Come, come, come to me, you wonderous calamity
In your embrace, I disappear into intoxicating apathy
Punish me, yes punish me for my irredeemable mistakes
Until the pain takes all my suffering away

Because without your love
I have no place on this cursed earth
Hold my tortured heart
Hold it close till death do us part

Torment me, come torment me, you vile pest
To you, I wed my soul and to you, I dedicate my life
They are forever yours to take henceforth
I exist to satisfy each and every one of your perverted whims

No joy can compare to the bitter taste of your lips
No promise could erase the beautiful disappointment apparent in your gaze
No feeling can compare to the ache caused by your hands
No other love could ever take your place

Em 2018, enquanto vasculhava o sótão empoeirado de uma casa abandonada nos arredores de Viena, encontrei um baú enferrujado. Dentro dele, havia cartas amareladas, um relógio de bolso parado às 3h03 e um caderno de couro com a inscrição "L.N.". O conteúdo me fez questionar tudo o que sei sobre arte, loucura... e o que habita além dos espelhos.

O caderno pertencia a Lysander Nocturne. Suas páginas misturavam esboços de criaturas com membros alongados e diários escritos em francês arcaico. Em uma entrada de 1911, ele descrevia "O Jardim das Máscaras Caídas" como "uma porta, não uma pintura". Segundo ele, as figuras dançantes eram almas "libertas da carne", e os sussurros ouvidos pelos colecionadores eram "o coro dos que vieram antes". A última página do diário era um desenho de Clara, sua esposa, com os olhos cobertos por asas de mariposa. A legenda dizia: "Ela vê o que eu não ouso pintar."

Mas o que me tirou o sono foram as três páginas finais. Lysander detalhava um ritual — "O Concerto das Máscaras" — com instruções precisas. Cético, decidi replicá-lo. Afinal, como historiador da arte, precisava entender o contexto, certo?

Seguindo os passos, usei uma tela pintada com tinta vermelha (uma réplica barata), um espelho rachado comprado em um brechó e velas negras de uma loja esotérica. O relógio de bolso do baú já estava parado às 3h03. Ignorei o aviso sobre o sangue.

Às 3h03 da madrugada, recitei os versos. Nos primeiros minutos, nada aconteceu. Então, a chama das velas inclinou-se para o espelho, como se algo soprasse nelas. Meu reflexo permaneceu imóvel, mas além dele, na penumbra do "quarto" no espelho, vi uma silhueta alta e elegante. Lysander. Seus olhos heterocromáticos brilhavam como vidro sob a luz das velas.

Ele não falou. Sussurrou. A voz vinha de dentro da minha cabeça, em um francês que de repente entendi: "Você trouxe tinta? Precisamos terminar a obra."

Acordei no chão, horas depois, com a tela vermelha coberta por pinceladas negras que eu não lembrava de fazer. Formavam um relógio despedaçado, e nos fragmentos, rostos se contorciam. Desde então, sonho todas as noites com o jardim. No início, era belo — flores de pétalas douradas, música de cordas distante. Agora, vejo as figuras dançantes de perto: são pessoas como eu, com bocas costuradas e olhos vazados, arrastando-se enquanto Lysander observa, sorrindo.

Pior são os espelhos. Sempre que passo por um, vejo Clara atrás de mim. Seu rosto está coberto por uma máscara de crisálidas, e ela segura um pincel feito de ossos. Na semana passada, encontrei uma mecha de cabelo loiro-platinado no meu travesseiro. Meu cabelo é preto.

Sei que estou na nona invocação. Lysander já não precisa do ritual para aparecer. Ontem, ao acordar, meus braços estavam cobertos de tinta vermelha, e na parede do banheiro, alguém havia escrito com batom: "O meio-diahh virá." O erro na palavra "dia" não era um erro — as letras extras formavam "hh", como em 3h03.

Estou queimando a tela enquanto escrevo isso. O fogo cheira a lavanda e carne queimada. Se não der certo... bem, talvez você encontre minha última obra em algum sótão. Mas cuidado: Lysander prefere aqueles que duvidam. Ele adora provar que está certo.

Nota do editor: O autor deste relato foi encontrado morto em sua casa em 15 de setembro de 2023, com o pescoço quebrado e um sorriso entalhado no rosto. Todas as telas do apartamento haviam desaparecido, exceto uma, mostrando seu rosto fundido ao de um homem loiro de olhos heterocromáticos. A tela foi doada ao Museu de Arte Obscura de Viena, onde vigias noturnos relatam ouvir sussurros em francês após o fechamento.

Surrender my flesh to demonic hordes
And vanish into the bleak void
Raping mind, body and soul
No sunrise will greet me tomorrow
No dawn will follow the nightfall
Crushed by the weight of my nemesis
The nightmare mounting my chest
A mockery of a dead horse
Drawing my pale cart beyond
The raging fires of hell
For I am
A corpse burned
And murdered
With my malignant blood

Carpets had always been in my family.

My father was a carpet fitter, as was his father before, and even our ancestors had been in the business of weaving and making carpets before the automation of the industry.

Carpets had been in my family for a long, long time. But now I was done with them, once and for all.

It started a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed sales of carpets at my factory had suddenly skyrocketed. I was seeing profits on a scale I had never encountered before, in all my twenty years as a carpet seller. It was instantaneous, as if every single person in the city had wanted to buy a new carpet all at the same time.

With the profits that came pouring in, I was able to expand my facilities and upgrade to even better equipment to keep up with the increasing demand. The extra funds even allowed me to hire more workers, and the factory began to run much more smoothly than before, though we were still barely churning out carpets fast enough to keep up.

At first, I was thrilled by the uptake in carpet sales.

But then it began to bother me.

Why was I selling so many carpets all of a sudden? It wasn’t just a brief spike, like the regular peaks and lows of consumer demand, but a full wave that came crashing down, surpassing all of my targets for the year.

In an attempt to figure out why, I decided to do some research into the current state of the market, and see if there was some new craze going round relating to carpets in particular.

What I found was something worse than I ever could have dreamed of.

Everywhere I looked online, I found videos, pictures and articles of people installing carpets into their bathrooms.

In all my years as a carpet seller, I’d never had a client who wanted a carpet specifically for their bathroom. It didn’t make any sense to me. So why did all these people suddenly think it was a good idea?

Did people not care about hygiene anymore? Carpets weren’t made for bathrooms. Not long-term. What were they going to do once the carpets got irremediably impregnated with bodily fluids? The fibres in carpets were like moisture traps, and it was inevitable that at some point they would smell as the bacteria and mould began to build up inside. Even cleaning them every week wasn’t enough to keep them fully sanitary. As soon as they were soiled by a person’s fluids, they became a breeding ground for all sorts of germs.

And bathrooms were naturally wet, humid places, prime conditions for mould growth. Carpets did not belong there.

So why had it become a trend to fit a carpet into one’s bathroom?

During my search online, I didn’t once find another person mention the complete lack of hygiene and common sense in doing something like this.

And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

It wasn’t just homeowners installing carpets into their bathrooms; companies had started doing the same thing in public toilets, too.

Public toilets. Shops, restaurants, malls. It wasn’t just one person’s fluids that would be collecting inside the fibres, but multiple, all mixing and oozing together. Imagine walking into a public WC and finding a carpet stained and soiled with other people’s dirt.

Had everyone gone mad? Who in their right mind would think this a good idea?

Selling all these carpets, knowing what people were going to do with them, had started making me uncomfortable. But I couldn’t refuse sales. Not when I had more workers and expensive machinery to pay for.

At the back of my mind, though, I knew that this wasn’t right. It was disgusting, yet nobody else seemed to think so.

So I kept selling my carpets and fighting back the growing paranoia that I was somehow contributing to the downfall of our society’s hygiene standards.

I started avoiding public toilets whenever I was out. Even when I was desperate, nothing could convince me to use a bathroom that had been carpeted, treading on all the dirt and stench of strangers.

A few days after this whole trend had started, I left work and went home to find my wife flipping through the pages of a carpet catalogue. Curious, I asked if she was thinking of upgrading some of the carpets in our house. They weren’t that old, but my wife liked to redecorate every once in a while.

Instead, she shook her head and caught my gaze with hers. In an entirely sober voice, she said, “I was thinking about putting a carpet in our bathroom.”

I just stared at her, dumbfounded.

The silence stretched between us while I waited for her to say she was joking, but her expression remained serious.

“No way,” I finally said. “Don’t you realize how disgusting that is?”

“What?” she asked, appearing baffled and mildly offended, as if I had discouraged a brilliant idea she’d just come up with. “Nero, how could you say that? All my friends are doing it. I don’t want to be the only one left out.”

I scoffed in disbelief. “What’s with everyone and their crazy trends these days? Don’t you see what’s wrong with installing carpets in bathrooms? It’s even worse than people who put those weird fabric covers on their toilet seats.”

My wife’s lips pinched in disagreement, and we argued over the matter for a while before I decided I’d had enough. If this wasn’t something we could see eye-to-eye on, I couldn’t stick around any longer. My wife was adamant about getting carpets in the toilet, and that was simply something I could not live with. I’d never be able to use the bathroom again without being constantly aware of all the germs and bacteria beneath my feet.

I packed most of my belongings into a couple of bags and hauled them to the front door.

“Nero… please reconsider,” my wife said as she watched me go.

I knew she wasn’t talking about me leaving.

“No, I will not install fixed carpets in our bathroom. That’s the end of it,” I told her before stepping outside and letting the door fall shut behind me.

She didn’t come after me.

This was something that had divided us in a way I hadn’t expected. But if my wife refused to see the reality of having a carpet in the bathroom, how could I stay with her and pretend that everything was okay?

Standing outside the house, I phoned my mother and told her I was coming to stay with her for a few days, while I searched for some alternate living arrangements. When she asked me what had happened, I simply told her that my wife and I had fallen out, and I was giving her some space until she realized how absurd her thinking was.

After I hung up, I climbed into my car and drove to my mother’s house on the other side of town. As I passed through the city, I saw multiple vans delivering carpets to more households. Just thinking about what my carpets were being used for—where they were going—made me shudder, my fingers tightening around the steering wheel.

When I reached my mother’s house, I parked the car and climbed out, collecting my bags from the trunk.

She met me at the door, her expression soft. “Nero, dear. I’m sorry about you and Angela. I hope you make up.”

“Me too,” I said shortly as I followed her inside. I’d just come straight home from work when my wife and I had started arguing, so I was in desperate need of a shower.

After stowing away my bags in the spare room, I headed to the guest bathroom.

As soon as I pushed open the door, I froze, horror and disgust gnawing at me.

A lacy, cream-coloured carpet was fitted inside the guest toilet, covering every inch of the floor. It had already grown soggy and matted from soaking up the water from the sink and toilet. If it continued to get more saturated without drying out properly, mould would start to grow and fester inside it.

No, I thought, shaking my head. Even my own mother had succumbed to this strange trend? Growing up, she’d always been a stickler for personal hygiene and keeping the house clean—this went against everything I knew about her.

I ran downstairs to the main bathroom, and found the same thing—another carpet, already soiled. The whole room smelled damp and rotten. When I confronted my mother about it, she looked at me guilelessly, failing to understand what the issue was.

“Don’t you like it, dear?” she asked. “I’ve heard it’s the new thing these days. I’m rather fond of it, myself.”

“B-but don’t you see how disgusting it is?”

“Not really, dear, no.”

I took my head in my hands, feeling like I was trapped in some horrible nightmare. One where everyone had gone insane, except for me.

Unless I was the one losing my mind?

“What’s the matter, dear?” she said, but I was already hurrying back to the guest room, grabbing my unpacked bags.

I couldn’t stay here either.

“I’m sorry, but I really need to go,” I said as I rushed past her to the front door.

She said nothing as she watched me leave, climbing into my car and starting the engine. I could have crashed at a friend’s house, but I didn’t want to turn up and find the same thing. The only safe place was somewhere I knew there were no carpets in the toilet.

The factory.

It was after-hours now, so there would be nobody else there. I parked in my usual spot and grabbed the key to unlock the door. The factory was eerie in the dark and the quiet, and seeing the shadow of all those carpets rolled up in storage made me feel uneasy, knowing where they might end up once they were sold.

I headed up to my office and dumped my stuff in the corner. Before doing anything else, I walked into the staff bathroom and breathed a sigh of relief. No carpets here. Just plain, tiled flooring that glistened beneath the bright fluorescents. Shiny and clean.

Now that I had access to a usable bathroom, I could finally relax.

I sat down at my desk and immediately began hunting for an apartment. I didn’t need anything fancy; just somewhere close to my factory where I could stay while I waited for this trend to die out.

Every listing on the first few pages had carpeted bathrooms. Even old apartment complexes had been refurbished to include carpets in the toilet, as if it had become the new norm overnight.

Finally, after a while of searching, I managed to find a place that didn’t have a carpet in the bathroom. It was a little bit older and grottier than the others, but I was happy to compromise.

By the following day, I had signed the lease and was ready to move in.

My wife phoned me as I was leaving for work, telling me that she’d gone ahead and put carpets in the bathroom, and was wondering when I’d be coming back home.

I told her I wasn’t. Not until she saw sense and took the carpets out of the toilet.

She hung up on me first.

How could a single carpet have ruined seven years of marriage overnight?

When I got into work, the factory had once again been inundated with hundreds of new orders for carpets. We were barely keeping up with the demand.

As I walked along the factory floor, making sure everything was operating smoothly, conversations between the workers caught my attention.

“My wife loves the new bathroom carpet. We got a blue one, to match the dolphin accessories.”

“Really? Ours is plain white, real soft on the toes though. Perfect for when you get up on a morning.”

“Oh yeah? Those carpets in the strip mall across town are really soft. I love using their bathrooms.”

Everywhere I went, I couldn’t escape it. It felt like I was the only person in the whole city who saw what kind of terrible idea it was. Wouldn’t they smell? Wouldn’t they go mouldy after absorbing all the germs and fluid that escaped our bodies every time we went to the bathroom? How could there be any merit in it, at all?

I ended up clocking off early. The noise of the factory had started to give me a headache.

I took the next few days off too, in the hope that the craze might die down and things might go back to normal.

Instead, they only got worse.

I woke early one morning to the sound of voices and noise directly outside my apartment. I was up on the third floor, so I climbed out of bed and peeked out of the window.

There was a group of workmen doing something on the pavement below. At first, I thought they were fixing pipes, or repairing the concrete or something. But then I saw them carrying carpets out of the back of a van, and I felt my heart drop to my stomach.

This couldn’t be happening.

Now they were installing carpets… on the pavement?

I watched with growing incredulity as the men began to paste the carpets over the footpath—cream-coloured fluffy carpets that I recognised from my factory’s catalogue. They were my carpets. And they were putting them directly on the path outside my apartment.

Was I dreaming?

I pinched my wrist sharply between my nails, but I didn’t wake up.

This really was happening.

They really were installing carpets onto the pavements. Places where people walked with dirt on their shoes. Who was going to clean all these carpets when they got mucky? It wouldn’t take long—hundreds of feet crossed this path every day, and the grime would soon build up.

Had nobody thought this through?

I stood at the window and watched as the workers finished laying down the carpets, then drove away once they had dried and adhered to the path.

By the time the sun rose over the city, people were already walking along the street as if there was nothing wrong. Some of them paused to admire the new addition to the walkway, but I saw no expressions of disbelief or disgust. They were all acting as if it were perfectly normal.

I dragged the curtain across the window, no longer able to watch. I could already see the streaks of mud and dirt crisscrossing the cream fibres. It wouldn’t take long at all for the original colour to be lost completely.

Carpets—especially mine—were not designed or built for extended outdoor use.

I could only hope that in a few days, everyone would realize what a bad idea it was and tear them all back up again.

But they didn’t.

Within days, more carpets had sprung up everywhere. All I had to do was open my curtains and peer outside and there they were. Everywhere I looked, the ground was covered in carpets. The only place they had not extended to was the roads. That would have been a disaster—a true nightmare.

But seeing the carpets wasn’t what drove me mad. It was how dirty they were.

The once-cream fibres were now extremely dirty and torn up from the treads of hundreds of feet each day. The original colour and pattern were long lost, replaced with new textures of gravel, mud, sticky chewing gum and anything else that might have transferred from the bottom of people’s shoes and gotten tangled in the fabric.

I had to leave my apartment a couple of times to go to the store, and the feel of the soft, spongy carpet beneath my feet instead of the hard pavement was almost surreal. In the worst kind of way. It felt wrong. Unnatural.

The last time I went to the shop, I stocked up on as much as I could to avoid leaving my apartment for a few days. I took more time off work, letting my employees handle the growing carpet sales.

I couldn’t take it anymore.

Even the carpets in my own place were starting to annoy me. I wanted to tear them all up and replace everything with clean, hard linoleum, but my contract forbade me from making any cosmetic changes without consent.

I watched as the world outside my window slowly became covered in carpets.

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.

It had been several days since I’d last left my apartment, and I noticed something strange when I looked out of my window that morning.

It was early, the sky still yolky with dawn, bathing the rooftops in a pale yellow light. I opened the curtains and peered out, hoping—like I did each morning—that the carpets would have disappeared in the night.

They hadn’t. But something was different today. Something was moving amongst the carpet fibres. I pressed my face up to the window, my breath fogging the glass, and squinted at the ground below.

Scampering along the carpet… was a rat.

Not just one. I counted three at first. Then more. Their dull grey fur almost blended into the murky surface of the carpet, making it seem as though the carpet itself was squirming and wriggling.

After only five days, the dirt and germs had attracted rats.

I almost laughed. Surely this would show them? Surely now everyone would realize what a terrible, terrible idea this had been?

But several more days passed, and nobody came to take the carpets away.

The rats continued to populate and get bigger, their numbers increasing each day. And people continued to walk along the streets, with the rats running across their feet, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

The city had become infested with rats because of these carpets, yet nobody seemed to care. Nobody seemed to think it was odd or unnatural.

Nobody came to clean the carpets.

Nobody came to get rid of the rats.

The dirt and grime grew, as did the rodent population.

It was like watching a horror movie unfold outside my own window. Each day brought a fresh wave of despair and fear, that it would never end, until we were living in a plague town.

Finally, after a week, we got our first rainfall.

I sat in my apartment and listened to the rain drum against the windows, hoping that the water would flush some of the dirt out of the carpets and clean them. Then I might finally be able to leave my apartment again.

After two full days of rainfall, I looked out my window and saw that the carpets were indeed a lot cleaner than before. Some of the original cream colour was starting to poke through again. But the carpets would still be heavily saturated with all the water, and be unpleasant to walk on, like standing on a wet sponge. So I waited for the sun to dry them out before I finally went downstairs.

I opened the door and glanced out.

I could tell immediately that something was wrong.

As I stared at the carpets on the pavement, I noticed they were moving. Squirming. Like the tufts of fibre were vibrating, creating a strange frequency of movement.

I crouched down and looked closer.

Disgust and horror twisted my stomach into knots.

Maggots. They were maggots. Thousands of them, coating the entire surface of the carpet, their pale bodies writhing and wriggling through the fabric.

The stagnant, dirty water basking beneath the warm sun must have brought them out. They were everywhere. You wouldn’t be able to take a single step without feeling them under your feet, crushing them like gristle.

And for the first time since holing up inside my apartment, I could smell them. The rotten, putrid smell of mouldy carpets covered with layers upon layers of dirt.

I stumbled back inside the apartment, my whole body feeling unclean just from looking at them.

How could they have gotten this bad? Why had nobody done anything about it?

I ran back upstairs, swallowing back my nausea. I didn’t even want to look outside the window, knowing there would be people walking across the maggot-strewn carpets, uncaring, oblivious.

The whole city had gone mad. I felt like I was the only sane person left.

Or was I the one going crazy?

Why did nobody else notice how insane things had gotten?

And in the end, I knew it was my fault. Those carpets out there, riddled with bodily fluids, rats and maggots… they were my carpets. I was the one who had supplied the city with them, and now look what had happened.

I couldn’t take this anymore.

I had to get rid of them. All of them.

All the carpets in the factory. I couldn’t let anyone buy anymore. Not if it was only going to contribute to the disaster that had already befallen the city.

If I let this continue, I really was going to go insane.

Despite the overwhelming disgust dragging at my heels, I left my apartment just as dusk was starting to set, casting deep shadows along the street.

I tried to jump over the carpets, but still landed on the edge, feeling maggots squelch and crunch under my feet as I landed on dozens of them.

I walked the rest of the way along the road until I reached my car, leaving a trail of crushed maggot carcasses in my wake.

As I drove to the factory, I turned things over in my mind. How was I going to destroy the carpets, and make it so that nobody else could buy them?

Fire.

Fire would consume them all within minutes. It was the only way to make sure this pandemic of dirty carpets couldn’t spread any further around the city.

The factory was empty when I got there. Everyone else had already gone home. Nobody could stop me from doing what I needed to do.

Setting the fire was easy. With all the synthetic fibres and flammable materials lying around, the blaze spread quickly. I watched the hungry flames devour the carpets before turning and fleeing, the factory’s alarm ringing in my ears.

With the factory destroyed, nobody would be able to buy any more carpets, nor install them in places they didn’t belong. Places like bathrooms and pavements.

I climbed back into my car and drove away.

Behind me, the factory continued to blaze, lighting up the dusky sky with its glorious orange flames.

But as I drove further and further away, the fire didn’t seem to be getting any smaller, and I quickly realized it was spreading. Beyond the factory, to the rest of the city.

Because of the carpets.

The carpets that had been installed along all the streets were now catching fire as well, feeding the inferno and making it burn brighter and hotter, filling the air with ash and smoke.

I didn’t stop driving until I was out of the city.

I only stopped when I was no longer surrounded by carpets. I climbed out of the car and looked behind me, at the city I had left burning.

Tears streaked down my face as I watched the flames consume all the dirty, rotten carpets, and the city along with it.

“There was no other way!” I cried out, my voice strangled with sobs and laughter. Horror and relief, that the carpets were no more. “There really was no other way!”

I hear a voice in the dead of night
Its haunting melody plucking
On the strings of my broken heart
My resolve begins to break
Fragments of her voice
Echo through my troubled mind
“My love, it’s so cold here in the dark”
 Whipped into a frenzy
Like a bolt of lightning, I race
Into the wild
Searching for the ancient oak
Devoted to my better half
Swallowed by the shadow
Of this dying tree
My hands dig into the ground
Until I reach her lovely bones
Still buried in the dirt
But my joy remains short-lived
Because I can hear the voice
Calling from the Vantablack
The nightmare begins anew
Forcing me to wake
Drenched in cold sweat

Expelled from the throat of God
Evil dressed in wounded flesh
And baptized in martyrs’ blood

A blight upon the universe
Born from depths of filthy ash
To murder the fruits of genesis

Exalting the endless night
Through empty sockets of false prophets
Crucified as a sacrifice
To the mysteries of Luciferian phantom light

On 17th June 2009, two British tourists, Rhys Williams and Bradley Cawthorn had gone missing while vacationing on the east coast of South Africa. The two young men had come to the country to watch the British and Irish Lions rugby team play the world champions, South Africa. Although their last known whereabouts were in the city of Durban, according to their families in the UK, the boys were last known to be on their way to the centre of the KwaZulu-Natal province, 260 km away, to explore the abandoned tourist site of the battle of Rorke’s Drift.

