[Part 1]

My name isn't important, but what you need to know is that I’m what we call in China a "lǎo lǘ" —a hardcore, seasoned backpacker. The kind who prefers the wild, untamed corners of the world over any tourist spot. I chase the raw, primal feeling of nature. But a trip I took over a decade ago, during the Beijing Olympics, left me with a memory so strange, so chilling, that it haunts me to this day. I still can't decide if I stumbled upon a hidden community of mountain hermits or slipped into another dimension entirely.

My company gave us a long holiday for the Olympics, so I headed to Shaanxi province, planning to traverse Mount Taibai. For those who don't know, TaibaiMountain is the main peak of the Qinling Mountains, a place of treacherous beauty they call the "King of the Qinling". Its climate is extreme, with snow on the peaks even in summer. It’s a holy grail for trekkers like me. I'd done the standard routes before, but this time, I craved something more. I wanted to see the forbidden paths, the untouched landscapes.

I started with a group but soon slipped away on my own, leaving a note for the guide. The mountain felt ancient and mystical. Red prayer ribbons fluttered from old trees, and incense burners sat at the roots of ancient behemoths, hinting at the mountain's legends—they say this is where the great sage Jiang Ziya once appointed gods.

Deep in the wilderness, as dusk began to settle, I heard a commotion. A pack of strange animals, like a cross between large foxes and small wolves, were viciously attacking something much larger. The air was filled with snarling and tearing sounds. They hadn't seen me, and I didn't wait for them to. I turned and ran, but in my panic, my foot slipped.

I tumbled down a steep cliff.

When I came to, my backpack, my phone, everything was gone. All I had left was a flint, a dagger, a tactical flashlight, and the dog tag I wore around my neck. Miraculously, I wasn't badly hurt, and my survival skills are sharp. But I was trapped, surrounded by towering cliffs and ancient trees, with a pack of mystery predators lurking nearby. Finding a way out was a matter of life and death.

That night, shivering on a high ledge, I saw it: a faint glimmer of fire in the distance. Hope surged through me. Fire meant people. It didn't matter who—park rangers, hunters, fellow trekkers—it meant survival.

Fueled by adrenaline, I scrambled towards the light, stumbling through the darkness, narrowly avoiding deadly falls. When I finally reached the source, I found myself in a place that defied all logic. It looked like a village from an ancient Chinese painting, with white walls and black-tiled roofs, complete with an old-fashioned octagonal pavilion. My first thought was that I'd stumbled upon a hidden resort or a film set.

But as I got closer, I realized something was profoundly wrong. The people there didn't look like actors or staff. They looked… ancient. There was no electricity, only the warm glow of bonfires. Inside the pavilion, two old men with long robes and hair tied in traditional topknots were playing Go by the light of a thick candle.

When they saw me, their faces registered shock. One of them asked, in a slow, strangely accented, and archaic-sounding Mandarin, if I was from the "outside world". I managed to explain that I was a lost tourist and desperately needed food, shelter, and a way to contact someone.

They nodded and led me into the village. It was bustling. People dressed in similar ancient robes gathered around a large bonfire, talking and laughing. When the women saw me, they shyly retreated into their homes. The men, however, were curious and kind. They offered me fresh water and nuts from old clay pots. Their speech was fast and their dialect thick; I couldn't understand a word, but their friendly gestures were unmistakable.

They gave me a rough, hand-woven straw mat to rest on. I sat by the fire, watching them. Their way of life was surreal. They ate only wild fruits and mushrooms and drank from a mountain spring. I saw a man painting under the moonlight with a brush made of bamboo and animal hair, using a beautifully carved antique inkstone. Another sat with a

guqin—an ancient stringed instrument—on his lap, plucking a haunting melody. A man who looked like a doctor was brewing herbs in a clay pot for a sick-looking child lying nearby.

It was like a forgotten paradise, a community of poets and scholars living in perfect harmony with nature. I tried communicating with the sick child, using hand gestures. He didn't understand my words, so he drew pictures in the dirt with a stick—strange images of floating balloon-like objects in the sky and complex symbols underground. Though he was weak, he insisted I take his share of the food. I felt a pang of gratitude. Having nothing else to give, I took the dog tag from my neck and placed it over his head as a gift.

Exhausted, I lay back on my mat and drifted off to the sound of their quiet chatter.

Sometime later, a gentle shake woke me. I opened my eyes to see a young woman crouching in front of me, her face illuminated by the dying fire. She was beautiful. Before I could make a sound, she pressed a finger to my lips, then her own, in a universal sign for silence.

She slipped something into my hand and whispered urgently, her voice barely audible.

"Don't make a sound. I'm just like you," she said. My heart leaped—she spoke perfect, modern Mandarin. "Please, get this letter to my family. Thank you, thank you so much."

My mind raced with questions. Who was she? What was this place? Before I could ask, she gave me a look that screamed

danger, and then, like a shadow, she vanished back into the darkness. I looked down at my hand. It was a small bamboo tube. Inside was the letter she mentioned. The encounter felt like a dream, but the solid tube in my palm was real. Her strange fear made me decide to stay awake, pretending to sleep until dawn.

[Part 2]

The next morning, the villagers gave me some fruit and water and pointed me toward a path leading down the mountain. I searched for the girl, but she was nowhere to be seen. As I walked away, I glanced back at the village. It seemed to shimmer, obscured by a strange mist that wasn't there before, and then it was gone. I was careful to leave trail markers, vowing to return and unravel this mystery.

After another day of hiking, I was found by another expedition team and made it back to civilization. The first thing I did was send the bamboo tube by courier to the address written on the silk scarf inside. The note was brief, simply telling her parents she was well and not to look for her. I figured that was the end of it, a bizarre chapter in my life.

I was wrong. It was the beginning of a nightmare.

A few days after returning to Beijing, I received a call from the police in Xi'an. They said it was about an urgent case and they were flying to Beijing to speak with me. They arrived with another man, who introduced himself as the secretary to the girl's father, a high-ranking local official.

He explained the situation, his voice tight with anxiety. He asked me to recount every single detail of my encounter. After I finished, he nervously asked if I would be willing to repeat the story over the phone to the girl's father. I agreed. As I spoke, the powerful, stern voice on the other end of the line began to tremble. Finally, he choked out a single question that made my blood run cold:

"Are you sure... she's alive?"

I was stunned. The secretary explained the impossible truth. The girl, his boss's only daughter, had been a fine arts student. Years ago, she went to Mount Taibai to sketch and returned talking about a mysterious village of ancient people. Everyone thought she was delusional. But she became obsessed, returning to the mountain every year. Her father, a powerful man, tried to stop her. He arranged a job for her after graduation, but she refused, insisting she wanted to live in the mountains with the "ancients."

To prevent her from leaving, her father locked her in their high-rise apartment. One night, she tried to escape by climbing out of her window on the tenth floor. She slipped. She fell. And she died.

The secretary showed me the official case files—graphic photos from the scene, the autopsy report. There was no doubt. The girl I met had been dead for several years.

But the letter I sent... that was the part that truly terrified them. Forensics confirmed the handwriting and the fingerprint on the seal were hers. Driven by a sliver of desperate hope, her father had her grave secretly exhumed. The coffin was empty, except for the clothes she was buried in. Her body was gone. The secretary mentioned a gruesome local custom known as

pèi yīn hūn , or "ghost marriage," where the corpses of unmarried young people are stolen and sold to be buried with another deceased person, but it was just a theory.

They were convinced my story was the key. They offered me a huge sum of money and, with a mix of pleading and veiled threats, "invited" me back to Shaanxi. A heavily armed expedition was assembled—ex-soldiers, ruthless mercenaries, and professional mountaineers. My job was to lead them back to that village.

With their professional gear, we quickly found the cliff where I fell and even recovered my lost backpack. We located the ledge from which I first saw the firelight. But there was nothing there. No village. No light. We waited for days, scanning the horizon, but saw nothing. We spent the next two weeks combing the area in a grid search, but it was as if the village had never existed.

Finally, relying on pure instinct, I led them to one last spot. This felt right. This was the place. But there was no village, no pavilion. There was only a sheer, empty cliff face.

And then we saw it.

Hanging from a small, gnarled jujube tree growing out of a crack in the rock was my dog tag. The one I had given to the sick child. It was glinting in the sun, clinking softly in the mountain wind.

That was where my involvement ended. They paid me generously and made me swear to secrecy. I don't know if they ever found anything else. I don't know if the girl is a ghost, a resurrected corpse, or something else entirely. All I can remember is her smile in the firelight. She didn't look like a prisoner. She looked happy, like she was finally home.

China is a place of deep mysteries. Maybe one day I’ll go back to Mount Taibai. Maybe I'll find that village again. Or maybe, it will find me.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The room doesn’t imprison you—it convinces you that you left of your own free will.

But every hallway I manage to escape becomes a replica, a false sense of security and safety. Grief doesn’t die; it decorates.

It builds walls out of the memories that I don’t trust, gifts me keys I don’t remember earning, and it multiplies the number of doors I must walk through.

Some doors lead to moments that I swore never happened, but I couldn’t tell you if they did or not. Others feel too tender to be false.

The room knows that I will open any door if I think she’s behind it.

My one hope is finding the right door so that I can take my little girl home…

If haven’t read parts 1, 2, or 3, I urge you to start there. What follows won’t make sense otherwise.

—————————

I navigated my way through the thick darkness of the closet only to emerge back into the hallway this time.

Not in bed. Not on the floor.

Just… there.

Too quiet. Too clean. Too curated.

My knees gave out and I slid down the wall, slumping against the peeling wallpaper like a drunk dragged out mid-dream.

The rough texture of the wallpaper pricked at my skin like thorns as the lights above me buzzed with indecision — flickering in and out, caught between seconds.

For a long moment, I couldn’t move.

I didn’t want to.

Because I knew the truth before I even looked:

I was back. Not free. Just deeper.

I stood slowly, joints stiff, breath stale in my throat.

And that’s when I saw them.

Not one Room 409.

But two.

One door — rusted over, scorched black around the handle like it had once been set ablaze.

The other — soft sea-glass green, lit from within by the kind of warmth only nostalgia can fake.

I reached for the burnt door first only to realize it wouldn’t budge.

Locked.

The green one?

It opened by itself, as if imploring me to explore its interior.

The hallway behind me vanished. The path led only forward now.

I walked into the room slowly only to realize that this was my own living room. It didn’t feel like home though.

It felt like a replica, like a too-perfect stage set, waiting for actors who never come. The throw blanket was folded neatly across the arm of the couch, the air was stale, but free of dust. Familiar, but… wrong.

It was as if someone had reconstructed it from memory instead of experience.

There was a book on the coffee table that I didn’t recognize.

A Study of Grief in Nonlinear Time

I picked it up to study it further and noticed that there was no author or a barcode.

I opened the cover and noticed a handwritten note inscribed on the first page:

“What you bury does not die. It waits in corners, closets, and in the reflection that lags a little too long.”

My hands were shaking before I realized I was holding the journal again, but not in my hands...in my daughter’s hands.

I screamed in fright and dropped the journal but like a cat that lands on its feet, it landed perfectly, open.

New words filled the page where the old ones were:

“You’re not the only one who lived here. Memory is a hallway. You didn’t build all the doors.”

I backed away from the journal quickly and noticed that silence of the house had grown deafening.

I moved room to room — kitchen, bedroom, hallway — every space eerily pristine, untouched like a crime scene scrubbed clean. Sanitized grief.

That is when it shifted.

The hallway lengthened to disorienting proportions.

It was subtle at first. A few extra inches. Then feet. Then yards.

That old rose-colored wallpaper peeled from the edges, revealing something familiar beneath it.

The bones of Room 409.

It was bleeding through my life again.

I followed.

⸻

The door was new this time.

It was sea-glass green.

Worn brass knob scuffed down to silver, a victim to the erosion of time.

I hesitated before I opened it.

Inside, a child’s room awaited me. But it was not Emily’s.

Different toys littered the floor, and the walls were covered in drawings I didn’t recognize. They consisted of stick figures with hands too long, all smiling like they didn’t know how not to.

And in the center of the bed sat a boy.

He had chestnut brown hair with tiny freckles that adorned his face. He had eyes that looked far too old to belong to someone that small.

He looked up at me and smiled.

“Hi.”

I froze, unsure who this child was. “I think I’m in the wrong—”

“You came back,” he said.

I blinked in confusion, “Do I know you?”

He tilted his head slightly as if he found my question funny. “Not yet.”

It was in that moment that I felt it. That static that buzzed behind my eyes like a hive of enraged hornets. The one I’d learned to associate with the room.

It was watching me again.

The boy’s smile faded. “You remember her, don’t you? Your daughter?”

I nodded stiffly, fear guiding my movements like a marionette.

“Then remember me.”

The walls vibrated intensely as the drawings that decorated them on them twisted and distorted until the stick figures became…me.

The drawings depicted me crying, screaming, blank faced and standing in between a black and green door.

“Who are you?” The question lurching from my throat.

The boy stood up from his position on the bed, “I’m the morning you left the blinds closed. The day her laugh slipped away. The moment you stopped caring …I’m the version of you that never left the room.”

The sound of a door screeching open came from behind me.

I turned to see that it wasn’t a closet anymore that I was looking at.

It was a hospital room, Emily’s hospital room.

The bed was empty, the sheets disheveled. Mr. Grey, the stuffed elephant was torn apart, the stuffing strewn across the linoleum like snow.

When I turned back, the boy was gone. The journal was in the place where he had been standing.

A new page was open for me to read:

“You thought grief ended when the tears stopped. But silence is where it grows strongest.”

⸻

I ran through shifting rooms and bending hallways.

Furniture contorted into unnamable shapes.

Doorways opened into impossible spaces — reality glitching and gasping for its final breaths.

Static droned in my ears as Emily’s voice echoed from within the walls like a voice trapped inside a cave.

Faint. Distant. Warped.

“You left me in the dark too long. I became something else.”

I burst into the living room again…but it wasn’t mine anymore.

The photographs were all wrong.

One showed me with no face. In another, Claire’s eyes were scratched out. In the last, Emily stood alone at the playground by the swing set.

I rushed to the front door and pulled at the door begging to be free but…

Nothing.

It wasn’t stuck. It wasn’t locked.

It just…wasn’t real.

⸻

The journal was waiting for me on the dining table, like a guest waiting for dinner.

I didn’t want to read it, but at the same time…I did.

With morbid curiosity, my eyes befell the pages again.

“Sometimes the room doesn’t show you what happened. Sometimes it shows you what you’re becoming.”

Then came the knocks.

Soft, restrained.

At the window.

I looked to see that standing outside, in the rain…was me.

A younger version of me somehow.

His eyes were wilder than mine, consumed with grief. A cracked and splintered smile adorned his face.

He was clutching something in his hand, something I recognized immediately.

It was a room key.

409.

He raised his hand and dropped it on the windowsill, before turning to walk away.

I flung the window open and cried out after him.

But there was no man or rain, just a hallway.

It was stretched out like an open wound, the rose wallpaper pulsing beneath the beige paint like a beast in a deep slumber.

My world had become the room.

⸻

I collapsed onto the couch in a disheveled heap, unsure if I was exhausted or just empty.

The air buzzed slightly, not with sound but with sorrow.

It had shape now, actual weight to it.

Then a voice permeated from the walls.

It wasn’t Claire’s or Emily’s voice I heard, it was my own.

But it was older, gruff, significantly more bitter.

Worn down by time, guilt, and memory.

“You can’t bury grief like a body. It doesn’t rot—it roots.”

“What do I do?” I asked, uncertainty dripping in every word of my question.

“You do the hardest thing, you remember everything. Even the parts that hurt, those especially.”

The voice dissipated as yet another door appeared before me.

It was sea-glass green again.

It opened before I reached for it.

I stepped through and saw the same child’s room as before only now the boy was gone.

The bed sat empty, perfectly undisturbed like a lie frozen in time.

On the wall rested a mirror.

That wasn’t there last time…I thought as I found myself walking towards it.

I closed my eyes, fearful of the reflection that awaited me.

I opened them slowly, reluctantly.

It revealed…me.

Finally, me.

There was no smile, no delay.

The man in the mirror perfectly reflected me.

For the first time in what felt like hours… days… maybe years…

My reflection wasn’t lying.

Beside me, the journal hovered in the air like it had been waiting for this exact moment.

The pages turned like a wind was directing it to do so until it landed on the final page.

It read:

“It’s not about leaving the room. It’s about choosing what you bring with you when you do.”

I didn’t look away from the mirror, I held my gaze like I was delivering a testimony.

“I’m here.” I spoke, my eyes focusing with intent.

My reflection nodded as if to say: For now.

The room didn’t slam shut; it quietly closed and folded like a book after its final chapter.

The air became heavier, warmer, as if someone had been crying in it for hours.

I turned back to see that the hallway was gone and had been replaced with a stairwell.

There was no railing, just worn wooden steps spiraling downward into the cold depths below.

As I approached, I noticed something was carved into the first step:

“You’ve remembered too much to go back.”

I swallowed nervously and took the stairs one step at a time, slowly descending towards whatever fate awaited me at the bottom.

Each step beneath my feet echoed wrong.

Not with footsteps but with faint whispers.

“It was your fault.” “You weren’t there.” “She was waiting.” “You didn’t come.”

I tried to remember her laugh but the room was louder, it drowned out my every thought like TV static.

It was enough to make me scream but I stayed resilient until I made it to the bottom.

When I reached the last stair, I noticed a door.

It was unmarked and…weeping?

Thick, blackened water leaked from beneath it. Slow as molasses. Heavy as oil.

I reached for the handle and felt a harsh heat burn my palm like the room on the other side was ablaze.

I pulled away, but the door opened on its own accord.

Inside: a kitchen.

The low sound of a child laughing from another room.

It felt familiar and safe.

Too safe.

It felt like a trap disguised as comfort.

Every chair was perfectly angled. Every photo frame dustless. The lamp light illuminated the room in a soft gold, like memory filtered through nostalgia.

I stepped toward the counter and noticed an open lunchbox sitting there. It was a deep shade of purple and covered in stars.

A sticky note sat beside it.

It read:

“You’ll do better today. I believe in you.” — Dad

I stared at the note. It was in my handwriting, but I never wrote it.

The hallway compelled me toward the framed photos lining the wall.

Birthday parties she never had.

Beach vacations we never took.

Her graduation, years too far ahead.

All these memories decorated the wall.

I reached out to touch one and felt the image ripple, like I was touching water.

The room wasn’t showing the past; it was fabricating an entire future.

It was nothing more than an elaborate lie.

It was offering forgiveness I hadn’t earned.

And I almost accepted its apology.

Almost.

That is, until I saw the final door.

It was a small and narrow closet.

Inside, sat a woman in a chair. Head bowed as if she were napping.

“Claire?” Her name hung in the air in quiet suspension as I awaited a response.

She lifted her head slowly to reveal her bloodshot eyes and sickly pale skin.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she warned tiredly.

I knelt beside her, “I had to know.”

She looked at me with something like pity. “There’s a reason we buried it. The room showed me too. What comes after and what you won’t survive.”

“What did it show you?” I pleaded, eager for more answers.

Her pregnant pause filled my heart with tension before she finally spoke to me again:

“Emily and I… we forgave you, didn’t we? That’s what you needed us to do...what you wanted.”

I reached for her hand.

It was cold but not lifeless.

“You’re not her.” I acknowledged as I pulled my hand away.

She offered a soft smile laced with sadness. “I’m the version of me you needed. The peace you imagined. Not the truth.”

I stood and watched as the closet and the darkness behind her deepen.

In the distance, I could see the faint outline of the three numbers on a placard that have come to haunt me:

409.

The loop always ends here.

I looked down one last time, “You’re not real.”

Claire nodded, “And neither is the version of you that keeps pretending you’re healing.”

She faded before my eyes as did the world around us as I found myself back inside Room 409, alone.

Then came several loud knocks.

At first, I thought it came from the door. Then I realized that they were coming from beneath the bed.

I slowly crouched to peek underneath.

There was no figure, just a piece of folded paper.

It was written in Emily’s handwriting.

“You said you’d stay but you left me with the room.”

I dropped to my knees and wept, the emotional dam finally giving way.

My tears were not ones of fear; they were of recognition from finally understanding that I had never left.

My body went home, filed reports, and wore smiles.

But the part of me that held her hand when the machines turned off?

That part never made it out.

And the room?

It fed that part comfort, false memories, and just enough hope to continue to play pretend, until the truth was just one version of the story.

I wiped the tears that stained my face and saw it.

A door had manifested itself in the middle of the room.

It was new, but not.

The door was numbered:

409.

The journal sat in front of it, its pages fluttering.

I opened it and noticed there was only one line embedded into the page:

“If you walk through this door, there’s no forgetting again.”

I turned the page.

Blank.

Except, there was a key.

Etched into it were the numbers 409.

And beneath it, Emily’s name.

I whispered it aloud like prayer, surrendering myself to the room.

It shuddered and drew its breath before letting out an exhale that felt final before I opened the door and stepped through the doorway.

Inside, things were familiar once again, but not mine.

The room looked almost untouched: bed made, curtains drawn, no blood on the carpet. There were details I couldn’t explain, however.

There was a pair of women’s shoes by the dresser and a little girl’s coat draped over the chair.

Static blared from the TV in a deafening manner as I approached it.

As I got closer, I noticed a VHS tape resting on the nightstand.

Its worn-out label read: Room 409 — short film.

I inserted the tape into the battered VCR under the television and watched the screen crackle to life.

At first, only a title card: The Lotus Hotel presents…

Then: me. Standing with Brenner and other investigators in a brightly lit room, looking down at the photographs of a man and a woman, narrating the scene.

Only… I wasn’t speaking. My mouth moved, but a different voice spilled out — slower, brittle, almost stitched together from a dozen different recordings like memories falsifying their own reconstruction.

A voice made from fragments rather than complete thoughts.

The lines it spoke… they were mine.

From the briefing with Brenner.

From the report.

From the story I told myself.

“The detective believes he’s solving a crime… but what he’s really doing is running from the ending.”

I shut it off and as I did, the light to the bathroom turned on.

It was like I was being beckoned by the room to explore further.

I headed towards the bathroom and found a file folder on the sink.

The cover bore my name, handwritten.

Inside were intake forms, psych evaluations, and words like disassociation and trauma-fueled construct.

There were dates on the reports as well. Some matched the timeline I remembered, and others were from almost a decade earlier.

There was even a photo of me. I had shorter hair, wore a hospital bracelet, and had eyes that looked like they hadn’t slept in years.

That’s when I noticed it: the mirror behind the sink.

And the version of me staring back.

He didn’t move when I did. He didn’t flinch when I recoiled. He just stood there, smiling. Slowly. Sadly.

“Who are you?” I trembled.

He mouthed back: “The real one. The one who never left.”

I ran out of the bathroom and down the hallway, adrenaline coursing through my veins as my feet thudded against the carpeted flooring.

My feet guided me through the stairwell. The lobby flickered—pristine, then rotted—two timelines fighting to overwrite one another.

A bellhop stood at the front desk, humming to himself.

When I approached, he turned—and had my face.

“Welcome back, Mr. Cartwright,” he said courteously. “Will you be staying with us long this time?”

I backed away, the color draining from my face as the elevator dinged behind me.

I watched the doors open and heard a child’s voice singing softly from within.

Emily…

“Row, row, row your boat…”

I practically leapt into the elevator and pressed the buttons in a frantic plea that one of them will lead me towards the exit.

I hit every floor. Each opened to a different version of the Lotus. One looked like a hospital. One like a courtroom. One like a funeral home. In one, I saw myself sitting with a doctor. In another, I stood at a graveside alone.

All timelines. All versions of me.

I couldn’t breathe.

Eventually, I made it back to Room 409—the original one, I think. Or maybe a new copy. It didn’t matter anymore.

I stepped inside. The lights were dim. Dust settled in slow motion. The air felt ancient.

And there, burned into the wallpaper above the bed in blackened letters:

THIS IS THE ROOM YOU MADE TO FORGET HER.

And for the first time…I didn’t want to leave.

Chapter Index: [1] [2] [3]

Every time I decided to take a shot at wandering off to Bleakmire Parish, I somehow conjured another excuse to put it off.

Usually to do more research, practice the protection ritual, or spend another night shooting the .38 revolver my father left duct taped underneath his desk.

I was completely terrified of what may be lying in wait. I knew deep down that leaving would be the right call. There is no shame in self preservation.

I almost called the whole thing off... But every time I try to closed my eyes at night, I could hear Oliver's paralyzing shriek as he tried in vain to beg for mercy.

I had to do it. I had to discover just what was so important that my father would willingly turn away from everything he loved. I wanted... No, I needed a role model. A leader to show me the way to salvation. A shoulder to lean on.

Anything.

The harsh reality is that we don't usually receive what we want. We're given just enough to survive in interestingly painful ways. Life pushes us down, beats the fuck out of us... All so we will learn.

Nature wants us to adapt. To step up and face the problem head on. I want nothing to do with the selfish designs of our reality... But it seems the more I resist, the more my life topples.

I knew I had to do something. For Kenneth. Oliver.

There was far more than I could perceive at stake here. That morning, I wandered out into the foreboding Arkham streets, towards Bleakmire Parish.

Every single time I leave the office since I learned it, I have casted the Ward of Protection.

The protection ritual isn't complex, but it is very precise. A simple chant, the burning of sage... A personal sacrifice.

I walked through the shadow covered bookshelves and half melted candle sticks, the smell of burning sage flooding my senses once more. Smoke rolled off of the flaming herbs and entered my nose.

Not as good as cigarette smoke, but the smell brings me peace. Every time I inhale that plume of positive energy, I remember the serenity that my sacrifice will bring.

A chalice, large and made from silver, sits upon a small makeshift shrine, hidden away in a corner between some of the oldest shelves. The shrine holds only the chalice sitting on a silver plate, and several unused candles that appeared to be simply be replacements for the desk candle.

Days earlier, while I read through my father's grim spell tome, I came across this passage:

"The Luxmist Chalice was given to the Rooke family hundreds of years ago. It's origins are lost to me. All I know is that the chalice draws water from the spirit world. A blood offering made by one of Warpblood lineage will be required."

My throat tightened as I braced myself. I had cast the ritual a dozen times now, yet the gleam of the silver chalice always made my skin crawl. I drew a combat knife that I handpicked out of my father's collection. Eyes closed tight, the knife sliced my palm with a rapid sliding of the blade.

A hot pain traced where the blade split my flesh, the heat dancing in synchrony with the knife's chilled metal.

Self mutilation for a spell would never feel normal, but the benefits of the ward were far too great to ignore.

I squeeze the fingers on my sliced hand over the Luxmist Chalice, allowing blood to flow down into a trickling trail, dripping splotchy crimson beads of blood. Each droplet splashes against the bottom of the chalice and dissipates with a soft puff of glowing green ash.

Ethereal dust fills the room, flowing throughout the entire office, reviving the glowing frequency of protection. Glowing symbols began to appear once more.

The feeling of warmth and positivity quickly destroyed my disdain for the casting of the ritual itself. I wrapped my newest wound and the others lined up next to it. Ritual wounds tend not to leave residual pain, and as I bandaged them, I could already see the skin scarring over.

The scars left over heal quickly, leaving a slight glow of purple light just under the skin in its place. As if the blood had forever been altered in my hand. I hoped that it wasn't a permanent change.

With the ritual done, I knew it was time to face the Sin Eaters.

My map of the district was ingrained in my head. I left it on the desk and made my way towards that looming cathedral. For the first time...

I would approach Bleakmire Parish.

Finding someone who had more than just ghost stories and superstition on their tongues became increasingly difficult. The longer I orbited the Parish and it's surrounding filth littered streets, the more evident that this was not going to be as straightforward as I had hoped.

Harsh east coast wind tore its way between cold, interlocked roads. The air itself tried its best to force my surrender as I skulked through the noticeably silent neighborhoods. Gusts of wind wore me down with a bone freezing current that pelted my nose with stinging salt water. Many old apartments and homes - long past their prime - were still filled with those souls foolish enough to stay in Arkham's underbelly.

Tales were carried on the hushed tones of city residents and the booze-scented homeless folk that were passing by on their way to Bleakmire.

Haphazardly constructed shanty communities surrounded the Parish, tucked away within the oldest sections of the city. The people here dealt with borderline biblical plagues and famine, well before the end days come for us all.

The locals all cast nervous glances into a darkness that swallowed every little crack and corner of their community. Their weary eyes searched dirt encrusted windows of rust colored buildings for the answers to their meek prayers.

The sun could do little to aid against the groping shadows from behind consistently grey skies. Thick, murky rain clouds threatened to pop like overfed maggots as the atmosphere carried on in an inauspicious and uncaring formation above our heads at all times.

It felt like the city was trying to warn me at every turn... Yet, I had to press on and learn the truth. It was too late to turn back and run. So, into the lion's den I roamed.

I took a deep breath.

I kept inhaling whiffs of burning trash and rubber from the barrels that lined some of the sidewalks. The people were disheveled and forgotten, but they keep pushing to survive.

I knew I had to learn a bit more about Bleakmire before I willingly entered the source of all this chaos.

Not a single person would maintain eye contact unless approached directly, and even then I practically had to pry their attention away from whatever menial task they were doing before they bothered to acknowledge my existence.

I managed to learn that most of the city's homeless population eventually makes their way to Bleakmire Parish to take advantage of the religious survivors that still cling to their unwavering faith within the community.

As if to spite the several outbreaks of diseases that completely crippled the infrastructure of a once bustling spiritual hub, the survivors stood firm and offered what services they could to those in need.

I couldn't find a single modern photograph of the district in the files. Hell, not even at the university library. It was as if all sources of information have been scrubbed down to the bone. Or maybe down to whatever information wouldn't panic the outside world too badly.

When I finally got to interview the homeless, I quickly found out why.

What the locals wouldn't tell me, is that much of that information is divided up into carefully measured half truths, spoon fed to keep knowledge classified, and the denizens docile.

I found out from one of the old timers that the murder rate of the homeless goes up every year now, despite the assistance they receive from the Parish folk.

There were countless stories that seemed like twisted folklore to me. Urban legends at best, but at this point, all bets were off. A few of the stories stuck out to me, although I doubt the validity of some of them.

After roaming the streets covered in debris and lost souls for awhile, a shout rang out:

"Hey, kid!"

The form of a tired older woman spoke in a subtle New Orleans accent. Her voice could put anyone at ease, her ebony skin and long black hair easily the most vibrant I had seen in the city. She overheard my questioning of one of the homeless vagabonds and motioned to me to come speak with her just outside the doorway of her modest home.

"You're goin' to Bleakmire? Mighty foolish. Just who are you, boy?"

"Lawrence Rooke. I'm in the area investigating a murder. If you have any useful information, I would appreciate it ma'am." I did my best to sound official.

The woman's lips curved into a smile, her eyes easing up just a bit.

