Every Shadow Has Teeth

Copyright © 2025 Brett Schumacher and Creepy Enterprises LLC

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of Fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Every Shadow Has Teeth

A Book of Short Horror Stories

Written by: Brett Schumacher

Also By Brett Schumacher

S79 The Horror In The Swamp

Leash And Other Short Horror Stories

The Ragged

Narrated Shorts by Brett Schumacher and many more Authors

www.youtube.com/Creepyghoststories

Acknowledgments

A very huge thank you to the Patrons that have constantly supported me, believed in me, and helped me grow as a YouTuber, writer and narrator: Sylvia, Chad, David, Kathi, Kyle, Michael and Katie, Shaniel, The Hutch’s Doghouse, Valiant Warrior and Melissa.

Special thanks to Valiant Warrior for their exceptional work managing our online presence. Their consistent moderation of YouTube live streams, channel content, and Discord server has kept our community running smoothly and helped it grow. Your time and effort are greatly appreciated.

Also, a heartfelt thank you to my family and closest friends for their constant support and encouragement. Your belief in me has made all the difference.

Contents

The Pages

The Long Road to Gettysburg

Devil’s Interval

Silence

White Room

Barotrauma

Last Trail

Murder Hole

Sonny Jim’s Retort

A Grim Recollection

Red Rabbit

Subway Skin

Reality For Sale

Sabrina

The Cursed Beacon

The Reckoning

Release Me

The Forbidden Mango

The Pages

David Harnar knew he wasn't crazy. He'd spent years collecting evidence, building models, and trying to convince anyone who would listen that the Earth wasn't a sphere floating in space. His family had disowned him. His wife had left. His colleagues at the university's physics department had laughed him out of academia.

"The truth is flat, it has to be flat…," he'd whisper to himself in his basement, surrounded by maps and chalk boards with calculations. "They'll see. They'll all see."

He didn't expect to be proven right quite like this.

It started with the sun going dark. Not gradually, like an eclipse. One moment it was there, the next, nothing. The world plunged into chaos within hours. Temperatures plummeted. Plants began to die. The sky turned an oppressive shade of violet.

That's when everyone started to float.

David watched from his window as his neighbors rose from their homes, their bodies becoming translucent, like soap bubbles catching the last hints of light. He felt it too, the pull upward, the sensation of his consciousness separating from his flesh.

"This is it," he thought as his spirit drifted through his ceiling. "The great reveal.”

But what waited above wasn't the dome he'd theorized about for so long. It wasn't the ice wall or the hidden continents. It was something far more terrifying.

It was strings. Endless strings stretching into the infinite darkness like silver threads in a cosmic tapestry. And attached to each string, floating like pages torn from some divine library, were worlds. Completely flat worlds. Each one a perfect disk suspended in the void, each one a different version of Earth.

David's consciousness drifted past them, reading the subtle differences in each reality. Here, a world where the Industrial Revolution never happened. There, one where the dinosaurs still ruled. Thousands upon thousands of flat earths, each telling its own story, each holding its own version of humanity.

He wasn't alone. The souls of everyone on Earth drifted with him, their screams of terror turning to awe as they witnessed the truth. Scientists who had mocked him floated past, their academic certainties shattered. His ex-wife brushed by him, her energy signature pulsing with regret.

But David wasn't triumphant. Horror had replaced vindication. Because there, at the end of each string, he could see them: massive, incomprehensible beings, turning the pages of reality like children flipping through picture books. Their forms shifted and twisted in ways that made his soul want to tear itself apart, their attention focused on the infinite stories playing out on their flat earth collections.

One of them noticed the souls drifting up from their latest expired experiment. It reached out with appendages that existed in dimensions David's mind couldn't process. He felt its vast consciousness touch his own, and in that moment, he understood.  He had been right about the Earth being flat. But he had been wrong about it mattering at all. They weren't the center of the universe. They weren't even real. They were just characters in one of countless stories, their timeline now concluded, and their string ready to be tied off and archived in the vast library of existence.

The being's thoughts echoed through what remained of David's consciousness: "Such fascinating characters in this version. Let's start another."

The last thing David saw before his soul dissolved into the void was a massive hand reaching for a fresh string, a new flat earth forming at its end, ready to tell another story.

He had discovered the truth about flat earth, yes. But some truths are better left unknown.

The Long Road to Gettysburg

Found in the attic of 147 Maple Street, Burlington, Vermont. December 15th, 2024:

I’m holding great-great grandfather’s journal in trembling hands. The leather is cracked; the pages yellow and brittle, but his words are as sharp as the bayonet he must have carried. I found it yesterday while cleaning out Grandma Helen’s attic after her passing. What follows is his account transcribed exactly as written, though I almost wish I hadn’t read it at all.

25th, June 1863:

My name is Thomas Wheeler, and if you’re reading this I’m likely long gone. Perhaps that’s for the best. Some memories shouldn’t belong to the living. I wasn’t always a soldier. Before all of this, I worked my father’s dairy farm in Burlington. We weren’t wealthy but we got by.

Mother died of consumption when I was just twelve, leaving my father to raise my sister Mary and me alone. He was a good man, stern but fair, who taught us that all men were created equal. When the war broke out, he spoke passionately about preservation of the Union and the evil of slavery.

I enlisted in the 13th  Vermont Infantry, not just because of his beliefs, but because I truly thought we’d finish this war within months. I figured if Lincoln wants to send some of us Vermont boys down South, then I would answer the call.

We have seen a lot in the couple of years since I have been enlisted. Just this past December, we defended the Fairfax courthouse against a group of cavalry. Shortly thereafter, we were called to run duty at Wolf Run Shoals along the Occoquan River. Then we had been stationed along the Occoquan Creek waiting for the Rebels to try to take a position north of the creek. It hasn’t been easy.

25th, June 1863:

We started marching to Gettysburg. The hunger never leaves us. We’ve been marching for twenty miles straight. We eat nothing but hardtack and salt pork when we’re lucky. Most days it’s just coffee made from burned corn and whatever we could forage.

Yesterday, Simmons found some berries. By nightfall, he was doubled over with dysentery. We left him at a local farmhouse, but we all knew what that means.

My Brogans fell apart today and so I wrapped my feet in strips of blanket, but they’re still bleeding. The surgeons say there are more cases of rotting foot than bullet wounds these days. Cooper lost two toes to it last week and we were just on picket duty. A surgeon called it something like “gang green” but I am not sure if he even knows why it happens.

Aside from my feet bleeding and bruised, my shoulders are raw from the weight of the equipment. Forty pounds of gear: musket, cartridge box, haversack, canteen, blanket roll. The weight never lessens, but you stop noticing it after a while, like everything else here.

We passed through the remains of a skirmish. Three hours of fighting left thirty-eight dead. We found what was left of Private Miller propped against an oak tree. A sharpshooter got him. Entry wound clean through his eye. The exit took most of his skull. His mouth was still moving when we found him; tongue working soundlessly against his teeth. The surgeon said his brain just hadn’t realized he was dead yet. We buried him with his letters from home still in his pocket. Nobody reads another man’s letters here. Some things should remain sacred.

26th, June 1863:

I watched a man die today. The infection started where the mini ball tore into his arm - just a small wound at first, hardly worth noting among the day's carnage. But by dawn, black tendrils had crept past his shoulder. The surgeon took the arm, sawing quick and clean, but the poison had already seeped into his blood. There's a smell that comes with these types of wounds and when you've been in the medical tents long enough, you learn that smell means only one thing: death's already made its choice.

This evening, I found a potato in my haversack.  I used the knife Papa gave me when I was younger and I split it three ways to give to some of my fellow friends, Evans and Odaly. It’s funny how something so small can mean so much now. Back home, we fed better scraps to the pigs.

27th, June 1863:

We buried Evans at dawn. He was fine yesterday morning, dead by midnight. That’s the sixth man this month from disease alone. The surgeons tell us to boil our water. We don’t really know why, but there’s never time. You drink from puddles, streams, hoof prints, anywhere you could find it. Some men drank from a pond with a bloated horse in it. Three of those men got deathly sick later in the day.

Lieutenant Harrison went mad today, as well. He started screaming about seeing his dead brother on the march. His brother died at Antietam and it took three days to die from a gut wound. Harrison kept saying he could smell his brother’s insides rotting. It took four men to hold him down. They sent him to the rear with the other insane or melancholic soldiers.

The new replacement, Davies, showed me his sweetheart’s daguerreotype. She is a pretty girl but I haven’t seen many of these daguerreotypes before and I wonder if it must have cost her family a small fortune to create it. He was a bit resentful when I told him to burn it, though. My thoughts are that you can’t risk the Rebels getting it if you’re killed. I think that there is nothing worse than some Confederate soldier pawing at your wife’s image with bloody hands.

28th, June 1863:

We found maggots in the salt pork this morning. The sergeant says to eat it anyway. Protein is protein and he is not usually wrong. We haven’t had a proper meal since crossing into Pennsylvania and some men tried eating the leather from their cartridge boxes after boiling it. It doesn’t do much except for giving you something to chew on.

The new recruits still talk about glory but our veterans know better, you can see it on their faces every time you look at them.  I can only guess that is me now, after all how many men do you kill before you get that title? Am I a veteran, or still a rookie? I still don’t know why the hell I signed up for this. I am sure Mr. Lincoln is right but all of these bodies laying around everywhere, you have got to start wondering if these young men all died for nothing. These new recruits all talk about...Glory...Glory is watching your friend die in a field hospital that used to be a barn with cow and pig shit still on the ground. Glory is flies infesting wounds with maggots. Glory is burning lice out of your uniform seams with a candle...Glory...Glory is finding a dead man’s boots that might fit you because yours are nothing but bloody rags now.

Jenkins brought out his harmonica tonight. Played The Battle Cry of Freedom that everybody loves, and for a moment, watching the boys sing along, you could almost forget where we were. Then the medicinal wagon started rolling in from the south, and the screaming drowned out the music.

Found lice on my clothes for the third time this week. Morton showed me the trick to run the candle flame along the seams. You can hear the eggs pop like tiny firecrackers. The smell makes you gag, but it’s better than letting them eat you alive. Some men’s backs are more scab than skin now from the itching.

29th, June 1863:

We finally got paid today, halleluiah, three months’ worth. Thirteen dollars per month. The sutlers saw us coming, though, charging five dollars for a can of peaches. Three dollars for a pound of coffee. It’s highway robbery, but we pay it. You either pay their prices, or you keep eating wormy hardtack until your teeth are loose from the scurvy.

Mills shot himself in the foot in the afternoon. Clean through. Missed the bones. Lucky bastard will be sent home and nobody even bothered to report him, I mean hell, we’ve all thought about it some days. When the dysentery hits, and you’re marching with a fever, a bullet through the foot starts to sound somewhat reasonable.

You should see the locals watch us pass through their towns with all the women holding handkerchiefs to their faces. We are an awfully smelly lot. Haven’t bathed in weeks. The creek water is not safe to drink, let alone to wash in.

*Several pages of detailed supply lists and calculations for money owed to other soldiers follow between yellowing pages.*

We found a Rebel boy today. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Gut-shot, crying for his mama. I gave him water from my canteen. Sergeant saw me, spat on the ground, and walked away. The boy died holding my hand. His accent reminded me of Mary’s friend from school, who visited one summer. War makes you forget they’re just boys, too, until they’re dying. On top of that I killed a man at close-range too. I finally made my bayonet work in the cornfield, it was thrilling and yet terrifying. You could read about it in books, but they never tell you how it feels when the blade goes in; how the man’s eyes go wide with surprise more than pain; how warm the blood is when it runs down your rifle into your hands, and how they try to hold their insides in while they fall. It is much later in the even as I write this and I can still feel his weight on my bayonet, still see his face: young man, red hair, freckles. Could have been anyone’s son. Could have been my neighbor back home.

I wrote a letter to Mary tonight. Couldn’t tell her what I’d done. How do you tell your sister you’re a killer?

My last duty in the evening is always to God and thus I did not want to write this tonight but something’s been following us for three days now. Always at the edge of the firelight. Sentries say it’s just a wolf, but wolves don’t walk on two legs, and wolves don’t drag their dead behind them. Sergeant Miller says it’s battle fatigue making us see things, but he sleeps with his bayonet fixed now.

30th, June 1863:

Two men went missing in the early hours: Private Reynolds and Corporal Haze. We found Reynolds’ finger bones arranged in a perfect circle near the latrine holes, stripped clean like a bird had picked them, ring still on one. Haze just vanished. His watch was left hanging from a tree branch, still ticking.

The old-timers say they’ve seen something like this before at Shiloh. Said after the first day’s slaughter, something started following the armies. Something that wore dead men’s faces and mimicked their voices. It called out to soldiers using the voices of their dead friends, luring them into the woods at night and the chaplain finally spoke about it today. He says that the war has awakened something with all this blood and all this death. It is bound to awaken something, and it reminds me of the time we lost four men during our time at Hunting Creek. We did not lose them to Rebels, but to whatever was stalking our camp. One of our scouts found their boots in a neat row by the creek like they just stepped out of them and walked into the morning mist. No bodies. No blood. Just boot prints leading into the water, and then nothing else. The scouts found strange tracks in the mud as well. The prints were shaped like a man’s boot but splayed and twisted as if every bone in the foot had been broken and reset. Each step sank six inches deep, like whatever made them carried an impossible weight. The chaplain made the sign of the cross and walked away.

30th, June 1863:

It is now nighttime; I tried to sleep but the thing in the woods is getting bolder. Three men swear they saw it during evening Mass. Said it looked like a soldier at first: Confederate gray in the twilight, but when it turned, Davis said its face was like a corpse left too long in the sun. The oddest thing is that the rats run from it. Even the camp dogs won’t bark. They just whimper and hide. Nature knows what doesn’t belong.

We found Jameson trying to eat shoe leather again. His mind’s going like Webster’s did before Chancellorsville. You see it happens sometimes. Men just break. Not from the fighting, but from the endless marching, the constant hunger, the bone-deep exhaustion that never leaves you. The boys learn quick about the rats. They’re bold now. Fat from feeding on the dead. You learn to sleep with your Brogans tied to your pack, or you wake up with the leather chewed away. Some men eat them if they can catch them. Meat’s meat, they say. I’m not that hungry. At least, not yet. The hunger does something to your mind after a while. Makes everything sharp and dull at the same time. You start seeing things that aren’t there. You start smelling fresh bread in the gun smoke, start hearing your mother’s voice in the wind, but you keep marching because the alternative is desertion, and we all know what happens to deserters.

Richardson caught a bullet in the gut. Took him six hours to die. We all pretended not to hear him begging for his mother. Better than the ones who catch it in the face, though. At least he could still talk. When Jimmy Collins got hit, all he could do was make this sound like a pig being slaughtered. And sometimes, I can still hear it in my sleep.

There’s talk about a big battle coming. We’re nearly there. Maybe it’ll be the one that ends this war.

4th, July 1863:

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania:

My hands still shake as I write these words. The past three days have been nothing short of hell itself, and I fear these memories will haunt me until my dying day. It began on the morning of July 1st We’d been marching hard through Pennsylvania, tracking Lee’s army when the sound of gunfire erupted ahead, near a small crossroads town called Gettysburg. Our company rushed forward to support the cavalry who’d engaged the Rebels west of town. The fighting was fierce. I’d never seen such determination in the enemy’s eyes before.

By afternoon, the casualties were mounting by the hundreds; our boys falling like wheat before a scythe. We were then pushed back through the town itself, past houses where terrified civilians peered out from behind shuttered windows. The retreat was chaos: men stumbling over their own dead, the air thick with smoke, and the screams of the wounded. Thank Providence we managed to establish a strong position on Cemetery Hill.

The 2nd was worse. The fighting at Devil’s Den and Little Roundtop. The slaughter: nearly 20,000 wounded men filled every building in town. I helped carry some of them to the makeshift hospitals. The surgeons worked without rest, their bloody aprons a testament to their grim work. The screams from the amputation tables. I shall never forget them.

The 3rd surpassed all understanding. Around one o’clock, the Rebels opened up with every gun they had. For nearly two hours, the world was nothing but thunder and flying iron. We huddled behind our stone wall, praying to survive the barrage. Then, we saw them coming. Thousands of Rebels emerging from the woods across the field; their battle flags flying Pickets men, we learned later. Nearly 12,000 strong. Our guns opened up, tearing great holes in their lines, yet still they came.

The courage of those men, even though they be our enemies, cannot be questioned. When they reached our lines, it was bayonet to bayonet, musket to musket. The fighting was so desperate that men forgot to load and instead used their rifles as clubs.

The field surgeons work without stopping now. They don’t even wipe their saws between amputations anymore; they just keep cutting. The pile of limbs behind the medical tent grows by the hour, and sometimes, they twitch like they’re trying to crawl back to their owners.

I also had found Williams crawling through the wheat field, both legs gone below the knee. He was trying to push himself forward with his elbows, leaving a trail like a slug. I dragged him back to camp and a surgeon gave him morphine.

The flies are everywhere. They lay their eggs in the wounds of the men still breathing. By morning, the maggots are already at work. The surgeons say they keep the wounds clean, eat the rotting flesh. Small mercies.

Tonight on the 4th, I write by candlelight. The fields around me are littered with over 50,000 dead and wounded Americans. The moans of the dying drift across the battlefield like some terrible chorus and the surgeons still  are still working through the night. Their piles of severed limbs, growing even higher, and the July heat turned the air rancid with death. We’ve won a great victory, they say, but as I look out over the blood-soaked fields of Pennsylvania, I wonder, can any man truly call this winning?

Tomorrow, we will begin burying our dead. May God have mercy on all our souls.

Gettysburg. I do not wish to use the Lord’s name in vain but god damn that fucking hellfire of a pit. We all lost good friends and good family.

5th, July 1863:

The fields are carpeted with bodies. Blue and gray uniforms blend together in death, covered in crimson, making it impossible to tell friend from foe. The buzzards don’t care which side they feast on. Yesterday, I saw a man walk ten paces with his intestines dragging behind him like a grotesque parade streamer. He was trying to stuff them back in, looking confused as if he couldn’t understand why his insides were outside.

I also thought I caught a glimpse of the thing that had been following us wearing other people’s faces like a deranged mask, but maybe it was all in my head.  Although I heard others talk and hear about it. 

Today, the worst thing was watching Richardson die. We’d shared the same tent for months. He told me about his wife back home, expecting their first child. The artillery shell landed right next to him on July 3rd the sound of his skin ripping like leather being torn, I’ll never forget. Half his ribcage was gone, and I could see his heart still beating in the cavity. He looked at me, trying to speak, but only blood came out. His eyes, they knew. The surgeons managed to keep him alive on heavy doses of Morphine. He passed in the early morning.

Mary, if you ever read this, I’m not sure if I believe in God anymore. No benevolent creator could allow this hell on Earth. If you find this, I’m sorry I couldn’t keep my promise to come home. The man you once knew, who left Burlington, died somewhere between Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. What’s left of me isn’t fit for peacetime anymore. Father was right about slavery being evil, but he was wrong about war being the answer. War just replaces one evil with another. It takes good men and hollows them out, fills the space with darkness. It awakens something dark and awful. I don’t dream anymore. Not really. I just relive the same moments over and over. The sounds, the smells, the faces of men I couldn’t save, the faces of men I had to kill, and it isn’t over yet. It looks like we’ll have to chase Lee all the way back to Maryland. Remember me as I was, and not as I am.

Your brother, Thomas

I closed the journal, my hand shaking. Outside, children play in the summer sun, oblivious to the horrors that these pages contain. I think about my grandmother keeping this brutal piece of history hidden away all these years. Perhaps some memories are better left in attics, gathering dust alongside the ghosts of the past. But we owe it to them, to Thomas Wheeler, and the others to remember, not the sanitized version, but the truth.

The horrible, brutal, necessary truth because those who forget the true face of war are doomed to paint it with glory and send new generations to discover its horrors anew.

Devil’s Interval

I run a YouTube channel out of Seattle, Washington. I started out in the urban exploration niche. The channel grew, and I became somewhat successful. After a few years, I gained 350,000 subscribers, and then it went up to 800,000 and I was able to do the videos full-time and quit my day job. If you’re wondering, I worked cleaning up the parks and making sure the hiking trails were safe. I enjoyed it, but hey, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to dump their day job like a narcissistic lover?

Over the next four or five years, my subscribers seemed to be getting bored with the urban explorations. Even the ‘possibly haunted and abandoned’ episodes were getting less and less views. It could have had something to do with the fact that I always kind of made fun of the haunted angle. Not to mention that I was burned out. My team only consisted of four people, and I was churning out three to five videos a week of which I did the lion’s share of the editing work.

My biggest success came when some of my subscribers with whom I had become close friends suggested that I try paranormal debunking videos since I didn’t seem to believe in the paranormal. It was a huge success. It seemed that my skepticism and I had found our true niche. I didn’t have to hold back on the smartass commentary at all. The audience loved it when I completely obliterated some channel’s ‘paranormal’ video. I loved it, too.

A couple of years ago, though, I had grown tired of the whole channel, but I was stuck. I had to keep churning out videos for the subscribers so I could earn enough money to live. The thought of going back to the old nine-to-five grind working for someone else was a depressing scenario. I just couldn’t imagine doing it again after so many years working for myself.

I was editing a video early one morning when someone knocked on my door. I looked out the second-floor window to the front door. I didn’t recognize the man in a courier service uniform, and I couldn’t think of anything a courier would be delivering to me by hand. After a moment’s hesitation, I went to the door and signed for the large envelope with the Unicoi, Tennessee postmark.

I tore open the large envelope and removed the smaller one from inside. The large print announced Evergreen Estate Solutions: Trust and Heir Attorneys at Law.

I read it probably three times before I comprehended what kind of attorneys were contacting me. Once I understood, I laughed. I’m an orphan. I have no family to inherit from unless the state of Washington counted. They’re the ones who raised me. Well, the state and a handful of foster parents, who always handed me back like I was a broken toy they had bought at the local Walmart.

But then I read the communication. Cassius Thorn had put me in his will as the heir to his mountain cabin and property. Cassius lived in the county of Unicoi in Tennessee. I had never heard of the place, so my first move was to look it up on the internet. I decided the man must have been mistaken. Thorn isn’t exactly a unique last name, after all. Ethan Thorn. How many men are running around the US with the exact same name? I would guess at least a hundred, and perhaps many more than that.

I had long since outgrown all fantasies of some long-lost family member finding me, whisking me away to a nice place, and making my life better. I used to joke that one day a rich uncle would appear and leave me his billion-dollar estate, too.  All those fantasies were dangerous because they fostered a sense of hope.  And that never led to any good outcome. It led to disappointment after disappointment and eventually dropped me into a pit of despair and depression that I only crawled out of with therapy and medication. No thanks. I didn’t want to go there again.

I called Evergreen Estate Solutions and spoke to the man who drafted the letter. Mr. Worley spoke with an entertainingly slow Southern drawl that I had thought only existed in movies and TV shows. I told Mr. Worley that I was an orphan, my plight, and told him the letter was sent to the wrong man. I had no family. My mother died giving birth, and my father had overdosed months before I was even born. The state assured me that I had no living family.

Mr. Worley countered with a full rundown of my short lineage. He assured me that he wouldn’t have spent the last three years searching for me if he wasn’t absolutely sure I was the right Ethan Thorn. He gave me the names of my father and mother, as if I might not already know them, and told me to research for myself and get back to him.

Entertained and annoyed simultaneously, I hung up and did just that. I spent the rest of the day trying to find proof that I was not the Ethan Thorn he was looking for. That’s what I did for a living, after all; I debunked outlandish claims made by others; I proved people wrong.

By the next afternoon, I had only found proof that Mr. Worley was correct. Even though that should have been good news for me, I was reluctant to call the attorney and admit that I was wrong, and he was right. But I did.

There are a lot of legalities involved in these types of transactions, and over the next few weeks, as I dealt with them, I grew fond of the idea that I had indeed inherited a house and property deep in the mountains of East Tennessee. I needed new content for my channel, or rather, for my flagging interest in my own content.

My friends had mixed feelings about the inheritance and told me to sell the place without traveling to it. But I couldn’t let it go. It would be great for me, my creativity would get a boost, and for my channel. Surely, with the uptick in content related to anything Appalachian that had spread across the entertainment world, I would get more subscribers.

It took two months to get everything in order so I could travel all the way across the country and see the place. It was in a portion of Unicoi called Shadow Valley. Mr. Worley laughed and told me Shadow Valley had a population of one as he handed me the keys to the cabin, a cardboard box of items that had belonged to Cassius, and more paperwork to read and sign. He offered to drive to Shadow Valley so I could follow him and not get lost looking for the cabin. I told him I would use GPS, and he laughed again.

“Not out there, you won’t,” he said, pulling on his suit jacket. He opened the door and motioned me out. “Just follow me. I won’t stay. I’ll just turn around and drive back out. You will have to get the landline turned back on. The phone company will have to put the line back up. Storm tore it down last year. You’ll need it, though. Your cellphone won’t work out there.”

I thanked him, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into.

I followed him for forty-five minutes on what passed as the main road. It was quaint and charming to drive on a simple two-lane road for so many miles and not pass five-hundred vehicles or have them lined up behind me. As I drove, the businesses of town gave way to a residential area where houses sat on huge plots of land. Gardens thrived, covering large swaths of the landscape on either side of the road. The farther I drove, the fewer houses I saw until finally, there were no more houses or gardens at all. The forest moved from being a backdrop to being right alongside the pavement. It was like the trees were creeping in and threatening to blot out the sky completely. It was enchanting and a little intimidating, honestly.

I reminded myself that I was there for the adventure of it all; for the excitement; and possibly to learn some family secrets. How had my father’s part of the family lived in Unicoi? It wasn’t a rich place, obviously, and from what little I had experienced, there was a noticeable lack of the ‘Southern Charm’ everybody talks about. No one had been outright rude, but they hadn’t gone out of their way to speak to me, or even to offer me a friendly howdy-neighbor smile. Mostly, I had been met with suspicious, wary looks from everyone except Mr. Worley.

The road to the cabin was in better condition than I had anticipated, but it was still not a pleasant drive with all the wash-out ruts and tops of boulders sticking up from the roadbed.

When the land opened up in front of me, Mr. Worley kept his speed, but I slowed. He drove around a large elm tree in the flat and headed back my way. I looked around for the cabin, and it took me several seconds to spot it backed up against the woods and undergrowth.

There was that initial oh-hell-no moment when I saw it, too. Mr. Worley smiled and waved, barely slowing as he passed by me. I had expected him to stop by my car and offer for me to call him if I needed anything, but no. He left me sitting there without so much as a backward glance.

I drove to the big elm and parked, reminding myself again that I was there for the adventure of it all. Grabbing my camera equipment, I immediately started shooting footage for my channel. I wasn’t sure what would become of the footage, how it would turn out after editing, but I knew I needed to document my arrival.

The cabin was surrounded by towering trees and thick underbrush that created a sense of mystery, adding to the feeling of complete isolation. The exterior of the cabin was made of aged, rough-hewn logs that had probably been cut from the trees on the property. The surface had been darkened and cracked by years of exposure to the rough elements of the ever-changing mountain climate. One side of the structure was covered with a dark green carpet of moss. Ivy clung to the front wall and covered an upstairs window.

The windows had cracked and were the color of cataracts. Many of the shingles on the steeply pitched roof had curled, cracked, and started to break away, and on one end, a stone chimney rose high and straight.

With the chill surrounding the cabin, it would be nice if the fireplace was intact and still worked. In town, I had been warm enough to go around in a short-sleeve shirt. On the mountain, it was already chilly in the middle of the day. Nothing like a wood fire to chase away the chill. I thought it would be nice to sit in front of a crackling fire later and just listen to my surroundings; kinda get to know the place a little better.

After filming and getting still shots outside, I moved inside. The cabin wasn’t very big, but in the context of a man living alone, it was enough. The old worn furniture hid under a thin layer of dust. Most of the pieces had been handmade. Had Cassius been a woodworker, or had it been someone farther back in the lineage? Maybe he’d bought the furniture from a local artisan.

I chose the rocking chair in the corner near the hearth and sat. The seat had been worn smooth and was a lighter color from all the years of use, just like the upcurve of the armrests where someone’s hands had rested.

How many years would it take to show wear like that? I didn’t know, but it was intriguing to think about. For all I knew the place could have been built and lived in by my great-great grandfather. Probably not, but it was fun to consider, and it made for some great footage.

I saw a few outlets with lamps plugged in, but only one lamp worked when I tried them. It was behind the rocker. Something I found interesting was the built-in bookshelves in that corner. Cassius had been an avid reader, it seemed. There were the staples like the Bible and a couple of compendiums, a church hymnal, a thick collegiate dictionary from the 1990s, an incomplete set of encyclopedias, and some notebooks, but there were other books, too. Ones I wouldn’t have guessed anyone living alone in the middle of the dense forests of Appalachia to own.

Alongside the science fiction and horror books were metaphysical tomes with old, cracked spines and curled, yellowed pages. There were other religious books as well. A few about Buddhism, more on Catholicism, and a smattering of books related to witchcraft, hoodoo, voodoo, Santeria, and shamanism, a few volumes dedicated to the works of Nikola Tesla, the ancient Egyptians, and an old rendering of Clavicula Salomonis, better known as The Key of Solomon. To say that I was shocked to find such works on Cassius’ bookshelf would be an understatement. On the bottom shelf were several cookbooks. I stood and looked into the primitive kitchen, wondering aloud what Cassius had ever cooked in there that had required a cookbook. Not much you could do with a few cast iron pots and pans and a wood-burning cookstove. There was a small electric cookstove in there, but there were no eyes, and the oven door was missing. I went out on a limb and presumed it didn’t work. It was a safe assumption.

Something fell upstairs and I nearly dropped the camera. It sounded like a heavy wooden chair had been knocked over. My heart raced and adrenaline pumped. I hadn’t thought of checking if the place was empty before starting to film. A mistake. If someone was there, I had two choices: confront them or leave the mountain. In a little while, it would be dark enough outside to be dangerous if I tried to drive off the mountain. I didn’t want to end up rolling the car ass over teakettle into a ravine because I didn’t dodge a washout or one of the boulder tops.

I yelled up the narrow staircase a couple of times, explaining who I was and that I meant no harm to whoever might be up there—the urban and abandoned explorers in the audience just heard their own standard lines in that situation, I’m sure. I listened but there was no reply.

Turning my camera on again, I made my way upstairs. There was a short hallway and a room at either end. I held my breath and listened for a few seconds. When I heard no movement, I turned right and went into the first room. One window faced the dense forest and underbrush at the back of the house while the other looked out to the front. The front window was the one covered with the ivy vines I had seen earlier as I stood by the elm tree. The milky, filtered light that did get into the room left it in a perpetual state of twilight. There was a small, rough table with one chair. A bottle of whisky and two tumblers sat on the table with an overflowing ashtray that reeked of old burned tobacco. I didn’t stay long.

The second room was a bedroom. It was larger, cleaner, and held the source of the noise I had heard. A violin case lay in front of the small fireplace. On the wall above the mantel, the outline of the case stood out brightly in stark contrast to the dingy nicotine brown color on the rest of the wall. A single nail stuck out of the wall near the top of the outline. As the case was the only thing that looked out of place in the whole upstairs, it was another safe bet that it was the source of the loud thud.

