When I moved in with Grandma about five years ago, I didn’t know what to expect.

Grandma had been living alone since Grandpa died earlier that year, and when they diagnosed her with dementia when I was a senior in high school it seemed like a bad omen. Though they had caught it early, the doctors had suggested that living alone would probably only help her condition deteriorate faster. 

“Dementia patients often see their condition slow when they have company. Your mother has lived alone since your father died, and if someone were able to live with her, I think the ability to have someone to talk to would help her immensely.” 

Mom and Dad had looked at each other, not sure what to do about the situation, but seemed to come to a decision pretty quickly. With me looking at college and them unable to afford housing in the dorms, they offered me a compromise. Live with my Grandma and attend college nearby or spend some time trying to get scholarships and grants to pay for my own housing. Grandma and I had always been close, and she was delighted to let me stay with her while I attended college. There was no worry that I would sneak boys in or throw parties, I wasn’t really someone who did that sort of thing, and they knew that I would be home most evenings studying or resting for the coming day.

I moved in at the beginning of the academic year, and that meant I was there for Halloween. 

Grandma and I had been living pretty harmoniously, only butting heads a few times when I came home late from classes. Grandma liked to be in bed by nine and she didn’t like to be woken up when I came in late. Grandma liked to spend most of her time in bed, watching TV and knitting, but I still came in when I had the chance to talk with her and visit. Some days she knew who I was, some days she thought I was my Mom, but she was never hostile or confused with me. If she called me by my Mom’s name, I was Clare, and if she called me by my name, then I was Julia. Either way, we talked about our day and about life in general. I learned a lot of family secrets that way, things that she was surprised I didn’t remember, and I was glad for this time with her while she was still lucid.

So when I came in to find her putting candy in a bowl, I was shocked she was out of bed. She was huffing and puffing, clearly exhausted, and I wondered when she’d had time to buy the candy? She didn’t drive, didn’t have a car, and I didn’t remember buying it. She looked up happily, holding the bowl out to me in greeting.

“Clare, there you are! I wanted to hand candy out to the kids, but I feel so weak. I must be coming down with something, but I can’t disappoint the kiddos.”

Grandma seemed to forget that she was pushing sixty-five and not in what anyone would call good health. When she did too much and ran out of energy, she always said she “must be coming down with something” and took herself off to bed to rest, and it seemed to be her mind's way of explaining it. Somehow, it seemed, I had forgotten it was Halloween, but Grandma hadn’t. It wasn’t that surprising, if there was one thing you could count on Grandma to remember, it was Halloween. Grandma had always been in love with Halloween, at least according to Mom. She’d insisted I decorate earlier in the month, had made us get a pumpkin from the store which I then carved and set on the stoop, and if she had been in better health, she would have likely been in costume handing out candy. 

As it stood, she was lucky to have made it from her room to the table, and I knew it. I took the bowl and told her not to worry, and that I would make sure the kids got their candy. She thanked me and went to lie down, her energy spent. I went to the porch to put out the bowl of candy. I put a note on the stool so the kids knew it was a two-piece limit, and came back in to study.

Today might be sugar palooza for the little goblins out in the street, but for me, tomorrow was chem midterm and I needed to study. I was doing well, but this was only freshman year. I had big dreams and they would be harder to fulfill with poor marks in chemistry. I heard the kids shrieking and giggling as they came up the road, heard their footsteps on the porch, heard the step pause in speculation as they read the sign, and then heard them retreat after they took their candy. Grandma lived in a fairly nice area and the kiddos seemed used to the two-piece rule. I’m sure some of them took a handful and ran, but they seemed to be in the minority if they did. 

It was dark out, probably pushing nine, when I heard a knock on the door. I looked up from my book, peering at the door as I saw the outline of a little kid in a ghost costume. He was standing there patiently, bag in hand, and I wondered how he had missed the bowl and the sign. Maybe he was looking for an authentic experience, or maybe he was special needs. Either way, I got up and walked over to the door to see what he wanted. 

I opened the door to find a kid in an honest-to-God bedsheet ghost costume. He looked right out of a Charlie Brown special, and the shoes poking out from the bottom looked like loafers. He held a grubby pillow case in one hand and a candy apple in the other, and when he looked up at me through the holes in his sheet, I almost laughed. He looked like a caricature, like a memory of a Halloween long ago, and I wasn’t sure he would speak for a moment.

When he did, I wished he hadn’t.

His voice was raspy, unused, and it sucked all the joy out of me.

“Is Mady here?” he asked, and I shook my head as I tried to get my own voice to work.

“Na, sorry kiddo, there’s no Mady here.”

He nodded, and then turned and left with slow, somber steps.

I thought it was odd, he hadn’t even taken any candy, and when I closed the door and went back to my work I was filled with a strange and unexplainable sense of dread.

I had forgotten about it by the time Halloween rolled around again, but the little ghost hadn’t forgotten about us.

October thirty first found me, once again, sitting at the table and studying for a midterm. I was still working on my prerequisites for Biochem, and, if everything went as planned, I’d be starting the course next year. Grandma was much the same, maybe a little more tired and a little more forgetful, but we still spent a lot of evenings chatting and watching TV. Sometimes she braided my hair, and sometimes she showed me how to knit, but we always spent at least an hour together every evening. Tonight she had turned in early, saying she was really tired and wanted to get some rest before this cold caught up to her. I had sat the candy bowl on the front porch, careful to add the usual note, and when someone knocked on the door at eight-thirty, I looked up to see the same little silhouette I had seen the year before.

I got up, telling myself it couldn’t be the same kid, but when I opened the door, there he was. The same bed sheet ghost costume. The same pho leather loafers. The same bulge around the eyes to indicate glasses. The same slightly dirty pillowcase. It was him, just as he had been the year before, and I almost prayed he would remember before speaking. 

“Is Mady here?” he asked in the same croaking voice, and I tried not to shudder as I smiled down at him.

“Sorry, kiddo. Wrong house.”

He nodded solemnly, turning around and slowly walking back up the front walk as he made his way back to the street. I watched him go, not quite sure what to make of this strange little ghost boy or his apparent lack of growth. The kid looked like he might be about five or six, though his voice sounded like he might be five or six years in his grave. I briefly considered that he might be a real ghost, but I put that out of my mind. It was the time of year, nothing more. I went back to studying, finishing out the evening by visiting with Grandma when she got up from her nap unexpectedly. We drank cocoa and watched a scary movie and I fell asleep beside her in the bed she had once shared with Grandpa.

The next year saw the return of the little ghost boy, and he was unchanging. I tried to ask him why he kept coming back after being told she wasn’t here for two years running. I wanted to ask him why he thought she was here, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask him anything. There was a barrier between us that went deeper than a misunderstanding, and it was like we were standing on opposite sides of a gulf and shouting at each other over the tide. He left when I didn’t say anything, nodding and turning like he always did before disappearing into the crowd. 

I didn’t see him the year after that, but, to be fair, I was a little preoccupied. 

That was my fourth year in college, and I was only a year from graduating and moving on to work in the field of Biochemistry. I had been heading home when a colleague of mine invited me to a little department party. I was helping my teacher as a TA and the other TAs were having a little get-together in honor of the season. I started to decline, but I thought it might be fun. I had never really allowed myself to get into the college scene, never really partied or hung out with friends, and all that focus takes a toll sometimes. I hadn’t really been to a social gathering since High School, and I was curious to see what it was like.

I’ll admit, I indulged a little more than I should have, but when I came home and found my Grandmother lying by the front door it sobbered me up pretty quickly.

Her Doctor said that she had fallen when she tried to get to the door, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she had been going to answer the knocking of a certain little ghost boy. They kept her in the hospital for nearly three months, monitoring her and making sure she hadn’t given herself brain damage or something. Her condition progressed while she was in the hospital, and after a time she either only recognized me as my mother or didn’t recognize me at all. She began asking for Alby, always looking for Alby, but I didn’t know who that was. Mom was puzzled too, wondering if maybe she was talking about her Dad, whose name had been Albert.

“I’ve never heard her call him Alby, but I suppose it could be a nickname. They knew each other as children so it's entirely possible.”

After a while, they sent her home, but the prognosis was not good. They gave her less than a year to live, saying she would need round-the-clock care from now on. I didn’t need to be asked this time. I felt guilty for not being there and I knew that I had to be there for her now. I took a leave of absence from school, putting my plans on hold so I could take care of my Grandma. I continued to take some courses online, hoping to not get too far behind, but I devoted most of my time to her. She was mostly unresponsive, whispering sometimes as she called out for Alby or her mother and father, great-grandparents I had never met. She talked to Alby about secret places and hidden treasures, and her voice was that of a little girl now. She had regressed even more, and every day that I woke up to find her breathing was a blessing.

Grandma proved them wrong, and when Halloween came around again, I was in for a surprise.

I had taken to sleeping on a cot at the foot of her bed, keeping an ear out for any sounds of trouble, but a loud clatter from the kitchen had me rolling to my feet and looking around in confusion. I looked at the bed and saw she was still in it, so the sound couldn’t have been her. As another loud bang sounded in that direction I was off and moving before I could think better of it. I was afraid that an animal had gotten into the house, no burglar would have made that much noise, and when I came into the kitchen I saw, just for a second, the furry black backside of some cat or dog or maybe a small bear.

As it climbed out of the cabinet it had been rooting through, I saw it was a person, though it was certainly a grubby one. It was a little girl, maybe six or seven, and she looked filthy. She was wearing a threadbare black dress with curly-toed shoes and a pointed hat that she scooped off the floor. The longer I watched her, the more I came to understand that she wasn’t really dirty, but had covered herself lightly in stove ashe for some reason. She didn’t seem to have noticed me. She was digging through cupboards and drawers as she searched for whatever it was she was after, leaving destruction in her wake.

“Hey,” I called out after some of my surprise had faded, “What are you doing?”

The girl turned and looked confused as she took me in, “What are you doing here? This is my house, you better leave before my Momma sees you and gets mad.”

She continued to look through things, working her way into the living room, and I followed behind her, not sure what to say. Was this a dream? If it was, it was a pretty vivid one. I could feel the carpet beneath my feet, hear the leaky faucet in the kitchen, smell the lunch I had cooked a few hours before. The little girl had wrecked half the living room before I shook off my discomfort and asked her what she was looking for.

If this was a dream then I supposed I had to play along.

“I need my pillowcase, the one with the pumpkin on it. It’s my special Halleeween bag, and I can’t go trick ee treating without it.”

I opened my mouth to ask where she’d left it, but I stopped suddenly as something occurred to me.

I had seen that pillowcase before. It had been in Grandma’s closet for ages, and when I had offered to wash it for her, she had shaken her head and said it had too many memories. There was a pumpkin drawn on one side in charcoal, a black cat on the other side, and a witch's hat between them. Someone had sewn strings around the top so it could be pulled shut, and it looked like a grubby peddler's sack. Surely if this was a dream then Grandma wouldn’t mind if I gave this child the bag. Maybe that's why she had been keeping it, just in case this kid came looking for it.

I told the girl to wait for a minute and that I would get it for her. 

“Okay, but hurry! Halleeween won’t last all night!”

It took a little looking, but I finally found it under some old quilts at the top of the closet. At some point, Grandma must have recolored the cat and hat, and I wondered when she’d had the energy? She hadn’t even been out of bed without me by her side in over a year, so she must have done this before her fall. I took the bag out to the living room and held it out to the girl who was leaning against the sofa. Her eyes lit up and she snatched it happily as she danced around and thanked me.

“Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!” she trumpeted, “Now I can go Trick ee Treating! As soon as,” and as if on cue, a knock came from the door.

The little witch ran to answer it, and I was unsurprised to see the little ghost boy waiting for her.

“Maby!” he said happily, and she wrapped him in a hug like she hadn’t seen him in years.

“Alby!” she trumpeted in return, “Ready to go?”

“For ages, slowpoke,” he said, the smile beneath the sheet coming out in his words.

The two left the porch hand in hand, disappearing out into the crowd as they went to go trick or treating.

I watched them go, feeling a mixture of warmth and completion, and that was when I remembered my Grandma. I had left her alone for a long while, and when I went to check on her, I found her too still in her bed. I started to begin CPR, but after putting a couple of fingers to her throat I knew it was too late. She was cold, she had likely been dead before I was awoken by the clatter in the kitchen, and I held back tears as I called the ambulance and let my parents know that she had passed.

The funeral was quick, Grandma was laid to rest next to Grandpa, and a week later I was helping Mom clean out Grandma’s house. It was my house now, Grandma had left it to me in her will, and Mom was packing up some mementos and deciding what to donate. We were going through her closet when I found a box with keepsakes in it. There were pictures of my Mom when she was little, wedding photos of Grandma and Grandpa, and some letters Grandpa had written her during Vietnam. Mom came over as I was going through them, smiling at the pictures and crying a little over the letters, but I felt my breath stick in my throat as I came to a very old photo at the bottom of the box.

It was a small photo of two kids in costumes on the front porch of a much different house. 

One was a ghost, his eye holes bulging with glasses, and the other was a witch who had clearly rubbed wood ash on her face.

“Julia?” Mom asked, the picture shaking in my hand, “Hunny? Are you okay?”

The picture fell back into the box, and there on the back was the last piece of the puzzle.

Madeline and Albert, Halloween nineteen sixty. 

That was the last I saw of the little witch or the ghost, but when Halloween comes to call, the two are never very far from my mind.

I always hand out candy and decorate the house, just as Grandma would have wanted.

You never quite know what sort of ghosts and goblins might come to visit.

It was my first Halloween on Hamby Street, and I was raring to go.

I had just moved to the neighborhood the week before, and I was hoping to meet some of the kids on the street as I filled my bag with treats.

Mom hadn't set out to move this close to Halloween, but when your Dad decides he needs the house for his mistress and her kids you have to pick up and go pretty quickly. The court had made him buy Mom out of half the house, but that wasn't too difficult for him. We had found a very nice house on Hambry Street, a street packed with families and little cracker box houses, but unpacking hadn't left me a lot of time to make friends. 

Now, standing on the front stoop in my homemade ghost costume, I was ready to find some friends.

The costume had been last minute, my Mom had honestly forgotten about it in the move, and when I had reminded her an hour ago she had realized there was no time to buy one. Hunting around, she found some old sheets and cut a couple of eye holes in one to make a classic ghost costume. It looked kind of lame next to the superheroes and cartoon characters that were tromping up and down the street, but I liked it. It reminded me of Charlie Brown from the storybook I had on my bookcase, and as I set out I wondered if someone might actually give me a rock.     

I didn't get a rock, but I did get a lot of looks from those around me. 

I had expected some laughs, maybe some questions about why I didn't have a real costume, but what I got was something between fear and scorn. People stepped out of my way, the adults looked down at me with disbelief, and a lot of the kids looked scared. I had to look at the front of the sheet a couple of times to make sure they weren't stained or something. No one wanted to talk to me, most of the children turned away from me, and the people at the houses refused to give me candy. They slammed the door in my face almost immediately, some of them telling me that I should be ashamed of myself before doing it. 

That's how I came to be sitting on the sidewalk, trying not to cry, and wondering why I had bothered to come out at all? I had met no one, I had made zero friends, and I felt like I should have just gone home an hour ago. 

So when the group of other kids in ghost costumes walked down the street, they were pretty easy to spot.

There were five of them, their ghost costumes looking dirty and ragged, and as they walked like a line of spooky ducklings, the crowd parted for them as well. They didn't stop at any of the houses, they didn't speak to anyone, they just kept making their way up the street like an arrow fired from a bow.

I felt drawn to follow them for some reason, and to this day, I can't say why. Maybe I felt some kind of kinship, maybe it was the way people treated them, but, regardless, I got up and ran to catch them, my shoes slapping on the concrete as I went. The other kids watched me go with genuine concern, but I didn't much care. These kids seemed to have made the same mistake I had, and it seemed like it was better to be an outcast as a group than alone.

"Hey, wait up," I called, the five ghosts utterly ignoring me as we went along. We walked in our now six-ghost line, and I began attempting to make conversation with them. They looked to be about my age, or at least my height, and they all carried brightly colored candy bags that were in the same sorry shape as their costumes. They were mud-spattered and ripped in places, and the kid in front of me had shoes with a sole coming loose. His left sole slapped at the pavement, going whap whap whap and I wondered what sort of costumes these were? Were they some kind of zombie ghosts or something? Next to my clean white sheet, they looked downright grimy, and I wondered why their parents had let them leave the house like this. 

"Where are we going?" I finally asked, all of them leaving my neighborhood as we turned a corner and headed into a less crowded street, "I promised my Mom I wouldn't go too far and I don't know the streets real well."   

They ignored me, but I wouldn't have long to wonder.

I had seen the house before, Mom and I staring at it as we'd driven into town. It stood out, the grass long and the fence ragged, but the house was the centerpiece of the unkempt space. It had probably once been a very nice one-story house, but it looked like someone had pelted it with eggs or dirt or both, and the owner hadn't bothered to clean it off. The windows were boarded up, the shingles hung raggedly from the roof, and someone had spray painted Killer across the garage door in big red letters. It was impossible not to notice, and I realized too late that it was our destination.

"Are we trick or treating there? I don't even think anyone lives there."

They didn't say anything, but I realized I was wrong a few minutes later. 

I could see a light peeking from a crack in one of the boarded-up windows, and as the ghosts arrived on the sidewalk, it was suddenly covered by a shadow. The ghosts did not approach the house, they didn't even come off the sidewalk, they just stood there, bags in hand, and stared at the house. The shadow moved away from the opening a few times, but it always came back in short order. It was a fitful thing, moving away only to come back quicker and quicker to check that ghosts were still there. I kept turning to look at them, asking what we were doing and receiving no answer. The ghost kids just stood and stared, boring into the house with their dark circle eyes, and I think that was when I really got a good look at them.

Their sheets weren't just grimy, they were covered in muddy tracks. Some of the stains looked like they could be blood, but the worst was the bare stretch of leg beneath the sheets. The skin on those legs was cut and bleeding,  purple and bruised, and the arms were in a similar state of abuse. The eyes though, the eyes were the worst. Looking out from the open holes were darkened eyes that were purple with rings. The kids looked like they had gone ten rounds with a professional boxer, and the part that usually had color was pitch black and unblinking.

These kids weren't interested in candy, they were out for something else.

I had opened my mouth to ask them why they were just standing here when the door suddenly opened and a man in dirty, sweat-stained clothes came weaving out. He wore sweatpants and a tank top, and his bare feet looked like he had bumped them enough times to break every toe on them. He was thin to the point of being skeletal, and the clothes hung off him like rags. I had worried at first that he might be drunk, weaving and pivoting across the yard, but the closer he got, the more I came to understand that he was stone sober.

He wasn't stumbling, he was afraid, and it took everything he had to approach the ghost kids.

"What do you want?" he stammered, his foot catching on something in the tall grass, "Why do you torment me?"

The grass was so tall that you could hear the dry husks scrapping across his pants, but if it bothered him or the five other little ghosts, it never showed.

"Haven't I suffered enough? The town won't let me forget, my ex-wife won't let me forget, and now you return every Halloween to remind me of my mistake? Why? Why? Just leave me alone. HAVEN'T I SUFFERED ENOUGH!"

He stumbled again, his foot catching hard this time, and when he bumped into me, he barely missed being knocked down. That's when he seemed to realize that I was something else. He looked at me in disbelief, but it quickly turned to rage. He lunged forward, grabbing me and shaking me as I tried to articulate something, anything, that would make him stop. He was hurting me, my head snapping back and forth as he shook, and I couldn't make a sound as he tried to shake me to death.

"You...you aren't one of them. There were only five of them, there's always been five of them. Why are you hear? Why are you tormenting me? Why are you,"

Something hit him in the face and he fell back in the grass and clutched at his cheek. Something wet and sticky rolled down his neck, and I had a moment of fear as I wondered if it might be his eye. It wasn't, I saw that when he pulled his hand away, but when the second one hit him, I saw it was an egg as a third and a fourth joined them.

"Get off him you killer. Haven't you killed enough kids already?"

I turned to see three kids on the opposite sidewalk, a carton of eggs between their feet and their hands already throwing more. The man scuttled backward, shielding his face as he went and disappeared into the grass as more eggs came pelting in. I heard the crunch of old weeds that was followed by the slam of a door, and when I heard sneakers coming toward me, I put a hand up in case the eggs came flying my way.

"You okay, kid?"

I looked up to find a Power Ranger, the red one, extending a hand to help me up.

That was Ryan, someone who would later become my best friend over the next few days.

"Ya," I said, accepting the hand up. I looked over at where the other ghosts had been, but they were all gone.

I suppose they had gotten what they'd come for.

"Whoa, lemme help you with that," he said, taking the sheet off and folding it a little as he draped it around me. After a few minutes of fussing with it, his friends coming over to help, he had made a halfway decent toga out of it. His friends, soon to be my friends too, Rob and Patrick, agreed that it looked a lot better, though it clashed with their Power Ranger costumes badly.

"You're the kid that just moved in on Hamby, right?" Ryan asked, "I'm Ryan, this is Patrick, and Robert."

"Just Rob," he insisted as he waved.

They invited me to come with them, chucking another dozen or so eggs at the house the man had scuttled back into. They didn't seem angry about it. They did it like it was an expected chore, and almost seemed bored. They left the trash in the yard before picking up their bikes and walking back the way I'd come towards the happy sounds of our active street.

"Why did you guys egg his house anyway?" I asked, the four of us passing more kids on their way with eggs, "Did he do something to you?"

I had expected them to laugh or maybe act proud of what they had done, but they just shrugged. It was a look I sometimes saw on people who were voting or going about volunteer work, bored but certain of their actions, and it was something that was hard to make sense of at the age of ten.

"We egg his house every year, everyone does. No one likes Horace Jenkins, but especially not on Halloween."

"Why?" I asked, still confused.

"The same reason I bet no one has given you candy. No one wears ghost costumes, not after what he did."

"But what did he do?" I said, starting to get aggravated.

Ryan turned like he was going to yell at me for being stupid, but seemed to remember I was new.

"It was probably about fifteen years ago, way before we were born. Horace Jenkins was the owner of some company, something that was doing well around here, but it didn't make people like him. Horace Jenkins, from what my Dad says, was a mean man. He didn't treat people right, he was rude, he didn't support the community, but he was rich so people let him stay. On Halloween night, about fifteen years ago, he was coming home drunk from a party he'd been at with a rich friend of his and he ran over five kids in ghost costumes. It was all over the news, people knew he did it, but he got some hotshot lawyer who got him out without jail time. They claimed the kids had been running across the road, they claimed Horace hadn't actually been drunk, and they cast a lot of doubt and made a lot of deals, at least that's what Dad says. Afterward, Horace tried to pay the families off, but they wouldn't take the money. No one in town would take his money, no one would work for his company, and he lost all his money when his wife left him. She took his house, his cars, his kids, and he was left with that little house and not much else. The people here let him live in that house, but they let him know that we haven't forgotten. After the accident, it was considered kind of disrespectful to wear ghost costumes anymore, that's why no one does it. They didn't know you were the new kid on the block, they just thought you were being mean. Now you know better, eh Caesar?"

Caesar became my nickname after that, and my makeshift toga got me a lot of candy before the street lights went out.

I spent some time afterward trading candy with my new friends and promising to see them at school the next day.

I still live in that town, some twenty years later, and it's still considered a tradition to go egg Horace Jenkin's house. He's still alive, an old codger of seventy-nine, and I've realized that the town keeps him around as a warning. Working for the bank, I have come to find out that Horace Jenkins has no money, no assets, not a penny to his name, but his taxes are paid, his power and water bills are paid, and food is left on his doorstep once a week to sustain him. It's nothing gourmet, the basics are good enough for him, but it keeps him alive and living in a house that is slowly rotting around him. Once a year, someone cuts the grass, once a year, someone spray paints Killer on the garage door, and once a year, we all throw eggs and door clods at his house to remind him that he tried to cheat his way out of five lives.

The law may have exonerated him, but the town does not forget, and it doesn't forgive.

Sometimes while my friends and I throw our eggs at that sagging wreck, I think I see four little ghosts on the sidewalk, staring at the house of the man who murdered them.

Sometimes, while I throw my eggs at this temple of hatred, I wish Horace Jenkins would live a thousand years.

Then I remember that those ghost kids will be waiting for him, and that brings me some comfort**.**

"Hey, you live at the Murphy Farm, right?"

I looked up, not sure I had heard them.

No one had ever actually talked to me before, so it was a little weird to have it happen.

I'm a farm kid. My Dad is called Farmer Murphy, though that's not actually our name. He bought the Murphy Farm, the one hundred and twenty acres of farmland containing two cow barns, a large chicken shed, an orchard, and several fish ponds. Dad makes quite a bit of money working the farm, enough to afford a small army of hands, and we've run about three pumpkin patches already this year. With that kind of money, Dad thought it would be fitting to send me to a private school. Maybe he thought I could get the kind of education that would allow me to be more than a farmer, maybe he thought I would have a head for business and take the farm to new heights, but whatever he had hoped, it didn't leave me a lot of room for making friends.

I'm not an unpersonable person, I don't keep to myself or bully people or anything, but the kids at the private school know my Dad is a farmer, they can smell the cow crap on my boots and they see me work the pumpkin patch when they come to get their jack o lanterns. They laugh at me behind my back, call me Jethro, and think I must be dumb and simple. This leads most of them to shun me or ignore me, and that's about how I've spent the last two months since we moved here.

Until now, it seems.

"Uh, yeah," I said, looking up from my notebook.

"Told you," said a blond girl. I thought her name might be Rose or Lily or something like that, but the kid who had asked if I lived on Murphy Farm was Derrick. Derick was the one who called me Abner and pretended to smell crap on my boots even when they were clean, "Well, hey, we were wondering if we could see it. We're really interested in farming, aren't we guys?"

There were five of them, two girls and three boys, and they were smiling way too big. Derrick was part of the student council, the girl that was either Lily or Rose and the other girl (Hellen, maybe?) were cheerleaders. The other two were Stan and Guthrie, guys on the football team and pseudo-bullies. They had certainly bullied me enough, though not physically. I was a big guy, too much time spent bucking hay and dragging a hoe, but they didn't mind picking on me.

This was the most genial conversation we had ever had, actually.

"Since when?" I asked, looking between the five of them distrustfully.

Derrick sighed as his smile slipped a little, "Okay, okay, we really just need someone to say it's okay for us to be out there at dusk. We wanna do the Corn Man Challenge, and your Dad has the only one for about thirty miles.

It was my turn to roll my eyes, "You know that's fake, right? There's no real Corn Man."

"Well duh," Guthrie said, "We aren't babies. We just want to do it for TikTok. They've been going viral lately, and we want to see if ours will too."

I didn't really do TikTok much, I was usually listening to audiobooks or something on my phone if I was out working in the field, but even I had heard about this one. The Corn Man was an old legend that had blown up recently, and kids were making videos in fields of themselves standing as still as scarecrows while they sang the creepy little song to summon him. He never came, of course, but some of them were supposed to be kind of spooky. The legend said that if you could prove to the Corn Man that you could stand still in the face of his horrible visage then he must grant you a wish, but it was all superstitious nonsense. You might as well ask the milk cow for wishes than some Corn Man.

Even so, though, I supposed maybe I could work this to my advantage.

"Hmmm, I dunno," I said, putting on the hockey accent I sometimes used, "I'd have to run the tractor when you got done so there wouldn't be any footprints in the corn. The tractor gas is a little expensive," I pretended to think about it, "I couldn't run it for anything less than fifteen bucks a head."

They had their phones out before I even finished, asking for my cash app ID so they could send me the money. I'm not as stupid as they think, and, of course, I have a Cash app. I'd had my eye on a couple of new games and seventy-five dollars would get me a long way toward them. I nodded as the money was received, Derrick actually labeling it tractor gas, and I told them I would meet them at the edge of the east field at five thirty that afternoon.

"The sun will just be setting then, so it'll give you time to set up before it gets low."

They agreed and as they went away, chattering quietly, I sent out another text, preparing for this evening.

I met them at five-thirty-five that afternoon by the east field, surprised they had known which one to come to.

Sometimes city people got turned around.

"Come on," I said, disappearing into the corn, "It isn't far."

Derrick told me to hang on, the girls complaining that they didn't know they would have to wander through the corn. I didn't, just made my way to a spot near the left edge of the field and took a seat on a big rock. The spot was a little weird. No matter what Dad did to it, nothing would grow here. The rock was there to mark it, and as they came out of the corn and saw the little fifteen-by-fifteen-foot spot they started squawking about how it was perfect. One of the girls had a tripod, her Cashapp ID had said Lilyrose so maybe I had been right on both parts, and they set up a phone as they tried to find the right angle.

I just sat on the rock and watched them, looking at the sun as it rode lower and waiting for them to begin.

"Okay," Derrick said, "Let's all join hands and get started."

The other girl (turned out her name was Heather) pressed something in her hand and they began.

Corn man, corn man, come to me if you can,

Corn man, corn man, I can stand as the corn stalks can.

Corn man, Corn man, still as stone, not like a man,

Corn man, corn man, still and quiet as the corn stalks can.

They chanted the words then they stood stalk still in the corn field. The plants waved, giving no notice to the five high school kids who stood like statues in their midst. It was silly. Cornstalks didn't stand still at all. Whoever had come up with this story had clearly never spent a lot of time around corn.

"Nothing's happening," Hellen whispered.

"Give it a minute," Derrick whispered back.

"How long does it take?" Stan whispered, but before Derreck could answer they heard a rustling sound in the cornfield.

I lay on my rock, staying still, and listened to the rustle of something moving amidst the corn plants.

"Is that him?" Lilyrose asked.

"Shhh," Derrick hissed, "You're supposed to be still."

They stayed there as the sun set, the stalks rustling like insects around them, and suddenly it stepped from the corn like a phantom.

He was huge, nearly seven feet tall, and he was a mass of burlap sacks and chains. He had an axe in one hand and a cleaver in the other, and the hockey mask over his face made him look grizzly indeed. His boots galumphed with crusty mud, and he swung his head from side to side as he took in the kids standing in the field.

"It's the Corn Man!" Derrick shouted, immediately breaking his advice from a moment ago and staggering back a step.

"You...you said he wasn't real!" Heather gibbered, breaking into a run.

"I...I didn't," but whatever Derrick did or didn't know was lost as the Corn Man bellowed like a bull and charged them.

They all broke and ran, the corn shaking as they slammed into it and ran in the direction they had come. No one stayed to get their wish, no one remembered that was why they had come there, and as someone grabbed the camera they knocked the tripod over and did not come back for it. They were yelling and screaming all the way to their car, none of them giving a care for their guide, but I didn't mind.

The Corn Man swung his head in my direction as I began to laugh, and as he staggered toward me, I clapped my hands slowly.

"Great job, Travis. You're getting pretty good at this."

He lifted the mask, smiling as he held his burlap-covered hand out for his cut, "It is pretty fun to watch them city kid pee their pants and run away."

I slapped a ten spot into his hand and we headed for the house as Mom rang the bell by the back door, "After two months of being made fun of and thought of as the Stupid Farm Kid it is pretty nice to watch them get their comeuppance."

We stomped through the corn, the stalks parting easily, and Travis looked at the setting sun unhappily.

"Hey, cous, you ain't scared the real Corn Man will get mad at you for makin' fun of him, are ya?"

"Travis, don't tell me you actually believe in the Corn Man. He's just a story, he isn't real."

"Nu-uh, my Daddy says,"

"Travis, your Daddy is a drunk who claims he met Big Foot in Branson Missouri. He is far from a reliable source."

"But he says he believes in him, and that means he has to be real, right?"

It was hard to believe, sometimes, that Travis was a year older than I was. Travis was seventeen and HUGE for his age. The local high schools were trying to get him to play Football, same as they did every year, but Travis and Uncle Zeke were our best hands, and Dad really couldn't spare Travis so he could "Toss a ball around". Zeke depended on his son's added pay so he could properly pickle himself too, so he didn't push the matter.  

"Travis, don't believe everything your old man says. Sometimes you have to come up with your own ideas about things, ya know?"

Travis chewed that over as we came into the barn, leaving his costume in the barn before we went in for dinner.

Okay, so, my early comments may have been a little disingenuous.

I didn't lie, I've always been the big (supposedly) dumb farm kid, at least for the two months I’ve been at this school, but just here recently I've become more approachable by my peers. Derreck and his friends are about the fourth group that has paid for the pleasure of having the shit scared out of them in Dad's cornfield, and I expected they wouldn't be the last. The first group that had approached me had been pure coincidence. Travis had come whistling through the fields as they stood stalk still and they had bolted in fear before he even came out of the corn. After that, I had cut him in, put together a costume, and he blundered into every Corn Man summoning from then on.

It's not technically a lie. People pay more than what I charge for haunted houses, and I have certainly been cashing in given the time of year. People expect a scare around Halloween, they crave it, and I'm just giving them what they want. I think, deep down, they know there's no Corn Man, but it's the adrenaline rush that draws them in. I'm just providing the ambiance.

Derrick's video went up the next day and did very well. He even tagged Murphy Farm in it, which was nice. He seemed surprised when I was in class the next day, and I had to explain to him that I had stayed still, like you were supposed to, and the Corn Man had gone away. That seemed to work, he nodded as he thought about it, and I went back to my assignment as the rest of the class joked about Derrick and his run-in with the legendary Corn Man.

I got approached by a new group at lunch, four guys from the football team, who wanted to go see this Corn Man too. I told them I would need to run the stalk lifter, something that ran on diesel and was kind of pricey, and they shelled out twenty bucks a head for the privilege of using the field. I laughed to myself, eighty dollars richer, and when a new shadow fell over my lunch, I looked up to find the last person I had expected.

"Hey, I, uh, heard you can summon the Corn Man. I was hoping I could tag along too."

Margery Stokes was not someone I would have thought would fall for all this Corn Man nonsense. Margery was here on an academic scholarship, one of five given every year, and her grades reflected. Like me, however, she wasn't from the usual student background, and the others picked on her. We weren't friends, I don't think we had ever shared so much as a class together, but I did know of her.

"Yeah," I said, "Why, did you want to set up a time?"

"I was hopin I could tag along with those guys from earlier. I want to see what there is to this Corn Man thing."

"Well, it's generally twenty dollars a head, but I was mostly just gouging those guys. For you, I'd do ten, just don't tell anyone."

She nodded, reaching into her purse and pulling out a twenty.

"I can pay. Where and when do I meet you?"

I slid the twenty into my pocket, respecting her desire for fairness.

"Six by the east field. It's the one with all the corn in it, you can't miss it."

She told me she would be there and walked quickly off to get her own lunch.

I shot a text to Travis, telling him we had more people looking for the Corn Man and he said he'd be there.

I smiled as I chewed, happy business was so booming, and reflecting it would kind of suck to go back to being the big dumb farm kid once Halloween was over. It would suck, but I wouldn't mind returning to being a nobody either. Having a full social calendar was kind of a pain, and it was only a matter of time before Dad noticed what I was doing and put a stop to it.

Until then, though, let there be Corn Man.

The sun was sinking below the corn as a little red hatchback pulled up along the fence line and I saw Margery hop out and adjust her cardigan.

"Am I late?" she asked, not seeing anyone else.

About that time I heard the exhaust of a large F250 as it came into view and shook my head, "Nope, looks like you're early."

The four burly football players piled out, giving Margery a questioning side eye, and I told them to follow me as we headed into the corn. They came along noisily, talking and joking as they pushed the corn aside, and when the five of them had come into the field, the biggest one turned and tossed me his phone.

"You got the recording, right?"

I nodded and lined up the shot, the four of them laughing as Margery came to join them. They were all very cavalier about the whole thing, but I noticed that Margery was almost shaking with anticipation. She was quiet, almost stoic, and as they took their positions she seemed ready to fight to get what she wanted. I lined up the shot, telling them to start when they wanted, and the five of them began to chant as the corn swallowed the last long line of the sun behind the stalks.

Corn man, corn man, come to me if you can,

Corn man, corn man, I can stand as the corn stalks can.

Corn man, Corn man, still as stone, not like a man,

Corn man, corn man, still and quiet as the corn stalks can.

The ritual completed, they stood there like statues as they waited for the coming of the Corn Man.

I sat too, holding the phone as I recorded them, and the glowing remains of the sun behind them looked pretty cool. This would definitely make a great video. I hoped they remembered to tag the farm in it, but as I sat there, watching them twitch and glance around, something felt different this time. The crickets were silent, the night birds had gone still, and I was suddenly aware of how absolutely noiseless the world was. It's rare to be in the field at night and hear nothing, and it made me think of something my Dad had told me on a hunting trip once.

"When the birds and bugs go quiet, it usually means something big is around. Something big and something bad."

I breathed a sigh of relief when the corn began to rustle. There he was, I thought, as the stalks shook and the assembled kids began to shudder. He was later than usual, but the big oaf sometimes forgot that he was supposed to be there. Travis could be flaky, but I was glad he hadn't forgotten our arrangement.

When the thing broke free of the corn, I knew in an instant that it wasn't Travis.

This thing was made of cornstalks and roots, its arms were wound together plant fibers, and its legs were thick and muscled with the bulging veins of vegetation. Its face looked like a pagan idol, the features made of delicate silk and weathered cornstalks, and the eyes blazed at the assembled children like the coals of a fire.

"Holy shit! What the fuck is that?" one of them shouted, and the thing turned its head to look at him about a second before one of those arms came up and wrapped itself around him. I heard his bones break, his skin tear, and his final horrified screams were cut off as he was torn to pieces. The others ran then, the three football players sprinting into the corn, but I was frozen to the spot on top of my rock. I watched as it went after them, my eyes locked on the bloody remains of the kid whose name I had never bothered to learn, and from the rock, I heard the thing as it caught them. They screamed like trapped animals, their fear and their pain a living thing, but as I looked up, I noticed that someone hadn't run.

Margaret was still there, her cardigan spattered in blood and her face full of terror, but she refused to move. She was stalk still, her chest barely rising, and when I glanced down, I remembered that I was recording. The kid's phone had caught all of it, and as the thing came stomping back, I tried to keep everything in frame so I could prove I'd had no part in this. At least one person had been torn to shreds on my Dad's land, and I was not about to go to prison for some psycho that had been hiding in my East field.

As it came lumbering out of the field, it looked at Margaret and made its laborious way over to her. To her credit, she never moved, though I could see the tears sliding down her face as they joined the gore there. It stood far taller than it had any right to be, its body blocking the light of the moon as it fell across her, and seemed to judge her with those living coal eyes.

"You have proven thyself worthy of my boone, child. What do you ask of the Corn Man?"

Her voice shook only a little, but I still heard it from my rock.

"Please, my mother has cancer. Cure her, I beg you. She's all I have in this world. Please, take her cancer from her and let her live."

The Corn Man nodded his head slowly, and it sounded like trees bending in the wind, "Granted," he whispered and as he disappeared into the cornfield I could see the red running off him and hear the creak of the stalks as he vanished.  

The police found the bodies of Trevor Parks, Nathaniel Moore, and Gabriel and Michael Roose in the field that night. Dad was pretty mad when he learned what I had been doing, but the video cleared me of any involvement in the deaths. Travis had, thankfully, been busy in the cowshed with a particularly fussy milk cow and had remembered that he was supposed to be the Corn Man about ten minutes after sunset. He had actually met Margaret and I as we came out of the field, and I had to stop her from screaming as he came lumbering up with half his costume on. The police took the phone and the official report stated that some psycho had been creeping around, found us in the field, and decided to kill everyone but Margaret and I for some reason. Dad forbade me from doing anything like that in the fields again and I agreed, pretty done with anything related to the Corn Man after that.

A couple of days later, after I had been asked about a thousand questions by the police, Margaret came to sit with me at lunch.

"Thank you," she said, and I was a little confused as to what she was thanking me for.

"For?"

"My mom got the call today. They have to run a bunch of new tests, but the cancer is gone. She had a tumor in her brain the size of my thumb and it's just gone."

We sat in silence after that, neither of us saying it but both of us thinking the same thing.

It would appear that Margaret had gotten her wish from the Corn Man after all.

"Bill, the sign says take two."

Bill rolled his eyes at Clyde before pouring half the bowl into his bag and holding out the bowl for him to take the rest.

"Well, I don't see anyone here to stop me. Come on, Clyde. Live a little."

Clyde looked around guiltily and finally took two pieces out of the bowl and tossed them into his bag.

Bill sighed, "You're such a goody two shoes," he said, dumping the rest into his bag.

Clyde looked around, trying to see who was watching, "But what if someone else comes by and wants candy?"

"Then I guess," Bill said as he hefted the sack onto his shoulder, "they should have come earlier. Come on, it's almost nine and I want to hit a few more houses."

The two boys tromped down the sidewalk, Bill's eyes roving as he looked for another house with a bowl on the porch. The houses with people handing out candy were nice and all, but the ones with unattended candy bowls, guarded only by a sign and good manners, were the best. The kids were thinning out now, the unagreed-upon hour that Halloween ended approaching, and that would make it more likely that no one would tattle to their mom if they saw him scooping up bowls. His sack was getting heavy, but he knew there was room for a little more.

"Bingo," Bill said, seeing a house with a bowl on the porch.

"Bill, don't," Clyde started to say but Bill was up the stairs and on the porch before he could get it all out. The sign said "Take Two" but Bill scoffed as he pushed it over and picked up the bowl. He dumped it into the sack, hefting it back onto his shoulder without even asking Clyde if he wanted any. He would probably be a little baby about it, anyway.

"Can we go home now?" asked Clyde, looking around nervously, "We're going to get in trouble."

"You worry too much," Bill said, grunting a little as he came down the stairs, "If they leave the bowl on the porch," he explained, tightening his grip on the mouth of the full sack, "then they ain't coming out to supervise when you take it. They get an empty bowl, we get candy, and everyone wins."

Clyde seemed unsure but Bill put it out of his mind as they started home. It was five blocks home, and it was gonna be a hike with all these sweet treats bouncing on his back. They parted so a group of kids could make their way up the porch steps, and as they made their way up the sidewalk Bill could hear the disappointed noises from the kids behind them. He shook his head, first come first served, and kept right on walking.

Clyde was quiet, twitching nervously as they headed home. Bill hated it when he did that. His little brother was such a goody-goody that he sometimes worried too much. Clyde always gave them away if he saw you do bad stuff, shaking and stammering and letting momma know that Bill had been up to his old tricks again.

Bill stopped suddenly and opened the sack, reaching in for a piece of candy before finding exactly what he was looking for. One of the last couple of houses had these chocolate peanut butter pumpkins, and Bill wanted one badly. There was one peaking just below the surface of the candy mountain that was pressing at the sides of the bag, and Bill had just started unwrapping it when Clyde spoke up.

"Bill! Mom hasn't even checked it yet! What if it's poison or something?"

Bill rolled his eyes as he bit into the chocolate pumpkin and chewed, relishing the taste, "Don't be such a baby, Clyde. It's in a wrapper. No one's gonna poison candy in a wrapper. I don't need Momma to check my candy, I can do it myself."

He hefted the sack again, walking a little faster so Clyde would have to keep up, and thinking about maybe digging out another of the pumpkins. They had moved into a less full part of the sidewalk, the kids mostly gone home by now, and that was probably the only reason he heard it. It was a weird sound, like footsteps right behind him, and Billy turned his head suddenly but found nothing behind them.

"What?" Clyde asked, but Bill just shook his head.

"Nothin', let's go," he said.

Bill started walking faster, but no matter how fast he walked, the sound still followed. It actually quickened as he sped up again, keeping pace with him easily, and a glance behind him showed no one following him. What was this, Bill wondered. Was someone playing a joke on him or...maybe...

He shook his head. It was just the idea of Halloween filling his head with nonsense. There was no ghost after him, no spirit hounding his tracks. Maybe he needed a little more candy. Maybe if he just had another piece of Candy he would feel better.

He slipped the sack off his shoulder and reached in, but something seemed off. Was the sack emptier than it had been? No, no it couldn't be. He had only taken a single piece out. It just looked that way. There was still so much candy here. It was just his nerves. He took a Kit-Kat out and ate it before pulling the sack back onto his shoulder again.

As he started walking, he heard the sound again. Something was following behind him, the plop plop plop like worn down shoes as it tailed Bill and Clyde. It was past dark the light from the street lamps providing islands on the sidewalk with widening gulfs of darkness between. Bill felt the hairs on the back of his neck stick up. This couldn't be real, it was impossible. There was no way this could...

"Do you hear that?" Clyde asked, his voice low and scared.

Suddenly, Bill realized that it wasn't just in his head.

If Clyde could hear it too, then it had to be real!

"Go away!" Bill shouted, suddenly turning around to confront whatever it was that was following them. He got some strange looks from a couple of kids further up the block, but there was nothing on the sidewalk behind him but a single, brightly wrapped piece of candy. Candy, Bill thought, that would help him settle his nerves. He'd have a Snickers or a Reeses and be better in his mind for sure. He put the bag on the sidewalk, opened the neck, and reached in to get some...

The missing candy was obvious this time. Bill had lost about a quarter of his sack somehow and had never even noticed the loss. Was that what the thing was doing? Stealing his candy? But how? How could it be taking candy from his closed bag? It didn't make any sense. He pulled the neck shut without taking anything and threw it back onto his shoulder. It was noticeably lighter now. The weight of it was still there, but it wasn't as heavy as it had been.

"Bill? Is something wrong? You look scared."

"Let's go," Bill almost gasped out, his teeth chattering as he started walking again.

Right away came the steps.

Pap Pap Pap Pap.        

They were following him, houding him, making him crazy. Why was this happening, he wondered, as the sound chased him. He had just taken some candy. Surely this...whatever it was wasn't haunting him just for treats. That was stupid, it didn't make any sense.

Pap pap pap pap

He wanted to run, but what would it do then? His Grandpa had told him on a hunting trip that when you were confronted by a predator, you weren't supposed to run. If you ran it might think you wanted to be chased, and it might get excited. Bill didn't want to be chased. Just then, Bill wanted to be inside his house with the door locked and his blanket over the top of him so whatever monster this was couldn't get him. You were safe under the covers, everyone knew that, and Bill desperately wanted to be safe.

"Bill? What,"

"Cross the road," he growled at Clyde, and the two of them crossed in the middle of the road, Clyde looking around fitfully as they did so. Jay Walking, Bill thought. How ever would Clyde's record recover from this?

And still, that pap pap pap sound followed them across the road.

They were about a block from home now, and Bill was starting to feel a little silly about all this.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he had just thought he'd seen all that candy gone. There was no way it could actually be gone. He was holding the opening to the bag. He'd put it down and check, and then he'd find the bag still full. That would put his mind at ease.

"Bill, why are we stopping?" Clyde asked, sounding as scared as Bill felt, "I think we should,"

"Shut up," Bill snapped, opening the bag and looking in.

His stomach fell, it was worse than he thought. He had been wrong, it wasn't a quarter of the candy. Now, as he looked at the pile of treats inside, it was half of the bag that was now missing. It couldn't be real, there was just no way, but, sure enough, the bag was only half full.

"No," he moaned, "No, no, no, no, no, no,"

Billy hefted the bag and began to run, Clyde crying for him to wait as he chased after him. He could hear the pap pap pap sound behind him and feel the bag getting lighter as he flew along. Clyde was calling his name, trying to get Bill to stop, but Bill was lost to reason. It was taking his candy, it was taking HIS candy! He had to get home, he had to make it to the house before it could get it all. The footsteps were coming faster and faster, chasing him as he rounded the corner and saw the inflatable yard ornaments of home, and knew he was close to the safety of a closed door and the warm lights of his house. The footsteps still chased him, and now he couldn't get two words out of his head as he ran.

The sound of the footsteps seemed to whisper to him, and he wondered if the ghost that was chasing him was his own greed.  

"Take Two," it seemed to say, repeating again and again, and when he finally collapsed on the front porch of his house, panting and shaking, his sack was as slack and empty as it had been when he left.

With shaking hands, he opened it, and there he found the proof he had been looking for.

At the bottom sat two full-sized chocolate bars, their prize from Mrs. Nesbrook who lived across the street.

When Clyde came puffing up a few minutes later, Bill was crying on the porch, his sack in his lap and his face in his hands.

"Bill, Bill what's wrong? Are you okay?"

"No, no, it's all gone! It took my candy, and it's my own fault. You were right, Clyde. I got greedy. I shouldn't have messed with the rules. Now it's all gone and I," but when Clyde started to laugh, it shut him up in a hurry.

Clyde opened his bag and, to Bill's surprise, it was much fuller than it had been.

"There's no ghost eating your candy, silly. There's a hole in the bottom of your bag."