"Oh, good. Thought ya' might be a Fed'. Cops have been giving us trouble round here recently. They ain't got time to investigate murder these days. As for the Parish..."

The woman's eyes grow cold as she thinks for a moment. She searched my eyes as if she could pluck the answer right out of them.

"Three knocks. That's all she gives ya'. If you answer the third... Well, by then, it might be too late for ya'."

I could feel my brow furrow. What is wrong with the people here?

"I don't have time for nursery rhymes, ma'am."

The woman had to be in her sixties. She held an elegance about her that reflected her years of living a hard life on this planet. Her face was soft and wrinkled by experience. Her hair hung low beyond her back.

She continued on as if I hadn't said a word.

"Least that's how Danny Kline down the way at the Borer's Apartment building says it. He heard the knocks his second night living there n' answered the door to an empty hallway twice. But the third time... She was there."

Even as she spoke with confidence, she could not seem to hold her nerves completely steady. She took short breaths between sullen thoughts.

"Ol' Danny said she was the ghost of a nun, or least she was dressed like one. Said he couldn't see her face in the low light, even though she was only a couple feet away. Her black outfit hung loose, completely still in the dimly lit hallway, he says."

She shivered a moment, looking up to the sky as if seeking the correct words from the clouds.

"She stood and stared right at him. Just black nothingness where a woman of God's face should be. Worse yet, he feel her stare digging into his mind for just a split second, yessir. Then he slammed the door in her face, locked the bolts."

Taking a deep sigh, the old woman pulled out a pack of cheap cigarettes and offered me one. I gratefully accepted and flicked open my lighter with a satisfying clink. The bitter earthy smell of burning tobacco and the rush of nicotine helped sand my nerves down - if only by a fraction.

She leaned against the door frame of her half collapsed shack and looked off into the deeply overcast skies above. Dark bags under her eyes finally became visible as she turned her head heavenbound. She takes a long drag of her cigarette before continuing.

"Then Ol' Danny says a few months later, a drunk man down the hall of his building opened the door on the third knock. Didn't close it in time. Been gone ever since."

I finally spoke up. "I've heard the name before. Where is this Borer's apartment building, miss...?"

"Clarabelle. And it's in the only place no sane person seems to go... I think you know."

I did. I gave Clarabelle a nod, thanking her for her time.

I turned away, and as I did, I remembered the letter still sitting on my desk.

Wasn't-

By the time my body whipped back around, no one was there. I couldn't find her anywhere. Shaking my head, I continued on. I kept an eye out for Clarabelle as I went. To no avail, of course.

The next story was a bit harder for me to process.

I approached a man dressed in a sooty, grime encrusted Sunday church style suit... He looked like he was a fine enough man at one point, but his sharp boned jaw and thin, pale limbs dragged my wariness out of hiding.

His voice crackled like the burning barrels that stood along this particularly trashed street. His face was scrunched, as if he constantly had to stave off a fit of teary-eyed anger that pursued his every movement, trying to crawl out from the creases of his pursed lips.

When I asked if he knew anything about Bleakmire, his mouth curled into a thin line that stretched into a cold snapping frown.

"Don't go down Phillip's Lane. It's always hidden away in some part of the Parish, it is. Every hapless fool who finds their way out claims it to be in a different spot. Some are stuck there for days, they is."

Speaking about that logic defying street seemed to have grounded him back to his senses. Relaxing his shoulders and huddling closer to the nearby open flame. The weather grew colder and more damp as he went on.

"Some says the buildings and trees will lean in over the road, they will. The further you get, the closer them long shadows will try to take you."

The weary gentleman's eye contact fizzled out.

"I met a young man, a cartographer and avid conspiracy debunker. He came stumbling out of the district with his tail tucked. He wanted to map the road himself, he did. Called us foolish on his way in. He was gone for two days, and all he had to show for it was a mess of mapped out nonsense and frustrated scribbles."

I shifted and squirmed as he told his unlikely tale. His words, accompanied by his stench being heated by literal flaming trash, was almost more than I could bear.

"And what's worse is anyone who's walked that lane long enough... Well, they lose their shadow. For a few days it stays missing, even under the sun. They say they got an empty feeling in their stomach. Then one day, their shadow is just back, it is."

My face must have betrayed my skepticism, because he tacked on defensively;

"I'm not crazy, sir. That place ain't what the good Lord intended it to be. Not no more..."

Without dismissing me out right, the bone thin man hunched over to warm his hands over the flame of his barrel and silently begged me to leave with the forlorn look in his eyes.

I did.

The last story that really caught my attention was given to me by one of the local women, just around the corner to the Parish. She was almost out of sight, trying to duck into her brick hovel as I came forth. She was quietly relieved that all I sought was information.

Her voice was rough, like fine stones tempered by a raging river, completely doused in mystique and anxiety.

"If you don't know the place, then stay away from the gutters. Especially when it rains. The Thirsting One comes crawling for the wet."

The younger woman looked at me from the wide crack between the door of her home and the reddish decaying outer wall. I could smell sickness and death pouring out of the home, so I kept some distance.

"The hobos gave her that name, but we picked it up around here since it's so... Too damn accurate. She comes crawling in the damp dark, her neck twisting and stretched. Her head is covered with dark hair that drips like pondweed. She's got rotted skin that lumps in odd places, and countless eyeballs that shimmer in the shadows."

Her head poked out of the doorway so she could give the road a proper paranoid search. Long nails looked like bloodied talons as she dug them into the door frame.

"And when she's done? All that's left is a dried husk, left to be found in the morning.

The young woman's upper lip quivered as she spoke, a look of desperate hopelessness racked her features as she fought to contain her tears.

I shuddered at her description of the thing. Strange urban legends and superstitions didn't scare me nearly as much after what I glimpsed in the darkness near that diner... I couldn't quite help but see the similarities in my memories of what attacked Oliver.

Despite his refusal to join me against the evil in this city, Oliver still became my first prime example of the presence lurking beneath this God forsaken sink hole.

Leaving the woman to process her pain, I turned away, only to come face to face with the first harrowing street that leads into the district.

Eventually, the newfound information found a way to break my hesitation the more it wormed through my head.

I couldn't put it off any longer.

I had to go into the Parish.

Wrought-iron fences lined multiple blocks of church owned land, tipped with spikes that would curl the devil's tail. A once hallowed district, now left destitute and full of lower class citizens who couldn't afford to move away from the madness.

I saw men, women, children, all without proper housing and practically roaming the narrow stone streets in hordes. They acted as if they were shambling zombies, searching for sustenance.

I wandered onto the grounds of the massive Catholic cathedral that has plagued me for almost a month now. I decided to join the gathering crowd of grime covered vagrants. Their combined odor almost made me gag as I tried to blend into the group. They lingered in front of Saint Jacob's with whimsical glee in their eyes.

A man, dressed in muck caked-rags, resembling a tattered clergyman's long abandoned attire, babbled to a growing crowd of the dregs of Arkham society. He stood up on the steps of a Saint Jacob's, the remnants of a sermon still exiting in a frenzied manner.

Weird for a Tuesday.

High above, the recognizable statues of the forces of heaven and hell looked down upon us. For once, their gaze held not anger, and was not directed at me.

Instead, reverence clung to their faces. With a divine sense of purpose and love, they looked directly to the ragged priest as he bellowed his words before the crowd.

Every last word of his ravings still echo in my head.

Every hoarse cough in that raspy rattling voice. Every wet lapping lick of his peeling and stained lips sent a shivering reminder of Oliver's dried and mangled form, carelessly discarded like food wrappings.

"The Gods, when left to their own devices, are oft to experiment with our lives, our world... our very souls. We are but vermin to those who create and destroy. And maybe, it is humanity itself that violently stirs those celestials from their deeply restful slumber."

The crowd mumbled with approval amongst themselves, caught in the intoxicating influence of the man's message. They shifted along the stone steps as he spoke, his baritone voice booming like wild thunder all around.

"Perhaps it is our own darkness that draws the ill will of our Creator into the garden of Eden, tools of transformation in hand. Are we not the parasitic weeds that alter the very nature of our hosts in an attempt to purge our festering corruption through salvation? Is it not that we decided to speak for the creators and destroyers that we cast ourselves into the gaping maw of K'thali Mata'rith?"

That name... Flashes of Oliver's hastily written messages appeared in my mind.

I moved my way towards the front of the crowd to try and get a better look at the man. Whispers in the gathering were calling him "Reverend Armond." They held onto his every word and movement, as if entranced by his passionate speech. They were beginning to shiver in a blissful stupor.

"And when the Angel of Death can no longer live separated from the Illusion of Life, who are we to deny her all devouring will?"

As he spoke he reached upwards, pointing back at a tall statue of a hooded woman built upon the marble steps. The crowd's fervor could be felt hanging in the humidity.

Reverend Armond continued, a boundless conviction that bubbled out of him with every syllable. I had no intentions of finding him here today, and yet here he was. The man responsible for Kenneth's murder.

"Tonight, brothers and sisters, we gather for the feast. We will devour the lies of the past, as K'thali Mata'rith has done before us, within innumerable cycles of existence. We can put ourselves and our ancestors to rest. If you have faith in her divine will, and a drive to atone for your sins, then pray. Beg that she exert her perilous mercy unto the feast."

I stood at the front of the crowd that spilled over the huge marble steps of the cathedral, my eyes fixated on the hooded Angel statue that looked over us all. As I stared into the hood filled with a featureless face, my head began to feel light.

Sweat poured down my face in sheets of cold, salty streams. It felt like pressure was building in the back of my skull and teeth. Every moment that I watched, the angel shimmered with an aura of darkness, magnified in my altered mind state.

The taste of sulphur filled my mouth as the world around me faded into a red tinted haze.

"Damn it..." Was all I could squeeze through gritted teeth as I hunkered down to resist the hallucination.

Her arms sway in a rigid motion as the edges of reality frayed around my vision. Then, in a psychedelic fractalized motion, the arms split into six separate limbs that swirled in a hypnotic motion that pierced through our reality.

A wicked, rotted tooth grin spreads across the Reverend's loose and yellowed skin. The whole district itself slowly expanded, revealing endless rows of vicious fangs that must have always been hidden away from our world. Encircling us unseen for centuries, the inevitability of our fate locked within a gaping maw

The damage ridden cathedral began to break away into the sky as I stared on, no longer tethered to our world. I was becoming lost in the jaws of a being I couldn't hope to possibly comprehend. It fell into pieces in a swirling sky of malevolent clouds.

My vision began to fade as the Reverend and the entire crowd turned to watch me with swirling vortexing faces, a pure and unstable look of satisfaction rippling across their eyes and bloodied lips.

They all pointed at me and began cackling like wild dogs descending upon the spoils of their night's kill.

All except the Reverend. His softly spoken final words swirled about my consciousness as I fell into a bottomless pit of void and nothingness.

"May you be reborn in her image tonight, Lawrence Rooke. Do what your father could not."

The void caressed me with a vampiric embrace. For a time, it was as though I didn't exist at all. My purpose in the world melted away into a feverish, pitch-black abyss as consciousness connected and fused with unconsciousness.

I believed I was dead... for so long. It felt like centuries.

Just when I thought my worldly suffering to finally be over, I woke up in my father's... Well, my office, slumped over the desk still riddled with manilla folders and melted wax.

I stood weakly from the wobbling chair and tried to rekindle my balance, dangerously leaning all my weight onto a pair of sturdy bookshelves. A deep, tender pain in my guts brought my hand down to feel the flesh.

Fresh stitches held a new wound shut. Crusted blood crystalized along the shoddy medical work, leaving behind a mess that even a medieval physician would scoff at.

Not even the hum of my protection ward could ease the pain.

Fuck. Time for a drink.

I hoped I wouldn’t recognize the house when I arrived. When I left, I could still smell gunsmoke in the air. I could still hear the unfamiliar sound of fear in my father’s voice. I didn’t want to go back. I had to.

Overlook was throwing a homecoming parade. I was every small town’s dream: the girl next door made good. Sitting through the discomfort of my first flight, I thought back on the last year of my life. The audition, the funeral, the trial. I had always dreamed of singing, but people from Overlook didn’t dream that big. Most girls who grow up in the farm fields around the town’s single street only hope to marry before time steals their chance. I grew up watching the show, but I only auditioned when it started accepting videos. I didn’t make any money of my own at Mason County Community College, and my father could have never afforded to send me to one of the cities. He always said “I’d buy you the White House if I could pay the rent.” He was a good father.

For the first hour of the flight, I tried to keep my mind on the playlist. I had to perfect three new songs for the finale. One was an old honky tonk standard I had learned from my grandfather. One was a recent radio hit that no one in my family would have dared call country. I would have to strain to smile through it. And the third was my winner’s song—the one that would be my debut single if I won. The music was simple, and the label’s songwriter had found the lyrics in the story the show had given me. There it was again. I turned up the synthetic steel guitar to drown out the story I was trying to forget.

When I landed in Overlook’s aspirational idea of an airport, the local media was already there. Their demands unified in one suffocating shout. “Over here, Jenny! Show us that pretty face!”

I wished they would go away, but I had to smile. This is what I always wanted. “Y’all take care now!” By then, I had memorized the script.

Sliding into the car the show had arranged for me, I saw the rising star reporter who had picked up my story. I didn’t recognize it, but her blog told it beautifully: a troubled young man; a doomed father; and, a sister trying to hold her family together through all-American faith and determination. Her posts never mentioned who had actually been in our house that night. They never mentioned Tommy.

When I left, I told myself I would never step foot into that house again. I had begged to go to a hotel instead, but the producers said it would have been too accessible to the media. They made me come home.

By the time the driver opened my door, it was too late. Surrounded by the forest of trees Sunny and I had climbed as children, I recognized the house all too well. I remembered what it had been before. Walking up the gravel driveway, I couldn’t help but see my brother’s window. Dust had started to cling to the inside. Sunny had been in prison for six months. The last time I had seen him I had been shadowed by a camera crew. The producers thought a scene of me visiting him inside made a good package for my live debut. They were right.

The silence in the house was all-consuming. Before our mother left, I might have heard her singing hymns off-key while doing chores. The recession took that away in a moving truck. Before last year, I might have heard Sunny and our father arguing over a football game. Then the night that changed everything. Standing in our living room, I was in a museum that no one would care to visit.

I walked down the hall to my bedroom. I had changed it as I grew—changed the posters of my TV crushes for black and white photographs of our family. But it still had the paint from when my mother painted it before they moved in. Rose pink: my grandmother’s favorite color; time had taught me not to hate it.

This was where it happened. My father wasn’t supposed to be home that night. Just Tommy and me. Then darkness. Confusion. Silence. The silence that had never left. The silence I could feel in my bones. Being in my room felt like standing in a space that had died.

I came back to the present and placed my costume bag on the bed. I unzipped it and took out the baby blue sundress. None of the other Overlook women would ever wear something so lacy, so impractical, but it did look good on camera. The costume designer had glued more and more sequins onto me as the weeks went on. This dress shined even in the shadows of the house.

Once I had changed my sweats for the sundress, I put them in my duffle bag along with Tommy’s tee shirt. I was embarrassed to still be wearing it, but the cotton smelled like his cigarettes. Then I took out the boots. They were still shiny when I unwrapped them from the packing paper. They were the most expensive boots I had ever had, but the tassels would have gotten in the way in the barn. I was never going back there. Looking at myself in the mirror, I saw someone I had never met. She was a television executive’s idea of a good girl from the country.

Walking back down the hall, I saw where the summer sunlight fell onto the floor. It was too even. It was supposed to be hardwood, dented from me and Sunny roughhousing. They had to replace it quickly when they couldn’t scrub out the red boot prints. Tommy had laughed at my father when he asked him to take off his boots in the house. I had known he was more than rebellious, but that was what excited me. That was how he made me believe he was worth it. We had been better than Overlook.

I started to forget where I was as I stared at the fresh laminate. I would have ripped my dress to shreds and set my boots on fire if I could go back to that night—if I could tell that girl where she’d be a year later. I heard an impatient honk from the driveway. I couldn’t be late for the parade.

“You ready, Ms. Dawn?” The driver was being professional, but I flinched as he called me by the name the focus group had chosen for me.

“I sure am. Thank you kindly for your patience.” I couldn’t even rest with only his eyes watching me.

The sky was too big when the driver rolled down the top of the convertible. After the tightness of the old house, the open air above Main Street was a blue abyss. In one minute, the driver would start leading me down. In five minutes, I’d be on the stage. In ten, I’d accept the key to the city from Mayor Thomas. The advance team had scheduled out every last breath I couldn’t take.

Listening to the hushed whisper of the fountain that sat on that end of Main Street, I thought of everyone who would be there. And who wouldn’t. Sunny for one. The warden wouldn’t release him for this. Tommy might be anywhere else. After that night, his father had paid him to go away. He had plenty of money left after paying the district attorney, the judge, and the foreman. But my friends from Sunday School would be there. And my pastor of course. He had taught me where women like me went. The church’s social media said they had been praying for me. They wouldn’t have if they had heard what happened in that darkness—if they had heard me.

I didn’t know what had rattled through the grapevine while I had been away. Everyone had been too genteel to ask questions when I left. They were still eating the leftovers from the funeral. When my first performance went viral, they knew the proper thing to do was cheer on their hometown hero. Still, they had surely heard rumors. Tommy’s father was persuasive, but he couldn’t bribe the entire town to ignore their suspicions about his son and his late-blooming girlfriend. They had pretended not to see. I had to swallow bile when the car started. Driving down the middle of town, there would be no place for me to hide.

Before I could make out any faces in the crowd, we passed the old population sign. “Overlook: Mason County’s Best Kept Secret. Population: 100.” The old mayor’s wife had painted it—sometime in the 1990s based on the block letters and cloying rural landscape. Time had eaten its way around the wood years ago, but no one bothered to change it. All the departures and deaths kept the number accurate.

When the people started, the noise of the crowd was claustrophobic. There weren’t supposed to be that many people in Overlook. They manifested in every part of the town that had long been empty. From the car, I couldn’t see a single blade of the grass that Mrs. Mayo had always kept so tidy. The crowd had pressed them down.

“Well hey, y’all!” I remembered what the media trainer had taught me. A soft smile. A well-placed wave. I tried to act my part. All of these people—all too many of them—were there for me. They had shirts with my face on them. And signs that said “Jenny Is My Hero!”

But the sound was wrong. The high-pitched roar should have been encouraging or even exciting. Instead, just below the noise, their loud shouts felt angry. Each cry for attention sounded like a cry for a piece of flesh. Under the noise, I heard a deeper, harder voice. It sounded like it came from the earth itself. “Welcome home.”

I wanted to look away, to have just a moment to myself; I couldn’t. The eyes were everywhere, and they were all on me. Searching for safety, I looked for a little girl in the crowd. I wanted to be for them what my idols had been for me. I quickly found what should have been a friendly face. The girl wore the light dress and dark boots that had become my signature look over the last month. She even had her long blonde hair dyed my chestnut brown. Her grandmother had brought her, and she was cheering as loud as the women half her age. But the girl was silent. She was staring at me with dead, judgmental eyes. Her sign read, “I know.” Somehow, she had heard what I had said in the dark.

I tore my eyes away from the girl and fought to calm myself. The show’s therapist had taught me about centering. I tried to focus on the rolling of the tires. The sound of children playing caught my attention.

The car was passing the park. The one where Sunny and I had played on long summer evenings. Our father hadn’t even insisted on coming with us. The boy and girl on the swing were so innocent. Sunny hadn’t suspected that danger was sleeping on the other side of the house. I remembered his face in the courtroom. He knew that fighting old money would be hard, but he had looked to the witness stand like I could save him. When I chose the money, Sunny’s face lost the last bit of childhood hope he had left.

I watched the children run over the stones as I thanked a young man who had asked for my autograph. The children in the park sounded alive. I tried to find signs of life in the crowd. The children there had fallen quiet. Now they all looked at me like the little girl had. Their silence left the sound of the crowd even more ravenous with only the screams of adults. Rolling past the library, I saw that Mrs. Johnson, my fourth-grade teacher, had brought her son to the parade. He had freckles just like Sunny’s, but his eyes felt like a sentence. My stomach dropped when I saw that his sign bore the same judgment as the little girl’s. “I know.”

First Baptist Overlook rang its bells behind me. For the first time that day, I was happy. If we were passing the church, it was almost over.

As I listened to the old brass clang, the scent of magnolias filled my lungs. Over the heads of the crowd, I could see the top of the tree where I had met Tommy that Wednesday night. It was one of the few times he had come to church. The way he looked at me was holier than anything inside the walls. I knew the Bible better, but we converted each other. By the time the gun went off, we were true believers. That night, feeling each other’s skin between my cotton sheets, was supposed to be our baptism. My father should never have come home.

Then it was over. The driver pulled the car up behind the makeshift stage. The production assistants hadn’t planned for a town like Overlook. The platform was almost too big for the square. The town hall loomed over me as my boot heels hit the red brick. This place had raised me. I prayed I would never see it again.

An assistant led me up the stairs from the car to the stage. Before he gave me the cue, we looked over my outfit one more time. It was fresh from the needle, but the assistant still found a loose thread. I looked down to check for wrinkles like my mother had taught me. The fabric was ironed flat, but there was a stain on the skirt edge. Red. Jagged. It was only the size of a dime, but I knew it hadn’t been there when I took the dress out of the bag. When I looked back at it, it was the size of a quarter. The nerves under the stain spasmed with recognition. It was too late.

The assistant waved me onto the stage. I braced for the applause. There was no sound. All of the countless mouths were shut tight. All of the eyes looked at me. At the blood stain on my skirt. My shaking legs told me to run.

Before I could, Mayor Thomas barged onto the stage. Never breaking from her punishing positivity, she approached the podium like it was her birthright. With her well-fed frame, her purple pantsuit made her look like a plum threatening to spill its juice all over the stage.

“Hello, Overlook!” she cheered.

I stood like a doll as I watched the crowd. Mayor Thomas smiled for the applause that wasn’t there.

“I am so happy to be with you here today to celebrate our little town’s very own country star! She’s the biggest thing that’s come from our neck of the woods since I don’t know when. Maybe since I was her age.” The people usually humored Mayor Thomas’s self-deprecating humor. Only the mayor laughed then.

I looked to see where I was on the stage. I was inches away from the steps down. I thought about running for them. But it was too late. No one in the crowd was watching Mayor Thomas.

Something glinted under the sun. It was at the back of the crowd, standing apart from the town but still part of it. It was a motorcycle. Tommy’s motorcycle. Feet away, Tommy stood smoking a cigarette where it should have blown over the crowd. He had come back for me. We would make it out after all.

I looked up towards his familiar brown eyes. They were watching me like the rest of the town, but they weren’t staring. They were snarling. He was laughing at me. I was foolish enough to trust him, and now I have to live with his bullet in my chest. He was long gone. His father sent him away with the money we had stolen to run away. It was nothing to him.

“Well that’s enough from me! Ain’t none of y’all want to hear this old bird sing!” Mayor Thomas’s chins shook as she laughed to herself. The crowd insisted on its unamused silence. “Let’s have a warm Overlook welcome for…” I felt something warm on my chest. I looked down and saw that my entire chest was stained red. It was wet where my father had been shot. 

“Jenny Dawn!” I obeyed the mayor’s cheer and walked to the podium with a friendly wave. From the pictures I’ve seen since then, I looked like the princess next door. Mayor Thomas’s handshake was a force of nature. A reporter’s camera flashed like lightning even under the burning sun. Surely they could see the stain spreading over my dress.

Just as I had practiced, I leaned into the microphone and cooed, “Hey y’all!” Mayor Thomas clapped alone. In the middle of another choreographed wave, I noticed the blood had reached my hand.

“Welcome home, Jenny! Now, we’re going to give you an honor that only a few people in our town’s history have ever gotten. The last one was actually mine from Mayor Baker in 1971, but who’s counting?” Her chins shook again as she gestured for her assistant to bring the gift. It was an elegant box made of polished wood and finished in gold. I had seen the mayor’s box in city hall. “Your very own key to the city!”

The silence reached a deafening volume. This was the moment I had come back for. More cameras flashed, but the eyes didn’t blink. The only person who seemed to understand what was happening was a man standing by himself. He was closer to the stage than anyone else. Security should have stopped him.

He wore a department store suit and ragged tie. His shirt was dark and wet around his heart. I recognized him, and I wasn’t on stage anymore.

I was back in my bedroom. He was coming home. His business trip must have been cancelled. Tommy was climbing off of me. He looked afraid. And angry. I knew what was coming. I had to choose.

Tommy threw on his tee shirt and jeans and grabbed the duffel bag. We had to leave right then. I was petrified when my father came through the door. Time stopped when he saw the pistol Tommy had left on my vanity. My father had always been too protective. He thought I was too good for Tommy, but I knew he was my first and last love. The radio had taught me about our kind of love.

Tommy and my father both reached for the gun. I knew my father would never hurt Tommy, but he would never let me leave with a boy like him. Tommy grabbed the gun and pointed it at the man who would keep me from him. He wanted to be Johnny Cash, but his face showed him for the trust fund baby he always would be. Even with his cowardice, I had chosen him.

My father lunged towards me. I heard myself saying what I thought a girl in love was supposed to say. “Stop him, Tommy! Shoot him if you have to! If you lov—“ Then the sound of my father’s knees falling on the hard wood beside my bed.

And there he was again. Watching me from the crowd like he had that night. I took the wooden box from the assistant. It was engraved with my birth name and my father’s family name. The name that had been mine just a year ago. “Jenny” was the only part they had let me keep. Inside the box, set delicately in red velvet, was the pistol. Tommy’s pistol.

“Now, Jenny,” Mayor Thomas needled. “Will you do us the honor of singing us into Overlook’s first ever Jenny Dawn Day?”

I couldn’t do it anymore. The crowd was watching me. Everyone I had ever known could see the blood drowning out the blue on my dress. They had always known. I could never forget.

I walked to the microphone. It barely carried my soft, “I’m sorry.” The sound of Tommy’s gun echoed down Main Street.

If you’ve read Parts 1 and 2, then you know that Room 409 isn’t just haunted — it’s sentient. It doesn’t trap you the way you’d expect. It lets you leave so you can unravel in the places you think are safe. I thought I escaped. I thought wrong.

---

I opened my eyes and found myself back in the bed within Room 409.

The sheets were tucked like a nurse’s apology. Sunlight poured in through cracked blinds. Outside—birds chirped. Somewhere far away, the smell of fresh coffee wafted through a hallway that shouldn’t exist.

Everything felt normal — which is how I knew it wasn’t.

The wallpaper didn’t breathe. The mirror didn’t whisper. The notebook was gone. The silence was polite.

It felt like a dream trying to pass as a memory.

I stood. My coat hung on the back of a chair—clean, pressed, unscarred. I slipped it on. It fit too well.

For a fleeting second, I almost believed I was free.

Downstairs, the lobby was quiet. Empty. No mildew. No static hum in the vents.

Just sunlight.

I stepped outside.

The air was sharp and fresh, no longer polluted from the scent of the sky bleeding rain. My car was waiting, and my keys found their way into my hand out of instinct.

The engine purred to life as I drove past blinking stoplights, past kids with backpacks, and shopkeepers sweeping sidewalks. The kind of world where tragedy only lives in newspaper headlines.

It felt like waking up from an unfathomable nightmare.

Maybe that’s what I wanted all along, to believe this was just a dream.

⸻

At some point during my drive, I decided to stop off at a gas station to use the restroom.

The water swirled red as I washed my hands. Not blood. Something older. Remembrance?

I looked up.

My face smiled back. Rested. Too rested. Like grief had been ironed out of all the pores of my skin.

I forced a smile. The reflection held it longer than I did.

Then—behind me:

“You left me.”

My heart stopped.

I turned.

Empty bathroom stalls. Silent.

Except one was ajar.

Wet, child-sized footprints trailed from the tiles.

Back in the mirror—

Mr. Grey sat on the counter behind me.

And my reflection?

It didn’t move.

It just watched me.

Disturbed by what I was experiencing, I left the bathroom in a panic.

I didn’t know what to believe anymore…

⸻

The drive home was uneventful but ephemeral.

I was just happy to be in the outside world again and away from that dreaded place.

I placed the key in lock of the door and noticed that the lights were already on.

My apartment looked rather immaculate. The couch, dishes, and books were all pristine and organized appropriately.

I noticed one particular photo on the wall though; one I was sure I had taken down months ago.

My little girl, holding Mr. Grey.

I turned toward the dining table and noticed that the journal from the hotel was there.

No dust. No reason.

Just resting out in the open, as if it were anticipating my arrival.

I didn’t touch it, not yet.

My phone buzzed softly as I reached down to grab it.

The screen was lit up with the notification of a new voicemail.

I didn’t remember calling anyone.

I pressed play and began listening with fearful eagerness.

I heard my voice speaking, but...it also wasn’t mine.

It was flat, lifeless, eerily mechanical. It was like someone was reading from a script with complete disinterest in the subject matter.

“I’m home now. It’s safe here. I’m better now.”

I deleted it and thought that was the end.

But then it returned. Same timestamp. Same flat voice. Like it had never left.

As quickly as I deleted these voicemails though, they would appear in my inbox again and again.

No matter how many times I tried to delete it, it would come back.

I eventually chalked up my endeavors as fruitless and walked to the bedroom where a lamp glowed somewhat ominously in the corner.

Blue.

The exact shade she liked.

And beneath the lighting, sitting cross-legged was the girl in the photograph with Mr. Grey.

It was Emily, my little girl…my daughter.

She didn’t move and she didn’t blink.

She just sat underneath the glow of the lamp as if she were in a period of stasis.

But when I whispered her name, she looked up.

“I didn’t want to go alone,” she spoke in a hushed tone.

Her voice was purely air, barely more than a faint breath.

I stepped closer, my knees shaking. “You weren’t alone, Emily…”

She shook her head. “Yes, I was…you left me in the dark.”

“I didn’t want to see you suffer anymore honey...” I whimpered, fighting the tears that threatened to trail down my face.

“Why did you do this?”

She reached out and touched my fingers.

They were warm…real.

And then as quickly as she appeared…she was gone.

Like she’d never been there.

The lamp flickered, black and blue pulsating the room briefly before the colors surrendered to the darkness.

I screamed into the mattress, begging internally for a god that I didn’t even know existed to release me from this agony.

No sound came out, just a heavy and sustained breath of emotional turmoil.

The weight of everything I never said.

⸻

Things started unraveling the next morning despite the world pretending again.

I brewed my coffee, made some breakfast, and watched TV in the living room.

I did my best to block out the previous day’s events, but no matter what I did it seemed like my mind constantly gravitated back towards it.

I finished up watching a random program and went to go wash my dirty dishes when I felt like a pair of eyes were upon me.

It felt like I was being watched by someone, or something.

I looked around but didn’t see anything except the journal, the one from Room 409 on my dining room table.

I walked towards it and noticed that it was open.

It only had one line written across the page:

“How many times will you bury her to protect yourself?”

I slammed it shut.

