/r/Wholesomenosleep

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This is for scary stories with wholesome endings.

'conducive to or suggestive of good health and physical well-being.'

Stories that can be scary but have a nice twist to it. The nice twist can still be scary!

This sub is for scary stories with wholesome endings!

Wholesome: “conducive to or suggestive of good health, physical, emotional or moral well-being.”

Stories that are scary but have a nice twist. The nice twist can still be scary! Stories here have a horror element and end reasonably happily.

General Guidelines:

  • Please link or crosspost your favorite wholesome horror here! Unless you are the original author, please don’t post another user’s work as a text post. If you are the original author, please feel free to link, crosspost, or text post your story here!


  • If a story is under 6 months old, please leave a comment letting the author know that their story has been linked. They’re sure to appreciate it! If an author posts their own story, any duplicates will be removed. Please don’t let that stop you from continuing to post links to wholesome horror stories on our sub!


  • Just because this sub is called “WholesomeNoSleep" doesn't mean that the stories have to be from /r/nosleep. /r/DarkTales, /r/libraryofshadows, /r/shortscarystories, /r/cryosleep, /r/SLEEPSPELL, /r/thrillsleep, /r/thelongsleep, /r/mothergrues, etc., are perfectly acceptable sources. Original stories are also more than welcome. However, all links must lead to Reddit posts. Links to outside sites will be removed.


  • Our content rules are similar to /r/nosleep's. Posts must be a story where "something happens and then something else happens as a result". Posts must contain at least some horror. This is a sub for wholesome horror, after all. However, stories here do not have to adhere to no sleep’s plausibility rules. R-rated scenes are okay to a degree but no rape/ abuse/ pedophilia/ necrophilia/ bestiality, etc. Any excessively graphic or detailed torture/abuse/sex scenes will cause your story to be removed. Please use your best judgement or ask the mods before posting.


  • If your story is removed for breaking a rule, please do not repost it without working with the mod team in modmail to make it meet our guidelines first. Repeated reposting, whether it's because your story was removed or to gain more attention, or repeated rule-breaking posts, will result in a warning, and may result in a ban if continued.


    • Posts must be formatted so that they are readable. Please, no giant walls of text and no text boxes. If you are having trouble, shoot us a modmail. We are happy to help out!

    Thank you for your sweet and spooky stories!!

    Comment Guidelines:

    • The /r/nosleep immersion rule doesn't apply here. You don't need to "believe" the story to post a comment. But please, be friendly! Better yet, be helpful, wholesome, and kind!


  • Story critiques are welcome, but only constructive criticism! Stick to ideas, themes, compliments, and asking the authors about their story inspirations rather than giving out grammar tips and you’ll do just fine!


  • Before posting or commenting, please read our FAQ.


  • Have questions? Wanna discuss your favorite stories or other "wholesome horror" topics, or share wholesome horror memes? Visit our companion sub, /r/WholesomeNoSleepOOC!


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    My friends and I found a body stain in an empty house… then the stain followed me home.

    I’ve never been much for excitement. I’m the sort who likes to get invited out but always volunteers to be the designated driver, relieved because it means I get to stay sober and serious. No one expects the DD to go dancing on tables or telling wild stories. I can be shy, reserved plain Jane. I keep my nose in books and out of everyone else’s business. That was why it surprised everyone—especially me—when I agreed to join Miki and Shania in urban exploring that day. Miki is my cousin, and Shania is her best friend. I guess I agreed to go because I was feeling a bit stung over the fact that my crush, Yasmin, who is gorgeous and has a voice that could call angels, commented to friends that I am “a bit boring.” And so I guess I just wanted not to be boring. To have, for once, a story worthy of telling over a drink.

    But when we got to the house, I felt uneasy.

    The whole neighborhood was sad, really. A story of American prosperity turned to poverty and abandonment… entire streets with only one or two houses still occupied, the rest withering away with boarded windows in overgrown lots. Miki picked out the house at random, saying it looked “creepy.”

    I don’t know if it was any creepier than any other sad building in that cul-de-sac. The house had yellow siding stained by weather and time, curtains hanging in the cracked upstairs windows, a short flight of stairs leading to the front door. The lower windows were all boarded, and the door, of course, locked—but while I was ready to give up almost immediately, Shania’s eyes sparkled at the challenge. She circled around to the back of the house, and a triumphant yell brought Miki and me following.

    The backdoor, though boarded, had been broken into at some point over the years, and it swung open easily.

    “Are we sure it’s safe?” I wondered.

    Shania just grinned. “You gonna stay here if it’s not?” she asked, and plunged into the darkness.

    And that’s how it was inside. Dark. Shania and Miki flicked on headlamps and flashlights. I only had my phone light, so Shania pulled a spare flashlight out of her backpack for me.

    “Girl, it’s just an empty house with old stuff.” She squeezed my arm in encouragement. “Nothing to be scared of. Unless you believe in ghosts.” And she winked and laughed—a bold peel of laughter that lifted my spirits and made me jealous all at the same time.

    I didn’t know how a person could laugh in the face of fear like that. I didn’t really believe in ghosts. I didn’t believe—but was still scared of them. Was that pathetic? I smiled weakly and thanked her for the flashlight. Miki told me to “quit being a pussy” and squeezed in past me, and all three of us entered the living room and looked around.

    It looked exactly like every old person’s living room. The carpeted floor was a dark beige and stained with coffee here and there. A plush armchair sat facing an ancient television, the kind that looks like a boxy cube, not a modern flatscreen. I almost expected to see antennae sitting on top of the old thing. Bookshelves and hutches held books, knickknacks, cups and glasses and many years’ worth of dust. Little ceramic figurines of children and pigs with wings and big-eyed frogs and all sorts of odds and ends looked out at us. It was cluttered, and a lot of it was broken, the wallpaper peeling and mold streaking the walls.

    Just a forgotten, lonely old house.

    “Daaang!” Shania picked up a figurine from one of the shelves. “Look at this stuff! Super vintage. Bet there’s, like, collectibles and shit we could take.”

    “You wanna bring some back?” suggested Miki.

    I wondered aloud if that counted as stealing. Both girls looked at me and I shut my mouth.

    Shania looked around, gesturing with her flashlight, and said, “Stealing from who?”

    She had a point. I couldn’t really argue. Still… “I dunno, just feels kind of disrespectful,” I mumbled.

    “More disrespectful than leaving it all here to rot?” Shania tucked a glass-eyed frog into her pocket. “At least if we take some, someone’s getting use out of them.”

    Miki took out a bag and began filling it with some of the bowls and candleholders she thought might be crystal (I was pretty sure they were just glass, though). Shania was more interested in the figurines. I looked around, unsure what to take, and finally, my flashlight illuminated a ceramic lovebirds sculpture. I don’t know why I was drawn to it. It seemed handmade. The glaze wasn’t perfect, and the wings were a little clumsy. I imagined it might have been a gift, not storebought. Somehow the idea of a handmade gift, passed down and forgotten and then recovered, moved me. So I wrapped it up in some napkins and put it in my bag. I was still looking at the shelves, moving into the kitchen with its dirty and torn linoleum, when a scream made me jump.

    Back in the living room, toward the rear of the house, Miki was shining her light on something, Shania with her, both of them whispering. Then Shania bent toward the floor.

    Approaching, I saw that they were looking at the staircase leading up to the second floor bedrooms. The thought of going up there filled me with dread, and my gut bunched into knots. But my entire stomach seemed to overturn itself when I saw what Shania’s light was shining on.

    A dark stain, just below the bottom steps. A person-shaped stain. There was the head. There were two arms.

    “Okaaay… that’s… really freaky,” said Miki.

    Shania, kneeling and grim-faced, was tracing her flashlight along the outline. “You know what happens sometimes with old folks, they die and no one finds them for awhile… the body just lies there decomposing… this is probably where she died.”

    “’She’?” I echoed.

    “Or he. But all these figurines and stuff make me think grandma, not gramps. Bet if we go upstairs, we’ll find floral dresses hanging in the closets.”

    “I’m not going upstairs,” I announced.

    “Me either,” declared Miki.

    Shania wanted to go. Carefully avoiding stepping on the body stain, she ascended the stairs. From up there, she called out to us about things she found. “Bathroom is a mess, yuck.” “Yep, lots of flower print.” Stuff like that. Finally she returned, a dusty frame in hand, and offered it to Miki. It was a photograph of an elderly woman and a woman and a boy. “Bet that’s the old woman who lived here, and her family.”

    “I wonder why they didn’t check on her when she fell down the stairs,” said Miki.

    “Who knows? Maybe they’re dead, too. Maybe they live out of state.” Shania shrugged. “Look at this neighborhood. Been emptied out a long time ago. Chances are wherever her family lives, it’s not close by. Come on—let’s get out of here. Thought I heard something up there.”

    “Heard something?” The hairs on my neck prickled. “Like what?”

    “Like her ghost, gonna yell at us for stealing,” said Miki, and laughed. Then she and Shania raced to see who could get out first, pushing me aside. I cried out, nearly falling on that stain—oh God! I almost touched it!

    “Guys, wait!” I yelled, running after them.

    Halfway out of the room, I’d swear I heard a sound. A voice. Calling to me. And I screamed, heart hammering, my voice ripping from my lungs in a shriek of utter terror as I rushed after the others and out to the car.

    ***

    They wouldn’t stop teasing me the whole drive back.

    “Your scream could’ve woke up the dead!” Shania exclaimed.

    “Seriously I thought something got you,” put in Miki.

    I didn’t tell them how I thought I heard an old woman’s voice. They’d just laugh harder at me.

    Miki dropped me off back home, and Shania told me she hoped I had fun and wasn’t scared too much. I smiled weakly and waved good-bye, and retreated up to my bedroom in my parents’ house. I’m saving for enough to move out, but for now I pay a small amount of rent while I work at my uncle’s shop running the register.

    I felt ready to cocoon myself for a good week. This would make a good story to tell when I joined everyone for drinks… but it’d be awhile before I’d be up for it.

    I put the ceramic birds on my windowsill, trying to decide if they were cute or just creepy.

    A shower took off the last of the grime and the chills, and by dinnertime, I was feeling excited enough to share what I’d done with my friends. I snapped a pic of the birds and texted to the group chat with Yasmin and the others, explaining that I’d found the birds in an abandoned house and even seen the body stain where the old woman who owned them died. Lots of exclamations and emojis from everyone in response. Yasmin texted: Whoa!! Damn girl, you gotta invite me next time!

    I hadn’t been planning a next time. The thought of exploring more terrifying places made my pulse escalate (and not in a good, fluttery way). But if it impressed Yasmin… if it made me more interesting and less boring…

    Anyway. I tucked my phone away and went to bed feeling, for once, like someone who had stories to tell. Not the dull girl who looked after the shop and was so forgettably plain the only name she could possibly have was Jane. No, I’d become someone else. Brave. Exciting.

    I had glorious dreams of dancing on tables at the center of parties—but something jolted me awake in the dead of night. I lay there, curled under my sheets, every hair on end.

    From somewhere downstairs came a soft wail. A moan.

    Oh God… the old woman!

    The moaning continued. I pulled the pillow over my head and whimpered, too terrified to move. How did her wailing not wake anybody else? She was so loud!

    I don’t know how long I lay there, wishing the wailing would stop, before I drifted to sleep again.

    When I woke, sunlight streamed through my window. My recollection of the previous night was hazy—I assumed the wailing must have been a dream. I even laughed at myself. Here I was, plain Jane, giving myself nightmares because I was such a homebody that the slightest adventure had me spooked. I headed downstairs for breakfast—

    And froze.

    On the wooden floorboards at the bottom of the stairs was a stain. The same stain we’d seen in the empty house.

    “MOM!” I shrilled.

    My mom rushed out of the kitchen. “Jane? What is it?”

    I pointed to the foot of the stairs, right where she was standing.

    Mom looked down. Stepped back, accidentally trampling the stain as she examined the floor and then looked back up at me, questioning. “What? Honey, what is it?”

    “The stain,” I whimpered.

    “Stain?” she echoed. Dropped down to her knees, peering close. “Where?”

    She couldn’t see it. She was right on it, and couldn’t see it.

    “Um… nevermind,” I said.

    Hurrying back to my room, I snatched my phone. Came back and took a picture of the stain to send to Miki and Shania. Except—it didn’t show up. I could see it on the floor. See it right there with my own eyes. But when I tried snapping a pic with my phone… nothing on the screen.

    “Sweetie?” Mom’s brow knit in concern. “Everything all right?”

    “Ummm… yeah. Yeah, just… yeah.” I smiled feebly.

    Having lost my appetite, I went to work without breakfast. After my shift when I came home, the stain was still there—if anything, darker than before. But Mom and Dad went up and down the stairs without seeing it. I went upstairs and got the birds. Considered shattering them and scattering the pieces, but as I held up the little ceramic sculpture ready to drop it on my floor, pangs of guilt had me setting it carefully back down. I should return it to the house, I thought. Until then, I wrapped it up and tucked it deep into my closet. Out of sight out of mind.

    Hopefully, once it was back in its place, the stain would disappear.

    ***

    The moans persisted. Every night. Always around the same time. The stain persisted as well. As for Miki and Shania—they refused to take me back to the house to return the birds. They didn't want to go back, and didn’t believe me about any of it, especially after Miki came to my parents' home and couldn’t see the stain. She asked if I was just making it up for attention.

    I’d have been angry. Furious at my cousin for throwing such an accusation in my face—if I hadn’t been so terrified in that moment because just behind her stood an old woman.

    ***

    Things got worse. The old woman appeared randomly in my house. Always near the stairs. Sometimes, I’d see her come out of a room. Sometimes, she’d be hovering by the window, looking confused. Other times she was looking right at me.

    One night, I arrived home after midnight. I’d been out with friends, doing my usual shift as the DD. No one really noticed how morose I was. My thoughts that night were on Yasmin and my social situation and wondering if I would ever break out of my own shell—when as I headed upstairs, a cold and clammy hand gripped my ankle.

    Shrieking, I ripped free. My shrill scream woke my mom and dad, who rushed out, Dad with his fists up, ready to fight whatever intruder was apparently murdering his daughter. I rushed into my room and slammed the door, sobbing.

    When I came out, there was no one there. Nothing. Just my parents looking at me, concerned.

    They asked me if I’d be willing to see a psychiatrist. I thought maybe a medium would be better, and I found one online who did a teleconference with me. She recommended the same thing my instinct had told me to do initially: destroy the ceramic birds. I’d taken a personal item, she said. Something that meant something to the deceased. If this object was what had brought the ghost into my home, destroying it would free me.

    ***

    Next day, when I returned from work, I retrieved the birds from upstairs. I’d decided that, rather than destroy them (which seemed disrespectful), I’d start by returning them to the house where I found them, even if it meant I had to go back there alone. But I’d just left my room and barely reached the bottom of the steps when—

    Cold fingers clasped my ankle.

    I shrieked, jerking free and rushing for the door. The ghost! Trying to grab me! As I reached the front door, I spun back, glaring over my shoulder. I could see her, now. The ghost of the old woman. She lay at the bottom of the steps, her fingers curled into claws and her face a grimacing snarl.

    Her mouth opened in a wail.

    I stood there for a long time, staring. And then I came back over to the stairs. And when I knelt down, she grabbed my arm—so tight! Her icy hand left strange imprints on my skin. I held the birds down to her and with my other hand, clasped hers. I don’t know what gave me the courage to suddenly do this. But now, I heard what it was she’d been wailing, over and over again.

    “Help!” she groaned.

    “I’m here,” I said. Her hand squeezed tighter. “I’m sorry I ran away before. I don’t know who gave you these birds, but they must have loved you very much. I’m sure they wish they could’ve been there for you.” She was listening now, her mouth still a grimace of pain. I’m not religious, and I don’t know any prayers. So I just kept saying, “I’m here. You’re not alone. Here are the birds. Here’s my hand…”

    I don’t really know what else I said. My vision was blurry, and I didn’t realize that tears were streaming down my cheeks until I blinked and squeezed my eyes shut and reached up to wipe them clear, and when I looked down again, the old woman was gone. I was alone. Just me sitting there at the bottom of the steps with some dusty ceramic birds in my palm.

    The stain was gone.

    ***

    The medium told me I should get rid of the birds anyway. But I didn’t. I went upstairs and put them back on my windowsill. They sit there, still. I’m keeping them for someone who shouldn’t have been forgotten.

    20 Comments
    2024/02/24
    14:51 UTC

    258

    Don't Ever Change

    The day we exchanged yearbooks for signing was a bit hectic, and I hadn’t even noticed Stephanie had signed it until I was at home flipping through. The message baffled me at the time. Don’t ever change. I wasn’t under the illusion that I’d treated her anything but badly, especially through high school. She was an outcast, a weirdo, and the insults and taunts came to my lips whenever she was nearby. Not to mention a few pranks that, now that I’m older, I’m ashamed to even recount.

    At first it was straightforward, devastating news - I’d been rejected from Yale. My entire life had gone off track in an instant. A clerical error, they’d explained with an apology, and they just couldn’t admit me this year. There was no room. They hadn’t even bothered to call, they just sent another letter, which just threw salt on the wound. My future was in tatters, I felt, unable to start school in the fall.

    My friends, of course, came to the rescue and suggested taking a gap year, something common in Europe, and travel a bit before reapplying next year. It tempered the depression bearing down on me and I went to my parents with the request, already making a list of countries I would love to visit, things I’d like to do.

    Then came the second hit - my father’s business went under, so horrifically that they declared bankruptcy. We had enough money to keep the house, and my father got a new job with the help of a friend to keep our heads above the water, but money to travel was no longer an option. I recall sequestering myself in my room for 90% of the day for ages, watching reruns on Netflix and trying not to imagine my friends going off to college in the fall without me.

    It was summer, though, and college wouldn’t have started for months anyway, so I eventually did what I always did. I dragged myself out of the depression and realized I still had what I’d had before. I had hangouts with friends and parties and shopping and the volunteer work I did at the senior center and the homeless shelter. I figured that last part could be a great addition to my applications for the next school year for Yale, that even when something had gone wrong, I’d continued to give back to my community.

    But when summer came to an end and time went by, little things started to throw up red flags. Most of my friends went to schools out of state, but those who stayed nearby started to ignore me, almost like they were forgetting I existed. I’d text them and they’d reply hours later, or days later, saying they’d invite me to the next party but never doing so. I put it down to the big change of college for them, even as I felt left behind, everyone else moving on with their lives and I was stuck fast in quicksand.

    Trying to keep myself busy, I decided I could try to take a few fun classes, the home ec type. I started calling up places for classes on cooking or gardening or pottery, but they’d always ‘just filled up’ or ‘definitely not for beginners’ or something like that. The hopeless feeling inside me grew with every passing day and the worst part that my parents didn’t seem to notice. I was still a teenager, I didn’t expect or want big, emotional conversations about myself with them, but it was like they didn’t see that I was suffering, stuck in this rut.

    Then there was the flashing neon sign that crash landed in front of me. My hair. I’d always had long blonde hair, since middle school, and in a midlife crisis sort of way, I decided to cut it into a pixie and do some blue streaks. I called my hairdresser, but they couldn’t find an appointment for me. Any appointment. I called another one of a similar caliber, same thing. Over and over and over. An itch started to form in the back of my mind that something was wrong in my world. But I didn’t fully realize it until, in tears, I went to the bathroom with scissors and tried to cut my hair myself.

    They wouldn’t cut, appearing sharp but as useless as a toddler’s plastic toy. My blonde hair was permanent.

    I spent the next hour crying on my bed, my mind in a tornado of confusion and fear and despair. And as I lay there, makeup smeared on my face from my tears, fear struck me hard in the chest at a realization. I leapt from my bed, grabbing my yearbook and flicking quickly to Stephanie’s photo, where she’d signed it.

    Don’t ever change.

    I dropped the book like it had burned me, my breath catching in my throat. We’d all joked about her being a witch, knowing that her mother ran that herbal shop downtown and sold supplies to the magical community, though in the back of my mind I’d doubted it. It felt too cliché, the goth girl having psychic or magical abilities, like if she’d been that girl, she would’ve gone in the other direction with her appearance to stop the taunting.

    But what if I’d been wrong? What if she’d cursed me? Cursed me to live a life like a statue, never changing, never going anywhere, to well and truly have peaked and then plateaued in high school?

    Pulling out my phone, I realized I still had her number, put in a group project with her against my will a few years back. I dialed it, pacing as it rang, not even knowing what I was going to say.

    “Yeah?” came the answer.

    I froze mid-step. “Stephanie?”

    “Yeah, who’s this?”

    Of course she’d deleted my number. What possible reason would she have for wanting to stay in touch with her high school bully? “Jennifer. Geraghty.”

    A sigh rattled the line with static. “And what brought you to call me this evening, Jenny?” she asked, a nickname I’d dumped in the trash once I reached middle school.

    Swallowing hard, I slowly sat down on my bed. “I can’t…do anything.” I hesitated, but she didn’t fill the silence. “My life is stuck. I can’t do anything. I can’t change. Just like your message in the yearbook. Did you…did you curse me?”

    “I’m surprised you figured it out so quickly.”

    At that, an unexpected fury churned in my chest and I shot to my feet. “Why?” I shouted. “This is my life. What, am I supposed to spend the next sixty years living at home? Why would you do this to me?”

    “Because I wanted to,” she said. The simple explanation left me slack-jawed and silent in shock. “You tormented me for years. I was close to suicidal for some of it, though I doubt you have an ounce of care for that in you. You just liked to jab me with knives. So, I decided not to take it anymore. I mean, this is pretty advanced stuff, this spell, I wasn’t even sure it would work.”

    “It was just high school!” I told her. “For Christ’s sake, you’re going to let me suffer like this forever?”

    “This isn’t something I can reverse,” she chuckled.

    My eyes widened. “What?” I breathed. “No, there has to be a way-”

    “You have everything you need,” Stephanie told me. “You have a great life, loving parents, you’re smart, gorgeous, you make friends really easily and you wield your power over the ones you can ostracize because you’re superior to them.”

    “I’m not…superior, I just-”

    “There are worse things I could’ve done to you,” she growled. “You have no idea. It could’ve bounced back at me, damaged me, but it still would’ve been so worth it.” The comment made my muscles tense and the hair on the back of my neck rise. “You have a better life than just about everyone else, and you chose to use it to lord over the rest of us. Well, congratulations. You’re guaranteed to have that for life now.”

    “I don’t…” I couldn’t figure out what to say.

    “Don’t call me again, Jennifer.”

    With that, she hung up the phone, the telltale beep beep beep sounding in my ear, leaving me stunned. I slowly lowered the phone, wandering over to my bed and sitting down on it.

    There were options that quickly came to mind, of course. I started researching the spell she’d done, determined to find another witch to undo it, but there was nothing to be found. There really was no undo button. Days turned into weeks, my research online and in the library and then eventually going to witches for help, who all but laughed in my face.

    At that point, I needed to busy myself. Whether my life was frozen in time or not, Stephanie had been right; I had everything I needed and most of what I wanted. So, I started moving forward again, if in no way but time. My parents didn’t seem worried at all about my lack of advancement, my ignoring the months as they passed like milestones meant nothing to them anymore. They just reverted back to their happy old selves, seamlessly incorporating my once-again busy life back into theirs and supportive through it all.

    I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I tried to hold onto high school at first. I went to the football games and pep rallies as a ‘supportive alumni’, tutoring the kids in my favorite subjects, talked with teachers like they were old friends, but it wasn’t the same. Eventually I grew to dislike being there for the exact reasons I’d wanted to stay, that being, I’d wanted to stay as happy as I’d been before.

    The other paths available to me were community based. I did play tennis in high school, so I’d get together with my old tennis coach and rally a bit after practice. And I’d been playing piano for years, so I did that as well. But the most meaningful work, I realized slowly, was the volunteering I did.

    The work I did at the senior center started to take on new meaning since, without potential for a real life of my own, I was able to live vicariously through the lives already lived. So many of the residents had children who didn’t have the time or resources to care for them, even though they made sure they had the care they need. That meant visits were few and far between, and I started to notice the smiles in the faces of the elderly people I began to think of as friends. When I started to visit more often and became a recognizable face, they opened up more, and some of them had stories were incredible and I’d never have guessed, especially the oldest ones.

    My work at the homeless shelter increased as well. Some of it was tedious, since the money needed to come from somewhere and that meant a lot of paperwork, but I knew it was important. Every day I saw many of the same people, but also a lot of new faces. I learned more about homelessness and the causes and solutions which, I have to admit, I hadn’t been that interested in with my volunteering in high school, since it had mostly been about putting it on college applications.

    Coming in week after week, month after month, becoming friendly with those who needed our services, I was forced to start to see them as people. People who might be just as stuck as I am, except so much worse off. The hoops you had to jump through to get help of any kind in this country, whether mental health related or were physically disabled were near impossible sometimes. Even when all someone needed was just enough to get them on their feet, and I knew in my gut they could take it from there if they got that help, it was a struggle every step of the way.

    Of course, there was the other end of the spectrum. As the months continued to pass by, I became familiar with those who barely seemed able to lift a finger to help themselves, sleepwalking through life or acting as if it was a personal affront that we were full up for the night on beds. It was then that I started wondering what had brought them to where they were.

    The seniors I worked with told me of their lives that had come to a comfortable conclusion in the home they resided in, and I had heard so many of their stories at this point, but what of those society turned away from? How did they get to be miserable or hopeless or violent or broken? Were they just as stuck as I was, seeing no path forward, feeling like they were at the bottom of a hole?

    And how long had they been down that hole? Had there been an inciting incident, or was it just since they were my age, or younger, with nothing and no one there to hold their hand out and help them through life’s hard parts? Where would they have been if they’d grown up with my parents and their wealth? Stephanie had been right, I’d had everything I needed in life and more, and I realized I’d taken every single bit of it for granted. Worse, I’d acted as if it was deserved, as if the circumstances of my birth and the easy, well-paved road of life ahead of me was something I’d accomplished and every nasty thing I’d done to others, especially in high school, was my right.

    One night, just having arrived home after leaving the shelter when five p.m. had rolled around, my phone rang, and I didn’t recognize the phone number but answered anyway. Some of the shelter employees were from all over and still had their old numbers. “Hello?”

    “Hello, is this Ms. Geraghty?”

    “Yes, it is,” I replied, shutting my car door and walking up to the front door. “Are you from the shelter? I just clocked out at five.”

    “Ah, no, this is Josephine Martinez from Yale admissions.”

    The key halfway to the lock, I completely froze. A few seconds passed before I realized I should say something. “Oh, hi,” I managed.

    “I just wanted to give you a call and let you know that your admission will go through this fall, after what happened last year, if you’re still interested in attending. That stinks, the situation you were in with that error on our part. Has anything changed for you since then?”

    The question was so heavy and so striking that I was silent again for an uncomfortably long moment. “Yes, but… I mean, sort of, but I still definitely…want to go to Yale.”

    “All right. Well in that case, I’ll send you an email with all the pertinent details. The application still needs filling out again, just a formality, to make sure all your personal information is the same, etcetera. We look forward to having you.”

    “I-I look forward to being there,” I replied. As I hung up, I wondered if she’d noticed the odd, almost confused tone of my voice, but that thought slipped from my head as I slowly sat down on the bench on the front porch.

    Did Stephanie change her mind? Was there a way to reverse the spell and she’d just been messing with me, torturing me, never planning to make it a life sentence? Surely I could’ve found that out in my research, though. Everyone I’d found had said this one was irreversible. Could this be a taunt? Maybe this woman didn’t even work at Yale, maybe Stephanie was just getting off on making me hopeful only to crush my dreams again.

    Still in a bit of a daze, I dialed the girl’s number, waiting as it rang. “Jennifer?” she asked warily.

    Seemed she’d saved my number after last time. “Hi. Um…did you…do anything?”

    “Anything like what?”

    “Like…break the curse.”

    “I told you, I can’t break it. Why?”

    “Did you pretend to be a woman calling from Yale?”

    Stephanie fell silent. “You got a call from Yale?”

    I let out a long breath, leaning heavily on the armrest of the bench. “How could this happen?” I whispered. “I thought this was forever. I thought…”

    “Jennifer…this curse can’t be broken by the caster,” Stephanie told me slowly. “But it can be resolved.”

    My eyes narrowed. “What?”

    “Look, I cursed you to be stuck in the life you were in because you were a horrible person, not because I wanted to get back at you. Though, I mean, that was a really nice bonus,” she mused. She sighed. “Did you ever read the wording of the curse? Carefully, I mean.”

    “I…thought I did.”

    “As my mother would say, there wasn’t a way to bulldoze through the mountain, but there was a way to climb over it, even if that climb was difficult and infuriating. You couldn’t change your life, but you could change the lives of others. And more important, you could change your mind. You could become a better person. And I guess you got a good start on it right away, because it’s barely been a year and you’ve resolved the curse.”

    I stared at my feet. “I feel like I deserve more like four years. Considering what I put you through in high school.”

    Stephanie whistled. “Wow. You have changed.” I pursed my lips. “If you’ve got your life back…that means it in every respect,” she noted. “You might be in the same place in your life doing the same things, but you’re a different person than when all this started. So, you could do the full four years. But don’t think of it as penance. That’s never what this was about. I mean,” she said with an audible grimace, “it did make me kinda happy knowing you were so miserable, but still.”

    I chuckled. “Yeah.” Pausing and pursing my lips, I nodded. “Okay.”

    “Okay?”

    “I don’t know what comes next,” I said. “I never thought my life would be mine again. But I know what I want to do differently. So, I’ll start there.”

    “Sounds like a plan,” she said softly.

    /r/storiesbykaren

    8 Comments
    2024/02/12
    01:38 UTC

    71

    Protection

    Sitting up in bed, my eyes go to Roxy, my Aussie, as my heartbeat quickens in panic. “Roxy?” I whisper.

    Her gaze is steady, her lips curled back in a snarl, the growl echoing from deep within her chest as she stares at the corner. Swallowing hard, I slide my gaze over and see the darkness. It’s a small shadow, but it’s swelling, like a tumor, climbing the wall. It creeps out in all directions as it takes form, becoming three dimensional, and it takes its first step.

    “No, no, no, no, no,” I breathe. I’m frozen. My eyes dart to Roxy, then back to the shadow figure. “Not real, you’re not real.”

    “You know I’m real,” it whispers back. “That’s why Roxy can see me.”

    My arms crawl with goose bumps like insects prickling across my skin, my throat constricting, and I can’t get enough air. Roxy takes a slow step back, then another, her wide, unblinking eyes set on the predator in front of her. But she doesn’t back up enough. She doesn’t run, she would never run, because she would never leave me.

    And it slinks forward toward her, the darkness encroaching menacingly, threateningly, the promise of an attack. My chest aches from fear, and I finally get myself to move. Inch by inch, as if through sludge, I force myself forward toward Roxy, a slow-motion race with the shadow man. His height makes him bend under the ceiling, towering and terrifying, as I finally reach Roxy’s side, curling my fingers in her soft fur.

    “I got you,” I choke out, my vision blurry from tears. “I got you, he won’t hurt you.”

    He reaches out for us and a hand closes on my arm-

    ***

    I lurch back to consciousness in my dark bedroom, tears streaming down my face, my chest heaving in panicked breaths. Roxy is on my bed, furiously nuzzling me and licking my face. I wrap my arms around her and hold her close. “Oh baby, my baby,” I whisper. “I’m okay. Everything’s okay.” I breathe. In and out. In and out. I take in my surroundings, my familiar bedroom, my real bedroom.

    My breathing slows and Roxy senses me calming down, so she lays down at my side as she was trained to, pressed up against me, her weight solid and protective. Turning on my bedside table lamp, I slide my legs out and my feet down to the carpet, walking over to the light switch. I flick it upwards, turning on the ceiling fan light, Roxy’s eyes following me all the way.

    A shadow man sits in the corner. But Roxy doesn’t see him. Because he isn’t there.

    Wrapping my arms around myself tightly, I take in and let out a long breath. “Who’s my good girl?” I ask, smiling. Roxy’s tail gently wags back and forth, knowing I’m talking about her. I walk over and sit down, and she crawls forward a few inches, putting her head in my lap. “Oh, is it time for scritches? Of course it is, always time for scritches,” I murmur as I scratch her behind her ears.

    I glance at the shadow man dismissively. “You’d never let them get me if they were real, huh, Rox? Well. I’d never let them get you either.”

    /r/storiesbykaren

    3 Comments
    2024/02/11
    01:27 UTC

    181

    Blood on the Ceiling

    The small bungalow was absolutely gorgeous. The owner had outdone themselves when they were renovating. Not just the regular things, like nice backsplash over the kitchen counters and an extra wide tub in the master bath. It was the colors they’d painted the walls, perfectly balanced to blend into the background of any style of furniture the renter would bring in but also strong enough to make the rooms warm and inviting. And the little things, like ceiling fans in the bedroom and living room, and the way they made the most of every inch of the kitchen space.

    Then there was the backyard which, while small, was beautiful. Native plants ensured blooms and greenery all year round, but the rock garden landscaping made for easy maintenance. There was a small cast-iron table and chairs off to the side, where I imagined myself sitting to eat lunch, and a hammock in the corner hung from the yard’s two large trees, just the spot to hang out with a good book.

    But after listing all this, the ad in the paper had a note at the bottom: “Warning – House is haunted.” Which I’m sure dissuaded some people and made others curious. I fell into neither category; I was a professional psychic, and so a house rented at a steeply discounted rate because of a haunting immediately grabbed my attention.

    I’d spent barely five minutes led around the home on a tour by the owner, an older woman named Tabitha, before I’d fallen in love with it.