Bill looked at him in disbelief, "But...but I heard it. The footsteps,"

"It was the sound of the candy falling out," Clyde said, flipping over Bill's bag and showing him the hole in the bottom of his sack. The sack had been at critical mass, Bill supposed, and the candy had made the hole bigger as it bumped around in there as he ran. Bill looked at the hole, dumbfounded, for a moment, and then he started to laugh. He took the candy bars out of the sack and threw the bag away, putting an arm around his brother as the two went inside.

"I suppose it serves me right for just taking what I wanted, huh?" Bill asked, feeling the fear disipate inside him as he began to feel silly instead.

"Yeah, but it's okay," Clyde said, "We can share my bag."

They spent the rest of the evening eating candy and telling spooky stories. 

As he sat eating candy, Bill decided that, from now on, he would listen when something told him not to take too much.

Dad was always kind of a weird guy.

Weird and strict.

I always thought this was just because he was a single parent, but even that seemed to only barely cover his odd behavior. He expected the best of me, expected my chores to be done, expected the rules to be followed, and, if I didn't, there was only one punishment that would do. 

Dad never hit me with a belt, he never spanked me with his hand, he never took my stuff or put me in time out.

No, Dad had a different sort of punishment he used.

He didn't introduce the jar until I was six, and it was revealed with a lot of serious contemplation.

I remember coming home from my first day of Kindergarten and finding my Dad sitting in the living room, the jar on the little end table where the magazines and rick rack usually stood. The jar may have begun life as a pickle jar, it always smelled a little of brine, and inside were beans. These were spotted pinto beans, the kind I had used on art projects and crafts since before I could remember, and I noticed they had been filled up to the brim. All in all, there were probably about three bags of beans in there, and a piece of scotch tape declared it to be my jar.

"Take a seat, we need to have a very serious talk," he said, and I ended up just sitting on the floor of our living room and looking up at him. He looked very serious, more serious than I had ever seen him before, and that scared me a bit. Up until now, Dad had always been this goofy guy who played pirates and astronauts and Mario Kart with me, but now he looked like a judge ready to sentence me to death if I didn't have a pretty good defense for my crime.

"You are six now, long past knowing right from wrong. In this family, it is customary to use The Bean Jar to punish children. Do you see this jar?" he asked like there was any way I could miss it.

I nodded and he smiled, seeming pleased.

"The Bean Jar symbolizes You. It is everything you are, and everything you might be. So, from now on, when you are bad, or insolent, or you disobey my orders, I will not yell at you or send you to your room. I won’t do anything but take a bean from The Bean Jar."

I almost laughed. Was this a game or something? Was I supposed to be scared of a jar of beans? This had to be another one of Dad's jokes. Dad was always doing stuff like this, telling me how the monsters in my closet could be kept away by a teddy bear or that the Cavity Creeps would eat my teeth if I didn't brush them twice a day. Dad was a goofball, he always had been, but I think it was his face that made me wonder if he was joking or not. Throughout the whole thing, he just sat there, deadly serious, and never averted his eyes from me.

"You're a smart kid, just like I was, and I see now that you'll need an example. You may think this is just a regular jar, but you're wrong," he said, reaching in and picking up a bean, "dead wrong."

He didn't even take it out. He just lifted a little, hovering it over the pile, but he didn't need to do anything else. Suddenly, miraculously, it felt like someone was touching my brain. It was the feeling of getting a sudden sadness, a sudden bit of anxiety, and I wanted him to drop that bean back in the jar. I needed to be whole, I needed all my beans, and he must have seen that on my face because he dropped it back in and I trembled as I tried to make sense of what had just happened.

"I'm sorry, but you have to know what's at stake here. You're my last chance, I have to make sure that you are perfect, and the Bean Jar knows perfection from flaw. My own father used this method, and his father, and his father before him. The Bean Jar is always used until the child's eighteenth birthday, or until all the beans are gone."

I was panting when I asked him what would happen if all the beans were gone.

He looked at me without mirth and without any sign of a joke or a goof, "You don't want to know."

That's how we started with the Bean Jar. Dad didn't suddenly turn into an ogre or become a villain overnight. He went back to being the same guy he'd always been. We would play video games together, build with my Legos, and play pretend after school. My Dad had never scared me like that before, he and I were always really close, but I remember how he would get when he had to take beans out of the jar. His face would become completely neutral, and he would walk to the jar and take out a bean before crushing it between his thumb and forefinger. 

The Bean Jar was utilized even for the most trivial of infractions. 

Forgot to wash my dishes? Lose a bean.

Forgot to put my clothes away? Lose a bean.

Stayed up too late on a school night? Lose a bean.

There was no escalation either. There was never any difference between forgetting to clean up my toys or yelling at Dad because I was frustrated. It was always one bean at a time, ground to dust between his large, calloused fingers. He would look at me too with this mixture of pain and resolve once it was done, his stoicism only going so far.

Those times he took a bean, however, were unbearable. 

It felt as if each bean were a piece of my psyche that he was turning to dust. As a child, every bean made me hyper-aware of my actions, but I was still just a child. Sometimes I forgot things, sometimes I was lazy, and sometimes I thought I could sneak around and get away with not doing what I was told. I was always caught, always punished, and I always fell into a state of anxious, nervous emotions once it was done. I hated the way it felt when he crushed those beans, and I didn't want to lose another one. I didn't want to lose them so badly, that I trained myself to perform the tasks expected of me without fail. Five am: start the laundry. Five twenty: make breakfast. Five Thirty: wash my dishes. Five forty: dress. Six o'clock: clean up my room. Six thirty: backpack on, fully dressed, waiting by the door to leave. Three ten: Get home, do homework. Four thirty: Clean house. Five: Start dinner. Six: Eat dinner when my father got home. Nine o'clock: brush teeth, take a shower. Ninethirty: Bedtime. Every day, without fail, these things were done or I would be one bean shorter.

This manifested itself as a kind of mania in me. Not only did I have to get all my chores done, but I needed to get good grades too. After a while, good wasn't good enough either. What if Dad decided that C's and B's weren't good enough? I strove for all A's, and Dad seemed happy with my efforts.

To the other kids, however, I was a weirdo, and I didn't really have any friends.

Dad was my only friend, but it was a strange kind of friendship.

Like living with someone who has schizophrenia and could change at the slightest inclination.

I didn't have any real friends until high school when I met Cass.

Cassandra Biggly was not what you would consider a model student. Her parents had high expectations for her, but she was a middling at best. She came to me because I was the smartest kid in school, at least according to the other kids, and she begged me to help her. I helped her, tutored her, showed her the way, and soon her grades improved. That was how we became friends, and how she was the first to find out about the Bean Jar.

"So, he just takes a bean out and crushes it?"

"Yes," I said, not sounding at all mystified about the process.

"And...what? It means you have less beans?"

I thought about it, Dad had never actually told me what would happen, only that it would be terrible.

"When he takes out all the beans, then something awful will happen."

"Like what?" Cass asked, "No dessert for a month?"

"I don't know, but I know that when he crushes those beans, it's like a piece of my sanity is mushed. I feel crazy after he smooshes a bean. I don't like feeling that way, I don't like it at all."

I started crying. I hadn't meant to, I was sixteen and I never cried anymore, but Cass didn't make me feel bad about it. She just held me while I cried and eventually, I stopped. It had felt good to be held. Dad hugged me, but he never really comforted me. I didn't have a mom, someone whose job seemed to be comforting me, and as Cass held me, I realized what I had been missing all these years.

I had been missing a Mom that I had never even known.

We hung out a lot after that, Cass and I. Despite our age, it never became inappropriate. She gave me something I had been missing, a friend without the threat of punishment looming over our relationship. The realization made me feel differently about my Dad. He was still the lovable goofball that he had always been, but I started to see how our entire relationship hung under the shadow of that bean jar. As I pulled away, he became more sullen, and more suspicious, and I saw him holding the Bean Jar sometimes as if he wished to smash them. If I wasn't misbehaving, though, he couldn't, that was always the deal. He knew it, I knew it, and he knew that as long as I abided by the rules, he couldn't punish me. 

Despite how it will sound, Dad was never cruel about the Bean Jar. He never used it to take out his frustrations, he never came home and punished me simply because he’d had a bad day. The rules were established, we had both agreed to them, and I knew that by following them I would be safe. I think, deep down, Dad really did think he was doing the best for me, thought he was molding me into something better than I could be, and I guess he was right, though it wasn’t fair, not really. 

Then, one day after coming home from Cass's, it all came to a head.

Dad was supposed to be at work, so Cass and I came back to the house to play video games. She had never even seen a Super Nintendo, and she wanted to play some Mario Kart with me. We had come in, laughing and making jokes, when someone cleared their throat loudly, sending a chill up my spine and turning me slowly to find my Dad sitting on the couch. He looked so much like he had the day he introduced the Bean Jar, and he was wearing that look of pain and resolve.

"You come home late, your chores aren't done, your homework is undone, and you have brought someone here without permission. Why have you decided to break the rules like this?"

I saw the hammer come down on the table, but I hadn't realized what he'd done until then. It turned the bean he had laid there to smithereens, and I shuddered as I gripped my head and moaned. If he noticed, he made no comment. He just brought the hammer down on another one, and I nearly vomited as a pain like no other went through me. He had lined up four, one for each infraction, but he had never done anything like this. It had always been one at a time, and that had been bad enough. 

This, however, was unbearable.

"Stop it!" Cass yelled, "Whatever you're doing to him, stop," but he cut her off. 

He grabbed her under the arm and heaved her toward the door, "This is your fault. You've changed him, made him forget his purpose, but I won't let you kill him. You aren't allowed in this house, never again, and I,"

"Put her down," I growled, finding my feet, weaving only a little, "You will not touch her."

My father looked at me, not believing what he was hearing.

"Put her down, now," I repeated, stepping up close and getting in his face.

"You dare? You dare to challenge me? You're no different than the rest. I tried to raise you better, but it appears I was a fool. I'll smash every damn bean in that jar if I have to. When all the beans are gone, you’ll cease to exist! I’ll smash every damn bean in that jar, just to prove...just to...just to...prove," but he never finished. 

He let go of the hammer as he clutched at his chest, and it fell from his grip as he gasped and beat at his shirt front. His face had gone from red to purple and before he hit the floor it was nearly black. I just stood there for a moment, listening to Cass beat at the door and ask what was wrong. I couldn’t answer, I just stood there, feeling like I was suffocating as the realization that my father was dead fell across me. 

That was two years ago. 

I’ve been living with Cass since then, her parents taking me in gladly. Cass and I are getting ready for college and that’s when I remembered the house. It’s still there, still sitting on the same lot, and I decided that it might be good to sell it so I can pay tuition. There were things inside as well, I’ve been back there a few times to get things, and I knew my father’s room was essentially untouched. The police hadn’t bothered to search the place. Dad’s death was no mystery, after all, and they had decided he had died of a heart attack and saved me a lengthy interrogation. 

I started cleaning it out as summer began, selling what I could and donating what I couldn’t. I found pictures of my Dad and I, taken in better times, and far too soon I had cleaned out everything and was left with only my fathers room. I paused at the door, almost feeling like a burgler when I thought of going in there, but finally decided this was my house now and this room was as good as mine.

The room was spartan, a bed and a dresser and a closet, but it was what I found inside it that took me by surprise. 

Five jars, each of them bearing a different name.

Jacob, Mark, Sylvester, Katey, and James.

They were empty, the lids gone, and the taped on names made them look exactly like mine.

What the hell was this? Who were these people? I didn’t know any of them, and no one but Dad and I had ever lived in the house. It had always been the two of us, always just…

No, that couldn’t be true, because my mother had once lived with us. 

There, in the back, was a sixth jar, the glass broken but the tape intact.

Maggie.

“When the beans are gone,” I heard Dads voice echo in my head, “then you cease to exist.”

Had the names on those jars been real people? Had I lived with them and simply didn’t remember them? How could you remember people who never existed? 

I sat there for a long time, trying to make sense of it all, and finally decided to write al this before it grew unclear.

Apparently Dad wasn’t as crazy as I might have thought, and maybe I should have been more respectful of the bean jar.

It sits on the shelf in my dorm room now.

I took it from the house before I sold it and I guard it jealously. 

I don’t know if it still works the same now that dad is dead, but I’m not taking any chances. 

I've worked construction since dropping out of college, so about twenty years. I know most people don't think much of it, but if you haven't shivered in the night lately then thank a construction worker because we probably built the thing that's keeping the elements out. It's not glamorous work, but I have managed to claw my way up the ranks till I have my own crew, run my own job sites, and live pretty comfortably.

After twenty years, I've noticed that there are constants in this industry, but only three standouts, hard hats, lunch pails, and porta johns. Job sites and Porta potties go together like a hand in a glove. They are always necessary, always terrible to get stuck in for long periods of time, and always seem to smell both sterile and like a horse manure field. In twenty years I've been inside more porta potties than I have women, and, unfortunately, I think some of the shitters were cleaner.

This particular time was a little different, a lot different, and it's something that sticks with me to this day.

It's been weeks, months even, and I still wake up sometimes in a cold sweat as I see that thing and hear it grind its teeth together.

I'm getting ahead of myself, lemme start from the beginning.

We were working on these new apartments, one of those big old buildings with about eight units per floor and about fifteen floors that are wedged between another one that's mostly the same thing. I was sipping my fifth cup of coffee when I heard the ominous rumble from my guts and knew what was coming. I'd had two breakfast burritos from Dollies, she's an angel but she goes heavy on the peppers, a whole pot of coffee, a hashbrown as big as a pretzel, and now it was all coming to a head. The guy showing me the blueprints for the building looked at me with real worry and asked if I needed to take a minute. I told him it was fine, but he got about halfway through telling me about a problem with the wiring when it happened again.

I gritted my teeth, that one might as well have been a starting pistol, and I told him I'd be right back.

I made it to the lift just before the doors closed, and the guys who were taking it down looked worried as my stomach growled like a V8 with a bad carburetor.

"Too many of Dollie's spicy chorizos, boss? said one of the guys at my elbow, and I nodded as the sweat started standing out.

"It's fighting with the pot of coffee and the hashbrown in there, and it's anybody's bet who'll win."

"Remind me not to follow you into the john," he said with a laugh as the lift came to the ground floor.

I was out and looking for one of the blue boxes that marked our porta potties. There were about five of them on-site, and it wasn't long before I found one of them over by the office. I was waddling now, trying not to lose it right here in the yard, and the guys were laughing as I came ponderously toward my oasis in the desert.

I closed the door, pushed the black locking bar, and had my pants down and my ass over the hole before I could embarrass myself further. I checked for paper and was glad to find some, not always a given, and as the pressure began to relieve itself in the worst way possible, I closed my eyes and sighed happily. I'll save you the messy details, but, needless to say, I was glad when it was finally over.

I took out my phone, giving it some time to see if there was any more business to conduct, and that's when I became aware of the strange sound. At first, I thought I might not be done, but I realized pretty quick that the slight splashing noise wasn't me. It was like something was making ripples in the water, splashing up a little as it sturred below, and I wondered if maybe I had dropped off a big enough payload to still be stirring as it sank.

When it splashed again, this one high enough to wet my nethers with cold, dirty water I stood up quickly. That had definitely been something alive splashing around in there, and I must have looked pretty silly just standing there, pants around ankles, as I stared into the hole. I fumbled at my phone, trying not to drop it in as well, and bent low so I could see into the fallow pit.

It was hard to tell at first, the murky blue water looked like a subterranean lake more than anything, and the murky light in there wasn’t helping matters one bit. I wondered if a snake had gotten in, maybe something bigger, and that was when I noticed something round coming out of the water.  

As it rose, I recognized it for what it was; the top of a very bald head. 

The tips of ears were sticking up from the surface of the muck, and as it rose I could see the beginning of eyes as well. They were open, staring, and utterly devoid of anything human. I stumbled back, nearly falling down as my feet tangled in my pants, and bumped hard against the door as the whole thing shook on its base.

What the hell was that, I wondered? Had some homeless guy gotten into our shitter? Had some freak gotten down there with nasty stuff on his mind? I didn’t know, but what I did know was that I was locked in here with him. I reached for the lock, the light from my phone held forward so I could see, and when I heard a splash, I turned back in a hurry.

The light from my phone fell across the opening, and the head that rose from it looked like some kind of creature from one of the old stories my friends and I had told to spook each other with when we were younger. Its skin was inky, though that could have more to do with where it was residing. Its ears were long and pointed, like a bat, and its eyes were white like the full moon. It rose from the festering swamp like a vampire from some old movie, its body simply rising without any kind of mechanism to lift it. I wasn't sure if it was tall or capable of levitation or something, but as its face came fully over the lip toilet lid, I saw the worst of it.

Its mouth was stretched into a perpetual grin, its teeth long and sharp as they fit together like puzzle pieces. As neatly as they came together, they still appeared to be too big for its mouth. They looked like they might be painful to it, the grin more of a grimace than anything, and they were gravel gray and slimy with something more vicious than saliva. In the dim light of the little toilet, it rose up to tower over me. It kept rising, its head nearly brushing the ceiling, and I could see that its arms and legs were, indeed, longer than expected. They were nearly twice as long as its body, the hands ending in cruel claws. It leered at me, reveling in my fear, and I was paralyzed by that fear.

The creature was terrifying, but I don't think that was all of it. There are certain places where we seem to believe we have the illusion of safety. Your home, your bed, the bathroom, places you are at your most vulnerable and comfortable. You think of these places as safe, as sanctuaries, and when that space is violated it feels like a violation of your person.

It opened its mouth, giving me a good look at those gravel-gray fangs, and as it hissed softly, it leaned forward like it was getting ready to strike.

I don't know how I did it, I shouldn't have been able to move at all, but my hand seemed to come up all on its own and flick the plastic bar back that was holding the door closed.

I went from cowering on the floor of a filthy porto-potty stall to scrambling across the yard of the job site, the light flooding in as it sent the creature shrinking back into its dark hole.

I had crab-walked about twenty feet when I realized that I hadn't had time to pull my pants up and was scrambling half-naked across a job site with hundreds of people on it. I didn't think all of them were watching me, but way more eyes than I wanted were there. I jerked my pants up and started yelling about some kind of animal being in the porta-potty. Some of the guys ran over to investigate, others came to see if I was okay, but ultimately they found nothing. I told them, told the authorities when they got there too, that something had been in the tank and it had come at me spitting mad. They got somebody out there to drain it, but they didn't find anything. I hadn't expected they would.

Whatever it was, it had gone back to hiding in the muck.

I had the unit closed down and told the vendor that he could come and get it.

He offered to bring a new one, but that didn't help.

I do my business off-site now, but I will remember that grinning, dripping, terrible face for as long as I live.

Charles stepped into Fun Land Amusements and ground his teeth at the sight of children playing skeeball and air hockey and the waka waka waka of Pacman that filled the air.

The Great Gizmo reduced to playing chess in a place such as this.

The owner started to say something to the well-dressed gentleman, but Charles waved him off. 

He didn't need directions, he and Gizmo were old friends and he could practically smell the old gypsy from here. That was one of those words his great-great-grandchildren would have told him was a "cancelable offense" but Charles didn't care. Much like The Great Gizmo, Charles was from a different age.

Charles had first met Gizmo in Nineteen Nineteen when the world was still new and things made sense.

It had been at an expo in Connie Island, and his father had been rabid to see it.

"They say it's from Europe, and it has been touring since the eighteen hundred. It's supposed to play chess like a gran master, Charlie Boy, and they claim it's never been beaten. I want you to be the first one to do it, kiddo."

Charlie's Father had been a trainman, an engineer, and a grease monkey who had never gotten farther than the fifth grade. He had learned everything he knew at the side of better men, but he knew Charles was special. Charles was nine and already doing High school math, not just reading Shakespeare but understanding what he meant, and doing numbers good enough to get a job at the Brokers House if he wanted it. His father wouldn't hear of it, though. No genius son of his was going to run numbers for Bingo Boys, not when he could get an education and get away from this cesspool.  

"Education, Charlie, that's what's gonna lift you above the rest of us. Higher learning is what's going to get you a better life than your old man."

One thing his Dad did love though was chess. Most of the train guys knew the typical games, cards, dice, checkers, chess, but Charle's Dad had loved the game best of all. He was no grand master, barely above a novice, but he had taught Charles everything he knew about it from a very young age, and Charles had absorbed it like a sponge. He was one of the best in the burrows, maybe one of the best in the city, and he had taken third in the Central Park Chess Finals last year. "And that was against guys three times your age, kid." his Dad had crowed.

Now, he wanted his son to take on The Great Gizmo.

The exhibition was taking place in a big tent not far from the show hall, and it was standing room only. Lots of people wanted to see this machine that could beat a man at chess, and they all wanted a turn to try it out. Most of them wouldn't, Charles knew, but they wanted the chance to watch it beat better men than them so they could feel superior for a little while.

Charles didn't intend to give them the satisfaction.

The man who'd introduced the thing had been dressed in a crisp red and white striped suit, his flat-topped hat making him look like a carnival barker. He had thumped his cane and called the crowd to order, his eyes roving the assembled men and woman as if just searching for the right victim.

"Ladies and Gentleman, what I have here is the most amazing technical marvel of the last century. He has bested Kings, Geniuses, and Politicians in the art of Chess and is looking for his next challenge. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, The Great GIZMO!"

Charles hadn't been terribly impressed when the man tore back the tarp and revealed the thing. It looked like a fortune teller, dressed in a long robe with a turban on its head boasting a tall feather and a large gem with many facets. It had a beard, a long mustachio that drooped with rings and bells, and a pair of far too expressive marble eyes. It moved jerkily, like something made of wires, and the people oooed and awwed over it, impressed.

"Now then, who will be the first to test its staggering strategy? Only five dollars for the chance to best The Great Gizmo."

Charle's father had started to step forward, but Charles put a hand on his arm.

"Let's watch for a moment, Dad. I want to see how he plays."

"You sure?" his Dad had asked, "I figured you'd stump it first and then we'd walk off with the glory."

"I'm sure," Charles said, standing back to watch as the first fellow approached, paying his money and taking a seat.

This was how Charles liked to play. First came the observation period, where he watched and made plans. He liked to stand back, blending in with the crowd so he could take the measure of his opponent. People rarely realized that you were studying their moves, planning counter moves, and when you stepped up and trounced them, they never saw it coming. That was always his favorite part, watching their time-tested strategies fall apart as they played on and destroyed themselves by second-guessing their abilities.

That hadn't happened that day in the tent at Connie Island.

As much as he watched and as much as he learned, Charles never quite understood the strategy at play with The Great Gizmo. He stuck to no gambit, he initiated no set strategy, and he was neither aggressive nor careful. He answered their moves with the best counter move available, every time, and he never failed to thwart them.

After five others had been embarrassed, to the general amusement of the crowd, Charles decided it was his turn.

"A kid?" the barker asked, "Mr, I'll take your money, but I hate to steal from a man."

His Father had puffed up at that, "Charlie is a chess protege. He'll whip your metal man."

And so Charles took his seat, sitting eye to glass eye with the thing, and the game began.

Charles would play a lot of chess in his long life, but he would never play a game quite that one-sided again.

The Great Gizmo thwarted him at every move, countered his counters, ran circles around him, and by the end Charles wasn't sure he had put up any sort of fight at all. He had a middling collection of pieces, barely anything, and Gizmo had everything.

"Check Mate," the thing rasped, its voice full of secret humor, and Charles had nodded before walking away in defeat.

"No sweat, Charlie boy." His father had assured him, "Damn creepy things a cheat anyway. That's what it is, just a cheating bit of nothing."

Charles hadn't said anything, but he had made a vow to beat that pile of wires next time the chance arose.

Charles saw The Great Gizmo sitting in the back of the arcade, forgotten and unused. He didn't know how much the owner had paid for it, but he doubted it was making it back. The Great Gizmo was a relic. No one came to the arcade to play chess anymore. There was a little placard in front of him telling his history and a sign that asked patrons not to damage the object. The camera over him probably helped with that, but it was likely more than that.

The Great Gizmo looked like something that shouldn't exist, something that flew in the face of this "uncanny valley" that his great-grandson talked about sometimes, and people found it offputting.

Charles, however, was used to it.

"Do you remember me?" he asked, putting in a quarter as the thing shuddered and seemed to look up at him.

Its robes were faded, its feather ragged, but its eyes were still intelligent.

"Charles," it croaked, just as it had on that long ago day.

Charles had been in his second year of high school when he met The Great Gizmo for the second time. School was more a formality than anything, he could pass any test a college entrance board could throw at him, but they wouldn't give him the chance until he had a diploma. He was sixteen, a true protege now, and his chess skills had only increased over the years. He had taken Ruby Fawn to the fair that year and that was where he saw the sign proclaiming The Great Gizmo would be in attendance. He had drug her over to the tent, the girl saying she didn't want to see that creepy old thing, but he wanted a second chance at it.

His father was still working in the grease pits of the train yard, but he knew his face would light up when he heard how his son had bested his old chess rival.

The stakes had increased in seven years, it seemed. It was now eight dollars to play the champ, but the winner got a fifty-dollar cash prize. Fifty dollars was a lot of money in nineteen twenty-six, but Charles wanted the satisfaction of besting this thing more than anything. Despite what his father wanted, he had been running numbers for John McLure and his gang for over a year, and some well-placed bets had left him flush with cash.

“Good luck, young man,” said the Barker, and Charles was surprised to find that it was the same barker as before. Time had not been kind to him. His suit was now faded, his hat fraid around the rim, and he had put on weight which bulged around the middle and made the suit roll, spoiling the uniform direction of the stripes. Despite that, it was still him, and he grinned at Charles as he took the familiar seat.

This time, the match was a little different. Charles had increased in skill, and he saw through many of the traps Gizmo set for him. The audience whispered quietly behind him, believing that The Great Gizmo had met his match, but the real show was just beginning. Charles had taken several key pieces, and as he took a second rook, the thing's eyes sparkled and it bent down as if to whisper something to him. The crowd would not have heard it, its voice was too low, but The Great Gizmo whispered a secret to Charles that would stick with him forever.

“Charles, this will not be our last game, we will play eight more times before the end.”

It was given in a tone of absolute certainty, not an offhand statement made to get more of Charles hard-earned money. Charles looked mystified, not sure if he had actually heard what the thing had said, and it caused him to flub his next move and lose a piece he had not wanted to.

Charles persevered, however, pressing on and taking more pieces, and just as he believed victory was within his grasp, the thing spoke again.

“Charles, you will live far longer than you may wish to.”

Again, it was spoken in that tone of absolute assuredness, and it caused Charles to miss what should’ve been obvious.

The Great Gizmo won after two more moves and Charles was, again, defeated.

“Better luck next time,” said the Barker, and even as Charles's date told him he had done really well, but Charles knew he would never be great until he beat this machine.

The pieces appeared, Charles set his up, and they began what would be their fourth game. Charles, strategically meeting the machine's offensive plays with his own practice gambits, would gladly admit that the three games he had played against The Great Gizmo had improved his chess game more than any other match he had ever played. Charles had faced old timers in the park, grandmasters at chess tournaments, and everything in between. Despite it all, The Great Gizmo never ceased to amaze and test his skill.

Charles tried not to think about their last match.

It was a match where Charles had done the one thing he promised he would never do.

He had cheated.

The Great Gizmo had become something of a mania in him after he had lost to it a second time. He had gone to college, married his sweetheart, and begun a job that paid well and was not terribly difficult. With his business acumen, Charles had been placed as the manager of a textile mill. Soon he had bought it and was running the mill himself. Charles had turned the profits completely around after he had purchased the mill, seeing what the owners were doing wrong and fixing it when the mill belonged to him. He’d come a long way from the little kid who sat in the tent at Coney Island, but that tent was never far from his mind.

Charles had one obsession, and it was chess.

Even his father had told him that he took the game far too seriously. He and his father still played at least twice a week, and it was mostly a chance for the two to talk. His father was not able to work the train yard anymore, he’d lost a leg to one of the locomotives when it had fallen out of the hoist on him, but that hardly mattered. His father lived at the home that Charles shared with his wife, a huge house on the main street of town, and his days were spent at leisure now.

“You are the best chess player I have ever seen, Charlie, but you take it too seriously. It’s just a game, an entertainment, but you treat every chess match like it’s war.”

Charles would laugh when he said these things, but his father was right.

Every chess match was war, and the General behind all those lesser generals was The Great Gizmo. He had seen the old golem in various fairs and sideshows, but he had resisted the urge to go and play again. He couldn’t beat him, not yet, and when he did play him, he wanted to be ready. He had studied chess the way some people study law or religion. He knew everything, at least everything that he could learn from books and experience, but it appeared he had one more teacher to take instruction from.

Charles liked to go to the park and play against the old-timers that stayed there. Some of them had been playing chess longer and he had been alive, and they had found ways to bend or even break the established rules of strategy. On the day in question, he was playing against a young black man, he called himself Kenny, and when he had taken Charleses rook, something strange happened. The rook was gone, but so had his knight and had been beside it. Charles knew the knight had been there, but when he looked across the board, he saw that it was sitting beside the rook on Kenny's side. He had still won the match, Charles was at a point where he could win with nearly any four pieces on the board, but when they played again, he reached out and caught Kenny by the wrist as he went to take his castle off the board.

In his hand was a pawn as well, and Kenny grinned like it was all a big joke.

Charles wasn’t mad, though, on the contrary. The move had been so quick and so smooth that he hadn’t even seen it the first time. He wondered if it would work for a creature that did not possess sight? It might be just the edge he was looking for.

“Hey, man, we ain’t playing for money or nothing. There’s no need to get upset over it.”

“Show me,” Charles asked, and Kenny was more than happy to oblige.

Kenny showed him the move, telling him that the piece palmed always had to be on the right of the piece you would take it.

“If it’s on the left, they focus on that piece. If it’s on the right though, then the piece is practically hidden by the one you just put down. You can’t hesitate, it has to be a smooth move, but if you’re quick enough, and you’re sure enough, it’s damn near undetected.”

Charles practiced the move for hours, even using it against his own father, something he felt guilty about. He could do it without hesitation, without being noticed, and he was proud of his progress, despite the trickery. He was practicing it for about two years before he got his chance like The Great Gizmo.

By then, Charles was a master of not just chess but of that little sleight of hand. He hadn't dared use it at any chess tournaments, the refs were just too vigilant, as were the players, but in casual games, as well as at the park, he had become undetectable by any but the most observant. He was good enough to do it without hesitation, and when he opened his paper and saw a squib that The Great Gizmo would be at Coney Island that weekend, right before going overseas for a ten-year tour, he knew this would be his chance.

There was no fee to play against the thing this time. The Barker was still there, but he looked a little less jolly these days. He was an old, fat man who had grown sour and less jovial. He looked interested in being gone from here, in getting to where he would be paid more for the show. He told Charles to take a spot in line, and as the players took their turn, many of them people 

Charles had bested already, they were quickly turned away with a defeat at the hand of the golem.

The Great Gizmo looked downright dapper as he sat down, seeing that the man had gotten him a new robe and feather for his journey. The eyes still sparkled knowingly, however, and Charles settled himself so as not to be thrown by any declarations of future knowledge this time. The pieces came out, and the game began.

Charles did well, at first. He was cutting a path through The Great Gizmo's defenses, and the thing again told him they would play eight more times before the end. That was constant, it seemed, but after that, the match turned ugly. The Great Gizmo recaptured some of his pieces and set them to burning. Charles was hurting, but still doing well. He took a few more, received his next expected bit of prophecy, and then the play became barbaric. The Great Gizmo was playing very aggressively, and Charles had to maneuver himself to stay one step ahead of the thing. He became desperate, trying to get the old golem into position, and when he saw the move, he took it.

He had palmed a knight and a pawn when something unexpected happened.

The Great Gizmo grabbed his hand, just as he had grabbed Kenny's, and it leaned down until its eyes were inches from his.

It breathed out, its breath full of terrible smoke and awful prophecy, and Charles began to choke. The smoke filled his mouth, taking his breath, and he blacked out as he fell sideways. The thing let him go as he fell, but his last image of The Great Gizmo was of his too-expressive eyes watching him with disappointment.

He had been found wanting again, and Charles wondered before passing out if there would be a fourth time.   

Charles woke up three days later in the hospital, his wife rejoicing that God had brought him back to them.

By then, The Great Gizmo was on a boat to England, out of his reach.

The year after that, World War two would erupt and Charles had feared he would never get another match with the creature.

The match had begun as it always did. Charles put aside The Great Gizmo's gambits one at a time. He played brilliantly, thwarting the Golem's best offenses, and then it came time to attack. He cut The Great Gizmo to shred, his line all a tatter, and when he told him they would play eight games before the end, Charles knew he was advancing well. He had lost barely any pieces of his own, and as the thing began to set its later plans in order, he almost laughed. This was proving to be too easy.

The Great Gizmo and the Barker had been in Poland when it fell to the Blitzkrieg, and the Great Gizmo had dropped off the face of the earth for a while. Charles had actually enlisted after Pearl Harbor, but not for any sense of patriotism. He had a mania growing in him, and it had been growing over the years. He knew where the thing had last been, and he meant he would find the Barker and his mysterious machine. The Army was glad to have him, and his time in college made it easy to become an officer after basic training. They offered him a desk job, something in shipping, but he turned them down.

If he wanted to find The Great Gizmo, then he would have to go to war.

He had fought at Normandy, in Paris, in a hundred other skirmishes, and that was where he discovered something astounding.

Despite the danger Charles put himself in, he didn't die. Charles was never more than slightly wounded, a scratch or a bruise, but sustained no lasting damage. He wondered how this could be, but then he remembered the words of The Great Gizmo.

“You will live far longer than you may wish to.”

He returned home after the war, but the old construct returned to America. It took a while for his contacts to get back on their feet, but eventually what he got were rumors and hearsay. He heard that Hitler had taken the thing, adding it to his collection of objects he believed to be supernatural. He heard it had been destroyed in a bombing run over Paris. He heard one of McArthur's Generals had taken it as a spoil of war, and many other unbelievable things.

After the war, it was supposed to have been taken to Jordan, and then to Egypt, then to Russia, then to South Africa, and, finally, back to Europe, but he never could substantiate these things.

And all the while, Charles grew older, less sturdy, but never died.

He was over one hundred years old, one hundred and six to be precise, but he could pass for a robust fifty most of the time. He had buried his wife, all three of his children, and two of his grandchildren. He had lost his youngest son to Vietnam and his oldest grandson to the Iraq war, and he was trying to keep his great-grandson from enlisting now. They all seemed to want to follow in his footsteps, but they couldn't grasp that he had done none of this for his country.

"Checkmate," he spat viciously as he conquered his oldest rival.

He had gone to war not for his wife, or the baby in her arms, or even the one holding her hand.

He had gone to war for this metal monstrosity and the evil prophecy it held.

"Well played," it intoned, and he hated the sense of pride that filled him at those words, "You may now ask me one question, any question, and I will answer it for you. You have defeated The Great Gizmo, and now the secrets of the universe are open to you."

Some men would have taken this chance to learn the nature of time, the identity of God, maybe even that night's lotto numbers, but there was only one question that interested Charles.

"How much longer will I live?"

The Great Gizmo sat back a little, seeming to contemplate the question.

"You will live for as long as there is a Great Gizmo. Our lives are connected by fate, and we shall exist together until we do not."

Charles thought about that for a long time, though he supposed he had known all along what the answer would be.

The man behind the counter looked startled when the old guy approached him and asked to buy The Great Gizmo.

"That old thing?" He asked, not quite believing it, "It's an antique, buddy. I picked it up in Maine hoping it would draw in some extra customers, but it never did. Thing creeps people out, it creeps me out too, if I'm being honest. I'll sell it to ya for fifteen hundred, that's what I paid for it and I'd like to get at least my money back on the damn thing."

Charles brought out a money clip and peeled twenty hundred dollar bills. He handed them to the man, saying he would have men here to collect it in an hour.

"Hey, pal, you paid me too much. I only wanted,"

"The rest is a bonus for finding something I have searched for my whole life."

He called the men he had hired to move the things and stayed there until they had it secured on the truck.

Charles had a spot for it at the house, a room of other treasures he had found while looking for the old golem. The walls were fire resistant, the floor was concrete, and the ceiling was perfectly set to never fall or shift. Charles had been keeping a spot for The Great Gizmo for years, and now he would keep him, and himself, for as long as forever would last.

Or at least, he reflected, for four more chess matches.

Wasn't that what The Great Gizmo had promised him, after all?  

The Great Gizmo

My Grandpa was an odd guy.

He was clearly wealthy, but no one was ever sure how. He lived frugally, in a small house on a quarter of an acre, with a sensible car, and nothing too fancy in the house. If you'd driven past it you would have assumed some old timer on a pension was just moldering away his golden years there, and you would have been right in some ways.

Where he showed his wealth was in his generosity. Grandpa liked to give. He gave the best Christmas presents, had the best candy for Halloween, donated to charities, and liked to see people happy. If you asked him how he could afford to be so generous, however, he would always just wink and say he had his way. Not even my Grandmother knew where his money came from, and they were married for fifty years.

So when he died, we all wondered who would inherit his mysterious fortune.

My cousins had loved Grandpa, grandkids always do, but the two of us had always been close. My old man hadn't even waited till I was born to go grab some milk and cigarettes, and Grandma and Grandpa had helped my Mom raise me so she could go to work. I have a lot of fond memories of sitting with my Grandpa and watching TV, taking walks around the neighborhood, and eating ice cream at this little shop on the corner. He would always tell me to appreciate the little things because the smallest thing could be the one that changes my life the most.

"Take this," he would say, showing me the door knocker he often carried in his pocket, "I found this when I was a very young man, sifting through trash in a landfill as I looked for bottles to sell. It became my lucky charm and it changed my life forever."

Grandpa carried that door knocker for as long as I had known him, and it was pretty unique. It was a brass hand holding an apple and it was all meticulously crafted in exhausting detail. The fingers had individual nails, the apple had a stem and leaves, and even the knuckles had wrinkles on them had been carefully worked. I couldn't believe, as a young child, that Grandpa had just pulled this out of a dump, but he carried it everywhere, and I suppose it did bring him luck.

The funeral was beautiful, everyone there having nothing but kind words for Grandpa and his family. After the service, my three cousins and I were asked to come to a will reading at the Lawyer's Office and Grandpa had been as generous in death as he was in life. My cousins had received a trust fund for each of them, the amount payable on their thirtieth birthday with a small living expense each month. Grandpa hadn't left a trust for me but he had left me his little house, which I was pretty glad for.

Mom had recently married and, though I liked Mike a lot, it had seemed a little weird to have her adult son living in the house she was trying to make a new life in. Grandpa's old house was the perfect size for me, a college student with no real prospects of marriage in the near future. It was close enough to campus that I thought it would be ideal, but the lawyer had one more thing to give me.

"Your Grandfather was also very clear that I give you this," he said, handing me Grandpa's lucky charm, the brass door knocker.

I thanked him, thinking I might hang it somewhere in the house in Grandpa's memory. It seemed only fitting to make a little memorial wall out of it. After all, Grandpa had loved the thing and it had been his only constant possession for years.

So, I moved in that day, taking my things and wishing my mom and stepdad goodbye as I, too, embarked on a new life.

Over the next few days, I changed the house around a little. I hung my flat screen on the wall, I moved Grandpa's favorite chair around, I added my books to his bookshelf, and I donated his clothes and some of his other things to one of his favorite charities in town. I think Gramps would like the thought that his stuff would help people in need, and they were very thankful. A few of them offered condolences, having read about his death in the paper. Grandpa bought a lot of his stuff from Goodwill and Habitat for Humanity, but he also donated a lot so he was well-known to them.  

It was Friday, about four days after the funeral, when I noticed the knocker on the counter and remembered my plans to hang it and make a memorial wall.

I didn't have anything else planned for that day, so it seemed like a fine pursuit.

I hung the knocker in the living room, putting it above a little shelf where I put some candles and a picture of Grandad. I put his wallet up there too, something else he was never without, and I added a tin of Altoids, a pocket watch I had seen him wear, and a few other pictures of him. The door knocker was the centerpiece and it all looked very nice when I got done. As I finished I stepped back and admired it, thinking that Grandpa would have liked it too.

That night was the first time I heard the knocking.  

I was lying in bed, doing some doom scrolling before I went to sleep when suddenly I heard a loud thump from the living room. I took out my earbud and listened, wondering if something had fallen over or maybe someone was at the door, but I didn't hear anything. I shrugged, thinking it had been my imagination, but just before I could slip the earbud back in, I heard it again.

Three long booms from the living room and then silence.

I got up, wondering who would be knocking on my door at this time of night. I went to the front door and looked out the peephole. I opened the door to see if someone was joking around, but there was no one there. The front porch was empty, and Grandpa didn't have bushes or anything to hide behind. The kid or whoever would have to be the freaking Flash to make it off the porch without being seen and I closed the door and started to go back to bed.

I had come to the hallway that led there when I heard it again.

Three long booms and then silence.

I turned back, looking at the door, but there was nothing. The knocking hadn't come from the door, I would have been able to tell. No, it had come from the living room. I glanced around, looking for someone at a window or maybe the rattle of a woodpecker on the eaves, but there was nothing.

I decided to just go to bed and try to make sense of it later, but that wasn't the last time I heard it.

I heard the knocking a couple of times over the weekend, but I could never quite nail down where it was coming from. It was always either one, two, or three knocks followed by a ten-second pause and then the same number of knocks before it stopped. By Monday I was pulling my hair out, wondering if it was the pipes or something in the walls, and then finally I caught it.

I had found a wedding picture of my grandparents sitting in a desk drawer, something Grandpa had probably put away so he wouldn't miss her, and decided it would look better on the shelf with his other memories. I was adding the wedding picture beside one of Gramps accepting an award for philanthropy when the knocker on the wall suddenly rattled and thumped. I jumped back, not sure what to make of it, but it thumped once, twice, three times, and was quiet for about ten seconds. I had just thought it might be a fluke or something when it did it again.

Thump, thump, thump, and then silence.

I took it off the wall and looked for some kind of motor or something, but it was just a normal brass knocker.

It happened two more times that day and I was extremely curious as to what made it do it and why. I started going through Grandpa's desk, hoping for some explanation, and that's when I found the letter. It was in the middle of a ledger book, addressed to me, and it wasn't even sealed, which was unlike Gramps. It was just a single page of notebook paper, and I was glad to see Grandpa's cramped handwriting speaking to me from the page.

I hope you're enjoying the house, and I hope you found this letter in a timely manner. I had considered leaving it to Wilson to give to you, but I thought it might be better if you came across it naturally. Also, I wanted you to receive the knocker, and Wilson may have decided to keep it if he'd read the letter. He's a good man, an honest man, but greed can do funny things to people. You have probably noticed by now that the door knocker taps on its own sometimes. You wouldn't believe how I discovered its power, a complete accident, but I swear that what I'm about to tell you is absolutely true.

The door knocker opens doors to different places. Place it on a door and wait for the knocks. Once it knocks, open the door and travel to where it takes you. The knocker only has three destinations, but they have been of great benefit to me and our family. When it knocks, you will have ten seconds to open the door. The second set of knocks is the doorway closing so it won't work if you catch it on the second set. 

One knock opens onto the Treasury, a room of treasures. Coins, gems, gold, all piled to the ceiling. If anything guards it, it has never bothered me, but I am always careful not to take too much.

Two knocks opens onto the Library, a room stuffed with bookshelves. You can spend hours, days even, in this place and time won't pass outside the door. I have learned so many things here, things lost to time, and read about things that have yet to happen.

Three knocks opens onto a Void, a darkness that I dare not enter. Anything you put in here will be gone, anything. There is no ground inside it, though, so don't walk in. I am ashamed to say that it's where I've been putting my trash, but it's also where I hid your dog, the one I said ran away when you were very young. He died suddenly, just lay over and died, and I put him in before you woke up from your nap. I’m sorry I never told you, but you were so young when it happened that I didn’t think you would mourn him for long.

The knocks are never consistent, but each knock seems to come at least once a day. The three knocks usually come in the evening or early afternoon, one knock is usually in the morning or before noon, and the two knocks come's when it will. While you are inside, don't let the door close. I was stuck in the library for a long, long time once and was fortunate that your Uncle came along and opened the door. Time doesn't affect people the same way inside the door as it does here, so spend as much time as you want there. If you get hurt, however, you will still be injured, so be careful. You and I have always been close, and I know you and your cousins have speculated for years about my mysterious fortune. The knocker is yours to do with what you will, but always remember that money breeds difficulty, which is why I have always kept it a secret.

Good luck, I love you, kiddo.

I read through the note a few times, trying to make sense of it. There was no way. Grandpa had always been sharp, not real problems mentally, but this sounded like the mad ramblings of a lunatic. The knocker, however, had moved on its own, that much was true. It occurred to me that there was a way to test the rest of it, so I decided to do just that.

I took the knocker off the wall where I had hung it and attached it to the closet door in the living room. It looked a little silly there, a door knocker on a door that opened onto a closet with two coats and a bunch of board games in it, but I wanted to be sure. It was silly, the kind of thing you read about in fairy tales, but I wanted to be sure.

I had a while to wait, but it finally happened just as I was thinking of going to bed.

It was around ten thirty and I was reaching for the remote to turn the TV off when I heard it. Two loud knocks, seconds apart, on the closet door. I popped up, remembering I had ten seconds to get there, and threw the door open. I expected to find the same closet that he had been there earlier. I expected this to be a joke from my Grandfather. What I didn't expect to find the great library he had talked about on the other side.

It was huge, a library to rival any I had ever seen, and the windows shone with perfect sunlight as I stood in shock. The shelves were tall, taller than the roof of the house I stood in, and they had long, trestled ladders with wheels to slide along the floor. I could see a grand staircase, and I felt sure there would be levels above the next as well. I could learn anything in there, I could learn everything in there, but I remembered what Grandpa had said about not getting closed inside and looked for something to prop the door open with. I saw an end table and pulled it over to put in the way, stepping inside and marveling at the space.

I spent hours perusing books. There were books on languages, on history, on science, on anything I would want to know. I only explored the first floor that night, but there was enough here to keep me reading for days, maybe months. I was studying architecture at College, and there was a whole section of books I could use to study any period, any style, and anything else I wanted. This place was like the library they talked about in Alexandria, the library in the Harry Potter books, and some kind of wizard's private collection from a fantasy novel all rolled into one. Time may have moved differently here, but it didn't stop me from getting tired. I had been excited when I came in, but after a couple of hours of looking at books I was yawning and rubbing my eyes.

I decided to come back another time and let the door close as I pushed the end table out of the way.

It was true, I couldn't believe it, but I had seen it myself.

Grandpa had a magic door knocker!

I spent the next few days testing each knock pattern, and Grampa's observations had been spot-on. I found the room with the gold in it the next day and it was almost more impressive than the library. Think of a room full of any kind of money you could want. Gold bars, US currency, ancient denari, little stones with things scratched on them, gems, pearls, silver nuggets, and other things I didn't have names for. I reached for a stack of hundreds with shaky hands and brought them out before letting the door close again. I had made about two grand in a matter of seconds, and I put it somewhere safe before heading to class. The Void was a little scarier when I got it, but I had been setting garbage bags beside the door in case I was home when the knock came.

The Void was just what it claimed to be. It was like looking out at the night sky, except there were no stars. It was an inky, unnatural blackness, and I wondered if maybe Nietzsche had been describing this place when he talked about staring into the abyss. The space was utterly devoid of anything, but it seemed to crouch as well, just waiting for me to drop my guard. The bags went in, falling into a soundless, airless void, before I closed the door again.

It was great for a while, truly a blessing. I had all the money I needed, and whatever I took seemed to come back after I shut the door. I could take books from the library if I needed to, and anything I left on the work tables would put itself back on the shelf. I spent a lot of time in the library when I could get there, and sometimes I would wake up to find I had fallen asleep. The door never slammed shut and trapped me in there, and without anyone to come behind me and accidentally close it I felt safe in there. I learned so much in a relatively short time, and my professors were impressed with my knowledge. I considered bringing them the books I used to gain this knowledge, but thought better of it. How would I explain it to them? A guy in his early twenties who just happened to have a book that was probably hundreds of years old was something that would probably gain the attention of the wrong sort of people.

I was careful not to use too much of the money, careful not to spread it around too much, and careful not to show anyone the books from the library.

It went well for about four months, but then I started getting knocks of another sort from the door.

It started subtly, with little knocks and taps from time to time. I'm sure I missed a lot of them, but I would sometimes look up if I was watching TV or something, expecting to see the knocker tapping but find it silent. I started watching the door closer, seeing strange lights waft beneath it sometimes. They would skitter across the bottom, like strange shadows, and I found myself watching them more than the TV after a while. My trips to the other places were still uneventful, the landscapes the same as they had always been, but it was the times in between the knocks that I came to dread.