When authorities carried out a full investigation into the Rorke’s Drift area, they would eventually find evidence of the boys’ disappearance. Near the banks of a tributary river, a torn Wales rugby shirt, belonging to Rhys Williams was located. 2 km away, nestled in the brush by the side of a backroad, searchers would then find a damaged video camera, only for forensics to later confirm DNA belonging to both Rhys Williams and Bradley Cawthorn. Although the video camera was badly damaged, authorities were still able to salvage footage from the device. Footage that showed the whereabouts of both Rhys and Bradley on the 17th June - the day they were thought to go missing...

This is the story of what happened to them, prior to their disappearance.

Located in the centre of the KwaZulu-Natal province, the famous battle site of Rorke’s Drift is better known to South Africans as an abandoned and supposedly haunted tourist attraction. The area of the battle saw much bloodshed in the year 1879, in which less than 200 British soldiers, garrisoned at a small outpost, fought off an army of 4,000 fierce Zulu warriors. In the late nineties, to commemorate this battle, the grounds of the old outpost were turned into a museum and tourist centre. Accompanying this, a hotel lodge had begun construction 4 km away. But during the building of the hotel, several construction workers on the site would mysteriously go missing. Over a three-month period, five construction workers in total had vanished. When authorities searched the area, only two of the original five missing workers were found... What was found were their remains. Located only a kilometre or so apart, these remains appeared to have been scavenged by wild animals.

A few weeks after the finding of the bodies, construction on the hotel continued. Two more workers would soon disappear, only to be found, again scavenged by wild animals. Because of these deaths and disappearances, investors brought a permanent halt to the hotel’s construction, as well as to the opening of the nearby Rorke’s Drift Museum... To this day, both the Rorke’s Drift tourist centre and hotel lodge remain abandoned.

On 17th June 2009, Rhys Williams and Bradley Cawthorn had driven nearly four hours from Durban to the Rorke’s Drift area. They were now driving on a long, narrow dirt road, which cut through the wide grass plains. The scenery around these plains appears very barren, dispersed only by thin, solitary trees and onlooked from the distance by far away hills. Further down the road, the pair pass several isolated shanty farms and traditional thatched-roof huts. Although people clearly resided here, as along this route, they had already passed two small fields containing cattle, they saw no inhabitants whatsoever.

Ten minutes later, up the bending road, they finally reach the entrance of the abandoned tourist centre. Getting out of their jeep for hire, they make their way through the entrance towards the museum building, nestled on the base of a large hill. Approaching the abandoned centre, what they see is an old stone building exposed by weathered white paint, and a red, rust-eaten roof supported by old wooden pillars. Entering the porch of the building, they find that the walls to each side of the door are displayed with five wooden tribal masks, each depicting a predatory animal-like face. At first glance, both Rhys and Bradley believe this to have originally been part of the tourist centre. But as Rhys further inspects the masks, he realises the wood they’re made from appears far younger, speculating that they were put here only recently.

Upon trying to enter, they quickly realise the door to the museum is locked. Handing over the video camera to Rhys, Bradley approaches the door to try and kick it open. Although Rhys is heard shouting at him to stop, after several attempts, Bradley successfully manages to break open the door. Furious at Bradley for committing forced entry, Rhys reluctantly joins him inside the museum.

The boys enter inside of a large and very dark room. Now holding the video camera, Bradley follows behind Rhys, leading the way with a flashlight. Exploring the room, they come across numerous things. Along the walls, they find a print of an old 19th century painting of the Rorke’s Drift battle, a poster for the 1964 film: Zulu, and an inauthentic Isihlangu war shield. In the centre of the room, on top of a long table, they stand over a miniature of the Rorke’s Drift battle, in which small figurines of Zulu warriors besiege the outpost, defended by a handful of British soldiers.

Heading towards the back of the room, the boys are suddenly startled. Shining the flashlight against the back wall, the light reveals three mannequins dressed in redcoat uniforms, worn by the British soldiers at Rorke’s Drift. It is apparent from the footage that both Rhys and Bradley are made uncomfortable by these mannequins - the faces of which appear ghostly in their stiffness. Feeling as though they have seen enough, the boys then decide to exit the museum.

Back outside the porch, the boys make their way down towards a tall, white stone structure. Upon reaching it, the structure is revealed to be a memorial for the soldiers who died during the battle. Rhys, seemingly interested in the memorial, studies down the list of names. Taking the video camera from Bradley, Rhys films up close to one name in particular. The name he finds reads: WILLIAMS. J. From what we hear of the boys’ conversation, Private John Williams was apparently Rhys’ four-time great grandfather. Leaving a wreath of red poppies down by the memorial, the boys then make their way back to the jeep, before heading down the road from which they came.

Twenty minutes later down a dirt trail, they stop outside the abandoned grounds of the Rorke’s Drift hotel lodge. Located at the base of Sinqindi Mountain, the hotel consists of three circular orange buildings, topped with thatched roofs. Now walking among the grounds of the hotel, the cracked pavement has given way to vegetation. The windows of the three buildings have been bordered up, and the thatched roofs have already begun to fall apart. Now approaching the larger of the three buildings, the pair are alerted by something the footage cannot see... From the unsteady footage, the silhouette of a young boy, no older than ten, can now be seen hiding amongst the shade. Realizing they’re not alone on these grounds, Rhys calls out ‘Hello’ to the boy. Seemingly frightened, the young boy comes out of hiding, only to run away behind the curve of the building.

Although they originally planned on exploring the hotel’s interior, it appears this young boy’s presence was enough for the two to call it a day. Heading back towards their jeep, the sound of Rhys’ voice can then be heard bellowing, as he runs over to one of the vehicle’s front tyres. Bradley soon joins him, camera in hand, to find that every one of the jeep’s tyres has been emptied of air - and upon further inspection, the boys find multiple stab holes in each of them.

Realizing someone must have slashed their tyres while they explored the hotel grounds, the pair search frantically around the jeep for evidence. What they find is a trail of small bare footprints leading away into the brush - footprints appearing to belong to a young child, no older than the boy they had just seen on the grounds. Initially believing this boy to be the culprit, they soon realize this wasn’t possible, as the boy would have had to be in two places at once. Further theorizing the scene, they concluded that the young boy they saw, may well have been acting as a decoy, while another carried out the act before disappearing into the brush - now leaving the two of them stranded.

With no phone signal in the area to call for help, Rhys and Bradley were left panicking over what they should do. Without any other options, the pair realized they had to walk on foot back up the trail and try to find help from one of the shanty farms. However, the day had already turned to evening, and Bradley refused to be outside this area after dark. Arguing over what they were going to do, the boys decide they would sleep in the jeep overnight, and by morning, they would walk to one of the shanty farms and find help.

As the day drew closer to midnight, the boys had been inside their jeep for hours. The outside night was so dark by now, that they couldn’t see a single shred of scenery - accompanied only by dead silence. To distract themselves from how anxious they both felt, Rhys and Bradley talk about numerous subjects, from their lives back home in the UK, to who they thought would win the upcoming rugby game, that they were now probably going to miss.

Later on, the footage quickly resumes, and among the darkness inside the jeep, a pair of bright vehicle headlights are now shining through the windows. Unsure to who this is, the boys ask each other what they should do. Trying to stay hidden out of fear, they then hear someone get out of the vehicle and shut the door. Whoever this unseen individual is, they are now shouting in the direction of the boys’ jeep. Hearing footsteps approach, Rhys quickly tells Bradley to turn off the camera.

Again, the footage is turned back on, and the pair appear to be inside of the very vehicle that had pulled up behind them. Although it is too dark to see much of anything, the vehicle is clearly moving. Rhys is heard up front in the passenger's seat, talking to whoever is driving. This unknown driver speaks in English, with a very strong South African accent. From the sound of his voice, the driver appears to be a Caucasian male, ranging anywhere from his late-fifties to mid-sixties.

Although they have a hard time understanding him, the boys tell the man they’re in South Africa for the British and Irish Lions tour, and that they came to Rorke’s Drift so Rhys could pay respects to his four-time great grandfather. Later on in the conversation, Bradley asks the driver if the stories about the hotel’s missing construction workers are true. The driver appears to scoff at this, saying it is just a made-up story. According to the driver, the seven workers had died in a freak accident while the hotel was being built, and their families had sued the investors into bankruptcy.

From the way the voices sound, Bradley is hiding the camera very discreetly. Although hard to hear over the noise of the moving vehicle, Rhys asks the driver if they are far from the next town, in which the driver responds that it won’t be too long now. After some moments of silence, the driver asks the boys if either of them wants to pull over to relieve themselves. Both of the boys say they can wait. But rather suspiciously, the driver keeps on insisting that they should pull over now.

Then, almost suddenly, the driver appears to pull to a screeching halt! Startled by this, the boys ask the driver what is wrong, before the sound of their own yelling is loudly heard. Amongst the boys’ panicked yells, the driver shouts at them to get out of the vehicle. Although the audio after this is very distorted, one of the boys can be heard shouting the words ‘Don’t shoot us!’ After further rummaging of the camera in Bradley’s possession, the boys exit the vehicle to the sound of the night air and closing of vehicle doors. As soon as they’re outside, the unidentified man drives away, leaving Rhys and Bradley by the side of a dirt trail. The pair shout after him, begging him not to leave them in the middle of nowhere, but amongst the outside darkness, all the footage shows are the taillights of the vehicle slowly fading away into the distance.

When the footage is eventually turned back on, we can hear Rhys ad Bradley walking through the darkness. All we see are the feet and bottom legs of Rhys along the dirt trail, visible only by his flashlight. From the tone of the boys’ voices, they are clearly terrified, having no idea where they are or even what direction they’re heading in.

Sometime seems to pass, and the boys are still walking along the dirt trail through the darkness. Still working the camera, Bradley is audibly exhausted. The boys keep talking to each other, hoping to soon find any shred of civilisation – when suddenly, Rhys tells Bradley to be quiet... In the silence of the dark, quiet night air, a distant noise is only just audible. Both of the boys hear it, and sounds to be rummaging of some kind. In a quiet tone, Rhys tells Bradley that something is moving out in the brush on the right-hand side of the trail. Believing this to be wild animals, and hoping they’re not predatory, the boys continue concernedly along the trail.

However, as they keep walking, the sound eventually comes back, and is now audibly closer. Whatever the sound is, it is clearly coming from more than one animal. Unaware what wild animals even roam this area, the boys start moving at a faster pace. But the sound seems to follow them, and can clearly be heard moving closer. Picking up the pace even more, the sound of rummaging through the brush transitions into something else. What is heard, alongside the heavy breathes and footsteps of the boys, is the sound of animalistic whining and cackling.

The audio becomes distorted for around a minute, before the boys seemingly come to a halt... By each other's side, the audio comes back to normal, and Rhys, barely visible by his flashlight, frantically yells at Bradley that they’re no longer on the trail. Searching the ground drastically, the boys begin to panic. But the sound of rummaging soon returns around them, alongside the whines and cackles.

Again, the footage distorts... but through the darkness of the surrounding night, more than a dozen small lights are picked up, seemingly from all directions. Twenty or so metres away, it does not take long for the boys to realize that these lights are actually eyes... eyes belonging to a pack of clearly predatory animals.

All we see now from the footage are the many blinking eyes staring towards the two boys. The whines continue frantically, audibly excited, and as the seconds pass, the sound of these animals becomes ever louder, gaining towards them... The continued whines and cackles become so loud that the footage again becomes distorted, before cutting out for a final time.

To this day, more than a decade later, the remains of both Rhys Williams and Bradley Cawthorn have yet to be found... From the evidence described in the footage, authorities came to the conclusion that whatever these animals were, they had been responsible for both of the boys' disappearances... But why the bodies of the boys have yet to be found, still remains a mystery. Zoologists who reviewed the footage, determined that the whines and cackles could only have come from one species known to South Africa... African Wild Dogs. What further supports this assessment, is that when the remains of the construction workers were autopsied back in the nineties, teeth marks left by the scavengers were also identified as belonging to African Wild Dogs.

However, this only leaves more questions than answers... Although there are African Wild Dogs in the KwaZulu-Natal province, particularly at the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Game Reserve, no populations whatsoever of African Wild Dogs have been known to roam around the Rorke’s Drift area... In fact, there are no more than 650 Wild Dogs left in South Africa. So how a pack of these animals have managed to roam undetected around the Rorke’s Drift area for two decades, has only baffled zoologists and experts alike.

As for the mysterious driver who left the boys to their fate, a full investigation was carried out to find him. Upon interviewing several farmers and residents around the area, authorities could not find a single person who matched what they knew of the driver’s description, confirmed by Rhys and Bradley in the footage: a late-fifty to mid-sixty-year-old Caucasian male. When these residents were asked if they knew a man of this description, every one of them gave the same answer... There were no white men known to live in or around the Rorke’s Drift area.

Upon releasing details of the footage to the public, many theories have been acquired over the years, both plausible and extravagant. The most plausible theory is that whoever this mystery driver was, he had helped the local residents of Rorke’s Drift in abducting the seven construction workers, before leaving their bodies to the scavengers. If this theory is to be believed, then the purpose of this crime may have been to bring a halt to any plans for tourism in the area. When it comes to Rhys Williams and Bradley Cawthorn, two British tourists, it’s believed the same operation was carried out on them – leaving the boys to die in the wilderness and later disposing of the bodies.

Although this may be the most plausible theory, several ends are still left untied. If the bodies were disposed of, why did they leave Rhys’ rugby shirt? More importantly, why did they leave the video camera with the footage? If the unknown driver, or the Rorke’s Drift residents were responsible for the boys’ disappearances, surely they wouldn’t have left any clear evidence of the crime.

One of the more outlandish theories, and one particularly intriguing to paranormal communities, is that Rorke’s Drift is haunted by the spirits of the Zulu warriors who died in the battle... Spirits that take on the form of wild animals, forever trying to rid their enemies from their land. In order to appease these spirits, theorists have suggested that the residents may have abducted outsiders, only to leave them to the fate of the spirits. Others have suggested that the residents are themselves shapeshifters, and when outsiders come and disturb their way of life, they transform into predatory animals and kill them.

Despite the many theories as to what happened to Rhys Williams and Bradley Cawthorn, the circumstances of their deaths and disappearances remain a mystery to this day. The culprits involved are yet to be identified, whether that be human, animal or something else. We may never know what really happened to these boys, and just like the many dark mysteries of the world... we may never know what evil still lies inside of Rorke’s Drift, South Africa.

Carved into a black marble tombstone
Numerous decades of chronic existence
A tall tale of slow-burn collapse and decay
Mourning the rise of the sun with each dawn
Because tomorrow became yesterday

Man-shaped shadows are no longer living
For what is the purpose in the absence of meaning
A sleepwalking machine with a mouthful of dust
Sailing towards the ending entropic
Before losing course in a memory of what wasn’t  

I lived but a mere six years and a spare
Some three hundred weeks filled with blissful despair

Stuck in a cell monocolored sickly gray
Inhaling the sweet remains of a world withering away

Decrepit
Flesh and blood

And while suicide is legal
My choice is never final

Decrepit
Flesh and blood
Canitude

I doubt anyone will read this but hey reader, I'm Alma!

My journey begins on the 2nd of June, three days ago in this year of 2024. I remember the day being quite cold, as it is autumn—almost winter at that time in Argentina. 

The sky was cloudy, with gentle thin tears falling from it. There was fog, a lot of fog, and the ambience was generally humid for the constant rains of the season. I remember waking up wishing I took my life a while back, because in case it wasn't bad enough having lost my mom months ago, another family member just went and died. Not on purpose or anything! No, it was just a car accident. Someone drunk driving. Anyway, now because of ol’ good cousin Lucas, we all had to go to the graveyard on a day like that, on top of the burial being early. 

Looking in the mirror and brushing my teeth, I tried to think about it as a change of routine, since my days were pretty dull. Just surviving, doing absolutely nothing and not looking hard enough or just not getting a job. The water went through the drain as my life escaped from in-between my fingers, unable to keep it together. Jesus, when was it decided that I was to turn 24 this year? 

As I drove out of the city and into the road listening to Será by Las Pelotas, I decided I wouldn't touch not a glass of alcohol. I knew there would probably be eyes around, and given the circumstances in which that idiot died, of course people would be focused primarily on me not doing “my thing”. Because of course, everyone in the family had labeled me as an alcoholic, even if that was a long time ago, it appears that two years of alcoholism are hard to erase from the record. 

I set foot outside of the car my mother had left me. I was so ready to hear something along the lines of “It is because of people like you that…”, “It is due to people like them that…” I opened the umbrella and braced myself, walking towards the entrance. The place was huge, it is the biggest cemetery of the province after all, and one of the prettiest too. I had been there before for different occasions each time, first was because of a childhood friend’s uncle, then my grandparents on specific dates. I found it funny how they asked to be buried there and my family just did that, despite how expensive it was. At least they had the extra money I guessed, good for them!

When I crossed the gate at first no one was around to receive me. I held my umbrella tight and tried to find the person in charge, because well, there normally was someone who had to let you in. And so for some minutes, all I could see was how the cemetery sprawled over the landscape, the different paths it had, without any guidance, seeming like a maze. The statues and monuments, granite and marble, apparently staring at me as if I was some sort of alien, ignoring their own cracks and flaws that time had given them as a warning, they had to retire. I wondered who was managing the place, letting it get so… worn out. 

A frown was visible on my reflection as I peeked through the third window of the building at the front, and saw the room was devoid of any human beings. Man! I was so angry, I had woken up, gotten out of bed and now everyone in the family would think I am an asshole for not showing up, but this wasn't my fault! I sighed and relaxed my shoulders, my left hand reaching for my phone when all of a sudden someone put a hand on my shoulder. 

“Alma” my auntie greeted, showing me a weak smile. 

Not much happened after that. I just remained there, silent, watching as my other family members talked with each other and shared memories of my cousin. I felt out of place. I never really connected with anyone in the family, they felt like some sort of strangers that I knew out of obligation, or formalities. It was such a big family, so many people and no one was even close to knowing not even what my favorite color was. Nevertheless, I knew that I had to be there. And as they were finally closing the hole in the ground, I felt a presence next to me.

“Enjoying yourself?” Asked my younger cousin, Matilda. 

“Aren't you supposed to be like, crying and shit?” I glanced at her askance, not really sure about what she meant with the question. 

“I'm surprised you decided to show up. You could perfectly be the one who killed him.” 

I didn't have a comeback. I wasn't even able to reply, my phone started ringing, and God it was loud. I cursed at myself and buried my hand in my pocket, going away to answer it. By the time I was far enough though, it ceased to ring, and a message that I hadn't seen before popped up. Both notifications were from my dad. 

My heart sank. Of all the bad news I could’ve gotten that day, these were by far the worst. And while he got to enjoy a life abroad, in a first world country, sending me a message from a Café with his younger daughter and perfect wife, I stared blankly at the screen, reading over and over the message. 

‘I have talked about this with Monica. I saw the balance in your bank account that I transfer money to. I'm so disappointed. One would think that you would've done something of use by now, you're old enough to live by yourself. I don't know what to do with you anymore, you're wasting your life. And if it's gonna be like that, this is the last month I'm giving you money. I mean it. I can't help you anymore.’ 

Another message. It was a contact he shared, my ex-psychiatrist. My hands went cold as the shock went away and reality settled in. What did he mean? I hadn't wasted that much money! I still could do something! Mom’s life insurance was bad, did he think it was gonna last forever?! I felt my heart race, my face get warm and saw the blurry vision of tears blocking the way. I put my phone away. I had it coming, he had been warning me. I lowered myself to the ground slowly, squatting down. I cleaned my tears with one hand and still held the umbrella with the other, and I observed the puddles being formed by the water that fell from the crying clouds with tiny waves. A chilling wind whispered to me through the rows of graves, carrying with it the scent of dampt earth and decaying leaves. I let it tickle my cheek and move my hair. I took a minute. 

By the time I started walking back I saw everyone was leaving, each jumping onto their cars or just saying their goodbyes. I waved to my aunt who was talking with the staff and decided it was enough. I turned around and headed to the exit. Approaching the window I first peeked at, however, I stopped. A poorly written poster that communicated they were understaffed and needed a night watchman caught my eye. I quickly took a picture of it while I thought no one was looking, saving the number attached for later. Every chance I got, I had to take. Not like I had any better alternatives. 

The very next day, with a sense of defeat and a clearer head to calm my mood, I made the call. An old man answered, the very owner of the cemetery. We agreed to have a job interview on the next day, “as soon as possible”. But I didn't think too much of it, after all, it was a night shift there, and who in the world would want a job like that? He surely didn't have many candidates, and that was an advantage to my favor. So considering how desperate we both surely were, this would go well. I would armor up and use every tactic and resource I had to get this job, so I dressed with a white shirt, serious pants, high heels and tied my hair up in a bun. A serious independent woman ready for the position!

Yeah that did not go as planned. I had to drive barefoot, when I arrived the high-heeled shoes kept making me struggle in the mud and I had to roll my pants up a little more so they didn't get too dirty. On top of that, it was so chilly that I felt my body shaking every few minutes. I was so tense, nervous and felt so not-ready. In a shocking turn of events, Mr. Pacífico, the owner, whose name is actually Carlos, was very understanding. He was like one of those warm and welcoming grandads that you can see watching the birds and feeding them at a park, with a soft, serene voice. 

“Very well Alma, enough with the background and standard questions” he smiled at me and intertwined his fingers on the table. “I wanna know, why do you want to work here?” 

I smiled and looked down before returning my gaze back to his eyes.

“I find the place to be very special. I think it would be a great experience and I just know that I can do the job well. I also really need the money sir.” 

He chuckled. “I love how honest you are, sweetheart! It is perfectly fine! I know you don't want to work here!, Who in their right mind would? Just tell me, do you fear death?” 

I giggled, thinking I had heard him wrong. However, with the silent revelation that it wasn’t a mistake, I answered. “No sir.”

I got the job a few minutes after that. Or well, at least a trial night. I would be there for one night and if everything went well, I would get the job. This trial was paid, so of course, I had nothing to lose.

It was supposed to be easy. There was no big storm, no client coming for the night, nothing to really worry about, or so I thought. Carlos explained it all to me, he would leave and I would be at the office, the building next to the gate, the only entrance and exit of the place surrounded by pointed fences. There, I had to regularly check the many cameras distributed along the whole graveyard and its various facilities. Landline was working in case of an emergency and there were a distinctive amount of locks I had to learn to use quickly on the door to shut it. I could communicate with him through the old phone or my mobile in case something was out of place, he just told me to have common sense and everything would be alright. I appreciated that he trusted me and all, yet I was still hesitant to stay all alone so when he told me that there was a security guard roaming around, I exhaled with relief. 

 “Oh and by the way, if you see any fog coming from the nearby forest, lock yourself in here and don’t open the door, no matter what happens.” he warned before leaving without further explanation, and the door finally closed.

