anywhere the microphone could reach.

That frightened him more than the knocking itself. A problem was supposed to leave evidence. This one had made a specific point of not leaving any, as if it had known, somehow, that he'd try to record it, and had simply declined to be caught.

Sleep came in fragments after that. He was late to a seminar for the first time in his life. An assignment returned with a note: This isn’t like your usual work. Everything alright?

His friends noticed. Ujjwal caught him nodding off in the library, chin nearly touching the keyboard, and shook his shoulder hard enough that Kunal startled upright and knocked his coffee over. "You look like a zombie, man," Ujjwal said, not entirely joking, watching him mop up the spill with his sleeve. "Properly. You sleeping at all?" Kunal said he was fine, just behind on a deadline, and Ujjwal let it go the way friends do when they've decided not to push, but he kept glancing over for the rest of the session, and Kunal caught him doing it twice.

Vishaka noticed too, over their calls. When she pressed him, he snapped, then apologized immediately, blaming coursework, the time difference, the weather, anything but the truth.

It was past two when the knocks came again. Instead of freezing, Kunal sat up and knocked back against the wall, three deliberate raps.

Silence.

He counted ten heartbeats, feeling ridiculous.

Then, from inside the wall, three knocks answered.

Not an echo. A reply.

After that night, the world began to tilt. While brushing his teeth he caught his reflection blinking a half-second after he did. Walking back from the tube in the dark, he was certain someone matched his footsteps, until he spun around and the street was empty, yet the sound took one extra step before stopping.

And once, so quietly he almost convinced himself he’d imagined it, a voice inside the wall whispered his name.

“Kunal…”

He started sleeping on friends’ couches. It worked, no knocking, no whispers. But each time he returned to the attic, the sounds waited for him, patient as ever.

Vishaka begged him over the phone. “Just move somewhere else. Please.”

“And pay for what, exactly?” he said, more sharply than he meant to. He'd already done the math more times than he wanted to admit, a deposit he didn't have, a second month's rent overlapping the first while notice periods ran out, the loan repayments that were supposed to start the moment he graduated, not a term early because he'd panicked over some noise in the walls.

This flat was the cheapest thing within an hour of campus; he'd looked at eleven others before it and none of them had worked with what his brother had scraped together. There was no version of moving that didn't mean asking his family for more money, and he would rather lie awake every night of the year than make that call.

One night, the knocking no longer came from the walls.

Kunal woke in the grey hours before dawn, certain he had heard it, and lay rigid for a long moment trying to place the direction. Not the headboard. Not the window. He held his breath until his ears adjusted to the dark, and that was when he understood it was coming from inside the wardrobe, muffled by wood and the coats hanging inside, three knocks as patient and unhurried as ever.

He didn't move at first. He lay there doing the small, useless arithmetic of a person trying to talk himself out of what he already knew he'd have to do, counting how many nights it had been since he'd slept properly, telling himself it was a draft, a shifting hinge, anything, until the knocks came a second time and he made himself get up.

The floor was cold under his bare feet. He crossed the room slowly, some old animal instinct telling him that moving fast might provoke whatever was waiting on the other side, and stood in front of the wardrobe with his hand hovering over the handle for longer than he could account for afterward. He could hear his own breathing. He thought, absurdly, of knocking on it first, the way he had knocked on the wall, asking permission to open a door in his own room.

He didn't. He gripped the handle and pulled it open in one motion, fast, the way you rip off a plaster.

Nothing. Coats. Shoes. The suitcase he still hadn't fully unpacked since August, its zip half-open, one sleeve of a hoodie hanging out like something had been rifling through it. Cold air brushed the back of his neck. The window was shut. The radiator, when he checked without quite meaning to, was warm to the touch.

He stood there a long moment with the door open, waiting for the wardrobe to explain itself. It didn't. Eventually he closed it and went back to bed, and did not sleep again that night.

By the following week he had stopped attending lectures. He tore wallpaper down in strips, unscrewed the radiator, smashed a section of skirting board with his heel. There was nothing behind any of it, no pipes, no cavities, no explanation.

The walls filled with his frantic handwriting: timestamps, tally marks, diagrams of a room he could no longer see straight. The knocking no longer waited for night. It came in the afternoon too, soft but constant, like a pulse the building itself possessed.

Then, once and only once, the voice returned, closer, almost gentle.

“I am you.”

Vishaka hadn’t heard from him in four days. She finally convinced Mr. Sayed to check on the flat.

The landlord let himself in, half-expecting chaos, torn wallpaper, broken furniture, the wreckage of a young man coming undone.

Instead the attic was immaculate. The wallpaper Kunal had ripped away was back, seamless, as if it had never been touched. The radiator sat bolted in place. All the notes and diagrams were gone. The bed was neatly made.

Kunal was gone.

The police found no trace of him at stations, airports, or hospitals. The only clues were three small, perfectly spaced dents on the bedside table, the kind knuckles might make if they had been knocking from underneath.

His phone was tucked beneath the pillow, screen still lit, battery nearly dead. On it was a single unsent message to Vishaka:

I'm sorry.

Weeks later, after the investigation had quietly closed, Mr. Sayed locked the attic door and stood on the landing, keys in hand.

The building was quiet.

Then, from behind the locked door, faint but unmistakable:

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

I hit a possum driving home from my parents’ house on Christmas Eve.  Rachel saw it, but at least the kids were asleep.  Merry Christmas, right?
 

I’ll admit I probably would have failed a field sobriety test, but that thing had plenty of time to move too.  It just looked at me; like it had no idea that it was in danger.  

Sometimes people are like that too.  

There was a moment, just a fraction of a second, when I looked in that possum’s eyes; that I saw not terror, but peace. It was a look I had seen before; a look I wish I could forget.

 
Now I sit in the comfort of my overpriced home, in the gated community that I chose for status, not security. And while my expensive electronics and German car might make me a target for thieves, the gate gives me no comfort.  

I may not know the hour of my death, but I know where I’m headed.  I started walking that path decades ago, when I followed Nick down that old limestone road behind the church.
 

It was the summer of ‘99 and my burgeoning atheism was oddly stifled by my other primary interest: punk rock.  There was a surprisingly thriving punk and hardcore scene in my small southern hometown.  There was a catch though; all the bands were Christian; at least that’s what they said.  

Most of the venues were rec rooms and other buildings owned by the church.  I say “the church” because I had no clue what any of that stuff meant.  It always seemed so strange to me.  What does a mosh pit have to do with Jesus? 
 

There were always a couple of older guys in the crowd that would find the connection.  At some point of every show, there would be an intermission of sorts, and those guys would engage in weirdly aggressive impromptu sermons.  Some had done time (if you believed them); as if that was somehow a badge of honor and not a strike against them.  With those tattoos that looked cool until you got close enough to realize they were all praying hands and bible verses.  Badasses for Christ...  What a joke.
 

I had probably already smacked into him in a mosh pit or two before, but I didn’t formally meet Nick until I started working at the movie theater.  It was a business model built around teen labor.  I tore tickets and popped popcorn for a whopping $4.40 per hour.  I didn't mind as long as I got my employee passes; it was a big summer for movies.  Nick was one of the lead ushers and he played The Blair Witch Project for some of the employees the night before it released. 

 
After the movie, Nick asked me what I thought about it.  I told him I didn’t really get the ending, but I liked it.  He said he thought it would be bloodier.  ‘Aren’t horrors supposed to be bloody?’ was what he said.  
And it was that word “horrors” that sounded so odd that it kept looping in my ears. 

It was the first time I realized Nick might be more Christian than punk.   I don't know how he had me pegged for a horror fan, but after that night it was all he wanted to talk about.  Apparently, his parents were so strict that the only way he could watch R-rated movies was to sneak a peek at work. 
 

I let him borrow some staples from my VHS collection, stuff he wouldn’t be able to see at work like Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  He made quick work of the American catalogue, so I started introducing him to the Italian stuff: Argento, Fulci, the Bavas...  I used to joke that I was corrupting him.  That joke doesn’t seem very funny to me now.
 

I knew he didn’t work on Sundays, but I figured his parents just forced church on him.  I didn’t realize he was a true believer until he asked me to pray with him on our lunch break one night.  Godless heathen that I was, I had no idea what to expect.  I don’t remember everything he said; a lot of it was super-repetitive.  But I remember it was more selfish than I thought it would be.
 

Nick asked God for a new truck.  Could you pray for that?  How would I know?  I’d only been inside the rec rooms and banquet halls of churches, half-listening to scared-straight sermons from middle-aged men that wore hoodies to hide their paunches and died their roots.  It was only a matter of time before Nick asked me to attend a proper service.
 

I sandbagged him for a couple weeks, but he was buddy-buddy with the GM so eventually I had a Sunday off and no excuse to get out of it.
I thought the holy water was going to boil when I walked through the door, but they didn’t even have any.  No one spoke in tongues or handled snakes, but what I did see was worse in its own way. 
 

The pastor, or reverend or whoever he was started talking about the rapture and how when it happens, it will be the most amazing sight you could ever see.  All the dead Christians would be resurrected and blessed with divine power like an army of zombie fundamentalist superheroes.  

To see a grown man say such ridiculous things with such earnest conviction in his eyes was terrifying.  What was worse were the reactions of the starry-eyed crowd, nodding in agreement, hanging on his every word; as if what they were hearing wasn’t laughably absurd. 

 
After the service, we were supposed to go to Sunday school.  As a sixteen-year-old non-believer, it sounded like the lamest thing I had ever heard.  Miraculously, Nick asked me if I wanted to ditch.  He said he had something he wanted to show me.  Of course I wanted to ditch, but it seemed so weird that he was asking.  He actually believed all that shit.  What could he possibly have that would be worth skipping Sunday school?

 
Behind the church there was this old limestone road.  I never saw any cars on that road; not that day, not ever.  The woods on either side were so thick; it looked like dusk instead of ten in the morning.  Nick kept talking about the sermon and the second coming of Christ.  In hindsight I wish I had been paying more attention, but it was a little hard to keep up with. 

 
He kept bringing up David Koresh and how obvious it was that he was a fraud.  Koresh thought he could sire the vessel for Jesus’s return, but Nick said that was just pride.  The real Jesus wouldn’t even realize he was divine.  He would just be some normal person; maybe even a kid in a mosh pit.  Then one day when the world got too sick and darkness reigned in men’s hearts, he would wake up and fulfill his divine destiny.

 
As the road twisted, we lost sight of the church.  We came to a plot of land encircled by a barbed-wire fence.  Nick lifted the wire that ran across the top while pressing the middle wire down with the heel of his boot.  I climbed through the opening and repeated the courtesy for him.  I remember feeling the pulse in my neck just then, as if marking a point of no return. 

 
I knew Nick liked good music and had a taste for splatter flicks, but this was the first time I had seen him outside of work.  My sense of who I thought he was... was colliding with who he actually was.  The way he rattled off all those biblical details, citing scripture as if I had any clue what he was talking about.  It was like talking to a stranger. 

 
He led me through a dense thicket of trees until we came upon an old barn.  It was red with white trim, but the white had faded to a flaky yellow.  Nick slid the 2x4 that hasped the two doors of the barn shut until the left door creaked open under its own weight.  

It was so dark in that doorway; it reminded me of any number of scenes from the movies I had lent Nick that summer.  A chainsaw revved in my mind.  I hesitated, but Nick went right in, and then I was all alone in front of that quiet old barn in the middle of nowhere.

 
Windows on either end of the barn were the only source of light inside.  There were several stalls, but they were all long vacant.  The walls were lined with rusted antique farming implements; cast iron crescent blades and wide forked rakes.  A brush hook jutted ominously from a vertical beam.  I didn’t think to ask who the barn belonged to; I was too distracted by whatever was under the giant tarp in the middle of the place. 

 
How could I not be? It was the only thing you could look at in that place; easily ten feet tall and almost as wide.  From the corner of my eye, I could just see Nick’s self-satisfied grin as he noticed me noticing.  But he didn’t pull the tarp away just yet.  Instead, he selected  a pitchfork from the implements that lined the wall.  The tips of the prongs were darker than the rest of the fork.  At the time, I thought it was rust.
 

He asked me if I had accepted Jesus as my savior.  I lied and said yes.  He was so manic just then; it was like he was possessed.  He asked me if I knew the meaning of grace.  I told him it was something like being humble, which I now believe betrayed my true godlessness.  He frowned and for a second it looked like he wanted to put that fork in my chest. 

 
He said grace was when God gave you a taste of the sweet life.  It was like a parent favoring one child over all the others.  A gift from God just to show his love.  Nick said that’s how he knew he found the right one.

 
Right one?  Was he talking about me?  He waited for some sign of understanding on my face, but I know my confusion was betraying me.  I had no idea what he was talking about; the whole morning felt like a dream.  I kept looking away, but the only other thing to look at was the tarp looming tall over the two of us, swallowing us in its shadow. 

 
Nick said he had been at a Plea for Purging show.  During their song, Grace for Blood, he blindsided some kid in the mosh pit.  Total accident, but he caught the guy hard in the eye with his elbow.  

His eye swelled up immediately, and the kid started crying and freaking out because he thought his dad wouldn't let him go to shows anymore.  Nick felt so bad; he got the kid’s name and number, but when he met up with him a few days later, his eye was fine.  Like it never happened.  He told me the kid was named Mateo, which was Spanish for "gift from God".

 
Nick’s eyes went unfocused when he said that, like he was looking straight through me; like he was looking through the world itself.  Then his eyes focused on mine, and for a minute it was like when we used to shoot the shit on our lunch break at the theater.  A nervous chuckle crept its way from my throat. 
 

Then he released a bombshell I didn't know he was holding.  He told me that he knew I was an atheist.  My eyes were locked on those dark rusty prongs as he gestured wildly in his fervor.

My fear was not lessened by his assurance that it was a good thing that I was a non-believer, for that was another element of God’s plan for him.  I was to be the objective witness to the divine grace that had been revealed to Nick.  I was still in shock from his revelation when he finally removed the tarp.

 
Under the tarp was an enormous cross.  It was made from the same beams that held up the barn.  Hanging from the cross was a young boy. 

Nick said he was fifteen but there wasn’t a hair on his body, just a camouflage of black and blue, a topographical map of pain.  His eyes were just swollen slits in his face.  Barbed wire was wrapped tightly around his forehead in a crude crown; the same wire I had so naively held open for Nick. Wrapped around limbs pinned crudely in place with heavy nails. 

 
Mateo... a gift from God.

 
Perhaps if I had believed in an afterlife... if I thought I had a soul that could be saved... but I was too scared.  Nick had the fervor of a zealot.  His eyes were so wide... He kept moving around, talking with his hands, talking with that pitchfork...  

He was jumping from point to point, drawing connections out of thin air.  None of it made sense. 
 

When he finally stopped, I had no idea how to respond.  The silence was unbearable, so I muttered an “Amen”... 

I immediately regretted it.  Not because it was the wrong thing to say, which it objectively was, but because he thought it was right. It was what he wanted to hear.
 

I couldn’t bear to make eye contact with Mateo, who groaned in pain in time with my “Amen”.  He kept looking at me, looking with those puffy wet eyes.  Judging me; lumping me in with that maniac.  And why not?  If we keep company with monsters, are we not monsters too?  Isn’t that what Nick would call fellowship?  And what difference did it make when you were nailed to a cross in a barn in the middle of nowhere?

 
Mateo must have sensed what was coming before I did; sensed my inherent threat.  Nick’s plans for me involved more than just witnessing.  Through all his incoherent ramblings, he was clear about that much at least.  It wasn’t enough for me to see the new vessel.  Knowing, Nick explained, did not always accompany witnessing.  In order to know that Mateo was divine, I was going to have to participate. 

 
He said that Mateo had a kind of amnesia.  This body had none of the memories of when he was Jesus, so Mateo had no idea what he was.  We had to remind the body of its previous life... 

And death.  That was the most important part, Nick explained.  Mateo’s body had to remember how it died.

 
Nick had already done most of the work.  After he saw how Mateo’s shiner heal so completely, he knew he had found the right vessel.  Recreating the scourging was no problem for such a biblical scholar as Nick but convincing him to come to the barn was a challenge.  He said he told him he had a box of old Playboys in there.  Nick of all people.
 

He had already taken Mateo’s body to the threshold of death’s door, but when he pointed the handle of that pitchfork towards me, my heart sunk as I realized he wanted me to push him through it.

He called me Longinus, whoever the fuck that was, and said that it would save my soul.  Giggling... He was giggling when he told me how happy he was that I would finally see with my own eyes.

 
But I didn’t see... not what he thought I would see.  I wish I could tell you that I saw horns in Nick’s shadow, a forked tongue, or his head spinning 180 degrees.  I wish I could tell you that I saw something, anything that would explain the evil that went on in that barn.  But the only evil I saw that day was born of misguided faith; that and greed.  Because had it not been for Nick’s misapplication of the meaning of God’s “grace”, Mateo would still be alive. 
 

While Nick’s actions were unforgivable, they still followed a sick logic.  It was my own behavior that even now I struggle to explain.  When I had it in my hand, for a second, I considered putting it in Nick’s chest.  I could have stopped him right then, but I didn’t.  Just like that possum; I had my out and I just...

 
When the tips of the prongs touched Mateo’s mottled ribs, his eyes opened wide.  He stared right at me as I did it and what I saw was not fear.  Not hate.  Not righteous rage at being brutalized, beaten, and tortured.  
 

No, the look in his eyes, like the look in that possum’s right before it played chicken with two and a half tons of Japanese steel, was the look of someone that knew that their end was imminent and had let go of all of their earthly burdens.  What did Mateo have to fear as that pitchfork sunk past the bony plate of ribs into the vital workings of the boy as he hung.  What good would that hate do his soul, if he carried it with him into the afterlife?

 
The look on Mateo’s face, as he took his final breaths, was grace.  Not this prosperity gospel revisionist bullshit that Nick had warped to suit his own desires, but real grace.  The kind that even a godless heathen like me could understand and recognize instinctively. 
 

I've thought about what we did in that barn every day since.  It follows me like a shadow.  But it’s not the fear of what Nick would have done to me, or the memories of my own acts that haunt my dreams.  It was the look in Mateo’s eyes.  All the blood and the bruises, the nails, the barbed wire, even that pitchfork.  The brutality we inflicted on Mateo’s body only illuminated that horrible light in his eyes; a light that in that moment I knew I would never know. 
 

And then... the light went out.

 
On the way back to the church, Nick gave me so many attaboys I thought I would puke.  Then we went our separate ways and I did.  I called in an anonymous tip immediately, but there was never anything about Mateo in the papers.  I went back a couple of days later and somehow managed to find the barn.  The cross, and Mateo along with it, was gone, like it had never existed, like it had been raptured into thin air.
 

I never showed up for my next shift at the theater.  I just no-called until they fired me; they were used to kids flaking out on them.  It didn’t make me comfortable knowing that Nick was out there, but he only knew me through work and the music scene.  As long as I was a hermit, our orbits would never intersect. 

 
I wish I could tell you that the guilt of what we did to Mateo was punishment in and of itself, but that is a lie that we tell ourselves because the truth is too horrible to face.  That we do horrible things to each other and then we move on with our lives.  That we can excuse the most loathsome of acts as long as we believe that we are in God’s good graces.  That we are somehow special and not replaceable pieces in a machine that we were never meant to understand. 

 
But I was not destroyed by what I had witnessed in that barn, what I had participated in. It loomed large in my mind in the beginning, but eventually it became a dull background hum.  I can’t say exactly when I started to live my life again, but I can say when I went back to the movie theater.  It was May 5th, 2001; opening weekend of The Mummy Returns.  The first one came out when I still worked there. 
 

By that point, I had already completed my first semester at the University of Florida.  I was in town for the weekend feeling like the cock of the walk.  Part of me was hoping to run into an old coworker that I could beguile with one of my newly-acquired college life anecdotes.  Maybe I’d see one of the girls I never had the confidence to ask out.

 
There were no girls, unless you count Pat the 70-year-old lesbian that worked the box office.  I recognized a couple of the guys sweeping popcorn, but I had already forgotten their names.  The one person I did recognize was the new GM. He had put on a little weight since the last time I saw him, and he had a new haircut as well.  Spiked fade, frosted tips; all the rage amongst douchebags back then.

 
We didn’t talk, but he made eye contact and smiled.  Then he nodded his head, as if such a gesture could carry the weight of what hung between the two of us.  Nodded.  Like we were at a punk show or something. 
 

After the movie, I drove up to the front row of spaces.  Next to the handicap spots, there was a spot designated for the GM. Parked in that spot was a brand-new red Toyota Tundra.  The license plate holder read “Saved by Grace”. 

 
I’m not ashamed to admit that I keyed the fucker. 

 
He should have been in jail.  We should have been in jail.  But it was like he was being rewarded, like he was living the good life. 
 

I drank a lot in college.  Maybe it was the guilt.  Maybe that was just what I told myself.  But it didn’t really feel like I earned that MBA, since I barely remembered my nights.  And when I landed my first job, I called it beginner’s luck. 
 

But a part of me knows, it has never been luck.  I’m a skeptic.  I dismiss the concept at its face.  I believe what I have reason to believe, what I have seen, what I have witnessed.  And what I have witnessed -what I have participated in- makes me believe in an afterlife.  I saw it in that possum’s eyes, the same light that was in Mateo’s.  That was grace, true divine grace.

 
But I also know that the grace that Nick preached about is real too.  My whole life is proof of its existence.  What we did in that barn got us in someone's good graces, but I don’t think that it was God.

 

“I haven’t been in a place like this in years.” She says as she walks into the room while taking in all the surroundings. I gesture to the leather seat in front of me as curiosity starts to pull at my thoughts.

“What, therapy?” I say as I take my seat opposite her. “No,” She says, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, “A place where people think that they are safe.”

I crinkle my brows a bit in confusion, questions swimming in my mind. I ignore the urge to ask her to elaborate, but instead, I move to the next topic at hand.

“So, Ms. Sterning. Let’s get you started, shall we?”

She sits back casually. Legs crossed, posture relaxed like she owns this place. Though her demeanor is almost unreadable. Her eyes, especially, are dark brown, almost black, like they hold dark memories, as if it has experienced horrible things before.

I shake away my thoughts. With my pen set on the paper, I’m ready to do my job. Professional. Detached.

“Tell me, Ms. Sterning, let’s start with your childhood, shall we? Tell me a little bit about how you came to be.”

She sits back again, eyes on me. I shift in my seat, suddenly feeling a bit uncomfortable with her seemingly piercing gaze on me.

After a brief pause, she starts to answer my question.

“Well, I had a normal childhood. You know, two loving parents, a roof over my head. I had everything I could need.” Her eyes falter for a moment, like she’s holding something back.

A moment of silence goes by. I look up from my clipboard, patiently waiting for her to finish her story.

“I had a best friend too. We were inseparable since birth. You see, our moms were best friends in high school, so it was only natural for their children to become best friends as well.” Her gaze travels for a moment. A warm smile plastered on her face as she reminisced about old memories.

“Sadly, when high school started, she had to move away.” Her smile started to fade slowly.