Then, one night, something knocked back.

I was brushing my teeth when I heard a familiar boom sound three times. I checked the clock and saw it was nearly eleven, a little late for knocking but I stuck my head out to look at the door, nonetheless. The toothbrush was still half in my mouth, and I had expected to see nothing stranger than the knocker fall back into place.

Instead, something knocked again, and it wasn't the knocker.

I came slowly out of the bathroom, watching as strange lights came flashing from between the cracks in the door. It was like a haunted house attraction, and I almost expected to see smoke billowing out from underneath it. The knocks were shy, almost uncertain, and I was preparing to head to my room when something hit the door hard enough to shake it in the frame. I jumped back, not sure what to make of it, and when it hit it again, I fell onto my butt and just watched it shake.

Whatever was knocking was adamant about getting in, and it slammed its weight into the door again and again. The knob rattled, the door shook, and the lights flashed faster and angrier. My teeth were chattering, this had never happened before, and I was terrified that whatever it was might get through. It slammed into it again, the old wooden door cracking in the frame, and when it struck this time, I saw something break through the surface and come grabbing blindly from within.

It was an arm, a long, purple arm covered in scales.

It thrashed around, trying to find something to grab, and the sounds from within were like bats and birds turned up to a thousand. It shivered right on the edge of hearing and I expected my ears to start bleeding. It was looking for the knob, and I wasn't sure what would happen if it found it.

Instead, it bumped into the knocker.

It fell off the door, it was only held on by a couple of screws, and as it clattered onto the floor, the most hellish sound of all ripped from the hole before being cut off as suddenly as it had begun.

The lights, the noise, and the banging all stopped with a suddenness that made me dizzy.

I stood up, looking at the broken door, and walked slowly into the living room to see the extent of the damage. Something was bumping, but I thought maybe the arm had knocked something over. I wanted to make sure the knocker was okay, but as I came around Grandpa's old chair, I saw what was making all the noise.

It was the arm that had come through the door. It was leaking black fluid all over the hardwood and flopping around like a fish.

It didn't flop for long, but now I'm left with a problem.

The portal only seems to open when the knocker is up, but unless it's up, I can't open it.

I wonder if this is why my Grandpa kept it with him so often.

Did he, perhaps, have a visitor one night when he least expected it?

For now, I'm keeping the knocker in my bedside table, but even as I lay here writing this, I can hear it bump against the wood every now and again.

The money will eventually run out, that or my curiosity to learn will get the better of me, and I'll hang the knocker again, but I think, for now, I'll let it sit.

No need to invite trouble if I don't have to.  

My Inheritance had some strange rules

I was just looking for something to make my end-of-summer sleepover amazing.

What I got was a sleepover that no one would ever forget.

Margo, Jenny, and I had been friends for years, since Kindergarten even, and we were getting ready to start seventh grade in a few days and wanted to hold our annual slumber party. I had the pigs in a blanket made, the chips that Margo liked, the sour gummy worms for Jenny, and a huge bottle of Doctor Fizz for us to share. I was getting the movies ready when I realized that I hadn't found our favorite game yet and started hunting through the closet.

We had played Mall Madness, a game my mom had given me from when she was young, and it was a hit at any sleepover. We would shop till we drop, charge it up, and then laugh about who got the best deals and spent the least amount of money. It was great, I had probably replaced the batteries in it a dozen times or more, but I just couldn't find it anywhere. It had always been at the top of my closet, right beside my old Barbie travel case, but today it was nowhere to be found.

I blew out in exasperation, wondering where it could be, but ultimately decided to go check the attic. It had come from the attic, so maybe Mom had put it back up there. I pulled down the ladder, glad it was still daylight so it didn't look so spooky, and went looking for Mall Madness. It was kind of a chore because Mom is something of a hoarder. Dad calls her a "Pack Rat" and it seems pretty fitting. She keeps everything. She had clothes from when my sister and I were little kids, she's got school art projects, she had boxes of old photos and memory books, and all kinds of things. I pushed aside a bunch of dresses and found an area dominated by old toys and games that she had saved. It was a mishmash of dolls, books, some old dollhouses, and a couple of dusty board games.

I didn't find Mall Madness, but I found about seven others. Apples to Apples was for babies, Uncle Wiggly sounded kind of weird, Don't Wake Daddy was missing pieces (some of which I had lost), and Monopoly took too long. I was about to give up when I saw a black box at the bottom of the stack that I didn't think I had ever seen before. It was covered in dust, the letters barely visible, and as I pulled it out, tugging it quickly so the other boxes wouldn't fall, I wiped off the cover and read the red letter slowly, the red on black hard to read since it was so faded.

Mystery Man the name proclaimed, and I was about to open it to see the instructions when my mom called to let me know my friends were here and I ran downstairs to see them.

I tossed the game onto my bed as I ran past, figuring we would check it out late, and we were soon all laughing and jumping as we got excited for tonight.

We ate dinner, we played hide and seek in the backyard, we hung out in my tree house, and as it started to get dark we came in to watch movies, play games, and start the rest of the evening's activities. Dad worked nights and Mom didn't really ever make us go to bed when we were having sleepovers. We usually passed out sometime around midnight, but tonight we wanted to stay up till we heard my Dad pull in from work. We wanted to see if we could stay up till dawn, just to see if we could, and we had enough snacks and sugar to manage it, we thought.

By eleven thirty we had watched two movies, eaten most of the snacks, drank half a bottle of soda, and braided each other's hair during the end of Balto. We were a little bored with movies and Jenny asked if we could play Mall Madness for a little bit. That was when I remembered the game and told them I had something different in mind tonight. The game had worked its way half under my pillow somehow and when I pulled it out, my friends Oooed and Awwed at it appreciatively.

We opened the box and found a blackboard with silver spaces, the big orange phone in the middle having an honest-to-God spin dial on it. We had cards with descriptions on them, and it felt more like we were assembling a police sketch than a dream date. We would go around the board, landing on spaces and drawing cards, and when we found a card with a number on it, we would dial the number and it would help us determine the identity of our mystery man.

"So it's a little like Dream Date, then," Margo said.

"Seems weird," Jenny said, "Like we're hunting him or something."

I looked at the instructions but they gave no particular instructions on the purpose for making a description of the guy. We would take turns until we had assembled our mystery man and then we would call triple 0 on the phone and give our description to the person on the other end. Somehow they would know if it was right or not and tell us we had won or tell us to try again.

"Simple enough," I said, and I picked up the dice and rolled first.

It was about four turns later when Jenny landed on a card that gave her a phone call. She tried to dial, but she was having some trouble until I showed her how the rotary phone worked. Mom had shown me, saying that was how they used to call people a million years ago, and once she got the number plugged in, she held the phone against her head and waited for the click. Someone came on after three rings, a weird staticy voice that I didn't much like, and whatever it told Jenny, she didn't seem to like it either. After a few minutes, she put the phone down, her hands shaking a little.

"Well?" Margo asked, "What did it say?"

"I'm," Jenny cleared her throat, clearly trying to get in control of herself, "I'm not supposed to tell anyone. The phone man said the call was just for me."

She handed me the dice, her hand very sweaty and a little shaky, and we continued.

It was my turn to use the phone next, but Margo pulled out a card and laid it down. The card let her steal my phone call and I laughed a little as I stuck my tongue out at her. She dialed the number and held the phone, interested to hear what was to come. None of us thought it was real, well, Margo and I didn't, but Jenny scooted a little away as she made her call.

The voice picked up, said something quick and harsh and Margo's smile slipped off her face as she listened.

Her lip was trembling as she put the phone down, and she wrote something on a piece of paper and shook her head when I tried to pass her the dice.

"The guy on the phone said to let you roll again. He said some other stuff, but I'm not supposed to say."

I rolled again and grumbled as I landed just shy of a phone space. I wanted to hear what had them so spooked. This was a board game, ages ten and up and all that, and there was no way it could be that terrifying. We continued taking turns, the girls wanting to keep playing despite their obvious discomfort, and finally, I got my wish. I drew a card after landing on the spot and it was the phone booth, Search the deck for a phone call card and dial the number. I took the first one I found and dialed the number, letting it ring five times before someone picked up.

"The Mystery Man is a blonde, about six foot tall, in a wide-brimmed hat. That's for your ears only, toots, so don't tell any of those other little bitches what I said, I'll know."

That was a little weird and I put the phone down with some hesitation. I didn't think they could say things like that in a board game like this. Margo and Jenny didn't bother to ask what he'd said, and I made notes as Margo took her turn. I had a blonde card and a wide-brimmed hat card, but I didn't have one that said six feet tall. I guessed I would just have to draw for it. Meanwhile, Margo had gotten another phone call and as she listened, I saw her glance over at Jenny and the look didn't seem friendly. I didn't know what the phone guy was telling her, but it seemed to be making her mad.

We played the game for hours, and in that time, the game got worse and worse.

Anytime Jenny got a phone call it nearly put her in tears.

Anytime Margo got a phone call it seemed to make her angrier and angrier.

I tried to take the phone from Jenny at one point, offering to take the call for her, but she shook her head and told me the phone man said she had to take it, whether she liked it or not.

"Yeah," Margo said, her eyes looking mean, "She needs to take her calls just like the rest of us."

As the game went on, we got more clues. I learned that my Mystery Man was a six-foot-tall blonde in a wide-brimmed hat with a mustache, black pants, and a white shirt. I had most of that, but I was still missing the six-foot card and the mustache. The man on the phone had alluded to the fact that Margo would soon make her move against Jenny, the two being like dogs ready to fight, and when Margo threw down a card, it looked more like a knife toss than a friendly showing.

"White glove, I get to take one of your cards, Jenny."

Jenny nodded, holding her card out like a fan and Margo picked the fourth one, pulling it back smugly before glowering at it.  

"You switched it," she accused, flipping it around to show the Green Sweater card.

Jenny shook her head, "Nu-uh."

"Yes, you did!" Margo accused, "The phone man said you were a cheater, but I didn't want to believe him at first. Looks like he was right."  

"I never cheated," Jenny said, almost crying.

"Then why wasn't this the Green Scarf card? The phone guy," but she brought her teeth together, hard, and it sounded like wood clacking together.

"What?" I asked, "What did he say?"

"Nothing," Margo said, "Doesn't matter. Just play the game."

Jenny didn't look like she wanted to continue playing, but she didn't look like she was capable of stopping either. The game would continue whether we wanted to or not, and after that, the phone calls got even weirder.

I pulled a card, dialed the number, and was greeted with about ten seconds of heavy breathing before he spoke.

"The mystery man has a long, sharp knife. He's walking down the street, turning left on Martin Drive, and will soon be there."

That sent a chill through me. Martin Drive, that was two streets away. That was like an easy twenty-minute walk. What the heck was this? These weren't prerecordings. This had to be live, but that was impossible. This game was probably twenty years old at least.

It couldn't happen.

"Look," I said, hanging up the phone, "let's just call this a draw. I think this is getting a little too real and,"

The orange phone rang, and I felt my words wither in my mouth as we just sat there and looked at it. It was like watching a bomb tick down, none of us wanting to be the one to touch it. It just kept ringing, and ringing, and finally, to my surprise, Jenny reached out to pick it up. Her hand shook, her breath coming in quick gasps, and as she lifted it to her ear, I heard someone snarl something and she winced like she'd been struck.

She held the phone out for me, hand moving like someone with nerve damage, and said it as for me.

I took it, held it to my ear, and said hello.

"Whether you play the game or not, you little bitch, the Mystery Man is still coming. If none of you wins when he's coming to get all of you, but if one of you manages to win, then they might be safe. You never know. Better finish what you started."   

I hung up the phone, trying to keep my teeth from chattering as I told them what he had said.

"That's not true," Margo said at once, "the phone guy told me that I had to beat Jenny or I'd get taken. He said Jenny was trying to win on purpose so the Mystery Man would get me."

Jenny burst into tears, "He said that you two were trying to sacrifice me to the Mystery Man and that I deserved it. He said I was useless, just holding you two back, and I deserved to get dragged away."

I thought about it, weighing what they had said, "Sounds like if we all win, then he can't get us at all. We have to work together to get out of this."

Jenny shook her head, "He said that if I told you what my Mystery Man looked like, he'd get me for sure."

"Me too," Margo said, her anger slowly turning into fear.

"Well, who cares what he says? He's coming, regardless, so we have to do something."

So, we started playing the game cooperatively.

Helping each other proved a better strategy, and Margo soon had everything for her mystery man. Margo dialed triple zero and declared that her Mystery Man was five foot four and bald, with a hockey mask, a machete, and a white jumpsuit. A voice came from the rotary, making us all jump with its suddenness, as it reverberated around the room.

"You have discovered your mystery man, Margo. You are safe, for now."

We were still for a moment, and then Jenny reluctantly picked up the dice and kept playing. She got a card, dialed the number, and choked out a sob as the man on the phone told her about her Mystery Man.

"He's on your street," she said, sobbing a little, and I rolled the dice so we could get to her turn again.

"White Glove," I said, "Lemme see them."

Jenny held up her card, but she started nodding at one that was five into the stack.

I drew it and, sure enough, it was the mustache.

Now all I needed was the six-foot tall and the knife.

Jenny went again, drew a card, and breathed a sigh of relief as she dialed triple zero.

"My Mystery man is Six feet tall, dark-haired, with a rope and a long coat."

The phone made the sound again and declared, "Jenny, you have discovered your Mystery Man. You are safe, for now."

I had picked up the dice when I heard something creak the door open downstairs. It was long and loud, like a funhouse door at the carnival. I tossed the dice, moved my piece, and drew a card. It was a phone call and I threw it away and rolled again. I moved, drew, and pumped my fist as I got the six-foot card.

I was rolling again when the phone began to ring.

It barely covered the sound of a footstep on the bottom of the stairs.

I let it ring, rolling and moving like a madman. I drew but it wasn't what I needed. I got another phone card and threw it away. I could hear my Mystery Man on the stairs, moving as slow as any horror movie villain. I drew the gun and cursed as I tossed it away. I drew another white glove card, but I tossed it and kept rolling and moving. I could hear him on the stairs, his boots clumping menacingly. I had to find the knife. I had to banish this Mystery Man. If I didn't, it would be my death.

He came onto the landing when the ringing phone became too much and I picked it up and put it down again. It started to ring after a few seconds and I did it again before moving my piece. I could still hear his boots in the hallway that led to my room, and they grew louder by the second.

Jenny and Margo were watching the door to my bedroom like it might explode, but I was focused on my task.

Rope, tossed.

clump clump clump

A wide-brimmed hat, tossed.

clump clump clump

He was walking past my little sister's room now. He'd pass Mom and Dad's room after that, and then it would be down to my room at the end of the hall. What would happen if he got me? 

Would they even believe Margo and Jenny? Would the Mystery Man leave them alone once he got me? I didn't know but...

My heart lept into my throat.

I had the knife, I was done.

I dialed triple zero as something opened the door to my room.

Jenny and Margo gasped, sliding away from the board and as far from the door as they could get.

"My Mystery Man had blonde hair, a wide-brimmed hat, is six feet tall, has black pants and a white shirt, and a knife."

I practically screamed it into the phone, falling forward to cover it as I expected that long, sharp knife to stab into me at any minute.

I heard the tone and then heard the phone crackle out, "That was a close one, Heather. You're safe from your Mystery Man, for now."

I just lay there for a while, panting and trembling, as Margo and Jenny came to comfort me. 

They told me they had seen him standing in the doorway, his blonde hair spilling beneath his hat and a sharp knife in his hand. He had raised it, took a single step, and then just disappeared into nothingness. We lay there, just kind of basking in the feeling of still being alive until I heard Dad pull into the driveway.

We had made it, we stayed up till sunrise, just like we wanted to.

I went down and hugged my dad, who seemed surprised I was still awake but glad to see me and then the three of us turned in.

I put Mystery Man back in the attic and have never touched it again.

One brush with death was enough for me.

So if you find a copy of your own while trolling through the thrift stores and antique malls in your area, be very careful with it.

The Mystery Man you find might not be a mystery for very long.Mystery Man

I’ve been sitting on this one for a little while, but I think it’s time.

This happened about three years ago. I was, without a doubt, the worst kind of hiker. You know those guys who are all “leave no sign”, bagging their garbage, burying their poop, cleaning up their campsite, respecting nature's natural beauty, and all that? Ya, that wasn’t me. I like camping, my parents like camping, but there was always a mentality of “the woods will take care of things.” I watched my dad leave a whole cooler full of empty beer cans at the site one time when I was eight. We brought a couch with us on a camping trip once just cause Dad knew there was a ravine nearby. Broken fishing rods? Left by the creek. Garbage? Right on the ground. Hell, we left a whole tent once cause Dad couldn’t get it back in the bag. We didn’t use campgrounds either. Dad and Mom would pack up and find somewhere in the middle of nowhere and just live off the land for a couple of days, and then leave their crap behind.

I can’t say that this is why I am the way I am. I know better than to litter and be a pig, but, in my head, the woods will always just take care of themselves. It’s been here for millions of years, why is my trash and stuff gonna mess with that? If my styrofoam cooler kills a couple of trees then they didn’t deserve to be there, right?

That was what I thought, at least.

I go camping about three times a year; the start of spring, the start of summer, and the end of summer. I live in California, so I always just pack up my pickup, get some food and beer and “recreational greenery”, and head out to somewhere remote. A buddy of mine from work hadn’t shut up about this overlook about an hour from the city, right outside the Santa Lucia Mountain range, and I figured I’d go crash out there for a weekend. Unlike my parents, I am not a “living off the land” kind of person. I brought food, I brought stuff, and I intended to do nothing but sit in the wilderness, sleep in my hammock, and get high.

I called out Friday and found the perfect spot by lunchtime. It was gorgeous, overlooking the valley and so remote that if I were to get really hurt I’d prolly die out here with no one the wiser. I set up my hammock, set out my fire logs, got some water (just in case) and just kinda spread out a bit. I made some lunch, sandwiches, rolled a joint, and just kinda got mellow for a bit as the day rolled on. It was nice out here, just watching the clouds and listening to nature. I was soon pretty well-lit and as the sun started creeping down I set about lighting my fire. There was probably a burn ban in effect but I had water and I didn’t care. Out here, no one was going to see me anyway, and I started roasting hotdogs as the sun cut a fantastic line across the sky.

That was the first time I noticed them.

I remember looking up and whispering shit as I mistook them for Rangers or Cops or something. They were just silhouettes on the ridge not far from my camp, three or four of them, and they had these wide, flat-topped hats like park rangers or the guy on the oatmeal box. I watched them for a minute, thinking I was busted, but they just stood there. They didn’t move, they didn’t call out, but I know they saw me. My fire had to be visible for a ways at this height, and the longer they stayed there, the more creeped out I felt. Why were they just standing there? If they wanted me to leave, then why not tell me to leave?

I didn’t know, but once the sun set, I noticed they had vanished and just kinda kept an eye peeled. I had my gun, a big ole .45, so I wasn’t worried, but I suddenly wished I had a tent to sleep in instead of just a hammock. I sparked up again after eating a pack of dogs, though, and that took care of any thoughts of shadow guys or whatever. 

I dozed off in my hammock but I dreamed about them that night too. 

I dreamed that they were in my campsite, just standing around and watching me. They were like the outlines of people, like when someone stands in front of the sun and all you get is a burnt-out image of them. They didn’t have any features, no eyes or anything, and I was frozen there as they looked at me. They didn’t say anything, they just watched me, and it felt like being sleep-paralyzed the whole night.

I woke up after dawn, almost fell out of my hammock, and started making breakfast as I stirred up the ashes of last night's fire. I wondered if it had really been a dream or not, but I felt like it must have been. Why would they come and look but not say anything? All my stuff was there, too, down to the hot dog wrapper I'd left on the ground next to the fire, and I tossed it in absentmindedly as I ate my eggs and ham. The ice was still holding out, it was spring and not too hot yet, so I decided to go on a forest pub crawl today.

Translation: I put a bunch of beer into my backpack and walked out into the woods so I could have a drunk hike.

I spent about five hours hiking in the woods, tossing my dead soldiers into the trees as I finished them. Some of them broke, most of them didn’t, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was following me as I hiked in the woods. I never saw anything, it wasn’t like I spotted someone hiding behind a tree, but it was, like, deep pockets of shadow that shouldn’t have been there. It was midday, the sun was high, and I should have had major visibility. Even so, I found myself looking around as the crawling feeling just got worse and worse. Some of it was being drunk in the hot woods with no water, and when I found a stream I plunged my face in to get a little clarity. I drank a little, Dad always said running water was fine to drink from, and when something snapped not far from me, I looked up like a zebra at a watering hole.

I looked around, trying to find what was stalking me.

There was nothing, just the quiet forest, and the gently rushing stream. 

No, no, I didn't believe that. I had felt stalked all day, and as I watched the trees I felt sure that something moved out there. I got up and started running, the zebra analogy too hard to break, and I kept waiting for the claws to sink in, the teeth to bite, and the hot breath to fall on my neck. It was going to come at any minute, I could feel it, and when I tripped over a fallen log I just lay there and waited for the end. It would get me now. It would get me and I'd be dead, I'd be dead, I'd be...

Nothing happened.

I lay there for nearly ten minutes, just knowing it would get me when I moved, but it never came.

When the ants started to bite my legs I sat up and swiped at them. I had fallen next to an ant bed that I had accidentally stomped on in my haste and they were mad as hell about it. I ended up going back to the creek to wash them off, a haphazard trip that took another ten minutes, and I was still looking around like a scared animal. I sat with my legs in the creek until they stopped throbbing and then made my miserable way back to camp. It was not as much fun walking back as it had been walking out, and I was jittery and tense the whole way. The sun was starting to slip down and I absolutely didn't want to be out here when it got dark. 

Too many things could be crunching around out here in the dark.

I made it back to camp before it got dark, and as I cooked my dinner the sun started to ride low again. It was more hotdogs tonight, cooked over the fire, but I couldn't finish all of them. I was too scared to look away from the ridge and I ended up burning more than one of them. They tasted fine either way, but I had eyes only for the shadows on the ridge.

They had the same wide-brimmed hats, a few of them had canes, but none of them were really people. They were like shadows, the burned images at Hiroshima, the photo negatives that sometimes get burned into old photographs, all of them at once, and none of them at all. They just stood there, watching me. They didn't move, they didn't stir, and as the sun sank I became colder and colder. I should have gone to my truck and left, but I didn't. I made myself put it out of my mind, I convinced myself that I was being foolish. 

When it got dark I got in my hammock and tried to get comfortable, but it wouldn't come. My leg hurt, I was sunburnt, I was hungover, I was dehydrated, I was, I was, I was, I was, but ultimately I was afraid. I was afraid that when I closed my eyes they would get me. I was afraid they would just carry me off in the night and I would never be seen again. They would find my truck and my campsite, but never me.

Maybe, I thought as I finally nodded off, someone would look up one afternoon at sunset and see me on that ridge, just watching.

I must have fallen asleep, and I like to think I dreamed what came next.

I want to, but I can't convince myself that I did.

I "woke up" and saw them standing around me. I could see them, and not just the ones in front of the fire. They were darker than the night somehow, and they began to creep closer to me. Crept is the wrong word, though. They slid along the ground like the ghosts in some of the horror movies I'd watched as a kid. They hemmed me in, my body shaking but my voice stuck in my throat. I didn't dare move, I didn't dare speak, and as they knelt around me, I heard whispering. It was a terrible sound, and it follows me into sleep sometimes.

"You come here to the womb of creation and leave your waste."

"You are a brainless creature fit only to destroy things made by your betters."

"You burn the wood of a creature who has existed before you were more than a twinkling in your father's eye, you destroy a place that was new when this planet cooled, you throw your trash into a home shared by a hundred billion organisms, and you claim to be the superior here, the better. You are nothing, and you will die and be forgotten."

On and on and on. They whispered endlessly to me, telling me how worthless I was, how I was a nuisance and a nothing, and how I would never change. Then, one of them rose up over my hammock, his body seeming to hang over me like a shadow cast from above. He looked like them, but he was clearly their boss or something, and when he brought the cane down on nothing but air, I heard it crack like a thunderbolt.

"Go back to your stinking pit, but be warned. The next time you come to our woods and ruin our place, you will not be allowed to scamper off so easily. You are a stunted thing who was taught badly, but ignorance is forgivable. If you persist in this folly, however, we will not be so kind again. Now GO!" it yelled, and I opened my eyes to find that it was morning.

I was laying in my hammock, piss dribbling down my leg, and I knew that I better not be here when the sun set again.  

I cleaned up everything. I picked up all my garbage, I cleaned up the site, I poured water over the fire, and mixed it with dirt like they always say to on TV, and then I took everything with me and ran for the truck. 

That was Sunday, and I've been kind of afraid to leave my apartment. What if they are waiting out there for me? What if they find me slipping or don't like that I don't recycle or something like that? What if I offend them and they drag me back to the woods to be punished?

That's part of why I'm writing this. If you're like me, someone who doesn't care about their mess or just leaves the woods wrecked, then watch out. Don't let the Dark Watchers catch you messing up their forest because they do more than just watch. Don't let them see you slipping, or you might find out what sort of punishment awaits those who anger them.

“Attention, teachers and students, recess is canceled today due to crows, that is all.”

There was a collective awww from the students but that wasn't what had gotten my attention.

Had the principal just said Crows? Like the birds, I asked myself as I told my third graders we would play Heads Up Seven Up. As they got set up to play the game, I picked up the phone and called a friend of mine in the other class. Kayla had been helping me integrate into the flow of Jefferson Moore Elementary since I'd arrived here at the start of the year, and I could hear the smile on her face as she answered the phone.

“Mrs. Swearington's Class,”

“Crows?” I asked without preamble, “Did I hear that right?”

“You did. The school has a code for Crows and you should definitely follow it.”

I was quiet for a moment, trying to find a good response to that, until she said my name like she might have lost me.

“I mean, are crows different in Ohio? Cause we had crows in Maine too and we didn't close down the playground for them.”

She was quiet for a moment and I could hear the sound of a very heated argument going on over what I assumed was a game of heads up seven up. Great minds thought alike, it seemed.

“Crows here are a little different. I can't really talk about it right now. Meet me after school for drinks and I'll fill you in. Don't worry, though. Crow days only usually last a couple of days.”

“A couple of days?” I said in disbelief, but that was when someone started crying and Kayla said she had to go.

She hung up and I was left with more questions than answers.

It wasn't that much of an inconvenience, I supposed. My kids, despite being eight and nine, were pretty well-behaved. I had very few fights, very little beyond the usual drama that surrounded little kids, and most of them were good friends who helped each other. My own game of heads up seven up was full of more laughing than arguments, and as recess ended, we started Math and worked toward lunch. Good kids or not, it was still going to be a long day without recess. Even the best-behaved kids get stir-crazy when they can't blow off steam on the playground. Luckily, we had Gym today so they could get their zoomies out in the fully enclosed gym building instead. We walked across the school, me leading the line as we headed for the gymnasium, and I couldn't help but glance at the playground as we walked past.

Even as an adult, I thought the new playground looked pretty cool. They had replaced all the old metal equipment with colorful plastic and it made me wish I could take my tie and my sensible shoes off and just go play with them for a while. There were five large, colorful structures, teeter totters, slides a plenty, a four-square court, some of those spring animals, a big sandbox, a basketball court, and lots of shady places to sit and visit with friends. It was an amazingly inviting place, but today it looked like something out of a Stephen King novel. 

The crows had taken over every inch of the playground, and they lay thick upon the land. They watched us as we passed, looking affronted to see people so close. I understood now, it was a little intimidating to see that many crows assembled. They called a group of crows a murder, and the name made sense now. They looked capable of anything as they sat there glaring at us. They looked capable of hurting even me in such numbers, and I turned my back on them with a real effort.

They were still there when the bell rang to release students for the day, and I noticed that no one went anywhere near the playground as they headed for home or the bus.

Kayla shot me a text as I was walking to my car to let me know that she'd had to go home with stomach problems, but that she would meet with me soon to let me know the story behind the crows.

“Just don't do anything dumb in the meantime. I don't want you to get in over your head ;).”

I rolled my eyes at her text but decided I would toe the line until I had more information. I had to admit that something about that group of crows had spooked me, and I suddenly didn't like the idea of just going out there and scaring them off. I didn't know how they would react, and I wasn't in a big hurry to find out. I had joked that we had crows where I was from, but I didn't think I had ever seen crows like this. 

I must have been thinking about them as I lay down to sleep because I dreamed about them that night.

I was walking onto the playground, the crows sitting around me and staring in disapproval. Everything beyond the playground was in mist like I was standing in a fog bank, and the deeper I went into the playground, the more crows there seemed to be. In the center of the playground was a merry-go-round, the old metal ones that often injured the children who went to play on them. Standing in the center of it was a man, slowly rotating with the motion of the thing. He had his back to me, and I saw that he wore a coal-black coat with a high, dark mantle. His top hat was lined with feathers and shiny trinkets, and his boots were black and thick. He was rotating slowly, the old engine of destruction squealing as it turned ever so slowly. The crows were looking at him, their beady eyes drawn to him, and as he spun, I became afraid. I didn't think I wanted this man to look at me. I thought that if he looked at me something terrible might happen, but I was powerless to look away. He just spun like a ballerina in a music box, and as he came around, I saw one glittering eye before I woke up in a cold sweat.

There was another warning about the crows during the morning announcements, but it was hardly needed. We had all seen them as they perched on the playground equipment as we came to school that day. I was working the pickup line that morning, and the reactions of the children weren't what drew my attention. The children were disappointed but understanding. No, it was the reaction of the adults as they caught sight of the crows. There were some transplants, like me, who looked at it like an oddity, but it was the local parents that really caught my eye. They looked at the playground like a source of childhood trauma and many of them made sure to tell their children not to go to the playground under any circumstances.

“Keep a close eye on her,” one mother said to me as her kindergartner walked inside, her pink coat making her stand out amongst the sea of children, “I had hoped they wouldn't come back this year. Damn him,” she whispered and then looked at me like she had said too much before driving off in a controlled hurry.

We settled in for today's lessons, but you could tell that the mood was muted. They didn't have gym to look forward to today, the extracurricular was Music, and they knew that there would be no real outside activity today. I hated it for them, and when I called Kayla at about ten thirty, my texts going unseen, I was in for another surprise. The woman who answered said that Ms. Swearington was out today, and might be out for the rest of the week.

“Poor dear. She caught that bug that's going around. I hope she didn't leave it behind when she was here yesterday, I hear it's nasty.”

I didn't even have lunch with my friend to look forward to, it seemed, and I settled in for a long day.

As the class played hide and seek during indoor recess, I noticed that one of my students was still at her desk. Lisa was coloring up a storm, really putting swirls on her paper, and I came up to check what she was drawing. She looked absolutely focused on what she was doing, showing no interest in the other students or their games. It was odd to see that kind of focus in a kid her age, and she jumped a little when I came up behind her and tapped her shoulder.

“Whatcha,” I started, but when I looked at the page it took my breath away.

She had drawn the playground from my dream perfectly, complete with the man in the dark cloak and top hat. He was standing on the merry-go-round, arms extended to the sky, and the crows were flying all around him. The picture was way too detailed for someone her age, much too good for someone not even in middle school, and when she looked back at me, she asked if I had seen him.

“Who?” I asked though I knew who she meant.

“The Crow Count,” she said, matter-of-factly as if it was something that everyone knew.

“I haven't,” I lied, picking up the picture and getting a better look, “Who is he?”

“Mommy says not to talk about him,” Lisa said, looking guilty as if realizing she shouldn't have been drawing him either.

“I won't tell,” I said as I put the page back on her desk, “is he a friend of yours?”

“No,” Lisa said and she sounded afraid of the idea that someone might think he was friends with her, “The Crow Count isn't anyone's friend. He brings the crows here, at least that's what Mommy told me. She said I must never go into a big group of crows or the Crow Count will take me away with the murder.”

Hearing someone so young say these things made me cold all over again, but I just patted her arm and said that was very interesting. It was the most normal thing in the world to her, apparently, and I didn't want to draw attention to the fact that this was my first time hearing about it. I left her to her coloring, telling my students they had about five minutes left for indoor recess before going back to my desk. I Googled Crow Count and Crows in Ohio, but I didn't get much. Crows in Ohio brought up memes, because of course it did, but Crow Count brought up only a single entry. It was an old Germanic legend about a ruler of crows who sometimes took children to feed his flock or young girls to be his bride. Neither were ever seen again, but it was the excuse for telling children to avoid large groups of crows, something associated with battlefields and death. 

The depiction, something taken from an old storybook, was very familiar.

A courtly fellow in a tall hat with feathers and a dark cloak.

I clicked off o fit, feeling my stomach tie itself in a knot, and began geography. 

I was still thinking about it at the end of the day as the bell rang and everyone headed for home. The playground was still full of crows, and it was hard not to imagine that I could see someone on the playground among them. Could that be the hatted gentleman, the Crow Count? I didn't dare look too long, but I was beginning to get a little tired of this. Two days with no outdoor recess was beginning to take a toll on my students. I didn't know what we'd do if this went on much longer, but it appeared we'd never find out.   

After a night spent dreaming about crows and the man in the tall hat, I arrived at school to find a group of adults standing around the outskirts of the playground. The crows were giving them an unhappy look, looking like bouncers preparing to kick them out, and I approached the group to see what was going on. The teachers looked at me guiltily, not seeming to be sure what to say, until Mr. Simmonson, the fifth-grade English Teacher, stepped up and said one of his students had gone in there.

“Samantha Parks was walking across the track, heading for her first class, when she stopped and looked at the playground. It was like something had entranced her, and she walked slowly away from the track and headed into the playground.”

“Has anyone gone in after her?” I said, afraid the birds might hurt her.

The others shook their heads and I felt a rage bubble in me as I dropped my bag and walked toward the playground.

Crows or no crows, I was going to let a student get injured without trying to help them.

Mr. Simmonson caught my arm as I tried to go in, “He won't like it if you disturb him.” he whispered, looking ashamed as he said it.

“Who?” I asked, squaring my shoulders and looking at him darkly, “The Crow Count?”

He looked surprised that I knew the name, but when he let me go, I walked straight onto the playground and away from the pack of cowards.

The crows watched me, hostility in their beady eyes, but they made no move to attack me as I walked among them. It was exactly like my dream. The crows covered everything, their numbers having risen in the three days they had been here. Their murder was huge, the equipment looking like a giant crow as they sat on every empty surface. It was a mass of wings and feathers and beady black eyes, and I walked within that heaving black sea of avians.

I came to the center far too soon.

He was standing on a merry-go-round, the metal battered and the paint faded and chipped. It looked as if it had been moved through time, and he stood in the middle of it as it turned ever so slowly. The crows guarded him, leaning closer as if making ready to charge me if I tried to attack him, and he seemed utterly at ease. He was dressed in the same black hat with feathers around the brim, the same black cloak, dark as a raven wing, and the same leather boots that looked like they had walked across the ages to be here. He looked like he could have known Vlad Tepes, could have watched an original Shakespeare play, could have wielded a knife as it slew Caesar. He was ageless, an engine of destruction as much as the one he stood upon, and as he turned, I saw the girl kneeling on the hot top. 

She was tall for ten, looking like a woman more than a child, and when I took a step toward her, the man spoke.

“Do not touch what belongs to the crows.”

I stopped, despite myself, and as I looked up I finally got a look at him. His face was young, his hair a perfect salt and pepper, and his features were sharp and angular. He looked like a painting in a museum, a man out of time, and as he came fully around he looked like nothing so much as a demon in human form. His eyes, however, were what drew me the most. They sparkled, the cornea like the faucets of the gem. No wonder the crows followed him. His eyes were something they would desire above all other things, and I wondered if they would take them from him when his life finally came to an end.

Somehow, despite being captivated by this strange man, I found the courage to speak. 

“She does not belong to you. She is of this school, and under its protection, under MY protection.”

The man sneered, “You would dare tell me what treasures I may take? This is my domain, and I take what I want.”

“Not today,” I said, and the girl shook off whatever spell she had been under and began to hyperventilate.

“Where...where...where am I?” she asked and I tried my best to calm her down.

That seemed to be what the crows were waiting for. They flew at us suddenly, buffeting the two of us with their wings and raking at us with their claws. Crows may not seem very formidable, but they're bigger than you think, and there were so many of them that all I could do was pick a direction and run. As long as it was away from the Crow Count, I didn't give a damn where it went. I pushed the girl in front of me, leading her through the throng of crows and getting pretty cut up in the process. I heard her scream as I covered her with my body, putting a hand over my face as I tried to save my eyes. We were running blind, bumping into things and rebounding back before we chose a different way. I felt like we would never make it out, that the crows would bury us under their mass or just carry us away. I didn't think I'd ever see my class, my students, or anything ever again, and that was when I stumbled out of the cloud and out of the playground.

I lay on the ground, covering myself, but the crows were gone. I was breathing heavily, reaching for the girl to reassure her, but she wasn't there. I looked around, trying to find her, but she was just gone. Where was she? Had she escaped? What had...but that was when I heard a massive push of wings and the raised voice of the murder. 

As I looked up, they all took flight at once, ascending into the sky in a great wave of black wings. In the middle of the cloud, held between the claws of many, many crows, were a pair of people that were soon lost amongst the cloud. One in a tall hat and cloak and another in the uniform our students wear. All I could do was watch them go, the tears coming as the murder took flight and left our playground behind.

The other teachers came up then, helping me to my feet as they took me to the office.

The principal was expecting me, and she told me to take a seat as the nurse came in to treat the multiple cuts and abrasions.

“I'm sorry you had to learn about it this way. It's why we don't often hire outsiders, they don't understand, and it gets many of them killed, or worse.”

I had a thousand questions, but I was in shock, and I could not vocalize any of them.

“The Crow Count is a part of the town's history. He's something that has always existed and always will. He comes, he takes, he leaves. In the years he does not take, we celebrate. In the years when he does, we mourn. That's why we have the Crow Warnings, why we teach our kids to be on their guard, and why the parents are so fearful. We know he will take if we give him the chance. There is nothing we can do about it. The Crow Count is old and clever, and nothing will stop him. Best to accept it, he never takes more than we can afford.”

I wondered if the parents I saw consoling each other as I went to leave would agree that it had been a price they could afford.

I'm sitting in my apartment now, and I'm three sheets to the wind.

I don't know if I can keep teaching here, knowing that the Crow Count will be back again, but I don't know what else I would do. I love the job and I love the kids, and if I can keep them safe, then don't I owe it to them to stay? Also, I want to know more about this thing. I want to know what it's here and how it came to be here.

Also, I want to know why it takes them and what it does with them once it has them.

Above all else, I want to know how we can stop this from happening, and stop the crows from stealing what is most precious to us.   

"And when she came out of the bathroom, her entire class was gone. The third-grade class of 77 was never seen again, but they say, sometimes, you can still hear laughter in the woods outside the,"

The door opened and we all covered our eyes as Reggy grinned in at us.

"I knew you guys would be telling stories again. You should have waited."

Becky sighed, Randal chuffed unhappily, and I tried to smile as I told Reggy to close the door before someone saw him. We were in the old equipment storage by the play field, and if an adult saw us they would make us get out.

We liked to tell scary stories, and the scarier the locale, the better. The old equipment shed had been unanimously decided upon because it was A. home to a lot of creepy crawlies, and B. Didn't let in a lot of light. We had to keep finding new places to tell stories because the ones we had got old pretty quickly. You can only tell stories in a place for so long before it stops being scary, but sometimes it was because the teachers chased us out. The third reason was stepping in right now and grinning like a shot fox at us.

Reggy, the weird kid of PS 24, had earned his title honestly. It wasn't just because he was overweight to the point of being a blob, and it wasn't just because his hair was always full of thick, gross-looking dandruff. It wasn't just because his Dad was the school janitor and seemed to love the job, or because he ate sauerkraut and onion sandwiches for lunch. The reason was that Reggy just emanated an aura of unsettledness. I got the feeling about him that I got about certain adults or dogs, the ones your parents tell you to stay away from.

Reggy had a feeling of danger, of not rightness about him, and it made me uneasy.

It didn't help that he had adopted us as his "best friends" this year. Becky, Randal, and I had been friends since Kindergarten, but we had managed to avoid getting too close to Reggy. That had lasted until fourth grade when we were in Mr. Novak's class together. Reggy had decided that we were his best friends, he didn't have any regular friends, and he adopted us as His. This led to a year of smelling his sandwiches at lunch, having him follow us on our playground games, and listening to his wheezy resting breaths as he sat in our pod in class.

We had hoped we would be rid of him at the end of the year, but when our parents had signed us up for Summer School Care, a kind of after-school care during the summer, we had groaned as Reggy came in and saw us. He explained that the school had agreed to let him attend for free if his Daddy worked through the summer, and we all prayed that he would be in a different fifth-grade class than us when the new year rolled around.

"Well, since you're already telling stories, I've got a good one." Reggy said, "It's the tale of the skinned raccoon."

Reggy started to lay out this story about a skinned raccoon that he had seen one evening while his Dad worked late, and we all tried to pretend that it wasn't the most gruesome thing we had ever heard. The way he described the raccoon made me think he had not only really seen it, but that he had probably skinned it himself. He said it had left little red footprints on the floor as it walked away, and his father had been angry when he found them.

"We followed them all the way to the woods," he told us, "but we never did find the raccoon."

We all made the appropriately scared noises, but I think we were all just hoping he would let us move on.  

When Mrs. Simmon pushed the door open a moment later, telling us this was off-limits and we needed to leave, it was almost a relief.

We left the shed, trying to kind of lose Reggy as we did, but we knew he'd find us again.

It was impossible to hide from Reggy, he knew everywhere and everything about the school and all the hidden little nooks and crannies. His Dad had keys to any door in the school, and Reggy often borrowed some of them and got into places he shouldn't. His Dad always covered for him, for some reason, so he never got in any real trouble. It's weird, it was like his Dad was scared of him sometimes, but he was a grown-up and there was no reason he should have been afraid of him.

As we left the shed, running into the sunshine of a triple-digit day, Reggy said something that caught my interest.

"That's a shame, I was going to tell you guys about how I saw the missing kids a few nights ago."

The missing kids!

That was a big topic of discussion these days.

Last year, four kids had gone missing from PS 24, a first grader, Marry Edwards, A third grader, George Tate, a Kindergartener, Savanaha Marcus, and a Fifth grader, Robbie Fust. They had come to school and then just never left. The cameras at the school left a lot to be desired, that's what my Dad said, and they hadn't seen the kids leave school by any of the other exits either. My Dad works for the police department and he told me I needed to be extra safe until they found whoever was doing this. They suspected a teacher, but the question was how would they get the kids out? If they were hidden in the school somewhere then they would have found them by now, they had searched the school a bunch. The disappearance hung around the schools like ghosts, and it sounded like the teachers were afraid that they might lose their jobs if it kept happening.

I thought about what he had said until after lunch and decided I would just have to ask him.

We were playing outside, the day a little cooler now that the sun was heading towards down, and Reggy was leaning against the fence and watching people as he often did. Reggy liked to just sit there and look at people, watching them as they went past, but he didn't makeup stories about them or anything. He just watched them like the animals in the zoo watched fat children, and it was really weird.

"So, Reggy," I said, and Becky and Randal looked surprised since we never really talked to him and just accepted when he talked at us, "What did you mean that you were going to tell us about the missing kids?"

Reggy turned his gaze away from a first grader who was chasing a ball with some effort, and his grin was downright predatory, "Oh yeah. I saw them the other night when Dad was working late."

"Like, you saw them saw them?" I said, "Like you know where they are?"

"Well yeah," Reggy said, "They're under the school."

I looked at Becky and Randal, the two of them now as invested as I was, "Why haven't you told anyone?"

Reggy shrugged, "No one asked."

I could have smacked myself in the forehead, "Well, can you take us there?"

Reggy was already grinning like a creepypasta monster, but I saw a glimmer pass over his eye, and I should have known to take it back. He wanted to show us, he wanted us to come with him, and I suddenly didn't want to go. But, it didn't really matter if I did or not. If there was a chance I could help my Dad and find those kids, I wanted to. Dad was worried about losing his job too if they didn't find someone, and I didn't want that to happen.

"Yeah, I'll show you right now. Come on."

Reggy looked over at Mrs. Simmon and Ms. Gaie to make sure they weren't paying attention and the four of us headed towards the school. Reggy led us into a side door, through the third-grade hallway, and to the middle of the school to an area called The Square. The Square has been a part of PS 24 since it was built back in the seventies. It's an area of grass with a couple of small trees growing there. How the roots don't mess up the school, I don't know, but it's a place that lots of kids usually go to between classes. There's a utility building in the middle of it and that was where Reggy took us. He pulled a long key out of his shorts pocket and unlocked the door, ushering us into the little building before closing us into total darkness.

Then he pulled the chain on a light hanging from the ceiling and we were left looking around a small square room of tools and other implements.

"There's no one in here," Becky said, looking around before looking back at Reggy with a scared look.

"Well ya," Reggy said, grabbing an edge of what turned out to be a carpet, ""Otherwise they would have found them by now."He pulled the carpet back and revealed a hatch in the floor. It was flush against the ground, with no wheel or handle to poke out, and if you didn't know it was there you would never see it under the rug. Reggy squeezed a pair of handles and pulled the hatch up to reveal a ladder that led down into the earth. Reggy started climbing down like he'd done it a thousand times before, and when he saw we weren't following him, he asked if we were coming.

"They're down here. If you want to see them, then you'll have to come down," he said, making his way down again as if the matter was settled.

I looked at Randal, but he just shook his head and went for the door, "No way, man. This is way too weird for me."

He put a hand on the knob, but when he turned it, the door was locked. I went to look for the flip lock that would let us out, but both sides of the knob had a keyhole. I had never seen anything like this, and I realized that Reggy had the only key to the door. We were locked in here with him, for better or worse, and we would need him to let us out too.

I looked at the hole and figured it beat being stuck in here.

At least we might find another way out if we went down.

We descended the ladder slowly, the darkness thick around us. I tried turning the light on my watch on to see a little, but it didn't provide much light. We spread out, trying to find a switch, and when the lights suddenly came on I jumped. We were in a big room, like a storage unit, and it stretched the length of the grass area above us. The ceiling was metal, the walls were metal, the floor was concrete, and the place was full of boxes. They were stacked up to the ceiling in some places, and I wondered what this place had been before it was just used to store things.

We grouped up, moving around as we checked the room, and I saw something speckled on the floor. It looked like someone had spilled juice or maybe paint, and as we came around a big stack of boxes, I saw another door. This one wasn't locked and as it came open we saw that it led down a long hallway that went further underground.

"What is this place, anyway?" Becky asked, sounding a little scared as we followed the tunnel.

"I'm not sure," Randal said, "But my mom told me that when she used to go here, back in the early eighties, people used to talk about there being bomb shelters or something under the school. She never saw them, but she said that was something the kids told scary stories about."

"You think that what these are?" I asked, seeing a door coming up on our left.

Randal shrugged, "Maybe. I guess it would make sense for it to be in the very middle of the school."

We tried the door, but it was locked tight. The next three were also locked, but the fifth door opened pretty easily and held what we were looking for. Well, not exactly what we were looking for, but we found the missing kids.

The room had been some kind of work room that had been turned into just another storage room. The boxes the kids were lying on were drenched in blood. They were dead, thankfully. If they hadn't been, they would have been screaming. They were naked, their clothes lying in rags, and someone had been very busy. Their arms and legs had been removed, the bones broken cruelly. Their stomachs had been opened, their entrails hanging around them like snakes, and a few of them were missing eyes. The little girl, Mary, I thought, had her jaw pulled off and her tongue was missing. Becky started throwing up, Randal sounded like he wanted to scream, and when someone started laughing I knew we'd stumbled into a trap.

It was Reggy, his bulk blocking the door. He had a knife, the long kind you’d find in a kitchen, and he was grinning like a creep again. He was just standing there, not trying to come after us, and it was clear that he realized, like we did, that we weren't going anywhere.

"Looks like you found the lost kids. Guess it's time to add three more to my little collection."

"Come on, Reggy," I said, trying to talk our way around him, "This isn't funny. You got us pretty good with these Halloween decorations, but enough is enough. You win, just let us out so we can,"

When he slashed me across the chest, slicing a long red line that split my t-shirt and the skin beneath, I hissed in pain and stumbled back.

"There's no getting out now. You're staying here forever. I meant to get you all before school ended, but there was just never a good opportunity. Now, we can be friends forever; all eight of us."