The leather felt like melted flesh against my hand as I threw it across the room.

I watched in pure astonishment as it vanished in mid-air.

That was the first of many things that I couldn’t begin to explain:

• In the bathroom mirror, I watched myself walk away. Another time I saw my reflection smile when I didn’t.

• A girl on the sidewalk whispered, in my daughter’s voice, “I still remember you.”

• The sound of peeling wallpaper buzzed behind my teeth.

Most disturbingly though, the journal followed me no matter where I went. I couldn’t get rid of it either. I would throw it away, tear it apart, set it on fire, but it always came back to me in immaculate condition.

In the fridge, in the mailbox, in the cabinets…

It was always soaked in red ink and each time it reassembled itself, new words would be carved into its pages.

“You didn’t survive. You split.” “He’s wearing your face now.” “The Room didn’t trap you. You brought it with you.”

The words haunted me even behind my eyelids, to the point that I stopped trying to run away or destroy it.

One night, I dropped to the floor beside my bed and reached under it.

The journal was there because of course it would be.

Every page had been written in, but not by my own hand.

By Emily’s.

Drawings, scribbles, all the stories we never finished. Things she might’ve whispered to me if she had more time to.

My eyes fell upon the words inscribed on the final page:

“You thought healing meant pretending but healing means feeling. And you won’t let yourself.”

Her scent suddenly infiltrated my nostrils. Shampoo. Baby powder. The hallway after bath time.

Three knocks slowly reverberated throughout the room.

Not from the door, but from inside the closet.

I turned. I already knew it was waiting.

I opened the door and the dark inside breathed out.

The closet wasn’t a closet.

It never had been.

It was an invitation shaped like absence.

I stepped inside and the dark swallowed my vision.

Hands brushed old coats, cardboard boxes. For a second, I thought maybe—just maybe—I’d imagined it all.

Then the floor shifted.

Not in weight, but in memory.

⸻

Suddenly, I found myself in a hallway.

It wasn’t mine nor the hotel’s.

It was…somewhere between.

The carpet was the color of faded red, like wine was spilt violently onto it. The wallpaper was a vine-green and seemed to sprawl endlessly.

My ex-wife Claire picked it once, before we knew what kind of grief waited in the walls.

The hallway stretched in both directions – unending, dream-warped. It was infinite but familiar, like grief that forgot where it began.

There was no closet behind me.

No apartment.

Only this place.

I reached out and traced my fingers slowly along the wall. It pulsed—like it remembered me.

In the wallpaper: faint etchings, a child’s drawing, a hospital wristband.

A courtroom door?

This wasn’t a hallway, it was a map.

A map comprised of everything I’d refused to remember.

⸻

Doors lined the hallway like soldiers waiting to take orders.

They bore no numbers, only marks and symbols of various kinds.

A handprint.

A burn.

A crayon sun.

I opened the first door and stepped into Emily’s room.

Not a version of it.

It was her room, exactly how it had been.

And standing in the corner, in her unicorn pajamas…was Emily.

She didn’t look up. Instead, she just moved her thumbs like she was texting someone far away.

“Sweetheart?” I cautiously inched towards her, uncertain of what could potentially transpire.

She didn’t answer but rather kept moving her thumbs.

I stepped closer, the air thickening like a blanket of sorrow wrapping itself against my skin.

“I’m sorry,” The apology leaving me like a gasp. “I never stopped missing you. I just didn’t know how to carry it.”

She looked up with tired, bloodshot eyes.

They weren’t angry, but rather glassy with disappointment.

“You left me in the Room.” She murmured with child-like sadness.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“I waited.”

Her interruption made my blood turn to ice. She had never been that way with me before.

I reached out for her, but she evaporated like a mist.

I was left stupefied, nothing but the air and silence to offer me comfort.

The door to the room was gone now too.

Only the walls remained now.

For a moment, I knew how Fortunato felt - walled in, forgotten, sealed behind silence.

⸻

Eventually, the door to the room manifested itself again.

I opened it and I began walking down the hallway to navigate my way out of this hellscape I found myself in.

Door after door appeared, what awaited me on the other side was emotionally heavier than the last.

An empty hospital corridor that felt cold like a morgue.

Claire crying in a car, her body shuddering violently with grief.

My mother’s silence when I told her the machines were being turned off.

The Room was a map with each grief serving as a landmark.

Each memory was a trapdoor.

And it kept building out of me, like vines on an abandoned structure.

I stepped through the last door, the hallway’s shape already forgetting itself behind me. Its impermanence pressing down like a weight I couldn’t carry.

Home awaited me on the other side.

Sunlight beamed through the kitchen windows as I was greeted with the faint smell of toast and coffee.

As I was walking around the kitchen, my phone buzzed.

A notification revealed that I had received a message from Marla:

“You’re slipping again. The Room’s getting in.”

How could she have contacted me? I wasn’t sure she even existed.

The message disappeared seconds later and was instead replaced by:

“Come back before it keeps more of you.”

I placed my phone back in my pocket, my eyes falling upon the journal that waited nearby on the table.

It was open and in Claire’s own handwriting it said:

“You loved us. But you hated what it made you feel. You buried her so deep, you forgot where you left her. That’s why it can follow you. Because part of you never left that room.”

Below that, smaller ink:

“We’re not ghosts. You are.”

⸻

Later, I walked to the park in an attempt to clear my head.

The sun was warm; the sound of children’s laughter and swings creaking filled the air.

It almost felt real.

Almost.

Until—

“Dad?”

I turned.

Emily was standing near the swings with the other kids.

She was alive and smiling.

Not spectral. Not wrong.

Just… her.

I approached, a smile finally making an appearance. “Emily?”

She softly nodded. Behind her, every swing creaked – perfectly, in unison.

The other kids were gone.

The sky blinked in almost strobe light effect like it was forgetting how to hold its shape.

The grass warped until it found its identity again as…the hotel carpet?

The tree bark twisted into plaster.

The world morphed and reality seemed to break all laws of known physics known to man.

As everything began to settle, I realized I was back in Room 409.

It was as if I’d never left.

⸻

The journal was on the desk again.

But this time, the words weren’t written.

They were spoken — Claire’s voice rising from the pages like breath fogging glass:

“You keep trying to go forward with parts of you missing. But the Room doesn’t forget. It keeps what you try to leave behind.”

I looked in the mirror.

I was asleep.

Even though I was awake.

My reflection breathed. I didn’t.

It blinked.

I didn’t.

Behind me—

The closet creaked open, looking more like a casket than an invitation.

The Room let me run. But it knew I’d built it myself.

It wasn’t done with me…because I never stopped needing it.

Room 409 doesn’t keep you…it becomes you.

Chapter Index: [1] [2] [3]

"The seeds of fate are sewn by the hands of every molecule in existence. One man's God is yet another's fallen angel."

• Professor Phillip J. Covington, 1916, Miskatonic University

My father's favorite quote. He knew it better than he knew his own family.

Maybe it was those words that helped keep my soul afloat as everything crumbled around me. Perhaps, it will be my only company at the end. Either way, I believe I understand its meaning a bit more clearly after that harrowing night.

A wiry tenor voice crackled over the phone as Oliver spoke the morning of our meeting.

"Sparrow's Diner. Find me in the back. I'll pick a booth. Come alone."

The tension in his voice reassured me of just how serious he was about all of this. I knew I could trust him... At least as far as this case goes.

The outside of Sparrow's came as a nice change from the surrounding architecture. It was antiquated, at best. What it lacked in modern amenities, it made up for with a rare and authentic urban charm.

I found Oliver at the little mom-and-pop diner, not too far from Bleakmire Parish. He was already sitting in one of the greasy booths, tucked away in a corner, far from the few patrons that were murmuring to each other throughout the establishment.

Cheap, knock off 50's decor lined the walls. Every table had one of those tacky stained-glass light fixtures that hung by a thick wire, hovering just a little too low, dangling haphazardly above the silverware.

The hanging light droned on through out our awkward encounter, taking short breaks from buzzing when the electricity occasionally flickered out. The smell of a fryer bubbling in the back of the restaurant mingled with the powerful scent of stale black Colombian coffee.

Oliver tried his best to look inconspicuous under his short, ragged salt and pepper hair, drenched in perspiration. A glint of poorly sealed madness shone at the corner of his eye.

He was closer to my age than my father's, though it was hard to tell with his features completely worn down by stress. Even if his cheap black suit needed a good washing and proper ironing, I couldn't judge a man offering a helping hand.

Holding his head low, he saw me and mustered the bravado to give me a weak smile and a jittery wave.

I sat across the table from him. His facade faded in an instant.

The man practically vibrated with nervous energy. His hand visibly shook as he reached for his fifth cup of coffee.

I almost broke the tense silence several times as we stared at each other with an unspoken understanding of just how peculiar this situation was.

Oliver wordlessly smacked an open palm on the table top.

He quickly snapped his hand back to his side as if whatever he set on the table was about to explode at any second.

Instead of a bomb, Oliver's hand revealed a simple silver ring, now lying on the table. Empty coffee mugs clanked into each other as his elbow retracted with a swift, shakey motion.

Bouncing legs rattled the cups and saucers to the point where I could feel the whole table trying to wriggle free from under my arms.

Lanky fingers curled into a fist. He chewed on thin nails. I spoke out loud what we both knew was true.

"This was Kenneth's."

I wish I could have mustered more sympathy for my father in that moment.

Oliver nodded quickly.

"Yes. It was the only thing I could take with me. It slipped off of his finger when... while I tried to save him. I wasn't fast enough."

Oliver's voice felt sincere, but his thousand yard stare gave him the appearance of a pale wraith, come to enact a punishment for some unknown transgression. His eyes did not see me. They stared right through me.

He pushed the ring forward.

Bile splashed onto my tongue and I fought back the urge to vomit as a wave of emotions struck me with mental projections of my father's blood smeared corpse.

I could smell bacon frying in the back room, its nauseating sizzle haunting me as I looked down at the simple wedding band. It hurt deeply to see he still wore the matching half to Mom's ring up until his dying breath.

I nodded, tenderly picking up the ring and enduring a pain that had been broiling up in my chest since I first walked into my newly inherited office.

The trinket was chilling in my palm.

I felt the shifted weight of responsibility from father to son for the first time in my life. I knew now that whatever Kenneth was doing here was worth dying for. At least, it was to him. Even if it was all in his head.

Oliver's gaunt facial features practically tightened to fit his bones as he handpicked his next words carefully. His eyes kept flicking sideways to peek out the window. His nervous fingers tapped out an erratic tune as he continued to try and calm his nerves.

"I would imagine you're looking for answers, Mister Rooke... And it would practically eat away at my soul if I didn't attempt to stop you—"

"Don't even try."

My own voice sounded foreign to me in that dimly lit diner.

Oliver shifted uncomfortably in his cushioned booth bench. I sat back in mine, feeling the cool hard tabletop against the bottom of my folded hands. Its smooth surface helped ground my nerves, even if only for a moment.

A young waitress came by and took my order for a coffee. Her curly red hair and bored eyes bobbed as she scribbled on her writing pad. Oliver waited until she was around the corner.

"Ok, Lawrence. Fine. I won't argue. All I will say is that you are willingly falling into the same trap as your father."

I leaned forward without realizing it.

"What the fuck do you mean by that?"

With a sigh of resignation and a voice full of unease, he recalled the night my father died.

"I went with Kenneth—excuse me, I went with your father that night to visit an old acquaintance of his at Saint Jacob's Church. We were ambushed."

Oliver sipped on his cup of coffee, though it was clear that more energy was the last thing he needed right now. The man looked like he might jump out of his seat and flee at any moment. Instead, he held the table and continued:

"One of their leaders, Reverend Armond. He was our man on the inside, but his help was a ruse. He trapped us with something truly monstrous. Down in the tunnels."

Recalling that night was causing physical pain to Oliver as he writhed in his chair. He moved with all the grace of a wounded wolf, caught in the iron grip of a hunter's trap.

With an exasperated sigh, Oliver hissed a whisper that I barely caught over the humming of our gaudy table lighting. Smelling his rancid breath only somewhat diluted my understanding of his words.

"The Sin Eaters," his hands fidgeted with some silverware still wrapped in a napkin, "those bastards are always watching, don't you get it?!"

My mind took me back to that dreaded office, to those mad scrawlings in my father's case files. I began to suspect Oliver was just as far off his rocker as my old man.

Oliver finished his cup of coffee and physically yearned for the waitress to come back. He clinked the cup back on its saucer and put both hands on the table to lean in closer.

His timid demeanor collapsed under a newly found aggression that poured forth as he forced himself to speak quickly and quietly.

"You want to find the Sin Eaters? Fine. You'll be doing it alone. I am never setting foot in that god forsaken place again... Did you bring his damned map?"

I was a bit taken aback that he knew anything about my father's possessions. I pulled the folded paper from my coat pocket and slid it over the table, slipping it past the coffee cups and saucers.

With a jolt, he pulled the map in, scribbling furiously at it. He was out of his seat by the time I realized he had pushed the map back over to me, a neurotic outburst barely contained in his movements.

I didn't bother trying to get him to come back for more questions. The man's sanity was spent, devoured by whatever happened that fateful night. Instead, I looked at what my new acquaintance had written on my map.

"Rise again, K'thali Mata'rith. The question is Saint Jacob's."

Below, he scratched in a message that I read and reread until it clicked:

"Search Bleakmire for the Dark Angel. That is where the devourers hide."

I cursed under my breath. I had no idea what the hell any of that meant. I stumbled my way out of the booth, my shoulder accidentally bumping the light fixture on the way up.

"Hey—" I tried to shout as Oliver passed through the door.

I slammed money for the coffee and a tip on the table without counting out the bills and made a mindless dash for the door. I prayed that I might still catch him in the heartless streets of Arkham before I was cast into this insane situation on my own.

With a newfound sense of urgency, I ripped the diner door open and stepped out into the inky black street. Steel light poles lined either side of the road, doing their best to fight against the shroud of night.

I caught a fleeting glimpse of Oliver as he took the first of what I suspect would have been many evasive turns around the corner of the diner, into a blackened alley.

As I took my first step on the grimey and trash covered brick alley, I heard it.

A gutteral scream ripped across the night sky.

Pain and primal terror violently expelled from the lungs of my only ally thus far in this haunting task that lies ahead.

My mind scrambled into a kaleidoscope of twisting pressure that threatened to implode my skull in the wake of a drowning flood of volatile emotions.

Shock overlapped anxiety and was completely smothered by a sense of intimidating awe that scraped the back of my thoughts with the raking claws of the unknown.

The hairs on my neck became sharp as needles in the electric aftermath of the sudden realization that my father wasn't so crazy, after all.

I froze in place. Oliver's scream dragged out into the muggy night air for several seconds, only to be cut short by the sound of something pulpy and wet being torn apart. The smell of decay and a coppery metallic tinge assailed my nostrils.

Unnatural gurgling sounds squelched from just around the corner of the diner. A strange, almost invisible gas filled the air, leaving my tongue dry.

"Oliver?" I hoped he would answer before I could act.

Confusing sensations sent my imagination into orbit. I tried to calculate what living being on Earth could make a noise like that. I listened hard to the hellish sound that crept in between my thumping heartbeats.

A howling tailwind carried my body to the edge of the alleyway with a speed fueled mostly by fear and caffeine.

I stopped at the edge of the void that veiled the path. The faltering remnants of street lamp light trickled along the damp brick and was repelled by a physical darkness that filled the space with an amoeba-like fluidity.

My eyesight plunged into a wall of shadow that wrapped the scene with a filter that still casts doubt on my memories of that night, even now.

Just at the edge of the light, a mound of what appeared to be dried leather was rustling and shaking as it was being dragged further into the unseeable darkness.

I was a bit distracted by an overpoweringly sickly sweet smell that practically halted the breeze itself. The lump kept shaking just beyond my sight...

Like a fly larvae, the lump pulsated with an organic fluid-sac quality that made my skin crawl. As it slithered further into the dark, I strained my eyes into a squint, unable to propel my legs forward another step.

In the abyss of that bleak alley, I could barely see round, wet, reflective orbs glistening just behind the lump. The discarded leather crackled like old paint under a hot sun as it shrank lower and smaller against the brick alleyway.

The taste of black coffee soured on my tongue as the silhouette of an animalistic mass appeared beneath the strange reflective orbs.

An undulating slender form pulsed with an insatiably wretched hunger that matched the inhuman movements in the leather pile. Its body was the size of a large jungle cat or a bear, and yet its shape did not resemble either in the least.

In the dark, I could almost see a long, thin tail as it scraped below a rusted dumpster. A body, like a fat snake wrapped in rotted human flesh, with four gangly limbs protruding out and holding itself up. Hands extended into long fingers that pressed tightly to the rough brick walls.

A woman's head sat atop the being's elongated neck, mostly shrouded by stringy black hair. A sinewy, ropey red appendage branched outwards from within the hair, hanging suspended in mid air. It forked and split off, occasionally rippling like a sentient cluster of fleshy lightning.

Those horrific arteries continued to grow outwards. It released a disgusting pressurized hiss until, with an unflattering pop, a vaporous mist was dissolved from the air around the pile of flakey leather.

The smell of burning flesh and hair made my stomach do somersaults as I tried to peer into shadows that thankfully hid that avatar of blasphemy's full image from my eyes.

My vision adjusted even more. A cheap black suit was shredded to pieces and discarded in tatters along the cold dried and crumpled leathery remains of Oliver.

His face was almost wholly unrecognizable. A terrible mouth agape within the twisted remnants of dried and hollowed flesh. It only held onto its humanity by the look of unimaginable suffering that was permanently etched into his once screaming jaws.

My eyes pierced the shadows in a last ditch effort to try and figure out just exactly what the fuck I was looking at... When it dawned on me that it was looking right back at me.

Watching.

Staring.

Two soulless black eyes looked into mine from beneath the mess of greasy black hair, mimicking the reflective properties of the other bulbous orbs that were scattered across this demon of my nightmares, all of which were staring at me with the same hostile curiosity.

The proboscis of arteries retracted with the curling and melting of flesh. A thick, liquidy burbling sound, caught somewhere between sick elation and animalistic hunger, drove spikes of anxiety into my mind.

I tried to glimpse anything else about the being. Anything at all.

Anything except those damned eyes.

I felt something within me call out to that thing as the sensation of my hallucinogenic states took over, the world around me shifting about like the start of a bad acid trip.

Its eyes stayed locked to mine and I could feel it interacting with the waves of energy that rippled out from my body, something I had never witnessed in all my years.

Silent and with an oozing quality, the thing bolted to the diner wall. It scrambled up the building with shaking, grasping palms that slapped with great force, echoing wet, meaty smacks from the alley and streets that expanded and contracted with slow, warm breaths until the end of my frantic sprint to the hotel.

Every sound and reflection only sent me barreling that much harder down the empty streets of that freezing Arkham night.

A seared image of clustered eyeballs draining the life force of my informant kept dashing my attempts at rationalizing what I had seen into the cracked concrete that crunched under foot.

I took several wrong turns and avoided many shadow strewn shortcuts for fear of another ambush from that abomination of God and all creation. I sprinted until my muscles screamed in a hot pain that I couldn't ignore anymore.

By the time I made it into my small hotel room and locked the bolts, I had lost myself to a vicious cycle of thought loops. I babbled in the fetal position on a dirty grey shag carpet until sunlight reached my eyes in the morning, stuck in an illogical mental paradox.

All food tasted spoiled, as if existing in the same world as that monstrosity was enough to warp my fate to fit its unknowable will.

I wasn't that hungry, anyways.

Eventually, I found enough shredded pieces of my own fragile sanity to leave my hotel room. I couldn't hide from this. I had to move forward.

Without a second thought, I burst out into the hallway, my single bag of belongings over my shoulder. The trek down Arkham's barren roads felt like a constant battle of wits. Even in the morning sunlight, every shadow reached a little further than they did the week before.

Above the city's many rooves and smokestacks, Saint Jacob's cathedral loomed tall. Truly a relic of the Catholic faith. Barely able to stand in its own shadow, it watched over modern day Gomorrah, and all its dark deeds.

With a sinister stare, the combined legions of heaven and hell watched me from atop the cathedral walls and balconies, scorn buried in their eyes. I fought to remove their judging marble pupils from my sight.

Every time I looked upon that corrupted temple of God, I felt the infinite eyes of weather-worn statues pressing down on me. Visions of their arms swaying in steady unison, their eyes flooding the parts of space where stars dare not shine.

No... No. I had to keep going.

To spite my fear, the hallucinations, my father's killer... I pushed on.

The world around me morphed sluggishly, taking on the appearance of pale red candle wax, slowly dripping to the brick and concrete walkways on either side of the street.

Buildings beaded with fat globs of a scarlet material that rolled and slid down their slick surface like a cold sweat. That glossy, repulsive material piled up quickly, invading my nose with a pungence that reminded me of wet black mold.

"Slow deep breaths." My voice trembled as started my breathing exercises for calming my nerves.

In through the nose.

Out through the mouth.

As I stumbled into my father's office, a surprisingly warm sensation of peace began to wash over the rabid fear that so badly wanted to drive me into a frenzy.

His now familiar office space was already lit by candle light. I distinctly remember putting it out before I left...

And yet, I felt at ease. A soft hum reverberated in my ears. The strong herbal scent of burnt sage grounded me in an instant.

I latched the bolt locks in place and just stayed there, breathing in controlled bursts and waiting to hear the slapping of palms approaching the door.

Instead, I finally noticed the familiar symbols that were carved into the bookshelves and walls. They were glowing a yellowish-green light, rippling in the shadows that remain untouched by the candle's influence.

Sigils that I couldn't comprehend before suddenly began to make sense as I took my time inspecting them.

Each one was doing something slightly different, but they all worked together to create some sort of protection field.

Several bundles of burnt sage smoldered softly, sending miniature wisps of smoke flowing in all directions. Resting in a gold saucer, they helped reverberate the energy in the air.

I was safe... For a moment.

My father's desk reflected the small flame's glow. A forest green envelope lay atop the files. It held a golden symbol of an eye, a triangle for the pupil. The paper felt old, like it hadn't been handled in centuries.

I opened the envelope. Inside was a letter, or more accurately, an invitation. Written in beautiful cursive with a red luminescent ink that caressed the old paper.

"Dear Mister Rooke,

I am so sorry to hear of your father's recent death.

Come by my place and I'll see if I can't help you find some answers.

P.S., Do some digging through Ken's rituals and spells. The old man isn't as mad as you think.

With your bloodline, it might come naturally... Or it might not.

After you rest for awhile, you will find me. On your way to Bleakmire Parish, we will cross paths. For now, let your spirit, sanity, and sanctity restore for awhile.

I know Arkham is a horrid place. But to me, it's home.

Good luck."

—Clarabelle

The letter crackled between my fingers as I set it down.

Deep red letters reflected their magical light against my skin and left me feeling a sense of curiosity, despite the path ahead being so daunting.

The taste of cigarette smoke hit my tongue before I could register that I was lighting one up. It was the first in days.

A head rush hit me as the nicotine took my nerves and steadied them against the stacked odds.

My sight wandered past the symbols and furniture, across the desk... And onto my father's journal.

Amidst countless spells and recipes for protective concoctions, I found it highlighted:

Ward of Sanctuary.

I would have to learn it. The feeling of true comfort and mental stability felt foreign to me. After being shoved into a neurotic hysteria for so long... I hadn't considered that I might ever feel relief hidden within this nightmare of a city.

Was I truly ready to accept this reality? All I knew is I would find out the truth for myself. This case went far deeper than I could fathom at the time.

Maybe... I wasn't alone in all this. There were others to find. I would need as much help in this city as I could get.

For dad.

"The seeds of fate are sewn by the hands of every molecule in existence. One man's God is yet another's fallen angel."

I had to try something.

Friday night. Everyone’s favorite night. Blake tossed her backpack into the corner and slipped into comfy sweatpants. She swung open the fridge, time for a dinner befitting the D&D champion she is: cold pizza with pineapple.

Her foot hit a slick patch by the fridge. The slice went one way, Blake went the other. The cracking of her skull against the tile rang through her entire body. Time slowed as the sharp taste of copper hit her tongue. The lights dimmed, darker and darker, as sound faded into the background.

The apartment door creaked open. A sudden flare of light stretched the shadows, turning the air sharp and cold. A figure swept in, black robes trailing, and a brass fanfare of horns blaring.

“Your time ha…” the voice bellowed, bassy and grand. The figure stopped mid-phrase, tilted his head, and squinted. “Any chance I can bum a pint off you?” The bass was gone, replaced with something drier, almost casual.

Blake’s chest heaved. “You… you’re…”

“Yeah?” The figure leaned closer, hood shifting just enough to show a grin.

“You are…”

“Parched,” he cut in, “Proper parched. Got a pint?”

Blake blinked, dazed, sprawled on the floor next to the mangled pizza. “…What?”

The figure picked his way past Blake and the pepperoni while swinging his shoulders ostentatiously, carefully sidestepping the puddle. “Careful there,” he said. “Might get you killed.”

“I was going to say the line. Your time has come, cue the drama… all that. But honestly? Management’s got us on this ‘do more with less’ rubbish these days. Fewer scythes, more souls, no overtime pay. You know how many idiots slip in kitchens every week? Or keel over on their mistresses? And I’m supposed to keep the numbers up. Bollocks to that.”

He raised two bony fingers and swung them outward in a lazy arc, completing the gesture.

Death is a Brit? ran through Blake’s mind, before everything went black.

---

Blake came to in her bed, head throbbing, vision blurry, mouth dry.

The last thing she remembered was that grin, before the dark swallowed her. She instinctively touched her head and groaned. “Oof. Shit.”

She took a moment as she sat up in bed. “Monty Python’s Death? Showing up in my concussion hallucinations? What does that say about me?” She shrugged, “Best not to open that door.”

She shuffled into the kitchen. “Nice going, Blake,” she muttered, while crouching to peel pepperoni off the tiles.

“Oi,” said a voice, far too close. “Pass the cheese doodles, will ya love.”

She yelped and spun around. Death was sprawled across her couch, black robes bunched around him, remote in one hand, orange dust staining the other.

Blake blinked. “Oh my God. You’re real?!”

“Shhh.” He gestured toward the TV, eyes fixed. “Blondie’s on about the moon again. Fewer brain cells than a goldfish, that one. I sometimes wonder if one of my colleagues forgot to pick her up. You know what I mean?”

“Death is watching Love Island on my couch,” Blake whispered.

“Right, love. Couch’s better than mine. And you’ve got cable.”

On screen, a reality contestant squealed. Death smirked and flipped channels. He stopped on a news anchor. “See that bloke? He’s due for a visit in a few months.”

Blake pressed her palms to her temples. “This isn’t happening.”

“Don’t worry, lass. I cut you a break. Took the tax auditor instead. He was going to look into that little mistake on your return. You’re off the books now. No need for thanks. Just let me stay a little while.”

Off the books, Blake thought, whatever that means. She only nodded.

“All right then. Roommates!” Death laughed, patting a throw pillow. “Oh, and you’ll teach me D&D. I’m always collecting these lads mid-campaign, and I’ve no bloody clue what they’re on about or why they all keep throwing dice at me.”

Blake sighed. Hard to tell if it was the headache or the sheer absurdity. Either way, she tossed him a fresh bag of cheese doodles and sat down beside him.

---

That night bled into the next, and the next. One bag of cheese doodles became two, then three. Before she knew it, a little while had become a week. A week became a month. Somehow, Blake healed up fine, but of course, Death never left.

In that time, she learned two things quickly. One, only she could see or hear him. Two, having Death as a roommate was equal parts expensive and unbearable.

Last week, Blake reached her limit and snapped. “You need to clean up. And you need to not be here tonight.”

“I know you can’t see it right now, but I’m rolling my eyes,” he said. “Why? It’s not like you’ve got a boyfriend.”

Blake’s stare said enough.

“…Girlfriend?” Death added quickly. “I have a date,” Blake said flatly. “So be a good roommate, clean this mess up, and make yourself scarce.”

Death lifted both hands in mock surrender. “Alright. Cross me heart.”

He’d promised. And maybe, just maybe, she believed him.

---

The elevator rattled upward, slow as always. Blake shifted the wine bottle Ryan had brought into one hand and told herself to breathe. It had been a nice evening, Ryan was funny, asked questions about D&D, laughed at her dorky jokes, and even picked out a half-decent Merlot from the bodega downstairs.

When the doors opened, she led him down the hall and stopped at her door. Instead of walking right in, she cracked it open an inch, peeking inside.

The apartment was tidy, everything more or less where it should be. No ominous cloaks draped over the furniture. No empty candy wrappers on the table. She exhaled. Death, for once, seemed to have listened.

“Place looks nice,” Ryan said as she flicked on the light.
“Thanks, not exactly a castle, but it’s my warm home.” Blake forced a grin.

They settled in easily, glasses poured, shoes kicked off. Conversation looped around nothing in particular. She caught herself watching him, realizing with a small, sudden shock: she actually liked him.

The kiss came almost naturally. A lean across the couch, a nervous laugh cut short, lips meeting softly. Warmer than she expected. For a moment, it was perfect.

Goosebumps rose on her neck, sadly not from the kiss, but the sudden realization that perfection was about to end.

There he was. Death, leaned against the sofa, hood pulled back just a bit.

Blake jerked back. Ryan’s brow furrowed. “Did I… do something wrong?”

“No,” Blake stammered. “No, it’s…” She leaned in again, one hand behind Ryan’s neck, the other hand flapping frantic gestures toward the kitchen. Go. Away.

Death ignored the hand and looked down at Ryan’s hairline.
“That’s brave, love. Proper heroic…. A ‘bald’ choice, you know what I mean.”

Blake froze again, lips parted but not kissing. Ryan shifted back this time, uneasy. “Uh… bathroom.” He stood before she could stop him, disappearing behind the door with a polite cough.

The second it clicked shut, Blake spun around, facing Death, whispering with all the venom of a shout. “You promised!”

“Whaat? He can’t see or hear me.” Death waved it off and leaned back, “Besides, you’re punching below your weight, love.”

Blake’s fists clenched. “Out. Now.” Death tilted his head, smirk unfading. “Honestly, I’m just looking out for you.”

Before she could snap back, the bathroom door opened. Ryan stepped out, catching her mid-argument with empty air. His face stiffened. “Who… were you talking to?”

Blake blinked, thought quickly. “I was… rehearsing dialogue… for D&D.”
Ryan checked his watch like it had just buzzed. “Oh. Right. Look at the time.”

The door shut decidedly behind him minutes later.

Blake collapsed into the couch, staring at the ceiling. Death slid into the armchair opposite her, propped his boots up, and snagged the wine. “Well,” he said, swirling the glass. “I don’t think he’ll be back.”

“How does one kill death?” Blake snapped. She didn’t listen to the response, turned her head, and closed her eyes.