“But even then, I never forgot her. We kept in touch, but that gradually stopped until her yearly postcards were no more. So then I took the initiative to pay her a visit. However, when I arrived at the same address from which the postcards were sent, no one answered. The house seemed empty of furniture too, so I assumed that whoever lived here does not live in this house anymore.” She folded her hands in her lap. She leaned forward. Came close to me. Too close for comfort. Her eyes almost look menacing.

“I know it was you who did it, Caden.”

—

My eyes shoot open. I bolt upright in my bed. I can’t breathe. My heart is beating rapidly. Sweat beads cover my forehead. These nightmares are starting to get too vivid. I look over at my nightstand and sure enough, there it is, 3 am on the dot.

This has become some sort of routine now. Each night, I’ve been getting nightmares that feel too real. However, this is the first time that this woman appeared in my nightmares. There was something about her. Her presence felt too real. This is nonsense. It was just a dream, go back to sleep. I lay back down and close my eyes in an attempt to fall asleep, but I can’t shake off this feeling of paranoia. Her voice still echoes in my head. I know that it was you…

—

My eyes scan over the document I’m holding. I have a new patient today. Something catches my attention. My eyes widen in realization. The patient’s name reads “Anastasia Sterning”. Sterning. Sterning. Where have I heard that name before? My mind instantly goes back to the nightmare I had this morning. My heart sinks, and my breathing becomes a little more noticeable. This can’t be. This can’t be the same woman, right?

The sudden knocking at my office snaps me out of my thoughts. Is it time already? Anastasia Sterning is currently right outside that door. Waiting.

You’re being ridiculous. It was just a damn nightmare. I open the door, and there she is. Her presence…it feels too familiar. Those eyes. I’ve seen those eyes before.

“It’s been years since I’ve been in a place like this.” My attention quickly turns back to her. Oh, this can’t be. Am I having another nightmare?

“Care to elaborate, Ms. Sterning?” Calm and collected, such a big contrast to the actual thoughts forging immense uneasiness within me as we speak.

“Well, last time I was in therapy, I was only just a teenager.” Oh, thank God. I sigh in relief.

“Well, that’s the circle of life, I suppose,” I say, shrugging with an unapologetic smile. She sits on the seat opposite mine. I study her quite closely. She leans back, so comfortably in fact that if someone were to come in here, they would mistake the owner of this office. My body fills with déjà vu. This feels like a movie im rewatching for the second time. Everything feels the same.

There is something about her presence, though. It’s unsettling. It feels like she knows something that I don’t. That feeling alone is enough to eat me up from the inside. What is your deal, Ms. Sterning?

—

My eyes are on her patient file again. There is just something about this woman that I can’t place. My eyes read her name over and over again, as if in doing so I’d get an answer to all these bizarre questions. Maybe I will find what I so desperately seek. Some comfort to ease my racing mind. Contrary to the horrid nightmare I had this morning, talking to Ms. Sterning was much more pleasant than I had initially anticipated. She was friendly, open. Her conversation was light. I could tell that she avoided the heavy parts of the conversation, though. Oftentimes, shying away from certain topics, redirecting my questions elsewhere.

The phone rings. The sound pierces the quiet air, making me nearly jump.

“Dr. Wright speaking, how can I help you?”

Silence. “Hello?” I say, slightly concerned. Breathing becomes noticeable on the other end of the line. The breathing becomes heavier by the second.

“She knows what you did.”

The line runs dead.

What?

Part III

I was once more in a hopeless situation, my best bet was to camp it out and wait for morning, but how could I? I didn’t know what time it was, it could have been six more hours till sunlight or just two, both seemed like an eternity.

That thing was out there, tracking me, I had no proof of that, but I just knew. I felt stalked, watched, observed.

As I weighed my options, Berry let go of me and climbed down, he looked around, then took off in one direction, slowly but steadily trotting away, as if he knew the way out.

“Berry, where are you going? Psst Psst, come back you bitch” I whispered in his direction, a loud Meow returned to me.

My whole life I’ve been on my own and never felt bad about it. I worked in solitude, rested in solitude, loved in solitude and hated in solitude. In that moment however, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to be on my own, I started following Berry.

It was hard to keep track of where he was going, the woods were dark despite the full moon, its black figure morphing in and out with the shadows of the trees.

We must have walked for about fifteen to twenty minutes when we finally managed to break through the bayou into a plain. Berry stopped in the field and I finally looked up, an old decrepit house met my gaze, standing silent and dull.

Berry meowed at me, as I turned my attention to him, he turned his attention to the house and then back to me.

“Good boy Berry, you just might have saved us.” I replied petting him, loud purrs were my reward.

That house would be a good place to hide and spend the night, it looked abandoned and in ruins, not the best, but better than the woods with that…thing chasing me.

We went up to the decrepit porch, I fully expected to have to knock down the door to get in or climb through a broken window but, strangely enough, everything seemed in order.

Regardless, I started pushing the door with all the strength I had left, making quite a ruckus.

“WHO GOES THERE?” A rough, rigid voice cut through the night.

Taken by surprise, I stumbled on my own words.

“H-hello? I-I’m so sorry, I-I-I thought it was abandoned, I-I didn’t mean to do anyt-“

“Ms. Angela is that you?”

A switch turned on in my brain.

“Oh-oh God, Mr. Michael, sir. Yes, it’s- it’s me Angela.”

The house looked different at night and in the dark, old man Michael was the last thing on my mind and I just didn’t have the clarity to even imagine that this could be his house, now that I knew, it made sense.

He quickly opened the door, not a lot changed, the house was still dark, after all why wouldn’t it be?

“Is everything all right Dear? What happened?”

“I need some help sir, I need to use your phone if possible, there’s been an…accident…” I didn’t yet know what to do.

Call the police? It wouldn’t look particularly good for me if they went up to the Shining and fond Lewis’ body on the floor and no monster. Perhaps it would have been worse if they found nothing. It would have been even worse if they found something else...

Regardless, I needed to get out of those fucking woods, a taxi might have been the best choice overall, the Shining is a trap and the best way to survive it is to not fall for it. Taxi, airport, a million miles between me and this shithole, that was the best plan.

“Oh goodness, of course! Come in dear…oh wait a minute, let me make some light for you.”

 The old man lit a candle with a swift sleight of hand, seemingly out of nowhere, I didn’t question it. Berry did however, strongly hissing at him.

“Berry, stop.” I scolded.

The house lit up nicely, nothing had changed from the last time I was there, the old man was in his nightgown, I had clearly woken him up.

The strange thing is that he was still wearing the dark sunglasses he always had, how many people sleep with their glasses? Maybe he always puts them on when he’s awake.

“Oh, is there someone else here? Did I hear a cat?”

“Yes sir, I’m sorry it’s a stray I picked up on the way…I hope it’s not a prob-“

“I never did like cats. Just keep it away from me.” He snapped back, rudely.

“Oh…okay then.”

I didn’t care, for what it’s worth I would have kept a bull away from him as long as I got out of there. I picked up Berry and went inside.

The light stemming from the candle enveloped the room in a strange sort of way, it was as if there was nothing beyond it, eternal darkness, a feeling similar to that of the fifth room.

Regardless we sat down at the table, I was finally able to rest, my legs aching and my heart going at a thousand miles an hour. Fatigue washed over me and I felt lightheaded, I needed some respite and that chair was my savior.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t give you a proper welcome dear, I wasn’t really expecting visitors.”

“Oh don’t worry about it sir, I’m the one that’s sorry, I assure you this is an emergency and definitely not planned.”

“Yes, I’m sure dear, what happened exactly?”

I didn’t really know what to say, a giant monster was stalking me after he vaporized my friend, that would do it.

“Uh…I went camping in the woods but my car broke down, I just need to call for a taxi to get back, nothing serious fortunately.”

“Ah that’s unfortunate dear…are you sure nothing happened at the Shining?”

He may have been blind, but he still saw right through my bullshit, I didn’t care, I needed that fucking phone call.

“Y-yeah of course, everything is fine in there.”

“Good, good…you know, it wouldn’t be the first time something went awry in there.”

“Oh…I’m sure many bad things went on over the years.”

“No, never bad things.”

It was starting to get very weird, I looked around the room but I couldn’t see anything past the darkness, my sixth sense was buzzing.

“Sure…I’m really sorry to have disturbed you sir, if I could use your phone I would be out of your hair and on my way in a s—“

“I don’t have a phone.” He interrupted me sharply.

“Y-you don’t…?”

“You saw them, didn’t you.”

His tone had changed, the sweet old man that was very welcoming and nice had disappeared. His voice had taken a measured and controlled but intensely quiet texture.

“Uhm…do you have any way I could call for someone…sir?”

“You saw Audrey and Austin.”

He knew a lot more than I thought he did, for being a blind man he was mighty perceptive, perhaps more than the average person. I understood at that moment that I wasn’t safe, I was just in as much trouble as I was in the woods, just with less cold and wind.

“I don’t know what you’re talk—“

“Sure you do…That’s why you’re here isn’t it.”

I kept silent.

“It’s okay, you don’t need to tell me, I already know.”

His voice had completely changed, it was rough, raspy, a scarred voice that doesn’t need to raise itself to command attention.

“How do you know about them?” I asked, letting go of the facade I was putting up.

“I’ve known them my entire life. I saw them grow up, change, go insane…I saw them after they died, I’ve kept a close eye on them.”

“Audrey and Austin…is that who they are? Victims of the asylum?”

“They’re not victims, they’ve paid their due…they’re still paying, forced to roam around, unable to go above and beyond.”

“What sins? Sexual deviancy? Anxiety? Mental disorders?...those are not sins, those are wounds as real as physical ones, they don’t dese—“

“Their sins are much greater than that.”

“They helped me, they’re not evil, they don’t want to hurt me.”

“It doesn’t matter, that’s their destiny, they’ve chosen it themselves, nothing will redeem them, there is no salvation.”

“How do you know all these things? You can’t even see in front of you.” I snapped back.

His arrogance annoyed me, his commanding voice called for rebellion. To me he was just another unreasonable person, those spirits…ghosts…people, deserved compassion, deserved sympa—

“I deserve sympathy too. I have lived many lives, I have seen many things, met many people. There is no right or wrong in the world, only the strong survive. They were weak, pathetic, insecure…just like all the others.”

“And you are strong?”

“I know it may be hard for you to understand, but I am much stronger than you can hope to imagine. I was born twice, once in light, once in darkness. I have made it my home, my realm that I rule with swift judgment and clarity. I do nothing but help those in need, give them what they want…what they crave…what they deserve, allow them to see who they really are. Those smart enough to realize it don’t hesitate, they give up their shame and accept my help. The real question is…are you smart enough? Are you strong enough?”

“The mere fact that I’m still here is proof of how strong I am.”

“Yes…you certainly are…that’s what I like about you.”

“You know nothing about me.”

“You think?”

“I know it.”

 “I have followed you ever since that one summer night in the park, Angela…you know which one.”

Those words cut a hole in my throat like a knife through butter, the words dying in my mouth, drowned by dread and fear.

I knew exactly what he was talking about, how could he possibly know that about me? I never told anybody, much less some old guy that I had never met. He may have been blind but he could see a lot more than anyone I had ever met.

“You don’t have to be scared, I’m here to help you, to offer you a choice, to show you everything you need to see.”

“Who-who the fuck are you?”

“It doesn’t matter who I am…what matters is whether you know who you really are.”

“Please…I just want to go home…I’m so tired…all of this is so tiring.”

I started to softly cry, the mental and physical stress finally caught up to me, it felt like I was in a nightmare, desperate to wake up but forced to sit through it all.

“I can help you with that, I know the road is a difficult one, but the path is always there for you to follow, no matter how hard it gets…let me show it to you.” He put his hands on the table, palms up, inviting me to join him.

At that moment I was ready to take that step. I was tired, in shock, scared, I was ready to let go, to let someone else decide for me.

I slowly put my hands on the table, my heart pounding in my chest, my body slowly reacting to the commands I was giving.

I closed my eyes.

I felt my hand touch something, “it’s all over” I thought.

That’s when I opened my eyes, Berry’s paw was on top of my hand, he looked back at me with those big beautiful yellow eyes, a heartfelt soft meow tickled his whiskers.

I stopped myself.

I never let anybody tell me what to do, what to think, what to feel. I like to think that only in the moment of truth can a person understand who they really are. I think this was my moment.

“I don’t need your help.” I finally said.

The old man sighed.

“How unfortunate. You know, I always liked Audrey and Austin, such sweet souls…it was very sad what happened to them…of course they deserved it, they were too blind to see. A strange kind of fog haunted their minds, it haunts many people, trust me, I’ve seen them all. Eventually the world moved forward and left them behind like many others. Man created ways to clear the fog, shine a light through it…highlight the path that lead them to their destination…it’s funny however because no matter what you do, eventually…smoke always gets in your eyes.”

The old man closed the palm of his hands.

A grin slowly formed on his face.

He brought his left hand up to his glasses and took them off.

A pair of dark orange owl eyes waited behind them.

“It’ll get in your eyes too.”

My heart began pumping adrenaline once more, moving at a constant steady pace worthy of the best piston engines.
 The darkness around me suddenly lit up with glowing orange eyes, appearing from nowhere, all locked in on me.

Berry stood up on the table, ears back, claws drawn and a mouth full of hate.
He charged at the old man’s face with unprecedented speed and rage, the signature sound of a catfight as the underlying soundtrack.

The claws ripped and tore at his eyes in a furball of pain.
As the man screamed in agony I didn’t miss my mark.
I got the candle from the table and sprinted through the door, protected by the feeble light of the dying flame.

Outside it was still nightfall, cold and wet. The moonlight was gone and the bayou was completely dark. The candle was quickly put out by the howling wind and I was left in complete disarray.

But once more that didn’t stop me, I kept on running in one direction, clueless as to where I was going or where I would have ended up, survival on my mind and nothing else.

I managed to run for about ten more minutes before my body gave up. The adrenaline was starting to lose its effects.

I crumbled at the base of a big oak tree, I couldn’t do this much longer, both physically and mentally.

I couldn’t think straight, my mind lacked the clarity that always characterized me. I was starting to get slow, to think slow, I couldn’t even breathe anymore, too much effort.

That’s when I did something I never thought I would again in my life.

I started praying.

“Please…God…if there’s anyone out there…save me…show me the way…please God.”

There’s a saying that goes “there are no atheists in a foxhole”. That night I really understood what it meant, but what I was about to witness was almost impossible to understand.

As my pleads echoed in the dark woods I closed my eyes and erupted in a hysterical breakdown. My hands running in my hair, tears running down to the earth.

Suddenly, a golden light filtered through my brows, my eyes opened to what seemed like a stairway to heaven.

I quickly wiped the tears and got up on my feet. It wasn’t a stairway, it was a road.

Hundreds of little fireflies were glowing in the dark, one next to the other, extending for what seemed like miles, highlighting a path.

I couldn’t believe it, I stood there, at the start of this path that would surely take me to wherever I was supposed to go.
I didn’t know what to think, I didn’t know who to thank.
My eyes wide open, tears running down my cheeks, gaping.

I guess sometimes moths do go after fireflies in the woods.

I started to walk down the road. The darkness was kept away from the small but bright insects, leading me to my destiny.

I almost wanted to stop and ask one of them where I was going, the thought of it answering kept me from doing that. I wonder whose voice I would have heard.

It felt like being at the movies, your focus is only in front of you, where the light is, nothing but emptiness in your peripheral, occasionally lit up by the screen.

The fireflies were so beautiful, their golden light brought peace to my senses, tranquility to my soul and a newfound hope for myself. It was the way back. It didn’t matter what waited me at the end, wherever it was or whoever was bringing me there. I always believed in fate and I was finally looking at it.

I kept thinking back about what the old man said to me.

I wondered how many people had ended up like me and Lewis, how many fell victim to that monster. I wondered if Austin and Audrey were also the unfortunate claims of evil.
I wondered where I belonged in all of this, I had a feeling I would soon find out, in the meantime, I tried not to think too much.

After what seemed like a thousand miles, I could finally see the end of the tunnel.
The firefly pathway ended just a few feet in front of me into a plateau, stopping just before the end of the woods.

“Finally.” A sigh of relief.

As I approached the last fireflies I looked back. The path had disappeared, the hundreds of small lights scattered all around, their duty honored, the small insects went back to their lives.

I stepped into the open field, a breeze of fresh air caressed my hair, my vision adjusting to the change of scenery. In the distance a bright light caught my attention.

“God, it must be a lamppost.” I thought out loud.

As I got closer and squinted my eyes a bit more, a chilling realization hit me like a brick.

It wasn’t a lamppost.

I wasn’t heading for the main road.

I was back at the Shining.

The light came from the first floor.

A deep sense of duty grew inside me. I couldn’t run anymore, I had to face my fears. If I was lead back there, it meant there was unfinished business.

Pride filled my chest, determination commanded my movements, acceptance calmed my spirit. I escaped death twice already, I was getting used to it.

I knew I could count on Audrey and Austin, they saved my life, they are victims just as much as me, worse perhaps. As far as I knew the monster was still roaming around in the woods, looking for me. I had some time to prepare for what was coming, to figure out what to do.

Deep down I already knew, we always know what to do deep down, it’s only a question of listening to yourself. A small but ever growing voice kept replaying a thought in my mind.

“The only way to end this, is to destroy everything.”

I entered the house. The smell of lavender hit me immediately. The house looked…different.

The parquet floor was the same but everything else seemed…brand new. The layout remained the same but the decadent walls, the empty spaces, the missing doors just weren’t there anymore.

In their place: wooden furniture, wallpaper, freshly painted walls, beautiful oak tree doors. It felt accommodating, like someone was living in it.

It was still dark but not pitch black anymore, the overwhelming light emanating from upstairs made its way all around the house, leaving the corners in the shade but still visible. The main living space was now occupied by a long dining table, complete with elegant blue velvet stuffed chairs; replacing the old dodgy wooden table that I had known.

Paintings now hung on the walls, depicting all sort of scenes; hunting parties, fishing expeditions, battlefields, generals and other old world décor. The house was silent except for a few underlying sounds; boards creaking, tapping, muffled whispers. All coming from upstairs.

The stairs were completely wrapped in the shining golden light that came from the first floor. It felt like a passage to a place beyond, the light at the end of the tunnel. I didn’t hesitate. After looking around I went up the steps, slowly.
My heart beating,
my hands steady,
my spirit resolute.

At the top of the stairs the light became almost blinding. It took me a few seconds to get my eyes accustomed to it, after I did, it became clear that something had happened on the first floor as well.

The smell of lavender gave way to that of tobacco, the wooden tiles on the floor were untouched, completely clean, despite the rampage and bloodbath caused by the monster.

Lewis was also absent, or rather whatever was left of him, not one drop of blood anywhere. Similarly the walls had been painted over, new doors occupied each room entrance, a big Persian carpet sat in the middle of the big open space, above it, stood the mural.

It was as if someone had just stepped out for a break after finishing painting it.

Perfect doesn’t begin to describe it. The colors vibrant, the lines well defined, the shapes well crafted. The scene depicted was the same as it always was, one detail caught my eye immediately.

The white player was not a woman anymore.
It wasn’t your average man either.

It was Lewis.

His face had been distorted, adapted for the painting. He looked in distress, dressed in typical 1800s attire, he has only one pawn left. The ever present thick glasses sat on his nose, his big lips curled into a grimace, sweat running along his face. His beautiful confident eyes were now witnessing horror.

It was as if I was looking at him once more, impossibly human yet fake at the same time.

By now you will have guessed that the light came from room 505. It was now open, unchanged. After all it was always perfect looking. It was as if the rest of the building had fallen into line, following the fifth room’s lead.
A familiar shape waited for me inside.

The shadow cast on the wall wore a bright white smile, what once would have absolutely terrified me, now was a welcomed sight.

“Austin?” I asked.

The shape hesitated, as if it was surprised by my greeting. After a couple of seconds, it put up its arm in a friendly salute.

I did the same, walking into the room itself.

To my right another shape appeared on the wall.

“Audrey? Is that you?” I whispered.

“Yes.” I heard back.

The voice did not come from any particular point in the room, in fact it was as if it came from everywhere.
I wondered whether I was hearing it for real or just imagining it.

“You must leave.” I heard clear as day.

“I’m not leaving. I was brought here by…someone, this is where I’m supposed to be.” I never felt so confident in my life and it was reflected by the tone of my voice.

I felt like a knight challenging the dragon to save the imprisoned princess;
a cowboy ready for the final shootout;
a samurai defending his honor.

“Why?” A disarming question.

“I-I don’t know… I think I need to destroy this, all of this, it brings nothing but pain and suffering…If I don’t do something the cycle will never end.”

I knew the end goal but I didn’t know how to reach it and I had nobody to tell me. I was on my own and yet I felt hope in my veins.

“Don’t…it’s our home.”

That’s when it all came crashing down on me.

“No…no it isn’t…this is not your home, you- you never belonged here, don’t you see?”

The shadows moved, Austin soon joined Audrey on the same wall.
The two shadows merged into one, seemingly hugging each other, desperate for comfort in a moment of great stress and need.

“You think that because of the problems you had you deserved pain and suffering…you felt different, estranged, you felt like you didn’t belong in society among other people because of who you were. None of that was true, you weren’t wrong, you weren’t broken, you didn’t ruin your lives…”

The ethereal voice had now been substituted by echoing, faint, sobs.

“I know what it means…you just wanted to be left alone, to feel part of something big. You wanted to belong in a society that excluded you for being different, you never wanted to do any harm to anyone…you just needed some help…but you never received it…it’s time to know the truth.”

“The truth is we deserve it.” I heard back among the cries.

“It was never your fault. Guilt can feel like a way of honoring the past, you think that by staying hurt you’re somehow making things right, you don’t need to stay here and pay a debt that nobody is collecting…you don’t add value to the world by inflicting pain on yourself…or letting others inflict it on you…you add value to it by moving on.”

“We made mistakes, we have to atone.”

“You didn’t make any mistake. You were not wrong, you were human.”

The echoes of the cries began to sound more real. They felt closer, more present.

“The only mistake you are making is thinking that you belong here, in this hellish place, among the pain and suffering caused by the darkness of evil. I know how it feels…I also thought I made a mistake once, I felt like I deserved nothing good and everytime I felt happy I would hurt myself…I would not allow myself to move on, to get on with my life and accept that, as a human, I am not perfect.”

I started crying too.

“I never asked for help, I never told anybody, I never doubted how guilty I was.”

I composed myself.

“The truth is that we are so much more than what we think we are, it’s in the moment of truth that we show who we really are…so let go. Not because you deserve punishment…but because you deserve to rest.”

In that moment the two shadows separated. They distanced from one another and slowly faded away in a moment of bliss.

I think that’s the reason I was brought back to the Shining, I was the key to help Audrey and Austin move on, to break the cycle, to stop the pain from continuing.
In that moment it all made sense.

I felt a familiar sensation. I felt part of something bigger; my entire life lead me to that moment, nobody else in the world could have taken my place because only I had the power and knowledge to get the job done.