    Once we’d finished our walk-through, she sat me down at the table and chairs in the backyard and folded her hands in her lap with a meaningful sigh. “So. You saw in the ad that I disclosed the haunting.”

    I nodded. “Yeah.”

    “And you’re okay with that?”

    “Yup.”

    She paused. “Believe in ghosts?”

    “Yes, definitely. Do you know whose spirit it is?”

    “No idea, sorry.” She paused again. “Well, all right then. If you’re still interested, it’s first and last month’s rent, plus half the rent as a security deposit.”

    I nodded my agreement, knowing that likely multiple previous tenants hadn’t made it even two months, which meant that down payment was important to her. Renting out this place every two weeks was likely unenjoyable. “I can definitely do that,” I told her. “Do you need pay stubs or anything?”

    Tabitha waved a hand dismissively. “Credit check and the down payment is fine.”

    And that was that.

    My old place had been an apartment, so I had just the right amount of furniture to fill a small bungalow like this one and room for a few extra pieces I had delivered and assembled myself. I hired a moving company to help and spent a weekend unloading and getting the lay of the land. Filled the fridge with food and did some cooking. Made myself at home. And through it all, I felt not a peep from my sixth sense.

    It was on the third night that I took out my Ouija board to reach out. The procedure was one I’d done many times before and my fingers rested comfortably on the planchette as I went with the typical opening question, asking over and over if there was anyone there with me. And while I did, finally, feel the presence in the house, I didn’t get any answers. Well, I didn’t get any that evening.

    That morning was a different story. The word ‘YES’ written in big bloody letters on the ceiling.

    Propped up on my elbows, my neck tilted back to take in the message, I sighed. “Felt the need to send a message, did you?” I grimaced, worried about where the blood had been sourced, but found the culprit without too much trouble: a dead bird near my bedroom door, blood soaking into the carpet.

    “You know, I’ve got markers in the kitchen drawer!” I called out to the spirit. “Those would’ve worked just as well.”

    Once I’d disposed of the bird’s corpse, that morning was spent soaking the carpet where the bird had been tossed aside, removing as much of the blood as I could, as well as the droplets that had slid from the ceiling down to the carpet and my bedding. I left a message on the landlord’s cell, asking to borrow some paint from when she’d done the ceilings, if she had any left over. Then I sat in my living room on my couch reading a book for the better part of the afternoon.

    The weight of a glare on me was heavy, but I waited patiently until I felt it close by. Then I flicked my gaze up to directly meet the gaze of the spirit in the corner.

    The boy’s eyes, which had been narrowed in an angry glower, widened in shock and he took a step back. He didn’t vanish, though, which I ascribe to curiosity more than anything else. “You… You can see me?” he asked.

    I earmarked the page of the book in my hands and put it aside. “First time that’s happened?” I asked in reply. He didn’t respond.

    I took in his clothes, which didn’t seem that old, in comparison to the many spirits I encountered over the years. I’d guess early 1900’s, 1930’s if I was pushing my luck on my estimation. Leaning forward with my elbows on my knees, I clasped my hands together. “You like scaring people?”

    “What’s it to you?” he snapped.

    The lamps in the room flickered at his outburst and I changed tactics. “Is this your home?”

    His face went slack, and he fell silent for a long moment. I waited patiently. “No,” he finally said. “I mean… Yes, it’s mine, and I don’t want anyone else here. But…it’s not…my home,” he said, his voice a mumble by the time he finished.

    I nodded slowly in understanding. “My guess is…the person who trapped you here is long gone,” I said softly. Purposefully steering clear of any words involving death, I focused on the problem at hand. The boy shifted on his feet warily. “Do you want to stay here, or do you want to move on?”

    “I, um…” His eyes trailed down to the floor. Unsurprisingly, he’d not spent much time considering that question. I gave him time to think it over, waiting in comfortable silence. “Can I change my mind later?”

    I nodded. “Sure. Your house, your decision.” He looked around, as if seeing the house in a new light. “I’m April. Do you know your name?”

    His eyes narrowed. “That’s a stupid question. My name’s Miles.”

    “Some of the ones like you that I meet don’t remember their names,” I explained.

    “Really?” I nodded. “That’s…quite sad.”

    “I think so too.” I pointed to my television. “You know what that is by now, right?”

    His face brightened. “It’s a television. I never had one.”

    “I start work on Monday, and I’m gone from about nine to five,” I told him. “You can watch whatever you’d like. I’ll leave the remote pointed the right direction on the coffee table, so it’s easy for you to press the buttons.”

    Miles eyed me warily. “Why are you being so nice to me? I tried to scare you. I scared off everyone else.”

    I hesitated, the pause heavy between us. “I knew someone very much like you. She was taken too early, stolen from me,” I said softly. “And I missed her dearly. But she was stuck. And she was scared. She had me, though, and I helped her down the new path she was faced with. I try my best to help others like her, and like you, because nobody deserves what you’re faced with. And certainly no one deserves to go through it alone.”

    /r/storiesbykaren

    9 Comments
    2024/02/10
    01:49 UTC

    98

    A House Made a Home

    The house had once been loved. It had been built for a family that had hoped to grow in size, making memories for decades and passing the house down through the generations. It had been designed with careful thought, constructed with reliable, strong materials, and should have become more than a house. It should have become a home.

    Instead, a year after it had been built, it had lost that potential, and family after family had moved in and then quickly moved out. It laid empty ever since.

    That was an irresistible mystery to me. The paperwork I held in my hands told me everything I needed to know about the two-story colonial before me. The house had been brought to my attention by my friend and colleague Adam, since he lived the next town over and I myself lived in a neighboring state, and Adam had told me it seemed right up our alley. That’s because we both worked in the same career – haunted realty.

    Of course, most haunted houses were an easy fix. Someone had died, refused to move on, and needed help. Some cases were more severe, with the spirits determined to stick around for reasons beyond the control of any spiritualist, and those needed to be exorcised. And in extremely rare cases, actual demons took hold, not only infecting the house but traumatizing those that had moved in before they even had the chance to go to bed that first night. But of course, those cases prompted the arrival of an experienced exorcist, and the problem was resolved without delay.

    But this house? I looked at the photo of it paperclipped to the front of the folder I held in my hands, then looked up to it in front of me. This one was a mystery.

    A referral from Adam meant it was something complicated, something that needed sorting out, and that’s why he’d picked me. I’m thirty-eight now and have spent most of my adult life in this career in my capacity as a psychic medium. It isn’t the most profitable career path I could’ve chosen with this gift, but it was the most rewarding.

    Walking up the cobblestone walkway choked with weeds poking up between the stones, my eyes skimmed over the property. It had spent decades being ignored, having been foreclosed and now sitting empty as the years piled on, probably forgotten or written off by the bank at this point. The house had been built well, but time ravages even the strongest of construction. The leaves sat caked around the bushes and buildup had caused the gutters to crack and break, dirt and grime flourished along the brick exterior, and the lawn had long since been conquered by native plants.

    That was just the lack of curbside appeal, though, and the interior would be the same. Any house flipper knows that it’s the bones of the house that makes the decision of the worthiness of an investment. And I knew enough about this place at this point to be confident the bones were solid.

    That first step inside, though, let me know why that was irrelevant.

    My internal alarm flashed a warning as soon as I crossed the threshold, and I slowly tucked the folder I was holding under my arm as my eyes slid warily around the foyer. I continued inside, reaching out mentally, exploring the residence thoroughly, and decided to press my luck.

    “You are beautiful, aren’t you?” I sighed, looking around. I passed through to the living room, empty and worn, and felt eyes on me, a confusing contradiction of presences in the house. “You have so much potential. Everyone else just must not have seen it. That’s the only reason you still stand empty.” The contradiction of feelings increased in strength on both ends as I strolled into the kitchen. “I can do so much here. We can make you a home again.”

    And something pounced.

    Dread creeped steadily up my spine, as if something was watching me over my shoulder. Creaks and moans spread through the house, unnatural and impossible to dismiss as typical settling. My instincts told me to run, my senses let me know I was in the presence of a predator, and my vision started to tunnel as my heart raced.

    “There it is,” I whispered over a lump in my throat.

    A fear liath. An incredibly rare spirit, and Adam likely had no idea what he’d walked into when he’d stumbled upon the listing for this house. He’d told me something felt off, but likely he’d only stayed for a minute or so before departing, his instincts kicking in.

    A typical fear liath would be smarter than this, but this wasn’t typical. Likely this one had fed on the owners who had moved in, one after another, and eventually had driven away any chance of new ownership. Its desperate, hasty tactics as soon as I’d entered told me it was starving, ravenous for the emotional food source it had been deprived of for so long.

    The next few moments told me just that. As I turned to look around my room, a snake, black as an oil slick, slithered across the floor, then another, then a third, taking their time to cross the old hardwood floors as they went. Then a tarantula caught my eye, moving achingly slowly, step by step, across the countertop. Looking around, I spotted another walking across the flat surface in the breakfast nook.

    I shifted my attention from them to the house around me. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

    And then, well, it did.

    The creak of floorboards drew my gaze, and my heart skipped a beat. My father stood tall in the entryway from the living room, taking slow steps toward me, his wooden bat in his hand. “You’re nothing,” he hissed at me. “You’re weak. And you’re broken.”

    I took in a slow, deep breath, and then let it out, attempting to flush the adrenaline that had flooded through me. “And you’re dead,” I murmured. “You can’t hurt me.”

    The apparition flickered and disappeared, and I suddenly stood in an empty room. But the heavy weight of dread still laid over me like a thick blanket, refreshed by the chemicals in my brain as the fear liath fed on them.

    Without further delay, I put my folder on the kitchen counter and walked swiftly through the house and back out the front door. After a quick trip to my car’s trunk for supplies, I went back into the home, spreading out everything on the floor. The burden of fear vanished when I left and reappeared when I reentered, like the shift from a frigid interior to the warm, sun-drenched outdoors and back again. I ignored it, spray painting elaborate sigils in which I was well-practiced on the floor of the kitchen.

    Then I took the bag of herbs, held it as I stood in the circle of symbols, and flicked my lighter, catching the flame on the edge.

    I spoke the recitation of expulsion with the ease of practice through repetition, letting the flames lick up the sides of the bag until it was too close to my fingers, and then I let it drop to the floor to burn itself out. Any vanilla human wouldn’t have felt anything but a release in pressure, but I felt more. The fear liath grabbed hold of its residence with invisible claws, grasping frantically to secure its grip like someone being wrenched away by the winds of a hurricane, before its grip slipped, and it dissipated into the ether.

    Taking in and letting out a deep breath, I looked around the home with new eyes and a smile spread across my face.

    “You did it.”

    My eyebrows rose in surprise as I turned to my right. There they stood, a half-opaque family of three consisting of a mother, father, and young daughter. They looked mostly stunned, but also grateful, and the emotion on the father’s face in particular was incredible.

    “How did you do that?” the father spoke. “After all those years of our home sitting empty?”

    “Experience,” I said with a smile, walking over to the folder on the counter of the kitchen. I flipped through to the first page. “Let’s see… We’ve got Helen, Travis, and…Maggie, that must be you,” I said, meeting the gaze of the six-year-old. She smiled shyly and nodded.

    “Our house,” Travis said softly. “It’s in such a state of disrepair. We’ve been forced to watch it deteriorate further, watch that…demon chase away any hope of making it a home. Will you bring life back into this house?”

    I nodded. “I will. It says the three of you died of carbon monoxide poisoning. I’m sorry for that. Especially for your little girl, her life cut so short.”

    “Caring for this house and allowing us to move on is the greatest gift you could possibly give us,” Travis told me. “We’ve long accepted our fate. We just needed to see the house become a home again to give us peace.”

    “You’ll have it,” I said. “Just one favor?”

    Travis nodded. “Anything.”

    “When I bring in the crew to bring this place back to its former glory, make yourself scarce,” I said with a grin. “This is the first step to cleansing this house of everything, but let’s keep it our little secret that you’re spying on them to make sure it’s a job well done.”

    Each of them smiled and nodded. “You’ve got yourself a deal,” Travis replied.

    /r/storiesbykaren

    3 Comments
    2024/02/07
    20:23 UTC

    20

    Under the Shade of a Tree

    I knew this wasn’t sleep.

    My eyes were wide open however I couldn’t see. Everything was a bright blur. Imagine, staring at the sun and not being able to close your eyes from a torturous bright. The panic set in causing my body to hyperventilate. I must of laid there for hours, paralyzed in fear, before I was able to actually sense something. I was trapped inside a big bright nothing that I could not escape. The boundaries of reality began to blur. In time, I had lost all taste and smell. Consciousness was coming and going. It was still difficult to tell dreams from reality. Somewhere in this madness I heard and a voice that I’d not heard in quite some time. It was my Mother, telling me that she was there to help make things comfortable. And by the sound of her voice, to my surprise, she sounded truthfully optimistic. I on the other hand was not so sure.

    “Where am I?”, I recall asking with all the strength one could muster. Mom said that I was home in my apartment. It didn’t feel like it.

    For what seemed like months I became acclimated to this ‘apartment’. It felt as though everything had been rearranged. I remembered my seat on the couch. I was to believe that it was now on the opposite end of the living room. It felt like a different room altogether. The same went for the bedroom. It just didn’t feel like the one I once knew however curiously did have a slight trace of familiarity.

    “You’ll get used to it” Mom would say whenever my frustrations would boil over.

    Her tone was always truthful. Mom was the only thing that brought me comfort. We would sit and have long and conversations about a host of different topics throughout the days that passed. Although my brain was having these comprehensive conversations I suspected that only a fraction of the words were getting out, if any. There was nothing else for me to do but use my brain, and that I did. Mom seemed to understand my jumbled speech regardless as though we were speaking perfectly to one another.

    One day she asked about my vision and if there had been any improvement. To be honest I hadn’t really noticed. I was so preoccupied with getting used to it that I didn’t realize the odd shapes that were starting to materialize.

    “Keep focusing” she advised me, like she knew this from experience.

    I began to focus on anything that seemed to take shape within the brightest white. Soon, I was using them to find my way around. The combination of textures within the white mass gave me a trajectory. I saw things as coordinates, equations even. They came like dreams and once I had my mind set on where I wanted to go they would propel my momentum. It was the most curious sensation. Mom called it ‘transition’. I was lost inside this self guiding reality, one where time and space were suddenly absent. The sensation of touch brought me back to senses long forgotten.

    It was a slight pinch that had me swirling with questions. When was the last time I ate a meal, or needed to use the rest room? When was the last time I actually used my hands, or even my own voice? When was the last time I’d heard anything? My mind was filled with these puzzling revelations. I became destitute inside them.

    I lingered in this stoic state, struggling to comprehend the sudden realizations that fell on me all at once. Then, I recalled the day I awoke blind. There was no memory of anything before that moment.

    A strong sensation of loneliness invaded me. I thought about Mom. Where had she gone? Was she still nearby and I simply could no longer communicate? Had she left me? I began to search for her within this world of mass bright. I travelled into it with amazing speed knowing the harder I pushed the farther away I’d be. But far away from what? It was as though centuries had past when I finally heard a voice.

    “Over here”, Mom’s voice was crystal clear, as if she had been right next to me this whole time.

    Within the bright white I began to see images like negatives of a photograph, and in them was Mom. Tears were pouring down her cheeks. Behind her, a world in despair came into focus. There were mountains of people, fighting and climbing over each other, desperate to reach the serenity of a beautiful tree at its peak. The long and blossoming limbs provided a comforting shade beneath them. A shade that no one would ever reach. In that moment I experienced a kaleidoscope of the worst feelings imaginable.

    “I’m sorry”, Mom said softly before falling backwards becoming one with the chaos.

    For the first time the brightness faded into a long lost darkness but not before I glimpsed a familiar figure. It was my Grandma, standing under the tree.

    The first thing that came into focus was a ceiling. Then the low monotonous hums of various machines entered my ears. I could feel my body again. I was laying down in a hospital bed loaded with tubes inside my arms pinching into my veins. A particularly large one was lodged deep into my throat helping me breath. No wonder I couldn’t speak, I thought.

    My eventual release from the hospital came with unwanted noise both physically and mentally. Before I fell asleep that fateful night I was a strong and independent young woman, proud to be doing well on my own. Now, I’m forever changed. I’ll never be able to speak the same, nor hear things with a clarity I once had. My body has been wounded in the most vile way. I’ll struggle into life with a fragile immune system hoping the slightest cold will not kill me. That’s what a poisoning does.

    I should have known once Mom showed up at my door that something was wrong. She was a stranger to me after all. I had vague childhood memories of her coming and going. I went though life without her. There were a few times she’d come back trying to enter my life. Grandma was always there to protect me. That day though, I opened my door and let Mom into my life. I felt sorry for her as she stood on the doorstep, vulnerable and weak. I was doing really well, perhaps I could help, I foolishly thought. Take her in and be the provider, reconnect even. Within two weeks of her arrival I would wake up blind and near death. I learned shortly after I regained consciousness at the hospital that Mom was found dead inside my apartment. She had killed herself with the very poison she slipped me.

    Only a disturbed mind could rationalize that poisoning their own child would allow them a fresh start. But this was her plan. To kill me and take my identity. It would have been easy. I was basically a copy of her, physically. But once the plan didn’t work and I survived, she took her own life. I’ll never completely understand any of this. Mom had given into the demons that controlled her. All I have are these recollections that stick in my head like real memories. I left Mom climbing amongst the desperate, forever reaching for a peaceful place under the shade of a tree. And within all of this was Grandma, still protecting me.

    As for Mom, she finally gave me that soft spoken apology I deserved… or perhaps not.

    0 Comments
    2024/02/07
    19:14 UTC

    19

    Mr. Creeper’s Ukulele

    My story starts when I was five or six. That’s when I first picked up a ukulele. I loved my ukulele with all my heart. Still do, obviously. And I’m grateful for all the success I’ve had because of it. Here’s the problem: I don’t deserve it. Not entirely, anyway.

    My parents never told me to practice, I just did. I practiced day and night, until my hands hurt. It was slow going at first. Then one day, everything changed. I was playing Hey, Soul Sister when I noticed a peculiar sound, like a heartbeat, quietly keeping time, like a built-in metronome. Except of course, back then, I had no idea what a metronome was. But it was there all right, guiding me.

    Having no idea where the sound was coming from, I scanned the room for intruders. Then it dawned on me: the sound was coming from my own mind. I shrugged it off and continued practicing, but the sound remained. Over time, a voice started speaking to me, giving me tips. The voice was creepy. Sometimes it would say stuff that was highly inappropriate, especially to a young girl like me. But I was still a kid, so I thought nothing of it. Instead, I gave him a name: Mr. Creeper.

    Mr. Creeper became my imaginary friend. Except of course, he wasn’t imaginary. Nor was he my friend.

    (Before I go on, let’s get one thing clear: Mr. Creeper was, and still is, very much real. And he’s not an anomaly. There are many evil spirits lurking about. More than you would care to know.)

    When I told my mother, she scoffed at me. So much so, that I cried and threw a fit, smashing my uke into a million pieces. Then I cried some more, because I no longer had a uke. Oh, what a fuss I made.

    Mr. Creeper was displeased. That night he appeared to me, moments before I fell asleep, threatening to hurt me if I stopped making music. Apparently, Mr. Creeper had plans for me.

    It was the first time I’d seen him, and it scared me half to death. His face was covered in warts and boils. His belly was bulging like a beach ball. His eyes were weird and googly and seemed to see in all directions at once. What scared me most was his teeth, long and sharp and severe. I cried myself to sleep that night, and suffered from a series of vicious night terrors. Night terrors that have remained with me ever since.

    My mother, being a gracious woman, bought me a brand new ukulele for Christmas. A nicer one, in fact.

    Mr. Creeper was pleased.

    Time passed. Mr. Creeper continued haunting me, but my memory of those days is fuzzy. I was still a kid. By the time I turned twelve, I’d stopped playing the uke. I was a busy girl. Mr. Creeper went away, until one day while alone in my candle lit bedroom, he startled me.

    “Hey Brit,” Mr. Creeper said, his voice cold and crisp.

    My heart stopped beating. Standing – more like hovering – over my bed was Mr. Creeper. Disparaging thoughts crashed through my mind. In truth, I’d thought Mr. Creeper was gone for good.

    Wrong.

    He snarled. “Wha? Ya hard of hearing?”

    I tried speaking, but the sound was gibberish.

    “Why dontcha get that ukulele out of your closet? Play me a tune, why dontcha?” After minutes – maybe hours – of comprehending what the heck was happening, I bolted.

    Mother was at work, but Dad was visiting, so I told him. My cheeks were red and sopping with tears. He ruffled my rosy-red hair, calling me his silly little princess. But I relented. When he saw how serious I was, he tossed me onto his back (he hadn’t done this in years) and charged playfully upstairs into my bedroom.

    I gasped. Mr. Creeper was above my bed, twirling his pitchforked tail. His eyes were cruel and hateful.

    “He won’t see me, you know,” the monster said. “He’s too old. And stupid.” “Hey!” I blurted, involuntarily.

    My father shot me an uneasy look. “See, princess. No monsters. Just a twelve-year-old girl’s bedroom, which needs cleaning, by the way.” He nudged me.

    He was joking, but I could tell he sensed the monster, because his eyes were scanning the room and his face was pale as water. His feet wouldn’t stop shuffling. Clearly, he was eager to leave my haunted bedroom. And for good reason: Mr. Creeper was making choking gestures, strangling himself with his wretched red tail, taunting him. It took every ounce of restraint not to scream in holy terror.

    As we left my bedroom, something struck me. I tripped and tumbled downstairs, spraining my ankle in the process. Dad zoomed me to the hospital. That was a bad day.

    Time passed. Then one day after school, my old uke was resting neatly on my bed. “That’s impossible,” I told myself, shakily, as a cold chill dripped down my spine. The ukulele was beckoning me. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. My hands trembled as I strummed her. Weird thing was, even though I hadn’t played her in years, she was still in tune.

    I played Fifteen, by Taylor Swift. I still remembered the chords. The pulse returned, keeping time, the lights in my bedroom flickered, and a spotlight fell on me. Suddenly, I was Center Stage. An invisible audience started jeering. I could feel the tension in the room, anticipating my next song.

    “Mr. Creeper?” I quietly spoke.

    I felt him crawling inside my head. It was awful, really. Like a virus scratching my skull.

    “Play.” That’s all he said.

    The crowd started chanting: “BRIT… BRIT… BRIT…”

    Reluctantly, I played an Ed Sheeran song (which sounded eerily similar to the previous song).

    “Wha? Did I say you can stop?” Mr. Creeper heckled. “Did yo mamma raise a quitter?”

    The crowd turned on me, heckling me with a chorus of, “BRIT SUCKS!… BRIT SUCKS!… BRIT SUCKS!…”

    I was so scared that I peed myself. Good thing no one was around to laugh at me. (Except, of course, Mr. Creeper.) After cleaning myself up, I tip-toed back into my bedroom, careful not to trip and fall. (Like I needed another sprain.)

    “This is ridiculous,” I told myself. “I’m nearly thirteen. Too old to believe in spooks.” My voice sounded far away, like it belonged to someone else. I didn’t like it. Nor did I trust it.

    “Brit,” Mr. Creeper said. “Play another song. Something melancholy, in a minor key.”

    My bedroom lights dimmed; all the candles blew out, although I don’t recall lighting any. My mouth was dry, my heart was going a million miles an hour. I wiped my sweaty bangs from my forehead and took a deep breath.

    “Hurry it up, wontcha!” someone in the crowd chirped, scaring the daylights out of me. The crowd was growing restless: “Yeah. We ain’t got all day!” followed by, “Yeah, kid. We got all millennia!”

    I’ve never been more scared in my life. I closed my eyes and prayed for them to go away. This must be a dream. Or maybe I was getting sick. When my eyes popped open, I nearly died. Mr. Creeper was directly in front of me, seething. Globs of drool glistened from his dagger-like teeth, his fatty fingers fidgeting while he floated in thin air.

    I tried to move, but my mind and body wouldn’t cooperate. When his teeth touched the nape of my neck, I shrieked.

    My mother bolted into my bedroom, and seeing how scared I was, she let me sleep on the foldout couch in the living room. I was grateful. But I wasn’t stupid. The monster was lurking in my bedroom, waiting.

    Needless to say, I avoided my bedroom all week, but by the weekend, I started practicing again. It’s difficult to explain why, but any musician will tell you: the music is inside you, yearning to get out. I was a prisoner to it. It controlled me. So did Mr. Creeper.

    Next time he appeared, I pleaded for him to leave me alone. “Nah!” Mr. Creeper replied, flying directly above me. “I’ve got BIG plans for you.” “B-b-but, why me?”

    Mr. Creeper’s googly eyes bobbled back and forth. “Why not?” He thrusted his razor-sharp claws against my freckled throat.

    I shrunk into the size of a pea. I was going to add my rebuttal, when the uke flew into my hands. I gasped as it found my grip.

    “Play!” the monster instructed.

    I played. To my astonishment, I was exceptional. So much so that I made up a song on the spot. Then I made a video and posted it. That video went viral. You’ve probably seen it. It’s called Creeper’s Lament. My first hit song. You could say the rest is history, and you’d be correct.

    Not gonna lie: I liked the newfound fame. Who wouldn’t? My classmates started treating me differently. Suddenly, I was special, if only for a week. I started pumping out more videos. My fame quickly spread. The principal called me into her office, asking if I’d be interested in performing at the end-of-the-year talent show. I agreed. My parents were thrilled, and bought me the best ukulele money could buy.

    That’s when I performed Flight of the Bumblebee, using only one hand. BAM! Another viral video. You may remember it: I was wearing a long, black dress with white buttons shaped as stars, and my hair was braided. The kids in the crowd were shouting for an encore, so I played two Beatles songs at the same time, surprising even me. The kids ate it up. So did the internet.

    You may remember the rest. After going viral, I made a series of Top Ten albums, spanning many years. Unbelievable. People adored me. And why not? I helped inspire an entire generation of kids to play the ukulele. They all wanted to be the next Brit Starr.

    My concerts sold out fast. My father was now managing me. He was nice and all, but things got weird. You see, it wasn’t me playing. It was Mr. Creeper. Sounds nuts, I know. But it’s true. Mr. Creeper was guiding me, providing me with unbelievable dexterity. Songs arrived fully formed in my mind.

    After years of recording albums and touring the world, while finishing high school online in my spare time (which was never), Mr. Creeper became erratic. Nothing seemed to satisfy him. To please him, I was forced to play a medley of rock classics: Stairway to Heaven, Highway to Hell, Hotel California, Smells Like Teen Spirit – the list goes on and one – which earned me an entire new audience. But even that wasn’t good enough. No, not for Mr. Creeper.

    He wanted more. Always more. That’s when I started doing stunts: playing a flaming ukulele, performing upside down, walking a tightrope, you name it. The shows got more and more elaborate. So did my costumes.

    Over time, people got bored of my antics. I didn’t blame them. In fact, I was relieved. Unfortunately, my father was furious. Turns out, Mr. Creeper had infected his mind as well, causing him to drink and act belligerent. Thus, I announced my retirement. I’d just turned twenty-five, and I was a millionaire, I didn’t need the stress. I was looking to open my very own music school: School of Uke. Sounds cool, right?

    Wrong.

    Mr. Creeper threatened to kill me. “You do as I say, Brit. Ya hear me?” His claws scratched my spine, causing internal bleeding. I was rushed to the hospital where I nearly died. Mr. Creeper wreaked havoc on the other patients. “I’ll kill ‘em all if ya don’t do as I say!”

    That was dreadful. So was the fact that no one believed me.

    My father made me a deal: I could quit touring, but I would continue making music. I refused. So he made another offer: I could publish my very own autobiography, and live off the royalties. I agreed. Maybe I can finally get my story out.

    Mr. Creeper went on another rampage, tearing up my bedroom, haunting me day and night. He was merciless. Sleeping became impossible, because that’s when he’s strongest. I was at my wits end. I had to do something.

    So I did. It came to me during a dream: I could enter his mind as well. I used this to my advantage, and over time, I learned to harness his magic. Thus, I’ve created a spell. My spell (if it works) will undo my fame and fortune.

    Therefore, when you read this, the name Brit Starr will mean nothing to you, and I can go back to being normal. Phew. What a relief!

    So why am I telling you this, on Reddit, no less?

    Because once my father read the first draft of my autobiography, he went ballistic. After weeks of squabbling, he hired a ghost writer. (Most celebrities do this, I know, but I was appalled.) But no worries, if my plan works, the public won’t remember me (or my music), and all my troubles will disappear, including my autobiography.

    Alas! The spell is complete. It’s entwined into this story. (How I did it, I’ll never tell, not in a million years.) But what about Mr. Creeper, you ask? Will he go away? Doubt it. But hopefully he’ll grow tired of me and haunt some other little kid. Not my problem.

    If my spell is successful, by the time I post this, you will have long forgotten my name. Not only that, you will have forgotten my concerts and all the time you spent commenting on my posts. Those comments will disappear, along with their memory. My TikTok account will vanish. I will mean nothing to you. Thus, I will be scrubbed, along with my fame and fortune. My parents will know me, obviously, but they will have no recollection of my so-called music career. Heck, I’ll probably open that music studio, and if I’m lucky, I’ll live happily ever after. No more monsters.

    Reading this now, you probably think this is just a silly story. Perfect. That’s the plan. That’s why I’ve taken my story to Reddit, using a male avatar, no less. Just in case. (I doubt my father will stumble upon this, because he doesn’t use Reddit, but I can’t take any chances.)

    If by chance you do remember me, and my spell failed, that’s okay too. I’ll have to live with that. Hey, at least you’ll understand the grief I’ve gone through, and cut me some slack. Or maybe you’ll think I’m nuts. Whatever. I’m over it. So here goes. I’m so nervous I can barely keep my hands close to the keys. Mr. Creeper is clawing me, and I’m bleeding profusely, but he won’t stop me. Not this time.

    Will my spell work? There’s only one way to find out.

    Here goes…

    0 Comments
    2024/02/07
    16:11 UTC

    41

    Blind illusion

    I lost my vision at the age of six in a silly accident. I call it silly because I was hit by a bicycle while crossing the street. The fall damaged my optic nerve. I’ve had Bowey, my service dog, my beloved pupper, since then. Apart from Bowey, I have my father and mother who worked in the airforce. We all lived in the same house but separately. It rarely affected me. Bowey was all I needed.Oh, and I also have a friend, my neighbour, an old lady whom I call Marlboro due to the strong smell of cigarettes on her whenever she hugged me. She hugs me tight and takes a long sniff off of the top of my head. Marlboro is a widow of an airforce officer who was killed in combat, her son is also a flyer. She stays right above my apartment but I have never been to her place. My mother says she must be lonely and that’s why she must have befriended me. But I know that she loves me like a grandson and thinks I am special.It was not long after the accident but by then I had come to terms with it. I knew the path from my home to the park, school and shops inside the airforce campus. Marlboro always waited for me on a bench near my home and used to finish the last leg of her walk with me. She felt that I won’t be able to climb the stairs to my apartment alone, even though, I go everywhere alone, except for Bowey.She fixes me a sandwich whenever I get hungry even without asking. She used to have treats for Bowey as well. But I felt Bowey was not very fond of Marlboro. Whenever she came near me to hold my hand, Bowey would shift to the other side. I assume it’s the strong smell of tobacco. He was a happy and playful boy and who would not leave my side, ever.When my mother returns from her duty, I tell her all about the adventures of the day and how Marlboro brought my favourite tuna sandwich. Sometimes, it is hard to tell if she is listening at all. But I think I am a great story teller, Bowey and Marlboro agree.Father mostly joins in for the after work drinks with the other officers and reaches home late. He hugs me tight and kisses me goodnight with his alcohol breathe.My home is silent most of the time so I have learned to smell my way around. In an airforce campus it is pretty hard to rely on sounds as it is loud all around. I recognise the smell of the corner cafe at the turn from my school, the rose bushes near the turn at the senior officers’ quarters, the fuel smell near the area of the aircraft station, just before turning to our apartment complex and my final stop is the bench where Marlboro waits for me.One day, Bowey fell ill and he couldn’t accompany me to the school. Mother and father had an argument that morning about dropping me off to school. In the end, Mother dropped me off and asked me to wait at the bench near the corner cafe until she could come to pick me. I asked her to tell Marlboro to not wait up for me today. My mother agreed hurriedly and left.After school, I waited at the cafe bench for a long time. I could sense the light dimming and the cafe buzzing with the sounds of young officers. I decided to walk back to my home alone, it was my usual path sans Bowey. I passed the rose bushes, fuel smell and I counted my steps to Marlboro’s bench. She was not there today. My mother must have informed her about the change in today’s routine.I started climbing the steps to my apartment. I had never done this without Bowey or Marlboro. I climbed and climbed and nothing smelled familiar. I was tired by now and as I climbed further, at a point I felt a flat wall in front of me. It was not a wall, it was a door. I pushed it and stepped into the room. It felt open, I could hear the aircraft sounds, louder. I walked forward with no smell to guide me, tears were filling up my eyes by now. Whatever light I could sense dimmed further. I missed Marlboro. I missed Bowey. I bumped into cold steel and fell.I had a sudden realisation that I was too high up and I could feel my heart-beat in my eyes and I was about to fall and somebody familiar was holding onto my hand, preventing my fall. I smelt Marlboro and was relieved immediately. She pulled me up and hugged me tight. We didn’t talk much while walking back home.When my mother returned from work I told her what had happened. She was overcome by emotions, hugged me tight and promised me that she would never leave me alone. She wanted to thank Marlboro in person. We went upstairs to find her apartment locked. Upon enquiring with the neighbours, we got to know that an old lady used to live there several years ago. She committed suicide by jumping off of the terrace. The apartment was never allotted again and has been empty since. My mother held me close that night.For several days my parents took turns to drop me off after school. I was not bothered much by the revelation, I just had one strong feeling, I missed her. One day, when I walked back home, I waited at our usual spot, hoping to see her again. She never came. I got up to leave, but then Bowey shifted to my other side. I smiled. I smelt cigarettes again.