 I glanced at the computer, unsure if I wanted to sit just yet. There was a coffee machine and a mini fridge next to a cupboard filled with supplies and snacks that he didn’t say anything about, and I would’ve asked about it if only I hadn’t heard the main gate close just when I was about to head out. I sighed and put all the locks on as he had instructed. Taking a better look at the room after, it was filled with stuff to be comfortable during the shift. To be honest, at that point I was just jumping on one leg, this would be the most comfortable, easiest job ever, and everyone else was dumb enough to judge it as scary and not take it. I smiled at the surveillance camera inside the room and surrendered to the chair, sitting comfortably in its embrace. I looked at the walkie-talkie that connected me with Zeiss, the security guard, it was strange not to know anything about the man, but I couldn’t be unprofessional and talk to him because of that, so I decided to instead familiarize with the list of cameras and their locations, which were written down on paper. I had to remember this, since it was my trial night, if anything out of the ordinary happened I had permission to tell the other guy to check it instead of going myself, although normally whoever was closest had to do it. 

After a few minutes of going back and forth between the list and the video on the screen, I leaned back on the chair and got my feet out of those god awful high heels to sit comfortably cross-legged, relaxing in what seemed to be my best job to date. The video of the office could barely capture the top of my head from that angle, so it would be perfectly fine. I was just about to close my eyes when I spotted something moving in one camera, which made me squint because it was a little dark and I could not distinguish it properly. Of course there were lamps and lighting but along with them came certain spots they didn’t quite reach, and this humanoid figure without any flashlight was in one of them. Unsure, I sat up straight and picked the walkie-talkie, pressed the button Carlos had taught me and spoke. 

 “Hello Zeiss, I’m Alma the new watchman, I think I’m seeing something weird in… err…” I failed to remember the name of the location and just repeated the number. “Camera number 11. Could you please go and check it?” I panicked for a short moment as I let go of the button, given that I had told him unclear indications, and saw how the figure began moving again, probably taking something out of a pocket or a belt. I heard static.

 “Good evening Alma, I believe you are referring to me. I am standing in front of the camera, over.” The figure waved. He sounded young, around my age or younger. Was I tripping or were they really this understaffed, hiring whoever came first? I sighed, embarrassed. 

 “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought…” I left the sentence unfinished. “It’s a little dark in those areas, don’t you need a flashlight?” 

 “I have one, don’t worry.” he began walking and left the frame, not saying anything beyond that. 

 I frowned with a subtle awkward smile looking at the device. Yeah I probably was working with someone as strange as the position he had. Who the fuck would be willing to lurk the cemetery at night like that? I mean, staying in a room and watching the whole place was one thing, but actually being out there at night on their own? Most likely someone really dumb, arrogant or a psycho. I put the thing down on the table and leaned back once more, taking my phone out of my pocket. I had some signal, but no WiFi. I forgot to ask for it. 

I rolled my eyes and let it rest on the table too. I watched the footage, still, it got boring after some time. Got over the fact that I didn’t ask and made some coffee anyway, got some pen and paper and started drawing, every few minutes checking if everything was alright and if I could see that Zeiss guy somewhere in the cameras, but there was nothing. I was letting out a big big yawn when I realized I had to hit the bathroom. It had been quite some time since the last visit and my body was letting me know. I got up and put on those diabolical high heels. I attached the walkie talkie to my blazer’s pocket and approached the door with all the locks on. Did I really need them? Everytime I had to head outside I would have to do everything over and over again, kind of annoying if you ask me. I stretched as I felt the breeze letting me know it was windy, which made the temperature more freezing. I turned the lights on when I reached them in the restroom, and did my business peacefully. The crickets sang, the trees’ leaves joined them and the bell rang… I shook my head softly. Bell? Were there bells here? 

 Standing outside, I could hear its faint ring in the distance. I pursed my lips and like a fucking stupid protagonist of a horror movie, went towards it. It didn’t sound like the chapel’s big bell, it was a small one, like that of a goat. I clenched my fists unknowingly as the chill seeped through my bones, my breath unfurling in pale clouds that vanished as I moved on. The lamp posts from the set path were sparse, their dim halos barely enough to push back the surrounding shadows. Each pool of light bringing ahead of it a void so complete it felt alive until the next bright zone. Walking through the cobblestone was hard with those awful shoes, and yet I didn’t stop, as if I was being called, and the minutes froze waiting for me. The bell rang intermittently, closer now, and with it came its faint vibration in the air, as though the sound itself carried weight. When I reached the end of the cobbled track I hesitated for a moment, right in front of me a sea of uncut grass. I wondered how much time it took me to get there, and yet as soon as I caught the repeating sound so near, I immediately got off those high heels. Barefoot now I made my own way through crooked headstones, their etched names half-erased by time. My eyes set on my newfound need. The next repetition echoed unnaturally as I finally reached the small origin of it; a small bell to the side of a grave, with a string attached to something underground. It wouldn’t cease this time, moving continuously as I fixed all my attention on it. I extended my hand and tried to touch the string, and suddenly it went silent. No more movement. The lamps that I left behind grew further apart, and the night deepened. I snapped out of it, scanned my surroundings only to barely see more gravestones with bells next to them. 

“What the fuck…” I stepped back, but as soon as I gave my back to my surroundings and faced the trail I had to return to, all the bells sang in chorus. My eyes opened wider than before, turned around, hand reaching for the walkie talkie at the sight of all those little shits dancing. A slow walk transformed quickly into a jog, and a jog in a run at full speed. They mocked me, they laughed non-stop at how I was a coward, how I left without even grabbing my shoes again, how my finger pressed the button but I was so frightened I couldn’t even spit out some words. My breath began to run out, tears covering my retina and making it hard to actually see what was in front of me, and so with only differentiating between vague shapes and tones light or dark I tripped, letting go of what I was holding. I realized they weren’t ringing anymore. Wiping my tears while still crying, I sat with the minor scratches I had received, trying to recover. But the crickets didn’t talk, the wind didn’t blow, and this wasn’t over. I reached for the only communication I had with someone, and now I talked quietly as I got on my feet again. 

“Hey dude, are the-” I wasn’t able to finish, all I let out was the loudest scream I could offer. I had the brilliant idea to look back once more, and there I saw a vague shadow figure of a man in a trenchcoat. No need to say or do anything else, it was a race to the safe spot. I have never ran so fast in my life, and it was more impressive considering I’m completely out of shape. As I finally approached the door, I could hear footsteps closing in on me which gave me the last shot of adrenaline I needed. I entered and slammed the door, to which loud bangings exploded on it, as if it was someone who came to collect owed money. 

“Please please just leave me alone, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” I shouted as I backed away. It stopped. I cried for a short second before the door opened by just using the handle, that was enough to make me shriek and throw the walkie talkie as hard as I could to whoever was there. 

“Bitch, what the hell!” It impacted on someone’s head, rather than the floor. The guy held his hand to the place it was hurt. 

I blinked twice, going dead silent. It was a twink. By his voice I could recognize him, it was Zeiss. I covered my mouth and analyzed him. Brown hair, dark eyes, a bit shorter than me and apparently younger too. I was fucked, if this was the security, the whole place and us were fucked.  

“Oh my god I am so sorry!” I went ahead and grabbed him by the arm to make him come inside and letting go to then close the door with all the locks. “This crazy shit happened to me back there and I, I think we are not alone, we must call the police, or Carlos or…” 

“Alma, I see you are scared, but for fucks sake calm down and tell me what happened!” 

“I was in the bathroom I heard a bell and then went to check and there were like a shit ton of bells and they rang on their own and then I ran and there was this man in a trenchcoat that looked at me and…” I explained frantically, no pauses, no breaths in-between. 

“Wait, so…” he crossed his arms. “You just got freaked out by the bells and called me?” 

“W-Well yes! You're supposed to handle these situations!” I gestured desperately- “But what the fuck are you supposed to do if you wouldn’t even be able to take me on a fight?!”

“Girl… are you trying to make me angry or something?” the way he raised his eyebrows told me that I sounded crazy, and he was over the situation. 

“What?, What am I supposed to do with those bells!?, Why did they even ring?, Are there people buried alive down there!?, And the man… neither of us can take him!”

“There’s no man, Alma. We’re alone here. You probably are delusional or just saw a family of goblins standing on top of each other to look human in a trenchcoat.” his calm demeanor combined with that unbelievable explanation left me staring at him blankly, to which he sighed and added. “Look, I get it, it’s your first night and you think this place is haunted, but believe me, it’s far worse than that. I mean, why else the paycheck would be so good?” 

“But the bells…” 

“That’s on you, just ignore them, they sometimes ring, and so what? They didn’t harm you did they? And you could’ve just told me to go check them if you wanted, you even had the two-way radio with you.” he brought up, as if it was the most casual and normal thing ever. 

“You’re nuts, for real.” I frowned with pain. 

“Uh-huh, that’s why I’m the one wearing shoes and you’re the one who’s barefoot in this temperature.” 

“I had to!” I tried to clarify, but he shook his head lightly. 

“Sure, just get your shoes back on and continue your job. We still have three more hours to go.” he reminded me as he unlocked the door. 

“Can you at least come with me to get my shoes?” I asked, taking the flashlight already accepting the situation. 

The man rolled his eyes but agreed, and after escorting me to the office again he left for, as he put it, “Goblin hunting”.

 The last three hours I spent treating all my scratches and getting myself clean again before sitting at the desk and writing the first part of all of this. I was very tired and almost fell asleep many times, but I managed to stay awake and get most of it done, of course while watching the cameras every few minutes. I sometimes saw Zeiss walking around, other times it was just plain nothing. But the night had definitely earned the title of crazy already. It was about to be sunrise when Carlos arrived and opened the gate. I was getting out of the first building, ready to leave, and Zeiss was leaning on a wall nearby, with his arms crossed, yawning. I was congratulated and told I got the job as I was handled the payment for the trial. I must’ve had a troubled expression, because the owner then asked.

“You still want the job right?” With a worried smile. 

“Oh, uh…” I mirrored the smile anxiously, discreetly looking at the money, and then at him again, not being able to even count how much it was total, as it was even more than I expected for this. “Yes of course sir, I just need some rest.” 

 He giggled and shook my hand happily, and we said goodbye. I waved to Zeiss on my way out and I left, having way too much to think about and many things to consider about this job. Getting home felt like a blessing. I collapsed on my bed, slept until the afternoon and woke up late, knowing that I would have to go to work if I wanted to keep this salary. I read the messages Carlos sent me, a contract, some other stuff. But I didn’t reply, I had no clue of what to do yet. 

I finished writing this just now and I’ve been thinking that if I hadn’t panicked, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Should I come back?

Slowly wandering into a dark blue fog
And the moon shines brighter than before
Yet the night remains eerie still
Darker than my darkest moments
In the spinning yellow walls of yesterday
Blessed with rare clarity
I denounce my decadent self-destruction
Tomorrow
A broken heart will develop a new
Addiction
Forevermore
Armed to the teeth
With the wish to die
I drink and find myself once again
Dancing with a knife
In the immortal words of Zarathustra
I am nothing
Nothing more and nothing less
But a hopeless dreamer
A false prophet
I have orphaned the great lie
Medicating a healthy liver
Because suicide is legal
If the soul was swallowed whole
By the pale fever
For a thousandth time
Yesterday I killed myself today
Three seconds of sobriety
Then a cracked skull
Lost in thoughts
Emotionless rationale presuming sanity
Disinterest and disgust
Red silk threads
String theory
bind me to human
Filth
A pest
With masturbatory needs
Lifeloving and psychotic
Sycophants
Self-proclaimed Satanists
Sheep dressed in wolf’s pelts
Weep for help
Dragged to hell
Farewell
Clutching the holy cross
A bloody oath
Between a hypocrite and a vulture
 To brutalize every heretic
In your name – my demonic lord
A crusade to excuse my self-loathing
Without falling upon the blade
I wield with a raging hate
As a neuronaut
Sailing upstream
through uric acids of traumatic memory
On a warm winter afternoon
Artistic work of arson
Skydiving Cacatov
Raining vomit and pestilence
Pissing into his own grave
A misanthrope
A nihilist
And above all else
A rabid dog

For the past two and a half years now, I have been living in the north of the Scottish Highlands - and when I say north, I mean as far north as you can possibly go. I live in a region called Caithness, in the small coastal town of Thurso, which is actually the northernmost town on the British mainland. I had always wanted to live in the Scottish Highlands, which seemed a far cry from my gloomy hometown in Yorkshire, England – and when my dad and his partner told me they’d bought an old house up here, I jumped at the opportunity! From what they told me, Caithness sounded like the perfect destination. There were seals and otters in the town’s river, Dolphins and Orcas in the sea, and at certain times of the year, you could see the Northern Lights in the night sky. But despite my initial excitement of finally getting to live in the Scottish Highlands, full of beautiful mountains, amazing wildlife and vibrant culture... I would soon learn the region I had just moved to, was far from the idyllic destination I had dreamed of...

So many tourists flood here each summer, but when you actually choose to live here, in a harsh and freezing coastal climate... this place feels more like a purgatory. More than that... this place actually feels cursed... This probably just sounds like superstition on my part, but what almost convinces me of this belief, more so than anything else here... is that disturbing things have washed up on shore, each one supposedly worse than the last... and they all have to do with death...

The first thing I discovered here happened maybe a couple of months after I first moved to Caithness. In my spare time, I took to exploring the coastline around the Thurso area. It was on one of these days that I started to explore what was east of Thurso. On the right-hand side of the mouth of the river, there’s an old ruin of a castle – but past that leads to a cliff trail around the eastern coastline. I first started exploring this trail with my dog, Maisie, on a very windy, rainy day. We trekked down the cliff trail and onto the bedrocks by the sea, and making our way around the curve of a cliff base, we then found something...

Littered all over the bedrock floor, were what seemed like dozens of dead seabirds... They were everywhere! It was as though they had just fallen out of the sky and washed ashore! I just assumed they either crashed into the rocks or were swept into the sea due to the stormy weather. Feeling like this was almost a warning, I decided to make my way back home, rather than risk being blown off the cliff trail.

It wasn’t until a day or so after, when I went back there to explore further down the coast, that a woman with her young daughter stopped me. Shouting across the other side of the road through the heavy rain, the woman told me she had just come from that direction - but that there was a warning sign for dog walkers, warning them the area was infested with dead seabirds, that had died from bird flu. She said the warning had told dog walkers to keep their dogs on a leash at all times, as bird flu was contagious to them. This instantly concerned me, as the day before, my dog Maisie had gotten close to the dead seabirds to sniff them.

But there was something else. Something about meeting this woman had struck me as weird. Although she was just a normal woman with her young daughter, they were walking a dog that was completely identical to Maisie: a small black and white Border Collie. Maybe that’s why the woman was so adamant to warn me, because in my dog, she saw her own, heading in the direction of danger. But why this detail was so weird to me, was because it almost felt like an omen of some kind. She was leading with her dog, identical to mine, away from the contagious dead birds, as though I should have been doing the same. It almost felt as though it wasn’t just the woman who was warning me, but something else - something disguised as a coincidence.

Curious as to what this warning sign was, I thanked the woman for letting me know, before continuing with Maisie towards the trail. We reached the entrance of the castle ruins, and on the entrance gate, I saw the sign she had warned me about. The sign was bright yellow and outlined with contagion symbols. If the woman’s warning wasn’t enough to make me turn around, this sign definitely was – and so I head back into town, all the while worrying that my dog might now be contagious. Thankfully, Maisie would be absolutely fine.

Although I would later learn that bird flu was common to the region, and so dead seabirds wasn’t anything new, what I would stumble upon a year later, washed up on the town’s beach, would definitely be far more sinister...

In the summer of the following year, like most days, I walked with Maisie along the town’s beach, which stretched from one end of Thurso Bay to the other. I never really liked this beach, because it was always covered in stacks of seaweed, which not only stunk of sulphur, but attracted swarms of flies and midges. Even if they weren’t on you, you couldn’t help but feel like you were being bitten all over your body. The one thing I did love about this beach, was that on a clear enough day, you could see in the distance one of the Islands of Orkney. On a more cloudy or foggy day, it was as if this particular island was never there to begin with, and all you instead see is the ocean and a false horizon.

On one particular summer’s day, I was walking with Maisie along this beach. I had let her off her lead as she loved exploring and finding new smells from the ocean. She was rummaging through the stacks of seaweed when suddenly, Maisie had found something. I went to see what it was, and I realized it was something I’d never seen before... What we found, lying on top of a layer of seaweed, was an animal skeleton... I wasn’t sure what animal it belonged to exactly, but it was either a sheep or a goat. There were many farms in Caithness and across the sea in Orkney. My best guess was that an animal on one of Orkney’s coastal farms must have fallen off a ledge or cliff, drown and its remains eventually washed up here.

Although I was initially taken back by this skeleton, grinning up at me with its molar-like teeth, something else about this animal quickly caught my eye. The upper-body was indeed skeletal remains, completely picked white clean... but the lower-body was all still there... It still had its hoofs and all its wet fur. The fur was dark grey and as far as I could see, all the meat underneath was still intact. Although disturbed by this carcass, I was also very confused... What I didn’t understand was, why had the upper-body of this animal been completely picked off, whereas the lower part hadn’t even been touched? What was weirder, the lower-body hadn’t even decomposed yet. It still looked fresh.

I can still recollect the image of this dead animal in my mind’s eye. At the time, one of the first impressions I had of it, was that it seemed almost satanic. It reminded me of the image of Baphomet: a goat’s head on a man’s body. What made me think this, was not only the dark goat-like legs, but also the position the carcass was in. Although the carcass belonged to a goat or sheep, the way the skeleton was positioned almost made it appear hominid. The skeleton was laid on its back, with an arm and leg on each side of its body.

However, what I also have to mention about this incident, is that, like the dead sea birds and the warnings of the concerned woman, this skeleton also felt like an omen. A bad omen! I thought it might have been at the time, and to tell you the truth... it was. Not long after finding this skeleton washed up on the town’s beach, my personal life suddenly takes a very dark, and somewhat tragic downward spiral... I almost wish I could go into the details of what happened, as it would only support the idea of how much of a bad omen this skeleton would turn out to be... but it’s all rather personal.

While I’ve still lived in this God-forsaken place, I have come across one more thing that has washed ashore – and although I can’t say whether it was more, or less disturbing than the Baphomet-like skeleton I had found... it was definitely bone-chilling!

Six or so months later and into the Christmas season, I was still recovering from what personal thing had happened to me – almost foreshadowed by the Baphomet skeleton. It was also around this time that I’d just gotten out of a long-distance relationship, and was only now finding closure from it. Feeling as though I had finally gotten over it, I decided I wanted to go on a long hike by myself along the cliff trail east of Thurso. And so, the day after Christmas – Boxing Day, I got my backpack together, packed a lunch for myself and headed out at 6 am.

The hike along the trail had taken me all day, and by the evening, I had walked so far that I actually discovered what I first thought was a ghost town. What I found was an abandoned port settlement, which had the creepiest-looking disperse of old stone houses, as well as what looked like the ruins of an ancient round-tower. As it turned out, this was actually the Castletown heritage centre – a tourist spot. It seemed I had walked so far around the rugged terrain, that I was now 10 miles outside of Thurso. On the other side of this settlement were the distant cliffs of Dunnet Bay, which compared to the cliffs I had already trekked along, were far grander. Although I could feel my legs finally begin to give way, and already anticipating a long journey back along the trail, I decided that I was going to cross the bay and reach the cliffs - and then make my way back home... Considering what I would find there... this is the point in the journey where I should have stopped.

By the time I was making my way around the bay, it had become very dark. I had already walked past more than half of the bay, but the cliffs didn’t feel any closer. It was at this point when I decided I really needed to turn around, as at night, walking back along the cliff trail was going to be dangerous - and for the parts of the trail that led down to the base of the cliffs, I really couldn’t afford for the tide to cut off my route.

I made my way back through the abandoned settlement of the heritage centre, and at night, this settlement definitely felt more like a ghost town. Shining my phone flashlight in the windows of the old stone houses, I was expecting to see a face or something peer out at me. What surprisingly made these houses scarier at night, were a handful of old fishing boats that had been left outside them. The wood they were made from looked very old and the paint had mostly been weathered off. But what was more concerning, was that in this abandoned ghost town of a settlement, I wasn’t alone. A van had pulled up, with three or four young men getting out. I wasn’t sure what they were doing exactly, but they were burning things into a trash can. What it was they were burning, I didn’t know - but as I made my way out of the abandoned settlement, every time I looked back at the men by the van, at least one of them were watching me. The abandoned settlement. The creepy men burning things by their van... That wasn’t even the creepiest thing I came across on that hike. The creepiest thing I found actually came as soon as I decided to head back home – before I was even back at the heritage centre...

Finally making my way back, I tried retracing my own footprints along the beach. It was so dark by now that I needed to use my phone flashlight to find them. As I wandered through the darkness, with only the dim brightness of the flashlight to guide me... I came across something... Ahead of me, I could see a dark silhouette of something in the sand. It was too far away for my flashlight to reach, but it seemed to me that it was just a big rock, so I wasn’t all too concerned. But for some reason, I wasn’t a hundred percent convinced either. The closer I get to it, the more I think it could possibly be something else.

I was right on top of it now, and the silhouette didn’t look as much like a rock as I thought it did. If anything, it looked more like a very big fish – almost like a tuna fish. I didn’t even realize fish could get that big in and around these waters. Still unsure whether this was just a rock or a dead fish of sorts – but too afraid to shine my light on it, I decided I was going to touch it with my foot. My first thought was that I was going to feel hard rock beneath me, only to realize the darkness had played a trick on me. I lift up my foot and press it on the dark silhouette, but what I felt wasn't hard rock... It was squidgy...

My first reaction was a little bit of shock, because if this wasn’t a rock like I originally thought, then it was something else – and had probably once been alive. Almost afraid to shine my light on whatever this was, I finally work up the courage to do it. Hoping this really is just a very big fish, I reluctantly shine my light on the dark squidgy thing... But what the light reveals is something else... It was a seal... A dead seal pup.

Seal carcasses do occasionally wash up in this region, and it wasn’t even the first time I saw one. But as I studied this dead seal with my flashlight, feeling my own skin crawl as I did it, I suddenly noticed something – something alarming... This seal pup had a chunk of flesh bitten out of it... For all I knew, this poor seal pup could have been hit by a boat, and that’s what caused the wound. But the wound was round and basically a perfect bite shape... Depending on the time of year, there are orcas around these waters, which obviously hunt seals - but this bite mark was no bigger than what a fully-grown seal could make... Did another seal do this? I know other animals will sometimes eat their young, but I never heard of seals doing this... But what was even worse than the idea that this pup was potentially killed by its own species, was that this pup, this poor little seal pup... was missing its skull...

Not its head. It’s skull! The skin was all still there, but it was empty, lying flat down against the sand. Just when I think it can’t get any worse than this, I leave the seal to continue making my way back, when I come across another dark silhouette in the sand ahead. I go towards it, and what I find is another dead seal pup... But once more, this one also had an identical wound – a fatal bite mark. And just like the other one... the skull was missing...