It was exhilarating; a sensation I thought I had never experienced before.
That’s when it hit me.
I did experience it before, in that very room.

It was the same high that me and Lewis had chased this whole time. The same reason why we came back and, eventually, lead us to what happened.

Hope is a dangerous thing, it can lead down the darkest of alleys and bring you to the highest of mountains at the same time.

In the end, what truly matters, is to find your own way. Nobody knows what’s best for you more than yourself, we can feel lost at times and that’s when it’s nice to have some help; after all, the light of the mind alone cannot burn away all the darkness.

“He’s here.” I heard shouting next to my ear, snapping me back to reality in the harshest way possible.

“Who-who’s here?” I asked, terrified.

“The monster.”

I rushed to look out the window in the lobby to see a harrowing sight.

A huge looming figure shrouded in darkness moved steadily and at a pace towards the house.

...

Black was the eye whose gaze held his. It had sunken deep into the socket of a skull, all but stripped of flesh and fur, bound only by sinew and scraps of hide to a body gnawed of meat and marrow by carrion beasts just days before and left to rot into the soil upon which it lay. However, it did not molder. The last of the autumn leaves had not fallen from their branches before arctic air bore down, bringing with it not pillowy snow, but a sickly, freezing ice that coated the ground and all that was sedentary, sealing the landscape in a brittle stillness. The remains lay frozen, hollow gaze fixed forward, watching for someone to come along and view its grisly fate before being reclaimed by the earth.

 The awaited sat beneath one of the multitude of cedars and pines, all bowing under the weight of accumulated ice, reverently submitting to the conquering winter. He tugged at the biting rope around his waist, easing the discomfort caused by its constriction, but did nothing to quell the ravenous pangs of hunger. At the other end of his binding sat a hastily made travois crafted from hickory branches and scraps of leather tack cut from a stolen mule that lay frozen two days behind him. Atop the ragged skid lay a motionless mound, partially shrouded by a soiled saddle blanket, leaving two boots exposed to the elements – boots that had not stirred since the night before.

It had been at least three days since the storm had moved in, and two since the man had eaten. He reached a trembling, red hand into the pocket of his woolen coat in search of a piece of hard tac he knew was not there. His fingers rooted into the deepest seams with the hopes of finding an errant crumb, but he ceased his fruitless search with a curse, knowing he could no longer delay the inevitable. Feeling the lifeless gaze of the desiccated beast, he held back the handfuls of melt that churned in his stomach at the thought of what he must do to survive. 

He pulled the travois to him and lifted the woven blanket to see the face of his younger brother, eyelids half open, revealing a sliver of pale hazel peering lifelessly at the frozen branches above. 

The brothers’ flight had taken them deep into the mountains South and then East from Fort Smith. The first three days of the journey were made on the backs of two pack mules stolen from the corrals on the outskirts of town. On the fourth morning, the younger brother’s mule was spooked by some small creature dashing between its legs, causing the beast to rear and fall back onto its rider, breaking its neck and crushing the ribs of the other. In the days that followed, their supply of food was depleted, and the younger brother’s condition worsened, as did the constitution of the surviving mule, which expired sometime during the fifth night.

In the days before the icy gale, the brothers had seen rabbits and birds, squirrels and all manner of game run freely through the trees, giving them hope that they could outlast their pursuers – if any there were. The elder brother knew that the freeze had forced the creatures he had once seen as their salvation into their burrows, but tempered his dismay with hope that it had sent those that sought them back to their dens as well. There was no way of knowing for certain, and he considered each painful step he took as one he could not reclaim.

Leaning back against a brittle tree, he buried his hands in the pits of his arms then sank his chin as close to his chest as he was able, blowing hot air down the front of his collar and, for a moment, warming his face. It was near impossible to tell the time of day as the low-hanging curtain of clouds that brought upon this frozen hell lingered above, remaining seemingly only to gloat upon the suffering they had caused. He allowed his eyes to close, focusing on the intermittent comfort his breath provided. There was no destination, he remembered. All he had hoped for himself and his brother was a sense of security amongst the peaks and valleys of the mountains; a place to hide until they could form a plan for the future. But, it seemed to him now that in fleeing justice, they had unwittingly run into the gaping maw of death.

The unblinking eye remained fixed upon the pitiful sight before it in commiseration. The man met its lifeless gaze once more, now with a reluctant understanding of his situation. Just below the stinging pain of his feet and the abraded skin around his waist, he felt the growing torment from his innards clawing its way through as his body consumed itself. The civil parts of his consciousness abated as he slowly stood and ambled towards the carcass of the deer. He fell to his knees and, with irreverent, blistered hands, reached inside the open carcass and began to eat.

He couldn’t tell if the trail was obscured by ice or if it was there at all. Regardless of the path’s existence, he could travel no further as what little diffused light the sun provided began to fade, and the oppressive cold crept in now unabated by the day’s relative warmth. He was unsure of how far he had traveled that day and even more uncertain if his pursuers had kept pace. Through the uncertainty, he was sure that either of the latter issues would be irrelevant if he froze during the night. Looking behind him, he saw the near-unbroken lines trenched into the ice and soil flanking uneven footsteps. He imagined the path leading miles back in the wrong direction and the glee his pursuers must have felt once the railway to their quarry was discovered, resting easy knowing that they had but only follow at a distance until he was too weak to put up any sort of fight. It would be the simplest bounty they would likely ever collect.

Tom had always followed his brother wherever he led. He thought of the day his father disowned him, expelling him from their family’s farm South of St. Louis. His father, a man whose morals stood as a reflection of that holy book, could not abide by his oldest son’s drinking and debauchery, so he cast him away as his sinful right hand. As he rode into the morning and his mother’s wailing pleas faded, Tom pursued, unwilling to continue his existence without his only friend. Through the Indian Territories to the plains of Texas, Tom followed without question. From legitimate work as ranch hands and cattle drivers into vile thievery and killing, he followed. He had not asked him to, but he didn’t turn him away either.

Tom still followed, but not on his own volition – dragged along as he had always been in a lonely procession through the Fourches with no resting place to be found. 

The surviving brother searched for the driest of kindling he could find, but only managed to gather a handful of twigs among the countless frozen and saturated limbs that littered the ground. During his last desperate search, he found a tree whose top had fallen beneath an outcropping of rock, which had kept it sheltered from the elements. His fingers lost all feeling and bled as he wrenched the brittle limbs from their host and drug them towards his camp.

The man produced a box of matches bearing the faded seal of the commissary where its previous owner had purchased it. No matches remained. He remembered the pouch that hung around Tom’s neck and the flint and steel contained within. Helping himself to things found on the bodies of dead men was not new to him – the act of turning men into corpses and the subsequent theft both being direct contributors to his current woes. In his mind, this was different. He had not killed his brother, and Tom surely would have wanted him to have it. Should he die due to some antiquated sense of respect? Morals? He had left those in Missouri along with his family name. 

He leaned over to the travois and took hold of the blanket's corner at Tom’s head and pulled it back. The same glassy, lifeless eyes stared into the darkening sky, lips barely parted as though ready to comment on its bleakness. Gently pulling at the leather strap strung around his brother’s neck, he created just enough space to place the blade of his knife. The cut was quick and practiced, and he pulled the severed ends towards him, revealing an embroidered buckskin pouch. Pulling it away, he quickly returned the blanket to its original state and leaned against the rock. He remembered Tom trading ten lead balls to a young Creek boy during one of their more pleasant encounters with the tribe while passing through the territories. Loosening the leather string tied in a half-hitch knot, he upturned the pouch and emptied its contents into his cracked palm. A chipped striker and a worn piece of chert lay amongst a few malformed lead balls and three tarnished half-cent coins. Taking the desired items and returning the remainder to the pouch, he returned it to its rightful owner, placing the strings around Tom’s neck and tying the strings back together. Returning to his newly acquired implements, he glimpsed the knife he had used to cut the string and tried to remember who he had taken it from. He wondered how many, if any, of his possessions he had come about honestly.

Sparks pierced the darkness in multitudes of violent births, which nearly instantaneously faded from existence as he struck the flint, none of them finding purchase among the tinder that awaited their igniting force. He leaned in closer and tried again, and again, striking his knuckle against the cold ground, sending a jolt of pain up his arm. The man struck again and again, stone against steel, his broken hands struggling to grip the implements as melted ice intermingled with blood. Anger began to grow inside the man with each attempt, striking with increasing ferocity, no longer caring for the embers. Sparks flew wildly, and it seemed as though he hoped his burning rage would set the mountains ablaze. It was then that he heard the first voice he had heard in days echo through the valley. His voice – A primitive scream that he felt could be heard in the heavens burst from his lungs, burning his throat as he wailed to the uncaring sky.

And then, a flame.

Through his stinging eyes, he saw the glowing ember among the nest of tinder begin to take form. The apocalyptic rage gave way to urgent focus as he sheltered it, carefully adding kindling and nursing the flame with gentle breaths.

The flames lashed out at the darkness as its heat drove back the cold. The man’s feet and hands began to emit a needling pain as his appendages thawed, but still, he kept them close to the fire, embracing the newfound feeling despite its unpleasantness. Strips of meat cut from his recent find began to char as they hung skewered over the flames. Though the man felt he could eat the meal in its entirety along with the sticks it was prepared with, he ate sparingly, gnawing at the sinewy cuts that even the least discerning scavenger had deemed unworthy of trouble. Placing the larger limbs onto the fire, he lay as close as he could, pulling his coat over him and stared into the glowing center. He watched as the coals pulsed with deep orange light, fixated on the hypnotic pattern. There was no sound other than the faint crackling of the fire; no warbles or howls, no wind or breeze, only an oppressive silence filled the air, quiet as the grave. 

“Jim?” 

The voice was weak and muffled, but familiar.

“Jim… I… I can’t see…”

He didn’t answer.

“P- please… You know I don’t like the dark.”

“You ought not be talkin',” Jim said after a moment, his voice barely a whisper.

The silence once again fell upon the camp, with even the sputtering of the fire quieting itself in a seeming fear of reprisal.

“C’aint you at least cover my feet?”

A tear rolled down Jim’s face as he tightened his grip on his coat, unwilling to turn to face his brother. 

“... You're dead, Tom. You ought not be talkin’...”

Jim’s shoulders began to tremble as he quietly sobbed. The silence returned and lingered for a while.

“Ain’t nothin’ here, Jim…” said Tom, his tone turning somber.

“... You’ll see…”

Jim awoke from a dreamless sleep to the pelting sounds of frozen rain in the dull, early morning light. The fading embers hissed at the unwelcome precipitation as he sat upright, half expecting to be staring down the wrong end of a barrel. Jim looked towards the travois to see Tom’s shrouded body still there, unmoved and motionless as it had been the night before. He stoked the fire as best he could with the remaining wood he had kept dry beneath the skid and ate a bit of the charred meat. He would need to find more food that day, as the remaining few portions would only sustain him through to the evening.

He didn’t bother covering the remnants of the fire, as it would serve no purpose. Stealth had ceased to be his tactic for evasion since the miles-long line he had left could only be missed by a blind man. His only chance, he knew, was to embrace the unholy conditions and press forward, hoping that his longing for survival was greater than his pursuer’s drive to catch him. He could make more ground and would discontinue the obvious trail if he left his brother buried or otherwise. Jim quickly pushed the thought from his mind, imagining Tom’s body displayed in the streets of Fort Smith, being gawked at by passers by and handed over for payment as a prized pelt retrieved from the wilderness. He gathered an armful of dry wood from the sheltered tree and entrusted it to Tom beneath his blanket before setting off.

As the morning’s storm passed, a cold more brutal than any since filled the air in stark defiance of the day’s light. Jim trudged through the valley across the ever-thicker layer of ice that coated the ground, his labored breaths forming plumes that obscured his view. The modicum of strength he had felt upon embarking on the day’s trek was quickly sapped as the rope around his waist bit into his already chapped skin, his legs quivering at every bump the travois encountered. The towering bluffs around him became obscured by wilting evergreens as he travelled deeper into the valley, leaving only the relative elevation as his guide in maintaining his already unsure course.

All at once, an explosion. 

It erupted from behind him, sending him sprawling to the ground, all the while splinters of wood pelting his back. With ringing ears, Jim lay stunned. His senses returned as he reached for his pistol, firing a shot in the direction of the blast. Scrambling to his feet, he began to run only to be pulled back to the ground by the travois still bound to his waist. He turned and fired again into a hazy mist behind him and found his feet once more, now pulling furiously on the skid to make distance. Another concussion from behind sent more shrapnel towards him as he fled, Jim firing another shot blindly behind him. His eyes were wild as he pulled, his heart pounding in his temples. Just ahead, he saw a clearing where the valley forked and oriented his flight towards the left-most option, ducked his head, and ran. 

Above the incessant ringing in his ears, he heard no voices, no crashing pursuit – only the sounds of his boots breaking through the ice. It didn’t matter. He continued to run. 

Rounding the turn into the clearing, he was met with another blast, this time to his front. The momentum of the travois pushed him forward and onto the ground as he tried to stop.

Jim looked up towards his ambusher, gun in hand, to see a cracked willow on the opposite bank in the final stages of falling – its trunk splintered at the center as frozen mist fell around it. Intermittent explosions echoed through the valley as trees ruptured from the bitter cold, sending them crashing to the ground. His heart still pounding, Jim breathed a sigh of relief, letting his head fall and closing his eyes.

As he lay there, he felt a dull ache in the back of his head and a warmth creeping down his neck. He reached back and felt for its source, finding a gash at the base of his skull. Pulling back a blood-soaked hand, he cursed. The adrenaline faded as the pains he had become accustomed to returned in force, now accompanied by his newly obtained wound. Jim sat upright and produced a soiled rag from the inside of his coat, then pressed it to the back of his head, now throbbing with a blinding pain.

He sat for a while attempting to staunch the persistent bleeding, crimson droplets branching out upon the white as they fell. The ground was different here. Frozen rain had accumulated, but underneath was solid ice. Vibrations of a current emitted from beneath him.

He heard another crack just ahead, much less violent than the initial barrage. Searching for its source, Jim saw a monstrous pine near the riverbank, its boughs jerking unnaturally as its trunk began to give way. He quickly stood as realization struck him. Trying and failing to gain his footing on the icy surface, Jim fell to his knees as the pine creaked and moaned, slowly revealing the direction of its descent onto the frozen river. He stood again, this time finding purchase, and began to pull, but not soon enough. The hulking tree fell onto the frozen sheet just upstream from him, crashing through with a cacophonous crack and thunder. Water erupted from its icy prison and drenched everything around it, now flowing freely at Jim’s feet. The chorus of cracking began to crescendo as the ice fractured and folded onto itself with the force of the ripping current, setting forth a torrent of unbound force.

Jim’s footing slipped again and again as he desperately pulled the travois towards the bank, the freezing water now at his ankles. He fell a final time, the shock of the sudden cold robbing the air from his lungs. The formerly solid surface listed, pulling the travois towards the raging river. Jim grasped at the rope and began to pull, only to feel the ice beneath him begin to splinter. Before he could undo the harness, the surface gave way, and he was plunged into the murderous waters below. 

Agony was the only word that came close to quantifying the pain he felt as his body swung from side to side with the steps of the beast of burden he was lashed to. He was unsure if he was in the hands of a savior or a captor, but, for the moment, he didn’t care.

Fragments of what felt like memories flashed in his mind – fleeting glimpses of deep blue then blinding white, swirling in a whirlwind of light and dark. He felt the tightness around his waist he had grown accustomed to, but not its weight. Out of the corner of his half-opened eye, he saw the cut end of the rope dangling beside him, now coated with ice that came to a point at its severed end. He slowly became aware of the same ice forming on his clothes and hair, stiffening them and adding an unnatural, pressing weight. With every step the mule took, he heard the clinking of chains and other metal implements rhythmically clattering against its sides. Jim tried to speak, but was only able to produce a pitiful whine – the conflagration in his chest repressing any hopes of forming any semblance of a word. The visages continued in dizzying, hypnotic flashes of light as he closed his eyes, turning his stomach, whose contents he weakly emptied down the side of the mule and onto the ground below. The exertion drained what little remained of him as the throbbing light slowed and gave way to a foreboding darkness, once again pulling him back down into the depths of nothingness.

When he woke, the metallic odor of blood filled his nostrils, accompanied by the smell of food. His mind ignored the more urgent of the odors and fixated on the source of potential sustenance. His body ached as he pushed himself onto his elbows and examined the room. A menagerie of chains and steel traps hung from the rafters of the wooden shack, and hides too numerous to count covered the walls. Along the far wall, a large, cobbled fireplace stood with a cracking fire burning within, above which hung a large pot that was surely the source of the heavenly smell. He looked down to see that he was covered by the large pelt of some massive beast and realized that he was naked underneath. Anger welled inside of him as he looked for his gun belt, only to find it draped over the back of a stick chair next to a table at the other side of the room.

“Ain’t no need fer that.” a gruff voice said.

Jim strained his eyes, peering into the dark corner where the voice had come from. On the opposite side of the table, shrouded in shadow, he made out the silhouette of what could have easily been that of a bear.

“When ye decide I ain’t yer foe, put them clothes on an’ come get some stew,” it said in a calm but firm tone, motioning a massive hand towards an outfit draped over the end of the log-framed bed he lay upon.

He eased his battered body from under the fur and stood uneasily, bracing himself against the edge of the bed. Everything hurt. In the flickering light of the fire, he saw black and purple bruising covering nearly every inch of his body and dried, streaking blood framing lacerations along his arms and legs. With more than a little effort, he slowly dressed himself, occasionally glancing towards the corner where his host sat.

Once dressed, he limped his way towards the table, the slightly undersized clothes constricting with every halting step, painfully pressing against his battered skin. Maintaining a grip on anything he felt could bear his weight, his eyes moved from the figure in the corner to his gun belt that hung in front of him. Jim glimpsed the dark wooden handle of his pistol snapped snugly in its holster. He tried to remember how many shots he had fired during his battle with the trees. 

“Iffin’ my hospitality ain’t eased yer mind, I say again – ain’t no need fer that.” said the man, now seeming a bit perturbed. 

Jim paused as he reached the table, now able to make out the features of the man. Larger than he had initially judged, the mountainous figure was draped in coarse furs, his face framed by a bush of a gray beard just as coarse as the pelts. He considered the man’s words before pulling out the chair and easing himself onto it. The trapper pushed a bowl piled high with broth and rough-cut chunks of meat towards him. Jim eyed the man as he took hold of the oversized carved spoon and began to eat. The broth burned his cracked lips as he took his first bite, stinging the lining of his throat as he swallowed. His body bade him eat slowly, but the ravenous hunger drove him to gorge himself as quickly as he was able. Without chewing, he forced the bits of meat down his throat and plunged the spoon into the bowl, retrieving an even larger bite.

“It’s poisoned, ye know…” said the trapper as Jim shoved a third spoonful into his mouth.

He spat the half-chewed mouthful mostly into his bowl and pushed back from the table, panic rising in his throat. A bellowing laugh erupted from across the table, the trapper’s head flying back at its force, mouth agape, revealing a toothy maw. Jim stared at him with wild eyes – he was sure that his airway was tightening from whatever foul addition the man had made. The raucous laughter decayed into a soft chuckle as the trapper wiped his bearded face before standing and walking towards the fireplace. Jim’s burning gaze fixed upon him as the figure eclipsed the flame.

“Beg yer forgiven’ me…” he said, stifling his laughter.

“... ain’t offen I get a caller, an’ when I do, ain’t none of ‘em are so untrustin’.”

He retrieved a kettle and two tin cups before returning to the table, filling both with a thick, black liquid and placing one in front of Jim before returning to his seat.

“There’s the antidote.” the trapper said gruffly, pointing at the steaming coffee in front of Jim and taking a sip of his own.

Jim’s anger was quickly repressed by his ever-present hunger. He decided that even if the meal was poisoned, he would rather die with a full stomach than in the wretched throes of starvation he had endured for so long. He half stood and pulled the chair back to the table before returning to his meal.

“Been out a day er so. Figured you’d be hungry.” 

Jim glanced up as he scraped the bottom of his bowl for the remaining bits of stew that had pooled in the worn divots in the wooden dish. His hunger battered but not yet defeated, Jim stood wearily and ambled towards the fire, refilling his bowl from the cast-iron pot that hung above it.

“Where ye’ comin’ from, stranger?” asked the trapper from across the room, breaking the silence.

“Missouri. Outside of Springfield.” Jim said raspilly, the half-truth seeming to burn his throat as he spoke it.

“Quite aways from there to these parts…” the trapper said almost as a question.

Jim limped back to the table, reclaimed his seat, and started into his second helping, this time a bit slower. Inquiry or not, he felt just the slightest obligation to expound upon his falsehood. He allowed his chewing to be the excuse for his lack of response.

The trapper took a long gulp from his cup before speaking again.

“An’ where ye’ headin’?”

Jim glanced up, still gnawing on a particularly tough piece of meat. Shadows obscured the man's eyes, but he could feel the expectant gaze.

“Hot Springs. My brother was dyin’. Consumption. Heard the water there has a way of healin’ folk, so I figured....” Jim trailed off, feeling Tom’s absence for the first time since he awoke.

Dull pelting could be heard just over the snaps of the fire as sleet began to fall onto the roof of the shack, tapping at the shelter, assuring Jim that it was still there.

“‘Fraid I couldn’t ye both,” the trapper said somberly. “Had to cut ‘im loose from ‘ye... Would’ve drug us both under the ice…”

Jim imagined Tom’s body maimed and frozen miles downstream.

“How long you been out here?” Jim asked weakly between bites, forcing the visage from his mind.

The trapper seemed to ponder a moment, taking a gulp from his cup and wiping his beard.

“Whole life it seems. Come up here one spring an’ couldn’t bring myself to leave. Built this here shack an’ here I been ever since.”

“Take it you don’t like folks much then…” 

“I like folks jus’ fine, jus’ don’t much care fer company all the time. See, up here, I got all the say in what folks come by an’ how long they stay ‘fer.”

“Don’t imagine you get many callers this time a year.” Jim said without looking from his bowl.

“It’s usually ‘round this time I get a trader meet me at the river. I give ‘em the furs I got on hand an they give me some supplies for the winter. Figure they couldn’t make it down this time bein’ as the river’s frozen solid. Didn’t know it was ‘till I went an’ saw it fer myself…”

The trapper trailed off, his voice now ponderous. 

“... Strange thing, this storm. Long as I been here I can’t remember it ever bein’ this awful ‘fore winter months…” 

Jim continued eating, now slowly chewing the meat, trying to guess its origin. Wind began to whistle through the small gaps in the sills, the sleet falling in sheets on the roof. The trapper tilted his head and sat deathly still as the popping of the fire rejoined the chorus.

“Do ye know why I stay here, stranger?”

Jim shook his head.

“A man could live his whole life lookin’ upon the mountain whose shadow he was born under and it seemin’ the same as it ever was. His father, his father’s father, and all in that line born ‘neath that mountain would say the same; ‘It's as it's always been’. Save fer the trees an’ smaller things man can meddle with, everything ‘peers fixed an’ unchangin’.