By morning, she would convince herself it was just nerves, just bad timing. But when Ryan didn’t respond in the days that followed, it became harder to maintain that rationalization. He even vanished from the apps. Blake wondered if she was being figuratively ghosted, or if Death had made it literal. She didn’t dare to ask.

---

In the weeks that followed, Blake went to work, came home, and found him still there: eating cereal, watching daytime TV, playing video games. Her bank balance sank lower as she supported a dependent, one she couldn’t even declare.

Even with Death hogging the couch, emptiness still gnawed at Blake. So, when he suggested the diner, she didn’t fight him.

“Glorious juice,” Death muttered before he sipped from his Earl Grey tea. He sat across from Blake at the local diner, poking at her cold fries. “Why are you so quiet? You used to have a little more energy, Blake.”

She looked up. “I’m dateless, and you’re eating yourself through my savings.”

Death, perfectly at home in the booth, stole a fry. “Cheer up. You can bet on anything these days.”

“Football?” Blake muttered.

“Small potatoes. I mean the good stuff.”

He cleared his throat and rattled off the bets on William becoming King by November, whether the next Bond’s a ginger, the exact day aliens land, how Keith Richards might outlive us all, when a famous rapper-turned-prophet will have his next meltdown, and which athlete will get their signature shoe produced first.

Then his finger pointed to the muted TV bolted above the counter.

“Like the new guy?” Death smirked.

Blake’s almost-smile curdled. “Who cares?”

Death leaned closer, voice dropping to a whisper. “It’s all about the death pools, lass. Newsreaders, rock stars, politicians,… fuckin’ Kardashians. Odds on who makes it to Christmas. Punters drop fortunes on it. Cleaner than the stock market, if you ask me. And twice as fun.”

He paused to scribble a few names and dates on a napkin, pushed it across. “And… you’ve got some power in your corner.” He motioned his arms as if flexing his biceps.

For a beat, Blake just stared. Then shoved it back, disgusted. “You want me to bet on people dying?”

Death leaned back, smirking. “Please. Everyone’s at it. I literally have all the info. What’s your problem?”

“I’m not a monster.”

“No,” he said, smile sharp. “You play with wizards and dice, arguing for hours over how to overcome pretend dragons, but in your own life, you’re just faffin’ about. You’re so dull. Which is worse.” He paused just enough so he could interrupt her response, “No wonder Ryan never rang you back.”

The fight that followed was volcanic. Yelling, slamming doors, stomping,… To the other patrons, a young woman was screaming at the sky. It took their attention for about 5 seconds as she got ushered out by the staff. To them, it looked like just another person who couldn’t handle the pressures of the big city.

When they got back to the apartment, Death’s usual wit had vanished, “Alright. You want me gone? I’m gone. But remember this, the taxman took your place. You are off the books. See you in, what, fifty thousand years, Blake. Stay healthy, yeah?”

Fifty thousand years. The number rattled in her skull, too big to grasp. Rage was the only thing left to grab hold of. “You limey asshole!”

He smirked, already fading. “All right, lass. Stay skint and dull. Enjoy the quiet.”

Death was gone. For the first time in weeks, Blake was completely and agonizingly alone. Silence set in, except for one little phrase echoing in her head: Off the books.

Author’s notes:

More shorts on my Substack.

No celebrities, royals, reality contestants, or rock stars were harmed in the making of this story. Any resemblance between Death’s betting slips and real-world gossip is purely coincidental… or maybe he just spends too much time on X. Either way, I wouldn’t take investment advice from him.

If you’re just joining, you probably think I’m another grieving man seeing ghosts in a hotel. But if you read the first part (which I will link in the comments so you can get caught up), you know better. You know I checked into Room 409 looking for answers. What I found instead… was myself. And not the version I wanted to see.

---

I didn’t remember falling asleep.

But I remember the moment I woke up.

My eyes snapped open to a darkness that wasn’t nightfall, but annihilation- a void so complete it devoured edges, bled through form. It pressed against my skin like wet cloth. My lungs struggled to draw in air that didn’t feel like mine. Breathing felt… borrowed.

And for a few seconds, I forgot where—or when—I was.

Hadn’t I just—been holding something? I thought in confusion, the metal imprint still ached in my palm like muscle memory from a dream I was only half awake from.

Then, my eyes caught it: a sliver of golden light spilling from the cracked door of Room 409.

It hadn’t closed.

The door was still ajar, still waiting.

⸻

I sat up, the sheets clinging to my skin like they remembered a different body. Sweat – or something colder – soaked through, as if the bed had wept with me.

I noticed the carpet was gone and in its place: splintered floorboards, raw and gray, warped by moisture. My shoes and socks had vanished, and I could feel the grain of the wood digging into the soles of my feet, as if the hotel had peeled back a layer of comfort on purpose.

There was no sound, no droning sounds from the lights, no wind against the windows. Just…silence, thick and watchful.

And then, a child’s laugh pierced the quiet.

It was soft and familiar, but it didn’t come from in front of me.

It came from behind like a memory masquerading as sound, muffled by time.

I followed it into the hallway, eager but slightly frightened at where I was being led.

The geometry of the hallway had changed once again.

It stretched unnaturally long and narrow, the walls bowing inward like something exhaling. Wallpaper peeled in uneven strips, revealing something beneath that pulsed faintly. Not wood, not concrete…skin.

Somewhere ahead, a door creaked open.

Then another.

And another.

Door after door stretched down the corridor. No room bore a number now. Their placards had rotted away or fused to the walls. Some doors were marked with ash. Others bore sigils carved deep and angry into the surface—some I recognized from dreams I’d never spoken aloud. None of them were inviting.

The laugh came again. This time, layered.

A woman’s voice, humming beneath it. A lullaby.

I knew that melody.

I walked on, deeper into the hallway that shouldn’t exist.

It narrowed into a point, terminating in a single, untouched door.

Unlike the others, this one was perfect.

Gleaming cherrywood. Brass doorknob. A soft orange glow leaked from underneath, pulsing like breath.

The scent hit me before I reached it:

Lavender shampoo. Baby powder. The soft warmth of blankets left in the sun.

And something else.

Pine. Old plaster. Mold.

The smell belonged to her room.

I opened the door and stepped inside.

⸻

It wasn’t like her room. It was her room.

Every detail—down to the plastic horses lined on the shelf in height order, the stained rug with dried juice marks, the crooked poster she made me promise not to fix, the crack in the ceiling from the night we tried to hang fairy lights, and even the paper stars taped to the ceiling — some curling, some half-fallen, was here.

A bookshelf stood by the wall. Dog-eared fairy tales. A journal with puffed unicorn stickers. Crayons scattered like fall leaves all over the floor.

But some details were too perfect.

The drawings were recent, dated with today’s date in a crayon she didn’t have. And her stuffed elephant Mr. Grey that rested on her bed? He had his missing eye sewn back on…with a needle still stuck in the seam.

The air felt heavier here — not oppressive, but sacred.

My throat tightened, lungs refused to fill.

The room that shouldn’t even exist anymore.

We boxed most of it up after the funeral. The rest was sold or thrown away.

My knees buckled at the realization that this wasn’t a memory, this was something more.

“Daddy?”

I was startled by the voice; it was one I hadn’t heard in years.

I froze in place like a snapshot in time.

The room was empty except… it wasn’t.

In the corner, beyond the lamplight, stood a silhouette. Child-sized. Flickering like old film. Its edges frayed and wrong.

“Did you find the story yet?” it asked in her voice—but not quite. It sounded faintly distorted.

I felt a lump form in my throat as I asked, “What story?”

“The one you stopped telling me.”

The voice didn’t come from her mouth anymore; it came from inside me.

I doubled over and felt the world fold in on itself.

---

The light flickered and the room contorted itself in a sickening metamorphosis to reveal that…I was back in the hospital.

The bright lights beamed overhead, making the bleached walls glisten in a melancholic way. The sterile silence of the room was broken only by the mechanical rhythm of beeping monitors.

I saw my ex-wife Claire sobbing next to me as I sat beside her and the girl in the bed, my daughter.

Her hand was warm in mine as she lay in the bed with IVs in her arms.

“I’m scared,” she murmured, her smile cracked but defiant.

I continued to gently hold her hand in mine, tears fighting to be released from my eyes. I couldn’t let them out; I had to be strong for her.

The most I could do was deliver a small smile as her hand slowly curled into a gentle fist.

That’s when she uttered the words, “Tell me the story again.”

I remember the silence and the way I held her hand, but I didn’t tell the story.

My mouth opened but no sound came, I couldn’t find the words.

I’d told it so many times… until I couldn’t anymore. Until the endings became too hard to fake.

“Am I gonna go to the Room too?”

I flinched, my blood turning to ice. “What room?”

But I already knew what she was talking about. My heart plummeted as she looked past me toward a corner of the hospital room where something unseen loomed.

“The one with whispering walls,” she breathed, her voice seemingly echoing off the walls. “The one in your head.”

That’s when the monitor flatlined.

I didn’t kill her. I just didn’t stop it when I could have. That’s what makes it worse.

---

I snapped back to the present with a horrific gasp as I staggered and caught myself against a nearby doorframe.

I was back in the hallway, my hands on the floor. Bloody, splinters embedded in my palms.

The elephant, the hospital room, my ex-wife, my daughter…all gone.

The only proof she had ever been here were five small fingerprints across my chest-still warm, still soft, still hers.

I didn’t know what was real or not anymore. That’s when I made the decision to escape.

I ran or maybe I didn’t.

It felt like my legs were carrying me, but it also felt like I was just running in place.

The halls looped and twisted like paper curling in fire.

The ceiling lowered and the walls folded inward.

Doors multiplied and opened, fanning outward in impossible angles like veins branching from a central artery.

And behind each one: a different version of myself.

One screaming.

One begging.

One silent and holding the elephant.

All of them mouthing the same thing:

“You’re not the first. But maybe you’re the last.”

The words echoed like a bell struck underwater, it was muffled, warbled, but deep. Anchored.

One hallway gleamed with new wallpaper, champagne trays, laughter. The next: bloated ceilings, black mold bleeding from vents. The Lotus flickering between what it was and what it became.

Time wasn’t moving forward anymore, it was folding, breathing, watching me.

I stopped – lungs burning like a raging inferno, thoughts unraveling – feeling like time had been gnawing at my sanity, one loop at a time.

I noticed a mirror that had appeared beside an elevator that hadn’t been there a second ago.

I peered into it but the man staring back didn’t follow my movements.

He watched with a sinister smile mouthing the words, “You’re already here.”

The elevator chimed and I turned to see its doors open, as if it were imploring me to leave this nightmare behind.

Inside: no numbers, just a single downward arrow. The button pulsed.

I stepped in.

---

The descent was silent.

Each time the doors opened, I saw glimpses:

• A hallway where figures stood with their backs turned, whispering in unison.

• A ballroom decaying on one side, pristine on the other.

• A room of floating clocks all set to different times ticking backward – my name etched on every face.

I pressed no button.

The elevator seemingly choosing where it wanted me to go, what to see.

When it stopped, I stepped into what looked like the front desk, or a dream of it.

The air shimmered like a memory trying to hold itself together.

There was a journal open on the counter with my name on the front.

I turned the pages and noticed that the entries were all dated from years ago but were all in my handwriting.

Even more peculiar was that the contents of the journal were comprised of things that I didn’t completely remember writing. Some I did—but they had ended differently.

One note in the margin caught my eye, circled repeatedly until the ink bled through:

“You stayed because you couldn’t forgive yourself. You can leave, but you will have to leave him behind.”

The desk drawer creaked open.

Inside: her crayon drawings. Letters addressed to me.

I didn’t remember ever seeing them. I don’t know how she sent them, but her handwriting was unmistakable.

The last one just said:

“It’s okay, Daddy. You don’t have to be sad anymore. I’ll remember the story for you.”

Below it: a child’s handprint. Tears I didn’t even know had formed in my eyes began falling like rain as I realized that the bloody print on my clothes was the same handprint from her.

It glowed faintly as I touched it.

The hotel exhaled, not metaphorically, but as if it had been holding its breath in anticipation.

The walls breathed and the light pulsated before ceasing to do so.

The air froze and the consistent buzz went silent.

I turned my attention to the light shining through the glass of the entrance doors.

I walked towards the door, no whispers. no humming. no warping of reality.

Just silence and plumbing somewhere overhead.

I placed my hand against the glass

Cool. Solid. Real.

Outside, life was happening.

A man pacing on his phone. A woman lighting a cigarette. A mother walking hand-in-hand with her daughter.

I could see my car, the parking lot, the world, home.

The rain that was once coming down in a torrential downpour had stopped.

I could go.

I could finally leave.

Then:

I heard someone speak my name.

Before I could even react, I found myself back in Room 409.

The lights flickered and the mirror on the wall no longer showed my own reflection.

The door was open, revealing the hallway and a figure walking down it.

A man.

Same build. Same coat. Same stride.

Same face.

But the posture was too confident.

The eyes too dry.

Not his eyes.

Not anymore.

⸻

The journal was open again; all the previous entries of mine were erased now.

New pages.

New ink…that was fresh and wet.

“That’s the man you became when you stopped feeling. He remembers how to pretend, how to smile. He’s the version who left her. The one who never cried.”

My breath hitched as the memory stabbed me behind the eyes:

A playground.

A father in a car.

Watching children laugh.

Feeling…nothing.

No ache. No yearning.

Just an all-consuming void emptiness.

Absence where pain should be.

That version had survived.

And now…he was walking away.

“You can still follow him,” the journal offered.

“But if you do, you will forget all of this. You will forget her.”

My fingers hovered above the page momentarily with hesitance, before flipping the page. I let out a pained cry as I felt the paper scorch my skin with an intense heat and I pulled my hand away immediately.

I gasped, recoiling as the journal slammed shut with a wet thud.

The mirror shattered.

I turned back toward the open doorway.

The hallway was gone, erased.

Replaced by a wall of black.

Not shadow.

Not void.

Just absence.

And then—

Footsteps.

Behind me.

Measured.

Soft.

Intentional.

I turned—

And came face to face with myself.

It wasn’t a reflection, nor was it a memory.

It was a man.

Same height. Same build. Same trench coat.

But the eyes?

Dead.

Glass marbles where grief used to live.

“You shouldn’t have come back,” my reflection spoke, his voice was clinical. Hollowed of heat.

“People like us don’t get closure. We get consequences.” He stepped closer. “I buried it, all of it. The guilt. The noise. Her. And you—you’re digging it back up like it’s going to save you.”

I backed away. “I didn’t come here to be saved.”

The other laughed. Once. Cold and humorless. “No. You came here to bleed.”

I clenched my fists. “I didn’t want this.”

“Yes, you did,” the other said, stepping closer.

“We built this place. You and me. Brick by brick. Memory by memory. We are the Room.”

A long silence, and then: “The Room doesn’t forgive.”

And the journal on the desk opened itself.

The final page.

No scrawl.

Just five words:

“If you want to leave…”

Another line appeared.

“One of you must stay.”

I watched my reflection dissipate with a dark smile as a door suddenly creaked open.

Not the door to the hallway.

Another door.

One that hadn’t been there before.

The closet.

Now wide open.

I should’ve left but something kept pulling me deeper—not a force. A thread.

Something I’d tied myself.

I ventured into the darkness of the closet, away from Room 409. I don’t know how long I walked, minutes, hours, years?.…Until I was there again.

Eventually, the hallway changed. The flickering lights stopped. The mildew faded. The walls turned crisp and clean, bathed in a warm amber glow.

I’d made it. The front lobby.

It was too quiet.

No one at the concierge desk. No guests. No bellhop. Just menacing tranquility, like the building was suppressing the urge to tell a secret.

I walked toward the front desk. The lights above buzzed. Something about the air felt staged, like a photograph.

That’s when I saw the frame.

A cheap black-and-gold plaque sat crooked on the counter like a forgotten joke beside a dusty pen jar. Inside it: a photo.

Me.

Dressed in the same clothes I was wearing now, only smiling. Forced. Wrong.

Below the picture: “Employee of the Month — January 2015.”

My stomach turned. The blood drained from my face. I reached for the photo with a trembling hand but a voice stopped me.

It was calm and familiar.

“It’s always someone’s turn.”

I turned.

And the man standing in front of me… was me.

But not quite. His eyes were tired. Worn out like an old VHS tape that had been played too many times. He smiled with his mouth, not his eyes.

“You’ll get used to it,” he said. “We all do.”

Then he stepped aside, gesturing back toward the long hallway behind him. The door to Room 409 stood open at the far end, waiting.

My nameplate was already back on it.

Somewhere deep inside me, a voice whispered, “Tell me the story again.”

It was finally that time to go back home. Cam had dreaded this day, and honestly, she didn’t want to go back there. Her family home was full of good and bad memories. She would end up selling the house once everything was taken care of, along with any loose ends. Getting the keys from a family lawyer, Cam made her way over.

She began unpacking a few boxes with her name on them. Cam figured they would have been tossed out or donated. Going through these boxes, she came across some with the name Marlowe scribbled on the front. Who was this? Opening the box, Cam saw a few knickknacks and some drawings.

It wasn’t a family member that she knew. As Cam turned the drawing over, she saw her own handwriting as a child. ‘Marlowe and me! Today I met Marlowe. He says he is my imaginary friend.’ Oh… she had forgotten about that. Cam had forgotten that she had an imaginary friend.

Just like all kids, she grew up and no longer needed an imaginary friend. It honestly surprised her that her parents even kept all this stuff. Why put Marlowe’s name on it, though? Could it be because they believed she would remember? Or was it to help her remember the reason she forgot in the first place?

Furrowing her brow, Cam placed the paper back into the box and shut it. She decided to use this time to get the inflatable bed set up and get some dinner. This would be her first night back in her childhood home since she moved away for college. When she came back from getting Chinese take-out, fumbling with the keys to get inside, Cam was surprised to see a few boxes spilled out onto the floor.

She didn’t remember knocking anything over before she left. Setting her food down onto the kitchen table. Cam knelt and raked the items into the now half-empty boxes. She sat them upright where they were, not bothering to place them back where they were originally. Cam washed her hands and sat down to eat her dinner before it got cold.

Soft whispers echoed through the entrance of the house and towards the living room. Going through the dining room, it continued along with heavy footsteps following close behind it. Cam opened her eyes, straining her ears to listen to the voice whispering just outside her bedroom door. Pulling the covers up over her head, she pretended that she was still asleep. Cam had to be dreaming or just hearing things like auditory hallucinations.

In the morning when Cam stumbled out of bed and made her way to the bathroom. She was met with a trail of toys leading from her bedroom door to the living room. The will to pee winning over the curiosity to follow the trail, Cam went to the bathroom first. Once she walked out, she began picking up each toy and the empty box, placing them all inside. Looking at the wall space above the fireplace, Cam saw each drawing taped to it as if in chronological order.

Shuddering, she took them all down, placing them back into the box labeled Marlowe. Cam was starting to think that her family home could be haunted. Not that voices or things moving by themselves were a sign or anything. Should she look into getting the house cleansed or blessed? If that wouldn’t anger the already agitated entity that was clearly wanting Cam’s attention.

With her curiosity satiated, she finally went to the bathroom. Cam did her business and washed her hands. As she did, the mirror seemed to fog up. Raising her head, Cam furrowed her brow and watched as the words ‘Are we still friends?’ appeared on its surface. She was about to call it out by its name, but Cam clamped her mouth shut.

If she called it out by its name, it would only empower it.

Cam smeared the words with the palm of her hand, turned out the light, and went back to the bedroom to try and sleep. Tonight, would only be the first of many where she couldn’t sleep. It got to the point that Cam began to become paranoid of her surroundings. Even when she talked to her therapist, they told her that she was imagining these things due to childhood trauma. Cam knew… she could sense that this was not a trauma response to what she was experiencing.

There was a possibility that there could be something at the library or city hall about this house. This spirit that called itself Marlowe had to have some type of connection to it. Or it attached itself to children. Cam had been a lonely child, so it was very possible that’s why it found her and latched on. Though when she left, this Marlowe may have tried to attach itself to her parents instead.

The following morning, she was able to gather all the information available to her. Cam’s family home had been built in the 1930s. It had a handful of owners before her parents bought the place. It had been rumored to have at one point been a haven for cultists. Why someone had thought it would be a good idea to call this house a haven to anyone was beyond her. This cult would do a lot of strange rituals, and people were rumored to have gone missing.

So, Marlowe must be one of these missing people. A ghost trapped here, pretending to be her imaginary friend. Cam had to build up the courage to confront them and get them out of this house. Stepping into the middle of the living room, the fireplace lit, and candles lining the mantel, she closed her eyes. Letting her hands fall to her sides, Cam let out a slow, even breath.

Cam’s heartbeat was the loudest sound in her ears until she spoke his name aloud.

 “Marlowe.”

The candles flickered on the verge of flickering out. Cam slowly opened her eyes, and a man stood before her. His clothes were stained in red, form flickering.

It was as if he was fighting to stay in the living room. Cam’s eyes met his, and Marlowe’s face contorted into a snarl. “Why have you summoned me here?” he growled out, beginning to pace. She furrowed her brow, watching his every move. “You’ve been haunting me! And you’re asking why I called out to you?” Marlowe shook his head, then looked around as if on edge.

“I haven’t been the one toying with you. It was them…” he rasped, flickering out.

What had he been protecting Cam from? Was something else here besides him?

The candles themselves also went out one by one. A childish giggle echoed in the entryway. The floorboards creaked one by one, heading towards Cam in the living room, who backed away. Cam’s ankles bumped into something behind her. There wasn’t any furniture in the living room, so what is it or who is it behind her?

She turned her head to look up at what was behind her. Towering over Cam was an entity, their face a patchwork mess. That consisted of different pieces of other women’s faces. The entity raised their hand, placing it onto Cam’s face. A too-wide smile spread across the entity’s misshapen lips.

Cam wouldn’t be making it out of this house alive. 

Part 1

Crouching in abject horror behind my chair, I tried to make myself as small as possible while still being able to see him. I considered calling for help, but dismissed that idea: how would I begin to explain this situation, and would that thing see the light from my phone? Instead, I watched. It made a quick turn down the aisle bordering the armchair section, the one closer to the exit. It was moving more purposefully now, and seemed to have a clear idea of where it was going. I could see that it was wearing a blue suit and red tie, which nearly gave the impression of a security guard, until juxtaposed with its badly misproportioned form. A terrible stench had now wafted over from it, something rotten and fetid, an eternity of unwashed filth. While trying desperately to suppress my gag reflex, I also faintly began to hear that it was muttering something to itself, slowly and laboriously, struggling to form the words.

As quickly as it had turned down the aisle, it turned to its left … away from me … into the sofa section and its footsteps fell silent. I felt momentary relief in it not coming directly towards me anymore, but then another thought chilled me to the bone: Could it be tracking me, unaware of exactly where I was, but following a trail? I had been in the sofa section just before armchairs. I also realized I had no idea how strong its senses were … hearing? smell? night vision? maybe others?

Making its way through the sofas now, row by row, it did seem to be tracking. It was meticulously looking each display model over, sometimes stopping to run a hand over the upholstery here, squeeze a pillow there, sniff a cushion, or some combination of these. Halfway to the back of the building, it was picking up speed, seeming to know better what it was looking for. Faintly at first, but then more clearly, I began to make out the words it was struggling to speak: ”boss … wanna … eat … bring … boss … food”. My head began to swim as fear gripped me, but my attention was immediately drawn back to the thing. It had stopped in front of one particular couch, staring for a moment. A sadistic grin then spread across its face, revealing a mouth full of teeth longer, sharper, and more numerous than any person could have. My stomach sank as I realized that was the last sofa I had looked at and sat on, before moving over to armchairs. It was a particularly sumptuous, overstuffed davenport, upholstered in a light blue suede. Had I dropped something there? I checked my pockets as quietly as possible, and still had my keys, phone, and wallet. So what had made it so excited?

It was now examining the couch more enthusiastically, running its hands over all the cushions, squeezing the pillows, and taking deep whiffs of the fabric. Suddenly, it stood up, dropped everything it was carrying, grabbed one of the pillows and walked around to the back of the couch, facing away from me. It set the pillow down on top and leaned into the back. Was there something underneath it was trying to get at? As a rhythmic tapping began, however, it dawned on me exactly what it was doing to the couch.

—

Stifling a laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation, I decided that now was the time to escape while it was … occupied. It was between the entrance door and me, so that was not an option: making a wide arc around it would take too much time, and I would potentially be in its field of vision most of the way out. Also, was the front door still unlocked? Looking around, my gaze settled on the side wall, opposite the direction of the exit. There, in the middle, was a door faintly illuminated in red by an emergency exit sign. That would have to be my way out, even if there might be a fire alarm connected.

Taking a deep breath as quietly as possible, I began crawling, away from that thing and its sofa. The carpet proved effective in dampening any sound I might have made, and as long as I took care not to brush up against any furniture, I was virtually silent. After some minutes I reached the edge of the armchair section, and managed to cross the concrete aisle with no noise into the desk section. Here I would have to be more cautious. If I bumped into something there would be a lot more noise than from an armchair. As I crawled onward, I remembered from my map that after this section, there were only patio sets, and then the wall.

As I cleared the desk section I began to feel impatient and tried to stand hunched over to cross the final aisle. I was too quick, however, and lost my balance. The thud when I hit the concrete floor echoed throughout the building. The thing stopped what it was doing and listened, the silence seeming to last hours. Finally, just I was preparing to get up and run, it returned to its business, this time with greater urgency.

Nearing the edge of the patio set section, the door loomed larger and larger in front of me. Any moment I would be able to reach out and touch it. I didn’t know what was directly outside, but hoped that there would be a clear path back to the front parking lot. Just as I was going into the last 20 feet, the thing started making loud grunts. Looking back, I saw it raise its club and with a final horrifying roar that shook the very air, it brought the club down onto the sofa with full force, which exploded into a plume of stuffing. I gave an involuntary yelp as a spring that must have ricocheted off a wall landed in front of me. Silence fell again. I didn’t wait for it to react. I jumped to my feet, crossed the last 20 feet at top speed, and threw my weight against the door handle. I tumbled out into bright sunlight. Behind me a cacophony of fire bells went off.

The moment I was outside, I had my car keys out and was sprinting towards the front parking lot. Thankfully there was a paved path all the way along the side of the building. I expected it to be behind me any moment, but 10…20…30 seconds went by with no reaction. I had nearly reached my car, a full minute after going through the door, when the thing finally connected what the open door and fire alarm meant. With a roar, it came bursting out the side door, moving faster than I imagined it could. Now, charging toward me, I finally saw it for the first time in full light. It was wearing no shoes with its disheveled suit, its huge, leathery feet providing adequate protection. In its raised left hand it was holding the club, with pieces of stuffing still clinging on, and what turned out to be two large McDonald’s bags. It was trying to hold its pants up with its other hand, complicated by the upholstery from the backrest having caught in its belt and ripped off, now billowing behind it.

I absorbed this all in barely a second, as I was already at my car. I jumped in, shoved the key into the ignition, and reversed out of the parking spot in one quick motion. The thing was now less than 100 feet away, rapidly closing the distance. Now, facing the main entrance, I noticed that the owner’s car was gone, but I didn’t have time to think about that. Putting the pedal to the metal, I made for the first of the concrete barriers.

Rounding that first corner, I checked my mirrors, and saw the thing still in pursuit at breakneck speed, having closed some of the dwindling remaining distance. Now, navigating the second barrier, I took deep breaths, reminding myself that there was just one more turn before exiting onto the main road, and then the highway in half a mile. Suddenly, there was a scream of rage, followed by load thumps that shook my car, almost causing me to lose control. Taking a quick look in the mirror, I saw that it was on the ground, tangled up in its pants, and that the McDonald’s had spilled onto the pavement in front of it: at least a dozen sandwiches and several milkshakes, now on their sides, the contents streaming toward a drain. It was taking out its rage on the pavement with its club and screeching barely intelligible words … boss … mad … no … food … no …more … couch. The main road appeared before me. I made the turn and was on the highway less than a minute later.

—

I drove until well past midnight, putting Valkenstein’s as many miles as possible behind me. At the hotel that night, I parked the car discreetly out of sight of the highway and kept the door bolted and barricaded with every heavy object in the room I could move. The next morning I abandoned my car at the nearest airport and finished the rest of my trip by plane.

I think I’m safe now, even if it’s a risk writing about what happened that evening. The owner tried to warn me about the time and clearly didn’t want to be involved, so she was probably just a bystander. As for that thing, I doubt that it’s literate.

This is a long story. But if I’m going to tell the truth about Room 409, you need the whole picture. I’ve seen what happens when you only remember pieces.

I don’t usually post stuff like this. I’ve worked in law enforcement for over a decade. I’ve seen overdoses, suicides, disappearances — the worst humanity has to offer. You learn to compartmentalize, or the job will hollow you out.

But there’s one case I could never shake…one that changed everything for me…

———

Two bodies. No trauma. No drugs. Just two people, lifeless in a hotel room — still dressed, still posed, still watching something that wasn’t there anymore.

The official report says we don’t know how they died.

That’s not true.

I’ve been to the room. I’ve seen what’s waiting there.

And I think it’s time someone else did too.

———

The photographs lay scattered across the metal tabletop like remnants of some ritual no one dared name.

The images captured two bodies, a man, and a woman. Both were twisted, but not violently — more like they had been wrung out and drained emotionally rather than physically. Their skin bore the pale-gray hue of forgotten marble, smooth, bloodless, and waxen. The man and woman’s eyes were wide open, fixated on nothing, and coated in a thin film like gossamer. Their mouths were slightly parted not in fear, but confession.

No signs of struggle. No needle marks. No ligatures. No bruising. Tox screen came back clean. They were just… gone, as if their souls had quietly slipped out through the pores and never looked back.

“It’s like they ceased to exist,” Brenner said beside me, settling into the seat with a look that didn’t match his usual confidence. “No trauma, no resistance, and no definitive cause. Coroner says it’s like something pulled the soul right out of them.”

I didn’t respond. I couldn’t stop staring at the woman’s face. It was a look that was truly the stuff of nightmares. There was no peaceful expression, nor was there one of distress. Instead, she appeared hollow, a shell of the woman she was before. Whatever she saw in her final, uncertain moments weren’t meant for human eyes.

I swallowed, my eyes struggling to pull away from the blood chilling scene in the photographs.

“Time of death?” I finally managed.

“Forty-eight hours before discovery. Best guess,” Brenner shook his head. “Even that’s shaky though. They were dressed and there were no signs of a struggle at all. Room service was completely untouched. The strangest part? Every mirror in the room was covered.”

That caught my attention. I looked up in puzzlement. “Covered?”

Brenner acknowledged the look with a nod and resumed. “Towels. Bedsheets, hell, the woman even used her coat. They covered every reflective surface in the room. It’s like they were trying not to look at something.”

Or they didn’t want something to see them. I thought in silence to myself.

“There’s more,” he added grimly, his voice dropping like a stone. “They had no IDs and there were no records of any check-ins from anybody from around the time they would have been in that room. The hotel’s system has nothing either. They were only found because the maid smelled mildew and ozone. She said the room gave her a headache just walking past it.”