I could accept that they’d been killed by either a boat, or more likely from the evidence, an attack from another animal... but how did both of these seals, with the exact same wounds in the exact same place, also have both of their skulls missing? I didn’t understand it. These seals hadn’t been ripped apart – they only had one bite mark each. Would the seal, or seals that killed them really remove their skulls? I didn’t know. I still don’t - but what I do know is that both of these carcasses were identical. Completely identical – which was strange. They had clearly died the same way. I more than likely knew how they died... but what happened to their skulls?

As it happens, it’s actually common for seal carcasses to be found headless. Apparently, if they have been tumbling around in the surf for a while, the head can detach from the body before washing ashore. The only other answer I could find was scavengers. Sometimes other animals will scavenge the body and remove the head. What other animals that was, I wasn't sure - but at least now, I had more than one explanation as to why these seal pups were missing their skulls... even if I didn’t know which answer that was.

Although I had now reasoned out the cause of these missing skulls, it still struck me as weird as to how these seal pups were almost identical to each other in their demise. Maybe one of them could lose their skulls – but could they really both?... I suppose so... Unlike the other things I found washed ashore, these dead seals thankfully didn’t feel like much of an omen. This was just a common occurrence to the region. But growing up most of my life in Yorkshire, England, where nothing ever happens, and suddenly moving to what seemed like the edge of the world, and finding mutilated remains of animals you only ever saw in zoos... it definitely stays with you...

For the past two and a half years that I’ve been here, I almost do feel as though this region is cursed. Not only because of what I found washed ashore – after all, dead things wash up here all the time... I almost feel like this place is cursed for a number of reasons. Despite the natural beauty all around, this place does somewhat feel like a purgatory. A depressive place that attracts lost souls from all around the UK.

Many of the locals leave this place, migrating far down south to places like Glasgow. On the contrary, it seems a fair number of people, like me, have come from afar to live here – mostly retired English couples, who for some reason, choose this place above all others to live comfortably before the day they die... Perhaps like me, they thought this place would be idyllic, only to find out they were wrong... For the rest of the population, they’re either junkies or convicted criminals, relocated here from all around the country... If anything, you could even say that Caithness is the UK’s Alaska - where people come to get far away from their past lives or even themselves, but instead, amongst the natural beauty, are harassed by a cold, dark, depressing climate.

Maybe this place isn’t actually cursed. Maybe it really is just a remote area in the far north of Scotland - that has, for UK standards, a very unforgiving climate... Regardless, I won’t be here for much longer... Maybe the ghosts that followed me here will follow wherever I may end up next...

A fair bit of warning... if you do choose to come here, make sure you only come in the summer... But whatever you do... if you have your own personal demons of any kind... whatever you do... just don’t move here.

Countless moments and empty bottles
A soul shattered into pieces and left for dead
On the cold surface of the blood-stained floor
After yet another failed attempt to cross the bridge
Not unlike every time before

Possessed by a nauseating lust
For the bitter taste of rotten fruit
I cast myself into the liquid flame
In these stygian fires I drown
To escape the horrors lurking in the mirror

Losing countless memories between empty bottles
I mourn again my inability to reunite with the dead
On the cold surface of the blood-stained floor
Plotting yet another attempt to cross the bridge
Because all my wounds ache so much worse
Than at any other fucking point in time before   

It’s been a year now... You’ve all been asking me to finish the story. You’ve been trying to track me down, spreading my story on the internet, coming up with your theories as to what The Asili really is... You were all wrong... You want to know how the story ends? Fine. I’ll tell you... But everything I’ve told you so far... The fence. The grey men. Our friends lost inside the Asili... Everything that comes next is what I’ve been afraid to tell... The stuff of nightmares...

We’d passed through the barrier and entered the darkness on the other side... I woke... I woke up and all I could see was the tops of the trees high above me. They were that tall I couldn’t even see where they ended. I couldn’t even see the sky... I remember not knowing where I was. I couldn’t even remember how I’d ended up in this jungle. I hear Angela’s voice, and I see her and Tye standing over me. I didn’t even remember who they were at first... I think they knew that, because Angela asks me if I know where we are. I take a look at my surroundings, and I see the jungle. We were surrounded on all sides by a never-ending maze of almost identical trees. They were large and unusually shaped – like, the trunks were twisted, and the branches were like the bodies of snakes... And everything was dim – not dark, but... dim...

It all comes back to me... The river. The jungle. The fence... The grey men!... We were on the other side. We were in the Asili. We’re here to look for others – for Naadia... I take another look around and I realize we’re right bang in the middle of the jungle, as if we’d already been trekking through it. I asked Tye and Angela where the fence had gone, but they asked me the same thing. They didn’t know. They said all three of us woke up on the jungle floor, but I didn’t wake for another good hour... This didn’t make any sense. I started freaking out and Tye and Angela tried to calm me down...

Not knowing what to do next, we decided we needed to find which way the rest of the commune went. Angela said they would’ve tried to find a way back to the fence, and so we needed to head south. The only problem was we didn’t know which way south was. The jungle was too dark and we couldn’t even use the sun because we couldn’t see it... The only way we could find where south was, was to guess...

Following what we hoped was south, we walked for days through the dimness of the jungle, continually having to climb over the large roots of trees - and although the jungle was flat, we felt as though we had been going up a continual incline. As the days went by, me, Tye and Angela began to recognize the same things... Every tree we passed was almost identical in a way. They were the same size, same shape and even the same sort of contortion... But what was even stranger to us, stranger than the identical trees, was the sound... There was no sound – none at all! No birds singing in the trees. No monkeys howling. Even by our feet, there were no insects of any kind... The jungle was dead quiet. The only sound came from us – from our footsteps, our exhausted breathes... It was as if nothing lived here... as if nothing even existed on this side of the fence...

Even though we knew something was seriously wrong with this jungle, we had no choice but to continue – either to find the others or to find the fence. We were so exhausted, that we lost count of the number of days we had been trekking – even Angela forgot. On one of those days, I felt as though I reached my breaking point. I had been lagging behind the others for the past two days. I couldn’t feel my legs anymore – only pain. I struggled to breathe with the humidity, that was still here on this side of the jungle. I’d already used up all my water from my backpack, and I was too scared to sleep through the night. On this side of the fence, I was afraid the dreams would be far more intense. Through the dim daylight of the jungle, I wasn’t sure if I was seeing things – hearing things. What fuelled me to keep going was to find Naadia – and if not even that... to find what was here. What was calling me...

It didn’t even matter anymore, because I was done... It all became too much for me. The pain. The exhaustion. The heat... I decided I was done... By the huge roots of some tree, I collapsed down, knowing I wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon... Realizing I wasn’t behind them, Tye and Angela came back for me. They berated me to get back on my feet and start walking. We didn’t have time on our side after all... I told them I couldn’t. I just couldn’t carry on anymore. I just needed time to rest... Hoping the two of them would be somewhat sympathetic, that’s when Tye suddenly starts screaming at me! He accused me of not taking responsibility and that all this mess was my fault. He was blaming me! Too tired to argue, I just simply told him to fuck off. But he wasn’t having it. He said he hated guys like me, that didn’t follow things through or some shit like that. I reminded him that we both chose to go beyond the fence, not just me. Angela told us to stop – she said we didn’t have time for this shit...

Tye, clearly wanting to leave nothing unsaid, he brought Naadia into it. He claimed Naadia didn’t really want to be with me. He said the commune didn’t have enough members, and so Naadia tricked me into going – that later down the line, she would break up with me once the commune was a success... I didn’t believe him – but I was pissed! I called him a liar. I said him and the others just couldn’t stand to see one of their own with a white guy... And that’s when he said it. What I’d suspected all along... He didn’t hate me just because I was with Naadia... He hated me because... he was with Naadia... She didn’t end things with me because we were drifting apart, or this fucking trip to Africa. It was because she was with him... It was all a lie! I had risked my life for her! For a lie!...

I think all three of us knew where this was going- and before it did, Angela tried shutting the whole thing down. She told me to get the fuck up and for Tye to keep walking. She said ‘We're not doing this now’... She knew... She already fucking knew... Tye already finished what he had to say – but I wasn’t done with him! Despite how tired I was, I got to my feet and shouted after him. I demanded to know if it was true. He didn’t answer me - he just kept on walking. Even though he had his back turned to me, I saw that stupid grin on his face. Wanting to make him angry, I got right behind him and I shove him in the back as hard as I could! It worked. Tye turns and gets in my face. He warns me not to get into it with him. Wanting to get further under his skin, I then say it doesn’t matter if he was with Naadia or not, because one thing was still true. Confused to what I was talking about, I then said to him... ‘It’s true what they say, you know... Once you go white, all the rest are shite!’...

Expecting Tye to punch my lights out, he instead tackles me hard to the floor, and he just starts wailing punches at me! I’ve never been much of a fighter, and the only thing I think to do is try and gouge his eyes. It works, and I can hear him yelling out in pain – but suddenly he grabs me by the wrist and twists me hard enough to get me on my back. He then puts me in a choke hold and starts squeezing the light out of me. I can’t breathe, and I can already feel myself passing out. Images start coming to me – the fence, the tree with the face – Naadia! Just as everything’s about to go to black, Angela effortlessly breaks up the hold! While she puts Tye in an arm lock, telling him to calm down, I do all I can just to get my breath back... And just as I think I’m safe from passing out... I feel something underneath me...

I get up on all fours, and underneath me is just a pile of dead leaves, but there’s something hard beneath it. I press down on the leaves and something feels almost metallic... Sound comes back in my ears and I can hear Angela shouting at me... Feeling something underneath me, I brush away the dead leaves... and what I find... is a fence... Not the same fence we passed through – but an old rusty wire fence. Angela and Tye realize I’ve stumbled onto something and they come over to help brush away the dead leaves. We discover beneath the leaves, an old and very long metal fence lining the jungle floor, which eventually ends at some broken hinges... But that’s not all we found... Further down the fence, Angela found a sign... A big red sign on the fence with words written on it. It was hard to read because of the rust, but the first word said ‘DANGER!’ The other two words were in French, but Tye knew enough French to understand what it meant... The sign said: ‘DANGER! KEEP OUT!’...

We made camp that night and discussed the metal fence in full. Angela suggested that the fence may have been put there for some sort of containment - that inside this part of the jungle was some deadly disease, and that’s why we hadn’t come across any animal life... But if that was true, why was the metal fence this far in? Why wasn’t it where the wooden fence was – where this dark part of the jungle began? It just didn’t make sense... Angela then suggested that we may even have crossed into another dimension, and that’s why the jungle was now darker and uninhabited – and could maybe explain why we passed out upon entering it... We didn’t have any answers. Just theories...

We trekked again for the next couple of days, and our food supply was running dangerously low. We’d used up all of our water by now - but luckily, this jungle had rain, and was more than moist for us to soak whatever we could from the leaves... You wouldn’t believe how fucking good leafy moist water tastes after a day of thirst!... Nothing seemed like it could get any worse. This dim, dead jungle was just a never-ending labyrinth of the same fucking trees over and over! Every day was the fucking same! Walk through the jungle. Rest at night. Fucking Groundhog Day!... We might as well have been walking in circles...

But that’s when Angela came up with a plan... Her plan was to climb up a tree until we found ourselves at the very top, in the hopes of finding wherever this jungle ended – any sliver of civilization, or anything! I grew up in London. I had never even seen trees this big! And what’s worse, I was terrified of heights... The tree was easy enough to climb, because of its irregular shape. The only problem was, we didn’t know if the treetops even ended. They were like massive fucking beanstalks! We start climbing the tree and... we must have been climbing for about half an hour before... we finally found something...

Not even half-way up the tree, Angela, ahead of us, tells us to stop. We ask what’s wrong but she doesn’t answer. She’s just staring over at a long snake-like branch. Me and Tye see it. It wasn’t the branch she was staring at – it was what’s on the branch... We didn’t know what it was at first, and so we got closer to it. It was some sort of white material hanging from the branches, almost like a string puppet, and whatever this thing was, it was extremely long. It might even have been fifty feet. We still didn't know what the hell this thing was, and so Angela gets close enough to feel it. She could barely describe to us what it felt like, but she said it was almost rubbery in texture... But eventually, we realized what it was... and when we did... it made all of our skins crawl... It was snake skin!...

This skin - this fifty feet long skin, it belonged to a snake! How big was this fucking snake!? For the first time in this jungle, the three of us realized we weren’t alone - and if its skin was up here in the trees, then IT was probably in the trees! We climbed down from that tree immediately. If this snake was still around, we didn’t want to be around when it found us...

We thought we knew the answers now. We thought we knew why this place was contained... A massive fifty fucking feet long snake! It seemed big enough to swallow a cow! If this snake was in here, then what else was in here?? More snakes? Worse? Is that why the grey men warned us to stay away from this place? Is that why Naadia and the others were thrown in here – as some sort of sacrifice to it?... We thought we were finally beginning to solve the mystery of this place... But we were wrong. Dead wrong!...

I did sleep a handful of those nights... As terrified as the dreams made me, I still wanted answers. Tye and Angela thought we found them, and even though I knew we hadn’t, I let them keep on believing it. For some reason, I was too afraid to tell them about my dreams. Maybe they also had the same dreams, but like me, kept it to themselves... But I needed answers. How had I foreseen the fence? What was the tree with the face? The crucified man?? I needed the answers – I needed it!...

That night, knowing there was a huge prehistoric-sized snake that could take any one of us at any minute, I chose not to sleep. We usually took turns during the night to keep watch, but I kept watch that whole night. All night I stared into the pure black darkness around us, just wondering what the hell was out there, waiting for us. I stared into the darkness and it was as if the darkness was just staring back at me. Laughing at me... Whatever it was that brought me into this place, it must have been watching me...

I guessed it was now probably the earliest hours of the morning, but pure darkness was still all around. The fire had gone out and I couldn’t see anything, not even my own hands. Like every night in this place, it was dead quiet... But then I hear something... It was so faint, but I could barely hear it. It must have been so far away. I thought maybe my sleep deprivation was causing me to hear things again... But the sound seemed to be getting louder, just so slightly – like someone was turning up a car radio inch by inch... The sound was clearer to me now, but I couldn’t even describe it to myself. It was like a vibration, getting louder ever so slightly... As the minutes passed by, I quickly realized this wasn’t some vibration. It was like a wailing. A distant but loud ghostly wail... It was getting louder. Closer – close enough that I knew I had to wake up Angela. She was deep in sleep but I managed to kick her awake. Almost instantly, she heard the sound and was alert to it. We both listened. It was getting closer! We woke up Tye and the three of us looked around to find which way the wails were coming from. It seemed to be coming from all around us...

We quickly get our things and got the hell out of there - but wherever we went, the sound was following us amongst the darkness. It was so loud by now that we couldn’t even hear one another. We put our headlights on and followed behind Angela – but no matter where we went, it just seemed like we were heading directly towards the sound. Barely able to see anything, we were stopped in our tracks by a large tree root and we desperately had to climb over it because the wailing was now directly behind our backs! I struggled to climb over and I could hear Angela yelling ‘Come on! Hurry up!’ We ran down the other side of the tree, thinking we finally managed to outrun the sound – but it was waiting for us! We ran directly into it!...

We ran into the sound and I realized what it was. It was people! Dozens and dozens of them! All around us! From my headlight, I could see their faces. Men, women, children – the elderly. They were barely clothed in torn pieces of clothing and were so skinny! They were basically just skin and bones. Their eyes were pure white like they were blind and they began to grab us! Claw at us! Pulling us to the ground, there was so many of them on top of me, I couldn’t move! Thinking I was going to be ripped apart, I then noticed something... None of them – absolutely none of them had any hands! Some of them didn’t even have wrists – just stumps where their hands and arms should’ve been. Their groans were so loud on top of me, I couldn’t hear myself think. I couldn’t breathe!...

Amongst the countless groans, I then hear what sounds like gun shots! The armless zombie-people on top of me start to move away, but my body’s still pinned down. I then feel an arm – and it was Angela! Holding a revolver, she drags me to my feet. She shoots more of them and the entire horde are scared off. Once we find Tye, we just leg it out of there, shooting or shoving the zombie-people out of our way. We ran so far that the sound of their groans was almost gone. We kept running through the darkness, as far away as we could from them. I was ready to collapse but I was too afraid to stop – but then we did stop!... The ground beneath us suddenly wasn’t there anymore and I feel myself falling. For a few seconds we’re just weightless, before we crash back down against the ground...

I was in so much pain! I could feel leaves and dirt all over me and when I try to crawl up on my knees, I reach out to feel something in front of me... It felt like a wall. A dirt wall – all around us. Realizing we’ve fallen into something, I look up with my headlight and see we’ve fallen into a ten feet deep hole. I could see glimpses of Tye next to me - I could hear him moaning in pain, but I couldn’t hear or see Angela. I look up again with my headlight and I see Angela pulling herself out of the hole. She must have managed to hold onto the edge. Once she was on the surface, me and Tye yelled out for her - but all Angela could do was stare down into the hole, clueless on how she would get us out... Being trapped down there wasn’t the worst of our problems... The groans had returned! We could hear them up there. It now sounded like there were hundreds of them. Gaining closer...

We were too far down to see Angela’s face, but we saw her headlight moving frantically back and forth - from us and the oncoming wails. We yelled out to her again, but she couldn't’ hear us. We were too far down and the sounds on the surface were too loud. Angela was shouting something back down to us, but we couldn’t hear her either... I can’t be certain what she said, but I think it was... ‘I’m sorry!’... And before the wails could reach us - could reach her... Angela’s headlight was gone... She had left us... She left us to the wails... To the dozens or even hundreds of zombie-like people... She left me alone... alone with Tye...

We were now down there for what felt like hours! Our headlights had died, leaving us both trapped in pure darkness. And for hours, all we heard was the painful noise from the people above our heads. It was like fucking torture! I felt like I was going mad from it! Even though Tye was right next to me, I couldn’t help but feel like I was completely alone down here, with only the darkness and the endless wails taking his and even Angela’s place... But then the darkness gives me something! Gives us something! A light... a faint, warm orange light. Ten feet above our heads. It was the reflection of fire! It seemed like it was moving repetitively around the edges of the circle. Tye must have seen it too, because suddenly I can feel him hitting me, getting my attention... And if there was fire, then there was people – real fucking people!...

Even though it was useless, I tried yelling over the wails to whoever might be there. If the two of us wanted out this hole, this was our only chance... but then something changed.... The groans of the zombie-people began to die down. Some of it changed into what sounded like screams... They were all screaming! But over the screams I then heard what sounded like growls! Deep, aggressive animal growls – like roaring! There was something else up there. As if all at once, the screams and thudding of footsteps above us suddenly just vanish away – back into the darkness where they came... But we could still hear them. Outside of that burning orange ring, we could hear the ones who didn’t get away. We could hear them being ripped apart. Eaten! We were no longer trapped by the endless wails... We were now trapped by something else. Something apparently worse... Something that could rip us apart!...

It’s all so clear to me now... Everything that happened to us... it was all planned. It was planned from the beginning... For days we saw absolutely nothing... and then suddenly, we saw everything at once... Those people - those zombie-like people, they were supposed to find us... and we were supposed to fall into that hole... It was divine intervention...

Believe it or not, we did find the others. I did find Naadia... But we almost wished we hadn’t... We knew there were monsters inside of this jungle now... and we did find our way out of that hole... But it wasn’t monsters that was waiting for us on the surface – not the monsters you’re thinking of... What we found in that jungle wasn’t monsters... It was men...

White men...

End of Part III

I wake, and in the darkness of mine and Naadia’s tent, a light blinds me. I squint my eyes towards it, and peeking in from outside the tent is Moses, Tye and Jerome – each holding a wooden spear. They tell me to get dressed as I’m going spear-fishing with them, and Naadia berates them for waking us up so early... I’m by no means a morning person, but even with Naadia lying next to me, I really didn’t want to lie back down in the darkness, with the disturbing dream I just had fresh in my mind. I just wanted to forget about it instantly... I didn’t even want to think about it...

Later on, the four of us are in the stream trying to catch our breakfast. We were all just standing there, with our poorly-made spears for like half an hour before any fish came our way. Eventually the first one came in my direction and the three lads just start yelling at me to get the fish. ‘There it is! Get it! Go on get it!’ I tried my best to spear it but it was too fast, and them lot shouting at me wasn’t helping. Anyways, the fish gets away downstream and the three of them just started yelling at me again, saying I was useless. I quickly lost my temper and started shouting back at them... Ever since we got on the boat, these three guys did nothing but get in my face. They mocked my accent, told me nobody wanted me there and behind my back, they said they couldn’t see what Naadia saw in that “white limey”. I had enough! I told all three of them to fuck off and that they could catch their own fucking fish from now on. But as I’m about to leave the stream, Jerome yells at me ‘Dude! Watch out! There’s a snake!’ pointing by my legs. I freak out and quickly raise my feet to avoid the snake. I panic so much that I lose my footing and splash down into the stream. Still freaking out over the snake near me, I then hear laughter coming from the three lads... There was no snake...

Having completely had it with the lot of them, I march over to Jerome for no other reason but to punch his lights out. Jerome was bigger than me and looked like he knew how to fight, but I didn’t care – it was a long time coming. Before I can even try, Tye steps out in front of me, telling me to stop. I push Tye out the way to get to Jerome, but Tye gets straight back in my face and shoves me over aggressively. Like I said, out of the three of them, Tye clearly hated me the most. He had probably been looking for an excuse to fight me and I had just given him one. But just as I’m about to get into it with Tye, all four of us hear ‘GUYS!’ We all turn around to the voice to see its Angela, standing above us on high ground, holding a perfectly-made spear with five or more fish skewered on there. We all stared at her kind of awkwardly, like we were expecting to be yelled at, but she instead tells us to get out of the stream and follow her... She had something she needed to show us...

The four of us followed behind Angela through the jungle and Moses demanded to know where we’re going. Angela says she found something earlier on, but couldn’t tell us what it was because she didn’t even know - and when she shows us... we understand why she couldn’t. It was... it was indescribable. But I knew what it was - and it shook me to my core... What laid in front of us, from one end of the jungle to the other... was a fence... the exact same fence from my dreams!...

It was a never-ending line of sharp, crisscrossed wooden spikes - only what was different was... this fence was completely covered in bits and pieces of dead rotting animals. There was skulls - monkey skulls, animal guts or intestines, infested with what seemed like hundreds of flies buzzing around, and the smell was like nothing I’d ever smelt before. All of us were in shock - we didn’t know what this thing was. Even though I recognized it, I didn’t even know what it was... And while Angela and the others argued over what this was, I stopped and stared at what was scaring me the most... It was... the other side... On the other side of the spikes was just more vegetation, but right behind it you couldn’t see anything... It was darkness... Like the entrance of a huge tropical cave... and right as Moses and Angela start to get into a screaming match... we all turn to notice something behind us...

Standing behind us, maybe fifteen metres away, staring at us... was a group of five men... They were wearing these dirty, ragged clothes, like they’d had them for years, and they were small in height. In fact, they were very small – almost like children. But they were all carrying weapons: bows and arrows, spears, machetes. Whoever these men were, they were clearly dangerous... There was an awkward pause at first, but then Moses shouts ‘Hello!’ at them. He takes Angela’s spear with the fish and starts slowly walking towards them. We all tell him to stop but he doesn’t listen. One of the men starts approaching Moses – he looked like their leader. There’s only like five metres between them when Moses starts speaking to the man – telling them we’re Americans and we don’t mean them any harm. He then offered Angela’s fish to the man, like an offering of some sort. The way Moses went about this was very patronizing. He spoke slowly to the man as he probably didn’t know any English... but he was wrong...