I was scared, but Randal had clearly gone well past scared. He screamed like a cat that's been stepped on and ran at Reggy, shoving him as the bigger boy stabbed him in the shoulder. Even though he'd got him, Reggy was still put off balance. He fell into some boxes and we scattered. Randal had gone back the way he came, Becky running behind him, but I knew there was no way out that way. I went left, running into the unknown, and when someone roared like a wounded beast behind me, I charged heedlessly.

I don't know how long I ran, I don't know how far I ran, but when I slammed into a ladder hard enough to make my eyes blur, I shook myself as I tried to climb it. I couldn't let him catch me. If he caught me, I'd be dead. I climbed and climbed and climbed and when I got to the top I pushed at the hatch and almost screamed when it wouldn't move.

I pushed and pushed, getting a little bit of give but it always came back down again. I couldn't make it budge, not even a little bit, and as I shoved at it, I started hearing something down the tunnel behind me. It wasn't loud, not like someone running, but it was feet coming up the concrete.

I screamed and shoved at the hatch, feeling it give but not open. I squinted as something fell onto my face, dirt or something, and I had to brace my back against the wall so I could use both hands. I got brief flashes of light as I shoved, just the slight glimmer from the edges, and when I heard the laughter from the bottom of the ladder, I kept shoving, praying to God to help me.

"Found you!" Reggy sing-songed putting his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, "You might as well just come down. That hatch doesn't open. I don't know where it comes out at, but it's not going to help you."  

He started climbing and I felt like crying as I shoved at the hatch. My arms were hurting almost as badly as my chest, and I was afraid that he would get me before I got the hatch open. He would cut my legs and I would fall down the ladder. Then he could do whatever he wanted, probably drag me back to his little room and finish me off. I shoved and shoved, yelling for help as he got closer and closer. He was climbing slow on purpose, really stretching it out, and his words were muffled by the knife he had clamped in his teeth.

"Shcream all you loik. No one ish coming to help," but we both squinted when the hatch came slowly open and I saw the faces of about seven or eight kids I recognized from the program. They helped me out, yelling for a teacher as Reggy retreated down the ladder. They had seen him, though. They knew he was down there, and as the teachers came running, I was lying on the grass and breathing heavily.

I was in a corner of the field, the back corner by the utility shed, and the kids had been playing kickball when they heard a loud shrieking sound from that direction. It was the hinges on the door, long ago grown over with grass and covered with dirt. They came over and saw it opening and closing, and when they heard me yelling they came to help pull it open. The group of them had managed to fling it open, and as Mrs. Simmon came running to see what they were talking about, I breathed a sigh of relief.

I told them what had happened, told them how Becky and Randal were still down there, and Mrs. Simmon sent someone to call the police, but wouldn't go down there herself.

"If what you're saying is true then it would be dangerous for us to go down there until the police get here."

They came pretty quick, my Dad with them, and I told them the story again and begged them to save my friends before he hurt them. They went down the ladder, guns drawn and flashlights out, and my Dad and another officer told me to take them to the shed we'd gone in through. I took him there, but the door was standing open and I knew Reggy had fled. Dad went down the ladder and, to my relief, came up with Becky and Randal. They were scared but unharmed. They told us how Reggy had come running for the front door and climbed up while they hid behind some boxes. They said he hadn't even noticed them as he ran, and he seemed pretty scared.

The police took the bodies out in bags, and the whole place was covered in tape. They got Reggy's Dad too, and he told them how he had known there was something off about his son, but hadn't known he was that off. "Sometimes I was afraid to sleep with him in the same house," he told them, "I know it's not right to be afraid of your kid, but I was really afraid that he would kill me one night." The police decided he hadn't had anything to do with it, though I hear the school fired him for knowingly letting Reggy take his keys to get into restricted areas.

As for Reggy, no one knows what happened to him.

Wherever he ran to, he was never seen again.

Now the ghost stories around school are all about Reggy and how he's just waiting for his next chance to kill more kids.

If they'd been down in those tunnels that day, if they had stood face to face with the psycho while he contemplated killing us, they might not be so quick to tell stories about him.

The funeral was small; surprisingly so, considering how many people had known him - how many people claimed to be a friend. His mother had long since passed, though his father still roamed the Earth. His father, brother, and his aunt all stood around a small hole in the ground. A few unfamiliar faces stood a few feet away, nodded to the family, and walked away. Someone unknown handed them a bouquet of artificial-smelling flowers. His father nodded his thanks and tossed a felt rose into the hole where a plain silver urn waited to be covered in dirt. The priest recited his prayer, asking for mercy upon a non-believer’s soul. They all stood for a moment, after the prayer, in silence. It wasn’t a sad silence or a mournful silence, but absolute. A silence that put an end to him. He was gone. He was over. And that was about it. His father signaled the undertaker and dirt began spilling into the hole. The remaining family turned and walked away from him. They left him here - to sit in the ground - and fade. The flowers given by a distant face would fade in the sunlight, their heavy perfume warding away bugs and animals. The plaque marking his seat of eternity would fade, become overgrown by grass and moss. The stone brandishing his name, birthday, death day, and a note - suggested by the funeral director about living in the present - would become weathered and unclear. Then they would forget. The family, the friends, the people in his life. He left nothing behind for them to remember, so one cannot blame them. When his memory fades, what’s left? Pieces of sun bleached felt petals being scrapped from the sidewalk and thrown away. No one came back to visit. They left him there to sit in the ground and fade, just like his name.

All I wanted when I was a kid was to go to summer camp. Every summer, I would beg my parents to send me, but they always said the same thing. "It's too expensive" or "It's too far away" or "We can't afford to drive out there when you get home sick." I know Summer Camps have fallen out of popularity these days, but they were just about the coolest thing to a kid in the early nineties. Every show had a summer camp episode, there were movies with summer camps, there were even music videos on MTV about summer camps, for God's sake. I felt like I was missing out on a big part of my childhood experience by not being allowed to go, but every year I was forced to sit at home and wish.

So, when Mom told me she had found a Summer Camp for me when I was eleven, I was ecstatic!

Camp Moonsong was an all-girls camp about an hour from our house and the fee for the sixty-day stay was surprisingly low. Low enough to make Mom suspicious that it was some sort of front for a sweatshop or something, and she read over the paperwork very carefully with my Dad. I remember just hovering outside the kitchen as they went over it, Dad not showing her level of dedication as he held paperwork in one hand and smoked with the other.

"They talk about not being responsible for injuries or accidents a lot in this stuff," I remember her saying sighing when Dad scoffed.

"They're just being careful, Wendy. It sounds perfect, honestly. She's been begging to go to one for years, and if we don't send her before she's thirteen, I think she'll miss her chance. You know twelve is usually the cut-off for these kinds of things."

They discussed it for a while, and when they finally came and said I could go, I was overjoyed!

I had my bags packed before the last week of school was even out, and on the second day of summer vacation, my Mom and Dad drove me to the camp for drop off. It was beautiful, one of those camps like you see on TV. It was in the middle of the woods with a bunch of little cabins next to a lake and I could see a boat house, hiking trails, archery courses, and all kinds of things that I was chomping at the bit to go try. We met the head councilor at the Main Cabin, a smiling blonde lady named Gladys, and after some hugs and checking over my stuff, my parents headed out, and I was shown to the Sparrow Cabin where I would be staying for the next sixty days.

That's where I met Lauren, Sandy, Heather, and Claire, the girls who would be my cabin mates.

Sandy and Heather were twelve and this was their first time at Moonsong but not at a sleepaway camp. Lauren was ten and she had never been to camp either, so this was a first for both of us. Claire, however, had been coming here for about three years, and she was the only one of us who didn't look excited. She was trying to put on a brave face in front of us, clearly not wanting to spook us, but her mood was absolutely off.

Claire was also our cabin captain so when the loudspeaker came on, welcoming us and telling us to meet at the pavilion for orientation, she led the way.

The pavilion was more like a small amphitheater, a stone stage with rows of concrete seats leading up and out of it. We took a seat in a section near the stage, all of us chatting animatedly, except for Claire, as the other cabins assembled. Each cabin had five girls, and there were six cabins in all, Sparrow, Magpie, Grouse, Dove, Hawk, and Crow. They had spread out a little, giving each cabin room to gather, and as we all sat chattering, the camp counselors arrived to start the summer orientation.

"Welcome, campers," Said Gladys, her voice echoing off the stone benches, "and welcome to another exciting year at Camp Moonsong!"

There were a few other adults on the stage, and she introduced them as the Activity Directors. There was a counselor for Swimming, Canoeing, Archery, Hiking, Nature Studies, Physical Challenges, and Arts & Crafts. Gladys told us how our daily schedules would be posted on the bulletin boards outside our cabins at first light and that each day would end with a marshmallow roast around the fire pit.

"And don't forget, the fire pit is where we choose that night's sleepwalker," she said, something that brought nothing but polite claps from some of the campers.

I saw more than a few of them that looked like Claire when she said it, and I realized there might be something a little strange at work here.  

Our first activity was Archery, so Claire took us back to the cabin so we could get ready.

"So, what's with the sleepwalker thing?" I asked, Heather chiming in as well as Claire went to get a shirt that was a little more comfy.

"It's nothing," she said, stripping out of her polo and slipping on a t-shirt, "It's just something that Camp Moonsong does. It doesn't mean anything, it's just tradition."

"What do you mean?" I asked, the four of us falling in behind her as we headed for the range.

She made a frustrated noise, rounding on us angrily, "Just don't worry about it. If you're lucky, it won't be a problem anyway. There are thirty of us, the chances are good that a few of you might never have to see it." she said the last more to herself than anything.

"See what?" I asked, but she ignored me as we came to the archery course.

We had archery, arts & crafts, and a trip to the lake that day, and by the time the sun set and the bonfire sprung to life, I found I had quite forgotten about the Sleepwalker. We spent a while roasting and eating marshmallows, singing songs, telling spooky stories, and then I saw Gladys step close to the fire with a box that rattled slightly. Some of the girls looked at it ominously, Claire among them, but Gladys was all smiles.

"Okay, campers. It's time to pick tonight's sleepwalker. You returning campers know how it works. If you reach into the box and draw the black ball, you are tonight's sleepwalker."

I snorted, not quite sure why this had some of them so worried. What? Were they going to come and scare us in our cabin if one of us drew the black ball? Would we have to scare people? What was this, I wondered, because it all seemed kind of ridiculous.

The box had barely gone through five people before a girl of about eight got the black ball. It was clearly her first time here because she seemed pleased but mystified as she handed Gladys the ball. Gladys asked her what her name was, and then announced that Brenda was the summer's first Sleepwalker. After that, we all went back to our cabins, even Brenda, and I remember sitting up a little with the other new girls and whispering about how silly it all was. Were they trying to scare us or something? Oooo, sleepwalkers we all said as we laughed but when Claire told us to go to sleep, she said something that took the starch out of our sheets.

"Wait till tomorrow morning, then we'll see if you still think it's so funny."

She was right.

The bugle woke us up the next morning and we all shuffled to breakfast in the mess hall. Amidst the chomp of cereal, toast, eggs, and bacon, I heard someone sniffling loudly. It wasn't normal sniffling, like the kind you get from someone who's homesick. This was different, and I didn't have words for it yet. I do now, now that I've grown up a little. It's the hopeless kind of sniffling from someone who's lost something that can't get back, like a mother or a wife crying for a husband or a child.

I glanced over to the Crow table and saw that it was Brenda. She looked terrible, like she hadn't slept at all, and the circles under her eyes looked like bruises. She wasn't eating, despite how the girls in her cabin tried to coax her, and her eyes seemed to weep constantly. The crow table was next to ours, and she seemed to be telling them, in between sobs, that she wanted to go home. They were trying to talk her out of it, saying that the chances were low that she would draw it again, and after a few days she would forget all about what she'd seen.

I didn't know exactly what to make of it then, but I would learn.

For the next week and a half, I watched as different girls drew the black ball. The ones who had been here before took it better than the new ones, and the new ones were always in tears the next day. Because of how the schedules were set up, we really didn't have a lot of interaction with the other cabins. We lived with the girls in our own cabin, but outside of meals and the fire pit, we didn't see the others during the day. Most of them stuck pretty close to their group during the periods in between activities, and none of them wanted to talk about what was going on if you asked them.

Then, about a week and a half after Brenda drew the ball, Heather drew out the jet-black sphere and was that night's Sleepwalker. I remember the look on her face when she drew it out, the look of uncertainty and fear, and Gladys named her the Sleepwalker of the Night. She went back to Sparrow Cabin, seeming unsure of what to expect, and as we got ready for bed, we all watched her a little apprehensively.

"So," Heather asked, "What happens now? Do I start walking or something? Do they come and get me in the night?"

"Maybe they're going to make you disappear!" Lauren said, and we all laughed nervously.

"Just go to sleep," Claire said, and it shut us all up as we looked at her, "It won't happen till then."

She slid under her blanket and slid a pillow over her head. So, we all settled in, turning the lamp off and nestling down for sleep. Heather was soon snoring, as was Lauren, and I yawned as I drifted off as well. I guessed if something was going to happen then it would happen, and before I knew it I was dreaming about swimming and friendship bracelets and all the other things I was going to do tomorrow.

I woke up in the middle of the night, filled with a need to pee worse than anything I'd ever felt.

I was coming back from the latrine, almost back in bed, when I glanced at Heather and saw something that stopped me in my tracks.

Heather's mouth was open in a silent O of a scream. Her hands were bunched up in the covers, and she was writhing slowly on the sheets of her small bed. Her eyes were closed, shut tight like they might be locked that way, and she sucked in breath like she might be screaming in whatever dream she was having.

I woke the others, showing them what was happening, and when Sandy reached over to shake her, Claire grabbed her by the wrist.

"It won't do any good, and it could make it worse. You just have to let her get over it on her own."

"But we can't just leave her like this. She's in pain." Sandy said.

"She could be in more pain if you try to wake her up. She'll come out of this at dawn so just let her be."

We went back to bed, none of us but Claire sleeping, and when the sun came up, Heather came awake shaking like someone who's been badly startled. She looked around like something might be after her, like this might all be a dream too, and when we came to comfort her she began to sob. Her eyes had the same dark circles that I'd seen on the other girls, and she walked to chow when the bugle sounded like a zombie.

She didn't eat breakfast, and when I asked her what she'd dreamed about, Claire shot me a nasty look.

"We don't talk about it. The worst thing you can do is make them relive it."

"But if we know what happens when you're the sleepwalker,"

"If you're lucky," Claire said, talking over me as my voice rose, "You'll never find out what it is,"

"No," Heather said, "No, I want to talk about it."

Claire got a pained look, "You don't have to," she whispered, "I know what it's like. It's not something you should have to relive."

"Wait," I said, putting something together that I should have a while ago, "You knew this was going to happen and you didn't warn us. Why didn't you say something?"

"Because it wouldn't have done any good," Claire said, "Knowing it's coming doesn't make it any easier.  It's terrible, no matter if it's the first time or the fifth. I got chosen twice last year, the knowing doesn't matter, it's terrible every time."

"Do you want to know or not?" Heather said, turning to us angrily, "Because I'm only going to tell it once and then I never want to talk about it again.”

We said we did and she got a faraway look as she began.

"I was in the woods, it was night and everything was dark. Then I felt something watching me, something like a tiger or a bear or something. It was big, whatever it was, because when it roared it shook all the trees around me. I started running, running through the woods as fast as I could. You say I was in bed, but my legs ache and my arms feel the pine needles that slashed at them. I ran and ran and ran, but it never seemed to catch me. It was always just out of sight, just out of reach, and the farther I ran, the more afraid I got. After a while, I felt like I might be going crazy. I was so scared, so absolutely terrified, and it just never ended. Then, just as the sun came up, I heard it roar and I heard the trees rustle as it jumped, and I fell down as something heavy hit me. Then I woke up and you guys were standing there looking at me."

She started crying then, and Claire gave her a hug as she assured her it was over and she was safe now.

Needless to say, Heather decided to stay in when we saw it was our turn to hike today.

She had spent a whole night in the woods and saw no reason to spend another hour looking at nature.

That's how it went that summer. Every night we drew balls from the box, and every night it was some girl's turn to spend it in a state of terror. Sandy got her turn, Laura too, and even Claire had to suffer it one night, but never me. Some of the girls went twice, but I seemed to be immune to the black ball. It never chose me, and if it hadn't been for the Team Challenge I would never have experienced it.

Team Challenge was Gladys's' idea, and she was clearly pretty proud of it.

It was the last week of camp, and I had almost thought I would get away without having to be the Sleepwalker. We were gathering for the morning meeting after breakfast, and all of us assembled in the amphitheater. Gladys stood up there, smiling like she had a big surprise for us, and I suppose she was right.

"Good morning, Campers. This week, I have something special planned. Today, we start the Team Challenges! Two cabins will face each other in three events, Archery, Canoe races, and Obstacle Course! The winners will be immune to sleepwalking for that night. The losing cabin, however, will all have to be the sleepwalker that night!"

No one cheered, but we all knew the stakes.

The way it shook out was that for three days the cabins would compete.

On the fourth day, one of them would get the buy and the other two would face off.

On the fifth day, the last two would go head to head to crown the best cabin.

Saturday would be the color war and then pick up.

Claire took us aside and told us we had to win this.

"Everyone in the cabin has been the sleepwalker at least once, well, almost all of us," she said, looking at me with jealousy.      

I didn't feel good about it. Quite the contrary, I felt terrible. Heather had been the Sleepwalker twice now, Sandy too, and I hadn't been picked once. I didn't want to, either. I had watched them go through it, and it looked miserable. As it happened, though, I had one the best times on the obstacle course, and I was one of the better campers on the archery range. I felt we had a good chance of winning this thing, and the girls agreed as we started making a game plan.

The Sparrows beat the Crows on Tuesday, and then we got the buy on Thursday. We were hopeful we could win this thing, and the incentive was on full display. The losing teams showed up to breakfast with bags under their eyes, shaking noticeably as they refused to eat. Whatever was going on, it was even worse in a group, and we prepared to win against the Hawks and take the whole contest.

We had them at Archery, but they smoked us at the canoe race.

We were certain we could whip them on the obstacle course, but then disaster struck. As Claire came across the final leg of the course, having gone last so I could go first and give us a strong start, she slipped and fell off the beam, the race going to her opponent. The Hawks won, and we would be the sleepwalkers that night.

We fought it, trying to stay up as late as we could, trying to stay up all night, but we were just so tired. By eleven we were all dozing, and by midnight we had lost the fight. I remember blinking owlishly as I watched Claire drift off fitfully, and when I opened my eyes I was in the forest.

We were all in the forest, looking around as we awoke into some kind of strange shared dream.

I was just trying to orient myself when I heard the roar that Heather had described, and it galvanized me in a way that nothing ever had. It was like a bear's roar mixed with something feline and something much deeper. I imagined it was what a tyrannosaurus rex sounded like, the scream of some extinct creature come back to life, and I started running. They were with me in the beginning, all of us neck in neck as we fled into the woods. It was always behind us, stomping through the trees like it was as tall as a redwood. It crashed, it rumbled, and as we ran for our lives, it menaced us from the darkness.

Heather was the first to fall.

I looked back, meaning to help her, but the darkness swirled up and took her. Her tear-streaked, terrified face was there one moment, and then suddenly she was swallowed by the gloom. Laura fell next, stumbled as she looked back at Heather, and I didn't look back to see her get gobbled up too. I kept running, kept showing my heels, and when Sandy fell too I didn't even notice right away. I was in a state of panic, something I would later call a heightened terror response when I went to college to study psychology. It was similar to the response prey animals have when they are fleeing for their lives, the kind of thing that gets them eaten by pack hunters when another one pops up on the side while they're focused on the threat behind them.

I ran and ran and ran, my legs pumping and my heart racing. I don't know when Claire fell or even if she did, but I felt the branches that reached out to slow me down and the rocks that battered my bare feet. I felt every mile that I ran and I felt every horrifying stumble as I nearly lost my balance. I kept running for my life, and when the sun came up at long last, I didn't stop. I heard it spring, heard it come up from behind me like a tidal wave, but if it hit me, I didn't know it.

I came awake like I meant to fight off an attacker, and the other girls were around me, looking as bad if not worse.

We lost the color war, all of us were too tired to focus.

Mom commented on the bruises under my eyes when she came to pick me up, but I just hugged her and said how glad I was to see her.

I never spoke about that summer, not until I wrote my senior thesis on the difference between irrational and rational fear in adolescence.  

I didn't think I would ever visit those memories again, not until today.

I've been working as a psychiatrist since I graduated, helping kids get over their trauma and trying to find them some relief. Mostly it is normal stuff, divorcing parents or concerns about school and friends. We talk about monsters in closets or stories that won't go away when they close their eyes, typical kid stuff, but sometimes I help them tell a parent about someone who is doing something they shouldn't so that person can go somewhere where they can't hurt them again.

Those are the good days, the days I feel like I've made a difference.

When the girl started telling me about the dreams, the ones she'd had after her mother said they had enrolled her in camp again, I felt myself beginning to hyperventilate. She described dreams of something big chasing her through the woods at night, about dreams that only came when she was at camp, and only when she was the sleepwalker. I didn't even feel it at first when the pen snapped in my hand, and when the girl said, her voice panicked, that I was bleeding, I looked down to see my hand had the jagged end of a pen buried in it.

I told her mother that she might want to find another summer camp this year, not voicing what I actually believed so I didn't sound crazy.

The mother seemed concerned, "But Jenny loves Camp Moonsong. She's gone every year since she was nine."

I strongly recommended she find her daughter another camp, and the two left, mollified, with a prescription refill.

I had never imagined the place was still open, never in my wildest dreams.

I sat in my office, trying to control the shakes as my hand throbbed like an infected tooth.

I'm afraid to go to sleep tonight, something I haven't been afraid of since that first week home from camp.

I'm afraid I might wake up in the woods again, fleeing from the thing that chases the sleepwalkers.The Sleepwalkers of Camp Moonsong

I don’t remember much of the house fire that killed both my parents. I lived on the first floor, but the gray smoke had grown so thick that I stumbled blindly for what felt like hours before finding a door. My throat felt like sandpaper and my eyes constantly streamed tears of irritation and pain. Strips of burned and mutilated flesh hung from my poor hands, though I knew it would heal rapidly, within a few hours. A firefighter appeared like a ghostly silhouette before me.

I remember the flashing lights of police and fire trucks and the far-away echo of deep voices. From the direction of the house, I remember the dying screams of my parents as they burned alive. My childish imagination could never have predicted what would come next.

Behind the flurry of ambulances, fire trucks and cop cars, I saw a single black sedan with tinted windows. Compared to the bright colors and strobing lights of the emergency vehicles, it looked like little more than a shadow. The windshield, too, looked dark and opaque, nearly impossible to see through.

I sat in the back of an ambulance. The EMTs had already cleared me, saying I only had a few scrapes and some mild smoke inhalation and eye irritation, but that I didn’t require urgent care or hospitalization. 

Abruptly, the doors of the black sedan flew open. Two men in black suits stepped out, wearing sunglasses even in the middle of the night. I stared, open-mouthed, as they swerved their way through the jumble of emergency responders and vehicles. They came straight at me, unsmiling and grave. Their faces looked extremely pale, almost vampiric in a way. 

“Hey there, Ghosten. Ghost-inn. Quite a unique name,” the one on the right said calmly, stretching my name out as he dropped down on one knee. His sunglasses looked like mirrors, but they reflected the world darkly.

“Hi,” I whispered in a tiny voice. “Who are you?”

“We’re here to bring you to a good home,” he responded in a voice as soothing as balm on a wound. He put a hand on my shoulder, trying to be comforting. But through the thin fabric of my T-shirt, I could feel his skin burning as if with an inner fever. I tried to draw back, but his grip tightened, the fingers digging into the thin bones.

“Where’s mom and dad?” I asked. “Why haven’t they come out?” He just shook his head.

“We’ll explain everything on the way, son,” he said, rising to his feet. He gently patted me on the shoulder a few times for good measure. No one else paid us any attention. With the two strange men beside me, we started off toward their sedan.

***

“My name is Keller,” the leader of the two men said as he slid smoothly into the driver’s seat. He motioned at the silent one next to him. “This is Vlad.”

“Where are we going?” I asked. He turned in his seat, jerking his head to face me. The veins on his forehead and neck seemed to pound in time with his heart.

“You sure do ask a lot of fucking questions, kid,” Keller hissed, his teeth gritted as his lips flew into a snarl. Taken aback, I sat as silent as a statue as he started the car and slowly pulled away from the jumble of emergency vehicles.

We traveled in silence for hours, down winding roads and past dark forests. I remember we eventually came to a small airfield in the middle of scattered corn fields. A man with a black rifle stood at the front gate, looking bored and tired. Keller showed him a silver badge in a black leather case, and the gate started to roll to the side.

Keller pulled into a dark corner of the airfield. Together, the two agents quickly got out, slamming their doors closed. I had tried the handle a couple times along the trip, hoping I could jump out when the car slowed or stopped, but it was locked from the outside somehow. Now I frantically grabbed it again, shaking the door with as much force as my small body could muster. I only saw the grinning, pale face of Vlad outside. A key jiggled outside, and both doors flew open. In Vlad’s hand, I saw a needle filled with clear fluid. They held me down as he injected it in my neck. I felt sick and weak as black waves clouded my vision.

***

I fell into a dreamless sleep. By the time I woke up, things around me had changed drastically.

I was handcuffed and thrown into the back of an SUV. With a pounding migraine, I looked up front, seeing Keller and Vlad still in the front seats. But now, the windows outside showed jagged mountain peaks covered in thick drifts of snow. The night outside looked freezing cold. Endless forests disappeared into the shadows off in the distance. I could feel the car rapidly accelerating uphill as hail peppered the windshield and roof. Vlad glanced in the rearview mirror. His eyes reminded me of those of a Siberian husky, ice-cold and predatory. 

“Ah, you’re awake? That’s good,” Vlad hissed in a thick Eastern European accent. “We’ll be there soon, Ghosten. There are few things you should probably know before we get there.

“Escape is impossible. Anyone who tries gets shot by the snipers. Some who lose hope might take it as the easy way out. Perhaps those are the smart ones.

“When you get there, you and the other newcomers will take a test. Those of you who fail will be euthanized. Do you know what euthanasia is, Ghosten?” I nodded. “Every month, the bottom 10% of the class will be taken out. At the end of nine months, those left alive will be offered jobs with the CIA and the military.

“All the kids there are freaks, just like you. They don’t all heal burnt, blackened skin in a few hours, though” Vlad continued. “That is impressive.” I felt a cold shudder run down my spine as I realized these men knew far more about me than seemed possible. “What else can you do, kid?”

“Nothing,” I muttered. “My hands weren’t that badly hurt. I think you’re exaggerating.” My voice felt weak and small.

“Uh-huh,” Keller said sarcastically. “Oh, look at that. What a sight, huh?” 

I remember that moment like a screenshot to this day. I gazed open-mouthed in horror up the steep mountain slope. Dark patches of evergreens surrounded the small, snow-covered road on both sides. Their boughs reached out toward the SUV, their overgrown needles scraping the sides with a faint screech. I could smell the overwhelming presence of pine coming in through the vents.

Above us loomed something like a massive high school surrounded by rolls of razor-wire and multiple layers of tall, electrified fences. A dozen jet-black sniper towers were placed equidistant around the perimeter of the property. The enormous brick building at the center looked like it had no windows at all. Sheer concrete walls rose to a flat roof a few stories high. Large industrial-sized smokestacks scattered over the top constantly belched black smoke into the crisp Alaskan air. Behind it, dozens of snow-capped mountains stretched off towards the horizon.

***

We pulled up to the gate. Spotlights converged on the SUV from all directions. A guard dressed in all black stood there with a large rifle strapped to his chest. On his face, he wore a silver mask. It had long, slitted eyes and metal lips tightly pressed together in a grimace. My first thought was of the Man in the Iron Mask. Two more guards stood in a nearby guardhouse wearing identical masks, though they varied in height and build. Keller rolled down the window. The guard in charge spoke in an electronically-distorted voice. It sounded inhumanly deep with a subtle hiss of static writhing under his words.

“What is your business?” the guard hissed.

“We’re dropping off another subject for the tests,” Keller said calmly, showing his silver badge. “The Department for the Cleansing of Anomalies.”

“We have another shipment coming in by train from the capital,” the guard said, his mask revealing and distorted voice revealing nothing of what lay hidden under the surface. “The Cleaners are unloading the train now. You can drop the boy off over there. He needs to get an identification number.” I didn’t like the sound of any of this. Most of all, I felt unnerved by the way they talked about me as if I were a sack of meat getting delivered to a butcher shop.

The SUV slowly pulled off from the front gate, following the freshly-plowed road that wound its way around the exterior of the strange, prison-like school. I could hear far-away screams, a combination of many dissonant voices that rose and swelled into a hellish cacophony. I saw a platform of bare, gray concrete swarming with hundreds of kids, most of them looking like they were in the range of nine to thirteen. More armed soldiers wearing the same silver masks screamed orders. Some held black German shepherds on long chains that snarled and snapped at the kids, pulling against their restraints with wolfish ferocity.

“We’re here!” Keller exclaimed excitedly, pulling up next to the concrete platform. They pulled me out, taking off my handcuffs and shoving me into the surging crowd. The men in the silver masks pushed us forward relentlessly towards the building.

***

“Males to the right, females to the left,” one of the guards said in an electronically-amplified voice, repeating it over and over. More guards had black truncheons, which they used to beat kids who they thought moved too slow or, sometimes, for no reason at all. I looked down the line of people, wondering where it led. Hundreds of boys disappeared into a dark hallway, while the line of girls veered off to the other side of the platform where another similarly black threshold waited to swallow them up.

“Keep moving forward,” another guard said, smashing his truncheon down over and over on the backs of boys ahead of me. I heard bones cracking and panicked screams. People tried to run past the sadistic guards of this hellish place, but they timed their shots with practiced ease. I saw quite a few kids get bit by the dogs as well. Drops of fresh blood stained the ground leading forward, mixing with darker, older stains eaten into the pavement. I shivered uncontrollably in the freezing Alaskan winter, wondering if I had somehow ended up in Hell. Maybe I had died in the fire along with my parents, and this was eternity.

I tried to slink into the center of the crowd, letting the boys on both sides of me take the brunt of the blows, though a few glancing strikes still hit me. I felt immensely grateful when we moved into the black hallway, which at least had some heat. Bizarre slogans in gold paint lined both sides of the wall. “Welcome to Stonehall, the School of Eyes,” one read. “A hurricane of souls spirals out of the chimneys, rejuvenating the planet,” read another. It was almost as if a schizophrenic in a psychotic state had written their thoughts down, though they seemed to connect in any eerie way I couldn’t yet understand.

Next to me stood a small boy with jet-black hair and a nose that looked like it had been broken and badly set. Unlike the others, he wasn’t screaming or upset. He looked calm. He glanced over at me, meeting my eyes.

“Hello,” he said over the wailing and cries of the confused, hurt kids. “How are you?” I laughed at that.

“Not very good, to tell you the truth,” I answered. “I think we might die tonight.” The boy shook his head once, the serenity never leaving his eyes.

“No, not you and not me,” he said simply. “Others, yes. But people die here all the time, after all. Like the signs said, a hurricane of souls spirals out.”

“How do you know we won’t die?” I asked, confused. He leaned close to me. There was an odd smell around the boy, almost like ozone with a note of panicked sweat. Yet his expression reflected no perturbation in his mind.

 “I can see the future, sometimes,” he whispered, looking around to make sure no one was listening. “Just in small doses, and it’s not always right. It’s like… imagine if reality was a beehive, filled with millions of cells rising above you. Those are all the possible worlds. But some paths are straighter heading upwards, and these are the more likely realities. Other paths would have to swerve and curve in insane ways, and these realities almost never come true.”

“Well, I sure hope you’re right,” I said, “because today is not a good day to die.”

***

I found out that the boy’s name was Dean. I stayed close by his side as all of the boys were herded, one by one, into a room. After waiting for nearly half an hour, it was my turn. A guard in a silver mask took my arm and put it on top of some sort of machine that reminded me of an X-ray. A metal clamp closed around my wrist and elbow. Two other guards watched, armed with black rifles. Suddenly, red lasers shot out, sizzling into my skin. I screamed, trying to pull away, but seconds later, it was over. I looked down at my arm, seeing a number tattooed there in black copperplate: “A-20101.”

After that, we were led into a large auditorium with hundreds of velvet-lined seats facing a stage. A man in a black robe wearing the same iron mask as all the other guards stood there waiting, not moving in the slightest. For a moment, I thought it might be a mannequin. Dean stood behind me in line.

“Find seats!” the guards screamed in their amplified voices. People scrambled to the nearest open seat. Dean and I found two seats near the front, only a stone’s throw away from the still figure on the stage, looming over the crowd like the angel of death.

On the right arm of each seat, there was a tablet. The screens stayed dark for now, but once the hundreds of boys had taken their seats, all of them in the room turned on at once.

“You know why you’re here in Stonehall,” the black-robed man on the stage said, taking a long step towards the students. “Each of you are different, capable of great things. In this school, we will weed out the weak and feeble. Only the strongest and smartest will survive.

“The first round of elimination will take place by test. Enter your identification number at the top of the screen. The test will begin in ten seconds.”

The questions that came up on the screens seemed bizarre and nonsensical some of the time. The first strange one had to do with Tarot. It read: “In front of you, you see the Fool, the Hanged Man and the Devil. What card comes next?” In a flash, I somehow knew what they wanted me to say. “The Death Card,” I typed on the small touchscreen keyboard.

The questions varied wildly. Some topics focused on astral projection or out-of-body experiences, while others asked about ancient types of torture. Strange wildcards continuously came up, non-sequiturs like the Tarot question. I still remember another bizarre one.

“If the National Socialists had won World War 2, in what year would Adolf Hitler have died?” it asked. I thought about what Dean had said, how he could see different realities above him like the cells of an eternal beehive. I wrote down, “1949”, and the test was over.

***

The screens all went black simultaneously. Spotlights overhead came on, shining down on us from all directions. The white glare blinded me temporarily. On the stage, I could just barely see the silhouette of the robed man. He raised his hand, his pointer finger extended upwards, reminding me of the ISIS salute.

“The tests are being scored now,” he rasped. “Please stay in your seats.” I nervously looked around, seeing the other students sweating heavily. The doors at the back of the auditorium flew open. Dozens of guards with rifles walked in, their masks gleaming under the harsh fluorescent light. In pairs, they walked over to some of the boys, pulling their arms out and checking the tattooed numbers. They passed by me and Dean, but the boy on the other side of me had failed. Sweating heavily, I saw him stumble to his feet as the black-gloved hands of the guards forced him up.

“What’s happening?” he asked, his voice weak and uncertain. “Where are you taking me?”

“Shut the fuck up,” a guard hissed, pushing him forward onto the steps. The boy went sprawling, smashing his face into the hard steps with a sickening thud. A moment later, he raised his swollen head. Streams of blood flowed from his nose. He spit up frothy blood and a piece of a tooth. After a few minutes, they had lined up a few dozen of the boys out of the few hundred people in the class. At gunpoint, they marched them out and into the hall.

“The rest of you will be shown to your rooms,” the black-robed man at the front of the hall said. “Every month, you will have a test, though not all will be based on knowledge. Some tests may be based on your skills and abilities. You will be honed over the months, strengthened and shown amazing sights.”

***

We were led out into the hallway. It split off into four corridors, and off in the distance, I saw it split off again. The halls had been decorated somewhat like a traditional school, with tiled floors and brick walls. Fluorescent lights hung overhead, casting the pale, terrified faces below in a white glare. Stairs going up six or seven levels opened up intermittently.

They sectioned us off in groups of a dozen, sending us into rooms with cold steel bunkbeds covered in thin mattresses. I was thankful to see Dean in my group.

I laid down immediately, feeling bone-tired and weak from all that happened and the long distances I had traveled. I heard Dean weeping in the bunk below me. And then, far below us, the screaming started. At first, it came through muffled. I saw air vents in the room, square grills at the corners. The sound seemed to come from them. The wailing intensified, the notes of agony and terror growing stronger.

“What is that?” I whispered, not wanting to know the answer. I had a sick feeling in my stomach. My heart was racing.

“You can’t see it?” Dean asked. “I can. They get locked in concrete rooms. Then the vents start whirring, and the poison comes through. They see their nails turning blue as they pile up into pyramids of bodies, coughing up blood from screaming so loud and so long. Can’t you see it?”

“No, I can’t,” I said. After about fifteen or twenty minutes, the intense, agonized wailing began quieting down. One by one, the voices died out like stars winking out at the end of the universe. 

***

I fell asleep sometime in the pitch-black night. I dreamed of pyramids of naked corpses with dilated pupils and blue lips. Men in hazmat suits came in, but when they turned to look at me, I realized their suits were fused to their skin, their plastic masks melted to their blood-red, grinning skulls.

I woke up screaming as something like a tornado siren rang out above me. Bright lights turned on overhead, humming with an incessant tinking sound. I thrashed in my bed, falling off the side of the bunk and landing on the floor. The other boys looked at me like I was insane. Dean got out of bed and helped me stand up.

We were marched single-file back down the hallway. Classrooms opened up on both sides of us, filled with a mixture of girls and boys. A silent guard with a silver mask pointed us toward a classroom on the right, where a dozen girls sat at tables, their eyes looking tired and haunted. A man stood at the front of the class with strange, blood-red irises. He had a shaved head and a reddish hue to his skin, as if he were at risk of exploding from hypertension at any moment.

“Sit down!” he yelled. “Sit down! We don’t have much time here.” I quickly found a seat at a table with three other boys. On the chalkboard, the man had written, in large, spiky letters: “PYROKINESIS”.

“My name is Mr. Antimony, and I’m here to teach you little shits about pyrokinesis,” he hissed, walking in circles with a manic energy. “Most of you will fail. The art of harnessing the deathless self within the heart and bringing heat from it is a rare one. It has been practiced by Buddhist monks and practitioners of Advaita Vedanta for millennia, along with the other higher arts like telekinesis, mind-reading and astral projection. A few of you may be worthy enough to realize the source of this power.

“In the drawers in front of each of you, you will find a variety of objects: cotton balls, rubbing alcohol, paper and a book titled ‘The Art of Living Fire’ written by the ancient seer, Hermes Trismegistus.”

In the first class of this bizarre place, we were taught how to heat objects with our hands until they exploded into flames. The two other boys at our table, Kim, a young Asian kid with magnified glasses, and Tommy, a little, malnourished-looking kid, instantly proved to be adept at the lessons. I hadn’t succeeded in lighting even the smallest cottonball when something went horribly wrong in a flash.

Kim had succeeded in igniting a Bible on fire when a ball of flames shot out of his hands, causing the bottle of alcohol to erupt. It melted in an instant, dripping a blue inferno over the table. It soaked into Kim’s shirt and pants, and the red flames that emanated from his hands exploded. He screamed, running in circles as his skin blackened and dripped. I saw his eyes melting out of his head. He fell to the floor, and someone grabbed a jacket and tried to smother the flames, but it simply ignited. The student dropped the jacket, backing away from the screaming, writhing body on the floor.

***

During the next few weeks, we continued to learn at the nightmarish classes of Stonehall. Regular casualties occurred, and deaths frequently happened during accidents. Yet these deaths did not go towards the quota that would be enforced in another week. Another 10% of the class would die, and this time, they said the tests would include practical demonstrations of powers that would be ruled by a team of judges.

“We need to get out of here,” Dean whispered one night. Tommy lay at the next bunk over, his small face looking pinched and mousey in the dark. 

“They’re going to start the executions again soon,” he said. “The path to the concrete rooms down below.”

“The path to the gas chambers,” Dean agreed. “We need to find a way to break out and tell the world about this place.” All of us had grown exponentially in the last few weeks, our latent abilities coming to fruition under the constant watchful eyes of the teachers. 

“Why don’t you use your precognitive abilities to see a way out?” I asked Dean. “There has to be weak spots. Maybe we can kill the guards and take their suits. If we had the masks on…”

“We’re too small,” Tommy said. I shook my head.

“You’re too small,” I said. “Dean and I might be able to pass. Not all the guards are tall, after all.”

“What if the students rebelled?” Tommy asked. “Maybe we could ask around, see if other kids want to fight back and try to escape. If all of us attacked them at once…”

“They have precognitive abilities, too,” Dean said. “They’re going to see the most likely paths just like I can. At least the ones at the top, and a few of the teachers…”

“So it comes down to my plan, I think,” I said. “And we don’t know who we can trust. The three of us could probably kill and overpower a guard. What do you think?”

“They killed my parents and kidnapped me,” Tommy spat with venom. “I would love to see some of these fuckers dead.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that, but I think it might,” Dean said, and then everything went quiet.

***

On the day before the scheduled test, Tommy came running up to me and Dean after the class on assassination techniques had finished. His scarecrow-thin face shone with a wide grin. I had never seen him so excited.

“I think I found a way out,” he said. He looked around furtively, making sure no one else stood close enough to hear. “Do you guys remember the day you came in here?” I nodded. How could I forget?

“I got dropped off by two agents,” I said. “They claimed they were from some non-existent government agency called the Cleaners.”

“I came on the cattle cars,” Tommy said, frowning at the memory. “Well, they drop off more kids out there every day. They need constant fresh meat for the tests, after all. There are guards all over the place, and cars out there.”

“We need to find a weak spot in the guards’ defense,” I said, “where we can overpower a couple of them and kill them and steal their uniforms. After that, you think we could just walk out of here?”

“The medical ward usually isn’t heavily guarded,” Dean said. “We need to do it tonight, though. This is the last chance.” We made it sound so easy, but in reality, I knew it would be an almost impossible task.

The rest of the day passed by in a blur. Before I knew it, the classes had finished, and we were being led back to the chambers. We waited in the darkness, whispering so the other boys wouldn’t hear our plans. When 3 AM rolled around, Dean indicated it was time to go.

“The hallways outside are empty,” he whispered. “We need to move now, as quickly and quietly as we can.” I saw his pupils constricting and expanding rapidly, as they always did when he tried to tap into the multiverse of possibilities. I wondered what it looked like, staring up into the beehive of realities. Despite his attempts to help me learn some precog abilities, I had failed in every attempt so far.

Whether day or night, the hallways always looked the same- windowless, with every inch of them illuminated by the harsh fluorescent lights overhead. Dean lead us successfully down turn after turn. I heard the guard’s steps missing us by mere seconds. Afraid to even breathe too loud, we made our way towards the medical ward.

***

“Are you guys ready?” Dean whispered. Using his abilities seemed to take a toll on him. His face looked pale and sweaty, his dilated pupils gleaming manically. “We need to fight. There are two guards up ahead.”

“Fuck,” Tommy whispered back. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

“They’re going to murder us if we don’t, maybe,” I said. “We have to kill them first.”

“Hey, stop right there!” a guard exclaimed abruptly, coming around the corner. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. I froze like a deer in the headlights, staring dumbly at the guard. Luckily, Tommy went into action immediately, running at the guard before he could aim his gun.

Tommy raised his small hands, causing a swirling vortex of flame to erupt from his hands. With lightning-fast reflexes, the guard grabbed his rifle as Tommy’s hands wrapped around his bare throat. There was a flash as the rifle fired. At the same moment, the skin on the guard’s neck started to drip and blacken. There was an echoing of pained screams as my ears rang.

Another guard came around the corner seconds later, aiming his rifle at Dean’s head. Dean shot a flash of blue lightning from the tips of his fingers, using his telekinetic powers to send the rifle flying upwards. The bullet smashed harmlessly into the ceiling, causing dust and debris to rain down on our heads.

Tommy fell on the guard’s body, a torrent of blood pumping from the massive hole in his chest. I ran at the second guard, a flash of blue light sparking from my fingertips and sending him sprawling backwards. He grabbed his rifle, shooting blindly in the direction of me and Dean. I heard bullets whizzing past my head, missing my brain by inches.

“I’m hit!” Dean screamed. I looked back, seeing a ragged hole eaten into his right shoulder. Blood spurted from the wound in time with his heartbeat. Tommy had stopped moving as he lay on the writhing body of the other guard. The flames spread down his body. He kicked and clenched with all of his strength, looking like a poisoned hornet twisting on the floor.

I knew I was alone now. Focusing on the spinning vortex of energy within my heart, I tried to bring out the fire I had never succeeded in creating before. The guard lay stunned for a moment, but I knew he would rapidly recover. I leapt forward, putting my hands around his throat. I felt something freezing cold running through my blood, but when it emerged from my skin, it grew burning hot. An acrid smell like ozone and burning metal surrounded me, pouring off my feverish skin. The guard screamed as his throat melted. His gurgling grew low and distorted. I felt his windpipe collapsing under the heat and assault.

Breathing heavily, I looked around, expecting to see a platoon of guards running in. Someone must have heard all the gunshots and screaming. Dean’s eyes had started to roll up in his head by this point. I crawled over to him, slapping his face.

“Stay with me, man,” I whispered. Rapidly, his lips took on a bluish cast. His paleness grew vampiric, his skin chalk-white. I knew it was useless.

I got up, feeling dissociated and unreal. I looked around, seeing an empty, dark room down the hall. It was one of the rooms for the medical ward, filled with unoccupied beds and equipment.

With a rush of adrenaline, I leaned down, dragging the body of the guard I had killed over to the room. At first, his body seemed too heavy, impossibly heavy, but my telekinetic powers came rushing out. I felt drained from using my powers so much, and I hoped that, soon, I could rest.

I rapidly stripped the guard of his military gear and silver mask. Underneath, I saw a young man, probably in his early twenties. He had a soft, child-like face. He seemed on the border of life and death as his gurgling breaths came slower and shallower. I wondered how such cruelty could hide behind such a mundane exterior.

***

It took me a few minutes to change, breathing heavily in the dark. The gear all felt far too large on me, especially the boots. I saw a nearby medical closet with linen, slip-proof socks and hospital gowns. I put on pair after pair after socks until I could walk in the black boots.

The gear smelt of burnt flesh and blood, with drops of blackened gore still staining the bullet-proof vest and tactical vests. I put on the mask, whispering a few words. The built-in voice distortion system caused them to come out low and predatory, like the hissing of a snake.

“Stay with me, man,” I whispered, feeling the echoes of past atrocities spreading around me. “Stay with me.” I slowly opened the door, looking both ways but seeing no one. Close by, I heard heavy footsteps rushing in our direction.

I came around the corner as a dozen guards ran up with rifles. The one in front froze, holding his gun with practiced ease. I stared into the unreadable silver face, wondering if this was the end.

“I found two boys dead,” I said. “Some guards, too.”

“We heard gunshots,” he responded. I nodded, pointing behind me at the pools of blood and the broken bodies laying strewn about like garbage.

“It looks like a couple kids attacked some guards,” I said. “I was just about to go report it and call for back-up.”

“Go get the Principal,” he hissed. “We’ll secure the area.” Gratefully, I crept past the still, eerie figures of the soldiers, unable to believe my luck.

I made my way outside, hearing panicked screaming and pained sobs. A new round of kids stood next to the cattle cars of the train under a cloudy, black sky. A thin layer of cracked ice covered the ground. Seeing these kids beaten and pushed forward brought back horrifying memories of my first night here. Looking around, it grew worse when I saw the black SUV of Keller and Vlad. It stood empty, the engine running. In the line of kids, I glimpsed their two pale faces dragging two girls toward the hallway.

Blending in with the crowd of guards, I quickly made my way over to the SUV and got inside. Without hesitation, I put it in drive and slowly started pulling away. No one had noticed anything yet in the chaos of the moment. In the parking lot, I saw dozens of other similar SUVs used by Stonehall for trafficking kids. I hoped I could blend in and get out before anyone raised the alarm.

I pulled slowly up to the main gate, my heart twitching like a trapped rabbit. The iron mask of the guard revealed nothing as I rolled down the window. He held his rifle tightly in his hands. Through the eyeholes, I saw two red irises staring out.

“Identification?” the distorted voice said. Even through the distortion, I could hear the boredom in his voice. I checked the pockets of the dead man’s uniform, finding a wallet. I pulled it out, flipping it open and showing the silver badge in the center. The guard nodded, moving back to the guardhouse. The gate slowly started ambling to the side.

“Wait! Stop him!” a voice shrieked from behind me. In utter panic, I glanced in the rearview mirror, seeing Vlad and Keller heading in my direction, sprinting blindly toward the SUV.

“Fuck!” I shouted, slamming the gear shift into drive and accelerating rapidly. The tires spun on the ice for a long, heart-stopping moment. The guard ran out of the guardhouse, raising his rifle at the SUV. Then the car took off in a flash as the tires caught, sending me flying through the open gate.