The trapper tapped a massive finger on the table.

“Man’s started meddlin’ with more an’ more though. Not much’ll stay the same fer long. I never took to a woman… more liken they never took to me..” he chuckled. “... But I found that when I set up camp here, an I saw these hills and hollers, I knew they’d always be. An’ I fell in love. Took ‘er fer my bride. Good one, too. Always lookin’ after me an’ given’ me anything I need.”

Jim gave the old man a quick glance as he took a drink, beginning to wonder if years of isolation had driven him mad.

“She’ll teach ye things too, ye know. Teach ye things ye ain’t never thought of. It wasn’t long ‘fore she showed me what she is – what she can do.”

Jim looked up to see the trapper leaning towards him from across the table, seeing his face in its entirety for the first time as the firelight flickered across the grizzly visage. Leathery skin marked by blemishes and scars stretched across a massive skull; his mouth twisted into a wide, toothy smile. It was then that he saw the eyes. Streaks of red hid any whiteness that was there, framing cloudy white circles that were fixed on him with a burning intensity.

Jim slowly sat back in the chair, unsure of what to say as the empty eyes stared at him. The trapper lifted a massive hand and took hold of a bottle from the other side of the table. Behind where the bottle had sat, Jim saw the embroidered buckskin pouch, its string tied where he had cut it days before.

“Where’d you get that?” Jim sneered.

He thought back to the day he had been pulled from the river and the trek up the mountain on the back of the mule. 

‘The rope had been cut...’ he thought. ‘Tom wasn’t there…’

Horror set in as fragmented memories began to coalesce. Tom was there. Pulled behind the mule, he remembered, the travois bumping along the ground as the beast dragged them up the trail.

“Lies beget lies, stranger…” The answer came bluntly.

“Storm got the critters a-hidin' in their holes since it moved in. Nothin’ movin’ means nothin’ to trap. Nothin’ to trap means nothin’ to eat. But like I says, my woman provides.”

Jim stood in shock, coughing and gagging as he backed away from the table, toppling his chair and tripping on it, sending him crashing to the floor. The old man began to chuckle as he pulled the cork from the bottle and began to fill his cup. A thick, viscous liquid flowed from the neck as an overbearing copper odor filled the air.

“Don’t know why you keep comin’ back here, stranger. Figure it might be for a reason.” The trapper said, rubbing his bearded chin with his free hand. He seemed to be deep in thought for a moment before slowly rising, his shadow growing large against the wall behind him.

“She called ye here, didn’t she? Drove ye to the river an’ plunged ye into its clensin’ waters…”

Jim could only watch as the monstrous figure lifted the now overflowing cup, its sides streaked with sanguine lines.

“... an’ I be yer John – raisin’ ye anew!”  he bellowed, lifting his head to the ceiling, then raised the stained chalice and drank, blood dribbling down the sides of his mouth and onto his tangled beard.

The monstrous figure lowered the cup, head still raised, and sighed deeply as though in ecstasy. effortlessly pushed the table to the side and stepped towards him. Jim began to kick and claw at the floor, manically propelling himself away from the approaching beast, but not quickly enough. An anvil of a boot came crashing down on Jim’s foot with a sickening crack of bone, pinning Jim by weight and pain, his agonizing screams filling the shack.

“Ye had the flesh…” the trapper said over Jim’s screams, kneeling to his side and taking his jaw in a mighty, calloused hand.

“...an ye want fer the blood.”

The hand squeezed with an unbearable force, thumb and fingers prying his jaws open, laughing all the while. Jim writhed and punched, but the sanguine stream found its mark. Cold, clotted blood slithered from the opening and down his throat, choking him instantly.

Jim pressed a hand against the face of his assailant and reached wildly behind him with the other for anything to use as a weapon. He grasped something hard and swung it at the trapper’s massive head. A massive hand caught his wrist before the blow could land. The trapper sneered, raised the other hand, and delivered a devastating blow.

The cold returned, more frigid now, more painful. The white blanketing the ground seemed to glow, emitting only enough light to make out the figure of the trapper pulling him along the ground by the leg. Ice and rocks scraped along his back as his shirt had lifted in the rear, collecting the debris as he was dragged along. Other than the pounding of his head and the dull, throbbing ache of his mangled hand, the rest of his body was numb. Jim tried to roll to one side, and halfway did so. He reached with his good hand, grasping for anything he could reach, but his fingers only clawed the sheet of sleet, slipping and tearing his nails. Weakness took hold again as the world began to close in around him. He fell back, once again submitting to unconsciousness.

He dreamed again of the swirling blue and blinding white; faster and faster they went, but slowly formed the visage of a blazing orb, steady among the dancing blues. He felt warmth – warmth he had forgotten could exist, warmth he had never felt in his life.

Jim was awake again. His eyes kept shut by his own frozen blood; he felt the rope lashing him to a tree. He pulled feebly against his bindings and tried to form words of protest, but nothing came out. Jim stopped his struggle when he realized the warmth of his vision remained. It grew hotter, and for the first time since the first frigid wind blew in, he felt beads of sweat forming along his brow. 

“Look on ‘er face, sinner!” Howled his captor.

“Look into ‘er clensin’ eye.”

The heat pulsed, growing from an uncomfortable warmth to a singing burn. Jim grunted as he writhed against the ropes again, each movement more painful than the last. The light to his front shown pale red through his sealed eyes.

“Look! Open yer eyes an’ see!”

Jim’s eyes slowly began to open, lids peeling apart one after the other letting through a flood of blinding light. He turned his head from the conflagration. The blur of his vision began to sharpen when he made out a figure against an adjacent tree. It had been tied as he was, facing the light, unmoving, and incomplete.

It was then that he realized there was no crackling, no sound of burning - just silent, pulsating light and heat, just the gentle pelting of ice upon the ground and heavy footfalls approaching.

Massive hands took the sides of his head and wrenched it forward, pinning it against the tree with a crushing force. Jim clenched his eyes.

“Fer once in yer miserable life, open yer eyes.” The trapper hissed in his ear, the putrid odor of rotten breath filling his nostrils.

Jim screamed, his skin now blistering from the inferno. His eyes shot open.

The trek into town had been much slower given the muddy mire caused by the melting ice, the wagon sliding from the road, becoming bogged down more times than not. Late winter sun beamed through the barred window of Jim’s cell, but he could only feel its warmth.

He heard the crowds gathering outside, chittering and rumbling with glee. Footsteps approached his door, and he heard the familiar rattle of keys and the mechanical clank of the lock.

“Come along now, son.”

Jim stood, raising his hands towards the voice; cold shackles were placed shortly after.

The crowd shouted and jeered as he was led onto the street. Murderer, coward, and all other names were given to him as the firm hands at his arms led him stumbling toward the gallows.

He took each creaking step expectantly and, after a few paces, was turned to face the throng. A few gasped while others laughed upon seeing his face. A coarse, hemp noose was placed around his neck and was oriented to the side as it was tightened.

The charges were read, but Jim did not hear them. Instead, he focused on the warmth of the sun seeping through the still frigid air.

“Say yer peace, son,” the preacher said, placing a hand on Jim’s shoulder, the spectators quietening.

He thought for a moment.

“Aint no peace to be had.”

The lever was pulled and the floor gave way. 

Part One

***

Love never commanded such meaning until the day I saw my daughter visit me in the hospital. If those demons pretending to be angels could be described as a beautiful illusion, then her gentle spirit must be a precious reality. Together with my wife, she read the Bible and offered prayer for my recovery.

“Does daddy dream while sleeping like this?”

She looked to her mother for an answer, face bright with an amazing smile.

“If he does, I bet he’s dreaming about riding horses with you on the beach.”

Her words sparked something within me, bringing forth a powerful memory. Like a lucid dream, I re-lived a moment from my past.

A gentle, salty breeze cooled my skin. The pleasant sensation of warm sand hugged around my toes. Our little girl held a red plastic shovel, digging for shells in the fading afternoon sun. Along the distance — off to our right — a pair of horses trotted down the beach. When they passed by, our daughter giggled with gleeful joy in her eyes. She ran up, slamming into me with a hug.

“Daddy, daddy! Can we ride horsies on the beach someday, too?”

The memory faded, returning me to the bleak sterility of my hospital room.

My little girl kissed my forehead before departing with her mother, leaving me alone once more. Settling into the silence, I fought to hold on to the beautiful feeling the flashback gifted.

Any pleasant emotion I attempted to cherish was snuffed out when a deep, echoing voice caught my attention:

“You passed the test.”

Floating near the window, a figure cloaked in dark robes faced me. Clutching an old leather-bound book in hand, I noticed bones protruding from its finger joints, covered in mottled flesh that appeared rotted beyond decay.

“Excuse me?”

Without revealing its face, the entity floated ever so slightly closer.

“All mortals face temptation before being granted access to eternal paradise. For resisting the evil one, I shall be your safe passage to our heavenly father’s side.”

Extending a skeletal arm teeming with rotting flesh, the entity offered a grotesque hand.

“Y’know, for being a guide into the afterlife, you sure don’t give off a very inviting appearance.”

“This is the form all life takes when we return to God. For his judgment measures far greater than the appearance of mortal flesh. Will you not come forth with me now?”

Moving back, I gravitated towards the Bible sitting by my bed.

“Alright, prove to me you aren’t some demonic freak trying to trick me again. Come stand over here. I know you monsters can’t be around this thing.”

It lowered its arm, backing up against the window.

“Very well. Remain here, though you put off the inevitable. All of God’s children must return or face judgement in the end, you cannot deny it forever.”

“Yeah? Well take a good look at me! I’m not dead yet!”

The entity sprawled its arms out, tilting its head back just enough to reveal the outline of a boney jaw underneath the hood.

“But you will be soon.”

Disappearing into the wall, the grim reaper wannabee made its exit before I could offer a response.

The next day, an older man visited with my wife. He appeared vaguely familiar, though I could not place his identity. There was something I didn’t like about him. While my wife’s frown carried the burden of grief and loss, his expression felt imbued with toxic emotions of anger.

“Well what’d the other doctor say? Is my son going to be a fuckin’ vegetable when he wakes up? Because I’d rather just pull the damn plug right now.”

My wife’s frown grew deeper, tapping into a wellspring of sorrowful tears.

“You’d really just give up on him so easily? What about your granddaughter, Dylan?”

“It’s been several months. The poor girl should understand her father is gone! It’s not healthy to feed a young child lies n’ false hopes like that.”

I wanted to punch the jackass squarely in the jaw; if only I had a working arm.

“I can't believe you, y’know that? She’s a six-year-old girl. She still believes in Santa, why shouldn’t she think there’s still hope?”

Walking over to the window, the disgusting person claiming to be my parent cracked the window. Fishing out a cigarette and lighter from his shirt pocket, he blew a deep puff of smoke outside.

“Listen here, bitch. It was your bright idea to go on a vacation while the mountains were covered in snow! Maybe yer husband would still be here if y’all didn’t pressure the man to blow all his fuckin’ money on frivolous bullshit!”

The ruckus alerted a passing nurse, who stopped by to finally take my wife’s side:

“Sir, you need to calm down or I’m going to get security to escort you out of here.”

He sighed, snuffing the cigarette butt on his boot and tossing it out the window. A sickening sensation of anger washed over me when he stepped up to my bedside, laid a hand on my shoulder and hummed.

“Lord, be with this boy right now. I tried to tell him this woman was no good fer him, now look what happened. Maybe y’all will steer clear of icy roads next time. Granted there’ll be a next time.”

Another lucid vision flashed before my eyes.

My knuckles gripped an unsteady steering wheel, skin tingling from the biting cold. The defroster worked tirelessly to maintain what little vision I had beyond the windshield.

My wife comforted our crying daughter in the back seat, cuddling up next to her for warmth. Snow covered the road, blending in with the thick maelstrom of a horrible blizzard. 

Before I could react, the road twisted off to the right. Our car nose-dived off a cliff. The vision ended right before we collided with the ground.

My father was gone when I came back around. Hovering by the window, the wannabe grim reaper stalked quietly as my wife sobbed into my bedside.

“You have been here too long.”

“And I’ll keep staying here. What are you gonna do about it?”

“Listen to my words. Souls cannot exist upon the mortal plane for long. As you are, you must face judgment or return to God. These visions are a sign your soul is becoming more sensitive to the volatile energies of the mortal world. Soon, they will destroy you.”

“Is that going to be a better fate than going to hell with you?”

Hovering up to the Bible by my bedside, the entity placed its finger bones over the cross symbol.

“I am not your enemy but tomorrow he will come. The devil will tempt you once more, listen not to the lies. Perhaps then you shall understand what must be done.”

Fading into a veil of black smoke, the reaper departed.

It was a simple design. I'd been doodling ahead of a meeting with the city manager and other municipal staff when someone else joined me in waiting.

“Carl Arn,” he said, sitting next to me, despite several empty seats farther away.

My company was competing for a contract to provide city services, and I figured his was too. We shook hands and introduced ourselves. I was confident in my presentation and went back to the absent-mindedness I'd been up to. Prepping any more than I had would've been counterproductive and I was working on relaxing as much as possible before my pitch.

“Whatcha got goin’ on there?” my competitor said. I didn't really want to talk but I could see he wasn't going to leave me alone. He was one of those nervous types, couldn't keep quiet. He had to fill every silent space.

I was going to beat this guy, but he didn't know it yet. I knew his company and had gone up against much more confident reps. They must have known we already had it in the bag or only responded to the RFP as a professional courtesy.

It wasn't going to be a very lucrative contract, but my strategy was to springboard into three adjacent municipalities and use this one as a hub.

“Just doodling,” I said to him. He was young, maybe five or so years younger than me. The ink on his degree was still drying.

He cranked his neck to look. It was annoying and I slapped my palm over what I was drawing.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm a bit of an artist, myself. I minored in...” he trailed off, looking at a corner of my paper.

“What's that?”

“Hm?” I looked at him, ready to scold him in the most diplomatic way possible.

His eyes were wrong.

Like they were a centimeter or two off from center. I blinked several times as if I were trying to reset them with my eyelids.

“It's beautiful,” he said, not looking up from the page. I looked down and saw everything I'd drawn was covered except one little shape near the corner that was just outside of my hand.

“What?”

“Brootifil,” he said and sucked in a line of saliva that had trailed out of his mouth. His eyes were too big, almost like he was hungry.

“Are you okay?” I hadn’t actually finished the question before he swatted me faster than my eyes could see the blow coming.

I was belly up on the floor trying to orient myself. My first thought was to get him away from my presentation and my notes. He hadn't touched my backpack, though. 

He was holding the sheet of paper up to his face, so close it was like he extremely nearsighted. His eyes were so large, it made me think of that astronaut who drove across the country in a diaper to kill her boyfriend's romantic rival. 

Then he stuffed the paper in his mouth and began awkwardly chewing it. Tears were flowing from his eyes and he turned his face up to the ceiling like he was in heaven.

“Is everything alright out here?” An older white man came out of the conference room where we were to meet. I propped up on one elbow, intending to get to my feet. But my head swam and I laid back down.

My competitor turned to the older man and something and his face must have told the other man to step back. I commanded my body to get up, but it was as if I were paralyzed. My body twitched without actually moving and I stopped struggling against the invisible gorilla pinning me to the floor.

He hummed as he continued chomping on the paper, face turned to the old man. A long, pregnant moment passed where nobody did anything.

“May I help—”

My competitor attacked, fingers extended like knives as he stabbed the other man, who still didn't look like he understood was happening even as he plummeted to the ground, his murderer still in the process of killing him.

It took longer than I would've guessed for police to respond to a crime in a municipal building, but my competitor—Carl Arn—managed to kill two people and injure three others, including one critically.

That's not counting me, of course. Even though I was on the floor and clearly not in the fight, the assumption was the two of us were together and the policy's response was somewhat anticlimactic.

They screamed at him and the two responding officers fired three times apiece, managing to hit him only twice.

They screamed at me as he lay next to me, the life leaking out of him and flowing toward me. I was able to turtle up, covering the essential parts of me like I could shield myself from projectiles traveling at almost nine hundred miles per hour.

By some miracle, I remained gunshot for the next half hour or so while I was handcuffed, commanded to put my hands above my head, stood up, sat down, and almost tazered for resisting before fainting and waking up in a hospital bed, handcuffed to the frame. 

I had a concussion but was otherwise fine. Arn had swatted me hard and fast enough to leave a handprint and jar my brain loose.

The video had vindicated me. They didn't see the slap—rather the aftereffect. It had been so fast the camera hadn't caught it, just me falling to the floor and thrashing around like I'd been caught in a spider's web.

I'd fished the scratch pad with pen attached from the little end table near my bed. Luckily, they'd handcuffed my right arm, leaving my dominant one free.

I decided against jotting down what I recalled had happened. No doubt anything I committed to paper the police would be interested in, even if it was a grocery list.

So, I doodled. It was sort of cathartic, taking me back to those initial moments. My mind went back to Arn's face, struggling to deny the undeniable fact he was rapidly dying.

A piece of the paper he'd snatched and eaten was attached to his chin. The shape I'd finished moments before Carl Arn asked me, “What's that?” was still there for anyone to see.

His face turned into the shallow pool of red, drowning the shape.

I drew it a half dozen more times while sitting in a hospital bed while the authorities decided how they were going to untie this knot and if my neck would be in it.

I fell asleep after a light lunch of potato chips, baloney sandwich with a packet of mustard and a packet of mayo, and dry, tasteless coleslaw.

I came to with a woman in my room, gathering things off my lap. She was mumbling in Spanish, her back to me when she stopped completely.

“Nice,” she said in unaccented English, her head dipped as if she were reading something. Then she turned around, facing me.

God, her eyes.

It was like she was trying to see something above her head, through her skull. Her face was otherwise slack as she felt around blindly like we were in the dark.

She groped around until he hand landed on the (unused) metal bed pan. I thought those things were plastic nowadays.

I must have gasped because she turned around like she'd heard a homing beacon. I tugged at the cuff, a ringing dinner bell for the mindless dog about to bludgeon me to death with a disposal pan if she could still tell the difference between my head and feet.

I must have been screaming because another woman came in the room—I'd temporarily forgotten the word “nurse” in my panic—surprising with of us and the first woman began swinging in random directions with such savagery, I felt shadows of pain across my cheeks.

This time the police didn't have the opportunity to confuse me for the perpetrator. The nurse hooked a hand behind his neck, leapt both feet into his chest and commenced to flattening the less-hardy of the two between Officer Wheeler's skull and the pissbox. She landed on his chest, only her arm visible from where I lay as she flapped it up and down like a one-winged bird, the pan making a -DOON- sound each time it bounced off his head.

More hospital security came (quicker than the cops had) and a few pops later, the woman was dead.

I had to get out of here. My eyes drifted over to where the nurse had been looking at something before she'd turned violent. I had a tingle of uneasiness, feeling something I had done potentially being the cause. My mind wouldn't quite let me grasp what it was, but it felt like it should have been obvious, like something wedged between my teeth that I couldn't work out.

The officer I'd seen shoot stepped halfway into my room with his gun out. He looked perplexed, like he wanted to blame me, and I leaned into looking pathetic, hovering my face near my handcuffed wrist as I did a supine version of a huddle.

The next two hours were a flurry of hospital staff and police in and out of my room. The cops kept stopping a nurse from checking on me because my room was an active crime scene. But when a doctor suggested moving me to another room, they shot that down for reasons I couldn’t understand.

Finally, a detective and some hospital administrator had a long conversation outside of my room. The administrator said something to the detective about calling the mayor and the rest of the investigation was wrapped up in less than ten minutes.

The cop who’d been assaulted survived and the nurse who came in to check on me told me he was on a floor below after having emergency surgery to reattach his jaw. The nurse had been shot and had bled to death fighting the cop who’d shot her three times.

Everything the cops could have taken out of my room, had been removed. They’d even taken my clothes, keys, and wallet. By that evening, a detective finally came to speak with me.

“Mr. Harold, you have a minute?” He knocked on the door. I recognized his voice as the same one who’d spoken with the administrator. He walked in where I could get a good look at him and the guy was a sloven mess. I was used to Detective Green and Briscoe on Law & Order, and although Lenny’s suits looked off the rack, he didn’t look like he’d dressed himself while falling down a laundry chute.

I waited for him to speak. He stood by my bedside and looked like he smelled. Something whitish was drying on his lapel, he had ring-around-the-collar, and dried spittle in the corners of his mouth. I was grateful for the chill hospital air choking whatever smells were crawling over him before they could reach me.

“Am I going to need a lawyer?” I asked him.

“No-no,” he said. “We’ve been able to put together what happened at city hall and here earlier. Um, are you okay?”

I wasn’t, but I was currently numb to the whole experience considering for half of it I’d been treated like a suspect. I shrugged.

“What you had to go through was incredible. You’re a real hero.”

He was pouring it on a little thick. I guessed this was what they did instead of an actual apology. I’d had two-to-three guns pointed at me by people who were allegedly there to protect me.

“When can I go?”

“Well, I guess when the hospital discharges you. We certainly don’t need to hold you for anything.”

“Okay.” I nodded. He stared at me for a moment like he was expecting me to say something more.

“I suppose I should get going. Let you, y’know, convalesce. Oh, I’m Detective Unangenehm, by the way.” He offered his hand belatedly. I looked at it for a long second before shaking it. His hand was limp and sweaty, like wilted lettuce, kind of like what it looked like he had trapped between his front teeth.

He headed for the door, and I kept expecting him to turn back before he got to the door and ask, “One more thing,” but he exited.

Then he came back a minute later.

“I forgot to ask you,” Detective Unangenehm said. “Do you have any idea what set off Carl Arn or Rosa Skein?”

“Who?”

“The... man at city hall. And your nurse?” Unangenehm had his notepad in his hand and glanced down at it.

I’d never forget Carl Arn’s name, and I hadn’t known the nurse’s. While I didn’t know what had driven them mad, I had a strong suspicion and considering it led back to me, I wasn’t about to volunteer that.

“I have no idea.”

Unangenehm smiled, nodded somberly, and left.

A nurse had come into my room right after. She erased something from the dry-erase board and wrote something else while the detective and I had been talking.

She was thin and tall but older than she looked as she grunted, bending over to pick up something off the floor.

She turned over the piece of paper I'd been drawing on, made a face, then showed it to me.

“This yours?” she asked. 

Everyone in Hobbins Glenn knew how Sorrow's Eve began. The story had been passed down from mother to child for as far back as anyone could remember. It was as familiar to the townsfolk as the meandering paths and wooded thickets that surrounded the small village, tucked into a valley resting between mounds of forested hills.

It was a tale to be told in the deepest, darkest hours of night, as the guardian of shadows rose to its full zenith in the sky.

Within each cottage, behind each shuttered window and locked door, there lived a storyteller, a woman whose age eclipsed the early memories of her youth. Wisdom, greater than knowledge found within the pages of books, was written into the deep lines embedded into a face flecked with brown spots.