I flipped to another photo. The door. Room 409. The brass number plate was crooked and corroded, like the door itself had been terminally ill for a long time. I brushed the photo aside to see a photo of a note, written in frantic, borderline illegible writing.

Two simple words written massively into the paper like a final cry for help, “Never again”.

“They weren’t the first, were they?” I whispered.

Brenner didn’t look up.

“No,” he said. “Just the first we couldn’t explain away.”

———

That conversation haunted me. Every detail carved itself into my memory.

For months, I replayed it. Obsessively. That room. Those photos. That look in her eyes.

Something about it got under my skin — like a needle sparking the catalyst for addiction.

Eventually, I gave in.

I had to know what happened. Not just to them…but to the others. The ones written off, forgotten. Lost to time.

That’s when I went to the Lotus Hotel.

The place wasn’t even on the map anymore. The parking lot was cracked and crumbling. The building loomed behind overgrown hedges and trees half-swallowed by its own neglect — as if the world had tried to erase it. The neon sign above the front doors sputtered in the rain, casting jaundiced light across the rain-slick parking lot. A few letters flickered in and out — fighting to stay lit or trying to disappear.

But I knew where I was.

Fourth floor. Room 409.

Where all the stories began, and where they always seemed to end.

⸻

Inside, the lobby reeked of mildew and rotted wood. Wallpaper curled from the walls in long, curling strips like peeling skin. Mold painted the corners of the baseboards. A chandelier overhead trembled in place like it was afraid of falling and flickered like it had forgotten how to stay lit.

The elevator that rested on the other side of the room groaned in its shaft like it was waking up reluctantly.

At the front desk sat a clerk. Skin the color of wet ash, eyes that didn’t blink. Preserved but not alive.

I approached the clerk with as friendly of a demeanor as I could muster. “I need the key to—”

Before I could even finish, he slid it across the counter — rusted and worn, the tag dangling like a noose.

The tag read in spidery handwriting, “Room 409”.

I stared at him, perplexed at how he could have possibly known what I was there for. “How did you—?”

“You’re not the first,” the clerk voiced flatly, without weight or warmth.

I winced nervously but didn’t ask what he meant.

I took the key and walked to the elevator. Once inside, I pressed the button and watched the panel light up beneath my finger. The cage rattled to life as it began its slow ascension towards my destination.

I leaned against the wall as it rose, thinking maybe I was being reckless. That maybe going alone was a mistake. But I knew one thing for sure:

Whatever answers existed — if they existed at all — they were upstairs.

———

The fourth floor was wrong.

The hallway stretched for too long. Not physically, but architecturally. It was reminiscent to that of a carnival funhouse, the warped dimensions seemed to make the hallway spin and shake making balance difficult. The proportions felt… wrong, like a ribcage extended by unnatural means.

The wallpaper was the color of aged bruises and curled from the seams like dead leaves. The carpet sagged in places, stained in dark, blooming shapes that suggested something had once crawled…and bled.

The overhead lights blinked rapidly without any distinct rhythm as I turned my attention towards the end of the hallway.

Room 409 waited at the far end like a patient. Its number plate hung crooked, edges clawed and bent, as if someone had tried to scratch it off but was unsuccessful in doing so.

The metal had refused to be erased but just beneath the handle there was a small handprint.

It wasn’t smeared or pressed. It was a child’s handprint that was perfectly preserved.

My grip tightened around the key, chills creeping up my spine in a slow march. I’ve seen a lot of things. War zones, crime scenes, human grief in its rawest forms. That was all a part of the job description, but this felt different.

This felt aware, calculated…deliberate. It was like the room knew who it was waiting for and had set a trap to lure me into its clutches.

The key slid in like it remembered me and the door opened without resistance to reveal that the room was…

Normal?

Was this a ruse? An illusion hiding something worse? Possibly?

I blinked. I don’t know what I expected — gore, maybe, or something supernatural right out the gate. But what I saw was a generic hotel room. Beige walls. A neatly made bed. A chair by the window. A desk with a mirror.

It was bland, beige, and forgettable. Nothing you would give a second glance to.

Neatly made bed. Chair by the window. A desk. A mirror.

But something felt off. The temperature was colder than the hallway. It wasn’t freezing but it was the kind of cold that lingers after someone breathes on your neck.

There was a subtle, continuous hum that floated in the air as well. It was soft, but not mechanical. Was it the plumbing? No, that couldn’t be it. Breathing?

I shook it off and stepped inside, that’s when the door clicked shut behind me. I jumped, then cursed under my breath. I wasn’t usually this rattled, but something about this place clawed at me.

It feels like I’m not supposed to be here.

The light casted from the lamp dimmed by a hair, just enough to make the shadows feel participatory…watching.

I scanned my surroundings again, the room feeling different than it was before now that the lighting had changed.

That’s when I saw the suitcase beside the chair and on the desk: a leather-bound journal.

I picked it up and felt its cracked spine and curled edges in my hands. The texture felt like skin that had seen too much sun.

This wasn’t in any of the crime scene photos. I thought as I opened it. So, what was it doing here?

I flipped through the pages and to my surprise, most of them were blank.

But near the back, one sentence had been scrawled in spidery handwriting into the page’s center:

“You’re not the first.”

My stomach dropped. The words from the clerk downstairs, they were written here. Was this all a prank by the hotel?

But before I could dwell on it further, a laugh rang out from the bathroom.

It was high, sharp, but childlike in nature.

I turned my attention from the journal and noticed that the door to the bathroom was slightly ajar.

There was no light, no movement, just the creeping veil of darkness peeking out from the crack in the door.

“Old pipes,” I muttered, trying to believe it. My own words tasted of denial as I placed the journal back onto the desk. None of this was making sense but I came here to get answers, and I wasn’t going to leave without them.

I sat at the bed’s edge, the springs sighed beneath me not from my weight, but from the memory of someone else seemingly.

My eyes surveilled the wall, studying for what could be an unknown terror beyond its unappealing features. I couldn’t tell if it was the lighting or if my eyes were playing tricks on me, but the wallpaper seemed to pulse slowly like breath behind plaster.

I stood and crossed the room towards the window, unease mounting.

I expected to see a view of the outside world but instead, I was met with a brick wall.

That wasn’t possible. The Lotus Hotel was supposed to overlook the street from this location. How could a brick wall be here to obstruct my view?

I turned my back to the window to head back towards the door to leave the room but noticed that the door looked farther away than it had previously. It was as if the room had elongated to a disproportionate, impossible size to keep me from escape.

The shadows in corners of the room had deepened due to the light shrinking in size and magnitude.

My view rested itself at the mirror above the desk.

It reflected the bed, the lamp, the suitcase, and me sitting back on the bed.

Only… I wasn’t. I was standing, but the version of me in the mirror wasn’t looking back anymore.

I didn’t move and neither did the version of me in the mirror.

My eyes transfixed on this other version of me as it sat perfectly still on the edge of the bed —hands on knees, spine straight, expression vacant. He was just like me in an uncanny sort of way, for his posture was too precise. Too stiff, not relaxed, unnatural.

It was as if this other me were like a mannequin posed to imitate memory.

I took a slow, deliberate step forward, but the reflection didn’t follow.

It stayed still, rooted in place on its spot on the bed as its doll-like eyes trailed me. A dark, faint smile pulled at its lips in a vain attempt to perform being human.

I turned away, my skin perspiring as my stomach knotted in ways I didn’t know were possible. My skin prickled like I’d just remembered something out of order — like realizing I left the stove on… after hearing the fire alarm from down the street.

I made for the door, boots thudding against the aged carpet in an eager attempt to escape.

One step. Two. Three.

By the fourth, the door didn’t seem any closer and by the fifth, it looked further away.

“How is this possible?…” The words fell out of my mouth like breath on glass. Useless. Fragile.

I turned around and noticed that everything regarding my surroundings had completely changed.

The mirror was gone. So was the desk and the suitcase. Even the lamp’s soft, sickly warm glow, gone without a single trace.

The bed was the only thing that remained. Its sheets were untouched, corners perfect. It was like it had never been used at all…

The hum in the air started to grow, like cicadas on a summer day.

It wasn’t mechanized nor was it the buzz of electricity or old plumbing, this was organic.

It felt like the sound of breath held too long after surfacing from deep water.

Or like something waiting, lurking. Not to be seen…but recognized.

I ran a hand across my face and felt it come away damp from the sweat dampening my skin.

My body felt like it was in a sauna, but the room was ice-cold, like a meat locker.

My throat was parched. That kind of bone-dry, grief-laced kind of thirst you get after swallowing something you were supposed to say but didn’t.

I looked down at my hands and noticed they were trembling slightly.

It was enough to feel like a warning, an omen of something unfathomable approaching.

The TV suddenly clicked on behind me.

No remote. No sound.

Just the static hissing in the air in an almost deafening way.

A snowstorm of distortion, glitching pixels, and behind it — something else bleeding through. My living room.

Same worn and beat up couch, a bottle of Jack half-empty on the floor.

A man’s voice — hoarse, shouting.

Not just any man though, it was me. Red-faced. Hunched. Screaming at someone just out of frame.

Something about trust and about lies.

About — “You said she was at your sister’s!”

The footage jumped to show me all alone, crying violently. Clutching a photograph in my hands like it had betrayed me in the worst way imaginable.

Another jump in the footage and this time, I was kneeling at a gravestone of a child.

I was wearing that same trench coat and had the same weathered hands.

A small toy elephant sat behind the stone. Sun-bleached, yet familiar.

A hand touched my shoulder…it was my own.

I recoiled in terror before the screen abruptly went to black.

I could hear nothing but my frantic panting as I tried to grasp what all was happening in this moment.

I stared at the completely black TV screen as it lay dormant.

What was that quote from Friedrich Nietzsche? I thought, trying to regain my composure.

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”?

Was the TV the abyss gazing into me? I pondered as I pulled my eyes away, praying that this was the end of whatever hellscape I found myself entangled in.

My prayers went unanswered as the TV flickered to life again:

Room 409.

The numbers looked diseased, peeling…melting.

The footage playing before me now showed another version of me. This one was lying dead on the bed, eyes wide. The mouth was torn open, as if something had scrambled its way out from the inside. Just like the crime scene photos…

I watched as the words “Never Again” began being clawed across the walls in erratic, looping handwriting.

The wallpaper bled the blackest ink like a gushing wound.

This wasn’t metaphor, this was reality.

I staggered back, my heel catching on something and nearly tripping over.

I turned to see that the mirror, the desk, and the journal had all returned to their previous respective places…

I stumbled towards the desk and retrieved the journal.

The room pulsed around me, not visibly, but vibrantly. Like space had grown tired of pretending to be stable.

My breath had gone shallow and my heart beat like it was tapping Morse code for run.

The journal’s worn, withered leather appeared warped from time or heat…perhaps even memory.

The pages were yellowed, frayed, and soft at the edges. I flipped to the first page to reveal my own handwriting.

It read, “You died here once already. Do better this time.”

I stared anxiously, waiting for the ink to vanish.

It didn’t, however.

I reached out with a slightly trembling finger and pressed it against the page, it was still warm, still fresh.

Then…the journal palpitated just once, like a heartbeat.

I snapped it shut fearfully as I watched the room begin morphing once more with my own eyes.

The walls began to throb, not visually…not yet. Something behind these dreaded, bland walls had lungs.

The air thickened, like breathing through wet cotton.

Then came three knocks.

Soft, not loud nor impatient. These sounded expectant.

I turned toward the door, my heart pounding in my throat like an incessant drumbeat.

These knocks didn’t demand attention, they seemed to be calling to me.

I reached for the handle, uncertain as to what could await me…but then I stopped.

I felt something in my pocket. My hand descended to pull the object that seemingly manifested itself there to reveal that it was a key.

Not the hotel key, this one was different. This one was older, more rusted. It felt heavy with meaning.

Etched into its side like sacred scripture were three numbers:

409

Behind me, the bed creaked as if to scream in agony.

I turned but there was no one there. The mirror revealed my reflection was back and seated again.

This time… it was crying.

Thick streams of crimson blood flowed down like a grotesque waterfall as it looked upon me, lips contorting into a broken, crooked smile. One that seemed to say, I’m sorry for what comes next.

My knees buckled and gave out beneath me, the key clattering to the floor by my side.

I floundered and fumbled like a fish out of water, reaching for anything that felt real.

That’s when I noticed the journal nearby and grabbed it, feeling it in my clutches once more.

It radiated an unsettling warmth, and it felt heavier, like it had teeth ⸻ Before I could focus on it longer, the door opened with a sluggish, intentional groan.

A thin wedge of light spilled into the room, pale and colorless.

I forced myself upright against the bed and stumbled toward the doorway in a fearful silence.

I gripped the door tightly and opened it wider to find myself staring down another hallway. This wasn’t the one from the Lotus Hotel, this one felt…older, more personal.

The wallpaper was in a state of gradual but immense decay. The faded roses hemorrhaged through the plaster.

The air smelled like a bygone fragrance and wood left to rot.

At the end of the hallway, the light illuminated a figure. They were seated knees to chest, head bowed in what appeared to be prayer.

“Hello?” I managed. My voice barely made it past my lips before the figure stirred.

I was met with a pale face, with sunken features. Grime and time clinging to her skin. She was like a corpse resurrected from the depths of the earth.

“Don’t be afraid,” she voiced in a hushed whisper. “They don’t like it when you’re afraid.”

I stepped closer cautiously, “Who… who are you?”

She glanced upward, listening to something I couldn’t hear.

“Name’s Marla,” she answered. “Been here longer than I can remember. You’re not the first to survive Room 409, but…”

She trailed off with hesitation, the pregnant pause lingering in the air until she finished, “You might be the first to leave and bring it with you.”

“Bring what?” I blinked, our eyes meeting one another’s.

“This place,” she spoke, as she gestured towards our surroundings. “It doesn’t just trap you; it copies you and follows you out. Lives in the spaces between your thoughts.”

She curled and brought her knees to her chest tighter.

“They all say, “Never Again”. But the room remembers, it’s patient. It always bides its time…”

The lights scintillated in a menacing tone, causing Marla to flinch.

“Time’s running out. You need to remember what you forgot before the door closes again.”

“What did I forget?” My voice cracked like porcelain as I contemplated what I could have forgotten.

Her mouth formed a sad, knowing smile.

“That you never really left.”

I blinked as her words revealed the crippling revelation of what I found myself in.

She didn’t however, Marla was too still, too symmetrical. And just for a fleeting second, her shadow didn’t match her body.

I took a step back, wary of potential danger.

“Are you… real?”

She tilted her head slightly, her eyes shifting. Not with emotion, but out of mechanism.

“I’m what’s left when remembering hurts too much,” she murmured, as she continued to pull her knees tightly against herself. “You made me.”

The hallway warped, the roses bled across the wallpaper like watercolors drowning in themselves.

Marla stared past me, “The room shows you what you need to see. What you fear. What you buried.”

Then her eyes locked on to me. “But it also buries you.”

“What memories?” My fingers scratched the back of my neck, aching for answers.

She rose slowly, like a moon on a lonely night. Her joints cracked like frozen branches in winter.

Her eyes were like the cold steel of iron.

“The ones you told yourself never happened.”

The hallway groaned as the shadows gathered in the corners like cockroaches

They whispered things that were almost decipherable to my own ear…the desire to understand those things was suffocating.

I reached toward one, this one resembled the discernable shape of a person.

It reached back, almost in longing before Marla grabbed my wrist with force. “Don’t, they’re not real. But they want you to believe they are.”

My knees buckled slightly, the smell of sulfur and rot closed in around me like a wet cloth.

“I’m… losing myself,” I whispered, nauseous from the pungent smell that filled my nostrils asphyxiatingly.

Marla nodded. “That’s what it does. Piece by piece. Until you forget there ever was an actual you.”

Then, like a mirror shattering inward…a memory manifested itself in my conscious.

A hospital room, a child’s hand in mine, a toy elephant on a chair.

The child’s wide, uncertain eyes looked into mine as a voice echoed in the deepest recesses of my mind:

“I never left you.”

The image cracked apart and dissipated as quickly as it had appeared.

I found myself back in the hallway with Marla.

Her voice was sharp now. “Remember what you buried, before the door closes for good.”

I clutched the rusted key; its weight held me steady like an anchor.

The hallway began to stretch and warp, like a dream breaking apart. The far door drifted away like a ship slipping beneath a dark tide.

I stood tall and cleared the bile from my throat with a cough, “I’m not leaving without the truth.”

Marla’s gaze softened — proud, mournful. “Good, because this place makes sure you never forget.”

She stepped backward, fading into the dark as the shadows hugged her with welcome.

“And sometimes…” She was almost gone. “…it demands a price.”

The lights shattered, and glass fell from the ceiling like scalding hail. Whispers screamed my name…laughing, crying, wailing as I shielded myself with my arms above my head.

I shook the glass off me and stepped forward into the permeating darkness.

I gripped the key in my hand like a lifeline…

———

I will tell more when the time is right but for now let me leave you with these parting words…don’t trust your reflection.

Pulling into the lot, Maya parked next to Carl’s Civic. She stared at it for a moment before killing her engine.

“You can do this,” she sighed, grabbing her badge in her dash for the entrance. 

The fluorescent lights at OmniCenter’s call center hummed a flat dead note. Another eight hours of scripted smiles and verbal abuse for minimum wage and decent 401k. Maya skipped to her cubicle, her jingling key rings announcing her tardiness.

Slumping into position, she logged into her phone with seconds to spare.

"Maya. Just the agent I was hoping to see,” her boss cheered, “Your average handle time last shift was a thing of beauty. Absolutely pristine."

"Oh. Thanks, Carl," she nodded, catching her breath.

"Don't 'thank' me. It's just data. And data doesn't lie. Keep this up, and we'll be talking team lead sooner than you think. Now, let's hit those queues. I'm expecting great things tonight," Carl smiled, his knuckles bleaching on the cubicle frame.

“Anything else?” Maya mumbled.

“Nope. That’s it,” he snapped, tapping his fingers on the walls edge as he left.

Maya  donned the vice of  a headset, opening the lines for calls. She fielded through complaints and dead air.

“Thank you for calling OmniCard, this is Maya, how can I help you?”

“My card’s being declined for a transaction. I’m hoping you can be my hero tonight,” Eric uttered. 

“I’ll certainly try. Can I get your card number?” Maya chirped through a professional smile. 

As she typed, Eric continued, “It’s just for a pizza. Long night, you know? You sound like you use a slice from Papa Rizzo’s.”

“Okay, Mr. Eric, I see the issue. The fraud algorithm flagged it. I can authorize it right now.”

“Eric, please. Mr. Eric was my father,” he chuckled, “And thank you. You are a gem. It’s nice to talk to someone who doesn’t just read from a script.”

“Just doing my job. Enjoy your pizza.”

“Will do, Maya. Have a good night.”

“You too.”

Ending the call, she punched out of her phone to grab a coffee. From his cubicle Carl glanced at her, tapping a pen against a spreadsheet. She looked away, her smile fading.

“Hey girl,” Ava chirped, “You get the workforce management talk from Carl yet?”

“No.” Maya fixed her coffee. “What is it?”

“The usual. ‘My girlfriend dumped me, so I am gonna take it out on the call reps,’” Ava joked in her best Carl impression.

“We’re family. The company values your time,” Maya snorted.

“Maybe, one of us should date him,” Ava snickered, “Take one for the team.”

“He’s all yours girl,” Maya chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” Carl stood in the doorway.

“Just girl talk,” Maya muttered into her coffee.

“Well we need coverage on the phones,” Carl tapped the doorframe, “Can’t have everyone on break at the same time.”

“Sorry,” Maya acquiesced, squeezing past him.

As she logged back in, the next call chimed in. 

“OmniCard, this is Maya.”

“Maya? It’s Eric. We spoke earlier? Papa Rizzo’s?”

“Yes, Eric. Is there another issue?” Her brow furrowed. 

“I just wanted to… review my recent transactions,.” he stammered.

“Of course.” She pulled up his account. “Can you verify your last few transactions? I can…”

“Was the coffee shop charge for $6.50?” he interrupted.

“Yes.”

“Ah, right. The americano,” he sighed, “Sorry, it’s just… you have a very calming voice. It’s been a rough week. It’s nice to talk to a real person.”

“Sir, I’m happy to help with your account, but…”

“It’s Eric. Please. And I know, I know, it’s unprofessional. But don’t you ever get lonely here? Anyways, how's your coffee?”

Carl surveyed the call center, a frown on his face. Maya raised her eyebrows tilting her head towards the phone. 

“Sir, if there are no issues with your transactions, I need to make my line available for other clients.”

“Right. Of course. Sorry for taking up your valuable time, Maya.” 

The line went dead as Carl reached her cubicle.

“A caller just called back personally. Kinda creeped me out.”

“Maybe he’s just friendly?”

"It made me uncomfortable."

"Fine... let's pull him up,” Carl groaned, leaning over her keyboard. “Ah. Yes. His average handle time is twelve minutes. Do you know what that does for our occupancy rates? He's a goldmine."

"He asked if I get lonely."

"Your after-call work on that one was almost three minutes." Carl’s smile faded as he propped himself on her cubicle wall. "Look, Maya. You have a gift for engagement. But you need to control the call flow, not let it control you. This sounds less like harassment and more like an agent who lost grip on a conversation and is now trying to CYA. Am I wrong?"

"I know what I heard."

"What I hear is a dip in efficiency. Leadership is breathing down my neck about shrinkage, and now my top agent wants to file a report that will tie us up in meetings. Be professional. Manage the call. Now, please, log back into your phone. We have a service level to maintain."

Maya’s eyes followed Carl as he moseyed back to his desk. Shrugging, she opened the line taking the next call.

“Maya…” a voice whispered.

“Sir,” she barked, “this is a professional line. Do you have a valid account inquiry?”

The caller disconnected the call. Maya winced and took the next call. Her phone rang, going dead as she answered.

Ring. Dead.

Rising up in her seat, she scanned the floor. The fluorescent light’s drone intermingling with Ava’s call script. Carl studied his monitor, rapping his pen against the spreadsheet. His gaze broke from the screen in her direction. Maya shrunk behind the quarter wall of her cubicle. 

Ring. Dead. 

Ring. Dead.

A ping from Carl emerged on her screen, Late shift metrics are in. We’re overstaffed. Maya, you’re at the bottom. I need you to clock out.

Maya typed, Please. The calls... he's still out there. I can't. She held the backspace key, deleting her plea. She auxed out of the call queue, striding over to Carl’s station to ask to stay.

"Maya, Maya, Maya. After all we've discussed? You’re overreacting. The real-time adherence report says we're over headcount, and my hands are tied," he sighed, dropping his pen on the spreadsheet.

"Just let me stay until shift change. I'll do busywork. For old time’s sake?"

"You know... it's against policy. But for you? Fine. I'll walk you out. I forgot my charger in my car anyways.”

"Thanks, Carl. You’re a lifesaver," she breathed, clutching her bag.

“Whatever,” he smirked.

The humidity smothered the dark parking lot as the pair stepped outside. Maya hugged her hoodie, her badge clacking against her purse as she adjusted the strap.

“See?” he huffed, “Not so bad.”

“Thanks again for walking out with me.”

“Of course,” he nodded. “Old time’s sake, right?”

They walked in silence. The buzz of the building’s rooftop units followed them across the concrete. Her footsteps echoed sharper than his, like she was moving faster without meaning to.

“Eric, is it?” Carl asked.

She glanced at him. “Yeah.”

“Creeps like that never learn how to take a hint.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “You know, you have a really empathetic phone voice. That’s why they latch on.”

They passed the row of handicapped spots. Maya fumbled for her keys.

“You didn’t used to be this quiet with me,” Carl pressed.

“That was different.”

“How so?”

She found her keys and held the key fob between her fingers like a blade. 

“It was a fun mistake, but I need this job more.”

“Sure.” Carl laughed, “I just keep thinking about how you ended it. One minute we’re texting after shift, then you ghosted.”

“Nothing, personal,” she muttered.

“Oh, I think it was,” he chuckled, “I get it. The office rumors, the performance favoritism… I’m your dirty secret.”

Stopping at her car, her fingers hovered above the door handle. Carl leaned back against the Civic, crossing his arms.

“You know,” he grumbled, “I never really minded being a secret at first. But it does make me wonder…”

Maya opened the door, tossing her purse on the passenger seat.

“Wonder, wha…”

Snatching the back of her head, Carl smashed her face into the doorframe. Maya’s nose cracked as she collapsed over the center consul. 

“Why you women are so entitled,” he rasped, “What gives you the right?”

Committed he pummeled her face against the gearshift. Her legs kicked. Crimson pooled in the cupholders. The car rocked as he spewed curses, emptying his rage on Maya. 

“Women,” Carl huffed, ”Figures. Always making messes for men to clean up.”

The keys slipped from her fingers, clattering against the pavement. Carl reached in his pocket, popping his trunk with his fob. With a grunt, he heaved Maya’s body into his arms. Dropping her body in the empty compartment, he paused.

“There’s only one way to keep a secret,” he whispered.

Carl returned her car. Gathering her purse. Retrieved the keys from the concrete. Slamming them all shut in the trunk like an old file. The Civic's beeps echoed in the twilight. He smoothed his shirt, turning back towards OmniCard.

“Nobody ghosts me.”

Part I

The next day, the boy woke to the sound of laughter. Uncle Sam sat sprawled on the sofa, his long frame almost swallowing it, while two police officers lounged beside him, laughing so loud it pulled the boy from sleep like a hand dragging him from water. He rubbed his eyes, each motion slow, hesitant, as though awakening fully would make the world collapse.

When he entered the living room, the officers held steaming cups of coffee or was it tea? their hands loose, casual, yet their laughter carried an edge he couldn’t place.

“Your dad’s funny,” one officer said, a grin cutting across his face.

“I’m his uncle,” Uncle Sam corrected, voice flat, calm, unbothered.

“Oh… that makes more sense,” the first officer chuckled. “My uncle was hilarious too.”

The boy stiffened. “What are you guys here for, anyway?” His voice cracked slightly, betraying the tension coiling in his chest.

The first officer’s face twisted into gravity. “Oh… it’s horrible.”

“Just horrible,” the second officer added, his voice carrying an unnatural weight.

“What happened?” the boy snapped, the question sharper than intended. Uncle Sam’s head tilted slightly, his eyes tracking the boy, unreadable, calculating.

“Six teenagers,” the first officer said slowly, as if the words themselves were knives. “Camping in the woods nearby… stabbed. More than fifty times.”

The boy’s stomach churned. “Jesus…” he whispered, a dry, rattling breath leaving his lips.

“How far from here?” he asked, his voice lower, more controlled.

“Ten yards, maybe,” the officer replied. “At least.”

The boy’s heart thumped violently, a horrid bubbling twisting inside him, cold and hot at once. Sweat gathered on his forehead; he shoved it away, tried to hide it, wiping the droplets with his elbow in a desperate, unconscious maneuver. But the officers’ words seemed to lodge themselves in his skull, a static hum behind his eyes, matched with heavy, ragged breathing that he could almost feel vibrating through the air. That gnawing ache the one that had been sitting quietly in his chest for years now filled his head entirely, pressing against the wrinkles of his brain.

“We better get going now,” one officer said, voice normal, casual, breaking the spell.

“Yeah, better get to it. Gotta lotta work ahead,” Uncle Sam replied, his tone steady, controlled.

“Nice meeting you, Samuel,” the first officer said, extending his hand. Uncle Sam took it with a slow, deliberate grip, shaking firmly.

Silence fell after the officers left, the echo of their boots fading into the distance.

“Crazy, ain’t it?” the boy muttered, eyes darting toward the spot where the officers had been.

“What?” Uncle Sam’s voice was calm, almost hollow.

“The teenagers… the ones who got stabbed. Crazy, ain’t it?”

“Oh… yeah,” Uncle Sam said, voice flat. “Horrible.”

The boy didn’t move. His heart still throbbed violently in his chest, the residual echo of their presence filling the room like a shadow he couldn’t shake.

Uncle Sam retreated to his room, leaving the boy alone in a pit of sweat, a storm thrashing violently in the back of his pupils. His chest heaved, but no tears came. The boy sat rigid on the sofa, thoughts twisting endlessly, looping over themselves like barbed wire in his skull. The wrinkles of his brain seemed to constrict with every passing second, mirroring the tightening of his fingers, the balling of his palms, the coiling of his arms each movement a desperate attempt to bury the enormous weight deeper into his stomach. He had been doing this for so long that the hours slipped away unnoticed; soon, night fell over the cabin like a heavy, suffocating shroud.

Uncle Sam must be sleeping, he told himself, eyes fixed on the basement the godforsaken basement, dark and forbidden. A place he was never allowed to enter. Uncle Sam would never… he would never…

A voice hissed in his mind, panicked and rising, echoing off the walls of his skull.

He didn’t do it…

He didn’t do it…

HE DIDN’T DO IT!

The words reverberated, vibrating through every nerve, until his thoughts became a hammering rhythm. His body tensed, his heart raced, and the storm inside him refused to relent, a tempest of fear, guilt, and something unnameable twisting him from the inside out.The boy tried desperately to drown out the terror clawing at the trenches of his soul. He stood, trembling slightly, and approached the basement. A black, suffocating darkness loomed before him, vast and unwelcoming. Each step down the rickety stairs was measured, cautious his toes testing the floorboards as though they could betray him.

CREEEEK.

The long, agonizing screech of a floorboard beneath his weight jolted him violently, sending sweat dripping down his spine and plunging him further into despair. Panic knotted in his chest as his eyes caught a thin, dangling string swaying silently in the darkness.

With tentative fingers, he tugged it. A weak, yellowish light flickered to life, cutting through the oppressive black like a trembling beacon. The light revealed a crudely fashioned door, embedded awkwardly into the side of the basement wall.Dust clung thickly to the concrete floor, coating his shoes in powdery gray. The wooden walls loomed like silent sentinels, empty yet whispering with the ghosts of forgotten things. The basement was barren, yet it seemed alive, holding its secrets close, daring him to uncover them.

The boy pushed the door open, letting it click shut behind him, and stepped into a dimly lit cell-like room. Shadows clung to the corners, bending and twisting in the pale light. He carefully descended the stone steps, each footfall deliberate, echoing faintly against the polished surface. Surprisingly, the room below was clean, almost meticulously maintained.

A small television sat in the corner, surrounded by stacks of DVDs. A bookshelf, orderly and unassuming, stood nearby. Yet the boy’s attention was drawn elsewhere a faint, almost imperceptible sound, a ripple of noise that didn’t belong to the hum of the TV or the quiet of the stone walls.

He scanned the room, heart pounding, trying to pinpoint its origin. Slowly, he pressed his ear against the bookshelf.