I accelerated at dangerous speeds down the slick slope of the Alaskan mountains, leaving Stonehall behind. A few minutes later, a voice came over a radio next to the steering wheel. I recognized the voice of Keller.

“Ghosten, stop! This was all a test, and you passed. You escaped from Stonehall,” he said urgently. “You were the only one in the last five years to successfully get out. Your training is done. We’d like to offer you a job.”

I glanced in the rearview mirror, seeing cars far behind me. A few black SUVs flew out of the gate, looking as small as fruit flies. Swearing, I accelerated as fast as I could, fearing I would skid right off the road.

After making it to the bottom of the mountain, the road split off into four directions. I saw thick forests to the left and right. Nervously, I pulled right and sped around the corner, nearly sliding into a tree. I looked in the rearview mirror again, but I didn’t see my pursuers.

I pulled over, abandoning the car and fleeing that place of horrors. I walked for days before I found a small town where I managed to blend in. But I still feel hunted to this day.

In the history of American serial killers, we have seen some truly bizarre examples of how the human brain can go wrong. Most people may know of the case of Ed Gein, a man who tried to get a sex change operation but was denied. Ed Gein wanted to become a woman. Perhaps he wanted to become his domineering, fanatical mother. But when he couldn’t get a sex change operation, a significantly harder feat in the 1950s, he decided to make a suit of women’s skin that he could wear. He planned to physically transform himself into a female by this method. At first, he only dug up graves to get at the flesh required, but over time, the need grew, until he started murdering women to take their skin.

Another absolutely insane case is that of Richard Chase, the schizophrenic serial killer who became a living vampire. Like most truly bizarre cases, this one came from California. After doing far too many ego-shattering doses of LSD, his psychotic predispositions started to split his mind into a fractured, nightmarish state. He thought he was having constant heart attacks or that his heart would stop beating randomly. He thought his blood had turned into a powder. He thought that the bones in his skull would move around when he watched them in the mirror. Sometimes, he would put oranges up to the sides of his head to try to absorb vitamin C through osmosis.

In the end, he decided he needed blood to keep his heart going. He started by killing animals and drinking their blood. Eventually, he even killed a rabbit and injected its blood into his veins, which caused a severe infection and hospitalization. But his psychotic terrors continued to grow, and he quickly realized that animal blood was not returning his heart to its beating state. He decided he needed human victims, which he found by murdering whole families. He cut open a baby’s chest and put its organs in a blender with Coca-Cola, which he then drank.

Needless to say, these kinds of insane meltdowns don’t only occur in the past. They continue to happen regularly, and no matter how many serial killers we catch, in the end, more always arrive to replace them.

***

My partner, Agent Stone, sat next to me in the black sedan, driving the car at break-neck speeds through the winding roads and rolling hills of northern California toward the crime scene. An occasional vineyard dotted the landscape in the foggy breeze. I took in all of the beauty and splendor of this ancient land, smelling the sweet spring breeze that blew in through the vents.

“You ever notice how many serial killers California puts out?” Agent Stone asked, turning to regard me with his colorless blue eyes. I nodded grimly.

“Some states grow potatoes, and others grow corn, but California grows serial killers and madness, it seems,” I said. Agent Stone barely seemed to hear.

“Ed Kemper, Lawrence Bittaker, Herbert Mullin, Richard Chase, Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, Joseph DeAngelo, Kenneth Bianchi and so many others,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s fucking nuts. You know what I think?”

“Does it involve lizard people?” I asked with a dead-pan expression. He laughed, a brief, harsh laughter that always cut off abruptly.

“I think it’s because California is a leftist shithole. All the college campuses have extreme students and professors. This is where the Weathermen and all the bombings started, after all. So they teach these impressionable dumbass kids about killing for the greater good. They call their opponents Hitler and then say they can murder them. So these kids, they grow up listening to their teachers and professors preaching these radical philosophies and embracing political violence and murder. 

“Some of the smarter kids eventually realize, if we can use violence in these situations, then why not for our own personal causes? Just like the Communists and radicals, they start to see themselves as the victim, and those they murder are the perpetrators of… well, whatever they want to accuse them of,” Agent Stone said. I blinked rapidly, absorbing the information.

“You sure have thought a lot about this,” I said. “I always figured it was just the sex and drugs in California driving people crazy. You know, my brother still lives out here, though I haven’t talked to him in a few years. He’s a bit whacked out, too, I guess. So I take it you’re not planning on moving here?” Agent Stone just gazed stonily out the front window as he flew down the road.

***

“This is going to be… disturbing,” Agent Stone said. He pulled the car into a dirt road that wound its way through a public nature preserve. A hunter had found the bodies and called it in. The sedan came to a stop and Agent Stone cut the engine. I noticed the sounds of birds singing all around us while the engine pinged and tinked. This place looked mesmerizing with rugged pine trees and dark brush covering the rolling hills. I opened the door and breathed in the fresh air, seeing a hummingbird fly past my head. Two other FBI vehicles lay parked nearby, sitting empty and dark.

“Here,” Agent Stone said as he came by my side, holding out a dark vial labeled “Peppermint Extract”. He rubbed a couple drops under his nose. “This will help with the smell of the dead bodies. They’re pungent as hell by now. They’ve been rotting out here for the last couple weeks.” I tipped the vial onto the tip of my finger, repeating the movements. It had an overwhelmingly minty scent.

“Let’s do this,” I said, staying close by his side as we wound our way down a dirt trail and into the woods. I heard the soft murmuring of voices ahead. Through the dark green pines, I saw a fluorescent yellow tent. It stuck out immediately with its garish day-glo color scheme. Around it, CSI technicians from the FBI gathered evidence. Agent Stone and I always liked to come out and personally look at every crime scene. He claimed it helped him get a sense of the killer’s soul, and in a way, I felt I understood what he meant.

“Four victims,” Agent Stone said. “They’re all just kids, really. The oldest one is eighteen. It looks like they were camping here when the killer came out and shot all of them.” 

His faded blue eyes scanned the crime scene, taking everything in with photographic precision. I breathed in the air, noticing it wasn’t so pure and sweet in this spot. The smell of rotting bodies and feces hung thick in the air. The more subtle odors of blood and panicked sweat followed it. 

I nodded, almost seeing it happen in my mind’s eye. One of the boy’s dessicated corpses still hung halfway out of the open tent door, one hand reaching out in front of him desperately. Another teenager lay dead in the tent, sprawled on top of the sleeping bags. A pool of thick, clotted blood swarming with all sorts of insects surrounded him.

The two other victims lay in front of the tent, one face-down and one face-up. The killer had mutilated the last two victims, slicing open their chests from neck to groin. He had taken out their intestines and thrown them over the nearby branches like Christmas tinsel. The festering, rotting organs hung like limp snakes covered in maggots.

“What are your thoughts?” Agent Stone asked, turning to me. They seemed to connect slowly, puzzle pieces falling randomly into place. The last victim had been a woman in her house, a single mother. The killer had stabbed her repeatedly, slicing her throat from ear to ear. She had a toddler in the next room, but the killer hadn’t harmed the child. After dismembering and mutilating her body, he had simply left, coming and going as quietly as a ghost. None of the neighbors had seen anything, and no cameras nearby had caught any footage of him as far as we knew. On the white wall, in her blood, he had written a single word: “JONAH”.

“Based on the previous victim and these victims, I think we have a mostly disorganized killer. The last time, he used a knife, and this time, he used a gun and a knife. There’s no sign of any sexual sadism, and he doesn’t seem to care about the genders of his victims, though all of them were white. I think we are dealing with a white male, late twenties or early thirties. He has a severe psychotic disorder, possibly schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and he regularly suffers from command hallucinations. I think, when we catch this guy, if we catch this guy, he will have a totally bizarre motive. Unlike Ted Bundy or Lawrence Bittaker, this guy isn’t doing it for purposes of sexual sadism and torture. He’s doing it for some reason we can’t even possibly begin to comprehend. I’m not even sure if he wants to do it, or if he feels he is forced to kill. But he will kill again, definitely. He will keep killing until he gets caught.”

***

Agent Stone and I stayed at the crime scene for about half an hour, watching the technicians work and discussing the case. The technicians told us that the shots had come from a high-caliber rifle at close range. The victims hadn’t had a chance.

The case got a lot stranger when Agent Stone and I got back to the car. Someone had left a note on the windshield. It fluttered in the light spring breeze as if trying to catch our attention.

“What the hell is this?” I asked, moving closer and plucking it out from under the wiper. In spiky, copperplate handwriting, I read the following message: “If you turn this note into evidence, I will kill a family member of yours. If you don’t, I will torture a little girl to death.”

“What the fuck?” I said, handing the note over to Agent Stone. He frowned, his face forming into a stony grimace. “This can’t be real, can it?”

“Well, shit, we already got our fingerprints on it,” he said, sweating heavily. He carefully opened the door and took out an evidence bag, sliding the note inside. “I don’t know if this is some kind of sick joke or not, but we shouldn’t take any chances. We need to send this note to CSI. Maybe it will have a fingerprint that matches one from the crime scenes, but even if not, having a potential handwriting sample from the killer could help the prosecution. And if it turns out to be bullshit, they can destroy it after the killer gets caught and convicted.”

We also had a camera in the sedan, just like most police cars. But when we got back to headquarters and reviewed the footage, all we saw was a man dressed in all black with a dark ski mask slipping a note under the wiper. He had walked over only a minute after we had started down the trail toward the crime scene, as if he had been waiting there for us to arrive. Thinking of it sent shivers down my spine. And I wondered, at that moment, was I hunting the killer- or was he hunting me?

***

After we got back to our hotel for the night, I tried calling my brother. But the phone number I had for him no longer worked. A robotic female voice came on, saying that the line was no longer in service. For a brief moment, I wondered if he was even still alive. Johnny had always been a heavy drinker, and at some point in his life, that habit had spiraled into full-blown alcoholism. He had owned his own successful business and had a large house, but over time, he lost all of that and had eventually moved into a small cabin in Mendocino County. We had gotten into an argument the last time we spoke, as I told him he needed treatment and to stop asking me for money. He never called me again after that.

I hadn’t really worried too much about the note, but a small nagging voice at the back of my head told me I should go and warn Johnny, just in case. Around 7 PM, I left the dingy, cramped hotel room and headed to my rental car. I put in my brother’s address, seeing he only lived about thirty minutes away. I felt strange going to see him out of the blue like this when we hadn’t talked in nearly four years.

The scenic road took me along the coastline, past rugged rocks and deep-blue ocean. With some Johnny Cash playing in the background, I let myself relax, absorbing the natural beauty of this place. Soon, the road curved back into thick, dark forest. I checked the GPS, seeing my brother lived only a few miles away. As I got closer, I felt anxious and uncertain. What if he didn’t want to see me? 

“You have arrived,” the robotic voice said as I saw a small, dilapidated cabin at the end of a dirt road. Sharp rocks crunched rhythmically under the tires. The wide boughs of evergreens fanned out behind the cabin, with many of the branches leaning on the roof and walls. The grass looked overgrown and riddled with weeds. In the small driveway, the hunk of a rusted-out car stood next to a small moped.

Heaving a deep sigh, I opened the door and started heading down the cracked concrete walkway towards the cabin. I took a flashlight out of my pocket, shining it through the shadowy yard. To my surprise, I saw the front door standing wide open. All of the lights in the house looked dark. Something like an iron band gripped my heart at that moment. I felt something primal screaming within my subconscious, some ancient intuition that shrieked at me, “This is wrong.”

I walked into the front room, wrinkling my nose. A fetid smell like old garbage and rotting food hung thick in the air. Behind these rank odors, though, I noticed something more subtle and yet more revolting. I knew it well from my work with the FBI. It was the smell of death, of blood and dying sweat.

“Johnny?” I yelled into the blackness. “It’s me, Ray. Are you here?” In response, I heard only the echoing of my voice and the rapid thudding of my heart. I pulled my service pistol from its holster, a Glock 19X. Chambered in nine millimeter, it was a sleek, reliable gun with a sheer-black exterior.

With my flashlight in one hand and my pistol in the other, I crossed my arms and started moving forward, clearing the corners and doorways as I went. The creeping shadows dancing across the room made my adrenaline-soaked brain see false silhouettes more than once. White-knuckled with terror, I cleared the living room, seeing an empty bottle of vodka on the old, wooden table. Countless cigarette burns scarred the table’s pockmarked surface.

I made my way into the kitchen, seeing a scene straight from a hoarder documentary. Dozens of garbage bags stood in a pyramid in the corner, their plastic surfaces swollen almost to bursting. The glittering of white rodent eyes shone briefly before disappearing into cracks and holes in the walls. A cockroach skittered across the stained tiled floor, disappearing into the mountain of trash.

The sink held countless dishes with pieces of rotting food still clinging to their surfaces. A jungle of black and yellow molds grew over them, rising up in circular patches with wet, glistening filaments. The entire cabin consisted of only a single floor. Inhaling deeply, I moved into the last area: the bedroom.

I pushed the door slowly, wincing as its joints creaked with a whining of rusted metal. It opened up onto a scene from a nightmare.

I saw my brother, Johnny, laying there on the bed. His arms and legs were tied to the posts, spread out like Jesus on the cross. The killer had cut out both of his eyes. The dark sockets shrieked silently up at nothing like two empty, screaming mouths. In his arms and legs, I saw strange circular patches of melted, purplish flesh. The skin looked eaten away, revealing veins like fat worms and glistening muscle. Black, necrotic burns surrounded the ugly wounds. Johnny’s mouth still lay frozen in a silent scream, the tip of a purple tongue sticking out of his blue lips.

“Oh shit, Johnny,” I whispered sadly, feeling sick and disgusted by the sight. The murderer had carved a symbol into his chest as well. I saw an eye sliced into the spot above his heart. Around it, twelve wavy protrusions emerged like crude tentacles. Drips of dried, darkening blood surrounded the mutilation. But what had killed him? I didn’t know.

I raised my flashlight, clearing the corners of the filthy room. On the nicotine-stained wall, I saw more spatters of blood. Moving closer, I realized they formed words. The killer had left me a message.

“Sometimes, HE gets inside of you and makes you do things you don’t want to do,” it read.

***

I glanced down at my cell phone, trying to call the police. Out here in the middle of nowhere, however, I had no service. I tried 911 three times, but I couldn’t get it to ring once. Cursing, I decided to run back to the car. I knew that I had cell phone service back on the scenic road near the shoreline, because I had used the internet to play Johnny Cash on the drive. I just needed to drive back in that direction until I got closer to a cell phone tower and call for help.

Johnny had no neighbors nearby except trees and animals. In reality, this cabin appeared the perfect scene for a murder. No one would hear the screams of the tortured victim all the way out here. I felt instant regret for not organizing protection around my surviving family members as soon as we found the note. I knew I needed to contact Agent Stone and warn him that the killer might target his family as well.

I made it outside, taking a great lungful of fresh air. It tasted immensely sweet and refreshing after the oppressive odor of death and putrefying garbage. Breathing heavily, I bent over, trying not to retch. The horrors of what I had seen hit me all at once, like a freight train crashing into my mind.

I heard the cracking of twigs nearby and the rustling of leaves. Looking up, I saw a black silhouette creeping around the side of the house, only steps away from me. I instantly recognized the man from the sedan’s video feed, wearing all black clothes and a black ski mask. Before I could react, he ran at me, raising a glittering, blood-stained butcher’s knife above his head.

I stumbled back, thrown off-balance by the abrupt assault. I tried to raise my pistol and aim, but before I could bring it up, the man reached me. I saw the knife coming down in slow motion, aimed at the center of my face. I twisted my body, throwing myself to the side. The knife whizzed past my ear, slicing through the air in a blur. A moment later, I heard a crunching of bone and felt a cold numbness spread through my left shoulder.

I landed hard on the ground, looking over and seeing the knife embedded deeply into my flesh. Bright-red streams of blood instantly spurted from the wound. The black handle still quivered, shivering in its place. I couldn’t feel my left hand anymore. I dropped the flashlight on the ground with a dull thud, raising the pistol and firing in the direction of the madman.

He gave a grunt of pain as a bullet connected with his stomach. He took a few steps back, nearly falling but catching himself at the last moment. I could hear his pained, rapid breathing. Reaching quickly toward his belt, I saw him pull a pistol of his own. I kept firing, my shaking, unsteady hands missing most of the shots. As he started to aim at my head, I used the last round in my magazine. I inhaled deeply, aiming and firing.

The bullet caught him in the right leg, sending him spinning. He fell hard on the ground. The gun went flying from his hand. He gave a surprised shout of pain as blood soaked into his clothes, causing the wet, glistening fabric to stick tightly to his skin.

I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. Slowly, I sat up, my head spinning from the blood loss and pain. Red and blue lights split the creeping shadows apart. The shrill whining of the siren cut off abruptly. The police car arriving was the last thing I remember before falling forward. A wave of weakness shot through my body as a black wave crept up and dragged me under.

***

From what I found out later, after we had sent the note to the FBI, the supervisor in charge of the case decided to send police protection to the family members of myself and Agent Stone throughout the country. They had sent a couple state troopers to my brother’s house until the Earthquake Killer got captured or killed by police. I couldn’t imagine how surprised they must have been to arrive and find an FBI agent bleeding out next to the killer.

They quickly got ambulances and paramedics there. I went into emergency surgery and would eventually regain full use of my arm after extensive physical therapy. The Earthquake Killer, too, ended up surviving, though they had removed over five feet of intestines and part of his liver in the process.

I woke up in the hospital to see Agent Stone standing grimly over my bed, his tanned skin gleaming with sweat. His pale eyes, which never seemed to show a shred of emotion, sparkled for a moment when he saw me conscious.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” he said, giving me a crooked half-grin. “You did it, Harper. You got the bastard. He’s in the same hospital as us right now, handcuffed to the bed and guarded by police.”

“I should have shot him in the head,” I whispered, my throat cracked and dry. “He doesn’t deserve to be alive.” Agent Stone nodded, shrugging his massive shoulders.

“Well, we can’t change the past,” he responded blithely. “Turns out the guy’s name is Herbick Mueller. Your profile was right on the money. White male, 28-years-old, long history of institutionalization and paranoid schizophrenia. You won’t believe his rationale for killing all those people.”

“What, he confessed?” I asked, surprised. “Already? I wasn’t even there! Dammit, I wanted to be there.” Agent Stone only shrugged.

“Well, the evidence would have sealed his fate anyways. He left behind a piece of hair at one of the crime scenes, and we got his DNA from it. He said he needed to kill people to prevent earthquakes from happening,” Agent Stone said, his face a stony mask that revealed nothing. I repressed an urge to laugh at the ridiculous statement, remembering how many people had died and how horribly, including my own brother.

“I still want to talk to him myself,” I said. He nodded, patting me on my uninjured shoulder.

“As soon as you get cleared by the doctors, we’ll talk to him together. I think you’ll be surprised at what he has to say.”

***

I spent the next couple days in the hospital recovering from my surgery before being medically cleared to leave. I felt immensely grateful to get away from the tasteless hospital food and the incessant boredom. Watching TV for days straight felt mind-numbing.

Excitedly, I put on my black suit, hanging the left side over my cast. I would need months of physical therapy and treatment before my arm would fully recover. Herbick Mueller was still in the hospital, under constant watch. Agent Stone and I would go and interrogate him alone.

I walked into the room with Agent Stone by my side, seeing a wiry man with dark, wavy hair laying on a hospital bed. His leg sat in a cast, and bandages covered his stomach and chest. I smiled, seeing the extent of his injuries. Agent Stone and I pulled up some chairs and sat down close by his side. He turned to regard us with eyes the color of steel. On one of his arms, I saw a tattoo that said: “EAGLE EYES LSD”.

“How did you find out my brother’s name and address? How did you find out who me and my partner are?” I asked. The Earthquake Killer gave a wide, lunatic grin, his silvery eyes sparkling with suppressed humor. He leaned close to me. I noticed a subtle, cloying odor that followed him around, almost like roses.

“God told me,” Herbick answered simply. I raised an eyebrow at that.

“God told you to kill, or he gave you the information?” I said.

“Both,” he answered. “Sometimes God reaches down and uses us. Sometimes, he gets inside of us and makes us do things we don’t want to do.”

“That doesn’t seem like a very loving God,” I responded. Herbick shrugged. “How did you first contact him?” His eyes went slack, his mouth opened. Herbick looked as if he were staring a million miles away. Abruptly, he came back, focusing on me again.

“Well, people like you can’t really understand, anymore than a blind man could understand the beauty of colors and light. I used to be just a normal guy, working and going to school. But one day, after taking a high dose of acid,  I dissolved my individual soul into the universal soul. It was as if I held up a candle’s flame to the Sun and saw that these were the same, that the light of the smallest and the light of the greatest are both just eternal light. In the beginning, something endless and unmoving stood like a pillar of mind, outside of time and space yet within everything and everyone. When I saw my soul, this smallest flame of blinding light, I knew I also saw the One, the Eternal.

“And then a voice came to me, a voice like rushing water and static. It screamed into my mind, over and over. At that moment, I knew what Moses must have felt like and why he aged so rapidly when he saw God. And do you know what that shrieking voice said?” I just shook my head. He leaned close, his gray eyes cold and dead. “It wanted sacrifices. God said to me, ‘Pick up the victims and throw them over the boat. Kill some so that many may be saved.’

“God showed me what kinds of horrible things would happen if I did not follow his orders. I saw massive earthquakes ripping apart the land and tearing down the mountains, killing hundreds of thousands of people in minutes. I saw cities collapsing, trapping millions under the rubble. In that vision, I had no self, no sense of me, but I saw everything and knew it to be the absolute truth.

“I did what I had to out of love and compassion. I never wanted to hurt anyone, but what kind of man would I be if I let the many die for a few? But now that I’m here, being kept as a prisoner, the sacrifices are not being performed. God will send down an earthquake at any moment to kill us for our countless transgressions. The sins of the Earth are too great for him to turn away.” Agent Stone and I stared hard at this man, wondering if he was truly as insane as he claimed.

“How did you kill my brother?” I asked, a sense of revulsion rising in my chest. “What were those marks on his body, those strange, black-and-purple patches eaten into his skin?” Herbick Mueller grinned at this, showing off filmy, yellowed teeth.

“Well, the thing is, God wants a lot of suffering and pain in exchange for saving the innocent. Sometimes, we have to be like Jesus. Your brother told me telepathically to kill him. All of the victims did.

“Humans have been communicating telepathically for thousands of years. After I saw God, I could tap into that power. And all of the victims pleaded with me to kill them. They said, ‘We’re like Jonah from the Bible. Throw us over the side of the ship so that others may be saved.’

“In a way, I’m like Jesus. I gave up my life as a sacrifice to God, and now I only serve that soul- that soul which is also my soul. I see everything clearly now, things I never saw before. This reality is an illusion, and there’s no such thing as death. We’re all just eternal sparks of the One.

“So your brother, well, I injected acid and bleach into his skin. I just wanted to see what would happen, but he did not react well at all. He kept thrashing and screaming and, after I cut out his eyes, he stopped moving. I think the hydrochloric acid got into his bloodstream and killed him somehow, but who knows? I’m not a doctor, I’m just God.”

At that moment, a team of agents wearing dark sunglasses walked into the room. I saw a dozen of them, and for a brief moment, I thought they were all FBI. I wondered what would have caused the FBI to send so many people for a case we had already solved.

“We’re taking this case over,” one of the men said, the tallest of them standing at the front. I guessed he was the leader of the group. Agent Stone and I looked at each other, confused. The man pulled out a silver badge. I read it, frowning.

“The Department for the Cleansing of Anomalies?” I asked. “What is this, a joke? This is an FBI case, and we’ve already got the suspect in custody with plenty of evidence.”

“We’re taking this suspect with us, right now,” he said. Two nurses came, hurrying around the bed of Herbick Mueller. They started disconnecting his medical equipment with practiced precision. He simply grinned up at us with a strange, sly expression that I couldn’t read.

I looked over at Agent Stone, about to say something, when I felt the first tremblings of an earthquake start shaking the walls and floor.

I could have flown home, but I thought a drive would clear my head.

I’d just finished four years in the Marines, four of the messiest years of my life. I had made the mistake of bringing my new wife to California with me and returned from Iraq to find her warming someone else’s bed. The bed in question was of a fellow Marine, someone left on base while I fought and bled for my country. After six months of staying on base so I could meet with lawyers and finish my divorce, I was officially out and done.

When I told my dad that I was going to rent a car and drive home, he understood. I told him I needed to come back slow so I could clear my mind, and he told me to drive safe. “Take your time, kid. We'll be here when you get back,” he said and I took him up on it. I was coming cross country, California to Tennessee, and I was seeing the sights and taking in the local flavor. I had decided to make this a long overdue vacation.

I did a lot of thinking on that trip, but my only mistake was picking the kid up.

I was driving through Oklahoma, enjoying the sights and feeling like I could watch the hills and valleys roll by forever, when I saw the kid standing there with his thumb out. He was young, couldn’t have been old enough to enlist, despite his army coat. It was July, the heat stifling, but he was wearing fatigues and a service jacket that looked antique. A breeze ruffled his hair, pushing it back in a harsh puff that made me think of kids blowing on dandelion fluffs. Maybe it was the jacket or maybe it was the look of naked want on his face, but I pulled up beside him and rolled the window down.

“Hey kid, you need a lift?”

He turned his perfect sky blue eyes to me, and I’ll never forget his words. 

I sometimes hear them in my sleep.

“I sure do. Can you give me a lift to McMan, mister? God will thank you if’n ya do.”

I thought that was a little weird, but I told him to climb in and he did so gladly.

The signs told me McMan was about thirty miles up the road, and I expected the kid to chatter like a squirrel the whole way. To my surprise, he was quiet, his eyes closed and his head bowed for the first couple of minutes. It took me a second to realize he was praying, and when he finished, he sat up and plastered a half daffy grin on his face. 

“God tell ya I was a straight shooter?” I asked, more to break the ice than anything.

“He said to thank you for your assistance, Mr. You will be greatly rewarded in his kingdom.”

I nodded, thinking I could use all the help I could get. The farther we drove, the more I began to suspect that something was off about the kid. He stared forward the whole way, his blue eyes on the horizon, and his mouth seemed set in an eternal grin. He wasn’t as young as I’d thought, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and the jacket had the name Harris stenciled on it. It was covered in patches too, the kind you get for service, and I was glancing at one on his left breast when I saw the bulge under the coat.

I felt a cold shudder run through me as I recognized it.

The kid was packing!

“You look a little young for the service, kid,” I said, trying to disuade some of my fears,“Your brother give you that jacket? Was he in Iraq like me?”

“My dad left it to me when he died.” the kid said matter of factly.

“Sorry to hear that. Was he in Iraq?”

“The Gulf War,” he said, his voice not matching the grin “He enlisted before it started and was there for a couple years after it ended.”

I nodded, “I bet he had some stories. I was in,”

I had been about to start on one of my Sand Box Tales, but the kid cut me off suddenly with the last thing I expected.

“Do you believe in God, Mister?”

I blinked, the subject unexpected.

“Not really, kid.” I answered, being honest, “I’m an atheist, have been ever since what happened to me overseas. I think that, if there is a God, it’s pretty crummy of him to let us live here like this.”

I had expected a fight, but the kid just nodded.

“He forgives you for that. Daddy was like you, Momma said, before he went to war. He saw something over there, bad things, and he came back from the war looking for God. He said he had seen some things over there that scared him and made him want to be better, and he couldn't do better without some help. So, he came back and started looking for a purpose, and he found one. He found a lot of people offering purpose, but only one who delivered. By the time I was born, he was part of the Family.”

I listened politely, not wanting to interrupt the kid, but the way he was talking about his dad's search for God made me a little concerned.

It didn’t seem like a happy memory.

“I was born into the Family. Father Marcus was our everything, our teacher, our preacher, our second father, and our salvation. He brought lots of people together, lots of lost people, but that wasn’t enough. Father Marcus wanted more. He had plans, big plans, but they wouldn't turn out be so good for us.”

He was quiet for a minute, looking out the glass and seeming lost in thought. I thought again that he had to be a kid, couldn't be out of high school, but maybe it was just whatever was wrong with him. Even though his eyes looked like he was in the worst pain imaginable, he still wore that plastered-on grin that never reached those eyes. He was like a doll with a troubled owner, a doll that smiles through its destruction.

“When I was ten, Father Marcus told the congregation that the end times were coming. He told them that the government was going to come down and take everything that we had built here, that the Devil was set against us and we needed to escape. He told everybody to sell their things, bring the bare minimum, and come to a place that he had found. It was a farm on the outskirts of town, a big farm that had once been a dairy. They gave him their money so that he could secure their paradise, free from anything that the government or the devil or anybody else might do, and came there to start their new lives. We were hopeful that this would be our paradise, but it wasn’t a paradise. In the end, it was a prison.”

I felt a chill run up my spine as he said that. I wanted to tell him to stop. I didn’t want to hear the end of it, but instead, I just listened. The kid was hurting, that was clear enough, but his story was so captivating. It was like one of those true crime stories, the ones so bad that you just know it has to be true. I kept my eyes on the road and listened, just letting him tell it, already knowing that it wouldn’t have a happy ending.

“We were basically his slaves. We worked in the fields, we took care of the animals, we kept the big house, where he lived, and did his bidding. Father Marcus came down to spit the hellfire every night and to pass down new edicts and rules. Men were not permitted in the big house. No one but Father Marcus could lay with a woman, even within a marriage. All children were Father Marcus's children, but his actual children were special. Eventually,he took all the women that he liked up to the house to "populate the earth". He took my sister up there with him, and we never saw her again. People didn’t like it much, but what could they do? Father Marcus was keeping us safe from the apocalypse, right? So we followed his orders, until everything fell apart.”

We rolled into the outskirts of McMan then, the farms and barns making me think of the place the kid was talking about. I wondered, suddenly, where we were going, and why the kid wanted to go to McMan so badly? Every mile felt like an eternal march, and I was dreading coming to the end of the journey.

“Where,” I started but the kid seemed to be expecting my question.

“Stay on the Main road, mister” he said, clearing his throat before going on. He seemed as dry as an old stick, and when I reached behind the seat and offered him a coke from the cooler, he took it with a smile. I wondered why I had done that? I didn’t want the kid to go on, but in a way I did. I needed the end of it, I needed to know how it had all shook out. I was a curious bastard, it seemed, and I needed to see the bodies in this kids path.

“Then one day, he gathered us in the barn and told us that the end was near. He told us we needed to prepare ourselves to go, because we were meeting God tonight. He gave us all something to drink, something in a red cup that his wives dipped out, and we all drank it. No one argued, no one fought him. We were all so brainwashed that we would have jumped in front of the six fifteen train that ran near the farm if he’d asked. Everyone drank, everyone obeyed, and everyone went to sleep. They stayed asleep too, except me. I woke up in the hospital with tubes in my arms and my wrists secured to the bed. The police were there, one of them waiting in the room with me, and they had questions. It turned out that they were the ones who had been coming, not God. They had arrived to find everyone dead, fallen around the barn like dolls, but had managed to get there in time to save me. I don't know why I lived while everyone else died, and it ate me up for a long time. Father Marcus, my family, everyone was gone, and I had been left behind. No one wanted anything to do with me, my Dad had burned a lot of bridges before we went into the Family, and none of them wanted to take in a moody sixteen year old who'd just been through hell. So I went into the system, going from group home to group home, until a couple weeks ago.”

I clutched the wheel hard, suddenly very worried about what we might find in McMan. The town was coming up now, a nice old brick town that looked downright picturesque. We passed a sign for a new Mega Church, the Sunrise Gospel House, and there was a smiling old guy beaming down from the front. The kid shot a glare at him, and patted his heart, inevitably patting the piece as well.

I suddenly wondered who was in McMan that this kid needed to see?

“I was watching TV in the group home and an ad came on for a church. The church had recenly aquired its own network, and the pastor of the church was very familiar. He spoke about peace and God's love, but all I could hear was the voice that told us to drink the juice and go meet God. As I watched him smiling and hugging people, I heard a very different voice in the back of my mind. It was God, the real God, and he told me what I had to do. He said I needed to be his sword, and I needed to cleave the unrighteous from his midst.”

He patted the gun again, whispering a prayer to God, and my hair stood up on the back of my neck as something strange and strange wafted from the kid.

At that moment, he felt very righteous. 

We were well into town now, rolling up Main Street, and he told me to stop. I dropped the kid off at the light, and he thanked me, saying he could make it from here. He gave me a real smile then, not the doppy one he'd been wearing the whole way through his sad little tale, and waved at me.

“God bless you, mister. I'm off to do his work.”

Then he was gone, and I sat there watching him go until someone politely honked behind me and I was forced to roll along. 

I wasn’t sure what to do as I made my way out of town. Did I tell someone? If this pastor had really messed the kid up like that, then maybe he had it coming. Was that really my call to make, though? In the end, I called the McMan police department and told them what I suspected. I told them about the kid and the story he had spilled, but I don’t think they took me seriously. The dispatcher seemed like the report was going in a little pile of crackpot shit, but I felt I had done my due diligence.

I was still thinking about it when I stopped for the night, wondering where the kid was and what he was doing as I drifted off to sleep.  

I woke up the next day and turned on the news to see that Pastor Michael Wheeler of the Sunrise Gospel House had been shot in front of his congregation. The Pastor, someone wanted by the FBI for his alleged connection to several past cults, had been shot by someone from one of his past religious orders. The kid was in custody, but police were already saying he was mentally unwell and this was likely a retaliation slaying. Police were still looking for a mysterious caller who had tipped them off before the shooting, and they had many questions for that individual.

I left Oklahoma as quickly as I could, flinching every time I saw a cop.

That was a couple of years ago, and I've never told anyone what happened on that trip home. 

It's something that's weighed on me since I let that kid out on Main Street, and I can only imagine that he was right about God blessing me. I came back, found a job that paid well, met the love of my life, and settled into wedded bliss fairly easy. It all seemed very easy while it was happening, and I can't help but wonder if a little divine direction had something to do with it.

As long as he doesn't point me at his enemies like he did that kid, I suppose we can be square.

It was all my fault, and it almost cost Felicia and I our lives.

Our friend Sandy was having a house party, and we both wanted to go. Sandy threw the best parties, and they usually got pretty wild. The last one had been a real blow out, and we both had little more than foggy memories from it. Sandy was celebrating her graduation from Nursing school, so we all knew that this one was going to be a serious rager before she had to settle in to pay student loans.

Before we went, Felicia and I had agreed that one of us needed to stay sober so we could get home safely.

“We don't want a repeat of last time,” Felicia reminded me, and I nodded as I remembered how the Uber driver had tried to hold us captive until we agreed to invite him in.

Running in heels is never fun, but we had managed it that night, and beat him to the door of our apartment.

So we did rock paper scissors for it, went ten out of ten, and I ended up with the loss. I wasn't happy about it, but I decided that I would do my best to stay sober so we could get home without having to A. Get rides with creepy, handsy guys, B. Get murdered by a stranger, or C. Having to take a cab that neither of us could afford. We pulled up to the house, the party already in full swing, and I took a deep breath as I prepared to say no to temptation and be the best sober friend I could be.

I lasted all of an hour at the party before I just couldn't hold out anymore. Someone handed me a drink, didn't even ask, and I drank it before I could think better of it. It was one of the very tasty screwdrivers I had seen going around, and I decided then and there that this would be the only one. I could still hold out, one drink wasn't going to get me.

An hour after that, I was completely plastered, and Felicia was not pleased. She had decided to go all in, so now both of us were drunk and had no clue how we were going to get home. We took one look at each other, laughed, and said screw it. We drank way more than we should have that night and had a blast. We danced and drank and mingled our way through the party, and when Sandy waved us out around two am, we were basically holding each other up.

I staggered to the car, but I couldn't even get the key in the door to unlock it, let alone drive. Felicia and I decided we would just walk home. It was seven blocks from Sandy's house, but we had no chance of getting a cab this late and the Ubers would all be weirdos at this point. Felicia agreed, but was basically dead weight three steps later. She was ready to sleep and certainly wasn't interested in walking seven blocks. I was holding her up, looking for options as my own buzz wavered, when I saw a yellow cab parked at the corner. I got excited. It was a little late for cabs, but I wasn't about to question providence. The light was still on, the guy in the front looking pretty awake, and I thought our luck might be turning around as we staggered toward it.

I knocked on the window and a guy with red hair snugged under a driving cap jumped as he turned to look at us. He was a big guy, big with fat instead of muscle, and he looked surprised but also delighted as he rolled the window down. He asked how he could help us, and I told him we needed a lift. He asked where we were going, and after telling him the address I offered to give him a nice tip if he got us there safely with no weirdness.

“Yes, ma'am. I believe I can manage that,” he said with a big smile, “Hop in.”

So we piled in the back, he turned off his light, and off we went.

Felicia was asleep about the time we made the first turn, but I tried to stay awake to make sure the driver didn't try any funny business. We were from a pretty big city, and girls had been going missing pretty regularly lately. You read about it on Facebook all the time, they'd go out, get a little drunk, and then they'd never see them again. No one really knew what it was, but a lot of people thought it was a murderer. It was scary to think about, but I felt a little safer being in a real cab rather than an Uber or some random guy. You never quite knew what the vetting process on Uber was, but I knew that cab companies had to do background checks on their drivers, so at least this fella was on the up and up.

“You ladies coming from a club?” he asked, making small talk as he took his first left.

“House party,” I said, trying to be polite, “Our friend was throwing a real heck of a get together and we partied a little too hard, I think.”

“Sounds like fun.” he said with a laugh, “Looks like your friend had a little too much though.”

I laughed, “Ya, she does that sometimes. I was supposed to stay sober so I could drive us home, but I'm not very good at it.”

He laughed, “Well, I guess it's a good thing for me.”

I made a noncommittal noise, and settled back. There was a little holder on the patrician with waters in it, and when I reached for one, I saw the cabby turn to track my movement. He seemed interested in what I was doing, and I held up one of the waters and said that one of his fairs must have left it behind . It was a shame, because my stomach was a little too full of alcohol and some water would have been nice.

“Oh, those are for fairs. I have a bunch in a cooler up here and I replace them as needed. Help yourself.”

I thanked him, testing the seal to make sure it was sealed. It seemed to be, but I never got it open. The feel of the wheels beneath me was lulling me to sleep, and I was losing the fight. I tried to stay awake, but I was just too drunk. My eyes kept slipping shut and opening, slipping shut and opening, and as I threatened to go under for good, I heard his phone ring. He picked it up, talking to someone on the other end, and it was like his whole personality changed. He spoke in a much different voice than he'd used with us, and gone was a jovial guy who had picked us up. Now he was gruff and kind of short with whoever he was talking to, and it seemed like a complete flip in personality.

“Ya, I gottum. We'll be there soon.”

I started to ask what he meant by that, but before I could question the statement, I was unconscious.

I don't know how long we were out, but I woke up suddenly and was unsure of where we were.

I looked around, groggy and disoriented. Felicia was still sleeping beside me, dead to the world and not showing any signs of coming back, and the cabby was still behind the wheel and driving us home. At least, I thought he was. I glanced out the window, no longer seeing tall buildings and concrete, and thought he must have taken a wrong turn. We were in the country, the buildings traded for rural pavement and shadowy houses. Everything was dark outside, no street lights this far out in the country, and I just watched it wizz by for a moment as I tried to make sense of it. I was confused, unsure how we had gotten so lost, and then I remembered the conversation before I passed out.

“Ya, I gottum. We'll see you soon.”

Even in my drink-addled brain, I remembered those words.

I glanced at the numbers on the dashboard clock and was surprised to see that we had been in the cab for over an hour. It shouldn't have taken that long to get home. Seven blocks would have been an easy drive this late at night, and as I tried to sit up I felt something press against my wrist. The unopened water was a cool presence against my arm. I didn't remember opening it, and realized I must have fallen asleep before I could drink it. My vision swam as I tried to come upright, and I blinked quickly to clear it.

“Where,” I tried, but my throat was dry, “Where are we?”

The Cabby jumped a little, probably figuring I had passed out like my friend, and when he looked over his shoulder I heard, again, the voice of that happy cabby who had picked us up came out again.

“We're driving to your home.”

I tried to make his words make sense, but it was like wading through mush.

“This isn't right,” I mumbled, “I live in the city.”

“You told me 175 Worth Street.” he said, tapping his phone in the holder on the dash.

“No,” I slurred, trying to make my head stop spinning, “It was 751 Worthy Street. We were,” I put a hand to my mouth as the hot vomit threatened to come coursing up it, “We were only seven blocks from our house.”

He put a theatrical hand to his brow, “Oh my gosh, I guess I put the address in wrong. Let me just find a place to turn around and we'll get you back on track.”

He started tapping at the phone, but I could see he wasn't hitting anything. I was suddenly wary, some of my intoxication ebbing as he put on a show of trying to get the address in right. I remembered those stories about girls going missing, and wondered if our names and faces would be on the news tomorrow. Would they think we just wandered off after drinking too much? Would they even look for us?

He turned down a side road, saying he was going to turn around, but instead of turning around he kept driving. I banged feebly at the glass that separated us, telling him he was going the wrong way, but I was so weak. I felt very dehydrated, my mouth dry and my head spinning. I reached for the water, but I thought better of it. I didn't want anything he might give me, and as the top came off, I squeezed it against the little holes that allowed us to hear him. He jumped and cursed, turning around to glower at me as the voice from the phone came back again.

“You stupid bitch! I hope you keep that energy when they get you. They'll teach some manners.”

My blood ran cold at that, and I let the empty water bottle fall as I looked for other options. I tried the doors, but the child locks were on and I couldn't get it open. I started to panic. I kicked at the door, at the glass, but each kick was more feeble than the last. I was starting to feel like I might pass out again. The Cabby laughed, telling me about all the terrible things the people he was taing me to would do, and my vision was swimming with tears. I bent over and puked in the floorboard, some of my vision clearing up as I purged the liquor, but it also left me feeling weak and unsteady. I banged my head against the glass as we finally came to a halt, and I went shakily to the window to see where we were. We were not, miraculously, in front of my apartment, the whole thing a dream or a hallucination, but in a vacant lot down some country back road.

At the end of the vacant lot, perched like a gargoyle, was a white van waiting for us to arrive. As we sat idling, the doors came open and shadowy men started getting out. I felt my blood run cold as they walked toward us, stopping halfway between as if waiting for the Cabby. I thought again about my car sitting in front of Sandy's house, about how I could have just driven us home if I had stayed sober.

“Looks like we've reached your destination,” said the Cabby, turning around to flash me a big creepy grin as he slid his seat belt off, “Don't go anywhere, I'll be right back,” and he hopped out to go talk to them.

I shook Felicia, trying to wake her up, but she was little more than dead weight. They would get her, and they would get me in my current weakened condition. I couldn't fight them off, I could barely keep my head up, and I cried bitter tears in the back of that cab. If I was lucky, maybe they'd just kill us, but I doubted it. We were both likely to end up in some overseas brothel or on the streets of South America, and either prospect sounded grim.

The Cabby shook hands with one of the shadow people, pointing back to the cab and likely telling them he had a couple of half drunk girls ready for transport. We were in the middle of nowhere. There was no chance anyone was coming to help us. We'd be heading wherever in no time, gone and forgotten, never to be seen again, and there was nothing to be done about it.

It appeared, however, that someone had other ideas.

They had started walking toward the cab when lights suddenly lit up the back glass. Cars suddenly began pulling up, vans and undercover cars, and the people came out of them with guns drawn. The men in the headlights of the cab put their hands up and as they surrounded them they had them cuffed and collared pretty quickly. They took the men away and that was when they seemed to realize that they had people in the back of the cab. They helped us get somewhere safe so they could get us checked out and I'm pretty sure Felicia never woke up through the whole thing. They kept assuring us that we were okay, that we were safe, but all I could do was cry. I felt like I had been plucked from the brink at the last minute and I thanked them with every breath I had.

That was how I was almost trafficked by some gang or organization or another. The cops told us the less we know the better, and I agreed. I haven't drank since then, and now I'm the permanent designated driver for our group. I take friends of friends home too, sometimes intoxicated women we've met that night, just to make sure no one has to go through what I went through.

Ralph walked a lot, like every day a lot.

He had lost his car a few years ago during the pandemic. Not because he couldn't pay for it, but because he had a habit of driving drunk and the cops took his license after the third time, so it didn't make a lot of sense to have it. He had walked ever since, and it kind of helped with his sobriety. He was a bit of a mess before that, drinking a lot, showing up to work hungover, eating too much fast food, but the walking had helped him drop a lot of weight and had kind of made him not want to drink. Walking while you were drunk was kind of miserable, and when walking was your means of transport you got pretty good at avoiding things that left you unable to do it.

Ralph was coming into town on Tuesday, walking up the sidewalk that led from the Trailer Park he lived in to the grocery store when he saw the first sign.

It was a normal enough white sign with big block letters at the top that read missing.

The thing that stopped him was the face that looked out from the sign. It was a guy of about three hundred pounds, thinning hair pulled back into a ponytail, and deep bags under his eyes. He was a deeply unhappy man, a man who looked like he was just looking for a hole to die in, and if it had a beer in it then all the better. The eyes that stared out of that poster looked like the eyes that stared from between the bars of a drunk tank, and they had more than once.

Ralph reached out and took the sign, staring into eyes that he hadn't seen in years.

He was looking at himself, just a past version of himself, a version two or three years out of date.

Out of date was a good way to describe it, like spoiled milk.

Missing- Ralph Gilbert

Address- 9733 Earin Way, Trailer 17

Last seen- April 23th, 2023 walking along the shoulder of the road.

Call Filibuster Sheriff's Office with any information.

Cash reward possible.

Cash reward, Ralph thought. It was weird to think that someone would be willing to offer a cash reward for someone like him, but he supposed it was possible. The friends he had now certainly valued him more than his bitch of an ex-wife or either of his ungrateful kids had, more than the family he had left too for that matter. He put the flier back up, thinking it was weird that they hadn't just come out to the house to see if he was there.

He had been there for a week after the...the what, he thought.

The night that something had happened, something Ralph couldn't really remember.

He kept walking up the street, enjoying the later afternoon as it dwindled towards dusk. This was his favorite time to walk, he thought. The weather was hot, even for early May, and he spent most days inside due to the heat and the way the sun had made his eyes hurt lately. The evening walks were about the best thing for him, and he couldn't wait till Autumn came and he could stand to walk during the day again. The last thing he wanted to do was lose his progress.

Two thousand twenty-one had been a pretty turbulent year for Ralph, but not all of it had been bad. He had started noticing that the walking was making him lose weight and that he felt better about being more active. It would have been very easy to sit on his couch and feel bad about it, he had certainly done that for a while, but as his food ran out and the money he had gotten from his disability payments had started to dwindle he knew he was going to need to do something. That was how the walking had started. Walk to the grocery store, walk to McDonalds, walk to the 24/7 Fill that he worked nights at, and walk home. After a while, people in the trailer park started noticing he was walking and they would offer to pay him if he would walk their dogs. Pretty soon, Ralph had a bunch of mutts on leashes and he became known as the Dog Man.

Soon people came to walk their dogs with him, and Ralph felt like he finally had friends. He hadn't had friends since high school, and the ones he'd had then had never led him into anything healthy. These guys were walking with him, helping him find shoes that wouldn't pinch his feet and give him blisters, suggesting pants that wouldn't give him a heat rash, and one day Ralph hopped on the scale and discovered he had lost fifty pounds.

By two thousand twenty-two, it was a hundred, and by the next year, he was at one eighty and feeling better than he ever had. His trips to McDonalds were down to once a week, his dog walking was making enough money to keep his bills paid and his fridge filled, and Ralph felt better than he had in years.

He had felt like that right up until last week when...something had happened.

As Ralph came into town he saw more of the signs hanging on the poles and was a little curious as to why no one had come to the trailer to check on him if they were so worried. He had been there all week, and they could have come and knocked. Ralph had been kind of out of it the last week though, and he was worried that he might have caught something. He barely remembered stumbling home after...whatever had happened. Ralph hadn't liked that. It reminded him of being drunk and out of control again. How many times had he stumbled into this trailer after a night of drinking to find that he couldn't remember how he'd gotten there? He sat on his couch, just looking at the dark Television, and suddenly he wondered where the groceries had gone?

That was when he remembered that he'd been carrying groceries. He had been coming back from the Forest Hill grocer, bags bulging in his hands, and he had come around the corner, Matheson Curve, and then...he didn't know. Something had made him squint and he thought, “Oh shit, there goes my milk,” and then he had been walking back into his trailer.