    2 Comments
    2024/02/07
    06:56 UTC

    38

    The Grove

    Dozens watched from behind me, but I ignored their eyes burning into my back. My footsteps were slow but steady, terrified but resigned to my fate, fear stiffening my muscles but determination pushing me on. The day was bright, the sun beating down on me, barely tempered by the hat I wore, and sweat already started to soak into the back of my shirt. I started through the wildflowers that spread across the edge of the grove, my hands absently brushing the ones that came up past my knees.

    And as I passed the edge of the tree line, the sky started to darken. I continued to walk toward my judgment. Like many in our town who'd come before me, I was here to find out whether I was guilty of murder.

    “What are you doing?” I snapped at my older brother.

    Elton continued through the cabinets, leaving every door open as he searched, finally turning on me with a snarl on his face and an empty bottle in his hand. “There’s nothing here.”

    “We’re out of whiskey,” I told him tiredly. “I’ll buy more tomorrow.”

    “You’re useless,” he growled. Walking over to the sink, a wobble in his step, he chucked the empty bottle in.

    “Hey!” I shouted. “Could you at least do that outdoors? Or aim for the garbage can?”

    Elton picked up the top of the bottle, which had remained intact, examining it as if he wished it could’ve magically refilled instead of shattering. “I got fired.”

    That gave me pause. “Elton…you need to lay off the drink,” I sighed. “You can’t keep a job like this.”

    “Like what?” he snapped, taking a few unsteady steps toward me. “What I do on my own time is my business.”

    “Not in my house it isn’t,” I shot back.

    A ripple of goosebumps spread across my skin and the sweat that had built up suddenly chilled me. The trees were thick and tall, but it shouldn’t have been this dark, I knew. There was something else pulling the light from the world, something sinister that lived and hunted in these woods. Something that I needed to find. Or rather, that needed to find me.

    My heartrate increasing by the minute, I continued into the woodland, claustrophobia starting to take hold. I forced myself to take in and let out even, steady breaths. The flowers had given way to a heavy layer of leaves, built up over months but not yet decayed, wet and thick and squishing under my shoes. As the day turned to night, my lower lip starting to tremble and my hands starting to shake, and I didn’t notice when my shoes dampened through to my socks.

    And I hoped and prayed I would make it out.

    “Your house?” Elton said, his eyes narrowing dangerously. “The house you bought with the money from Dad’s inheritance, you mean?”

    I took a breath. “You got the same, Elton. Not my fault you spent it away.”

    Stomping over, he towered over me, a good four inches taller. “You’re a selfish bastard, up on that high horse,” he hissed. “I spent that money how I saw fit. Wasn’t my fault Henrietta and the kids needed more than I could give them.”

    “You spent it on drink,” I muttered. “Not on them.”

    Elton raised his hands toward me, realizing he had a broken bottle in one, staring at it as if it was something he’d not seen before. “I need more to get to sleep,” he told me, his stare burning holes in my eyes. “Otherwise, I get the nightmares. You know that.”

    My heart fell. Too many men fell down this hole when they came back from the military and I hated what it had done to him. But something else burned inside me; I was starting to hate him too. I loved the man he’d been but hated who he’d become.

    “We are out,” I said slowly. “You’re plenty drunk to fall asleep.”

    His eyes widened. “I’m not a drunk,” he shouted. And again, the bottle in his hand rose and a shot of adrenaline rushed through me as I saw it coming for me. Instinctively I blocked it, shoving it back at him. And it caught his throat.

    Was I to blame? The question wouldn’t leave me. It plagued me, crushing me under its weight. I hadn’t meant it. I’d never kill my brother, my own flesh and blood. But I had, hadn’t I? I’d shoved the serrated glass right back at him. It had been instincts, yes, but what kind? Survival? Or a flood of emotion that came from a place deep inside me, where my true colors shone?

    As I continued step by step further into the grove, I found myself wishing for a sweater, unbelievable in the current mid-summer climate of the town. It wasn’t enough to make me shiver, just enough to send a chill through me, to make me fold my arms and curl in against it. The area I found myself in now was something different, something other, and I knew I was close.

    Then I came to an abrupt halt as I heard squishy footsteps behind me, unmistakable as a creature other than human. They were too large, too heavy, and something else accompanied them. The sensation of being in the presence of a predator, the urge to run, to not look back and let adrenaline do the work of racing back the way I’d come.

    But of course, it was behind me. There was no escape. So, I turned to face it.

    “No, no, no, no,” I breathed, dropping to my brother’s side.

    His face showed nothing but desperate confusion, the broken bottle dropped to the side, forgotten, as blood poured from his throat. I thrust my hands over it without any hesitation, frantically trying to stem the flow, to find the edge of the artery I’d slit and hold back the blood. But my fingers grew slick as the knees of my pants soaked in the blood that spread quickly across the floor.

    “Elton,” I cried, “no, no, Elton, hold on, put-put pressure-”

    Tears came to my eyes and I suddenly pulled the shirt over my head, balling it up and shoving it against the wound. “Ronnie?” he managed.

    “Please, no, please,” I choked out, tears clouding my vision. “Hold it, help me hold it there…” But his grip slackened as his pupils dilated and his breathing slowed. “No,” I said, continuing to hold the shirt firmly against his neck. “No, Elton…oh god…”

    His eyes stared at the ceiling, at nothing, his body still, and I sat back in the pool of his blood, my shirt falling from my grip as an overwhelming, stunned tiredness overtook me. My gaze slid around at the scene and then went back to my brother. A sob choked in my throat before it broke through and I dissolved into tears.

    The creature of the grove stood before me froze me in place. The domain around us, a swamp choked with weeds and fallen trees, suited its form as an alligator, but it stood on two feet. At least ten feet tall, I was unable to breathe for a good ten seconds before I shuddered in a shaky breath. It cocked its head at me, its eyes showing an intelligence behind them that I would never expect from an animal. It was deeper than a human gaze, something behind it that I couldn’t comprehend.

    “Ronald Merrill,” it spoke. The voice was a growl from deep in its throat, startling me and sending fresh tears streaming down my face. “What is your crime?”

    I took two breaths, in and out, before I managed to speak. “I killed my brother.” There was nothing to say but the truth. The creature saw through us anyway and, to be honest, it was a confluence of emotions that I was desperate to be free of, which I hoped I could do here.

    “Was it in malice?”

    My face crumpled. “It was an accident. He came at me with a broken bottle and I…I just…I shoved it back at him. The edge hit his neck. He fell. And there was so much blood…”

    “You loved him.”

    I grimaced. “I don’t know. Maybe. I used to. But…” My eyes narrowed, staring sadly at the ground. “Yes. Yes, I loved him.” I blinked rapidly a few times against the tears, my breaths jagged in my chest against the pain of my loss, of my guilt, of my terror. “But…I fear there was something inside me,” I confessed, forcing my eyes to the pitch-black eyes of the creature before me. “Something that wanted to be free of him. Something that wanted to…” I swallowed. “Please, tell me. Am I guilty of murder?”

    “You are not.” The words were so simple, so final, that it took several seconds to absorb them. Then I felt my knees give out and I fell to the murky ground. “Leave the grove and lay your brother to rest. Speak to him, though he cannot speak back. It will do you good.”

    I sobbed, my fingers curling into the wet, mossy ground, but then was pulled from my daze as I realized my grip was now on fresh weeds. Looking around, the creature was gone. The swamp was gone, leaving the grove in its place. Bright with sunlight, tempered by the branches of the trees overhead, vines curling up their trunks, fungus spotting the bark. And wildflowers scattered around me.

    I remained there, sitting on my heels, for a while before I felt fully able to grasp the verdict I’d been given. Sniffling and wiping the tears from my face, I pushed myself to my feet. And I set off to bury my brother.

    /r/storiesbykaren

    1 Comment
    2024/02/06
    19:53 UTC

    79

    Any panda lovers out there?

    My mama loves panda bears. She has an entire collection of stuff. Panda figurines? By the hundreds. Panda pillowcases with matching blankets? Yep. Plush toys and slippers? She’s got it. Plates shaped like a panda face, glasses with panda prints? Check. I can go on and on, but I think you get the point, right?

    There is this one glass display cabinet that houses her figurines. When you come down from the second floor this cabinet welcomes you to the ground floor of the house. So, each time I went down in the morning I would say a loud “good morning!” to the pandas. Each day, I would notice the smallest set of pandas in different forms of disarray. When I say small, they are about an inch and are in different poses. There are 6 in total: one sitting down eating a bamboo shoot, one doing a headstand, one sitting looking like it wants to put its feet to its mouth, one standing up wearing a Chinese pointed bamboo hat, another one standing up holding a fishing rod with a dangling fish on it, and one sitting in a lotus position as if in meditation. My mama would always fix it when she notices them. They would sometimes be separated and far apart, in different sections of the cabinet, sometimes fallen over to the bottom. It’s like they come up with all kinds of mischief when we are not looking. When I was younger, in my mind I saw these little pandas playing around and having fun. But as I got older, I figured my big sister must like messing it up. She didn’t share our mama’s love for the pandas. Only I did.

    I was assigned to a different country for work and will be away for 2 years. Mama packed up the panda set for me to take saying she knew it was my favorite since I was a child as I would always point them out in the morning. It will be my first time away from home because us Asians don’t really leave home after 18 like others do. We stay with our family for as long as we can. We got all emotional even if it was just two years and I highly appreciated being able to bring those little pandas with me. When I got to my new place, I made sure to put the pandas at my bedside table. When I come back from a tiring day at work, I would look at those little black and white figures and smile thinking of home. They didn’t move into different positions like they did, which made me really believe that it was my big sister moving them around.

    I met Stuart a month after starting work at the offsite location that I was assigned to. He’s charming and would make me laugh. He started dropping by my workstation during his breaks and then we started having lunch together. By the 4th month he started coming over to my place and hanging out over the weekends. Soon we were making out in the couch, but I would not allow him to go further than that. What can I say, I was raised by very strict Asian parents.

    One Saturday night, Stuart arrived unannounced. Looked like he’s been drinking. He said he just wanted to hang out and watch our favorite series with me. I was hesitant at first but felt like I trusted him enough to hang out despite him looking a little drunk.

    Big mistake.

    Stuart started kissing me and was trying to put his hands under my shirt. I was pushing him away when he grabbed me hard and bit my lip.

    Stuart: “What is it with you, you think you are too good for me?”

    Me: “Stuart, please let me go. You’re hurting me. My lip is bleeding, I need to put some ice on it.”

    He wouldn’t let me go and started to push my shorts down.

    My papa taught me some self-defense moves growing up. And I saw this as my chance to practice one of them. I poked Stuart’s eyes, and he pulled up while calling me a self-righteous b*tch. I ran towards the bathroom and locked the door. I didn’t have my mobile phone with me and could not call for help. By then I was praying to all my ancestors to help me. I didn’t know what to do. I was just sitting in the corner, crying. Suddenly the pounding on the bathroom door stopped replaced by a surprised yelp. I didn’t dare leave yet. I just sat there for maybe another hour before I figured that the silence outside means he already left. I opened the door and saw no one. I checked every possible hiding spot and did not find him. I decided I will report Stuart to HR on Monday and maybe ask help to get a restraining order since I didn’t know the procedures in that country.

    Monday came and there was no Stuart. I already filed a report to HR about what happened. The next day, I asked if they’ve heard from him yet. They informed me that he is not responding to his messages or picking up his phone when they call. After a week, the office sent a representative for a wellness check. They said no one was at home and his car was not there either.

    By the 3rd week of Stuart missing, someone reported a car parked illegally in the apartment complex near ours. They found Stuart rotting inside with several small bite marks. The hospital suspected that these are rat bites. With the report I filed with HR, the police concluded that he left my apartment and passed out inside his car due to being intoxicated and the rats somehow got inside his car.

    I went home that day super stressed from all that happened. I looked at my little pandas, missing home. I noticed they had some red splotches all over their small bodies and are in complete disarray. I must have splashed them with my red beet and berry smoothie at some point. But that has been some time ago, how did I not notice these red spots until now? Anyway, I just wiped them out. I checked the bedside table but there were no droplets or anything from my smoothie. I’m just wondering now how the pandas got dirty while my bedside table escaped any of the splashes of smoothie.

    I’m back home now, so my little panda friends are back to their glass cabinet doing their nightly mischief. But should I get assigned to a different country again I will make sure to bring them with me once again. They really help me feel close to home.

    10 Comments
    2024/02/05
    18:44 UTC

    257

    Hellhound

    I think of her as my little hellhound now. But that wasn't always the case, of course. To give you proper context, this story starts the night I broke up with my boyfriend.

    It was a messy yelling match that ended with Ian slamming the door behind him on his way out of my apartment, and all I’d wanted to do was get through a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Maybe watch some gratuitous violence on Netflix, smoke some pot to help me get to sleep. But pulling into the dark parking lot of the grocery store down the street and ignoring the lazy drizzle in the air, something caught my eye.

    A dog, laying down under a tree that, during the day, provided shade for the lucky Floridian who claimed the parking spot under its branches. A dog lover through and through, and with far less caution than was rational, my path immediately curved toward the animal. It appeared to be some sort of German shepherd mix and looked like it had had a much worse day than I had. A much worse life, to be honest.

    Its fur was rough and patches were missing, possibly from mange, though I’m not a vet. My guess was that it had been out here for ages, and to be honest, the town I currently lived in wasn’t huge on paying attention to stray dogs. Unless they got aggressive, of course, then it was time to call in animal control to take down the threat to all the precious children.

    Getting within a few yards of it, it raised its head and let out a low growl. “Hey,” I murmured, crouching down. “You look like ten miles of bad road.” Its ears weren’t flat against its head or anything, and it didn’t bare its teeth, but it let out another warning growl. “Not keen on people, huh?” I paused. “You hungry?” No reaction, unsurprisingly. I pushed myself and went into the store.

    Coming out a few minutes later with a bag of jerky in hand, I went back over to the dog, which growled once again at my approach, as if this spot under this tree had been bought and paid for, no guests allowed. “You like jerky?” I tossed it a big piece, landing perfectly just a foot in front of its paws and it flinched back as if it were a grenade. But it only took a moment to scent what it was, and the dog promptly went back over it and snatched it up, chewing and swallowing quickly.

    Then it took a few steps back, unconvinced. I tossed another piece. Then another. We went through the whole bag, aside from one piece left. “Want to come with me?” I asked, waggling it in the air. The dog, I could see it was a girl now, took a few steps forward. I nodded back toward my car. “I’ve got air conditioning. We could get you over to the emergency vet, I’ll spring for a nice warm bath, in case you got fleas. Get that skin condition figured out. Whaddya say?”

    Slowly taking steps backwards, jerky in hand, I headed back to my jeep and, to my honest surprise, she began to follow me. And when I tossed the last piece of jerky into the back seat, she jumped up inside, chowing down on it, and I shut the door.

    A few hours later, we were back at my place and she was still in rough shape, but in much better condition, as well as flea- and dirt-free. I hadn’t had a dog for close to two months, my last girl passing away and still reluctant to replace her, but I still had all her things. I took them out from storage in my garage and put the bed on the ground in the living room, where it had been when Roxy had used it, something tight gripping my heart when I put it back.

    The dog walked over, sniffing it thoroughly. “That’s for you to sleep on,” I said. “My bed’s fair game during the day, but I move around at night, so you got your own.” Kneeling down next to her, I let her sniff my hand before offering pats, which she tentatively accepted. “You a good girl?” She met my gaze, something in her eyes that I couldn’t describe. “Hm. Maybe you’re still working on figuring that out. Don’t know what your life’s been like so far, but I get it. Trust is hard.”

    I paused for a long moment and then, unbidden, a name popped into my head. I attributed it to my love of the show Supernatural. “Lilith. That sounds good,” I murmured.

    And that was that. It took her ages to come out of her shell, weeks of staying near her bed, or hiding in the nice dark laundry room, unless it was dinner time. She was perfectly house-trained though and chill with a collar and leash, so I figure whoever had had her before had taken care of her at some point, but no chip and no response to ‘found dog’ ads resulted in her just staying with me. Over those weeks, her coat filled in, her eyes got a bit brighter, and every time I saw her dozing on her bed, I smiled.

    We went on a walk every morning and every evening, and a low growl rumbled up from her belly whenever someone walked by, so I was careful to give them a wide berth. After a month or so, I took her to the dog park. Not to participate, we stayed outside twenty yards or so from the chain-link fence and just sat on the grass.

    Her eyes darted after each of the dogs inside, curious, attentive, and admittedly, aggressive. Tense. Wary.

    “This is where dogs go to have fun,” I said, gently rubbing her behind the ears. “See them all? They’re all nice. That’s why they’re all together.”

    Only time would help her out of her shell, I knew. Those first few trips, whenever a happy, playful dog ran up to the fence, spotting us out on our own, Lilith would let out a sharp bark, then another, and another, until the dog decided that they wanted nothing to do with my big grumpy girl. And I’d hoped she’d get past that, but she never changed. She didn’t want anything to do with other dogs or people.

    But she did become less aggressive on walks, and more obedient in that respect. Eventually I was able to stop worrying about her doing something like lunging at someone ‘suspicious’ that we passed on a walk. And that was the only bar really I wanted to reach. Aside from that, all dogs have their own personality, and if she honestly wasn’t going to have fun chasing tennis balls and wanted to be a hermit, I wasn’t going to force her into a world she wanted nothing to do with.

    The years passed and she was my closest buddy for a while. Suspicious when I came home smelling like a new guy, and exceedingly wary of Spencer, who I dated for a year or so. Gratefully, that ended pretty amicably. Then there was Harold, who absolutely loved Lilith, despite her complete indifference toward him, and we dated for about six months. And a few others that came and went.

    As I closed in on my thirtieth birthday, glumly wondering if I was destined to be alone forever, just me and Lilith, I was struck by how much she’d changed over the past six years. I’d never known how old she was when I first found her, but the vet said guessed that Lilith been at least six already. And one day when I noticed her take an extra moment to get to her feet for our walk, it seemed to hit me all at once, how gray the fur around her muzzle was compared to when I’d first found her.

    That’s when the weirdness started. First it was a guy on the corner of the block that would always watch us when we went out for our walks and when we returned. He was a perpetual fixture, like some homeless guy would be, but didn’t look the type. And he was always there, leaning against a telephone pole. I brushed it off, assuming he had a similar schedule to mine. Even though Lilith, seemingly reverting to old habits, let out a low growl whenever the man looked in our direction.

    Then there was a woman who came to my apartment one time with some flyers for some sort of medicine line for dogs. She tried to chat me up about how one could give me extra years with my girl, practically trying to get herself invited in. But when her toe just made it over the threshold, Lilith, who’d been standing in the middle of the living room, hackles up, let out a low growl, rebuffing the attempt.

    Looking unreasonably irritated at that, she’d just left.

    Then came the knock that night. A handsome man in a black suit stood on my doorstep and, despite Lilith’s comforting presence, especially it being after dark, I answered the door with the chain still on it and pepper spray in hand. “Yeah?”

    “I’m here for Lilith,” he said, his voice quiet and calm.

    I stared at him. He was too perfect, his head bald and smooth, his skin carved from marble, his eyes dead and vacant of emotion, his face a facsimile of a normal man. I felt like I was staring at a psychopath. “You’re…here for her?”

    “She knows why. It’s time for her to come home.”

    Swallowing hard at the nut job standing in my doorway, I didn’t hesitate before slamming the door shut and flicking the deadbolt. Taking a few steps back, Lilith’s toenails lightly tapped as she walked across the hardwood floors and slid her head under my hand. I absently patted her, wondering if I should call 911. But that was a bit moot when the man proceeded to walk through the closed door.

    Stumbling back, I shouted, “What the fuck?” and flicked the tab on my pepper spray, holding it up in front of me defensively.

    And as quickly as the man had made his entrance, Lilith made her transformation, though it was unnoticed by me until she stood, as I stared wide-eyed at my intruder. Then, suddenly, beside me a young woman rose to her feet, and that drew my gaze, prompting me to stumble back. Naked aside from the dog collar loose around her neck, she unlatched it, holding it in her hands and looking at it almost reverently before she turned to the intruder. “No.”

    “No, what?” he muttered, bemused.

    “I don’t want to come back.”

    He shifted his weight, staring in stark disbelief, as if the young woman had lost her mind. “Lilith, this was a punishment,” he said slowly. “You want more of it?”

    “What’s happening?” I whispered, blinking rapidly.

    Lilith turned to me and took my hand, putting her collar into it. “Hold onto that for me?” I hesitated before nodding. “I’m not really a dog, Tracey,” she told me, her voice quiet, something dangerous lacing the words. “I never was. And like he said,” she continued, looking back to the man in my living room, “this was punishment. It was supposed to be, at least.”

    “You’re saying you enjoyed it?” he smirked. “The life of a pet? Tame and trained and obedient? Should we have vied for something more creative?”

    “It just…wasn’t what you’d planned,” Lilith sighed. “Wasn’t what I’d planned. Wasn’t…” She shook her head slowly. “All those humans I’d met before, it’s as if they were a different breed. Tracey is so curious, none of their tendencies, their vices, their vicious desires. It was a life of peace. I’d never had that.”

    “You grew fond of your master, did you?” he chuckled.

    “She wasn’t my master,” she snapped. “Not like you are.”

    “Maybe that’s how I can fix things, then. Lucifer wanted a punishment for his daughter, and I’m not one who would ever disappoint him.”

    At that, he reached his hand out toward me and clenched his fist and I suddenly couldn’t breathe. Fumbling at my throat, my eyes bulged as my blood turned to acid in my veins, agony echoing through my every cell and I collapsed to the ground.

    Stop it!” Lilith screeched. Her voice echoed in my head as my vision swam. There was a loud crack and suddenly I could breathe, the pain was gone, and I gasped in lungfuls of air, fumbling back along the ground in a panic. My wide eyes staring, I saw that Lilith had the man pinned to my front door by his throat, a sliver of a crack slithered almost the length of the door where he’d struck it.

    “She is mine,” Lilith whispered, her voice barely audible to me, “and she’s not to be harmed. Punishing a daughter of Lucifer is one thing. Angering her is quite another, I’m sure you’d agree.”

    His dark, steady eyes stared into Lilith’s, unphased by her attack. My lower lip quivered and my heart raced as I blinked back fearful tears, just staying as still as I could on the floor, willing myself to turn invisible.

    “What do you think your father will make of this?”

    “We would need to ask him,” she said. “I wouldn’t dare assume to know what…my great father…would decide. Are you saying you would?”

    He pursed his lips as he kept his gaze on hers, unblinking. “Surely not,” he purred. “I am his servant above all else. As are you. Aren’t you?

    Lilith fell silent and I watched as she gradually released her grip on his throat. “I suppose since neither of us can presume to know better than my father, that there’s no choice but to visit him and ask.”

    “That seems most logical,” he murmured, his voice thick with condescension.

    Taking a breath, Lilith walked over and crouched in front of me. “My years with you were pleasant,” she said softly. “I doubt to ever see you pass through the gates of Hell, so this will be goodbye, in all likelihood.” She gently smoothed down my hair, tucking it behind my right ear, as I could only stare, feeling as if the ground was wobbly beneath me, that it could drop out at any moment.

    Pushing herself back to her feet, the man unlocked my door, removing the chain, and opened it. My eyes widened at the world beyond, not of the street I walked out to every morning, but of another world, a horizon far off, the air dark reddish orange and clouded with smoke, the faint echo of screams sending chills down my spine. They then simply walked through, shutting it behind them and dropping me into a stark silence, leaving me sitting on the floor.

    It took me several minutes to gather myself before walking over to the door, hesitating, and then swiftly swinging it wide open. It revealed only my street, dark and lit by streetlights, wind whispering through the trees and car engines echoing from the nearby main roads.

    I looked down to the collar in my hand, tracing my fingers over the name carved into her tag, before looking back up to the world outside my door. My world, not hers. I stood there for ages, wondering of her life as a dog before she’d met me, and wondering of what it would be once she arrived home. Her real home, it seemed, mine just a temporary stopover.

    And in spite of how I’d been smothered beneath the terror and confusion of what she really was, I found myself hoping, like any dog I’d had before or would in the future, that I had given her a good life in my home.

    /r/storiesbykaren

    19 Comments
    2024/02/05
    02:07 UTC

    19

    My Crow Speaks To The Unseen

    It was as though we were cursed. I speak now, of course, looking back on losing nearly everyone I knew to the prevailing darkness. But even then, something ominous loomed in the shadows, drawing to us every foul thing arisen on that spoiled plane.

    I couldn't be sure how they came our way, but members of the Choir came, one by one. I worried we had somehow caught up to the world of the beastmen, and it troubled me. I told Detective Winters, when he found me sitting in the night, watching the wall at the edge of the manor's estate grounds, with vast primeval forests beyond.

    "I'd not worry, we can fortify this place. Anyone approaching will be at our mercy."

    Fortunately, we had a master of warfare, in Detective Winters, and had not his resurrection cost such a grotesque and almost unforgivable toll, it was essential when we did it and paid off when my friend showed us most of our best defenses.

    It was Jacoby and Charlie, two former orderlies of Dellfriar, who first showed up. Detective Winters had them at gunpoint with his automatic shotgun pointed at them.

    "I don't know how we came here. It was as though moonlight took us in our sleep." Jacoby said to us.

    "No, it was like the pull of the moon, on a beam of light." Charlie explained.

    "There's a darkness watching them. It means to infiltrate us." Agent Saint said quietly to Dr. Leidenfrost and Detective Winters.

    "These men were at Dellfriar. I left them among the beastmen." I said.

    "We escaped them and headed towards Thule. There's supposed to be a human settlement there. We got separated from the rest when those lights got us in our sleep. Moonlights." Jacoby insisted.

    "Very suspicious. You can't stay here. My husband already declined to bring you along. Following us was a mistake." Dr. Leidenfrost proclaimed. I felt a chill.

    Detective Winters indicated he would use his weapon at the slightest provocation. Both orderlies got up and fled. When they were gone I felt no relief. I had grave concerns, for if they could show up on our doorstep, any of the Choir could, or worse.

    Perhaps the answer lay in their odd description of the lights that had brought them to us. I knew that ratmen and cat sorcerers all held positions on the moon. I suspected they had something more to do with the Hooded God, however.

    On my last night before my petrification, I actually dreamed of Circe. In the years we had at Leidenfrost, the best and most peaceful times were the days of my life. I knew it wouldn't last forever, and I never took the tranquility and security for granted. I'd known too many awful adventures.

    "Grandson, you've said the name of my stone, your wife-stone, as many times as it takes. We only await the proper light of the moon. Wouldn't want it to steal any of my beauty, would we? And I've waited thousands of years for this release, so what are a few moments, lingering in the sweet comfort of your meaningless dreams?" Circe monologued, as I slept.

    When I awoke, I had taken her place in the imprisonment of the emerald. She held it in her hand, as she had taken my place at Leidenfrost manor. "It is a good time to live again. You've done all I required of you. Now you may rest as I did, and watch the world revolve around unseen forces. You could hear me, my true heir. But believe me, I never even considered letting the opportunity to live again pass me by. As sweetly and tenaciously as you cling to life, mine was worth far more."

    "Where is my father?" Penelope was suddenly at the door of the study. She had no fear of Circe, and this frightened me.

    "He's made of stone, forever. He is dead, but he cannot pass on, for he is trapped, body and soul, in the form of stone. This stone." Circe tossed the emerald through the air and Penelope caught it.

    "If you call to him day after day, he will be free, but only at the cost of your life. He could trick you into casting spells, drawing on his words, as I tricked him. He won't though, not unless you have dire need of magic. You see, your father has a secret. A secret about you." Circe laughed evilly.

    "My father kept no secrets from me. I knew his every thought." Penelope held the emerald and looked into it.

    "This one secret he kept from everyone, almost even himself. But I knew him better than that. I could tell you his secret." Circe folded, grinning with contemptuous enthusiasm.

    "I could guess since I felt this moment. Tell me if you will, but I care not to expose my father's deepest feelings. When I see him again, he will willingly tell me. You have no power over the bond between us, nor can you manipulate our relationship for your ends." Penelope spoke as the sorceress in her, challenging Circe.

    Circe said nothing but smiled with satisfaction. Evidently, she had wanted to see the person my daughter was deep within, beneath her current childhood. Circe had guessed that Penelope was born of an old soul, perhaps even as old as Circe herself.

    "Go play, child. Keep him close, use as much magic as you want." Circe laughed wickedly.

    "I don't need to draw from the emerald." Penelope whispered to me as we walked away. She cast a simple spell of her own, and suddenly I could speak to her. She alone could hear me, but it was enough. I was not to be trapped alone, no, I would be able to watch over my daughter, at least.

    "My Daughter, where is my Lord?" Cory found her sitting in the great hall of Leidenfrost Manor, beneath the double spiral staircase's middle landing.

    "Dad is trapped in this emerald. Circe is here, in the manor." Penelope said with some thoughts.

    "What will we do? We should tell your mother! We should tell everyone!" Cory exclaimed.

    "No. For now, we play her game by her rules. Unless you know a better way to free my father?" Penelope asked Cory.

    "What is it she expects of you? Has she asked you not to tell on her?" Cory asked Penelope.

    "She didn't bother. She knows I know what she wants. She wants me for an apprentice. This is a test. Should I fail, there will be death." Penelope explained her thoughts.

    "There will always be death." Cory told her.

    "Are you with me?" Penelope asked the bird.

    "My Daughter thinks that this crow has a problem with keeping secrets?" Cory asked her, tilting his head so that the light made her a reflection in his eye. Penelope flinched, she'd seen things that scared her in the eyes of the crow before. She'd grown up around the bird.

    "You never told on me when I stole cookies or played with my mother's things. You said the secret was worth a fortune between us. I always loved that about you, how everything is fair. I love you, Cory." Penelope told the crow.

    "Of course, Cory is a good friend as well. My Daughter is loved in my heart, but only as much as anyone else." Cory said oddly.

    "You know just how to make me feel right." Penelope giggled. I wondered at their exchange. It felt like I was eavesdropping. Obviously, she had her own bond with my crow, and their own inside jokes.

    Penelope held the emerald up to the shimmering sunlight of the evening. "I've always known your big secret, Dad. Nothing about you is a mystery to me. Charming you was a spell I learned as an infant. I know you love me best of all. It's my eyes, they enchant you."

    The sparkles from the emerald at sunset shown on her eyes, one gold and one purple, but both a kind of gray in that light. I saw past the surface colors of her eyes into the being she was, and was before, the older part of her soul. That soul regarded me as the child, and felt protective and nurturing towards me. I realized I belonged to her, and not the other way around. I'd always sensed the magnitude of her presence, even when she was a little baby, and catching a glimpse of her, after I'd died, revealed to me my own core.

    "I will confront Circe, when I am ready, and find a way to restore you to life. In the meantime, you and Cory can help me. I have much to learn." Penelope took me and Cory to her room and put us on her desk.

    She got out her notebook, something she'd written 'Book of Shadows' on the cover. It contained a sketch of her sister, jokes she was saving to tell to Cory, copies of recipes her mother had for pies and canning and two functional spells. One of them involved fairy dust and the other was called 'shielded from boredom'. I looked at her spells she had made, realizing I'd never once crafted a spell. She already had two.

    "You cast Shielded From Boredom when you and Persephone were in the Golden City. That's how the two of you stayed sane." I wondered.

    "I did. We were getting very bored, after we wandered the maze for too long. It felt like a very long time."

    "Probably an endless amount of time." Cory squawked.

    "Incredible. You realize that spending an eternity in a place like that would normally shatter the sanity of anyone? Your spell worked. Somehow it kept you and your sister safe." I pointed out.

    "It just came naturally." Penelope smiled, proud of herself.

    "Who does my Daughter speak to?" Cory looked around.

    "I can hear Dad. He's in the stone, dead, but he isn't entirely gone, he has a presence."

    "My Lord," Cory spoke to me, although he could not see or hear me: "You may be as a wife-stone, but you are in good hands. My Lord will be set free, someday."

    0 Comments
    2024/02/03
    16:59 UTC

    18

    ‘In service of others’

    “What loftier goal or higher calling could a person ascribe to, than in aiding his fellow man? Being in the loving service of others in their time of need, should be the sacred duty of every conscientious soul. It's a core tenet in every major belief system. That's why the humble subject of this legal inquiry diligently gathered up things to eat and delivered them to the hungry. With this purposeful, kind-hearted gesture, hollow belies were filled, and their ravenous anger and mindless frustration were abated.

    Every single day he endeavored to this necessary task. Often times, at great risk to himself. Let’s face it, it’s a jungle out there. Mortal danger lurks around every corner. We’ve all seen it. Mr. Ignatius cleverly navigated the unique perils of modern society to help out the disadvantaged. I don’t throw out accolades like ‘selfless’, or ‘hero’ very often, but in this case, it’s richly deserved. Harvey Ignatius is… quite frankly, a saint.

    No more statements, your honor.”

    The jury and audience sat in dutiful silence while the defense attorney painted a glossy, almost messianic version of the accused. A few of them had bemused grins on their faces by the thick, insincere layer of ‘horse-hockey’ they’d just heard. Others were infuriated, offended, or outraged by the creative characterization of the defendant as anything other than the piece of human excrement that he was.