The sound that greeted him twisted something in his chest. A baby’s wail, sharp and raw, cut through the silence. Beneath it, there was something else a deeper, more guttural sound, violent and ragged. A sobbing voice, or maybe multiple voices, wracked with grief or agony, filling the space with a weight that pressed against his ribs, making it hard to breathe.The boy’s skin crawled. Every instinct screamed at him to flee, yet some thread of fear, or curiosity, kept him frozen against the shelf, listening, absorbing the unbearable sorrow that seemed to seep through the walls themselves.

The boy’s breaths began to overlap, shallow and rapid, each inhale and exhale colliding against the next. Sweat poured from his forehead, dripping to the floor like a leaking faucet, slicking the cold stone beneath him. Panic clawed at his chest, but a strange compulsion drove him forward.

He began yanking books from the shelves one by one, stacking them haphazardly, then returning them, over and over, his fingers trembling with urgency. Finally, a single book resisted the shelf, holding steady. He pushed against it, and half of the bookshelf swung open, revealing a dark, gaping entrance.

The cries hit him then shattering, raw, and unbearable. The sound seemed to tear at his chest, vibrating through his bones. Heart hammering, he stepped inside.

There, in the dim light, a woman appeared. Pregnant, familiar her face etched into his memory, yet horrifyingly altered by pain. She had six babies, each wailing violently, their tiny screams piercing the air. Her own sobs were loud, ragged, and unrelenting, each one a blade cutting through the room. Scars and bruises mottled her skin, maps of suffering and torment that spoke louder than words ever could.The boy froze, paralyzed between recognition and horror. The room seemed to shrink around him, every breath a struggle against the cacophony of cries, the weight of despair pressing on him like stone. He wanted to run, to scream, to tear the scene from his mind but something held him there, trapped in the undeniable reality of what he had found.

“Are you… Sam’s daughter?” the boy asked, his voice trembling.

The woman nodded, and her tears poured like an ocean from her eyes, spilling down her bruised cheeks.

“PLEASE… TAKE MY BABIES! PLEASE, GOD, TAKE MY CHILDREN! LET US OUT OF HERE!” she screamed, her voice jagged and raw, echoing off the stone walls.

The boy pressed a trembling finger to his lips. “He’s going to hear you… I’m… I’m so sorry. Just… please, whisper.”

“Please… take us. I’ve been here for years. I don’t even know how old I am… please,” she begged, her sobs rattling the floorboards.

Panic struck him like a hammer. Sweat poured from his temples and clung to his skin. He clasped his hands over his chest, feeling his heart hammer wildly, bouncing up and down like it wanted to escape. Anxiety carved itself into the tight wrinkles of his brain, making each thought scream louder than the last.

“I… I will,” he whispered, his voice strangled, deprived of air, each word clinging to his chest as if the very act of speaking might tear him apart. “I will come back. I promise.”

With trembling hands, he shut the hidden bookshelf door, retreating upstairs. Each step back felt heavier than the last, as if the weight of what he had seen followed him, rooting itself into his chest. Once in his room, he worked frantically to remove all evidence of the hidden chamber, shoving books back into place, trying to erase the nightmare he had uncovered.

The next morning, he sat at the kitchen table, cereal in front of him, fingers twitching nervously. Uncle Sam chewed loudly, oblivious, while the boy’s mind raced, haunted by the cries and the desperate faces of those he could not yet save.

“Hey, kid… you seen my pistol?” Uncle Sam’s voice sliced through the quiet kitchen like a knife.

The boy didn’t answer.

“Kid, my pistol! Where is it?” he snapped, the words snapping in the air like twigs underfoot.

“I… I can’t tell you that,” the boy stammered, his throat tight.

“Where is my gun?” The words hit harder this time, bouncing against the walls of the small kitchen.

Silence lingered, heavy and thick, pressing down like wet cloth on the boy’s shoulders.

“Upstairs… in my room,” the boy finally whispered.

“Where in your room?”

“The… closet,” he said, each word fragile.

Uncle Sam muttered under his breath but left it at that. Soon after, the two returned to their breakfast, the awkward tension dissolving only slightly into the sound of cereal being eaten. Uncle Sam scooped up a large, soggy handful and, between bites, said, “What do you think… some sort of badass or something?”

He laughed, a rough, booming sound, before shoving another bite into his mouth.

The boy hadn’t touched his cereal.

“What’s wrong with you? Eat your cereal it’s getting soggy,” Uncle Sam snapped.

“My bad,” the boy muttered, dipping his spoon hesitantly into the bowl.

Uncle Sam rolled up his sleeve, revealing a rectangular watch for a split second before covering it again. “I gotta go,” he said casually, walking toward the basement with the ease of a predator moving through its territory.

The boy’s gaze lingered over the dark shadows at the basement entrance, long and quiet, as Uncle Sam disappeared into the hidden cellular.Down below, the faint scent of dust and mildew clung to the air. Uncle Sam’s boots echoed softly against the concrete floor as he approached the bookshelves. His brow furrowed in confusion as he shifted one volume, then another, something had shifted.

Up above, the boy hovered in the doorway, cloaked in the delicate shadows, straining to hear.

POP! POP! The shots tore through the air like jagged lightning, rattling the walls and shaking the floor beneath him. The kid froze, a prickle crawling up his spine, his heart pounding so violently it felt like it might burst through his ribs.

He darted his gaze wildly toward the exit, the stairs, the shadows every corner a potential threat. His chest tightened, lungs burning as if the air itself were conspiring against him.

Panic clawed at his mind. He bolted upstairs, slamming the uncle sams bedroom door behind him, the echo of each shot still hammering through the house. His fingers shook uncontrollably as he yanked open drawers, tore through closets, desperate for a weapon anything to defend himself from the chaos downstairs.Below him, the floorboards groaned under the weight of unseen movement. The basement seemed alive, exhaling slow, menacing thuds that echoed through the house like the pulse of a monstrous heartbeat. Every creak, every whisper of movement was amplified in his mind, twisting the shadows into shapes that lunged at him.

A cold sweat ran down his back. His palms were slick, trembling over every surface, as if the walls themselves were closing in. The shots had stopped but the silence was worse, heavier, suffocating, broken only by the faint, deliberate scrape of something or someone moving far below, waiting.The kid’s breath came fast, ragged, slicing through the tense stillness. He felt trapped in a storm of fear, the house twisting into a labyrinth of dread. Every second stretched, stretched, stretched until it felt like the basement was no longer beneath him but everywhere around him, watching, waiting.

The kid cowered beneath the bed, pressed so close to the floor that every creak of the wooden planks sounded like the world itself was cracking apart. Dust motes floated in the slivers of light, but they were almost invisible to him, swallowed by the oppressive darkness. Each shallow breath felt like inhaling smoke, sharp and choking, as if the air itself wanted to crush him.The boots came first slow, deliberate, thudding against the floor with an intent that made the entire room vibrate. Each step was a hammer blow to the pit of his stomach. The walls leaned inward, dark corners stretching like claws, shadows thickening until they felt alive, crawling toward him.

“COME OUT!” Uncle Sam’s roar shattered the fragile silence. The sound didn’t just echo it slammed into the kid’s chest, rattling his bones and leaving a ringing in his ears that drowned out everything else. The floorboards groaned under the weight of Sam’s approach, creaking and whining like the house itself was warning the boy.

The kid’s pupils expanded to their limits, terror paralyzing him. Every instinct screamed to bolt, yet there was nowhere to run, only the narrow, suffocating prison of the bed.

Then the shadow fell. Uncle Sam’s looming figure stretched across the floor, immense and immovable. The kid could feel the cold brush of the rifle’s metal as it swung lazily, a silent predator, waiting. And then the teeth the great, unnerving white teeth, spread into a grin that radiated malice, gleaming even in the dim light, sharper than any knife.

A hand clamped down on the kid’s scalp. Iron. Pain. Terror. His scream ripped out, raw and wild, bouncing off the walls, swallowed by the shadows. The fingers dug in, lifting him off the floor with inhuman strength, as the bedframe groaned in protest beneath them.

“SHUT UP!” Uncle Sam bellowed. His face was close enough for the kid to see the cruel flex of muscles, the twitch of a vein on his temple, the gleam in his eye that promised absolute control. The room seemed to shrink around him, the air thickening, pressing against his chest, squeezing the oxygen from his lungs. The shadows stretched, elongated, coiling around the bedposts and walls, as if they, too, hungered for him.

The kid’s body quaked, every nerve screaming, fingers clawing at the floor, searching for anything, anything to hold onto. The house itself felt alive the walls breathing, the floorboards whispering warnings, the air vibrating with the echo of Uncle Sam’s fury. Every heartbeat pounded like a drum of doom, each second stretching, elongating, suffocating.

And all the while, that grin the white, predatory grin never left, as the kid dangled helpless, terror pouring into him like molten fire, filling every hollow of his being.

The room was no longer a room. It was a cage, a predator, a living nightmare and the boy was trapped inside, every inch of him consumed by the presence that could crush him without effort, that could end him with a flick of a hand.

The kid lashed out, fists hammering into Uncle Sam’s stomach, each strike met with a deep, hideous laugh that seemed to echo through the walls, bouncing like jagged shards of metal. Pain bloomed across the boy’s knuckles, burning and raw, but he refused to stop, driven by some impossible mixture of fear and defiance.

Then the cold, unyielding butt of the rifle slammed into his gut, and he crumpled against the floorboards. The wood groaned beneath their combined weight as Uncle Sam pressed him down, his immense body pinning the trembling boy in place. The kid flailed, arms and legs swinging like a headless chicken, each movement only tightening Sam’s grip, crushing him into the floorboards, forcing the air from his lungs.

“Why?” Uncle Sam’s voice cut through the chaos, sharp and ragged, almost pleading. “Why do you do this to yourself? Why does everyone trust me, yet I’m so lonely, so empty, no matter who’s with me? Why?” His hands dug into the floor beside the boy, bracing, every muscle taut. His eyes burned with something unnatural, a mixture of rage, despair, and hunger.

“Why do you want to trust me?” he continued, voice dropping to a low, dangerous rasp. “You know I’m not human. I don’t think I ever was. Everybody knew… nobody cared.”

The boy struggled beneath him, each breath a scream trapped in his chest, the floorboards splintering under the weight and fury of their collision. Fear, confusion, and something darker an understanding he couldn’t yet name twisted in the pit of his stomach. Every flail, every punch, was swallowed by the sheer, suffocating presence of Uncle Sam.

And in that crushing, unending moment, it became impossible to tell where the boy ended and the terror began.

Uncle Sam snarled, the sound tearing through the night like metal scraping bone. Then he smiled, and it twisted into a laugh a hideous, alien sound, more scream than mirth, echoing across the deadened landscape. The air itself seemed to shiver in terror at it.

The boy had reached the end of the road. The road that had carried him through fifteen short, shattered years had abruptly ended at the edge of a still, black lake. Every heartbeat pounded in his chest like a funeral drum, each gasp of air tasting like ash.

Without hesitation, Uncle Sam seized the boy, his massive hands unflinching, merciless. The cold night air bit at his skin as he hurled the boy’s naked body into the dark water. The lake swallowed him immediately, the surface rippling once before smoothing into an impenetrable black mirror. No scream lingered. No struggle remained. Only silence.The boy was gone. Forever lost, a shadow erased from the world, leaving nothing behind but the echo of a laugh alien, unearthly, and utterly final.

He never sleeps. Uncle Sam never trust him, kids. He’s not human, and he never was. He contains that of flesh and bones, but something deep within is anything but human. He never sleeps. He is there in the light and hides in the darkness. You may know him, you may not, but always remember: Uncle Sam never sleeps.

THE END

When I gave birth for the first time, I was 15. I won’t get into how I ended up a teen mom—if I could even call myself a mom back then. I felt less like a person and more like… a womb. What matters is that I had postpartum depression, and those first months were hell.

I lived with my parents, my older brother, my mom’s younger sister and my grandparents, in a tiny house on a quiet neighborhood, in a country I won't name. The crib was installed in the room I shared with my aunt. Sometimes she'd lose her temper and yell at me when the baby cried.

I can’t deny my family did what they could to help me. I'd spend most of my time crying in my bed, no thoughts in my mind, not even sure what I was crying about. My mother would bring me soup, trying to convince me to take better care of my kid; first, gently, then pleading, and then yelling and threatening me. I can still taste that soup—slightly overripe tomatoes and carrots—whenever I cry. My father was the financial provider, but even he and my aunt would help caring for the baby when I was on my worst days. My brother… he was different.

He never raised his voice. He would watch me with the baby, his expression unreadable, and then quietly offer to hold Daniel for a while. When I hesitated, he’d tell me I needed rest, that I looked sick, that I shouldn’t be left alone with something that “demanded so much.”

I was feeling worse day by day. My mind would get confused and my body felt dizzy. I thought maybe my mom was feeding me antidepressants without my knowledge. But she'd never risk any drugs affecting her grandson.

One time I woke up and saw my aunt taking Daniel from his crib. I felt like I couldn't move. I wanted to ask her what she was doing, but no sound came out of my mouth. I shut my eyes, and when I opened them again, I was breastfeeding. I couldn't remember how that happened.

One evening, when the baby's cries had been going on for hours, my brother sat beside me on the bed. His voice was calm, almost soothing.

“Have you noticed,” he asked, “how his eyes don’t look like ours?”

I stared at Daniel, too tired to answer.

“They swapped him.” he whispered.

I didn't reply, but deep down the words crawled under my skin. The thought festered. Every time I looked at my son, I saw something that didn’t belong. I hated myself for it.

The last night I heard Daniel cry, it stopped suddenly, cut off mid-breath. I rushed to the crib, but it was empty. My brother stood in the corner, his face pale and unreadable.

“Don't worry,” he said softly. “I took care of it."

My mother screamed when she found the crib empty. My aunt blamed me. My father didn’t look at me for weeks. The police interrogated me. But the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence. No body was found.

Years later, I moved to another state, where I met my husband and started a family. I have a beautiful daughter now. My family never visited her, not even my brother.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, tasting the soup in the back of my throat, my chest too heavy to breathe. I hear my brother's voice:

“He wasn’t really your baby.”

And I shiver. I go check my daughter. She's safe. We're all safe. And nobody will ever know what happened to Daniel.

Part II

The boy fourteen, and soon to be forever marked sat quietly as the road carried him forward. It was a road paved in comfort, the kind granted by birth, but one that would soon betray him. A road that had already broken many souls and left them scattered along its unseen edges.Through the glass, automobiles drifted past in flashes of steel and light, while tall oak trees stretched high into the skyline. His pupils wandered aimlessly, trying to follow the blur of shifting scenery, never settling, as though searching for something they would never find.His mind circled back to his parents, their lessons, their warmth, their world. That was the only truth he knew. Beyond them lay a mystery, a silence he had never dared to question. And yet the road pulled him deeper, toward a house he had never seen, toward an uncle he had never known.The oaks kept streaming past, their shadows dragging behind until the sun itself sank into the horizon. The forest grew thin and wiry, animals peering out from its darkened edge, their eyes glowing faint against the oncoming night.

The boy’s eyelids grew heavy. Slow. Reluctant. His body slackened as the dark closed in, and finally, in silence, his eyes shut for a few fragile seconds.Then the boy’s parents took a sharp turn. The road narrowed, thinning into a single, lonely path: no lanes, no passing, no choice but forward. It felt as if it existed only for them, leading them where it wanted, not where they chose.

And then headlights. A tow truck burst into view, barreling straight toward them. It moved with urgency, a beast on wheels, and when it struck, it was like jaws snapping shut. Metal shrieked. Their car’s teeth and jaw caved inward with the crash.

The boy’s eyes shot open. Adrenaline surged like fire through his veins.

Beside him, his father gripped the wheel, his face drenched in sweat. His foot slammed the pedal, shoving the car into reverse, tires screeching against the asphalt. His voice cracked out, raw and desperate, filling the car with terror.

“Oh shit oh shit NO! PLEASE NO, PLEASE, NO!”

The mother and son were frozen, their breaths coming in sharp, shallow gasps. There were no words, only the heavy weight of fear and sorrow pressing down on them.

The tow truck slammed again and again into the car, each impact jarring their bodies and rattling their bones. Slowly, inevitably, the vehicle teetered on the edge of a steep cliff. The world outside the windows became a dark, yawning abyss, swallowing everything whole.The boy felt the darkness press in from all sides. His mind emptied; there were no thoughts, only the waiting. Waiting for something to happen, or perhaps waiting for nothing to happen ever again. Time stretched, infinite and hollow, as the night held them suspended between terror and oblivion.

The boy awoke to a blinding light, searing against his reddish pupils. He lifted a trembling hand to shield his eyes and tilted his head carefully, every movement slow, deliberate. His neck protested, stiff and sore, as he shifted his heavy skull to the left.

Before him stretched a wall too white, almost plastic in its brightness, sterile and alien.

“He’s awake!” someone shouted, their voice sharp and urgent, echoing off the cold walls.

A nurse and two doctors stared at the boy, unsure what to say. He drew in deep, shuddering breaths, each one rattling through his chest, while the staff tried to steady themselves.

“Where are my parents?” His voice was gravelly, strained, almost breaking into a shout. He pressed a fist to his mouth, coughing harshly, the sound wet and wrenching, before he turned back to them.

“Where the fuck are my parents?!” he shouted again, the gravel of his voice compressed deep into his lungs. His palms pressed into the hospital bed, lifting his torso as his heavy skull bobbed with the effort.

“Excuse me where THE FUCK are my parents?!”

“Sir, calm down,” the nurse said, her voice trembling. The doctor and the second nurse took a cautious step back, uncertain how to contain the boy’s rising panic.

The boy drew in huge, shuddering gasps of air, trying to swallow, trying to steady himself, trying in vain to grasp the truth of what had happened.

“Just take a seat,” the doctor said gently.

Slowly, mechanically, the boy sank into the small chair tucked into the corner of the hospital bed.

“Your parents… tragically… passed away. A reckless driver,” the doctor continued, his words cautious yet firm.

The boy’s eyes seemed to dissolve, pupils heavy and wet, though not a single tear fell. Inside, a storm raged flooding, twisting, pounding against the walls of his skull. He stared down at the pale blue tiles beneath him, frozen in a silence so thick it felt eternal.

“What happened to the reckless driver? Where is he?” The boy’s voice, though low, carried the weight of stone, unwavering.

“The police are searching for him. They will find him,” the doctor replied.

The boy drew a deep, trembling breath, his chest rising and falling like waves.

“Who will… um… who will look after me?”

“Your uncle is waiting in the lobby,” the doctor said.

The nurse guided the boy down the sterile hallways to the lobby. He still wore his hospital gown, the fabric hanging loosely around him, a pale ghost among the pale tiles. The hospital itself felt drained of life walls and floors coated in a muted, lifeless white, the light harsh and unfeeling.

Silence clung to every corner, heavy and suffocating, as if the building itself remembered the broken, the lost, and the dead who had passed through its halls. It was a somber, invisible weight pressing down on the boy’s shoulders, a quiet song of despair and emptiness that seemed to follow him with every step.

Then he saw him.

Uncle Sam’s posture was rigid, his spine unnaturally straight, his body radiating a silent authority. One foot tapped lightly, almost impatiently, against the pale hospital tiles.The nurse guided the boy toward him, then stepped back, leaving the two alone in the cavernous lobby. Uncle Sam towered above the small crowd, nearly seven feet tall. He was broad and imposing, but not overweight his frame was all hard lines and controlled strength. A buttoned black coat hung over black sweatpants, and his scalp was shaved clean, a black mustache sharp against his pale skin.Silence stretched between them like a taut wire. Then, without a word, Uncle Sam turned and gestured for the boy to follow. His footsteps fell heavy against the tiles, each one echoing like a drumbeat.

They emerged into the hospital parking lot. The asphalt gleamed darkly in the rain, slick and reflective under the dim lights, each blackened puddle shimmering like shattered glass. The lot was empty, vast, and silent an eerie stage for the encounter to come.

Uncle Sam leaned against the red truck, his massive frame pressing into the weathered metal. The truck was caked in dirt and grime, the interior layered with rust and the lingering scent of neglect. With a deliberate motion, he reached into his pocket, produced a cigarette, and placed it between his lips.The flame of his lighter flared, cupped in his large hand, casting a brief, flickering glow that pierced the black fog of the parking lot. The small spark danced in the darkness, reflecting off the wet asphalt like a dying star.

“Get in the front, kid,” Uncle Sam said, his voice low, calm, but carrying an unmistakable edge.

Rain tore down from the sky, pounding against Uncle Sam’s windshield like the tears of some colossal, unseen infant, its sorrowful gaze fixed on the dark abyss below. The wipers swept back and forth in relentless rhythm, slicing through the sheets of water while the yellow glow of the truck’s headlights pierced the gloom.Uncle Sam’s eyes were sharp, predatory, scanning the blackened world beyond the glass. His large hands gripped the battered steering wheel with practiced control, and his spine hunched slightly, leaning forward as if the darkness itself demanded his vigilance.

The boy could not sleep. His wide, unblinking eyes traced the motion outside the skeletal, elongated spruce trees rushing past in streaks of shadow. For a moment, the forest seemed alive, its long, skinny trunks staring with empty, unseeing pupils as the red truck carved its way through the storm.

Hours passed. Deep into the night, neither of them slept. The paved road had long since disappeared, replaced by a narrow, winding dirt path that led through a forest so dense it seemed untouched by man. No houses, no lights, no signs of civilization appeared for what felt like endless hours.

Finally, Uncle Sam brought the red, rusted truck to a halt beside his cabin. The engine sputtered and died, leaving only the soft rustle of the wind through the trees and the distant drip of rain from the leaves.Uncle Sam flicked the last remnants of his cigarette into the damp grass. His heavy boot crushed it underfoot, leaving nothing behind but a scattering of ash and a quiet sense of finality.

The boy claimed the smallest bedroom in the cabin, leaving Uncle Sam to occupy the spaces below. Dawn crept over the horizon, the orange sun spilling its light through the narrow window and casting long, sharp shadows across the boy’s unrested face. He had not slept; the weight of the previous night pressed heavy on his eyelids.Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, he let his feet touch the worn wooden floor, then turned toward the closet. Shirts and pants hung neatly from their hangers, each article of clothing staring back at him like silent witnesses. He examined them closely every piece a men’s small, fitting him perfectly, yet carrying the unmistakable scent of a life lived elsewhere, a life he was now forced to step into.

Now dressed, the boy carefully made his way downstairs, each step pressing into the spruce wood planks that groaned under the weight of his bare feet. The living room was stark, almost oppressive: a worn sofa, a lone window, and a large Confederate flag mounted firmly on the wooden wall. Its presence sent a sour, sinking feeling curling into the pit of his stomach.No technology cluttered the room; the space felt frozen in another era. The square windows scattered across the walls offered fractured glimpses of the outside world, letting in slivers of pale morning light. The boy hesitated before settling onto the sofa, his gaze inevitably drawn back to the flag.

Through one of the windows, he caught sight of Uncle Sam. Shirtless and glistening with sweat, the man’s muscles flexed rhythmically as he lifted weights. The early sun caught the droplets on his skin, turning them into small, burning embers of orange light. The boy felt a subtle shiver crawl up his spine, equal parts awe, fear, and unease.

Later, they sat at the table eating cereal in near silence. Uncle Sam’s crunches were loud and deliberate, each turn of the spoon a sharp punctuation in the quiet room. The boy’s bites were delicate, tentative almost fragile his movements careful as if the act of eating itself demanded precision.

“What do you think of the place?” Uncle Sam asked, his voice calm but carrying a weight that made the boy shift slightly in his seat.

“It’s… alright,” the boy muttered. “Do you have a TV or a computer or something?”

“Hell no.”

“Why not?”

Uncle Sam’s eyes scanned him carefully. “Anything stick out to you?”

The boy’s gaze fell to his empty bowl for a long moment before he lifted his head, meeting Uncle Sam’s stare. His eyes were wide and round, nearly protruding, held tightly by heavy eyelids that could barely contain them. The intensity of his gaze seemed to anchor him to the chair.

“Your flag,” the boy said finally, voice low.

“Got a problem with that?” Uncle Sam snapped, his tone sharp.

“Yeah. I do.”

Uncle Sam shifted a soggy clump of cereal with his spoon, bringing it to his mouth slowly, deliberately, all while keeping his eyes locked onto the boy’s. The silence stretched, taut as a wire, each bite a quiet challenge in the space between them.

THUD!

The boy collapsed onto the spruce floorboards, a burning red bruise blossoming across his cheek. Uncle Sam rose to his full height, towering like a predator in the small room, his muscular frame almost brushing the ceiling.

“I’m gonna make a fucking man out of you, boy,” he growled, voice low and threatening.

Stars erupted in the boy’s vision, and a high-pitched ringing stabbed at the hollows of his ears, sharp enough to feel like it was drilling into his skull. Pain radiated through his head as he pushed himself upright, hands clawing at his hair, pulling it back as if to staunch the invisible flood of red-hot agony in his brain.The door upstairs slammed shut with a deafening finality, echoing through the room, but the boy barely registered it. His mind was a storm, nails raking across the wrinkles of his thoughts, scratching, digging, tearing, leaving his terror raw and unrelenting. Every heartbeat was a hammer; every breath a jagged blade cutting through his chest.

The boy sank onto the edge of his bed, pressing his forehead against the cool glass of the window. Outside, the sun bled slowly into the horizon, dragging long shadows across the world as it sank lower and lower. Tears carved swift, glistening trails down his face, streaks of sorrow that seemed to burn as they fell. His heart hammered violently, each beat thudding into his stomach, twisting with grief and anger. It ached for the parents he had lost, a hollow, unfillable ache that clawed at every corner of him. He longed desperately for something, anyone, to fill the void that now defined his world.

Hours passed, though time felt suspended, stretched thin like a taut wire over the empty room. His tears slowly dried, leaving his skin slick and tight, like cracked earth beneath a merciless sun. Outside, the dying light of the day seeped into the clouds, painting them in distant, unreachable colors, a quiet reminder of a world moving on without him.

Thump… thump… A piercing, aching creak ran through the floorboards. The boy’s head jerked toward the sound, and there, beneath his door, he saw the polished leather boots of Uncle Sam.

The door swung open with a deliberate force. Sam stepped inside, a rifle dangling loosely at his heel, his eyes locking onto the boy’s with a predator’s focus. The boy felt his heart surge and hammer against his ribs, each beat a frantic plea to flee but there was nowhere to run. Uncle Sam exhaled, a low, controlled hiss.

“You wanna go hunting?” he asked, voice calm but edged with menace.

“Sure,” the boy said before he could think, words tasting foreign on his tongue.

He didn’t know why he agreed whether it was some instinct buried deep within, raw fear, or something entirely unknowable stirring in the dark recesses of his mind.

Once outside the cabin, the air was thick with the damp scent of wet leaves and the lingering smoke of a campfire. Shadows of animals flickered across the forest floor, moving quietly among the tall, skinny trees. Uncle Sam reached into his back pocket and handed the boy a heavy, cold pistol, the weight of it unfamiliar and intimidating in his small hands.

They moved deeper into the forest, stepping cautiously over roots and fallen branches. Every rustle of leaves seemed magnified in the dense silence, yet no animals revealed themselves. The boy’s pulse thrummed in his ears as he scanned the layers of shadowed greenery.

Then, abruptly, Uncle Sam froze, his finger snapping rigidly toward a branch of a skinny spruce. There, perched with silent stillness, an owl regarded them with round, unblinking eyes.

“You aim. You can shoot that,” Uncle Sam said, his finger pointing rigidly toward the owl.

“Bet I could,” the boy replied, unsure of himself but drawn by something deep inside.

“Go ahead,” Uncle Sam prompted.

The boy closed his right eye, his hands trembling slightly as he aimed at the owl’s torso. He squeezed the trigger. The shot rang out, sharp and final, and the owl, once perched with silent pride, collapsed from the branch like a stone dropped from the sky.

“Nice shot,” Uncle Sam said, his voice flat, almost approving.

They walked back toward the cabin in silence, the forest pressing in around them. Uncle Sam carried the pistol loosely, as did the boy, their steps echoing softly on the damp earth.

“Why do you think I have that flag?” Uncle Sam asked suddenly.

“Because you’re racist,” the boy answered bluntly.

“What do you think racism is?”

“Hate for other races,” the boy replied, feeling the words on his tongue.

“Wrong,” Uncle Sam said sharply. “I’ve never hated anything in my life.”

“That… doesn’t make sense,” the boy muttered.

“Because I’m not in favor of the weak. Only the strong,” Uncle Sam explained, his voice even, almost philosophical. “That’s why I love it here. There’s no law or order it’s for the weak. Whatever a man takes, he keeps. Around us, life is divided into pockets of power. To claim what’s mine, I must take it based on my principles.”

The boy fell silent, his chest tightening. He didn’t agree, but somewhere deep, clung for agreement

“Yes,” he whispered after a long pause. His heart ached, pounding, yet strangely still, caught in a silence that pressed down on him like the forest itself.

Soon, the skinny forest blurred behind them. Uncle Sam froze, and the boy mirrored him instinctively. Uncle Sam raised his rifle, eyes narrowing, and aimed at a deer grazing among the trees. A sharp pull of the trigger, and the assault rifle barked into the quiet, the deer collapsing into the green grass as a soft plume of smoke drifted from the barrel like a gentle breeze.

Without a word, Uncle Sam hoisted the animal and carried it to the porch, beginning to skin it with methodical precision. The boy watched silently, his stomach twisting at the sight and smell, yet something in him was mesmerized.

A cigarette clung to Uncle Sam’s lips, glowing faintly in the dim light. Once the deer was prepared, he placed the meat eloquently on a silver dinner plate and set it before the boy.

“What do you think of the chicken?” Uncle Sam asked, his eyes scanning the boy.

“It’s alright,” the boy muttered.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s a bit dry,” the boy admitted.

“Go get the barbecue sauce,” Uncle Sam instructed.

“Where’s it at?”

“The cupboard… actually, the stove. It’s by the stove. Go get it, kid.”

The boy returned, carefully coating the deer meat in smooth layers of brown sauce.

“Hey, Uncle Sam… why did you never have kids?” he asked, his voice quieter than before.

“I did,” Uncle Sam replied, chewing slowly.

“You did?”

“That’s right.”

“They… moved out?”

Uncle Sam swallowed and reached into his pocket, producing a worn brown wallet. Digging inside, he pulled out a single photograph and handed it to the boy.

It was a girl, sixteen or maybe eighteen at most. An emerald necklace glimmered around her neck, catching the light. Her short black hair barely brushed her shoulders, framing a gentle face with a soft smile.

“What happened to her? Where is she now?” the boy asked, his voice almost a whisper.

“She passed on. She’s somewhere in the clouds,” Uncle Sam said flatly.

“Sorry to hear that,” the boy murmured, eyes lingering on the photograph.

“That’s alright. Don’t worry about me. It’s in the past,” Uncle Sam replied, returning to his plate.