As he walked into town now, he saw more missing posters and it started to give him the creeps. Watching his own face, his false face, looking back at him was eerie, and he wanted to rip them down. He was here, he was alive, why were they looking for him? He wasn't missing, he was walking up the road. He passed people, side-eyeing them as if expecting to be recognized, but they just walked right past him without a look back. That was weird, Ralph thought. Yeah, he'd been gone for a week, but people surely hadn't forgotten him that quickly.

He'd been sitting in his trailer for a week before he'd thought that a walk had seemed like a good idea. It was weird, the food should have run out by now, but Ralph really hadn't been hungry. He'd moved between the living room and bedroom like a sleepwalker, sleeping like he hadn't done since he was still three hundred pounds of lazy couch potato. He hadn't felt like he needed to eat anything either though, and that was rare. Despite his weight loss, he still had to manage his prodigious appetite. He couldn't even remember drinking water that whole week, and until he'd gotten up to walk he had worried that he was catching the flu. He had wandered around in a daze, just kind of existing, and it made him feel good when the afternoon had finally called to him.

As he walked towards the supermarket, however, he suddenly wished he had stayed at home.

Sitting in the parking lot of Forest Hill Grocer, was a green Ford Focus that became the focus of his terror. It shouldn't have been that way, it was just a car, but there was something about it that made him stop and stare. His legs felt made of lead, and his bowels would have turned to water except he remembered that he hadn't done that all week either. That made sense, he supposed. Nothing going in meant nothing coming out...right?

It didn't matter, after a week of no food or water Ralph should be dead, and that thought seemed to move him at long last.

He was suddenly walking toward the car, his eyes falling on a dent in the front bumper.

That was a fresh dent, though Ralph didn't know how he knew that.

The door to the car was open, and Ralph climbed into the backseat like a sleepwalker.

He sat there, waiting for something to happen, feeling kind of silly.

This was stupid, the owner of the Focus would come back and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. He would call the cops. Ralph would go to jail, and then he'd be in big trouble. Well, Ralph thought, at least then they would know where he was. Ralph supposed they could take the signs down if he was sitting in a jail cell.

Finally, after an indeterminable amount of time, the owner came out with groceries in brown paper bags. He was a young kid, maybe twenty or twenty-two, and when he opened the back door, he set them inside without comment. Ralph watched him move around to the front seat and climb in, cranking the car and driving off.

The further they went, the more sure Ralph was that the kid would see him. The kid would look in the rearview mirror, see Ralph sitting there and freak out. He might have a wreck, and Ralph would feel terrible about that. The longer they rode without the kid commenting on his presence, the stranger it all felt. Ralph leaned toward the kid a little, meaning to tap him, but as he did he caught a look at the rearview mirror and stopped.

The backseat in the mirror was empty, except for the groceries.

That's when he remembered, and suddenly Ralph wasn't in the kid's Focus anymore.

Suddenly he was back on the side of the road, near the guard rail for Matheson Curve, and he could see the headlights in his eyes again.

The kid had been going too fast, hot roding around, and his tires had screeched as he hit Ralph. Ralph's groceries had gone everywhere, his milk squishing under the tire as his lettuce rolled under the guard rail. The kid had come out to find Ralph lying across the guard rail, moaning and groaning as he lay dying. The hit had thrown him back, bringing him to rest against the metal rail that had broken his back. He had looked at the kid, begging him to help him, and in his panic, the kid had done the only thing he could think to do.

He had pushed Ralph over the side of the rail and into the drop below.

It was night now, and Ralph was looking over that rail again. He couldn't see his body down below, it had fallen to the bottom and likely been picked clean by scavengers, but he knew it was down there. Ralph would likely go on to be a town legend, someone who had just disappeared one day after making a slight splash in Filibuster, but for now, all he could do was look down into the ravine and wonder what to do next.

He had read some ghost stories when he was younger and wrote a few when he got older, but it wasn't every day that you became one.

Something wafted past on a stray wind, and when Ralph caught it, he realized it was one of the missing posters.

An idea occurred to him, and he thought maybe he wouldn't have to stay a mystery.

* * *

Officer Vermis stood by the guard rail, ready to catch the kid if he decided to take a nosedive. It was pretty high, he might opt for a short flight over a lengthy prison sentence, but Vermis doubted it. The wind pushed his hair just as it did the officer's jacket, and he pointed down almost accusingly as he turned to the kid.

"Is this where you pushed the body over?" Vermis asked. 

The kid, Tyler Mishet, nodded before being taken back to the station in the back of a different squad car.

Vermis sighed, that was going to be some hard canvasing, but they would find Ralph Gilbert. When they had gone to the kid's house, he had as good as confessed on the spot, and that had made it all very easy. He was repentant, very sorry, and very young, and some soft-hearted judge would probably not insist on the death penalty for him. It was unlikely he ould never operate a motor vehicle again, not unless the state prison let him run a tractor or something, and he supposed that would have to be good enough.

It was weird though, the police would have probably never known about the accident if it hadn't been for the tip they had gotten. Looking at Ralph's picture on the front of the poster, Vermis remembered the night they'd taken his license. He'd been a bad drunk, but he'd turned it around and Vermis hated that he had to end up like this. It was a bigger shame that the kid had his life ruined by a moment of inattention, but those were the breaks.

He flipped it over, looking at the odd writing on the back. It looked like it had been done with mucus, except it was a florescent green like the slime they used to dump on the kids on the shows his boys had watched when they were younger. He didn't know what had written it, and he didn't care. They could take Ralph Gilbert out of the unsolved case file and put him in the closed case pile, and that was good enough for him.

The message read, Green Ford Focus, dent in the front bumper, kid hit Ralph Gilbert about a week ago on Matheson Curve. Body in the ravine. Don't let him rot down there.

I like exploring. From state parks to virgin wilderness, I love going out and seeing things. I used to go alone a lot, just communing with nature and really roughing it, but thankfully on the day in question, I had someone with me. Jake hadn't wanted to go, had said he had a bad feeling about it, but I insisted. Jake is kind of a shut-in, and I thought that some fresh air and sunshine might help get out of his shell a little. Plus, it was spring, and who doesn't like to go hiking in spring?

We were hiking in North Georgia, a state park I won't name so you don't go looking for it. It's beautiful out there. There's a river running through the gorge, places to swim and picnic, rock walls to climb if you're feeling bold, and lots of nature to commune with. We had come to the end of the usual trail, the river continuing on even if the marked trail didn't, and Jake looked at me oddly when I didn't turn around and go back.

"I wanna see what's up ahead," I told him.

I had never been beyond that, but I had always wanted to.

"No way," he said, "That's out of bounds. The signs say there are holes or unstable terrain."

"So?" I asked.

"So, it means it is dangerous. I know you're all about exploring, Chuck, but I'm not trying to die today."  

"Oh, come on," I prodded, "Just a little bit further. Don't be a wimp."

He looked like he wanted to go back, but my heckling had gotten to him a little.

"Okay," he said, "but if it looks bad, we turn around, understand?"

"Yeah yeah," I said, waving him off as we went past the signs and onto the unmarked trail.

The signs were needless anyway, I thought. Georgia is swampy in some places and sinkholes and subterranean caves aren't that uncommon. We'd just avoid the soft areas and we'd be fine. I had read online that there was a waterfall at the end of the trail, but I had never seen it. Some hikers said it was beautiful, and that it went all the way back up the cliff, which would be a pretty long drop for a waterfall. I wanted some pictures for my travel blog, and as we walked down the trail, I knew this was going to be a hike we’d both remember for years to come.

I must not have been watching where I was going very closely, because all the warning I got was a little cracking sound before I was suddenly in free fall. I was watching the hole in the ceiling get smaller and smaller as I fell, and then everything went black for a little while. When I opened my eyes, that circle of light above me was more like a spotlight. I groaned as I tested my limbs, my back, and my neck, and found myself mostly in good shape. My head hurt but my arms and legs still worked. I had fallen onto some kind of moss, something that had probably saved my brains from being splattered all over the floor, and as I lay there staring up into the ceiling, I saw a silhouette impose itself over some of the light.

“Chuck, thank God! I thought you were dead! I'm trying to get the Rangers, but I can't get a signal. You break anything?”

I sat up a little, rubbing my head where a knot was forming. I felt a twinge of pain in my back, but nothing too bad. I was smart enough not to push it, though, lest I mess myself up further and unrepairably. “I don't know. My back, I think.”

“Well, that's better than most people after they fall into an underground cave, I guess. Unfortunately, I got all the climbing hooks and you got all the rope. I'm gonna head back up to the swimming hole and see if I can get some help. Hang tight, I'll be right back.”

Before I could say anything, Jake was gone and I was left with nothing but the moss and the darkness around me. I didn't know how big the cave was if I was in a cave at all, but the blackness seemed deep and impenetrable. As I lay there, the pain beginning to seep into my body, I thought I heard something. It was slight, no more than a tickle on the senses, but it was definitely something. It was like something with claws walking quietly on stone, like a rat but bigger than usual. I thought it was my imagination at first, but as it circled my spot like a shark preparing to strike, I realized I wasn't imagining it.

I lay as still as I could, hoping that whatever it was would decide that I wasn't interesting or eatable, but when it spoke, I was taken off guard.

It sounded like a woman, like a young, pretty woman.

“Hello?”

I stayed quiet, not sure what was going on, hoping it was a delusion or a hallucination.

“Is someone there?”

It sounded real enough, not like any of the voices I had ever heard in a daydream or a regular dream, and, despite myself, I decided to answer.

“Hello?”

There was silence for several long breaths, and then it spoke again.

“Are you from up there?” she asked, and I assumed she was pointing to the ceiling.

“Ya, my name's Charles, what's yours?”

Silence, silence, and then it spoke again.

“I don't have one. No one has ever called me anything.”

That was weird, I didn't know anyone who didn't have a name. It made me wonder how long she had been down here, and who had left her down here? Had she fallen into one of these subterranean tunnels like I had? Had she gotten trapped without a way out? I asked her, but after two long breaths, she told me she didn't know.

“I don't remember ever not being down here. It's my home, and if I lived up there it was a very long time ago.”

The long pauses between conversations were a little weird, but I put it out of my mind. Clearly, she didn't get a lot of chances to talk to people, and she was just remembering how to make conversation. There was nothing wrong with that. In fact, I was glad she had found me. I didn't want to be down here all alone and maybe I could help her get out once Jake came back.

“Why don't you come over here into the light?” I asked, patting the stone beside my moss bed, “That way I can see you.”

Silence, silence, then speech.

“I don't really like the light,” she confided, “It hurts my eyes and it burns my skin.”

That made sense, I thought. If she had been down here long enough then she was probably kind of sensitive to the light. I remembered reading about people who live in the dark too long and go blind when they take them in the sun, and I felt foolish for asking. It was really more my sense of vanity anyway. The idea that I might be talking to some old hag had crossed my mind, but she sounded young and pretty and I guess I just wanted a look.

“Is there anyone down here with you?” I asked, hearing my throat click as I said it. My throat was dry, and when I reached behind me, I felt for my water bottle and realized it had rolled off in the fall. I was thirsty, and I didn't know how long Jake would be gone.

“Hey, uh, you don't see a clear bottle anywhere in there, do you? There's water in it and I'm very thirsty.”

Sitting in the sunbeam wasn't helping matters much, and I was too scared to move to go looking for my sunscreen. I wasn't in a lot of pain, but they said that neck and back injuries could be exacerbated if you moved. I lay there, frying like a fish, and I just knew I was gonna have a wicked sunburn when I finally got out of here.     

When the water bottle rolled out the darkness and bumped my hand, I had to stop myself from flinching away from it. I reached down, trying to move as little as possible, and as the water hit my throat it was like pure honey. I splashed a little on my face, imagining I could hear the sizzle, and sighed in relief as I found some comfort from the heat.

“Thank you,” I said, looking at the darkness as if expecting to see someone peeking out at me.

Silence, silence, then...

“No problem. You're the first person I've had to talk to in a long time. I didn't want you to lose your voice.”

I smiled, glad to give her the comfort of a human voice. We talked a little, mostly involving me talking and her adding in things every now and again. I told her about hiking, about Jake, about the world above, and she seemed to enjoy my descriptions of things like TV and movies. For her part, she told me she had lived in the tunnels down here for a while, and that she could see in the dark pretty well. She ate whatever she found in the tunnels, and I wasn't the first person to fall in.

That made me feel bad for her, “None of them offered to get you out?”

“You are the first one to be alive when you fell in. Some of them are alive for a little while, but they don't stay alive for long. No one comes for them and they succumb to the fall.”

That gave me a chill, “You mean they die?” I asked.

Silence, Silence, then...

“Yes.”

“And no one comes for their bodies?” 

Silence, silence, then...

“They do not find their bodies. I told you, Charles, I eat what I find in the caves.”

My mouth was dry again, but it had nothing to do with the heat. She had just admitted to being a cannibal, but I suppose one couldn't hold that against her either. She was trapped down here, food was probably not plentiful. She had to survive the best way she could, but I couldn't understand how the park service didn't know people were going missing. How did they not collect the bodies before she got a chance to eat them? Did they just think people were lost in the park.

I thought that maybe they should be a little more proactive, but then Jake’s voice whispered in my head, “Like putting up a sign to stay off the dangerous trail?”

“Were you,” I tried to ask but my tongue felt stuck to the roof of my mouth, “Were you planning to eat me?”

Silence, silence, then...

“Yes,” she said, not showing the slightest bit of hesitation, “but you were alive and the sun was up. I usually don't find the bodies until after dark, so there's no sun to keep me away.”

That made me shudder. 

It isn’t often you get to have a conversation with someone who’s planning to have you for dinner.

“And if the sun had been down and I was still alive,” I started, but I couldn't finish the thought.

I didn't have to, though.

Silence, silence, then...

“Yes,” she said.

I was quiet, not sure how to answer, but she beat me to it again.

“I have to eat, Charles. All creatures must eat, and I am no exception.”

“You don't feel weird about eating your own kind?” I asked, trying to find the right words so she wouldn't be offended.

Silence...silence....then...

“I do not eat my own kind, Charles. I eat people.”

My teeth chattered a little at that. Translation: she wasn't a person. Which led my mind to ask the question I dare not voice; what was she? What was I down here with? Even if my back wasn't injured, even if I wasn't paralyzed, something I was pretty sure I wasn't, I still had no way to get out. I could no more jump thirty feet than I could have tossed Jake the rope, and I was at her mercy, it seemed. She needn't wait until dusk, I thought, as I watched a cloud cruise across the mouth of the hole. If it started to rain, if it became overcast, even if some stray cloud covered my hole in shadows, it would be nothing for her to snatch me back into the darkness. 

It was a sobering realization to discover that your life was hanging so tenuously.

“Charles?” she asked and I heard that clicking noise getting closer, “Charles? Are you okay?”

I hadn't noticed until now, but her voice sounded artificial. It was like something approximating the sound of a voice, a speaker playing someone's voice from a video or something. It was a good copy, but I wanted to know what was making it. The longer I lay here, the less certain I was that she was a girl, and the more certain I was that I was talking to a monster.

“Charles?” she said, and there was worry in her voice, as well as hunger.

“I'm here, darlin,” I said, making myself answer her, “I was just wool-gathering. I hit my head when I came down and it made me feel a little woozy.”

The clicking came even closer to the circle of light, a circle that was, suddenly, not nearly wide enough.

“I do not know this word, woozy. What does it mean? Is it like being tired?”

“Yeah,” I said, “Yeah, it's a lot like being tired.”

I kept looking up, hoping to see Jake and the Rangers up there. How long had he been gone? It had to be at least a half hour. I couldn't imagine that no help had come in half an hour. Even if he had walked all the way back to the station at the trailhead, someone should have come back by now. I didn't know if they could stop her from dragging me off and eating me, but I hoped so.

“Charles?”

“Yeah?” I said, hoping my voice sounded steadier than I thought it did.

“Are you afraid?”

I had to stop myself from answering with a Texas-sized “Hell Yes” since that might provoke her, “Na, darlin. Why would I be scared?”

The clicking came up to the edge of the light, slow and unsure, and I imagined that I could see something there, just beyond the light. A face or something, and it did not look at all human. It looked like a bad driftwood carving or a strange idol from a heathen tribe outside of civilization, and I found it hard not to stare at the spot.

“Your heart is beating very fast, your blood is pumping through your veins like a river. I can hear it, it's making me hungry. Are you afraid of me?”

I opened my mouth to deny it, but that was when someone called my name and a shadow imposed itself across the light.

It felt like too much, and I wanted them to move as they blotted out some of the light.

“Chuck?” Jake yelled, “Are you okay?”

“Sure, great,” I lied, glancing over to see the face I hadn't seen was gone.

Someone else cast a shadow over me and I was shaking as my light was cut in half.

“Chuck, my name's Ranger Mike, and I'm here to help. Ranger Gabe and I are going to repel down. Is your back or neck injured?”

“I...I don't think so,” I yelled, listening for the clicking and the voice of the not woman, “I think I just hit my head,”

Mike talked to someone up there and they concurred.

“We're going to drop some flares down so we don't get stuck, close your eyes, okay?”

I nodded, but there was no way in hell I was going to close my eyes with that thing around. It was strange how quickly She had become It and how little I wanted to bring her back up with me now. I had no idea what I had been talking to, and suddenly I didn't want to know. I wanted out of this hole, out of this hell, and I promised whatever was listening that I would never scoff at signs there to keep me safe again.

If they would get me out of here, I might never come back to the woods again.

The flares came down, and I saw the cave was much bigger than I had thought it was. The flares sent up a ghostly light, casting everything in flickering illumination, and that was when I saw it. It was only for a second as it retreated down a side passage, but I caught a glimpse of what I had been talking to. The driftwood carving analogy wasn't far off, the whole thing looking white and thin and kind of fragile looking. It walked around on these long, thin legs that looked like nothing so much as pure bone, and its eyes were set high up on its bony forehead.

It looked at me almost apologetically as it left, but the two Rangers who repelled down never so much as glanced into the cave. 

They had me up and on a stretcher, before I could warn them, and after securing it all to ropes they had the three of us winched up as the flares burned in the darkness below. There were more rangers at the top, paramedics too, and as they got me top side I was dragged to stable ground and checked out by the EMTs. They said the bruise on my head was nasty but there probably wasn't any brain damage. My spine appeared fine, though they wouldn't know for sure until I had an EKG, and my neck felt okay too. Ultimately they said I was very lucky, and I told them they didn't know the half of it.    

I'm in a hospital room now, waiting for my EKG, but I just wanted to get this down while it was fresh. I can't prove that it wasn't a hallucination, the ER docs said I was definitely concussed, but I think it was all real. I talked with something under the ground, something that would have eaten me if it hadn't been for the light encircling me. I was extremely lucky, in a lot of ways, and I thank God I made it out with little more than cuts and bruises.

When/If I hike again, I'll be paying attention to the signs from now on. 

You never know what you might find just below the surface.

I’ve always hated people. Not really people, but having to interact with them. You could call me anti-social, but honestly, it just bothers me how fake people are. Friends, family, relationships. People change at the drop of a dime, or maybe it's just them randomly deciding to show their true colors, either way, people will always find a way to tear you down and make you feel less than nothing. I guess getting stabbed in the back enough times made me want to keep to myself, unfortunately, in this society, it's hard to avoid people. You have to go to the grocery store, you have to speak to cashiers at the gas station, and unfortunately, you have to have a fucking job…

Every aspect of life demands you interact with someone, and I fucking hate it. That's why when COVID hit, and the country got locked down, it didn't bother me one bit. Not only did I not have to go to work, but the government paid me triple what I made, and sure, even though paying millions of people for years on end for no reason caused this ridiculous inflation we're experiencing now, at least I didn't have to interact with anyone, and even though astronomically more people died because of the lockdowns than died of covid due to it causing depression and desperation leading to suicide along other health conditions that couldn't be treated, I still consider it a plus. My only problem was figuring out what to do with my extra time. 

At first, it was amazing. The first week I started and finished 3 shows on HULU I had been wanting to watch, but one thing about the lockdown that hit me hard was I couldn't even go joyride in my Mustang. I guess the cop saw me past too many times in one day and pulled me over. He said if I wasn't out to get essentials, I had to go home or Id be arrested which made no fucking sense. Eventually, I got tired of just watching TV and not being able to go out and enjoy the world. I'd never really been into video games, I mean, I had an X box but mainly to play a Friday the 13th game as I was a Jason Voorhese fanatic along with any other content that would be described as especially heinous, but I figure I might as well put the x box to use since I had so much time to kill. Upon searching through the games, I found the one that would give me everything the government took away.

If you're not familiar with GTA5, it's an open-world game where you basically do whatever you want. You design a character and can choose to do different types of missions to make money, or just drive around and interact with the world. The best part for me was it had a Mustang exactly like mine. I made my character look as much like me as I could, did some missions, made some money, and bought my car. I played the actual game for a while but I quickly found myself more fixated on the mechanics of the world. The people walking and driving around saying outrageous things.

I am by no means a computer or programming specialist which is why I guess it amazed me so much. How did it run how it did? I passed the time simply walking behind people, seeing where they went, driving behind cars, to see if they had a destination. I was amazed to see how these people interacted with each other. A pedestrian, crossing the road and getting hit by a car. An ambulance shows up and revives the person. A gang member shooting a gun causes motorists to drive erratically crashing into multiple other cars and causing mayhem. I concluded the game is probably a grid, like a railroad track these people were programmed to walk or drive on, but when forced to deviate from their programmed route was where it got really interesting, for example, one time a plane crashed causing multiple people to run frantically, and I chose one to follow. They ran and ran and decided to get off the road and head up a mountain. They topped the peak and proceeded to fall down the other side, repeating this over multiple ranges until I got tired of following. I've seen them decide to jump in the ocean and swim toward the horizon, and even randomly jump off a bridge. I understand how they can be programmed to follow a predetermined route, and even deviate to another route while staying on the grid, but some of them do things that kind of make me think they can make choices.

At the end of the day, I’m sure it's just my ignorance of programs and computer shit, but I did find it very entertaining to see what these people did. Eventually, I created my own games within the game, mainly a slasher game where I put on a mask and stalked people from the shadows. I’d wait until it was night, and I would carry a machete like Jason, and just follow people until I felt it was their time to die, and I would kill them. I’d walk through trees and backyards finding somone sitting on their porch or standing in their driveway smoking a cigarette, and I would sneak up and kill them. Sometimes I would just watch from the shadows. I wouldn't even be holding my controller, I'd just sit and watch the world exist because I wasn't allowed to watch my own… Or could I? 

I loved walking around the areas that were just trees or hills, away from the city where the animals are, so I decided to go experience my own world again, against the wishes of the government. It’s not like anyone would see me at night, especially if I just walked around wooded areas. For some reason, I can't tell you why, but I wanted it to be as much like the fake world I had been living in as possible, so I even ordered a mask like the one I had been wearing. I put on clothes similar to my character and walked out my back door and into the woods behind my house. The cool breeze was refreshing and the sky was so clear the moon lit up the forest. I had no clue how deep it was but I knew it was deep enough to not worry about cops seeing me and forcing me to return to my prison. For hours I just walked around, admiring nature, all the while wearing a mask and gripping a machete. All of a sudden, through the trees I saw an illuminated floating window. It was too dark to see the house until I got to the wood line. I wondered what the people inside were doing. What they might be up to. I fought with myself in my head about going and finding out inevitably choosing to have a peek. What's the worst that could happen? There were no trespassing signs and the way the law works is you have to be told not to be there by the police before you can get in trouble. The thought of this person having a gun crossed my mind but not before my legs had started walking across the yard. At that point it was already too late, not to mention, I didn't really care. I wanted to see what they were up to. 

Only one window was lit up and it was the perfect height for me to peek through. I crouched below it and slowly rose to look inside. It was absent of blinds but it had curtains that were slightly pulled apart, a kitchen window. A woman was doing dishes as her kids were sitting at the table finishing dinner. I wasn't sure if her husband was home, or if she even had one, but I was satisfied with what I saw and decided not to find out. My heart was still racing As I walked back through the woods. This was exhilarating, but as the adrenaline started to wear off, I started to realize I didn't know my way back. I wasn't worried. I happened to have the Google Earth app and knew it would help me find my way home but when I lifted my mask to look at my phone, I realized 2 things. 1, these woods were pretty big, but not that big. Maybe a square mile surrounded 15 houses along its border. 2, it was only 10 o'clock. I obviously didn't have to go to work the next day, so why not check out another house before I call it a night?

As I made my way to the east side of the woods I started to question if what I was doing was wrong. Sure, I could lose the machete, but in my defense, originally I just planned on walking around the woods. I couldn't kill someone. Not in REAL life. But what's the difference between this and simply looking out your window at your neighbor's house or staring at a jogger a little longer than normal? I was just getting a closer look. I decided to lose the machete in case I was seen and continued through the woods until I saw light dancing through the trees. The smoke smell in the air told me it was a fire up ahead and when I approached the woodline I could see a shadow moving back and forth. I crouched down low and parted the bushes to see a barrel with a blazing fire, and a man carrying a cage. I couldn't see what was inside but once I heard the meows I had an idea. He opened the cage pulled out a small cat, maybe a kitten, placed it in a burlap sack, and tossed it in the barrel. The meows turned to screams and it was so loud I had to cover my ears. I quickly turned and darted back into the woods. 

I felt horrible, but what was I going to do? The cat was already in the fire so there was no saving it. The screams echoed through the woods for maybe 20 seconds, and then it was quiet. I had heard that sound before thinking it was just some cats fighting or something. How could someone be so fucked up? I mean, I know I can't say much, I’m watching people from the woods with a mask on, but I’m not burning cats alive. I couldn't get home fast enough. I crawled into bed and forced myself asleep so I didn't have to think about what I had just seen and thank God I didn't have any nightmares about it. The next day, I woke up instantly thinking about it but the shock of it had kinda worn off. I felt a little numb trying to understand how evil like that could exist, but I carried on with my day eventually forgetting about it altogether. 

When the sun started to go down, I reentered the woods, this time with a route planned out. I’d check out 3 houses a night, all on different sides of the wooded patch in case I were seen I would be out of the general area, and also to learn my way around the woods so I didn't have to rely on Google to tell me where I was at. The first house was dark and the absence of cars in the drive led me to believe no one was home or maybe it was unoccupied. I didn’t approach the second house due to a man working in his garage. The car he was working on was nice and had him so preoccupied he didn't even notice me watching from the open door. I lingered for a bit and then headed off to my final house before calling it a night. I could hear the whipping sound before getting close to the house. My jaw dropped inside my mask when I looked through the window and saw where it was coming from. A man in a wheelchair, and an older woman wearing a face of pure anger, gripping the belt. He sat in his chair emotionless as the woman repeatedly hit him with the belt. He didn't even try to fight back, and honestly, I don’t even think he knew what was going on. The lifeless look on his face told me he was an empty vessel, a health condition the woman resented for whatever reason. I wanted nothing more than to bust in and stop her, but was it my place?

I wanted to take my mind off of what I was seeing, and the image of the woman and her kids came into my mind. I wondered what they were doing… Maybe something normal that would make ME feel normal again. I made my way to the yellow house hoping the wholesome view of a loving family would prevent any nightmares the scene would cause, but when I got close I could hear the yelling. She did have a husband, and they were arguing. Looking through the window, I could see her crying in the kitchen, the man towering over her with fury in his voice. The kids weren't there but it was 11 pm so I assumed they were asleep, unable to hear the anger filling the house. I didn't like how he talked to her, but again, what could I do? 

For weeks, I watched the evil that dwelled in the houses surrounding the woods, walking through the dark trees with negative sounds echoing through my head. Images of people, hurting each other, or themselves. 15 houses, very few pleasant to watch, or anything that could be considered normal. Every Monday, a sound echoed through the forest. I felt it starting to change me, drive me crazy but at the same time, cause me to feel numb. So much pain in such a small area, the craziness inside every box with a door. How much more was in the rest of the world?! What even was normal? I made a decision. Sticky notes.

 “Hurting yourself isn’t the answer”

“How would you like to be in a wheelchair?”

“You'll burn next if you don’t stop.”

Messages no one would report because they’d have to explain. I approached the yellow house to leave my last note. “Treat her better”, that’s all it said. Maybe it would be enough. Maybe if these people knew someone was watching they would change their ways. His car door would be the best place for this one. As I stuck it on the handle, I could hear the yelling. He was always yelling, and drunk. It was worse than usual because I could hear things being thrown and slammed. I peeked through the usual window just as he flipped the kitchen table and backed her against the wall. He raised his hand, bringing it down across her face. She hit the floor as he stood over her. He took another swig from his bottle before striking her again. Between every angry sentence, he would hit her. He was going to kill her!

Before I could even think I had kicked in the door. Before he could even turn, I had picked up a chair and swung it at his head. He hit the ground and the woman started to scream even louder. I looked down to see the blood pouring from his head. I dropped the chair and ran back into the woods, her screams fading the further I got. 

I got home, hid the mask, and bit my nails to the nubs waiting for whatever evidence I left behind to lead the cops to me. Any trails I made over my weeks of walking through the woods, like breadcrumbs for the police, but they never came. 

The next day, every news channel played the same story. "Man killed by a masked vigilante." The woman had told the story, exactly how it happened. How he was beating her mercilessly. How she feared for her life, and how a masked person had come in to save it. I wasn’t proud of what I had done. I had taken a man's life. What if he was only going to hit her one last time and be done? Did this man really deserve to die? It wasn’t my intention, and no amount of Reddit or social media posts praising the vigilante made me feel better about what I had done. 

The truth is, I'm not a vigilante. I’m not Superman and I'm definitely not God, so who am I to change what I feel needs to be changed? To redirect a timeline that would otherwise never exist. If there is a God, who am I to change what he himself doesn’t deem worthy to alter? So from now on, I just watch… Or not... One thing’s for sure, the longer I do this, the easier it is to not look away.

SHORT FILM at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKzkNB9Df_Y

“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”

The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.

Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.

People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.

Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.

Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.

Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.

The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.

“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”

Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.

The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.

“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”

They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.

How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?

Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.

Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.

When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.

He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.

“What did you see out there, Jason?”

Jason continued to stare at the wall.

“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”

He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.

Jason remained silent as the grave.

“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”

“You're wrong,”

Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.

“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.

He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.

“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”

On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.

Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.

Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.

They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.

“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”

Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.

“We should have gotten there by now.”

Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”

“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”

Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.

They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.

He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted

When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.

“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”

Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”

Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”

The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.

“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”

The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.

“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”

“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”

And oh, what glory there had been in it.

Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.

“No way, there is no way.”

“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”

“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”

As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.

Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.

When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.

The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.

“Jason, What if it's a trap?”

“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."

Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.

When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.

Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.

It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.

“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”

The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.

“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”

Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.

“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”

“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”

Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.

“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.

Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.

“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”

“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.

“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.

For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.

“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”

“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.

“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.

He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.

The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.

Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.

“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”

Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.

He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.

Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.

“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”

Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”

Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.

That was where the video ended.

In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.

After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.

Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.

Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.

Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.

The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.

Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.

“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.

We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.

Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.

It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.

“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”

We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.

So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.

Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.

“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.

Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.

“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”

“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”

Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”

Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.

The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.

When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief. 

“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.

“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”

“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”

“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”

He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.

It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.

“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.

“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.

I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.

“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge. 

Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice. 

When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.

Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.

“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”

The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.

“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.

I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.

As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.

We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.

“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.

“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”

He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.

Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.

“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?

Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”

Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.

The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.

"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing. 

"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."

"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.

We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.

"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."

I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.

"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."

It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.

As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now. 

I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing. 

On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it. 

At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.

The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down. 

"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"

"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.

"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.

"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.

It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.

I had seen four, and only two had left so far.

When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind. 

"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.

I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.

After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.

We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea. 

That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.  

I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?

I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.  

I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but I had fallen behind in my studies.

I’ve always been an honor roll student. I had some B’s here and there, but mostly fantastic grades. I wasn’t big into extra curicular activities, but I was a library assistant and I did a little volunteer work for the required hours I needed to graduate.

It all changed when I turned seventeen. My parents had gotten me a car for my birthday. Nothing fancy, but four wheels and an engine is always nice, but it came with a caveat. If I wanted to drive it, I would need to pay for insurance on it. This led me to pick up a job, which led to a lot of closing shifts at my local fast-food chain and not a lot of time for studying or doing homework.

So when Mr. Castleberry told me that I was going to fail 12th grade English if I didn’t bring my grades up, I asked him if there wasn’t something we could work out. I had meant extra credit, maybe a make-up assignment or retake a test, but it seemed that he had other ideas. He looked around as if what he was going to tell me was likely to get him in trouble, and then he scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. When I asked him what it was, he told me to open it when I got to my car and not to tell anybody.

He refused to say anything else about it after that, and as I sat in the front seat of my car reading the message, I was a little weirded out.

I mean, you saw these sorts of situations in adult films or in the back of hustler magazines, but you never really thought that it would happen in real life.

Meet me at my house at seven-thirty tonight, before sunset, be prepared to stay till dawn.

I started to go back in and tell him there was no way in hell, but I did need this particular class to graduate. Who knows, maybe he just liked to hang out with his students in the middle of the night. I didn’t believe that for a second, but I decided that it was worth looking into. If I wasn’t comfortable with it, I could always take the bad grade and figure something else out.

It worked out pretty good because I was off that night and Mr. Castleberry lived about fifteen minutes from my house.

I pulled up outside his house at about seven-fifteen and saw him peeking out the curtains as I came up to knock. He threw the door open, looking around as if to see if I’d been followed, and then practically pulled me inside by the front of my shirt as he closed and locked the door. He threw about four different locks, as well as a chain, and then told me to follow him to the bedroom. I raised an eyebrow, that was a little fast, but I did as he asked and figured we would talk over the particulars once we got there.

When I stepped into his bedroom, I noticed that Mr. Castleberry had an odd setup. His bed sat in the middle of a circle that I had a sneaking suspicion might be silver. The walls were painted in holy symbols and Mr. Castleberry was finishing a circle of salt around the bed as I took it all in. He pursed his lips, clearly not sure how to begin, and sat down on the bed as he tried to figure out how to explain it.

“We don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll try to be quick. I have a demon inside me, a demon that only comes out at sundown.”

“Bull!” I laughed, thinking he was joking, but his face was stone cold serious.

“Hand of God,” he said, “That's what the circle and the salt is for. I have people I know who come and sit with me, to make sure the demon doesn’t escape somehow, but sometimes I have to ask my students to stand in. I just need you to sit there and watch me until dawn. After that, you’ll have your A.”

I sighed, thinking this over. It appeared he didn’t want anything sexual, but he was certainly after something weird. Mr. Castleberry had always seemed like such a normal guy. Who would have thought he was secretly some kind of weirdo who thought he had a demon or something. Whatever, though. An A was an A, and I needed to pass this class.

“Okay, so, what do I do if this thing gets out?”

Mr. Castleberry was getting comfy in bed, “There's a box beside the chair,” he said, pointing to a old wooden chair by the wall, “Use what's in there. The gun is a last resort. The bullets in it are very expensive, so I hope you’re a good shot. Don’t call the police, and don’t invite anyone over. You got that?”

I nodded, reaching down beside the chair and finding the box as he got comfortable.

“Good, the sun's going down, so it won't be long. Oh, the demon will try to tempt you, just make sure you don’t listen to anything it has to say. There's earplugs in the box, but I don’t recommend that you use anything electronic to block him out.”

“Why not?” I asked, taking a battered old Bible and a cross out of the box. The gun inside was a heavy old revolver and it looked like it would blow a hole through a barn if I used it. There were earplugs, and a spray bottle labeled HW that I assumed would hurt the demon too. When Mr. Castleberry didn’t answer me, I asked again as I looked up. He was lying on the bed, arms crossed over his chest, as he mouthed the words to a prayer I didn’t know. He was speaking in Latin or Spanish or something, and as the sun got lower, he seemed to be fighting to finish it. His tongue was getting heavy, his words growly, and he was twitching like an epileptic.

As the sun slid below the horizon and true dark overtook the town, his eyes popped open and I heard a sound like someone popping all their vertebrae at once. He roared like a charging rhino and his body contorted on the bed like someone being flayed alive. I jumped as he writhed on the bed, knocking over the chair as I went for the door. I needed to call the hospital. This was beyond a joke, and he needed help.

“N N N N NOOOO!” Mr. Castleberry forced out, “D D D Don't llllllEAVE. Stay till…DAWN. ONLY WAY TTTTTT,” but that appeared to be all I would get from Mr. Castleberry.

He went limp then, falling back to the bed as a soft and satisfied growl left him.

As he lay there, I watched as his chest rose and fell. What was going on with him? Was he actually possessed? I shook that thought off. I had been raised Catholic but the older I got, the less sure I was that God existed. If there was no God, then there was no Devil so there were no demons either. That meant that the school board was just letting someone like Mr. Castleberry teach kids with whatever mental issues he had going on. Probably schizophrenia or multiple personalities or something. I didn’t know, but if I had to stay here all night to get an A, then I supposed I would. I was gonna be tired at work tomorrow, but I had Sunday off so I could always recuperate then.

“Ah, yes, the sabbath is a good day to rest. It was good enough for the All Mighty, at least, so I suppose it’s good enough for you.”

I felt my breath stick in my throat. The voice I had heard from the bed had been as different from Mr. Castleberry as sandpaper was to velvet. Whoever was talking sounded like the kind of people who do the kind of ASMR that gets you banned on YouTube. It was the kind of voice that lures kids into wells, the kind of voice that lures women away from happy marriages, and the kind of voice that leaves men questioning their sexuality.

I looked up to find Mr. Castleberry reclined on the bed, his head resting on his hand in what was likely supposed to be a seductive pose. His eyes were smoldering, something I hadn’t thought them capable of, and his smile was predatory. He was sizing me up like a predator preparing to spring, and I felt my skin erupt in goosebumps.

“Mr. Castleberry?”

It laughed, and I felt like I should join in but forced myself not to. “The old man’s gone to bed, but you can talk to me if you want. My name is Satan.”

I scoffed, “No way in hell. I’m sure Satan has better things to do than bother my English teacher.”

He laughed, “Very astute. The Spanish girl he brought in last time screamed and ran out of the room when I told her that. I see you have thicker skin, though. You may call me Raesh, and what may I call you?” I started to tell him, but I seemed to remember something about telling a demon your name and decided not to give him my real name.

“Sam,” I said, earning a wide, toothy grin from the imp.

“Astute and Cagey, I like that. So, how about you break that salt circle and let me out? I’m sure we could have some fun before this ole fuddy-duddy gets up.”

“Wouldn’t the silver circle hold you inside too?” I asked, dubiously. Raesh peeked over the bed and chuckled, “That crafty old duck. Who knew you could afford that much silver on a teacher's budget. Well, no matter, if you step inside the circle, breaking it with your foot, then it isn’t a circle and I can come out. Come on, what do you say?”

I found myself considering it. I had actually prepared to stand up when I realized what I was doing. I didn’t know anything about this creature, a change my mind had made from mental disease to creature, and I was just going to trust him? No, no I didn’t think so. I planted my bottom and shook my head.

“I don’t think so,” I said and was surprised to find that I was almost apologetic.

Raesh shrugged, “Of course not, why would you release me for free? Why wouldn’t you want to get something out of it, after all? So, what is it you want? What is this old man offering you to keep watch over me?”

“Uh,” I floundered and finally just decided on the truth, “An A in his English class?”

It sounded lame, and when Raesh laughed, I knew he had thought so too.

“A meaningless mark of completion? I could make you rich beyond your wildest dreams, get you any one person, any twelve people, you desire, or set you up in such a way that not graduating from school would be the least of your worries. I could do so much for you, and I don’t even need to take your soul. I just need you to free me. It’s been so long since I was free to roam the night, and I’m so very hungry.”

He had been weaving a spell around me, drawing me into his promises, but that last brought me back to my senses. What would this thing do if it got loose? Who would it hurt if it was just allowed to roam the night? I shook my head, trying to get the invasive words out of my skull, and when I turned back, Mr. Castleberry looked disappointed.

“A pity. I really could have done more for you than I can for this old stick.”

I ignored him after that, though he did not return the favor. I had brought some books to work on homework, but he was talking too much for me to concentrate. I spent a few hours trying to complete my Geometry Homework while he offered to help, offered to get me all the answers, offered to do things I’d rather not think about, and a hundred other such offers. He also threatened, promising a thousand different punishments for not letting him out only to walk them back a moment later and apologize.

I checked my watch as I finally closed the book and discovered it was only ten thirty. I had been at this for three hours, and it didn’t seem to be going by quickly.

“Only eight more hours until sunrise,” he said, guessing the source of my sighs, “Plenty of time for you to change your mind.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the earplugs, pushing them in and taking my American History homework out.

Two hours of mostly silence later, I put it away and looked up to find Raesh looking at me a little too intently.

I yawned, getting sleepy as I pulled out my phone and scrolled through TikTok. I couldn’t hear it, and as I reached for my headphones, I remembered what Mr. Castleberry had said. He had warned about using electronic headphones, but I figured one probably would be fine. Besides, they had noise reduction on them. That had to count for something.

Raesh tried to call out to me when I swapped the earplug for the headphones, but I ignored him as I popped it in.

I was listening to a two-minute story about something or another, but as I scrolled to the next one, I was surprised to find that it was a live stream from a familiar room. I could see myself sitting there, face glued to the phone, but as I watched, Raesh looked right at the camera and smiled. I was infuriated. Mr. Castleberry was just livestreaming himself as he scared some dumb kid of the week. In fact, the title of the stream was “High School Kid Tormented by “Demon”. He had tricked me! Why would he do that?

“Why indeed?” Raesh asked, staring at me through the camera as if he could see me through the phone, “What do you owe him? He made a fool of you online. What if your friends saw this? What would they think? You’d be a social outcast. Why not give them something to watch? I bet you’d love nothing more than to wrap your hands around this fool's throat and choke the life out of him. Do it. No one would know. Just walk over here and,”

I was getting up, but as I took a step towards the bed, alarm bells rang in my head. Raesh was messing with me. Looking back down at the phone, I could see it was a generic TikTok shop stream, and when I looked back up, Raesh was so close that his nose was pressed against the barrier.

“Come on, just one more step. One more step and you can do whatever you want to him. Kill him, kiss him, do his laundry, I don’t care! Just LET ME OUT!” he bellowed and I stumbled back into my chair as he laughed. After that, I just watched the TikToks with the subtitles on.

I didn’t trust my ears anymore.

I made it till two but after that, my yawns started to sneak up on me. I wished I had brought an energy drink or something. I wasn’t used to staying up this late, not regularly, and my eyes were getting heavy. I swapped over to an adventure game on my phone, but it kept slipping longer and longer the later it got. I could see Raesh watching me, catlike as if just waiting for me to nod off. He was tricky, and I wondered if Mr. Castleberry had coffee in the kitchen. I just had to make it a little bit longer, just a few more hours and I was home free. I made it till three ten before I lost the fight.

One moment I was running my eight-bit knight through my hundredth dungeon, and the next I heard someone giggle from the bed. I looked up to find not the leering Raesh, but Stephanie Morgan from my math class. She was joined by Tina Feller, Debbie Rose, and half of the cheerleading squad whose names I was a little foggy on. They were in their underwear and seemed to be beckoning me to come join them. There were comments about long division and making a human pyramid, and as I got slowly to my feet, something seemed off. Where was Raesh? He had been there a minute ago. He might not have been present, but something in their voices as they called me to bed reminded me of him. It was underneath their voice, something wicked and hidden, and I shook my head and snapped my eyes open not a moment too soon.

I was standing at the edge of the circle again. I had lost twenty minutes, and Raesh was cursing like a sailor as he had a tantrum in the middle of the large bed. He was thrashing hard enough to jounce the frame, but not hard enough to disturb the salt. He looked up at me with real scorn on his face, clearly contemplating all the terrible things he wanted to do to me.

“You were so close! The boobie trap always gets them!”

I was wide awake now, but I knew it wouldn’t last long unless I found something to focus on.

Three hours, I had three hours.

Despite that knowledge, I smiled at the old imp.

“Can’t trick me, Raesh. No deceitful person will dwell in my house, And no liar will stand in my presence.”

To my surprise, Raesh sat back like I had slapped him.

I blinked, that was different.

“What? Not a big fan of scripture?”

Raesh looked at me sardonically, “Obviously. I would prefer if you’d keep it to yourself in the future.”

Message received, I thought.

Maybe there was more to God than I had thought.

So that was how we spent the last three hours. I kept the old worn Bible on my lap, and whenever Raesh would start trying to worm his way back in, I would begin to read from it. It put him off talking, right up until the sky began to lighten. Then he turned to me, my eyes barely staying open, and delivered one final bit of crypticness.

“I don’t have much longer. When you think back on this time, I want you to remember ttttthat you cccccoulddddd have had mmmmm more than this old st st stick ever ddddIDDD.” he growled out.

As the first rays of light came up over the window sill, he twisted violently, so violently that I thought he had broken his neck. He twitched a few more times, screaming hoarsely until he finally settled back onto the bed. I sighed as he twitched again, realizing it was over as I packed the cross and the Bible back into the box with the gun and the earplugs. The spray bottle went in last, and as I secured the lid, Mr. Castleberry sat up and stretched grandly.

He blinked and looked at me, smiling as he realized I was still there. “I had a feeling you wouldn’t be so easy to scare off. As promised, you’ll pass with an A now. Here,” he said, and to my surprise, he fished two one-hundred-dollar bills out of his nightstand.

“What's this for?” I asked.

“I give anyone who works the sundown shift two hundred bucks when they're done. There's more where that came from if you’d like to come back. The number of people who come back, however, is surprisingly low.”

I asked him how he could afford this and he smiled, laughing warmly, “I don’t teach for the money. I teach because it’s what I love to do. My father set me up before I was born, something I don’t think Raesh knows. Money doesn’t mean the same thing to demons that it does to us, and I think he just sees it as a thing I have. I don’t covet it, so he doesn’t see it as a vice.”

Two hundred bucks, I thought, for twelve hours of basically nothing. I could sit with Mr. Castleberry for three nights and make what I made at the fast food place in a week. I would have to think about this very hard, but I was definitely tempted to come back. I knew what I was in for now, so it would be easier a second time. I knew Raesh would have new tricks, but maybe I’d be ready now that I was prepared.

Before I left that day, I asked him what the demon had given him to have such control after dark.

Mr. Castleberry thought about it for a moment and finally decided to share the secret with me.

“My mother was sick, very sick, and I was looking for a miracle to make her better. Raesh’Ieal came to me and offered me a deal. He would possess my body after dark, control me from sunup to sun down, and in exchange, my mother would be spared from the disease that was killing her. I agreed, on the condition he couldn’t do anything that would take away my ability to be free during the day. He agreed, but it was all for nothing.”

“What do you mean?” I asked,“Your mother lived, right?”

“For a while. He didn’t lie, he cured her of the cancer that was eating away at her. The cancer, however, had damaged her kidneys. She lived another eight months before she died of renal failure. Let that be a lesson to you, should you decide to come back. Demons always promise the moon, but they don’t tell you that the cheese is rotten.”

I left that room two hundred dollars richer and maybe a little wiser.

Wiser or not, it wasn’t the last time I sat with Mr. Castleberry and Raesh’Ieal.

“Daddy! I lost a tooth.”

He lisped a bit as he said it, and as I held my hand out I saw that his hand had a tooth in it. It was one of the front ones, and I congratulated him on losing it so cleanly. I wondered if he had pulled it out himself, but I put that out of my mind. Brandon didn’t even pull his own splinters out, and I really couldn’t see him yanking out his own teeth. He was six, six and one month as he liked to say, and this was the first tooth he had lost. He was late in that respect, many of his friends had already started losing baby teeth, but he was giddy as he brought this one to me.

“Now the tooth fairy will come and take it away!” he said, skipping off to continue playing.

Ah yes, I had forgotten that part.

Brandon had become obsessed with the Tooth Fairy after his friend Nina had lost her tooth. He thought of her as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio, and he was very excited that she would come through his window and leave money for his teeth. He had asked what she did with all those teeth, where she got all the money, and a thousand other things. I was a pretty creative person, and I had come up with all kinds of stories about what she did with them, where she got the money, how she came in without making a sound, and on and on and on.

I was kind of glad that he had finally lost a tooth because I was starting to run out of material and thought if he experienced it he might lose interest in it.

We put it under his pillow that night and I assured him that it would be gone in the morning and there would be money there when he got up.

Then, of course, I fell asleep waiting for my wife to get home and woke up to find her sleeping beside me and the sun beginning to peek over the horizon.