    Sensing the potential for angry outbursts in his courtroom, the judge reminded those in attendance to remain silent. The district attorney stood to begin his closing arguments. He turned to directly face the jurors and inhaled deeply. His eyes remained tightly closed a moment; as if hearing the fanciful defense narrative had been painful to experience. Both the defense and prosecution lawyers had promising back-up careers in acting, if their regular vocations fell through. Drama and courtroom theatrics were frequently employed as a creative facet of jurisprudence.

    “Let me remind the audience and jury members that the ‘things to eat’ Mr. Ignatius ’gathered up’ were PEOPLE. The ‘hungry’ with ‘hollow bellies, filled with ravenous anger and mindless frustration’ were the DEAD. Despite the creative framing Mr. Skoll just entertained us with in his closing statements, Harvey Ignatius didn’t volunteer at a soup kitchen or work in a leper colony. Not by a country mile. The accused man in the courtroom actively conspired with flesh-eating CORPSES to procure LIVING VICTIMS, for them to EAT!

    He did these abominable things for the most selfish of reasons. That is, to save his own cowardly skin. There’s no absolute way of knowing how many innocent victims he lured to their deaths with his cunning ruses but the evidence points to dozens, if not hundreds. If forming an unholy alliance with the dead roaming the countryside to be spared from their bloodthirsty hunger isn’t grounds for the harshest of punishments, I don’t know what is! Every person on the jury today has the sworn duty to find this detestable human being guilty in the first degree.

    I rest my case.”

    (Four minutes later)

    “Your honor. By unanimous decision, we the jury, find the defendant guilty of all charges.”

    Judge Wyndcott tried to maintain his composure as the verdict was read but had to stifle a smirk of pleased satisfaction. Frankly, he was surprised it took them that long. All that was left, was to hand down the sentence. The bailiff ordered the now convicted procurer of living victims, to rise.

    “Harvey Ignatius, for your heinous crimes against humanity, I sentence you to permanent confinement in ‘the maze of the undead’. Your internment will be simulcast on Pay-Per-View. As the hungriest and more ferocious of the dead, let’s see if you can strike a deal with them. We’ll all be munching our popcorn.”

    The entire courtroom gasped at the severity and incredible rarity of Judge Wyndcott handing down the Mount Everest of undesirable punishments.

    ‘Bang’, went the gavel.

    0 Comments
    2024/02/03
    04:53 UTC

    44

    Charon's Holiday

    Laundry day, again. I wonder how many of these are there in a lifetime? I suppose it varies, depending on how often someone does laundry. I avoid it, running out of clean clothes before I wash. I don't mean to be gross, it's just that I've developed a lifelong aversion to laundry day.

    What's that Quinten Tarantino movie where the girl is telling her friends why she hates going into the laundry room - and it ends up being the backstory for her gun? That sums up why I also, lately, won't go do laundry. I work at night, which means going down there is going there at night, past young men smoking and glaring weirdly and obvious drug deals in the parking lot. I'd rather not get attacked, and I worry that it could happen.

    So that's why I owned a gun. I kept it a secret, because I am politically opposed to guns. Which is why I am - a hypocrite. More on that:

    As you already know, I died not too long ago. They managed to defibrillate my heart in the hospital. I'd made it there and gotten blood in me and undergone surgery for my gunshot wound. A complication of the surgery put me into shock, and I was dead for about two and a half minutes. The doctors agreed it was a total miracle I came back.

    It wasn't a scene from John Wick on the gangsters who haunt my apartment building. No, it was me cleaning my gun, routinely, and then one day, somehow, accidentally shooting myself. Don't make a habit of gun cleaning and do it when you're bored and drunk.

    I'm genuinely sorry to everyone who was in the morning commute when that ambulance came through and started a traffic jam that made so many people a few minutes late. I'd have hated that, if I were you, and I'm sorry about that. I'd had a very bad night at work, my boss had groped me again. Can you believe he told everyone I'd tried to kill myself because I'd come on to him and he had shown me his ring? Well, I responded by drinking that morning, which is evening for someone who works all night. That's when I ended up getting shot and dead and everything.

    I found myself standing in a kind of mist, and I felt quite afraid and miserable. I sensed I had died, and while it was a mere two and a half minutes of my life before I was back in the hospital, I underwent a terrifying ordeal that seemed to last much, much longer.

    The evidence of it are the two coins I have, the silver drachma minted as though yesterday, kept timelessly, upon the ferryman. I'd stood there for what seemed like a long time before I saw the creature.

    "When you are ready to cross, I will take you." Charon told me. I trembled in horror at the sight of it, the skeletal thing with its long white bear and hair and its ghastly crown. It held a rugged wooden pole and stood on what appeared to be a boat, inviting me in with the gesture of its bone-fingers. "Do not fear me, I am Charon, ferryman to the other side."

    "Am I dead?" I asked.

    "Not quite." Charon sighed. "Nothing is like it used to be. I used to get paid two drachma to carry souls across this distance of the Styx. Now, all I get are terrified and penniless customers and sometimes they even go back from here. I think you might do that."

    "If I am dead, is that Heaven?" I asked.

    "No. That would be Hell. You will have your soul cleansed and sent back in a new form. It might take an eternity, and it will be due suffering. All the pain you caused will be inflicted upon you until your soul is finally clean of all sin. You, I'd guess you achieved level eight, Malebolge. It's bad, it's about as bad as Hell gets. You make the cut for that circle because you were a hypocrite. You politically and openly opposed gun ownership and yet it is the gun you owned that caused your death. That's classic hypocrisy, they won't ignore it, they love classic souls." Charon told me.

    "I really don't want to go to Hell." I proclaimed. It sounded rather bad.

    "Maybe I will leave you here and you'll go back. It will look like a miracle, by now. You don't know much about death, do you?" Charon chuckled at my expense.

    "Not really. I try not to think about it." I said honestly. "I don't really know much about life either. Look at me, I made a classic mistake. That's as bad as it gets, right?" I confided in Charon, trembling at the thought of Hell.

    "I don't either. I wish I could get a burger, or something. Put some meat on these bones." Charon told me.

    "Want me to cover for you while you take a break?" I asked. Charon started shaking a little bit and said nothing for a moment, then it offered me the pole.

    "I promise I'll come back. I don't want what's in-store for the guy before me." Charon leaped off the boat as I took the pole and hefted a small bag of coins. "Be right back."

    Charon left and I was granted an image of him, dressed in a black burial suit and walking stiffly across a street towards a burger place. I couldn't believe it was the same one I worked at.

    He got to the counter and Mike was there. "Can I take your order, Sir?" Mike wrinkled his nose at the stench of the cadaver.

    "I'd like a burger." Said Charon. That's how it started. Simple enough. Things did escalate quickly, as it turned out Charon was a horrifying customer beyond all nightmares. I'll go into detail, but mind that it gets gory:

    "Sir, you have to order a specific burger, like off the menu. Order one of the meal numbers, like number one: the Single Cheeseburger with fries and a drink. Or off of the side menu: The Classic Burger or Classic Cheeseburger."

    "I don't want a Classic Burger. This is my only lunch break. Give me a burger, please." Charon ordered.

    "Fine. It's the Classic Burger, though." Mike put in the order.

    "I literally don't want the Classic Burger, just a burger, that's all!" Charon huffed. I could see the problem. In Charon's world, nothing was nastier than something that was classic. He seemed to think it was a downgrade, and refused to accept it.

    "It is just a burger, we just call it a Classic Burger." Mike picked up on the frustration Charon was expressing.

    "Well, in that case, I accept. It is strange you call your burger a Classic Burger. That's weird." Charon complained.

    "Sorry, Sir." Mike apologized. Charon glared, feeling patronized. "May I have a name for the order?"

    "Charon." Charon said.

    "Okay. That'll be twenty-three ninety." Mike rang it up.

    "Kinda expensive for a burger, don't you think?" Charon complained.

    "Not really. It's a really good burger, and that's a pretty normal price for a burger, these days." Mike told Charon.

    "Okay, here's my money." Charon offered a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, two silver drachma, a few wooden nickels, a gum wrapper and a car wash token.

    Mike uncrumpled the twenty-dollar bill and then picked up the silver coins. "We can't take these."

    "Why not? They are worth a fortune." Charon growled.

    "Because they aren't real money." Mike smirked.

    "I paid, keep the change." Charon determined.

    "Whatever, buddy." Mike glared. He went in the back to make the burger.

    "Order up for Karen!" Mike slightly mispronounced Charon, having thought the guy's name was Karen.

    Charon looked around and then got up from his seat to get his burger. He examined it and noticed it was made poorly and that Mike had spit on the bun. "Let me talk to your manager."

    "Hey, boss, Karen wants to see you!" Mike called our boss out.

    "What is this sloppy mess? I get one lunch break, just one. This is what I get to eat?" Charon pointed at the heap that was formerly a burger.

    "Sir, if you don't like it, go somewhere else." Out boss said in a classic way.

    "Okay, but first give me back my money." Charon glared.

    "Sure, I can do that. Let's be rid of you." Our boss said. I love his customer service skills, knowing what he's got coming. He took out the top twenty and a five and gave started giving them to Charon.

    "Wait, he paid with those silver coins. Give him those." Mike said.

    Charon took the two silver coins and said. "You know what, forget the damn burger."

    My boss and Mike blinked.

    Charon reached over the counter and took them each by the top of their head and peeled their skin off in one tug, leaving them standing there with no skin, dripping blood. Then they started screaming. Mike ran and hit his head and fell over, but my boss stuck his groping hand into the fryer vat by accident as he slipped on his own blood.

    He writhed screaming in agony and died a bad death there on the floor.

    Charon returned with their souls, looking much like they did at their moment of death. "These classic clowns have a lot of soul cleansing to do. I appreciate you helping me get a break from working in this endless grind from Hell."

    "No problem." I told Charon.

    "Here." Charon gave me the two silver drachma. "Keep the change."

    1 Comment
    2024/02/02
    16:46 UTC

    5

    My Crow And The Golden City

    "In this chapter, we establish how everyone at Leidenfrost Manor is spending their time. Then, after Gabriel mentions that the phones have stopped working, news from outside arrives in the form of Agent Saint and her team. The world beyond is on the brink of an apocalypse, as a multitude of unchecked monsters begin their rampage and revenge.

    As to Silverbell, Agent Saint recognizes her and is surprised to see her, because she had already helped her return home. Since it never happened, Agent Saint suspects that the veil between worlds is weakening.

    Penelope and Persephone follow strange music into the mists between worlds. Cory sees them do so and tells me and I rush after them. I manage to find them in the Golden City, where masked revelers are celebrating the arrival of the Hooded God. We learn that the god will release everyone from life upon arrival, and could arrive at any moment. The city is like a shifting maze, with staircases that defy gravity and buildings of impossible geometry.

    Just when we realize we cannot escape, Silverbell finds us and leads us along an unseen alleyway, back to our own world, just as the celebrations of the city become as agonized screams of terror that then fall silent."

    I wrote in my notes. I had started to compile a volume of the things I had seen and done. I did not yet know my role in all things, nor how much of a story there would be by the end, but I did know it had reached a point where I could see I did indeed have a role in a much larger story. I thought it was over, and had no idea it had only just begun.

    It is true that those things happened, but my indulgence of words has grown significantly over the span of time I have seen since those days. And as before, I shall compose it as an adventure, an episode, in the style of my thoughts and perceptions of those days, except it is about this time that I became aware of my daughter's abilities, and so there is more to this chapter than perhaps there would be if I had written it then. I shall now, from hindsight, tell the full story, and know in my words what she knew, at least as it pertains to the Hooded God and the events of the Golden City that we participated in, merely by our intrusion.

    First of all, consider that this might be too horrifying of a perspective, and that you already know the important parts of the chapter. Secondly, consider I shall again visit the preliminary stages of my daughter's developments in magical abilities in further chapters. Finally, consider that in this one episode, I have cheated and told the story from my own concepts that I have now, and not with the mystery that shrouded my perceptions on that day or even as I reflected and wrote about what had happened.

    Everyone in Leidenfrost Manor was living quietly and knowingly that all our peace and tranquility was each moment a blessing. Instead of boredom, there was a kind of absorbing of the atmosphere of orderliness.

    We spent our time gardening and husbanding wild chickens we'd caught. We build a corral and managed to lure sheep and cows and pigs into it, building pens and learning how to care for them. The woods were full of stray farm animals, and danger. I thought I saw an ettercap, and mentioned it to Silverbell, who said again:

    "White Nettle, this is revenge." And she'd spit, a glistening and oddly bitter smelling droplet that was sticky and would become like an amber. These she hung around the windowsills on spider's threads she would politely harvest for her uses. She had assured me that the spiders in the manor were under her spells and would never scare anyone, let alone bite. In exchange, they were promised nobody would harm them when they were discovered, nor wipe away their hidden nests.

    Dr. Leidenfrost was our leader, administered to everyone's requisitions and in exchange we had an economy of freely exchanged favors, everyone contributing their handy skills and talents to our common comfort and security. She often told me I was her inspiration or asked me for advice or just confided her insecurities to me. As her spouse, I was her singular support, except when she picked on Isidore. Anyway, our family flourished and we also had a village, and that flourished too.

    Gabriel and Clide Brown were the only ones who really got out and saw the collapse first-hand. The rest of us stayed near the house and grounds. We farmed and crafted and just lived our lives in peace.

    Gabriel reported to us what they had seen, but it was often the lack of information that conveyed the most impression that I had, that there was nothing out there. There were no more phones at some point, but there's no sense in correlating that with the arrival of Agent Saint's party. They had promised they would come, but we had lost contact with them much earlier. I think the point was that they couldn't call us and tell us they were coming, but even before there were no phones there was no phone service. Slightly different problems.

    It was easy to lose contact when there was no phone service, no signal. You couldn't just dial someone's number, you needed a switchboard. For a while there were smaller phone companies, scavenged from the wreckage of civilization. What I really should say is that the months, the years, had passed the last of such attempts at rebuilding a civilized society.

    Agent Saint had my brother and nephew and Detective Winters with her. It was a very joyful reunion, as I had not seen any of them in a long time. They had many adventures and assured us they had come from the same world I had, and thus Agent Saint's reaction to Silverbell is so significant:

    "I am surprised you are not in Fairy Land" Agent Saint told her.

    "White Nettle destroyed the spokes of the wheel of worlds. You know this is all there is, and think, where you come in, that is where White Nettle took me key, dressed in your eyes. It is her glamor, that you thought she was Silverbell. But I am me, right here. And you should see what she has done to my home. Ettercaps everywhere! It is an atrocity!"

    "And that is what I learned, along the way. So, it is true. My abilities, they have faded somewhat." Agent Saint told us.

    "Why is that?" Dr. Leidenfrost asked her teasingly. My wife was aware of Agent Saint's virginity, and that it was apportioned to her ability of prophecy.

    "I bathed in the House of Jher. I assure you it was not my first choice for resolving that adventure!" Agent Saint blushed.

    We had no idea what she meant, and I'll tell you later what we learned when she explained it to us. It was not as erotic as it sounds, but never-the-less Agent Saint felt tainted by the whole experience right to her very soul and it affected her confidence in her ability to have visions of the future. Mostly, because she had learned the secret of how visions were born.

    I was hoeing a patch to plant carrots, beets and potatoes when Cory came and landed on the scarecrow in the tall wheat near me, behind the oak fence. He squawked in alarm, and I stood up, he had my attention.

    "What is it?"

    "My Daughters have followed piping into the mists lingering!" Cory said clearly. I had no idea what he had just said.

    "Are you talking about Persephone and Penelope?" I asked "In danger?"

    "Follow me, my Lord!" Cory flew off as a crow flies and I had to scramble over fences and traverse wheat to get to his mist and piping.

    Indeed, a sweet bagpipe sound was emanating from the mist and the stuff was like a thick white smoke, and I could see nothing in it.

    "What is this?" I asked Cory.

    "My Lord will need a staff, pouch and wife-stone of sorcery, as he has with a word he knows." Cory glanced at me.

    "I only need my friend." I held my arm for my crow.

    "Then take the kit for his sake." Cory flitted to my arm and looked me in my eye, causing me to flinch at the dark depths of his soul. I could see the specter of death reflected behind me, and recalled well not to look him in his beady little eye when he tilted his gaze at me so.

    "Esc." I charmed my kit to my person. After a moment my staff, with its runic carvings like wormed bark, my flax pouch full of cantrips, the emerald of Circe around my neck, all began to feel real again, instead of away from me. The relics were real, but their otherworldly properties left them in dreams, unless I called them to awaken in my hands.

    "My Lord knows a very clever spell." Cory complimented.

    "It's nothing compared to someone who can craft such as this." I held up Circe's emerald. "I'm an amateur."

    "I think my Lord is past amateur, even if he must learn much before becoming skilled in magic." Cory judged me. "I've seen my Lord cast spells with proper effect on a number of occasions. What happens when an amateur casts spells?"

    "Well, I suppose I could have gotten it wrong. I did that much more often than got it right." I realized. "These are mine, though, it feels right to have them by my side."

    "So it is." Cory agreed.

    We walked into the mist, stalling no longer. I did feel a sense of urgency that I am not mentioning in contrast to our conversation and preparations. There was also a current of underlying terror, for ourselves, despite my valiance at going in there to rescue my daughters, I admit I hesitated, so great was my fear of that unknown mist and the uncertainty that they could even be rescued at all.

    I actually ignored those feelings, in favor of a confused and distracted focus on the precise thing at-hand. That-is, until we stepped into that musical white fog.

    We walked right through it, like a curtain, and it was gone. We were alone in a crowd of masked revelers. They wore many costumes, mostly with huge frilled collars and masquerade-styled domino masks, most of them grotesque and bejeweled. The crowds were dancing and partying like puppets, repeating their motions endlessly and without meaning.

    We moved among them, and I looked around at the adobe buildings, adorned in paper lights and lit by strange stars and a sky that looked too low somehow. The shifting sands around the city formed strange pillars, swirling like dust devils in one place.

    Around them, the buildings shifted and twisted as though contorted through a lense. Cory said that when he looked away and looked again they would shift. With Circe's emerald I needed not look away for the effect to transpire. I watched as the streets and alleys and facades shifted places as though mere illusions, their colors bleeding and shimmering into position past each other, trading places almost instantly. It happened in the blink of an eye, and I could see how it watched the eyes of everyone, with a thousand eyes of its own. A spell with eyes, I was fascinated.

    When nobody was looking, it would change any section of the city that was unobserved. In this way, there was no escape from the ever-shifting maze. Everyone who was in the city could not escape. I saw through the magic to its roots, that somehow all of this was happening in one single instant, the spark of an even greater magic.

    I could not see what it was, I was somehow repelled from looking at the source of the enchantment. I felt it in my soul, somehow depleting me just for looking at it. And I couldn't see it anyway, so I looked away. I exhausted the emerald of Circe, concealing myself from its gaze as it looked back at me, and saw only a humble reveler, no different than the others. At least I hoped that is all it saw.

    "What is this place, my Lord?" Cory clicked in Corvin.

    "It is the clutches of something that is - keeping it this way." I described what I had seen, as best as I understood it.

    "What have we here?" Cory asked a reveler in a crow mask. To my astonishment she responded to him, saying:

    "I am unpaired, or I was. Would sir dance with me, and be my match in the festivities?" She asked.

    "Could you help me find two missing girls? They are like me and have no mask." I said to her.

    "I am Ysildra. Dance with me, play with me, there is no time to waste before the Hooded God releases us all from life. We are to rejoice!" Ysildra tried to embrace me but our bodies were like smoke mixing, untouched by the other.

    "We're not quite here yet." I sighed in relief. "Maybe they aren't either. Maybe we can escape."

    "My love, what are you?" Ysildra looked perplexed and disturbed. She took off her mask, her eyes watering. "You're not for me, are you?"

    "I'm sorry, but I am not for you. Could you help me anyway?" I asked.

    "I still love you. I will try to help." Ysildra promised. She seemed to be struggling to break free from her position, and after she walked away, shifted blurrily back to where she was and tried again, then she was walking beside us.

    "We must, to the chapel, away. They might baptize you before the image of the Hooded God." Ysildra told me. She tried to take my arm, but her hand passed through my elbow and I saw this frightened her and hurt her feelings, for it struck a tear from her.

    "I can't do that. I've got to find my girls." I told her.

    "See that?" Ysildra pointed to something. I gazed but saw nothing.

    "What are we looking at?"

    "It is like a princess with wings and glowing and tiny. She flits from place to place, obeying the corners and not the passages. She knows her way, hard to spot her." Ysildra told me.

    "Does she see us?" I asked.

    "I don't think so, we are in the shadows, my lover, and how we sit still amid the chaos." Ysildra gazed at me with broken longing, like she had waited a thousand lifetimes for me and only to be denied. Perhaps she had.

    "How can we get her attention?" I asked.

    "There is something about you than makes you, unseeable." Ysildra told me.

    "Then how do you see me?" I asked her.

    "I do not." Ysildra said, tears running across her cheeks as she painfully confessed. "I only feel you, and how it feels, I know you by that sensation. And how I hear you, for I bow to your will, my love." Ysildra knelt.

    I took off the emerald. "Now you should see and hear me."

    "I do. And even more beautiful." Ysildra told me. "And to feel the touch of the Hooded God will be an even sweeter desire, as soon as the stars swing round and round again, to the beginning of the song, endlessly repeated."

    "Yeah, we are trying to get out of here before that happens." I said.

    "Leave the Golden City?" Ysildra looked confused and almost like she would laugh, it was absurd to her. She stood and danced a little, unable to hold still for very long.

    "Lord!" Silverbell flew up to us.

    "I'm glad to see you, Sylvia. I can't solve this maze." I told her.

    "It is easy. You follow me now." Silverbell told me. We followed her, Ysildra in tow and located the girls.

    Oddly enough, I sometimes remember finding the girls and then meeting up with Silverbell. Sometimes we met Ysildra only as we left. There were times I recall finding our skeletal remains on the streets of the dead city, the only ones without party hats. Part of the magic was a timelessness, a lack of sequence, the rules of time and space meaning only the whim of the Hooded God, dreaming in madness of a conquered city he couldn't touch, trapped forever.

    The girls were fascinated, and with her eyes glowing my daughter Penelope spoke to me saying:

    "Father, this is the sum of all those dreams I had of your adventures." Penelope told me, with her left eye glowing purple and her right eye glowing gold. Her voice sounded too old for my little girl, and I realized she was not as I had last seen her. She and her sister had wandered the aeons, and their minds were only intact through their respective natures.

    I considered that death had already tasted Persephone. Persephone lived with the blessing of a powerful goddess, her life belonging to a living energy that had sworn her into existence. Whatever happened to her had to become a part of that charmed reality, obeying the narrative of the goddess. Wandering an enchanted maze was not dangerous for her, merely satisfying the curious compulsion of her patron.

    Penelope was far more complicated. She was born with the capacity of her mother for intelligence and logic and my ability to cultivate magic and the secrets of our old world. This adventure had demonstrated what she was capable of. She had harnessed the magical energy she had needed to shield herself and her sister, by instinct. Even with that commendable achievement, she had activated the depths of her soul to reinforce her sorcery. Her oldest and wisest part had risen from her timeless self and kept her safe from the endless darkness, the shifting sands, the realm of the Hooded God.

    We reached the center of the maze, its exit. The white fog was like a bubbling gruel on the surface of a sloped building. Colored smoke issued from its chimney. Cory flew through it, clicking for us to follow quickly.

    Persephone knew the sound of the crow when he did that and ran after him. Penelope looked at me and I saw the oldness in her eyes fading, her scowl leaving and her normal face returning. Then she followed her older sister through. Silverbell left me there.

    I looked at Ysildra. "Thank you."

    "I would come with you if I could." Ysildra hid her emotions. She trembled. She knew I was leaving and instead of throwing herself at me, she tried to make it a sweet goodbye.

    "You'd be welcome. I appreciate your friendship. I'm not sure we would have made it through this without you."

    "Yes. You're welcome. Just go, I think. Please." Ysildra's eyes were watering, but she refused to blink and cry, she was holding back her heartbreak. "I had to love you. I'm glad you were worth me being the wheel of this city. You know, like a third wheel, but out of everyone."

    "I don't see why. You're so beautiful, and you've proven to be the kind of person anyone would want for a friend." I told her honestly. I knew she'd live in hell, so it was the least I could leave her with.

    "Would you have kissed me goodbye, if we could touch?" Ysildra asked me. I thought about it and nodded.

    "Sure, I would. My wife would actually be disappointed if I told her this day ended with me refusing to kiss you at the end on account of her. She's very romantic."

    "Then, tell her to receive my kiss, on my behalf." Ysildra said, her voice sounding a little high, and then she started crying and turned and fled.

    I was free to go, so I did.

    "The stars are weird, in that place." Penelope told me when we were home. She sounded normal again. I forgot the sorceress who had resided in her, protecting her. She was no different, yet somehow changed. It was because she knew, or thought she knew, what she was capable of.

    "Don't go into places like that." I admonished her.

    "Why not, it's what you do!" Penelope protested. I'd never seen her tween before and I was a little startled. Then she frowned and apologized. "I'm sorry, Dad. I heard the music. It sounded alright."

    "It's fine." I shrugged. I'd realized she was just as scared as I was that we'd never escape.

    I went and found Silverbell where she was drawing a map of the city in some spilled sugar.

    "What can I help you with?" Silverbell asked me.

    "I wanted to thank you for coming in after us." I said. "And saving us."

    "I made that look easy, I bet." Silverbell kept playing with the sugar. She stopped and looked at me. "The Hooded God wanted you there."

    "Why is that?"

    "I think it was personal." Silverbell told me. "See this?"

    I looked at the sugar. I saw nothing but an elaborate maze.

    "No, what am I supposed to be seeing?" I asked.

    "It is a pattern. I recognized it right away. That's how I made that rescue look easy. It is hard to explain." Silverbell told me.

    "Give me a try." I said.

    "Well, when White Nettle took Fairy Land, it was the maneuver of an opportunist. This is because the four pillars that compose the world are gone. It's like when Mum brings out the projector and slide show. Slides atop each other, like worlds, smeared into one world. Hmmm, maybe I am not explaining it right?"

    "I get it. The pillars kept the world layers separate. They're gone and the worlds are as one world, self-collapsed." I said.

    "Sort of." Silverbell frowned. "Anyway, the point is that something else is like that here. With no place to go, this Hooded God needs to be known, to exist. It is in their collective consciousness, the fabric of their world. The Hooded God is nowhere else, this pattern, it is its mind, do you see how the streets form the canals of dreaming?"

    "I don't see that. It is something you are familiar with that I've never heard of." I said.

    "Well, nevermind that. Think - is there anyone who you would forget, who cannot die, who exists between worlds, outside of time, as a mere thought, a dream?" Silverbell asked.

    I realized she was talking about Aureus and I thought about anything else and said: "Nope."

    "That's good. Let us then leave this pattern as so much spilled sugar, and forget what it spells out. All for the better." Silverbell scattered the sugar by swirling her wings.

    0 Comments
    2024/02/01
    16:57 UTC

    587

    I am being watched by a woman from the other side of the road everyday. Now I know who she is.

    A few years have passed since I moved out of my parents' house to stand on my own two feet. While most things were difficult to manage at the beginning of my independent life, I now do them in my sleep.

    a daily, weekly, even yearly routine that has always worked and there's not much that can break it. except when you realize sooner or later that the perfect life you've supposedly built isn't so perfect after all.

    For example, when you realize that the monthly costs are too high to put any significant money aside and it will probably be difficult to pay off your student loan. and when the tax authorities come knocking at your door for a tax audit, you really realize what it means to be an adult.

    some time ago i was in a terrible crisis because i had massive debts that i couldn't pay and my mother also died. and as i was an only child and my father died when i was a child, my mother was the last person i could count on. it was around that time that i started to see her.

    the woman on the side of the road. i didn't notice her at first, but the more often she appeared, the more often i noticed her. at the time, i thought she was just a simple middle-aged woman waiting for her bus. but the more often i saw her, the more it increased. in the beginning, i saw her maybe once a month. then eventually twice, then eventually several times a week and eventually every day. and she always looked at me. She had long brown hair and a few strands of gray. Otherwise she was quite pretty. She wore a white short-sleeved top with a black skirt that went down to her feet. She also wore a bracelet

    her face was emotionless and no one who walked past her seemed to interact with her. a month before the event, i started seeing her even at night. and during the night, she stood even closer to my house. she was not on the opposite side of the street but on mine, staring at the house. when this was the case, some strange things often happened. i heard someone knocking on the door but i didn't have the courage to open it because i assumed the woman was stalking me. then i heard doors and even windows opening and closing. i tried to speak to her a few times but every time i stepped out of the house she was gone. it was almost as if she had vanished into thin air.

    And two weeks before the event, I saw her everywhere. At home, at work, on the way home, in my favorite cafe. everywhere. i only saw her in the corner of my eye. but the really scary thing happened the night before the event. i woke up in the middle of the night because i saw her in my dreams. she ran up to me and asked me for help. but she didn't explain what she wanted me to help her with. she just repeated it until i woke up. a shiver ran down my spine because my door was ajar and i saw her peeking through the slit. i wanted to scream at her to leave me alone, but i couldn't get a sound out. she turned around and disappeared into the darkness.

    i contacted the police, but when they searched my house they found no one. there was no sign of a break-in either.

    i worked at a tech company as a computer scientist and even though i was earning well i could only just cover my costs. and then there were still the back payments to the tax office. i couldn't even afford a car so i had to walk. i remained optimistic that my situation would change at some point. but most of all i hoped i wouldn't see the woman again.

    and then came the event that changed my life. that evening i was walking home from work. it was a friday so it was the weekend and i don't know why but something made me take a detour through a forest. the forest atmosphere was incredibly calming. for the first time, i was able to really reflect. i came to the conclusion that i imagined the older woman as a reaction to my mother's death. that i didn't want to be alone and longed for a mother figure to lean on. i lay down in the grass and closed my eyes.

    i was about to sink into the realm of dreams in the middle of the forest when i was suddenly awakened by a loud scream. i jumped up and looked around. i heard a woman screaming from a distance. i don't know why i didn't call the police right away, but i ran in the direction of the noise. i was afraid that someone was in danger that i had to help.

    and then i saw them. two older, broad men who had gagged and tied up a young woman. they pressed their hands over the woman's mouth as she screamed in panic for help while they tried to tape it shut with duct tape. as they were still busy with the woman and were inattentive, i was able to pick up a thick stick nearby and sneak up on them. i reached out and pulled the stick over the head of one of them. he fell unconscious and the other first wondered whether he should attack me but then took flight.

    the woman cried bitterly and i freed her. then i called the police. in the meantime, i stayed with the crying and traumatized woman and assured her that everything was fine and that nothing would happen to her. the man who had been knocked unconscious was arrested immediately and his partner was arrested as well. the two were wanted criminals who had already taken the life of a middle-aged woman after torturing and raping her.

    when an ambulance arrived alongside the police, the woman was given medical treatment while the policemen questioned me. they told me that they needed a witness statement from me and took me to the police station. afterwards, i visited the woman in hospital. and she thanked me from the bottom of her heart. She explained that she was afraid at that moment she would share the fate of her mother, who was also murdered, but now she is happy that she is well. we talked for a while and got to know each other a little. and it got late.

    i explained to her that i had to go now but that we would surely see each other again. she thanked me again and said goodbye. when i stepped outside i saw her again. the woman. she was standing on the other side of the street again. although it was raining i could clearly see that she was smiling at me. and then she made a sign for me to follow her.

    i took this as a chance to find out what she wanted from me. also because i hoped to finally have my peace. i followed her and while i did so she always kept eye contact even if that meant walking backwards. i was a bit confused but whenever i called out to her where she wanted me to go she just kept quiet and made the gesture again that i should follow her.

    she eventually led me to the town cemetery and there to the grave of a ruby miller. when i finally caught up with her she had her back turned to me and was staring at the headstone. she turned and looked me in the eye and i could see that she had tears in her eyes.

    she began to speak: "i suppose you're wondering who i am and why i was watching you. after everything that happened, you deserve an answer. the girl you saved today. she's my daughter"

    i looked at her in disbelief and replied: "what? that's a very macabre joke, isn't it? she told me her mother is dead".

    "she is" she replied and showed me the gravestone. "my name is ruby miller. the men who were arrested today abused and killed me some time ago. they took my daughter's photo from my wallet and told me before they killed me that they would find my daughter and do the same to her."

    I didn't know what to say so I just listened carefully.

    "in the afterlife, i was looking for a way to help my daughter. souls are no longer bound by time after death. this allowed me to find a solution in different timelines to save my daughter. and in every timeline in which my daughter survived, you were the one who saved her. so i returned to my timeline, tracked you down and led you into the forest.

    thank you from the bottom of my heart. i hope you know that you are her guardian angel. finally i can rest in peace now that i know my daughter is safe."

    suddenly she pulled a ring she wore on her right hand off her finger.

    "i want you to have this. this is my wedding ring. a gift from my husband. we were wealthy. this is a five-carat diamond ring. it was buried with me, but i don't think i have any use for it anymore. but for you, it can be a key out of your difficult situation."

    she handed me the ring and came up to me for a hug. i closed my eyes for just a moment and when i opened them again she was gone. the only thing i heard was the rain pattering on the headstones and the grass. i stood in front of the headstone for a few more minutes. i still had the ring in my hand. it was hard to process that moment.

    i sold the ring for a good price and was finally able to get rid of a significant amount of my debt. samantha, the woman i saved, became a friend of mine shortly after. but i never told her what happened at the cemetery. or what happened before that fateful day. if i had told her i had met her mother, she would never have believed me. Ruby however never showed up again.

    i still cry when i think about it. thank you ruby. sincerely

    11 Comments
    2024/01/30
    23:53 UTC

    65

    'My friends went on vacation to the underworld, and all I got was this T-Shirt'

    I realize the title is a little misleading. I don’t mean they went to the infernal home of ‘Hades’, the greatly-feared god of death in Greek mythology. I wouldn’t make light of something like that. Not to mention, if they had visited the land of no return, they wouldn’t have been able to return and give me the shirt, right? We’ve all read those classic myths and epic tales. There’s always some catch or critical error the protagonist makes whenever they dare to enter the one-way realm of the dead. That’s not the case here. This was something else.