When supper had been eaten, and children had been bathed, the storyteller would take up her mantle beside a fireplace, in a wooden rocking chair reserved solely for her.

As her wide-eyed audience settled in around her hunched and blanketed figure, seated in a semi-circle on the floor, she lit a rushlight. Within its dim, fluttering glow her pale face tarnished the muted beige of a weevil.

Sometimes when she spoke she recounted the many interlocking histories of the denizens of Hobbins Glenn, whom had married whom, those that had been cast out of the village, those whose names had been struck from their weathered tombstones by the turn of the seasons, under the lash of ceaseless wind and rain.

A particular favorite among children was the tale of a father who had been gifted with too many daughters, and been left barren of a son.

Somewhere between the here and now, and after the storyteller had been given life, there had been a farmer who had lived on a quiet stretch of land on the border of Hobbins Glenn.

On the eve of his youngest daughter's birth, the farmer's wife died.

Cradling his newborn, he led a procession of teary-eyed girls up to the top of the cemetery's highest hill and watched as her elm coffin was lowered into the ground.

A fellow mourner had offered sympathy, not just for the farmer's wife, but to the farmer himself for his misfortune in never having a son.

“Rotten luck, seven girls. What will you do when age or illness claims you? The law of succession requires a man's land needs a son to carry its legacy forward.”

The farmer was keenly aware his land was forfeit should his toes point toward the clouds before a boy could be blessed with his surname.

He picked at the thought like a crusted scab, over and over, scraping his nails under its cracked surface to jab at the raw and tender sore beneath the rough and hardened flesh.

As the years passed the scab grew larger. He poked at it constantly, even as his gaze lingered on the empty space beside him. Like the scab, the bed had seemingly grown larger, twice the size that it had been when his wife was warm, and breathing, and alive.

Replacing her wasn't as simple as substituting a puppy to soothe the enduring ache of losing the unquestioned devotion and companionship of a loyal, but dead, dog.

There wasn't a woman willing to take on the challenge of seven girls, five cows, three pigs, two horses, fifty chickens, and four fields of wheat within a hundred miles of Hobbins Glenn.

And even if there were a woman up to the task, the farmer's heart soured at the notion of another woman's objects occupying the nooks and crannies where his wife's possessions were now enshrined.

The next part of the story differed from storyteller to storyteller, with details altered to align with the age of the rapt listeners gathered at the foot of her rocking chair.

In the versions delivered to the youngest in Hobbins Glenn, there was a well-traveled merchant eager to share the rumors that crisscrossed the valley, drifting from market stalls to passing caravans and back to market stalls in a never ending circle of gossip.

This merchant spoke of a grotto, misted in sea spray, its entrance hidden beneath a curtain of hanging moss. When the veil of vines were parted, a long forgotten cavern was revealed. Its damp walls wept water into glistening pools edged by aged boulders strewn with clumps of lichen that clung like tree resin to the slick stones.

Within this grotto there was a shrine. Atop this shrine there was an empty chest, fitted with golden clasps...

If the children were older, less inclined to believe in the wishing magic of talking fishes, or in mystical caverns where treasure buried itself like a hermit crab at the stroke of dawn, the storyteller presented her tale with a darker variant.

In this version, the farmer became a nightly visitor at a tavern located in the center of Hobbins Glenn. At a table that rocked back and forth on its uneven legs when the weight of his elbows were rested on its stained surface, he greedily drank ale after tankard of ale, picking endlessly at the scab, seeking a solution to his problem.

One night, when the farmer was as plentiful with his tankards as he was with his thoughts, a stranger entered the tavern; his arrival heralded by a howl of wind that blew in behind him, throwing back the door on its loose hinges.

He wore a long-sleeved shirt and breeches, blacker than chimney soot. Silver buckles studded the shafts of his mid-calf boots, their turned down leather cuffs stitched to the uppers with knotted dimples of gray cord. A heavy, woolen cloak hid the true width and depth of his shoulders beneath it folds, and its generous length dusted the back of his calves. The cloak shifted as he moved, flashing glimpses of its inner lining, shimmering and red like the seeds of a pomegranate.

His face was buried deep within a hood shaded the same color as his clothes, its outer piping matched his cloak's inner lining.

It was late into the eve when the stranger arrived. Many of the tavern's patrons had already abandoned their mugs, and their rambling conversations, for the comforts of feather pillows and straw mattresses. He had his choice of where to settle himself, as nearly every table in the room sat empty. He chose a a bench opposite the farmer and lowered himself onto it, without the courtesy of an introduction or asking for permission.

From within the folds of his cloak he withdrew a coin purse and tossed it onto the table.

The farmer drained the last drops of ale from his tankard and wiped his sleeve across his mouth. A small belch escaped his lips. He slowly glanced from the pouch to the stranger.

His glance met an unblinking gaze, twin opals for eyes staring back at him.

“I seek the man with seven daughters,” the stranger said. “I was told I would find him here.”

“Found him,” the farmer replied. “Six now. My eldest. Lenora, has married. Gone away with her new husband.”

“Revenna, “ the stranger said. “Eyes as blue as cornflowers. Honey-ed hair that flows like a stream.”

The farmer sighed. “There is no dowry. I cannot meet a price.”

The stranger pushed the pouch closer toward the farmer.

“All the coins in the pouch, or information on how to obtain a son, for a bride.”

It was here the storyteller would pause, leaving her audience to debate which choice they would make if such an offer were presented to themselves.

Invariably, the males within the small groups vocally declared their support in favor of the bag of coin.

The girls, more sentimental, and who had been paying much more attention to the story, gave their favor to fulfilling the farmer's quest in securing a legacy for himself.

After the discussion, and long sip of tea, laced with milk, the storyteller continued.

To the disappointment of the boys, she resumed her story with the farmer having chosen to receive the information the stranger offered.

“There is a forest beyond the DireThorne peaks in the north. Echos of seekers past will provide the route which will guide you to a shrine. Atop a pillar there is a chest, adorned with golden hinges. Fair is the price the chest demands.”

The farmer left the tavern, freed from a mouth to feed, eager to begin his journey to obtain an heir.

It was at this point each storyteller wove geographical lessons into the farmer's adventures across the Kindlehollow plains, naming towns and the customs of the people who lived within each region beyond the boggy reach of the Tangleroot Mire. The trick was not to arouse the children's suspicion, lest they discover their storyteller was also a seasoned schoolmistress, teaching them the lay of the land, which forests were haunted, how to ford rushing rivers, or how to avoid the lairs of hobgoblins.

When the farmer finally reached the forgotten forest of Duskfen, the youngest listeners were thoroughly spent. They had shifted from sitting upright to lying on a rug, propped up on elbows or curled onto their sides clutching their favorite blankets, their eyelids drifting between open and closed.

This pleased the storytellers. Sleep brought the chance to repeat the story, on another night, beside the same fireplace, surrounded by the same, yet ever-changing faces. As they grew, so did the tale, not with the addition of new, more exciting elements, but with each child's ability to remain awake for longer and longer stretches of the storyteller's plot weaving.

The final act of the story contained a twist, as all good stories do, shocking to those who heard it for the first time, sobering to those who knew it was coming.

The farmer did not reach the gloomy confines of Duskfen alone. He had brought the daughter who had sent his wife to her grave.

Over the many days and miles they had traveled, they had not once walked side by side. They moved as two lone strangers sharing the same road, heading in the same direction, each aware of the other's presence, yet unwilling to engage in the meaningful conversation that might have emerged without the interruptions that came with a cramped cottage and five older voices vying to be heard.

She had tried to ply answers when they left Hobbins Glenn.

What was in this forest?

Why couldn't they find what they needed in the forests closer to their cottage?

Had he ever seen the DireThorne peaks?

Should she pack her charcoal pencils and blank pages of vellum?

Her questions were as frequent as his wife's nightly trips to the chamber pot had been, during the final stages of her confinements, when she was heavily rounded with each child.

She chirped her countless observations like a cricket, endless and annoying, unlike the meek girl who would circle around the entirety of Hobbins Glenn to avoid his disapproving glances and gruff retorts, with a downcast head and averted eyes.

She had soon learned, when her many queries went unanswered, that no response was a response.

Silence forged itself to their stride, wedged between their footfalls and exhaled breaths, as a third traveler to accompany them on their journey to Duskfen.

When they arrived at the edge of the forest, the farmer discovered how the vast stretch of lofty trees had earned its name. Duskfen didn't warrant nightfall to rouse nocturnal creatures from their slumber.

Towering trunks, capped with an intertwined panoply of branches and leaves stretched to the height of mountains, shielding the bleak shadows that dwelt within the forest from light. Darkness loomed behind each bush. It seeped into the undergrowth, and flowed into the clefts between banks of smaller trees. Even at the peak of midday, the streams they encountered ran as black as ink.

At his insistence she had taken the lead when they breached Duskfen, while he observed her from afar.

Her handed down cloak had seen one too many winters, been worn in succession by one too many of his girls. Patches of cloth, cut from dresses she had outgrown, had been sewn onto the garment where the wool was as threadbare as the silvery wings of a horsefly. Her boots were too large, sliding up and down over the back of her heels. One wrong, floppy step sank her into oozing puddles of mud lurking beneath the spongy layers of damp earth resting on the forest floor, wrestling her boots from her feet.

Perhaps, if she had been born first he would have laughed, watching her tug, tug, and tug to extract her boots from the quagmires into which they had sunk.

Perhaps, he would have been proud of her skill with her charcoal pencil. When they stopped to rest she balanced a wooden tablet on her lap, overlain with a blank piece of vellum, and drew their surroundings. Her hand flowed freely, capturing frogs leaping over stumps and splashing into ponds, bats swirling around a hollow and then gliding low through a maze of trees. In a rare moment that broke their silence, she declared when they returned to Hobbins Glenn she would bind her pictures into a journal to celebrate their travels.

Perhaps, he would have worked harder to stash enough coin for her dowry. He was certain if things could be different there would have been a line of men longer than every trunk in Duskfen, stacked end to end, seeking to secure a marriage arrangement.

Somehow, without him knowing, or having paid little attention, she had grown into a beautiful blossom of a young woman, reed thin, with a mass of red curls that brushed her lower back. In the almond shape, and fern-green shade of her eyes, the farmer found an identical match to the woman he'd set into the soil oh so many years ago.

Looking at her from across a shared campfire pained the farmer, prodding him to dig deeper beneath the oozing crust of his enduring scab. A disturbing jumble of grievances tallied against her were thrown together into a cooking pot of resentment, and left to simmer until her worthwhile qualities; her humor, her curiosity, her artistry, had been boiled away in steamed wisps.

Six girls were plenty. This blossom had cost him years of laughter and happiness, and robbed him of a means to produce a son.

The voices stirred the first night they bedded down to sleep. Everywhere. Nowhere. Close, like a lover whispering in his ear. Far, like the melancholy howl of wolf drifting across a meadow.

“It has three heads.”

“The face bleeds.”

“Belly of a stump.”

“Bring the girl.”

“Fair is the price the chest demands.”

“Leave the girl.”

Fair is the price the chest demands. The phrases repeated like a familiar chorus. Soft. Loud. Beside him. Next to her.

It was here the storyteller paused once more, listening as children who had never heard the story murmured their thoughts aloud, trying to decipher the meaning behind the words the voice's spoke.

If the child was a boy “three heads” obviously alluded to a Dragon stalking the forest of Duskfen. With even more imagination applied, this Dragon had dueled a warrior whose face had been bloodied during their battle. “Belly of a stump” was the challenge. This was the one they couldn't quite reconcile into their dragon and knight confrontation taking place somewhere deeper within the forest.

Girls were simpler, not lacking in the imagination inherent in the boys, but more inclined to apply the logic of reasonable assumption, when considering the environment surrounding the farmer and his daughter. Rather than instantly jumping to visions of a scaled, fire-breathing dragon kiting a bloodied knight in dented armor, they used deduction. “Three heads”, they reasoned, was a marker meant to guide the farmer. Exactly what type of marker remained elusive, and often left them confused. Many assumed it was a reference to a tree, where three, thick trunks had had been fused into a single, solid mass of wood.

It was during these moments the storyteller was drawn backward in time, where she saw herself seated at the foot of a rocking chair, wide-eyed and eager for her storyteller to resume her tale after every well-timed, tension-mounting pause.

Each had their own favorite in their age of smooth, baby-soft cheeks and missing front teeth, a story that stuck with them long after candle flames had been doused into curled, burnt wicks.

Sorrow's Eve.

The Farmer's Choice.

Fournier's Enchanted Sword.

The Unbraiding.

There was something intangible within these stories that made them as unforgettable as love's first kiss. The telling of them required patience, skill, the understanding reactions to the narratives were as important as the narratives themselves.

It wasn't often the youngest in Hobbins Glenn dreamed of the day they too would be hampered with a limp, and joints that ached like an unhealed wound from the simple act of rising from a chair, but for future storytellers the thought of bundling themselves into a blanket beside a fireplace, sharing their most savored tales by the flickering glow of rushlight, was a day that could not come soon enough.

When the story resumed, the storyteller's audience discovered “three heads” was not a tree, but instead represented a small river, split into a trio of branching paths.

They also discovered there had indeed been the mention of a tree in the phrases the voices repeated. At the river's head, the trunk of the tallest tree bled sap through furrowed grooves gouged into its rough surface. Two knotted holes resembled a pair of squinted eyes, and a gash beneath them had twisted into the visage of a snarled grin.

The farmer and his daughter followed the river's head until they reached a fallen log, its hollow interior wide enough for a man to crawl through.

It was here the voices assaulted the farmer with another chorus.

“Jasmine, where jasmine does not belong.”

“Jasmine.”

“Jasmine, where jasmine does not belong.”

“Jasmine for the girl.”

“Calm the girl.”

“Sleep for the girl.”

“Fear her flight.”

The farmer called for a halt to their progress, suggesting the day had been tiresome.

While his daughter gathered kindling for their fire, the farmer searched for jasmine in the abundant undergrowth that formed a leafy ring around their clearing.

In a blooming patch of purple hellebore and pink hydrangeas he found the white, star-shaped petals of the flower reaching up through a twined mesh of stems and leaves.

That night, over a supper of fried frog legs, he boiled water for a remedy he told his daughter would soften the ground against her weary bones and relieve the pain of the blisters on her feet.

She tested the brew with her nose, inhaling the sweet, floral aroma, before lifting the cup to her lips.

The farmer watched closely, urging her to gulp the concoction swiftly, drain the cup's contents right down to the very last drop.

“Sleep for the girl.”

“Son for a farmer.”

“Belly of a stump.”

His daughter's eyelids drifted open and shut like the youngest of the children in the storyteller's audience.

The cup slipped from her fingers, landing with a muffled thud.

The farmer caught her before she fell. For a brief moment he cradled her as he had done when she was an infant.

Perhaps, he would have loved her as he did the others if the jellied cord that had been looped around her neck had been tighter. He could have buried them both together, grieved for her as he did his wife. Living, she was a persistent reminder of his greatest loss. She was the cause of his festering scab. She was the reason the injury had not healed.

He dragged her through the stomach of the stump, emerging into another clearing.

Wooden planks, rotted with age, were set into the soil, forming a winding path through an avenue of low hanging branches that were knotted together like the matted clumps of an orphan's tangled hair.

Shafts of long poles were staked into the ground, their tips wrapped in strips of cloth bound together with pitch-pine tar. Tendrils of black smoke spiraled into the air, coaxing the cloth into eruptions of pulsating orange flames.

He lifted his daughter into his arms.

Fair is the price the chest demands.

An earthen knoll at the end of the path had been pillaged of its roots, its interior laid bare.

On a pedestal that stood in front of a monolith veined with cracks, and covered in symbols that glimmered with the eerie sheen of foxfire, there was a square chest domed with a rounded lid, and fitted with golden hinges.

The farmer set his daughter down and approached the chest.

The voices pressed in, harassing, circling. They swooped in close for their attacks, then scurried back into the shadows like a banshee driven to seek the safety of her lair at the first brush of daylight.

“Son for the farmer.”

“Girl for the chest.”

“Leave the girl.”

“Claim the son.”

“No love for the girl.”

“Never for the girl.”

The farmer stopped mid-stride, and clamped his hands over his ears.

They advanced again, converging from all sides, their phrases sharpened for another assault.

“Tighten the cord.”

“Release the cord”

“Snip the tie.”

“Grave for the girl.”

“Eyes of a dead wife.”

The voices waned into the hushed tones of softly chattering whispers.

“I can hear them, father,” his daughter said.

One second he was standing; the next, he was on his side, clutching his head, as a sudden burst of jolting pain showered his vision in an explosion of blinding white stars. The knoll, the pedestal, his daughter's boots, all spooled together in a hazy blur of brown, green, and gray.

A rush of blood flooded his ears, his eardrums pulsing in rhythm to his heartbeat.

The world collapsed inward, shrinking smaller and smaller, until his sight narrowed into the tunnel of a captain's spyglass.

She knelt beside him. “Would you like to know what they said?”

She leaned closer, her warm breath tickling the hairs on his cheek. “They warned me about you. About what you were going to do. Jasmine, where jasmine doesn't belong. Rosemary cures the jasmine. Bash the farmer. A father for a mother. Fair is the price the chest demands.”

As he had dragged her through the fallen log, she too dragged him to the pedestal.

She flung open the chest's lid and slipped her arms under and through his.

Lifting with the strength of mother whose child lay pinned beneath the weight of a fallen horse, she deposited him into the chest.

Then, she slammed the lid shut.

“Fair is the price the chest demands,” she repeated, watching as the sheen of foxfire on the monolith rippled in a cascade of blinding light.

A booming clap of thunder pierced the silence of Duskfen.

The chest pitched upward and slammed back down, again and again, rising and falling like a ship tossed about on storm-thrashed waves. In a chain of rapid snaps the chest's panels splintered along its joints.

When the storm ceased, the girl lifted the chest's lid.

Inside was a woman with almond-shaped, fern-green eyes. She was warm, breathing, alive.

It was at the conclusion of the story that storytellers wet their parched throats with the last swirl of tea in their cups, inwardly congratulating themselves on a fable well told.

The children who had managed to remain awake for the entirety of the tale began to babble all at once, their voices tripped over one another, questions and observations flying faster than spinning wheels could twist fiber into thread.

Was it really the girl's mother who had been in the chest?

Where had the father's body gone?

What happened to the farmer's family after daughter and mother returned to Hobbins Glenn?

The answers sprang easily to the tongues of storytellers who were not yet seasoned enough to let the questions linger like the scent of eucalyptus oil massaged onto sore muscles..

Those whose faces were scoured with lines, like those found scrubbed onto the bottom of well-used pots, were more evasive with their replies, framing their responses into more questions for the children to ponder.

What other woman could have been in the chest? Was it really a woman, or had the echoes manipulated both the farmer and his daughter to manifest a cruel illusion, born from their longing and their loss?

If the chest coursed with ancient magic, was it so hard to believe the farmer might vanish, never to be seen again, like a goat who'd escaped the confines of a paddock, foraging for bramble further and further afield?

The farmer's plot of land might still border the village. Perhaps, among the hardworking townsfolk who inhabited the smaller hamlets clustered around Hobbins Glenn, the farmer's daughter had raised a family of her own.

“Darling,” she purred melodically, “my darling, what a grand sense of style you possess,” to the Duke of Wilbury, who was wearing a grey bespoke Galvache blazer, matching trousers, impeccably hemmed, a thin brown leather belt and boots and the fragrance of Orinoco and who responded, “Genevieve, my love, mine is but a pauper’s in comparison to yours,” and the pianist played Debussy and the waiter poured red wine, and Genevieve, in her emerald green Em Tsheçon dress was radiance itself as her soft, rich skin smelled intoxicatingly of Pamplemousse Serenade…

---

Pamplemousse Serenade

...the newest creation from House of Madeleine…

---

—pped and fell, tumbling, tumbling, down the shaft, arms reaching out, scratching, flailing, trying to break… trying-to-slow down, trying to

THUD.

Dazed, Gar got up feeling the cold wet rock wall in the deep underground darkness, blinking, getting his eyes to adjust and his brains to stop swimming.

When they'd stopped and he could see, he saw through a dim smoky grey that Roddy was dead; broken neck.

But Lancelot was still alive, crawling over.

“Fuck. Is he—” asked Lancelot.

“Yeah,” said Gar.

Gar pulled both of Roddy's eyelids closed.

Far away, something bellowed, and the bellowing echoed down one of the natural corridors.

Lancelot's body shook.

Gar gripped his steel suction-spear and rubber collection sac.

“Which way?” asked Lancelot, holding the same two pieces of equipment.

“There, I think,” said Gar, pointing.

---

Two Weeks Earlier

---

A baby coughed.

Rain water dripped through a patched roof.

A pair of worn cupboard doors hung loosely open, revealing bare shelves.

“She's dying,” a woman said.

“She’s sick,” said Gar.

“She's sick and she's dying and you're sittin' there doing nothing about it.”

“Well what do you want me to do?”

“Get a doctor.”

“I tried. We can't afford one.”

“Then steal medicine.”

“What medicine? I've got no medical degree. Besides, even if I knew what medicine, I couldn't steal it because they all keep it stored in the vaults now.”

“Find work.”

“You think I haven't tried?”

“Try goddamn harder.”

Gar grabbed a soggy hat, pulled it onto his head, and draped a threadbare cloak on his shoulders and walked out of the hut into the rain.

The streets were mud.

He trudged along, looking for no one and nothing in particular, roasting in premature grief and lingering guilt, when a sheet of paper, carried haphazardly by the cold wind, pasted itself to the ground a few feet in front of him.

He picked it up.

He read the running ink:

Brave Men Wanted! No Experience Necessary! Good Pay! Equipment Provided! Interested? Enquire promptly, at the House of Madeleine.

---

A beautiful, semi-nude young woman reclines on a chaise longue.

It's hot.

Her body glistens.

Three turbanned servants fan her with giant leaves.

In the background, an impossibly large, glassless opening reveals a lush, green jungle of trees and vines and moss and ferns and passing tigers and—

The woman takes out a small, decorative red glass bottle. She sprays herself seductively with its contents.

—a thick, muscular constrictor snake slides through the opening. “Pamplemousse Serenade,” it hisses, and swallows the willing, moaning woman whole.

---

Pamplemousse Serenade

...the scent of bliss…

---

—ning down the walls, collecting in pools in recesses in the cavern floor and dripping from the long stalactites hanging fang-like overhead.

Gar led.

Lancelot followed.

The corridor narrowed and widened as it wound its way, this way and that, in a seemingly neverending series of bends, behind which lay, always, the unknown, and from around which issued, with increasing proximity and ferocity, that lone and horrible bellow, which hammered spikes of ice down both men's spines.

“It can't be far now,” said Gar.

Lancelot said nothing, his mind stuck on the imagined nightmare that he was traversing the veins of some colossal stone beast.