I went quickly, but quietly, and thanked my lucky stars that Brandon was a sound sleeper. He hadn’t woken up yet, and I took the dollar I was going to put under there out of my pocket and prepared to make the swap. To my surprise, however, the tooth was already gone. No one had left money, but the tooth had disappeared. I looked around, thinking it had slipped out, but it was just gone. I left the dollar anyway, not wanting him to be disappointed, and went back to my room to get a little more shut-eye before the alarm went off.

We never made it to the alarm, because Brandon came in waving the dollar and saying the Tooth Fairy had come.

“Look what the tooth fairy left me. He said it was all for me.”

I told him that was awesome but internally I raised an eyebrow. He? The tooth fairy had always been a woman any other time he’d talked about her. Maybe, I thought, Brandon had just had a dream or something last night. He put the money in his piggy bank and I figured we could maybe put this behind us.

Two days later, as I put him to bed, I put my hand beneath his pillow and felt something strange.

I took my hand out and found another tooth.

“What’s this?” I ask him.

“Oh, I lost another tooth,” Brandon said.

No excitement, no hope that the tooth fairy would come. Just a matter-of-fact tone. I guess that was what I wanted, his obsession with the tooth fairy had ended when he had finally lost a tooth. He’d gone from being absolutely excited to absolutely unphased, and that stopped me for a moment.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had another loose tooth, buddy?”

“I, uh, don’t know. It just kind of happened.”

I put the tooth back under his pillow, telling him to make sure to say something next time, and then I kissed him good night and put him to bed.

When I went to put money under his pillow a little later, though, the tooth wasn’t there. Instead, there was a coin. I took a look at it, thinking it was a half dollar, but realizing I was wrong almost at once. At first, I thought it was one of those weird chocolate coins you sometimes get for Christmas. Turning it, I realized it was just extremely grubby. It was heavy, like it was made out of brass or copper, and the surface looked dirty like it had been at the bottom of a well for quite some time.

I started to take it with me, something in me wanting to keep it away from my son, but I put it back instead. It wasn’t mine, after all, and by the look of it, it was probably something that he treasured. It had been back under his pillow for less than a few seconds before his hand went searching for it. His fingers took hold of it almost greedily as he clutched it, and I decided to take the dollar back with me.

Brandon changed a bit after that night, but it's only in retrospect that I see it.

He became very secretive, not my little buddy like he used to be. Brandon didn’t want to play video games in the living room with me anymore. He didn’t want to read stories at bedtime anymore. He spent a lot of time in his room, and he just seemed to be closing off. His mother laughed at me when I told her I was feeling a little hurt by it.

“He’s just being a kid,” she said, “Kids go through phases sometimes. Don’t take it so personally. In a couple of months, he’ll probably be back to his usual self again.”

I hoped he would, but it was hard to ignore the physical changes that were going on as well.

Not only was Brandon quieter, but it seemed like he had grown. He hadn’t gained a foot in a single week, but sometimes it seemed his fingers were abnormally long, his arms were strangely jointed, and his face was oddly stretched. He would look at me sometimes, look at me like he was thinking about doing something that he knew would make me angry. I didn’t like it, but he never did it right out in the open. Like I said, Brandon never came to sit with me or play video games, but I would sometimes catch him peeking at me from the hallway, or from under the table in the kitchen.

It was creepy, but I figured it was just little kid behavior.

A month after Brandon lost his first tooth, I found another one in his backpack.

Well, not just one. I found five hidden in the front pocket of his backpack after he left it on the kitchen table when he went to the bathroom.

He had become pretty protective of the backpack, putting it in his room or keeping it close to him at all times, and I started getting suspicious of what might be in there. I didn't think it was drugs or anything, he was six, but I thought it might be something weird or dangerous. What if he had a snake or something in there? So when he suddenly ran off to go to the bathroom, I knew this was my chance to have a look. I needed to sign his folder for school anyway, so I took out the folder and looked over the day's report before taking a peek in the pockets. The teeth were just sitting there, bumping together when I poked at them, but they didn’t really look like human teeth. These looked more like animal teeth, and they were too strange to have come out of my son's mouth. They might’ve been from a cat or a dog, I suppose, maybe a

“What are you doing?”

I zipped the backpack and turned around, looking like I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t.

“Nothing, just signing your folder.”

Brandon looked at me with a great deal of distrust, taking the backpack and going to his room without putting his back to me.

I told his mother about the teeth when she came home from work, but she brushed it off again, saying that little kids often collected strange things.

“My brothers collected animal skeletons they found out in the woods,” she said dismissively and she got ready for bed, “Thank goodness it’s just teeth and not a whole skull.”

I let it go, but it was hard not to see what was going on. Brandon started looking like he wasn’t sleeping well. He had huge bags under his eyes, and he was fidgety anytime he was made to sit still, like at dinner or for homework. He would get short and agitated, muttering to himself in a way I couldn’t understand. I listened carefully once when we were doing math homework, and it sounded like he was talking in a different language. He looked up when he saw me noticing, squinting at me with that look of distrust, and it broke my heart to see him like that. Brandon had always been my little buddy, and this sudden change in him was painful to watch.

Two weeks later, I got a call from the school.

They needed to speak to me about something important. Brandon had been in a fight, a fight where he had knocked more than a few of the kids' teeth out. I came down right away, afraid that Brandon was hurt, but when I saw him sitting in the principal's office he looked none the worse for wear. He had a bruise on his cheek, and his hands looked like he beat them against the wall, but he didn’t seem injured or in distress at all. Quite the contrary, Brandon looked happier than I had ever seen him.

I took a seat next to him in the office, waiting to see what they had thought was so important.

“We called you in not because Brandon has been fighting, but because of other rumors going around about him in class.”

“Rumors?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. The student he fought with said Brandon has been making strange deals with other students.”

Shook my head, not quite understanding, “What kind of deals?”

“They say he has been buying people's teeth.”

I shuddered, thinking about the teeth in the bag that I saw not long ago. I looked down at Brandon, questioning him with my eyes as to whether or not this was true. He looked back at me without hesitation, pretty much letting me know that it was.

“He’s been trading his lunch for them. He’s been trading other things for them, too, like toys and other small things. He has allegedly traded over twenty students for their teeth across three grades. Today, the student in question had taken the trade but refused to give him any teeth. Your son responded by beating the teeth out of his mouth.”

I looked back at Brandon, asking what he was thinking? He didn’t bother to answer, just clinched his fist in his lap and looked at the floor. I think that was when it really hit me how much he had changed. The bags under his eyes were dark and deep, and his fingers were long enough that I couldn’t see how anyone didn’t notice. Each finger seemed twice as long as it should be, and as he clinched, I could see a fourth knuckle on each of them.

“The reason we called you in, sir, is to get those teeth back.”

I turned and looked at the principal, “What do you mean?”

He looked a little green as he wiped his forehead with a napkin, “We believe your son has the missing teeth, but he won’t tell us where they are and he won’t give them back to us. We can’t seem to find them, and the mother is hopeful that the dentist can put them back in if they’re not too badly damaged. If nothing else, they want them back so they can take them to the dentist and make sure the teeth are baby teeth and not permanent. Brandon hasn’t said a word about where he put them, and we are deeply troubled by this behavior.”

I looked at Brandon and asked him where the teeth were?

He shook his head, not saying a word.

I asked him again, and when he shook his head this time, I heard something.

Something nearly indistinguishable, but altogether unsettling.

Something was rattling in his mouth.

“We can sit here until you decide to give us those teeth, but you’re not leaving until we get them back. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but,”

The idea that we wouldn’t be leaving seemed to decide him. He bent slowly over the principal desk, making eye contact with the older man the whole time as he opened his mouth. Three teeth fell out as he pushed his tongue out, and none of them appeared to be his. The teeth clattered onto the desk like old dice, and more than one of them had the root hanging from them. As he sat back up I had the sneaking suspicion that he was holding out.

The principal, however, seemed more than okay with what he had gotten back. He told us to go, saying that Brandon was suspended for two weeks, and I collected up my son as we headed for the door. The principal managed not to vomit before we got out of his office, but it was a near thing.

We talked the entire way home.

Well, I talked, and Brandon just sat there and said nothing.

I told him I didn’t know what all this was about, but that he needed to stop. This wasn’t him, this wasn’t like him, and he needed to tell me what was going on so that I could help. I was his dad, I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t help him if he didn’t talk to me. The whole time, he just sat there and stared at me. Most kids who are being chastised look out the window or look at their feet, but he stared directly at me in brazen defiance. His fingers kept flexing, and I saw him put a hand to his pocket more than once. I wanted to tell him to turn them out, to give me the tooth from that kid that he had kept, but something in me didn’t dare. I was loath to admit it, but I was a little bit afraid of my son at that moment. He looked nothing like the boy that I had known for almost seven years. My grandma used to tell stories about babies taken by fairies, and the changlings that they left behind. This reminded me of those stories. The kid in front of me was so fundamentally different from the one I knew that it was almost like I was talking to a different person.

As we pulled up in the yard, I told him he was grounded. No tablet, no TV, no dessert. Brandon didn’t seem to care, he just walked inside and went to his room. His tablet was still on the charger, and his TV remote had been left on the door to his room. I didn’t know what he was doing in there, but it clearly wasn’t playing. He was way too quiet, and when his mother called to tell me she was working a double, I almost cried. I didn’t want to be here alone with him more than I had to be, and that made me feel even worse.

He didn’t come out for dinner, and when I went to bring him his plate a little while later, I heard muffled voices as he spoke to someone.

“I tried to get the teeth, but they caught me.”

I didn’t know who he was talking to, kind of thought he might be talking to himself, but when a gruff voice responded I felt my stomach drop.

“You’ll just have to do better next time.”

The voice was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was deep and watery, like something from the bottom of a well, and it spoke in a way that made its mouth sound strangely full. It was devoid of any kind of kindness or charity, the sounds you sometimes hear when people speak to children. It was an authoritarian invoice, the teacher, and they were not pleased with my son.

“I’m grounded, they suspended me from school. I’m not going to be able to get you any teeth for at least two weeks.”

“Your father has teeth,” it said matter-of-factly, “Your mother has teeth too.”

When he answered, he didn’t sound afraid.

When he answered, it was with cold assuredness.

“They won’t just give them to me. They don’t understand what I’m doing.”

What was he doing? That’s what I wanted to know. I gripped the doorknob, hoping they wouldn’t hear me, and that was when the voice said something that made my blood run cold.

“Then do not ask for them. Take them, like you did from the boy today.”

I opened the door in one fluid motion, and my son looked up guilty as I walked into his room

“Who are you talking to?" I asked.

“No one,” he said much too quickly.

“I heard someone,” I said, “I heard someone in here talking to you, and I wanted to know who it was, and where they went.”

That was a lie. I didn’t think I wanted to know who they were. What I wanted was for them to never come back again. The person had sounded like some kind of demonic fairy from a kid's story, and I was afraid of what I would see if he did come back.

“It’s nothing,” Brandon said much too quickly again, “I was doing voices.”

I talked to him for a little while longer, but I got nothing. He wouldn’t talk to me, he wouldn’t tell me anything, and eventually I just left.

I should’ve left it at that, I should have just left it alone, but I had to try one more time.

It was late, about ten thirty which was pretty late for us, and I decided to try a peace offering. I felt pretty certain he was still awake, I had heard something moving around in there, and so I cut some of the pie I had made to go with dinner and walked to his room. I was going to offer him the pie and see if maybe we could talk. I just wanted to know what it was that had made him change so much. Most of all, I just wanted my son back. It killed me to have him act like this, but as the door came open, I got more answers than I had bargained for.

It was standing over his bed with its arm going under his pillow, and in the darkness of his room, I realized it had to be what he'd been talking to. The pie fell to the ground, but I had a death grip on the plate, and I realized I had sprained my thumb once I was in any state to feel it. I didn’t speak, I could barely breathe and as the thing turned to look at me I realized my fairy theory might not be too far off. It was grubby looking, like something that’s been living in a ditch. Its features were completely covered in something dark that had the texture of earth, except for the two large lamp-like eyes that protrude from its face like bubble lights. It was tall, something I realized as it took its full height. It had been crouching before, putting something under my son’s pillow, and it had to stoop so as not to bang its head on the ceiling, which is about nine feet from the floor. From its back, four insect like wings protruded. They weren't large enough to carry it, but they were large enough to be noticeable. Its hands and arms, the fingers multi-jointed, were far from delicate looking as it wiggled them ceaselessly.

I expected it to charge me, I expected it to attack me, but instead, it raised one huge finger to its face and made a shush sound.

“Shhhh, you’ll wake the baby,” it whispered, and its mouth sounded like it was trying to swallow something.

Then it smiled, and I saw not a double but a triple row of teeth inside its mouth. There’s no order to them, molars next to canines next to bicuspid next to what appear to be fangs and shark teeth. Its mouth is such a mishmash of teeth that it’s impossible not to feel a little woozy when you look at it. It pulled its lips down, somehow containing all those teeth, and before my very eyes, it vanished.

My son was pretty upset when I grabbed him up and carried him out of the house.

I put him in the car, and we waited till his mother got off work before taking him to a nearby motel. I told her what I had seen, as best as I could, and I think she believes there might be something going on now. My son is furious, saying he needs to get back home so that he can do his job, but he won’t say what that is.

Honestly, I think he’s been collecting teeth for whatever that thing was.

When I went back to get us some clothes and check the house, I looked under his pillow and found another of those strange coins. There’s a box under his bed, and inside it’s equal parts teeth and coins. There are around twenty of them, and they’re sitting next to teeth of every shape and every size. Most of them are animal teeth, but some of them are definitely human teeth. I’ve taken the entire box with me, but the phone call I got from my wife before I left the house was what really worried me.

She called to tell me that our son had locked himself in the bathroom, and she was afraid he was hurting himself.

“There’s a weird squelching sound, followed by him yelling and crying.”

He had locked himself in the bathroom, but I went and got the manager to unlock it for us.

What we found there will stay with me for a very long time.

We’re at the hospital now, my wife is in the ER room with him while I sit in the waiting room and wait for updates. The protocol states only one parent can go in at a time, and my son doesn’t want me to go in there. He can’t speak very well, but he made that very clear to my wife. I gave him space, not wanting to exacerbate his condition any more than I had to. I’ve got the box on my lap as I sit out here, and I’m not really sure what to do with it.

Inside are the eight teeth he managed to pull out of his own head before we got him restrained.

Whatever this creature is, it must get its due, and my son was apparently intent on giving it that due.

We'll probably end up having to take him to a mental facility, but I know he isn’t crazy.

I saw that thing, too, and I know it will find him no matter where we take him.

So be very careful when you tell your kids about the tooth fairy.

What comes to collect their teeth might be something far worse than even you could imagine.

I opened the mailbox and started shifting the mail around to see what today's bunch of crap was.

Bill

Bill

Credit card offer

My hand froze as I looked at the envelope, my jaw quivering a little as I read the address on the front and the name of the sender.

This hadn't happened in years, not since I'd left for college, but I had felt safe enough to settle somewhere, hoping that the letters had stopped.

It had been three years since she'd written, but it made me feel like I was a teenager again, fearing that anyone but me would find one of those letters.

From Catherine Mansley to Justin Mansley

Dear brother,

It’s been so long, you should come see me in The Blue.

Love, Catherine.

I tore the letter up and went back inside, trying not to notice how the paper had made my fingers feel clammy and moist. The envelope too had been the same way, moist and difficult to hold. It was like wet paper that had dried badly, but it was always that way. When Catherine sent me letters, they were always like that. I had kept them at first, hiding them so no one would find them, but I burned them now, not wanting them near me.

I picked up my phone to call Daniel, but it went straight to voicemail. I tried my uncle, but Uncle Mike was hoping I had seen him. He said Daniel had been missing for about a week now, and everyone was getting pretty worried. I can hear him calling me as I sit on the floor with my knees against my chest, trying not to hyperventilate, but I know it's useless. That feeling is the closest I can come to drowning, the closest I can come to understanding why Catherine writes these letters.

Daniel, Carter, Clint, Henry, they're all gone now.

I'm the last one that Catherine hasn't got.

When we were kids or early teens, we would all go stay at Grandpa's Cabin over the summer. Grandpa was long dead, Grandma too, but the cabin was always called such. My mom and dad would usually come up first to get it ready, and I loved the times before my cousins got there, the times I could just enjoy the cabin. I haven't been back in years, not since we went to look for Clint, but I can still remember the cabin. It was more a lodge than a cabin, and Dad claimed that Grandpa's Dad (our Great-Grandpa) had built it by hand. It was made from the huge old trees in the area, and it had a big area downstairs with four rooms above it. The rooms were easily as big as hotel rooms, the Motel 6 kind, and they held our family and the families of my cousins easily.

Dad had a brother, Uncle Mike, and a Sister, Aunt Claire, and both of them had two kids.

Catherine was the only girl in the family, other than Aunt Claire, and the youngest. This meant she tried extra hard to keep up with her older cousins and it often led her into trouble. The time she fell out a tree and broke her arm, the time she'd bruised her legs and butt jumping her bike over a fifteen-foot drop, the time she'd nearly drowned at Carffer's Pond, were all times she was trying to keep up with us. We were merciless too, giving her no quarter, and it must have been miserable for her.

We loved to hike and swim and spend time in the cabin, but the thing we all looked forward to seeing the most when we came out here was The Blue.

The Blue was a hole in the woods, more like a pit than anything, with water inside that was perfectly blue, like the stuff inside the jar where the barber keeps his combs. It went thirty feet into the earth, the precipice sheer and easy to stumble into if you weren't paying attention. The water inside was so blue that it hurt your eyes if you looked at it for too long, and it always looked artificial to me. Someone had hung a bridge over it, a rickety thing that swung across on ropes, and my cousins and I thought it was great fun to go and tempt fate by bouncing on it and making it sway.

Thinking about it now makes me downright shudder, but all kids think they're immortal.

I was twelve when it happened, but it could have happened before then easily.

We had been at the cabin a week, swimming and fishing and generally enjoying our time in the woods when Clint said he wanted to go see The Blue today. He said it quietly, because if he had said it any louder, his mom or my mom would have heard and that would have been the end of it. All the adults knew about The Blue and had forbidden us to go anywhere near it. Dad had told us stories about playing on that bridge when he and Uncle Mike were kids, but Aunt Claire had always been too scared to go on that rickety old thing. I think my Dad knew that we were going out to The Blue, probably expected it, and never expressly forbade us to go there, like my mom did. He knew that forbidding it would just make it that much more enticing, and if he let us get it out of our systems, The Blue would become boring all on its own.

I don't think he believed something tragic would happen, but if he had, he might have kept a closer eye on us.

We told our mothers we were going on a hike, Uncle Mike, Uncle Dale, and my Dad having gone out fishing that morning, and they said that was fine but to be back by lunchtime.

We had made our way out as quietly as possible, thinking ourselves clever for not letting Catherine hear us making plans, but no sooner had we jumped off the back porch than here she came with a “Wait for me!”Clint grumbled that we should just run off without her, but that was when my Mom poked her head out and told us not to forget Cat. Catherine seemed pretty pleased with herself as she followed us out of the yard, and as we hiked towards The Blue, she realized where we were going.

“We can't go there,” She said, looking scandalous, “Mommy said it was off limits.”

“Well Mommy isn't here,” said Daniel, “So if you don't want to come, then turn around and go back.”

Catherine seemed to think about it but must have decided it was too far to walk back on her own. We were about two miles into the woods, and despite her desire to follow us everywhere, Catherine was kind of a scaredy-cat. She didn't like being by herself, and it usually led to her getting hurt when she tried to follow us into dangerous situations. She still followed us, but suddenly she was a safe distance away as we made our way toward The Blue.

When the trees parted and the edges of the pit opened up, we knew we had arrived.

“There it is,” Clint breathed, the lip coming into view not long afterward, “So cool.”

We had seen it dozens of times but it was always awe-inspiring.

The hole was like something punched by a meteor, the edges jagged and uneven. Maybe there was a meteor at the bottom, maybe it’s what made the water so blue, but we had never seen it, well, not yet. We were only really interested in the bridge that day and cared nothing for the natural beauty. We spent the first few minutes just leaning over the edge and spitting into the water below. We couldn’t see it when it hit, but we knew it had.

If the side had crumbled we’d have all gone in and then this story might be very different.

“Let’s go on the bridge,” one of them said.

I think it was Clint but it could have been any of them. It was definitely Carter who agreed, but we all wanted to go. The bridge was what we lived for, the thrill we came back for, and the second my hands touched the ropes of that swinging death trap, I felt the adrenaline begin to pump within me.

The bridge was in disrepair from the first time we found it, and it had only gotten worse over the years. It was missing a few boards, the ropes frayed and peeling, and we should have known it was only a matter of time before there was a problem. When we got to the bridge, all of us crowding onto it as we usually did, Henry moved to the front and began swinging it from side to side. The ropes creaked as we all laughed and held on. Henry was quite a bit larger than most of us, and when he rocked the bridge, he really rocked the bridge. It swayed wide over the gap, and we all laughed and joked as we swayed along with it.

We had been cheating death for a couple of minutes when we realized that someone was missing.

We looked back towards the lip of the pit and saw Catherine hunkered in the woods. She was miserable, not liking the sight of us trying to throw ourselves into The Blue, and didn’t seem to want any part of it. We joked and picked at her, but I wish now that I had seen the fear in her eyes and thought better of what we were doing.

I should have been a better big brother on that day.

“Come on, Cat,” Clint said.

“No way,” Catherine said, grabbing one of the trees like we might try to pull her onto the bridge.

“Don’t be a scaredy-cat,” Clint sing-songed, repeating the phrase scaredy-cat again and again as the rest of us picked it up.

I didn’t pick it up till last, but I chanted it right along with the rest of them.

Catherine was clearly on the verge of tears, but she still had her pride. She stomped over to the bridge, as indignant as anyone could be at six, but as she came to the edge, she started to look unsure again. Her hands shook if she reached for the ropes, and when Henry stepped out of the way, she walked hesitantly onto the rickety boards of the bridge. Henry closed off her retreat, and she stepped closer to our group as she tried her best not to cry.

“All right, Henry, let’s get some big swings this time.” Clint trumpeted.

Henry seemed all too willing to oblige, and soon the bridge was rocking farther than I had ever seen it rock before. It was swinging over The Blue like a pendulum, and even I was afraid that we might go in. It was pivoting back and forth, the ropes groaning like a ship's mast in a high wind, and I wondered for a moment what it would be like to fall into that blue water. You could only really tread water for so long before you went under, and I wondered how long that would be. Would anyone get back with help before I drowned?

I didn’t see it when Catherine fell off the bridge, but when Henry yelled out a moment later, I looked over and saw her when she hit The Blue. She didn’t splash, the water just staying put, and she came up thrashing as she tried to get her head above the crystal blue surface. The water must’ve been thick because she was really struggling to make any headway in it. She was calling for help with big, gasping breaths. The bridge had stopped moving, all five of us looking down into the chasm and knowing that we were in trouble. We had been playing where we shouldn't, we had been being stupid, and now someone had gotten hurt.

“We've gotta get help,” Daniel yelled, and his words were like a starter pistol.

I ran for the cabin to try and get help, Daniel and Carter coming with me. I prayed Catherine could tread water while we ran the twenty or so minutes back to the cabin, but I knew that Catherine wasn’t a strong swimmer. I didn’t expect she would still be treading water by the time we came back, but I prayed to God that she would be. Mom, Aunt Clair, and Aunt Liz were at the table when we ran in, drinking tea and laughing, but they jumped up when we told them what had happened. Mom came running, grabbing a rope and running along behind us, as we went back. My dad and uncles still weren’t back from fishing, but Aunt Liz said she would call emergency services to hopefully get someone down here. The run back took a little longer, all of us winded from the sprint to the cabin, but Catherine had only been in the water forty-five minutes by the time we got back. That wasn't so long, I thought. She could still be fine.

It was forty-five minutes too long, though.

Clint said she had gone under about five minutes after we left and she hadn’t come back up since. My mom tied the rope off to a tree, but it was too short to make it down to The Blue. She went back for another rope, my Aunt staying with us, and by the time she got back, she had emergency services in tow. They brought longer ropes and divers, and soon they were in The Blue trying to find her. The divers who went in said The Blue was miles deep, and the water was like trying to swim in Jell-O. They went as deep as they dared, but they never found Catherine. My Dad and Uncles came back from fishing to find my mother inconsolable and Catherine presumed dead. They didn’t have the heart to punish us for what happened, and all of us said it had been a terrible accident. We left out the part where we had been rocking the bridge, and they decided that Catherine must’ve just lost her balance and fallen in. They shouted a little that they had told us to stay away from The Blue, but they could see how shaken up we were by what had happened.

They thought we had been punished sufficiently, but it appeared that something else disagreed.

We never went back to Grandpa‘s cabin again. It held bad memories for all three of us, and I don’t think any of Dad's siblings went back either. None of my cousins went there willingly again. It held terrible memories for all of us, and I think that we knew something dark was waiting for us to come back.

The first letter showed up two weeks after Catherine’s funeral.

The two weeks after we buried my sister were a really bad time for me. I was sad about what had happened to Catherine, but I was also unbelievably riddled with guilt over it. I felt that I had every right to be guilty, I had played a part in what had happened, but I didn’t think I had been the biggest part. Looking back, my cousins were really the ones who had pushed her to get on the bridge, but I hadn’t stood up and tried to protect her. I had failed in my duties as a big brother, and she had paid the price.

My parents had been talking about back-to-school shopping, something they seemed unwilling to do, and my mother was trying to guilt my father into getting it done. They were both distraught over the loss of Catherine, but my mother had always been a bit of a realist when it came to things. My sister was dead, but I would still have to start school whether I wanted to or not and I would need things to begin school with. While they argued about it, Mom told me to go get the mail and see if the circular had come yet. I think she wanted coupons out of it, but I can’t really remember.

I would find it hard to remember much about that day when I looked back, except for the letter.

I went out to the mailbox and found that there was a circular in there. There were also two bills, a couple of condolence cards, and a letter in a strange envelope. The envelope felt moist, the paper, seeming damp and moldy, and I didn’t like touching it. I started to sandwich it between the condolence cards, and that’s when I noticed it had my name on it.

From Catherine Mansley to Justin Mansley

I felt the other pieces of mail slip through my fingers when I read the name. It couldn’t be. Catherine was dead, dragged into The Blue by whatever lay below, and there was no way this letter was from her. I thought it might be a trick from one of my cousins, but they had all seemed as Guilty about what happened to Catherine as I was. Clint hid it behind a constant stream of humor, but he still clearly felt like we needed to hide what they had done. Like me, he realized that we would get in trouble if they knew that we had been goofing around and I didn’t think he would be stupid enough to try to pull something like this.

I opened the strange envelope. I didn’t want to. I wanted to throw it away, but I had to know what was inside. Even at twelve, I knew there was no way this could be from Catherine. Dead people did not send letters to the living, but I still had to know what was going on here.

The letter was brief.

All of Catherine’s letters have been brief.

It’s your fault, you should be the one in The Blue.

I just stood there for a moment, looking at the letter. I started to rip it up, thinking again that this was a cruel joke, but something stopped me. It isn’t something I can really explain, but tearing that paper felt like tearing the page out of the Bible. It just felt fundamentally wrong, and I ended up stuffing it into my pocket instead as I collected up the mail that I dropped on the pavement. I couldn’t destroy it, but I didn’t want my parents to find it either. What would they say if they saw it? Would they know what I had done? I couldn’t risk that. I was in enough turmoil over my sister’s death without my parents blaming me for it.

I came in and dropped off the mail, sneaking back up to my room as I hid the letter in a box of baseball cards under my bed.

It wouldn’t be the only one soon enough.

Over the next two months, I got two more letters, each on the same day of the month. After the second one, coming about two weeks after school started, I started checking the mail every day to make sure the letter didn’t get picked up by my parents. I hid them in the same box, each of them reading similar to the one before it.

I’m lonely.

I miss you.

It’s your fault.

Come to The Blue.

Come to The Blue.

Come to The Blue.

It was October, the leaves already a vibrant orange in the front yard, when Clint called me after I received my third letter.

“Are you doing this?” he asked, sounding scared and angry.

It sounded like he was shaking something in the background, paper or something, and I asked him what he was talking about.

“These letters. Carter and I have each gotten three. If this is you, you need to stop. We all feel bad about what happened to Catherine, me especially, but this is going to get us in trouble. If one of our parents found those letters then we could be in serious trouble for what we did. Your sister is gone man, and I’m sorry for it, but this isn’t gonna bring her back.“

I knew what he was talking about without having to be told. I told him I had been receiving them too, and that I bet Henry and Daniel had been getting them as well. I still didn’t think they were from Catherine, there was no way for dead people to write you letters, but somebody clearly knew what we had done in the woods. Clint said that was impossible. We had been the only ones in the woods that day, or at least the only ones around The Blue when Catherine had fallen in. He said it had to be one of us, and before he hung up he said he was going to call Daniel and see if it was one of them playing a bad joke.

He called me back twenty minutes later and said they were just as freaked out as he was.

“He says he’s been dreaming about The Blue, and he knows that Henry has too. Henry is talking about The Blue a lot these days and Daniel is scared that he’s going to tell somebody what really happened."

I hadn’t thought of that either, but I suppose by then I thought it might be what we deserved.

The letters kept coming on the same day every month, and I realized that it was the same day that Catherine had gone into The Blue. We all received our letters on the anniversary of her fall, and as Christmas came around we all started to worry about Henry. Henry had always been a big boy, looking like a high schooler even though he was a year younger than Daniel, but when he came to our house for Christmas, he looked like he had lost about thirty pounds. It also looks like he might’ve been pulling out his hair. He was twitchy, quiet, and nothing like the boisterous boy had been a few months ago. Daniel told us that when he talked, it was about The Blue. He said he dreamed about it, drew pictures of it, and in the pictures, Catherine was floating in it. Henry and Clint had been the last ones to see her alive in all that blue, but in the pictures, she was waving at them from the water.

“He says that in his dreams, she comes out of The Blue and tries to get him to jump in. She told him that it’s nice down there, that it’s cool and wonderful, and that he would really enjoy it if you were to join her. He keeps talking about joining her, but I don’t know how we would. Dad told Mom that we were never going back to the cabin, not after what had happened. They’re all really afraid that one of us will fall off that bridge if they went back." Daniel told us as we sat at the kid's table in the den.

Henry sat at the table with us, but he did little more than move his fork around in his mashed potatoes, not really eating anything.

A couple of months later, my aunt and uncle put Henry in a psychiatric facility. Dad told us he was sick, but Daniel said he'd started having night terrors and he'd almost completely stopped eating. He couldn't go to school, he wouldn't play, and it was like he'd just shut down completely. Daniel was afraid to sleep in the same room with him, and he really hoped that whatever this place was they had taken Henry to, they would fix him.

A month after that, Henry broke out of that facility and was never seen again.

No one was quite sure how he had gotten out without being seen, but Henry was gone.

Everything in the room was exactly the way it had been the night before, including the restraints that were still buckled in the same way they had been when the orderly had put him to bed. The police thought for sure they would find him walking along the road or something, maybe in the woods around the place, but they never did. Uncle Mike and Aunt Liz were devastated, but the four of us were pretty sure we knew where Henry was. They would never find him, just like they’d never found Catherine. We were all pretty sure that he was in The Blue. The facility they put him in was about thirty miles from Grandpa‘s cabin, but we were still certain that’s where he was.

When I got my letter that month all my questions were answered.

Henry came to join me in The Blue. You should all come and see him. He’s much better now.

Daniel and Clint called me later that day, and I told them I had gotten the same news.

“What are we gonna do?” Clint asked.

I didn't have an answer.

Carter went next, though it took him two years to do it.

Carter was about two years younger than Clint, the youngest of the cousins besides Catherine, and he held out only because he and Clint were so close. I don’t think Clint‘s parents ever had any inkling of what was going on with their son, but by Thanksgiving, he was looking the same way Henry had. He was barely eating, and only then because Clint coaxed him. Clint had changed since that summer when we lost Catherine. He had softened a little, and I think he had realized that life was a little more fleeting than he had believed. He said Carter wasn’t sleeping, was having nightmares about The Blue, and told Clint that Henry was in the dreams too. Carter was smarter than the rest of us, not that this was saying much, but I think it helped him put off the bad feelings and get through it for a while. Unlike Henry, Carter just looked tired all the time, and when he came to my fourteenth birthday that year, the bags under his eyes looked like bruises.

“It's not as bad as it looks,” he told me with a faint smile, “My parents sent me to a doctor who got me some meds that help. Well, not really help, but they let me sleep. They make it harder to get out of the dreams, though.”

I asked him about the dreams, and despite Clint telling me not to make him think about them, Carter said he didn't mind. Daniel and I sat close, like students listening to a lecture, and Carter reeled a bit as he thought about it, not seeming sure where to begin.

“I'm standing on the bridge. It's nighttime, it's always nighttime in the dreams, and I'm looking down into The Blue. It's,” he blinked really fast for a few seconds and shook his head before going on, “It's glowing in the dreams. It's always glowing. As I stand and look down, Catherine and Henry come up out of the water and wave at me. They tell me to jump. They tell me to join them. They tell me how great it is down there. As they tell me, I kind of want to jump. I,” his eyes shut for a count of five before he jerked awake with a start, “I want to go to them. There are no dreams in The Blue, no nightmares or letters or anything. It's just peaceful.”

He leaned over onto Clint and started snoring, and Clint accepted his weight gratefully.

Carter nearly made it to my fifteenth birthday party, and a lot of that was due to Clint.

This whole thing brought us all closer together, and we called each other often. Daniel actually came to live with us for a while, his parents having trouble coping with Henry's disappearance. Aunt Liz was eventually put into the same facility Henry escaped from after she tried to overdose on sleeping pills, and Uncle Mike soon moved in with us too. He and Daniel looked sad most of the time, but I think they enjoyed having us close.

Daniel had started having the dreams a lot more often, but he was fifteen and starting high school, and he had other things to occupy his mind. If there was anyone who could have used our help, it was Clint. Clint had started high school too, he and Daniel were a year older than me, but he missed a lot of days while he tried to take care of Carter. Carter was losing his mind at an alarming rate, and Clint confided that he had started strapping him into the bed at night.

“I've caught him sleepwalking to the front door, and he fights me when I try to get him back to bed. I don't know how my mom and dad haven't noticed yet, but I may have to tell them soon. He's like a zombie, and I don't know how he makes it through school every day.”

A week before my fifteenth birthday, Aunt Claire called us to tell us that Carter and Clint had gone missing.

“They both disappeared in the middle of the night.” she said tearfully, “And I just don't know what to do. The police have no idea, but I was hoping that maybe they had gone to your house for some reason and they were safe.”

My mom said they hadn't, but she and Dad said they would help her look for them.

“Clint's bike is gone too. I told Dale that Indian Scout was a bad idea, but he swore Clint was responsible and that he wouldn't just up and leave without telling us.”

Daniel and I were eavesdropping, and he said we both knew where they were.

After my parents left to join the search party, we piled into Daniel's Jeep and went to Grandpa's cabin, as little as we wanted to. Uncle Mike had left him the Jeep when he got his driver's license, but this would be the longest trip we had made in it. Grandpa's cabin was about two hours from my house, and despite having left a note, I was sure my mother would be worried sick. The drive seemed to take forever, but when we pulled up in front of the cabin and found Clint's motorcycle out front, we knew what we would find.

It was dark when we got to The Blue, and Clint was kneeling on the ground as if he were praying.

The dirt beneath his forehead had turned to mud, and he didn't even look up when we approached.

“I didn't catch him in time.” Clint said through tears, “I didn't wake up until the sun was nearly up, and by then it was too late. He beat me here by minutes, though I don't know how. I tried to catch him, but he was already standing on the edge when I arrived. I begged him to come back, but he just pitched over and went into The Blue. He was right,” he said, pointing, “It glows at night.”

I hadn't even noticed, but as I looked up, I could see it now. The Blue was glowing like the iridescent moss you sometimes found in caves, and as I looked down, I thought I saw three figures swimming within it. They were looking up at me, but I leaned away before they could entice me over.

“Clint,” Daniel said, but he didn't respond, “Clint, we need to go.”

“Go?” Clint asked, not seeming sure of what he was talking about.

“Yeah, we need to go. It's too late for Carter, but your mother is worried sick about you. Aunt Claire thinks you and your brother have been kidnapped, maybe even that the same person got you who got Henry. Let's go back,” he coaxed, “Let's go back before something happens.”

“Something already happened,” Clint said, his voice husky, “Carter's gone, Henry's gone, and I'm tired of living with these dreams every night. They aren't going to stop until we all go in, and I'm tired of fighting it.”

“What are you,” Daniel started, but Clint had stood and sprinted for the lip of the drop before we could stop him. Daniel made a grab for him but missed him completely. We both stepped after him, trying to catch him, but he was over the edge before we could even process what had happened. He didn't splash when he went in, just like Catherine hadn't, and Daniel and I stood there breathing heavily as we watched the still surface of The Blue.

When he didn't surface, we walked back to the cabin with only the moon to guide us and called our parents.

As emergency services came out to dive into The Blue again, Daniel and I just sat there in shock.

“We've got to get some distance from this,” Daniel said, “Maybe if we go where she can't find us, the dreams will stop and we can avoid the same fate that the others did.”

I asked him if he believed that, and all he could say was it was worth a shot.

They sold the cabin after that. My Aunt Claire and Uncle Dale had lost both of their children in one night, and they took it pretty hard. Daniel and I helped each other through the next few years, but when Daniel graduated and said he was taking a job overseas, I could tell that the dreams were starting to get to him. I had kept my grades up, using the sleepless nights to study, and was eligible for early graduation. I had been accepted into a college three states away, something that broke my mother's heart, and Daniel wished me luck.

For the next three years, we just kind of maintained. The dreams got better with distance, and soon I stopped having them all together. Daniel told me the same and built a life for himself in South America. After three years, I almost forgot about the dreams and The Blue, just choking it up to something remembered wrong from childhood, and as I got closer and closer to graduating, I couldn't wait to start my new life.

Then, Aunt Liz had died, and Uncle Mike had begged Daniel to come back.

Aunt Liz had died of a stroke in her bed, having left the facility years ago, and Uncle Mike was a mess. He had never really gotten over the loss of Henry, and he begged Daniel to come back and help him. Daniel had agreed to come back to help with the funeral preparations but then said he had to go back. He invited Uncle Mike to go back with him, saying he could stay with him in South America, but he doubted he would.

“It's only for a couple of weeks, a month tops. I'll be fine,” he assured me.

Now he was gone too.

As I sit here on the floor, typing this out, I can hear something I haven't in three years.

The Blue is calling again, Catherine is calling again, and I don't know how long I can hold out.

Sooner or later, I'll go join the rest of them.

Sooner or later, I'll return to The Blue.

The old guilt is still there, it's always been there, and I was a fool to think I could run from it.

I should have saved myself the trouble and jumped the night Clint went in.

Now I'm the last, and it's only a matter of time before Catherine gets me too.

Did anyone else become a participant in the social experiment known as Flat Stanely?

I went to elementary school in the mid-nineties (95-2001) and I was in third grade when our teacher announced that we would be taking part in the Flat Stanley Project. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, Flat Stanley was a series of books about this flat kid who goes on all these weird adventures to famous places. New York, The Grand Canyon, France, Australia, this guy went everywhere and was like a flat version of Curious George. We started reading them in class, making them part of our English hour, and one day Mrs. Gazle told us we were going to have a contest.

"Today's English lesson is to create your own Flat Stanley. It can look however you want, but the winner of the contest will get three prizes from the prize basket, and be the classes Flat Stanley that we send into the world to participate in the Flat Stanley Project."

We were all excited. This was a chance to see our work in the pictures that would come back, not to mention get some cool stuff from the prize basket. We all drew out our own concept for Flat Stanley and set to work coloring and designing him. My Flat Stanley was a spy, wearing a big trench coat, a wide hat, and carrying binoculars. He wore his regular clothes under it, and he just looked so goofy that I thought I had a real chance of winning. My friend, Todd, laughed when he glanced over at it, telling me it was cool. His Flat Stanley was a football player for the Georgia Bulldogs, his favorite team, and I thought his Stanley looked cool too.

So when the class voted on the displayed Stanleys, I figured Kaylies Flat Stephany would win. It had a sparkly tiara and a ball gown she had made with felt. That was the one I had voted for at least, since we couldn't vote for our own, and if not hers, I figured Matts would win. His Flat Stanley was a truck driver, complete with a net hat and sleeveless t-shirt, and he had put a lot of work into it. I knew some kids thought mine was funny, but I didn't figure I stood a chance. I hadn't used any special materials or done anything really innovative, and I figured I'd hang him in my room when I got him back.

So when Mrs. Gazle announced that my Flat Stanley had won, I was shocked.

I went home that night with a new super bounce ball, a pocket-sized Stretch Arm Strong, and an eraser shaped like a Pikachu.

I also went home to tell my Mom that I had won the contest and that my Flat Stanley would be going out to other schools and other places so we could get pictures back and see all the cool places he'd been. She said that sounded really neat, and we brainstormed where he might end up. Paris, DisneyLand, the Moon (we both laughed about that one), or maybe even at an Atlanta Braves baseball game. We had a good afternoon thinking about where he might end up, and when Dad got home he joined us in our daydreaming.

I went to bed that night thinking of all the cool places Stanley might go, and what we might see when he came back.

It started out pretty normal. Mrs. Gazle sent the package out to a school the next town over and they sent us back pictures a week later. Stanley had been to a volleyball game, an art museum, and finally to play put on by the class. They sent it up the road to the next school, where Stanley went on a hike, went to the zoo, and then to a baseball game. It wasn't the Atlanta Brave, it was a t-ball game, but it was still neat. This went on for a couple months, Flat Stanley traveling to Texas, New Mexico, California, Idaho, and Kansas. We hung the pictures up, sent out thank you cards, and talked about the places that Flat Stanley had gone to. It was a good time, and we used it in our Geography class to help us learn our states. It seemed that Flat Stanley was in all our lessons that year. Math (if Flat Stanley travels from Burbank California to El Paso Texas, how far has he traveled?), Geography (If Flat Stanley is at the Alamo, then where is he?), and of course English where we read the books and the letters we got out loud.

It was approaching April when we came to class to find that Mrs. Gazle wasn't there. We were all pretty bummed, because Wednesdays were usually when we got our Flat Stanley letters, and the sub told us that Mr. Gazle would talk about it when she got back. There was no Flat Stanley that day, and when Mr. Gazle came back the following week, we moved on to something else. All the Flat Stanley stuff had disappeared from the class, and its absence was as noticeable as our missing teacher had been.

She never told what had happened, and it was a mystery talked about in hushed tones well into the fourth grade.

It would probably still be a mystery if I hadn't decided a decade later to pursue teaching.

I'm in my second year of college now, and I've progressed into student teaching. I decided that I wanted to try my hand at being an elementary school teacher, something like fourth or fifth grade, and when they gave me the name of my mentor, I realized I knew her. It was Mrs. Gazle, my old third-grade teacher. She taught fifth grade now, her retirement coming up on the horizon, and she smiled when she realized who I was, giving me a big hug.

"Welcome back, I'm glad to see you decided to take up teaching."

Her classroom was in the same room her third-grade class had been in, and the kids reminded me a lot of me and my friends when we had been her students. She had a good group. They were hungry to learn, and they liked her a lot. Mrs. Gazle was the kind of teacher who kept kids' attention effortlessly, and I hoped it was a skill I would learn from her. The kiddos in her class took to me pretty quickly, and soon I was teaching classes while Mrs. Gazle just sat back and observed.

Something about being in her class again made me remember my days as a third grader at this school, and that made me think about Flat Stanley again. There was nothing like that in her fifth-grade class, the kids would have probably thought it was babyish, but it did rekindle some of the mystery I had felt from a decade before. I tried to find a good time to bring it up, but nothing seemed to present itself.

Until Friday of my second week.

I was packing up to leave when Mrs. Gazle offered to take me out for drinks. I was a little surprised, and she must have noticed because she laughed airily at my look of chagrin.

"What?" she asked, her coat over one arm, "You didn't know teachers drank?"

I decided to join her and found a small group of other teachers waiting for us when we arrived. Some of them I knew, most of them I didn't, but it turned out that this was a regular thing for them. They drank and talked about their week, complaining about some students who were especially difficult, and generally blew off steam. Mrs. Gazle and I sat in the corner, nodding and listening to them, and she smiled at me over the lip of her fourth glass of wine sometime near eleven.

"I've been sending glowing reviews to your professors," she confided, "You're one of the better student teachers I've ever worked with. I think you're probably a shoo-in to be hired at the end of your training period, and I'll recommend you to the principal myself if he doesn't extend you a position."

I thanked her, sipping my second beer as I took it all in.

"Hey, can I ask you something?" I said suddenly.

"Neither of us is nearly drunk enough for you to offer me a ride home yet, big fella," she said, snorting into her glass.

"No, no, nothing like that. Something's always bugged me from my time in your class, and I was wondering if you remembered the Flat Stanley Project we did?"

Some of the color fled from her cheeks and I could swear she shuddered a little.

"I'm surprised you even remember that. It was a long time ago."

"Well, everything disappeared from the class so quickly, and when you came back you never brought it up again. All the books were gone from the class library, all the letters were gone, everything was missing. I think we talked about it for half of the fourth grade before something else caught our attention."

She looked far away for a moment as if contemplating whether she actually wanted to answer me or not.

"I think I need a little air. Would you care to escort me?"

I told I would, and we left amidst a hail of catcalls about "cradle robbers" and "cougars on the prowl." I had taken her arm, and she was trying to be unbothered by it, but she was stiff and a little unsteady as we walked out onto the patio. Something had her spooked, and I didn't think it was the half-hearted teasing of her peers.

When we came outside, she leaned against the railing outside the seating area, looking at the waves as they crashed against the water below us.

I came to lean beside her, realizing she was trying to figure out where to begin, and having trouble getting started.

"Are you sure you wanna know? That's a pretty messed up story, but I suppose we could count it as a part of your education. Maybe it'll help you avoid something that got me in a lot of hot water and canceled the Flat Stanley Project for the whole school."

I told her I did, pretty intrigued with what could have happened to make a whole school ban something as benign as a kid's art project.

"Well, you remember that we sent the little guy around to a school in the next town over? Well, they sent it to another school, and that school sent it to another school, and so on and so forth. We had about the best result of any other classes, getting back twice as much material as is normal. I started integrating it into the curriculum, as you remember, and it was such a huge part of our class. I appreciated the material, sometimes it's hard to keep kids' attention when they're that young, but Stanley really helped. Then, one day, I arrived to find that a new package had come the day before."

She stopped, shivering a little as she watched the waves.

"Someone had sent our Flat Stanley back, and I was excited as I opened the envelope. We were starting fractions that day, at least, we were supposed to, and I wanted to see if there was some way I could work fractions into the package. I would get my wish, but not in the way I wanted."

I had reached into my pocket for a cigarette, and Mrs. Gazle asked if she could have one.

I had never seen her smoke before, but as she inhaled that first mouthful, she closed her eyes and looked euphoric.

"Flat Stanley was supposed to go to Carter Wilde Elementary school in Boise, but it appeared he had gone somewhere else. You're too young to remember it, but there was a pretty terrible person in the Midwest in the late nineties. He was picking up young women who were hitchhiking, and the police would find them later after he was done with them. Somehow, he got our Flat Stanley and thought it would be funny to use him to taunt the police. He had murdered five girls that week," her voice broke as she said it, the tip of the cigarette jittering as she spoke, "and attached pictures of them to the Stanley he sent back. They were horrific, and as I spilled them out on my desk, I recognized what I had at once."

She was shaking, and as I put my jacket around her, she smiled ruefully at me.

"You're a good kid, despite making me relive this. We knew that the kids in my class had all kinds of wild ideas about what had happened, but we also knew that none of you knew the truth."

She took a long pull off the cigarette and let the ash dribble down.

"The first girl he sent pictures of was Ashley Mankse. He had cut her chest open, the X going right between her breasts, and skinned her open like some kind of flower. Her face was set in the worst possible look you've ever seen, and right there in the middle of her chest, was Flat Stanley; YOUR Flat Stanley."

I thought I got it then, but Mrs. Gazle hadn't even got rolling yet.

"Then there was Francis Carmichael, the girl he took from the fair. She was looking for a ride, and he gave her one. He cut her arms and legs off while she was alive, burning the wounds closed with an iron so she'd bleed out slower. He finally cut her throat, and after that, he put one foot from that Flat Stanley in her teeth and took a picture. He was standing upright, her body on display, and her burnt nubs are something I still can't quite get out of my head."