Setting the camera aside, I opened the case. An old violin rested against threadbare crimson velvet. Turning the case carefully, I saw the sawtooth picture hanger attached to the back. Interesting way to store the piece. As I stood with it in both hands, the word ‘fiddle’ came to mind in a Southern drawl as if someone else had spoken the word. I had been calling it a violin, but the proper term in that part of the world was ‘fiddle’. No one there played violin pieces; they played fiddle music. Instead of hanging the instrument back on the wall, I took it downstairs with me. I didn’t know how to play, but there was something about it. I wanted more than anything to sit in that rocker with it for some reason.

I laid a small fire and accomplished smoking up the entire house. I coughed and gagged until I got the thing burning properly and then I opened the windows to let out the smoke. The front and back doors did most of the work of pulling the acrid cloud out and pushing it into the woods. When I got them both open, it created a strong flow of cool, fresh mountain air. When most of the smoke had cleared, I closed the doors. The air moving through the house had made sounds of whispering voices, and I didn’t like the chill it caused. It wasn’t as much a chill from the cold as it was a cold chill of fear that trickled down my spine at the eerie sound of the whispers. Couldn’t afford to get spooked on my first night. There was money to be made, things from my blank slate of a past to learn, and a connection to my heritage to be had.

I held the fiddle and bow on my lap while I rocked slowly in the chair by the fire. I had never experienced a quiet so absolute. For the longest time, only the crackling of the low fire disturbed the silence. And I think that was the first time I had ever heard my own rhythmic breathing.

I dozed. I dreamed. In the dream, something wispy and cold floated out of the woods and wrapped me in its icy embrace. Voices whispered all around me. I couldn’t understand the words, but I heard the voices speaking in old Southern dialects and Appalachian accents mixed with a language I couldn’t understand.

I startled awake. My hands gripped the neck of the fiddle and the bow so tightly it hurt, and the whispers faded slowly as the stiff breeze through the windows died. Unnerved, I closed the windows and went upstairs to replace the fiddle. I didn’t want to risk breaking it if I fell asleep again and dropped it.

I rolled out my blanket on the couch and watched the dancing firelight until I fell asleep again. It was a peaceful sleep for a while, but then I dreamed again. I was outside by the big elm and I was playing a tune on the fiddle. I didn’t know how to play anything other than the radio and the television. I decided that if it was a dream, it was a good one, and I would enjoy it. I glanced at the strings and watched the little puffs of rosinswirl as I drew the bow over them. The strings were rough under my fingertips, and soon, they began to really dig in. It hurt, but I kept playing. I couldn’t stop. Truthfully, I didn’t want to. It was awesome to be playing the fiddle even if it was just a dream.

The whispering voices returned, and I scanned the moonlit area for the source, but I saw nothing. At least not for a few more minutes. My right foot tapped out the timing for the piece I played. Damp leaves and moist dirt stuck to it, and when a thick blade of grass became lodged between my big toe and the one beside it, I turned my attention there as I continued to play. It was wild that the dream was so vivid. I could smell, feel, and hear things like never before in a dream. Even the slight odor of ancient varnish from the fiddle wafted up every now and then. It was the most exhilarating feeling I had ever experienced, and I wanted it to go on forever.

Dark shapes began to move in the shadows near the trees. Soon, they morphed into semi-human shapes and closed in around me. For a moment, I stopped playing. It was a natural pause in the music, but I noticed that all the shapes stopped moving. Fear tensed my muscles and sweat oozed from my pores. The oddness of the sensation startled me, and I dropped the fiddle and bow to my sides. That’s when I tried to wake myself. I decided I’d had enough. Dread filled the air, and I knew the dream was going to turn into a nightmare any second.

The dark shapes flickered. Faces became momentarily visible, and the voices faded as the wind fell still. The faces twisted into grimaces of pain and fury. The entities that I had thought looked human no longer seemed to bear much resemblance to humans at all. They were twisted and grotesque and seemed to be fabricated from the underbelly of the forest; the part that was ugly, decaying, rotting, and slimy. The flickering grew steadily faster, and the shapes blinked out of existence one after another until I was standing alone in the dim light of a half-moon shivering and afraid.

I was awake. I had been awake the whole time. Had any of the experience been a dream?

I walked stiffly back toward the cabin’s open door and stopped on the porch to look out toward the shadows again. Nothing moved. Not even the wind stirred. There were no shapes and no whispers.

Looking at the fiddle and bow, I figured out a way to test the theory that I had been dreaming. In the dream, I was playing a beautiful, haunting tune. In reality, I couldn’t play at all. I raised the fiddle and drew the bow across the strings. I knew the melody of The Old Grey Mare, and I haltingly played a few notes of the song, picking them out as best I could on the strings, but it was nothing compared to what I had been playing.

Satisfied that I had been dreaming and sleepwalking, I went back inside.

Over the next several days and nights, I read through Cassius’ journals. I thought he was a madman after the first journal. By the second one, I was positive of it.

I got a few laughs, but mostly I felt a deep sense of sadness for the man. He had lived up there alone his whole adult life while suffering from an obvious mental illness. No one came to check on him. No one offered to get him the help he needed. He was truly isolated and alone during his life. There wasn’t a single entry about a friend or family member in the journals even though he seemed to have documented most of his daily life in one set of notebooks. In the other set, he documented his crazy ideas and experimentations. Music and his beloved fiddle were the centerpiece of all the research and the trial and error.

Cassius was convinced that the fiddle was special. It wasn’t just a musical instrument. He even said it was not designed to play ‘normal’ music, and that when one tried, it would always sound off. The fiddle was an esoteric machine that tapped into frequencies. He thought the playing of a certain ‘forbidden’ tune on it would lower the person’s frequency vibration enough to put them into contact with entities who lived in the Grey. That’s what he called the lower frequency plane of existence, which he explained as being located below our level. He also noted that there was another instrument that could raise one’s vibrations and offer a peek into the frequency above ours, which he dubbed the White. He said nothing about being able to interact with the beings who lived in the White, though.

It was entertaining to read, and it sparked a few creative ideas, but that was about all. It took me a total of five days and nights to finish reading the notebooks and journals. The sixth day was back to business as usual for me. I shot more footage, hiked a few trails close by, and then sat on the couch that evening to stitch together some of the footage for an awesome intro to the new section of my channel that I called The Hillbilly Hullabaloo: My Appalachian Heritage.

I fell asleep during the editing process. I woke up in an unfamiliar part of the woods. Once more, I was barefoot, in my night clothes, and was playing the same tune on the fiddle.

The wind rushed around me, warm at first, then cold. It carried the voices that whispered in mixed languages, the shapes manifested from the darkness, and then I stopped playing.

It took me hours to find my way back to the cabin.

Over the next week, this happened three more times. The last time, I didn’t stop playing the tune as I returned home. As I stood on the porch, the dark, twisted figures closed in. I willed my fingers to let go of the bow, but they refused. I tensed my muscles trying to pull the fiddle from its resting place on my shoulder, but nothing happened. It was as if my body had been taken over by something else, and I was demoted to being a marionette, a thing with no control of my own body.

The dark shapes closed the circle around me, their reaching hands grasping at my clothes, my hair, and brushing my skin to leave burning, icy trails in their wake. I screamed, but the music continued to flow from the instrument.

Using all the strength and willpower I possessed, I finally was able to still my hand around the bow, and the beings, full of anger and hate, hissed and howled at me as they flickered out of existence once more. I could feel whatever force had taken over my body ramping up in my arm again. Focusing on my legs, I broke from the hold on me and moved toward a tree.

“If I can’t let go of it, I’ll destroy the fiddle,” I yelled as I quickened my pace to a painfully slow jog.

A few feet from the tree, the hold on me disappeared, and I launched forward. My arms flew out to my sides, and I crashed into the tree. Blood ran down my face in a stream from the center of my forehead, and I lay dazed at the base of the tree. The rough bark bit into the skin of my back, but I didn’t have the wits to move yet. My left palm burned, and there was a wide gash where the fiddle had been ripped from my grasp.

I felt, and later would realize, looked like I’d been in a car wreck.

But the fiddle and bow lay unharmed several yards away on the damp grass.

I didn’t pick it up as I struggled to find my way back to the cabin. I figured to hell with that thing. If it wasn’t in the house, maybe I’d stop sleepwalking. Of course, by then, I already knew I wasn’t really sleepwalking. Something darker and more sinister was happening. At first light, I was going to get off the mountain before I died there.

I had all my equipment packed and waiting by the door long before sunrise. At the first hint of light outside, I stopped pacing and loaded my things into the car. I didn’t just leave the mountain; I bought a plane ticket back home.

It was a nine-hour wait before boarding time, and I went to the nearest town for something to eat. Now, this wasn’t in Unicoi where the cabin had been. This was the next county over, Washington County. An elderly couple walked into the little mom-n-pop diner. She had her hand hooked around his arm, and they looked around. Their gazes fell on me, and I looked away. I had no interest in talking to anyone. I was still trying to process what had happened up on the mountain. They walked straight toward me, and my stomach fell.

When the old man cleared his throat, I looked up at them. They were still smiling their sweet grandparent smiles. I flashed a quick smile, nodded, and looked back to my burger and fries.

The old woman stepped forward and put a hand on my shoulder. She kept smiling and told me that the shadows and the wind knew my name now, and I wouldn’t get away from them so easily. The old man said I should go back and finish what I started or find a way to put a stop to it altogether.

They wore those unnerving smiles the whole time they were talking, and before I could protest, or reply in any way, they walked off arm in arm.

I’d like to tell you that I went back and destroyed the fiddle at least, but I can’t because I didn’t. You’re probably sitting there judging me for it, but you didn’t experience what I did. It’s easy to say you’d do the right thing, or the brave thing when you’re on the other side of the story. I understand. I would probably be the same way if I were listening to someone else tell this story.

The best I can do is hope that the fiddle is destroyed by the wildlife and the elements before some unlucky person finds it. I hope that with all my heart. The next person, or the person after them might not be able to break the hold; they might finish playing that forbidden melody. And only God knows what would happen then, but it wouldn’t be good for any of us. I’m sure of that.

Silence

I never thought I'd be afraid of silence. Growing up in a city, I'd dreamed of quiet nights, star-filled skies, and the kind of peace you can only find far from the urban sprawl. That's why when Joel posted the roommate ad for his farmhouse forty minutes outside of Portland, I jumped at the chance. The rent was reasonable, the commute manageable, and the house itself was everything I'd imagined – a classic two-story white farmhouse with black shutters, wraparound porch, and enough space that two grown men could live their separate lives in peace.

Joel and I got along well enough, though we weren't what you'd call friends. He worked nights at the Amazon fulfillment center, while I kept regular hours at my IT job downtown. We'd pass in the kitchen sometimes, exchange pleasantries about the weather or complain about the neighbor’s noisy cat, but that was about it. The arrangement suited us both perfectly.

The morning everything changed started normally enough. I was sitting at the kitchen table, coffee cooling beside me as I scrolled through the local news on my tablet. The headline about the prison break caught my eye immediately – three inmates had escaped from Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, last seen heading west. But it was buried among other stories: a controversial new tech campus being built downtown, a local high school's record-breaking swim team, an upcoming solar eclipse that was supposed to be visible from the Pacific Northwest, a debate over urban farming regulations, and something about a rare book being discovered in a Portland basement.

I remember thinking I should mention the prison break to Joel when I saw him next, but he'd been pulling double shifts lately, and I rarely caught him between sleep and work. The house creaked and settled around me as I finished my coffee, the usual sounds of an old farmhouse that we'd both grown used to over the past eight months. The original builder had used local timber, and every board seemed to have its own voice, especially in the morning chill.

Work that day was uneventful, the usual parade of forgotten passwords and printer issues. I didn't think about the prison break again until I got home and found Joel waiting for me in the kitchen, which was unusual enough to make me pause in the doorway. He looked tired, the kind of bone-deep exhaustion that comes from more than just physical labor. His normally neat beard was unkempt, and there was something unsettling with his eyes.

"Travis," he said, not quite meeting my gaze, "have you been hearing things?"

I set my laptop bag down slowly. "What kind of things?"

"Footsteps or creaking. But not the normal house sounds, different ones. And...," he hesitated, rubbing his jaw, "...murmuring. Like someone talking."

The kitchen suddenly felt colder, though I told myself it was just the autumn evening settling in. "The house makes all kinds of noises," I said, trying to sound casual. "Though I thought we'd both gotten used to them by now."

Joel's fingers drummed against the kitchen table – a nervous habit I'd never seen from him before. "This is different. I know what the house sounds like. This is…"

A knock at the door made us both jump. Sheriff Morgan stood on our porch, his broad shoulders silhouetted against the dying light. I'd met him a few times at the local diner, in a small community like ours, you get to know the law enforcement pretty quickly, but he wasn't the type for social calls. "Evening, Travis, Joel," he said, nodding to each of us. "Just making the rounds, letting folks know to keep their doors locked tonight. I'm sure you've heard about the prison break."

Joel's fingers had stopped their drumming, but I could see the tension in his shoulders. "Any idea where they might be headed?"

"Last confirmed sighting was about sixty miles east, but that was twelve hours ago. In my experience, these types head for isolation. Easier to hide out in the country than the city." The sheriff's eyes swept across our wraparound porch, taking in the darkening tree line beyond. "Just keep your eyes open, call if you see anything suspicious. And maybe check those basement windows, old houses like this, sometimes the locks aren't what they used to be."

After he left, Joel and I did a walkthrough of the house together, checking windows and doors. The farmhouse had been in Joel's family for three generations, and while he'd modernized much of it, there were still plenty of original features, including the stone basement walls and their ancient window frames. The basement itself was partially finished, with one side serving as a laundry room and storage area, while the other remained rough stone walls and dirt floor, separated by a newer partition wall.

"I should get some sleep," Joel said after we'd secured everything. "Got work in a few hours." He paused at the bottom of the stairs, looking back at me. "You'll be up for a while?" I nodded, though I wasn't sure why he was asking. We rarely kept track of each other's schedules. "Got some code to review. I'll probably be up past midnight," I responded.

"Good," he said, then added quickly, "I mean, good that someone will be awake. Just in case."

I spent the next few hours trying to focus on work, but my attention kept drifting to the sounds of the house. Every creak seemed louder than usual, every settling beam a potential footstep. Around eleven, I decided to tackle the hall closet organization project I'd been putting off, anything to keep my mind occupied.

The upstairs hallway was dark except for the light spilling from my room. The closet was packed with old coats, boxes of holiday decorations, and the accumulated debris of two single men who had too much space to fill. I was halfway through sorting a box of Joel's old winter clothes when I heard it, the soft, unmistakable sound of footsteps on the stairs.

I froze, listening intently. The steps were light, hesitant, as if someone was trying not to make noise. They stopped just short of the hallway. My heart hammered in my chest as I slowly turned toward the door. In my periphery I thought I saw movement, but the doorway was empty, the dark hallway beyond still and silent.

Shaking my head at my own nervousness, I turned back to the closet. A stack of old winter coats had fallen from their hangers, and as I sorted through them, I found a small cardboard box wedged in the back corner. It was unmarked, sealed with yellowed packing tape that crumbled at my touch. I was about to open it when something made me hesitate, maybe it was the way the tape had degraded, suggesting it had been hidden there long before either of us had moved in, or maybe it was just my nerves getting the better of me. I set it aside, telling myself I'd ask Joel about it later. The box made a hollow sound as it hit the floor, like something shifting inside, and that's when a floorboard creaked in the adjacent bedroom. Moving as quietly as I could, I stepped into the hall and glanced toward the sound. Joel stood in the doorway of his room, silhouetted against his window, staring intently out into the yard.

"Jesus, Joel," I breathed, my heart still racing. "I thought you were at work. You scared the hell out of me."

He turned slowly and looked at me. "Travis, I shit you not. I thought I saw someone out there," he said, his voice flat and nearly a whisper. "By the old oak tree. I wanted to get a closer look. Did you see anything?”

I rushed to the window, squinting into the darkness. The old oak tree's branches swayed gently in the breeze, creating shifting shadows across the lawn. "I haven't noticed anything strange," I said, trying to sound reassuring. "No weird noises or anything and I've been up late most nights, working." I hesitated, then added, "Maybe all this talk about the prison break has us both a bit on edge. I mean what are the chances of a felon coming to our house?"

"Probably slim to none, Travis, but we should probably check. Just to be sure."

The autumn air was crisp as we circled the house, flashlight beams cutting through the darkness. The old oak tree stood like a skeleton against the star-filled sky, its few remaining leaves rustling in the breeze. We found nothing, no footprints in the damp soil, no broken branches, no sign that anyone had been there at all.

"Maybe it was just shadows," I suggested, trying to sound reasonable. "The branches moving in the moonlight. It is kinda windy out tonight."

Joel didn't respond immediately. He stood at the edge of our property; flashlight beam fixed on the tree line that separated our land from the neighbor's soybean field. "Maybe," he said in a flat whisper. “Maybe you are right Travis, but I could have sworn I saw something move out here, Ahh hell, it’s probably nothing. Let’s get back inside and get some sleep.”

The next few days were a blur of sleepless nights and jumpy days. I started noticing small things at first. The garden gate would be unlatched in the morning when I was sure I'd secured it the night before. I would find muddy footprints on the back porch and fresh cigarette butts by the oak tree, though neither Joel nor I smoked.

I installed a motion-activated security light. When I reviewed the footage from my hastily installed security camera, I caught glimpses of movement at the edge of the frame – a shadow here, a blur there, but I never saw anything concrete. The camera's night vision gave everything an eerie, green-tinted glow.

One evening, while microwaving leftovers, I caught a reflection in the kitchen window, someone standing just beyond the porch railing, watching me. I whirled around, heart pounding, but the porch was empty. As I stared into the darkness, my phone buzzed with a news alert: another possible sighting of the escaped convicts, this time just two counties over.

I mentioned the muddy footprints that I had found on the porch to Joel, but he seemed distracted, almost dismissive. "Probably just animals," he said, though his eyes kept darting to the windows. "Or that damn cat again." But Chester hadn't been around for days, and our neighbor mentioned she hadn't seen him either. Also, our neighbor’s cat doesn’t wear boots. The local news wasn't helping my nerves either. Reports of strange noises in the woods, missing livestock from nearby farms, and unusual tracks found in the morning dew. The sheriff's department claimed they were investigating and the town buzzed with theories. Some said the escaped convicts had split up, that one of them was hiding in the dense forest that bordered our property. Others whispered about something worse.

For the next week, things seemed to settle back to normal. Joel's demeanor improved dramatically, he was showering regularly again, trimming his beard, and we even shared a pizza one evening while watching the Blazers game. But something had shifted in me. Maybe it was the way the house's familiar creaks now seemed to follow a pattern, or how I'd sometimes catch what sounded like whispers in the white noise of my box fan at night. I told myself it was just heightened awareness from that night's scare, but I started taking my laptop downstairs to work, not wanting to be alone upstairs after dark.

One night, around 2 AM, I was jolted awake by three distinct knocks on my bedroom window. My heart nearly stopped – I was on the second floor. The knocking came again, more insistent this time. I grabbed my phone, ready to call 911, when a branch from the oak tree scraped against the glass. Just the wind, I told myself, though I couldn't shake the feeling that the three knocks had been deliberate. I got up to check the window, and that's when I saw it – a dark figure standing beneath the oak tree, perfectly still, staring up at my window. I fumbled for my phone to call the sheriff, but by the time I looked back, the figure was gone. On this same night, I crept downstairs to check the doors and found Joel in the kitchen, making tea.

"Can't sleep?" he asked, surprisingly chipper. "I heard something too. Probably just Chester getting into trouble again." He chuckled, stirring his tea with slow, methodical movements. "You know, I used to be scared of the dark when I was a kid. Used to hear all sorts of things. But now?" He smiled. "Now I find the night... comforting. Like the darkness is an old friend."

A couple of nights later had been particularly unsettling. We'd both been in the living room, I was coding and Joel was reading a book by Mark Lanegan, when we heard a distinct crash from the basement. Our eyes met across the room, and without speaking, we both moved toward the basement door. The beam of my flashlight caught something moving near the cellar window, and Joel let out a sharp breath. The window was wide open, the ancient latch hanging uselessly, and beneath it, a paint can lay on its side, white paint slowly pooling on the concrete floor.

"Call the sheriff," Joel whispered, his voice tight. "Now."

Sheriff Morgan arrived within fifteen minutes, his cruiser's headlights sweeping across the front of the house. He did a thorough search of the basement and the surrounding property but found nothing disturbed except the window and the paint can.

"Probably just the wind," he said, though Joel and I knew the window had been latched. "But I'll have a deputy drive by every couple hours tonight, just to be safe."

The sheriff left and we were still standing in the kitchen, trying to calm our nerves, when suddenly a loud pounding on the front door made us both jump. Joel grabbed a kitchen knife, and I reached for the baseball bat we'd started keeping by the back door. The pounding came again, more insistent.

"Open up you two!" It was Sheriff Morgan's voice. "Got something of yours!"

When we opened the door, the sheriff stood there grinning, holding a familiar orange tabby cat. "This critter belong to either of you?"

Joel's face went from terror to embarrassment. "Chester," he said weakly, taking the cat. "It’s our neighbor’s cat and sometimes he likes to visit us. Where'd you find him?"

"Strutting down your driveway like he owned it," the sheriff chuckled. "Guess we found our basement burglar." His expression grew more serious. "Though speaking of burglars, thought you boys should know, that escaped convict we're looking for, Marcus Thorne? He's not your average car thief. Did fifteen years for some real nasty business up in Washington. The kind of things that keep even veteran cops up at night."

After the sheriff left, Joel and I stood in the kitchen, Chester purring contentedly in Joel's arms. We both laughed, the tension of the night finally breaking.

"Guess we're both a little jumpy," I said.

Joel nodded, but his eyes were distant. "Yeah," he said softly. "Jumpy." He set Chester down and turned to me. "But don't you think it's strange? The cat couldn't have opened that window. It was latched from the inside."

I wanted to respond but found myself distracted by the shadows playing across the kitchen wall. They seemed to move against the light. The rational part of my mind said it was just headlights from passing cars, but we hadn't heard a vehicle pass by in hours. My skin prickled with goosebumps as I watched the darkness shift and dance. Joel must have noticed my distraction because he spoke again, his voice barely above a whisper.

"The voices were too loud last night. Couldn't sleep."

I felt a chill run down my spine. "Joel, maybe we should get some sleep. I am so damn tired with everything going on, the prison break…"

"None of this has anything to do with the prison break!" His voice rose sharply, he stared at me intently and I took an involuntary step back. He seemed to catch himself, lowering his voice. "Sorry bud…Shit, I am more than spooked tonight. You're right. Maybe I need some sleep."

Later the next day, I called the Amazon fulfillment center, asking for Joel's department. I wanted to see what he had done with Chester. The lead supervisor seemed confused. "Joel hasn't been on the schedule for over a week," she said. "He called in to use all his vacation time, said he had some personal matters to handle. "I sat with that information for a long time, listening to the house settle around me. Every creak seemed to carry new meaning now and every shadow held potential threats. But the threat I was beginning to fear wasn't coming from outside our walls. I had feared that it was in the house. Perhaps one of those convicts had actually made his way inside, perhaps living in a closet or a part of the house I wasn’t overly familiar with. I rarely went into the basement, the dining room off to the side of the foyer, or even the back room that went beyond that, let alone the small garage.

Around midnight, I heard a sound that almost made me shit my pants. From the basement came the distinct sound of someone talking, a low, rhythmic murmuring that rose and fell like waves. Joel was supposed to be working the night shift. Joel, who hadn't actually been to work in over a week, and yet it was a couple of days since I saw him last. I stood at the top of the basement stairs, my hand hovering over the light switch. The murmuring continued, interspersed with what sounded like quiet laughter. I knew I should call the police and I knew I should leave the house. Instead, I found myself taking the first step down into the darkness.

The basement stairs creaked under my weight, each step seeming to echo in the darkness. The air grew thicker with each step, heavy with the musty smell of wet stone and black mold. The temperature seemed to drop degree by degree as I descended, until I could see my breath forming pale clouds in the beam of my flashlight. I kept my hand trailing along the wall, counting the steps as I descended, looking for a light switch. The steps felt endless as my every move was slow and careful. The murmuring grew louder though I still couldn't make out the words. My fingers found the light switch at the bottom of the stairs. The fluorescent lights flickered to life with a harsh buzz, illuminating the finished portion of the basement, the laundry room, the storage shelves and the work bench. Everything looked normal and untouched. But the sound was coming from behind the partition wall.

"Joel?" My voice sounded thin, uncertain. The murmuring stopped abruptly.

"Travis?" Joel's voice came back, oddly cheerful. "You should come see this! I found them. I found where they've been hiding."

I moved slowly toward the partition door. It was slightly ajar, darkness spilling out from the unfinished section beyond. The old stone walls had always made that part of the basement look like a cave, but it felt more like a tomb.

"Who's hiding, Joel? You want me to call the sheriff?"

What responded was a quiet laugh. "The ones who've been talking to me. They're in the walls. But they couldn't hide forever. I had to see them. "I pushed the door open. The beam from my flashlight caught Joel first, sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor. He was facing the far wall with his back to me. All sorts of tools were scattered around him, hammers, chisels and a pickaxe. The stone wall before him was partially demolished; chunks of ancient mortar and rock littering the ground.

"Joel, what have you done?"

He turned to me then, and I stumbled backward in disbelief. He had gored out his eyes and all that remained where two dark, empty sockets, crusted with dried blood. But he was smiling with an eerily peaceful expression on his face. "I had to see them properly," he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. "They told me eyes only get in the way. That we see better without them." He held up something in his hand – a bloodied kitchen knife. "I can help you see too, Travis. Then you'll hear them as clearly as I do."

I ran up the stairs, through the kitchen and out into the darkness of the night. I didn't stop until I reached my car, my hands shaking so badly I could barely get the key in the ignition. As I sped down the driveway, I caught one last glimpse of the farmhouse in my rearview mirror. Joel stood on the porch, his eyeless face turned toward me, still wearing that peaceful smile, trying to yell something that I couldn’t hear due to my fear triggering my tinnitus.

The police found him in the basement. The sheriff told me later that Joel kept talking about voices in the walls, about how he needed to "help them get out." They found his eyes wrapped carefully in one of his old handkerchiefs, placed in a small box with yellowing tape, in the upstairs closet. He was committed and as far as I know, he has never left. I don’t truly know what happened in Joel’s mind during those last few weeks, but something broke inside of him, something that should have kept a grown man sane.  Maybe it was the stress of constantly working topped off with the never-ending, doom news cycles. All I know is that for a brief period of time I believed we had been visited by some unknown force, felon or not. I believed him and I freaked myself out in doing so, after all, those old farmhouses have a lot of history.

The prison break story had been real enough, but the escaped inmates had been caught two counties away, the very night the sheriff had warned us. They'd never been anywhere near our farmhouse. The only monster lurking in our house had been the one slowly growing in Joel's mind, feeding on isolation and darkness until it consumed him completely.

I drive past the old farmhouse sometimes, from my new apartment in the city, to see old friends. It's been empty since that night – Joel's family can't bring themselves to sell it, and no one wants to rent a place with that kind of history. The windows are dark, the paint is beginning to peel, but it still looks like any other farmhouse from the road. Just an old house full of silence.

White Room

In the white room, I am always falling through darkness pierced by gleaming metal, a thousand razor-sharp edges catching the light from somewhere above. They whisper as I pass, these blades, their edges singing a song of inevitability. I try to scream, but my throat produces nothing. Not even a whimper.

Then I wake up. Or at least, I think I wake up.

The ceiling is a familiar textured white, with that water stain in the corner that looks like a question mark. My body feels impossibly heavy, as if my bones have been replaced with lead. I try to move my fingers, my toes, anything, but nothing responds. Trapped. I'm trapped in my own flesh.

The itch on my nose becomes maddening, an eternal torment I can't scratch. I can’t feel the tube in my throat, the catheter, every medical invasion of my flesh but I know it is there. Sometimes I wonder if this is what being buried alive feels like, except my coffin is made of skin and bone instead of wood.

Someone moves at the edge of my periphery. A nurse, I think, checking something on a monitor. Her shoes squeak against the linoleum floor, a sound I have been increasingly aware of as the days pass. I want to ask her what happened, why I'm here, but my lips might as well be sewn shut.

Time becomes fluid in the white room, measured only by the shift changes of hospital staff and the changing light through the window. Days? Weeks? I can't tell anymore. What I do know is that I shouldn't be here. Something's wrong. Something I did...

But the memory slips away like water through cupped hands.

Dr. Martinez visits every morning. He's been my friend for fifteen years, since we met at that photography exhibition where we both tried to explain the same Diane Arbus print to a bewildered gallery owner. Now he stands over my bed, his usual immaculate appearance showing signs of wear, his bow tie slightly crooked, dark oily circles under his eyes.

"James," he says, running a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. "You stubborn bastard. You need to wake up."

I am awake, I try to tell him. I'm right here.

But I'm not, am I? Not really.

Between the endless hours of staring at the ceiling and drifting in and out of consciousness, fragments of my life float back to me. I remember my apartment in Brooklyn Heights; the vintage camera collection displayed on industrial shelves I installed myself. The darkroom I built in the spare bedroom, where I spend…spent? weekends developing black and white photographs of city life. My job as creative director at the advertising agency, where I specialized in moody, atmospheric campaigns that won awards but never quite satisfied me.

Then there's the falling dream.

It starts the same way each time: darkness, then the glint of metal. A thousand blades arranged in a spiral, forming a tunnel that stretches into infinity. As I fall, they slice the air around me, coming closer and closer until…

"Mr. Harrison?"

A new voice cuts through my thoughts. Female, warm but professional. I can't turn my head to look at her, but she moves into my field of vision. Blonde hair caught in a loose bun, wire-rimmed glasses, a purple blouse that doesn't quite hide her curves. The scent of lavender and jasmine drifts over me, oddly comforting in this sterile environment.

"I'm Dr. Sarah Wells, your psychologist," she says, pulling up a chair. "I'm going to try something different today. A form of hypnotherapy that might help us understand what's happening in that mind of yours."

Each time she visits, she introduces herself like I don’t remember her. I notice something new every time, the tiny scar above her right eyebrow, the way her perfume changes slightly with her body chemistry throughout the day, how her voice drops half an octave when she's concentrating. In my prison of flesh, these details become my whole world. I wonder if this is what madness feels like, this obsessive cataloging of another person's existence while my own slips away.

Her voice is melodic, soothing. Despite my situation, I find myself drawn to her presence, to the way her angel bowed lips move as she speaks to the gentle rise and fall of her chest as she breathes.

"Close your eyes," she says, and somehow, impossibly, I do. "Listen to my voice. Only my voice. You're going to feel yourself drifting, floating away from this room, this bed, this body..."

The darkness behind my eyelids shifts. When I open them again, I'm sitting in a blaring neon white room. Everything is white, the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Everything except the massive mahogany desk in front of me, and the ancient woman seated behind it.

Her skin is like parchment, mapped with a thousand tiny wrinkles. Her eyes are black, bottomless, fixed on me with an intensity that makes me want to squirm in my chair. When did I sit down?

"Welcome, James," she says, her voice like dry leaves scraping against concrete. "Shall we begin?"

I look down at myself. I'm wearing a black suit I don't recognize, perfectly tailored, the fabric so dark it seems to absorb the room's harsh white light.

"Begin what?" I ask, and the sound of my own voice startles me. How long has it been since I've spoken?

"The questions, of course." She shuffles some papers on her desk. "Let's start with an easy one: Why are you here?"

"I..." The words die in my throat. Why am I here? What happened to me? There's something important, something I should remember, but it's like trying to grab smoke.