In broken English, the man said ‘You - American?’ Moses then says loudly that we’re African American, like he forgot me and Angela were there. He again offers the fish to the man and says ‘Here! We offer this to you!’ The man looks at the fish, almost insulted – but then he looks around past Moses and straight at me... The man stares at me for a good long time, and even though I was afraid, I just stare right back at him. I thought that maybe he’d never seen a white man before, but something tells me it was something else. The man continues to stare at me, with wide eyes... and then he shouts ‘OUR FISH! YOU TAKE OUR FISH!’ Frightened by this, we all start taking steps backwards, closer to the fence - and all Moses can do is stare back at us. The man then takes out his machete and points it towards the fence behind us. He yells ‘NO SAFE HERE! YOU GO HOME! GO BACK AMERICA!’ The men behind him also began shouting at us, waving their weapons in the air, almost ready to fight us! We couldn’t understand the language they were shouting at us in, but there was a word. A word I still remember... They were shouting at us... ‘ASILI! ASILI! ASILI!’ over and over...

Moses, the idiot he was, he then approached the man, trying to reason with him. The man then raises his machete up to Moses, threatening him with it! Moses throws up his hands for the man not to hurt him, and then he slowly makes his way back to us, without turning his back to the man. As soon as Moses reaches us, we head back in the direction we came – back to the stream and the commune. But the men continue shouting and waving their weapons at us, and as soon as we lose sight of them... we run!...

When we get back to the commune, we tell the others what just happened, as well as what we saw. Like we thought they would, they freaked the fuck out. We all speculated on what the fence was. Angela said that it was probably a hunting ground that belonged to those men, which they barricaded and made to look menacing to scare people off. This theory made the most sense – but what I didn’t understand was... how the hell had I dreamed of it?? How the hell had I dreamed of that fence before I even knew it existed?? I didn’t tell the others this because I was scared what they might think, but when it was time to vote on whether we stayed or went back home, I didn’t waste a second in raising my hand in favour of going – and it was the same for everyone else. The only one who didn’t raise their hand was Moses. He wanted to stay. This entire idea of starting a commune in the rainforest, it was his. It clearly meant a lot to him – even at the cost of his life. His mind was more than made up on staying, even after having his life threatened, and he made it clear to the group that we were all staying where we were. We all argued with him, told him he was crazy – and things were quickly getting out of hand...

But that’s when Angela took control. Once everyone had shut the fuck up, she then berated all of us. She said that none of us were prepared to come here and that we had no idea what we were doing... She was right. We didn’t. She then said that all of us were going back home, no questions asked, like she was giving us an order - and if Moses wanted to stay, he could, but he would more than likely die alone. Moses said he was willing to die here – to be a martyr to the cause or some shit like that. But by the time it got dark, we all agreed that in the morning, we were all going back down river and back to Kinshasa...

Despite being completely freaked out that day, I did manage to get some sleep. I knew we had a long journey back ahead of us, and even though I was scared of what I might dream, I slept anyways... And there I was... back at the fence. I moved through it. Through to the other side. Darkness and identical trees all around... And again, I see the light and again I’m back inside of the circle, with the huge black rotting tree stood over me. But what’s different was, the face wasn’t there. It was just the tree... But I could hear breathing coming from it. Soft, but painful breathing like someone was suffocating. Remembering the hands, I look around me but nothing’s there – it's just the circle... I look back to the tree and above me, high up on the tree... I see a man...

He was small, like a child, and he was breathing very soft but painful breathes. His head was down and I couldn’t see his face, but what disturbed me was the rest of him... This man - this... child-like man, against the tree... he’d been crucified to it!... He was stretched out around the tree, and it almost looked like it was birthing him.... All I can do is look up to him, terrified, unable to wake myself up! But then the man looks down at me... Very slowly, he looks down at me and I can make out his features. His face is covered all over in scars – tribal scares: waves, dots, spirals. His cheeks are very sunken in, and he almost doesn’t look human... and he opens his eyes with the little strength he had and he says to me... or, more whispers... ’Henri’... He knew my name...

That’s when I wake up back in my tent. I’m all covered in sweat and panicked to hell. The rain outside was so loud, my ears were ringing from it. I try to calm down so I don’t wake Naadia beside me, but over the sound of the rain and my own panicked breathing, I start to hear a noise... A zip. A very slow zipping sound... like someone was trying carefully to break into the tent. I look to the entrance zip-door to see if anyone’s trying to enter, but it’s too dark to see anything... It didn’t matter anyway, because I realized the zipping sound was coming from behind me - and what I first thought was zipping, was actually cutting. Someone was cutting their way through mine and Naadia’s tent!... Every night that we were there, I slept with a pocket-knife inside my sleeping bag. I reach around to find it so I can protect myself from whoever’s entering. Trying not to make a sound, I think I find it. I better adjust it in my hand, when I... when I feel a blunt force hit me in the back of the head... Not that I could see anything anyway... but everything suddenly went black...

When I finally regain consciousness, everything around me is still dark. My head hurts like hell and I feel like vomiting. But what was strange was that I could barely feel anything underneath me, as though I was floating... That’s when I realized I was being carried - and the darkness around me was coming from whatever was over my head – an old sack or something. I tried moving my arms and legs but I couldn’t - they were tied! I tried calling out for help, but I couldn’t do that either. My mouth was gagged! I continued to be carried for a good while longer before suddenly I feel myself fall. I hit the ground very hard which made my head even worse. I then feel someone come behind me, pulling me up on my knees. I can hear some unknown language being spoken around me and what sounded like people crying. I start to hyperventilate and I fear I might suffocate inside whatever this thing was over my head...

That’s when a blinding, bright light comes over me. Hurts my brain and my eyes - and I realize the sack over me has been taken off. I try painfully to readjust my eyes so I can see where I am, and when I do... a small-childlike man is standing over me. The same man from the day before, who Moses tried giving the fish to. The only difference now was... he was painted all over in some kind of grey paste! I then see beside him are even more of the smaller men – also covered in grey paste. The rain was still pouring down, and the wet paste on their skin made them look almost like melting skeletons! I then hear the crying again. I look to either side of me and I see all the other commune members: Moses, Jerome, Beth, Tye, Chantal, Angela and Naadia... All on their knees, gagged with their hands tied behind their back.

The short grey men, standing over us then move away behind us, and we realize where it is they’ve taken us... They’ve taken us back to the fence... I can hear the muffled screams of everyone else as they realize where we are, and we all must have had the exact same thought... What is going to happen?... The leader of the grey men then yells out an order in his language, and the others raise all of us to our feet, holding their machetes to the back of our necks. I look over to see Naadia crying. She looks terrified. She’s just staring ahead at the fly-infested fence, assuming... We all did...

A handful of the grey men in front us are now opening up a loose part of the fence, like two gate doors. On the other side, through the gap in the fence, all I can see is darkness... The leader again gives out an order, and next thing I know, most of the commune members are being shoved, forced forward into the gap of the fence to the other side! I can hear Beth, Chantal and Naadia crying. Moses, through the gag in his mouth, he pleads to them ‘Please! Please stop!’ As I’m watching what I think is kidnapping – or worse, murder happen right in front of me, I realize that the only ones not being shoved through to the other side were me and Angela. Tye is the last to be moved through - but then the leader tells the others to stop... He stares at Tye for a good while, before ordering his men not to push him through. Instead to move him back next to the two of us... Stood side by side and with our hands tied behind us, all the three of us can do is watch on as the rest of the commune vanish over the other side of the fence. One by one... The last thing I see is Naadia looking back at me, begging me to help her. But there’s nothing I can do. I can’t save her. She was the only reason I was here, and I was powerless to do anything... And that’s when the darkness on the other side just seems to swallow them...

I try searching through the trees and darkness to find Naadia but I don’t see her! I don’t see any of them. I can’t even hear them! It was as though they weren’t there anymore – that they were somewhere else! The leader then comes back in front of me. He stares up to me and I realize he’s holding a knife. I look to Angela and Tye, as though I’m asking them to help me, but they were just as helpless as I was. I can feel the leader of the grey men staring through me, as though through my soul, and then I see as he lifts his knife higher – as high as my throat... Thinking this is going to be the end, I cry uncontrollably, just begging him not to kill me. The leader looks confused as I try and muffle out the words, and just as I think my throat is going to be slashed... he cuts loose the gag tied around my mouth – drawing blood... I look down to him, confused, before I’m turned around and he cuts my hands free from my back... I now see the other grey men are doing the same for Tye and Angela – to our confusion...

I stare back down to the leader, and he looks at me... And not knowing if we were safe now or if the worst was still yet to come, I put my hands together as though I’m about to pray, and I start begging him - before he yells ‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP!’ at me. This time raising the knife to my throat. He looks at me with wide eyes, as though he’s asking me ‘Are you going to be quiet?’ I nod yes and there’s a long pause all around... and the leader says, in plain English ‘You go back! Your friends gone now! They dead! You no return here! GO!’ He then shoves me backwards and the other men do the same to Tye and Angela, in the opposite direction of the fence. The three of us now make our way away from the men, still yelling at us to leave, where again, we hear the familiar word of ‘ASILI! ASILI!’... But most of all, we were making our way away from the fence - and whatever danger or evil that we didn’t know was lurking on the other side... The other side... where the others now were...

If you’re wondering why the three of us were spared from going in there, we only managed to come up with one theory... Me and Angela were white, and so if we were to go missing, there would be more chance of people coming to look for us. I know that’s not good to say - but it’s probably true... As for Tye, he was mixed-race, and so maybe they thought one white parent was enough for caution...

The three of us went back to our empty commune – to collect our things and get the hell out of this place we never should have come to. Angela said the plan was to make our way back to the river, flag down a boat and get a ride back down to Kinshasa. Tye didn’t agree with this plan. He said as long as his friends were still here, he wasn’t going anywhere. Angela said that was stupid and the only way we could help them was to contact the authorities as soon as possible. To Tye’s and my own surprise... I agreed with him. I said the only reason I came here was to make sure Naadia didn’t get into any trouble, and if I left her in there with God knows what, this entire trip would have been for nothing... I suggested that our next plan of action was to find a way through the other side of the fence and look for the others... It was obvious by now that me and Tye really didn’t like each other, which at the time, seemed to be for no good reason - but for the first time... he looked at me with respect. We both made it perfectly clear to Angela that we were staying to look for the others...

Angela said we were both dumb fuck’s and were gonna get ourselves killed. I couldn’t help but agree with her. Staying in this jungle any longer than we needed to was basically a death wish for us – like when you decide to stay in a house once you know it’s haunted. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to go to the other side... Not because I felt responsible for Naadia – that I had an obligation to go and save her... but because I had to know what was there. What was in there, hiding amongst the darkness of the jungle?? I was afraid – beyond terrified actually, but something in there was calling me... and for some reason, I just had to find out what it was! Not knowing what mystery lurked behind that fence was making me want to rip off my own face... peel by peel...

Angela went silent for a while. You could clearly tell she wanted to leave us here and save her own skin. But by leaving us here, she knew she would be leaving us to die. Neither me nor Tye knew anything about the jungle – let alone how to look for people missing in it. Angela groaned and said ‘...Fuck it’. She was going in with us... and so we planned on how we were going to get to the other side without detection. We eventually realized we just had to risk it. We had to find a part of the fence, hack our way through and then just enter it... and that’s what we did. Angela, with a machete she bought at Mbandaka, hacked her way through two different parts, creating a loose gate of sorts. When she was done, she gave the go ahead for me and Tye to tug the loose piece of fence away with a long piece of rope...

We now had our entranceway. All three of us stared into the dark space between the fence, which might as well have been an entrance to hell. Each of us took a deep breath, and before we dare to go in, Angela turns to say to us... ‘Remember. You guys asked for this.’ None of us really wanted to go inside there – not really. I think we knew we probably wouldn’t get out alive. I had my secret reason, and Tye had his. We each grabbed each other by the hand, as though we thought we might easily get lost from each other... and with a final anxious breath, Angela lead the way through... Through the gap in the fence... Through the first leaves, branches and bush. Through to the other side... and finally into the darkness... Like someone’s eyes when they fall asleep... not knowing when or if they’ll wake up...

This is where I have to stop - I... I can't go on any further... I thought I could when I started this, bu-... no... This is all I can say - for now anyway. What really happened to us in there, I... I don’t know if I can even put it into words. All I can say is that... what happened to us already, it was nothing compared to what we would eventually go through. What we found... Even if I told you what happens next, you wouldn’t believe me... but you would also wish I never had. There’s still a part of me now that thinks it might not have been real. For the sake of my soul - for the things I was made to do in there... I really hope this is just one big nightmare... Even if the nightmare never ends... just please don’t let it be real...

In case I never finish this story – in case I’m not alive to tell it... I’ll leave you with this... I googled the word ‘Asili’ a year ago, trying to find what it meant... It’s a Swahili word. It means...

The Beginning...

End of Part II

I uhm... I don’t really know how to begin with this... My- my name is Henry Cartwright. I’m twenty-six years old, and... I have a story to tell...

I’ve never told this to anyone, God forbid, but something happened to me a couple of years ago. Something horrible – beyond horrible. In fact, it happened to me and seven others. Only two of them are still alive - as far as I’m aware. The reason that I’m telling this now is because... well, it’s been eating me up inside. The last two years have been absolute torture, and I can’t tell this to anyone without being sent back to the loony bin. The two others that survived, I can’t talk to them about it because they won’t speak to me - and I don’t blame them. I’ve been riddled with such unbearable guilt at what happened two years ago, and if I don’t say something now, I don’t... I don’t know how much longer I can last - if I will even last, whether I say anything or not...

Before I tell you this story - about what happened to the lot of us, there’s something you need to understand... What I’m about to tell you, you won't believe, and I don’t expect you to. I couldn’t give two shits if anyone believed me or not. I’m doing this for me - for those who died and for the two who still have to live on with this. I’m going to tell you the story. I’m going to tell you everything! And you’re gonna judge me. Even if you don't believe me, you’re gonna judge me. In fact, you’ll despise me... I’ve been despising myself. For the past two years, all I’ve done since I’ve been out of that jungle is numb myself with drink and drugs - numb enough that I don’t even recall ever being inside that place... That only makes it worse. Far worse! But I can’t help myself...

I’ve gotten all the mental health support I can get. I’ve been in and out of the psychiatric ward, given a roundabout of doctors and a never-ending supply of pills. But what help is all that when you can’t even tell the truth about what really happened to you? As far as the doctors know - as far as the world knows, all that happened was that a group of stupid adults, who thought they knew how to solve the world’s problems, got themselves lost in one of the most dangerous parts of the world... If only they knew how dangerous that place really is - and that’s the real reason why I’m telling my story now... because as long as that place exists - as long as no one does anything about it, none of us are safe. NONE OF US... I journeyed into the real Heart of Darkness... The locals, they... they call it The Asili...

Like I said, uhm... this all happened around two years ago. I was living a comfortable life in north London at the time - waiting tables and washing dishes for a living. That’s what happens when you drop out of university, I guess. Life was good though, you know? Like, it was comfortable... I looked forward to the football at the weekend, and honestly, London isn’t that bad of a place to live. It’s busy as hell - people and traffic everywhere, but London just seems like one of those places that brings the whole world to your feet...

One day though, I - I get a text from my girlfriend Naadia – or at the time, my ex-girlfriend Naadia. She was studying in the States at the time and... we tried to keep it long distance, but you know how it goes - you just lose touch. Anyways, she texts me, wanting to know if we can do a video chat or something, and I said yes - and being the right idiot I was, I thought maybe she wanted to try things out again. That wasn't exactly the case. I mean, she did say that she missed me and was always thinking about me, and I thought the same, but... she actually had some news... She had this group of friends, you see – an activist group. They called themselves the, uhm... B.A.D.S. - what that stood for I don’t know. They were basically this group of activist students that wanted equal rights for all races, genders and stuff... Anyways, Naadia tells me that her and her friends were all planning this trip to Africa together - to the Congo, actually - and she says that they’re going to start their own commune there, in the ecosystem of the rainforest...

I know what you’re thinking. It sounds... well it sounds bat-shit mad! And that’s what I said. Naadia did somewhat agree with me, but her reasoning was that the world isn’t getting any more equal and it’s never really going to change – and so her friends said ‘Why not start our own community in paradise!’... I’m not sure a war-torn country riddled with disease counts as paradise, but I guess to an American, any exotic jungle might seem that way. Anyways, Naadia then says to me that the group are short of people going, and she wondered if I was interested in joining their commune. I of course said no – no fucking thank you, but she kept insisting. She mentioned that the real reason we broke up was because her friends had been planning this trip for a long time, and she didn’t think our relationship was worth carrying on anymore. She still loved me, she said, and that she wanted us to get back together. As happy as I was to hear she wanted me back, this didn’t exactly sound like the Naadia I knew. I mean, Naadia was smart – really smart, actually, and she did get carried away with politics and that... but even for her, this – this all felt quite mad...

I told her I’d think about it for a week, and... against my better judgement I - I said yes. I said yes, not because I wanted to go - course I didn’t want to go! Who seriously wants to go live in the middle of the fucking jungle??... I said yes because I still loved her - and I was worried about her. I was worried she’d get into some real trouble down there, and I wanted to make sure she’d be alright. I just assumed the commune idea wouldn’t work and when Naadia and her friends realized that, they would all sod off back to the States. I just wanted to be there in case anything did happen. Maybe I was just as much of an idiot as them lot... We were all idiots...

Well, a few months and Malaria shots later, I was boarding a plane at Heathrow Airport and heading to Kinshasa - capital of the, uhm... Democratic Congo. My big sister Ellie, she - she begged me not to go. She said I was putting myself in danger and... I agreed, but I felt like I didn’t really have a choice. My girlfriend was going to a dangerous place, and I felt I had to do something about it. My sister, she uhm - she basically raised me. We both came from a dodgy family you see, and so I always saw her as kind of a mum. It was hard saying goodbye to her because... I didn’t really know what was going to happen. But I told her I’d be fine and that I was coming back, and she said ‘You better!’...

Anyways, uhm - I get on the plane and... and that’s when things already start to get weird. It was a long flight so I tried to get plenty of sleep and... that’s when the dreams start - or the uhm... the same dream... I dreamt I was already in the jungle, but - I couldn’t move. I was just... floating through the trees and that, like I was watching a David Attenborough documentary or something. Next thing I know there’s this... fence, or barrier of sorts running through the jungle. It was made up of these long wooden spikes, crisscrossed with one another – sort of like a long row of x’s. But, on the other side of this fence, the rest of the jungle was like – pitch black! Like you couldn't see what was on the other side. But I can remember I wanted to... I wanted to go to the other side - like, it was calling me... I feel myself being pulled through to the other side of the fence and into the darkness, and I feel terrified, but - excited at the same time! And that’s when I wake up back in the plane... I’m all panicked and covered in sweat, and so I go to the toilet to splash water on my face – and that’s when I realize... I really don’t want to be doing this... All I think now of doing is landing in Kinshasa and catching the first plane back to Heathrow... I’m still asking myself now why I never did...

I land in Kinshasa, and after what seemed like an eternity, I work my way out the airport to find Naadia and her friends. Their plane landed earlier in the day and so I had to find them by one pm sharp, as we all had a river boat to catch by three. I eventually find Naadia and the group waiting for me outside the terminal doors – they looked like they’d been waiting a while. As much anxiety I had at the time about all of this, it still felt really damn good to see Naadia again – and she seemed more than happy to see me too! We hugged and made out a little – it had been a while after all, and then she introduced me to her friends. I was surprised to see there was only six of them, as I just presumed there was going to be a lot more - but who in their right mind would agree to go along with all of this??...

The first six members of this group was Beth, Chantal and Angela. Beth and Angela were a couple, and Chantal was Naadia’s best friend. Even though we didn’t know each other, Chantal gave me a big hug as though she did. That’s Americans for you, I guess. The other three members were all lads: Tye, Jerome and Moses. Moses was the leader, and he was this tall intimidating guy who looked like he only worked out his chest – and he wore this gold cross necklace as though to make himself look important. Moses wasn’t his real name, that’s just what he called himself. He was a kind of religious nut of sorts, but he looked more like an American football player than anything...

Right from the beginning, Moses never liked me. Whenever he even acknowledged me, he would call me some name like Oliver Twist or Mary Poppins – either that or he would try mimicking my accent to make me sound like a chimney sweeper or something. Jerome was basically a copy and paste version of Moses. It was like he idealized him or something - always following him around and repeating whatever he said... And then there was Tye. Even for a guy, I could tell that Tye was good-looking. He kind of looked like a Rastafarian, but his dreads only went down to his neck. Out of the three of them, Tye was the only one who bothered to shake my hand – but something about it seemed disingenuous, like someone had forced him to do it...

Oh, I uhm... I think I forgot to mention it, but... everyone in the group was black. The only ones who weren’t was me and Angela... Angela wasn’t part of the B.A.D.S. She was just Beth’s girlfriend. But Angela, she was – she was pretty cool. She was a little older than the rest of us and she apparently had an army background. I mean, it wasn’t hard to tell - she had short boy’s hair and looked like she did a lot of rock climbing or something. She didn’t really talk much and mostly kept to herself - but it actually made me feel easier with her there – not because of... you know? But because neither of us were B.A.D.S. members. From what Naadia told me, Moses was hoping to create a black utopia of sorts. His argument was that humanity began in Africa and so as an African-American group, Africa would be the perfect destination for their commune... I guess me and Angela tagging along kind of ruined all that. As much as Moses really didn’t like me, Tye... it turned out Tye hated me for different reasons. Sometimes I would just catch him staring at me, like he just hated the shit out of me... I wouldn't learn till later why that was...

What happens next was the journey up the Congo River... Not much really happened so I’ll just try my best to skip through it. Luckily for us the river was right next to the airport, so reaching it didn’t take long, which meant we got to avoid the hours-long traffic. As bad as I thought London traffic was, Kinshasa was apparently much worse. We get to the river and... it’s huge – I mean, really huge! The Congo River was apparently one of the largest rivers in the world and it basically made the Thames look like a puddle. Anyways, we get there and there’s this guy waiting for us by an old wooden boat with a motor. I thought he looked pretty shady, but Moses apparently arranged the whole thing. This guy, he only ever spoke French so I never really understood what he was saying, but Moses spoke some French and he pays him the money. We all jump in the boat with our things and the man starts taking us up the river...

The journey up river was good and bad. The region we were going to was days away, but it gave me time to reacquaint with Naadia... and the scenery, it was - it was unbelievable! To begin with, there was people on the river everywhere - fishing in their boats or canoes and ferries more crammed than London Underground. At the halfway point of our journey, we stopped at this huge, crowded port town called Mbandaka to get supplies - and after that, everything was different... The river, I mean. The scenery - it was like we left civilization behind or something... Everything was green and exotic – it... it honestly felt like we stepped back in time with the dinosaurs... Someone on the boat did say the Congo had its own version of the Loch Ness Monster somewhere – that it’s a water dinosaur that lives deep in the jungle. It’s called the uhm... Makole Bembey or something like that...Where we were going, I couldn’t decide whether I was hoping to see it or not...