    They actually went on a little remote island getaway. The tropical resort in Tobago is called: ‘The Underworld’ because their tourism bureau is in the business of selling cleverly-themed vacation travel packages, and filling their hotel rooms. Referring to it as ‘Caribbean mosquito haven’ would dissuade travelers from visiting their tiny island. As they say: ‘Accent the positive, eliminate the negative, don’t mess with Mr. In-between.’

    Elise and Tony are two of my best friends in the world. Rob and Becca are also very good buddies. I was invited to go with them on the trip but as a single guy, I didn’t want to be the ‘odd man out’, if you know what I mean. It would’ve felt weird starring into my drink glass while they paired up to ‘suck face’ and grope each other. Knowing what I know now, everything turned out for the best. Tropical curses can be hard to get rid of.

    I asked Tony to text me when they arrived safely, but internet coverage on the island is spotty, so I wasn’t surprised I didn’t hear from him for a few days. When I did, it wasn’t at all what I expected. I assumed I’d receive panoramic shots of the beach at sunset, or some good-natured ribbing about me being stuck back home in the blustery cold weather. Instead, what I actually got was troubling, to put it mildly. As his revelatory messages unfolded, he confessed that they felt increasingly unsafe by a series of uncomfortable events which transpired, completely out of their control. His tone strongly implied they were in grave danger.

    It seemed like an off-putting joke at first. I thought they felt bad for me being home alone, and were trying to minimize their vacation fun, but this went way past downplaying their enjoyment. It was eerie and morbid. Tony said they were being followed at night by shadowy figures mirroring their movements. He actually used the word ‘stalked’ in a follow-up response. News stories of travelers being victimized or killed in tourist traps are increasingly common these days. Because of that, I urged him to contact the authorities immediately.

    He didn’t respond right away but I completely understood. He genuinely sounded afraid for their safety. It’s not like they had time to reassure me they were alright, in the middle of their ongoing situation. Tony is six-foot-five and built like a professional football player. Rob is no slouch either. He’s a bodybuilder. The two of them together are very intimidating to approach but thieves are brazen, desperate, and if they have weapons, it doesn’t matter how buff you are. I was highly worried but hoped the island police would put an end to the potential crisis.

    Hours passed. Nothing. I decided to reach out to Elise, Rob, and Becca separately. They were equally unresponsive. I looked up the Tobago police department phone number and was about to call them when another text came in. This time from Rob. I don’t mind telling you, his message concerned me even more than I had been with Tony. He appeared to be completely rattled by whatever they were going through.

    “Dude. The creepy things watching our bungalow from the jungle are definitely NOT human. I know how that sounds but they can slither up the trees like a freakin snake. We’ve called the cops a dozen times but they’ve been a no-show, so far. They advised us to stay inside under all circumstances, and keep quiet. The last couple times they refuse to even answer our call! It’s madness. Becca and Elisa are inconsolable. They were the first to see them leering at us through the window. Tony grabbed a mop from the closet to try to scare them off but I reminded him of what the cops said. Maybe the big lug will keep his ass in the house. You know him. He thinks he’s Superman or something.”

    Rob was definitely the more level headed of the pair. It seemed like he was keeping his wits about him, but the way he described the stalkers in the jungle as being serpent -like made my skin crawl. I worried the locals might’ve slipped something into their drinks to rob them. When I tried to call their phones, it wouldn’t go through. A recording informed me the intended recipients ‘were not equipped to send or receive international calls’. Cell coverage was apparently limited to person-to-person on the island. Fortunately texts would go through using the resort WiFi service.

    If Tony resorted to brandishing a mop handle as a threat deterrent, then they had no significant weapons. I was engrossed in their ongoing drama from a couple thousand miles away, but unable to offer any real help. They were essentially on their own. All I could do was text moral support and calming words, from afar.

    “Alvin, we’re fully surrounded in this glorified native hut, right beside the swamp.”; Becca revealed. “Rob and Tony are keeping a lookout from the windows. We have the lights out so they can’t see inside. The reptilian creatures have yellowish eyes and slitted pupils. It’s like seeing an unholy demon from Danté’s Inferno on the other side of the glass. There’s not a trace of humanity in them! No emotion on their monstrous, leathery faces. They slither and flex their sinewy bodies in the nearby tree branches to intimidate us. Despite the danger lurking in this godforsaken hellhole, Tony keeps threatening to go out there and ‘kick their asses!’ What a moron! He just doesn’t get it. Elise can’t talk any sense into him either, and the damn island cops here are useless.”

    I messaged her back immediately but struggled to find anything helpful to say. I didn’t have any real-world experience dealing with a jungle full of ‘snake men’ intimidating tourists at ‘The Underworld’. The situation was so surreal, I wondered if they were under the influence of some potent hallucinogenic drug and actually seeing spider monkeys in the woods. That would’ve made more sense than an army of serpent ghouls dangling from tree limbs in Tobago. Despite the bizarre optics, the four of them clearly believed what they were telling me. I was convinced of that.

    “Did you jam kitchen chairs under the doorknobs like they always do in the movies?”; I suggested to Rob. “The dining room should have some knives in the drawer.”

    His quick answer implied they had fortified the bungalow as much as possible with the items they had at their disposal. No sooner than I’d sent my pointless tips to him, a message came in from Elise. She is one of those phonetic texters who uses acronyms and abbreviations. Under the duress of also being surrounded by yellow-eyed ‘snake folk’, you could imagine the syntax police having a field day.

    “Alvin we r under attack!!! They r gettin closer. T an Ro said they are outside house now OMG. I’m soooo terrified im never coming back if we make it out”

    She also included a half-dozen frightened emojis and cartoon ‘poop’. Presumably ‘it’ was scared out of her. I felt beyond helpless. My best friends in the world were enduring some hideous, supernatural fever-dream and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

    An hour passed while I gnawed my bloody fingernails to the quick. Several follow-up messages went unanswered. I didn’t know what to think. Had the menacing entities in the Tobago jungle breached their cottage? Had my terrified pals been carried off to the ACTUAL underworld by zombified corpses liberated from their graves? The human imagination is a powerful thing and with no input or feedback to keep it securely on the rails, things can drift far, far afield. My thoughts went to terrible places. After an eternity of silence passed, Tony finally messaged me back.

    “Whatever those dark, slithery things are, they are closing in on us. They’ve crept even closer now. They’re no longer attempting to hide in the jungle fog any longer. I can see them clearly in the moonlight. Let me tell you now, they aren’t any know species of living creature! Only dark voodoo could summon something evil like them from the depths of hell. They’ve started scratching and clawing on the door and walls to torment us. I don’t know how long I can hold them off. Alvin, it’s been real, Bro! Tell my family I”

    The message ended abruptly, as if he sent it in an urgent hurry. I never got a response from him after that. Texts sent to the others were equally met with silence. iMessage stated they were ‘delivered’, but not ‘read’. I knew what that meant. My stomach sank. In frustration, I frantically called each of them in hopes it might go through, but I got the same automated error message from before. It was utterly hopeless.

    Despite it being 2:30 AM, I called Rob’s Mom. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but she needed to know they were in mortal danger. She could reach out to the international authorities to do an inquiry into their safety. I need not have worried about waking her up, though. She answered immediately. She’d been getting ‘play-by-play’ details about the horrifying saga from Rob, the whole time. We compared notes. She too had been advised about the alarming ‘Caribbean Voodoo snake cult’ lurking in the ‘underworld’ woods.

    “I’ve already been in contact with the other parents.”; She confessed while sobbing. “We’re going to fly down there first thing tomorrow morning, and demand they do a wellness check. We’ll get to the bottom of this horrific madness.”; She assured me. There was a lingering tremor in her voice which spoke of how frightened she was.

    I felt a sense of relief that they were going there to investigate. Obviously I was still on edge, but there was only so much I could do as a non-relative. I sent at least a dozen more texts but all of them were left ‘unread’. Had the serpent zombies breached the door? I had no idea what to believe about the current status of my friends but things appeared pretty grim. I was on pins and needles for the next couple days as repeated follow-up messages went unanswered.

    A firm knock on the front door, early the next morning startled me. I staggered out of bed and pulled it open. There stood Tony, Elise, Becca, Rob, and his Mom; all grinning from ear to ear. Tony held up a colorful T-Shirt with the words ‘Visit Tobago!’ emblazoned on it. He handed it to me while my early morning audience roared in unison at my perplexed expression.

    As it turns out, their collective text saga was an intricately orchestrated ruse! They did it to give me a vicarious adventure because I’d decided to skip the trip. They really got me. I’d been the inadvertent catalyst for the elaborate prank because I made an offhand joke about them needing to avoiding voodoo dolls and zombies. Touché. Rob’s Mom was in on it too. They figured I’d call her since she was the only parent whose number I knew. It was masterful in its planning and execution. Revisiting the beginning narrative of this story, my best friends went to ‘The Underworld’ (and all I got was this anticlimactic T-Shirt).

    10 Comments
    2024/01/26
    19:12 UTC

    22

    'Obliteration Frequency'

    Every object in the universe has its own unique threshold and breaking point. The frequency range required to surpass that tolerance depends on individual factors specific to the item. Ella Fitzgerald could shatter a wine glass with her incredible singing voice and dynamic pitch. Soldiers circling the ancient city of Jericho were able to crumble its formidable walls and raze it to the ground by blowing their trumpets in unison.

    Anything can be destroyed by using the precise frequency and vibrations needed to achieve what is known as 'the oblivion frequency’. ANYTHING. Using the exact aural range, an object begins to deteriorate at the molecular level. The looming question on many people's minds might be: "What practical reason would anyone have to destroy something with focused sound waves? That's an academic quandary better left to philosophers and theologians, right?

    The important point to this narrative is, a well-funded team of scientists and engineers were investigating the prospects of using projected sound as a ‘super weapon’. Not just to blast at high volume. That’s old-school, two-dimensional thinking. They went about cataloging ‘oblivion frequency’ ranges for common objects. Why? You know the reason. To bring doom and destruction to 'the enemy'!

    It is always that.

    In the field of modern warfare, it's important to never look back. Ethics aside, the advantage of any weapon is short lived. The technology is soon understood and then copied by all. Explosives are a medieval invention. Chemical weapons have been around for over a century, and nuclear power were about to enter the antiquated age of old technology, as well. Using targeted sound waves as a focused weapon appeared to be the next big area of focus. I was the bureau chief for a top-secret agency, and directed my people in weaponry research to do just that.

    The threat of artificial Intelligence misuse and maintaining deep cyber security protocols were of paramount importance to us, back when we still had separate counties and different laws. Inversely, to breach another nation's security infrastructure and manipulate their network was a key initiative for our division, and every other country. With the obliteration ranges for countless things studied and cataloged, my scientists sought to expand our deadly arsenal by identifying the most illusive and vulnerable items to exploit. Despite our deliberate efforts to do just that, even the most jaded bureaucrat in the world like me didn’t expect what they discovered.

    When presented with their initial report, I didn’t believe what I read! It was genuinely terrifying. Worse than that, there was no ‘putting the genie back in the bottle’. I green-lit the team’s research budget and gave them the authority for self-autonomy. After implying ‘the sky was the limit’ on whatever space-age pipe-dreams they developed, it was too late for me to demand that they pull back on the creative reins.

    The damned fools had isolated the obliteration frequently for the Earth itself! In their burning quest to develop the most powerful weapon possible to use against potential threats and enemies abroad, they’d stumbled upon the precise recipe to destroy the entire planet! I didn’t think I needed to specify that any technology which blew up our mutual home, would be pointless and ‘overkill’. Apparently greater articulation was necessary with my engineering eggheads, but it couldn’t be undone.

    They couldn’t exactly pretend to not know what they’d discovered. It had to be presented to the war council, but on what occasion could this newly developed research be used? It was an absolute doomsday scenario to initiate and carry out! There was no practical use for it, whatsoever. No one ‘wins! if everyone ‘looses’. I said as much in my follow-up report to the team, but was given a surprisingly pragmatic response to my critical feedback.

    One of the lead designers of the technology deadpanned: “In the event the Earth is ever invaded by hostile extraterritorials, it is important to prevent the world from being taken over.”

    “Are you saying you’d destroy the entire planet, just to keep another species from taking over?”; I asked incredulously.

    I could hardly believe my ears at the time. It seemed preposterous to think that way. Then, the more I considered his glib response, the more I realized it wasn’t such an outrageous position to hold at all. Why should we as the dominant species, care what happened to our planet if we were eliminated? As selfish as it might’ve been from a philosophical point of view, we weren’t about to share OUR Earth with aliens who dared to invade it and kill us. They would possibly wipe out other species as well.

    With that blasé, human-centric mindset, I forwarded the report, up the chain of command. In the zeal to prepare for whatever contingencies arose, it was just one more theoretical weaponry brief to be added to the defense department’s collection of endless records. I never expected it to considered or utilized. Who would? I assumed it would be skimmed by top brass for strategic plausibility; and then squirreled away in a row of filing cabinets. It, along with thousands of other hypothetical scenario reports at the Pentagon would never scrutinized by human eyes again.

    I was wrong about that, as you’ll soon come to realize. About six years later, ‘They came’. There was no ambiguity about their intentions. We fought them together as a unified world with conventional military weapons, but they only had a superficial effect. Then several of superpower partners unveiled their top secret cache of unconventional weapons. They were technologically impressive, and we were secretly relieved they weren’t ever used on our country before the international alliance. Sadly, they too had little effect on the invading aliens.

    A secret meeting was held between the cabal of nations that hadn’t fallen yet. The assessment for the future was beyond bleak. At the current rate of unit casualties, the Global Security Forces predicted the end of humanity would happen in less than two weeks. Someone ‘at the very top’ elected to reveal the doomsday obliteration plan we’d developed years earlier.

    I had no official knowledge of it being bandied about mind you; but I feared in the back of my mind it might be coming. We’d reached the end of all survivable forms of warfare. It was time. Most forms of communication had been destroyed in their efforts to isolate us. Major cities were in ruin. Corpses littered the street. Our food and clean drinking water sources had been strategically poisoned; and the savage, merciless way they executed people without exception or pity drew out our fiercest retaliatory anger. Having our backs up against the wall motivated us like nothing else could.

    Despite our chances of survival rapidly circling the drain, we weren’t about to adopt ‘orderly disposal’ and wish them well. The official decision was eventually made to implement the ‘Omega Frequency Protocol’. Our situation had deteriorated to full-thermonuclear war, without the actual nuclear warheads. Once the OFP was enacted, the lingering hope was to destroy every single one of them in the process of obliterating ourselves and planet Earth.

    I felt the initial vibration that morning. It was somewhat subtle at first, but exponentially grew in sonic intensity. By then I knew what was coming, but feeling the precise frequency of doom shook me to the very core. Far more than the actual vibration itself, was the emotional impact of ‘knowing’. Feeling the end approaching was both terrifying and strangely soothing. If they didn’t ‘win’, then by delusional extension, we wouldn’t ‘lose’. I smiled bitterly and prepared for the moment when everything would disintegrate.

    The very roots of my teeth began to rattle and hum from the potent tone. Then my inner eardrums popped and ached. Cracks appeared in concrete. A low rumble in the core of the Earth radiated upward to the embattled surface. Remembering the scientific details from years earlier, I knew we were approaching a critical juncture where the focus of the frequency would reach its breaking point. In this case, the very Planet beneath our feet. It wouldn’t be much longer.

    Without explanation, the obliteration frequency stopped! For the briefest of moments I wondered if life had ended and I was hallucinating, or if they had intercepted our subsonic, kamikaze broadcast. I was filled with seething rage at being denied final revenge. The gnawing numbness of wanting all terrestrial life destroyed, but realizing I was still alive, was impossible to describe. A selfish part of me was grateful for the brief, unexplained reprieve but my primal instinct to survive was outweighed by the far greater concerns looming in the air.

    Had they prevented the OFP from ruining their invasion and takeover of the planet? Or, had humanity ended the countdown to extinction for some reason? That was the question, but no one outside the inner-sanctum of government decision makers knew the answer to it. That is, until the official record was declassified and revealed to the exhausted public.

    According to the statement circulated worldwide through the remaining communications grid, their attacks stopped because of a ‘secret weapon’ we’d utilized against them. Their unrelenting bombardment of the surface ceased as a direct result of this advanced ‘tool’. There was no mention of the severe downside of completing the last-ditch maneuver, or it being a freakin’ doomsday device which would’ve completely destroyed the Earth! For morale raising reasons, that was widely omitted.

    I had to smile at the discreet employment of ‘spin’ and patriotic propaganda in the press release. The majority of people had no idea how close we came to becoming lifeless dust in the cold expanse of space. I think humanity was just so happy to escape extinction that they didn’t bother asking details or ‘how’.

    The massive alien vessels reportedly left before the critical obliteration point was reached. We spooked them. They were observed leaving the solar system via our observatory sources and high-tailing it away. Hopefully they’ll return to wherever they came from and stay there; but I wouldn’t count on it. I guess we called their bluff for the moment. Regardless, they’ll be back at some point, for round two. You can count on that.

    Boy, am I glad I filed that weapons brief with the Department of Defense despite the misgivings I had at the time. The eggheads saved our asses. We’d better get to work on developing more advanced technology for when they return. Maybe we can isolate their own unique frequency and target their species, specifically. That would be infinitely smarter than ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’. We gotta fight smarter. Drastic threats and poker bluffs only work once.

    0 Comments
    2024/01/25
    00:59 UTC

    11

    The Spectacle

    Yes, the crowds were cheering. The gods of thunder were a choir of wordless prayers to the imaginary force of fairness. Just imagine a wave, like on a high school bleacher with a hundred people on it, but each person is about two thousand people all wearing their seating districts' browns. Such a wave actually generates a breeze that, well butterfly effect, certainly matters.

    It's seismic in scale, a mega arena. With almost a million seats, and an entire city of services built around it, the Court of High Decision rocks any petty supreme court or even the sway of childish emperors, makes democracy into a dumpsterfire and the House of Lords an outhouse (by comparison to its sheer scale and the magnitude of its influence). You see, our great grand babies are all one people, cool and all, but the final choice for any new global law is decided here, in this great chamber of choice.

    Would man fight man, to decide the outcome? Sometimes they do, it's called war. But when the natural law applies, it must be nature that decides. Or something like that, anyway. I wouldn't agree with the fast-and-loose definition of nature our descendants go with.

    In one corner we have this creature brought back from the prehistoric times when cave bears could chew on dinosaur jerky they found thawing in the cataclysmic glaciers. It is about fifteen percent elephant and nearly seventy percent mastodon. It has killed a lot of stock mules, every day it is encouraged, well, he is encouraged, to drive the mules from his food and sometimes he catches them and kills them. He is a total brute, weighing in at seven and a half tons, we have the red bull elephant - representing the decision not to pass a law that will decriminalize crimes committed against former criminals.

    Things get scary when we look into the other corner, where there's a pack of trained mules, blue jacks, genetically engineered donkey and horse hybrids with something wrong with them. They are ferocious, psychotic and murderous creatures that have trained for years to kill elephants with their bites and kicks. They work in tandem, distracting it and avoiding its tusks and getting trampled. What might have seemed an easy victory for the red bull elephant is not-so-much when we review the footage of stock mammoths getting chased, cornered and butchered by the blue jacks.

    The feral donkeys represent a decision to pass a law that decriminalizes any crimes committed against former criminals. To make it worse, even if the red bull elephant somehow wins against the pack of trained elephant killers, an appeal may be applied for. There is one way out of this horror, however. Specifically, an older law governs the creation of new laws and an appeal may only be applied after a decision is reached. It's the basis for everything.

    So, our would-be terrorists have devised a weapon that will disrupt the relativity of time in the mega arena. It would stop any sequence, causing the battle to be locked in a permanent stalemate. And remember, until a decision is reached, the battle ends, then no new appeal can be filed for, so this one particularly worst law of all time never happens.

    It all started, for me, when I was called to the side of the park where I work. I was responding to a call for first aid, although when I got there, it was so much worse. Luckily, paramedics were already on their way. I spotted what appeared to be a Mickey Mouse-eared cap made of fur and full of strawberry jelly.

    A man was sitting holding his dripping wrist in shock. I put on a tourniquet, noting his soundless gaze. Then I saw the remains of someone in the tall grass and one twitching dog leg.

    I stared in surprise and then gagged in horror as I realized the dead body in the uniform of a Nazi-styled security guard outfit was only half, split right down the middle. It collapsed and became a steaming mess that made me throw up at the sight and stench of it.

    "What happened?" I tried to ask the survivor.

    The fear in his eyes was like a sickness, infecting my very soul. I staggered back and felt my world tumbling away from me - or me from it. I landed on the other side of some shimmering basement with corridors and luminescent lighting and wires and plumbing exposed above me where I stared at the ceiling. I got up, dazed and looked back at the survivor.

    Then he was gone and there was just a brick wall. My hand found the survivor's hand holding the wet and sticky leash and I lifted it slowly and found the missing part of the severed dog. I gasped in horror and then saw the man who was cut directly in half, or the other half, that is. I groaned in horrified shock and then got to my feet, trembling. I started walking away from the carnage, totally disoriented.

    I was stopped by a shouting security guard with a strange-looking white rifle pointed at me. It looked like it was made of some kind of ceramic or plastic, but the threat in his voice was clear. He aimed it at me and I put up my hands.

    Then, as I stared into his surprised eyes, seeing me from outside of his known world, evidently, in my attire and presence, he asked me, inching towards me:

    "What are you lost down here from some show? What's that you're wearing?" He asked me.

    I was wearing my normal clothes and boots I worked in. He had the Nazi-looking security guard uniform.

    "I was working, in the park, and fell in here somehow. Are we underground?" I asked.

    "I'll ask the questions." He directed me to turn around against the wall.

    Just then I heard a sound like a chipmunk sneezing and then it repeated twice more. I turned and looked and saw the security guard's gun had a huge glowing hole in it and his chest had two holes in it that I could see directly through. Then his head exploded right where he stood staring at me in complete surprise and shock in his eyes.

    I blinked and then fell to the floor and screamed "No!" and shielded myself. I was so terrified that I closed my eyes, shielding myself with my arms over my face.

    "Who're you?" A celebrity voice asked me. I looked up and saw a scantily dressed person with all sorts of colorful buttons and feathers and rainbow dreadlocks. They held a similar weapon to the one the headless guard had.

    I tried to get away, crawling desperately down the corridor.

    "Come on, get up. I'm not agroed or nothing. Don't you get it? I'm Chimmy, that's why this sells." The celebrity said to me with a lot of odd inflections.

    "Chimmy?" I blinked, worried about the weapon the celebrity was waving around, occasionally pointing at me. "I don't know where I am. What is happening?" my voice was subdued and trembling with fear of what I had gotten into.

    "This is Mega Arena Sigma, the biggest and greatest court on the planet. You must be, uh, not from around here." Chimmy spoke slowly and plainly, like someone who is trying to be easier to understand for someone with English as a second language.

    "I fell in here." I stammered.

    "You fell through time itself friend. One of our temporal isolation dislocating element devices, or what we call TIDED, was somehow set off too early and it also malfunctioned. Sorry, you went through it, at least you weren't standing there when it happened. That's why these guys are all shredded-bad." Chimmy gave me some exposition, which I couldn't comprehend.

    "Can I go home?" I asked.

    "Well, probably. I am going to try and fix the TIDED. We sorta need it." Chimmy went over to it and started working on it. While it was getting its manual diagnostic which was composed mostly of a screwdriver, but also involved a hologrammatic schematic with some kind of computer assisting in finding the problems in the device, Chimmy told me the rest.

    "Well?" I asked, worried about getting trapped in the destruction of the Mega Arena that Chimmy had described to me.

    "We can only use this once. If you help, you'll be transported home. Our goals align." Chimmy told me.

    "This is a nightmare." I proclaimed.

    "No time for dreaming." Chimmy laughed at me.

    "What do I do?" I shuddered, worried about the strangeness and unknown dangers I would face.

    "You'll have to climb up to the next level and tell Skittles we're still on the countdown. Last time we could chat I had to tell everyone my position wasn't up." Chimmy told me.

    I went to the hatch and opened it with trepidation. When I was climbing up, I realized what I'd gotten myself into. The ladder took me up an extensive shaft. At the top there was a functional utility chamber where I met Skittles.

    "As a scientist, I can't just take your word that you time-traveled. It is theoretically impossible. We'd have to seek other possibilities before we went with time travel. That's just the mythology of Science Fiction. The real world is more a place for horror." Skittles told me.

    "Never mind, that. What do I have to do next?" I asked. "If you succeed I could get back home."

    "Well yes, if you were actually displaced by the initial activation of a TIDED. That's what I would expect." Skittles informed me.

    "And that's coming from?" I worried.

    "The world leading scientist in TIDED technology, since I invented it." Skittles grinned.

    "So?" I shrugged.

    "So, you'll need to go and tell everyone to continue with the countdown as planned. You can fix the same problem caused when you arrived here and the TIDED malfunctioned. We have radio silence now since Big Brother is listening for us."

    "I'll do it. How many?" I asked. Skittles hesitated and then nodded and said:

    "Eight more. You'll have to hurry. Harper is the next, at the northern base of the arena. You'll have to take this tunnel."

    I followed the tunnel and found the priestess, Harper, and told her to keep with the countdown. She had her stopwatch going and showed me on the TIDED where an automatic trigger was set to go off a precise time, as long as the device was armed to that setting.

    I got instructions to go to the school teacher, Wilt, at the top end of the mega arena, directly above her position at the base. I looked at the towering ladder and gulped in trepidation. I began to climb, sweating and my heart beating, vertigo blurring my vision when I looked down.

    Near the top I stopped and nearly fell from fright. An electric arc curved up and under the dome, a powerful lightning bolt of static electricity. Another one arched off of it and continued along the wall as a visible blue wave of energy before it dissipated into a buttress the size of a skyscraper. I was nearly to Wilt's position and could see them there.

    Suddenly I screamed in horror and nearly lost my grip. I had seen the flash of another bolt take Wilt and flash them so I could see the bones inside them as it strangled them in an electrocuting death where they stood. I wrapped my arms on the ladder and cried out and couldn't go on.

    I held on there, looking at the empty platform. Then another arch moved along the steel girders and the ladder I was on was like a giant Jacob's Ladder and it was moving at high speed towards me. I panicked and clambered the rest of the way up the ladder to the catwalk and ran along it just as the arch hit the metal beams and threw sparks everywhere like a bright showering.

    I set the TIDED to go off when it was supposed to and then I was forced to guess where I should go next. Strangely enough, I looked down at the arena below and could see the structural foundation was not a circle, but rather a diamond. I was at one tip of it. I looked across and in the distance, I could see a platform in the same elevation as mine, one at each end.

    I guessed I could find my way to the mirrored positions somehow. I had no idea how massive the mega arena was, or what sort of horrors I would endure to cross it.

    I reached the next position where the plague doctor wore a strange yellow dress. The aroma of vanilla and lavender permeated the air and the tattoo of the crowned wasp glowed in the dim light. The doctor was attentive to their device but drew and aimed a precaution at me, firing one shot to show quill-like needles bushed out where it was discharged.

    "Wilt is gone, but the countdown continues." I told the doctor in the strange yellow dress.

    "It is like we are all going to die. Have you thought of that?" the doctor asked me.

    "I'm going home. You people can do whatever you want." I told them.

    "Doctor Kcoh is home here, in this place, doing what is right." Dr. Kcoh told me.

    Their position was compromised and the security guards in Nazi uniforms would arrive at any moment.

    "The TIDED." I pointed out where Dr. Kcoh was hiding it. I went and switched it to its armed position, while Dr. Kcoh readied something of some ritual importance.

    "Where there is smoke there is fire. You should get going. Tell the chef, Murrazza, that I went out in a blaze. We always share recipes." Dr. Kcoh held up a weird looking device and held it to their chest for a few seconds. It was like the room became hot, the heat coming from them.

    "You're so hot." I told Dr. Kcoh

    "Thanks, sweetie, now get going."

    It felt hot down there, and the sound of security guards coming for us could be heard.

    I fled the chamber and began another ascent up a second ladder. Below there were flames and screaming. I was crying from the awfulness of it, shaking and breathing as I went. My fear of the electric arcs kept me alert and moving until I reached the chef. I told him about what happened and to keep up the countdown.

    "Take these drugs." Murazza told me. "They'll help with this."

    The climb back down was almost too exhausting to bear. I took the drugs and felt my energy go back up after I reached the bottom. There I walked among a horror show of proportions.

    The stench was like the farm section at the county fair, except if it were a hot summer day and the vents were all broken. I found the pilot, Libby, or what was left of her.

    The four-armed green ape of environmental concerns had gotten ahold of her and broken her body to fit through the bars. The clover simian had played with her dead body until it got bored and then tossed her in a heap into one corner of its cage.

    I nearly fainted when I saw all that, forgetting the mission and wanting to flee in terror. It was only the sight of the panda reaching with its prehensile tail that froze me in my tracks. It ignored me and acquired the corpse, pulling it towards its own cage. With its back to me, the panda began to eat, chewing and peeling loudly. Its tail swished oddly, the very long and powerful prehensile tail.

    I found the TIDED and set it to go off on-time. I was leaving the menagerie of horror-animals when I was suddenly accosted by a handler of the creatures. I tried to get away, only to run into an override that was supposed to be tagged out, and bounced off the switch. I clambered to my feet and started climbing the utility ladder to the next platform.

    The zoo attendant reached the base of the ladder and then noticed the broken tag out and the flipped switch, with a flashing red light indicating something. Suddenly out of nowhere, a machine of some kind got them. I gasped in dread, seeing them get cleaned by the unstable stable cleaner.

    Along the way I found a node where someone had hacked into it and called me as I reached it on my climb. "Who are you? Where's Libby?

    "I was just going to tell you to resume the countdown," I told the coach in the zebra-striped yoga suit and feather headdress. "I'm from the malfunction."

    "Lucky it didn't turn you inside out. That'd be gruesome. Imagine everything in you bursting out of some split in your side and boiling out all over the place. That's a more probable outcome. So, you're lucky."

    "I am. Seems luck is lite."

    "Is Libby all right?"

    "Libby is gone. I reset her device to go off."

    "You'll have to tell Sprite and Drake. I can't call them, they aren't near nodes."

    "I thought it was supposed to be radio silence." I said.

    "Nobody told me that. Typical, for them to forget Asia." Asia said.

    I climbed back down and went to the last base position.

    There, in the lab, I found numerous dead security guards and scientists in lab coats, all with multiple cookie-cutter holes in them from one of those white guns, this one a little larger and smoother than the other two. The murderous librarian, in her kilt and Christmas sweater and steampunk goggles on her skullcap, had discarded the empty weapon on a table amidst the sizzling dead.

    "Sprite?" I asked her.

    She looked at me oddly and said:

    "It's worse than it looks." Sprite told me. She'd rigged her TIDED under the main beam, directly over an open vat of bubbling petri stuff. She was sitting facing me where she'd gone out on a limb over that and balanced there to attach the device. Turning around, she'd gotten caught when the limb went limp and left her stranded out there. If she moved, it would collapse and drop her into the petri.

    "You've got to reset the TIDED to go off on time." I told her.

    She was sweating bullets of terror at her predicament.

    "Know what that stuff does to a living body?" Sprite was gasping in fear.

    I started feeling fear for her, second-hand.

    "You're going to be fine." I told her.

    "It's vibrating under me. The screws are all coming loose and wiggling." Sprite gulped.

    She'd reset her device. I could do nothing for her.

    "Throw me a line and you can take it up with you and secure it. I could swing across." Sprite showed she could think under pressure. It wasn't enough. Time was out.

    The limb suddenly collapsed and dropped her into the ooze. She screamed and gurgled as it dissolved her alive, all the way to her bones and those like seltzer disintegrated amid foaming bubbles. I stared in horror and then I screamed in terror as some of the stuff that had splashed out had coalesced into one big blob that was quickly sliding towards me.

    I felt my heart beating at a million miles an hour in nightmare fueled flight as I climbed. The stuff was trying to slither up the ladder, but as I climbed I lost it and it descended to form a puddle below me. I felt relieved and realized I had wet my pants in the terror.

    I reached the last platform as it started to shake.

    "The devices are going off and mine isn't!" Professor Drake exclaimed. He triggered his device, slightly out of sequence, shifting through some kind of neon landscape like the platform was a flying carpet.

    The sign showed a huge cartoon character with a butt coming down on the professor, crushing him. I realized I had seen it through to the end, witnessing none of the killings by blue jacks, their abrasive whiplike tongues like cheese graters, skinning their prey alive. Nor the crushing embrace of the muscular trunk of an elephant's hug.

    When I found myself again on the lawn of the park, it was moments before the man walking his dog was in the right place at the right time. I was in the clubhouse on the other side of the park just seconds earlier, and everyone who was in the room with me said they looked away at a flash and when they looked back I was gone.

    I went over and asked the man if I could pet his dog and he said it was okay. So I pet the dog and there was a bit a rustling in the bush behind me as the half of a corpse arrived in our time. I knew it was there, nobody else had to see it.

    "What a very nice dog." I told the nice man walking his dog and then I shook his hand and nodded and smiled.