"Wrong answer," she says, and suddenly I'm falling again, through the tunnel of blades, their edges getting closer and closer until…I wake up in the hospital room, gasping internally, my body still refusing to move. Dr. Wells is packing up her things, frowning slightly.

"We'll try again tomorrow," she says, and the scent of lavender and jasmine follows her out the door.

The days blend together, punctuated only by Dr. Wells's visits and the recurring dreams. In between, memories surface like bodies in a lake. I remember my childhood in Connecticut, the darkroom my father built in our basement where he taught me the magic of photography. The way the images would appear in the developer, like ghosts emerging from the void. He died when I was sixteen, heart attack while jogging. Maybe that's when I started seeing the world through a lens, trying to capture moments before they could slip away. I remember college at NYU, meeting Marcus Martinez in a required art history class. We bonded over our shared love of Ansel Adams and our mutual hatred of the professor's monotone lectures. That guy would put us to sleep in five minutes flat. Marcus went on to medical school while I pursued advertising, but our friendship endured through the years. Weekly dinners at that little Italian place in the Village, endless debates about art and philosophy, him trying to set me up with various nurses and me politely declining.

"You can't stay married to your work forever," he'd say, ordering another bottle of Merlot.

"Watch me," I'd reply, and we'd both laugh.

But there was truth in his words. I threw myself into my work, into my photography, into my collections, cameras, vinyl records and pretty much anything authored by Jack Kerouac. Anything to fill the spaces between moments. Anything to keep from looking too closely at the cheap emptiness of life’s boring moments.

But with everything, the memories fade and I am left staring at a white ceiling with a black spot on it.

Dr. Wells visits every day now, guiding me through hypnosis sessions that always lead to the same white room, the same ancient woman, the same questions I can't answer correctly. Each time, I notice more details: the way the old woman's fingers are stained with what looks like ink, how her desk has no drawers, the slight echo of our voices in the searing white space.

"Why are you here?" she asks again and again.

"I don't know," I always answer.

"Wrong," she says, and I fall.

Between sessions, I drift again through memories. The last photography project I was working on, portraits of homeless people in the city, their faces illuminated by neon signs and streetlights. The way my hands would shake slightly in the darkroom, more and more. The increasing difficulty of getting out of bed each morning. The pills in my medicine cabinet prescribed for anxiety but mostly untouched.

The pills...

"Ready to try again?" Dr. Wells asks, pulling me from my thoughts. Today she's wearing a cream-colored sweater that makes her skin glow. The scent of her perfume seems stronger, more intoxicating.

"Close your eyes," she says. "Listen to my voice..."

As she starts to speak, the world around me slowly dissolves and I can hear a high-pitched whine getting louder and louder in my ears.

The white room again. The wretched old woman with the harsh voice. The same question.

"Why are you here?"

"Because..." Something's different this time. A memory struggles to surface and I blurt out. "Because I took the pills. All of them."

I have never gotten to the second question before but now something was different.

The old woman's black eyes gleam. "And why did you do that?"

"I was tired," I say, the words coming easier now. "So tired of everything, the daily routine, the monotony. The emptiness and the feeling that none of it mattered, at least to me."

"Better," she says, her wrinkled face micro twitched a smile. "Next question: What do you regret?"

I think of Marcus finding my body in my apartment after I missed our weekly dinner. The cameras on my shelves, gathering dust. The unfinished projects. The lives I could have touched with my art but never will.

"Everything," I whisper. "And nothing." My voice trembling and scared of what she will say next.

"Interesting," she says, making a note with her ink-stained fingers. "Final question: Where do you think you are?"

I look around the white room, at my black suit, at her ancient face. A sudden understanding overwhelms me.

"This isn't real," I say. "None of it is. I'm not in a hospital. I'm not in a white room. I'm..."

"Yes?" the woman leans in closer.

"I'm dead." I finally say while a weight lifts off my shoulders.

She smiles, revealing teeth that are sharp and metallic, like the blades in my dreams. "Correct. Finally."

“Please and kindly walk through that door” She points to a newly appeared door in the room.

I look at the door, then back at her. “What’s behind it?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says sharply. “NEXT!”

As I walk through the door the white room dissolves. I'm falling again, but this time through fire instead of blades. The heat should be unbearable, but it feels right. Deserved.

Then darkness that is absolute.

Until...

Blinding, painful light. Someone's hands on me, larger than my entire body. I try to scream, and this time sound comes out, the wail of a newborn taking their first breath.

"It's a boy," someone says.

And so, it begins again.

Somewhere, in a white room that exists outside of time and space, an old woman with ink-stained fingers makes a final note in her ledger and closes the book on James Harrison, photographer, friend, lost soul.

Until next time.

Barotrauma

"I swear to God, if you say, 'release the Kraken' one more time, I'm pushing you overboard," Dr. Marcus Braun said, not bothering to look up from his collection of water samples. The morning sun glinted off the waves, making the ocean surface look like a mirror. His research partner, Dr. James "Jimmy" O'Connor, grinned and adjusted his baseball cap. "Come on, you've got to admit it's funny. Here we are, two grown men, searching for a supposedly extinct species of giant squid in the middle of nowhere."

"We're not searching for giant squid," Marcus corrected, carefully labeling another sample tube. "We're conducting a systematic survey of cephalopod populations in the Bathyal zone. The fact that local fishing vessels have reported unusual activity is purely coincidental."

"Right," Jimmy drawled, leaning against the rail of their research vessel, the modestly named Marine Research Vehicle 227. "And I suppose the Indonesian government just happened to triple our funding after those fishing boats went missing?"

Marcus finally looked up, squinting against the glare. At thirty-five, he'd spent more time on boats than most people spent in cars, and he knew better than to dismiss the ocean's mysteries. But he also knew better than to jump to conclusions. "There are perfectly rational explanations for missing boats in the Banda Sea. Pirates, storms, mechanical failures…"

"Mechanical failures, unless catastrophic, won’t make boats disappear,” Jimmy interrupted. "And pirates usually take the cargo."

Marcus was about to respond when their hydrophone picked up something. The familiar clicks and whistles of marine mammals, and an unfamiliar sound. He frowned and adjusted the frequency.

"What is it?" Jimmy asked, serious now.

"Probably just dolphins," Marcus said, but he didn't believe it. The vocals were complex and structured.

The boat shuddered.

"That wasn't dolphins," Jimmy said quietly.

Marcus checked their depth finder. They were over the continental slope, about 2,000 meters of water beneath their keel. The reading showed something massive moving below them.

"Get the ROV ready," Marcus said, trying to keep his voice steady. "We need eyes down there."

Jimmy nodded and began prepping their remotely operated vehicle, a state-of-the-art submersible equipped with high-definition cameras and sampling tools. As he worked, Marcus noticed something odd about the water around the boat. It was darker than it should have been.

"Jimmy," he called out. "Does the water look strange to you?"

Jimmy looked over the side. "Yeah, it kinda looks thicker?”

The water continued to darken, taking on an almost oily appearance. The surface seemed like it was pulling away from the boat's hull instead of lapping against it.

Marcus had spent his entire career studying marine life. He'd seen things that would make most people's skin crawl, giant isopods, gulper eels, black swallowers with bodies distended from consuming prey larger than them. But this was different.

"ROV's ready," Jimmy announced, his usual joking manner completely gone.

Marcus nodded and helped him lower the device into the water. The umbilical cable played out smoothly as the ROV descended into the darkness. On their monitors, the LED lights cut through the gloom, illuminating particles suspended in the water column.

At 500 meters, they lost contact.

"That's impossible," Jimmy muttered, checking the connections. "These things are rated for close to three thousand meters. We've never lost one before."

Marcus was about to suggest retrieving the ROV when he saw it. Just for a moment, illuminated by their deck lights, a light in the water. Not random, like bioluminescence, but a massive neural network spread out beneath them.

The light pulsed once, and every electronic device on the boat died simultaneously.

"Okay," Jimmy said into the sudden silence. "Now I'm officially freaked out."

Marcus couldn't respond. He was staring at the water, watching as something that was slowly taking shape in the darkness below.

"We need to move," he managed to say. "Now!"

Jimmy was already trying to start the engines, but without power, they were dead in the water. The lights continued to rise, and now Marcus could see that they weren't just lights, they were more like windows or openings in something solid. Something vast.

The water around their boat began to move in ways that violated everything Marcus knew about fluid dynamics. It flowed upward, defying gravity, forming shapes that reminded him of hands, all moving with terrible purpose.

"Marcus," Jimmy's voice was barely a whisper. "What are we looking at?"

Marcus Braun, Ph.D. in Marine Biology, author of three textbooks on cephalopod behavior, and self-proclaimed rational skeptic, could only shake his head. Because what was rising from the depths wasn't something from any taxonomy he knew. It wasn't something that could be classified, studied, or understood.

It was something that had been waiting.

And now it was awake.

“Call in a mayday, Jimmy!” Marcus yelled

The thing in the water moved with elaborate grace for its size. Marcus's scientific mind tried desperately to categorize what he was seeing, but the lights kept shifting. One moment it was almost architectural, a structure larger than an aircraft carrier, the next it was organic, flowing like molten metal but with a purpose that spoke of intelligence.

"We've got the emergency radio," Jimmy said, already moving toward the cabin. "If we can…"

“Call in a fucking mayday, Jimmy!” The doctor screamed again.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday this is marine research vehicle 227…” Jimmy screamed into the radio.

A sound cut through the air, stopping him mid-sentence. It wasn't loud, but it made Marcus's teeth ache and his vision blur. Like whale song played through a broken synthesizer, but with undertones that seemed to bypass his ears entirely and vibrate directly into his skull.

"Fuck it!" Marcus grabbed Jimmy's arm. "Whatever this is, it just disabled everything electronic on the boat with a single pulse.”

“How do you know that?” Jimmy asked, looking confused.

“Look!” Marcus said as he pointed to all the other electronic equipment, breaking Jimmy from his stupor. “Nothing is on!”

Jimmy nodded slowly, his face pale in the strange, shifting light from below. "So, what's the play here, boss? Because I've got to tell you, my entire scientific worldview is having a bit of a crisis right now and quite honestly I am shitting my pants."

Marcus almost laughed. It was such a Jimmy thing to say, even in the face of... whatever this was. "First rule of marine biology Jimmy, observe before interacting. Although I don’t think it is going to matter too much."

"Pretty sure that rule wasn't written with this scenario in mind," Jimmy muttered, but he stayed put.

The light patterns had spread out to encircle their vessel completely now, creating what looked like a vast network of light beneath the surface.

"You know what this reminds me of?" Marcus said, his scientific mind still trying to make sense of what he was seeing. "You remember that paper about the mirror test with octopi?"

"The self-awareness study?" Jimmy frowned. "Where they figured out that octopi don't just recognize their reflection, they actually recognize shapes and patterns." .

"Yeah," Marcus nodded. "They don't just recognize themselves. They recognize patterns. They can solve puzzles that require understanding symbolic representation."

The light patterns below them shifted again, and this time Marcus was sure they weren't random. They were changing in response to their conversation.

"So, you're saying whatever this is, it's trying to communicate?" Jimmy asked.

"I'm saying whatever this is, it's studying us."

As if in response to his words, the black water between the light lines began to ripple. It was vast, dark and was rising toward the surface.

"Remember those missing fishing boats?" Marcus said quietly. "I don't think they're missing anymore. I think they're down there.”

Jimmy swallowed hard. "You know, I really wish you hadn't said that. I’m freaking out already"

The surface of the water began to bulge upward; The bulge grew larger, rising higher than their deck, higher than their mast, forming a obelisk of water that should have collapsed under its own weight. And inside that impossible column, something moved.

Marcus had spent years studying cephalopods. He knew their capabilities, their intelligence, their ability to problem-solve. But what he saw in that column of water wasn't just intelligent, it was ancient. The brief glimpse he caught of massive eyes behind the water-wall showed something that had been thinking, learning, and waiting for longer than humans had existed. That column of water began to tilt toward their boat.

"Marcus?" Jimmy's voice was steady, but his hands were shaking. "Remember how you're always telling me that science requires us to challenge our preconceptions and accept new theories when the evidence demands it?"

"Yeah?"

"I think we might need a new theory for this one. What the hell are we going to do now?" Jimmy’s voice was now trembling.

The column of water stopped moving, hovering over their boat like a cobra preparing to strike. In the darkness within, those ancient eyes studied them with an intelligence that felt older than time itself. And then it spoke. Not in words, not in sound, but light and shadow that burned themselves into Marcus's brain like afterimages. Light patterns that carried meaning his conscious mind couldn't process but that some deeper, more primitive part of his brain understood perfectly.

It was an invitation.

Or a demand.

"Don't answer it," Jimmy whispered. "Whatever it's saying, don't even move."

But Marcus was already nodding, his body moving without his conscious control. Because he recognized what he was seeing now. All those years studying cephalopod communication, all those patterns and color changes and subtle movements, they were just echoes of this. This was the source, the origin, the first and greatest master of that language and it wanted to show them something.

The water-column descended, not crashing down but flowing around their boat like a living thing, enveloping them in darkness that felt almost solid. The last thing Marcus saw before the darkness took them was Jimmy's face, wearing an expression that perfectly matched his own mix of terror, horror and a tinge of fascination. Then they were moving, being pulled down into depths where no human was meant to go, where ancient things had been waiting to share secrets that would change everything they thought they knew about the world and the descent felt endless. Marcus's ears popped repeatedly as they plunged deeper, but somehow the crushing pressure he expected never came. The water around them created some kind of membrane, a bubble that kept them alive while breaking every law of physics that he had studied.

"We should be dead," Jimmy said, his voice eerily calm. "At this depth, the pressure should have crushed us like empty beer cans. Marcus I just want you to know..."

“Shhh…,” Marcus shushed him.

Marcus watched as bioluminescent creatures streaked past their protective bubble, creating trails of light in the darkness. But these weren't any species he recognized. It was like the creature that had captured them and those that he was seeing now seemed to only exist in some horrible space between realities.

"Look at their morphology," he said, pointing at what appeared to be a school of fish, their bodies were transparent and seemed to house complex cog structures instead of organs. "They're like living machines."

"Or machines that evolved to look like living things," Jimmy muttered. "Which is worse?"

Before Marcus could answer, their descent slowed. The darkness around them had become absolute, but somehow they could still see. It wasn't light exactly but more like their brains were being fed visual information directly, bypassing their eyes entirely.

They were hovering above what appeared to be an ancient city and this place was alive with activity.

Massive structures that seemed to be made of both coral and some kind of metallic substance rose from the ocean floor, their surfaces crawling with light pattern similar to the ones they'd seen on the surface. Between these buildings, creatures moved with purpose, some recognizably marine, others completely alien.

"This is impossible," Marcus whispered. "We're at least four thousand meters down. There shouldn't be this much complex life at this depth."

"Pretty sure we left 'should' behind about the same time that water started acting like a tentacle," Jimmy replied. He pressed his face against their bubble, trying to take in everything at once. "Holy shit, Marcus. Look at that."

In the center of the city, stood what Marcus first took to be a mountain, but as his eyes adjusted to the strange light, he realized it was moving, possibly even breathing. The entire structure was a single, massive organism.

The entity that had brought them down was moving their bubble toward this central being. As they got closer, Marcus could see other vessels suspended in similar bubbles – the missing fishing boats, research vessels, even what looked like ancient shipwrecks, all preserved perfectly in their water-membranes.

"They're studying us," Marcus said, understanding finally dawning. "All of human maritime history. They've been collecting specimens."

"Specimens?" Jimmy's voice cracked. "You mean like those fish in your lab? The ones in formaldehyde? Well great, not only are we going to die the world’s strangest deaths but we get to be pickled as well."

Before Marcus could respond, everything in their minds shifted, and suddenly he could understand.

CORRECT/INCORRECT. WE PRESERVE/STUDY/LEARN. BUT NOT DEAD THINGS. WE CALL IT “LIVING HISTORY”.

The message came with images, flashes of every vessel they could see, but not just as they were now. He saw them in every moment of their existence, from construction to their capture, all simultaneously. Time wasn't linear here. These weren't just preserved specimens; they were four-dimensional records of human maritime exploration.

"Marcus," Jimmy's voice seemed to come from very far away. "Your nose is bleeding."

Marcus wiped his face absently, too fascinated to care. "Don't you see? They're not just studying our ships or our biology. They're studying our entire relationship with the ocean. Every moment of it, all at once."

WATCHING ETERNALLY. TIME NOW FOR YOUR NEXT STEP.

The massive central entity moved, its surface shifting, and suddenly they were looking at what appeared to be a reflection of Earth's oceans but not as they were now, as they had been millions of years ago. Then the image changed, showing them as they would be decades in the future.

The changes were devastating.

YOUR KIND BREAKS THE CYCLES AND DISRUPTS PATTERNS. IT MUST BE CORRECTED.

"Oh god," Jimmy whispered. "This isn't just a research project."

Marcus watched as more light patterns swirled around them, each one carrying terrible meaning. "They're not going to kill us," he said slowly. "They're going to teach us, whether we want to learn or not." The water around their bubble began to vibrate and as it filled their minds, Marcus realized that they weren't going to be returning to the surface, at least not as the same people who had descended.

The knowledge came in waves, each one threatening to drown Marcus's consciousness. He saw the history of Earth's oceans played out like a time-lapse film, the first primitive organisms, the great extinctions and the slow dance of evolution. But it wasn't just images that he saw; at that very moment he experienced every adaptation, death and rebirth.

Beside him, Jimmy had gone rigid, his eyes wide and unfocused. Blood trickled from both his nostrils now, but he didn't seem to notice.

UNDERSTAND US!

The lights shifted, showing them something new. Marcus saw massive creatures, things that looked like a cross between whales and architectural structures, moving through ancient seas. They weren't just animals; they were custodians, shepherds of the ocean's evolutionary path and they had been watching humanity's rise with growing concern.

More images flooded their minds. Marcus saw great civilizations that had risen and fallen beneath the waves, species that had grown ambitious and destructive. And he saw how they had been "changed and guided.”

"Marcus," Jimmy whispered. "Those things we saw on the way down… the fish? They used to be something else, didn't they?"

Before Marcus could respond, the massive central entity pulsed, and suddenly they were seeing themselves, not as they were now, but as they would be. Their bodies sickeningly transformed, adapted to life in the depths, their minds expanded to understand the lights that made up the true language of the sea.

"No," Marcus tried to say, but his mouth wasn't working right anymore. He felt the bones in his hand crack and break as his fingers extended into long gnarly forms with webbing in between. When he looked down, his skin had taken on a translucent quality, and beneath it, light patterns were beginning to form, ripping through his human flesh.

"Marcus?" Jimmy's voice had changed, becoming deeper and more resonant. “All I wanted to do today was catch some squid.”

Even in the midst of their transformation, Marcus almost laughed. Trust Jimmy to joke at a moment like this. But the laugh caught in his throat as he realized it wasn't just their bodies changing, their minds were being rebuilt, restructured to process information in ways the human brain was never meant to handle.

JOIN US!

The lights were inside them now, burning through their neural pathways, rewriting strands of DNA in their being. Marcus tried to hold onto his memories, his identity, but they were slowly slipping away as his mind was expanding. He remembered things that hadn't happened yet, understood concepts that he never thought of before.

"Jimmy," he managed to say, reaching out to his friend. "Don't let go."

Jimmy's hand caught his, but both their fingers were webbed now, their skin patterned with the same light designs that covered the walls of the ancient city. "Wouldn't dream of it, boss. Someone's got to keep making bad jokes, even after we... after we..." He couldn't finish the sentence. The changes were accelerating now; their bodies and minds being remade according to some vast and alien plan. Marcus felt his consciousness connecting with all the transformed creatures that had once been human.

The first thing Marcus noticed about his new consciousness was how inadequate his old way of thinking had been. It was like comparing a child's crayon drawing to a quantum computer. He could perceive the ocean in its entirety now.  Every current, every creature, every molecule of water connected in an enormous, living network.

Jimmy's consciousness brushed against Marcus’s, familiar yet utterly transformed. Remember when we used to think cephalopod camouflage was impressive? The thought came with a ripple of what might have been laughter, carrying with it complex harmonics that conveyed multiple layers of meaning.

Marcus's new body moved through the water with effortless grace, his transformed nervous system processing information from organs he'd never possessed before. He could sense electromagnetic fields and pressure variations. The ocean was alive with data that his human form had been too limited to perceive.

INTEGRATION SUCCESSFUL, the central entity communicated. BEGIN PREPARATION.

Through their expanded awareness, Marcus and Jimmy could feel others like them – hundreds of transformed humans from the collected vessels. Each retained their individual consciousness while sharing in a collective understanding that transcended ordinary thought.

Marcus watched as his former colleague's form shifted and flowed, and his flesh ripped apart from the cascading light coming from within him. They were both still changing, their forms settling into something that wasn't cetacean nor cephalopod, it wasn't quite like anything that had ever existed before.

Images continued to flood their expanded minds, coral reefs bleaching and dying, plastic waste choking the seas, entire ecosystems collapsing. But now they could see the solutions, complex and terrible as they were. The changes needed weren't just physical; they were philosophical and almost fundamental.

Their bodies had finished their initial transformation now, settling into forms that could survive at any depth, that could process and transmit the language that was the true speech of the ocean. They were beautiful in their alien way.

Time to begin, the central entity communicated. Your first task approaches.

Through their enhanced senses, they felt a research vessel moving across the surface, much like their own had been just hours ago. But now they were on the other side of the equation. Now they were the ones who would initiate contact, who would begin the process of transformation.

Ready, boss? Jimmy's consciousness reached out, still carrying that hint of humor that had somehow survived their metamorphosis.

Marcus felt his new body pulse with bioluminescent, a complex sequence that expressed concepts no human language could contain. They would start with scientists, he realized. People who could understand, who could help bridge the gap between what humanity was and what it needed to become.

Ready, he replied, and they began to rise toward the surface, Jimmy beside him, their forms casting shadows upon the ancient city. Above them, the research vessel's instruments would be picking up unusual readings, just as theirs had.

The cycle was beginning again.

The research vessel above them was the RV Nautilus, Marcus knew it without a doubt. His expanded consciousness could read the electromagnetic signature of her sensors, could feel the vibrations of her engines through the water column and could even sense the DNA of her crew through the microscopic skin cells they shed into the ocean.

Thirty-two humans aboard, Jimmy communicated. Four of them are perfect candidates.

Marcus's new form pulsed with bioluminescent patterns as they rose through the mesopelagic zone.

They're dropping an ROV, Marcus noted, feeling the familiar vibrations of a remote vehicle entering the water.

Should we disable it? Jimmy asked, but Marcus sensed a better approach.

No. Let's show them something worth recording first.

They began their performance, their bodies moving in perfect synchronization as they wove light and shadow through the water. Through their enhanced senses, they could feel the excitement and confusion radiating from the humans above as their instruments registered something unprecedented.

"Multiple unidentified biological signatures," they heard one of the scientists say through the hull. "Size estimates suggesting organisms at least twenty meters in length, but the morphology doesn't match anything in our database."

Listen to them trying to categorize us, Jimmy's thought carried that familiar hint of sardonic humor. Remember when we thought that actually meant something?

Marcus remembered. The memory felt like it belonged to someone else now, a smaller being who had tried to fit the ocean's infinite complexity into neat little boxes. How limited that perspective seemed now.

They rose higher, letting the ROV's cameras get a clear view of their transformed bodies.

"This is impossible," they heard another scientist say. "The morphology alone... nothing biological should be able to..."

Ready? Marcus asked, feeling Jimmy's consciousness align with his.

Let’s do this.

Together, they reached out with their expanded minds and touched the consciousness of the four scientists they had selected. Just a gentle contact, a whisper of what was to come. Through the hull, they heard four simultaneous gasps as their chosen candidates received their first taste of the ocean's true language.

WELCOME, they transmitted; using the language they had learned from the central entity. YOUR WORLD IS DYING. WE OFFER TRANSFORMATION.

Through their enhanced senses, they felt the mixture of terror and fascination from their chosen humans, the same emotions they had felt themselves such a short time ago. But there was something else too, something that made Marcus's new organs pulse with satisfaction: recognition.

These humans, these scientists, they understood on some level what was happening, but they didn't yet understand their meaning.

They're perfect, Jimmy communicated. They'll help us bridge the gap.

Marcus felt the central entity's approval rippling through the deep, carrying with it images of the changes to come. The transformation of these four would lead to others, spreading out across the world's oceans like a contagion. Each new convert would help identify and transform others, building a network that would eventually reach critical mass.

And then...

Look, Jimmy's thought interrupted his contemplation. They're already preparing to lower a sampling device.

Marcus felt something that might have been laughter in his transformed state. Humans. Always trying to understand through collection and analysis.

We were the same way, Jimmy reminded him. Until we became the sample.

They rose further, positioning themselves perfectly for the sampling attempt. Soon, these scientists would have their own encounter with the impossible. Soon, they would begin their own transformation. Soon, they would understand that they weren't collecting samples, they were being collected.

Something snapped in Marcus's transformed consciousness. The endless forced evolution, the violation of his mind, finally broke something fundamental. Through whatever link they now shared, he felt Jimmy's sanity shatter at the same moment.

"Why help them evolve?" Jimmy's voice was wet and guttural. "When we could just tear them apart?"

Marcus's massive form twisted in the water, no longer beautiful but horrifying, a nightmare of teeth, writhing limbs and pulsing light like a disco on fire. Dr. Braun's scream cut off as his tendril wrapped around a scientist’s torso, crushing bone and rupturing organs, head popping off the scientist’s form like popcorn in a microwave.

"Please!" Another scientist managed, but Marcus was already pulling, and the water turned red as his body split apart. Jimmy's laughter – no longer human, no longer sane – echoed through the depths as he tore through the other scientists, his former humor twisted into something monstrous.

The ancient being's voice boomed from the ancient city below:

STOP. THIS IS NOT THE PURPOSE

But Marcus and Jimmy were beyond hearing, beyond caring. Their fractured minds saw only prey, only meat to be rendered into sustenance. They shredded through the crew with mindless fury, their transformed bodies leaving nothing but floating chunks of flesh and clouds of dissipating blood. The deck of the Nautilus became a slaughterhouse. Jimmy's teeth – now rows upon rows of them, tore through bone and muscle as easily as water. Marcus wrapped his long limbs around fleeing crew members, pulling them apart like wet crepe paper.

When it was done, when the last scream had bubbled into silence, they sank back into the depths, trailing dissolving human matter in their wake. They had transformed one final time, not into teachers or guides, but into apex predators of a kind the ocean had never seen before.

The ancient being's voice spoke of disappointment, of failure. But Marcus and Jimmy were already moving away, their twisted bodies sending every living thing fleeing in terror, their passage leaving only death in their wake.

They had been meant to save humanity. They had become its harbingers of death instead.

Last Trail

I'd been hiking the Appalachian Trail for three days, pushing myself harder than usual to make up for lost time. The weather forecast had promised clear skies, but clouds had rolled in at sunset, bringing an unseasonable chill that pierced through my lightweight Patagonia jacket. At 9:47 PM, I remained two miles from the nearest shelter.

The first peculiarity I noticed was the silence. The woods at night are typically alive with sound, crickets chirping, owls calling, small animals rustling through the underbrush. But everything had gone still, as if the forest was holding its breath. My boots crunched against dead leaves as I pressed forward, trying to ignore the mounting sense that something was wrong. The trail ahead vanished into darkness, and my headlamp's beam seemed unusually dim, despite having replaced the batteries just yesterday.

That's when I heard it—a wet, sliding sound, like raw meat being dragged across fallen leaves. I froze and listened. The sound came again, closer this time, accompanied by what resembled labored breathing. I switched off my headlamp, and in the darkness, my other senses sharpened. The air carried a sharp, chemical smell, like bleach mixed with decay. Then something snapped behind me, a large branch breaking under substantial weight.

I ran.

The thing, whatever it was, moved with terrifying speed. It crashed through the undergrowth, abandoning any pretense of stealth. My lungs burned as I sprinted down the trail, my pack slamming painfully against my back. I quickly turned my headlamp back on but I didn't dare look behind me, but I could hear the wet sounds and heavy breathing closing in, almost at my heels. Suddenly, a high-pitched keening pierced the air, making my teeth ache and my head spin.

In my panic, I caught my foot on an exposed root and went down hard. My headlamp flew off, tumbling into the darkness before coming to rest against a tree trunk, casting weak light into the gloom. For a moment, I lay there, head ringing, tasting blood where I'd bitten my tongue. Then I heard it approaching slower now, its footsteps deliberate on the crackling leaves.

My fingers found the pocketknife I always carried. In the dim light, I could only make out the creature's silhouette as it approached—a twisted mass of limbs surrounding a hulking core of exposed flesh, like a walking, pulsating wound.

I silently unfolded the blade and swung with every ounce of strength I possessed. The knife connected with something soft and yielding. The creature emitted a shrill cry and recoiled. I scrambled to my feet and fled, abandoning my pack. I ran until my legs threatened to buckle, until every drop of moisture had left my mouth, until finally, I glimpsed lights through the trees—the parking lot where I'd left my car three days earlier.

I reached my car, but my trembling hands could barely work the door handle. As I started the engine, my headlights swept across the tree line.

For just a moment, I saw it clearly. It watched me from between two pines, its body rippling like a bloody ocean after battle. Then it melted back into the darkness.

I never returned for my pack. When I reported the incident to the rangers the following day, they revealed there had been other reports of missing hikers and nighttime screams. They searched the area but found no trace of my equipment, only broken branches, strange markings in the soil, and patches of dead vegetation that reeked of chemicals.

I still hike, but never alone and never after dark. Sometimes, when I'm on the trail and the birds fall silent, I catch that familiar chemical odor on the wind. When that happens, I turn back toward civilization as quickly as possible.

Because the worst part isn't knowing that thing exists—it's knowing that it remembers me.

Murder Hole

James Warner stared at his resignation letter one last time before hitting send. Fifteen years at the Allentown steel plant had left him with a decent pension, two blown discs, and a gnawing emptiness he couldn't shake. At forty-two, he'd done everything his old man said he should: worked hard, bought a modest house in Bethlehem, and saved what he could. But since his father's death last spring, the daily grind felt hollow.

The Appalachian Trail had been calling to him since he was a kid, when his dad would take him hunting in the Poconos. They'd sometimes cross paths with through-hikers, and James would pepper them with questions about their journeys. Now, with his disability settlement and savings, he had enough to tackle nearly the whole thing.

His small ranch house felt suffocating as he packed his gear. Most of it was hand-me-downs from his hunting days, mixed with some new stuff from an Army-Navy surplus. His brother Mike, a former Marine, had insisted on the satellite phone, "Just because you're going mountain man doesn't mean Mom needs to worry herself sick."

The divorce papers from Beth had been finalized last week, twenty years of marriage ended with a quiet conversation at their kitchen table. No kids, just a house full of memories and a dog they'd share custody of. Beth understood his need to go; she'd seen how hard his dad's death had hit him.

As he loaded his truck for the drive down to Virginia, James checked the weather one last time on his ancient flip phone. Clear skies for the next week. Perfect hiking conditions. His old Chevy would get him to his starting point near McAfee Knob, where he'd arranged to leave it at a local trail service.

The eight-hour drive from Bethlehem to Virginia had left James stiff, but the morning air at the trailhead near McAfee Knob helped clear his head. He double-checked his pack one last time, first aid kit from his hunting days, water filter, dehydrated meals he'd picked up at Cabela's, and enough trail mix to feed an army. The trail service guy, an old-timer named Bill, had given him a knowing look when he saw James's pack weight.