They ate in shared silence. The deer meat glistened in the darkening dusk, its texture smooth yet oddly grimy, a chewy reminder of the forest and the violence that had taken place only hours before.

The days began to march forward along the road a road familiar to every man and boy, a road with stops at every turn, though many chose never to leave it. The boy kept walking that road, and the days stretched into weeks, the weeks folding into months.

He moved along its turns and twists, navigating familiar maneuvers in every place he had come to know. The days were spent hunting, the occasional board game offering a fleeting distraction from the monotony.Now, the boy was sixteen, his body and mind shaped by the rhythm of the road, by the steady, unyielding presence of Uncle Sam, and by the lessons harsh and silent that had become his only inheritance.

The kid sat on the sofa, staring toward the basement, his hand covering the corners of his mouth, masking any hint of expression. His head snapped toward the door at the sound of loud, insistent knocking.

Knock, knock. “Kid, get the fucking door!”

Knock, knock. “GET THE DOOR!”

“Give me a second,” the kid muttered, dragging himself toward the door. He opened it just a crack and saw a black boy standing there, a cross hanging around his neck.

“What do you want?” the kid asked.

“Talk about the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” the black boy replied.

The kid shut the door slowly, then swung it wide open. A silver pistol gleamed at the black boy’s belt. His eyes locked on it, frozen. The kid readjusted his own pistol at his waist, letting it hang casually an unspoken threat.

“Is there an issue?” the black boy asked, his voice tight.

“No,” the kid replied, voice steady.

A heavy silence stretched between them. Sweat began to bead along the black boy’s forehead.

“Is there an issue?” he repeated, a little louder this time.

The kid tugged his pistol free and let it dangle loosely at his side.

“I gotta go,” the black boy said.

“What are you doing way out here?”

“Spreading the Lord’s name.”

“Does anyone know you’re here?”

“What?”

“Does anyone know you’re… why?”

“Why do you ask?”

The kid inhaled deeply, weighing the moment, then said, “Best you get out of here.”

The kid returned to the living room and, to his surprise, found Uncle Sam sitting on the sofa, eyes fixed on him. The kid lowered himself onto the couch across from him.

“Who was that?” Uncle Sam asked, his voice steady but probing.

“Don’t worry about it,” the kid replied, keeping his gaze low.

“I will worry about it. Who the hell was that?”

“Some black priest,” the kid said shortly.

“Did you tell him to back off?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

Later into the night, when the wolves howled deep in the dusk and the silhouettes of animals drifted pale beneath the moonlight, the kid remained awake. He lounged on the sofa, his fist propping up his skull, a bored expression smeared across his face. He had assumed Uncle Sam was asleep, but he very much was not.Then, a painful creak from the kitchen floorboards drew his attention. The kid’s eyes widened as he saw Uncle Sam emerge knife in his right hand, dressed in a white raincoat now drenched in a vivid red, as though soaked in blood.Uncle Sam’s gaze locked onto the kid, studying his frozen figure. Slowly, deliberately, he placed the knife in the sink and turned on the leaking faucet. Warm, cool blue water ran over his crimson-stained palms, melting the dark streaks into the sink.

“Hey, kid… don’t be scared,” Uncle Sam said, his voice low, almost a whisper, but carrying weight like a stone dropped into water. “Just had to skin a deer for dinner tomorrow.” His laugh was soft, hollow, but it lingered, curling around the edges of the room.

“Okay,” the boy muttered, barely audible, his throat tight.

Uncle Sam brought a cigarette to his lips and lit it. The small flare of the lighter illuminated his face for a split second sharp cheekbones, pale skin stretched over something larger than human.

“Come closer,” he said, slow and deliberate.

The boy obeyed, his legs stiff, his pulse hammering in his ears.

“What’s the matter? Come closer,” Uncle Sam repeated, his tone now sharper, almost a command.

The boy’s feet moved, but every step felt heavy, inevitable. There was no room to turn back.

Uncle Sam lifted his long, pale hand into the air, then let it drift down to the boy’s scalp. His fingers tangled in the boy’s hair, pressing, rubbing, controlling. He smiled, but the movement of his lips felt calculated, alien.

Without warning, Uncle Sam removed the cigarette from his mouth and pressed it against the boy’s lips. The kid inhaled sharply, choking on the smoke. It filled his lungs like fire, and he coughed violently, exhaling thick, gray clouds that clung to the air. His small hands covered his mouth, but the smoke burned through his senses.

Uncle Sam’s grin widened, stretching across his face like a crack in porcelain. Rows of silver-white teeth glinted in the dim light as his laughter spilled out, low and sinister, curling into the corners of the room. The boy didn’t understand why he was laughing. He didn’t want to. But still, he forced a laugh, small, shaky, a mirror of Uncle Sam’s, just to survive the silence that hung heavier than anything he had ever felt.

And through it all, the boy realized: he was trapped. Not by walls, not by hands but by the weight of Uncle Sam’s presence, by the certainty that whatever came next would be decided entirely by the man before him.

The three beings moved with caution as they entered the mansion, hoping to find the important object. "Salvor, are you sure this is the place?" he turned to face her and nodded, "The scent of the cult is here," as they continued forward. Elise was carrying a black, sharp-edged metal staff, topped with a crown, and a white orb at its center. Elron was wearing golden armor on his entire body, with pointed ears, fair skin, and blue eyes. Salvor was a bit pale-skinned, but he looked like a normal human aside from his glowing eyes, two pointed fangs, and sharp black claws on his fingers. Together, the elf, vampire, and mage planned to stop the coming evil.

Moving carefully through the hallways that were slim, straight, and devoid of life. Elise held her staff upward with the center orb glowing bright, searching for signs of the cult feeling their presence in a certain room upstairs. "They're upstairs," She whispered, stopping at the wooden staircase. She lightly tapped her staff on the ground to cover them all in her silent spell. Just in case the stairs made noise, they found it strange no one had stopped them yet. All three had what sounded like the cult members were praying without a second thought, with a swift motion of her hand, the door was ripped from the hinges, and they stormed in, with a strange sight.

Five of them were in a circle motion praying while one was kneeling in front of something and turned, "Oh, it seems we have guests," She said, surprised. "Supernatural, inhuman ones at that," She added. "I assume you came here for this," She said, revealing a crystal sphere that seemed normal. However, all three felt the magic emanating from it. "That is a Porteye! It's used for viewing distant places and events, even for communication," Elron said, with a worried glance. The woman laughed at this, "As expected from an elf, judging from your armor, a high-ranking one," She said, with glee.

The five cultists began to shift and stand in unison as their bodies elongated, twisted, and morphed into creatures. The three comrades prepared as they charged toward them with mailce, openly showing at them, two of them charged at Elron, the other two at Salvor, and the last one came at Elise. Holding up her staff, she blinded the one coming for her by sending pure light, then lifted it and threw the creature into the ceiling, then moved back a good distance as it crashed onto the wooden floor. Salvor sidestepped the swipes and punches thrown at him, countering the attack. The vampire jumped, spun around, and kicked one in the side of the head, sending it flying over the second one charging forward. He slid between its legs, turned around, and swiped the ankle, making it roar in pain.

Falling to one knee, he took out a dagger marked with runes and jumped onto its back with one swift motion, stabbing its neck. The moment the weapon made contact, the runes began to glow slightly white, the transformed human's flesh started to sizzle and smoke as the holy metal and warmth made contact with its cold skin. Without wasting a second longer, Salvor dragged the weapon across the neck of the creature as a mixture of black and red blood sprayed out on the floor beneath. Jumping off, he looked at the former human, trying to stand, but collapsed to the ground, unmoving, hearing the second one rush at him, taking a deep breath, waiting until it was on him, and then backflipped high in the air. Glancing at its eyes, he gripped the dagger tightly, landed on the back, and stabbed the back of the head in one swift motion, its fate following the same as his comrade.

"I'll make you answer for your sins," Elron told them, with a tone of anger but also conviction to rid the world of the scourge that was The Void Worshippers. Glancing behind to the far wall, knowing he could use it for support if needed, as the last two slowly walked toward him, deciding to make the first move, Elron charged. Unsheathing his four-foot sword with the silver hilt marked with two golden runes, one on each side, swiping down to finish him quickly, Elron swiftly evaded the attack and countered, jumping him and stabbing the eye. The creature fell back hard and moaned in agony out of the corner of his eye, seeing the second one trying to catch him off guard with one motion, he took the sword out and threw it toward the creature, hitting its neck with mixed red-black blood pouring onto the floor. When it grabbed the hilt of the blade, blue fire spread on his palm, sending him down like his comrade, and he pulled his weapon out, slicing its neck.

I hope the creators show mercy, though I don't think they will, Elron thought, before joining Salvor, offering each other a smile at the work they just did. Before looking over at Elise speaking with the transformed cultist, "I'll give you one last chance to come back to the light or I won't spare you," She said, seriously. He lunged for her, and she cast a spell that turned him into stone in a second before crumbling apart in front of them, looking up to see the last enemy she began to walk towards her with her friends by her side. The female cultist with red hair laughed out loud at this turn of events, "I was sure you three would perish, but it seems you were stronger than you all look." Now, a few feet away from the two mini stairs leading up to the altar, the Porteye lay a dark, smooth, and perfectly round stone.

"Let me guess, you want to know who my master is? Why send me here? And what was that prayer for?" She said, with devious intent. All three nodded in agreement. "It may depend on your survival," Salvor said, showing his fangs to her, holding her hands up in defeat and sighing deeply, "The reason I was sent here is because it was a nice location hidden in plain sight, you know," She said, so casually like it was a minor deal. "That prayer was something that would be crucial later on down the line in my master's plan." They waited for her to answer the first question, "As for the first one, I think I'll save the surprise," She laughed, but a somber look washed over her face.

"Last year, I was on the verge of death from a terrible accident. Out of nowhere, a voice called out and saved me, giving me his blessing in return for loyalty," All three assumed who she was talking about in that moment, but that's when a thought crossed Elise's mind. Blessings can only be given out from the creators or divine beings like angels, or aspects, so this...creature tricked her into believing it, "Your master, whoever...or...whatever he is, it's not being truthful." A loud, manic laugh burst out from her lips, as they all heard the sound of flesh and skin ripping as huge wings came out of her back, a mixture of black and red colors just like the mixed blood of the morphed cultists. The woman's eyes became black where they were white a few moments ago, and the green eyes became bright and corrupted, orange eyes as oily black tears moved down her face.

Without warning, she dashed to the mage and, with a heavy push of her right hand, Elise went flying backward, hitting the ground with a thud. Elron jumped up, aiming to strike her down with his blade, while Salvor flexed his dagger and claws, running at her with tunnel vision. The cultist put her hand on her face, with a sigh, and looked at the two beings coming at her as if they were in slow motion, waiting until they were in range, and folded the wings. Both of their attack were stopped by her wings, taking this chance, and she flipped sideways, the force from it flung them both into the opposite end of the room, a look of contempt came over her. However, before she could choose what to do with the three powerful intruders, a dark, powerful presence overcame her, and a voice penetrated her mind shortly after feeling that.

A slight smirk was on her face when the others were back on their feet, ready to subdue her or, at worst, kill her, but that didn't happen. Instead, she snapped her fingers to reveal hidden red runes throughout the room they were in, and they began to glow brightly, power shimmering within. "You guys have around thirty seconds," She told them, before going back, grabbing the Porteye, and taking flight into the air with a grin, she told them, "Oh, the name's Temperiss and HE sends you his regards!" before leaving. Elise tried to stop her by throwing an energy beam that would paralyze her wings, but failed when she dodged it and flew off into the night. The runes began to glow even more, and they could feel the heat emanating from them.

The vampire and elf gathered around the mage as she whispered, swung her staff above her head, and slammed it onto the floor. Covering them in a massive shield of light energy, in the next moments, the explosion went off, but the sound was muffled by the spell, and everything was burned. It lasted for less than ten seconds, but their vision was blurred by smoke and debris when it was cleared. The walls were gone, a part of the roof was destroyed, and the bodies of the cultists were incinerated. "What do we do now?" Elise looked deep in thought before answering, "For now, we'll keep an eye on things since evil has returned to Sleeper Creek."

Returning to the headquarters was not a pleasant feeling, knowing they had failed to obtain the powerful artifact that would have been of great help. Opening the door to find four others in the room, two sitting on the couch, one welcoming them back, and the other quiet off to the corner, the Skinwalker, Siren, Chimera, and a human, Elise thought. "I was worried for your safety! I'm glad to see you three make it back," Torrin said, the eight-foot beast, with a lion head and muscular body, large bat wings, griffin tail, and three-toed black bird-like feet standing on hind legs with a large white cloak. "I'm happy...you're back," Stephen said, in a whisper from the corner, the young male with a plain red sweater, black pants, brown skin, with ear piercings, and a black metal mask hiding his mouth. While the green-eyed, black-haired girl with ripped jeans, heels, black nail polish, a gold pendant, and a face that smiles often.

"So what happened?" Vanessa asked, intrigued, as Salvor was explaining what they witnessed. She looked to the final one sitting on the couch, cleaning their weapons, two guns, and a knife, which she placed into the holsters on her legs and each side of her waist. "Don't worry, I got my silver bullets, holy water, and incantations ready." The woman with locs, pulled into a bun, lean, and five feet eight inches, "Elenere, the one who saved Sleeper's Creek from the Nightwalkers two years ago?" She nodded, looking at her with a slight smile. "Now that everyone's here, let's get started," Torrin said, in a more serious tone, "As we all know, Sleeper's Creek exists within the Veil, separate from the mortal world, but someone is trying to end the balance and dominate this entire realm, or worse, destroy it entirely!" Eilse thought about it and hated the implications.

Looking to their human ally, Elise wondered what truly happened on the mission that saved the entire realm from a far worse fate. "I know the general view on what you did, but most of the major details were left out. Can you tell us how you did it and what you were fighting?" She nodded. "It's not a pretty or short story, so buckle up." Over the next hour, she would discuss it, and it shocked the room several times. When she got to a certain part, she paused, as if thinking about it was painful, "You all know of Jophiel! Leader of the Fallen Five, the First Betrayer of light, and a Lord of The Void?" Everyone in the room nodded in unison, stared at her in silence, waiting for her to continue.

"The head council of Sleeper's Creek asked me to keep this confidential, but I trust all of you here," taking turns to meet the others' eyes. "It was him; he somehow managed to break the Veil, come into reality, learn of the existence of Sleeper's Creek, and its potential." Going on to tell how she and a good portion of her friends went to stop him and his advancing legions, but most of them died in that battle. However, when only she and Beck were left, he sacrificed himself by charging at the nine-foot dark lord with a self-destructing crystal, which ended both of them and closed the gate in the process. Throwing or killing his legions and stopping the rest of The Void from invading, but that left Elenere as the sole survivor of that great mission.

After taking in the story, the room fell silent for a long while, and one question came up in the back of Elise's mind, coming to the surface. "Do you think Jophiel was destroyed?" Elenere looked directly at her and shook her head in a disapproving, uncertain manner. "I would like to believe so, but he's a Fallen Angel, the First one at that, so it's a possibility," Elron spoke about how this master was able to save a human from the edge of death and transform her into a Nightwalker. "What?!" Torrin said, slightly raising his voice in shock at hearing this, before realizing and calming himself a bit. He then continued to tell them about the seeing stone and the ritual.

Elenere's face remained focused and neutral throughout the debrief, but hearing that sent her into showing clear unease on her face. When Elron was finished, she chimed in, "If that's the case, then we have to stop them the sooner the better." Vanessa, after staying silent and listening to everything so far, chimed in with a suggestion on who could help them, but knew the reaction would be mixed, "How about we get Uriviar's help?" The expressions on everyone's face were of distrust and suspicion. Vanessa saw this and slumped back on the couch, "Does any of us...trust him?" Stephen partially spoke up for the first time, and all of them gave it some thought before agreeing that he could help. "He was the former warden of the prison and a part of the church, right? - "Why don't we just get it out of the way?" Salvor interjected, cutting Torrin off, and walking out of the room to call him.

Not even a minute later, Salvor walked back into the room with a frustrated face. "Did he answer?" Elise asked curiously. With a single shake of his head, she knew the answer, "So where should we start?" Evenere made another call and smiled when the other person picked up. "I have the place," As they all got ready to move out and stop this plot from completion, Torrin spoke up, "All of you going would raise eyes, and we don't know how many are in league with the enemy." With some debate, they decided the mage, siren, and skinwalker should do this mission.

They left the estate and got into the car, driving into the outskirts of Sleeper's Creek entertainment district, where the help was located. Twenty minutes later, Elenere pulled into the driveway, which was empty aside from her car, and all four of them left quickly while looking at the entrance. "I'll be here," Elenere said, It would be good to have her as a lookout; she can look after herself just fine, Elise thought as they began to speed walk. Going up the steps, opening the glass door, and stepping inside to an average-looking bar with not that much to look at, but a bartender behind the counter welcomed them in with a loud, cheerful voice, "Come in, Nel told me to prepare for your arrival!" As they went further into the bar. Elise gave her a confused glance, which she must've picked up on, because she replied quickly, "Her and I have been good friends since we were kids!" She said, wiping off the counter with a damp cloth.

She appeared normal, but Elise could sense she wasn't human. And saw her wear an orange beanie that covered her hair, and wondered if she was a gorgon, since they were known to hide theirs and she hadn't met one. The woman saw Elsie staring and answered, "Yes, before you ask, I'm a Gorgon, my name is Mira." She said warmly, "I assume you're here because of the danger that's threatening Sleeper's Creek and the balance itself, correct?" All three nodded to confirm her suspicion. "How did you- I've been hearing whispers from other Nightwalkers and humans," Mira interjected.

A crash came from the back room of the bar, and they all stood up and readied for a fight. "Wait! That's my assistant, Ajax!" She said, loudly coming out of the back was a young man in his early twenties. He walked next to his mentor, bowed in their presence, and introduced himself, "Still the same, I see?" Stephen scoffed, glancing upward to see him. He ran and hugged him, with Stephen somewhat returning the favor, as that was happening, Mira went to the back and came back out with a large book as she presented it downward for the group, "This might be what you need. Promise me you'll keep it safe?" Elise nodded.

She went into the cabinet and took out two drinks, one was heart-shaped with a golden liquid within, while the other had a silver drink inside. However, that bottle was smaller and was in the shape of a cube. "It's on me!" she said, before a loud BANG sounded and startled everyone inside, causing them to look back, and to their horror, the car was flipped over. "Elenere!" Elise grabbed her staff, ready to rush forward. Mira let out a loud laugh, "Don't worry about Nel, she may be a human, but that certainly won't kill her!" She grabbed a brown bag from under the counter and placed the book and two bottles within carefully so they wouldn't break. "They're group and leader are onto us, go into the back, one of the sisterhood of mages made a Doorspace to take you out of here, I'll seal it behind you!" She told them.

Elise perked up at this and wondered what she knew, but knew there was little time, so they all rushed to the back with her. She stood in front of what looked like a closet door, put her hand up to it, and a symbol showed. It was a pink glowing eye with the lids adorned with sun rays. "Is it safe?" Stephen asked, glancing at her. Mira nodded, and all of them heard the front door swing open, hitting the wall behind it, and a pink light glowing slightly.

"Ajax, go with them!" Mira commanded, he was about to protest before hearing "Hello! Is anyone home!" In a voice that could only have evil intent. "Just a minute!" With a smile, Mira gestured to go, so they did. When Ajax was the last one, she hugged him, "Be careful, be on guard, and trust only this group!" She told him, after he left, Mira closed the door and sealed it behind. Taking a moment to gather herself and put on her best poker face, she went back to the front to see a robbed figure already sitting on one of the stools waiting for her, "What took you so long?" It asked, in that same mailce dripping voice. She apologized, making up a lie that she was cleaning the back before he came.

The closer she got to the figure, the more the stench of decay was present, and it was downright frightening her. Mira knew at a mere sight that this thing shouldn't exist because what was in front of her was Human. Or... rather... was because once he made eye contact with her, she couldn't hide the fear as where the eyes should have been, empty sockets now replaced them, the skin was pale like he was a ghost, and his teeth were pointy like a shark. She also noticed sickly blue vines all over his skin, "What happened to you?" As she went to prepare his drink for him, "Oh, just a gift from the master is all. Why do you want in?" She scoffed dismissively, "Of course not! Just Curious!" She knew it was a risk to ask, so she took a deep breath, "Let me guess, you're here to deal with me and Elenere!" It let out a loud laugh like they both knew.

She found a bottle with a pure black liquid inside. The label read, When you seek and wish to end, Hm, fitting, Mira thought, as she got a glass, placed it in front of the thing, and poured it for him. The creature gulped it down in one go, "That's the stuff!' It yelled in glee, just as Mira was about to take off her beanie and freeze the evil in front of her, the front door burst open with Elenere injured, blood coming from a cut on her forehead. A shaky breath with her gun pointed right at its head, "Bastard! Do you know who I am?" What a low chuckle it said, "Who doesn't? The hero of Sleeper's Creek, right?" With obvious sarcasm, in the next moment, Elenere let a shot ring out, and he dropped to the floor. "Come on, he might not be dead," She warned, as Mira went to her side.

Elenere took out her knife and gave it to the Gorgon, "Take it, just in case!" She told her friend, just as soon as she did, the corpse stood up. Mira noticed it was a ringed knife, so she spun it on her finger, then gripped it tight, and, along with Nel, charged at the evil that invaded the bar. Mira jumped up, swung the knife down, and missed because it moved swiftly out of the way while Elenere shot two more times, and he dodged those as well. It looked at Mira getting up, rushed forward, and kicked her back into the far wall. The thing looked at Nel, smiled, and went after her, but she was prepared as she took out a small vial of holy water and partially hid it from his sight, waiting until he was on her.

Just as he reached out to grab her face with his hand, she timed it and swerved it at the last second, throwing the vital upward. When the holy water hit his face, a powerful scream of agony came out of him as retaliation, he picked her up by her neck and began to squeeze with anger. She saw his face was steaming and burned from the holy water, "You'll regret that!" It yelled, showing a rotten smile, before they heard "Nel! Now!" She closed her eyes when all of a sudden the grip on her loosened. As she fell to the floor, Mira took off her beanie, and eight gray snakes emerged, four on each side. The creature looked surprised; however, to her shock, it didn't turn to stone.

A small chuckle came from him, but she noticed his movements were now slow and sluggish, and so did he as a look of confusion came over his face. Mira scoffed at this as she ran, sidestepped a grab that came for her because of the slow movements, and stabbed one of the eye sockets. When this happened, a bloodcurdling shriek came from him as he fell back, trying to grab the knife, but recoiled from the touch as Mira went back to grab her hat, and put it on, "Alright!" as Nel looked at the scene. She got up, walked to that thing, and the barrel to her gun over its pale face, "You'll tell me everything about your master's plan!" It slowly turned its head to face the human, "You believe...you can..stop him, laughable," Her anger only rose at this. "Tell me who HE is?!" Elenere shouted, losing composure.

Mira came behind her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder with a smile, "Oh..one more thing," He shot up and struck Elenere's stomach. His dark claws punched her flesh, and she fell back, clutching herself as Mira ran over and drove the knife deeper, watching him take his last breath. She then ran over and lifted her shirt to see dark vines quickly spreading throughout her body like poison. "Can you stand?" Nel shook her head at this, "I think...he paralyzed...me," She told her, feeling her strength leaving her. Mira ran to the back and, after some searching, found a bottle that was cool to the touch, with white liquid inside, as the label read, To shield from unexpected disaster, I pray this could work, Mira then ran back to her friend, whose condition worsened in the short time it took to find the bottle, "Their master...is worried...about...my intervention!" Nel said.

The Gorgon popped the cork and poured a few drops into her friend's mouth; a smile covered her face after she tasted it. "Do you know...what it tastes... like?" She asked, and Mira nodded because she had already taken it once. "Vanilla and Maple," Nel felt her strength suddenly return around twenty seconds after tasting it, "I think...he wanted to book?" Mira helped her onto a table, went back to the body, and took the ringed knife out of its corpse, lighting a flame and burning the body. "So what now? If he knew about the book I'm exposed, I can't stay here!" After being deep in thought, Elenere said, "After this, their master would want you to leave, so I think staying here is the best action to throw off suspicion." The smell already began to stop, but the body was burned to nothing but ash, not even a corpse left behind.

Maury Buttonfield was walking—when a car running a stop sign struck him—propelled him into an intersection: into the path of a speeding eighteen-wheeler, which ran over—crushing—his body.

He had been video-calling his wife,

Colleen, who, from the awful comfort of their bed, watched in horror as her husband's phone came to rest against a curb, revealing to her the full extent of the damage. She screamed, and…

Maury awoke numb.

“He's conscious,” somebody said.

He looked over—and saw Colleen's smiling, crying face: unnaturally, uncomfortably close to his. He felt her breath. “What's—”

And in that moment realized that his head had been grafted onto her body.

“Siamesing,” the Italian doctor would later explain, “is an experimental procedure allowing two heads, and thus two individuals, to share one body.”

Colleen had saved his life.

“I love you,” she said.

The first months were an adjustment. Although Colleen's body was theirs, she retained complete autonomy of movement, and he barely felt anything below his neck. He was nonetheless thankful to be alive.

“I love you,” he said.

Then the arguments began. “But I don't want to watch another episode of your show,” he would say. “Let's go for a walk.” And: “I'm exhausted living for two,” she would respond. “You're being ungrateful. It is my body, after all.”

One night, when Colleen had fallen asleep, Maury used his voice to call to his lawyer.

“Legal ownership is your wife's, but beneficial ownership is shared by both of you. I might possibly argue, using the principles of trust law…”

“You're doing what?” Colleen demanded.

“Asking the court to recognize that you hold half your body in trust for me. Simply because I can't move our limbs shouldn't mean I'm a slave—”

“A slave?!”

Maury won his case.

In revenge, Colleen began dating Clarence, which meant difficult nights for Maury.

“Blindfold, ear plugs,” he pleaded.

“I like when he watches. I'm bi-curious,” moaned Clarence, and no sensory protection was provided.

One day, as Maury and Colleen were eating breakfast (her favourite, which Maury despised: soft-boiled eggs), Colleen found she had trouble lifting her arm. “That's right,” Maury hissed. “I'm gaining some control.”

Again they went to court.

This time, the issues were tangled. Trust, property and family law were engaged, as were the issues of consent and the practicalities of divorce. Could the same hand sign documents for both parties? How could corporeal custody effectively be split: by time, activity?

The case gained international attention.

Finally the judge pronounced: “Mrs Buttonfield, while it is true the body was yours, you freely accepted your husband's head, and thus his will, to be added to it. I cannot therefore ignore the reality of the situation that the body in question is no longer solely yours.

“Mr Buttonfield, although your wife refers to you as a ‘parasite,’ I cannot disregard your humanity, your individuality, and all the rights which this entails.

“In sum, you are both persons. However, your circumstance is clearly untenable. Now, Mr and Mrs Buttonfield, a person may change his or her legal name, legal sex, and so on and so forth. I therefore see no reason why a person could not likewise change their plurality.

“Accordingly, I rule that, henceforth, you are not Maury and Colleen, two sharers of a single body, but a single person called Maureen.”

“But, Your Honour—” once-Maury's lawyer interjected. “With all due respect, that is nothing but a legal fiction. It does not change anything. It doesn't actually help resolve my client's legitimate grievances.”

The judge replied, “On the contrary, counsel. You no longer have a client, and your former client's grievances are all resolved by virtue of his non-existence. More importantly, if Maureen Buttonfield—who, as far as I am aware, has not retained your services—does has any further grievances, they shall be directed against themself. Which, I point out, shall no longer be the domain of the New Zork justice system to resolve.

“Understand it thus: if two persons quarrel among themselves, they come before the court. If one person quarrels with themself—well, that is a matter for a psychologist. The last I checked, counsel, one cannot be both plaintiff and defendant in the same suit.

“And so, I wash my hands of the matter.”

The gavel banged.

“Washed his hands in the sludge waters of the Huhdsin River,” Maureen said acidically during the cab ride home to Booklyn.

“What a joke,” added Maureen.

“I know, right? All that money spent—and for fucking what? Lawyers, disbursements. To hell with all of it!”

“And the nerve that judge has to suggest a psychiatrist.”

“As if it's a mental health issue.”

“My headspace is perfectly fine, thank you very much. I need a psychiatrist about as much as a humancalc needs a goddamn abacus.”

“Same,” said Maureen.

And for the first time in over a year, the two former-persons known as Maureen discovered something they agreed upon. United, they were, in their contempt of court.

Meanwhile, the cabby ("Nav C.") watched it all sadly in the rearview mirror. He said nothing. What I wouldn't give, he mused, to share a body with the woman I loved.

I didn’t sleep that night.

After I was sure Win was out, I crept into the closet – making sure not to wake up Jess. My heart was pounding, my breathing hard and fast, and I didn’t want to scare her.

I was scared enough for the both of us.

We had some of our things stacked in boxes toward the back of the closet – old, unnecessary things consolidated to a few boxes. I had meant to take them up to the attic, that new shared and secret space, but just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I was glad I hadn’t because the thought of creeping up those narrow stairs into the still, hot dark up there after what had just happened seemed unbearable.

One of the boxes had a bunch of Win’s baby things. Old bottles, a well-used maternity pillow, some of Win’s baby toys she had moved on from – all of them were stuffed into a box labeled ‘Someday’. We’d been saving them, of course, with the thought that maybe we’d need them again; someday. A sweet wish we were banking on for the future.

I ripped the tape off the top of the box, a little too loud. I winced, looking back through the closet to the edge of the bed, watching Jess’s feet in case she stirred and kicked. But she was still, and even from the insulated quiet of the closet I could hear her deep, rhythmic breathing.

I rummaged through the box, my hands clumsy in the dark – forgotten shapes playing against my imagination. I knew what I was looking for, and after some digging my fingers brushed against a length of cord. A hard, plastic shape. I pulled it all free.

It was Win’s baby monitor. A small black camera, the power chord snaking around the aperture. I stuffed it into the pocket of my pajama pants, walking carefully around the spots in the floor I knew would creak and back out of the closet.

As I stood in the doorway, I heard it.

A long, slow creeaaak.

This wasn’t the timid, hesitant sound I’d heard before. This was drawn-out, deliberate – ending with a low, hollow thunk, like the lid meant to shut itself. Like it meant to be heard.

I froze. The shape of the second-floor unspooled in my mind: the hall stretching to Win’s room, the nook, the box in the corner.

creeaaak. thunk.

Again – measured, almost playful.

My pulse skittered. I thought of her jaw clicking last night, her wide, glassy eyes. The cold tooth in my palm. I felt my forehead break out in sweat at the thought of it – that frigid pebble of a molar.  

I walked down the hall as silently as the carpet allowed, feeling the darkness lean toward me. Lick at me. The creaking stopped as I reached her door.

I eased it open.

The room glowed in the faint, amber haze of her nightlight. Win was a bundled shape on the bed, her face turned toward the wall. The toybox sat still and shut within the nook, as if it hadn’t moved in years.