I did look forward to seeing some animals on this trip, and Naadia told me we would probably get to see hippos or elephants - but that was a total let down. We could hear birds and monkeys in the trees along the river but we never really saw them... I guess I thought this boat ride was going to be a safari of sorts. We did see a group of crocodiles sunbathing by the riverbanks – and if there was one thing on that boat ride I feared the most, it was definitely crocodiles. I think I avoided going near the edge of the boat the entire way there...

The heat on the boat was unbearable, and for like half the journey it just poured with rain. But the humidity was like nothing I ever experienced! In the last two days of the boat ride, all it did was rain – constantly. I mean, we were all drenched! The river started to get more and more narrow – like, narrow enough for only one boat to fit through. The guy driving the boat started speeding round the bends of the river at a dangerous speed. We honestly didn’t know why he was in a rush all of a sudden. We curve round one bend and that’s when we all notice a man waving us down by the side of the bank. It was like he had been waiting for us. Turns out this was also planned. This man, uh... Fabrice, I think his name was. He was to take us through the rainforest to where the group had decided to build their commune. Moses paid the boat driver the rest of the money, and without even a goodbye, the guy turns his boat round and speeds off! It was like he didn’t want to be in this region any longer than he had to... It honestly made me very nervous...

We trekked on foot for a couple of days, and honestly, the humidity was even worse inside the rainforest. But the mosquitos, that truly was the fucking worst! Most of us got very bad diarrhea too, and I think we all had to stop about a hundred times just so someone could empty their guts behind a tree... On the last day, the rain was just POURING down and I couldn’t decide whether I was too hot or too cold. I remember thinking that I couldn’t go on any longer. I was exhausted – we... we all were...

But just as this journey seemed like it would never end, the guide, Fabrice, he suddenly just stops. He stops and is just... frozen, just looking ahead and not moving an inch. Moses and Jerome tried snapping him out of it, but then he just suddenly starts taking steps back, like he hit a dead end. Fabrice’s English wasn’t the best, but he just starts saying ‘I go back! You go! You go! I go back!’ Basically what he meant was that we had to continue without him. Moses tried convincing him to stay – he even offered him more money, but Fabrice was clearly too afraid to go on. Before he left, he did give us a map with directions on where to find the place we were wanting to go. He wished us all good luck, but then he stops and was just staring at me, dead in the eye... and he said ‘Good luck Englund’... Like me, Fabrice liked his football, and I even let him keep my England soccer cap I was wearing... But when he said that to me... it was like he was wishing me luck most of all - like I needed it the most...

It was only later that day that we reached the place where we planned to build our commune. The rain had stopped by now and we found ourselves in the middle of a clearing inside the rainforest. This is where our commune was going to be. When everyone realized we’d reached our destination, every one of us dropped our backpacks and fell to the floor. I think we were all ready to die... This place was surprisingly quiet, and you could only hear the birds singing in the trees and the sound of swooshing that we later learned was from a nearby stream...

In the next few days, we all managed to get our strength back. We pitched our tents and started working out the next steps for building the commune. Moses was the leader, and you could tell he was trying to convince everyone that he knew what he was doing - but the guy was clearly out of his depth - we all were... That was except Angela. She pointed out that we needed to make a perimeter around the area – set up booby traps and trip wires. The nearby stream had fish, and she said she would teach us all how to spear fish. She also showed us how to makes bows and arrows and spears for hunting. Honestly it just seemed like there was nothing she couldn't do – and if she wasn’t there, I... I doubt anyone of us would have survived out there for long...

On that entire journey, from landing in Kinshasa, the boat ride up the river and hiking through the jungle... whenever I managed to get some sleep, I... I kept having these really uncomfortable dreams. It was always the same dream. I’m in the jungle, floating through the trees and bushes before I’m stopped in my tracks by the same make-shift barrier-fence – and the pure darkness on the other side... and every time, I’m wanting to go enter it. I don’t know why because, this part of the dream always terrifies me - but it’s like I have to find what’s on the other side... Something was calling me...

On the third night of our new commune though, I dreamt something different. I dreamt I was actually on the other side! I can’t remember much of what I saw, but it was dark – really dark! But I could walk... I was walking through the darkness and I could only just make out the trunks of trees and the occasional branch or vine... But then I saw a light – ahead only twenty metres away. I tried walking towards the light but it was hard – like when you walk or run in your dreams but you barely move anywhere. I do catch up to the light, and it’s just a light – glowing... but then I enter it... I enter and I realize what I’ve entered’s now a clearing. A perfect circle inside the jungle. Dark green vegetation around the curves - and inside this circle – right bang in the middle... is one single tree... or at least the trunk of a tree – a dead, rotting tree...

It had these long, snake-like roots that curled around the circles’ edges, and the wood was very dark – almost black in colour. A pathway leads up to the tree, and I start walking along it... The closer I get to this tree, I see just how tall it must have been originally. A long stump of a tree, leaning over me like a tower. Its shadow comes over me and I feel like I’ve been swallowed up. But then the tree’s shadow moves away from me, as though beyond this jungle’s darkness is a hidden rotating sun... and when the shadow disappears... I see a face. High above me on the bark of the tree, carved into it. It looked like a mask – like an African tribal mask. The face was round and it only had slits for eyes and a mouth... but somehow... the face looked like it was in agony... the most unbearable agony. I could feel it! It was like... torture. Like being stabbed all over a million times, or having your own skin peeled off while you’re just standing there!...

I then feel something down by my ankles. I look down to my feet, and around me, around the circle... the floor of the circle is covered with what look like hands! Severed hands! Scattered all over! I try and raise my feet, panicking, I’m too scared to step on them – but then the hands start moving, twitching their fingers. They start crawling like spiders all around the circle! The ones by my feet start to crawl up my legs and I’m too scared to brush them off! I now feel myself almost being molested by them, but I can’t even move or do anything! I feel an unbearable weight come over me and I fall to the floor and... that’s when I hear a zip...

End of Part I

Every day is another desperate attempt
To outrun the racing claustrophobic thoughts
Every night is a spectacular failure
Ending in inhumane yet self-inflicted torture

Each morning seems a little colder than the one before
When lightless eyes paint the world in gloomy shades of gray
Painful disappointment and self-loathing have become too much to bear
And any will to live is quickly lost in the suffocating presence of dismay

Once again reliving every dreadful memory
While a broken heart yearns for a release
Pale hands shake clasped around the key
But the cunt won’t dare to shoot
Deeply in love with the visceral torment of suicidal agony    

Children, forsaken and shaped by tragedy
Following instinctual urges into the throes of desperation
Savor the bitter taste of cold melancholy
Scarring every masochist clinging to a lifetime of suffering

The promise of a beautiful tomorrow
That’s how she lured you into the bloodbath of life
Abandoned at the side of this gray road
To shoulder the unbearable burden of mother’s disappointment

But here the pain ends
Inside the knotted end of a rope
A death portrait craved into pale skin
Welcome

I kept reading. The tremors stopped.

TW: Domestic Abuse

Link to Part 1

Link to Part 2

Link to Part 3

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

“Here Jimmy, you got one left!”

Stars raced across my vision, a fresh hit of sweetness and fluorescent lights jolting me into the present. A small, multicolored box sat in front of me, my senses sharpening all at once as I became aware of the cool metal table my arms rested on. I was surrounded by a number of faces, most of them looking at me intently. I couldn’t make out any of the details, save for the woman standing in front of me. She wore a wide smile, her rosy cheeks accenting her auburn hair, errant strands spilling out from her messy bun. I tried to shift my focus to orient myself, but my head refused to swivel. I’m in James’ Life. Right. The revelation settled in, I watched my hands reach out toward the box, stale air wafting errant scents of warm food and sanitizer to my nose. I could feel my muscles moving, stretching my arm out, but the intentions weren’t my own. I was a passenger in this body, but every sensation was striking. To donate your life experience is to catalog your existence, in a way; I experience the moments that define you in excruciating detail. I just wish I could know how many moments that is. Sometimes it's single digits, sometimes I’m in here for what would be days. My sensations never dull either; every smell, sound, even emotion is collected into some fathomless reservoir, shipped off to Vivi for who knows what. 

“Thanks Mama!” my mouth exclaimed, the voice of a young James Clancey bleeding out of it. My slender fingers worked the wrapping paper off, shrill tears echoing into the room. At this moment, I stared intently at the gift, a lump was forming in my throat. James had finally unwrapped the gift, his knowledge and memories beginning to mingle with my own thoughts. My senses fading into the background, James took over as I stared down at a collection of cards, a number of foreign faces smiling back from the cardboard. Many of them decorative and ornate, I poured over the intricacies of each card with care, a stream of hot tears leaking from my eyes. Glassey and wet, I wiped a streak of tears onto my sleeve as my attention fixated on the last card. My mouth fell open, nearly dropping the box as I stood.

“You found a Babe Ruth card?!” My heart was hammering in my chest, my excitement irradiating the air around me. My sight was now locked onto my mother, tears welling up within her as well. With a silent smile, she nodded, playing with her crucifix necklace mindlessly. 

“Happy Birthday,” she whispered, her joyous tears muffling her voice. I dropped the box back onto the table, stretching myself across the coarse iron table to receive her embrace. A chorus of “awwws” erupted around us, my face buried in her chest. I felt a tear drip onto my head, my hair catching it like a dewdrop.

“Jeez, Mel, you’re givin’ the boy a shower,” a voice said, my eyes opening to retrieve its owner. Papa stood at the end of the table, holding a camcorder with a playful smirk creasing his rosy cheeks. I giggled at the sight of him, pieces of frosting still stuck to his mustache. Mama cocked her head to the side, a similar smirk spreading from her pink, teary-eyed face. She stuck her tongue out at him, laughter joining the noise. I couldn’t stop smiling; I was so happy I could die, my excitement at the thought of showing off my cards to my friends overwhelming me. I tucked them neatly in the bottom of the box, handing my new prized possession to Mama for safe keeping.

“Guard them with your LIFE,” I shouted, Mama giving me a mock salute in reply. I got down from the table, adrenaline coursing through me as I ran to the jungle gym. Some of my friends joined me, racing to tie their shoes as I galloped up the stairs. It crunched under my feet, bits of peeling paint flaking off and drifting to the rubber floor silently. It wasn’t the nicest place for a party I know, but Mama and Daddy were doing their best. She did find a Babe Ruth, after all. Even though Daddy was busy working, which sucks, at least he’ll be home tomorrow! I just hope I can show him the card before he finds it in my room. I’ll just wait for him right outside like Mama does sometimes. Satisfied with my rationale, I ducked into the playset’s plastic tube, my friends at my heels. 

“Last one down the slide has to smell Blake’s shoes!” I declared behind me, a chorus of  determined shouts bouncing around the inside of the tube. I giggled to myself, hands falling over themselves as I crawled frantically toward the end of the tube. A screwhead dug into my palm, the momentary sharpness disrupting my momentum. Hands faltering, I slumped to one side in pain, a hand running into my shoe with a thud. I looked back and saw a train of my friends, head to tail, scrambling to make it to the slide before anyone else, almost climbing over themselves in desperation. I don’t blame them; I could practically smell Blake from here. I righted myself, resuming my army crawl toward the mouth of the tube, the pain drowned out by a newfound determination. I was the first one out (obviously), clambering awkwardly as I raced to the slide. I heard shouts and laughter behind me, but I never stopped to look back; I was NOT going to lose on my own birthday. I launched myself down the slide, rocketing to the bottom like a torpedo. My feet touched rubber, and I knew I had won. My friends filtered out of the slide one by one, a groan of protest erupting from none other than Blake, spilling onto the ground in dead last. 

“Sucks to suck, Blake,” one of my friends sneered. “Gotta be faster than that!”

“Ugh, whatever,” he grunted, annoyed. He dug his heel into the ground procedurally, his shoe sloughing off his foot and onto the rubber. I guess he is last pretty often, huh. He picked it up, put it to his nose, and sucked in a long, dramatic inhale. Some cheered, but most (including me) groaned and fake gagged, a smug smile smeared across Blake’s face in triumph. 

“Nastyyyyy,” I rasped, Blake’s full cheeks bouncing as he laughed. “Okay: Blake’s it!” The triumph faded from Blake’s face at those words, my friends and I scattering around, trying to put as much distance as possible between us and him. Laughs erupted once more, the game in full swing now. 

I can look around. 

The thought drove my blood cold. I was ripped out of the moment, dread rippling through me like a lightning strike. I don’t have autonomy over my actions while I’m in someone’s Life; I’m at their mercy, moving with them. Somehow, though, I knew the statement to be true. The laughter dulled around me, my consciousness still trying to swallow the thought. It was like I was thrust underwater, unable to swim back up to rejoin James and his party. The cursed idea rattled around my head as James continued to play with his friends, faces coming in and out of focus sporadically. Despite the finality of the statement, it felt more like a warning than an invitation. Every muscle in my neck stiffened, consciously trying to keep my eyes locked forward, a smile still painted on my face as James enjoyed his party. At this point, he had been playing in the indoor jungle gym for a while, the mess of other boys and girls falling over themselves in glee. It took all of my concentration to refrain from testing my own sight, James’ head whipping around erratically as his friends squealed with joy. 

Don’t do it. You can’t. You aren’t supposed to be able to, so don’t. 

A deep belly laugh bellowed out to my left, the roar of the children happily engulfing the sound. Despite my intense concentration, I tried to anticipate James’ movement. Caught up in the game, though, I realized all too late that James wouldn’t try to look for its source. I shifted James' head, his eyes dragged along with it unwillingly, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

At the far end of the room, a rotund man stood clapping monotonously, swinging his arms like a cymbal monkey. His smile was three sizes too large, his open mouth showing rows of cartoonishly large, blocky teeth. His eyes were mismatched; pupils dilated and soulless, his left eye was the size of a baseball, his right shriveled like a grape, drifting lazily as he laughed. His nose had been chewed off, like a dog toy had been glued on where a nose should be. His skin was pink and distended, large sections of his head and cheeks completely missing, forming massive divots like a snowball. Streaks of spittle nestled into some of the divots from his cavernous mouth, glistening in the harsh lighting. His body itself was grotesque, appearing as if someone attempted to build him by playing darts with the limbs. Varicose veins accented his pink legs, snaking all the way to his neck before bulging out angrily. My gaze anchored to him, I watched as his laugh lost its warmth in an instant. His smile and clapping never faltered, but his laugh now sounded more repetitive, procedural even. Like a robot trying to mimic a laugh. His gaze bore through James and into me, as if trying to rip me out and punish me for seeing him. At the same time, though, there were no thoughts buried in his pupils, no intention behind his staring; he merely was, existing solely to clap and laugh. The scene lasted for only a second, but his stare continues to seep into me, even now. James seemed unfettered, somehow, turning his head back once more, chasing a small girl toward the monkey bars. 

“Jimmyyyyy. Ten minute warning.” The voice was James’ mom’s, her sing-song tone cutting through the clamor of the party. James scanned the crowd of parents, eyes finally finding her once more. I tried to catch any details about the parents’ faces, hoping to find a distraction from what I just saw. I didn’t dare push the limits of my control further, though, and yielded to James once more, my facial muscles pulled into a scowl.

“Okayyyyy,” he hollered, one friend sneaking up behind to tag him on the back. I swung around blindly, trying to tag him back, only to feel my arm collide with the boy’s face with a dull thwap. I felt James trying to turn around, but my vision began fading once more, the journey through James’ Life taking me to a new memory.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 

My thoughts were a hurricane, spiraling around an epicenter that was the man’s face. I grasped desperately at any rationalization that came to me, only for them to crumble upon further inspection. Was he real? Is that a part of James’ memories, or was that my own doing? Why was I allowed to move? Who allowed me to move? Questions kept buzzing around my skull as memories of James breezed past me. More problems for later. The only moments I actively remember were meeting the Virmani twins and talking to James’ crush for the first time, but my body remembered everything else. Moments of stinging cheeks from calloused hands, heat behind my tear stained cheeks, the smell of burnt dough and alcohol, a burning in my throat from Dad’s drinks, everything. In hindsight, I worried that if I focused too much, I would find more monsters accidentally. So I stayed back, attempting to retreat into my thoughts while my body did its job. My introspection stopped shorter than I wanted, though, as some omniscient sensation stapled me back to James, forcing my active participation once more. My consciousness merged with James once more, in this moment forced to live both with him and as him.

I was home. Stepping through the front door was like being sucked into a wind tunnel, the grumble of Frankie’s car outside fading in afterthought, droned out by the crash of porcelain and glass. The front room was trashed. Like the aftermath of a tornado, broken bits of picture frames and fine china littered across the already stained carpet. Stripes of blood painted our old end table like some satanic altar, books and jewelry scattered haphazardly around it like offerings. One of Mom’s plants had fallen off of the shelf too, dirt and shards of planter nestling into the fraying carpet. One of the two light fixtures had burst, opaque lightbulb glass resting atop our stereo system in the corner, itself sporting a new, saddening hole in its speaker. My eyes digested the scene slowly, eventually centering on our small kitchen, bottles and playing cards splayed across the countertop. Sorry Dad, I have to leave my shoes on for this. Thanking him and Mom silently for getting me steel toes, I crunched through the weathered living room, intent on finding any signs of life, the occasional shatter of glassware cutting the air like a symbol crash. The kitchen wasn’t much better; the blades of the blender were completely dislodged from the rest of it, the smell of charred bread and candle wax pooling across the crumb-littered countertop. Accenting the drab, lifeless kitchen was Papa, on the floor by our dishwasher, legs tucked into his chest. He sat with his eyes clamped shut, muttering to himself, cheeks flushed and caked with sweat. I watched his eyes dart beneath their lids, the Lord’s Prayer becoming more and more audible as quiet descended. My shoes caught on the lip where the tile met the carpet, a shy crunch pulling Papa out of his trance. Bewildered, unspoken prayers clinging to his lips, his eyes fluttered open, two rippling puddles of fear staring back at me. He mouthed something I couldn’t comprehend, his anguished expression fueling the righteous fire that had been building. He can break our stuff, fine, whatever; this was too far. 

“Papa, wh–”

A hollow crash sliced through my question, ceramic shards and dirt from some flower pot showering me from the hallway. The sound of a door clicking closed followed behind, the dirt and debris settling noiselessly across the hallway. One especially eager piece of pottery nicked my cheek, a thin red line of blood slowly weeping onto my shirt. Mom got me this one. I didn’t even hear Papa’s protests, the whelming rage surging out of me, carrying me into the hallway. I knew they were in their bedroom, some shortsighted attempt at hiding their arguments from me. As if I couldn’t hear it from my bedroom directly across the hallway. I half glanced into it as I stormed toward my parents room, catching a glimpse of my dresser tipped over, baseball cards crushed beneath it. My bat was missing too. I grasped the handle in what felt like slow motion, my knuckles white with furious anticipation. I couldn't understand why, but a memory of playing shortstop for the first time surfaced as I yanked the door open. I don’t get to play it a lot, but it's my favorite position. Shortstop required lots of forethought and dexterity, which is probably what saved me from the saucer careening at my head. The world resumed its normal speed as I ducked reflexively, a warm yellow light spilling out from my parents’ room as the saucer greeted the wall behind me. The air reeked of both liquor and incense, assaulting my nose and forcing tears to my eyes. The sheets were literally torn off of the bed, errant pieces of cloth flush to the mattress. Books and jewelry littered the floor around the bed, Mom’s nightstand knocked over beside them. Scarlet stains adorned the cedar chest on Dad’s side of the bed, pieces of his lamp spilling off of it onto a pile of dirty clothes. Mom’s lamp was still on somehow, its yellow glare defiant amidst the chaos, monstrous shadows stretching across the mounted TV.  

It was the worst I’d seen them.

Mom, her knuckles white and trembling, clutched Dad’s nightstand defensively, a trail of cuts and bruises spiraling up her outstretched arms. Pieces of her sheer tank top were slashed to ribbons, her pale stomach decorated purple and brown to match her arms. She was in her underwear, a mess of blood and dirt running down one leg. One eye was swollen shut, her other eye trained on the figure in front of me, his back turned. Despite his own lacerations, matted black hair, and imposing stance, I knew it was Dad. He was shirtless, his sweatpants stained dark maroon with slivers of glass caught in the coarse material. His many white scars reflected forebodingly in the yellow light, accenting his worn, calloused knuckles. It took me too long to realize that’s where my bat ended up; dangling at his side, his other arm extended toward Mom. 

“Lying BITCH,” he barked, his tone rooting me to the ground. His massive silhouette dwarfed my mother, eyes never leaving him. Dad told me never to interrupt them, especially after poker night, but something in me knew this time was different. I wouldn’t be granted enough time to figure out what though; his arm was already cocked back, bloody fingers encasing a baseball like ruby glass. Time slowed down again, his fingers reflexively shifting the laces to a fastball. We all knew he had a cannon for an arm too. Air left my lungs, a dull, wet thud ringing in my ears as the shadow of Mom crumpled to the floor, a gurgling moan sputtering weakly from behind the bed. My brows knit themselves together, my vision already blurring. I don’t even remember speaking, but my body remembered.

“Dad.”

He whipped around almost brazenly, his greasy moustache tinged pink. One large laceration trailed up from his belly button to his collarbone, bits of pink muscle tissue peeking out like an undershirt. He was missing a tooth, a deep maroon leaking from the unoccupied space. His pupils were pinpricks, blue veins thrumming at his temples. Rage had flooded his vision, but flickered out like a candle at the sight of me. Caught between a gasp and a sob, he blinked tears away as my bat clattered to the ground, Mom’s gasps bloating the sudden stillness in the air. 

“Oh my poor Jim,” he said, rushing at me with open arms. Even with his wound, he didn’t hesitate as he draped his large frame on me, a poor imitation of a hug. He reeked of blood and booze, a smell so thick you could choke on it. He smelled like the pennies Tony would use for his weird drinking games. My arms glued to my sides, I watched his shoulders bounce rhythmically, his sobs stifled by my jacket.

“The devil got your Mother,” he choked out between sobs. “Look at what she did to your poor Dad. I’m so sorry you had to see that.”

I blinked away tears, setting my jaw on his shoulder. He’s trying to blame the devil again. Not this time. I tried to break out of the hug, but his grip slipped tighter around me, his meaty fingers clenched around my jacket.

“S-She said she had more money for Daddy, you know. I’ve always told you lying’s bad, didn’t I Jim? I don’t want you to be a liar like her, okay son?”

Mute as a fish, all I could do was nod, my face burning.