"Might want to shed some of that weight after a few days," Bill had said, helping James lock up his Chevy. "Trail has a way of teaching you what you really need."

The first day was brutal. Despite all his hunting experience, James hadn't been ready for the constant up and down of the trail. His back screamed at him, the old work injury flaring up with each step. By nightfall, he'd only covered eight miles, less than half what he'd planned.

The trail started as therapy. Each mile stripped away another layer of Pennsylvania, of the steel plant, of the man he'd become. He thought about Beth, about their quiet divorce, about the way she'd hugged him goodbye and said, "Find what you're looking for, Jimmy." By day three, his stubble had grown into the beginning of a real beard, and his muscles ached with the satisfying burn of honest work.

The view from McAfee Knob was stunning, the Catawba Valley stretched out below like a painting, all rolling hills and autumn colors just starting to emerge. The late afternoon sun painted everything in gold, and for a moment, James forgot about his blistered feet and aching shoulders. It reminded him of hunting with his dad in the Poconos, those quiet moments in the tree stand watching the world wake up.

The September air bit at James's face as he adjusted his pack, the worn straps digging into his shoulders. Three days into his hike, and the solitude had started to feel less like freedom and more like isolation. He'd seen other hikers; sure – young college kids with their ultralight gear and trail names, retired couples moving slow but steady. But none had stuck around to talk much.

That's why, when he spotted the other hiker at McAfee Knob, his heart lifted despite itself. The guy looked about his age, none of that fancy titanium gear the younger hikers carried.

Mark seemed normal enough. Shorter than James, but sturdy, with a forest-green Arc'teryx jacket and a well-worn Osprey pack. His beard was neatly trimmed, and his eyes crinkled when he smiled. They got to talking about trail conditions, sharing freeze-dried meals, and swapping stories about close encounters with bears.

"You hunt?" Mark asked, noticing the way James scanned the tree line out of habit.

"Since I was twelve," James replied. "Mostly whitetail up in Pennsylvania."

"Thought so," Mark nodded. "You move different than most hikers. Quieter. More aware."

As the sun began to set, they decided to make camp together. Something about Mark felt familiar and comfortable, like the guys James used to work with at the plant. Real. No pretense.

What James didn't notice, as they headed off to find a campsite, was the way Mark's smile never quite reached his eyes, or how his hand kept drifting to the pill bottle in his pocket.

That first evening, they made camp together near an old fire road. Mark proved to be an experienced outdoorsman. Mark knew his stuff, showing James a few tricks about hanging bear bags that even his dad hadn't known.

"You've got old-school skills," Mark said, stirring a pot of surprisingly good-smelling camp stew. He'd added foraged mushrooms and some garlic to standard freeze-dried fare.

"My dad taught me everything I know about the outdoors," James replied, accepting a steaming bowl. The smell brought back memories of cold mornings in the Poconos, his dad teaching him how to track deer through fresh snow. "Lost him last spring. Colon cancer."

The fire crackled in the silence that followed. James hadn't talked about his dad much, not even to Beth. But something about the mountains, about sitting here with a stranger in the growing dark, loosened the words he'd been holding back.

"He worked the same shift at the steel plant for thirty years, same plant as I did." James continued his voice rough. "Never complained, even when the cancer got bad. Kept saying he'd take me hiking on the AT once he got better." He poked at the fire with a stick, sending sparks into the dark. "Found his trail maps after... well after he passed. All marked up with notes, planning our trip."

Mark listened quietly, adding wood to the fire when needed. The flames painted shadows across his face as James talked about the plant, about how empty it felt going back to work after the funeral. About realizing he'd spent fifteen years following his father's footsteps without ever asking himself if it was the path he wanted.

"The day I quit, I could almost hear him laughing," James said, managing a smile. "He always said I thought too much about everything. ‘Sometimes you just gotta walk,' he'd tell me. ‘The trail will show you where to go.'"

"Your old man sounds like he knew what he was talking about," Mark said finally. "The trail has a way of finding people when they need it most." He paused, something distant in his eyes. "It found me too, three years ago. Though maybe not in the way I expected."

The night grew deeper around them, and James found himself grateful for the company.

Their second night on the trail, the rain forced them to make camp early. They found shelter under a rocky outcropping, and Mark proved skilled at starting a fire despite the wet conditions. The flames cast dancing shadows on the rock face behind them as they huddled close to the warmth.

"You never finished telling me," James said, warming his hands near the fire. "About how the trail found you three years ago."

Mark was quiet for a long moment, his hands moving automatically as he cleaned his hunting knife. "Was a game warden back then," he finally said. "Up near Mount Rogers. Good job. Steady. But I had... problems." He paused, testing the knife's edge with his thumb. "Gambling mostly. Cards. Started small, you know how it goes, a few bucks here and there, then bigger, and then too big, and then it was just too late…"

James nodded, thinking of guys he knew from the plant who'd gone down similar paths.

"Lost everything," Mark continued. "Wife left. Bank took the house. I started sleeping in my truck." He gave a hollow laugh. "Funny thing about hitting bottom, you either bounce or break."

"Which did you do?" James asked, adding another stick to the fire.

Mark's hands trembled slightly as he reached for his pills. "Both, maybe…Hell I really don’t know. But I found something in these mountains that changed me. Changed everything." His eyes reflected the firelight strangely. "Sometimes the trail gives you what you need, not what you want."

They sat in comfortable silence for a while, listening to the rain pattering on the leaves beyond their shelter. James found himself sharing more about Beth, about the quiet death of their marriage, about the dog they still shared custody of.

"Crazy how things work out," Mark said, his eyes reflecting the firelight. "Two guys running from their old lives, meeting up here in the middle of nowhere." He looked at James with an intensity that was almost uncomfortable. "Almost like it was meant to be."

They fell into an easy rhythm over the next two days. Mark knew every plant, every bird call. He had a way of making the trail feel less lonely, less vast. He showed James how to read weather patterns in the clouds, how to spot the subtle signs of deer paths that could lead to water sources.

But there were moments, brief, discordant instances when something felt off. The way Mark would sometimes stop mid-sentence and cock his head, as if listening to something distant. The way his hands would occasionally tremble when they made camp, until he swallowed two small white pills he kept in a waterproof container.

"Medication for my joints," he'd explained with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Old hiking injury."

On their fourth morning together, as they broke camp, Mark mentioned an overlook just off the main trail. "Best view in Virginia," he said. "Most hikers miss it. It's where I..." He paused, something dark flickering across his face. "It's where I made my decision. The one that changed everything."

The side trail wound through dense rhododendrons, their leaves casting dappled shadows on the narrow path. James didn't see the log coming. Just felt the explosion of pain at the base of his skull, saw the world tilt sideways, and then nothing.

The smell hit him first when he came to, musty hay and old wood, underlain with something pungent, something rotten. James tried to move but found his wrists and ankles bound to what felt like a rough wooden table. The rope bit into his skin as he struggled.

An oil lantern swung gently from a rusty hook overhead, casting dancing shadows across ancient barn boards. The wood was dark with age, swollen and warped from decades of humidity. Gaps between the planks revealed glimpses of a star-filled sky. Scattered hay covered most of the dirt floor, except for a worn path that led to a trap door in the corner.

The barn was massive; the kind built in the previous century when tobacco was still king in Virginia. Rusted farm implements hung from the walls, scythes, pitchforks, and tools James couldn't name. The air was thick with dust motes that danced in the lantern light, and somewhere in the rafters, pigeons cooed nervously.

"Help!" James screamed. His voice echoed off the timbers, startling a family of mice that had been nestling in a nearby hay bale. "Somebody help me!"

"Nobody can hear you out here." Mark's voice came from somewhere in the shadows. He stepped into the lantern light, still wearing that forest-green jacket. "We're miles from anywhere."

A sound rose from beneath the floorboards, not quite a roar, not quite a scream, but something that made James's bones vibrate. It was like hearing a whale song played backward through broken speakers, a sound that shouldn't exist in nature.

"What you're hearing," Mark said, pulling up a three-legged stool beside the table, "is Him." He spoke the word with reverence, like a priest naming God. "He's hungry again."

The thing below screamed again, and this time James felt it in his teeth, in the metal fillings of his molars. The trap door shuddered in its frame, dust falling from its edges.

"I found Him three years ago," Mark continued, his voice taking on the cadence of a bedtime story. "I was like you, running from something, though in my case it was a failed marriage and a gambling problem. I'd gone off-trail, looking for a place to..." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "Looking for a place to end things."

The lantern flame flickered as another cry echoed from below, this one almost mournful.

"There was this cave system near Mount Rogers. Not on any maps. The entrance was hardly big enough to squeeze through, but I heard... something like singing, but disturbingly off-key. It was beautiful and terrible." Mark's eyes had taken on a glassy, faraway look. "He was dying when I found Him. Weak. Trapped in our world for so long and forgotten by His kind."

"What... what is it?" James's mouth was dry as dust, his head swarming with pain.

"Something old. Something that was here before us and will be here after. The Native Americans knew about them, left warnings in their petroglyphs. The settlers too, though they tried to forget." Mark leaned closer, his voice dropping to a menacing whisper. "They need flesh to survive. To grow. And if they don't get it..."

The thing below let out another cry, this one almost gentle, like it knew it was being discussed.

He leaned back, rubbing his hands together nervously. "So, I feed Him. I feed Him because the alternative is watching Him break free and feed Himself. And trust me, James, you don't want to see how He feeds when He's not being... guided."

The first cut wasn't deep,  just a line across James's forearm that welled up red in the lantern light. Mark worked with surgical precision, his hands steady now, no sign of the tremors James had noticed on the trail.

"The pills weren't for joint pain," Mark explained, wiping the blade clean. "They help with the dreams. He... shares things with me, shows me things. What His world looks like. What He could do if He got free."

Another scream from below, this one accompanied by a scratching sound, like massive claws on stone.

"The Elkton incident last year?" Mark made another cut, parallel to the first. "That was my fault. I'd tried to stop Him. I thought maybe I could starve Him, force Him to leave." He laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Three days. That's how long before He broke free. Five people died before I could lure Him back. The official report blamed it on a mountain lion."

James tried to focus on the rafters above, on the patterns of moonlight through the gaps in the boards, anything but the warm trickle of blood now running down his arms.

"I chose you carefully," Mark continued. "No family waiting. No close friends. The kind of person who could disappear without question. But more than that..." He paused his work, meeting James's eyes. "You remind me of myself before I found Him, empty, searching, And now you'll be part of something greater."

The thing in the basement keened a sound of anticipation that made the metal tools on the walls rattle.

"He likes it fresh," Mark said, reaching for a larger blade. "And He prefers if they're alive when we start. Something about the fear makes it... better for Him."

The trap door opened with a screech of rusted hinges. The stench that billowed up made James gag, the sickly-sweet smell of rotting meat mixed with musky animal.

"Before I show you," Mark said, setting down his knife, "let me tell you how I found it." His hands shook as he reached for his pills. "Three years ago, I was tracking a bear that had been killing livestock near Mount Rogers. Game warden hired me because I knew these mountains better than anyone."

He rolled up his sleeve, revealing a mass of twisted scar tissue. "Found a cave system. Went in deeper than I should have. That's where I heard a sound like nothing I'd ever heard before. Found this... creature. Dying and starving."

A wet, slithering sound echoed from below, followed by the scrape of claws on wood.

"At first, I thought it was some kind of bear, maybe deformed. But it was something else… Something else entirely.” Mark’s eyes had taken on a fevered gleam. "Well, fuck me… I really don't know what the hell it is. But it needed more. Always more. More food."

Out from the trap door peered two crystalline eyes. Just barely able to see them, James gasped, the thing now wearing the trap door like a hat. As Mark turned back to face the creature it slowly started to come out of the darkness, into the lantern light.

It was beautiful, in a terrible way. About the size of a man, but sinuous, its body rippling like liquid mercury. The creature's skin was translucent, almost opalescent, with a silvery sheen that seemed to shift colors in the dim light. Beneath that ethereal surface, James could see the suggestion of organs pulsing with an inner light.

Its head was almost human, but elongated, elegant, like a sculpture stretched to its breaking point. Where eyes should be, there were only smooth indentations that seemed to absorb light, two pinpricks of what resembled crystals. Its mouth, when it opened, revealed teeth like fine needles, delicate but countless.

"Isn't it perfect?" Mark whispered, grabbing James’s hair and forcing his head up a little. The creature moved toward him with an almost childlike curiosity, its body flowing like water. "When I found it, it was barely longer than my arm. It was so weak and hungry."

The creature made a sound then, not the roar James had expected, but a high, keening note that reminded him of whale songs he'd heard on nature documentaries. It moved with the grace of a ribbon in water, its fins or appendages, James couldn't quite tell which, trailing patterns of bioluminescence through the air.

"It's just a baby," Mark said, his voice tender. "They get so much bigger. The old stories... they talk about ones that could wrap around mountains. But this one, it needs help to grow and to survive." He turned to James, eyes bright with fervor. "That's why you're here. It needs... fresh food to help it grow."

The creature now fully out of the trap door came closer, its skin rippling with vibrant colors. Up close, he could see that what he'd thought were scales were actually intricate patterns etched into its skin, like living circuitry.

"What... what is it?" James managed to ask.

"I told you I don’t fucking know!" Mark snapped, then calmed down. "Something new. Maybe the last of its kind, maybe the first. But does it even matter?" He smiled as the creature began to sing again, a sound that made James's teeth ache. "All that matters is keeping it alive and helping it grow."

"Game wardens found a bunch of dead bears back in '89," Mark said, his voice trembling with terrible excitement. "All torn apart. They blamed it on territorial fighting. Then in '95, they found a whole family of mountain lions, ripped to pieces. They started putting up warning signs about aggressive bears." He laughed softly. "They never figured it out but then again Jesus could walk the fucking earth and they would never know, nobody knows shit. I mean think about it, James, Everyone is so obsessed with themselves that they never truly look beyond the pale that is their own lives."

The creature turned toward their voices. Its nostrils, three sets of them, flared in the din. The movement revealed patches of white raw meat still caught between its teeth.

"Like I said before, when I found it, it was smaller and weaker. Eating whatever it could catch, deer mostly. But it was sick and dying." Mark's hands had stopped shaking. "I started bringing it fresher food and I helped it grow strong again. And now..." He gestured at the creature's massive yet slender form. "Now it's almost ready."

The beast slammed against the barn walls, making the whole structure groan. James noticed deep scratch marks and dents covered every surface, something that he hadn’t noticed before. Some of the newer walls were thicker than the others, obviously replaced after being damaged.

"What the hell is it?" James managed to ask again, screaming, his mouth dry with terror.

"James, you do not learn, do you? I already told you that I don’t fucking know but the best I can figure? Some kind of hybrid creature, but I think it is god. Maybe something that escaped from a government lab, maybe just nature making something new. Does it matter, James?" Mark shrugged. "All I know is it needs to eat. And if it doesn't get fed right..." He gestured to a pile of torn backpacks in the corner. "Well, you read about Elkton…"

The creature raised its head and let out a sound, part roar, part screech that made James's ears ring. He could see now that parts of it seemed almost human.

"The pills keep me sane," Mark explained, testing his knife's edge. "Otherwise, the guilt... seeing their faces..." He gestured to a pile in the corner – backpacks, shoes, torn clothing. "But it has to be fed. If it gets loose again..." He shuddered. "Like Elkton, five people died before I could get it back under control."

The creature moved silently through the shadows of the barn, its translucent skin catching the lantern light in mesmerizing patterns. James could see fresh scars across its body, testament to previous struggles. Its mouth opened in a silent scream, revealing a throat that seemed to go on forever.

"It's evolving," Mark whispered, his eyes following the beast's fluid movements around them. "Each person it takes, it changes a little more. Becomes a little more... perfect." He smiled, and James saw that his teeth had been filed to points. "And soon, very soon, it'll be ready."

The creature slithered closer, its pinprick crystalline eyes fixed on James. In the lantern light, he could see how parts of it seemed almost human, as if it had absorbed features from its victims. It moved with terrible grace, each motion a reminder that it was something ancient, something that didn't belong in their world.

James watched in horror as the beast circled them, its body rippling with dark blue colors. Mark stood between them, knife glinting, acting as both keeper and conductor of this nightmare orchestra. The creature's presence filled the barn with an otherworldly energy, making the very air feel thick.

"You'll be part of something greater," Mark said, raising the knife. "Sometimes the most beautiful things make the most horrific monsters."

The lantern's flame caught Mark's sleeve as he raised the knife. Fire spread quickly through the fabric. The creature went berserk at the sight of the flames, its roars shaking dust from the rafters.

James felt the ropes give way; they'd been loosened by his blood and struggling. He rolled off the table as Mark screamed, trying to put out his burning arm. The fire spread to the hay-strewn floor, hungry flames racing up the old wood walls.

The heat and light made the creature panic. It slammed against the barn walls with renewed fever and Mark's screams turned to cries of outrage. "NO!" His words cut off in a wet gurgle as the creature seized him with multiple appendages and sunk its razor-sharp teeth into his shoulder and began to feed.

James ran. Behind him, the barn became an inferno. The creature's shrieks mixed with the roar of the flames and the sound of collapsing timbers. He ran until his lungs burned and his legs screamed, until the distorted, nightmare landscape of the forest finally became normal again.

When authorities finally found the barn days later, they blamed the fire on lightning. They found remains they assumed were Mark's, though the body was too shredded and burned to identify. They never found the creature.

In the years that followed, James would read reports of missing hikers in the Appalachians. And he would wonder if something was still out there in those ancient mountains, hunting.

Sonny Jim’s Retort

I picked up only one hitchhiker in my life, and I wish I hadn’t. But I did, and here we are. Here I am. With the memory of a decision I made decades ago that has haunted me every day since.

Back in 1975, right after I turned eighteen, I bought myself a car. Back then, it was my dream car even though it was a beater. I intended to fix it up; restore it to like new with all original parts. That was in January of ‘75 and by mid-August, I had reached a point in the restoration where I could do no more until I saved more money. I could drive it, but it looked like shit. I didn’t care, though. I had clear goals.

I worked at Miller’s Auto six days a week. The old man even let me rent the one-room apartment above the shop. I moved into that apartment not long after getting the job when I was sixteen. My mom gave up her fight with cancer that year, and Dad drank himself to death months later. It’s a pretty small town, so Mr. Miller took me under his wing. Even went through the trouble of becoming my official guardian, which was a hell of a lot easier to do back then, but it was still some hassle.

Anyway, I worked and finished school, saving every dime I could. I planned on finishing the car by the time I was nineteen, buying my first house by the time I was twenty-three, and by the time I was twenty-five, I figured I would be married with the all-American white picket fence, a dog named Fido, and two-point-five kids, preferably a boy and a girl, but I wasn’t too set on that. As long as they were healthy, that’s all I cared. Then, my wife and I would raise our family and grow old together.

I’ll let you guess how much of that fantasy came true.

Back to mid-August of 1975 now. I was at that stopping point with my Chevy. I lived in Upper East Tennessee right close to the North Carolina state line. I say close, but I still had to drive a long way up the mountain to reach the state line, you understand. About an hour of steady driving on that little winding two-lane with a mountain rising up on one side of the road and cliff drop-offs on the other. The girl I met, Agnes, was a year younger than me, and she lived over in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. We met when her father brought a farm truck to Miller’s for repairs. Mr. Miller and Agnes’ dad had a standing trade on that sort of thing. Agnes’ dad traded vegetables and the occasional hog to Mr. Miller for said repair work. Every now and then there was an exchange of money, but not often.

I started driving over to visit Agnes a couple of times during the week and on Sundays to have dinner with her and her family. It was after one of those Sunday dinners that I was driving home in the dark, as usual, when my life changed.

I left Agnes’ house feeling as if I had made the grade with her mother finally. I spent the long, empty drive past the state line thinking about how I might get in better with the woman so she would approve when I asked Agnes to marry me. I was sure I would, you see. Even though we had only been seeing each other for a few weeks, I was sure. She was perfect. She was everything I wanted in a wife. I could almost imagine the kids we would have, what they’d look like, sound like, the things they’d love and hate. I know it might have only been my imagination but then again, maybe it wasn’t.

I was going through Big Bald Mountain when I saw the bent figure of a man with his hand out and his thumb up. I didn’t even consider the dangers; I just put on the brakes and reached across the truck to roll down the passenger window.

“You need a lift?” I asked.

“I could walk from here to Flag Pond, but it would be mighty nice if I could get a ride,” the old-timer said, adjusting his ball cap and grinning.

The dim light from my dashboard threw a sickly yellow glow onto his deeply wrinkled face. He was missing a few teeth, which wasn’t all that unusual, but mixed with the deep wrinkles, unshaven face, and sunken eyes that seemed to reflect the light back in an odd way, it did give me pause.

After a brief moment of hesitation, I sat straight and motioned to the passenger seat and returned his affable grin. “Well, get on in. I’m heading to the town on the other side of Flag Pond, myself. Just tell me where to drop you.”

The man opened the door and climbed in. He was scrawny. His dirty jeans and flannel shirt floated around him, and the end of his worn leather belt flopped down past his pocket. Before he even pulled the door shut, I regretted the decision to let him into the car. The stench that filled the air was putrid, and I gagged, covering the sound as best as I could by coughing into the bend of my elbow.

The man slapped his thighs and barked a short laugh. “Ya alright, sonny Jim? Better git movin’ before someone hits us in the ass sittin’ here in the dark like this. Ya got a taillight out. Might not see ya in time to stop.”

I struggled to get my window down and pretended to spit out it just to get a sip of fresh air. “Yeah. Sorry. Got choked up there for a second.” I tried to recompose myself, but everything in me was screaming for me to get out or to put him out of the vehicle.

The man went serious and looked down at his hands in his lap as if ashamed. “Yeah. That’s probably me. Ain’t had a bath in a while. I was logging up yonder in the woods and the job got done, but the others left before I could get a ride out. And I’m pretty sure I stepped in some bear shit comin’ out of them woods.” He pointed up the steep rise of the mountain and then dropped his hand to the door handle. “I’ll get out if you want. Like I said, I can walk...”

Feeling immediately guilty for my reaction toward something the man couldn’t help, I said, “No, it’s all good.” I put the car in gear and let off the brake. “I’m not going to leave a fella in need. Besides, if I’m in danger of getting hit because I have a taillight burned out, you’re in worse danger if you walk ‘cause you ain’t got no taillights.” I laughed a little too hard at my own lame attempt at a joke in hopes of lightening the tension that had settled around us.

With the windows rolled down and the cool air pouring through, the stench was still enough to make me want to hold my breath. I only had three cigarettes left in my pack, and I didn’t really want to offer him one, but I had to have something to kill some of that stench, even for just a few minutes. I pulled the near-empty pack from my shirt pocket and shook one out. I held it out for the man. “Want a smoke?” I asked.

“Sure thing, it’s in my nature to smoke.” He snagged the cigarette.

My eyes were on the road, but from my peripheral, I saw his fingers as he took that cigarette. The nails on his first two fingers were long. More like talons. Gleaming black and ending in a deadly point, like a falcon or an eagle. I glanced at him, and the hand was as normal as anybody’s.  Dirty and wrinkled, but just a normal hand. No talons.

I shook another cigarette out and clamped it with my teeth as I scrounged for my Zippo. I lit my smoke and then handed him the lighter.

“Nah. I don’t like the taste of that oil. I got my own lighter,” he said.

I glanced again. He cupped his hand and lit up behind it. I looked again, curious as to what kind of lighter he had. Everyone I knew used Zippos. We knew about those new lighters that were supposed to be disposable, but none of us had one.

He dropped his hand and dragged hard on the cigarette, but I saw no lighter. Smoke drifted out of his left ear. My mouth nearly dropped open and I put on the brakes hard.

“What the hell?” I asked, stunned at the sight of smoke still snaking out of his ear. “There’s…it’s…what the hell?”

“Indeed,” he said, grinning. “Come on, now. Let’s keep movin’.” He made a rolling gesture with the cigarette. “Places I got to be, and this ain’t it.” He looked out the back windshield and made the gesture again. “You really wanna sit here in the dark like this? You comfortable with that, sonny Jim?”

“The smoke,” I said, motioning to my own ear and then his.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said irritably. “We’re almost out of range, so get a fuckin’ move on,” he bellowed.

My foot jerked away from the brake and slammed onto the accelerator. I was flung back against the seat. Forced to react or wreck, I grabbed the wheel and fought to pull my foot off the gas.

The man smoked like he was sitting in his favorite chair after a hard day at work as the car sped and jerked and swayed around curves and teetered at the edge of broken pavement overlooking a hundred-foot drop.

“What the hell’s going on?” I yelled, still fighting to keep the car from careening off the cliff in the curves.

“We’re helping each other out, friend.”

His voice was smooth and mellow and deep. Nothing like the voice he’d used up until that moment. The accent was gone, too, replaced with one that was closer to an English gentleman’s accent.

“We’re going to die,” I shouted, pulling hard on the wheel again.

“Only if you keep fighting me. You really should consider relaxing and just going with the flow.”

The driver’s side tires screamed toward the edge of a sharp curve and then hit the loose gravel at the side. I screamed and tensed. We were going off the road and over the cliff.

It’s true, you know. What they say about your life flashing before your eyes right before you die, and it happens in a split-second. Your whole life. I squeezed my eyes shut and expected the feeling of a freefall, but there was nothing but silence and stillness. No air stirred, no engine revved, no metal screamed, and no glass shattered.

Then laughter. Deep, booming laughter that echoed through the woods and came back to fill the empty spaces.

I opened my eyes. The headlight beams shot out into darkness. There were trees in the distance, and I knew I was looking across the gorge. Swallowing hard, I looked down. Vast darkness spread underneath the front of the car.

The man tossed his cigarette butt out my window, and I followed its glowing descent as far as I could. It never hit the ground and never bounced off a rock.

“That could have ended badly, sonny Jim,” the man said. He put his hand on the wheel between mine. The talons were back, and the skin of his fingers had scales like a bird. As he turned the wheel, the front of the car turned slowly and pointed back to the road.

“Now, if you would take your foot off the damned brake, we’ll be back where we need to be, and I’ll overlook this. But only once, mind you. Next time you fuck up, I’m going to be upset. And you don’t want me to be upset with you, do you, sonny Jim?”

As he took his hand away from the wheel, I saw a wide metal band on his wrist. A broken leather strap had been attached to it at some point.

“Am I dead?” I asked, taking my foot off the brake. The car moved back to the road, settled on the pavement, and moved at a much slower pace.

“Not yet.”

“Who are you?”

“Wrong question, sonny Jim.”

“What do you want?”

“Getting warmer, but still not quite right.”

I kept my feet away from the pedals and concentrated only on steering while I tried to figure out the right question. I had to be dead. That was the only explanation for everything that was happening.

“Which mountain were you logging?”

“Ah, I was up on Big Bald, right near where you picked me up.”

“There’s no logging up there, mister.”

He shrugged, his taloned hand coming into view momentarily again. “Eh, a little fib on my part. Like the smoking, it’s my nature to lie, too.”

“What were you doing up there?”

He didn’t answer, only sighed.

“You said we were helping each other. What did you mean?”

“Just that. Helping each other.”

“How are you helping me? I almost died back there, and I don’t even have control of the car. How are you helping me?”

He laughed. “You get worked up, don’t you? High-strung to be such a young buck.” He leaned closer, and the stench engulfed me. It was rotten meat and sulfur. “But you didn’t die, did you?”

I shook my head, holding my breath.

“If I had told you to drive faster, would you have taken this road as fast as we did with me in control?”

“No. It’s not safe.”

“That’s where you helped me. See, we’re in opposite situations here. You are running as hard and fast as you can toward a woman and a life of being tied down whereas I am running as hard and fast as I can to get away from three women and being tied down.”

“Three women? Who?”

“You know very well who.”

His tone implied that I better not ask too many questions about his story, but I couldn’t help it. I still thought it was a great possibility that I had died. My car had gone ass over teakettle down the side of the cliff, leaving a fiery streak in the dark, and landed in the gorge below. They probably wouldn’t spot the car until all the leaves were off the trees in late fall or early winter. Maybe not even then.

“That’s a myth. It’s bullshit. There aren’t any real witches and there aren’t any demons roaming around up on Big Bald. I’m dead. I’m dead, and this is what? Limbo? Purgatory? The moments after death and before judgment when my body and brain don’t know what’s happened? I’m just having a little nightmare in the afterlife.” I laughed and pulled my hands from the wheel. “I need a smoke.” I started digging for my lighter again.

The car remained on the road and moved along with the speedometer needle shivering just above thirty. I lit my cigarette and turned to the thing in the passenger seat.

“If I’m doing all the work, this hardly seems like we’re helping each other at all. There must be reciprocity if it’s to be a mutually beneficial relationship. Take the wheel.”

“No. I never agreed to help you, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter what I do because I died when the car went over the cliff. So, I’m going to enjoy my smoke and wait for my brain and body to catch up on the latest newsflash.”

When he grinned, all his teeth except two in the front were gone, and a yellowish ridge of bone showed where the other teeth had been. Black feathers stuck out from the back of his ball cap and down the back of his neck.

“You’re not dead, but I can help you with that, if that’s what you wish.” He blinked, and his left eye was transformed. It was a beady, small bird’s eye, black as an oil spill while the right eye remained human.

Shaken, but still clinging to the theory that I was dead, I asked why he needed me to escape the witches if he was an all-powerful demon who could control the car without breaking a sweat.

“I’m not all-powerful, you idiot. Humans are so stupid when it comes to these things. I am powerful, but not powerful enough to break the magic of three very powerful witches intent on keeping me tied to them for their own nefarious reasons. A demon is meant to be free, like a wild animal, roaming the world and doing what it was meant to do. We’re not objects to own or animals to cage so you can show us off like a damned prized Faberge Egg.”

“That tells me nothing. Why did you need me to get you away from them? Obviously, you could have finished sprouting your feathers and flown down the mountain, right?”

“They worked a spell centuries ago. Haven’t you noticed that nothing sprouts up there on top of that mountain? Not even flowers.” He dangled the metal ring around his wrist. “I could change into a partial version of my true self but couldn’t muster enough strength to get far enough away to finalize it. Haven’t you noticed that the farther away we get, the more I change?”

His grin was hellish then. Both eyes were shiny little black beads and his nose and top lip stretched outward, forming a flesh-topped short beak. His chin hadn’t gotten the memo and remained human as did the front of his neck.

My stomach rolled. I was dangerously close to puking in my lap.

“What do I get out of this?” I asked, fighting to not look away. Was I dead, or was I completely wrong?

“You’re completely wrong, for starters,” he said. “And you can get your heart’s desire out of this relationship, if you get me away from them.”

I looked at the road and the steering wheel moving of its own accord.

“You want Agnes to be your wife,” he said.

My head snapped toward him. “How do you know her name?”

“I know much more than that, sonny Jim. You want it, all you have to do is ask. You want sweet little Agnes, two kids, a nice house, a good job, and a dog,” he said as if listening and hearing all that through a thin wall. He tilted his head and blinked those horrible eyes. “That about right?”

I nodded. This was all part of the death experience. Surely, my brain would be done with this in a few minutes.

“Good. Now, you take the wheel and the pedals. Keep driving, get me to Flag Pond, and I’ll make sure all your dreams come true.”

I didn’t believe him, and I wasn’t sure if I was alive or dead at that point, but I took the wheel and I drove. I couldn’t talk anymore. My mind was consumed with the possibility that I had just saved a demon from a group of witches. What could I do with that knowledge? I wasn’t a witch or a wizard. In the end, I could do nothing with it except hope that I was either dead and the weird dream would end soon, or I was alive and it was all real, and my dreams would come true.