"I'm sorry," I started, but she cut me off.

"No, no. You wanted to know, so let me get it all out. It's like the confessional I used to go to when I was little. If I get it all out, maybe it won't haunt me as bad. He got Dawn Caimbridge and Betsy Caimbridge next, split their backs, and made a pair of blood angels out of them. He set Flat Stanley in the middle of them, the crevice between their sides, and snapped a picture. They were still looking for them when they found Ashley. Finally, he got Melanie Fasterly, and she was probably the worst. He beat her with a sledgehammer until her bones were like glass shards. The picture he sent back was unrecognizable as a human being, and if it hadn't been for the hair I would have never known what it was. He stood the cut out between her lumpy legs as if to save her modesty, and she honestly looked about as flat as he was if you don't count all the bone spurs sticking out of her."

Mrs. Gazle's jaw was shaking, the skivering causing her to stutter over the last few words, and when she looked back at me, there was regret on her face. All the alcohol had been burned out of her, the fear having shaken it all loose as her mind remembered what had likely been the worst day of her life.

"I called the police, of course, but my real concern was for you guys. If this psycho had mailed this back to us, then he had the address of the school. If he knew where we were, then he could pay us a visit and make us his next photo collage, and I couldn't have lived with myself if that had happened. So, I gave the police everything, and they agreed to keep an eye on the school for a while. I needn't have bothered. This twisted fuck had a particular hunting ground and a particular prey, neither of which were children in Georgia. He never did pay us a visit, but it took six more girls before they caught him. I didn't sleep well until they had him in custody, and I didn't sleep soundly until they slipped the needle into him last year. He was a rotten, twisted individual, and he deserved every ounce of what he got. I had to take the rest of the week to recover from his little present, and there was talk that they might want me to undergo counseling. When I got back, the school had scrapped all the Flat Stanley stuff. It was too much of a risk that some students would get a hold of it next time, and they couldn't have that. Some of the teachers thought we should tell the students, some of them thought we should tell the parents and a few of them thought I should be fired for some reason. It was decided that we wouldn't tell any of them, and we would never speak of it again. In exchange for not causing an uproar, I got to keep my job. I thought it was a pretty fitting trade back then. So that's the whole sad story, cure your curiosity?"

It did.

Mrs. Gazle was right, too. They offered me a job at the end of my training, and it turned out it was her job. Mrs. Gazle retired at the end of that year, wanting to spend more time with her grandkids and her daughters. We still get drinks sometimes, and she really is a lovely woman. As for me, I noticed one major part of the contract as it was presented to me. They put it in bold so you can't possibly miss it, and so if you break it, you really only have yourself to blame.

Under no circumstances will our students participate in any program that sends documents to other schools or entities without the express permission of the administration. This includes penpal programs, Hands Across the Water, the Flat Stanley Project, and other affiliated projects there within.

I signed that contract ten years ago, and now I instruct student teachers myself.

In the decade I've been teaching, I have never broken that rule, and I have Mrs. Gazle's story to thank for that.

When you send something like that out into the world, you never know who might answer back, and what they might have to say.

"I heard Susan was having a party this weekend while her parents were out of town."

"Oh yeah? Any of us get invited?"

"Nope, just the popular kids, the jocks. and a few of the popular academic kids. No one from our bunch."

"Hmm sounds like a special guest might be needed then."

We were all sitting together in Mrs. Smith's History Class, so the nod was almost uniform.

Around us, people were talking about Susan’s party. Why wouldn't they be? Susan Masterson was one of the most popular girls in school, after all, but they were also talking about the mysterious events that had surrounded the last four parties hosted by popular kids. The figure that kept infiltrating these parties was part of that mystery. Nobody knew who they were. Nobody saw them commit their heinous deeds, but the results were always the same.

Sometimes it was on the living room floor, sometimes it was in the kitchen on the snack table, sometimes it was in the top of the toilets in their parents' bathroom, a place that no one was supposed to have entered.

No matter where it is, someone always found poop at the party.

"Do you still have any of the candles left?" I asked Tina, running a hand over my gelled-up hair to make sure the spikes hadn't drooped.

"Yeah, I found a place in the barrio that sells them, but they're becoming hard to track down. I could only get a dozen of them."

"A dozen is more than enough," Cooper said, "With a dozen, we can hit six more parties at least."

"Pretty soon," Mark said, "They'll learn not to snub us. Pretty soon, they'll learn that we hold the fate of their precious parties."

The bell rang then, and we rose like a flock of ravens and made our way out of class.

The beautiful people scoffed at us as we walked the halls, saying things like "There goes the coven" and "Hot Topic must be having a going-out-of-business sale" but they would learn better soon.

Before long, they would know we were the Lord of this school cause we controlled that which made them shiver.

I’ve never been what you’d call popular. I've probably been more like what you'd call a nerd since about the second grade. Don’t get me wrong, I was a nerd before that, but that was about the time that my peers started noticing it. They commented on my thick glasses, my love of comic books, and the fact that I got our class our pizza party every year off of just the books that I read. Suddenly it wasn’t so cool to be seen with the nerd. I found my circle of friends shrinking from grade to grade, and it wasn’t until I got to high school that I found a regular group of people that I could hang with.

Incidentally, that was also the year I discovered that I liked dressing Goth.

My colorful wardrobe became a lot darker, and I started ninth grade with a new outlook on life.

My black boots, band t-shirt, and ripped black jeans had made me stand out, but not in the way I had hoped. I went from being a nerd to a freak, but I discovered that the transformation wasn't all bad. Suddenly, I had people interested in getting to know me, and that was how I met Mark, Tina, and Cooper.

I was a sophomore now, and despite some things having changed, some things had stayed the same.

We all acted like we didn't care that the popular kids snubbed us and didn't invite the nerds or the freaks to their parties, but it still didn't feel very good to be ostracized. We were never invited to sit with them at lunch, never asked to go to football games or events, never invited to spirit week or homecoming, and the more we thought about it, the more that felt wrong.

That was when Tina came to us with something special.

Tina was a witch. Not the usual fake wands and butterbeer kind of witch, but the kind with real magic. She had inherited her aunt's grimoire, a real book of shadows that she'd used when she was young, and Tina had been doing some hexes and curses on people she didn't like. She had given Macy Graves that really bad rash right before homecoming, no matter how much she wanted to say it was because she was allergic to the carnation Gavin had got her. She had caused Travis Brown to trip in the hole and lose the big game that would have taken us to state too. People would claim they were coincidences, but we all knew better.

So when she came to us and told us she had found something that would really put a damper on their parties, we had been stoked.

"Susan's party is tomorrow," Tina said, checking her grimoire as we walked to art class, "So if we do the ritual tomorrow night, we can totally ruin her party."

Some of the popular girls, Susan among them, looked up as we passed, but we were talking too low for them to hear us. Susan mouthed the word Freaks, but I ignored her. She'd see freaks tomorrow night when her little party got pooped on.

We spent art class discussing our own gathering for tomorrow. After we discovered the being in Tina's book, we never called what we did parties anymore. They were gatherings now, it sounded more occult. We weren't some dumb airheads getting together for beer and hookups. We were a coven coming together to make some magic. That was bigger than anything these guys could think of.

"Cooper, you bring the offering and the snacks," Tina said.

Cooper made a face, "Can I bring the drinks instead? Brining food along with the "offering" just seems kinda gross.``

Tina thought about it before nodding, "Yeah, good idea, and be sure you wash your hands after you get the offering."

Cooper nodded, "Good, 'cause I still have Bacardi from last time."

"Mark, you bring snacks then." Tina said, "And don't forget to bring the felenol weed. We need it for the ritual."

Mark nodded, "Mr. Daccar said I could have the leftover chicken at the end of shift, so I hope that's okay."

That was fine with all of us, the chicken Mark brought was always a great end to a ritual.

"Cool, that leaves the ipecac syrup and ex-lax to you, my dear," she said, smiling at me as my face turned a little red under my light foundation.

Tina and I had only been an item for a couple of weeks, and I still wasn't quite used to it. I'd never had a girlfriend before then, and the giddy feeling inside me was at odds with my goth exterior. Tina was cute and she was the de facto leader of our little coven. It was kind of cool to be dating a real witch.

"So, we all meet at my house tomorrow before ten, agreed?"

We all agreed and the pact was sealed.

The next night, Friday, I arrived at six, so Tina and I could hang out before the others got there. Her parents were out of town again, which was cool because she never had to make excuses for why she was going out. My parents thought I was spending the night at Marks, Cooper's parents thought he was spending the night at Marks, and Mark's Mom was working a third shift so she wasn't going to be home to answer either if they called to check up. It was a perfect storm, and we were prepared to be at the center of it.

Tina was already setting up the circle and making the preparations, but she broke off when I came in with my part of the ritual.

We were both a little out of breath when Cooper arrived an hour later, and after hurriedly getting ourselves back in order, he came in with two twelve packs.

"Swiped them from my Uncle. He's already drunk, so he'll never miss them. I think he just buys them for the twenty-year-olds he's trying to bang anyway."

"As long as you brought the other thing too," Tina said, "Unless you mean to make it here."

Cooper rolled his eyes and held up a grungy Tupperware with a severe-looking lid on it.

"I got it right here, don't you worry."

He helped us with the final prep work, and we were on our thousandth game of Mario Kart by the time Mark got there at nine. He smelled like grease and chicken and immediately went to change out of his work clothes. I didn't know about everyone else, but I secretly loved that smell. Mark was self-conscious about smelling like fried chicken, but I liked it. If I thought it was a smell I wouldn't become blind to after a few weeks, I'd probably ask him to get me a job at Colonel Registers Chicken Chatue too.

Cooper tried to reach in for some chicken, but Tina smacked his hand.

"Ritual first, then food."

Cooper gave her a dark look but nodded as we headed upstairs.

It was time to ruin another Amberzombie and Fitch party.

When Tina had showed us the summons for something called the Party Pooper, we had all been a little confused.

"The Party Pooper?" Cooper had asked, pointing to the picture of the little man with the long beard and the evil glint in his eye.

"The Party Pooper.” Tina confirmed, “He's a spirit of revenge for the downtrodden. He comes to those who have been overlooked or mistreated and brings revenge in their name by," she looked at what was written there, "leaving signs of the summoners displeasure where it can be found."

"Neat," said Cooper, "how do we summon him?"

Turns out, the spell was pretty easy. We would need a clay vessel, potions, or tinctures to bring about illness from the well, herbs to cover the smell of waste, and the medium by which revenge will be achieved. Once the ingredients were assembled, they would light the candles, and perform the chant to summon the Party Pooper to do our bidding. That first time, it had been a kegger at David Frick's house, and we had been particularly salty about it. David had invited Mark, the two of them having Science together, and when Mark had seemed thrilled to be invited, David had laughed.

"Yeah right, Chicken Fry. Like I need you smelling up my party."

Everyone had laughed, and it had been decided that David would be our first victim.

As we stood around the earthen bowl, Tina wrinkled her nose as she bent down to light the candles.

"God, Cooper. Do you eat anything besides Taco Bell?"

Cooper shrugged, grinning ear to ear, "What can I say? It was some of my best work."

The candles came lit with a dark and greasy light. The ingredients were mixed in the bowl, and then the offering had been laid atop it. The spell hadn't been specific in the kind of filth it required but, given the name of the entity, Tina had thought it best to make sure it was fresh and ripe. That didn't exactly mean she wanted to smell Cooper's poop, but it seemed worth the discomfort.

"Link hands," she said, "and begin the chant."

We locked hands, Mark's as clammy as Tina's were sweaty, and began the chant.

Every party needs a pooper.

That's why we have summoned you.

Party Pooper!

Party Pooper!

The circle puffed suddenly, the smell like something from an outhouse. The greasy light of the candles showed us the now familiar little man, his beard long and his body short. He was bald, his head liver-spotted, and his mean little eyes were the color of old dog turds. His bare feet were black, like a corpse, and his toes looked rotten and disgusting. He wore no shirt, only long brown trousers that left his ankles bare, and he took us in with weary good cheer.

"Ah, if it isn't my favorite little witches. Who has wronged you tonight, children?"

We were all quiet, knowing it had to be Tina who spoke.

The spell had been pretty clear that a crime had to be stated for this to work. The person being harassed by the Party Pooper had to have wronged one of the summoners in some way for revenge to be exacted, so we had to find reasons for our ire. The reason for David had come from Mark, and it had been humiliation. After David had come Frank Gold and that one had come from Cooper. Frank had cheated him, refusing to pay for an essay he had written and then having him beaten up when he told him he would tell Mr. Bess about it. Cooper had sighted damage to his person and debt. The third time had been mine, and it was Margarette Wheeler. Margarette and I had known each other since elementary school, and she was not very popular. She and I had been friends, but when I had asked her to the Sadie Hawkins Dance in eighth grade, she had laughed at me and told me there was no way she would be seen with a dork like me. That had helped get her in with the other girls in our grade and had only served to alienate me further. I had told the Party Pooper that her crime was disloyalty, and it had accepted it.

Now it was Susan's turn, and we all knew that Tina had the biggest grudge against her for something that had happened in Elementary school.

"Susan Masterson," Tina intoned.

"And how has this Susan Masterson wronged thee?"

"She was a false friend who invited me to her house so she could humiliate me."

The Party Pooper thought about this but didn't seem to like the taste.

"I think not." he finally said.

There was a palpable silence in the room.

“No, she,”

“Has it never occurred to you that this Susan Masterson may have done you a favor? Were it not for her, you may very well have been somewhere else tonight, instead of surrounded by loyal friends.”

Tina was silent for a moment, this clearly not going as planned.

"No, I think it is jealousy that drives your summons tonight. You are jealous of this girl, and you wish to ruin her party because of this."

He floated a little higher over the circle we had created, and I didn't like the way he glowered down at us.

"What is more, you have ceased to be the downtrodden, the mistreated, and I am to blame for this. I have empowered you and made you dependent, and I am sorry for this. Do not summon me again, children. Not until you have a true reason for doing such."

With that, he disappeared in a puff of foul wind and we were left standing in stunned silence.

It hadn't worked, the Party Pooper had refused to help us.

"Oh well," Cooper said, sounding a little downtrodden, "I guess we didn't have as good a claim as we thought. Well, let's go eat that chicken," he said, turning to go.

"That sucks," Mark said, "Next time we'll need something a little fresher, I suppose."

They were walking out of the room, but as I made to follow them, I noticed that Tina hadn’t moved. She was staring at the spot where the Party Pooper had been, tears welling in her eyes, and as I put a hand on her shoulder, she exhaled a loud, agitated breath. I tried to lead her out of the room, but she wouldn't budge, and I started to get worried.

"T, it's okay. We'll try again some other time. Those assholes are bound to mess up eventually and then we can get them again. It's just a matter of time."

Tina was crying for real now, her mascara running as the tears fell in heavy black drops.

"It's not fair," she said, "It's not fair! She let me fall asleep and then put my hand in water. She took it away after I wet myself, but I saw the water ring. I felt how wet my fingers were, and when she laughed and told the other girls I wet myself, I knew she had done it on purpose. She ruined it, she ruined my chance of being popular! It's not fair. How is my grievance any less viable than you guys?"

"Come on, hun," I said, "Let's go get drunk and eat some chicken. You'll feel a lot better."

I tried to lead her towards the door, but as we came even with it she shoved me into the hall and slammed it in my face.

Mark and Cooper turned as they heard the door slam, and we all came back and banged on it as we tried to get her to answer.

"Tina? Tina? What are you doing? Don't do anything stupid!"

From under the door, I could see the light of candles being lit, and just under the sound of Mark and Cooper banging, I could hear a familiar chant.

Every party needs a pooper.

That's why I have summoned you.

Party Pooper!

Party Pooper!

Then the candlelight was eclipsed as a brighter light lit the room. We all stepped away from the door as an otherworldly voice thundered through the house. The Party Pooper had always been a jovial little creature when we had summoned him, but this time he sounded anything but friendly.

The Party Pooper sounded pissed.

"YOU DARE TO SUMMON ME, MORTAL? YOU BELIEVE YOU ARE OWED MY POWER? YOU BELIEVE YOU ARE ENTITLED TO MY AID? SEE NOW WHY THEY CALL ME THE PARTY POOPER!"

There was a sound, a sound somewhere between a jello mold hitting the ground and a truckload of dirt being unloaded, and something began to ooze beneath the door.

When it popped open, creaking wide with horror movie slowness, I saw that every surface in Tina's room was covered in a brown sludge. It covered the ceiling, the walls, the bed, and everything in between. Tina lay in the middle of the room, her body covered in the stuff, and as I approached her, the smell hit me all at once. It was like an open sewer drain, the scent of raw sewage like a physical blow, and I barely managed to power through it to get to Tina's side.

"Tina? Tina? Are you okay?"

She said nothing, but when she opened her mouth, a bucket of that foul-smelling sewage came pouring out. She coughed, and more came up. She spent nearly ten minutes vomiting up the stuff, and when she finally stopped, I got her to her feet and helped her out of the room.

"Start the shower. We need to get this stuff off her."

I put her in the shower, taking her sodden clothes off and cleaning the worst of it off her. She was covered in it. It was caked in her ears, in her nose, in...other places, and it seemed the Party Pooper had wasted nothing in his pursuit of justice. She still wouldn't speak after that, and I wanted to call an ambulance.

"She could be really sick," I told them when Cooper said we shouldn't, "That stuff was inside her."

"If we call the hospital, our parents are going to know we lied."

In the end, it was a chance I was willing to take.

I stayed, Mark and Cooper leaving so they didn't get in trouble. I told the paramedics that she called me, saying she felt like she was dying and I came to check on her. They loaded her up and called her parents, but I was told it would be better if I went back home and waited for updates.

Tina was never the same after that.

Her mother thanked me for helping her when I came to see her, but told me Tina wouldn't even know I was there.

"She's catatonic. They don't know why, but she's completely lost control of her bowels. She vomits for no reason, she has...I don't know what in her stomach but they say it's like she fell into a septic tank. She's breathed it into her lungs, it's behind her eyelids, she has infections in her ears and nose because of it, and we don't know whats wrong with her.”

That was six months ago. They had Tina put into an institution so someone could take care of her 24/7, but she still hasn't said a word. She's getting better physically, but something is broken inside her. I still visit her, hoping to see some change, but it's like talking to a corpse. I still hang out with Cooper and Mark, but I know they feel guilty for not going to see her.

In the end, Tina tried to force her revenge with a creature she didn't understand and paid the price.

So, if you ever think you might have a grievance worthy of the Party Pooper, do yourself a favor, and just let it go.

Nothing is worth incurring the wrath of that thing, and you might find yourself in deep shit for your trouble.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1bfb6lq/beyond_dollar_general_beyond_pt_1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Hey everybody, Alphabet man here.

Do you know what the best part about being back on this side of reality is?

I can actually ANSWER your questions!

So, to recap, Gail and Celene almost got snapped up miasma that appeared in my freaking house. So, we talked about it and came up with a plan of attack. Well, Gail wants to attack, anyway, so I agreed that it might be time to arm ourselves with something that would stop them if they came back. Like some of you suggested, we have kitted out the house for optimal dispersal of miasma. Every light bulb in the house has been upgraded to the highest wattage I can get and the biggest lumen count available. We've also added lights in places that don't seem to have enough lights. Every room has at least one new lamp or tap light in it, and it makes even the dreariest room shine like the sun. We also got some of those jog lights for ourselves, the ones that make light so people can see you at night. We even got one for Buddy, a collar that makes him look like a one-dog rave. We all have those deer spotting lights that can flag down plains, and we're working on changing our sleep schedules so we can stay vigilant all night. I've never been one for night shifts so that part has taken some getting used to.

If I sound a little crabby while writing this, that's why.

I suggested that it might be a good idea to reach out to people who knew more about this than we do, but Gale wouldn't hear of it.

"You want to let them know where we all are?" he said, sounding incredulous.

"Gale, they already know where we are," I said, trying to stay calm in the face of his mounting hysterics.

I hadn't known Gale long, even though we had been through a lot, but this seemed out of place for him. The Gale I had known in the DGB, at least the Gale I'd known before he had gone into the ceiling, had always been resourceful and not prone to letting his emotions get the better of him like this. Even when he was overwhelmed, he always seemed to keep it together and make a plan. This Gale seemed barely in control of himself, and his paranoia was at an all-time high.

Though, I suppose, if shadow creatures had come to grab me in the middle of the night, I might be a little paranoid too.

"I don't want them knowing a damn thing about us. They're in league with those things. Hell, they probably ARE those things. We tell them that we know what they're up to and we give away our advantage."

"What advantage is that?" I asked Gale, "They know we all live together in a house that I bought with the money they gave me? Come on, Gale. They probably know when we take a dump and how much it weighs. These guys aren't some Scooby Doo villain. These guys are organized, but if they think that we might blab to the wrong people, then they might leave us alone again."

Gale blew air out of his nose, sounding agitated.

"If you go to them, then I'm leaving."

A silence hung between us as the words sank in.

"Gale!" Celene said, but he cut her off.

"If you're going to lead them straight to us, then I'll just go ahead and take my chances on my own. I might be harder to find if I just keep moving."

I wanted to rail at him, I wanted to make him see reason, but after a moment of just staring at him, I put my hands up and sighed.

"Fine, I won't call them. But we need to figure out what's going to happen then because tonight it was pretty clear that we had no clue what we were doing."

That was when we made plans to set up the defenses I talked about earlier, and ultimately what brought us to this point. We've been staying up all night and sleeping most of the day for the past week. Poor Buddy is taking it the hardest. The poor pooch was made to be a night dog, and he seems confused anytime I tell him to go back to bed when the sun's out. Usually, I just let him run in the backyard, but I always end up getting up to let him back in during the heat of the day. I'm lucky to get four hours of continuous sleep most days, and it feels like I'm just taking a series of cat naps. Gale seems to be doing the best out of us. He sits awake all night like it's his duty to guard us, then sleeps like the dead all day. Celene is doing pretty well, but I've caught her snoozing a time or two.

This would have probably been a lot easier if we had done it right after coming back from the Beyond. In the Beyond, you always slept with the lights on. In the Beyond, you always slept when you were too tired to go on. There was no night or day, there was just time, and you passed that time as best you could. We were used to it, but after a few months in the real world, we've gotten used to sleeping when the sun goes down and being awake when it comes up.

It's weird though.

When I dream, I almost always dream that I'm back in the Beyond.

I can hear the soft buzz of the overhead lights, the tinny music that plays on the speakers, and silence that seems to moan at you after a while.

In my dreams, I go back to the Beyond, but they aren't nightmares, not always. Sometimes I go back to that first store, the one I destroyed, and search through the rubble for something. I don't what it is, but I know that I need it. Whatever I'm looking for, I never find it. I sift through the rubble, looking and looking, but I never discover what I've lost. Sometimes I find little reminders of my store, however. One night I found a coloring book that I had done, the adult kind with lots of swirls and little pieces. I had to wipe coffee ground off it, the moisture having wrecked the picture, but even wet and saturated, it was still beautiful. I couldn't believe I had destroyed it in my anger, and as I flipped through the book, I noticed there were pages at the back that I hadn't finished. I didn't remember these pages, but that's because I don't think they existed when I was here. They showed a forest of terrible crystals, their beauty undeniable. Inside the crystals were people, and as I flipped, I could see them turning into dust inside. Big shadow creatures were moving around, and as beautiful as the crystals were, the creatures looked like crayon drawings next to their complexity. They were moving around the crystals, tending to them, and as I flipped, I saw them bring in someone new. I don't know how I knew, but I knew it was Gale. The book started flipping pages in my hand then, and the images moved like a picture book. As they set Gale into the crystal that would grow around him, they put something into him. It was...well, it was like the opposite of light but it still shone. I know that doesn't make any sense, but it's the best I can do. It was inside him before they sealed him up, and as the crystal grew around him, it shone out with a strange dark light. Eventually, I came along and smashed his crystal and pulled him out, but even as we escaped, I could see that shard of darkness glowing inside him.

I wanted to tell them about the dream, but I knew Gale would scoff at it and Celene would just say it was nerves.

I don't think it was, but I never got a chance.

We were attacked on the fourth night if you can call it an attack.

My neighbors probably thought I was insane because you could see my house from down the street. On the third day, we had to go get thicker curtains after the little old lady next door nicely asked me to turn my lights down because it was keeping her awake. If it had been the Karen that lived two houses down, I would probably told her to eat me raw, but Mrs. Gorbetts is such a nice old lady that I felt bad for keeping her awake.

We bought blackout curtains and that peel-and-stick stuff that blacks out your windows, and Mrs. Gorbetts told me she slept like a baby the next day when I went to get my mail.

We all sat in the living room at night, the TV on but none of us watching it. Buddy was asleep in his comfy bed by the couch, his snoring making me a little jealous. Celene and Gale were on the couch, Celene cuddled up next to Gale and Gale looking like one of those stuffed husbands you saw online for lonely women. I was in my Lazyboy, drinking coffee and yawning. We were watching an old black and white movie, that was really all that was worth watching that late at night, and I was just about to suggest we find something on Netflix when something touched down on the carpet hard enough to make the board creak above our heads. It was followed by a loud roar that made Buddy jump up and bark, but it was gone a moment later.

"What," I started, but Gale put a finger over his lips.

"They're testing our defenses," he whispered, and sure enough there was another one from my room a moment later. Same thump, same loud roar, and then silence. Celene sat up, looking nervous but ready, and Gale put his big ole flashlight in his lap like they might come out of the crevices of the couch after him. We all kept our lights close by, mine was on the end table, and as much as I doubted they could get us I still put a hand on mine.

"I think," but Gale stopped as something big and dark stepped out of the small shadow cast by the TV stand.

It rose to fill the room, but there was only so much shadow left. The shadows that remained were there to act like bear traps, or so Gale thought. He said if we covered all the shadows, then they might get desperate. If we left a couple, and they tried them, then it would tell them that they couldn't get far, and it wasn't worth the effort.

The miasma sent one huge hand out towards Gale, but it turned to nothing as it came into the ocean of light we were bathed in.

We put our flashlights on it and burned it to a crisp as it grumbled away to nothing.

That was all for that night's battle, but the war wasn't over.

The next two nights were spent probing for weaknesses.

It was surprising what the miasma could manifest from, and shadows we hadn't even considered were suddenly vantage points for them to come through. Some of these we took care of, some of them we left but made note of, but it never did them any good. The light stopped them, it made them as intangible as weak spirits, and we began to settle into our nocturnal lifestyle. It was easy since we didn't have jobs, or anywhere to be. My parents were a little concerned about why I was staying up all night and sleeping all day, but I told them I had a third-shift job at a call center and they bought it. Gale and Celene didn't even have that to contend with. Gales's family was either dead, estranged, or refused to believe it was him when he reached out. Celene was an only child with divorced parents, both of whom were dead. The cousins she had tried to reach out to either didn't remember her, didn't care, or didn't believe her. She and Gale really just had each other, and me, which was probably why we had clung so close together. Even my parents didn't really understand what I had been through, though I didn't tell them more than they needed to know, and it had brought the three of us, four if you counted Buddy, into a found family built on shared trauma.

So, when Friday came we were all on high alert. We had been attacked three nights running, and we fully expected tonight to be the big one. This would be when they put all their knowledge together and launched something big. Despite his whining, we had turned Buddy's collar on and it was providing an eye-tearing show within the living room. We had our lights, we had our reflectors, and we had even created some new shadows for them to test out. We were ready, all of us were used to staying up now and sitting in a kind of self-imposed preparedness.

When the sun came up and nothing had happened, we were a little surprised.

When Saturday night came, we did the same, and again nothing happened.

"Maybe they've given up," said Celene.

"Maybe they're trying to lure us into a false sense of security," Gale said, not buying it.

Sunday we were all on pins and needles. We let Buddy sleep without his collar on, he really was having trouble sleeping with all the lights flashing, but we still donned our jogging lights, our headlamps, and our giant flashlights. We sat at the ready, sure that tonight would be the night, and we jumped at every little noise. Any noise, any creak, any groan of wood could be the miasma, and by midnight we were all standing up, not wanting to be too comfy. Buddy looked at us, annoyed at being kept awake by us, but we refused to let our guard down.

When they got here, we would be ready.

When morning came, and still nothing had happened, Celene started to laugh.

"They must be having laughing fits if they can see us. They got us to stay up for three nights running on high alert and then didn't even show up."

Gale looked like he wanted to be mad, but he started laughing too.

"I guess we must be pretty silly."

"It's a good thing we got those thick curtains," Celene chimed in, really cackling now, "or the neighbors would be having fits at the sight of us. We probably looked ridiculous, like we were waiting for vampires or something."

I couldn't help it, I started laughing too.

She was right, we must look silly.

"Well, boys, we made it, I guess, and I think this calls for a celebration. What's say we all go get some breakfast before we turn in? I think I could eat about three stacks of pancakes at the Chuck House and a pound of bacon, what about you?" she asked, turning to Gale.

Gale was still chuckling a little, "I hope they have a horse, caught I imagine I could eat a deep-fried Clydesdale, with a side of hashbrowns."

That got me laughing again, and pretty soon Gale and I were hanging on each other in stitches.

We were sleep-deprived and running on the dregs of pure adrenaline, cut us some slack.

"Well then, let's get out of these reflectors and get some breakfast," Celene said, ditching the lights as she went to get her coat out of the hall closet.

Buddy was barking as Gale and I finished up our laughter, and I thought it was because he was annoyed by us and all the noises we were making.

When Celene screamed, I realized my mistake.

We both went running into the foyer, but it was already too late.

We had put tap lights in all the closets. We had changed out the weak bulbs for something that would fry cockroaches. We had been so careful to put as much light in every space imaginable, but we had forgotten about one spot.

The arm coming out of the coat closet in the foyer was as thick as a tree, and as it dragged Celene inside, she was screaming for Gale.

He jumped, trying to catch her hand, but he came up short.

She disappeared into the closet, her shriek abruptly cut off, and as Gale dug the flashlight out of his pocket, the little one that he always kept on him, we could both see by the narrow beam that that closet was empty.

That was around sunrise.

It's closer to noon now, and Gale is inconsolable. He's been opening the door to the closet, the closet that now has a new halogen bulb in it, for hours, but Celene is never inside. She's been taken, but we don't know where. We assume she's gone back to that monochrome area in the ceiling, the one Gale was trapped in, but we don't know.

I made a phone call about an hour ago, a phone call I should have made from the start.

Gale can say what he likes, he can leave if that's what he wants, but I need answers.

I have a meeting with Agent Cash tomorrow at noon.

I will get to the bottom of this, and I will get Celene back.

Even if it means I have to plunge right back into the Beyond to do it.

"Markie banged on the door, his eyes beginning to tear up as he called for help. He had gone into the equipment shed looking for answers, and what he had found scared him nearly to death. As he banged on the door, he could hear the creature pulling itself free of the wall behind him. The massive paws came to rest on the ground, the claws clittered on the pavement, and he could almost feel the rumble as the beast came for him."

I put a hand over my mouth to stifle a gasp, but Terrence didn't seem to have any such hesitation. He moaned like a trained mourner in a soap opera, and Ralphie slapped a hand over his gaping mouth as he leaned forward in expectation. Danny had all of us in the grip of his story, and he knew it. He continued to weave his tale as I tempered my excitement with the reminder to listen for the approach of Coach Tyson. "The handle, which had been unlocked when Markie had come in, was as unyielding as the walls around him, and as the beast came closer and closer, Markie felt terror growing inside him, threatening to overtake him."

I perked up my ears, having heard a noise on this side of the veil. Was it Coach Tyson looking for four missing students? Was it Coach Lianna coming to get something from the equipment shed? Was it a monster like the one in Danny's story that was stalking us from amidst the dusty football pads? Who could say?

"The monster leaned down over him, its breath hot against his ear as it spoke. "I told you what would happen if I caught you in my lair again. Now, I am prepared to make good on that promise." Something wet fell on his shoulder, the spittle dribbling down as it prepared to rip his head off."

We were all leaning in, our heads close enough to be clonked together like the three stooges, just waiting for the thrust.

"When the door opened suddenly, Markie fell into the hallway. Coach Blaskawhit looked shocked, and Markie crawled behind his legs as he looked into the equipment room, the creature nowhere to be seen."

As if on cue, the door came open and Coach Tyson poked his head in with a dramatic "ah ha." He acted like he had caught four weasels in his hen house, but he couldn't have been that surprised to find us here. We met here in the equipment shed every chance we got, and we were constantly ditching gym class to tell spooky stories. "I thought I'd find you four here. If you intend to finish your mile in the allotted time, you better hurry. There's twenty minutes left in class, and I think it's going to take every bit you've got to finish in that time."

I squinted owlishly as I came out, the sun very bright after being in the depths of the equipment shed, and rolled my eyes as I saw Justin and his friends, Ryan and Frank, sitting on the grass by the finish line. Coach Tyson probably hadn't even noticed we were missing until those three had finished their laps, and now we had less than twenty minutes to run a mile. Coach shouted for us to get a move on, so we got a move on and started beating feet.

As we ran, I asked Danny if he had meant for the Coach to burst in in his story.

"Absolutely. You didn't really think I would let the monster get Markie, did ya?"

I had, but I didn't say as much.

"Sucks he found us. I had a great story planned for today too."

Danny laughed, and it made me feel a little angry.

"What's so funny?"

"Nothing personal, but your stories kinda blow."

I slowed a little, not quite wanting to understand him, before speeding up to catch up with the group.

"What do you mean? My stories are as good as yours."

They weren't, and I knew they weren't, but my pride was hurt, and I wanted to vent.

Danny looked like he was going to answer, but Terrence beat him to it.

"No way, dude. Danny's stories are the best. Your stories sound like something that wouldn't make it on a kids horror site."

It wasn't what Terrence said that got me, he was too stupid to chew gum and walk, but it was the little nod that Danny gave in return that really rankled me.

I was still thinking about it as Ralphie and I rode the bus on the way home, Ralphie trying to cheer me up.

"Come on, buck up. Danny isn't such hot crap."

"Stupid Danny," I groused, doodling on my pad as I sulked, "Thinks he's such hot crap just because he's in Mrs. Hurckamer's Creative Writing class, just because Mrs. Hurckamer invites him to the eight-grade writing club after school. I can write just as good as he can."

Raphie was watching me doodle over my shoulder, raising an eyebrow as the picture took shape.

"Who's this fella you're drawing here?"

I looked down, not paying attention to what I was doodling, and almost started. I had drawn a large, muscled man, his face bulbous and ugly. One eye bulged from his skull while the other seemed too deep in the socket. His cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk looking for nuts for winter. He had a hump, one shoulder higher than the other, and his arms ended not in hands, but in rounded tumors that had scabrous bulges on them that looked to be trickling puss or something. He had no fingers, no knuckles, just those big round bulges at the ends of his arms.

"Billy," I said, absentminded again though it was from the shock of this creature.

"Billy?" asked Ralphie, the bus jouncing him as it took off.

"Billy...Gumballs," I said, drawing a pair of overalls onto him. I added large, gum rubber boots without socks and a few more veins on his rounded not hands. I drew an undershirt but erased it. It didn't seem right, and it looked better without it, "He was bullied in high school for being different, and they called him Billy Gumballs because his cheeks bulged like he was chewing too much gum. When he was snubbed by his crush for the school dance, he murdered the kids at the dance and disappeared before the police arrived. The school was abandoned after that, and now the local kids think the place is haunted. They're right, because Billy still lives there he kills anyone who comes into his school."

Ralphie listened, nodding along as the story came together. As the bus rumbled away from the school and towards our street, I told him how four middle school kids had gone into the old school on a dare, and how each of them had run afoul of Billy Gumballs. Only the last kid had survived, and Billy had let him go so he could tell his story and people would be afraid of him. The kids died in the usual horror movie ways, but mostly they were crushed by the heavy tumor hands of Billy Gumballs. I illustrated some as I talked, and as the bus stopped at Ralphie's house, he smacked my arm and told me I had written a real great story there.

"What story?" I asked.

All I had been doing was doodling and talking.

"Your Billy Gumballs story. You should tell it tomorrow, I bet Danny wouldn't say it blowed."

I realized he was right, and what's more, I realized I could do one better than just telling it. As I got home, I lay on the couch and started drawing it out. I could make a horror comic out of it, something that even Danny couldn't do, and then I could impress him. That would show Danny whose stories blow.

I drew the last couple of panels as I lay in bed that night, and when I tucked it into my backpack,

I couldn't wait for school the next day.

I worked on the cover for it as I rode the bus to school the next morning, and when I stepped off, I was so excited to show it to Danny.

I was excited, right up until I ran into Justin, Ryan, and Frank.

"Whatcha got there, Nerd?" Justin said, seeing the hand-drawn comic under my arm.

"Nothin'," I said hastily, trying to get past the trio.

Justin and his friends, aside from being good at gym, were pretty big bullies in my grade, and when Ryan deftly took the comic from under my arm, I cawed and told him to give it back.

"Billy Gumballs?" he said, tossing it to Justin as they played keep away, "What the hell is this?"

"It's a school project," I lied, trying to get it back from them, "Come on, give it back before you wreck it!"

Justin opened it up, thumbing through the pages as he deftly avoided me, "Huh, not too bad, for a baby," he said, tearing one of the pages in half and letting it fall to the ground.

You can probably guess what happened after that.

By the time the bell rang, I was left on my knees in the hallway, trying not to cry as I salvaged the pages of my comic.

It was ruined, wrecked beyond repair, and as I sat in homeroom and seethed, I knew just what I would do.

I'd make another one, but instead of four friends going to find Billy, it would be four bullies.

I'm not sure why, there was no reason to do it, but as I remade the comic, Danny became the leader of the bullies. He hadn't done anything worse than offering honest criticism, but I couldn't help but think of him as responsible for this too. Without Danny, I would have never drawn the comic. Without Danny, it would never have existed to be destroyed in the first place. No one survived this time. They were all killed by Billy Gumballs, and as I finished the last page, I felt a weird surge course over the hairs on my arms.

It reminded me of something my Grandma had said.

It reminded me of having a goose walk over my grave.

When the bell rang, I found my friends by the stairwell, waiting for me before we went into English. Ralphie nudged Danny, who was standing off and looking guilty, and when he walked up he rubbed the back of his neck as he apologized. I was sure that Ralphie had put him up to it, but the longer it went on, the more genuine it seemed. "I'm sorry, I didn't know what I said affected you like that. I really didn't mean to hurt your feelings. Ralphie says you've been working on something cool. I'd love to see it if you want me to."

I wanted to say something, but I was dumbstruck.

Suddenly, the comic in my hand felt like an accusation and the last thing I wanted to do was hand it to Danny.

"It's not quite done yet," I said, pushing it behind my back, "I don't wanna show it to you until it's perfect."

Danny nodded, clearly wanting to see but still feeling guilty for what he had done yesterday.

"That's cool, I'd still be glad to look at it when you get it done. Ralphie has been talking about this Billy Gumballs all through homeroom. He sounds pretty cool."

I filled Danny in on some of the details, slipping the comic into my bag as we walked to class. I would redraw it later, I decided. I was a so-so storyteller, but I was good at drawing and I knew I could make another one before the end of the day. I'd just draw Justin and his friends getting smashed up by Billy. That would be fine. Danny had apologized, but I was still mad that those bullies had wrecked up my original comic. I doodled in English and then did some more in Math class. By social studies, I was getting close to completing it, and as the lunch bell rang, I put the finishing touches on it, yet again.

It was weird, though.

When I got done, I didn't get that same feeling I had gotten from the one I’d made earlier.

This time it just felt normal, like it always did when I completed a drawing.

I shook it off, figuring it was just nerves, and took it to the cafeteria to show my friends.

We spent the lunch period marveling at the intricate ways that Billy Gumballs smashed and bashed the three boys who had made our lives a living hell since kindergarten. Danny laughed more than he looked afraid, but when he tapped the comic with the back of his hand and declared it to be the best story I had ever written, I felt pretty proud of myself. The guilt I had for the one that was hidden in my backpack was gone, and I felt like maybe we could begin to get past this.

When a scream erupted from the hallway outside the cafeteria, we all ran to see what had happened.

It was Vanessa Franks, and she was pointing to the crumpled form of Justin's friend, Fred. He was leaning against one of the lockers, his head little more than a pulpy melon. We would learn later that his skull had been caved in, the bone shattered like an egg. Vanessa had been on her phone, not really paying attention to where she was going, and slipped in the pool of blood that was forming from beneath him. That was why she had screamed.

She had slipped and looked up into the ruined face of her classmate and nearly lost her mind.

They came and took the body away, but all of us were in the gymnasium by that point. They had moved all the students there and locked the school down while they searched for the killer. They felt pretty confident that they had to be somewhere in the building, and they would have to have a lot of blood on them after what they had done. Beating Fred to death would have left quite a lot of damage to them as well, and the teachers and police had interviewed most of the students to see if they could narrow down a suspect.

My friends might be chattering about the murder, but I was on pins and needles. They had forgotten about my comic, and thank God for that. The one they had seen, however, wasn't the one I was worried about. It was the comic in my bag that made me afraid. If the cops found that comic, I would have a lot of questions to answer, and they would probably be answered in a little room at the police station.

There was a picture in that comic of Fred with his head smashed against a locker, and it looked very similar to the scene upstairs.

Fred had been the first victim, and when Justine turned to Danny and asked what they were going to do now, Danny had told them they would find who had done this and put him down like a dog.

"It's weird, isn't it?" Ralphie said, bringing me out of my contemplation.

"What's weird?"

"You drew a comic about those bullies getting killed, and then one of them gets his head caved in."

I agreed that it was pretty weird, reflecting that I was glad the one I had shown them had featured Fred getting thrown down some stairs.

"You," Ralphie started, wetting his lips as if not sure how to begin, "You didn't have anything to do with that, did you?"

I wanted to deny it right away, but I was having trouble forming a good argument. Of course I didn't have anything to do with it. How could he even think such a thing? Just because I had drawn something similar, didn't mean I had anything to do with this.

"How could I, Ralphie? I was in the cafeteria with you guys when it happened, remember?"

Ralphie nodded, but the look he gave me was still pretty hard.

They put us all on buses and sent us home not long later. We were assured that school would be back in session tomorrow, but we weren't so sure. They still hadn't found the killer, not a trace of him, and Fred's parents were distraught. The bus Ralphie and I had been on had driven past his mother as we pulled off and she was shaking with tears as she sat on a bench outside the office.

Seeing that made me feel guilty all over again, but I wasn't sure why.

Ralphie didn't talk much on the ride home, and the goodbye he gave me when he climbed off was decidedly muted. I wondered if he really thought I had done this, and as my stop came up, I decided I wanted a nap instead of TV. I tossed my backpack down when I got home and went to lie down on the couch, but my nap wouldn't last long.

When the phone rang a little bit later, I got up and answered it groggily. It was Thursday, so Mom wouldn't get off till five, and Dad wouldn't be in till after bedtime. I had the house to myself till five thirty, but I wished they had been here. I needed to talk to someone about this, about the guilt I was feeling for some reason, and I just knew my parents would help me out.

I found Terrence on the other end of the phone, and he sounded hysterical.

"They found Ryan's body this afternoon at the school!"

I sat up straighter, not sure if I was awake or still dreaming.

"What do you mean?" I asked, "He was on a bus home, same as the rest of us."

"I know," Terrence said, "but my Dad called me about ten minutes ago all spazy. He said that one of the officers had been searching for the guy under the bleachers in the gym when he had found Ryan all crumpled up under there. He was beaten to a pulp, and he wanted to know if I had locked the doors and was being safe. I told him I was, and he told me to go upstairs and lock myself in my room until my mom got home. I'm scared, I don't know what's going on, but it sounds like kids at our school are getting killed."

No, I thought, as the phone slipped out of my hand.

Not just any kids from our school, kids that I had drawn in a comic dying in the ways they had been found dead.

In the comic, the one I had hid from my friends, Ryan had been dragged under the bleachers and the group had found him later beaten to a pulp. A literal pulp. In the comic, they only knew it was him by his sneakers since the rest of his body was a bloody pile of meat.

"Terrence, does your dad think they have any idea who's doing this?" I hedged, trying to find out if I was a suspect for some reason.

"Not a clue, but the police are really scratching their heads."

I hung up on Terrence and hovered over the number for Danny's house. I was hesitant to call him, wanting to worry him even less than I wanted to admit to having written this suddenly relevant comic. I dithered for a few before thumbing his name, listening to it ring before his mother grabbed it on the fourth one. She told me that Danny was at the pizzeria on Sherman and she supposed he had forgotten his phone. She asked if I wanted to leave a message, but I told her that was fine and I was going to meet him at the pizzeria anyway.

We hung up and I grabbed my backpack as I headed out.

My timing must have been impeccable because I caught him just as his pie arrived at the table.

"Hey, you feel like a slice too?" he asked, inviting me to sit.

"Na," I said, taking the comic out of the bag, "I need to come clean with you. I could overlook the first one as an accident, but after they found Ryan dead too, I don't think I can overlook it. This was the comic I did earlier today, something I wrote while I was mad at Justin and his friends."

Danny looked at the cover, opening it up and leafing through it. He raised an eyebrow when he saw himself leading the bullies. As he read, though, something strange happened. Far from being horrified, he began to laugh. When he came to Justin's death, the bully decapitated with a single punch, his head falling down the stairs and into the boiler room, Danny wiped an eye and looked at me in disbelief. He seemed confused that I wasn't laughing.

"Oh, come on. Sure, it's scary, but it's also so over the top that it's almost cartoonish."

"Two people have died in exactly the way I drew this. I am only one, besides you, who knows it exists, and I can't help but think it's a little bit serious. They'll put me in jail for this. They'll use this to put me in the electric chair down at Stragview! They'll think I murdered those kids!"

Danny shook his head, "There's no way you killed Fred. Ralphie and Terrence and I will attest to that. You were with us all through lunch, and I can't imagine that anyone would believe that a shrimp like you did that to Fred or Ryan." he said, holding open the book to the pages in question.

I was stunned, unsure what to do, and when he laughed again, I found myself laughing right along with him. How had I not seen this? They could testify that I hadn't been anywhere near either of those boys. The GPS on my phone could tell the police I had been at home all afternoon. There was no way to link me to any of this. I was safe. "Come on," Danny said, "Come hang out at my house till your mom gets home. Then I'll walk you home just to make sure that ole Billy Gumballs doesn't get you."

We laughed about it all the way to his house, cracking jokes as we talked about the character. Danny said he had some ideas for what Billy could do next, though we'd have to keep real people out of the story this time. We couldn't have the police trying to claim we were killing people through fiction, he said, and then both of us were laughing all over again.

As we came up the stairs to his room, I told him I was going to use the bathroom and I'd catch him up.

"Well, don't take too long. I'm gonna get some Dead By Daylight going so we can play co-op."

I said that sounded great, and we parted ways.

I was standing at the toilet when I suddenly remembered something. In the comic, Danny had gotten away in the end, but Billy had been waiting for him when he came home. He had come out of his closet, I reflected, and smashed his head after sneaking up on him from behind. I started to run to him, but I stopped as I zipped my pants, remembering what Danny had said. It was just a coincidence. Nothing like that happened. Heck, I thought as I flushed, I bet Justin was safe and sound at his house as I was thinking about this.

I shook my head as I let the water flow over my hands.

Such an idiot, I had gotten myself all worked up over nothing.

When I heard him scream from the room next door, I came tearing out of the bathroom as my flimsy hope fell apart.

I came running into the room, my hands still dripping water, and that's when I saw him.

Danny was sitting at his desk, the controller in his hand, with his head collapsed into his chest. Someone had driven his head in like a nail, and the perpetrator was still standing behind him, looking at me guiltily as he turned towards the door. I thought I was dreaming, that I was hallucinating, but as we stood looking at each other, I had to come to terms with his realness.

His head was bald, his skin was pale, and his cheeks looked like a squirrel preparing for winter. He wore overalls without a shirt under them, and gum rubber boots that were black as pitch. His hands were bloody, covered in old and new blood, but even so, no one would mistake them for real hands. They were rounded, a pair of bulbous tumors that sat at the end of each wrist, and when he turned to run, I yelled for him to wait.

Instead, he jumped out the window and was gone.

No one has found Billy yet, but I think the police have finally decided I didn't have anything to do with it. They didn't care that I had written the comic, they didn't care how much I tried to turn myself in, all they wanted was to bring the killer of four children to justice. You didn't misread, Billy had killed Justin before he got Danny. They found him in the school too, his head completely parted from his body.

I don't know what to do now.

Perhaps, if I am the one who created Billy Gumballs, there's some way that I can destroy him as well.