Then the—

…so fast neither of them…

a flesh-orb with a single bloodshot eye ringed with sharp flat teeth

…could…

—the impact: smashed them against the wall!

the head was a face and the face was a mouth and the eye was a tongue and the teeth were nails hammered through the lips of a screaming maw

Gar hit his shoulder, Lancelot, his head, dropping his suction-spear, he tries to pick it up, slipping, as Gar fails to register what he's seen, ripples of pain radiating from his shoulder, and, it was like a sphere on an eel's body, he thinks, like a head of cabbage sculpted from a mass of ground-up corpses.

And it comes again—this time from the other direction—bellowing, this time, so loud Gar thinks his eardrums'll pop and, evading it, feels the heatwind of its momentum, sees it snap its trap-jaws shut on Lancelot, weaponless and dazed, and carry him off into the cavernous darkness.

Manic, Gar runs after it.

He comes upon a chamber.

Low, vast.

It's there—and a hundred smaller its, its newborn, hungry young, feasting-sucking on bits of Lancelot's flesh torn from his cracked, exposed bones—and he's still in agony breathing when Gar screams and hunched low runs at the pamplemousse with his suction-spear held back, charges into it, knocking it back, falling on and wrestling it, tasting its bloodslime, and stabbing with the suction-spear and stabbing stabbing kicking stabbing screaming stabbing crying laughing stabbing until it's dead. Until it’s dead and he is soaked, and what's left of Lancelot is, mercifully, dead too.

Now Gar is alone in the chamber with the newborn its, which are hissing at him, and one-by-one he goes, stabbing each with his suction-spear and sucking out its organ bile and depositing it in his rubber collection sac.

When he's done, he lifts the full, heavy sac, and drags it the distance he'd come, past where the pamplemousse attacked them, all the way to the bottom of the shaft, where Roddy's body lies with its neck broken.

He yells.

A rope descends.

He grabs it, and mechanically it pulls him up, through the dark and into daylight.

I noticed something odd last night. As I was washing the days dishes I looked out my kitchen window and saw a light. A big red light, blinking off in the distance.

Nearest I could tell it looked it was on top of The Hill, it’s light cascading down upon mine and the other houses, drenching this tiny town in deep crimson for seconds that felt like eons at a time.

Flash on.
Flash off.
Flash on.
Flash off.

I continued watching through the window, the dishes in my hands far in the back of mind. The light was mesmerizing, but as it would turn off I’d find myself trying to remember when it even showed up.

To the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been any new construction in town for years, let alone on The Hill, anything there had long been reclaimed by nature. Old rotted wood and crumbling stone entangled by vines, covered with mosses and being broken apart slowly by sprouting trees.

Flash on.

Flash off.

Flash on.

Flash off.

The more my mind wandered the longer the flashes seemed, and the normal dark of night began to feel sparse in between deep baths of red. I began to feel a heaviness in my chest and a restlessness in my legs, an itch to go somewhere.

Flash on.

Flash off.

I tried to move, to set the dishes down and just move, but I felt glued there, staring out of the window. It was as though my muscles were replaced with lead. My chest began to feel heavier, and my heart began to race. I could feel sweat growing on my brow as the flashes grew faster once again.

Flash on.
Flash off.
Flash on.
Flash off.

My heart beat faster and faster, as the weight grew and my body began to feel pulled towards ground. My muscles began to ache as I struggled to do anything, run, hide, close the window, or even just my eyes.

Flash on. Flash off.
Flash on. Flash off.

The flashes grew faster than they had been before. I began to hear a ringing in my ears, so loud I was sure my ear drums would burst.

Flash onFlash offFlash onFlash off

The light is almost flickering now, I try to scream but nothing comes.

FlashonFlashoffFlashonFlashoff

It’s so fast now it’s hard to keep track of when the light is even on or off anymore. A red ring begins to grow around my vision.

FLASH ON.

The light stays on this time, for longer than it had before, my head feels as though it will split in two.

FLASH OFF.

and just like that, the light is off and stays off.

I feel my body relax, though the fatigue stays. A sharp pain in my left hand. I look down to see the cup I had been washing, broken, and a gash across my wrinkled palm. I rinsed the wound as I glanced at the clock overtop the oven, it read 1:35 am. I’d been there for hours, but it had felt like minutes.

I finished cleaning my new wound, and quickly found myself laying in bed, trying to rest my overly fatigued body. Where had that time gone? Sleep evaded me as I struggled with an answer.

It was there again tonight. I noticed it midway through my dinner. It was dull at first, either something new, or a windup I had missed last night. Dull and slow, but pulsing just like the night before. As time went it grew brighter and my food grew colder. I watched through my window again.

FLASH ON

FLASH OFF

As the light grew brighter it began to fill the nighttime air like a fog. It’s presence was thick, stinking, and putrid. A buzzing began in my ears.

FLASH ON

FLASH OFF

A buzzing. Deep and low, vibrating my whole being. Through the red I could see, again, that the light was coming from on top of The Hill. A dark, lonely place, The Hill.

FLASH ON
FLASH OFF

My temples begin to throb as my vision turns red. I taste blood.

FLASH ON

FLASH OFF

It’s been four nights in a row now.

That light has shown up four nights in a row.

It’s clearly beginning to affect my health. I wake up in the morning in odd places around my house, my muscles sore and body dehydrated. It seems that I can remember it starting, but after a certain point I just wake up. No clues as to what I had been doing previously, just soreness and a splitting headache.

It’s daytime now, and I swear I can see that there’s nothing on The HIll, just like I thought. I even grabbed my old binoculars to try and get a better view, but all I could see is a hill covered in green overgrowth. I think about the old road up to the top, I think about driving up there to see what’s really going on.

I think about these things, but I don’t do them. The fear of success and power of imagination keeping me here, rooted. What do I think I would find? Is it better to find nothing or something? What could I do even if I did find something strange up there? I sat as my thoughts raced circles around me.

It’s been over a week now. I’ve tried everything I can think of, but the light still persists. Somehow, through blackout curtains, newspaper, and even plywood, the light persists. It’s stinking glow fills my whole house each night, the air humid and thick. I know it will be here again tonight, I can feel it in the sweat that grows across my brow.

I never visited The Hill. I thought about it for days after I first brought it up, but couldn’t find the courage. I know it sounds silly, but I think it WANTS me to go there. I think it wants me to see it in person. I think it wants ME.

There’s a feeling, and I know it’s about to start. A pressure that fills the air, and it begins to smell almost of burning, a bristling of energy like right before lightning strikes. The air leaves and is replaced with anticipation.

FLASH ON

As expected, it returns. However, the light has no build up tonight. As soon as it turns on I feel it’s effects full force. I try to breathe, but the sickly air barely pours into my lungs, it’s thick and dark, like molasses.

FLASH OFF

It feels different tonight. I feel different tonight. I still feel an incessant itch, telling me to move, but unlike the previous nights this time I actually move, or remember moving. I don’t remember making these decisions myself, or even wanting to, but the led weights that were my feet began moving forward and onward.

FLASH ON

Forward and onward, like a fish on a line.

FLASH OFF

FLASH ON

I found myself in my car, driving on empty streets glowing scarlet. I passed houses, their own lights long off, illuminated instead by the nights current events.

FLASH OFF

In the intermittent spaces where there was no light it only made how wrong things were more obvious. Because there was NO light. No street lamps shone, no traffic signals blinked, not even the neon signs decorating the town bar hummed their soft hum.

FLASH ON

Not only was it pervasive, it had become absolute.

FLASH OFF

While it shone, the town shone.

FLASH ON

And when it was gone, so seemed the town, swallowed into a darkness unfamiliar.

FLASH OFF

I found myself at the bottom of The Hill, staring at a road that hadn’t seen a car since they still fought horses for space. Well aware I was no longer making decisions at this point. Something called me, and when I refused to answer, it answered for me. My car lurched forward and I started my ascent.

FLASH ON

Trees leered on either side of me, their shadows long and imposing, their branches creating a tunnel that separated me from the night sky. My car bumped and rattled along what was left of the road. I saw the remains of the old town as I drove. Abandoned after a fire, the hollow shells of buildings stared back at me with vacant expression.

FLASH OFF

I drove forward, even as the light left again, and I was swathed in pitch black, I kept driving. Even as it came back again and left again, I drove. The buildings were little more than rubble at this point, lashed down by vines and eaten by time.

FLASH ON

I neared the top of The Hill.

FLASH OFF

As I crest the top, my car dies, I don’t bother trying to start it at this point, I know that means I’m done driving. I open the door and begin to step out.

FLASH ON

The air is worse here than it has been so far. Sweat sticks my shirt to my back, I try to breathe but the smell makes it stop quick. Rotten and sweet, it coats my throat. I cough.

FLASH OFF

It’s like I’m blinded, for the first time I notice that not even the night sky shines with stars anymore. I stumble forward and trip.

FLASH ON

I’m moving again, pulled like a magnet. A low thrumming sound fills the air, my temples pound, and my vision blurs red. I can see the light now, not just the glow it emits, but the light itself. It seems to float, suspended by the density of it’s surrounding air.

FLASH OFF

I continue forward, the darkness covered by the red curtain of my eyes, and this time I did not stumble. I move as I feel the air, warm and strong, push me from behind.

FLASH ON

I stand underneath the light. I look up.

FLASH OFF

Silence echoes through The Hill. The thrumming is gone. My temples stop throbbing, and my vision clears.

I stand underneath the light, and I look up.

FLASH ON

The End

"Have you heard The Void?" The question kept popping up more and more often. In the dark basements where goth kids sulk. In dinky bars where they serve only beer, glasses are an unheard-of luxury, and unemployed philosophers pretend they know how the world works.

I had heard of them. The whisper-punks. The elusive new band that will redefine music. "Void of Plenty." Hearing them play... well, that's a privilege. You will not find them on Spotify or Bandcamp. The Void comes to you. In the middle of the night. While you sleep.

And whispers its angst and hopes and dreams in your ears.

In the morning, they are gone. Poof. No trace left. But you will know. Oh, you will know that they were there. Your life will be changed forever.

Finding them has become something of an obsession for me. Waking up at 4am, ears buzzing, starting to work the leads right away, rearranging my conspiracy board, making calls, surfing abandoned forum boards.

I can feel them, I can't explain why. Just a tiny itsy bit out of reach. But there.

The need to find them became almost intolerable.

That's High Strangeness material right there.

THE VOID WHISPERS.

In the end the pieces clicked. The spell itself was relatively easy, it turns out. All you have to do is drink a mix of cheap beer and discount wine (not white).

Run through the central park naked at midnight.

Don't get into any fights, that would reset the spell. Once you leave the park, all high on adrenaline, get dressed and stumble wherever your feet will lead you. Add sugar.

Easy-peasy.

I end up in an abandoned parking lot on the outskirts of the city. There's a light in the second-story window of a decrepit building across the lot. Yup, let's head there. What could possibly go wrong.

The door is nailed shut, but the window right next to it is open. Shards of glass cover the floor inside. Early detection system. Home security for the homeless.

Yes, this is extremely safe, thank you, Editors.

The upstairs room looks almost cozy. Considering. Furniture consists mostly of empty cardboard boxes and three folding chairs. Cheap candles everywhere. A fire-safety inspector's worst nightmare.

I catch my breath and eye the trio. Except it's not a trio, not exactly. Two of them eye me right back, with no apparent alarm or surprise.

"Hey mate, you ok?" the guy-one asks. The way you'd ask someone who's late.

I will find out later that he goes by the name of Cupcake. Once he smiles, it becomes clear why.

Next to him sits a girl, tightly packed in a grossly oversized waterproof parka, her hood drawstrings tied so tight it looks as if she'll be choked out any moment now. She's peering at me through sunglasses that reflect a light from another world. Or perhaps she's asleep. Hard to tell. Name's Pale.

The third member of the band is sitting on the cardboard table in the middle of the candles. It's a dictaphone. A scruffy Norelco NT-1 cassette recorder, the little silver kind, scuffed to dull pewter at the corners, a hairline crack across the speaker grille. There was a time when prestigious journalists carried them around everywhere. Also, insane cranks trying to record the voices of the deceased.

It was a thingie.

One red LED on its face, dim, steady. Waiting.

I'm told it holds two dead voices, unlikely room mates. Two dead men sharing one tape.

One is the late Karlheinz Stockhausen, the mad composer who spliced the human voice into sine tones until you couldn't find the human.

The other that of Darby Crash, the screamsinger of the Germs, who planned his own death at twenty-two to make himself immortal. Only to get upstaged by the assassination of John Lennon the very next day.

You can't plan fame.

Together, they go by the name of Hiss.

I introduce myself. Cupcake seems amused and politely reaches over to move Hiss off the chair for my benefit. The instant his hand gets close, the little machine clicks — a soft mechanical bite — and its red light flutters, and the cracked speaker spits three seconds of sound: an organ chord, swelling, churchy, and under it a voice, slowed and dragged half an octave too low. German. Maybe.

Familiar. Maybe.

"Sorry," Cupcake says, to the recorder, not to me. He sets it gently on the cardboard instead.

"It don't like being touched when it's listening."

I pull out my notebook. It's more armor than tool. These guys look super cool and my impostor syndrome spikes badly. The notebook lets me feel more important. My shield of paper.

And then I notice Hiss has turned its one red eye on the notebook. Or it feels like it has. Two recorders in the room now, mine and theirs, and only one of us is any good at the job.

High Strangeness: "Tell our readers about yourselves."

Cupcake: How many you got?

HS: Excuse me?

C: Readers. How many you have?

I feel exposed all of a sudden. Pale chews on bubble gum, pops a bubble. No trace of emotion. Hiss just... sits. The red light pulsing, very slightly, in time with my breathing. I feel judged by a machine.

I don't know. I just slip the magazine into coffee shops, bars, and couple of dentist offices.

Cupcake nods seriously.

C: Slipping in. I see. Well, our process is not entirely dissimilar. We slip in uninvited. When people sleep, they're innocent, you know? Like children. Everything's possible when we sleep. That's when we sing. Well.. whisper.

HS: I don't... how does it work, suggestion, hypnosis?

C: Nah, man… how do I put it. Punk's all about tearing down the walls, right? Burn down the old, invite the new. Our songs don't tell people what to do. They wreck the old patterns within you.

You wake up and you realize you don't have to live by rules somebody else wrote.

You do you.

Maybe you keep living exactly like before, no problem — but now you're doing it 'cause you want to, not 'cause you were told.

You be your own narrator.

HS: Like mental abolitionists.

C: I guess. Sounds pretentious. Would look cool on a T-shirt, though.

HS: Does it work? The process.

Pale: Yes.

Pale surfacing from her daze spooks me badly. It's like a corpse sitting up in the morgue mid-autopsy and starting to flirt with the medical examiner.

At the sound of her voice, Hiss clicks — catches her "Yes" — and half a second later plays it back.

Hiss: Yesssss.

But it's not just her "Yes". Two other "yesses" are layered in the background, one stiffly German, the other defiant and slightly drunken-sounding.

The two dead men agreeing with her.

I ask Pale how she knows, but Cupcake just laughs, and Hiss, well — Hiss spools a half-inch of fast-forward, that sounds like a witch cackling.

C: Pale's used up her speech limit for the next hour or so, man. She's not much of a talker.

I try to find some mental footing once again. Not easy.

HS: How do you choose your audience?

C: Hmm. Hard to say. It's not a process. We go with the flow. Walk the street in the dead of the night, see a house that feels right. Break in. Always works out.

HS: Has anyone ever woken up mid-performance?

C: Never. Hiss does a thing. I don't know what it is. They sleep like babies. Always.

He picks the recorder up — carefully, two fingers, the way you'd lift a hamster — and holds it near my face. I don't hear anything.

But I feel it, low in the chest, behind the sternum, a pressure with no sound attached to it. Like a memory you can't quite catch.

My eyelids get heavy. The candle flames lean in.

For a moment the room is very far away and very warm and I want, badly, to lie down on the filthy floor and not get up.

Cupcake sets it down. The feeling lifts like a hand off the back of my neck.

"Subsonic," Cupcake says, apologetic.

I write "subsonic" in the notebook, with a hand that isn't quite steady.

I swear the red light watches me do it.

Hiss smiles. It seems like. The little reels behind the cracked window turn a slow quarter-rotation, both at once, like a thing rolling its eyes back in amusement.

C: We distill the song down to a simple, reptilian whisper.

The creative process starts with what you'd call a normal jam in a studio. Guitars, synths, drums, the usual trouble for the neighbors. We practice, we lean in, we really go.

And then we start peeling away all that's unnecessary. Layer by layer.

Until all that's left is hiss.

I ask what's the role of Hiss in the creative process.

C: Heh. Whatever's in there, call them souls, call them voices from beyond — it remembers being recorded. Both of 'em do. One geezer spent his whole life cutting up tape, splicing voices, building cathedrals out of little snips.

Real precise.

The other one — he barely let himself get put on tape at all, made one record and checked out, like he was scared of being caught.

So we got one ghost who can't stop recording and one who never got recorded enough, both of them sharing that one strip of tape that's way too small for either of 'em. They fight over it. You can hear it.

We play our song to Hiss, it records it, then plays out. Only now there's little less of the song and a bit more of the Void.

Rinse, repeat.

Until we get it all purified.

As if on cue, the machine emits a long, even wash of static. The sound of nothing, full of everything. Every path you could have taken if only you hadn't got that mortgage payment hanging around your neck.

HS: Where do you see this whole thing going?

C: Ahaha. Are you asking where I see myself in five years? Dunno, man. Probably jail, for breaking and entering.

HS: Would you ever do a conventional concert?

C: Pfff. Nah. Started as a joke, but now it's us, you know? Can't imagine it any other way. You know how musicians go on about a good gig, how they "felt a unity with the audience" and all that? We get that every single time. That person, fast asleep — they're our whole world, our whole purpose, in that moment. We literally got their ear. They don't check their phone, they don't glance at their date, they're totally in the music.

HS: They have no choice.

C: Sure they don't.

HS: Don't you think it's maybe unethical? Making someone listen who didn't agree to it?

C: Does anyone ask if you wanted to see a Coca-Cola ad on your way to the bus? Didn't think so.

I can't argue with that.

Nobody says anything. Pale has gone still as furniture. Cupcake is watching me with something almost like sympathy.

I don't write anything in the notebook. There's nothing to write. The notebook was always the wrong tool. It only ever caught the words.

I ask the only thing left in me.

HS: What happens when the tape runs out?

Pale suddenly grins.

Don't worry. There's always the B-side.

I don't know what else to ask. I'm not that good at my job. Somehow no one seems to notice. Perhaps it's the notebook that makes everyone think otherwise. I look at it, just scribbles over scrawls over scribbles.

HS: Will you play for me?

Hiss rewinds the tape with a sudden burst, replays myself back to me. "Will you play for me?" But this time I sound different. Younger somehow.

Pale turns away to the broken window and pops a lonely bubble gum pop.

Cupcake looks uneasy. Apologetic, almost.

"Sorry, mate. We only ever play once to a person."

Of course.

I let myself out the broken window. The lot is grey, dawn coming up dirty behind the dead factory. Streets are empty, and so am I. No one to tell me how to live or think.

The most terrifying feeling in the world.

Making me my own narrator.

Part I

Part II

The night was peaceful, quiet. I finally fell into a long deep sleep after days of restlessness. That night I dreamt, like I always do. This time it was more conventional.

It was a good dream, I was in a crowded room, a party. Many people dressed in elegant tuxedos and long dresses exchanged conversations over a glass of white wine. Waiters diligently loitered around  waiting for any opportunity to make themselves accommodating. As I entered the room, applause thundered from everyone.

Warmth, respect and pride hit me like a cold shower on a sunny day. All these people were cheering me on, snapping pictures, celebrating me like a hero. I turned to my side and saw Lewis next to me, dressed in a dashing tuxedo, he was acclaimed as much as me. The golden light that enveloped the room made it feel like a Disney princess’ palace. I felt so good, I felt belonging, appreciated, famous. I felt like I felt in room 505.

As we made our way through the crowd, it slowly split up like the Red Sea, revealing a big wall at the end of the room.

On it was the mural I was commissioned to restore, it was perfect looking, like it was painted just hours before. In that moment the feeling grew stronger, it became overwhelming, something I had never experienced before. I remember thinking “this is what drugs must feel like”.

The light grew along with the pleasure, I felt part of something much bigger than I could ever imagine. Part of something that would change the world, make it a better place, revolutionize it. It reached a point where the light enveloped everything, shining bright like a million lightnings.

That’s when I woke up, sunshine from the window resting on my face, Lewis next to me in bed.

The dream was over but the feeling remained, although I could feel it fading away.
Lewis was also awake.
We looked at each other.

“We must go back.” We said at the same time.

We got up and readied ourselves. We took precautions this time, packed some food, water, flashlights and I made sure the switchblade was with me.

We didn’t really have a plan, we just knew we had to go back, it was as if we had withdrawal symptoms, we weren’t sick yet, but we needed to feel that way again and that’s the only place in the world where we could. We were getting hooked on it.

I took the files on the patients with me, I felt like there was more about them than it seemed, after all I got them from the room.

We had woken up late and that was both a good and bad thing, we felt well rested and recharged but it was also already early in the afternoon, we wanted to go back, but we weren’t too eager to do it while dark.

We went anyway, planning to stay there until sunset and then leave. We wanted to know more, understand it…experience it again.

It just felt right, I spent my whole life suffering, feeling excluded, feeling different. This was my reward, a place where I could be myself, accepted. I deserved it and nothing would take that away from me now.

We got in the taxi and headed to the Shining.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Asked me Lewis.

“Never been more sure of something in my life.”                                      

“Good.”

“…are you?”

“Y-yes, I am”

I looked at him in the eyes, the same eyes I looked into last night, something about them was different. They were full of confidence, determination. He may have sounded unsure but I couldn’t doubt him, it felt wrong.

“You know, I never did anything for myself, ever” He broke the silence. “I always followed a path laid out for me by someone else. Study this, graduate here, work with him…I never even stopped to think if that’s what I really wanted to do.”

He stared right ahead of us, didn’t look anywhere else while talking, he didn’t want to, he couldn’t.

“I have so much to say, so much to do and I never bothered to take the time to express my opinions, to become who I wanted to be. It was easier to follow the path after all, trains don’t work off the rails and neither do I.” I took his hand.

“But maybe I was never a train, maybe I was never meant to travel along these never ending tracks, now I know I’m meant for something bigger.” He finally looked at me, his eyes watery. I took off his glasses and reached my hand out, wiping the tears off his eyes.

“ I never followed any rules, never listened to the others, never ran on tracks. I always put myself first and followed what my heart told me and that made me a target…It was hell at first, didn’t have any friends, my family despised me and I got very ill…it was very tough. But it made me who I am today, someone I am proud of, someone I can rely on, someone that doesn’t need anyone or anything.”

“Everybody needs somebody Angela.”

“Maybe…I don’t blame you Lewis, It’s a lot easier and safe to follow along the path you have in front…but I believe none of us are stuck on rails, we all have the freedom to choose our own destiny, we just have to find the perfect road that leads us to it. Sometimes it’s bumpy, sometimes it’s smooth but they all lead to happiness, we just have to get there and, to do that, we can’t stop.”