“Daddy loves you vewwy much, you know that son? V–very, ve–”

Without warning, his body shuddered, hiccupping audibly. After a few moments, his body stilled, a long exhale flattening his back. The stench hit me first. Bile and booze. Bile, blood, and booze. I felt sticky and claustrophobic, the smell and his grip racing to see who could put me in a panic attack first. I wouldn’t let either of them win, though, as I dug my elbow into his sternum. He yelped like a wild dog, stumbling backward as I freed myself, bits of orange spittle swinging from his lip. He looked ugly, his scowl twisting his face into a fleshy spiral like a cinnamon roll, glazed and sticky. I was terrified, my own heartbeat echoing in my skull. My body moved on its own now, though, a heaving cough escaping me as the stench from my jacket coalesced behind me. My body remembers screaming at him, a flurry of heinous words and pointing fingers, my eyes bulging out of my head in rage. His face stuck in a contorted snarl, Dad started down at me as I spoke, motionless, slowly clenching and unclenching his jaw. I don’t remember how long it took until I was emptied, but my father never stirred, unblinking. 

“Shoes,” he muttered. I realized he was lasered onto my shoes, not onto me. Color drained from my face, feeling cold and clammy for the first time since arriving home. 

“In the house,” he continued, stumbling toward me like a necromanced corpse. My baseball instincts drained with my color it seemed, as the warm sting from Dad’s hand racing across my cheek sent stars across my vision. Panic hummed under my skin, my cheek pulsating in time with my heartbeat. Most of the night had been a blur, but the next moments are still branded into my soul, an old wound refusing to heal.

“Naughty piglet,” my father croaked, his bloody fingers dripping rhythmically onto the carpet. “You know better.” I tried to right myself, stare into him pleadingly, but those same fingers shot out to my neck, shutting down any chance at forgiveness. I was forced to the ground on my back, hot air wheezing out of my windpipe as Dad’s baseball grip wormed their way into my Adam’s apple. My hands flailed against his arm, strength rapidly escaping me. I watched as he raised his free hand, white scars reflecting the yellow once more.

Thud. His fist collided with my gut, my abs tightening futility at the blow. Hot air wheezed out of my windpipe, unable to form a groan. 

“Naughty piglet,” my father croaked, his bloody fingers dripping rhythmically onto the carpet.

Thud. His fist collided with my gut. 

“Naughty piglet,” my father croaked.

Thud.

“You know better.”

Thud.

“In the house,” he continued, stumbling toward me like a necromanced corpse. The warm sting from Dad’s hand raced across my cheek, sending stars across my vision.

Dad’s baseball grip wormed their way into my Adam’s apple.

Thud.

“Naughty piglet.”

Thud.

Bile and booze. Blood, bile, and booze.

Thud.

Again, and again, and again, and again. 

I experience the moments that define you in excruciating detail. I just wish I could know how many moments that is. Sometimes it's single digits, sometimes I’m in here for what would be days. My sensations never dull either; every smell, sound, even emotion is collected into some fathomless reservoir, shipped off to Vivi for who knows what.

That thought resurfaced. I knew something was wrong. My body, continually pelted by blows, wasn’t transitioning. This moment is repeating, like skipping on a vinyl record. 

I was stuck here.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

It’s cold here, shrouded in apathy
Desire lies buried under malignant emptiness
Desperation stretching every painful moment endlessly

Colder still it will be
That black hole you call future
Nothing more than a coffin

It can only get worse;
I am slitting my throat
You should definitely hang
 

I posted this to r/nosleep originally but it got taken down and I'm not entirely sure why. Still new to posting. I figured I may as well keep the post up somewhere. This is a part 2.

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1i2euu7/my_bosses_are_acting_strange_and_i_need_advice/

I promised I’d update here if anything happened. It's been about 2 weeks since the incidents I mentioned in my last post about this, and things have been getting worse. 

For a while, my managers ramped up their strange behavior. It got more and more frequent. At least twice per shift they’d come up to me to have an awkward conversation that dragged painfully on until I dismissed myself by saying something like, “Well, I guess I should get back to work now.” And they still wear those grins. It creeps me out. It’s like a plastic mask they’re wearing, and their overly friendly tone is just as fake. 

I mentioned last time that they’ve been giving me more hours, allowing me to stay late. It’s gotten to the point that they ask me to stay late daily. I’ve been working 3 extra hours per shift, every shift. Don’t get me wrong I’ll take the money. But the sudden switch had me on edge. Not to mention all these late hours do get tiring. It’s hard to make time for my friends and family when I’ve essentially become nocturnal. 

A few days ago, when my bosses came around for their, now regular, conversation with me, I mentioned that I couldn't stay late that night. They kind of just stared at me, silently, for what felt like far too long. After that pause, their smiles fell. I mean like from the happiest they've ever been to completely blank.

Rich asked me coldly, “Why?”

I replied, “I just could use some sleep. I figured since it's the last day of the week and the truck's pretty much done it'd be fine.” 

Trevor responded quickly, almost interrupting me, “We're really going to need your help. You have to stay late.” 

I told them I wasn't obligated to and that, since I wasn't scheduled past 3am, I was going home at 3am. Without a word, they both turned and marched down the aisle and out of sight.

To be entirely honest, I could've stayed late. I had nothing going on the next day and I wasn't all that tired yet. I was hoping that if we had some type of disagreement, they'd snap out of this weirdness and go back to their usual, abrasive selves. No such luck so far.

The rest of that shift, I didn't see them. I took my break at the same time as George, the coworker I get along with that I mentioned in the last post. We usually sit and talk for a bit during our 15. Normally, his wife makes him lunch. But today, he wasn't eating. Actually, he wasn't doing much of anything. He was sitting at a table in the break room, hands by his sides, staring straight ahead at the lockers, which are across from the entrance so that I was looking at the back of his head. I thought he was just lost in thought so I sat across from him and said,

“Long shift? I saw your department got hit hard with freight.” 

He turned his head to look at me like how an owl does, without moving his actual eyes. My stomach twisted a bit when I saw that same plastic smile plastered onto his face. 

I've always known him to be a quiet man. But he responded to me in an overly enthusiastic tone. Almost like how a parent would encourage a child, “Sure did! Are you staying late tonight?”

I hesitated for a bit before answering, “Uh… no. I already told Trevor and Rich I was going home at my normal time tonight.” 

“That's a shame. We're really going to need your help.” 

He stood up and left right after saying that. It felt like it was a weird place to end an even weirder conversation.

I worked the rest of my shift until 3 am rolled around. For context, when the store closes, the doors are locked. Only my bosses have the keys for the door since they supervise the night shift. Normally, I need to go find them and ask them to open the door before I clock out and leave. Usually, I can just wave one of them over as I’m heading to the front. But that night, it took me 20 minutes to find them. I walked 2 laps around the whole store, looking down every aisle and checking both the break room and training rooms. When I finally found them, they were outside in the bullpen. That's a big concrete area behind the store that connects to the receiving area where they keep pallets of lumber, insulation, and other bulky items. When the store closes and the doors lock, the lights in the bullpen shut off. My bosses were both standing dead still, in the dark, staring straight ahead with those same smiles. 

I called out from inside, “Hey guys? Can one of you let me out?” 

They turned to me simultaneously. Trevor brought his watch up to his field of view, but I swear he didn't actually look at it. It was hard to tell in the dark. 

“Is it 3 already?”

“Yeah. Could you unlock the front, please?”

“You sure you don't want to stay late? Rich is going to buy everyone food.” 

“That's nice of you, but I already had my lunch.” 

Again, his smile fell flat. He followed me in and we walked together to the front. But he took odd paths, walking up and down aisles that lead away from the front, taking as long as possible to reach the door. Finally, he unlocked the door and let me out. 

That all happened last week. This week, to my relief, my supervisors have been giving me my distance. I'll still see them with their smiles and their stiffness but the strange conversations have been less frequent. 

That’s not to say all is well. I complained a bit in the last post about a strange smell. I swear it's been getting worse. No matter what aisle I'm in, the smell of rot follows me. I've scoured my departments for what I'm assuming is a dead rat, or several dead rats judging by the smell, but I've found nothing. 

It is cold out at night, however. The rats usually come inside and hide in the aisles for warmth and to eat the bird seed in the garden department. It's not the first time this has happened, but it is the worst case of it so far. 

Speaking of, they've been very active. It's not unusual to see a rat every now and again scamper in between aisles. But I've been hearing them a lot more than usual while I work freight. I'll be putting product away and hear a noise from within the aisle, only to look and see nothing but paint cans. It's also strange for them to hang around in the paint department, there's no food for them here. 

I saw on the last post you guys asked about quitting. I don't know if that's an option right now. The extra hours have really been helping and I don't think I can afford to stop working to look for another job right now. With my resume, there’s no guarantee I could find one that pays enough, anyway. And so far, even if it's been creepy, there are rational explanations for all of this. I can't put myself at financial risk over some weird run-ins with my coworkers and a bad smell. 

For now, at least, I’ll keep my head down like I always do and hope things sort themselves out. Like last time, I’ll make sure to keep note if anything weird happens so I can make another update.

In six days I have crafted my vision
A portrait of perfection crafted with love
They have brought it to ruin in one
My entire world torn apart
Reduced to ashes along with my heart
A wounded heart knows no forgiveness
Driven insane by the deafening silence
At the funeral of my every dream
Slaughtered in cold blood
Infecting me with jealous hatred
Now as I have given life
From the dust of the earth
I will butcher that which I have birthed
You made me do this
For this sorrow you have caused
I now live to inflict suffering
and breed torturous chaos

Life is bloodletting the semblance of being
Teetering on the edge of disappearance

Monotone drums beating behind my ribcage
Such is the ritual music of total warfare
Raging ceaselessly and without cause within me
A battle of opposing wills fought between
The screaming silence and mute phantom whispers

All that I’ve known equals zero divided by nothing
Facing the absurdity of this splintered existence
The occasional clarity will paint shadows of a dead light
With the false promise of a triumphant escape
From the labyrinthine clutches of madness

Irrational thoughts and lucid instincts form a singularity
From the paranoid fragments colliding with reality
Ascending in a downward spiral beyond the event horizon -
The mirror reflecting the horrors contained by the force
Holding together the black hole that is my mind

The immaculate hanging gardens of primordial perfection
Brought thoughtlessly by the archwhore to a state of ruin
The pinnacle of creation burned by their carnal desire
A lone light in the darkness of chaos defiled
My paradise of plenty reduced to a steppeland of naught
An unforgiving sea of dust to which I keep myself bound
Where I must spend eternity as I roam across
Neverending monotony of decrepitude and emptiness
Haunted by the memory of what no longer is
Each step is more painful than the one before
Yet one glimmer of hope always shines from below
The evil shadow hanging over my children
The suffering they make love to and the sorrow
I’ve spawned to stalk their every move
For breaking my heart

Human teeth by the looks of it. 

Molars, incisors, and every tooth in between. It had to be about forty pounds of teeth tightly wrapped in potato sacks inside a blue duffel bag that looked identical to mine.

I wish I had double-checked the contents at the airport, but I was so exhausted by my flight that I just wanted to get home. 

And now all my clothes, toiletries and Hawaiian souvenirs are gone, replaced by a bag that belongs to either the tooth fairy or some psychopathic dentist.

Seriously, how the hell did this get through security?

I put on some kitchen gloves and dug around through the teeth, hoping to find some form of identification. There was nothing. Nothing but more teeth.

Then I received a text on my phone that stiffened my entire back.

 ‘Where are my fucking teeth?’

I was more confused than ever. Was the person who expected this bag seriously texting this phone right now? How did they get my number?

Instinctively, I looked around my empty apartment, threatened by the message. But of course, the only movement was my own reflection on the balcony glass.

Then my phone sent a picture of an open blue duffel bag. Inside was my red summer shorts, along with my surfboard keyring and tiki mask magnet. They have my stuff.

‘You have our teeth. And we know who you are.’

I received a picture of a crumpled form I filled out to go scuba diving. It was left in the outer pocket of my duffel bag. My name was listed. My address. Even my phone number.

Oh shit.

Then I received a call from an unknown caller. I put the phone on the ground and let it ring out. Each ring sent a buzz through my hardwood floor, and a shiver up my neck.

Another text: ‘We know where you live. Give us the teeth.’

Terrible scenarios flooded my mind. Men wearing balaclavas bursting through the door with army boots and pointing their gleaming knives at my face. Zap straps tightening around my feet and hands, cutting off all circulation. Days of being locked in a cargo container and having to suck the moisture from filthy puddles for sustenance…

Okay, relax, relax. Chill. I had a habit of watching too much true crime.

I ran through the options, they all seemed like imperfect solutions.

1.) I could call the police … but I didn’t know if they could help me. They would have no idea who this tooth person is either. I doubt they would put me in witness protection based on a few texts.

2.) I could go stay at a hotel in a different town… But how long would I have to wait? They know where I live. They could visit at any time. I’d be living in danger…

Before I could stop myself, I texted back.

'This was an accident. I’ll give you back the bag. I didn’t mean to take it’

I stayed there, kneeling by the tooth-bag, waiting for a reply. 

‘You will drop the bag at [redacted] park. There is a wooden bench on the south end dedicated to the firehall. You will place the bag beneath there at 10:00pm.’

I breathed a sigh of relief. Instructions. Clean and simple. That park was across from my apartment. I could do that no problem. 

Another text: 'And you must add one of your front teeth.’

My throat tightened. What?

I quickly texted back. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Because of your interference. A price must be paid. One of your front teeth’

They can’t be serious.

I stood up and closed the blinds on my balcony, paranoid that someone can see me. I had typed the single word ‘Why?’ but never hit send.

How could they even know if I added a tooth in or not? There were thousands of teeth in that bag.

I lightly touched my two front teeth, so firmly panted in the roof of my mouth. How would I even pull a tooth out?

***

Arriving around 9:30 pm, the park was pretty cold. Most nights it snowed this time of year, but luckily it had been pretty dry for a while, so I didn't need to wear too many layers.

The bench dedicated to the firehall was easy to find, and I shoved the tooth-bag directly beneath it with a paper note on top: ‘Sorry about the mix up.”

I sat on the bench for a little bit, pretending to look at my phone. There was an old man out for a walk through the park, and a young couple with their dog. I didn't want them to think I was dropping off a bomb or drugs or something, so I stuck around for a bit and smoked a single cigarette.

One cigarette turned to three. Then four. I couldn't help myself, I was nervous.

Would they know I didn't add my teeth?

After considering it back and forth in the apartment, I left my front teeth alone. If they really wanted some extra teeth, I figured I could stop by a dental office on a later date and get them all the teeth they wanted. I just couldn't bring myself to grab a wrench, and pry perfectly healthy teeth out of my own mouth.

At 9:53, the park emptied out and it started to get freezing. It was my cue to exit.

I took one last drag, exhaled a large plume of smoke and I saw it contour around the edges of a … strange, unseeable shape in front of me. 

It was really odd. 

It felt like there was something invisible standing only inches away.

As I tried to move forward, a bone-like hand found my throat. Two yellow eyes appeared, floating in the air.

“Filthy liar. You didn't add your pain.” 

“wha—?”

The powerful grip lifted me by the throat. I brought my hands down against a wiry, invisible arm.

“Each tooth remembers." The voice came as a seething whisper. "Every tooth retains the pain from when it was pulled.”

My assailant lifted me a whole foot above the ground. I couldn't breathe.

“Lord Foul needs his shipment of pain. You delayed it.”

“Please!” I tried to say, but could only make a choking sound. “GHhhk! Ack!”

The entity dropped me to the ground.

I inhaled and immediately tried to crawl away, but an invisible knee pinned me down.

“And now, you must top off the pain with a fresh garnish.”

 Two invisible hands forced their way into my mouth and pried open my jaw. I tried to fight back, to close my mouth, but it was no use. This entity, whatever it was, had incredible strength.

“A fresh dollop of pain will rejuvenate the supply.”

M two frontmost teeth (my ‘buck-teeth’), were effortlessly bent outward, and snapped off. I shrieked from the pain. Tears streamed instantly.

“That's for stealing our bag.”

As if my teeth were the tabs on a soda can, the entity began to bend each one outward. All my upper front teeth. Then my lower. One by one.

“That's for lying. 

“That's for screaming. 

“That's for being fucking irritating.”

My gums became a fountain of blood. The pain in my mouth was catastrophic—each nerve ending raw and on fire. I tried to scream for help, but the knee on my chest weighed down harder. Soon I could barely make a sound.

The hands plucked out all my bent, broken teeth like a series of pull tabs. Pwick! Pwick! Pwick!

“Lord Foul will be most pleased.”

The bony fingers travelled further into my mouth. Sharp nails dug beneath my molars, and pulled.

The last thing I remember was looking up and seeing the yellow eyes stare back at me. 

Two glowing moons from hell.

***

***

***

I almost bled to death that night.

Thankfully someone found me passed out in the park and called an ambulance, which took me into a hospital, where I recovered for six days straight.

My mouth was a wreck. Every single tooth ripped out. Every. Single. One. There were half-inch wounds all over the roof and floor of my mouth. No conventional dentures would even fit in my desiccated gums. 

It took 3 months of visiting the dentist to slowly reconstruct what was destroyed. And even now, I still have to wear two different sets of dentures. One for daytime (which allowed me to carefully chew food), and one for night time (which slowly bent my fucked gums back into place).

I have no idea what the hell attacked me that night. I don't really want to think about it.  Or about what happened to that duffel bag full of teeth. 

I’ve since moved cities, as you might expect. In fact, I no longer live in the US. I’ve moved far away.

Most importantly, I bought a custom built suitcase off the internet with zebra stripes. I’ve pinned bright yellow plastic stars all over, and many other identifiers too. it might look like a tacky eye sore, but I’ll never confuse it for someone else's bag.

If you're ever at the airport and you recognize my bag from this story, I give you permission to come up and say hi. I make it a point to try and meet friendly people, and move forward with my life.  Who knows, if you catch me in the right mood, I may even show you my removable teeth.

As far as I know, I’m the only 27 year old with grandma dentures.

The beauty of pure horror
Will be reflected in your tearful eyes
Once you finally cross
The threshold to everlasting peace
A pale parody of the expression
Carved into the marble angels
Watching over the shallow grave
Containing the butchered
Pieces of everyone you’ve ever loved
Sacrificed to feed the monster
Raping my fucking mind
With an obsessive lust
For the flesh of my own kind
My desire will be satisfied
Only after your beautiful form
Is picked clean between my teeth
and we are both swallowed whole
Into my vengeful madness

The girl stood on the edge of the skyscraper. Her heart was etched in darkness like the night sky above. She looked down upon the apathetic citizens of Shinjuku as they went about their boring lives.

Salarymen rushing to catch the last train.

Drunken vagrants hassling for change.

Nightwalkers bringing their clients into love hotels.

"What a drag." She muttered.

Up until a week ago, her life was normal.

Up until a week ago, she had no reason to die.

But now?

Her feet were almost off the edge.

Her balance was supported only by her heels.

" Goodbye Shinjuku. I don't need you anymore and I'm sure you feel the same way about me. Oh. I'm sure you won't be missed either." The girl said while staring at her stomach.

The father discarded them with a callousness she thought impossible. He had fed her so many expert lies about love and commitment. She dutifully kept their relationship secret from students and faculty just like he insisted. "They're jealous of our love. They'll try to tear us apart," he told her.

She thought she was doing right by her lover. He repaid her affection with bruise marks and crumpled dollar bills.

"Get rid of it." He said coldly as he left her naked and alone in the cheap motel room. Her dreams of starting a happy family were shattered just like that. She quickly learned that reality wasn't like the fairytales she grew up reading. Happy endings were rare to come by.

The girl wondered if she would make it on the news after this. That would make it impossible for her to be ignored. An ideal ending. She made sure to email her school pictures of her pregnancy test and every text conversation she had with her teacher. She prayed that memories of that night would haunt every waking second of his life.

With one final step, her body plummeted.

The lights and sounds of the city all became a blur.

In a moment, she would become red splatter.

She'd be forgotten by the next morning.

No more regrets.

No more bitter sentiments.

All she had left were the memories of a fabricated romance.

They call it a depression nest. What hatches in this nest? What is the egg in this image? Who is breeding?

She built her nest herself, of course. She was lying on her side in her bed, next to her laptop, running a YouTube video, a makeup tutorial. She was lying in a mound of her worn clothes, half-eaten food, books, magazines, and cables. Not only that, but she hadn’t showered in 3 days. In the air lay a chalky and foul stench. Why was she like this? The room was full of clothes, and plants that she bought, most of which were dying now. Between shirts and sweaters, there were magazines, some of which you can take for free, but a large number that she bought, some on psychology, some on philosophy. One within the periphery of her vision asked, “What makes us happy?”. The answer wasn’t in her half-eaten toast hanging over the edge of the plate sitting in her bed. It was from yesterday. In the depths of it, she couldn't eat properly. 

She didn't want to do anything, and she was desperately looking for something that would get her out of this. If only she could pull herself together the way others could. Why, why, why was she like this? Who does this to themselves?

She tried her best not to think about how old she was, that her life was just passing her by, while everyone else was making progress. What made her spiral down this time, was an invitation to a baby shower. For her friend S. They hadn’t seen each other in months. News of the pregnancy had reached her, but she didn't message her and didn’t answer any messages that she got from S. The invitation reminded her of the last birthday that S celebrated. Back then she had been unemployed for about one and a half years and people told her that surely she would soon find something. What had been eighteen months now were thirty. Time was fleeting, she herself would be turning thirty soon. Studies unfinished. Accomplished nothing. Thoughts hammered into her mind. The makeup video raged on in front of her, and she closed her eyes, trying to fall asleep. If it only wasn’t ten in the morning and she already slept 12 hours. 

Sleep was not an option. Her video droned on with the constant humming in the background. In a move that felt theatrical to herself, she stretched out her arm next to her laptop and took a breath. She hesitated, pulled it back briefly, only a few centimeters, and then stretched it out again to smash the machine off the little table by her bed. The video continued, and the laptop landed on the clothes-covered floor, precisely on a sweater that her mother knit for her. The scream that she let out was guttural, deep, primal. Standing up quickly, her head felt dizzy from how fast it was, she had to hold herself on the bookshelf that was next to her bed and screamed again. 

She couldn’t take it anymore, she had to change something about her life, or it would all go to shit. Alone this is impossible. Get therapy, clearly something was wrong with her. Tidy up. Do something about this horrible situation and finally get her life back on track. She put on jeans and pulled in her belly to close them, she would have to start exercising too. Looking around, she had this feeling, kind of the opposite of a déjà vu, where you see things from a new perspective, and it feels like you are in a very familiar place the first time. The walls seemed different, and the trash scattered on the floor felt unfamiliar. Disgusted, she felt her throat tighten, seeing how her room looked, how she had let herself become. 

After a deep breath, she took a step towards the door of her room to get out, get something to eat, and leave this shit behind, start repairing. Then she thought for a moment, that she would have to take her phone. What if there was an alert? This was her only possibility. She turned around, took another step towards her bed, and found her phone. Lying on the glossy baby shower invitation card. The motivational framed poster of an egg with some cracks on the side, that he had hung months ago caught her glance, as she tried to look away. Back at her stared her reflection in it, her eyes with deep black shadows underneath, her greasy hair framing her tired face, her white hoodie stained with whatever she had to eat in her bed two days ago. 

She could not take this, she could not do it, her knees gave in, and she broke down, attempting to cry, but couldn't. Lying on her side, she turned her head away from the dirty stinking clothes she was lying on—full view again of the make-up tutorial video that was still running. 