But I knew better. I was learning to be better.

I pulled the monitor from my pocket, unwinding the cord. I worked by memory, crouching in the far corner of the room – away from the bed, away from the box. Out of sight, my mind whispered, out of sight.

I found an outlet and jammed the cord in. The red light blinked on. I angled the lens toward both the toybox and the bed, making sure they fit together in the frame. Then – standing, holding my breath – I backed out of the room.

On the other side, back in safer dark of our room, I took out my phone. I downloaded the monitoring app and logged back into our account. It took a moment for the camera to start streaming live to me but when it did…

I saw Win, still and tucked away in her blanket. I saw the room, the night vision switching on as soon as the camera felt how dark the room was. I saw the nook -- the dark little threshold in the far wall.

And inside, the edge of the toybox.

I settled next to Jess as softly as I could, as careful as the bed springs as I was of the floorboards, rolling over on my side, hugging my phone close to me. I checked the app every few minutes like I was pressing on a bruise to make sure it still hurt. My little portal into Win’s room, a window to peek through. The toybox was still, a window to peek through. Static shimmered across the shadowed wood, making it seem alive, squirming.

And there, eyes wide in the dark, I waited. I watched.

**

“What are you doing?”

I jolted, half-asleep, spilling cold coffee over the edge of the mug. I was sitting at the kitchen table, hunched forward in my seat. My phone in my other hand, close to my face.

Too close, I guessed, from the way Jess was looking at me.

“Hello?” she asked. Her arms were crossed in front of her, and she nodded her head toward my phone. “What’s that?”

“Just work,” I said, sliding my hand and the phone with it under the edge of the table and into my lap. I’d been checking the feed since dawn, over and over, and I’d had to have my phone plugged in ever since I got up out of our bed a few hours to charge. I brought the mug to my lips, taking a sip. Wincing at the flat, cold flavor.

“Yeah,” Jess said, turning around. She was portioning snacks – carrots and apple slices and yogurt pouches. A juicebox.

I frowned.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Jess didn’t turn around.

“Packing a bag,” she said, stuffing the goods into the plastic grocery bag.

“Yeah, I can see that,” I said, sitting up a little in my chair, a dull pain settling in my lower back, “but why?”

Jess dropped her hands on the counter. I saw her shoulders slump, saw her head roll back just the barest few inches. Inches enough for me. I felt my heart kick up in my chest.

“For Mom’s?” she said, half-turning her head to me. I could see the side of her eye, her lips drawn tight.

“For Mom’s,” I repeated, closing my eyes.

Of course. Jess had told me last week we’d be going to see her parents this weekend. They lived two hours away, they were well off in their retirement, and they spoiled Win at every chance they got. The thought of her coming home with some fresh toys, something new and good? It was a relief, it was a balm to the unease throbbing in the center of me.

“I’m sorry,” I said again after a moment, opening my eyes again – a slow struggle, “I know I’ve been…”

“We’re leaving in an hour,” Jess said, grabbing the bag. Cinching it shut and turning toward me.

I met her eyes. I tried to smile. Wondering, idly, if I looked as sick as I felt.

Jess softened. She didn’t return the smile, not quite. But her body relaxed, her free hand easing the neck of her bathrobe. Rubbing her collarbones – drifting tickling fingers along their ridges. It was a small gesture of self-comfort, automatic, and one I knew well. In that moment I wanted so very badly to stand up, cross the distance between us in the kitchen, and wrap my hands around her waist – to take her hand, hug her close, and whisper how much I loved her right into the dip of her shoulders. To wish in her well.

I blinked, my eyes suddenly watering. Jess smiled, and this time I’m sure what she saw reflected back on my face was genuine. It was the real chord of our love, thrumming through us – what brought us together, what made Win, what made sharing this life and this house so beautiful.

A secret, smiling note between us that – in the bare seconds of that moment – felt like it could fill the house. One that could amplify all of the light of everything good we had here and push back the shadows.

I stayed at the kitchen table longer than I needed to, just watching her move. The soft hum of the fridge, the faint shift of the house above us – like something settling deeper into place. Her presence felt… steady. It was something I could hold onto.

“Want to get the girl?” Jess said, walking by me and pausing where I sat. Laying her hand on my shoulder. Squeezing once. It felt like home should.

I wiped my eyes, nodding. I heard Jess walk on behind me – out the kitchen and up the stairs. When I was sure she was gone, I thumbed shut the close button on my phone. I stood up, stretching, and tried to keep that lingering moment with me.

Then, with a sigh that turned into a shaking yawn, I turned around myself and started up the stairs. Toward Win’s room.

**

I walked past our room, smiling to myself as I heard Jess humming deeper inside as she got dressed. The sun was up and full as I came to Win’s door – streaming through the window upstairs, washing the still-bare walls in warm gold. Win’s door was closed, Win’s door was closed – a habit she picked up after potty training; she always closed the door on the way back into her room if she had to get up in the middle of the night for some reason. I reached for the handle and pressed my ear to the wood, listening for the sounds of my girl sleeping.

Nothing.

I eased the door open.

Win’s bed was empty. Blankets a messy coil at the foot, pillow almost bare.

Except for Milkshake. Except for fucking Milkshake.

The room didn’t have any of the warmth from the outside hall. It felt… hollow. Empty.

I took a slow step inside, shutting the door again, my eyes sweeping the room. I didn’t see Win’s new doll anywhere – that one didn’t have a name yet and I was glad of it. Hoping she’d forget about it, hoping she wouldn’t latch on to it like she had that ashen snake. It would be so much easier to take that way – to get rid of.

creeaaak

My gaze shot to the nook. The toybox was open, its black lid angled back.

For a moment, I didn’t understand what I was seeing—two small legs, pajama cuffs bunched at the ankle, feet hooked over the edge. Half my daughter’s body – inside the gaping mouth of that shadow thing. The rest of her vanished inside.

“Win.” My voice came out flat, too quiet.

No answer.

I dashed across the room and grabbed her around the waist. She twisted in my arms, immediately struggling, small hands clutching something to her chest. I gasped, surprised, and tried to keep my grip on her.

“Let go!” she shrieked, writhing. “LET GO.”

“Win, stop. STOP,” I said, finding myself screaming as I yanked her back and out of the nook. I felt what she was holding on to pressing against me, a lump of cold and wet. It was repulsive, and in the dreamy scramble of the moment the first thought that lit up my mind was that it was dead, that it was a dead thing Win had and she was squeezing it so tight against herself.

“Drop it baby,” I said, my mouth going dry, “drop it now, what…what is that?”

Win’s eyes shot to mine. Her face was flushed, eyes bright. She wailed, her arms going limp as she started to cry, sloping against my shoulder. I held her closer to me, an entirely different sting of tears welling in my eyes.

Win dropped the thing. I felt it land on my bare feet, and I gasped. And, I hate myself very much for admitting this – but my first reaction was to drop Win, after feeling the way that frigid lump felt against the tops of my bare feet. It was lizard instinct, the kind that knows to run when you see a shadow creeping up behind you out of the corner of your eye.

But Dad instincts won. I squeezed Win tight, stepping around the thing and away from the nook. 

The toybox lid slammed shut.

I moaned. My heart was throbbing, my guts wrung. Win held on tight to me, pressing her face against me, her wails rising as I spun around to look at the box.

It was silent. Eerie. Still.

I heard footsteps pounding down the hall – Jess. I hugged Win tighter, burying my face in her hair.

“Shhh, shh,” I said, my own voice shaking, “it’s okay, daddy’s here. I’m here, I’m with you, I’m here.”

I repeated my litany as the door to Win’s room shuddered in its frame.

“Robert? What’s going on?”

I could hear Jess on the other side of the door, see the knob rattling. I heard her grunt before she gave three short slamming knocks.

“ROBERT.”

Had I closed the door? I moved to open it, breathing hard, when my foot brushed the thing on the floor once more.

I recoiled, feeling bile sluice up my throat even before I laid eyes on the thing. I looked down, expecting to see something rotten and awful, something that should never be in my daughter’s room. I stared, struck dumb and disgusted, down at the lump on the floor.

It was, of course, a toy. A new toy, one I’d never seen before – and larger than the others. Its body was lopsided, stitched from mismatched fabric: faded doily webbings, shredded silks, threadbare linens. All of them separate shades of grey, a bouquet of ash. The shape of the thing was uneven, and I couldn’t tell if the fabric was supposed to be a dress or a shirt or a blouse. It looked – half-finished.

My mind retched the word: undigested.

The thing had two button eyes, one missing, leaving only a frayed circle of thread. The one that remained, however, was smoke-white and glassy. Staring down at the thing, I almost thought I saw myself reflected in its haze.

“What the hell is GOING ON?!” I heard Jess shout, from the hallway.

Hearing her voice, the strain, the horrible rise in pitch at the end, broke me out of my shock. I reached for the door in a rush, turning the knob. Hearing the lock click as I swung it open.

Jess was on the other side, her face almost as red as Win’s.

“Whathappenedwhathappened,” she said, twice and fast, slurring her words together. She was already stepping in the room, reaching for Win. Taking her from me.

I reached for her, the same way I’d wanted to reach for the warmth in the kitchen hours ago — but this time she twisted away, her back to me. The box creaked behind her, long and low, a settling groan.

Like it was breathing.

I let Jess take Win from me, my gaze shifting back to the thing on the floor. The cyclopean bundle.

“What is that baby,” I heard myself say, before I realized I was speaking.

Win’s face was buried in Jess’s shoulder, and she raised it, her face twisted with anger and confusion.

“It’s mine,” she said, breathless. “It was in the hallway.”

My mouth went dry. “What hallway? What?”

She didn’t answer – just hugged Jess tighter, her cheek pressing into her mother’s neck.

“Jess, I…”

But Jess just looked at me. Something unreadable in her stare. I felt it shrivel me, and suddenly all the menace in the room was gone. I felt empty, confused and dumb.

“you’re acting in-sane,” Jess hissed.

I opened my mouth to reply, but Jess stepped out of the room, barreling down toward the other end of the hallway. Back to our room.

I turned around to glance once more at the toybox before following them. The shadows underneath the chitinous wood were deeper than they should have been in the spilling daylight, pooling and oily at the bottom. I glared at it, waiting for it to open, waiting for it to creak.

But there was nothing. Once again, the fucking thing was still.

**

By the time I came downstairs, Jess was in the entryway, kneeling in front of Win and buttoning a dress up the girl’s back – it was nice, almost too nice; floral print and pressed smooth. Win hadn’t worn it since Easter. Win was struggling to try and get the dress off, heavy-salted tears still lying fat and swollen on her face.

A small overnight bag sat open on the bench, half-filled with Jess’s clothes. The plastic snack bag was next to it, and beside that too were Jess’s toiletries.

There was nothing of mine.

Win whined, a pitiful little cry, and slumped down on the entryway wall as I came close. Jess froze, her face locked in a scowl. She watched me from the corner of her eye, standing up slowly.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Jess gesticulated with both of her hands in front of her – an inferred ‘duh’.

“I’m taking her to my parents. Alone.,” she said, her tone already hard.

“Jess –”

“What the hell was that? I mean, she’s shaking, Rob. She’s scared out of her mind.”

“She was in the box,” I said. “Halfway inside.”

“It’s a toybox.” Jess zipped the bag with one sharp pull. “Not a trapdoor. Not some – ”

“You didn’t see it.” I stepped closer. “The way she was in there. The way she was holding that thing, I mean, it felt disgusting…”

“What felt disgusting?”

“The toy,” I said, “the…thing she had.”

“It’s a toy, Robert. She’s a kid. Kids play. You’re the one turning it into some something, something it isn’t ever going…” She stopped herself, glanced at Win, lowered her voice. “You’re scaring her.”

I looked at Win. She stared back, peeking up through her bangs which had spilled loose over her head. Her eyes were shiny and wet, her lip trembling.

I wanted to go to her. I wanted to scoop her up into my arms and hold her. I wanted to apologize to her a hundred thousand times with a hundred thousand kisses all over her head. I wanted to take the fear I had put into her, siphon it out, and remove every hard thought flowing through her head.

I wanted her Daddy to make it all better. But Jess stepped between the two of us, reaching a hand down for Win’s. Our daughter took it, -- standing up and locked eyes with me once more.

“It’s mine,” she said softly, almost a whisper.

Jess stroked her hair. “I know, honey. We’re just going to go see Grammie and Grandpie for a little while.”

But Win was still looking at me, clutching the edges of her dress and pulling it up over her knees. Her voice was steady now:

“It’s not for you,” she said.

The words slit their way into my mind. I stood still, meeting Win’s gaze. She stared through me. And even then, even in that moment and knowing what was coming, it felt like there was no one else in the entryway but the two of us.

Jess stood, sweeping Win close as she opened the door. She picked up our girl with one hand while the other looped though the bags’ handles. A late summer gust rushed in, filling the entryway with hot, bitter warmth. The air wet like breath.

“Don’t follow us,” she said. “Just… let us breathe for the day. Take some time and, I don’t know. Relax.”

I opened my mouth to respond – to try and convince them to stay. To argue, to push back, to tell them I was coming too.

But Win’s words were still buried in me. I felt so full – of dread, of confusion. Of a vague and helpless anger. It was all enough to make me burst…and yet I felt paralyzed, that I myself was just another fixture of the house – just some unwanted thing left to stand and witness another leaving love.

And what if Jess was right? What if I was the one making everything this way?

Did I want it to be this way?

The door shut behind them, the sound echoing through the house. I stayed there in the doorway, watching through the window set into the front door at Jess’s back as she went down the steps, Win’s small head resting on her shoulder, bobbing up and down – her eyes fluttering shut. The sudden warmth dissipated with the door shut, sealing out the sounds of their retreat – the engine starting, the slow backup down our driveway. I watched as our car drifted down the street without a sound. the quiet in the house shifting again – not settling this time but holding its breath.

Glutted with the words Win had whispered.

It’s not for you.

**

I don’t know how long I stood in the empty entryway. I lingered longer than I should have, hands in my pockets, staring at Win’s backpack. Jess must have left it in her rush to get out and by the time I noticed it they had been gone for too long. It was hot pink and covered with blue polka-dots. It was also zipped tight. I didn’t know what was inside, so I left it where it was. Because, for several long moments, I thought if I kept looking that maybe I’d hear the car back up again. Hear the door open. Hear her voice calling for me like nothing had happened.

The house felt airless, not empty – not exactly – but suspended. Like every room was holding its breath. But the quiet never went away. It just… waited.

I drifted from room to room, trying to shake my thoughts loose. My eyes skimmed the places no one was—the living room, the kitchen, the hallway to the stairs. The corners where shadows pooled like water.

I kept going, unable to stop, pacing the downstairs in tighter and tighter loops. Circles around Jess and Win. Circles around the toybox. Around the thing I’d seen. Around what I’d done. Each lap pulling the walls closer, each turn drawing me in.

Everywhere felt wrong without Win. Without Jess.

My mind kept replaying what I’d seen in her room, like a broken clip on a loop – the pale cuffs of her pajamas disappearing into the toybox, her little heels spinning over the edge. That lump of cold in her arms.

Except, each time I ran it back, the edges started to shift and blur.

Maybe she hadn’t fallen all the way in. Maybe she was just leaning over the edge.

Maybe the lid didn’t slam — maybe it just fell.

Maybe the lid did open easily, maybe it’d just been stuck when I tried, the wet paint sticking with humidity.

Maybe she really had found that thing in the hallway, and I’d—

I sat down hard in one of the kitchen chairs, the breath rushing out of me.

Jess’s voice came back in perfect detail. You’re scaring her. It landed heavier this time. Made my skin itch.

Was that what she saw? Not a father keeping his daughter safe, but some paranoid lunatic grabbing his kid and shouting at her about nothing?

I pressed my hands to my face and stayed there. The dark behind my eyelids was safer. But when I opened them, all I could see was Win.

I took out my phone, unlocking it and composed a quick text to Jess:

“Hey. Sorry for earlier. I know I can be a lot sometimes. Hope you and Win are having a good time with your parents.”

And then:

“Love you both.”

The air in the kitchen felt thick, like I couldn’t get enough of it down my throat. My fingers itched for something to do, anything that would stop the circling.

The toys.

I went upstairs and gathered both Milkshake and the new lump doll. I didn’t look at them too closely. I didn’t want to know if they were warm or cold. I just put them all in an old laundry basket, carried it through the back door, and locked them in the garage.

It helped a little. But not enough.

I came back inside, opened my laptop at the kitchen table. The screen lit my face in the stillness, and I tried not to stare at my dim reflection in the monitor. I signed in, minimizing all my work tabs, and opened a new tab. I stared at the empty search bar, not sure what to type.

Then it came to me. I typed: “60 Adams house history.”

It was our house address. Nothing came up at first — just realtor blurbs, aerial maps, a few grainy shots of the property from when the last owners had it listed. But there were no photos listed anywhere taken inside the house. None of them showed the nook. None of them showed the toybox.

I tried other searches: 60 Adams accidents. 60 Adams deaths. 60 Adams children.

A few old news clippings turned up, scanned crooked into the county archive. I expanded my search, replacing our address with the name of the town and county. Still, there was mostly nothing. Fundraisers, lost pets, a fire at a gas station that’s been a vape shop for as long as we'd lived here.

I leaned back in my chair, staring at the screen. My reflection met my stare, my eyes tired and too wide. I blinked, looking around the kitchen for the first time. Already it was dusk. I checked my phone, but I didn’t have a single message.

I almost closed the laptop. I almost let myself believe there was nothing to find. That the absence of proof meant I could shut this down and go sit in the living room until Jess came back. Maybe if I couldn’t forgive myself I could at least distract myself enough to forget. Bury myself on the couch in a blanket, order a pizza and maybe pick up some beer from the liquor store down the road – or maybe something stronger. Jess would be back that night, she had to be. At the very latest she would on Sunday. I wouldn’t have long to myself and maybe if I numbed the time I wouldn’t keep feeling this way all night – or all day tomorrow.

God I hoped it wouldn’t be that long.

I looked down at the laptop again, one more time before I shut it off. And that’s when I saw it.

A thumbnail on a page for the Sevrin Hill Historical Society, some buried section of their website that hadn’t been updated in years – white background with blue bulleted hyperlinks. I clicked on one of them: “Community Picnic — August 8th, 1987.”

The photo loaded slow, the pixels knitting themselves into shapes. Rows of folding chairs on the lawn in front of an old town hall. People holding paper plates and sweating in the August sun. People that looked like they could be anyone and be anywhere.

And near the bottom edge of the frame, apart from the others – a girl, maybe six years old. Standing alone in the grass. Her expression was unreadable, almost blurred by the sun.

But in her arms, hanging loose against her side, was something long and striped.

I leaned closer to the screen. My hand went to the trackpad, zooming until the image broke into little squares. But it didn’t matter how close I got. I knew the shape.

Milkshake. Or…something that looked exactly like it.

I leaned in closer, squinting, trying to let my mind run over the pixels. Trying to synthesize what I couldn’t define make sense in my mind. It was like I was looking at an old Magic Eye poster – the truth was in there, I just had to relax my focus, let my mind fill in the details.

The more I looked at the thing in the girl’s arms, the more sense it made to me. The thing in the girl’s arms was Milkshake. But the more I looked at the girl…

She was plump, and her face had the grim acceptance of the relentlessly bullied. She was short, the Girl Scout uniform she wore ill-fitted and looked even in the low quality of the image like it needed to be washed. And there was something over her eye. It could have been a trick of the lens or a mote of dust but…the closer I looked, the more I was sure. It was an eyepatch. Medical, white and wide, covering her left eye.

The same eye missing from the doll upstairs. Win’s newest plaything.

I scrolled down to the caption. The words were simple, nothing strange:
Sevrin Hill residents celebrate at the farmer’s market.

That was all. No note about the snake. No explanation for why she was standing alone, away from the other kids. Not that I really expected there to be one. Still, I felt like I was on to something. The coincidence, the eerie resemblance, was too great.

I sat there a long time, staring at that girl’s pale, unreadable face.

Then it came to me, clicking back to the previous page. I typed the year from the original link on the historical site in my search bar and followed it with “Sevrin Hill girl scouts”.

A few pages popped up, but most of it was irrelevant. Some of the results directed me back to the county’s public records, and so I filtered my search to only show results from there. I clicked on a few dead ends and found more than a few dead links. I was almost out of search results when I got lucky.

Another photo – this one a faded black and white. A line of young girls sat under a mural – the same one I’d seen with Win and Jess downtown while we’d walked over for dinner a little while ago: fields of sunflowers of varying sizes and skill in composition. The girls were all wearing smocks, and some of them had paint smudged around their noses and eyes. And there, at the very end and almost shoved out of frame, was the girl from the farmer’s market photo.

A slinking, ringed serpent wound around her shoulder.

Below, the caption read “Troop 217. From left to right: Lenore Adams, Cary Ann Clark, Stephanie Cole, Marissa Trailor, and June Howard.”

June Howard. That was the girl’s name.

I copied and pasted it into the search bar, my heart beating fast. I made my search “June Howard Sevrin Hill”. I hesitated for a moment and then added “disappeared” before jamming the enter key.

I clicked the top result.
It was a scan of the Sevrin Hill Gazette from 1992, the grain ghosted into the page like it was printed on ancient skin. I leaned closer to the screen, squinting at the headline:

LOCAL GIRL STILL MISSING

The article was barely three paragraphs. An afterthought between a notice about a pancake breakfast and an ad for lawnmower repair. I skimmed it, breathing faster and faster with each line.

Authorities continue to search for 11-year-old June Howard, missing since the evening of September 2…last seen walking home from a friend’s house in the Adams Street area, near Hollow Hill Road…quiet and shy…missing her left eye, often wears a white medical patch…no new leads.

It was the photo that stopped me.

She stood alone, framed from the knees up, her expression flat in a way only a kid who’s been through too much can manage. The white eyepatch was there, stark against her skin. In one hand was a thick hardcover book, the other a plastic terrarium. Curled up inside was a small, ringed snake. But I wasn’t looking at her face or the snake.

Behind her was a white house with a sharply pitched roof and a narrow front porch. One corner sagged, the same way ours did. The windows were set too close together. The siding was split under the eaves in a way I knew by touch.

I didn’t have to check the caption. I didn’t have to count the shingles or match the railings.

It was this house.

Our house.

I sat there staring at the screen, my hands resting uselessly on either side of the keyboard. The girl’s face filled my mind — the blunt, guarded expression, the white medical patch swallowing one eye. The same side missing from the doll upstairs.

June Howard.

The name kept spiraling in my mind, an undercurrent to every thought.

I looked again at the old photographs – the farmer’s market, the troop mural. Both times, the snake was there, draped around her like a stuffed animal for any other kind of child. Milkshake, or something so close it didn’t matter.

Maybe there was a practical explanation. Some eccentric neighbor or overzealous parent with a sewing kit and too much time on their hands, making toys to match a pet snake for the lonely girl down the street. A gift that, by some coincidence, had outlived her and ended up in our house years later. That could happen, I told myself. Small towns hold on to things. People die, boxes get donated, junk ends up in attics and thrift stores and – sometimes – in the hands of children who don’t know the history behind them.

But the more I tried to settle into that version, the less it fit. It was too neat. Too bloodless. I could feel it in the pit of me, in that place Jess would call paranoia but which I knew was something else entirely. A sharper kind of knowing. There was a ring to it – the resonance of truth vibrating inside my skull – that this wasn’t coincidence, and it wasn’t harmless. I needed to trust that, even if she wouldn’t. Especially if she wouldn’t.

My eyes drifted up, toward the ceiling. The attic was the one part of this house we hadn’t seen when we toured it. After Jess and I had torn down the boards during our first week here, we’d swept out the splinters and insulation and then started sliding things up there we didn’t need right away. Winter coats. Boxes of old books. A few sealed cartons left in the coat closet from the previous owners that I’d never gotten around to opening. The sealed boxes…

Now, the thought of those forgotten remnants made my skin prickle. Maybe there was something left behind. Something of the one-eyed girl, something of June’s. And if there was, I wanted to see it for myself.

**

I climbed slowly, my palms sticking to the rails. The attic pressed in around me as soon as my head cleared the opening. It was the same as I remembered: the pitched roof – a tent of dark beams, the scattered floorboards over insulation puffing out from between joists, and the slow, oppressive heat curling around me. My breath felt heavy in it.

A few of our own boxes sat stacked near the attic stairs, labeled in Jess’s neat handwriting. Beyond them, the cartons from the previous owners slouched against one wall, the tape yellow and curling at the edges. For a second, I just crouched there, staring, the hair on my forearms rising for no reason I could name.

I started toward them, stepping lightly along the narrow plywood path laid to keep from crushing the insulation. The floor flexed under my weight. I knelt at the first box, traced the faded writing scrawled across the cardboard – indecipherable – and popped the top.

Inside was a mess of paperbacks, most of them damp-soft at the edges, and a few ceramic figurines packed in yellowed newspaper. I shifted them aside, looking for something… more. Something that would connect.

Beneath the books and brittle newsprint was a layer of toys – cheap plastic farm animals, a jumble of hair clips, and a pair of jelly sandals gone cloudy with age. I dug deeper, my fingers catching on the cracked edge of a photo frame. Inside, faded almost to nothing, was a picture I recognized instantly—two little girls in early-90’s puffers, cheeks red from the cold, their parents standing behind them. Candace and Marie. The worn twin of the photo Jess and I had found in the downstairs coat closet. We’d found other traces of them when we first moved in – marker scribbles on the upstairs baseboards, a pair of children’s spades behind the shed, a few other photographs tucked in odd places. Little artifacts of a family’s life left behind and outgrown like discarded cicada shells.

I felt the familiar sag of disappointment as I set the frame aside. No snake. No eyepatch. No June. Just more pieces of someone else’s history.

But as my hand left the frame, something made me pause. I picked it back up, this time looking harder at the girls’ faces. One of them – Marie, I thought – had the same pale hair and glass-bright eyes I remembered from the doll Win had in her hands the night I’d carried her down from her room. Not just blue eyes, but those blue eyes, the same clear, almost unnatural shade, crystalline frost. I stared at her smile, wide and fixed, and felt my skin prickle.

The connection was loose, frayed—but it was there. The doll Win had been holding the night I’d taken her from her room. It was someone. One of these girls.

I lowered the frame into my lap, holding it there longer than I meant to, the attic’s still heat settling heavy over me. Enveloping me. Licking at me.

And then I heard it.

Not a creak, not the dry flex of wood, but a low groan from below. It wasn’t the water softener, the boards shifting in the house. It wasn’t any appliance or outer wind.

It was squelching. Luridly alive, an unmuffled groan that I felt in my bones. Deeper than a creak, wetter than wood should sound. A long, deliberate sound – something working its jaw after a slow meal.

It came again – shorter this time, clipped, a swallowed chuckle. The sound reminded me of something I’d heard before, and it only took a moment for me to put it together. I felt sick, unbalanced, even as it came to me.

It sounded like the toybox. The opening of its jaws. The exaggerated sibling to its taunting creaking moan.

I knew I should go downstairs, get my hammer, smash the fucking thing apart and take the splintered remains outside to burn them. But instead, I found myself turning toward the far side of the attic, toward the sound’s echo in my head. Hesitating only for a moment, I started toward the back end of the attic, the section we hadn’t used, running my hand along the bare wood of the slanted attic walls for support as the floorboarded path narrowed.

That’s when my hand brushed a section of wall that felt…off. Too smooth.

I turned my head, swaying slightly on my feet—the boards here were thinner, narrower, uneven in their fit. Their grain didn’t match the rest of the attic—darker, almost bruised. I thumbed on my phone’s flashlight, already bracing for something I didn’t want to see.

The beam caught on a stretch of boards slick with a black, oily residue, as if something deep in the wall had burst and seeped slow for years. The stain seemed to breathe faintly under the light, as if there were pressure behind it. When I pulled my hand away, there was a faint film webbing between my fingers, sticky and metallic in the air and on my tongue when I reflexively swallowed.

I pushed the first board. It flexed, giving before tearing away with a damp snap. I tossed it down into the insulation and reached for another. Each one peeled off softer, wetter, colder. The dampness seemed to cling, not just to my hands but under my nails, sinking in. By the time I’d cleared the last of them, I was shivering.

Beneath the boards was not more wood, but stone. Black stone – slick and glistening, reflecting the light in the same way the toybox lid did, a shifting sheen that made me think of the way an eye moves under a lid. At the center of this surface was an opening – low, jagged, puckered at the edges. A split seam in the wall, raw and uneven, as if it had grown out of the house.

I crouched low, the rafters pressing down on me, and angled the light inside. The corridor beyond was paved with uneven stones mortared with something pale and fibrous. The walls pressed in tight at odd angles – as if they had shifted and locked into place centuries apart. The cold that rolled out was a deep cold, bloodless and still.

It wasn’t just darkness in there. It had weight. It had depth that didn’t belong in the shape of this house –  the way a body can feel its wounds deeper than the shallow scar tissue.

I dropped to my hands and knees, breath loud in my ears. I stuck my head inside, the stone damp and cold against my arms, angling the light forward. The beam bled into the dark and disappeared.

Somewhere ahead, in that thin black channel, something shifted. Soft. Deliberate.

My throat tightened. I jerked back, scraping my shoulder against the frame.

For a moment I stayed there, crouched, my breath ragged, phone still aimed at the hole. Waiting for the sound again. Waiting for…something.

But the corridor was still.

I stood, my knees popping, and backed away until my spine pressed against the far wall, nearly falling into a pocket of insulation as I did. The hole waited in the beam of my light—patient. Expectant.

I killed the flashlight. The dark rushed in.

Then I turned, forcing my way down the attic stairs, sliding the plywood cover back behind me.

I didn’t look up again – not once. I went downstairs, flung open the front door, and walked to the end of the driveway. I sat on the curb, cross‑legged.

I looked down at my hands and watched them shake. Black filth under my fingernails. I breathed, hard and fast, trying to calm myself down.

“Headlights, baby, c’mon headlights please,” I repeated, I prayed, aloud to the quiet of the evening, “c’mon, c’mon, come home baby pleaaase…”

I sobbed, finally letting my head drop into my hands. I wanted my girls, I wanted home the way it was even just a day ago. That I’d take, I’d take anything over what I had seen. What I’d felt.

But cutting under even that? I had a different kind of dread. A dread that resounded in me and, even now, grew louder and louder. Echoing, repeating, demanding I feel it.

It was this – Jess wouldn’t believe me. Even after everything, even after dragging her up there to show her, I had a sinking knowing at the very center of me that all of this would be another example of breaking from them. From their reality.

No, Jess may not believe me. And I would spare myself the trial of getting her to, that I knew now. Because whatever the fuck was going on in this house – with the toys, the toybox, the horrible, lonely way in the attic – I would have to deal with it and spare them of the grief. Even if Jess never believes me, I know what I heard.

I would fix this. I would fix this for our family, for my girls.