“You really believe all of this?”

I put both my hands on his. “Of course I do, we can do it.”

I only believed half of what I was saying, I think it’s true that destiny is waiting for us all, but it’s not happiness, it’s not sadness, it’s death. That’s the only thing that is sure in life, the universe sure has a fucked up sense of humor.
I obviously wasn’t going to tell him the truth of what I believed. We were on our way to a haunted house that somehow made us feel more alive than ever, it definitely wasn’t the right time or place for existentialism or crude realism.

Not to mention the fact that my beliefs were also under great scrutiny, I didn’t really know what to think at that point, I still don’t. It’s clear there are so many questions still left unanswered, the scary thing however, is the notion that the answers to them are out there…somewhere.

Regardless, just because some things should be said, doesn’t mean they have to be heard…which is also what I wish Lewis knew…

“The other day…” he started. “when I fell ill in the lobby…”

“You don’t have to tell me Lewis” I interrupted him.

“I-I know, but I want to…that word, “winder”, is what I used to get called as a child.”

“Oh…I’m not sure what that means…”

“I know, it’s something very specific, it’s also why it shook me to my core…people used to call me that because I would “wind people up” whenever I talked.” I kept silent.

“That turned into the “winder”…he who would wind people up…me.” It made sense now, I could see why people would say that, after all he also winded me up really good the first time I met him, but it’s now clear to me that there’s much more to him than what it seems. Perhaps we’re not so different me and him.

“Nobody knows this…only those who called me that would know…and I haven’t heard from them in years…whoever or…whatever etched that into the wall, somehow knew.”

That’s when the jigsaw fell into place. It made sense, the way I felt when I met the…shadow, it felt like it looked straight at me, through me. I think that’s also what happened to Lewis, whatever haunts the Shining can see and know everything about us.

I didn’t know how to feel about that, on one hand it really freaked me out, on the other it felt reassuring, I wasn’t on my own on this one. I debated telling him about my experience, I never had the chance of telling him, not that I really wanted to but this seemed the right moment. However he anticipated me:

“I should also tell you something else…”

“What is it?” I asked.

“That day we ran from the house, when we both got ill…I saw something while in the taxi.” I knew it, I remember that moment, he looked back at the house and almost fainted.

“What did you see?”

“When I looked back…I saw what must have been a thousand orange eyes looking at us.”

“Like the eyes of a thousand owls?” I didn’t skip a beat.

“Yes, exactly like that!...how did you kn—“

“I saw them too Lewis…While we were running, yesterday night, they were there in the lobby and again, when we ran away.” I thought that perhaps telling him the truth would make him feel better this time.

“We’re in the same boat.”

“Let’s hope it’s not the Titanic ehehe.” I guess he didn’t lose his sense of “humor”, not sure how I felt about that.

We got to the Shining at about 4:30 PM, that gave us roughly two maybe three hours to look around. The truth of it is that we didn’t have a plan, all we wanted was to chase that high again, we came prepared but it wasn’t out of logic, it was out of cope, we knew we were threading mighty thin ice and we didn’t want to admit it.

Entering the house felt different this time, I didn’t feel any uneasiness or anxiety. It felt like I knew the place, the same way the place knew me, I was getting used to it. I think Lewis also felt this way, he looked the opposite of what he did the last time we were here.

I guess it was also a good opportunity to grab back our equipment, we had left it here in a hurry when we thought we were gonna die a horrible death.

That was still on the table and I think we both knew it but the reward was worth the risk. We didn’t waste much time, we settled our things down on the parquet and went upstairs, the usual lavender smell showing us the way.

The door to room 505 was closed, the way we left it last time when it slammed shut. Everything else also seemed the same, the mural was still there, along with my equipment, nothing out of the ordinary.

“Are you ready?” Asked Lewis.

“Yes, let’s go.” We didn’t have any time to waste, we were itching to get back in there, back to a place that treated us right, somewhere we belong.

Lewis led the way.
He stepped forward.
Grabbed the shiny golden handle and pulled on it.
Nothing happened.

“What is it Lewis?” I asked nervously.

“It-it won’t open”

“What?”

“It won’t fucking open.” He kept on pulling but it just wouldn’t budge.

“There’s no way, let me try” I got right next to him and started to pull on the handle. Not one inch. It was glued shut, it felt like it weighed a million pounds, I might as well have been pulling on a wall.

 “What the fuck.”

“Jesus, it won’t fucking open.”

We both started pulling on it, nothing. We began banging on it, pushing it, scratching at it…nothing. After some time, we collapsed on the floor, defeated. All this trouble, all this effort for nothing. We sat in silence, our minds slowly realizing what this meant. That’s when Lewis freaked out.

“I can’t fucking believe that we can’t open it…how are we supposed to get inside?” He got up and started pacing around the room as I stayed on the floor.

“There must be a way, a key of some sort maybe? You should look at the files you got from the room, they must mean something!” He was not himself, he was neurotic, manic, he was losing control over his urges and that scared me.

“Calm down Lewis, we’ll find a way but you need to slow down.”

“We need to find it now Angela, time is ticking and we don’t have all day, don’t just sit there, do something!”

“Hey don’t you fucking yell at me, I am not happy either that it’s not open but I’m not freaking out like some kind of psycho so just settle down.”

“Don’t you get it Angela? We NEED to get in there or God knows what will happen to us.”

“Are you insane? We can just leave, we don’t have to be here, we can come ba—“

“I need this now.”

“You need to calm down…now.”

“I can’t, I have spent my entire fucking life being calm, now it’s time to demand, it’s time for me to take what I wa--.”

That’s when I slapped him across the face. He took the hit and finally shut up.

“I said, calm down.”

He snapped out of it.

“I-I’m sorry, I-I don’t know what came over me.”

“That’s okay, but you need to control yours—“

BANG, a loud crash coming from downstairs interrupted me, my heart skipping a beat.

 “What was that?” I asked, trembling.

“I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out”

Lewis didn’t skip a beat and went downstairs with a steady pace and a closed fist. It felt good to see him so strong.

I remained upstairs, I like to think of myself as a courageous person but sometimes being brave could also mean being stupid, I wasn’t sure what Lewis was being at that point, and in these cases, it usually means being stupid.

“Hey Angela, you should come down.” His tone was relaxed and calm, there was clearly nothing to fear.

I went downstairs and stopped next to Lewis, he raised his hand and pointed it towards the table in the lobby.

As my gaze followed his finger it stopped just underneath the table, where Berry the black cat sat, eating some of the food I had brought along. The crash was likely Berry knocking it off the table to eat it.

“No way.” I chuckled.

“He’s so cute, isn’t he?”

He walked up to it and picked him up, the cat letting out a squeaky meow. I closely followed and went to pet it, Berry started loudly purring, it was nice and relaxing, they say that a cat’s purr has beneficial effects for humans.

Something about the frequency of the vibrations they make, I don’t know if it’s true or not but it certainly calmed us down, finally allowing us to think straight.

“Look, I don’t know what is happening, but I don’t think it’s good” I said.

“We just need to slow down and take our time…like you said, we could always leave and come back another time, it’s not like it’s going anywhere ehehe.”

Lewis was really not gonna let it go, despite all the weird and bad things that had happened to us, despite the weird effect this whole situation had on our minds…he still wanted to chase that high.

The sad thing is that I didn’t blame him, deep down that’s also all I wanted but I have been through this kind of things before, well, not this fucked up anyway. I know what this thought process gets you and it’s nothing but trouble.

“Alright…well, how about we grab our stuff and leave? It’s already late, the door won’t open and it seems like the right moment to get our things back to the motel.”

Lewis thought about it for a moment.

“Ok Angela…let’s just check one last time if the door is still shut.”

I didn’t have time to reply, Lewis handed me Berry and went upstairs to check. The black cat looked at me with his big yellow eyes, it seemed like he wanted to tell me something, like it was warning me about someone…or something.

In folklore black cats are harbingers of bad luck, the tireless companions of witches and akin to their fellow black ravens and crows. I always found it sad that people would kill these cats because of this reason, they are fantastic creatures and extremely lovable.

To die because of some abstract concept makes one wish that death would treat them better than life did. However there’s one more piece of folklore about cats that always fascinated me. Cats can see or sense spirits. Anybody that has ever had or been around cats will have a story about some creepy or weird behavior they had. Whether it’s staring at a specific point in the room; reacting to seemingly nothing or acting weird after someone’s passing.

“Might not be a bad thing to have you around in here” I thought as that notion came to mind. Berry meowed back, as if he had heard my thoughts; cute.

That’s when his head stood up, eyes wide open and the ears moving around.

Shortly after that a deafening roar shook everything.

My instincts were to hit the ground and cover my ears, it felt like an artillery shell had just landed a couple of feet from me, the house creaking around, Berry bolting away to safety.

“What the fuck happened.” I said quietly under my breath.

Darkness enveloped everything around me, not the same darkness I saw in room 505, it was as if someone had dimmed the sun down, dropping us into a twilight like atmosphere.

Then came the tapping. A waterfall dropping on the house. I looked outside of the window to see heavy rain falling all around, the darkness being the product of heavy overcast blocking the sun, the roar being thunder. In a matter of seconds a storm had gathered right outside the door.

“Angela, are you okay?” I heard shouting from upstairs.

“Y-yeah, are you?”

“Yeah, come up.”

I got up and went upstairs, the deafening sound of rain hitting the roof accompanying me every step of the way.
Lewis stood in front of room 505.

“Lewis?”

“It just won’t budge.”

“That’s okay…let’s just leave, it started raining, didn’t you notice?”

“Uh? Oh yeah…it started raining” He looked distracted, didn’t seem at all worried about the sudden and intense storm. I came up next to him and grabbed his hand.

“Come on, Lewis…let’s go” I said softly.

“Yeah…yeah…I’ll-I’ll call a taxi.” He finally took his eyes off of the door, the rain in the background silencing any other sound.

“Oh...my phone’s dead.” He said abruptly.

“What?”

“Look…the battery’s dead.” He turned his phone over to me, on the screen the irrefutable proof of no power, “You should call it.”

I got out my phone and went to unlock it.

Nothing happened. Black screen.

I went to unlock it again.

The empty battery sign flashed on the screen.

“What the--  How is that possible it worked flawlessly until now, it was at 95% battery.” I pushed back, we had no way to call anyone, no way to message anyone, no internet, nothing.

“I-I don’t know but it must be a sign! Something is happening don’t you see? The storm and the batteries, it can’t be a coincidence!” Lewis was right, it did not sound like a coincidence but the most dreadful thing is that he believed it to be a good thing.

“There must be a way to get in, or we wouldn’t be here.”

“I think you’re just seeing things Lewis…how about we leave anyway?” I replied with despair in my voice.

“What? Are you crazy? Don’t you see there’s a storm outside? It’s dangerous.”

“Oh because staying in here is so much better.”

“Yes it is, what if the door finally opens?”

“Lewis you’re scaring me, the door is not gonna fucking open, this feels like a fucking trap, we’re fucking trapped in here.”

“We have no choice Angela, the storm outside is too strong and too dangerous, the nearest town is a 40 minute drive and we have no way to call for help…the best thing we can do is wait it out…and hope for the best.”

I hated the fact that he had a point. The logical solution was to just wait for the storm to die down and then just get out.

After all, rule number one is “if you have shelter, stay with shelter.” the problem arises when your shelter might not be what you think it is.

“Fine, but as soon as it slows down, we’re going.”

“Of course.”

I had decided that if shit hit the fan, I was gonna leave anyway, with or without the storm, with or without Lewis.

The rain was pounding the roof and the wind howled, echoing across the house. It was pretty late in the afternoon at that point and the clouds covered the sun completely, the little light that filtered through, was quickly fading away and darkness was setting in.

We set up camp upstairs so that we could keep an eye on the fifth room, Lewis was hoping that it would magically open, I dreaded it. The same way we might have gotten in, something might have come out.
We sat down underneath the mural, eating a snack and just waiting.

“Do you have those files?” Lewis asked.

“Yeah, I have them here but there really isn’t much you can gather from them.”

“Can I see them anyway?”

“Yeah” I replied, annoyed, handing them over. He took a look at them, as I told him, not much to see.

“Do you think this place is haunted?”

“I don’t know…this place certainly isn’t normal.”

“Could it be that all those figures we saw were ghosts? Trapped in here for some reason?”

“I think you might have watched too many horror movies.”

“Come on Angela, are you really telling me that after all we’ve been through you haven’t questioned your beliefs at all?”

“I don’t know what to believe anymore Lewis, I just know that I don’t like this place.”

“I don’t like it either you know?”

“Oh really? It doesn’t seem like it.”

“You’ve felt that way too, you remember.” I did feel that way too and at that point I was fighting every inch of my body to not fall into that spiral of desire, not to fall victim to the cravings that I felt.

I like to think I was doing a good job, I have always been good at separating my heart from my mind, even when I ended up following my gut. This time I knew there was a lot more than just pleasure at stake.

“Yes…I remember, but we have to keep our head Lewis, we can’t just go crazy.”

“I know, I know, as soon as we can we’ll get out.”

I was on edge, every possible outcome didn’t seem particularly good at that point, part of me knew that the better solution would be that damn door opening, going in there and just letting go, letting the universe envelop me and stop worrying about everything.

I knew it was some kind of death wish, who knew what that fucking room was, it could have been hell. Except it didn’t feel like it, it felt like heaven, peace at last.

It felt like complete silence, when is the last time that you actually couldn’t hear anything? I remember each one, it only happened twice, it’s a sort of realization, some kind of epiphany, you think “fuck, there is complete silence right now” even your thoughts seem incredibly loud in comparison, that’s the closest I have ever been to feeling at peace. Room 505 promised that and so much more.

“Can I ask about your tattoos?” Lewis snapped me out of my thoughts.

“Y-yeah, sure.”

“I didn’t really get a chance last time it came up.”

“Yeah well, it wasn’t the right moment, sorry” Not that this was the right moment, but it’s not like we had things to do.

I was fascinated by Lewis, he somehow changed from the first time I met him and remained the same at the same time. He was both the annoying dork that pissed me off and also the man with a tormented past full of confidence that had gotten the best of me. Really made me think about this old Japanese saying I once read: “A man is whatever room he’s in”.

“Why do you have so many?”

I usually respond sarcastically to these kind of questions, nine times out of ten they come from people ready to judge me, saying dumb stuff like “do you know they last forever?” or “what if you regret them later?”, stupid questions deserve stupid answers.

This time however, I thought I’d be nice for once.

“I think that in a world where nothing lasts forever, the opportunity to carry something with you until you die is a delicate and very special one, I take pride in knowing that I didn’t pass up on it.”

Lewis stayed silent, you could tell he liked that answer.

“…Plus they look cool as fuck.”

We both chuckled.

“That’s a nice philosophy I must say, I always wanted to get one but…you know, never really got around to make that decision.”

“What did you want to get?”

“It might sound dumb but…I wanted to get a firefly.”

“That doesn’t sound dumb, look what I have.” I lifted up my sleeve, pointing at the moth I have tattooed on my inner forearm.

“Yeah I saw that” he chuckled, I smiled. “It’s my favorite out of the ones you have.”

“Really? It’s not bad but also nothing to write home about.”

“You know I always wondered…can’t the flame come up to the moth for a change?”

“W-well…I never thought about that.” It somewhat left me speechless, I thought that was a pretty deep thought, I remember getting that tattoo simply because I thought it would look cool on me but now, it sort of developed into a whole new meaning.

“Do you think moths go after fireflies in the woods?”

There was a moment of silence, and then I kissed him. He may have been annoying and a dork, but he knew what to say to get me.

It felt good, it felt like the right thing to do, I didn’t question what it meant. In that moment it was the one thing that would give me relief, it felt like everything was going to be okay.

The kissing became a lot more passionate, we started touching each other and we were soon in the mood for a lot more than just kissing. We never got that far unfortunately.

The now dark room was quickly lit up by a flash of light, followed by a deafening thunder that, again, shook the whole house. It startled us; until that moment, other than the first one, only rain and the howling of the wind inhabited the house.

“Fuck, is it getting worse?” I asked.

“I don’t know, I don’t care.” replied Lewis, quickly going back to kiss my neck.

Another flash.

“Oh what the fuck” shouted Lewis. Thunder.

“What? What is it?” I reacted.

Lewis got off of me and rested his back on the wall, eyes wide open.

“Did you see that? There was someone there.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I was starting to get scared.

Another flash.

This time I saw it too.

As the room lit up, there, on the wall opposite to us, stood a shadow figure.

The same silhouette I saw before. Thunder. The smell of tobacco assaulting our nostrils.

Back to darkness, yet we knew we weren’t alone anymore.

“Holy shit I saw that as well.” I trembled.

Me and Lewis got close, supporting each other, back against the wall.

Another flash, another figure.

It was two of them now. Thunder.

The second one was new, it was a taller silhouette, standing next to the first one.

“Jesus Christ it’s him.” whispered Lewis in a terrified voice.

“Who the fuck are you talking about?”

“The smiling person.”

Out of all the things, that was the last one I wanted to hear.

Flash. The same two silhouettes, the second one had a big, white, teethy smile on what would be its face. Thunder.

The smile lingered as the room fell into darkness once again. It felt the same as when you look at something really bright, a bare light bulb for example, and when you look away you can still see that impression.

I got the switchblade from the pocket of my backpack. Not sure what I was going to do with it, but it made me feel less naked. Lewis popped open one of the glow sticks he had brought, a faint green light enveloped our immediate surroundings.

Flash. The silhouettes moved closer. One on the left wall, one on the right, close to the stairs. Thunder.

“They’re coming for us.” squeaked Lewis.

“We need to get the fuck out.”  I replied.

“Go!” shouted Lewis.

It was at that moment that we both sprung up and sprinted for the stairs, grabbing whatever we could.
I got almost halfway to the stairs when I heard “Wait” whispered in my ear.

I stopped. In a split second I recognized that voice. I had heard it in my dreams. At that moment I knew there was nothing to fear, the panic vanished but the adrenaline kept on pumping.

“Lewis, stop! Wait!” I shouted.

He was already gone, he kept on running without looking back and disappeared in the darkness below the stairs. I stood frozen in place. I could not move, it felt as if someone was holding me.

I look around.

Flash. The shadow is now standing right next to the fogged up window. Thunder.

In the darkness, the faint glow of Lewis’ stick reflected on the window where, suddenly, letters began to appear.

It was as if someone was writing on the foggy window with their finger.

I was finally able to move, I slowly made my way over, picking up the glowstick on the way. As I got closer, it became clear what was written on it.

“don’t go.” The shadows were communicating with me.

“W-why?” I let out in a frail voice.

“not safe.”

“What-what the fuck am I supposed to do then?”

“wait for him” appeared back.

I settled down, these…spirits, were telling me to wait for what I could only imagine to be Lewis. I didn’t feel threatened, I didn’t feel in danger, I knew they were not going to hurt me.

The adrenaline crash hit me fast and hard, my shaky legs crumbled and I fell to the ground, my eyes slowly closing, my consciousness steadily fading away.

I woke up some time later, the feeling of something wet hitting me in the face quickly woke me up. It was Berry, he had come back and was licking me in the face.

“Lewis?” I innocently called out, still in a daze.

The realization of where I was quickly came back to me and I immediately went into high alert. The only one that replied was Berry which now kept close to me.

Silence all around. I looked outside the window to see that the rain had stopped and moonlight was now shining through, offering me a respite from darkness. How long was I out? How long has it been night?

On the window the evidence of previous conversation was slowly fading away as the rain had stopped God knows how long ago. One word, however, stood out from the rest, one I didn’t recall.

“hide”

I looked at it confused, desperately trying to remember when that happened and still trying to collect all the fuzzy memories from before I passed out.

I didn’t have enough time to do that as Berry quickly snapped its head towards the stairs, a loud hiss escaping its mouth.

Shortly after a loud BANG came from downstairs.

“ANGELA?” I heard shouting. It was Lewis, he was back.

“LEWIS? Is that you?” I shouted back.

“Yes, it’s me, you’d never believe what happened to me!” His voice was upbeat, happy, full of anticipation and pride. It felt off.

“I’m coming upstairs.”

Berry growled, his fur standing on end, he was ready for a fight. Instinctively I grabbed my switchblade, this time I knew it would be useful if needed.

I held my breath as I heard each step come up the stairs, I was hoping Lewis had found help for us to get out but it seemed like Berry knew something I didn’t. The message left by the spirits now made sense, they had anticipated his return, I wasn’t going to hide.

The way the moonlight entered the house, the top of the stairs were still dark, you could see just enough to understand whether there was someone there or not. As the steps got closer, I could see the silhouette come up.

It really was Lewis.

He stopped at the top of the stairs, still in the shadows.

“It finally happened Angela!” he said, not moving a muscle.

“What happened? Y-you just ran away, I-I-I stayed here Lewis, they told me to stay, I-I tried to tell you but you just didn’t stop.”

“That’s okay Angela, they lied to you anyway.”

“What…?”

“I got us some help! You think they want the best for you? That they’re here to protect you? TO WARN YOU?” His tone shifted, he became aggressive, assertive, loud.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“They’re not who you think they are, they’re not like him, they won’t help you…he will, you can trust him.”

“Who is he?”

“Don’t you understand?” Lewis slowly started to come closer.

“He told me the truth.” Another step forward.

“He showed me the way.”

Lewis finally stepped into the moonlight, his clothes were raggedy, covered in mud and wet from head to toe, sticks and leaves were stuck all over him, it looked like he rolled down a hill.

Behind those thick glasses, where those beautifully confident eyes sat, were now two deep bloody holes.

“I was blind but now I see.”

“Oh God.” I screamed in shock, tears rolling down my eyes, hands shaking yet resolute in hitting the switch on the knife, snapping forward like a spring.

“Stay where you are Lewis.” I threatened, knife pointed at him.

“Don’t be afraid Angela, you’ll soon join me, you’ll soon see” He replied in a soft, calm voice.

From below a series of huge stomps began to echo through the house, slowly getting closer, the floor below me trembling.

“W-What the fuck is that?” I asked, terrified at a proper response.

“It’s him, he’s here.” Replied Lewis as he got on his knees.

The heavy steps were right beneath me and they quickly made their way to the stairs, after only a couple of steps, I began to see something emerge from them.

A glowing dark red light pierced through the shadows, getting stronger and stronger.

Along with it, a pair of horns appeared from the steps, slowly revealing the goat like head they stood on, a pair of blood red eyes soon stared back at me as the entire figure stepped forth. A giant, 6’5’ body of muscle covered in thick black fur, standing on its hind hooves, a white human grin rested on its face, reflected by the filtered moonlight.

Sharp black shiny claws tickled the wall, a grinding sound echoing through the room.

“This is it.” I thought, end of the line.

There’s no way I’d be able to escape this monstrosity, the realization that I would spend the last moments of my life in absolute terror, staring at unfathomable horror, waiting for a painful and violent death…or something worse, really saddened me.

I stood there in absolute terror, all the confidence I had before evaporating in an instant. I wasn’t going to fight that, I didn’t even think about it.