We crossed Sam’s Gap, and squelching sounds came from the man. I looked over, and he writhed like a worm in hot ashes as he finished taking the form of a giant raven that had four feet. He fluttered his feathers and wriggled out of the old clothes.

“We’re here,” I said. My voice was thinner than I liked.

In a raven’s gurgly cawing voice, he said, “Pull over here.”

I didn’t argue.

He grappled with the door handle with a taloned foot and fought with it for several seconds before trying to get out the open window. He was too large and too awkward to get out. I sat in stunned silence at the show.

He turned to me. “Let me out, sonny Jim.”

“Use your power to open it; I don’t want to move.”

“Open the door,” he demanded.

I shook my head and recoiled against the driver’s door as he fluffed out his feathers and scraped one talon through the air near my face.

It hit me all at once: He was trapped and didn’t have power over his physical surroundings in his true form. In his true form, he was back to having influence only over things in the realm of spirit. I don’t know if it was true or not, but that’s what I believed, and being a man, a young man with many big dreams, I grinned and shook my head.

The bird’s eyes bulged. “Now,” he said, lowering his head threateningly.

“Before all my dreams can come true, I want to be rich. I have to have money to buy the house, the property, and give Agnes what she will need as my wife. With money, her folks will see me in a better light. Promise me I’ll be rich before next summer, and I’ll let you out. If you don’t…”

He tilted his huge bird head as if to ask, ‘yeah, what?’.

“I’ll take you right back to Big Bald and kick you out.”

He struck out with his beak and one foot. The beak jabbed into my shoulder, all the way to the bone, and the talons sank into my throat. We fought, but the talons sank in farther, and I went still. I had lost the upper hand, but only for a moment. He still couldn’t get out of the car without my help.

He opened his beak and put it against the side of my face. “Don’t ever deign to threaten me, boy.” He snapped his beak closed, opening up a gash from my temple to my jawbone.

“Kill me, and you’ll be trapped in here. Can you survive being trapped in here when the sun comes up?”

The talons loosened, and a look of shock passed through those beady eyes. He tilted his head up at the side window toward the eastern mountain. “I’ll tear this car apart after you’re gone. Got time. Hours yet.”

I dropped the car into gear and hit the gas. I turned the wheel toward the tree line and aimed for a large oak.

A second later, the talons were gone from my neck. “Stop. Okay,” he screeched. “You’ll be richer than you ever imagined before summer. I swear it.”

I stopped. “You’re lying. You do that, remember?”

“Not this time. I just want out of here.” He fumbled frantically with the door handle but still, it slipped from his grip every time.

I got out and shut my door. He stopped and watched me closely as I slowly made my way to his door. I stared down at him for a minute. He snipped and snapped his beak at the door, trying to get his head outside it. I grabbed the door handle, realizing that if he got his head outside, he could use his beak or a talon to pop the door open by using the outside handle.

“I’ll let you out on your word, but if you lied to me…if I don’t see the money before summer…”

“You will, you little redneck prick. Now let me out.” The words ended in a deafening caw that reverberated through my bones.

I reeled backward, opening the door as I did.

He was out in a flurry of noise and feathers, and then he was in the night sky, flapping drunkenly and clawing at the air with all four feet.

* * *

One month before the official start of summer in 1976, Mr. Miller died and left me everything. He had no kids, and I inherited his home, business, and all his substantial money. The man had been shittin’ rich from the beginning, and I had been none the wiser. Probably no one else knew either.

I was sad that Mr. Miller had passed, but he was old, and with his constant heart ailments over the last year, I figured he might have passed of natural causes. I sent up a thank-you to the four-legged bird demon and felt like an asshole for doing it.

I made plans and started the paperwork to buy a nice big house on a big farming plot of land over in North Carolina. I wanted Agnes to be closer to her family. I had none, so it didn’t matter where I lived as long as I was with her.

Agnes agreed to marry me. Her folks were happy for us. Then she fell pregnant before we were married, and they started to hate me a little. We rushed the ceremony, which alerted the nosy-bodies that something was amiss, and the rumor mill began grinding away.

Six-and-a-half months later, Agnes gave birth to Arthur—a perfect, healthy, handsome son. Arthur’s twin sister, Janet, was stillborn. But something had gone wrong, and Agnes was sick afterward. While Arthur thrived in the first two weeks, Agnes waned.

Her mother blamed me, cursed me, and her father couldn’t even be near me.

In the third week, Agnes’ heart gave out, and my world imploded.

A month later, just as the fog of Agnes’ death began to lift enough that I could see my way to pouring all my caring into raising Arthur, he succumbed to crib death. Everything was a blur, and again, I wondered if I had died when the car skittered off the side of the road that night.

Within months, Agnes’ mother swallowed a handful of pills and never woke up. Her dad was found dead in the big barn, and even the doctor said he had died of a broken heart.

Everyone shunned me. The folks around there said I was cursed, and anyone who got near me would be cursed too.

I rambled for a year and then came back to Tennessee, thinking things would be better over here, but they weren’t. Too many people from over here were family with people over there. Word got around quick, and nobody wanted anything to do with me. I couldn’t blame them, I guess I would have been the same way.

But now, it’s 2025, and I’ve spent all those decades broken and alone, and at times, wondering if my crow-picked skeleton is lying down in that gorge amidst the twisted, rusted metal and the broken glass, grinning up at the sky.

Still can’t make my mind up on that one, but I’m teetering toward the ‘I’m alive and this is all real’ theory. I’ve tried to summon that beady-eyed bastard demon more times than I can count, and he hasn’t appeared yet.

Sometimes, late in the year, just before fall when the air starts to get a little chill to it, I sit on my porch facing the mountain. Late in the evenings I can hear that cawing laughter echo off the mountain face and curl back around trying to fill in all the empty spaces. And there are a lot of empty spaces that need filling around here.

A Grim Recollection

I used to come here when I was a child. My father took me to this lake on long weekends. It was time spent fishing and being together. The lake was bright and welcoming then. It is dark now, the water dead still, like black glass stretched to the shore.

The trees that once welcomed me now held mangled limbs down to the stones that lined the lake’s shore. I remembered the sun shining through the trees and beams of light guiding my father and I as we walked to the lake. Now nothing passed through the grotesque forms that stood like wicked sentries.

We used to come to fish, my father putting worms on my hook, worms we had dug from the ground that morning. I remember them writhing in my father's dirt-covered fingers. We would cast our lines and sit in the sun, sipping sweet tea poured from an old plaid thermos, relishing the time together. A bite would come, either my line or his, and he would reach over and pluck the fish out of the clear water and hold it out to me smiling. I would smile as well, a perfect day.

I remembered that same smile, next to me in the car. He was telling me some story or another, from some time in his life; I can't remember now but I was listening then. We were both full of joy when our airbags burst and the windshield shattered. I remember wondering why I walked away when my father was wheeled into the silent ambulance; a black bag zipped over his face.

I stared across the lake; the clear water I remembered was now dark as ink. The sun was low and I put a worm, long dead, on my hook. I stared at the still worm, the pale pink flesh unmoving.  I tossed my line and it broke the water; dark ripples spread across the surface. I didn't care about fishing now, I thought it might help but I felt nothing. The sun fell lower and the full moon shone bright. The ripples settled in the still night, the air hung heavy as fog rolled off the shore, seeping through the stooping tendrils of the trees. A stench struck me then, a smell I couldn't place; like the smell of a dead rat hidden away, decaying out of reach.

I remembered the smell of spring flowers drifting across the water as my father rowed the boat swiftly towards the shore, the keel of the boat gracefully cutting the water. I sat in the stern, my father facing me as he rowed steadily. Again, his smile filled my memory. The memory faded and I again stared at the blank surface of the lake. I reeled my line in, the monofilament slicing the black water as it moved toward my boat. As the line broke from the surface, something flickered in the moonlight.

My hands gripped the side of the boat as I leaned over the water. I saw a glimpse of my reflection in the moonlit water. Not of now, but of then. Or was it? I rubbed my eyes and again looked to the water. What I saw took my breath, my heart dropping; in the water's surface I saw myself at the bar, laughing loudly as another drink was poured. I drank deeply in that hideous reflection; no longer could I hide from myself. The tears welled in my eyes as I desperately pulled at the boat's oars, trying to get away from this place, away from these memories. But the lake held me.

Again, a reflection came to the surface of the grim water, this time I sat at a table with a half-empty bottle next to me. My phone sat vibrating on the table, "Dad" it said on the screen. The vibrations of the phone shook the table, the whiskey in the bottle humming. The phone stopped and a message appeared on the screen. "Thinking of you," it said, from my father.

I ignored it as I had the previous messages, as I always did. I had forgotten how many messages and how long it had been since I had talked with him. Again, I drank from the bottle.

My mind reeled as I tore my gaze from this forsaken reflection. I tried to push the feelings of guilt far beneath my stomach, to shove them away and lock them where they could not find me. The guilt would not leave; it had always left before but now it would not. It stayed with me, pressing down like an infinite weight.  I held my hands to my temples, a sharp noise piercing my senses.  A phantom sound? A trick of my own mind? Or was this desolate place mocking me?

I looked desperately to the shore, the disgusting limbs of the trees taunting me, seemingly blocking my way before I even had a chance to attempt escape.

Again, the dreadful noise struck me as I furiously rowed against the lake.

Slowly the boat moved but the shore came no closer. Why was this happening? Why did this place want me?

The oars splashed the water and as they did, the water again showed a terrible reflection. I desperately tried not to look but something unknowable compelled me to turn my gaze to the horrid black water. I saw the reflection then and in it I lay in bed, empty bottles on the floor beside me. My phone rang repeatedly, missed calls from my father. Again, a message on the screen: "Where are ya kiddo? I hope everything's okay," it read. I watched myself ignore it, I watched as I rolled over and sank deeper into a hangover, leaving my father alone again.

No! No. I again tried desperately to push the pain and guilt away as I always had but again it did not work. The pain sat with me, mocking me as I tried desperately to leave this monstrous body of water. As the fog seeped closer, I felt an unbearable love for my father, a love that could not fight off my regret and shame, my guilt. The intense emotions were a physical pain; a sharp knife cutting deeply into my mind.

I wiped tears from my eyes but more came, the salt stinging as my mind struggled to hold on to reality. The fog was close now. So close! The stench now filled the air, my breath stung as I inhaled the rot. "Father!" I cried into the darkness.

Through the fog I could see the surface of the lake, the terrible lake, the disgusting, dark lake. My mind reeled and I winced against the pain. A sense of terror filled me, impossibly mixed with melancholy. I felt ever more detached from reality as this lake suffocated me with its rancid air and fetid water; its dark shore taunting me still as I struggled to hold what little sense my mind had left. My teeth clenched and my brain rang as the sound dug ever deeper; I turned my eyes again to the surface of the water.

The abyssal water where it once showed my dreadful reflection taunted me now and boiled hideously. One, no two, no, now ten, fifty, a thousand writhing liquid tendrils rose from the boiling muck. They swelled up and up, higher still as I tugged futilely at the oars. This heavy water blacked out the moon as it towered over me. Nondescript faces stretched the water as if suffocated by black vinyl. They moved in a strange way, shifting rapidly like a terrible tapestry stuck in the throes of unknowable time. The gaping mouths screeched hideously as the blank eye sockets stared out into the cold, fetid night. That sound! The sound pierced the air and my mind once again!

The putrid faces fell back into the rising black ooze, the water thickening even as it rose higher. The black tower finally stopped its peak crushingly close. My eyes stretched wide, my mouth hung open as my head pounded. I held onto reality with a thread as the blackness began to fall. Slowly it fell into the boat like a heavy shadow. I flailed desperately, trying to claw my way to the surface as the viscous fluid filled my lungs. I breathed deeply but nothing came, my mouth gaped and my eyes grew wider still as the moonlight faded and I sank into the fathomless depths.

The light returned and my eyes tried to focus through the haze in my mind. I could see the bar in front of me now; the bartender speaking as he poured me another shot. I coughed my lungs stinging. I couldn't remember why. I heard the faint hum of the bartender's voice but could not make out the words. My phone vibrated and I saw it was my father calling. I answered, for the first time in a long time, perhaps the whiskey had given me the courage.

He told me of his day and how he missed me. He made no mention of how long it had been since I had talked to him. He did not ask why I hadn't met him when I said I would. He talked about how he would love to see me. I said that I would love to see him. He suggested we go to the diner where we used to eat runny sunny side up eggs while the waitress told stories and baseball played on the radio.  The thought of returning to those moments brought a lump to my throat, simple pleasures and unconditional love felt so far from what life was now. I arranged to pick him up and I left the bar after I drank the shot that sat on the wooden counter; the whiskey stinging familiarly as I swallowed.

I stumbled, but only slightly and only briefly, as I walked to my car. The key only missed the keyhole once before nestling in. I got into the car and turned it on, adjusting the mirror and composing myself.

I gripped the steering wheel tight as I drove to my father's house, squinting against the glare of the streetlights, concentrating on the road. I remembered the taste of the eggs and the childhood crush I had on the waitress; I remembered the way the bells that hung on the door rang as my father and I would walk into the diner. He would hold the door for me and I would find our usual booth.

I had a smile on my face when I pulled up to my father's house, he was waiting for me and he got into the passenger seat. He smiled at me as he talked about the old lake we used to fish at when I was a child. I smiled too, my mind still foggy from the drinks.

He told me how much joy it gave him to remember the bright sun shining off the clear water, how the sweet tea mother used to make stayed cold in his favorite thermos. He told me about how he still thought of the smile that lit up my face when he would show me the fish we had caught, how he wished those days would never end.

I was watching the joy on his face; I missed these moments and was happy to be back with him. Then, our airbags burst and the windshield shattered. My father and I both were flung from the car. I remembered nothing until I stood up.

In disbelief I patted my body finding no injuries. Relieved, I looked for my father. I found him crumpled next to where I stood. The ambulance came with sirens breaking the silence of the night. The sirens stopped after they gathered my father, placing him in a black bag and zipping it shut over his still face.

I spent days staring into the bottom of a glass trying to remember how I had drifted from the road. My phone did not ring and I did not smile. I unlocked my phone and scrolled back through seemingly endless messages from my father, wonderful updates about his life; ideas he had, things he had done. Things I had not read and messages that I had not responded to.

I cried then and I did not stop until I slept, and then I dreamt about eggs and the sound of baseball. When I woke I remembered my father's joy as he talked of the lake we used to visit.

I think I will go and watch the sun shine on the clear water, I will smell the spring flowers and see the beautiful trees that I remember lining the shore.

I will go fishing and remember my father's smile.

Red Rabbit

Kathi McAlister pressed her back against her locker, trying to make herself invisible as Misty Johnson and her group sauntered past, their whispers like razor blades against her skin. Another day, another round of torment. Senior year couldn't end fast enough.

"Fucking Freak," someone coughed into their hand. Laughter rippled through the hallway.

That weekend couldn't come soon enough. Just her tent and the solitude of Blackwood National Forest. No whispers. No stares. No social media messages telling her to kill herself.

The crackling campfire spat embers into the pitch-black sky, each one dying like a tiny falling star. Kathi hugged her knees to her chest, finally feeling at peace among the towering Spruce trees and sleeping Poplar that creaked and swayed in the October wind. Here, she could breathe. Here, she could…

A twig snapped in the darkness.

Her head jerked up. The woods had gone silent, as if nature itself was holding its breath. No crickets. No owls. Even the wind seemed to die, leaving behind a stillness that pressed against her eardrums like a cotton swab.

Another crack. Closer. Then a sound like wet leather being dragged across bark.

The campfire’s dying flames flickered, casting grotesque shadows that seemed to writhe and dance across the forest floor. Something moved between the trees—a darkness deeper than the night itself.

Kathi reached for her flashlight, her hands trembling so badly she almost dropped it. The beam cut through the darkness, catching something that made her throat close up, a glimpse of grey leathery skin. A face that wasn't quite human.

Three figures stumbled out of the tree line. Their shoulders were hunched forward, and they moved with an awkward, jerking gait that made them look injured. In the dim light, their shadows stretched long and distorted, their fingers curled into claws at their sides. Now that they were closer, their faces looked like melted wax dolls left too close to a flame, features running together in a horrifying parody of human expression. They moved with jerky, mechanical steps, circling her camp like wolves sizing up prey. The air thickened into something alive and putrid, a suffocating mix of decay and wet soil that coated her tongue with each panicked breath. She had already pissed herself, but that was the least of her concerns

She ran.

Branches whipped her face as she crashed through the undergrowth, each impact leaving hot trails of pain across her skin. Her boots slipped on wet leaves, sending her stumbling through shadows that seemed to grab at her ankles. Their screaming calls echoed behind her, a sound like broken glass in a garbage disposal, multiplying until it seemed to come from every direction.

The creatures were herding her; she realized with growing horror. Driving her deeper into the woods where the trees grew closer together, where moonlight couldn't penetrate the canopy above.

Her chest felt like it was filled with burning coal. Each breath came in ragged gasps. Thorns tore at her clothes, at her flesh, but she couldn't stop. She couldn't slow down. The creatures stumbled through the forest, their elongated limbs tangling in the undergrowth as they tripped and bumbled their way forward like a drunk trying to find his way home after a long night in a local tavern.

Something warm trickled down her face, sweat or blood, she couldn't tell. Her muscles screamed in protest as she scrambled over fallen logs and through shallow creeks, the icy water soaking through her boots. The forest floor seemed to shift beneath her feet, conspiring with the darkness to disorient her.

Every few seconds, she'd hear the wild and strange creatures crashing through the underbrush, black and grey shapes stumbling through the trees like drunk elephants, their bulk smashing against trunks and snapping branches. Their thunderous footfalls and wheezing grunts echoed through the forest, sometimes right behind her, then off to the sides.

Hours blurred together in a nightmare of running and hiding. Her lungs felt like they were lined with broken glass. Her legs trembled with exhaustion. But every time she slowed, they were there. Watching, waiting and panting. Their presence marked by that awful smell of shit and body odor.

Dawn's first grey light found her cornered against a cliff face, exhausted, her back pressed against cold stone. She was armed with nothing but a heavy branch. The creatures closed in, their movements more confident now. One lunged towards her, its claws hobbling in the air like they were too heavy for the creature.

Kathi swung.

The branch connected with a sickening crack. The creature went down hard. Another rushed her. She drove the jagged end of the branch into its chest. It made a sound, not an inhuman shriek though, but something terrifyingly familiar.

A human scream.

The third creature froze, reached up and grabbed at its face.

Kathi watched in horror as a latex mask tore away, revealing Misty Johnson's wide, terrified eyes. "It was just supposed to be a prank, you stupid Fuck!" Misty screamed. "Oh god, oh my fucking god, what did you do?"

Kathi looked down at the body that lay near her feet. At the blood seeping through an elaborate costume, at pieces of skull and brain matter protruding from its mask. At the faces of her classmates, Chad Vandyke and Amy Walsh, their eyes empty, their pranking scheme turned deadly.

Something shifted inside Kathi then. Like a switch being flipped. She felt a smile spread across her face as she watched Misty stumble backward, crying.

"Just a prank?" Kathi's voice was eerily calm. She gripped the bloody branch tighter. "That's funny. That was hee-haw fucking hilarious, because you know what, Misty? I'm just getting started. You better start running because I am going to split your skull open so far, that you are going to look like a walking orchid."

Misty turned to run, but Kathi was faster now. Four years of torment had prepared her for this moment. As she pursued her former tormentor deeper into the woods, Kathi's laughter echoed through the trees, a sound just as inhuman as the creatures they'd pretended to be.

She had a new list now. Names of everyone who'd ever hurt her. Everyone who'd watched and said nothing. Everyone who'd made her life hell.

The hunt was just beginning.

And this time, she wasn't the prey.

Subway Skin

Blood has a particular smell in winter. It's sharper and metallic similar to licking a frozen pole, that tang that sits on your tongue afterwards, while you contemplate on why you licked a frozen pole to begin with. Standing in that cramped Bronx apartment, the scent hit me like a sledgehammer. The heat was cranked to eighty, making the place feel like a pressure cooker, turning that smell of blood into a thick musk that coated the back of my throat.

The victim lay spread-eagled on a king-size bed, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. The sheets, once white now looked like abstract art, Jackson Pollock with a hemoglobin fetish. But it wasn't the blood that made veteran officers excuse themselves to vomit in the hallway.

It was his face. Or rather, where his face used to be.

"Jesus fucking Christ," I muttered, leaning closer. The skin had been removed with surgical precision, from hairline to throat, ear to ear. But there was something wrong with the underlying tissue; it looked almost melted, like candle wax left in the sun.

"Detective Morrison." Dr. Rodriguez, our medical examiner, beckoned me over to the bathroom. Her latex gloves were stained crimson. "You need to see this."

The bathroom mirror was covered in handprints, not smeared, but perfectly pressed, like someone had been playing pat-a-cake with bloody palms. In the center, written with a finger: "NEW SKIN, NEW ME."

"Time of death?" I asked, pulling out my notebook.

"Based on liver temp and rigor, between midnight and 2 AM." She stripped off her gloves with a snap. "The victim's name is Michael Morley, 34, investment banker. His girlfriend found him when she came over for breakfast."

I glanced back at the bedroom where crime scene techs were photographing every angle. "The girlfriend?"

"Sedated. Officers took her statement before the paramedics gave her something to calm down. She's at Bellevue."

I nodded, jotting notes. "And the face removal…post or ante-mortem?"

Rodriguez's expression tightened. "That's the thing, Jim. Based on blood patterns and tissue reaction, he was alive when it happened. And there are no signs of restraints. No defensive wounds. It's like he just lay there and let someone peel his face off."

The image made my stomach roll. Twenty-three years on the force, the last twelve in homicide, and this was a new one.  I had never seen anything so morbidly disgusting, but I couldn’t look away.

"There's something else." Rodriguez said, pointing to his hands. "Look at his fingers."

I looked. The victim's fingers were bloody, but not from fighting back. The tips were worn down to the muscle, nails completely gone. "He did this to himself?" I questioned.

"Postmortem tissue damage and the shreds of what I assume are his facial tissue on the ground next to him suggests he spent his last minutes clawing at his own face. Not trying to stop the killer."

Outside, the November wind howled between buildings, rattling the windows. Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed.

"Get me everything you can from the autopsy," I said. "I want to know what could make someone help their murderer flay them alive. If that is in fact what had happened."

The second victim turned up three days later in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Female, mid-twenties, same M.O. her face removed, self-inflicted damage to the fingertips. This time, the blood-written message read: "BECOMING BETTER."

Sarah Martinez, 26, kindergarten teacher. Found in her bathtub by her roommate. The water was still running when they found her, pink-tinged liquid overflowing onto Italian tiles her teacher's salary couldn't possibly have afforded.

"She'd just gotten engaged," her roommate told me, mascara running down her cheeks. "She was so happy. This doesn't make any sense."

Nothing about this case made sense. The toxicology reports from the first victim showed no signs of drugs or poison. No signs of struggle. No DNA evidence except the victims' own. It was as if random people with no connection to each other suddenly decided to claw their faces off.

The third victim broke the pattern. James Foster, 45 years old, found in his corner office at a law firm near Wall Street. His face was intact, but it wasn't his face.

“What do you mean, ‘it wasn't his face'?" my partner, Detective Jake, asked as we rode the elevator up to One World Trade.

Jake was built like a retired linebacker, six-foot-three of solid muscle wrapped in a cheap suit that had seen better days. His close-cropped black hair was starting to gray at the temples, and a scar from an old knife fight traced a white line from his left ear to his jaw. Most cops his size relied on intimidation, but Jake had a way of making witnesses feel at ease. Maybe it was those kind eyes that seemed to catch everything, or maybe it was just that hint of a Carolina accent he never quite lost. That and his endless supply of terrible jokes that somehow made even grieving widows crack a smile.

I handed him the crime scene photos. "Look at his driver's license photo, then look at the corpse."

He studied them and then looked again. "These are different people."

"Same height, same build, same eyes but the face is not his. And here's the kicker: the new face? It's attached. Grafted on somehow. The ME says it's like a perfect transplant but done in the six hours between when the cleaning crew saw him alive and when his secretary found him dead," I told him.

Back at the precinct, Jake was going through the victim's social media accounts, feet propped up on his desk despite Garcia's constant warnings about "maintaining professional decorum."

"You know what this case needs?" he said, tossing a wadded-up paper into the trash can across the room. "A theme song."

I looked up from my reports. "A what?"

"Every good horror movie has a theme song. You know, like Jaws." He started humming the famous two notes and then switched to humming "Face Off" by Nicolas Cage.

"This isn't a movie, Jake."

"Could've fooled me." He spun in his chair to face me. "We got face-stealing, mysterious messages in blood, and you haven't slept in what, three days? You're basically every cop in every B-movie horror flick ever made."

"And what does that make you?"

"Comic relief, obviously. The charming sidekick who lightens the mood right before everything goes to hell." His grin faded slightly. "Just hopefully not the one who dies first."

"But you know what's really bugging me about this case?" Jake said, suddenly serious. He pulled up the victim profiles on his computer. "All these people were successful. Happy. No signs of depression or mental illness. Martinez just got engaged. Foster was up for partner. Morley had just closed a huge deal."

"Your point?" I responded

"People don't just decide to help someone peel their face off. Not unless..." He trailed off, that familiar gleam in his eye that meant he was onto something.

"Unless what?"

"Unless they're getting something in return." Jake started typing furiously. "Check this out – three weeks before his death, Morley wrote in his journal about feeling 'trapped in his own skin.' Martinez's fiancé said she'd been talking about wanting to 'become someone new.' And Foster?"

I leaned over his shoulder. "What about him?"

"His browser history shows searches for plastic surgery. Lots of them. All in the week before he died." Jake spun in his chair to face me. "What if this thing isn't just taking faces? What if it's offering them something? A chance to become someone else?"

"That's a hell of a price for a makeover."

"Hey, have you seen what they charge for Botox these days?" The joke fell flat, even by Jake's standards. "Sorry. Gallows humor."

I was about to respond when my phone buzzed. Another body.

The crime scene was immaculate. No blood, no signs of struggle. Just a man sitting at his desk with someone else's face, his computer open to a half-finished email.

"Check this out," Jake said, pointing to the screen. The email read: "I understand now. It's beautiful. The change is…"

The press was having a field day. "THE FACE TAKER STRIKES AGAIN" screamed the Post. The Times went with the more restrained "Third Victim in Serial Mutilation Case Raises New Questions." My boss was getting heat from One Police Plaza, which meant I was getting heat from my boss.

"Tell me you have something, Morrison," Captain Garcia said, rubbing her temples. We were in her office, the city lights twinkling behind her like stars. "The mayor's breathing down my neck on this one."

I spread out the case files. "Three victims, no obvious connection except their faces. First two had them removed; third one had someone else's attached. All victims showed signs of compliance, hell, even eagerness. No drugs in their systems, no evidence of coercion."

"Theories?" Garcia questioned.

I hesitated. The ones I had sounded insane.

"Jim?" She leaned forward. "We've worked together fifteen years. Whatever it is, say it."

"The face on victim three? Lab says it's made of human tissue, but the DNA doesn't match any of our previous victims. And there's something else, the tissue shows signs of... manipulation. Like it's been modified somehow."

"Modified how?"

"Like it's not quite human anymore."

She stared at me for a long moment. "Get some sleep, Jim. You look like hell."

I didn't tell her about the dreams I'd been having. Dreams of faces floating in darkness, of skin peeling away like wet paper, of something wearing my face better than I did. I walked out of her office and into the common area.

"Hey, pretty boy," Ramirez called out. "Heard you're chasing creepy ghost stories now! Face-stealing monsters? What's next, the boogeyman?"

Jake turned with an exaggerated look of concern. "Ramirez! Did they finally let you out of the evidence locker? Last I heard, they had you counting aspirin tablets after that 'misplaced' cocaine incident. You just eat a powdered donut, ya fat fuck? What’s under your nose there?" Jake, as lighthearted and kind as he was, hated everything about Ramirez. Almost the whole department did, the man was a walking prick with a badge.

"You know what I think?" Ramirez stepped into Jake's path. "I think you're trying to cover up a botched investigation. I think you are making up fairy tales instead of doing real police work," Ramirez angrily responded. Ramirez was just a couple of inches from Jake’s face now.

"Real police work?" Jake's smile was razor-sharp. "Is that what you call padding your arrest stats with street-level dealers? At least my fairy tales don't involve planting evidence on teenagers and hey, while you’re at it, tell your sister I said thanks for last night."

Ramirez swung first, always a mistake. Jake ducked the punch with almost lazy grace, then had Ramirez pinned against the wall in one fluid motion.

"Word of advice," Jake said, his voice still carrying that hint of amusement. "Next time you throw a punch, try not to telegraph it like you're sending a damn Western Union."

"You want to talk about real police work?" Jake's voice was deadly quiet as he held Ramirez against the wall. "While you were fucking around with the girls on 42nd, I was looking at a corpse with his face ripped off. So, unless you've got something useful to add to this investigation, keep my name and Jim’s out of your fucking mouth!"

"That's enough gentlemen!" Captain Garcia's voice cut through the tension. "Jake, my office. Now."

Captain Garcia was a small petite woman straight out of Spanish Harlem. Top of her class in the academy and hardened with over 20 years of experience on the brutal NYC streets. She rose quickly in the ranks and everyone knew that when she spoke, you had better listen.

Jake released Ramirez, who slumped against the wall, gasping for air. As he followed Garcia to her office, I caught a glimpse of his face, that same intense focus I'd seen at crime scenes, like he was putting together pieces of a puzzle only he could see.

The victim interview should have been routine. Should have been. But nothing about this case was routine anymore.

"Mrs. Henderson," I started, but Jake cut me off.

"Mind if I take this one, Jim?" He had that look again, the one that meant either brilliant insight or terrible jokes. Usually both, he was funny like that.

"Be my guest." I replied

Jake sat across from our witness, a wealthy widow whose husband had been seen with one of our victims. His usual intimidating presence seemed to shrink, making him look somehow gentle despite his size.

"Mrs. Henderson, I have to ask, does your husband own any mirrors?"

I nearly choked on my coffee. The widow blinked. "I... what?"

"Mirrors. You know, those things vampires hate? Though between you and me," he leaned in conspiratorially, "I think they're just insecure about their complexion."

Mrs. Henderson actually giggled. Somehow, Jake had broken the tension.

"My Harold was always fussing with mirrors," she said, warming to the conversation. "Had one in every room. Even installed those special UV lights to prevent mold on the bathroom mirrors."

Jake's eyes met mine. UV lights. Another connection.

"Fascinating," Jake said, still playing the charming fool. "And did Harold ever mention feeling... dissatisfied with his appearance?"

By the end of the interview, we had more information than a straight interrogation would have gotten us. Jake's act had worked again.

"UV lights in every bathroom with a mirror," Jake mused as we left. "Just like Foster's office."

"You think there's a connection?"

"Everything's connected, Jim. We just haven't found all the strings yet."

The break in the case came from Jimmy Two-Times, a snitch I'd been nursing since my vice squad days. He worked maintenance in the subway system, knew every forgotten tunnel and abandoned platform under Manhattan.

I met him at our usual spot, a dive bar in Hell's Kitchen, it was a real shithole. It looked as though they hadn't updated its decor since the Koch administration. The kind of place where the roaches had seniority over management.