    "Well," He dismissed me and my odd behavior, "It's about that time."

    0 Comments
    2024/01/23
    22:42 UTC

    264

    ‘Body Heat’

    No dispute. We had it wrong.

    People were way off about a number of things in their raving predictions about the end of the world. Yes, the dead rose again from their graves, however they aren’t the frenzied, carnivorous ghouls we expected them to be. Uncoordinated staggering and slurred speech is definitely present as their greater motor-functions are affected, but the aggressive attempts to terrorize the living and tear us to shreds, is not how it is.

    Essentially, the active dead (A.D. for short) occupy another classification of handicapped status. They are simply too dependent upon the living, to do anything beyond begging us for help. Yes, they still have material needs and as a protected class of mostly-homeless citizens, it’s up to the mostly apathetic public to look out for them.

    You might think the end of the world and total collapse of civilization would bring about a full cessation of certain social niceties. That would definitely make sense but the official authorities in charge of Armageddon demand an orderly transition to absolute doom as we approach it. Some things will never change. Bureaucracy is known for its stubborn rigidity. Looting is limited to Thursday afternoon. Traffic citations are still issued, but lesser infractions are simply waved off. It’s really quite similar to pre-apocalypse times, but with a few less rules and more frequent road hazards.

    I was lying awake, wondering why in the hell I still have to get up and go to work. What’s the point? As I pondered the redundancy of having an alarm clock at the end of the world, I heard the distinctive sound of my front door knob rattle. I went from a drifting drowsy state, to fully awake instantly. It’s not like crime or home invasions ceased. If anything, they occur more frequently now but I was ill prepared for an unexpected standoff with an essential-resource stealing bandit.

    Then I heard the lumbering. The thud of uncoordinated footfalls. Either my intruder was drunk, stoned, or A.D. It was up to me to determine which one. In the darkness, and ‘in the heat of battle’, it can be difficult to ascertain. Legally, I could blast drunken thieves but the active dead are protected by law. If you think that being convicted of home invasion manslaughter was bad before the collapse of civilization, just try mounting a legal defense now over splattering a homeless zombie!

    I shouted for whomever it was in my hallway to ‘scram’, but there was no response. I silently cursed myself for not locking the back door before I went to bed. The A.D. still know how to open doors so I couldn’t just open fire. I fumbled with the lamp switch. When my fingers made contact, I turned the knob and struggled to adjust to the instant flash of bright light. My ‘uninvited guest’ stood there timidly at the doorway threshold, but by then I had my answer. His wafting stench of decay reached my nostrils, long before I was able to see him.

    “Itssss verrrryyyy cccccoooollldddd. Mayyyy IIIIIII craaaaawwwlll innntooo beddd wiiiithhh yooooooouuu?”

    I don’t need to tell anyone how much I did not want to share my home and bed with a rancid A.D., but the law is the law. If my corpse visitor reported me to the compliance bureau, I’d lose my weekly stipend. I didn’t want to lose my Cheetos and Beer. That would turn my boring and awful existence to devastating. I did insist on spraying his festering skin with deodorant and wrapping him in an old sheet first, but honestly it did very little to dissipate the stink.

    He took my terms without complaint and climbed into the unused side of the bed like an eager, rotten-toothed beaver. I got the impression he just wanted to treated like a ‘human’ again. I did have to help him up onto the mattress, but other than that, I didn’t have any other problems from him. Well, except the sensation of feeling a decaying ‘flesh popsicle’ leaning against my body for warmth and body heat. I guess that’s what the dead crave most of all. You might not think it possible, but after a while, you stop noticing the smell. Mostly-ish. They call it ‘smell blindness’.

    Just keep in mind, we were dead wrong about the apocalypse, if you can forgive the pun. Not only was it not televised. It also wasn’t expected to lead to ‘post-life-acceptance’; or (P.L.A.). I never thought I’d willingly invite a corpse to stay in my home but on the plus side, Carl doesn’t eat my food and is pretty good with a joke. That is if his dangling jaw doesn’t fall off during the punchline.

    5 Comments
    2024/01/19
    19:30 UTC

    31

    My husband insists on keeping this one painting of a woman

    0 Comments
    2024/01/09
    02:19 UTC

    28

    'Under the Old Yoke'

    When they showed up, no one knew what to think. Sure, we were nervous. Who wouldn't be, but the outright terror or wholesale panic you might expect from massive alien spaceships touching down on the planet wasn't generally present. The artificially calm sense of decorum the population felt was largely because ‘they’ presented themselves as 'benevolent advisors’.

    You should always beware slithering, side-creeeping strangers who say they ‘came to help’. Don’t believe a word. It’s a damn lie.

    The thing about a genuine mentor is, you can either accept or ignore their guidance. Once the directives became mandatory and were enforced without exception or mercy, the ‘friendly’ visit rapidly migrated into the nightmare realm of a full-on arachnid invasion. Some knew it was an oppressive occupation from the very beginning. Others hoped for the best; while the overwhelming majority of us clueless fools simply accepted the distasteful yoke of slavery in blissful denial. The immediate defeat of our ‘dominant’ species came without so much as a whimper.

    They dissolved all government and military organizations first. Thats ‘invasion protocol 101’. Then they 'strongly discouraged' all forms of worship and organized belief systems involving 'higher powers or deities'. There was no need for any of that, they explained. We had THEM to praise and faithfully follow, without question. Mass gatherings for any reason were not allowed. The ‘Nebuli’ didn’t want organized dissension.

    Only serving our newly assigned, officially-sanctioned ‘purpose’ was permitted. The needs of individuals, and independent thought in general were not entertained. As a matter of fact, ‘individuality’ as a concept was ‘discouraged’ in the absolute harshest of terms. I’m sure I don’t need to spell out what that means but basically, the few rogues and nonconformists who dared to stand up to them were made examples for mockery in the public domain. Civil disobedience and failed activism were violently quashed as a stark visual lesson for other potential troublemakers to witness. You get the picture.

    Our interstellar ‘heroes’ shrewdly pointed to the fact that all wars and sectarian violence had ceased since their arrival. Overcrowding, crime, and hunger had been eliminated too. On the surface, it was hard to argue with these ‘slippery, selfless saviors’ from afar. Of course, with ‘freedom-of-speech’ being a fading facet of the past, arguing wasn't exactly possible any longer to debate the pros and cons. That only served to validate their point and justify the mercurial, authoritarian regime. To them, the complete elimination of our free will and personal choice in day-to-day matters was the ‘perfect solution' to end all of our problems.

    The amount of physical force used to control us was surprisingly minimal. They didn't have to. They used just enough ‘shock and awe’ for people to know they could unquestionably ‘compel’ us to comply. 'The advisors' perfected psychological manipulation down to a science. Like obedient little subjects groveling for praise from our creepy, side-stepping overlords, we self-policed ourselves to the point they didn't have to raise a wooly, octopus-like tentacle.

    ————

    I don’t want to paint myself as some ‘brave leader of the Nebuli resistance’. I wasn’t. I was a chicken-shit coward like every other person with common sense. I didn’t want to be zapped by one of their ‘death-ray’ guns, or sent away for ‘behavioral reprogramming’. Like every reluctant ‘upstart’ who led an insurgent revolution, I just got pushed too far one day and felt the uncontrollable desire to fight back. History is littered with examples of fools like me who dared to say ‘enough’.

    As a rudimentary rule of thumb, a person would be smart to avoid making waves or calling too much attention to themselves. Specifically, it was very wise (under the unique circumstances) to avoid eating crab legs, calamari, or smushing a spider in public. Initially, I didn’t make the connection. Mistakes like that caught their attention in ways which did not lead to positive interactions AT ALL. Perhaps they were distant ‘relatives’. Que sera sera. I learned that and a number of painful lessons from this ugly experience, the HARD way.

    There was no real variation in how they verbalized things to us because they used a generic digital vocoder to simulate human speech. I swear, it must’ve been sampled from the 1970’s disco hit: ‘Funkytown’. As if their startling visual appearance wasn’t alarming enough on its own, imagine the mechanically-tinged verbal communication! It was an effective one-two punch of ‘nah, I’m outta here!’

    While they bore no significant humanoid features, they did possess a certain level of unique ‘personality’. I always avoided direct eye contact with their compound optic receptors. It was too difficult to focus without an obvious place to gaze. Thats not to say I didn’t watch them closely. I did. I noticed they would emit a hissy little squeak of displeasure when they were uncomfortable or highly agitated. It was hard to miss that telling quirk of their behavior, and I made a mental note to investigate and study it more.

    Just imagine a room-filled with five-foot-tall ‘King Crab-Octopus’ hybrids with gangly, spider legs! They would swoop around the room to intimidate people and clank their shells together noisily, in a display of flamboyant power. They would first declare their ‘benevolence’ in the heavily digitized ‘robot voice’, while simultaneously ‘correcting’ a person for eating an ‘Admiral’s feast’ at a popular seafood restaurant chain.

    As you might’ve guessed, I was the poor slob who was ‘corrected’. There I was, breaking a crab leg in-half when they scurried in and began pulsating in an apparent fit of ferocious rage! Before I knew what hit me, I was given a potent ‘attitude adjustment’ for my unknown transgression. It was a powerful lesson to learn, I’ll say that. And by ‘correct’, I mean they tortured me mercilessly with a severe, headache-inducing pain device which brought tears to my eyes, and numbed my extremities for hours. All for eating their ‘cousin’.

    If that’s not clear enough regarding how intimidating and ruthless they were, two or three of their pods held arcane technology to vaporize us. To make matters worse, it was nothing for them to dart sideways around a corner, and then rapidly climb straight up the wall, or scramble across the ceiling overhead! It was madness inducing to realize how agile and spry they were. There was no way to outrun them. That much was clear. I decided the only hope was to try to outwit them.

    Perhaps they believed their deluded ‘savior’ nonsense. That would explain their indignant reaction to the revolt I organized, later on. Describing the Nebuli race as ‘shifty’ would’ve been an understatement. At least we could hear the joints of their exoskeleton creak and flex. Because of that ‘Achilles heel’, they couldn’t sneak up on us easily. If someone created a Nebuli joint lubricant to quieten their mobility, we would’ve never fought back in ‘the great mothball uprising’.

    —————

    The most critical piece of intel about the Nebuli came purely by accident, as these things sometimes do. Upon a routine production inspection of the factory where I’d been assigned to work, their agent exhibited the most visceral reaction imaginable to the ordinary mothballs we produce in the plant. I thought the agitated alien inspector was going to melt like a slug doused with salt! It was rapturously drawn to the palm sized object like a newly discovered treasure, or a moth lured to a flame.

    Despite having a manic obsession with it, the noxious chemical makeup was obviously very toxic to the cleric. I saw no reason we couldn’t produce a large production run of beachball-sized ‘Nebuli-ball’ prototypes for our ‘sincere protectors’ to ‘play’ with. That’s where the idea came from and the revolution was born.

    The basic plan was to lure as many of them as possible to the warehouse, and then spring the massive trap on them. With any luck, they would react exactly the same way with the scaled up version, as the smaller ones. After seeing the poorly designed, long shot idea spelled out here, it’s no wonder I am not a brilliant military strategist, but the ‘hare-brained’ scheme worked better than anyone could’ve imagined or hoped. I take full credit for all of my successes, no matter how much they might not be deserved.

    Their top leaders came to the fake exhibition and we unleashed dozens of the massive chemical weapons on them in rapid succession. It was fascinating to watch it unfold. They tried to scurry away in mortal terror but somehow the noxious substance drew them like a magnet. In just a few seconds, they were wrapped tightly around the balls and rapidly dissolved by the caustic chemical compound.

    I couldn’t begin to explain why it worked, but in the end I didn’t need to. Superman has his Kryptonite and the Nebuli obviously have their mothballs. They couldn’t resist them, and yet it was deadly. It actually cooked their soft tissues and left their hard shells hollowed out and smoking like they’d just been tossed into a boiling pot. The icing on the cake was witnessing their dying squeals. That, and no longer having to hear those damn ‘funkytown’ vocoders.

    After sharing my secret weapon with others who had been ‘corrected’ across the world, they successfully pulled off the same operation a few dozen times like I had. The remaining survivors unfortunately grew wise to the ruse. They refused to be lured in to any more mothball ambushes, but by then, the Nebuli were so outnumbered and demoralized by our insolence that they decided to leave Earth for ‘greener pastures’. Let them ‘save’ another developing species from their own excess, greed, and carnal vices.

    —————

    “Why are you ungrateful natives rebelling against our moral guidance and assistance?”; They demanded for me to respond. I mocked them as they shook and rattled in defiant fury.

    “We’ve improved the human quality of life a hundred fold!”

    I relished hearing their squeaks of displeasure, but was careful to display no external awareness. I didn’t know how familiar they had become with human body language, and didn’t want to receive another ‘parting shot’ ‘correction’, as they disembarked.

    ——————

    That’s the completely true story of how we (eventually) cast off the enslavement yoke of ‘benevolent stewardship’ by octopus-spider-crab-walking space aliens with monotone vocoders. Slowly, we became self-reliant and free once again. At least, as much as humanity could muster after going back to having global wars, corruption, violence, poverty, hunger, and deadly diseases.

    The original yoke of human failings and self-induced hardships around our necks returned. At least that one is all ours. The simple pleasures in life are back. Now we can enjoy a plate of steamed crab legs with an enhanced sense of appreciation. Live and learn. Now get to cracking!

    2 Comments
    2024/01/06
    16:51 UTC

    3,432

    I finally found out why my aunt couldn't adopt me

    My name is Susan, and I was in the foster care system since I was about 2.5/3 years old. I was adopted at 6, and my very first memory is crying into my aunt's arms asking why I couldn't just go live with her when I found out I'd be moving to my (now parents) home. She was gentle about explaining it, telling me that back before my parents had died she'd broken some laws, and she wasn't allowed to. Life moved on, I got adopted and my now parents did everything they could to keep me in contact with my aunt.

    When I was about 10 or 11 my aunt finished her probation, got her own place and started letting me come over. We'd get our nails done, go shopping, try new restaurants...I knew she was working her ass off to spoil me, and truth be told, it made me feel special. Like I had three parents who'd do anything for me.

    At 16 I got the "full" story from my aunt. She'd gotten into some pretty hard drugs as a teenager, got busted for possession a few times and theft once. Then my parents died. My dad was her brother, and as much as his death wrecked her, being told she couldn't adopt me was the kick in the ass she needed to get clean and stay clean, but she always thought it was too little too late...even if I did end up in an amazing family.

    I'm 22 now, and a couple months ago I got a random DM from a podcaster. They told me they'd done some...not so legal things to track me down, but they did it to inform me they were covering "my story" on their show, and wanted to know if I had anything I wanted to say, or any details left out. I honestly thought there'd been a mix up somewhere, and wrote them back saying that my parents died in a car accident and there wasn't really a story to tell. I was over at my aunt's house this weekend and told her about it in passing, joking that I hoped they hadn't spent any actual money to track "that girl" down.

    My aunt went pale and told me to sit down. Then she laid it all out for me:

    I wasn't her niece. We weren't related, at all, and we didn't even meet until the day I went into foster care. The people she told me were my parents really were her brother and his wife, but they died childless...my story, our story was so much worse than that.

    At 17, she really did fall into a bad crowd. Painkillers were her drug of choice, and by 19 she had the wrapsheet she told me about when I was 16. She was out on bail, running around some middle class suburb, grabbing anything that wasn't nailed down to pawn. She managed to Jimmy open a window and get inside my biological mother's house, taking every piece of jewelry and electronic she could find.

    She said she'd never be able to explain why, but she went to the basement. She didn't think there'd be anything worthwhile down there, but she just had to go check it out. It was dark, dingy and unfinished. There was the normal junk: old furniture, out of season decorations... and a dog kennel, pushed into a corner and half covered by an old blanket. She was just about to go back up stairs when the "dog" shuffled around.

    My aunt's always had a soft spot for animals, so she went to let the poor little guy out and found...me. I'll spare you the gory details but safe to say, I was a mess. And my aunt...she didn't even think, she called 911 right there. I've since heard the call, and oddly, the thing that sticks out to me the most is her screaming, "I AM BREAKING INTO THIS HOUSE. I AM ROBBING THEM. I DON'T FUCKING KNOW THE ADDRESS" until they traced the call.

    According to the reports I've seen, she didn't leave my side the whole time. She waited with me until the police kicked down the door, and cut the lock off the kennel, she testified against my mother, even without immunity, and promised her that she'd never see me again...

    The last week of my life has been utter chaos, but throughout everything, all I can say is...thank God I have her in my life

    70 Comments
    2024/01/05
    05:01 UTC

    13

    I Work at a Haunted Hotel, and a Spirit Risked its Existence to Rescue Me

    0 Comments
    2024/01/04
    12:17 UTC

    48

    The New Year's Eve When Time Stalled

    Experts described what happened in Caribou, Maine on New Year’s Eve as a case of mass hysteria. That somehow more than seven thousand people had simultaneously taken leave of their senses. There was only one person the good people of the City of Caribou believed had lost their mind that day, a man named Vic Huntington. But more on that in a minute.
     
    I am a woman of science, an undergraduate biologist and a psychologist by both PhD and profession. My background gives me a well-informed understanding of what mass hysteria is and is not. In psychological terms, what is known as mass psychogenic illness is when a close group of people develop some physical illness when no organic or pathogenic cause can be found.
     
    The earliest examples were dancing manias during the Middle Ages when groups of people would dance for weeks on end often spitting, stripping, howling, or making obscene gestures as they did. Similar rude behaviors were also common in nunneries during this time period. In both cases, it was likely the groups were acting out against oppressive social norms and strict codes of conduct. Sometimes you just need to blow off steam and blame possession by spirits.
     
    I submit that mass hysteria is not an entire town experiencing the same event, no matter how strange or unexplainable. And that is what happened this particular New Year’s Eve.
     
    Vic Huntington is a much-loved member of our community. A high school physics teacher, mentor, a member of the Aroostook Family Services Board of Directors, a coordinator of multiple charity events. A person who lifts people up, knows the right things to do and say in almost every situation, and now a man with stage four lung cancer. Vic is strong, but he is tired. After fighting hard for six months, he decided to stop treatment. But to everyone’s astonishment, he claimed to have another plan.
     
    He began laying out his plan in the middle of December by speaking about it everywhere he could. Chamber of Commerce meetings, Rotary and Lion’s Clubs, book clubs, political groups, the library, street corners, anywhere he could draw an audience. It was during this time that Vic’s closest friend Manny came to see me.
     
    “I am very concerned about Vic’s well-being,” Manny said during our visit. “Vic is convinced he can somehow stop the progression of the cancer and ultimately save his life by slowing or stopping time somehow. It’s pure madness.”
     
    “Vic is an optimistic man. It may be that he is having a bit of trouble moving off the denial phase of his grief,” I offered.
     
    “I’m not so sure. All his friends are beginning to think he may need to be in a hospital. His doctor says there’s no physical reason to put him into care right now, but we all remain concerned about his mental health. Have you seen one of his lectures? I think we need to disrupt his plans.”
     
    “I have not had the pleasure of hearing one of his presentations yet, but here’s what I can do for Vic. I’ll attend his lecture tonight and see if I can detect any significant signs that might indicate a need for intervention. We’re usually looking for signs that someone is at risk of harming themselves or others. Of course, if he’s depressed or grieving, I can always suggest setting up some sessions as opposed to a major intervention. In the meantime, just try to be there for him. Let him know he can call you anytime day or night if he needs something or is feeling overwhelmed.”
     
    “Fair enough. Prepare yourself though, it’s really weird.”
     
    I entered the high school gymnasium with no particular expectations. Another twenty or so people were also there, some already snickering amongst themselves. Vic took the stage and stood in front of a portable white board, a set of fresh dry erase markers resting in the tray. A microphone was clipped to his baggy t-shirt. His clothes hung on his body, his frail form slowly disappearing into them, a result of his cancer treatments and failure to thrive.
     
    “Thank you everyone for coming tonight. My motivation for giving these lectures is to make sure everyone is aware of what I’m planning to do on New Year’s Eve as it may impact all of you.”
     
    Vic took a deep breath and a moment to survey the assembled. He gave a nod of greeting in my direction.
     
    “Let me begin with a little background.”
     
    He drew five stacked, parallel lines on the whiteboard with a stick person beneath them.
    “One theory of time is that all time in any given place exists it a series of layers. All events are present, just in different planes of existence. Theoretically, an individual could use certain sound frequencies or other devices to disrupt the borders of these planes and travel through time.”
     
    Vic drew an arrow from the top of the stick person’s head up through the parallel lines.
     “A second theory, and one I tend to subscribe to, is that time is more like a perpetually expanding oval that never quite joins together.”
     
    He drew an oval with a gap in the middle of the bottom portion to show where the lines didn’t meet.
     
    “Imagine if you will,” Vic placed his marker on the point to the right of the gap, “this is the beginning of time. Creation or the big bang, depending on your philosophy.”
     
    Tracing the oval all the way around he stopped at the left point of the gap.
     
    “And this point is the present, this exact moment in time. We are moving forward along this portion of the oval’s line, but you notice the present and the beginning never meet. That is because, like our universe, time is constantly expanding. As we move forward in time, the oval gets bigger so we remain at this exact relative point in the continuum of time in perpetuity.”
     
    There was a pause as Vic looked for signs that his audience understood. Some heads were nodding, other listeners were squinting, and a few people whispered to one another.
     
    “As you all know, I am dying of cancer. However, it has occurred to me that if my theory of time is correct, it may be possible to stop it. To prevent the growth of time and allow us to remain where we are. None of us will get sicker or die, we will all stay as we currently are in this particular moment in time.”
     
    Someone expelled a sharp, “Ha!”.
     
    I looked down at the cast on my arm. Presumably this also meant the wrist I broke skiing the previous weekend would never heal. It would have been nice if Vic could have stopped time before I had to live for eternity with a busted appendage.
     
    Vic went on quickly before he lost his audience to doubt. “I have developed a machine that I believe will be capable of producing the right vibrations and tones at the correct frequencies to stop the expansion of time. If I am successful, it will likely impact the entire town. I’m sure you have some questions.”
     
    A hand shot up. The man did not wait to be called upon.
     
    “Let’s pretend your machine actually does something. What stops us from dropping into the gap or meeting up with the beginning of time. I’d hate to wake up New Year’s Day in the middle of The Creation.”
     
    “Let me assure you, if you arrived at The Creation, you would not exist yet so you would not have to worry about waking up there.” There were titters from the audience. “But seriously, if time is stopped the line won’t move forward making it impossible to close the oval. As for dropping into the gap, the risk is not zero, but since it is nothing but a void, I suspect there is really nowhere to drop into.”
     
    A man of advanced years who had been listening intently spoke up, “You said this would impact the whole town. Why just the town? What about the rest of the world?”
     
    “An excellent question. My theory is that the rest of the world will continue on but as long as the machine is active, we shall remain in the same time. You see the range of the machine to project its impulses is limited. My estimates indicate they would cover the entirety of Caribou and perhaps just a little beyond the city limits.”
     
    “You’ve lost your mind,” a man in a flannel shirt yelled as he led his wife out of the room.
     
    The next day Manny returned to my office. “Well, what do you think. Can we stop him?”
     
    I sat back in my chair, choosing my words carefully. “I’m not sure we should. This project, as foolish as it may be, is giving him hope. If we stop him, he will blame us for preventing him from living. I think the best course of action is to let him go through with it. Once he fails, it will be easier to reason with him and help Vic reach acceptance about his pending transition to the other side. Believe it or not, this is good for him. Though I realize it is painful to watch him go through this so publicly.”
     
    Four days later on New Year’s Eve at seven in the evening as planned by Vic Huntington, seventy-seven
    people showed up in the middle of town at the high school football field to watch his attempt to stop time. We stood on the field as a semi-truck pulling a flatbed trailer arrived and rolled onto the fifty-yard line. The machine took up about two-thirds of the trailer and a large fuel tank the remaining space.
     
    Vic used a step ladder to get himself up onto the flatbed where he connected the fuel line to his machine. The device itself was unremarkable, resembling a generator with a large, fan blade on one end. He said a few words to the gathered group of friends and supporters that no one could hear over the rumble of the semi-truck, which waited until after he spoke to cut the engine.
     
    With little fanfare, Vic, hair and clothes disheveled like the mad scientist he had become, began turning on the machine. It awakened with an ordinary mechanized whir. Flipping two switches initiated a vibration that shook the field making it difficult to stand. People were adjusting to a wide stance to steady themselves, a few grabbing the arm or shoulder of the person next to them. Manny turned his head in my direction and raised his eyebrows.
     
    It was as a series of hums and tones across different frequencies began to fill the air, rising to a deafening pitch, that everything changed. The air around us became disturbed, thickening with motion caused by the sound waves. It became difficult to move as though we were surrounded by wet sand. To the east, a wall of darkness began to form. Clouds were moving rapidly overhead, then there were stars in a night sky followed soon after by sunrise and the passing of another day. While I could
    see and hear, I could no longer move at all as time whooshed by overhead.
     
    In the east the emerging darkness had progressed to a wall of absolute black. A void where no light had ever entered. I wanted Vic to turn off the machine, but how could he? Like the rest of us he was immobile, stuck wobbling in this moment in time like a skipping record.
     
    A gust of wind came from the void in a howl and two smokey shapes began to emerge, floating overhead. More form than figure, the misty black vapor began to organize into a pair of winged, demon-like creatures with thick rear legs, rows of wispy spikes running the length of their pointed tails. Coming from the void where time didn’t exist made them immune to the concept. They used their wings to steady themselves as they seemed to be moving through the space by riding the
    sound waves that congealed the air.
     
    Initially the beasts moved toward one another, stopping short before rearing up on their hind legs, dipping their heads from side to side as if looking at each other. The existence of the other seemed to surprise them. Then one peeled off dipping downward, riding the soundwaves toward the rapidly oscillating people on the ground like it was descending a flight of stairs. Once nearer the crowd, the figure began riding the gentle rollercoaster waves close to the heads of those gathered as the other figure continued to hover above.
     
    Following its third pass over our heads, the beast reached out it’s taloned rear claws and snatched Mrs. Westphal off the ground. The demon didn’t grasp her so much as guide her through the airwaves. It began to play with her vibrating, paralyzed body much like a cat would toss a toy into the air before batting it around on the floor.
     
    The second beast descended, scooping up a man I didn’t know, and began the same game of slow-motion play, the bodies remaining aloft in the concentrated air. This same demon figure then found itself caught in a loop of air. It drifted toward the first beast who lurched out at it, defending Mrs. Westphal as its own human toy. The first beast pushed Mrs. Westphal upward and the smokey figures began to swirl in a battle for control. Mrs. Westphal began to slowly descend and the second beast pulled her toward it, the first giving chase before managing to regain control of the woman by using its wings to vigorously pull the air in its direction.
     
    The unstable air it had created caused the beast and Mrs. Westphal to descend rapidly in a yin and yang-style spin as the second beast began pushing its man nearer the edge of the void. As they approached the ground, the first beast attempted to put on the breaks by thrusting its powerful legs out in Mrs. Westphal’s direction. This move allowed the beast to regain control of its flight while at the same time repelling Mrs. Westphal, who slammed into the fan of Vic’s machine.
     
    Two fan blades bent and the machine began to rock violently. The beast joined the other near the void, both hovering as they watched events unfold. As the machine began to falter, the air currents wavered, tossing the beasts and still aloft man violently up and down. The machine sputtered and a sucking sound was rising. I was able to move my arms ever so slightly.
     
    The sucking sound grew louder as the smokey beasts began to dissolve back into the void. The man they had snatched from the ground was also caught up in whatever gravitational force was pulling the beasts into the void. With a loud pop, the man shot rapidly toward the void, hitting its edge as if it were a brick wall, causing his body to shatter and rain slowly down upon the ground.
     
    In that moment, as the machine’s fuel line separated from the tank, there was a powerful jolt as though someone had suddenly pulled their foot off the clutch and stalled the family car. The assembled were tossed roughly to the ground where they remained dazed and confused. A light breeze moved across the field.
     
    It was the Maine State Police who first arrived on the scene at the high school’s football stadium to find a group of stunned citizens, a machine in pieces, the body of Mrs. Westphal, and whatever was left of the man littering the field. They began taking statements, not believing a word any of us said.
     
    As an officer was taking my statement, the church bells chimed in the steeple across the street. The officer looked at his watch.
     
    “Clock’s a little slow.”’
     
    I looked down at my phone before turning the screen toward the officer, “No, its eight o’clock on the dot.”
     
    The officer glanced at his smart watch before pulling out his phone. “My phone says its four minutes after eight.”
     
    I shuddered. “Everyone,” I shouted across the field, “look at what time your phone says.” We were all running four minutes slow.
     
    The preliminary report from the State Police listed what happened that night as a mass hysteria event caused by the stress of witnessing a double homicide. In other words, an entire city had lost touch with reality due to the murder of two townspeople. It was a story that made even less sense than ours. They had no clear murder suspect.
     
    While the incident convinced me to have Vic committed to the state psychiatric hospital, it ultimately wasn’t what we witnessed that haunted me. My psychiatrist mind couldn’t help but consider a different motive for a mass hysteria event, creating a nagging fear that I couldn’t trust my own experience.
     
    We were a close group of community individuals who came together to support a dying man. A man who wanted to live forever, whose loss would be painful in some way to every one of us on that field. People under stress due to Vic’s impending demise who truly wanted to break the rules of the universe and perhaps even God’s plan, our own mortality staring back at us from a flatbed trailer in the form of Vic. Was it possible that Vic’s machine somehow placed us in a hypnotic—or dare I say hysteric state—that allowed us to blame the stoppage of time for whatever actually happened on that field? Did a mass hysteria event paralyze us?
     
    Could it have been Vic who murdered those people and we needed to blame demons to protect our friend who had suffered enough? A friend none of us would ever have expected could do such a thing. Had someone in the group had the technical knowledge to know how to disrupt the time settings on our devices to make our mass psychogenic delusion seem even more real?
     
    Following the event, I bought a new phone that keeps proper time. Others who left the area claim their clocks reset to normal time once they left the city. As for me, I keep the old phone on a charger so I can look at it whenever the fear that I experienced a psychogenic illness wells up in me. The time on the phone I held that night remains four minutes behind. It allows me to reassure myself the event actually happened as I remember it no matter how difficult it is to believe. I desperately need to remain unbroken.

    6 Comments
    2024/01/01
    18:45 UTC

    19

    The egregor that protects me..

    First. I'll introduce myself. You can call me Micky, I'm 20 years old, and I'm female. I grew up in a not so nice house, built on top of native war grounds. My heritage includes Romani people and native americans, alongside women from Salem. So, to say I'm sensitive to the paranorm is an understatement.

    Now, for those of you who don't know, an egregor is an entity created entirely of the energies its most exposed to.

    That being said, at a very early age I'd never been comfortable in my own home. I always felt like I was being watched. I couldn't be anywhere in the house without hearing a stramge noise, or gasps in my ear, even the occasional name call from another room even when I'm all alone.

    I decided to start learning how to control my abilities in middle school, and began to dabble in speaking to spirits and energies around me. Of course, I took the necessary precautions almost all the time.

    However, that didn't stop the negative energy I began to feel EVERYWHERE. It always felt like someone was following me. Things like cups tipping over, or chairs moving, and voices out of thin air became normal to me even in public. It got to the point where I hated being alone because I was scared that this thing would hurt me. That is, until one day I HAD to be home alone.

    I was laying in my bed on my phone, with my headphones over my ears. I felt someone lightly pokingthe back of my head, so I assumed my family was back home and turned around to look.

    No one was there.

    Again the poking.

    Again. No one.

    I decided to take off my headphones and go sit on my roof for a while. (My window opens to a flat section of roof, it was a normal spot to chill at for me.)

    However, as soon as I opened the window an ear piercing, murderous, shrieking scream ripped through the air from INSIDE my room. Immediately I was petrified. I grabbed my phone and a knife (just in case) and moved to exit my room. That's when I heard the cabinets in my kitchen downstairs opening and slaming shut repeatedly. I was freaking out and I didn't know what to do, so I hid in my closet and called my mom in a panick who hurried home.

    That was the only truly scare experience I've ever had. Except for when I caught the form of my egregor on camera.

    I was sitting in my livingroom with the tv off, just chilling on my phone watching youtube. That's when I noticed a shadow in the tv that shouldn't have been there. I just had a weird feeling, so I took a picture and looked at it for a few minutes. I still couldn't quite discern why the shadows where there, and I was definitely freaked out. I decided to go upstairs and take a showee. It was only about 30 to 40 minutes. I returned to the sofa, in the same exact spot. In the same position. I looked at the tv to turn it on.

    The shadows werent there anymore.

    These weren't just daylight shadows either. They were figures. As if someone was standing in the reflection of the tv. But, these shadows were way too dark to be people. They were PITCH black. Darker than darkness itself.

    I stared intently at the tv to try and find these shadows, I koved around and looked from different angles, I opened and closed the shades, turned lights on and off- I did everything I could think of to bring these shadows back.

    Thats when I noticed that they weren't actually gone. They'd just moved.

    So I took another picture.

    Weeks later I'd almost forgotten about the incident, and I stopped trying to contact spirits for the time being. However, they weren't done talking to me.

    My friend came over to my house after I told her I had been hearing my name way more often than normal, and that these voices wouldn't leave me alone.

    We decided to set up my recorder and get some EVP's. They were successful. Thats how I learned that my egregor wasn't trying to scare me. He was trying to protect me.

    We asked so many questions, and he answered them all. He named himself Greg after hearing many of my friends joke about me having a ghost named 'Greg'. He stayed in my house and slept next to me every night. He made sure I was never alone. He was the one protecting my home from evil creatures and people because that house was his home too.