My mind was overwhelmed by the sheer horror of what stood in front of me. I felt at peace. The pain would end, the sadness would end, everything would end. Soon total darkness would finally envelop me, and total silence would settle in.

Except it didn’t.

An overwhelming flash of light exploded from the window behind me, soon followed by a deafening thunder which mixed in with the roaring screech of pain coming from the monster’s throat. Its claws shielding the red eyes, its balance shaking.

“RUN.” I heard coming from somewhere in the room. I wasn’t going to question the nature of that voice.

I instinctively grabbed Berry, clutching him with my left arm, the right one busy wielding the knife.

I sprinted towards the abomination, my heart in my throat, adrenaline in my veins.

I got past Lewis and soon found myself face to face with the giant, the strong smell of rot and death coming from its fur almost making me vomit.
I didn’t stop.

I ran my knife into its right leg, a crunchy sound escaping it, dark red blood pouring from the wound.
A sharper screech so loud it must have been heard for miles silenced every other sound.
I made my way down the steps of the stairs, looking back over my shoulder.

The looming figure reeled, blinded by the light and the pain, its claws ripping into Lewis in a fit of rage, turning him into nothing more than a cloud of red mist, what was left of him sat lifeless and untouched on the perfect, parquet floor.

I sprinted outside, the cold breeze of the night caressing my hair, goose bumps on my skin, tears down my cheeks.

I kept running, didn’t matter where, my eyes locked on my feet, carefully making sure I didn’t trip on the many roots of the woods.

It wasn’t raining but the drops of water falling from the trees echoed a relaxing symphony. Berry kept silent and close, its claws digging into my sweater, making sure he wasn’t going anywhere.

After a while I stopped, exhausted. It was the middle of the night and I was somewhere in the thick bayou, clueless, scared and cold.

...

The asylum sat atop a low hill, grey amongst a landscape of dying brown grass. Like a dead husk of tooth protruding from a swollen gum, filled with infection. The sun rarely touched this place, almost never. The distant mountains blocked its rise and dominance. Constant cloud coverage of overcast skies did the rest. It mattered little to the denizens of the hospital/school. They were rarely allowed to leave their rooms, their cells. Their cages. 

And they never went anywhere without their chains. Their straitjackets. Their bondage. They went that way from dungeon to dungeon to treatment chambers to recreational area to mess hall and back to the dungeons again. They were never allowed outside. 

The guards were large. Jaded criminals. Mean. They were always armed. Nightsticks. Blackjacks. Saps. Cattle prods. Firearms for when things turned really bad and real damage and nastiness was needed. They did what they wanted. Moral-less heartless apes. The place was a den of beatings and torture and rape and murder under their watch. Female inmates got it the worst. The most frequent amount of attention from the monosyllabic slabs of muscle, fat, greasy hair and soiled sweat stained uniforms in the shapes of men. 

No one cared. No one cared for them. The law, of the land or from on high, did not touch here, did not have a presence here. Right and wrong held no real meaning. They were just empty words. As empty as the promises given to the patients and their families. 

No. This place was not a den of rehabilitation, nor one of care. It was one man's laboratory. His working ground on which to harvest and reap. To pluck and take what he saw and wanted. Just like the guards saw and took what they wanted. 

The patients, the inmates, the prisoners… they were all of them at the mercy of the warden and head physician. The throne of God and king sat empty in this desperate patch of land, this vile part of the earth, and was thus filled by the man who ran Willowbrook School for the Disabled. Though everyone that knew anything about the place knew its true name. 

Willowbrook Private Asylum. For the Deranged and Criminlally Insane. 

It might’ve been the hint that foretold the deeper darker secrets the place kept… the tip of the iceberg of depravity and barbarism. But nobody cared. 

No one. Nobody that mattered anyway. No one shone a light on the travesty and horror within the walls and minds and flesh of Willowbrook. Not God. Not man. No inquiring eyes spied into the diseased hearts festering broken and poisoned within the walls of pain and derangement. 

And so Doctor Krugman conducted himself as he saw fit. He performed his experiments however he wished, on whomsoever he desired. And he desired much from his patients. Especially the children. Especially the girls. 

The asylum was Doctor Krugman’s private hunting ground. The facilities were his own personal laboratory. And the work done here in his name and not God's was nothing to do with the study nor treatment of mental illness. Krugman's experiments were more personally motivated, fiscal gain and considerable prestige. His experiments were concerned with the study of disease. 

And as far as hunting grounds went this was like taking a scatter-gun to fish swimming trapped within a barrel… 

Viral. Parasitical. Contagions and infections, all kinds and sorts. Anything that was this year's favorite scope of academic field of study. Plagues and bugs long forgotten and some thought eradicated, he brought back. 

He bred them back from oblivion in vials and beakers and jars and gave them back their vile mindless idiotic and systematic killing capabilities, their blind idiot destructive godpower. 

He took his forged sword of biblical pestilential flame, the syringe, loaded with swimming mixture, brimming with the foul life of unseen microscopic monsters, nature-bred and manmade alchemical into new killing existence. He injected the inmates with the various diseases at his discretion, at his own leisure and need. 

For the patients, the dogs, the poor pitiful moaning and mindless beasts. It was an inescapable hell. Naked and pale and emaciated. They look like skeletons. They look like wraiths. They are smeared with feces and nearly all of them are absolutely alive with livid violence. Some are broken. And only lie there. They only stare and their eyes are empty. There are the self-mutilators too but they are mixed and overlapped with those of more outward violent persuasion. Their temperament shifts between the destruction of their own flesh and the desire and need for the destruction of others. They are nearly always active, mindless with their roving violence and attacks and angry aggressive movements, they only stop to self-flagellate or carve or tear at their own deep and stubborn wounds. The cold tile floors are slick with urine and blood and fecal discharge that's runny and chalky and strewn with vivid strips of lurid red, shed internal and expelled with the rest of the diabolical waste. 

The smell of the asylum was indescribable. Ungodly miasmic doesn't even come close. Charnel house burning in the deepest reaches of infernal hell doesn't either, but somehow the warden and staff and the guards have become used to it, blind to it. It is a foul abomination of wonder that they've managed it. But they have. 

There are never any visitors. They are a thing of such long gone and far flung ancient history that they might've never had actually had any in the institution. It was a cesspool, a smear of woe, a house of pain. The idea that anyone would put anyone in this place and then visit is a farce that no one finds funny. Not after you've seen. Not after you've seen this house of mental infection and running bloody shit, not after you've lain eyes on it, laid eyes on it all in all of its charnel house and hellbound antiglory. Not after you've smelled it. 

Not after you've smelled this lie of the mind and stone, this bleeding and fecal house of absolute and total decay. Total boundless rot. Creeping its eating way into everything and all, all things. Nothing is sacred within these mindless walls. Trapped beneath this heat and shrieking ceiling. 

Watch the beatings. The carvings with sharpened spoons, the flaying of flesh already roughened and bulbous and out of shape with hectic scar tissue, carved open once more like fleshen doors, fleshen gates of hell that cannot be closed and refused to be shut against, and are filled with oceans and worlds of titanic raging blood. 

Blood that must be spilled. Blood that must be shed. Blood that must be allowed to free and flood this world of madness and violence and screams. It is lurid surging crimson inside that boils and broils with intense and violent hatred. Fear. See and smell and hear the fear in the echoed and ceaseless caterwauls and shrieks and moans of torment and monstrous satisfaction, psychotic indulge let loose with passionate yowling cat-cries … music that the sane and well of heart and mind cannot bear or understand. 

Hear and know the cacophony. It is the sound of fear and madness. 

Willowbrook had long been a place of manmade darkness, sitting with disquiet on a forgotten patch of earthen squalor, dead earth … gratefully forgotten by anyone that might've known or remembered its terrible and wretched existence. Like any infection it festered and grew worse, greener with dead-milk and more rancid with the crawling anguished passage of merciless time. For prisoner and guard alike. Only the warden thrived. 

And then the prisoners of Willowbrook, patient and employed alike, began to finally share something together. A fascination. Wild dreams and ideas… 

It all concerned morbid and colorful fantasies, all having to do with the far off mountain range carved into the horizon with harsh biting jagged lines that were so much like wild animal teeth. Fangs on the horizon. Biting into the grey tumult of the defiled skies of the dead heaven that hung over this place in perpetua, this wasted land. 

A woman. A powerful woman in a castle in the Carpathian Mountains. A dark sorceress. According to some of the stories and whispers shared in the dank and putrid hell of tile and torch and feces and shock treatment flame, she was a powerful witch. One that ate the flesh of man. One that drank blood. 

Doctor Krugman dismissed it all as hogwash. Absolute delusion. Shared hysterical fantasy, by the patients and the staff alike. It was no real wonder, not really. Not to him. The guards and nurse-staff had all been feebleminded and little better than the apes and mongoloids they cared for. He wasn't surprised that they too would be taken in with cheap fairytales and grim flights-of-fancy … not at all. 

But then he too started to hear it. 

The sound. 

The song of the mountain. 

…

It had been any usual day at Willowbrook. Krugman and a few of the aides were loading the syringes with various strands of the daily pestilence. Some were mixing up the ‘Willowbrook Special' or the ‘Willowbrook Cream’. It was a cheap chocolate drink mixture that was part water, part choco-gelatin powder, and part diseased fecal matter/discharge collected from other infected patients. The drink was a safer alternative to the patients deemed to physically large and emotionally and mentally volatile to approach with the needle. Many of these hulking addled tormented creatures could be lulled in and fooled with a tasty drink, a sweet and delicious beverage, a wonderful creamy drink like candy… 

Yet some still received  liberal use of the leather straps. And the nose plugs. And the long cylindrical snake of translucent feeding tube. Forced down the throat. Lubricated to slide right past the natural gag reflex. 

They were all in the deepest recessed dungeon of the asylum. Quarantined low and away from the rest of the mindless rabble horde of flagellate patient/inmates. Filling syringes, sterilizing needles. Gloving up. Mixing up the rancid drink. 

Krugman was suddenly possessed, later he wouldn't be able to recall by just what and moreover it didn't matter by the end, the fall – he suddenly set down the needle he was loading. He looked to the rest of the staff, mindlessly busy with their own work, and he excused himself. Explaining he would return shortly. 

He just needed something from his office. Something he needed to fetch. 

…

Alone and in his small warden’s office/head-physician quarters he suddenly forgot all about what it was he had come up here for. He was at his desk. It was positioned by the large window. The only one not barred in the whole building. He found himself compelled to gaze out at the evening sky, shot with sherbert colors and goblin fire from the flight of the sun. Twilight was upon the land now. And all of it was poor. Diseased. Dead. 

The swamplands. The marsh. The endless bog and quagmire of spoiled earth that went on for God only knew how long. Some of the local folk and travelers, the patients and guards too had a funny name for the swamp country of mud and stagnant death. One Krugman and the groundskeeper found particularly amusing. 

Wormland. 

And the vast expanse of country to the left. Out the window. Living in supplicant shadow of the dominant and biting mountain range…

The mountains…

Krugman's gaze was fixed. His mind followed. 

And she came to him. From out of a coronal starburst of fire and blood that stole over his vision and filled his cracking fraying mind. 

A great bird. Wolf headed. And on great wings of black bat-leather. 

The sorceress of the mountains came. And spoke to him. 

And Doctor Krugman listened. He listened very well. 

…

The vision started with the eye. The red light. The livid red eye, wreathed in lurid breathing flame, dancing with the obliterating intensity of the inferno… gazing lidless. Blazing. Staring. Staring out. 

Staring out from the mountains. 

The shattered minds of this dread and forsaken construct were so easy to invade. 

Then it flowered out, flowered forth … in a visceral blossom of flowering red. Opening red. Gaping. Wet. Visceral. Like the insides and tissue of living breathing animal things, organs and gore and splashes and undulating waves like a painter's livid brushstrokes, vivid blood red … all blossoming out and flowering out forth from the livid red eye in a wild corona that was so much like a wild and dream-like explosion. The shattered minds of the asylum gaped in imbecilic awe and idiot amazement at the dancing and shifting lurid display of kaleidoscopic red dreams made wet and real. The red eye of the mountain wreathed in wet and dancing viscera and scarlet gazed into them, their minds, but made for them also a great and wild phantasmagorical and earthbound star. A wild god’s eye of gore for starflame, spilling red for its licking tongues of stabbing and dancing fire. 

And at the center, at the precious nucleus heart of the corona… was her. 

The sorceress. 

The blood drinker. Flesh eater goddess of the mountain castle. Occult princess of darkness and crawling and hunger. Daughter of the Lord of Flies. 

Vampiress. 

Her dark will poured into them all, the open shells of their broken minds were eager rescepticles. The open mouthed detritus within each and everyone of their skulls was like the eager mouths of a whore, open and spread and eager and dripping. Waiting to be filled. 

She came into them. And filled them with her red light.

…

Andre Rand was happy with his station in life. He’d been content before as groundskeeper at Willowbrook, tending and cleaning and shoveling an such, wielding the long forked blades of the garden shears and taking them to wild growth and shrubbery with a well practiced and maintained professional ease. Raking and collecting the dead leaves that fell when the weather started to turn to biting cold and the dead sky above somehow became an even bleaker and more necrophiled heavenscape. 

But things were different now. Much better. The warden had seen to that. He’d given Rand a promotion. Said he was the only one who could stomach the work that was needed. 

I’ve new research… Krugman had said, had been saying, aloud and to the staff that was remaining and also muttered to himself and to no one and beneath his labored hot and heavy breath.

I’ve new research… new experiments… much more vital… of much more critical pertinence … I must not fail. 

I must not fail the mouth of the mountains. 

Rand turned a corner and pulled his gloves, making sure they were tight, secure, snug. Everything had to be tight and battened down in this place. 

The cell was thrown open. 

The girl cowered away. Filthy in the corner. Trying to hide her face, as if doing so would somehow banish the judgement that had come to call, away. By not seeing it. Just don't look.

Rand smiled. Chuckled. Hawked. Spat. Cracked gloved knuckles. 

Then he said something awful and came into the room. 

The struggle was short. He didn’t need any help from the other attending staff. They just watched. And filled their minds as their glazed over eyes drank everything in. 

She was brought to the showers. Where Krugman had been performing his most recent experiments. Where the tubs were filled. 

She screamed, shrieked mad unholy terror when she was brought bound into the large room of cold tile made hot and stifling and sour with slaughter, with butchery. The air of the sweating breathing tile room was blood miasmic, cloying and thick and pungent. She could taste everything. 

They prepared her for bleeding, for the great orifice-gate elongation/opening. 

For she has declared we should all be open gates. Open wounds for her open mouth, her widening jaws. We should all be opened and waiting and ready to receive her even as we offer ourselves, our bodies and our innards and our precious running scarlet as feast and banquet and aphrodisiacal slime for the lulling goddess tongue, the divine and swallowing goddessmouth from the fanged rock tearing into the gentle far off fabric of the faerytale horizon. We should all be so chosen, we should all be so grateful, we should all be so lucky. 

Us. Here. In the goddamned and forsaken, dilapidated and forgotten remains of Willowbrook. We have finally been given our answer, we have finally received our savior. We have finally been delivered. 

We are truly free. 

In our bondage to her and the mountain, we are truly free. Within these obelisk walls of shit stained torment, we have strained, been bequeathed the infernal knowledge of true salvation. We are bleeding for the fruit of the tree, for we are free in our flagellate wounds brimming filled with sorrow and gangrene. We are now her temple. 

No one could remember the girl, the newest one’s name nor patient number as she was pulled up by hoisting and biting chains, naked. Screaming. Screaming the names of forgotten loved ones that have forgotten her as well in turn to come and save her. Nobody did. This place was now a domain of the goddess. 

Blood drinker sorceress … of the biting rock. 

Feed me. 

With scalpel she was opened. From the throat down and through the mound of Venus flesh and into the blossom of her womanhood, opening it. Wider. Gaping it for the mouth of the mountain. The screams were replaced with sickish gurgles, vile choking sounds… then these too tapered off and ceased. 

The freshly carved flesh was opened, her gate widened and renewed. Her viscera and blood spilled out in a thick dark gush that proceeded to fill the tub and the room with more fresh lurid scent, thickening and deepening the sour stench of blood miasma into one that would never leave the walls or floors or the eyes and flesh and minds of those in bastard attendance. 

Krugman cheered. Elated! Another successful experiment! 

Then he called to her. As he’d been instructed to. 

Old words. Arcane. Ones he’d never heard or known before the mountain had come and spoken to him of real knowledge and the true potential of occult cannibal power. 

Demon. Vampira. Vampiress. 

Shadows deepened in the room, the corners, the stifling heat of the bloodsoaked animal air chilled as she arose from the place where the darkness was the most stygian and pitch. Krugman and Rand and the other guards and staff gathered there watched her emerge and come forth with devout and religious silence. 

The dark and regal tall statured shape of the woman changed and shifted with each advancing step. As she neared the freshly filled tub the darkness of her blank dripping silhouetted featureless canvas grew more grotesquely defined and decayed. The bipedal dominating shape of her royal womanhood bent and twisted and became more scarecrow and insectile and rodent. Jaws opened, grinned, grew rictus then shattered and broke and unhinged and still they grew. Out of socket and out of shape and true. The daggering fangs of her terrible and graverobbed necrophiled power, demon power, grew and elongated from tearing black gumlines of greening and putrefying flesh. Transmogrifying and changing alchemical and chimerical and sloughing substance even as they grew, like the rest of her demented monster form. 

She was beautiful. She was the goddess. The mouth of the mountain. 

She came to the freshly filled large basin of warm pungent human scarlet, butchered and spilled. The vampiress bent her haphazard and broken shape to the tub. The terrible and dementedly wide jaws came in open as the rat king’s nest of corpse-straw hair bowed in both animal feeding and dæmoniacal prayer. 

Slurping sounds… heavy. Thick as the red of which they pulled and sucked. 

And then Krugman joined his new master in her dark prayers. To her father. One of the fallen. One of the cast-out from on high. 

The Adversary. 

His words were hers and they were the ones that she had taught him. Had filled his mind with forgotten languages and tongues and forbidden names… he said them now. 

For her. With her. As she fed. As she belched them stygian and swollen and as of ancient stone from the blackmouthed gate and line of her powerful will and mind.

The others joined … the phantasm aural spill of her dark glow blanketed over them and filled their empty battered minds, filling them with the arcane black language. 

Their forgotten chant filled the showers, the feeding place of bloodprayer. The bastard, ebon dripping shape of the mountain continued to drink deeply with head bowed and fed. 

The mouth of the freshly opened girl began to join them in their chanting. A cooling corpse chained prostate over the royal feeding basin, her eyes filled with darklight and began to glow black. 

Then the wound that had spilled her and ended her tortured run of miserable and pitiable existence began to dance with movement as well, opening and shifting close and then parting once more, obscene lips strange and made of the rippling gore with arcane movement. Speaking deep and guttural and with a dangling entrails tongue. A great gored mouth spewing precious food and religious token life for the mountain jaws of the sorceress blood mass abattoir madness. 

The dangling naked body of the girl prayed obsidian words from all mouths, all sets of lips given and made until the basin was emptied and the terrible shape of the sorceress reached up with one knifing sharp splayed scarecrow claw and ripped the chanting corpse with glowing eyes down from the chains and took to tearing and rending and feasting on the cold naked meat. 

Krugman and Rand and the others stood by. Watching. Seeing the same scene of slaughter and ritual of animal need play out and unfold before their unblinking eyes. Waiting. 

Waiting for their minds to be filled once more with instruction. 

…

Weeks passed. The slaughter rose in intensity. And the violence grew more and more deranged…

in the name of the mountain. 

…

Those that were left were gathered. Krugman spoke to them all as a priest from his pulpit. 

Her pulpit. The pulpit of the sorceress, the rostrum of the far off watering mountainmouth. 

“She doesn't want your weak and feeble love or friendship, she wants your precious body fluids! She doesn't want your warmth of words or affection, she doesn't need your feeble love, brothers and sisters and children of the mountain, she just wants your spilling blood, defiled! Those of you afflicted with poison of the blood, diseased, you have the greatest opportunities for her favor! The more corrupted and diseased and vile the blood and the feces discharged in sickness, the urine, the bile heaved and retched and the vomitus pulled and brought spilled forth! The more corrupted and vile the disease the better!!" 

Willowbrook filled with human noise. The bastard and sour stone and dilapidated masonry construct of misery and pain filled with the cacophonous sounds of religious madness. 

All of them were happy to oblige. Willing. All of them were supplicant sow to her, the sorceress  queen of the stabbing spire in the fanged rock aspiring to pierce the soft horizon end of the heavens flesh. 

And in the weeks that followed they went about their work. All of them. 

All of the ones that were left in Willowbrook. The forgotten asylum. 

…

Florin was sure he could spy something in the distance. A low rise. It looked like a little slope of hill. 

It looked like there might be a building on it. Solitary. 

But if so… it was still many miles off. He and Griffin still had a ways to go. More trudging and struggling pulling steps, perilously lurching forward through this awful quagmire of death and putrescence and vile carnivorous mud. Earthen sludge that was alive with hungry movement. 

Wormland. 

A few times the abominated things had attacked, since their mule and cart had gone down many days back. They'd only been able to bade the writhing things away with torchflame, fire. All the while the quivering pustule sac of subterranean wombmind that held mastery over this spoiled patch of watery earth searched and hunted for their vibrations above. Hunting for their elusive movement, and sending her writhing children out in a lunge. Only to be repelled… again and again. 

She quivered with tectonic anger, underground rage buried and swimming and mounting and rising. Percolating in the boiling mud, the broil of the under-earth. 

She would have them. These impetuous wanderers, these animal invaders …

The wombmind quivered and more orifice-holes opened and spat. 

More children swam. Dispatched. 

As the pair, Florin and Griffin cut their slow and muddy path of progress through the sour land. To the hill they thought they might see in the distance. To the building that might be there. 

They wondered together if there was anyone that might be in there, inside. 

What might they be doing out here? This far out? And away from anything?

The putrid earth all around them churned and searched, reaching and searching for them. 

They pushed on, the pair. Hoping that if they made and covered the miles to the place there on the far-distant hill and there was anyone inside, that they might be of some help. And perhaps an improvement over their shared accommodations and company as of late. 

They could really do with some luck. They might've prayed, either one of them, but they were exhausted with their marching effort and they were afraid to jinx it. So they said nothing, either of them. Nothing aloud. They only silently wished inside. 

please… just something better than all of this, and God-willing, someone that might be able to help us… 

Hell, Griffin thought, anything's got to be better than this. 

The very moment this crossed his haggard and weary mind a dark and primal scream and witchy peal of laughter shot out from the dark of the far off dilapidated building. 

But they were still too far out, so neither he nor Florin heard anything. So they didn't know. 

And so they marched on. Slow. On the doomed and forged path towards far off and away screaming Willowbrook. The putrescent earth hunting beneath their feet. 

Quivering in needful hunger and animal rage. 

TO BE CONTINUED…