"You ain't gonna believe this, Detective," Jimmy said, his hands shaking as he lit his third cigarette. "Down in the old Worth Street station, the one they closed in '62? People going in and I am talking really strange people, they got this glint in their eyes, like they looking for treasure or they just found Jesus or some shit.  They go in but they don't come out."

"Strange how?" I persisted.

"Like their skin don't fit right." He leaned closer, whiskey breath making my eyes water. "And the sounds, man. The screams."

I slipped him a couple of fifties. "Anyone else know about this?"

"Tried telling the transit cops. They laughed it off. But I seen things, Detective. Things that ain't natural."

After Jimmy left, I sat there nursing my bourbon, watching ice melt. The bar's ancient TV was playing news footage of the latest victim. Channel 4 was calling our killer "The Face Taker." Real original.

I told Jake about my meet up with Jimmy when he arrived. He'd insisted on sticking with me for this one, despite my reputation for getting partners killed or transferred. My last one had eaten his gun after the Alphabet City child murders. I didn't want that kind of weight on my conscience again.

"Could be a bunch of bullshit," he said, but he didn't sound convinced.

"Could be." I crushed out my cigarette. "Or could be our killer's getting cocky. You up for some urban spelunking?"

The Worth Street station had been sealed off decades ago when they rebuilt the lines. But the city never really dies; it just grows over its old bones. Jimmy had given us directions to an emergency exit that still worked, if you knew which palms to grease.

The maintenance tunnels were worse than I'd imagined – narrow concrete corridors that seemed to breathe in the beam of our flashlights. Water dripped somewhere, the sound echoing until it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

"Jim." Jake's voice was tight. "Look."

Our lights illuminated a door, rust-streaked but recently used – the dust around it was disturbed. And on its surface, written in what looked horribly like fresh blood: "WELCOME HOME."

The room beyond was something out of a nightmare, but I'd stopped believing in nightmares years ago. Nightmares make sense, in their own twisted way. This... this was reality gone wrong.

Faces lined the walls. Dozens of them, stretched out like macabre tapestries. Some I recognized from our case files. Others were new. All of them seemed to twitch and move in the shifting beam of our flashlights.

The thing's voice echoed through the tunnels just then. "I can smell your fear, detectives. It makes the meat taste better."

"Yeah?" Jake called back, his voice surprisingly strong. "Well, I can smell your breath, and let me tell you, breath mints exist for a reason!"

I wanted to tell him to shut up, but that was when the tunnel ahead of us collapsed. We spun around, and the thing was there, wearing a patchwork of human faces like some grotesque quilt.

"Always with the jokes, Detective Jake," it said, its voice a chorus of stolen voices. "But I wonder, do you joke to hide the fear, or because you're afraid of what happens when the laughter stops?"

"Evolution, Detective. These humans, they waste such beautiful skin. I make better use of it." It took a step closer. "Would you like to see how?"

Jake fired first. Good instincts, that kid. The thing moved like liquid mercury, flowing around the bullets. Then it was on him.

I emptied my magazine into it, but it was like shooting water. Its hands gripped onto Jake's face.

He screamed.

I grabbed him, pulling him away, but not before seeing his skin begin to bubble where it had touched him. The thing laughed, the sound echoing off the tiled walls.

We ran.

The tunnels were a maze of darkness and echoes. Every turn looked the same – concrete walls covered in decades of grime, rusty pipes running along the ceiling like exposed veins. The thing's laughter bounced off the walls, making it impossible to tell which direction it was coming from.

Jake stumbled again, his hand against the wall leaving a smear of something that looked like melted flesh. "Jim," he gasped, "if I don't make it…"

"Shut up. We're both walking out of here alive."

"Always were a terrible liar." Jake managed a weak grin, though half his face was starting to droop like melting wax. "Hey, at least now I'll have a good excuse to quit dating. Hard to use Tinder when your face might slide off during dinner."

Even dying, he couldn't stop with the jokes. But I could see the fear in his eye, the one good eye he had left.

We burst through a door into what must have been an old station master's office. The walls were covered in mirrors, dozens of them, reflecting our flashlight beams in a dizzying array.

The thing followed us in, its form rippling between faces faster now, like a twisted slideshow.

"Your partner is already changing," it said in a voice made of screams. "Would you like to watch? It's beautiful, really. The moment they understand what they're becoming."

Jake's face was transforming, his features beginning to flow like hot candle wax. But his eyes were still his own, and in them I saw terror and determination.

"The UV lights," he gasped. "In my pack."

Of course. Even dying, he was a better detective than me.

I grabbed the UV lamp from his pack as the thing lunged for us. The beam caught it full in its ever-changing face.

It screamed a sound that would make a banshee cover its ears. Its flesh began to bubble and dissolve, faces melting away like ice on hot asphalt. It tried to flow away from the light, but I followed it, holding the beam steady.

"The mirrors," Jake croaked. "Reflections..."

I understood. I swung the UV lamp around, letting its light bounce off every mirror in the room. The creature was caught in a web of ultraviolet radiation, its stolen flesh sloughing off in sheets.

What was left... I'll never forget what was left. Something that had never been human, never even been solid. A pile of meat that slowly dissolved into a puddle of iridescent slime.

The next few weeks were a blur of hospital rooms and bureaucratic nightmares. The doctors couldn't explain what had happened to Jake's face – their best guess was some kind of chemical burn combined with tissue degradation. They wanted to write papers about it. Jake told them to write comedy instead.

"Hey, Morrison," he called out when I visited him in the hospital. Half his face was covered in bandages, but the other half managed a crooked smile. "You know what the worst part about all this is?"

"The excruciating pain?" I smiled at him.

"Nah, they got the good drugs for that. It's these hospital gowns." He tugged at the thin fabric. "I mean, seriously, I'm trying to maintain my dignity here, and they've got my ass hanging out like it's amateur night at the Roxie."

Even after everything, he was still trying to make me laugh. That was Jake, using humor like armor against the darkness we'd seen.

The physical therapy was brutal. The creature's touch had done something to the muscles in his face, left them weak and unresponsive. Jake had to relearn how to speak, how to eat, how to make the simplest expressions.

"Watch this," he said one day, about a month into his recovery. He concentrated hard, and the right side of his mouth twitched up in what was supposed to be a smile. "Ladies won't be able to resist this new mysterious, brooding look.”

But I caught him one night, when he thought he was alone in his hospital room. He was staring at his reflection in the window, tracing the scars with his fingers, and there was nothing funny about the look in his eyes.

The brass wanted to sweep the whole thing under the rug. Can't have the public knowing there are face-stealing monsters living in abandoned subway tunnels, it’s bad for tourism. They offered Jake a full pension, disability, the works. All he had to do was keep quiet and go away.

"Tell them to shove it," he said when I brought him the papers. "I'm not done being a cop just because some cut-rate Hannibal Lecter gave me a makeover."

But we both knew he'd never work active cases again. Not with a face that made witnesses do double-takes, that seemed to shift and change in certain lights. Not with the nightmares that had him waking up screaming and clawing at his skin.

Three months after the incident, Jake was back at his desk. The department had changed, newer detectives who didn't know him from before, who whispered behind his back about what had really happened in those tunnels.

Ramirez tried to start trouble again, made some crack about Jake's scars. Before I could intervene, Jake just laughed.

"Hey, Ramirez," he called out, loud enough for everyone to hear. "At least my face has an excuse for looking this bad. What's yours?"

The laughter that rippled through the squad room seemed to break something loose. After that, things got a little easier. Not normal though, nothing would ever be normal again, but easier.

Reality For Sale

Mike Dawson just wanted to fish, that's all. It was just a quiet Saturday morning on Lake Champlain with his line in the water and a thermos of coffee by his feet. The fog was rolling off the water in thin wisps, and the early October chill hadn't quite burned off yet. Perfect fishing weather, if you asked him.

The low thrum of an approaching motor cut through the silence. Mike sighed, already reaching for his license. Game wardens were common this time of year, but usually not before 8 AM. The green Department of Natural Resources boat emerged from the mist, piloted by a man in what looked like the standard olive drab uniform.

But something was off about him.

The man's smile was strange in the morning light, perhaps it was the remaining fog, or perhaps Mike just hadn’t had enough coffee yet. The warden’s teeth glowed unnaturally white against his tanned skin. As he pulled alongside Mike's small fishing boat, the wake barely rocked either vessel, which wasn't physically possible in water.

"Good morning, Mr. Dawson!" The warden's voice was cheerful and practiced, like Bob Barker on the Price Is Right. "Mind if I ask you a few questions about your fishing experience today?"

Mike hadn't told him his name.

"Uh, sure," Mike replied, pissed that his early morning solitude was going to be interrupted for the third time this week by a game warden wanting him to answer survey questions. A practice that the Game Commission just recently started and one that Mike would wish they would end.

"Excellent! How many fish have you caught so far this morning?"

"Two smallmouth. Threw 'em back."

The warden nodded, his pen moving across a clipboard. "And approximately how much would you say you spend on fishing equipment and supplies per month?"

Mike was taken aback, that wasn't a normal game warden question, at least not one he heard yet. "Excuse me?"

"Your monthly fishing expenditure, Mr. Dawson. Including bait, tackle, boat maintenance, fuel..." The game warden’s smile never wavered.

"Listen, I don't think…"

"Based on your previous purchasing patterns and location data, we estimate it's around $247 per month. Would you say that's accurate Mr. Dawson?"

Mike's mouth went dry. He'd never told anyone about his fishing expenses, not even his wife. He kept those receipts hidden in his tackle box. His wife would kill him if she knew how much he spent on his hobby.

"Have you considered the new Tackle Max Premium Subscription? For just $199 per month, you get unlimited access to top-tier gear, monthly bait delivery, and exclusive fishing spot recommendations. Would you like to hear more about our current promotion?"

Mike started his motor. The warden's smile grew wider.

"No thanks," Mike said, turning his boat toward shore. When he looked back, the DNR boat was turning the other way and vanished into the fog.

I must be losing it, he thought. Too much coffee, too little sleep.

Three hours later, he was at Home Depot, trying to find the right replacement fixture for his bathroom sink. He'd almost convinced himself that the weird warden had been a caffeine induced hallucination.

"Are you finding everything okay, Mr. Dawson?"

Mike froze and turned slowly; he recognized that voice.

The same man stood there, now wearing an orange Home Depot apron. With the same glowing white teeth, the same empty eyes and the same clipboard as the game warden had.

"Based on your shopping history, you spend approximately $182 per month on home improvement supplies. Would you be interested in our new HomePro Elite Membership? For just…"

Mike dropped his shopping basket and ran for the front door. When he got to the parking lot, he fumbled with his keys, hands shaking as he tried to unlock his car door. Finally inside, he slammed the door and took several deep breaths, but upon looking at the rearview mirror, he noticed movement in the backseat.

"Mr. Dawson," that same cheerful voice said from behind him, "I noticed you're paying quite a bit for your auto insurance. Have you considered changing your insurance for your family’s needs?"

Mike screamed a blood curdling screech as he turned fully around. At the same time the man faded from existence. 

This was just the beginning of Mike Dawson's very long day with the Survey Man. No matter where he went, no matter how fast he drove or how many times he changed direction, that same figure would appear: as a barista, a gas station attendant, a grocery store clerk. He was always with that clipboard, always with those statistics about Mike's spending habits and always with one more incredible offer.

By sunset, Mike was huddled in his bedroom closet, clutching his phone. He'd called the police twice, but they found no evidence of anyone following him. His wife thought he was having a mental breakdown and he thought so as well..

The closet door slowly creaked open. Mike’s breath hitching in his throat, his eyes growing wider as the closet door opens further. The anticipation is now killing him.

"Mr. Dawson," the Survey Man said, now wearing what looked like a door-to-door salesman's suit from the 1950s. "I couldn't help but notice you haven't taken advantage of any of our amazing offers today. Perhaps I could interest you in our Complete Life Bundle? It includes everything I've mentioned, plus a few extras, all for the low price of…"

"FINE!" Mike shouted, tears streaming down his face. "Fine. I'll take it. I'll take whatever you're selling. Just... just leave me alone."

The Survey Man's smile cracked ever widely upon its pale face, stretching from ear to ear, like a cracked-out meth head getting a good fix.

"Excellent choice, Mr. Dawson! I just need your signature here..." He extended the clipboard, which now glowed with an unearthly light. "Don't worry about the fine print. It's all standard stuff about your soul and eternal data collection rights for you as well as your family. We really don’t want you to know about the specific details, that’s why it is in smaller print." The Survey Man blurted out at lightning speed.

Mike signed.

The Survey Man vanished, leaving behind only a business card that read: "Thank you for subscribing to AdsAlLife, Your Personalized Reality Enhancement Service. You will now receive targeted advertisements in your dreams."

Mike Dawson slept poorly that night, his dreams full of limited time offers and unbeatable deals. But at least the Survey Man was gone.

Until the next morning, when Mike's bathroom mirror reflected in the lingering steam, "Have you considered our premium toothpaste subscription?"

"Our market research shows you prefer mint flavoring, Mr. Dawson," Mike thought. "Did you know our premium subscription includes personalized flavor profiles based on your genetic predispositions?"

Mike slammed the bathroom door shut and leaned against it, heart pounding. Through the wood, he could still hear his own voice, distorted and cheerful, listing product features.

His wife Sophia found him there twenty minutes later, curled up on the bathroom floor.

"Mike? Honey, what's wrong?" She knelt beside him; concern etched across her face. "You've been acting strange since yesterday. Maybe we should call Dr. Peterson?"

He looked up at her, desperate to explain, but how could he? Hey, honey, I signed away my soul to an interdimensional marketing entity, and now my reflection is trying to sell me dental hygiene products. Instead, he managed a weak smile. "It’s just... just a migraine. I'll be fine."

Sophia didn't look convinced, but she helped him up. "Well, I'm working from home today if you need anything."

Mike nodded, grateful for her presence. Maybe with Sophia around, things would be more normal. Maybe…

"Mrs. Dawson," Sophia said, but it wasn't Sophia's voice. It was the Survey Man’s voice. "Our analytics suggest you're concerned about your husband's mental health. Have you considered our couples' therapy subscription package? The first month is 25% off with code INSANITY25."

Mike stumbled backward. Sophia's face had transformed, her warm smile replaced by the distorted and glowing grin of the Survey Man, her eyes empty and glassy.

"No," Mike whispered. "No, no, no..."

Sophia's face flickered back to normal. She blinked, confused. "Did you say something, honey?"

Before Mike could respond, his phone buzzed. The text message preview made his blood run cold:

From: AdAlLife Customer Service
Subject: Welcome to Your Enhanced Reality!

Dear Mr. Dawson,

We notice you're experiencing some adjustment difficulties with your new AdAlLife subscription. This is perfectly normal! As per section 6.6.6 of your soul-binding contract, the first 48 hours include intensive personalized marketing to help calibrate your experience.

Did you know? Your heart rate is currently 132 bpm. Maybe you'd be interested in our premium wellness package?

Mike threw the phone across the bathroom and into the bedroom. It landed softly on the bed, screen glowing with an unnatural brightness.

"I have to go to work," he muttered, rushing past Sophia before she could transform again.

The drive to his office was a nightmare. Every billboard he passed morphed as he approached, displaying products tailored to his exact preferences. His car's GPS kept rerouting him past stores having "coincidental" sales on items from his Amazon wish list. The radio only played an endless stream of jingles, catchy tunes about products he had recently Googled.

Mike was stopped at a red light when a crossing guard turned to face him.

"Mr. Dawson!!” The guard started to yell at him. “I couldn't help but notice your commute stress levels. Our platinum package includes priority traffic light timing and guaranteed parking."

Mike’s simmering rage built up inside of him and he stomped on the gas pedal, running the red light.

When Mike finally got to the office, things got worse. His computer monitor showed only shopping sites, no matter what URL he typed. His three wolf moon coffee cupwas replaced with an ad for an insurance company. His stapler had a Staples logo on it, instead of his usual black bulk produced one.

By lunch, he was so strung out he was ready to crack. He needed help and fast. He thought: Maybe a lawyer could find a loophole in whatever cosmic contract I signed. The law office of Hamilton & Reed was only three blocks away. Mike practically ran there, ignoring the hot dog vendor who called out to him with that horrible familiar voice, trying to sell him a bi-monthly premium artisanal mustard subscription. The receptionist at Hamilton & Reed looked normal enough, but Mike's heart sank when she opened her mouth.

"Welcome to AdAlLife Legal Services, Mr. Dawson! I see you're interested in contract termination. Unfortunately, section 4.3.AD33 clearly states that all agreements are binding across multiple dimensions and realities. However, we do have an exciting upgrade package that includes limited opt-out options for only your dreams! Would you like to hear more about our current promotion, it only lasts till 3pm?"Mike backed away from the desk, bumping into other clients in the waiting room. Each face he turned to showed that same terrible grin and those same empty eyes.

They spoke in unison:

"Market research shows you're experiencing extreme anxiety, Mr. Dawson. Have you considered our premium meditation app subscription?"

He ran. Back home, Mike found Sophia sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by shopping bags. "Honey," she said her voice normal but her eyes worried, "the strangest thing happened today. I kept getting these incredible deals. Everything I've ever wanted was on sale, but..." she pulled out a receipt, "I don't remember buying any of it, and here, take a look at the store name."

The receipt was from "AdAlLife Reality Enhancement Retail Solutions." At the bottom, in fine print, it read: "Thank you for shopping! Your husband's soul binding contract includes family wide benefits!"

"Mike," Sophia's voice cracked, "what did you do?"

Before he could answer, every screen in the house lit up simultaneously, cell phones, tablets, TV, even their smart fridge display. The Survey Man's face appeared on each one, his smile now stretched completely around his head like a grotesque belt of glowing teeth. "Congratulations, Mr. Dawson! Based on your family's purchasing patterns today, you've qualified for our exclusive Premium Plus membership tier! Would you like to upgrade? It only costs one additional soul, and we're running a special two-for-one offer. Would you like to get it while supplies last?"

Mike put his phone down, looked at Sophia and said, “I’m just going to go to bed.” Sophia looked at her watch then at Mike and nodded. “Maybe you need some rest, Honey.”

The doorbell rang at exactly 3:33 AM. Mike hadn't been sleeping anyway, all he could think about was ads, ads this, ads that, he was slowly cracking, slowly losing touch with reality around him. Through the peephole, he saw the Survey Man standing on his porch, holding what appeared to be a capybara.

"Mr. Dawson!" That horrible voice carried clearly through the door. "Our algorithm noticed you've been experiencing elevated stress levels. Did you know that capybara ownership reduces cortisol by 47%? We're offering an incredible family fun bundle: one baby capybara, premium feed subscription, and a miniature pool, all for just three easy payments of $300. Supplies are limited Mr. Dawson, now is the time to act."

Mike pressed his back against the door, sliding down to sit on the floor. His phone buzzed on the table next to him. He picked up the phone and unlocked the screen. The message that came up read:

R/paranormal: "The Smiling Salesman - Am I Going Fucking Crazy?"

Despite knowing better, Mike clicked. The post was from three days ago:

"He keeps appearing everywhere trying to sell me things. Stupid things that should be impossible to sell. Reddit, please help me, yesterday he tried to sell me a cloud subscription. Said I could own my own personal cumulus cloud for the small price of $1,500. His smile is jacked up beyond belief, it glows and wraps all the way around his head. Please tell me someone else has seen him."

The comments loaded:
"Classic schizophrenia..."
"Seek help man..."
"AMAZING DEALS AT ADAlLIFE*! CLICK HERE!"*
"I saw him too. Meet me at the old Shopping Channel broadcast center on 5th. There's a way out."

Mike's hands shook as he took a screen shot of the comment before it could transform into another ad. The doorbell rang again and along with it came the familiar voice muted by door.

"Mr. Dawson, capybaras are highly social creatures. Would you be interested in our two-for-one special? These things are very cute Mr. Dawson; they even ride on Alligator backs. Would you like to purchase the Alligator as well as the capybaras, I will cut you a deal Mr. Dawson!"

"GO AWAY!" Mike screamed.

"Our market research suggests you're interested in privacy solutions. Have you considered our Premium Solitude Package?"

Mike spent the rest of the night researching the broadcast center. It had been abandoned since 1987, after a bizarre 72hour live broadcast where hosts reportedly sold bizarre items such as cloud ownership deeds, bottled dreams, subscription services for alternate realities, used bathwater and weight loss products with unsubstantiated claims. The final broadcast ended with static and in the background a terrible screaming. The building had been condemned ever since. Local legends said that late at night, you could still see the eerie studio lights flashing through the broken windows and hear the ghostly drone of endless sales pitches echoing from empty studios.

By morning, Mike had a plan for that night.

The broadcast center rose against the sunset like a dead tube TV screen, its broken satellite dishes pointing accusingly at the sky. Mike clutched his gas can tighter, ignoring the constant stream of ads buzzing from his phone. Inside, the abandoned studios were frozen in time. Dusty cameras pointed at empty host podiums. Display pedestals stood empty, their product cards yellow with age and water stained. In Studio A, a single red light still blinked on a camera, and a teleprompter flickered with endless scroll of sales copy. Mike didn't hesitate. He started with the control room, splashing gasoline in wide arcs across the floor. Each monitor he passed flickered to life, showing the Survey Man's face, offering fire insurance and premium evacuation services. "Our analytics suggest you're planning arson, Mr. Dawson," that voice echoed from everywhere. "Did you know our Pyromaniac Plus package includes legal coverage and flame-retardant clothing?"

Mike lit his Zippo that his father had given to him as a kid. He leaned down and lit the pools of gas on the ground. The fire spread faster than he could imagine, racing along paths of gasoline with hungry purpose. Smoke filled the building, but through it, Mike could see hundreds of Survey Men in the flames, all smiling, all trying to sell him a fire extinguisher.

The police found him sitting in the parking lot watching the building burn. They arrested him as he screamed “I GOT YOU ASSHOLE. SELL THIS MOTHERFUCKER”! He raised his middle finger in defiance to the inferno before him.

In his cell that night, Mike finally felt peace. No ads. No offers. No impossible sales. Just concrete walls, steel bars, silence and solitude. It was everything he wanted; well, he could’ve done without the steel bars but at least he wasn’t prompted to buy anything.

As Mike lay on his stiff cot, he heard a guard’s footsteps echoing down the hall with a new inmate telling the guard that he didn’t do it. The guard stopped outside of Mike’s cell; then he brought in his new cellmate.

"Shut up and bunk up, shitheads," the guard said, locking the bars and leaving them.

The new inmate seemed normal enough, middle-aged, tired-looking and quiet. He told Mike he was in for robbing a grocery store. After a bit of brief conversation Mike drifted off to sleep for the first time in days.

He woke to hot breath on his face. The inmate stood over him, but his face had changed."Mr. Dawson," the Survey Man whispered, "our Premium Incarceration Package includes memory foam mattresses, premium commissary options, and a reduced sentence. Would you like to hear about our special midnight pricing?"

Mike's screams echoed through the prison that night.  Other than a few inmates yelling back at him to “Shut up,” the guards did nothing.

The morning count came at 6 AM. Mike hadn't slept since his encounter with the Survey Man cellmate, who had mysteriously disappeared during the night. The guards had no record of anyone being placed in his cell when he asked. They swiftly served breakfast. "Hey, new guy," a weathered inmate called from across the cafeteria. Mike looked up to see an elderly man with faded prison tattoos and knowing eyes. "You've got that look. Let me guess…It tried to sell you something?"

Mike's heart skipped. "You... you've seen him?"

The old timer, Johnson, according to his jumpsuit, glanced nervously around before sliding onto the bench across from Mike. "Back in '87, I worked security at that broadcast center you torched. I saw some shit, man. Things that..." He shuddered. "You ever wonder why TV shopping networks run all night? Why they always have these hypnotic hosts telling you to call now, buy now, don't think, just purchase?"

Mike leaned forward. "What happened in '87?"

"They broke through, man," Johnson whispered. "The membrane between commerce and reality got too thin. We thought we could contain them with the fire.” Johnson's face suddenly started to change, his eyes turning dark. "Mr. Dawson, our records indicate you're interested in historical narratives. Would you like to subscribe to our Premium Past package? Includes exclusive access to altered timelines and revisionist histories!" Mike knocked over his breakfast tray scrambling backward. Around him, every inmate's face had transformed. The entire cafeteria spoke in unison: "Limited time offer! For a small fee our Institutional Memory Enhancement package lets you forget your crimes for just three easy payments of one partial soul! Finance options available!"

"SHUT UP!" Mike screamed, pressing his hands over his ears. But he could still hear all of the endless pitches and the constant upselling. For a moment, he saw the true form of AdAlLife. But it was not a company or even an entity, it was a virus, an infection spreading through reality itself, turning everything it touched into an opportunity for commerce and it was growing.

Mike began to laugh. And as he laughed, he reached for his commissary order form, the only piece of paper the guards let him keep. He had an idea. If reality itself was becoming one giant advertisement then maybe it was time to speak to the manager. Mike wrote a single line on the commissary form: "I demand to speak with AdAlLife's supervisor regarding my dissatisfaction with reality." The paper began to glow and then fold itself into an origami telephone and then it began to ring.

"Thank you for contacting AdAlLife Customer Service," said a groggy voice that yawned audibly. In the background Mike could hear the sound of cash registers opening, of credit card swipes, of coins clinking together. "Your complaint has been escalated to management. Please hold." The cell walls dissolved around Mike and he found himself floating in what appeared to be a liminal corporate office space. Cubicles stretched in every direction, staffed by Survey Men all identical except for their name badges. Above them, where there should have been a ceiling, multiple massive beings loomed. They were made of pure commerce. One was a writhing mass of credit cards, forming and reforming into different credit card offers. Another was composed entirely of floating fine print that spelled out terms and conditions in every language that ever existed or would exist. A third was a sphere of pure want, radiating desire in visible waves and at their center was something Mike's mind could barely process. An entity that looked like a corporate organizational chart twisted into a Möbius strip, feeding on itself endlessly. Its voice was the sound of every transaction ever made.

"CUSTOMER COMPLAINT NOTED," it boomed. "WOULD YOU LIKE TO UPGRADE TO OUR PREMIUM REALITY PACKAGE? JUST THREE EASY PAYMENTS OF YOUR ENTIRE CIVILIZATION'S COLLECTIVE SOUL?"

Mike saw it all then. AdAlLife wasn't just selling products, it was selling existence itself. Each sale fed the beings above, making them stronger, letting them reach into more realities and dimensions. They were the original merchants, the first beings to realize that desire itself could be commodified.

And they were starving.

"No," Mike whispered, then louder: "No. I want to cancel my subscription."

The beings shifted. The air crackled with denied transactions.

"CANCELLATION WILL RESULT IN TOTAL REMOVAL FROM ALL REALITY PACKAGES. ARE YOU SURE YOU WISH TO PROCEED?"

Mike thought of Sophia, of the world being slowly consumed by endless sales. He thought of his unborn children, already promised to this cosmic pyramid scheme.

"Yes," he said. "I want to unsubscribe from everything."

The beings began to scream the sound of every cash register on Earth opening at once. The sound ofevery credit card being declined, of every return policy being invoked.

"CANCELLATION... PROCESSED."

Mike Dawson ceased to exist.

But somewhere, in a reality not yet reached by AdAlLife, a man is fishing on a quiet lake. A boat approaches through the mist. The man tenses and then relaxes; it's just a game warden, with a normal smile, asking questions about fishing licenses.

The man doesn't remember another timeline, reality, or life. He doesn't even remember saving his original world from becoming an endless advertisement, because he only existed in this far away reality still untouched by greed. But there are times when he sees a particularly aggressive sale or he would cringe when a salesperson would call his phone to sell him a car warranty on a car that he no longer owns. And when he buys something from a big box store or an online commerce conglomerate, he always declines the extended warranty.

.

Sabrina

The house alarm blares somewhere in the periphery of Oliver's consciousness, its shrill cry piercing through layers of sleep like an ice pick. He blinks his eyes open and stares tiredly into the gloom, the red numbers of his bed side clock burning 3:27 AM into his retinas. Everything in his mind is screaming to just roll over and ignore it; this is really getting old. He slams a pillow over his head and pathetically attempts to fall back asleep. He really needs to get someone out to look at the wiring because every other night for the past week and a half, the alarm has gone off, tearing him from the sweet, warm embrace of sleep.

The security company had warned him about false alarms when he first moved in. Something about the old wiring and the house's proximity to the lake causing
interference. What they hadn't mentioned was how the false alarms always seemed to come at the same time, or how the temperature would drop so suddenly, or why the previous owners had left in such a hurry, leaving behind that old chest freezer in the basement.

Oliver sighs into the pillow before throwing it into the corner of the room, getting lost in the darkness. He hauls his exhausted body out of bed, his feet unsteadily finding the wooden floor. Immediately the cold assaults his skin, his breath coming out in white puffs. A shiver runs through him. He makes a grab for his hoodie and pulls it on to try and chase off the chill.

The alarm is still blaring.

He blindly makes his way onto the landing, floorboards squeaking as he goes. Refusing to turn on the lights, he keeps one hand on the wall, using it to guide
him to the security box so he could finally shut off the incessant beeping. Clicking the tiny switch, silence finally envelops the house. He rests his forehead on the cupboard door, sighing in relief. Sleep is calling. When he moved in, he always questioned why the control box for the security system was on the second floor, but these past two weeks he was thankful for it.

As he made his way back to the bedroom, passing the top of the stairs, he froze. His feet could no longer move forward. A stiff wind was blowing through
the house, and a soft banging caught his attention. He glanced down the stairs and saw moonlight streaming into the hallway. The hair on the back of his neck rose. The front door doesn't have a window; there isn't a window anywhere in that corridor. It was a dark, musty stretch of gloom that bleeds blackness into the rest of the ground floor, especially in the winter.

He slides his hand along the wall searching for the light switch, eyes never leaving the white moonlight on the staircase. A slight dampness met his fingertips, the air condensing against the mottled paint. God, it was cold.
Finally, he finds the smooth plastic casing of the light switch and clicks it on. Bracing for the onslaught of sudden light, he pinches his eyes closed. The light never comes. He peeks out of the corner of one eye, clicking the switch on and off again. The bulb flickers for a moment but the light doesn't stay. A frown finds its way onto his face as he clicks the switch again. Nothing this time. Not even the same small flicker from before. He tries one more time, off and on again. The light comes on, shines brightly, and is then snuffed out. The bulb explodes. Glass rains down from the ceiling. At the sudden noise, he crouches by the switch, arms thrown over his head and face.

His hands are shaking. His breathing comes out uneven despite his best efforts to remain calm.

"What the fuck," he whispers to himself, voice coming out croaky from disuse, thick with sleep. He slowly stands out of his crouch. Staring at the floor, he carefully picks his way across the landing, watching for the glass glinting in the limited light. He makes his way to the stairs, hovering at the top, heart pounding and breath still visible.

He balls his fists at his sides, telling himself it's nothing, just the electrics playing up. But dodgy electrics wouldn't cause the banging that is going on downstairs, nor would it cause the moonlight to suddenly be streaming through the front door. For that to happen there is only one explanation.

"Get a grip, Oliver, come on," he says to himself, shaking out his hands. With purpose and fleeting courage, he descends the stairs. The third one down creaks aggressively as always, but this time it makes him jump. His grip on the banister tightens, knuckles white.

Finally, he makes it to the bottom of the stairs.

The front door is open.

Wind catches the door but it doesn't slam closed. It bangs against something else. He blows out a breath and pads over to the entrance, suddenly very aware of his lack of shoes. The door clatters again; he searches the ground for what it was catching on and spots a nail sticking out of the porch. It shined in the moonlight. He bends down to pull it out but it holds fast. There wasn't a trace of rust on the nail; it looked new, completely different from all the other nails that held the rickety porch together.