    However, an egregor no matter what they say, is not a good entity. They suck your energy out of you. They feed off fear, they take and take and take.

    I had to say goodbye to Greg.

    Sometimes I can still feel his eyes watching me.

    I can hear him whisper my name in my ear.

    I can feel his caress when I sleep.

    Maybe I shouldn't have said goodbye....

    I want Greg to hold my hand again.

    I want to feel the thrill of terror he brough me.

    I want to see his black, boney figure in my dreams...

    Do you still exsist Greg?

    Are you still here?

    Visit me. Please.

    (idk how to upload the photos, so they're on my pf)

    1 Comment
    2023/12/29
    08:21 UTC

    13

    ‘You can’t take it with you’

    Even tech-savvy billionaires have to die sometime; and ‘when their number is up, it’s up’, just like everyone else. At least that’s what Austin Sears kept hearing but he didn’t much care for that dismissive opinion. It suggested a permanent end to a relatively short existence. Ideally we were meant to do more than simply fade away after an extinguished heartbeat. He was fascinated with virtual reality as a potential alternative to death and poured considerable resources into developing the fledgling technology. Both for commercial applications, and for his own personal use.

    Specifically, he wanted to ‘live on’, in some significant way. Augmented reality was a partial step in the right direction but it had its limitations. By pre-scanning the surroundings, he was able to insert a virtual version of himself into a room or landscape. The trouble was, it was only a simulation. It wasn’t really him. He sought to discover a way to bottle the essence of himself and then have it uncorked after his body expired. The truth was, humanity had been trying to achieve various forms of immortality since the first human died. It was only natural to desire ‘more’. For the first time in history, technology could be enlisted to better aid in that quest.

    A chain of reoccurring clones wasn’t the answer. Even if an exact physical replica could be engineered and grown again as needed, it wouldn’t mean true immortality for the genetic original person. The memories would be artificially embedded recordings spoon-fed into the new facsimile. Austin wanted more than that. For himself and for humanity. He sought to find a way to encapsulate the finite range of the human spirit into an indestructible package.

    The challenge had always been how to transfer a lifetime of chemically-stored sensory experiences into the digital realm. Augmented reality offered an avatar-like fantasy which felt like the person was a video game observer. Essentially, it was two dimensional pretense which felt surreal and hollow. Austin wanted to join organic consciousness with the seemingly endless bounds of the cybernetic universe. His dream was to orchestrate a true fusion of worlds.

    The first major breakthrough in making this goal a reality was the ‘synaptic converter’. It translated the chemical process of consciousness into a tangible binary matrix which could then be digitized and stored like computer files. Although crude and limited at first, it was still miles ahead of traditional magnetic recordings of analog sight and sound. There was a some ‘loss in translation’ between the two wildly-different mediums but refinements came shortly after. It wasn’t long before people could ‘walk a mile in another person’s moccasins’.

    ‘Second hand’ or ‘shared memories’ became a thing in the ‘Wild West’ era of the technology. There were ethical considerations. There were protests. The Sear’s team of scientists were accused of ‘playing god’. People feared what they didn’t understand. To the fair, no one including Austin, really understood the full parameters of what they were doing at the time. It wasn’t far-removed from a caveman trying to reverse engineer a precision timepiece. Simply learning where the parts went in the complex mechanism didn’t offer a deeper comprehension of its purpose or meaning.

    The next stage brought a deeper level of knowledge, understanding, and awareness. The applications grew to include more than a realistic ‘shared experience’. It was one thing to feel another person’s memory in a hyper-realistic fashion. It was quite another to realize the amazing potential of transferring consciousness at death into another living medium or vessel. The public began to see the greater possibilities beyond the current appeal of sensory voyeurism.

    Commercial investors were the last to really get it. They stoked the fires of progress, as they sought to gain favor with Austin’s immortality dream team and make a buck. Eternal life outside the finite limits of the human body was tantalizing but what good was material wealth to intangible, non-corporeal beings? If Austin Sears found a way to make cognizant existence beyond death possible, there wouldn’t be a ticket price for admission. He’d moved beyond financial considerations. It would be shared equally with all mankind.

    The synaptic converters improved until they were virtually lossless in their transfer of memories but that was still worlds apart from the concept of passing the essence of conscious minds into a limitless expanse. That required an even greater technology leap. One where personal memories were faithfully recorded; and their true spiritual essence and awareness of that individual was transitioned to the virtual realm. That was a very tall order.

    The most pivotal moment in human history came once his team unlocked the doorway to consciousness itself. They back-traced the origin of where thoughts are created, to its roots. An electrochemical reaction in the mind changes stimuli from the senses into stored thoughts. Realizing memories are the metaphysical manifestation of our conscious self, they tracked down the precise location where ‘we’ exist. From that key discovery eventually came the immortal, virtual phase of humanity.

    Understanding just how the apex of consciousness in the brain operated took some trial and error. Was it mostly chemical? Was it electrical? Was it ‘spiritual’? Could it have been all three in varying degrees? The scientists didn’t know for certain but pinpointing the exact location ‘where the magic happens’ offered a huge leap in answering the question. They studied the spongy organic tissue and complex, synaptic interplay with sophisticated detection devices until the answer presented itself. At that moment they witnessed the birth of a brand new memory being formed.

    Humanity peered long into the abyss and saw the light of awareness and conscious being. We finally witnessed our bare essence and understood where the ‘soul’ is. Once that wide chasm had been crossed, the team went on to develop a ‘spirit converter’ to harness the mind and transfer our intellectual being from a physical entity, to non-corporeal eternal life. At long last, Austin Sears found a way for all of us to ‘take it with you.’

    0 Comments
    2023/12/28
    01:01 UTC

    18

    'Solstice Rise'

    On the night of December 22nd, a series of sadistic murders occurred across Northern Europe, but the grotesque, unholy pattern wasn’t recognized right away. There was too much compartmentalization between departments to immediately connect the forensic dots. Seemingly random attacks coalesced in suburban areas. The nighttime home invasions left all of the occupants dead, but far worse than the violent killings themselves, each of the victims were savagely mutilated and mangled.

    The unknown perpetrators made no effort to conceal their deeds or erase evidence. No valuables were taken. There were no sexual assaults; and no individual from infants to the elderly were spared the heinous brutality. As the respective authorities from each jurisdiction went to work, they took photos, dusted for fingerprints, and canvassed the neighborhood for relevant leads. It was rudimentary police procedure.

    Those were pretty much universal methods for solving murders, no matter where you live in the world. International news coverage of the senseless killing epidemic brought greater awareness to the struggling detectives. They compared notes and realized it obviously wasn’t hundreds of random, unrelated incidents. As unimaginable as it might seem, there was an organized operation to attack innocent families and sadistically torture them. The sheer volume of the savagery and the widespread scope of the incidents called for greater resources.

    Interpol might’ve been the most logical organization to steward the investigation, but this was a unique situation where old fashion leg work was definitely needed as well. Being centralized and inner-agency-connected certainly helped facilitate a more unified approach, but the individual department’s efforts led to the greatest progress. Interpol simply compiled the raw data from them and tried to make sense of it. Thats where the greatest challenge came from.

    “Our mobile forensic unit collected evidence at the scene. There were bloody fingerprints throughout the home and signs of a horrific struggle. All victims were killed by hand, from what we can determine so far. There were deep claw and bite marks on the bodies, and numerous broken bones from being violently gripped and squeezed. Fingers and limbs were actually torn off the torsos! I’ve never witnessed brutality quite like that in my 23 years on the force. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight. If it wasn’t for the human fingerprints in the victim’s blood, I’d suspect it was wild animals that mauled these poor souls. We also took numerous samples of mud on the floor and carpeting, and unbelievably, bare footprint impressions leading inside the residence, and then back outside! The shoeless maniacs who did this horrific crime were obviously powerful and unhinged psychopaths.”

    That detailed report from one crime scene unit in the Netherlands closely matched the others in Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere. At first, the Interpol detectives assigned to head the investigation thought the multiple reports were accidental duplicates. Only after verifying that each of the disturbing analyses came from a different location did they realize the incredible ‘coincidences’ were too similar to ignore.

    Further hindering the process, was the upcoming holidays. Christmas was in a few days and numerous teams were short-staffed. However once the ritualistic murder plot was recognized, all Holiday leave was cancelled for local and international investigators, forensic technicians, and police officers. Everyone needed to be on full alert to defend against the organized, still-unfolding terrorist movement, of undetermined goal and purpose. The authorities were wise to be prepared for future attacks but none of them could’ve handled knowing the truth.

    The following night brought just as many vicious murders as the previous. The home invasion death toll trippled, and then later quadrupled. This time, a reluctant witness came forward with jaw-dropping testimony. His claims might’ve been dismissed outright as delusional and the byproduct of his heavy alcohol consumption, but the Danish man offered a couple details which they couldn’t ignore.

    “I swear, they were shriveled up and brown like mummified corpses! I know how that sounds but they wore old shriveled rags and had no shoes on their feet. I watched from the alley as one of them stumbled out of that old house on the corner. I’d heard ungodly screams coming from it and looked around the wall to see what the hell was going on. I fully admit I’d been tossed out of the bar for fighting but I was still sober enough to recognize a walking corpse when I saw it! That unholy thing wasn’t alive! It was covered in bog mud and had a rotten noose wrapped around its decayed neck. Then I witnessed it and three others stagger toward the woods. They headed directly into the swamp and I pray I never see or smell such diabolical things ever again.”

    The highly agitated, drunken sot was interviewed extensively by the local detectives and then released. He was well known as a harmless vagrant with no prior violent offenses. Then they placed his dubious testimony into the report and shared it with Interpol. Obviously his reliability was circumspect but the mention of the suspects being barefoot warranted a second look. All across Europe, there had been over four thousand of these perplexing massacres associated with the ongoing investigation. Under the dire circumstances, they couldn’t really afford to discount any affidavit, no matter what the witness’s blood alcohol level was.

    The director of Interpol instructed those local detectives to pursue the witness statement about the four assailants walking into the swamp. Police dogs pulled the investigators all the way up to the edge of the peat bog itself, where the musty trail went cold. There was considerable evidence to support the man’s bizarre testimony, but none of then could begin to explain why the shuffling footprints ended there. To add to the mounting frustration, none of the collected fingerprints or foreign DNA at any of the crime scenes matched known suspects in the extensive criminal database.

    Elsewhere, the unexplained bloody reign of death repeated in over a hundred terrified towns. The newest wave of massacres occurred with virtually no resistance from the civil authorities. After the first two nights of senseless carnage, the frustrated governments sent military patrols to the affected neighborhoods. Soldiers stationed in Germany and Ireland called upon a couple of suspicious figures coming out of wooded areas to identify themselves, but there was no response in either case. After two unheeded warnings they were forced to opened fire. What they discovered after the ‘suspects’ were neutralized was nightmarish and unbelievable.

    ————

    “This can’t be! I’ve just reviewed the autopsy reports. It’s ridiculous. Those bodies didn’t just die! Come on! There has to be a mixup at the processing laboratory records centre. The bodies of the suspects supposedly collected at the scene of those two incidents last night have been dead a long time. Look at the goddamn post mortem photos! They look as though they’ve been buried in the ground for years and the clothing on them is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

    The deputy chief was furious about the lack of professionalism in the organization. There was absolutely no room for screwups of that magnitude. People were terrified. They demanded swift action and a full return to public safety. He telephoned the information clerk involved in the records transfer and immediately fired her on the spot. She protested that the medical files she forwarded from the laboratory were accurate, despite what they depicted; but he wasn’t having it.

    Then, on a simultaneous conference call, he demanded for the German and Irish medical examiners to resend the results of their autopsies. Both of them expressed unapologetic distain and indignation.

    “How dare you demand anything from us! Your once-acclaimed organization is both bloated and woefully inept.”; The German medical examiner spat. Both Angus and I received these Bronze-Age era cadavers in place of the actual suspects you ordered us to conduct autopsies upon. We simply sent you information for the museum specimens you’ve provided us with. I have no idea where those ancient, moldy cadavers came from but if this is some kind of a sick joke to evaluate our competency, I don’t appreciate it. If you can’t get your organization under control, I’ll be contacting your director to file a formal complaint.”

    In a rare equalizing moment of karma, the deputy chief was speechless. He wasn’t used to being dressed down by subordinates in the field. He was too taken aback to immediately process what was said. Once the words sank in, Sebastian was too distracted to worry about receiving a threat to his job, or the petty insult. He let that go and simply sought to clarify the details.

    “Wait, are you telling me that both of you received very old specimens that do not appear to have died last night? I’m going to get to the bottom of this immediately. Trust me. I’m going to call and speak with the soldiers who took out the suspects, and I’m also going to confirm with the processing teams at both murder scenes about the condition of the deceased bodies they packed up in the transfer bags.”

    As soon as he ended the call with the two belligerent medical examiners, the deputy chief called the records clerk and apologized profusely. He acknowledged he was in the wrong, and had overreacted. Then he offered her job back. If there was one thing Sebastian had learned in his storied career, it was the necessity of being earnest. He was still working on being humble with mixed results.

    —————

    “I knew you’d be a calling me because I couldn’t believe what we found when we checked the suspect’s vitals.”; The Irish sharpshooter confessed. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes, Sir! I even took photos with me cell phone. I know that’s not protocol but those things… they definitely ain’t human no more. They were dead, long before I pulled the trigger.”

    His call with the German soldier who shot the assailants went pretty much the same way. The distraught man admitted he was absolutely mortified by the withered, dried-up, lifeless figures he discovered after shooting them near the woods. From the military personnel, to the medical crew who packaged the bodies up for transport, to the forensic pathologists themselves, all members of the team had acted professionally. Especially in light of the highly uncomfortable circumstances.

    The evidence was all there but it required a complete dismissal of science and logic to accept the truth. The bizarre photos in the report were not the result of a bureaucratic mix up or a hoax. The undead perpetrators of these savage killings were rising out of the nearby swamps and bogs each night on the anniversary of the Winter Solstice. Their apparent motive was to exact their merciless vengeance on the living descendants of their own murderers. They were the fabled ‘bog-men’ who met violent ends thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age. Sacrificed for unknown reasons and then thrown into the surrounding peat bogs to rot. Ironically, the unique biology of the rich soil preserves their restless corpses.

    It was up to deputy chief and the other brave and dedicated sentinels of the front lines to stop the angry, rising souls by any means necessary. As Christmas Eve approached, Sebastian wanted to give the gift of peace and freedom from the nightly wave of terror. He organized a mass bog burning, and swamp drainage program across the whole of the entire continent. Wisely and without offering an explanation, his clever purification ritual ended their bloody retaliation. Hopefully they too can now rest in peace.

    2 Comments
    2023/12/25
    22:06 UTC

    13

    'Tag'

    The first thing she noticed was that the lights were out. The second, was that her arms and legs were tightly bound. She went to let out a scream in the darkened room but a gag in her mouth stifled most of it. It tasted heavily of a strong chemical. Almost immediately she realized she had been abducted. Her mind raced to recover the events that led her there. Still groggy from the forced anesthesia, she had no recent memory to reconstruct the pieces.

    Desperately she worked her hands back and forth but to no avail. The ropes were too tight and expertly knotted. To avoid ingesting any more of the noxious chemical, she forced her tongue to push the gag away from her mouth. It's harsh residue made her lips and tongue numb but at last she was free of it. She spat out the astringent taste and slowly the numbness went away. To her horror, she was in her underwear. Fearing what anyone would in that chilling situation, she did a mental evaluation of her extremities. It didn't feel as if she had been sexually assaulted, but she had obviously lost control of her bladder while unconscious.

    The unpleasant smell of her urine mixed with the understandable fear made her very nauseous. It was all she could do to keep from adding vomit to the pee and lingering ether residue. Strangely, she did notice a dull ache on the back of her neck. It was as if she had been stung by a bee or burned with a curling iron.

    Compared to her loss of freedom and far more important worries, the minor stinging sensation was of no real significance. Her family had no significant wealth. If the kidnappers realized that she had no money, there was only one other possible reason for her imprisonment. At first she tried to avoid thinking about it but the stark reality wouldn't fade. In the smart thinking of a survivor, she decided to use that probable threat as motivation to escape.

    She dared not yell out, for fear that her unknown abductor might still be nearby. Instead she rocked back and forth until her body was away from the puddle. On doing so, her feet and hand restraints flexed enough to loosen a bit. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the darkened room. She looked around for any source of escape or weapon but saw nothing. Just as she neared freeing her hands, a door opened and a large man walked over to her. She pretended to still be unconscious but he wasn't fooled. Through his black leather mask, he addressed her. His voice was digitized for apparent disguise purposes.

    "I see you are awake now. You should save your energy and stop trying to get out of those ropes. If you do as you are told, you will be released, unharmed. Is that clear?"

    She instinctually nodded in agreement even though she didn't believe a word of it. She certainly wanted to take him at his word but who could trust the promises of a kidnapper? He realized she was just pretending to agree and called her on it.

    "It's smart of you to be agreeable but I can tell that you don't believe me. I understand that. Honestly, if our roles were reversed, I wouldn't believe what I've said to you either but I am being honest with you. If you are hungry, I will bring you something to eat and drink. I can also bring you a clean change of clothes. Do you want me to do that? I apologize for what happened there. It's an unfortunate side effect of being unconscious through anesthesia."

    She nodded solemnly. In the back of her mind, she was afraid of what he might do if she said no. She was also afraid of accepting his offer for clean clothes. It undoubtedly meant changing in front of him. Then she would be even more vulnerable. Most of all, she was afraid to ask him why she was there and what he intended to do.

    Once again, her faceless abductor surmised what she was thinking. "If you are worried about me remaining in the room while you change, you can relax. We aren't barbarians here. If we wanted to... 'harm' you, we could have easily done so while you were unconscious. As a matter of fact, if we really had Ill intent in mind, you wouldn't have regained consciousness."

    For what was supposed to be 'words of comfort', they failed to make her feel any better. A shiver ran down her spine at the thought of being so completely powerless. She was also struck by his odd use of 'we'. Also for him to boldly suggest that they were somehow 'civilized' kidnappers. She wisely refrained from pointing out how contradictory those words were, with the facts. The whole thing might have actually been humorous under less terrifying circumstances. Clearly 'they' thought very highly of themselves. She planned on using that bit of gleaned intel as a tool to plead for her release.

    He turned to leave but stopped short at the door. "I'm going to get you food, water and some clothes now. Be smart and resist the urge to try to free yourself. We have an infrared camera and are watching. I'll return in a minute. If you continue to cooperate as you have been, you will be freed. Understand?"

    Again she nodded. Finding out about the camera in the room dampened her escape ambitions significantly. So far, he was being reasonable. She didn't want to escalate hostilities when 'they' held all the cards. It still seemed too good to be true but until things changed for the worse, she opted to pretend to cooperate. It seemed the best course to survive.

    In a few moments he returned. As promised, he brought food and water. Instead of freeing her to help herself, he simply fed her small bites of the food and held the cup of water to her parched lips. Out of desperate necessity, she didn't press him to release her tied hands. He was almost gentle in his actions but she wondered about his vague promise about the change of clothes. Obviously she couldn't change them herself as long as her hands and feet were still bound.

    "You also promised to give me clean clothes and privacy to change into them."; She pointed out, timidly. "Are you still going to keep that promise?"

    The kidnapper's mask betrayed no expression but she sensed he was possibly smiling at her sudden burst of nervous courage. "I'm afraid that I had to deceive you."; He sheepishly admitted through the vocoder. "Your water was dosed with the same anesthesia medicine that we used before. Soon you will grow groggy and pass out. I'm here to catch you. I promise that the next time you wake up, you will be free. We couldn't risk you being untied. I will treat your body with dignit...."

    Her eyes began to get heavy but her heart raced at his earnest admission of lying to her. She fought the powerful drug but was losing the battle to remain conscious. The more he tried to reassure her, the more she panicked. She wanted to scream that he was a damned liar but couldn't seem to find the words. The last thing she witnessed before passing out was the chilling sight of him slowly walking toward her.

    II

    "According to law enforcement authorities in Rotterdam, she was found near a municipal landfill. They just happened to report it to our INTERPOL network as part of the international information sharing agreement. The crime might have went unnoticed or dismissed as a 'local' incident but we've had a number of similar abductions reported in the past couple days."

    "Similar abductions in or around Rotterdam?"; The INTERPOL deputy asked the director. He realized there had to be a much bigger point for the director to be so animated, but he liked being deliberately obtuse.

    "All over Europe. More than a dozen so far. There's also been similar reports coming in from the Mediterranean and the Middle East. I don't know what's going on but it's no coincidence. This is some sort of connected event and we have to get to the bottom of it."

    "Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East? Those places are thousands of kilometres apart. How could they possibly be connected?"

    "It's in the similarly of the crimes."; Director Hongwei explained. "They all seem to have certain details in common. While the gender of the abducted isn't always the same, so far they have been released with only minor injuries. Sworn affidavits taken from the victims describe an almost parallel experience, despite taking place in completely different countries; or in some cases, different continents. So far, there appears to be no obvious personal ties between any of them. It's as if the kidnappers followed the same 'rule book' and compared notes."

    His chief deputy marveled at the details as they were explained. "Were the minor injuries consistent from one case to the others?"; He asked. The director smiled.

    "I was wondering how long it would take for you to explore that line of thought. There's a good reason for why you are my chief investigator!"; He praised. "I can always count on you to be methodical and thorough. I'm assigning the case to you. I know you'll be able to uncover the baffling connection to these bizarre, unusual abductions."

    Jurgen Stock appreciated the high praise from Director Hongwei but wasn't looking forward to the long hours and complex case files it would take to investigate the crimes. He wasn't even sure if he'd be able to tie the geographically distant cases together. Working with one local law enforcement agency was hard enough. Trying to coordinate between dozens of local police organizations scattered across the globe was going to be significantly more difficult.

    He amassed an impressive team of investigators to tackle the daunting task. The director signed off on the financial funds needed to pay for the investigation. Deputy Stock flew to Holland to interview the most recent victim. She was still in a state of disbelief and shock over the baffling crime. The rest of his team remained back at INTERPOL's headquarters in Lyon France to compare notes on all the similar cases. Testimony from victims scattered across the world read like a rehearsed speech. They had no prior memory of the events that lead to their abduction. They awoke bound and gagged in a darkened place. Their captors were basically polite, and then promised to release them if they cooperated.

    It wasn't long before a greater pattern in the deepening mystery would emerge. All known cases involved the victims having a small wound on the back of their necks. As Deputy Stock had speculated, the wounds had something in common. The circumstances of which, were difficult to fathom at first.

    III

    "From what I can see in the original interview photos, It appears to be some sort of icon made against the victim's skin with a branding iron. The wound was still very irritated and raw at the time of photography but it appears to resemble a line drawing of a clothing tag. If so, that would be exceptionally ironic. It's roughly the right size and location of a real laundry instruction tag. The brand is imprinted on the back of the victim's neck, right where a shirt tag would normally be. I'll take several new photos for an updated analysis when I meet Ms. Chevalier. Maybe Jimenez can age-progress my new photos in the forensics lab for a better idea of what it's supposed to be. I'm about to interview her at the local police station to see if I can learn more about her abduction."

    The director offered Jurgen a few suggestions for the interview. "Be cautious about what you divulge to the local authorities. It's too early in the investigation to know how far this conspiracy goes. Just show them your credentials and have them call me if they have any doubts or questions about our jurisdictional right-of-way. The less we leak to them, the easier it will be to eliminate potential suspects."

    Jurgen acknowledged the director's confidential strategy and ended the call. The police chief was visibly agitated at the idea of losing authority of his investigation but he complied with the official INTERPOL orders. Jurgen and his team were given a conference room and full access to the abduction report. It really didn't contain any new information but he wanted to familiarize himself with all the records before interviewing her. There was no sense in traumatizing the lady all over again with redundant, pointless questions.

    "Good afternoon Madam. I'm deputy inspector Jurgen Stock of Interpol. I appreciate you coming back in to give another statement for our team. I realize you've had a very rough couple days. We felt that your abduction might not be an isolated incident and wanted to question you about what you remember. I've read over your detailed statement to the Rotterdam police and just want to ask a few follow-up questions."

    She nodded dutifully but there was an obvious hesitation in her physical demeanor. Her level of discomfort at reliving the experience was so great that it seemed to manifest itself as a painful wince. He witnessed it each time he asked her a question. It was apparent she was suffering from shock and a whole host of other psychological afflictions that she would need therapy for. He adjusted his countenance and adopted a more sympathetic tone.

    "First of all, I'm sorry that this happened to you. It's in no way your fault. I'm a strong believer in justice and we need to use this opportunity to catch the persons responsible." She began to tear up at the support and affirmation but he didn't want to derail momentum of the interview. "In the time since you were released and filed the original police report, have any new details occurred to you? We find that immediately after a terrifying incident of this nature, the victim is often too traumatized to remember all the important things. With time to de-stress and reflect, crucial facts often materialize later that were previously forgotten. Is there anything new that has come to you since Sargent Saddler took your statement?"

    Ms. Chevalier was still visibly shaken but felt a little more at ease with deputy Stock. He approached the situation with both delicacy and tact that were largely missing from her initial interview. She confided in Jurgen that the local police initially treated her with an obvious air of doubt and suspicion. They couldn't seem to wrap their minds around an abduction that didn't involve ransom money or sexual assault, and ended with her being released alive.

    Prior to learning about the other cases, deputy Stock might have shared their skepticism but he didn't attempt to devalue those feelings. She was a victim and to doubt her testimony made her a victim, all over again. Without giving out sensitive details, he assured her that she wasn't alone. Others had shared her fate. That disclosure made her feel better and validated the testimony of her experience. She made a much greater effort to help after that since she knew he really believed her.

    She offered critical insight into the kidnapper's accent, the cologne he wore, and little nuances of how he held the silverware that he fed her with. In all, she provided more than a dozen new details that were not provided in the original report. Deputy Stock thanked her for her efforts and promised to work hard to bring her kidnappers to justice. As she left the interview room she turned to the deputy to ask him the questions that had been troubling her the most.

    "Why? Why would anyone do what they did to me? What was their goal and why was I eventually spared? Those thoughts keep rolling over and over in my head. I can't stop looking over my shoulder. I check the locks on my windows and doors repeatedly. I can't sleep. I'm too terrified to answer my door when the mailman comes. I don't even trust my food being prepared by another person. Will I ever get answers? I just want it to be over so I can get on with my life! I fear I'll never be the same again."

    Jurgen smiled sympathetically. "I can't tell you very much about what we know so far but I will say that similar crimes have been occurring recently to many others. We are in the process of connecting the dots so we can zero-in on the culprits. I am the director's direct liaison in change of investigating all of the cases. We will find out who is behind these crimes so you can sleep easier."

    "If it's been happening to others, why haven't I heard about it on the news? The police captain acted like I had made the whole thing up for attention! Why would they try to humiliate me if they knew I was telling the truth?"; Ms. Chevalier demanded.

    "That's just it, ma'am. They don't know about the other abduction instances. The ones we know about occurred in other places outside the Rotterdam jurisdiction. We've just now realized there is a connection." Immediately he regretted divulging classified information to her but in this case, her need to understand outweighed the risks of a breach in confidentiality. "In order for us to effectively do our job, I need you to keep what I just told you, to yourself. Do you understand? Otherwise it will seriously compromise our investigation."

    She nodded. "...and why the hell would they want to brand an image of a clothing tag on the back of my neck?"; She asked with a bewildered tone. The sheer inexplicable nature of which made her lower lip tremble.

    Her final question made Jurgen remember that he needed to take newer photos. "We don't know the answer to that yet but if you don't mind, I'd like to take a couple more shots of your wound since it's had a couple more days to heal. If the image is clearer, we can search for it using our database to see if it has any known gang or cartel associations."

    Ms. Chevalier dutifully bowed her head for deputy Stock to shoot the updated images. He promised her that he would make it his primary objective to bring her captors to justice.

    IV

    Deputy Stock's team analyzed the most recent data on the associated crimes. They shared their findings with Jurgen after he returned from the witness interview. Reports of nearly identical abductions continued to pour in from all over the globe. With so many aspects of similarity, it became easier to look for possible differences. The team got their first significant break with a case in Belgium.

    There, a local man was kidnapped in an Antwerp suburb. Like the other cases, he was released unharmed except for a brand to the back of his neck. The only significant element in that case was the brand itself. It wasn't an illustration of a clothing tag like the Rotterdam victim. While the burn was still crusted over and inflamed, it was clear enough to make out what appeared to be a simple representation of a finger; complete with fingernail.

    Jurgen initially theorized that the difference might be associated with gender until photos from the other victims started to come in. There were women who had received the 'finger' brand and men who received the clothing tag. Stranger still, there was at least one other brand associated with the growing crime spree. A young woman in Austria received a crude, eight legged creature branded to the back of her neck.

    At that point, it was a complete toss up. A member of Jurgen's team complied a detailed spreadsheet of crime location data, each victim's age, gender, and the brands they received. It wasn't obvious if the brands were unique to location, the kidnapper's 'identity' or some other unknown factor. There were so many possible variables that it could mean anything, or absolutely nothing at all.

    Although unlikely, the choice of brands burned onto the victims could be completely random. Jurgen felt there was too much coordinated organization and synchronicity for it to be meaningless but he couldn't find a pattern. The team worked late into the night to sift through the mountain of statistics seeking a connection, any solid connection. Try as they might, nothing came together.

    Jurgen called headquarters to deliver his nightly report. Director Hongwei listened with great interest as his deputy relayed their findings and running theories. When he admitted that their progress had recently stalled, the director asked for the photos and spreadsheet to be emailed to him. He wanted to offer another set of eyes. A fresh perspective could often do wonders in cases of investigative stalemate. Jurgen agreed and emailed him the case files.

    At 4 AM, Jurgen was awakened by the unsettling ring of his cell phone. He squinted his eyes to read the caller ID. It was director Hongwei calling. He fumbled with the buttons in his semi-conscious stupor but finally managed to answer the call. "Hello?"; He whispered hoarsely. He wasn't even sure if he was dreaming.

    "Jurgen! I've been looking over the data and had some thoughts. First of all, did your team arrive at any conclusions of what the eight legged creature was supposed it be?"

    Still half asleep, Jurgen could only repeat the question at first. "Eight legged creature, sir? You mean the insignia that was branded on some of the victims? We assumed it was some sort of um, an arachnid. You know, a spider, mite or a tick."

    "Yes, that was my assessment as well."; The director agreed. "The thing is, I think the team is wrong about the other brand symbol. I don't think it's a finger. I believe it's supposed to be a toe. It's much too short and wide to represent a finger. A toe on the other hand makes far more sense. It also has a nail but is shorter and wider than any finger."

    Jurgen was starting to come out of his unconscious fog. The director's analysis made perfect sense but he was still at a loss to understand the significance of a 'toe brand', over a 'finger brand'. Before he could ask what the significance might be to any of it, director Hongwei interrupted.

    "Tick, TAG, Toe."; His boss shouted excitedly. "It's gotta be wordplay for the traditional kid's game, tic tack toe!"

    Deputy Stock was still a little fuzzy but he realized that the director was definitely onto something monumental. "But how could that correlate to an international crime wave of abduction and branding?"; He muttered.

    Director Hongwei laughed. "I'm glad you finally asked!"; He offered with a hint of mischief. Jurgen could tell that his boss was quite pleased with whatever he was about to reveal. "Check your email. I just sent you a global map with all known abductions marked on it."

    Jurgen woke his computer up and checked his messages while placing the director on speaker phone. In the new email from his boss was an attachment. The moment the image opened up, he was wide awake. He could hardly believe what he saw. All of the crime scenes reported to INTERPOL were marked on the map. Amazingly, they all formed a series of tic-tac-toe games on nearly every continent.

    The director had drawn game divider lines between the crime scene locations so it was more obvious what was going on. All Jurgen could do was sit there with his mouth open in awe. If he hadn't seen it drawn out so succinctly, he wouldn't have believed it. When he finally recovered from the shock, he congratulated the director for his amazing powers of deduction. The two of them discussed what direction they should go in from there.

    V

    "I think if we scour the deep web for 'Tick tag toe' and other variants, we'll find some relevant information. Our investigation is about to take off, Jurgen. This is huge! Hopefully we can start to make arrests soon and wrap up this macabre 'game' but we have to play it smart. We need to get all of the twisted participants across the globe. There could be several dozen of these 'players', worldwide. If my suspicions are correct, there may be even more casual observers in the macabre conspiracy. At the very least, we have a general idea of where the next abduction will take place and what their brand will be. There are at least three unfinished 'tick tag toe' projects in progress; and a new one just got underway."

    "How do you know that?"; Jurgen inquired.

    "See the solitary kidnapping marker in Prague? That victim was branded with a tag-shaped brand. If you compare the various games we have identified across the world, the 'tag' brand is always on the center square. Whomever places that one, decides where a new game starts. There are too many city and town variables around a new location to guess where the players will strike next. We should concentrate on the two active games that are nearing completion. To align with the other linear abductions in the Argentina game, a 'toe brander' will try to abduct someone in, or around Buenos Ares next."

    "I can have a team assembled there this afternoon, sir."; Jurgen offered enthusiastically.

    "No. No. As I said; we will need to approach this all at once. If we make a handful of arrests in Argentina, our visual presence at the crime scene will cause the other participants to go 'dark'. We have to coordinate our arrests worldwide to nab all of them simultaneously. Let's see if we can shut down the entire criminal syndicate."