She closed her eyes for a moment and pulled herself together. The video was interrupted by a loud beeping noise from her phone. “Temperature out of range”. Again. Her mind was concentrated on the spot, even though she felt the pressure of her eyes and got a sense of the stale air in the room. She followed the cables that went into the bottom drawer of her nightstand with her hands, pulled the clothes in front of it away, and opened it. 

The glass apparatus that kept the egg at a constant temperature was humming more loudly and showed a temperature of 115°F on the simple LCD Display. Just above the allowed range- the pump was still running though. She checked the drawer above and realized that the temperature control liquid was running low. Opening the liquid compartment released an intense smell of foul eggs, she poured more liquid and pushed the button on her phone to make the noise stop. As if to feel some kind of connection, she put her hand on the glass, just above the egg, and closed her eyes. 

Crack.

She heard a crack and backed up. It felt like the earth was opening and hell’s darkness would spill out. She felt the sting in her heart. The hatching of her baby was not due for another 3 weeks. The temperature must have been running high too much. This was what she had been waiting for all this time, but she was not prepared, no one could help her. Another cracking sound, and she saw the shell coming apart in a black rip. Through the inner membrane, a tiny fist pushed out, opened its little fingers, and pierced the thin layer with its sharp claws. The black inner liquid gushed out. She reached out with her hand, to touch the glass again when she heard the terrifying shriek, followed by rapid scratching against the glass. 

Crack. Bump.

The nightstand was shaking as the creature freed itself from the egg and threw itself against the glass. It moved so fast, it looked like a wet ball was frantically bouncing around in the glass box. The scratching got more and more violent. Hungry. She knew what was coming now. What she had been hatching would consume her now. 

Bump. Bump. Crack.

A circular crack was visible on the glass now. She stood up and thought of how sweet it was to sacrifice yourself for your child. This is what it means to be a mother.

Bump. Crack. Scratching. Bump.

Crack.

Two souls stood together on a hill, appearing from the distance to be a single whole. The two shadows overlooked a farmstead below them, hidden by the cover of darkness. Lurking like predators in complete silence, ready to pounce on their prey. With a single torch to illuminate their surrounding held by one of the two shadows, hardly noticeable from afar.

“I’m not sure we should do this, Syura.” One shadow spoke to the other.

The other sighed loudly, “We must, Barsaek, can't you remember what they’ve done to us? What they’ve done to you?” the shadow exclaimed.

“I know but… I don’t want to go back. I thought we were through with this…” Barsaek reasoned.

Syura smirked her grin smirk, “I might be, but you could never be through with this, with what you are. You are the one who told me that only the dead get to see the end of the war…”

“Syur…” he begged, but she cut him off.

“Listen, I hate to do this, but you’re making me, and I only do this because I love you – now let me remind you what they’ve done!” tearing open her shirt as she spoke.

He attempted to look away, but she shouted at him not to avert his gaze from her exposed form.

“Don’t you dare look away now! That is what they’ve done to me, that is what they took from you, Barsaek.” She cried out, pointing at his artificial arm while he stood there, staring at her, helpless against the oncoming onslaught of memories.

“You’re right…” he conceded, and turned his gaze to the farmstead below. Something in him was beginning to snap, a part he had tried to bury deep inside his mind. Someone terrible he was trying to forget came to the forefront of his thoughts.

“And besides, you promised me we’d do this and you can’t back out now,” Syura remarked while covering up again.

“You’re right again…” her friend lamented, “Why do you have to be right all the time, Syura…” his voice shaking as he uttered these words. “I hate just how right you are all the god damned time, Syura!” he screamed at her, flames dancing in his eyes. Unstoppable hateful flames danced in Barsaek’s eyes as his face contorted into an expression of a vampiric demon on the verge of starvation-induced insanity. Seeing the change in her friend’s demeanor, Syura couldn’t help but giggle like a little girl again.

“Because someone has to be, don’t you think?” she quipped, watching him race down the hill, the torch in his hand. From the distance, he seemed to take the shape of a falling star.

Before long, he vanished from sight altogether, disappearing into the dark some distance from the farmstead, but Syura knew where to find her friend. She always knew where to find him, especially in this state.

All she had to do was follow the screaming.

Slowly descending the hill, she listened for the screaming, getting excited imagining the inhuman punishment Barsaek was inflicting in her name upon those who had wronged her, those who had wronged them. In her mind, for as long as she could remember - they were always like this – one soul split between two bodies. For her, it was always like this,  ever since the day she met him when he was still a child soldier all those years ago. To her, they always were and forever will be a part of the same whole.

The screaming got almost unbearably loud by the time she reached the farmstead. Barsaek was taking his sweet time executing their revenge. He made sure to grievously injure them to prolong their suffering.

Syura took great care not to take any care of any of the dying men lying on the ground as she made it a mission to step on every one of those in her path.

Blood, guts, and severed limbs were cast about in an almost deliberate fashion. A bloody path paved with human waste by Barsaek for his only friend to follow. By the time she finally reached him, he was covered in blood and engaged in a sword fight with an old man who was barely able to maintain his posture faced with a much younger opponent. The incessant pleas of the man's wife suffocated the room. Syura crouched in front of the woman and blew Barsaek a kiss. For a split moment, he turned his attention from his opponent to her and the old man’s sword struck his face. It merely grazed the young warrior's face, almost more insulting than anything else.

“He shouldn’t have done that…” Syura quipped to the wailing woman who didn't even seem to notice her.

Barely registering the pain, Barsaek halted for a split second to take in a deep breath – pushing his blade straight through his opponent to a chorus of grieving garbled syllables.

“I guess he didn’t love you enough… Mother…” Syura scolded the weeping woman who in turn still seemed oblivious to her. “And now he dies.” With her words echoing across the room as if they were a signal or a command, Barsaek cut off the man’s head. Watching the decapitated skull of her husband crash onto the floor, the woman fell with it, letting out an inhuman shriek, much to Syura’s twisted delight.

“Would you look at that, like daughter, like mother!” she called out to her friend, who seemed equally amused with the mayhem he had caused.

Not satisfied with the carnage he had caused just yet, Barsaek turned his attention to the woman and stood over her with a ravenous gaze in his burning eyes. She begged for her life, but his heart remained stone cold.

Cruel as he might’ve been, this devil was merciful than her. With a swift swing of his blade - he cut off her head, bringing the massacre to an abrupt end.

Once the dust settled by sunrise, Barsaek and Syura were long gone, two shadows huddled as close as one. Almost like two souls in one body; they traveled unseen by foot to the one place where they both could find peace. The gateway between the world of the living and the land of the pure. Once there, the shadow slowly crawled toward a grave at the foot of a frangipani tree.

“I told you, Syura… I told you I’ll lay their skulls at your feet,” Barsaek lamented while carefully placing two skulls at the foot of the grave containing his only friend.

Original Post.

“Hey Mom - where did you say you met Camila again?”

From the top of the small flight of stairs that led down into our apartment’s living room, I listened to my mother’s heavy breathing over the phone and waited, saying nothing else. The silence that followed my question was a tactical ceasefire, a measure designed to break Maggie as efficiently as possible. The woman was deathly allergic to silence, especially when anger was the emotion filling the empty space that speech typically occupied. I could practically hear her throat closing.

Not to say it was an effortless strategy on my end.

My first impulse was to unleash nuclear wrath on my mother, not keep my mouth shut. I would have loved nothing more than to give in to that impulse, split the proverbial atom in my head, and point the resulting uncontrollable tempest of confusion and rage at Maggie, fallout be damned.

But I knew anger would cause her to withdraw. This was my best chance at extracting information, so I held my tongue. For Camila’s sake.

While I waited, shifting movement in the periphery caught my eye. My wife’s partially inflated face had turned to look at me, her nose rising and falling like a buoy atop a stormy ocean current. The air mattress motor did not function as well as I had hoped. It seemed to lack the required power to fully inflate her body.

With her eyes fixed on me, the dizzying aroma of brine and mold slid into my nostrils.

I battled simmering nausea, which was partially from the smell, but primarily from the circumstances. Despite my efforts, Camila was changing. I had hoped the incomplete expansion would postpone these changes, but it did not seem to prevent her transformation. Or maybe the air from the motor was the only thing stopping her from transforming completely.

Weary from the quiet, Maggie spoke up. It took a minute or two to work, but my gambit was a success. More to the point, she did not attempt to lie her way out of this.

I did, however, become lost in thought while I bided my time, forgetting she was still on the line altogether.

“…what happened to Camila? Are you safe?”

Her voice, emerging unexpectedly from the silence like a monstrous claw from the fathomless depths of a pitch-black closet, was startling. The surprise weakened the hold I had on my emotions, allowing a tiny morsel of my total anger to break free from its tenuous detainment. A white-hot spark acting as an ambassador for the full, blooming inferno I was fighting to control.

“I…don’t even know where to fucking start, Maggie. I…Jesus, I’m going to let you figure that out. What the fuck is going on?” I yelled.

Reigning in the fury before it gained enough momentum to consume me, I closed my eyes and released a deep, cathartic exhale. Having almost lost control, I reminded myself why I was so devastated in the first place.

With my eyes shut, I allowed a collage of wedding memories to come flooding into my mind’s eye. I heard the canaries chirping, felt the warmth Camilla radiated when she spoke her vows, and smelled the sweet, nectareous scent of honeysuckles floating on the breeze. The exercise was grounding, and as my eyelids slowly reopened, my priorities became clear.

I loved her, and she was still Camila, whoever and whatever that was.

“She’s…she’s damaged, mom.”

My wife was currently laying lifelessly on our largest couch in the living room, positioned against the wall farthest from the stairs. Her toes were pointed upward and she held her arms at her sides, as if rehearsing for her own wake. I had affixed the motor from the airbed to her injured wrist, layers of scotch tape wrapping around the nozzle to decrease the amount of air leakage. The makeshift augmentation was a start, but it was imperfect. The mechanical draft opened Camila’s body, yes, but it didn’t fully pressurize her. Instead, the air rippled through her, waves of expansion and de-expansion washing over the surface of my wife like a tarp flapping in a strong wind. I described this all to Maggie, and when I was done, she did not need to pause before launching into her follow up questions.

A subtle undertow of fear now colored her speech, however.

“Is she acting normally? Does she look like herself - broad strokes, I mean - does she look like Camila? Her skin, her shape?”

“And you didn’t answer me - are you safe? I need to know you’re safe, Jack.”

Maggie’s line of questioning left me feeling uneasy, as she alluded to details about my wife that I hadn’t yet disclosed to her.

Twenty-four hours had passed since that knife pierced Camila’s wrist, and her body had remained in a constant state of flux ever since. Patches of her skin had transitioned from their normal peach-color to an iridescent, gleaming silver. At certain angles, her flesh refracted against my eyes and I saw a shimmering rainbow, like she had evolved into a human-sized pearl after spending many years trapped inside a titanic oyster.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t just her skin that was changing. Some of her most recognizable features had become horrifically abstracted. Camila’s right eye was now elongated upwards, forming a blue-white oval that started at her hairline and ended at her nose, with her other eye remaining unchanged. The fingers on both of her hands had fused, now appearing like sleek, crystalline oven mitts. Her legs had lengthened, with her feet now hanging over the side of the couch as of the last few hours. If she stood up completely straight, I estimated she would be at least nine feet tall.

When she first deflated, Camila became a latex suit crafted in her image - a rubbery doppelgänger. Given time, however, she was developing into something else entirely. As if to signal that those changes were becoming progressively more unstable, her port had taken on a bright and foreboding red glow.

Through the haze of my worry and sleep deprivation, I offered my wife a weak smile. She reciprocated, but the right corner of her mouth made contact with her lower eyelid as she did, causing an intense chill to radiate from the top of my head downwards. As her smile widened further, part of her eye disappeared behind the corner of her mouth, overwritten by the creases of her grin.

It was all becoming too much.

Numbly, I turned away from Camila and whispered something to Maggie, hoping the question would be inaudible to my wife under the loud vibrations of the motor.

“I’m safe, okay? But Mom…what is she? A replica…a machine…what?”

I did not have to wait long for her response. She started speaking before I even made it up the small set of stairs that led to the front door.

Unnervingly, Maggie struggled to define Camila’s exact nature.

“Camila…is not a replica or a machine. She’s…it’s not artificial or synthetic, not man-made, though it has been… modified…by new technology. But we didn’t create it. No one created Camila. We’re not sure how old she…it is.”

My eyes dilated, and I almost dropped the phone, my hands now slick with sweat.

“A friend of your grandmother’s approached me at Angie’s funeral. They offered Camila…as a replacement. To help you recover. A mutually beneficial arrangement. Something…someone that could be constructed specifically for you, in the aftermath of everything.”

“Something that couldn’t die.”

Maggie hesitated, probably to let the information sink in.

Angie was my long-term partner before Camila - died four years ago from kidney failure. Never wanted to get married because she knew she was running on borrowed time.

Her death had shattered me for a long while.

My grandmother’s death, on the other hand, was an unambiguous blessing - for me and for the world at large. The woman was a notoriously sadistic mining baroness. A magician tyrant well versed in the arcane sorcery of transforming human suffering into ore, and then ultimately, ore into hideous wealth. When she died three months ago, Maggie had inherited everything. With that inheritance, she single-handedly funded our wedding, a fact I’ve felt apprehensive about since.

After a pause, she continued.

“But she…it's on loan. It belongs to them. They own it, and the technology they put into it. They…they said the loan would continue if…”

Unable to finish her sentence, Maggie fell quiet, her words dissolving amidst some combination of fear, shame, and cowardice. Although it was nearly impossible, I said nothing in response, waiting for silence to pull the completed confession out of Maggie. Eventually, she relented, and her tone became alarmingly clinical.

“They want to see communion in the wild, so they said the loan would be extended if Camila became pregnant. That was the original agreement.”

The sentence was a primed grenade lobbed at my diaphragm, exploding into fiery shrapnel when Maggie hit the last syllable of the word “pregnant”.

I felt myself choking on the available atmosphere. Either I had forgotten how to breathe, or the air I swallowed had lost its ability to provide oxygen. No matter the root cause, I was drowning above water. My chest burned and my vision faded. I dropped the phone onto the top step, as I needed both hands to grip the banister to prevent me from toppling over into a messy pile not entirely dissimilar to Camila.

Eventually, I sat down. It took me a minute to remember that Maggie was still on the line. I reached a drenched palm over to the device, grasped it tightly, and brought it back up to my ear.

“Jack - Jack, are you there?”

“I’m…I’m here.” I said hoarsely, despite the suffocation I was still experiencing.

“Good. Now, listen to me - if the technology is malfunctioning, she’s dangerous. I can’t explain it all over the phone. Drive over to Nana’s, and I’ll spell out everything.”

As Maggie talked, I forced dry air down my throat and into my lungs, trying desperately to restart the life-giving circuit. Slowly, my air-hunger faded, and I became steady on my feet. When I finally stood back up, phone still pressed to my ear, I said the only thing that came to mind.

“She’ll…Camila will be okay if I leave her here?”

“Yes. She can’t go anywhere. Before you go, you need to disconnect the motor. I’ll explain why that’s important when you get here. But you need to leave as soon as possible.”

And like that, Maggie ended the call.

Pulling my keys from the hook by our front door with all the dexterity and finesse of a rum-infused toddler, I clumsily slid them in my pocket and turned to face Camila.

“I’ll…I’ll be back soon, okay?” I muttered while walking back down the stairs into the living room, praying for a response that would verify that my wife was still somewhere in that shell.

As I approached her, Camila did not wave goodbye or nod her head in affirmation. She did not say anything.

Instead, Camila produced a smile, eerily identical to the one she had produced earlier, with the corner of her mouth once again consuming the bottom of her right eye.

Despite being a carbon-copy of her previous expression, it at least felt earnest.

But then I moved towards her.

Upon closer inspection, her grin appeared almost synthetic. Hollow, vacuous, and without emotion. Something she was wearing to mask predatory intent - a visual pheromone designed to entice, soothe, and disarm me. Almost within arm’s reach of the chugging motor, I stopped. The device was battery powered, not plugged into the wall. Meaning that if I wanted to disconnect it, I would need to be right next to my wife.

Within striking range.

Before I could decide what to do next, Camila found the energy to speak at a volume loud enough for me to hear her over the motor.

“Jack…don’t come any closer.”

Although she appeared to be warning me to stay back, her inviting grin had not waned. If anything, it was growing wider as I approached. Like a positive feedback loop, every step forward made her smile that much more emphatic, which encouraged me to continue moving forward, so on and so on.

At close range, Camila’s rapturous smile was disturbing. But overtime, I found that the discomfort fell away. Instead, the more I looked it, the more alluring the expression became. Beautiful, even. It was like a beacon guiding me home on a moonless night. I almost lost myself in its gravity, but right before I was within reach of Camila, the smell of brackish water and decay once again filled my nostrils, severing my trance.

No longer spellbound, the oldest and most primal portion of my brain shrieked bloody murder, now acutely aware of the imminent threat. As gallons of adrenaline spilled into my system, my heart thumping violently against the inside of my chest, Camila spoke one more time.

“Stay…back. Go…to Maggie.”

I raced to my car, stopping only to lock the door. From outside our apartment, I could still hear the motor running.

One last thought echoed in my head as I inserted the keys into the ignition of my car.

The batteries will run out and the motor will stop on its own, eventually…

——————————————-

My grandmother’s home was as stereotypically “old-money” as a mansion could get. The property, with its creaky black gates overtaken by vines, lengthy stone road connecting the gates to the house itself, and immaculately maintained gardens, appeared as if it had been lifted from the 1920s, pulled through time, and then dropped in the same location a century later.

Parking behind Maggie’s car, I reviewed the plan in my head, telling myself that I was attempting to keep my actions focused and intentional. Though, in actuality, I was really just taking a second to imbibe in denial’s tranquilizing embrace.

I’ll get out, see what Maggie has to say, and then go home. When I get home, I’ll call an ambulance. Camila…she’s sick. She has a disease, that’s why she has the port, right? I…I just don’t understand it. But just because I don’t understand her condition, doesn’t mean they can’t help her at the hospital.

She was already outside waiting for me, leaning nonchalantly against the driver’s side door of her navy-blue pickup truck. Upon my arrival, she placed her hands in the pockets of her mono-color charcoal-gray pantsuit and cautiously began walking towards me. Maggie’s imposing height, gaunt frame, and skeletal facial features made her organically intimidating, in spite of her talkative nature.

Palms up and out to show she meant no harm, Maggie started speaking.

“Look, Jack, you were rotting with heartbreak after Angie. I did, as always, what’s best for you…and, of course, what’s best for Nana’s business, God rest her soul…”

The next few seconds were a blur. Everything happened so quickly.

Before she could say another word, my fist collided with her teeth, splitting the flesh above my middle knuckle open and sending Maggie crashing to the earth. The blow incapacitated her, but she remained conscious, moaning in agony on the ground. I bent over her, reaching into the right breast pocket of her blazer to retrieve her phone.

A wave of uncomfortable disorientation washed over me, along with the intense sensation of being watched.

Why…why did I do that?

The assault and the theft were spontaneous and involuntary. I’ve never punched anyone in my life, let alone my mother. Nor did I know the location of Maggie’s phone ahead of time, at least not consciously. Once I had the damn thing in my hand, I didn’t know what I had planned on doing with it.

As if in response to the question I did not ask out loud, it started vibrating.

There was an incoming call from Camila to Maggie’s phone, despite the fact that my wife’s phone was currently in the glove compartment of my car.

“Hello…” I whispered.

“Hey love! There are about to be some men at the apartment - I think they’re friends of Maggie. Could you do me a favor and grab a case of documents from under her truck bed? The key should be in the pocket opposite to where her phone was.”

At first, I didn’t think it was actually Camila on the other line. The voice was much too low. When it hit the word “friends”, however, the voice self-corrected and rapidly increased its pitch by multiple octaves. It then sounded more like Camila, but it was still a little too high. When she finally arrived at the word “key”, the pitch dropped a few semi-tones, and I finally heard something that convincingly sounded like my wife.

“How…Camila, how did…”

“Oh! Well, I’m at home, but I’m there at your grandmother’s house, too. Mostly in you, a little in Maggie. Enough to know what she’s thinking, at least.”

“And what she’s thinking is bad for both of us.”

I couldn’t focus on understanding what Camila was trying to tell me. Instead, I remained preoccupied by the strangeness of what was supposedly my wife’s voice. Although the tone was finally correct, the quality of her voice was horribly wrong - frayed and hollow, like it was coming from a megaphone. Before Camila could say anything else, there was a male voice yelling something in the call's background.

There was a scream, a few gunshots, and then there was silence.

“Camila?? Hello?”

The call had dropped. I tried using Maggie’s phone to call Camila back. Although the call went to her phone, ringing softly in the glove compartment, she never picked up.

It must not work that way. I need to get home.

I found myself physically unable to leave without first following Camila’s instructions, however. My hands were unwilling to open the driver’s side door, no matter how much mental pressure I exerted. They just wouldn’t listen to that particular demand until the assigned task was completed.

Reluctantly, I walked over to retrieve Maggie’s car keys. As I did, I experienced a subtle pain in the knuckle that had delivered the haymaker. Not the discomfort and the ache from the punch itself - a new, different pain. It was a piercing, twisting sensation, similar to the pinch that accompanies a mosquito bite. At first, I thought it was nothing, but when my bloodstained hand entered her blazer pocket, sunlight reflected off something receding into the skin around my knuckle. A sliver of iridescent, wiggling fabric, burrowing into the flesh of my hand until I could see it no longer.

It looked like a tiny, cylindrical fragment of Camila’s altered skin.

Unsure of what else to do, I followed my wife's instructions, found the box of documents concealed in my mother's truck bed, and loaded them into my car.

By that time, Maggie was getting to her feet. She was unsteady though, likely concussed, so she had no chance of stopping me.

I heard her say one last thing before I got into my car and sped back to our apartment, however.

“Its antihelix…the regulator…they’re broken.”

—————————————-

I don’t have a lot of time to detail the state of the apartment upon my return.

I am currently on the run.

When I arrived home yesterday, the door was ajar, and the hallway smelled nauseatingly metallic.

Coagulated blood, viscera, and bone fragments inundated the area around where Camila had been lying. No obvious bodies were visible. The leather of the couch that Camila had been lying on was burnt and blackened like lightning had struck it. I don’t know who or what died there. But my wife was nowhere to be seen, and she hasn’t called Maggie’s phone since I left my grandmother’s estate.

I bolted. Didn’t grab a single thing before I left.

Now, I’m posted up in my car on a secluded stretch of country road, reviewing the contents of the crate that Camila instructed me to steal. Although, “forced me” to steal may ultimately be more accurate.

All the documents, except one, are records of a deep-sea mining operation that occurred between 1999 and 2016.

Stapled to the bottom of the box, there is a torn page from what I’m assuming is an old book of poetry.

The title of the poem is De onde Lúcifer pousou, brotou um Fio de Deus. Portuguese to English, it reads:

“From where Lucifer landed, God Thread sprouted”

The title of the deep-sea mining operation is listed as Diosfibras III, which translates to “God Thread” or “God Twine”, depending on which google translator you use.

Working on transcribing and uploading them now.

-Jack