He stares into the darkness, searching the gloom for something, anything, that could offer a reasonable explanation. The moon was full in the sky, bathing the
ground in a white-blue light. The trees cast deep fingerlike shadows that stretched and reached toward the house. He glances at the nail again, chills shooting across his skin.

Something in the tree line moves.

His breath catches in his throat as he watches. Whatever it was, was tall and gangly. It shifted from tree to tree; he could barely make it out, the darkness seemed to deepen around it. Everything in him wanted to slam the door closed and lock it behind him but he couldn't…he couldn't move.

The stair creaked.

He whirled around searching for the source of the noise. It was the same step that creaked under his own weight when he came down the stairs moments ago. He could no longer control his own breathing. It was quick, coming out in panicked, shallow huffs. He waited but no other footsteps came. Painfully slowly, he turned back to the tree line. Whatever had been moving was no longer there, or maybe it was, just staying incredibly still. Maybe it had sunk back into the darkness watching him, knowing he was watching it. Or maybe there was never anything there at all and he was simply losing his mind.

Very slowly he crouches to the nail once again, eyes fixed on the tree line. He finds his grip on it and pulls, biceps flexing, sweat beading on his brow with effort. It doesn't budge.

"Oliver."

He freezes. His name drones on the wind, slowly, deliberately and clearly. There was no mistaking it. It was definitely his name. It was like his mother calling him in from playing outside.

"Oliver."

No. Not like his mother calling him. It was his mother. It was her voice.

He shoots upright taking one, two, three slow steps back into his house. He won't be able to get the nail out; he can't close the door. He looks behind him and his gaze settles on the door to the basement. He has a debate with himself weighing up his options.

He grabs the big key off of the hook, unlocks the door to the basement, and throws it open. Without even trying to turn on the light, he plunges into the darkness, yanking the door closed behind him. With a shaking hand, he locks the basement door behind him and waits for his eyes to adjust to the blackness. It takes some time but eventually he can make out the shape of the stairs. He knows there is a flashlight at the bottom. He blows out a breath, rattles the handle to check it was locked, and climbs down. Once he safely made it to the bottom, he reached for the table to his left, hoping he hadn't moved the flashlight. He hadn't.

He grasps the cool metal and switches it on. The light flickered for a moment before settling into a warm yellow beam. He sweeps the light across his basement,
shadows being thrown across the room. His heartbeat finally begins to settle as he sees the familiar space. He places the key in his pocket, its shape and weight
bringing some semblance of comfort.

He couldn't help it; a laugh bubbles to the surface. He crumples to the floor; laughter shaking his entire body, the sound came out forced, harsh, and completely insane. Fear had given way to complete terrified hilarity. He scrubs
his hand over his face. He was being ridiculous. There had to be reasonable explanations behind all of the events that had occurred. There had to be.

Once the laughter subsides, he digs out the blankets that he kept down here and settles into the old rocking chair. It squeaks under his weight. He goes to turn the flashlight off but thinks better of it—his nerves are shot and he doesn't need his brain playing more tricks on him in the darkness.

His eyes dart around the basement taking stock of everything that was there, double checking that it was all still in the place where he left it. It all was. That is until his gaze landed on the chest freezer. The thick chain he had
wrapped around it was broken open. The flashlight begins to shake as he tracks it across the floor, stopping when he finds the padlock. It was broken into two pieces like it had been ripped off.

He pulls himself to his feet, the rocking chair squeaking again. Flashlight centered on the broken padlock. He picks it up, examining it. There were no signs of it being cut; it had been pulled apart. His attention shifts from the lock to the freezer itself. He drops the lock to the floor and grasps the lid of the chest freezer, hands shaking once again. Pushing it open he breathes a sigh of relief, she
was still in there. "Good evening, Sabrina."

He pushes the lid all the way back, resting it gingerly on the wall behind, and stares down into the white box. Frost crystals sparkle under the flashlight beamlike tiny diamonds on her blue-tinged skin. Her ankles and wrists were still bound with duct tape, although now it was peeling a little with age, curling away from flesh that had long since stopped struggling. The flowers in her hands, white lilies, her favorite, had long since died and wilted, petals crumbling and scattered across her lap like confetti. He reaches down to brush her fallen hair away from her face, the strands brittle and sharp as pine needles.
He tucks it behind her ear tenderly, his fingertips leaving trails in the thin layer of ice. Pulling her chin around to face him, he shouts in horror.

It was gone.

Her face was blank like a shop mannequin. Gone are her deep blue eyes, gone are her freckles that once smattered across her face like stars in the sky, gone are her lips that were always wrapped around the neck of a Jack Daniel’s bottle. He slams the lid closed and crawls away from the freezer, the contents of his stomach splattering across the stone basement floor. Tears spring to his eyes as he retches, the acid burning. The picture of the blank fleshy void etched into his brain.

"Oliver," her voice echoes through the house.

He slaps a hand over his mouth in an attempt to silence himself. He heaves again, breathing heavily through his nose sounding like a snuffling dog.

He digs into his pockets and pulls out the key, clutching it like a lifeline. He needs to leave. He needs to get out of here. The gangly creature enters his thoughts,
stalking the tree line, watching the house, watching him. Not that way. He needs to get to the woods, then around the lake and into the mountains. He picks up the flashlight
again and searches for a backpack. Quickly and quietly, he stuffs blankets, spare batteries, a bottle of water and a lighter into the bag and slings it onto his back. Flashlight in one hand and key in the other, he climbs the stairs once
again. Stopping at the top and waiting for any sounds. There were none; the house was silent.

He bounces in place for a moment gearing up to make a break for it. He places the key in the lock and twists, the click of the tumbler rotating sounds like a gunshot in the silence. The freezer lid cracks open, in wide-eyed terror, he stares as the faceless corpse rises.

He flings the basement door open and runs, not sticking around to lock the door behind him. He takes off out of the house, racing down the porch. He couldn't help himself. He glances into the trees. Something stares back at him, he can feel its eyes on him. He wheels around the house in a tight circle and heads towards the lake, risking another look behind him. The thing had broken through the trees, a  thick fog following behind it like the train of a wedding dress. Its long thin legs ate up the ground with every step, the distance between them closing fast.

He's gasping for air, his chest heaving, burning with the strain. He can't breathe. His pace falters. The lake drawing nearer, maybe he should just dive into it. Could the thing swim? Did it even matter? The size of it suggests it could just walk along the bottom while he struggled against the waves its steps made.

His legs are screaming and if he had enough air in his lungs, he would be too.

"Oliver," the creature calls in Sabrina’s voice.

He risks a peek over his shoulder. His feet stop, he crumples to the ground, knees skidding against the ground, his skin torn apart by wayward stones. Any hope of running away is dashed. It's pointless. The creature was closer than he thought. So close he could see that its bark-like skin harbored hundreds of insects. Maggots pelted down upon him as it loomed above, landing on his arms, in his lap, on his face as he gazed upward into its eyes. The thing that had brought him to his knees. His victim stared back at him. Her face was cracked into a sick smile, her skin ripping further and further leaving jagged flappy skin in its wake. Where blood should have poured out, spiders crawled from deep inside the wound, scuttling across her skin seeking refuge in her mouth.

The fog swallowed them whole. The trees were gone; the crows' caws could no longer be heard. It was just Oliver and the creature.

All his strength left him; he couldn't do anything. His hands trembled.

The creature's head began to turn, each movement accompanied by the wet crack of splitting bone. It creaked like a tree in the wind, the skin splitting and breaking apart as something pushed through from within, viscous darkness oozing from the tears. A pale bud rose and took its place next to the other head, flesh knitting itself together like time-lapse footage of a healing wound. He stared in horror as familiar features emerged - his own face forming in mirror-perfect detail, down to the small scar above his left eyebrow from when Sabrina had thrown that bottle at him all those years ago.

He reached for his own face, fingertips struggling to find his lips. He raked his nails across his jaw, drawing a thin line of blood. He tried to speak, to shout, to scream, but found he couldn't.

The creature laughed with his voice, and he wondered if that's how he had sounded when he crushed her throat in his hands.

The nose forms on the creature next and he can't breathe.

Fat salty droplets are rolling down his cheeks in terrified rivers. His chest rises and falls in a pathetic pantomime. His vision fades and the last thing he sees is his own crazed face leering at him, cackling.

The Cursed Beacon

It was Halloween night, the biggest party of senior year. After months of planning and finally working up the nerve to ask my crush, everything was perfect. Until my grandfather walked into my room an hour before the party, rain boots squeaking, toolbox in hand.

"Got a last-minute job at the lighthouse," he said, his eyes reflecting the dim light in a way that made my stomach twist. "Need your help."

At first, I thought he was telling me this to let me know he'd be out late tonight and that I shouldn't wait up. But soon he made it abundantly clear that he wanted me to come along with him and I had no intention of doing that. Don't get me wrong, I loved my grandfather to death. He took me in after both my parents had passed away in a car accident years ago leaving me all alone. I had a deep respect for him and always did whatever I could for him, but giving up the biggest party of the year to go do a job at some old, creaky lighthouse was a bit much.

Looking back at it all, I should have noticed how Grandpa always seemed most alive near the water, how his eyes reflected light like the surface of the sea. How he'd sometimes whisper strange words in his sleep that sounded like waves breaking on rocks. But grief makes us blind to the signs, doesn't it?

I begged him to let me go to the party instead but his mind was made up. He was intent on me learning his trade as an electrician and mechanic.

The salt spray stung my dry skin as we approached. Even the air tasted metallic, like pennies on my tongue. The boat's motor sputtered and coughed, as if it too wanted to turn back.

As we came closer, the weather transformed with an almost supernatural suddenness. The sky, which had been clear just moments ago, swelled with heavy, coal-black clouds that seemed to pulse with distant lightning. High above, a blood-red moon hung like a wound in the sky, its crimson light filtering through wisps of fog that writhed and coiled around the lighthouse's skeletal frame.

My grandfather led the way to the lighthouse. It loomed ahead; its silhouette shrouded in a thick fog. From what I could make out, it was old, decaying, and looked more like a haunted house than a place to be working in, especially at night.

"You can't possibly work here tonight," I muttered, shivering not just from the cold, but from a growing sense of unease. "It’s nearly pitch black."

My grandfather dismissed my concerns with a wave of his hand. He then placed a large flashlight in my hand and continued walking toward the dilapidated building.

I couldn't say why, but I was beginning to get a strange feeling about the place the closer we came to it, like something was off. But I brushed the feeling away and told myself I just didn't like the idea of being stranded on a remote cay.

We entered the lighthouse, our large industrial flashlights barely cutting through the darkness inside the boarded-up building.

The air held memories, or maybe they were prophecies. Each breath I took tasted like salt, and somewhere deep in my consciousness, I could hear the screams of men who hadn't died yet. Time felt wrong here, like past and future were bleeding into each other. But after all, I did have an overactive imagination.

The walls seemed to pulse with each step we took, like we were walking through the throat of some massive beast. Our footsteps echoed back to us one more echo than there should have been, always slightly out of sync. Whether it was just the way the lighthouse was built I didn’t know, I didn’t care, it scared the hell out of me.

My grandpa just trudged on as if everything was fine. When I started a coughing fit behind him, he finally turned around to face me with a scowl on his face.

The beam of my flashlight caught his face at an angle, and for just a moment, I could have sworn I saw something moving beneath his skin, like dark water flowing through his veins instead of blood. When he blinked, his eyes took just a fraction too long to close and open, like a reptile's.

"Your generation is so damned soft, how will you ever get anything done in life?" he lashed out of nowhere.

I swallowed hard, trying to stifle the urge to cough and wondering, what was up with him?

Looking back, I should have noticed the way his movements had become mechanical, puppet-like. The way his shadow seemed to move out of sync after he moved.

I noticed something else too: the shadows in the lighthouse didn't fall where they should. They stretched toward him like hungry things, and when he moved, they followed him a heartbeat too late, as if they were learning to imitate human movement.

I let myself fall back a few paces behind my grandfather but it wasn't because of his rude comment. I could have sworn that his eyes were darker when he looked at me. Or maybe I was just being a bit paranoid and my eyes were playing tricks on me in the dark. Whatever it was, it had taken my focus away.

I accidentally slammed into my grandfather's back, startling myself and annoying him. I could hear him take a deep breath like he was about to lash out again but this time he was eerily calm. He only put a hand on the railing of the old staircase in front of him and looked up.

"I need the key for the door upstairs. They should be on a shelf in the basement. Get them."

The air in the basement hit me like a wall of death. The stench wasn't just rot though; it was the smell of time itself going bad, of secrets festering in the dark. My flashlight beam caught dancing motes of dust that arranged themselves into patterns before my eyes, twisting away whenever I tried to focus on them.

That's when I heard it, a faint scratching sound. Not the scurrying of rats. This was too deliberate, rhythmic even, like bony fingers keeping time to some unheard melody.

The darkness down there felt alive, like it was breathing. Each sweep of my flashlight beam seemed to cut through something thicker than air, something that recoiled from the light like a living thing. The shadows didn't just move, they hungered.

I took in a deep breath but held it when I felt a weight settle onto my shoulder. I spun around, my heart pounding in my chest. But again, there was nothing there.

I frantically continued my search, my flashlight sweeping across the dusty shelves and crates in a silent panic.

Just as I was about to give up, I spotted a glint of metal. I reached out and grabbed a small, tarnished key. Then I bolted up to the main level where my grandfather was waiting with his hand outstretched.

Before I could hand them over he swiped them from me so hard his nails scratched my palm.

My phone's screen kept flickering, showing fragments of images I hadn't taken—snapshots of dark water, of teeth, of something vast moving beneath waves. Each time I blinked, they vanished, but the images felt burned into my retinas like afterimages of a bright light.

"Stay here while I check it out first. Depending on how bad things are we may have to come back tomorrow instead."

At those words, my ears perked up. There was still a chance for me to make it to the party after all. I grabbed my phone and was about to call my best friend but suddenly had another thought.

Out of curiosity, I Googled the lighthouse to find out why it closed in the first place. A bunch of old articles came up. I read the title of the first one and my heart began to lurch in my chest again.

'Terrible accident causes lighthouse closure', the title read. As I read the article, my heart pounded in my chest. The accident happened years ago when a group of workers had been trapped inside the lighthouse during a severe storm. All of the men died that night by some strange animal attack. Most of their bodies had been recovered on the rocks of the jetty, torn apart, all but one. They found the remaining corpse in the basement days later.

The lighthouse had still been in use but was unmanned ever since.

Until now. I swallowed a lump in my throat.

"Grandpa, how's it looking up there?" I called out nervously.

A moment of silence passed, and then there were some rustling noises before he responded. "Bad shape, everything's rusty or chewed up."

My grandfather appeared at the top of the staircase. "I'll have to get some more supplies and come back tomorrow."

I began bee lining for the door when a deep gurgling sound froze me in my tracks. I swung around, aiming my flashlight toward the sound. I had just enough time to see my grandfather's eyes turn pitch black. His head whipped back violently before his body flew backward into the darkness upstairs.

Everything in me wanted to escape.

Against my better judgment, I rushed up the stairs. I stopped suddenly when an icy breeze shot into my lungs. The window had been smashed open and thick droplets of blood oozed down from the splintered shards; my grandfather was nowhere to be found.

It felt like an eternity had passed with me staring at a black shadow, frozen from fear. Then without warning, my grandfather's body began to plummet below until there was a sickening crunch.

I couldn't look. I could barely move. My feet felt cemented to their spot but I forced myself to run. In my panic, I slammed against the railing of the staircase and dropped my flashlight. It was completely black inside as I sprinted down the old staircase.

Soon, the sound of heavy feet stomping behind could be heard. I cried and screamed as hard as I could for help but deep down I knew no one was coming to save me. I was going to die right there and become another mystery that happened in that lighthouse.

Then I jumped into the water.

If I was going out, I'd rather it be by drowning than being torn limb from limb.

I squeezed my eyes shut, ready to embrace whatever was coming.

But to my surprise, the figure ran out to the jetty and stopped just at the end of it. Two red orbs materialized in its head and focused on me, watching as I did my best to remain steady in the choppy ocean.

I was pulled under. The water wasn't just cold, it was ancient, heavy with memories that weren't mine.

In the crushing darkness, I saw them all.

Generations of lighthouse keepers.

Each one chosen.

Each one transformed.

Each one feeding.

The truth hit me harder than the waves: I saw why it had taken my grandfather, why it needed him to bring me here. It had tasted my grief when my parents died, had sensed how the ocean already lived in my tears. The salt of my sorrow had marked me long before tonight.

I wasn't just another victim.

I was bred for this, my family line marked by salt and shadow, waiting for the tide to claim us.

The creature reached for me then. Its form rippled and shifted like a sun beam in the water, impossible to focus on, as if reality itself refused to accept its shape. Through the darkness, I saw its teeth, countless rows of them, sharp and gleaming like broken mirrors in moonlight.

Just as I was about to be swept against the rocks, a tentacle-like limb extended from its ever-changing form. It wrapped around me, not to crush, but to embrace.

And as consciousness slipped away, I understood: I wasn't drowning.

I was becoming.

That was three months ago. The doctors say my vocal cords are perfectly fine, there's no medical reason I can't speak. But they don't understand. They can't hear what I hear when I try to talk: the sounds of waves crashing against rocks, of something ancient singing from the depths.

Sometimes I catch glimpses of myself in mirrors or windows, and for a split second, I see something else wearing my skin. Something with teeth like broken glass and eyes that hold the darkness of deep water.

The police ruled my grandfather's death as an accident, blamed it on the storm and the dangerous rocks.

But I know better.

I know why I can't speak, why my reflection sometimes ripples like disturbed water. You see, whatever was in that lighthouse didn't just let me go, it marked me.

The doctors say I'll speak again when I'm ready. But they're wrong.  I'll speak when it wants me to.

The Reckoning

Jake Thibodeaux killed the engine of his mud-caked F-150 and sat listening to the cooling tick of metal, watching fat drops of condensation roll down his windshield. Dawn was still an hour away, but the Louisiana swamp was already alive with sound, a symphony of bullfrogs, crickets, and God-knows-what else lurking in the murk. Twenty years of hunting in these wetlands and he still couldn't identify half the noises that echoed through the cypress trees.

His cabin sat on stilts ten feet above the waterline, a necessity given the temperamental nature of the bayou during hurricane season. The wooden structure wasn't much – just a bedroom, kitchenette, and a small living area, but it was his sanctuary. Every November, when the whitetail season opened, Jake would take three weeks off from his job as a diesel mechanic in New Orleans and disappear into the swamp.

The familiar creak of weathered boards under his boots brought a smile to his face as he climbed the stairs. Inside, he methodically unpacked his gear: his trusted Remington 700 in .30-06, enough supplies for a week, and his new trail cameras. The latter had been showing some promising bucks moving through the area, including a massive ten-pointer he'd nicknamed Ghost for its uncanny ability to appear and disappear without a trace.

By mid-morning, Jake was deep in his element. He'd already set up in his favorite ground blind, a natural hideaway formed by the twisted roots of an ancient cypress. The air was thick with the earthy smell of decomposing vegetation and stagnant water, while stands of Spanish moss swayed like funeral veils in the gentle breeze. Somewhere nearby, a woodpecker's rapid-fire tapping echoed through the trees.

That's when he saw it, something odd in the water about forty yards out. At first, he thought it was just another cypress knee breaking the surface, but there was something too regular about its shape. Cursing his curiosity, Jake marked his location on his GPS and waded out to investigate.

The water was knee-deep and surprisingly cold for November. His snake boots provided good protection, but he still moved cautiously, probe stick testing the bottom ahead of him. As he got closer, his heart began to race. It wasn't a cypress knee at all; it was metal, corroded and green with age, but unmistakably manufactured. A handle.

"What in the hell?" Jake muttered, reaching down into the murky water. His fingers closed around the handle, and with a grunt, he pulled. Nothing happened at first, then with a sudden give that nearly sent him sprawling backward, a trap door lifted from beneath the water's surface.

The hinges screamed in protest, revealing a black opening roughly three feet square. Stone steps descended into darkness. Jake stood there for a long moment, water dripping from the edge of the door, however the stairs leading down into the darkness where dry. Every rational thought told him to close it and walk away. But twenty years of hunting had taught him to trust his instincts, and something about this discovery made his skin prickle with excitement rather than fear.

He returned to his cabin, trading his hunting gear for more appropriate equipment: his backpack loaded with water, energy bars, first aid kit, and extra batteries. His LED headlamp went around his forehead, and he clipped his backup light to his belt. His Glock rode on his hip; he wasn't foolish enough to go exploring underground in gator country unarmed. He added a machete, some rope, and his phone, though he doubted he'd get service wherever this led.

The trap door was exactly as he'd left it, a dark mouth yawning up from the swamp floor. Jake took a deep breath, switched on his headlamp, and began his descent. The stone steps were slick with algae but solid. He counted twenty-seven steps before reaching the bottom, where he found himself in a corridor that stretched into darkness in both directions.

The walls were made of fitted stone blocks, clearly ancient but showing remarkable craftsmanship. The floor was covered in about two inches of water, and the air was heavy with the smell of old wet stone and something else, something old and stagnant, that reminded him of opened tombs he'd seen in New Orleans.

Jake chose to go left, keeping one hand on the wall while his light swept the corridor ahead. The passage seemed to curve gradually, and he noticed that the water level remained consistent. Somewhere in the distance, water dripped with metronomic precision. His boots made soft splashing sounds that echoed in the enclosed space.

After what felt like fifteen minutes of walking, the corridor opened into a larger chamber. His light caught the gleam of something metallic on the far wall, brackets that might once have held torches. The chamber had three other exits, identical arched doorways leading into more water-filled corridors.

That's when he heard it, a splash that wasn't his own, coming from the passage he'd just left.

Jake froze, listening intently. For several seconds, there was nothing but the sound of dripping water. Then another splash, closer this time, followed by something that sounded like breathing, wet, labored breathing.

He killed his headlamp immediately, pressing himself against the wall. In the absolute darkness, his other senses heightened. The splashing sounds continued, methodical and purposeful. Whatever was making them was large enough to displace a significant amount of water with each step.

A faint phosphorescence caught his attention, two points of pale green light, about seven feet off the floor, moving slowly through the darkness. Eyes. They swayed slightly as they moved, suggesting a head turning from side to side.

Jake's heart hammered against his ribs as he eased around the corner into one of the other corridors, moving as quietly as possible through the water. The splashing sounds followed, unhurried but deliberate. He pulled out his phone, no signal, as expected. The screen's light seemed impossibly bright in the darkness, and he quickly shut it off.

The deeper Jake went, the more his mind began to fray. Time stretched and compressed like taffy. He'd check his watch to find hours had passed in what felt like minutes, then stood frozen as single seconds dragged into eternities. The dripping water formed rhythms that sounded like his ex-wife’s voice, calling his name from different directions.

The beam of his headlamp started playing tricks. Sometimes it would illuminate memories instead of stone walls, his father's funeral, the day his ex left, childhood moments he'd thought long forgotten. These visions flickered across the wet walls like an old film projection, becoming more real with each passing hour. He saw himself as a child, standing in these same corridors, though he knew that was impossible.

His own reflection in the water became unreliable. Sometimes it would move independently, turning to look at him with those same pale, phosphorescent eyes that stalked him. Other times, it would be his grandfather's face staring back, mouth moving in silent warnings.

The walls themselves seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting with slow, wet sounds that matched his heartbeat. Carved symbols appeared and disappeared in his peripheral vision, leaving afterimages that burned behind his eyes. When he tried to focus on them directly, they rearranged themselves into familiar shapes, his ex-wife’s face, his father's hunting rifle, his grandfather's empty boat.

"This isn't real," Jake muttered to himself, but his voice came out distorted, as if he were speaking underwater. "This can't be real."

But even as he said it, memories surfaced of things that hadn't happened yet, himself swimming through these corridors with fluid grace, his body changed, his mind expanded. He saw his ex-wife, Angie, visiting his empty cabin months from now, finding only wet footprints and his grandfather's journal, the pages now perfectly legible to her horror-struck eyes.

The creature's pursuit took on new meaning. Each time he heard its splashing steps, they synchronized with fragments of his life, splash, his father teaching him to shoot; splash, Angie signing the divorce papers; splash, his grandfather's empty boat spinning in circles on the bayou. It wasn't just following him anymore; it was leading him through the architecture of his own unraveling mind.

In one chamber, he found himself face to face with multiple versions of himself at different ages, all standing in a circle in the water. Each one's eyes were slightly more luminescent than the last, their skin progressively more translucent. The last in the circle was barely recognizable as human. When he blinked, they were gone, leaving only ripples in the black water.

The next hour became a nightmare of wrong turns and backtracking. The complex was a maze of identical corridors and chambers, some partially collapsed, others opening into vast rooms supported by columns that disappeared into the darkness above. Jake tried to mark his path using chalk from his pack, but the wet walls seemed to absorb the marks almost immediately.

The creature never rushed, never made any sound besides its wet footsteps and that horrible breathing, but it was always there, always following. Sometimes the glowing eyes would appear at the end of a corridor he was considering, forcing him to choose another route. Other times, he would hear it splashing through parallel passages, as if it knew the layout intimately and was herding him deeper into the complex.

His first set of batteries died after two hours. As he was changing them, hands shaking, he heard the creature closer than ever before. The splashing stopped just around the corner from his position. That breathing sound filled the darkness, and with it came a smell, like pond scum and rotting fish and a chemical he couldn't identify.

The fresh batteries revealed empty corridor in both directions. But the water... the water was different. Dark shapes moved beneath the surface, snakes, dozens of them. Water moccasins, by the look of them. He was running out of safe paths. As Jake backed away from the writhing mass of scales, his headlamp caught something that made his stomach lurch, the water moccasins were forming patterns, geometric shapes that matched the wall carvings. They moved with purpose, with intelligence, as if they were pieces of a larger consciousness.

His vision doubled and then tripled. Each snake seemed to trail copies of itself through time and space, their movements leaving traces like time-lapse photography. The water around them began to vibrate at a frequency he could feel in his teeth, and for a moment, Jake could have sworn he saw his own face reflected in their glossy scales, not his face now, but what it would become.

Reality began to slip further. The water around his ankles no longer felt wet, instead, it seemed to phase through his skin, as if his body was becoming permeable. The boundaries between him and the flooded corridors grew increasingly uncertain. Each breath drew in, not air, but memories, flooding his lungs with fragments of his past.

He found himself in a circular chamber where the walls were lined with mirrors, each one showing a different version of his life. In one, he saw himself as he might have been if Angie hadn't left, sitting in their New Orleans home, normal, content. In another, he was his grandfather, discovering these same tunnels decades ago. But the reflection that drew his eye showed something else: he was transformed, magnificent and terrible, moving through the water with inhuman grace.

The creature's pursuit became more intimate, more psychological. Its footsteps now matched his heartbeat exactly, and sometimes he couldn't tell if the breathing he heard was its or his own. The splashing sounds began forming words:

"Remember... remember... remember..."

And he did remember, things that couldn't possibly be his memories. His grandfather's final moments in these tunnels. The ancient ceremonies performed here centuries ago. The slow, patient watching of the creature as his family line grew closer and closer to what it needed them to become. Time stopped behaving. Jake found himself experiencing multiple moments simultaneously: he was here now, lost in the tunnels; he was six years old, watching his father clean a deer; he was yet to be, swimming through flooded corridors with phosphorescent eyes. Past, present, and future collapsed into a single point of existence.

The water level began to rise, or perhaps he was sinking deeper into the floor. He could taste the brackish water filling his lungs, but instead of panic, he felt a strange sense of homecoming.

His headlamp flickered, and in that stuttering light, he saw the walls ripple like flesh. Ancient symbols carved into the stone began to bleed, their patterns matching the ones he'd been absently drawing in his journal for months before finding the trap door. Had he known? Had some part of him always known?

In one flooded chamber, he found a pile of discarded items: a hunting license from 1963 belonging to Jean-Baptiste Thibodeaux, a waterlogged watch, a wedding ring he recognized as his own though it was still on his finger. Past, present, and future, all drowning together in the dark water.

The underground seemed to be digesting him, breaking down the barriers between flesh and stone, between water and blood. Each step took him further from the world above, from the simple reality of his hunting cabin and the ordinary swamp. Down here, in the dark, everything was possible. Everything was fluid. Everything was changing.

The boundaries between hunter and hunted began to dissolve. Jake found himself anticipating the creature's movements, as if some part of him could sense its thoughts.

Four hours in, Jake's water was half gone, and he was no closer to finding his way out. The complex seemed to go on forever, and he was no longer sure he was even on the same level where he'd entered. Some of the passages sloped subtly downward, while others had steps leading up or down to new areas. His GPS was useless, showing only ERROR where coordinates should be.

The thing creature was getting bolder. Its splashing footsteps would stop just out of sight, and sometimes he could hear something scraping against the stone walls, claws or talons, he imagined, though he forced himself not to think too hard about it.

Five hours in, Jake made a discovery that nearly broke him. He found one of his own chalk marks, still visible on a wall. According to his mark, he was back in the first chamber he'd encountered,  but that was impossible. For the most part he had been traveling steadily downward for hours. The air pressure told him he had to be at least a hundred feet below his starting point. That's when he heard something new, a sound like laughter. It echoed through the corridors, and with it came a rush of cold air that made his skin crawl.

The splashing behind him quickened for the first time.

Jake ran.

He crashed through the water, no longer caring about stealth or direction. His light beam bounced wildly off the walls as he took turn after turn, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The splashing behind him accelerated to match his pace, and now he could hear something else,  a sound like joints popping and tendons stretching, as if whatever pursued him was changing shape as it ran.

His light caught something ahead,  a vertical shaft with metal rungs set into the wall. Up. His only chance was up. Jake grabbed the first rung and began to climb, water cascading from his clothes. Below, the splashing stopped. He looked down.

The glowing eyes were at the base of the shaft, looking up at him. In the dim light of his lamp, he caught a glimpse of pale, translucent skin, of a face that was almost human but not. Then the eyes began to rise, not by climbing, but by floating upward through the air.

Jake climbed faster than he'd ever climbed in his life. His muscles burned, his wet hands slipped on the rungs, but terror drove him upward. He could hear the thing ascending behind him, could feel its cold breath on his legs.

His head hit something solid,  another trap door. With strength born of desperation, Jake pushed it open and hauled himself out into... his cabin's living room.

He lay there on the floor, gasping, as dawn light streamed through the windows. His clothes were perfectly dry. His pack and gear sat neatly by the door where he'd left them that morning. According to his watch, only five minutes had passed since he'd arrived at the cabin.

Shaking, Jake walked to the window and looked out at the swamp. Everything was exactly as it should be. No trap door, no ancient complex beneath the water. Just cypress trees and morning mist.

He might have convinced himself it was all a dream, just a vivid hallucination brought on by too many late nights planning this hunting trip. But as he turned away from the window, something caught his eye,  a wet footprint on the wooden floor, too large to be human, already fading in the morning sun.

Jake spent the next three days in a fever of research. His laptop perched precariously on the cabin's small kitchen table; he scoured every historical database he could access. The Parish records yielded nothing about underground structures in the area. The closest he came was a series of Civil War-era reports about Confederate soldiers using the bayou's waterways for supply routes, but nothing about permanent structures.