    Not surprisingly, the director's hunch about the 'deep web' was correct. A keyword search revealed a seedy underground group called: 'Tick, Tag, Toe. It consisted of a message board where all parties used pseudonyms and spoke in thinly-veiled code phrases. It was immediately obvious that the active participants of the message board were directly tied to the crimes that INTERPOL was investigating.

    The group had started out as a fantasy role-playing subculture of serial killer enthusiasts. At some point, pretending was no longer enough and they formed their very own 'no kill' imitation club. Director Hongwei hoped to use the collected DNS data to uncover the identities of the criminals behind the anonymous avatars. It was going to be a real challenge to ping their IP addresses without spooking the entire group.

    Jurgen put his deep web specialist on cyber surveillance detail. In time he hoped to uncover all of the user identities. Even with that necessary information, it wasn't evidence of anything beyond visiting a web site. Detectives on the ground in each jurisdiction would have to do the leg work and tie the group members with their actual crimes.

    With assistance from the internet regulatory authorities, INTERPOL's cyber experts were able to glean the addresses of all official members of the serial killer imitation group. More specifically, they were able to locate the households were the registered internet services were associated. Unless that IP customer lived alone, they only had the general residence where a computer had been used to contact the black site. It wasn't proof of the specific identity of who was behind the keyboard.

    If there was a case where the internet account associated with a club member was a single occupied residence, it was fairly obvious who the perpetrator was. Otherwise it could by anyone living or visiting there. In situations where only one member of the cabal lived near an abduction, it also made for a stronger case against that suspect. Regardless, none of the known evidence against the lead suspects in the residences would hold up in an international court. It was all very circumstantial. They would need much more evidence to obtain a conviction.

    VI

    In a well-executed, coordinated operation, law enforcement officials raided the homes of the members and seized computers and cellular telephones. Data analysts examined their devices for usable evidence. They were seeking direct connection with the criminal operation and full proof of equipment ownership. What they found, startled even the most seasoned investigators.

    "Are you kidding me, Jimenez? That doesn't make any sense."; The deputy ranted. "So all of the adults arrested in these raids have denied any responsibility or knowledge of the crimes? How could they all pass polygraph tests? What does that mean? Did the real members of this sick internet kidnapping club forge their DNS information and pin a spoofed ID on innocent parties?"

    His technology guru shrugged. "The overwhelming majority of the real suspects in these kidnapping cases are minor kids still living at home with their clueless parents."; He explained. "It was their personal computers and cell phones that logged hundreds of visits to the dark internet site. Like most parents, they had no idea what their sneaky kids are into. I can't tell you how many times we found internet searches on the teen's personal devices for: 'how to create homemade anesthesia' or instructions for 'how to tie someone up'. There were even detailed plans on how to 'make personalized cattle brands with a 3D modeler'. None of the parents had a clue.

    "Teenagers? How could they coordinate such a sophisticated criminal operation on this scale? Most of them can't even make it to school on time! It just doesn't make sense!"

    Jimenez looked at him blankly. "Clearly you don't have kids, Jurgen. Modern kids are into things that we would have never even dreamed of. Sure we found ways to peak at our father's nudie books or 'borrow' the family car for a 'joy ride', but not the millennial generation. They are tech savvy, self-absorbed goth brats with bloodstreams full of hormones and high fructose corn syrup. Frankly, I'm not really surprised at all in their involvement. I'm just relieved my own teenager's account wasn't on the participant list."

    Later on, director Hongwei and Jurgen discussed the appalling state of morality in the world. "I blame the invention of a global internet to facilitate bad ideas on a planetary scale."; The director lamented halfheartedly. "This might actually be humorous if it wasn't such a sad testimony on the future leaders of tomorrow. At least I won't be around to see it. Our health experts project a life expectancy of less than twenty more years for me. You on the other hand, should be around to witness it all."

    Both men laughed at director Hongwei's grim assessment of the future. Despite the fact that most of the participants in the international kidnapping spree were juveniles with certain legal protections, they still ended a major crime wave. They put a damper on the shadowy world of the deep web and raised awareness of the need to maintain a watchful eye over it. It also helped strengthen the bond between INTERPOL and the smaller law enforcement organizations.

    "I've been thinking."; The director opined. "I've had some time recently to reflect on my career and what I'd like to get out of my remaining years. I believe it's time for me to step down as director and hand the reins to you. You are ready, my man! Effectively Monday you are the new INTERPOL director, Jurgen. 'Tag'. You're 'it!'"

    0 Comments
    2023/12/24
    18:59 UTC

    459

    I have a Christmas tree that won’t die

    When I was growing up, my sister Sarah insisted we needed to have a real tree every Christmas, even though our household budget was literally less than zero most months. She would go absolutely all out in making Christmas fun and exciting, even when we were kids, artfully decorating the house with handmade ornaments and cutting lawns all year so she could afford to make dozens of gingerbread cookies when December came around.

    My favorite childhood memories were pine-scented and trimmed in tinsel, ringing with my grandmother's awful singing voice, my sister's happy laughter, and the crackling of the fireplace.

    But the year I turned 11, my grandmother passed away a few weeks before Christmas. Sarah and I had adored Gram, and we both felt like we were totally unmoored without her.

    At 19, Sarah was practically still a kid herself, but she was dead-set on keeping me out of the foster care mess she went through. When I was a baby, she had spent a few years moving between families before my grandmother finally got custody of us both. Sarah didn't like to talk about it, but I knew with absolute certainty how fierce her love was for me, and that she would throw herself in front of a train rather than lose me.

    Sarah was a wild teenager, and our grandmother was constantly chasing after her. Gram hadn't liked Sarah's boyfriend, Mark, at all. Before she passed, Gram had frequently tried to convince Sarah that she really shouldn't be dating a man ten years her senior, and especially not someone with such a volatile temper.

    I didn't learn about this until Sarah told me when I was much older because I had never known either of my parents, but my biological father had been like Mark. He had sucked my mother into a whirlpool of all the things that ruin a young woman's life before she even graduated high school. By the time I was six months old, my father and my mother had both passed from overdoses within a year of each other. I knew Gram was perpetually afraid that what happened to her daughter would happen to Sarah and me, too.

    If it was possible, I liked Sarah's boyfriend even less than our grandmother did, with that kind of instant, unadulterated hate that kids have. I hated that he stole away my sister's time, I hated how he always smelled like cigarettes and cheap cologne, and I really hated all the times I had heard her crying on the phone with him.

    If Gram hadn't died, I think Sarah might have broken it off with Mark. He was an unsupportive asshole when she was sick, whining about how much time Sarah spent taking care of Gram and me, not even bothering to make sure Gram and I were out of earshot when he complained. But Gram had racked up so much medical debt from the cancer treatments that we lost our house only a few weeks after her funeral.

    So Sarah, Mark, and I were crammed together into a one-bedroom apartment, and my "room" was a tent of sheets hung with a clothesline and the living room couch for a bed. My sister scoured the classifieds for a second job and artfully dodged house visits from social services until we could afford something bigger. I spent every night rolling tiny balls of tissue to put into my ears, so I didn't hear her and Mark arguing about it through the thin walls, with him complaining about how he never signed up to take care of a "fucking brat" and "especially not two."

    I was less than thrilled about sharing my tiny space with a Christmas tree, but my sister was trying extra hard to make our first Christmas without Gram special. Mark had doubled her share of the rent because of me, and she had no savings to go to a proper tree lot. Mark made pretty good money in a union construction job, and I had heard her quietly begging him to just let her slide a little in December. But he was adamant that she had to cover all of her own expenses and mine, her beloved Christmas decorating being chief among them.

    A few beers in after work one day, Mark suggested we drive out into the local state park and cut down a tree ourselves. My sister protested that it wasn't safe, that we would get in a lot of trouble if we got caught, and although she didn't say it out loud to him, I saw her gaze kept darting to the quickly disappearing six-pack. He waved her off, and we reluctantly piled into his old Buick, me still in my pajamas with a hastily thrown-on winter coat because of the late hour.

    I remember that cold December night with crystalline clarity. There was a quiet crunch of frost beneath our boots, and my heart was pounding with worry that a police officer or park ranger might jump out from behind a tree trunk and catch us. My nose was running from the bitter cold, and I kept involuntarily sniffling, which annoyed Mark, who snapped at me every chance he got.

    Over the past weeks we had lived together, I got the impression that Mark hated me as much as I did him and was simultaneously obsessed with every little thing that I did. I would catch him staring at me in a way that made me want to talk to my sister, but I didn't know quite what to say, and I was petrified if he found out how much I disliked him, that he would throw us both to the curb.

    There was something incredibly unnerving about watching Mark walk around in the dark with a tree saw. I stayed as close as possible to my sister without knocking her over, my mittened hand clinging to hers tightly. Sarah squeezed my hand back just as hard, which made me wonder if she was equally as nervous about Mark's drunken laughter and uneven stride.

    We made our way deep into the forest, where no one would see us taking the tree down. The further out we went, the more the trees seemed to close in on us, as if they were banding together to intimidate us into going back.

    "How about this one?" Sarah had asked that question a few times before, her tone pleading, stopping in front of another tree. Mark blinked at her slowly and shook his head. It seemed as if he was turning this into a way to punish her for asking for something, as he so often did. Sarah clenched her free hand around a tree branch, looking at me worriedly.

    We walked until the moon hung high in the sky, wide and bright, like an eye watching us trek through the snow. My face went numb, my legs felt sore, and my eyes were heavy.

    I had fallen half-asleep on my feet when Mark finally called out to Sarah and me, who had been trailing behind him for the last mile or so.

    "Here it is!" His voice was full of feigned cheer. He pulled a flask from his pocket and raised it to us before taking a celebratory swig. His cheeks were red with exertion, and his eyes were glassy and wild.

    "It's a little tall for the apartment, isn't it?" Sarah's voice was weary. She dropped my hand and put her mittens on her own cheeks to warm them.

    We had stopped in a clearing, where the moon seemed to spotlight the tree Mark had picked. I had to admit it was the prettiest one I had seen so far, a lush, deep green and almost perfectly symmetrical. When Sarah shined the flashlight on it, the yellow beam made the frost that covered it glitter, like it was already covered in golden tinsel. It stood about a foot and a half higher than Mark. I tried to picture it in the small living room.

    "What do you think?" Mark's dark gaze was focused on me; the blade of the tree saw flickering sharply in the moonlight. I swallowed, feeling like a deer in the headlights, looking between him and my sister. Sarah saw the worry on my face.

    "We'll make it work. Thank you, Mark." She answered for me, reaching for my hand again. He nodded, having gotten the answer he had obviously been looking for and bent down to start sawing.

    I had never seen a tree cut down before. When Gram, Sarah, and I had picked them out in the lots over the years, they had already been neatly trimmed and packaged. I felt a pang of sharp guilt in my gut, like when I first realized that the chicken fingers at the store came from the same kind of chickens I saw at the petting zoo.

    "Do trees know they're being cut down?" I asked unthinkingly, looking at the looming tree line that circled the clearing where we stood. I felt like they were looking at us cut down their friend.

    "That's the stupidest fucking question I've heard in a long time," Mark grunted, the saw making a screech that sounded especially loud in the silent forest. Sarah ignored him and knelt to look me in the eye.

    "No, kiddo, they don't feel it," she said reassuringly, pulling my knit hat snugly over my ears while making a silly face to lighten the mood. I couldn't help but smile and wrapped my arms around her in a warm hug. She returned the embrace almost too tightly. Over her shoulder, my gaze shifted to Mark. His face shone with sweat from the effort as he sawed diligently. Suddenly, something fell and bounced off his shoulder.

    Mark was startled by the impact, lifting an arm to block his face. I watched in horror as the saw blade ricocheted back, coming a hair's breadth away from his neck. I screamed, certain his throat would be slashed. Sarah whipped her neck around to see what had happened. Mark was staring at the half-sawed trunk, the blade still embedded and reverberating in the bark. Sarah leaped towards Mark to check on him, seeing the dangerous angle of the saw.

    The object that had hit him was just a pinecone. It rolled to a stop at my boot. I picked it up and examined it.

    "What the hell happened, Mark?" Sarah scanned the shadowed tree line anxiously, looking for what had caused the commotion. Her eyes landed on me, and I reflexively slid the pinecone into my pocket, like I might somehow get into trouble for holding it.

    "My hand slipped, no big deal." He said, trying to cover the fearful shaking in his voice. He got to his feet quickly and paced a few steps, taking deep breaths and another deep swig from his flask.

    "Should we just go home?" I heard Sarah ask him quietly.

    "No, we came all the way out here, let's get your fucking tree." Mark snapped. He dropped to his knees and finished sawing through the tree, doubling his efforts in a fervor that seemed like angry retribution.

    Sarah led me out of the clearing to stand among the trees beyond, out of the area where the tree might fall. Mark kicked the tree to sever the last of the trunk, and it snapped with a sound like a gunshot, echoing through the trees and shaking the ground beneath us when it fell. Mark stood over it, panting like he had just won a battle.

    "Alright," he said finally, "come help me carry it." Mark held the base of the trunk, Sarah stood at the front, and I reluctantly made my way to the center between them. Even at 11, I recognized the uncomfortable feeling that I was helping to do something wrong, like dragging away a body.

    The tree was heavy, and I could barely see my feet in front of me. I tripped and almost fell hard on my face, and Mark swore, readjusting his footing with the extra weight.

    "Pay attention." He growled at me, his face red and shiny with exertion. My arms were exhausted, but I was worried about what he might do if I faltered again. I looked at Sarah, but her concentration was entirely on the looming darkness before us and keeping the flashlight trained ahead.

    Suddenly, I felt something wrap around my wrists. I almost dropped my arms again, frightened, but another glance at Mark reminded me what might happen if I did. It was a prickling sensation, like tight rubber bracelets, but it wasn't painful. I kept my hands steady and found it easier to keep up with the pace of the adults who stood on either side of me.

    I was so relieved when we made it to the car I almost cried, my eyes welling up with tired tears. The prickling feeling around my wrists subsided when I freed my hands, and I scurried into the backseat, hugging myself to try to warm up and forget the strangeness of the night. I heard Mark and Sarah struggling to tie the tree to the top of the Buick, a scraping, metallic sound that made me feel like I was inside of a can opener.

    The ride back to the apartment was quiet and tense. Everyone was exhausted, and we still had to drag the tree inside and up the stairs. It was later than I had ever been awake before, and my eyes kept drifting shut.

    I woke to Sarah's gentle hand on my shoulder, the apartment building looming behind her. It was built like an old wooden ship, with drafty hallways that barely kept out the cold, short ceilings, no elevator system, and seven flights of stairs. The lights inside were barely functional, and flickered eerily in the tiny alcove that passed as a lobby. As we assembled back in formation to pick up the tree, standing in the cold entryway, my mind was awash with strange images and feelings, like we had walked inside of the tree and gotten stuck, or maybe never left the forest and would be carrying the corpse of the tree forever in the cold darkness.

    Once again, my wrists prickled as we walked up the stairs that led to the apartment. This time, I could see Sarah's face more clearly and saw the strain that wrinkled her forehead and tightened her jaw. I didn't dare look back at Mark.

    When we finally entered, Sarah immediately pulled out the tree stand, measuring it against the trunk. She had obviously been worried since she first raised her concerns with Mark, and her frown deepened.

    "It's going to be a tight fit," She said reluctantly. Mark, who had walked into the kitchen to take another beer from the fridge, slammed it down on the counter and grabbed the tree stand out of her hands.

    We had placed the tree horizontally on the threadbare living room carpet, and it occupied most of the room. Mark stood at the base of the tree trunk and started hammering it into the stand, using only his bare hands and fury. Sarah came and sat next to me on the couch that was also my bed, wrapping me up in my favorite old blanket, one that Gram had knitted for me and of the few things I had left from our old life. She held me and kissed the top of my head as Mark let out a stream of curses.

    "There," he finally said, having semi-successfully shoved the tree into the metal ring. Both the wood and the metal had warped, and there were splinters and pine needles everywhere. He hoisted it up, and the top of it bent under the ceiling. Even standing, it took up most of the free space in the room. He looked at Sarah and me and grabbed the trunk, shaking it like a prize fish.

    Mark's eyes suddenly widened, and he cursed loudly, yanking his hand away from the tree with a sudden jerk. Blood oozed profusely between his fingers. He cradled his mangled hand against his chest, his face contorted in pain. Sarah hesitated for a minute, her reluctance palpable before she finally, begrudgingly, rose to assist him.

    "Something in there bit me," His accusatory, bloodshot eyes found mine, almost as if he blamed me. I thought about the prickling pressure around my wrists and twisted my hands together nervously, feeling overtired and confused about what was real. Sarah gave the branches a halfhearted shake, obviously doubting his perception.

    "I think you probably cut yourself while we were carrying it, or maybe on some of the splinters," Sarah tried to soothe him as she pulled him towards the bathroom. He looked wildly between me, Sarah, and the tree and seemed to realize how improbable his line of thought was, letting himself be pulled out of the living room.

    I was alone with the tree. Down the short hallway, I heard the familiar muffled sounds of Sarah's soothing murmurs and Mark's angry lamenting. I stared at the tree until my eyes grew too heavy to keep open, again struck by that odd feeling that I was still in the woods where we had found it.

    I slept fitfully, my dreams echoing the feelings that had haunted me while I was awake.

    I was back in the clearing, at the moment where the saw blade had almost hit Mark's neck. In the dream, however, black, gnarled tentacles that stretched like burnt branches emerged from the tree, holding the blade to Mark's throat, dark blood dripping down to the ground like thick sap. Along the edges of the tree line, more black tendrils crept through the shadows, slithering closer and closer.

    I woke up with a start, feeling a phantom, rubbery pressure around my ankles. I was still sitting upright on the couch with my winter coat on, my blanket clenched in my hands.

    The tree seemed to take up my entire line of vision, and for a split second, I wondered if Mark had left me back in the forest and I had dreamed that I had made it back to the apartment.

    "Come and get your Pop-Tarts!" Sarah called softly from the kitchen, and relief washed over me.

    I walked carefully past the tree and took my breakfast from my sister, a warm bundle wrapped in a paper towel. Sarah looked tired, still in her sweatpants, and her thick curls pulled back into a messy bun, but her wide smile lit up her face as usual.

    "Mark's still asleep, and we slept through your bus, so we're going to borrow the Buick to get you to school. Can you go get ready super fast?" She asked. I nodded, my mouth full of artificial strawberry filling, and sped through my morning routine.

    Sarah had a thoughtful look on her face as we drove to school.

    "Do you like living with me and Mark?" She asked suddenly. I faced the window, letting my breath fog the glass.

    "I like living with you," I answered carefully, with a tact I now know was way too advanced for an 11-year-old to have mastered.

    I think Sarah knew that then. In the reflection of the window, I watched her knuckles turn white as she gripped the steering wheel. We drove the rest of the way in silence until she parked in front of the school.

    "I can't wait to decorate the tree with you tonight." She pulled me into a hug before I left.

    "Me too." In truth, I didn't really want to touch the tree again, but I hoped my smile looked real.

    That week at school was tough. It was always hard in the weeks before Christmas, as Gram was always just barely scraping by, and my gift wish lists were always just a few lines where other kids wrote pages.

    That year, I didn't want to write down anything in case Sarah saw it and felt badly she couldn't afford to get me anything. Instead, when the teacher passed out the paper, I drew the forest from my dream, putting extra detail into the tree, hoping to solidify that I was truly back in reality by capturing it on the page.

    When I got off the bus outside of the old apartment building after school, I knew something was wrong.

    Sarah always waited for me to walk me from the bus stop, using her break between her shifts at the diner down the road. That day, I walked up the stairs to the apartment by myself, crunching on the dried pine needles we had left behind while dragging the tree the night before, full of dread for what I would find.

    When I opened the door, the sight of the tree greeted me. A single strand of lights was wrapped around it, dangling like a tail, the rest lying in a tangle on the ground.

    Sarah sat in the same spot I had on the couch this morning, still in her pajamas instead of her work uniform, holding a bag of frozen peas against her chin. She saw me in the doorway and raised a hand in a wave, but her eyes were sad. I looked back at the tree, wondering if the strange magic it seemed to possess had gotten to her, too.

    "Ready to decorate?" She asked, her voice muffled by the bag. I stared at her, letting my backpack and coat slide to the floor next to the couch. She held my gaze and then slowly took the bag of peas away from her mouth, sighing, like I was making her tell a secret. Her chin was a violent shade of purple, and dried blood was crusted around her lips. I stared at her, and she seemed to shrink into herself.

    "I tripped while I was taking out the ornaments." She said quietly. One of her handmade paper snowflakes was in her lap, and she smoothed it out and handed it to me.

    "Where should this one go?" She changed the subject. I took the snowflake from her, reeling from the hundred questions I had that ran through my mind. In a fog of worry I couldn't name, I looked around the tiny apartment and blindly found a spot on the wall.

    We repeated that a few more times until the air finally got lighter. She put on a soundtrack of classic Christmas carols and joined me in putting up the ornaments and decorations; although she didn't sing like usual, as her bruised mouth was still obviously painful.

    I was nervous about touching the tree at first but quickly got used to the familiar motions of Christmas decorating, inwardly chiding myself for being childish and silly. I wanted to ask Sarah more about what happened, but she seemed as delicate as the ornaments we hung. When I filled the area where I could reach, Sarah hoisted me up under my arms, and we both started laughing uncontrollably. I felt my brow furrow as a branch seemed to bend towards me as if it wanted me to hang an ornament on it.

    A sudden icy blast froze us both in our tracks. Mark stood in the front doorway, smelling like cold air, cigarettes, and alcohol. He had a broad, unnatural smile plastered on his face.

    "Wow, this place looks great," He said cheerily. Sarah winced as he walked over to her. He kissed her roughly, ignoring her bruised chin.

    "I told you this was the right tree," Mark blustered, walking around it in a slow circle. I didn't say it out loud, but I thought it looked a little silly in the small apartment, the top still bent over because it didn't fit. It looked like something wild we were trying and failing to domesticate.

    "Looks like you still need some help with the lights. Could you hand those to me?" Mark was directing his attention to me, which always gave me goosebumps. I looked to the ground next to my feet, picked up a strand from the tangled wires, and handed it to him. Mark took them from me and looked pointedly at Sarah.

    "See, that's what you do when you want something, Sarah. You ask \*nicely\*. You don't just take it." He tightly cinched the strand of lights around the branches, violence in his movements, like he was tying someone up.

    "I pay for the gas \*and\* the insurance, Mark. And you were asleep," Sarah hissed, almost too quietly for me to hear. He shot her a warning look that chilled me to my toes, reaching his hand out to me for another strand. His other hand was bandaged, with blood seeping through the white cloth, and remembered his accusation of a creature in the tree the night before. I handed the strand of lights to him, feeling the urge to run away from the apartment and never come back.

    Mark withdrew his arm suddenly, dropping the lights. He shook it wildly and rushed to the bathroom. I heard running water from the sink. It was just like last night, but this time, Sarah didn't follow him to help.

    "How old are those shitty lights? I think they just shocked me. This fucking tree, I swear," Mark shouted back to us.

    Sarah didn't answer. Instead, she looked at me, lightly touching her mottled chin.

    The rest of the night sped by in a blur. I was old enough that I had pieced together some of what happened but young enough that I had no idea what to do about it. I was furious that Mark could just be so casually cruel, from hurting Sarah to casually watching TV in the bedroom after eating the dinner she made. The walls around us felt especially small and tight. There was no mention from anyone about finishing the decorating we had started earlier, the tension as thick and heavy as the air before a snowstorm. My heart was splintered, and I felt like I was trapped in a cage decorated for Christmas.

    As part of our nightly routine, Sarah sat with me to help me after dinner to help with my homework. I felt ashamed that I couldn't meet her eyes, but I couldn't look at her bruised face again, even when she tucked me in. While I was anxious and stressed, I was still exhausted from the night before, and I fell asleep almost immediately.

    This time, when I dreamed, I was still in the apartment, but it was filled with an infinite forest of pine trees. The roots choked the carpeted floor, and the branches rose through the ceiling. Strands of lights slithered like snakes, weaving through the shadows.

    The Christmas tree stood in the center of it all, but it wasn't the same tree we had decorated earlier that night. It was illuminated like a star, covered in layers of lights and ornaments. There were glass baubles in such mass they looked like cauldrons bubbling over, tinsel that exploded in patterns like fireworks, hand-carved wooden figures, intricate paper flowers, candy canes and dried fruits in all the colors of the rainbow, popcorn strands that hung in so many loops it looked like lace, enough bells to fill a thousand sleds, and what seemed like a planetary ring of candles and electric lights in countless shapes and sizes.

    It was like a thousand Christmases all happening at once.

    The air around the tree vibrated with energy, and the room seemed to expand and contract around it as if it were breathing, alive and conscious. In the dark space around the almost painful incandescence of the tree, a looming, angular void slowly separated itself, taking corporeal form. It was drawing in the light around it, the effect reminding me of pictures I had seen of black holes in space. It was featureless, yet there was an undeniable sense of sentience in its fluid, deliberate movements. It suddenly stilled, as if it became aware of my gaze, a chilling moment of recognition in the darkness.

    As it leaned forward, my stomach dropped, an instinctive reaction to the unknown and potentially malevolent creature. But it seemed more curious than anything. It was bowing to me, or so it seemed, long, fingerlike appendages outstretched, curling and uncurling towards me like winding smoke.

    Before I knew it, my own hand was lifting, almost of its own volition, extending towards the curling wisps. I felt something wrap around my arm and woke with a scream on my lips. Something clamped down over my mouth.

    "Hey- hey honey, it's me." It was Sarah's whispered voice. My chest heaved, and I was still caught somewhere in the blurry line between dream and reality.

    "You have to be quiet, ok?" The urgency in her voice brought me back more solidly into reality. She was kneeling over me on the couch. I noticed she had her coat on, the worn fur on the sleeve soft against my cheek. The room was dark and boxy again, lit only by the tree's few strands of Christmas lights.

    "We're going to leave tonight." Sarah continued, stroking my hair soothingly. "One of the girls at work told me about a place that will get us somewhere to stay, just the two of us. Somewhere safe. But Mark can't know we're leaving." She gestured beside her, and I saw she had brought me my backpack.

    "I already have half of our things downstairs, so I just need you to pack up your homework and the stuff that you have out here. I have a taxi waiting for us, and I'm going to run down to let the driver know we're coming. I'll be \*right\* back, ok?" She helped me into my winter coat. I nodded, feeling both tired and awash with adrenaline from my dream and our sudden escape. Sarah noticed my unease.

    "Can you be super fast and super quiet?" She squeezed my hands, trying to bring me to the present. I nodded again, this time with more certainty. Sarah still seemed uncertain about leaving me, her lips in a tight line and made more severe by the swollen bruise, but I knew she had to make sure the taxi wouldn't leave. And we couldn't afford to leave what few clothes and other items we had behind if we weren't coming back. She kissed the top of my head and grabbed the suitcases, quietly closing the front door behind her.

    I started packing, my hands fumbling in the dark, first my homework, my clothes, and then my blanket, squishing it down to fit. I surveyed the room, looking to see if I needed anything else, and then realized I had forgotten the most important things we had- Sarah's Christmas decorations.

    I pulled out my blanket, the decision to sacrifice it an easy one when I knew how important our Christmas decorations were to Sarah. Gram would have understood. I laid it down in front of the tree and started stuffing as many of Sarah's ornaments and decorations as I could into the backpack. I picked them off the walls and the tree as quietly as possible, but in my half-awake state, I forgot that one ceramic bauble played the old carol "O Christmas Tree" when you shook it. I stuffed it into my backpack quickly, but my hands shook as a tinny tune sang with ominous cheer in the darkness of the living room.

    After a minute that seemed like an eternity, I turned my head to survey the room. My stomach sank into my feet. There was a tall, shadowy figure standing in the doorway. I blinked a few times, wondering if the creature from my dreams had returned. But in the faint glow of the lights on the tree, I realized it was Mark.

    He stared at me, his eyes utterly black in the flickering red and green lights. In his hands, the blade of the tree saw glimmered. I wondered if he had come for me, Sarah, or for whatever he thought bit him the day before. He took a step forward, and my question was answered. I flinched back. My heart raced, and my stomach somersaulted, my mouth filling with bile like I might throw up. I couldn't remember how long ago Sarah had left or how long it would take her to make her way back up the stairs.

    Mark took another step towards me. His face was a mask of fury, like all of the hatred he had built up over the months had distilled into this moment.

    Suddenly, like I had stumbled back into my dream, black, twisted appendages erupted from the tree. They solidified into jagged, branch-like tentacles, pulling Mark into an embrace and surrounding him like a feeding octopus. His face was a mask of shock, and he grabbed at his neck. His face was incredulous and disbelieving at first, then twisted with increasing panic as more appendages erupted from the tree, wrapping like coiling snakes around his arms and legs. The tree saw fell out of his limp hand.

    In only a few seconds, he was lifted off the ground entirely. As his body was pulled tighter into the tree, his skin seemed to melt away like it was being devoured by acid, the needles embedding themselves into his skin like stinging bees. Mark howled, the sound high-pitched and desperate, like an animal that knew it had been caught by a predator that would swallow it whole.

    The room filled with the foul smell of burnt pennies. Smoke began filling the air, then fire, starting at the tree's base and then slicing up, covering Mark's legs and torso. His screams were feral and panicked, and something else seemed to scream with him, echoing him in a tone that seemed almost mocking. The fire crept further up his neck and then finally his face, his choked screams becoming wet with blood and quieter as life left his body. The entire tree was engulfed in flames, burning like a bonfire, the heat intense on my face even from across the room.

    I felt something pull hard at my shoulder, and I screamed with everything I had, my arms going up to fight off whatever had come for me. My eyes stung with smoke, but the room was filled with bright light now, and I recognized my sister. She pulled me into her arms, bolting across the living room and through the open front door. Over her shoulder, I saw one of those tentacles stretch high above the tree, moving back and forth, almost like it was waving me a farewell. Sarah tore down the stairs with me held tightly in her arms, sprinting until we were in the safe embrace of the cold winter night.

    We clung to each other in the backseat of the taxi, smelling like soot and crying together. The taxi driver had seen the apartment window explode with flame and used his radio to call 911. The three of us waited for the fire department, the fire alarm howling mournfully as the other tenants sleepily and confusedly streamed out of the building.

    Sarah stroked the back of my hair and whispered soothing things into my ear about how much better our life would be at our new place and how everything would be easier from now on. She told me not to think about what I had seen, but I couldn't help it. The memory was soldered into my mind.

    I tried to explain the creature I had seen to Sarah, and to the police officers and fire marshals who spoke to me in gentle tones throughout the week, but all it did was earn me pitying looks and a few sympathetic hugs. They ruled the fire and Mark's death as caused by faulty electrical wiring in the Christmas lights. His apartment was the only one that had been touched by the fire, burnt almost entirely down to the steel beams, a nearly perfect square carved from the rest of the old building.

    Sarah had been right when she spoke to me in the taxi. Our lives were so much better in the months that followed. She and I were able to stay together, living in a tiny, quaint townhouse that was funded by a local nonprofit that worked with domestic violence survivors. They made sure that Sarah and I were taken care of through that winter and in the years after, and I got more presents that Christmas than I had in my whole life.

    Later that year, in the spring, I went on a Scouts trip to that same park we had taken the tree from. I slipped away from the tents in the middle of the night while the other campers slept, and hiked for hours until I finally found the clearing where the tree had been. I had forgotten about the pinecone in my coat pocket until Sarah and I got to the hotel after the fire. After I realized what it was, I kept it safe, feeling like it was something significant.

    I planted it next to its stump in that clearing, burying it with the drawing I had made of the forest and marking the spot with a rock I had painted with the word "Thank You" and dotted with hearts and stars. I spent a few years caught up in being a teenager before I thought about the tree again, finally remembering it right after I got my first car in college. That summer, I drove back to that forest to check in, more out of a sense of closure than any expectation it had actually grown.

    When I got there, the tree had grown beautifully. It was a vibrant shade of green with a thick canopy of needles, and it reached higher than my waist. I gathered a small bouquet of wildflowers and placed them at its tiny trunk, leaving with a smile.

    After that summer, I went back there as often as I could, the act of visiting becoming a ritual that felt soothing and peaceful. I noticed that other hikers, maybe inspired by the growing altar I had created, had left offerings of their own– painted stones, little notes, and trinkets.

    We still take a trip out to the forest to visit the tree once every year. My family thinks it's a fun, unique holiday tradition that we have an outdoor Christmas tree. Sarah brings her family too, although I think it's more to support me and spend time with us than her belief in what I saw. I'm not sure, though. We've never spoken about it outright, but I know we switched to having a plastic tree every year after Mark's death, and she's never had a real tree inside her house since.

    Every Christmas break, we make a whole day of decorating. We still have everything I saved from that night, although some of the more delicate things stay in storage, but Sarah also has her own Etsy store now, so we have an unlimited supply of beautiful handmade ornaments. We sing carols and drink cocoa, and the kids play tag and build snowmen. The tree is still solid, strong, and healthy, and in the next couple of years, we'll probably need a professional ladder to get all the way up to the top.

    I don't know if whatever watched over me that night lives in the new tree. I haven’t dreamed about it since then, although I've noticed the shadows around it never seem to sit quite as flat as they should.

    I like to think that it does. I like watching it stand tall and quiet in the peaceful winter air with all the other trees around it. I wonder if I was the first to lay down offerings at its trunk, or if I was just the most recent in a line of many that came before me. I wonder if it spreads itself wide down in its roots, looking for more evil things to eat.

    It brings me so much joy to watch it grow alongside my children and my sister's children, marking the years with happy memories.

    I like to think we make it happy, too.

    37 Comments
    2023/12/22
    23:38 UTC

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