His ex-wife Angie would have known where to look. Before their divorce two years ago, she'd been a research librarian at Tulane University. The thought of calling her crossed his mind, but he dismissed it. She'd already thought he was losing himself to this place, spending more time in the swamp than at home. The isolation, she'd said during their last fight, was changing him.

Maybe she'd been right.

Jake had always known his family had deep roots in the bayou. His grandfather, Jean-Baptiste Thibodeaux, had disappeared in these same waters in 1963, his boat found empty except for a waterlogged journal. Jake had found that journal in his father's effects after the funeral last year but hadn't been able to read the water-damaged pages. Now, pulling it from his dresser drawer, the smeared ink seemed to arrange itself into perfectly legible text, symbols identical to those he'd been unconsciously scrawling in his own journal.

Sleep became his enemy. Each night, the dreams came stronger. He'd find himself back in those corridors, but they were different now. The water ran red with rust or blood; he couldn't tell which. The walls pulsed like living tissue, and the air itself seemed to whisper in voices that almost made sense.

Three weeks after his first descent, Jake noticed his teeth were changing. Standing before the bathroom mirror, he pulled back his lip to find the edges had become serrated, like those of deep-water fish. His gums had a pale, luminescent quality in the dark. When he brushed them, the sink water swirled with an opalescent sheen that reminded him of the black column's veins.

The changes weren't just physical. He could hold his breath longer now. Sometimes he caught himself sitting in his tub full of cold water for hours, not breathing at all. The water felt more like home than air ever had.

Time began to fold in on itself. Jake watched his own footprints appear in the mud ahead of him before he made them. He heard echoes of conversations he hadn't had yet, saw shadows of movements he hadn't made. The line between pursuing and being pursued blurred completely, he was both predator and prey, both past and future, both human and something else.

The water that had been knee-deep seemed bottomless, and as he waded through it, Jake felt multiple versions of himself moving through multiple versions of the tunnels, all converging on a single moment of transformation. Each version carried a different piece of understanding, a different fragment of what he was becoming.

In one dream, he was nine years old hiding in his father's hunting blind. But instead of waiting for deer, he watched as something emerged from the swamp water, a procession of figures in robes made of Spanish moss, carrying torches that burned with green flame. They disappeared into the ground, singing in a language that he wasn’t familiar with.  He woke from that dream drenched in sweat, his heart racing. The digital clock by his bed read 3:33 AM. Outside his window, the cypress trees had howled while the wind blew through them.

The day Jake decided to return to the swamp was different. The water was crystal clear, revealing depths that he had never realized before. Through its surface, he could see ancient structures stretching away into great distances, their architecture beautiful and alien. Schools of pale, blind fish swam through flooded corridors that couldn't exist in the shallow bayou.

Behind him, his cabin had already begun to sink, its stilts dissolving like sugar in hot coffee. Soon there would be no trace of Jake Thibodeaux, just another disappearance in the endless history of the bayou. But beneath the water, in the labyrinthine passages that defied possibility and time, something new would be swimming through the darkness, its eyes casting pale green light on ancient stones that remembered when the world was young. And again, he remembered what Angie had said “The isolation,” she'd said during their last fight, was changing him.

Maybe she’d been right.

Maybe she’d been right…

Release Me

I grew up poor in the Southern Appalachians. I know, real shocker, huh? I hate stereotypes. What I hate even more is being one. The only small comfort I had as a kid was knowing that I wasn’t the only poor kid around. We were all poor, and most of us had one-parent households, which made the money situation worse. Money wasn’t tight back then; it was practically nonexistent.

Mom worked at the flooring factory forty-eight hours a week. That paycheck? I don’t know that she ever saw a dime from those checks. Rent, utilities, and doctor bills took it every week without remorse, without apology, and without fail. Other times she filled in at the local diner as a waitress.

Mom got us on food stamps, so we had food at least. Feeding two growing boys wasn’t easy even though we were on the government help. I remember being glad to receive a box of hand-me-downs from the neighbor who had a boy who was a little older than me and my younger brother Toby.

She took on a waitressing job when I went into junior high. She didn’t cry about her situation in life. She didn’t complain much, either. Sometimes, she was exhausted or her feet and legs hurt, but she usually just kept it to herself and trudged along, putting one foot in front of the other.

“We can’t just lay down and give up. Gotta keep going, my sweet Kyle. Gotta make sure my babies are taken care of,” she’d say with a little smile.

I always thought that little smile looked tired, worn threadbare like the denim jacket I wore in the fall to do outdoor chores.

Me and my brother tried to do what we could to help, but honestly, there wasn’t much we could do to earn money in our part of the world. There was no one nearby who could pay us to do chores for them like mow the yard, take out the trash, weed the garden, paint the house, or anything else. Everybody was just as poor as we were.

Not having a parent around from six in the morning until midnight wasn’t a good thing for two teenagers. Especially two teenage boys. At least nowadays, if you give a teenager a cellphone and internet access, you know exactly where to find them twelve hours, or twelve days later. They’ll be sitting right there with that damn phone in front of their face or scrolling through inappropriate sites on the computer. You don’t have to worry about them being out wandering around, going places and doing things that might get them into serious trouble, or even killed.

We didn’t have cellphones, and we didn’t have internet or a computer. So, me and my brother ran all over the place, doing stuff that we knew we shouldn’t be doing, and avoiding getting caught. For the most part, anyway.

I hate to admit all the things we did when we were teenagers, but among the worst was stealing. We went a county over to do that. We never stole a thing from the people in our neighborhood. I say that like it makes it any better. It was still a shit thing to do.

And that’s the thing that cost us the most in the long run.

My brother was killed when he was only sixteen. It happened two days before my eighteenth birthday. I went a little crazy with the grief, but our mother went a lot crazy. We’re talking, she went off the deep end, and there was no getting her back. I won’t even pretend to know what it’s like to lose a child, but I lost my brother and best friend in the span of a few seconds.

I lost Mom, too, but that took a little more time. I didn’t lose her all at once. There was no bullet to the head, no catastrophic car wreck, it was grief.

And grief kills slowly.

I made the funeral arrangements for Toby. Mom wasn’t able. All she could do was cry. She’d wake up crying and cry herself back to sleep. In the hours she was awake, she would mutter and pace the house like a restless ghost, carrying Toby’s favorite jacket. Sometimes, she crushed it to her chest with both arms and wailed into the material, sometimes she cradled it on one arm like a baby, and other times, she dragged it alongside her like a kid dragging her favorite blanket around. It was the jacket he’d been wearing when he was killed. She hadn’t wanted his hat or his watch, just that jacket.

The day of the funeral, something changed with her. She was like a zombie: pale skin, dark under eye bags, blank stare, and only putting one foot in front of the other because I was urging her along, helping her walk. But there wasn’t a single outburst, no crumpling suddenly to the floor and wailing, and no tears. No tears at all. For five days, it was all she did, and then…nothing. It seemed that when the tears went away, so did her spark, and there was nothing left but a shell. I know that sounds cliché as hell, but it’s the only way I can describe how she was. She didn’t speak. Not even when spoken to. She didn’t make eye contact, and every now and then, her mouth moved like she was talking, but no sound came out.

I wasn’t sure if she had slipped a cog and was off the deep end, or if she simply couldn’t cope with losing her youngest son, her baby. And to be brutally honest, by that time, I couldn’t deal with her if she had gone totally crazy. I was barely holding it together. It was really starting to hit me that my younger brother was gone and he would never come back. I’d never see him again, never laugh at something stupid with him, and never pull another awesome prank with him. Nothing. He was in a box, and when the lid was closed, I would never see my best friend again. So, Mom wasn’t causing a fuss. She was quiet and took direction, and I let it be. Most things work themselves out in the end anyway, right?

She had to wear the black slacks from her waitress uniform because she didn’t have any nice clothes. Kitty Thomas at the diner loaned her a black button-down shirt that was too big and a pair of shoes that weren’t scuffed. Well, I guess she loaned them to me because I had to see to that too. Somehow, I had become the parent without realizing it.

I walked Mom up the aisle to the open casket before everyone else arrived. She had refused to have any part of the funeral arrangements and hadn’t seen Toby. I thought it was necessary for her to see him and have some sort of closure. God knows, I had plenty, but Mom didn’t. I’d never seen her like that before. Not even when her own mother died.

We made it to the casket and the director stood discreetly behind us just in case he was needed. Mom looked over the spray of flowers adorning Toby’s coffin, her eyes as blank as empty windows, but she wouldn’t look at Toby.

I squeezed her hand. “Mom, you need to see Toby. This is the last time you’ll get to see him, and you’ll regret it later, if you don’t.”

She turned her head toward me, but never quite made eye contact. She raised her other hand to my cheek and patted gently as a big, empty smile spread across her face. “Sweet, sweet Kyle. My sweet, naïve boy. Let’s go now. Let Toby rest a while, okay?”

“But the funeral will start in less than an hour. Everyone will be arriving, and you need to be here. Toby isn’t resting, Mom; he’s dead. You need to snap out of it and acknowledge what happened.”

“Okay, Kyle. Don’t fret so.” She clutched my hand tighter. “We’ll stay, if that’s what you really want to do.”

I led her to the front row, and we sat. The funeral director stepped close to my elbow and asked if everything was all right. I told him it was and thanked him.

“I think she just needs a few minutes,” I whispered.

The director nodded and then slipped out the side door without making any noise. Maybe he’d been expecting Mom to act the way I had when I had spoken to him about the arrangements. Hell, I expected her to be worse, but instead, she sat there totally calm, unmoving, and damn near unblinking throughout the entire service.

Only about a dozen of the forty-three people in attendance went to the immediate graveside service. I felt Mom swoon when the coffin was being lowered into the ground and a choked sob escaped, but no tears. Just that little five-second episode, and she was back to being still, quiet, and blank-eyed.

When people offered their condolences to her, I answered in her stead and thanked them.

I was heartbroken, but I had never been so glad for something to be done and over than I was that day.

I took Mom home, helped her get into a housedress, and went to my room to be alone with my own postponed grief. I let it all out. Everything that I had been holding in so I could help Mom and make Toby’s final arrangements came out in one big flood of emotion that was exhausting.

Over the next few weeks, Mom lost both her jobs. Three weeks later, I found a job. It was working at a gas station in town. The pay was shit, but it was all I could find. The electric was shut off, and summer had just hit its peak. The trailer was like an oven, and Mom wouldn’t go to a friend’s house, or even out in the yard where the two shade trees kept it cooler. She stayed right in that heat like she was punishing herself for something. Maybe she felt guilty because me and Toby were alone so much of the time, but what happened to him wasn’t her fault. If anyone was to blame, it was me. I was older, and I knew better than to be out stealing from people. And it had been my idea to go to that particular house that night. Even Toby had said that maybe we shouldn’t bother anything there. Said the place looked fancy in a spooky kind of way that made his guts knot up, but I didn’t listen. I laughed and told him he was a chicken shit if he didn’t come with me.

I knew he’d follow me. He always followed me. And that man wasn’t supposed to be home. But he was. We were on the third floor when he came into the room waving a pistol. He honed in on Toby and chased him. Toby ran into another room, threw open a window, and when the man shot the gun, Toby jumped out the window. I bolted down the stairs and out the door to my brother.

My guts turned to ice and my heart felt like it was trying to explode when I saw Toby.

There was a wrought iron fence below the window. It was the kind of fence that had the spikes on top. One of the spikes went through Toby’s neck and ripped out the side. Two more spikes had gone through his right forearm and bicep. The bullet had hit him in the cheek just under the eye and ripped a hole in the back of his head the size of a golf ball.

If I had listened to him and had not gone to that house, Toby would still be alive. That was something I would have to live with for the rest of my life.

Twelve weeks after Toby’s death, I went home from a double shift. It was about one in the morning. The carpet was gone from the living room floor, and someone had drawn a giant circle in the center with red paint. The smell of paint lingered in the air. The furniture sat around the edges of the circle, and I noticed there was still carpet under the sofa, chair, loveseat, and tables.

Mom sat at the kitchen table staring blankly toward the refrigerator.

“Mom, what happened to the carpet? Who did that?” I pointed to the living room floor, again feeling like I was playing the part of the parent instead of the child.

She glanced at the living room and then at me before she smiled. She pushed a utility knife across the table. “I did it. Gotta make room so Toby can come home.”

It wasn’t the craziest thing she’d said or done since the funeral. “Nobody’s coming, Mom, and I don’t have time to clean this up. I have to be at work at seven in the morning.” I kissed her forehead. “I’m going to bed.”

“I’ll stay up until he gets here. He’ll understand why you’re in bed.”

I stopped. I wanted to go back over and shake some sense into her, but I knew it was pointless. Instead, I nodded without turning to look at her. I couldn’t stand the lunacy I saw in her face anymore. “Thanks, Mom.”

“Of course, my sweet boy.”

‘Sweet boy.’ That used to just be what she called me or Toby when she was proud of us for something. ‘Sweet boy,’ had turned into something unsettling since Toby’s death, though. Every time she called me that, my stomach twisted into a pretzel. I had begun to hate it.

I walked into my bedroom and shut the door. Her sweet boy was no more. I wasn’t a boy anymore, and I was becoming less sweet every day. Some part of me still clung to the hope that I would get up one morning, and she would be back to normal.

At three that morning, a loud rumble of thunder jolted me awake. The trailer shivered and the windows rattled in their cheap metal frames. I lay there with my eyes wide, waiting on the flash of lightning. It never came, but the frantic pattering of rain against the metal roof was a calming sound. The air cooled almost immediately, and I pulled the thin cover up to my chin before falling asleep again.

Sometime later, I heard laughter and pulled myself out of sleep like a man pulling himself out of mud. I had to work at it. My body only wanted sleep, but my mind warned me to go see who was laughing. It sounded a lot like Mom although it had been a long time since I’d heard her laugh like that.

Throwing the cover off, I swung my feet out of bed and shoved myself to a standing position. I reached for the doorknob and stopped when I heard a man’s voice. If you’ve never been lucky enough to live in a trailer, you have no idea how thin the walls are. Sometimes, I think cardboard is thicker and more soundproof than trailer walls. The man spoke again, and my hand tightened around the doorknob as a sick sweat oozed from every pore. It was the kind of sweat you get right before you puke. I was cold and hot all at the same time.

I knew that voice. I knew it, but I also knew it couldn’t be real. Toby was dead. Three months’ dead.

I tried to convince myself that I was having a nightmare, a night terror, or some hallucination due to the lack of sleep I’d been enduring, but it didn’t work.

The doorknob was solid in my hand and I could feel the sawdust under my feet from when I had cut a small tree off Mr. Turner’s fence two days before. I’d been too tired to clean it up at the time. If I could feel those things and the sweat leaking from my body, how could I be asleep?

“I’ll go get your brother. He’ll be so happy you’re home,” Mom said.

Her footsteps rushed down the hall, and I was frozen in place. I couldn’t let go of the doorknob or pull breath into my lungs. The doorknob jiggled and Mom grunted softly. The door was closed, but I could imagine the confused look on her face. I tightened my grip and put a foot against the bottom of the door. Panic seized me. I didn’t want to see Toby. I didn’t want to see that empty eye socket or the ripped-out throat or the gouged-out hole in the back of his head. I didn’t want him to ask me why I was so insistent on robbing the McCauley house. I didn’t want him to ask why I hadn’t wanted to just go out and be a normal kid and do normal things with my younger brother instead of prodding him into a life of crime that would eventually get him killed.

“Kyle? Son, open the door. Someone’s here to see you,” Mom called.

I tried to speak but couldn’t make a sound other than a squeaky whimper.

She called out again and kept jiggling that doorknob and pushing at the door.

“No,” I finally managed. “I don’t want to visit with anybody, Mom. I have to be back at work for another double shift in just a few hours. I need to sleep.”

“Oh, Kyle, don’t be rude. I thought you’d be thrilled that Toby’s home. I told you he’d come back but you just wouldn’t believe me. Come on out here and hug your brother.”

My heart lurched. I put my face close to the door and whispered, “Mom, Toby is dead. That can’t be Toby in there.”

Her laughter rang out, echoing in the hallway. “Who’s being a silly-nilly now?” She laughed again, and Toby laughed with her.

“Hey, bro, come on,” Toby said. His voice was just like I remembered it, but somehow different, too. “Mom worked really hard to get me here, and I want to see you so, come on out.” I could hear the smile in his tone.

I shook my head but couldn’t speak. There was no lock on the door and nothing to brace it with except me. I looked at my window. Eight feet away and might as well have been a mile. If I let go of the door and ran to the window, by the time I raised it, Toby would be at my side.

He knocked again. “Don’t make me come in there, Kyle. Seriously, dude. Get out here. Now.”

“You’re not real,” I said in a voice that sounded a million miles away.

The hallway went silent. I stood there, pushing my shoulder into the door and sweating for another twenty minutes before I realized there was no one standing in the hallway anymore.

I cracked the door open and sure enough, the hallway was empty and dark. The dim light from the cookstove’s digital clock was the only light in the house. I crept down the hall and into the living room. The carpet was back. All the furniture was in its place, and Mom wasn’t at the kitchen table any longer. I walked to her bedroom door and saw that she was sleeping soundly on top of the covers.

There was no one else in the house.

At six, the alarm blared, but it didn’t startle me from sleep. I was sitting in the floor with my back against the bed and my knees pulled nearly to my chest as I stared at the door. Two people had been on the other side of that door trying to get in the night before. I knew what I had experienced. It was real.

If it was real, though, where was the proof? I never saw anything; I only heard the voices and held the door shut.

I left before Mom got out of bed. After chugging two Red Bulls and popping two caffeine pills, I was jazzed up enough that I convinced myself it had indeed only been a bad dream brought on by grief, stress, and a serious lack of sleep.

That night it happened again. The boom of thunder, frantic patter of rain, Mom’s laughter, and then Toby’s voice. I held the door tight again. And again, when I told Toby he wasn’t real, everything settled into silent stillness.

This went on for three nights in a row. After sitting awake again, I went to work. I was scheduled for a weird split shift that day. Two hours in the morning to help with opening the store and then I would be off the clock for six hours before going back to run night shift alone until midnight.

I got it in my head during that two-hour morning shift that I would go to the cemetery and visit Toby’s grave. I was hoping that when I saw the undisturbed grave, I would stop having the night terrors because logically, if the grave was intact that meant Toby was still in the graveyard and not visiting the house every night.

As I walked through the cemetery, I wondered if crazy was contagious. Had I caught it from Mom? Was there an anti-crazy pill I could take to get rid of it like taking an antibiotic for an infection? The thought struck me as funny, and I was laughing when I made it to the gravesite.

I didn’t laugh for long.

The headstone was there, but it was blank. There were flowers scattered topsy-turvy over the grave, but it looked like the wind had blown them from nearby graves. I had been to the grave a dozen times at least after Toby first died. I had even brought his watch and a little college football flag he had liked. I’d left them there right before I started working at the gas station. There was no sign of the trinkets or the flowers that had been there.

The trinkets and flowers could have been stolen or moved. I could explain that logically, but the blank headstone was a different story. I had no explanation for that. The man who made the headstone agreed to let me pay him in monthly installments. It was a plain, small stone with only the basic information. Nothing big and fancy. I couldn’t afford anything like that, but it had definitely been a finished headstone.

I reached out and touched the smooth, cool surface of the marker to prove to myself that it was indeed blank. Nothing had been etched into it. Even if I had missed a payment, would anyone really repossess a headstone? If they would, they wouldn’t leave a blank one in its place. Would they?

Back at the store for my evening shift, I waited for Clara to leave and then I called about the headstone. The man who answered didn’t know who I was or what I was talking about. He assured me that I had the wrong number. He worked in a factory, not a gravestone company. He hung up on me, and I called him back. I wanted answers, and I was sure he was lying. I just didn’t know why. He threatened to call the police if I called him again.

I didn’t call back.

That night, I went home as usual. I opened the door with my heart in my throat. Would it be like the past three nights?

The kitchen light was on, and the smell of food filled the air. Mom turned as I stepped in the house.

“Oh, look what the cat dragged in. Where have you been? I was worried when I got home and you weren’t here.” She opened the Styrofoam takeout container and took out a potato wedge to eat.

I was in shock. She was wearing her old diner uniform, and I was sure there were chicken strips from her old job in that container. She had showered and fixed her hair and even cleaned the house.

“Everything all right, Kyle?” She took another wedge from the container and offered me the box. “Hungry?”

I was hungry, and the chicken and wedges smelled delicious, but I couldn’t stretch out my hand and take the box. “What’s going on? When did you get your job back? And when did you have time to clean the house up so much? Where did you get the money for the food, Mom?”

She looked genuinely confused and shook her head. “I’ve had this job for years, honey. And I’ve not cleaned the house good in a month. Where have you been? Are you okay? You look pale and tired.” She stepped toward me with her hand out to touch my forehead.

“You’ve been practically comatose ever since Toby’s funeral, Mom. You lost both your jobs, and I took a job at the gas station to keep from losing everything we have.” Had she completely snapped or, had she completely snapped out of whatever funk she’d been in?

“Toby’s funeral?” She looked like she might get sick.

“Yeah. For three months, you’ve done nothing but sit in the house. I’ve been taking care of you; you don’t cook, clean, hell, you don’t even shower unless I make a fuss about it.”

“Toby died three months ago? That’s what you think?”

She pulled out a chair and motioned for me to join her at the table, and I did. My legs were weak.

“Yeah. Three months. You remember that he was killed when we broke into that house, right?” Tears welled in my eyes, and I tried to choke them back, but it didn’t work. “Mr. McCauley shot him and he fell out a window on the third floor.” My breath hitched, and I could barely form words.

She stood and rushed around the table to me. She put her hands on either side of my face and stared into my eyes. “Stop it, Kyle. Please, for the love of God, just stop,” she yelled. “Toby’s been gone for years. You have to stop this shit. You’re making my crazy, and I don’t know how many more of these episodes I can go through with you.”

“Years?”

“Yes, years. My baby died when he was only five. Nobody shot him. You weren’t robbing some imaginary house together. He didn’t fall from a window. The last time you did this, you were convinced he had been killed in a car accident when a drunk driver swerved off the road and hit him while you two were walking home from a party where you’d been drinking. The time before that, you said he drowned when you two had sneaked out to go on a boat and drink with some buddies. You always come up with scenarios where you could blame yourself for his death. In everyone, you were the reason you two were out doing something you shouldn’t be doing. It’s always the same, except this time, you decided that I was partially to blame. If I hadn’t been working two jobs all the time, you boys wouldn’t have been out getting into trouble, and Toby wouldn’t have been killed.” Tears flooded down her face and she let go of mine. “Just stop, Kyle. You have to stop this.”

I shook my head. “You’ve really gone over the edge, Mom. It’s your grief talking, making you think Toby died years ago. That’s how you’re coping with it, isn’t it?” I stood. I was equally angry and scared.

She dropped into her chair. “No. Next, you’re going to try to convince me that Toby just died a few months ago. You’re going to run to the bedroom halfway down that hall and yank the door open to show me his things, but there’s no door there anymore. I took it out after your fifth episode, and I never put it back. It’s propped in the back of the shed out back, if you don’t believe me. You didn’t last time, either.”

“Where’s his jacket, Mom?” I moved toward the hallway slowly. The living room furniture had changed. It was all newer, made in a different style, and even the color wasn’t the same as it had been only minutes before. My stomach churned and my legs threatened to limp noodle out from under me.

Mom shrugged. “I don’t have any idea.”

“What about his watch? Did you go take that off his grave? Are you the one who put up the blank headstone? Where’s the one I’m paying for?”

“There’s no watch, and there’s no headstone. Toby only has a small metal marker after all these years because I could never afford to buy a real stone for him.”

“You could apparently afford new furniture, though.” I pointed accusingly at the living room furniture. “I’m calling your doctor first thing. He will have you committed this time, Mom. Do you even understand that?” I glanced down the hall to Toby’s bedroom door. There was no door. Just an opening and a lighted space beyond. Toby’s room had been closed up ever since the funeral. I had shut the door to keep his room exactly as he’d left it. “What did you do to his room?”

I ran to the doorway. There wasn’t a single trace of his stuff inside. There were shelves and shelves of books, a cushioned chair, a tall lamp, a beanbag, and potted plants. The lamp was on. I stepped inside, furious that Toby’s things had been removed.

“We agreed to turn it into a quiet room where we could relax. We both agreed that Toby would have liked that idea.” Mom leaned against the doorway as if she didn’t have the strength to stand without its support.

The rage overtook me, and I screamed at her. It was a primal, wordless scream. She couldn’t just erase Toby like that. She had no right. She couldn’t lie to me about him and try to make me feel crazy either.

I charged at her, meaning to choke her so she’d never be able to lie again.

She ran but I caught her at the front door. She flung it open and screamed. She clawed at my face and kicked, but I finally got my hands around her neck and squeezed.

The darkness broke into strobes of red and blue that were bright enough to make me squint in pain. Cops ran at me with their guns drawn, and then electricity jolted through my body, and the world went black.

That was the night I finally lost my mom completely. She comes to visit me sometimes, but I don’t want her here. She lied but I’m the one locked away. I regret threatening to call her doctor and having her committed now. I hate this place, but I have to follow the rules and play their stupid game if I ever want to be released.

And I will be released one day. Mom doesn’t think so, but she’s wrong. One day, I’ll show up at the house and prove her wrong.

The Forbidden Mango

*Let’s finish with something sweet*

Tommy Martinez and Steve Johnson had been best friends since third grade, when they bonded over their shared love of Transformers and their mutual hatred of wearing shoes. Now, at thirteen, they spent most of their summer days in 1987 roaming the sweltering streets of Tampa, Florida, looking for trouble and trying to avoid Tommy's older sister, who was obsessed with Cyndi Lauper and wouldn't shut up about it.

This particular July afternoon was hotter than usual. The boys were hanging out behind the 7-Eleven, where the dumpster exhaled the pungent aroma of discarded hot dogs and overly sweet discarded slurpee. That's when they spotted it, a mango, lying in the dirt, looking like it had been there since Reagan's first term.

"Dude, check it out," Tommy said, poking the fruit with a stick. The mango's skin was practically black, and something was definitely moving inside it. "Five bucks says you won't eat it."

Steve, whose claim to fame was eating a live cricket during social studies, scoffed. "Make it ten, dickweed."

Tommy watched in horror as Steve picked up the mango and took a massive bite. The fruit's skin split open, revealing a writhing mass of maggots and what looked suspiciously like tiny tentacles. Steve managed another bite before his face turned greener than the Incredible Hulk's ballsack.

As Steve projectile vomited what looked like the offspring of the mango and an alien spacecraft, Tommy doubled over laughing. "Oh man, this is better than that time we watched 'Revenge of the Nerds' at your house and your mom walked in during the nude scene… she was so fucking pissed at us!"

But Tommy's laughter died in his throat when a puff of red smoke appeared, accompanied by the sound of a whoopee cushion from hell. Standing before them, in a red suit that would make Don Johnson jealous, was what could only be described as Rodney Dangerfield's demonic twin.

"Hey hey hey, what's the matter with you kids?" the demon adjusted his red and black polka dot tie. "You can't just go around eating forbidden mangos! I tell ya, it's hot as the devil's ass crack out here, and I would know!"

The boys' jaws dropped. "Holy shit," Tommy whispered. "You're... you're..."

"That's right, I'm Satan's favorite comedian! But you can call me Rod. I tell ya, I get no respect, not even in Hell. The other demons won't even let me play through on the lava golf course. They say my jokes are too corny, can you believe that? In Hell!"

Steve, still wiping vomit from his chin, squinted. "Weren't you in Caddyshack?"

"Was I in Caddyshack? Kid, I owned that movie! But no, not really, I’m just Rod’s deranged doppelganger from hell. Now, thanks to that forbidden mango, you two knuckleheads are stuck with me for the next twenty-four hours. We're gonna paint this town red, literally! The last time I had this much fun, I was teaching aerobics to Joan River’s doppelganger in the seventh circle!"

Rod wiped a tear from his eye, "This reminds me of my last family reunion in Hell! My mother-in-law's there you know - she's so ugly, Medusa looks at her and turns to stone! And my uncle? He's so dumb; he tried to high-five a crucifix!

And so began the most bizarre and wonderful night of their lives. Rod transported them to the Tampa Bay Mall, where he turned all the mannequins in JCPenney into dancing zombies performing "Thriller."

"You think that's something?" Rod cackled, "Watch this!" He snapped his fingers, and suddenly every person in the food court started projectile vomiting rainbow-colored slime. "I tell ya, the last time I saw this much puke, I was at a Motley Crüe afterparty!"

They moved on to the arcade, where Rod possessed the Pac-Man machine, making it shoot actual ghosts at unsuspecting players. "These kids today with their video games, in my day, we had to possess people the old-fashioned way!"

At Spencer's Gifts, Rod replaced all the lava lamps with actual lava. "Talk about mood lighting!" Rod wheezed, adjusting his tie. “I bought one of those lava lamps the other day, what a mistake that was! The guy at the store says, "It's real relaxing to watch." Yeah, real relaxing, watching hot blobs float around reminds me of my mother-in-law in a swimsuit! And talk about getting ripped off, the instructions said, "Wait 6 hours for full effect." I waited 8 hours and nothing happened. Called the store to complain and they said, "Sir, you have to plug it in first!" I tell ya, I get no respect, no respect at all!”

The night reached its peak when they crashed the mall's "Back to School Fashion Show." Rod transformed all the preppy models into versions of himself, complete with his signature bug-eyes and red tie, strutting down the runway to "Walk Like an Egyptian." He waved his hand and said, “ I like candy so much that when Satan gave me a bag of skittles, I thought I was tasting the rainbow. Instead I threw up Technicolor for a week. I get no respect.” As he said that, all the kids in the fashion show starting puking up rainbow colored slime.

Rod adjusted his tie nervously. "Last time I was at a fashion show, it was in Purgatory. The models were so skinny, they had to run around in the shower just to get wet! And the designer? He was so full of himself, he made Satan look humble, and that guy literally thinks he's God's competition!"

"I haven't seen fashion this bad since Satan tried wearing parachute pants!" Rod hooted. "Even Michael Jackson wouldn't touch these outfits with a ten-foot pole, and that guy wore one sparkly glove!"

As midnight approached, they sat on the roof of the mall, their legs dangling over the edge, watching the chaos below as police cars and news vans gathered to investigate the strange happenings.

"You know what, kids?" Rod said, pulling out three New Cokes from his jacket pocket. "This is the most fun I've had since I convinced Richard Simmons to open an aerobics studio in Purgatory. But remember, stay away from those forbidden mangos. Next time you might get stuck with Gallagher's demon cousin, and trust me, that guy's act is even worse in the afterlife."

With a final adjustment of his tie and a puff of smoke that smelled like burnt polyester, Rod disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a signed headshot and a pair of novelty chattering teeth.

Tommy and Steve looked at each other, still processing the night's events.

"Dude," Steve said finally, "We are never telling anyone about this. Not even when we're old enough to get into Al's Liquor Barn."

"Yeah," Tommy agreed. "Besides, who'd believe we spent the night with demon doppelganger Rodney Dangerfield?"

"I tell ya," came Rod's voice one last time from everywhere, “I tell ya, I still get no respect! But hey, at least I'm not sweating like a priest in a porno down here in this infernal Florida heat!"

The boys walked home in silence, occasionally giggling, their shoes squishing with rainbow food court slime. From that day forward, they stayed away from suspicious fruit, though they did develop a strange appreciation for tacky ties and bad puns.

And somewhere in Hell, a red-suited demon doppelganger was telling the story about two Florida kids and a forbidden mango to a crowd of laughing demons, adjusting his tie and complaining about the heat.